Our envy of others devours us most of all. ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn At one point in Toni Morrison’s 1970 debut novel The Bluest Eye, a character reflects on jealousy and envy. As a child, she was familiar with jealousy — that feeling that someone else has gotten something that rightfully belongs to you. Envy, when it comes, is a new and unsettling feeling, a perception that somehow, one is lacking something. In The Bluest Eye, that something is beauty, beauty as defined by others, beauty […]
The more things change …
Maya Angelou’s first autobiographical installment, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is widely considered to be the best of her series of autobiographies. Nominated for a National Book Award in 1970, this work has been a staple of high school reading lists, and banned book lists, for several decades. It is a beautifully written recollection of Angelou’s childhood, from the time she and her older brother were sent alone by train to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother (Angelou was 5) until Angelou, […]
Both Sides Now
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Sympathizer is a confession written by a nameless narrator to a nameless commandant. The narrator suffers from the ability to see both sides of events and of people. Through his confession, he reveals his life story, which is tied up with the history of his country, Vietnam, and foreign intervention there. Given his sympathetic nature, the narrator is able to see at times the good intentions but especially the bad of all those involved in his life […]
Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman
Alan Cumming mentioned After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie in a NYT piece on his ten favorite books. Having read and reviewed (and loved) Rhys’ well known classic Wide Sargasso Sea for CBR6, and being impressed with Mr. Cumming’s literary choices (seriously, check out that list; it’s gold), I decided to give After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie a go. While it isn’t a masterpiece like Wide Sargasso Sea, it is nonetheless a brilliant and bold novel. This is one of Rhys’ early novels, published in 1930 (Wide Sargasso […]
The Fibonacci Novel
Is there anything we all have in common? What could link an English Pilgrim en route to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Alan Turing, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, a middle aged computer programmer and a little girl? I suppose if there is one thing humans share that other creatures do not, it is our particular ability to communicate: we can tell stories, remember the past and form plans for the future. Louisa Hall’s 2015 novel Speak addresses that, but through her unique stories, which seem so […]
Control
All My Puny Sorrows is a poignant novel about sisters, creativity, depression and suicide. Toews touches on a number of big themes in her story but questions of control– by outside forces, over one’s life, creativity and even death– are the center of the narrative. We tend to admire and support the person who resists oppressive control from outside forces such as patriarchy and religion, the person whose creative force and innovation set her apart. But what if that person also resists more conventional societal […]
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