The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

Right off the top I have to say that this book has been chosen by my Novel Lovers of Sebastopol, which is primarily a female exclusive reading group.  I have to add though, that this selection was brilliant: I am thoroughly enjoying the book a third of the way through. 

The protagonist is a woman, not long after the time of Abraham, who relates her stories, as was the custom of the time, passed down from her grandmother and mother’s female families through to her female children and grandchildren.  Stories passed across five generations, by telling and retelling.  Most of we readers respect this historical concept and rue the loss about a millennia ago of the retold verbal story. 

From my perspective, as an aging male, I’ve achieved balance between my testosterone and my estrogen.  I’ve raised kids all my life, and am naturally envious of the mystical “Red Tent” goings on, of which I will never be a part.  I’m sure that like me, other readers always want a book that teaches them something, and this one’s got birthing rites in spades.  And at least as far as I’ve read, a comical view of men, not unlike the old Greek plays about sex strikes, etc.  This was before urbanity (City-States), so all people were alike.  People are normal in this book – which seems to be a current concept I’ve been appreciating recently.  I like book characters, not the best in the world at X, Y and Z.  Beautiful women, studly men, are always in the eye of the beholder.  We readers understand love and relationships, which abound in this book.

So, the first hundred pages enjoyed: I’m all in.

Eight Hundred Grapes by Laura Dave

I sometimes think I could restrict myself to just writers in the corridor between San Francisco and Sonoma counties and just like the plethora of new restaurants, never run out of enjoyable experiences.

Laura Dave isn’t a native Sonoman, but she’s an excellent writer who has done good research and has captured the feel of the small wineries which abound in Sonoma County.  Our “boutique” wineries are similar to SillyCon Valley’s tech start-ups in being small and passionate about their products.  Unlike techville, here it’s family owned and operated; our guys like to settle in for life.

Like most of my friends and neighbors, I’ve gone to scores of tasting rooms and equally many small winery dinners to meet the winemaker, the family, and sometimes their sons and/or daughters who carried on.  The ethos that was the central theme of this book is the real difference between Napa and Sonoma counties.  Our small lot winemakers are a treasure unique to Sonoma County.  I have been hearing these personal stories now for seventeen years, much like the family story portrayed in “Eight Hundred Grapes”.

The story about terroir was done beautifully in “French Kiss,” 1995 with Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline.  The story of Pinot Noir was given a boost in 2004 by “Sideways” with Paul Giamantti.  This book only adds to glamour of Sonoma County wines.

And by the way, the author writes a great love story, with great insight into real people’s foibles.  Don’t peek to the end – the trip from the beginning will give the reader a joy ride just like the “Big Dipper” roller-coaster at Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

So, again, don’t peek – and then I guarantee you’ll shed two tears of joy at the end: one for love and one for wine.

The Fall by John Lescroart

You can’t get much better than a cops & lawyers murder mystery that takes place in San Francisco; but to top it off, the murder of the young woman takes place near where Miles Archer took a bullet, Bush & Stockton. 

 

The author brings San Francisco to life for the reader.  The characters are all too human and you almost feel like part of the family.

The plot lines are fast-paced and interesting.  It’s not easy to come up with new ideas and twists in this genre of police procedure and the justice system.  Lescroart has comeup with a story that is intriguing to the end.

One more thing that all readers love to hear is that this is just the first in what will be a series of Rebecca hardy’s cases, most assuredly with her father, Dismas, close by her side.

 

The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker

I’m sure Disney has got story board artists working day and night on Mi Mi’s wardrobe and action scenes.

This was a great fairy tale.!    

   The themes are classic.

      Two misfits, struggling through life,

   until one day, they meet,

      and fall in Love.!

Siegfried faces his ultimate challenge when he follows a birdsong to find the sleeping Brunnhilde whom fate has destined Siegfried to awaken and fall in love with.   

No.!, that was another German fairy tale. 

But alas, destiny dictates directions,

   along their separate paths.

