Robert Weibezahl

NonfictionEssays

An expatriate writer on life in Italy

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Treasured by many readers for her 22 (and counting) mystery novels featuring the Venetian policeman Commissario Guido Brunetti, Donna Leon is also a practiced writer of sharply observed commentary about a range of subjects. My Venice and Other Essays collects some of these short and incisive pieces for the first time.

An American who has lived in Venice for 30 years, Leon straddles these two disparate cultures with a dexterous balance of affection and acerbity only afforded the perceptive expatriate. Leon clearly loves her adopted city, but she is not so pie-eyed as to overlook—and report to often hilarious effect—its idiosyncratic imperfections: dealing with a snail-like bureaucracy as her ancient flat crumbles, witnessing all manner of detritus furtively dumped into canals, enduring an aged, inconsiderate neighbor’s blaring television (and plotting how to kill off said irritant in one of her crime novels). Retreating to a house in the country, she encounters all sorts of singularly Italian critters—human and otherwise—including an attentive chicken, a wayward cat and a not particularly intelligent mole.

Moving beyond Italy, Leon is often less tolerant, but no less mordant, in her assessments of the U.S., particularly its foreign policy, militarism (something she witnesses up close as a teacher at a military base), and consumerism. Yet, there are endearing portraits of the somewhat eccentric members of her American family and a sprinkling of sweet childhood memories to soften her mounting discomfort with her native land. She also offers a scathing appraisal of Saudi Arabia, where she taught at one time.

An unabashed opera lover, Leon includes a handful of snappy pieces on the pursuit of that art form. She closes the collection with some thoughts on writing—including Suggestions on Writing the Crime Novel (“I refuse to call it ‘literature,’” she writes self-deprecatingly). One particularly arresting piece contrasts the life and death of Princess Diana to the fate of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth.

My Venice and Other Essays might fail to register on the radar of those unfamiliar with Leon’s fiction, which would be a pity. Savoring these short and engaging pieces is akin to sharing a latte at a Venetian café with an entertaining, opinionated, intelligent friend.

Treasured by many readers for her 22 (and counting) mystery novels featuring the Venetian policeman Commissario Guido Brunetti, Donna Leon is also a practiced writer of sharply observed commentary about a range of subjects. My Venice and Other Essays collects some of these short and…

Literature

Brief encounters with flesh-and-blood writers

Review by Robert Weibezahl

By its very nature, most literary reportage is ephemeral. A review or author interview tied to the publication of a new book serves its intended purpose—helping to bring the book to the public’s attention and spur some sales—but few of these pieces have lasting value. So, gathering a collection of writer profiles that first ran in newspapers a decade or more ago may seem, on the face of things, a foolhardy endeavor.

But John Freeman’s How to Read a Novelist, which gathers 55 short pieces this notable critic wrote on assignment for papers around the world, is an exception. It is worth our attention for two reasons. First, Freeman has included mostly writers whose work has a lasting or at least universal appeal. There are a fair share of Nobel Laureates among them, including Nadine Gordimer, Mo Yan, Doris Lessing, Günter Grass, Imre Kertész and Toni Morrison, as well as many winners of the National Book Award, NBCC Award, Pulitzer, Booker and other major awards. Alongside such giants as Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Joyce Carol Oates and David Foster Wallace, are less mainstream writers such as Kenya’s Ng?g? wa Thiong’o, Libyan expatriate Hisham Matar, and the Bosnian American Aleksandar Hemon.

The second strength of the book is what Freeman himself brings to these encounters. A perceptive critic, he remains transparent in most of these profiles, and yet his careful reading of the writers’ work informs and shapes the pieces. By his own admission, he focuses less on literary craft and tries instead to identify the essence of each subject’s art by what they reveal in conversation. Sometimes their concerns are political, sometimes personal and sometimes, as with Atwood or Dave Eggers, they are focused on broader issues of keeping literature alive or connecting with readers.

Freeman’s infectious enthusiasm for literature keeps us interested. “I have always felt there is something electrifying about meeting novelists,” he writes. “It has to do with grasping that the creator of a fictional world, a universe that lives inside you as a reader while also feeling strangely disembodied, is not as interior as that world but alive: flesh and blood. In this fashion, I wanted the pieces I wrote about novelists to describe an encounter, to show to the reader what the writer revealed to me.”

Freeman largely succeeds in this mission; these brief encounters illuminate familiar work and inspire one to read the less familiar. Some pieces are more successful than others, of course—that is the nature of the beast in a collection this broad-based. Predictably, some writers are less forthcoming than a reader might wish. Yet even less compelling profiles, written with breezy insight, warrant a read and make How to Read a Novelist a companionable literary compendium.

