Grr!

I was 80% finished with a pretty good (and lengthy) review of the The Hopkins Manuscript when I lost my data. I did one of those too quick keystroke combos that highlighted all my text and then wrote over everything as I unknowingly went on to type another word. In a second poof, gone. And not a damn “undo” button in site.

Sigh.

I had been intrigued by The Hopkins Manuscript from the moment I looked at my first Persephone catalogue. But for some reason I didn’t order it when I chose my first twelve Persephones. I think I wanted everything in those first books to be jam and Jerusalem, and there didn’t seem like there would be much cozy in a dystopian novel about the end of the world. I realize now that I was wrong on a few counts. Not only is there a certain coziness to much of the book, but the cataclysm of the moon crashing into Earth takes, rather perfectly in many ways, the thematic place of World War II – something common to many other Persephone titles. Indeed the fact that The Hopkins Manuscript was published in 1939 means that Sheriff could have only been aware of the rumblings leading up to WWII. Yet much of this survival tale seems prescient, and the accompanying highs and lows of human nature depicted could just as easily be applied to the WWII experience in Britain.

As a member of the British Lunar Society, our hero, champion chicken breeder Edgar Hopkins, learns months ahead of the general population that the moon has slipped its moorings and is headed toward Earth with ever increasing speed. What follows in the months that Edgar must keep the secret is an interesting, if somewhat odd, exploration of Edgar coming to terms with his final seven months on Earth. I have been trying to figure out how to describe Edgar. The word ‘prig’ comes to mind. A retired bachelor drawn very much like the stereotypical female spinster. Generally capable and content but with a deep well of loneliness and much too worried about the small stuff in life. Jodie at Book Gazing does an excellent job summing up Edgar:

He is a man obsessed with niggles, who inflates the importance of the smallest insult or honour to incredible proportions. He is rather petty and although he sometimes realises how ridiculous his behaviour is after the fact, he always finds some way to justify his thoughts to himself. He will probably remind readers of the phrase ‘a bit of a stuffed shirt’ and is a harmless character, though sometimes his thoughts tip over into small, spiteful ideas that have a little too much righteous conviction behind them.

I went to my bookcase. My hands moved instinctively away from the classics – the heavy books of history and philosophy that have helped me through unhappy times in days gone by. Instinctively I went to an obscure, untidy row of books in the corner of the lowest shelf: the oldest friends in my library – the treasures of my boyhood.

For as much as most of us love to read, we probably have other things we would rather do, people we would want to spend time with. But assume for one minute that you have said your goodbyes and have chosen to be alone when the end came. Are you calm enough to read? Do you obsess over what the end might be like? Do you want to think about happy times? About regrets?  Let’s say you want to read. Do you choose and old favorite? Do you try something new? Will it be Jonathan Franzen or the Booker short list or something like that? Will it be the eternal truths of poetry? A picture book? People magazine?

It kind of boggles the mind doesn’t it? So tell me what you think. As the world comes to an end and you sit in your comfy chair just waiting, what would be the last book you choose to read? [1/7/11 update: After reading the comments on this post I realized that my question is not as grammatically clear as it should be. I makes it sound like “well that is the last book I would ever read…” Let’s try this instead: As the world comes to an end and you sit in your comfy chair just waiting, what would your first choice be for the last book you would ever read? Slightly better.]

(Let’s also pretend like you have made your peace with your god, so please no holy books…okay, you can say “The Bible” or similar, but then please follow it up with something else…you aren’t running for office after all…)

