Review: East of the Mountains by David Guterson

Ben is a retired cardio-thoracic surgeon, a widower, a man with terminal cancer. As the story opens, he is planning a last hunting trip during which he intends to commit suicide in order to spare his daughter and grandson the pain of watching him waste away. He is a meticulous planner, choosing to make his death look accidental but once he actually leaves for this final journey over the Cascade Mountains, even his elaborate and careful plans are turned upside down. After a car accident on his way to his chosen hunting grounds, Ben and his dogs set out to fulfill his intentions both traveling with others and traipsing through the countryside of his childhood on foot. During the journey, Ben recalls his own early years and meditates on the changes in the area around him.

Guterson has written beautifully of the Washington orchards and mountains. His portrayal of the various small towns through which Ben passes is consummate. And he captures the isolation and solitude of the area and of his main character. The pace of the novel is slow and measured and there are no loud and climactic moments as Ben wanders through the detailed landscape of his beginnings. This is not action-packed; rather it is a peripatetic and thoughtful journey about mortality and humanity. The narrative focuses almost solely on Ben and his internal life during the 48 hours which he has determined to be his last. The quiet flow of this story will not be for everyone but for those who are in no rush to overlook the beautiful descriptiveness contained within these pages, this is a haunting and melancholic read. Recommended with reservations.

Review: A Strong West Wind by Gail Caldwell

I was drawn to the idea of a memoir written by a literary critic in which she examines the pull of her Texas childhood on the woman she grows into being, who acknowledges the importance of the books she's read in shaping her personality, and who has gone on to have an illustrious and celebrated career in a field that is wildly interesting to me. Unfortunately, unlike almost every other reviewer out there who raves over this memoir, I thought the book fell flat.

Divided into two parts: Texas and everything afterwards, this was a painfully slow, navel-gazing read. The writing was able but pretentious. It was emotionally flat. Caldwell is clearly an incredibly erudite woman but her meandering text was a strain. It was a strain to care. It was a strain to stay awake. It was a strain not to close the book for good one night and give into surrender. While she didn't fall into the dysfunctional childhood memoir, exactly, she seems to suggest that her father's exacting and strict influence on her life was somehow injurious. The young girl who overcame being stricken with polio as a baby, who powered through so much on sheer determination as a child, seemed to be lost as she grew up. And in her place was a depressed woman who had somehow lost her way. Riding along with her while she tried to find her sense of self again was not particularly pleasurable, despite the occasional flashes of beautiful imagery. I am essentially alone in my assessment of the book but I don't want another reading experience like this one any time soon.

Review: North of Ithaka by Eleni Gage

Eleni Gage, namesake of the grandmother who was tortured and killed during the Greek civil war and who was immortalised in her father's memoir titled Eleni, decides to take time off of her job and return to her roots. Her goal is to rebuild the original Gatzoyiannis home despite her aunts' certain insistence that she will fall prey to the curse uttered by her grandmother, forbidding family from coming back to Lia, their native village not far from the Albanian border. Willing to brave the curse, Gage returns and embarks on both a family history and the reconstruction of the family home.

This is equal parts travel memoir and family exploration. As in many moving and starting over memoirs, Gage must rely on friendly villagers to help her recreate her family's ancestral home. She runs into the usual delays and bureaucracies as she tries to make a home destined to temper the horrors of the past. Unlike other travel memoir writers, she faces the added challenge of overcoming the terrible memories and distrust engendered by the atrocities of war as she brings the Gatzoyiannis home back to life. While living in Lia and overseeing the reconstruction, Gage has the chance to speak with village elders and learn more about her family from those who knew her grandmother. She makes many friends and brings long forgotten good memories to light through these new cross-generational relationships. She also gets to experience village life, local customs, and Greek culture in a way that so few non-natives do.

In creating this memoir of her year in Lia, Gage also invites us to know the characters in her family and in the village. She has written a book that makes the reader feel as if they too are family. It is interesting and reaffirmed my desire to visit Greece and experience the superstitions and care that she encountered myself. An interesting read, this should appeal to most fans of travel narratives.

Review: Bound South by Susan Rebecca White

Southern fiction is always high on my list of appealing reads. I love the eccentric characters, the enticing settings, and that indefinable something that marks them undeniably as southern. Combined with the cheery and colorful cover, this guaranteed that I would be buying this book for myself. And I am pleased to say that I was not disappointed in it.

Mostly told in the three alternating voices of Louise, her daughter Caroline, and her maid's daughter Missy, this enchanting novel details three very different examples of Southern womanhood.

Louise is a wife and mother struggling with her relationship with her difficult daughter. She is creative and has quite an eye but no outlet for that creativity. She takes on the problems of all of those around her, cantankerous mother-in-law, divorcing friend, and gay son. Over the course of the ten years of the narrative, she learns her own worth and how to best be there for others while still being true to herself.

Caroline is not the typical southern deb in waiting. She is an actress, one who disdains the others at her high school, one who wants to make a difference, one who cannot relate to the mother she finds overly conventional. Like her mother, Caroline learns much about herself throughout the novel, even if she runs away from the south and all that it represents in order to discover it.

Missy is a born again evengelical Christian whose father ran out on her mother and her when she was small. Waiting for him to come back for her and dissatisfied with her life as it is, she looks for her own good works to do. She decides that helping Charles, Louise's son, overcome his homosexuality will be the thing that changes her life. And it is, but not because she succeeds and certainly not in the ways that she expects.

The three main characters will draw the reader in and keep them reading along. The humor made me chuckle repeatedly. And yet White doesn't shy away from controversial topics, treating them fairly and sometimes slyly satirically. This is well written and entertaining and while the ending just tapers off, it is overall a fun slice of southern reading.

Compass Points Challenge 2009

Guess I should get around to signing up for my own challenge, eh? Of course I will be doing this as I am also hosting it. The rules are to read four books between March 1 and August 31 that contain the names of the four major compass points (North, South, East, and West) in the title. My list as it stands right now will be:

1. North of Ithaka by Eleni Gage
2. Bound South by Susan Rebecca White
3. East of the Mountains by David Guterson
4. A Strong West Wind by Gail Caldwell