Well reviewed a few years ago, it turns out Amy Bloom’s Away is the kind of historical fiction that doesn’t have a lot of effect on me. The main character, Lillian Leyb, travels across North America in the mid-1920s so that she can get to Siberia where her daughter might be. I loved her character, but the story itself is a tale of repeated advancing and falling back. There’s some decent moral takeaways as well.

In the early parts of the book, Lillian Leyb is introduced as a Jewish immigrant in New York City. She’s unsentimental, other than a deep love for her dead child Sophia. She meets people, cares for them, and is willing to take on roles for them without much fuss. Beard for the gay Yiddish theater star, no problem. Lover to his father, no problem. She views much of her life almost as a business transaction. She becomes fond of many of the characters she meets, but her interaction is almost an exchange of services for her.

Then she finds out that the pogrom that drove her out of Russia might not have left her child dead. A new immigrant to New York City carries a story with her of a neighbor saving the child and adopting her as her own in Siberia. Lillian must go find her even if the story isn’t true. But both lovers fail to assist her, showing the pitfalls of transaction based loyalty. Her alternative to a steamship trip back across the Atlantic (which she cannot afford), is to travel to Alaska via Seattle, and from there to boat across the Bering Straight to Siberia. But without money, the trek is easier said than done.

This is not a story of an inexorably advancing fight against the odds. Lillian falls into situation after situation, usually coming out of them worse for the wear, though sometimes closer to the end of her journey. In some ways, this is nice to see in a story. It’s kind of the opposite of Eric Flint’s 1632 where everything works out for the protagonists. But it also makes for a depressing story.

I also found the moral ambiguity refreshing. Murder, sex, mistressing, prostitution, theft, death, abandonment. The characters perform these things, and don’t really dwell on whether they are damned to hell for doing so. Likewise when similar bad things happen to them, it isn’t an occasion for the gnashing of teeth. Stuff happens in the world and they pick up and move on to the next thing. A few of the characters have deep attachments to some of the other characters: Lillian to her child Sophie, Reuben Burstein to his son, Gumdrop to her cousin Snooky, and a few others. But even then when bad things happen, the character pick up and continue with their lives, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Fiction often portrays the climaxes of stories as the completion of a person, but in real life, this is usually not so. We grieve when someone dies, we feel violated by theft or abandonment, but something else comes along in our lives and we deal. Away reflects this.

But while it may be fairly true to life in that respect, when the climax of a story isn’t a climax, it makes for a less than interesting plot. I enjoyed the characters very much, but since I’m a pretty plot-based reader, I couldn’t whole-heartedly enjoy the novel.

A few other blogged reviews:

• And I Quote… The Sequel
• Life Wordsmith
• Write Meg!
• Jewesses With Attitude

Title: Away
Author: Amy Bloom
Cover creator: Sherrie Wolf (painter)
Imprint / publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Format: Paperback
Length: 235 p.
Publication date: 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0-8129-779-0

Junot Díaz’ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. At least one reviewer called the award safe. I’ve seen that attitude from a few literary types, including a former co-worker at the bookstore. The line goes something like this: awards should go to books that need the publicity. In other words, awards do not go to books that are good. I realize the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Many great books do not get the buzz they deserve. On the other hand, the criteria for most of these awards does not include no one has heard of the book. One or two do, but not the Pulitzer. Anyhoo, to Paul Constant over at the Stranger, stuff it.

However, I have mixed feelings about the book. It’s the story of a fat Dominican nicknamed Oscar Wao. He doesn’t have the game with women that, according to Díaz, is built in to every Dominican male. He retreats into science fiction, role-playing games, and other assorted geekery. Gives up on his own life.

Díaz writes with raw language. Cuss words in both English and Spanish. Pretty frank descriptions of barrio life. While not the first to do this, it’s still refreshing. The language gives the book a very immediate feel. He also includes liberal doses of geek references, many of which only fellow travelers will get. I’m half-geek, and more than a few went over my head. Díaz also includes footnotes on the life and dictators of the Dominican Republic. I liked all of these touches.

