Book Beginnings on Friday

Book Beginnings on Friday is a meme hosted by Katy from A Few More Pages. Instructions are pretty clear: just share the opening sentence of your current read, making sure that you include the title and author so others know what you're reading.

 This week's entry - Monica McInerney's Upside Down Inside Out: A Novel






 

Eva Kennedy had just stepped into the cold March air when a watermelon rolled across the footpath in front of her.

How can anyone resist reading about a runaway watermelon?!

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 Review: Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Publisher/Year: Anchor, 2002

Small books should produce short reviews. This seems simplistically logical. Unless said small book is brimming with historical, cultural, and political perculations. Then all bets can be presumably off. This is where I currently stand with Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, a captivating novel by Dai Sijie. Well, actually, it is not so much a novel as a fable, a semi-autobiographical fable at that. But we’ll get to that later.

I need to cycle back to the slim factor. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress runs to around 184 pages, not the standard minimum 200 pages to which one becomes accustomed with contemporary fiction. The length is deceptive, intriguing. The first question I had was whether the book was more short story than novel. Could it carry the narrative construct full-circle, filling in the appropriate shading at key spots to gift it literary heft? It seems foolish now, and a tad embarrassing, to realize that these questions rested on a judgement of its mere physical presence. Especially so when I start to consider how physical presence is delicately and ideologically contrasted with that of the emotional, psychological, and cultural presence within the book’s pages. Short story long: small book, big impact.

Set in the early 1970’s, two teenage boys (the narrator and his friend Luo) from disgraced middle class families are sent to a remote village in the Phoenix of the Sky mountain to be re-educated as part of China’s Cultural Revolution. The narrator brings with him a violin that is mistaken by the villagers as a ‘bourgeois toy’. Told that the violin must be destroyed, the boys manage to con the village headman into giving back the violin by stating that it is officially sanctioned by the government. And to prove it so, the narrator performs a Mozart sonata now artfully referred to as “Mozart is Thinking of Chairman Mao.”

As reward for their quick intelligence, the boys are introduced to their barely-modest living conditions and backbreaking labor in the local coal mine. But fortune comes their way in fellow laborer and old friend Four Eyes, who just happens to be the son of a well-known poet and the keeper of a secret suitcase filled with Western novels. The novels are forbidden fruit for the narrator and Luo, not just because of the defiance the books represent to their mandated re-education pursuit but because they had never before had access to any such works. The duality of this significance makes the novels even more covetous, and after much bartering and bullying, Balzac’s “Ursule Mirouet” makes its way into their eager hands and hearts.

''Picture,'' Dai says, ''a boy of 19, still slumbering in the limbo of adolescence, having heard nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism, Communism, ideology and propaganda all his life, falling headlong into a story of awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, of all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden from me.''

Prior to this discovery, the boys had been recipients of travels to a nearby village to watch new films. The village headman would then request a report back, resulting in the boys spinning their own vivid Technicolor stories for a captive audience. These experiences soon demonstrated to the boys that story-telling would be the key to their survival. Their stumbling upon the secret suitcase provides an additional means to exploit this advantage, and provides the catalyst for an unanticipated and somewhat unrecognized education in hope, love, and freedom.

How the novels within that secret suitcase transform the lives and loves of the narrator and Luo as well as those immediately around them is the centerpiece of the story. It is not so much that the books exist but how the boys bring their experiences of the novels alive for their fellow villagers that feeds their craving for knowledge beyond their mountain. This knowledge provides them with hope for the future, a way through the agony burdened on their physicality by the tenets of the Cultural Revolution.

"Without [Jean-Christophe, the eponymous hero of Romain Rolland's four-volume masterpiece] I would never have understood the splendor of taking free and independent action as an individual. Up until this stolen encounter with Romain Rolland's hero, my poor educated and re-educated brains had been incapable of grasping the notion of one man standing up against the whole world."

