I'm just thinking that if everything you're looking for disappears, maybe you should stop looking. Maybe you should focus on what's tangible in the here and now.
-- Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Sunday Sentence: 'A Tale for the Time Being'
As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further comment:
-- Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
-- Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
Friday, August 16, 2013
Review: 'Five Star Billionaire'
FIVE STAR BILLIONAIRE
By Tash Aw
Literary fiction
July 2013
Spiegel & Grau
ISBN: 978-0812994346
The tale of the up-and-down fortunes of five people trying their luck in
Shanghai may not make the Booker Prize shortlist, but Tash Aw’s Five Star
Billionaire is an entertaining tale that sheds light on the universal human
desire to be counted.
Phoebe is a young woman who has recently arrived in bustling Shanghai to try her luck. Things appear to be going her way when a rich woman drops her ID card at a coffee shop. Between that and the self-help advice she reads, such as the adages in a book called Five Star Billionaire, Phoebe just knows she’ll make it.
Justin is already near the top. His family has been rich for generations, owning and developing property. He’s the one picked in his generation to be the fixer, the one who makes sure things get done. His whole life is work -- meetings, society appearances, travel, paperwork. Not like his brother the hipster and his girlfriend, who owns a cafe but doesn’t even know how to read a ledger.
Yinhui has worked hard as well, and is now a successful businesswoman with several ongoing ventures. Her life revolves around work as well, and she is poised to become even more successful.
Gary has come from nothing and nowhere to be a huge pop music sensation. Winning a talent show and then going on to make hit after chart-topping hit, his life is controlled every minute in service to his career and those screaming girls who adore him.
Walter is the Five Star Billionaire author and a character who lives in the shadows. He is the cog in this story that sets things going and, as his story is eventually revealed, his reasons are made clear.
Written much in the style of a Kate Atkinson multiple narrative, the connections among the characters draw them into each other’s stories. Propelling them all is the other main character in the novel -- Shanghai. It is sprawling, it is tightly packed, it rewards the ruthless and robs the trusting. Stopping to smell the roses is not recommended in a cutthroat, fast-paced world, yet it is something that many of the characters yearn to do.
Shanghai is as mysterious and unforgiving in Aw’s novel as it is in Bo Caldwell’s Distant Land of My Father, a brilliant story of sophistication and survival that encompasses WWII, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, a flawed but fascinating novel with settings that include the International Settlement in Old Shanghai and a fantastical city that could not exist in reality, but which seems to be mirrored in Five Star Billionaire.
In Aw’s novel, Shanghai is not just the exotic locale it often is to Westerners. This ultra-competitive world is recognizable to anyone who sees the way that financial success is deemed the ultimate goal for so many in today’s world. The goal of making money for its own sake, for respect and to get even with anyone who tried to hold you down is as much a part of American society as it is in Shanghai.
The grace of Five Star Billionaire is that the human motives behind the drive to succeed, and the wanting to connect with other human beings even if it takes time away from a business meeting, underlies the story arc of each character.
©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission
By Tash Aw
Literary fiction
July 2013
Spiegel & Grau
ISBN: 978-0812994346
Phoebe is a young woman who has recently arrived in bustling Shanghai to try her luck. Things appear to be going her way when a rich woman drops her ID card at a coffee shop. Between that and the self-help advice she reads, such as the adages in a book called Five Star Billionaire, Phoebe just knows she’ll make it.
Justin is already near the top. His family has been rich for generations, owning and developing property. He’s the one picked in his generation to be the fixer, the one who makes sure things get done. His whole life is work -- meetings, society appearances, travel, paperwork. Not like his brother the hipster and his girlfriend, who owns a cafe but doesn’t even know how to read a ledger.
Yinhui has worked hard as well, and is now a successful businesswoman with several ongoing ventures. Her life revolves around work as well, and she is poised to become even more successful.
Gary has come from nothing and nowhere to be a huge pop music sensation. Winning a talent show and then going on to make hit after chart-topping hit, his life is controlled every minute in service to his career and those screaming girls who adore him.
