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matthewcpeck's Reviews (587)
'Serena' makes for one of the most compulsive reading experiences I've had in quite a while. The first chapter alone has enough tragedy, intrigue, and shock to fill a novella, but Rash's book never loosens its grip until the acknowledgment page.
It's about a Boston lumber magnate and his brilliant, ambitious new bride Serena, overseeing a logging operation in the highlands of western North Carolina at the start of the Great Depression. Their dynasty is beset on one side by the US Government and the burgeoning National Park System. And on the other side is a local teenager named Rachel that happens to have borne Pemberton's illegitimate son.
That Serena is perfectly aware of the child and ostensibly OK with the situation is one of the first in a string of unconventional narrative maneuvers. Revealing more of the story would be shameful, but I'll be enticingly vague - 'Serena' starts out surprisingly, but the climax has a grim, Shakespearean inevitability. The only other recent work of pop culture I can think of that tells such a bewitching tale of the dehumanizing effects of unfettered capitalism, isolation, and greed (in a similar milieu) is 'There Will Be Blood'.
I'll pick a few nits about Rash's prose. The dialogue, especially that among the novel's upscale individuals, tends to be weirdly lifeless and forced. The conversations among the working folk fare much better, like the rich dialect of the Greek chorus/logging crew that pops up every couple of chapters. And while Rash's descriptions of his native Appalachia are ruggedly evocative, he'll sometimes reach for a simile that attempts a Cormac McCarthy-esque gravitas but falls just short.
One thing Rash has got that McCarthy doesn't, however: strong females. Serena is a truly awesome creation: scary, sexual, and near-supernatural. Rachel may seem to be her antithesis, but they're both resourceful, independent women in a fiercely patriarchal time and place.
Anyway...read the book before it's become inseparable from Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, later this year.
It's about a Boston lumber magnate and his brilliant, ambitious new bride Serena, overseeing a logging operation in the highlands of western North Carolina at the start of the Great Depression. Their dynasty is beset on one side by the US Government and the burgeoning National Park System. And on the other side is a local teenager named Rachel that happens to have borne Pemberton's illegitimate son.
That Serena is perfectly aware of the child and ostensibly OK with the situation is one of the first in a string of unconventional narrative maneuvers. Revealing more of the story would be shameful, but I'll be enticingly vague - 'Serena' starts out surprisingly, but the climax has a grim, Shakespearean inevitability. The only other recent work of pop culture I can think of that tells such a bewitching tale of the dehumanizing effects of unfettered capitalism, isolation, and greed (in a similar milieu) is 'There Will Be Blood'.
I'll pick a few nits about Rash's prose. The dialogue, especially that among the novel's upscale individuals, tends to be weirdly lifeless and forced. The conversations among the working folk fare much better, like the rich dialect of the Greek chorus/logging crew that pops up every couple of chapters. And while Rash's descriptions of his native Appalachia are ruggedly evocative, he'll sometimes reach for a simile that attempts a Cormac McCarthy-esque gravitas but falls just short.
One thing Rash has got that McCarthy doesn't, however: strong females. Serena is a truly awesome creation: scary, sexual, and near-supernatural. Rachel may seem to be her antithesis, but they're both resourceful, independent women in a fiercely patriarchal time and place.
Anyway...read the book before it's become inseparable from Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, later this year.
A really odd book to which it's difficult to assign a star rating, 'The Age Of Wire And String' is a technically a book of short stories in the way that 'Revolution 9' is technically a Beatles song. It's written like an almanac or encyclopedia of the rituals, history, and jargon of an America in a parallel dimension. The idea of a normal sentence or image is tossed out into the abyss as one reads clinical descriptions of musical legs and angels in the grass. (I read the 2013 Granta version with abstract illustrations by Catrin Morgan that make everything that much more disorienting.)
In between the short, encyclopedia-entry-like works are 2 longer pieces that are more recognizable stories, albeit really weird stories. 'The Weather Killer' recounts an apocalypse-cum-origin myth in spare, Biblical prose that heightens the hallucinatory madness of the events described. And 'The Animal Husband' is a distorted, seemingly personal account of childhood that maybe is a key to understanding the whole of the book, in which nighttime is when the 'bird eats black air' and writing is 'scratching away the white'.
'Wire And String' is hard to describe - at times it reminded me of the playful Irish genius triptych of Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Flann O'Brien. At other times it reminded me of LSD-fueled 60s rock lyrics. But one of Marcus's greatest feats is making this book a lot of fun to read, from start to finish. I even laughed out loud at times, simply at the surprise of a word or name used in a unorthodox way. I can only hope that a thousand years from now, after some kind of cataclysm has erased all traces of our society, an archaeologist will dig up 'The Age Of Wire And String' and believe it to be a historical document.
