August 28, 2007

Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls by Danielle Wood

It is written, in my rather crazed declaration in the post below, that my love for Danielle Wood’s Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls began at the first line. The first line? “The trouble with f*llatio, in my view, is its lack of onomatopoeia”. By all rights I could end this book review right now, but then that would be cheating.

I would like to take Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls and wave it in the faces of those who claim that fiction by women for women is stupid. I would like to take Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls and throw it in the faces of women who write stupid fiction for women, in an attempt to make them stop. Stop. Rosie Little is “the next Bridget Jones” for which we’ve been longing for ten years. But Danielle Wood is a sucessor to Helen Fielding only in that her writing is startlingly original, intelligent, honest, hilarious, sparkling, raw and full of life. Rosie Little Cautionary Tales for Girls is a successor to Bridget Jones only in that never has there been a book quite like this. If we must draw comparisons, may I suggest, somehow, Helen Fielding meets Sheila Heti?

A collection of short stories, but one which would convert even the short story’s most reluctant reader, Rosie Little is their teller. Sometimes she is the protagonist, elsewhere a bit character. In the stories where she does not appear at all, she interrupts in brief stops entitled “A Word from Rosie Little”, whether to quote “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in Latin, to expound on aqualine noses (see below), or just for a word on, hilariously, p*nises. Rosie is witty, well-read, wary of wolves but only after a fashion. She and her entourage learn the hard way, such is the way learning goes, and their stories are recounted less as a precautionary measure (for it is too late for most of us I think), but rather to put real life on display in all its absurdity.

The relentless drive of a bride on “her day” leads to considerable embarrassment in “Vision in White”. “Elephantiasis” tells the heartbreaking story of a reluctant collector of elephant knickknacks, and ends hilariously (though not for the character) with male strippers dancing to Henry Mancini. “The Anatomy of Wolves” about a woman who goes back to the man who hits her, and she goes back again. “Rosie Little in the Mother Country” about English pervs, and the impossible youngness of being abroad for the first time. Each of these stories stands up on its own, and yet together they make a collection which reads almost seamlessly.

Rosie Little is rare narrative voice: smart, literary, funny, naive. Her confidences win friends, and her cautionary tales underline universal experience. And somehow she doesn’t become confused with her author in the way you might imagine– Rosie remains distinct, vividly real in her fictional realm. In Rosie and her tales, Danielle Wood has created something incredibly important. Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls raises the standard for women’s fiction, establishing the presence of greatness, and so wouldn’t it be nice if readers refused to settle for less anymore?

August 28, 2007

Rosie Little blew my mind

(I will write a composed post in a moment, for now, can hysteria guide my way?)

Love at first line– that was all it took. And then Danielle Wood’s Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls managed to grow more fulfilling with every line that followed. I’ve absolutely fallen in love and so wholeheartedly. I will tell you, as it goes, that I thought I’d known love, but now I realize…. Oh but now…

Yesterday morning I sent out an Emergency Book Recommendation urging friends to obtain this book. When informed yesterday evening that a friend of mine had purchased it that afternoon, that I was responsible for just one copy of Rosie Little being sold was immensely gratifying. And my friend will like it. I can’t think of any youngish woman I know who wouldn’t (except the horrible ones, but even they might). I will become this book’s champion. You may receive it as a gift from me in the future, and you will not receive a gift receipt because I know that you most definitely will not need it.

Oh the perfect book– these come along so rarely. I kept waiting for Rosie Little to let me down, because there is no such thing as a free lunch or life isn’t fair, or other such pathetic reasons, but Rosie never faltered. Would it be way too ridiculous to say that RLCTFG blew my mind? Because after all when you begin with what appears to be the pinnacle of pleasure which only intensifies, isn’t that what happens?

Do you remember that first line to which I fell in love (and I will quote it in my review-to-come). From that to the last line? Particularly if you are me? “In a moment, I would take a bold and good-sized step, out into the woods again. But first, I would finish my tea.” Yes yes yes. I finished this book on my lunch break today and returned to my desk unable to function. Symptoms of this are lingering as this post probably makes clear.

