Book 15: The Golden Hour

The Golden Hour by Margaret Wurtele

I stumbled upon this a while back in one of the bookstore's bargain bins but since it concerned a time period I'm usually interested in, I figured I'd give it a shot. It was only $3.99 after all. Given that I hadn't heard anything about it, I wasn't expecting much, and I know that sometimes people have a tendency to set their novels in World War II because it's one of those topics that adds immediate gravitas. This one was set in Italy, an area I haven't read too many war novels on, though A Thread of Grace is absolutely amazing and wonderful and sad. This novel, on the other hand? Well, I am sure that Wurtele is a great person, she seems nice from the novel and all, but I really, really didn't like this book. About half way through I actually thought to myself, "why am I still reading this crap? I should quit. Giovanna's an idiot and I hate her, and this is so unrealistic." Now, I admit I don't finish every book I ever start but usually I don't actually contemplate quitting them. It's more that I decide maybe I should take a break and read something else or alternate between a book I'm struggling with and something else, and then somehow don't make it back to the original book until I just admit that I'm no longer reading it. I actively thought about putting this down and never picking it back up.

The main problem is the narrator and main character, Giovanna. While early in the book, Giovanna tries to convince the reader that she is brave and courageous because of that one time she carried a hawk, at no point do her actions in 1943-45 ever make her seem any of those things. Instead she comes off as spoiled, self-centered, stupid, unrealistic, dumb and flighty. Now some of those things could be okay in a main character, especially since Wurtele uses Giovanna as a character that had no idea of what was truly going on with the Germans, and discovers more about the dark side of the Fascist regimes as the novel progreses. So even though she was annoyingly naive, that could have been okay because the novel shows her growing up. The same could be said about spoiled - it would be okay for her to be spoiled and slightly self-centered if the novel truly charted her becoming aware of the world around her and growing up from there. I believe it attempts to do that, but not very convincingly since all of Giovanna's "war work" seems over exaggerated by her, hence making her sound whiny and spoiled even when she's "helping" everyone. The biggest problem is that this girl is dumb.
 

 

Giovanna is a seventeen year old in Nazi occupied Italy, and around the same time she both starts helping the nuns teach the local children and assisting her brother who is in the resistance. The nuns' school is partially occupied by German soldiers and since there are no young Italian men around, Giovanna starts feeling some attraction for a married German officer. The Soldier's Wife did an interesting and pleasant job of exploring a woman's attraction to the occupiers, though not entirely memorable. This novel did not. Basically, Klaus is hot and Giovanna is horny. But you know, youthful stupidity, I'll let it pass. However, why the hell Giorgio would ask for Giovanna's help in anything is beyond me. She's basically incompetent. I mean, yes, she finds food to help supply the partisans but it basically involves her asking half the characters in the novel, and climbing into vegetable gardens. Why, oh why, Giorgio would you ask an indiscreete teen to help you find food? Not only does she tell half the people she knows what she is doing, but some of the others figure it out because she's just so covert. I just kept wanting to ask her if she knew the meaning of the word "secret."

Anyway, as the description of the novel reveals, later in the novel she will end up helping a Jewish man named Marco that her brother brings to her. Once again, I couldn't get beyond her stupidity. She tells more people than she should that she's helping a Jew, and now she's not only revealing her secrets, but those of other people, such as when she tells her best friend that the nuns are helping her shelter him. Dumbass, you do realize there are such things as collaborators? And that even if they aren't collaborators, they could still be tortured for information if anything ever happens? It is at this point that she whines about how busy she is, what with stealing food from vegetable gardens, and helping at the clinic (she is in charge of the supply closet - she got banned from the school after the nuns discovered her little dalliance and had to find something else to do) and hiding Marco (someone else is hiding him, you're just visiting because you're still a horny teen).

