Monkey Hunting: Carry on, my wayward son

Length: Short (250 pages or more)

Accessibility: Very easy to read

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

You thought I’d forgotten about you guys, but no! I’m back! Suffice it to say grad school is not the best time for recreation of any sort, but I try my best to find material that I want to write about and that I think is worth sharing with all my readers. On that note, let’s move into the review. Today’s book is Cristina García’s third novel Monkey Hunting and, much like Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, it is about a family. The novel follows the multigenerational story of Chen Pan, a Chinese man who, like many others, is tricked into boarding a ship to Cuba and then enslaved by the Cubans in their sugar cane fields. The story travels forward and backward in time, relating how Chen Pan’s family history unfolds both in this new land and back home in China.

I’ve struggled with how to explain my feelings about this book. When I finished it, I had one of those moments that I’m sure all of you have had at some point where I thought, Ok, I read the entire thing, I couldn’t put it down, but in the end, was it really that good? It certainly has its good qualities as well as bad. Let’s start out with the good ones. The topic was very interesting. Before picking up this book, I had no idea that, at multiple points in the past 300 years, so many Chinese men emigrated to Cuba, either forcibly or of their own free will. I love when books reveal new parts of history to me. That’s one of the main reasons I read: to broaden my understanding of the world. Monkey Hunting is also written in fairly simple language. I could read through it rather quickly without missing any important points or getting lost in the story. That makes it a good book for my schedule, where I can only usually pick up a book for an hour at a time. With this language, I could get through decent chunks of the book even when I only had a short while to read.

Now for the not so great parts, namely a lack of emotional depth, gratuitous sex scenes, and extraneous plotlines. García’s story has the potential to be emotionally deep and engaging. There are many scenes of families reuniting, loved ones dying, people being brutalized and enslaved. Yet, these moments tend to roll past as if an impartial observer is describing them rather than someone who is in the thick of the action, someone who is experiencing all this heartache and hardship. This may be because most of the book is written in third person, but I often found it difficult to connect with the characters because their lack of connection with the emotional world around them made them feel unrealistic and a little flat.

Next is the gratuitous sex scenes. Now, don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with books having sex scenes. Take, for example, a book I reviewed in a previous post, Water for Elephants. I loved that book and it has a decent number of sex scenes. However, it’s one thing to include these scenes because they fit naturally into the flow of the plotline and they add to the development of the characters and it’s another thing entirely to include them just to spice up the story. García is, unfortunately, guilty of the latter. As the novel goes on, the characters seem to spend more and more time between the sheets and repeatedly visiting brothels. These scenes are either graphic and uncomfortable (especially the ones in the brothels) or so steeped in metaphor that they become a little confusing. These encounters quickly lose whatever impact they were supposed to have and become more like scenes in some sort of romance novel than in a novel about generational family ties.

The last aspect of the book that I wanted to write about is a strange and extraneous choice García made in terms of plotline. Generally, speaking, the various plotlines that follow the different generations of Chen Pan’s family fit logically and seamlessly into the fabric of the novel. There is one plotline, however, which doesn’t seem to fit at all. Chen Fang is introduced midway through the novel. She is the only character who narrates in the first person and her chapters are always subtitled with her name, which does not happen for either Chen Pan or his great grandson Domingo’s chapters. Her story is the only one that takes place in China and seems to have very little bearing on the history of the Chen family. It is not until her very last installment that we even find out how she’s related to the family. I could see how this plotline was meant to serve as a kind of counterpoint to Chen Pan’s, maybe a glimpse of what his life would have been like if he had stayed in China. However, the lack of obvious connection between her and the rest of the narrative makes that whole branch of the plot more of a strange digression than a development of the family history.

Whether you should read this book or not really depends on what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for a book you could read on vacation or in short bursts and still get the full effect, then this is a good choice for you. If you’re looking for a deep book with profound content, I would pick something else. I would recommend something like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 years of Solitude in that case, which I reviewed in my first blog post, if you look further up the page. If you read Monkey Hunting, love it, and are looking for other works by Cristina García, her most well known book is entitled Dreaming in Cuban. I would recommend giving that a try. I hope you enjoyed my review. I promise to be back as soon as I can with more. Feel free to comment below. Keep reading!

