ELIZABETH SPELLER'S THE FIRST OF JULY RANKS WITH THE GREAT WAR NOVELS

All Quiet on the Western Front and The Red Badge of Courage are classic war novels because they deal not with the war so much as with the men who risk their lives, often for a cause they don't fully understand--if, indeed there is a legitimate cause. The books have a universal quality because humanity does not change its yearnings.

Elizabeth Speller’s The First of July is a book in this classic tradition as it examines men of different backgrounds, in different countries, and of different ages, all who have a reason to enter the war as a soldier but whose reason may have nothing to do with love of country.  Each makes extreme sacrifices during WWI but each for a very different reason.  In that way, in particular, I was immediately reminded of All Quiet on the Western Front and The Red Badge of Courage.  Those protagonists were boys; that is not always the case in The First of July.

First of July becomes a superb study of human character and motivation, its strengths and weaknesses as well as the yearnings which sometimes lie so deep inside that we are not even aware. 

Following the characters’ individual stories and appreciating the uniqueness of each man becomes a sad joy as we learn their fates in the horribly bloody battles of WWI.  In fact, Speller sets her novel before the war begins and then in the time leading up to, and then shortly after, the bloodiest battle for the British of WWI, The Battle of the Somme.  Allied forces casualties numbered almost one hundred thousand.

First of July is exquisitely crafted.  The ugliness and grittiness of war is exposed in a descriptive but controlled manner.  We move through time when war lay only on the horizon until it is all encompassing. We learn each character’s background and reaction as the war moves closer and closer.  We get a glimpse into the distinct cultures of their different countries as well as of their personal relationships with others.  From a wealthy “runaway” member of British royalty to the son of a coffin maker whose greatest wish is to make enough money to buy a fine bicycle, we view every strata of society, different kinds of relationships from mother and son to husband and wife.  Some men are honest; some are not.  Some have been mislead.  Some are ambitious; some are not. In total, we are gifted with a perceptive view of Everyman meeting the horrors of war.  It is stunning.

The writing is excellent--descriptive yet right and objective. I will definitely read another one of Elizabeth Speller’s books of historical fiction.

TAKE FREDRIK BACKMAN'S NOVEL, A MAN CALLED OVE, ALONG FOR THE RIDE

Traveling with a good book is akin to having another companion, and Fredrik Backman’s strong  novel, A Man Called Ove, is just the kind of traveling companion you look for.

While his story makes a wonderful companion, Ove, the 59 year old we meet as he vents at a salesman trying to explain to him what an iPad is, would not be the kind of man you’d normally seek as a travel partner.  He has no faith in technology and no respect for salesmen who try to explain it to him.  He’s a cranky guy, set in his ways, disliked and avoided by most, and thoroughly convinced that his way is the only way.

So what makes Ove interesting?  We all think we know someone quite like him: older, basically intransigent, intolerant of others, longing for the past, etc. etc.  I, of course, do not find a 59 year old to be “old,” but that’s another story.  Ove’s familiarity is part of his appeal because we nod our heads and smirk as the author sardonically portrays him.  He’s humorous because he is essentially humorless.  But the more we get to know Ove, the less we smirk at his bungling attempts, his unfailing but failing resistance to the growing interaction with his very persistent and very pregnant new neighbor, and his reliance on a very real guardian angel whose approval he seeks even as he deeply sighs at what she prompts him to do.  There are a lot of tears, often unexpected, that go along with our smirks at his quirky behavior. 

Why the tears, you may ask.  Behind every person’s current story is a back story.  It is important to know Ove’s, and as a reader, you might begin to hope for a long flight or a rainy day where you stay indoors.  You will want to read about a man called Ove to find out what makes him tick.

Backman’s writing is direct and deceptively simple.  A chapter entitled “A Man Called Ove Backs Up with a Trailer,” for instance, becomes an introduction to a host of characters, each nicknamed by Ove according to physical appearance. He practically becomes unhinged for his neighbor's breaking the (Ove’s) rules, for driving ineptitude, and for what he considers his basic lack of respect.  Of course, it’s also humorous as Ove tries to drive their car with all the modern bells and whistles, reacting peculiarly to backup warning sounds and other new-fangled unnecessaries in modern vehicles.

Backman makes sure that just as the reader begins to feel dead set against Ove, he releases a bit of information, injects some humor, and makes sure we want to see what happens next. He brings our rolling boil back down to a curious simmer.  

As we learn more about Ove, we begin to envision a very different man from the 59 year old we’ve just met.  It reminds us not to judge because we never really know how deep the roots are and where they are gnarled and twisted. 

A Man Called Ove examines some deeper questions as well.  What makes a person heroic?  What are worthwhile values by which one lives life?  What makes one truly happy?  Do we always know our true worth in the world?  Are we ever too old to stop growing?  Is happiness out there if we just look for it and reach out?

In many ways, these questions are answered, and as they are, along with the smiles at the humor, and the interesting encounters and revelations, the reader is moved to tears over and over again.  Those tears are not always from sadness.

It’s a complex book.  It’s an interesting book.  It’s a thoroughly enjoyable book.  Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove is definitely a worthwhile travel companion.

McCULLOUGH'S THE WRIGHT BROTHERS IS NO FLIGHT OF FANCY. IT'S THE REAL DEAL.

The beauty of David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers emanates from McCullough's ability to flesh out these two men, showing them as more than cardboard figures in ancient photo stills or early 1900 stereotypes in antique movies getting their airplane off the ground at Kitty Hawk and launching us into an entirely new age.  In McCullough’s book, these are real men, challenging themselves to do something no man has ever done before.  We know what happens, but traveling on their journey is quite a trip.

As usual, McCullough’s meticulous research gives us much more than an historical moment; it gives us a feeling for the period in history when men in several countries of the world knew they were on the brink of being able to finally and confidently move into another realm—the air.  The race began on the ground, but the finish line was in the air.  Wilbur and Orville Wright’s story is timeless.  And it’s fascinating reading.

McCullough doesn’t begin with their airplane.  He begins by allowing his reader to observe Wilbur and Orville, their relationship with one another and with other members of their family, their personal characteristics which seem to complement each other, their family history of the early loss of their mother, the steadfast values of their traveling Bishop father, and their extraordinary dedication to making something worthwhile of their lives.  That last quality was virtually in their DNA and led them to work tirelessly to fulfill a life-long dream to fly.  Theirs becomes a story not only of early 20th-century discovery but also a lesson for every dreamer today.  

  

No one needs to be reminded of man’s quest to fly.  Through the ages, stories abound: in Greek mythology’s Icarus, in ancient drawings, in Da Vinci’s flying machine drawings, and in numerous documented failed attempts.  Always interested in the mechanical nature of how machines work, the Wright brothers were explorers and inventors—printing and publishing their own newspaper, getting in on the bicycle craze and then becoming bicycle builders who develop and patent their own popular brand of bicycles. They continued that business to earn a living as they also worked on their airplane.

Absorbed with watching the way birds use their wings—not by flapping so much as by riding the currents of air—they left the prevalent aeronautical culture and worked on developing a wing shape that enabled them to do the same thing.  But before they even tried to build, they studied everyone who had ever made attempts at building a flying machine.  They had immense help from the Smithsonian Institution, for instance.  They also intuitively knew to keep their cards close to their chests as others around the world were attempting to fly as well.

By the time the brothers brought their machine to the primitive beaches of Kitty Hawk, they understood they were close to realizing their dream.  They returned seasonally over several years before they actually performed that first flight.  It’s difficult to imagine that even after their theories worked, the brothers still had to learn to fly—and they had no teachers.  It was a matter of getting into the air and through trial and error without killing themselves that they learned to ride the currents and soar like the birds.

Amazingly, the exciting prospect of flight did not, at first, have Americans anxiously on the edges of their seats.  The French and Germans were most enthusiastic, and, indeed, the initial financing and fame the Wright brothers gained came from Europe rather than from America.  In pursuing the important business aspect, Wilber Wright spent a great deal of time in Europe, eventually bringing over his brother and, ultimately, his sister and father.  

As fame and competition impacted their work, Wilbur remained the businessman in the flying enterprise, and Orville became the flier, recovering from a tragic flying accident where he was seriously injured and his passenger was killed.  In fact, lawsuits concerning patents as well as the business aspect of their enterprise occupied so much of Wilbur’s time that he was forced to give up flying in order to attend to business.  Orville continued to fly and break records.

Reading about these pioneers is fascinating.  Though two of the most important men of the 20^th century, they never became arrogant or changed by their celebrity.  The money and fame that accompanied their work were not the goals, and those who knew them often mentioned their basic humility. 

Orville lived to a ripe old age, but Wilbur died in his mid-40s.  Their far-reaching successes came early.  

I was fascinated by the book.  I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and learning about these two very important men and their accomplishments as well as their bumpy road to success.  They exemplify the American dream, working tirelessly to achieve their goals and finally reaching them through their hard, dangerous, and sometimes exhausting efforts.  I just flew cross-country from Seattle, and I tried to imagine how they would react to the hustle and bustle of SEATAC or Newark airports.  I wonder what they would say if they could see their invention today as a mode of travel for even the ordinary person.  I wonder what they would have said to the men and women who took the idea of flying and sent us to the moon and beyond!

Other David McCullough books I’ve read, enjoyed, and highly recommend are Truman, John Adams, 1776, The Path Between the Seas (about the building of the Panama Canal), The Great Bridge (about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge), The Johnstown Flood, and Mornings on Horseback (about Theodore Roosevelt).  I haven’t had a moment of boredom.  I’ve enjoyed every one.  This is history that reads as a novel, revealing the people and time as well as discussing the event.  It doesn’t get much better than this.

GO SET A WATCHMAN -- HARPER LEE'S BEST SELLER IS DEFINITELY WORTH A READ

Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman.  Hmmm.  I held back from reading any reviews or analyzes of the novel I pre-ordered and waited for with bated breath.  I had already read the various stories about this book's history, and I wanted to put that aside as much as I could just as I wanted to put To Kill a Mockingbird aside as much as I could.

But as I read Go Set a Watchman, I could not see Atticus as anyone other than Gregory Peck nor Jean Louise as anyone other than a grown-up Mary Badham.  Nor could I ignore that, at the very least, Go Set a Watchman may have been "touched up" by persons unknown from Harper Lee's original rejected draft form and that the characters I would come to love in To Kill a Mockingbird, including Tom Robinson, as well as the sub-plot of his trial, would have their seeds planted, to some degree, in this earlier book. The absence of Boo Radley was very obvious.  It wasn't until I finished reading that I looked at some of the reviews to see how others reacted not only to this book but also to the bits and pieces inserted or missing from To Kill a Mockingbird.

I did not finish Go Set a Watchman with the negative reactions I’ve read in the press and in magazines.  I thought the grace of language and the feelings of small-town Southern life that speak primarily of a past era were here, and the soft fluidity of expression that Harper Lee exhibits in a supremely more polished manner in To Kill a Mockingbird is evident here.  The tone, despite Jean Louise’s rambunctious and iconoclastic rebellion, is calm and consistent on the parts of the older Finches and troubled on Jean Louise's part.  One can see how Atticus’ approach to his daughter when she was six has not changed much now that she is 26.  Nor can one see any inconsistency in Atticus’ earlier defense of Tom Robinson or of his present defense of Calpurnia's son.  Held in higher regard than personal feelings is the law.  

While it is distressing to be reminded that the council’s feelings and even Atticus’ reasoning were so much a part of the pre-1960s South (and unfortunately even later), those feelings were real and to deny them is to re-write history.  I abhor re-writing history.  But this novel, if printed in its own time, would have died a natural death and gone the way of other dated and/or unacceptable works.

Go Set a Watchman is a rite of passage novel, and it's interesting because our protagonist is already 26 years old, far older than usual. She has to move out of the old ways and into the new, and she has to experience how different life is in a place like New York before she can make that move.  When she left Maycomb, she was searching for something she could not identify.  This trip home helps her move closer to the road she will follow in life.  It's not her Daddy's world anymore even if he doesn't know it yet.  That's a universal truth most adults have a tough time accepting, and Atticus is no exception.

I wonder where Harper Lee’s real feelings lie in these matters.  She said she wanted to write a "race book." There's no question that she sides with Jean Louise.  Was she trying to make that transition from the world in which she grew up into the new world just being born when she wrote this book?  Had this book been published in its time, I wonder if To Kill a Mockingbird would have followed.  I doubt it.  But if it had, would it have ever gotten to the pinnacle of American Classics?  I doubt that too, for we would never have forgiven the older Atticus Finch who is so much a part of the old order.  Jean Louise revolts against Atticus’ ideas, but she comes to understand them.  She is just past them.  She is actually asked to come back to Maycomb and exert some positive influence on these too-long-held ideas.

What is interesting about Jean Louise is that even as she is repelled by the people she loves, she sees how she accepted many of the same behaviors.  When she visits Calpurnia and asks if Calpurnia hated the family she faithfully served, Jean Louise awakens to the stark, hard realization of how different and how difficult their worlds were.  But it is not as if she had never been to Calpurnia's home or known Calpurnia's family.  She was brought up blinded to the injustices of the times.

Jean Louise realizes that accepting the way she is raised is the basis of racism and other types of prejudice.  Attitudes and behaviors that appear to be the natural scheme of things are never questioned, but they are subtly taught and passed down generation after generation.  Change is right, but change is a huge challenge.  When Jean Louise leaves Maycomb, she still has a long way to go.  But she is willing--and anxious--to work at it.  There's the key to moving in the right direction--it takes conscious work and effort.  It can be achieved.

