Teaser Tuesday Two-fer

"I rewrapped the wound, using the last of the gauze . . . . and that was when I looked up to see the iguana hissing in my face.

"I knocked the safety off the gun, cocked the hammer, and pulled the trigger."

-- A Small Fortune by Audrey Braun. Yes, she killed the giant, poisonous iguana. I just hope I would have the wherewithall to do the same if I were escaping through the jungle with a bullet wound. 

This is a great book. It is a lot of fun and exciting enough to keep me thinking of it until I can get back to it.

"He was surprised to read 'Bornholmer Strasse' on a sign on the Western side.  He had never considered that, on a city map, the connecting routes might continue uninterrupted, that the names might simply go on as before the Wall was built."

-- "The Road to Bornholm" by Durs Grunbein in The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain, published by Words Without Borders Anthologies.

This book is full of powerful stories and essays about post-communist life in the former Soviet Bloc. But the most powerful are those, like this one, describing the actual fall of the Berlin Wall. 

When this book gets too dense, I take a break with A Small Fortune.

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Mailbox Monday

Several books came into my house last week, three even came in the mailbox in time for Mailbox Monday. This week, I am also participating in Story Siren's version, In My Mailbox.

A Small Fortune by Audrey Braun (see here for my description, because I've already started this one)



The New York Stories by Elizabeth Hardwick (from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program)



The Garden Book, published by Phaidon (a treat for myself from Ampersand, my favorite artsy bookstore, after we won the first phase of our big trial)



A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks (another from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program -- I double dipped last month)

Review of the Day: The Marmot Drive

Published in 1953, The Marmot Drive was the first of John Hersey’s novels not set during WWII. It takes place over a weekend in a New England village, when the town decides to drive out a plague of “marmots” or woodchucks. This happens to be the weekend when Eben Avered brings his fiancée Hester out from New York City to meet his charismatic father, the town’s Selectman, and his faded mother.

The book is a mishmash of conflicts and contradictions. Eben and his father are in a continual battle over ideas, values, and Hester – the kind of battle all too recognizable between powerful men and their newly adult sons. Hester battles with Eben and herself. The villagers battle with each other, rearrange allegiances, and battle some more. And everyone battles the woodchucks.

The book has all the markings of allegory, but it hard to tell what the allegory is. Do the woodchucks stand for something else? Cityfolk? Black people? Commies? All might have been possible contenders back in the 1950s, depending on whether the village is to be condemned for the drive or praised. But the book does not tie things together so easily.

The novel ends up a big stewpot of paradox, where the characters are more bad than good, the country people more open minded than the city people, all of life more complicated than simple. It is thought-provoking and interesting, but peters out in a messy, paltry ending, just like the marmot drive itself.

Review of the Day: Leaving Brooklyn

At my law office, we have a word for 15-year-old girls who have a sexual relationship with their 37-year-old doctors – we call them “clients.” I spend my days suing child molesters and the institutions that allowed the abuse. So the fact that I could set aside my professional and personal outlook and be swept up in this novel is a testament to Lynn Sharon Schwartz’s literary gifts.

In Leaving Brooklyn, Schwartz spins a post-war coming-of-age story out of the heroine’s damaged eye. Audrey is legally blind in her right eye, a lazy eye prone to wander on its own. The eye gives Audrey a creative, imaginary way of seeing “behind” things, including ideas. Her eye is the center point for the story; it is also a metaphor for the inward gaze that perfectly captures the mind of a 15-year-old girl.

Audrey feels stifled by what she considers the narrow-mindedness of her Brooklyn neighborhood. She escapes Brooklyn, and ultimately her childhood, through a series of weekly sexual encounters with her Manhattan eye doctor.

Schwartz tells the story as a memoir that entwines the adult Audrey’s perceptions with the child’s. In moving between the two – and in recognizing the ambiguity inherent in memory and perception – she paints an accurately ephemeral portrait of Audrey as “Everywoman.”

NOTES

Leaving Brooklyn by Lynn Sharon Schwartz was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner. This super cool Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts edition has a new introduction by Ursula Hegi.

OTHER REVIEWS

(If you would like your review posted here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

Opening Sentence of the Day: A Small Fortune

"It was partly my fault for staying up so late copyediting the latest volume in Dee Dee Dawson's Legends of Lust series."

-- A Small Fortune by Audrey Braun

So begins what is described on the back as "a fast-paced, sexy thrill-ride." I am very excited to read this for a couple of reasons.

First, my friend wrote it. She wrote it while waiting for her two (I think it's two) literary novels to finally percolate up to the top of some publisher's Must Print list.  In the meantime, she had fun writing this thriller -- using a thriller-ish pen name -- and I am going to have fun reading it. There is even a character in it with my first name.

(You can expect to hear nothing by praise from me for this one and I encourage everyone to buy a copy. When my friend becomes famous, you'll be happy you did.)

The second reason I am excited to read this is because I am alternating back and forth between this and The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain, published by Words Without Borders Anthologies. When that one gets too dense, I switch over to Mexico beaches and adventure for a while.

NOTE
Book Beginnings on Fridays is a Friday "opening sentence" event hosted by Becky at Page Turners.