Bird Cloud: A Memoir by Annie Proulx

Ordinarily, when I see a book about a person who buys some land and builds a house, my interest doesn’t go much further. However, when the builder is noted author, Annie Proulx, and the house is her dream home in Wyoming, my interest piqued.

Proulx is one of the best novelists and short story writers of the late 20th and into the 21st centuries. Her award-winning novel, The Shipping News and That Old Ace in the Hole are my favorite of her books. I always show my creative writing class a documentary about Ms Proulx writing Ace. It shows them the amount of research and hard, meticulous work that a novelist of Proulx’s stature puts into a new work of fiction. Her short stories, however, represent another whole aspect of her talent. I can honestly say, I have never read a Proulx short story that I did not like.

In Bird Cloud, Proulx tells the story of her family from its French-Canadian roots through to New England. She describes several places she lives, but none of them match her ideal home for reading, research, and writing. She searches Wyoming -- three collections of her short stories are subtitled “Wyoming Stories” – for a perfect plot of land, secluded, but near enough to civilization for food and supplies. She wanted a place where she could have rooms that looked out over the vast prairies nearby and mountains in the distance. Then she launches into a history of the area she selected dating back to the earliest inhabitants several thousand years ago, through to the Native Americans pushed out by white settlers in the 19th century. Then the search began for an architect and construction crew. The delays and pitfalls were frustrating and costly.

Once the house is finished, she takes a detailed inventory of the flora and fauna surrounding her. She has particular interest in birds, and spots several pairs of eagles – bald and golden – along with falcons, hawks, ravens, owls, and myriad song birds. Here, she describes one unique encounter.

“It was a big thrill when I saw a white-faced ibis near the front gate where there was irrigation overflow. The ibis stayed around for weeks. A few days after this sighting I was sitting near the river and saw two herons fly to the bald eagles’ favorite fishing tree. They were too small to be blue herons, and did not really look like little blues. A few minutes with the heron book cleared up the mystery; they were tricolored herons, the first I had ever seen. By the end of the month, American goldfinches were shooting around like tossed gold pieces despite another cold spell” (220).

This conversational style gives her prose a smooth and seamless fluidity that paints a digital-quality image in the mind of the reader. She welcomes me into her world as a expected visitor. This memoir will appeal to those interested in wildlife, because her keen eye for observation reveals much about the fauna of a wilderness area most of us would never visit.

The house is complicated in its orientation, layout, and construction, and I can imagine such a wonderful hideaway for a writer and reader. If you have never read Proulx, start with one of her collections of stories and get a feel for her exquisite view of nature – flora, fauna, and human. 5 stars

--Chiron, 3/8/11

Mentor: A Memoir by Tom Grimes

Mentor is the second book recommended by my good friend, Margaret Hawkins, author of A Year of Cats and Dogs and How to Avoid a Natural Disaster, both reviewed here last year. Grimes’ memoir must be on the shelf of anyone interested in the writing process or writing while trying to hold body and soul together. Tom had an amazingly supportive partner, Jody – that makes all the difference in the world. I can personally attest to the value of spousal support.

In 1988, Tom Grimes wrote 20 hours a week and held down a job as a waiter in a Florida restaurant. A fleeting encounter with Frank Conroy, published novelist and director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, led Tom to apply to Iowa. He was accepted and packed up his family and moved. The memoir revolves around the relationship Tom developed with Frank. He also reveals, in great detail, the agonies, joys, triumphs, and disappointments of the writing life.

The Amazing thing about this book involves an incredible number of passages that reflect closely on my own reading and writing life. For example, he describes his first class with Frank, who began by writing on the board, “meaning, sense, and clarity,” then said, “‘If you don’t have these you don’t have a reader’” (25). Another, “the world is chaos and an artful novel satisfies our human desire for order, or … the novel excavates meaning from the rubble of incomprehension” (55). Frank discusses the “impostor syndrome” with Tom. “You can’t believe good things are happening to you and you’re worried someone will find you’re a fake…Don’t worry, it’ll pass” (121). I have said these, and many other things, to my creative writing classes.

At times, Tom displays a seemingly inexplicable lack of confidence in his writing. But a writer knows and understands. I can relate to that feeling. Agonizing over a poem or a story for hours or days or months only to see someone chop it to bits, or worse, dismiss it out of hand, can have a devastating effect on a writer. Grimes gives the reader a boost and a reminder that beginning writers can never give up – if they are serious about their art.