The character of Henry becomes important in light of Jean Louise's awakening.  She already revolted against some of the hometown characteristics, and she continues to take stronger and stronger stances.  Henry, however, comes from a different background, will remain in Maycomb, and despite his feelings that some of what he sees is wrong, he is concerned with his own acceptance, and so he approaches problems from an entirely different standpoint.  Isn't that the way the world works?  In Jean Louise's case, it is Uncle Jack who lectures her about the way their world works and how she fits into that world--or doesn't.  I found it all interesting and with a great deal of truth.  Sometimes the truth hurts, as Jean Louise discovers.

The Boo Radley sub-plot of To Kill a Mockingbird is not hinted at in Go Set a Watchman.  What that does to To Kill a Mockingbird is broaden the definitions and demonstrate another type of prejudice.  It fills out this second book and adds to its richness. It reminds me that Go Set a Watchman is a rejected first draft.

I liked the title of this novel as well.

According to the website Bible Hub, the title is from Isaiah 21:6 about the prophecy concerning the ruin of Babylon. Jean Louise symbolizes that watchman, and she reports what she sees in the land that must change.  As in the Bible, the event is not to happen immediately, but will in due time.

In the novel itself, it is suggested that the watchman is one's conscience.  We know right from wrong, and we should be able to choose right for ourselves as we grow up and begin to individually evaluate the world around us.  We need a watchman to alert us to dangers.

No matter how one approaches Go Set a Watchman, first reactions will be visceral.  This novel, still a monumental best seller, hits us with a flurry of punches that knock the wind out of us because Atticus Finch is not the man we thought him to be--as Uncle Jack tells Jean Louise--or because the South was just beginning to be forced to change in many ways after WWII and was still filled with seething animosity.   We don't want to hear that.

But I recommend this book.  I see the seeds of Harper Lee's greatness. I'd like to hear your reactions to it in the comments section.

JAMAAL'S JOURNEY----THOSE LAST FEW MONTHS OF HIGH SCHOOL

It’s the end of June, and during this past week, at least in my corner of the world, high schools celebrate the jubilant passing of students moving from one stage of their lives to the next.  Most graduating seniors throw up their caps, make or listen to speeches urging them forward, and seem in the midst of graduation euphoria.  For a moment, at least, the world looks bright to many of them.  In fact, for many, this is a brief period of time when the tensions of the last few months ease, and the future, seen through tearfully blurred vision, seems set.  Not so for others. 

It is the last three months of Senior Year that John McCormack captures in his novel, Jamaal’s Journey. Throughout that short period of time, McCormack’s perceptive book delves into the growing pains, questions, happinesses and sorrows that face a primarily minority group of students.  At best the teenage years are not easy ones, but for Jamaal and his friends, the struggle is a constant.

Jamaal, an African American HS senior, is trying to find his way, and as we travel with him on his journey, he deals with all the teenage trials—how to win the girl of his dreams, how not to break a heart or to have his own heart broken, how to move ahead in a world where even his language has to be altered to avoid ostracism by his friends or ostracism by the wider world he will enter as a college freshman.  It’s a thin tightrope to walk where reaching the goal of getting to the opposite landing is fraught with anxiety and questions that are sometimes unanswerable.  Jamaal relies on his friends, many of whom cannot travel the same path as he.

Despite the underlying seriousness of his novel, John McCormack packs Jamaal’s Journey  full of humor, irony, and typical teenage gaffes.  Jamaal and his friends make real life choices, overcome obstacles, sometimes are beaten into defeat, and sometimes display strength of character and mind in admirable ways.  It’s so real that you wish you could intercede and make the road a bit smoother.  The reader cannot help but recall the universal problems teenagers face and cheers these young people on throughout the story. 

Don't think for a moment that this is a dark, dour book.  McCormack captures the cadence of  language and weaves it into Jamaal’s story, sometimes narrated by Jamaal and sometimes by someone more omniscient.  The book is full of the ironic consequences of youthful decisions and the yearnings and laughter at parties where teenagers work on perfecting their coolness in front of others.  It’s about friendship, loyalty, and resilience among peers.  It’s about love of family and friends as well as the realization that after high school, things will never be quite the way it is in this point of time. Jamaal’s Journey reflects life, and life is never all good or all bad.

Real life is full of choices, and Jamaal’s choices set him on a journey he can barely envisage.  It’s more like a dream he is chasing.  He and his friends illustrate the problems in our society when socio-economic hardships so hamper children that simply getting to school each day is a problem.  Yet, they also illustrate the intrepid spirit within that helps them deal with the problems they face and overcome.

Jamaal’s Journey might be an eye-opener into teenage culture for adults, but it is also an excellent book if you are traveling with a teenager.  There are lots of lessons to be learned as he/she is being entertained by reading a good book. 

Jamaal’s Journey has already earned several awards in its category:

“Kirkus Indie Book of the Month Selection” for April, 2014

The San Francisco Book Festival Honorable Mention for YA in 2015

The National Indie Excellence Finalist Award for African-American Fiction in 2015

The Award Winning Finalist in the “Fiction: African-American” category of the 2015 International Book Awards

As a disclaimer, I should reveal that I taught at Spring Valley Senior High School with John McCormack.  But I really enjoyed reading Jamaal’s Journey, and I hope you will too.  It is available through Amazon.

LISA SEE'S DREAMS OF JOY--A JOY TO READ

Dreams of Joy is Lisa See’s sequel to Shanghai Girls, and what a sequel it is!  I didn’t even realize it was a sequel when I hastily selected the book, but I quickly caught on.  Shanghai Girls was so memorable that I was back in the story almost immediately. 

See moves us ahead many years, and the baby in Shanghai Girls is now a Los Angeles resident and a college student at the University of Chicago.  The family exists here, but China is still a part of their lives.  Much has happened in China over the years—especially the Communist Revolution led by Mao tse-tung.  The horrors caused by Japan are over, and the utopian era of communism has begun.

Or so Joy, the impressionable 19 year old college student, vaguely embarrassed by her family’s old-fashioned ways and immersed in the perfection of the communist vision through activity in the university’s Chinese Students Democratic Christian Association (and her boyfriend Joe), believes.  Additionally, as the novel opens, Joy reveals that she has just learned the truth about her mother, father, and aunt. The combination of these influences lead her to return to China—a country inviting Overseas Chinese to come back, to leave their evil capitalistic habits behind and to become a builder in the new and perfect communist world.

Every reader knows that outlook will lead to heartache, but Lisa See weaves a tale that is at once universal in nature—a young girl searching for her identity and her independence—and specific—a story that reflects the horrors of Mao’s leadership and speaks to the horrors of Mao’s Great Leap Forward where millions of Chinese starved to death.  Actual numbers of victims could not even be counted because the dead simply piled up and littered the roadsides and fields.  Cannibalism occurred especially when one family traded their baby for another.  In the end, there were simply too many to bury.  So we are also getting a chapter in China’s recent history.