By its very nature, most literary reportage is ephemeral. A review or author interview tied to the publication of a new book serves its intended purpose—helping to bring the book to the public’s attention and spur some sales—but few of these pieces have lasting value.…

Memoir

From County Clare to Swinging London

Review by Robert Weibezahl

The arresting photo on the jacket of Edna O’Brien’s lyrical memoir, Country Girl, captures the writer sometime in her heyday, cigarette poised between her lips, looking confident and inquisitive, but also a little bewildered. These same qualities have always defined O’Brien’s writing itself—she is a magical storyteller and prose stylist who writes emphatically from both the head and the heart, yet has never been afraid to express the tentativeness of life.

Country Girl, its title a nod to her first and still widely read debut novel The Country Girls, is a book that O’Brien’s fans will warmly embrace. The assumption has always been that swaths of autobiographical detail have fueled much of this Irish-born writer’s fiction, and this impressionistic chronicle of her life lays to rest any doubts. Here are the true details of a childhood in the west of Ireland as young Edna pushes against the provincial and parochial constraints of village and parish. Later, she quickly acknowledges the mistake of an early marriage, but remains too long in this claustrophobic union with an impatient martinet who discourages her talents, then seethes when her literary star begins to eclipse his own. On the upside, that marriage—O’Brien’s only trip to the altar—produced her two beloved sons, Carlo and Sasha.

After her first novel appeared in 1960, bringing quick fame and some measure of wealth, O’Brien was ensconced in Chelsea and duly immersed in London’s Swinging Sixties, partying with Paul McCartney and Richard Burton (a fellow Celt and “bard brother”), and forging enduring friendships with Harold Pinter and other seminal writers and artists of the age. She became a patient of renegade psychiatrist R.D. Laing, who gave her LSD. During extended teaching trips to New York, she became a close friend of Jackie Onassis. She was wined and dined at the White House.

It was a remarkable transformation from shy country girl from County Clare to world-renowned literary celebrity, and what strikes one most in O’Brien’s story is that her life has been a study in sharp contrasts. The little girl whose once grand but impecunious family often had the bailiff at the door could never imagine those future dinners at Jackie O’s Fifth Avenue digs. Having lived in London nearly all her adult life, her connection to Ireland remains indelible, even though her native land all but banned her early books. Reading between the lines of this candid, if intentionally elliptical memoir, it becomes patently clear that much of O’Brien’s literary output has been an effort to integrate her motherland (and, indeed, her complicated relationship with her strong-willed mother) into the larger canvas that has become her life. Now in her 80s, Edna O’Brien reveals herself in this memoir as a woman of youthful passions and yearnings, still a writer of exquisite prose that probes the clandestine corners of what she herself has called a fanatic heart.

The arresting photo on the jacket of Edna O’Brien’s lyrical memoir, Country Girl, captures the writer sometime in her heyday, cigarette poised between her lips, looking confident and inquisitive, but also a little bewildered. These same qualities have always defined O’Brien’s writing itself—she is a…

Biography

When father is famous

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Charles Dickens is inextricably tied to the children he “fathered” in his fiction—Oliver Twist, Pip, Little Nell. In real life, the beloved writer sired 10 offspring (possibly 11, if unconfirmed reports of a child with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, are true), nine of whom lived into adulthood. Those children are the focus of Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, an engaging work of Dickensiana that arrives at the tail end of the year-long celebration of the author’s bicentennial.

The borrowed title is ironic, for what Gottlieb shows us in this family portrait is that while the elder Dickens may have professed to expect great things from his children, in most cases he jettisoned those hopes somewhat prematurely. It is never easy to be the child of an accomplished parent, and Dickens was one of the most famous men in the world. The impatience he displayed when judging his children’s accomplishments, his refusal to give them a chance to come into their own in their own good time, must have been frustrating, particularly for his sons (given the times, and the less conditional affection he seems to have shown his daughters, the two girls may have suffered less).

Only two of the Dickens children achieved a level of accomplishment that would have pleased their father. Henry, second youngest son, went to Cambridge, became a lawyer and judge, and was eventually knighted for his services to the Crown. Kate, younger of the two surviving girls, became a much admired painter. Yet, as Gottlieb shows us, success is relative. The writer’s eldest and namesake, Charley, would prove himself as a publisher after his father’s death, and Alfred had a measure of success in Australia. Walter and Sydney died in their early 20s, too young to judge where their lives might have led. Mamie, most adoring of their father, became something of a religious eccentric. The peripatetic Frank died in Illinois, of all places, while the youngest, Plorn, lived in relative obscurity Down Under.

