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Nicola BarkerDARKMANS
The novel is set in a contemporaneous British district bisected by the arrival of the Channel Tunnel's international passenger station, a sore point for one of the central characters, cranky 61-year-old Daniel Beede, distraught at the loss of local landmarks. Beede is estranged from his prescription drug-dealing son Kane, though they share a flat, where Gaffar, a muscular Kurdish refugee with a rabid fear of salad greens, takes up residence. Beede is friends with Elen, a podiatrist, and with Isidore, Elen's paranoid and narcoleptic husband; their young son Fleet is a spooky prodigy who, in one of this intricate tale's several instances of mind-bending nuttiness, may actually be Isidore's ancestor from nine generations ago. This improbable premise is supported by the boy's propensity for quoting bits of the biography of King Edward IV's court jester, one John Scogin, the dark man who haunts the book. Despite the story's plotless sprawl, any reader open to the appeal of an ambitious author's kaleidoscopic imagination will relish this bravura accomplishment.
Joseph Boyden
THREE DAY ROAD
From Amazon:
In 1919, Niska, an old medicine woman, ventures into civilization to retrieve one of the two boys she reluctantly sent to war. She speaks of the townspeople: "I must look a thin and wild old woman to them, an Indian animal straight out of the bush." She expects Elijah Whiskeyjack to return, but is it Xavier Bird who gets off the train. He is a mere shadow of his former self; he is without a leg, addicted to morphine, and near death. The three-day road is a journey between life and death. Niska, the medicine woman, paddles Xavier in her canoe, and as they travel, in an attempt to keep him alive, she tells him her life story. In return he tells her of his and Elijah's terrible experiences in the First World War. As they travel, hovering over them like a dark cloud is the "Windigo", a terrible Indian spirit monster. A Windigo is what a man becomes after eating human flesh.
T.C. Boyle
RIVEN ROCK
From Library Journal: 'When Stanley McCormick, the brilliant but highly strung son of the inventor of the Reaper, marries Boston socialite and MIT graduate Katherine Dexter, the papers call it the wedding of the century. But the marriage is never consummated, and after a disastrous honeymoon, a catatonic Stanley is moved to Riven Rock, a prisonlike mission in Santa Barbara. Diagnosed as a schizophrenic sex maniac, Stanley is to be kept entirely separate from women, including Katherine, who may speak to him only by telephone. Katherine goes on to become a major figure in the burgeoning suffrage movement and even smuggles a steamer trunk full of contraceptives into the country in support of Margaret Sanger, but she never divorces her husband or gives up hoping for a cure. Riven Rock resembles The Road to Wellville in its send-up of medical quackery in the early years of the century, but here the fact-based love story takes precedence over satire. This affecting and surprisingly mature novel is Boyle's best book since Water Music."
Bebe Moore Campbell
YOUR BLUES AIN’T LIKE MINE
From Publishers Weekly (edited):
Written in poetic prose, filled with masterfully drawn and sympathetic characters that a less able hand might have rendered in stereotypes, this first novel blends the irony of Flannery O'Connor's fiction and the poignance of Harper Lee's. Moving quickly and believably from the eve of integration in rural Mississippi to the present-day street gangs in Chicago's housing projects, Campbell captures the gulf between pre-and post-civil rights America;... her story shows us how far we have come and yet suggests we have not come so far after all.
"Much of the power of this novel results from Ms. Campbell's subtle and seamless shifting of point of view. She wears the skin and holds in her chest the heart of each of her characters..". - New York Times Book Review.
"If this is a fair world, Bebe Moore Campbell will be remembered as the most important African-American novelist of this century -- except for, maybe, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. Her writing is clean and clear; her emotions run hot, but her most important characteristic is uncompromising intelligence coupled with a perfectionist's eye for detail."
—The Washington Post Book World
Bebe Moore Campbell died at the age of 56 in 2006.
