In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

You're going to start thinking I read nothing but short stories, soon, after three collections in a row. This is the last one for a while, since I have screwed up and forgotten to read my daily short story for about a week. And, the collection I'm reading is a thick one that I'm not in love with. I may even ditch it and put it in the donation pile. 

In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway was Hemingway's first collection of short stories, published when he was still a fresh young thing at 25 years of age. It's a unique book. It starts with a vignette called "On the Quai in Smyrna" It's such a confusing bit of writing that I had to look it up online to see what on Earth was happening. And, it turns out that was a deliberate approach. 

From Spark Notes:

["On the Quai at Smyrna"] begins the collection by disorienting the reader. Ernest Hemingway makes this story by confusing by never establishing the setting or the characters. All he gives is a series of impressions and memories. This disorientation actually serves to orient the reader to the tone and flow of the stories to come. 

So, after looking that up I thought, "Great, I'm not going to understand a word of this book," but that did not turn out to be the case at all, although there were some stories that didn't make a lot of sense to me. The vast majority were his Nick Adams stories, which start with a young Nick accompanying his father to a childbirth and another with his father getting frustrated over the local Native Americans refusing to do a job for him. 

In the latter, the doctor wants the natives to hack up a tree that floated over to the Adams' property to prevent ending up with a rotting log on his shore. The doctor treats the local natives in exchange for odd jobs and thinks they're just trying to get out of doing work when one of the natives says he can chop it but there's a lumber company logo on the log and it's technically stealing, making the doctor rethink the job. Later, you follow Nick to war and around Europe and home, where he spends time in the woods. Not all of the stories are about Nick Adams but a good portion of them are and I thought they were surprisingly mature for such a young writer. 

In between the stories are more vignettes, often but not always war scenes. 

There's also a story about a jockey and his son and how the jockey becomes corrupt that I thought was pretty fabulous: "My Old Man". I marked a quote from that particular story and started to type it up before realizing that apparently I marked it because it had an offensive ethnic slur (used very casually) and that I probably flagged it to remind myself that there were numerous times I grimaced reading these stories because of similar words/racial slurs that were offensive. So, bear that in mind if you read it. 

Recommended but not a favorite - I am pretty much in awe of how skilled Hemingway's writing was at such an early age. But, while I appreciated the skill, I didn't love the stories. What I loved the most about In Our Time was the glimpse of Hemingway's early writing. It was particularly fascinating to find that everything Hemingway wrote was so very Hemingway from the beginning: bullfights, fishing, war, heaving drinking, frustrations with women. I've now read his first book and his last (unfinished novel) along with a few in the middle. Yep, Hemingway was just Hemingway, once and forever. 

©2021 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Mini Review and F2F Report: Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

I'm going to keep the description fairly brief and dive right into talking about my book group's discussion of Brooklyn because it was a surprising discussion.

Brooklyn tells the story of Eilis, a young Irish woman with a talent for numbers. Eilis is skilled at bookkeeping and is offered a job in a small shop as a clerk. Her boss, Miss Kelly, has a system by which she keeps the best customers happy. She's strict and not a particularly nice person, but Eilis is happy to be employed. Then, a priest returns to her small village from America for a visit. He knows someone who could give Eilis a much better job with the opportunity for growth and offers to help her move to New York City. Eilis's brothers live in Liverpool and by encouraging Eilis to move to the U.S., her big sister Rose is basically sacrificing any chance she might have to marry and move away, herself. Eilis takes the opportunity to leave and gradually finds her way in life and love as a new American. But, will she be happy if she marries? And, when tragedy strikes, forcing Eilis to go home, will she ever return?

I made the mistake of assuming there wouldn't be much to talk about in F2F group because Brooklyn is such a quiet, understated book that focuses on interpersonal relationships and the everyday events through which Eilis transitions from Irish woman to immigrant worker and then becomes, without even realizing it, an American. Those small changes, though, turned out to be eminently worthy of discussion.

Among other things, we discussed:

• How well the author, a male, got into the head of his female main character.
• Whether or not Rose was "sacrificing herself" by staying behind to live with and care for their mother while Eilis moved to America.
• Comparison of the jobs Eilis held in Ireland and the U.S. and how culture impacted the way the employees interacted with customers.
• Whether or not Eilis, her mother, and her brothers were culturally conditioned to say little in their letters to each other.
• The relationship between Eilis and Rose.
• The relationship between Eilis and her mother.
• Why men left Ireland to get work in England.
• How to pronounce those tricky Irish names (there were at least 4 or 5 different ways people thought Eilis might be pronounced). 
• Eilis's immaturity and whether or not she matured throughout the book.
• Eilis's passivity and whether she would have gone to America at all if she hadn't been encouraged by others.

