untitledI just finished reading Bill Clegg’s “Did You Ever Have A Family”,  a novel about loss, grief, regret and sorrow. It revolves around June Reid and the death of four people in a house explosion and the subsequent impact on the lives of their surviving families and the people they touched. It does not have a happy moment in its almost 300 pages.

June Reid’s daughter, Lolly, is about to be married. Lolly, Lolly’s fiancé, June’s ex-husband and June’s live-in boyfriend, Luke, are all staying at Lolly’s house in Connecticut the night before the wedding. After an argument with Luke, June heads out of the house and while she is out, the house explodes and everyone is killed. The resultant grief draws June inward, and she leaves town, spending her time in isolation thinking through her relationships with those who have died and others who have survived. Every thought and every moment is tinged with regret.

Luke’s mother was Lydia. Luke and Lydia had a complex relationship stemming from the moment of his birth and they were just starting to reestablish a connection when Luke was killed. And, as unlikely as it might seem (Luke was thirty years old and June is 52), June and Lydia were becoming close friends.

The book tells Lydia’s complex story through her grief. Like June, Lydia turns inward, but with a number of twists. There are various other characters throughout the book who have unique stories, never cheerful. Most of these characters deal with their grief through limiting contact with the outside world. As one character observed, “we’ve learned that grief can sometimes get loud and when it does, we try not to speak over it.”

A close friend of mine suggested, in no uncertain terms, that I should not read “Did You Ever Have A Family.” She was trying to protect me from the intensity of sorrow that this book would inevitably bring. I questioned reading “Did You Ever Have A Family”. Did I really want to subject myself to a book about intense sorrow? But you don’t need a book about overwhelming loss for the fog of grief to come rolling down. All it takes is a song, a word, a sound or nothing at all. As one of the characters in the novel comments, “It took nothing more than the sight of the wrinkled fabric for every last memory to return.”

In the Sunday, November 8, 2015 NY Times, there is an article written by Laren Stover, entitled “Melancholy’s Sweet Allure.” Although the article seems to be about depression more than melancholy, and although it distinguishes grief as a separate emotion, it made a couple of points which would explain why I chose to read this novel despite the emotions I knew it would evoke. In the article, the author points out that melancholy is ephemeral. “It visits you like a mist, a vapor, a fog. It is generally uninvited.” Stover says it is “fine to indulge in the cloudy charms of melancholy.”

Grief will find you in the light of day and in the darkness of night and you don’t get to pick when it will strike. So maybe reading a grief filled novel simply lets you control the time and mechanism for sinking into that melancholic mist which belongs to no one but you. Even if the rest of the world believes that melancholy is not a good place to be, I think I agree with Stover that the indulgence in its depths can sometimes be a fine place to be. Sometimes a sad novel is just the vehicle to take you there. And you won’t find a novel much sadder than “Did You Ever Have A Family?” If you think you are up for it, you can reserve this book at the Cuyahoga County Public Library, by clicking on http://encore.cuyahoga.lib.oh.us/iii/encore/record/C__Rb11163941.

 


