Dia de los Muertos

Here are three titles in honor of Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), also referred to All Souls Day. This is a day, in Mexican culture and also in many religious traditions, to celebrate the lives of loved ones who have died and to pray for and honor them. These books do a little of both. Death figures predominantly in all of them and, therefore, there is a sense of sadness underlying each one, but they also reveal great beauty, love, and a celebration of life. These books offer readers what is best about fiction: the imaginative journey through all of life's possibilities.

We're in Trouble by Christopher Coake


I have found it difficult to describe this book of short stories in the past because while the characters in each of them somehow must deal with the idea of death, either through personal loss or vicariously through someone else, the stories rise well above being simply depressing tales of the hardest part of human life. They are worth reading, thinking about, and even cherishing, but I think the following quotation about the book does it more justice than I can:

"Each of the seven stories in this extraordinary debut collection shows love staring at the face of death--an encounter that elicits either the best or the worst in these unforgettable characters....With the complexity, depth, and narrative drive of a novel, these stories show love darkening and persevering as it is tried by the cold fact of death....Christopher Coake makes us feel the truth of his characters' lives and transforms it into cathartic art." Book Jacket

Love is at the heart of these stories, and this is what makes them compelling rather than sensational, thoughtful rather than depressing.

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier


This novel can be classified as science fiction, because it takes place in the future, but not necessarily one very far removed from our present. The world as we know it is still recognizable, and other than enhanced technology has not changed all that much. Two stories run parallel to each other in the novel. One is the story of The City, which is the place where those who have died live and work and exist in a rather normal way until the last people who remember them in the land of the living "cross over" to The City themselves. In alternating chapters, we follow the story of Laura Byrd, who is trapped alone in a scientific research station on Antarctica. The connection between the two plot lines becomes clear to the reader relatively early in the novel, though the characters do not see it until closer to the end.

Barbara Hoffert of Library Journal offers a nice, short description of The Brief History of the Dead:

"Inhabitants of the City eat at Jim's sandwich shop and read Luka Sims's mimeographed News & Speculation Sheet--never mind that they are all deceased. They've made the crossing--each person's [sic] is uniquely beautiful--and they don't know what happens next. People do disappear, and it is surmised that you remain in the City as long as you remain in the memory of someone left behind. Hence the concern when people start vanishing in droves....Beautifully written and brilliantly realized, this imaginative work from [Kevin Brockmeier] delivers a startling sense of what it really means to be alive. Highly recommended."

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak


The Book Thief is ultimately the tale of Leisel Nenninger, a foster-child of a German couple who live in a small town during height of World War II. Leisel is the book thief of the title. She and her family, like many Germans during that time, are caught up in the politics of war and find themselves performing acts of heroism of which they never, ever would have thought themselves capable.

What makes Leisel's story unusual, however, is the narrator of the novel, who is Death himself. But in Zusak's hands, Death is not a monster or vengeful or necessarily frightening. Death is a being who, as he tells us, is
"in all truthfulness attempting to be cheerful about th[e] whole topic [of death], though most people find themselves hindered in believing me...Please trust me. I most definitely can be cheerful....Just don't ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me."


The reason Death is even telling us the story of Leisel--one of the millions of stories of the Holocaust that could be told--is that every so often he is profoundly struck by one of the many lives he has seen, and he cannot forget it. He says of Leisel, "Yes, often, I am reminded of her, and in one of my vast array of pockets, I have kept her story to retell. It is one of the small legion I carry, each one extraordinary in its own right. Each one an attempt--an immense leap of an attempt--to prove to me that you, and your human existence, are worth it."

In his review of the novel, Philip Ardagh of the Guardian praises Zusak for this choice because "[i]t gives a unique and compassionate voice to a narrator who can comment on human's inhumanity to human without being ponderous, 'worthy' or even quite understanding us at times." I was so happy to read this description because though I very much loved this novel, it has always been very difficult to describe to other people how a novel narrated by Death could be at all worth reading. Or how I could see this narrator as at all sympathetic.