Only one chapter failed to hold my attention. Chapter Eleven, which relates the story of a play Tom was writing, is written as play dialogue. Beside this minor lapse, I thoroughly enjoyed every other page. This book goes on my reading list for my own creative writing students. 4-3/4 stars

--Chiron, 3/3/11

Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life by Barbara Louise Ungar

Not everything Amazon.com recommends turns out to be a waste. These sharp, but simple poems convey all the passion and emotion a reader could want in a collection of verse. I had never heard of Ungar, but the title intrigued me, so I bought it. It is so very (too?) easy with one click shopping to indulge a passion – or an obsession – these days, but I am really glad I did.

Here’s my favorite:

“Moccasins”

Sky-blue beads’ pattern of heaven
and walking on wind—
who made them?

When I left home
and the great Plains behind,
I painted the floor of my narrow

room that very blue: I had
a futon, books and clothes,
three windows that opened on chains

into magnolia trees.
I lived in the sky.
I danced all night and out into the dawn.

It’s those cloud moccasins
I want, dancing the sky (52)

This poem, and almost all the rest of this collection, embodies everything I love in poetry I read and write: simple images, nice phrasing, a smooth, flowing rhythm, with a wonderful, unexpected closing image. Many even have a nice crisp edge to them. Ungar doesn't hold anything back. Anger sometimes peeks out of this collec tion about break-ups and divorce, but it never has a hint of self-pity. 5 stars

--Chiron, 3/4/11

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

A good friend in my book club recommended this, and I was a bit skeptical when I found out it was a young adult novel. However, I Capture the Castle proved to be a mixture of Brontë, Austen, with a dash of Dickens – in short a wonderful read that tells a story of interest to any serious reader.

Cassandra, the narrator, is 17 on the verge of 18. She has finished school and decided to keep a diary to help her learn to write. Her wonderfully quirky family includes her younger brother Thomas, an older sister Rose, her father James Mortmain (the author of a well-received novel who is now blocked), his wife Topaz (the children’s stepmother), and Stephen, the son of a deceased housekeeper of the Mortmain’s who had nowhere to live. Heloise (the beloved dog), Abelard (the cat), and Miss Blossom (a dress form with a personality all her own) round out the main cast.

The family has serious money problems, and one day, two Americans arrive to take possession of the estate on which the Mortmains live.

Cassandra is one of the best narrator/characters I have ever had the pleasure of sharing all the joys and sorrows of growing into adulthood. She has a marvelous imagination, and places herself in all sorts of situations. She goes for a walk with Stephen. Smith writes, “As we pushed aside the first green trails of larch I thought, ‘Well, this will disprove my theory that things I’ve imagined happening never really do happen.’ But it didn’t – because everything was so different from my imagining. The wood had been thinned out, so it wasn’t cool and dark as I expected; the air was still warm and the rays of the sinking sun shone in from behind us. The tree trunks glowed redly. There was a hot resinous smell instead of the scent of bluebells – the only ones left were shriveled and going to seed” (251).


Reading this prose, I felt as if I were in the room as she told me the story of her life. The prose is simple, yet elegant, descriptive without being overbearing – in a word: marvelous. She cleverly hid the ending in quite a few clues that only made sense when I finished the book. I hated to put it down and read it in three chunks of about 15%, 35%, and 50%. I also watched the film which was pretty good, although as expected several scenes were deleted, shortened, or combined with others. Despite this minor disappointment, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, but I loved the book completely. A must read for anyone with the slightest touch of the romantic. 5 stars

--Chiron, 2/25/11

Beet by Roger Rosenblatt

Academic novels are among my favorite reads – especially those involving English professors. I measured Beet against my favorites: Straight Man by Richard Russo, The English Major by Jim Harrison, and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang, and I am happy to say this one measures up! The fun, the politics, the turf wars, the “unusual” students, the bizarre faculty, and the businessmen trying to turn a college into a business are all present in their funny, sad, and tragic glory.

Peace Porterfield is a tenured English professor who cares about only one thing: teaching his students. Rosenblatt writes, “All he knew about being a professor was students, teaching, and learning, and this skewed and narrowed prospect of academic life deprived him of the full, rich picture” (26).

If I listed all my favorite passages, this would be the longest review I have written to date. But here are a few:

“There were more political constituencies on the faculty than professors” (45). “What’s wrong with making a buck? … “Nothing. Unless that’s all you make” (121). “Once money alone drives these [academic] institutions, they’re goners” (126). “He [a fellow faculty member] had a liberal arts education, you had one, I had one. What’s it for, if not to enable us to beat back people whose only values are dollars?” (126). And lastly, really my number one favorite: “Professor Porterfield was just the sort of faculty member he despised, … ‘He keeps to himself. He teaches, talks to students in office hours, and goes home. He doesn’t gossip’” (145).

