"The Elegance of the Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbery

There come times when you hope you aren’t the boy who cried “Wolf!” too often, whose statements about this or that book have caused calluses to grow in people’s hearts and not to trust their devoted reviewer. If they have, I want to take it all back and beg you to trust me about this book. A bestseller in Europe, highly praised wherever it was reviewed (this space will be no exception), “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” will stun you with its own elegance, with its erudition, and with its wisdom.

Originally published in 2006 in France as “L’élégance du hérisson,” this marvelous second novel of Muriel Barbery charts the highly refined intellectual journey of a fifty-four-year-old Paris concierge from isolation to a full, loving embrace of her life and loved ones. Our heroine, Madame Michel, has read deeply and widely of the world’s narrative masterpieces, and has delected the great art of the world, recognizes and appreciates the world’s great music, and is more than passingly familiar with the themes of modern philosophy. And in her strong intelligence, her reading bears the fruit of a highly sophisticated wisdom. (However, all is not Tolstoy, Mozart, and Vermeer: at a critical juncture in the narrative, Madame Michel finds meaning and persuasion in a lyric by rap artist Eminem.)

Madame Michel’s narrative alternates with that of Paloma, an unhappy young girl who is part of a family that lives in the apartment building. Each in her own way, they ponder the function and effect of Art in our lives, and jointly their understanding has a deep and highly persuasive effect on us. The book is completely beguiling – a delight to read and thought-provoking in the extreme. Mme Barbery brings us into the confidence of these two very different-but-similar female characters. We love Madame Michel and learn to love Paloma as the book proceeds, and the alliance of the two is too brief – we regret that it can’t take up more of the story – such is the author’s effectiveness with her characters.

I need also to devote a moment to the seamless and virtuosic translation by the novelist Alison Anderson. This could not have been an easy book to translate, but this just might be better than Michael Hulse’s rendering in English of W.G. Sebald’s “The Emigrants.”

For most of this unique book, philosophical considerations share space with skewerings of modern manners and pretension. The fact that such beautiful and heartbreaking love unfolds late in its pages just strikes me as miraculous, and a tribute to Mme Barbery’s powers. I doubt very seriously if I will a better book this year.

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"The Emigrants" by W. G. Sebald

“The Emigrants” affects us very deeply, and it does this with a subtle, relentless buildup of man’s inhumanity to our chief characters, who are quite a sympathetic lot. This book has woven its enigmatic spell on some highly prominent readers, like Cynthia Ozick, Michael Dirda, Susan Sontag, and A.S. Byatt. W.G. Sebald brought this book out in German in 1992, and I want to give extra props to the translator, Michael Hulse, who captures the somber and straightforward prose so beautifully. This gem requires and deserves your attention like only a few other books.

The book’s main framework consists of a first-person narrator’s efforts to research the history of relatives and acquaintances who left Germany or other European countries for England in the 20th Century. In due course we learn these characters were fleeing Nazi ascendancy. The brief first section actually focuses on a seemingly random individual, but in fact, the character of Dr. Selwyn sets the tone for all the other emigrants: “The years of the second war, and the decades after, were a blinding, bad time for me, about which I could not say a thing, even if I wanted to.” Shortly after moving away from the property the narrator and his wife had rented from the doctor, they learn of his suicide. The lives of the other characters often lead them to suicide, too.

The language in this quiet unquiet book makes us think of simple magazine pieces, written to elucidate the lives of some individual or other. The tone is rather light and distant, and never threatens to bog the reader down in emotion. But impossible to miss: the devastation of the Diaspora and the utter impossibility of remembering or discussing the Nazi regime. The first section, a kind of introduction although not marked as such, concludes with our narrator realizing that the dead come back to us, and he further concludes that they deserve to have their stories told.

A series of characters take us, Virgil-like, through varied versions of hell, but these are hells of frustration, of inefficacy. There is no help on Earth for the despised and reviled Jew. Sections dealing with two prominent characters take into account these characters’ visits to respective cities, each freighted with symbolic importance. The narrator’s great-uncle Ambros travels with his master to Jerusalem just before the First World War. They find a practical ruin. Everywhere, springs have dried up, once-spectacular buildings and temples have sunk and fallen, waste clogs the streets, and the city, even with its untold shrines, churches, and missions, appears abandoned. Later in the book, the narrator moves to Manchester, in the U.K., the onetime humming hub of the Industrial Revolution. There he visits with Max Ferber, an artist convinced of his own failure, and who works at painting in an odd, physical way, that leaves dried paint droppings and coal dust inches deep on the floor of his studio. Here too, the once proud, globally important city falls into ruin, dries up, its heyday long past.

