Lesson Learned

After several days of thinking about it, I've come to a conclusion about the future of Book Chase.  

In the last ten days, I have had three separate discouraging bits of feedback regarding what I do here: one bit from a fairly well known author who took offense at something I said about her latest book, one bit from a regional author who ranted in a rather embarrassing way (I think) about something totally unrelated to her work that I said, and another bit from a publisher saying that I had "committed" to a review merely by accepting an unsolicited book of theirs in the mail (what am I supposed to do when a book whose genre I don't read suddenly shows up at my back door?).

Well, I have now thought it all over, and I have decided that enough is enough.

I am going to finish up with the review copies already in my possession, but I am not going to accept any others for review.  

I will still, on occasion, review books here - but they will be books I buy, borrow from the library, or get through programs at Amazon, GoodReads, or LibraryThing.  

I have never been a shill for writers or publishers, and I refuse to become one now.  This is not a job; if it were, I would have starved long ago.  I will, from this moment on, read what I want, when I want.  I have let my desire to get out the word on new books and authors overwhelm my personal time because I believed I was doing just a tiny bit of good.

Lesson learned.  Life is too short for this kind of frustration.  

The Dinner

Readers who are drawn to fiction built around well-developed characters are likely to be intrigued by the premise of Herman Koch’s new novel, The Dinner.  Two couples meet for dinner in one of Amsterdam’s more pretentious restaurants to discuss what their fifteen-year-old sons have done to prompt a sophisticated police investigation into the event.  It is the first time they have spoken of what happened, or even acknowledged that all four of them are aware of their sons’ guilt.

Paul and Serge Lohman are brothers whose personal circumstances are very different.  Paul is an unemployed schoolteacher who lives with his wife Claire and their only son; Serge is expected to be the country’s next Prime Minister and lives with his wife Babette and their two sons, one of whom is adopted.  Paul, the book’s narrator, resents his brother and considers him a pretentious boor, more a hypocritical public performer than the “man of the people” he considers himself to be. 

The evening, when the two couples are finally seated at a table that offers them even a minimum of privacy, gets off to a relatively civil beginning.  But, over the course of what turns out to be a dinner of several hours, the conversation becomes more and more vicious as it begins to focus on the two boys and the life-changing choice they made together.

Dutch Author Herman Koch

The Dinner is presented entirely through the eyes of Paul Lohman, a man who feels morally superior to his superficial brother and sister-in-law in every way – but he feels that way about most people with whom he is forced to interact.  In addition to relating the actual dinner conversation, Paul is quick to guess at what each of his dinner companions is thinking but leaving unsaid.  And, in a series of flashbacks that go back several years or just a few days, details are revealed about the Silver families and their sons that begin to complicate everything the reader thinks he knows about them.

Many of the best psychological novels take place largely inside the heads of a single narrator, and The Dinner uses that approach.  As Koch reveals more and more about his chosen narrator, the reader will begin to appreciate just how finely crafted his novel is.  Bit by bit, the true nature of Paul, Claire, Serge, Babette, their sons, and what all of them are guilty of is revealed.  In the end, none are particularly admirable, but the biggest surprise is yet to come.

 (Review Copy provided by Publisher)

Book Trailer of the Week: The Whipping Boy

WARNING: Some viewers might find this book trailer hard to watch, perhaps even offensive.  

I know nothing about this debut novel, despite the fact that this trailer was posted in June 2012, or its author, but the trailer certainly makes me want to know more about both.  

The Whipping Club (trailer starring Eric Roberts):

(20th Book Trailer of the week in a continuing series of unusual and memorable book trailers spotted by Book Chase)

May We Be Forgiven

Harold Silver has learned to live with the fact that his younger brother, George, lives a more glamorous and outwardly successful lifestyle than he is ever likely to attain.  But living with that knowledge, and accepting it, are two very different things. 

The two men are nothing alike.  George is a television executive at the top of his game, an aggressive man whose size allows him to be physically intimidating when he wants to be.  Harold is a “Nixon scholar” who has been working on a Nixon book for years and has just lost his small-time teaching job.  In contrast to George’s life, Harold’s future is completely up in the air at this point.  But George is a ticking time bomb, and after his violent temper finally gets the best of him, the two Silver families are changed forever.

Almost before he knows it, Harold is living in George’s house and has shouldered sole parental responsibility for his brother’s young son and daughter.  Everyone around him is suffering, and it is easy to blame George for all of that pain.  But Harold knows what really happened on the horrible night his brother destroyed their families.  And he feels guilty.

May We Be Forgiven is the blackest of comedies, a satirical look at contemporary American culture and what is happening to our families, especially to our children.  And, when it is not going completely over the top (something it does way too often), the novel is both funny and insightful.  At almost 500 pages, May We Be Forgiven is almost twice the length of the average novel, and reading it is much like reading two separate novels under one cover. 

A.M. Homes

The first 200 pages, or so, encompass an intriguing look at two very different men who have had a difficult relationship since childhood.  It is about a man willing to take responsibility for his part in something that could destroy the next generation of his family.  It is about redemption and forgiveness, and as improbable as the story is, something like it could actually happen.  The rest of the book is a farcical, slapstick comedy, so over the top that the book’s message is lost amid the absurdity of the story.  All sense of realism is gone, and the novel suffers for it because May We Be Forgiven becomes overcrowded with minor characters and subplots that do more to distract the reader than to add to the book’s central plot. 