With the first page of the book, Joy reveals that she has learned the truth about her lineage; her aunt is really her mother.  Her “parents” are really her aunt and her husband, Sam.  Her real father is Z.G., an artist still in China.  Sam recently committed suicide rather than face possible deportation to China.  The FBI’s interest in Sam stemmed from Joy’s involvement with the communist-leaning Chinese Students Democratic Christian Association at the University of Chicago.  Joy feels she is the cause of his death and allows the guilt to lead her back to China to try to atone.

The year is 1957.  Joy’s world is topsy turvy, and she intends to return to China to find her real father and to help build the ideal communist world—a world her American family has warned is a farce and lie time and again.

See does a wonderful job creating a narration by the two main characters, Joy and Pearl, her "mother" and original Shanghai Girl.  The reader feels the voice of each: the differences in age, experience, and aims.  Each one needs to grow in understanding not only of the world around her but also of each other.  All of that universal growth occurs within the context of a crazed, violent, repressive, and, in many cases, ignorant world that must be navigated with great care and duplicity. 

As readers, we get to see how “mother love” is not always a product of giving birth to a child, and that at its height, mother love is selfless even if the child is lost or selfish or rebellious.  We see another unfortunate example of how an entire people can be lured into submissiveness to the point of death or can be submissive enough for oppressive leadership to gain such power and control that the people lose their options and freedom. 

Dreams of Joy, obviously a title with a symbolic meaning, is rich in description of a country relatively few of us have visited and which we certainly have not seen as it is depicted here.  See’s scholarly research and journeys in today’s much more open China with people like Amy Tan give her an insider’s view that she shares with us.

Lisa See is certainly one of our great contemporary authors.  Read Shanghai Girls first, and you will want to follow up with Dreams of Joy.

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS--GREAT VACATION READ

Water for Elephants is a must read if you're looking for a colorful mixture of love and murder against the backdrop of a Depression-era circus (and who isn’t?). This is definitely not the circus your folks took you to when you were little. The first chapter is rife with hints of love, scenes of disaster, and a gruesome description of murder. With her phenomenal opening, author Sara Gruen has the reader hooked!

Told in flashback by Jacob close to the end of a lifetime, he takes us back with him to the Depression and a long-vanished world when circuses moved by train from town to town, each circus aspiring to be the next Ringling Brothers. With jobs scarce and starvation a real possibility, those who worked for the circus did just as they were told, and the conditions were mean and difficult. Gruen's description of the circus life, the kinds of acts, and the treatment of animals and people create an atmosphere of grunge and fear. Living conditions are atrocious on the train; horses are packed in so none can lie down. People are treated no better. There is a hierarchy among the circus folk—performers do not mix with the hands; the cook tent is handled differently for each level of worker, and everyone knows his place. Life is tough, and each member must earn his keep. It is not unusual for people no longer needed nor useful to be tossed from the moving train in the middle of the night. Gruen populates her book with the artists, performers, trainers, animals, and sideshow performers for which the circus is famous, but they do not become stereotypes; they're developed and interesting people who struggle to do their jobs and present the world with the illusions we wish to see.

Unfortunate circumstances initially bring Jacob to the circus, a world totally removed from the one he left behind as a Cornell veterinary medicine student. As he is introduced to the circus' unusual culture, so are we. A strange old man, Camel, an alcoholic in the age of prohibition, takes Jacob under his wing and makes sure he gets a job and a place to stay. At the circus Jacob meets August and his wife Marlena, a star performer on the Liberty horses, those regal white stallions with the beautifull girl standing and riding and guiding them around the ring. The couple’s and Jacob’s strange friendship evolves in and around the circus and grows more complex as time passes. Many of the characters have developed personal psychological defensive walls and come from strange and eerie backgrounds. Little by little Sara Gruen reveals them and forces her reader to react emotionally. She writes tightly, and no detail is unimportant.

In those crushing economic times, circuses fold, and the remaining ones rush to hire performers or secure animals that might add to their allure. At one such moment, the circus acquires Rosie, an elephant who does not seem to live up to her reputation as a wonderful performer. Although he hates Rosie, under August's direction she becomes the center of attention when ridden by Marlena. August is not happy with his new assignment as Rosie’s trainer. Rosie frustrates him and he retaliates cruelly. Neither Marlena nor Jacob can tolerate this abuse, and their concern for Rosie creates interesting consequences. It is Jacob who unlocks the secret to Rosie.

Water for Elephants is a wonderful book of layered stories. I got lost in each layer and enjoyed the richness and surprises. I cannot describe this novel as a “pretty” book. If you enjoy Americana and love an escapist adventure, this is certainly the book for your next vacation.

UNBROKEN--LAURA HILLENBRAND'S EPIC STORY OF ONE OF AMERICA'S FINEST

For a horrifying but very real picture of human resistance and endurance in time of war, read Laura Hillenbrand's brilliantly written Unbroken.  This is non-fiction that reads as fiction. Make sure you have time because once you pick up this book, you will not want to put it down.

Hillenbrand is extremely careful to let us get to know our protagonist, Louis Zamperini, as a child, an often recalcitrant child, a dedicated Olympic athlete, a WWII bombardier and prisoner of war, and a returning GI. The author's meticulous depiction of Louis’ background, his dedication to become a runner in the 1936 Olympics and a skillful, trained Army Air Corps bombadier during WWII helps us to understand how he withstood the Japanese attitude toward prisoners of war and particularly toward him.  It also helps us to see how he was able to build a post-war life, something we hear about almost daily with our contemporary returning military.

In June, 1943, Zamperini and his surviving fellow fliers were adrift in an ocean teeming with sharks.  Their search mission for another plane abruptly ended when their own plane failed mechanically and crashed into the ocean.  Wrapped in the plane's wires as it sunk below the waves, Louis mysteriously managed to find himself on the surface of the water near a raft. At that time, life rafts were not sufficiently equipped to withstand the horrors of being adrift in the ocean for any length of time. The  survivors of the crash had just enough food to sustain the barest of life; they managed with just enough water to do the same, and then, after being strafed by a Japanese fighter, they were captured and became part of the Japanese prisoner-of-war system that left more dead prisoners by a significant margin than any other country in WWII.  The Japanese culture despised the idea of surrender or of being captured by the enemy, and their treatment of their captives reflected their disgust and lack of respect. In fact, as Japan saw its loss in the war an eventuality, it issued a Kill Order so that no prisoner-of-war would be left alive.  The atomic bombs assured that order was not carried out.

Japanese politician Nakajima Chikuhei said in 1940 “...it is the sacred duty of the leading race [Japanese] to lead and enlighten the inferior ones.” The Japanese, he continued are the “sole superior race of the world.” Its military-run school system drilled children on this imperial destiny.” This is the true outlook of fascism.

