The King in the Tree by Steven Millhauser

This book was a surprising treat.  The format is three novellas, two of which are re-imaginings of the lives of literary characters Don Juan and Tristan and Isolde (Ysold in this novella).  I don’t know much about the origins of either of these stories, so the re-imaginings were fresh tales for me.  Both novellas were beautifully written and Millhauser evokes incredible visual images through his writing.

In An Adventure of Don Juan Don Juan travels to England to escape his reputation and find refuge at the estate of an acquaintance, Augustus Hood.  The Don is weary of his existence and seeks a truly new experience.  Hood is an eccentric Englishman who’s life work appears to be overseeing the creation of various worlds within his four thousand acre property.  Millhauser describes these undertakings in detail and the reader is drawn quickly into this beautiful but artificial life.  Amidst all the fake scenery Don Juan begins to experience true emotion as he has never been able to in his life thus far.  The results are painful and though the story of Don Juan is dated, the human emotion in this novella is poignant and ageless.

The King in the Tree is the novella based on the story of Tristan and Ysold.  Again Millhauser brings alive an ancient story by infusing it with undeniable emotion.  Each character is sympathetic and real, but the love triangle they are caught in begs the reader to choose sides.

The first novella in this book, Revenge, is the only one that stands alone without a historic tale as its basis.  The story is told in 2nd person which normally drives me mad.  However, Millhauser makes it work in this seemingly innocuous story that grows more complicated with each room the narrator takes us into on her tour through her home.

One thing I really liked about this book was that each story really gained in momentum and substance as you got deeper into it.  This worked well for me because I did not want to rush through the book as I am wont to do.  The pacing allowed me to put the stories down and then get more deeply involved the next time I picked it up.  I am looking forward to reading more of this author’s work.

House Rules: A Memoir; Rachel Sontag, 2008.

I picked this book up on a whim.  I was in the memoir/autobiography (what is the official difference?!) section and just picked it up and read the flap.  I was intrigued and made an impulse buy.  Wow.  It is so hard for me to say what another person would think of this book because I just found it so moving subjectively.  I feel like the writing must be good because I have certainly been known to get distracted from a good story if it is written badly.  But really I just felt such a strong kinship with the main character and found the similarities between our lives striking.

Rachel Sontag grew up in a middle/upper class Jewish home with an extremely emotionally abusive father, a passive and potentially mentally ill mother, and a sister who found a way to disappear instead of bearing the brunt of her father’s cruelty.  Rachel struggles to survive in this environment and becomes increasingly self aware of how she has been forced to cope and how these coping skills stop being effective outside the strange world that is her family.

While Rachel’s father is overtly emotionally abusive, telling Rachel that he wishes she was never born, that she is scum, etc., her mother at times acknowledges her father’s “sickness” (as they call it) and at times is entirely complicit in his abuse.  When Rachel’s mother asks her, “What do you want from me?”  Rachel thinks, “I wanted her.  I wanted Mom to be someone she wasn’t, to take on a strength she never possessed, to do what I hoped I would have done in her situation.  I thought that mothers were naturally inclined to protect their children, and she was failing.  I thought she should have expected more from love, and I held her to my own standards of love, which were conceptual and formed merely in opposition to hers and had yet to be tested in the world.”  Rachel’s mother repeatedly reminds her that “This is your family.  No family is perfect.”  And Rachel vacillates between a fierce love for her and a need to abandon her trust in her mother.

While Rachel is desperate to escape her home she is also trapped by thinking how difficult it would be to make it on her own.  After a brief stint in foster care she decides she will make it through the next two years by shutting down and spending as much time away from home as possible.  She makes it through those years and finally erupts into the world outside her home and into the realization of what those years have done to her.  She discovers that she has yet to find what she is actually interested in and what she actually wants out of life after so many years trying desperately to anticipate her father’s next move and to protect herself from his abuse as best as she can.