• I loved this book.
• I have been trying to write a plot bullet for about 20 minutes now and can’t seem to get anything I like.  Nothing I come up with makes the book sound as charming as it is. It is the story of two families whose lives become more and more entangled as the offspring of each family become friends, lovers, spouses, and enemies.
• One matriarch Mrs. Willoughby, rules with an iron glove. Extremely efficient, she instills fear and makes things happen. The other matriarch, Mrs. Fowler, is kinder and gentler She just kind of lets things happen, yet she too manages to make things happen.
• The character I absolutely loved: Mrs. Fowler. Such a gentle soul but with a fire that she has kept tamed over the course of her married life. Even into her widowhood she still is of two minds, the independent thinking Millicent she was before she got married and Milly, the more passive woman she had to be once she got married. She is the grandmotherly figure you want to run to when something is wrong.
• The character who I loathed: Belle. One could maybe choose Helen or Mrs. Willoughby for this distinction, but they are both pussycats compared to the atrociously petty, self-centered Belle. God I hated her. A bit of an archetype, she is the one you would hiss at when she came on screen if this book were a film. (I wish.)
• To varying degrees we get to see the lives of each of the characters develop, fall apart, and eventually get mended. Through the joys and pains, everything comes full circle. Hence the name of the book.
• I didn’t realize that  a Merry-Go-Round could be called a roundabout in the UK. (Oddly enough it wasn’t this book that first made me aware of it. It was actually the one I read just previous to this one, Little Boy Lost. In that book Hilary takes Jean to a circus where he rides a roundabout.)
• The name Richmal Crompton alone should enticee one to pick up this book. In my head I always think of a sort of healthy breakfast cereal when I hear her given name.
• One of the funnier characters in the book is Arnold Palmer, a handsome and vain novelist, who I think must be there so Crompton can poke a bit of fun at herself. He wrote forty-some novels, so did she. He talks about his proclivity to introduce too many characters in the opening chapter, so does she. I wonder if Crompton “casually” laid good press clippings around her study when she was expecting guests?
• I really didn’t want this book to end. As far as Persephone goes, it ranks right up there with the best of the Whipples.
• Wait, are you still here? Go read this book.

I just found out thanks to the Google that the Carlyles’ home on Cheyne Row in Chelsea is actually open to the public. The bad news is it appears to close for the season at the end of October so I won’t be able to visit it while I am in London. That is a bummer because the house is easily the third main character in Thea Holme’s social historical look at the life of Thomas and Jane Carlyle’s life in their Chelsea home from 1834 to Jane’s death in 1866. Turns out Thea Holme’s husband Stanford was the curator of the house museum and they actually lived in the house in the 1960s. Not surprising then that she decided to write this book.

I started reading The Carlyles at Home during the readathon, but all the descriptions of home improvements kept my mind wandering to all the things that we needed to do to our place. I also couldn’t really read it before going to sleep either for that same reason.

There is lots of domestic minutiae for those of us that like that sort of thing. The Carlyles at Home is a primer on daily life in the mid-19th century. Almost a behind the scenes look at all those costume dramas we love to read and watch. Food (limited selection, always leading to indigestion), gardening (Jane liked flowers, Carlyle like fruits), home improvement (seemed to be constantly making changes to their home), finances (misers with unsteady but overall decent income), and servants (always hard to find and keep).

I love books that deal with incomes and expenditures and this one includes a whole chapter on money. I had to do a little online research to understand the difference between pounds, shillings, and pennies. After so many years of not really understanding it is nice to finally know that there were 12 pennies to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound. And that a price of 1/7/6 would mean that something cost a pound, seven shillings and 6 pennies. But don’t try and convert those pennies into modern pennies because the old pennies were  not of equal value to the new pennies that were ushered in upon decimalization in 1971.

And speaking of money. Remember how annoyed I was by the fact that the Provincial Lady was not very organized or good with money? Well Jane Carlyle would be just the person to put her in her place. She is the personification of competence in domestic housekeeping. And Jane’s skills and abilities went well beyond what most women were allowed to do at the time. She was an executive ahead of her time.

After reading The Carlyles at Home, I am even more interested in reading Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives which looks at the married lives of five Victorian couples including the Carlyles. I am curious to read a less romanticized view of the couple. For Thomas Carlyle just seemed like a bit of a baby and a bully. He was constantly complaining, and it was Jane’s lot to make everything perfect for him. A pretty impossible task.

One of the more amusing stories about Jane was the crisis she faced at the prospect at having to attend an aristocratic ball décolletée. The fashion at the time was that even the most modest of ladies during the day would bare their shoulders and (ahem) bosoms by night. For 49-year old Jane this proved to be almost too much. She was fairly forced into it by Carlyle who declared that true propriety required conforming to the fashion of others. (That is some message for all you parents trying to get your children to dress with some sense of modesty.) In the end Jane became entranced by how well she looked in the dress once she saw herself in it in the candlelight.
  
