Book Recommendations: Novels of the Romantic Poets and the Bronte Sisters

The last two books I read were really enjoyable, both historical fiction accounts of famous authors.

I first suspected Jude Morgan's Passion: A Novel of the Romatic Poets would be silly, poorly written or melodramatic - probably all three. The cover does not inspire confidence. I was pleasantly surprised to find such a strong, well researched novel, with vivid characters and amazing storytelling. If you have any interest in Percy Bysshe Shelly, John Keats or Lord Byron, here is a novel about the women who loved them.

Following close on Passion's historical heels is Emily's Ghost: A Novel of the Bronte Sisters, by Denise Giardina. While I had a hard time liking the characters, I appreciated that the author was not trying to make me like them. I also enjoyed the introduction by Giardina of subplots I did not anticipate, such as mill worker rebellion. I can't really say how much of a behind-the-Bronte-novels peek this is. I would have to read biographies of the Brontes in order to know what is real and imagined. I half don't want to know because Emily's love story ends tragically, as it must.

What I found most remarkable about both novels is how they moved me. Knowing beforehand that these creative, poetic lives were snuffed out too soon did not save me from being devastated when it took place in the novels. I could not help wishing it would turn out some other way.

Between these two books, I lost count of the characters who died of consumption. I read most of Emily's Ghost in the middle of the night while sitting up with Luca. His four-week-old cold has moved down to his chest, making him cough and wheeze like a consumptive. It was disconcerting to hear his rattling lungs while reading of Emily's and Ann's deaths from consumption and no surprise I could not find sleep even after finishing the book and turning off the nightlight.

Book Review: Ghost by Alan Lightman

After losing his job at a bank, David Kurzweil takes an unlikely position at a funeral home. One night in a viewing room, for just an instant, he sees something he describes as a vapor hovering near the casket. David cannot reject what he has seen but cannot reconcile it with the physical world. The story of his sighting leaks to the press, and he finds himself in the middle of a controversy between scientists and believers in the supernatural. David struggles to understand his experience amidst those who believe him without question and those who question him without believing.

Ghost is a novel of ideas, and readers expecting a supernatural thriller will be disappointed. The novel begins with David speaking in first-person and suitably shaken. He has seen something that defies reason, and nothing can ever be the same. The first-person narration falls away quickly, and I felt cheated by the switch to third-person. It changed the story from an experience to an observation, distancing the protagonist from the reader.

Lightman has said that character depiction is the toughest part of writing for him, and that weakness is the chief problem with this novel. The quirky accessory characters in Ghost were sketched out with great potential, but Lightman failed to color them in. The members of the Society for the Second World, the three women in David’s life (mother, girlfriend, and ex-wife), the men of David’s rooming house, and the mortuary workers all seem as vaporous as the novel’s eponymous ghost.

Lightman waits until the novel’s near-end to describe what David saw, and even then the description is vague and unsatisfactory. However, it is not the author’s intent to tell a ghost story; thus, the particular manifestation of the supernatural being is irrelevant. What I enjoyed most about Ghost was the idea that a tiny moment can change your entire outlook, can make you find or lose faith. When you experience something that you thought could never happen, it makes you question everything you know. If A is no longer true, what about B? What about C? The point of the novel is not what David saw, but how he, as a contemplative, intelligent man, evaluates the inexplicable.

What I'm Reading: Haven Kimmel

If you don't know Haven Kimmel, you should meet her. Start at the beginning with her first work, A Girl Name Zippy: Growing up Small in Mooreland, Indiana. In these autobiographical snapshots, Kimmel manages something every writer struggles with: to write honestly about her family without hurting them or making them hate you. The stories are hilarious, touching, and identifiable. You know these people; you remember these childhood feelings of joy, embarrassment, frustration, and silliness. The Kimmels' story continues in She Got up Off the Couch: and Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana. These bittersweet tales focus mainly on Kimmel's mother, a woman who put her life on hold for her family and then takes it back. Know anyone like that? Thought so.

The great thing about Haven Kimmel is that her fiction is amazing, too. The Solace of Leaving Early is stunning. Kimmel attended seminary, and faith and religion are major themes in this novel. Kimmel's contemplations are intellectual and inconclusive, which I appreciate because you cannot get to the bottom of religion, any religion. Reason will take you only so far, and then you have to take a leap of faith...or not, because you have better ways to spend your time. As little as I care for spirituality, I enjoyed these meditations immensely. The Used World, her latest, is another exercise in awesome and features the reappearance of several of her Solace characters. To round out her list of works is Something Rising (Light and Swift), which I'm reading now.

The Alchemist

I'm about three months behind initiating a discussion for my book club on The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. I considered getting up the gumption today since it's pretty slow at work, but instead I'll combine a post and a discussion point because I'M A MULTI-TASKER. I've been hung up on a line from the book, "And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it." (Now, isn't that sweet? The whole book is like that: fulfilling your personal destiny, not abandoning your dreams, and trusting that all of the natural and spiritual world has your back.) This poetically worded concept is actually quite common. Most people call an unlikely event "happy coincidence" when it's favorable and "Murphy's Law" when it's not.

What the book does not address is the worth of the "something" being sought. Santiago, the shepherd boy in The Alchemist, is seeking treasure. Is that a worthy quest or merely avarice? What about people with truly laudable quests, like curing cancer, who don't seem to be getting anywhere? Conversely, people throughout history with rotten dreams, like genocide, can be quite successful. Are they getting help from the universe? Should they be? Chew on that, book club, and email me your thoughts.

