Writers by Barry Gifford

Posted on December 16, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Barry Gifford’s brief fictional scenes of celebrated authors are funny, tragic and insightful.

writers

The prolific and versatile Barry Gifford (Wild at Heart; The Lost Highway) has a little fun with a range of literary figures in Writers, a collection of dramatic scenes “intended to be read as stories as well as performed as plays.” Gifford begins with “Spring Training at the Finca Vigía,” in which Hemingway showcases his famous bluster and paranoia while hosting two Brooklyn Dodgers at his Cuban home; Martha Gellhorn also makes an appearance in this longest of Gifford’s imaginings. Most run around 10 pages in length, and are short and pithy.

The settings range from “relatively realistic” to “wholly imaginary,” Gifford warns, and include a conversation between the living Roberto Bolaño and the ghost of Jorge Luis Borges. Arthur Rimbaud tells his sister on his deathbed, “I have been bitten by life before and survived.” Marcel Proust’s final words are likewise recorded. Herman Melville laments the public’s reaction to Moby-Dick to a passing policeman, who worries that he is suicidal. Emily Dickinson questions her sister: “Why? I’m nobody. Who are you? Aren’t you nobody, too?”; James Joyce and Samuel Beckett exchange silences. Joining these cameos are Kerouac (with characteristic openness and affinity for drink), Albert Camus, Nelson Algren, Jane Bowles, Baudelaire and others.

Gifford’s imagined anecdotes occasionally reference the absurd, but overall tend to confirm readers’ impressions of large and troubled personalities. These famous artists appear surreal and often ugly, but by caricaturing them he also reasserts their humanity. The result is both entertaining and thought provoking.

This review originally ran in the November 24, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 6 sets based on my personal affinity.

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Maximum Shelf author interview: Ruth Wariner

Posted on December 14, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of The Sound of Gravel, here’s Ruth Wariner: Finding a Voice.

Ruth Wariner was 15 years old when she left the polygamist Mormon colony where she grew up in Chihuahua, Mexico, and took her siblings with her to California. She raised her three youngest sisters while earning her GED and putting herself through college and then graduate school, eventually becoming a high school Spanish teacher. She now lives in Portland, Ore., where she remains close to her siblings and is happily married. The Sound of Gravel is her first book.

wariner
When did you know you wanted to write this story? How long did it take?

There was one specific moment when I realized I needed to write my story. It was late May in 1995, and I was 23 years old. My three youngest sisters, Elena, Leah and Holly, who were 12, 10 and eight at the time, and I were living in Grants Pass, Oregon, and eating a lunch that we’d ordered from the dollar menu at Burger King. We were sitting there when out of the blue, Leah asked, “So what happened to our mom anyway?” I was stunned by the question and suddenly realized that I had never told my sisters the story of where we came from.

That was when I began thinking about writing my memoir. But I was in college, and had full responsibility of my sisters. I was working a part-time job with barely enough time to do my homework. After I finished graduate school a few years later and started teaching, I began taking memoir and creative nonfiction writing classes after work. By then my sisters had grown and moved out of my apartment, but still, I wanted them to know who our mother was–or at least to know her as I had known her. I wanted them to know where we had come from and why we had to run away and grow up without parents.

Once I was ready to sit down and actually start writing The Sound of Gravel, it took me almost five years to finish. I couldn’t spend more than a few hours a day writing and often had to step away for a break, especially when I wrote about my most painful memories. There were times when it took me a few days to get back to finishing a disturbing scene.

Why did your story need telling, other than for your sisters?

My reasons for writing have always been very personal: I wanted to share my memories with my siblings–for their own healing and to help them understand the life we left behind. The more I wrote, the more I recognized my own need to process those most heartbreaking parts of my life and to express how I felt about those moments. It’s never been my intention to promote a particular cause or belief system, nor is it my intention to disparage any readers’ own beliefs or religion.

This retelling was painful. What made that process worthwhile?

The story was definitely a hard one to tell, but it has been an incredibly healing journey. Some of my memories bothered me more than I had expected them to. I hadn’t thought about my younger sister Meri in years, but when I wrote the scenes with her in them, I did so through tears.

Revisiting my mother’s life and writing about her in detail was also amazingly cathartic. Looking at photographs of her and remembering the way she smelled, the sound of her voice, the way she combed her hair, the way she smiled and the light freckles on her skin brought her back to me in a very raw and real way. Being able to think about her choices from a more adult perspective also helped. As I’ve grown and reflected on my own life and my relationship to the world, I realize my mom didn’t have a lot of self-love and self-acceptance. She chose a life and a belief system that reflected how she felt about herself.

