mamabrico

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“Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics, an ambitious and surprising first novel, starts out with a bang, proceeds with a pow, and ends with a boom. Part adventure story, part coming of age tale, part murder mystery, it’s not a novel for the faint-hearted or for those who shrink from dense, wordy prose. If this sounds like a criticism, it’s intentional. Pessl’s style veers between clever, lively, and engaging, and clumsy, ostentatious, and precious. Ultimately, though, the book holds up and, at least according to this reader, is worth the challenge.
Our narrator is Blue. Blue van Meer. She’s a precocious and savvy teenager, poised to graduate as valedictorian of her class. Blue lives with her father, a man who seems to consider himself intellectually superior to just about everyone, save, perhaps, Blue herself. Blue’s mother, an ardent butterfly collector, died in a car accident when Blue was very young. The van Meers live a peripatetic lifestyle, uprooting every semester and moving to yet another college town where Blue’s father sets up as visiting professor. Blue attends a different school every couple of months. At least this is the pattern until her senior year, when her father announces that, for this critical year, preparation for her upcoming years at Harvard (it’s a given that Blue will end up at Harvard), they’re settling in one spot for the duration. And here is where the drama begins to unfold as Blue falls in with an elite group of students, hand-picked by a charismatic and alluring young film teacher who cultivates these select students like hot-house flowers. The novel culminates in a cataclysmic camping trip which shatters Blue’s world, revealing the illusory nature of all perceptions, even, and perhaps particularly, those we most profoundly rely on.
I could just leave it at that and have done with this little review, but the style of the book bears at least passing mention. Everything we, as readers, learn in the book is filtered to us through Blue’s unconventional consciousness. She communicates largely via references to literature, philosophy, political theory, and history, liberally quoting and referencing primary works, both real and invented by Pessl for the sake of the novel. This tribute to the enduring works which help shape our world is taken a step further with the structure of the book; Pessl organizes the novel as though it were the syllabus for a university literature course. The title of each chapter is the name of a book; we begin, for example, with Othello, and then we read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, followed by Wuthering Heights. Careful readers will note how each chapter pays homage to its namesake.
Our vision, our comprehension, of the events narrated by Blue are Blue’s own version and vision of those events. And we must never forget that, while she’s remarkably advanced for her age, she’s still an adolescent. Pessl has constructed a surprisingly complex novel, using this narrative technique. Blue is trustworthy. Entirely so. But how accurate is the interpretation of a teenager, caught in that moment between child and adult and interpreting the world from that perspective?
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mamabrico wrote this review Saturday, September 8, 2007. ( reply | permalink )

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“When I first escaped the exacting confines of academia, after spending a bunch of lofty and challenging years working on a doctorate (I never quite finished!) in literature, I found myself unable to tolerate "serious" literature. Or perhaps, more accurately, just not inclined to negotiate serious literature. On the other hand, I devoured mysteries, vampire novels, police procedurals, romances, thrillers, chick-lit fiction, and any other kind of light reading I could get my hands on. At one point, all I wanted to read were Dorothy Sayers mysteries (they're fabulous, every last one); at another point, my reading list consisted exclusively of Elizabeth George's cozy British mystery series. I read all of them. In order. And at some other point, I wanted only to read books about magicians. Not the lovely magical realism that erupted from Latin America in the latter part of the 20th century, but gritty, exploratory novels about magicians and their wild lives. As my graduate school experience receded, I slowly emerged from this cerebral-book-avoidant corner and started reading serious literature again, but this time with an appreciation of all the other literature that's out there! At this point, as many of you already know, I love a good, challenging highbrow piece of literature. But I also love just as much a good, gripping, well-told story! Serious literature or not, if it's well-written, well-plotted, interestingly told, I'm just as likely to be hooked.

