The Idlewild Discussion on an Anthropological Botswanan Journey That's Really a Love Story

I've talked about all the light reads I've been working my way through this fall, but my October book club choice was the opposite of a light read. Take one look at Mating by Norman Rush and everything about it says heavy read. It's almost 500 pages; those pages are nearly transparent; even the cover makes you think, "...Oh, this is definitely literary."

These surface judgments were only half accurate. If a book can be both dense and easy to read at the same time, then this one does that. Let me explain: the narrative isn't told in a hard-to-understand way; the language is fairly conversational, and there is a plot there—it's not just musings. But it's actually this casual language that makes this book take a lot longer to read than most. (To give you an example, I had 200 pages left on the Thursday before our meeting, and that night I read from about 6pm to 11:30 pm, minus about 45 minutes, to finish those 200 pages. It took that long. My usual approximate 1 pg/min rate did not apply here.) Dialogue punctuation is non-existent, so you really have to get in the flow of what's happening to follow. (Not a book that can be read in short little 10 min subway commute chunks.) Also, the language is sort of stream of consciousness but not in a totally rambling way. More of a, this is how I would say it if I were talking to a person, with interrupting clauses and without correct sentence structure, way. 

So now that I've given this great rundown on how this book is written, you probably want to know what it's actually about. The year is somewhere around 1980. Our unnamed narrator (and she remains unnamed throughout the entire novel—a fact I didn't realize until our discussion) is an American anthropologist in Botswana. She's around 32, highly intellectual, highly independent, and also incredibly curious about people. Specifically, her relationships with people. We gather early on that this narrative is a recollection; she's telling us, from the beginning, about her relationship with one Nelson Denoon, the fascinating but mysterious founder of an alleged utopian society out in the desert. Denoon becomes our narrator's obsession, as she is bound and determined to venture to this settlement and make herself part of Denoon's life.

While this book is somewhat plot-driven, what's most interesting is the story running below the surface. At the basic level, you have this woman on her own in Botswana, seeking out a man out of curiosity. A bit deeper, though, Mating is about this woman and how she makes decisions, and this relationship and how these two people interact. The setting alone could be its own story, but Mating isn't really about the setting so much. It's more about our narrator and Denoon, their lives simply set against an interesting backdrop. Our narrator is a unique character in a unique setting. Perhaps it's this quality and this quality alone that made her feel like a somewhat distant character, unrelatable to a degree. But Mating also felt very much like a product of its 1980s time, and maybe 32 in 1980 is very different than 32 in 2013. (E.g. At 28, I'm at the point where I related more to 30 than 20, but I felt nothing in common with our narrator.)

To be honest, I expected to get a lot more out of our discussion. And maybe we did dig deeper, but I had two glasses of wine at our meeting and then stayed up way too late...so I could just be forgetting all our ground-breaking points of discussion! Either way, I did enjoy this book and it felt good to stretch my heavy duty reading muscles for a change. To me, reading serves one or two purposes, sometimes both at the same time: it provides entertainment and it, in some way, educates. Sometimes one trumps the other when you choose a book off the shelf, but both are fabulous.

Reading Roundup: Maybe If I Were Older...

Despite my love of Southern lit, and despite Lee Smith being a preeminent author of modern Southern lady lit, The Last Girls is actually my first encounter with any of her books. This story reunites a handful of college friends on a Mississippi River cruise, decades after their first trek down the river on a makeshift raft as young, idealistic co-eds, at the request of the husband of their recently deceased friend, Baby. It's one of those situations where completely different personalities come together because of a common bond. We meet four modern-day characters from the original gaggle of girls [there are like a dozen of them, so why do we meet only four?], and these women all have their flaws. They've lost touch; they're mostly cynical; and none seem too pleased for this reminder of their pasts.

I didn't like a single character in this book. And as a result, didn't really like this book at all. It felt like all these people had been dragged down by things in their life, when nothing really bad had happened to them to warrant such a negativity. [They're all middle class and white and probably just bored.] I think the author was trying to say a lot about life and friendships and secrets and how these things shape the person you eventually become. Maybe I just not old enough to understand and appreciate that kind of reflection, but I find it hard to believe that every single character had somehow morphed into a shell of her former, youthful self. There was such an aura of negativity that I wondered why any of them agreed to this trip in the first place. So maybe The Last Girls was not the best intro to Lee Smith. [It is, by far, her lowest rated on Goodreads.] We'll have to try again.

Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary was this month's book club pick, and while I was neutral towards it [mostly just thought it was boring], I was excited for the discussion; we have such a range of ages in our group that I knew others would be able to provide insight I never saw.

The story follows two characters—two strangers—whose lives are pushed together by the most random of situations. William G. and Neaera H. are both adults living fairly quiet, lonely lives. William was once married but now lives alone and works in a bookstore. Neaera writes children books and self-describes as a spinster without cats. They're both drawn to the turtle tank at the London zoo and become obsessed with the idea of freeing the turtles. The short chapters alternate in perspective, but their thoughts are often so similar that you forget whose thoughts you are reading.

I think that's much the point of this story. It's about these two people who feel utterly unconnected finding a connection in an unlikely place. It's not a cute story; it doesn't follow the expected trajectory of a romance. It has a lot of thoughtful musing on life and relationships; the sea turtles represent something to each of them, and that's why they find a connection there. As I was reading this, I felt too young for it. And older members of our group agreed. I think the right kind of reader can grab onto a lot in this story. There is a lot that can be taken away; maybe I just need to save it for a re-read in 2043.

[PS: You may recognize the author's name; Russell Hoban is the author of the "Frances the Badger" children's series. True classics!]

The Idlewild Discussion on Drugs, Class, and Modern Pakistan

Last month for my book club, we read Mohsin Hamid's debut novel, Moth Smoke. I read his second, more well-known novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a couple years ago and quite enjoyed it, thus I really pushed for Moth Smoke during the decision-making part of our prior book club meeting. I remember thinking The Reluctant Fundamentalist would be great for discussion, and I hoped this one would be the same. [Honestly now, I can hardly remember a thing about TRF except that I liked it...and my review on it was too ambiguous to jog my memory!]

For a book that you read and feel has so much to discuss, it was actually another one of our unusually short discussions. Perhaps we felt the story was pretty straightforward; perhaps none of us had enough personal connection to the culture to really share insight; perhaps it left us in the same wordless daze I clearly felt when writing about TRF.

