The Invisible Mountain, by Carolina De Robertis. Vintage Books (2009), 424 pages.

This is a book that will make you want to fly to Uruguay and walk the streets of the first village you come to, knocking on doors and asking if you might come in to listen to stories told by whoever might be living there.

Uruguay as portrayed here is magical, beautiful, and filled with people whose childhoods and family histories are enormously captivating.  Part of this atmosphere is conveyed through the use of a splash of magical realism in the first third of the book—though if you’re not a fan of magical realism, please be assured that there’s not too much of it to be annoyingly confusing, nor does it distract from the main plot in any way. There’s just the right amount, and it’s skillfully employed: the author gradually stops using it until, by the middle of the book, it’s gone. The book progresses in time from 1900 to 1960, and the use of magical realism to inform only the first few decades of the century felt perfectly appropriate to me because it mirrors the way in which family ancestral stories far removed from our memories can take on certain magical qualities, while the more recent past feels more mundane.

The last third of the book deals with historically accurate Uruguayan political events, and though I was less intrigued by some of these characters, I appreciated learning about the Tupamaros and the events of the late ’60s and early ’70s.

Excerpt:
She didn’t have the answer to his question. It might have taken much longer if it hadn’t been for the second homecoming. Years afterward, as a grey-haired woman trying to understand her granddaughter Salomé, holding her thin hand on a rattling bus after fifteen years of fearing for her life, Pajarita would think back to this year, 1930, the year of homecomings, and decide that there must have been a magnet, some cosmic unseen magnet that attracted—instead of pots and nails—the men she loved back home, just as Salomé was coming home now, like some miraculous, emaciated changeling. Such things do happen; all kinds of ore lies buried inside lives, and surely people can’t see all the forces that push them, draw them, hold them up. Sometimes you call the forces forward yourself, without knowing that you’ve done so. In the year of homecomings, in 1930, two weeks before Ignazio came home, Pajarita had knelt before a ceramic statue of San Antonio and prayed on Coco’s behalf….

Late one night, a knock sounded at the door. Ignazio had been home a month, and they sat in the living room, listening to the winter rains.
“Are you expecting anyone?”
She shook her head. More knocking.
Ignazio stood, looking wary. “Who is it?”
“Pajarita?”
The voice pushed at her, made her rise and grasp the knob and turn and pull and there he was. Artigas. Drenched  and shivering under a too-small umbrella. Overgrown hair clung to his head. He held hands with a little girl, about five years old, a mulata with Artigas’ hazel eyes. She was also wet. She stared up at Pajarita.
Artigas said, “Are you going to let us in?”
She motioned for them to enter. Her brother dripped onto the rug. She could taste the verdant plains of Tacuarembó, the hot dry wind, the smell of stew from the cooking pit, the crack of firewood under Artigas’ ax, his smell, his voice, his shadow in the dark.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

One day this summer, however, wandering about in my local independent bookstore, I ran across a stack of The Family Fang surrounded by little notes of acclaim written by the booksellers who work there. The words “breath-taking,” “stunning,” and “genius” were being thrown around (this time, however, without any mention of “wackiness”) so, with a heavy sigh and a heart burdened by my sense of responsibility to Book Shark readers, I forced myself to pick it up and look inside. Within a few pages it became clear to me that the family Wilson had created was surreal, bizarre, possibly even psychotic, but not, fortunately, charmingly eccentric.

While the distance between eccentric/kooky/wacky and bizarre/surreal may seem like an insignificantly short one to many, it is, I feel, a distinction that is crucial. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, for example, is full of bizarre characters and goings-on that are difficult for readers to relate to but are rendered in a way that makes all the madness seem somehow entirely believable. This is the case with much Southern gothic literary fiction. Genre fiction set in the South, on the other hand, is frequently populated by entire towns full of  nothing but “wacky, kooky” personalities whose eccentricities are meant to make them appear original and therefore believable, but who in fact, by virtue of being nothing but a collection of these traits, come across as entirely unbelievable.

So. For those of you who care which category the Fang family falls into, rest assured that I have carefully assessed the nature of their strangeness and have concluded that theirs is come by honestly, that they are in fact, legitimately bizarre.

The family consists of parents Caleb and Camille, and their children, Annie and Buster. Caleb and Camille are performance artists who create “happenings” which they film for later viewings in art galleries. Their events are meant to disturb the public (who are always unknowing participants in these pieces) but, in fact, end up disturbing their children (who are always a part of the “art” as well) to a far greater degree. We come to understand the depth of Annie and Buster’s despair with this way of life through chapters alternating between various performances in their childhood and their current lives as adults.

