#playingbookie

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Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

No one likes to be told they’ll enjoy a book, or maybe just me, because: expectations. It’s a spoiler, and I like to ruin things myself, thanks you.

But I really did like Station Eleven, and that was a joy (see: relief) because I haven’t really meandered into the post-apocalyptic genre since The Chrysalids in high school novel study. Which was a good book, as far as I remember. But something about sci-fi and how so many of them turn into zombie worlds—which author Emily St. John Mantel mentioned later in the book—makes my eyes glaze over. So huzzah! for this novel and bringing a new genre onto my playlist.

Synopsis: This is a book about beauty and survival and the beautiful sadness of surviving. The Georgian Flu epidemic wipes out something like four out of five people on the planet. Everywhere. We’re not sure why the people who survived did, but they did. Flipping between three-ish stories: the life of an actor who has a heart attack on the eve the epidemic strikes; a young girl who watches him fall onstage and then survives long after that fateful night with his image and memory locked into her brain—even more so than her own parents’; and a fan of the actor, a paranoid paramedic who gives us a glimpse of the initial days of societal collapse through the lens of his brother’s stockpiled apartment.

A tricky thing, I think, about setting a story in an apocalyptic scenario is how removed it can feel from real life and thereby real people. This story, however resonates with the shock, the awe, the hope and the dismantling of society in a fictionally honest way. And because it feels human, the moments of introspection feel very intimate—

“She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.”

The metaphors used were small, mundane and therefore so appropriate. Because isn’t that what we would all miss most later? The stirring of coffee at the milk counter, the flicker of the garage light, the twist of a road to your office, the hum of the library printer?

“The tattoo argument had lost all of its sting over the years and had become something like a familiar room where they met.”

Here’s my one (initial) drawback (maybe more coming after time has set in): At times I found the “off-ing” of characters to be refreshingly undetailed, passed over. While other times there wasn’t enough emphasis on the point a person died. The impact might ripple a bit longer on the character’s own perspective, their nervous system stunned, but that didn’t make its way around me. Maybe in “Year 15″ or “Year 20″ people can be killed so off the cuff, but there was one death tax (the son—spoiler!) that I felt needed to be taxed much more.

Also, maybe the Jeevan story could’ve had like .. a less corny ending thread, er something..

Well, off to journey this genre and author much more.

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“The seventh guitar was a nervous person, because he was nearly blind. He’d been able to see reasonably well with an extremely thick pair of glasses, but he’d lost these six years ago and since then he’d lived in a confusing landscape distilled of pure colour according to season—summer mostly green, winter mostly grey and white—in which blurred figures swam into view and then receded before he could figure out who they were. He couldn’t tell if his headaches were cause by straining to see or by his anxiety at never being able to see what was coming, but he did know the situation wasn’t helped by the first flute, who had a habit of sighing loudly whenever the seventh guitar had to stop rehearsal to ask for clarification on the score he couldn’t see.”

Emily St. John Mandel in Station Eleven

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Mink River - Brian Doyle

I rewrote this review to make more sense to an outside perspective. And to actually be a review ..

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“Stories are not only words, you know. Words are just the clothes that people drape on stories.” - Brian Doyle

I was drawn to Mink River without knowing the author or the story. But at that time, and since that time many times, it's reminded me of the lyricism of life and the love of home, and to appreciate the intertwining of our stories and how they fold and unfold and envelope one another even as that messy tangle gets gross and dysfunctional only to come out in the end with the realization, once again, that you never know what you need when you need it most, and the testing of our relationships, with each other and ourselves is somehow the beauty of it all. What I mean to say is: this book will leave you breathless.

Set in a small fictional (at least in name) town on the Oregon Coast, this tale drips in vibrant detail of the Pacific Northwest. It’s the story of one season in a community, written through the weaving of residents’ shared and separate experiences.

While reading this book, you hold threads of many peoples’ stories (a teacher with flashing eyes, a young boy who loves his bicycle, a fisherman with an abusive father, a carver battling her inner darkness, a policeman and his pregnant wife, a doctor, a dying nun, to name a few) in as many pages, much as we do everyday in our own familiar circles. You become truly immersed into life by the Mink River, loving and knowing the daily trudge and toil as if they were your own. In its simplest form: the author, Brian Doyle, inspires us to find the extraordinary in the mundane; and he uses not only his choice of words but the way they’re written to enhance the reader’s understanding of time, character, place, mood, presence, being. Each character has flaws, has strengths, has beauty, struggles, is human. (Or not. Be prepared for Moses, the crow, and many other beings—rivers, bears, fish, animals and movements of all persuasions—with voices or thoughts that are so achingly earthy and real.)

Written with more attention to lyricism than proper grammar, some passages may leave your thoughts trailing; but this structure (or lack thereof) becomes part of the narration. It’s like you’re privy to an entire town’s run-on conversation, and Doyle uses grammar sparsely to show the slide and rise of thoughts and voices, which are never very linear in real life anyways. So, while at times you may get lost in the mix of a conversation (who is saying what?) it makes you present with the characters in a very intimate way. With this in mind, it seems less necessary to hold on to every word, but instead to simply understand and recognize the tenor of their meaning. In some way this style of writing—the capture and release of ephemeral moments—becomes meditative.

Just as a lived memory holds eternal for one and not another, different details of this book will stick with each reader. It's truly beautiful read and there’s no wrong way to enjoy this book, but it would be a shame not to.