The one problem with Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls is, interestingly, in regards to one of the coolest things about it– design. A little black hardcover with a red spine, polka dots and a red shoe on the cover, black endpapers and flyleaf, fairytale fonts. A bit of whimsy, like Rosie herself– small but fierece in mean red boots. Ingenius, I think, but then when I was at Book City on the weekend, I saw it on display beside the cash register with novelty books. I was aghast. Mean boots indeed, this book is substance incarnate. As its champion I may be forced to complain to store management, and really, at this point, I wouldn’t put it past me.

August 22, 2007

Big Book of the Berenstain Bears

So I’ve been giving some thought to the types of books I read as an adolescent, but what about the books from even earlier? The picture books? Once again I wish I could tout some high-falutin lit cred from way back in the day, but what I come up with is almost just nonsense. Bookish poppycock, oh, but GOOD bookish poppycock. I loved Amelia Bedelia, Jillian Jiggs, Miss Rumphius (who was not nonsense). Etc. etc. But most of all I did love The Berenstain Bears.

And so I was excited about the re-issue of Big Book of the Berenstain Bears by Stan and Jan Berenstain, and by the chance to go back in time and remember why I liked these books so much. This book is actually five books in one, in which the Bears have a new baby (she appears while Brother and Papa are in the woodshed), get a sitter (nicer than she seems), are afraid of the dark (solution=nightlight), go to the doctor (won’t hurt a bit), and clean their room. A little preachy (life is better when you keep your closet tidy), and not so fashionable in terms of gender roles, but still these are nice little stories. Perhaps they are more suitable for application to real life than flights of the imagination, but this big book would strike me as sensible to have around in the event of children, and five in one is good value to boot.

So where did my fierce love of this series stem from? Upon careful consideration of this compendium, I have managed to trace my attraction back to the Berenstain Bears’ tree house. Marvelously pink with chimneys and windows in the boughs, I wanted to live in a house just like it. I think I also used to be fascinated by the way the Berenstain Bears kept popping up in Dr. Seuss easy-reads, thus existing in multiple literary dimensions. That Brother Bear was never identified by name in the Dr. Seuss books only added to his allure, and made him much more cool and mysterious than might be suggested by the stories in which he collects birds’ nests, or peels down to his underpants for a booster shot.

August 19, 2007

Digging to America by Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler’s novel Digging to America begins with two American families waiting at the airport for their adopted baby daughters to arrive from Korea. Brad and Bitsy, the Donaldson’s, have come with an entourage of extended family, a shock of camera flashes, balloons, excitement and an inevitable camcorder. The Iranian-American Yasdans, on the other hand, are more subdued: Sami, Ziba, and Sami’s mother Maryam are waiting patiently off to the side. “The girls” arrive, and the two families become acquainted, and entangled throughout the following years due to this unique history they now have in common.

This is how the story begins, but not what this story is about. Which is where the mastery creeps in, I suppose, in good writing. The international adoption is a given, the relationship between two very different families becomes a fact, and the story is about ordinary life with all that in the background. The story is not the situation, but rather how people react and interact accordingly. Tyler explores family friendships, and how different family values seem to so often constitute a threat. How, in a country as new as America and with unconventions such as international adoption and immigration, does a family manage to find or create traditions which suit them? What do blood ties really mean? this explored through scenes of exasperating family gatherings, the families’ fierce love for their daughters, or Bitsy’s father who, before losing his wife to cancer, is momentarily surprised to realize that he could not give her his bone marrow. That they’d shared no blood meant less than nothing to him.

This book was a pleasure for a summer’s day, actually the span within which I read it. Well written, joyfully storied, alternatively happy and sad, though it wasn’t perfect. What are the odds of ever making characters called “Brad and Bitsy” three-dimensional? And yet Tyler goes some lengths towards doing this, with multiple points of view which make clear the distance between a person’s actual self and how they are perceived from the outside. Each of Tyler’s characters come with foibles which render them heartbreakingly real, and thus how they react in their lives reads as true.

