Private Life by Jane Smiley (Knopf, 2010)
This novel in five parts spans the onset of the 20th century, covering the years from 1883 – 1942, and features the main character, Margaret, who endures tragedy without complaint but is awkward and on the verge of spinsterhood in post-civil war St. Louis when she meets the strange though eligible physicist, Captain Andrew Early. Margaret and Andrew marry and move to a naval base in distant California. Smiley writes with a smart, keen eye, stringing her narrative like holiday lights among historical American icons – The St. Louis World’s Fair, the Great San Francisco Earthquake, two World Wars and the U.S. encampment of Japanese – while at the same time slowly revealing the sad and intimate details of an unraveling marriage. Smiley’s characters are intelligent, adventurous and full of “life force,” and the couple’s private drama is articulated through scenes that are so well-crafted and convincing that the reader shares Margaret’s suspicions about her husband’s increasingly bizarre and sometimes paranoid behavior. Along with Margaret, the reader ultimately questions Andrew’s very sanity, and together we teeter between what is true and what is the dangerous figment of an overly-intelligent mind (9/10).
Monday, May 31, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
RollnSmoke Reviews: ISTANBUL
Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk (Vintage, 2004).
Nobel Prize in Literature winner and famous native Instabullu, Orhan Pamuk, creates a portrait of his beloved city through written vignettes and sometimes bleak sketches from his childhood and through assembled historic photographs that is akin to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist in that Pamuk focuses on the beauty in the landscape that resides in its deeply seeded melancholy or “huzun.” Istanbul, once the great center of both the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, has, in the past century, fallen far off its high pedestal, and in its secularity must define what it means to be Turkish. Because there is no overarching narrative and most chapters are bite-sized and lack action, the reading requires patience. Several chapters stand out like “Exploring the Bosphorus” and “Hazun,” while the final two chapters, about the author’s first true love and about his devoted affection for his mother, close the book on a distinctively personal note (7/10).
Nobel Prize in Literature winner and famous native Instabullu, Orhan Pamuk, creates a portrait of his beloved city through written vignettes and sometimes bleak sketches from his childhood and through assembled historic photographs that is akin to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist in that Pamuk focuses on the beauty in the landscape that resides in its deeply seeded melancholy or “huzun.” Istanbul, once the great center of both the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, has, in the past century, fallen far off its high pedestal, and in its secularity must define what it means to be Turkish. Because there is no overarching narrative and most chapters are bite-sized and lack action, the reading requires patience. Several chapters stand out like “Exploring the Bosphorus” and “Hazun,” while the final two chapters, about the author’s first true love and about his devoted affection for his mother, close the book on a distinctively personal note (7/10).
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