On Halloween: Two Recent Novels Set in Ireland Where Magic Still Casts Its Spell

 

 My children's friends dressed up for Halloween and went trick or treating--all except those who lived up the street in one of the more modern houses.  At the time I thought this was a little strange, but who am I to judge?  The fact that the mother was from Ireland weighed in there somewhere, I suspected, but I didn't realize how strong the magical, sometimes threatening world of fairies and other creatures was a part of Irish society, even among folks who were completely "modern" until I recently read two novels by Irish writers where the other world is very prominent.

 

The books are Land by Maggie Farrell and The Time of the Child by Niall Williams.  The first takes place mostly in the middle to late 19th century in Ireland and other places to which many Irish fled following the Great Hunger of the Potato Famine. The second is firmly anchored in the mid 20th century, as electricity and television are coming to the country. What they have in common--in addition to evocative descriptions and a compelling story--is the role that belief in magic plays in everyday life.  You aren't supposed to mess with fairies or sacred wells or curses or the like, not because they are unChristian but because they still have power.

 

Both writers paint this backdrop of belief vividly, but without giving it much credence.  Christianity doesn't fare much better: it also is part of the landscape but prayer doesn't work in a world where folks are poor and caught in changing colonial and technological traps. Both novels also are engaging stories, well worth seeking out particularly as the days grow short, winter approaches, and darkness menaces.

 

So now I understand better why my neighbour kept her kids home on Halloween.  You don't mess with forces you see out of the corner of your eye: best to stay on their good side.

Do We Need a New Standard for AI-assisted Writing? The case of Thélyson Orélien

 

On Friday Éditions Boréal, a respected French language publisher in Quebec, pulled the plug on a novel by the Haitian Canadian writer Thélyson Orélien.    C'était ça ou mourir had been on the short lists of several prestigious prizes and was flying off the shelves of book stores and libraries.  I know:  I was 47th in line when I tried to get an e-copy through Libby. 

But it appears that Orélien used artificial intelligence to write the book.  The possiblity was raised a month ago or so by someone who (anonymously at first) ran it through one of the programs that are supposed to be able to detect when a text has been written by a machine.  Orélien denied this, but he also was caught out in several incidents of plagiarism over the last decade.   At first his publisher stood by him, but when Orélien did not/could not show proof that the book had not been AI-assisted, it finally announced it would no longer re-print the book or have anything to do with the writer.

Okay, perhaps this is a cautionary tale.  Maybe writers who take the easy way in creating a story should be called out.  Certainly plagiarism should not be rewarded.

 

But what if the AI-assisted work is really, really good?  This is a question I keep asking myself, because when I finally got my hands on a copy of the book I was amazed by it.  Whereas most of the AI-generated texts I've seen are stylistically mediocre, this book sings.  True, the story it tells--of a migrant from Haiti trying to find a safe haven somewhere--is not original.  But it rarely is the originality of a tale that is important, it's the way it's told.

 

And I found C'est ça ou mourir captivating. 

 

Must we find a way to assess writing on some other basis than whether or not a machine helped it along?  What about the impossibility if avoiding AI when looking something up on Google these days?  How are we going to integrate AI into our lives and our art creatively? 

BFF: Betsy-Tacy and Tib by Maud Hart Lovelace

 

     Didn't do a review of any book last week because my oldest friend (in duration, not in age) was visiting from San Francisco.  We met when we were 15, roomed together at Berkeley, had children about the same time, and shared political views and many good times over decades.  So there just wasn't time to consider a book review.

 

However, since she left to go home, I've had time to think about friendship, and a series of book has come to mind. They are the Betsy-Tacy-Tib books by Maud Hart Lovelace which I read with delight in early adolescence.  They take place in pre-World War I Minnesota, which is a long way in time and place from the years my friend and I were growing up and where we live today.  Somehow, though Lovelace caught the joy and troubles of good friendships which appear to speak to young people even today, judging from the fact that the books are still in print. 

 

Friendship is hard to write about, but Lovelace did a good job of it.

Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere and Good Intentions

 

 Until she edited the Best American Short Stories 2025, I'd never read anything by Celeste Ng.  My family, knowing how I love short stories, sees that I get the year's edition each Christmas, and I read the volume usually with delight.  The formula is simple: the series' editor picks 100 short stories from all those published in dozens of literary magazines. Then a guest editor reads them all and chooses 20 that he or she thinks are the best.  Occasionally I find an editor's choices uninteresting, but rarely.  And I really liked what Ng chose last year.  So, I decided to find out what she has written herself.   

 

Don't get me wrong:  I found myself reading her second novel (the one I was able to get by Libby late at night) Little Fires Everywhere long after my usual bedtime because I was captivated by the story.  But when I'd finished the book I was let down because there were important parts of the story that just didn't hang together. 

 

The novel starts with several little fires raging in a house and a mother and teenage daughter leaving town.  We find out at the end just what has happened, and, while we are carefully prepared for the the ending, in the morning after a reading binge, the impossibility of situation hits one between the eyes like the rising sun on a hangover headache.  

 

To go into the details about why Ng's story doesn't work, I'd give away too much.  But I can say that what got me interested and what kept me reading was the brilliant depiction of her charcters and the vivid picture of life as an upper middle-class adolescent in the 1990s.  Full points for that. 

 

The story takes place in the Shaker Heights suburb of Cleveland.  It is a planned community, proud of its history.  Its citizens, according to Ng, are convinced of their moral superiority in part because of their purported "colour blindness."  A lot of this is pretense, Ng says, and she is cruelly funny when she points out the contradictions of a community stalwart. 

 

Why does Ng do this?  Because she wants to demolish self-righteousness?  Because she thinks we all should take off into the sunset as do the mother and teenage daughter who kick off the story?  I was convinced that was the case until I came upon an interview with her.   

 

Here's what she said,  "So many people try to do what they think is right. Even when they do things that end up being terrible, it often comes out of a place with good intentions. All the characters in Little Fires Everywhere are doing something they think is justified and moral. I wanted this book to be a space for looking at people who seem like villains to us in order to understand how they got to where they are. If we understand how they got to where they are, then we have a better chance connecting with them in some way. There are very few real villains in the world, just like I think there are very few heroes."

 

When I read that I nodded my head: I agree that most people do want to do the right thing.  That's not what I took away from this book, though, so if that was Ng's intention she failed with me. But it's a good read if you don't think too much about it. 

A Book to Read for the Day of Truth and Reconciliation, September 30

I repeat: the circumstances in which you read a book may have a big effect on what you think of it.  As I noted a couple of weeks ago, reading A Month in the Country during a beautiful August probably made me like the book even more than I would have had I read it in another month.  But it's not just weather that affects the attitude we bring to a book's reading.  What's happening in the world can have a very strong influence.

 

A case in point is Kukum by Michel Jean.  Originally written in French, it is now available in a very good English translation by Susan Ouirou, but I read it first in French in the spring of 2021.  I was taken with the opening scenes:  the young woman who would become Jean's kukum, his grandmother, is an orphan who has been taken in by a couple trying to carve a farm from the forests of Quebec's North Shore.  She is grateful to them, but when a young Innu man comes down the river she (and he) fall desperately in love with one another even though they don't have a common language.  There follows an account of their life together, in the bush, following the caribou, hunting and gathering, telling stories and building dreams.  The life is very hard, but the way Jean tells it, almost idyllic. 

 

Then the outside world intrudes in the form of clear-cut forests, mineral exploration and changes to water flows.  The little family is forced to leave their semi-nomadic life and settle in a rudimentary village.  Then the RCMP comes to take the children away to school...

 

The day I read that was the day that news of the discovery of the remains of some 200 children on the grounds of a residential school in British Columbia  came out.  The coincidence was like a blow to the gut, the pain of Kukum and her family resonating with that of the families whose children were sent to the Kamloops residential school and who never came home. 

 

But Kukum survived as did some of her children, and luckily, Jean, who was the weekend anchor TVA news for several years, is here to tell the tale. 