It is true that a number of the children were undermined by drink and profligacy (traits perhaps inherited from Dickens’ father and siblings, if not from the abstentious and prudent writer himself). But Gottlieb raises an important question: How would the Dickens children, particularly the boys, have fared if their father had been more patient, helping them finding their places in the world, rather than shipping them off to unsuitable careers and inhospitable climes? The man who imagined great life-arcs for the characters in his fiction seems to have had little imagination when dealing with his own offspring’s lives.

 

Charles Dickens is inextricably tied to the children he “fathered” in his fiction—Oliver Twist, Pip, Little Nell. In real life, the beloved writer sired 10 offspring (possibly 11, if unconfirmed reports of a child with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, are true), nine of whom lived…

NonfictionMemoir

Publishing’s golden age through the eyes of an industry legend

Review by Robert Weibezahl

The name Richard Seaver may not be widely known outside of publishing, but this champion of cutting-edge literature, who died in 2009, was highly regarded as a purveyor of some of the most important writing of the second half of the 20th century. It began in the 1950s in Paris, where young Seaver went to live cheaply and study as a Fulbright Scholar and ended up consorting with all manner of literati. With some other young Turks, he started the literary magazine Merlin, introducing the English-speaking world to the work of a range of postwar European writers—not least of all, another expatriate by the name of Samuel Beckett. Back in New York in the ‘60s, Seaver worked for Barney Rosset’s daring Grove Press, where he played an important role in the censorship trials over Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s novels, and shepherded the publication of William Burroughs, John Rechy and Henry Selby, among many other wild and original writers.

Seaver’s arresting memoir, The Tender Hour of Twilight, bears the words “publishing’s golden age” in its subtitle, but perhaps “mercurial” would be a more apt adjective to describe the challenges this iconic editor weathered to bring controversial writing to the fore. Proving to be as fine a writer as he was an editor, Seaver recounts many charming anecdotes about his personal and professional lives—which, really, were inextricably linked. Being roused from his sleep by a drunken stranger named Brendan Behan banging on the door of his shabby Paris digs; tracking down the elusive, largely unknown Beckett; battling legal windmills with Rosset; courting a young French woman, Jeannette Medina, who would become his devoted wife and partner-in-literary-crime for over five decades (and editor of this posthumous volume)—Seaver conjures a magical time before publishing became engulfed by corporate interests, when a talented young man with a vision could make his mark.

Full disclosure: I had a passing acquaintance with Seaver when I worked at Holt, Rinehart and Winston under his stewardship, and I remember him as a refined gentleman whose unassuming demeanor belied the fact that he had brought to light some of the most unapologetically raw writing of the age. Like the man, The Tender Hour of Twilight is often self-deprecating and always civilized. It is a paean to a time that can never be replicated, a book that will appeal to anyone who savors  the literary life.

 

The name Richard Seaver may not be widely known outside of publishing, but this champion of cutting-edge literature, who died in 2009, was highly regarded as a purveyor of some of the most important writing of the second half of the 20th century. It began…

Fiction

Love in the modern world

Review by Robert Weibezahl

When you only publish a book once every decade or so—and your last novel won the Pulitzer Prize, to boot—expectations for your next work are bound to be excessively high. Oh, and when that last book was a weird and wonderful mega-seller like Middlesex, well, that’s the dilemma for Jeffrey Eugenides. What do you do for an encore?

Probably the smartest thing for any writer to do under these daunting circumstances is to go in a very different direction, and with The Marriage Plot, Eugenides does just that. Less epic in proportion than Middlesex, and far more conventional in narrative, this much-anticipated novel uses the traditional device of a love triangle to explore questions of religion, identity, mental illness and, of course, love. Its title is a play on the term often applied to 19th-century Regency and Victorian novels (by the likes of Austen, the Brontës and Mrs. Gaskell) that center on the attainment of a suitable marriage.

Because he borrows peripheral details from his own life for his fiction, it might seem that Eugenides is a writer of thinly veiled autobiography, but he assures readers that The Marriage Plot is an invention. “I’ve had to pare down the autobiography in order to find the fiction,” he confessed to his editor Jonathan Galassi in an interview on FSG’s Work in Progress blog. “Autobiography is a largely fraudulent exercise. People don’t understand their lives or what happened to them; they only think they do. . . . Autobiography (or life) is artless.”

Still, in some ways it seems hard to separate one of The Marriage Plot’s central characters from his creator. Like Eugenides, Mitchell Grammaticus is a Greek-American from Detroit who graduates from Brown University in 1982. Like the author, Mitchell spends some time in Calcutta, working as an orderly at Mother Teresa’s Home for Dying Destitutes (this section of the novel was excerpted in the New Yorker’s summer fiction issue under the title “Asleep in the Lord”). In an interview with the New Yorker, Eugenides conceded that this part of the book is the most autobiographical thing he has ever published, while holding fast to the assertion that, “Almost everything I’ve ever written, and especially Middlesex, is made up.”

