The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida

Posted on July 3, 2015 by pagesofjulia

A vibrant, thought-provoking literary puzzler about identity and self-determination.

diver's clothes

“You stand in the middle of the small square, thinking about your options.” Vendela Vida’s (The Lovers) vivid fourth novel, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, is surprising in several ways, beginning with its unusual second-person perspective: you are the protagonist.

“You” are a woman traveling alone from Florida to Casablanca, fleeing troubles at home that are only gradually revealed to the reader. What you seek is unclear: a vacation? An escape? But what you find instead is the immediate theft of your passport and wallet–in short, everything you need to travel or return home. This abrupt change in circumstances is terrifying but also strangely freeing.

As the rest of the story unfolds, the unnamed protagonist spontaneously reacts to situations as they present themselves. You accept a passport and wallet that was stolen from another American woman, offered by the Casablanca police in lieu of your own, and take on that woman’s identity. You accept an unlikely job offer as the stand-in for a famous American actress. You hang out backstage with Patti Smith, date an older Russian businessman, even undertake a little acting. When circumstances get hectic, however, you are tempted to use your newfound skills in spontaneity and anonymity to disappear again.

The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty is a complex, enigmatic fable about starting over, the nature of identity and the possibility of escaping the past. Vida’s meticulous release of details, knowing use of suspense, colorful evocation of Morocco and tantalizing characterization make this a singular, revelatory and deliciously satisfying novel.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the June 16, 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 cameras.

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Lanterne Rouge by Max Leonard

Posted on July 1, 2015 by pagesofjulia

An amiable history of a largely unsung hero pays respects to the last-place finisher of the Tour de France.

lanterne

Even non-cycling fans recognize the Tour de France as the sport’s biggest annual event. Naturally, the attention of the press and the viewer is focused at the front of the race, where attacks, group sprints and winners are born. In Lanterne Rouge: The Last Man in the Tour de France, Max Leonard directs overdue consideration to a different segment of the Tour, where he finds a less fairytale-like but very sincere story.

Ever since the Tour was founded in 1903, as a struggling newspaper’s publicity stunt, someone necessarily has come in last place. Cycling’s term for that someone dates back almost as far: based on his research, Leonard argues that it must have been in use before World War I. The usage of lanterne rouge, or red lantern, is generally accepted as having come from the railroad, where a red lantern lit the last car, letting signalmen know the line behind was clear. Over the last century and more, the lanterne has been variously a joke, a dishonor, an achievement to be sought after and a source of controversy, conflict and myth.

Importantly, the lanterne rouge achieves the accomplishment of finishing the race. The Tour has always had a high rate of attrition. Many men withdraw from the race over weeks of mountain passes, long days and severe weather; some years, Tour staff have pulled trailing riders from the race as well. The lanterne is the man who finishes last–but finishes, a respectable feat.

Leonard makes his passion easily felt as he follows his underappreciated subject. In his prologue (a word not only for a book’s introduction but also a preliminary time-trial stage of the Tour), he attempts to ride a mountain stage of the Tour, but DNF’s (“did not finish”), and his failure will haunt him for the rest of his research and writing process. He then spends nearly two years meeting with surviving lanternes and those who remember them, and searching French libraries for scraps of information about the earliest ones. For example, he pursues the legends of the first lanterne rouge, Arsène Millocheau of 1903 (but did he really finish the race?), and of Abdel-Kader Zaaf of 1951, whose story involves wine, naps, religious difference and colonial racism. Leonard studies the lanterne (and, somewhat resignedly, the leading yellow jersey as well) exhaustively, throughout history and through the race’s evolutions and rule changes. A chapter on drug and doping scandals rounds out any analysis of the Tour, and yes, some lanternes were involved.

Lanterne Rouge is an engaging, exhaustive survey of the last man in the Tour de France, a history, a collection of appealing anecdotes and a psychological consideration of winning and losing. An obvious choice for serious cycling fans, Leonard’s approachable study will also please general sports fans, history enthusiasts and those who root for the underdog.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the June 12, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 bidons.

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Still Life With Insects by Brian Kiteley

Posted on June 8, 2015 by pagesofjulia

The subtle, sublime life of an amateur entomologist, in tiny glimpses.

insects

Leah Hager Cohen (No Book but the World) selected Brian Kiteley’s first novel, Still Life with Insects (originally published in 1989), for reprinting by Pharos Editions. In her introduction, Cohen gracefully outlines the strengths of this slim, quietly powerful book.

