First, the numbers: this is my seventh Elizabeth Strout book and my fourth pandemic book (Intimations by Zadie Smith, Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart, and The Sentence by Louise Erdrich). In March of 2020 Lucy Barton, the subject of four of Strout’s books, is told by her ex-husband William to pack to leave New York City in a few days’ time. She agreed, assuming she would...
In the pre-blog days I read and loved Evidence of Things Unseen by Wiggins, a book set in East Tennessee. I think it’s worthy of a second reading, but meanwhile I read her 2022 book. It took me a long time to take in this 544-page book with its layers of stories and many important characters. It was breathtaking. First we meet Rocky whose father had been a robber baron, leaving Rocky and...
I loved Ruth Ozeki’s previous book, A Tale for the Time Being for several reasons, one of which was that it had ideas “complicated enough to make my head hurt.” Thinking about this one is best approached by talking about its various elements. But first, the framing story: in an unnamed city in the U.S. Annabelle married the beloved Kenji Oh, a Korean-Japanese musician. When...
This novel is hard to think about and I had to keep reminding myself that it is a novel and I never quite believed that. The narrator is an author writing about her mother who had recently died. I loved the tone. She works hard to explain she is writing fiction, although it feels like a memoir. I don’t like being the center of attention except under very specific conditions. Then I adore it...
I admire the author’s book Exit West and looked forward to this one. The audiobook read by the author captures the grimly factual, matter-of-fact tone of the book as he did for Exit West. The book opens with Anders waking to discover he has turned brown. While this book has elements of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Jose Saramago’s Blindness, its trajectory is its own. Other...
I’m hesitant to read a book of short stories (all those beginnings and endings!) but having admired Jess Walter’s book Beautiful Ruins, I took this on. And I’m so glad I did. Qualities that were evident in that book were what made these short stories work for me. He creates places and characters with impressively few words that are poignant and make you glad you are there. More...
This is the third Elizabeth Strout novel I’ve read with Lucy Barton at the center. A fourth one was published in September. In this one Lucy is the narrator and takes a conversational tone with us: Because I am a novelist, I have to write this almost like a novel, but it is true—as true as I can make it. And I want to say—oh, it is difficult to know what to say! But when I report something...
This is my third Antoine Laurain book and once again I have had a pleasing time reading it. The tone is light and folks are friendly and likable. It begins with a Parisian woman, Laure, being hit on the head and mugged outside her apartment building very late at night; her bag was stolen, so she had no keys or phone. She was given a room in a hotel across the street for the night. The next day...
It was Tony’s enthusiasm for Beryl Bainbridge that took me to this book which he described as “a humorous gothic horror novel.” It was set in Liverpool in 1944, a bleak time. The blitz began in the summer of 1940 and continued erratically until January of 1942. Liverpool, along with Birkenhead, across the Mersey River, were hit very hard by the German bombardments to disrupt the...
I greatly admired Tessa Hadley’s The Past and have thought about reading other books by her. She seemed to sketch her characters effortlessly without making them single dimension figures or being cruel or dismissive. This one begins with a focus on Paul whose mother had just died. I couldn’t stop thinking of The Stranger by Camus; which begins, “Today Maman died.” The...