The pivot on whom The Marriage Plot revolves is Madeleine Hanna, a newly minted English major who, alas, like many English majors, finds herself cast into post-college life without a practical rudder to help her navigate the real world. Madeleine and Mitchell have been close friends since the beginning of freshman year and, as is so often the case in these collegiate pairings, Mitchell is madly in love with Madeleine, but she does not share his feelings and prefers to remain “just friends.” Their inevitable schism is painful, especially for Mitchell, who continues to pine for what might have been. Madeleine, though, has turned her full attention to Leonard Bankhead, a student in her semiotics seminar  who is brilliant, moody and widely reputed to be oversexed.

Eugenides takes us deep inside the hearts and minds of this trio of intelligent young people.

Madeleine and Leonard fall intensely in love in a kind of hyper-intellectualized, collegiate way (they share a passion for the arcane lit-crit of Roland Barthes). What Madeleine doesn’t realize at first, though, is that Leonard’s charismatic brilliance (and bedroom stamina) can be attributed to his manic depression. When she breaks off their relationship, Leonard spirals down into madness. With a foreboding naïveté, Madeleine skips her graduation ceremony to race to his side in the psych ward. Reunited, they become the doomed lovers of the piece, and like their counterparts in 19th-century fiction, wedded to their tragedy. Mitchell, meanwhile, sets off for a year in Europe and India, intent on forgetting Madeleine while fulfilling a spiritual quest.

The novel deals with issues that obsess young intellectuals—the nature of love, religious truths, the meaning of life—which would explain why the 51-year-old Eugenides has chosen to set it among college students. “To me, college doesn’t seem that long ago,” he told the New Yorker. “It wasn’t hard to remember the music we listened to or the films we watched, or the way I felt back then. Much of the novel is written from the point of view of a young woman graduating from college. So, as with any book, it was more of a labor of imagination than recollection.”

It makes perfect sense that this story of intense love originates on campus, because for many, the university years are marked by a geographical and emotional intimacy unmatched in the outside world. Eugenides does a terrific job capturing a certain kind of college experience during a distinct era, and for those of us who shared that experience, there is instant recognition. A convincing novel can capture an age and cement it in memory, and The Marriage Plot does so, achieving something halfway between amusement and nostalgia.

By borrowing both title and conceit from the Victorian marriage plot novel as the basis for his own, Eugenides dares to make a bold literary statement. The seminal novels of the 19th century, even those that highlight the domestic, are predominately about society rather than the individual. The Marriage Plot, though, has narrower concerns, focusing as it does on three characters whose dilemmas are based in decidedly late 20th-century solipsism. Madeleine, most of all, remains an enigma—a highly intelligent, fortunate rich girl, who casts aside everything her education has taught her to enter what she herself disdainfully calls a “Stage One” marriage (“traditional people who marry their college sweethearts, usually the summer after graduation”). It is no wonder disaster looms. All three of the characters, though, are well drawn and pertinent, advancing the plot equally through action and inaction, and Eugenides takes us deep inside the hearts and minds (really inseparable here) of this trio of intelligent young people in order to dissect some basic truths about the unpredictable nature of love.

A gifted writer, Eugenides does so much well. He has a great talent for zeroing in on the perfect delineating detail—he describes Madeleine’s well-bred WASP mother, for instance, as “all hairdo and handbag”—and the intelligent, self-deprecating humor that percolates beneath the characters’ adolescent angst endears them to us, despite their lapses into self-indulgence. 

Perhaps the greatest strength in the novel is Eugenides’ depiction of Leonard’s manic depression. Readers are convincingly led though the trenches with him as he repeatedly relapses and rebounds. Whereas Leonard may not be the easiest character to like (the blogosphere is abuzz with rumors that he is based on the late writer David Foster Wallace), Eugenides helps clarify his misunderstood affliction with compassion and insight. 

It will be interesting to see if Eugenides’ fans embrace The Marriage Plot with the same fervor they showed for Middlesex (which has sold more than 3 million copies). It is certainly an ambitious novel and, in the end, after some woolgathering, its exploration of the vagaries and frailties of the human heart wins the day. Whatever critics and readers say, don’t expect a reaction from the famously circumspect writer himself. “If you want to write fiction, you have to be congenitally deaf to readerly murmurs about your character,” Eugenides told the New Yorker. “The trick to fiction-writing is to get the reader to believe what you’ve written. The greater your success at that, the more you deform yourself in certain literal minds.”