This one's a potential spoiler, so I'll turn it white and you can highlight it if you're not worried about spoilers:

• Why Eilis went back to America, in the end, and whether or not she would have gone if there hadn't been a connection between someone in Ireland and Eilis's landlord in New York.
• What exactly was going on between Eilis and that fellow in Ireland.
• The cultural differences between Irish and Italian families. 
• The cover of the book shown above - whether or not it reminded anyone of what shops used to look like in small-town America (it did; I didn't mention my hometown but there were small stores that looked very much like the cover photo when I was young and those who grew up in Vicksburg said they remembered shops that appeared similar).

Wow, look at all that! There was so much to talk about. There was also a death that we discussed but I'm trying to avoid spoilers.

Some of us were aware that a movie version of Brooklyn has been made but none of us had viewed it, so there was no basis for comparison. We all did agree that we liked the book, though, and several people said they were going to look up the movie.

Recommended - I enjoyed the book, low-key as it was, and definitely recommend it. We didn't have a show of hands but there were really no negatives brought up so I think I can safely say everyone in my book group enjoyed Brooklyn and the discussion was a lively one. While I do recommend it for book group discussion, I'd advise printing out some topics to discuss. We were fine once we got going but there was a bit of twitchy shuffling before someone spoke up and got the conversation started.


©2016 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery  or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Copyright 2014
Scribner - Historical Fiction/WWII
531 pp.

Once, when she was eight or nine, her father took her to the Pantheon in Paris to describe Foucault's pendulum. Its bob, he said, was a golden sphere shaped like a child's top. It swung from a wire that was sixty -seven meters long; because its trajectory changed over time, he explained, it proved beyond all doubt that the earth rotated. But what Marie-Laure remembered, standing at the rail as it whistled past, was her father saying that Foucault's pendulum would never stop. It would keep swinging, she understood, after she and her father left the Pantheon, after she had fallen asleep that night. After she had forgotten about it, and lived her entire life, and died.

Now it is as if she can hear the pendulum in the air in front of her: that huge golden bob, as wide across as a barrel, swinging on and on, never stopping. Grooving and regrooving its inhuman truth into the floor.

~fr. p. 207 of All the Light We Cannot See

In All the Light We Cannot See, Marie-Laure is a young French girl who has lost her vision. Her father is the master of locks at Paris's Museum of Natural History and a fine craftsman. To help Marie-Laure gain a little independence, he has created a painstakingly detailed model of their Paris neighborhood so that she can familiarize herself with the area's features from the safety of their home.

Werner and his sister live in an orphanage in a German mining town. When he discovers a broken radio and is able to fix it, his eyes are opened to the wonders of science and engineering. He quickly teaches himself about wiring, currents, radio tubes . . . everything he needs to know in order to build and repair radios. The last thing he wants is to end up crushed in a mine like his father.

As Hitler comes to power and war breaks out, Werner ends up in a barbaric school where he is educated and desensitized to cruelty while Marie-Laure and her father are forced to escape to her uncle's home in a walled seaside village after the Germans invade Paris. Both experience the horror and deprivation of war but Werner is only peripherally aware of how hardened he is becoming while Marie-Laure becomes stronger and braver when war challenges her household to endanger their lives for the sake of others.

Eventually, Marie-Laure and Werner cross paths but there's a long and winding set of paths before they finally, briefly intertwine. I admit to being surprised that the encounter between Marie-Laure and Werner was so minimal but it worked because the storytelling is so intricately and beautifully crafted that I actually found myself deliberately dragging out the reading of All the Light We Cannot See for the sake of simply enjoying Doerr's writing.

I was, I confess, disapointed with the ending. At over 500 pages, I felt invested in the story and there were certain answers I desired to know but which were not revealed. After giving it some thought, I realized that the slow, fragmented feeling of the ending chapters does lend it a realistic air. Anyone who has read much about WWII knows that often the answers never came. Did someone live or die? What happened to valued possessions? But, in the end, the stunning writing convinced me that an imperfect ending was not enough to make it less than a 5-star read.

Highly recommended - The highest compliments I feel like I can give to a writer are love of and belief in the characters he created and having felt a "you were there" sensation. Both were true of All the Light We Cannot See. I particularly loved the idea of those elaborately detailed neighborhood models Marie-Laure's father built to help her learn her way around. I found myself thinking, "I would love to see and touch those models." I also adored Marie-Laure's entire family, rooted for Werner, whose humanity was buried yet still evident through the occasional thought he had about how disappointed his sister would be, and sometimes found myself rereading sentences for their rhythm and beauty. A truly spectacular work of writing.