In between the short, encyclopedia-entry-like works are 2 longer pieces that are more recognizable stories, albeit really weird stories. 'The Weather Killer' recounts an apocalypse-cum-origin myth in spare, Biblical prose that heightens the hallucinatory madness of the events described. And 'The Animal Husband' is a distorted, seemingly personal account of childhood that maybe is a key to understanding the whole of the book, in which nighttime is when the 'bird eats black air' and writing is 'scratching away the white'.
'Wire And String' is hard to describe - at times it reminded me of the playful Irish genius triptych of Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Flann O'Brien. At other times it reminded me of LSD-fueled 60s rock lyrics. But one of Marcus's greatest feats is making this book a lot of fun to read, from start to finish. I even laughed out loud at times, simply at the surprise of a word or name used in a unorthodox way. I can only hope that a thousand years from now, after some kind of cataclysm has erased all traces of our society, an archaeologist will dig up 'The Age Of Wire And String' and believe it to be a historical document.
'The Luminaries' has a cover, title, heft, and Man Booker badge that make it look cerebral. But Eleanor Catton's book is an accessible, rollicking fun read. The plot is insanely complex: a string of mysterious events in Hokitika, New Zealand during that country's 1860s gold rush, involving a teeming cast of prostitutes and criminals and bankers and Chinese people and their increasingly tangled attempts to solve those mysteries.
Catton has produced a wild blend: a mystery novel; a mammoth 19th-century stylistic homage like 'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell'; an intriguing exploration of a rarely-documented place and time; a metaphysical/supernatural fable; and a formal experiment. As for that final category, 'The Luminaries' is divided by sections heralded by zodiacal charts, and these are further divided by chapters with esoteric/occult titles ('Moon in Aries', 'The Greater Malefic', etc.). I'll admit that I'm altogether too (willfully) ignorant of the horoscope to fully grasp whatever Catton was doing here, but I marveled at the innovative structure and timeline. The book begins with a section that's a 362-page book in itself, then continues with sections and chapters that become gradually shorter and shorter until they're impressionistic - and the little Victorian-style 'In Which So-and-so does this' chapter headings become, hilariously, longer than the actual chapters.
I didn't flat-out love that first section of the book, which seems to consist almost entirely of drawing-room conversations between men drinking brandy and smoking cigars. But the plot really kicks into high gear around the halfway point, and somehow Catton ties every loose end together, in a jaw-dropping use of storytelling mechanics and logical character behavior that reminded me, oddly, of 'Breaking Bad'.
If you can get through that initial section, 'The Luminaries' is pretty fantastic. I read the hardcover, but I would recommend an e-book version, if possible - avoid the 2.6 lb weight while taking advantage of the ability to search the book to keep track of characters and places.
Catton has produced a wild blend: a mystery novel; a mammoth 19th-century stylistic homage like 'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell'; an intriguing exploration of a rarely-documented place and time; a metaphysical/supernatural fable; and a formal experiment. As for that final category, 'The Luminaries' is divided by sections heralded by zodiacal charts, and these are further divided by chapters with esoteric/occult titles ('Moon in Aries', 'The Greater Malefic', etc.). I'll admit that I'm altogether too (willfully) ignorant of the horoscope to fully grasp whatever Catton was doing here, but I marveled at the innovative structure and timeline. The book begins with a section that's a 362-page book in itself, then continues with sections and chapters that become gradually shorter and shorter until they're impressionistic - and the little Victorian-style 'In Which So-and-so does this' chapter headings become, hilariously, longer than the actual chapters.
I didn't flat-out love that first section of the book, which seems to consist almost entirely of drawing-room conversations between men drinking brandy and smoking cigars. But the plot really kicks into high gear around the halfway point, and somehow Catton ties every loose end together, in a jaw-dropping use of storytelling mechanics and logical character behavior that reminded me, oddly, of 'Breaking Bad'.
If you can get through that initial section, 'The Luminaries' is pretty fantastic. I read the hardcover, but I would recommend an e-book version, if possible - avoid the 2.6 lb weight while taking advantage of the ability to search the book to keep track of characters and places.
3 1/2 stars. I was a tad disappointed to find out that 'Death By Black Hole' was a compilation of monthly magazine columns, rather than a book focusing primarily on black holes. But this book serves as a splendid primer on the current understanding of astrophysics (as of 2007), written in the extremely likeable tones of America's most popular scientist.
Tyson's essays are grouped into sections, starting off with a brief history of humanity's astronomical knowledge from Copernicus onward, and ending with a powerful, razor-sharp piece about science and religion (the final paragraph is chilling). There are also some hilarious rants about egregious science-blunders in a range of Hollywood films - a cocktail party chat between NDT and James Cameron resulted in an accurate night sky being digitally inserted into TITANIC's remastered DVD release - and a couple of chapters about the frustrations of the complexity of research vs. media coverage & public perception, chapters which should be required reading for those people that think that our predominant theories are just dreamed up on a whim, instead of being backed by centuries of hard-won knowledge and tedious data-gathering and -testing.