Agatha Christie
AND THEN THERE WERE NONE
Considered the best mystery novel ever written by many readers, And Then There Were None is the story of 10 strangers, each lured to Indian Island by a mysterious host. Once his guests have arrived, the host accuses each person of murder. Unable to leave the island, the guests begin to share their darkest secrets--until they begin to die.
Angela Davis-Gardner
PLUM WINE
As this enthralling novel opens, Barbara Jefferson, teaching English in Japan in 1966, receives a bequest from her Japanese fellow teacher and mentor, Michiko Nakamoto, a Hiroshima survivor who has just died of cancer. Barbara's superiors arrive at her apartment bearing Michi-San's gorgeous tansu chest, filled with bottles of homemade plum wine dated by year. After a short, perfectly rendered struggle with the elder Japanese teachers over the possession of the wine, Barbara discovers that the rice paper wrappings of each bottle contain a portion of the story of Michiko's life. Barbara's path through the texts, which she cannot translate herself, forms the rest of the novel. As Barbara delves into Michi-San's life and loves, an odd triangle forms between Barbara, Michiko and Michiko's childhood friend Seiji, a man who is between the two women in age, and who translates some texts. Author of Felice and Forms of Shelter, Davis-Gardner handles the Japanese mores of the time expertly, and the dialogue spoken by non-native English speakers is pitch perfect. She quietly wows with this third novel, which features a wonderfully inventive plot and a protagonist as self-possessed as she is sensitive.
-- Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
Don DeLillo
FALLING MAN
Amazon.com Review
The defining moment of turn-of-the-21st-century America is perfectly portrayed in National Book Award winner Don DeLillo's Falling Man. The book takes its title from the electrifying photograph of the man who jumped or fell from the North Tower on 9/11. It also refers to a performance artist who recreates the picture. The artist straps himself into a harness and in high visibility areas jumps from an elevated structure, such as a railway overpass or a balcony, startling passersby as he hangs in the horrifying pose of the falling man.
Elaine Dundy
THE DUD AVOCADO
The original "chick-lit" novel written in the late 50s about a young American woman who moves to Paris. I have been wanting to read it for a while. Supposedly wickedly funny, sexy and charming.
Louise Erdrich
THE PLAGUE OF DOVES
Three Indians are incorrectly blamed for a family's murder in North Dakota in 1911 and they are lynched. The book follows the descendants of the lynched men and of the lynch mob for a century as their stories intertwine.
Diana GabaldonOUTLANDER
Outlander, a 600-page time-travel romance, strong-willed and sensual Claire Randall leads a double life with a husband in one century, and a lover in another. Torn between fidelity and desire, she struggles to understand the pure intent of her heart. But don't let the number of pages and the Scottish dialect scare you. It's one of the fastest reads you'll have in your library.
"While on her second honeymoon in the British Isles, Claire touches a boulder that hurls her back in time to the forbidden Castle Leoch with the MacKenzie clan. Not understanding the forces that brought her there, she becomes ensnared in life-threatening situations with a Scots warrior named James Fraser. But it isn't all spies and drudgery that she must endure. For amid her new surroundings and the terrors she faces, she is lured into love and passion like she's never known before. Gabaldon creates characters that you'll remember, laugh with, cry with, and cheer for long after you've finished the book." --Candy Paape
Natsuo Kirino
OUT
A literary page-turner as timely as when it first came out, this biting critique of Japan's social and economic underclass begins when three female co-workers are forced to confront the act of a friend against her abusive husband, but evolves into a blistering exposé on those whose stories are never told: the unseen night-shift factory workers who make Japan's endless supply of box lunches; women who are swamped in credit-card debt but cannot live off their looks, youth, or father's paychecks as "parasite singles"; aging parents who, instead of being looked after by their children, are left to support their grandchildren and still look after their in-laws long after their spouses are gone; and alienated Brazilian immigrants who never attain the rights and respect of citizens. Kirino presents nuanced characters forced to make difficult choices but she does so with immense empathy and humanity, making us see there are no clear labels to put on her characters, like good, evil, victim, or criminal.