515YjQLBnbL._SX338_BO1,204,203,200_In Laura Groff’s “Fates and Furies”, beginnings and endings  combine in a character rich story about life, love and loss. Lancelot Satterwhite (Lotto), is born into a loving and wealthy family in sunny Florida, tied to his religiously zealous mother and his kind, mild mannered father. Lotto “would have been bright, ordinary if his years continued so. One more privileged kid with his privileged kid sorrows.” But when Lotto’s father suddenly dies, Lotto ventures out beyond his family, meets Gwennie, Michael and Chollie, experiments with drugs, alcohol and sex, and gets shipped off to boarding school in frigid New Hampshire at the age of 14. In boarding school Lotto discovers his love for acting, commences his “era of women” and appears to be fated to great things.  Lotto goes off to Vassar, continues to pursue acting and women and meets Mathilde. Mathilde, also a student at Vassar, was “mythological. Friendless. Icy. She went weekends to the city; she was a model…She never partied.” Mathilde had no family and her background was mysterious. Lotto and Mathilde are married within three weeks of meeting, at the age of 22. Lotto’s mother disapproves and cuts him off, both economically and emotionally. Mathilde supports them while Lotto pursues his hopeless acting career. But in a sudden change of career path, his talent as a playwright takes off and Mathilde leaves her job in an art gallery and handles the business side of Lotto’s career. Lotto and Mathilde throw frequent parties and their marriage is the envy of their friends, particularly childhood friend Chollie. When the various fates, especially Lotto’s, have been realized, at least, from Lotto’s perspective, we start to learn about the furies (mostly, but not exclusively, Mathilde’s), all from Mathilde’s perspective. The furies part of the book is my favorite. Don’t get me wrong. The furies would not work without the fates. It is the fates half of the book that gives the furies it’s extra punch.  The fates part of the story is rich with surprises and depth. We learn all about Mathilde’s childhood and college era, both of which deeply impacted her actions and emotions. Mathilde’s perspective on life is best illustrated by her observation that the traits and hurts that we start with in our lives expand and take over with the passage of time. “It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.” This perspective colors her life and actions as she grows older. We also start to learn a little more about Chollie and the interesting interactions between Chollie and Mathilde. The furies part of the book is so interesting and surprising that I do not want to give too much away. You will just have to read the book and let me know if you agree! This book can be reserved at the Cuyahoga County Public Library by clicking on http://encore.cuyahoga.lib.oh.us/iii/encore/record/C__Rb11163936__X7?lang=eng&suite=gold.

The Heart Goes LastMargaret Atwood’s latest, “The Heart Goes Last”, is so funny, and so scary at the same time that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I was done. At the start, we meet Stan and Charmaine, a recently married, once happy couple, now destitute, and living in their car. The backdrop is an economic collapse, in a political environment with no safety net. Those in the middle and lower ends (I guess the middle is not an end) of the economic scale are devastated. Stan and Charmaine are constantly on the run from would be robbers and murderers because of the economic devastation and because “only rich people can afford to have police”.  Stan cannot find work anywhere and Charmaine is working in a bar which also serves as a brothel (not much activity in the bar, but the brothel part of the business is booming–sex is a theme of this book!). As you can imagine, living in a car in constant fear puts a damper on a relationship, not to mention the perspectives of the residents.

Stan reluctantly decides to visit his gangster brother to collect on some debts and at about the same time, Charmaine sees an ad for an idyllic living arrangement called the Positron Project in the town of Consilience. At the Positron Project, residents get a house and a job. They also get to spend every other month working and living in a prison, while another couple lives in their shared house. The arrangement sounds good to Stan and Charmaine (I told you that living in a car and escaping marauders can skew your perspective) and they sign up and move in. Positron has very strict rules, unexpected surveillance and dictatorial leadership. All goes well, for a while… And then things begin to go very, very wrong. There are desirable and undesirable sexual encounters, disappearances, sex robots, interesting medical procedures, unexpected interrelationships, gangsters and lots and lots of Elvis impersonators running around. And at the end (I won’t really give away the end), there is real life uncertainty.

All in all, the book feels like a light story, but of course it’s not. Although the book seems funny at times, Charmaine observes that “comedy is so cold and heartless, it makes fun of people’s sadness.” “The Heart Goes Last” is a story of what happens to human nature when life becomes hopeless–both from the perspective of the helpless and the perspective of those who capitalize on despair and hopelessness. And the story, in true Margaret Atwood fashion, highlights the need for opportunity, economic equality and honest, selfless and empathetic leadership, within a story that illustrates the possible impact of the loss of those qualities. The story also reminds us that things are not always as they seem and that human nature is complex and sometimes unpredictable. All in all, a good read.

You can reserve this book at the Cuyahoga County Public Library by clicking on http://encore.cuyahoga.lib.oh.us/iii/encore/search/C__Sthe%20heart%20goes%20last?lang=eng.

 

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“My Name is Lucy Barton” is a deceptively simple book that on first blush might seem to be about a relationship between a daughter and mother. Lucy is telling her story looking back over a nine-week period she spent in the hospital recovering from complications after removal of her appendix. While she is recovering, her estranged mother comes to visit and stays with her in the hospital for almost a week. During that time they remember people and events in their lives and Lucy reflects on her past, her mind and her heart.