Around the same time as the suitcase discovery, the story-telling capabilities of the boys brings them into contact with the local tailor and his beautiful seamstress daughter. It is through the courtship of Lou and the Little Seamstress that the pure potency of the novels is activated. The transformative power contained within the imaginations of these boys to intellectually struggle against the controls aimed at them is triggered through the reading of the novels. Luo’s determination to mirror this transformation in the Little Seamstress gives her a path to her own freedom, to her own power as a woman and as a sexual being. Her final act seems inevitable yet shocks the boys, and provides the coda to the fable’s concepts of intellectual pursuit and intellectual liberation.

There is a bitterness that comes from lessons learned, like we somehow failed ourselves for not knowing already what needed to be learnt. Such a lesson comes at the expense of loss for the boys, not only of the Little Seamstress but in their prior intellectual victories. As the narrator asks, “had we ourselves failed to grasp the essence of the novels we had read to her?''

It is not so much a failure as a maturing, a recognition that the opening of the mind to truth and the opening of the soul to hope is a rage against the machine that can cut both ways. These are actions that can outlast and outstrip any processes or methodologies or systems that seek to close both entities to the pursuit of self-discovery, but not without a cost. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as it sets forth a path that, even if not taken, still always exists. The real question then is whether the boys are better off having experienced the novels, having been seduced by them.

Such is the overarching mode of Sidjie’s fable. More Orwellian that Orwell could have imagined, the Cultural Revolution operated for a decade to stamp out the educated, intellectual class and re-educate the youth in ways of the virtuous peasantry. But for all its might, the Revolution could not eradicate the power of the intellect, the creativity it forges and promotes. Sijie was one of those youth, spending the years between 1971 and 1974 in the mountains of Sichaun Province. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is his streamlined yet riveting semi-autobiographical fable of those years, an expression of creativity that vibrates with wickedly vivid depictions of a time that could perhaps be most simplistically described as ‘strange’ to those of us on the outside looking in.

It is also, and more winningly so, an expression of cultural education wrapped up in a double-bind literary motivation that could only be so artfully crafted by the hands of someone who lived through the strangeness and came out at the end believing that they were indeed better off for having experienced it.

Book Review: Janice Dickinson, No Lifeguard On Duty

Publisher/Year: Regan Books, 2002

No one can accuse Janice Dickinson of being shy and reserved. She is as brash and sassy as they come, traits that have served her well during the many life trials she has endured through the years. Dickinson claims to be the world’s first supermodel, a statement that has propelled numerous investigations to disprove her arrogance. But the bestowing of this title is only one minor story composing Dickinson’s tell-all biography, aptly titled No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World’s First Supermodel.

It is no secret these days that the life of a model is not all glitz and glamour. On the surface, it seems like an endless party of fame and attention and free stuff; underneath it all though, there are numerous destructive and seductive strings attached to each. Dickinson certainly got tangled up in these strings throughout the majority of her modeling career. Sex. Drugs. Rock ‘n Roll. It was all there, to varying degrees, consuming and abusing her at every turn.

And yet, Dickinson rarely positions herself as a victim. She is always, always the victor. This approach in itself makes the biography a riveting read. But it is the attitude and swagger Dickinson infuses in her prose that separates her story from most sympathetic tales of a young girl searching for meaning and acceptance by haphazardly running from her demons.

At the start of the book, we are introduced to Dickinson’s father, an unsympathetic and cruel individual who returns time and time again as the principal demon from whom she is running. Dickinson witnesses her father sexually abusing her older sister, a discovery that propels her to vehemently resist his attempts to pursue the same course of action with her. Her refusal to ‘service’ him leads to years of physical and emotional abuse at home, and even more years of lingering psychological abuse.

Dickinson goes into detail about how she came to focus on becoming a supermodel (encouraged tremendously by her mother), and the external and internal struggles she endured in achieving the level of notoriety and contentment she enjoys today. Like most models then (and still today), Dickinson traveled to New York and began plying her wares. There were numerous false starts but she was desperately determined. She eventually made her way to Paris where her ‘look’ (considered too ethnic in New York, largely in part to her huge lips) was eagerly embraced. It was when she returned to the U.S. as a much in demand model that she infamously coined the term ‘supermodel” to justify her diva antics.