Chapter Nine was rather poignant. It focuses on Peace as a professor. The chapter begins, “The better teachers at any level possess invention and imagination. These powers are not the same and are not equal. An imaginative teacher is always inventive, but an inventive teacher is not necessarily imaginative” (101). The chapter includes a Socratic dialogue between Peace and his creative writing class.

Irony abounds in this novel, from the fierce feminist student who continually uses “seminal” to characterize her ideas to the name of the English building, Mallory, which is a misspelling of the Sir Thomas Malory, author of the great legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

Tons of literary references are spread throughout the book as well. Peace’s wife, Livi, often calls him “Candide,” because of his naiveté and cockeyed optimism. At the end of the novel, Rosenblatt foretells the future for most of the main characters, but he doesn’t know what happened to Peace. “He may have decided to cultivate a garden – not one of his own, but somewhere that had no gardens, and needed them. One simply doesn‘t know what Peace’s future contained. His present was good enough. He took her hand [Livi’s], and they walked together from that place” (225). A free book to the first reader to identify the literary reference contained in the last sentence of this novel!

Students might not find this novel funny, administrators might wince on occasion, but faculty members will howl with laughter. 5 stars.

--Chiron, 2/20/11

The Reckoning by Howard Owen

Suspense takes a place in my reading life only once or twice a year, so I like to save the space for a well-told story, with interesting characters, and a plot with believable twists and turns. Howard Owen has admirably fulfilled this task with his ninth novel. Seems as though I have some searches at local bookstores and, failing that, on Amazon ahead of me!

Jake James is 16, a cross country star, and seeking his first intimate relationship. He is the grandson of “Wash” James, failed candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia and scion of a wealthy family that owned a famous Virginia ham company. Jake’s father, George, runs the company now, and his past intrudes into the life of Jake and his friends.

The story lives in a backdrop of the Vietnam War and 9/11. George graduates from college one year after I did, so many of the events and characters are strikingly familiar to me. I lived through the national turmoil of the 60s and 70s, and Owen has recaptured those memories for me in amazing detail.

My major problem with the story is a curious episode at the end. Jake befriends a nine-year-old Guatemalan boy, who is the son of his aunt’s housekeeper. The novel is 2-1/2 pages too long to my tastes. I did some checking and some reviewers feel this ties up the novel with Jake becoming a little self-centered and more caring about others. However, I never really saw him as entirely selfish -- he was a typical teenager. I am much more interested in the evolving relationships between Wash and George and then George and Jake. So, I still think this ending was a bit too cute. Aside from that, I found a few sentences and references that gave me pause. Nevertheless, this is a page turner of the first order. 4-1/2 stars.

--Chiron, 2/11/11

The Seven Sisters by Margaret Drabble

This rather peculiar book has really left me perplexed. I discovered Margaret Drabble in grad school, and was surprised to learn she is A.S. Byatt’s sister. Byatt visited a class in British Women Writers. I had already known Byatt from her novel, Possession, and I have since read most of her novels. When I first read Drabble, I liked her, but not entirely and not as much. Her prose seems a bit stilted at times, and I had to stop on more than one occasion to pick up a thread she had dropped.


The story starts out as a diary of Candida Wilton, newly divorced mother of three daughters. Candida has taken her divorce settlement and moved from rural Suffolk to a slightly squalid London neighborhood. She takes a class reading Virgil’s Aeniad, but when the building is converted to a health club, she aimlessly joins. She has friends from school, whom she rarely hears from, and friends from Suffolk, whom she rarely hears from, and doesn’t seem able to make any solid new friends. When a sudden windfall lifts her from near poverty, she rounds up her friends for an adventure retracing the steps of Aeneas from Carthage to Naples. This is part one.

Part two suddenly shifts to third person and relates details of the trip to Italy. Then one of her estranged daughters weighs in as the narrator of part three, with a final section from Candida, post Italy. This must represent some sort of post-modern novel, but the ending confused me quite a bit. I am going to have to dig up some serious reviews and see what others think.

I really enjoyed the diary section. The issues of aging, broken relationships, loss of family and friends all made for an interesting excursion into the life and mind of a 50-something women who finally gets a grip on herself.

The section on the Italy trip was also good, but I felt it lacked some detail. The daughter’s section reminds us that every story teller tells his or her version of events. The last section really confused me.

Not the best Drabble I have ever read, but it certainly was worth the effort. This one will need a re-read sometime soon. 4 stars.

--Chiron, 2/6/11

Neither Wolf Nor Dog by Kent Nerburn

I wasn’t sure I would like this book. A good friend who is really into some New Age things recommended it for our book club. I had read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee years ago and found that horribly tragic tale of genocide moving and unforgettable. As I began Nerburn’s book, I became absorbed from the opening pages. This first person account of atrocities and the underlying philosophy of Native Americans, takes its place as an important supplement to Dee Brown’s book. While some of these incidents had a vague place in my consciousness, Nerburn brought them into clear focus with his collection of “talks” by Dan, an elder of the Lakota tribe.