August 16, 2007

The Raw Shark Lady

An interview with Steven Hall up at Baby Got Books. And yes indeed it is funny to be reading Drabble’s The Sea Lady post The Raw Shark Texts. Two books with very little in common except fish and unconventional narrative structure, but how they inform each other just based on their proximity. I am rereading The Sea Lady because I read it too quickly the first time, so excited was I by a Drabble yet unread. I’m paying much more attention this time around, and loving it just as much.

August 15, 2007

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

I don’t claim to have a sure grasp on Steven Hall’s novel The Raw Shark Texts. If I did claim such a thing, you’d probably know I was lying, or just stupid, and even the Raw Shark Texts discussion forums make clear that straight answers are not close at hand.

Steven Hall’s first novel exists as a conundrum, a puzzle and a maze. Eric Sanderson wakes up prone on a living room floor, devoid of memory, and the only clue offered out of this predicament is a letter he wrote before, signed “The First Eric Sanderson”. This latest Eric Sanderson therefore must follow subsequent clues and put pieces together to recover his identity. Such a neat little premise is complicated, however, by the fact that Eric’s conciousness has been attacked by a “conceptual shark” and that Eric remains under threat.

A conceptual shark? Constructed of the words and ideas it feeds upon, this shark is the concept of a shark quite similar to the shark you now see in your mind as a consequence of the words and ideas I’ve just given you. And so not entirely farfetched after all. Hall’s novel stands as metaphor for what language and ideas can do, the power of books. Notes Eric Sanderson, “it was possible to create a maze from stacked, written-on paper. Bizarre, unlikely, stupidly time-consuming and dangerous, but, yet, possible.” Which, with his novel, Hall has demonstrated.

Of course in addition to the metaphor, this book’s literal function is essential. The Raw Shark Texts is an adventure. When Eric Sanderson makes the preceding remark, he is in fact crawling through an underworld maze actually constructed of stacked telephone directories. Under threat from his conceptual shark and with the clues from the First Eric Sanderson, Eric has descended into this world of “unspace”, in which he can be relatively safe from his predator. He teams up with a girl called Scout who has her own motives for involvement, and together they’re looking for a way to defeat the shark and save themselves.

There is something, albeit undeniably clever, of the “look ma, no hands!” variety about this book. Steven Hall seems intent on demonstrating the innumerable powers a book is capable of, employing typefaces, codes, images, and even a flipbook. In lesser hands this postmodern extravaganza might have been rendered quite hollow, narratively speaking. But no, Hall is not so cheap. The best trick of all is his story: Eric Sanderson’s entire plight is the result of errors made in a fury of loss after the death of his girlfriend Clio. And that Hall’s conceptual people, his conceptual love, that this stack of written-on paper so managed to break my heart and have me longing for appropriate resolution is a testament to Steven Hall’s skill as a writer. It serves to underline his entire thesis: that a book really is a most powerful thing.

August 8, 2007

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida

“People assume those in mourning aren’t thinking clearly,” explains Clarissa, the heroine of Vendela Vida’s novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. “Ha! My brain was a razor. A flesh-eating predator.” With prose stripped so bare, this spare and understated narrative follows Clarissa on a journey to Lapland after she learns the man she called her father wasn’t her father at all. Her other relationships are similarly hollow: her brother has Down’s Syndrome and doesn’t communicate; her fiance says he loves her and she pretends to be asleep; Clarissa’s mother disappeared when she was fourteen, leaving her in a bakery because, as the woman at the counter reported, “she got tired of waiting.” Clarissa is incredibly alone, but all the while this thought runs through her head like a mantra: There must be someone else… There must be someone I’m closer to.

Seeking this “someone” Clarissa escapes to the north of Finland, directed by clues to her real father’s identity. What follows is a quest of sorts, but one much diverted, exhausted. It’s fascinating, however, to learn more about this part of the world so unknown to me and Vida paints a sense of place so well– a place which lends itself to this “razor-sharp prose” in its own barreness. Reading this story was a curious experience however– I was not ultimately sure that I liked it. The prose, the choice and spare details, the traumatized voice all seemed much like what would be found in a short story, and to have it sustained for the length of a novel didn’t feel quite right. A certain superficiality seemed the result, but then, oh, I read the end. The end of this novel is magic spun out of gold– surprising, risky, realized and incredibly satisfying. Casting the entire novel in a different light than I’d been viewing it in all along, and the fact was I loved it. Which I couldn’t have told you twenty pages from the end, but from the final sentence, clearly it was so.

