{"id":197,"date":"2011-07-07T14:21:17","date_gmt":"2011-07-07T14:21:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/reading_0910\/"},"modified":"2013-04-16T14:54:17","modified_gmt":"2013-04-16T19:54:17","slug":"reading_0910","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/reading_0910\/","title":{"rendered":"President David R. Anderson’s Bookshelf (III)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hornets<\/a>The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet\u2019s Nest<\/b>
\nBy Stieg Larsson
\nAlfred Knopf, 2010<\/p>\n

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet\u2019s Nest<\/em> concludes Stieg Larsson\u2019s series of novels about investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, not because Larsson was finished with the subject but because he died before he could write the 10 novels he reportedly had planned.<\/p>\n

I wondered, in my comments on the previous novel, The Girl Who Played with Fire<\/em>, where Larsson was going with the series. Was it going to now focus on Lisbeth Salander or would it return to Mikael Blomkvist and Millenium <\/em>magazine? The series appears to have been headed in the latter direction, with Blomkvist launching another investigation \u2014 this time into the injustices done to Salander by the state. The novel returns to Larsson\u2019s broad themes about right-wing extremists, the role of a free press in a democracy, and violence against women. It\u2019s kind of preachy.<\/p>\n

Salander spends most of the novel in a hospital bed recovering from the wound she received in the last pages of the previous novel, so even though midway through The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet\u2019s Nest<\/em> she gains access to a computer and the Internet, her place in the novel is circumscribed. This is an interesting take on one of the tropes of crime fiction: the detective who for whatever reason is immobile and has to solve crimes by cerebration. (Rex Stout\u2019s Nero Wolfe was such a detective.)<\/p>\n

The first novel in this series introduced us to Salander, the second novel told us how Salander got that way, and this novel, by settling old scores with Salander\u2019s enemies, clears the way for the next chapter in her life. The last sentence of the novel begins with the words, \u201cShe opened the door wide.\u201d That metaphorical act tells us where this series was headed. I wish we could have the other seven novels.<\/p>\n

\"Girl<\/a>The Girl Who Played With Fire<\/b>
\nBy Stieg Larsson
\nVintage Crime\/Black Lizard, 2010<\/p>\n

In my comments on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo<\/em>, I said, \u201cLet\u2019s not kid ourselves: it\u2019s the character of Lisbeth Salander that makes this book worth running out to read right away. In my view, she is clearly the most interesting female investigator in crime fiction today precisely because she is so ruthlessly amoral and portrayed as such so unapologetically until the end of this novel. I am eager to read the next one to see where Larsson goes with this character.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Girl Who Played with Fire<\/em> doesn\u2019t disappoint. Larsson\u2019s first novel was about the reporter Mikael Blomkvist and his investigation into a corrupt businessman. Salander did some investigating for him, and she stole the show, but it was basically a novel about Blomkvist. This novel is about Salander. We learn where she came from and can begin to see how she got be to the way she is.<\/p>\n

Two detective novelists in the American tradition have experimented with characters who, like Salander, first appear as ruthless, amoral warriors: Robert B. Parker\u2019s Hawk and Robert Crais\u2019 Joe Pike. The question for the author becomes whether, and if so how, to develop this character. Parker appeared content to let Hawk be Hawk. We don\u2019t hear about his childhood, his friends (if any), never see the inside of his house, and so forth. Crais has taken a different route with Joe Pike both in L.A. Requiem <\/em>and The Watchman<\/em>, revealing his past and showing a capacity for sympathy and understanding that expands his character.<\/p>\n

Larsson seems to be headed down that latter road with his novel, which is about Salander, not Blomkvist. We learn about her father, her mother, how she came to be under guardianship of the state. We see that she\u2019s capable of human empathy in her treatment of her former guardian, a stroke victim. Her relationship with Miriam Wu seems to suggest that she\u2019s capable of sustained human friendship. In many ways, we come to see her as a victim of her past, not a freak of nature.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s only one more Larsson novel. Where will he take this character?<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>The Danish Girl<\/b>
\nBy David Ebershoff
\nViking, 2000<\/p>\n

This is a book I just picked off the reading room shelf in Rolvaag Library because the cover caught my eye. I had never heard of it, even though it was apparently an international best seller when it was published. This is why you should wander around the reading room from time to time.<\/p>\n