Elwyn Farmer is an amateur entomologist, forever wandering off to peer under dry leaves or dig in riverbanks. Still Life with Insects consists of his journal entries, spanning 40 years: from 1945, when his 43rd birthday has just been celebrated, to 1985, when his vision begins to fade. The entries record his quiet rejoicing in the ephemeral glory of the natural world, the beetles he collects and, through and around them, the details of his fragile life. Following several nervous breakdowns, he tells stories in which grandchildren and tragic death figure at an equal level with the Burying Beetle (Nicrophorus marginatus), or the Asian Stink Bug his family encounters in a Hungarian resort.

Although a bug collector’s field notes may not sound like an imaginative or exhilarating backdrop, Brian Kiteley’s distinctive style plays well to such a challenge. His greatest accomplishment is understatement. In a mere 103 pages, a sensitive, complex man becomes a brittle old man, fully experiencing the passing of time and life. The stories that fill these journal entries, sparse and widely spaced over decades, are necessarily mere vignettes, bare sketches. Still Life with Insects is a deceptively simple story, characterized by restraint, but with many layers of allegory available to the close reader.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the May 19, 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 boxes.

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The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander

Posted on May 21, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Moving, charming, delicately lovely, this memoir of a husband’s death offers solace and even joy.

light world

Poet Elizabeth Alexander (Crave Radiance; the 2009 Inaugural Poem) was enjoying a loving, creative, exultant and full life with her husband, Ficre Ghebreyesus, and their two sons, when Ficre died suddenly. The Light of the World is her record of that man–a husband and father, an artist, activist and chef–and of Alexander’s grief and gratitude for the years she shared with him and the love and family they made.

This astonishing and naturally poetic memoir of love and loss is vivid and abundant with sensory detail and bright color. Alexander includes recipes–Ficre’s, and those that comforted her after his death; gives evocative descriptions of his paintings and the food and music they both loved; counts his scars; and recounts her dreams of him. But The Light of the World is not a dream itself: Alexander is lucid and absolutely present. Perhaps to ward off the end it threatens, the story she sets out to tell starts, and starts again, and starts again: at their respective mothers’ pregnancies; at Ficre’s 50th birthday, the week of his death; when they met at a coffee shop in 1996. Alexander then resolutely travels through the tragic center of her story and into the life that follows, when her family of four becomes “a three-legged table,” as she phrased it in her first poem afterwards. In this tender, perceptive portrayal, Ficre comes alive again: an Eritrean native, a peace-lover born into war, a painter also accomplished in photography, collage and sculpture, an eager reader fluent in seven languages and who “could say hello and thank you in literally dozens of other[s],” an activist and member of African, African-American and global communities. “Your life is just like a foreign film!” a friend rightly exclaims, and Alexander’s is just the voice to portray his broadly informed, musical, painterly existence.

Short chapters and language of unrivalled beauty ease a sad story, and Alexander and her sons do make a joyful noise in the end. She feels that she carries “a Santa’s sack of gifts” of Ficre’s thoughts and impressions that belong to her alone; she celebrates the time they had. Their shared dreams, scars, meals, songs, dances, history and family are fittingly and exquisitely honored here.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the April 23, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 9 red lentils.

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God Help the Child by Toni Morrison

Posted on May 14, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Toni Morrison brings a keen perception and lyrical voice to the veiled but lasting effects of childhood trauma.

god help

Toni Morrison (Home), winner of a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize in Literature, satisfies her fans with a searing, lyrical story about the power of childhood trauma.

God Help the Child centers on a woman who has left behind the “dumb countryfied name” Lula Ann to become Bride, “with nothing anybody needs to say before or after that one memorable syllable,” a successful California career woman with her own cosmetics line but who wears no makeup. Her mother was a light-skinned, “high yellow” woman dismayed by and unable to love her blue-black daughter, but Bride grows up to repossess her skin tone and every other aspect of her beauty.

From a childhood marked by rejection and terrible crimes, Bride remakes herself as an object of attraction and a financial success, but as the novel opens, she faces dual blows: her mysterious live-in boyfriend, Booker, leaves, and a prisoner is paroled with whom she shares an old bond. God Help the Child reveals these complicated paths in alternating perspectives, most frequently Bride’s first-person voice but also that of her friend Brooklyn; her mother (who taught Lula Ann to call her Sweetness, rather than Mama or anything else that would tie them too closely together); the new parolee; and a child Bride meets along the way. Eventually, after several oblique glances, Booker himself comes fully into sight, but his perspective is told only in the third person, as Bride goes looking for answers and Lula Ann threatens to reemerge.