Hillenbrand shows us how violence was an integral component of the Japanese military culture.  “The Japanese imperial army made violence a cultural imperative.”  Before America was attacked at Pearl Harbor, the horrific attack on Nanking, China was an example of the Japanese approach.  Needless to say, Japan’s prisoner of war camps were violent places that resulted in more deaths than in releases at the end of the war.

Throughout Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand leads her readers to understand not only the Japanese approach to its prisoners, always supporting her information with statistics, but also how Louis Zamperini had grown into a man who had a chance of surviving despite the odds.

When he returned from the war having resisted every attempt to break and kill him by sadistic Japanese, in particular one nicknamed "Bird," his spirit finally collapsed and he nearly ruined his life.  On the brink of destruction, he once again found something that would not only save him but also would guide him until his death at age 97 in July of 2014.  His “war” as a civilian can be seen by many as a tougher war than the physical one he experienced as a prisoner, and his redemption, perhaps, even more remarkable.

I absolutely do not want to give you any more specifics about what Louis endured nor do I want to delve too deeply into his “before” and “after” lives.  All of this man's life was a remarkable journey.

Why read this book if it is simply the biography of a splendid individual?  The answer is simple.  Louis has a a great deal to teach us about hope, dedication, endurance, and finding one's self time and again despite the pain.  His life is something we can all profit from understanding. The author, Laura Hillenbrand, took away something for her own life, wrote about Louis' influence on her, and shares that with us.  If you are familiar with Man's Search for Meaning, you will see the same kinds of ideas there.

I add too, now that the movie is out and so famous, that the movie ends at chapter 33 in the book.  The movie, which I admit I have not seen yet, cannot do justice without the “rest of the story.”  Read this book.

Unbroken is well-written, interesting, supported (you will seen her bibliography at the end), and will make you want to look at more of Hillenbrand's writing.  I've got Seabiscuit on my list.

SHANGHAI GIRLS--LISA SEE TAKES US TO EXCITING SHANGHAI

If you've read Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, you're probably already looking for another book by See.  If you haven't read Snow Flower..., read Shanghai Girls and you will be hooked. 

As with Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See allows her readers a glimpse into a culture removed not only in time but also in place.  She allows us to travel with her to pre-World War II Shanghai when the city was filled with foreigners and, according to See, foreigners who had no idea of and no interest in the lives of the Chinese inhabitants.  They lived in their own international quarter, richly and privileged with no concern for anything but their own extravagances.  In fact, according to See, even the Chinese who associated with the foreigners had no concern for their fellow countrymen and women who served and worked for them; rather they looked down upon them as peasants destined to live their subservient lives. 

In some ways, therefore, Shanghai Girls is a story of awakening.

But there is much more here.  The story opens in 1937, just before Japan attacked Nanking but not before the tensions began to mount.  Revolution within China is still years away, but the seeds are already sown. Our heroines, sisters Pearl and May, are modern girls, Shanghai girls, who mix with the westerners and work as the beautiful girls who model  for the calendars.  They are celebrities. 

Their story is told through Pearl, the older sister who always saw herself as the less favored of the two.  People were charmed by May who was prettier and more outgoing.  Yet, no sisters could be closer, and the novel traces their lives and travails as they rebel as much as they can against their, in their eyes, old fashioned parents, get caught in Japan's horrific attacks on China and Chinese citizens, and sift through their own lives to try to find some peace and direction.

In some ways, therefore, Shanghai Girls is the story of war and its aftermath.

In some ways, therefore, Shanghai Girls is a story about family and devotion.

In some ways, therefore, Shanghai Girls is a story of finding the truth. 

The beauty of the book is also in the telling.  Lisa See is truly a gifted author.  Her style is spare as she writes Pearl's words, but Pearl is also a college graduate which gives See a bit more latitude.  I have already mentioned Nanking.  While we've read of the horrors as Japan prepared for conquest of China, Pearl's perspective is from an entirely different place.  She lives it in China.  It is a time for the Chinese to make some very difficult choices about their futures. 

“Friends we've known in the cafes—writers, artists, and intellectuals—make choices that will determine the rest of their lives: to go to Chungking, where Chiang Kai-shek has established his wartime capital, or to Yunnan to join the Communists.  The wealthiest families—foreign and Chinese—leave by international steamers, which chug defiantly past the Japanese warships anchored off the Bund.”

As I read, I can feel the tension of the times and the fears people faced.  The idea of making that decision of where to run, particularly because I know China's fate, is a story too universal to read without sympathy if not empathy.

See's descriptive powers are wonderful as you'll see as Pearl describes something as simple as a dress.

“I choose a cheongsam of peach-colored silk with red piping.  The dress is tailored so close to my body that the dressmaker cut the side slit daringly high to allow me to walk.  Frogs fashioned from the same red piping fasten the dress at my neck, across my breasts, under my armpit, and down my right side.

Lisa See brings her reader right into the setting.  No matter the time or location—for the book moves from one generation to the next—you will see it in your mind's eye.

You will get to know the sisters as fleshed-out people with all their strengths and weaknesses, and you will identify with some of their pains and questions. 

Shanghai Girls is a coming of age book in a time of turmoil and violence.  It is set in a time when respected customs and ways are challenged and replaced and where people are forced to make difficult choices and strange alliances in a violently changing world.  On the other hand, it is a book about love, devotion, and family.

Shanghai Girls is a fine book in every way.  I believe you will be drawn in to the story just as I was, and because there are twists and turns and revelations as we follow the lives of Pearl and May, you will finish the book, sigh, and wonder what happens next to these sisters.  Read and enjoy.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER'S FLIGHT BEHAVIOR--A DIFFERENT KIND OF TRIP

If you've read Barbara Kingsolver's novels, you must be a fan.  I've no doubt about that.  She places her characters in unusual situations highlighting the diversity of people and their problems and often their relationships with the natural world.   Kingsolver also shows that despite humanity's diversity there exists a binding similarity.  Interesting.  This sounds stilted, but it is the uniqueness of Kingsolver's approach that brings me back time and again and makes me relate to situations that are far afield from anything I have ever or will experience. 

My last Kingsolver read was the totally enthralling The Lacuna, and this time I share Flight Behavior with you. 

The definition of “flight” offers myriad possibilities.  Are we going to read about the natural world as in birds or are we talking about people or machines?  What members of the natural world?  What kind of people?  What kind of machines?

In Flight Behavior we read about different kinds of flight.  We read about intentional flight, behavioral flight, and potential flight.  We read about the intended and unintended consequences as well as the personal costs one might pay.  The masterful manner in which Kingsolver weaves all this into a compellingly interesting tapestry lures and captures the reader's interest. 

