#70....The Alexandria Quartet....Mountolive

"He pondered deeply upon them during those long sleepless days and nights and for the first time he saw them, in the light of this new knowledge, as enigmas. They were puzzles now, and even their private moral relationship haunted him with a sense of something he had never properly understood, never clearly evaluated. Somehow his friendship for them had prevented him from thinking of them as people who might, like himself, be living on several different levels at once. As conspirators, as lovers--what was the key to the enigma? He could not guess."

In Mountolive, Lawrence Durrell's third installment of the dramatic Alexandria Quartet, Durrell takes a different turn from his previous novels Justine and Balthazar. We finally leave behind the whiny, depressed narrator Darley, and switch to an omniscent third person narrator who gives us the skinny on what's REALLY going on behind the scenes. Mountolive might well be called "Nessim", because a good portion of the novel takes place from Nessim's POV...and boy, is he not who you think he is.

David Mountolive, a Britisher who is briefly mentioned during Balthazar, meets up with the same wacky cast of characters from Justine when he spends time at the Hosnani household perfecting his Arabic. He develops a close friendship with Nessim (pre-Justine) and an even closer friendship (with benefits) with Nessim's mom Leila, who is tending her sick husband. We also get to know Nessim's younger, less attractive brother Narouz, who is a couple cards short of a deck, if you know what I mean. Mountolive returns to England, and after years in the diplomatic service is finally given an Ambassadorship back to Egypt. He hopes to hook up again with Leila, whom he has been corresponding with by letter since he left, and whose husband has finally died, but Leila becomes disfigured after a bout with smallpox and is afraid to meet him.

Through diplomatic channels, and thanks to one of Pursewarden's one-night-stands, Mountolive and we find out what Nessim's really been up to all this time. Apparently he's been shipping weapons illegally to Palestine in support of the Jewish cause. Which, if you've been keeping up, explains why he was so hot to marry Justine (she of the Jewish faith). We discover that Justine was sleeping with both Pursewarden and Darley to keep an eye on them in case they knew anything about Nessim, since Pursewarden is in the diplomatic corps and Darley is close to Melissa, who was dating someone who knew all about Nessim. When Pursewarden discovers the truth, he kills himself rather than turn in his friend, but tells Mountolive what he knows before he offs himself. Mountolive has to turn this information over to the British, and starts to see his friend in a whole new light. The Minister of the Interior, Memlik Pasha, is kept quiet by Nessim through bribery, and they both agree that no one need know which Hosnani brother was responsible for the diplomatic melee. So you guessed it...Narouz gets the blame and the gunfire.

There were good and bad things for me about Mountolive. Parts of it bored me to tears. It was way more historical and political than Justine or Balthazar, which were more gossipy and, at times, mopey and sentimental. The best part of the book, for me, happened once everyone started to figure out what Nessim was up to. I could not stop reading. There were a lot of "a-ha" moments....scenes from the first two books suddenly made sense. It made me want to go back and re-read the first two books again so I could put things together, or in case I missed stuff.

I have read that the next book, Clea is actually a sequel, not another POV on the same time period like the first three books, so I will be excited to finally move forward in time and see what happens to everyone.

Grade: B+

#70...The Alexandria Quartet...Justine

"Far off events, transformed by memory, acquire a burnished brilliance because they are seen in isolation, divorced from the details of before and after, the fibres and wrappings of time. The actors, too, suffer a transformation; they sink slowly deeper and deeper into the ocean of memory like weighted bodies, finding at every level a new assessment, a new evaluation in the human heart."

How much can we rely on memory as truth, and how well can we really ever know another person? Lawrence Durrell tackles these questions in Justine, the first installment of his four-part Alexandria Quartet. Set in the ancient city of Alexandria, Justine is primarily the memoir of an unnamed man and his affair with a beautiful married Jewish socialite. Because of a horrifying incident in her past, Justine finds herself unable (or unwilling?) to be monogamous and so flits from affair to affair. Although her husband Nessim is presented with strong evidence of her affairs over the years, he is unable (or unwilling?) to believe it, until Melissa, the girlfriend of the narrator, comes to Nessim with her knowledge of the affair. Thinking two wrongs make a right, Melissa and Nessim begin an affair, which results in a child. When Nessim finally takes his revenge on the man who hurt Justine, Melissa dies, and Justine inexplicably flees her life in Alexandria for a Jewish kibbutz in Palestine, the narrator adopts the child and retires to a remote island to write about his memories of Justine.

Durrell uses two very unreliable sources of information to define Justine: memory, and the stories of her discarded lovers. Before we judge her as readers, we have to take this into account. As anyone knows, the further away in time an experience is, and the more wrapped in feeling it is, the more likely our memories of the experience will be skewed. Justine's previous husband wrote a book about her, but admits that his memories of their time together may not have been completely accurate: "Did this sort of thing happen so often or is it that my memory has multiplied it? Perhaps it was only once, and the echoes have misled me." The quote from the beginning of the post also emphasizes the deceptive truth of memory. We also have to account for the bias that results from the memories of past lovers. I would never want one of my ex-boyfriends to write a book about me and have people accept that as how I am. The narrator says it best: "How much of him can I claim to know? I realize that each person can only claim one aspect of our character as part of his knowledge. To every one we turn a different face of the prism." I think most of us agree that the part of the prism that would be reflected by an ex-lover might not be the most flattering picture in the world.

