Jerry Mitchell wrote an article about Rick Bragg in today’s Clarion Ledger.

Click here to read….

No one who read Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, can forget her riveting opening sentence:

“I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster . . . Mom stood fifteen feet away. She had tied rags around her shoulders to keep out the spring chill and was picking through the trash while her dog played . . . at her feet . . . ”

Not your typical memoir! The Glass Castle is the story of Jeannette Walls’ life…her childhood primarily, in which she describes with beauty and matter of factness, what life was like growing up with her three siblings and their parents. Her family was at once deeply dysfunctional but also unique and surprisingly vibrant. Her brilliant, gregarious father taught them about physics, geology and how to make the everyday seem like an endless adventure, all the while moving from place to place to place. When he was drunk, though, he was dishonest and destructive.

Her mother was a free spirit who never wanted to take on the responsibility of being a parent. She was far more interested in pursuing her dreams of becoming an artist. The Walls children learned how to raise themselves; they fed, clothed and protected each other. The huge majority of this fell to Jeannette as she was the oldest. They were seemingly always on the run–from bill collectors mostly! They traveled from town to town, staying just enough ahead of all responsibilities. Schooling for the children was erratic at best. They lived in shacks without electricity or plumbing and their food came by way of scrounging or scrapping together nothing and making it into something. Yet, in spite of the hardships, Walls comes away with a belief that her childhood, though far from ordinary, had its moments of thrills and unusual freedom. The children eventually grow up and migrate to New York where they go their separate ways. The parents also move to New York and choose a life style of homelessness which Walls refers to in that gripping opening sentence.  Making peace with her bizarre life and her parents’ choice to live the way they do is the journey she takes us on. I honestly can’t recommend this book enough.

Glass Castle sold over 2½ million copies and has stayed on the best sellers list for several years.

In Half Broke Horses, Walls takes us on yet another remarkable family journey, that of her maternal grandmother, Lily. Now, here is a real character, just as rich as any I have come across in a long time. Lily lived out west and was a “rifle toting, horse breaking Annie Oakley in a biplane” says USA Today. She left her New Mexico home at age fifteen, and rode five hundred miles alone on her pony, to teach in the frontier town of Red Lake, Arizona. She lived through everything from droughts to floods to the Great Depression. She will remind you so much of Jeannette that it answers a lot of the questions we were all left with after reading Glass Castle. Walls’ mother makes so much more sense to me now after learning how she was raised (by Lily) and what she was like as a child. I would almost be tempted to suggest you read Half Broke Horses first and then Glass Castle.

Resilience is the trait that seems to best describe these people…. three generations of a unique, fascinating and eccentric family. None of them seem to have had expectations of an easy life. Lily, in particular, was determined to take her fate into her own hands. She was a rebel with a cause, wanting to live and experience everything she could and always pick herself up when she was knocked down. Hard work was her trademark as well as a simple, humble acceptance of the world. She was practical to an extreme but could also be quite moved at the beauty of a sunset.

Frankly, in comparison to these women, we are all wimps! This book has been described as Little House on the Prairie for adults and that fits to some extent. But, I came away with a little different perspective. To simply say she was a frontier woman and these were old stories from a time and place we can only imagine cheapens this woman and the women who came after her. This extended family, as unusual as they were, seems to culminate in Walls who has reached a place of purpose and put to rest so many personal demons. She remains respectful of her history and never denigrates or exaggerates the highs and the lows. She shares her grandmother’s tenacity and sheer brilliance for survival.

There is a prevalent belief that our current generation has become jaded and cynical and thereby weak and spoiled; that we know nothing of the hardships previous generations endured. I don’t think that is 100% true. There will always be survivors; those who beat the odds and make their lives work from sheer will and determination. Jeannette Walls and her family will make believers out of all those skeptics time and time again.

In her acknowledgments, Walls writes:

“I will never be able to adequately thank my husband, John Taylor, who has taught me so much, including that its okay not to be completely ‘broke.'”

That’s pretty cool . . .

Jeannette Walls was here Wednesday, January 26th for a signing and reading. Half Broke Horses is now out in paperback.

-Norma

i attended the ghostface killah (see below) show last night in oxford so i’m a bit out of sorts this morning, please forgive me.

reading…reading…reading…what have i been reading…

i just finished the new dexter novel, dexter by design, last night and started the new christopher moore novel at one this morning.

the new dexter is pretty damn good.  i haven’t been watching the new season of the show because i’m way too impatient to watch a show week to week.  i like to sit down and watch a whole season rapid fire, one episode after another (so please don’t reveal anything that’s happening on the show).  i wish the show followed the books a little closer in that i wish that rita’s kids had the “dark passenger” on the tv show.  read it, it’s good.

christopher moore’s new one, bite me, is a sequel to you suck which came out in 2007.  if you’re a christopher moore fan, this book will do nothing but encourage your love for his oh so wacky novels.

by zita

I feel like I have just read one of the most scholarly, unique novels in quite some time. Muriel Barbery, a native of Casablanca, who has taught philosophy in France and now lives in Japan, knows how to get raw human emotions on the page in a terse, captivating, and humorous manner. Her popularity with the release of Elegance of the Hedgehog (2008) probably forcasted her success with this new release, Gourmet Rhapsody.