Quite a few passages really stuck out. Here they are – without comment – because they clearly speak for themselves.

“Our elders were schooled in the ways of silence, and they passed that along to us. Watch, listen, and then act, they told us. This is the way to live” (65).

"‘Look out there, Nerburn’ he said. I surveyed the lavender morning sky and the distant rolling foothills. “This is what my people care about. This is our mother, the earth.”
"‘It’s a beautiful place,’ I offered.
He snubbed out his cigarette. “It’s not a place. That’s white man’s talk. She’s alive. We are standing on her. We’re part of her’” (131).

“'Whenever the white people won it was a victory. Whenever we won it was a massacre. What was the difference? There were bodies on the ground and children lost their parents, whether the bodies were Indian or white. But the whites used their language to make their killing good and our killing bad’” (162-162).

Dan’s granddaughter weighed in, when she met Nerburn during one of the author’s trips around the reservation with Dan. She said, “They ignored us. We were just women. But we were always the ones to keep the culture alive. That was our job, as women and mothers. It always has been. The men can’t hunt buffalo anymore. But we can still cook and sew and practice the old ways. We can still feed the old people and make their days warm. We can teach the children. Our men may be defeated, but our women’s hearts are still strong” (249).

I did find some minor faults with the book. I felt the book went on just a bit too long -- the last few chapters were really over the top. I got the message clear as a mountain stream without them. While Dan often complains about how “Hollywood Indians” sounded, he frequently sounded like a Hollywood Indian to me.

But overall, a touching and shameful account of the genocide this country perpetrated against Native Americans. At times, it had a rather Zen-like feel to it, but it was always, honest and from the heart. 4-1/2 stars

--Chiron, 1/26/11

Solar by Ian McEwan

While searching for a novel with a title I could not quite remember, I stumbled on a similarly entitled book by Ian McEwan. I examined the dust jacket, and I bought it, because, judging by the cover, it sounded interesting. Several decades later, I eagerly await each new novel by this Booker Prize-winning author.

Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Solar, tells the story of Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who expanded on an aspect of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Beard coasts on his past glory, and now seems only interested in the pleasures his reputation can bring him. Patrice, his fifth wife, has discovered an affair, and Michael experiences severe regret and tries everything to mend his marriage. He returns home early from a conference to discover his post-doctoral student assistant naked in a dressing gown Patrice had given Michael for his birthday. Michael’s life becomes as dense and entangled as the theories and calculations that made his reputation.

As in all his novels, McEwan mires his characters in contemporary problems and difficulties. Otherwise intelligent people seem bewildered when faced with moral and ethical choices. When Michael receives a possible solution to the problem of global warming from a deceased colleague, he decides to pursue this idea alone, and gathers funding from numerous sources in the U.S.

As I approached DFW airport the other day, I silently hoped for one or two more turns circling the airport so I could finish the last 18 pages – McEwan’s prose is that good. What I like most about McEwan’s novels are the tiny fire crackers he plants along the way, which turn out to be bombs that flare unexpectedly. Finding these seemingly offhand remarks becomes a game I relish when reading his work. For example, when Beard takes off from England for a conference near the Arctic Circle to study melting glaciers, he looks out the window of the plane. McEwan writes,

“Here was a commonplace sight that would have astounded Newton or Dickens. He was gazing east, through a great rim of ginger grime – it could have been detached from an unwashed bathtub and suspended in the air. He was looking past the City, down the bulging widening Thames, past oil and gas storage tanks toward the brown flatlands of Kent and Essex and the scene of his childhood and the outsized hospital where his mother had died, not long after she told him of her secret life, and beyond, the open jaw of the tidal estuary and the North Sea, an unwrinkled nursery blue in the February sunshine. Then his gaze was rotated southward through a silvery haze over the Weald of Sussex toward the soft line of the South Downs, whose gentle folds once cradled his raucous first marriage, a synesthesia of misguided love, infant excrement and wailing of their lodgers’ twins, and the heady quantum calculations that led, fifteen years and two divorces later, to his prize. His prize which half blessed, half ruined his life. (107-108)

McEwan’s lovely prose hides a secret, and as I circled DFW, too absorbed to look out the window, I turned the last page, and the “commonplace” exploded into a tragic-comic ending, which left me looking forward to McEwan’s next novel. 5 stars

--Chiron, 1/12/11

Chipmunk Seeks Squirrel by David Sedaris

At first, I did not really like this collection of fables, but, trapped on a long flight to California, and with nothing else to read easily at hand, I decided to slog through to the end. Actually, I began to enjoy the tails [pun intended], and the last were the best of all.

