John Updike made the life of Boston’s suburban elite his territory—emphasizing their sense of entitlement and superiority, their “clubbiness,” their alcoholism, and their sexual experimentation as a way of proving they exist. One generation later, Lily King, like her fellow Massachusetts authors Susan, George, and Eliza Minot, shares her own insights into what sometimes passed for family life in a similar, but more “Brahmin” suburban setting. Dividing her novel into three parts, Lily King tells the story of Daley Amory, daughter of Gardiner and Meredith Amory, from her eleventh birthday, during the Presidency of Richard Nixon, through her forties and the election of Barack Obama. Though she lives for long periods of time during those years without contact with her alcoholic father, she never really escapes her need for him, even, on occasion, subsuming her own “best interests” to care for him. A fascinating look at the extent to which girls and women yearn for a father and the lengths to which they might go to make that father love them.
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Posted in 0: 2010 Reviews, Biographical/Autobiographical, Growing Up, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, 2010 reviews, Poland, Post World War II on Jul 5th, 2010
Set in 1963 in Wisla, the rural Polish town where author Jerzy Pilch himself grew up, A THOUSAND PEACEFUL CITIES feels as much like a real memoir as a satirical, fictional retelling of life in Poland in the years preceding the Student Revolt of 1968. In 1963, the Communist party is in power, and the country is under Soviet influence but not control. A strong, independent spirit and the residual respect of the populace for First Secretary Wladysaw Gomulka, who successfully challenged Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, has encouraged the populace to live as they have always lived, though economically they are becoming poorer. The churches, both Catholic and Protestant, are still open and are a major part of life, not just in terms of religion but in the communities’ regular social gatherings. Under the increasing influence of the Soviets, however, Gomulka has become more dictatorial, imposing further limits on his people. At the outset of the novel, the reader immediately discovers that Jerzyk’s father and his father’s friend, Mr. Traba, an alcoholic former clergyman, plan to kill First Secretary Wladysaw Gomulka in Warsaw. What follows is a wild ride through rural Poland in 1963—a novel that is, by turns, hilarious, thoughtful, filled with metaphysical and dialectical argument, and embellished with lyrical details from the natural world.
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In deciding to explore the complex and agonizing story of her brother’s life, Cuban author Cristina Garcia abandons her usual prose and writes in poetry, a form more appropriate for the intense feelings she bears toward her brother, a sick and broken man who was routinely victimized by his family as a child. Tracing her brother’s life from his birth in 1960, when the family became one of the first families to escape to New York from Castro’s Cuba, she recreates his life through poetry, up to 2007, when the book was first published. These short poems in free verse engage the reader in filling in some blanks, and as one does, the growing horrors of this child’s life; the author’s own feelings of guilt for being unable (for whatever reason) to stop the torments her brother endured; her intense resentments against her parents, especially her mother; and her abiding sadness for the shell of a man her brother has become threaten to overwhelm the reader in the same degree that they must have overwhelmed the author.
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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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