Several years ago I read The Shark Net, Robert Drewe’s memoir of growing up in Perth in the 1950s and 60s and was favorably impressed with it as you can see from the linked post about it. Now at last I’ve listened to one of his novels. After all, it is Australian and New Zealand Literature Month. The novel opens in rural Britain, perhaps in the 1880s, when Will Dance is a child and...
In the pre-blog days I read Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue, about a Vermeer painting, which I enjoyed, though it suffered in comparison with Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring which was published the same year. This novel brings to life the characters in Renoir's wonderful painting (a link here) which I see when I visit the Phillips Collection in...
This book has multiple strains that bump against each other. First we are introduced to the nebbishy editor who had once written brilliantly cutting non-fiction, but couldn't bear the real or imagined harm it did to the subjects. As he begins teaching a night school class in writing, issues about writing come up. The class argues about the concept of how many plotlines exist and thereafter...
Steve Martin has such a variety of talents: a comedian, actor, banjo player and composer, fiction writer. I have read two fiction books by him (Shopgirl and An Object of Beauty) and found them to be terrific. A few years ago we heard him perform with the bluegrass band Steep Canyon Rangers here in Charlottesville. He had a patter, as someone from bands typically does, as they...
This Australian best seller is told in the first person by a 40 year old academic whose location on the Asperger's Symdrome scale is immediately apparent to everyone but him. He is governed by logic which suggests to him that an unvarying meal schedule is the most efficient, that his clothes should be chosen for practical reasons only, and individuals he encounters should be described by an...
Jane Franklin Mecom was the beloved younger sister of Benjamin Franklin with whom she had a lively correspondence. She married badly and spent her young years caring for her many children and coping with the repossession of household goods to cover her husband’s debts. The Book of Ages is Jane’s small crudely made book that records the births and so sadly often, the deaths of her children...
The Maid’s Version, reviewed by Tony’s Book World, is described by the author as “country noir.” It was awfully dark and the tone did remind me of Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice. Woodrell also wrote Winter’s Bone, which I understand has been made into a good film. The maid is Alma whom we hear about from her grandson who is sent to stay with her...
Anthony Marra, a 28-year-old man from Washington, D.C. has written a complex and emotionally satisfying novel with characters who are wildly different from any in his own life. Set in Chechnya, the story occurs in 2004, but ranges back to the first Chechen war to flesh out the characters, and occasionally tells what happens to characters many years in the future. I found it helpful to read the...
I hesitated to take on this book after reading some reviews, thinking it would be out of my comfort zone. Fortunately I read Tony”s review and knew I would love it. And I did. The unusual nature of the narrative is the “Groundhog Day” aspect of the storytelling. The novel begins with a birth in 1910 in rural England that goes wrong as there is a snowstorm and the doctor...
Having loved Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, I was excited to pick up her new book. The New England setting is once again an integral part of the story, this time in a small town in Maine. The narrator of the prologue gives us a brief description of the Burgess family history and tells the impetus for that narrator to write the story of the Burgess brothers. There are three...