A Reader's Place

Edie Pritchard is the girl we remember from high school who had it all. Smart and beautiful, you would have picked her out of the class picture as the most mature, the girl who understood what it was all about. The photographer for her senior photo told her to look as if she knew a secret, and she did. But unlike so many novels these days, it’s not a family secret that Edie knows. “All of us are someone else in the eyes of others.” That’s what Edie Pritchard knows and that’s what shapes her life in small town eastern Montana.

The Lives of Edie Pritchard is a novel in three parts, catching up with Edie every twenty years. Her first husband, high school classmate Dean Linderman, is a brooding, bottled-up sort of guy, convinced that Edie really meant to marry his more volatile and ambitious twin brother, Roy. That sets the tone for the controlled menace that permeates the story. Grudges, jealousy, and settling scores haunt all these people and define their lives. Edie wants none of that, but she’s trapped, defined by her beauty queen high school history.  “When I was young I wanted love but sex is what I got.”

Twenty years later, Edie is in a different town with a different husband and a sullen teenage daughter. Her circumstances may have changed but her life is not much different; she’s still defined by her looks and the memories of others. Twenty years after that, well, I’ll let you read the book.

Watson is terrific at creating these characters, delineating them quickly and keeping their relationships tense.  We worry about them all, especially the ones who lack self-reflection. Roy, the twin, is an especially heartbreaking and frustrating character. A charismatic flirt and bad boy, Roy can’t get out of his own way. But it’s Edie who captures our hearts in her attempt to live on her own terms even thought she understands why it will always be difficult to do that. “What makes me think we have the right to control the memories of others?” she wonders. Atmospheric, even poetic at times, The Lives of Edie Pritchard is an absorbing, character-driven novel; a good read for a winter’s day. For those who enjoyed Olive Kitteridge, this would be a good choice.

You may think you haven’t heard of Anthony Horowitz, but you’ve probably been eagerly consuming the various wonderful British TV series that he’s created or to which he’s contributed. Foyle’s War, anyone? Collision? Midsomer Murders? Agatha Christie’s Poirot? And then there are his entertaining mystery novels, like Moonflower Murders.

The prolific Horowitz has command of all the mystery genres and he riffs on them all. Moonflower Murders is the second in his Susan Ryeland series; it’s a classic country house murder with some twists. I read the first one in the series, Magpie Murders, when it came out in 2016 and enjoyed it, but, frankly, I couldn’t give you any details. Pure entertainment goes into the fizzy portion of my brain and when the fizz vanishes, so does the plot. (That’s not a criticism of the book!)

It’s hard to give a short plot summary of this mystery because it’s layered and has a complicated setup (but it’s very easy to follow on the page). Susan Ryeland, the repeating character in the series, is a former fiction editor who’s now in Crete with her boyfriend; they own a small hotel. In her literary life, one of her most successful authors was Alan Conway, who wrote a very popular mystery series. Conway was murdered. A mystery author murdered? This is the first inkling for the reader that life and art will be very much intertwined.

A British couple, the Trehernes, come to see Susan and ask for her help. They own a posh boutique hotel in Suffolk where there was a grisly murder eight years earlier. Their daughter Cecily has just gone missing after reading a mystery that references that murder. The author of the mystery? Alan Conway, Susan’s murdered author. The Trehernes believe that their daughter saw something in Conway’s novel that related to the eight year old murder and now she’s in danger. They want Susan to visit the hotel and re-read the mystery to see if she can figure out what their daughter might have discovered. There is someone in jail for the murder, but it’s not at all clear that he did it. Is the real murderer after Cecily? 

Susan’s intrigued and she needs a break from the hectic pace at the hotel in Crete, so off she goes. Then the fun starts: the multiple characters with motives, the secret financial problems, the red herrings, and the illicit relationships. Horowitz even includes the full text of Alan Conway’s earlier novel so the reader can try to find the answer for herself. It’s quite an entertaining romp.

In addition to Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders, I read another Horowitz mystery, The Word is Murder, in which the author himself becomes Watson to a surly detective’s Sherlock. The connections between life and art in these novels are brilliant and fun. Horowitz’s style is just right for these mysteries: a little breezy, just the right level of detail to be atmospheric, and a raft of idiosyncratic characters.