Their Eyes Were Watching God: The birds and the bees and the cigarette trees

Length: Short (220 pages or more)

Accessibility: Moderately difficult to read

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

And back to classic literature we go. Today we’re going to take a look at a writer whose work was at one point almost forgotten, but who was luckily rescued from obscurity and is now one of the more commonly read authors in high schools across the US. Their Eyes Were Watching God is Zora Neale Hurston’s most famous work. A young woman named Janie Crawford struggles to find happiness on her journey to womanhood. She marries three very different men: Logan Killicks, Jody Starks, and Tea Cake. Janie has difficulty finding herself in her first two marriages, both of which are oppressive and miserable. It’s not until her second husband dies and she meets Tea Cake that she begins to truly know herself and come into a sense of her own self-worth and power.

This book, like many classics, is a mixed bag. On the positive side of things, we’ve got beautiful descriptions, interesting narrative style, and engaging subject matter. This novel is rife with descriptions of the natural world. They are vibrant and Hurston does a good job of using them as powerful, if somewhat obvious, metaphors for Janie’s emotional state. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I really appreciate a good metaphor. Hurston also has a very cool narrative style. Instead of having one sort of narration in her novel, Hurston has three going on that she slips seamlessly in and out of from paragraph to paragraph. She has the descriptive, high-flown voice, the more average impartial narrator voice, and the colloquial voice of her characters. In this way, Hurston gets a nice mixture of style going in her novel that’s hard to achieve without switching perspectives. She gets profound, informative, and, in the colloquial voice, she even gets some chuckle-worthy humor, all without changing which character is speaking. The different styles make it both interesting and, at times, a little challenging to read, and you know I always enjoy a little challenging reading.

When it comes to subject matter, Hurston takes the smart route and addresses a topic few writers in her time were talking about: domestic abuse. Janie winds up in multiple relationships in which she suffers abuse in one form or another. Rather than shying away from the emotional effect this has on Janie, Hurston dives into it. She gives Janie wonderfully introspective moments where she is able to realize the negative effect these relationships are having on her and take charge of her life. Hurston gives her the opportunity to stand up for herself and makes her the powerful female protagonist that is often distinctly absent in 20^th century literature. There are way too many male writers in this period who make women seem weak and flighty or ignore them altogether. It’s good to see someone bringing them to the forefront.

I said earlier in the review that this book is a mixed bag. Despite all the praise I have for it, I stand by that statement. While the descriptions and the characters all make for pretty good reading, the plot itself and its momentum leave something to be desired. The novel is all about Janie’s journey and, like most novels in this genre, it wanders a fair amount. This book is very short and there are decent sized sections, especially during her second marriage, where there is no forward motion in the plot at all. There are multiple scenes where various townspeople who really don’t play a significant role in the plot sit around discussing things that ultimately have very little importance in the grand scheme of the novel. This is not the way throughout the book, but these sections really slow everything down and they are rather difficult to get through.

Despite the rambling sections, this book is definitely worth reading. It’s an important piece of American and African American history that nearly fell through the cracks. It’ll make you think, make you laugh, and make you glad you’ve never been caught in a hurricane in southern Florida (unless you have, in which case I’m glad you’re still alive). If you’re interested in checking out some of Hurston’s other work, she has a few other novels, including Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Moses, Man of the Mountain. She also wrote a decent amount of poetry, if you’re more into that than fiction. I hope you enjoyed my review. Please feel free to comment below. Keep reading!

Water for Elephants: Sex and violence and secrets, oh my!

Length: Moderate (350 pages or more)

Accessibility: Very easy to read

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Once again, let me start this post by apologizing for yet another long absence. Let’s just say senior year of college tried to swallow me whole, but I made it out, covered in slime and with a few puncture marks on me, but still alive. Anyway, let’s get back into it. Today, we’re going to hit a little bit of popular fiction, something we haven’t seen a whole lot of in this blog. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen’s third and most successful novel, is the story of a man who actually follows through on a threat many of us have made at one time or another: he runs away and joins the circus. After his parents die, Jacob Jankowski, unable to deal, hops aboard the train carrying the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth and begins his career as a circus veterinarian. He falls for the equestrian star Marlena as they bond over their shared love of the stubborn elephant Rosie. Her jealous husband August, along with a circus rife with corruption and hardship, make their story anything but a fairytale.