And there it is: the center of the Jewish faith, the symbolic pinnacle which believers the world over acknowledge and cherish, lies devastated. All holy places, temples, shrines, and significant symbols – gone. And commerce, that other stalwart leg on which the Jewish community stood, lay in ruins as well. All crumbles to dust, forgotten in history's ultimate pogrom.

There is much here to explore and much to admire. I have not made a study of the critical literature that follows this book, but suffice it to say the language serves its ends splendidly, by placing before us, unadorned, the frank and violent prejudices that last to this day. Sebald shows us the great black hole: the unnamed and unspoken-of decades surrounding World War II, and the devastation they wreaked on a wide variety of individuals. A somber read, yes, but I promise you, a worthwhile one, one which won’t drag you down, but only make you think. And make you wonder at its creator, W.G. Sebald, and his unforgettable artistry.

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"Tinkers" by Paul Harding

Every book has its individualism. Every book has the chords that it plays, and its events, its moods, its peculiar light. “Tinkers” by Paul Harding has gray and black, done in chiaroscuro, contrasting hues that represent the universe and the deep insides of people’s souls. This remarkable, dense little book presents so many challenges in its brief pages – it’s like slicing into a geode of quartz and finding that the crystals lead to other mountain ranges, which you would have to shrink to go to, before returning to your normal size. I’m glad to quote Marilynne Robinson here, however obvious and inadequate it is: “‘Tinkers’ is truly remarkable.”

Instinct tells me that propounding the plot would do this book a disservice, but maybe we’ll let it take us to an appreciation. “Tinkers” consists of the story of father and son, each their own type of tinker. The father is the itinerant kind, who tries to make a living driving a cart with goods for sale around the countryside during the first quarter of the 20th century. The story also introduces his son, who approaches death’s door at the novel’s outset. The narrative features in stunning and clear language, the conflict that arises when individuals throw in together but are hopelessly, grandly, mismatched in their abilities to cope with life and the world. That, however, makes up but a small part of the energy and raison d’être of this book.

The salient outward event of the story comes when Howard, the older character, realizes his wife wants to institutionalize him because of his epilepsy, and he leaves her and his family one night during the dinner hour and never goes back. The following passage, illuminating his understanding that he has misread his wife’s taciturn ways, gives a glimpse at the depth of feeling Harding evokes, and the soaring language he puts in his tinker/poet’s mind. As he drives past his own house and his own family seated to dinner, never to return, we can hear him wail:

“God hear me weep because I let myself think all is well if I am fully stocked with both colors of shoeshine and beeswax for the wooden tables, sea sponge and steel wool for dirty dishes. God hear me weep as I fill out receipts for tin buckets and slip hooch into pockets for cash, and tell people about my whip-smart sons and beautiful daughters … because my wife’s silence is not the forbearance of decent, stern people who fear You; it is the quiet of outrage, of bitterness. It is the quiet of biding time. God forgive me. I am leaving.”

Such is the strength of Harding’s diction; page after page contains language powerful enough to startle us and make us pause, to make us pull out our notebooks and transcribe at length. Another I must share: on the day Howard’s mother takes his own failing father away into the care of others, “My mother opened the outside door and the light came in and carved every object in the kitchen into an ancient relic. I could not imagine what people had ever done with iron skillets or rolling pins.” In the interests of space, I will not relay any of the numerous other examples so chock-filling this book.

I will, however, observe that Mr. Harding includes a vein running through the story, consisting of a high-toned phenomenology embraced by Howard, by any measure the main character. Our first glimpse comes when Howard imagines what happens when his grand mal seizures hit. He perceives that a door opens, a door which in normal times is disguised as the natural world, and that needles of a constantly-flowing electricity find him and stick fast to him, cleaving him in the middle, holding and holding to something inside him. Howard wonders at the forces that find him at these moments. He thinks he sees death from a different vantage from ordinary humans; he is allowed glimpses of the cosmos other must die to see. Aside from this admittedly inadequate discussion, please let me assure any potential reader that this facet of the story is worth the price of admission itself, and raises the chicken-and-egg question: is Howard a poet because of his affliction, or is he blessed with these hard-won insights because of his poetic nature?

