Duck Duck Book

The disreputable history of Frankie Landau-Banks : a novel / by E. Lockhart.
New York : Hyperion, c2008.
[MCL call number: y LOCKHART; 17 copies, no holds
also in large type at:  LGE-TYPE y LOCKHART 2009; three copies, no holds
and in audiobook format read by Tanya Eby Sirois at: CD YA LOCKHART; five copies, no holds
and in downloadable audiobook format read by Tanya Eby Sioris; one copy, no holds]

One of the great strengths of fiction is that it can offer readers the opportunity to pretend to be someone they are not.  This isn’t always an actual pleasure for the reader — sometimes it is quite agonizing to read the part where your protagonist embarrasses herself, takes an action that hurts a loved one, or makes a terrible mistake.  But overall, there is real joy in stepping into another person’s skin while reading their story.

Adolescence is a precarious time filled with possibilities, broken promises, discovery, and agony — making it an excellent stage of life for a fictional protagonist.  No one escapes their teenaged years unscathed.  You try something new and fail horribly, you embarrass yourself by blurting out the wrong thing, you find you have no words available when you most want to express yourself, you wish desperately for things that are made impossible by the stupid rigidity of your life and circumstances, you take emotional risks without realizing they are risks at all and then get hurt, and so on.  Adolescence is glorious in its suckitude.  But at its best it is also a period of intellectual growth, burgeoning independence, and intense joy in the experience of living.  A few soaring highs to go with the agonizing lows.

Frankie Landau-Banks is a more or less normal 15-year-old girl who happens upon a complex (and sort of infuriating) underworld at her exclusive private school.  There is a group of boys, one of whom is Frankie’s new boyfriend Matthew, running a secret society.  No girls allowed.  This offends Frankie’s sense of fairness, but more importantly, she wants in.

She doesn’t want in just to break a barrier, or just to get closer to Matthew — after some self-examination, Frankie realizes that what she wants most is to be recognized as intelligent, interesting, clever, and worthy of the friendship and admiration of this powerful group of kids.  But, not only do they dismiss her as too young and too female to be worthy of more than cursory attention, they don’t even realize it when she finds a way to insinuate herself into their affairs.  After a few months, she is running their whole show, three steps ahead of even the club’s savvy co-president, masterminding elaborate pranks and creating an unheard of buzz among the student body.  Obviously she’s going to get found out, right?

[thanks, Joanna]

The latke who couldn’t stop screaming : a Christmas story / by Lemony Snicket ; illustrations by Lisa Brown.
San Francisco : McSweeny’s Books ; c2007.
[MCL call number: j Holiday SNICKET; 17 copies, no holds]

Sometimes it is difficult to review a book with only words as tools. This book is short enough that if you were here, I could read it aloud to you, showing the pictures along the way like any good parent, babysitter, auntie, or children’s librarian. You would laugh, you might cry, and you would definitely learn some basic facts about the miracle of Hanukkah and how frustrating it is to be misunderstood.

But since this is not possible, perhaps you will take my very terse introduction to heart, seek out the book, and read it aloud to someone you know. Or ask them to read it to you.

[thanks, Markrid]

Emily’s runaway imagination / Beverly Cleary, illustrated by Beth and Joe Krush.
New York, Morrow, 1961.
[MCL call number: j CLEARY; five copies, one hold; one copy reference only at Central Library]

Emily lives in Pitchfork, a tiny town in Yamhill County, Oregon, in the 1920s. As her story begins, she has just received a letter from her cousin Muriel, a girl her own age who lives in Portland and is blessed with a public library to provide her with a copy of Black Beauty. Emily thinks it is punishingly unfair that Pitchfork has no library, from which she might also borrow a copy of Black Beauty, and tells her mother as much. Emily’s mother is not only sympathetic, but proactive, and that very day she writes to the State Library in Salem to inquire about how the citizens of Pitchfork might set up their own library. As the book progresses and Emily has other adventures, the town’s library slowly moves from idea to reality, with the help of Emily, her mother, and many of their friends and neighborhoods.

(As you can imagine, this is a story that makes the heart of any public librarian glad. And perhaps particularly so a public librarian here in Oregon, where rural and small town libraries, like many cultural institutions outside the glare of urban areas, are both strong and weak. And it is worth noting, for those of you who think of her merely as the famed and award-winning author of the Ramona books, that Beverly Cleary is a librarian as well as a writer, so perhaps the storyline is no surprise. But I digress. . .)

Emily is vivacious and energetic, and although she often makes mistakes or confuses things unnecessarily in the course of her many adventures, the turmoil is relatively sedate. There is no terrible upset for her to undo — trouble is sorted out in short order and with the comforting mantle of family and community around her Emily is safe to muddle about until she finds the path she means to take.

And the stories are fast-paced, almost self-contained little novel-ettes in each chapter: Emily helps her mother throw a party for the matrons of the town, she dresses up a plow horse like a graceful steed when her cousin Muriel comes to visit, she drives around with her grandfather in his newfangled automobile, she makes a homely looking custard pie, and so on. This would be a very good book for reading out loud at bedtime — each chapter is substantial and reads almost a separate story, but the tale of the town’s library is always in the background providing a nice sense of continuity, accomplishment, and civic togetherness.

