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July 20, 2006
Books I Read in July
New Total: 91
Empress Orchid
by Anchee Min
From Publishers Weekly: Talk about story arc: poor girl from rural China auditions for a job as royal concubine, winds up as emperor's wife number four, gives birth to the "last Emperor," rules China as regent for 46 years. The fascinating, implausible life of Tsu Hsi, or "Orchid," was reviled by the revolutionary Chinese, but here it receives a sympathetic treatment from Min (Red Azalea; Becoming Madame Mao), who once again brilliantly lifts the public mask of a celebrated woman to reveal a contradictory character. Sexually assertive, intellectually ambitious, socially striving, Min's Orchid is also "isolated, tense, and in some vague but very real way, dissatisfied." Even after giving birth to the emperor's only son, Orchid feels trapped by the stultifying imperial rituals and persecuted by the other residents of the Forbidden City: six other royal wives, 3,000 invisible concubines and 2,000 scheming eunuchs. In addition to these powerful distractions, she has to discipline her overindulged son, outmaneuver the ruthless politician Su Shun (who wants her buried alive when the emperor dies) and advise the ailing emperor how to fend off both the Boxers and the Western "barbarians." Min, herself a survivor of China's Cultural Revolution, has done a prodigious amount of on-site research to capture the glorious, hopeless last days of the Ching dynasty. At times her writing is textbook-flat, and she sometimes loses track of her teeming cast of characters (for example, Orchid's dangerous mother-in-law and mentally ill sister). But readers will be enthralled by the gorgeously woven cultural tapestry and the psychologically astute portrait of the empress-a talented girl from the provinces who married (way) up.
My Review: Holy crap this audiobook was p-a-i-n-f-u-l. I was bored a mere 3 hours into the plot, and it took me at least 3 weeks to plow through the remaining million hours of boring narrative. It's such a shame, because the story COULD have been brilliant, but it just got bogged down in the details. Like I need 20 minute descriptions of the imperial palace of infinite luminescence...I should have just turned it off and moved along.
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The God of Nightmares
by Paula Fox
From Publishers Weekly: Fox's prose flows as clearly and gracefully as clear water in a stream--but there is a dark current underneath: "the implacable forces of time and loss." From a hardscrabble existence with her relentlessly cheerful mother in rural upstate New York, narrator Helen Bynum goes to New Orleans in search of her aunt, a former Ziegfeld girl and has-been actress. Aunt Lulu proves to be an irascible alcoholic, but Helen stays on in the warm-scented, langorous city, so different from the gray, frozen atmosphere of Poughkeepsie. Here Helen feels free for the first time to pursue the potentials of her own life. Enveloped in the affection of her new friends--her landlord, a poet, and his mistress; a seductive young man with silver hair who is the son of a rabbi and with whom she falls in love; another woman from the North who becomes her best friend; an elegant homosexual of Creole descent--Helen at first feels safe and contented. But as she gradually becomes aware of the imminence of WW II in Europe, the injustice of race relations in the South and the dark secrets in her friends' lives, she is suffused with apprehension about "the black wall of death" that seems to loom everywhere. In a poignant chapter set years later, Helen finally realizes the implications of those long-ago events. Fox ( A Servant's Tale ) is a highly gifted writer whose insightful novels resonate with subtle truths.
My Review: This book was a strange and lonely interlude between other, more concrete fiction. I loved the aloof descriptions, the high drama, the abstract landscapes, and the ultimate conclusions. Of course, I saw the main twist coming a mile away, but it didn't really take away from the overall poignancy of the whole story. I wish I could have read it while in New Orleans.
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Geography of the Heart
by Fenton Johnson
From Publishers Weekly: Novelist Johnson (Scissors, Paper, Rock) watched his lover, San Francisco high-school teacher Larry Rose, die of AIDS in a Paris hospital in 1990 after an intense three-year relationship. Rose was HIV-positive but asymptomatic when they met, and while their lovemaking was haunted by fear of contagion, the author remains HIV-negative. Rose, the only child of German Jewish Holocaust survivors?his father, Leo, was imprisoned and beaten by the Nazis in Holland, escaped and hid for three years with broken vertebrae?had a very different background from that of Johnson, who grew up Catholic and the youngest of nine in an isolated Appalachian town in Kentucky. Johnson writes with crystal clarity of his gradual acceptance by his lover's emigrant parents, of coming out to his own widowed mother at 31, of Rose's gradual physical deterioration and of his working through grief toward emotional renewal. This is a remarkable memoir, touching, funny, searing, eloquent, beautifully alive.
My Review: Wow--this book was unquestionably the best memoir I have ever read. I was completely caught up in the story, and felt like I was experiencing the awakening of the AIDS movement. I didn't fully appreciate how far we've come until seeing how different the situation was a mere 15 years ago. I challenge anyone to read this book and not rally to the GLBT movement. But even beyond a political book, I found the author's understanding of love to be more closely tied to my own than anything I've read before. Time and time again, I marveled at passages that I would have written were I a more skilled writer.
