A Tale for the Time Being is a novel about Zen Buddhism, quantum physics, writers and readers, writer’s block and reader’s block, hate and love. It moves fluidly through the past and present and involves some dynamic and admirable female protagonists. Small wonder it was nominated for the 2013 Man Booker Prize (and should have won instead of The Luminaries). The narration moves back and forth between Ruth, a present-day middle-aged writer living on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia, and Nao, […]
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is Jeanette Winterson’s autobiographical novel about her upbringing by an evangelical Christian mother in England and her coming out as a lesbian. As with my previous review, The Golden Notebook, an underlying theme is alienation, a breaking up of the whole person and an attempt at putting it all back together again. In this case, the author struggles to reconcile religion, family and sexual preference. The main character, also named Jeanette, tells her story in retrospect and focuses on […]
The Golden Notebook: A Novel by Doris Lessing
There is a part of me that feels brazen and shameless for daring to write reviews of literary classics. Who am I to judge Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for example (which I did for Cannonball Read 5)? The Golden Notebook is another such a book, but it is also one of those novels that I have wanted to read because it appears on so many “must read” lists, particularly among feminists. So I will boldly proceed with this review in the hope that I do […]
Someone: A Novel by Alice McDermott
It’s hard to give a plot summary for this novel because I’m not sure there is a clear plot line. The narrator Marie gives us her life story, an ordinary life with love and loss, births and deaths, set in Brooklyn from her 1920s’ girlhood through WWII, then marriage and family. It’s about what happens to her, her neighbors, her parents and brother. These are ordinary lives but no life is really just ordinary. There’s always more to people than you realize. McDermott’s writing is […]
Book of Ages by Jill Lepore
Book of Ages was a 2013 National Book Award finalist in the non-fiction category. Historian Jill Lepore pieces together the life of Ben Franklin’s sister Jane and in doing so not only reveals the life of a fascinating “ordinary” 18th-century woman who happened to be the beloved little sister of a Founding Father, but also demonstrates her own prodigious skills as an historian. Lepore’s work is specifically about Jane but more broadly about history and historians, biography and novels, and determining whose lives are worth […]
The Woman Upstairs. You wouldn’t like her when she’s angry.
This novel appeared on several 2013 “best novels” lists and it seems to fit into a genre that’s very popular these days, featuring a narrator whose truthfulness and mental well being are unclear. As I read, I was reminded of novels like The Other Typist and The Dinner, but The Woman Upstairs carves out its own place. The narrator comes across as abrasive yet sympathetic, a flawed human deserving compassion and yet somewhat self-involved, too. This contradiction compelled me to stay with the story and find out […]