Even though I know I’ll have to talk about my childhood in the coming months, I feel like I left so much of my past on those pages, which has made it easier for me to talk about. I’m grateful for the opportunity to share my experience. Writing this book also ended up being a process of self-discovery and personal healing. I feel like I found a voice I honestly didn’t know I had. I needed to recognize for myself that my life, my experience and what I had to say about it matters. This was especially important for me after growing up in a large, chaotic household where I really wasn’t heard.

You’re narrating the audiobook yourself. How has that project played out?

I actually just finished recording the audio book yesterday. I hadn’t considered reading myself but the Macmillan team felt that because the memoir is written in such a personal way, it needed to be read and recorded in my voice. The idea of reading it aloud to people really frightened and intimidated me, and I was so nervous that I broke out into hives the day before I started recording! When I finally sat down in the tall chair in front of the microphone with a digital version of my book in front of me, my throat became dry and tight, and my voice trembled. But after reading a few paragraphs and taking a few deep breaths, I felt more relaxed and was able to get into the flow of a natural reading pace. I ended up spending three full days in the studio with a fantastic recording team, and even though it was really hard, emotional work, and even though I felt completely out of my comfort zone, I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to record my book and feel that it will be more powerful for listeners.

You’ve shared many personal details. Did you choose to withhold any?

I chose to leave out some details of my siblings’ experience in the Colony because their stories really aren’t mine to tell. I only wanted to share the details of their lives in relation to how they intertwined with my own. But when it came to my story, I honestly didn’t hold anything back. I have nothing to hide.

What do you want people to know about you that’s not in your book?

I’m still really close to my siblings on my mother’s side. All of us except for Matt, who is still a committed member of my dad’s church, live in the Pacific Northwest. We spend every holiday together and are a strong support system for each other. Growing up in the kind of poverty we did made our bond with each other stronger; we just didn’t have enough stuff (electronics, cable TV, computers, etc.) to distract us from each other. Growing up without parents also secured and strengthened our bond, and I am incredibly grateful that we were able to stay together through very challenging situations. For me, it’s important that my readers know this because in spite of our troubled childhood, there has been so much goodness and joy that has grown and blossomed. We grew stronger than our circumstances.

This interview originally ran on November 19, 2015 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

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Maximum Shelf: The Sound of Gravel by Ruth Wariner

Posted on December 11, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on November 29, 2015.

sound of gravelIn The Sound of Gravel, Ruth Wariner tells of growing up in a Mormon polygamist colony in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico. Her childhood was filled with sad and shocking hardships, some painfully difficult to read. But Wariner’s tone is never self-pitying, and her love for her mother and siblings imbues a distressing memoir with nuance, and eventual relief.

Ruth’s mother, Kathy, became the fifth wife of Joel LeBaron when she was 17 years old. Joel’s father founded Colonia LeBaron in Mexico because the practice of plural marriage was better tolerated there than in the United States. Ruth was Kathy’s fourth child and Joel’s 39th. He died just three months after Ruth’s birth–murdered by his brother over a conflict about church authority. Kathy remarried a man named Lane and bore another six children with him. Ruth was the eldest nondisabled female child and, over the years, many domestic duties, including childcare, fell to her.

The Sound of Gravel begins with the family history of the LeBarons, whose status as church leaders impressed the young Ruth, and with Kathy’s personal history, as told to her daughter. The earliest scenes Ruth relates from her own memory find her at age five, and introduce her siblings: Audrey, the eldest, with a disability that remained undiagnosed for years and that led to occasional violence against the other children; Matt, a responsible boy; Luke, good-natured but developmentally delayed; and the baby, Aaron. Later the family grows as Meri, Micah, Leah, Elena and Holly are born. Lane, Ruth’s stepfather, promises to complete Kathy’s family’s dwelling and add a showerhead, electricity and other longed-for luxuries, but is slow to do so. Lane’s first wife and her children receive preference as to the basics, in the tradition of the LeBaron church. Ruth dislikes Lane early on, for his failure to support her mother as well as his harsh discipline. From an early age, Ruth sees her mother’s conflicts and jealousies with her sister wives, and worries that plural marriage looks more like misery than the holy state her church teaches it to be.

Ruth grows up quickly as the household swells in size. The family moves around: Kathy leaves Lane after he beats her, and moves to the United States where her parents live, but returns to him. Lane relocates his families as they seek work: they harvest and sell pine nuts in New Mexico, camp out in El Paso, and smuggle undocumented Mexican workers across the border under the children’s makeshift bed in a camper. But Kathy, Ruth and the other children always return to Colonia LeBaron because, Kathy says, “this is where you kids belong.”

