The narrator of this coming of age novel is a 17 year old very accomplished young man who finds he is attracted to men as well as women. He struggles with all the universal feelings about the object of his affections, a young academic staying with the narrator’s family for six weeks in their home on the Riviera. Those feelings, the intense longing, fear of rejection, the countless ups and...
I do hate being surprised at the end of a book. It’s not that I mind plot twists, but I do mind being misled. And there’s no question about it, we were misled. The story of Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom was incorporated into this book; it was great to read a book with their story as a major part of it. I enjoyed getting to know them in a new light, written into a story by someone who...
My third book by Ward Just is a more complicated one for me. When it began, I thought it was a straightforward, plot-driven story, but I am left unsure that I have all the implications. Well, I should say, I’m sure I don’t have all the implications, and am not at all sure I can articulate the underlying message. Here we go: The forgetfulness of the title is the...
It was fun to read about the Cathars, heretics who were the object of the only crusade undertaken by the church against fellow Christians. Assuming the book accurately portrays the history, it was actually a war to acquire land, a very believable proposition. The twin plots, set 800 years apart, were too overly connected for comfort and were pretty foolish. But on the other...
The elements of recent history of the Czech Republic, and Prague in particular, are in evidence in this book. The main character, Kristyna, is a divorced woman with a teenaged daughter whose grandmother and other family on her mother’s side died in Nazi death camps, having been divorced by her non-Jewish husband. And her father was a staunch Stalinist to the end of his life. The mother...
Echo House was a real pleasure to read; it dips into the lives of three generations of a power family in Washington. Because it covers a long time span (between the wars to the 90s), it visits the characters from a distance, always with references to the key moments in their lives. This is not as tight a story as An Unfinished Season, but like that book, place is very important...
I have mixed views of this 2006 book by a British writer. It was always engaging and I was never tempted to give it up. The narrator was purportedly a man, but at the risk of sounding sexist, the sensibilities of this narrator were not masculine. An appealing character in many ways, but not a guy as I know them. And as evidence that I am not a sexist, I offer this: I was made uneasy by the...
I am new to Ward Just — somehow I had not heard of him until the last year or so — and now I have lots to look forward to. An Unfinished Season is the story of the pivotal summer for a privileged young man before he enters college, set in Chicago in the 1950s. His life that summer involves a pleasing mix of worlds — the deb balls of North Shore fine families, his visits to hear...
A very dreamy book; events and descriptions are misty and their reality is quite uncertain. A young Russian man is telling the story of his time in a tiny desolate village called Mirnoe where he meets a woman in her 40s who has been waiting for her beloved to return from the war for 30 years. The wonder of her faithfulness and goodness is the central theme of the novel. By the writer of Dreams of...
The Seattle setting is very much a part of Waxwings, as is the time — the beginning of the end of the dot com boom. Two separate stories eventually intersect. One is the story of the arrival of a Chinese illegal — the term snakehead (human smugglers) is used in this book. The other is the disintegration of a marriage and the effect on the 4 year old child of the couple. The British...