Along the way there were the oblligatory sexual encounters (Nicholson, Neeson, Jagger, to name but a few), drug abuse, marriage (three in all), abortion, and a whole lot of emotional baggage. Pulling her through it all were her strong feelings of family, within the modeling world and within her blood family. It is abundantly clear throughout the book just how much she loves her sisters, even when they were estranged. But this devotion to family is most especially evident in her discussions of her two adored children, Nathan and Savannah.

Reading No Lifeguard on Duty is just the tiniest of guilty pleasures. We all want to learn about the escapades of celebrities; our voyeuristic impulses are too difficult to contain when it comes to famous people. And with Dickinson, who most people likely know from her stint as a judge on America’s Next Top Model or her frequent escapades covered in the tabloids, this impulse is on high alert. But after reading her story, you come away with much more than a collection of entertaining snippets about famous people and parties; you get a very real sense of her strength and confidence.

Dickinson is definitely a role model--a strong, confident and deliberate female who takes no shit and no prisoners. And working in a world built on exploiting idealized femininity and female sexuality, she most certainly must have scared people silly (and quite frankly, probably still does to this day) with her abrupt, sometimes brutal attitude and business tactics. There is definitely much to learn from Dickinson about being a strong female presence in the world.

What makes No Lifeguard On Duty a rewarding reading experience overall is that Dickinson has everything to hide and does not. Sure, there are moments when she is talking about taking pictures at Studio 54 that you wish she would just publish them already to satiate your intense curiosity. But for the most part she is as revealing as she is cocky (which is a most apt description for anyone who knows anything about Dickinson), a lethal combination that makes you love her and hate her and admire her all in the same moment.

Book Review: Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

Author: Geraldine Brooks
Publisher/Year: Penguin, 2002

Review:
The Black Plague that decimated Europe during the 1600’s is the setting for Geraldine Brooks’ novel Year of Wonders. Like many recent novels that have their fictional grounding in non-fiction events and people, Brooks has fastened her story around a few letters regarding a small village in France that quarantined themselves during the Plague. Little is know about the village of Eyam but Brooks has weaved a compelling humanistic tale regarding what may have transpired within the segregated boundaries of that village.

Year of Wonders is told from the point of view of twenty-year old widow Anna Frith. Anna works as a servant to the young minister, Mr. Mompellion and his wife Elinor in order to make ends meet after her husband dies in a horrible mining accident. She also boards a newly arrived tailor, Mr. Viccars, who inadvertently introduces the Plague to the small community through a single bolt of cloth. It is this one seemingly insignificant delivery that sets off a chain of devastating events for Anna and her village.

Mr. Viccars is the first victim of the disease and he warns Anna to burn all the cloth to prevent the disease’s dispersal. Despite her best efforts, she is unable to burn it all, and the town soon begins to succumb to the deadly disease. Anna’s two small children are among the first to die, leaving her alone and inconsolably bereft.

She becomes single-minded about taking care of Mr. Mompellion and his wife, joining them in their ministrations and comfort of the ill. When the local healer is the victim of mass hysteria, Anna and Elinor begin studying her healing art of herbs and work to provide a viable antidote to the death ceaselessly surrounding them.

Despite their best efforts, nothing stops the disease or its ugly psychological effects on the villagers from spreading, as both continue to ravage the village and its families with no set path or reason. The realization that nothing is working leads to the conception of a most desperate action. Mr. Mompellion forcibly suggests, and the community follows along, to isolate themselves from the rest of the district to keep the disease from spreading to their neighbors.

After a year, the disease begins to fade and the community is faced with starting over. It is at this point that the plot becomes a little too contrived, a little too obvious. Brooks needed a strong, independent ending suitable for Anna, whom she took from a simple character to a fully realized person throughout the story. Anna deserved such an ending but what is provided rings just a tad hallow. It lacks the aura of believability that haunts all preceding plot points.


And certainly throughout the rest of the novel, Brooks creates a very believable and fantastic narrator in Anna. Anna’s emotional and psychological evolution occurs in direct relation to the evolution of this horrible event. She is a woman keenly aware of her circumstances and the brutal times in which she must exist, and tries to make the best of it for herself and her community. Her story alone is compelling and more than compensates for the periodic lapses into modern-day sensibilities that creep into Brooks’ writing.