And now I segue into what's going on in my life and what I have been wanting: sleep. For such a harmless goal, you'd think the universe could help me out. Indeed, it is working against me. There are many things that disturb a baby's sleep. Currently, my baby is experiencing three of them: teething pain, illness, developmental milestones. Over the past several weeks, Gianluca cut three new teeth. Babies are SUPPOSED to get two teeth at a time every two months, starting at 5-6 months old. I have an eight-month-old with seven teeth. And since teeth come in pairs, there's another on the way.

On top of that, he contracted a mean cold that went straight to his lungs. It sucks holding a baby down to force his asthma meds. It sucks sitting in a steamy bathroom at 3:00 A.M. It sucks even more watching your baby struggle to breathe, his body jerking as he sleeps. He's getting better though. A few more days ought to do it.

The third sleep-destroyer is actually awesome. Luca is learning to pull himself to a standing position, as well as learning to crawl. Right now, it's more of a backwards scoot, but he'll get there. Who can sleep when there's potential for pitching over the side of the crib? [Note to self: lower crib mattress.] So I'm still not sold on Personal Legends, but I think my baby is dabbling in alchemy. He has managed to turn sleep deprivation into gold.

What I'm Reading: Cormac McCarthy

My intellectual husband suggested I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and I did just to prove that I can take his advice. You may have heard stirrings in the literary community about this book: it has already been shortlisted for book-type prizes, declared a masterpiece, and hallelujah! Oprah has selected it as her newest book club read.

I don't get it. The hullaballoo, that is. I'm fairly sure I understand the novel. The premise is simple: a man raises his son in a post-apocalyptic world. How the world-as-we-know-it ended is irrelevant; it is merely the setting for this novel of a father's devotion to his young son.

I didn't dislike The Road entirely. McCarthy's spare prose is a revelation. It's not terribly innovative; others have a similar style: Hemingway comes first to mind. However, I tend to read authors who fill a swimming pool with words and write like they're meandering in slow laps. Compared with them, McCarthy is a cannonball dive. His prose is piercing and direct and no less meaningful for its brevity.

Still, I don't get the POINT of this dark, depressing novel, and I've read every review I can find to see where I'm going wrong. Why hasn't anyone said that the father and son were unlucky to survive? Their every moment is a waking nightmare, a hell on earth. McCarthy hits his readers over the head with how delicate and sensitive the child is, and how every atrocity he encounters shatters him emotionally. This child was born after the apocalypse; he has never known anything other than starving, freezing, and hiding from cannibalistic "bad guys." He has no memory of a compassionate humanity. For McCarthy to assume, and expect us to assume, that the child retains his innocence for the 5, 6, 7 years (the child's age is never revealed) of his life, which consists solely of grim survival, is nonsensical.

Some reviewers are deeply moved by the care and love the father exhibits for his son. This theme did not strike me as extraodinary, but I blame this failure on my personal experience. I have the good fortune to witness this kind of devotion every day. One critic gushes over a scene in the novel where the father and son have a brief reprieve in a bomb shelter and the father gives his son a haircut. I was flabbergasted by his amazement at this simple gesture and imagined my son and how his father would tend to him in such horrible circumstances. A haircut? Oh, this and so much more.

My third and most controversial point (aren't you glad you stayed with me?) is that I don't think the father and son should be on this road at all. The boy's mother, the man's wife, concluded years ago that suicide was their best option. In a flashback, she tells her husband that all they have to look forward to is being murdered, raped, and eaten, in no particular order. She cannot face that hopeless existence for herself or her family, and she kills herself. Tragically, she does not manage to convince her husband, who carries on with his son in a state of perpetual fear and misery. Try as I might, I can find no understanding for why the father chooses this shadow of a life for himself and his son.

What I'm Reading: Lee Smith

Occasionally people ask me what I'm reading because they generously attribute me with good taste in literature. Thank you, people, and here's a recommendation. I just finished On Agate Hill by Lee Smith. This was the third novel I've read by Ms. Smith, and I highly recommend her as an author. Smith was an author that I discovered on my own, and it's always such a nice surprise to be blown away by a novel when you have no expectations from publisher's hype, word-of-mouth, Oprah, or bestseller lists. The last time that happened for me was when I stumbled across Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale.

This time my happy discovery was Fair and Tender Ladies (1989) by Lee Smith. I was looking for a novel set in the Appalachians because I was missing my grandmother. She was a spirited, sad, funny firecracker, born and raised in the Eastern tip of Tennessee, and her family's roots in that area are centuries old. I was delighted to recognize little pieces of my grandmother in the main character: a point of view or turn of phrase, her disappointments, rebellions, her restlessness, and her deep love for the beauty of the Appalachian mountains.

Ladies is a lifetime of letters from its heroine, Ivy Rowe, to her family and friends. (That makes it an epistolary novel, if you're into learning new words or checking my credentials.) The writing, all in Ivy's semi-educated voice, is so smooth you don't even notice your eyes are translating text; you hear this novel more than read it. The story is moving, surprising and fulfilling, and Ivy is a character you will not soon forget. The last, broken sentence of the novel echoed in my head for days. I've also read and enjoyed Oral History and now On Agate Hill, but for me Fair and Tender Ladies is her best. Give one a try.