Reminiscing Books

Marilynne Robinson's GILEAD is written in the form of a letter from an aging Congregationalist minister, the Reverend John Ames, to his young son. The novel is set in 1956. Ames, his young wife Lila, and their seven-year old boy live in Gilead, Iowa. Gilead, a biblical place whose name means "hill of testimony," seems to be something of a misnomer for a place so flat as that part of Iowa, but in the context of this novel, "Gilead" takes on an additional significance as a life testimony, and for Ames himself, a memorial (a grave mound). Ames, who is ailing with a heart condition, writes in order that later his then grown son will know something about whence he comes.

Ames, his father, and his grandfather were all ministers. Ames's grandfather was literally called to the ministry, believing that he had been graced with visions of Jesus, of which most striking of all was an appearance of Jesus in chains. His grandfather took that to mean that he should dedicate himself to the abolitionist movement, and he became involved in some violent radical actions along with the (historical) abolitionist John Brown. Ames's father was, by contrast, a pacifist, and the father and son had a difficult relationship. Ames feels distant from both his father and grandfather. He loves his own son dearly, and yet knows his life clock is running out on him.

It's difficult to carry off an epistolary novel. In the days before email, the letter was a real art form, though, and the best writers could be spellbinding and highly entertaining. GILEAD's success rests principally on the strength of Robinson's masterful use of language. Early on in the novel it seems like the story, as such, really isn't going anywhere, but you want to continue on just because the language is so beautiful--spare, astringent. Eventually, though, this reader hungered for something a little more. Later on in the novel, fortunately, some tension develops when Ames's namesake, John Ames Boughton, the son of his best and oldest friend, comes to town. Boughton, a disgraced profligate, returns as the prodigal son, but Ames isn't quite ready to assume the role of welcoming substitute father. Ames is also worried about Boughton's friendly contacts with Ames's wife and child.

I had the opportunity both to listen to the audio version, read by Tim Jerome, and read the book myself. Jerome has a marvelous voice, perfectly suited for the Reverend Ames, but after a while I frankly found it tedious to listen to the audio version. On the other hand, I very much enjoyed reading GILEAD, even if, admittedly, it tested my patience at times.

Gilead is a beautifully written novel of the thoughts and memories of a pastor in his later years. The main character recounts the events of his life and portions of his family history for his son when he is gone. This book is not as much action or event driven as it is almost a poem as a novel. The story is touching at times but at the same time gets somewhat repetitive regarding the relationship between the main character and his namesake. Worth reading.

I keep this book by my bed as a sleep aid. Even if I am not feeling overly tired, I read a few pages and I can't keep my eyes open. I would highly recommend this book to anyone with insomnia!

Gilead is a nearly perfect book.

It is quiet, multi-layered, and deeply spiritual. Composed in the form of a letter from the elderly protagonist, John Ames, to his young son, the work is a meditative near-monologue about faith, anger, love, and forgiveness; emotional patrimony, isolation, and loneliness. Absent characters loom large, and vast haunted landscapes are communicated in just the barest of verbal exchanges.

It also is without question an American novel; Robinson has made an unspoken agreement with her readers that we possess some intuitive understanding of the fiery arc of radical abolitionism and its dissipation, of the Congregationalists who moved from New England to claim the prairie as Free-Staters, and of the central role of Calvinistic theology in shaping a certain type of intellectual life.

I rate this one star only because there are not negative stars. As another reviewer said there is no beginning, no middle, and no end. It is simply a rambling monologue with no plot or purpose; except to make money for the author. This was a gift so at least I did not spend the money; but it is a shame anyone did. I read it all the way through (which makes me more stupid than those that quit at half way), thinking it would get better; it did not.

I thought this book was absolutely wonderful. I felt like I knew the characters and was sad when I finnished reading it. Great for a weekend read and I felt completely satisfied. I would encourage anyone to read it!

I read this book a few years back after getting it from the library. I now want to buy it because even though much time has passed, the characters and the story still fascinate and haunt me. This is a story you won't forget, and it's a great one!

This is the story that Hannah Grey has waited a long time to tell. It's the story of what happened to her the summer she was seventeen, living in Maine. The summer she met Conary Crocker, the wild boy she fell in love with.

It's also the story of what began to happened with the Haskell family who lived in isolation on an island off the mainland of Dundee, Maine back in the late 1880s.

It's part love story, part ghost story.
And the two stories eventually collide...

I thought this was very well done. The characters were realistic, and well developed and I found it to be an easy and satisfying read. I will look for more books written by Beth Gutcheon.

MORE THAN YOU KNOW

This is my first Beth Gutcheon book but certainly will not be the last. I really enjoyed this book. It was cool how past and present were totally tied in with each other.

Hannah Gray tells of the summer she met the love of her life, Conary Crocker, resident bad boy. This is a summer during the Great Depression. Hannah and her half-brother and nasty, mean step-mother summer in Dundee, Maine. Not only does Hannah meet Conary, but they also meet some nasty, evil ghosts who are haunting the house where Hannah and family reside.