Wilson’s family is original and I appreciate the twisted sensibility that appears throughout the novel—the subject matter of Camille’s paintings for example—but I am left with the feeling that he doesn’t quite know how to move his story from a strange and fascinating image, to a plot that actually takes the reader somewhere. Wilson seems to be aware of this himself as his description of Buster’s novel mirrors exactly the way Wilson seems to be stuck:

The novel seemed to be a cave of sorts, twisting, maze-like passages, but Buster focused only on finding an exit that was not the original entrance, pushing his way through the dark until he found a path that held the promise of escape. He knew that Micah and Rachel would emerge, finally, from the pit and take their places aboveground, but he had to get there, had to find the correct sequence of events that would unlock that image.

Unfortunately Wilson does not discover the right sequence of events for the Fang family’s exit and what began with such promise, ends in a flat, completely unbelievable ending—an ending so incompatible with what went before, in fact, that I couldn’t even remember it. You may recall that I read this book over the summer (three months ago): when I sat down to finally write about it and could not remember how it ended, I went back to re-read it and was surprised to find the ending was meant to shock me. The fact that I was not only not shocked, but couldn’t even remember it confirms my feeling that it was completely wrong. A great ending, no matter how unforeseen, should have a sense of inevitability about it—a feeling that even though you, the reader, would never have thought of it, the story could not have ended any other way. This is not the case with The Family Fang however, and as a result I have (sadly) downgraded it from what I thought was going to be at least a four star novel, to a mere two.

EXCERPT:
Two hours into a nap that he had taken for no reason other than he was bored, Buster was shaken into consciousness, his muscles aching from the effort of staying asleep for so long, by his sister. “I found something weird,” she told him. “How weird?” Buster asked, unconvinced that it warranted getting out of bed. Annie held up a tiny oil painting, the size of a dental dam, which featured a small child with his arm, up to his elbow, inside the mouth of a wolf. Around them were gleaming surgical instruments, flecked with blood. It was unclear whether the child was placing the items inside the wolf or pulling them out. “There’s like, I don’t know, a hundred of these paintings in the back of my closet,” Annie told him. At the prospect of overwhelming weirdness, not simply an isolated case, Buster found his interest wax. “Okay, I’m up,” he said, and he followed his sister into her bedroom. On their hands and knees, Buster and Annie moved the nearly one hundred paintings from the faint light of the closet to the middle of the bedroom, arranging them like tiles on the floor. When they had retrieved every last painting, they looked in stunned silence at the resulting disharmony that now filled the room.

A man, covered in mud and thin, lash-like wounds that dripped blood, wandered in a field of palaminos.

A little girl, buried alive, played jacks by match light while her parents wailed above her grave.

An ocean of dead, decomposing geese were stacked like cordwood by men in biohazard suits.

A woman, her hair on fire, held a brush made of bone and smiled an exact reproduction of the Mona Lisa’s expression.

A young boy, his hands wrapped in barbed wire, wrestled with a tiger while the boy’s classmates circled around them.

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Vindication!  I read Three Cups of Tea a couple of years ago, well before the scandal broke (via the April 17 episode of 60 Minutes), and was unable to get more than halfway through it. Not because of boredom (though there was plenty of that), nor the quality of the writing—something about the book simply pissed me off. I was angry enough to post a review of the book on this website, even though our policy is to review only books that we have completed. In my review (which I ended up removing about a year after it was posted, in order to conform to Book Shark policy), I mentioned that I found myself hating the author, as well as the cultish behavior of his followers. (I recall a friend of a friend carrying on for over a half an hour about how life-changing the book was, and how he had come to realize that his life was utterly meaningless and sad compared to Greg’s. He was clearly in the thralls of cultish Greg worship, and it freaked me out.)

Three Cups of Tea felt disingenuous to me. I could not understand his behavior following his “kidnapping.” Why were there no emotional repercussions of any sort? He simply carries on as if nothing had happened, filled with the same humanitarian urges as before, with no feelings of anger toward the “kidnappers” or any doubt whatsoever about their worthiness to receive 100 percent of his time and devotion? While ignoring his newborn baby on the other side of the planet? I kept wondering about a father who would have so little interest in getting to know his own new baby (firstborn) because the children of people who supposedly almost killed him needed his help. Actually, I wondered a great deal about his true feelings toward children, because I didn’t believe he particularly liked them. Part of what felt false as I read was this: here is a person who has made his life’s purpose helping children. That’s why he wrote the book, why he started his charity, why he was doing everything—it was all For the Children! And yet children are almost entirely absent from the book. He doesn’t talk to them, interact with them, or explain in any detail what he hoped the schools will do for them. In the few places they do appear, they are not portrayed as individuals but as a homogenous little pack of star-struck fans, completely in awe of him, pulling on his hands, leading him to and fro, and so on. Cute little monkeys—part of what makes the landscape quirky and fun, but certainly not any meaningful aspect of the book. I found this very odd indeed, and couldn’t believe he failed to relate a single conversation with a child in his book. What did the kids hope to learn? What subjects would they study? What had their schooling been like thus far? What did they have to say about a new school? I blamed the editor for not getting Greg to answer these questions, then gave up on the book in disgust.