I capture the castle / by Dodie Smith.
New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
[MCL call number: FICTION SMITH; eight copies, one hold;
also in audiobook format at MCL call number CD FICTION SMITH; two copies, no holds]

There is a particular type of novel, the story of genteel poverty, which may be familiar to contemporary readers, but which is not often written now. Generally the actual plot is about something besides poverty — romance, a kind of literary situation comedy, the trials of adolescence, or another medium-weight topic. But a major feature of this particular kind of book is the poverty of the main characters. They are really destitute. They have little or no income, their earning potential is incredibly slight, and although they just manage to have someplace to live, they are having trouble feeding and clothing themselves. Our heroes are people who weren’t always poor, and they’re vaguely guilty about not being able to figure out how to stop being poor. For reasons of family background, education, or profession (which of course boil down to class, more or less), they are expected to be financially comfortable, and their friends and acquaintances are embarrassed to see them in poverty.

Perversely, another feature of this kind of novel is that the intense contrast between the main characters’ potential for wealth and comfort, and their actual dismal poverty makes them seem more unfortunate than people who are socially expected to be poor. They have fallen very far, and everyone (people in the novel, and readers) is supposed to find them sympathetically pitiable for this.

As I said, novels of genteel poverty are not currently in vogue. There are a few nineteenth century American stories with genteel poverty elements — Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott is a familiar one — but the more recent examples I have encountered are all British, and I Capture the Castle, written and set in the 1940s, is one of these.

Cassandra Mortmain is the middle child in her family, and she is a writer. She begins the diary which forms the text of the novel with a sort of mission statement:

“I am writing this journal partly to practice my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to teach myself how to write a novel — I intend to capture all our characters and put in conversations. It ought to be good for my style to dash along without much thought, as up to now my stories have all been very stiff and self-conscious.” (page 4)

Cassandra and her very odd family are holed up in an antique house built onto a medieval castle, and since they have no money they do not entertain or travel. They are friendly with the local vicar, who is not very heavy-handed on the question of religion, and with the village librarian, who delivers books to her patrons by bicycle.

The family’s quiet, impoverished life is interrupted by the arrival of new neighbors — a pair of American brothers who have inherited the local manor house and attached fortune from their grandfather. The brothers have inherited the role of the Mortmain family’s landlords, and almost immediately Cassandra’s older sister Rose sets out to get the older brother (the one with the money) to marry her. This Jane Austen-style romance plot is surprisingly compatible with the 20th century setting, even as it exposes the family’s sometimes shameful conspiracy to aid Rose’s fortune hunting. In the meantime, Cassandra’s father is researching his second novel — he wrote one 15 or so years earlier, which was very successful and very post-modern. He won’t explain his work to anyone, but his research seems to consist entirely of doing crossword puzzles and reading mystery novels, which confuses and worries his loved ones, who fear he may be going mad.

It is not so difficult to imagine some of the direction of the plot, with this short introduction in hand. There is romance, and romantic trickery. There are several painful scenes of poverty intruding on the family’s ability to eat well, to dress appropriately for social occasions, and generally to rise to their station. There is quite a bit of friendly bohemianism, stimulating intellectual conversation, and distressing adherence to society dictums. It is not so much the plot, though, that drives this novel. The people in the story are compelling, and not just for their oddness — what makes the novel worth reading is that Cassandra remains true to her initial project to practice for writing a novel — her descriptions of events, conversations, and her own observations and feelings are rich and complicated. She gets at the detail without missing the bigger picture and without having to actually recount every single thing that takes place. Cassandra’s narrative exposes the network of events as they occur, to be sure; but the real joy is getting to know the people, their habits, their interests, their desires, their feelings for each other, their limits, and their strengths.

* * *

If you need another slightly romancy early 20th century novel about an intelligent young woman finding a way to master her own destiny, set in the framework of a very similar genteel poverty, you might try Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons.

* * *

Dodie Smith is perhaps most famous for her novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians, which is worth reading even if you think you know the whole story from the movie.

The outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place / E.L. Konigsburg.
New York : Atheneum Books for Young Readers, c2004.
[MCL call number: y KONIGSBUR; 12 copies, no holds;
also in large type at: LGE-TYPE y KONIGSBUR; five copies, no holds]

Margaret Rose Kane has just been rescued from an unpleasant summer camp by her beloved great-uncle Alex — Margaret’s parents are in Peru for the summer working on an architectural dig to see if they still want to be married to each other, and Margaret wasn’t allowed to come.  Anyway, camp was horrible and Margaret is greatly relieved that she’ll spend the rest of her summer with Alex and his brother Morris, who live together in an old house in a neighborhood that has been unfashionable for a long time. 

But now their neighborhood is getting gentrified, and the upwardly mobile folks who are moving in have successfully petitioned the city to remove the beautiful handmade towers the two brothers spent 45 years building in their back yard.  Margaret learns about the towers’ fate shortly after her arrival at her uncles’ house — it’s completely decided; there has already been a hearing where all sides had a chance to argue their positions, and the city has determined that the towers are unsafe (there aren’t even any structural plans showing how they were built!) and a direct violation of the city’s zoning code. 

Margaret really has no idea exactly how she is going to do it, but she is going to save the towers. 

The water room / Christopher Fowler.
New York : Bantam Books, 2005.
[MCL call number: MYSTERY FOWLER; seven copes, no holds]

One interesting (and perhaps disturbing) feature of cities is their wholehearted subjugation of the natural environments they replace. Of course any group of people taxes natural resources — water, air, fuel, food, and so on — but a city’s high concentration of people in a small space over a period of time produces such an intense use of resources that it is impossible for the local natural environment to continue in its original course.

Many cities are built on rivers, or alongside ocean or lake ports. Available water is one of the most basic requirements for human settlements, but when settlements grow into towns and then into cities, people are very quick to interfere with their water sources, in various ways and for various reasons. Perhaps one of the most common ways is to divert, drain, or bury any water that is in the way of development. The city is built to seem as if none of this has happened, but underneath the streets and houses and parks and office buildings, much of that water is still there.

