Fiction writer and reviewer.
I will be posting a few more reviews for 2022 here, but I've moved the OC BookBlog to Substack, and will eventually migrate all the years of reviews there, but for now, do subscribe there for book reviews. Free and easy.
Sadly, OCinsite, where the OC BookBlog was born, is shutting down, so reviews will no longer be available there either.
Follow the link below to keep up with reviews and recommendations for avid fiction readers and book groups.
Thanks. Happy reading.
He was leaving Cameroon in a month! Leaving to certainly not return after three months. Who traveled to America only to return to a future of nothingness in Cameron after a mere three months? Not young men like him, not people facing a future of poverty and despondency in their own country. No, people like him did not visit America. They got there and stayed there until they could return home as conquerors.
Hard to find jobs when so much of the workforce is out of work and this plot element is front and center. Jende has had the good fortune, through an enterprising cousin, to land a well-paid position as chauffeur for a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Jende’s determined wife, Neni, is studying to complete an associate's degree in order to progress to schooling as a pharmacist, but takes a summer job as housekeeper for the family. Until the crisis, they are optimistic. Eyes on the American dream.
Nothing in the world of New York movers and shakers is simple, nor is the struggle of the immigrant, and, as expected, their worlds collide in the face of the Wall Street debacle. The divide between rich and poor, white and black, and the core question of what it means to live a good life, is present on every page, but in the hands of this talented writer, never oppressive. We see the truth, we feel the heartbreak and the struggle. It would be easy to presume an ending, but do not: nothing is exactly as it seems.
…I saw this man who used to drive another executive at Lehman Brothers. We used to sit together outside the building sometimes; he was a fresh round man. I saw him downtown. The man looked like he had his last good meal a year ago. He has not been able to find another job. He says too many people want to be chauffeurs now. Even people who used to be police and people with fine college degrees, they want to be chauffeurs. Everyone is losing jobs everywhere and looking for new jobs, anything to pay bills.
The mix of characters is just right. The financier, his social climbing wife and sons. The kindly staff assistant, the caring housekeeper. The Cameroon cousin and the immigration lawyer with tall tales to tell. A church which may or may not provide spiritual solace. All living complex lives suffering from a need for simplicity.
Told more in dialogue than prose, the occasional descriptive passages perfectly render New York at the time [as a migrant from that great city, I can attest to the validity.] You will care deeply about Jende and Nini from page one, you will root for them, and worry about them, and also be shocked by their decisions, which, in truth, make perfect sense and which, in the end, like most good stories, has to do with who we are when far from what feels like home.
Realistic and thoughtful, it’s a novel of cultures clashing and good people stumbling into the ravines of despair and misplaced hopes, and unexpected redemption.
Mbue has just published her second novel, the highly lauded HOW BEAUTIFUL WE WERE, which takes place in Africa and deals with environmental degradation. I will report back.
And, given the strange times we live in, and the sense of displacement and disconnection rampant, the novel could not fit what ails us more. Thankfully, there is hopefulness in the strangeness.
Like a spool of yarn, of many colors, the novel reveals in strands, a bit at a time, and takes the reader along, although I cannot give you a plot or even a meaningful summary: it’s just seekers of truths, meeting in strange ways, colliding, in effect, and then rolling along to an undefined destination, unravelling further as they go.
With his backpack, shabby sweater, jeans, and running shoes, he fit right in. He began to talk to himself in a low, eloquent mutter. As his money dwindled and his credit cards maxed out, he considered his situation dispassionately, as if his life were being lived by someone else. He felt himself expanding into invisibility. Soon, he imagined, no one would be able to see him at all. He would just fade away and vanish before taking up occupancy in the spirit world where he would be as unwelcome as he was here.
An aging couple searching for their missing adult son, a former actor. A group of retirees who take their walks at the mall. An oddball young woman taking a weird hallucinogenic and her bully lover who may or may be a domestic terrorist. An activist group supposedly helping the poor and the needy, but under the auspices of a shadowy figure who may or may not exist. Another sort-of collective called Sandmen who target street dwellers. And, a Trump-like President and Cabinet perpetuating a philosophy reminiscent of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, for whom “charity is a sin... because it encouraged losers.” Oh my.
It’s not magical realism, although sometimes it feels that way. It’s not science-fiction, although it could be. It takes place in Minneapolis, Baxter’s personal home and favored landscape, so the just-plain-folk setting is a stark contrast to the idiosyncratic cast and ever-so-gently fantastical underpinnings. It all works.
We were younger then. We believed everything. We thought love could save the world... But I don’t believe movies anymore. I don’t believe in them, and I don’t believe their stories. They don’t seem real to me – just fantasy. Robots in space? Superheroes? Characters who look like Cary Grant? The only person who ever looked like Cary Grant was Cary Grants. Fantasy. And novels. All of it. It all looks made up now. Bunch of imaginary puppets on strings, dancing around. When did we lost our grip on reality?
