This book catches everyone's attention with its title, taken from Darwin's exaggerated account of Captain's Cook's first interaction with the Maori people. The book tells two stories: one is of the author falling in love with a Maori man while doing post-graduate research in New Zealand, and the other is of the explorers of the 17th and 18th centuries and their interactions with the indigenous people of New Zealand. The parallel is well-done.
Thompson did a good job balancing both stories. Her own life is fascinating, as she and her eventual husband adjust to life together while they are living all over the world. The historical pieces held my attention equally - Thompson uses a combination of letters, historical documents, and other books to put together a coherent and reasonably complete account of several hundreds' years worth of interactions between Europeans and Maoris. And I wasn't bored.
Earlier this year I read Paradise Lost and that was an interesting background for this book. The tragedies on Pitcairn Island detailed in Paradise Lost had their genesis in the clash between Europeans and indigenous people - a theme Thompson returns to several times in her narrative. Another point of reference I had was Hulme's The Bone People, which I had read several years ago - the fictional account of a small group of Maori. Thompson's description of her husband and his extended family didn't come right out of The Bone People but was not inharmonious with it either. Together, these three books were interesting to think of together in learning a little something about that part of the world.
Even taken alone, Thompson's book was a good read - serious scholarly work to be sure, but also personal, making a good combination.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Shanghai Girls by Lisa See
A few years ago, I enjoyed See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, so when Shanghai Girls came out I put it on my library queue. Yes, I know the cool kids have Netflix queues, but I have a library queue. In any case, I shouldn't have been in such a rush because it was not one of the best things I've read this year.
The story follows two sisters who grow up in Shanghai in the mid 1930's with every privilege. Suddenly, their father is bankrupted and he promises them to Chinese men living in the U.S. to pay off his debt. Young, naive, and reluctant, they go to America and their lives change completely.
While See's writing is very good and the story moved quickly, I didn't get that 'into' the book. The narrator, who is the older sister, had a detached style of storytelling. While this may have been an attempt to create a character who protected herself by being unemotional, it ended up creating a character who I didn't care enough about. There were also a few parts of the book where ostensibly large secrets were revealed, but they weren't surprising to me at all.
What kept me most interested in the book was the descriptions of the environs in which the sisters lived, both in Shanghai and in Los Angeles. See did a great job of describing scenes on the street, interiors of stores and restaurants, and details around everyday life that transported me to the settings she was describing. In Shanghai, it was the upper-class life the girls lived, and in Los Angeles it was the tourist-friendly Chinatown that was alien to the Chinese characters. I wish See had made the characters and story as compelling as the settings were.
The story follows two sisters who grow up in Shanghai in the mid 1930's with every privilege. Suddenly, their father is bankrupted and he promises them to Chinese men living in the U.S. to pay off his debt. Young, naive, and reluctant, they go to America and their lives change completely.
While See's writing is very good and the story moved quickly, I didn't get that 'into' the book. The narrator, who is the older sister, had a detached style of storytelling. While this may have been an attempt to create a character who protected herself by being unemotional, it ended up creating a character who I didn't care enough about. There were also a few parts of the book where ostensibly large secrets were revealed, but they weren't surprising to me at all.
What kept me most interested in the book was the descriptions of the environs in which the sisters lived, both in Shanghai and in Los Angeles. See did a great job of describing scenes on the street, interiors of stores and restaurants, and details around everyday life that transported me to the settings she was describing. In Shanghai, it was the upper-class life the girls lived, and in Los Angeles it was the tourist-friendly Chinatown that was alien to the Chinese characters. I wish See had made the characters and story as compelling as the settings were.
Assorted Nuts by Sandy Bax
Disclosure: The author of this book is someone I know, and some of the people in her story are close friends of mine. This made it hard to be objective -- but it's fair to say that this book stands out as incredibly honest and, at times, side-splittingly funny among what I've read this year. It's not a perfect book but I am awed that someone I know could have written an entire book from scratch just because one day she sat down and decided to start doing it. I am also flattered to have received a pre-release copy which really made me feel like a serious book critic.