When you only publish a book once every decade or so—and your last novel won the Pulitzer Prize, to boot—expectations for your next work are bound to be excessively high. Oh, and when that last book was a weird and wonderful mega-seller like Middlesex, well,…

Fiction

The talented and timeless Edna O’Brien

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Now 80, the peerless Irish-born writer Edna O’Brien is still producing exquisite fiction, as evidenced in her new collection of stories, Saints and Sinners. O’Brien has long plumbed the emotional groundwater of family resentments, the disaffection of a life in exile, and the exposed nerve of sexual and romantic longing. Many of these new stories return to these familiar themes, but there is now the inevitable patina of age—of wisdom gained, or at least nostalgia—that well suits O’Brien’s lyrical, ruminative narrative gifts.

Versions of O’Brien’s own “escape” from the narrow confines of rural Irish childhood (she has lived mostly in London since she was 23) have fueled her novels and stories, as has the inability to shed completely the ties to the motherland. Some of the stronger stories here revisit these verities. “Shovel Kings” chronicles the life of an aging Irish day laborer, an economic refugee in London who returns to Ireland only to discover he is no longer at home in either world. A failed reconciliation between a woman who left home and a cousin who stayed behind prompts the painful realization that, “It was not love and it was not hate but something for which there is no name, because to name it would be to deprive it of its truth.”

Mothers and daughters—territory O’Brien surveyed in her last novel, The Light of Evening—are at the center of “My Two Mothers” and “Green Georgette,” while variations on love’s relentless, if often bitter, pull play out in an adulterous marriage in “Madame Cassandra,” a transatlantic affair in “Manhattan Medley,” and a spinster’s enduring hope in the moving, melancholy “Send My Roots Rain.” In “Sinners,” the real or imagined peccadilloes of a traveling trio trigger an overwrought, inadvertently comic reprisal from the repressed owner of a bed-and-breakfast.

The Irish “Troubles,” now largely a relic of the past, rear up in the violent denouement of “Black Flower,” while the violence of a newer, greedier Ireland lead to a misguided young man’s repercussive death in “Inner Cowboy.” And in “Plunder,” the one story that journeys afield from O’Brien’s accustomed terrain, a girl in an unnamed, war-torn country is repeatedly defiled, then left for dead, by a marauding gang of hooligans.

With a singular combination of sumptuous prose and stark brutality (both emotional and physical) that is all her own, Edna O’Brien continues to delineate the contradictions and perplexities of the human experience.

Now 80, the peerless Irish-born writer Edna O’Brien is still producing exquisite fiction, as evidenced in her new collection of stories, Saints and Sinners. O’Brien has long plumbed the emotional groundwater of family resentments, the disaffection of a life in exile, and the exposed nerve…

FictionShort Stories

Ha Jin on the immigrant life

Review by Robert Weibezahl

The characters who inhabit the stories in A Good Fall, a new collection by National Book Award-winner Ha Jin, are Chinese immigrants of various stripes, all living or working in the Queens, New York, neighborhood of Flushing. Like most immigrant stories, these tales are at once universal and particular—marked by the familiar adjustments needed to survive in a new place, which in this collection, are specifically Chinese in tenor.

Frequent conflicts occur across generational lines, as older Chinese parents fail to accept the Americanized ways of their children. The overbearing presence of a mother visiting from China threatens to destroy a marriage, forcing the son to take extreme measures. A recently arrived grandfather cannot abide the manners of his American-born grandchildren and is horrified when they reject their Chinese family name. Inextricably-bound concerns over money and honor drive a Buddhist monk to attempt suicide, and motivate a young woman to grudgingly send home money she cannot spare to a sister with the finely honed sensibilities of a seasoned extortionist. Some stories, set in the 1980s—around the time that Ha Jin himself first came to the U.S. as a student—unfold under the shadow of the oppressive Red Chinese government. Those set in more recent times embrace the freewheeling capitalist impulses that send Chinese immigrants, both documented and undocumented, to American shores.

Jin writes with a direct, unfussy style that captures the odd cadences of these lives lived in translation. His most memorable characters are often irrational: the professor gripped with panic because he has misspelled a word on his tenure application, the young husband convinced his homely infant daughter could not possible be his, or the suicidal monk who, at 28, thinks himself an old man ready for death. Jin tells every character’s story with a mixture of compassion and humor, conveying the validity of his or her daily worries, but showing too that, as with all human complications, and no matter our cultural heritage, we are often our own worst enemies. 