Durrell also challenges us to define love. Can you love someone when being unfaithful to them? Can you love someone through an intellectual avenue rather than just purely sexually? Can you really love something without a desire to possess it? My definition of a love relationship would be monogamy and commitment, which is the more conventionally accepted format...and clearly, Justine's definition is 180 degrees different from that.

I ended the book wondering why Durrell would want us to feel so negatively about Justine. Maybe it is my personal experiences and values that turned me against her.

I liked this book. It started a bit slow but grew on me. Happily I am not as turned off about reading the next three books as I was during the first few pages of Justine.

Grade: B+

#71....A High Wind in Jamaica

"Grownups embark on a life of deception with considerable misgiving, and generally fail. But not so children. A child can hide the most appalling secret without the least effort, and is practically secure against detection. Parents, finding that they see through their child in so many places the child does not know of, seldom realize that, if there is some point the child really gives his mind to hiding, their chances are nil."

There were several take-home messages Richard Hughes passes along to us in his 1929 novel, A High Wind in Jamaica. We'll kick off this review with them right now.

1)Children can be more devious than adults.
2)Not all pirates are bad guys (something Disney took to the bank with their Pirates of the Caribbean movies).
3)Parents and other adults are clueless about the true nature of children.

The five Bas-Thornton children (ranging from ages 3 to 12) aren't like normal kids. They live in the ruins of an old sugar plantation in Jamaica, and are basically running wild. They spend their time hunting, climbing trees, playing with sticks and old bottles for toys, and torturing animals, until one day a freak hurricane blows away their house. Their parents decide to send the kids back to England since Jamaica has proven unsafe, but en route, their ship is boarded by pirates. These pirates are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. They take all five children onto their own boat as a way of inducing the captain of their ship to produce money. The captain mistakenly sees the pirates throw things overboard, and assumes he has drowned the children, so they quickly leave the scene. The pirate captain is now stuck with the children, whom he never intended keeping.

The kids adjust quickly to life aboard the pirate ship, and Stockholm syndrome kicks in. The pirates are never overtly cruel to the children and pretty much allow them to do whatever they want, and a quasi-attachment is created between the kids and several members of the crew. When the kids are taken to an entertainment while on land, the oldest boy falls and breaks his neck...but astonishingly, the children don't seem to be very upset about this development and don't show much interest in his fate. The pirates board another ship, and take the captain hostage. The oldest girl, Emily, is stuck in the cabin with the bound captain, and when he makes a move to try to escape, she stabs him repeatedly, and he later dies of his injuries. Again, very little remorse is shown on Emily's part. In fact, another girl, Margaret, is blamed for the incident, but is thrown overboard. Luckily she is rescued.

The novelty of having kids swarming all over the pirate ship wears off, and the captain, Jonsen, finds another ship and makes up a story about rescuing the kids. The kids are taken onto the new ship, but Emily tells the people on the ship what really happened. The pirates are hunted down and charged with murder of the missing captain and the older Bas-Thornton boy; however, without actual bodies, the eyewitness accounts of the children will be necessary to convict them. The kids are reunited with their parents, who also left Jamaica, and a lawyer tries to get the true story of what happened with the dead captain out of Emily, who won't talk. The other kids hardly remember what happened. When Emily is put on the stand at the trial, she tells of seeing the dead captain, but not why he died. Everyone assumes since pirates are bad that the pirates killed him, and they are all hanged. Emily goes back to her regular life, seemingly unaffected by everything that has happened.

I have mixed feelings about the book. On the one hand, it was very interesting to read an adult's account of the thought processes of children. It was interesting to see what Hughes felt would hit the radar of a child. For example, at the beginning of the book, two incidents occur that Emily, the oldest girl, ruminates about for much of the book: an earthquake and the violent death of their pet cat during the hurricane. These seem to be logical, traumatizing events that might upset most kids. However, what was disturbing to me is what DOESN'T seem to upset them. The children don't seem to be very fazed by the terrible storm during the hurricane and the subsequent loss of their house and most of their belongings. They don't seem upset to be set adrift on a boat without their parents, aren't upset about being shot at and taken onto a pirate ship, and don't seem to miss their brother when he dies. Whether this is a commentary on the adaptability of children, or their inherent selfishness and lack of attention, I'm not sure. Maybe a little of both.

Something else I found interesting was the unreliability of children as witnesses during a trial. Hughes notes that "the children listened to all they were told, and according to their ages, believed it....Who were they, children, to know better what had happened to them than grownups?" Basically, the difficulty of getting children to tell the truth, when they are heavily influenced by grownups, makes them difficult witnesses. The lawyer has Emily memorize answers to questions he'll ask her, which she does with no trouble...but never does she seem to question their truth or validity. After the lawyer interviews all the children (which is basically a joke, as the kids can't stay on the subject and are making stuff up), the lawyer admits to their father that "I would rather have to extract information from the devil himself than from a child". Emily's testimony, while accurate, describes the death of the captain, but does not tell the whole truth. This is enough to convict the captain and crew.