These are some of the best books I read this year: I worked hard to winnow the list down to seven fiction and seven nonfiction titles. Not all were published in 2020. If I wrote a post about a book, I’ve provided the link.  They’re just in order by title.

FICTION

The Abstainer by Ian McGuire
A very literate historical thriller about an Irish policeman in Manchester, England in 1867. See my post here.

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
An immersive, frightening, and all-too-realistic story about a mother and son on the run from a Mexican drug lord. Will they reach the U.S. border before the cartel’s henchman catch them?

Gone So Long by Andre Dubus III
An ex-con father wants to see his estranged daughter in this haunting tale. See my post here.

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
This is auto-fiction with a raw, hungry immediacy. Akhtar’s linked stories about life in the U.S. as a Muslim, the son of immigrant parents, are unforgettable, often shocking. He writes about the bigotry he experiences as a Muslim, the narrowmindedness in his own community, and and the way those things affect his feelings about living in the U.S. It’s the right book for this time.

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
The third and final volume in Mantel’s brilliant fictional life of Thomas Cromwell, who rose from the son of a blacksmith to Henry VIII’s confidant and enforcer. See my post here.

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
Eerily prescient, Donoghue’s latest claustrophobic novel is set in a hospital during the influenza pandemic of 191x and follows a nurse who cares for pregnant women who have the flu. I found this riveting for its carefully drawn characters and emotional content.

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
A coming of age novel, a trenchant commentary on the lives we live today, full of brilliant set pieces, Lerner’s novel delves into many aspects of our cultural dysfunction. See my post here.

NONFICTION

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time by Hilary Spurling
Powell is often called the English Proust; I read his magnum opus, the 12 volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time years ago and loved it. A trenchant picture of English society in the first half of the twentieth century. See my short post here.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Wilkerson makes the case that caste not racism accounts for the way Blacks have been treated in our society. India and Nazi Germany provide other examples of caste-based systems to make the argument clear. An important book to read now.

Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries, and a Half-Dozen Revolutions by Annik LaFarge
A short but pithy life of Chopin and his music. See my post here.

Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town by Barbara Demick
Demick follows the life of citizens in a small town in Tibet before and after the Chinese takeover. See my post here.

Georgia O’Keefe: A Life by Roxana Robinson
I am sure this is the best biography about O’Keefe and a model of biographical writing. I love Robinson’s fiction, too: Cost and Sparta are among my favorites.

God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World by Alan Mikhail
Mikhail explores the fraught relationship between the Ottoman Turks and Europe in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. See my post here.

An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn
Mendelsohn, a classics scholar writes about the Odyssey and his father, joining their stories together in remarkable ways. Read my post here.

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I enjoyed Walter’s last book–Beautiful Ruins–so much, that I was eager to read The Cold Millions and have the same experience all over again. Well, it doesn’t happen like that. A good writer changes it up. Like Beautiful Ruins, there is a mix of historical and fictional characters in this new novel but it’s very different. I wasn’t disappointed.

The Cold Millions is set in Spokane, Washington in 1909 when the IWW, the workers’ union often known as the Wobblies, tried to hold a series of free speech rallies. Two brothers, Gig and Rye, have been drifting around Montana and Washington after the deaths of their parents and sister. They pick up jobs when they can and ride the rails to places where there might be work. Gig takes easily to this vagabond life, but Rye, only 17 years old, is not so sure this is the life for him. Gig worries that he can’t take care of Rye properly.

The brothers are drawn into the Wobblies’ world, caught up in the fervor for workers’ rights. Workers are the “cold millions” of the title, compared to the rich mining barons who run the town and live in warmth and luxury on the South Side. Enter Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the historical rabble rousing young woman whose fiery speeches, determination, and charisma keep the Spokane workers riled up.

The rich industrialists won’t give in to the workers’ demands and they have the means to pay off the Spokane police and hire thugs. How Gig and Rye are tested in their loyalties forms the core of the story. Walters portrays Spokane as a wild and woolly town and the dialogue is rich in colorful slang and equally colorful secondary characters. It’s easy to picture the setting: rainy, muddy, and cold, and filled with cheap hotels, tawdry saloons, and prostitutes. As the story develops, the reader becomes attached to Gig and Rye, especially Rye, who is so young and vulnerable. What will happen to the brothers in this soup of labor violence? The historical characters drive the plot but the brothers are the real beating heart of the story.