There's also this whole plot about her parents don't understand her and treat her like a child. For example, she is very upset when her father makes a joke about her fainting after she tells him she's going to work at the clinic because he just constantly underestimates her. Guess what she did exactly two hours earlier in the book at the clinic? Fainted at the sight of blood! Given her sheltered upbringing, Giovanna has managed to avoid noticing what's been going on with the Jews but after meeting Marco, she becomes aware. After that, there are about 20 pages of her asking everyone she knows if they knew about what was happening with the Jews - obvious much? This is also when she decides that it is now her mission to help the Jews ...

I will say that the novel picked up in the last 80-100 pages, but that's mostly because Giovanna somehow mellowed out a bit and went from being intolerably annoying to eyerollingly annoying. I think it may have also helped that there were some journal entries from Marco's perspective which actually made me want to yell at him because he was putting down exact names of everyone helping him - I just kept thinking, "don't use names, if you are discovered, you are incriminating other people." So basically, the novel went from annoying to bland for the last 100 pages but not enough to justify this novel or turn it around for me.

In other words, I don't recommend this novel, and even the Italy setting couldn't save it. I didn't have high expectations but apparently even those were aiming too high.

Book 14: The Consolation of Philosophy

The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

 

This is one of the first reading assignments in my "Antiquities" class (the first one was actually selections of The Dead Sea Scrolls, but those included less than half of the book).  Honestly, for a somewhat religious text written in the 6th century, I was pleasantly surprised by the readibility and the message behind the book.  Naturally, I didn't agree with everything the author had to say, but the first half especially appealed to me.

 

Boethius, a prominent statesmen in Italy (after the fall of the western part of the Roman Empire), wrote The Consolation of Philosophy while imprisoned for treason after having been one of the most important advisors to the king of Italy.  He declares himself innocent of the charges, and as this piece begins, he is in despair, under arrest.  It is at this time that his old muse, Philosophy, comes to him, to console him and remind him of himself and the actual path to happiness.

 

The piece is broken down into 5 books, with varying chapters per part, and is a mix of prose and poetry.  The first part basically addresses the author's despair at his false imprisonment and the changes of fortune he has experienced.  In book 2, Philosophy chastises Boethius for cursing fortune since as she points out, everything he had before this was the result of fortune.  He cannot curse her for her reversal given that he was more than happy to accept her gifts.  This part as well as the first half of the third book involve Philosophy taking down the things people pursue in hopes of happiness even though they bring only false happiness.  Power brings its own obligations, and people that pursue money find themselves needing more and more to protect what they have.

 

The next half of the text deals more with God and religion, and as a result, the arguments didn't speak to me as much.  The rest of Book 3 argues that true happiness comes only from God, while the fourth book examine the idea of wickedness and why it is that bad things happen to good people and vice versa.  The argument is that the wicked suffer by their wickedness and inability to attain good, but I can't say that argument had me entirely convinced - certainly it may be true, but it's still nice to see some come-uppance.  Also, I would argue that there are people who are evil or wicked and don't know it.  Philosophy also states that wickedness made people less than human.  Finally, the fifth book addresses the idea of free will vs foreknowledge.  The character Boethius has a hard time believing that any actions can be the result of free choice if God already knows everything that will happen and therefore the events must happen.  Personally, this concept doesn't bother me because if I personally don't know the future I will make my choices freely even if someone else has already foreseen them.  Philosophy's final argument for free will is that human perception is different from God's, and that God being eternal, is in all times at once - basically, the future is his present as is the present, so therefore he knows everything because he sees it as it is happening even if it hasn't happened yet.  I know this was written 14 centuries before Slaughterhouse-Five but that concept totally made me think of Tralfamadore.