The characters who inhabit the stories in A Good Fall, a new collection by National Book Award-winner Ha Jin, are Chinese immigrants of various stripes, all living or working in the Queens, New York, neighborhood of Flushing. Like most immigrant stories, these tales are at once…

FictionHistorical Fiction

A Partisan’s Daughter

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Louis de Bernières is the go-to guy if you like richly told “big” books such as Corelli’s Mandolin and Birds Without Wings—sweeping stories, filled with colorful characters and told from multiple points of view. His new book is not big—in fact, it is little more than a novella—and the multiplicity of voices with which the narrative unwinds has been reduced to just two. Still, A Partisan’s Daughter is vintage de Bernières: a story of impossible love, ethnic conflict and the whims of history, played out through the inevitable fates of ordinary, if compelling characters.

These characters are Chris and Roza. He’s a 40-year-old English pharmaceuticals salesman, locked in a loveless suburban marriage; she’s an undocumented Yugoslav girl, scraping out an existence amid the economic hardship of pre-Thatcher 1970s London. They meet when, on an impulse—and for the first time in his life—Chris approaches a girl he believes to be a streetwalker. Roza protests she is not a “working girl,” but she accepts a ride from him because she judges him, rightly, to be safe and kind. Before they part, she admits that she was once a prostitute, and charged 500 pounds for her services. Obsessed with the idea of sleeping with her, Chris begins to squirrel away money, but in the meantime he regularly visits Roza as friend rather than client, enjoying her company and listening to her stories.

They are vibrant, sometimes disturbing stories of her childhood near Belgrade, as well as her misadventures after she escaped to England. Roza shocks Chris with the revelation that she once seduced her father, who was a comrade of Tito, and details her rape at the hands of a British thug. But Chris, like readers of the novel, is never quite sure when Roza is telling the truth or when she is weaving a tale to make herself more fascinating—to this humdrum man who so obviously adores her, and to herself.

De Bernières, like Roza, knows how to construct a captivating narrative, and A Partisan’s Daughter is a graceful, persuasive exploration of boundless storytelling and the limits of love.

This review refers to the hardcover edition.

A Partisan's Daughter is vintage de Bernières: a story of impossible love, ethnic conflict and the whims of history, played out through the inevitable fates of ordinary, if compelling characters.
FictionWorld Fiction

Zafón’s latest literary game

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón returns to the world of his international mega-seller, The Shadow of the Wind, with his latest novel, The Angel’s Game. The setting is Barcelona in the first half of the 20th century—though a fictional Barcelona, envisioned, perhaps, by Poe by way of Buñuel. The story, which has threads that bind it to the earlier novel but can be read independently, once again features the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, the labyrinthian secret library where volumes languish until someone rescues them from eternal obscurity.

The liberator this time is David Martín, who as a young boy is deserted by his mother and ultimately orphaned when his abusive reprobate father is gunned downed in the street by thugs. David seeks refuge in the newspaper offices where he works as an errand boy, and soon shows his talents by writing a popular serial novel for the paper. When he is fired out of jealousy, he cleverly turns out a series of potboilers under a pseudonym.

Then David is approached by a Parisian publisher, Andreas Corelli, to take on a highly lucrative commission, but because of his long-term contract with the philistine publishers of his series, he is obliged to turn down the offer. The lure of the mysterious Corelli’s money is too great, however, and as soon as David agrees to take on the project, his obstructive publishers are killed in a suspicious fire. David, of course, is a prime suspect. Byzantine complications ensue.

The work Corelli hopes David will write will provide the founding myths for a new faith. The volume that David rescues from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a theological tract, Lux Aeterna. It is safe to say that Zafón has religion on his mind in The Angel’s Game, in a somewhat more didactic purpose than he seemed to have in The Shadow of the Wind. That earlier book, with its clever blend of gothic and pulp, moved at a more engaging pace than this one. But fans of Zafón’s mesmerizing literary style will not be disappointed as he sweeps them into his curious literary netherworld.

Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón returns to the world of his international mega-seller, The Shadow of the Wind, with his latest novel, The Angel’s Game. The setting is Barcelona in the first half of the 20th century—though a fictional Barcelona, envisioned, perhaps, by Poe by…

Fiction

A tragic blend of sorcery and heartbreak

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Sheri Holman never writes the same book twice. Her weird and wonderful new novel, Witches on the Road Tonight, is a blend of backwoods sorcery and ageless heartbreak. Its story extends from Appalachia in 1940 to contemporary New York City, with stops along the way in the 1960s and ’80s. Holman freely borrows from Mary Shelley, cheesy horror movies, mountain folklore and the Gothic-laced Southern coming-of-age novel to create a disturbing world, wholly her own.