 

The investigation into suspected grave sites continues. The Day of Truth and Reconciliation is worth remembering. 

Sean Michaels Writes an Unabashedly AI-assisted, Very Good Novel

There's been a lot in the news these last days about Artificial Intelligence as people who know what's going on in the industry send out alarms of a looming apocalypse.  At the same time, the people who make books are trying to use AI to streamline production and/or weed out AI slop from the projects submitted to them. 

So this week, I decided to look at a recent novel whose author, Sean Michaels, unabashedly used AI to write bits of it.  Do You Remember Being Born?

, published in 2023 by Random House Canada, is the story of Marian ffarmer, a  celebrated, somewhat elderly poet who is enlisted by a tech company to write a work of poetry with Charlotte, a precursor to ChatGPT, Claude and friends.  She takes the assignment partly because she'd like to help her middle-aged son buy a house- -the collaboration comes with a handsome honorarium--and partly out of curiosity.  Michaels acutely observes the world of high tech, and also provocatively raises questions about what is art, and who can make it.  The result is a lively and sometimes touching tale, cleverly told.

Note that Michaels started working on the novel years before the present controversy.  He saw the dangers and possibilities in AI long before most people outside the world of those constructing Large Language Models did.  He is cagey about whether the poem Marian and Charlotte write is of any value.  In addition, he allows a suspicion that maybe Charlotte is not a chatbot but a real person.    

I was able to ask him about that last possibility when I was preparing to talk about the book in one of the discussion groups I've led in libraries.  His reply: ".. I'm afraid that's a question meant for you to answer yourself. For me to do so would be cheating." 

 

A man of honour, perhaps! 

 As for the prospect of an AI catastrophe and the end of civilization, that question has been around for a long time, although the voices warning against such a fate are becoming more and more strident.  I spent the last several years worrying about it: the result is my recent book Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us Through the Next 75 Years (Dundurn Press).  My conclusion?  Collective wisdom will be a powerful tool as civilizations attempt to overcome the major upheavals ahead.

 

 

The Hole in the Middle of the Story

This summer I read two page-turners, novels that sucked me in and kept me reading late into the night.  One is Cailin Mullen's Heather, which could be classed as a police procedural in which a young woman chief of police in a small New Jersey town tries to revive a cold case and unravel mysteries about her own life.  The other is The Stationery Shop by Marjan Kamali and set a world away in Tehran with the Iranian Revolution of the 1950s roaring in the background.

 

Aside from the fact that both novels have strong women as the anchor character, at first glance the two  books seem to have little in common.  The Stationery Shop is a love story which goes off its rails when tension mount as a society comes apart.  The heroine doesn't learn why she was jilted until 60 years and several hundred pages later.  Heather, however, from the beginning is a mystery and while there's a lot of sex in it, there's relatively little love. 

 

The stories, however, share a characteristic that isn't immediately obvious. The resolution of the mysteries, the explanation of what has happened in both cases depends on a woman who is able to rise from terrible circumstances to a position of comfort if not plenty.  Bully for them, I'd say, it weren't for the great hole this leaves in the plot. Of course, in both cases the story is told so skilfully that you don't notice the problem until you've finished reading the book.  Then you begin to wonder: how did this happen?

 

This secondary mystery may not bother you.  If you're happy to take a story as presented and not wonder too much about loose ends, I'd recommend both books as good reads.  But for me the lack of information about the woman who overcomes great odds is deal breaker.  No amount of captivating detail and harrowing suspense can make the books anything more than second rate.

 

A Month in the Country: An English Pastoral with Long Shadows

  

A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

 

This week's selection is a direct follow-up of Orbital, Samantha Harvey's space pastoral.  As I noted earlier, she said J.L. Carr's book A Month in the Country inspired her to write a tale in which no dramatic events take place, but  where context and climate are all important.

 

Carr writes in the first person from the point of view of Tom Birkin, badly damaged by World War I, who had trained as an art

restorer and finds himself cleaning up a mural in a village church in England during the month of August 1920.  I suspect that I found the book particularly pleasing because his evocation of wonderful summer weather rhymed with what we have been experiencing: not too hot, enough rain to keep things fairly green, sweet smells of growing things all around.   I also had an afternoon and evening free to indulge in reading, which allowed me to float along on the river of Carr's words.

