This book is scandalously subtitled, "The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and their Son. " Given that, it is the not-too-scandalous story of a priest and nun who each leave their order, fall in love, get married and have a family, and spend their lives trying to reform the Catholic church. Mer A. reminded me of it; it had been on my booklist for a while.
This book is written as a memoir by the son of the former priest and nun. I enjoyed reading this book, at least partially because it was set in Boston. It was interesting for me to get some of the history of all the Catholicism in Boston, and learn about the history of so many of the buildings and institutions I've read about in the paper. The book also gave me a better understanding of many of the emotions and practices behind Catholicism.
The first half of the book talks about the Catholic community starting in the 1960's. This description of the women who became nuns after high school is a good example of the complexity in the Church that the author does a good job in depicting:
"Each girl arriving at Bethany that day had her own tale of how she got there, of course. Climbing up toward the novitiate were eighty stories of beneficiaries or victims, depending on how you view the outcome, of the circumstances that could send a teenage girl into the convent. Some had sisters in the order; some had alcoholic fathers and a reason to leave home; some wanted to further their education and saw no other way. A few felt called by God."
The relationship between the author's parents was not as central a storyline in the book as I expected. Instead, Manseau used their relationship to highlight some of the aspects of the Church that he saw in most need of reform. He comments on his parents' desire for reform more than his own; many of the people in the book (and in his childhood-life) are other former priests and nuns who were struggling with the same dichotomies his parents were. I was most struck by the difficulty of reforming an institution such as the Catholic church, and the willingness that people involved in such reform had to holding on to the pieces of it they found meaningful in the face of injustices.
It was hard to tell in some parts of the book how much Manseau was reporting on his parents' feelings about something versus stating his own opinions. For example, when commenting on the different jobs new nuns got at the novitiate, he writes,
"Every slight you received was a cross to bear, and wasn't it the cross they were there for? Some crosses weighted more than others, though, and who got which cross seemed a matter as predetermined as the stain of original sin."
As the book progresses, Manseau makes increasingly more frequent references to the recent sexual abuse scandal, culminating in several chapters on how it impacted his family and people he knew. This is when his discussion of the church changes from criticism to a scathing rejection.
"Much has been written about celibacy's role in the abuse scandal, but very little has been said about the possible effects of this symptom of celibate culture: the seminar's attitude toward basic relationships, the distrust of which might have been just as damaging to those who persevered at St. John's as the denial of their sexual impulses. In the name of preventing particular friendships, the seminary system seems to have done its best to create a clerical class filled with men who never learned that other people are more than objects from which something may be obtained."
I think this book was written at a good time. The sexual abuse incidents have publicized an important discussion about the need for reform in the Catholic church, and this book depicts just how hard that reform will be to achieve, and just how long some people have already been fighting for it.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Friday, March 23, 2007
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfeld
What a great book. I really enjoyed reading this story about a young journalist who is asked by a dying author to write her biography. The book jacket accurately describes the book as "...a tale of Gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family, including the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire."
The style of the book took some getting used to. It was written in an old-fashioned tone, more like what I would expect from a book written in the 19th century. The narrator is a young woman, ostensibly in modern-day Enlgand, but many of her comments and her lifestyle suggest an older time. Perhaps if I had read more Austin or Bronte it would be humorously familiar. For example, here she describes her return to the author's mansion:
"When I went back to Yorkshire, I received no explanation for my banishment. Judith greeted me with a constrained smile. The grayness of the daylight had crept under her skin, collected in shadows under her eyes. She pulled the curtains back a few more inches in my sitting room, explosing a bit more window, but it made no difference to the glloom. "Blasted weather," she exclaimed, and I thought she seemed at the end of her tether."
There is a lot in the book for book-lovers specifically. Not only is the main character the daughter of a bookseller and herself a bibliophile, but she is interviewing an author, and several pivotal scenes occur in libraries. At one point she runs a fever and faints, and a doctor is brought in. He suspects that her ailments are in her head. "I reached for the prescription. In a vigorous scrawl, he had inked: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, till end of course."
The book is a mystery, and a good one. There are several great twists, and enough clues that the reader could play along if desired. But it's also a great novel. There are wonderful moments of symbolism, plot, and good thick characters. The charaters form a wonderful canvas where Setterfeld gives us parallels and comparisons between them throughout the book. Each character individually taken is complex and compelling, but the real beauty is each of the characters taken in contrast to the others. In some cases it's governess/doctor or twin/twin or mother/daughter or lover/lover, but the pairs are amazingly effective in further elucidating the characters.