The biggest and most cohesive chunk of the book is dedicated to Tyson's explanation of star life cycles and galactic origins. This, of course, includes the beautifully named essay of the title, which introduces the term 'spaghettification' into the physics lexicon.
Its compilation format means that there's some inevitable repetition, and some subjects that are explained too hurriedly: the prizewinning piece 'In The Beginning', for example, though describing the particle physics of the Big Bang across three pages is pretty admirable. I'd still recommend Brian Greene's 'The Fabric Of The Cosmos' as the best in-depth popular explanation of everything cosmological, but 'Death By Black Hole' has more than enough enthusiasm, clarity, and mind-expanding factoids if you're looking for a more compact read. And Neil deGrasse Tyson is pretty much a national treasure, lame scientist-puns and all.
Tyson's essays are grouped into sections, starting off with a brief history of humanity's astronomical knowledge from Copernicus onward, and ending with a powerful, razor-sharp piece about science and religion (the final paragraph is chilling). There are also some hilarious rants about egregious science-blunders in a range of Hollywood films - a cocktail party chat between NDT and James Cameron resulted in an accurate night sky being digitally inserted into TITANIC's remastered DVD release - and a couple of chapters about the frustrations of the complexity of research vs. media coverage & public perception, chapters which should be required reading for those people that think that our predominant theories are just dreamed up on a whim, instead of being backed by centuries of hard-won knowledge and tedious data-gathering and -testing.
The biggest and most cohesive chunk of the book is dedicated to Tyson's explanation of star life cycles and galactic origins. This, of course, includes the beautifully named essay of the title, which introduces the term 'spaghettification' into the physics lexicon.
Its compilation format means that there's some inevitable repetition, and some subjects that are explained too hurriedly: the prizewinning piece 'In The Beginning', for example, though describing the particle physics of the Big Bang across three pages is pretty admirable. I'd still recommend Brian Greene's 'The Fabric Of The Cosmos' as the best in-depth popular explanation of everything cosmological, but 'Death By Black Hole' has more than enough enthusiasm, clarity, and mind-expanding factoids if you're looking for a more compact read. And Neil deGrasse Tyson is pretty much a national treasure, lame scientist-puns and all.
Lives up to the critical adoration. All of Wells Tower's stories - with one notable exception - are about frustrated males. Divorcees, runaways, failures, angsty teens. The descriptions, dialogue, and characters are all convincing, if often discomfiting.
The biggest surprise is the title story, a super-gory first-person account of a group of Vikings sacking Lindisfarne told in a contemporary, Daniel Woodrell-esque vernacular. Its works so well and feels so immediate, that I'm surprised that this type of unconventional historical fiction isn't more prevalent.
Anyway - if you care about short stories, this book is one of the essential selections of the last ten years. I eagerly await Wells' follow-up, whenever it comes...
The biggest surprise is the title story, a super-gory first-person account of a group of Vikings sacking Lindisfarne told in a contemporary, Daniel Woodrell-esque vernacular. Its works so well and feels so immediate, that I'm surprised that this type of unconventional historical fiction isn't more prevalent.
Anyway - if you care about short stories, this book is one of the essential selections of the last ten years. I eagerly await Wells' follow-up, whenever it comes...
Helene Wecker's clever debut novel is an epic tale of the immigrant neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan at the end of the 19th-century, told mainly through the dual narratives of the Semitic legends of its title: a female Golem created as a custom-made wife for a husband/master that dies unexpectedly on the boat from Poland; a Jinni (genie) trapped in human form and unwittingly freed from a copper flask by a Syrian-american tinsmith. Strangers among strangers in a strange land, the protagonists are forced to eke out human-style existences, eventually meeting up and maintaining an unusual relationship, and discovering that their pasts are intertwined in an ominous way.
Like any worthwhile fantasy or science fiction, 'The Golem And Jinni' employs a wild concept to examine pressing concerns. The emigration aspects of the plot are of ongoing relevance, as are the conversations about religion and religious tolerance. And Wecker uses the Golem character to explore the mysteries of humanity and free will, in material of the sort usually found in futuristic stories about androids and cloning.
It's Wecker's prose, though, that keeps the book from being great. The novel has earned comparisons to Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke, but Wecker doesn't have the spark, the offhand use of an otherworldly sensual detail, that lends an eerily convincing quality to those Britons' work. Wecker's writing is unpretentious and placid, but it's not terribly imaginative. I wish she'd have used a thesaurus once in a while. And she also uses italics (ugh).