The mystery in The Water Room is predicated on the continuing existence of rivers underneath the city of London, and on their continuing ability to exert pressure on the fabric of the city. As the book opens, Detectives John May and Arthur Bryant are occupied with the project of re-forming London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit, a small and decidedly unorthodox police unit which investigates freaky things — kind of like a more sedate, more intellectual, and tweedier version of The X Files.

The Peculiar Crimes Unit has no assigned cases, and when an old friend comes to Bryant with news of his elderly sister’s odd and sudden death, Bryant seizes on the project of puzzling out what happened. How did she drown in water from the River Thames, sitting up in a chair, fully dressed and tidy as can be, in her own completely dry basement? Soon the entire unit is occupied with researching Egyptian mythology and Victorian spiritualism, tracking the history of local buildings, questioning the deceased’s neighbors, tailing a wayward academic as he travels to clandestine meetings with gritty underworld types, and of course opening up sewer grates and wandering around underground. The rivers become major characters in the story, and like any truly three-dimensional and well-written characters, they are complex and unpredictable even as they become familiar and interesting to the reader.

[thanks, Mary Lou]

* * *

For those of you who want to read another mystery featuring London’s underground rivers, try the Lord Peter Wimsey / Harriet Vane mystery Thrones, Dominations, by Dorothy Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh (St. Martin’s Press, c1998; mentioned in a review of another Paton Walsh novel in Duck Duck Book number 34). Or, for a nonfiction discussion, consult N. J. Barton’s The Lost Rivers of London : A Study of Their Effects Upon London and Londoners and the Effects of London and Londoners Upon Them (Phoenix House, 1962, and Historical Publications, 1992; reviewed in Duck Duck Book number 20).

The uncomfortable dead : (what’s missing is missing) : a novel by four hands / Paco Ignacio Taibo II & Subcomandante Marcos ; translation by Carlos Lopez.
New York : Akashic Books, c2006.
[MCL call number: MYSTERY TAIBO; six copies, no holds]

Most histories of revolutionary groups do not bother to explain how radical organizations work — how they manage discussion and foster creative ideas, how they support their members’ intellectual and political growth, how they make decisions, or how their leadership structures work.  As a person who has spent a reasonable amount of energy engaged in work for social change, I am incredibly frustrated by this gap in our collective memory, and I have often become nearly irate after seeing a movie or reading a book that was advertised as being about how change happened, but which never talked about the actual nuts and bolts.

I did not expect The Uncomfortable Dead to be a lesson in how the Zapatistas get shit done.  It is not a history, but a mystery novel.  The story deals in murder, intrigue, politics, and the business of detection, but since one of the protagonist detectives is Marcos’s Elías Contreras, an Investigation Commission [sic] of the Zapatistas, a bit of instruction in the mechanisms of Zapatista political society does seep in.  For example, in the first few pages of the book readers find a brief lesson about the practicalities of revolutionary life, when Elías explains why his job is necessary:

“Yeah, El Sup didn’t actually show me the paper, but he told me what it was all about.  There was a disappearance.  The message said that one of the women had disappeared and that El Sup should write up a paper blaming it on the bad government.  Which is actually what El Sup is sposed to do, the problem being that citizens, that is, the city folk, are already used to the Zapatistas telling them the truth, that is that we don’t lie to them.  So like I said, the problem is that if El Sup writes is communiqué accusing the government and then it turns out that the woman ain’t disappeared at all and the bad government didn’t harm her, what happens is our word begins to look weak and what happens is people stop believing us.  So then, my job was to investigate to see if she really was disappeared or what and then I was to report to El Sup what it was that happened so he could decide what to do.” (page 18)

Throughout the book, Elías’s story makes it clear that in the Zapatista conceptual framework, police are unnecessary.  What is needed instead are investigators, who are only responsible for finding out what happened.  Investigators have no role in capturing criminals, trying and convicting them, or punishing them. 

So a little bit of the nuts and bolts are in there.  Like many other strategists before him, Subcomandante Marcos seems to be well aware that the medium may be an important element of the message.  The intrigue, the mystery, the gumshoeing in The Uncomfortable Dead are all at least partly in service to another kind of tale, showing a bit of Zapatista life and values to the rest of the world and explicating Mexican history from a people’s perspective. 

As a whole, The Uncomfortable Dead is a disjointed story.  Chapters alternate between the narrative following Elías Contreras and one following Taibo’s Héctor Belascoáran Shayne (a famously popular detective among Mexican readers) and his investigations in Mexico City.  The mystery is rooted in the confusing history of 1968, the massacre of students in Mexico City, the government crackdown and the Dirty War, and the connections these events have to contemporary Mexican politics.  The characters and plot lines are erratic and hard to follow, and the novel’s construction and conclusion are somewhat abstract, but the story has considerable charm as a political document and as a commentary on contemporary Mexican life. 

U.S. readers may find some bits of the story intriguing for historical reasons — for example, one of the characters relates the story of students from the School of Anthropology who went through central Mexico City after the devastating earthquake of 1985 marking buildings with signs saying “Catalogued as a national monument” so that developers would have to face a mountain of red tape before they could demolish and gentrify (page 152).  Reading this, I could not imagine such a tactic working anywhere but Mexico.

But altogether, The Uncomfortable Dead‘s difficulties of obscure narrative flow, a complex backstory, and the jumpiness of switching between different protagonists will be difficult only for some readers.  Anyone who is intrigued by the Zapatistas and their story, or who is interested in the history of left politics in Mexico, or who is already a fan of Taibo or of Marcos should find The Uncomfortable Dead relatively satisfying.

