This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison (fiction)

Originally posted in the New York Journal of Books, September 10, 2015

This is Your Life was a popular television show in the 1960s and 1970s, an early reality show that delighted many audiences. Each episode introduced an unsuspecting guest to their past through previous friends, coworkers, and acquaintances. But who is it who decided which people were important or at least significant in our lives?

It’s with this format that Jonathan Evison examines the life story of an elderly widow in This is Your Life, Harriet Chance. Starting at age zero up to seventy-eight, we see the truth and consequences of Harriet’s tumultuous life. As Evison speaks to his protagonist directly, he reminds her that life is like “a pinball, pitching and careening, rebounding off anything it makes contact with.” Harriet is going to be forced to examine past choices that make up her identity and discover what she thought was an option was never even a choice.

As the story begins, Harriet is ambivalent about taking an unexpected cruise to Alaska, a gift from her late husband. His ghost visits her, making her children believe she’s losing her mind. They try to ban her from taking the trip, but she’s determined to go, even if it means going alone. While the random appearances of her late husband continues onboard, as if he’s trying to tell her something, all she’s getting are memories of how unpleasant he was, leaving her to wonder why she misses him so much in the first place.

Bernard is a blue-collar worker who catches Harriet’s eye, despite her being a society girl. It seems muscles can say more than trust funds. They marry quickly, and soon two children join them. The years slip by with Harriet increasingly conscious of how much she gave up for that idealized nuclear family. Then there’s the fact that after the initial thrill of Bernard’s manly persona fades, she’s left with a cranky old man:

“Conversing with Bernard reminds you of talking to your golden retriever. . . . A tilt of the head, a wag of a tail, a snarl—it’s about all you can reasonably expect.”

With these details, Evison takes Harriet back and forth through flashbacks that reveal how modern she was for her time, and how events from the past shape her beyond what she’s willing to admit. At age twenty-five, he asks her:

“Have you released your independence at long last? Have you finally stopped tracking the progress of that other incarnation of yourself. . . . Or have you simply lowered your standards?”

Ouch. Is that what is troubling her, that other self that may have taken a different and better course? One that wouldn’t involve changing her husband’s diapers or watching her daughter steal from her purse? Was there ever a choice?

Before the ship has left the dock, Harriet gets the shock of her life, and it’s not just her dead husband climbing over the railing. She’s shaken by a sudden revelation that knocks her flat, and coping with that can only involve a great deal of wine. Suddenly, Harriet isn’t exactly who she seemed just pages earlier.

Evison teases out the details by flashbacks, reminding Harriet directly that maybe she is not the only one with disappointments. This changeup sets the tone for her cruise off kilter, and she finds it difficult to recover. It doesn’t help that a sudden visitor joins her for the remainder of the trip. The pinball flippers are snapping wildly now. Her future has become a game of chance, and one can only hope Harriet doesn’t end up down the drain or tilting out.

The novel itself is intriguing. Of the frequent flashbacks, Evison handles these well, portraying a lifetime in relatively few chapters. And he shines at describing the awkward moments of life, the minutiae that can trouble us—fat ankles, visits to rest homes, the nature of boxed wine—and shows how these reveal more about us than any autobiography. He suggests our identity isn’t made of grand gestures but how we handle the irritating little things in our life when no one is looking.

The way Evison (the author) handles the direct observations and questioning of Harriet (his character) at the beginning seems fresh and innovative, but becomes a bit tiresome after many chapters. Sometimes the way he speaks to her is annoying:

“Ring-a-ding-ding, it’s your thirtieth birthday, Harriet Chance, let the party begin!”  

“So c’mon, birthday girl, turn that frown upside down, and start counting your blessings!”

Another troublesome part of the novel is Bernard’s visits to his after-life handler. Is this heaven? Hell? Maybe it’s purgatory. In any case, Bernard is in trouble for contacting Harriet. But the purpose of these interruptions are never really clear.

author Jonathan Evison

That said, the questions Harriet faces are universal and all the more compelling for this reason. Would knowing the outcome of our potential life choices make life happier? Or would we be immobilized with hesitation? Do choices really exist? As in his previous novel, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, Evison demonstrates a gift for dissecting past and present, and revealing the hope we all have not just to win, but to stay in the game.

- See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/your-life#sthash.M2rIERMJ.dpuf

Released 9/8/15 from Algonquin Books.

Review copy provided by the New York Journal of Books.

Special thanks to Brooke Czuka at Algonquin Books.