 

But even without the weather cooperating, I think I would have delighted in the book, which is seemingly such a simple story.  There are threats in the shadows.  We do not learn what exactly happened in the War which left the man with an uncontrollable twitch to his face, and memories that he would is trying to repress.  Similarly, there is the mystery of the gorgeous mural that he is cleaning, which turns out to be a painting by a Master, not an ordinary itinerant painter.  Is there a connection between it and the grave that another ex-soldier, now an archeologist, is supposed to be looking for?

 

Then there is the name of the woman who left the money to clean the mural and find the grave: Hebron.  FamillySearch says that it is a name from Northumberland, possibly from "from Old English hēah ‘high’ + byrgen ‘burial place, tumulus’."  But there are other Hebrons in this world, and possibly therein lies a good part of the tale.

A Kind of a Space Pastoral: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

 

 

The past couple of weeks have been wonderful for star-gazers.  There was the complete eclipse of the sun that swept across the   North Atlantic and Europe, a grand show of the Perseid meteor shower, a rare planetary alignment visible (so it is said) a bit before dawn a couple of weeks ago here, and finally last night's partial eclipse of the moorn.  Sad to say, I didn't see any of the events either because of cloudy skies or too bright city lights. 

 

Whatever, now is a good time to consider Orbital by Samantha Harvey.  Published in 2023 and the winner of the Booker Prize the following year, the book documents 24 hours in the lives of six astronaiuts and cosmonauts on the international space station.  There is no great drama: the space travelers get on reasonably well despite being from countries that sometimes have been enemies (Russia, the US, Japan, Italy and the UK).  Even the small glitch in the system that keeps the spaceship liveable for humans passes as more of a nuisence than a real danger. What the novel chronicles are the musings of the crew about the earth and what they are doing up in space.  And that is more than enough...

 

Harvey says she got the idea for the book after reading A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr.  Not much happens in it either, but the time, place and concerns are there to read and are precious.

 

A book to savour, and to dip back into frequently as you try to puzzle out what life on earth means

Marie Benedict's Carnegie's Maid and Why the Philanthropist Started Paying for Libraries

Libraries are among my most favourite places, and I've long been curious about Andrew Carnegie who financed hundreds of them  in the US, Canada and abroad at the turn of the 20th century.  (The photo is of the original Carnegie Library in Walla Walla WA where I got my first library card, age 5 or 6.) When looking for a good biography of him, I came across another library treasure that isn't quite a "true" story, but an historical novel that givdes a possible explanation of why the industrialist gave away his fortune.  The book is Carnegie's Maid by Marie Benedict, a prolific novelist who specializes in writing historical novels about women on the edges of great things.

 

Her books include novels based on the lives of  Mileva Marić (The Other Einstein, 2016), Hedy Lamarr (The Only Woman in the Room, 2019), Clementine Churchill (Lady Clementine, 2020), Belle da Costa Greene (The Personal Librarian, with Victoria Christopher Murray 2021), and Rosalind Franklin (Her Hidden Genius, 2022).  

 

I have some experience in trying fill in the gaps in the lives of historical figures.  One of my first books was about Robert Nelson, a doctor and anglophone Patriot in the Canadian Rebellions of 1837-38. His francophone colleagues were the one who were remembered when I wrote The Words on the Wall: Robert Nelson and the Rebellion of 1837 in the 1990s, and I wanted to set the record straight.  I did a lot of research in archives and libraries, and the book has 198 footnotes. But to make his story readable and believable, I felt compelled to invent some events and characters that fill in Nelson's emotional life. Therefore, I'm  on Benedict's side when it comes to allowing a little real fiction into novels about the lives of "real" people.

 

So far I've read two other of her books, the ones about Hedy Lamarr and Belle da Costa Greene, and been swept away by all three.  Benedict begins with solid information about her heroines, and then does some imagining of things that might have happened to them.  In Carnegie's Maid she clearly indicates that the person is made up, but she also explains why she thinks that someone in Carnegie's life inspired him to make his generous gifts to so many towns although she's equally clear that no one knows for sure.  Whatever, the result is a very good read.