For those who may question if voting for a Japanese book in this heated international climate is somehow anti-American, just think of it as pro-world, recognizing the similar social and financial challenges and moral crises faced by global citizens of every color.
Jhumpa Lahiri
UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The gulf that separates expatriate Bengali parents from their American-raised children—and that separates the children from India—remains Lahiri's subject for this follow-up to Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake. In this set of eight stories, the results are again stunning. In the title story, Brooklyn-to-Seattle transplant Ruma frets about a presumed obligation to bring her widower father into her home, a stressful decision taken out of her hands by his unexpected independence. The alcoholism of Rahul is described by his elder sister, Sudha; her disappointment and bewilderment pack a particularly powerful punch. And in the loosely linked trio of stories closing the collection, the lives of Hema and Kaushik intersect over the years, first in 1974 when she is six and he is nine; then a few years later when, at 13, she swoons at the now-handsome 16-year-old teen's reappearance; and again in Italy, when she is a 37-year-old academic about to enter an arranged marriage, and he is a 40-year-old photojournalist. An inchoate grief for mothers lost at different stages of life enters many tales and, as the book progresses, takes on enormous resonance. Lahiri's stories of exile, identity, disappointment and maturation evince a spare and subtle mastery that has few contemporary equals.
Janet Lord Leszl
A PEBBLE TO POLISH
Life is relatively uncomplicated for a popular, idealistic college student. Cassandra Delaine is totally unprepared for dramatic events in rapid succession looming on her horizon. The first financially opens a thrilling world of possibilities, the next emotionally devastates her. While struggling to cope with the situation she finds herself in, Cassie becomes the single parent of an extremely difficult child. Teetering on the edge of sanity, she considers the unthinkable. Psychological stability remains elusive until other mothers of children with autism offer hope and supportive understanding.
Powerfully written, this page turning novel provides a glimpse into the lives of families touched by autism.
Mario Vargas Llosa
AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER
From Amazon:
At its most basic level, Vargas Llosa's most famous novel is a portrait of the writer as a young man. The semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical Mario is a young student and would-be writer whose careers and aspirations are disrupted when he falls in love with his aunt-in-law, much to the horror of their many friends and relatives living in Lima. Pedro Camacho, an eccentric (to say the least) Bolivian scriptwriter, has been hired at the radio station where Mario works, and the youth envies the prodigious output of Pedro's intricate soap operas and hopes to learn from his new mentor the secrets of being an artist. The chapters alternate between descriptions of Mario's amusing and increasingly complicated life and Pedro's formulaic and decreasingly coherent scripts, as each character is gradually overwhelmed by the burdens and expectations they've created for themselves.
Toni Morrison
A MERCY
"Nobel laureate Morrison returns more explicitly to the net of pain cast by slavery, a theme she detailed so memorably in Beloved. Set at the close of the 17th century, [A Mercy:] details America’s untoward foundation: dominion over Native Americans, indentured workers, women and slaves." (From Publisher's Weekly)
Greg Mortenson
THREE CUPS OF TEA
The astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones and his humanitarian campaign to use education to combat terrorism in the Taliban's backyard. Anyone who despairs of the individual's power to change lives has to read the story of Greg Mortenson, a homeless mountaineer who, following a 1993 climb of Pakistan's treacherous K2, was inspired by a chance encounter with impoverished mountain villagers and promised to build them a school. Over the next decade he built fifty-five schools;especially for girls;that offer a balanced education in one of the most isolated and dangerous regions on earth. As it chronicles Mortenson's quest, which has brought him into conflict with both enraged Islamists and uncomprehending Americans, Three Cups of Tea combines adventure with a celebration of the humanitarian spirit.