Given Holman’s commanding narrative abilities, every character in the novel is afforded a moment in the sun, but the through-line of the story centers around Eddie Alley and his daughter, Wallis. Eddie is a young boy, living with his mother, Cora, in a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains when two interlopers—a writer and photographer at work on a WPA guide to the region—change the trajectory of his life. The writer, Tucker Hayes, falls under the spell of Cora, who is rumored locally to be a witch. He also takes young Eddie under his wing, showing him an old silent film version of Frankenstein on a hand-cranked projector. Tucker, who is a week away from being inducted into the army, ultimately disappears, presumed AWOL. The truth, we will come to find, is far more complicated and unexpected.

The ancient film and projector survive the years. Eddie has evolved into Captain Casket, the host of a kitschy horror-movie show on a local television station. Eddie’s wife, Ann, invites Jasper, an orphaned teenager who reveres Captain Casket, to come live with the family for the summer. Like Tucker before him, Jasper proves a dangerous interloper, not only the catalyst for arousing Wallis’ budding sexuality and igniting her connection to the family’s dark legacy, but also awakening impulses that Eddie has long suppressed.

Holman expertly untangles and reweaves many threads in this novel: among them, the lure and revulsion of both external and emotional violence; the complexity of sexual love; the fragility of the relationships we construct; real and perceived ghosts; and, of course, witchcraft: “Someone else’s curse, like the story of someone else’s love affair, is meaningless and hollow,” Wallis comes to realize. “Only our own love has the power to damage.”

As intended, Witches on the Road Tonight haunts. As the twisted narrative unfolds with tantalizing surprises, Sheri Holman displays her own kind of sorcery, making us believe what we might not otherwise believe.

 

Sheri Holman never writes the same book twice. Her weird and wonderful new novel, Witches on the Road Tonight, is a blend of backwoods sorcery and ageless heartbreak. Its story extends from Appalachia in 1940 to contemporary New York City, with stops along the…

Memoir

Chronicle of a life well told

Review by Robert Weibezahl

It will come as no surprise to readers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez that the first book to leave a lasting impression on that sorcerer of fiction was The Thousand and One Nights. This is just one of many glorious details the Colombian-born Nobelist, who put magical realism on the world's literary map with his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, shares in the first volume of his memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale.

Garcia Marquez is one of those writers who is frequently described as beloved, and this autobiography has been a huge bestseller around the globe in its original Spanish. Now elegantly translated into English by Edith Grossman, the book is at last available to those of us who do not read the author's native tongue.

Just as he might start one of his novels, Garcia Marquez begins his narrative with a journey. He is in his early 20s, living in Barranquilla and scratching out a living as a journalist, when his mother appears one day out of the blue at a bookstore where he often hangs out. As the eldest son, he must accompany her to the town of Aracataca to close the deal on the sale of the family home. The uncomfortable journey via boat and train is fraught with mishaps, and the young man spends a good part of it assuaging his mother's concerns about his decision to drop out of university to become, of all things, a writer. The whole misbegotten venture ends with a muddle that leaves the house unsold, but for Garcia Marquez it proves the catalyst for this larger journey into the past.

Though he mostly sticks with chronology when relating the story of his life, Living to Tell the Tale is anything but linear. One memory casually sparks another, leading him to a colorful digression about some other event or character. Character is the operative word here, for the real people who surrounded him were as singularly eccentric as anyone he has created in his fiction. "I cannot imagine a family environment more favorable to my vocation than that lunatic house," he admits, "in particular because of the character of the numerous women who reared me." If his grandmother and aunts encouraged piety, his grandfather, known as "the Colonel," encouraged freedom of expression, at one point having a wall in his office painted white with the express purpose of providing a fresh canvas for preschool-age Gabriel's wall scribblings. The Colonel's own freedom of expression had resulted in nine illegitimate children. When all the sons descend on the house one Ash Wednesday to pay their respects, imaginative little Gabriel thinks that the crosses they all bear on their foreheads are some kind of family imprimatur, and he is sorely disappointed later to learn the truth.

His father was a homeopathic pharmacist who disappeared for long periods of time, leaving his mother with 11 children to raise. But Garcia Marquez's memories are anything but bleak, for everyone in his world was relatively poor and struggling, and pleasures were found wherever possible. Later, working as a journalist in Bogota, he weathers his country's political upheavals with the same sense of equilibrium. It is around the time of the popular uprising of April 9, 1947, that he reconnects with the girl he has known since childhood who will become his wife. This chapter of the story ends with Garcia Marquez on a plane headed for Geneva, writing a letter to Mercedes asking her to be his bride. Like the trip that launched the book, this seems to be another symbolic journey, as he embarks on the part of his life that will turn him into a citizen of the world.

