In this unusual story, a woman in Jerusalem has died alone, her body unclaimed. The only clue to her identity, is a pay slip from the bakery where she once worked. She is eventually identified as Yulia Ragayev (the only person ever actually named in the story) who emigrated not long ago with a long lost boyfriend. The human resources manager from the bakery is charged with figuring out what to do with the body. He is a middle aged man with a failing marriage and little joy in his life. This mundane task becomes an epic journey as he tilts at bureaucratic windmills in an effort to take Yulia back to her home in a dismal frozen part of Soviet Russia. He meets many characters along the way, none are named but each represent a life experience to be reckoned with. It is a short book (237 pages) that reads almost like a long parable for what life requires of us to do our best, to maintain our humanity, to define who we are.
Monday, February 15, 2021
Call Your Daughter Home by Deb Spera
Annie is the matriarch of the powerful Cole family of Branchville, South Carolina in 1924. The suicide of her young son has shattered the family and caused a long estrangement with her two grown daughters.
Gertie, poor and abused by her drunken husband, is desperate to make sure her four daughters won't suffer the same sad life. Working for Miss Annie's Sewing Circle could be her way out.
Retta is a first generation freed slave employed by Miss Annie. Her life is complicated when she challenges the skepticism of the residents of the black community of Shake Rag by taking in Gertie and her children.
Desperate times call for desperate measures for all of them but there is a dark secret they share that brings the lives of these three women to a dramatic climax. I am always fascinated by southern stories where race/class is so well defined and yet the lives of both races is so entwined. And it is particularly true of these women.
Salvador by Joan Didion
If you were a grown-up in the 70's, you remember the Civil War in El Salvador - a bunch of bad minded military driven groups with initials that it was difficult to keep straight. And then there was the USA with their noses and weapons where they probably shouldn't have been. Didion is the master at putting a clarifying lens to significant events and issues in history. War is always about greed and power with the greatest loss coming to the people who never have anything to gain by the war in the first place. The war ended in 1992 and this was written in 1994. Enough time to provide perspective? Recovery is yet to come. The book is short but nothing sweet about it.
Friday, February 12, 2021
This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger
In 1932, Odie O'Banion and his older brother Albert have had it with life in the Lincoln Indian Training School in Minnesota. They may have be white but are just as poor and even more isolated. With the help of Mose Washington, a young Sioux who had his tongue cut off when he was young, they devise a plan to escape. The plan becomes action when a fatal accident makes it necessary to leave immediately. Another tragedy adds little Emmy Frost to this band of lost children. In true Huck Finn manner their journey is fraught with both danger and unexpected kindness. It is another look at life during the Depression and a time when social struggles tended toward a sense of communal support not selfish hoarding and is all framed by Krueger's love for this part of the world.
A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende
During the Spanish Civil War, Roser a talented musician falls in love with Guilliam, a passionate Republican. He dies in the war and Roser, pregnant and unmarried, escapes to a refugee camp in France. Guilliam's brother Victor, a medic in the war, finds her and hatches a plan for their escape to South America but to make it work there must be a sham marriage between the two of them. And so the real story begins. They board the ship Winnipeg, an escape route organized by the poet Pablo Neruda, and head for Chile. We observe the plight of the immigrant and struggles against the code of economic status. We watch a practical relationship become something much more. We see the political world shift through Salvador Allende and Pinochet. We hear wise observations that echo the world we are living in now and pause to consider the poetry of Neruda that begins each chapter. It is a universal story and a hopeful one, rich in history and sometimes surprisingly snarky - but maybe that's just the translation 😏
The Prague Sonata by Bradford Morrow
An act of kindness results in a gift - a single movement of a sonata - to young a music student at Columbia University. Meta Taverner is intrigued by the unidentified work and the story shared by the elderly woman who had protected the sonata. It is clearly old - and beautiful. That story leads her on a quest to find the rest of the sonata and identify the composer. Is it possible it was written by ...well can't give that part away. Her journey takes her to Europe and the reader back to the Prague of WWl and beyond. The story unfolds back and forth between the historical and the contemporary. Rich in history and in music theory - which you don't need to technically understand to recognize its significance - you are drawn from one piece of the puzzle to the next. Music lovers will understand the passion for the search but anyone will enjoy the mystery and romance of the time and place.