This is a book that I learned about from ANZ Litlovers. And like The Secret Son, another book I encountered there, this one is both a candidate for a favorite for the year and not well-known in this country. A Girl Made of Dust is set in the battleground of Lebanon in the early 1980s, when Israel invaded Lebanon in a struggle with the PLO. It is the story of three generations of a...
It was Ron Charles' enthusiastic review that drew me to this debut novel. The main character is descended from a rubber baron and has devoted her life spending money to make everything in her environment perfect as she conceives perfection. This is particularly challenging to achieve with her children, but she is undaunted. And quite unappealing. The story is related chiefly from the...
What a set-up this book has: four adult children gather for one last month-long vacation at the grandparents' old place where they had spent time as children. Very quickly their individual identities, as well as the alliances among them and irritations with each other come through. There's the woman who arrives first so she can have a long walk alone to steel herself to being around them...
See the Update below. A book described by Reading Matters as a love letter to Paris that is set in the mid-1960s is irresistible. She did also emphasize that it is very mysterious and that too was true. The narrator is Jean, looking back on a few days when he was 18 and his father had just fled the city (for mysterious reasons) and he was on his own as his mother was somewhere in the south. The...
This is my third Elizabeth Strout book (Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys). They each have very different strengths and approaches and I admire the artistry of all of them. This short novel is narrated by a woman who grew up in the most awful circumstances. For her first 10 years her family (parents, a sister and a brother) lived in a garage and had very little to eat. She began staying after...
This is the second book written by Anthony Marra; his first, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena was one of my favorite books for that year. Within this collection of short stories is a web that connects the characters. Like his first book, Marra gives Chechnya a key role in the story, as the place Russians must do anything to avoid being sent to or the place that is ravaged by the...
First I should say that I can’t write about this book without giving an extra strong SPOILER ALERT. I was expecting a book about a marriage, the first half about the man’s more sunny perspectives (Fates) and the woman’s, well, less sunny view (Furies), with a Greek myth flavor. That turned out to be wrong. The man (Lancelot, called Lotto) had an unusual life story before...
Kamel Daoud is an Algerian journalist based in Oran; he has written a book mirroring or perhaps responding to Albert Camus's The Stranger which I read in 2012. He begins with the sentence, "Mama's still alive today." while the narrator Meursault of Camus's book tells us right away that his mother had died. Perhaps a brief refresher of The Stranger is...
Now I have finished the fourth and last of the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante. My thoughts on each of the others here: My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. The narrator is a women from a poor neighborhood in Naples who against all odds becomes educated and is a successful novelist and a public figure, writing social commentary as well. At the...
This collection of short fiction, one novella and three short stories, is intense reading. The novella which gives the book its title uses the poem by Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," as a guide. A few lines of the poem appear at the beginning of each chapter that explicates the thought expressed. The main character of the story is Jim Mendelssohn, a man in...