 * * *

Rather obviously, the book I read was a translation.  The Spanish version is:

Muertos incómodos : falta lo que falta / Subcomandante Marcos, Paco Ignacio Taibo II.
México, D.F. : Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, 2005.
[MCL call number: SPANISH Fiction MARCOS; ten copies, no holds]

Before being published as a book, Muertos incómodos was serialized in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada.  In fact, the project came about when Taibo discovered a package on his doorstep, containing the first chapter and a letter from Marcos asking Taibo to write the book with him for publication in La Jornada.  At the time of this first publication, the chapters were available on La Jornada‘s website, but they have since been removed.  However, the full text of what appears to be this first, serialized version (which may not be identical to the book version) is still available elsewhere on the web, in Spanish, of course.

Manstealing for fat girls / Michelle Embree. 
Brooklyn, NY : Soft Skull Press, c2005.
[MCL call number: FICTION EMBREE; seven copies, no holds]
 
Angie Neuweather thinks she’s fat.  In grade school she was given the unfortunate nickname “Lezzylard,” and it stuck like glue, especially once Angie’s best friend Shelby came out as a dyke.  Angie’s mom has a loser boyfriend who is moving in to their apartment.  She doesn’t know who her dad is.  She doesn’t get on well at school, and there isn’t much to look forward to in her grim suburban St. Louis neighborhood.  Everything sucks.  Daily life breeds fantasies such as:

“There should be a horror movie called Cafeteria.  A hundred teenagers trapped inside with nothing to do.  And when the popular kids get tired of being so wonderful and pretty and cool, they start slowly killing the rejects by eating little slices of them.  Little raw slices, with sides of powdered mash potatoes and canned green beans.” (page 2)

In this book, being a teenager is totally about waiting for something to happen on the one hand, and on the other, rushing around like you’re on crank (whether you are or not) just to get shit done.  Angie and Shelby’s odd circle of friends, acquaintances, and family members hang roughly together as life passes by, getting high, skipping school, having sex, bragging, and pontificating about nothing — damn, sound familiar? And, when small circumstances conspire to scrape across Angie’s life in a very uncomfortable way, she and her people find a way to cut through the shit and (almost) make things right.

The story is great, there’s no doubt, but it’s not just the plot that makes this a good book.  Embree’s intelligently descriptive writing gets the job done without fireworks — her dialogue, in particular, is simple and unpredictable and so vivid that it’s almost like no one had to write it at all.  You won’t be disappointed.

A desert in Bohemia / Jill Paton Walsh.
New York : St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
[MCL call number: FICTION; four copies, no holds]

The chaos and turmoil that accompanies wartime allows a for a great deal of shifting of accepted roles and social patterns. When nearly everything normal is disrupted, some people take advantage of their neighbors, some rise to heroism or bravery unexpectedly, some withdraw from their former responsibilities, some rejoice in the opportunity to remake themselves entirely — the range of responses is wide.

A Desert in Bohemia opens during a period of intense upheaval just at the end of the Second World War, when German soldiers have withdrawn from their occupation of central Europe and Russian soldiers are arriving as vanquishers. There is essentially no government, no social order other than what people can forge in their relations with other people near them, and the questions of what people will eat and how they will shelter are of primary importance to nearly everyone.

The story begins as one by one, several people seek the shelter of a large castle abandoned by retreating German soldiers. First a woman who remembers nothing other than a massacre that she has managed to walk away from unharmed, then a sweet-tempered idealistic young partisan, then his comrades and their severe and manipulative field commander, then the young Count who would, if not for the war, be lord of the castle. As the book progresses, these people and their loved ones grow older and live lives picked apart by the changes of history and circumstance, and we follow them through forty-five years of family life, politics, idealism, education, disillusionment, intimacy, and detachment.

A Desert in Bohemia is about European history, certainly — it is a story of war and ideology and political pressure and national identity and culture, and it is also the story of certain people’s lives and relationships — but at the center it is a story of what these individual people do with the chances they have been given. How do they bend, when do they break, where is their grace, when are they unlikely heroes, and when do they hold each other back? How do they navigate through the impossible choices they face, and what do they do with the results of choosing? One of the things the book is about is this question of moral luck — what happens when people are faced with situations in which circumstances well beyond their control make them heroes or shameful traitors? Are they more heroic, or more traitorous, than those who have not been similarly cornered? Are they more virtuous, or more despicable, than others who by sheer chance were not forced to choose sides, who were not compelled to judge what it is acceptable to give up and what it is acceptable to give things up for?

* * *

(For more on the question of moral luck, see my review of Thomas Nagle’s essay “Moral Luck,” below.)

Paton Walsh has written several other worthwhile novels for adults — one that I particularly liked is Knowledge of Angels (Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1993) — for young children and for teens, as well as a series of mysteries written for adults (staring Imogen Quy, who works as a nurse for a Cambridge college).

She is also noted for being brave enough to take on the task of completing Dorothy L. Sayers’ unfinished novel, Thrones, Dominations (New York : St. Martin’s Press, c1998), during which Sayers’ perfectly imperfect sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey and his new wife, mystery writer Harriet Vane, solve a murder while coping with the anxieties of their young marriage and the death of King George V. Paton Walsh followed Thrones, Dominations with another Wimsey/Vane novel, A Presumption of Death (New York : St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2003), this one written from notes, rather than from an incomplete manuscript. Both “collaborative” novels are worthwhile for lovers of Sayers, Wimsey, and Vane, but for the rest of you, I’d recommend starting with the first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Whose Body? (many publishers, dates).

