Await Your Reply

Chaon, Dan. Await Your Reply. NY: Ballantine Books, 2009.

Submitted by R. Stuhr

If you read the blog entry for Cloud Atlas, then you already have read my comments on novels made up of separate stories that slowly become connected, so I won't repeat them here. Oberlin College professor Chaon uses this method with Await Your Reply. This novel starts out with stories about young or youngish people who have left or are preparing to leave friends and family behind: a young man who repeatedly disrupts his life to search for his twin brother; a young girl whose parents have died gives up her plans for college to leave town with her high school teacher; a young man leaves college after receiving a phone call from his biological father who is calling to tell him that he has been living with adoptive parents. In some respects, this novel is a mystery. The reader collects clues and slowly puts together the disparate pieces into a meaningful whole. Chaon's novel depicts everyday people making good and bad decisions, driven from forces from within themselves and from without. Some are motivated by love, others by greed, and all from loneliness.

Dan Chaon's novels and short stories (all highly recommended!):

Await Your Reply
Burling 3rd Floor PS 3553 .H277 A95 2009

You Remind Me of Me
Burling 3rd Floor PS 3553. H277 Y68 2004

Among the Missing (short stories)
Burling 3rd Floor PS 3553 .H277 A8 2001

Cloud Atlas

Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas. Random House, 2004.

Submitted by R. Stuhr

It seems to be more and more common in novels and films to take seemingly disparate stories that gradually link link together through the characters and details of the narratives. Although it may start to seem like a cliché, it does reflect life if you step back outside of your everyday existence. Meetings that are chance or random become significant, actions of people unknown to each other may gradually (or not so gradually) may bring those people together or change the lives people unmet. Movements within history and politics, culture, science, dramatically change the lives of people born decades and centuries later. Mitchell uses this technique in his novel Cloud Atlas, but adds something a little different. His novel presents six stories that move forward in time in great leaps. It begins with a remnant of th journal of kept by a notary, a passenger on a 19th century ship voyaging through the South Seas.The next story jumps to Belgium between the world wars. A destitute, disinherited, morally shallow young man is seeking to study composition with a once prominent composer who has succumbed to ill health brought on by syphilis. These first two stories could be entirely separate short stories. The next story is reminiscent of the Karen Silkwood case of the 1970s. A minor overlap is introduced into this story. The next story takes place in what is perhaps the present day. The main character is a failing publisher who through sibling conspiracy winds up confined against his will in a gothicly horrific rehabilitation home. He has in his possession a manuscript that tells the story of Luisa Rey (the Karen Silkwoodesque character from the previous story). The next story takes the reader far into the future. Consumerism has triumphed; commodification is everything; cloning (taken a step further than the clones in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go) has done away with the need or possibility of most noncloned people to work. Finally, the story at the peak of this triangle of stories, takes place after most of the world has been laid to waste whether through war, environmental disaster or all of the possibilities of human induced catastrophe combined. Civilization is starting over in some cases with remnants of memories and evidence from earlier civilizations, in other cases, Battle Star Gallactica like, survivors of the disasters travel together on a ship, observing the newly developing civilizations. At this point in the novel, the reader is starting to pull some threads together and a theme is developing. In the second half of Cloud Atlas, Mitchell continues the stories in reverse order... all of the threads and themes coming together.

Now that I've gone on in great detail about the make up of the novel, I should say something about what first struck me about Cloud Atlas. It was Mitchell's incredibly beautiful writing. I was in love with this novel before the end of the first story. Mitchell's writing changes as the stories change. The first two stories have the most formal and evocative style because that is in keeping with the time period. The story that takes place far into the future (in Korea) features txt mssgng influenced vocabulary and spelling. Nothing seems haphazard or rushed off in this work. Mitchell's writing isn't a hobby or a commercial enterprise (merely), but he is truly a master with words and ideas.

Having said that, his novel, as I interpret it, explores how far greed, acquisitiveness, selfishness, and a craving for power can be taken. The penultimate story (moving forward) describes a society that has taken these aspects of the human character about as far as they can go. The novel opens and closes with the 19th century voyage. The notary is a simple and good man. He is troubled by the uninhibited colonial appropriation of land and control and throughout tries to reconcile his national loyalty, his religious instincts, and his belief in the essential goodness of his fellow "man" with what he observes. In the end he almost dies because of his faith in others, but even his narrow escape does not end his sense of hope and optimism. "Belief is both prize and battlefield, within the mind & in the mind's mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves, and Gooses shall prevail" (508).

