Sunday Shorts: A Round-Up Of Short Book Reviews

This post is a collection of short reviews of some of the books I've read in the past month.

In a Perfect World by Laura Kasischke

This author won me over with The Life Before Her Eyes, and when I finally started In a Perfect World, I couldn't put it down. Jiselle is a thirty-something flight attendant, with an open heart and naive nature, who falls for a pilot. Mark seems perfect -- he's handsome, charming and sexy. Jiselle quickly agrees to marry him, quit her job, and raise his three motherless children. Do you sense trouble coming? 

The story of Jiselle's marriage is one layer of this novel. In the background of her life, the "Phoenix flu" is killing indiscriminately, and no one understands why or how to prevent or treat it. Furthermore, the United States is blamed for this growing worldwide epidemic. We see society change gradually around Jiselle, beginning with occasional electrical blackouts and shortages and ending with a world that is almost unrecognizable.

I love Kasischke's lyrical, poetic writing. Her vivid imagery and attention to detail make her stories seem realistic and concrete, yet you're being drawn into a world in which nothing is quite as it seems. I love the fact that, unlike other dystopian fiction, this novel takes place in a culture that is clearly our own. The apocalyptic events don't come in one dramatic moment. It's a slow progression, painted vividly with realistic details. This made it eerily easy to imagine these events really happening.

In a Perfect World creates an apocalyptic universe interwoven with a drama about falling in love, marriage, and becoming a stepmother. This novel reflects the zeitgeist of post 9/11 America. It's also full of allusions to history, including the Bubonic Plague, and folklore. The author spent a great deal of time researching how cultures respond to plagues. Most of all, however, it's a story about who you become when life demands every bit of strength and fortitude you have -- and more -- and about the glorious and agonizing journey of becoming a mother. 


(4.5/5 stars)

The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman

Three sisters – Elv, Claire, and Meg -- have a deep bond. They share stories of a secret, magical land and a private language. One summer, after their parents' divorce, things go terribly wrong. While trying to protect Claire, Elv becomes the victim of a vicious, depraved crime. She carries this secret for the rest of her childhood, and it leads her down a tragic path that changes everyone's lives. 


I used to be a devoted reader of Alice Hoffman's books. This is my first in many years. She is the queen of quirky, lyrical magical realism. She weaves together realistic, raw, painful experiences with mythology and fanciful stories. For example, the brutality Elv suffers becomes intertwined with her fantasy world, and she lives in a dark fairy tale. Hoffman is also masterful at intermingling aesthetic beauty with darkness and pain: a necklace made of a bird's bones, a young woman hobbled by guilt and grief making intricate, beautiful jewelry in a tiny, secluded studio, or a tiny black demon, with delicate wings, bringing tragedy and sorrow.

I had mixed reactions to this novel. It is dark and sad, to the point of being emotionally manipulative at times. The characters seem to be relentlessly bombarded by tragedies. Even given the fact that the line between reality and fantasy is porous, as it always is in Hoffman's novels, it sometimes strained credibility for me. 

However, I was often mesmerized by the storytelling, characters, lyrical storytelling, and vibrant imagery. I also found parts of this story deeply moving. One piece of the story that particularly tugged at my gut involved a program in which prison inmates rehabilitate severely abused dogs. This provides some sense of purpose to a very troubled character who has always had a tremendous heart for hurt or suffering animals. At this point, the novel actually made me cry, leaving me with feelings that have stuck with me ever since. 

(3.5/5 stars)

Triggered by Fletcher Wortmann 

Imagine the worst thing in the world. Picture it. Construct it, carefully and deliberately in your mind. Be careful not to omit anything. Imagine it happening to you, to the people you love. Imagine the worst thing in the world.

Now try not to think about it.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, particularly the "Pure O" kind (uncontrollable obsessive thoughts with relatively few compulsive rituals) may be the most misunderstood mental illness. People continually joke about OCD, which makes me cringe. "I can't stand it if my CDs aren't organized. I'm so OCD." Or they imagine it's just a frenzy of hand-washing and lock-checking. The reality is generally much darker and definitely not funny.