I really look forward to Sedaris’ pieces on NPR, but I rarely enjoy his writing. It always seemed smarmy to me, and I had a hard time relating to his tone. However, I heard him interviewed on Terry Gross’ show, Fresh Air and felt this latest book might be interesting. I also saw him interviewed on Jon Stewart, so I decided to give him another try.

This book had its moments, but it will not make me a fan of his writings. As I began this review, I tried to figure out some explanation for this dichotomy, but I came up empty. As I said, the last story was really good, and made me close the book with a chuckle. “The Grieving Owl” tells the story of an owl whose mate is three days dead. he obsesses over learning things, and jilts a young female his mother tried to match him with. Two brothers and his mother stalk the grieving owl, and sometimes steal his victims of hunting, because he asks them to teach him something in exchange for their freedom.

Now, a beast fable is a story with animals who have human characteristics – including the power of speech – which contains some moral lesson. Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest Tale” is a classic of the genre, right up there with Aesop and his foxes, hares, and tortoises. The glitch is in the moral. For the life of me, I cannot figure out this as any more than a humorous, slightly bawdy story. Characteristics shared by most of the tales.

Owl sees a rat and debates the one rule of owldom – never engage with your food. Kill it immediately and eat. But he catches a rat, and begins a conversation:

“So this rat, it was as if he were following a script. ‘I just swallowed some poison,’ he claimed. ‘Eat me, and you’re destined to die as well.’

It’s embarrassing to hear such lies, to think they think you’re dumb enough to believe them.

‘Oh please,” I said.

The rat moved to plan B. ‘I have children, babies, and their counting on me to feed them

I said to the guy, ‘Listen. There’s not a male rat in the history of the world who’s given his child so much as a cigarette butt, and don’t try to tell me otherwise. In fact,’ I went on, ‘from what I hear, any baby of yours has a better chance of being eaten by you than fed by you.’”

Grim humor, yes, but pretty amusing. The brother of Owl, steals the rat when he tells Owl something interesting, and then the brother eats the poor fellow. Oh, well. If I ever figure out what the moral is, I’ll let you know. 3 stars

--Chiron, 1/7/11

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins, one of the foremost proponents of the “new atheism,” has returned to his first profession, evolutionary biologist. In this fascinating work, he lays down, in clear terms for the non-professional, all of the evidence from DNA to skeletal structure to behavior proving Darwin’s theory of evolution.

He starts off with some things I have argued for years. People who do not believe in evolution misunderstand the use of the term theory in that connection and fail to grasp the immense time scales involved. In fact, Dawkins describes quite a few things about evolution, which seemed to be mere common sense to me. Bi-lateral symmetry and similar skeletal structures for example.

Near the end, he sums all this up in a neat little package. Dawkins writes,

“What Darwin didn’t – couldn’t – know is that the comparative evidence becomes even more convincing when we include molecular genetics, in addition to the anatomical comparisons that were available to him.

Just is the vertebrate skeleton is invariant across all vertebrates while the individual bones differ, and just as the crustacean exoskeleton is invariant across all crustaceans while the individual ‘tubes’ vary, so the DNA code is invariant across all living creatures, while the individual genes themselves vary. This is a truly astounding fact, which shows more clearly than anything else that all living creatures are descended from a single ancestor. Not just the genetic code itself, but the whole gene/protein system for running life,…is the same in all animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, archaea [microbes that live in extreme environments] and viruses. What varies is what is written in the code, not the code itself. And when we look comparatively what is written in the code – the actual genetic sequences in all these different creatures -- we find the same kind of hierarchical tree of resemblance. We find the same family tree [emphasis by Dawkins] – albeit much more thoroughly and convincingly laid out – as we did with the vertebrate skeleton, and indeed the whole pattern of anatomical resemblances through all the living kingdoms. (315)

On one or two occasions Dawkins does become a bit overly technical, and some passages required a slower and repeat reading, but overall this is a thoroughly readable and enjoyable account of the present state of the theory of evolution. (5 stars)

--Chiron, 1/14/11

Old Heart by Stanley Plumly

These are the kinds of poems I do not like. Awkward constructions, twisted odd metaphors, minimal punctuation, dense imagery all prevent me from enjoying this book of poetry. Unfortunately, the poems he read were not in any of the books he had for sale – at least none in the ones I bought sound even vaguely familiar.