The novel was inspired by the life of Einar Wegener, a Danish painter who became one of the first identifiable cases of surgical gender reassignment. The novel begins one day when Einar\u2019s wife Greta, also a painter, asks him to put on women\u2019s stockings and shoes and pose for her so that she can finish a portrait. Her female model had canceled that day, and she needed to do the legs. Einar complies, and thus begins the series of events that moves from Einar taking to dressing more and more often as a woman, to a forced departure from Denmark, to life in Paris, to a crisis, and to Einar\u2019s decision, with his wife\u2019s support, to go to Dresden for gender reassignment surgery. He emerges as Lili Elbe.<\/p>\n

This is one of the most intimate novels I can remember reading. It\u2019s not physical intimacy but rather a meticulous recounting of the sate of mind of someone going through this extraordinary set of experiences. Set in the 1920s, the novel also meticulously records details of daily life. At a street market in Paris the woman who sells fine skirts and blouses has chipped front teeth; Lili\u2019s velvet cap features a yellow-diamond and onyx brooch shaped like a monarch butterfly. Reading the novel, you feel drawn further and further into the lives of the characters and the realia<\/em> that surrounds them.<\/p>\n

The novel surfaces an interesting paradox: Einar\/Lili is presented throughout as weak and passive, yet he\/she achieves extraordinary self-knowledge and acts upon that knowledge with extraordinary courage and determination. How could someone be at the same time so seemingly powerless and yet so brave?<\/p>\n

This is a slow, meditative novel that will draw you into its interior space. I recommend it.<\/p>\n

\"Confessions<\/a>Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip \u2014 Confessions of a Cynical Waiter<\/b>
\nBy Steve Dublanica
\nHarperCollins, 2008<\/p>\n

I like books about food, cooking, and eating (see Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously<\/em> by Julie Powell, Heat<\/em> by Bill Buford, and In Defense of Food: An Eater\u2019s Manifesto<\/em> by Michael Pollan elsewhere on my bookshelf). For four years Dublanica anonymously chronicled his experiences as a waiter on a blog called \u201cWaiter Rant\u201d that ultimately won an award for best writing of a blog. This book grew out of that blog.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s about being a waiter. Like Anthony Bourdain\u2019s Kitchen Confidential<\/em>, which tells the story of what\u2019s going on in the kitchen, Waiter\u2019s Rant<\/em> tells what\u2019s going on among the wait staff. Both books present life in a restaurant as a frenetic, heart-pounding, eyeball-bulging experience. Food workers stay up too late, smoke too much, drink too much, do too many drugs, and lead messy lives. Restaurant owners are mean, greedy people with no managerial skills. Maybe it\u2019s really like that.<\/p>\n

Dublanica was a seminarian and then a mental health care worker before he began waiting tables, so he comes at his narrative with a kind of double-consciousness: on the one hand he\u2019s a waiter, immersed in the adrenalin-charged business of getting food out to the table on time; on the other hand he\u2019s standing apart from the other servers as someone with more education and more perspective \u2014 in short, as a writer. In one chapter near the end of the book he tells the story of how he eased a drunken customer out of the restaurant rather than serve her. A customer watching him says afterwards, \u201c’You\u2019re more than just a waiter. Aren\u2019t you.’ ‘Yes, madam,’ I reply.\u00a0 ‘Yes, I am.’\u201d\u00a0 (Dublanica is usually the hero of his own stories.)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s some fine writing in this book, but I was hoping that it would be a little less about how crummy the narrator\u2019s co-workers were and a little more about the business of getting food on the table.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife<\/b>
\nBy David Eagleman
\nPantheon Books, 2009<\/p>\n

My friend Inga Velde \u201975 read this book and passed it to me. It is short, puzzling, and quirky. I recommend it.<\/p>\n

David Eagleman is a \u201cneuroscientist and a writer.\u201d He calls the chapters in Sum<\/em> \u201cTales,\u201d and that\u2019s a good label for them. They postulate an imaginary situation connected to the afterlife, spin out in a narrative that shows what it would be like under those conditions, and then, typically, end with an ironic twist \u2014 like an O. Henry short story \u2014 that contains something like a moral.<\/p>\n

