Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves by Dave Lowry

A library patron handed me Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves and said she was returning it and wanted me to have it; she described it as a fun read. That’s exactly right. It’s a humorous whodunnit with frequent, mouth-watering descriptions of Chinese cuisine.

Tucker is a senior in college when some unnamed unfortunate event results in his leaving school. At a rest stop in New Hampshire he meets Corrine Chang, who needs a ride to Buffalo. He takes her by way of his parents’ house in Massachusetts. Over a meal of Dongpo pork, Corrine — and readers — learn that Chinese cooking is Tucker’s passion and that he’s headed to St. Louis. I don’t want to give away too much of the story, but I can say that Corrine ends up in St. Louis too, and readers eventually learn who the diamond thieves are. In between, they learn Tucker’s many rules, such as “Rule #11: Timing is everything,” and “Rule #45: Never pass up the opportunity to have dumplings.”

Tucker is a sweetheart, and an interesting character. Besides being the only non-Chinese Chinese chef everywhere he cooks, he’s a martial artist. He can incapacitate bad guys, but Lowry also lets readers see him muse, holding Corrine, “I thought about the pool of warmth around us that seemed like a space that was at the same time very , very small and simultaneously all the room I would ever need or want.” I wouldn’t call this a cozy mystery since there are Chinese gangsters and kitchen staff trading insults. But it’s a gentle one, sweet in a way, romantic and original.

Just have snack — or a Chinese take-out menu — handy.

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Time Present and Time Past by Deirdre Madden

Longtime bookconscious readers know I used to take the Europa Challenge. I have so many books to read and other things going on in my life that I stopped doing it but I am still a big fan or Europa Editions, who bring some of the best European writers to American readers.

Time Present and Time Past, by Deirdre Madden, is a quiet, reflective book about a middle aged man, Fintan, whose prevailing quality is a “combination of high intelligence and an innocence so incorrigible that it can sometimes look like stupidity.” He is married to a very kind woman who even his tough old mother loves, and he has a warm relationship with his nearly grown sons and young daughter, as well as his sister, Martina, and beloved aunt, Beth.

Sounds boring, doesn’t it? But Madden explores Fintan’s inner life, and that of the other characters, in such a way that by the time you’ve turned to the last page you feel as if you’ve discovered what makes us human. Essentially, that is the topic of this novel: the human experience. From remembrances of childhood to reflections on old age, Madden explores what living feels like, and she does it without much of a plot or even much drama*, instead sticking with simple, familiar domestic scenes that are part of her readers’ shared experience — family meals, commuting to work, sitting in a cafe, speaking with a coworker, taking a child and her friend on an outing.

It’s Madden’s exquisite writing that makes this work. Riding with Martina to visit a cousin, Fintan begins to remember where he is: “. . . already something is beginning to wake in Fintan’s memory. He does not recognise any given house, field, or hill but he generality of them speak to him. They are all familiar in a visceral way, and he knows deep down that he has been here, or hereabouts, before now.” I’ve heard Paul Harding describe good prose as something which you always knew, and never heard anyone else put into words quite the same way before. That’s what’s beautiful about Time Present and Time Past.

* there is a very important and well-done subplot about a trauma Martina experienced that changed the course of her life that deserves special mention.

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Dancing Fish and Ammonites by Penelope Lively

Here’s another brief review I wrote for the library.  I love Penelope Lively‘s writing, and I really enjoyed her memoir. It made me wish I could hear her speak, or even better, sit down and have a cup of tea (or glass of wine) with her.

Novelist Penelope Lively reflects on “old age,” “life and times,” “memory,” “reading and writing,” and “six things” – objects around her  house that hold special meaning for her – in this vivid and unique memoir. The book reads like a conversation with a wise older friend, and Lively’s nonlinear narrative and varied recollections make this a book you can dip into. For fans of Lively’s fiction, her descriptions of various stories’ origins are interesting and enlightening. For history buffs, there are remembrances of a WWII childhood in Egypt and as the war grew too close, Palestine and England. Throughout the book, Lively notes the importance of reading. “I can measure out my life in books. They stand along the way like signposts: the moments of absorption and empathy and direction and enlightenment and sheer pleasure.” I found all of these in Dancing Fish and Ammonites.

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October Mindful Reader column

The column ran today in The Concord Monitor.  Here it is:

 

The Mindful Reader: ‘Lightkeeper’s Wife’ strays from the ordinary

Sunday, October 12, 2014
(Published in print: Sunday, October 12, 2014

Cape Cod author Sarah Anne Johnson’s debut novel The Lightkeeper’s Wife begins as an ordinary work of historical fiction. In 1843, Hannah Snow is the lighthouse keeper’s wife on a treacherous stretch of coast. There’s a wreck one night when her husband, John, is away. Hannah makes a risky rescue attempt but manages to save just one passenger.

After he recovers from nearly drowning, Billy Pike stays on, helping Hannah. John’s horse turns up without him, and bucking convention, Hannah chooses to remain at her husband’s post tending the light. She loves her work. “What an exhilarating feeling, knowing that she could help a floundering ship navigate these waters.”

