Read it forward: My Wish List

The great pleasure of a local bookstore is the hidden treasure that an enthusiastic bookseller presses into your hand. This particular book, "My Wish List" is on bestseller lists in Europe, however I might not have found it elsewhere and I promise you, this is a true gem.

A slim novella with unpretentious prose and powerful subtext, the stream of consciousness narrator, one Jocelyne, married to a man named Jocelyn, lives in a small town in France where she owns a sewing shop and blogs about cloth and textures and threads. "TenGoldFingers" [perhaps a nod to Midas] has growing list of devoted followers who evolve into Jo's cheering squad and support network, and one might say the true fabric of her life.

Harboring the sadness of a lost child, her husband's subsequent despair and betrayals, and the painful memory of her mother's sudden death when Jo was just a girl, she nevertheless cherishes her life, more than most, so much so that when she wins the lottery, she tells no one and never cashes the huge check because she fears the compromises riches will make.

"I think of myself, of all that will now be possible for me, and I don't want any of it."

We follow Jo as she struggles with what she might have done with the money if she took it - from buying her husband the Porsche he has always wanted to giving away a million dollars to a worthy individual or treating herself to all the James Bond movies on DVD - and as her husband heals and becomes more appreciative and her children and friends thrive and she more and more delights in her uncomplicated life.

She tells only her father about the lottery, a man with dementia who remembers for only six minutes at a time, so he is safe with secrets, and his inability to share his daughter's dilemma is an especially poignant aspect of the novella, beautiful interactions.

Of course, literature requires conflict, and nothing in a good story stays the same. However, even expecting the drama to unfold, we are startled, and moved, when the narrative arc shifts and our lovely protagonist is thrust onto an unexpected path. What can you do when your life is torn apart and all the wealth on earth will not repair the damage?

Gregoire Delacourt

This is the first novel translated from the French by this author and I'm told a film will soon arrive, from France, thankfully, as they do better translating from the page to the screen.

A profound and exquisitely written fiction on the power of love and the perils of greed, I urge you to read it forward - buy the book and pass it on. And, if possible, read it in one or two sittings, as this is a tale to fall into and remain until it plays out. Perfect for a day at the beach or an evening on the couch. Happy reading.

Briefly on Atkinson

Just posted on Goodreads a summary review of Life after Life by the great Kate Atkinson.

Kate looks like someone I'd like to lunch with!

The great Kate Atkinson never fails to surprise and "Life After Life" is not only different from previous novels but different from just about anything you might read. Not easy going at first - takes a bit to get into the repetitive and circular motion of Ursula's life, and all those in her orbit - but worth staying with as it evolves into a profound portrait of English life and style and the vulnerability of a nation during the World Wars. As Ursula faces tragedies, dies and is repeatedly reborn, raped and emotionally abused, discovers her own strengths or seeks comfort in indiscretions, in many ways, so goes a nation. The book is an obsessive read, hard to put down once into it, and important to stay with in order to sustain the flow. For those who read a few pages a night before they sleep, might not work. Optimally, find real time to devote to several chapters at once. I have admired Atkinson since "Behind the Scenes at the Museum" which I still recommend highly, a remarkable debut and she just gets better all the time.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/846126386

Short Stories by Francesca Marciano

Many accomplished writers begin with short stories and evolve into novels, and a few, like the great Alice Munro, master the form and stay with it. Other novelists return to the shorter form, again and again, because when written well, it is the essence of storytelling. This is how it all began - oral storytelling and poetry translated ultimately from the cave wall to the page.

Novelist Francesca Marciano has gone backwards, publishing this month her first story collection, following three good novels and bringing the skill of the novelist to nine distinct contemporary tales.

Francesca Marciano

I first discovered this talented writer with RULES OF THE WILD, which takes place in Africa and transports the reader not only to the landscape but to the romance of wildlife. As a woman who has lived in many places, and currently resides in Rome, Marciano is especially adept at evoking a sense of place not only as background but as the framework for the motivations and longings of residents. 