We also meet the Haskell family from 100 years earlier. They are a miserable, mean, unhappily wed couple who also have two children. Claris, the mother, marries Danial, which is odd due to the fact that Danial is a strange man, mean, cold, nasty, rude. Claris comes from a fun-loving, music-loving, happy, close-knit family and marrying Danial turns out to be the BIGGEST mistake of her young life.

All of these characters become involved with each other through ghosts and/or lost souls -- what have you. This book is a story of two couples and their relationships and how both of these relationships are intertwined even though they lived 100 years apart. The book tells of love, hate, hauntings, murder, great secondary characters, good story line, and history.

The wildly happy couple -- Hannah and Conary and the miserable, hateful couple -- Danial and Claris -- will stay in your mind for a long time. The book tells the stories of these two couples and their families in a way that will delight and scare you. This is good writing. I also enjoyed the history of the area, be it true or not!

This is a very well written book, one I thoroughly enjoyed, and one I will highly recommend to my friends/family.

Thank you!!! Pam

In "More Than You Know," Beth Gutcheon tells two stories, both set in a town in Maine, at once: first the story of Hannah Gray and the summer she spent with her irritating stepmother and the love of her life, Conary Crocker and second the story of the Haskells, a family that could not stand each other. As Hannah faces her own struggle with Edith (her stepmom), a spirit from the past begins to haunt her. At the same time, she begins to look into the Haskell murder mystery, which occurred many years before her time. The novel is about discovering our pasts and the importance of moving on--the danger of closing our minds to the world around us. Hannah becomes freer in her relationship with Conary while discovering what isolated and unhappy lives the Haskells lived because they were alone on an island and would not admit their anxiety and anger. This discovery is important to what happens later in Hannah's life: a reverence of the past, tradition and family, but not a slavish devotion to it. The ambitious, well-written and impressive novel is crafted beautifully and effectively. The problem is, in the end, the storylines are not all that exciting. Gutcheon's story needed more pizzaz, more flash and more style to draw the reader in more. She does all she can with the spare storyline, but to really accentuate the meaning of the novel, she needed to highlight it, rather than watercolor it across the page.

What an enjoyable read this was! While this is considered a Christian novel, the religious message was woven subtlety and artfully throughout the storyline, making it an important part of the story rather than a sermon.

The charactors were all interesting and likable. The plots of each woman's life held your interest, and while you knew the book was likely to have a happy ending, each subplot had a twist to it to keep your interest.

I truly enjoyed this book and found myself parceling it out so that it wouldn't end too quickly. I recommend it to anyone interested in a good story!

This is the first stokes book I ever read, after reading it, I was hooked I bought and read everything (novels) she has written, and I am awaiting her next one. If you are new to her works start here and you'll be hooked too.

This books hold your attention all the way through. It's a look at what real friendship is about and should be. You feel so good reading the book and know that life can be real. Makes you want to go back in time with your good friends and put a note in a "blue bottle" and see how it ends.
Great read.

I decided to purchase this book because it was highly recommended by a dear friend. We were traveling to North Carolina to see our new granddaughter and I cannot leave home without a good book! While searching through my stash of unread books, I noticed that Ms. Stokes lives in Asheville, North Carolina, which made "The Blue Bottle Club" a perfect choice for my traveling companion. I was not disappointed! I enjoyed this book so much that I have read four more of her books and look forward to continuing through her collection. Do not stop with "The Blue Bottle Club"! Continue with "Circle of Grace", "The Amber Photograph" and my favorite "The Amethyst Heart".

This was the worse book I've ever read. It is a poor excuse for a book really - with weak character development, poor grammer and no real plot. Just an excuse to promote Ms. Stokes' religious views - while criticizing other religions. Is that really what Jesus would do? The conversation with the cat is the ultimate in inane literature.

Most male characters were evil. And four of the five main characters never married and seemed unusually attracted to other women. It made me wonder if there is a new genre of Christian Fiction.

Normally I enjoy literary novels and good writing. I don't require a lot of action, flashy settings, glamourous characters, or what have you.

I was disappointed to find Home simply tedious. Very little action, repetitive dialogue, nothing to enjoy in any of the characters, nothing even to look forward to for their futures (either for them or for us.)

If you enjoy reading about theological debates circa 1950, thinly veiled Bible-based racism, figurative hair-shirt-wearing, uncontrolled weeping, and crotchety but not feisty old men, by all means pick up Home.

I found it to be the literary equivalent of a big spoonful of cod liver oil: probably not without hidden healthful qualities, but requiring a good deal of determination to choke it down.

Maybe not perfect, because it did come to an end. This is truly one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. I read Gilead after Home, and found it equally as beautiful. It is a story set in a simpler time, when things like good behavior and honor mattered more. The things that set Jack so far apart from his family would not seem like such a big deal now.The relationship of Jack and Glory is skilfully written, and it is easy to feel her pain and hope. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

I was excited to see that this book had been released since I loved GILEAD so much. While I enjoyed HOME, I probably did not like it as much as it's predecessor.