And now I’ve just finished the exposé Three Cups of Deceit. Who better to bring Greg’s evils to light than the amazing and brilliant Jon, one of the most engaging writers on the planet, an actual mountaineer and humanitarian, and himself a victim of Greg’s, having donated about a hundred thousand dollars to the fake charity?

Deceit is a slim book at just 75 pages, but nobody researches as thoroughly and passionately as Jon, and this is a must read not only for those who read (or tried to read) Tea, but also anyone with a general interest in charlatans. The kidnapping was a lie. Schools were not built. Millions of dollars were squandered. The IRS was lied to. Everybody he ever met was lied to. And I bet I’m right that he doesn’t even like kids.

(Interesting side note for those following the fascinating new field of memoir fraud litigation. The same lawyer who filed the suit against James Frey’s publisher, on the grounds that the book was falsely advertised as nonfiction and consumers were due their money back, is now seeking restitution for Tea readers, on the same grounds. Read about it here. Shockingly, only 1,345 readers actually requested a refund for Frey’s book. Let’s all demand our money back for Greg’s fake book!)

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Broken Glass Park is a coming of age novel originally published in Germany (so I suppose I should properly refer to it as a Bildungsroman).  The coming-of-age protagonist is a seventeen-year-old Russian immigrant living in the slums of Berlin. I loved her voice, and found her to be refreshingly unpredictable. I couldn’t guess, for example, what her intentions were when—after going to the newspaper offices to complain about the tone of an article concerning her stepfather’s recent murder of her mother—she winds up contacting the senior editor at his home and inviting herself to stay with him for a few days. Nor was I sure what she was thinking when—on an impromptu date with a kid who gradually reveals himself to be an immigrant-hating, far-right member of the National Party—she pressures him to rollerblade with her toward a wooded area in a bad part of town.

This is a fast-paced and unsentimental story that reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye. I recommend it highly. Just one rather minor point, though (I almost feel petty complaining about this, but since I was forcefully pulled out of the story and had to put it down for a bit as a result, this must be said): what possessed the translator to translate “dachshund” into “weiner dog”? How could he not know that “dachshund” is, in English, “dachshund”? He turned our tough, gritty narrator into a three-year-old. She simply never would have said that. Nor would she have called her guardian “dumpling.” So this is perhaps not the finest translation of Bronsky’s work.

Excerpt:
I turn the corner and find myself in the living room. I have to shield my eyes because there’s a bright TV on. The sound is off. Christina Aguilera is dancing on the screen, her blond dreads flying around and her mouth straining. She seems distraught that she’s unable to make a sound.

Against the wall is a couch, long and oddly shaped, like a giant shrimp. There’s a mound on the couch. Shit, I think, trying to back out of the room. But the mound begins to rise. It sheds its husk—a blanket. I retreat, startled, and step on the remote. Christina Aguilera’s voice blasts through the air at full volume.

The noise is so jarring that I squat down and put my hands over my ears. My eardrums feel like they’ve just burst. And it’s still loud as hell. The mound on the couch morphs into a human shape, jumps on the floor, and pounds a button on the remote. The TV screen goes dark. I can hardly believe how immediate the silence is. I stand up again. In the dark, I can’t tell who is standing in front of me…

“You must be the…,” he says, knitting his brows.
“Sascha.”
“Right. Volker told me about you. You stayed out of sight all evening. I was wondering where you were hiding.”
“I was tired. I fell asleep.”
“Aha.”

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Joyce Carol Oates, in my experience, is a writer you either love or hate (love because of how effortlessly and incisively she maps out the terrain inside her character’s minds, or hate because of her compulsive, neurotic, nearly deranged use of the em dash, and its accompanying run-on sentences.) Both of these qualities are present in typical abundance in A Widow’s Story. I think it’s safe to say that if you love Oates, you will love this memoir, and if you find her writing style makes you want to beat your head against the wall, you will want to read it only after precautionary measures (a bicycle helmet, say) have been taken.