I love this book. Always have, always will. It’s books like this that give me hope for the popular fiction genre. If I can be frank for just a moment, so much crap is on the market today and it just warms my heart to read a book as well written and carefully crafted as this one. I honestly don’t know where to begin in terms of praising this book. Let’s just start with her world building. Gruen does a fantastic job of creating the perfectly contained universe of a traveling circus. She captures both the magical aspects that the public sees and the grimy, visceral, everyday activities that go on behind the scenes. This world comes alive on the page and never once becomes stagnant, even when she’s just describing an average day.

Gruen one-ups herself by creating not one, but two fully fleshed out and engaging worlds in this novel, the circus and the nursing home where the frame story takes place. In the frame story, Jacob is 93 years old and he’s waiting for his kids to come and take him to see the circus. You would think that part of the story would be slow and boring. How could a nursing home possibly be interesting? But no, these chapters are just as engaging as the rest of the book. Frame stories are always difficult to make work in a story, and yet Gruen seems to do it with ease. I applaud her for that accomplishment.

Her characters are captivating. The main players, people like Jacob, Marlena, and August, are all brilliantly multi-dimensional. None of them are flat or stereotypical and you always want to learn more about them. They’re constantly revealing something new about themselves and they develop right before your eyes, growing and changing with every chapter as if the text is alive. Some of the less central characters, such as Uncle Al the sleazy circus owner, while not as fully sketched out as some of the others, still make for excellent reading. Gruen makes sure her characters are either hateable or relatable, which is one of the reasons the story is such fun to read. She peoples her story with a colorful cast that makes up the always grungy but never dull world of her novel.

This year in my fiction workshop, my professor introduced me to the concept of “managing your mystery”. When you write any fiction piece, you have to figure out what information to reveal when and what’s worth holding back. Sara Gruen is the master of managing her mystery. In the prologue of the novel, she introduces a death scene that will recur at the end of the book. She only provides the most basic details. We don’t know who is killing who, what causes the stampede in the menagerie just before the death, what characters are involved, anything that would give away the ultimate reveal in the book. The lack of definite detail in this scene draws you in and makes you want to read to figure out what’s happening. The entire book is like this. There is intrigue and tension built up in every chapter and, the farther you get into the book, the harder it is to put down.

I cannot recommend this book enough. It’s great for beach reading, serious reading, any kind of reading, really. It’s also easy enough to read that you can tear through it pretty quickly, even if you don’t have a lot of free time. I do warn you, though. Once you start reading this book, you may not be able to stop until you’re finished. If you’re interested in reading more of Sara Gruen’s work, she has written two other novels, Ape House and At the Water’s Edge (which is brand new, by the way). I hope you enjoyed my review. Feel free to comment below. Keep reading!

The Grapes of Wrath: All we are is dust in the wind

Length: Long (450 pages or more)

Accessibility: Easy to read

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Today’s review takes us on a fantastic journey into the magical world of dust. Yes, you heard me right folks, dust. The Dust Bowl, to be specific, and we’ll be taking this journey with a classic American author, John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath is about the increasingly tragic life of the Joad family. The book begins when Tom Joad, the oldest son, is released from prison and returns to his family home in Oklahoma, only to find that his family has been driven off their land by a combination of drought, bank foreclosures, and the introduction of machines that eliminate the need for human labor. In an attempt to find work, the Joad family sets out for California, where it is rumored that work and financial security are guaranteed. As they travel, they encounter hunger, death, and violence from the locals at every turn and, when they finally reach California, they find it is not the paradise they were promised.

This book is a strange combination of flowing, beautiful prose and unnecessarily lengthy and repetitive tirades. Every page is full of vivid descriptions of the absolutely desolate landscape of Oklahoma, the squalor that the Joads and the other families live in, the destruction of the land. Very rarely have I gotten a clearer picture of the setting of a story and it’s safe to say that I now see modern farming practices in a completely different light.