Maybe the poet, reading this kind of poetry, knows where the commas should be. But the casual reader is lost. I read a couple I mildly liked, but most of these were less than enjoyable. 2 stars

--Chiron, 12/31/10

Tinkers by Paul Harding

Usually, for some unknown reason, I do not follow the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but a good friend recommended Tinkers, so I thought I would give it a go. This peculiar novel recounts the last couple hundred hours in the life of George Washington Crosby as he lay dying. During this time, he reminisces, hallucinates, and briefly becomes lucid as to his surroundings.

Most of the prose has a smooth, dreamlike quality, but I was puzzled by frequent shifts in viewpoint from George, to his father Howard, and to George’s grandfather. Harding tells some of these flashbacks and memories in first person and some in third person. This seemed confusing at times.

George’s hobby concerned clocks – collecting and repairing them. He made lots of money which he squirreled all over the place. Many of the images of people getting sick and dying resembled the winding down of a clocks works. George and Howard both had missing fathers.

The psychological aspects of this novel, however, really stand out. The hallucinations, the memories floating in and out, all punctuated with those moments of lucidity when George had to recollect where he was, who all the people around his bed were, and why he couldn’t wind his clocks.

A decent novel, a worthy addition to the Pulitzer Prize canon, but the confusing bits bothered me. 4 stars

--Chiron, 12/31/10

The Clam Lake Papers by Edward Lueders

Margaret Hawkins, author of The Year of Cats and Dogs and How to Survive a Natural Disaster, told me I have to read this book. And who am I to argue with a writer I admire so much? Not surprisingly, she was right.

This short novel/poetry/philosophy/meditation volume has a quirkiness all its own. The author/narrator is a college professor who spends his summers in his cabin on Clam lake in Northern Wisconsin. He arrives one year to find his food depleted, his bed slept in, and a letter from a mysterious stranger who has spent the winter writing and meditating on language, literature, life, and the flora and fauna in his snowbound cabin.

I have often fantasized about such a hiatus from the world. The silence pervades the pages, and I could not hear the stranger’s voice. Some of his musings are serious and some comic, but all have an air of a man seriously grappling with the large and small details of life.

The stranger is most concerned with metaphors, and he reduces much of human existence to the wide variety of ways we use metaphor. I am not sure I bought into this idea entirely, but it certainly is intriguing.


Winter on Clam Lake









I will nominate The Clam Lakes Papers for candidacy on my “Desert Island Shelf.” It certainly needs another read after I have thought about it a little more. The author has penned a restful, relaxing, serene story, and Lueders has revived my fantasy of a getaway vacation without cell phones, radios, TVs – only paper, pencils, books, and a supply of food. 5 stars

--Chiron, 12/29/10

The Snapper by Roddy Doyle

I first discovered Paddy Doyle with Paddy Clarke Ha, Ha, Ha, his Booker Prize winning novel from 1993. Doyle has a level of humor that rivals any writer today. He has an understated tone – much like the English – but with a wild Irish flare.

Twenty-year old Sharon Rabbitte finds herself pregnant after an unfortunate encounter following a marathon drinking bout in a local pub. She refuses to reveal the name of the father, but it leaks out when the father leaves his wife and proclaims his love for Sharon. It takes all Sharon’s wiles to convince her family and her friends the man is lying. Her flimsy explanation doesn’t fool many, but the force of her personality brings them around – eventually.

This novel of family, friends, enemies, and especially father and daughter not only has wonderful humor, but many poignant moments as well. Unfortunately, the language is peppered with four-letter words uttered incessantly by and among all the friends and family members, so I won’t quote any of my favorite passages here. Forewarned is forearmed. The best jokes are the dirtiest, and the worst Doyle delivers in an amazingly comic dead-pan style. I have a few more of Doyle’s novels, and I can’t wait to see what else he has in store for me. (Five Stars)

--Chiron, 12/26/10

Sestets by Charles Wright

A publisher sent me this book for some reason – perhaps he or she had my address and some empty envelopes and nothing to do on a quiet afternoon. I am ambivalent about Charles Wright. Sometimes I like his poems – quite a few in this collection actually – and sometimes I like them until the end. These poems have a discordant, unexpected twist at the end that jars my vision of the poem. He probably intends that reaction in a reader. Twists and turns inhabit the ends of many, many poems, and I don’t mind those. Wright’s just happen to cross over the line. For example, here is “‘Well, Get up Rounder, Let a Working Man Lay Down’” [Note: structure lost when transfered to blog]:

The kingdom of minutiae,
that tight place where the most of us live,
Is the kingdom of the saved,
Those who exist between the cracks,
those just under the details.

