What I Read in February 2012

Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum. Oskar refuses to grow after age three, when he begins to play his toy tin drum. It speaks for him during the rise of Nazism, the war years, and the postwar turmoil of a divided Germany.

Scott Turow, Innocent. I enjoy Turow’s legal thrillers because they hold you with puzzles, not violence. Innocent is one of the thrillers in the series devoted to Rusty Sabich and Sandy Stern, lawyers in Kindle County aka Chicago. It has more plot twists than a pretzel and I could not put it down.

Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk. I am posting on each part of this book as I complete it. Part I – Behind the Lines. Svejk is in the World War I Austro Hungarian army, but not yet in battle. His struggles are with the military itself. Part II – At the Front. Svejk is not actually at the front, just continuing his long bureaucratically-obstructed journey toward that destination.

Margaret Drabble, The Sea Lady. Two people, a man and a woman, journey back to a place of their childhood. They meet there a third person from that time. A bit heavy on reminiscence and coincidence, but a good read for those of us who are looking back at our own reflections.

Angela Thirkell, The Brandons. Lavinia Brandon is rich widow, fond of her children and a bit silly. Everyone around her finds her absolutely charming, as do I. Just the person to spend a giggly afternoon with in 1939 Bartsetshire.

Sandford Salyer, Marmee: The Mother of Little Women. This rather informally written biography of Louisa May Alcott’s mother tells the story of the Alcott family as Abigail May Alcott (Abba) experienced it.

Edmund White, Fanny: A Fiction. Yes, a fiction. Loosely based on Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, this book is not quite a novel and not quite a biography either. Mostly true to the historical facts, it invents incidents in Frances Trollope’s life, to no particular point that I could see.

Flannery O’Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge. This collection of nine short stories, published after O’Connor’s death is my first experience with her work. The stories are skillfully wrought and intentionally disturbing.

Angela Thirkell, Before Lunch. Another cheerful muddle in the Bartsetshire series. Breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner are all important. That’s where people meet, talk, misunderstand. Some lovers head down the wrong path, but most matters are resolved before lunch.

Katharine Weber, Objects in Mirror Are Closer than They Appear. Two American women, Harriet and Anne, share an apartment in Geneva. The arrangement is temporary. They were roommates before, but now things have changed. Some objects in the mirror are indeed closer, too close.

Katharine Weber, The Little Women

I seem to be working my way back and forth through the work of Katharine Weber. First, I read Triangle, the sort of historical mystery viewed from today than I enjoy. Then I moved back to The Music Lesson, set in an Irish cottage with a heroine imprisoned in more ways than one. Now it’s forward again to The Little Women.

Weber seems to like the effect of multiple voices. In Triangle, in a series of interviews we hear the present voice of a woman obscuring the past, along with the voices from that past. In The Little Women we hear the voices of three sisters recounting their adventurous year when they ran away from home, all the way from New York to New Haven. The sisters are Margaret (Meg), Joanna (Jo) and Amy. The names were deliberately chosen by their parents to celebrate the idea of sisterhood.

Okay, so now I might as well get the usual raised-eyebrow-reaction-to-our-names thing out of the way. Margaret, Joanna, and Amy. So, yes, we were more or less named for the Louisa May Alcott characters by our inventor father and English professor mother (whom we have never, ever addressed as, Marmee, not even at the best of times, when her love and approval and goodness bathed our family in its golden light), and no, there are just the three of us, and yes, that’s right, very good, Beth is the one who dies anyway, so you see why they skipped her and went straight to Amy.

Jo tells the story but Jo also indulges in dialogues with the reader and, more, with her sisters who intersperse their her story of their lives with comments, the comments often being unfriendly ones. I suppose this gives us a rounded view of their characters. They are one for all and all for one as sisters, but quibbling and argumentative as individuals.

Reader’s note: Really, really enough! This is getting obsessive and embarrassing. Surely even the most dull-witted reader who’s been skipping around gets the point by now. It’s a wonderful, terribly attractive family. It’s time to move on. MG [Meg]

As the story progresses, the comments gets more acidic and narrator Jo repeatedly defends her choices of what to include and what to omit on the grounds of narrative necessity and artistic choice. With quotes from the classics. Amusing at first, it does become tedious, the sisters found, and so did I.