No matter how stunning the background or cruelty of industrialism, however, they cannot entirely offset the often ridiculously repetitive rants that Steinbeck weaves into the narrative. In between the chapters that further the plot, Steinbeck inserts chapters that give general information about people’s lives and the hardship they faced in this period. However, rather than revealing new information every time, he simply repeats a few things over and over again. For instance, he talks about how people are being forced to leave and how the new tractors are destroying the land. He then uses ten different metaphors to describe how the tractors are destroying the earth. The next time one of these chapters comes around, he does it again with different metaphors and the introduction of maybe one new idea here and there. Early on in the book, he spends more time beating us over the head with these metaphors and, also, explaining what he means by them (much like the dreaded Nathaniel Hawthorne) than furthering the plot. Fortunately, this improves over the course of the novel and the plot chapters eventually become much longer than the other chapters.

Despite all this repetition, the characters are really well drawn and relatable. My heart breaks a little bit every time a character dies or goes hungry, even if it isn’t a main character that we’ve spent a lot of time with. Steinbeck does a great job of establishing a sense of community amongst these migrant workers that binds them and makes it so that, by sympathizing with one character, you realize that you’re sympathizing with an entire movement and class of people. Steinbeck shows us what it means to be reduced to nothing and how desperation can turn people into cruel animals. If that’s not a compelling subject, I don’t know what is.

The ranting and repetition aside, I would recommend that you read this book. It has great historical significance and it’s one of the most accessible studies of The Dust Bowl and it’s effect on human life I’ve ever read. It is quite a lengthy book, but just hang in there. It’s well worth your time. If you’re interested in shorter works by Steinbeck, he has written such other classics as Of Mice and Men and The Pearl, as well as 14 other novels, some nonfiction pieces, and multiple collections of short stories. I hope you enjoyed my review. Feel free to comment below. Keep reading!

The Counterlife: Two worlds, one family

Length: Moderate (330 pages or more)

Accessibility: Difficult to read

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

With the exception of Toni Morrison, a lot of my posts lately have dealt with books from the early 1900’s. Today, we’re going to take a break from that and accelerate about 60 years to 1986, when Philip Roth published one of his earlier novels. The Counterlife is not one book, but several. In each chapter, the story tackles a different version of reality, all centered around the lives of Henry and Nathan Zuckerman. In every version of the story, one of the brothers is suffering from a heart condition, the medication for which makes him impotent. Whichever brother it is has an identity crisis and the different choices they make when dealing with their crises determine the course of their story.

I have read a lot of books in my time. I’ve read amazing books, weird books, pointless books. I’ve read some really awful books too, ones I wouldn’t finish if they weren’t assigned for class. It only took about the first 10 pages of The Counterlife to realize that it is one of the most self-aggrandizing, pretentious, and overly dramatic books I’ve ever read. This book should not really be classified as a novel, as there is no plot to speak of, very little rising or falling action, and no logical narrative flow, even within the chapters. This book would be better off being classified as a collection of personal essays or treaties on Jewish identity and the nature and effects of diaspora. Rather than weaving his thoughts on these subjects subtly into the story, Roth spells them all out at great length, using the most pompously academic language and often without inserting paragraph breaks for pages at a time. Attempting to follow the wandering thread of Roth’s argument makes reading this book a long and grueling process.

To say all of Roth’s characters are annoying would be an understatement. The male characters are misogynistic, sexually violent, and angry. The female characters are mewling and bitchy. All of the characters are flat, unsympathetic, and stereotypical beyond all belief. As a result, entire swaths of the novel are almost unreadable because the characters in them are people I cannot relate to and about whom I couldn’t care less. It is clear that Roth focuses much more on the development of his rhetoric than on the development of his characters.