Lucy is a successful writer living in New York City. We learn that she grew up extremely poor in rural Illinois and until she was 11 years old she lived in a garage with her parents, her brother and her sister. Prior to her mother’s visit to the hospital, Lucy had not seen her mother for years. During their week long conversations, her mother reminds Lucy of old friends and acquaintances and brings her up to date on the directions their lives have taken. But when it comes to discussing some of the things that Lucy thinks of as significant in her own life, her mother is unresponsive. For instance, Lucy remembers the terror she felt when, as a child, she was locked in her father’s truck as punishment. When she tells her mother that she remembers her father’s truck, her mother says “‘The truck?’ My mother’s voice sounded surprised. ‘I don’t know anything about a truck.'” And when Lucy tries to tell her mother about her success as a writer, her mother “looked at me quizzically, as if I had said I had grown extra toes, then she looked out the window and said nothing.”

Remarkably, Lucy only sees her mother one more time before her mother’s death, nine years after Lucy is released from the hospital. “Why didn’t I go there to visit her?…I think–to say it simply–it was easier not to go.” As much as Lucy resented her family for not showing interest in her, ultimately, Lucy felt that her connection to them was a burden and some of the memories best left alone.

While the book addresses the relationship between mother, daughter and family, it focuses on how little we know each other, how much we want to be known and how difficult it is to know oneself. That desire to be known, for Lucy, started with her mother. “I wanted my mother to ask about my life. I wanted to tell her about the life I was living now.” But as Lucy and her mother reminisce, she realizes that this desire to be known and to be accepted is a focal point of life and relationships. Lucy recalls a story her mother tells about a woman named Katie Nicely, who spent time with Lucy’s mother although their circumstances were quite different. Lucy’s mother observes that “I always thought she liked my circumstances being so much lower than her own. She couldn’t envy anything about me.”

This desire to be known expresses itself in Lucy’s musings about her doctor, who came to see her every day for nine weeks (except Father’s Day) and charged her for only five hospital visits, and in her musings about people who had come and gone throughout her life. And through a recurring personality in the book, Sarah Payne, an introverted author and teacher, Lucy learns to use writing as a way to make sense of the lack of clarity in life. Lucy’s recurring reminiscences of Sarah Payne instruct us about that lack of clarity and how best to address it. Such instruction is best summed up by Lucy when she recalls a particular lesson. “Sarah Payne, the day she told us to go to the page without judgment, reminded us that we never know, and never would know, what it would be like to understand another person fully. It seems a simple thought, but as I get older I see more and more that she had to tell us that.”

My Name is Lucy Barton is a lovely, thoughtful book, with a variety of life lessons. It is scheduled to be released in January of 2016 and can be reserved at the Cuyahoga County Public Library by clicking on http://encore.cuyahoga.lib.oh.us/iii/encore/record/C__Rb11177267__Smy%20name%20is%20lucy%20barton__Orightresult__U__X7?lang=eng&suite=gold.

Thirteen Ways of LookiingI just finished Colum McCann’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking” and it is simply the antithesis of the last two books I reviewed (Purity and City on Fire). And that’s a good thing–in case you were wondering. None of the clutter or pretension. Simply beautiful writing, moving story telling and believable, recognizable and sympathetic characters.

Thirteen Ways of Looking is a novella and three short stories. Each is beautifully written, touching, thoughtful and subtle.

The title work and the longest of the four delves into the life, mind, heart and death of an aging retired lawyer and judge, Peter Mendelssohn. The story consists of thirteen chapters, which may be one way of interpreting the title, although the looking goes much deeper than that. Each chapter begins with a stanza of Wallace Steven’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. When we first meet Mr. Mendelssohn, he is lying in bed in his expansive Manhattan apartment, thinking about his previously deceased wife, his live-in health care helper (who calls him Mr. J), his son and daughter, his career and his blackberry. He is trying to figure out how to get out of bed on his own and attend to his daily functions so as to maintain some semblance of self sufficiency in old age.

