wahistorian's Reviews (506)

Tatiana de Rosnay’s extraordinary research and her own background did justice to the unique spirit of Daphne du Maurier in this book. De Rosnay relates du Maurier’s adventures—her many travels, her network of friends and family, her fascination with Cornwall—without losing sight of the drive to write that constantly spurred her on. Motivated at first by a desire to become independent from her overbearing forebears, especially an egotistical and temperamental actor-father, young Daphne is soon overtaken by the need to write and soon develops a life shaped by writing routines and the “pegs” on which to hang her stories. That need to weave together history and place and dark human impulses pushed her toward new forms and stories not always fully appreciated by critics and the reading public. It is fascinating that filmmakers seemed best able to grasp the potential of her ideas, from ‘Jamaica Inn’ to ‘The Birds’ to ‘Don’t Look Now.’ De Rosnay has done a masterful job at recreating a creative life and spirit, and separating it from the privilege that shaped du Maurier’s life.

“Until a man is dead, he is not yet done being created” (98). The simplicity of this story of two Fulu brothers at arms in WWI—Alfa and Mademba—hides a complex story of colonialism, culture clash, and the grinding dehumanizing of war. This book reminded me of Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ in the author’s ability to reveal multiple stories in layers of beautiful language, language that simultaneously captures the place these men came from and the place they find themselves on the battlefield. So moving.

I desperately want to make jokes about this novel, because it is so chilling and disturbing that my psyche can’t take it in. (No more dystopia for me until the pandemic is over.) East Coast novelist Patrick Hamlin is a production assistant on the movie is his novel, and his particular assignment is chauffeuring actor (and former child star) Cassidy Carter to and from the L.A. film set. The California they inhabit is a hellscape of the not-too-distant future: the place has literally run out of water, which has been replaced by a chemically engineered substitute, WAT-R. Meanwhile, wildfires rage and residents are becoming strangely vague, then, wordless, then catatonic. Cassidy and Patrick improbably team up, in an effort to make sense of the changes *and* what’s happening to their film. Petty individual concerns are subsumed in the disaster that is every day life, and Patrick’s wife—back in upstate NY at an Earthbridge commune designed to help people deal with their climate change grief and anxiety—begins to look like the prescient one. No happy ending here: the characters are perhaps understandably paralyzed by their cognitive disconnect and nostalgia for the old world. Ultimately no one is called to account except by the inexorable forces of nature. Aargh.

In this short quiet book, Jan Morris, the inveterate traveler, shares what she came home to in Wales, her stone and slate stable-turned-house, Trefan Morys. “Trefan Morys is a house of deep resilience, but life comes and goes through it, as through everything else,” she writes (p. 116). The home she describes is in and of nature, an abode of Pan, and must have been a retreat from politics and the complexities of culture and nationalism that she often wrote about. What she describes is not so much a house as a way of life, one that is enviable but also perhaps achievable for any of us. I thoroughly enjoyed visiting it.

What a terrible terrible almost-two years this has been, and kudos to Gary Shteyngart for trying to make sense of it in a novel about pandemic-avoidance (or almost avoidance) and friendship. Writer Sasha Senderofsky’s closest friends and rivals join him, his wife Masha, and their adopted daughter Nat in an escape to the country that turns into a months-long test of their relationships. Shteyngart’s novel of creative types confronting illness, mortality, betrayal, and love can’t even be called satire this time, except for possibly when it comes to social media and our obsession with apps, tweets, clicks, and alerts. The carefully ordered lives of these desperate people have been turned upside down and, for better or for worse, they turn to one another to try to make things right. ‘Our Country Friends’ is a very moving work about how we’re living now; best of all, Donald Trump hardly makes an appearance. And now I’m going to read some Chekhov.

