Archive for the ‘Fiction’ Category
How does one go about daily life in a city under constant missile and sniper barrage? This gem of a novel follows the arc of four lives during 22 days in May and June 1992: the cellist, the sniper, the water carrier and the baker. Through their eyes we come to understand the cost of modern war in a city that seems familiar. Sarajevo is an hour’s plane ride from Italy – closer by plane than Seattle is to Spokane.
The cellist uses music to mourn the random, senseless loss of 22 people, killed by shells while waiting to buy bread. The sniper, faced with the dilemma of killing for peace, must in the end face the implications of those killings. The water carrier and baker confront death in the simple acts of crossing streets and choosing to help neighbors and acquaintances.
Contained in this short work is a world committed to life. The heroics appear small insignificant choices but they mean the difference between dull acquiescence to circumstance or active living in an impossible situation. Here are some clues for living for all of us in an increasingly difficult world. ~Gretchen Echols
Cressida, born after World War II, is haunted by the horrors of the holocaust. Her comatose father lies in an upstairs room in the servants’ quarters tended by a faithful black retainer on an estate in South Africa. She spars with her mother who is addicted to romantic notions of love. Her conventional older sister wakes the household often with her nightmares of being attacked by Germans.
They have been given the use of the servants’ quarters by the owner of the estate, George Harding, disfigured by his own war injury. He goes about in a hat with a veil to hide the hideous burns sustained when he was shot down in a raid. George conscripts the reluctant Cressida to entertain his hapless nephew Edgar who has come to live with him.
As Lynn Freed recounts Cressida’s coming of age over a span of about eight years, characters are revealed to be classic fairytale types: a fairy godmother, a prince under the influence of a spell, a queen grasping at the remnants of her beauty. Hidden secrets are brought to light. As the years from sassy, recalcitrant pre-teen to lovely young woman are recounted, Lynn Freed, in spare concise prose, weaves a spell as magical as any fairytale. ~ Gretchen Echols.
Wartime Berlin, a city where the police answer to the Gestapo, tension is everywhere, and ordinary people struggle to survive is the setting for Hans Fallada’s novel Every Man Dies Alone. Written in 1947 and based on real events, this novel is translated into English for the first time. It opens with the delivery to Anna and Otto Quangel notification of the death of their son in the invasion of France. A quiet working class couple who keep to themselves, they share a building with a retired judge, a Nazi party family, an opportunistic petty criminal and an elderly Jewish woman. Grief over their son’s death, inspires them to begin a campaign of writing anti-Hitler postcards, dropping them in buildings around the city. They envision the rising of the common people against Nazi control of their lives as the cards are passed from hand to hand, inspiring discussion and dissent. In reality the cards are immediately turned in to the police, inspiring only terror in the hapless individuals who pick them up. In the dance of cruelty, manipulation, conspiracy and betrayal surrounding them, they doggedly continue to drop their postcards. United and fearless, convinced the war will be over soon and life will be better, they grow closer as the months go by. The police inspector in charge of their case is initially amused. As time passes Gestapo pressure increases, amusement turns to frustration and fear. Well written, following multiple intersecting storylines giving a taste of life in wartime Berlin, this is a can’t put down novel. ~Marla Vandewater
Seattle author, Erica Bauermeister’s first novel The School of Essential Ingredients (Putnam $24.95) is pure delight. It tells the story of eight students who gather each week for a cooking lesson from Lillian, a world-class chef who needs no lists and no recipes. For her, smells are “what printed words are for others, something alive that grew and changed.” She tells her students they will learn what they need to. With each lesson, friendships form, memories are evoked, and the characters learn as much about life as they do food. The writing is as sensual and satisfying as a good, slow meal. As Lillian says, the most essential ingredient of all is time -”the weeks it takes to ripen a tomato, the years to grow a fig tree. And every meal you cook is time out of your day – but you all know that”. Read this book on a Sunday afternoon, then create a pot of soup! ~Carol Santoro
In The Tsar’s Dwarf, by Peter Fogtdal, Sorine is a middle aged dwarf hired by the court of Danish King Frederick to jump out of a cake to entertain visiting Tsar Peter the Great. The next thing she knows she has been given to the Tsar, a collector of human oddities. In Russia, despite various demeaning situations, she continually asserts her intelligence and wit while retaining her dignity as a human being. Through her eyes we see life at the Russian court, in an Orthodox religious cloister, as a member of the Tsar’s museum of human curiosities and in the family of a wealthy Polish merchant. Elegant crystalline prose creates a multi-layered narrative as we follow Sorine on her journey. She is a captivating spit-fire of a woman, forging a life for herself in a hostile world. ~ Gretchen Echols