Where I have really mixed feelings is about Oscar. He is a quintessential loser. He’s a loser so much he doesn’t even claim victim status in order to get special privileges to excuse his loserdom. He expects to die old, fat, and a virgin. At times I really got in to him. But a lot of times it felt like all the boringness of watching such a loser in real life.

A blurb on the book also called this the immigrant saga for people who don’t read immigrant sagas. I didn’t feel like it was all that different from some of the other immigrant sagas I’ve read. Other than a lack of a rise to and conclusion with the family in middle-class to upper middle-class respectability after being subjected to racism and economic hardship, this felt a lot like every other immigrant story I’ve read. An admittedly small sample size, but still. It’s not a huge drawback though because the point of this story is not about the family making its way in the first world. The focus is Oscar. So it’s somewhat different, and somewhat the same.

I’m glad I read the book, but it wasn’t an unqualified success for me.

Title: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Award: 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Award: 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
Author: Junot Díaz
Imprint / publisher: Riverhead / Penguin
Format: Hardcover
Length: 335 p.
Publication date: September 2007
ISBN-10: 1-59448-958-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-59448-958-7
Subject: Dominican Americans — Fiction
LC classification: PS3554.I259B75 2007

Another day of Sunday reading. Again this week I participated on the Wordsy podcast. Check out last week’s episode, which also features yours truly. There’s more though. If you are interested in appearing on the podcast, Hans has set up a conference call and wants people to call in. The phone number is on that link, but I believe the time will be 10 a.m. Pacific next week rather than 9:30 a.m.

Reading today is the last 225 pages of Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex. Last year when I worked at the bookstore, several of the more literary booksellers raved to me about Middlesex, so I used my employee discount and bought a copy. Given the size of my to be read pile, getting to it within the year is pretty good.

I can’t rave about it as much as my former co-worker though. I do see why it won the Pulitzer Prize, and why my friends loved it. But I didn’t engage as much as I would like. For one, it’s a family aga, and some of that form tend to drag. As did Middlesex. For another, a lot of the early family history in the book didn’t really seem to have a lot of connection to the main story. But by the time I got to the third and fourth sections, which are about the narrator, I was fully into it.

Calliope Stephanides is the narrator. He’s a hermaphrodite raised as a girl. This much is revealed early on, and everything builds to the point where Cal learns that he’s not actually a girl and comes to grips with it (mostly).

The family history told is that of his paternal grandparents, Lefty and Desdemona Stephanides, Greeks born and raised among the Greek minority in western Turkey. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire and a war between Turkey and Greece, Lefty and Desdemona escape to the United States (along with Dr. Philobosian, who plays a part later). The whole point of this backstory is that Desdemona feels guilty for her sins and believes that Cal’s hermaphroditism is a result of those sins. And in a way she may be right. But it ends up seeming like such a minor part (indeed Eugenides has Desdemona disappear in the last section of the book for the most part) that a lot of the history seemed kind of pointless.

In addition, there’s a bit part where Eugenides has Desdemona playing a role in the formation of the Nation of Islam in Detroit during the 1930s. Some authors feel the need to insert their historical characters into famous incidents. I don’t know why. It usually feels false to me. In this case it felt false and was also completely unnecessary.

The other part of family history involved is that of Milton and Tessie Stephanides, Cal’s parents. This is a bit more pertinent, for they fail to examine their daughter close enough to realize she’s a boy for 14 years. What personality traits and events can contrive to distract them so much? To me, this read like a lot of subtle commentary on the state of the American family during the 1950s and 1960s. Outwardly appearing to be very concerned with Calliope and her brother Chapter Eleven (I didn’t figure out why he had that nickname until the end), in reality they are looking much more at fitting in and achieving the American dream.

I also thought the last two sections on Calliope’s childhood and her realization that she’s not normal was quite well done. There’s a growing sense in her that something isn’t right. She doesn’t mature like other girls, for instance. It causes a vague sense of unease in her, but no direct questioning of what’s wrong. These days where sex is far less a taboo I suspect it would take a sheltering on the order of the F.L.D.S. for a person not to know their own genitalia.

I liked all the characters in the book. Eugenides portrayed every one of them except Jimmy Zismo (Desdemona’s connection to the Nation of Islam) in a positive light. They mess up quite frequently of course, but none came across as bad people. Just people dragged along by the cultural circumstances.

