The Fortress of Solitude

 The Fortress of Solitude

By Jonathan Lethem

This year marked the 20th anniversary of my graduation from college; I was unable, or unwilling, to attend

my reunion. But it felt like a milestone worth marking. So I decided to reread this novel, which I consumed while on a transcontinental train ride from LA to Boston that I took from college to NH, where my parents still lived.

The first part of the book I remembered quite clearly. It features Dylan, whose parents, especially his mother, move the family into Brooklyn as part of some idealistic experiment. The mother had been a "Brooklyn kid", and so would her son. He is "one of only three white kids in his school." She is proud of this. His father, a painter who has decided that his life's work will be a hand-painted film that nobody will every likely see, is oblivious. The Ebdus' are not the only white newcomers to Dean St., but others are there less because of progressive ideals than conservative ones -- they wish to "reclaim" the neighborhood. They no longer live in Gowans, but in Boerum Hill.

Whiteness comes to define Dylan's childhood much as blackness defines others depending on who is the minority. It has its pros. He is exposed to everything that was hip in Brooklyn's black community in the 1970s, and will be in the rest of the white nation not long after. Deep funk. Weed. Graffiti. But it has its downsides too. He is constantly "yoked", or stolen from, usually with some sort of physical reminder of his lowly place in the world. The major saving grace is the arrival on Dean Street of Mingus Rude, who is the son of a once-famous soul singer and who becomes something of a best friend/protector to Dylan. Together, the two navigate adolescents with the help of a ring bestowed upon Dylan by a wino that he has seen fly. The ring helps them fly.

But it is only Dylan who is able to escape Dean Street. It isn't easy. He is expelled from a fancy Vermont college and winds up in Berkeley with a Brooklyn-sized chip on his shoulder. He lives in the past, penning the liner notes to box sets of old blues and soul records. 

I found that the story lost its vitality a bit in the second part of the book, when Dylan tries to reckon with his childhood. I wish the ring and its magical powers, which threaten to send the book into parts beyond realistic fiction, had played a larger role. But, still. It's a brilliant book. Perhaps I will revisit it in another 10 years.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

By Douglas Adams

Thought I would pick up a little sci-fi. Plus I liked the slim size of this paper back with a reputation for
irreverence.

Silly, the book definitely was. It tells the story of an ordinary Earthling, Arthur Dent, who is swept off the plant by his friend, Ford Prefect, who, it turns out, isn't an Earthling but a visitor from space doing research on our plant for the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The sweeping happens just in time, at precisely the moment that earth is destroyed to make way for an interstellar super highway -- which, it turns out, wasn't actually necessary.

It's that type of absurdity/bureaucratic parody that runs through the book. It's been a bit of a slog for me, to be honest, as the plot makes no attempt at realism. Even though I just finished it, I don't really know what happened. Guess I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. 

The Mona Lisa Vanishes

 The Mona Lisa Vanishes

By Nicholas Day

What a wonderful book! Erin gave it to me after I finished my last book. I will say that I'm not usually one
for nonfiction. I need story! But this nonfiction book had it in droves. It unfolds like a classic who-done-it, alternating between the mysteries of Leonardo da Vinci in Renaissance Italy and the disappearance of his painting 500 years later or so. It also tells a great tale of life in the early 1900s, which seems so distant from now but was, much like today, a time of rapid technological growth and societal change. 

Peace Like a River

 Peace Like a River

By Leif Enger

I saw a book by this author in our school library. I'd never heard of him, and on the flap it mentioned that it
was a follow-up of sorts to his best-seller Peace Like a River. So rather than risk the new book, I went back to the old one to see what it was like.

It was quite the departure from the last novel I picked up, Martyr!. That one was wonderful, but also frenetic and chaotic and anxious. This one was, in contrast, quite peaceful -- despite the air of violence that envelops it.

The book tells the story of the Land family. They are nothing if tight-knit, turning their hardscrabble, rented house in western Minnesota into a veritable home. They would be the typical "all-American" family if not for two facts. First, the mother of the family has abandoned them, too disappointed in her husband's decision, made after taking a ride in a twister and emerging unscathed, to cease his studies to become a doctor in favor of janitoring. And second, this little sojourn in the tornado has somehow bestowed upon the elder Land some mystical, if not God-like qualities. He can, in fact, occasionally and, it seems, accidentally perform miracles. One day, he wanders off the edge of a porch and continues walking into midair. On another, his touch heals the face of the man in the act of firing him. 