Rachel spends some time after she leaves home trying to understand her father and have a different kind of relationship with him.  In thinking about his past she writes, “When I look at photographs of Dad at  his prom and on his bike and in the very first apartment he shared with Mom, I think maybe he was just too young.  That Dad hadn’t finished growing up himself before I came along.  That he didn’t know how to relate to children, so that when we demanded to be children he lost all sense of what to do.  Maybe Dad had never seen me as a child, or maybe he had and wanted me to remain one forever.  Or maybe it never sunk in that I was meant to become someone, that in the same way God had created man, not indentical to God but in God’s image, Dad had created me, so that I could create myself.  I know that in raising us the way he did, Dad saw himself as a model for right.  how badly he wanted us to arrive at our destination without straying too much from his path.”

Because her father continues to be abusive even in a long-distance relationship, Rachel eventually completely severs contact with him and concentrates on forging new relationships with her sister and mother.  She has difficulty forgiving her mother, “Unlike her, Mom’s children would have a family.  Even if that father was cruel.  Even if that family was a skeletal facade of what a family was supposed to be in Mom’s imagination, a dream still caught in response to her own childhood.  Mom didn’t protect us because we weren’t her priority.  Although I disagreed with her decision, I could understand it, yet I couldn’t help but see it as a question of character.  And the older I got the less I could excuse it…But the fact was she could have left and she didn’t.”  Despite these realizations, Rachel works on accepting herself, her mother, and her sister for who they all are.

I was struck time and again by the similarities both in Rachel’s situation to mine and the similarities between our coping mechanisms and our work later in life to reflect on what made us the way we are.  In the end this is a painful story of a family and the pain of leaving parts of that family behind to begin to form a life of your own making.

Unaccustomed Earth. Jumpha Lahiri, 2008

Jumpha Lahiri has some very strong themes that repeat themselves again and again in her short stories. This is certainly something that can be found in many short story writers as well as novelists, but there is a certain repetitiveness to the set-up in Lahiri’s stories that gets overwhelming when reading her collected stories. Lahiri’s stories in this book almost all involve:

1. Bengali fathers who have Ph.D.’s and are unable to be emotionally present for their children or their wives.

2. Bengali wives who stay home to raise the children and feel isolated in American suburbs.

3. Arranged marriages for Bengali immigrants, but the children of these marriages tend to marry Americans.

4. First generation Bengali-American daughters who have affairs with married or unavailable older American men.

These are just a few of the rampant similarities in the characters of Lahiri’s stories. And while this becomes tedious, she is an engaging writer and her themes speak to something larger and universal. Lahiri consistently comes back to the idea of family and the conflicting distance and intimacy that exist in these relationships. At the end of the title story a Bengali immigrant father, now in his 70’s thinks about his own alienation from his children and his late wife, and about his daughter’s future, “That loss was in store for Ruma, too; her children would become strangers, avoiding her…He wanted to shield her from the deterioration that inevitably took place in the course of a marriage, and from the conclusion he sometimes feared was true: that the entire enterprise of having a family, of putting children on this earth, as gratifying as it sometimes felt, was flawed from the start.”

It is a relatively dark world in Lahiri’s estimation. Her characters by and large do suffer the deterioration of their marriages and the loss of their children. And while her characters are all Bengali families who are recent American immigrants, these are not experiences unique to Bengali immigrants to America or immigrants in general, but instead these are visions of the human experience.

I remember being entranced by Lahiri’s first book of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies. I wonder now if those stories were less repetitive or if it was just that it was the first time I encountered her writing. Regardless, I recommend this book and enjoyed being immersed in Lahiri’s world as I was reading.

The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and The Snow Dog. Doris Lessing, 2005

Doris Lessing has been publishing books since 1950, and wrote this one at the age of 86. Lessing has written over 50 books in a combination of short stories, novel and nonfiction, and I have to say that in part her prolificness made me nervous to read any of her work, especially something published so late in her career. So many writers fall prey to repetitiveness and when they write books for over 50 years the later books seem often to be lame reproductions of earlier stories that were acclaimed when they came out. Doris Lessing does not appear to be a writer who has this sort of problem. She wrote The Golden Notebook, which is considered a feminist classic, as well as writing a series of science fiction books. However, I was not aware of how much variation there was in her career, so before reading this book I was a bit nervous that I would not like it. Two other points against the book for me were that it is an apocalyptic novel which I often am not interested in, and it it is a sequel. However, the book was given to me as a gift, I loved Doris Lessing’s novel The Fifth Child, and I had an inordinate amount of time on my hands to read while my infant son was breastfeeding seemingly nonstop. So I read it.