The book is a memoir, one that is built around the author's daughter's wedding, but told almost entirely in flashbacks. Bax covers a range of topics, including her childhood, several marriages, having a child, substance abuse, and breast cancer. Nothing is too private for Bax to share in the book, which is probably her most important characteristic as an author - her complete transparency in telling the stories with all their details. Bax's voice is clear throughout, and knowing her, I know it's authentic. I found myself laughing out loud (to the chagrin of a car full of Amtrak passengers) at several parts, and appreciating how important humor had been to Bax throughout her life.
Bax is a great storyteller which is not true of every memoirist. There are reflective parts of the book where my attention wandered a little but I was always drawn back in by the next set of anecdotes, fresh and cleverly told. From stories about her childhood with her siblings to later interactions with her ailing mother (and everything in between), she has a way of telling a story that is powerful: the story represents a particular incident but also encapsulates a stage of her life in just a few paragraphs.
If there's one thing about the book I would have wanted to be different it's that certain parts of the book (most notably Bax's childhood and first marriage) were told slowly with plenty of detail while other pieces (such as the sections on breast cancer and alcoholism) were given proportionally shorter airtime. Given the bravery of the author in sharing intimate details, perhaps it was easier to write at length about the parts of her life that had happened longer ago. Whatever the case, I was invested enough in the story and the journey she was going through that I could have read an entire book about her life through her daughter's birth, then another book about the more recent years.
That said, the structure of the book, as a series of trips into different parts of her life as she's reflecting on all of this at her daughter's wedding, is a nice way for her to cover a lot of material without needing tell a continuous narrative. Now, I happen to know that Sandy just became a grandmother - again. Hopefully she is taking some notes on the experience that will one day become a sequel - may I suggest A Little Nuts - about the grandkids.
Congratulations, Sandy.
The book is a memoir, one that is built around the author's daughter's wedding, but told almost entirely in flashbacks. Bax covers a range of topics, including her childhood, several marriages, having a child, substance abuse, and breast cancer. Nothing is too private for Bax to share in the book, which is probably her most important characteristic as an author - her complete transparency in telling the stories with all their details. Bax's voice is clear throughout, and knowing her, I know it's authentic. I found myself laughing out loud (to the chagrin of a car full of Amtrak passengers) at several parts, and appreciating how important humor had been to Bax throughout her life.
Bax is a great storyteller which is not true of every memoirist. There are reflective parts of the book where my attention wandered a little but I was always drawn back in by the next set of anecdotes, fresh and cleverly told. From stories about her childhood with her siblings to later interactions with her ailing mother (and everything in between), she has a way of telling a story that is powerful: the story represents a particular incident but also encapsulates a stage of her life in just a few paragraphs.
If there's one thing about the book I would have wanted to be different it's that certain parts of the book (most notably Bax's childhood and first marriage) were told slowly with plenty of detail while other pieces (such as the sections on breast cancer and alcoholism) were given proportionally shorter airtime. Given the bravery of the author in sharing intimate details, perhaps it was easier to write at length about the parts of her life that had happened longer ago. Whatever the case, I was invested enough in the story and the journey she was going through that I could have read an entire book about her life through her daughter's birth, then another book about the more recent years.
That said, the structure of the book, as a series of trips into different parts of her life as she's reflecting on all of this at her daughter's wedding, is a nice way for her to cover a lot of material without needing tell a continuous narrative. Now, I happen to know that Sandy just became a grandmother - again. Hopefully she is taking some notes on the experience that will one day become a sequel - may I suggest A Little Nuts - about the grandkids.
Congratulations, Sandy.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
The Strand Bookstore
Web and I got to New York Saturday around 3 and headed down to Union Square. We checked out the farmer's market then went to the Strand Bookstore - famous for having "18 miles of books".
