The Hurricane Sisters

Recently I was hotel-bound in Hong Kong as the result of, you guessed it, a hurricane. Correction: typhoon. Whatever you call it, had it not been for a lack of viable alternatives, I likely would not have finished. I didn't hate Hurricane Sisters, per se, but I found the characters to generally be really big whiners.

Dorothea Benton Frank has written this novel primarily through alternating points of view by three members of the Rivers family. Daughter Ashley is the clear protagonist - a starving artist, she fashions herself as the second coming of Jackie O and bemoans the fact that she's never once gotten to visit Paris. (Side note: this is hard to swallow given the money Frank tells us this family has.) Fast on Ashley's heels is mother Liz, who continually laments 1) her horrible mother (Ashley has nicknamed her own parents "The Impossibles," so there's definitely a bit of a theme here) and 2) that no one in her family has ever cared one lick about her work with victims of domestic violence. Dad Clayton is experiencing a bit of a mid-life crisis and does his own share of poor me-ing. Brother Ivy (as in Clayton IV) makes only brief appearances, which is a shame because he is the only one who doesn't carry on constantly about the hand he's been dealt.

The family, as you've probably gathered, is a bit dysfunctional. The book opens with Liz and Clayton bailing her mother of of jail for walking a llama on a highway. It gets simultaneously wackier and entirely more believable from there, in a you-can't-make it-up kind of way. Snake charmers and sleezebag pols are only two of the types who play bit parts and starring roles.

Upon finishing Hurricane Sisters, I understood why Frank made her main characters so irritating. And, frankly, I was able to appreciate what she had done; I definitely liked the book better after I'd finished it than I did while I was reading it. That said, some chapters were a slog when all I wanted to do was reach through the pages and shake someone (which, yes, is a testament to Frank's skill as an author). In that sense, it wasn't so different from my experience reading the Lowcountry Summer trilogy last summer. Maybe books set in South Carolina in summer are not my thing.

Despite the fact that I opened this review noting that I only finished Hurricane Sisters because of an actual hurricane, I wouldn't completely write it off. This is a fine beach/airplane read provided the reader can bear a hearty helping of whining along with the hijinx.

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

Ostensibly, Katarina Bivald's The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend, is the story of a twenty-something Swedish woman, Sara Lindqvist, who strikes up an improbable, long-distance friendship with the elderly Amy Harris of Broken Wheel, Iowa, bonding over their shared love of books. Having lost her job in a small bookshop when it closed, Sara accepts Amy's invitation to visit Iowa and discover life in small town America.

Sara arrives in Broken Wheel to discover Amy Harris is dead. This is no Agatha Christie plot, though. Amy, it seems, had been sick for some time and her correspondence with Amy was one of her last true pleasures; she failed to disclose her illness for fear of dissuading Sara from making the trip.

Sara, understandably, was stunned by Amy's death and moreso by the insistence of Amy's friends and neighbors that she stay in Amy's house for the planned visit. Slowly, Sarah becomes increasingly ingrained in the life of the town and lives of its inhabitants to the extent that neither she nor they can imagine her departing when her visa expires.

Ostensibly.

More than anything, though, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is a book about books. It is a book for and about people who prefer the company of books to that of other humans. Anyone who has ever loved reading so much that they've turned down an invitation or marinated in the stew of so-many-books, so-little-time will be able to relate to Sara and Amy. Sara muses on using books to hide from life and also on whether her life, so dominated and defined by books was "really enough," thoughts I'd wager only the most committed of bibliophiles can likewise claim.

I want to add, too, that The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is the story of life in tiny-town America and, in particular, the ways that life is disappearing. Bivald has done an excellent job of capturing the zeitgesit, characterized so often by an all-consuming angst, which is all the more impressive given that she is Swedish. (The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is actually an English translation of a Swedish original.)

All-in-all, this book is outstanding and one I can easily and happily recommend to anyone looking for a good work of fiction. Happy reading!

Finding Fontainebleau: An American Boy in France

Several years ago I read Julia Child's memoir of her time in France in the immediate post-war years, My Life in France, which is one of the finest memoirs I've read to date. Naturally, then, Finding Fontainebleau, jumped out at me from the pages of a recent Publisher's Weekly. So first:

Thad Carhart was four-years-old when his father was stationed in France as part of the NATO command. The entire family lived in Fontainebleau for three years, during which Thad started school (becoming "Ted" in the process, as Thad proved impossible to render, as he explains in a humorous anecdote), a good, but naughty, student. In Finding Fontainebleau, Carhart looks back on those three years - a giant Chevy station wagon, a brood of five rambunctious children, and a France still awakening from the nightmare that was World War II - while also weaving in the history of Fontainebleau, and by extension the kings and emperors of France. (Side note: it is to my great regret that I have not yet visited Fontainebleau. If this book convinced me of anything, it is that I really must do so at the next opportunity.)

I enjoyed Carhart's style very much, although I found the steady stream of inserted French to be distracting. For me, it was distracting because I could read it, and so the translations served only to repeat what had read in the previous line. I'm not sure if it would be more or less distracting to a non-French speaker. And, while I enjoyed both the memoir aspect as well as the French history lessons, I felt these were often each so short as to be quite choppy. Carhart's interjections about his life in France since returning to live with his own in the late 1980s further served to heighten this sense for me. And, unfairly, I couldn't help but compare it to the incomparable My Life in France. This is entirely unreasonable, as one memoir is told from the perspective of an adult, while the other is a child's memories, but given the time and place, I couldn't help myself.