The first tale, for example, imagines what it would be like if in the afterlife you relived all of your life experiences so that all of the similar experiences are grouped together. You would spend 27 hours in pain, 18 months waiting in line, 77 hours confused, and so on. The tale ends by noting that you would even spend a certain amount of time wondering what it would be like if your experiences were split into tiny, more tractable morsels \u201cwhere moments to not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.\u201d The point of this tale, I think, is to suggest that we should take pleasure in the episodic, fragmented nature of our experience.<\/p>\n

Another tale begins by positing that the world of the afterlife is made up only of people you know, another that in the afterlife you can choose whatever you would like to be in the next life, another that God\u2019s favorite book is Frankenstein<\/em>, and so on. One of the blurbs on the book jacket has one Geoff Dyer asserting that \u201cSum<\/em> has the unaccountable, jaw-dropping quality of genius.\u201d I wouldn\u2019t go that far by any means, but it is unexpected, witty, and thought-provoking.<\/p>\n

\"Julie<\/a>Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously<\/b>
\nBy Julie Powell
\nLittle, Brown, 2005<\/p>\n

I love good food, I love to cook, and I thought Julie and Julia<\/em> was a great movie. I was in an airport before a long flight, saw the book, and bought it.<\/p>\n

This is a memoir. Its narrative is framed around the Julia Project, the author\u2019s decision to cook every recipe in Julia Childs\u2019Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I<\/em> in a 365-day period. She chronicled that project in a blog and then wrote this book. It\u2019s really not a book about cooking. It\u2019s a book about not knowing who you are, being stuck in a dead-end job, being afraid that you are permanently stuck and that you will never know who you are, and about finding a way out of that trap.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s fun, mostly. While it\u2019s not a cooking book per se<\/em>, or a compendium of recipes, there are lots of cooking stories, enough recipes to keep you going, and lots of funny stories of kitchen mishaps. The narrative about finding out who you are seems less sustained, though it has moments of passion and brilliance. We\u2019re told that the author found herself through this project, but it\u2019s not clear how or whether that actually happened.<\/p>\n

Like many young writers, Powell goes a long way by being hip, flip, and profane. Sometimes that\u2019s really funny, as in this description of \u201cthe French paradox\u201d: \u201cthat much-publicized puzzle of how French people eat all that fatty food and drink tons of wine, yet still manage to be svelte and sophisticated, not to mention cheese-eating surrender monkeys\u201c(pp. 272-3). Other times it\u2019s just vulgar and dumb, as in \u201dPlease understand \u2014 I love my husband like a pig loves shit\u201d (p. 18).<\/p>\n

So, read this book if you are interested in a frequently amusing book about cooking. If you\u2019re looking for a memoir about finding yourself\u2014not so much.<\/p>\n

\"Iron<\/a>Iron Lake<\/b>
\nBy William Kent Krueger
\nPocket Books, 1998<\/p>\n

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\"Blood<\/a>Blood Hollow<\/b>
\nBy William Kent Krueger
\nAtria Books, 2004<\/p>\n

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\"Mercy<\/a>Mercy Falls<\/b>
\nBy William Kent Krueger
\nAtria Books, 2005<\/p>\n

Greg Kneser, the excellent dean of students at St. Olaf, turned me on to William Kent Krueger, a Minnesota novelist who writes detective novels set in the Boundary Waters area. The detective, Corcoran O\u2019Connor, is part Irish and part Anishinaabe Indian. He lives in Aurora, Minnesota (a thinly disguised Ely), with one foot in the town and the other in the nearby Ojibwe reservation. That\u2019s not his only divided loyalty: he was the sheriff of Tamarack County, then he lost his job, then he won it back. So these novels are part police procedurals and part a variant of the tough-guy genre with a troubled, alienated individual with bad habits in dogged pursuit of a criminal. Then there\u2019s Cork\u2019s marriage to Jo, an attorney, which when it\u2019s going well is a great thing and when it\u2019s going badly is a real mess.<\/p>\n

I recommend the Cork O\u2019Connor novels for their evocation of the North Woods, their serious and respectful treatment of Native American traditions and culture, and their cold-eyed look at sin and evil.<\/p>\n

<\"The<\/a>The English Major <\/b>
\nBy Jim Harrison
\nGrove Press, 2008.<\/p>\n

Why do people keep giving me books about English majors having midlife crises? And by \u201cpeople,\u201d here I mean my wife. Furthermore, when novelists want to write about adults misbehaving, why is it always the English major? What about the peccadilloes of chemistry majors, for example? Or economists? Surely they have some. Perhaps its because the people who write novels tend to have been English majors, and they write about what they know.<\/p>\n