Walter is the Five Star Billionaire author and a character who lives in the shadows. He is the cog in this story that sets things going and, as his story is eventually revealed, his reasons are made clear.
Written much in the style of a Kate Atkinson multiple narrative, the connections among the characters draw them into each other’s stories. Propelling them all is the other main character in the novel -- Shanghai. It is sprawling, it is tightly packed, it rewards the ruthless and robs the trusting. Stopping to smell the roses is not recommended in a cutthroat, fast-paced world, yet it is something that many of the characters yearn to do.
Shanghai is as mysterious and unforgiving in Aw’s novel as it is in Bo Caldwell’s Distant Land of My Father, a brilliant story of sophistication and survival that encompasses WWII, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, a flawed but fascinating novel with settings that include the International Settlement in Old Shanghai and a fantastical city that could not exist in reality, but which seems to be mirrored in Five Star Billionaire.
In Aw’s novel, Shanghai is not just the exotic locale it often is to Westerners. This ultra-competitive world is recognizable to anyone who sees the way that financial success is deemed the ultimate goal for so many in today’s world. The goal of making money for its own sake, for respect and to get even with anyone who tried to hold you down is as much a part of American society as it is in Shanghai.
The grace of Five Star Billionaire is that the human motives behind the drive to succeed, and the wanting to connect with other human beings even if it takes time away from a business meeting, underlies the story arc of each character.
©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Review: 'The Color Master'
THE COLOR MASTER
By Aimee Bender
Literary fiction short stories
August 2013
Doubleday
ISBN: 978-0-385-53489-5
Magic realism is a tricky thing. Go too far in one direction and the result can be either fantasy or an inability to keep that disbelief suspended. Go too far the other way and the result can be so close to the real world that the reaction is: Why bother?
Aimee Bender, like two characters in the title story of this collection, knows how to mix the ingredients together just right.
Her stories are filled with yearning. Some characters do outrageous things, daring themselves to push past acceptable behavior. Even the thought of doing outrageous things, dangerous things, changes the world or the characters, and there is a sense of loss.
Other characters dare themselves to discover, and the result often is a finding of themselves, or love, or both. Often, the stories have healing qualities. Characters are saved or come to new realizations about themselves that make their lives better. They learn to create colors so garments reflect the sun, the moon and the sky. They learn how to mend tigers and why the tigers need mending. A cake that was created to replenish itself learns how to overcome the darkness of the never-ending need to please. A man with a perfect face learns how to find the love of his life. A family that receives unexpected presents learns to cherish what they have.
Some of the stories defy easy explanation. And that’s all right. The moods, the emotions, the journeys that the characters undertake are worth savoring and being allowed to steep into memory. They should not be rushed through. They should be enjoyed.
©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission
Thursday, August 8, 2013
Review: 'The Woman Upstairs'
THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS
By Claire Messud
Literary fiction
April 2013
Knopf
ISBN: 978-0307596901
Collisions between creating and privacy, friendship and art, love and honesty
are at the heart of the brutal, passionate and uplifting The Woman
Upstairs, the latest novel by Claire Messud.
Uplifting is just about the last word that comes to mind when Nora Eldridge begins her story. She is more than irritated or even cheesed off. She is furious. Angry isn't volatile enough to describe her scorching, psyche-deep, all-consuming rage. It's part of being a woman, an unmarried woman who teaches young children and who once thought of becoming an artist, a woman who once held an important corporate position and who could have married a man who became a successful attorney. Nora knows this and she knows it's hardly acceptable. This is Nora -- she is honest about how she feels, even when she does things she knows are wrong, and she is about as honest a narrator as one usually sees. Just when it looks like you've caught her being unreliable or just trying to fool herself, she puts the record straight. As when she says:
In putting the record straight about why she is angry, Nora goes back to relate what happened a few years ago when she gave her heart away to three members of the same family. First is her new third grade student, Reza, who catches her eye at the supermarket before he comes to her class; his mother, Italian artist Sirena, who is living the kind of life Nora may have once wanted or thought she wanted; and his father, Skander, an academic who is a quietly charismatic man.