That's precisely what happened, the other day, with Sarah Gruen's Water for Elephants, a lively, action filled romp in the proverbial Big Top. We meet roustabouts, freaks, grifters, misfits, ringleaders, animal tamers, circus performers, and an extensive collection of animals, ranging from the exotic to the comparatively common but never mundane. The protagonist, Jacob Jankowski, unexpectedly facing a life turned upside down, jumps on a passing train and lands in the midst of The Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Only one exam away from being a certified veterinarian at a top university, Jacob is given the job of caring for the circus animals. As he becomes more involved in the inner workings of the circus, we learn of the dysfunction, the class divisions, and the fears that grip this world - the tensions between the circus performers who are treated like royalty and the lowly circus workers who are expected to cater to the stars, man the circus, fix what's broken, feed whoever's hungry, and generally keep things running smoothly. Jacob occupies a surprisingly flexible position, with his intimate knowledge and understanding of animals making him an invaluable addition to the circus crew and his lowly status as a drifter taken in by the circus making him no different from any other worker. Stitched on top of this lively patchwork is a simple love story made all the richer by its unusual cast of characters and its colorful milieu.

Gruen reveals, in the "Author's Note" at the end of the book, that she was inspired by a 2003 Chicago Times article about Edward J. Kelty, a Depression-era American photographer, who spent several years, during the 1920s and 30s, following traveling circuses around the United States. She tracked down several of his books of photos and her novel grew out of his photographs and his stories about the circuses and the individuals and animals who animated them. This world is brought vividly to life by Gruen, both because of the meticulous attention to detail, and because she punctuates her novel with photographs from Kelty's books, adding a profound visual depth to her work.”

mamabrico wrote this review Saturday, September 8, 2007. ( reply | permalink )

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“How often do you buy a book because of its simple heft in your hand and the clarity, the appeal, of its cover? On a whim last month, I picked up a little paperback book from Mollat. Ordinarily I read fiction, with the occasional non-fiction or memoir interrupting the flow. I couldn't resist the title of the book. Red Dust: A Path Through China, by Ma Jian, a writer I'd never heard of before. I'll confess to an abiding love, almost an obsession, for nice little paperbacks. I don't mean cheap, mass-market paperback romances with lurid covers; I don't even mean gripping thrillers dripping with blood and guts. No, I mean small, nicely bound, appealingly packaged little paperbacks. I can't say no! And it's even worse when their cover pages are matte cardboard instead of the more ordinary glossy stock. Red Dust was potent in its allure; its cover largely white with a primitive red woodcut print -- an Asian dwelling with a thatched roof in the upper right hand corner, Buddhist prayer flags stretching across the upper quadrant, the Great Wall of China straddling the bottom third. Everything else is white save the title, black lettering against the central white section of the cover, and the author's name printed, also in black, within the red woodcut pagoda-like structure in the upper right. Despite the random way I ended up with the book, the purchase proved to be a good one. I loved the book. Let me tell you a little bit about it.

Red Dust is a memoir about an extraordinary adventure that the author undertook in the early 80s. Ma Jian situates us in the middle of his world, totalitarian China, the working world of Beijing, where every move and every utterance is under surveillance, where every individual expression is suspect, and where freedom of any kind does not exist. He's a 30 year old photographer, tasked with taking Communist propaganda photographs of factories and their employees around China. In his spare time, he studies Buddhism, writes poetry, and paints. These activities have garnered him the watchful glare of his superiors. He's uncomfortable under their scrutiny and ultimately decides to walk away from his job and start a 3 year journey across China.

As Ma Jian travels, by train, by bus, by bicycle, and primarily by walking, through rural China, across mountain ranges and deserts, through snow and ice and searing heat, we see over and over the astonishing beauty of his nation. The breadth and diversity of the landscape are with him constantly; the vestiges of China's history, the ruins of cities and temples, provide the backdrop for his journey. He details a near death experience where he finds himself walking across the desert with no water, having misjudged the distance to Lake Sugan. He's saved by the taciturn kindness of a man fixing the wheel of his truck. The man doesn't offer to drive him back to civilization. Instead he places the lid of his thermos, filled with water, in Ma Jian's path. And then he tells Ma Jian to follow a set of wheel tracks and wait until dawn, when a truck will pass. We never find out whether the driver of the passing truck the following morning is, in fact, the same man who gave Ma Jian his water. All we discover is the harsh clarity of struggling to survive, first in the brutal daytime heat, and then in the unbearable cold night of the desert.