In Moth Smoke, the main character, Daru, is a young man clearly on a downward spiral. At the opening, we find out he's on trial, and it's the story's subsequent flashbacks that give us the full picture. After getting fired from his banking job, Daru can't find another job and eventually loses motivation to do so. Naturally, his funds dwindle and he finds himself surviving without the luxuries he once had. His casual habit of smoking weed spirals into a pervasive, though not crippling, drug addiction. Daru turns to drug dealing and a series of heists to keep money in his pocket, and you, the reader, are following his story knowing the ending, but wondering how he got there.

The notable thing about Moth Smoke is how slowly and naturally Daru's downward spiral feels. It's never set in a melodramatic light; even the big occurrences that signal his decline are told casually and without much fanfare. Further, the story is told through different perspectives—that if Daru, his best friend Ozi, and Ozi's wife Mumtaz. As you read each of their words, you understand each of their perspectives. And it ends up diluting the gravity of Daru's situation; essentially, we're seeing several angles to the story, rather than a Daru-centric one.

I think one of the big takeaways from this book—and I believe from TRF as well, because the background of the two main characters were strikingly similar—is a statement on the influence of class in Pakistan culture. Daru and Ozi grew up together and attended the same well-to-do private school, but their different backgrounds dictated what they did with their adult lives. Daru grew up poor, was given the opportunity for a good education, but didn't have the same wealth to fall back on in his adult life; he had to continue working for his place in society, and that left him with a lot of resentment.

The most interesting character to me was actually Mumtaz, Ozi's wife. She attended college in New York with her Pakistan background mostly absent from her life, even dreading run-ins with traditional Paki boys she met. When she met Ozi, they married, had a child, and headed back to Pakistan, her life took a turn she was unprepared for; growing up so independent, so much an "American" woman, she strongly disagreed with the traditional role of wife and mother she was forced into under Pakistan culture. Mumtaz reminded of so many girls I met in college, wondering if they ever feel as conflicted about their cultural heritage as she was.

This book had a fairly positive response amongst our group, but I don't think anyone really felt passionate about it. The main reason for that, as discussed, was just that no one really liked Daru. And you don't have to always like your main character, but no one cared about him. He was ultimately a lazy individual that blamed everyone and everything around him for his current plight, without ever making a real effort at improving himself and his situation. And who has time for people like that?

Idlewild Round-Up

After what's seemed like a long, unintentional hiatus, I've actually made it to book club the past couple of months! The Friday night meetings are sometimes killer, as we often go away for the weekends, but I'm hoping that this summer will be low-key enough that I'm able to keep going. I always love reading the books in the summer when I don't have to think about anything else!

Our May selection was Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. The summary and introduction hyped this up as a hilarious, witty novel, but meh...it wasn't all that to me. The story follows Jim, a lecturer of medieval history at an English university. He's not really a grump, but he doesn't have a shred of optimism in him either. He's cynical and sardonic, almost in a pleasant way—which is where the comedy is supposed to come in. Jim feels like he's living in a world of crazy people, both inside and outside of academia.

Lucky Jim doesn't have much of a plot; rather, it chronicles Jim's encounters to make a sort of satirical statement on English society, particularly academia, in the 1950s. And that must be why it's lauded as such a hilariously trenchant novel; it was to the society in which it was written. For me now, it just sort of existed. We didn't have a ton to say about this one; everyone sort of enjoyed it but also didn't get a ton out of it. The characters were enjoyable, and at points it was a total entertaining farce (especially in the last third of the book). Amis didn't treat any of his women particularly well, either. I think I would enjoy this more on a second reading, as I would for any of Elaine Dundy's works, but I doubt I'll ever get to it.

Our June pick was a collection of short stories: The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon. We have never done short stories as a book club and thought it would be an interesting experience. Well, it turns out, calling this a "short story collection" is pretty deceptive. So the publisher calls it that, but really, this is more a series of vignettes focusing on the same characters. It takes you a couple stories to realize that you're reading about the same people, but as you get further in the book, the "stories" feel more like chapters as the running thread becomes more dominant. The overarching plot involves a Guatemalan literature professor, Eduardo, and his encounters with different characters—a brilliant student who suddenly leaves school, verbose Mark Twain scholars at a lit conference, a Serbian classical pianist who favors his gypsy heritage over classical upbringing, and, tying it all together, Eduardo's own Polish grandfather with a story of how it made it out of Auschwitz alive.

In most of the stories, you learn more about these characters than the narrator that ties them all together. In the end, you still feel like you don't know much about Eduardo; he's sort of lost, himself, and he keeps chasing after something or someone because that's what he does—it becomes his own sort of obsessive treasure hunt. And though you don't know much about it, ultimately Eduardo is the one this book is about, as he explores his own identity and history. I feel like the author was trying to do something really poetic and subtle and sort of self-indulgent that maybe a lot of people could think they identify with. Maybe it went over my head or maybe I just didn't appreciate it, but ultimately, it was just okay.

The Idlewild Discussion on Mental Illness and Spanish Politics

Right smack dab in between reading The Angel's Game and The Prisoner of Heaven, I read another book set in war-torn Barcelona for my book club—Carmen Laforet's Nada. [I'm done with reading about Barcelona for a while now.] Deemed "one of the most important literary works of post-Civil War Spain" and "one of the great novels of twentieth-century Europe," Nada is the story of an orphan, Andrea, who leaves her small town to attend university in the big, glitzy Barcelona. There, she's housed by poverty-stricken relatives that she only remembers from much brighter days gone past.

Okay. "Great novel of twentieth-century Europe" is quite the acclaim for this fairly simple story. In fact, it left us wondering from where this praise came—and to what exactly it was being compared. The author wrote this book when she was in her early twenties, and it sometimes suffered from what book club members called "writer's workshop syndrome." As in, that sentence sounds like it came from Creative Writing 101. I can't say I really noticed that throughout; I think I took this book at face value and didn't analyze it too much. I didn't love it, didn't hate it. I didn't think it remarkable, but didn't think it had anything too worthy of criticism.

Mario Vargas Llosa penned the book's introduction, and somewhere in there, he described this story as one that is plagued with sadness throughout (not his exact words, just to that effect). So naturally, I entered this believing, "Oh god, 270 pages of depression. Can't wait." But in actuality, I didn't read it that way at all. I'll give you a bit of background to explain why.