In any event, here\u2019s a cranky novel about Cliff, who was an English major, taught high school English, left that profession to become a full-time farmer on his wife Vivian\u2019s family farm, and then, at age 60, was left on his own when Vivian, who has become a \u201clate-blooming real-estate shark\u201d has an affair, sells the farm, and makes it clear that he is unwelcome. Cliff goes on a road trip.<\/p>\n

He had a jigsaw puzzle as a child of the 48 states, and he resolves to visit all of them, throwing a piece of the puzzle away as he crosses each state border. Along the way he resolves to rename each state and its state bird. Renaming birds is the fun part of the novel. Bird names in general are preposterous \u2014 Rufous-sided Towhee for example, or Chestnut-vented Tit-Babbler \u2014 and in the course of the novel Cliff comes up with some excellent replacement suggestions for bird names.<\/p>\n

But I digress. This is a book you might enjoy if you think we should pay more attention to place, you like road trips, you like narrators who are attuned to the landscape around them, you like descriptions of big hearty breakfasts, you like fishing, you don\u2019t like cell phones, you think boats should be rowed rather than propelled by power motors, and you like lots of talk by the narrator about sex he is having, or used to have, or wants to have, mainly with younger women. Many of the blurbs describe the novel as \u201cearthy.\u201d<\/p>\n

I found most of those aspects of the novel tiresome. But this is an interesting take on the novel of self-discovery. It begins with the blow to Cliff represented by losing his wife and the farm. He does what heroes have done for centuries in such a crisis \u2014 he takes to the road, has a series of adventures that put him in new situations and thus opportunities to grow, and ultimately comes home. Has he changed? Did he learn anything? That\u2019s not clear. Earlier I called this a cranky novel. I debated while reading it whether the novel itself was cranky or merely its narrator. In the end, I think it was the novel.<\/p>\n

\"Gorbachev's<\/a>Gorbachev\u2019s American Spy<\/b>
\nBy Jeffery Barnett
\nBasil Road Books, 2010<\/p>\n

This novella by my friend Jeffery Barnett, an immensely cultivated and interesting man, is part historical fiction, part political thriller. It tells the story of an unlikely relationship between Mikhail Gorbachev and an American military intelligence officer, Mike Shea. The author might have titled it “Mike and Mikhail.” It\u2019s a fun and quick read. Imagine a story that spans nearly twenty years, touches upon the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Nixon\u2019s visit to China, the Yom Kippur War, and offers insights into the Byzantine workings of the inner circles of the Communist Party during the Cold War. Highly recommended.<\/p>\n

\"Wicked<\/a>Wicked Prey<\/b>
\nBy John Sandford
\nG.P. Putnam\u2019s Sons, 2009<\/p>\n

It\u2019s always a big day when I get my hands on a new John Sandford novel. It\u2019s like sitting down to a piece of homemade raspberry pie topped with fresh cream: you want to devour the whole thing right away, except that then it will be all gone.<\/p>\n

Wicked Prey<\/em> is set during the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, and it\u2019s an interesting blend of political thriller and detective novel. There are really three plots going on here: the gang that is robbing political operatives of their walking around money; the depressing story of a mean-spirited petty criminal and his abusive relationship with a young woman; and the story of Letty, Lucas Davenport\u2019s ward, who is growing up too fast and is just like Lucas. It\u2019s a lot to juggle, and sometimes you feel like you\u2019re reading a couple of different novels at once.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting to watch what the writers of great series detectives \u2014 Robert B. Parker, Sue Grafton, even the venerable Rex Stout \u2014 do when they get into the middle of their series. They look for new directions without abandoning what\u2019s working. Parker, for example, is keeping up the Spenser series while starting a new series featuring Jesse Stone and another new series featuring Sunny Randall, and now he is integrating characters from one series into the others. Stone and Sunny Randall have begun a relationship, and it seems inevitable that at some point Stone and Spenser are going to confront each other. Sandford also has two other series going, the Kidd novels and now the Virgil Flowers novels. The Prey novels and the Flowers novels have interlacing characters.<\/p>\n

