Shelf Love

I’ve been trying to read books from my shelves, both physical and digital. I was sort of craving a mystery this weekend, so I decided to try this Swedish crime novel by Viveca Sten, and translated by Marlaine Delargy. I got it as part of an Amazon giveaway a few years ago to promote their Amazon Crossing translation publishing program. I knew absolutely nothing about it, other than that it was the first in a series called the Sandhamm murders and that it has been adapted for TV.

The book begins with the discovery of a dead body off the shores of Sandhamm island. It all appears to be an accident until the dead man’s cousin is found dead. The detective on the case, Thomas Andreasson, comes in from the mainland, but he has some local knowledge and connections to help him interpret some of the clues he finds and uncover more details about the people involved. In particular, his longtime friend Nora is able to offer some insight, but she’s worried about her own future as she considers an important career move and what it might mean for her marriage.

I found this to be a reasonably good mystery/thriller. The solution to the mystery was satisfyingly unexpected, and on looking back, I could see there was at some information that pointed to the solution sprinkled throughout. And there’s a really gripping race against the clock toward the end that I enjoyed. However, I found most of the characters pretty bland. Nora was the only one who really stood out and that’s mostly because of her personal dilemma outside the crime. Thomas had some personal history that was supposed to give him layers, I think, but it mostly stays in the background. I’m guessing it’ll be developed later on. There’s also a lot of talk about who is going on vacation when that seemed like a lot of distraction in a first book but might be meaningful once you get to know the characters more. But none of it was quite enough to make me want to seek out more books in the series.

The day when Daisy met Jay Gatsby again should have been beautiful, the same kind of day on which she had been married, or at least a crisp and dying summer day like the one where she had met the handsome young soldier. Instead silvery clouds hung overhead like wet rags out to dry, and when we stepped out of the car in front of Nick’s humble little place, we could both smell the rain, paused for the moment, but by no means gone. Back in Louisville, that high wet smell coupled with the uncomfortable prickling heat meant that a twister was on the way, crossing the flat cropland with a destructive fury that was out to ruin lives. We were in the East, however, and we had other ways to ruin our lives.

The prose Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful is wonderfully languid and evocative, which is a good thing, since she draws her story from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Poor prose would sink her whole project, but as it is, this novel feels like a worthy tribute.

Vo tells her story through the eyes of Jordan Baker, who, in this version, was “rescued” from Vietnam by a white missionary woman who couldn’t bear to leave behind her favorite baby when she left. In general, Jordan seems confident and self-assured, despite being left on her own for much of her childhood. She goes to clubs, has affairs with men and women, and doesn’t seem to fret much about the ways she is different. But being reunited with her childhood friend Daisy and getting drawn into Jay Gatsby’s orbit shakes something loose in her, and she starts to uncover things about herself that she never knew before.

The supernatural elements of this story sneak up. In fact, at first, I thought Jordan was speaking in metaphors when she described magical happenings. But the book is suffused with magic. Jordan has special magical abilities, and Jay’s wealth is of demonic origin somehow, which makes perfect sense, really. I don’t recall the details of Gatsby well — I had to review a plot summary to refresh my memory before I got very far in this — but I was impressed with how well the magic was incorporated into the story without changing its essential elements. And this addition to the story helped me recognize just how much World War I must have haunted Nick and Jay. They brought those ghosts back with them.

As much as I admired the construction of the book and the creativity with which Vo adapts Gatsby to her own purposes, I wasn’t fully absorbed in the book. At times, despite how emotionally amped up it seemed like it should be, it felt a little cold and detached. But, in fairness, I think that’s a reflection of her drawing inspiration from Fitzgerald’s, whose prose style I enjoy but find similarly detached. So it’s not a flaw exactly, but something that keeps me from giving my heart to the book, despite finding what Vo is doing extremely interesting.

Maggie and her eight younger brothers and sisters have lived in near isolation for as long as they can remember — just them and their parents and occasional trips to the library in town. But then Maggie decides that it’s time for her to strike out on her own. At age 19, her primary skill is child care, and with her younger siblings growing up, it makes sense for her to leave. So her father arranges for her to take a child care job that will require her to live in town, away from her family. And then, in the time between the decision and the leaving, the world seems to open up to the family, with mysteries unearthed and secrets revealed.

This book by Elizabeth Gentry has sort of the dark fairy tale quality of a Shirley Jackson novel. A lot of things in this world don’t make literal sense. The neighborhood around the house seems like a maze that shifts around as Maggie takes her first steps outside on her own, in preparation for finally leaving. And memories also seem to shift, with Maggie starting to recognize and remember neighbors she must have known at some point. These include her own grandparents, who make dark references to the severing of their relationship.