This first novel is full of surprises, and I cannot wait to see what Jayatissa does with her next book. The premise is fascinating: Sri Lankan orphan Paloma is adopted by white American parents at 12, but this is 18 years later and her life is spinning out of control, for reasons that only become apparent as the book moves on. Her biggest problem as the novel opens is that she finds her roommate Arun, an undocumented man from India whom she barely knows, dead at their kitchen table and minutes later, vanished. The one challenge with this as a plot point is that the police are not particularly troubled by her report of his death and no one has any reason to suspect her of the murder of a man who may or may not exist. But there are many other mysteries in Paloma’s life to preoccupy her and the reader. She handles white racism, immigration, international adoption, the gig economy, the sex trade, and other contemporary issues as matters of fact *and* plot devices, which makes this novel really fresh and unexpected. Definitely a page-turner.

I love that Banville has turned his elegant, spare writing style to detective fiction. His mournful detective, St. John (“pronounced Sinjun”) Strafford (“with an R”), has been detailed to Ballyglass to investigate the murder of a priest while the local plod is down with the flu. The village is blanketed by snow, which gives the atmosphere a locked room aspect—there are no footsteps in or out, so the first suspects are the respectable Protestant Osborne family, who boarded Father Tom Lawless’s horse and with whom he often stayed. The story is rife with red herrings, although Banville does not hit the reader over the head with them; he’s much more interested in conveying a sense of Ballyglass in 1957, with its long-simmering religious tensions and its small town gossip. The protagonist reminded me a bit of P. D. James’s Inspector Dalgliesh, who always wants to understand the whole landscape before beginning to zero in on the crime. As a result, you feel as if much more is at stake than the death of one priest and you’d be right.

This excruciating Naturalist novel was reportedly the inspiration for James M. Cain’s ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice,’ and you cannot help seeing the parallels as you read what one observer calls the first noir novel. (https://shrineodreams.wordpress.com/tag/postman-always-rings-twice/) Therese Raquin is dejectedly fulfilling her obligations to her cousin-husband Camille and his mother in a grim haberdashery in Paris, when would-be artist and sometime-clerk Laurent comes into their life. Therese and Laurent begin an affair, then fall into a plot to get rid of the troublesome husband. All of Zola’s characters in this book act because of irresistible drives and urges that they don’t understand and cannot turn away. Once the deed is done, Therese and Laurent are inextricably bound together—“to the end of the line.” Their fear, guilt, and regret turn their relationship poisonous immediately, and Zola describes their life together in excruciating detail. The animal instincts of these two transplanted peasants is intensified and corrupted by urban life and they are trapped in an unbearable existence until they find the one way out. The book was an outrage when it was published and the reader can still see why.

The premise of this book reminded me a bit of Riley Sager’s ‘Survive The Night,’ and I wanted to compare the two since I felt like Sager’s book had some gaping holes in it. ‘Five Total Strangers’ uses a much more plausible plot: stranded in an airport halfway home in a snowstorm on Christmas Eve, eighteen-year-old Mira catches a ride to Pittsburgh with her seatmate and three other college students, all seemingly friends. The drive from Newark to Pittsburgh turns into a hellish journey, with road closures, disappearing possessions, dying cell phone batteries, and increasingly suspicious fellow travelers. While in Sager’s book suspicions seem justified, in this book Mira’s paranoia doesn’t make much sense until things start to go missing (a plot development that is really never explained). Still, the intensifying blizzard makes for a claustrophobia that enhances the story and the novel keeps you turning pages to find out how—or if—these five will *ever* get home.

Anyone who cares about climate change and local politics, water, farming, and the state of the planet should read this book. I picked this up after driving across Kansas twice this summer; I was hoping to learn more about a way of life this is pretty foreign to me, but one that I had glimpsed from the highway driving 70 miles an hour: feedlots, rolling grass hills, pronghorn, irrigation. Bessire’s beautiful and personal story of a farming generation confronting (and avoiding) the depletion of the Oglala aquifer describes a whole world of people like you and me faced with the end of a way of life. In applying his anthropologist’s training to the place he grew up, he clarifies the issues, suggests some solutions, and concludes that we are all complicit in the depredations that began with Native American and bison genocide and may end with desertification of the Plains. But being complicit also means we can be part of the solution. His descriptions of southwest Kansas reveal a beauty that might not be obvious to most of us, but it is one that compels deep love for the place. I wish this book had never ended and I hope it wins awards.