book-blog.com

Book Notices | Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb

Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Amazon   Lori Gottlieb is a therapist and columnist, and I guess a podcaster too, though I haven't listened to her podcast yet. She has a background in writing, which may go some way toward explaining why this memoir is so very good. In it, she weaves together stories about her therapy clients (disguised versions thereof) with an account of her own struggles, principally the breakup that led her to seek therapy herself. So it's a book about a therapist giving and getting therapy and about the process of therapy itself, and it's fascinating and well written and heartwarming and heartbreaking and informative. It's a cliché to say that one didn't want a book to end, but I found myself thinking as I was reading that if this one somehow had an infinite number of pages, I would happily keep reading indefinitely.

Book Notices | Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuściński

Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus

Amazon   In Travels with Herodotus, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński writes about some of his experiences traveling the world as a foreign correspondent, beginning with his first ever trip abroad, to India, in the 1950s. On the day his editor gave him that assignment, she also handed him a copy of Herodotus's History, a far-ranging account of the clash between the Persians and Greeks in the 5th century B.C. and the antecedents to that conflict. Herodotus is the so-called Father of History because he invented the genre, but he was also really the father of journalism—a roving reporter, like Kapuściński, who traveled the world and interviewed locals and compiled a narrative to preserve information and try to explain events. Kapuściński felt a kinship with him across the millennia. He describes himself as regularly carrying his copy of Herodotus with him and dipping into it at intervals. He alternates in this book between his own reports and those of Herodotus. The Herodotus sections include translated snippets of the History and speculative paragraphs in which he imagines what his predecessor's experiences may have been. So the result is a kind of hybrid, a travelogue through space (in his reports) and time (the Herodotus bits). While each of these parts made for interesting enough reading, they don't really mesh together all that well. Sometimes his shoehorning Herodotus into the narrative felt a little jarring. (Case in point: the author's odd and arguably pointless insertion of Herodotus's account of the Amazons and Scythians in his book's last chapter.) Still, it's an interesting enough read, and I was happy to re-immerse myself in Herodotus' world for a bit.

Book Notices | Time Frame by Douglas E. Richards

Douglas E. Richards, Time Frame

Amazon   Not too long ago, I accidentally reread a book I'd read and reviewed already in 2016, Douglas E. Richards' time travel novel Split Second. It wasn't until I was halfway through that things started to seem familiar, and I finished the book again anyway because I couldn't remember what happened. I had a similar reaction to the book as I did the first time through. (My consistency was heartening.) And this time, too, I said to myself, yeah, I'd read another book by this author. Turns out, the sequel to Split Second was published in 2018. I figured if I didn't read it now, I never would. So I did. Time Frame follows the characters from the first book as they attempt to use time travel for good (to assassinate North Korea's Kim Jong Un) and prevent nefarious forces from using it for world domination. I'm not going to give away the cool time travel twist that informs much of the plot of both books, so I can't say a lot. But Time Frame, like its predecessor, is a fun read with characters I was happy to spend time with.

Book Notices | The Memory Monster by Yishai Sarid

Yishai Sarid, The Memory Monster

Amazon   This short book is written in the first person and purports to be a letter written by the unnamed narrator to his boss, the chairman of the board of Yad Vashem, explaining "what happened there." We don't find out what event he's alluding to until the very end of the book. In seeking to explain it, the narrator provides an account of pretty much his whole adult working life, and in quite a lot of detail. He is trained as a historian and wrote the book, literally, on the Nazis' methods of execution in the Polish camps. He also regularly leads tours of the camps for students and other groups. Initially detached from the subject, he becomes increasingly unhinged by the emotional toll his career takes on him, and he is plagued by the question of what sort of Jew he would have been had he lived through the Shoah. I'm not sure that I really understand the book's ending, but my guess is that "what happened there" is a sort of answer to that question for him.

Book Notices | Masquerade by Tivadar Soros

Tivadar Soros, Masquerade: Dancing Around Death in Nazi-Occupied Hungary

Amazon   In his memoir Masquerade, Tivadar Soros (the father of George Soros) writes about his experiences during the ten-month period between March 1944, when the Nazis occupied Hungary, and January 1945, when the Russians arrived in Soros's neighborhood in Budapest. Soros determined early on that his and his family's best chance for surviving the war would be to try to pass themselves off as Christians and live apart from one another, a plan that involved a lot of back-and-forthing with document forgers and landlords. Soros was quick-witted and resourceful, and he managed to save his family and a great number of other people besides. His account of the machinations that were needed to do so and his run-ins with different characters—a master forger, a 17-year-old German soldier, a woman on a park bench who had escaped from Germany—is surprisingly readable, and although one is hit in the face by details of man's inhumanity to man while reading, it is also a surprisingly hopeful book. Soros was born Tivadar (or Teodor) Schwartz in 1893. In 1936, in an attempt to make themselves less of a target for anti-Semitism, Tivadar and his family changed their name from Schwartz to Soros, a name with meanings in both Hungarian ("the one who is next in line") and Esperanto ("will soar"). (This early attempt to camouflage themselves presages the tactics the family would adopt in 1944.) Tivadar had learned Esperanto during World War I and founded the Esperanto journal Literatura Mondo in 1922. Masquerade was written in Esperanto and published in 1965 as Maskerado ĉirkaŭ la morto: Nazimondo en Hungarujo ("Masquerade Around Death: The Nazi World in Hungary"). Humphrey Tonkin edited and translated this English version, which was published in 2000. Tonkin also adds an excellent afterword in which he puts Tivadar's story in its larger historical context and summarizes the author's life outside the period here described.