In this, her first memoir, Oates tells about the sudden, unexpected death of her beloved husband of forty-six years and the grief that subsequently consumed her. Oates has avoided the all-t0o-common pitfall for the grief memoirist—that of becoming so lost in one’s private pain that the writer forgets she is writing for a reader, and that this reader requires an actual story (as opposed to a self-absorbed three hundred page journal entry)—and has ended up with what I think is the best memoir about grief and loss I have ever read. Her ability to access all of her feelings, while at the same time maintaining an analytical distance from those feelings is a skill that sets her work apart from a long line of books I had high hopes for, but which ultimately failed in their efforts to bring me into their world.

A Widow’s Story is beautifully told, completely accessible, and not to be missed by either the memoir fan or the general reader.  But, as with all of Oates’ work: Read safely, wear a helmet.

EXCERPT:
Of all deliveries I have come to most dread those from Harry & David those ubiquitous entrepreneurs of fateful occasions—Sympathy Gift boxes adorned with Sympathy Ribbons hurtled in all directions across the continent. Why are people sending me these things? Do they imagine that grief will be assuaged by chocolate-covered truffles, pate de foie gras, pepperoni sausages? Do they imagine that assistants shield me from the labor of dealing with such a quantity of trash? This morning I am eager to forestall another delivery of sympathy baskets for I have dragged out all the trash cans I can find in the hope that the trash will be hauled away, I have just emptied the mailbox—so stuffed, I could barely yank out its contents—and this mail I am “sorting” by way of throwing most of it into the trash can—there arrives the UPS delivery truck—another Harry & David monstrosity?—”Mrs. Smith? Sign here, please”—crying bitter tears as I open the carton—tear open the cellophane wrapper—tear at the basket cramming into the trash can packages of chocolate-covered truffles, bags of gourmet popcorn, here is a Gourmet Riviera Pear—unnaturally large, tasteless, stately as a waxen fruit in a nineteenth-century still life—here is a jar of gourmet mustard, and here a jar of gourmet olives—whoever has sent me this, I have no idea—the card is lost—the label is lost—I am frantic to get rid of this party food—I am infuriated, disgusted, ashamed—for of course I should be grateful, I should be writing thank-you notes like a proper widow, I should not be weeping and muttering to myself in icy rain at the end of our driveway bare-headed and shivering in a rage of futility accusing my husband “You did this! —you went outside in the freezing cold, I know you did, this is exactly what you did, when I was away in Riverside you did this very thing, you were careless with your life, you threw away both our lives with your carelessness contracting a cold, a cold that became pneumonia, pneumonia that became cardiopulmonary collapse—and here as if in rebuke to my raging despair is a Harry & David Miniature Rose—a delicate little rosebush that measures about five inches in height—which I think that I will keep—though, back inside the house in better lighting, pried out of its packing-case and set on the kitchen counter, the Miniature Rose appears to be already wilting, near-dead.

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Hamilton has written a smart, funny book that stands out in the glutted chef/memoirist category in that she writes about her life—her childhood in rural New York, working on an MFA in fiction, her marriage and travels with her family to Italy—rather than just chapter after chapter about various restaurants. She does have her own restaurant in New York (Prune) but the chapters about it are mercifully brief and unlike many chef/authors, she does not focus on it in a way that sounds like one long advertisement for her restaurant.

Hamilton has a real talent for sarcasm and is at her best when ridiculing the hypocrisy and condescension of others. Her problem, however (and the reason for four stars rather than five), is that she seems to be unaware of her own tendency toward self-congratulation and smug superiority. Whether she is writing about cooking, other writers, opening a restaurant, being a mom, or even about being humble, she describes herself in terms that make it clear she is better at it than everyone else. This didn’t bother me for the first two thirds of her book—because she really is very funny and a very good writer—but there is a limit to even a smart, biting sense of humor if the author is always the most special person in the room and everyone else is an idiot.

Despite this drawback, Blood, Bones & Butter is a great read, obviously for anyone interested in an insider’s view of the restaurant life, but also for the the general memoir fan.

EXCERPT:
The reader reads aloud, with a sing-song up… then down… then down again cadence. My mood shifts from merely reluctant to derisive. It’s a tired reading style. I’m sick of it. It attaches more imortance to the words than the words themselves—as they’ve been arranged—could possibly sustain, and it gives poets and poetry a bad name….

