Review: 'Circus of Wonders'

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Circus of Wonders
By Elizabeth Macneal
Historical Fiction
Atria

A country girl, covered in birthmarks that make her an object of scorn and curiosity, is sold by her destitute drunk of a father to a traveling circus owner in post-Crimean War Britain. Just as Nell grows into her true self as the mechanical wings she performs with unfurl, so the story of all the characters in Circus of Wonders unfurls. It's a novel of yearning, sorrow and wonder.

Elizabeth's Macneal's second novel opens with Nell, a girl on the cusp of womanhood, entranced by the colorful handbills being put up around the village by a bear of a man. The man, Toby, is the brother of the circus owner, Jasper Jupiter. Jasper sees himself as the natural successor of P.T. Barnum and is determined to not fail as the master showman did. Nell draws the townsfolk's attention and flees to the sea, where she feels free in the water. Her ability to ride the waves and dance in the sea precedes her aerial performing in the circus. Toby sees her dive into the water and fears for her safety. He is caught flat-footed staring at her when she surfaces. The entire scene sets the stage for what becomes of these characters, from Toby introducing Nell to his brother's circus to Nell's way to be the queen of her world.

Circus of Wonders has overtones of the story and film "Freaks" in the way it takes us into the world of people who live being stared at by others. The comradery draws Nell in. So does the honesty:

"Where else can we be celebrated for who we are?"

"For how we look, not who we are."

Nell soon realizes that she can control the way people see her. When she flies during the show, she is the one in control. The crowds adore her. It is a power that helps her believe in a genuine chance of a life not spent alone, or as someone doomed to be the unwed aunt to the future children of her beloved brother and his betrothed.

Just as Nell once thought she and her brother were inseparable, so did Toby and Jasper. Jasper is the older and has always been the leader. Their father gave Jasper a microscope, while Toby received a photography machine. The microscope plays into Jasper's sense of being in charge, while the camera reinforces Toby's fading into the background while life goes on in front of him. Toby joins his brother on the Crimean battlefields. That's where Jasper and a new friend, Dash, turn into rowdy war criminals, killing with bloodlust and looting with glee. Toby is charged with creating pro-war propaganda, and sets up photographs that make the war look, well, civilized. 

It was astonishing, he added, what a difference modern machines made. They could offer an exact impression of how things were and have it delivered to thousands of drawing rooms within a fortnight. 

Or an exact impression of what was created to look like how things were. Something we are grappling with today in this era of misinformation and social media.

Jasper's ambition is the force that drives what happens in the narrative. He is part Icarus and part Dr. Frankenstein. He likens himself to both driven, doomed figures. Other characters' awareness about themselves and what matters to them do not stop him; sometimes, they are the impetus to his bad choices.

Circus of Wonders is filled with illusions -- the illusions of how war is portrayed, of how circus acts are created, of how people see each other. The illusions work together to reveal some poignant truths about how important it is to see oneself clearly, and to know when it matters to have a dream. Whether it comes true or not.

Review: 'The Sentence'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Sentence
By Louise Erdrich
Literary Fiction
Harper

Whether it's the past not letting go of us, or us not letting go of the past, many souls walk with ghosts swirling around them. They may be metaphorical ghosts bringing about tragedies that reverberate around the world, or they may be spirits haunting a bookstore. Both types figure in Louise Erdrich's The Sentence.

Tookie lives what may seem like a quiet, even mundane, life. But it's one she never expected to have after being sentenced to 60 years in prison. She agreed to go get the body of the lover of her crush from his wife, and transported it, plus more, across state lines. Yes, it is as wild as it sounds and Tookie's acceptance of that was a clear sign this is a character to watch and wonder over. She is released after serving more than 10 years and talks her way into working at Louise Erdrich's real-life bookstore. 

While in prison, Tookie became a reader. One of those people who live and breathe books, who will race through a book and then go back to the first page to savor every word, every sentence, every paragraph, every page.

One day, she sees the tribal cop who arrested her. Pollux always has been the one for her, and they are married. It's a good life, no matter how quiet it looks on the outside. Tookie treasures it, but is not surprised that there will be upheaval.

The upheaval arrives when one of Tookie's best customers, an annoying white woman who is one of those Indian wannabes, dies. Although Flora has died, she isn't gone. She's haunting the bookstore. At first, it's benign, even though it unnerves Tookie. But as with all stories, things change and build.

This is November 2019, one of the few remaining months before the world changes. Money is tight at the bookstore, the owner is headed out on tour (for this book) and people are starting to hear rumors about a mystery virus.

As Tookie and her family -- including her stepdaughter Hetta and her new baby, who were visiting but are now stuck together uneasily -- hunker down, the malevolent spirit that took over the White House casts a spell over their lives as surely as Flora has taken over the bookstore. Other bookstore employees are now hearing her. And nearly all of Indigenous women who work there have ghost stories of their own, even if they do not believe in them.

