Review: Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow

Ragtime is called one of the best books of its time. It was apparently a trailblazer in terms of the way the novel has evolved. It is included on the lists of 1001 books that will make you a well read person. Obviously I missed something substantial here because it didn't impress me, draw me in, or engage me in any real sort of way. In actuality, I found it to be rather a mess. Then again, my critical facilities may be going haywire or, conversely, it could be an emperor has no clothes kind of situation here. I know which scenario I think it is. Draw your own conclusions.

This historical fiction novel is a pastiche. Ostensibly following several very different characters, Doctorow has woven real historical figures and actual events from the turn of the 20th century (right up until the eve of WWI) into his narrative. A plethora of characters is introduced and then seemingly dismissed in the early stages of the novel, only to reappear on the page later, making coincidental connections with each other. The almost vignette like narratives highlight the major ideas and enthusiasms of the time: Coalhouse Walker's quest for justice highlights rampant racism, Houdini's acts underline the public's fascination with death defying escapes and their interest in the occult, Father's trip to the North Pole emphasizes the way in which exploration still captured the imagination, the trial of Harry Thaw chronicles the birth of the celebrity culture through his actress wife Evelyn Nesbit's role in Stanford White's murder, the pow-wow between Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan showcases the rising industrialization and mechanisation of the time, and so on. Perhaps there's just entirely too much going on in the novel, too many characters, too many themes, and a superficiality to both.

The combination of fictional and real characters resulted in a short-shift approach to both and I found myself lacking sympathy for anyone. Late in the book when one character finally reappears, I just didn't care. And the coincidental intersections of the characters, real or imagined felt too contrived and intentional. This was, of course, a fascinating time period with so much nascent but I felt as if Doctorow had just missed the mark in depicting it. Having read it, I am that much closer to being "well-read" but I'm not any closer to understanding why.

Review: War and Peace

Finally!!!! Yes, it was sort of fun in a snobbish way, to carry around this door stop of a book and have people comment on the fact that I was reading it--if they really believed I was reading it and not just carrying it around to look smart. But I am more than glad to have finished this behemouth. Of course, now I have to try and review it, which is liable to expose my less than intelligent reading of it shamefully obviously. So let's just lay it out in the open, I am not nearly intelligent enough to read this anymore. (I say anymore because once upon a time I was truly smart and could read brain-challenging things like this, get something out of them, and converse thoughtfully on them. Not so much anymore.) So. My opinion of War and Peace? It's more like a novel and a philosophical treatise mashed into one and this less than discerning, very superficial reader found this an uneasy pairing. I think I read somewhere that Tolstoy most liked the bits I didn't so I probably missed the entire point of the book. What I liked: the domestic scenes, the characters' lives and interactions which showed war and peace perhaps better than the instances I didn't like. What I didn't like: the authorial intrusions discussing what makes a great military leader or the nature of war, and the extended accounting of troop movements and the intricacies of battle made my eyes glaze over with boredom. These bits were eminently soporific and contributed to the length of time it took me to read the book since I would page forward to see how long I had to endure what I was reading before getting back to the actual characters and when I saw with dismay the sheer number of pages of this ahead of me, I promptly stashed a bookmark in the book and took a nap. I have caught up on my sleep until 2010 (I had a lot of back sleep to catch up on) as a result. Had we managed to stay with the Bolkonskys, the Bezukhovs, the Rostovs, and the Kuragins, among others, I would have been a much happier reader, as the twists and turns in their lives and fortunes was most engrossing for me. As it stands though, War and Peace contains both halves and so while I feel a sense of accomplishment for having read it from cover to cover, I'm not sure it's something I can recommend to any but those who already want to check it off their lifetime reading lists.

Sunday Salon: Review: The Red Queen by Margaret Drabble

I like Margaret Drabble's work. I know next to nothing about Korean history. And I have a ridiculous fascination with royalty. So Drabble's The Red Queen easily caught my interest with only the barest minimum of jacket copy. Taking a fairly unknown, at least in the West, account written by a Crown Princess in eighteenth century Korea and weaving it into a novel, Drabble has written a completely engrossing story in three sections. The first section, narrated by the Crown Princess' ghost, tells the outline of her life. She married the Crown Prince as a child, long before his later mental illness became not only evident but increasingly dangerous and uncontrollable. She tells of her everyday life, sequestered in the palace, surrounded by political enemies and a few friends. Her account of a priviledged woman's life would be interesting enough without her marriage to the Crown Prince but the manueverings that his illness caused the court and his father the King to emply were also terribly interesting. The second section of the book, once the Western reader is conversant in the Crown Princess' life, focuses on Barbara Halliwell, an English academic travelling to South Korea for a conference, and the chosen "emissary" for the Crown Princess' story. Babs reads the princess' diary on her way to the conference and her interest is so piqued that she spends much of her down time (and a bit of the conference time as well) exploring the places connected to the princess. She is accompanied by a Korean doctor she meets and the pre-eminent speaker from her conference, with whom she embarks on a brief affair. The third section shows Babs after the conference is over and all the momentous events of it are long concluded and it details how the Crown Princess' story will be passed along into the future because it is a story that deserves to be told. There is a neat convention that strikes me as particularly Drabble-esque in this last part of the book but you'll have to read it yourself to see what it is. As always in Drabble's novels, the writing is precise and tight and very well done. The links between the three sections are strong and pull the reader along happily. I am thoroughly glad I took the time to read this one last month and recommend it to others who like depth and thoughtful reading in their lives.