Unbelievably, she’s reading from pages of pale green rice paper—they remind me of hundred-dollar bills—on which she has written by hand. We have computers, of course, in 1997. Her poem is not good but good-looking and well-dressed. She’s missed the point. She should be in bookbinder school. Blindfolded and spun around by her obsession with the handwritten word, the feel of paper, and the smell of ink, in this round of the game she’s pinned the tail far away from the donkey, right into the mantel. She still thinks that writing is about self-expression; I can just picture her, with a favorite callligraphy pen, sitting at her desk in front of the window where a spider plant hangs, a large table of expensive hand-wrought paper before her and a big bowl of milky sweet tea. And there in the weakening sunlight, she maps out a description of an old man’s hands—her own grandfather’s perhaps—with knuckles like like like…and ah, the metaphor comes, like pecans. Knuckles wrinkled and brown like toasted pecans.

She finishes reading and looks up at the room, smug and afraid simultaneously. We remain silent, some people’s eyes are closed though a couple of people sigh crisply, audibly, as if it say you have pierced my soul.

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ 

Follow-up travesty #1: The Tiger, by John Vaillant.  So much potential! The natural landscape and peoples of Siberia, the beautiful Siberian tiger in lore and in the flesh…and written by the man who brought us The Golden Spruce! Now, I normally never review a book that I listened to rather than read (indeed, this is the first), but since this one was read by John Vaillant himself, I really have to say that his voice is one of the most irritating and unlistenable that I have ever heard. Each and every sentence is shouted with an army drill sergeant inflection. I lost focus on what was happening because all I could picture was Vaillant on an army base, barking orders in front of a row of new recruits. Also, he has a pretentious manner of putting extra emphasis on all the Russian words and names in the story. Instead of blending these words into the sentence normally, he pauses and self-importantly over-pronounces each one, as if to say, “Look at me, look at me, I’m using a proper Russian accent!”

Lest you think that perhaps The Tiger is worth reading in book form, absent the author’s dreadful inflection, be aware that Book Shark Editor-in-Chief Cindy was unable to get beyond the first quarter of the book. In an interview earlier this year, Cindy had this to say: “Dying of boredom. And it’s all about the killing of this tiger because he’s such a man-eating beast. WTF? This from the same guy who wrote so beautifully about nature and the killing of trees??”

Follow-up travesty #2: Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen. You can’t get more hype (and more let down) than this one. For a complete and thorough review, please click here.

Follow-up travesty #3: The Angel’s Game, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. For a complete and thorough review, please click here.

Follow-up travesty #4: The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters. I bought this one because Fingersmith is extraordinary, and this promised to be more or less the same book, judging by the reviews and the back cover copy. (Because I strive always for complete accuracy in my posts, I will acknowledge that Little Stranger is not technically a follow-up to Fingersmith because in between the two, in 2006, The Night Watch was published, but who has ever heard of Night Watch? It disappeared quickly and almost without a trace, perhaps for reasons related to Publishers Weekly’s observation that the narrative was “slightly difficult to comprehend.”) Just to be clear, I’m not annoyed that Little Stranger isn’t exactly the same as Fingersmith. I’m annoyed that it is utterly and totally forgettable because nothing happens. Around page 300 the story finally appears to be getting going, and I trudged through another 200 pages certain that a stupendous twist and/or revelation at the end would make it all worthwhile—Waters is, after all, famous for last-minute twists. At about page 480, I began to panic, as the book is 510 pages long and even if the revelation was the most shocking and well-written thing in the world, I wasn’t going to have much time to enjoy it. Sadly, there is no ending to be found…just a few puzzling unanswered questions.

Follow-up travesty #5: The Wave, by Susan Casey. For a complete and thorough review, please click here.

Follow-up travesty #6: Witches on the Road Tonight, by Sheri Holman. This is surely the most deeply painful disappointment of all, because our own Gustine Awards are named after the protagonist in Holman’s Dress Lodger. I first heard of this follow-up when one of our guest reviewers alerted me to the creepy yet beautiful perfection of this sentence: “She slips out of her skin from time to time, leaving it hanging on a peg in her bedroom while she disappears through the keyhole.” Naturally, I became very excited. And I learned from Publishers Weekly that the book would “map out the devastating consequences of sin and circumstance that were forged in the hills of Appalachia and tumbled down through the generations.” Yay! Depression-era Appalachia sounds marvelous. What could go wrong? Here’s what: “Captain Casket, a cartoonish TV horror movie presenter [with] makeup and kitsch.” Oh, Sheri. Book Shark Editor-in-Chief Cindy was unable to get past the first chapter due to this asinine Casket character, and the reviewer who first alerted me to the aforementioned beautiful sentence followed up with an e-mail letting me know that she was unable to finish the book after the midway point.

Follow-up travesty #7: State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett.  (Review written by Cindy Blackett.) Now, we know Ms. Patchett can write—in 2002, Bel Canto won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize, and was a finalist for both the 2002 Gustine Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her Truth & Beauty: A Friendship is a beautifully written remembrance of her friendship with author Lucy Grealy, and although Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face is in a class of its own, I like to pair the two books together as gifts and never recommend one without mentioning the other. So I feel almost guilty accusing Ms. Patchett of brain damage. I will instead accuse her of writing while smoking pot and watching Gilligan’s Island reruns.