This is social history that doesn’t necessarily feel like non-fiction. You will find lots of quotes interspersed but you won’t find any citations so it doesn’t really have an academic feel.

This book is perfect for anyone who wants to understand the daily life of a middle class Victorian couple or anyone who likes reading about domestic details. Or both.
  

Illustrations by Arthur Watts

For me the Provincial Lady books are true cozy, comfort reads. And I am a fan of the two that I have read thus far. But a large part of the humor found in these books comes out of the disheveled nature of the Provincial Lady’s lifestyle. And it is that very thing that tends to aggravate my mild OCD. I constantly want to fix her life. I want to balance her checkbook, prioritize her housekeeping tasks, manage her social calendar, and show her a million and one ways she can economize.

And once my mind starts to overwhelm my willing suspension of disbelief, all hell breaks loose. Once I give in to organizing her world I start to question her life choices, and then I end up feeling a little exasperated. Not surprisingly given the title, in this volume the Provincial Lady goes to London. She rents a flat for herself so she can work on her next book, which she never seems to get around to. Caught up in way too many seemingly unpleasant social situations, she doesn’t ever seem to get around to writing anything. And in that sentence is a world of hurt for someone with a brain like mine.

1. She needs to set a writing schedule to ensure she has time to maintain her professional commitments.
2. She needs to realize that a more effective work schedule would allow her to earn the money she needs to cover her costs.
3. She needs to stop being a social suppliant. By taking control of her social life and saying no in the right way and at the right times she would not only preserve more time for her work and things she would prefer to do, but she would also gain a bit of the upper hand–especially since her successful book has increased her social value. A few declined invitations would only add to her social allure, and over time increase her demand allowing her to pick and choose the social occasions that she might actually enjoy.
4. Did she really think that busy, distracting, expensive, London was the place to write?

Do you see how pernicious my mind is? The whole point of these Provincial Lady books is to delight in the ditzy chaos of her life. And I do delight in them, but I am also rewriting the script of her life as I chuckle.

And what’s up with her marriage? They seem about as happy together as two strangers waiting for the same bus.

Although my mind works overtime reading these books, I do actually enjoy them. One thing Delafield does particularly brilliantly is the way in which she manages to make the books feel like real diaries. As I have noted in the past:

The diary entries brilliantly capture the episodic, shorthanded cadence so typical of how one thinks about things. Not always in lovely complete sentences, but short bursts of thought, like thousands of brain synapses firing directly onto the page. There is much that made me chuckle in this book. And of course I love a good bit of domestic detail and this book does not disappoint on that account.

       
Regular readers will know that I am a big fan of Nevil Shute. He is a fantastic storyteller whose penchant for manly man adventures is balanced by his penchant for including strong female characters. Despite the fact that British born Shute only spent the last 10 years of his life living in Australia, his many books with Australian themes or settings place him in many minds in the pantheon of Australian writers. A somewhat forgotten or overlooked writer since his death in 1960, Shute has been getting a bit of attention in the blogsphere in recent years thanks to Vintage Classics reissuing four of his novels with fantastic new covers. And most recently the Riverside Readers book group read his nuclear Armageddon blockbuster On the Beach. You can see what Simon, Polly, Sakura, and Kim thought about that book on their blogs.

Since I find Shute’s novels to be unputdownable, I thought reading one of them would be a great choice for last weekend’s 24-hour readathon. So I picked up Requiem for a Wren which was the only Shute on my shelves that I hadn’t read. In it, we find Alan Duncan returning home to his parents’ farm in Australia after spending several post-WW II years in London. Right off the bat he, and the reader, are informed that his parents’ parlourmaid has just killed herself. I can’t say much more than that without spoiling some of the mysteries that swirl through the book. There were many aspects of this story that I found compelling and the novel drew me in as quickly as I expected, but overall I was disappointed with Requiem for a Wren. It felt like the more compelling outer story was, in the end, just a shell for Shute’s interest in writing about WW II which took up the majority of the literary real estate and comprised the inner, story within a story. Shute often frames his novels this way and it usually doesn’t give me any pause whatsoever. But in the case of Requiem I just don’t think I was in the mood for the shift.