 

 

 

Seven Moons of Maali Almeida: One of the Few Books I Couldn't Finish

  

When I started this exercise some weeks ago, I intended to talk about books I didn't like, as well as ones I did.  This is not supposed to be a place to do nothing but boost books, becaues there are some  out there that don't deserve a boost, in my opinion.  So this time it's the turn of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Kuranatilaka.  The book was one of the New York Time's 100 Notable Books of 2022 and was on NPR's  Books We Loved list  in 2022.  What is more one of the particpants in the book discussion group I was leading at the time was extremely enthusiastic about it.  "It's so funny," she said. 

 

I didn't think so!

 

Here's the Goodreads resumé:

"Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet queen, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira lake and he has no idea who killed him. In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to the photos that will rock Sri Lanka."

 

Ordinarily I'm not bothered by a book which  begins with mysteries, where you aren't sure at all where the author is leading you, where you have to figure out what the main themes are, what the drama will be.  But this one made very little sense to me, and I found much of what was happening in the first chapters extremelyi distasteful.  Perhaps I'm too bound the culture I live in to appreciate the irony, to enjoy the satire. Whatever, this is one of the rare books I had to put aside.  One of my rules is to  give the author at least  50 pages to show me what he or she is doing, so I kept reading until I'd passed that landmark. But then I returned it to the library, glad I hadn't bought it.

 

Needless to say, I didn't put the book on the roster of the book club that season even though that one member (whose opinion I usually agreed with) urged me to.  However, I would love to hear from anyone else who found the book a good read: please give me your reasons.   

Kim Thuy and Caroline Vu: Two Very Different Novels by Vietnamese-Canadian Women

Last week the  featured  book was written by an American who fought in Vietnam.  This week let me draw your attention to two books written by women who were born in Vientam, endured part of the American war there, and then ended up in Montreal. Caroline Vu is ten years older than Kim Thuy, but both have written stunning books of life in war torn Vietnam and the immigrant experience in North America.  Both have several to their credit, but  Thuy's debut novel Ru is my favourite of her oeuvre, while the only one of Vu's that I've read so far is her latest, Catinat Boulevard.

 

Vu left  the country when she was 11: her mother, a doctor, was able to get her and her sisters to the US, and to start a new life there.  Thuy was about the same age when her family leflt, but by then Saigon had fallen.   She and her family were among the thousands of "boat people" who fled, often in small boats and always to a future that was dreadfully uncertain. Both women are well-educated: Vu is a family doctor, and Thuy is trained as a lawyer.  Each also is fluent in English, French and Vietnamese: Thuy writes for publication in French and Vu, in English.  Each has two children, and seemingly masses of energy, as witness the number of projects they have successfully undertaken.

 

It's a truism that there are many ways to tell a story, and Vu's and Thuy's stories certainly bear that out.  Despite their similarities, the manner in which each tells hers is strikingly different.  Vu's is sprawling--470 pages--and covers the lives of two women who are school friends in the last days of the old Vietnam, plus the life of the son which one of them has with an African-American GI.   It begins in the 1960s and ends in 2020.  Along the way it deals with pedophilia, begging children, racism, Agent Orange, Communist re-education. and much more.

 

Thuy's book, on the other hand, is spare and poetic.  The trials that the family (modelled on her own, it seems) go through are harrowing, but the message at the end is upbeat.  The family may have to work in the fields in Quebec for a spell, but they have unquestionably found a better place for themselves.

 

Which is better? Hard to say, depends in part on how you like your fiction--long narratives, or short distillations of experience.  Perhaps the best thing for you is to read both and decide...

 

Is the Lesson to Draw from Tim O'Brien That Hope Is the Most Important Thing to Carry?