Death has a dilemma, and it's not one that is so far removed from questions we sometimes ask ourselves. Death wants to understand us: "I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race--that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant." By telling us the wonderous story of the book thief, Death is trying to make sense of it. How can the story of this one little girl offer proof that we, that humans, are worth it? Leisel has a great deal to offer us as we try to answer this question.
Ardagh has the highest praise for this novel:

A number one New York Times bestseller, The Book Thief has been marketed as an older children's book in some countries and as an adult novel in others. It could and - dare I say? - should certainly be read by both. Unsettling, thought-provoking, life-affirming, triumphant and tragic, this is a novel of breathtaking scope, masterfully told. It is an important piece of work, but also a wonderful page-turner. I cannot recommend it highly enough.


In one of my other posts, I said that one of my criteria for a Great Book is that it leaves me thinking about it long after I have turned its last page and that it is a book to which I can return, flip through at random, and find something beautiful on any page. The Brief History of the Dead and The Book Thief are two novels that, for me anyway, fit that definition of Great Books.

A Pair of Books: one by Elise Blackwell and one by Anne Peile

Nothing in particular makes these books a "pair" other than that they appear together in this post. Well, they're both written by women, but that's where any similarity between Elise Blackwell's Grub and Anne Peile's Repeat It Today with Tears ends.

Why pair them, then? Easy. They're both library books, which are due, and I enjoyed them both, but (here we go again) for very different reasons.

Grub by Elise Blackwell

"A long overdue retelling of New Grub Street--George Gissing's classic satire of Victorian the literary market place--Grub chronicles the triumphs and humiliations of a group of young novelists living in and around New York City." (book jacket)

I haven't read the original New Grub Street, but I am a sucker for books about writers, professors, editors...you name it. Wordy nerdy types are my people. And, as it turns out, it doesn't matter that I haven't read Gissing's book because I was immensely entertained by Blackwell's take on the literary life of her characters. Some are purists: they write for the sake of creating high literary art, to push the envelope of language and story.  Others are made blood-thirsty by ambition, artsy-fartsy experimentation be damned. Then there are the writers who are trying to bridge the line: secretly write pop lit. that the masses want while claiming to subscribe to the purist camp.  And, naturally, their lives as messy as any of the plots they try to get on paper.

Will high art win over the ambition to be the next hot shot on the talk-show book club circuit?

No spoilers here, but let's just say that Elise Blackwell's satire of the publishing world is a good reality check for those of us who mythologize the NYC literary life.  A very funny book all around.

Repeat it Today with Tears by Anne Peile


Speaking of spoilers, this short review of Ann Peile's novel will be a little on the vague side because I don't want to reveal too much. It's a short novel about a controversial subject, so it doesn't take long for readers to get right to the heart of the matter, but I'll still try to keep from saying more than I should.

To be honest, when I got Repeat it Today with Tears at the library I took it home with the assumption that I'd be returning it unread. The blurb on the back was a little sensational for my taste:

"Susanna is a secretive child, obsessed with the father she has never known. When she finally discovers his address, she goes to find him. What happens next is almost unthinkable. You might not condone what Susanna does, but after reading Repeat it Today with Tears, you might just understand it."

The first sentence alone was enough to make me think that Peile had a job ahead of her if her writing was going to keep my interest for more than a few pages. But this novel had been long listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction for a reason, and I was curious.

It is clear to me now why Repeat it Today with Tears was on that long list for the Orange. This brief, 186-page novel is fascinating, beautifully written, and full of empathy for a girl who is desperate for love and belonging. Though Susanna does a terrible thing, you come to see where Susanna's impulses come from--despite what you think is your better judgment as a reader. Excuse them? No. But as the 'sensational' blurb on the jackets says, "you might just understand it."