Father and son are both tinkers; the son collects antique clocks, fixes and maintains them in his business. We read a series of excerpts in the book, from an 18th-century guide to repairing clocks, which are tinged with the supernatural and philosophical. These are in fact, fitting additions to the off-the-charts language employed here. The story presents the universe as an impossibly complex machine, not unlike an antique clock. In the final flashback showing a healthy GW Crosby (the son tinker), the author guides us to the dark basement, with its numerous ticking clocks and its dark wallpaper. A solitary 40-watt wall lamp illuminates the workbench, and a grandchild is instructed to watch as GW hums and tinkers to no apparent effect. On rare occasions the tick-tocking of all the clocks would synchronize, only to diffuse again into a chaotic pattern. And then in this dark, apparently boring scene, our heroic author lets the child-guest watch the dust float in the light of the jeweler’s lamp and imagine “miniaturized ships exploring inner space: The giant is fixing the time machine.” Thus does Harding turn our space and time inside out, miniaturizing space travel and making a tinker’s basement into the center of the universe.

Time and perception blur as we grope our way along this unique trail. Like David Mitchell and Marilynne Robinson, Paul Harding once again reinforces why we read, why we look forward to the next experience of crackin' open a new one.

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"The Great Fire" by Shirley Hazzard

In this exceptional story, Shirley Hazzard gives us the eternal story of Aldred and Helen, thrown together in the chaotic and threatening aftermath of the Second World War. He's a major in the British Army who re-upped at war's end to study the effects of war on old cultures. She is the daughter of horrid and ambitious parents and has a terminally ill brother to whom she is devoted. She's loyal, erudite, fifteen years Aldred's junior, and falls unalterably in love with him. War's fortunes and the designs of empires unfortunately separate them and put an entire world between them - he is sent back the the U.K., and Helen goes with her family to her father's new posting in New Zealand.

There are several Great Fires here. One is World War II itself, and one is specifically the bombing of Hiroshima. Another is Aldred and Helen's love. Ms. Hazzard's prose comes across as reserved and cautionary, but is deeply touched by what we witness. The intellect and the heart are both deep, and deeply affected. Our author inspires awe at our renewed understanding of the power of language.

Our hero Aldred is a very virtuous man. He hides his severe wounds,which are physical as well as emotional. He is aghast in the wake of war and weary in the role of occupier (his superiors assign him to a study of Hiroshima after The Bomb). His friends and colleagues see it, too: one potential rival for Helen's heart gives up the field when he comes to know Aldred better.

Besides a very memorable love story, this is also the story of civilization and hope surviving cataclysm. (Not to spoil anything, but the force of Helen's and Aldred's love will at length not be denied.) Helen's beloved brother dies, and the cataclysm becomes close and personal. Aldred helps people in the U.K. - our author never flinches in her willingness to protray sympathetic characters - minor heroes - of either sex or any age. (The secondary characters would make a very fertile area of study.)

I honor Ms. Hazzard. I recommend this piece in the highest terms possible. Would that she produced fiction more often - I will definitely be taking up her other novels. Wow.

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"Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson

In "Housekeeping" Marilynne Robinson establishes herself as the very best of living American authors. This novel perches on the fraught balance between living and dead, drowning and flying, orthodox and outcast.

In a lonely town in the Far West, where "the history of the world happened elsewhere," there is a house owned by Sylvie and Ruth's family. Sylvie is Ruth's aunt and is very little more than a drifter. Lucille is Ruth's younger sister and she occupies the house. This remote town sits on the shore of Lake Fingerbone, a deep and dark expanse of water that has claimed, in circumstances dark or disastrous or both, the lives of some of Ruth's forebears, including her mother. Sylvie comes back to the house with Ruth, but has no intention of staying. In one of the book's very significant episodes she and Ruth try to traverse the lake by crawling along the railroad bridge that arches over the water, and although this attempt fails, we know where Sylvie's heart, and eventually Ruth's too, lie. They want to traverse Fingerbone (to abjure working their fingers to the bone, as it were), take to the road, and see what tomorrow brings. They ultimately do not want the anchor of the house. Lucille, the orthodox member of the family, cannot understand the impulse, and is completely willing to settle down and make a go of things. Every feeling we get from this character is that she will succeed at it.

This was my introduction to Ms. Robinson, and I was completely stunned, awestruck. Her striking gift with words is well-known (see "Gilead" and "Home" and assorted non-fiction), but it's her gift with the larger issues in her stories that sweeps me away here. She poses an age-old question: how do you measure success in life? Are our hopes for material success doomed endlessly? Is an orthodox career through life as heavy as a lake, as suffocating as a bottomless body of water?

This is one of the best books I have ever read, or will ever read. Ms. Robinson fills me with wonder at her conception and her execution. Read it for the thrill of having a classic in the author's lifetime.

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"Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language" by Seth Lerer

Anyone interested in a concise, engaging history of English, look no further than Professor Seth Lerer's "Inventing English." This splendid little book (266 pages plus appendices) has superb, easily-digested detail when the subject warrants it, and glosses over long periods when they provide no instructive changes. I had the sensation while reading it, of flying over the subject at 35,000 feet, and then plunging to the surface of minute detail at strategic stops along the way.