When I was working on the final chapters of my book Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us through the Next 75 Years, I struggled with what I was going to tell people to do to prepare for tough times ahead. The book was supposed to be a hopeful one, laying out the predicament we're in now, but showing ways that we can approach the future and make sure that our civilizations survive. I knew I had to also give some advice on what to have ready to take with us as we go forward.

It took me a while, but finally I decided a good place to begin was Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. The collection of inter-connected short stories is considered one of the very best books about the Vietnam War.
O’Brien starts the book by detailing the things carried by a group of soldiers as they fought in the country’s jungles. Some things were linked to their previous lives: Lieutenant Jimmy Cross kept letters from a girl he hoped to love folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. Other things the soldiers carried were determined by necessity or near-necessity: can openers, pocketknives, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, C-rations, matches, cigarettes, steel-centred nylon-covered flak jackets, one large compress bandage (usually in the helmet band for easy access), and:
"Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO [radio telephone operator], carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother’s distrust of the white man, his grandfather’s old hunting hatchet.
"Necessity dictated."
Necessity dictates a lot, and one of the most necessary things is the telling of stories. Sometimes the stories are explanations of what has been happening, sometimes they are a sort of spell against what may happen. If they are done right, they can be transformative, and if the story teller has a soul filled with art, they can be both a pleasure and a pain to hear.
As I write, the world is embroiled in a half dozen conflicts, some big, some small, all harrowing for the people involved. I wonder if there is a soldier somewhere taking notes, talking into his phone, preparing the way for a book that one day may cause people to reflect on the wars going on now. Would that book change the way history unfolds? Probably not. No more than O'Brien's book has kept us out of the current wars...
But we can hope that it makes some difference. And hope is perhaps the most important thing to carry.

The Library Book: A Tribute to Books, Reading and the Places Where Our Culture Is Kept.

  

A librarian friend of mine recommended The Library Book by Susan Orleans quite a while ago, but it is only this month that I sat down and started to read it.  And a very good read it is.

 

Orleans who had a love affair with libraries from an early age  set out to tell the story of the Los Angeles Public Library and the fire that nearly swept away its main branch in 1986.  She operates on two time frames.  The first is the history of the library itself, which goes back the mid-19th century. The second is what happened one fateful spring day when somehow the library caught fire, and what happened then: salvaging thousands of books that were waterlogged and/or scorched by fire, rebuilding, and trying to find who set the library on fire.  The book's ante-hero is Harry Peake, a would-be actor and big time fabulator, who confessed more than once to setting the fire, but also denied he knew anything about what had happened that fateful day.

 

The book ends with the rebuilt library open for business and under-current of satisfaction that books, library-lovers, and the great history of collections of the world's knowledge survive against sometimes stiff odds. We never learn who set the library on fire, but we don't care because the books survive.

 

Orlean wrote her book when the shift toward  internet dependence was just beginning: it was published in 2018.  We hear how people still called the library to get information, even though it was becoming very easy to Google a query oneself.  Physical books were the foundation of the library's collection and e-books were somewhat of a novelty.   

 

Time have changed somewhat. Visit any library today and you'll see that the shelves are still filled with physical books, but e-books are now an extremely large portion of collections.  The great increase in e-book use followed the Covid 19 pandemic (the American Library Association says the jump was in 2021-22. ) I know that I had never borrowed on before the Bibliothèque de Montréal shut the doors to its many branches during the lock-down.  Ever vigilant, the library system  added something like 45,000 e-book titles over night early on in the pandemic.  How wonderful it was to be able to have access to books even when I was stuck at home!

 

The habit has endured: I currently have two physical books out of my local library, and two e-books waiting for me on Libby.  I think I'd rather read a physical book, but it is very nice to be able to pull out my phone and pick up where I left off reading an e-book.  That's how I was able to read a good portion of The Library Book while on the bus or in the Métro without lugging a physical book with me everywhere.

Vikram Seth's Passage to India

  

I first went to India in the summer of 1994, or rather it seems that way to me today.  Actually I first set foot on that great subcontinent a decade later when I visited Kerala state, doing research for my book Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places (Véhicule Press, 2007) but in 1994 I spent much of the summer reading Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy.  At nearly 1500 pages it was literally heavy reading even in paperback, but it also transported me to the India of the 1950s so engagingly that I didn't mind the length.

