Reading Life

Followers

Showing posts with label literary fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literary fiction. Show all posts

Monday, May 6, 2019

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

Set in New York, My Name is Lucy Barton, is a psychological portrait of a woman who has survived a terrible upbringing of cruelty and poverty. 


At the start of the novel, Lucy, who is temporarily hospitalized, received visits from her mother. Lucy is grateful for the visits and grateful for the doctor who seems to genuinely care for her. 

Underneath the mother's kindness, however, there is an undercurrent of cruelty. Lucy is the only one who has successful escaped her humble beginnings in Amgash, IL. 

Lucy has gone to college and become a writer but she still experiences loneliness and disconnection. Once after Lucy has her first baby, she calls her mother. Her mother, however, refuses to accept the charges for the collect phone call.

This novel is set in the 1980s before cell phones and smart phones. Another crucial part of the novel is the AIDS epidemic; Lucy feels a connection with outcasts and with the neighbor who is dying. 

The brothers and sisters she left behind in Amgash feel some resentment for Lucy, who made it out of the rural community. Those themes are explored in Strout's award-winning short story collection,  Anything is Possible

Lucy discovers she will always be connected to  her family even though she has left them and started life anew elsewhere. 

The Chrysler building on the cover makes sense.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

The Blind Contessa's New Machine

The Blind Contessa's New Machine
Is this novel really about the machine as the title suggests? Since the machine, a typewriter, is what allows the blind Contessa to communicate with her lover its obviously pretty important.

But frustratingly, the novel doesn't tell us (or maybe its not meant to) what Pellegrini Turri's last letter relays. The Countess leaves his last missive on the bed even though a girl offers to read it to

her. We also don't know how much Antonio knows when he burns the typewriter. Typewriters at this time were apparently made almost entirely out of wood, except for the "type" plates.

The ending and the setting instantly remind me of a Henry Jamesian novel. The reader is left in the "dark" on purpose. What we don't know about characters is just as important as what we do know.

The novel does make me eager to learn the Carolina Fantoni and Pellegrini Turri's history. It leaves readers with a delightful scent of lemons, winding rivers, and fanciful dreams. Though Carolina's fate is tragic the novel also leaves readers with a new appreciation for the lengths someone will go through to find a chance of happiness.

Becasue there are so many open ended questions, this novel would make a wonderful book club selection.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Out Stealing Horses

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson.

Out Stealing Horses is a novel that immediately grabs hold of readers's attention. I was hooked from the moment Petterson describes Trond's friend, Jon:

Jon came often to our door, at all hours, wanting me to go out with him: shooting hares, walking through the forest in the pale moonlight...balancing on yellow logs...it was risky... He never knocked, just came quietly up the path from the river...Even in the morning early when I was still asleep, I might feel a restlessness far into my dream...He smiled his little smiled and squinted...'Are you coming?' he said. 'We're going out stealing horses.'

The phrase "out stealing horses," has a double meaning, one for the son and quite a different one for the father. Stealth is an important element in the novel, though there's no actual stealing: the boys never intend to take Barkald's horses.
The point-of-view, expertly executed by Petterson, moves back and forth in time. Readers see Trond as a fifteen-year-old, enjoying his last summer of  innocence, and Trond as a sixty-seven year-old man vexed with a neighbor that could be his doppelganger.

Though Trond would rather not revisit his past, the summer he played "out stealing horses" comes back to him in his older years and in his dreams. As a teenager, Trond is blissfully unaware of  anything beyond the beauty of the woods and the game he plays with his friend, Jon. Two unrelated accidents, a shooting and a fall, soon set a whole different series of events in motion that are as irreversible as the stacked timber that  falls in the Glomma river.

Trond's father is not the man Trond thinks him to be--not the man he trusts and admires. The pair, Trond and his father, have been staying in a rented cabin in the furthermost reaches of Norway. Though their time cutting trees bonds father and son together; sadly, it is also a precursor to betrayal. Petterson won one of the highest literary awards, the Dublin IMPAC award, for this evocative novel.



Review by Chantal Walvoord

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Liesel Litzenburger's The Widower


The Widower by Liesel Litzenburger
A baby left in an orchard, a gun won in a pool game, a car wreck on an icy day, and snapshots taken in a hotel room are isolated incidents that fatefully converge in this beautifully written literary novel. In one sense, the stories of the people who live in this small town in Michigan’s upper peninsula are in the words of one of the characters “unbelievably sad.” Ray who says he’s in the “life saving business” can save everyone but himself. The widower of the title, Swan Robey, just wants to be left alone after a tragic incident on an icy road. A young Canadian woman becomes involved with an abusive boyfriend. A convict returns to his hometown after spending the last twenty years in jail.

Like the Wislawa Szymborska poem, “There But for the Grace,” chance encounters cause these characters to meet and find reprieve from their sorrows.

 What I liked best about the novel is the beautiful language Litzenburger uses throughout. Here’s one of many beautiful descriptions of the lake: “Soon the big lake is visible, silver, flickering through the trees. Then the whole of it bottomless, forever. It is his map, his secret. It holds his life. He can follow the shore road, the water, all the way home.”

Litzenburger's latest work is Now You Love Me, a collection of short stories. 

Blog Archive