Each is bound by familial duty for half a century:  he to find fame and fortune in America; she to raise their love child     in their impoverished town in Burma.

Yet, they meet for one final moment   in  death.

The smoke from their pyres joining together, rising to the heavens.

This is a tale worthy of inclusion in the Arabian 1001 Nights.

As we Americans have Faulkner and Hemmingway, whose style and essence many writers try to incorporate, Germans have Kafka and Hesse.  These four are the sort of writers to whom you can apply the suffix, -esque.

In Sendker’s case, he’s going for a pinch of Siddhartha and a whiff of The Glass Bead Game.  I heard an NPR program on the lure of theosophy around Hesse’s time. 

It was a discussion of Michelle Goldberg’s book, The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West.[1]

The “Heartbeats” content is perfect for a graphics film, like with Ariel and the Sea, or Beauty & the Beast, maybe Aladdin and Jabbar.  I watched and loved them all – I’m sure I’ll love this one too.

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[1] Here’s NPR’s discussion of The Goddess Pose

The Years by Nicholas DelBanco

O.K., complaint number one is that this book was misrepresented to me as a nice book about old people going on cruises.

And there were a few pages about life on a cruise ship, probably just enough in the beginning to entice people to buy the book.  But the real message of the book was about the horror of memory loss as old age sets in.  It was also about the mental confusion that potentially leads one off on strange pathways when one is old, because the mind’s logic circuits have been compromised.

O.K., again.

Both my sister and I (60’s) read innumerable books about the process of dealing with aging parents (80’s); these were effectively self-help books.  And we read every one we could stomach.  Many did help. 

This was not a self-help book for the young-ens.  It was a baying at the moon from one of the young-ens, who loved his or her mother and family and wanted to rail against the injustice of facing the same fate.

Son or Daughter, it doesn’t matter, you spend the quality time at the end of life with a parent and scream at the unfairness of their loss of memory because you are next, and you know it. 

O.K., yet again, I sympathize with their loss.  But writing as the God-like omniscient narrator for the first 200+ pages of a 300 page book is inexcusable.  I hate O.N. because:

      Whatever the writer says is unassailably true, even if the author is lying or ignorant.

      O.N., but nonetheless single-sourced; no dialog second-source confirmation.

      It’s too easy – it’s the lazy writer’s mode.  You should work for it through dialogue.

I hate to bring in the name-dropping.  The fact that in this “kind of book”, all the women graduated from Radcliff and the men from Harvard.  They all summered in … .. and wintered in … ..  It used to be called old money and had sex appeal in women’s magazines, 50 years ago.  It was pretentious in this book: “bad champagne in business class”, Kubrick and Garbo.  It’s back to the Garrison Keilor quotation, “All the women are strong; the men good looking, and all the children are above average.”

There’re 24 million people over 65 and more than half of them are women.  This crass book will appeal to them.  It mentions the names they grew up with, signifying wealth, position and status.  If ten percent of these dowagers buy the book, that’s a million copies.  These millions also have really great moms who are dying in their nineties.  Women whose marriages lasted 50-70 years, who went through seriously trying times: world wars and depressions, and yet held their families together.

 

My Struggle by

This book seems so committed.  Book 1 of 6?

Ruby by Cynthia Bond

I don’t normally stop and take notes when reading a book.  I like to base my opinions on the book’s overall impression.  However I’m changing my style to accommodate an aural-only discussion format. 

I’ve been impressed by three stylistically brilliant passages:

n                                The scene which unfolds in Chapter 4 with the town’s men gathered around a pit fire is a steal from Henry V’s night before Agincourt.  No better complement than to use a scene from Shakespeare.

n                                I love the start of Chapter 5 where Bond switches voices to that of the crow, which turns out to be a continuing theme.

n                                A literal bodice-ripper, this one.  Page 98 has Ruby with the best orgasmic scene that I can remember for sheer thunder.  This is repeated at the end of Chapter 13 with Bond’s equivalent fantasy of a male orgasm.