And it felt like we walked through all the 18 miles! The first floor had a great selection of tables laid out with popular books and the Strand's customers' top 80 books. (Interestingly, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Wells, which I had never heard of but Jo recently recommended was among the top 80.) It was my first look at Eggers' Wild Things with its furry cover. Also on the first floor was a huge selection of cookbooks and fiction. I could have moved in there. The basement and third floor had non-fiction, including huge sections on art and design. Each major section had a table for the top books in that section, an option I really liked. They seemed to intersperse New and Used books in all the sections.
The top floor, only accessible by elevator, had been recommended to me by Kung...it had special editions and rare books. The first thing we both noticed getting off the elevator was the delightfully musty smell of old books. It was fun to see unedited galleys and very old editions. It was obvious that serious work went on there assessing and repairing books.
Of course we bought two books from downstairs: Seeing by Jose Saramago (the sequel to Blindness), and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Web's lucky he got me to leave the store at all.
And it felt like we walked through all the 18 miles! The first floor had a great selection of tables laid out with popular books and the Strand's customers' top 80 books. (Interestingly, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Wells, which I had never heard of but Jo recently recommended was among the top 80.) It was my first look at Eggers' Wild Things with its furry cover. Also on the first floor was a huge selection of cookbooks and fiction. I could have moved in there. The basement and third floor had non-fiction, including huge sections on art and design. Each major section had a table for the top books in that section, an option I really liked. They seemed to intersperse New and Used books in all the sections.
The top floor, only accessible by elevator, had been recommended to me by Kung...it had special editions and rare books. The first thing we both noticed getting off the elevator was the delightfully musty smell of old books. It was fun to see unedited galleys and very old editions. It was obvious that serious work went on there assessing and repairing books.
Of course we bought two books from downstairs: Seeing by Jose Saramago (the sequel to Blindness), and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Web's lucky he got me to leave the store at all.
Monday, October 12, 2009
City of Refuge by Tom Piazza
I noticed this book reviewed on one of the book blogs I read and bumped it up in the queue since I had just read Eggers' Zeiton and wanted to compare the two stories about New Orleans. While Eggers' was non-fiction and this was a novel, I came out of the two books with reversed reactions - Eggers told a story while Piazza's best accomplishment with this book was a reasonably comprehensive view of New Orleans in the months after Katrina.
Surprisingly, reading this book felt much more like reading non-fiction. There were two families whose lives the book followed and certainly their stories were compelling, but it was the city of New Orleans itself that he seemed to take the most care in characterizing. The characters were reasonably predictable in their concerns and their conflicts, and he made some easy choices: for example, making one of the families affluent and white while the other was poor and black, and making one of the main characters a newspaper reporter. But I forgave Piazza his trite setup for his portrait of the pure devastation and ruin that New Orleans experienced.
During Hurricane Katrina, Web and I had been traveling in Argentina. Skillfully avoiding televisions and newspapers to fully immerse ourselves in the culture there, we had little idea what was going on at home until we got back about a week after the storm. It was hard to understand how bad things were, and completely surreal to believe it was going on in the United States. Even reading this book I had a hard time believing that our government really reacted this poorly, and I felt shame reading the descriptions of the city and how it was that so many people lost their lives.
When I chose to read the book I was hoping for more of a story with characters I cared about, but I value what I got out of the book - a sad education on the before and after of New Orleans, with a cautiously optimistic view of the rebuilding that continues today. Eggers says in his forward that he did not intend to provide a comprehensive survey of Katrina, but Piazza may have succeeded in doing this. Ironically, the line between non-fiction and fiction that has been subject to much discussion in literary circles lately (and that has historically been navigated carefully by Eggers) seems to have been toyed with by Piazza too - his characters are composites of so many of the both heartbreaking and uplifting stories that we've heard in the years since Katrina, the situations all potentially leads for stories in the New York Times or Newsweek.
