Overreader

Mysterious Series

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Mon, 20 May 2013 00:52:00 +0000

So a couple of series to talk about now - both of them with books in the running for an Audie award for mysteries (one of my Armchair Audies categories), which is what brought me to them to start with. And they're very different, but both quite worthwhile.

Chris Ewan's Good Thief's Guide series centers on Charlie Howard, an English mystery writer and, oh yes, also a thief. He makes his way from city to city across the globe (Amsterdam, Paris, and Vegas that I've read so far - The Good Thief's Guide to Vegas being the audiobook nominated this year), and manages to find himself deeper and deeper in trouble wherever he goes. With the advice and help of his forbearing agent, Victoria, he eventually extracts himself - but not so cleanly that he can stay in the city he's just visited. So on the road again he goes (at the moment, in my reading of the series, he's on his way to Venice.) Ewan's writing is bright and clean, and Charlie is self-deprecating and not as smooth or adroit as he'd like to be, a great character to hang out with, even though he'll embroil you in all sorts of dangerous nonsense. The mysteries themselves are solid, and I always enjoy Ewan's descriptions of the locals and locales that Charlie encounters.

Simon Vance reads the Good Thief's Guide series, and obviously I love it. His delivery is smooth and clean and engaging, and he picks up perfectly on the emotional sub-texts as well as the energy of the text.

Lars Kepler's Jonna Linna series follows Swedish Detective Inspector Linna through some disturbing and dangerous territory in and around Stockholm. If you like complex, psychologically-twisted plots, read Kepler (which I found out is the pen name of a married couple of writers - Alexander and Alexandra Anhdoril - but my husband just acted like I was crazy when I proposed that we write a series together about a female private detective in 1930s Dublin, even though it is obviously a brilliant idea!) In the Audie-nominated The Nightmare, Linna investigates a suicide that wasn't, and an accidental drowning that also wasn't, and his instincts (like all good fictional detectives, his instincts are almost always right, even if there's no evidence to support that) tell him there's a connection. Although Linna's personal/emotional life is the least compelling thing about the series, as a detective he is fun to get to know, and I love the way he interacts with his colleagues. Kepler relies a little heavily on "horrid childhood leaves massive damage leading to creepy criminal adulthood" bad guys, but really commits to them once they're out there.

The mellifluous Mark Bramhall reads the Jonna Linna series. He is a master of voices and tone, and there's something very fluid about the way he narrates. I'm not sure why I haven't posted about Bramhall before - though largely it's because I encounter him a lot on multi-voiced books - but I'm always happy to see his name on a project, because I can trust him to fully explore the text. This is no exception, and I particularly love when Kepler's characters are joking with each other, because there's an edge of teasing laughter that makes me smile along with Bramhall.

Drink With Me

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Sat, 18 May 2013 22:42:00 +0000

Don’t remind me, don’t remind me: I’m a month behind on LesMis Project. At least. Valjean is turning in his coffin. (That’s what’s known as foreshadowing in the literary trades, BTW.)

But! This is the end of Volume 2: Cosette. Soon I will move on to Marius! First, though –

No more sweeping! Hooray!

Book Eighth – Cemeteries Take That Which is Committed Them

So, poor Fauchelevent is totally confounded about how Valjean and this kid appeared in his garden, but he’s committed to helping them, even though no men are allowed in the convent. He “understood nothing of the matter. How had M. Madeline got there, when the walls were what they were? Cloister walls are not to be stepped over. How did he get there with a child? One cannot scale a perpendicular wall with a child in one’s arms.” (p.354) (Well, not unless you’re Valjean you can’t, apparently.) But hey, Valjean had risked his life to save Fauchelevent, so turn about is fair play and all.

Fortunately for Valjean (who, let’s face it, does manage to get himself fortuitously out of as many scrapes as he gets himself in, at least since the initial 19 year prison term), one of the nuns is dying. This means a couple of things: everyone else will be distracted praying for her, and when she dies, outsiders have to enter to sign the death certificate and bring out her coffin. Fauchelevent and Valjean cook up a plan wherein Fauchelevent will stick Cosette in a basket and haul her off to a fruit-seller friend of his to await the next move. Meanwhile, somehow or another Valjean will get out then they will reenter under guise of Fauchelevent’s brother and niece, the one to be the gardener’s assistant, the other to join the convent school.

The nun dies, and Fauchelevent is summoned to the prioress. Now, Fauchelevent is actually a kinda clever guy, but he looks and acts like a simple guy. “The whole convent thought him stupid.” (p.359) So they don’t know that he recognizes all the bells and signals that happen in the place just like another language, and think he’s the old, lame, slow, totally unthreatening guy he makes out to be, which is perfect for their needs.

Reverend Mother starts an interrogation, and Fauchelevent his counter-interrogation, and eventually they come to the two essential points: he has a brother who he wants to come join him to help with the things he’s too infirm to do, and she wants him to pretend to send the dead nun to the cemetery but really put her (in the coffin she’s used as a bed for many years) (as you do) in the crypt under the convent. He mentions various legal and moral objections, which she adeptly bats aside, and logistical objections, which she tells him to figure out, and he finally agrees. As he’s leaving, she says his brother and niece can move in the day after the nun’s mortal remains are dealt with as she wishes. (He tries to get Valjean brought in to help with moving the slab that covers the crypt, describing his strength: “A perfect Turk!” (p.366) but Reverend Mother assures him he can do it on his own.)

“The strides of a lame man are like the ogling glances of a one-eyed man; they do not reach their goal very promptly.” (p.367) But eventually Fauchelevent gets back to the gardener’s cottage to relay the prioress’s plan. He still doesn’t know how he’s going to get Valjean out of the convent, though.

Valjean, of course, has a plan. Instead of sticking dirt in the dummy coffin to go to the cemetery, he’ll stick himself. “Jean Valjean gave way to one of those rare smiles which lighted up his face like a flash from heaven in the winter. ‘You know, Fauchelevent, what you have said: “Mother Crucifixion is dead.” And I add: “and Father Madeline is buried.’” (p.368) Despite the jokes, he convinces Fauchelevent that he’s serious, so they figure out the logistics of where to hide him pre-coffinization, and what kinds of air holes and provisions he’ll need, etc.

“What seemed unprecedented to Fauchelevent was, we repeat, a simple matter to Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean had been in worse straits than this. Any man who has been a prisoner understands how to contract himself to fit the diameter of the escape…. An escape is a cure. What does not a man undergo for the sake of a cure?” (p.369) Besides, “to live for a long time in a box, to find air where there is none, to economize his breath for hours, to know how to stifle without dying – this was one of Jean Valjean’s gloomy talents.” (p.369) (Dude, I am so not suited to the life of a convict.)

The plan also calls for Fauchelevent to send his friend the gravedigger off to drink while he “buries” the body, in reality releasing Valjean and sending him off to collect Cosette from the fruit-seller. Finally they iron out all the obstacles. “’That is settled, Father Fauchelevent. All will go well.’ ‘Provided nothing goes wrong,’ thought Fauchelevent. ‘In that case, it would be terrible.’” (p.370) (See, Hugo knows about foreshadowing, too!)

MINOR hiccup: Fauchelevent’s gravedigger friend? Dead. The new guy? Not a drunken sot who can easily be sent off. Or difficultly sent off. No matter what Fauchelevent tries – even offering to buy the drinks himself! – the new guy is going to bury the body before he leaves the cemetery.

So Valjean’s coffin is lowered into the grave. “He had a certain sensation of cold.” (p.375) (Understatement is another literary technique.) He heard the priest and choir boy chanting Latin over his head. He heard a shovelful of dirt hit the coffin lid. And another. And a third. At the fourth: “There are things which are too strong for the strongest man. Jean Valjean lost consciousness.” (p.376)

Finally Fauchelevent hits upon a desperate plan to stop this new gravedigger from burying his pal. There’s a system of cards to do with locking the cemetery gates and the guard and fines, and when he pick-pockets the gravedigger’s card, he’s able to convince him to run home and look for it before he gets fined, offering to bury the coffin himself. The gravedigger gratefully agrees and rushes off, and Fauchelevent hops into the grave to pry up the coffin lid. He freaks the heck out to find Valjean possibly dead, then freaks out again to see Valjean alive. “To see a corpse is alarming, to behold a resurrection is almost as much so.” (p.379)

They get out of the grave, though, and bury the coffin, dropping the gravediggers tools off at his place and letting him know the burial was over and that Fauchelevent had “found” his missing gate-card, so now the gravedigger thinks that Fauchelevent is the best guy ever.

The nuns and religious community also think Fauchelevent is the best guy ever, for putting the dead nun in the crypt. Goodwill just surrounds the guy. His “brother” “Ultime Fauchelevent” becomes his assistant with no problems, Cosette charms the nuns by looking like someone who will grow up to be ugly (apparently nuns love that in a kid – easier to cure them of vanity that way) and she becomes a charity pupil at the convent school. So although “Javert watched the quarter for more than a month,” (p.384) Cosette and Valjean were safely hidden. (There’s lots of sad stuff here about how easy it was for Cosette to keep her secrets from her classmates, because of the awful training in terror and silence via the Thenardiers, yikes. Poor kid.)

It was a little paradise for Valjean. Safety, the garden (he always liked working with crops), Cosette growing and laughing and spending time with him when she wasn’t in school, and a kind of salvation. You see, Valjean had started to forget the lessons of the Bishop with the silver, and to compare his actions with those of man (against whom he tended to look rather saintly) as opposed to comparing them to what God would like (against which he was scraping by.) So he was able to swing back to the side of the angels.

He compared captivity in prison to that in the convent: In prison, “they lived nameless, designated only by numbers, and converted, after a manner, into cipers themselves, with downcast eyes, with lowered voices, with shorn heads, beneath the cudgel and in disgrace.” (p.385) The nuns “also lived with shorn heads, with downcast eyes, with lowered voices, not in disgrace, but amid the scoffs of the world, not with their backs bruised with the cudgel, but with their shoulders lacerated with their discipline.” (p.385) “What had those men done? They had stolen, violated, pillaged, murdered, assassinated. They were bandits, counterfeiters, poisoners, incendiaries, murderers, parricides. What had these women done? They had done nothing whatever.” (p.386) It goes on for a while in this vein, but basically: Valjean is moved by the ‘imprisonment’ of the nuns, and the fact that their devout community has allowed him to regain his own faith and communion with God. And, yes, he’s noticed that twice now when he was in his most desperate straits, he was saved by his encounters with religious people.

“Many years passed….” (p.388) and that’s the end of Volume 2: Cosette.

Armchair Audies Category Report: Literary Fiction

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Wed, 15 May 2013 23:23:00 +0000

Time for me to get all judgemental for the Armchair Audies! Herein is my opinion about the Audies 2013, Literary Fiction category. The nominees are:
(note: if you click the "Read the review" links below, you'll get to a site with a sound sample of the book, too.)

REMEMBER BEN CLAYTON Stephen Harrigan Read by George Guidall (Recorded Books) Read the review

HEFT Liz Moore Read by Kirby Heyborne, Keith Szarabajka(Blackstone Audiobooks) Read the review

BRING UP THE BODIES Hilary Mantel Read by Simon Vance (Macmillan Audio) Read the review

THE REMAINS OF THE DAY Kazuo Ishiguro Read by Simon Prebble (Tantor Media) Read the review

THE END OF THE AFFAIR Graham Greene Read by Colin Firth (Audible, Inc.) Read the review

Last year when I participated in this fun venture for the Teens and Narration by Author categories, I set this as my criteria: The Audies site says only that the awards recognize "distinction in audiobooks and spoken word entertainment," which is a pretty broad basis for judging. Production values, narrative technique, ability to engage the listener, preferably in a way that makes listening to a title even better than reading it would be - it's all part of the package, in my opinion. Balancing that, is just that ephemeral thing: what I like.

So it's easy for me to say: NOT Remember Ben Clayton. This is the first book in, oh, ages and ages that I haven't finished. I did give it 5 discs (out of 14) before I gave up, so I listened to about as much of Guidall's narration as I did of the shorter books in this category. I can say that I wouldn't have gotten further in the print book - it wasn't the narration that failed. The book is not interesting. It tries, and it fails, to sweep me into a grand historical setting with wars and travel and artists and lonesome cowboys with mysterious kidnapped-by-Comanches pasts. (See, so many elements! And yet they just didn't speak to each other, or to me.) Guidall handled it all just fine, but he never seemed any more enthusiastic about the material than I was, and it was neither distinctive nor entertaining, if I'm using the APA's criteria.

4th place in this category, but leaps and bounds and tall buildings and maybe a couple of complete cityscapes above the Harrigan is Heft. I definitely enjoyed Moore's tale which gradually - delightfully gradually - pulls together two unlikely recluses. Kel and Arthur are both intriguing characters, and Heyborne and Szarabajka (in particular) bring a lot of life to them. There's something, though, and I'm annoyed with my inability to articulate it, that was just enough 'off' for me about the book that I opted against writing about it at the time I read it. And for months afterwards - even though it was highlighted in my spreadsheet as one that I intended to review. I think it's the fact that I heard so much buzz about Moore's novel, lots of positive noise, so I was expecting to be wowed. I wasn't wowed. I LIKE it. I'd encourage you to pick it up - I know Arthur will stick with you and alter your brainwaves a little - but I wasn't wowed. So as distinctive as Szarabajka was, and as proficient as Heyborne was, they didn't elevate the book beyond the text. I could read this in print and not always have their voices in my head, which I just can't do with the top 3 in this category.