Overall, it was not my favorite book, due to its dark, foreboding feel, but the ending was good and there was suspense and momentum to the plot.

Grade: B

#76....The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

"For those who like that sort of thing," said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, "that is the sort of thing they like."

The age-old concept of 'teacher's pet' runs amok in Muriel Spark's novella The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a short and enjoyable read. The liberated, outspoken and self-obsessed Miss Brodie is a teacher in her prime of life at a girls' school in 1930's Scotland, where she selects six impressionable ten year-old girls to be part of her 'set'. Instead of teaching them the usual school subjects like math and social studies, Miss Brodie tells the girls about her love affairs, her support of Fascism, and her conflicts with the other teachers at the school, which as you can imagine goes over very well with the conservative school administration. It is hinted at several times during the book that the principal, Miss Mackay, is looking for a reason to get rid of Miss Brodie, and hopes one of the six girls might provide her with that reason. The story follows Miss Brodie's continuing attempts to control the lives of her girls into their teenage years, trying to make them fit the roles she has cast them for even after she is no longer their teacher. The plotline moves seamlessly back and forth from the present time into the future, so we can see how Miss Brodie's girls 'turned out'. None of them really seem to become the 'creme de la creme' that Miss Brodie was grooming them for.

The six girls are typecast from almost page one. Rose Stanley is 'famous for sex', although she never does it. Monica is well-known for doing math in her head and getting pissed off. Mary is picked on constantly as the scapegoat. Eunice is the athletic one. Jenny and Sandy, best friends, write fictional tales about Miss Brodie's romantic escapades. We are told that one of these girls eventually betrays Miss Brodie to Miss Mackay, which results in Miss Brodie's firing and eventual downward spiral.

Miss Brodie also makes the mistake of getting involved with a teacher at the school, a one-armed art teacher named Mr Lloyd, who is married. His frustration in not being able to be with Miss Brodie results in his becoming involved with the six girls by painting them (all with Miss Brodie's face). Miss Brodie selects Rose to begin an affair with Mr Lloyd, but he chooses instead to become involved with Sandy, which goes against Miss Brodie's evil plan. Because Miss Brodie cannot have Mr Lloyd, she begins an affair with another teacher, Mr Lowther, whom she does not love but who loves her. When he cannot have her, and their affair becomes public knowledge when she leaves her nightgown under his pillow and it is discovered by the maid, he marries another teacher at the school.

I liked this book, but was sort of disappointed in the ending. The front cover of my book says that this book (printed in 1970) was now a "devastating movie". So I guess I was expecting Miss Brodie to do something dramatic and self-serving like shoot one or all of the girls, shoot one of the male teachers and/or herself, or blow up the school, especially after she tells the girls that the only way the school will get her to leave is if they assassinate her. They did keep mentioning that jar of gunpowder in the science room....hmmm. Maybe I have too vivid of an imagination. :)

A quick, quirky read with some slightly humorous parts. Recommended if you have nothing else on your TBR list.

Grade: B

#79....."A Room With A View"

“Take an old man’s word; there’s nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror—on the things I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now… ‘Life’, wrote a friend of mine, ‘is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.’”

One of my favorite movies is While You Were Sleeping, a hilarious romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock. It tells the story of a woman who falls in love with a stranger she sees everyday from afar, but has never officially met. Their lives collide when she comes to his rescue when he is attacked at a subway station, and while he is in a coma, is mistaken for his fiancée by his family. Bullock’s character, Lucy, is without any family in the world, and she is taken in as one of their own by Peter’s family. Because she is so happy to finally be loved and be part of a family, she doesn’t correct their assumption about her relationship with their son, figuring as long as he’s comatose no one will know the truth, but the weight of lying to his very loving family begins to weigh on her conscience….especially when she begins to fall for Peter’s brother Jack. Things get complicated when Peter regains consciousness and actually proposes to her. Lucy realizes that she must come clean with everyone before making the biggest mistake of her life. If you haven’t seen it, rent it now.

E.M. Forster’s novel, A Room With a View, reminded me so much of this movie, because the two main characters are both named Lucy and both struggle with the impact of telling lies to their friends and family. Forster’s novel begins in Florence, Italy (ironically where Lucy from While You Were Sleeping wants to go on her honeymoon), where we meet young, innocent Lucy Honeychurch and her maiden lady chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett. The ladies have just arrived at an Italian pension and are distressed because they were promised rooms that would have a view of the Arno River. They’re overheard by an older man, Mr Emerson, who agreeably offers to switch rooms with them, since a view doesn’t matter as much to him and his quiet son, George. This is agreed upon, and Lucy and Miss Bartlett become intimately involved from this act with the Emersons (who are thought unsuitable) and the other pension guests: the annoying parson Mr Beebe, the radical author Miss Lavish, and later, another self-obsessed parson, Mr Eager. Lucy is portrayed as a woman with her own thoughts and feelings, and is not as conventional as those around her would prefer. She gets into trouble when she goes sightseeing alone, and witnesses a murder in the Piazza, but luckily faints into the arms of the erstwhile George, who falls in love with her at that very moment. When he kisses her on an outing into the hills, which Charlotte witnesses, both women flee Florence for Rome, where Lucy meets the stuffy, insufferable Cecil Vyse. He proposes to Lucy three times, and she finally accepts on the third occasion, even though her family and most of her neighbors hate him because he is a snob and hates people.