2015 Maritime Reading Challenge

2015 Maritime Reading Challenge

Andrew Wyeth

It's been ages since I've suggested a Reading Challenge, and this one is a bit personal.  First, I adore Andrew Wyeth art and have been slowing collecting a few pieces (reproductions, of course).  My favorites are his ocean and ship images(even decrepit ones like above). Actually, ESPECIALLY the old and decrepit ones.  

At the same time, I recently saw a PBS Special on Sting's new production on Broadway, The Last Ship.  I bought the soundtrack. I am a bit obsessed (of course, hearing an eight-year-old sing sea shanty songs from the backseat is fun too!).  About this same time I was reading Brian Doyle's novel The Plover that just knocked me out: top 5 of my forever book list easily.  

Lastly, I've been spending more time than usual at my local favorite gorgeous beach and there is something so mysterious and visceral about the waves and rocks that I have the ocean on my brain. This reminds me of advice from a sage poet when I shared a ocean poem with him: he basically said, don't bother, it's all been said, as everyone feels this way about the sea. So let's see what's been said before! Can any author or poet describe the atmosphere of the sea that matches our own?

As a kid, I was lucky. We camped by the ocean each summer.  I confess that for far too long, I used to see the distant ocean oil-rigs lit up at night beyond the Channel Islands and thought that they were drive-in theaters on Hawaii.  Yep, smart kid.  It was at this beach, Refugio, west of Santa Barbara, that I first read Island of the Blue Dolphins, a true-story from Scott O'Dell that is a childhood classic now and that has set me (and a gazillion other kids)on a course for saltwater romanticism.

In my obsession with Andrew Wyeth I discovered his father had illustrated and edited Sea Story Collections.  Incidentally, the entire Wyeth family apparently are outrageously gifted artists.  Sadly, my family just creates long-term grudges!

So, it's still January, it's early, so it still counts!  Jump in!  Instructions below:  ***

2015 Maritime Reading Challenge

Any titles related to the sea or ships (both commercial and military), in any time period, in any region.  Nonfiction is fine, poetry is great, fiction is better! Classics like Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick, The Old Man and the Sea, etc are obvious choices.  We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen is a recent title that is amazing, related to Danish seafaring. The Lighthouse Road by Peter Geye is another such title focused on Lake Superior.  Another surprise is the book Longitude: by Dave Sobel, a nonfiction look at how men figured out how to navigate by longitude and not just latitude.

The Pilothouse Chart company lists these titles (some are mentioned above)in their top 10 of nautical fiction:  (www.pilothousecharts.com/nautical.htm)

• Grey Seas Under by Farley Mowat
• Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (I could not get through this book....)
• Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brien
• Spartina by John Casey
• The Sea Wolf by Jack London
• The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers
• Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling
• The Wreck of the Mary Deare by Hammond Innes (out of print but still possible to find)

Entirely imaginary titles for completing parts of the Challenge:

• Captain: read five books and list them on this Challenge entry page (see tab above for link)
• First mate: four books
• Navigator:  three books
• Cabin boy: two books, and the knowledge that "In cases of shipwreck or starvation from prolonged be-calming, they are the first to be eaten by higher-ranking crewmates. (International Fellowship of Royal Privateers website)

***Any mention of the ghastly "Pirates of the ..." movie series constitutes an immediate expulsion from the Challenge for obvious reasons.  But, please feel welcome to mention a film or series or even exhibition related to the maritime world and maybe someone else can enjoy it too.

Sign in with name, means of contact, location by country, and goal in the comments section below.

Short stories from Aleksandar Hemon and Vladimir Nabokov

Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon

Nabokov’s Dozen by Vladimir Nabokov

I purchased Love and Obstacles after seeing a bit of an interview of Hemon a few months ago. One of the blurbs inside from the Washington Post stated, “Reviewers find it difficult to resist comparing Aleksandar Hemon to Nabokov, since both men [have a] preternatural facility in their second, acquired language….” Frankly, I didn’t catch what they were referring to, completely missing the point on “acquired language”. Immediately, I ordered the Nabokov short story collection too, just to read both and see how they related. The fact that Hemon is terribly handsome never influenced my purchasing decision. It was his voice.