Many factors make The Counterlife a really frustrating book, but none more so than the moment when Roth tries to introduce a point and prove that everything he’s written has meaning and significance. About 200 pages into the book, Roth inserts a chapter where (I won’t tell how) he reveals what essentially amounts to the frame story for the whole novel. He puts the previous chapters into context and shows why his characters act the way they do and why everything seems so odd and overplayed. For a moment, the novel appears to be turning around and finally getting on track. But that moment is brief and is killed shortly after when the narrator for that chapter, Henry Zuckerman, lapses into another fit of ridiculous rage and rambles endlessly, just like before. Rather than moving away from the overly dramatic characterization and making his point distinct and clear, Roth falls back into that pattern, making his characters unsympathetic and unreadable. Also, just on principal, while it is good to know that there is a method to the madness buried somewhere in this book, should we really have to wade through 200 pages of really just awful writing before and 80 pages after this chapter to prove said point? I say no.

I take a hard pass on The Counterlife, no question about it. I understand the messages that Roth was trying to get across, but he just went way overboard, trying so hard to prove a point that his book just becomes ridiculous and nearly impossible to read. If this seems like something that’s up your alley, you will not be lacking for options. Roth wrote a plethora of other novels, including but unfortunately not limited to American Pastoral and Goodbye, Columbus. I hope you found my review helpful. Please feel free to comment below. Keep reading!

A Farewell to Arms: The new normal

Length: Short (280 pages or more)

Accessibility: Easy to read

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Today, we will go where we have only gone once before; the battlefront. If that makes you squeamish, don’t worry. Violence-wise, this book is nothing compared to the last war novel I reviewed (The Surrendered by Chang-Rae Lee). A Farewell to Arms was Ernest Hemingway’s first bestseller and a semi-autobiographical account of his experience in World War I. The novel follows Frederic Henry, an American who enlists in the Italian army and serves as a lieutenant in the ambulance corps. He falls in love with British nurse Catherine Barkley and their love affair blossoms after Henry is injured at the front. Eventually, the war separates them and Henry is once again forced to face the brutality and pointlessness of war.

The only way I can think to describe this book is that it’s weird in a good way. When I first opened it, the sentences read a little bit like crazy talk. There are very few periods and multiple thoughts bleed into one another in a single paragraph or even within a single phrase. There are a lot of observations of trees and mountains thrown in with details about army maneuvers. Eventually, though, Hemingway wiggles his way towards a plot of sorts and uses his observations of nature to contrast the horrors of war in a way that’s very visually striking.

The overall tone of the book is very stark and cool. You could almost read the entire thing, even scenes where death and destruction are involved, in a monotone. Hemingway strips emotion away from his story, giving the narration a strange, detached quality. The narrator himself, Henry, seems to exist inside a bubble that, though he’s involved in the action around him, allows him to consider it from a distance. This emotional disconnect creates a distinction between Hemingway’s novel and others of this period and before that were chock full of flowery prose and sentimentality. This book is a nice break from novels where nature is the main character and everyone is reminiscing about the way things used to be.

Hemingway’s tone is not the only thing that makes this novel engaging. While A Farewell to Arms is about World War I, at its heart the novel is about struggling to maintain a sense of normalcy during wartime. In every conversation that Henry has with Catherine and his friends, Hemingway builds up a sort of fantasy world in which Catherine and Henry are married and all of his friends will survive the war and soon go home to their families. They push reality away and pretend that everything is going to turn out all right. Meanwhile, the war is pushing its way back in. Mortars are exploding all around them, soldiers are shooting their comrades out of fear, and Henry’s imminent return to the front will pull him away from his love. The glaring difference between the fantasy and the reality makes the novel all the more heart wrenching and makes the pains of a 100-year-old war present and immediate.

The main issues with Hemingway’s novel are his female characters and his ending. Many people complain about Hemingway’s difficulty writing women and I’m no different. There are multiple women in the novel, mostly Red Cross nurses, and all of them are pretty flat. Even Catherine, a main character, often seems more like a walking stereotype than a real person. She’s subservient, vain, and needy and it makes reading her dialogue with Henry rather cringe-worthy at times. This leads us to the problem with the ending of the novel, where Henry escapes from the army and he and Catherine lead an idyllic life in the mountains. This section goes on for many chapters and literally nothing of note occurs. The very end of the novel is better (I won’t reveal it here), but that period between his escape and the end is pretty damn slow and could have been cut down a whole lot.