Because she is also an actress and screenwriter, her dialogue is especially rich and she quickly draws the reader in. 

From India to Greece to Venice, the diverse characters of THE OTHER LANGUAGE explore different facets of their lives - ego and expertise, the passion to rediscover old loves, the dissolution of a marriage, the false claims we make on each other. The writing is clear and descriptive, never flowery or sappy. We come to know the characters quickly and well and you might recognize some of them, or discover yourself. 

In India, for example, a wife seeks a richer identity by draping herself in indigenous clothing like the dupatta, the scarf women wrap around their shoulders, and the distinctive sandals called chappals, clearly emblematic of her desire for a richer identity, while her husband finds her foolish, trapped as he is in writers' block and discontent. 

He walked some more, all the way to the Shiva shrine at the end of the ghat. He had had no useful thoughts about the story he was trying to crack. India wasn't a place conductive to creativity, he decided, it occupied too much space with all its unanswerable questions.

THE OTHER LANGUAGE is the kind of story collection best read all at once - the diversity of character and place makes the sum of the parts a larger whole, and in this, as good as a novel told through places and faces. Or, read one at a time when you need a quick fix of fiction.

How to find a great book

What is better for a reader/writer than to discover a great book/writer? And there are just so many that the opportunity for discovery is always there. But so many, SO many, we must first wade through the publishing labyrinth.

There are lists, oh yes, lots of lists. Goodreads lists and Amazon lists and everyone's favorites lists. Books categorized by emotion or geography or style. Pulitzer Prize winners - I've read most of these now - and National Book Award winners and Pen winners and Booker winners, those are all good sources. Oprah books. City Reads. All excellent sources.

Lots of book group lists now, if you want to read what everyone else is reading, and sometimes that works because you will find many great books there. Although, also many heavily promoted books that appeal to a broad audience. Not the same.

NPR frequently shares their finds. You can spend a year reading Nancy Pearl's recommendations in one of her Book Lust books, great resource [especially Book Lust to Go.] Europa publishes new translations of fantastic European writers and reprints those out of print, you can read well just reading their titles.

Facebook and the Twitter-sphere is loaded with self-published authors [myself included] paddling through muddy waters to reveal a daring piece of writing, and there are lots of book review bloggers who promote books [myself included]. No shortage of lists, but so much so, now the lists too are overwhelming.

What's a reader to do?

Word of mouth. In the end, that's the source. Always has been. What are you reading? we ask a friend who also reads good stuff. What's interesting, we ask at the local independent bookstore, still the best source for discovery. What's better than browsing? Not every good read, hardly in fact, are new. The back stacks at the library hold a myriad of books that have languished for years for lack of interest, but not lack of greatness.

Or, you meet an interesting person [in this case a lovely well-read man] who tells you about a writer you never heard of: Stefan Zweig. "Letter from an Unknown Woman" he recommends, the title story of a collection of four long stories. 1922. The writing is spectacular. Crisp, sharp, heart-wrenching. Wow. Why have I not found him sooner? [The same might be said of the man.] Then you discover that the new Wes Anderson film is based on writings by the same author. Synchronicity.

Stefan Sweig

The same man [who has quickly detected the way to my heart] brings me a book by Alexander Theroux. "Primary Colors." [No, not the politico.] Philosophical essays on color. I've read brother Paul Theroux, but not the sibling. Elegant writing. Wow! Where might I have found these books? Not on any lists I know.

Have I mentioned lately "Evidence of Things Unseen" by Marianne Wiggins? A truly great novel, short-listed for the most prestigious awards, still hardly known. Recommended highly. Or have you read "The Water is Wide" Pat Conroy's first autobiographical tale of teaching at a school for impoverished black kids on an island in the South? Gorgeous prose. Great story.

Buried in the most esoteric lists and on many Amazon pages and in the tweets of excellent authors with much to say, there are hidden gems, and we cannot find them without a nod from another reader. In reading, like most things, we get by with a little help from our reading friends.

Spring Reading?

