How in the world did August get here so fast?! I have been trying to carve out some reading time of late and catch up on some books that I have wanted to read.

I loved hearing Audrey Niffenegger when she was at Lemuria a couple of weeks ago. I have to say that Time Traveler’s Wife was not a real favorite of mine. I felt like if she had dropped about half of the jumping back and forth it would have been much more manageable and enjoyable because the premise was really great. So, when her next novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, arrived, I glanced at it but never read it. After listening to her, though, I was intrigued and picked it up….I am LOVING it!! It is beautifully written and has a very unusual and intriguing plot. I feel like Niffenegger never set out to have a blockbuster of a novel but Time Traveler’s Wife became just that. It’s not her style. She’s not flashy but Fearful Symmetry, seems to be much more of who she truly is….a gifted writer who researches and labors over the details and truly crafts her art. She is a bookbinder and visual artist which fits with her thoughtful and somewhat subdued personality. I am sure she is pleased to death with what her success with Time Travelers Wife brought but I would imagine she is enjoying this latest book in a much different way. She is just so good.

I also have just finished Troy Carnes book, Rasputin’s Legacy. I have known Troy for years from his coaching several of my girls in basketball at Jackson Prep and honestly picked up his book to be nice! I didn’t put it down for 2 days! It is fast paced and well thought out. I am so happy for him and hope many readers will pick up his book. I love stories set in and around WWII and have read just about every Holocaust book out there and this book has all of that but while it reads like a fast spy novel it also has huge heart. A great read.

More reviews and comments on Rasputin’s Legacy

More reviews of Her Fearful Symmetry

Over the past while I have been hearing more about the name David Mitchell. He had a front page review in the Times by David Eggers that was really good for The Thousand Autums of Jacob De Zoet, Susie has written two blogs on him already having read Thousand Autumns and Ghostwritten, his first. The result has been this resounding thought in my head: “Read David Mitchell.” So I picked up Cloud Atlas, his most well-known work to-date, and started it a few nights ago.

When I first pick up a book by an author I’ve never read I’m not quite sure at what level/arena I’m going to relate. Will it be on the “entertaining storyline” level? the “this is well written” level? the “this was a really good book” level? or the “…um…uh…wow this book is blowing me away at a level I can’t quite put my finger on but my life is probably going to change by the time I get through it” level. The last is for a select few authors in my brief reading career: Melville (putting salt in my veins), Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (they might know me better than I do) , McCarthy (he just stuck his boot up my all-knowing arse and I’m so thankful), etc…It’s the same with musica: Shostakovitch, Beethoven, Bach, Part, and Messiaen….

I got about fifteen pages into Cloud Atlas and had a moment of, “wait a second…this is really good but I think this guy might be brilliant.” So I took a break, found the dictionary and encyclopedia app on my phone and had a little recap only to confirm, “yes…this man is in fact quite brilliant.” One really doesn’t put authors into that last category, they created it and then take it by force, never to let loose their hold on you. David Mitchell is already establishing himself on my conscious in this way. I hope he continues to stake his claim in this arena as I go through the work.

Cloud Atlas is composed of a series of stories that span time and are all wound into a beautiful novel. I have completed the first two. The first is an account of an American traveling from the New Zealand area of the Pacific back to America in the mid 1800s (Melville’s blood is pumping throughout). In the first twenty pages he is able to firmly establish a blender in which he throws Western Christian thought, the savage native, and the pure native. It was a nice stretch of the mind, having a incredible “zinga” of a passage in there. The second is about a wild young musician that is broke and running from debt collectors, finding refuge at the estate of an unsuspecting famous elderly composer. Here he dug a place in my heart with an incredible grasp and use of a musical education and temperament.

It is incredible when an author is able to lay such a broad foundation so naturally through the eyes of individuals that are no less than owned. So far, Mitchell seems to me a untamed literary beast that is able to wield not only his words and characters but also the styles and words of others, and moving them to a rhythm to say something purely his own. I am trying to hold on to this wave, and allow myself to continue to hear what he is saying. I’m sure I have rambled in extremes my whole way through this post as is my tendency, but–whateva man–I get excited and this is the best my unfiltered young mind could muster. Who knows, maybe I’m just impressionable. Great works, the likes of which this book is moving towards, in any artistic medium usually leave me with my mouth open only wishing to express my gratitude for their hard work and time they spent to give me this experience.

READ DAVID MITCHELL

-John P.

by Kelly Pickerill

I spied a good looking book on Joe’s desk a few months back; it was the review copy of Howard Norman’s new book, not due out till July.  Well, it’s July!  And not only has his book arrived at Lemuria, but Howard Norman himself will be here on Friday, the 30th!

I really enjoyed reading this book.  At the start, Wyatt Hillyer sits down to write a letter to his adult daughter whom he hasn’t seen since she was very young.  Though Marlais doesn’t know her father and may never be close to him, Wyatt wants her to know what happened to him in the five years before she was born, the years when, during World War II in Canada, he participated in a violent crime that changed his life.

I loved the tone and texture of Norman’s novel more than any other aspect.  Because it’s a letter, the events Wyatt recalls are a mixture of memory and fact.  The dialogue can lack verisimilitude, though that’s forgiven because Wyatt is recalling conversations that took place more than twenty years previous.  But Wyatt is a careful wordsmith, meticulously choosing how he relates the events that eventually lead to his daughter’s birth — his parents’ simultaneous suicide, when he’s eighteen, because they are in love with the same woman, the secret infatuation Wyatt harbors for his cousin, Tilda, once he comes to live with her family, Tilda’s affair with a German student and the uproar their relationship causes in the small town of Middle Economy, and the events of the war which the citizens of Canada are finding more and more distressing, especially Wyatt’s uncle.

In the review in the Washington Post by Ron Charles, he points out that the epistolary style results in an “odd disconnect between the novel’s sober tone and its outrageous plot” making for a story that “seems shocking only in retrospect.”

At the time, you lean in, trying to catch every word, lulled by his voice as he describes the most ordinary lives that just happen to be punctuated by macabre accidents and bizarre acts of violence.

Come out to Lemuria on Friday starting at 5 to hear Howard Norman read from What Is Left the Daughter.