I enjoyed the book’s aura of mystery and general weirdness. It was often unclear what was truly off-kilter and what aspects of the weirdness was due to Maggie’s own perception of reality, a perception that it seems had been altered by her parents’ choices. I was, at times, frustrated by the large number of characters — too many siblings to tell apart, especially since they were sometimes referred to by name and sometimes by their area of interest or role in the family. I sometimes wondered how much of the story was deliberately ambiguous and strange and how much was just confusing, but that’s not unusual in this kind of book.

At the end, some of the secrets about Maggie’s family are revealed. But other elements remain mysterious. How, precisely, did Maggie’s parents make her and her siblings forget? Why are the paths so hard to navigate? I’m not actually sure those answers are important, though. The book is, at heart, about how parental influence dictates reality and how becoming an adult involves stepping out into one’s own reality. That’s what Maggie is in the process of doing, and by doing so, she brings some of her altered perspective back to her family. By the end, the world is different for everyone.

I checked this book out of the library mostly because I like Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing and storytelling style. I had no idea that this book was so different from her past novels, and if I’d known, I’m not sure I’d have been interested. As it turns out, I’m glad I didn’t know, because I really liked this.

Whereabouts is a short book, just 157 pages, and there’s the slimmest wisp of a story. The unnamed main character teaches college at an unnamed city. She lives alone, her main companions being the unnamed people who surround her on the city streets. One of her most regular conversation partners is her barista. She’s not entirely cut off — she has friends who she visits and who visit her. She has a somewhat fractious relationship with her mother. But her general mode of living is one of solitude.

Solitude: it’s become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well. It’s probably my mother’s influence. She’s always been afraid of being alone and now her life as an old woman torments her, so much that when I call to ask how she’s doing, she just says, I’m very alone. She says she misses hiving amusing and surprising experiences, this even though she had lots of friends who love her, and a social life far more complicated and lively than mine. The last time I went to visit her, for example, the phone kept ringing. And yet she’s always on edge. I’m not sure why. She’s burdened by the passage of time.

A lot of the book is made up of little reflections like the above. The narrator will have an experience or observe something, and it will get her thinking. And a lot of what she thinks about chimed with the kinds of things I think about, as a woman of a similar age who lives alone and works from home. She talks about the “small pleasures my solitude affords me,” as well as the ways it plagues her.

The very little wisp of plot involves her decision about whether to eschew her solitude for a fellowship program that her will her away from home for a year and put her amid other scholars at mealtime every day. She’s interested — and not. Because she’s happy — and not.

Lahiri initially wrote his book in Italian and then translated it back into English, her native language. And the style feels a little different from her other novels. The sentences are shorter, and the chapters are very short. It’s a book of simple but profound observations, almost as if working in another language required her to slow down and choose her words much more carefully. I’ve not read her memoir about learning Italian, In Other Words, but reading this made me curious about it.

Elwood Curtis was on his way to the campus where he’d enrolled to take college classes while still in high school when he got caught catching a ride with a car thief, and being a young Black man in the 1960s South, the outcome was not going to be good. Instead of college, he ended up at the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reform school where there’s no real education or reform.

Decades later, a secret graveyard is found at the Nickel Academy and as an adult Elwood watches the news unfold from New York, he knows the time has come to return to Nickel.

The novel tells the story of what happened to Elwood at Nickel, with occasional glimpses of his New York life. Nickel, which Colson Whitehead based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys, All the boys suffered, but the Black boys, in Whitehead’s version (but no doubt also in real life), bore the worst of it. Having always been a good student, Elwood is determined to earn enough points to rise through the ranks and qualify for early release, but it becomes clear early on that real goodness, the kind of goodness Elwood imagines for himself, is not available at Nickel without a heavy cost.

Elwood saw Dr. Martin Luther King as a personal hero. When he was young, he listened over and over to recordings of his speeches and internalized his message. He had gone to protests, even over his grandmother’s objections — she thought it was more important for him to go to work. And his impulse at Nickel was to make things better not just for himself, but for everyone. When another boy was beaten up my bullies, Elwood tried to stop it, only to get a far worse beating from the men in charge than the bullies got. And when Elwood saw how the school was skimming and selling state-provided food and supplies (those intended for the Black students, of course), he wanted to report it. His perspective was that

If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest. That’s how he saw it, how he’d always seen, things.

The glimpses we see of the adult Elwood are not those of a crusader for social justice. He’s getting by, and eventually doing better than getting by. Did Nickel take that impulse for justice away? What kind of man did Nickel make him? His secrets aren’t revealed until the end of the book, but Whitehead very cleverly planted everything we needed to know throughout the book. It’s an unsettling story about how difficult it is to be truly good in a world full of wickedness. I’ll be thinking about it for a while.