Joyce Carol OatesTHE GRAVEDIGGER’S DAUGHTER
Publisher's Weekly: "At the beginning of Oates's 36th novel, Rebecca Schwart is mistaken by a seemingly harmless man for another woman, Hazel Jones, on a footpath in 1959 Chatauqua Falls, N.Y. Five hundred pages later, Rebecca will find out that the man who accosted her is a serial killer, and Oates will have exercised, in a manner very difficult to forget, two of her recurring themes: the provisionality of identity and the awful suddenness of male violence. There's plenty of backstory, told in retrospect. Rebecca's parents escape from the Nazis with their two sons in 1936; Rebecca is born in the boat crossing over. When Rebecca is 13, her father, Jacob, a sexton in Milburn, N.Y., kills her mother, Anna, and nearly kills Rebecca, before blowing his own head off. At the time of the footpath crossing, Rebecca is just weeks away from being beaten, almost to death, by her husband, Niles Tignor (a shady traveling beer salesman). She and son Niley flee; she takes the name of the woman for whom she has been recently mistaken and becomes Hazel Jones. Niley, a nine-year-old with a musical gift, becomes Zacharias, "a name from the bible," Rebecca tells people. Rebecca's Hazel navigates American norms as a waitress, salesperson and finally common-law wife of the heir of the Gallagher media fortune, a man in whom she never confides her past. Oates is our finest novelistic tracker, following the traces of some character's flight from or toward some ultimate violence with forensic precision. There are allusions here to the mythic scouts of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, who explored the same New York territory when it was primeval woods. Many of the passages are a lot like a blown-up photo of a bruise—ugly without seeming to have a point. Yet the traumatic pattern of the hunter and the hunted, unfolded in Rebecca/Hazel's lifelong escape, never cripples Hazel: she is liberated, made crafty, deepened by her ultimately successful flight. Like Theodore Dreiser, Oates wears out objections with her characters, drawn in an explosive vernacular. Everything in this book depends on Oates' ability to bring a woman before the reader who is deeply veiled—whose real name is unknown even to herself—and she does it with epic panache."
Orhan Pamuk
MY NAME IS RED
At once a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, and a brilliant symposium on the power of art, My Name Is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of sixteenth-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers. The Sultan has commissioned a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land to create a great book celebrating the glories of his realm. Their task: to illuminate the work in the European style. But because figurative art can be deemed an affront to Islam, this commission is a dangerous proposition indeed. The ruling elite therefore mustn’t know the full scope or nature of the project, and panic erupts when one of the chosen miniaturists disappears. The only clue to the mystery–or crime? –lies in the half-finished illuminations themselves. Part fantasy and part philosophical puzzle, My Name is Red is a kaleidoscopic journey to the intersection of art, religion, love, sex and power.
Ann Patchett
TRUTH AND BEAUTY
Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writer's Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Truth & Beauty, the story isn't Lucy's life or Ann's life, but the parts of their lives they shared. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long winters of the Midwest, to surgical wards, to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this is what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined ... and what happens when one is left behind. This is a tender, brutal book about loving the person we cannot save. It is about loyalty, and being lifted up by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest.
Frank E. Peretti
THE OATH
Under cover of darkness, something evil is at work in Hyde River, an old mining town deep in the mountains. Its latest victim, nature photographer Cliff Benson, was brutally killed while camping -- and his wife Evelyn has been driven nearly mad by what she saw, but she can't remember what it was. The sheriff thinks a rogue bear killed Cliff. But townspeople whisper -- and Cliff's death is just the latest in a long string of bizarre "accidents." Cliff's brother Steve is determined to find out the truth about what's concealed in the old caverns near Hyde River, a mystery that the local folk legends only hint at.
Tom Piazza
CITY OF REFUGE
From Amazon
In the heat of late summer, two New Orleans families--one black and one white--confront a storm that will change the course of their lives.
