Reading Roundup - April-May 2012

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (4 stars)

A very moving book. I loved the narrator and am surprised so many readers found him difficult to like. It was just a very honest story of a son grieving his father's death in his quirky, unique way. One of my great fears is that my husband will die and leave my oldest son, almost the age of the narrator and similar to him in some ways, with a black hole in his heart that could never, ever be filled. The rest of us would be devastated, of course, but the connection my oldest son has to his Dad is like his lifeline to the world. It felt like a personal story to me in that way. This book does a good job of allowing the reader to just sit with the sadness of losing someone you love, and somehow coming to terms with the reality that things can never be made better or fixed.

Mao's Last Dancer by Li Cunxin (3 stars)

An unlikely (but true!) story about a young, starving Chinese peasant boy becoming a world class ballet dancer. Man, it really was a rotten life out there in the Chinese countryside. Cunxin came from a family of seven boys, and I cannot fathom the strain of feeding seven boys with no food. They subsisted on dried yams. Cunxin got an incredibly lucky break when he was selected to attend Madam Mao's dance academy where to his utter amazement he got to eat rice every single day. Cunxin's talent, in conjunction with his incredible inner drive and commitment to dance (and the death of Mao and the disbanding of the absolutely insane Gang of Four and dismantling of the Cultural Revolution) led to his eventual contact with the west. After one mind-blowing trip to Dallas, Texas to study for a summer where he also discovered that Americans could eat full meals and take showers every day, Cunxin eventually defected to the United States. It is a good story, especially since his life was timed so perfectly with Chinese politics for things to work out nicely for him. After several years of Deng Xiopeng's relatively not-insane leadership, he was eventually able to travel back to China and see his family again.

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain (3 stars)

This is a fictionalized memoir of Hemingway's first wife Hadley, who was married to Hemingway during his years in Paris as he was a rising star, before the publication of his first novel The Sun Also Rises. This book was enjoyable but not memorable. It mostly made me feel glad that I wasn't married to an artist with an ego as large as life. It did capture the excitement and wonder of being married to someone like that, but the end, when he gets the idea that he could somehow be married simultaneously both to you and your best friend, with whom he has fallen in love and been carrying on an affair because he is such an innovative artist, who writes such sparse, true prose and dialogue, that the old fashioned ideas about treating people decently just don't apply to him anymore... then it would get tiresome. Hadley comes out the hero of this story for sure, and from what I've read about her life she deserves it. It is such a relief that she married a normal, steady man after their divorce and lived a long happy life with him.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (3 stars)

I read this in conjunction with The Paris Wife, and it was interesting to get Hemingway's memoirs of the same time period that The Paris Wife covers. He captures the magic of that time in his life well - the snazzy, heady friends, the wonder of actually being a writer writing good, important stuff, the joy of being poor somewhere with a killer exchange rate with the dollar so even though you were poor you could still spend winters skiing in Austria and springtime in Spain and do much of your work in cafes. It was nice that he wrote with so much admiration of his then-wife Hadley all those years later, who was part of the magic. Overall, though, it's not my kind of magic. The incessant drinking, the uber-wealthy friends with open marriages, the dramatic artists... it just feels draining and distracting from the best things in his life, and eventually it all did destroy what he speaks of with so much tenderness thirty-five years later.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (3 stars)

I thought this would be a good way to conclude my Hemingway bender since this is the book he wrote during the time in Paris covered by The Paris Wife and A Moveable Feast. The writing really is excellent and evocative, and I don't think we can see how revolutionary his style was at the time since his influence has been so enduring. His "Iceberg Theory" of characters works beautifully here; somehow the characters are deep and true despite Hemingway not revealing all that much about them. But man, these people. What a sorry, drunken lot. This really put the exclamation point on how fortunate Hadley was to escape this hollow, ridiculous, self-absorbed scene that Hemingway somehow got drawn into. To my way of thinking, if your find yourself in a Lost Generation, the thing to do is try and find some way out, not to hang around drinking and sleeping with random, messed-up people. It just irritated me to no end that they seem so self-congratulatory about throwing off the dumb constraints of traditional morality to truly live (although they never say so in so many words) yet live completely miserable lives (which they do say in so many words). And mind you, they are grown-ups, not 18 year old college freshmen. Not that you could tell.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (4 stars)

Whew. This book is only for people who like to know where the brain matter ends up after someone else gets shot in the head. Again. Strangely, that's actually how I like my violence. If someone is going to get shot in the head, we at least owe it to them to really feel the gritty horror of it. Apparently Cormac McCarthy agrees. Someday he will write a lovely book about butterflies and rainbows, and I will definitely read it, but until then I just have to keep reading his disturbing, violent stories because I cannot not read writing this good. Incidentally, this was a perfect book to read after my Hemingway marathon, because McCarthy is the true Jedi master of the sparse style Hemingway pioneered. When you thumb through books by the two authors, even the way the paragraphs look are similar. The reading order was a complete coincidence, but a very interesting one. I'm not sure I'm as desperate about the future and young people these days as Bell, but then I'm not yet an old man, I suppose.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (4 stars)

A beautiful book about being young and being old. Sparse, insightful, and funny. Really a gem.