Back in England, at the Honeychurch home at Windy Corner, Lucy discovers that Cecil has arranged to let a cottage in town to none other than the Emersons. George befriends Lucy’s brother Freddy, and as they spend more time together, Lucy begins to warm up to George, until the one day where George tells Lucy that she cannot marry Cecil because 1)Cecil’s a snob and hates people, 2)Cecil doesn’t allow Lucy to have her own thoughts and feelings and is trying to brainwash her, and 3)George loves Lucy and knows she loves him too. He kisses her again. Although Lucy lies to George about her feelings for him, later that night she breaks off her engagement with Cecil because she knows George is right about him. She then lies to her family, telling them there is no one else she is more interested in, and that she wants to go traveling in Greece, instead of admitting she is trying to escape George. Plans are set in motion for her to go to Greece when she discovers that the Emersons are moving away so that George can get away from her. He does not know the engagement is over. On her way out of town, Lucy meets up with Mr Emerson, whom she initially lies to about going to Greece with Cecil, but then breaks down and tells him about the end of her engagement. Mr Emerson encourages her to go find George so they can be together, and that telling lies and making big mistakes is the worst part of life. The book ends with her marrying George and having her whole family pissed off that Lucy lied to them instead of just being honest. Like Lucy in While You Were Sleeping, Lucy Honeychurch's honesty with herself in the end brings her love.

I have to admit that although I liked A Room With a View, it wasn’t the page-turner I think it could have been. I expected to blow through this book in three days, but it took almost two weeks. The last 1/3 of the book was really good, but for me, the middle 1/3 dragged horribly. Up until George moved to Windy Corner, it was seriously boring, partly because I hated Cecil, and partly because Cecil was making Lucy boring. I also have to wonder if all clergymen in 19th /early 20th century England were as stuffy and pompous as they seem to be portrayed so frequently in classic literature. Jane Austen, I believe, wrote the book on irritatingly proper and self-centered country parsons— I hate Mr Collins from Pride and Prejudice more than anything. I just have a hard time believing that men of God, who are ostensibly supposed to love all God’s children, could be so obsessed with money and social status. But that seems to be how it was!

My heart also went out to Lucy’s character. Although it created a big mess, I understood why she wasn’t forthcoming with her feelings for George. She had Charlotte telling her that he was a socialist, and the negative feelings of the other pensioners in Italy towards the Emersons didn't help. I noticed that she seemed to warm up to George when her brother started to get along with him. Having Cecil’s thumbs-up when he arranged for them to be in Cissie Villa seemed to recommend them as well. She didn’t want to disappoint her mother, who initially seemed excited by her engagement to Cecil, but then at the end, is relieved when she calls it off. So in that sense Lucy was not the only one who was lying!

Not my favorite of the list so far, but definitely not the worst. Here's hopin' the other Forster books upcoming will have a bit more drive to the narrative.

Grade: B+

#80...."Brideshead Revisited"

"I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember."

Brideshead Revisited is the reminiscence of Charles Ryder, a British military captain stationed in England during World War II. As his platoon is moved through the British countryside, they end up at Brideshead, a mansion no one is familiar with except Charles, who makes up for all of them by not only knowing of Brideshead intimately, but also knowing the family who used to live there. Arriving at Brideshead brings up Charles' memories of the past and the Marchmain family.

Charles meets Lord Sebastian Flyte, the son of Lord Brideshead, at Oxford, where Charles is studying to be a painter. Sebastian is wealthy, happy-go-lucky and irreverant, and introduces him to the 'wrong' group at Oxford, which includes Anthony Blanche, an all-out homosexual, and Boy Mulcaster, who will be his future brother-in-law. Sebastian becomes a very different person though, when he brings Charles home with him to stay at Brideshead. He is very close-lipped about his family, drinks a lot, and is also resistant to his family's Catholicism. The Marchmain family, consisting of the separated Lady Marchmain, his two sisters Julia and Cordelia, and his older brother 'Bridey', welcome Charles into the family, and Lady Brideshead tries to enlist Charles' help with Sebastian's alcoholism. Charles refuses, and continues giving Sebastian money to drink, although Sebastian is convinced that his family is turning Charles into a spy. Sebastian is eventually pulled out of Oxford, and Charles quits Oxford as well to attend art school, where he becomes an architectural painter and makes his living on the decay of the British aristocracy by painting all of the grand old homes before they are sold or torn down.