Take a poor rural teenage girl with a desire to escape and attend college who finds herself pregnant by a young man who decides on the honorable route and marries her.  His family supplies a house for them and a job for him on their sheep farm—a barely subsistence living.  Two children later, her life is unbearable stifling.  She is attracted to other men although she never cheats on her husband.  But she intends to,  and she climbs the mountain behind her house to meet the latest object of her desires while mulling over the claustrophobic perimeters of her life and wondering whether this act will cause catastrophic self-destructive consequences. She doesn't care.  

As she approaches the point of rendezvous, she  beholds a magical and frighteningly exquisite sight.  Looking into the tree-filled valley, she is stunned by the way it sparkles and flares up as if on fire.  Light fills every bit of airspace and clings to the trees.  It takes her a few eerie minutes to realize that this is not fire but a valley of mystical light. At the moment she interprets the vision as a miracle and a sign.  The spectacle has meaning she cannot  define, but her mind whirls as she turns around and hurries home, her rendezvous instantaneously cancelled.  The valley of light stops her from throwing away her life.  

Dellarobia keeps her discovery to herself until she learns that her father-in-law, Bear, intends to allow a company to clear-cut log the mountain.  She knows she cannot allow the destruction of the trees but cannot explain the trees aflame in the light up there.  She has no words to describe and share what she witnessed.  Somehow she convinces her husband, Cub, to take men to look at the mountain and the forest.  In less than an hour the men are back to collect their wives to show them the sight that dazzled them as it dazzled Dellarobia.

This time Dellarobia is able to identify the flashing lights.  They are butterflies, dense and thick.  They fill the sky and make the light glow golden.  They cling to the trees.  The fire she had seen was the flashing sunlight on the wings of butterflies.  The fire is alive.  The butterflies are creatures in flight sparkling in their journey.

Cub is the first to pounce on the butterflies as religious signs.  “Mother, Dad, listen here.  This is a miracle.  She had a vision of this...She foretold of it.  After the shearing we were up talking in the barn, and she vowed and declared we had to come up here...She said there was something big up here in our own back yard.”

The results of sharing her discovery with others poke holes in the walls confining Dellarobia and her children.  Sharing does more than poke; it takes a sledgehammer to those walls and opens up her small, insulated world to outsiders from across continents—all with interpretations of the butterflies' meaning.

You might imagine some of those interpretations, but I guarantee you will be nodding or clicking your tongue as you see the ramifications of Dellarobia's discovery.   

Perhaps I would have been happier had Barbara Kingsolver been less political in her approach, but I never reached a point where I wanted to put this book down.  When Kingsolver mixes people of different backgrounds in one situation, she is at her best, and the results entirely ring true.  A intrusive outsider handing out pledge-to-save-the-earth leaflets at the top of her mountain, once calls Dellarobia “you people.”  The outsider knows best—he thinks.  Nuff said 

Take one very fed up woman from a rural southern Appalachia hamlet, throw in some unusual weather and a life-changing experience.  Couple that with Kingsolver's magnificent control of the English language and elevated descriptions, and you will surely come away with a little deeper understanding of the forces that impact our lives for better or for worse.

Read Flight Behavior if you are a Barbara Kingsolver fan.  It you haven't experienced flying on the wings of her outstanding prose, take a flyer on Flight Behavior.

UNBROKEN: BE INSPIRED BY THIS TRUE STORY OF RESILIENCE

For a horrifying but very real picture of human resistance and endurance in time of war, read Laura Hillenbrand's captivatingly written Unbroken.  This is non-fiction that reads as fiction. Make sure you have time because once you pick up this book, you will not want o put it down.

Hillenbrand is extremely careful to let us get to know our protagonist, Louis Zamperini, from the time he was a child, an often recalcitrant child, until he was captured and held as a prisoner of war by the Japanese during World War II.  The author's meticulous depiction of  Louis' background, his focused attempt to become an Olympic runner in the  famous 1936 Olympics and later as a dedicated Army Air Corps bombardier helps us understand how Louis, despite the odds, withstood the Japanese treatment of prisoners of war and particularly of him.

In June, 1943, Zamperini and his fellow fliers were shot down and adrift in an ocean teeming with sharks.  They had just enough food to sustain the barest of life for those not injured; they managed just enough water to do the same, and then, after being strafed by a Japanese fighter, they were captured and became part of the Japanese prisoner-of-war system that left more dead prisoners by a significant margin than any other country in WWII.  The Japanese culture despised the idea of surrender or of being captured by the enemy, and their treatment of their captives reflected their disgust and lack of respect. 

It's easier to understand the treatment of prisoners when one reads what Japanese politician Nakajima Chikuhei said in 1940 “...it is the sacred duty of the leading race [Japanese] to lead and enlighten the inferior ones.” The Japanese, he continued are the “sole superior race of the world.” Its military-run school system drilled children on this imperial destiny.” 

Because of their schooling, violence became an integral component of the Japanese military culture: “...the Japanese imperial army made violence a cultural imperative.”  Before America was attacked at Pearl Harbor, Nanking was an example of the Japanese approach.  Needless to say, Japan's prisoner of war camps were violent places that resulted in more deaths than in releases at the end of the war.

Throughout Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand leads her readers to understand not only the Japanese approach to its prisoners and supports her statements with statistics but also to see how Louis Zamperini had grown into a man who had a chance of surviving despite the odds.

I absolutely do not want to give you any more specifics about what Louis endured nor do I want to delve too deeply into his “before” and “after” lives.  All of this man's life was a remarkable journey.

Why read it if it is simply the biography of a splendid individual?  The answer is simple.  Louis has a a great deal to teach us about dedication, endurance, and finding one's self time and again despite the pain.  His life is something we can all profit from understanding. 

Unbroken is well-written, interesting, supported (you will see her bibliography at the end), and will make you want to look at other books by Laura Hillenbrand.  

Unbroken is going to be the book read in this fall's Orange [County] Reads program, and I will be leading the discussion in several libraries around the county.  If you live here, I hope you'll participate.

SOON TO BE MOVIE--READ THE FAULT IN OUR STARS FIRST

Once again I have been hit hard by a book.  This time the novel is The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.  Almost a year ago at a party I spied a young friend sitting on the deck deeply engrossed in a book and facially reacting to what she was reading.  The book was The Fault in Our Stars, and I respect her enough to want to see what had her so mesmerized.

This is a powerful book.  It deals with the lives of three young cancer victims, and it is told through the eyes of one of them, a seventeen year old girl, Hazel Grace.  John Green adeptly gets inside Hazel's head and shares her view of family, friendship, sickness, love, and death. 

Hazel's attendance at a Support Group she attends to please her mother but which she finds incredibly ineffective serendipitously leads her to find a friend in Isaac, a boy who has already lost an eye to cancer and then, through Isaac, to Augustus Waters, a boy who has lost his leg.  This trio, removed by fate from other teenagers, forms a bond and creates a support system that includes humor and an understanding of the flaws in the universe as it applies to them.  Despite the ways their illnesses vanquish some of their hopes and dreams, sickness does not eradicate all of them.