When the hand comes down, the wing-white hand,
We are the heads of hair
and finger bones yanked out of their shoes,
We are the Rapture’s children. (19)

If this doesn’t make sense to you, that’s poetry. I can only suggest each reader must decide for him or herself. Here’s a poem – my favorite in this collection – that is perfect and complete in my view, “‘It’s Sweet to Be Remembered’”:

No one’s remembered much longer than a rock
is remembered beside the road
If he’s lucky or
Some tune or harsh word
uttered in childhood or back in the day.

Still how nice to imagine some kid someday
picking that rock up and holding it in his hand
Briefly before he chucks it
Deep in the woods in a sunny spot in the tall grass. (32)

How many times have I picked up random stones and tossed them into the woods, a ravine, a lake, a stream, or the ocean? Have I altered the course of history? Have I ever so slightly unbalanced the delicate scales of existence? This is what I love about poetry -- the images, the memories, the connections to my own existence. 4 stars

--Chiron, 12/20/2010 (The Winter Solstice)

Long Lankin by John Banville

On my annual trip to Charleston and The Blue Bicycle Book Shop, I stumbled on this slim paperback of John Banville’s first book. Although changed from the 1970 original – one story and a novella were deleted, and one story added – this collection has an atmospheric air about it that reminds me of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

Each of these stories has wonderful prose wrapped about a mysterious person, perhaps a ghost, perhaps a murderer, perhaps a fleeting shadow in the woods. Most of the characters have anxieties, passions, and secrets. Banville deftly builds to the climax of each story.

Curiously -- there is no title story – but they all have a psychological probing into the characters. In “Summer Voices,” Banville’s prose elucidates the characters of a brother and a sister who have escaped from their aunt’s daily prayer session for a swim.

“The boy did not move. Sunlight fell through the tiny window above the stove. The radiance of the summer afternoon wove shadows about him. Beyond the window a dead tree stood like a crazy old naked man, a blackbird hopping among the twisted branches. The boy stood up and went into what had once been the farmyard – the barn and the sties had long since crumbled. After the dimness of the kitchen the light burned his eyes. He moved across to stand under the elm tree and listen to the leaves. Light glinted gold through the branches. He stood motionless, his arms hanging at his sides, listening, and slowly from the far fields, the strange cry floated to his ears, a needle of sound that pierced the stillness. He held his breath. The voice hung poised a moment in the upper airs, a single liquid note then slowly faded back into the fields, and died away, leaving the silence deeper than before.” (65)

I only wish I had discovered this writer 40 years ago! I am making my way through his 15 published works, and it is a journey of sublime delight. (5 stars)

--Chiron, 12/19/10

The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan

I picked this short novel as my next read, because I thought it might be a respite from the last few long and intense works on my reading list. Well, my streak is now at four. McEwan is one of my favorite authors. His fluid and brilliant prose has consistently reinforced my belief in him as one of the masters of 20th--century fiction.

The Cement Garden tells the story of a family nearly alone in a run-down area of abandoned and crumbling apartment blocks. One day, the father dies of a heart attack while working in the garden. Almost immediately, the mother takes to her bed and dies – apparently of cancer. This leaves Julia, Jack, Sue, and Tom to fend for themselves. The family had no relatives to check on the four youngsters and no neighbors who showed any interest in what was going on in a house McEwan describes as gothic.

Julia, the oldest, begins dating and her boyfriend becomes curious about the secrets the house contains. This story has the air of The Lord of the Flies in miniature. The children play games, fantasize, and more or less take care of the house and each other.

This intense novel is not for the squeamish or faint of heart, but it does have a mysterious air throughout the 140 pages. McEwan runs the race to the last word of the last page. The climax at the end has as much shock as any suspense story I have read in a long time. If this book were a movie – faithful to the text – I cannot see it getting anything less than an NC-17 rating. Nevertheless, I have to give this brilliant psychological novel five stars.

--Chiron, 12/12/10

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

Cleopatra is arguably, as Stacy Schiff stated in a recent interview, the most famous woman we know so little about. I would add the most famous woman about whom so many myths and misperceptions swirl about her. Schiff has set down a detailed biography drawn from contemporary sources, including Plutarch, Dio, and Josephus. She carefully points out inconsistencies in these accounts, and deftly explains the political and social reasons her history appears as it does today.

Schiff disposes of several myths. She was not Egyptian, or even African – she was Greek through and through. She was not beautiful. Some Romans chided Julius Caesar for his liaison with her, because, “she’s not even beautiful. Lastly, she did not take her life by the bite of an asp. Alexandria held a reputation as a center for the finest poisons in the known world. Their potions acted quickly, irreversibly, and with no pain.

