A Burning

 A Burning

By Megha Majumdar

The literal burning of the title happens late at night at a train station, where shadows of men are seen

fleeing while one after another train car is lit ablaze. More than a hundred are left dead. 

Meanwhile, in a nearby slum, a young woman named Jivan is pondering this atrocity. When her previous Facebook posts on the incident fail to garner enough likes as she wanted, Jivan reposts a video of a weeping woman who declares that police were at the seen and failed to act and so isn't the state just as much a terrorist as the people who lit the flames in the first place.

Jivan, it is clear, is striving, hoping for more. She has dropped out of school for a clerk job at a fancy clothing store, where she brings home her family's first steady income in a long while. She wants to be seen, to be somebody. 

But, it seems, in modern India, Muslims are not destined to be somebodys.

Because, due to her post or some other motivation, Jivan is arrested for the crime that she has nothing to do with. The poor, Muslim girl becomes a scapegoat for the nation, a charade of justice that fools enough people. 

Along the way, Jivan's fall allows others to rise. There is her former physical education teacher, PT Sir, who parlays testimony as the accused's former teacher into a plum job with a rising nationalist political party. And Lovely, a hijra -- which, based on some quick research, I think is an Indian term for someone who is transgendered --  follows a similar path to a starring role in a new movie. Both make the conscious decision to quicken injustice for Jivan for a better life for themselves. 

There is a cruel irony running in the background. The nationalist political party to which PT Sir belongs, and which wins election amidst Jivan's trial, preaches service to the state, subordinating the self for the good of all. But is self-service that leads party leaders to doom Jivan to what they know is an unjust fate. It is a commentary not just on India but the facade of the zero-sum game that many seem to think they must play to get ahead throughout the world.

As a reader, I will say this was a difficult but mesmerizing one to get through. You are sympathetic to each character in their striving. But it is Jivan with whom your loyalty lies, and it is hard, at the outset, to imagine anything but justice coming her way. That it doesn't is a gut punch that will be a bit hard to recover from.

The Eye of the Needle

 The Eye of the Needle

By Ken Follett

I came across this book one evening after the kids had found and ransacked a box of books my parents' dropped off about a year ago. I was just off Cloud Cuckoo Land, and thought I'd give it a shot. It was a winner.

Set in England during World War II, the book tells the tale of a German spy whose codename is "The Needle" owing to his penchant for killing with a stiletto knife. As cover, he goes by Henry Faber. With D-Day approaching, German officials send Faber to East Anglia to assess the size of the army amassing there. What he finds is a ruse -- inflatable tanks, plywood planes, and half-built barracks designed to trick the Germans into thinking that the landing target will be Calais. Faber photographs the truth and sets about returning the information to Germany so it can better defend the true location, Normandy.

Standing in his way is Britain's Military Intelligence (MI), whose ranks have expanded to include the likes of Percival Godliman, a Medieval historian who served with distinction in the previous war. Godliman (whose name is, come on, a bit obvious) and his colleagues track Faber to a remote island off the coast of Scotland, where he awaits a rendezvous with a U Boat. But it is one of the inhabitants of the island, Lucy, who becomes the real hero. She and her husband, David, had sought refuge on the island four years before when a car accident on the couple's wedding night left David legless -- and humorless. When Faber shows up, they are initially just glad to see another human being, and Lucy especially so. She conducts a tryst with Faber, who becomes uncharacteristically smitten with Lucy and so holds off on killing her -- which becomes his fatal mistake.

Whoa, what a page turner this was! Full of fairly graphic violence and, toward the end, sex, this was more of a book than I bargained for. I'd picked it up expecting silly cliches, but by the end I couldn't put it down -- even though I knew what the outcome had to be. I might check out more Follett in the future.

Still Life and A Fatal Grace

 Still Life and A Fatal Grace

By Louise Penny

I read these two mysteries, the first in the Armand Gamache series, back to back, and they are blurred in my head. In the first, a beloved community member is killed by an arrow. The search for the perpetrator leads investigators to her house, which the victim had kept under wraps from even her closest friends for decades. The reason, it turns out, was that it had been covered in folk art that held the clue to solving the crime. In the second, a decidedly unbeloved newcomer to the community was murdered at a post-Chritsmas curling match in an unusual way: through electrocution. On ice. In a crowd. The subsequent investigation revealed it was the victim's daughter, who had endured enough suffering at her mother's hand and mouth that no one could blame her for the crime.