I loved the book. It was the kind of book that took me about 50 pages to realize how engrossed I was in the characters and in the world that Lessing created. After I would put the book down I would find myself thinking about the characters and worrying about them. I would wake up in the morning and be picturing landscapes described in the book.

At the center of this story is General Dann (obviously). He is an extremely sympathetic character: a self-reflective and thoughtful man who is unsure about other people’s confidence in him. The world Dann lives in is bleak, hopeless and wrought with violence, but he finds humanity time after time. One of the most touching relationships in the book is the one the General has with his Snow Dog: a beautiful creature of Lessing’s imagination. The book follows Dann as he initially tries to escape from his fated responsibility to bring peace and hope back to the people who follow him, and we are with him as he begins to accept the responsibility presented to him. In addition to her skill in creating engrossing and real characters, Lessing is also very able at writing a world that the reader can truly picture. She has come up with a highly imaginative vision of our world after the apocalypse both visually and in imagining how humankind will rewrite and lose touch with history when all records have been destroyed.

I don’t want to spoil any more of the story, so will leave it at that. I highly highly recommend this book, and will be reading its predecessor as soon as I get the opportunity.

Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand. Fred Vargas, 2004

Ah, the French. The last time I read something translated from the French had to have been 8th grade for Madame Barnett. And I am guessing that Madame Barnett’s translation skills topped those of Sian Reynolds who translated this book. I think I was 3 pages in before I decided that the book must be translated or else Fred Vargas was a very very awkward writer. Turned out the former was the case. You would think that the fact that the story takes place in Paris would have clued me in on page 1 but, no, it was not until page 3, “The prospect gave him a cast-iron excuse for opening a bottle of white wine before six o’clock,” when I realized I was definitely in foreign territory. In the U.S. of A there don’t seem to be many cast-iron excuses for police officers finishing their desk work with a bottle of white wine at the office. But I diverge…that is really a cultural translation issue and my problems with this text lie in the literal translation. However, despite my concerns with the quality of translation, Ms. Vargas seems quite happy with Ms. Reynolds work as she has translated a number of her novels into English.

I had finally gotten used to the writing style when the plot of the novel moves us from Paris, France to Ottowa, Canada. Once the story arrives there Ms. Reynolds takes the liberty of creating a sort of dialect for the Canadians that was so distracting I often had to go back to read for content because I had lost part of the story while paying attention to such ridiculous lines as, “What about this weather! Hey, man, what have you been up to, with all that mud on your pants?” This appears to be Ms. Reynolds attempt at comparing the more casual French of the Canadians to that of the French. A note at the end of the book states, “Canadian French differs more in terms of idiom and vocabulary from the French spoken in France than Canadian English does from British or US English. The French characters here sometimes find the language difficult to follow, but the examples have necessarily been cut or modified for translation.” It is an understandably difficult task to get this across to the reader, but I truly believe this nuance could have easily been dropped when being translated. So, perhaps my issues do lie with both the cultural and literal translations of this book.

Anyhow, on to the story which gets second billing here to translation issues. This book is a French version of a trashy American mystery novel. It is complete with an obsessive, offensive and potentially sociopathic police chief who is lucky to have a cast of devotees that help him to get out of scrapes. The chief, Adamsberg is the central character in a number of books by Vargas, three of which have won various awards. The plot of this novel is vaguely intriguing and delves into the chief’s personal history. There are a couple of twists and turns but nothing breathtaking. All in all this is not a book I would recommend unless you have a strange fascination with the French and want to learn more about what books they must be reading on the beach this summer.