I hope readers won't shy away from the subject matter before giving this novel a chance. I almost missed my opportunity to read Repeat it Today with Tears because I was literally judging this book by its cover. I'm glad I gave Peile the opportunity to convince me of her gifts as a storyteller. Formidable gifts.

West of Here by Jonathan Evison

The scope of Jonathan Evison's West of Here makes me wish that everyone would read it. I fell so in love with the Pacific Northwest when I moved here from the landlocked state of Ohio that I always want to show everyone who hasn't been here what I can see on a daily basis. The mountains rising on horizon: the Cascades to the east, embraced by arms of the rising sun; the Olympics to the west, silhouetted by darkening sunset. The water of Puget Sound separating Seattle from the foothills of the islands and the Peninsula; incoming weather always a reminder that the wild vastness of the Pacific lies just a few hours beyond.  


As the industrial age finally reached the Pacific Northwest at the end of the 19th century, two hydroelectric dams were built on the legendary Elwah River to bring "light and civilization" to the towns on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. Evison's novel tells the story of the fictional town of Port Bonita, Washington, and how its inhabitants and landscape are shaped by push towards modernization, both in those earliest of days and in 2007, as the dams are about to be removed for the largest wilderness restoration project in the world.


As character Ethan Thornburgh imagines it, his goal of building the dams in the middle of one of the wildest places in North America becomes "no longer enough to prove something to the world, to distinguish himself for the sake of distinction, to conquer in the name of Ethan Thornburgh. Taming the Elwah was to bring civilization to the feet of his daughter, to ensure that she grew up in the world with electricity and a thousand other modern conveniences, so that she should never be forced to sweat and toil in the mud, never have to expose herself to the crushing forces of the wilderness, even profit by it." Certainly a white man's perspective on the wilderness--he, as did so many industrialists, sees it as a force to be fought and tamed.


Those were the days when conquering the wilderness was an adventure, a way to make one's mark on the world. Evison's decision to move his novel back and forth between the turn of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first emphasizes the drastic difference in our world view from what it was was a mere century ago. The industrial age was all about conquering nature. Our desire, more and more, is to undo the damage to the environment that we caused because of that very impulse.


West of Here is historical fiction. All of the larger events in the novel have a basis in history: the dams do exist on the Elwah and are currently being dismantled; the fictional town of Port Bonita is a thinly disguised version of the real town of Port Townsend; the Clallam Tribe (like all Native American tribes) was ravaged by displacement and racism and is trying to reclaim its sense of identity and its treaty rights. But Evison admits that he has taken liberties with the historical record in order to tell his story the way he wants to.  As he put it in a recent panel discussion on writing historical fiction, sometimes factual detail has to be sacrificed in the name of truth. That ability to bring art from fact is the beauty of writing fiction.


The human characters who populate Evison's novel are all, in the end, minor characters who move the story of the true central character along. That central character is the landscape and the town that anchors the relationship between those who dwell on the land and the land itself. Evison describes the landscape of the Elwah River as he imagines it once was--it is a landscape that thousands of people have been planning for decades to eventually restore, as nearly as possible, to its former glory.


West of Here gives a sense, for readers who don't live in the Pacific Northwest, of how and why salmon are a crucial element of the culture, how the wilderness, even as tamed as it now seems to be, is always part of our lives, even for those who never leave the city of Seattle.  His characters are dreamers, losers, industrialists, convicts, do-gooders, prostitutes, explorers,  homebodies...all intertwined in some way to the land on which they live. His juxtaposition of past and present shows where we once were, where we are now, and how much further we have to go. It's a story with a specific sense of place, but it's also a story that, with changes to the "outer" details of people, setting, and time, can be told of every place on earth that humans call home. 


(The Seattle Times has been reporting on the Elwah Dam Removal project. Click here to see the short Seattle Times video "Removing the Dams, Restoring a River: Massive Changes on the Elwah River." It gives a good sense of the immense scale of this fascinating project.)