Like so many others who read voraciously – all kinds of books, from experimental modern fiction to the classics, from thoughtful novels of ideas to thrillers, and from analytical non-fiction to other-worldly fantasy – I have often been asked to name my favorite author, as if it were possible to choose just one. And as Lloyd Alexander points out above, I tend to read according to mood and what appeals at different stages of my life. My all-time favorite books, however, tend to be those which deal with ideas in a unique way, capturing my imagination at the same time that they convey a new slant on a universal theme. If they are also written with a touch of humor, so much the better. Among my long-time, special favorites are several authors who are little known in the United States, authors whose unique work has continually entertained and surprised me, often moving me to tears at the same time that it has left me with a smile on my face. One such author is Australian author Elizabeth Jolley (1923 – 2007). Simultaneously daring and subtle, insightful and bold, sensitive and sometimes sexy Jolley’s novels are absorbing and satisfying on many levels, and I hope I’ll persuade a few who are unfamiliar with her to take a look at her novels.
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Thoughtful and full of heart, this novel by Ojibway author and storyteller Richard Wagamese is so gripping that it is hard to imagine any reader not being left breathless from the sheer drama of the writing and its overwhelming message. On a magnificent, clear night, Franklin Starlight, age sixteen, and his father Eldon, from whom he has been estranged for nearly all of his life, sit smoking around a campfire in the mountains. Eldon, an alcoholic who is just days away from death, has persuaded his son-in-name-only to accompany him on his final trip “beyond the ridge.” As Eldon shares his story, he makes in a final effort to connect with his son and to reconcile himself with his own guilt about actions from his past. It is a wondrous novel about stories, their importance in our lives and memories, their ability to help us reconcile the past with the present, and ultimately their power to teach us the nature of the world and our relationship to it.
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Life, as understood by Logan Mountstuart, is a series of random events, not events which are fated, controlled by a higher power, or the result of carefully made decisions. But Mountstuart also believes that one can look for and find the extraordinary within the ordinary. Through his personal journals, begun in 1923, when he is seventeen, and continuing to the time of his death in 1991, we come to know Mountstuart intimately, both as an individual, growing and changing, and as an Everyman, someone who participates in and is affected by the seminal events of the 20th century, after World War I. Because he is a writer, he is able to meet Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway (whom he confuses with F. Scott Fitzgerald), Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, and Ian Fleming, the reader has the vicarious fun of being there and meeting them, too, since Mountstuart seems very much like the rest of us. He buys early paintings by friends Paul Klee and Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso draws a quick portrait of him and signs it. During World War II, Ian Fleming, who works for the Secret Service, gets Mountstuart a job in Naval Intelligence, where he spies on the Duke of Windsor. After the war, his peripatetic life continues to other continents. Entertaining and fast-paced, despite its length.
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In a novel which ranges widely over almost three centuries of Russian history, author Andrei Makine, a Russian émigré who has lived in France since 1987, recreates the life of a young Russian author/filmmaker who finds that the concept of creativity in the world in which he lives must always bend to the will of someone else – the censors, a hired director, or the tastes of the public – if his work is to survive. In this metafictional novel Makine presents Oleg Erdmann as his author/main character, a man whose parents were originally from Germany. Oleg was born in Russia, but his father was unable to cope with the difficulties he faced as the head of an immigrant family in a country which did not admit him into its mainstream, and he spent most of his spare time escaping his personal problems by painstakingly creating a detailed model of a giant castle, elaborate and reminiscent of the castles from the eras of Peter the Great and his successors Whenever serious problems would arise in his daily life, his father would say, softly, “This is all happening to me because of that little German girl who became Catherine the Great.” Determined to write a screenplay about Catherine the Great years later, Oleg goes way beyond the limits of the usual biography, questioning not only Catherine’s life and her decisions but also the very nature of love and how one achieves it, using Catherine’s lengthy affairs with over a dozen men to expand the scope of his screenplay into a discussion of life, love, and art.
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With a title which recalls a children’s game which is used to make choices, Rock, Paper, Scissors is filled with the interactions of people who have faced hard times and have somehow survived. The novel opens with Thomas and his sister Jenny dealing with the death of their father in a jail cell where he has been awaiting trial on some unknown charge which will bring a long jail sentence. When they later go to their father’s apartment, neither of them wants anything as a memento, but Jenny decides to take his toaster, simply because hers is broken and she has very little money to buy a new one. Later, when the toaster does not work, Thomas takes it apart for her and finds something surprising inside. Throughout these beginning pages, the novel moves back and forth in time as Thomas, forced to think about his estranged father, obsesses about death – that of his father, of family members, and even of the unknown people he sees in the supermarket – and it is through this introspection that many of the details about his family background are revealed. As compelling as the plot and Thomas’s psychology may be, the novel’s philosophical underpinnings and the universal themes which emerge from the conflicts are even more provocative. Filled with smart, crisp language; carefully described and introduced imagery; and occasionally lyrical passages, the novel owes much of its appeal in English to translator K. E. Semmel. With contrasting themes of life and death, love and hate, accident and design, strength and weakness, selfishness and altruism, and reality and invention, the novel offers much to ponder on many levels.
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