We have a simple, straightforward section on Old English (or Anglo-Saxon), one of a family of Germanic and Scandinavian languages. I had not understood in such clear terms the extent of post-Conquest class difference which one's language indicated: if you spoke Anglo-Norman (William's language), you were privileged; if you spoke Anglo-Saxon, you were the newly bereft, untouchable. The chapter on Chaucer gave me a better understanding of this brillant and sardonic poet than any past study. He did not invent Middle English, but he did perform a stunning conflation of its mix of sources, syntax, politics, and mutability. While doing so, he hearkened back to some Old English structure and practices. He also understood the subject of post-Conquest language in England to be a highly charged political issue.

Prof. Lerer provides no dry, date-giving overview. He includes spicy, provocative exegeses along the way of anonymous Anglo-Saxon versifiers, and in turn, Chaucer, Shakespeare (to a somwhat lesser depth, however), Milton, Dr. Johnson and Emily Dickinson in a particularly head-turning juxtaposition, Mark Twain, and Ralph Ellison. (I will never think of the quote "I yam what I am!" in the way same again.)

Professor Lerer (he's the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Stanford) engages us throughout this book; this was its principal surprise for me. He takes his reader along for a joyous ride, full of wisdom and telling anecdote. I found myself assiduously taking notes, with a lot more enthusiasm than ever I did in linguistics class. Some exposure to linguistics, in fact, would be helpful as you approach this book, but is certainly not essential. This book is made for the language-loving lay person.

I generally get my books at the library. But his one, I'm thinking, I'm going to have to go out and buy. I'm going to want to return to it pretty often. It's full of intriguing information, engagingly presented. Lovers of the English language will love this. I did and do.

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"Pretend All Your Life" by Joseph L. Mackin

Where to start with the themes, symbols, and moral stance in this magnificent little novel? Richard Gallin, M.D., plastic surgeon, collector and alterer of masks, promiser of a better life, vain aspirer to honor, has lost his son in the 9/11 bombings. It’s obviously impossible to tell; there are no survivors, are there?

At the novel’s outset, Dr. Gallin, in the wake of the attack on the Twin Towers, seems unable to get back on track – his relationship is deteriorating because of his own boorishness, his practice is sinking, his assets erode as his debts mount. He’s also being hounded by a second-rate journalist who is trying to avenge his lover’s firing by Dr. Gallin because the lover, a surgical nurse, had contracted HIV. He meets an art dealer/appraiser who greatly admires his collection of African tribal masks, and who agrees to find a buyer for them. Apparently she also greatly admires Dr. Gallin; and that same night the flabbergasting, miraculous appearance of a new character triggers a series of events and consequences that spiral beyond control.

This tight-knit, closed-within-itself piece brims over with moral questions – or perhaps has a single answer to all our ethical quandaries: you may think you know the answer, but chances are you don’t, and even if you did, there is no way to ensure an act is right, anyway. Dr. Gallin felt he had no alternative but to dismiss the surgical nurse on his staff because the man had contracted HIV. The man’s lover, an unhappy aspiring novelist, attempts to extort money – on ethical grounds – from Dr. Gallin to avenge the firing. Dr. Gallin is mugged and stabbed, only to be rescued by a local immigrant tough, to whom the doctor makes the promise of a new appearance and a renewed chance at life once he does the doctor’s dirty work on the extortionist.

Life and death flow through and around our protagonist. An extremely memorable fictional invention, Dr. Gallin struggles in the end to find the right way, to give of himself so that others may live a better life. Mostly. The motif of the masks is brilliant, and when you ally it with the unfinished sculpture by the doctor’s widowed daughter-in-law, it reverberates with added meaning. The characters’ personal internal processes convince and compel, they lift us up and take us along, as we feel the pain and doubt. The book relies slightly too much on coincidence, but we forgive this completely, for the sharp physical focus, and the contemplative rewards we get along the way.

My congratulations to Mr. Mackin. I recommend this unreservedly. How is it that a debut piece can be so polished, deep, and effective?

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"The Gathering" by Anne Enright

The occasion of her brother's death triggers a harrowing spiral of memory and soul-searching in Veronica Hegarty, a 39-year-old Dublin wife and mother. Veronica comes from a family of 12 children, but it is not a particularly close family. Veronica, her (now dead) brother Liam, and little sister Kitty were shunted off together to live with their grandmother for extended stretches of their childhoods. During these stays in a Dublin neighborhood called Broadstone, Veronica and her brother suffer at the hands of their grandmother's landlord.

