Harriet's Corner
The Bi-Monthly Newsletter of What to Read
Issue #6: In which she might consider what wacky protagonists have to do with OCD...
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Bon jour mes chers amis! ...I hope that you have all caught up on your reading because I have some intriguing and some quirky recommendations for you this month. Yeah...kinda quirky. I'm not exactly sure what attracted me to some of these books that have as a common thread really offbeat and wacky protagonists. I have also been drawn toward memoirs this spring......(the memoirs do not contain the wacky protagonists...those, thankfully, are fiction!) But first, you must indulge me and forgive me for breaking the promise I made in my last newsletter.....I have to write yet again about the Middle East...but believe me, a very different book from the ones I have been reading.
Baghdad Without a Map: And Other Misadventures in Arabia by Tony Horwitz (paperback, $15.00)
Tony Horwitz takes an irreverant, funny, poignant and often a non-political look at the Middle East and the habits and customs of the Arabs and Muslims. I have had some trouble writing about this book, because every time I pick it up to think about writing, I start to read it again! It is in part laugh out loud funny, in part astute observation and in part just plain wacky. Although it was written just before the Gulf War in 1991, it remains very current. Horwitz moves to Cairo when his wife, the author Geraldine Brooks becomes Middle East correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. He relays how Arab men find it very peculiar that he would be following his wife around the world for HER job. In fact, Horwitz writes about some of the same events and experiences that Brooks writes about in "Nine Parts of Desire". But he is writing from a whole different perspective..totally different! The places he goes, the things he does and the observations he makes demonstrate, as Horwitz says, a true American "chutzpah"!
So while we are in nonfiction, let's continue with memoirs.
Flirting with Danger: Confessions of a Reluctant War Reporter by Siobhan Darrow (paperback, $12.00)
Darrow's memoir is witty, warm, wise....and cynical. She was born in Belfast to a Irish mother and Jewish American father who was soon to abandon the family. (I had to ask my Irish-American friends how to pronounce her lovely Celtic name.) I found this book to have few parallel stories. Her adventures as a war reporter are nothing short of remarkable. She was in Chechnya, Albania, Northern Ireland, Israel and Serbia reporting very literally from the front lines. Her observations are eye-openers. We also have an wonderful inside look at the development and growth of CNN, which she joined in it's infancy. What Ted Turner offered to the world at that time was innovative, unique and ground-breaking. And then there is the story of Darrow's personal life: Her studies in the USSR, her marriage to a young Russian who didn't love her but was desperate for a green card, her life in the desolate, isolated and haunting despair of Moscow during the height of Communism, her brief fling with Ted Turner which was filled with wealth and luxury, her desire to find her soul mate and have a family more normal than the family of her childhhood. I found her to be so sympathetic that as soon as I finished the book, I checked her out online to find out what has happened to her in the intervening years....and I'm sure you will want to do the same.
Son of the Rough South: An Uncivil Memoir by Karl Fleming (hardcover, $26.95)
Karl Fleming, as many of you know, is the journalist husband of Anne Taylor Fleming who is a regular at the Sun Valley Writers' Conference. After reading this book, one cannot look at him again as that handsome distinguished looking husband of Anne.
He has an amazing story to tell and tells it perfectly. Fleming grew up in astounding poverty in Eastern North Carolina. His mother gave Karl to a Methodist orphanage because she could not afford to raise him. He stayed there until age seventeen learning how to live a rough life as an unloved child. His treatment in the orphanage at the hands of the bullies made Fleming a lifelong supporter of the underdog. He began his journalism career with a newspaper job in the small town of Wilson, North Carolina. He quickly became Newsweek Magazine's chief civil rights reporter during the sixties. He was reporting in his own backyard....and he saw (and reported) it all: James Meredith enrolling at the University of Mississippi, the Birmingham marches and the tragic Birmingham church bombing, Selma, the assassination of Medger Evers and the murder of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi. Karl Fleming lived the history of the Civil Rights Movement. He lived the headlines that we read...and wrote many of them. This book is so rich in history but yet is beautifully written with searing truth and candor. Karl Fleming may still be that handsome and distinguished man, but he is a man whose courage and sense of justice helped shape the events of a turbulent decade.