This is a case where less would most certainly have been more.

It's Book Saturday Around Here

I've enjoyed a nice, bookish Saturday to this point (interrupted only by the hour I spent working on a daughter's 2012 tax return), and I'm hoping to extend it with a solid hour or two of reading later today.

I started an interesting book last night called Notes from a Coma, by Mike McCormack. Mike is an Irish writer and the novel is set in that country.  I see from the copyright data that Notes was first published in 2005 (perhaps in Ireland or the U.K.), but it is being published in the U.S. next month as a "Soho Paperback Original." 

The story concerns an Irish farmer who goes to Romania and "buys" a two-year-old boy from a crowded orphanage.  I'm guessing that things do not go all that well for the young man in Ireland, however.  If that were not so, JJ O'Malley would not have volunteered for an experimental program to look at the feasibility of giving criminals the option of being placed into a deep coma rather than suffering the day-to-day boredom of incarceration.  

I am only 32 pages into the book, but it appears that the volunteers are hooked up to monitors and, via the Internet, become national celebrities.  Strange and futuristic, this one already has me hooked.

Around lunch time I finally made it out to a bookstore I discovered on the Internet last month, a place called Good Books in the Woods (and that is sort of where it really is).  This used-book bookshop is a treat for book lovers, especially those who collect.  It reminds me of a couple of Houston-area stores I used to visit regularly before they disappeared from the face of the earth.  It is filled with several thousand books (most of them in hardcover), and to my great delight, it allocates substantial shelf-space to quality modern first editions. 

Sadly, there does not seem to be much foot-traffic through the store (especially for a Saturday) because, even though it is only a quarter mile of an interstate feeder road, it is tucked completely out of sight inside what is predominately a residential area.  Good Books in the Woods offers residents of North Houston, The Woodlands, and surrounding towns a great alternative to driving into the city for books (and to the local mall's Barnes & Noble).  

Come on, Houston, let's support these guys before we end up losing them, too.

Speaking of Barnes & Noble, I have to say that I was happily surprised this morning to find some of the chairs back in place.  My favorite B&N has refit an upstairs corner of the store into the reading area it used to be.  There is even one little table there for anyone wanting to take advantage of the store's WiFi without sitting in the coffee bar among all the giggling teenage girls. I have to tell you this made my day.  Can B&N management really be listening to customer feedback for a change?  Even the Nook area in this store seems to have shrunk a little.  

And, icing on the Barnes & Noble cake, I found a bargain-table book by Robert Hicks I didn't know existed.  Hicks is the author of one of my favorite Civil War novels, The Widow of the South. This 2009 novel, A Separate Country, is set in post-war New Orleans and features Confederate general John Bell Hood, one of the more controversial officers on either side of that terrible war.

And, finally, I took a minute from my browsing to jot down a quote from Marilynne Robinson's When I Was a Child I Read Books:

Marilynne Robinson

"Over the years I have collected so many books that, in the aggregate, they can fairly be called a library.  I don't know what percentage of them I have read.  Increasingly I wonder how many of them I ever will read.  This has done nothing to dampen my pleasure in acquiring more books.  But it has caused me to ponder the meaning they have for me, and the fact that to me they epitomize one great aspect of the goodness of life."

Exactly.

A Possible Life

Despite being clearly labeled on its cover as a “novel in five parts,” A Possible Life could just as easily have been called a short story collection or a group of short novellas. Most readers, I suspect, will consider the book to be a collection of interrelated short stories.

Each of the book’s five stories, or parts, is titled with the name and time period of its central character, and they are presented in this order: Geoffrey, 1938; Billy, 1859; Elena, 2029; Jeanne, 1822; and Anya, 1971. The first two stories are set in England, the others in Italy, France, and the United States. In each of his tales, Faulks takes his central character from relative youth to old age,  describing a lifetime during which seemingly innocuous decisions made by them and others will determine which of their “possible lives” will become reality.

Geoffrey Talbot, bored with his life after university, decides to enlist in the British Army, allowing him to cross paths with the French woman who will haunt the rest of his days. Given up by his family because they could not afford to feed all their children, Billy Webb spends his youth in an orphanage/poorhouse where he meets the two little girls with whom he will grow old. Decades after Elena’s father returns from a business trip with an orphan boy he wants to adopt, she finally learns the truth about the love of her life. Jeanne, said to be “the most ignorant person” in her rural French village, makes a difficult choice that will ultimately define who she is. And, finally, Anya, an extremely talented singer-songwriter must make painful decisions if she is to survive the 1970s American music scene.

Sebastian Faulks

Faulks presents his premise that all human beings are connected, tenuous as those links might be, by referencing the tiniest of details. Sometimes a physical object moves from one story to another, at other times the descendent of an earlier character appears in a later story, or a reference to the future made in one story comes true in a second. The psychological impact of the connections is often increased by the very subtleness of the references.

Novel, or not, A Possible Life is definitely memorable.  Sebastian Faulks fans should be pleased with it, and readers new to the author’s work will likely want to read his earlier work after reading this one. They might even begin to wonder about their own possible lives – and which one they might end up with.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)