Oddly enough, one of Shute’s biggest failings is one of the things I love about his work. As I have noted previously, and as Kim notes in her review of On the Beach, Shute’s writing cannot be called elegant. In Kim’s words:

Shute also tends to write in a fairly stilted manner, using phrases that seem ridiculous — “The breakfast came upon the table” — and referring to characters by their nationality or occupation — “The Australian”, “The scientist”, “The Commander” — which grate with constant repetition.

He certainly takes a similar approach in Requiem. The writing can be corny sometimes and feel a bit like a 1940s film with everyone talking in a rapid, clipped manner where every word is focused on moving the storyline forward. It can make for some one dimensional characters. But the odd thing is, I love this about Shute’s book.

Now that I have dissed both Shute’s prose writing  in general and the narrative structure of Requiem specifically, you may be thinking that I wouldn’t recommend this book. Not quite. As I have said I love Shute’s quirky prose and many of you would be happy to overlook it in favor of compelling story telling. And the story within a story structure of this particular novel wasn’t problematic, I just wasn’t in the mood for the inner story–I wanted more of the outer story. The only thing that should stop you from reading this book is reading another Shute novel. If you go back to this link, you can get a sense of which of his other novels you would find interesting. But if Requiem is the only Shute at hand, you shouldn’t be disappointed.

  


(This is not the edition I have. I just liked it better)

 Preface on Labeling Fiction
I would love to come up with a short phrase that would adequately describe this kind of novel. Categorization is not always helpful when describing fiction. It can unfairly pigeon-hole a book or an author’s entire body of work. Or it can knock a book off of someones TBR because it falls into a category that a potential read thinks she doesn’t enjoy. Still, despite the pitfalls I want to find a phrase or label that would sum up this genre.

In the past I have referred to it as “smart chick-lit” but I never felt comfortable with that. Chick-lit limits the scope of Wolitzer’s novels and audience too much. Not wanting to get into WW III over my oversimplification, but I think true chick-lit is strictly of the boy meets girl, complications ensue, variety of novel. And none of the three Wolitzer novels I have thus far read fall into that category. I know there have been conversations out in the blogosphere about gender and fiction recently. Teresa at Shelf Love explored it well, but wasn’t necessarily interested in slapping a title on this kind of fiction.

Maybe it would be helpful if I described what I think this category of book is all about. Usually written by a woman but not always. Focus tends to be about relationships. And it is definitely commercial rather than literary fiction. Teresa teases that out in her post: commercial fiction, no matter how well written deals with issues at the surface and doesn’t make the reader look too deep to find meaning. It always uses a light touch, and I think, more often than not, uses humor or at least makes you chuckle once or twice.

So: relationship-oriented, commercial fiction, often with a splash of humor that may or may not be written by a woman. Oh, and they are usually a easy to read. Hmm. That doesn’t really get me closer to my pithy descriptive phrase does it?

Let me try another tack. Which authors do I think fall into this, as yet, un-describable category?

Mary Gordon
Nick Hornby (I wouldn’t have thought of him, but Teresa was right to include him.)
Wally Lamb
Elinor Lipman
Armistad Maupin
Claire Messud (She tries to write literary fiction, but I think she fails.)
Marge Piercy
Joanna Trollope
Meg Wolitzer

No doubt, even among the authors I have read, there are many others than I list here. And there are some who sit on the line that could be included depending on how much you squinted.

Still no closer to having a label for this kind of fiction. Maybe I should talk about The Position.

The Review
The spoiler-free way to sum up this plot. In 1975, Roz and Paul Mellow write a sex manual the becomes a wild success making them celebrities and sexual gurus. The book is full of illustrations of the husband and wife in various sexual positions including the one they invent: “Electric Forgiveness”. What makes all this more interesting and complicated than it sounds is that the suburban couple have four children ranging in age from about 6 to 15 at the time the book is published. And they find the book. And it changes them.