Anyway, it was good, though not as good as the other Pulitzer Prize winners I’ve read recently.

Title: Middlesex
Award: 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Cover creator: Henry Sene Yee (designer) / Olga Grlić (artist)
Imprint / publisher: Picador / Holtzbrinck
Format: Paperback
Length: 529 p.
Publication date: 2002
ISBN-10: 0-312-42215-6
Subject: Greek Americans — Fiction
Subject: Detroit (Mich.) — Fiction
Subject: City and town life — Fiction
Subject: Suburban life — Fiction
LC classification: PS3555.U4 M53 2002

I loved Michael Chabon’s family drama set in the milieu of the Golden Age of comic books from 1938 until 1954. And not even because of the comic book connection.

The story follows Josef Kavalier and Samuel Klayman (aka Sammy Clay). It begins in Prague, just after the Germans annexed Sudetenland and essentially took over the rest of Czechoslovakia. Restrictions on Jews started soon thereafter. Kavalier is scheduled to leave, but his exit visa is revoked at the border. Subsequently he seeks out a former teacher of his, the magician Bernard Kornblum to help him escape. Using their skills in magic, they manage to ship Kavalier eastward, and he makes his way to his cousin’s place in New York City. That cousin is Sammy Clay, who works for a novelty company drawing brochures and advertisements. But Clay wants to get into comics, which shortly before took off with the advent of Superman in Action Comics. Kavalier took art in Prague, and so he and Clay propose a new comic book to the owner of the novelty company, Sheldon Anapol. Anapol agrees, and that beings a long and fruitful collaboration between Kavalier and Clay. But Kavalier’s true goal is to rescue his remaining family from Nazi Germany. It’s an obsession the threatens to destroy him.

The first major positive about the book is the incredible research Chabon must have put into the settings. There’s the Jewish Prague of 1939, the comic book artist and writer scene of New York City, the upper-crust of New York as well, military bases in Antarctica during World War 2, and the suburban expansion of the 1950s. Chabon brings you right into the thick of these societies with detailed descriptions that match up with everything I’ve read of these eras.

On a related note, Chabon has an awesome flair for description. Often times, I detest overly wordy description as needless fluff. Not in this case. Take this excerpt describing the apartments of Jews in Prague:

In many apartments, there was a wild duplication and reduplication of furnishings: sofas ranked like church pews, enough jumbled dining chairs to stock a large café, a jungle growth of chandeliers dangling from ceilings, groves of torchères, clocks that sat side by side on a mantel, disputing the hour. Conflicts, in the nature of border wars, had inevitably broken out. Laundry was hung to demarcate lines of conflict and truce.

Chabon’s description and use of words is superb. I recognize a large number of words. Yet at least a dozen times Chabon managed to pull out words that I had to look up. It’s almost a bit much, like someone trying to impress you, but it works.

The last major plus I want to highlight is the characters. The book really rests on the characters. All of the characters become real. There’s about a billion layers to Kavalier and Clay, and Chabon even fleshed out the secondary characters like Anapol and Rosa Saks (Kavalier’s girlfriend and Clay’s wife). Oh yeah, I intended to let out that little tidbit. It’ll make things interesting.

Title: The amazing adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Awards: 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Author: Michael Chabon
Imprint / publisher: Picador / St. Martin’s Press / Holtzbrinck
Format: Paperback
Length: 636 p.
Publication date: 2000
ISBN-10: 0-312-28299-0
Subject: Comic books, strips, etc. — Authorship — Fiction
Subject: Heroes in mass media — Fiction
Subject: Czech Americans — Fiction
Subject: New York (N.Y.) — Fiction
Subject: Young men — Fiction
Subject: Artists — Fiction
LC classification: PS3553.H15 A82 2000

I moved Gifted to the top of my reading pile after it was put on the Man Booker long list this week. Now that I’ve read it, I can see why it was long-listed, but I am unsure if I like the book or agree with the status the literati have accorded it.