So much of what Garcia Marquez lived in these early years would feed his fiction, and Living to Tell the Tale is a delightful companion to those incomparable novels and stories. It covers just the first third of his life, but the now 76-year-old Garcia Marquez has promised two more volumes of memoirs. For our sake, may he live to tell those tales, as well.

Robert Weibezahl's new book, A Second Helping of Murder: More Diabolically Delicious Recipes from Contemporary Mystery Writers has just been published by Poisoned Pen Press.

 

It will come as no surprise to readers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez that the first book to leave a lasting impression on that sorcerer of fiction was The Thousand and One Nights. This is just one of many glorious details the Colombian-born Nobelist, who put magical realism on the world's literary map with his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, shares in the first volume of his memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale.

Fiction

Secret sorrows of ’60s classmates

Review by Robert Weibezahl

It's been almost 20 years since Lawrence Kasdan's movie The Big Chill brought together a group of once-idealistic '60s types for a fun-filled weekend of mourning and recriminations. If you remember that 30-something gang as cynical and disillusioned, wait till you meet their 50-something counterparts in Tim O'Brien's engaging new novel, July, July.

The occasion for this regret-filled gathering is a 30th reunion at a small college in St. Paul, Minnesota. Like all reunions (but especially those in novels and movies), the event gives the assembled characters the chance to take stock of their lives. As it turns out, everyone in July, July has been disappointed by the way things have turned out.

The narrative moves between the reunion, held on a muggy Midwestern weekend in July 2000, and another July right after graduation, when the '60s were in full tumult. It was during that earlier July that two of the assembled alums became direct casualties of the dual conflicts in Southeast Asia and at home. David Todd, who once had major league baseball prospects, went to Vietnam. He came home minus a leg and plagued by flashbacks. Billy McMann burned his draft card and headed north to Winnipeg, losing his Republican girlfriend, Dorothy Stier, in the bargain.

Of all the characters in the novel, David and Billy are O'Brien's best creations, because between them they represent the choice that so many young men had to make back then. And each of their stories proves that, in the end, neither choice was really a winner. O'Brien, who won the National Book Award for his Vietnam novel Going After Cacciato, is one of the most celebrated writers of the generation who fought in or against the war in Vietnam, and he does a deft job here of conveying the confusion and terror that David and Billy endured.

The third man of the group, Marv Bertel, seems to have escaped any permanent scarring from the '60s, but he has his own secret sorrows. As do all the women. Some are housewives, some have careers, and none is particularly happy. Marla Dempsey, David's ex-wife, believes she is incapable of love and has the track record to back up her fear. Amy Robinson and Jan Huebner are embittered divorcees, while Spook Spinelli has <I>two</I> husbands and seems to be trying for a third. Prim and proper Dorothy, battling breast cancer, must fend off Billy's still-simmering resentment. And Ellie Abbott is haunted by the drowning death of her lover, Harmon Osterberg.

Harmon is one of two classmates whose deaths the group mourns. The other is Karen Burns, who was murdered not long ago. Though a memorial service for the two classmates anchors the weekend, the grieving is not really about the dead. It is about opportunities missed or squandered by those still living, and the indisputable fact that for all their former idealism or perhaps because of it their lives have not gone as planned.

The Baby Boom generation has long been accused of being self-centered, and O'Brien doesn't do much here to dissuade readers who might hold that opinion. Still, while July, July abounds in discontentment, it is never maudlin. The characters, though middle-aged, still carry with them some measure of their youthful dreams. "The turbulent world of their youth had receded like some idle threat or long-lapsed promise," O'Brien writes near the close of the novel. "But still, as with . . . several million other survivors of their times, there would also be the essential renewing fantasy of splendid things to come." A promise of possibilities, no matter how tenuous, still sparks the sexual and emotional couplings into which they fall.

While the wisest among them have adopted a kind of cautious optimism, even the most foolish in the group would freely admit their individual and collective foolishness. And it is this clear-sightedness that makes <B>July, July</B> more than just a eulogy for the 1960s. The ways in which O'Brien portrays his generation might strike some as unflattering, but he refuses to shy away from the wreckage these characters have left in their wakes. Those who, like the author, came of age amid the turmoil of a decade marked by shattered trust, will find much to recognize about themselves and their lives in this emotionally honest work.

Robert Weibezahl has worked in the book publishing industry for 20 years as a writer and publicist. He lives in Los Angeles.

 

It's been almost 20 years since Lawrence Kasdan's movie The Big Chill brought together a group of once-idealistic '60s types for a fun-filled weekend of mourning and recriminations. If you remember that 30-something gang as cynical and disillusioned, wait till you meet their 50-something counterparts in Tim O'Brien's engaging new novel, July, July.

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