When we first moved into this house, I posted pictures of what it looked like (complete with the belongings on the previous tenants). I thought it would be kind of fun to juxtapose what it looked like then and what it looks like today — though I am shamelessly NOT putting up pictures of the kitchen and bathroom.
Lee manages to garner a scholarship to the prestigious Ault School in New England. From South Bend, Indiana, she is completely out of her element when she gets to the school — a feeling that never dissipates over the four years she is there. She is alienated from her wealthy classmates, eclipsed by their popularity, and, at the same time, thoroughly indoctrinated into another world that serves to separate her from her own family. Like most teenagers, Lee is thoroughly self-obsessed But she’s also a very compelling character with a strong voice, and Sittenfeld writes about the awkward teenage years with understanding and grace. Bittersweet and powerful, this is a touching novel that reminded me of my own hated high school years. Highly recommend.
Gopalakrishnan has retired to his native village after 40 years in the civil service. He is not happy about being back in Paavalampaati, but his father has died and his mother needs someone to take care of her. His wife Parvati is not unhappy about being back in the village — theirs was an arranged marriage, and she was never comfortable in Delhi — but she has deep reservations about leaving their son Suresh behind.
Gopu, as he is known to friends and family, is a rigid man. He walks every morning rain or shine for his health, taking the same route every day. (Indeed, it is on his morning walk that we first meet him.) He likes his coffee and tea just so. He devotes a certain amount of time each day to reading. In his highly-structured existence, he is like both his father and grandfather, but he also possesses a certain haplessness they did not; in some ways, he is deeply and self-consciously ineffectual. Life seems to have borne him along.
But when Suresh appears unexpectedly for Diwali, Gopalakrishnan is forced to take action; Suresh is in deep trouble and nothing he can do is enough.
Shankar’s tone is marvellous. His prose is compact and matter-of-fact, but he captures sights and sounds of India — and his dialogue is so perfect that I could actually picture the Indian headroll and hand gestures as his characters spoke. His characters are well-realized; they seem less like fictional characters than real people and we have been plopped down into their lives. No quibbles there.
Structure, on the other hand, is something else entirely. I spent a long time waiting for the story to start. Page 50, page 100, page 130– these all rolled by and Shankar was still roiling backwards in time to review Gopalakrishnan’s past. And while this history is absolutely necessary to understand the present, I felt like the storyline was often subsumed. It is only halfway through that the present conflict pops up; everything preceding it sets the stage. One could, of course, argue that this structure is integral to the novel itself and that the journey referenced in the title stretches both backwards and forwards. Unfortunately, it simply doesn’t work. The story founders for a while.
That said, I would still recommend.
I’m usually flummoxed by questions like “What’s your favorite book?” or “What’s your favorite CD?” Honestly, I don’t know what to say. After all, one’s taste changes, just as one reads or listens to new things. Ultimately, it seems to be that being able to give an answer to questions like these is tantamount to saying, “I am a deeply unimaginative and stagnant person.” Okay, okay, maybe I am — but please, please let me labor under my delusions.
So it is with deep suspicion that I regard all these top book lists. Top books of 2005! Top books of the 20th century! And now, there’s the What Books Should Everyone Read Before They Die List..
Talk about raising the ante.
Here it is:
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bible
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quite [sic] on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Tess of the D’urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time? The Time Traveller’s Wife?!? Come on. Not one, not two, but count ‘em THREE novels by Dickens? Yet not a single one by Edith Wharton? I would take The Last Samurai over The Lovely Bones any day. And then there’s the top of the list, To Kill a Mockingbird, which, in my opinion, is a charming novel for younger readers, but has somehow been elevated to cult status and the very pinnacle of high litrachooer.
See, this is a popularity contest. Which is fine. Except for the fact that a popularity contest is subjective — and these lists are so very definitive.
The defense budget, that’s where. And check out where the environment and education fall into this. Those two little slivers epitomize the Bush administration to me. It is apparently a worthless exercise to invest in the future.
It’s shaping up to be a busy week, just like last week. Which is when Steve informed me that the plumber is coming this weekend and would I choose a tub? Yeah, yeah, I grumbled. So last night, I shot down to Home Depot, thinking that they would have something perfect there — simple, white, cast iron. The biggest issue, I thought, would be getting a tub with the right slope in the back. (This is very important, as anyone who likes to read in the tub knows.)
Wrong.
There are literally thousands of tubs to choose from. But only a few that don’t need to be special-ordered. Which takes, like, 14 days. We have, like, 4. Still, we’ll probably manage to get something done — but it’s going to be my typical last-minute scramble.
Yesterday, we went slightly east to the Cedar River, where there was a kayaking tournament Steve wanted to watch. We hiked around a bit, and then explored some of the other rivers and trails. It was a good day — and for me the highlight was seeing a large wild cat posed on a hillside above I-90. Unfortunately, Steve missed him. At first I thought it was a bobcat — the right coloring — but it seemed to me he was a lot larger than a bobcat. Anyone know what other kinds of wild cats roam the wilderness areas around 90?
We have a very haphazard approach to renovation. For instance, the kitchen floors are done (as of more than a year ago), but we have done nothing with the cabinets. Steve picked up spares from the last condo job he was on, and they’re sitting in the garage. But he has since decided not to use them because they’re odd sizes.
The bathroom is no different. We have a new sink — but the horrible blue tub and toilet are still there. At first, Steve said we would tile up to the tub, replacing the toilet and cabinet. Then we would replace the tub. I just said okay because first of all, what do I know about doing this stuff and second, it’s always just best to go along with it. Two weeks ago, he informed me that this was a backwards approach — we should start by replacing the tub and reinserting the window that was removed and covered with the awful plastic shower liner. One of his contractors gave him a freebie window … and my task today is to look for a tub.
Funny, because he’s off sailing.
So that’s what I’m doing.
Marcy Merrill is a photographer who makes cameras out of old Altoids tins and comes up with the most amazing shots. I love them.
See the rest of her Pintoid Adventures.
I leafed through the pages of this at the library — should I? shouldn’t I? Ultimately, I was hooked by the diagrams and long footnotes, thinking WOOWIE! This is going to be a great novel like Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, wonderfully bizarre and from a completely unique viewpoint.
It wasn’t. Or rather, it was — but only kind of.
The Family Tree is told through two intertwining narratives, past and present. In the past, Rebecca recounts her childhood, leading up to her bipolar mother’s suicide. In the present, she is married to a humorless, controlling biologist who likes to explain away every human impulse with genetics. There are also forays into her mother’s past and the somewhat labored tale of her grandmother’s thwarted love and subsequent marriage to her cousin. Eventually, all the stories converge and we learn the real (if somewhat forced and perhaps even implausible) issue at the heart of her unhappy marriage: her husband doesn’t want to have children with her because depression is hereditary.
For me, the problem with this novel is that it simply doesn’t know what it wants to be. Most of the scenes recounting childhood are hysterically funny. Yet the descriptions of her married life feel narrow and dark — and when she talks about the grandparents, she is deeply contemplative. It leads to a jumble, made even worse by the diagrams and footnotes that hooked me in the first place. The diagrams simply illustrate scientific principles put forth by the dour scientist husband; the footnotes describe elements of pop culture, particularly TV, as a way to underscore the fact that Rebecca is doing her doctorate in sociology. At first, these were interesting, but as the novel wound to its inevitable close, they became irritating devices used for effect rather than purpose.
Don’t get me wrong: The Family Tree is far from being bad. It’s well-written and draws one in. But when I finally put it down, I had the sense that by choosing to be so many things, the novel ended up being less than it could have been.