I was traveling at the end of August, so didn’t get my reading list posted for the month. Here’s a double entry:
The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel is weird. It’s told in three parts that are linked in various ways. In the first part, in the early 20th century, a man loses his lover and son to diphtheria and begins to struggle with his religion as a result. He goes into the High Mountains (which aren’t very high, apparently) in search of a religious artifact that proves men evolved from apes. In the second part, a pathologist, who hallucinates his dead wife’s religious dialogue, performs an autopsy on a man whose body is filled with things it shouldn’t be, and it develops that he was the father of a boy accidentally killed by the central character in the first part. In the third part, a Canadian whose parents emigrated from the High Mountains, loses his wife to illness and now, for reasons neither he nor the reader understand, he adopts a chimpanzee and they move to Portugal. Very weird and probably open to numerous interpretations.
In the Lonely Backwater by Valerie Nieman is a novel set in coastal North Carolina. A coming-of-age story and a mystery, it features Maggie, a complicated high school girl who is a suspect when a cousin goes missing and then is found dead. The dead girl is popular and pretty. Maggie is neither of those things and hangs out with a couple of guys who are also on the social fringe. She works in her father’s store at a marina and helps maintain their houseboat, while also enjoying the freedom of sailing and exploring the coastal environment. Because her father is an alcoholic, she begins to look to the detective investigating her cousin’s death as a father-figure, but still struggles to tell him everything she knows.
The Commitments was Roddy Doyle’s first novel. It centers on Jimmy Rabbitte who gets together some friends and local musicians to form a band to play Soul music in a fictionalized version of Dublin. The band members settle on the name The Commitments and proceed to develop their sound (in some cases, learning how to play their instruments). They get pretty good and are starting to book gigs, with a certain amount of drama along the way, which is to be expected. I read the book on my way to Ireland and enjoyed telling people I met there that I had done so, and invariably the conversation shifted to the film based on the book, which, alas, I haven’t seen.
Not a Novel by Jenny Erpenbeck is a collection of essays that help the reader to understand where the writer’s fiction is coming from. Erpenbeck, who won the International Booker Prize this year for her novel Kairos, is a German writer born in what was then East Germany. I first started reading her a year ago as I was preparing for a trip to Berlin, which is the setting for her novel Go, Went, Gone. This collection of essays includes remarks she has given at the presentation ceremonies for several of the awards she has won.
The Good Deed by Helen Benedict is a novel set on the Greek island of Samos. The story involves an American woman who is suffering from a personal tragedy, one that is revealed to the reader slowly over the course of the book. She’s rented a room on this island to get away and maybe forget, but that’s easier said than done. The island also contains a refugee camp that houses refugees from the Middle East and Africa who have fled, most of them by boat, and are awaiting official status. As with the American’s story, the horrific tragedies of several of the refugee women come out in stages. The American is sympathetic, but what can she do to help these people? Meanwhile, what about her life back home?
A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks by David Gibbins was my book club’s selection for September. It has a lot of fascinating information about the underwater exploration of shipwrecks, some of them extremely old. The author, a marine archaeologist and novelist, has participated in bringing to light information about these wrecks, not just a catalog of the contents but also researching the origin of the ships, the causes of their sinking, and details about the people involved. While it’s amazing what he has assembled in this book, it’s difficult to absorb, in part because there’s no development, just a series of explorations.
Village Weavers by Myriam J. A. Chancy is a novel that covers a lot of territory thematically. It’s about two women on opposite sides of the U.S. who were childhood friends in Haiti but had a falling out long ago and so have not been in touch with each other. There are issues of class and color among the Haitians and Dominicans, but also corruption and authoritarian repression in Haiti and also colonial exploitation and its aftermath. The narrative comes in a braid of timelines and points of view, but it all works together.
Living Things by Munir Hachemi, translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches, is a short but powerful novel that is a story but also an exploration of story-telling. The narrator, Munir, ponders the literary art of writing from one’s own experience, which raises the question of how much of the story that follows is from the author’s own experience. Munir and three friends from Madrid drive to France in hopes of finding work harvesting grapes. The harvest is delayed because of earlier rain, but they get other work that embroils them in a mystery and other troubles. Thematically, in addition to literary theory, the book is exploring the exploitation of migrant labor and also class struggles in Spain.