From the beginining, Nora knows she's crossing the line when she realizes how deeply she cares for Reza. When he suffers first one, then two, instances of bullying, Nora crosses the line in taking care of him. Sirena immediately stirs her sympathy and empathy. When Reza's mother suggests that they share the lease on a loft space to create their respective works of art, Nora again crosses the line and jumps at the chance. She babysits for Reza, she takes longer and longer walks with Skander when he walks her home, she starts helping Sirena with her installation. She's way too invested in these people.
Messud displays acute observations about education, art and how people care for each other in this novel. It begins with Nora explaining an aspect of her job, which in turn reveals truths about her:
It's fairly obvious that Sirena, whether meaning to or not, is taking advantage of Nora. After all, Nora ia one of those ubiquitous Women Upstairs. They are Barbara Pym's Excellent Women. They are the Maiden Aunts, the Youngish Widows, they are On the Shelf. They are there to serve. That is their function, their role. They are not made to complain or complicate matters. No matter that they once had dreams of becoming an artist, no matter they still feel the weight of their own mothers not having a fulfilling life beyond housekeeping and child-raising duties, that they could have married but realized it would have been the end of their dreams.
This is how Nora is viewed. But she yearns, or how she still yearns.
Nora is someone who wants to be fully understood for who she really is, but she isn't sure that she can trust anyone else to understand her. So she hides. Until she gives her heart away. Even her art is compressed. She tries to make little dioramas of rooms of famous women artists -- Emily Dickenson, Virginia Woolf and Edie Sedgewick. One weekend, Nora completely obliterates the line in her relationship with both Sirena and Skander and believes she is reveling as her true self, as an artist. And it comes back to haunt her in what will be seen by some as a huge betrayal and by others as an artist simply being an artist, using what material is there.
The culmination of Nora's relationship with the family is not much of a surprise. There has been plenty of conversation about ethics and history -- Skander's academic specialty -- and creating art, to warn the reader. And how nothing looks the same to everyone. Much of what is conveyed is quite meta, including Sirena's art, which includes in her installations objects remade of trash:
The ultimate beauty of the novel is how it ends. It's not one of those novels that ends without resolution. And it is an ending that makes great sense considering what Nora has revealed of herself all along.
She may be a Woman Upstairs, but one of the ideas that has been consistently presented throughout is that no one should go gentle into that good night. No matter how many times one may argue with and cajole Nora during the novel, this is not an easily imagined resolution. It's a resolution that can make a reader all the happier for having made the journey of reading this novel.
©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission
By Claire Messud
Literary fiction
April 2013
Knopf
ISBN: 978-0307596901
Uplifting is just about the last word that comes to mind when Nora Eldridge begins her story. She is more than irritated or even cheesed off. She is furious. Angry isn't volatile enough to describe her scorching, psyche-deep, all-consuming rage. It's part of being a woman, an unmarried woman who teaches young children and who once thought of becoming an artist, a woman who once held an important corporate position and who could have married a man who became a successful attorney. Nora knows this and she knows it's hardly acceptable. This is Nora -- she is honest about how she feels, even when she does things she knows are wrong, and she is about as honest a narrator as one usually sees. Just when it looks like you've caught her being unreliable or just trying to fool herself, she puts the record straight. As when she says:
I'd like to blame the world for what I've failed to do, but the failure -- the failure that sometimes washes over me as anger, makes me so angry I could spit -- is all mine, in the end. ... I thought I could get to greatness, to my greatness, by plugging on, cleaning up each mess as it came, the way you're taught to eat your greens before you have dessert.
In putting the record straight about why she is angry, Nora goes back to relate what happened a few years ago when she gave her heart away to three members of the same family. First is her new third grade student, Reza, who catches her eye at the supermarket before he comes to her class; his mother, Italian artist Sirena, who is living the kind of life Nora may have once wanted or thought she wanted; and his father, Skander, an academic who is a quietly charismatic man.