As Hazel's relationship with Augustus grows, she decides to share her favorite book, An Imperial Affliction by Peter Van Houten, a strange book that ends midstream because the main character, Anna, dies.  Hazel's obsession is to contact the author to find out what happened to his other characters: a hamster, Anna's mother, and the Dutch Tulip man.  She writes to Van Houten who is a recluse living in Amsterdam but receives no reply.  How can one recommend a story that doesn't end?  Augustus becomes obsessed with An Imperial Affliction as well, and because of his feelings for Hazel, he wants her to have the answers she needs. 

I refuse to be a spoiler and tell you what happens to any of the three main characters or to the quest to find the ending of An Imperial Affliction.  In fact, I am not going to tell you any more about the plot.  I will promise that you will be thoroughly engrossed and involved with these teenagers and their families.  Augustus' parents have “Encouragement signs” all over the house with sayings like “Home is Where the Heart Is.”  Hazel overheard her mother say, “I won't be a mom anymore.”  Isaac’s mother becomes his eyes.  Yes, some of it will stab you deeply.

We get to learn about Hazel's cancer and treatment through her own voice.  She defines the other characters to us.  She fluctuates in her tolerance to their caring and presents, probably an honest reflection of the fluctuating hopes and fears she as well as the people she loves feel.  John Green does an extraordinary job of presenting his story without sinking into melodrama.  He uses literature, philosophy, and just to keep us all grounded, video games, to make points. 

Most of all, John Green uses love in its many manifestations.  Love can be wonderful; it can also result in excruciating pain. Young love in all its bittersweet manifestations is here.

One of the many things I appreciated about this book was the feeling that I was reading real-life reactions to real-life tragedy.  Getting the teenagers’ reactions to their plights was particularly important.  What happened to their pre-illness friendships and aspirations?  From what source did their strength and faith spring?  How do they react to the deaths of other cancer friends?  In the end, I believe I learned something. 

Essentially an existentialist, I appreciated the approach on all levels.  Lately I’ve been reading books, quite by accident really, that explore our natures and our dealings with everyday struggles.  This book certainly falls into this category, and as I’ve always felt that the lessons in a good book can improve our own lives, this book has improved mine.

As was The Book Thief, The Fault in Our Stars is listed as Young Adult fiction.  Once again, I suggest that parents read this book and discuss it with their children.  It's that powerful.  It can be frightening.

Adults will approach The Fault in Our Stars on a different experience level.  Who knows, maybe it is more difficult for us to accept cancer in children. While I really thought The Fault in Our Stars was a wonderful book for me to read, I admit to very teary reactions to some of it.

I read John Gunther's Death Be Not Proud when I was 11 or 12.  I became so obsessed with Johnny’s cancer that I convinced myself that I had a lump on my head just as he did. The book hit me so hard my mother made an appointment with our doctor so he could tell me I was fine.  But hey, that’s me.

You might be wondering why I am recommending this on Third Age Traveler.  Simple.  John Green has a lot to say.  The novel is written beautifully, and it will keep you totally engrossed.  Go for it.

HOTEL on the CORNER of BITTER and SWEET -- A GREAT TRAVEL COMPANION

Here’s another wonderful historical novel.  This book is Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford, and through it I time-traveled back to Seattle, Washington and the internment of the Japanese population soon after the United States entered WWII in the Pacific. 

This is a love story, but it illustrates once again how complex are the influences that shape our destinies.  This theme catapults Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet from a period piece to a universal exploration of the human condition and the human heart. 

Most of the books I’ve read about this period of our history were written in a Japanese voice, but Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is written from the Chinese perspective of Henry Lee as an adult and as a child.  Ultimately, however, the author raises points as universally appropriate to 2013 as they were to 1942-1986. 

In 1942 Seattle, the Chinese and the Japanese neighborhoods abutted one another, but with Japan engaged in a war against China, the feeling from Henry’s father is one of enmity.  Most of the people in Chinatown had relatives in China and all had an historical tie.  Today’s readers know from history the horrors of Japan’s war on the Chinese, so right or wrong it is understandable that Henry’s father forbids him even to enter Japantown, Nihonmachi.  He hates the Japanese and sees no difference between those in Japan and those in America.  This is only one source of the father/son conflict in the novel. Nihonmachi is home to jazz clubs, unseemly in Mr. Lee's eyes, but even as a boy, Henry is a fan of Jazz. 

Henry’s father makes him wear an “I am Chinese” badge so Caucasians will not mistake him for Japanese, and he sends him to an all-white school in another neighborhood rather than to a Chinese school.  He insists that America-born Henry speak only English.  Because Henry’s father and mother speak only Cantonese, this dictum essentially cuts off all communication between Henry and his parents.  Henry is an outsider in school and an outsider is in his own silent home.  Henry is twelve years old. 

Mr. Lee is not attempting to make Henry “American.”  He still wants Henry to eventually return to Canton to finish his Chinese education.  Henry is Chinese first.

Also attending the all-white school is Keiko, a Japanese girl with whom Henry develops far more than a friendship.  She, too, is American born, but she and her parents consider her American.  She speaks no Japanese.  With her, despite the political history, Henry is not an outsider.  Indeed, even Keiko’s parents accept and like him.  She, however, remains a secret to his parents.

Henry and Keiko, scholarship students at the school, are hounded and bullied by the white students.  They are totally ostracized. As part of their scholarships, they help serve lunch to the other students, and that is where their friendship develops under the watchful eye of a rather unusual lunch lady, Mrs. Beatty.

Another important character is Sheldon, a Black jazz saxophonist who, in Henry’s youth, was a street musician looking for a big break.  Sheldon’s work in a jazz club in Nihonmachi causes Henry to break his father’s rule.  Henry introduces Keiko to Sheldon, and this wise man knows and cares for them both.  I sensed a hint of Huckleberry Finn’s Jim, the surrogate father to a boy who is adrift. 

Culture, ethnicity, friendship, and love are universal qualities that impact on all our lives no matter how we try to be different from our parents or from our background.  This story becomes universal.

It is beautiful to me that what binds together Henry, Keiko, and Sheldon is Jazz.  Jazz is a uniquely American music.  Some musicologists say it began as African-Americans blended spirituals and the field hollers of plantation slaves and then, as time passed, mixed it with the syncopated beat of ragtime and the sounds of driving marches and brass bands.  In this novel, different as one might see Henry, Keiko, and Sheldon, they come together harmoniously as Americans just as diverse elements of music came together harmoniously as Jazz. They are different but they are the same.  As Sheldon tells Henry, “Fix it.”

