Saturday, January 21, 2012

City of Thieves

I was stuck in the bookstore--if anyone is "stuck" in a bookstore--and I gathered a stack of books to see what I felt like reading. I was failing miserably in my attempt to read through the NY Times notable list for 2011 (seven down, ninety-three to go) and had started and put down a dozen different titles in as many days. So I started through the stack, reading no further than the first page. One, two, four, six books, no luck, no zing, no first page tingles, no spark. Blah. I picked up another and another and put them down. I was in the mood for some quick-start, well-written fiction. Then I picked up David Benioff'a City of Thieves, opened it up to chapter one and read this:

You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold. When we slept, if we slept, we dreamed of the feast we had carelessly eaten seven months earlier--all that buttered bread, the potato dumplings, the sausages--eaten with disregard, swallowing without tasting, leaving great crumbs on our plates, scraps of fat. In June of 1941, before the Germans came, we thought we were poor. But June seemed like paradise by winter.

These sentences, these models of beautifully constructed parallel clauses begins this tale of Leningrad (Piter, to its denizens) during World War II. Under siege by the Germans, everyone is starving, cold and desperate---with a few notable exceptions. City of Thieves tells the story of an odyssey, the journey of teenage Lev and the soldier Kolya, and their search for a dozen eggs in a place where all the chickens have long been soup. Benioff's novel is alternately horrifying and hilarious, gruesome and gratifying. It is a fast, effortless read, owing largely to Benioff's excellent pacing and beautiful syntax. It is no surprise to find that he is a screenwriter first, novelist second. His scenes are often cinematic in nature, and that is no criticism: some of the best writers conjure up the visual in just that way (Hawthorne, anyone?).

Both plot and character driven, I dare say no more just in case anyone actually reads City of Thieves (I hate it when people tell me what happens). I enjoyed the story so much that I stayed in that bookstore and finished the first two chapters before I got up and bought the darn book. City of Thieves, btw, was published in 2008---did I mention this was a used bookstore?

Friday, January 13, 2012

Lost Memory of Skin

Russell Banks' latest novel is in the tradition of his other work---which is to say that it is about a completely different topic than anything he has worked on previously, and that it is focused on a particularly American narrative, yet situates it very much in place.
I've long been a fan of Banks. From the devastating Affliction to the fascinating Cloud Splitter Banks looks closely at the lives of Americans and the ways in which society shapes the individual. His writing can be wildly different from book to book and stylistically it doesn't always work. I had to put down The Reserve, for example, because I didn't believe it.
Lost Memory of Skin exposes the lives (via a single life) of convicted sex offenders and how, through the legal process, we have isolated these individuals to the extent that we have created a tiny, new, marginalized class of quasi-citizens. Banks did a great deal of research for the novel, using the actual predicaments of these men (for most are men) in shaping the situations and setting. This is a heartbreaking read, and though the some plot twists aren't always believable (and they don't have to be, do they?), it is very readable and engrossing. Banks uses lengthy descriptions of the landscape of Florida, past and present, perhaps to link the protagonist's fate to something larger--or perhaps not.
The human thought, emotional cost portrayed here is quite real. Bank's writes an indictment of an indiscriminate justice system, one that condemns as sex offenders a rapist of children along with the nineteen year-old that has sex with his underage girlfriend.
This book made me recall another novel, Stewart O'Nan's The Good Wife (2005) which is based on the author's close look at the toll the penal system takes on families. Book books give us heartbreaking tales of mistakes made and lives misspent. Both these novels skillfully illuminated a parcel of life I'd known nothing about.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

The Haunting of Hill House

All I'd ever read of Shirley Jackson's, all I ever knew she'd written, is the oft-anthologized story, "The Lottery" which I can hardly bear to type, let alone re-read. Jackson ruined state-run gambling for me; I didn't want to hear the word "lottery" for a long time.
A colleague teaches Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and recommended it. Originally published in 1959, this is a well written novel that I enjoyed--until I got creeped out. Good stuff.
Using many of the conventions of the haunted house story, Jackson starts off with an interesting, if slightly weird protagonist. Eleanor leads a stunted life: at thirty-two her only occupation has been caring for her ill mother. When the mother dies, she moves into the home of her sister, where she is relegated to a cot in the baby's room. When Eleanor is sought out by a Dr. Montague to participate in a "study" of a haunted house (due to a past experience with a poltergeist), it feels as though her destiny has finally arrived.
As one of a group of four, Eleanor goes through a number of changes upon her arrival and there are several "incidents" of a paranormal nature. I'll say no more about plot. Overall, I found this reminiscent of The Turn of the Screw in its atmospheric creepiness and the ambiguity of the situations. The claustrophobia and weirdness that Jackson evokes in her prose made me uneasy while reading. Is the house haunted, or is it the inhabitants? Is Eleanor the catalyst or merely more sensitive than others to psychic vibrations? Who, or what, exactly, is doing the haunting?