When Books Complement Each Other: Little Women and March

  

The first "chapter book" I ever read was Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.  It ws a Christmas present when I was in second grade, and it took me to March (yes! that long) to read the first part.  But after I got that far, I found myself a committed reader, and it's been one book after another ever since.  It is hard to underestimate the effect of the book on me in other ways as well: I've often said that my political, social and moral ideas are rooted in the striving of the four March girls, the Little Women

 

Set during the American Civil War, the book tells of their domestic ups and downs as they struggle to do the right thing, and worry about their father who has enlisted  in  the Union army as  a  chaplain. Mr. March is not a well-defined character, however, so despite his central place in the psychological geography of the family, the reader knows very little about who he really is.

 

Geraldine Brooks fills that gap.  Her

March tells the story of what he does when he is with the army, how he painfully arrived at his moral principles, and how he is wrenched to realize that his youthful love for a young slave woman has smoldered for decades.  In short, it is a novel for grown-ups full of moral questions as well as drama.  It is also a wonderful complement to Alcott's classic.

 

There are two levels of invention here: Alcott's enthralling quartet of girls, and Brooks’ imagining of their father's life. Alcott apparently didn't think much of Little, but the book has delighted generations. Brooks' novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006.  Both are engaging and "true" in the way that the best fiction is true and both are worth reading, no matter your age.     

 

Note: the image is of the cover of my much-read copy of Little Women 

Prophet Song: "the end of the world is always a local event.."

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, the winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, is  billed in some quarters as a cautionary tale about what happens when a  country allows itself to be taken over by authoritarians.  It begins on a cold and rainy night when government agents come for Larry, a union leader and the husband of Eilish through whose eyes we see the drama.  From there things go from bad to worse.

But the book is far from being just another dystopic tale, ready to send shivers up the reader's spine but soon to be forgotten.  It is told with curious mixture of concrete detail--what you need when you're preparing for a siege, why the water from the kitchen faucet runs brown, the rapidity with which people put up or take down flags that are symbols of their allegiance--and poetic description.  It is written in lengthy  run-on sentences that both sweep the reader along, and make him or her gasp for breath at the audacity of seeing inside someone's head so clearly. The combination is mesmerizing.  

Lynch says he was  compelled to write Prophet Song by the Syria refugee crisis of 2015 and subsequent years.  Since he did not know enough about Syria he transposed his drama about people responding to civil war and an authoritarian state from there to Ireland, where he was born and where he still lives.  That he can make the transfer so believable is evidence of his skill as a storyteller but also sad testimony to how close to the surface disaster is in most places.

Ultimately, however, Lynch offers a sort of hope. He writes of Eilish as she tries to escape with her two surviving children. 

"... she looks at her infant son... and she can see that the world does not end, that it is a vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time...that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event..."

At the time I first read those words I was working on my book about the importance of collective and individual memory to the survival of our civilizations, Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us Through the Next 75 Years.   Yes, I thought, the end may seem nigh, but we must continue as best we can.  Which is what Eilish does in the end, the very end.

A book to read and to think about.
 

Grey Bees and Snails: Two Novels about Ukraine

 

In Survival, Margaret Atwood's fascinating essay about Canada and its literature, she analyzed the relation between animals in a nation's fiction  and its views about itself.  The United States' animal stories were all about overcoming them, she pointed out, while English ones had cozy human-like beasts who ended up taking tea  together.  In Canadian writing, on the other hand, the animals were always victims which, she  argued, reflected Canadians' basic attitudes toward life.

Interesting idea, I remember thinking, but put it away, until recently when I've read two extremely good novels by Ukrainian writers, Grey Bees (2018) by Andrey Kurkov (translated into English by Boris Dralyuk) and Endling by Maria Reva (2025). Kurkov's hero is a beekeeper who wants little more than to allow his bees to do what they do best--collect pollen and make honey.  But he lives in territory that Russia invaded in 2014, and undertakes a long journey to safer, more clement country. It's  a quest and he encounters many adventures.  He and bees survive, which is saying something.

Reva is a Ukrainian-Canadian who immigrated with her family when she was a child.  Her novel starts off as a near-farce: three young women enroll themselves in a "beautiful Ukrainian bride" scheme, largely to make some money.  One of them also is a biologist bent on saving snails from extinction, and she's outfitted a van as a lab.  The other two are hoping to make contact with their militantly feminist mother who has disappeared, perhaps to avoid the consequences of her previous wild protests.  But they, and Reva, come up against the 2022 Russian incursion into Ukraine. The story first skitters to a false end, and then takes off in another direction involving kidnapping 13 would-be husbands for Ukrainian brides and snail match-making.  Quite funny, and very relevant.

All this to say: if you apply Atwood's scheme for comparing a people with its literature, particularly its animal stories, Ukraine comes across as a small being that survives great odds.  Makes sense, doesn't it?

Grey Bees won a slew of prizes when it came out, and--this just in!--Endling has won the 2026 Amazon.ca First Novel award.  Well deserved.