Review: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

What a cool concept for a book: nesting stories like Russian babushka dolls. I read a later book of Mitchell's and thoroughly enjoyed it but was still leary of this one given that I already knew that Mitchell pushed the time period of at least one (turns out it was two) of his stories into the realm of the future and I am not often happy to follow where speculative fiction leads. But this was a marvelous book that managed to keep me engaged even through the sections about which I initially worried. Mitchell takes us through the centuries and around the world in his amazingly inter-linked story novel. We start in the 1850's in the tropics reading the diary of an upstanding American notary traveling home from an assignment. The diary ends abruptly mid-sentence as we jump to letters written to a friend by a penniless English composer in the Netherlands. We leave our composer mid-story to detail a young female detective in California looking into the suspicious deaths of several people in connection with a power plant funding corporate greed and carelessness. Our detective in mortal peril, we move onto a disheartening modern day England where a small publisher fleeing the thug brothers of his most famous author is committed to an assisted living home by his brother. Onward to a Korea set in the future where bio-engineering and corporate dissimulation have reached new terrifying highs. And thence to an island in the Pacific where the remnants of civilization, starting over after an unnamed catastrophic event has almost completely decimated the human race, we come to the apex of the story. Each story ties into the previous story in inventive ways and the arc of the story, especially as it gains momentum, running back through the earlier stories and telling the tales originally left untold, is masterful. This was well worth the time I spent and once I understood and accepted the form, it moved along swimmingly.

Review: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani

I ran across this book on one of my book group lists on the internet a couple of years ago but like so many books, I bought it and promptly stashed it into the masses to be read at some vague and later date. It can be quite hard to be rescued from this indignity as I forget about these books but this one is apparently a classic of Italian literature and appears on the list of books that could be read for the 1% Well Read Challenge so I headed to my stacks and pulled it out. The story, told from the perspective of a man looking back in time, tells of the Finzi-Contini family, a rich and somewhat reclusive Jewish family in Italy in the years leading up to World War II. The narrator is a young man, a Jew, who comes to be included in the inner sanctum of the Finzi-Continis, first befriending Alberto and Micol Finzi-Contini and then falling in love with the beautiful Micol. The story is an intricate one that balances the growing menace throughout Europe with the insular nature of the Finzi-Contini estate. The novel starts when the narrator is traveling with friends to Etruscan tombs. Their young daughter innocently sends him on a journey through memory to the time that he knew Alberto and Micol and their intriguing, eccentric family. This is not a lighthearted book, even though it details the narrator's growing love for Micol. The future looms too darkly over the Ferrarese Jews, including the Finzi-Contini family for all their seeming unconcern for Hitler and the suddenly enforced racial laws. There is a definite feeling of melancholy and dirge about the book and whether this is original or a function of the translation, it suits the storyline quite well. I won't say this is an easy book; it would be difficult if for no other reason than that we as readers know what inescapable fate is in store for these people but it is also a slow and ponderous book to read. There is much to appreciate but it has to be done slowly and with great deliberation.

Review: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

I've been sitting and stewing about this review for several weeks now because I have had a hard time deciding how to review a book that has so many plot twists that it resembles nothign so much as a DNA double helix. Obviously plot summary of any length would ruin the reading experience for the three people in the world yet to read this fascinating story of two Victorian era women who prove that appearances and even perceptions can be completely deceiving. I'm sure some other reviewer before me has labelled this a tour de force and it really is so I'll just echo their rather trite sentiment. I was happily accepting of the story that our first narrator, Sue, an abandonned child whose mother was hanged for thieving and who was subsequently raised and protected from the more sordid aspects of her situation by a loose gang of petty criminals, tells us. But this is a Rashomon of novels and nothing is as it seems, with each narrator building on previous accounts, and in some cases completely and totally turning what the reader knows to be true on its head. This could have been disconcerting except that Waters handles it well and never makes the reader think that she has thrown a twist in out of the blue. We are as surprised as some of the characters as they find out the truth of their lives and who they are, different in so many ways from their original perceptions of themselves. I wouldn't call this a thriller but it is definitely suspenseful, if only because you can't wait to see what's around the next bend or laying in wait for you on the next page. This will keep you up at night, racing to finish and find out all of it, even if you are generally an early to bed person.

Review: The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley

This Victorian children's morality tale is one that I've not heard many other people mention and that is a shame. It is more sophisticated than many elementary school-aged books written now and yet still sweet. Tom, a little chimney-sweep who is smacked about by his master, is cleaning a chimney at a great house when he is mistakenly thought to be a thief. He is terrified and runs off, all the while trailed by the queen of the fairies. After encountering huge obstacles in his path and overcoming them, he faces more mistrust and so wanders off to bathe in the river. He falls in and is transformed into a water-baby. As a water-baby, he has many adventures and learns to be a better boy than he had ever been when on land. This story owes much both to Gulliver's Travels and to The Odyssey. There are many strange creatures who instruct Tom in what is right and good during his quest and he has a loyal girl waiting for him to come home to her during his strangest adventure. The language would probably be a bit tough for elementary school readers today, either because they didn't understand it or simply because it is quite ornate and descriptive, unlike today's books, but the creativity of the land in which the water-babies live and the creatures that populate it might help children overcome these difficulties. There were pockets of the story that were a bit tedious in their insistence on moral lessons being pointed out in case the reader missed the significance of Tom's experience but this is very much a hallmark of the literature of the time and didn't ultimately detract from the overall loveliness of the story.