In a later chapter, Ma Jian stumbles accidentally upon a leper colony, underfunded and essentially forgotten by the government, which is kept intact by the kindness of a young doctor who refuses to leave because he's gotten attached to the patients. Receiving virtually no financial help from anyone, the members of the colony, in various stages of physical disintegration, work the land and manage to eke out a frugal life for themselves.

Throughout his travels, Ma Jian is confronted by the cruel absurdity of the totalitarian regime, the strange, petty behavior that such a regime engenders in its subjects, and the surprisingly frequent and even more sensational generosity which even a regime as heavy and forceful as the Chinese Communist party can't suppress.”

mamabrico wrote this review Saturday, September 8, 2007. ( reply | permalink )

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

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“Summer is reading time, isn't it? Bookstores put out entire tables devoted
exclusively to items deemed somehow appropriate for the season. And we, we readers, anticipate long evenings, the sun happy to oblige with light until
late into the night. I've always loved hot, sultry evenings filled with books; I remember the hours when, as a child, I’d climb the red-bud tree in our front yard, big heart-shaped leaves hiding me from the neighborhood kids playing kick-the-can in the street, a book clutched in my hand as I scrambled up, bare feet and single handedly. Sometimes I'd get called away, lured, perhaps, into the antics of the games in the street, and I'd forget and leave my book up there. I'd find it, the next morning, folded open where I'd stopped the night before, pages slightly soggy with the hint of damp from its night outdoors. I'd find it still there in the morning; I read hundreds of books each summer in that
tree.

I no longer average hundreds of books per summer, but I'm still committed to
reading. The highlight this summer was Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. Murakami, a contemporary Japanese writer, gives us a wild surrealist novel which focuses primarily on a young protagonist, Kafka Tamura, a thoughtful and prepossessing high schooler who’s run away from home both to get away from a mysterious danger, and to search for a mother and sister who disappeared years ago. The chapters alternate between Kafka’s wanderings and those of Nakata, a gentle misfit gifted with the ability to chat with local cats. These two make their way across an apparently random landscape despite obstacles that constantly threaten their peace. Each has a lovely knack for befriending powerful,protective personalities. Though they never actually meet, their paths constantly intersect, impacting each other as
well as the broader world. And oddly, the coherence of the region in which
each moves seems to depend on the way one behaves in relation to the other.
As in dreams, their actions affect each other and their intimate surroundings. In the same way Nakata raises his umbrella just in time to protect himself from sardines raining from the sky, Kafka manages to help a tragic, unhappy woman find her way to the country of the dead, a mysterious place she's been seeking for 30 years of a long, obsessive life.

Murakami seamlessly stitches together bits & pieces of Japanese culture,
American pop, Asian and western philosophy, jazz, the spirit world, and much
more. In Kafka on the Shore. we meet an astonishing cast of characters,
including Colonel Sanders, a savvy and fast-talking pimp claiming he's
"neither god nor Buddha" but rather "a concept," and the deeply sinister
Johnnie Walker who stalks Tokyo's cats, collecting their souls for his own
dark purposes. If this novel sounds like a dizzying ride on a surrealist
rollercoaster, it's also an astonishingly enjoyable trip! Murakami is such
a master storyteller that, despite the book’s apparently scrambled,
haphazard details, the whole hangs together superbly.This is an unfailingly
readable though never overwhelming page- turner. ”

mamabrico wrote this review Saturday, September 8, 2007. ( reply | permalink )

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“Read this book for a host of reasons: it's beautifully written, deeply moving, evocative, historically accurate, and illuminating. I would say it teaches with delicacy and verve; I never felt pounded by any kind of agenda, an easy trap to fall into when the book's subject is as heartrending as Adichie's.

Adichie gives her readers a glimpse into the lives of a group of people caught in the turmoil of the Nigerian civil war (1967-1970). Focusing on 2 Igbo sisters, twins from the southern part of Nigeria, the British boyfriend of one of the sisters, and the houseboy of the other, she traces their movements, their connections, their philosophies, and their fragile and concerted attempts to remain alive and in contact with one another. The result is profound. Don't miss this.”

mamabrico wrote this review Wednesday, August 8, 2007. ( reply | permalink )