In "The Gathering" Anne Enright captures in the first person the oblique, lurching brush with madness induced in the surviving sister - a stunning achievement. The sentences in this novel - the recorded thoughts of an angry, haunted woman - rush and burrow and spike their way into Veronica's and our conscious view. Veronica struggles her way through a crisis, and decides after a half-hearted attempt at running away, that maybe she'll embrace her life.

The language in "The Gathering" slowly and subtly gains clarity, perfectly reflecting the hero/narrator's state of mind. The dramatic internal dialogue is the V-8 engine roaring under the hood of this suped-up vehicle. Don't look for an intricate plot; the intricacies here involve the internal struggle to come to grips with a highly toxic past - some of us succeed and some don't. Veronica's brother Liam committed suicide under the burden.

Ms. Enright has written a remarkable book in a way that defies expectation or definition or classification. It's a highly personal, scary, death-defying journey that won the Man Booker Prize, and for this reviewer, there is no wonder in that at all.

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"Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish" by Richard Flanagan

Sometimes the buzz surrounding a book crashes through my everyday. Such is the case with "Gould's Book of Fish," a story ultimately about the brutal strength of empire and the truly callous way science applied itself in the service of accepted wisdom in the 19th century.

The prison surgeon, an obese, self-absorbed, and manically ambitious individual, assigns Billy Gould, a small-time forger and crook, the job of painting the various species of fish caught by the surgeon and others. Additionally, the camp's commandant, himself an impostor wearing a gold mask, is skimming funds from the government to build a new city-state in this island off the coast of Tasmania. Well, the surgeon, who wanted to advance the art of Enlightenment classification, is killed and eaten by his pet pig and becomes "the largest pig turd on the planet." The commandant, too, comes to an appropriately ghastly end. But these plot particulars do not begin to inform you about this remarkable, outrageous outlier of a book. Flanagan blesses his reader with a very healthy dose of the outlandish, the impossible. There is an ultimate metamorphosis in the book which I will not spoil. The triumph of the book for the author is in its unbelievably inventive plot devices and prose. The triumph for the reader and the main character is the final transcendence over the Enlightenment's compunction to classify everything (including aboriginals as sub-human), and the madness of Britain's imperial and penal systems.

Oh my gosh! If you've missed this one so far, you should definitely open it up. Its plot elements may not be for everyone, but the theme of man's inhumanity etc. etc. is universal.

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"Tree of Smoke" by Denis Johnson

Perhaps the ultimate novelistic treatment of the origins of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, "Tree of Smoke" is an epic, a quick read, and really centers around the power of lies. This is gigantic, heroic stuff.

The narrative focuses on a young CIA officer assigned to Vietnam in 1961, Skip Sands. Skip is the nephew of the near-mythic, and definitely delusional Frank Sands, a colonel in (presumably) military intelligence, and one major driving force behind American intervention. Other characters also bob and eddy in Frank's wake, in particular a sergeant named Jimmy Storm. His real name, it turns out is B.S., and in this B.S. Storm, we have a distillation of one of the main thrusts of this novel.

Skip butts heads with B.S. on his way to ultimate disillusionment. At the end, besides being a man wanted by the authorities, Skip feels he must assert the truth of Frank's demise, against all those who want to believe he's alive.

I have to congratulate Denis Johnson on the effort throughout, but there is one episode that seals this novel's greatness for me. B.S. forces a shady local man to help him determine some piece of intelligence or other - this is very late in the game, after the Colonel is dead (I think - it's been well over a year since I read this). In the course of guiding Sgt. B.S. Storm to this remote location, the man and the sergeant have to go through a maze-like cave system. They get briefly lost, and thoroughly covered in bat guano. Ultimately, they both fall from a hole six or eight feet to the ground, emerging from the cave into the light, having been "shat" to the ground. I thought this was a sort of summation, a highly appropriate treatment for our master BS-er.

This is masterful, vivid, and powerful. The very distinctive language of the American soldier in Vietnam - part battlefield stress, part drug addlement, part military slang, and all insubordination - is wonderfully, distractingly, on display here. I shake my head in wonder. This is one to definitely take up. Most definitely.

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"Wedding of the Waters: the Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation" by Peter L. Bernstein

A superb, comprehensive, well-detailed history of the planning and building of the Erie Canal. Begun at a time (1817) when there was not one professional civil engineer in the U.S., the canal's proponents overcame Washington's indifference, immense physical challenges, and roiling New York State politics to build their water highway. By cutting nine tenths of the time and expense of moving goods from the Midwest to Atlantic seaports, the Canal made the economic development of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys possible. It also catapulted New York State into an eminent position in the Union, having abjured federal help; pushed New York City into world-class status; made Chicago the second-most important city in the U.S.; served as a model for federal funding of the Civil War; and vaulted America into the limelight as a world power. Not bad for a serviceable little ditch.

