Peter Ho Davies is Welsh and Chinese, and teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan. That the topic of national identity is central to the book is perhaps not surprising. It is set in a small village near the coast of Wales during World War II. The hatred of the Welsh for the English and the English feeling of superiority, the longing of Esther, the Welsh girl, to...
The characters who people You Don’t Love Me Yet are very odd, but more recognizable than those in Motherless Brooklyn, another book by Lethem that I have read. Four members of a nameless rock and roll band in Los Angeles include a singer who takes home the depressed kangaroo from the zoo where he works, a fickle (to put it delicately) bass player named Lucinda, the songwriter and...
Irene Nemirovsky was a Russian who fled to France during the revolution and became a respected author. With the German invasion of France, she was again under threat, and in 1942 was arrested as a stateless Jew and died in Auschwitz. Her husband was arrested shortly after she was and also was killed by the Nazis. Their two daughters survived through efforts of many people and...
I listened to less than half this audiobook and decided not to continue. The premise that Raskolnikov kills the horrible old woman who is a pawnbroker because he is a "modern" thinker, believing that the greater good is served if he has her money for his mother and sister, is a tough case to make. And especially so if in the course of events, he also kills her victimized...
I read this with enthusiasm, but have some reservations. The character who was the victim didn’t seem plausible; I had a similar problem with the parents of the two missing teenagers, the mother was relentlessly hysterical, the father mindlessly mean. And I kept wondering why the inspector failed to ask some important questions. The setting, the countryside outside London...
A thorough exploration of various miseries. The plot centers on a judge who has retired to a remote ruin of a house near the Himalayas close to Nepal. He had been sent to Britain by his father to be educated to make a better life; he does succeed to some degree in that he comes back to India and has a career. His personal life is horrid and when we meet him he has reluctantly taken in his...
Recommended by someone in the UVa bookstore when I asked for a book by Bernard MacLaverty. The story is set in Yorkshire — Oxgodby is the name of the village — and is the story of a World War I veteran who is hired to remove the paint covering a medieval mural (fresco??) in a small church. Reliving times in the old England is a great part of this book. I learned a...
A action-packed, fun book with a great plot. The story of a young man whose sudden terrible misfortune lands him on a circus train during the Depression alternates with his view of life in the nursing home when he is 90 or, he says, perhaps 93. He encounters a dwarf and his beloved dog, an elephant who understands commands in Polish but not English, a paranoid schizophrenic, and the love of...
A pleasant and fast read. A man leaves the monastery after 20 years and arrives in San Francisco with badly out of date clothes, little idea of the world for all those years, and a gym bag of belongings. He takes the downstairs room in a little house owned by a struggling divorced woman with a daughter and you can guess what happens. There are nice moments of humor and drama...
Paul Auster successfully creates the Kafka world of paranoia where everyone is in on the new deal except you. The book recounts a day in the life of the incarcerated main character, called Mr. Blank because he can’t remember his name or much about himself. He looks at pictures of people from his past that he cannot quite remember and is cared for and visited by these same people...