Fast forward several years. Charles' painting career is on the rise and he is married to Celia, Boy Mulcaster's sister. They have two children and Charles knows that Celia has already had indiscretions with other men. When he arrives back in New York after painting jungle ruins, he and his wife board a ship to take them back to England. On board is none other than Julia, Sebastian's beautiful sister, who is also struggling to escape a loveless marriage to an unpopular politician. Charles and Julia begin an affair, which is soon known by all but is not looked on favorably by Julia's Catholic family. Charles and Julia plan to divorce their respective spouses to marry each other. This plan proceeds until the elderly, ailing Lord Marchmain returns to Brideshead to die. Religion having always been a sticking point between the Catholic Julia and the agnostic Charles, Lord Marchmain's death returns Julia to her religion, and she gives up Charles so that she will no longer live in sin. In the end, when Charles re-visits the chapel at Brideshead during his military stay, there is some intimation that Charles may have taken on Catholicism too.

I have to say that I was very disappointed in this book. Those of you who loved it, go ahead and blame it on the circumstances of my cat Frank's unhappy passing last week and the ensuing depression that followed. Besides wondering why there are so many drunks named Sebastian in 20th Century literature, I kept waiting for the story to take off, and to me it never really did. The most interesting characters, Sebastian and Anthony Blanche, almost completely drop out of the story by the middle of the book, and even Lady Marchmain dies pretty early on. Call me a purist, but I can never really root for characters who cheat on their spouses, so Charles and Julia lost my sympathy too.

On the Catholic angle. I read that Evelyn Waugh was a Catholic convert, and his conversion obviously meant a great deal to him. It was interesting to me that Waugh has several of his main characters converting to Catholicism by the end of the book. These conversions all seem to happen as a result of a major life change. Sebastian goes to live with monks abroad when no one else will take him in, and Julia is reconciled with the Church when her father dies. Lord Marchmain is converted on his deathbed when he receives the Last Rites. Charles himself even comes around to the Catholic faith at the end, most likely because of losing Julia, when he kneels in the Brideshead chapel and prays.

Interestingly enough, I am also in the middle of watching the movie version of Brideshead, with Emma Thompson playing Lady Marchmain. So far, excepting a couple of scenes, the story has been fairly true to the book. The movie is playing up the possibly homosexual angle on Sebastian (which I guess never really occured to me when I was reading the book, but may have explained why he got depressed when Anthony Blanche left Oxford and why he stayed with the cripple Kurt) quite a bit. Sebastian is positively flamboyant in the movie. Julia also seems to be playing a more central role in the movie than she did in the book. She accompanies them to Venice to visit Lord Marchmain, which didn't happen in the book.

Overall, just okay for me. And this book didn't have a tough act to follow after Augie March.

Grade: B-

#83....A Bend In the River

“People lived as they had always done; there was no break between past and present. All that had happened in the past was washed away; there was always only the present. It was as though, as a result of some disturbance in the heavens, the early morning light was always receding into the darkness and men lived in a perpetual dawn.”

A Bend in the River follows the story of Salim, who retreats from his ancestral home on the western coast of Africa and takes over a small trading goods store deep in the wilds of central Africa, at a bend in the river where civilization and the lack thereof intersect. Salim takes this job for several reasons: uprisings in his hometown, escaping from an unwanted engagement, and wanting to make something of himself. He is warned by the previous owner of the store, Nazruddin, to know ‘when to get out’. Salim arrives to see he will be living on the fringes of existence, in a town that has gone back to bush and rubble after colonial rule. He befriends other ‘foreigners’ who live in the town, and when a slave boy, Metty, is sent to him from his parents, he employs Metty in the shop.

Salim is also responsible for Ferdinand, a boy from the jungles who will be attending school in the town. Salim jealously watches while Ferdinand gets the schooling, education and opportunities that are closed to him. When the country is taken over by an anonymous President, new things begin to happen in the town. Modernization arrives in the form of the “Domain”, a series of modern buildings and a ‘polytechnic’, where Ferdinand gets to attend more school and Salim’s friend Indar, also from the upper-class coast, arrives as a speaker. Unlike Ferdinand, who blindly spouts the dogma he is taught at school, Indar has concerns about the direction of the country, as Salim has had all along. Through Indar, Salim meets Yvette, the young wife of Raymond, a man whom the President favors. Salim begins a passionate affair with Yvette, but when Raymond’s favor drops with the President, things go sour for Salim and Yvette. At the same time, things also start to go sour for the town. There are tribal uprisings and attacks against the President and his minions. Shop owners who have been there forever sell out and leave. Salim begins to feel the nervousness of being trapped, and decides to visit Nazruddin in London, where he becomes engaged to his daughter Kareisha. Upon returning to settle accounts in the town, he finds that the President has sold his shop to someone else, and he is under suspicion from the police. When he is imprisoned, Ferdinand, who has risen to the post of commissioner, bails him out of jail and puts him on the first steamer out of town before the arrival of the President, who is coming to execute everyone of prominence in the town.

