Years ago I saw the movie based on Amy Tan's book The Joy Luck Club. I don't remember being amazed. But I just finished The Hundred Secret Senses. This is the second book of hers I've read and I am eager to read more of Tan's stories. Love them!
Amy Tan does a beautiful job showing a balance of real and possible, extra perception, deeper memory, in her character Kwan. We see Kwan from the point of view of her half sister Olivia, who doesn't quite understand or believe everything Kwan says but doesn't try to argue her out of it. So we are taken on an incredible journey just because Olivia stays open to the possibility. I adore this story! Yes, I highly recommend it.
Page 38: Our three different fates had flowed together in that river, and become as tangled and twisted as a drowned woman's hair.
Page 49: In time, however, I taught Miss Banner to see the world almost exactly like a Chinese person. Of cicadas, she would say they looked like dead leaves fluttering, felt like paper crackling, sounded like fire roaring, smelled like dust rising, and tasted like the devil frying in oil. She hated them, decided they had no purpose in this world. You see, in five ways she could sense the world like a Chinese person. But it was always the sixth way, her American sense of importance, that later caused trouble between us. Because her senses led to opinions, and her opinions led to conclusions, and sometimes they were different from mine.
Page 118: We listened patiently to Lester, words skittering out of his mouth like cartoon dogs on fresh-waxed linoleum, frantically going nowhere.
Friday, August 19, 2016
Friday, June 3, 2016
The Dead School
School is almost out for the summer. My daughter, my oldest kid, is graduating from high school in a week. If there's a connection to this book, it was unconsciously made.
The Dead School was written by Patrick McCabe, an Irishman. He wrote so that you could easily hear the Irish accent in your head. The story took an alarming turn to insanity, leaving me to feel that we are all on the edge of mental collapse. The characters moved me. And scared me.
The first quote shows the lilt of the language. The second is an illustration of the insanity.
Page 25: When The Canon heard this he did not quite know whether to fall about the place laughing or just draw out there and then and hit her a skelp of his walking stick. He just couldn't understand it. He could not for the life of him understand what was the matter with her. Fortunately for her in the end he just sighed and said "Ah, daughter, will you come on now. Stop your cod-acting like a good girl and put him into the holy water, I have confessions at eight."
Page 248: Anyway, when he had first noticed that Setanta wasn't moving and was probably dead, it had occurred to him to bury the animal. But then he went and forgot all about it and by the time he did remember, it was already too late, for what had once been a grand old cat growing old gracefully was nothing so much as a pile of mucky goo and moving maggots lying beneath the kitchen window.
The Dead School was written by Patrick McCabe, an Irishman. He wrote so that you could easily hear the Irish accent in your head. The story took an alarming turn to insanity, leaving me to feel that we are all on the edge of mental collapse. The characters moved me. And scared me.
The first quote shows the lilt of the language. The second is an illustration of the insanity.
Page 25: When The Canon heard this he did not quite know whether to fall about the place laughing or just draw out there and then and hit her a skelp of his walking stick. He just couldn't understand it. He could not for the life of him understand what was the matter with her. Fortunately for her in the end he just sighed and said "Ah, daughter, will you come on now. Stop your cod-acting like a good girl and put him into the holy water, I have confessions at eight."
Page 248: Anyway, when he had first noticed that Setanta wasn't moving and was probably dead, it had occurred to him to bury the animal. But then he went and forgot all about it and by the time he did remember, it was already too late, for what had once been a grand old cat growing old gracefully was nothing so much as a pile of mucky goo and moving maggots lying beneath the kitchen window.
Monday, May 23, 2016
The Invention of Wings
What a lovely story, Sue Monk Kidd's Invention of Wings. It's interesting to me how the characters in a story based on historical people often come across as less alive to me. I'm not sure why that is. Also it's a gross generalization; don't pay any attention to me!
This story was the perfect tale to tell with the fatalism of being strangle-held by the culture one is born into, and then doing what one can do about it in the end. I took only one quote - not sure why that was. It was certainly well written and smoothly crafted. Sometimes it's the highest compliment when I don't take quotes because it may be that I am too engrossed in the story to be bothered! I do recommend reading it.
Page 144: I'd been wandering about in the enchantments of romance, afflicted with the worst female curse on earth, the need to mold myself to expectations.
This story was the perfect tale to tell with the fatalism of being strangle-held by the culture one is born into, and then doing what one can do about it in the end. I took only one quote - not sure why that was. It was certainly well written and smoothly crafted. Sometimes it's the highest compliment when I don't take quotes because it may be that I am too engrossed in the story to be bothered! I do recommend reading it.
Page 144: I'd been wandering about in the enchantments of romance, afflicted with the worst female curse on earth, the need to mold myself to expectations.
Saturday, April 30, 2016
The Things They Carried
This is another book my daughter was assigned to read in school and she recommended it to me. Tim O'Brien provides an engrossing insight to the Vietnam War in The Things They Carried.
Page 20: They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture.
Page 44: It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
Page 84: In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't' tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh."
Page 255: But this too is true: stories can save us.
Page 265: The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow.
Yeah, I recommend it too.
Page 20: They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture.
Page 44: It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
Page 84: In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't' tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh."
Page 255: But this too is true: stories can save us.
Page 265: The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow.
Yeah, I recommend it too.
Sunday, April 10, 2016
Gone Girl
I haven't seen the movie, but Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn was a frightening ride. At first I was a little annoyed with the babble of the writing. On page 10 Amy babbles on in her diary: "Carmen, a newish friend--semi-friend, barely friend, the kind of friend you can't cancel on--has talked me into going out to Brooklyn, to one of her writers' parties." I stuck with it and over 200 pages in we learn that Amy isn't dead after all, she's just psycho-bitch crazy and the blather of her diary was her elaborate ruse at teaching her husband a lesson for cheating on her by framing him for her murder. Yikes. These people are seriously disturbed. And disturbing. Especially with the unsettling resolution.