SJ Williams, a carpenter and widower, lives and works in the Lower Ninth Ward, the community where he was born and raised. His sister, Lucy, is a soulful mess, and SJ has been trying to keep her son, Wesley, out of trouble. Across town, Craig Donaldson, a Midwestern transplant and the editor of the city's alternative paper, faces deepening cracks in his own family. New Orleans' music and culture have been Craig's passion, but his wife, Alice, has never felt comfortable in the city. The arrival of their two children has inflamed their arguments about the wisdom of raising a family there.
When the news comes of a gathering hurricane--named Katrina--the two families make their own very different plans to weather the storm. The Donaldsons join the long evacuation convoy north, across Lake Pontchartrain and out of the city. SJ boards up his windows and brings Lucy to his house, where they wait it out together, while Wesley stays with a friend in another part of town.
But the long night of wind and rain is only the beginning--and when the levees give way and the flood waters come, the fate of each family changes forever. The Williamses are scattered--first to the Convention Center and the sweltering Superdome, and then far beyond city and state lines, where they struggle to reconnect with one another. The Donaldsons, stranded and anxious themselves, find shelter first in Mississippi, then in Chicago, as Craig faces an impossible choice between the city he loves and the family he had hoped to raise there.
Ranging from the lush neighborhoods of New Orleans to Texas, Missouri, Chicago, and beyond, City of Refuge is a modern masterpiece--a panoramic novel of family and community, trial and resilience, told with passion, wisdom, and a deep understanding of American life in our time.
Marge Piercy
SEX WARS: A Novel of Gilded Age New York
Post-Civil War New York City is the battleground of the American dream. In this era of free love, emerging rights of women, and brutal sexual repression, Freydeh, a spirited young Jewish immigrant, toils at different jobs to earn passage to America for her family. Learning that her younger sister is adrift somewhere in the city, she begins a determined search that carries her from tenement to brothel to prison—as her story interweaves with those of some of the epoch's most notorious figures: Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Susan B. Anthony; sexual freedom activist Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president; and Anthony Comstock, founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, whose censorship laws are still on the books.
Salman RushdieMIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
From Amazon.com. Two children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947--the moment at which India became an independent nation--are switched in the hospital. The infant scion of a wealthy Muslim family is sent to be raised in a Hindu tenement, while the legitimate heir to such squalor ends up establishing squatters' rights to his unlucky hospital mate's luxurious bassinet. Switched babies are standard fare for a Hindi film, and one can't help but feel that Rushdie's world-view--and certainly his sense of the fantastical--has been shaped by the films of his childhood. But whereas the movies, while entertaining, are markedly mediocre, Midnight's Children is a masterpiece, brilliant written, wildly unpredictable, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.
Jane Smiley
THE ALL-TRUE TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES OF LIDIE NEWTON
From Publishers Weekly (edited):
An immensely appealing heroine, a historical setting conveyed with impressive fidelity and a charming and poignant love story make Smiley's novel a sure candidate for bestseller longevity. Lidie Harkness, a spinster at 20, has an independent mind, a sharp tongue and a backbone. She marries Bostonian abolitionist Thomas Newton, who is enroute to the Kansas Territory. As the newlyweds gingerly come to know each other, they are plunged into the turmoil between pro-slavery Border Ruffians from Missouri and K.T. Free Staters, an increasingly savage conflict that presages the Civil War. Smiley evokes antebellum life with a depth of detail that easily equals Russell Banks's exploration of the same terrain in Cloudsplitter. Her scenes of quotidian domesticity on the prairie are as engrossing as her evocation of riverboat travel on the Mississippi. As Lidie and Thomas experience privation, danger and the growing pleasures of emotional intimacy, and as tragedy strikes and Lidie pursues a perilous revenge, Smiley explores the complex moral issues of the time. Propelled by Lidie's spirited voice, this narrative is packed with drama, irony, historical incident, moral ambiguities and the perception of human frailty.