The poverty and poor living conditions that come with Kathy’s choices are based on her religion, her devotion to and dependence on Lane, and a belief that the United States is a Babylon “standing between us and our connection to God.” Squeezing a living out of food stamps and Lane’s meager earnings–shared among four wives and an uncounted number of children–means mostly subsisting on beans and rice. The children are pulled out of school in their early teens–Ruth at age 14–because “Mom insisted that it was more important for me to be around to help her take care of the house and the kids.” But the most heartbreaking aspect of Ruth’s childhood is Lane’s sexual abuse, which continues for years even as Ruth repeatedly reports him to her mother. Kathy exhorts Ruth to forgive and move on; but even a town tribunal fails to stop the abuse. The community’s betrayal of its children is an especially disturbing phenomenon in a story filled with the tragedy and woes of day-to-day hardships of poverty, the absence of creature comforts, illness and accidental death.

However, through it all flows Ruth Wariner’s careful, loving portrait of her mother, a woman doing her best with limited options, believing that her church knows best. Despite her profound anger at her mother’s failure to protect her from Lane, Ruth understands that she is loved, and deeply loves her mother in return. “I realized how little she had asked of the world, and how even that had been too much for the world to give.” She reflects that “Mom couldn’t teach me that because she didn’t know herself. She couldn’t show me how to be happy, only how to barely survive.” These and other contemplations establish Ruth as a wise and thoughtful narrator.

The Sound of Gravel is straightforwardly told, in chronological order and with little lyrical adornment. Its power lies in the facts of the story, which is deeply affecting both in its horrors and in its redemptive conclusion. At the end, when Ruth saves herself and her sisters by escaping Colonia LeBaron, she has earned the reader’s sympathy and respect, and an identity beyond that of survivor.

Rating: 8 babies (and counting).

Come back on Monday for my interview with Wariner.

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Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir: With the lost photographs of David Attie by Truman Capote

Posted on December 10, 2015 by pagesofjulia

A superb Capote essay with never-before-seen photographs originally commissioned to accompany it make an ideal match–and a great story.

brooklyn

Truman Capote’s essay about Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., filled with clever observations in his familiar style, was first published by Holiday magazine in the 1950s. It was reprinted in 2001, with a foreword by George Plimpton, which is included here. However, the singular contribution of Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir: With the Lost Photographs of David Attie is those photographs, discovered in 2014 by the late photographer’s son in dusty wooden boxes. The story Eli Attie tells in his afterword is as compelling as Capote’s witty and winning portrait of Brooklyn. Capote’s career was distinctly tied to Attie’s when the latter was hired to photo-illustrate Breakfast at Tiffany’s for its scheduled appearance in Harper’s Bazaar, which Eli learned only decades after his father’s death.

Capote’s essay is of course brilliant in its scenes, characters and language. “Sunstruck scraps of reflected river-shine” and the lovely alliteration of “plenipotentiaries from the pearl-floored palace of Poseidon or mariners merely” exhibit his decorative, evocative way with words. The historic contribution of this glimpse at a place in time is significant; and the same must be said of Attie’s documentary photographs, which perfectly complement Capote’s text. Since Harper’s Bazaar ultimately cut the novella, the included images went unpublished, including several of a young Capote, framed against the “beautiful staircase floating upward in white, swan-simple curves to a skylight of sunny amber-gold glass” in the house where Capote lived (in the basement).

This marriage of Capote’s glimmering words with Attie’s harmonizing photographs is perfected by the younger Attie’s narrative, in this unparalleled addition to the Capote canon.

This review originally ran in the November 17, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 8 local institutions.

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The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende

Posted on December 9, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Isabel Allende’s latest masterpiece explores war, race relations, forbidden love and reconciliation.

japenese lover

Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits; Maya’s Notebook) presents a beautiful, complex story of love, sacrifice and redemption in The Japanese Lover.

In 1939, an eight-year-old Polish girl named Alma is sent from Poland as the Nazis advance, to live with her aunt and uncle in opulent circumstances in San Francisco. There she meets a Japanese boy her age, Ichimei, who will be her great love, and her older cousin Nathaniel, who will be her best friend. Alma’s story–and her convoluted relationships with Ichi and Nat–is revealed from a distance of many years, when a young Eastern European woman named Irina takes a job at the senior residence Alma has just moved into. Slowly, Irina wins the trust of the prickly elderly Alma, and the unsolicited devotion of Alma’s grandson Seth. These and other characters are wrought with tenderness, humor and nuance in Allende’s characteristic lyric style, as the story of Alma’s love unfolds in a narrative alternating between passionate old age and the passions of youth.