Anyone who knows me understands that severe OCD, particularly the "Pure O" kind, is a subject painfully close to my heart. Wortmann describes it, from the inside out, so much better than any other writer I have seen. His account of his experiences is sometimes cerebral, sometimes raw and confusing, and sometimes absolutely brilliant. And much of the book was hilarious. As a person who gets through pain with dark humor, I felt like I "got" it -- I kind of wanted to take this young author out and buy him a drink. He definitely has a keen intellect and a sharp wit, and at times he reveals himself with painful honesty. The book made me laugh out loud and cry at the same time.

(4.5/5 stars)

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt April 16, 2002

As for me, I was sired in 1977, the same year as the hero of this story. In truth, my life has been very ordinary. As I mentioned before, I do many good things with myself and others, but they are ordinary things. I dig American movies. I dig Negroes, particularly Michael Jackson. I dig to disseminate very much currency at famous nightclubs in Odessa. Lamborghini Countaches are excellent, and so are cappuccinos. Many girls want to be carnal with me in many good arrangements, notwithstanding the Inebriated Kangaroo, the Gorky Tickle, and the Unyielding Zookeeper ... That is why I was so effervescent to go to Lutsk and translate for Jonathan Safran Foer. It would be unordinary.

This is the voice of Alex Perchov, one of the narrators of Everything is Illuminated, a quirky and often endearing Ukrainian twenty-year-old who is enthusiastic about American culture and proud of his sexual exploits which are, in fact, figments of his own fertile imagination. He has learned English with the help of a thesaurus, creating a monologue that prompted Francine Prose of The New York Times Book Review to write: "Not since ... A Clockwork Orange has the English language been simultaneously mauled and energized with such brilliance and such brio."

Alex's father runs a small tour service, driving Jewish Americans to the places where, several generations ago, their relatives died in The Holocaust. Jonathan Safran Foer has come from America, searching for the woman who may have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Alex's grandfather, haunted by his own memories of World War II, is his tour guide and driver, and Alex serves as translator. The three of them set off, with a dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, the "seeing eye bitch," adopted from "the home for forgetful dogs," to find Jonathan's ancestral village, the shtetl of Trachimbrod.

They travel the Ukranian countryside, beautiful but still ravaged by World War II, 50 years ago. When they reach the site of Trachimbrod, they find an old woman who has made herself the curator of the shtetl's memories; her home is filled with boxes of photographs, bits of jewelry, and other remnants of what was once a thriving community.

Alex's narrative about their "very rigid search" for Trachimbrod, and for the woman who may have rescued Jonathan's grandfather, is one of three strands intermingled throughout this novel. The second is a heavily fictionalized narrative Jonathan is writing about his ancestors and the history of Trachimbrod. It is a blend of storytelling, in which the past and future are often tangled, magical realism, and assorted thoughts on art and life. It begins when Jonathan's great great great great great grandmother, Brod, is rescued from the river as an infant, the only survivor of a horse and wagon accident. It continues through the life of Jonathan's grandfather, a man with an unusual disability and a prodigious history of sexual exploits.

This narrative is full of odd, quirky characters. These include Yankel the disgraced usurer, forced to wear an abacus bead as a reminder that he cheated someone. He lovingly raises Brod and as he ages, fearing he will lose his memory, he scribbles notes about his life on his ceiling with her red lipstick. It also includes the mad squire Sofiowka and The Kolker, who survives an accident at the flour mill with a blade in his head.

Throughout this fictional history, things are also vitally important, beginning with the detritus of the wagon accident which surfaces in the river when Brod is rescued and the bead Yankel wears to remind him of his disgrace. These things, including prayer beads, shawls, glasses, and other objects, fill much of people's lives and signify remembrance. This is reflected in Jonathan and Alex's odyssey, in present time, in the way the old lady from Trachimbrod carefully saves the possessions of Holocaust victims in piles of boxes, just in case someone comes searching.

