Things I've Been Silent About, Azar Nafisi

When one loves an Azar, how can one ignore a book written by an Azar?  That’s the dilemma I found myself embroiled in, within my head.  This book-by-Azar remained on my book group bookshelf, unread, for months.  It would jump out at me as I skimmed the shelf, yet I passed it by, over and over again.  It was both enticing and distasteful as it stared back at me.

It’s interesting about that bookshelf.  Here are the books I’ve toted home from book group, lined up on the shelf, waiting to be read.  Some have sat there for an embarrassingly long time.    Books that sounded enticing, worthwhile, interesting, exciting, or important for one reason or another.  But, when the time came to  select one, were passed by.

Things I’ve Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi sat and sat and sat on that shelf.  How many months ago did I bring it home?  I didn’t read it, but I couldn’t part with it. Azar, Azar, Azar stared at me.  I had to read it and when I finally did I greatly enjoyed it.  Thanks Betty Azar and thanks Azar Nafisi.

Much of my resistance to reading Things I’ve Been Silent About was that it was about Iran, a country both fascinating and distasteful to me. I didn’t want to read about ugly political turmoil, the suffering of people, or the control of women’s freedoms.  But that wasn’t what the book was about, although there was that too.

Instead it was about an exceptional woman, marriage, and a mother-father-daughter struggle.  It is an intimate look at Nafisi's family, the secrets she kept, and the price of political upheaval to a family.  One word I came across in the description of the book was dissection, and that fits.  Nafisi dissected her childhood experiences and relationships as she told her story.

Azar Nafisi is a good story teller, and the story, although difficult, was not depressing.

Another admirable woman and another wonderful memoir.

A Homemade Life, by Molly Wizenberg

I have not followed Molly Wizenberg’s food blog, Orangette—but reading this book, which arose from the blog, was very satisfying. It wasn’t just that the food parts are both tempting and entertaining. I found Wizenberg’s style forthright, funny, and reflective, with descriptive zingers that startled me and made me laugh. Easygoing, likeable… these are the kind of words that keep floating up. Even if you don’t care about the recipes, this book is fun to read.

I expected A Homemade Life to be enjoyable because I’d heard good things, but didn’t anticipate that I’d be in the bath with it until the water got cold—twice—because even after deciding to stop reading and get out (hence, not to add more hot water), a single sentence of the following chapter would draw me back in.

Wizenberg's syntax is admirable, something I notice and respect, and mention because one could be forgiven for not expecting such able writing from a blog-born book.

Her recipes are diverse, from the down-home (her father’s mayonnaise-heavy potato salad) to the sexy (tarte Tatin). In fact, I cherish her take on the latter:

…tarte Tatin is essentially a sexed-up apple pie—a housewife in stilettos, you could say. [Tantalizing vision of deep amber carmelized apples and puff pastry here.] Dolloped with crème fraîche, tarte Tatin doesn’t dally with small talk. It reaches for your leg under the table.

This is a gently meandering memoir organized around food. The happy Oklahoma childhood. The student years in Paris. The telling moment when, after her father dies of cancer, she plunges back into her studies—in Paris—but realizes that Foucault’s social theories no longer compel her. “My three years in graduate school, I now know, amounted to one big excuse to go back to Paris.” By the second week there, her research notes were being usurped by addresses for pastry shops and kitchen supply stores, and she knew she was quitting grad school to write about food. Now, as well as the blog, she writes regularly for Bon Appétit, and has been featured on NPR.org and PBS.org.

Oh, and there’s a love story in there, too. And, FYI, Wizenberg and her husband own and run Delancey, a pizza place in Ballard. She’s local! Did everybody know this except me?

Recommended for everyone who enjoys eating.

~ Paula

The Keep by Jennifer Egan

Kim wrote in an e-mail:

OK - I'm not even going to try to write a review for the blog about this book because I don't know how I would.

But, after trying - and quitting - so many books that were frustrating and disappointing  (why is it that most of the shortlisters and winners of the Man Booker Award seem to be more for writers than readers, i.e., all about the writing and not so much about the story) I'm pretty charged up about  "The Keep" by Jennifer Egan. I loved this book - it's extraordinarily well written and entertaining.  You could say it's a gothic tale - or that it's a story of redemption - or a modern day crime story - or all of the above.  And it's a mind bender - even now, I can't tell you what's real about it and what's not (i.e., there's a related web site that will keep you guessing!) It's gripping - and funny - and a cliff hanger til the end!  I couldn't put it down!

And with all that, it is still "serious fiction", i.e., the author was a finalist for the National Book Award for her first book, "Look at Me.

Do you remember reading John Fowles "The Magus" - kind of uncategorizable? That's this book too.  Try it! You'll like it."

~ Kim

(Posted by Fran, with permission from Kim, because her "review" sure did make me want to read The Keep!)

"Canada" by Richard Ford

I read my Best Fiction of 2012 this week.   Canada by Richard Ford is an outstanding work of art, made more so by the gentle, unhurried unfolding of its terrible tale. It begins:

“First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.”

So fifteen year-old Dell Parsons tells about the robbery that tore his family apart, dividing his life into “before” and “after”, and how his mother, his father, his twin sister and he each found their way into new lives. Told with Ford’s signature internal dialogs by the now-adult Dell, this is a haunting story of loss, broken trust, rebellion, the occasional kindness of strangers, and the shocking life decisions made by seemingly reasonable people.

