The Cairo Affair by Olen Steinhauer

This book was very reminiscent of Lawrence Durrell’s “The Alexandria Quartet”, one of my classic favorites.  And this is not just because of the Egyptian setting; or post-recent “Arab-Spring wars”; but also because of the author’s deftness of handling multiple voices for narration, an always difficult undertaking.

Alas, this is not (yet) a quartet, albeit a riveting 400-page read.  As with Durrell’s book, the plot lines fall somewhat within the domain of the foreign services, the secret ones.  I’m starting this write-up only having arrived at page 100 of 400, but I’m already caught up in the depth of the plotlines, a myriad of them.  

The depth comes from thoughtful, human characterizations, of which JC Oates is my capable standard.  The reader feels that this story is so believably real, that even as characters are shot and killed, the others move on, as they must, as though this is a necessarily acceptable part of life.  The women are written really well: no need in the movie for reed-thin Eurasians, nor booby blondes.

I’ll tune back in half way through.

Just as le Carré is always saying, the espionage world messes with the minds and morals of those who engage within it.  Lying, cheating and deception are so engrained in their way of life that they can no longer tell up from down.  Even time becomes difficult to grasp ahold of, “What did I tell her yesterday and what will I say to her tomorrow?”

Wow.!  Good through the final page.!  Not a twist; but an unexpected outcome.

All of my early praise continued to be justified throughout.

 

 

The Age of Miracles

Reading at Spring time in California is inspirational.  The glorious month of May with Mother Nature reveling in her fecundity and looking forward to the joys of her summer sunshine along the River.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And so, we have been given a small book to read to take away all our normally deterministic cares and concerns; our plans for future actions and deeds (good and bad).  In place of our hopes and dreams, we are provided with an argument for theological fatalism; an omniscient God(s) as found at the roots of historical religions.

I read about a third of this book, then switched into speed-read mode and finished it the next day.

Sorry, the narratives on girl-cliques, training bras, and cool guys, have become unenlightening to me in my dwindling years.

So, we’ve got permission to run the sprinklers all summer long, drink to excess, and run the air-conditioner at max all the time. 

Que sera, sera.

The 100-Year-Old Man

Pretty much everybody thought “Forrest Gump” was a silly, stupid book/movie.  Then again the world is full of stupid readers and silly film-goers, so why not Gump-II: History Revisited Again?

I’m sorry to say that I won’t be able to use any of the standard phraseology of critical literary review: the elements of literature are totally missing in this 400-page spoof.  It would be like trying to review an edition of “Mad Comic Books”.  I used to love MAD.  It was a great, fun read, … .. when I was 13. .

I’m sorry that we were subjected to this tripe.  I rarely say that it was a waste of time.  I usually find that the author tried to write something of value and simply failed in their endeavor.  This author was writing as a stoned-13-year-old, simply wanting to snub his nose as authority, politics, the world, and anyone over 14.

Possibly I’m objecting too much because I’ve spent the last 63 years of my life being over 13.  I actually had to have a job at 14 in order to buy hamburgers, cokes, and car parts.  I’ve been around for most of Jonasson’s “history”.  A few dare-devils in my high-school class drove dynamite trucks, summers, for Kaiser-Permanente in west San Jose; I worked in a machine shop.

OK, I’m going to chill.  2,000,000 bought his book, then again, 99.97% of the world’s population didn’t buy his book.  There will always be crap out there on the remainder tables; I’m always for giving people shots at succeeding as authors.  Let there be 20 bad books for every good one [Julia Grass has a good one out there right now – Sacred Night], but as a library reader’s group (implicitly somewhat literate), possibly a community leader in book selections], let us hope that we often pick and read the good ones.

I found no redeeming merits for having this book as a Sonoma County Library recommended read.  In fact I find it embarrassing that an SCL selection committee would stamp their approval on this book.  In makes a mockery of SCL’s and the Foundation’s management capability to oversee libraries and advise patrons on issues of literacy.