©2015 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery  or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne

The Comanche male was thus gloriously, astoundingly free. He was subject to no church, no organized religion, no priest class, no military societies, no state, no police, no public law, no domineering clans or powerful families, no strict rules of personal behavior, nothing telling him he could not leave his band and join another one, nothing even telling him he could not abscond with his friend's wife, though he certainly would end up paying somewhere between one and ten horses for that indulgence, assuming he was caught. He was free to organize his own military raids; free to come and go as he pleased.

~p. 51, Empire of the Summer Moon

It took me forever to read this book because what you don't see in that excerpt about the Comanche male is that the lack of religion, law and rules of personal behavior meant that when they attacked other tribes or white settlers, Comanches were vicious to the point that they are among the few who, in retrospect, could truly be called "savage" without it being a racial slur. Seeing nothing wrong with torture (including that of babies), rape (heavily pregnant women and elderly women were not immune to rape and torture), scalpings and other horrors, young Comanches actually appeared to enjoy the cruelties they inflicted on their enemies. The details make for hard reading. Not everything about the book makes it miserable, though, or I would never have made it to the end.

So many raids were made by moonlight that in Texas a full, bright spring or summer moon is still known as a Comanche Moon.

~p. 65

When my book club discussed Empire of the Summer Moon, I wasn't able to attend. I'm sorry I missed the discussion. I was still only partway through the book because I had to keep setting it aside (although that's not the reason I didn't make it to the meeting). It kept occurring to me that the Comanche gang rapes -- which were often followed by murder, but not always . . . sometimes a woman would survive the initial attack, only to go through the same thing repeatedly -- could be classified as "sociopathic group-think run amok" [my wording]. These were not your sweet, passive Indians who were eventually shuffled off to reservations after giving in peacefully to numerous unfathomably ridiculous requests. The Comanches fought to the bitter end and in the nastiest ways imaginable. They fought to win and to drive people away. It worked for a very long time.

Quanah Parker was the last Comanche chief and part of Empire of the Summer Moon is his story, the story of the final people to leave their land behind and how he negotiated for his people and cleverly earned a fortune. But, most of Empire of the Summer Moon is dedicated to the history of the Comanches, how they lived and why they were able to ride for hundreds of miles without getting lost, how they defeated the Apaches, drove back the Spanish and stopped the white man's expansion into "Comancheria".

There's also plenty about Quanah's mother, the young white captive Cynthia Ann Parker. Although most everything that has been written about her either is very vague or involves a lot of assumptions because of what the author of Empire of the Summer Moon refers to as her "resonating silence" after she was retrieved from the Comanches, the author did an astounding job of gathering parallel accounts and information about various sightings of Cynthia Ann that help round out her story.

By the point of her liberation by whites, Cynthia Ann Parker had not only become a part of her Comanche tribe (with a completely different name) but was happily married to a chief and had three children. Her husband's death and the separation from her boys grieved her deeply. Cynthia Ann's story is a very sad one. Had she lived, I'm sure she would have been pleased with her only surviving child's leadership and kindness toward his people.

I could spend all day typing up quotations from the book because it is fascinating, well-written, informative history and at a glance I can see that I probably marked at least 25-30 passages. But, instead I'll tell you that if you're interested in Native American history, it's a must read. I've been on a bit of a Native American bent for the last couple of months and the first two books were highly critical of white treatment of Indians, as all books about Native Americans should be, in some way. But, Empire of the Summer Moon also shows the flip side -- the devastation and cruelty inflicted on white settlers by the uncivilized tribes.

As in any book of its kind, there is no escaping the horrors whites inflicted on Indians. They came, they saw, they conquered. But, author S. C. Gwynne gives you a good understanding of the rights and wrongs on both sides, the combined cruelty and idiocy of the young American government's decisions regarding our aboriginal people, as well as a glimpse into the reason hunter/gatherers eventually lose out to agrarian societies. Very engrossing stuff. I have two more non-fiction titles about Native Americans and a fictional account of Cynthia Parker's life (which I already know is in many ways wildly inaccurate) that I'm looking forward to reading, hopefully in the near future.

One of the things I really enjoyed about Empire of the Summer Moon was reading about various other tribes besides the Comanches, how they arrived in Indian Territory (aka, my home state, Oklahoma) and the wildly diverse camping grounds of the Comanches. Sometimes, I recognized the descriptions as places near my hometown. I miss Oklahoma, even 25 years after moving away, so it always gives me a buzz to read anything at all about "home".

I think this quote gives you a good idea of both the years of great change described and the quality of writing in Empire of the Summer Moon:

Much of what was left of [the Penatekas], starving and demoralized, limped on to a tiny reservation in 1855, despised even by other Comanches.