Alex reads Jonathan's fictionalized history and discusses it in his letters, and this provides the third strand of the novel. It's an interesting addition to the book, because in effect, the novel reflects on itself and explores its own meaning. We also see Alex's character develop through these letters, as he sheds some of his silliness and prepares to take responsibility for himself and his beloved younger brother.

Jonathan Safran Foer is a tremendously gifted writer, with the courage to try something new and different. At moments I was awed by the story and by his writing. I really liked Alex's voice, and I quickly got used to his quirky use of the English language. I loved much of the magical realism in Jonathan's fictionalized history, and I admired the themes of memories, forgiveness, and coming of age.

On the other hand, I found the novel quite uneven. I ran the gamut from being absorbed by the writer's brilliance to barely wanting to keep turning the pages. It especially fell down during Jonathan's fictionalized narrative. At moments, it was splendid, but at other times it seemed self-consciously clever and disjointed. Some of the sexuality also disturbed me. I am all in favor of not shirking from explicit sex, when it fits the story, and I enjoy a bit of gratuitous literary smut here and there. But some of this sexual content was just bent.

Overall, I thought this was a unique and compelling story with memorable characters, that illuminates the the second world war and the holocaust and how it affects us several generations later. It shows us an empty field where a shtetl stood for generations, seeing births, marriages, feuds, friendships, and deaths, obliterated by Nazis in one afternoon. This image is more powerful than anything that could be expressed in words. It also does a beautiful job of exploring the theme of remembrance, through myriad layers, and I admired the way the author combined quirky humor with somber memory and reflection. This is definitely a novel I will remember.

Read Another Review of This Book At: Books and Other Stuff

Rating: I don't know how to rate this one.


 

Thoughts on the Movie Adaptation: The movie recreated one strand of this complicated novel, the journey Jonathan, Alex, and Alex's grandfather made to Trachimbrod. It offered excellent acting and gorgeous imagery, including a luminous moon shining on the river and a lush field of sunflowers.
While it followed Foer's novel closely in many ways, it made radical changes. Like the book, it revealed secrets about Alex's grandfather, who had been hiding his own memories of World War II. However, the grandfather's story is completely different; I am still puzzling over why screenwriters changed it.

The movie also created a new facet to Jonathan's character by making him a "collector," a young man with the quirky habit of taking things that evoke memories -- photos, his grandmother's false teeth, dirt from her grave -- and bagging, labeling and saving them. I think this may have been done to capture some of the elements of Jonathan's fictionalized history, which isn't presented in the film . It reminded me of its emphasis on multi-generational memories, and on the things that make up much of people's lives. When asked why he collected all these objects, the film version of Jonathan said, "I'm afraid I'll forget." It reminded me of the way Yankel, in the fictionalized history, scrawled his memories on his ceiling with lipstick. I also think the movie's authors wanted to reinforce the theme of remembrance which was explored so richly in the novel.

I liked the novel and the movie equally but, for me, they were very different. The book offered incredibly rich, though uneven, narratives about history and memory that could never be duplicated on screen. The film offered the advantage of not having to wade through the bent and self-consciously clever parts, of course. It also created gorgeous imagery and made the characters more three dimensional and human, somehow.

Another thing I admired about the movie, which I saw for the first time several years ago before picking up the book, was the way it revealed the history of antisemitism in Europe. It seems that too many accounts of the Holocaust treat it as if it were disconnected from the rest of Europe's history, as if Hitler somehow conjured the evil of antisemitism. Like much of Eastern Europe, Ukraine had a long history of progroms and other forms of persecution. Jonathan pointed out, in a very apt and poignant moment, that at first many Ukrainian Jews came to the Nazis to protect them from the Ukraine.

I recommend this movie, though it's not for the squeamish. Take a peek at Roger Ebert's review of this film. I agree with his comment that this is a movie that "grows upon reflection" -- it also benefits from a second viewing.