The action doesn’t stay in the 1970s for long. It flashes forward to present day (roughly 2003) quite quickly. Not surprisingly, almost 30 years later, the kids and the parents have issues. To say the least. After the initial chapter, Wolitzer tells the tales of what has become of each of the six Mellows, allowing plenty of space for each character to reveal him- or herself. She includes plenty of humor and drama and characters who are, for the most part, entirely believable. Wolitzer is not as successful in intertwining into all this the post-9/11, traumatic midpoint of George W. Bush’s disastrous foreign policy. One can easily overlook these bits that feel tacked on. But I am less forgiving of the fact that a gay Republican character, even when having a crisis of faith about the direction of the party, doesn’t even mention the incredibly divisive and hate-filled, anti-gay Republican agenda which was at its most venomous leading up to the 2004 elections.

Quibbles aside, The Position, as with all fiction in this category, was an easy and enjoyable read, and really helped my page count during the 24-hour readathon this weekend. If you haven’t tried Wolitzer yet, I like her novel The Wife the best.

Which authors do you think fall into this category? And what should we call it?
  

What happens when the page count includes a comma?
How does one begin to write a review of a novel of 1,358 pages? Better question: How does one begin to read a novel of 1,358 pages? I very much enjoy the act of reading. But as with most other facets of my life and personality I am always thinking about the end result. In reading that means I am always thinking about finishing a book, logging the finished title on my list of books read, and choosing the next book. In general I don’t feel bad about this.  I read things completely, but sometimes I don’t read things as closely as I should and thus I don’t always retain a whole lot of detail. In fact one of the reasons I decided to review every book that I finish was so that I could look back on my reading list and actually recall what happened in a particular book. But being results driven in reading has also aided me in reading a whole lot more. This isn’t a question of quantity over quality either in choice of material or in the way I read a book. What it does mean is that my slightly OCD-influenced drive to finish whatever I am reading with all due speed helps me spend time with something that I love–books.  If it weren’t for that, I would still love books, but I would probably spend way too much time in front of the TV while my paper friends sat neglected and dusty on the shelf.

So, how then does the results-driven reader get through 1,358 pages? This was not without challenge for me. At first I kept looking at where my bookmark was. But 50 or even 100 pages into a book this thick doesn’t look much like progress. It soon became clear I needed a plan for getting through this one. I thought of following Dovegreyreader Scribbles read along which is reading 100 pages a month for a year. Some following that read along are going to read a chapter a day for a year. Both seemed like a good way to break this monster book down. But it didn’t seem right for me. The results-driven me kicked in and decided that  that was too much time to have something like this hanging over my head. So I plunged in, hell bent on reading this book in much less than a year.

The good news is that the book actually came to the rescue. Once I started getting into the rhythm of the writing and story lines it soon became clear to me. One shouldn’t approach War and Peace as a book. It is more like your favorite TV drama or mini-series, or, dare I say, soap opera. You enjoy the moment. The setting, the costumes, the characters interacting. You enjoy the arc of the mini story lines, and you don’t mind that it goes on and on and on, seemingly without end. It allowed me to enjoy the process and think less about the end.

A note about spoilers
Just as I have with my previously posted graphic summaries, I do list below what could be considered a spoiler or two. But the arc of this book is so sprawling, the characters so many, and the page count so high, that even if you know what happens, I think it would be hard to ruin it for someone who hasn’t read it. Plus my spoilers aren’t too spoily.

The story
If it took me this three paragraphs just to express my thoughts on how I read the book, how long do you think it would take me outline the story? You don’t want to know. And I don’t want to try. It would probably also take me longer to do that then it did to read the book. So you get a bulleted list:

• Begins in Russia in July 1805
• Ends in about 1820
• The war bits relate to the campaigns in the Napoleonic Wars in which Russia was involved.
• The peace bits tell the story of a circle of titled and not-so titled upper class Russians in Petersburg and Moscow.
• There are plenty of peace bits (chapters, sections, etc.) with parties, marital intrigue, romance, etc., but to me it was all background. The impact of the wars on the characters and their families spills over into all of the peace bits.
• Lots of inappropriate and typical upper class behavior: too young girls being paired off with too old men; marriage for dynastic and financial reasons; overspending, gambling debts; and other such luxuriously tragic goings on.
• A relatively happy ending. Like an Austen you can kind of see the marriages coming down the pike, and they do come together in the end.
• A few of the deaths are surprising, but given the vast scope of the novel they are sometimes, I think purposely, anticlimactic.