Only ten years before, such a thing would have been unimaginable. At the moment of the raid on Parker's Fort, the moment when a weeping Lucy Parker placed her terrified daughter on the rear flank of a Comanche mustang, the Comanches, and the Penatekas in particular, had been at the peak of their historical power and influence. They had defeated the Europeans, cowed the Mexicans, and had so thoroughly mastered the far southern plains that they were no longer threatened by other tribes. They had enough enemies to keep them entertained and supplied with a surfeit of horseflesh. But none to really worry about. Their source of food and sustenance, the buffalo, roamed the plains in record numbers and still ranged into every corner of Comancheria. The tribe's low birth rates virtually guaranteed that their nomadic life following buffalo herds was infinitely sustainable. Their world was thus suspended in what seemed to be a perfect equilibrium, a balance of earth and wind and sun and sky that would endure forever. An empire under the bright summer moon. For those who witnessed the change at a very intimate and personal level, including Cynthia Ann and her husband, the speed with which that ideal world was dismantled must have seemed scarcely believable. She herself, the daughter of pioneers who were hammering violently at the age-old Comanche barrier that had defeated all other comers, now adopted into a culture that was beginning to die, was the emblem of the change.

~p. 110

Empire of the Summer Moon was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, published by Scribner in 2010. Although it does bounce around in time a bit and can thus be a bit confusing, that and the fact that I thought the book could have used a glossary were my only complaints.

Highly recommended. An exceptionally written, extremely well-researched and revealing tale of American History, focusing on the Comanches and their downfall but including plenty of insight about other Native American tribes, the dangers to pioneers of the time period and the clueless handling of the Comanche "problem" by the young American government and its army. The Civil War and its impact on the frontier is also described. One warning: there is some very graphic description of violence in Empire of the Summer Moon.

Just walked in:

All Woman and Springtime by Brandon W. Jones and

Heading Out to Wonderful by Robert Goolrick -- both surprises from Algonquin Books

They also sent me copies of two books that I have tried and failed to get into, so I think I just won't mention them, although I may give one a second chance (the other got two chances but will not get a third).

Let's offset the Native American History glum with a bit of kitty fun:

No, I did not let Isabel begin a workout. She gets enough working out, I promise you. Crazy cat. Happy Tuesday!

©2012 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery and Babble or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

The Best American Poetry: 2009 - ed. by David Wagoner

The Best American Poetry: 2009

Ed. by David Wagoner

Series Editor, David Lehman

Copyright 2009

Scribner Poetry

207 pp, incl. author bios

I have at least two other poetry books I hoped to tackle for National Poetry month, but so far The Best American Poetry: 2009 is the only poetry book I've managed to read (I still have a week). And, it's a surprisingly palatable "best of" anthology.

First the disclaimer:

I know jack about poetry. Seriously . . . I can write limericks, but I have never studied poetry, do not recognize imagery when it's staring me in the face and can't tell good poetry from doggerel. I only know what I like. Sometimes it's the cadence, sometimes a rambling quality that makes some sort of sense to me, often simply the interplay of words. Regardless, I'm no longer afraid of poetry in spite of my ignorance. And, now that I've read this particular book, I think I'm going to study up a bit because it seems pretty ridiculous to have made it this far into my life without knowing a thing about what makes a poem a poem.

What I loved about this book:

Besides the poetry itself, some of which I loved, some of which perplexed me, the best thing about this book is that there's a section of author bios in the back. After each bio, the author talks about his or her selected poem. Some describe how they came to write the poem that was selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry: 2009 or, even better, what it means. I learned quite a bit from simply reading the information shared by this particular variety of poets. For example, one of the poems is simply a collection of movie titles. Others often started with a thought but then other random threads were added. Some really did have deep meaning.

What surprised me the most was the fact that they didn't all have some grand theme. I had no idea that poetry could be as abstract and random as painting or sculpture. Of course, we're talking randomness within some sort of structure, but still . . . I learned something new and I'm happy about that. I wish all poetry books had translations for the unstudied. Perhaps poetry would be more widely read if individual poems, their inspiration, their meanings and/or origins were explained and, thus, became less intimidating to more readers.

What I disliked about this book:

Nothing. That doesn't mean I loved every single poem, though. And, there was one author's explanation that I found frankly disturbing. His poem was partly based on his "real loathing for so-called Christians". As I read that, I thought, "That kind of hurts." It's very odd to be randomly loathed by someone who has never met you. I think that's the closest I've ever felt to understanding what it must have been like to have been a European Jew around the time of Hitler. Personally, I don't loathe anyone, including that poet. He might be really personable; I can't say. The whole Jesus thing is, to me, wrapped around the concept of love -- including the words, "Love your enemies as yourself." So, smooches to you, James Cummins. You can deflect them with your shield of loathing but I still love you because I believe in Christ.

I've got a lot to accomplish, today, but I'll try to squeeze in at least one more poetry post before the end of the month. For now . . . the treadmill and washing machine are calling (among other things).

Happy Monday!

©2011 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery and Babble or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.