The cozy domestic scene, however, is disrupted one evening when the eldest boy, Davy, lying in wait for two ne'er-do-well teen aged enemies, kills them when they enter the children's bedroom brandishing a bat. It would seem like self-defense, except he walks up to one of the boys writhing in pain on the floor and shoots him in the head like an injured horse. 

Davy is hauled off to jail, charged with manslaughter, and put on trial. Which doesn't go all too well. So Davy decides to up and leave. When the police can't find him for days, the rest of his family does the same, using a recently-inherited Airstream trailer to try to track Davy down. Somehow, they end up at a farmhouse gas station run by a woman named Roxanne in the badlands of North Dakota. There they -- well, only the book's 11-year-old narrator Reuben -- find Davy, and Jeremiah Land finds a beau. Rube takes several midnight rides to Davy's hideout, which he shares with a shadowy, dangerous-seeming fellow named Jape. Rube is happy to keep these rendezvous secret until he learns that the policeman pursuing Davy, to whom Rube and the family had eventually taken a liking, has located the hideout and plans to try take Davy there. Rube knows Jape won't like that, and will probably kill the policeman. So he blabs, and leads a posse of local ranchers there.

They are too late. The cabin is empty, save for the lawman's hat, which is not a good sign. Davy is gone. The family, however, is newly buoyed  by the fact that Roxanne will be joining them -- permanently. They had back to Minnesota, where there is a wedding and a move into a new home. Things are looking up. Then Davy returns. Unbeknownst to him, Jape has followed. And when Davy goes to leave, there is violence. Rube is shot. So is Jeremiah. The former's wound appears more serious. But Jeremiah is a miracle worker, and trades his life for his sons's.

Reading this book was like wearing a warm blanket on a cold day. Its prose, even in the tensest of moments, was just so earnest. It had me returning in my head to my Grandparent's house, to my own childhood when I was unencumbered by responsibilities. I read it in almost a dreamlike haze. I think I happened upon it at just the right moment.

Long Island

 Long Island

By Colm Toibin

The second novel following the life of Irish immigrant Eilish finds her facing a crisis. Her husband, Tony, a
plumber, has had an affair with one of his clients' wives, and she is pregnant. Soon, the husband comes to Eilish, and, in grand and angry fashion, declares that he will be depositing the baby on her doorstep, so she better get ready to raise it.

She isn't. She draws a line in the sand with her husband, but it isn't Tony that she has to deal with. The life they have carved out for themselves on Long Island includes a small compound with homes for Tony's parents and siblings all on the same plot of land. At the beginning of the novel, Eilish had made a sort of peace with this somewhat stifling environment. But her mother-in-laws' control over the family, including the fate of the unborn child, is too much for Eilish to take. She has made it clear to Tony: the baby or me. But Tony, it turns out, is more afraid of his mother than his wife.

Eilish flees to Ireland, using her mother's 80th birthday as an excuse. She hasn't, in fact, seen her mother in decades, though she has been sure to send monthly updates on her family. Their reunion isn't exactly a happy one. Eilish's mother refuses to ask her about her life in America, and is as rude and controlling as her mother-in-law. But things begin to thaw when Eilish's children arrive. Her mother softens, taken with her daughter Rosella, and Eilish begins to see that she could have a life separate from Tony.

It is then that Eilish rekindles a romance with Jim Farwell, a local pub owner with whom Eilish had something of a fling many years before, when she had come home for her sister's funeral a secretly-married woman. She never told Jim of her elopement, and he was sure they would marry. Then she abruptly left for the US, and had no correspondence since. Complicating matters was that Jim is on the cusp of something like a new life. He, after years of bachelorhood, has found a partner in Nancy, Eilish's once-best friend, and they have decided to marry.

But Jim cannot resist Eilish, who knows nothing of his relationship with Nancy. It is something like a reversal of Eilish's previous visit. Except that Jim is eager to leave Nancy and start a new life with Eilish. It is not to be. Nancy finds out about the affair and, without letting anyone know she knows, ends it by revealing to the whole town that she and Jim are engaged. He will have to stay after all.

The back of the book describes it as "quiet", but I didn't find it that way. Perhaps it is because of my own life stage that I found it excruciatingly intense. To me, Eilish's return totally upended the lives of the people of Enniscorthy just as they were about to find some sort of peace -- just as she had done before. I wonder if the whole series is some sort of meditation on the disruption that mass emigration played on Ireland and its villages. It seems as though, in this case, it threatens to tear them apart, both because of the loss of people but also because the people who remained can't help but wonder whether they made the right decision. Just like the people who left. 