But it isn't really the plot that keeps me coming back to these novels; it's the characters that really draw you in. There's Clara and Peter, the resident artists, and Ruth, the curmudgeonly poet, and Oivier and Gabri, the owners of the Three Pines Bistro, and, of course, Gamache himself, a man of inscrutable integrity and kindness who is, we learn, on the outs from the rest of the Surete because of his attempts to hold a fellow officer accountable. It is this drama that weaves through all of Penny's books. This stuff is literary candy -- I'm looking forward to going back for more.

Cloud Cuckoo Land

 Cloud Cuckoo Land

By Anthony Doerr

This is a paean. Not only does Doerr say as much in his afterward, but so does a New York Times book

review. Seems like people really like to use that word when they can. So: paean. That much is clear. A paean (why not squeeze as many as we can in?) to books.

The book that this book focuses on is a fictional Greek myth called, as the title suggests, Cloud Cuckoo Land. It is one of several threads that connects the many characters and settings that inhabit this book. Chronologically, there is: Anna, who lives in an about-to-be-besieged 15th-century Constantinople; Omeir, who is drafted into the military machine about to do the besieging; Zeno, a motherless son of a Greek immigrant trying to make a life for himself in rural Idaho; Seymour, of the same Idaho town, who is also trying to make sense of his place in the world; and Konstance, who, in the 22nd century, on a spaceship that has embarked on a 500-year journey to an exoplanet the inhabitants of the Argo hope will be a replacement for the ravaged earth they left behind. 

It is, chronologically, Anna who stumbles upon Cloud Cuckoo Land while trying to discover ancient manuscripts for paying Italians. In doing so, she sets the rest of the story in motion. The book is one of two possessions Anna takes with her while fleeing Constantinople; the other is a snuff box with an image of Urbana, Italy. During her escape, Anna runs into Omeir, a harelipped outsider who does not speak Anna's language. Still, the two stay together and make it to safety, a feat that Omeir believes is owed to Anna's mysterious book. And so as his final act, Omeir, his wife Anna long dead, takes the book to the city on the snuff box so it will be safe for all time.

Four centuries later, Zeno is in a North Korean prison camp when he meets and falls in love with a classics scholar named Rex. The two are soon separated, but not before Rex teaches Zeno some of the old language. In their last meeting, Rex encourages Zeno to try some translating, which he does upon his retirement from a highway department job in Idaho. Not long after, a discovery of an ancient text -- which turns out to be Cloud Cuckoo Land -- is made, and, amateur though he is, Zeno sets about making a translation. Which somehow captures the imagination of a group of fifth graders who urge Zeno to help them stage a play based on the old story.

It never happens. That is because Seymour, reeling from the destruction of a forest that killed a beloved Great Gray Owl to build condos, brings bombs into the library during play rehearsal so he can exact revenge on the development company just a few feet away. Zeno dies removing the bombs from the library. Seymour ends up in jail, where he matures and works to atone for his crime. Eventually, he does so by bringing back the 5th-grade survivors and presents them with a bound copy of Zeno's translation of Cloud Cuckoo Land.

One of those survivors is an Australian woman who will become the great grandmother of Konstance, who, spurred on by her father's quotations from the book, pieces a full story together. This gives her the courage to break out of the Argo, which has become beset by a pestilence, when she realizes that it is not actually hurtling through space but in fact sitting on the Icelandic tundra as part of a corporate experiment. 

So it all comes together. The story helps give meaning to five lives and, we can presume, many more. A paean indeed.