My two criticisms are:

n   The first is one of timing.  This “Ruby” book is effectively a rewrite of Zora Neale Hurston’s, 1937 “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” which I read this year during Black History Month. 

n   The whole book is a female fantasy novel.  The last quarter of the book was not just predictable, but procedural.  Bond’s depiction of dropping to a new low below low is a script-writer’s wet dream.  There are many books like this one that fall into the lusty lure of film adaptation and forego literacy for lucre.  The script scenes are evocative.  By the end, we have forgotten Shakespeare and Greenwich Village and are wallowing in America’s pig sty of “HBO’s Deadwood – 2004-06”.

 
Not black or white female, it could be Chinese or Muslim, as well, but female.  The homage paid to Hurston wasn’t just in the Black village setting, and the return home and salvation, but most importantly in the eye-opening learning about the world around them, and the striving, against inhuman odds and travesties, of all women, for their rightful place in it.

The Stranger by Harlan Coben

I read it in three sessions over a 24 hour period.

It’s a great, spell-binding read.  I’m not going to spoil the action, so I’ll only hint at the plotlines.

A perfect suburban family in a charming soccer mom town on the east coast has their dream interrupted by a stranger who comes into their lives briefly dropping a bombshell.  He causes suspicion, which turns into mystery.

The writing is the type I enjoy, cerebral thought development, and the pace of plot development is what keeps you reading the next chapter without pause.  The protagonist is the husband/father who has two boys, and it’s mostly men in the story.  The author after all is male.

An added lure is the involvement of crazy WEB sites like www.HowToFakeAPregnancy.com

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.  It wasn’t the passionate read of six-hour sessions because you just can’t put it down.  So I’m asking myself the question, “Why was it so good?”  It’s not just me, many other readers whose opinion I value thought it was a “best recent read”.

Of course there was the dramatic crescendo of the ending and since that was at the end it sticks with us.  You couldn’t help but shed a tear, even though it was a predictable ending.

I think we are in a new era of writing about the last century.

In the era surrounding WW-II, the 30’s, 40-s, and 50’s there was the John Gunther type of book Inside Europe, a study of the politics of nations, winding up with William Shirer’s, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  Next came the good guys, bad guys’ era with John Wayne heroes.  We’ve just finished a quarter century of le Carré type espionage and spy novels where the whole cast ensemble are bad guys; there are no good guys.  Now they’ve all died off. 

We have entered the era of retrospectives on 20^th century history: no politics, no heroes or villains.  It is pleasant reading.  It is stories about little people, commoners.  That is why I think this book has such broad appeal.  Now to some of the specifics:

·           Doerr’s style of multiple scene slices by time and venue was brilliantly handled.  For me, it was just the right mixture.  I think that the shortness of the shifts, 1-3 pages, helped to make this work.

·           Characterization achieved efficient balance.  There was no glut of minor characters; they conveniently crossed the stage and exited.  But we got to know and understand the children.  Werner was deeply-layered and natural; possible based on the author himself.  Making him an orphan was a good literary device; no need to delve into parentage.  The girl, Marie-Laure, is endearing because of her perseverance, but painted through the reflected visions of her father and grand-uncle.  The blindness was a perfect device for her, because, like a magic trick, it diverted attention away from the author going too deeply into a teenage girl’s character.  Another thing that makes these characters work is the ages: a ten year story, from 6 to 16.

·           There is the illusion of minute detail on any number of subjects in the children’s lives.  We readers don’t really want this to be a text on radio electronics, nor tide pool crustacean life.  But we like to think we have learned something and we enjoy the detail writing about things that stir passions like puzzles, museums, and Jules Verne.

·           I theorize that we are now in an age of a kinder, gentler world view of the last century.  I could make similar comments about the author, Phillip Kerr, who has written ten novels following the career of Bernie Gunther over thirty years (1930-1960) from Berlin police Lieutenant to private eye.