The Line, by Olga Grushin

This is for Historical Tapestry's blog challenge - L is for Line.

The line, a shuffling, sighing, gossiping organism starts hopefully, populated by people who aren't sure what exactly will be sold at the other end, or even when, but they all have their dreams. Anya hopes for a cake, an airy, sweet cake to color her drab existence. She lives with her husband in a loveless marriage, watching over their 17-year-old son and her mute mother, all caught in a tiny apartment but utter strangers to each other. As it becomes clear what the line does sell - tickets to a concert by a composer now banished to the West - the line becomes their family's life, the visceral representation of their government's wrongheadedness and repression, and then it transforms them.

This story is historical in the most magical way, blending the Soviet Union of the 1930s, the 1960s and the 1970s into a strange, timeless place never precisely identified (though the model is clear to the reader). Olga Grushin's language is similarly magical, as she brings both the characters and the stark, dim city where they live to sparkling, brilliant life. I first fell in love with Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov for her skillful blending of language and theme, and she does almost as well here. Sukhanov is a tough work to beat, and I highly recommend it, particularly to artists or those who love art (which sould be everyone, right?). The Line is a little more universal in its tale of human disappointment and hope, and perhaps just a touch less sharp for being so universal, but overall it's an excellent, excellent book.

If you're interested in learning more about Ms. Grushin (a Washington local, by the way), check out this interview with the great independent bookstore, Politics and Prose. Ms. Grushin came to the US in her teens, and (amazingly), English is not her native tongue.

The Known World by Edward P. Jones

This is for Historical Tapestry's blog challenge - K is for Known.

I am willing to bet you have never read a book like this before - unless you've read this one. The Known World is the story of black slave-owners in a fictious Virginia county, but it's also the story of the web of relationships that slavery built and destroyed. There's Caldonia, the newly-widowed mistress of the plantation her husband, a freed slave, built and populated with people still condemned to bondage. There's Moses, the black foreman who helped create that plantation and isn't sure where his heart lies. Plus Fern, the black woman who could have passed for white but never contemplated it, and Mister Robbins, the white slave owner who's both harsh overseer and racial diplomat, and many, many more. As all these characters move through the turbulent antebellum and Civil War periods, it's impossible not to get caught in their wake.

Written in a unique style that dips back and forth between attentive, tuneful omniscence and detached, anthropological chronicling, this book is a wonder. By just the first 7 pages the reader has experienced both:

"He paused before leaving the fields as the evening quiet wrapped itself around him. The mule quivered, wanting home and rest. Moses closed his eyes and bent down and took a pinch of the soil and ate it with no more than if it were a spot of cornbread. He worked the dirt around in his mouth and swallowed, leaning his head back and opening his eyes in time to see the strip of sun fade to dark blue and then to nothing."

And,

"In 1855 in Manchester County, Virginia, there were thirty-four free black families, with a mother and father and one child or more, and eight of those free families owned slaves, and all eight knew one another's business. When the War between the States came, the number of slave-owning blacks in Manchester would be down to five, and one of those included an extremely morose man who, according to the U.S. census of 1860, legally owned his own wife and five children and three grandchildren."

This is a great book, written by a fascinating (and local!) man. I won't be giving away my copy - this one's a keeper.

An infusion of fresh blood - yum

Our writing group meets tomorrow and we'll have three new (or probationary, technically) members joining us. Two of the three are men, which we are all pretty excited about. Not because our writing group doubles as a dating pool/occult ritual cult, but because in our group of about 8 people, one of them is a guy. And while most fiction readers are, reportedly, women, all of us as writers value the perspective of that other chromosomal combination.

In spite of our desire to have some male feedback, it's been a little difficult to recruit and retain men for the group. I don't yet have a year with it, but in the time I've been with the group, we've added just 2 men, only one of whom stayed and is now the lone standout. Until tomorrow, at least. I suspect some affirmative action was involved in getting these latest two gentlemen, but I'm happy to remain guessing on that one. It's mysterious that writing, which is often dominated by men (see, for example, last year's controversy over the Publisher's Weekly top books list) seems to be filled with women at the lower rungs. I have no idea if that perception is correct nor do I feel informed enough to venture an explanation, but it's curious to me. I'd be interested to hear if anyone else out there has a similar dynamic in their writing group.

The numbers game aside, I'm looking forward to hearing from some different voices in our groups. Last week, two avid reader friends of mine, both women, were talking about how hard we thought it was for men to write female characters. (Norman Rush's fascinating but ultimately appalling Mating prompted the conversation; Tolstoy got major props for pulling it off.) We noted that we found female author's male characters far more believable, but then laughed at ourselves when we realized of course we had no idea if the men were truly authentic, or just appeared so to our minds, sympathetic to the female authors. Which is all to say, I'm excited to have some real live men (aside from my wonderful, real live husband) to sound test my male characters on.

Ines of My Soul, by Isabel Allende

This is for Historical Tapestry's blog challenge - I is for ...

My fondness for this book might be colored by its presence (though imperfect) in a particularly ego-stroking moment: There I was, in Santiago, Chile, hunched over local favorite Isabel Allende's latest book in a hip coffee shop, and the server delivers my cappuccino with "Viva Espana" written in the foam of the cup. I blush as I realize that the four words I uttered to request said cappuccino were still tinged with the accent lingering from a college study abroad and this guy thought I was actually Spanish. I have rarely been so excited. I didn't say another word and I tried to cover up English on my book's cover. That is, so long as I remembered to do so, which was briefly because I quickly fell back into the book's gripping plot.