Since I can't decide, and it's my blog and I'll do what I want, I'm declaring a 2nd place tie between The End of the Affair and The Remains of the Day. I reviewed both of these here in March, so I won't rehash too much, but I'll tell you this: YUM! Both of these older books are so well-written, and you should all read them right now. Or better yet, listen to them, because Firth and Prebble both bring such life to their narrations. Distinctive? Check! (I definitely can't read either of these without hearing the narrators' voices in my head.) Entertaining? Double check! (Firth is sneakily calm about the emotions in Greene's novel, and Prebble just revels in the reserve and fish-out-of-waterness of Ishiguro's butler.) These are both real treats to listen to, and I wouldn't have without the Armchair Audies project, so I'm very glad to be able to tell you how great they are.

And that means the winner, by another little hop over a skyscraper, is Bring Up the Bodies. (And I do NOT know what is wrong with me, not to have blathered on and on about Mantel's novels here. I blather on about them elsewhere - both of her Cromwell novels won the Booker, and I was very into them for the past couple Tournament of Books. Somehow I never mentioned them here. So, first of all, such gorgeous language, such complex but fascinating characters with tricks and twists and an amazing grasp of Cromwell's times. Mantel writes the HELL out of her subject, and I will devour the third as eagerly as I did the first two, I'm sure. And as long as Vance is the narrator, I'll devour it via audio, too. He is a magician with this material - and no, I'm not just saying that because of my long-standing devotion to the guy's voice! This narration just proves how right I am to follow Vance from genre to genre - he has that quality that makes the listener eager to hear what else he's done. The voice differentiations here were particularly well-done, each person not only distinct, but perfectly suited to the character. I was distinctively entertained, and 24 hours of listening flew by. This is the clear winner, and I do hope that the APA agrees come awards night.

By the Witness of the Martyrs

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Sun, 12 May 2013 15:19:00 +0000

Oh, goodness. Victor Hugo. Les Misérables. Look, man, I get that you have to totally pad out this thing, so that when I read it I can admire all the clever prose and gain historical context and all, but honestly? Two full books about convents?

Well, I was going to make a separate post for each book, but I just can't do it to you for these two. Sorry, Guiding Principles of the Les Mis Project, you are overridden.

Houses of God: good.
But not for living in.

Book Sixth - Le Petit-Picpus
Book Seventh - Parenthesis

Plot-wise, nothing happens. There. Done.

Okay, fine. Rue Petit-Picpus is the location of the mysterious convent on the other side of the wall that Valjean super-humanly scaled with his little charge in order to escape Javert and his minions. They're hiding in the hut of the gardener, who was the same guy that Valjean lifted a cart from long ago, saving his life. (Yes, yes, we covered all that in the last post. I'm just place-holding it because otherwise you'll forget by the time any actual plot happens.)

For whatever reason, though, Hugo sees fit to go into a lot of detail about the convent, the history of convents, worship, etc. (He claims it is "to say, without transgressing the proper bounds, things which story-tellers have never seen, and have, therefore, never described." (p.328) I have my doubts, though. I think he was just stalling.)

So - this convent in particular: super harsh, lots of rigor, no men allowed, Perpetual Adoration. The nuns "make no use of the bath, never light a fire, scourge themselves every Friday, observe the rule of silence..." (p.329) and other such uncomfortable practices. This is a fun bit: "All their teeth are yellow. No tooth-brush ever entered that convent. Brushing one's teeth is at the top of a ladder at whose bottom is the loss of one's soul." (p.330) Nice!

"These nuns are not gay, rosy, and fresh, as the daughters of other orders often are. They are pale and grave. Between 1825 and 1830 three of them went mad." (p.332) So that's clearly a fun place for a school for girls. The pupils were allowed to talk, of course, but they weren't all chitter-chatter, other than the exercise hour when they dashed around giggling and cheering the place up some. There are various anecdotes regarding visiting relatives not being allowed so much as a hand-clasp with the students, the whole 'no nuns ever seen outside the convent' rule, the personalities of the nuns.

Anyway, that's the place. Oh, and there's a good but about of the architecture of the place. And, like, the system of bells that calls everyone because of the not-talking thing. There, you know about this convent now.

But! That's not all! (Well, it's all for Book Sixth. But Book Seventh is here, too.) You see, "This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the Infinite. Man is the second." (p.345) Which is great and all, but now we have to read several pages about the whole concept of convents. (Parenthesis indeed!) And, sure, Hugo gets pretty funny here:

"Monastic communities are to the great social community what the mistletoe is to the oak, what the wart is to the human body." (p.346)
"Monasticism, such as it existed in Spain, and such as it still exists in Thibet, is a sort of phthisis for civilization. It stops life short. It simply depopulates. Claustration, castration." (p.347)
"The obstinacy of antiquated institutions in perpetuating themselves resembles the stubbornness of the rancid perfume which should claim our hair, the pretensions of the spoiled fish which should persist in being eaten, the persecution of the child's garment which should insist on clothing the man, the tenderness of corpses which should return to embrace the living." (p.348)
"'Ingrates!' says the garment, 'I protected you in inclement weather. Why will you have nothing to do with me?' 'I have just come from the deep sea,' says the fish. 'I have been a rose,' says the perfume. 'I have loved you,' says the corpse. 'I have civilized you,' says the convent. To this there is but one reply: 'In former days.'" (p.348)

So basically, convents, etc. were fine, once upon a time. But now? Not so much. On the other hand, God? We're good to go. Keep praying. Don't deny Him. ("There is, as we know, a philosophy which denies the infinite. There is also a philosophy, pathologically classified, which denies the sun; this philosophy is called blindness.")

But convents - "A convent is a contradiction. Its object, salvation; its means thereto, sacrifice. The convent is supreme egoism having for its result supreme abnegation.... The taking of the veil or the frock is a suicide paid for with eternity." (In case you were in any doubt as to his opinion.)

So, that's that. Convent: restrictive, unnecessary, possibly full of zombies, but! Talk about secluded. No men except the occasional priest no one looks at, and the gardener who wears a bell to ensure the women don't note him. And, hey, a safe school for little girls, too! I predict Valjean will find this intriguing....

Hot Summer in a Small Town

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Wed, 08 May 2013 23:51:00 +0000

Juliet in August by Dianne Warren
(Putnam / Tantor Media, 2012)
Format: Audio CDs via library (narrated by Cassandra Campbell)

From Goodreads: "Juliet, Saskatchewan, is a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of town-a dusty oasis on the edge of the Little Snake sand hills. It's easy to believe that nothing of consequence takes place there. But the hills vibrate with life, and the town's heart beats in the rich and overlapping stories of its people: the rancher afraid to accept responsibility for the land his adoptive parents left him; the bank manager grappling with a sudden understanding of his own inadequacy; a shy couple, well beyond middle age, struggling with the recognition of their feelings for each other. And somewhere, lost in the sand, a camel named Antoinette."

This is quiet, introspective, enclosed. And yet expansive and deep and true. Everything takes place in a small town in the Canadian desert of Saskatchewan, where farmers struggle with economics and nature, and townsfolk struggle with economics and business. I didn't suspect, going into it, that I would fall for everyone in Juliet and care so deeply about their moment-to-moment cares. The bank manager had me in tears. I wanted to wrap the rancher on his unexpected horse in a big hug. The mother of six stressed me out with each passing hour of her day. They all just got under my skin, and I kind of love Warren for bringing them to life for my enjoyment.

I'm also glad the Audies brought it to my attention. Although I'm not armchairaudies-ing the Solo Narration - Female category, I checked out that list (and have actually listened to 3 of them now), and was intrigued by this. I'm always up for a Campbell narration, and this is my favorite of the 3 I've heard. (Considering it beats out 2 narrations by Kellgren, to whom I'm devoted, that's saying a lot!) Campbell put me on that horse, and in the diner, and in the car with all those kids, battling a hot day with errands to run and no money to spend on them. I loved how her narrative tone shifted as Warren's focus shifted to another person's story in this book.

How To Charm Mel

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Tue, 07 May 2013 13:19:00 +0000

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
(Riverhead, 2013 - also Penguin Audio, 2013)
Format: audio CDs via library (narrated by the author)

From Goodreads: "The astonishing and riveting tale of a man’s journey from impoverished rural boy to corporate tycoon, it steals its shape from the business self-help books devoured by ambitious youths all over “rising Asia.” It follows its nameless hero to the sprawling metropolis where he begins to amass an empire built on that most fluid, and increasingly scarce, of goods: water. Yet his heart remains set on something else, on the pretty girl whose star rises along with his, their paths crossing and recrossing, a lifelong affair sparked and snuffed and sparked again by the forces that careen their fates along.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a striking slice of contemporary life at a time of crushing upheaval. Romantic without being sentimental, political without being didactic, and spiritual without being religious, it brings an unflinching gaze to the violence and hope it depicts. And it creates two unforgettable characters who find moments of transcendent intimacy in the midst of shattering change."

I've seen Hamid's name bantered about, but this is my first time reading him. Oh, he's a charmer of a writer. This short but expansive novel parodies self-help books with each new chapter, trying to keep the "you" of the supposed audience on track to filthy richness, despite obstacles such as a poor rural childhood, power and gas outages in the burgeoning business, mafia-friendly competitors, corrupt government officials, etc. And most importantly, by keeping "you" away from the alluring "pretty girl" (another very real but nameless character) who keeps popping up and stealing your thoughts from the path to success. It's all fun, and a fantastic depiction of modern life in parts of Asia.

Hamid narrated the audiobook with great flair and with his tongue firmly in his cheek (as it should be) with the self-help portion of each chapter. His energy didn't flag even when the story did a couple of times (the "pretty girl" was so much more interesting in her teens and middle age than she was in her early adulthood), which kept me engaged. It's only 5 CDs long, so if you're interested in audios but don't want to commit to something that'll take over a month of your commute, this is a good one to check out.

There, Out in the Darkness, a Fugitive Running

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Sun, 05 May 2013 04:33:00 +0000

LesMis Project time! Victor Hugo's Les Misérables is still on the hunt for misery. I'm in the middle of Volume 2: Cosette, and I tell ya, that kid is really not out of the woods yet, for all that she's been airlifted out of the Thenardier's lives by Jean Valjean.

Hey, old guy & little gal, I'm just not
sure the cops aren't going to find you.

Book Fifth - For a Black Hunt, a Mute Pack

(That's some serious hunting terminology, which tells you a little about how temporary that temporary refuge of Cosette & Valjean is.)

So, when last we saw them, Valjean & Cosette were living in an obscure rented room on the outskirts of Paris, giving alms to the poor but otherwise trying not to be noticed much. But then one of the regular wretches looked like a certain police inspector from Valjean's past, and then a guy who also seemed particularly Javert-ish moved in down the hall, so Valjean shoved all his cash (except for one coin that fell on the floor and rolled off) into his pocket, gathered Cosette, and headed off into the night.

It was a bright moon, but that's okay: "Jean Valjean could glide along close to the houses on the dark side, and yet keep watch on the light side." (p.306) Not to beat us over the head metaphorically or anything. Poor Cosette just goes along with it all quietly, thanks to having been brought up to obedience no matter how unpleasant the situation. Plus she likes Valjean so if he drags her off for a journey by foot crossing and re-crossing the streets of the city, well, such is life.

Unfortunately, no matter how many times he doubled back and circled round and practiced evasive manoeuvres, Valjean could sense he was being followed. (Apparently 19 or so years in prison makes you fairly attuned to those sorts of things.) He spotted three men a couple of times, and one of them was pretty darn reminiscent of Javert. Finally he got a glimpse of the men in full moonlight, and saw that yes, it was his old nemesis. That meant full-out concerted getting away, carrying Cosette whenever she tired, unfortunately getting a little held up paying a toll over a bridge, but still unable to fully lose his followers. "Jean Valjean shuddered like the wild beast which is recaptured." (p.309) There was little escape - he headed into a quiet street, came up against a Y shaped turning, basically got them trapped in the middle of a labyrinth with a guard stationed at the only opening he could see. "[T]o advance was to fall into this man's hands; to retreat was to fling himself into Javert's arms. Jean Valjean felt himself caught, as in a net, which was slowly contracting; he gazed heavenward in despair." (p.311)

And looking heavenward is, as I'm sure Hugo would like us to realize, generally a good idea:

A troop of handily-recruited soldiers started a dark-niche-by-hidden-corner search of the alley down which they hid. "A few minutes only separated Jean Valjean from that terrible precipice which yawned before him for the third time. And the galleys now meant not only the galleys, but Cosette lost to him forever; that is to say, a life resembling the interior of a tomb." (aww!) "There was but one thing which was possible. Jean Valjean had this peculiarity, that he carried, as one might say, two beggar's pouches: in one he kept his saintly thoughts; in the other the redoubtable talents of a convict. He rummaged in the one or the other, according to circumstances." (p.313)
"[T]hanks to his numerous escapes from the prison at Toulon, he was, as it will be remembered, a past master in the incredible art of crawling up without ladder or climbing-irons, by sheer muscular force, by leaning on the nape of his neck, his shoulders, his hips, and his knees, by helping himself on the rare projections of the stone, in the right angle of the wall...." (p.313) (Ouch!)
So he checks out the 18-foot wall, the one ledge about 5 feet up, the flat stone on top of the wall. Unfortunately the 8-year-old didn't climb all that well. "Should he abandon her? Jean Valjean did not once think of that. It was impossible to carry her. A man's whole strength is required to carry out these singular ascents. The least burden would disturb his centre of gravity and pull him downwards." (p.313) (I should think so!)
Fortunately, there's a rope nearby, used in aid of lighting the street lanterns. He dashes over and fetches it. Cosette is finally starting to get right freaked out, and asks who's out there. " 'Hush!' replied the unhappy man; 'it is Madame Thenardier.' " (p.314) (MEAN! But effective.) So he makes a kind of harness from his cravat and the rope, sticks the rope in his mouth, and in seconds is on top of the wall, then hauls Cosette up to join him, and they're out of sight mere moments before the soldiers rush into that part of the alley. Whew!