The reading pile, forever calling to me, forever too tall and growing, seems heavily laden right now with stories antithetical to the spring season. So be it. I do love contrast.

I am currently re-reading "Mary Coin" by Marisa Silver, a truly beautiful novel published last year that invents the lives and crossroads of Dorothea Lange and the Depression era farm worker who became immortalized in the photograph "Migrant Mother." I reviewed the book favorably last year and now my book group will discuss, so [happily] another reading. However, the landscape of the story is bleak, the era distressing, and women's lives particularly challenging, so hardly the vitality of spring. Think tiny purple crocus trapped under a hard frost.

In honor of the 75th anniversary of "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck, I am joining a countrywide movement promoted by NPR to re-read the novel. I haven't read this since college [and don't remember any of it] so I look forward to revisiting Steinbeck's elegant prose and gripping landscape, although this too will be a dreary place, like barren branches of a late-bloomer.

And then, for no special reason other than I often like to go back to beginnings, I will read Saul Bellow's award-winner: "The Adventures of Augie March." I was re-reading some early Philip Roth recently and he was a great admirer of the Nobel Prize winner and I confess I never got to this iconic novel so the time has come. Augie too grew up during the Depression so I guess there is a real theme here. This character is said to be quite dynamic, like Jasmine in full bloom.

And because I have to wind my way out of the Depression era, I am going to read a book that only recently came to my attention: "Edisto" by Padgett Powell. Published thirty years ago, the novel has had a recent resurgence, with comparison to Truman Capote, J. D. Salinger, and Flannery O'Connor. A coming-of-age story of a rambunctious boy, perhaps this one will spring fully into the season.

Perhaps these are the right books to read as the country finally begins to lift itself out of the Great Recession, albeit slowly and still painfully. Or, in commiseration with my dear friends on the east coast, my reading list is trapped in the long winter, so even if the calendar and the stars suggest spring, Mother Nature says no, not yet. So I will linger in the chill a bit longer, in literary terms, that is. Southern California is lovely in March.

Ride the Slightly Wild Side with Jess Walter

Jess Walter is indeed a 10.

Many, perhaps most of us discovered the great Jess Walter with his most recent success, "Beautiful Ruins" which I reviewed favorably last year. Here was a powerful descriptive voice with an engaging storytelling style and a delightfully original tale set from Italy to Hollywood and from the fifties to the present.

Ruins is what reviewers call a break-out novel, so I expected there were other works tucked away, perhaps out of print, so imagine my surprise when I discovered that JW has a large body of work, including an Edgar winner and a National Book Award nominee. Why hadn't I heard of this writer before? I pay attention, I watch for the sleepers, but I missed him. However, now he is fully found.

When interesting writers come to me later in their writing lives, I go back to their backlist, and I downloaded several of JW's books, all markedly different, all original, all compelling writing with powerful narrative thrust and edgy characters. I am officially hooked!

First I read "The Financial Lives of the Poets" a quirky tale of a marriage imploding under the weight of the economy, drugs, boys gone wild and men unwilling to grow up. As funny as it was wise, I even recommended the novel to a snob of a reader-friend of mine who relished every bit of it. Great writing always wins. 

Then I read his recent collection of stories, "We Live in Water" which is, to my mind, and I adore short stories, not as grand as the long fiction, but oh so interesting and again, unforgettable characters and scenarios.

I read next "The Zero" which other reviewers compared to Kafka and which rocked me to the core - an intimate portrait of the after-shocks of 9/11 with a focus on one emergency responder, and told in a way that it might have been any of us. I will never forget this cop. I want to soothe his weary brow.

Now, "Land of the Blind" which may be my favorite. A little mystery, a lot of heart, a novel filled with such a collection of strivers and the lonely it might have been the basis for a Beatles song [think Eleanor Rigby.] And all in the context of the technology boom and the capitalist mania before and during the economic collapse. A coming of age story without dwelling on the coming, which I especially appreciated - we know these characters, and we care about them, without stripping them to the bone.