Even Morrison’s minor characters are complex, intriguing people deserving of closer inspection, and as Bride’s journey acquires a momentum of its own, the magnetism of her troubles pulls the reader along. She suffers the coldness of both her parents, a harrowing court case, an assault, a car accident and a fire; but it is the traumas of her childhood that most torment Bride, and, as becomes apparent, the same is true for Booker. In the end, healing comes in a surprising form.

Beautifully composed in a variety of distinct voices and covering a range of family concerns, God Help the Child employs a hint of magical realism and explores issues of race and women’s lives familiar to fans of Morrison’s fiction. The story of Bride’s life and trials is sensual, both delicate and strong, poetic and heavy with sex, love and pain, exemplifying a revered author’s unfailing talent.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the April 20, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 earrings.

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Suitcase City by Sterling Watson

Posted on March 20, 2015 by pagesofjulia

A reformed drug dealer gets pulled back into the game in this tense, bloody thriller with a strong sense of place and a soft heart.

suitcase

Suitcase City by Sterling Watson (Weep No More My Brother) opens with an extended flashback to protagonist Jimmy Teach’s time in small-town Florida. At the time, Teach has just finished a brief career in professional football and is back in the game of smuggling drugs, or in his words, operating as a “maritime consultant.” When a business deal with Guatemalans goes sour, Teach competently cleans up the mess, and moves on.

The bulk of Teach’s story then takes place nearly 20 years later, in late 1990s Tampa, Fla., where a rundown neighborhood called Suitcase City gives the novel its name. Teach is reformed, more or less: he’s vice-president of sales at a pharmaceutical company and has rebuilt a relationship with his teenaged daughter after his wife’s (her mother’s) death. But a little incident inside a bar one Friday afternoon–a tiny mistake, a single piece of rotten luck–and suddenly Teach finds himself worried about losing his house, his job, the relationship he’s built with his daughter, and maybe his own life.

Suitcase City is nearly halfway over before the reader finds out who Teach’s enemies are and what the present beef is about, but this lengthy plot development is never boring or slow–quite the opposite. Every moment is riveting, making this a difficult book to look up from at all; the reader is every bit as concerned as Teach over the maddening mystery of who or what in his past is pursuing him, and why. To get answers and solutions, Teach has to look into his past as well as consider his future. Along the way, he gets his hands dirty with blood, gore, prostitutes and drug dealers more sophisticated than anyone involved in his “maritime consulting” two decades ago.

Watson’s magic is in pacing and taut prose, in the details that make his Florida setting so compelling–boats and bilge, lobsters and golf–and in a father’s love for his daughter. Diverse characters enliven Teach’s world, including his charming daughter, a pushy reporter and a colorful pair of police detectives who represent a range of competence and demeanor. In the end, Teach is flawed but likable, and Suitcase City is an absorbing thriller, a vivid adventure in a bright, humid, perilous underworld.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the February 13, 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 tee times.

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Father Brother Keeper by Nathan Poole

Posted on March 6, 2015 by pagesofjulia

This memorable collection of reflective short stories about commonplace tragedies showcases a gentle, painstakingly accurate writing voice.

father brother keeper

Nathan Poole’s debut collection of short stories, Father Brother Keeper, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and is an emotionally evocative and varied experience. Its contents are rarely connected, as when two consecutive stories follow one family through generations of gentle conflict. However, even stories that don’t share characters do have in common their settings in rural Georgia and a series of small towns. Each is a miniature masterpiece of perfect, often tragic realism, featuring men, women and children dealing with everyday trials: illness, death, divorce, financial hardship.

An old man fights his dementia–“he was losing traction”–when his estranged daughter leaves her two small children with him and drives away. A young man finds more than a dozen bait dogs (fight dogs past their prime) abandoned on his family’s property and accuses the wrong man of the brutality. Two brothers react in different ways toward their mother after their father leaves. Two young neighbor girls who are friends contract the same illness but with different outcomes; mapping this divergence is a challenge for each family. In the stories labelled “Two from Sparta,” four generations live off their land in slightly different ways, each father learning how to make his way with his son. A young man sets out to find the oldest, biggest tree of each species in the country, to honor a death. “It would be an easy thing to do, and good… a dedication. The year I would learn the joy of calling each thing by its proper name.”

Poole’s achievement in this collection is just that, calling each thing by its proper name. Though perhaps simple in their subject matter, each story is weighty in its emotional impact, and sharply, poignantly real. The stories all feature people living simply, accommodating change if not embracing it, and struggling to move forward through whatever life hands them. Poole’s voice is original, authentic and starkly honest; he is clearly compassionate toward his characters even as he walks them through terrible everyday calamities. Father Brother Keeper is a slim book but one that demands to be read slowly and thoughtfully, so that the hints of redemption can percolate. Meticulous, gorgeous and brooding, these stories will appeal to connoisseurs of the short story as well as fans of traditional Southern ways of life and literary fiction.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the February 5, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 barrels.