Jamie Ford’s narrative begins in 1986 when boxes of Japanese belongings are uncovered in the renovated Panama Hotel. These were things hidden by Japanese being taken to the internment camps during World War II.  Most never returned to Japantown.  Ford flips back and forth between 1986 and the 1940s as Henry remembers the war years. All loose ends come together neatly in the denouement.  This technique works so well because Henry grows up, his parents grow older, Sheldon ages, old characters leave, and new characters are introduced.  That’s what happens in life.  Some characters, like Mrs. Beatty, are quite remarkable, but as they are never quite understood through Henry’s eyes, there are aspects of them that we’d like to know about but which are never revealed.

Ford’s story is strong and well developed.  This is a wonderful read which will have you shaking your head, sighing, and wishing life were easier for everyone.   After all, aren’t many of our most precious things on the corner of bitter and sweet?

THE SENSE OF AN ENDING--JULIAN BARNES' INVITATION TO SOLVE A LIFE

In the case of Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, the title says it all. I think.  What does it mean?  Confused?  So am I.  I finished this short novel and enjoyed it immensely.  But I’m not sure I totally get it, and, of course, I can’t ask you at this time to give me your thoughts on it. 

Our protagonist, Tony Webster, is about my age.  He grew up in a time I am totally familiar with and totally at home reading about.  I recognize so much of what he says and what he does.  Perhaps every age sits with a kind of smug philosophical elitism feeling contempt for those considered too plebeian to see the truth about life as clearly as they do.  “Understanding the world” and denigrating it as it currently is usually occurs over a beer.  At any rate, Tony and his three friends see themselves as young philosophers throwing around German terms and names of established philosophers as a way of affirming their superiority over the masses.  The best thinker among them is Adrian, and he is respected by his peers.

Adrian eventually becomes the center of life’s puzzle for Tony whose own life and loves turn into what he himself terms ordinary: a university girlfriend, Veronica, who eventually chooses Adrian, a failed marriage where he retains the friendship of his former wife, Margaret, a daughter and grandchild.  As a retiree, he volunteers in a hospital library.

When he asks Margaret over a friendly lunch if she left him because of him, she enigmatically replies that she left him "because of us."  

Life is never really ordinary, and this book is about growing up, remembering back in whatever way we are capable, being deeply hurt and deeply hurting others, and trying to finally understand what life is all about. 

Tony tells his story, so there is so much about truth and about the other characters to which we are not privy.  Additionally, there is the always constant question about what is history?  What is memory?  How accurate is either?

And I, always interested in the title’s meaning, am not quite sure I get it.  Veronica tells Tony he “will never get it.”  What’s “it”?

Indeed, this book was suggested by my sister-in-law with the warning that it is “different.”  She wanted to discuss it when I was done, and I would like to discuss it with her too.  I want to see how she viewed The Sense of an Ending.  I’d like to discuss it with any of you who have read it too.

Despite my questions, I highly recommend this novel.  It’s thoroughly intriguing.  It’s short and reads easily.  Barnes has a flowing, descriptive style, and I got to really know Tony Webster and to understand his dilemma.  But because of the first person narration, I never understood some of the other characters because Tony never does.  Oh well, it is so nice to dwell on a book as much as I’ve been dwelling on this one.

Here are some of my favorite quotations:

“…of course we were pretentious—what else is youth for?”

“…we knew we grasped life—and truth, and morality, and art….”

“…our fear: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature.”

Do you remember feeling and thinking like that?  I do.

And then the truth about the “sixties”—

“If you’ll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn’t experience “the sixties” until the seventies.  Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties—or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side.  Which made things rather confusing.”

How did I know that summer that Woodstock would be what Woodstock became?  I think (after this book I’m not so sure) I remember what it was as it was happening.

Here’s a very poignant definition:

“…remorse.  A feeling which is more complicated, curdled and primeval.  Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to….”

Wow!  That is a wakeup call.

Here’ the retired-in-his 60s-Tony.  How painful is this:

“Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

Several times during the novel, Tony hums or sings "Time is On Our Side."  I well remember this song and sang along.  But here's another question: Is it?

In the end I was deeply touched, quite nostalgic, and somewhat puzzled.  I think I will continue to ponder the meaning of Barnes’ title as I try to get The Sense of an Ending.

    

THE LIGHT BETWEEN THE OCEANS--A BEAUTIFUL, PAINFUL NOVEL

M.L. Stedman’s first novel, The Light Between the Oceans, is a beautifully composed rendition of life at its cruelest, when justice for one means tragic injustice for another.  There are no villains here, but there are victims, and Stedman’s tale shoots out theme after theme making her readers take a serious look at what it takes for some of us to make it through our daily lives.  Read it but be prepared for tears.

Thomas Sherbourne returns from his WWI years on the Western front a shattered man reminiscent of Hemingway’s Nick Adams—an existential man trying to make an orderly life from the chaos surrounding him.  What he had done during the war earned him medals and only a superficial scar for others to see, but it shattered him inside, filling the cracks with survivor’s guilt, and leaving him looking for a steadying routine.  The idea of duality occurs time and again throughout the novel.

Tom finds the order he seeks on Janus Rock, an isolated lighthouse 100 miles off the coast of Australia in the treacherous Indian Ocean.  (peace in the midst of upheaval) The detailed routine of following the multitude of rules, keeping the signal light operating at optimum condition, recording the minute details of time, weather, and other observations force him to reintroduce a workable rhythm to his life and to make some sense of his world.  Difficult for others, this life suited young Tom perfectly.

When he meets, falls in love, marries Isabel, and brings her to Janus, he feels his life is as good as any man can have it, but after a series of miscarriages and a stillborn baby, Isabel sinks into deep despair until what she considers a miracle occurs. 

Sorry friends, but you will have to read The Light Between the Oceans yourself to move on from here and find out what Isabel considers a miracle.  Tom considered it more of a mixed blessing, to say the least.

 As Rob was not going to read the novel, I told him the story as it unfolded, and he enjoyed its retelling, the two of us guessing what was to happen next.  We could not help it.  This story has multi-barbed hooks for the reader.

Stedman is a wonderful writer.  She handles language beautifully, switching tenses to bring immediacy to some sections and time for contemplation in others.  The story moves smoothly and delves into a myriad of life’s possibilities:  war and its results, loss and recovery, love, man’s isolation—both physically and psychologically, the big lie that cannot be withdrawn, prejudice, forgiveness, and redemption.  I have probably left out some possibilities, but that’s already a lot to cram into 342 pages and to do it well!

Hemingway’s Nick Adams going through the steadying routine of fly-fishing in “Big Two-Hearted River” or Macbeth’s musing “Things without all remedy/Should be done without regard/What’s done is done” come to mind throughout the novel.  These ideas are universal in man; they do not change over time, and close as they are, Tom and Isabel Sherbourne have to find their own paths through life’s vagaries once each learns that life isn’t fair.

This is a novel worth reading, and I am looking forward to M.L. Stedman’s next book.