It’s often entertaining and enlightening to read about history from a new vantage point. We didn’t learn everything in our high school and college history courses, and, of course, we know the curriculum had a certain Eurocentric point of view. Alan Mikhail’s book God’s Shadow is a terrific repositioning of our view of European and Middle Eastern history in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Shifting political fortunes made it a volatile–and violent–time and Mikhail has some interesting things to say, especially about the geopolitical considerations that sent Columbus across the Atlantic Ocean. It’s different from what we learned in high school.

The history that Mikhail tells so well focuses on the Sultan Selim, who ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1512 to 1520. His father, the Sultan Bayezit, had several sons by several concubines. In the royal court, once a concubine had given birth to a son, her obligation to the sultan was done. She was then expected to teach her son all he needed to know in case he became the next ruler. A strong bond between mothers and sons meant that many of these women, who often started life as slaves, became powerful members of the court, even sometimes the power behind the throne. There’s a great story in how Selim–the third in line for the throne–and his mother finessed their situation to his advantage. Family loyalty was not encouraged.

As sultan, Selim oversaw a great expansion of the Ottoman Empire; from Egypt in the West to Iran and Azerbaijan in the East. In his eight years as sultan, he spent most of his time leading his armies in these conquests, which paved the way for the much more peaceful era of his son, Suleyman the Magnificent. According to Mikhail, the growing power of the Ottoman Empire under Selim threatened the western European countries like Spain, France, Italy, and Portugal, which were barely nation states compared to the huge and well-organized Ottoman Empire. In Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella had just finished an exhausting–and violent–Reconquista, expelling Muslims (and Jews) and subjecting those that remained to the tortures of the Inquisition.

Selim controlled the best trade routes to the East, threatening access to lucrative trade with India and points farther east. In Mikhail’s explanation, Columbus’ voyage across the Atlantic was to make contact with a Great Khan in China who was rumored to be a convert to Nestorian Christianity. The plan was to make common cause with this ruler and, in a pincer movement, destroy the Ottoman Empire. Mikhail’s evidence for this theory is both fascinating and very compelling.

I enjoyed this book for so many reasons. The story is absorbing and the writing is perfectly matched–graceful, straightforward and clear. I was looking forward to learning more about this period but didn’t expect such a page turner. God’s Shadow clarified and expanded my understanding of a pivotal period of history. If you have any interest in how religion and geopolitics around the Mediterranean in this era shaped our world, this is a great read.

Note: If you enter the search string “that changed the world” in your library’s catalog, you’ll find lots of results. I’m thinking of books like Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World; Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, also other books like Guns, Germs, and Steel whose authors claim that their point of view and subject matter will give you a different understanding of world history. I enjoy those books and so does my book club.

When I was growing up, I thought there was no place more distant and forbidding than Tibet. Why would anyone want to live in such a fierce, frozen place? It seemed so strange to a child in an urban apartment with central heating. And the Tibetans didn’t want visitors! Then, in the early 1990s I read Henrich Harrer’s memoir Seven Years in Tibet and I was hooked on finding more about the history and culture. The more I read, the more Tibet began to feel like a special corner of the world to me, a place of ancient, mystical traditions that had survived because the Tibetans held fast to those traditions. In San Francisco I saw Tibetan monks patiently dripping colored sand to create an exquisite mandala. That patience that was a world away from the daily life I saw around me. The enormous Potala Palace, hovering over Lhasa, fascinated me as much as the Parthenon. (More about that another time.) The Chinese takeover of the country with the subsequent trashing of Tibetan culture felt like a terrible affront and it was made all the more disturbing by the exile of the Dalai Lama, whose compassion, resilience and moral strength have been so exemplary. Eat the Buddha satisfied my curiosity about what’s been happening to the Tibetans who remained. 

I had read Demick’s previous book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, a wonderful eye-opener that is exactly as described by the subtitle. She’s a terrific journalist who knows how to balance the general and the personal. I also felt that I needed to catch up on what was happening in Tibet. I was too focused on the Dalai Lama’s attempts to keep the flame of Tibetan life and Buddhism alive. It was time to read about what was happening to the Tibetans left behind.