In The Niagara River Kay Ryan, our poet laureate for 2008-2009, writes brief, dense poems that are deceptively easy to read. The spare language is packed with meanings that imply greater things. Each short line vaults the reader forward by miles and results in arriving that much closer to the inarticulate. Her short poems contain many surprises in both internal and slant kinds of rhyme combined with exact rhyme. Ryan describes poetry as an intensely personal experience for both the writer and the reader. “The poem is operating so deeply in you that it is the most special kind of reading.” This is a slim volume holding gems of language, wit and wisdom that holds firm with many readings. ~ Gretchen Echols
“The poem is a raid on the inarticulate.” ~T.S. Eliot
Author Edwards spent 33 years on his manuscript, beginning when he was still a young English teacher in 1974. Such labors of love either turn out to be masterpieces of development or messes of over-thinking. Fortunately, The Little Book (Dutton $25.95) is one of the former. It’s part of a subgenre of unlikely time-travel tales, in which the “how” of transportation through the years is pretty much ignored in favor of appreciating the consequences of the journey. In Edwards’ story, teenage baseball star-turned-California rock musician Stan “Wheeler” Burden, attacked by an unknown assailant in 1988 San Francisco, tumbles backward to 1897 Vienna. There, he must adapt as best he can, striking up the most unlikely association with Sigmund Freud, and meeting his own father — another victim of this time dislocation — as well as his grandparents. In addition to discovering more about his father’s life and that of a former mentor, Burden helps fill out a vivid picture of Vienna before World War I, when it was still considered the intellectual capital of Europe. He must also contend with one moralistic dilemma after another, as he falls in love with a woman from his future and considers the opportunity of killing Adolf Hitler while he’s still a boy. The author obviously had fun contriving the lengthy arc of circumstances that will lead to Burden’s attack in 1988, but he shows even more delight in re-creating a long-ago and ostensibly promising era. If it took Edwards 33 years to write The Little Book, I fear we won’t see another work of fiction from him. Thank goodness his first novel is so memorable. – Jeff Pierce
Come to Moscow. It will be fun. With these words Fin entices her gay half brother Darcy. One year older, Fin has always held an uneasy allure. It is February 1984, In Russia homosexuals are persecuted. His passport is confiscated. Inexplicable encounters with men and Fin’s odd behavior pull him in different directions as over the course of a week his life goes wildly out of control. Part cold war thriller, part family drama, STRAY DOG WINTER (Macadam Cage $24.00) by David Francis will get your heart pounding. ~ Marla Vandewater
When crime novelist Mickey Spillane died in 2006, he left behind five unfinished novels featuring his hardest of hard-boiled private eyes, Mike Hammer. He stipulated that they should go to his friend, fellow writer, and occasional collaborator Max Allan Collins. Collins is now completing and publishing those books in Spillane’s memory. The first came out this fall: The Goliath Bone (Harcourt, $23), which is, chronologically speaking, the last Hammer, bringing the aging New York City gumshoe’s career to a fitting (and fittingly violent) close. While Hammer stories are often timeless, this one is tied firmly to the post-September 11 world. It builds around the discovery, in Israel’s Valley of Elah, of an oversized thigh bone said to be have once belonged to Goliath, the legendary Philistine giant felled by a slingshot-wielding David. The two young people who found this artifact are now threatened in Manhattan by both al-Qaeda terrorists and Israeli extremists, so they turn to Hammer for protection. In short order, Hammer and his secretary turned fiancée, Velda Sterling, are mixing it up with international assassins, federal agents, archaeologists, Broadway showmen, and at least one retired cop who’s having a hard time staying out of trouble. The Goliath Bone doesn’t send Hammer in a new direction, or cause one to rethink Spillane’s series as a whole. It’s a solid capper to Hammer’s professional arc, though, and a valuable reminder of this series’ strengths — fast action, a fully realized protagonist, and mayhem not inconsistent with Hammer’s urban jungle milieu and the dangers of his assignments. — Jeff Pierce
Jenny Shimada is a fugitive from justice living a quiet life in rural New York when she is found by a former associate and convinced to help some younger radicals on the run. Thrown together in an old farmhouse 30 miles from the nearest town, they negotiate resentment and distrust into tense workable relationships as months pass with no exit in sight. A surprise visit from the landlord pushes them into action with catastrophic results. Susan Choi’s fascinating and riveting novel American Woman (Harper $13.95) presents the psychological and emotional complexity of 1960′s radical action and life after going underground. Her clear and compassionate view of Jenny as she seeks to understand and reconcile her past with her current situation, keeps the reader fully engaged from beginning to end. ~ Marla Vandewater