I often felt spooked and chilly reading it, as if it were raining outside, which in the book it often was. Setterfield created what I would describe as several layers of a fairytale world, and I fell right into it.
The style of the book took some getting used to. It was written in an old-fashioned tone, more like what I would expect from a book written in the 19th century. The narrator is a young woman, ostensibly in modern-day Enlgand, but many of her comments and her lifestyle suggest an older time. Perhaps if I had read more Austin or Bronte it would be humorously familiar. For example, here she describes her return to the author's mansion:
"When I went back to Yorkshire, I received no explanation for my banishment. Judith greeted me with a constrained smile. The grayness of the daylight had crept under her skin, collected in shadows under her eyes. She pulled the curtains back a few more inches in my sitting room, explosing a bit more window, but it made no difference to the glloom. "Blasted weather," she exclaimed, and I thought she seemed at the end of her tether."
There is a lot in the book for book-lovers specifically. Not only is the main character the daughter of a bookseller and herself a bibliophile, but she is interviewing an author, and several pivotal scenes occur in libraries. At one point she runs a fever and faints, and a doctor is brought in. He suspects that her ailments are in her head. "I reached for the prescription. In a vigorous scrawl, he had inked: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, till end of course."
The book is a mystery, and a good one. There are several great twists, and enough clues that the reader could play along if desired. But it's also a great novel. There are wonderful moments of symbolism, plot, and good thick characters. The charaters form a wonderful canvas where Setterfeld gives us parallels and comparisons between them throughout the book. Each character individually taken is complex and compelling, but the real beauty is each of the characters taken in contrast to the others. In some cases it's governess/doctor or twin/twin or mother/daughter or lover/lover, but the pairs are amazingly effective in further elucidating the characters.
I often felt spooked and chilly reading it, as if it were raining outside, which in the book it often was. Setterfield created what I would describe as several layers of a fairytale world, and I fell right into it.
Monday, March 19, 2007
What is the What by Dave Eggers
This was a special book. I am an unabashed Dave Eggers fan; he is one of the few authors whose books I look forward to prior to their release. This book is a fictionalized account of the journey one of the "lost boys" of Sudan across Sudan and ultimately to Atlanta, Georgia. Valentino, the protagonist, is one of thousands of young boys who walked across Sudan during the country's Civil War. The book alternates between present time in Atlanta, and his childhood in Sudan.
Strangely, Eggers and Valentino position the book as a novel, not as a biography. Given how broadly Eggers interpreted his own life in A Heartbreaking Work... and still called it nonfiction, that this was considered fiction was a surprising choice. Valentino explains it in the preface:
"This book was born out of the desire on the part of myself and the author to reach out to others to help them understand the atrocities many successive governments of Sudan committed before and during the civil war. To that end, over the course of many years, I told my story orally to the author. He then concocted this novel, approximating my own voice and using the basic events of my life as the foundation Because many of the passages are fictional, the result is called a novel."
Voice is probably the most impressive aspect of the book. Often while I was reading, I forgot that it was not written by Valentino. Given that English is not Valentino's first language, it is hard to believe that there is not a little bit of Eggers in the voice. However, I did hear an interview with the two of them where Valentino remarked that he was amazed that Eggers captured his voice as well as he did.
The Eggers/Valentino team portrayed certain events with amazingly succinct descriptions. I was impressed by how effectively Eggers combined a short episode with an emotion. As the reader, I was easily led through Valentino's range of emotions: most notably, fear, grief, anger. The following scene took place during the boys' march across Sudan.
"Deng walked behind me, insisting on holding my shirt. This was a practice favored this night and on later nights by the youngest boys--holding the shirt of the boy ahead. Deng and I were certainly among the smallest of the walking boys. The most accommodating boys would remove an arm from its sleeve and allow those behind them to use the sleeve as a leash. Many boys did this with their younger brothers. There were many pairs of brothers in the group, and in the morning, when roll was called, when I heard their names called I felt such envy. I knew nothing about my brothers now: whether they were alive or dead or at the bottom of a well."
And this episode occurred once he was living in a refugee camp in Ethiopia:
"More boys arrived every day, families too. Every day I saw them crossing the river. They came in the morning and they came in the afternoon and when I woke up more had come in the night. Some days one hundred came, some days many more. Some groups were like mine, hundreds of emaciated boys, half of them naked, and a few elders; some groups were only women and girls and babies, accompanied by young SPLA officers with guns tied to their backs. The people came without end, and each time they crossed the river, we knew it meant that the food we had would need to be further divided. I came to resent the sight of my own people, to loathe how many of them there were, how needful, gangrenous, bug-eyed, and wailing.