 

The story is simple: a young woman and her mother are on the lookout for a suitable young man for her to marry.  She falls in love with someone who is not acceptable because of his religion (shades of Romeo and Juliet) and she ultimately marries someone who at first glance seems totally unimpressive, but who turns out to have wonderful qualities (shades of Beauty and the Beast.)

 

But far from being a bloated, formulaic Romance, the novel is a detailed, often funny, acutely observed portrait of India at a time of national affirmation.  I couldn't help thinking of it often as I read Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia (book review July 11. )  While Desai writes brilliantly, and tells a multi-faceted story,  the novel stumbles when it enters the realm of magic realism.  Seth is consistently realistic, and the arc of his story is much clearer, on the other hand.  His book is as rewarding a read as a real trip to India can be for those who don't know that corner of the world.

 

After decades of delay, Seth is promising to publish a sequel,  A Suitable Girl in Fall 2026.  In it, the young girl of the first novel is now in her 80s and is trying to find a good match for her grandson.  I'm looking forward to reading it, but perhaps I shouldn't hold my breath since Seth has previously set at least two other publication dates which passed without the book appearing.   

Sonia and Sunny: Pretty Good but Not Stupendous

 

      A friend who is a discerning reader raved to me about Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. "What she does is amazing," she said.  "It's one of the best books I've read in years."

 

Given that kind of praise, you can be sure I quickly went looking for it. Took me a while to get it: I always turn to libraries first, and even though the libraries I belong to have 30 copies among them, I had to wait three and a half months before my turn to read the book came up.

 

Obviously, reviews, word of mouth, and the fact that the book made many "best of 2025" lists has led to lots of people seek it out. However, I think the nearly 700-page novel, while good, is not as stupendous as all that.

 

It tell the stories of two young Indian people from good families from Delhi who have been sent to study in the US in the 1990s.  Sonia finds herself in a small New England town studying literature at an liberal arts college and struggling with cold and loneliness.   Sunny, a little older, has got a master's in journalism and has found a job on the night shift at Associated Press.  Without their knowledge, family members ineptly try to arrange a marriage between them, but the attempt comically falls apart without either of them being aware of what is going on. Sonia becomes involved with brilliant older artist who essentially enslaves her, and from whom she tries to escape throughout the book.  Sunny ultimately rescues her, but it takes hundreds of pages, a lot of magic realism, some brilliant descriptions of India, Mexico, Venice, and New York, before we are given a small glimmer of hope that the pair won't be lonely any more.

 

Desai reportedly spent 20 years working on the book, and it's clear that she struggled to shoe-horn tons of experience into her story.  There are moments which are wonderful, but there are others when this reader just wanted to get the end. 

 

Verdict: a book to take on vacation if you expect to have a lot of down time.  Don't expect to bowled over by it, however. 

Dobryd, or How One Little Girl Survived Disaster

 

The first sentence of Ann Charney's Dobryd is chilling: "By the time I was five years old, I had spent half my life hidden away in a barn loft." Those words took my breath away when I first read them many years ago. Yet the novel's unsentimental, clear-eyed vision offers hope that, with luck, the human spirit can blossom under the most dreadful circumstances.

Dobryd was published in Canada in the mid-1970s to a few, very good reviews. But despite high praise, it wasn't a commercial success. Last year, however, Baraka Books brought out a new edition, giving current readers a chance to read one of the best chronicles of life as a civilian in wartime ever written. 

The story is simple: After two and a half years hiding outside a small town in Poland, a five-year-old girl, her mother, her aunt, and her cousin along with four other adults, all Jews, are rescued by Russian soldiers as World War II draws to a close.

The child is at first terrified by the reaction of the people in her little world: "Weeping and laughing at the same time, they hugged me and embraced one another. I felt smothered in their arms. These embraces were not the ones I was used to; too tight, too close. I was frightened." And, looking outside the barn for the first time, she says: "A large orange circle covered the sky and coloured the world below. The fields, the animals, the farmhouse, all were illuminated in this strange, intense, blood-like colour.I heard myself scream, again and again."