Reading Hemon’s book first, I found myself constantly checking to see the genre, that little word on the back, again and again. Was this really fiction? It felt so autobiographical, because several parallels exist between some of the protagonist’s in the varying stories. Links to Sarajevo, the immigrant experience for a Bosnian in the US, and the writer’s experience all felt like direct references to Hemon himself. His writing is humorous, uncanny in the showing the little details as they relate to the whole, and almost eerie in how the violence of the past leaves a person intact and moving forward, even when it seems like it’s all destructive.

By far, my favorite story is “American Commando”. In it, he combines several elements: a teacher attempting to teach English to a classroom of Bosnian boys by using the tune “Catch a Falling Star”, Stallone’s Rambo archetype, playground warfare by nine-year-old boys, an obsessive film student, and a boy swimming far past the view of his parents, out into the deep sea. It all comes together in what can only be called stunning. The theme of it is a film student wanting to chronicle his escape from Bosnia to the US:

“I told her the stories of my life, embellishing here, flatly making things up there, for I frankly wanted to help her write a good script and get the funding for her project. I even meekly nudged her toward a short film in which I could play myself in various situations from my life—one of those brainy postmodern setups everybody likes so well because it has something to do with identity—but she gently rejected the idea. I flirted with her too, for, as everybody knows, the job of the writer is to seduce his readers.”


So, for her, he talks. And talks. He tells of the “Garden War” that he and his buddies vehemently engaged in, which perplexes her as she sees the focus of the ‘real’ war, one that killed many of those boys later, as more relevant. The war was fought over a patch of playground and later over the rightness of the “Workers” to build a utility shed. The boys called themselves “The Insurgents” and stopped at nothing—but being just nine and ten, the soldiers didn’t get far. Yet their urgency never waned:

“...for us, the war was elating, the freedom inherent in erasure, the absolute righteousness of our cause—we loved it all….And the life of stealth and deception, the feeling that we knew far more than the people around us.”

The story winds through present and past, and even this “writer” who knew so much on the playground is still surprised by details of his own family that the film student had gleaned. Important things that never occurred to him while in battle. And that other battle, the one that left the real Sarajevo in shreds, comes into play too.

Other stories in his collection have a similar feel, and “The Noble Truths of Suffering” also nudges heavily towards what I imagine is Hemon’s real life. In it, he meets a famous American author at a Bosnian dinner party and tries to figure out what is behind the famous name. Ultimately, he asks the author if he’s read his story, “Love and Obstacles”, when it was in the New Yorker. (It actually was: returning to back flap, is this really fiction???)

The author is more complicated than our narrator expects, one claiming to be Buddhist while writing war stories. He even comes over for lunch. And while this author never becomes pals with that author, he still looks for clues in his work, to see if his story is ever hinted at in the work of the other. The contrast of an aging (washed up?) author with smart-ass Bosnian author is well-crafted. It made me keep reading it in wonderment of what Hemon was getting at about writing, books, and literature in general. Is it disguising his personal fears at becoming successful without substance? Quantity without quality? (IMHO, not a chance).

But back to that blurb…the one that mentioned Hemon with Nabokov. Still, I was clueless what that meant, until I went to write about Hemon’s book and found no note of a translator. Surely, English couldn’t be his second language…could it? And what did that have to do with Nabokov, the Russian great? I threw a question out online and got several responses that stated Nabokov also wrote in English, not Russian. For both, English was a second language and makes both of their works that much more stunning. Their grasp is not amateur but surpasses most any English writer I can name.

Reading Nabokov’s Dozen was in many ways, then, similar to Hemon’s. Subject matter, time periods, style, and voice all felt different (Hemon is snarky and fun, Nabokov a teensy bit arrogant and above the masses), and yet they are united by stunning word usages and pictures of humanity, both the humor and the suffering.

Nabokov’s Dozen features two that are considered autobiographical, “O Mademoiselle” and “First Love”; the rest are pictures of rather simple events made complicated and deeper by the ideas Nabokov hints at. In “Spring in Fialta”, his main character meets up occasionally with an old lover. But far beyond any character studies is just how he describes things:

Regarding a train trip: “…with that reckless gusto peculiar to trains in mountainous country, [doing] its thundering best to collect throughout the night as many tunnels as possible.” Later he talks about the “elbows” of the train tiring, humanizing the transportation that appears so frequently in his works. True, he could have said “connecting rods” but where’s the art in that? Train travel in his stories is elegant, life-changing, and ultimately, far more than just a way to cover distance. Much of what happens in the story set in just a day in Fialta isn’t directly said: he alludes to it and lets you connect the dots. And when you do, it’s with a sharp blow to the chest.