Can the opposite be true? You'll need to read this novel for yourself. Cloud Atlas, recommended to me by Claire Moissan, a Grinnellian and Writing Lab instructor, is a consummate novel. It tells a compelling tale as it sheds light on the human condition, provides new ways to view history and the future, taking away all hope and handing back a spoonful of it before the last page is read, all in beautifully crafted prose.

Read this book!

Burling 3rd Floor PR6063.I785 C58 2004

Other Novels by David Mitchell:

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)

Black Swan Green (Random House, 2006)

Number9dream (Random House, 2001)

Ghostwritten (Random House, 2000)

Coming Soon

Reviews for Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply, and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Also, Dismantling the Public Discourse, and Nick Hornby's Juliet Naked.

Hold your breath.

Parasol in a Hurricane

Greer, James. A Parasol in a Hurricane. Wild Child Publishing, 2009.



Reading on the run? For less than the cost of coffee at the diner you can download a book for your PC, iPhone or Palm Pilot.

Try this police procedural for $1.99 from Wild Child Publishing.
"A Parasol in a Hurricane."



Take two universal ingredients—abusive relationships and a struggle for personal growth—mix them in the cauldron of a small-town police environment, add a dash of corrosive personalities and bureaucracy and you’ve cooked up a tasty crime drama. James Greer brings his expertise in law enforcement to the recipe called A Parasol in a Hurricane, a new e-book release from Wild Child Publishing. (Disclaimer: I have two collections published by Wild Child.)

The reader can tell Greer has done his share of professional homework, quoting Stephen King on marital restraining orders that are no better than the eponymous parasol. He also mentions recommended reading for on-the-make detectives and provides a précis of squad car communications and codes. Both protagonist Detective Karen O’Neill and the object of her inquiry, runaway Marsha Beston, are independent, on-their-toes women conflicted with less-than-understanding men and a struggle for self-realization.

Greer handles a tough job well of getting into the mind of a woman saddled with a loutish husband who has dragged her from San Diego to rural Wisconsin. Through the author’s dialogue, his protagonist also does a solid job of standing up to the department’s internal affairs officer while defending her suspect.

 And, yes, for a generally non-violent story, there are satisfactory killings to leaven the entrée. Parasol is a quick read filled with tension. Who knew life in rural Wisconsin could be so tasty?

A Parasol in a Hurricane, by James Greer, Wild Child Publishing

(www.wildchildpublishing.com), 2009, PDF file, 29 pages.

Reviewed by Walt Giersbach ’61 (http://allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.com)

The Calligrapher’s Daughter

Kim, Eugenia Sunhee. The Calligrapher's Daughter. New York: Henry Hold and Company, 2009.

Elena Filios

I just finished a very interesting book which I would like to recommend to you all. The Calligrapher’s Daughter, by Eugenia Sunhee Kim. It is a very richly drawn novel about Korea, a country torn between ancient customs and modern times during the early 20th century. The central character is a young woman who fights against the traditional role of women. Although a novel, it is very “ethnographic,” with many details about a country and a culture I was unfamiliar with.


Elena Filios
Community Information Technology Coordinator
Hartford Public Library
Hartford, CT 06103
www.hartfordinfo.org
www.hplct.org

On order for Burling Library

Patriotic Treason

Evan Carton. Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America. New York: Free Press, 2006.

Reviewed by Joe Hewitt
(Missouri State University)

Today, Americans know John Brown as the man who ignited the U.S. Civil War with his failed attempt to start a slave revolt with weapons from the Harpers Ferry armory in Virginia. Shortly after his capture, a Virginia court charged him with treason against the commonwealth of Virginia, conspiring with slaves to commit treason, and murder. After a four-day show trial, the jury’s inevitable guilty verdict took only forty-five minutes. Brown discouraged any talk of a rescue attempt by antislavery allies saying “I am worth more to hang than for any other purpose.” During the month’s wait before his execution, he read the Biblical passages affirming the righteousness of human equality, wrote many letters to family and friends, and received a steady stream of visitors from the North.