In the process one learns about:

• Napoleon and his quest for world domination. At one point in my undergraduate days I knew the rough outline of Napoleon’s romp through Europe and Africa. War and Peace helped refresh some of that and, more importantly, prompted me to go back and skim the history of that time to reacquaint myself with the “facts”.
• The nature of war which is so often about important people playing chess with human pawns. I think Tolstoy would have problems with the premise of this gross simplification but I think it still rings true and is very evident in his book.
• Human life and death, triumph and sorrow, things that are earth-shattering at the moment, are blips on the map of human history. Just imagine if Tolstoy put it in the context of geological time.
• Historians, on both the winning and losing sides, create heroes. Rarely–at least in this period, but one could argue even into our own day–are commanders and tacticians as brilliant as they are made out to be. Chance and dumb luck have much to do with success on the battle field.

What War and Peace isn’t
A paean to the art of war. There is certainly much description of military maneuvers and glory seeking commanders and soldiers. But the overall feeling I got from Tolstoy was that there wasn’t much glorious about it. In fact, there were times when I was caught up in the action, and like a 13-year old straight boy, was filled with the shoot ’em up thirst for a glorious victory. But I don’t think there was one instance where Tolstoy gives us a moment of pure militaristic climax. One of the more compelling scenes in the book is when Nikolay Rostov is proving his bravery and leading the charge against the enemy. Just as the reader reaches a peak of excitement over Rostov’s impending triumph, Rostov himself sees the face of his “enemy” and has an immediate crisis of confidence and conscience.

Final thoughts

• I enjoyed reading this book.
• It is no doubt a masterpiece, but it is also an enjoyable read.
• I think there are probably at least 300 pages that could be chopped out.
• When I had about 60 pages to go all I could think was “enough already, just end it”
• I could have done without the non-fictional, philosophical disquisition that Tolstoy includes in the Epilogue. In a different mood I would find it very interesting, but as the final 30 pages out of 1,358, it seemed like punishing someone for doing a good deed.
• I am very glad to have finally finished War and Peace. Probably the one title in all literature that reigns as most intimidating. Okay, I take it back, I think that distinction should belong to Ulysses.

And now I can pursue the read-a-thon without this one hanging over my head. Hoo. Ray.

The provenance and review of a hard to obtain memoir that reads like a novel.

Earlier this year as I attempted to collect all 20 of the Penguin English Journey series, one volume, A Shropshire Lad, was on back order and seemed unlikely to be available with any timeliness. So I appealed to Karen at Cornflower Books to see if any of the participants in her online book club had a clean copy they were willing to part with. Thankfully Jill, a lovely woman in Australia, came up with a copy she was willing to send me. In exchange, I told her to pick out a book from The Book Depository and I would have it sent to her. She picked out Henrietta’s War by Joyce Dennis. Feeling like the cost of that volume would barely cover Jill’s postage cost for sending me her copy of A Shropshire Lad let alone the cost of the book itself, I felt inclined to send her a couple of additional titles to thank her. I chose two of my favorite, and very different, American novels, The Professor’s House by Willa Cather and The Inn at Lake Devine by Elinor Lipman. Well, in a move akin to a benevolent arms race between our two countries Jill upped the ante by sending me a copy of A Fortunate Life by A.B. Facey.

I have read woefully little by Australian authors so it was no shock that this title was new to me. About a week ago Jill emailed me to tell me that the Australian Broadcasting Company has an on-air book club that was going to be featuring a discussion of A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute. Shute, a favorite of mine,  was a British ex-pat who lived in Australia and wrote some great novels set in Australia. She also mentioned that they would be discussing A Fortunate Life in December. This prompted me to pick up this book that she had given me. I was just going to give it a glance to see how high up I should put it on the TBR pile. Happily once I read a few sentences I was hooked and ended up not putting it down until I got to page 84 at 1:00 AM.

Albert Facey was born in 1894 and spent much of childhood fending for himself in the Australian bush. After his father died when Facey was only two years old, the family was dispersed in various parts of western Australia as his mother and his older siblings tried to find ways to support themselves. All but abandoned to his aunt and grandmother Facey’s childhood was marked by poverty and a hardscrabble existence as these pioneers built lives for themselves on the Australian frontier. At an early age Facey began a succession of jobs working for (and often being abused by) various settlers in the general region of his family’s farm. Of course this is the wide open frontier where a “close” neighbor might live five miles away. So when his live-in work life became abusive, getting away and back to his family wasn’t an easy thing. By the time he was 14 he had probably done more work than most of us will do in our lifetimes.