Despite Hemingway’s off-putting portrayals of women, this novel is definitely worth your time. Even if you’re not into war stories, this novel makes it touching, relatable, and, most importantly, readable. If you’re interested in other works by Hemingway, other novels of his include The Old Man and the Sea and The Sun Also Rises. He’s also written a large number of short stories, but what famous author hasn’t? I hope you enjoyed my review. Feel free to comment below. Keep reading!

Song of Solomon: I believe I can fly

Length: Moderate (330 pages or more)

Accessibility: Moderately easy to read

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I promised you I’d be back soon, didn’t I? Well, here I am and I’ve got a treat for you all. Today we take a look at one in a long list of excellent novels by Toni Morrison. Song of Solomon is another one of those books the plot and timeline of which are rather difficult to pin down. In general, the narrative follows Macon Dead, known in his community as Milkman, a young black man living in Michigan in the 1960’s. Trapped in his father’s shadow, Milkman’s life takes a turn when he reconnects with his aunt Pilate, her daughter Reba, and her granddaughter Hagar. This strange, mystical branch of his family launches him on a journey to discover his roots that turns his life upside down and makes him question everything he thought he knew about his family and his identity.

Though it takes a little while to get into it, this really is a brilliant book. Morrison’s prose is beautiful and simultaneously vibrantly descriptive and cunningly indirect. She never describes everything in a scene and she never tells us entirely what’s going on with a character so that we as the readers have to read between the lines and engage with the text in order to fully grasp it. The novel reads almost like a fairytale, filled with exposition that doesn’t feel like exposition because Morrison is just that good. Her tone and the way she weaves in tantalizing details allows her to give us necessary background information without it slowing down the story or becoming boring. Also, and this might sound like a trivial reason to love something, Morrison’s metaphors are exquisite. I spend a lot of my time reading novels and critiquing short fiction and it’s always refreshing to find someone who has such a firm grasp of the concept and execution of metaphors.

Morrison’s cast of characters is so unique and sometimes downright strange in the best way. She introduces innumerable characters rather rapidly and yet I, at least, am able to remember who each one of them is. Their personalities and character traits are distinct, so even if they drop out of the plot for a good one hundred pages, I’m still able to identify them whenever they reappear. I want to learn everything I can about these unusual people and, despite said strangeness, they still seem like people I could meet out in the real world. I connect and empathize with them, which makes the book so much fun to read.

The only real downside to this novel that I see is the initial meandering nature of the plot. For a good portion of the beginning of the novel, Morrison jumps around a lot in time and the novel is a little directionless. This in and of itself is not taboo in the world of novels. However, the fact that this occurs at the beginning of the book makes it a little difficult to get into the narrative initially. The plot kicks in and the novel picks up speed about one hundred pages into the book. Just be aware that a little patience is required.

This novel is an example of truly great writing. Morrison has imagination, emotion, and technical skill to beat the band. If you stick with the novel through the initial slowness and just take time to appreciate the writing itself, you will have a great time with this novel. As I mentioned earlier, Morrison has written many other novels, one of which, Beloved, I will most likely be reviewing later on this year. Other suggestions include The Bluest Eye and Tar Baby. I hope you enjoyed my review. Feel free to comment below. Keep reading!

My Ántonia: The original Bohemian Rhapsody

Length: Short (270 pages or more)

Accessibility: Very easy to read

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

First off, I would like to apologize for my lack of posting this past month. Schoolwork, while being a great source for this blog, is also ridiculously time consuming, especially when you get a little behind. Anyway, I’m back now, so strap on a bonnet and saddle up your horses as we join Willa Cather on a journey to The Wild West. My Ántonia is the story of a young Bohemian girl living in the as yet untamed land of Nebraska. The novel, narrated by her childhood friend and admirer Jim Burden, details the development of their relationship as they grow from childhood to adulthood. Though they start out as close friends, they are eventually pulled apart as they choose (or are forced to choose) different paths in life. Seeing as how this story is told in a series of fairly randomly spaced episodes, it’s difficult to give you more of a sense of the plot than that without detailing the entire book for you.