As the novel opens, the reader meets the internationally famous food critic who has been told by his physician that he has only 48 hours to live.

“I am going to die, but that is of no importance. Since yesterday, since Chabrot, only one thing matters. I am going to die and there is a flavor that has been teasing my taste buds and my heart and I simply cannot recall it. I know that this particular flavor is the first and ultimate truth of my entire life, and that it holds the key to a heart that I have since silenced.”

From this point on, the author organizes the novel into small, short and poignant chapters all written from the point of view of the protagonists’ family members, friends, fellow food afficionados, lovers, and even his dog and cat. Clever beyond clever! Additional chapters have titles which reflect food groups, including meat, fish, ice cream and mayonnaise , among others,and what  role they have played in the food critic’s life.

The reader learns that the deathbed quest for the elusive taste takes precedence over the protagonist’s love for his downtrodden, desperate wife, who has received little or rare attention from her husband, as well as his children who have never felt loved, nor wanted.  His has been a life lived selfishly and intellectually with his entire focus on food.  This novel will pique the interest of all chefs, all food lovers, and even those who have  even a vague interest in food.

Being the dog lover that I am, one of my favorite chapters,entitled “The Dog: Rue de Grenelle, the Bedroom” introduced me to “Rhett”. “He was a Dalmatian, and I’d baptized him Rhett, in honor of  ‘Gone with the Wind’, my favorite film, because if I had been a woman, I would have been Scarlett–the one who survives in a world that is dying.” When Rhett grabs and quickly devours the coveted Christmas Yule log exquisitely and laboriously prepared by the grandmother, everyone ( once the immediate disappointment and anger subside of the great loss) become greatly amused at Rhett’s aroma during the rest of the holiday.  The levity and humor with which Barbery writes gives  great delight and joy.

So, does Monsieur Arthens find his nostalgic, long lost flavor before his death? The reader will find out as he voraciously consumes the language of this delectable book as if he were consuming his last feast.  This French translation, a good one, takes the reader on a gastronomic voyage, one which he will not soon forget.

-Nan

I never read The Time Traveler’s Wife.  I have a copy at home, but for some reason I was afraid it would be too romantic and whimsical for my tastes.  But when Audrey Niffenegger’s new book, Her Fearful Symmetry, was released, like Norma was afraid of, I was incredibly attracted to the cover.  To make matters worse (or better, depending on how you feel about owning two copies of the same book), there’s an equally if not more attractive SIGNED limited edition.  It features an illustration by Niffenegger on the cover and fabulous black page edges.

[click here to order]

Niffenegger’s new book is an exploration of identity.  The twin girls who inherit their aunt’s flat aren’t exactly identical; Valentina is a mirror image of Julia all the way down to her organs (which, as you may have guessed, results in many health problems for Valentina).  The twins are vapid, extraordinarily lazy, and besides a few failed attempts at college, have sponged off their mother (their aunt’s estranged twin) and father in Chicago since high school.

After their mother’s twin dies, the twins inherit her estate in London on their 21st birthday on the condition that they live in the flat for a year before they decide to sell it.  The back garden of the flat borders Highgate cemetery, where their aunt is buried in a family plot.  Julia and Valentina soon discover that their aunt Elspeth, whom they’ve never met, will be quite a large presence in their lives even after her death.  For one thing, they live one floor above her lover, Robert, a tour guide at Highgate who is writing his doctoral thesis on the cemetery, and who, though shaken by Elspeth’s death, finds strange comfort in getting to know her twin nieces who so uncannily resemble her.  Julia and Valentina also begin to unravel the mystery of their mother and Elspeth’s shattered relationship, which ended just as they were born, and which the reader grows to suspect may have a bigger influence on their lives than they know.

Niffenegger’s prose is refreshingly terse and quickly paced.  When I began to read the book, which is written in British English, I assumed she was British.  She’s not; she lives in Chicago.  But I like that she chose to write in that style (mostly just spelling differences: realize=realise, and a few idioms) because it allows the book to be “narrated” by a British presence.  The book is written in the third person with a pretty thorough omniscience, but because the “it” narrator is British, in some ways it feels as though Elspeth is narrating, relating the events that take place after her death, both because of and in spite of it.

Niffenegger’s book made me think a lot about the choices an author makes when they unfold their story.  And how much of that responsibility is “given” to their narrator, that presence that we get to know as we read, who is only partly the actual author of the book.  Which brings me back to my first statement about Her Fearful Symmetry: that it is a book about identity.  How much of the identity of a twin is dictated by her sister?  How much are any of us defined by our family or our work or who we surround ourselves with?  How much should we work at protecting that identity so that we don’t begin, as Valentina finds herself doing, fading away?  And how difficult would it really be, if one were determined enough, to slip into another person’s identity?

Her Fearful Symmetry is many things: a ghost story, a family saga, a coming of age story, and an exploration of what makes us unique.