I'm not sure that I would say I liked this book more or less than Zeiton - I liked both of them, and neither was what I expected. Together, they gave me a multi-dimensional view of an important chapter in our recent history.
Surprisingly, reading this book felt much more like reading non-fiction. There were two families whose lives the book followed and certainly their stories were compelling, but it was the city of New Orleans itself that he seemed to take the most care in characterizing. The characters were reasonably predictable in their concerns and their conflicts, and he made some easy choices: for example, making one of the families affluent and white while the other was poor and black, and making one of the main characters a newspaper reporter. But I forgave Piazza his trite setup for his portrait of the pure devastation and ruin that New Orleans experienced.
During Hurricane Katrina, Web and I had been traveling in Argentina. Skillfully avoiding televisions and newspapers to fully immerse ourselves in the culture there, we had little idea what was going on at home until we got back about a week after the storm. It was hard to understand how bad things were, and completely surreal to believe it was going on in the United States. Even reading this book I had a hard time believing that our government really reacted this poorly, and I felt shame reading the descriptions of the city and how it was that so many people lost their lives.
When I chose to read the book I was hoping for more of a story with characters I cared about, but I value what I got out of the book - a sad education on the before and after of New Orleans, with a cautiously optimistic view of the rebuilding that continues today. Eggers says in his forward that he did not intend to provide a comprehensive survey of Katrina, but Piazza may have succeeded in doing this. Ironically, the line between non-fiction and fiction that has been subject to much discussion in literary circles lately (and that has historically been navigated carefully by Eggers) seems to have been toyed with by Piazza too - his characters are composites of so many of the both heartbreaking and uplifting stories that we've heard in the years since Katrina, the situations all potentially leads for stories in the New York Times or Newsweek.
I'm not sure that I would say I liked this book more or less than Zeiton - I liked both of them, and neither was what I expected. Together, they gave me a multi-dimensional view of an important chapter in our recent history.
The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos by Margaret Mascarenhas
I think this is one of the best books I've read this year. The backdrop of the story is a friendship between two girls, Lily and Irene, who are growing up in Venezuela during the revolution. Irene disappears while they are on vacation and fifteen years later, Lily finds herself on bedrest towards the end of her first pregnancy wondering what happened to her friend.
The book is told from alternating points of view, forming a complete story through several different narrators who each take one chapter. Irene's fate is revealed at the end but it was easy to forget that as the main theme because Mascarenhas weaves several other compelling stories and characters into the book. There are numerous love stories, glimpses into revolution politics, and native Venezuelan folklore all centered around this family and, tangentially, around what may have happened to Irene. Some of the narrators are unexpected - they seem to be minor characters - and it is not until pretty far into the book that certain connections between people are made.
This book also felt like a classic South American novel - some magical realism, some political statements, and at the heart of it, excellent storytelling. There was a style that made many of the chapters seem like someone telling me a story - I didn't like all the characters but I did grow to understand most of them.
I'm surprised this book did not get more exposure, but I'm glad I didn't let that dissuade me from giving it a try.
The book is told from alternating points of view, forming a complete story through several different narrators who each take one chapter. Irene's fate is revealed at the end but it was easy to forget that as the main theme because Mascarenhas weaves several other compelling stories and characters into the book. There are numerous love stories, glimpses into revolution politics, and native Venezuelan folklore all centered around this family and, tangentially, around what may have happened to Irene. Some of the narrators are unexpected - they seem to be minor characters - and it is not until pretty far into the book that certain connections between people are made.
This book also felt like a classic South American novel - some magical realism, some political statements, and at the heart of it, excellent storytelling. There was a style that made many of the chapters seem like someone telling me a story - I didn't like all the characters but I did grow to understand most of them.
I'm surprised this book did not get more exposure, but I'm glad I didn't let that dissuade me from giving it a try.
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