They drop to the other side of the wall and find themselves in a big rambling deserted garden with a shed in the corner, to which they retreat. "A man who is fleeing never thinks himself sufficiently hidden." (p.315) They can hear the soldiers searching on the other side of the wall. And then, weirdly, they hear some women singing religious chants somewhere, but they can't see where. It makes them kneel and confuses them. Then everything's quiet.

After a bit of wind but no human sounds, Valjean relaxes enough to notice Cosette's trembling. He asks if she's cold, but she only wants to know if Madame Thenardier is still after them. (Nice parenting skills, man. Way to terrify!) He tells her they're safe, and wraps her in his coat, and goes to scope out their surroundings.

Spooooooky!

To further the freakishness of the night, he hears a strange bell ringing periodically, and sees that it is accompanied by a light bobbing through the garden. "Where was he? Who could ever have imagined anything like that sort of sepulchre in the midst of Paris! What was this strange house? An edifice full of nocturnal mystery, calling to souls through the darkness with the voices of angels, and when they came, offering them abruptly that terrible vision; promising to open the radiant portals of heaven, and then opening the horrible gates of the tomb!" (p.317)

Cosette, bless her little heart, had crashed out, and now Valjean also had to worry about her dying from exposure. If he didn't get her inside, she might not make it. But it turned out that the bell and light were attached to some sort of man, so he pulled out some cash and bravely went up to him to offer a pile of money in exchange for shelter. And then the man said, essentially, 'oh, hey there, M. Madeline, howzit?' Which REALLY freaked Valjean out. The guy is chatting away, all, 'how'd you end up here, how weird, what's going on?' and finally Valjean asks who on earth he is.

"'Ah! pardieu, this is too much!' exclaimed the old man. 'I am the person for whom you got the place here, and this house is the one where you had me placed. What! You don't recognize me?'" (p.319)

Not the most helpful reply, though funny. A bit of moon hit the old man's face, though, and Valjean realized: it was Fauchelevent. (That would be the guy back in M. sur M. who was about to be crushed under a broken cart until super-strong 'Madeline' got under it and lifted it up, thus outing him to Javert as maybe being that super-strong missing Prisoner 24601.) So Providence is still on Jean Valjean's side, and sent him to the very convent where Fauchelevent was working (and wearing the bell so the women in the convent could avoid his boy cooties.) Because of Valjean's unacceptable gender, Fauchelevent couldn't take them into the convent, but he did put them in his own cottage, where Cosette warmed up and started breathing normally and generally came back from the brink of harm.

Old gardener: "Will you take 20?"

(Once in the gardener's house, "Fauchelevent had removed the bell and kneecap, which now hung on a
nail beside a vintage basket that adorned the wall." (p.321) I giggled a little at the idea of this old gardener going to some flea market in search of chic vintage accessories for his cottage.)

So, now that Valjean & Cosette are at least temporarily safe & warm, we get to find out how Javert got on their scent. When Valjean first escaped:

Looks pretty maelstrom-y to me!

"[T]he police had supposed that he had betaken himself to Paris. Paris is a maelstrom where everything is lost, and everything disappears in this belly of the world, as in the belly of the sea. No forest hides a man as does that crowd. Fugitives of every sort know this. They go to Paris as to an abyss; there are gulfs which save. The police know it also, and it is in Paris that they seek what they have lost elsewhere." (p.321)
So Javert had relocated to Paris, where the cops found him "useful in divers and, though the word may seem strange for such services, honorable manners." (p.321) Eventually Valjean was recaptured and then reported dead after diving off the Orion, and he wasn't on Javert's radar. "[T]he wolf of to-day causes these dogs who are always on the chase to forget the wolf of yesterday...." (p.321)
However, Javert did overhear talk about "the abduction of a child, which had taken place, under peculiar circumstances, as it was said, in the commune of Montfermeil." (p.321) And the child was named Cosette, and was the daughter of a dead woman named Fantine. So that rang a bell or two. Javert headed to Montfermeil, but didn't really get anywhere. (Thenardier had reported the abduction since "the disappearance of the Lark had created a sensation in the village." (p.322) - and way to go, peeps of Montfermeil, letting the poor kid get abused under your noses every day but saying nothing until she disappears. But Thenardier quickly realized that going on about it would mean people asking uncomfortable questions like, 'so how'd you pay off that 1500 franc debt, anyway?' etc., and changed his story to one of the kid going off with her kindly grandfather.)
Javert forgot about Valjean again, until he heard about this "mendicant who gives alms" over in Saint-Medard, who was a man of mystery. A man of mystery who lived with an 8-year-old girl from Montfermeil! Interesting.... So Javert switched places with the beggar by the church well (who happened to be a police informant) and waited for the "mendicant" to give him alms. "[T]he shock which Jean Valjean received on recognizing Javert was equal to the one received by Javert when he thought he recognized Jean Valjean." (p.323)
He wasn't quite sure - it was a darkish night - "and when in doubt, Javert, the man of scruples, never laid a finger on any one's collar." (p.323) So he followed him home, interrogated the portress, got himself a room, tried unsuccessfully to spy on his new neighbors, but was there when the portress heard that coin rolling across the floor as Valjean packed up to leave. She warned Javert, who hopped to it, and was ready to start following the escapees as they left the hovel.

He had his crew following, but he didn't tell them exactly what was up - it would be pretty

Note: not historically accurate,
scandal-sheet-wise. But you get
the idea.

embarrassing to be wrong, plus satisfyingly theatrical to be all 'ta da!' at the end of the chase - and since the papers would go to town with a headline like, "COPS TACKLE INNOCENT GRANDDAD OUT FOR A MIDNIGHT STROLL," he had to make sure of his facts.

At one point in the chase, Valjean was lit up in the moonlight, and then Javert was sure of the chase. He wanted no room for error, so he recruited the passing soldiers, and knew - just knew - there was no way 24601 would escape him this time. He ensured that the alley search would be very thorough. Unfortunately, that meant Valjean had time to escape via feats of strength and daring-do. "When [Javert] reached the centre of the web he found the fly no longer there. His exasperation can be imagined." (p.325) To put it mildly, I'm sure.

And thus ends this book. I'm officially 1/3 of the way through this novel, and just over 1/3 of the way through this year. Maybe I'll meet the "read it all in 2013" goal after all! Or maybe my fly will escape, too. Stay tuned!

Mommy, Tell Me a Story

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 21:08:00 +0000

My seventeen-year-old asked me to tell him a story. This was the best I could come up with based on the excitement of my day:

So many packing lists!

Once there was a Mel who was at work.

She had many many bills to match up with their packing lists. Some bills and packing lists matched up perfectly. Some packing lists had no bills, and some bills had no packing lists. Those required separate investigation.

Not 12! 11!

But one particular bill had a packing list. The problem was, they

didn't match. The bill was for 12 pieces of glass, but the packing list said Mel's company had only received 11 pieces of glass.

Invoiced sizes - one of
these things is not like
the other!

Packing list sizes

Plus, the bill said 4 of the pieces were 34" x 21.75", but the packing list said they were only 31.125" x 21.75"!

Mel had to make a phone call.

She called the vendor, who said Mel would have to talk to the person in Accounts about it. But the Accounts woman was out to lunch. They asked if Mel could call back in 15 minutes.

Mel said okay.

Mel's Phone of Many Buttons

She waited and waited, and finally the 15 minutes were over, so she called back. But the Accounts woman was on another call.

The vendor asked Mel if she would leave a message for the Accounts woman, and Mel said okay.

So Mel left a message, quoting the invoice number and explaining that she needed to resolve a discrepancy with the packing list. The vendor said that the Accounts woman would call back that afternoon.

All the bills waiting to be
posted, missing their
comrade from the
glass vendor

But... she didn't.

So Mel still can't post the bill on the accounting system, which means the vendor is in danger of not getting paid for this bill on time. Oh, dear!

To Be Continued....

Losing Grace, Finding Comfort with Honor Bright

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 04:20:00 +0000

The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier
(E.P. Dutton & Penguin Audio, 2013)
Format: Audio CDs via library (narrated by Kate Reading)

From Goodreads: "Tracy Chevalier’s newest historical saga introduces Honor Bright, a modest English Quaker who moves to Ohio in 1850, only to find herself alienated and alone in a strange land. Fleeing personal disappointment, she is forced by family tragedy to rely on strangers in a harsh, unfamiliar landscape.

In her new home Honor discovers that principles count for little, even within a religious community meant to be committed to human equality.

However, drawn into the clandestine activities of the Underground Railroad, Honor befriends two surprising women who embody the remarkable power of defiance. Eventually she must decide if she too can act on what she believes in, whatever the personal costs."

I'm continuing the tour of "hey, Mel & Rob tromped over the same ground as this writer" with Chevalier's latest novel. (She was in the MA class a year behind me. Therefore, I, too, should have many best-selling & movies-adapted novels to my name. Alas. But, look, I have a blog!) This time, she's gone to her other collegiate stomping ground, Oberlin, and its history as a transit point of the Underground Railroad.

Honor Bright is just flat-out a wonderful character. Chevalier has superb skill at creating women who are interesting - smart, observant, out-of-place but determined despite the odds, willing to learn from their mistakes and see their flaws. And this is a complex world, ripe with opportunities for misstep - Honor has found herself essentially alone within a small Friends community just outside Oberlin, Ohio. Her family is all back in England, where at most she can hope to receive news that is only a couple of months out of date, and her dire seasickness on the crossing prohibits a simple return to them. But even more lonesome than Honor are the runaway slaves she encounters, trying to make it to Canada before new, harsher Fugitive Slave Laws go into effect. She befriends two more wonderful women - milliner Belle Mills, and freewoman Mrs. Reed - and I loved how, although neither was Quaker and both relationships were limited by the secrets they all kept, the three communed in a way over needlecraft. Honor keeps so much internal, but when her sewing resonates with that of another skilled seamstress, it allows them a sort of exchange of spirit, if not of words. Of course, sometimes the gist of that conversation is, "Honor Bright, you may be something special, but that doesn't mean that you understand this new land of yours. Sit back and learn before you judge too much, okay?"

I dove into this in audio, and while I know I'd have embraced it regardless, Reading's narration was spot-on. Her voices - particularly Belle and her slave-hunter brother Donovan - captured the spirit of each character, and whenever Honor mused on her connections to others, how she felt about that person was abundantly clear in Reading's tone.

Aren't Any Floors for Me to Sweep

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:36:00 +0000

Look at me, racing along on the Les Mis Project. This next section of Volume 2: Cosette in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables was a brief interlude. A little breath taken between the drama of Valjean retreiving Cosette from the Thenardiers, and... well, whatever comes next. More drama, indubitably.

This is what I like: a true to text
scene from the book that matches
the part I'm posting about.