Evan Carton’s Patriotic Treason examines the life of John Brown, his abolitionist activities, his friends in the antislavery movement, the role of religion in his motivation for freeing slaves, his military exploits and terrorist acts in Kansas, his personal and public life, the role of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in creating Bleeding Kansas, the role of the Fugitive Slave Act in criminalizing abolitionists who refused to return escaping slaves as required, and his final desperate act. An unconventional historian, Carton describes John Brown’s inner conflicts much like a novelist would write about a major character giving the entire narrative an exciting, page-turner quality, but the history is thorough and detailed with its story of a man of action and faith losing faith in the political process to correct a systemic wrong.

In his epilogue, Evan Carton notes that the American historical establishment demonized John Brown as a dangerous fanatic. “Private citizens agitating on single issues were not the preferred engines of history.” Carton argues that the story of the Civil War needed a villain and John Brown offended conventional mores enough to fit that role.

This book helped me understand why Kansas, where John Brown emboldened the Free Staters to drive proslavery hooligans from the state, has done so little to recognize this founding father. Although his image reigns over the Kansas State Capitol’s rotunda in John Steuart Curry’s famous mural, his homestead near my boyhood home in eastern Kansas is not marked. One hundred and fifty years after Harpers Ferry, John Brown’s vision of a democracy for all, regardless of race, is still misunderstood.

On order for Burling Library

Beyond the Blossoming Fields--the story of Japan's first female doctor

Jun'ichi Watanabe. Beyond The Blossoming Fields. Translated by Deborah Iwabuchi and Anna Isozaki. London: Alma Books Ltd., 2008.

R. Stuhr

Blossoming Fields is the biography of the first female doctor trained to practice western medicine in Japan. This story, a bestseller in Japan and translated into English by my favorite translator, Deborah Iwabuchi and her colleague Anna Isozaki, presents Ginko in all of her bravery, hard as nails determination, and ego. Born into an important landed family, Ginko was married in the traditional manner of the time, but was unlucky enough to contract gonorrhea from her husband. She left her husband's household to return home to be cared for by her own family. Her illness served to magnify her unhappiness with her status as wife and even after she recovered she refused to go back to her husband--subjecting her family to the ignominy of a divorce. Her illness and recovery were the motivation for her medical pursuits. Seeking a cure, she and her mother went to Tokyo to visit a doctor trained in western style medicine. Ginko is mortified by the internal exam and this leads to her desire to become a doctor so that women have the option of being examined by a female rather than a male doctor.

The path is anything but smooth. Ginko is disinherited by her family, lives on almost nothing and studies at all hours so that she will be the top student in all of her classes. Watanabe leaves no doubt about the nearly insurmountable obstacles she had to overcome. It was not illegal for women to attend medical school or to practice medicine, but it was not done nor acceptable in the society. It took years for Ginko to get into medical school and then she experienced both verbal and physical abuse. Somehow, despite poverty, starvation, threats, and isolation, Ginko achieved her dream and opened a clinic in Tokyo where she treated both men and women. Ginko attended to her patients and her staff with fiery moral zeal. She was loved and hated. No one seemed to get past her very private personality until, following her conversion to Christianity, she meets a young man who has aspirations to set up a Christian utopia in the far north of Japan. She finds her self in the midst of another controversy when she decides to marry the younger man and eventually leave her practice to join him in Hokkaido.

Ginko’s life is never easy and in the end, her greatness was in what she achieved to become a doctor and in the door she opened for other Japanese women to do the same.

Ralph Nader's "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us."

Ralph Nader, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009.

Reviewed by T. Hatch

One might wonder how can the super-rich do anything but enslave us? Ralph Nader in the Author's Note implores us, in a corollary on Coleridge's willful suspension of disbelief, to utilize our sense of “imaginative engagement.” While Nader describes the genre of this work as a “practical utopia” (a charming and provocative oxymoron in its own right) I came to think of this process as more of a consciously informed credulity.

Seventeen aging billionaires at the behest of Warren Buffet take to meeting at a resort hotel in Maui and conspire to lead a series of mass movements that successfully commodifies worker justice and democracy. Naturally along the way a host of reactionaries such as the U.S. Chamber of Congress and the management of Wal Mart push back but the “Meliorists” are too well organized, too well funded, and being the old geezers that they are have nothing left to lose.