When Andrea arrives at her new home, she joins a family that is suffering from a lack of funds. In a nutshell, there's no money and conditions are dismal at best. And then you have the family itself. There's grandmother, the matriarch, who is old and feeble but always trying to take care of others. Her two sons who, post-war, have wandered off the path of ever being productive members of society; now they're just violent or sullen or confused, but grandma will never deem them anything except her "wonderful boys." You have Gloria, one brother's wife, who has some awkward relationship with the other brother but constantly suffers at the violent hand of her husband (though, of course, grandma still thinks she's great). And then there's one of grandma's daughters, who is possessive and manipulating and more than a little bit nuts. Actually, they are all nuts. I think that, really, in the most serious way, the entire family is suffering from various mental illnesses.

So you see how that dismal setting can foster an overall tone of despair. What gives light to the story, though, is Andrea. After reading the intro and the setting into which she had entered, I was afraid Andrea was going to end up mentally and emotionally weak, almost manipulated to a point of submission. That's not the case at all, though. Andrea is a strong character, and through her telling of the story, you get the feeling she's telling it with a bit of an eye roll and a tone that says, "My god, look at these crazy people I had to put up with." I actually read this story with a bit of humor. Much of that tone may come from the perspective—that Andrea's character is "looking back" on this part of her life, though that also makes you wonder how much is truth and how much is reflective exaggeration.

This story takes place in a post-Civil War Barcelona, which is somewhat described through the characters and their situations, but without a working knowledge of post-war society, it just spawned a lot of questions. Like, were these extremes we saw just norms of the time? The poverty, the domestic violence, the gap between rich and poor—were these all understood by readers at the time, making this just a story rather than a statement about a particular moment? So many characters are stuck in the past, or rather, defined by the past. But to them, it's recent; it's just life. To us, it's a reflection of a much broader history—social, economic, and political.

Despite this being a longer-than-usual post, it was actually our shortest book club discussion on record. It just felt rather straightforward. Not bad. Just simple. So like I said before, "great novel" may be somewhat of an overstatement, at least from our perspective.

Fiction | Love and Loathing in Friendship

It has sadly been a loooong time since I've been able to attend one of my book club's monthly meetings. The last time I attended was in May! Thankfully, our beloved host bookstore survived the hurricane, and, thanks to my Goodreads friendship with another book club member, I was able to find out meeting details, despite the store having no power the week before it. So last Friday it was book club reunited! At last!

The book selected was Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, translated from Italian and published by indie bookstore favorite Europa. Ferrante has written three novels prior to this one, all apparently shorter in length, and this one is the first in a planned trilogy (more on that later).

My Brilliant Friend starts by introducing our narrator Elena, a woman in her sixties, who is reflecting on her 1950s childhood and adolescence with her best friend, Lila. Right off the bat as children, Elena and Lila are not much alike. Elena is good, while Lila is bad; Elena is passive, while Lila is aggressive. These dissimilarities expand as they grow up. Elena has to work hard in school, while Lila is naturally brilliant; Elena is plagued by adolescent awkwardness, while Lila matures beautifully.

Elena and Lila have a typical adolescent friendship, one that is littered with competition and animosity that runs (mostly) quietly below the surface. It's an accurate portrayal of the internal conflicts one has with a friendship, be it jealousy, competition, etc. You wish the best for your friend while at the same time hoping you come out on top; you're horridly jealous of her looks but you want to be seen with her. We hear the conflicts of Elena's friendship with Lila—thoughts of Elena's that Lila may never even be aware of—but they stem from Elena's own insecurities. Essentially, Lila highlights Elena's own flaws to herself and it causes Elena to both despise her and idolize her.

As a reader, I felt I never knew much about Lila's perspective, how she feels towards her friendship with Elena. We feel distant from Lila, even though we follow her day to day through Elena. Perhaps it's just a consequence of Elena's storytelling—she's writing about the effect the friendship had on herself, internally, and is less concerned on the thoughts and feelings of Lila. It's just another example of that selfishness found in friendships.

Growing up in the 1950s in a small neighborhood of Naples, Lila and Elena are severely limited as women by the society in which they live. Part of their friendship stems from their mutual distaste of the state of this society, but they deal with their frustrations in different ways. Lila is an aggressive woman and resorts to the same actions and behaviors she is trying hard to escape. To her, this is the only option because she would otherwise remain the passive woman she hates so much. Elena takes her frustrations out on her mother, finding her the representation of everything she doesn't want to become. Both reject the role for women in their society but have different solutions. Elena finds an escape with an education, while Lila plans to marry rich to get out of a society shaped by poverty.

Really, the very fact that they strive for a different kind of life is what makes Elena and Lila notable characters. Their world is so miniscule, encompassing only a few blocks, and it's one of those worlds that is easy to get sucked into because you know nothing else. It's illustrated perfectly when Elena takes a trip into city center that, though only a few miles away, feels like a foreign land to her. She comments on how quiet it feels. All she knows is a society where violence and fighting are the norm. Abuse and arguments are so commonplace that a world without that appears odd to Elena. The setting so strongly defines the characters' perspectives, and you wonder if it was, in fact, commonplace or if Ferrante paints such a small world to emphasize the characters own experiences. Because growing up, one's world is small and self-centric, anyway.

I was really disappointed to see that this was published so recently and that the next in the series is not out yet. Lately, I've found I don't have much motivation to continue series I've started for one reason or another (Sea of Poppies, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Hunger Games, Palace Walk). They've just lacked the something that makes me want to keep reading. But this ended in such a way that wasn't a satisfying enough conclusion. It's like a character-driven tv show, where you don't necessarily care what happens next, but you need to know how their everyday life turns out. There is more to these characters, and we've seen just enough of a peek into their futures that we want to know how they get there.

Fiction | The Dawning of the Ibis

For my book club last month, we read Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. I haven't written about it until now partly because I'm lazy and busy, but also partly because I'm not sure exactly what to say about it—a trend I am finding to be true more and more with my book club's selections.

Sea of Poppies is sort of a difficult book to read. It's the story of a ship, the Ibis, and its crew, shedding light on a particular moment in history, when British colonialism still ruled India, and the 19th-century Opium Wars were just around the corner. The crew is a mish-mosh bunch from various walks of life, all part of a society in which caste and place hold significance and left to wonder how much that matters when you're all thrown on a ship together.

This is the first of a planned trilogy, and therefore feels more epic in stature than a standalone novel would. It can be very hard to follow from the beginning. Its structure reminded me a great deal of The Known World, also a book club pick, because many different characters are thrown at you from the beginning, and you feel like you're rushing around to keep track of them all. The novel begins feeling more like a collection of scenes that eventually come together as a cohesive story as the characters begin to interact and overlap.