There is nothing else to say: This is Ford’s masterpiece, a huge story, told by a heartbroken boy in a quiet, calm voice.  Fiction doesn't get much better than this.

Sitting Practice, by Caroline Adderson

Ross and Iliana are an unlikely match, but they fall in love and marry.  He is gregarious, soft-bodied, a foodie who caters for the movie industry in Vancouver, BC.  She is quiet, athletic, a nurse who escaped her upbringing as child of a fundamentalist Christian minister.  Both love their work, and love each other. 

Six weeks into their marriage, a terrible car wreck changes their lives forever.  Iliana suffers a spine injury that leaves her wheelchair-bound with no hope of walking again.  It takes agonizing months of rehab just to be able to sit up in the chair without a body brace.  Sitting practice.  Ross still loves his wife, but is blown away by guilt, helplessness, and the accoutrements of the new Iliana—brace, chair, catheters—and his libido melts away. 

Sitting Practice follows their marriage and the people who are close to them.  It is the story of coping with a sudden, stunning, irrevocable change—not just Iliana’s coping, but Ross’s, and the ripples outward among the people who know them.  When Ross plunges into guilt and depression after the accident, an old girlfriend takes him to a Buddhist retreat.  He is a hopelessly clumsy participant but something stirs him, and he becomes an unlikely but earnest novice Buddhist, even occasionally experiencing a valuable insight into his own behavior.  Another sitting practice. 

I had this book for months before finally opening it, fearing that it would be more depressing than I could bear.  It was not depressing.  Nor was it sentimental, or treacly.  The characters pulled me in, page after page.  Even the most minor or annoying ones were developed enough, interesting enough to care about and remember.  The humor was tough.  I found the story to have an unexpected rhythm, which I liked for the way it reflected the unpredictable veering of any life.  No single thread dominates, yet each is important to the weave—Iliana and her slow, frustrating rehab, her sudden invisibility, and loss of herself as a sexual being; Ross and his panic and guilt, his cautious reaching for a system that can contain and give meaning to his life; the satellite characters (Ross’s narcissistic twin sister, Bonnie, and her toddler son—his beloved nephew, Bryce—and many others).  Each bumbles along; the story turns unexpected corners.  I kept second-guessing but didn’t quite anticipate the twists on the way to the ending, which is another threshold moment, not sweet but full of light. 

~ Paula

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

I usually turn up my nose at historical novels.  Why not just read an historical account? Or a rash of biographies of the period?  But when the main character leaves only his accounting books and a few hundred enemies in his wake, I'm a patsy.  In this case, it was Thomas Cromwell in Hilary Mantel's British tome, Wolf Hall. Winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2009, the novel uses rich, compelling language and gives the reader a keen sense of place.  Mantel paints the famous characters of Henry VIII's court in realistic colors--most of them not very pretty but always witty.  It's a brilliant attempt to get under the skin of the infamous Cromwell, solicitor and personal friend of Cardinal Wolsey.  Instead of going down in ruin with his master when Anne Boleyn made it her business to destroy Wolsey, Cromwell sidled up to Henry, finally making it possible for the king to set aside Katherine and wed Anne.  And you know where it went from there: monasteries looted, nuns begging on the roads, and the king getting richer every year.  Thomas too.

Cromwell was a butcher's son, of no title and no lands, who ran away to France at 15 to escape his father's horrific beatings.  The gentry hated him for having Henry's ear because Thomas had no pedigree, but he became a brilliant attorney and master of languages.  He had worked in France and Italy, becoming fluent in French, Italian, German and Latin.  With a prodigious memory and a smooth tongue (lawyers!), he became one of the wealthiest men in England, thanks to Henry.  He outlived two wives and two beloved daughters.  But the reason Mantel's book (532 fascinating pages) is so interesting is the picture she paints of the private man and daily life in the 1500s.  I'd always thought Cromwell unprincipled and power hungry.  His son tells him he looks like a criminal, which was part of his problem--men assumed he was up to no good even when he was relaxing by his own fire.  The Cromwell I met was shrewd, wily, and tough, but he was also scrupulous in his accounts and never faltered in his belief in the protestant reformation.  The harsh picture of Thomas More that Mantel paints makes it clear that Martin Luther was more than welcome as the one adult in a room of debauched ecclesiastics, self-styled martyrs, and charlatans.  The book is a love letter to the Church of England--from Cromwell's point of view.

Mantel's writing is sure-footed when it comes to the historical facts that are available from Cromwell's accounts, and she never talks down to the reader.  I had a rough few first pages with faulty pronoun references until I realized that "he/him" nearly always referred to Cromwell--a grammar "misuse" that made the lead character seem omniscient and and omnipresent.  A neat trick.  For anyone who loves history, England, or the Tudors, this was a great read.  Oh, and the title?  The last page of the book has King Henry and Queen Anne (with love already gone sour) going "on progress" through the countryside.  Cromwell is planning the trip for them all and is looking forward to a 5-day stay at Wolf Hall--ancestral home of the Seymours.  I can only hope the author is working on a sequel.