 

One reason I was pleasantly surprised by this was due to all the references to Greek and Roman philosophy and mythology.  Only knowing beforehand that it was a Christian text, I thought I could easily be bored with this, but given the time it was written, this was when the ancient texts still were very much a part of the thoughts and culture of the time, and hadn't already been lost or avoided as pagan and inappropriate for a Christian audience.  I am always nervous about philosophy, but I actually enjoyed this - it was broken down into small, easily digestible chunks, and the argument was easy to follow.  It's still philosophy so I doubt I'll be pressing this into people's hands, but for anyone interested in expanding their horizons and braving philosophical texts, this is certainly not a bad starting point.

Book 13: The Secret History

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

 

I've heard about this novel quite a few times, and have had it on my "I should get around to that" list for a while but somehow, while I knew the novel existed, my idea of what it was about was completely off.  Maybe it was the title but I think I was expecting something along the lines of secret societies meet National Treasure and that the characters would use old literature and culture to discover some deep conspiracy and secret - but in a very literary and thought provoking way rather than pure popcorn fiction.  I would have rather read that book than the one I read.

 

This wasn't a bad book but it would have been better trimmed by at least one hundred pages.  The novel reveals a key part of the narrative in the first chapter, and from there flashes back to show how it all developed before chronicling the aftermath.  Basically, five students murder a classmate, Bunny, by pushing him off a cliff, and the question is why did they do it and will they get away with it?  Richard is one of the five killers but he is also the newest member of this odd and tight knit group, all of whom fascinate him.

 

The twins, Camilla and Charles, Henry, Francis and Bunny are the five students in Julian's Greek class, majoring in the classics.  All of them are from privileged, well off families, and they are the only ones that Julian, an eccentric professor, has accepted into his classics program.  Richard, though coming from a working to middle class background, is fascinated by this world, and with the right clothes and presentation is able to join this group even if it takes him a while to get accepted.

 

The thing is that none of these characters are likable.  The closest might be Francis and Charles because they seem the least developed.  While the students admire Julian and see him as a friend, he is blind to his students' real situation and his teaching methods encourage them to see themselves as different and better.  After all, he thinks the poor that accept their role and status should be praised.  Given their backgrounds, the students are obviously already used to being treated as better but they certainly didn't need this professor boosting their egos anymore.

 

Richard is just as bad if not worse because he wants so much to belong and is blinded by these people's obvious faults.  He simply shrugs off murder, and keeps emphasizing how great all these people are despite obvious hindsight, writing this narrative a few years after the occurrences.  Though this was originally published in 1992, the time period of the narrative can feel difficult to narrow down, and it is only in the second half that I felt the novel started having cultural references that truly tied it down to a time period - basically, it almost feels like it could have been the '60s or '70s until a few references to presidents, Mel Gibson movies and Sarah Jesse Rafael's talk show.

 

The characters are pretentious, elitist snobs, but more than that they are tedious.  While Richard tries to explain that they are brilliant and special, they mostly come off as self involved.  It's basically five hundred pages of drinking.  The first two hundred pages especially seemed to drag at which point the murder of the first chapter occurs.  While the next three hundred pages also could have been trimmed, at least I could understand how Tartt was trying to show everyone's reactions and the pressure they were feeling.  In fact, it feels very Crime and Punishment, and the characters even make a joke about that - while they may be ironic about the connection, it is certainly appropriate: a man who thinks he's exceptional commits a crime and discovers he's just as average as everyone else, and these characters certainly think they are exceptional and that the rules don't apply to them.  While I can certainly see why Tartt made the choices she did in the novel, I wonder if it would have been more interesting when it was first published.  After all, I've read quite a few novels with unlikable characters but none of them left me quite so blah.  For example, I hated the characters in The Dinner but I would still love to see other people's reactions and talk about it.  Maybe The Secret History raised more discussion in 1992, but at this point, I don't think it really stands out.  This novel didn't really make me want to discuss it.  I couldn't see myself recommending this to anyone because like the characters, the novel is too tedious at times.  The main reason I read this now is because I've been seeing Tartt's new novel, The Goldfinch, everywhere, and having read this, I can safely say that I can avoid The Goldfinch, and not feel like I'm missing something.