As much as this is the story of Facey’s life, it is also the story of western Australia. Facey’s many jobs bring to life the blood, sweat, and tears it took to settle the Australian bush: clearing land for crops and pastures, building dams for water supply, driving cattle to market, laying railroad track and many other grueling tasks. The many anecdotes Facey tells about work and family are humorous as often as they are sad or frightening. He wonderfully describes a way of life and perhaps more importantly a way of seeing life that most of us can only imagine.

The bulk of the book focuses on the many things Facey did before the age of 20. This was the part of the book I enjoyed most. Although he didn’t keep a diary (being largely illiterate until into 20s) and wasn’t necessarily witnessing great events at close quarters, I think Facey is a bit of an Australian Pepys. In addition to the detail Facey gives us about such a wide variety of frontier experiences his life after 20 also illuminates on a personal level the grand sweep of Australian history in 20th century. From his service on the bloody shores of Gallipoli in World War I to his Depression-era experiences to the many ways an uneducated boy from the bush manages to survive into old age in a rapidly changing world.

Even though one knows going into it that Facey survives into the his 80s, it is hard not to get caught up the drama of his early years. Probably because Facey encounters more than his fair share of adversity and danger. This book is a page-turner and it is a shame that it is not readily available outside of Australia. Over 750,000 copies have been sold there, but it seems to be rather hard to find from these shores. I checked The Book Depository this morning as well as Barnes and Noble and Amazon and none of them seemed to have reasonable copies available. Come on Penguin, share this one with the rest of the world.
  

The kind of book that makes you miss your subway stop…

2010 is turning out to be the year of Maggie O’Farrell on My Porch. In 2009 I had attempted to read The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox but there was something about the shifting narrative that made it temporarily unattractive to me. But then this past January when we were Thailand another O’Farrell title (The Distance Between Us) was in the resort library, I picked it up and ended up loving it. So then I went back to Esme and loved it. And then O’Farrell’s latest book, The Hand that First Held Mine, came out and not surprisingly I loved it as well. So now I have moved on to her first novel After You’d Gone, and yes, once again love was in the air. As regular readers know I am prone to hyperbole so I throw around the word “love” a lot. When I analyze this love for O’Farrell’s novels it becomes clear that I don’t love O’Farrell’s books in the sense that they are life-altering works of genius. But they are extremely enjoyable reads, the kind that make you want to stay in bed all day and read it from cover to cover. The kind of book that makes you miss your subway stop.

Now that I have read 80% of O’Farrell’s five-book oeuvre, I feel safe in saying that she loves to play around with shifting narrative. Both backwards and forwards in time but also from different points of view. And the various threads eventually all come together in sometimes surprising, and always intriguing ways. I was somewhat to see O’Farrell use this approach in her first novel. I guess part of me was thinking that one had to work up to that kind of narrative complexity and that her first would be more straight forward. I think I was somewhat disappointed, like this whole interwoven thread thing was a little gimmicky. It is a good gimmick, don’t get me wrong, but I began to wonder if she is capable of something more straight forward. Would I even want her to try? That her first novel doesn’t do it as expertly as later novels may be why the notion came into my head at all. But ultimately for me this is a quibble.

For those of you who need more than abstract ramblings to entice you into reading a book let me try and summarize the plot. Alice is acting odd, gets hit by a car, ends up in coma. Too succinct perhaps? In the process we learn all about her childhood and her love life, her family dynamics, and we actually get some narrative from the comatose Anna. Still not enough? Edinburgh, London, love of her life, family secrets. And sex! Did I mention sex?! O’Farrell’s description of Alice’s sex life was positively male in its somewhat graphic, horny, honesty. If William Styron had written it, it probably would have annoyed me. But from a female writer it was kind of refreshing. Or it may have something to do with the objects of desire. I can identify with O’Farrell’s interest in men, while Styron’s raunchy desire for Sophie left me cold. Maybe this is why straight men tend not to groove on “lady authors” as much as I do. Could it be as simple as that?