In many ways, My Ántonia is a good piece of literature. The novel is very visually pleasing. Much like D.H. Lawrence, Cather weaves in a lot of vivid descriptions of nature that make the scenes come alive. Nature becomes a supporting character that is always present and buoys up the narrative throughout the novel. When the story itself gets a little boring, the descriptions of nature are always there to draw your attention and keep you engaged.

Again, much like Lawrence, Cather’s choice of topic is a major contributing factor to my interest in this novel. The focus of the story is a poor immigrant family and the struggles that they face in trying to build a life not only in a new country, but also in an area of said country that few people had yet to conquer. The hardship they have to deal with and the varying effects it has on the different members of Ántonia’s family make both for engaging reading and for sympathetic and relatable characters. All of this sounds very similar to my last review, but what can I say? Lawrence and Cather have a lot in common, which is a good thing in my book, considering how much I love Lawrence.

The only major quarrel I have with this novel is the narrator himself. Cather made an odd choice in having a young American boy tell the story of an immigrant girl. Now, I’m no feminist, but from the minute I picked up the book, I noticed the obvious disadvantages of this choice. We don’t know what’s going on in Ántonia’s head unless she tells Jim her thoughts and feelings and we miss most of the more interesting moments in her life because they don’t occur with Jim. Instead, we learn this information as gossip and we never get the full story. In terms of plot and action, the events of Ántonia’s life are far more engaging than that of Jim’s easy life of educated leisure. Jim also tends to pass a fair amount of unnecessary judgment on Ántonia’s choices in life. This makes Jim’s character unsympathetic and I want less and less to see things through his eyes and instead judge for myself. All this is not to say that the book is horrible because Jim is the narrator rather than Ántonia. I just thought it was an odd choice and following Ántonia’s perspective instead could have done a lot to improve the narrative.

Despite the downsides, I would recommend that you read My Ántonia. It is a neat story, save for the occasional and somewhat lengthy digressions into the indulgent life of Jim Burden. This isn’t your typical Little House on the Prairie tale. The characters are unique, the story is engaging, and the backdrop is picturesque. What could be better than that? If you want to check out other works by Willa Cather, it turns out that My Ántonia is actually the final book in her prairie trilogy, the first two of which are O Pioneers and The Song of the Lark. I hope you enjoyed my review. I’ll be back real soon with another one. Feel free to comment below. Keep reading!

 

Sons and Lovers: Oedipus, party of two

Length: Moderate (450 pages or more)

Accessibility: Moderately easy to read

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Despite the promise I made in a previous post, we’re going to take a brief trip back into British literature with one of my new favorite authors, D. H. Lawrence. Sons and Lovers is about Gertrude Morel, a young woman who is stuck in an unhappy marriage with coal-miner Walter Morel. With all of her love for her husband gone, Mrs. Morel devotes herself to her first son William. She intends to live through him and his success in life. When William dies suddenly, Mrs. Morel shifts her attention to her second son Paul. As he grows up, Paul becomes so bound to his mother that he is incapable of forming lasting relationships with other women. The only thing that can free Paul is death, whose I won’t say.

It is very rare that I find a book that I think has very few, if any, faults. Lawrence is an amazing writer. His sentences are beautiful and they flow like poetry over the pages. Sons and Lovers is overflowing with descriptions of nature. Basically every other sentence is devoted to talking about a field at sunset or a stand of trees in the dark. Usually, this would slow down the story and make it pretty boring. Who wants to hear that much about the English countryside? Lawrence, being the genius that he is, manages to weave these descriptions in without them seeming out of place. Instead, they make the text vibrant and create a constant and vivid picture of the characters and their lives in your mind.

When writing this novel, Lawrence made an excellent choice of subject matter. He’s writing about a poor family, people who are struggling not only with emotional issues, but also with financial ones. While I’m not a miner in 20^th century England, the struggles of the Morel family are still somehow more relatable and interesting than, say, people sitting in a drawing room on an estate chatting about Lady A getting engaged to Lord B. Their problems, whether they don’t have enough money to buy food or are getting laid off for lack of work, have real stakes, which makes them interesting to read about and makes us empathize with the characters.