Martyr!

 Martyr! 

By Kaveh Akbar

Death is a constant in the life of Cyrus Shams. His mother died when he was an infant, her plane, mistaken

for a fighter jet, shot down by the US Air Force. Some 20 years later, his father followed, though he was dead in many ways before his body expired. Cyrus seemed destined to die young too, and made something of a past time of consuming substances -- anything, really -- that seemed sure to accelerate this process.

Until. One day, out of his mind on something, a bulb hanging from his ceiling blinks, and when he wills God to make it happen again, it does. Henceforth, Cyrus becomes sober. But sobriety can only take him so far. He is convinced that his life has no meaning and, from the outside, it's a bit hard to argue with him. He is a perpetual student, a writer who barely writes with no real plan or aspirations for the future. Yet he yearns to imbue his life with purpose.

Then the bulb blinks again. A show opens at the Brooklyn Museum called Death Speak in which an artist, Orkideh, who is diagnosed with terminal breast cancer, sits in a room and speaks with whoever wishes to about life and death. Here, thinks Cyrus, is a woman whose death with have meaning. He launches a writing project about martyrs, flies from Indiana to New York, and meets with her regularly. He is surprised when she goes out of her way to invite him back, and so he returns two days in a row. She hints at knowing something about his mother and her death, which spooks him. He ruminates on it -- how could she know? -- and vows to ask her about it the next day.

Except the next day, Orkideh is dead. Twice. Once when her body expires, and once when Cyrus learns the truth about who she is: his mother. She had been trying to leave Iran with her lover, who took on her identity to fly out quickly to escape her more acutely intolerant and intolerable husband. When the lover dies, Cyrus' mother leaves anyway and builds a new life for herself in New York. Without Cyrus.

Suddenly, Cyrus' whole world view crumbles. His mother, who he had thought died a meaningless death, actually died what he considers to be a meaningful one. They coexist at the same time. Or do they nullify each other? 

It is enough of a twist to shock Cyrus out of his self pity and into the world, perhaps for the first time. 

Brooklyn

 Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

Lazarus Man

 Lazarus Man by Richard Price

Can't say I thought a whole lot about this one. The title refers to the main character, whose life takes an

abrupt turn when he is found alive in the rubble of a collapsed building after 36 hours under a chunk of concrete. Miraculously, or so we think, he emerges unscathed. He becomes something of a folk hero, who is sought out to give speeches. He finds that he has something to say, and that he can express his thoughts in a way that moves people. He is a new man, and is able to move on from a downward spiral of a life that had descended into cocaine addiction. Turns out, though, he is something of a fraud. Footage of the collapse taken by a camera-obsessed local resident spots him running about in the immediate aftermath. So how did he end up under the concrete? He was tired, and lay down. Nevertheless, his words are true, and they help various other characters rise from the ashes of their own train-wrecked lives. 

I found this book a bit plotless and predictable.

In the Distance

In the Distance

By Hernan Diaz

My 150th entry! It took a little longer to get here than I anticipated, but a milestone nonetheless.

I picked this book up primarily because of how much I enjoyed Trust, the last book I read by this author. That work felt a lot like a crossword puzzle, which I find myself trying to unlock more frequently of late. It featured basically the same story told from four different, sometimes intertwining, points of view. It's not an uncommon method, but the way he wrote it made it take a while to figure out what was going on. And even by the end, you don't really know who to believe.

This book was much different, but no less interesting and, at times, riveting. It is, as the dust jacket explains, a book that "defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre." It is a tale of the settling of the west, with a twist. The main character, Hakan, or The Hawk as he becomes known, wants desperately to get east. After setting out with his brother from Sweden, he somehow becomes separated and winds up on a boat bound not for New York City but for San Francisco. When he arrives there, he becomes determined to reunite with his brother and takes up with an Irish family in search of gold. Against all odds, they find it -- only to have it stolen from them by a powerful woman from a nearby town who takes a liking to Hakan and keeps him as something of a sex slave.

He escapes, and spends much time wandering the desert, taking up with a scientist in search of the first signs of life on planet earth in the salt flats around what I can only assume is Utah. The scientists' help becomes tired of the desert mission, and, when he stops to give assistance to a recently-attacked group of Native Americans, they leave him. Hakan stays, and for his efforts he is gifted some medical training and tools, as well as a horse, which makes his journey much faster.