Ghosh says that inspiration for this story first came because he wanted to tell about the lives of Indian indentured workers which were inextricably linked to British colonialism. Sea of Poppies highlights the detrimental influence of this colonialism in India, and though this one is set immediately prior to the Opium Wars, opium still plays a huge role in the rise and fall of the characters. (And I believe that Ghosh's planned sequels will get deeper into the Opium Wars.)

One reason this novel is hard to get into is because of the writing. Style and language shifts from character to character, including one character who speaks in pidgin English. It's confusing for the reader, which I believe mirrors the confusion for the characters themselves as they are thrust in a setting and have trouble relating to each other. The longstanding divisions of race and class are broken down on the ship and a person's future is determined by fortune's wheel rather than their place in society. The usual rules of power and influence have been discarded. One of the characters, Captain Chillingworth, has a line that I found most descriptive of this story's themes:

"Men do what their power permits them to do."

I ended up liking Sea of Poppies, particularly after our discussion, but I have to be honest; it's generally not my kind of story at all, and I doubt I would've liked it had I read it alone and without my book club. Call me a wimp, but I just don't like to read about the darkness of man and how cruel people can be to each other (and this often seems to be the kind of story we read in book club). It's just my own tastes. Regardless of the overarching theme or redeeming qualities, it's hard for me to look past those things. Several people in my group thought this book amazing, but I just don't have a desire to keep reading the trilogy.

Reading Roundup: Not What I Expected, Part 1

This is going to be a story of two books I recently read and how they turned out to be entirely different than what I had expected at the beginning. I can't honestly say that happens very often in my reading adventures; I guess I'm usually just a pretty good early judge of my opinion, but these both surprised me.
 

The first was last month's book club selection, The Known World by Edward P. Jones. At first encounter, I thought, "Oh boy, it's a book about slavery. What an upper." And then I saw it won the Pulitzer, and I thought, "Oh boy, it's gonna be boring, too." And yes, it was. For a bit. The structure is non-linear and there's about a billion characters, which requires some time and dedication to fully grasp and get into. But somewhere just past a third of the way in, I got into it, and it turned out to be really stunning.

So yes, The Known World is about slavery, which I unfairly judge as a boring topic I've encountered one too many times, thanks to high school English. But, it's not really about the white vs. black theme of slavery predominant in American literature; it's about free blacks (specifically, a freed slave) owning slaves. The man around which all revolves, Henry Townsend, has had his freedom since he was a boy, when his free parents bought Henry's freedom from his master, William Robbins. Henry had an atypical upbringing as a slave under Robbins, who took Henry under his wing, made sure he was educated, and treated him more like a son than property. As a result, Henry adopted Robbin's belief system as an adult, which caused conflict between his parents, his plantation, and the Virginian society directly outside his realm of reign.

In this Virginia town that upheld slavery as an acceptable institution in society, free blacks owning slaves contradicted how things "were supposed to be." What Jones did—he made slavery less about race and more about class, invalidating all the rules from slavery that put blacks below whites. Naturally, this caused chaos that slowly, but surely, caused the town to essentially implode, as the rules of society and morality were called into question.

Jones' characters are complex with all the grey areas left open to explore. A single action can quickly shift your opinion, because no one is ever fully good or fully bad enough to have warranted permanent placement on either end of the spectrum. On a similar note, the scattered, time-jumping structure of the story can leave you wishing for more on some characters while other important ones reach their fate abruptly. The Known World keeps you on your toes, and you need focus while reading it. As I learned, it's not a book to be read in short snippets on your morning and evening subway commute. But it is very satisfying by the end, when you feel like you were plopped down in this specific place and time with these people and rules and you watch it all unfold and figure out what it all means.

By the way, there's a list of characters at the END of the book. Yeah, no one in book club realized that one until it was too late, either.


For brevity's sake, I'll post my second review at a later date. That turned out to be a lot longer than I expected, and I don't want to bore you to death...

Nonfiction | Lost in the Amazon

After a long Anna Karenina-filled end of summer, my Idlewild book club decided on something a little lighter for our October meeting. Enter, the nonfiction bestseller, The Lost City of Z by David Grann. Grann is a writer at The New Yorker, and this first book of his led him deep into the Amazon to investigate the 1925 disappearance of explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett.

Fawcett's story is notorious. One of the last "gentlemen explorers" of the 20th century, Fawcett was a member of the Royal Geographic Society, an organization that sent explorers to map unknown parts of the world for the advancement of geographical sciences. First of all, take that in for a minute. Less than a hundred years ago, there were still parts of the world unmapped. It's not a fact easily comprehendible, when we live in a world in which I can currently perform a live street view search via Internet on my suburban house 800 miles away.

Fawcett took several trips to and through the Amazon in his day to map its unchartered abyss, but his 1925 expedition is unquestionably his most famous...because he never returned. Accompanied by his son Jack and Jack's lifelong friend Raleigh Rimmel, Fawcett entered the forest on a quest for Z, a lost city of grandeur he believed to have been hidden deep in the Amazon.

Imagine this: no phones, no satellites, no GPS, no Gore-tex, no Off, no modern gadgets for ease and convenience. You have none of these things and you're entering an unmapped territory, populated by possibly hostile natives, where nature rules. And let me tell you, Grann makes it clear that nature is nothing to mess around with—so many bugs that can invade your skin and body, viruses and bacteria that invade your body and mind, things so disgusting that you'll cringe as you read their attacks on explorers. WHY WOULD YOU SUBJECT YOURSELF TO THAT?

Fawcett wasn't the first to quest for a lost city. The legend of El Dorado long preceded Fawcett and his crew, but Fawcett believed he'd found proof, had faith, and was just antsy enough to keep trying. A lot of worldwide speculation has been made since Fawcett began his trek in 1925 and never returned—did he die of hunger? Was he killed by natives? Has he been held hostage? Did he decide to stay in the jungle? Grann uses our modern tools of the 21st century to try and follow Fawcett's path, find out Fawcett's fate, and see if there ever was a Z that existed.

That all was more of a summary than a review, but that's kinda how it goes with this book. It's a fascinating piece of 'armchair travel' nonfiction, one of those stories that's gonna make you want to Google everything and find out more information as you read it. It's got some good ideas to discuss...like what drives a person to such a quest? And can man ever really conquer nature? Does it need to? Should it? Living in a world that feels pretty domesticated, we're reminded by The Lost City of Z that nature is King. It's no joke; it can chew us up, spit us out, and make it look like we never existed—an idea further explored in Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.