There are occasional lovely bits of writing. For example: “At that moment she understood why people say You might want to sit down. There was inside of her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips were all being brought together at closer angles.”  Lovely bits of description aside, however, the “plot” of State of Wonder is shockingly terrible. Essentially, a lot of really ridiculous stuff happens in a jungle. You know how Gilligan’s Island became increasingly ludicrous as the years went on, with plotlines ever more far-fetched? That is the case with this book, but in Brazil instead of an island. I can’t bring myself to spend a day carefully writing a chronicle of all the many, many things wrong with this book when the author herself has taken leave of her senses, so I have chosen instead to provide only the briefest of summaries, made up largely of incomplete sentences:

Dull, flat, afflectless characters. Tedious, tiresome dialogue. Boring people having boring conversations amidst a plot of such ridiculous proportions that were the book to be turned into a treatment for television, it could not be sold as a Scooby-Doo adventure (much less a Gilligan’s Island episode).

Follow-up travesty #8: Will there be a Travesty #8? It’s all up to you, Jeffrey Eugenides. I am extremely excited for the October 11 release of The Marriage Plot. This is of course a follow-up of epic proportions, since you haven’t released a thing since Middlesex won the Pulitzer back in 2003. Will you break the string of travesties? I have faith in you. I’m going to hold on to a belief that you have done it, and am looking forward to a one-of-a-kind, mid-October reading delight.

Note to our readers: I highly recommend this interview between Mr. Eugenides and his publisher, which took place last year when he was about two-thirds done with The Marriage Plot. Only a writer of truly exceptional caliber would describe the genesis of a book this way: “As I followed one of the characters, her story began to swell until I finally realized that I had two different books on my hands. I then had to surgically separate the two books, like conjoined twins, hoping that each retained sufficient major organs to survive.”

Eugenides Interview

Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

Oh, Susan. I’m so embarrassed for you. Aren’t you embarrassed? Must all your books become a paean to your unbridled lust for one of the main characters? When you had an affair with one of the scientists in The Devil’s Teeth, it didn’t distract terribly from the story, and we, the readers, figured it was a unique occurrence. But now you’re lustily chasing after all the surfers in this book, particularly Laird Hamilton—a married man—and it’s too much. It’s too much!

I bought this book because I had faith in your ability to write about natural science in an engaging manner. (The Devil’s Teeth was fabulous, and won a Gustine in 2005.) Also, I love tsunamis and rogue waves. Adore them! Can’t get enough of them! What a pity that your book treats those topics so brusquely in order to devote more space to surfers and how hot they are. As well as page upon page of actual surfer dialogue, so that we can hear for ourselves how awesome they are:

“Ah, cuz,” Shearer said. “The weather was just shit. Totally ridiculous. It was like, ‘Where’d this come from?’ Visibility less than a mile…”
“It was spooky,” Emory agreed. “We rolled up to the beach thinking, ‘Ah, it’s nothing.’ We got out there and it was like, ‘Woah! Wake-up call! Holy shit!”
“It was all disorganized and funky,” Shearer recalled. “I’d never seen it like that. It was really screwed up…”
Casil reached into the cooler and passed out another round. “That whole day just sounds cartoonish,” he said.
“Oh, it was, Lickle said, popping open a can. “The bigger it got, there was no reality to it. It was the friggin’ Twilight Zone.”
From somewhere back in the garage, Hamilton chimed in: “It was another scale! Other scale. Metric scale.”

In other words, this is not a book for people who like science and/or nature writing. It’s a book pretending to be something it’s not, and using the success of its predecessor to lure people into a purchase they will regret…unless you are the sort of person who actually wants to hear the rest of the above conversation, which continues on in the same vein for nine and a half more pages.

Susan employs a very tiresome tone throughout the book: one that shouts, “I was there! I was there! I know these surfers personally! We shared beer and secrets together!”  I’m pretty sure she intends for her audience to feel painfully jealous.

I did feel bitter, not because Susan and the surfers got along so famously, but because there are only two chapters (36 pages out of 318) that are worth reading. Chapter 7 (I Never Saw Anything Like It) tells the story of the landslide-induced-tsunami-prone Lituya Bay, Alaska, which has endured numerous cataclysmic tsunamis, and explores, in great detail, the 1958 event that decimated the bay. That chapter also touches on the 1964 earthquake centered near Prince William Sound, Alaska, which caused a devastating tsunami in Crescent City, Oregon. Great material, well-written…but alas, the next chapter returns to the hot surfers.