The most interesting part of Wicked Prey<\/em> for me was the treatment of Letty. She is clearly going to be a force in future Prey novels, and the male-female, father-daughter dynamic that Sandford has set up is going to be fun to watch.<\/p>\n

\"Girl<\/a>The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo<\/b>
\nBy Stieg Larsson
\n(translated from Swedish by Reg Keeland)
\nVintage Crime\/Black Lizard, 2009<\/p>\n

I\u2019m continuing my exploration of Scandinavian crime fiction. According to a note at the beginning of this novel, the author died in 2004 shortly after sending the manuscripts for this novel and two others to the publishers. One of the other novels is called The Girl Who Played With Fire<\/em>. The other is untitled. Thus, his entire corpus of crime novels consists of these three works.<\/p>\n

This is an intricately plotted novel because it is telling more than one story at once. There is the story of \u201cCarl\u201d Mikael Blomkvist, a financial journalist and co-founder (with his lover, a wealthy married woman) of a center-left magazine who has just been convicted of libel; the story of Lisbeth Salander, a ward of the state with an appalling life story, amazing investigative skills, and the morals of a cat; and the crime that brings them together, a forty-year-old missing person story involving the family of a prominent Swedish industrialist. It sounds unmanageable, but it isn\u2019t. Larsson tells a compelling story about a crime and an investigation while developing two fascinating characters, Mikael and Lisbeth, and offering a critique of modern capitalism that resonates in light of the recent economic downturn.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s not kid ourselves: it\u2019s the character of Lisbeth Salander that makes this book worth running out to read right away. In my view, she is clearly the most interesting female investigator in crime fiction today precisely because she is so ruthlessly amoral and portrayed as such so unapologetically until the end of this novel. I am eager to read the next one to see where Larsson goes with this character.<\/p>\n

This is a gritty novel. Gosh, the Scandinavians are dark! (And I can\u2019t believe how much coffee gets drunk in this novel. How do they ever get to sleep?) If you\u2019re offended by graphic depictions of brutal sexuality, don\u2019t read this book. But if you accept that as a convention of this kind of fiction and you want to encounter a truly novel female character in a crime novel, read this one.<\/p>\n

\"Bait<\/a>Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream<\/b>
\nBy Barbara Ehrenreich
\nMetropolitan Books, 2005<\/p>\n

This book caught my eye at the public library. I\u2019d read Ehrenreich\u2019s Nickel and Dimed,<\/em> in which she reports on the lives of low-wage earners by taking a series of such jobs. This book adopts a similar approach to a different group: white-collar unemployed. Ehrenreich creates a new identity for herself and then tries to get a job in corporate public relations. In the course of her search she seeks the help of resume writers and career coaches, attends networking events and job fairs, joins professional associations, and even gets a style makeover, but in the end she is unable to find a job as she defined it for the purposes of this book: a reasonable middle-class salary, benefits, an office from which to work.<\/p>\n

This was a timely book when it was published in 2005: it is much more so today, when we are in the grip of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression and unemployment the day I am writing this stands at 9.7 percent. General Motors emerged from bankruptcy last week announcing that, among other things, it would cut more than 6,000 white-collar jobs. Many Americans today are in precisely the situation Ehrenreich examines in her book, and reducing unemployment is undoubtedly one of the keys to emerging from this downturn. I wish this book were more helpful, but it\u2019s mostly interested in excoriating the institutions Ehrenreich blames for the plight of the white-collar unemployed and the \u201ctransition\u201d industry to which the unemployed turn for help.<\/p>\n

Ehrenreich comes at her topic from a distinct point of view. She argues that the white-collar unemployed have done the things that are supposed to lead to success. They earned college degrees and worked successfully in meaningful jobs. They have skills, experience, and professional accomplishments. They are supposed to be living the American Dream. That\u2019s the \u201cbait.\u201d But in a tough economic environment (Ehrenreich\u2019s book grows out of the recession in the early 2000s), businesses and corporations cut costs by downsizing, \u201crightsizing,\u201d and outsourcing. The workforce gets smaller, salaries and benefits get cut, and people who have skills, experience, and accomplishments find themselves not comfortable in mid-career but unemployed. They are supposed to be valued employees, but instead they are disposable. That\u2019s the \u201cswitch.\u201d This book describes what it\u2019s like to be in that situation. To be fair, it does close with a solution. The best thing would be a return to fuller employment. The next best thing would be an expansion of benefits, such as universal health-care and expanded unemployment benefits to assist workers in transition. But Ehrenreich admits these solutions are \u201cunlikely or even utopian in the current political climate,\u201d which brings her to what is possible: self-defense. She argues that, \u201cNo group is better situated, or perhaps better motivated, to lead the defense of the middle class than the unemployed \u2014 assuming they could recognize their common interests and begin to act as a political force\u201d (p.236). (The political climate in 2009 obviously differs from the one Ehrenreich wrote in: at least one of her \u201cutopian\u201d ideas, expanded health insurance for all Americans, is under serious consideration in the House and Senate today.)<\/p>\n