Anyone else read this one?

Reading Anna Karenina: Part II

After a nice two-week break, I finally got back to Anna Karenina and finished it in time for our Idlewild book club discussion last week.

You know what I thought of Anna Karenina, Parts V-VIII? Mostly...BORING. Maybe it was because I already knew the characters; maybe because Tolstoy seemed to go on endless detailed rants, even more so than before; maybe because I was reading on long subway commutes and was being gently rocked to sleep anyway. But whatever the reason, I was just itching to finish.

My final thoughts on the book are pretty consistent with my original thoughts—more than consistent; those thoughts were completely reinforced!

• The level of detail that I griped about back during the first half of the book seemed to take over certain sections. Long-winded chapters about hunting trips and dinner discussions and political elections about bore me to tears. I definitely zoned out for all of these sections during those long train rides mentioned before.
• I thought the book's strongest point is that Tolstoy handles each character with such detail that they seem realistic—neither one way nor another, neither black nor white. This was particularly poignant in Tolstoy's treatment of his women characters. Anna is, at one point or another, intelligent, confident, irrational, jealous, passionate, apathetic, and ultimately her hysteria takes control and she spirals out of control, leaving you to wonder what happened to all her strong, independent characteristics.

I know that one of the notable features of Anna Karenina is that Tolstoy does address the issues of society in 19th century Russia, but as I mentioned, they bore me, so I don't have much to say on those. My favorite feature of the story, though, is how Tolstoy juxtaposes his characters and couples to create a story about relationships and how they are affected by the society in which they are built and by the individual personalities involved. The reader is constantly comparing Anna/Vronksy to Kitty/Levin because their stories are presented side-by-side.

One of the most important things to note upon finishing this book is—why is it called Anna Karenina? Sure, it's the plot line that everyone knows, the focus of any movie adaptations...but Anna's story is not the most important one in this novel. Yes, it's the most dramatic (a love affair, a fallen woman—ingredients for a headlining story), but Tolstoy spends most of his attention on Levin and his own personal awakening. The entire eighth part of the book, in fact, has moved entirely beyond Anna and Vronksy and is devoted entirely to Levin and his own struggle with reason and meaning. It leaves you wondering: What story did Tolstoy intend to write? Was Anna's only purpose to grab readers with a "dramatic" plotline? And if so, why did he name the book after her?

I never had to read this book in high school, but many other book club members did and noted how different their opinion was this time around as adults—when you understand complex relationships and recognize the grey areas. I have to wonder if I would've brushed this book aside ten years ago without thinking further about it.

Reading Anna Karenina: Part I

When I stopped by Idlewild in July to discover August's book club selection, I learned something unsettling: We were completely bypassing August and meeting again in September...and the book was Anna Karenina. I looked at it sitting there, so big and daunting, and promptly turned around and walked out of the store. I thought, "Anna Karenina?? REALLY?? This isn't 11th grade English! If I had wanted to read this, I'd have read it by now!!!!"

So I had completely decided to skip this one. Anna Karenina...HA. But then a couple weeks passed; I remembered that book club is one of my favorite extra-curricular activities, and I didn't want to miss another meeting with no excuse besides not wanting to read the book. And I discovered that the Brooklyn Public Library had the exact version (the newest translation) we were reading available as an eBook and therefore would require literally no effort to attain...so I gave in and started reading Anna Karenina.


Anna Karenina is not a difficult read, but it's not exactly a quick one, either. It's a "story told in eight parts," and I made it through four of them before my two-week digital check-out expired. But that was perfect, because I needed a break from Anna Karenina.

What do those few of you who don't know much about Anna Karenina need to know? Russia. Social rules. Love affair.

What have I learned so far?

• Tolstoy is detailed in his writing...painstakingly detailed. He's created these interesting, dynamic characters but sometimes goes into so much detail that it becomes incredibly boring. It's like he starts writing about one of them and then gets carried away and keeps going and going to the point where you're like "Ok, great, I see that Levin got a kick out of manual labor, but geez I don't need to know about every swoop of his scythe."
• The story can drag...but so can the characters. They all have some sort of "falling from grace" moment, some indication that they aren't easily pigeonholed as the certain type of person you initially took them to be. You think Levin is this socially-awkward, quiet type that you kinda feel sorry for while cheering him on, and then he gets really critical of the peasants and that just seems sorta uncalled for. Vronksy seems like the knight in shining armor type, but then you find out he's in debt and tries to off himself because he just can't deal. No one's perfect, I guess.
• On the same note, I don't particularly like any of the characters. Most of us know how the story ends, so I guess I keep reading just to see how it gets there. It is like a soap opera, but a demure, high-collared one.

Since I never had to read this in high school and thus missed the mega-analysis that English teachers force upon you, I feel like there's probably a lot I'm missing. But that's part of the reason I chose to read this with book club, because I'll get more out of it than if I chose to read it alone. (But let's be serious, that wouldn't have ever happened anyway.)

The Idlewild Discussion on the African experience

I finally made it to a book club meeting. I've missed the past THREE, and my literary life has seemed so lacking as a result. For this month, we read The Shadow of the Sun by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski.

Kapuscinski first spent time in Africa in 1957, when colonial rule was ending and countries were fighting for independence and learning to govern themselves. His career as the African correspondent to a Polish newspaper brought him back to Africa over and over again for the next 40 years as he traveled throughout the most poverty-stricken, destitute countries, delving deep into the "real," everyday experience in the Africa that is far off the radar. The Shadow of the Sun is a compilation of essays previously published, melded together to form a cohesive novel, that offers brief snapshots into different moments and locations in African history. Some is written as a memoir, some as a history lesson.

The best statement I took away from this book is this, Kapuscinski's introduction:

"This is...not a book about Africa, but rather about some people from there—about encounters with them, and time spent together. The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say "Africa." In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist."

This book just further confirmed that...I know nothing about Africa. Despite having close friends who have spent significant time in various countries, hearing their stories, seeing their pictures, it is not a concept I can fully wrap my head around. I can't imagine an area so vast and so lacking in resources. I took two main things away from this book: (a) Africa is hot. (b) The African mentality is completely contrasting to Western thought. For instance, the concept of distance is measured in time, but time is not the structured, independent variable it is to us. Stuff happens when it happens, on a schedule completely of its own.