One of the main themes of the book is a Latin saying inscribed on the town lycee building, Semper Aliquid Novi (‘always something new’). It is so appropriate to the seeming impermanence of settlements in Africa. The ruins of colonial buildings are still visible in the town, which begins to grow anew after independence and again under the Presidential rule, and Salim realizes that the current civilization he is living in could just as easily be reduced to rubble:

“The ruins, spread over so many acres, seemed to speak of a final catastrophe. But the civilization wasn’t dead. It was the civilization I existed in and in fact was still working towards. And that could make for an odd feeling: to be among the ruins was to have your time-sense unsettled. You felt like a ghost not from the past, but from the future. You felt that your life and ambition had already been lived out for you and you were looking at the relics of that life. You were in a place where the future had come and gone.”

Nothing seems to stay the same in Africa. Even the rise and fall of people in the President’s favor, such as Raymond’s rise and fall from grace, and the improbable rise of Ferdinand, an African raised in the jungle, show that importance as a human being can also be changed at a moment’s notice, and someone with the President’s ear one day can be ignored and forgotten the next.

Another element of the story I found fascinating was Naipaul’s treatment of African history. Salim says that, as Africans, “we never asked why; we never recorded”, since natives were unable to read and write. They relied on the oral tradition of passing stories down among family members. Salim, in talking about a story he heard from his grandfather, notes that “without my own memory of the old man’s story I suppose that would have been a piece of history lost forever.” Africa has to rely on educated Europeans, like Raymond, to record their history for posterity. However, absent from these dry European histories, which rely primarily on documentation, are the true experiences of the African natives and their traditions and beliefs. Salim becomes very angry reading over Raymond's journal articles, saying:

"[Raymond] gave no reasons and looked for none; he just quoted from the missionary reports. He didn't seem to have gone to any of the places he wrote about; he hadn't tried to talk to anybody....He knew so much, had researched so much. He must have spent weeks on each article. But he had less true knowledge of Africa, less feel for it, than Indar or Nazruddin or even Mahesh....Yet he had made Africa his subject."

A lot of noise has been made in other reviews about Naipaul’s treatment of women in this novel. Women seemed to fall into one of two categories: modern working woman, and object of obsession. Ferdinand’s mother, Zabeth, is a single mom who runs her own business in the bush, and Salim’s fiancée, Kareisha, is still single at 30 and becomes a pharmacist. Shoba, who is idolized by her husband Mahesh, and Yvette, who really seems to get around, aren’t portrayed as particularly ambitious women, who rely on the men around them to bring them their security. I did not enjoy the scene where Salim loses it and beats up Yvette, but I don’t think it says anything overarchingly negative about all women everywhere.

I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. And my enjoyment was unexpected, and definitely wasn’t enjoyment in the traditional sense. The story was dark, foreboding, and at times apocalyptic in its story of the rise, fall and disappearance of civilizations and rule in the wilds of Africa. Not usually my thing at all, but I have to admit I was sucked into the story, and was actually begging Salim to do as Nazruddin told him and “get out” when things started to go badly in town. The ending was a bit ambiguous for my taste, but that's probably the way Naipaul wanted it to go down. This book should remind all of us how lucky we are as Americans to have stability, democracy and education in our country.

Grade: B+

#86.....Ragtime

The 2005 movie Crash, winner of the Oscar for Best Picture, revolved around everyday, multi-ethnic people who collide with each other in Los Angeles amid racial and social tensions. Along these same lines is E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime, which focuses on a Jewish family, an African-American family, and a Caucasian family that all come together over a period of years in New York and change each other's lives.

Just like the plot of Crash, several stories occur simultaneously in Ragtime. The book opens in turn-of-the-century America with a traditional upper class Caucasian family living in New York. One day the mother discovers a live African-American baby buried in their backyard; she finds the mother of the baby and both the mother, named Sarah, and her baby move into the house. At the same time, a family of Jewish immigrants arrives from overseas, and are so financially strapped that both parents and the young daughter work in the mills, until the father hits it big with his 'moving pictures'. The father of Sarah's baby, a decent and successful musician named Coalhouse, is harrassed by several white firemen because of his color, and his car is vandalized and Coalhouse is sent to prison when he tries to protest. Sarah dies while trying to secure Coalhouse's release, and Coalhouse goes on a rampage to get revenge, killing firemen and blowing up firehouses. How it all ends up, you'll have to find out for yourself.

There are lots of little substories involving famous people like Harry Houdini, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, JP Morgan, and Henry Ford, who also mingle with varying ways into the lives of the three families. Their stories, however, are nowhere near as fascinating as those of the fictional characters, and almost seem like afterthoughts dropped into the story. I'm not sure if Doctorow felt his story would be more interesting with real-life personages, or if he wanted to use the real-life personages to give the story a historical perspective. I think the story would have been just fine without them, personally.