The other chapter worth reading (rounding out the 36 pages worth your time and money) is Chapter 9 (Heavy Weather), which discusses rogue waves (the only place in the book where you will learn about rogue waves, Susan’s subtitle for the book notwithstanding).

Check this book out of your local library and read only those two chapters.

EXCERPTS (Lusty Hamilton-love):
[Hamilton’s] blond hair whipped back in the spray; his muscular arms were spread wide for balance as he plummeted down the wave on a tiny board. He had classically handsome features, chiseled and intense, but no fear showed on his face, only rapt focus.

* * * *

I noticed Hamilton across the yard, puttying a fin onto a surfboard. His movements were brisk and efficient, his arm muscles flexing as he worked. It was an improbable display of vigor….

* * * *

If you spent time around Hamilton, you learned to sense his moods. His energy was the high-octane sort; along with the extra power, there was a heightened risk of detonation. When Hamilton was frustrated or upset, his whole presence signaled it. His eyes flashed a duller color than their usual sea green and hardened into a disconcerting stare, his movements tightened, his voice became lower and flatter, his muscles flexed as though spoiling for a fight.

Reviewer’s note:
The hallmark of every good romance novel is a thorough description of the protagonist’s eyes and how they change color depending on mood. Also, they must “flash.” Flashing is de rigueur. (Although how eyes could flash “duller” I don’t understand, since flashing usually denotes a lightening in color.) Could this book please be categorized as Romance so that people interested in nature writing are not deceived?

I saw this for sale in the textbook section of a university bookstore and bought it because (apart from the obvious reason that that it’s a coming-of-age memoir from the point of view of a young girl, perennially a favorite Book Shark genre) I was intrigued that an English professor intended to use it in the classroom. I once almost used The House at Sugar Beach in my own classroom, and wanted to see how Coming of Age would compare to Beach, since the two have similar subject matter.

Then I found out that Coming of Age is a classic of sorts, having been continuously in print (and used in high school and university classrooms all the time) for over forty years, and the author having won various awards and recognitions for the book, though she hasn’t written anything since the 1970s and in fact has pulled a Salinger-like disappearance, eschewing all publicity of any sort and generally being mysterious and secretive.

The book does not compare favorably to Beach. I wish I could tell the anonymous English professor to stop using it. “There are much better memoirs about race relations!” I would say to him or her. Because, clearly, that is why it’s used so much in schools—the author was front and center at the birth of the civil rights movement. She participated in all sorts of peaceful demonstrations for which she was jailed, including one of the lunch-counter sit-ins at Woolworth in Jackson. To protest the “Whites Only” rule at Woolworth’s lunch counter, Moody and two friends sat there for three hours, refusing to move. This wasn’t the first such sit-in at a Woolworth, but it’s the most famous because a large and violent mob gathered—with full police support—to harass Moody and her friends.

The problem is that after the author becomes a teenager, the writing becomes terribly dry and tedious. The first third of the book is just what I hoped for: a child’s point of view, perfectly told, of growing up in rural Mississippi in the 1940s. She describes the landscape, the people, and her own emotions with perfect clarity. But then she grows up and the tone changes. I became bored; I put the book down to begin another; I ended up skimming the last thirty or so pages. She recounts events as though they were a shopping list: I went to this college, made some friends, blah blah, transferred to this other college for a basketball scholarship, blah, blah, made some friends, blah blah, basketball, basketball, unhappy with that college so I left, joined a group, blah blah….

I spent a couple of minutes Googling Anne Moody after I finished the book, and I saw two interesting things. First, I saw this quotation from Moody herself, which explains everything: “In the beginning, I never really saw myself as a writer. I was first and foremost an activist in the civil rights movement in Mississippi.” There you go. That is why the book fails to be engaging right at the point that the author begins explaining her entry into civil rights: because she’s not compelled to be a writer telling a story; she is primarily compelled to tell about the struggle for civil rights. Many writers could both be a writer and tell the story of civil rights, but Moody cannot. Her narrative turns into a dreary history book.

The second thing I saw was a remarkable photo of the Woolworth sit-in. This is a gut-wrenching, painful photo. There is Moody (on the right) with her two friends, sitting at the counter while a mob of young white guys surrounds them, smoking and taunting and pouring sugar on their heads. This photo brings the event to life in a way that Moody’s account doesn’t even begin to. Looking at the photo, you think “Oh my god, that woman has a story to tell. How I’d love to know her thoughts and feelings from that afternoon…” I’m sorry to say that her written account of that afternoon is so empty of any emotion that I hardly remember reading it.

