An Island to Myself

I would get up in the morning, put on my pareu, brew my coffee, and suddenly reflect that by rights I should be in a pair of long trousers, jangling a bunch of keys ready to open the store. I had escaped! I had cheated authority, fate, life itself.

The Suvarov Atoll, now one of New Zealand’s national parks, was home to a modern-day Robinson Crusoe named Tom Neale in the Fifties and Sixties. His 1966 memoir of life in a rehabbed coastguard hut is a tale of industrious contentment chronicling his first two of three sojourns with his cats and chickens, a lifestyle he abandoned only as health and age demanded. There he fished, gardened, and beachcombed, living as free as the tradewinds. He thatched palms, built an oven and out-buildings, and slaughtered hogs. He survived fevers and storms, hunted wild boars, and pined for tinned beef and tobacco. But most of all, he counted himself lucky to have escaped civilization, such as it was even on Rarotonga, at that time populated by a mere 18,000 people.Reading his story,

I was struck by Neale’s remarkable sanity in his preparations and execution of an adventure many would label insane for its deliberate seclusion and open-endedness. It was such a page-turner I found myself rushing through the 192 pages on the treadmill and going to bed early to see what would happen to him next. I cursed the crabs that ate his crops and practically felt the warm sand between my toes as he watched the sunset over a nightly cup of tea. For a sense of his daily routine, check out this slideshow Neale in his loincloth, keeping order in paradise.

Amy and Isabelle

She was struck with the extreme ease with which lives could be damaged, destroyed.

Generational stories with deep character are Elizabeth Strout’s specialty. Who can forget the curmudgeonly yet caring Olive Kitteredge, for whom she won the Pulitzer Prize, or rural Amgash Illinois’ diverse population (Anything Is Possible) who are bound together by the most common yet unexpected of circumstances? I was therefore willing to suspend my ambivalence about this novel said to explore the secrets of sexuality that jeopardize the love between a mother and her daughter. It sounded too predictable, yet I doubted my instinct to pass it by. Though not a regrettable decision, it was time I could have spent better. The secret of this single mother raising her beautiful teenaged daughter is as obvious as the foamy brown river snaking through the industrial town where she lives a lonely and anxious existence. Her obedient daughter’s biggest secret has a more interesting twist though, more interesting even than her surprising friendships.

Despite the transparent plot, I like Strout’s depiction of Maine in the Seventies, a place we both knew well. Women wore pantyhose to work in the August heat, Sundays were for church, and the Catholics and Congregationalists viewed each other with detached suspicion. Over the course of 300 pages, Isabelle’s coworkers at the mill are transformed from one-dimensional paper cut-outs to human beings with relatable personal problems and a gift for empathy that has been lacking in Isabelle’s life.

This 1998 story was made into a 200l Oprah Winfrey Presents made-for-TV production, but I’m not surprised it never made it to the big screen. Watch the trailer and decide for yourself.

 

Hanna’s Daughters: A Novel of Three Generations

There are no biblical words for the deeds of mothers, despite the fact that they are probably of greater importance than those of fathers.

This arresting premise to Mariann Fredriksson’s 1994 novel had me hooked, as it did countless other women in the author’s native Sweden and Germany. After the first generation of hardship, however, I lost interest in this bestseller, finishing only out of a sense of commitment and diminishing hope that it would return to its early promise. It was as if the author herself lost interest half-way through and couldn’t muster the energy to pad the outline, which likely explains why I couldn’t find any film adaptations or English subtitled author interviews.

Chronically the lot of women from King Oscar II’s reign at the end of the 19th Century, when the rural impoverished lived in neo-feudal dependence on their wealthy employers, to the modern era of Social Democracy and Feminism, this story navigates such hotbed issues as rape, domestic abuse and dependence, infidelity, miscarriage, abortion, in-laws, and aging. It’s about love, loyalty, and coffee, coffee, coffee. So much coffee, in fact, that I expected Mrs. Olson from the Folger’s commercials to make a cameo appearance. It didn’t help that the three generations narrating alternating chapters backward and forward in time have maddeningly similar names: Johanna, Hanna, and Anna—such that it was sometimes hard to follow the thread.

If you are of Swedish or Norwegian heritage or your ancestor was a miller, you will likely appreciate it. If you’re looking for answers to the eternal question of daughterly fealty, however, you will find no challenges or answers here.

War of the Wolf

The gods are not kind to us any more than children are kind to their toys.

