Multigenerational dramas

Daughter of Fortune, by Isabel Allende is an interesting book, but like all books about multiple generations of characters it is lengthy. Unfortunately, it is also part of a trilogy, with Portrait in Sepia, and The House of the Spirits being the missing books. So, I cannot give a complete review of the entire plotline. However, I can safely classify the book as bildungsroman/romance light.

This novel is a story about Eliza Sommers, who adopted by a British family living in Chile, grows up sheltered in a multicultural household. Historical detail is vividly provided and the cultural attitudes of the British are painted over the Chilean background. Eliza grows up and falls in love with a young Chilean man. The novel moves from romance to adventure as Eliza follows her love to the gold rush in California. On the ship she stows away with the help of a Chinese doctor (to whom Allende has already introduced the reader, through extended flashbacks and descriptions of mainland China and Hong Kong) and with his help searches California for her love. Disguising herself as a boy she searches until her love has become more of a talisman than a memory. Finally, she returns to San Francisco and assists the doctor with his work. The book ends with the long-delayed acknowledgement of love between the doctor and Eliza.

Though this is a good story, the fact that there is no resolution after 399 pages and additional books that continue the story is discouraging. One has to be really interested in the characters to continue. If your not interested in multigenerational stories this is not the book for you.

"Crapula"

The Year of the Hare/Jäniksen vuosi by the Finnish author Arto Paasilinna was published in Finnish in 1975. The English translation did not come out until 1995. It was favorably reviewed by the NYT. It is an interesting premise - a man, Vatanen, who is having a midlife crisis, nurtures a young leveret back to health, and spends the year traveling around the country with said leveret.

At times the book is quite funny, unfortunately somethings fail to translate. The translator, Herbert Lomas, no doubt did a great job, but the combination of twenty years between publication and translation, plus the challenge of translating humor makes the book less amusing than one might expect. The vocabulary choices were sometimes quite odd too. For instance one chapter is titled 'crapula.' Which comes from Latin and means very drunk. It is not a very common word in American English and sounds very much like crapola - rubbish.

Now that I have criticized it, it was selected for inclusion in UNESCO's collection of representative works.

There are also some very dark moments where Vatanen is very cruel, and others where he is treated cruelly. Knowing that it is a funny book in Finnish makes me suspect that these moments are not intended to come out as cruel and unpleasant. Despite these defects, the book is interesting and readable.

November book club choices

Only three books were suggested for November:

A Complicated Kindness
Lucky You
Madeleine is Sleeping

A Complicated Kindness was selected.

October book club choices

The October book choices were:

1. Nothing (Intet)
2. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, Or: how violence develops and where it can
lead
3. The Yiddish Policemen's Union
4. The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Nothing (Intet in Danish) received the most votes.

August book club choices

The book choices for August were all quite unique.

1. How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall
2. Go Down Moses, William Faulkner
3. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
4. Kafka on the Shore/海辺のカフカ, Haruki Murakami
5. Trials and Tribulations. A Berlin Novel/Irrungen, Wirrungen, Theodor Fontane
6. Jubilee, Margaret Walker

Kafka on the Shore was selected.

The Shipping News

This 336 page novel by Annie Proulx is lengthy considering its content. Quoyle (like coil) the main character has reached his mid-thirties without having much of a direction, friends, or love in his life. When his father dies and his wife leaves him Quoyle finds himself at a loss about what to do. His aunt suggests returning to the family home in Newfoundland and he acquiesces.

In Newfoundland Quoyle builds a new life. Though stumbling through life as a not so successful newspaper man in New Jersey he finds that his skill is more than adequate at the small town paper in Newfoundland. He also finds love and friendship.

All in all, this is a pretty good story about a person returning to their roots and finding happiness. However, there is a lot of dark foreshadowing throughout the book which leads the reader to expect darker events which do not occur. Perhaps that is why the end was disappointing, or it might have been the Lazarus moment, but the ending is unexpectedly cheerful.

July Book Club choices

The book club choices were made from four previously proposed books plus three more new ones.

1. Divided sky/Der geteilte Himmel, by Christa Wolf
2. Five hours with Mario/Cinco Horas Con Mario, by Miguel Delibes
3. The Stone Raft/A Jangada de Pedra, by José Saramago
4. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
5. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
6. Daughter of Fortune, by Isabel Allende
7. The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
8. The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck

Daughter of Fortune was selected to be read.