Anna’s growth and maturity stems from her interactions with the colorful cast of secondary characters. There is her drunkard father Joss who meets a death perhaps more cruel than the Plague, and her stepmother Aphra who is more than a little unstable. There is also Anys Gowdie, the local ‘witch’ through whom Anna learns much about the nature of healing. And of course there is Mr. Mompellion and Elinor, whose mysterious relationship eventually leads to emotionally charged confrontations for all involved.

Brooks sets a very even tone to the novel that maintains the reader’s interest even through some of the more gritty plot points. The narrative flows freely, with each person and event contributing to the urgency of the moments in which they unfold. She paints a very depressingly realistic picture of a very dark time in history without trying to pack too many details into the story. As such, the story does not get bogged down in specifics, a situation that can result in an unfulfilling start-stop reading experience.

For sure, the story is solemn and depressing but there are also moments of great light and humanity that temper out the ugliness of the situation. Brooks does not hold back in her descriptions of the brutality of the Plague and the villagers towards each other. This is of course leads to some graphic death scenes and violent acts. But this is accurate of any hard time that befalls us as our instinct to survive takes over, regardless of the cost. But Brooks uses Anna and Elinor to counteract the ugliness, to provide moments of hope and compassion not only for the characters but for the reader as well.

This historical period was all dirty and illness and confusion and superstition and cruelty. Brooks has her finger on all these themes and threads them through the various events and characterizations with a keen, observant eye. She obviously did her research, as indicated by her employment throughout of the vocabulary of the time (which can slow down the reading process). The words lend an authenticity to the story that adds to the historical resonance of Brooks prose.

Few books about the Plague look at average people and how their spiritual and economic circumstances dictated their varying reactions to it. With this novel, Brooks has done an admirable job of putting faces and names to those people and giving them a vibrant voice. Year of Wonders is a worthy read for anyone interested in history, and for anyone interested in the progress of humanity in the face of great devastation.

Table of Contents: Three Junes

Author: Julia Glass
Publisher/Year: Pantheon, 2002
Synopsis: Three Junes is a vividly textured symphonic novel set on both sides of the Atlantic during three fateful summers in the lives of a Scottish family. In June of 1989, Paul McLeod, the recently widowed patriarch, becomes infatuated with a young American artist while traveling through Greece and is compelled to relive the secret sorrows of his marriage. Six years later, Paul's death reunites his sons at Tealing, their idyllic childhood home, where Fenno, the eldest, faces a choice that puts him at the center of his family's future. A lovable, slightly repressed gay man, Fenno leads the life of an aloof expatriate in the West Village, running a shop filled with books and birdwatching gear. He believes himself safe from all emotional entanglements--until a worldly neighbor presents him with an extraordinary gift and a seductive photographer makes him an unwitting subject. Each man draws Fenno into territories of the heart he has never braved before, leading him toward an almost unbearable loss that will reveal to him the nature of love.

What Others Have To Say
San Francisco Gate
"a warm, wise debut that just happens to focus on a newspaperman, a bookstore owner and, finally, a freelance book designer."

The Telegraph
"...a highly accomplished and sensitive novel..."

The Yale Review of Books
"Glass's critical success is the greatest literary mystery of 2002."

Book Review: Ben Sherwood, The Man Who Ate the 747

Author: Ben Sherwood
Publisher/Year: Bantam Books, 2002

Review:
It would be easy to categorize Ben Sherwood’s debut novel The Man Who Ate the 747 as a standard run-of-the-mill romance story with the obligatory dash of quirkiness inserted to set it apart for its genre companions. And this would be a fair assessment, if not for the composition of that quirky factor indicated by the novel’s title. The story is indeed about a man who eats a Boeing 747 airplane in a misguided attempt to prove his love to an elusive paramour.

The story begins with J.J. Smith, an average joe who works as a Keeper of the Records for The Book of Records. He is the guy who flies around the world to document amazing human feats for inclusion in the book’s editions. Smith has had a string of bad luck lately, with his last three record attempts ending in failure. As a result of his misfortune, his boss is hounding Smith to find the one feat that will reestablish his increasingly precarious position within the organization.