Book Fourth - The Gorbeau Hovel

Scene: Outskirts of Paris. Not the city, not a town, just an area with some buildings and some history. A house (numbered both 50 and 52, to confuse everyone) that looks like a shack, but is large inside. It used to be the residence of a lawer named Gorbeau, so that's the name that sticks with it. A dilapidated door and window huddle along the street, mismatched but both grim. "This door with an unclean, and this window with an honest though dilapidated air, thus beheld on the same house, produced the effect of two incomplete beggars walking side by side, with different miens beneath the same rags, the one having always been a mendicant, and the other having always been a gentleman." (p.296)

There are plenty of details about this house. An entire chapter's worth. Hugo deploys some more fun language:

"As a whole, it was not over a hundred years old. A hundred years is youth in a church and age in a house. It seems as though man's lodging partook of his ephemeral character, and God's house of his eternity." (p.296)
"Collectors of petty details, who become herbalists of anecdotes, and prick slippery dates into their memories with a pin...." (p.296) (Herbalist of Anecdotes is totally my new tumblr name.)
It's a dismal area. "As far as the eye could see, one could perceive nothing but the abattoirs, the city wall, and the fronts of a few factories, resembling barracks of monasteries; everywhere about stood hovels, rubbish, ancient walls blackened like cerecloths, new white walls like winding-sheets; everywhere parallel rows of trees, building erected on a line, flat constructions, long, cold rows, and the melancholy sadness of right angles." (p.298)
"Nothing oppresses the heart like symmetry. It is because symmetry is ennui, and ennui is at the very foundation of grief. Despair yawns. Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored." (p.298)

Anyhow, this hovel, not surprisingly, is the nowhere haven that Valjean retreats to with Cosette. They have a

room, warm and safe, and Cosette sleeps a long, healing sleep, give or take an instinctive startle response (jumping up, searching for her broom) when there was a noise in the street. She wakes, accepts her new lot in life, plays with her doll, and is content. As is Valjean:

"Some new thing had come into his soul. Jean Vlajean had never loved anything; for twenty-five years he had been alone in the world. He had never been father, lover, husband, friend. In the prison he had been vicious, gloomy, chaste, ignorant, and shy." (p.300)
"When he saw Cosette, when he had taken possession of her, carried her off, and delivered her, he felt his heart move within him." (p.300)
"It was the second white apparition which he had encountered. The Bishop had caused the dawn of virtue to rise on his horizon; Cosette caused the dawn of love to rise." (p.300)
"Nature, a difference of fifty years, had set a profound gulf between Jean Valjean and Cosette; destiny filled in this gulf. Destiny suddenly united and wedded with its irresistible power these two uprooted existences, differing in age, alike in sorrow. One, in fact, completed the other. Cosette's instinct sought a father, as Jean Valjean's instinct sought a child." (p.300)

So, happy families time. They didn't do a whole lot - stayed in, let the portress take care of shopping, took the occasional walk. He taught her to read, and "remembered that it was with the idea of doing evil that he had learned to read in prison. This idea had ended in teaching a child to read. Then the ex-convict smiled with the pensive smile of the angels." (p.301) The theory is that, if not for Cosette, that re-incarceration would have undone all the good that the Bishop had done for him, and Valjean would have ended up even more of a bitter and angry wretch than he'd been after his first 19-year stint. After all, it was by doing good (saving Champmathieu from hanging in his place) that he'd been thrown back in prison. Plus, he'd seen Fantine's slow and miserable death, which didn't help his outlook any. But then he found Cosette. "He protected her, and she strengthened him. Thanks to him, she could walk through life; thanks to her, he could continue in virtue. He was that child's stay, and she was his prop. Oh, unfathomable and divine mystery of the balances of destiny!" (p.302)

On their walks around the neighborhood, since Valjean was still wearing the poor old coat that the Thenardiers had so disparaged, sometimes people offered him a sou, assuming he was poor. He always accepted kindly. And then, of course, he gave more than was given to him to actual beggars. "This had its disadvantages. He began to be known in the neighborhood under the name of the beggar who gives alms." (p.302)

His portress was a suspicious sort, and spied on him one day as he removed a 1000 franc note from the lining of his coat. He asked her to change it, claiming it was his quarterly income, but it didn't stop her from gossiping with the neighbors. She also took the opportunity to feel the lining of his coat one day, and was a little taken aback by how many bank notes there seemed to be within."She also noticed that there were all sorts of things in the pockets. Not only the needles, thread, and scissors which she had seen, but a big pocket-book, a very large knife, and - a suspicious circumstance - several wigs of various colors. Each pocket of this coat had the air of being in a manner provided against unexpected accidents." (p.303)

Now some drama: there was a beggar who sat by a well near Valjean's church, and Valjean gave him coins regularly. One evening as he handed over the alms, the beggar looked up at him and Valjean freaked the heck out. He didn't say anything, but even though he looked at him carefully the next day and was reassured it was the same guy as usual, the terrible feeling stuck with him that it had been, that once, his old enemy Javert under those rags.

Later in the week, as he and Cosette were reading together, Valjean heard a strange, heavy footfall in the corridor. He hushed Cosette and sent her to bed, then hunkered down for the night with his back to the door, because he could tell someone was at the keyhole, looking in and listening. (He did briefly think it could be the portress, because "there is nothing which so strongly resembles the step of a man as that of an old woman." (p.304))

In the morning he heard the footfalls approaching again, and looked out the keyhole to figure if it was an old woman or a booted man freaking him out. It was a man. He couldn't see very well, but "the formidable neck and shoulders belonged to Javert." (p.305) The portress claimed it was just some random guy named Dumont or something, who was renting a room down the hall. No big deal. But Valjean had the heebie-jeebies good now, and that evening he collected his cash, scoped out the street, took Cosette by the hand, and walked out.

I presume they're bugging out of town, but we shall see in the next exciting installment!

Thank You Both for Cosette / It Won't Take You Too Long to Forget

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:12:00 +0000

So, I'm still a month behind schedule in my Les Mis Project (that would be my madcap scheme to read Victor Hugo's Les Misérables over the course of a year, and post about it here.) But now that I'm past some of the introductory stuff that the musical, I suppose, conveys via music, I'm looking at the plot of the book v. that of the musical, and I see that the action of this section (into the second half of Volume 2: Cosette) covers the events of the 10th and 11th songs on my London Cast Album (which has 30 songs total.) In other words, I'm about 30% of the way through the novel, and much the same with the novel. I think this means several long pages of historical context in my future.

Aw! Look at poor little Lark.
What that girl needs is a
savior - any volunteers?

But, to action! Book Third - Accomplishment of the Promise Made to the Dead Woman

While we've been contemplating Waterloo and forest-dwelling devils and large ships at harbor, our Cosette has been huddled under a table at the Thenardier's inn at Montfermeil. When she's not getting up first thing to sweep the streets, changing linens for the travelers, taking care of their horses, etc. And always watching for the next, inevitable torrent of abuse from Madame Thenardier.

Now, one of the deals with Montfermeil is that there isn't a lot of water flowing through the town, so if you run out, or the enterprising guy who gets up early to fetch it and sell it door-to-door (what a business opportunity!) is done for the day, you have to go through the deep, dark woods to the spring to get it yourself. And obviously, running the inn, the Thenardiers go through a lot of water. Even though the bucket is just about as big as eight-year-old Cosette herself, she's the one who has to fetch it. And Cosette is terrified of the dark.

But before we get more into that, Hugo wants us to get a clearer picture of the delightful Thenardier couple:

"Our readers have possibly preserved some recollection of this Thenardier woman, ever since her first appearance, - tall, blond, red, fat, angular, square, enormous, and agile...." (p.261)
"Cosette was her only servant; a mouse in the service of an elephant." (p.261)
"[T]he idea would never have occurred to any one to say of her, 'That is a woman.' This Thenardier female was like the product of a wench engrafted on a fishwife. When one heard her speak, one said, 'That is a gendarme'; when one saw her drink, one said, 'That is a carter'; when one saw her handle Cosette, one said, 'That is the hangman.' One of her teeth projected when her face was in repose." (p.261) (A Wench Engrafted on a Fishwife is totally going to be the title of my poetry chapbook.)
"Thenardier was a small, thin, pale, angular, bony, feeble man, who had a sickly air and who was wonderfully healthy.... He had the glance of a pole-cat and the bearing of a man of letters." (p.261)
"As for his prowess at Waterloo, the reader is already acquainted with that. It will be perceived that he exaggerated it a trifle." (p.262)
"Every new-comer who entered the tavern said, on catching sight of Madame Thenardier, 'There is the master of the house.' A mistake. She was not even the mistress. The husband was both master and mistress. She worked; he created. He directed everything by a sort of invisible and constant magnetic action. A word was sufficient for him, sometimes a sign; the mastodon obeyed." (p.263) (Side note: never realized that mastodon had two 'o's in it before. Hugo = educational!)
"This woman was a formidable creature who loved no one except her children, and who did not fear any one except her husband. She was a mother because he was mammiferous. But her maternity stopped short with her daughters, and, as we shall see, did not extend to boys. The man had but one thought, - how to enrich himself." (p.263) (Mammiferous! - my forthcoming bawdy musical.)

There's some delightful moments when Thenardier explains his philosophy of inn-keeping to his wife, which the Master of the House lyrics cover more than perfectly (the only deviation coming from anything that suggests Madame is anything but obedient to her husband.)

The Thenardier daughters dressed prettily and played with their toys and dolls. And "Cosette ran up stairs and down, washed, swept, rubbed, dusted, ran, fluttered about, panted, moved heavy articles, and weak as she was, did the coarse work." (p.264) It was Christmas-time, and some vendors had set up stalls up and down the town to sell gift items, and there was a toy shop right outside the Thenardier tavern. In the best tradition of shop-keepers everywhere, a gorgeous huge doll was prominently displayed for all to covet, and covet those girls all did.

One dark and moonless night, a traveler needed water for his horse, and the inn was out. Madame, of course, sent Cosette, who reluctantly started out, but was arrested by the vision of the big doll. "With the sad and innocent sagacity of childhood, Cosette measured the abyss which separated her from that doll." (p.266) Madame saw her and yelled, so she scampered off as well as an undernourished eight-year-old burdened by a huge wood bucket can scamper. After fifteen minutes of moving further and further from the lights of town, Cosette stood at the edge of the dark woods through which lay the spring.

"She set her bucket on the ground, thrust her hand into her hair, and began slowly to scratch her head, - a gesture peculiar to children when terrified and undecided what to do." (p.267) Much as she wanted to avoid the dark forbidding trees, she was more scared of Madame Thenardier. "What was she to do? What was to become of her? Where was she to go? In front of her was the spectre of the Thenardier; behind her all the phantoms of the night and of the forest. It was before the Thenardier that she recoiled." (p.267)

Cosette headed into the woods, and found the spring. Of course, when the bucket was full, it weighed
way more, plus - winter. Very cold water, slipping and splashing out of the pail with every struggling step. No stockings, just some wood shoes, so a little girl with cold wet feet, water spilling down her dress, taking ages to head back to the lights of town. Pathos, people. Pathos.

But just as she cries piteously out to God, the bucket stops weighing so much. A giant hand has reached out of the darkness and taken hold of the handle. Some big dark stranger. "This man, without uttering a word, had seized the handle of the bucket which she was carrying. / There are instincts for all the encounters of life. / The child was not afraid." (p.270)

Hugo is coy a little here, describing this stranger. Dressed poorly but with something wealthy about his carriage and expression. Carrying a cudgel-like walking stick, a little bundle of clothes, and not much else. We get a little history of this stranger evading some guards, entering the forest, examining certain trees and arrangements of stones, leaving the woods, and encountering Cosette. Once they walk a little in silence, they get to chatting, and of course he learns that she's not the most well-cared for of children, that she serves the inn-keepers, and that her name is Cosette. Stranger-man tags along to the inn, where he is well-received, once his money makes an appearance. He settles in with a drink to observe the life in the public rooms, where Cosette had gone to sit under a table and knit stockings for the Thenardier daughters. (They, meanwhile, sit nearby playing with a doll, ignoring her.) This is what Stranger-man sees in her:

"Her entire clothing was but a rag which would have inspired pity in summer, and which inspired horror in winter. All she had on was hole-ridden linen, not a scrap of woolen. Her skin was visible here and there and everywhere black and blue spots could be descried, which marked the placed where the Thenardier woman had touched her. Her naked legs were thin and red. The hollows in her neck were enough to make one weep. The child's whole person, her mien, her attitude, the sound of her voice, the intervals which she allowed to elapse between one word and the next, her glance, her silence, her slightest gesture, expressed and betrayed one solo idea, - fear." (p.276)

Eventually the Stranger-man pays Thenardier for Cosette's time for the night, so she can stop knitting and start playing. Her only toy is a tiny dagger, which she wraps in a scrap of cloth to pretend it's a doll. When the daughters get distracted, she sneaks over to play with their doll, until she's caught and screeched at. Observing the fracas, Stranger-man heads out and returns shortly with the magnificent doll from the stall, and hands it to Cosette. She just stares at it, and at him, and retreats under the table. "She no longer cried; she no longer wept; she had the appearance of no longer daring to breathe." (p.282)

The Thenardiers can't figure this guy out. He only eats bread and cheese and accepted a 'room' in the stable, but he pays up front and buys an extravagant doll. Thenardier is all about making money (especially as he has a giant 1500 franc debt looming over him), so he plays nice and encourages Cosette to say thanks and go off and play. Cosette will only do so once his wife grants permission (pathos!) but eventually the kids are all abed and the inn-keepers open up their finest room for Stranger-man. (They call it 'reposing' because "a chamber where one sleeps costs twenty sous; a chamber in which one reposes costs twenty francs." (p.284))

Stranger-man doesn't 'repose' right away - he heads down the hall and sees that Cosette is sleeping on a dirty pile of straw in a space under the stairs. The daughters, of course, are in lovely twin beds in their lovely room. They, along with Cosette, had put shoes on the hearth, because it was Christmas Eve and the good fairy drops cash in children's shoes that night. The 'fairy' had already visited, so the daughters were all set, but Cosette's wooden shoe was, of course, empty. Stranger-man took care of that, with a giant gold coin. Then, to bed.

In the morning, the Thenardiers were chuckling over the outrageous bill for the lodging they were going to give Stranger-man, and complaining about Cosette. He showed up and offered to take her away, and also didn't gripe about the bill. Thenardier wasted no time expressing various reservations about how he'd miss the darling little tyke and how even though she's always sick and costing him cash, he just adores her like his own kids, and Stranger-man just eyes him throughout. Thenardier points out that he'd feel better if he saw Stranger-man's passport and knew where Cosette was going, so he could check in on her periodically, but Stranger-man doesn't fall for that, and lets him know that once they leave, Thenardier would never see them again.