Both books are very similar in tone and content (not surprising since they are parallel pieces to each other), but I found HOME to move at a much more slower pace then GILEAD and that's saying something considering how slowly placed GILEAD is. It took me several days to complete this book. That's not to say it's boring. It's not. It's just that I think there is a bit too much repetitiveness.

Still, I recommend HOME to anyone who loved GILEAD. Both books compliment each other very well. They are not plot driven stories, but beautifully written books about people.

This review refers to the audiobook.

It's a shame. The narrator sounds like she's narrating an episode of Dynasty. Breathy and melodramatic. Like a congested divorcee waving around a glass of wine while she talks about her teenage glory days in the Hamptons.

In other words, definitely not suited to this material.

In her Pulitzer Prize winner Gilead, named the #1 fiction book of 2004 by the New York Times, Marilynne Robinson told the story of Pastor John Ames, a fourth generation Congregationalist pastor in Gilead, Iowa. More exactly, she allowed Pastor Ames to tell his own story, for the book is a 240-page letter from the 76-year-old Ames to his seven-year-old son. In the letter Pastor Ames looks inwardly to untangle how his present reality in his old and feeble years relates to whatever constitutes Ultimate Reality. Parts of his letter also fret about "the beloved child of my oldest and dearest friend." That would be "Jack" (John) Boughton, son of Gilead's Presbyterian pastor, Robert Boughton, who is named after Ames himself.

In a parallel but independent story, Home takes us back to Gilead in the 1950s. Glory, age 38 and the youngest of eight Boughton children, has left her teaching job in Des Moines and returned to Gilead to care for her aged and feeble father, Robert. She's deeply lonely and never married, although we learn she does have a romantic past. As a good pastor's kid, she still reads her Bible, and since Robert is a widower, Glory takes charge of all things domestic. Without explanation, the black sheep of the family, Jack, returns home after a twenty year absence. Jack is 43, an alcoholic, a thief who has spent time in prison, a miscreant who fathered a child out of wedlock, and, worst of all for his loving father, a decided non-believer. But Jack knows the Scriptures better than most, he plays hymns for his father, and he has a broken heart for an unlikely woman who did him nothing but good. He's come home seeking reconciliation. But that is easier said than done.

The Bible's parable of the prodigal son is far neater than this family's story. "It's a powerful thing, family," says Robert (176). Indeed, it is, especially when your family is a pastor's family brimming with Presbyterian probity and earnestness, a family that is good in order to look good. "Such a wonderful family they were!" (7). But there are no villains in this story. Father Robert is tired, sad, and tirelessly tender; he falls asleep at dinner, succumbs to dementia, and is vexed at how and why Jack arrived at his sorry state. Glory is the peace keeper who moves between accepting people, trying to fix them, and enabling them. Jack is irony personified. These are lovable characters. They have secrets that define them, roles that have been assigned to them for decades, memories both pleasant and painful, all come together in a house full of family ghosts. "This life on earth is a strange business," says Glory (253). And so she prays at dinner what we all hope and pray, "Dear God in heaven, please help us. Dear God, please help everyone we love. Amen." (292).

I want to thank Susanna Tamaro because she had inspired me to become an author for I have way better stories to tell! Great writer, very simple and I do agree has many in-depth life lessons; however, I have lived through more tragic and life growing experiences.

It's interesting to see that people either give it only one star, or five.
There are no in-betweens. In my opinion, it's because you either "get it" or you don't. I've almost been able to sort everyone I know into these two categories.
This was, and still is one of the best books I've ever read. I treasure it.

Although I enjoyed the audio adaption of the book I was a little put off by "grannies" view of her own daughter and then her granddaughter. I could feel the loss of her grandchild and how sad it must be to not have familiarity with those you love. I did want the granddaughter to appear before the book ended though, or at least I wanted more news of what happened. I enjoyed grandmothers past life but just couldn't understand this deep separation of her granddaughter. Maybe she will write a letter someday to give us her side and what happened.

Here is a much happier and very touching experience with letters from a grandparent. Please, read Camron Wright's "LETTERS FOR EMILY". I enjoyed the mystery and love displayed in this book. You will enjoy it I'm sure.

Susanna Tamaro is master in writing letters and short novels.
This book is my favorite. It is about love, relationships....it is about life. You will definitely find a piece of yourself in it.

This book is the letter written by Olga, a German woman, to her granddaughter. The long, lengthy, boring letter that she writes to her granddaughter tells about her life. And what a boring life she had. Olga lived in Italy. I give it 2 stars instead of 1 because there are a few tidbits of good philosophy and ideas in it.

Her granddaughter appears to be insensitive and ungrateful, according to the things Olga says.

This book was translated into English.