EXCERPT:
(from the beautifully told, emotion-filled childhood years. Note: George Lee is only eight years old here, and is babysitting the author, four years old, and her baby sister for the entire day while her parents are at work.)

“I’m goin’ to burn you two cryin’ fools up. Then I won’t have to come here and keep yo’ asses every day.”
As I looked at that stupid George Lee standing in the kitchen door with that funny grin on his face, I thought that he might really burn us up. He walked over to the wall near the fireplace and began setting fire to the bulging wallpaper. I started crying. I was so scared I was peeing all down my legs. George Lee laughed at me for peeing and put the fire out with his bare hands before it burned very much. Then he carried me and Adline on to the porch and left us there. He went out in the yard to crack nuts and play.
We were on the porch only a short time when I heard a lot of hollering coming from toward the field. The hollering and crying got louder and louder. I could hear Mama’s voice over all the rest. It seemed like all the people in the field were running to our house. I ran to the edge of the porch to watch them top the hill. Daddy was leading the running crowd and Mama was right behind him.
“Lord have mercy, my children is in that house!” Mama was screaming. “Hurry, Diddly!” she cried to Daddy. I turned around and saw big clouds of smoke booming out of the front door and shooting out of cracks everywhere. I looked back at Adline. I couldn’t hardly see her for the smoke.

EXCERPT:
(from the cold, dry, emotionless college years.)

After I gave up on the class, my only outlets were basketball, gymnastics and tumbling, and the church. I intensified these activities and never missed a day’s practice. Then I bought a piano for fifty dollars from a classmate. Now that I had the piano, I practiced all the time. Within a few months, I became the regular pianist at Centreville Baptist. I played for Sunday school and B.T.U., and the church paid me four dollars each Sunday. I was still working for Mrs. Hunt, so I was now earning a lot.
(Blah, blah, blah, blah…)

Blech. What a relief to be done with this. And what an unexpected turn of events, given that the first third of the book was quite enjoyable. As good as Shadow of the Wind! I said to myself. He’s done it again! But no, he has not done it again. Except in the sense that the setting is identical: a dark and gothic early-twentieth-century Barcelona. Even some of the characters from Shadow of the Wind are here, as is the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. So he did do that part again.

The parallels between the two books were not bothersome, because as every reader of Shadow knows, Zafón is thoroughly brilliant at dark and olden-days Barcelona, so why shouldn’t he revisit it? It’s not as though other authors are doing the same and the market is saturated with mysterious and sinister Barcelonian dealings. So I was quite happy to visit again and only became disenchanted when it became clear that the writing in The Angel’s Game simply isn’t as good.

The main character, David, is an author squandering his talents on mass-market thrillers: “penny dreadfuls packed with intrigue, high society murders, countless underworld horrors, illicit love affairs featuring cruel, lantern-jawed landowners and damsels with unmentionable desires, and all sorts of twisted family sagas with plots as thick and murky as the water in the port.”  We, the readers, are meant to understand that David is actually a literary genius, trapped into writing these books for the money but actually able to turn out works of brilliance when inspired. It’s funny, because David’s a lot like Zafón—an author who proved his literary gifts beyond all doubts with his first book for adults (he previously wrote four YA novels that I have not read) but flounders here in the depths of extreme melodrama featuring ridiculous heroines, over-the-top murders, and plot twists too silly to take seriously.

Is this some kind of joke? Is Zafón trying to admit, through an alter ego named David, that he has intentionally written a “penny dreadful” to make some quick cash?

EXCERPT (from the first, readable third):
The whole of Barcelona stretched out at my feet and I wanted to believe that when I opened those windows—my new windows—each evening its streets would whisper stories to me, secrets in my ear, that I could catch on paper and narrate to whomever cared to listen. Videl had his exuberant and stately ivory tower in the most elegant and elevated part of Pedralbes, surrounded by hills, trees, and fairy-tale skies. I would have my sinister tower rising above the oldest, darkest streets of the city, surrounded by the miasmas and shadows of that necropolis which poets and murderers had once called the “Rose of Fire.”

EXCERPT (from the last, unreadable third):
I raised the weapon and pointed it at his face. The sheen of the metal gave me away. Marcos jumped at me, knocking down the dummies and dodging the shot. I felt his weight on my body and his breath on my face. The scissor blades closed only a centimeter from my left eye. I butted my forehead against his face with all my remaining strength and he fell to one side. Then I lifted my gun and pointed it at him. Marcos, his lip split, sat up and fixed his eyes on mine.

“You don’t have the guts,” he whispered.

He placed his hand on the barrel and smiled at me.