Things get very interesting as Johnson introduces Annie/Blue, a sea captain’s wife who suffers a loss and rebels against the rules and superstitions surrounding a woman’s presence at sea. When pirates raid her husband’s ship, Annie saves herself, proves her mettle and goes on to masquerade as a man, the pirate Blue.

Johnson spins these two stories and Billy’s into a page-turner with a hint of mystery, weaving in details from her considerable research into women’s maritime history. Several minor characters are also female, providing Johnson a broad palette from which to paint women’s roles in a small 19th-century New England community. This interesting angle, along with the story’s twists, nautical details and compelling characters, make The Lightkeeper’s Wife an intriguing read.

Puzzling whodunit

Michael Nethercott’s The Haunting Ballad is an old-fashioned mystery set in 1957 Greenwich Village, featuring a beat coffeehouse and a colorful cast of characters. Private eye Lee Plunkett and his Yeats-quoting sidekick Mr. O’Nelligan encounter, among others, a “ghost chanter” who receives songs from the afterworld, a blues guitarist, a 105-year-old Civil War drummer boy and a trio of Irish brothers as they investigate the death of a cantankerous folk “songcatcher.” “The woman seemed to flourish on conflict,” O’Nelligan notes as the investigation turns up a steady stream of possible perpetrators. Nethercott’s period details enhance the story, as does Plunkett and O’Nelligan’s banter. Although this is the second book in Nethercott’s series, I hadn’t read the first (The Séance Society) but had no trouble catching up with his characters. The Haunting Ballad features strong dialogue and a great deal of charm, as well as a puzzling whodunit.

With grace

Brattleboro, Vt., author Martha M. Moravec’s Magnificent Obesity: My Search for Wellness, Voice and Meaning in the Second Half of Life tells the story of her heart attack at age 55 and subsequent quest to “close the gap between where she is headed in life and the very different place she wants to be.” Moravec reflects on or confronts just about every issue anyone might be facing as they enter their senior years, all at once: childhood trauma, family dysfunction, unrealized dreams, under- or unemployment, health concerns (obesity, debilitating anxiety, diabetes, colitis and heart disease) and struggles with faith (she thinks of God as “The Man at My Elbow”). But this isn’t a “disaster memoir” – she isn’t mopey or maudlin. She repeatedly praises the “Angels We Can See,” who are “People whose desire to help was so genuine as to seem either genetic or divinely inspired.” She sums up her problems: “I was suffering from acute sensitivity to the fact that I had spent the past 30 years of my life circumventing my life. . . .” But by the time you travel with Moravec to the end of this honest self-examination, her “struggle to lose weight, calm down and find God” has led her “to seek a kind of truce and peace in what unalterably is . . .” and to “grow up in time to grow old with grace.”

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Monastery by Eduardo Halfon

Monastery is Eduardo Halfon‘s second novel (after The Polish Boxer, also from Bellevue Literary Press) about Eduardo Halfon. Yes, the author and his hero share a name. In interviews at the time The Polish Boxer came out, Halfon said “To me, all literature is fiction disguised as memoir. Or perhaps memoir disguised as fiction.”

My library hosted Thatcher Freund last night for a talk entitled, “Why Stories Matter.” He was addressing life stories, and he noted two things that resonated with me as I finished Monastery at lunch today. First, that memoirs are about the moments in our lives as we remember them. And second that the details of a story are what the person writing/telling it went through, but the truth of the story is what everyone went through. Halfon’s work is a tremendous example of that.

Halfon’s narrator grew up in a Jewish expat family of Polish and Lebanese origins in Guatemala and in Monastery he relates his travels. He visits his sister’s fiancee’s ultra Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem, his grandfather’s boyhood neighborhood in Warsaw, the Dead Sea, a coffee cooperative in Guatemala and a border town near Belize, a jazz salon in the Paul Robeson Residence in New York, a former U-boat base on the French coast.

But whether we have experienced these things ourselves is irrelevant because the novel — which like The Polish Boxer reads like linked stories — is not really about the details, as interesting and enticing as those are. The novel is about family and love and confusion, about being together and alone, about identity and all that entails. It’s about having faith in who we are and in who we might be and even in who we (or others) might say we are. It’s about losing that faith or rediscovering it or worrying we’ll never have it. And all of us have experienced those things to some degree.

Halfon’s writing is rich. You may experience moments of dislocation or unease as you try to navigate the threads between chapters, which seem tenuous when you’re in the midst of them but grow stronger. But you’ll probably find yourself forgiving this because the book is beautiful and of course, True.

For example, the reader isn’t sure what’s going on when Eduardo hesitates outside the jazz salon, founded as an outlet for a grieving mother. He was looking for the place, so why doesn’t he just go in? He turns to the woman who helped him find his way, who is still in the elevator:

“The sound of the piano stopped, then silence, and gentle applause. She smiled at me with just her eyes. I held out my hand, a bit hurried and proud, perhaps wishing to defer the inevitable for a while longer. It took her a moment to understand, but then she also held out hers. And we stayed like that for a couple of seconds, maybe not even that, each of us on separate sides of the doors.”

Yes. Exactly. I’ve never been there in that moment but I’ve been there, in that moment.

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