Nom de Plume

Chicken experts weigh in! At 9 weeks, I’m thinking all these guys are roosters; Carrie thinks there’s still a good possibility they might be hens.

“Get me a book, will you?” I asked Steve about a week ago, as he prepared for a jaunt to the library. “I’m running out of things to read.”

So he came home with Tomato Girl. “It looked like something you’d read,” he said by way of explanation. Actually, it didn’t really, but that’s fine. No complaints on my end. Sometimes one gets in a reading rut; sometimes one needs something a little more unsettling.

Which is what Publisher’s Weekly says about it on the back cover, saying that it’s an accomplished debut. And the author bio says she’s published in literary journals and has written a book of poetry.

The reason that I’m telling you all this is because I want you to know that I was absolutely fair. I was prepared to like this novel. I opened its covers with a completely open mind. And sadly, nothing prepared me for its sheer, unutterable terribleness. It was beyond bad. And the really sad thing was that it wasn’t like trashy novel bad, which is just bad writing plain and simple and you harrumph about the crap that gets published these days, but it was a mass market paperback so who really cares? No, it was more like college fiction workshop bad, where everyone thinks they are saying profound new things in beautiful new ways, but it would be more enojoyable to hear a tortured cat scream for three hours straight. (If you’re wondering where that piece of randomness came from, chalk it up to the feral cats on the prowl last night.)

Enough said.

*Update: I feel a little guilty for posting that review, so I feel the need to mention that she has samples of her poetry on her site; they are MUCH better than this novel.

Padma Viswanathan tells a ripping good yarn. The year is 1896; Sivakami is 10 and her family is looking for a husband. They visit the healer in her mother’s home town to have her star chart done; he begs the family to let him marry her. Though his own chart says that he might die in the ninth year of his marriage, the birth of a son might stop his death from coming to pass. When the son is finally born, he does the calculations and realizes that he will die. And because they are Brahmins, and because Sivakami will enter a world of virtual seclusion upon his death, he does everything he can to prepare her, including hiring a local man, Michumi (who also happens to be gay and therefore trustworthy) to oversee the properties.

And then the story wafts over the next three generations, with Savakami holding the family together with the help of Michumi. Ripping good yarn. One of the things that was fascinating to watch was the arc of superstition and magic. Sivakami believes in the superstitions of her tradition–tradition, of course, being one of the few things allowed her. But her son Vairun (who by the way has vitiligo, which is a great thing to see represented in fiction) wholeheartedly rejects the idea of Brahmins’ inherent superiority and of all superstition, including star charts–despite the fact that his and his sister’s both come true. And it’s interesting to see how the story starts in one place–a mythologized place of legend–and ends grounded in the modern world, with problems blamed on people, not on gods.

To be absolutely, completely honest, I lost interest in The Toss of a Lemon toward the end, and it felt like a bit of work to finish it. And I didn’t really like the ending–don’t worry, no actual spoilers–because the end of an era, which has taken the novel almost 600 pages covering sixty-odd years, feels too explicitly stated. Still, if you read one book this summer, make it this. In addition to being a gripping read, Viswanathan’s prose is gorgeous.

Sunday morning, I reached into the coop and pulled out an egg. It wasn’t white, so it must have been laid by a Welsummer. Even though it was more of an ecru color than the terracotta Welsummers are supposed to produce, I rejoiced. “Look!” I crowed to Steve. “Another hen is laying!” And then I scrambled it up with an Old Faithful egg and two eggs from the grocery store, and we feasted at least partially on our own eggs.

About an hour later, our neighbor Adam from two houses up knocked on the door. “One of your chickens is in my backyard,” he said.

“Great,” Steve said. “Let me grab a wine cooler and a plastic lawn chair. There’s no better entertainment than watching Zia trying to catch her chickens.”

“Very funny,” I said, and we all trooped into the alley. There was a brown and white chicken standing confused right in the middle. She clucked. So did I.

“That’s not my chicken.”

“Well whose is it?” asked Adam.

“Oh my God,” I said remembering the chicken-trading conversation I had had with Carrie the day before. “Maybe it IS my chicken. Does she have no toes?”

At the point, I was next to the chicken. Sure enough, it was Stubbs, the chicken with no toes who lays an egg a day that Carrie no longer wanted. And sitting right next to her–also in the middle of the alley–was an egg so fresh that it steamed. She had obviously laid it right then and there. It looked identical to the one I had pulled out of the coop–but that would have meant laying two eggs in 12 hours. Which I don’t think is possible.

I managed to catch her despite the snide comments from the boys. Put her back by the coop, where she has been ever since. The question is about the first egg. Was it a Welsummer egg? Did Stubbs manage to squeeze out two in 24 hours? Sadly, that was the last egg I’ve gotten from anyone. Now that all the kids are official free-rangers, I have this suspicion that they’ve found a better place to lay than the coop. A place that I will never, ever find.

I want eggs!

Here’s the cycle: I vow I will post reviews of every book I read again; I’m good for a week; the books pile up; I tell myself I’ll get on top of it; they languish some more; I start feeling daunted; they need to be returned to the library; I forget what I’ve read.

I don’t even know whether people even read the book reviews, but the simple truth is that I miss them. There’s something so evocative about them for me; I remember where I was reading the book itself, where I was when I was posting the review–and more importantly, where I was in my life, what was going on.

And so, I heretofore vow once again to start the book reviews. Moreover, I am just going to abandon the whole list of books that I SHOULD review, which is incomplete anyway. There’s nothing super memorable anyway. Even the books I thought were memorable have somehow faded into the background–with one exception: Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American. I didn’t like it as much as I liked What I Loved and full appreciation is marred by the fact that her male protagonist often speaks like a woman trying on a masculine voice; nonetheless, it was so well-written, and with such universally acute observations, that I would wholeheartedly recommend it nonethless. Siri Hustvedt is fascinating to me; she is, in my opinion, a better writer than her more famous husband Paul Auster–yet is not nearly as well known. It’s a shame.

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Still no progress on the concrete countertops, but that’s really my fault because I’ve been too swamped with work to help. (Poor Steve. He feels neglected because every time he tries to talk to me during the day, I tell him to zip it.) But remember when he was doing his test run on working with concrete? The bbq table? The finished product’s pretty darn cool. And handy, too.

Steve has been complaining that I don’t post any of his pictures, to which I say, “Get your own blog.” However, to be fair, I will say that he was right and I was wrong about the height of the roost. Okay, Steve, does that make you feel better?

Which is what I am hoping is NOT the reason that the four Welsummers I bought aren’t laying yet. It’s been two weeks; supposedly, this should be enough time for the little stewpots to get over the trauma of moving. And really, there is NOTHING traumatic about their existence. Trust me. They have a nice comfy place to sleep, lots of yummy organic mash and daily treats, fresh water, and a carefree existence. A very carefree existence: Geoff and I like the idea of everyone free-ranging. I mean really free ranging, not just hanging out in their 150 square foot run.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that today is the first time I’ve just opened the gate; the Houdini twins–two of the chickiepoo crosses–have been squeezing out the gate for eons.)

But have the Stewpots given me a single egg? Nope. Nothing. Nada. The only eggs we’re getting are from the buttercup, who is coming to be known as Old Faithful. She lays eggs more often than what I’ve read about buttercups. I think she’s just so happy not to have a rooster coming after her all the time that she’s laying eggs doubletime in gratitude

So the question is whether they’re going through henopause. It’s either that, or they’re molting. Such is the risk of getting chickens at auctions: Who knows why they were given up?