Nader clearly wants to stand Aldous Huxley on his head (insomuch as he openly says so). Several of the reviews of “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” have focused on the more fanciful elements of the narrative, e.g. Wal Mart management caving into popular pressure and acquiescing to unionization of its labor force, as evidence of some form of nostalgic dementia on the part of Mr. Nader. Anyone who confuses this book for a blueprint or a guide to action misses the point. The imagination that Nader appeals to reminds me of the Annalist historian Marc Bloch's use of the term. For Bloch, a member of the French resistance tortured and killed by the Nazis at Lyon, that imagintion was a means to an empathetic historical understanding. It does not mean creating a narrative cut from whole cloth, rather it is an injunction to creatively imagine the solving of problems. Nader is clearly not using imagination then in the same way that the utopian socialist Charles Fourier was.

I spoke with the author albeit briefly on a radio call in show today (October 7th) shortly before writing this critique. Unfortunately Mr. Nader did not answer my first question which wasL: is corporate capitalism worth saving through reform. He instead concentrated on my comment that he mentions what was being served for lunch and food in general dozens of times throughout the book. There is much I wish I had said but didn't. For instance, by last March I was sorry that I hadn't voted for you for a fourth time.

On order for Burling Library

It Takes a Pillage

Nomi Prins. It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street. Hoboken New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, 2009.

Reviewed by T. Hatch

A trillion here, a trillion there, the next thing you know.... $19.3 trillion dollars is the current price tag for the bailout of the nation's banking system according to author, and former managing director at Goldman Sachs, Nomi Prins. That robust total includes everything chipped in from the Federal Reserve, the Department of the Treasury, The FDIC, and from Congress, to save capitalism as we know it. Prins has labeled this event as “the Second Great Bank Depression.” It is the single largest transfer of wealth in human history; we watched while it happened.

The magnitude of this brazenness is difficult to get one's mind around. Quantified a little differently, one million dollars in cash (i.e. 10,000 one hundred dollar bills) weighs about 144 lbs. Therefore $19.3 trillion weighs 2,779,200 pounds. A fifty-three foot semi trailer holds approximately 46,500 pounds of load; this is enough currency to fill sixty of these trucks. How far this cash would stretch into outer space if placed end-to-end is an open question.

Prins is clearly angry and it shows in her writing. While this contempt is understandable, and shared by almost everyone who is not a CEO with a Wall Street Bank, it does become somewhat tiresome. If the subject were the Holocaust or the Atlantic slave trade no rational or moral person would defend either practice. But to condemn the evil on every page wears the reader out and detracts from the larger argument.

This is a solid book because it is thoroughly researched and Prins has the technical expertise to make sense of the subject matter. Several themes are developed in some depth in this work. Bipartisanship may seem like it has disappeared from Washington but it remains alive and well when it comes to providing the banking industry with all of the taxpayer funds they need to sustain the current casino environment on Wall Street. The Fed is a highly secretive organization that operates with impunity in providing liquidity to the members of the financial elect. The removal of critical and effective regulation (especially the Glass-Steagall Act) was a disaster. And, allowing banks that were too big in the first instance to further consolidate through merger and acquistion is pouring gasoline on the fire. Finally, since almost nothing has changed structurally in our financial system there is bound to be another melt-down even worse than the current crisis, sometime in the not to distant future.

Prins also provides updated information on her website showing where, and how much, money is going to various financial institutions. It is clear from the information on the website and reading It Takes a Pillage that free markets are anything but free.

On order for Burling Library

The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo

Larsson, Stieg. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Knopf, 2008.

Submitted by Catherine Rod

Swedish author Larsson was a journalist who died at the age of 50 and before his three novels were published. The others in the series of three are The Girl Who Played with Fire (Knopf 2009) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Knopf 2010). Dragon Tattoo is about corporate and family corruption, tragedy and human vulnerability. Catherine Rod, an avid reader of mysteries, notes that this is the first of Larsson's three posthumously published novels. "It is absolutely riveting and has an interesting main character. If you like mysteries, try this one!"

All three novels are on order for Burling Library.