Francophiles will still, no doubt, enjoy this book. Carhart provides a particularly interesting look at the work of renovation in France and the work that goes into maintaining the country's patrimoine - the churches, chateaux, palaces, and even parks that make France, well, France. He does a great job distilling the cultural quirks of the French and capturing the old Paris of berets, pissotières, and baguettes.

Cluny Brown

Cluny Brown is an orphan, happy enough to be living with her widowed uncle, a plumber, looking after him and answering his calls. She also happens to fancy a spot of tea at the Ritz and, well, any number of other things that are, shall we say, above her station. This is still England in 1938, after all. And so, hoping to put her in her place once and for all, her uncle packs Cluny off to a Devonshire great house where she is to become a parlor maid.

Cluny Brown does not lack for spirit and her lighthearted hijinx are often amusing. Margery Smith wrote this novel in 1944 and the era suffuses that pages in a way that even the best historical fiction is not able to capture. (In this way, it is similar to The Ladies Paradise or Suite Française.) In fact, it is notable that the characters speak often of the coming war, yet with a somewhat vague sense of what this will mean. Of course, when Cluny Brown was published, the victors had not yet been victorious.

Ultimately, I felt the book was so-so. I may have liked it better had it not been for the ending, which I never foresaw (so points to the author for that bit, at least), and which I didn't quite understand. What bothered me most was that I felt it was entirely out-of-character. That said, there was enough of "jolly old England" between the covers that I couldn't feel too cheated by the characters when the setting itself was so refreshing.

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts

Abdel Kader Haidara never could have known what he was in for when he was designated the heir of his father's library of ancient and precious books. Soon he was recruited to traverse the countryside to add to the growing collection in Timbuktu. I'll pause here to note that this book is an excellent antidote to any feelings of inconvenience which are so often inherent to business travel. Haidara's travels are often by camel and canoe and he must take care not to appear too tempting a target to bandits and thieves. There's more than a bit of Dark Star Safari to his travels.

In any event, Haidara is very, very good at his job. In a single year he collects more manuscripts than an entire team of predecessors had managed in the better part of a decade. Soon the city of Timbuktu is home to some 350,000 volumes, many of which are many hundreds of years old. As in, written before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. For centuries, families have safe-guarded their books, locking them in trunks and burying them in desert holes. (The history of these volumes parallels that of the Sarajevo Haggadah in many respects.)

Book-by-book, Haidara has rounded them up from across the Sahara and was nearly as dogged in pursuit of funding to build a library to house them as he was at collecting them. No sooner, it seems, than he has received funding from the likes of the Andrew Mellon Foundation to house, protect, and archive the 800,000 books he and his colleagues have amassed, than Al Qaeda threatens to destroy it all.

Advancing on the former city of scholars, Al Qaeda, as Joshua Hammer explains succinctly, begins imposing Sharia law, chopping off the hands of suspected thieves, stoning to death those suspected of extramarital relations, and burning books. Thus, Haidara becomes a smuggler, building a network of couriers to carry Timbuktu's treasure out of harm's way. The work is fraught with danger of almost unimaginable magnitude, but nothing seems to cow Haidara. He rounds up village elders to testify for his men when they are caught, bribes militants at checkpoints, and just generally becomes a first-rate smuggler.

It is hard to give too much credit to Hammer for what he's accomplished here. He has managed to capture each of the elements of the story, from the geopolitical environment in Mali, to the war on terror, to Mali's history as a French colony, to, of course, the books and Haidara himself. Parts of the book read like a travelogue (Where the West Ends comes to mind), other parts like a biography, but the various story strands are woven together seamlessly and, if I may say so, pretty brilliantly. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is a must read for book lovers everywhere.

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge

Reading a book like this fills me with awe for the feats of engineering and and, frankly, back-breaking labor, that occurred regularly and as a matter of course for much of this country's history. Such mammoth undertakings are the stuff of David McCullough - from the Panama Canal, which, yes, I know, is not in this country, but was very much constructed at the will of it; to bridges and dams; to the Wright brothers' first flying machines. (Side note: it's no wonder McCullough is the master here - his latest book was published this past spring; Great Bridge in 1972.) There is no one better at bringing the greatest examples of innovation, invention, and engineering down to size than McCullough. 

That said, the primary weakness of The Great Bridge is, perhaps, McCullough's own strength: he has such a grasp of the engineering principles that he cannot help but include every last detail on how the caissons bore into the earth, how the cables were spun, how the planks were laid. Sometimes I felt I was reading an engineering text, rather than an historical account of the construction. I plead guilt to some serious skimming of these sections.

I was much more interested in the life and times of the Chief Engineer, Washington Roebling, the (exceedingly corrupt) political environments in Tammany Hall and the Grant administration, Henry Beecher's hypocrisy, the inimitable Emily Roebling, and the medical advances of the age...pretty much everything but the tensile strength of Bessamer vs. crucible steel. I had to chuckle when I read, "Collingwood spoke a little too long about the staggering quantities of brick, stone, steel, and iron that had gone into the bridge..." Like Collingwood's audience, I felt McCullough belabored these points a little too much.

Evidently I've lodged this complaint before as, in reviewing my previous McCullough posts, I noted my final verdict on the Paris book, "Overall, this was a good read, although it could be quite dense at time and, therefore, a bit of a slow go. French history or American art history buffs would enjoy it greatly, but others might find it just a bit on the dull side." Likewise, those with a strong interest in our nation's public works might go ga-ga for McCullough's detailed work, but other readers might find parts of it a slow go.