There is another harmful spirit that haunts Minneapolis, and its evil is unleashed when Derek Chauvin murders George Floyd. Even with the pandemic gathering force, many in Tookie's world take part in the marches and in trying to protect and clean up their city. During these events, of course Covid attacks a beloved character.

It is difficult to reach a resolution to ongoing events, although Erdrich does an admirable job of getting Tookie and her family through the initial phases. The Flora storyline is another facet to the idea of spirits, and approaches it from the aspect of how sometimes people are not randomly chosen by outside forces. For things to happen for a reason is a powerful human desire, and one of the joys of a well-crafted narrative is discovering how the why can connect to the what.

Throughout, there are two very strong storylines that make The Sentence another powerful Erdrich novel. Tookie and Pollux are two parts of a whole. Their personalities, their love, their essences, result in a lovely story.

If I stepped off a cliff in that heart of his, he'd catch me.

Dear Reader, I was captivated.

That this is a novel for all Dear Readers is evident in Tookie's love of story. The authors she handsells to customers make for a booklist both broad and deep. Erdrich even includes Tookie's top books in an afterword that is a delight to savor. Seeing beloved authors' names throughout the book also is a delight, including the few appearances Erdrich makes as a character in her own novel. 

One of the best is a customer Tookie names "Dissatisfaction" because the older Black man has read so much and is so choosy that it is difficult to satisfy his reading habit. Giving him a copy of James McBride's Deacon King Kong is a great scene.

It's also delightful to see how often Tookie and others gush over Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

Books are a lifeline to so many in this novel. The right one can be a special solace if, like Tookie, the reader realizes that even for those who do not believe in spirits, the past still exists in the present.

Review: 'Intimacies'

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Intimacies
By Katie Kitamura
Literary Fiction
Riverhead Books

The connections we make with other people are based to some extent on what we know about them, which is guided in part by what they show us. The levels of complexity and ambiguity in what we see, if what we see is what is really being shown, and what we make of it can add up to a long-lasting connection or a severed one.

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura chronicles these connections for a court interpreter in The Hague. The unnamed narrator is drifting after her father dies, her mother moves back to Singapore and New York no longer feels like home. At The Hague, she slowly makes a friendship, has congenial thoughts about her colleagues and meets a man. At an arts event, early in their relationship, a man who knows him tells her Adriaan is married and tries to both come between the new couple and claim her. It doesn't work, but the interplay between the three of them is fiercely emotional and yet quietly calm and civilized at the same time.

That tone, and the delicate balance between the surface of civility and the underlying deep emotions, is a hallmark of this short, highly admired novel (it made President Obama's list of favorite books as well as listed for the National Book Award).

Our narrator's work as an interpreter, and her understanding of that role, underpin the interplay between all the characters, especially as she tries to interpret what people are showing her and telling her. In her work, "there were great chasms between words, between two or sometimes more languages, that could open up without warning."

It's not just words; it's also actions that can be observed but perhaps not clearly or from the wrong angle, as when our interpreter sees three men slowing making their way down the street in an odd fashion. She realizes two of them are picking up cigarette butts dropped all over the streets of what appears at first to be a clean city, while the third follows them vacuuming up the small bits of trash. 

The author shows how what we interpret what we see in other aspects of life. The interpreter's friend introduces her to another friend. This new woman is the sister of a man who was viciously mugged near the first friend's apartment. This man, and what the interpreter sees him doing, are open to more than one meaning, until the truth settles in.

The interpreter also is assigned to the trial of a would-be dictator who is responsible for the murders of many people in his country. Of course the dictator's demeanor is never that of an evil monster, and that ambiguity about what people are capable of while appearing as something else is striking. Complicating the interpreter's work is the new lead defense attorney, who is the man that attacked her lover and tried to put the moves on her at the arts event. His actions are at times bizarre, and there is little ambiguity about his character. 

The attorney is a bit like the man in a real painting that is described in some detail as the interpreter views it during another art show. Judith Leyster's "Man Offering Money to a Young Woman" is a dual painting from the mid-1600s, painted by a woman in her 20s. The man is hovering over a woman working on a hand-sewing project. His look can be seen as either arduous, according to the author, or conceited. The woman looks fearful. The money in his hand isn't apparent at first, but it's there. He's treating her like an object of commerce. The other title of the painting is "The Proposition".

The painting operated around a schism, it represented two irreconciable positions: the man, who believed the scene to be one of ardor and seduction, and the woman, who had been plunged into a state of fear and humiliation.

More than one man in Intimacies uses women as objects of desire, of acquisition, as beings not even important enough to assassinate. Not all the women are sincere in what they are pursuing, and why, either. This is depicted more as an observation of the breadth and depth of human nature, rather than a judgment that some people are mostly good and some are mostly not. It's also an observation on our world, as seen while riding on a bus past The Hague's secure jail:

But none of us are able to really see the world we are living in -- this world, occupying as it does the contradiction between its banality (the squat wall of the Detention Center, the bus running along its ordinary route) and its extremity (the cell and the man inside the cell), is something that we see only briefly and then do not see again for a long time, if ever. It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed, the horrifying image or the voice speaking the unspeakable, in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know.