As Mendelssohn looks back on his life, he muses over the impact place and circumstances of birth can have on a life. “Curious thing, the blood we inherit. Slapping around inside, making us who we are: the landscape itself gets a say in the outcome of the mind.” And he observes just how fleeting success and career truly are in the great expanse of time. “You work your whole life to become a pillar of the community and then it all disappears in front of your eyes.”

But the story is not just about Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn is the vehicle around which we learn about the hearts of others living in very different circumstances, likely as a result of the blood each has inherited. The story is filled with wisdom and thoughtfulness mostly from the perspective of a life well lived, with a reminder that regardless of who you are, no life is without its loss and challenges and that ultimately, although circumstances vary, each life ends the same way.

“What Time is it Now, Where You Are”, is a very short story about writing a short story. The male writer is composing a short story for the New Year’s Eve edition of a newspaper magazine. He is focused on the fictional life of a woman marine stationed in Afghanistan on New Year’s Eve. The author’s anticipation of the soldier’s telephone call home tells the reader a great deal about the soldier’s life. The 11 page story evidences McCann’s amazing skill at evoking feeling with minimal language and without telling the reader how to feel, and reminding us how every story can change with every possibility.

“Sh’Khol”, Hebrew for losing a child, is the story of a divorced woman living in Galway and raising an adopted, deaf, disabled child born with fetal alcohol syndrome in Vladivostok. After she gives her son a wet suit for Christmas he disappears and the circumstances of his disappearance will never be clear. The story is about divorce, parenting challenges, guilt, disability, fear and compassion.

Finally, “Treaty” is an incredible story about a nun, Beverly, who, while in New York, sees a television news story that appears to include a man who kidnapped and abused her 27 years earlier in South America. When we first meet her, Beverly is living with a group of nuns on Long Island, where she has been sent for rest. She is becoming forgetful and chain smoking. She sees the television story and begins remembering the past, her role with the Church and her periodic questioning of faith. Ultimately, “Treaty” is a story of great strength amidst inflexibility and cruelty.

McCann concludes this collection with a very short Author’s Note, where he says, among other things, “Sometimes it seems to me that we are writing our lives in advance, but at other times we can only ever look back. …For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways.”

For me, McCann’s comments sum up literature at its best. And the best is what you will find in this collection. Take it out from the library, read it and cherish it!

This book can be reserved at the Cuyahoga County Public Library after its release on October 13 by clicking on http://encore.cuyahoga.lib.oh.us/iii/encore/record/C__Rb11163986__Sthirteen%20ways%20of%20looking.

City On FireI finished City on Fire a couple of weeks ago and just couldn’t decide whether I liked it and what I wanted to say about it. The book has its highs and its lows, but overall I have decided it is overly ambitious, tries too hard and is simply too long. 

A first novel, City on Fire is a snapshot of New York City in late 1976 and early 1977 (except when it flashes back or forward). In other words, lots of drugs, sex and punk rock. The novel follows so many characters (at least 20–but definitely more) that it is virtually impossible to summarize without writing a second novel. So this is simply a selective synopses.

At the start, we meet an interracial gay couple, Mercer and William. We learn that William comes from a dysfunctional, slightly dangerous, affluent family whose name is all over New York City. Also, William is the lead in a punk rock band, is a budding artist and (shockingly!), is a heroin addict. And lest I forget, William is estranged from his family of privilege. Mercer, on the other hand, comes from the south, is tied to his family, has a responsible job teaching at an all white private girls school and is a teetotaler (or maybe not; everything changes). William and Mercer’s relationship faces many challenges, as you might imagine.

William’s sister, who may be the most sympathetic character in the novel, is facing marital problems while struggling to raise and understand her two children and her secretive past. She is working in the family business and trying to hold it together while her uncle does his best to tear it apart. Her aging father, the leader of the family business, is suffering from dementia while he is being accused of insider trading.

In the meantime, we meet Samantha, whose father’s fireworks business is disintegrating, and Charlie, who is suffering grief over the loss of his adoptive father. Charlie is 17 and madly in love with Sam, who is madly in love with a much older married man. Enter the post humanists, an eccentric group of nonviolent revolutionaries (or something–it’s not really clear), with which Sam and Charlie are deeply enmeshed.