Now, Stranger-man had been observing a lot about the inn-keeper and his family, but he wasn't the only one with open eyes. "While drinking with the carters, smoking, and singing coarse songs on the preceding evening, [Thenardier] had devoted the whole of the time to observing the stranger, watching him like a cat, and studying him like a mathematician." (p.289) So Thenardier has a good inkling about how to handle Stranger-man, and finally puts his cards on the table: he needs 1500 francs to pay this
debt of his. And he got it.

Stranger-man gives Cosette a set of mourning clothes he'd carried in his little bundle, and with that and the giant doll in hand, they leave. It doesn't take long for Thenardier to realize he could have probably gotten more out of Stranger-man, so he tracks them down as they sit in a secluded spot off the road. He says he's taking back Cosette, because he'd miss her too much. Plus, he'd promised Fantine to take care of her, so what proof did he have that Stranger-man really was legit? Stranger-man took out his wallet, and Thenardier was giddy about the inevitable payoff, but instead Stranger-man produced a letter from Fantine instructing Thenardier to hand Cosette over to the bearer. Ha! Take that, Thenardier!

Thenardier was briefly inclined to attack Stranger-man for his clearly abundant stores of cash, but Stranger-man made it clear, via body-language with his cudgel/cane, that it wouldn't be wise. He went back to his tavern.

Now, finally Hugo decides to let us in on this giant secret: "Jean Valjean was not dead." (p.294) (Duh.) After he "fell" from the Orion while rescuing the topman, he swam under the ship and found a boat to hide in until that night, whereupon he made his way to shore and got himself clothed in civvies. A little sneaky travel through France got him to Montfermeil and Cosette. And once he had her, he took her hand and they walked off into a new life together.

In Russia, Books Read (to) You

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 04:41:00 +0000

The House of Special Purpose by John Boyne
(Blackstone Audio, 2013)
Format: Audio download via AudiobookJukebox.com's review program (narrated by Stefan Rudnicki)

From Goodreads: "From the author of The Absolutist, a propulsive novel of the Russian Revolution and the fate of the Romanovs.

Part love story, part historical epic, part tragedy, The House of Special Purpose illuminates an empire at the end of its reign. Eighty-year-old Georgy Jachmenev is haunted by his past—a past of death, suffering, and scandal that will stay with him until the end of his days. Living in England with his beloved wife, Zoya, Georgy prepares to make one final journey back to the Russia he once knew and loved, the Russia that both destroyed and defined him. As Georgy remembers days gone by, we are transported to St. Petersburg, to the Winter Palace of the czar, in the early twentieth century—a time of change, threat, and bloody revolution. As Georgy overturns the most painful stone of all, we uncover the story of the house of special purpose."

What? Another Boyne audiobook? Didn't I just do one of those? Yep, and I was pretty taken with it, so when I got the chance to listen to this one, I grabbed it. And what did I say about Boyne last time? He loves to explore people in crisis and identity and the difficulty of changing your role in the world. And history. And boy, howdy, does he do it this time, too. This time, his subjects are the Romanovs and WWI and an unassuming kid named Georgy who ends up leading, for a time, a pretty extraordinary life.

That extraordinary time - working in the Winter Palace as guard/companion to young hemophiliac Tzarevich Alexei while still a teen himself - marked Georgy for the next five or six decades as he and his wife make a life together in Paris and later in London, where he worked for years for the British Library. (This is what we call a clue to the fact that we should side with this guy. He delves into books.) And he's pretty great - intuitive, intelligent, devoted, often swept along but never without trying to analyze his place in the flood. His wife is more of a cipher, but since Georgy loves her, that's fine. Their grandson is the most dynamic character, a spark who weaves in and out of the narrative whenever it's in the present day.

I enjoyed the atmosphere Boyne presented of life in Russia a century ago - it is a world both strange and familiar. I mean, I had a few tidbits in my brain about the Romanov dynasty, the connections to other European royalty, the mysterious princess Anastasia, that weird Rasputin dude. But it isn't something I've read a lot about, and I liked the way Boyne drew them.

Still, with all the good, there was something just a little distancing me from this book. It didn't fully make sense to me until the last line, at which point I thought, "Oh, he just wanted to write that line, so he constructed a novel to support it." Which isn't the worst way for an author to envision a book, but the underlayers in this case weren't quite stable enough. I wish there'd been more to Zoya besides constant tragedy, and that some of the subplots that were clearly intended to provide emotional resonance had been fleshier.

The audio - well, one thing for sure: Rudnicki has a lovely Russian-accented baritone. Unfortunately it was too slowly paced for me - I didn't relish the idea of listening to that deliberate hitting of accents for 15 hours, so I opted for 1.5x speed playback, which was better. (Still slow, though.) His females were all pretty much the same voice, and there wasn't a lot of differentiation between Georgy's narrative and his dialogue, which is one of my audiobook pet peeves. It's not so awful or anything, but it wasn't the kind of narration I was itching to get back to, and combined with a similarly non-itchy book, this wasn't the biggest of successes for me. Alas.

Pardon Me While I Gush

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 23:34:00 +0000

Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi
(Penguin, 2013)
Format: library book

From Goodreads: "Kweku Sai is dead. A renowned surgeon and failed husband, he succumbs suddenly at dawn outside his home in suburban Accra. The news of Kweku’s death sends a ripple around the world, bringing together the family he abandoned years before. Ghana Must Go is their story. Electric, exhilarating, beautifully crafted, Ghana Must Go is a testament to the transformative power of unconditional love, from a debut novelist of extraordinary talent.

Moving with great elegance through time and place, Ghana Must Gocharts the Sais’ circuitous journey to one another. In the wake of Kweku’s death, his children gather in Ghana at their enigmatic mother’s new home. The eldest son and his wife; the mysterious, beautiful twins; the baby sister, now a young woman: each carries secrets of his own. What is revealed in their coming together is the story of how they came apart: the hearts broken, the lies told, the crimes committed in the name of love. Splintered, alone, each navigates his pain, believing that what has been lost can never be recovered—until, in Ghana, a new way forward, a new family, begins to emerge."

You guys. I literally - like, actually, physically, inexplicably - had to stop myself from taking a bite of this book. My desire to devour it, to internalize it and at the same time, to curl up in it and be surrounded by it, was that strong.

So, Kweku, the father of four, brilliant surgeon, loving husband, and then - none of those things, abandoning the roles without actually leaving them behind in his heart. Sixteen years after he left Boston and his family behind, he dies suddenly, leaving his ex-wife and children with too many things unsaid. They have continents of mis- and non-communication within them, for a group that started out so solidly as a nuclear family - but Kweku's leaving burned deep scars into them all.

But, whatever. A plot device - this long-delayed bringing back together of once-close family members, complete with sad revelations and falling into old patterns and tears (and tears) and joinings. It's good stuff, undoubtedly, and Selasi balances each of the five survivors with delicacy, weaving their stories just tightly enough to hold while still seeing their individual, lovely shades.

The magic is in the writing. Follow the ways color-attuned and monochromatic sensibilities speak about each character. Delve into the truths about identity and self-perception and heritage. Reel with the truths about your own reactions to universal v. individual tragedies (Fola, the ex-wife, has a brief but powerful moment of recall about the death of her father, and her anger that it is so easy - 'another African dying in ethnic conflict' - to dismiss as rote where another death would have brought her true sympathy and kept the individuality of her father intact.) Admire the use of dialogue and the silences within dialogue. See the emotions transparent in the empathic guts of the Sai family. Discover the terrifying beauty of Selasi's writing, and after you've read it and re-read it, come back and tell me how damn right I am.

(But if it's a library book, don't actually chew on the novel. It's bad form.)

And When She Was Bad....

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 05:01:00 +0000

And When She Was Good by Laura Lippman
(Harper Audio, 2012)
Format: audio CDs via library (narrated by Linda Emond)

From Goodreads: "Heloise considers it a blessing to be a person who seldom attracts attention. In her suburb, she's just a mom, the young widow with the forgettable job, who somehow never misses a soccer game. In the state capital, she's the redheaded lobbyist with a good cause and a mediocre track record. But in discreet hotel rooms throughout the area, she's the woman of your dreams - if you can afford the hourly fee.

For more than a decade, Heloise believed she was safe, managing to keep up this rigidly compartmentalized life. But her secret life is under siege. One county over, another so-called suburban madam has been found dead in her car, an apparent suicide. As forty looms and her son enters adolescence, Heloise is facing a mid-life crisis with much higher stakes than most will ever know. With no formal education, no real family or friends, Heloise has to remake her life - again. Disappearing will be the easy part. The trick is living long enough to start a new life."
This is the first stand-alone Lippman I've read, though I'm totally caught up with her Tess Monaghan detective series. Her writing, her Baltimore, have grown so steadily on me - I'm always slightly afraid that I'm going to end up deeper into the dark underbelly of life than I want, but somehow she balances it just right. Serious stuff, often thought-provoking, but lightly shaped and never far from intelligence and humor.

Heloise isn't an immediately likable character. Very bristly, defensive about her life (her public life and her very very private career life), and full of actions even she questions. But Lippman layers on more and more about Heloise, and I found myself way more in her shoes than I'd thought possible. And I was caught up in the slow wrapping of Heloise in binds that are going to make it vital and also terrifying for her to take action to change her life in ways she can't imagine. I just hoped she'd manage to do it in time.

Emond is a skilled narrator, and I always feel I can just relax when she's reading the book. (Is that a strange thing to look for? It may sound like it, but it's pretty great to know there are narrators you can trust to just get out of the way, and let the text speak for itself.) She's definitely alert to the text she's reading - pacing, inflection, voices all strong - but she manages it in a way that I can forget, audio to audio, what she herself sounds like. And yet, when I read a Reichs or a Lippman on paper/ebook, her voice has lurked in my head. It's just in a far quieter way than with such narrators as, say, Kellgren or Porter or (you knew I'd say it) Vance. This particular audiobook was nominated for an Audie in the Mystery category, which I'm listening to for the Armchair Audies project. I have no qualms about it being nominated, but am not yet sure how it will stack up against a strong field.

Keeping Watch in the Night

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 04:48:00 +0000

Still waiting for the
waif named in this
volume to show up....

Book Second - The Ship Orion of Volume 2: Cosette in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, here I go. The Les Mis Project is unwieldy and getting a little out of my control, but I'm determined to wrestle it into leg irons. Plus, I'm 26% into the book and still having fun.

It watches over me, is why.

First off, you should know that Orion is my favorite constellation. Not for any textual or contextual reason. Just so you know. I realize I'm probably far from alone in this - it's like saying Pride and Prejudice is my favorite Austen. Doesn't make it less true.

Anyway, we quickly learn that Valjean's imprisoned again, though Hugo feels that "the reader will be grateful to us if we pass rapidly over the sad details." (p.250) Suffice to say that there was a certain amount of scandal in the newspapers. If it'd happened now, #24601 would be trending.

Meanwhile, the town of M. sur M. We remember, of course, that as citizen, businessman, and mayor, Valjean had been some sort of paragon. Since his capture:

"...everything was gone on a small scale, instead of on a grand scale; for lucre instead of the general good. There was no longer a centre; everywhere there was competition and animosity. M. Madeline had reigned over all and directed all. No sooner had he fallen, than each pulled things to himself; the spirit of combat succeeded to the spirit of organization, bitterness to coordination, hatred of one another to the benevolence of the founder towards all; the threads which M. Madeline had set were tangled and broken, the methods were adulterated, the products were debased, confidence was killed; the market diminished, for lack of orders; salaries were reduced, the workshops stood still, bankruptcy arrived. And then there was nothing more for the poor. All had vanished." (p.251)

Another random plot point: people 'round those parts thought the devil was fond of burying treasure in

the woods. Only problem being that if you stopped him at it, or dug it up, or even looked for it, you were basically signing your death warrant. Still, this road-laborer, Boulatruelle, had taken, in the days preceding Valjean's re-incarceration, to wandering the woods in the evening, shovel in hand. Some folks laughed at him, some looked askance, but some - and our old pal Thenardier was one of them - thought the guy might have a non-demon-based reason for his actions.

Thenardier and the schoolmaster started plying Boulatruelle with wine and prying bits of info out of him. Eventually they deduced that Boulatruelle had seen an old acquaintance from the galleys (for Boulatrelle is yet another ex-con in this narrative) carrying a coffer into the woods along with some tools. "Now, the coffer was too small to contain a body; therefore it contained money." (p.254) But no matter where he looked, Boulatruelle couldn't find the thing.