The publisher\u2019s blurb on the jacket of this book calls it \u201calternately hilarious and tragic.\u201d I would call it \u201calternately self-righteous and mean.\u201d Here\u2019s an example. Ehrenreich has been working with a job coach, who does seem pretty ineffectual, and one day she decides to use a coaching session to try to persuade him that he needs to hire her as his PR person. She recounts that experience and then, driving home, observes:<\/p>\n

I make my way back down the freeway toward the hotel, aware of all
\nthe feelings appropriate to a pacifist on the occasion of his first kill.
\nYes, I am filled with self-loathing and disgust. Slime oozes from my
\nhands onto the steering wheel; the white noise of the road is filled with
\nmuffled denunciations and curses brought down on my soul. But I did,
\ndidn\u2019t I? I tried selling myself, and for an hour-long stretch I wasn\u2019t
\nhalf bad. I have blooded my sword. (p. 120)<\/p>\n

This is fancy writing, but it\u2019s silly. Trying to persuade someone to hire you isn\u2019t a mortal sin. This passage reflects Ehrenreich\u2019s view of what she calls the \u201ccorporate world.\u201d She\u2019s so certain of its failings (and of her own superiority to it), that she can\u2019t deliver much insight into it.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s good reporting in this book, and good writing. I recommend it to those who agree with, or can put up with, the agenda.<\/p>\n

\"Lima<\/a>Lima Nights<\/b>
\nBy Marie AranaDial Press, 2009<\/p>\n

This is another book I picked off the shelf of new books at Rolvaag Library, not knowing anything about the author. I\u2019m trying to be adventurous in my fiction reading. Set in Peru, it tells a story that, though familiar in many ways, holds your attention with exoticism that is curiously mixed with a hard-edged realism.<\/p>\n

Carlos Bluhm is a middle-aged man, descended from wealthy German immigrants, married to Sophie Westermann, also descended from German immigrants, with two sons. Carlos has not been as successful as his father and grandfather, so he and his family live in faded splendor \u2014 they still belong to the exclusive Club Germania, for example, but only because his grandfather was one of its founders, not because they can afford it.<\/p>\n

One night after a social evening with their wives at Club Germania, Carlos and his male friends go to a place called Lima Nights. There, women wearing red collars around their necks are available as dance partners. A young woman approaches Carlos and utters the novel\u2019s first sentence: \u201cGive me your hand.\u201d She is beautiful, erotic, dark-skinned, and 15. You can see where this is headed, and that is indeed where it goes. Carlos embarks on a passionate affair with the young woman, Maria Fernandez, they are discovered, and his wife and sons leave him. Maria moves into the house and for the next 20 years they live together, unmarried.<\/p>\n

Bluhm ran with the wrong crowd. His married male friends were promiscuous, but even in that context he was known as someone who turned to indigenous women for his affairs. The novel is brutally frank in its explanation for Bluhm\u2019s preference: \u201cIt wasn\u2019t the fragrant skin, the tiny toes, the thick black hair. An Indian woman was more disposable. It was a matter of convenience. And Bluhm\u2019s friends understood this about him very well\u201d (p. 19).<\/p>\n

Maria is \u201cdisposable\u201d not only because of her race but also because of her class. She lives in one of Lima\u2019s worst slums, her father has died, and her mother takes in laundry for a nearby prison. There\u2019s a different abusive man in her mother\u2019s bed every night. When Bluhm arranges to pick Maria up on a street corner early in their affair, it\u2019s the first time she has ridden in a car. He represents her path out of that life.<\/p>\n