Book 12: A Conspiracy of Faith

A Conspiracy of Faith by Jussi Adler-Olsen

 

This has definitely been one of my more entertaining reads so far this year.  The third novel in the series, this novel once again features Carl Morck and Department Q of Copenhagen's police force.  Just like in his last two novels, Adler-Olsen flashes back and forth between the cold case squad and either the victims or perpetrators of a current crime that relates to the investigation. One reason I think I like these as much as I do is that unlike many other crime novels, this isn't just about finding the killer before he kills again, but actually about saving current possible victims.

 

In this case, Carl is alerted when Copenhagen receives correspondence from Scotland.  They have found a message in a bottle, written in Danish, and believe it may require police attention.  As it turns out, that bottle has been sitting in a precinct for about seven years, and was written even earlier than that, but it gets Carl and his team on the case.

 

Meanwhile, the other chapters tell the story of an unnamed man (or a man with too many names) who is a serial kidnapper.  He targets families in faith based societies that are a bit removed from mainstream (Jehovah's Witnesses, etc.), and then kidnaps their children.  However, since the families know what he looks like, he has to come up with a rather extreme way to prevent them from going to the police after the fact or reporting on him.  As a result, even once Carl is able to place a name to the message in the bottle, he faces resistance from the relatives.

 

The mystery was very well-developed as well as the various viewpoints, which included the kidnapper, and his wife who is tired of not knowing what her husband does in addition to Carl.  In some senses Carl is still rather dense in his treatment and interactions with his co-workers.  Three novels into the narrative, there are still a few open plot points that I feel either need to be dropped or worked out soon.  For example, there are several clues that there is more to Assad than meets the eye.  While I don't think it is necessary that the whole story is revealed just yet, I think there is too much hinting with no pay off after three novels.  In other words, if Adler-Olsen wants to drag out the reveal, I think he needs to stop playing it up so much, or if he is going to keep playing it up, he needs to give more answers as he goes.  Also, even though Carl has successfully solved a few cases, he is still very uninterested in work sometimes.  While I get the whole grumpy persona, it is obvious that he is a good detective, so it may make sense to not have him attempting to shirk as much anymore as time progresses.  The other hanging string is from his injury, and the reason he was moved in Department Q, all events predating the novels.  I think this is actually being handled perfectly, though I think I'm going to want some resolution on this in the next few novels as well.

 

Despite those small nitpicks, I'm definitely enjoying this series, and while the last one was a bit dark, especially with the animal abuse, this novel was back to being that great mix of grim and humorous that made me like The Keeper of Lost Causes so much.

Book 11: The House Girl

The House Girl by Tara Conklin

 

Another book, another disappointment?  I seem to be on a roll.  I compared my Goodreads ratings for this year to one's from last year, and eleven books in, I already had four 4 star ratings, and one 5 star, with only one 2 star.  This year, I already have a 1 star and a 2 star, and even my two 4 star ratings involved an initial debate of 3 or 4.  I realize that I was on a really good streak last year but why am I on such an average one now?  I thought I knew how to pick books by now that I might enjoy!  Of course, it doesn't help when even authors I enjoy have slightly weaker or even disappointing offerings.

 

This is a another novel set up with the two timeline style that seems to be popular, especially for historical fiction.  In this case, the past is 1852, and focuses on Josephine, a seventeen year old house slave at the Bell estate, who decides to run.  The modern day piece follows Carolina "Lina" Sparrow, first year associate at a corporate law firm in New York.  Her mother is dead, and her father is an artist that has finally found success.  After 20 years of not talking about her mother, her father is finally ready to discuss her with Lina and his latest show focuses entirely on portrayals of her mother Grace.  At this same time, she gets a huge case focusing on slavery and reparations - their client runs a large business and his connections tell him the government is ready to issue an apology, so he wants to capitalize on this opportunity.  Given her connection to the art world, Lina hears about Josephine Bell and Lu Ann Bell - after years of lauding Lu Ann as a great artist that captured the reality of slavery with portraits of plantation life, experts have started to believe that it was Josephine's hand behind the brush rather than Mistress Bell's.