I bought this book a few years ago but never got around to reading it, until this past weekend. What a treat this book turned out to be! From the 3rd page forward I couldn't put it down, and I just didn't want it to end.
What a great writing style and wonderful use of the English language (I learned quite a few new words :-)! It felt like the author *really* knows her characters - from the quiet and stoic Finnish immigrants to Cathryn with her bi-polar sky-highs and crashing lows, and everyone in between. The lines by T.S. Eliot woven in here and there were just so delicious that I am now determined to read Eliot again.
Truly excellent book - one of the best I've read in many, many years!
I have high hopes for Sarah Stonich's next book which I just ordered.

These Granite Islands captures poignant reflections of a ninety-nine-year-old woman, Isobel, as she recalls moments in 1936 of her friendship with a mentally ill tourist, Cathryn, caught in an adulterous relationship. The third person narrator concentrates on Isobel but, occasionally, moves to Thomas, Isobel's only survivng child, as he keeps a bedside watch over his dying mother. The theme of entrapment is strong, and the environment of death, past and imminent, produces a heavy shroud over the memories. I appreciate the descriptions of the Minnesota lake region and the originality of outlook but consider the novel too long for relaxed reading.

Sarah Stonich has captured the world of her characters so powerfully that they live on in one's imagination long after the last page is read. I look forward to reading more from her!

Isobel seems to admire Cathrine's flair for the dramatic and considers her own life drab by comparison. Cathrine does so much to help Isobel get her business started and organized that Isobel seems to feel comitted to helping Cathrine even against her own judgment and comfort. The question this novel seems to be asking is how far should a person go in helping a friend.

Don't think I am biased just because I am from Minnesota & so is the author AND the story is set there. IT TRULY IS GOOD! I am not understanding why there are so many poor reviews for this book listed here. Yes, you have to be A LITTLE on your toes while reading, as the plot DOES shift from past to present regularly, but it is soooooo interesting and offers so many insighful reflections into the human condition! I felt as if I were living the plot myself, or experiencing it visually, if nothing else. I loved the characters and I could not wait to see what they would do next! The ending somewhat disappointed me, as I expected soemthing else, but I forgave the author (*smile*) because she had to do what she had to do with her craft of writing. And I was fine with that. It is just the whole experience of the book: it is like a movie you don't want to walk out on even to get a snack or go potty! I read the whole thing in 2 days, which is AMAZING for me, since I live the world's busiest life & usually don't make time for books.
Try this out! It is worth it!!

SEEK MY FACE, an extraordinary novel that takes place on one long rainy afternoon in New England, ranks (for me, at least) with the greatest novels taking place on a single day: Virginia Woolf's MRS. DALLOWAY, Nadine Gordimer's THE LATE BOURGEOIS WORLD, Saul Bellow's SEIZE THE DAY, and Philip Roth's brilliant evocation of a snowy afternoon, evening, night and its following bright winter morning--including breakfast--in THE GHOST WRITER.

After breakfast in THE GHOST WRITER, Hope Lonoff, the revered writer's wife, runs away from the revered writer on "her doomed search," in Roth's memorable words, "for a less noble calling..."

Another Hope is the quietly intelligent and secretly introspective woman painter at the center of SEEK MY FACE.

Prodigious, subtle, tender, alive, and emotionally precise, SEEK MY FACE is a marvel. I learned so much about painting,painters, women artists, and the perils and consolations of having a good memory while I was reading it and I feel so grateful to Updike for writing it.

Things trail us from place to place. Hope wanted to have an old chair of her grandmother's. She was raised as a Quaker in Ardmore. Now she is seventy nine and is wearing soft Birkenstocks. The sixties had been a great release.

Zack's pictures became famous and his drinking terrible. Zack had been a westerner. Zack McCoy had not liked to be interviewed. He had been coached on what to say. He had been self-indulgent and, even, self-educated. Clem used Zack to make a name in art criticism. He really had very little talent. Benton had been his teacher. The rich had made pets out of the European artists, Mondrian, Max Ernst, Duchamp.

At Bryn Mawr Hope's childhood interest in art had been revived. In 1942 Hope moved to New York City to be an artist. She attended Cooper Union. In the 1940's Hope and her artist friends despised the mural style. (Some of it has aged well.) Hope feels at times she has wasted her life. Her husband, Zack McCoy, didn't go through any of that. At their place on Long Island he simply went out to the barn and painted. The Cedar Tavern at University Place was a meeting place for the artists. Peggy Guggenheim had promoted Zack's work. Hope had been attracted to Zack, not to his art.

Hope has a fear of being thought stupid about all the new technology and is shy in the presence of a young interviewer about the working of the devices in her kitchen. Hope's current place is a farmhouse in northern New England, a sort of train arrangement with its attached barn. Zack and Hope were married in 1945 by a Congregational minister. Zack used industrial enamel paints for his work. In action, painting for Zack had a tempo. His way of working did produce failures. Hope remembers some incidents with shame. Alcoholics have a way of making the world assume the burden of their misbehavior.

Zack got his power of concentration from his mother. Hope foundered in Zack's shadow. Women didn't count for much in the world of macho painters. The couple hit each other when work was blocked and for other reasons. At the time of his death Zack was drinking a case of beer a day and Hope was in Europe.

The book's format is Hope being interviewed. Hope's later husbands also were connected to art. Guy Holloway was a pop artist and Jerry Chafetz had been a collector. Guy was half English. Their baby daughter was named Dot and Guy did his Benday series around the time of her birth.

The book draws upon the lives of actual artists to create a sense of verisimilitude. Updike's use of the material is masterful.

This is the first book in my 50+ years of life that I have not been able to finish. It just rambles on. Maybe if I knew more about Jakson Pollack it would have been more interesting, but I doubt it.

Updike is master writer of vast intelligence and fantastic insight into human relationships.

Here are some of my favorite quotes I pulled out of "Seek My Face,"

"She and Zack came to the sunstruck, wind-raked flats and filled the forsaken old farmhouse with the sound of their voices, augmenting the warmth of their bodies with that the woodstove, whose heat parched their skins and hair in its close vicinity but died halfway upstairs to the cold bedroom."


"As the sun warms the mountains these wasps of vapor are stirred into visibility above the valleys. Violet tinged panes had seemed thinned, like the skin of an old person; at a blast of wind from a certain angle a window vibrates like a harp being stroked."

"His airs, his vanity got worse after the `Life' article, and the world showed signs of coming around to his naïve overestimation of himself. Collapses would occur sometimes at one of the dinner parties she so carefully constructed, sometimes on a trip to New York, where the sense of spotlight on him, of bright lights and fortunes to be made as post-war prosperity seeped into the art market."

"Kathryn lifts her chin, her opaque protuberant eyes flash like those of the predator on the scent. She wants Hope's analytic mood to keep expanding, but already the effort has embarrassed the older woman with its immodesty."

"Outside the thin-paned windows, birds cannot be seen, a hush has thickened the air. The small shreds of cloud have grown flat lead-blue bottoms and white tops shaped like cauliflowers."

"She sees, walking past windows, that the sky, this morning so blank and pure a blue, is closing down, the scattered white clouds expanding to crowd out the spaces between them, packing themselves tightly as gray flag stones, with something vaporous arising even in the chinks, so that the sunlight leaking through is tremulous, like the shuddering reflections from the windows of a passing train."

In tone, in subject-matter and in meaning, the last ten pages of Seek My Face stand apart from the novel that came before them. It was almost as if the ever-reliable Mr. Updike took the main character from the novel, wrote her into a short story that concerned her childhood, and then placed the short piece into the longer prose offering, separate but unequal. The tender "memory" of the main character as a child in a long-gone America of the early twentieth-century, interacting with her endearing Quaker grandfather, was more touching than the tale of the character's having lived thru the highs and lows of the twentieth-century American art scene. I HAD to mention that. The story at the end, the woman's memory, meant more to me as a reader than everything else in the novel, a work I at times enjoyed a lot and at other times found myself bored with nearly past tolerance.

I'm a fan of John Updike. I've read most of his short stories and a half-dozen of his novels. But if I knew going into this book what I know now for having been from one side of it to the other, I'd read just the ending. But hey, if you're someone with an interest in the history and figures of American art from the 1940's to the 1970's, you'll probably get more out of Seek My Face, than I did.

Upon recently discovering Irish novelist John Banville, I was delighted to see that literary prose was still being written. Unfortunately, the more I read on the more cloying his writing became as it seemed a note-for-note copy of Nabokov's style. It was shocking--the same weakness for alliteration, the same affected misanthropy, the same comic cadence. Banville, for that reason, loses all standing as an artist in his own right, relegated to the status of gifted art-forger.
Unfortunately, he doesn't lift himself above this level by coming up with new plot ideas or interesting characterization. He has none of that. He demands that the novels be appraised on the merit of their style--which is, of course, someone else's style.
(I mean, has anyone even remotely acquainted with Naobov squirmed when Banville's narrator praises his own writing style, much as Nabokov's Humbert Humbert did?)
It's, as I said, cloying. And after several hundred pages depressing.
What I also found annoying was his poor characterization skills. For instance, Banville's Jews don't remotely resemble actual World War II era Jews. Didn't he do even the slightest research?
For instance, he mentions the main character's grandfather and his farm. Was Banville unaware that Jews were forbidden to own property throughout most European countries (consequently forcing them into an urban, ghetto-ized existence)?
So, no, Mr. Banville, your Jewish main character would almost certainly NOT have had a grandfather with a farm. Nor, statistically, would he have been 6'4''. Physical anthropologists, learned in the matters of demographics, have long since discussed malnutrition in the European Jewish communities of the World War II era. Even before the war, the "average Jewish person" was statistically several inches shorter than host population counterparts. [Think: Woody Allen or Peter Falk.]
Jewish-American author Jonathan Ames talks about the subject of blondism in the Jewish community. He is blond, and he describes how, as a child, Jews refused to believe he was really Jewish (so Nordic was he in cast). Yet all of Mr. Banville's Jews are blond and tall and strapping--with grandfathers with farms.
Didn't he do the slightest bit of research for his characters and their time-period?
Granted, the assimilated, upper class Jew would have statistically been more "Europeanized," more well-fed, more tall; but how would the main character: who was of the poorer class, living in a ghetto with his father as a rag-picker?
It's just laziness like this, political correctness and historical revisionism that makes his characters seem fake, poorly-researched--flat.
If only his prose--owing so much to another man's style--could compensate. It doesn't.

I enjoyed all of the reviews which are quite intelligent and perceptive, some of them even worthy of expansion into literary articles. But no one gave much attention to the symbolism, especially to the shroud itself and the scene of the appearance of the fake shroud, the physical disabilities of Vander, and the abnormalities of
Cass Cleave(even the symbolism of her name), and several others. And no one mentioned the fact that Vander is a Jew who always felt an outsider in his gentile milieu before WWII. Vander in that prewar era wanted to be, assume, the identity of his best friend. Certainly important in the development of Vander's character. I would like to read more from the perceptive readers. An afterthought: could Vander be a Faust figure?




























































cass cleave

Here it is. I have finally discovered a work by Banville that I would NOT recommend to anyone save, perhaps, to some castaway, starved for anything approaching true literature, living in some outback town, relying completely for his/her reading material on the sparsely-shelved public library in which the only Banville work is Shroud.

Indeed, in so many ways, this work is resembles nothing so much as a train wreck of two other Banvillean works, Athena and The Untouchable, both of which I would recommend with highest laud (a good, Banvillean word, that). In point of fact, I have done so in my reviews of these two masterworks.

Let's take this theme of identity (or lack thereof): The narrator of The Untouchable explores this evanescent notion much more deftly and seductively than herein, where it is pounded into the reader's cranium on page after page, rendering "heavy-handed" something of an understatement. All which illustrates that it's the Proustian style, not the Nietzschean, which best broaches this subject.

Then, of course, there's sex, and plenty of it herein: In Athena, the oneiric aura of the narrator's love/lust for his beloved is manifest in every raindrop, every turn of the street and, indeed, in every one of the paintings he elaborates on - Again, that deft, Banvillean touch - Here, to the contrary, we have detailed, emetic grotesqueries of the paedophilic narrator (whatever his name may be), inserting his phallus into women whom he desires or who, in their turn, desire to be, "ripped in two" by him.

Sorry, it's just not on. Yes, yes Banville's still a wizard with the English language. But even this quality, as opposed to his other works, is not up to the Banvillean mark here. I almost always have a quote or entire passage that I feel bound to include in my reviews of Banville's works, so rapturous are they. Not so here, and I've read the book twice.


Finally, it's generally a sound notion that when you find a book accompanied by nothing but encomiastic reviews without a trace of reservation, that there's something's rotten in the state of Amazon.

Three stars--It's still Banville, and nobody writes like him. At his worst, he's still far above, in a different realm, compared to most anything my would-be library patron might find on those sparse shelves - Unless, of course, s/he chances upon Proust.

It really is mostly about shame. John Banville is a master of English prose. His writing has a power and intensity, and originality that is matched by no other living writer that I know of. All the more shame that his wonderful talent is wasted on this bloated, fatuous, ugly novel. The main character "Axel" is an old, drunken, lecherous has-been scholar. The romantic "other" is a hare-brained, weird, humorless woman. (Indeed the entire novel is utterly humorless.) And so on and on.... Nobody is likable or interesting; they are just pathetic. Banville is unsurpassed in creating characters, living and riveting characters. But who would want to spend their precious hours with these creeps that he creates in Shroud? Not I, although I finished the book.

Maybe I just don't get it. Undoubtedly I don't get it. I don't want to get it. I don't care. Nothing about Shroud made me want to get it.

I liked The Untouchable by Banville. That was a wonderful book. This one stinks.

By the way, this book will really tune up your vocabulary skills. There are more odd words here than in a spelling bee.

Axel Vander tells us from the opening of this sensitive and tension-filled study of identity that he is not who he says he is. A respected scholar and professor at a California college, Vander is recognized for his thoughtful philosophical papers and books, especially on the nature of identity. Just before he leaves for a conference on Nietzsche in Turin, however, he receives a letter from a young woman in Antwerp, questioning his own identity and asking to meet with him. As the novel unfolds, we come to know more about the "real" Axel Vander and more about his mysterious correspondent, the emotionally disturbed Cass Cleave.

Like Banville's narrators in other novels, the elderly Axel Vander of Shroud is unreliable and often dishonest, self-concerned but not self-aware. Consummately venal, he blithely takes advantage of whatever circumstances arise. Cass Cleave, the daughter of Alexander Cleave, the narrator of Banville's previous novel, Eclipse, has visions and seizures, and Vander regards her as mad, but she and Vander develop a relationship of almost religious significance. He is depraved and amoral, and she is a sick, avenging angel.

In Turin, where she joins Axel, Cass sees religious symbolism in common events, finding an ordinary breakfast a form of communion. Artworks, especially crucifixion scenes by artists from the various settings in which the novel takes place (Cranach, Bosch, Memling, and Van Eyck in the Low Countries; and Tintoretto, Mantegna, and Bellini in Italy) further develop the symbolism. Always present in the background, of course, is the Shroud of Turin, which may be the real burial cloth of Jesus--or may not be. Parallels and contrasts between Vander and Jesus abound.

Banville's novel is intense, highly compressed in its development of overlapping themes, and filled with suspense, both real and intellectual. Every plot detail expands his themes of identity and selfhood, and our desire to be remembered after our deaths. Banville's prose is exquisite, creating mystery by introducing details at a snail's pace, conveying attitude, and acutely observing sensuous details and physical reactions. He juxtaposes unlikely events from different times to convey information, providing voluptuous descriptions which contain both an idea and its antithesis simultaneously. This is a challenging and fascinating novel, beautifully crafted and rewarding on every level. Mary Whipple

I never received my order. Can someone help me out here????!!! I need it for my February book club meeting!

I got bored. It's a rather short book, with all kinds of recommendations, so I read 20% before I gave up. Interesting and original premise, though.

Yes, Harriet Chessman is a wonderful writer. And yes, Someone Not Really Her Mother has deserved all of the critical acclaim it has received. What I love about this book, though, is the delicacy with which it illuminates the relationship between middle-aged women and their mothers. Book groups will find much to discuss here about their own lives. You may buy this book because of Chessman's elegant prose and her storytelling, but you will remember it long after for its insights into the changing bond between mothers and daughters as they both age.

The difference between the many very good works on a topic and a masterpiece on that topic is that the masterpiece penetrates so deeply that it awakens questions the topic itself, more narrowly or less profoundly addressed, does not inherently raise. Ms. Chessman's book makes us wonder not just what it's like to care for or even to be an Alzheimer's sufferer, but what the relationship is between memory and human connectedness, between consciousness and reality, even between mind and soul. In this case, it's also an efficient masterpiece -- a short book, almost a prose poem -- in which, literally, even the punctuation can be devastatingly touching and intellectually provocative.

Hannah Pearl resides in a nursing home in Connecticut because Hannah drifts from this time to others as her battle with memory loss slowly wins.
Hannah's life has not been easy; first she loses her family in the Holocaust, then her husband in the war, but Hannah was a fighter and made a life for herself and her daughter; a daughter whose heart aches at the emotional loss of her mother.
This book is Hannah's story. Told through her memory flashbacks, and seen through her daughter and granddaughters eyes as they struggle to understand not just what is happening to Hannah, but what she wants to leave with them before she departs this life.
It is an emotional read but one that will touch your heart with truths as past and present become one and you realize that life is precious for those who know love.

This is a wonderful novel of character and subtle suspense. Robert Barnard is a born storyteller--my favorite of all British mystery writers. It's literate, nicely bookish, told sparingly but well, with well-developed, meaty characters, It reads well, yet the pace seems deceptively leisurely. There is nothing told which isn't necessary to the story. Barnard spends time fleshing out all of his characters with insights and some humorous pokes at human foibles.
Eighty-year-old Bettina Whitelaw got out of Australia, but can't get Australia out of her. She is a successful novelist living in London who began her life in a little outback Australian village that had little to offer for a bright girl of budding literary talent. Now Bettina is digging back into her past to write a kind of memoir. Part of her past involved a rape and a baby daughter that she gave up for adoption. She has stirred up memories that precipitate a murder, and she is carrying a guilty secret.
Bettina, the central character, become a fully realized person in this book with faults and good traits--a person with a life that the reader is able to enter into. Barnard has in the thirty-five mysteries leading up to this one ensnared me with his storytelling mastery and all of the literary microcosms he has created over the years. For me, a great read!

Nine Lives Too Many
The Daemon in Our Dreams
The Rice Queen Spy
Clawed Back from the Dead

I know what Robert Barnard was trying to do with this book, but somehow I feel that he fell somewhat short. The main character is an eighty year old woman who is looking back at her early life in an Australian outback and the book keeps flashing back to this. The setting is in modern-day London, but Bettina is rethinking her early teenage years, and an event that changed her life. Barnard tries to mix past and present, but it doesn't appear as seamless as it should. The better parts of this book are the flashback sequences. I had figured out the real culprit in all this early-on, and it didn't make sense why Bettina, who knew who the guilty person was, did not make it known to the police, especially when her dear friend is attacked in Bettina's suite. Anyway, Barnard is a good suspense writer, and the book is good enough to merit a little time spent.

Other reviews have admirably detailed the plot which oscillates between an Australian outback village of the 1930's and present-day London. The link between these two setting is the 80-year -old Bettina Whitelaw, now an eminent writer living in England, but originally from the backwater town of Bundaroo in Australia. Early on we know that something bad is going to happen (her friend Hughie expresses anxiety about the motives of Bettina's friends and associates. He suggests they are after her money.) We also know something bad did happen to Bettina in the past, a crime which bit by bit is revealed.
Neither revelation is meant to be particularly startling. There are enough hints leading up to each event, that it is apparent that surprise is not Barnard's intent. This would not necessarily be a bad thing if the characters and dialogue were compelling, but they are not. Bettina has a decidely unemotional sardonic personality which is pretty much matched by the visitor Sylvia who plays an important role in the former's life. All the educated characters speak in one way, all the uneducated macho characters speak in another equally predictable way. My other disatisfaction comes from the plot device gradually revealing an Event from the Past. It makes pleasure in the immediacy of reading subordinate to finding out what the Event is. This becomes especially irritating when the Event (a crime) and its perpetrator (named on the last couple pages) are entirely predictable. There are lots of mysteries out there. I would not waste my time with this one.

Robert Barnard weaves a careful tale encompassing a long life but focusing on only 2 significant parts of it. Starting off in present-day London we meet Bettina Whitelaw, a successful 80-year-old author who is beginning to write her memoirs or, as she prefers to think of them, her memories. Through her writings the narrative alternates between the present and 1938 and the small town of Bundaroo in outback Australia where Bettina grew up.

Bettina's life in Bundaroo is marked by a significant incident, something that is only hinted at early on in the story, but which is revisited each time she adds to her memoirs. It's that incident that remains the focus each time the story returns to 1938. More and more is hinted at, teasing us with what might have happened before it finally gets revealed and talked about openly. (I apologise for being coy, hiding behind the word 'incident', but it would be remiss of me to reveal what it is here).

This particular incident is the first of two mysteries to be dealt with in the book. The second occurs in the present-day London part of the story when Bettina realises that someone has been in her house and has been searching through her desk. She asks a friend to house sit for her while she takes a short holiday in Edinburgh and is devastated to hear that her house does get broken into and the friend is severely beaten. The question in this case for Bettina is, was her friend's bashing a case of mistaken identity? Is her safety now in danger?

The story's mysteries really become of secondary importance, however. In both the 1938 storyline and the present day one, two unusual relationships take place. In Bundaroo, Bettina befriends a newcomer to town. Eugene "Hughie" Naismyth has just arrived from England and is like a fish out of water, unable to fit in with the locals. Also, his love of classical music and art consign him to a fate of being outcast from his schoolmates. The only person in school he can count on is Bettina who thumbs her nose at Hughie's tormentors and stands by him. The friendship between Bettina and Hughie endures right through to the present day and becomes one of the pivotal relationships in the book.

The second relationship starts off as a very stilted reunion between mother and daughter when Bettina meets Sylvia for the first time since she gave her up for adoption soon after she was born. Although both women begin determined to keep a formal distance between each other, they soon grow to enjoy each other's company and start to depend on each other. Through meeting and getting to know Sylvia we get to learn a lot more about Bettina and her life after Bundaroo. As their friendship grows, so does our knowledge of the two women, revealing their pasts to each other.

I enjoyed the way Bettina's life was filled in throughout the book. Although she was writing her memoirs, there were gaps in her knowledge of some very important events. These gaps were filled in through the course of seemingly unrelated events in the present day part of the story. Some people don't like stories that jump from one time period to the other finding that doing so can get confusing. In this case Barnard deals with the flashbacks to 1938 very nicely, smoothly switching timeframes and the way they were linked together made a very effective method of revealing her life to us.

I would call the pace of the novel measured rather than slow. Robert Barnard carefully constructs his story, adding one little clue on to another until the answer to the puzzle slowly dawned on me rather than being revealed in an earth shattering declaration.

Although I usually prefer fast-paced action thrillers or hardboiled private detective stories, this more sedate story kept me fully engrossed from the first page to the last. If you appreciate a plot that is filled with details, particularly where human emotions are concerned, then this book will appeal to you. The fact that there is a surprising twist or two near the end of the story is a bonus as far as I'm concerned.

I own every book Robert Barnard has written, so I am a big fan. What I find interesting in his books is that you can always guess what he's been reading recently. For instance, this book reminds me of Atonement by Ian McEwen, in being about an elderly writer looking back on her adolescence, which includes a climactic rape. There is also the possibility that she, as a writer, has edited her version of the past as a protection for someone or atonement for something.

That said, this is not your standard Barnard mystery, with deliciously nasty characters and a real puzzler that only resolves in the last few lines. It's more of a character study--interesting, but not a page turner.