Allende ruminates over lifelong love, in its various forms and bound by destiny; the sacrifices love does and does not compel; and the ugly realities of war and racism–while Alma emigrates to flee war, Ichimei and his family are interned in the United States following Pearl Harbor, and Irina’s personal history is touched by trauma and displacement that is revealed only late in the book. This novel of fervent feeling, reflection and multiculturalism will please Allende’s many fans.

This review originally ran in the November 17, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 gardenias.

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The Wild Swan: And Other Tales by Michael Cunningham, illustrated by Yuko Shimizu

Posted on December 7, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham darkly reimagines classic fairy tales, with moodily appropriate illustrations.

wild swan

Michael Cunningham (Pulitzer Prize-winner for The Hours) takes a fresh and dark look at a selection of classic fairy tales with A Wild Swan: And Other Tales. His brief, richly imagined new stories, often based only loosely on their models, are accompanied by detailed, atmospheric black-and-white illustrations by Yuko Shimizu.

An introduction teases readers to acknowledge that they, too, enjoy seeing the fairy tales’ “manifestations of perfection”–those with “comeliness that startles the birds in the trees, coupled with grace, generosity, and charm”–cut low. Cunningham then proceeds to do just that with his versions of originals by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and others.

Here readers will find the “crazy old lady” who lures Hansel and Gretel to her cottage of candy in the woods; but Hansel and Gretel are pierced and tattooed, and sexy “with their starved and foxy faces.” Snow White’s prince is obsessed with the beautiful deathly version of her he discovered in the coffin, and troublingly insists on replaying the scene over and over again. Rumpelstiltskin is surprisingly well intentioned–for the most part. Rapunzel’s life following the closure of the Grimms’ tale is revealed, and it’s a good thing she kept her severed braids. The Beast has grown to be a bad boy, even after Beauty gives him her love. He is “impeccably handsome” with “a lascivious, bestial smile; a rapacious and devouring smile,” the one who might catch your eye on the subway or at “the after-hours party your girlfriend has insisted on,” but you’ll come to regret it. And in the title story, the princess is successful in transforming all of her brothers but one back to their fully human forms.

Cunningham sometimes brings these stories into more or less modern times, but the point of this collection is not to recast the classics with smartphones and fast cars, and the setting of some remains unchanged. Rather, these are playful riffs on well-known stories, almost always with a still gloomier tone than even the Brothers Grimm applied. The mood of these tales of disturbing fetishes, murderous schemings and pedestrian human flaws such as hubris, laziness and jealousy is eventually relieved, however, by Cunningham’s final flourish, entitled “Ever/After.”

A Wild Swan works expert mischief with backstory, aftermath, interludes and retellings of well-known favorites. These tales are not always for the kids, of course, but will appeal to an intersection of dark humor and nostalgia for timeless stories, or anyone with an appreciation for a deliciously spooky imagination.

This review originally ran in the November 5, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 minutes under the lid.

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Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future by Lauren Redniss

Posted on December 3, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Superb illustrations accompany fascinating tidbits about weather and the world in this lovely, distinctive book.

thunder lightning

Lauren Redniss (Radioactive) offers a gorgeously rendered and singular piece of work with Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future. Her original artwork is stunning, dreamy and evocative, the perfect complement to facts about weather and carefully selected interview excerpts and quotations.

Redniss’s “Note on the Art” describes her media: copper plate photogravure etchings and photopolymer process prints, hand-colored, and a few drawings in oil pastel. She comments on the artistic tradition that inspired her: artist/scientists whose devotion to precision and accuracy have historically paired with “a sensation of strangeness, wonder, terror.” Her work is certainly worthy of that tradition; drawings of wildfires recall Picasso’s Guernica, and the chapter entitled “Sky” contains only striking illustrations and no text. These drawings are both otherworldly and very much of our world.

Redniss’s text, based on scientific research and cultural traditions, riffs on weather phenomena rather than offering a comprehensive study. Her chapters cover conditions (cold, rain, heat, fog) as well as concepts (dominion, war, profit), and span the planet and various peoples throughout history. She considers weather that has been blamed on witches or credited to gods; the use of cloud seeding as a weapon by the United States against Vietnam; and weather derivatives and insurance. Redniss’s subjects are quirky and entertaining; her chapter “Forecast” is as concerned with the Old Farmer’s Almanac as with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That tone of marvel and whimsy, plus exquisite illustrations, make Thunder & Lightning both remarkably beautiful and pleasingly informative.