Eventually, he runs into settlers on the Oregon trail. One day, he is offered another horse, this one strong and healthy, if he would only serve as a bodyguard to a confidence man who has somehow convinced many settlers that he has land in Oregon that he can give them, which prompts many to shower him with gifts from their meager possessions. One day, they run into a band of Native people, or so they think. In fact, it is a ruse; a group of "brethren" (Mormon's?) who pretend to be Native and then change clothes to chase them off. The settlers fall for it, and welcome the "heroes" into their wagon circle. Whereupon they are fired up on indiscriminately. Hakan, who is an enormous human, reacts quickly, and almost single-handedly defeats the brethren. 

Word of his deed spreads far and wide. He is a hero! He is a villain! He goes into hiding. For years, his legend grows outside of his isolation. He grows too, never stopping. He is, it seems, the embodiment of the western tall tale, growing taller with every telling. Even years and years after the event, he is recognized and almost taken captive once more. He manages one more escape, does a kind deed for a fellow Swede who has come into wealth and funds a trip to a place where he won't be recognized: back home. 

The cover of the book is a mirror image. A mountainous desert landscape above; the same desert landscape below. I will admit that I was a bit too involved in the plot of thee book to fully consider its message, but that image seems a key to it.

The City and its Uncertain Walls

 The City and its Uncertain Walls

By Haruki Murakami

A new Murakami novel! Well, actually, only partly new. This is an extension of one half of the novel Hard
Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which was actually two novellas combined into one. Anyway. It arrived just in time for my annual Murakami read, and I was excited to pick it up.

Part 1 of the novel felt almost exactly like what I'd read before, which was a little disappointing. It was surprising to read in an afterward that he almost stopped there, because it didn't seem like there was much new. A 17-year-old falls in love with a 16-year-old, who claims that she is just the shadow of a real person living in an alternate world, a small city surrounded by a wall where time has no meaning, every day is basically the same, unicorns roam the streets, and no one may leave or enter. The pair carry on an intense relationship, but one day the girl simply stops replying to his letters and seems to disappear. Soon after, this version of Murakami man finds himself there one day at the bottom of a hole that the gate keeper to the city usually uses to burn the bodies of the beasts (unicorns) who die off during the harsh winter. Gotta love the Murakami man in a Murakami hole! To enter the village, the man must be separated from his shadow. His eyes are scarred so that he can fulfill his function: to read dreams that are ensconced in old skulls in the city "library" -- where the "real" version of the girl he loved was supposed to work. He visits with his shadow regularly, and becomes concerned when it seems that his shadow is dying. They make an escape plan, hoping to get back to the other world at the bottom of a mysterious, swirling pool in a river that runs through town. They make it, but the man decides at the last minute to stay back.

Or does he? The novel picks up back in the man's life, but something is a bit amiss. He aimlessly wanders into his 40s and decides he needs a change. He finds a job as a librarian in a small town several hours from Tokyo. He is befriended by his predecessor, who, it turns out, died a year before his hiring; he is, in fact a ghost. And, of course, they meet in the bowels of the library -- kind of like a hole. The shadow makes a few acquaintances in the town, including a woman who runs a coffee shop but, perhaps more importantly, a boy who dresses every day in a Yellow Submarine sweatshirt and spends his days reading everything he can in the town library. One day, "Yellow Submarine Boy" overhears the man talking to his predecessor's grave about the walled city and his time in it; the boy, who is likely on the spectrum, decides he must go there. 

One day, he does, sending the reader back there. The man is there too. Or maybe it's his shadow? Because he recognizes the boy, but only as a feeling of connection not as an actually remembrance. The boy seeks him out and they "become one" in some mysterious ways, which is helpful to the man because the boy, a voracious reader, is far better at reading dreams than the man. Where once, the man could only get through two or three dreams, and poorly, now he can get through seven. The boy and the man "meet" in a room in the man's head, and the man decides he must leave the city. The boy helps him, telling him he must only believe fervently that his shadow on the other side will catch him. As the book ends, we think that's what happens.

Not my favorite Murakami, but enough of the familiar themes and dream-like qualities were there to get a fix. He is still raising questions about the role that our imagination plays in shaping our world. Are we all just wandering around in cities surrounded by walls that we, ourselves, build? Are just acting as our shadows as the real us lives in that city inside our minds? I hope he comes out with another book soon.