Interior Chinatown

 Interior Chinatown

By Charles Yu

This one was nothing if not unique. This book tells the story of Willis Wu, a bit-actor trying to make his way

up the ranks to the pinnacle of Asian acting: Kung Fu Man. But, of course, it is not simply the tale of Willis; it is also, in a way, the story of all Americans of Asian descent. The idea that Yu posits is that America is a black and white world that does not know what to do with this "other" category of people, which, despite centuries on American soil, therefore cannot shake the idea that they are somehow foreign. Asian stereotypes run so deep that Americans in this category are expected to play a role, what Yu dubs Generic Asian Man (or woman). 

He emphasizes this point by writing the book as if it is a movie script. Often times, Willis' acting jobs blend into real life. He will be playing "Special Guest Star" on a cop show, for instance, when he starts chatting with a fellow actor about the humiliation of having to do an accent when he was born and raised in the US. It's often a humorous, if disorienting, effect.

I found out after I started reading that the book won the National Book Award. It's easy to see why. It is inventive, funny, and, at times, powerful. I do wish, though, that it had been a bit heavier on plot. Often times, the book reads less like a novel and more like an essay. The blurring of "reality" and TV show -- which, I know, was part of the point -- added to this. So it was hard to commit to the characters. But a good read nonetheless.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

 The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

By David Mitchell

Set in the Dutch trading post of Djimi outside of Nagasaki, Japan, at the turn of the 19th century, this story

tells the tale of (as the title implies) a young clerk named Jacob de Zoet, who has signed on with the Dutch East India Company in a bid to win his fortune -- and the hand of a better-to-do Dutch woman he hopes to marry. He tries, and partially succeeds, but his rectitude proves an impediment to true wealth.

But what he finds instead might be more valuable. He falls in love with a young medical apprentice named Dr. Aibagawa, or Orito, and accidentally proposes. it is nearly accepted when fate, in the form of a near-demonic local lord, intervenes and banishes Orito to a strange mountain-top abbey.

The historical nature of this book is fascinating. I loved the way Mitchell recreated the Dutch-Japanese relationship of this period. It provides much dramatic tension in and of itself, particularly with the backstabbing politics of the DEIC and the arrival, toward the end of the book, of a British naval frigate (or some other navy-type boat). It raises lots of questions, such as: Was Japan better off as an isolated nation? What does it mean to be rich? Is it possible to be honest and successful? Can two people of such different backgrounds fall in love? What are the benefits and drawbacks of a strictly hierarchical society?

There is a supernatural element to this novel, though, that I found off-putting and, frankly, unnecessary. It involves a powerful Lord Abbot who is in charge of the Abbey to which Orito is banished. I'm not exactly sure why the author included this bit, ad it seemed to undermine the otherwise enthralling plot. 

State of Wonder

 State of Wonder

By Anne Patchett

Anne Patchett must have a penchant for South America. (I cannot be the only one who has delighted in the

paring of Patchett an penchant.) The last novel of hers I read, Bel Canto, told the story of an attempted coup in an unknown South American country. This one, though it starts in Minnesota, has as its climactic backdrop the Amazon basin. Patchett's bio reveals little about any time spent there, so she must have one heckofa imagination.

The basic plot is this: An American pharmaceutical company has heavily invested in a researcher who appears to have found a compound that would extend fertility well into a woman's 70s in the Amazon. But that researcher is fairly prickly and not prone to answering calls/e-mails/letters. So to protect that investment, they send down an eager employee, likely drawn there by his love of birding, who reportedly dies as a result. The president of the company, Jim Fox -- also a name of a former Valley News editor -- therefore turns to his employee-turned-lover Marina to find the researcher and the truth about what happened. Complicating Marina's trip is not just the danger and remoteness of the Amazon, but also the fact that the researcher, Dr. Annick Swenson, was her former medical school teacher, whose gruffness in the wake of a botched c-section led her to eschew working with patients in lieu of pharmacology. 

What Marina finds in the Amazon is, of course, not what she expects. I wouldn't want to give too much away to my phantom readers, so I'll just say that the most important surprise to Marina is her own competence. So when Swenson, in a plea to keep her in the Amazon, tells Marina, "Trust e, you won't fit in there anymore. You've changed," she's right. I suspect there is more to this story, particularly around fertility as a symbol for...something. I can't say my critical reading eyes are as sharp as they should be.

All in all, a great read.