The scream is the one that she has been prevented from letting out during their long period of hiding. Finally Yuri, the Russian soldier who has been carrying her, calms her. "My new friend.carried me outside. All the while his soft voice reassured me, and the sound of those words made me feel safe.. The fresh air of the summer evening felt soothing against my skin. I looked around me. I was no longer afraid."

But the privations she has suffered do not make an occasion for sorrow and regret. Charney says her book is an attempt to distance herself from the work of other survivors of Nazi oppression like Elie Wiesel and André Schwarz-Bart. "I didn't find my experience in their books, and I didn't want to spend my life following the narrow lane of lamentations," she says.

"I wanted to show that one can live through all that and still go on to be a whole human being. I wanted to have the world as my oyster the way it is for other people, and I wanted to feel free to go on to explore other things." She adds with emphasis: "One should really exalt life." That's why the book begins as it does with the liberation, and why there is so much about pleasure: ice cream, the feel of air on skin, the joy of being able to see further than four walls.

The book is also full of  love and luck. Charney was lucky enough to be born to a mother who was strong and clever and had enough resources to pay for help. Then once they were in hiding, the adults around her doted on her, teaching her to read and write, to knit, to sing. Afterwards Yuri became her special friend, and the champion of the family. It is from these repeated experiences of love and attention that Charney has built a sensibility that allows her to say that she had a "happy childhood".

Read it!The first sentence of Ann Charney's Dobryd is chilling: "By the time I was five years old, I had spent half my life hidden away in a barn loft." Those words took my breath away when I first read them many years ago. Yet the novel's unsentimental, clear-eyed vision offers hope that, with luck, the human spirit can blossom under the most dreadful circumstances.

Dobryd was published in Canada in the mid-1970s to a few, very good reviews. But despite high praise, it wasn't a commercial success. Last year, however, Baraka Books brought out a new edition, giving current readers a chance to read one of the best chronicles of life as a civilian in wartime ever written. 

The story is simple: After two and a half years hiding outside a small town in Poland, a five-year-old girl, her mother, her aunt, and her cousin along with four other adults, all Jews, are rescued by Russian soldiers as World War II draws to a close.

The child is at first terrified by the reaction of the people in her little world: "Weeping and laughing at the same time, they hugged me and embraced one another. I felt smothered in their arms. These embraces were not the ones I was used to; too tight, too close. I was frightened." And, looking outside the barn for the first time, she says: "A large orange circle covered the sky and coloured the world below. The fields, the animals, the farmhouse, all were illuminated in this strange, intense, blood-like colour.I heard myself scream, again and again."

The scream is the one that she has been prevented from letting out during their long period of hiding. Finally Yuri, the Russian soldier who has been carrying her, calms her. "My new friend.carried me outside. All the while his soft voice reassured me, and the sound of those words made me feel safe.. The fresh air of the summer evening felt soothing against my skin. I looked around me. I was no longer afraid."

But the privations she has suffered do not make an occasion for sorrow and regret. Charney says her book is an attempt to distance herself from the work of other survivors of Nazi oppression like Elie Wiesel and André Schwarz-Bart. "I didn't find my experience in their books, and I didn't want to spend my life following the narrow lane of lamentations," she says.

"I wanted to show that one can live through all that and still go on to be a whole human being. I wanted to have the world as my oyster the way it is for other people, and I wanted to feel free to go on to explore other things." She adds with emphasis: "One should really exalt life." That's why the book begins as it does with the liberation, and why there is so much about pleasure: ice cream, the feel of air on skin, the joy of being able to see further than four walls.

The book is also full of  love and luck. Charney was lucky enough to be born to a mother who was strong and clever and had enough resources to pay for help. Then once they were in hiding, the adults around her doted on her, teaching her to read and write, to knit, to sing. Afterwards Yuri became her special friend, and the champion of the family. It is from these repeated experiences of love and attention that Charney has built a sensibility that allows her to say that she had a "happy childhood".

Read it!

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 Women, 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