Did I mention that his novels mostly take place in Washington State - Spokane and Seattle - which may become for JW what Newark was for Philip Roth. Yes, he's so good I speak his name with the master.

"Children know what they are. Try telling a fat kid he looks good, or a child who is a bad athlete that he just needs to try harder. He knows better. But as adults, we start to believe the bullshit. We tell ourselves that cheating on our taxes isn't really stealing and that the job candidate with long legs is really a better fit for the company... We come up with rationalizations and justifications after the fact, and then we convince ourselves that these things are true. We pretend we are doing the best we can."

JW writes with contemporary flair about seemingly real people in the here and now dealing with the same sort of struggles and longings as the rest of us albeit in sometimes unfathomable circumstance. He writes men and women with equal flair and reveals the flaws in all of us with unflinching honesty and acceptance.

"The small things I took for granted then torture me now in their simple perfection: a plate of pancakes, a hand on my shoulder, a look of deep concern. You have no idea when you're so eager to escape your own house, your own life, your own childhood, of the sad truth that no one will ever care for you like that again."

Oh so true. And rarely do you find such clarity and honesty in the midst of a wild tale. I'm going to read "Citizen Vince" next which won the Edgar Award. Join me. JW is a great ride.

Alice Walker's MERIDIAN: Timeless

The great Alice Walker

PBS recently aired a fascinating documentary on the writer Alice Walker who rose literally from a hardscrabble existence to reverence as writer and activist. I have always been a fan of her clear prose and rich characters, and I was reminded that I had never read Meridian, her second novel, which is now available for e-readers, as are all her works.

While The Color Purple, The Temple of My Familiar, and Possessing the Secret of Joy are novels worthy of their accolades and readership, I found this early work especially interesting as I felt I was taking Walker's journey to activism with her.

As an aside, when Possessing the Secret of Joy came out, I decided not to read it, the thought of a novel about clitoral mutilation just too hard to bear, but my daughters, who knew I liked great fiction, bought it for me for Mother's Day, so of course, like all the art on the fridge, I had to comply. The great surprise: one of the most fantastic books I've read and yes, deeply embedded with joy despite the subject.

When you re-read a great writer, you nestle into their prose as if you've just run into an old friend. Walker never manipulates her reader, she just tells it like it is. Taking place largely during the sixties, a young woman is thrust into the harsh realities of sex and racism too soon to make sense of it, at first. Living in a small southern black community, she encounters civil rights fighters in black and white, and discovers the depth of the divide between the races, while also discovering her own desire to make a difference.

However the path to change for Meridian, like her people, is fraught with obstacles, not the least of which is her own community, filled with an assortment of unusual and fascinating characters.

"The majority of black townspeople were sympathetic to the Movement from the first, and told Meridian she was doing a good thing... Her mother however was not sympathetic... God separated the sheeps from the goats, and the blacks from the whites."

Meridian is the embodiment of truth. She suffers physically for her own and others' sins: a lightning rod for the storms around her. She struggles to forgive and to be forgiven. She longs for what she cannot describe. The man in her life, Truman, who also evolves over the decade, abandons her after a heated affair for a long-term relationship with a white woman, Lynne, whom he also ultimately abandons in the hopes of rekindling his relationship with Meridian, who by then has found her voice and her mission.

Lynne, like many whites and Jews who supported the civil rights movement, is one of the more terrific characters, for me, as Walker digs deep into her psyche, revealing her motives for activism: a woman who suffers for the oppression perpetrated by her people. Like Germans who sheltered Jews during WWII, were they compassionate or were they compensating for the sins of their nations? Walker also deftly portrays the mixed feelings among towards the whites who invaded their movement and some, like Lynne, who took their men as well.

"By being white, Lynne was guilty of whiteness. Then the question was, is it possible to be guilty of color?"

In my own novel, "Colors of the Wheel" I explore contemporary challenges of race, and novels like Meridian that reflect on the civil rights movement confirm that much has changed, and too much hasn't.