So saith Uhtred of Bebbanburg, the heathen hero of Bernard Cornwell’s wildly popular Saxon Stories which are my guilty pleasure. Billed as like Game of Thrones but real, this fiction about the unification of England under Alfred the Great (King of the Anglo-Saxons from 886 to 899) and his progeny was made into Netflix’ 4-season blockbuster The Last Kingdom interweaving Uhtred’s mercenary mission to serve the King with his quest to reclaim his family’s Northumbrian estate following his childhood abduction and adoption by the Danes. The series’ popularity hinges on Uhtred the Bold’s swashbuckling valor, dry-humored fatalism, and unerring sex appeal, most evident in the TV series. It’s a winning combination based far more in fiction than fact, yet forgotten historical characters from Aethelred the Unready to the Viking warlord Ubba have kept me googling for years.

War of the Wolf, the eleventh of twelve books in the series, depicts Uhtred at sixty, old but still strong as he battles the Viking Sköll toward the final unification of England. Fighting is the dominant raison d’être of this volume, with an undercurrent of superstition as Uhtred believes himself cursed by the gods. Many beloved characters of the previous novels are dead by this point, though several favorites abide with him. In order to save the surprise, I will not name names. I would also recommend listening to Matt Bates’ excellent narration, rather than reading the book, as it is long on gore and short on personal plot. This volume made me long for the youthful mischief and philosophical probing of young Uhtred, but it is still worth a look and listen. The final installment of the Netflix series is expected out sometime in 2022.

Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots

Can you ever really leave the place you come from?

I first learned of Deborah Feldman’s 2012 memoir through the stunning Netflix mini-series chronicling her flight from an arranged marriage. I highly recommend the program and book, but spoilers are necessary to this comparison, so stop reading now if you don’t want to know what happens.

In the film version, she goes from homeless in Berlin to finding her artistic raison d’être in a matter of days, complete with financial and emotional support, while also evading a stalker intent on retrieving her and her unborn child. It seemed too fairy-tale to be true, and indeed was. The real story is less Grimm’s and a shade grimmer. Her awakening is years in coming; she’s already a mother on a less-than-glamorous career path; her husband’s forgivable naïveté sours to unforgivable selfishness; and she never leaves New York.

I was disappointed at first, but in the long run better appreciated the effort it took for her to disassociate from an ultra-Orthodox community and assimilate into the greater world right there at home. The Torah, it seems, can be interpreted to govern every aspect of life; and the women make the necessary sacrifices. In a world of uneducated conformity, Feldman’s intellectual curiosity chafes so strongly we practically assume her fearful rebellion and wonder how anyone in her position endures.

The Bonesetter’s Daughter

She didn’t understand people who thrived on arguments and being right all the time. Her mother was that way, and what did it get her? Nothing but unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and anger.

You can always rely on Amy Tan for generational sagas about feudal cultures, abused wives, and wartime hardships. Her worlds make a pandemic seem less of a hardship by comparison, but I’ve been binge-reading Tan for different reasons. First is her balanced renderings of a relationship many middle-aged women can relate to, that of repressed daughters to domineering women. Tan’s mothers walk the line between tiger mom and smother love, with an added dash of dementia to season this story. Second, as a handwriting analyst, I appreciate her detailed observations on script. Calligraphy is a prominent plot device in this work, not only in the dynasty of ink-makers and calligraphers it depicts, but in the deceptions practiced by a child-protagonist who pretends to (and perhaps does indeed) channel a dead relative through her unpracticed hand. It’s a different take on the immigrant experience of the child interpreter/scribe navigating the parent’s puzzling world.

Published in 2003, this is a heavy tome at 387 pages, but the audiobook, read by the author and Joan Chen, is a joy to listen to at just under 12 hours. For a brief pictorial summary of this novel, watch this booktalk which recommends the story “for those who enjoy a mystery, a thrilling story, and a scandal.”

In Other Words

Reading in another language is more intimate, more intense . . .. We didn’t grow up with one another. Writing in a different language means starting from zero. . .. It comes from a void, and so every sentence seems to have emerged from nothingness.

I have just finished a most remarkable book by Jhumpa Lahiri, the American-raised daughter of Indian immigrants and winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She grew up speaking Bengali, was educated in English, and fell in love with Italian as an adult. Then with four works books to her credit, she moved to Italy in a quest for fluency.  In Other Words (Penguin Random House 2016, at 231 pages), is a reflective journal written in Italian, chronicling her progress and sense of otherness while also defining the language acquisition process in imagery so rich even a xenophobe can understand.