From the beginining, Nora knows she's crossing the line when she realizes how deeply she cares for Reza. When he suffers first one, then two, instances of bullying, Nora crosses the line in taking care of him. Sirena immediately stirs her sympathy and empathy. When Reza's mother suggests that they share the lease on a loft space to create their respective works of art, Nora again crosses the line and jumps at the chance. She babysits for Reza, she takes longer and longer walks with Skander when he walks her home, she starts helping Sirena with her installation. She's way too invested in these people.
Messud displays acute observations about education, art and how people care for each other in this novel. It begins with Nora explaining an aspect of her job, which in turn reveals truths about her:
When they tell me that I "get" kids, I'm worried that they're saying I don't seem quite adult. The professor husband of a friend of mine has likened children to the insane. I often think of it. He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people's. I see what he means, and because I've learned to be patient with children, to tease out the logic that's always somewhere there, and irrefutable once explained, I've come to understand that grown-ups, mad or sane, ought really to be accorded the same respect. In this sense, nobody is actually crazy, just not understood.
It's fairly obvious that Sirena, whether meaning to or not, is taking advantage of Nora. After all, Nora ia one of those ubiquitous Women Upstairs. They are Barbara Pym's Excellent Women. They are the Maiden Aunts, the Youngish Widows, they are On the Shelf. They are there to serve. That is their function, their role. They are not made to complain or complicate matters. No matter that they once had dreams of becoming an artist, no matter they still feel the weight of their own mothers not having a fulfilling life beyond housekeeping and child-raising duties, that they could have married but realized it would have been the end of their dreams.
This is how Nora is viewed. But she yearns, or how she still yearns.
Nora is someone who wants to be fully understood for who she really is, but she isn't sure that she can trust anyone else to understand her. So she hides. Until she gives her heart away. Even her art is compressed. She tries to make little dioramas of rooms of famous women artists -- Emily Dickenson, Virginia Woolf and Edie Sedgewick. One weekend, Nora completely obliterates the line in her relationship with both Sirena and Skander and believes she is reveling as her true self, as an artist. And it comes back to haunt her in what will be seen by some as a huge betrayal and by others as an artist simply being an artist, using what material is there.
The culmination of Nora's relationship with the family is not much of a surprise. There has been plenty of conversation about ethics and history -- Skander's academic specialty -- and creating art, to warn the reader. And how nothing looks the same to everyone. Much of what is conveyed is quite meta, including Sirena's art, which includes in her installations objects remade of trash:
... lush gardens and jungles made out of household items and refuse: elaborately carved soap primroses, splayed lilies and tulips fashioned out of dyed dishrags and starch, silvery vines of painted and varnished clothesline and foil, precisely and impeccably made. I couldn't quite picture them when she talked about them, but the idea made sense to me: visions of paradise, the otherworldly, the beautiful, and then, when you're in them, up close, you realize that the flowers are mottled by filth and the vines are crumbling and that the gleaming beetles crawling on the waxy leaves are molded bottle tops or old leather buttons with limbs. ... She told me too that latterly she'd made videos of the installations, that the story of the videos was precisely this revelation that the beautiful world was fake, was made of garbage; but that first she had to film it in such a way that it looked wholly beautiful and that sometimes this was hard. And also, she said, narrative was hard: when you made a video, there had to be a story, and a story unfolded over time, in a different way, and didn't always unfold as you wanted it to.
The ultimate beauty of the novel is how it ends. It's not one of those novels that ends without resolution. And it is an ending that makes great sense considering what Nora has revealed of herself all along.
She may be a Woman Upstairs, but one of the ideas that has been consistently presented throughout is that no one should go gentle into that good night. No matter how many times one may argue with and cajole Nora during the novel, this is not an easily imagined resolution. It's a resolution that can make a reader all the happier for having made the journey of reading this novel.
©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)