Philosophy made simple : a novel / Robert Hellenga.
New York : Little, Brown, 2006.
[MCL call number: FICTION HELLENGA; 12 copies, one hold]

Rudy Harrington is a widower with three independent, adult daughters. At the outset of the novel, he feels unsettled, and the small changes introduced by the natural course of his life are beginning to weigh on him some. He isn’t angry or depressed, he doesn’t have great fantasies that have been too long unsatisfied, but he is feeling low and slow. Somewhat impulsively, Rudy travels to Texas to investigate a business opportunity that has fallen in his lap — and soon enough he has sold his house and moved to rural Texas to become an avocado farmer.

In his new life, Rudy meets an elephant named Norma Jean (who paints pictures) and the Russian émigré who cares for her, begins in earnest to use and build the Spanish skills he acquired as a young man, constructs himself a suite of furniture, redecorates his house, and sincerely contemplates his relationships with his daughters.

Those of you who know me understood my affection for this book, I am sure, as soon as you read that one of the characters is an elephant. But there’s more to it than that — there is a kind of palpable tension between the regular-ness of Rudy’s story and the unusual beauty of the novel as a piece of writing. Philosophy Made Simple is well worth your time.

Rudy’s daughter Margot is featured in Hellenga’s first book, The Sixteen Pleasures (New York : Soho, c1994), the story of her journey to Florence to help dry out that city’s art treasures just after the 1966 flood — books, specifically; Margot is a book conservator. The Sixteen Pleasures is excellent, as are Hellenga’s other novels: The Fall of a Sparrow (New York : Scribner, c1998) and Blues Lessons (New York : Scribner, c2002).

Greenfinger / Julian Rathbone.
New York, N.Y. : Viking, 1987.
[MCL call number: FICTION RATHBONE; one copy, no holds]

Sometimes I think in themes, especially when it comes to literature. I imagine some of this is just part of my personality, as I have always liked lists and enjoyed putting things in groups with other things they seem to be like. It also seems likely that my work as a librarian encourages this kind of thinking — librarians are called upon to help people find a book that’s like the one they just finished, we create booklists on defined subjects, we sort and classify the materials in our library collections — and, of course, we think about all of these things, we dwell on how people use resources, the architectures inherent in information as it comes to us, and many other philosophical aspects of the work that we do.

Well, Greenfinger is a book that, to me, falls into a category. It is a novel about more or less regular people who find themselves turning into heroes, crusaders, people who cannot sit by and let things happen — all because they notice and cannot ignore the sheer evil of a profit-driven international corporation. Such stories are almost always thrillers, but they fall into different genre categories — mystery, adventure, romance — and can be told in different media — fiction, comics, film, etc.

In Greenfinger‘s first two chapters, the basics of the tale are laid out — Costa Rica’s land reform laws allow, in theory, for people who have farmed their land for a certain number of years to claim formal legal title to it. A giant multinational corporation is angling to control the world’s food supply through politics, brute force, and the commodification of science. Politicians are subject to pressure from big money. The United Nations straddles the tightrope between toadying to the powerful and serving the interests of the world’s people and environment.

The story is told from different points of view — some in the third person and describing the activities of various evil characters, or characters who are somewhat morally neutral — and some in the first person in the voice of Esther Somers, who is mother to baby Zena, wife to a lower level U.N. official, and who is far smarter than anyone else in the book. Esther kicks ass, in fact.

A prolonged scene near the end of the book shows us Esther, with small Zena strapped to her back in a Snugli, running long-distance through the Costa Rican jungle, pursued by a very fit and rather psychopathic ex-SAS killer-for-hire. Everyone who has previously been on her side is either dead or completely unavailable, and so Esther runs, she climbs, she waits patiently, she outwits, and rather than merely surviving, she and Zena can be said to win, without apologies, in the end.

(The farmers, the environment, and the world’s hungry do not win — though I don’t mean to spoil the plot for you.)

Betsey Brown : a novel / Ntozake Shange.
New York : Picador USA ; St. Martin’s press, 1995, 1985.
[MCL call number: FICTION SHANGE; eight copies, no holds] 

Bestey Brown is the oldest daughter in a socially aware and relatively privileged African American family in 1960s St. Louis. The novel focuses on Betsey’s family life, her path into adolescence, and her and her family’s experience of life during the introduction of school desegregation in their city.

Betsey takes her place in the world from the foundation of her family — Betsey’s parents and grandmother have each instilled in her generation a variety of different kinds of faith in the essential glory of their ethnic history. In the Brown household, being Black is something to be proud of, and the achievements and experiments of Africans and members of the African diaspora are daily acknowledged, explored, and celebrated. For example, Betsey’s father wakes the family up each morning with the beat of a conga drum and a quick question for each child about African, Caribbean, or African American history, current events, or culture:

“Betsey, what’s the most standard of blues forms?”
“Twelve-bar blues, Daddy.”
“Charlie, who invented the banjo?”
“Africans who called it a banjar, Uncle Greer.”
“Sharon, what is the name of the President of Ghana?”
“Um. . . Nkrumah, I think.”
“Thinking’s not good enough, a Negro has got to know. Besides, it’s Kwame Nkrumah. Margot, where is Trinidad?”
“Off the coast of Venezuela, but it’s English-speaking.”

This embracing of Blackness as something to be take pride in and familiar with doesn’t happen without conflict, though. Betsey’s parents have many differences of opinion, about lofty concerns (how to actively live out a commitment to equality without endangering the safety of their children), and everyday things (when is jazz a great art form, and when is it low-class “jungle music”?)

And, even though Betsey’s family is a place of strength for its members, the introduction of school integration in St. Louis tests that strength. All the children are bussed to faraway schools, and the family is under greater than average pressure as the grownups consider history, progress, and the state of the race; while each child deals with the stress of additional travel, isolation, and the anxieties of trying to learn among all those unfriendly white people.