Bernstein weaves a fascinating tale of the indomitable political will it took to even sell the idea to the bond-buying public. The story includes the stunning ingenuity of the men responsible for the work, and it's all placed perfectly in the context of the canal-crazy era. This is wonderful - not to be missed.

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"The Other" by David Guterson

While I was reading it and afterward, I could not escape the notion that "The Other" by David Guterson deals with a shadow character, a rumored extension of the first-person narrator, a superego. Neil Countryman, our narrator, makes the acquaintance of John William Barry, the eponymous Other, during a half-mile race in high school. They become close friends, and Barry's character becomes clearer over time, and over time it becomes more and more intolerant.

Barry is a young man of considerable abilities who holds himself and everyone else to outrageous standards. He's an over-the-top idealist who depends on Neil to keep him in contact with the outside world. In fact, at length he separates himself from the rest of the world by going to live in a remote cave on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. From this height he comes to depend completely on the down-to-earth aid Neil can and does give him. Eventually a snowstorm prevents Neil from bringing up the needed food and supplies, and when he finally gets to the Other's cave, he finds him dead. Later, when the authorities finally find him, Neil discovers he is the sole heir to Barry's very considerable estate, hundreds of millions.

This is one of those stories that provokes the highest kind of speculation in me. As I ponder the relationship of the two men, how irresistible it is to think how the uncompromising idealist-hermit represents the higher, more virtuous plane, and how living on that plane necessarily alienates you from society. Our earth-bound narrator eventually receives a mind-boggling financial legacy - isn't it something like learning what true virtue is - in the sense that it is of inestimable value?

David Guterson has produced a masterpiece, a novel for the ages. His prose, as always, is wonderful, and is one aspect of the book that stirred these deep thoughts in me. Each sentence and paragraph serves the higher shining truth - is an exhibit of supporting evidence. I think he ranks as the finest living American author - alongside Marilynne Robinson. If you seriously read fiction, read this.

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"In the Fall" by Jeffrey Lent

Powerful, sweeping, epic, gripping, brutally honest - these things and more describe Jeffrey Lent's debut novel, "In the Fall."

We meet one of the key players, a monster named Lex Mebane, quite late in the book. He owns and tries to rape a young slave woman, Leah, during the Civil War. She happens to be his half-sister and about the same age as he. She crowns him with a frying pan, leaves him in a heap, escapes North Carolina, and reaches Vermont in the company of a returning veteran named Norman Pelham. This book captures the outrage that the marriage of the two engenders.

The grandson of this union, Foster Pelham, is sixteen at the conclusion of this story, and travels from Vermont with his girlfriend to North Carolina to try to discover what happened. He finds Lex alive and unrepentant, but unable to control his desire to tell Foster the story. He does so and wants Foster to deliver some kind of retribution. Foster declines, preferring to leave him there with his memory and debilitating guilt.

The characters in this novel act from real and understandable motives; they not only engage us, they make us live our lives alongside them. This book's length and epic subject exhausted and exhilarated me. It is stunning, weighty, vivid, and rewarding. It's quite perfectly unbelievable that this is Lent's first book.

Take it up! Take it up!

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"John Adams" by David McCullough

This admiring, comprehensive biography is must reading for any student of the American Revolution, or anyone interested in American history at all. Also, it's the best biography I've ever read.

We follow Adams's career from his defense of the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre, to the two Continental Congresses, the wartime diplomatic missions, to his administration as his country's first-ever Vice President, and its second President. What the masterful David McCullough also gives us are the essential roles Adams played in bringing the country into being.

John Adams was vital to the selection of Washington to command the revolutionary army, to securing badly needed foreign funding during the war, along with Ben Franklin choosing Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence, and most impressive on an impressive list, the design of the three houses of government, the Legislative, the Judicial, and the Executive through the drafting of the Constitution.

We rightfully call Washington the Father of his Country. We need to find a distinguishing nickname for Adams, like the Godfather of his Country, or the cranky old Great-Uncle of his Country. Something.

I came away from the book with a very deep appreciation of Adams, obviously. So will you. This is must reading.

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"His Excellency: George Washington" by Joseph Ellis

This is my first introduction to Washington's motivation, his hopes and dreams as he led the rag-tag Continental Army against the strongest nation on earth. Washington was a fervent believer in the Enlightenment ideals of the rights of man, and led a nation to throw over its colonizer, and then with just as much conviction, retired to country life.