The Romans – great admirers and imitators of the Greeks – seem to have taken a cue from Euripides, who wrote, “Clever woman were dangerous” (qtd. in Schiff 4). She had an impressive education – the finest anyone could receive at the time. She spoke nine languages, and routinely negotiated difficult agreements and treaties with foreign kings without the aid of an interpreter. Even her contemporary critics “gave her high marks for her verbal dexterity. Her ‘sparkling eyes’ are never mentioned without equal tribute to her eloquence and charisma” (33).

The Romans treated their women as little more than personal objects to be bought, sold, traded, or discarded on the slightest whim. Cleopatra’s world, however, provided an environment in which women thrived socially, politically, financially, and educationally. According to Schiff, “as much as one-third of Ptolemaic Egypt may have been in female hands” (24). After her death, “a golden age of women dawned in Rome” (295). Suddenly, they enjoyed unprecedented freedom and political power.

The Romans respected Cleopatra, after all her fields and stores of grain fed the Roman Empire. But they also feared her wealth and her position as a queen with unparalleled support of her people. During her 22 year reign, not a single revolt or attempt on her life ever occurred. Rough estimates of her personal fortune place her among the wealthiest people of all time – over $100 billion dollars in today’s money. Kings would routinely give her a gift of thousands of silver talents, when 220 of the coins could feed and equip a Roman Legion for a year. Favored Court officials might be paid a single talent a year and believe themselves well-compensated. Yet her generosity with her people and her guests was legendary at the time.

Near the end. Schiff writes, “In the match between the lady and the legend there is no contest.

The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all: We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight, in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty. She remains on the map for having seduced two of the greatest men of her time, while her crime was to have entered into those same ‘wily and suspicious’ marital partnerships that every man in power enjoyed.” (299)

The only problem I had with the text came in the lack of connection to quotes and over 40 pages of notes. She opts for endnotes marked only by the page they reference. However, the notes have a detail, and at times a touch of humor, absent in such a vast undertaking. Schiff tells the true story of one of the great love stories of all times. She cites dozens of versions of her story, including Shakespeare’s, perhaps his greatest love story. Even if a reader’s grasp of Roman and Ptolemaic history resides in a dim college classroom, this biography will enthrall and amaze. The slight inconvenience in searching out and reading notes is well more than worth the effort to shine a brilliant light on those memories. 5 stars.

--Chiron, 12/12/10

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Some books make me laugh, some make me cry, some fill me with anger, and some with wonder and amazement. Every once in a great while, a book will do all of these things to me. The Help is one of those books.

Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, a recent grad from Ole Miss, has a degree in English and Journalism. With a great deal of optimism, she applies for a senior executive editing job at a major New York publishing house. A sympathetic editor advises her to get some experience first and asks her for story ideas she has to tell. None of them have any value beyond her local community, until she decides to tell the stories of black maids working for white families. The editor likes the idea and tells her to start writing. Skeeter’s naiveté exposes itself, when she wishes Editor Elaine Stein a Merry Christmas. Her deadpan reply, “We call it Hannukah.”

The story is set in Jackson, Mississippi with a back drop of the murder of Medgar Evers, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the passage of the Civil Rights laws of the 60s. Stockett uses three voices: Skeeter, Aibileen, the first maid to talk to Skeeter, and Minny, a powerful personality in the Black community and the first to join Aibileen in telling her story.

These women cook, clean, shop, and, most importantly, raise the children of these women whose main occupations seem to be gossip, bridge, and keeping the servants in their place. The parenting issues this novel raises alone make this a great and absorbing work of fiction. I get the feeling of a true story with only the names changed to protect the brave women who volunteered to open up to public view the ugly side of their lives.

At first, the maids are too terrified to talk to a white women, let alone tell the stories of Skeeter’s friends. Gradually – when one of the housekeepers has been brutally treated by her employer – her friends that work in white households all over the city come around and begin telling the tales of their difficult lives.

This sometimes grim tale, does have its moments of humor. When Minny gets a job in the suburbs, she wants to take the car, while her husband who works the night shift at a local factory wants it. Minny says, “She paying me seventy dollars cash every Friday, Leroy.” He responds, “Maybe I take Sugar’s bike.”

These strong women bear inconceivable burdens dealing with the prejudice of their employers while holding their own families together. Incredibly, they prepare food for the families, but they cannot use the same utensils to eat lunch, and thanks to one particularly obnoxious woman, can no longer use the toilets in the houses they spend all day cleaning. Once again, the inhumanity of one set of people against another – simply because of the color of their skin – baffles me.

One of the most poignant moments occurs near the end of the book at a church meeting called by the maids who told Skeeter their stories. This community demonstrates amazing strength in the face of threats to their homes, their jobs, and their lives. To anyone who thinks the servants in the “Jim Crow South” led happy and pleasant lives, The Help will come as quite a shock. 5 stars

--Chiron, 12/2/10