Now we jump again, this time to the ship. Orion had a long history, blah blah blah. More stuff about wars, political unrest, Bourbons, etc. I'm fascinated, truly. Whatever. The ship was at sea, now for whatever reason it's in the port at Toulon. (That's the same town where Valjean's galley ship was, back when he was #24601. He's #9430 now, which is way more boring and wouldn't trend at all.) I do like Hugo's musings about the awesomeness of ships:

"A ship of the line is one of the most magnificent combinations of the genius of man with the powers of nature. / A ship of the line is composed, at the same time, of the heaviest and the lightest of possible matter, for it deals at one and the same time with three forms of substance,-solid, liquid, and fluid,-and it must do battle with all three. It has eleven claws of iron with which to seize the granite on the bottom of the sea, and more wings and more antennae than winged insects, to catch the wind in the clouds. Its breath pours out through its hundred and twenty cannons as through enormous trumpets, and replies proudly to the thunder. The ocean seeks to lead it astray in the alarming sameness of the billows, but the vessel has its soul, its compass, which counsels it and always shows it the north. In the blackest of nights, its lanterns supply the place of the starts. Thus, against the wind, it has its cordage and its canvas; against the water, wood; against the rocks, its iron, brass, and lead; against the shadows, its light; against immensity, a needle." (p.256)

So it's a pretty impressive sight. Big and full of mysterious power and stories yet to be told. When it came to port, crowds of people came out just to watch the Orion sitting there. Like a reality show. And

The main topsail yardarm is that top crossbeam
on the middle spar, so: really, really high up.

this time, something truly exciting happened! The topman was up in the main-top-sail's upper corner, when he lost his balance and ended up dangling upside-down from the foot-rope, swinging back and forth above the abyss. It was way dangerous to go to his aid, and he was getting weaker. "[H]is exhaustion was visible in every limb; his arms were contracted in horrible twitchings; every effort which he made to re-ascent served but to augment the oscillation of the foot-rope...." (p.257) Basically, everyone was on death watch, riveted but half-turning away so as not to see the awfulness of his fall.

And then what happened? Tune in after this commercial break....

"All at once a man was seen climbing into the rigging with the agility of a tiger-cat; this man was dressed in red; he was a convict; he wore a green cap; he was a life convict. On arriving on a level with the top, a gust of wind carried away his cap, and allowed a perfectly white head to be seen: he was not a young man." (p.258)
So this convict, while everyone was first freaking out about the topman, went to an officer and asked if he could risk his life to save the guy, and the officer agreed. The convict "had broken the chain riveted to his ankle with one blow of a hammer, then he had caught up a rope, and had dashed into the rigging: no one noticed, at the instant, with what ease that chain had been broken; it was only later on that the incident was recalled." (p.258) (suspicious!)
"In a twinkling he was on the yard..." (p.258) and everyone on the dock held their breath while he looked over the situation and began to walk along the yard (that's one of the big beams that holds up sails, not, like, your back garden or whatever, FYI.) He tied a rope to the yard, "then he began to descend the rope, hand over hand, and then,-and the anguish was indescribable,- instead of one man suspended over the gulf, there were two." (p.258)
"Ten thousand glances were fastened on this group; not a cry, not a word; the same tremor contracted every brow; all mouths held their breath as though they feared to add the slightest puff to the wind which was swaying the two unfortunate men." (p.258)
The convict gets to the topman surely in the nick of time, since the sailor was clearly about to lose his grip. He held on to one rope while he tied the other securely around the sailor. The convict climbs back up, dragging the sailor behind him, takes a moment to catch his breath then picks up the sailor and carries him to where he can be safely handed over.
"At that moment the crowd broke into applause; old convict-sergeants among them wept, and women embraced each other on the quay, and all the voices were heard to cry with a sort of tender rage, 'Pardon for that man!' " (p.258)

I mean! Such tension! Such drama! But it's not done yet:

"In order to reach [the detachment on deck] more speedily, he dropped into the rigging, and ran along one of the lower yards; all eyes were following him. At a certain moment fear assailed them; whether it was that he was fatigued, r that his head turned, they thought they saw him hesitate and stagger. All at once the crowd uttered a loud should; the convict had fallen into the sea." (p.258)
"Four men flung themselves hastily into a boat; the crowd cheered them on; anxiety again took possession of all souls; the man had not risen to the surface; he had disappeared in the sea without leaving a ripple, as though he had fallen into a cask of oil: they sounded, they dived. In vain." (p.259)

This book ends with the newspapers again: "Nov. 17, 1823. Yesterday, a convict belonging to the detachment on board of the Orion, on his return from rendering assistance to a sailor, fell in to the sea and was drowned. The body has not yet been found; it is supposed that it is entangled among the piles of the Arsenal point: this man was committed under the number 9,430, and his name was Jean Valjean." (p.259)

Talk about gossip-worthy!

Bibliophilia, or, The Book So Nice I Paid for It Thrice

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 21:14:00 +0000

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
(St. Martin's Press, 2013)
Format: so many formats. I used an Audible credit (narrated by Rebecca Lowman & Sunil Malhotra), then I bought it in paper. That's right: paid for it twice. (Three times if you include the one I bought as a gift.) Cause why? Cause I love it, that's why. Also because she signed this awesome book plate for me, and I had to have something to put it in, right?

From Goodreads: "Bono met his wife in high school," Park says.
"So did Jerry Lee Lewis," Eleanor answers.
"I’m not kidding," he says.
"You should be," she says, "we’re sixteen."
"What about Romeo and Juliet?"
"Shallow, confused, then dead."
''I love you," Park says.
"Wherefore art thou," Eleanor answers.
"I’m not kidding," he says.
"You should be."

Set over the course of one school year in 1986, ELEANOR AND PARK is the story of two star-crossed misfits – smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try. When Eleanor meets Park, you’ll remember your own first love – and just how hard it pulled you under.

So, look. I told you last year to read Rowell's first novel, Attachments. Remember? When I said it was super funny and right and that she knew people inside out? Well, turns out that wasn't a fluke. Because now we have Eleanor, who is permanently lodged in my heart, and Park, who, dude. Just send me back to 1986; I was a sophomore in high school then, too. I'd totally have fought Eleanor for him.(Well, I wouldn't have. I was too introverted. Unlike now, clearly. Hello, all you dear friends who I talk at but not face-to-face, thanks for stopping by.) I'd have watched them and been jealous, though. Because Eleanor & Park together - oh, so right. Even when they're breaking my heart because the world is a sucky place sometimes, they're oh, so right. Heartbreakingly right.

(I'm a little broken by this book.)

Also in this book: music, comic books, too many kids sharing one measly room, the politics of who sits where on the school bus, excruciating gym clothes, more music, the difficulty in affording batteries for your soul-saving walkman when you're very poor, veterans as parents, an Impala, and Shakespeare. Every bit of it as glorious as the last bit.

My oldest kid & I listened to the audio while we did our spring break college visit road trip. Here's me: let's hit the road! Time to put on E&P! Here's him: wait, where's the pause button? I just have to find this song they're talking about. Cue me, pretending to care about whatever, lyrics, rhythm, yeah sure, but not-so-secretly impatient to get back to the text. (I'm not nearly as musical a person as - well, anyone else in my family.) (Did you know some people use their time in the car to listen to music instead of audiobooks? Weird, right?) Lowman was the bomb - she could make me tear up with, like, half a syllable (hello, strange hilly dark Virginian roads! You don't need me to see as I navigate you, do you?) - I'm thinking she was absorbed in the story as I was, and she very beautifully accessed Eleanor's agonies and ecstacies. I also enjoyed the other character voices she used. Malhotra was a lovely Park, wry and shy and able to make me cry. My son in particular was put off by his voice for Park's mom, which was pretty extremely accented for a woman who'd been in the U.S. for twenty or so years. Other than that, I'm all about this audio - the pacing and production were great. Oh, wait, one more thing - I do agree with my son that it would've been great if they'd been able to include some of the music E&P shared during the audiobook. But Rowell made a playlist page on her site, so you can listen along, too, even if you go for the print version of this super A+ I'll be raving about it for years book. (Mom, I'll loan you one of my copies.)

No Thanks for the Memories

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 04:42:00 +0000

The Absolutist by John Boyne
(Doubleday, 2011 - audio Tantor Media, 2012)
Format: Audio CDs via library (narrated by Michael Maloney)

From Goodreads: "It is September 1919: twenty-one-year-old Tristan Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich to deliver a package of letters to the sister of Will Bancroft, the man he fought alongside during the Great War. But the letters are not the real reason for Tristan's visit. He can no longer keep a secret and has finally found the courage to unburden himself of it. As Tristan recounts the horrific details of what to him became a senseless war, he also speaks of his friendship with Will-from their first meeting on the training grounds at Aldershot to their farewell in the trenches of northern France. The intensity of their bond brought Tristan happiness and self-discovery as well as confusion and unbearable pain. The Absolutist is a masterful tale of passion, jealousy, heroism, and betrayal set in one of the most gruesome trenches of France during World War I. This novel will keep listeners on the edge of their seats until its most extraordinary and unexpected conclusion, and it will stay with them long after they've finished."

John Boyne (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, etc.) loves war. Well, okay, that's unfair. He loves to explore people in crisis and identity and the difficulty of changing your role in the world. And history. So war is a great venue for his writing, what with the undiscriminating nature of bullets and the pressure cooker applied to teenage personalities, and all that. Plus loss and sorrow and decades of memory for the survivors.

Another thing about Boyne: like Ishiguro (and my husband and I) he went to UEA in Norwich for a Masters in creative writing. (We were a lot more contemporaneous with Boyne.) Somehow I didn't know that, but as soon as Tristan starts wandering around Tombland and drinking local brews and watching shoppers in the rectangle of awnings at the open-air market, I suspected. It was a lot of fun to revisit those streets with Tristan (I wish he'd made it onto the Unthank Road at some point. Because: a road named Unthank!)

Okay, that walk down Memory Lane aside (and could I be more literal? R & I were talking just the other day about our early courtship walks along the Unthank Road), there's a lot for the non-Norwichian to enjoy in this novel. Tristan is at once knowable and intriguing, a man struggling with his identity, his actions, his relationship with his family, and his place in the war. He's only 21, but after enlisting at 17 and serving several years in the trenches "over there," his soul is an old man's. But his heart is still as precariously confused and frightened as it was when his father kicked him out at 16 for transgressions that clearly have to do with his unreciprocated feelings towards his best friend. Once he joins the army, he meets Will, whose death eventually leads Tristan to meeting Will's sister Marian in Norwich. The army training camp friendship becomes both a trial and a joy to Tristan. Will, meanwhile, is struggling with entirely different but equally soul-shattering issues, and his combination of courage and callousness makes him a pretty absorbing guy to get to know. One of the many interesting angles in this novel are the overlapping but not identical portraits of Will as explained by Marian and by Tristan. I love the slight shifts and the gaps.

This is another in the Audies category of Solo Narration - Male, and my first experience of Michael Maloney's narration. I wasn't wowed. He was good for Tristan, other than my wish for a touch more emotional vulnerability when discussing the events of his early teens, but every word out of Marian's mouth grated on me. Not that the character wasn't somewhat brittle and acerbic, but the text made it clear that she was also quiet and tender at times, and you'd never guess it from Maloney's tone. I also had problems with the sound mixing in this - listening to the CDs in a couple of environments (home and car) I constantly had to adjust the volume and the bass to make up for inexplicable variances. It so rarely happens that I need to do anything like this that it bears mentioning now, and it made me question the nomination in this case.

Great, great book. Read it (on paper.)

Beggar at the Feast!

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 20:43:00 +0000

I mean, it's not as if Hugo had the advantage of a catchy Abba song to encapsulate his point, but geez, man. We get it. Waterloo = bad for Napoleon. Also, inevitable, because: God said so.

This is not the way to encourage me to catch up with my Les Mis Project. But never mind. Here we are - Volume Two: Cosette of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. And to start it off,

Oddly enough, none of the Les Mis
covers out there depict the
Battle of Waterloo. But
here's a candle, which is
almost the same, right?

Book First - Waterloo

So this whole thirty-page section goes like this:
Waterloo - I was defeated, you won the war
Waterloo - Promise to love you for ever more
Waterloo - Couldn't escape if I wanted to
Waterloo - Knowing my fate is to be with you
Waterloo - Finally facing my Waterloo

Or similar, anyway. There's a field. It's near Waterloo, in Belgium. There are armies amassed along various points of a triangle. It rained the night before, so Napoleon has to wait for the ground to dry out or his heavy artillery will sink in the mud, and he's an artillery-heavy fighter. The battle doesn't start until 11, because of the mud, which means by 4, blah blah blah. Ravines and hollow roads and some tussock or another. People who know they will die fighting, but it's for the Emperor, so, maybe that's okay. Or maybe it isn't, but it is what it is. And thanks to the rain delay, even though Napoleon thought he had the whole campaign wrapped up, Wellington was reinforced by Blucher, and the Emperor was dethroned.