One of Washington's basic urges was to own and develop some trans-Appalachian land. To this end he worked for decades on a canal from what is now Tennessee and Kentucky to the Potomac River. He saw the Revolution not only as an assertion of liberty for him and his countrymen, but as a tremendous personal opportunity.

"His Excellency" takes us from Washington's early days as a suveyor (which made him familiar with the land west of Virginia), through his days as a colonial officer in the British Army (at whose hands his mistreatment made for a durable grievance). The Great Man's motivations and abilities come into high focus in this excellent, highly readable account. No less an expert than King George III said that if someone were to lead the American Colonies to freedom, and then retire without a thought to dynasty, he truly would be a great man. Yep. That's right.

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"The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro

This is the story of the butler Stevens, who grasps impossibly late at a love he discovers could have been his. Written in the stilted, convoluted, impervious-to-intimacy language of Stevens’s thought processes, “The Remains of the Day” chronicles a brief period near the end of our sad hero’s life: he takes several days off from his position at a great English country house to drive partway across the country to see his old co-worker Miss Kenton.

It becomes clear through a series of reminiscences that Miss Kenton in her proper way offered affection, and more, to Stevens, when she was on the household staff with him. Stevens plain doesn’t see it; this sort of thing is alien to him. In any event he ignores her.

The two served Lord Darlington, a prominent politician during World War II. One strong undercurrent in Stevens’s and Miss Kenton’s conflict is their master’s affinity for Nazi Germany. Lord Darlington sets up an ill-fated conference at the estate to try to influence the British Government in favor of the Nazis. It is shortly after this that Miss Kenton leaves Lord Darlington’s employ, Lord Darlington is disgraced in the wake of the War, the home comes into the hands of an American and the staff is cut to the barest bones. The American gentleman, Mr. Farraday, banters playfully with Stevens, who, ever the loyal servant, struggles to appreciate the humor and possibly add his own repartee. Farraday at length makes Stevens take a short leave from the house, he should take the Ford and go for a drive. The drive is the narrative backdrop, as Stevens tries figuratively to leave his rigid self and travel across a county or two to see Miss Kenton.

The fascist undertone to Stevens’s employment is extremely important to Mr. Ishiguro’s point here. Stevens is one of literature’s supreme fascists – he represses his own feelings ruthlessly and refuses to countenance anyone else’s; it simply isn’t in the job description, this emotional stuff. Miss Kenton’s departure from the estate comes about at least partly because of Stevens’s fastness on this point. With her departure go Stevens’s chances at joy.

Mr. Ishiguro’s impeccable diction, which laces the novel up tightly; the conceit of the English manor and its Lord’s fascist tendencies (perfectly symbolizing Stevens’s closely-held emotions); the narrative action in which Stevens takes a break and drives away so late in life to find love’s potential – these all lend depth and greatness to his deservedly praised novel. Take up and enjoy! Repeat as desired! I know I will.

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"Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" by Haruki Murakami

I have never been taken to the realm of the "other" so successfully nor so beguilingly as by Murakami in this dual tale of technology, mystery, and danger. This book is part polemic about modern technology, and where it might take us, and part cautionary piece on where we might be without it. Are the two story lines exactly alike? Are they simply telling the same story in two separate historical epochs?

One narrative thread takes us to the near future, where the hero’s brain is used to store data, and he loses consciousness when the data is retrieved. Thugs pursue this protagonist for what’s on his mind, and the “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” story involves a scary, almost-dystopian future full of intrigue and danger. The “End of the World” thread is set in a non-specific dark age without technology, but in which the hero listens to the skulls of the dead as they sing to him.

If this sounds odd, there’s a very good reason for it. It is odd. And vivid and challenging and breathtaking and wonderful. This is pyrotechnic Murakami, weaving a spell. This is mysterious Murakami, challenging us to decide, from his out-of-this-world plot, what could he be driving at? Murakami holds his eminent place in the world of literature, as polarizing as he is, for very, very good reasons. For a trip to a place the cosmologists call the “absolute elsewhere,” this book is your magic carpet.
This is as stunning and as innovative as it gets.

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"Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell

“Cloud Atlas” takes us, wide-eyed and agape, through a cautionary Matryoshka doll of a novel, where hero after hero vies with and suffers from the whims and prejudices of those in power. This book stands as a brilliant testimony and reinforcement of why we take up reading in the first place. Mr. Mitchell echoes the South Seas observations of Robert Louis Stevenson, the crime mysteries of John D. MacDonald, and the dystopian future of Margaret Atwood. In each vividly wrought milieu, the author draws out the plight of a person or group as it strains against the tyranny of the day.