One day a group of boys threw rocks at a group of new arrivals. The rock-throwing boys were beaten severely and it never happened again, but in my mind, I threw rocks, too. I threw rocks at the women and the children and wanted to throw rocks at the soldiers but I threw rocks at no one."
Eggers and Valentino do no less of a superb job describing Valentino's life once he makes it to the U.S. Several months ago, I saw a movie called "Lost Boys of Sudan" at a local theater, then met a few of the men who had immigrated here. The theme of that movie, mirrored in this book, was that while moving to the U.S. certainly got the boys out of danger and offered them many opportunities they would not have otherwise had, it was an extremely difficult transition.
Many of the "lost boys" had minimum wage jobs, difficulty adjusting to school, unfriendly neighbors, and a life-long culture shock. The structure of the book, juxtaposing this life with his life in Sudan, succeeds in demonstrating the different universes of suffering and how experiencing a small injustice after a large injustice does not make it any more just.
In one passage, Valentino says:
"The thought of all that time wasted, so much time sitting on that wooden stool, cataloging, smiling, thanking, filing--all while I should have been in school--is to much for me to contemplate."
"I was taking home less than $200 a week after taxes," he comments, "I knew men in Kakuma [Ethiopia] who were doing better than that, relatively speaking, selling sneakers made of rope and rubber tires."
I realize there are a lot of quotations in this entry, but the writing in this book was really special. One thing I did not mention is that it's funny, too. There are laugh-out-loud moments, and a drifting sardonic internal monologue that found humor in tragedy. Finally, Eggers did a wonderful job structuring the book so it had an ending. Since Valentino is still living, I was pleasantly surprised to feel some amount of closure (albeit mixed with curiosity) upon finishing the book.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book, and learned a lot, too.
Strangely, Eggers and Valentino position the book as a novel, not as a biography. Given how broadly Eggers interpreted his own life in A Heartbreaking Work... and still called it nonfiction, that this was considered fiction was a surprising choice. Valentino explains it in the preface:
"This book was born out of the desire on the part of myself and the author to reach out to others to help them understand the atrocities many successive governments of Sudan committed before and during the civil war. To that end, over the course of many years, I told my story orally to the author. He then concocted this novel, approximating my own voice and using the basic events of my life as the foundation Because many of the passages are fictional, the result is called a novel."
Voice is probably the most impressive aspect of the book. Often while I was reading, I forgot that it was not written by Valentino. Given that English is not Valentino's first language, it is hard to believe that there is not a little bit of Eggers in the voice. However, I did hear an interview with the two of them where Valentino remarked that he was amazed that Eggers captured his voice as well as he did.
The Eggers/Valentino team portrayed certain events with amazingly succinct descriptions. I was impressed by how effectively Eggers combined a short episode with an emotion. As the reader, I was easily led through Valentino's range of emotions: most notably, fear, grief, anger. The following scene took place during the boys' march across Sudan.
"Deng walked behind me, insisting on holding my shirt. This was a practice favored this night and on later nights by the youngest boys--holding the shirt of the boy ahead. Deng and I were certainly among the smallest of the walking boys. The most accommodating boys would remove an arm from its sleeve and allow those behind them to use the sleeve as a leash. Many boys did this with their younger brothers. There were many pairs of brothers in the group, and in the morning, when roll was called, when I heard their names called I felt such envy. I knew nothing about my brothers now: whether they were alive or dead or at the bottom of a well."
And this episode occurred once he was living in a refugee camp in Ethiopia:
"More boys arrived every day, families too. Every day I saw them crossing the river. They came in the morning and they came in the afternoon and when I woke up more had come in the night. Some days one hundred came, some days many more. Some groups were like mine, hundreds of emaciated boys, half of them naked, and a few elders; some groups were only women and girls and babies, accompanied by young SPLA officers with guns tied to their backs. The people came without end, and each time they crossed the river, we knew it meant that the food we had would need to be further divided. I came to resent the sight of my own people, to loathe how many of them there were, how needful, gangrenous, bug-eyed, and wailing.
One day a group of boys threw rocks at a group of new arrivals. The rock-throwing boys were beaten severely and it never happened again, but in my mind, I threw rocks, too. I threw rocks at the women and the children and wanted to throw rocks at the soldiers but I threw rocks at no one."
Eggers and Valentino do no less of a superb job describing Valentino's life once he makes it to the U.S. Several months ago, I saw a movie called "Lost Boys of Sudan" at a local theater, then met a few of the men who had immigrated here. The theme of that movie, mirrored in this book, was that while moving to the U.S. certainly got the boys out of danger and offered them many opportunities they would not have otherwise had, it was an extremely difficult transition.
