BSI April 2010 selection
American Stories by Nagai Kafu
The fictional American Stories, written in 1908, affords us the opportunity to see America, turn of the century America, through other eyes.
How much have we changed? What has stayed the same?
A near contemporary of Natsume Soseki (Soseki’s Heredity of Taste was reviewed in this blog here ), Kafu could be considered a black sheep in Japan’s roster of modern literary greats.
Kafu and his work Yojohan fusuma no shitabari was the subject of several landmark censorship trials in Japan. Another of his works, Rivalry: a Geisha’s Tale , was also closely scrutinized.
An excellent article on Nagai Kafu is found at the Japan Times website in two parts: here and here.
DATE April 2010 selection
Swept up. Swept away.
Both terms are appropriate when talking about Mary, a Novel by Janis Cooke Newman . Newman has done an excellent job weaving facts and fiction in this telling of Mary Todd Lincoln’s life. She re-imagines the love story between Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd; their married years with births of their beloved and doomed children and the effect of Lincoln’s assassination had on Mary’s behavior.
Mary, a Novel begins with Mary Todd Lincoln’s documented commitment to an insane asylum for genteel women. Newman lets Mary reveal the circumstances surrounding her commitment. The reader hears of Mary’s childhood and her sorrow over her relationship with her single surviving son, Robert. The novel imparts an understanding and empathy for one of America’s more misunderstood First Ladies.
For more information on history’s Mary Todd Lincoln, try these books: Madness of Mary Lincoln by Jason Emerson, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave by Jennifer Fleischer, Mary Todd Lincoln: a Biography by Jean Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: Her life and Letters by Justin G. Turner, and The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage by Daniel Mark Epstein.
BSI May 2010
The Far Field by Edie Meidav
The Far Field is a dense exotic read. It follows American Henry Frye Gould, one-time minister, spiritualist, and now Buddhist, bent on creating his own utopian society in 1930’s colonial Ceylon (Sri Lanka). A self-described anti-missionary, Gould is really on a mission to prove himself—to his estranged wife, his son, his guru and ultimately to himself. Yet there is many a slip twixt cup and lip; and Henry’s journey turns out to be even more momentous than he imagines.
Novelist Edie Meidav lived and worked in Sri Lanka as a Peace Corps worker.
DATE May 2010
The total history of almost anyone would shock almost everyone. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Fire in the Blood is Irene Nemirovsky’s second posthumous novel is a slim book, 138 pages including a Translator’s Note, A Note on the Text and a Preface to the French Edition. However in that small quota of pages, she has packed a compendium of the human heart. Nemirovsky aimed to a novel about the “purity of parents who were guilty when they were young” and how parents are incapable of “understanding that ‘fire in the blood’ that had led to their youthful transgressions”. She succeeded.
A Fire in the Blood is set in the insular French village Issy L'Eveque, based on the Burgundy village where Nemirovsky and family fled to from Paris in 1940. The novel follows the lives of Silvio, his sister Helene and her daughter Colette and resounds with knowledge that past always shapes the present and future.
Although Nemirovsky was an established writer during her lifetime, she is currently most known for first posthumous novel, Suite Francaise, which won the 2004 Prix Renaudot.
BSI June 2010
Where were you when you first read The Catcher in the Rye? How old were you when you first read The Catcher in the Rye?
The Catcher in the Rye is a classic for a reason. Salinger does an excellent job embodying how young people think and act currently—even though Catcher was originally published in 1951 and parts of it written as early as 1946. Salinger captures that sense of existential angst we all suffer from at times, especially in adolescence.
DATE June 2010
Aryn Kyle offers a coming of age novel in her first work, The God of Animals. Yet she defies that straight forward description by producing a jewel of a debut novel.
It is summer in Desert Valley, Colorado. Twelve year-old Alice Winston copes with the drowning death of a schoolmate in nightly phone conversations with her English teacher. She spends her days working long hours beside her father Jody on their failing horse farm and struggles to cover the absence of Nona, her newly-eloped 16 year-old sister and their mother who retired to her bedroom shortly after Alice's birth. In the ensuing year, Alice will desperately reinvent herself and shake the long shadows cast by her sister and mother.
BSI July 2010
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie has produced a miracle of a semi-autobiographical book. He makes the reader angry, laugh out loud and even cry as you follow Junior’s search for himself and a better life.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian tells the story of Junior, a member of the Spokane tribe. Junior writes–and draws cartoons--about his life in his diary: the difficulties of being poor; the trial of being small and sickly; the alcoholism that dogs his entire tribe and his quest to break out of reservation. It is his yearning for a better life which gets him branded as a part-time Indian. He succeeds in attending a high school outside the reservation, but will he find acceptance outside the rez and be able to recover his belonging inside the rez? Junior lives and tells his tale with much humor.
Both The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian and Ten Little Indians, another book by Alexie, share the same kind of wry dark humor, spot-on commentary about American society and excellent writing. A reader’s guide for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, which won the 2007 National Book Award for Young Adult Literature , can be found here. Sherman Alexie is poet, stand-up comedian, novelist, screenwriter, and director.
DATE July 2010
Penelope Lively is known for her quiet excellent fiction and The Photograph is no exception. The novel poses the question “How well can you know someone?” and follows it in the wake of an unearthed photograph. Glyn, a landscape historian, discovers a photograph of his deceased wife Kath and an unknown man holding hands while searching through old research notes. Well seasoned in the ways time alters landscapes, Glyn uses his historian skills to excavate the terrain of his marriage.
Multiple mysteries of heart coexist in this novel. Lively reveals them through a deftly written medley of narratives which include Glyn, Kath and Elaine, Kath’s older sister. The Photograph captures “the many ways the past intrudes upon the present and the present alters the past”.
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