This review originally ran in the November 10, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 8 gorgeous interpretive hand-colored prints.

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The Early Stories of Truman Capote

Posted on November 27, 2015 by pagesofjulia

These previously unpublished stories written in Truman Capote’s youth are instantly recognizable.

early stories truman capote

The Early Stories of Truman Capote contains 14 stories, most previously unpublished, written in Capote’s teens and 20s, and only recently unearthed among his papers in the New York Public Library archives. Presented with a foreword by Hilton Als of the New Yorker, these are short pieces, studies of subjects Capote would continue to favor in the later works for which he is known: sensitive young children, fractious ladies, the poor and the disenfranchised. They are set in the Deep South, in New York City, in swamps and in small towns.

The talents of the author of In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s are evident in this early work. His descriptions are simple but strongly evocative: “curly, wig-like grey hair” and eyes “bright, like bubbles of blue glass.” His characters tend to be laconic but expressive, with interjections speaking as loudly as words. In “Swamp Terror,” a boy chases a convict into the woods and gets a bigger taste of adulthood than he bargained for. In “Louise,” a schoolgirl lets her petty jealousies do irreparable harm. “Traffic West” presents a remarkable collection of characters and events, in experimental form. In other stories, a young boy finds the dog of his dreams in a park, but the dog belongs to another child; and two wives muse on the hypothetical murder of their husbands.

These easy-reading, alternately amusing and haunting stories offer a fresh, new glimpse of Capote’s genius, and simultaneously feel intimately familiar.

This review originally ran in the November 6, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 deaths.

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Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta by Richard Grant

Posted on November 6, 2015 by pagesofjulia

An occasionally bumbling Brit moves into the Mississippi Delta and delivers a romping survey of the surroundings.

dispatches from pluto

Richard Grant (Crazy River) is “a misfit Englishman with a U.S. passport and a taste for remote places,” a writer and professional peripatetic when he encounters an old plantation home in the Mississippi Delta. Later he will ask, “What sort of idiot goes on a picnic and ends up buying a house?” He then explains.

In Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta, Richard moves, with his girlfriend, from New York City to a spot even the locals find remote. They struggle with home improvements, an enormous vegetable garden and the moral problem they encounter in hunting for their meat. After some hilarious hiccups along the way, they take pleasure in living in large part off the land. Perhaps more challenging are questions of culture: the liberal newcomers are sensitive to their conservative religious neighbors, who are surely suspicious in turn. But from the beginning they manage to bond like family.

Grant narrates the next year with reflection and humor, from electoral politics and absurd local news to learning how to hunt and party like a Deltan. The myriad forms and intensities of racism and racial tension develop into a theme, as Grant pursues diverse friends and acquaintances. But he finds beauty as well as complexity, and concludes, “I had done the thing that modern life conspires against. I had fully inhabited the present without distraction.” Dispatches from Pluto offers a lovely, appreciative and entertaining tour of the strange and rich Mississippi Delta.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the October 27, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 armadillos.

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Atlas of Cursed Places by Olivier Le Carrer

Posted on October 28, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Sailor Olivier Le Carrer guides readers on an enticing tour of frightening places around the world, with maps and pictures.

atlas cursed places

Olivier Le Carrer’s Atlas of Cursed Places: A Travel Guide to Dangerous and Frightful Destinations profiles 40 locations around the world, so that tourists may avoid risk and the adventurous may be satisfied that “many mysterious places remain to be explored and understood.” In his introduction, which recognizes Adam and Eve as the origination of curses, he describes these spots as falling into three categories: spiritual or paranormal curses; natural hazards; and human-caused threats. Le Carrer, a sailor, then sorts them by the oceans they lie nearest.

Historic religious conflicts qualify Gaza and Jerusalem: of the latter, Le Carrer writes that “mankind is capable of transforming even the most beautiful holy stories into a nightmare.” Other places are cursed by animal activity, as with Kasanka National Park in Zambia, where five million fruit bats descend annually, and Cape York in Queensland, Australia, where crocodiles reach 17 feet in length and live alongside eight of the 10 most dangerous snakes in the world. Le Carrer’s attitude toward his subjects varies, as he addresses the Bermuda Triangle rationally (“people navigate the area every day without incident, and there are often logical explanations for any incident”) but concludes mysteriously of Area 51 that “accursed nature strikes again.”

Le Carrer’s descriptions of place are designed to entertain and comfortably frighten his readers. His brief, playful evocations are accompanied by historical maps and period illustrations in this large-format book, which will please travelers and trivia fans alike.

This review originally ran in the – issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 6 possible explanations.

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