And then Sam gets shot, and throughout most of the novel she is lying in bed in a hospital on life support, and suddenly the novel become a simple who dunnit–or not so simple because nothing in this novel is simple. Somewhere in the midst of all this, someone steals explosives from Sam’s father’s workshop, a journalist becomes obsessed with Sam and her father and the posthumanists decide to resort to  violence. They create bombs and start bombing supposedly political sites in an effort to make a statement (any statement, apparently). There’s also a Vietnamese American woman struggling with her identity, a gay, seemingly benevolent, art dealer and a radical disc jockey who uses his radio show to foment revolution. And then comes the great black out.

There’s infidelity, detectives, journalists, issues of ethnicity, political statements, murder, suicide, evil, ambition, power, issues of class, unique interludes and at the end, all I can say, is who cares? If the book were only 300 pages, I might say give it a go. But at an inconsistent 927 pages, it’s too much of a commitment and I say pass. That said, if you disagree, or are simply curious, then you can reserve a copy at http://encore.cuyahoga.lib.oh.us/iii/encore/record/C__Rb11154597__SHallberg%2C%20Garth%20Risk.__P0%2C3__Orightresult__X4?lang=eng&suite=gold

 

51P5bUSPVFL._SX340_BO1,204,203,200_[1]“There’s a fashion now for fat, hyper-intellectual, cooler-than-thou novels that are loaded with lard and siphoned of believable feeling…” This is how Mary Karr, the poet and memoirist, has described today’s novel and this is how I felt about Jonathan Franzen’s “Purity”.

I loved “The Corrections”, and I always look forward to and read the next Jonathan Franzen novel. Although I found Purity disappointing, Franzen can definitely weave a story and  Purity is no exception. Its 560 pages take us from Oakland to Bolivia to Denver and back to Oakland. We meet anarchists, environmentalists, journalists, authors, politicians, information leakers and hangers on. Each character has a complex story and we learn that many of those stories are interrelated.

The book begins with an introduction to Pip Tyler, who is working in a job she hates while trying to find a way to pay her $130,000 in student loans. We very quickly learn that a core part of Pip’s personality revolves around her love for her very difficult, poverty stricken mother, who raised Pip alone. Pip describes her relationship with her mother as “tainted by moral hazard”, and we come to learn that is true in more than one way. Throughout the book Pip is pressing her mother for information about her father.

When we first meet Pip she is living in a squalid house with a disabled housemate, a schizophrenic housemate, political activists and on a temporary basis, two German peace activists. One of the German peace activists suggests that Pip go to Bolivia and work with famous East German Internet outlaw Andreas Wolf and the Sunlight Project. The Sunlight Project leaks the world’s secrets, the kind that governments, individuals and businesses would rather not disclose. Pip initially declines, reflecting that she could never leave her mother, but reconsiders after a series of events, including communicating with Wolf and a promise of assistance with finding her father. And then off to Bolivia Pip goes.

While in Bolivia and after her return, the story takes many interesting and unexpected twists and turns and we learn a lot about the characters and their interrelationships.

Franzen uses the novel as an indictment of technology and the Internet, and as a vehicle to address a variety of issues, including feminism, the relationship of men and women, and politics and power. Unfortunately, at times Franzen’s perspective on these issues feels forced and preachy. For instance, when Wolf becomes obsessed with finding his name on the Internet, he muses that “He was so immersed and implicated in the Internet, so enmeshed in its totalitarianism, that his online existence was coming to seem realer than his physical self.” Later, Wolf comments that the Internet is “radiant” with false light. And mixing feminist and technological issues, a character extends an alcohol induced rant “to male-dominated Silicon Valley and the way it exploited not only female freelancers, but women more generally, seducing them with new technologies for chitchat, giving them the illusion of power and advancement while maintaining control of the means of production.” At times the characters in the book feel like nothing more than vehicles to enable Franzen to espouse his views.

Although the book is extremely well written and the plot takes some interesting and clever twists and turns, Franzen’s characters are one dimensional caricatures of real people who are neither sympathetic nor relatable. When I read a novel I like to learn something from the character’s experiences. I like to feel something that the characters offer through the story that they tell. “Purity” does not provide that sort of reader satisfaction. The novel sucks you in with the promise of delivering greatness and then somehow just misses the mark.