Many of the "lost boys" had minimum wage jobs, difficulty adjusting to school, unfriendly neighbors, and a life-long culture shock. The structure of the book, juxtaposing this life with his life in Sudan, succeeds in demonstrating the different universes of suffering and how experiencing a small injustice after a large injustice does not make it any more just.
In one passage, Valentino says:
"The thought of all that time wasted, so much time sitting on that wooden stool, cataloging, smiling, thanking, filing--all while I should have been in school--is to much for me to contemplate."
"I was taking home less than $200 a week after taxes," he comments, "I knew men in Kakuma [Ethiopia] who were doing better than that, relatively speaking, selling sneakers made of rope and rubber tires."
I realize there are a lot of quotations in this entry, but the writing in this book was really special. One thing I did not mention is that it's funny, too. There are laugh-out-loud moments, and a drifting sardonic internal monologue that found humor in tragedy. Finally, Eggers did a wonderful job structuring the book so it had an ending. Since Valentino is still living, I was pleasantly surprised to feel some amount of closure (albeit mixed with curiosity) upon finishing the book.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book, and learned a lot, too.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Country of Origin by Don Lee
This book was recommended to me by Deena last June. She and I overlap somewhat with books, although she is more of a fan of mysteries than I am. Her comment on it was that she liked it, but it was "nothing spectacular." I think that's a fair assessment.
The book is about an American who disappears in Tokyo and the various people connected to her life. From the jacket, this book purports to be not only a good, old-fashioned mystery, but also a search for identity. I did not find that to be true. True, many of the characters were multi-racial and struggling with identity. And Lee did include some colorful descriptions of various groups within Japan. "The Japanese were yasashi, wet," he writes, "They stuck to one another in tribes like wet, glutinous rice. They were warm, gentle, emotional, whereas Westerners were dry and hard and individualistic, like thir rice, which fell apart into solitary grains."
But as a whole, the struggles with identity and race and background were not fully enough explored to make for good reading. The book was too pulpy to be an identity book and too poetic for a mystery. I was also distressed by some of the depictions of the sex trade in Japan, even though I'm not typically a book prude.
The narrative itself read quickly and the mystery aspect of the story was reasonably compelling. I also liked that as a mystery, it was possible to play along with the characters and start figuring out different aspects of the story.
I did enjoy the humor written into the book. The main character collects idioms incorrectly munged into Japanese, and her list of them is hilarious. I also appreciated how well-developed some of the characters were. Contained in one of their backstories was a great description of someone's thoughts about a huge mistake he made, "Occasionally he thought what had happened in Sao Paulo had changed him, had disrupted his development from the person he had wantd to be in to the person he was now..."
Overall, I think that this book needed to more fully commit to being either a great mystery or a great novel. I would most strongly compare this to another mystery I was not crazy about, Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. However, I read a lot of novels set in other countries that address identity, so I'm open to the idea that I am spoiled that way.
The book is about an American who disappears in Tokyo and the various people connected to her life. From the jacket, this book purports to be not only a good, old-fashioned mystery, but also a search for identity. I did not find that to be true. True, many of the characters were multi-racial and struggling with identity. And Lee did include some colorful descriptions of various groups within Japan. "The Japanese were yasashi, wet," he writes, "They stuck to one another in tribes like wet, glutinous rice. They were warm, gentle, emotional, whereas Westerners were dry and hard and individualistic, like thir rice, which fell apart into solitary grains."
But as a whole, the struggles with identity and race and background were not fully enough explored to make for good reading. The book was too pulpy to be an identity book and too poetic for a mystery. I was also distressed by some of the depictions of the sex trade in Japan, even though I'm not typically a book prude.
The narrative itself read quickly and the mystery aspect of the story was reasonably compelling. I also liked that as a mystery, it was possible to play along with the characters and start figuring out different aspects of the story.
I did enjoy the humor written into the book. The main character collects idioms incorrectly munged into Japanese, and her list of them is hilarious. I also appreciated how well-developed some of the characters were. Contained in one of their backstories was a great description of someone's thoughts about a huge mistake he made, "Occasionally he thought what had happened in Sao Paulo had changed him, had disrupted his development from the person he had wantd to be in to the person he was now..."
Overall, I think that this book needed to more fully commit to being either a great mystery or a great novel. I would most strongly compare this to another mystery I was not crazy about, Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. However, I read a lot of novels set in other countries that address identity, so I'm open to the idea that I am spoiled that way.
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