Four Weeks of Fiction and a Short Walk in the Woods

I guess I took quite a long break from my reading blog, but, as ever, I didn't stop reading!

In these past four weeks I've read two novels and part of a travelogue.  The travelogue was The Maine Woods, by Henry David Thoreau, which I picked up thinking it would be a good follow-on to the book about foundation narratives, America as Second Creation. The Maine Woods is a compilation of travel narratives Thoreau wrote about his trips to Maine in 1846, 1853, and 1857, around the same time agricultural pioneers were traveling westward to realize the American dream of owning land.  In fact, in the book Thoreau mentions such pioneers and suggests that if people are looking for land to farm, they could find some in the vast forests of Maine (once all the trees are cut down, of course).  I'm glad people didn't take his advice.

After about 100 pages of the Thoreau book, though, it started to get repetitious, so I put it aside and turned to literary fiction, most notably a book many people have been reading recently, The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd.  First published in 2002, this is an excellent novel; it's praise in the media is well deserved, I think.  It takes place in 1964 in South Carolina, and is the story of a 14-year old white girl who lives alone with her cruel and distant (widowed) father and her black nanny/housekeeper, Rosaleen.  She inadvertently gets caught up in the Civil Rights Movement by breaking Rosaleen out of the hospital where she is under guard after being arrested (and beaten) for spitting on a local racist's shoes.  The two of them flee to a place Lily hopes will reveal something about her mother who died ten years before.  In her mother's things, Lily had found a card with the figure of the Black Madonna and the name of a town, Tiburon, on the back.  When Lily and Rosaleen get to that town, they find that the Black Madonna is the label for a honey making business in town. They go there and are taken in by the beekeepers, three black sisters who hide them from the law (unknowingly) and teach Lily how to keep bees.  Eventually, Lily learns about her mother's connection to that place and the truth about her mother's death.

This book is very well written.  From the very first page I was struck by the strength of the voice I was hearing, that of the first-person narrator, Lily.  The characters are well developed, and there is great depth to the story, but what makes the book an exceptionally good read is the suspense that builds--not only from the fact that Lily and Rosaleen are fugitives from the law in segregated South Carolina just after the Civil Rights Act was signed, but also from the mystery of Lily's mother and her connection to the beekeepers.  Not until the end do readers learn the answer to all the questions that develop over the course of the novel. My only criticism is that at times the chain of events seems a bit implausible, especially for that time period. But for the most part, the plot kept me involved.

I've just learned that there is a movie of the novel that came out in 2008; I'm going to get it and see if it is true to the book.  I recommend the book highly; as for the movie, I'll reserve judgment until I've seen it.

After The Secret Life of Bees, I continued my foray into fiction with Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, a novel about a Dominican American family with four daughters and one son.  The novel goes back and forth in time as well as place, taking us to the Dominican Republic and to New York City, showing the differences between the two places over the decades, following each of the four daughters from early childhood to adulthood, marriage and children.  Each daughter has her own story to tell; each reacts differently to the two worlds, to their parents, to each other, and to the challenges of adjusting to life in the United States.

The book is interesting in that it doesn't have a clear narrative path; when I got to the end, it didn't feel like the end, and I wasn't sure that the story was resolved.  But that was okay.  I felt like I got to the know the Garcia family in all their complexity, which may have been the point, and a good thing, especially from the point of view of an Anglo who might tend to lump all Hispanics into one category and make a judgment about them as a group.  In this book, all the characters are widely divergent, exhibiting characteristics of humans from any race or culture.  They are Dominican, but they are also individuals, unique and complex.

That's one of the things I like about reading fiction written by people from other cultures: I find out how complex these groups of people truly are.  The characters in these books defy stereotyping because we see them up close, noting their individual traits, their peculiar characteristics, their brilliance and their flaws.  They're not all alike; they are a part of their culture but not merged with it. They are not merely Hispanics or Latinos; they are people, complicated and therefore interesting. I recommend this book highly, but beware--it's not a conventional narrative.

The final book, which I'm nearly finished reading, is a novel I borrowed from one of my coworkers: Live Wire, by Harlan Coben.  It's a murder mystery, of the the hard-boiled (HB) detective genre, featuring the continuing protagonist, Myron Bolitar.  Myron is an interesting character; he's a sports agent who somehow gets involved in investigating murders.  Who'da thunk it?  But all the conventions of the HB genre are here, from the main character's troubled past and unbelievably skilled performance in a fight; to the edgy, dangerous, not-quite-legal sidekick; the savvy female partner; and the suspenseful, intricate, and fast-paced plot.  It's not great literature, but it's a really good read.  What more could you ask from pulp fiction?  I recommend it to those who love mysteries, especially the hard-boiled-detective type.

So, this week I'll probably go back to non-fiction.  I may read a library book about Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, or I might choose another book from my collection that I've been meaning to read for lo, these many years.

In any case, I'll keep you posted!