In this extraordinary memoir from 1932-1934, Kitty Crockett Robertson describes her life on the North Shore of Massachusetts during the Depression, a time when she, a Harvard graduate, became a hard-working apple farmer to save the family farm in Ipswich. Her physician father had died, and Kitty, wanting to keep the farm from being sold for development, which her Boston-based brothers favored, decided to give up her job working at the Harvard Library to try to make the orchard profitable enough to save the land. Working almost single-handedly, she spent the next two years doing all the dirty work, learning in the process that “The Depression was that time of leveling when she and her neighbors kept going on the strength they learned from each other.”
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Just after author Yukio Mishima finished the final novel in his “Sea of Fertility” tetralogy on November 25, 1970, he disemboweled himself in a ritual suicide—seppuku—committed in the presence of four members of his private army. Mishima, aged forty-five, believed whole-heartedly in the strengths of the old Japanese emperors and in the strong, aristocratic culture that had evolved from the samurai. He never forgave Emperor Hirohito for denying his godliness at the end of World War II, and he despaired of the political wrong-headedness he saw on both the right and the left a generation after the war. Spring Snow, written in 1966, is the first of the four novels of what is generally regarded as his masterpiece, a series which explores the essence of life, the spiritual beliefs which make that life meaningful, the obligations of man to a wider society, the relationship of chance to free will, and the glory of dying for one’s beliefs. Despite Mishima’s awesome reputation and the notoriety he achieved as a result of his bizarre ritual suicide, his writing is not esoteric. Instead, he writes in an accessible, descriptive style which graphically conveys the culture of Japan in the days leading up to to World War I.
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A sanitorium set in Suvanto in rural Finland sometime around 1930 has drawn female patients, from all over the world. The “up-patients,” primarily wealthy women who enjoy the specialized spa treatments and the chance to escape from their everyday lives for periods of up to six months, live on a separate floor above those who are physically ill. Dr. Peter Weber, the physician in charge of the hospital, believes that most of their problems are gynecological, and he is doing research a special stitch which he believes will cure some of their problems. The arrival of Julia Dey, a woman with venereal disease, changes the atmosphere from what it has been in the past. Julia is often mean-spirited and sometimes deliberately cruel, and she upsets the balance among the patients and precipitates a crisis.
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Indicating in the subtitle that this is “A story of darkest Earl’s Court,” Patrick Hamilton sets Hangover Square in what was in 1940 a seamy, low-rent district of London, a place in which those who were down on their luck, out of work, or homeless could manage to scrounge through life. Bars and cheap entertainment venues provided evening activities for people who often did not get up before noon. George Harvey Bone, the main character here, is out of work, and like the other unemployed and under-employed people he associates with, he lives on the fringes of the entertainment business, people who party long and hard, their gaiety fueled by massive quantities of alcohol. Netta Longdon, a woman with whom George is obsessed, is a failed actress, a beautiful, spoiled, and manipulative woman who ignores George except when she wants money. She sleeps around with his friends (though not with him) and uses him whenever she thinks she can get something. George has an additional problem, however, one which has drawn the attention of the people he associates with. His “blackouts,” which might, in some cases have been attributed to repeated over-indulgence, appear also to be psychotic episodes of schizophrenia, and his alter-ego is telling him to kill Netta.
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First published in France in 1985, The Prospector signaled a change in what had been the author’s style until then. Abandoning the experimental style he employed in the 1970s, with its elusive characters and almost plotless “stories,” author J. M. G. LeClezio here creates an adventure story which is also a coming-of-age story and an exploration of culture. Set in Mauritius, where his French family has deep roots and where he now has a home, the novel is unique—filled with lush descriptions and vibrant characters who appeal to the romantic in all of us while simultaneously evoking the violence and horror which mar their lives and make a mockery of “civilization.” The novel’s exotic setting inspires dreams of lost worlds, mysteries, and lives tied to nature and its beauties. At the same time, however, the author is exploring the damage wrought by foreigners whose sole purpose is to exploit the land and use it for commercial purposes, specifically the plantation owners who have created and cruelly oversee the sugarcane fields worked by underpaid local help.
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The Chill, written in 1982, is a coming-of-age story so universal that it could just as easily have been written in 1902 or 2002. Set in the mid-1920s, in the hill towns between Siena and Florence, the novella recreates so skillfully the story of an unnamed narrator dealing with the pangs of adolescence that the reader can easily associate it with the author’s own childhood. Though the setting is dramatically different from that of J. D. Sallinger’s Catcher in the Rye, or L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, or any of the other coming-of-age novels one might recall, the issues are similar, if not identical in many respects. The novella illustrates a panoply of adolescent issues–the death of family members and the loss that represents, the changes which accompany death, an individual’s relationship with the past and history, the importance of memory, the growth of sexuality, and the extent to which other people’s perception of reality can color forever the reality itself for the participants in those same events. A coming-of-age classic.
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Henry Smart, born at the turn of the century, experiences such a miserable childhood that he is on the streets of Dublin by the age of five and solely responsible for his younger brother Victor by the age of nine. Always cold, hungry, and lacking a warm place to sleep, Henry and Victor are at the mercy of the elements, so focused on staying alive from moment to moment that they have no time to look toward the future. By the age of fourteen, Henry has met up with other poor young men who have some of the same resentments he has toward those who have dominated the land and commerce for so long. In 1916, the Irish Republican Brotherhood seizes the General Post Office on Easter Monday, declares a new government, and raises its flag, and Henry is there–not out of a sense of patriotism so much as a sense that he is at home–and is fed–when he is among these people. Including characters like Padraic Pearse and James Connelly, with whom Henry comes into contact at the GPO, and Michael Collins, for whom Henry later works as an assassin, Doyle recreates Irish history. Though the novel’s scope is wide and the events are among Ireland’s most significant, however, the focus remains clearly on Henry.
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The Great Plains around Willow Creek, Alberta, burgeon with new life in this dramatic family saga set in 1938. Two Ukrainian families who have escaped starvation during Stalin’s “Ukrainian Holocaust” have arrived in Canada, making their way to Alberta, where they can, for ten dollars, gain the rights to 160 acres of virgin land. After a devastating loss at the beginning of their stay in Canada, and a two-year jail term for Theo Mykolayenko, who was the victim here, Theo returns to his impoverished family, determined to make a good life as a farmer through sheer determination and untiring effort. Just as he is about to harvest his first crop, however, family conflicts arise with his sister and her husband, and these escalate. Though the heroic characters are extremely heroic and the villains are extremely villanous, the characters are well drawn, their behavior understandable within the context of their lives. The novel is not subtle, and it is often melodramatic, but it is undeniably moving, and it makes the reader empathize with those who have given so much of themselves to the tilling of the land.
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