Betsey Brown is not a tragedy, or a thriller. There’s tension and conflict, anxiety and reconciliation — plenty of high emotion. But essentially it is a sensitive novel about a child who is ready to begin becoming a woman, and the circumstances of her life.

I first read the book when it was relatively new, and I was a teenager myself. That first reading was the famous magical experience that literature is often advertised as providing — it drew me into a world I would never experience in my own life, it challenged my way of thinking, and gave me the opportunity to have emotions specific to the experience of reading the book. Betsey Brown reads just as true to me now as it did twenty years ago, and it is well worth your time. I would especially recommend sharing the book with any 10-15 year olds you know who are looking for some interesting leisure reading.

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency / Alexander McCall Smith.
Edinburgh : Polygon, c1998.
[MCL call number: MYSTERY MCCALL; 38 copies, 14 holds;
also CASSETTE Mystery MCCALLSMI; nine copies, two holds;
CD Mystery MCCALLSMI; four copies, 17 holds;
and LGE-TYPE MYSTERY MCCALL; three copies, four holds]

Precious Ramotswe is Botswana’s leading private detective, which explains the name of this book and her agency. If you like the friendlier sort of mystery novel, and you appreciate a folksy kind of vernacular and a storyline filled with people who have rich and supportive but not entirely three-dimensional relationships, you’re likely to enjoy this series of books. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is followed by five (so far) other novels about Mma Ramotswe, her friend Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, mechanic and proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, her assistant Grace Makutsi, and other interesting characters.

Mma Ramotswe is resourceful, honest, patient, and very very smart. She makes her own way in the world even as she draws deeply on the support of her dear friends and community — Mma Ramotswe is a person who shows that her successes come from her own initiative, fortitude, and hard work without diminishing that she could never be what she is without the love and attentions of other people. This is nice to see in a fictional character. In addition, the human mysteries around which the stories revolve are compelling and rich — not too violent or upsetting, but just disturbing and interesting enough to allow readers to consider serious matters while engaged in the recreation of reading. Mma Ramotswe is a philosopher of life, and her intonations about how things are, how they should be, and what they mean are often calming and subtly inspiring.

But, as much as I’ve enjoyed the books in this series, they do remind me of a feature of the world of literature that saddens me greatly — white people, people from the “western” nations, and representatives of the middle and upper classes are the ones who tell almost all the stories, even when the subjects of those stories are decidedly not white, not “western,” or not middle/upper class. (It used to be also that stories about women were told almost exclusively by men, though this is changing some with time.) It is common for readers to be interested in literature about people who live lives quite unlike their own and situations that seem exotic or glamorous or are very far away in time or geography. This is right and natural — reading is an amazing, complex activity that can simultaneously soothe one’s curiosity and excite one’s intellect, and providing a window on a new world is one of the things that literature and the act of reading do best. But the available literature changes how these needs are actually met.

What I really want is to be able to hear a chorus of voices about those people, places, and situations that are far from my own experience. I would love to know what the Batswana people themselves have to say about their culture, the place they live, and their society. I am sure they have spoken in their own voices, but how do I find that work, here in Oregon? The library catalog at Multnomah County Library, for example, contains the work of three authors who write fiction set in Botswana: McCall Smith, a former Peace Corps coordinator named Norman Rush, and South African exile Bessie Head. Of these three, Head is the only African, and have you even heard of either Rush or Head, or of their books? I hadn’t until I looked in the catalog.

McCall Smith spent much of his life in Botswana, but he is nonetheless a foreigner and a white man. His books are beautiful and (I think) respectful of the place and culture they describe, and I do not mean to discount the value of an outside observer’s voice. But though I very heartily recommend the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, I do wish that McCall Smith’s success and acclaim didn’t effectively overshadow other voices about Botswana and the Batswana people — and I wish that the voices of the Batswana themselves were more accessible to readers in the United States.

Dead air / Ed Goldberg.
New York : Berkley Prime Crime, 1998.
[Multnomah County Library does not have this book.]

When New York City private detective Lenny Schneider comes to Portland on a job, he finds himself embroiled in a murder mystery that centers around local independent community-supported radio station, KOOK F.M. (sound familiar?). Portlanders among you, see if you can track which characters are modeled after real people!

The Bromeliad trilogy / by Terry Pratchett.
New York : HarperCollins Publishers, 2003.
[MCL call number: j PRATCHETT; 20 copies, no holds]

The Bromeliad Trilogy is a collection of three novels about a people called “nomes,” a major social crisis, and the methods they use to solve their difficulties.

Nomes are tiny people — not to say that they’re just little humans, because they’re definitely more than that — who live in the midst of us. The nome society we meet in the first book (Truckers) live in a department store, and believe that the margins of the universe are the walls of the store. These nomes have a complicated, hierarchical society based on the circumstances in the store — a powerful religious order inhabits the stationary department, for example. The store nomes are in trouble — Masklin, a nome visitor from Outside, has arrived and freaked everyone out (he’s from outside the bounds of the universe, after all) and he has a very important black box with him that is reporting that the world is pretty much going to end really soon. Clearly this is a crisis — socially, religiously, and perhaps mortally.

The genius of these books is not merely the concept, the story, or the characters — the genius is that Pratchett has created a world that is similar to the one we know, but this world is shown from a completely alien perspective. The world of the book has deatils very different from our world which Pratchett logically explores and eloquently explains. For example, Nomes are very small, only a few inches tall. Like other small mammals, they have very tiny hearts that beat very quickly. Their voices are much higher than ours, and although during the story the nomes come across lots of humans, and they try to listen to us talk, they cannot understand us very well at all because our voices are so impossibly low, our speech so slow and groaning and rumbly.