If this book was trying to answer a question, I would say that question is this: Why is Africa the way it is? And similarly: Why is it so hard to change that?

I'm interested on your experiences with Africa. Ever been? Ever studied it? Read any other Africa-centric books?

What is the internet??

The February pick for the Idlewild bookclub was Tom Rachman's best-seller, The Imperfectionists—a welcome change of pace from last month's philosophical textbook.

This was an interesting book club choice. At first, I didn't think there would be much to discuss, but it turned out to be a good one. The story is about an English-language newspaper in Rome that, after fifty years of publication, is struggling to stay afloat in the changing landscape of news media. While this is the overarching plot, this book is really a collection of vignettes, each focusing on a different employee of the newspaper, in which their personal lives and work lives are interwoven.

The thing about the characters is...none of them are likable and each is flawed. (The one exception, in my opinion, is the lady who collected the newspapers, the one character not an employee.) I felt sympathy for some characters, was disgusted by others, but each of them were journalists, or exhibited what we decided could be described as typical "journalistic behavior"—somewhat cold, ambitious to the point of conniving. The women all seemed horrible, and I'm fully convinced Rachman has some serious woman issues that he was projecting. Despite disliking most of the characters, I was hungry to read each story, and they each deserved to be dissected. However, Rachman has this tendency to write an interesting character study and then slam a sentence onto the very end to indicate complete hopelessness for these characters. I found this trait very obvious, but I'm not sure anyone else at book club found it to be as poignant as I did!

Naturally our discussion led to technology and media and how the newspaper is nearly obsolete. How many people under the age of 30 currently subscribe to the daily print version of a newspaper? Not very many. I'm a lover of print, but realistically, technology allows a faster, easier look at the news. It's not difficult to see where the newspaper world is heading, but it's fascinating to see where it and technology have gone in just the past ten years.

To illustrate my point, watch the video below from 1994.

I can't believe I was the only one who was bored.

You may remember me mentioning last week how I was stuck reading an obnoxiously long book for my Idlewild book club. Well, I finally finished said book and last night was our meeting.

Let me give you a quick rundown of this book. The World As I Found It by Bruce Duffy is a hefty work of fiction from the NYRB Classics catalog. Duffy chronicles the lives of three well-known philosophers of early twentieth century Europe—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore. These three men were colleagues yet highly competitive with each other, sometimes influencing each other and at other times tearing each other apart. But here's the thing—these people really existed but this book is fictional. And not even really fiction based completely on truth; he just made stuff up (and fully admits it). A biography of Wittgenstein wasn't released until after Duffy wrote this.

I was bored out of my mind for 80% of this book, and with a book that is 558 pages long, 80% is a lot of pages. Wittgenstein was a tortured, seemingly miserable guy who struggled to find the greatest, highest truth. Well, like I said, philosophy bores me to death. The sections that focuses on Moore and Russell were more interesting to me because they were the ones who actually lived and did things, rather than just think about them. Especially Russell, whose storyline mostly focused on how many women he could sleep with, even up to his senior years. During our discussion, I was aghast to discover that I was the only one who was incredibly bored by this book. I got to wondering if interest in this book was directly related to the reader's general outlook on life. I'd say from ages 13–17, I was very philosophical and analytical, but my modus operandi now is to just live rather than think about it so much. It's why I don't care for philosophical study.

Beyond the philosophy angle, as I listened to our book club discussion, I felt incredibly puzzled as to what I missed in this book. The sections that stuck with others were boring for me, and vice versa. I'm sure it's just a question of reading taste, but I felt like such a simpleton because I couldn't explain my aversion to the book beyond, "I was bored; I just didn't care."

I loved the concept of this book—a fictionalized account of a real person's life. And the ending was fabulous, specifically the last twenty pages and the afterward by the author (a reflection on the book several years after writing it). Duffy ties up the end with a satisfying, "Ah, it all had a purpose," though I question if all of the previous 500 pages were necessary to make his point. But everyone else seemed to like it a lot, so maybe I'm just the weird one with poor taste.

Most importantly, I finished this book and I am finally FREEEEEE to read something else!

What I've read lately...

I've read a few things over the last month that a) weren't compelling enough to post about individually, or b) I am too lazy to write about individually. Ergo, compilation post.

For my December book club meeting at Idlewild, we read Carlo Collodi's classic, Pinocchio. [Sidenote: this may be the worst NYRB cover in existence.] I was under the assumption that this book is very different from the Disney movie known by all. Well, it is somewhat different, but not in the extreme way I thought it would be. Many of the plot points were the same. However, this story is much darker—too scary for Disney audiences. The cricket's appearance is too brief to even warrant him the name "Jiminy," and Pinocchio is....ANNOYING. Collodi obviously wrote these stories as lessons on behavior to children, which were published as chapters in a weekly magazine. But when all the chapters are compiled into one book, the lessons get repetitive and Pinocchio becomes unlikable because he seems to never learn! [More points found here in this NYRB article that I never actually read.] It was a quick easy read, but, to be honest, I can't even remember what we discussed about this book because I was too excited by the pita chips and wine.

In Nashville for Christmas, I read Joy in the Morning, the other well-known work by Betty Smith. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is in my top 3 books of all time, so I'd been meaning to read this for a while. It's a lovely story of a young Brooklyn couple in the late 1920s who were just married and moved to the midwest where Carl, the husband, is a law student. Annie is immediately endearing, as she's uneducated yet bright and eager to learn. This book should be required reading for newlyweds because it's uplifting in a non-cheesy, unsentimental way—in a way that reminds you that things happen but you get through them. It's a simple story but it sucks you in with likable characters while throwing some important life lessons in there about enjoying the small things and stuff like that. Not too much to say about this besides it was highly enjoyable.

The World Reading Party's country for the month of December was Greece. After a long search for Greek literature that turned up little more than mysteries or chick-lit or really long novels, I opted for the Greek classic, Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. It's the story of a traveling Englishman who meets an elderly (if 65 is "elderly" by today's standards—my dad certainly would not like to think so) vivacious Greek man named Zorba who aims to live life to the fullest and drags our narrator out of his shell. Supposedly this is a book about the philosophy of life and contains some important message on how to live it—which may or may not be something along the lines of "live how you want." But the only lesson I got from this was, in a nutshell, "Eat a lot, drink a lot, and sleep with a lot of women." I've read comments that this book is the book for some people, but I guess I am not one of those people. It was just meh to me. I didn't even learn that much about Greek culture, which is my aim with this reading challenge, so boo on that.