A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz (hardcover, $26.00) translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange
I have to tell you that this is one of my top ten books of all time! I had heard of Amos Oz and knew him to be among the foremost contemporary Israeli writers, but I had never read any of his novels. I first picked up this book because of the beautiful sepia image on the cover and was immediately intrigued. So, I thought I would take a look. My look turned into days in which I could not pull myself away from this extraordinary tale. Oz starts his life story with the sentence that most memoir writers I’m sure are told to avoid: “I was born….”. But this is the only ordinary sentence in the entire book. From his earliest recollections Oz was a “word child” with no one to listen to him. His love of language and his ability to use it has yielded a lyrical and profoundly beautiful story. It makes one desperately want to be able to read it in its original Hebrew. This is not a linear memoir. As the book moves back and forth in time we meet people who had tremendous influences on Oz as a person and as a writer. The tensions in his family and personal life mirror the tensions which were ever-present in his fledging country. An interesting aside: Oz has become somewhat of a cult figure in Israel. The reading of his works have become quite ritualized with people gathering in groups to read aloud. I can understand why.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (hardcover, $24.95)
Foer burst on the literary scene a few years back with "Everything is Illuminated". He is making lots of waves with this new book. I don't recall in recent years reading a book that has evoked as many disparate views as this one. The protagonist is a quirky nine year old boy, Oskar, who introduces himself by saying that he is an amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player, french speaker and pacifist. Oscar's Dad, whom he worshipped, was killed on September 11 in the World Trade Center. A year later, in his dad's closet, Oskar finds a key in a vase mysteriously labeled "Black." So he begins a search for the lock that this key opens, visiting (alphabetically) everyone listed in the phone book with the surname Black....Mind you, this is the phone book for the five boroughs of New York! Running parallel to Oscar's search is the story of his mute grandfather and his loves and losses in the firebombing of Dresden. These two stories do indeed come together in a tender way. Foer uses his humor and quirkiness to temper the warmth, depth and sensitivity of his tale.
The Education of Arnold Hitler by Marc Estrin (paperback, $14.95)
Wow....let's talk about quirky characters! Arnold Hitler had the misfortune of being born to George and Anna Hitler soon after World War Two. George married Anna after saving her life in a bombed out building in Italy during the war. He grows up in a small town in Texas where he shines in both sports and academics. No one pays any attention to his name....he could be Arnold Smith. He earns a scholarship to Harvard where suddenly everything is different...he becomes his name. No one can get beyond it. My first reaction was to ask why he simply did not change his name. It was the cause of so much grief and unhappiness. But there is a reason. The author explores the nature of identity--how we find our true identities, how our identities are shaped by those around us, and how false perceptions of our identities are developed by others, by a look, a name, a style of dress. As every review I read has noted, there is a Forrest Gump quality to Arnold and to the book....the difference being that Arnold is a genius. He does find himself surrounded by grand events and grand people. He is caught in the middle of a civil rights march on his first day of kindergarten, he is on the grassy knoll when Kennedy is assassinated, he dates Leonard Bernstein's daughter and becomes a confidante of Bernstein, he seeks out Noam Chomsky at MIT to discuss what is in a name and is in the middle of Harvard Yard when radical student group SDS shutsj down the University. Through all of this, Arnold has a tender relationship with his Italian grandfather whom he has never met....they converse through Arnold's right knee....I told you he was quirky! I think that both Arnold and the author begin to lose grip on reality toward the end of the book....but until then, this book is a delight.
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka (hardcover, $24.95)
Well, of course the title of this book stopped me dead in my tracks....this coupled with a cover that has the look of Soviet realist paintings of the forties...how could I resist? There is definitely something to be said for good covers on books...they are not necessarily the indication of a good read, but the initial attraction can lead to a wonderful surprise.....This book is a case in point. Here is a novel that gives a history of the Ukraine during the tragic years of Stalin, a documentary about the elderly in England, a poignant look at the emigrant community while telling us an often hilarious story of an 84 year old Ukrainian immigrant widow who tells his grown daughters he is prepared to marry a 30 year old Ukrainian floozy who clearly is just looking for legal papers. The daughters, sisters who have not spoken to each other since the death of their mother two years earlier, close ranks to try to save their father. Oh, did I mention that we also get a history of tractors....in English? This is the first novel by Lewycka, an English woman of Ukrainian descent. She has a wonderful sense of the absurd and yet there is an underlying sadness to Nicolai, the father and Valentina, the vamp. All the while, the sisters shift through painful memories in an attempt to salvage their relationship. Truly, a wonderful and quick read!
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (hardcover, $25.95) coming out June 14, 2005
This book is summer candy! I was fortunate enough to be able to read an advance copy. It is a treat and, I think, a blockbuster for this summer. Kostova worked on this book for ten years and did immaculate research for the background of her novel. Now, don't turn away when I tell you what this book is about....I was not inclined to read it at first either....This tale is a quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler in the area that today is parts of Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria....Vlad the Impaler, the model for Dracula, or, Dracula himself. Having read Bram Stoker's Dracula many year back, I decided I knew all I wanted to know on that subject. And yet here I was devouring this book about a 16 year old American girl living in Amsterdam with her foreign service-father. She comes across an ancient book and a bunch of yellowing letters addressed to "my dear and unfortunate successor". She steps into the world of her father's secrets and her mother's mysterious fate....a mother she never knew. Ms. Kostova blends fact and fiction, the present day and history, so seamlessly that one is swept up in the reality of our young storyteller as she begins her quest across Europe and across time to discover the true legacy of Dracula and what that legacy means to her. This is a fast paced (except for one long, tedious chapter set in Bulgaria) exciting book with many a twist and turn. This book takes historical fiction to a whole new level!
Happy Reading!
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