But still, the story is fascinating and the characters compelling. The books are charming entertainment, and yet they give us a great deal of real substance to contemplate. No doubt The Bromeliad Trilogy would be wonderful to read out loud, so as to maximize the potential for having a good discussion later.

The three books in the trilogy were originally published separately, and are available from various publishers and in various editions. They are: Truckers (originally printed in 1989), Diggers (1990), and Wings (1990).

Murder in the Marais / Cara Black.
New York, N.Y. : Soho Press, 1999.
[MCL call number: MYSTERY BLACK; six copies, no holds]

Murder in the Marais is the first in a series of novels. In this debut we meet Aimée Leduc and her partner, René Friant, private detectives who specialize in computer forensics and security. Despite this more or less unglamorous specialty, Aimée’s tendency to run into mysteries bigger and more dangerous than “how can we keep this data safe?” provides the storyline for this and later Leduc mysteries.

In the first pages of Murder in the Marais, Aimée is asked to break the code on a computer file, and deliver the results to an associate. Her prospective client, Soli Hecht, is old and weathered, and as it turns out he is a fighter from way back, having been a major player in the resistance to the Nazi occupation during the war, and a hunter of Nazi war criminals ever since. Aimée takes the job, and is drawn into a mystery of larger proportions than she anticipated, involving international trade agreements, old Nazis, life in Paris during the occupation, the ultimate fate of collaborators, and modern-day racist activism.

This is a complex story ranging through fifty years, with attention to the relationships within and between many different families and communities, and exposition of a broad slice of French and European political life. The mystery is set against the backdrop of Aimée’s life — her struggle with the death of her detective father in a bombing, her mixed feelings about her American mother (who walked away from the family when Aimée was a child), the anxiety with which she and René run their almost-financially-successful business, and other details bring richness to the novel.

Aimée Leduc solves more mysteries, gets in more fights, and has more adventures in four later novels: Murder in Belleville (New York : Soho Press, 2000), Murder in the Sentier (New York : Soho Press, c2002), Murder in the Bastille (New York : Soho Press, [2003]), and Murder in Clichy (New York : Soho Press, 2005). I was well-satisfied with the first books in this series, as mysteries and also as novels, but Murder in Clichy isn’t as good as the others. It comes too close to the hackneyed, formulaic dullness that the mystery genre has been so often faulted for. It’s still a decent book, but not a really great one.

So, my advice is, if Aimée’s story sounds interesting to you, read Murder in the Marais. If you’re really fascinated with her, continue on to the others in the series. If not, then I guess you can make your own decisions about how many of the series to read.

The earth, my butt, and other big, round things / Carolyn Mackler.
Cambridge, MA : Candlewick Press, 2003.
[MCL call number: y MACKLER; 27 copies, one hold]

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things was recommended to me by a teenaged library volunteer a year or so ago, and last week I finally got around to reading it. It’s about Virginia Shreves, who is fifteen years old and has what she describes in the first few pages as a “larger-than-average body.” Virginia’s mother, father, sister, and brother are all thin, handsome, athletic high achievers, and Virginia feels like she’s in the wrong family. Her best friend has moved to the other side of the country, her teen-psychologist mother and businessman father don’t pay her much attention when they’re not worrying obliquely about her weight, and generally things are at a steady low in her life.

When one of Virginia’s perfect family members does something very un-perfect and everyone has to deal with it, she begins to see her life a little more clearly, and the meat of the story is about what this does for her. The book is honest, compelling, and easy to read. The pain Virginia deals with about her body, other people’s ideas about it, and her own understanding of what it takes to be comfortable with herself is clear and sometimes very difficult to read, but overall her story is refreshing. Virginia’s actions and ideas are not always in line with what readers might imagine for her, which makes clear what a realistically drawn character she is. And, when push comes to shove, she makes decisions, takes responsibility, and solves problems — thus providing great relief to readers like me who find her sympathetic.

But more importantly, The Earth, My Butt is a satisfying story. I read the whole book in one burst and didn’t want to take breaks even for dinner (!), I was that interested in the characters and the story.

The Eyre affair : a novel / Jasper Fforde.
New York : Viking, 2002.
[MCL call number: FICTION FFORDE; 12 copies, one hold;
also CASSETTE Fiction FFORDE [“slightly abridged”]; seven copies, no holds;
and CD Fiction FFORDE [“slightly abridged”]: eight copies, two holds]

Thursday Next lives in the mid-eighties, but not the mid-eighties that you and I remember. In her world, Wales is an authoritarian socialist state, the English are still fighting Imperial Russia in the Crimean War, time travel is normal, cheese is something to riot over, dodos have been resurrected, and the literary “classics” are serious business. Next is an officer in England’s literature police force, SpecOps-27. Her job is to make sure that creators of forged manuscripts, pushers of “lost” Shakespeariana, and other literary criminals are found and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. In her debut appearance, Next has to contend with a major supervillan (he stops bullets in mid-air, can’t be photographed, and hears you mention his name no matter where you are) who kidnaps Jane Eyre and holds her for ransom. Hilarity ensues, and the line between the Outland (where Next is from) and the Bookworld (inside fiction) begins to blur a little.

I thought this book was pretty entertaining. Not really riveting, not great literature, but pretty good and certainly funny and worth my time. Then I began to read the next book in the series, Thursday Next in Lost in a Good Book (New York : Viking, 2003) and about 30 pages in, I realized I was hooked. The interesting thing, I think, is that Thursday Next isn’t really a compelling character. Don’t get me wrong, I like her just fine: she’s plucky, she doesn’t give up on what she believes in, and she’s resourceful. But I’m reading book number three in the series now, Thursday Next in the Well of Lost Plots (New York : Viking, 2004), and I feel like I should have gotten to know her pretty well, but I haven’t. Next still feels two-dimensional to me, and it’s the world she lives in that has me glued to her story.