Lawrence is the master of creating tension. This novel has fights (physical and verbal), sickness, sex, everything that makes life exciting and difficult. Lawrence has a lot of each of these things in his novel, but not all of the scenes are explosive and life altering. He’s able to build tension simply by describing the angry expression on a character’s face or giving us a sense of what goes unsaid when Paul and his mother disagree about a girl. Lawrence doesn’t have to beat us over the head for us to get the point and feel the pressure mounting. The thing that Lawrence is best at is including sex scenes in his novels without describing the actual sex taking place. He describes the ripeness of cherries on a tree, the beating of Paul’s heart, everything but what the two people are doing. The sexual tension is abundantly clear without Lawrence having to be crude or explicit about what’s going on. The moments when sex actually occurs are transformed from merely a physical action into a spiritual release, making them both beautiful and stimulating to read.

I wholeheartedly recommend that you read Sons and Lovers. Not only that, but I recommend you read it a bunch of times. Every time I read this book, I pick up on another cool element of Lawrence’s text. It’s engaging, beautiful, and totally worth your time. Lawrence’s other famous novel that I’m sure you’ve heard of is Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I can guarantee you has more sex in it than this book, if that’s what you’re into. I hope you enjoyed my review. Feel free to comment below. Keep reading!

The House of Mirth: Sugar, we’re going down swinging

Length: Short (350 pages or more)

Accessibility: Moderately easy to read

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

It feels like it’s been forever since I’ve reviewed a female author, even though it’s only been three posts since I talked about Jane Austen. Either way, it’s about time that I did another one, so today we’re going to check out Edith Wharton. The House of Mirth is about Lily Bart, a young woman who is addicted to luxury, but doesn’t have the money to maintain her lifestyle. When her attempts to secure a rich husband fail, Lily is forced to rely on her charm and beauty to convince the wealthy men in her circle to give her handouts. This practice quickly gets her into financial trouble and makes her the subject of gossip and suspicion in her social circle. Though she never stops trying to fit in, Lily is eventually rejected by her peers altogether and makes the slow, miserable decline into poverty and obscurity.

This book is fascinating. Wharton does an amazing job of capturing the complexity and cruelty of 20^th century upper class New York society. Every outfit, every gesture, every word even, is calculated to produce a certain effect and, though everyone is smiling and friendly, there is no such thing as loyalty. Sounds like the tagline for some sort of spy movie, right? That’s what makes Wharton’s novel so interesting. There may not be a whole lot of action, but the inner workings of the characters minds and the psychological warfare they engage in are so gripping that even the most mundane activities become intriguing. As an added bonus, Wharton manages to create a realistic portrayal of the people in this society despite the dramatic nature of her subject. While there are some soap opera moments, especially between Lily and her love interest Mr. Selden, mostly the emotional reactions and interactions of the characters are natural, which makes the characters more relatable and accessible.

The thing that appeals to me most about this novel is Lily’s character. I have to say, in this literary period, it’s refreshing to see a believable female protagonist who, while a little naïve, is not stupid. She’s completely aware of what she needs to do and how she needs to act to survive in this society. She’s incapable of sticking with any plan for too long, but that’s only because she’s not cut out for the cutthroat nature of upper crust society. She’s not willing to blackmail people and steal women’s husbands to get what she wants and her hesitation to do so makes her realistic and a more complex character. Wharton embraces a conflict with real, high stakes and challenges Lily at every turn, rather than falling back on an easily resolvable conflict that will result in a happy ending. With so many male and often even female authors falling short of that engaging, realistic mark in this period, it’s great to find a character and a situation you can really grapple with.

The only complaint I really have about this novel is the fact that the structure gets a little repetitive by the end. Lily finds a comfortable situation for herself, she’s not satisfied with it or something goes wrong, she gets in trouble and has to leave, then the next chapter finds her doing the same thing in a slightly crappier scenario. The other caveat I have is that if you’re not interested in the ins and outs of high society, then this book probably isn’t for you, no matter how engaging it is. Other than that, this novel is definitely worth a read. Edith Wharton’s other popular novel is The Age of Innocence, though she wrote a huge number of other novels and some short stories and poems to boot. I hope you enjoyed my review. Feel free to comment below. Keep reading!