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Cowboys Are My Weakness - Pam Houston

This was a book about the relationship between men and women, in love and not, and the self-worth, the value on that relationship within a women’s mind.

“I’ve always had this thing about cowboys, maybe because I was born in New Jersey. But a real cowboy is hard to find these days, even in the west. I thought I’d found one on several occasions, I even at one time thought Homer was a cowboy, and though I loved him like crazy for a while and in some ways always will, somewhere along the line I had to face the fact that even though Homer looked like a cowboy, he was just a capitalist with a Texas accent who owned a horse.”

A book of short stories that are succinct and to the point but just poetic enough to lean off the gas of abrasion. Houston is honest about women, about their strength and their weakness and that it’s a constant spectrum within and without. But can she pass including pet dogs in every story? Maybe it’s because I recently read Sight Hound that I picked up on it, maybe I’m a sour puss (ugh), but the love triangle between genders and the ever constant third wheel canine was fairly evident enough to be exhausting.

Kudos for using the name Homer.

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“I thought I was going to cry, but didn’t want to cry in front of him so I asked where the bathroom was. He pointed to the top of the stairs. As I walked up, I held the railing tight and started inventing things in my head: air bags for skyscrapers, solar-powered limousines that never had to stop moving, a frictionless, perpetual yo-yo. The bathroom smelled like an old person, and some of the tiles that were supposed to be on the wall were on the floor. There was a photograph of a woman tucked in the corner of the mirror above the sink. She was sitting at the kitchen table that we were just sitting at, and she was wearing an enormous hat, even though she was inside, obviously. That’s how I knew that she was special. One of her hands was on a teacup. Her smile was incredibly beautiful. I wondered if her palm was sweating condensation when the picture was taken. I wondered if Mr. Black took the picture.”

Jonathan Safran Foer in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

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“George had kept his hands in his pockets. After fighting off the local cowboys and Indians, it was nice to be with a man who didn’t think that her shoulder or her waist or her butt was part of the public domain. For the first month he didn’t touch her at all. They walked and talked, had cheap, wonderful dinners, went to the movies. One night George took her to the Blossom library. Latisha had never even been inside the building. He led her into the record section, and they spent the evening listening to classical music on headsets.

He had seemed vulnerable then, almost girlish, always looking off into space. To commemorate their third month together, he gave her his copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. 

She had felt the itch early on and thought it was love. Six months later, they married, and before the first year was out, Latisha realized that the reason George wondered so much about the world was because he didn’t have a clue about life. But by the time she figured out that the itch was really trouble and not love at all, it was too late. She was pregnant.

Jeanette paused at the door. “This is fine dear. I can make it the rest of the way myself.” She let go of Latisha’s arm and leaned on the door handle. “How long were you married?”

“Nine years.”

“Children?”

“Three.”

Jeanette shook her head. “Did you kill the bastard?”

Latisha laughed. “No, he’s still alive. I threw him away.”

“Splendid,” said Jeanette, opening the door. “I love stories with happy endings.” ”

Thomas King in Green Grass, Running Water

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Astonishing Splashes of Colour - Clare Morrall

It’s difficult to read a book from the viewpoint of someone who is not mentally stable, who has an altered perception of normal.

But what I may have struggled with most was the overwhelming urge of motherhood. My maternal instinct lies more in nurturing my zucchini plants than seeing how my gene pool negotiates high school round deux. I couldn’t connect with the longing to mother children.

While the discomfort in my gut (which I had often throughout) is likely a symptom of a well-written character (and note, the book was very readable, I did so in under 24 hours), I felt like it didn’t all tie in very well. I am skeptical of the introduction of Megan so late in the story when she plays such an integral part in its finale. The entrance and lack of exit of Margaret; the realization of real love for James, Kitty’s husband, seemed like a pivotal moment but was not built up to warrant any of the necessary crescendo; the grandparents, Dinah—all these characters seemingly not driven about in a fully intentional manner. It wasn’t as though they were an afterthought .. but, kind of? Their importance lacked even distribution throughout the novel. And the yellow period—it was never fully explained to me, but kept coming up as if I should understand what it meant, the weight it held was opaque if not more substantially blurred. And while this could be attributed to Kitty’s mental disposition (her being not mentally present or aware all the time and thus the timeline being skewed), it floundered in reading as such—it felt more like a mis-write.

I still enjoyed this novel, but may not have if I had to have put in more effort to flip its pages. High readability is one of its more pacifying attributes. 

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“Once, as a child, waiting with her dad in a gas station, she’d found a luna moth in that condition: confused and dying on the pavement in front of their truck. For the time it took him to pump the gas she’d held it in her hand and watched it struggle against its end. Up close it was a frightening beast, writhing and beating against her hand until wisps of pale-green fur slipped off its body and stuck to her fingers. Her horror had made her want to throw it down, and it was only her preconceived affection for the luna that made her hold on. When these creatures danced above their yard at night, she and her dad called them ballerinas. But this was no ballerina. Its body was a fat, furry cone flattened on one end into a ferocious face like a tiny, angry owl’s. It glared at Deanna, seeming to know too much for an insect and, worse, seeming disdainful. She hadn’t given up her love for luna after that, but she’d never forgotten, either how a mystery caught in the hand could lose its grace.”  

Barbara Kingsolver in Prodigal Summer