When the trial comes to an end after months, the interpreter notes that reporters who covered the opening and stayed away until the end will use pieces to form a narrative:

They had mere fragments of the narrative, and yet they would assemble those fragments into a story like any other story, a story with the appearance of unity.

This is exactly what the interpreter is doing as she observes the people she interacts with. It is dispassionately written, much as the author notes an interpreter or translator works, in that the person doing this work is trying to stay removed while accurately conveying what is being communicated.

Making conclusions early in the novel before revelations don't pay off. This is especially true of the ending. It was an unexpected ending and one that was joyous to behold. "Only connect" indeed.

Review: Tessa Hadley's 'Free Love'

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Free Love
By Tessa Hadley
Literary Fiction
Harper

A beautiful evening, a beautiful woman preparing herself for a beautiful dinner in a beautiful English suburb in 1967 -- Tessa Hadley sets the stage for a novel that shows how everything brittle cracked and everyone had a chance to become their own true selves during the revolution that swept through this seemingly perfect world.

In the novel, Free Love, the woman, Phyllis Fischer, is a 40-year-old Mrs. Dalloway with a husband and two children. Everything is just so; she has worked hard to make it that way because that is what she is supposed to do. The scene is set as an idyll:

Life flowed into the room from beyond the window in its drowsy suburban evening stream: the steady relieving splash of a hose in a herbaceous border, confiding clack of shears, distant thwack of balls from the tennis club, broken sharp cries of children playing, fragrance of cut grass and roasting meat, jiggling of ice in the first weekend gin and tonics.

Even "her dress for this evening waited like a friend". 

Phyllis takes pride in what she has accomplished, but it is obvious there is something missing: 

In all that stillness one pulse was racing: hers. Her life was passing, passing.

Dinner will not be a dinner party, even though she has taken great care with the food and her costume. The son of old friends is coming. Phyllis is certain Nicky Peters will be as much a bore tonight as he was when they met once in his boyhood.

Meanwhile, Nicky doesn't want to attend a stodgy dinner with stodgy friends of his stodgy parents. He is getting sloshed at a pub instead, wondering if he can escape the entire evening. He shows up an hour late, obviously more than one pint in, and is most inconsiderate and rude. Phyllis's husband, Roger, who works in the Foreign Office, brushes aside Nicky's obvious attempts to be a rude boor. Their teenage daughter, Colette, is at an awkward stage and is as contemptuous of Nicky as Nicky is of all of them. Their young son, Hugh, is glad to not have to attend because of his age; he would rather not share his mother's company at all anyway.

But before the story threatens to undo itself with trivial domestic drama, Hadley throws serious ideas into their dinner conversation. For example, Nicky tried to do some writing while in Iran and Afghanistan, but realized that "I didn't know what those people were thinking. So there was only me on every page, thinking about them: that was fairly sickening."

Nicky also is quick to stand up for not being a member of the Greatest Generation (even if it wasn't called that yet):

-- I suppose you think, Nicky went on, -- that we'll never be heroes, because we'll never be tested in the way you were. But we don't want to be. At least I don't. I'm happy to come clean: I'd fail every test you want to put to me. And I don't care. I'm a coward and I glory in it. A world built by cowards would be a better place. We could all sleep in peace and read our books.

It's about this time that I begin to wonder if a bookcase is going to fall on Nicky, like Leonard Bast.

Before an argument can break out at the table, a neighbor phones and demands that Phyllis go out in the dark, to another neighbor's yard, to rescue a child's sandal thrown into a pond. It is during this errand that Phyllis and Nicky suddenly kiss.

And everything changes in every character's world.

Hadley gloriously conveys what it is like to be in the throes of passion, to wonder if one will be able to breathe properly if one cannot be with the beloved. But woven throughout even this aspect of the story are the various strands of cultural and political explorations. Wondering if one is a Marxist or a traditionalist or nothing at all is as tied to the Britain throwing off the constraints of post-war gloom as experimenting with pot or sex.

There are characters who change and grow, who become their best selves with acquired wisdom and depth. There are characters who realize they should let someone go, and characters who realize they never should have let someone go. Some of these characters are the same character. There are characters who harden their hearts and a reader's heart can ache for them.

Later in the novel, a shoe drops in the plot about connections. At first it seems an odd choice by the author. Then the other shoe drops, and the plot takes on the overtones of an Oscar Wilde play. A reader does not have to be concerned about disbelief remaining suspended to remain invested in how the characters react to the plot points. The characters remain who they are, and that results in a rewarding reading experience. It's been some time since I was book drunk with falling into a novel, but that is what happened with Free Love.