 

In The Blood by Lisa Unger

I never doubted my belief in the veracity of this story. 

This was a spell-binding psychodrama thriller: murder, mayhem, and more.

Psychopaths on the rampage (if you can spot them), battling psychiatrists!  Who’s on top of the I.Q. ladder, i.e., who’s manipulating who?

Plots and sub-plots unfold – who can you trust?

A 24-hour read: 340 riveting pages.

The author’s got a half a dozen other books out:

  Heartbroken

      Darkness, My Old Friend

         Fragile

              Die For You

                  Black Out

                     Sliver of Truth

                         Beautiful Lies

So you can see a “shrinky” bent here.

Whether you’ve only taken one course [Child Psych 101 or Abnormal Psych 200] or even if you’ve got your PhD in Psychotic Drugs or Sociology of Abnormal Psychosis, this will hold your attention to the end, and you won’t know who to trust:

not the cops,

not the shrinks,

not the teachers,

not the kids,

not your family,

and least of all, not yourself.

 

Everyone’s wacko, and everyone has an agenda.

 

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simoson

Back to back coming of age tales -- or is it three in a row before this month? All teens: Cat’s Table, Brooklyn Tree, Flower Language.!  This time the protagonist is not 16, but 60, and transitioning through male menopause.

Ms. Simonson opens with the portrait of a stodgy old fuddy-duddy, an iconic English “Major”; then the author proceeds to awaken his feminine side, transforming the Major into an emotional, feeling, caring, amorous, and waltzing multi-cultural hero after the application of several doses of estrogen.

This story was pleasant to read because it had a nice balance of plot, narrative, and description.  We, as a group, have complained recently that this sort of balance was missing from our library selections.  For me, having lived the better part of a decade in England, there were many reminders of small town English life.

There were a great number of quotable bon mots, mostly voiced by the Major, and most of which I will leave to others to cite, but two that tickled my English-trained funny bone were: [p.175] in response to “where would we be if we were honest”, the Major retorts, “On a dry spit of land known as the moral high ground”; and [p.203] in response to “I’m in love with an unsuitable woman!” the Major retorts, “Is there really any other kind?”.  Simonson has provided us with a read that is a level up from our recent undertakings: more balanced, more urbane, much more broadly-based in scope.

If there is any fault with this otherwise good book, it lies in gender characterization.  And while yes, I feel the gender portrayals are “spot on” for women; they are a bit off the mark for men.  In “American” argot, she doesn’t get men.  It’s a book written by a middle-aged woman, for other middle-aged women.  The Major’s transformation: philosophically, physically, metaphysically, and culturally takes amazingly little time.

The men are all single-layer stereotypes.  This starts with the Major, who “hates women drivers.”  He is a rock-solid, confirmed bachelor at the onset of this story: golf once a week with his friend Alec (a name only, never developed); periodic telephone updates from his son, Roger [who is the epitome of a self-centered child who think that elders aren’t capable any longer of self-care]; and passing relationships with the local Vicar and other golf club buddies.

Additional men are added as the plot develops: the fundamentalist kid, Abdul Wahid; the Major’s freshly deceased brother Bertie; Mrs. Ali’s deceased husband (Ahmed: a nice guy we are assured); Colonel Peterson (not quite yet dead); Mrs. Ali’s deceased husband’s brother Dawid (a fundamentalist sympathizer at least when it comes to misogynist views on women).

Now with the women, we’ve got a large, yellow, sweet 2-pound onion to be carefully peeled, layer by layer, throughout the story.  Mrs. Ali is real; so is Grace, so is Sandy.  We empathize with dancing Amina; despise the old crone, Mummi.  We don’t really like Bertie’s wife Marjorie, nor Sadie Khan but we do root for Alice B Toklas, along with the women’s club ladies: Alma and Daisy, the Vicar’s wife.

