SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

One of the best debut novels I have read in a long time, Falling to Earth focuses on the aftermath of the largest and most powerful tornado ever to hit the United States, one known as the Tri-State Tornado of March 18, 1925, which traveled two hundred nineteen miles through northeast Missouri, across southern Illinois, and into southwest Indiana over the course of three hours eighteen minutes. Destroying everything in its path, it killed almost seven hundred people. Author Kate Southwood describes the aftermath of this storm in the town of Marah, Illinois, a rural composite of all the communities hit by this horrific storm. What elevates this novel above a journalistic report of buildings destroyed and communities devastated is Southwood’s focus on the effects of the tornado on one family – not the inspiring survival story of a family that has lost everything, as one might expect, but the story of a family that has lost nothing, their children safe, their home intact, and their lumber business safe. The novel’s fast pace, a direct result of the author’s ability to present details with which the reader will identify, combined with her careful building of the resentment against the Graves family, make this a novel which few will forget.

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Zachary Karabashliev creates a darkly humorous, entertaining, and compulsively readable novel so full of life that it bursts its way through several different genres. First, it is a love story, though in this case, it is a love story gone awry: the main character, also named Zack Karabashliev, has been living alone, miserably, at his home in San Diego for the past nine days, his wife having left him. It is also a story of the immigrant experience, in that Zack and his wife Stella met as students in Varna, Bulgaria, in 1988, and came to the United States as graduate students, working at several different kinds of jobs until they finally found financial, if not personal, success. The novel also becomes a quest, when Zack, in despair over the absence of Stella, decides to drive to New York to meet friends, traveling from California through the southwest and across the Mississippi and Midwest, stopping at small towns and bars along the way and observing how others live their lives. What makes this novel most unusual, however, is that it is also a well-developed metaphysical exploration of what it means to be alive, how we see our lives in the continuum of time, and where and whether happiness and an appreciation of beauty fit into the picture at all. Funny, poignant, and chock full of twists, turns, and surprises.

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Simon Howe, editor of the weekly newspaper in rural Maine, has just hired a new employee, previously an employee of a Portland newspaper and a former farm team player for the Red Sox, now an ex-con who served six years for assault on a woman. Amy, Simon’s wife, takes the side of the woman victim, wondering aloud if the victim, too, has a new job, and if she’s gotten over the trauma of being sexually assaulted. The new employee has told Simon that there are two sides for everything, but Amy feels such crimes are too damaging to women to be forgiven and she does not want to meet him. Soon after, Simon receives the first of what will eventually number six postcards from around the country, none of them signed, gradually hinting at some terrible deed that Simon unknowingly committed in the past. As the cards are mailed from closer and closer destinations, first from the Great Salt Lake, and then from Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Portland, Simon and Amy become more stressed and more impatient with each other. The final card is hand-delivered to the family’s mailbox, and the message demands that Simon meet with the sender during his 25th reunion celebration. Author George Harrar ratchets up the tension to the breaking point, and few readers will be able to resist seeing this book as a classic Alfred Hitchcock film. Ironies abound here in this tension-filled study of universal themes as seen through the seemingly simple life of a respected man in Red Paint Bay.

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A fast-paced plot, a setting that is both horrific and familiar, a mixture of fantasy with traditional religion, and unusual characters dealing with pressing political, economic, and moral issues capture one’s attention from the opening pages, as author Michele Roberts keeps the reader moving swiftly through the French countryside from 1931 – 1945. In many ways the two girls who are the protagonists of this novel represent the dichotomies of their times. Jeanne will do whatever is necessary to survive, including stealing food from the convent, and later taking jobs which demean her. Marie-Angele and her family, for all their religiosity, consider themselves superior because they are wealthier, and these hypocritical attitudes are also reflected, ironically, in the attitudes Jeanne experiences with the nuns in the convent. Though Jeanne is the primary narrator, Marie-Angele also serves as a narrator, expressing her own versions of events and her own attitudes toward life, and the two reflect very different realities which also reflect the realities of France during this period. Because time is not linear in this novel, the author is able to paint a picture of life from several different vantage points, not just in point of view but also in time. Sure to become an immense popular success not just for its story but for its style, this novel will surely appeal to a wide audience. Recommended for book clubs.

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Catalan author Quim Monzo’s new collection of short stories captures the reader’s attention with its surprises, tickles with its humor, bewilders with its disturbed, often absurd characters, and ultimately arouses deep sadness with some of its portraits of the elderly and those close to them. Included are seven full-length stories in Part I, and twelve, very clever one- or two-page mini-stories in Part II, each of these stories playing with reality, especially the reality of love, as Monzo’s characters and his readers understand it. These characters often experience and react to a very different reality from that of the reader, and, therein lies the stories’ tension as the characters make unexpected or bizarre decisions and move in unique directions. These sudden twists lead to innumerable surprises even for the most jaded reader, and no one can dismiss these stories as “too weird” (even if one were ungracious enough to want to do so) simply because the characters and their stories share so many details with our own everyday realities. As absurd as the characters and their lives may be, we can see that there are always strong and familiar truths embedded within even the strangest realities here, and we are always able to empathize with some aspect of the characters’ lives. Filled with wonderful stories which are full of surprises, A Thousand Morons reflects life’s absurdities at the same time that it also reflects the realities of life and love, an intriguing collection of stories told with wit and great panache.

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