There is a subtle lampooning of our current political climate which provides some insight into the otherwise murky plot and underneath the surface of all is deeply held belief, grief, anger, fear and hope. He’s a most unusual writer and this is a most unusual novel, so if you’re looking for the different, read THE SUN COLLECTIVE. Stranger than even the news and infinitely more fun.
I suppose in her spare time she wrote a novel and an extraordinary novel it is! An original, expertly crafted and insightful page-turner, exposing how politics and opportunism permeate every walk of life and every individual, and there are many in India, with aspirations for a better life.
Every character, except the young woman who gets the ball rolling by posting a social media comment related to terrorism, resulting in her arrest and imprisonment, makes a deal with the devil for themselves, and what they would like to accomplish, rather than stand up for innocence. A BURNING begs the question: what is the right thing for all versus what is most right for oneself. This novel is a punch to the gut story from page one that nonetheless keeps you hoping the end might turn out better than it seems and/or the end might justify the means.
And that is the very essence of a morality tale — can the end ever justify the means when a life is at stake and when truth is buried for personal gain?
In an effort to avoid spoilers, I won’t say anything more about the plot or the ending. I will say that the writing is concise and descriptive — you will feel as if you are there, within prison walls and without, with the victim, an aspiring actress/friend, a physical education teacher who wants to make a difference for more than one student, and a myriad of media and political influencers who manipulate the outcome.
This is one of the most hard to put down novels I’ve read, and that’s saying something, considering all the good fiction that’s been published just this year. [Read the reviews.]
As a rule, I include quotes from the books I recommend. In truth, the language in this novel is not what makes the book so grand — it’s not unusually eloquent or lyrical. It's nearly journalistic. You may feel like you are reading true crime without the excess of that genre. And, whatever I might extract, out of context, won’t make much sense. I promise you — every word is right and every word matters. She is a writer to reckon with.
Although the story takes place in India, the characters, the timeline, the fallout and the portent apply anywhere in the world right now. A microcosm of modern times. Worthy of the all the awards and award nominations it's received and would be a great read for book groups.
Hard to miss this one - on most every best of list.
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| Maggie O'Farrell Irish born - lives in London |
Maggie O'Farrell, an accomplished and wonderful writer, steps into a new league with this wholly original readable stunning work of fiction. Can you tell I think it's divine?
The tragic but surprisingly heartwarming tale recounts the largely imagined early life of Shakespeare, his enigmatic wife, Agnes, also known as Anne, and the death of their eleven year-old son, Hamnet. The inspiration for what many consider the bard’s greatest play, Hamlet, written four years after the boy’s death. And what a character the young Hamnet is: as ephemeral and existential as his namesake.
Hamnet’s mind, however, is in another place. For a long time, he could hear his mother and his sisters, his aunt and his grandmother. He was aware of them, around him, giving him medicines, speaking to him, touching his skin. Now, though, they have receded. He is elsewhere, in a landscape he doesn’t recognize. It is its cool here, and quiet. He is alone. Snow is falling, softly irrevocably, on and on. It piles up on the ground around him, covering paths and steps and rocks; it weighs down the branches of trees, it transforms everything into whiteness, blankness, stasis. The silence, the cool, the altered silver light of it is something more than soothing to him.
So little is known about Shakespeare’s early life so O’Farrell has woven what is known with what she has exquisitely invented. Once again, in this fiction, the telling is what matters most: mesmerizing prose, nearly Elizabethan poetry, but not, and not couplets, with stunning detail, for the landscape, the scope, and, at the heart of this tale, the grief of losing a child.
So she cannot bear their gaze, cannot meet their eyes. She doesn’t want their sympathy and their prayers and their murmured words. She hates the way people part to let them past and then, behind them, regroup, erasing their passage, as if it were nothing, as if it never were. She wishes to scratch the ground, perhaps with a hoe, to score the streets behind her, so that there will forever be a mark, for it always to be known that this way Hamlet came. He was here.
The story is as much about Agnes, a shaman, loving wife and mother, as it is about William. We meet their families. We inhabit the village life of late 16th century into the 17th, on to Stratford and London. You will see and hear and scent these worlds and feel nearly every heartbeat of every one of the many compelling characters.
The crowd around her, she cannot help but notice, is entirely still. No one speaks. No one moves. Everyone is entirely focused on these actors and what they are saying. Gone is the jostling, whimpering, brawling, pie-chewing mass and in its place a silent, awed congregation. It is as if a magician or sorcerer has waved his staff over the place and turned them all to stone.
My call for the Booker prize. A phenomenally elegant work of fiction. Happy reading.