There is no moral – other than, the rich get richer

                              and the poor get to have love and babies

February Reader's Theater

Here are the video links for the Feb 2014 one-act plays put on by the River Friends of the Library
Time Sandwich (about aging)
a

a

Wanda's Visit (Marriage Comedy)
b

b

James Agee's Depression Era Study
c

c

Crab Cakes (male aging)
d

d

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje

 

Sailing, oh sailing,

           a sea without women, oh

                      we men crave the sea.

 

This book was spell-bindingly written.  I finished it in two back to back readings.  It did drag a bit towards the end.  But this author is a master at 2 to 3 page character outlines.  He was like a script-writer penning a memorable back-story for an actor to use to properly get into character.

He neatly, Dickens-like, drew the characters together with a plot web at the end with some surprising twists.

The author titled this book a novel; but he also commented at the back that it could be called a fictional memoir.  As a novel, I found it bland, and when he went into older, reflective sections at the end, it was actually boring.  However, as fictional memoir, it was brilliant.  Ondaatje has an imaginative knack for inventing characters.

But then, I listened to Michael Krasny interview the “Train” guy about his book on Trains[1] (see below).  Ship travel, like train travel, pushes people’s nostalgia button.

So, I’m finishing up with my nostalgia.

Since stories have been told around traveler’s campfires, the most exciting and heroic are those about sea voyages.  It’s not too big a jump, for me, to think of space travel as sea voyages.  I’m not alone, the USS Enterprise of Captain Kirk and Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon to name a few.  I’m a junkie for sea stories; good or bad, I’ll still read them all.  My top four are: (1) The Odyssey, (2) Two Years Before the Mast, (3) The Old man and the Sea, and (4) Shackleton and the Endurance.  I’ve reread each of these at least once; a rarity reserved by Peter for the likes of Lawrence Durrell and the Alexandria Quartet, or Frederik Pohl’s “The Heechee Saga”.

My first Atlantic crossing by sea was on a troop ship, whose name was probably 0026894023.  It was a great adventure.  I got my “sea legs” after less than a day.  Me, who got seasick as a Boy Scout fishing off Santa Cruz Bay. [It was probably the early morning bus ride from San Jose to Santa Cruz; and I wasn’t the first – the deck was slippery from the first 6 or 7 eleven-year-old boys.] 

The crossing to Europe was in bad weather, rainstorms all the time; 30-45 foot swells that made you wonder why the ocean didn’t just swallow us up; “How will we ever get back on top of the swells?”  Looking forward along the port bow at a three-story building of turbulent water that you are heading for is scary. 

I volunteered to work in the bakery, getting special privileges, but mainly roamed the ship from sunup to sundown, just like these Sri-Lankan kids.  No swimming pools on a troop ship.  Most GIs stayed below decks and spent their time being sick, not eating and vomiting when they did.  The sea air gave me an enormous appetite, and I could eat even as food was sliding from one end of the table to the other.  We were prohibited from going on deck during bad weather, but the crew wasn’t about to patrol the place: “If some idiot GI wants to get washed overboard, who cares.” 

So, I spent most of my free time exploring the ship and watching the sea.

I could watch the sea for hours.

---

[1] Recently on NPR’s Forum:

http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201402181000#disqus_thread

On Feb 18^th  Michael Krasny’s Forum was a call-in book discussion about “Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World”, written by Tom Zoellner.  In NPR’s promo for this program, they said that “… .. Tom Zoellner is back from a rousing trip around the world… .. Zoellner charts the history of the locomotive along the world's most important railways, from the birthplace of the steam engine in Cornwall, England, to the frigid stretches of the Trans-Siberian railroad. We'll talk about his journey and discuss the future of high speed rail.”

Most of the program was devoted to telephone callers, remembering with fond nostalgia, their experiences with trains.  They didn’t ever get to any of the planned talking points.  The link above will take you to the more than a dozen comments that came in on-line with similar nostalgia.