I enjoyed this book a lot. Once I got used to the back and forth style of writing Doctorow uses while switching in between all of his characters, it was easier. He used short, concise sentences, which surprisingly didn't detract from the detailed picture he was trying to create. The narrative definitely sucked you in and had you caring about the characters and wondering how everything would turn out for everyone. I was so PO'd reading the section about Coalhouse's harassment. It is unfathomable to me that there was a period in this country where it was acceptable for anyone to be treated that way.

The front cover of Ragtime calls it "the astonishing bestseller about America", and while it only spanned maybe 15 years of American history, it displays our country at a time of innocence that would never happen again, before World War I, the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement and before terrorism and Communism really got going. It was strange to see famous people walking around in the book without paparazzi trailing their every move or without a posse of bodyguards. Those were really the days! Now movie stars can't even go to Starbucks without escorts.

An enjoyable read you won't be sorry you picked up.

Grade: B-

#88...The Call of the Wild

"Thornton knelt down by Buck's side. He took his head in his two hands and rested cheek on cheek. He did not playfully shake him, as was his wont, or murmur soft love curses, but he whispered in his ear, "As you love me, Buck. As you love me," was what he whispered."

I do not love animal stories, especially ones where animals get hurt or die. Old Yeller traumatized me for life, as did Turner and Hooch. Yes, I know animal death is all part of the great Circle of Life and everything (yes, I bawled through The Lion King as well) but when you get right down to it, animal stories are just something I avoid like the plague. Period. Marley and Me will never, ever be on my TBR list.

So as you might guess I was jumping for joy to read Jack London's mini-epic The Call of the Wild. I spent most of the first 40 pages fighting back tears for Buck, a dog who is suddenly uprooted from a loving and happy home to hauling heavy sleds, barely getting enough food to make it through a day, sleeping wet and cold in the snow every night, and not to mention occasionally being attacked by humans or other dogs. Buck is able to dig deep to find the will to not only survive, but thrive in his new environment, and along the way does meet up with some very ethical and loving humans. Thank God.

Despite the animal angle, I found Call to be very well written. London is good at expressing the shock and denial any of us humans would experience in such a dramatic change in living conditions. Watching Survivor or Lost, you see people doing essentially the same thing Buck does…getting past social niceties and doing what they have to do to survive, no matter what else happens.

If animal stories are your thing (and I won't tell you if Buck makes it or not) pick up The Call of the Wild.

Grade: B-

#94....Wide Sargasso Sea

"Coming from the Antilles’, he declared, ‘with a terrifying insight and … passion for stating the case of the underdog, she has let her pen loose on the Left Banks of the Old World”. Ford Madox Ford, describing the writing of Jean Rhys.

Jean Rhys certainly knew her subject when she wrote about Bertha Mason, the tormented ‘madwoman in the attic’ of Bronte’s Jane Eyre in her novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. Born on the island of Dominica, daughter of an English doctor and a Dominican mother, Rhys was also a child of mixed blood who was treated as an outsider in England, where she went to live with her aunt, because of her accent and mannerisms. Bertha Mason, introduced to us as Antoinette, is also a child of mixed blood who is treated as an outsider on the island of Jamaica, where she lives. Mixed blood is considered to be of lower status than black or white in the island’s society. Her mother Annette marries a wealthy Englishman but goes crazy when her house is burned to the ground and one of her children dies. After Annette’s death, Mr Mason takes care of Antoinette, sending her to school and to live with her Aunt Cora. Antoinette’s marriage is arranged to a man who is never named, but is assumed to be Mr Rochester of Jane Eyre. Her checkered past follows her to the island of Dominica, where a distant relative begins to fill Mr Rochester’s head with poisonous thoughts about his new wife and her family, intimating Antoinette could go the same way as her mother. Because Mr Rochester cannot be persuaded to think otherwise, the self-fulfilling prophecy becomes true.

Like any underdog story, the story of Antoinette’s turbulent childhood and the self-fulfilling prophecy of her madness is compelling and tragic. Rhys portrays the racial discrimination and isolation Antoinette experiences with great poignancy, having endured it herself to some degree in her own childhood. The stubborn blindness of Mr Rochester, who married for money and not love and who crushes his wife’s spirit by changing her name into something as ugly as Bertha, is infuriating. You will want to crawl into the pages of this book and beat him.

I haven't read Jane Eyre (believe it or not) and so I came to the end of this book wondering if I missed some subtle nuances in this story because of that; but as a stand-alone story I thought it was very well-written. You would have to have a heart of stone not to root for and sympathize with Annette’s plight.

Grade: B+

#97....The Sheltering Sky

“And it occurred to him that a walk through the countryside was a sort of epitome of the passage through life itself. One never took the time to savor the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and final, that there never would be a return, another time.”

The Sheltering Sky was Paul Bowles’ first novel, and his most famous. Seeing as Bowles spent the majority of his life as an American expatriate living in Tangiers, Morocco, there’s no one better equipped to write about the experiences of clueless American tourists in the wilds of Northern Africa. And that is the basic premise of Sky: an American couple, Port and Kit Moresby, and their friend Tunner have decided to do some traveling in and around this area of Africa, despite travel warnings in this area which Port knows about but neglects to mention to his wife or friend. Port is already unfaithful to his wife within the first six chapters, and Kit’s pretended or real nonchalance sets up the dynamic that is to continue between the couple. As the group travels deeper into Africa, they get further from civilization as they know it, and that’s when things get interesting. The experience of what was to be a fun foreign sojourn changes three lives forever.