 

So far, so good.  Given that the case and the mother issues came up at the same time, I expected the novel to find a connection between Josephine and Lina, and for it to turn out that her mother is a descendant of Josephine.  While predictable, I would have had no issue with this development, and enjoyed the way the threads connected.  However, this isn't were the novel went, so while I initially liked Lina, her story was quickly dragged down by too many plot points.  Josephine's story was engaging, but it quickly got drowned out with all of Lina's issues.  Basically, I don't think the two plot lines worked together.  Lina is in charge of finding a plaintiff to put a face to the victims of slavery, and while she quickly sees how Josephine and misidentified art would be a great angle, her intense focus on this one aspect basically makes her look like an incompetent lawyer.  If the case had been about ownership of the art rather than slave reparations, her intense focus on Josephine to the exclusion of everything and every one else would have made sense.  If there was a connection between Josephine and Lina through her mother, I would have believed it.  Instead, she is obsessed with finding a descendant that may not exist.  Early in the novel, she meets a man, Jasper, who believes he is in the possession of Josephine's work, passed down as a family heirloom, so Lina's goal is to find the connection between Jasper and Josephine except that Jasper doesn't identify as black, and has tatoos and piercings.  None of these are a problem but when you are looking for the poster child for the past victims of slavery, that's not exactly going to be what people are going to expect.  Have you heard of the media, Lina?  You might want to make a statement about "post-racial" America but it won't work in a case about reparations for slavery!  Basically, Lina's blindness to the fact that Jasper isn't the perfect plaintiff she's looking for (or even close to a good one) made her seem like an incompetent idiot.  She may be good at research, but common sense?  Sorely lacking.

 

As I said, I enjoyed Josephine and her story, but the novel got bogged down by Lina.  A large part of the gap is closed with a letter that explains everything that happens, and while it was nice to get that narrative closure, I would have preferred it if those chapters had continued to be told from Josephine's perspective.  Instead of discovering a document that spells everything out for Lina, I would have preferred if Lina just had the bare bones so that I as the reader could have continued to hear more of Josephine's voice.  I think I'm just frustrated because the novel started out promising before it irritated me, and since Lina's mother didn't tie into the Josephine part of the story, that whole plot point just seemed like a waste of time.  The cover is pretty gorgeous, though.

Book 10: No One is Here Except All of Us

No One is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel

 

Less than two weeks into the New Year, and I've already discovered my first one star review.  I'm actually surprised because halfway through I thought there were still enough redeeming qualities for two stars, but the more it went on, and the more I wanted it to end, the further my rating went down.  I admit it doesn't help the novel at all that I kept having to force myself to read a few chapters between books I actually wanted to read instead of reading it a shorter period of time, but it was so boring.

 

Now there are quite a few interesting and good ideas and premises dispersed throughout this novel; unfortunately they are not executed in a way that appeals to me.  Now a lot of the critiques of this book on Goodreads focus on certain small details, and while I agree that those details can be a bit uncomfortable, they didn't bother me or at least weren't the reasons I rated the novel so low.  I think it is entirely believable that a family would give up a child to a couple that didn't have any, though maybe not in the circumstances described.  After all, as Ausubel explains later, parts of the story were inspired by real life - her great grandmother was given up by her parents to a richer aunt and uncle because they couldn't afford all their children.  However this happened before World War I, while Ausubel shifts this action to World War II for her story.  I also think the idea of a village hearing about the atrocities of the Nazis and responding by simply disconnecting from the world is intriguing.  While it wouldn't work in most cases, couldn't it work if a village is isolated enough, and already had minimal contact with the world?  If they decide to cut all ties, could they just be forgotten?