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Unbecoming by Rebecca Scherm

Posted on February 18, 2015 by pagesofjulia

A delicious, deceptively simple tale of art, crime, love and betrayal.

unbecoming

In the opening pages of Rebecca Scherm’s debut novel, Unbecoming, Julie from California is working in Paris at an antiques repair shop, polishing and replacing hinges, cleaning beadwork and resetting jewels. Except her name is really Grace, and she’s from Garland, Tennessee. Two young men are about to be paroled from prison in Garland, and Grace is nervous, because her name is not all she’s lying about. From this beginning, we follow Grace back in time: her unhappy home life, her great luck in being loved by a popular boy from a good family, her joy at being his mother’s daughter, her departure for college in New York City, her work in art appraisal and her ignominious retreat from all of the above. Only at the end of the novel do we learn how exactly Grace landed in Paris with a new name, a forged biography and a fear of her past.

Unbecoming is beguiling: a love story with twists and turns; the tale of an insecure, insufficiently loved girl from the wrong side of the tracks; a delightfully nuanced narrative about trust and trustworthiness. Grace is endearing and intriguing, although she is not all (or is more than) she seems. Layers of lies, longing and duplicity recall The Talented Mr. Ripley, another chilling masterpiece of dishonesty’s helpless acceleration. Scherm’s light, confident touch with pacing, suspense and characterization is pitch-perfect. Beware staying up all night to rush through this engrossing, enchanting debut.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the January 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: 8 trillions.

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Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story by J. Jefferson Farjeon

Posted on January 28, 2015 by pagesofjulia

A captivating puzzle mystery involving strangers thrown together by chance in a nearly snowbound British country house.

mystery
British crime novelist J. Jefferson Farjeon’s Mystery in White was first published in 1937 and receives a brief introduction to accompany this new release. It’s a classic puzzle, timeless even in its charming historic setting. A group of strangers gather in a third-class train compartment a few days before Christmas: an “elderly bore”; a young chorus girl; a clerk who “did not have spots, but looked as though he ought to have had”; a brother and sister; and an elderly scion of the Royal Psychical Society. When relentless snow shuts down the tracks, they flee an apparent murder on the train into the “strange fairyland” of whiteness outside. They happen upon a fine country estate, but the danger only mounts.

The door is unlocked, fires lit and tea set out; though no one appears to be home, the kettle is boiling over. This setting is not the closed environment it seems: in their investigations, members of the party tramp about in the snow only to find their footprints fade quickly and paths are obscured. The danger of losing oneself in the blizzard is added to the danger of knife-wielding lurkers.

Farjeon increases the pace and plays out suspense with an expert hand. His characters are appealing, their plight both picturesque and distressing; there is just a hint of the ghost story to this whodunit. Mystery in White is, in short, an elegantly, enchantingly entertaining tale to be enjoyed on a chilly evening while safely indoors.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the January 2, 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 windows.

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Screenplay by MacDonald Harris

Posted on January 22, 2015 by pagesofjulia

An enthralling, time-traveling version of Alice, in dual wonderlands of 20th-century Hollywood.

screenplay

Originally published in 1982, Screenplay by MacDonald Harris (The Balloonist) exhibits remarkable sleight of hand with two parallel versions of Los Angeles. Alys was raised in the late 20th century by fabulously wealthy, unconventional parents and orphaned at age 18. With no personal connections and unlimited money to burn, he amuses himself with unusual old books and music and soulless sexual liaisons. An odd old man shows up at his doorstep and requests to rent a room–though no room has been advertised. He introduces himself as Nesselrode, a film producer, and says he can get Alys into pictures.

Soon Alys’s tenuous link to modern 1980s L.A. falters as he steps through a screen into black-and-white 1920s Hollywood with Nesselrode as a surly, time-obsessed guide. In this alternate world, he falls in love with a beautiful starlet, but can they make a life together in her time? Or in his?

In addition to the unmistakable overarching reference to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Harris’s novel recalls the moral questions of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Alys himself could have stepped from the pages of The Great Gatsby. Even with such classics for comparison, Screenplay is a masterpiece of darkly playful cunning. Harris’s evocative prose, in Alys’s disturbingly clinical, coldly self-indulgent first-person narrative, is both intoxicating and disquieting; the altered reality here is more sinister and sensual, even erotic, than in Carroll’s Wonderland. The tension in this memorable and singular dreamscape builds with perfect pacing to an ending that raises more questions than it answers.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the December 30, 2014 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 toasters.

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