When Sky was first shown to Doubleday Publishing in 1949, it was rejected because it was not felt that the book was really a novel. It’s not hard to see why Doubleday might have felt this way. It reads somewhat like a travelogue of Northern Africa, and may have been thought to be more autobiographical than fictional. The descriptive language Bowles uses is pure and beautiful. Bowles obviously gives his setting great importance and wants the reader to see where they are. You can feel the flies as Port drives the jeep through the swarm. You can smell the garbage laying around the hotel in Ain Krorfa. Having never been to Africa, I needed Bowles' help to imagine what it would be like, and he definitely came through for me.

Against this rich backdrop are the morally questionable characters of Port, Kit and Tunner. Interestingly, Bowles keeps them at an emotional distance from the reader by pointing out their myriad faults early and often, emphasizing lies, infidelity and insecurity. I never felt truly sympathetic to anyone except maybe Tunner, who is the quintessential third wheel and keeps getting the shaft. What made this book fascinating for me was how each character reacts to the diminishment of civilization in their environment. Tunner freaks out about weevils in their soup, yet Port and Kit unhesitatingly finish their entire bowls of soup despite this. Kit’s desperation and helplessness in the middle of nowhere, far from medical care when Port becomes sick, is palpable. How well would any of us hold up in this same situation? How much does it take for someone to be pushed across the line between sanity and insanity?

The last third of the book was, for me, where the momentum really picked up. Finally, I cared about one of the characters, yet still in a limited way. I wanted to know what would happen to Kit and if she would make it out of the wild. Not all of the book was coherent or readable (the section describing Port’s typhoid delirium is a good example), but the overall message of living every day in the present because there may not be a tomorrow is profound and sobering. It didn’t make me want to go on a trip to Tangiers any time soon, but thanks to Paul Bowles' beautifully descriptive prose, I was able to visit it in my imagination just as if I had been there.

Grade: B-

#100...The Magnificent Ambersons

"In the days before deathly contrivances hustled them through their lives, and when they had no telephones--another ancient vacancy profound responsible for leisure--they had time for everything: time to think, to talk, time to read, time to wait for a lady!"

This quote from the first chapter of Booth Tarkington's 1919 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Magnificent Ambersons, sets us up to enter the changing world of the turn of the century America. Horses and buggies are being swapped for "horseless carriages". Factories are springing up everywhere. And in the midst of a small midwestern town lives the ‘old money’ Amberson family, around whose fortunes the interest of the town revolves. There is only one heir to the Amberson fortune, George Amberson Minafer, and he is spoiled beyond belief and utterly ridiculous. He feels everyone else not an Amberson is "riffraff" and beneath him, and he shows nothing but contempt for the technological marvels that are changing the world around him. Georgie discovers several universal truths about money during the course of Tarkington’s novel: that it doesn’t buy happiness or guarantee forgiveness, doesn’t quell gossiping tongues, and, to misquote Tarkington, it’s “rahthuh bettuh” to ‘do something rather than be something’.

Tarkington’s two most sympathetic characters, Lucy Morgan, Georgie’s love interest, and his father, Wilbur Minafer, are excellent foils for the spoiled, upper class Georgie. Lucy represents the rise of ‘new money’, as her middle-class father becomes successful with his ‘horseless carriage’ and Wilbur, whose marriage to Georgie’s mother Isabel was reputed to be ‘beneath her’ represents the ‘save, don’t spend’ maxim, knowing that wealth is not end-all, be-all. Both are good natured, loving people who are more closely in tune with the world and its changes than Georgie is. You get the feeling after reading Ambersons that Tarkington wanted his readers to feel negatively about the entitled upper class, sitting on its money and contributing nothing to society. It definitely came across loud and clear.

In real life, Tarkington’s family fortunes followed much the same path as the fictional Ambersons, and thanks to that, Georgie’s resistance to the changes that occur both in his surroundings and in his immediate family is real and believable. Like Georgie, Tarkington was not a big believer in higher education, dropping out of both Purdue and Princeton Universities without graduating. Like Georgie, the Tarkingtons were upper class but suffered a decline in their fortunes with the Panic of 1873. Tarkington knew what it was like to go from something to nothing; and at the story’s conclusion, he leaves it up to the reader to decide if Georgie will make it after all.

I enjoyed this book, although I don’t know that it was Top 100 of the Century worthy. The story was well-told and had plenty of plot twists. The momentum of Georgie’s downward spiral kept the story moving, and I really had no idea until the end how it would all end up for him. With today’s societal obsession with the rich and famous, Georgie’s story of riches to rags and quest for redemption in the eyes of those who love him is still as relevant and absorbing today as it was back at the turn of the century.

GRADE: B+