When Kafka was the rage and West Village real estate was cheap

The most recent discussion of the Idlewild book club focused on Anatole Broyard's Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir. For all you New York enthusiasts out there, listen up.

Here's how it goes according to Broyard's story—

Broyard was a WWII vet from Brooklyn who returned to New York after the war and moved to Greenwich Village to become a part of its literary and artistic movement (sort of early rumblings of what would become the "beat generation" but much less "anti-academic"). Broyard moved in with Sherri, an eccentric woman who presented herself more as performance art than a realistic person. For a young and naive veteran, Sherri opened doors to a world of art, academia, psychology, sexuality—all those "movements" credited to the Village at the time.

And in reality—

Broyard was a WWII vet from Brooklyn who returned to New York after the world and moved to Greenwich Village. But, he had also just divorced his wife, with whom he'd had a daughter. So that whole "naive war vet" facade was not too accurate of a portrayal. And while Sherri is a real person (and apparently really as crazy as she seemed), his relationship with her should by no means be interpreted as a "love story" (despite the book's two sections being title "Sherri" and "After Sherri"); she served a vessel, carrying him from one place in his life to the next.


Really though, the details about Anatole's life are not what's in focus in this short memoir; it's called "A Greenwich Village Memoir" for a reason. He uses his own story, maybe loosely, to describe the Village scene—a scene in which late night conversation at pubs was intellectual in nature; books were highly desired and coveted commodities; West Village rent was extraordinarily cheap (!!!). And though the credibility of some of the occurrences is questionable in Broyard's own life, his story certainly could be true of this place and time. The detail and personalization with which he writes his scenes—particularly of parties and clubs and various locations around the city—are very effective.

Broyard wrote this memoir 40 years after the fact, right before his death at age seventy in 1990. Forty years is a long time during which one's memory can fade or rewrite personal history, so we'll probably never know the exact "truth" of his own story. However, this memoir is incomplete; it contains an epilogue from his wife, indicating that Anatole was planning another chapter dedicated to the death of his father which would've perhaps shed some light onto the truths of his own life...

While this book is an interesting portrait of a moment in NYC history, the author's biography has proven to be equally as interesting. In fact, much discussion has been focused on him since his death when it was revealed that Broyard was actually part black (of Louisiana Creole descent), a fact that he mostly hid all his life and certainly omitted—or at least cleverly masked—in this novel.


An interesting article to serve as a follow-up to this memoir can be found here, titled "The Passing of Anatole Broyard," an essay in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (pub. 1997).

Another note for NYC history enthusiasts: check out Ephemeral New York, a recent happy discovery!

The Idlewild Discussion on why Palace Walk reads like a European romance novel

Last night's Idlewild book club meeting was on the epic-ly long novel Palace Walk, which is part one of a literal epic—a three-parter titled The Cairo Trilogy for which author Naguib Mafouz won the Nobel Prize of Literature. The impression I get from this book is that some people find out amazing and some just find it "meh."

Initially upon finishing, and during book discussion, I generally found it "meh." Palace Walk focuses on one family living in Cairo before Egypt's Independence from Britain in the early 1900s (around the time of World War I). The father is domineering; the mother is submissive; the daughters race to get married first; the older sons try to build their own lives while really just following the path of male stereotypes of the time; and then there's little Kamal, the youngest, the most innocent, the ray of sunshine in an oppressive household (oppressive thanks completely to Papa Bear).

The book's 500 pages tell little more than that. It's simply a day-to-day portrait of ordinary individuals (or, as I'm guessing for the time, what would be middle- to upper-class individuals). The characters, with the exception of the eldest son, are all one-sided and completely stagnant in terms of growth or development. They each fit a stereotype. Al-Sayyid Ahmad, the father, is overbearing and harsh—the villain of the novel—but those are expected characteristics based on the historical setting. Likewise, the mother, like all other women in the story, have no role in society outside the home, as expected based on this society's treatment and opinion of women 100 years ago. To me this seemed somewhat soap-operatic, somewhat a European character novel. It seemed so full of stereotype that I felt it lacked authenticity. I didn't really learn anything about Egyptian society of 1917 beyond what I could have inferred from history lessons.

But,

• The father was the villain, but unlike Disney movie villains, we understood his mentality and his thought-processes. He wasn't just "the villain." Strict inside the home and lighthearted outside seemed to be his modus operandi. Points to the author for creating transparent characters. 
• Kamal just never matured in two years. Not sure what that was supposed to represent. Think this was mentioned in discussion but was probably distracted by wine/pita chips.
•  The daughters marry and become property of their husbands' home, thus virtually eliminating them from this story of Al-Sayyid Ahmad's household. Typical of society?
• Why has this not been a BBC or Masterpiece Theater production? Much discussion of this during book club.

I'm not too motivated to read the other two in the trilogy until reading some basic bios on the author. His politics seemed to so highly influence his writing that I wonder if all I mentioned early about the style seeming European and full of stereotypes was his method of criticizing Egyptian culture. Knowing this historical context makes the writing somewhat more interesting. [Apparently Mahfouz was stabbed in the back (literally, not metaphorically!) in the 90s by a fundamentalist because of his support of Israeli/Palestinian peace talks. And he was 82 years old!] Maybe this story was more "shocking" in the 1950s when it was written (thought it wasn't translated to English until the 80s), but it seems a little run-of-the-mill now.

Reading Notes on Cloud Atlas, Pt. 3: Discuss

Just as I expected, this book made for great book club discussion. Everyone had an opinion. Everyone preferred certain segments over others. Everyone had a unique experience with the book.

But figuring out how to sum it all up is proving more difficult than I thought.

In fact, the publisher clearly couldn't even sum it up, as the back cover blurb reads:

"A postmodern visionary who is also a master of styles and genres, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokvia love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction that reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwice, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky."

Have you ever read such a summary that says absolutely nothing?

So it may just have to come down to this: Cloud Atlas cannot be summed up. To get something out of it, Cloud Atlas requires a discussion or analysis or maybe a re-read if you have no one to discuss with.

The one thing most of us could agree on is that Mitchell used a unique format to tell the story (some found it more appealing than others; some found it gimmicky). Because each story is told in a different genre of literature, chances are you'll find one that is appealing to your reading tastes. Historical fiction, noir thriller, sci-fi...it's quite the variety. To me, splitting the stories in half increased the appeal, as each was left as a cliffhanger begging me to finish. And in my experience, I was much more interested the second time around, when things started to come together.

