"Birds flew across the windshield like a page of music."
Janet Fitch's second novel will be the next book review I post, but until then, here are two short, older reviews of books I count among my favorites.
ANGELA'S ASHES:
The BEST book I have ever read. An amazing, overwhelmingly emotional and masterful story of a young man's impoverished, hard and oppressive life. Tracking the author's life from the age of 2 to 17, memoirist and Pulitzer-Prize winning Frank McCourt brings us directly into this world, face-to-face with the dirt, the poverty and the struggle of a family trying to survive. What's so stunning about this book is not that the author survived such a traumatic upbringing to actually tell his tale, but that he remembers and relates the episodes of his childhood from the perspective of a child. So even though we "hear" the adults bitching and moaning about their lots in life, and see McCourt's drunken father as he drinks away the family's food money, we "live" the experiences through the wonder and magic and innocence of a boy who knows pain but also the simple joys of living.
One minute the book brings you to the verge of tears -- the next, you're laughing out loud from McCourt's playful, marvelously funny prose. If you've only seen the movie (which I haven't, but hear is terrible), don't hold it against the book. My favorite book and one I recommend to everyone who cares to listen.
THE HOUSE OF PAPER:
A little gem of a book, revolving around love not only of the written word, but of the compact, paper-bound package that it comes in. Written by Carlos Maria Dominguez in Spanish and translated into English, the tale explores the various stages of love, obsession, mystery and heartbreak that accompany a life devoted to the collection of books.
The first-person narrator's academic colleague and part-time lover has been tragically run over by a car while carrying a book of Emily Dickinson poems, an event that triggers an odyssey of sorts and leads the narrator and reader both into a world of literary delight and compulsion.
A short but sweet ride, from a writer who obviously holds a lot of appreciation for the lives of novel readers, as well as a bit of ambivalence concerning the acquisition and collection that goes into creating the abundant personal libraries so many of us have in our homes. The care and feeding of these physical housings of imagination and knowledge tread the fine line, Dominguez posits, between respectful, loving adoration and obsessive compulsion. There are also a number of really interesting, evocative drawings by Peter Sis that accompany the text and adorn the front and back cover of this book about dreams and nightmares.
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