Demick follows the lives of several Tibetans from the district of Ngaba, site of the former Mei kingdom, from the last Mei princess, to monks, nuns, teachers, and ordinary people trying to live their lives in a bewildering maze of Chinese hostility and ineptitude. She fills in the history we’ve missed, from the impact of Mao’s Long March to the flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959, to the way Tibetans live now, under the long arm of Chinese surveillance and centralized control. After so many years of Chinese indoctrination, many Tibetans have given up their own culture and acquiesced to the Communist worldview. It makes their lives easier but it also makes them exiles in their own land. Some continue to resist in any way they can. Others have managed to escape to India to join the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. It’s a harsh story but Demick tells it well. I highly recommend it.

At the moment I’m listening to Chopin’s Etude Op. 25 No. 10, called “The Winter Wind” for the way it evokes the howling wind of a winter storm.  I’ve listened to Chopin for many hours in the past three days, since I finished reading Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries, and a Half-Dozen Revolutions by Annik LaFarge.

This wonderful short book is a love letter to Chopin. It’s not a biography, although you will learn about the composer’s life and relationship with his longtime lover, the novelist George Sand, nom de plume of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin. It’s also not a book of musical criticism, nor is it a treatise about the difficulties of playing Chopin’s music. LaFarge starts by recounting a visit to a friend who was dying. The next piece of music she heard, at a jazz club, quoted Chopin’s “Funeral March” and she was jolted by the coincidence. The “Funeral March” becomes the thread that ties the various parts of the story together. (Although a number of Chopin’s pieces have programmatic names, Chopin himself hated this practice; all the names were supplied by others.)

LaFarge visits all the places where Chopin lived to recapture the atmosphere and history he might have experienced. One of the most moving sections of the book is set on Majorca, where Sand and Chopin lived for a while in 1838-9. Chopin was in Paris, very ill, coughing up blood and Sand wanted to find a place of warmth and light where he could regain his strength. The trip was not altogether a success: the weather in Majorca was cold and rainy and it took almost six months for Chopin’s piano to arrive. He had ordered a Pleyel pianino to be shipped to Majorca and it was held up by bad weather and extortionate customs fees. Chopin, Sand, and Sand’s two children ended up living in Valldemossa, in the hills northwest of Palma in a abandoned medieval monastery. The locals didn’t welcome this unusual couple–one with tuberculosis, the other a strange genre-bending woman. The sun and warmth they initially encountered quickly turned to cold and rain. It was not the most salubrious place for Chopin, but he wrote some of his most beautiful pieces there.

LaFarge visited the monastery, now a Chopin museum, which contains the Pleyel pianino and some of Chopin’s handwritten manuscripts. Many other music lovers and pianists have made the trek but maybe none so devoted as Nobuyuki Tsujii, a brilliant blind pianist, who stayed overnight on a cot in the room next to Chopin’s studio. LaFarge has a companion website, www.whychopin.com keyed to the book’s chapters, where you can listen to recordings of all the pieces she mentions, many of them on period instruments like Chopin’s Pleyel. I especially recommend listening to Nobu (as he’s known to his fans) and Tomasz Ritter, both Chopin competition winners.

Pleyel’s pianos were the intermediate instruments between the harpsichord and our modern piano. The harpsichord plucks the strings, somewhat like a guitar, thus the pressure on the keys doesn’t translate to how loudly or softly the instrument will play. Pleyel and a few other piano makers in the early 1800s tried other methods of striking the strings and were able to bring more resonance and color to the instrument’s tone. These were the first steps towards our modern piano action. The new pianos must have felt miraculous to a composer like Chopin, whose compositions are so flowing and dynamically varied.

LaFarge visited Paris, of course, and also Nohant, where Sand had an estate. Ever mindful of the need for silence and space for Chopin to compose, Sand built a beautiful soundproofed room for Chopin in Nohant. She took good care of him until she didn’t; not too long before his death she left him and although her daughter was at his deathbed, Sand was not. Ah, the vicissitudes of love! Of course, the “Funeral March” was played at his funeral.