It's not that Hugo doesn't do justice to the drama of the day. It's just that I read a lot of historical romance, and I've pretty much got all the military details down. At least insofar

as I care. But here's a taste for y'all anyway, because after all, I read this so you don't have to, but if I have to read about the carnage, so do you:

"Bauduin, killed, Foy wounded, conflagration, massacre, carnage, a rivulet formed of English blood, French blood, German blood mingled in fury, a well crammed with corpses... three thousand men in that hovel of Hougomont alone cut down, slashed to pieces, shot, burned, with their throats cut,- and all this so that a peasant can say to-day to the traveller: Monsieur, give me three francs, and if you like, I will explain to you the affair of Waterloo!" (p.218)
"If it had not rained in the night between the 17th and the 18th of June, 1815, the fate of Europe would have been different. A few drops of water, more or less, decided the downfall of Napoleon." (p.219)
Lots and lots of detail about the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, which, actually, was pretty cool because it seems it really makes a difference if the ground drains well or if there's a slight hill over on one corner: "Two hostile troops on a field of battle are two wrestlers. It is a question of seizing the opponent round the waist. The one seeks to trip up the other. They clutch at everything: a bush is a point of support; an angle of the wall offers them a rest to the shoulder; for the lack of a hovel under whose cover they can draw up, a regiment yields its ground...." (p.221)
The equipment! So much equipage: "We perceive the vast fluctuations in the fog, a dizzy mirage, paraphernalia of war almost unknown to-day, pendant colbacks, floating sabre-taches, cross-belts, cartridge-boxes for grenades, hussar dolmans, red boots with a thousand wrinkles, heavy shakos garlanded with torsades...." (p.222)
And then there was the Emperor himself. "Composed half of light and half of shadow, Napoleon thought himself protected in good and tolerated in evil. He had, or thought that he had, a connivance, one might almost say a complicity, of events in his favor, which was equivalent to the invulnerability of antiquity." (p.229)
Despite all that, and the earlier assertion that a bit of rain made all the difference: "It was time that this vast man should fall. The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the balance. This individual alone counted for more than a universal group.... The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and supreme equity to alter its plan." (p.232)
"He embarrassed God. Waterloo is not a battle; it is a change of front on the part of the Universe." (p.232)
"Napoleon and Wellington. They are not enemies; they are opposites. Never did God, who is fond of antitheses, make a more striking contrast, a more extraordinary comparison. On one side, precision, foresight, geometry, prudence...; on the other, intuition, divination, military oddity, superhuman instinct, a flaming glance, and indescribable something which gazes like an eagle, which strikes like the lightning...." (p.241)
"Waterloo is a battle of the first order, won by a captain of the second." (p.242) (Hugo has some funny things to say about Wellington's not quite deserving the plaudits he has today, but the English soldiers having earned lots of praise.)

Anyway, the battle is over, France is going to change mightily, and one thing about war? Some of it's noble, skanky. (Okay, "hideous features" is Hugo's phrase.) "One of them most surprising is the prompt stripping of the bodies of the dead after the victory. The dawn which follows a battle always rises on naked corpses." (p.246)

but a lot of it is a bit

Who would do such a thing? Who would scamper through the night, in a big floppy overcoat concealing large pockets, happily tromping through the mud and blood overlooked by a woman sitting on a laden cart? No one we've met, surely.

Oh, except for that one guy. Hugo plays it out a little, but I'll just tell you: Thenardier.

Plot points: Thenardier is skulking around collecting trinkets from the dead. He grabs a gold ring off a hand sticking up from a pile of corpses. The hand grabs him back, which makes Thenardier laugh and investigate further. He drags the corpse out from under the pile and discovers a silver Legion of Honor cross, a watch, and a purse full of cash.

The action of this hauling and pawing wakens the officer, who, let's face it, would probably have died under the weight of all the other dead men. Sergeant Thenardier hears the English approaching, and the officer (Pontmercy) tells him to take the watch and purse. Thenardier says they're gone already, such a shame, and before he scuttles off, he and Pontmercy exchange names.

Something tells me we haven't seen the last of Pontmercy, and now that Waterloo is over, I think we soon will see a great deal more of Thenardier.

Introspective Narration and Perfect Butlers

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 19:30:00 +0000

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
(Originally published 1989, this version Tantor Media, 2012)
Format: Audio download via library (narrated by Simon Prebble)

From Goodreads: "The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world in post-war England. At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving 'a great gentleman.' But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's 'greatness' and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he served."

Claim to fame: The hubby and I went to the same grad school writing program as Ishiguro. (Probably this means one of us will at least be shortlisted for the Man Booker soon.) (Not me, though - darn Americanness. But Robert is in with a chance.) Anyway, I love his work, and devoured The Remains of the Day a couple of decades ago. It stuck with me, and I found it just as fresh and engaging listening to Prebble's narration, which is up for an Audies award in Literary Fiction.

Prebble is the second Simon in my audio-loving-heart, but it's not a large leap between the two. He's got quite the aristo quality to his voice, which suits all of the Stephanie Laurens Regency romances he reads to me, as well as this tale of Stevens the butler who wants, above all things, to be the paragon of his trade. (Indeed, Stevens goes into some detail about cultivating his accent, which differentiated him from his butler father, whom he otherwise held up as a shining example of the role.) This is one of those books where a hell of a lot more happens inside the protagonist's head than in his actions, although it is due to the journey Stevens undertakes that he is finally reflecting on some aspects of his life and career.

It is 1956, and Stevens has been butling at Darlington Hall for several decades. His new employer is an American gentleman, but most of his service was to Lord Darlington, who was a big name on the international political stage between the wars. Unfortunately for Stevens, his sympathies weren't the ones that the rest of the country ended up holding. One of the things Stevens has to negotiate within himself is the extent to which he can feel that he was a Great Butler, given the ignominious cloud under which Lord Darlington died. Stevens also struggles with recollections about his relationship with his father, and with the former housekeeper he's on his way to visit. Very small moments resonate for years, and as Stevens begins to understand them in a different light, he also begins to settle into some new ideas about himself. It's absolutely full of subtle tension and heartbreak.

Prebble imbues each moment with those quiet emotions, carrying us along Stevens's road all the way. I loved how fully inhabited he was in Ishiguro's voice, how completely present he was in the narrative. This was a great pairing of book with narrator, and I'd recommend it to, like, everyone.

An Enchanted Reading of Enchanted

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 05:28:00 +0000

Enchanted by Alethea Kontis
(Harcourt Children's Books, 2012)
Format: audio CDs from library (narrated by Katherine Kellgren)

From Goodreads: "It isn’t easy being the rather overlooked and unhappy youngest sibling to sisters named for the other six days of the week. Sunday’s only comfort is writing stories, although what she writes has a terrible tendency to come true.

When Sunday meets an enchanted frog who asks about her stories, the two become friends. Soon that friendship deepens into something magical. One night Sunday kisses her frog goodbye and leaves, not realizing that her love has transformed him back into Rumbold, the crown prince of Arilland—and a man Sunday’s family despises.

The prince returns to his castle, intent on making Sunday fall in love with him as the man he is, not the frog he was. But Sunday is not so easy to woo. How can she feel such a strange, strong attraction for this prince she barely knows? And what twisted secrets lie hidden in his past—and hers?"

Okay, remember last year when I couldn't shut up about the brilliance of Katherine Kellgren's narration of L.A. Meyer's Bloody Jack series? And I said she would be the winner of the Audie award for Teen audiobooks? And how I was right? Well, that just shows you two things: Katherine Kellgren is a great narrator, and I know what I'm talking about.

Now that we've established that, and keeping in mind that this year Kellgren is up against Kate Rudd's gorgeous reading of John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, I am all about this particular Audies contender. (Except the cover. Not the audiobook's fault, but really, this cover is belch, right? How is her position natural or comfortable?)

Oh, Sunday! Such a classic misunderstood youngest sibling with a secret. She's the 7th daughter of a 7th daughter in a kingdom where magic is fairly commonplace, so really she shouldn't need to pour out her troubles to the frog at her local fairy well to make herself feel better. (But then again, I knew I had secret magic powers, and plenty of siblings, but it didn't stop me from turning my cat into my confidant.) Nevertheless, Sunday does end up sharing her diary with Grumble the talking frog, who they both know is enchanted, but who doesn't change when Sunday kisses him. Until, one day, he does, but she doesn't know it. She just knows that Prince Rumbold is "requesting" all eligible young ladies in Arilland to a series of balls, and her fairy godmother is on hand to assist her and her sisters in getting ready. Kontis plays with more fairy tales than I can count (or know, I'm sure) - in her household alone is a woman with many offspring living in a shoe, a tall tower with just one window at the top, a changeling son, a cursed spindle, a handful of magic beans, and, of course, birds that help with chores so Sunday will be ready in time for the ball. But nothing is straightforward, and Kontis wraps everything up in a coming-of-age framework that leaves me pondering the nature of story and the oral tradition. And pretty eager for October's publication of the second in this series, to boot.

Kellgren, of course, is perfect for this title. She has an entrancing story-time voice that gives full weight to emotional moments while never slackening the pace of the adventure. I find myself envying any children to whom she might read bed-time stories, but sorry for her, too, because I'm sure those kids would never let her go without repeatedly begging for "just one more" book. But I don't mean it's treacly or insipid in any way - and she definitely knows how to tap into a dark side for all those moments of evil and danger.

Not to be totally cheesy about it, but I was truly enchanted throughout.

Affairs! Colin Firth! (Sorry, Got Carried Away There)

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 06:16:00 +0000

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
(Originally published 1951, this version published 2012, Audible, Inc.)
Format: Audible download (narrated by Colin Firth)

From Goodreads: Graham Greene’s evocative analysis of the love of self, the love of another, and the love of God is an English classic that has been translated for the stage, the screen, and even the opera house. Academy Award-winning actor Colin Firth turns in an authentic and stirring performance for this distinguished audio release.

The End of the Affair, set in London during and just after World War II, is the story of a flourishing love affair between Maurice Bendrix and Sarah Miles. After a violent episode at Maurice’s apartment, Sarah suddenly and without explanation breaks off the affair. This very intimate story about what actually constitutes love is enhanced by Firth’s narration, who said 'this book struck me very, very particularly at the time when I read it and I thought my familiarity with it would give the journey a personal slant.'

Mmmm, Colin Firth.

Okay, fine, I'll make the review more substantive than that. This is up for the Solo Narration - Male category of the Audies awards, and it's my sacred duty as an #ArmchairAudies reviewer to give you the skinny on why I kept forgetting to do my job so I could listen to this book. (Good thing it was only 6.5 hours long.)

My husband (follow him on Twitter!) is a big Greene fan, so I've picked up on the guy through marital osmosis, but I can't say that I've set out to read him independently before. Mistake on my part, as it turns out. Smart, subtle writing, and such deceptively complex characters. You think they're one easily-graspable thing, but the deeper Greene goes (and deep he does go), the more each layer unfurls. And breadth as well as depth! Don't dismiss the rationalist as just a plot obstacle for Bendrix, he'll come straight at you from left field. And did you see what happened there, with Sarah and her mother and God? You had no clue, did you?

And I could sense Firth's enjoyment, especially of Bendrix. He approached the narration with a calm, almost under-stated attitude that really suited the overly-introspective Bendrix. But the passion for Sarah, the agony of their separation and uncertainty when they met again - it was all there. Obviously (you may not know me well, Dear Reader, but you can believe that at any given moment I'm as likely to be watching the BBC adaptation of Pride & Prejudice as I am to be doing anything else, bar reading. Or, like, my job, sleeping, that stuff) I am a Firth fan. I think he can do with his voice what Maggie Smith can do with her face - barely alter it but load each micro-change with macro-importance. He can play broad, too, a sweeping comic or dramatic turn, but this book was narrow, quiet, intense, passionate, and gorgeous.

Yep. I liked it, very much.

'M'sieur le Mayor', You'll Wear a Different Chain

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 21:40:00 +0000

At last, the final book in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables - Volume 1: Fantine.

When last we left them, M. Madeline had just confessed to the Assizes that he is, in fact, the criminal Jean Valjean. Everyone was too stupefied that the famous, beloved mayor of M. sur M. was speaking up in court for the convict Champmathieu that he just gave up on them reacting, and went home.

And thus, the dawn rises on Book Eighth - A Counter-Blow.

A classy cover with some
nice sober black for
the end of Fantine.

After the trek home, Valjean (we get to call him that now, instead of any of the aliases - it's okay, Hugo said so) heads to the hospital to visit still-barely-living Fantine. The nursing sister is startled by the sudden whiteness of his hair, which Valjean hadn't noticed. Fantine, meanwhile, has gone gray with illness.

She's convinced Cosette is on the way - that it's the explanation of Valjean's absence. So she asks him about it, and they all hedge a little, until the doctor says the kid is there, but has to be kept away because it makes Fantine too excitable. She argues about it for a while (a chapter or so) but finally something stops her:

"...her face, which had been radiant but a moment before, was ghastly, and she seemed to have fixed her eyes, rendered large with terror, on something alarming at the other extremity of the room." (p.205)
Valjean "turned, and beheld Javert." (p.205) It turns out that shortly after Valjean left the court, everyone shook themselves back to this new reality, and although the D.A. tried to convince them to still convict Champmathieu, he was "visibly at variance with the sentiments of every one, of the public, of the court, and of the jury." (p.205)
The case against Champmathieu was dismissed. "Nevertheless, the district-attorney was bent on having a Jean Valjean; and as he had no longer Champmathieu, he took Madeline." (p.205) So they sent an express to Javert, which he got first thing in the morning, instructing him to collar the deceitful mayor.
"Any one who did not know Javert, and who had chanced to see him at the moment when he penetrated the antechamber of the infirmary, could have divined nothing of what had taken place, and would have thought his air the most ordinary in the world. He was cool, calm, grave, his gray hair was perfectly smooth upon his temples, and he had just mounted the stairs with his habitual determination. Any one who was thoroughly acquainted with him, and who had examined him attentively at the moment, would have shuddered. The buckle of his leather stock was under his left ear instead of at the nape of his neck. This betrayed unwonted agitation." (p.206) (I adore this. I can just SEE Javert, always impeccable, just the slightest bit disarranged, and that being a massively telling detail to those in the know.)
"The instant that Madeline's glance encountered Javert's glance, Javert, without stirring, without moving from his post, without approaching him, became terrible. No human sentiment can be as terrible as joy. / It was the visage of a demon who has just found his damned soul." (p.206)
Javert's probity and determination to serve the law makes him rigid, and able to find pure joy from the successful pursuit of his duty. "Without himself suspecting the fact, Javert in his formidable happiness was to be pitied, as is every ignorant man who triumphs. Nothing could be so poignant and so terrible as this face, wherein was displayed all that may be designated as the evil of the good." (p.207)

So Javert stood there, in face-off mode, while Valjean reassures Fantine that she has nothing to worry about.