If you are like me though, you will read Purity and everything else that Franzen writes in the hopes that this talented writer will get it right the next time.

You can reserve a copy of Purity at the Cuyahoga County Public Library by clicking on http://encore.cuyahoga.lib.oh.us/iii/mobile/record/C__Rb11163916__SPurity__P0%2C4__Orightresult__U__X7?lang=eng&suite=mobile

Obioma“The Fishermen”, by Chigozie Obioma, takes place  in 1996 in Akure Nigeria and tells the tragic story of the Agwu family amidst a changing Nigeria. A first novel short listed for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, The Fishermen  revolves around 4 brothers. The story begins with the transfer of their disciplinarian father to the town of Yola, more than 1000 kilometers from Akure. The remainder of the family stays in Akure and that is when things begin to fall apart.

The story is narrated by the youngest of the four brothers, Ben, looking back 20 years after his father’s transfer, when life as he knew it changed forever. “Whenever I think of our story, how that morning would mark the last time we’d live together, all of us, as the family we’d always been, I begin–even these two decades later–to wish he hadn’t left, that he had never received that transfer letter.”

At the beginning of the novel the four brothers are virtually inseparable. Almost the first thing the brothers do after their father’s transfer to Yola is go fishing at the Omi-Ala river, where they have been forbidden to go. “We knew our parents would severely punish us if they ever found out we were going to the river.” The Omi-Ala river is a symbol of everything dark and evil in Akure.   “Omi-Ala was a dreadful river…It became the source of dark rumours. One such rumour was that people committed all sorts of fetish rituals at its banks. This was supported by accounts of corpses, animal carcasses and other ritualistic materials floating on the surface of the river or lying on its banks.”

While returning from the river one day, the boys meet a town madman who is said to have the gift of prophecy. The madman recounts a vision he has for the eldest of the brothers and after that the lives of the family start to unravel in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. 

The reader follows the boys from innocent childhood to the stark realities of a volatile and violent time. While Ben looks back at the events that occurred 20 years previous, he provides a glimpse into the politics, religion, superstition and environment of 1990s Nigeria. We learn about the vigilante style of justice that still took hold at that time in descriptions of school discipline, mob protests and petty disagreements. Ben introduces us to M.K.O. Abiola when the brothers meet him in 1993 as he is running for president of Nigeria. He then takes us through the bloody riots in June of 1993 when the military regime annulled the results of a presidential election. We see extreme poverty, conventional and superstitious religion, and love, depravity and intolerance.

Although the book is a moving and thoughtful story of a family interwoven with historic events, the book does feel like a first novel. In places Obiomo’s language is forced and tortured. For instance, when looking back on Ben’s father’s hopes and dreams for his sons, Obioma writes: “And for many years, he’d carried his bag of dreams. He did not know that what he bore all those days was a bag of maggoty dreams…” And describing the frailty of Ben’s mother, he writes “I wondered at the sight of her, if this horrible place sucked out the flesh of human beings and deflated large buttocks.” In another example of painful prose, he describes a sunset as “faint as a nipple on the chest of a teenage girl a distance away.” These sorts of sophomoric descriptions are painful to read and suggest a certain lack of maturity.

Despite the inconsistency in his writing, Obioma shows promise as a novelist and hopefully his next novel will reflect his growth and maturity.

If you are interested in trying it out, the book can be reserved at the Cuyahoga County Public Library by clicking on http://encore.cuyahoga.lib.oh.us/iii/encore/record/C__Rb11154633?lang=eng.

 

H is for HawkI know I said I was a fiction fanatic, but when I read good nonfiction I just want to tell the world about it. So let me tell you about “H Is For Hawk”.

Helen Macdonald’s “H Is For Hawk” is a beautifully written and thoughtful book that includes patience as one of its many themes. And initially a reader must be patient as the story gradually evolves and draws the reader into Macdonald’s world. H is for Hawk is in part a memoir, and in part literary musings and environmental and ecological warnings. But at its heart, H is for Hawk is a reminder of the deep and irreplaceable importance of love, kindness and humanity in each of our lives. It is also a book of deep introspection and grief.