Marianne Wiggins
EVIDENCE OF THINGS UNSEEN
A story of love, regret, how people (mis)understand each other, and how lives interconnect, often invisibly. The setting is mid-century Tennessee, with glances back and forward. Many passages of beautiful description. Wiggins traces the travails of the human heart with insight and sharp detail. Her characters are deeply and truly drawn, and the arc of the central story of Fos and Opal brings delight, laughter, foreboding, and heartbreak in its reading. The theme of unseen structures, patterns, curves, and forces that bind and shape our existence is a powerful metaphor for how our lives are lived.
David Wroblewski
THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE
Born mute, speaking only in sign, Edgar Sawtelle leads an idyllic life with his parents on their farm in remote northern Wisconsin. For generations, the Sawtelles have raised and trained a fictional breed of dog whose thoughtful companionship is epitomized by Almondine, Edgar's lifelong friend and ally. But with the unexpected return of Claude, Edgar's paternal uncle, turmoil consumes the Sawtelles' once peaceful home.
That's the last one. Vote for six. Send them to me via email. Have fun!
Jean Toomer's book CANE is now on the Classics list of nominations. I deleted it here.
Ricki is still taking nominations through today. She'll put the list up after she organizes it.
Sherry, what a difficult task you put ahead of us. I have read the list about 3 times now, and each time I changed my mind. I don’t know if I just email you my most recent choices, or wait for a few days to feel reassured that I will not change my mind once again. Browsing through the list was great fun though, and I might pick some of the suggestions to read independent of it making to our final list or not. So thanks everyone for the book ideas.
I know what you mean about trying to decide, but I just mailed off my votes - felt good to "pull the lever"
Capitu, I'm closing the voting Tuesday night, so you still have some time. Don't wait too long though. The way I look at it, is no matter what books make it, we'll have a good ole time discussing them. And with that list of books, it's hard to go wrong.
Just a reminder to vote this weekend. I'm closing the voting Tuesday night. Every vote counts!
Frank E. Peretti
THE OATH
Nicola Barker
DARKMANS
Diana Gabaldon
OUTLANDER
Orhan Pamuk
MY NAME IS RED
Natsuo Kirino
OUT
Greg Mortenson
THREE CUPS OF TEA
Just a reminder that tomorrow is the last day to vote.
That's fine, Sara. Thanks for the votes.
Constant Reader
Books mentioned in this topic
Beloved (other topics)Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time (other topics)
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (other topics)
I also added books that almost made the last list. If one of those books makes this list, I'll ask the person who nominated for the last list to start the discussion.
Diane Ackerman
THE ZOOKEEPER’S WIFE
Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Polish Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism, who managed to save over three hundred people. Yet their story has fallen between the seams of history. Drawing on Antonina's diary and other historical sources, best-selling naturalist Diane Ackerman vividly re-creates Antonina's life as "the zookeeper's wife", responsible for her own family, the zoo animals, and their "Guests" - Resistance activists and refugee Jews, many of whom Jan had smuggled from the Warsaw Ghetto. Ironically, the empty zoo cages helped to hide scores of doomed people, who were code-named after the animals whose cages they occupied. Others hid in the nooks and crannies of the house itself.
-from the book jacket
Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
HALF A YELLOW SUN
When the Igbo people of eastern Nigeria seceded in 1967 to form the independent nation of Biafra, a bloody, crippling three-year civil war followed. That period in African history is captured with haunting intimacy in this artful page-turner...Tumultuous politics power the plot, and several sections are harrowing. But this dramatic, intelligent epic has its lush and sultry side as well: rebellious Olanna is the mistress of Odenigbo, a university professor brimming with anticolonial zeal; business-minded Kainene takes as her lover fair-haired, blue-eyed Richard, a British expatriate come to Nigeria to write a book about Igbo-Ukwu art—and whose relationship with Kainene nearly ruptures when he spends one drunken night with Olanna. This is a transcendent novel of many descriptive triumphs. It's a searing history lesson in fictional form, intensely evocative and immensely absorbing.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Margaret Atwood
MORAL DISORDER
A series of interconnected stories that trace the course of a life and the lives intertwined with it. As in a photograph album, time is measured in sharp, clearly observed moments. By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, tragic, earthy, shocking, and deeply personal, Moral Disorder displays Atwood’s celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage. As the New York Times has said: "The reader has the sense that Atwood has complete access to her people's emotional histories, complete understanding of their hearts and imaginations.”