Guterson, David: Ed King

  Amazon  

Normally, if I don't like a book as much as I didn't like this one, I don't bother finishing it. So you won't find a lot of really negative reviews on this blog. But in this case, I persevered because I was intrigued by the concept—it's a modern retelling of the Oedipus Rex story—and because the writing was sometimes good, but mostly because of the sunk cost: by the time I was really unhappy with the book, I'd already invested enough time in it that I wanted to be able to review it.

Sophocles' Oedipus grows up unaware that the people raising him are not his biological parents; he unwittingly kills his biological father in a road rage incident; and he ultimately sleeps with and marries his mother, maybe not in that order. (Hopefully that much isn't a spoiler, but there are spoilers in what follows.) Guterson follows this general storyline in his account of his modern Oedipus—Ed King (get it?)—and he also preserves some smaller details: Ed has problems with his feet, for example; he names his company Pythia. But Guterson also diverges from the canonical story in some important respects: his Ed doesn't have children, and he does not blind himself. Indeed, Ed doesn't live for very long with the horror of the big reveal, as Oedipus did. Rather than roaming Greece for years as a blind outcast, Ed endures an uncomfortable few hours. These major departures make me wonder why Guterson opted to hang his story on Sophocles' framework in the first place. I suppose it's a hook to attract readers, but his references to Oedipus Rex sometimes seem like afterthoughts.

Let me just get some smaller complaints off my chest before I mention my main issue with the book: no one in this novel is likable; Ed's private pilot is particularly irritating; Ed's grandfather's constant Yidishisms are annoying; Guterson addresses the reader directly about 75% of the way in, having not done that earlier in the book; Ed's thoughts after discovering the truth of his situation are banal. But the main problem is that Guterson writes in excruciating detail about people and events that are not relevant to the story. Sophocles had the grace not to bore his audience with the details of Oedipus' preschool curriculum. Guterson? You guessed it. We get that and so much more: Ed's bar mitzvah speech, his brother's graduation speech, mind-numbing conversations between Ed and that god-awful pilot and between Ed and his AI assistant Cybil. Guterson also fleshes out the lives of characters who don't matter to the story: his biological father's other son; Ed's mother-wife's brother; Ed's adoptive brother and grandfather. Guterson thus fills in the family tree quite a bit while also, as I mentioned, omitting an aspect of the Oedipus story that makes his incest particularly abhorrent (and thus all the more interesting), that he fathered four kids by his mother.

On the plus side, the fact that Ed's marriage is childless probably means Guterson won't be tempted to write a sequel.

Book Notices | Out of the Ashes by Kara Thomas

Kara Thomas, Out of the Ashes

Amazon   This book starts out well. Samantha Newsom, driving past a police cruiser, reminds herself not to behave like a criminal: "I hadn't killed anyone. Not yet." That line hooked me for a while. Sam is heading back to her hometown to take care of that "yet," and while there, she confronts the defining fact of her life, the unsolved murder of her family and her life afterward as the unloved ward of a miserable relative. She starts playing private detective, hunting down old acquaintances and anyone who might have some insight into her family's fate. About halfway through the book, I realized that there were too many characters who were related to one another who I couldn't keep straight and too many different crimes that Samantha became interested in solving. And I lost count of how many people she thought the murderer of her family might be. By the time I found out who actually did it, I didn't care. I think this book had a lot of promise. I just felt like I was drowning in extraneous details after a while.

Book Notices | The Forgetting by Hannah Beckerman

Hannah Beckerman, The Forgetting

Amazon   In The Forgetting, Hannah Beckerman tells the story of two women in problematic relationships. Livvy married Dominic after a whirlwind romance, and they now have a baby, Leo. She's still in the honeymoon phase of her marriage, and what she doesn't see clearly—and we do—is that Dominic is manipulative and controlling. Our second protagonist, Anna, has been married longer to her husband, Stephen, and their relationship isn't perfect either. Stephen can be a little controlling, too, but it's harder for us to recognize and condemn it in his case because the issue is complicated by Anna's amnesia, the result of a car crash that occurred just before the book opens. So is Stephen keeping her from looking at their old photo albums, for example, because he wants to aid in her recovery, as he claims, or is something else going on? Beckerman tells the stories of these women in chapters that alternate throughout most of the book. It's a highly readable story, but also sometimes maddening. I wanted to reach through the pages and slap Livvy into awareness, or just slap Dominic. His gaslighting, the way he warps truths to undermine his wife's sense of reality, is infuriating. Things come to a head, of course, and readers may not be expecting the way the story is resolved. I wasn't.