Review: The House I loved, by Tatiana de Rosnay

This is the first preview book I've read that I truly didn't enjoy. I didn't care for de Rosnay's writing in Sarah's Key, and this was far less sophisticated. Rose has spent all of her married life in the home on rue Childebert, and though Napoleon’s Prefect now plans to tear the neighborhood down in the name of progress, she is unwilling to part with it. While she doggedly awaits the impending destruction she writes letters to her beloved late husband, sharing memories from their past, both good and bad, and building up to a final confession that she has kept as her secret for thirty years. Set in nineteenth century Paris during the Haussmann reconstructions of the Second Empire, this story is as much about that iconic city and its legacy as it is about the strength of its citizens. Those who enjoyed Sarah’s Key will recognize de Rosnay’s love for France and trend toward poignancy and tenacity in her characters, but this newest novel is more one dimensional than her earlier work. Told entirely through letters, the story tends to feel choppy and forced, and events are not related in chronological order, leaving the tale disrupted and at times hard to follow.

Book 49 on my way to 52.

Review: Greasewood Creek, by Pamela Steele

This book was pure poetry. I started reading it like a standard novel and found myself a little befudled, but a few chapters in I caught on and really started to enjoy the language. The story was a bit depressing, though. Avery is just a child when her younger sister dies, followed close after by her father’s desertion and her mother’s slide into alcoholism. Surrounded by family and friends she is able to stay and grow up on the Oregon ranch where she was born. As an adult she finds constancy there, but cannot escape the guilt she feels over her sister’s death. She hopes for happiness finally in the child she is expecting with her life partner, Davis, but when their newborn son dies the same forces of grief that tore apart her childhood engulf her again. Avery’s inability to escape the past is palpable in this fragmented narrative that mixes the present with flashbacks to her childhood and teen years, and Steele’s poetic style brings the beautiful Oregon ranch setting to life. Steele has depicted the depression, grief, and guilt of living after a loss with expert clarity, making this a powerful and faithful story of finding the inner strength to move forward and be reborn.

Book 44 on my way to 52.

Review: Delta of Venus, by Anaïs Nin

When I added this book to my list of must-reads I imagined it would be something like D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, a work I greatly enjoyed. But while Lawrence's Chatterley is a striking modernist novel about class systems, gender disparity, and sexuality with many well written and daring erotic scenes, Nin's Delta of Venus is its opposite. This is a book filled with daring erotic scenes, with many well written stories about class, gender disparity, and sexuality thrown in. Delta of Venus is actually a collection of short works written by Nin for a collector of erotica. Her instructions were to eliminate poetic writing in favor of heavily descriptive sex scenes, but Nin melds description and story telling artfully. Her writing, her tendency to delve further and further into the relationships and personal emotions of her characters, reminds me Lawrence's handling of prose, while her characters' sexual abandon reminds me of Martin Amis's more recent novel, The Pregnant Widow, about the feminist and sexual revolution of the 1970s (which also harks heavily back to Lawrence). This book probably isn't for everyone—there is sex on every page—but Nin is credited with giving literature a language for sex and sensuality, and I think for giving women a place in that language as well. She continued what Lawrence started, and what society in general continued a few decades later.

Book 18 on my way to 52

Review: Beloved, by Toni Morrison

I picked up the Gloria Naylor's book, Bailey's Cafe, just out of the blue, remembering how much I'd loved her previously, but that got me thinking more about African American fiction, and that led me straight to Toni Morrison. I had a copy of Beloved on the shelf, picked up from the library sale, so I went there next, which was fun for the compare and contrast. While they are both late twentieth century writers, Morrison's treatment of fiction is more classical, Naylor's more contemporary, Beloved takes place around the time of the Civil War, not the second World War, like Bailey'sm and Beloved offers both physical and meta-physical explanations while Bailey's is entirely other-worldly. Morrison is tackling the subject of self and slavery while Naylor is tackling its contemporary realization in the form of modern subjugation.

Toni Morrison is an enjoyable writer, but Beloved is not really an enjoyable book, nor is it meant to be. It's about slavery, after all, and the destruction it perpetrated. The book's characters, mostly former salves, fight to rid themselves of the past, but to deny the past is to deny one's sense of self and without self there is no future. To have any hope of future together they must first return to face the past they have so carefully left behind to live in a tenuous today with a non-existent tomorrow. As readers we begin the story somewhat lost, because that is where our characters are, and the book becomes more clear to us as life and self becomes more clear to them. It is this battle with the past, both real and imagined, that makes up the book. It's a depressing subject at best, but a well written comment on slavery and self, and like Bailey's there is much, much more to be said, to be studied and parsed, but that's where I'll leave it for now.

Book 10 on my way to 52 in 2011