Paul Auster
THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS
From Amazon:
"Vermont professor David Zimmer is a broken man. The protagonist of Paul Auster's 10th novel, The Book of Illusions, hits a period in which life seemed to be working aggressively against him. After his wife and sons are killed in an airplane crash, Zimmer becomes an alcoholic recluse, fond of emptying his bottle of sleeping pills into his palm, contemplating his next move. But one night, while watching a television documentary, Zimmer's attention is caught by the silent-film comedian Hector Mann, who had disappeared without a trace in 1929 and who was considered long-dead. Soon, Zimmer begins work on a book about Mann's newly discovered films (copies of which had been sent, anonymously, to film archives around the world). The spirit of Hector Mann keeps David Zimmer alive for a year. When a letter arrives from someone claiming to be Hector Mann's wife, announcing that Mann had read Zimmer's book and would like to meet him, it is as if fate has tossed Zimmer from one hand to the other: from grief and loss to desire and confusion.
Although film images are technically "illusions," this deft and layered novel is not so much about conscious illusion or trickery as about the traces we leave behind us: words, images, memories. Children are one obvious trace, but in this book, they are not allowed to carry their parents forward. They die early: Hector Mann losing his 3-year-old son to a bee sting just as David Zimmer has lost his two sons in the crash. The second half of The Book of Illusions is given over to a love affair, and to Zimmer's attempt to save something of Hector Mann, and of the others he has loved. In the end, what really survives of us on earth--what flickering immortality we are permitted--is left to the reader to surmise."
Russell Banks
THE RESERVE
(Review taken from the Los Angeles Times)
As John Fowles did in "The French Lieutenant's Woman," Russell Banks arrests his reader's attention in "The Reserve" straight off with the image of a mysterious young woman staring out at open water, though it's not Fowles' briny Atlantic but the considerably smaller expanse of an Adirondacks lake -- which is nonetheless large enough for Jordan Groves to land his pontoon airplane. Jordan is an artist and adventurer whose subsequent meeting with a beautiful heiress puts flame to the fuse that sizzles through several hundred pages on its way to a high-combustion mix of eros and thanatos.
Set mainly in 1930s America (there are a few short sections in European locales), the novel plays out themes of erotic obsession, madness and duty -- and weaves in specific elements (and figures) of the times: politics, the Spanish Civil War, the Hindenburg's transatlantic flights, the emerging practice of psychoanalysis.
Banks has written a short note about the novel in which he reflects on its origins as well as the fascinating convergence of his sources and influences. Aside from wishing to work on a narrative that would bring him closer to the era of his parents' youth and the attractions of the Adirondacks as a locale (so near his own home of 20 years), he confides his abiding fascination with the life and work of illustrator Rockwell Kent, whose career merged artistic aspiration with intense leftist political convictions. Further, Banks has read an unedited manuscript of Ernest Hemingway's "To Have and Have Not" and concluded that the female character was based on a real-life mistress of Hemingway's, who by all accounts was "mind-numbingly beautiful" but also emotionally unstable. (She apparently also was the model for the vengeful wife in Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.")
All these elements and others, Banks admits, combined in his imagination (in ways that can, of course, never be accounted) to produce this riveting narrative, featuring an almost pot-boiling love story set against a backdrop of global unrest and clearly demarcated class tensions.