Going through his correspondence, Smith comes across a child’s letter relaying that there is a man eating an airplane in Nebraska. He is intrigued by the simple absurdity of the tip, and begins to research the possibility of the story. A quick search confirms that a plane did crash in the indicated town years ago, so off he goes to Superior to find this certainly crazy man.

Smith’s arrival in the town reveals more than he could have hoped. Not only is Wally Wyatt eating the 747 but he is doing it out of love. Wally’s logic is that if this act does not get the attention of Willa, the local newspaper publisher with whom he has been in love with since early youth, then nothing will. J.J. is excited about the potential record and, despite knowing that Wally does not want any attention, inculcates a media blitz. The town is besieged by reporters from all over the world, all anxious to get the story, and by companies wanting to capitalize on Wally’s story in order to sell their wares.

As all of this is going on, J.J. takes it upon himself to get Willa’s approval for Wally. She disapproves of Wally’s action, avoiding all discussion of his activities until J.J. shows up at her office. Willa and J.J. soon find themselves enmeshed in their own love story. Long hidden behind the facts he works with, J.J. finds a freedom with Willa that makes he begins to understand why Wally would undertake such an absurd and dangerous activity in the name of love.

Now, the novel’s opening sentence—“the story of the greatest love, ever”—promises much but does not fully deliver. The Man Who Ate the 747 is, despite the unique premise, a standard run-of-the-mill romance novel with few surprises. Even the cover art—a heart with wings--is standard visual fare. But the book is a pleasant enough for a lazy afternoon on the porch or at the beach.

Book Review: Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea

Author: Mark Dunn
Publisher/Year: Anchor Books, 2002

Review:
Ella Minnow Pea, the title and lead protagonist in Mark Dunn’s quirky and loving ode to the alphabetarian in all us, lives a happy existence on the fictional island of Nollop. This island, located just off the coast of South Carolina, has a distinguished heritage as having been the home of Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Dunn’s modern fable is a spirited literary experiment evolving from the pleasures and devastations that arise as a result of the worshipfulness the Island’s residents lay at the feet of their famous history.

This worshipfulness is manifested in a brilliant monument to Nollop that includes his famous sentence. Time passes unmarked on Nollop until one eventful day a century later when the carefully constructed terracotta letters start falling off the monument one by one. As the letters continue to fall, the Island undergoes a widespread panic. They believe that the falling letters are a sign from Nollop himself, signaling them to reevaluate their use of these letters. The High Council’s resolution is to ban the use of the fallen letters, and those who do not follow the law are to be banned from the Island as well.

And so begins the transformation of this once peaceful place into a military state. Neighbors turn against neighbors. Books are burned. People stop speaking and writing for fear of punishment. Eventually, the monument has just five letters remaining, ‘LMNOP’ or (conveniently) Ella Minnow Pea. It is Ella and her small group of dissidents who first work to change the Island’s policy regarding the alphabet mayhem, and then work just as hard to develop a new pangram that will allow the Island to emerge from their language lock down.

Dunn tells the story in a series of letters, with each letter mirroring the restrictive communicative bounds taking place in the story. His literary device also stays true to the story as the people of Nollop are letters writers because of inconsistent telephone service. What Dunn provides with these letters is a first-hand account of how truly reliant we are on the alphabet, and how the loss of even one letter can severely affect people’s abilities to communicate and even function at a basic level.

You can also look upon Ella Minnow Pea as a light commentary on organized religion and government paranoia. As the story progresses, the Island moves from an ideal to a frightening parable on the devastating effects language sanctions can have on individual’s identity. Dunn constructs his characters and events deliberately to highlight how the fervor of panic can be tied to even the most trivial of items. The obvious solution to the problem would be to create new letters but the resident’s devotion blinds them to the easy solution. As such, it is a story of power abuse, as elders and elected officials take control and push their interpretations onto others.

Ella Minnow Pea is a clever exercise in creative writing. The novel can be a trying read as Dunn must, in order to maintain the story, use phonetic spellings and odd phrasings to keep the narrative moving forward. Readers may begin to feel less secure in their abilities to comprehend what is being said, what Dunn is trying to say, because of his approach. But take the time and expend the effort, especially if you are a language lover, as you will be most assuredly dazzled by what Dunn has constructed with his debut novel.