Yikes.
Yikes.
Saturday, March 12, 2016
Twelve Years a Slave
What a treasure this book is. I'm surprised it isn't required reading in schools. Though I didn't see the movie, that's how Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup came to my attention. Not a long book, it was written and published within months of his return to freedom and is acclaimed for the detail used to describe life for a slave, such as what they ate, where they slept, how to pick cotton. I was intrigued by juxtaposition of fancy high written English against the spoken English. And then of course there's the institution of slavery itself, hard enough for me to understand. It's interesting to see Northup try to understand the difference in culture between the north and the south, and concluding that slave-owning breeds cruelty as a learned behavior. I absolutely agree.
Some quotes from the book:
Page 23: Surely they would seek me out -- they would deliver me from thralldom. Alas! I had not then learned the measure of "man's inhumanity to man," nor to what limitless extent of wickedness he will go for the love of gain.
Page 28: So we passed, handcuffed and in silence, through the streets of Washington -- through the Capital of a nation, whose theory of government, we are told, rests on the foundation of man's inalienable right, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness!
Page 113: When the evidence, clear and indisputable, was laid before him that I was a free man, and as much entitled to my liberty as he -- when, on the day I left, he was informed that I had a wife and children, as dear to me as his own babes to him, he only raved and swore, denouncing the law that tore me from him, and declaring he would find out the man who had forwarded the letter that disclosed the place of my captivity, if there was any virtue or power in money, and would take his life.
Page 164: The influence of the iniquitous system necessarily fosters an unfeeling and cruel spirit, even in the bosoms of those who, among their equals, are regarded as humane and generous.
... Brought up with such ideas -- in the notion that we stand without the pale of humanity -- no wonder the oppressors of my people are a pitiless and unrelenting race.
Page 195: I was only a "nigger" and knew my place, but felt as strongly as if I had been a white man, that it would have been an inward comfort, had I dared to have given him a parting kick.
Some quotes from the book:
Page 23: Surely they would seek me out -- they would deliver me from thralldom. Alas! I had not then learned the measure of "man's inhumanity to man," nor to what limitless extent of wickedness he will go for the love of gain.
Page 28: So we passed, handcuffed and in silence, through the streets of Washington -- through the Capital of a nation, whose theory of government, we are told, rests on the foundation of man's inalienable right, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness!
Page 113: When the evidence, clear and indisputable, was laid before him that I was a free man, and as much entitled to my liberty as he -- when, on the day I left, he was informed that I had a wife and children, as dear to me as his own babes to him, he only raved and swore, denouncing the law that tore me from him, and declaring he would find out the man who had forwarded the letter that disclosed the place of my captivity, if there was any virtue or power in money, and would take his life.
Page 164: The influence of the iniquitous system necessarily fosters an unfeeling and cruel spirit, even in the bosoms of those who, among their equals, are regarded as humane and generous.
... Brought up with such ideas -- in the notion that we stand without the pale of humanity -- no wonder the oppressors of my people are a pitiless and unrelenting race.
Page 195: I was only a "nigger" and knew my place, but felt as strongly as if I had been a white man, that it would have been an inward comfort, had I dared to have given him a parting kick.
Friday, February 19, 2016
The Twins
Originally written in Dutch, The Twins by Tessa De Loo weaves a uniquely complex view of World War II. Estranged elderly twin sisters arbitrarily find each other at a spa. They were separated after being orphaned as young children, one to relatives in Holland and the other to relatives in Germany, before the war. They recount their experiences from opposite sides of the war with such intimate poignancy, trying to explain, trying to understand. The author succeeds in showing the humanity of regular people, no matter how history portrays them after the fact - no matter how we want to cast players in black-and-white simplicity. Here are some lines I collected:
Page 8: They wave and he waves back with a large white hand that passes back and forth in front of his face as though he wants to wipe himself out.
Page 50: The layers of time were grating over each. Before the war, after the war, the Depression years, a century ago...diverse landscapes that Anna hurtled through tipsily, as though in a runaway train.
Page 152: She had read enough to know that crying for a soldier who was departing for the front joined her to the company of millions of women throughout the ages. It had been written and sung about over and over again, but even so her grief was the only one, the worst one of all.
Page 223: Watch out for me! I am even worse than these who openly make war. I am friend and foe in one. I? There is no I, only an ambivalent treacherous we, who deceives itself in itself....
Page 290: Their whole meeting was a film she had failed to walk out of in time; now she wanted to know how it ended.
Page 351: Her powerlessness flowed down her cheeks -- too late, too late.
Page 8: They wave and he waves back with a large white hand that passes back and forth in front of his face as though he wants to wipe himself out.
Page 50: The layers of time were grating over each. Before the war, after the war, the Depression years, a century ago...diverse landscapes that Anna hurtled through tipsily, as though in a runaway train.
Page 152: She had read enough to know that crying for a soldier who was departing for the front joined her to the company of millions of women throughout the ages. It had been written and sung about over and over again, but even so her grief was the only one, the worst one of all.
Page 223: Watch out for me! I am even worse than these who openly make war. I am friend and foe in one. I? There is no I, only an ambivalent treacherous we, who deceives itself in itself....
Page 290: Their whole meeting was a film she had failed to walk out of in time; now she wanted to know how it ended.
Page 351: Her powerlessness flowed down her cheeks -- too late, too late.
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