I’m always looking for absorbing thrillers, well-written and with something to say about the human condition.  I just finished a good one: The Abstainer by Ian McGuire, a thriller set mainly in Manchester, England in 1867. It’s a dark story, filled with the pain of the long war between the Irish and the British. Themes of loss, regret, and betrayal, combined with beautiful writing kept me turning pages. I read it in two sittings.

James O’Connor, a policeman from Dublin, is sent to Manchester to help uncover the plans of the violent Fenian Brotherhood.  Personally, it’s his last chance to redeem himself from the alcoholism that wrecked his Dublin career. The British have just hanged three Fenians; they know there will be reprisals. At the same time, the Irish-American Stephen Doyle arrives in Manchester to plan the Fenian Brotherhood’s act of revenge. Doyle served on the Union side in the American Civil War and is well acquainted with death; he’s a cold-hearted, arrogant loner. His first task is to ferret out the informers in the group, then he’ll take revenge for the hangings.

It’s a classic face-off between two driven, intensely motivated men. McGuire takes the reader deep inside O’Connell’s head. All his colleagues know about his ignominious reassignment from Dublin. What they aren’t aware of is that he’s still grieving for his dead wife and son. Doyle, the Irishman bent on retribution, is also struggling with demons; it’s his anger that makes him so dangerous. The story is like a chess game: there are moves and countermoves; some are successful, some are thwarted. O’Connor recruits his nephew to infiltrate the Fenians and then spends sleepless nights worrying about his safety.

The absorbing aspect of the novel is O’Connell’s desperate interior life, which is matched by the dismal Manchester weather, with sky “the color of wet mortar.” I was stopped many times by O’Connell’s trenchant ruminations. Here, he’s worried about the safety of his nephew:

“It occurs to him…that if his son, David, who had died, had lived instead, this is what fatherhood might have felt like: this constant irritating fear, this sense that a vital part of your life is being lived elsewhere, in secret, by someone you may love but can’t possible trust.”

It’s writing like this that kept me reading despite the brutal story. The murderous hatred between the Irish and the British was no fiction; in the next century it would only get worse.

On Sunday mornings, my Israeli friend Pnina emails me the “Bookmarks” newsletter from the Guardian. It’s a lively roundup of new books and literary essays. Sometimes I just need to skim it and sometimes I find real treasure.

The treasure I found on Sunday was a piece by Clive James, who died in 2019. James was a well-loved (Australian-born) British literary and cultural critic. I discovered him for myself about fifteen years ago when I was putting together my book on memoirs. I found his first memoir, called Unreliable Memoirs and I loved it from the first page. Here’s what I wrote about it:

James pens a hilarious account of growing up in Sydney, Australia, in the 1940s and 1950s, son of a widowed mother who despaired of ever seeing her son make something of himself. His childhood was filled with mischief and over-the-top exploits at school and in the neighborhood, all of which hid his frantic adolescent need for acceptance and sexual conquest. A laugh out loud coming-of-age story with a strong sense of place and time.

 James went on to disprove his mother’s bleak view of his future by becoming a prolific author of literary criticism, poetry, memoir, and novels. He was a popular TV reviewer on the BBC, where his deadpan humor endeared him to listeners. It’s still in print to purchase but maybe your library has a copy of Unreliable Memoirs tucked away on a dusty autobiography shelf or you can find a secondhand copy; I highly recommend it. 

The Guardian article is an excerpt from James’s last book, Fire of Joy, about his lifelong love of poetry, which began with compulsory memorization of poems in elementary school. James didn’t find it difficult or unpleasant to memorize poems; he comments that “it was a fantastic combination of Parnassus and a maximum-security prison.” He goes on to write about the nature of poetry’s appeal and includes some of his favorite poems. His frank opinions, leavened with humor, make the excerpt a joy to read.

About poetry he writes, “With a poem the most important thing is the way it sounds when you say it. At that rate even the most elementary nursery rhyme has it all over the kind of overstuffed epic that needs 10 pages of notes for every page of text, and reduces all who read it to paralysed slumber–or even worse, to a bogus admiration.” (Is that why I’m such a fan of the “Jabberwocky?”) 

There are links at the bottom of the Guardian article to other articles about James, all of which sound wonderful. 

As best I can tell, Fire of Joy has not yet been published in the U.S., so the excerpt in the Guardian will have to suffice for now. I’ll keep an eye out for publication here.