And finally he advances into the room, and takes Valjean by the collar, which makes Fantine freak the hell out, especially since Valjean doesn't try to do anything about it. He does ask for a private word (calls him "Javert," which manages to piss him off: "Call me Mr. Inspector.") Javert's having none of it - makes him speak up about this super secret need of his:

Valjean "said very rapidly and in a very low voice:- 'Grant me three days' grace! three days in which to go and fetch the child of this unhappy woman. I will pay whatever is necessary. You shall accompany me if you choose.' " (p.208)
Now Fantine knows she was lied to about her kid being there. She flips, and Javert snarls at her that there's no such dude as Madeline the Mayor, there's only some dirty convict called Valjean. This doesn't soothe Fantine's agitation.
"...a rattle proceeded from the depths of her throat, her teeth chattered; she stretched out her arms in her agony, opening her hands convulsively, and fumbling about her like a drowning person; then suddenly fell back on her pillow. / Her head struck the head-board of the bed and fell forwards on her breast, with gaping mouth and staring, sightless eyes. / She was dead." (p.209) (I'm loving Hugo's descriptive language here.)
"Jean Valjean laid his hand upon the detaining hand of Javert, and opened it as he would have opened the hand of a baby...." (p.209) - just to remind us how preternaturally strong Valjean is - and then he accused Javert of murdering Fantine. Javert just kind of stares at Valjean while Valjean moves to Fantine's side, speaking inaudibly to him and kissing her hand. Once he achieves that moment of peace with her, he rises and puts himself at Javert's disposal.

Now they've stuck the mayor in jail. Scandal! Gossip! Sensational commotion! "We are sorry that we cannot conceal the fact, that at the single word, 'He was a convict,' nearly every one deserted him." (p.210) They don't actually have any details, those gossipy townspeople of M. sur M., which doesn't of course stop the speculation. (As it ever was, so shall it ever be.) The gentry in particular - who he's never mixed with, preferring to spend his time doing good works over fancy dinner parties, are all, "Well! I suspected as much. That man was too good, too perfect, too affected. He refused the cross; he bestowed sous on all the little scamps he came across. I always thought there was some evil history back of all that." (p.210)

The portress at his building is still loyal to the mayor, so much so that she habitually puts his key out in the evening, even though he's in jail. She's pretty startled when a hand reaches for that key, though! Javert was lax enough to forget Valjean's strength, it seems - so he broke a bar in the window, escaped, and went home for a bit. He asks the portress to fetch Sister Simplice from the infirmary.

While he waits, he heads up to his rooms, where he wraps up the Bishop's silver candlesticks and leaves the money he'd stolen from Little Gervais with a note on the table. When the Sister arrives, he hands over instructions about paying for his trial and for Fantine's funeral, giving the rest to the poor, which she is to deliver to the Curé. (That gentleman does as instructed, but gives Fantine a pauper's burial, in order to have more cash for the poor.)

Before much more can be said, they hear the portress swearing to Javert and his men downstairs that no one is inside. Javert sees the light, and heads up, where he encounters the nun praying by feeble candlelight in Valjean's room. "It will be remembered that the fundamental point in Javert, his element, the very air he breathed, was veneration for all authority." (p.212) He knew the nun wouldn't sin. He started to just automatically remove himself from the room (where Valjean, FYI, was hiding behind the door, just out of sight), but his duty to his job makes him ask her if she's alone in the room.

"A terrible moment ensued, during which the poor portress felt as though she should faint." (p.212)

The nun looks at Javert and says she's alone. Javert swallows the lie readily enough, but again his duty leads him to ask if she's seen Valjean. Again, the nun lies. Javert excuses himself respectfully.

"O sainted main! you left this world many years ago; you have rejoined your sisters, the virgins, and your brothers, the angels, in the light; may this lie be counted to your credit in paradise!" (p.213)

An hour later, a solitary man was leaving M. sur M., walking towards Paris. That's the end of Madeline, and the end of paupers-grave Fantine, and the end of the Volume bearing her name.

Being There

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:12:00 +0000

Being There by Jerzy Kosinski
(originally published 1970, this version Audible, 2012)
Format: Audible download (narrated by Dustin Hoffman)

From Goodreads: "Jerzy Kosinski’s clever parable of a naive man thrust into the modern world is more pointed now than ever. Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman (Rain Man, The Graduate), perhaps best known for his portrayals of vulnerable characters and antiheroes, gives an understated and exemplary performance of this satiric look at the unreality of American media culture.

Chance, the enigmatic gardener, becomes Chauncey Gardiner after getting hit by a limo belonging to a Wall Street tycoon. The whirlwind that follows brings Chance to his new status of political policy advisor and possible vice presidential candidate. His garden-variety political responses, inspired by television, become heralded as visionary, and he is soon a media icon due to his unknown background and vague, yet appealing, conversational nature. Being There was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film, starring Peter Sellers as Chance, in 1979."

Oh, humor. You crack me up.

In this case, my teen and I both cracked up, repeatedly - like, pause the book so we could laugh freely cracking up, throughout the 3 hours of this audio. Kosinski's deadpan portrait of Chance's life is relentless in its take-down of media and politics. Chance himself is that naive blank slate that suits the Pooh/Tao template so well (we listened to this right after the Hoff book, and a more 'Taoist by default' character I've rarely seen.) (Except for every other time someone creates a character with little agency of his own so we can see the world act upon him and thereby learn something about ourselves. I'm looking at you, Forrest Gump.)

I haven't seen the Sellers movie in a long while - the library will help me take care of that soon - but from what I remember, it's very faithful to the book. (Makes sense, given that Kosinski did the screenplay.) In other words, it's funny, too.

Hoffman's understated affability suited the narration brilliantly. He has a friendly, trustworthy tone - "laconic and matter-of-fact," as a reporter describes Chance - and leaves the listener free to snap up the parody throughout. I wish his voices were a bit more differentiated, but it wasn't ever hard to follow. Still, the few times the text moves out of Chance's proximity, I would have liked a shift to show the sharper minds at play. Otherwise, this is a vivid reading, and a guaranteed good time if you're at all fond of satire.

30 Things You Don't Need to Tell Me During this College Tour

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 05:23:00 +0000

You have a Blue Light system for safety (but you've never even heard of anyone needing to use it.) The campus is very secure and insulated from the town.
The town, though, is a great resource and will make your university years more engaging.
You'll barely remember to go to town since campus is a 24/7 joyride of activities.
Anyone interesting who comes to town will go to campus and you can hear them speak/perform for free.
There is a free shuttle that goes anywhere you need, even late at night from local hot spots.
You can call the extremely efficient and omnipresent campus police for an escort for any reason, even if it's just because you're too cold or lazy to walk somewhere yourself.
Your campus has a lot of great, fun traditions. (Don't say party school. Never say party school.)
Greek life is around, and a delight, and non-exclusionary, but no pressure - everyone has friends both in and out of the Greek system.
Greeks and non-Greeks alike spend a lot of time on service opportunities, because community spirit and volunteerism are strong core components of campus life.
There are hundreds of clubs and organizations, but if you can't find what you like (which seems impossible!), you can found one yourself really easily.
One of those clubs is Quidditch.
Speaking of which, people often compare your dining hall and/or library to Hogwarts.
Speaking of which, you can buy coffee at the library cafe.
The library has social areas on the ground floor and gets more studious the higher you go up.
The library has millions of volumes, but if you need something it doesn't have, ILL will get it for you within mere days.
The professors are accessible practically constantly. They even Skype!
The professors will hook you up with amazing internship and research opportunities, even if you're just a freshman.
Many people do research or internship work as part of their study abroad.
Study abroad credits transfer very easily.
Study abroad is the most fun anyone's ever had.
At the same time, when you come back for your senior year, you'll wish you had another few years to spend on campus, since it's so awesome.
However, 97% of students graduate in 4 years.
They all go on to good jobs (thanks to the strong community of past graduates and the career center's experts) or get into their first choice grad schools.
Many of them double-major, which is easy to do thanks to the expert advisers and desirable because of the vast opportunities on campus.
Even if you don't major in music/theatre/dance/stand-up comedy, you will have plenty of opportunities to get involved in the performing arts on campus.
Maybe you'll be in the marching band! Then you'll really be able to show your school spirit.
Everyone here has school spirit and they all love going to the games, even if they aren't sporty-types, because cheering on the (insert mascot here)s is such a blast.
All of the athletes on campus are scholars first, because academics are so important to us.
We will give you every academic opportunity you could ever desire, be it one of the majors for which we are famous, or be it your own interdisciplinary invention.
Make sure that your application essay isn't generic.

(Spring Break College Visit Trip scorecard: 8 tours taken, 3 flights, 1 train trip, 2 rental cars, 5 hotels, 2 friends' spare beds, 3 & 2 1/2s audiobooks enjoyed, and more waffles and biscuits than I can count.)

Just Being Pooh is Grand

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 01:03:00 +0000

The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff
(1982) (This version, Tantor Media, 2012)
Format: Audible download (read by Simon Vance)

From Goodreads: "Winnie-the-Pooh has a certain Way about him, a way of doing things that has made him the world's most beloved bear. In The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff shows that Pooh's Way is amazingly consistent with the principles of living envisioned by the Chinese founders of Taoism. The author's explanation of Taoism through Pooh, and Pooh through Taoism, shows that this is not simply an ancient and remote philosophy but something you can use, here and now. And what is Taoism? It's really very simple. It calls for living without preconceived ideas about how life should be lived-but it's not a preconception of how life-it's.... Well, you'd do better to listen to this book, and listen to Pooh, if you really want to find out."

You guys! I found something Vance did that I don't love! Not the book, I'm fine with the book, but something about his narration.

Okay, fine, that's not the sweetest way to begin this post, but as my regular readers know, I am devoted to Simon Vance's work as an audiobook narrator. Until yesterday, I would have said he could do no wrong, no matter how hard he tried. And this title was nominated in the Solo Narration - Male PLUS the Personal Development PLUS the Inspirational/Faith-Based Fiction categories for an Audie Award. I took it for granted that I'd be as impressed as always by Vance's narration. And for 98% of this book, I was. His pacing - his comic and tension timing - is notably brilliant. It's practically impossible not to listen to him tell you a tale, because he spins it out in such a way that you're hanging on all the words, no matter what those words are. Naval battles in Napoleonic times, the adventures of 007, Cromwellian intrigues, and the intersection of Chinese philosophy and stuffed bears - all are gripping.

So what's the problem? What could possibly disconcert me? Well, you'll laugh at me, but it bothered me each and every time it was used. It was his Piglet voice.

Pooh was slow and thoughtful and very-little-brained. Eeyore was gloomy. Rabbit was bossy and manic. Roo was enthusiastically adorable. But Piglet - sigh. Piglet was irritating. He was inconsistent - sometimes too close to the Pooh voice, sometimes chirpier, but not the squeaky, breathy voice Vance hit on once in a rare while for Piglet that worked best. Granted, if I didn't rely on his ability to suit voices to characters so consistently, this wouldn't have been so jarring, but I do, so it was. And I wasn't looking for Disney-informed versions of the 100 Acre Woods crew - Vance didn't go there for the others, and that was just fine with me. The whole book is under 3 hours, and while Piglet is in every chapter (probably), he doesn't speak up all that much. I wish that when he did, I'd been able to enjoy him.

Okay, that mountain of a molehill aside, this was a good production. There were a couple of moments between sections that I would have liked a half-second's pause, just to differentiate, but otherwise it was easy to follow and fun to hear.

Hoff's book has been out for 20 years, and I remember flipping through it once in a while, but I'd never gone front to back with it before. It's interesting, and cleverly assembled to make points about Taoism using the familiar tales of beloved Pooh Bear. Rescuing Roo from the river, finding the "North Pole," hunting heffalumps, and just being with Piglet and Christopher Robin all serve to illustrate the benefits of not over-thinking life, taking it as it comes, and trusting that solutions to problems will surface when needed. It was fun to imagine what Hoff would make of our digital age, given his screeds against mechanization and hyper-busyness in 1982, and interesting to look for ways to apply Taoism to my life. Of course, as with all things that tout the virtues of the simple innocents of the world (and we listened to Being There immediately after this just to reinforce this point), I am left wondering why proponents of these philosophies can't give me illustrations of people who are consciously choosing Taoism instead of embodying it by default. We all rightfully love Winnie-the-Pooh, and admire his ways of love and happiness, but get Rabbit to learn some Taoism. When I see him adopt it, I'll be more apt to see how to apply it to my own life.