In “Signs and Symbols”, he uncovers the complete irrelevancy of much of what makes the human exist: “Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.” He only infers how useless all that trembling worry became. Throughout this story, the images can be read different ways…in fact it’s the basis of an entire anthology (http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=165822&SearchType=Basic) that I am coveting from Continuum Books.

I loaned the Nabokov book to someone who felt understanding the “simple” stories was too much work—too complicated to read for pleasure. (Groan.) He’s not spare, but at the same time, it’s not like he’s being paid by the word. His usage is detailed but perfectly so, each word adding depth to what only appears simple.

“First Love” is sweet, with its image of Biarritz and the vacation of a wealthy family. Of course the boy will fall in love with the little French girl, and in his mind, the “gold coin that I assumed would pay for our elopement” would take them far away from her bourgeois parents to someplace more in keeping with his family’s wealth. But despite expecting that, knowing that it will come to an end, the story is still fresh. Retelling it, he bemoans his inability to remember the name of the little girl’s dog, and that failure of memory troubles him. Somehow, that simple loss changes his explanation of the whole affair, and when he can remember it, the ending naturally can be put to rest.

Reading these, I was reminded of the enjoyment of short stories, the way you can be transported, albeit briefly, into another place. I hadn’t felt this enthused since reading some of Tim Winton’s short stories that have a more earthy yet still compelling glance at humanity.

"Soundtrack of our Books" - article on coordinating music with literature

On the Millions website (http://www.themillions.com/), you can find all sorts of book-related discussions and reviews.  The following link is particularly intriguing. Sharon Steel wrote about publishers and authors who propose playlists that are directly (or indirectly) related to their characters and books.

What do you think?  Would you want your e-reader to pop up with music at certain moments of a scene?  Do you want to know what music the author was inspired by?  Is music too personally subjective to have presented as part of the 'package'?  In my case, I hate it when a book cover shows an actual person;  it interferes with how I picture things.  Along that line, I don't think I'd want a music tie-in necessarily...and I would especially dislike being pushed to understand a character by listening to their music (I would want that to be the writer's job).  Wouldn't it open up a whole new industry, catering to book interpretation, which would then be subject to costing the reader money?  Optional, maybe.  But required? No way.

Thoughts?

http://www.themillions.com/2012/01/the-soundtrack-of-our-books.html

Russian Winter, Daphne Kalotay

Russian Winter is an engrossing fiction novel from Daphne Kalotay that combines personal history with notorious events in human history.  Flashbacks from Stalin-era Russia combine with the modern life of a Russian defector, Nina Revskaya, once famous as a Bolshoi ballerina.  As she enters her final years, she decides to have a Sotheby's-style auction house sell her gems...purportedly to donate the funds to the Arts.  However, it soon becomes clear that she has more personal reasons to divest of the jewelry-some of the pieces harbor memories that are too painful to hold on to. 

In the meantime, Drew, the auction house assistant, is charged with the task of determining the provenance of the pieces.  A mystery arises as a new pendant is anonymously donated...one that would appear to be linked with Nina's set.  The significance is clear:  there's more to the story than Nina is willing to reveal.  And it is the verification of the jewels history that becomes a story of assumptions and lies, and the betrayals that come as a result from them.

The story was well paced, and plot twists developed that kept the mystery going.  I also found the in-depth portrayal of the auction house's job of verifying historical jewelry fascinating.  However, I had a few issues with the substance of the novel overall.  One, I got the impression almost that a formula was being followed...'reveal this much detail at a time, then hold back, move on, and sprinkle foreshadowing liberally'.  It worked, but once completed, the novel felt a bit manipulated.  Another thing was I think the author wanted to show two powerful, independent women in action;  and yet, both women (Drew and Nina) lacked warmth and were really kind of boring.  The men in the story-Grigori and Viktor-were far more interesting and vibrant to read about.  The women seemed passive in comparison.

The flashbacks of Russia were of the most basic historical components:  poets, vodka, intellectual suppression, mysterious arrests, the ballet, corruption, and poverty.  In other words, there was nothing new added that dipped beneath a mere surface knowledge of "Russia 101."  I would have loved if the book could have added historical details that would have revealed more complexity to the characters, in the way Vasily Grossman's Everything Flows uncovered a pain that explained its character's actions with more humanity.   And yet, to someone unfamiliar with Russian history, they might find it a good introduction to the unique events of the region's history. 

               Special thanks to Katherine Beitner of Harper Collins for the Review Copy.