~And when I would hear people say that you can’t start over, that you cannot escape the past, I would think You can. You must.~

*Check out Tim’s review of this book at Baby Got Books.

August 3, 2007

Summer books

Will quite shortly be now-rereading The Summer Book by Tove Janssen, which I bought in 2003 when I lived in England, solely because the edition Sort Of Books brought out then was absolutely gorgeous. The bright blue of the photograph on the cover, the photos on the endpages, even the typeface was perfect. I do remember reading this novel in the manky bathtub of my ramshackle terrace house on Silverdale Road, but I regret that I’ve forgotten everything within it. Surely there is more to this book than its cover, and I am excited to rediscover just that. I also think it will make a fine companion to my recently-completed To the Lighthouse. And once that’s done, just to flip the solstice 180 degrees, I am going to read Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name.

I think it’s best to plan ahead.

July 31, 2007

What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman’s novel What the Dead Know came recommended by Deanna and Kate for good reason, because the book was fantastic. Please see photo below of me on the dock with a beer, and the book, which just about sums it up. What the Dead Know was an absolute pleasure to take along on a weekend away.

Two teenage sisters disappear from suburban Baltimore in 1975, and a dazed woman emerging from a car accident thirty years later confesses to being one of them. Police detectives must prove that this Jane Doe is truly one of the missing Bethany sisters, but the pieces of the puzzle refuse to add up, roads lead to dead ends, and it’s a meandering path taken toward solution. But oh, such a compelling one.

Here is popular fiction at its finest, well-written, well-storied, taking every advantage of prose. I love that this book gave me the chance to recognize one of my latest new words “postprandial” in print. That characters are bookish, there are scattered literary references. Multiple points of view are convincing, and the story so well-developed that I couldn’t put it down until it was finished, until the last piece had fit. Afterwards I was pleased to realize that time so enjoyed could also feel well spent, and that this feeling didn’t even have to do with the paradise where I’d spent it.

July 27, 2007

April in Paris by Michael Wallner

Michael Wallner’s first novel April in Paris (translated from German by John Cullen) was fascinating to read having recently finished The Portrait of a Lady. Not that Wallner’s scope could be considered Jamesian by any means, but Roth, his protagonist, reminded me of Isabel Archer. This in his youth, in his worldiness-acquired-by-library, in his belief that he could “walk between the lines”, not “take up a position.” That he wants to be in the world, but not of it. Which is always a dangerous game, but particularly if you’re a German soldier in occupied Paris.

Roth’s work translating confessions for the Gestapo exposes him to the reality of the Third Reich, making him question his war in a way his fellow soliders might not be inclined to do. Seeking an escape, Roth sneaks away in civilian clothes whilst off-duty, assuming the persona of a Frenchman he calls “Antoine”. Matters become complicated when Antoine falls in love with the daughter of a bookseller, and she turn out to be working for the Resistance. As best he can, with luck and guile, Roth gets away with his double-life for a while, until the plot becomes too thick, and he is suspected of involvement with the bombing of a club attended by German officers. From this point Roth is no longer in control of his story, and the character he becomes through subsequent events is certainly not one of his choosing.

In this life, as a superior explains to him, “No one decides what’s going to happen to him.” Roth’s attempt to defy this from the outset becomes his downfall. Like Isabel Archer, Roth is terribly young. As readers we know nothing about his past, not even his first name. His is a tabula rasa; his self is inchoate. He thinks of himself in the third person, imagines how he looks from the outside, and thinks of “Antoine” as a character from a book. Unable to grasp the consequences of not playing by the rules in his society, Roth is tricked by the unreality of his every day into thinking nothing is real at all.

April in Paris is packed with action and suspense, but there are multiple dimensions to this narrative. The poetic language and musical references attribute it a certain melody. And I did love this story’s bookishness, naturally. Here is a story in the very most storied sense, start to finish, with an ending that is brilliantly invested with hope.