The characters in this horror novella by Daryl Gregory are not actually completely fine. All of them are trying to recover from various traumas, either supernatural or extremely gruesome. Harrison, for example, was a monster hunter as a kid who became the subject of a popular series of children’s books. And Barbara was the victim of the scrimshander, who carved messages into her bones and sewed her back up. Stan was partly eaten by cannibals as a child. And Martin and Greta have problems they’re a little slower to reveal.

These characters are brought together by Dr. Jan Sayer for group therapy, the idea being that getting to know others with similar traumas might help them, as they help each other. But, of course, things prove to be complicated by the fact that some of the beings who caused their problems are very much still around and active. And maybe even among them.

This is a satisfying and suspenseful book that presents a group of interesting characters and efficiently delivers a story about them. The different pieces tie together nicely, and I enjoyed watching it all fall into place. I’m glad it was just 182 pages. It’s the kind of story that could easily get bogged down in presenting complete backstories and presenting all the introspection the characters engage in. Gregory provides both, but only as needed. Each character feels complete, like there’s more to know about them, but this story about this group is not the time and place for such details. Although I wouldn’t want every book I read to be this tightly constructed, I appreciated the quick and compelling story presented here.

I read this short memoir by Lynn Barber because I really like the movie based on it. I knew nothing of Barber’s long career in British journalism. It turns out that just a chapter in the book’s 190 pages is about the events chronicled in the movie, so it doesn’t really add much to that story. Most of the book is about Barber’s career and her marriage. It’s a perfectly fine memoir, about a woman who led an interesting life.

After the events in the movie, when teenage Barber has an affair with an older man, she goes off to Oxford, where she parties more than she studies. But she meets, David, the man she eventually marries, and after university, she casts about for some sort of job where she might be able to write a little and ends up at the fledgling Penthouse magazine, where she gradually rose up through the ranks to become a noted interviewer. She writes a sex manual and then, after her children are born, she becomes an interviewer for a succession of well-known British papers and magazines. The book concludes with the story of her husband’s fatal illness and the horrible choices they had to make in seeking treatments through a cascade of complications.

Because this is so short, none of the topics are covered in extreme depth, but Barber’s prose is so economical that the narrative doesn’t feel incomplete. It’s straightforward and clear, perhaps a result of years of magazine writing. Barber’s particular story didn’t stand out to me as all that unusual for a woman of her era, but I’m interested enough in journalism that I liked seeing how her career developed. And I was glad that she kept it brief, instead of padding it out with lots of unnecessary details. A longer book would have been aggravating,  but this was a good glimpse of one woman’s life.

Lauren Groff’s newest novel is an imagining of the life of the 12th-century poet, Marie of France who wrote a series of Anglo-Norman lais. Almost nothing is known about her, which makes her a good subject for this sort of speculative historical novel. I had never heard of her myself, so I had no sense of whether Groff’s imaginings were plausible or not. But I do love historical novels about the distant past, so I was interested in Groff’s take on the period. But this novel relies too much on broad sketches, instead of the fine detail of something like Nicola Griffith’s Hild, another speculative take on a medieval woman.

Groff’s Marie is a member of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court who has been sent away to Angleterre (England) to serve as prioress at an abbey, where all the sisters are poor and (apparently) devoted to suffering. Marie is devastated because she’s madly in love with Eleanor and not particularly religious — at least not so religious as to feel any sort of a sense of vocation. But, once she arrives, she sees opportunities for reform, ways to make the abbey more prosperous and the sisters more comfortable and empowered. Part of her hopes to get the attention of her beloved queen, but these motives become mixed with her desire for power, her suspicion of men, and her understanding of a series of visions. Over time, the abbey becomes a fortress and Marie a leader unto herself.

I’m having a hard time working out how I feel about this book because there’s so much about it that I should like. For instance, I should really appreciate the ambiguity of Marie’s character. At some points, she seems like a protective mother, looking out for the good of her flock. And at other times, she’s a holy terror, quick to put down anyone who questions her or has the potential to encroach on her power. The sisters seem to love her and fear her. She seems deeply spiritual and extremely carnal. All of these contradictions make for a potentially vivid and interesting character. But the novel kept me at a distance, instead of immersing me.

I think some of the problem, for me, was the book’s episodic structure. It’s just 257 pages and attempts to cover her entire 70+ years of life, so it skips ahead a lot. At some points, it seems more like a series of stories about Marie of France — a big event will happen, get resolved, and not be mentioned again. And so there are chapters where she’s a guardian mother, keeping the sisters safe from evil men. And chapters where she’s focused on preserving her own power, sending away a sister who the other women are coming to love. Or she’s a lovelorn subject of a queen who has no interest in her as a person. The different sides of her exist side-by-side, rather than being fully integrated. It doesn’t take the time to dive deeply into who she is or what her world is like.

I’ve seen several reviews where people said they didn’t expect to love a book about a 12th-century nun. Maybe part of the problem is there. I would fully expect to love such a book, but it just didn’t live up to my hopes.