This innovative structure arrests any reader who expects a continuous narrative. At the abrupt conclusion of the first section, set in the 19th Century in the South Pacific, we are thrust forward to Europe, between the World Wars. From the intrigue and exploitation of an amanuensis by a famous composer, we rush forward to the 1970s and a plot involving murder as a corporate strategy by a California nuclear utility. From whence we rush to the years at the turn of the 20th to the 21st Centuries, and the tribulations of a man whom relatives want to confine against his will simply because he turned 60. Then come the futuristic visions, which turn progressively uglier and end in a post-apocalyptic world where all society and technology and culture have vanished. The ultimate of these brings us back to sailing ships on the Pacific Ocean, but without any that the race has any civilizing features, or communal practices, or hopes, at all.

Mr. Mitchell then retraces his steps back through the narratives, providing some measure of resolution for each. Certain individuals bear the exact same birthmark, showing a further continuity for the story. As the narratives build up, the theme of the downtrodden vs. powerful repeats in ever-new and cruel ways. We sense early on that the effects: these clever reiterations will leave an indelible mark on our consciousness. We get what the author wants us to have, and we admire and thank him for the multiple insights. Repetition shows itself as patently the most effective way to focus on the theme: the powerful will wreak their predation and exploitation of weaker people and groups, with never an end in sight.

This is stunning: effective, awe-inspiring, memorable, reverberating. If you are serious about reading serious fiction, read this.

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"The Colour" by Rose Tremain

In Rose Tremain's "The Colour" we follow the lives of a man, his mother, and wife, who travel from Victorian England to New Zealand for the newly-discovered gold there. The story starts off slowly, with the rigors of 19th-century round-the-world travel and the cloud under which the trio leaves England. The cloud really hovers over Joseph, the main force behind the move. His wife Harriet's story is told in some detail, and we believe her motivation in marrying Joseph, but we do open with the wrenching change of escape and seeming exile.

Joseph proves to be a secretive, grasping type, and has little consideration for the two women in his life. Living conditions appal us and them, and the two ladies try to put a life together as Joseph goes off to the fields. At length, Harriet goes in search of her errant husband, and at this point, this story really takes flight. We come to a gritty, all-too-real depiction of the raw greed and cruelty reigning at a mining camp, where Harriet meets a Chinese trader. For me, this episode proves that this is Harriet's story. She and this Chinese man become close and, in a soaring, lovely, dreamy part of the book, Harriet learns about herself, the possibilities of life and intimacy, and the full strangeness of the world. This couple secludes itself from prying eyes, and becomes enshrouded in clouds in its lonely mountainside nest. This man has no need of gold; he went to the fields to serve as a merchant to the prospectors. But he's left that behind, and subsists in a separate way. Harriet provides comfort and companionship and theirs is a compelling, devoted relationship. Harriet finds not only the gold of this man's love, but also gold of the more prosaic type, the "colour" so desperately sought by the grasping masses on the lower slopes. In the small stream running through their camp, Harriet spots a plentiful series of true nuggets, which the man has no interest in. The gold comes to those who do not seek it, but seek to give themselves away. So Harriet's manifold gain forms the center of this beautiful story, and when her beloved Chinese partner hears that his wife back in China needs him to come back, he abruptly leaves Harriet, who is nonetheless thoroughly enriched.

Rose Tremain holds a high place in my estimation, one of the highest. This story of Harriet's rewarded quest represents a deeply inspiring and gratifying tale, with sumptuous and vivid natural descriptions of nature and a soaring exploration of one woman's growth. Do yourself the great service of picking it up.

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"Prodigal Summer" by Barbara Kingsolver

This is a lovely tale of interweaving narratives, taking place in an Appalachian wilderness. Kingsolver's themes are survival of loss, the cycle of fertility, wildlife management - and the author deals with these themes in a lush, vivid, gratifying way. She brings quite a bit of expertise to the technical side, and truckloads of wisdom and compassion to the human side.

Amid the lush surroundings of a Southern Appalachain summer, three nearly independent stories play themselves out. We see the park ranger, a solitary, countrified, girl get caught up in a "Summer of Procreation," reflecting and participating in the lusty urges that take over in summer. This is also the thread in which the Ms. Kingsolver speaks through the ranger, admonishing a would-be coyote hunter of the unintended results of hunting.

Ms. Kingsolver also displays technical expertise in the sad but hopeful story of the transplanted city girl who is widowed but makes a new business opportunity from what is readily at hand.

I have seen objections to the author's perceived pontifications, but in this case, I see a balanced message, backed by a certain amount of science. And when it is propounded in such lush, vivid, captivating terms, the aesthete in me trounces any debating urge I might have. This is lovely. Take it up!

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