At the start of H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald focuses on her own grief over the death of her father and her separate but related obsession with goshawks. We travel with her as she acquires and trains her own wild goshawk, Mabel. She loses herself in the training of Mabel, while isolating herself from the people in her life and slowly sinking into a deep depression. At the same time, she takes us through English author T. H. White’s fascination with the goshawk and his ongoing personal crises which he too tries to bury in the training of a goshawk. His story becomes intertwined with hers and we learn about the likely inspiration and personal history behind his well-known novels, “The Sword in the Stone” and “The Once and Future King.”

As the book progresses, Macdonald recognizes her depression and the role her preoccupation with Mabel has played and slowly heals. Interestingly, as MacDonald heals, she thinks less frequently of T. H. White. She continues to focus on Mabel, with a healthier understanding that she and Mabel are linked, but distinct. She thinks more about her father and the characteristics that bind them. At the same time she begins again to interact with the people in her life. And although there are disappointments, she is able to recognize the irreplaceable rewards of love and companionship.

Throughout the process we get a look at the complex relationship between people and animals and people with each other. Macdonald’s descriptions are often painful and vivid illustrations of human and animal cruelty, but there are always lessons to be learned and every action has meaning. For instance, when Macdonald helps Mabel kill and feed on a rabbit, Macdonald comments that “Hunting makes you animal, but the death of an animal makes you human… But the regret wasn’t that I had killed an animal. It was regret for the animal. I felt sorry for it. Not because I was better than the animal. It wasn’t a patronizing sorrow. It was the sorrow of all deaths.” And when she encounters seemingly kind people espousing xenophobic views, she ponders the impact of her failure to respond. “I should have said something. Stomping along, I start pulling on the thread of darkness they’d handed me. I think of the chalk-cult countryside and all its myths of blood-belonging, and that hateful bronze falcon, of Goring’s plan to exclude Jews from German forests.”. Every action (or inaction) has its consequences.

Macdonald’s journey is a slow and sometimes painful one. She acknowledges the need for patience to work through the complexities of experience, just as the reader needs some patience to make her way through the book to obtain an appreciation of the depth and rewards that can be found in Macdonald’s story.

H Is For Hawk can be found at the Cuyahoga County Public Library at http://encore.cuyahoga.lib.oh.us/iii/encore/record/C__Rb11142374?lang=eng.

 

Our Souls At NightKent Haruf’s “Our Souls at Night” is a short, sweet story about the cycle of life. The main two characters are a widow (Addie) and a widower (Louis) in their 70s who, in an unlikely scenario, find each other and develop a slow moving romance. As the characters get to know each other and reveal their past lives, the intensity of the story creeps up on you under cover of Haruf’s simple straight-forward style of writing. What starts out seeming like a simple friendship reveals the complexity of human nature and our desire for love, companionship and acceptance, even when we try to turn our back on those seemingly conventional needs.

Addie and Louis disclose to each other the most personal aspects of their lives, including the sentiments behind Louis’ extra marital affair and the isolation of Addie’s marriage. “Our Souls at Night” confirms that everyone has a story to tell and life never turns out exactly as planned or anticipated. Louis, a retired high school teacher, reveals to Addie that he had wanted to be a poet. But his wife did not support his ambition and Louis reflected that he thought “she was jealous of my feeling about it and about the time it took me away to myself, being isolated and private.” Addie muses about never having found a career passion, commenting that “Not everybody finds out what they really want.” And later, discussing past failures and regrets, Addie wonders, “Who does ever get what they want? It doesn’t seem to happen to many of us if any at all.”

Through the developing relationship of Addie and Louis the book addresses everyday life anxieties, hopes, challenges and concerns and reassures us that such experiences are not unique. The story’s poignant ending reminds us how quickly life can change when family conflicts with self. The book is almost a complete success except for a rather annoying and superfluous reference to Haruf’s Plainsong trilogy toward the end of the book. If you are looking for a simply written, easy to read meaning of life story, this very short, very fast book is the one for you.

You can reserve this book at the Cuyahoga County Public Library by clicking on http://encore.cuyahoga.lib.oh.us/iii/mobile/record/C__Rb11150048?lang=eng.