Generally speaking, I have sort of adolescent reading tastes. I like action and adventure in fiction, I enjoy a mystery and I like narrative tension. A tight plot line keeps me eager to see the next page, and especially I love it when the characters in a book are so real that I’m upset to lose them at the end of the book. Fforde’s Thursday Next series doesn’t really meet any of these needs for me; but I am greatly enjoying reading it anyway because the almost-England of the mid-eighties and the world inside fiction are detailed and vast and complicated and amusing.

However, I must say that even this strength isn’t enough to make the Thursday Next books unqualified favorites of mine — Fforde created a very interesting world (with all the time travel and the Welsh communism) in The Eyre Affair, and then shifted focus to another whole world in Lost in a Good Book, which has Next learning how to jump from the real world into a book and then back again, and introduces her to the Bookworld’s version of SpecOps-27, Jurisfiction (“the policing agency that works within fiction itself to maintain narrative stability”). Maybe Fforde is planning on getting back to his 1986 almost-England a bit later in the series (I’m about halfway through The Well of Lost Plots, and another book follows it), but for now it feels like The Eyre Affair was just a launching pad, a place to frame a context for the fascinating world inside of fiction, where characters spend their off-page time in their own pursuits and there is a vast library of all published fiction presided over by the Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat (formerly the Cheshire Cat).

Another thing to note is that Fforde’s books rely on his readers’ shared understanding of Anglo-American literary culture. Readers who are not familiar with the works of the Brontë sisters, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, A.A. Milne, Thomas Hardy, Edgar Allen Poe, etc., will miss most of the jokes. The great world of fiction described in the Next books is really a fairly narrow one including only what you’d be force-fed in a high school English class (I would suppose, not having taken high school English myself), without mention of the vast majority even of well-known modern classics.

So, I’m a little disappointed. I wanted to desperately love Thursday Next, but I don’t. I wanted to be terribly concerned with her welfare and the resolution of her story, but I am not. Instead I became fascinated with a world I’d never troubled to imagine for myself. Next is necessary and she’s competently written but Fforde’s real strength is in the whole of the universe he’s created, not in the narrative or the characters. The Bookworld and its intricacies are amusing to contemplate, and Fforde’s mid-eighties England is both gentler and more horrible than the real one can have been, but fascinating to consider.

You will not find reason to immerse yourself in the lives of the people in Fforde’s books, because there is not enough there for you to step into. But if you are interested in a literary distraction, if you can stand the English Lit. in-jokes with their heavily Anglo-centric focus, and if you like the structure a fantasy can create, these books may well be for you.

The last English king / Julian Rathbone.
New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
[MCL call number: FICTION RATHBONE; four copies, no holds]

A major difficulty of historical novels is that they are not histories. One cannot rely on them to present historical fact — or at least one cannot rely on them to make clear which bits are fact and which are fantasy, supposition, elaboration, or argument. But the person who wants to read a historical novel is often a person who is curious about the history part, and yet unwilling to go to the trouble of discovering which historical work is best for the subject, and further unwilling to suffer through reading the undoubtedly dry and horrible tome. I am often such a person, as I am impatient with dense or overly academic writing, and intolerant of it when it gets in the way of the pleasure of language. So I read historical novels and then I am frustrated by them. The Last English King is a great exception to this rule. It is more of a nice fictional story surrounded by but distinct from an accounting of what might actually have happened. I haven’t actually fact-checked the story, but it fits right with the things I already knew (mostly) and the only sin I can easily imagine historians ascribing to its author is that he does not pretend to be objective.

Rathbone tells the tale of the English or Anglo-Saxon losers of the Battle of Hastings in 1066. He manages to make me think of the English as a noble, admirable people, something I’m not used to thinking — undoubtedly because I am more familiar with their more recent history than I am with the bits before the Norman Conquest. (I don’t despise the English, but if I am going to worry about the rehabilitation of a nation of imperialists, I like to start at home.)

The story is told through Walt, son of a minor landowner from who is part of King Harold’s inner circle of bodyguards and is with him at his death at the Battle of Hastings. Walt loses his hand, but fails to block the blow that kills Harold. Shamed by this, he flees across the channel and wanders all the way to what is now Turkey, where he meets a traveling companion to whom he tells his story.

We all know how it ends — Harold dies, Walt loses his hand, William the Bastard becomes king of England, and he and the Normans steal the harvest, salt the fields, burn villages, rape all the women, murder the men and the babies, and sell the children as slaves. Languages and cultures clash and foundations are laid for a thousand years of tensions between the English and the French. But what makes The Last English King a worthwhile read is that it is an engaging tale. Walt’s journey across Europe to the Black Sea and into Turkey is entwined with the story of his childhood and the way of life in Wessex during the reign of Edward the Confessor, and with the story of how Harold became king of England. Family, politics, sex, the everyday workings of society in England, Normandy, and on Walt’s journey, and the relationship between the humble and the powerful figure greatly in the narrative.

The Last English King tells the losers’ story, and is therefore necessarily a tragedy. The stories of victors are adventures, the kind of accounting of history that is taught by the strong to the subjected. But tragedies — failed causes, doomed love, bungled genius — are stories of people who kicked ass against the odds but didn’t quite hit every high note. Tragedies are glorious but not perfect, like the difference between a hero and a saint, and very, very human. This one is a wonder.