Ines of My Soul is the story of (real-life heroine) Ines Suarez and her 16th century journey from Spain to the New World, where she eventually became involved with Pedro de Valdivia, a leader in Pizarro's company. Together they and a tenacious bunch of settlers crossed the Atacama desert to found what would become Chile. They battle thirst, disease, other Spaniards and, most interestingly, the local Mapuche Indians. While I'd argue that Allende makes Ines a little too modern in her respect for the Mapuche - I suspect Allende didn't have the heart to make her beloved character Ines as bigoted as she probably was in real life - it's most likely a more comfortable stance for the modern reader to watch. (At least this reader was grateful Ines wasn't a total jerk to the displaced and abused Mapuches.) That aside, it was a charming, educational and really fun read. I definitely recommend it, even if it weren't tied to that particular cup of cappuccino!

And for those interested in Isabel Allende's writing habits and personal life, she was featured in the NY Times just this weekend.

Trying something new

I have long been a secret writer - my fiction closely held to my chest, priable away from only my dead fingers, I imagined. But over the past couple of years I've been "coming out" - first admitting that I write fiction, then, gasp, sharing it with other people. Eventually these people included folks other than my husband.

But, aside from the short fiction I publish here, it's still been pretty close-hold. Then I joined a writing group. Strangers? Reading my pathetic little scribblings? Gulp. However, since I've been purged in the fire pit known as Work and The Review Process, I got used to it.

Lately, I crossed a more vertigo-inducing bridge: showing the first chapters of my work-in-progress before I had written the whole thing and edited the heck out of it. It felt a little strange to even consider the first chapters, since as I don't currently know how the book ends I can't be sure how I want it to start. But, wisely or not, I'm submitting those chapters for professional review at a conference I'm going to (another first!) and the deadline was approaching. I needed feedback, I knew it, so I gulped and sent out a few pages.

Well, I didn't die. The experience was actually a bit encouraging - people liked where I was going with the story, liked the characters. That was good to hear. I'm still not sure I won't scrap the whole thing, and it feels a little weird to have people (including my husband) know what my story's about while I'm still writing it, but I'll deal.

How do other people handle this? I imagine it has to do with how private you are in general, and how much about yourself you share in any category. But if we take the icy plunge to show early material, is it more helpful or hurtful? Could it end up being writing by committee or a guiding hand when you most need it?

Snow Mountain Passage by James D. Houston

This is for Historical Tapestry's blog challenge - H is for Houston.

I say, "Donner Party," and we all know what you think, right? Reading or writing about the infamous settlers and their harrowing five months caught in the snow is bound to entail a certain amount of gut-wrenching horror, and James D. Houston's Snow Mountain Passage is no exception. But we are in the hands of a very capable author, and this story is about far more than the inhumanity those settlers had to resort to. Houston makes the wise narrative choice of focusing on one of the fathers and co-organizers of the party, exiled early in the trek and thus spared from the trap set by massive blizzards and a high mountain pass. Instead, James Frazier Reed is on the other side of those mountains trying to find a way to rescue his family and the eighty others snowbound with them.

It is 1846 and California is still contested, its people caught in the back-and-forth between Mexico and the United States. War threatens, impunity reigns, and it's unclear who even has the right to grant the land the settlers came to occupy. In the midst of all this are, of course, the native inhabitants, watching warily. Our hero, James Reed stumbles into this chaotic world with one mission, to save the wagon party he knows to be caught behind the Sierra Nevada ("snowy mountains"). But this is a story about what makes us human, our errors and all, and the path to rescue is circuitous - whether necessarily so or not.

One of the most compelling aspects of the book is its depiction of a people and a land in total flux. We often talk today about how rapidly change occurs, but at least we in the United States know, generally, who owns the land we walk on, what state it falls in, and what country governs it. We can see, more or less, how the future will unfold. This was not the case for the settlers in mid-19th century California. One of Houston's characters is Captain Sutter, an entreprenuerial Swiss who set himself up as ruler of a tiny corner of California. But that success is slipping away: "The future is crowding him ... What next? There was a time when he thought he knew. These days who can know anything, with the world transforming itself at such a pace. He grows weary of these unforeseeable changes."

Whether it's being caught in a succession of blizzards or drawn off to war against the Mexicans, this book is about unforeseeable changes. I think we can relate.

(For those interested in the author's take on his subject and some fascinating historical background -- visit here.)

On the boss encouraging reading at work - or something like that

After a great weekend trip to New York, risking an instantaneous addiction to NYC brunch, I'm starting to think I have a thing for that second city to the north. So, for those of you who are fortunate enough to live there (meaning you are unfortunately not living in DC, but that's alright), you might be interested in this event on March 25. It's a reading from a history of the cigar factory in Latin America and the role played by "readers" - people hired just to read literature to the factory workers.

What a lovely idea, that factory workers' humanity was sufficiently respected for the managers/owners to hire readers. I wonder what professions we could expand that to today. Think, for example, if there were people who read to the perennially grumpy department of motor vehicle employees as they snap horrible mug shot after horrible mug shot. Maybe our visages would improve! Or maybe we could read to people washing dishes in restaurants. I guess a lot of jobs today require thought, which a reader would distract from, but it's nice to think about what engagement in literature would add to the workplace, not just leisure time.