While pieces of individual stories came together, they never really came together as a whole. We were left questioning, "OK. What was the point of all that?" While I understand his overall point to the novel, why did it take him 509 pages to say what he pretty much concluding on the last page? Mitchell apparently isn't one to blatantly point things out; it's subtle and somewhat open to interpretation.

Like this comet birthmark I mentioned earlier. What was the point of that? Not much, except to hint that this one soul reincarnated. But that was apparently a literary reference to a Japanese (?) work, of which I would've had zero clue. See why I say this is too smart for me? And I still have to question why things like that are necessary. So that pretentiously smart people can discuss and impress themselves and each other when they catch a literary reference?

One conclusion we seemed to come to was that this was a book amount moments. It's a collection of stories where we don't necessarily get an entire picture of the characters and situations. We can't say we really know all the characters Mitchell created. All are faced with decisions; some choose the high moral ground and some don't. It doesn't necessarily tell us their character, instead merely how they reacted in a certain moment. And we see how these moments and decisions affect the future, even in the tiniest ways.

There are a lot of themes thrown around; things like power (though I would like the woman who said that to please explain rather than throw around the word "power") and greed and morals and human behavior and, essentially, the self-destruction of the human race. Pretty big, discussion-worthy ideas. But is this book going to be considered a master work of literature in ten years? Eh. As someone noted, it's very a much a work of the early 2000s. Whatever that means.


[Read my earlier thoughts on Cloud Atlas: Part 1 and Part 2.]

Reading Notes on Cloud Atlas, Pt. 2: A Quick Conclusion

I finished it, all 509 pages. It only took me an absurd ten or so days. My process of reading this book can best be illustrated by two different graphs:

A) Reading speed in relation to pages read

B) Interest level in relation to pages read

It was that dead zone in the middle there, which you may recall consisted of dystopian and post-apolyptic sci-fi, that killed me. However, quickly after I got past page 326, I was into it again and finished the rest of the book in a night. I most enjoyed stories 2, 3, and 4. Number 3—"Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery"—was a thriller that kept me interested just by the fact that it was a thriller. Number 4—"The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish"—involved a crazy old man and his escape from a nursing home, so that was just humorously entertaining. The author from story number 2—"Letters from Zedelghem"—amused me. The picture in my head was of Tom Hulce's bat-crazy Amadeus from the 1984 movie of the same title.

Once the sixth story—"Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After"—ends, Mitchell goes back through the other five stories and wraps each of them up with a pretty little bow.

[That's not sarcasm; he actually does conclude each of them to my satisfaction.]

The intent of all these stories, I think, is to say something to the effect that souls pass through time, and all of these characters are linked, both physically (as I discussed earlier in telling how the stories link together) and metaphysically. Though, Mitchell does tell these stories as a storyteller, and you're kinda (or at least I was kinda) left trying to rummage through all you've learned and figure out what was fact and what was fiction.

The final pages of "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" are actually pretty poignant, and I think get Mitchell's entire point across—Human nature doesn't change, and we can only take things so far before they explode and we have to start all over again. Like, we started out as lawless primitives and eventually we'll drive ourselves to that again (?).

Who knows. That's what I got from it. Once we discuss in book club, I'm certain my thoughts will be much better articulated.

But until then, there were a couple passages that both seemed important and that I enjoyed:

"Oh, once you've been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn't want you back...We—by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman's memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight" (p. 361).

"Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic

[Go back to Part 1 of my Cloud Atlas journey or continue to Part 3.]

Reading Notes on Cloud Atlas, Pt. 1: Suffering

My book club's pick for our August meeting is David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Published in 2004, Mitchell's third novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, which apparently means people are supposed to revere it. Right now, I do not.

So far, I am on page 326 of its 509 pages. And I am just sitting here, struggling through absurd language, screaming, "WHY WON'T YOU END???"

This book has an interesting format. I'll give it that. The "story" (if you can call it that) is told through six separate novellas of sort. The first is the diary of a man crossing the Pacific on a ship in the 1850s; the second is a series of letters from a young composer in the 1930s who headed to Austria to escape debt; the third is a thriller about a journalist in the '70s trying to expose a corrupt energy company; the fourth is about a publisher who escapes from some rough extortionists and ends up in a retirement home from which he can't escape; the dystopian fifth story interviews a Korean clone bred for work in a fast food joint who has gained consciousness; the sixth takes place in post-apocalyptic Hawaii where...well I'm not really sure what happened there.

So that all sounds like a mess of things that are unrelated. Except for brief mention of the previous story in each story...and I mean very brief. As in, the Composer in story B finds the journals of the man in story A. He finds them, and Mitchell mentions that fact, and nothing else. Nothing else gives you a hint as to how these stories all connect, except that this comet-shaped birthmark keeps appearing, and I'm not sure at all where that fits in.

And because we're spanning centuries of time here, Mitchell uses different language for every story. But I don't get why people (ie: on Goodreads) are so impressed by that. It doesn't take much to make up a language for dystopian robots and post-apocalyptic savages. Because it's made up. If anything, it just makes the story really confusing and hard to read. Robotic sentences like,

"The amnesiads in my Soapsac were reduced, accordingly, and ascension catalysts instreamed," (p. 197)

or incoherent sentences like,

"Windy mornin' it was, yay, I mem'ry well, sand'n'dune grass whippin' an' bloodflower threshin' an' surf flyin' off scuddin' breakers" (p. 258).

I'm not impressed.

Oy. I was doing alright with stories B, C, and D, perhaps actually enjoying them, and then we get to crap in the future, and I hit a wall. It's just not my style.

The book is structured A B C D E F E D C B A, with the sixth, post-apocalyptic story being the only one told in full in one sitting. Having just finished this one, I still don't see the point. I mean, maybe I can gather that it's about souls drifting through time, but if that's the over-arching theme that ends up tying them all together...well, COME ON [insert Gob Bluth voice here]! I'm just not understanding why all this is necessary to make that point. Because so far, it's not made very well.

I'll write an update once I finish the second half (once I revisit the previous five stories and once I am happily far away from the much hated sci-fi sections) to see if my opinions change. And once more after book club, when hopefully, a group discussion will add a lot to it. But for now...

this book is far too smart for me.

Has anyone else read this?


[Read the rest of my Cloud Atlas experience: Part 2 and Part 3.]