In addition to being a novel about a gifted child coming of age, Lalwani’s novel is also a novel of Indian people in the west. Rumika Rumi Vasi is the gifted girl. Her parents are Mahesh and Shreene. Her younger brother is Nibu. Mahesh and Shreene live precariously between the worlds of India and Britain. Rumi is much more firmly drawn to the West in which she lived (Cardiff, Wales), but her parents sequester her from everything to the best of their ability. Rumi doesn’t know any better than to follow along with her father’s desire for her to be admitted to Oxford at a young age, but she’s also clearly unhappy with the strictures with which he ties her down. She makes it to Oxford at age 15, but the pressure only increases on her.

Lalwani’s writing is generally good, but I found it to be choppy. It’s less a story than a series of vignettes. While the factual details of the story weren’t particularly important, I still found my immersion into Rumi’s character displaced by new things introduced in each vignette.

The writing does emphasize how isolated Rumi is. There are three characters in the book: Rumi, Mahesh, Shreene. Well, and one half character, Mark Whitefoot, a college buddy of Mahesh’s who stops by once per month to play chess with Mahesh. Everyone else is merely setting. Anyone Rumi could bond with is forced away from her one way or another, usually by the chapter after they are introduced. It’s an incredibly warped view of the world to grow up with. I got the feeling that Rumi was a victim of Stockholm Syndrome.

I felt very badly for Rumi throughout the book and wanted to strangle and slap around Mahesh and Shreene. The world is not as it was when you were a child, and the methods your parents used with you probably weren’t even appropriate then! And yet, when Lalwani delves into scenes from Shreene and Mahesh’s point of view, it’s incredibly clear that they aren’t evil people. They are Frankenstein monsters themselves. I pitied them, despite my anger at them.

I think a book worth reading, but in some ways because of how Lalwani ends the novel generally, though I have a beef with the very last scene. But no spoilers here since the book is barely out, so write me if you want to know that beef.

Title: Gifted
Award: 2008 Desmond Elliott Prize
Author: Nikita Lalwani
Imprint / publisher: Random House
Format: Advance readers copy
Length: 276 p.
Publication date: September 2007
ISBN-10: 1-4000-6648-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-4000-6648-3
Subject: Gifted girls — Fiction
Subject: Mathematics — Fiction
Subject: Immigrants — Wales — Fiction
Subject: East Indians — Wales — Fiction
Subject: Children of immigrants — Family relationships — Wales — Fiction
Subject: Culture conflict — Fiction
Subject: Cardiff (Wales) — Fiction
LC classification: PR6112.A49 G54 2007

I wanted to read this book mostly because it was the 2007 selection for Seattle Reads. It was a decent, but not outstanding, book. The novel is an exploration of assimilation by an American of Bengali heritage. His parents try to keep their feet planted firmly in both worlds. The son, Gogol Ganguli, for most of the novel wants to be an American and maybe visit his Bengali roots once in a while. But not that often. The title (The Namesake) comes from his father’s fascination with Nikilai Gogol. Gogol is supposed to be the child’s nickname, but without an official name to give him (due to some mishaps with the mail delivering a letter with the grandmother’s choice for an official name) it becomes his legal name. He doesn’t like it, and upon reaching the age of 18 becomes Nikhil Ganguli. His relationship with his name mirrors his relationship with his parents and his heritage. So we get to read about his stumbling his way through a series of relationships, mostly with women not of Indian descent. And we get to read about his somewhat distant relationship with his parents. There’s little dialog in the book. There’s very little action. Mostly it’s Lahiri describing people and social situations from Gogol’s point of view, and occasionally stepping into the head of other people. Worth a read, but I wouldn’t put it on any best of list.

Title: The namesake
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Cover illustrator: Philippe Lardy
Imprint / publisher: Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin
Format: Paperback
Length: 291 p.
Publication date: 2004
ISBN-10: 0-618-48522-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-618-48522-2
Subject: Young men — Fiction
Subject: Massachusetts — Fiction
Subject: East Indian Americans — Fiction
Subject: Children of immigrants — Fiction
Subject: Assimilation (Sociology) — Fiction
Subject: Alienation (Social psychology) — Fiction
Subject: Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich, 1809-1852 — Appreciation — Fiction
LC classification: PS3562.A316N36 2003