The question ultimately posed by this novel is whether Maria is, indeed, \u201cdisposable.\u201d After she and Bluhm have been living together for 20 years she begins to worry that he has made no commitment to her, that he could throw her out on the street at any moment, and that she would be right back where she started when she first approached him at Lima Nights. I don\u2019t want to give away the plot, so I\u2019ll simply say that she begins a campaign for commitment, Bluhm responds, and things end badly.<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s depiction of the culture of German Peruvians, its fascinating glimpses into the world of videntes<\/em>, or fortune-tellers, its evocation of passion, its hard-eyed analysis of privilege and abject poverty \u2014 all these are compelling. The characters I found less so. I don\u2019t understand what happened at the end.<\/p>\n

\"Bordeaux\"<\/a>Bordeaux: A Novel in Four Vintages<\/b>
\nBy Paul Torday
\nHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009<\/p>\n

I was in Rolvaag Library looking for a book to read, and \u2014 judging a book by its cover, which you\u2019re not supposed to do \u2014 grabbed this one.\u00a0 I\u2019m glad I did.<\/p>\n

The novel has four sections (the \u201cvintages\u201d referred to in the subtitle), each prefaced with a date:\u00a0 2006, 2004, 2003, and 2002. This is the order in which they occur in the novel, so you begin the story at the end, so to speak, and in the course of reading the novel come to understand how the situation with which you started came to be. Bordeaux<\/em> unfolds, in this way, somewhat like a mystery novel where you begin with a murder and as the detective learns who committed it, so do you.<\/p>\n

In this case, however, there isn\u2019t a detective, nor is there an omniscient narrator. Bordeaux<\/em> is narrated in the first-person by its protagonist, Francis Wilberforce. First-person dramatized narrators are always tricky. You have to take everything they say with a grain of salt because they are in the story \u2014 it happened to them \u2014 and they may well not understand what happened, or they may slant their interpretation of events to serve their own interests. That certainly happens in this novel. Wilberforce is not someone you will like, though you may at various points feel sorry for him. Raised in a loveless home by foster parents, utterly lacking not only in social skills but in social instincts, na\u00efve about people and relationships, alcoholic \u2014 this is neither a recipe for a happy life nor the description of someone likely to bring happiness into the lives of others.<\/p>\n

This novel reminded me of Evelyn Waugh\u2019s Brideshead Revisited<\/em> because it also tells the story of a solitary young man who is taken up by a wealthy, upper-class set and it doesn\u2019t go well, particularly in matters of the heart. Here\u2019s Wilberforce\u2019s reaction to his first visit to Hartlepool Hall:<\/p>\n

I imagined the world inhabited by these people to be like a garden surrounded by a high wall: inside the garden, the few inhabitants allowed to enter it enjoyed a life of leisure, in surroundings that were pleasant to the eye; outside, the world trudged about its weary business. I had been allowed a glimpse of the garden through the railings, had even stepped inside for a moment, and it had unsettled me.\u00a0 (p. 267)<\/p>\n

This \u201cunsettling\u201d is very important. Indeed, it is at the heart of the novel, which you could think of as the story of how Wilberforce gets unsettled and what he then does. Here\u2019s a hint as to how Wilberforce gets unsettled. It\u2019s from an interior monologue as he sits watching a glorious sunset on the moors after his first grouse hunt with his new friends. He\u2019s just overheard himself described by one of them as a \u201cNobody,\u201d and at first it\u2019s crushing, but then he thinks:<\/p>\n

Because I am nobody, I can choose to be whom I like. I can choose my life to be what I want it to be. I can become anybody. I can do anything . . . .\u00a0 It is a matter of choice, a matter of understanding that one\u2019s freedom to choose is limited only by courage and imagination\u00a0 . . . .\u00a0 All I have to do is stretch out my hand and take the thing I want. (p. 307).<\/p>\n

The novel depicts that happening.<\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t read this book if you an oenophile looking for a wine-themed novel. There are a lot of wine names tossed around, some compelling descriptions of how fine wines taste, a depressing portrait of alcoholism, thoughts about wine collecting (\u201cyou own the wine; don\u2019t let the wine own you\u201d), but at the end of the day this isn\u2019t a novel about wine. The love of wine is a symptom.<\/p>\n

Bordeaux<\/em> is a disciplined novel: tautly written in spare prose, carefully constructed, complex in its atmosphere and tone. I admired the craft as I was reading it, and I think you will too.
\n 
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