 

Unfortunately, it didn't work for me because the novel is too dreamlike or fairy tale like, and not in a good way.  Just because the prose is lyrical or poetic doesn't mean it's actually saying anything.  Instead, it kept me disconnected and, honestly, irritated with the characters.  They don't just decide to ignore the world but recreate the world, living in this otherworldly daze.  Even this could have worked if the writing style had changed distinctly when the village is finally confronted with reality, thus jarring the village and the reader back into reality.  However, even when bad things come, the novel retains this disconnected, "it's all a dream" quality so that I didn't even really care.  I feel like she just took it too far, and instead of wondering how the village could stay hidden, I just kept wondering "are these people fucking idiots"?  They just married off a twelve year old, she now has her own kids, and her husband is really good at sleeping?  Seriously, he spends the majority of the novel asleep even though he started out as a likable enough character before becoming completely useless.

 

I mean, I get the messages she is trying to go for - the Holocaust is so unreal, how couldn't it have been a dream etc etc, but it was so heavy handed.  There's also a whole Rapunzel like sequence with one character wandering through the wilds with her children, completely clueless.  Or another fun part, the narrator decides to write down everything she knows, which is a list of words.  Oh my god, stop trying to be deep.

 

Anyway, I think if Ausubel had told a straightforward historical fiction story with her family's past as a stepping point, it could have worked for me.  However, she said she tried doing that and it didn't work, so instead she wrote this mess.

Book 9: The Soldier's Song

The Soldier's Song by Alan Monaghan

 

I bought this book over two and half years ago while visiting the Dublin Writers Museum because of course I had to leave with at least one book by an Irish author, and Joyce is scary (I also participated in a Literary Pub Crawl of Dublin during that vacation though I think I preferred the one I did in Edinburgh).  Anyway, for some reason I never quite got around to reading any of the books I bought on that trip, and I'm trying to both reduce my stack of books, and read at least one book related to the Great War every month this year for the 100 year anniversary, so this seemed like a perfect choice.  Overall, it was a solid book - I can't say I regret leaving it to sit for so long but I certainly enjoyed it.  Unfortunately, I also discovered that it's actually the first part of a trilogy so instead of reducing my list of "books to read" by one, I've now added two!

 

Stephen Ryan is one of very few students at Trinity College in Dublin to be there on a scholarship.  Being from a working class background, he stands out in this environment, and his younger brother Joe thinks he's a sell out.  It's 1914, Ireland is full of debates about home rule and independence, and Europe is on the brink of war.  Despite having only a year left of school before receiving his diploma in mathematics, Stephen signs up as soon as war is declared, becoming an officer in the King's Army.  Lieutenant Ryan ends up in Gallipolli for his first assignment, and as chance would have it, is back in Dublin just in time to witness the Easter Rebellion of 1916 before embarking onto France.  As a result, the novel is able to portray the Western Front and the issues people had there, as well as explore important events in Irish history and politics of the time.

 

Honestly, I was a bit surprised by some of the novel because one upperclass character seemed to be in the process of being developed as the traditional nemesis but that rivalry was rather quickly squashed.  I actually liked that it didn't go the traditional road, but I also feel like there was enough left open about the character's past that it may be addressed in future installments.  I also enjoyed some of the supporting cast, such as Lilian Bryce, the only woman in the math program and Ryan's slowly developing love interest, and his best friend.  However, parts of the novel seemed a bit superficial, and it jumped around quite a bit at points.  I don't think describing battle action is the author's strength because I didn't feel all too oriented as to what was going on during the fight scenes.  This isn't a big surprise since the novel covered over three years of time in three separate countries and was only around three hundred pages long.

 

However, while I thought the novel was mostly solid if not exceptional, I thought the last few pages which address PTSD - they even include a session with Dr. Rivers who was also featured in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration - were its strongest.  Maybe I should see the fact that I was most interested in that part as a sign that I need to finish the Regeneration trilogy this year, too.