Having lived abroad and wrestled with three Romance languages myself, I was with her all the way in this journey she compares to swimming across a vast lake. I could visualize the “basket” of words she gathers each day like berries, only to feel them slip through her fingers like water. Her frustrations are palpable, but so too the victories. For those who have not endured the immigrant experience, this book is as close as you can get to the real thing. Unique for its bilingual layout; each spread is in Italian on one side and English on the other—the translation not her work but that of another, as she insisted on maintaining the separateness of her two worlds, her two brains so to speak.

To hear her read from the work and discuss what it means to her, watch this “State of the Arts” feature interview.

Writing Toward Home: Tales and Lessons to Find Your Way

Home is what can be recalled without effort—so that sometimes we think, oh, that can’t be important. Memories are the blueprint of home. A memoir is a home built from those blueprints. Finding home is crucial to the act of writing. Begin here.

Perhaps you’ve toyed with the idea of writing. Maybe you’ve been at it for years and are still groping for your voice. Regardless of where you are in this journey, Georgia Heard’s slender 1995 guide will help you define and refine your thoughts. From beginnings to endings, poetry to punctuation, from writer’s block to fear of rejection, Heard illustrates the power to be harnessed from our everyday world if we only pay attention. With quotes by artists of all stripes—choreographer Martha Graham, spiritualist Malidoma Patrice Somé, painter Thomas Hart Benton, and poet Theodore Roethke, this is an inspirational gem.

To get a feel for Heard’s creative approach, watch this eleven-minute Ted Talk on a writing prompt she calls a heart map, an emotional and visual tool where we use writing and words and drawings to map what we care about and who we are.

On the Road

I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

We may be under orders to stay at home, but that doesn’t mean we can’t travel with our minds. Jack Kerouac didn’t exaggerate in titling his 1957 Beat classic, a work I missed when I was young but perhaps appreciate even better now that I am old. This stream-of-consciousness road trip crisscrosses America more times than one can count—east and west between New York and California, north and south between Denver and Mexico, pointlessly, years on end, at dash-gripping speeds punctuated by hedonistic slow nights, all sex and drugs and jazz and crazy cats, like Hoo! Whee! as the fictional maniac Dean Moriarty would say.

Like Kerouac’s alcohol-fueled adventures, his caffeine-fueled manuscript, typed over three weeks in the spring of 1951 on one continuous roll of paper, draws on five years of memories with the likes of such Beat luminaries as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. The language of this pointless saga is electric with imagery and emotions so rich that a paragraph feels likes an hour in real time, but an hour impossibly recalled the morning-after with crystalline clarity and tenderness, where the narrator gaped into the bleakness of his own days, where contraband brooded in the heavy syrup air, and love is a duel. Small wonder the Modern Library ranks it 55th among the 20th Century’s top 100 English language books.

I haven’t seen Walter Salles’ 2012 film and doubt that I will. Someone else’s interpretation can of this wild ride only spoil the nuggets that speak to my own sheltered existed. But I loved Will Patton’s narration on Audible. Even turning 320 pages, I suspect this story would fly by like the golden prairie outside a Greyhound window.

The Plague Tales

I checked my shelf in hopes of rereading this medical suspense novel that I read 23 years ago when it first came out, but alas it must be on “permanent loan”. I know I wouldn’t have given it away, it was that entertaining. I’m a slow reader, easily distracted, but Ann Benson’s 1997 best-seller didn’t feel like the long read that it is, anywhere from 475 to over 600 pages, depending on the edition. Part historical fiction, part science fiction, part medical mystery, the story enthralled me from the start.

Picture an antiseptic near-future of ruthless Medicops (2005, in Benson’s timeline) where doctors are so expendable that a surgeon has to turn to forensic archaeology for a new career. Dr. Janie Crowe didn’t know she was digging up the Black Death along with that black soil sample from London. The lab assistant didn’t realize it was infected and wasn’t aware she’d transmitted it to herself and others. The world didn’t see it coming, and suddenly the Bubonic Plague gallops across America with alarming speed in a crisis that has become alarmingly familiar. Now picture a Medieval doctor, a Jew on the run from the Spanish Inquisition. He travels through France to England during the worst of the pestilence to wind up at the court of King Edward III where he alone understands the power of quarantine and records his efforts in a crumbling book that awaits rediscovery with a biological gift to cure the future.

My only qualm with the story is a little sagging speculation near the end, but this is still what I want to be rereading right now—so much so that I might even buy it anew.