Line By Line: Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

"Softly she laid her cheek on the pillow and stroked his hair. No tears flowed; it was a silent leave-taking."

"And now you know [life]'s not like that. Right? It's more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tastes wonderful, and you don't even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it's nearly burned down to the end. And then's when you're conscious of the bitter taste."

"The soul is the weariest part of the body."

"Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen."

Book Trailer: A.J. Jacobs, The Guinea Pig Diaries

Table of Contents: A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian

Author: Marina Lewycka
Publisher/Year: Penguin, 2005
Synopsis: Set in Peterborough, 84-year old Ukranian immigrant Nikolai Mayevskyj announces to his daughters that he's in love and will remarry. The object of his affection is Valentina, a 36-year old Ukranian woman with a visa about to expire and a pair of marvelous breasts. She's determined to use Nikolai to achieve the Western lifestyle she's assured she deserves, and he's willing to let her while he works on his book about the history of tractors. Meanwhile, his daughters, although markedly different in outlook and lifetime rivals, band together to thwart Valentina's ambitions. Valentina's turns their family home inside out, digging up old family secrets in the process. It's a battle of wills with all the participants shaped by their own pasts through recent Eastern European history.

What Others Have To Say
The San Francisco Gate
"Lewycka is a natural writer, a humorist with a light touch who draws the reader in to a family feud that is utterly funny but also stricken with plaintive sadness over the effects of war and inequity on human relationships."

The Guardian
"Reading this novel gave me the impression that I had read a school textbook on Ukrainian history with one eye on an episode of Coronation Street."

Houston Chronicle
"Though well-intentioned, the brief passages of tractor history bring the story to a standstill. Lewycka wants us to mull over the idea that the same ingenious minds that could construct peaceful agricultural machines could convert them into tanks for war."

Adaptation: Eat Pray Love

Book Review: Lenore Skomal, The Keeper of Lime Rock

Publisher/Year: Running Press, 2002

The Keeper of Lime Rock is the story of Ida Lewis, “America’s most celebrated lighthouse keeper”. The fact that she was also America’s first female lighthouse keeper makes this honor all that more significant. Author Lenore Skomal takes the few details known about Ida and fastens an interesting story about an unassuming woman reluctantly living in the national and international limelight for simply doing her job.

Lewis came to be a lighthouse keeper after her father fell ill and was incapable of undertaking his tasks. Along with her younger brother, Lewis maintained the lighthouse at Lime Rock and provided the necessary rescue assistance when required. She did these things with very little recognition until one fateful night in March 1869. It was then that she rescued two shipwrecked soldiers from nearby Fort Adams, and thereby cemented her place in American history.
As she continued to serve the lighthouse, news of her acts of heroism were celebrated all over the world (her adventure that March night was not her first or last successful rescue effort). Numerous feature stories and articles were printed over her career detailing her valor and courage. Rich and poor people alike flocked to meet this famous woman, and more than a few men sent her marriage proposals. There were even music compositions written in her honor, and Wordsworth penned a poem.

She received medals from Congress for her rescue of endangered soldiers and citizens. Numerous other awards poured in, either in monetary, medal or gift fashion. But Ida kept these closed away, intent to accept the accolades for peace of mind and as a boost for her self-confidence rather than view them as a means to mark her place in history. Lewis was a very modest person, who would have rather lived her life in obscurity than be the centre of so much attention. For her, tending the lighthouse flames hourly was more important than any of her rescue efforts, and certainly more important than any attention those efforts brought to her door.

For some time, Lewis was a novelty, a sideshow of sorts for a society struggling to shirk the confining principles ideal feminine passivity. The men she rescued didn’t believe she could possibly save them, until she did. Her physical and psychological strength was admired and praised by both men and women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony even visited Lewis, a meeting that interestingly left Lewis quite unimpressed by the feminist leaders of the time.

Because Lewis was so modest, The Keeper of Lime Rock is not the most engrossing read. It is a rather dull compilation that sometimes runs a little too freely with the platitudes about courage and heroism. Granted, Skomal did not have much to work with in that no journal or diaries exist from Lewis’ own hand. What material she did have is surrounded with truth speculation and third-hand tellings. Without firsthand accounts there cannot be any full understanding of Lewis; there is no way of knowing what she was truly thinking or feeling during her life outside other individual’s perceptions and insinuations. As a result, Lewis does not emerge as a three-dimensional person and this is mildly disconnecting for the reader.

The Keeper of Lime Rock is a short read, which is good as the writing lacks the vitality to make you want to read more. Information and events are repeated, making a strong case that Lewis’ story would make a better article than a full book. This is in no means meant to discredit or minimize Lewis and her contributions to women’s place in the workplace and society; she is most definitely someone worthy of admiring and studying. The problem lies in the written words themselves, for they never fully encapsulate the story-telling potential dwelling in Ida Lewis’ life story. The Keeper of Lime Rock merely reports the facts--what there are to report--and this is unfortunately just not enough to comprise a whole book.

Book Mark: The Kibble and Dibble Literary Awards

These awards came to our attention via Award Tragic:

The Kibble Literary Award recognises the work of an established Australian female writer.

Nominees:
Kristina Olsson for The China Garden
Shirley Walker for The Ghost at the Wedding
Josephine Emery for The Real Possibility of Joy

The Dobbie LIterary Award recognises the work of an Australian female writer published for the first time.

Nominees:
Karen Hitchcock for Little White Slips
Deborah Forster for The Book of Emmett
Robyn Mundy for The Nature of Ice

Table of Contents: The History of Love

Author: Nicole Krauss
Publisher/Year: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005
Synopsis: Leo Gursky, an elderly Jewish man who survived World War II in Poland before coming to New York City. He's a terribly lonely man who missed out on the life he wanted to live and the woman he wanted to love, and he does something every day to try to get someone, anyone, to notice him. While in Poland, he wrote books where he named the female character after the woman he loved. Alma Singer is a 15-year old girl named after a character in her parents' favorite novel, The History of Love. Her father has died and her mother has been hired to translate The History of Love from its original Spanish. Alma and her brother, Bird, struggle to understand their world after their father's death, and Alma sets out to understand the story of this novel and the woman for whom she was named.

What Others Have To Say
Houston Chronicle
"The plot involves a book-within-a-book, with characters from one story invading the other one in Paul Auster-like fashion, and depends on some largely undigested globs of magical realism to move things along."

The Washington Post
"...involves several narrators and moves back and forth through the 20th century and around the world. But that's just for starters: It contains a lost, stolen, destroyed, found, translated and retranslated book called "The History of Love," characters named for other characters, cases of plagiarism and mistaken identity, and several crucial coincidences and chance meetings that are all maddeningly scrambled in an elliptical novel that shouldn't work but does."

The New York Times
"there's less of the earnest A-student striving that often mars Krauss's efforts to live up to her idols, especially when she's trying to be funny."

The Guardian
"Krauss is undoubtedly an entertaining, humane and intelligent writer, but this novel is just too neat and too sweet for her talent to fly freely."

Line By Line: Lionel Shriver, The Post-Birthday World

"Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are."

"Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over."

"Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are."

"Now, bitterly, with one sweep of the front door, the compassion was spent. To the degree that Lawrence's face was familiar, it was killingly so - as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known. She'd been handed her diploma. There were no more surprises - or only this last surprise, that there were no more surprises. To torture herself, Irina kept looking, and looking, at Lawrence's face, like turning the key in an ignition several times before resigning herself that the battery was dead."

"Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks."