Fictional Books

With my husband's family being Finnish-American, our love of the U.P. and my fondness for mystery books I thought this would be an ideal mid-winter story to settle in with for the night. How very disappointed I was.

The writing style is somewhat disorienting, the who-done-it blatantly obvious from the beginning of the book, and the constant repetition of prattling by the characters unneeded.

Save your money and your time.

Author Kathleen Hills has a history with regions of the northern United States, and although the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is separate and distinct, from, say Montana or Northern Wisconsin, there are certainly similarities. In this third outing for the author's protagonist, the reluctant constable of St. Adele, John McIntire, comes across evidence that two former neighbors had not emigrated to the Soviet Union, as was supposed by pretty much everybody in the region.

In the early 1930's this country was in the grip of a serious depression and there was more than a little unrest. Some people organized a sort of mass emigration by mostly poor or disaffected people to a place in the Soviet Union called Karelia. Karelia was touted as the people's Eden, a place where everyone would be well-housed, properly fed and would find useful work, according to their needs. Karelia was advertised as sort of the penultimate socialist community. In reality, a lot of people who went, disappeared and were never heard from again. What was their fate in Stalinist Russia?

WITCH CRADLE, is set in the early fifties, a time when suspicion of that great evil, Communism, also known as the Soviet Union, was rampant in this country. It was the time of Roy Cohen and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. It was a time of black listing and anxiety. And while the people of the Upper Peninsula were relatively isolated from most of the excesses of that time, there were those who would take advantage of the circumstances. Bringing those national concerns down to the individual and very personal concerns of the people of St. Adele is a feat worth reading about, especially in the careful and adept hands of author Kathleen Hills.

Many questions rise. What is the FBI doing hanging around this isolated area? What exactly was Constable McIntire doing during his time away from St. Adele, the time he refuses to talk about? What exactly did happen to the people who went to the Soviet Union? And if some of the former residents of the area never made it to Karelia, what happened to them and why? This is a moving, solid work about people we all can relate to, in one form or another.

A book that captures the beauty and difficulty of love, relationship, and time, more than any I have read.

The storyteller in the The Beauty of the Husband is a woman who may or may not be Anne Carson, recollecting a failed marriage with a beating mind. The plot is nothing but her ability to bring in everything is astonishing. Like other great stylists - Antonioni, Proust, Picasso, Paul Taylor, her way of telling a story is peerless. Because after you have grasped the story why go back except to relish in style. As Godard pointed out, "what is art except that by which forms become style."

"How sharp the point of this remembrance is" according to Shakespeare. So put on Piazzolla, read this book and answer for yourself what a lover wants from the beloved. Start with a little beauty and truth...

This is Anne Carson's lastest book, and as with any wonderfully original talent, it is her best. Here there is her characteristic wry tone overlayed with a fine intelligence that only Seamus Heaney currently can rival. Do NOT miss this book!

beautiful and shocking. a piece for any reader. the essential beauty and shocking nature of the human is wonderfully conveyed in this piece. i participate in competitive forensics and placed 9th in the state with this piece, in my first year. the piece has so many levels that it can be understood and throughly enjoyed by the least literate, least educated and those with doctorate degrees in literature. while it may not have the same spirit as many of carson's other works, it has a beauty of its own as it creates a very complex comprehensive story of a husband and betrayed wife, with wonderful words in the 28th tango. remember "hold, hold beauty."

those who are still trapped in carson's other works remember to allow the writer grow too, don't confine her to what you think she should be doing. remain open to changes in carson... she has not yet reached her prime.

Through the first half of this book, I was disappointed. Although Anne Carson was continuing her interesting use of language and her use of Keats quotations was brilliant, the volume lacked universality. It presented a courtship and marriage every dependent upon the particular individuals and their peculiarities. The courtship and marriage of individuals unknown to the reader has limited interest.

Fortunately, through the remainder of the book, Anne Carson finally finds her voice for this book. It becomes an interesting exploration of beauty especially beauty in the context of marriage. In one brilliant chapter she gives quotations of elegiac couplets recording the view of a branch through her back kitchen window. After a sampling of seasons, she closes with "Well I won't bore you with the whole annal. Point is, in total so far, 5820 elegiacs/ Which occupy 53 wirebound notebooks, / Piled on four shelves in the back kitchen. . ." She succeeds in painting a picture of a year's psychological response in a truly innovative manner.

Any author continually expanding their repetoire will make some missteps. This volume includes some of Anne Carson's missteps but it also includes some exciting innovation. Read and enjoy but don't expect perfection.

There is so much written about London that a book this short can only say so much. For those of us that already know London very well (the real place as well as the fictional) we learn more from this book about Ms.Quindlen and her limited life experience than anything else. In London she wanders the well worn tourist trail and has nothing new to say, it's interesting to hear her well read tourist's perceptions of the city, although that is, in the end, all they are.
Most of her literary references are to classic nineteenth and early twentieth century novels thus limiting her scope to the aforesaid well trod trail. Very little contemporary fiction is mentioned. No childrens literature, no gay fiction, nothing that couldn't be considered 'serious literature' is referenced. Where is the London of P.L Travers, Zoe Heller, Paul Burston, Hanif Kureishi, Will Self, Alan Hollinghurst or David Baddiel to name a few ?
The section on the Borough is irritatingly packed full of factual inaccuracies such as her reference to the 'Little Dorrit Church' as though that was it's name (it is actually the church of St.George the Martyr and predates the novel by more than a century although this book gives the impression that it is a church commemorating a fictional character; there is a window depicting Little Dorrit there, but no-one locally refers to it as the 'Little Dorrit Church'); this section sounds as though she spent an afternoon in the area and did very little research, she omits to describe anything in the area such as the wall next to the church that is possibly the last remnant of the Marshalsea so I am suspicious as to whether she even went there. If she is interested in Dickens, and I understand from reading this book that she is, there were far more interesting places to have written about such as the site of the blacking factory at Hungerford stairs, which is now Hungerford Lane and is the entrance to 'The Soundshaft' a club underneath Charing Cross station ; or she could have gone to 'The Grapes' in Limehouse to the pub described in 'Our Mutual Friend', but as I have said her scope is as limited as the average tourist with their free tourist map of "Historic and Literary London". I found it very frustrating as there were so many places that I could have shown her that I'm sure she would have been interested in. She did the usual London tourist thing of barely venturing outside Zone 1. There is so much she is missing.

London looms large, in literature, in "real" life, and in the literary and cultural imagination. In this delightfully absorbing book, Quindlen, a former New York Times columnist, describes her first introduction to London-through books-and her second-on a book tour trip. She admits that she was fearful of shattering the magical image she held of London, and so put off a visit to the actual city for years. Only in her mid-forties did Quindlen finally make the trip, and she was relieved to discover that its charms and quirks were even better than she had imagined.

The chapters are loosely connected, with witty gems that regular readers of Quindlen will expect. She alludes to the great writers who have lived in London, suggests out-of-the-way detours about the city, and reflects on the present-day capital of the United Kingdom.

If a reader expects the author to provide sound-bite sidebars and details about where to eat and stay, he or she will be vastly disappointed and probably not make it beyond the first few pages. But if you've been to London and loved it, or if you have read Thackery and Dickens, Henry James and Monica Ali, you'll revel in this literary tour. Quindlen's rich narrative style will have you, like it did me, looking for airline tickets for another visit to this amazing city. Don't forget to pack this book along with anything by Dickens.

I had such high hopes for a book that got to the heart of my favorite city and my favorite literature. However, first it dismayed, then depressed, then just made me plain angry that Ms. Quindlen could be so superficial, so full of cliches, have such shallow skills of description and so absolutely little insight into either London or literature. Surely someone soon will pick up the inky scratches and try again.

There is so much more to the imaginary London than the author conveys. This book feels like it was dictated to complete an assignment. Buy the Ackroyd book, London: A Biography instead...and then use your own imagination. I agree with previous reviewers who called it superficial with the real book still waiting for an author to write it.

i love anna quindlen, i love literature, i love landscapes of the imagination, and i love london, so i was ready to love this book. however, it didn't give me nearly the depth i wanted. the essays are oddly generic, the comments oddly superficial. i was left with little impression, literary or geographical. i'm sad.

Phyllis Zimmerman is convinced that Percy Shelley is a genius, and that Mary and others are not. Her way of arguing that "Frankenstein" (and other works) is written by Percy, is one of three:
1) A passage is similar to something Percy has written
2) A passage is similar to something Percy was going to write
and, if neither 1)or 2) suits:
3) This is too good to be written by anyone else than Percy

This is what Zimmerman needs 600 pages to tell us.
300 of them are quotes (sic!)

Very boring, very unacademic. A totally waste.

From the time that *Frankenstein* was first published
anonymously, in January 1818, there have always been those who
knew that the "Author of Frankenstein" was Percy Bysshe Shelley
himself, rather than, as later claimed, his second wife, Mary.
But for one reason or another, those in the know remained silent,
confined themselves to hints, or went along with the Mary Shelley
myth. Phyllis Zimmerman is the first person to make the case
directly, with supporting evidence.

Phyllis Zimmerman's thesis: Percy Bysshe Shelley was a great
novelist as well as a great poet and playwright. However, with
the exception of two juvenile romances, he chose to relinquish
authorship, attributing his later novels to friends or to Mary,
who in consequence became famous as the "author of Frankenstein".

Zimmerman is well aware what she is up against: "Most of the
evidence, no matter who created it, points to Mary's authorship."
But she is undaunted: "The novel itself, however, provides a
different kind of evidence, a kind that cannot be falsified."

Therefore, she analyzes passages from *Frankenstein* and
other novels of Shelley, in comparison with passages written by
the pseudo-authors. She makes her case so compellingly, that much
of her book would be overkill, if it were not so interesting.

This is a book that is long, but never "tedious". It is a
pleasure to read slowly, as a good book should be read. I thought
I was thoroughly familiar with the 1818 text of *Frankenstein*,
but Zimmerman time and again made me appreciate the beauty and
significance of passages that I had previously skimmed over. Her
knowledge of ancient and modern literature is formidable. Some of
her interpretations may be overly audacious, but they are never
without merit. She writes very well, with none of the jargon that
has ruined so many books and English departments.

Her summation of the case for Percy Bysshe Shelley's
authorship of *Frankenstein*:

"*Frankenstein* is a profound tragedy; it reaches into the
author's inner being. It is a nightmare that expresses the
turmoil of Shelley's feelings in language of singular
beauty, with symbolism of exceptional complexity, and with a
richness of literary allusion that Mary Shelley never
attained. It is an enduring myth created by a myth-making
poet."

Although self-published, *Shelley's Fiction* is well
produced: good paper, good design, and good typography. This is
an important, ground-breaking work. It's too bad it was not
published by a major publisher and widely reviewed. It will be
shameful if Romantic scholars continue to give it the silent
treatment.

This 234-page book gathers its material from the few biographies and semi-fictional novels about the life and death of one of Canada's greatest artists, Tom Thomson, who drowned in Ontario's Algonquin Park in 1917. She makes no great effort to sort out fact from fiction but rather uses what she finds to argue that Thomson's story is inextricable from the how the nation came to embrace woodsman-artist Thomson, as brother, colleague and discoverer of the nation's spirit.

Lost and Betrayed: An American Tale by Sy Fleming is a fictionalized account of one family's Hurricane Katrina experience. The tale is written and focused on the Washington family, with Tyrone Washington as the narrator. From the start, Mr. Washington's opinion of democracy in America rings through clearly. There is mention of September 11, 2001 and Mr. Washington's work as a military officer. Most of the book, however, is based upon what took place during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Lost and Betrayed is a heartfelt account of the horror, how families bonded and one man's heroic efforts to save his family and others. The book read more like a memoir rather than fiction.

Though Lost and Betrayed was a heartfelt story of survival and heroics it would have been a smoother read if the focus had been more interactive as opposed to narrative. Also, the book was almost three hundred pages, of which only one hundred thirty-eight pages was the story. The remainder of the book consisted of an author's summary, The Bill of Rights, The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution of the United States of America and the Magna Carta. I was not quite sure why those documents were included in a fiction work. Lost and Betrayed: An American Tale would be a highly recommended read with more focus on the actual story of the Washington family without the insertion of the Nation's laws.

Angelia Menchan
APOOO BookClub

I admire Bob Quinn for his imaginative "Atlantean Irish" thesis from his documentary film and book of the same title (see review on Amazon), but the recently discovered fact he grew up not far from my relatives made me want to read his "fictional memoir." I found nearly nothing about the surrounding district, however; this memoir focuses on the eponymous stretch of houses along the River Dodder.

Published before Peter Sheridan's "44," Brendan O'Carroll's "The Mammy," or especially Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" cornered the market for males telling of hardscrabble Irish cityscapes and childhood hijinks, this emerges nonetheless from a harsher time that Quinn neither downplays or harps upon. His style is sparer, with less lyricism. He notes that he began this as autobiography before using his imagination to help narrate the story better.

Read better as vignettes of his formative years 1939-53, as the cover blurb elegantly phrases it, in a housing estate on the edge of the more respectable south Dublin neighborhood of Rathgar: "Here flocks of children learned to shepherd their fantasies through the narrow gap between anarchy and rigid parental rule." The stories he tells have the flavor of honest recollections of many of his mid-20c generation, and they may lose much of their resonance on the page rather than in speech, I reckon. The book captured me more for its details in passing than the strength of its whole storyline, but Quinn appears to wish to avoid a neatly drawn recountingn of his fragmentary recollections. Therefore, the book to me was better a store of memories to be shared rather than a focused and possibly more aesthetically pleasing but less accurate recapitulation of his honest emotions and mundane doings.

I respect Quinn's motives, even as I compare his more austere phrasing to the richer, if stagier tone of his contemporary memorialists. His eye is more akin to the camera's detachment, framed by an alert consciousness and a calculating sense of space and depth. You can see why he excelled in film. The book may be less appealing for its subtlety than the brasher, more theatrical tone of later such works in the 90s, but two fine passages stand out. The first reminds me of Flann O'Brien's mordant ear.

His father ("Mr. Toner") insists against the subtle pleas of the boy narrator that plain food and lots of exercise-- the unspoken subtext being the large family's straitened circumstances exacerbated by the wartime shortages-- suffice for his brood. "Look at dogs. They have only one meal a day. Have you ever seen a sick dog?

-- Yes, and you can tell they're sick 'cause they have a dry nose.
-- Ah, but that's only because some fool has given them sweets or something. If we could live like dogs we'd be much healthier.
--They get the mange and die at twelve, muttered Joe.
--That's seventy in human terms, corrected Mr. Toner. And even then they can still chase cats. Can you see your grandfather chasing cats?
--He wouldn't be that much of an eejit.
--That's not the point. Your Mammy and I are perfectly satisfied that you get plenty to eat. Anything else is sheer greed." (56)

Most of the narrative does not rise to such sublime heights, but each reader should find his or her own delights according to taste. Here's a more serious passage; like the other autobiographical- meets- storytelling (are there any other kinds for first-person tales?) accounts, we find maturity jostling against innocence that only seems less informed due to nostalgia.

"There was no television to provide surrogate drama, to supply images of alternative realities, however banal, to the inescapable opinions, judgements and presence of parents and in-laws. Theirs was the children's only reality. Their tensions too. The experience of the cinema was too infrequent to mediate its illusions. It only served as an occasional escape from reality." (62)

Quinn, as a noted writer and especially documentary filmmaker, challenged the establishment in his later work. While this book ends well before his own entry into manhood, you can see in representative sections such as that last quoted his own wish, as his preface explains, to convey to his children as they watched James Bond on TV, of the utter difference between his childhood and theirs. As a maker of the contemporary Irish sensibility by his own media contributions, but as a memorializer of the grit and grace of an earlier Ireland, he allows a fair depiction of truth, how he and his family survived in an era narrower in its escapes from reality but for all that more enriched in the tactics necessary for imaginative power.

I admire Bob Quinn for his imaginative "Atlantean Irish" thesis from his documentary film and book of the same title (see review on Amazon), but the recently discovered fact he grew up not far from my relatives made me want to read his "fictional memoir." I found nearly nothing about the surrounding district, however; this memoir focuses on the eponymous stretch of houses along the River Dodder.

Published before Peter Sheridan's "44," Brendan O'Carroll's "The Mammy," or especially Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" cornered the market for males telling of hardscrabble Irish cityscapes and childhood hijinks, this emerges nonetheless from a harsher time that Quinn neither downplays or harps upon. His style is sparer, with less lyricism. He notes that he began this as autobiography before using his imagination to help narrate the story better.

Read better as vignettes of his formative years 1939-53, as the cover blurb elegantly phrases it, in a housing estate on the edge of the more respectable south Dublin neighborhood of Rathgar: "Here flocks of children learned to shepherd their fantasies through the narrow gap between anarchy and rigid parental rule." The stories he tells have the flavor of honest recollections of many of his mid-20c generation, and they may lose much of their resonance on the page rather than in speech, I reckon. The book captured me more for its details in passing than the strength of its whole storyline, but Quinn appears to wish to avoid a neatly drawn recountingn of his fragmentary recollections. Therefore, the book to me was better a store of memories to be shared rather than a focused and possibly more aesthetically pleasing but less accurate recapitulation of his honest emotions and mundane doings.

I respect Quinn's motives, even as I compare his more austere phrasing to the richer, if stagier tone of his contemporary memorialists. His eye is more akin to the camera's detachment, framed by an alert consciousness and a calculating sense of space and depth. You can see why he excelled in film. The book may be less appealing for its subtlety than the brasher, more theatrical tone of later such works in the 90s, but two fine passages stand out. The first reminds me of Flann O'Brien's mordant ear.

His father ("Mr. Toner") insists against the subtle pleas of the boy narrator that plain food and lots of exercise-- the unspoken subtext being the large family's straitened circumstances exacerbated by the wartime shortages-- suffice for his brood. "Look at dogs. They have only one meal a day. Have you ever seen a sick dog?

-- Yes, and you can tell they're sick 'cause they have a dry nose.
-- Ah, but that's only because some fool has given them sweets or something. If we could live like dogs we'd be much healthier.
--They get the mange and die at twelve, muttered Joe.
--That's seventy in human terms, corrected Mr. Toner. And even then they can still chase cats. Can you see your grandfather chasing cats?
--He wouldn't be that much of an eejit.
--That's not the point. Your Mammy and I are perfectly satisfied that you get plenty to eat. Anything else is sheer greed." (56)

Most of the narrative does not rise to such sublime heights, but each reader should find his or her own delights according to taste. Here's a more serious passage; like the other autobiographical- meets- storytelling (are there any other kinds for first-person tales?) accounts, we find maturity jostling against innocence that only seems less informed due to nostalgia.

"There was no television to provide surrogate drama, to supply images of alternative realities, however banal, to the inescapable opinions, judgements and presence of parents and in-laws. Theirs was the children's only reality. Their tensions too. The experience of the cinema was too infrequent to mediate its illusions. It only served as an occasional escape from reality." (62)

Quinn, as a noted writer and especially documentary filmmaker, challenged the establishment in his later work. While this book ends well before his own entry into manhood, you can see in representative sections such as that last quoted his own wish, as his preface explains, to convey to his children as they watched James Bond on TV, of the utter difference between his childhood and theirs. As a maker of the contemporary Irish sensibility by his own media contributions, but as a memorializer of the grit and grace of an earlier Ireland, he allows a fair depiction of truth, how he and his family survived in an era narrower in its escapes from reality but for all that more enriched in the tactics necessary for imaginative power.

This is a pretty cool short story that anyone would enjoy. Especially anyone with any kind of horse racing background. I almost gave it 4stars, but it was just too short, even for a "short story". I LOVED the last few pages/"ending", and I would recommend that any person with any screenwriting abilities contact Mr. Tuttle @ [...] He even expresses this sentiment at the end of this story.

I'm out!

J.R.

HEMINGWAY served a generation of men because he walked the talk and inspired thousands of young, wild at heart writers to 'go', to 'inquire' and to grasp truth within the human psyche and soul. His creed was to always "write the truest sentence ever told." Papa would not yet have sent First Light to Scribner. It requires living truth but only bears a walking truth. True at First Light triggered my love for Papa's writing and my yearning for the old days of youth and truth and vigor and substance. I saw elements of the early years but True Light left me wanting for Papa's LOVE OF LANGUAGE and insight into our all too human paradox. It touched his genius but couldn't hold on to his full expression. I felt the anger and petulance without any meaningful redress or resolution. Patrick, you WILL do better expressing your own voice viewing life from the perspective of your personal vision. Yet, I thank you for rendering this final perspective of the man we've grown to love and revere.