But I couldn't help but be absorbed in the off-kilter quasi-romance of the title characters, and all of the stories-within-stories that Wecker dreamed up - it's an addicting, endlessly inventive story, even if the climactic magic-battle feels a little obligatory. Aesthetic reservations aside, I'd recommend it.
Like any worthwhile fantasy or science fiction, 'The Golem And Jinni' employs a wild concept to examine pressing concerns. The emigration aspects of the plot are of ongoing relevance, as are the conversations about religion and religious tolerance. And Wecker uses the Golem character to explore the mysteries of humanity and free will, in material of the sort usually found in futuristic stories about androids and cloning.
It's Wecker's prose, though, that keeps the book from being great. The novel has earned comparisons to Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke, but Wecker doesn't have the spark, the offhand use of an otherworldly sensual detail, that lends an eerily convincing quality to those Britons' work. Wecker's writing is unpretentious and placid, but it's not terribly imaginative. I wish she'd have used a thesaurus once in a while. And she also uses italics (ugh).
But I couldn't help but be absorbed in the off-kilter quasi-romance of the title characters, and all of the stories-within-stories that Wecker dreamed up - it's an addicting, endlessly inventive story, even if the climactic magic-battle feels a little obligatory. Aesthetic reservations aside, I'd recommend it.
Ben Marcus's debut novel defies convention in form, style, and content. There's family ("Ben Marcus" and his parents) at the center, living on a farmhouse-turned-compound in a dystopian Akron. Mrs. Marcus has come under the influence of a visionary cult leader named Jane Dark, who espouses a philosophy of extreme self-denial where absolute silence and stillness are seen as the ideal mode of existence. Mr. Marcus, meanwhile, has been exiled to an underground prison cell in the back forty, while young Ben has mandated sexual intercourse with a Dark's female 'Silentist' followers for breeding purposes.
This isn't presented in any linear, storylike fashion, though. The book starts with an introduction/caveat from the father, and it ends with a letter from the mother. Between these are three sections narrated by "Ben", and they range, stylistically, from instruction manual to almanac to memoir and beyond, immersing the reader in the book's bizarre universe. This is a world where human language can act as a physical substance that can bludgeon, or be absorbed into cloth. As in his previous collection "The Age Of Wire And String", Marcus experiments with English, creating his own jargon and endowing people, objects and weather with properties that that don't rightly belong. It's not just whimsy, though: it's written calmly and clearly. Sometimes it made me chuckle out loud, especially at the 'instructions' for reading the book, near the start (it makes more sense if recited through megaphone under moonlight, but reading in a German accent will "induce crouching"). And then it's deeply disturbing, haunted, like the recurring saga of Ben's sister, the subject of a family experiment that has her called by different names over a period of time, and shedding a husk of skin at the end of each interval.
The longish ending chapter, written as a final letter from mother to father, has a markedly different tone than the rest of the novel, and manages to be genuinely heartbreaking, if not as blazingly original and weirdly fun as the preceding pages. And it really is an addictive read, once you acclimate to its rhythms. When I was deep into the book, the picayune details of my daily life stood out with a new strangeness: instructions posted on a fax machine seemed like an incantation, and the fact that my work PC reads my fingerprint seemed suddenly frightening.
"Notable American Women" reminded me variously of Haruki Murakami, Flann O'Brien and William Gass, but it's truly an anomaly. It made 'normal' novels seem so stubborn and narrow-minded, and I enthusiastically recommend it to those that appreciate the varied wonders of the English language.
This isn't presented in any linear, storylike fashion, though. The book starts with an introduction/caveat from the father, and it ends with a letter from the mother. Between these are three sections narrated by "Ben", and they range, stylistically, from instruction manual to almanac to memoir and beyond, immersing the reader in the book's bizarre universe. This is a world where human language can act as a physical substance that can bludgeon, or be absorbed into cloth. As in his previous collection "The Age Of Wire And String", Marcus experiments with English, creating his own jargon and endowing people, objects and weather with properties that that don't rightly belong. It's not just whimsy, though: it's written calmly and clearly. Sometimes it made me chuckle out loud, especially at the 'instructions' for reading the book, near the start (it makes more sense if recited through megaphone under moonlight, but reading in a German accent will "induce crouching"). And then it's deeply disturbing, haunted, like the recurring saga of Ben's sister, the subject of a family experiment that has her called by different names over a period of time, and shedding a husk of skin at the end of each interval.
The longish ending chapter, written as a final letter from mother to father, has a markedly different tone than the rest of the novel, and manages to be genuinely heartbreaking, if not as blazingly original and weirdly fun as the preceding pages. And it really is an addictive read, once you acclimate to its rhythms. When I was deep into the book, the picayune details of my daily life stood out with a new strangeness: instructions posted on a fax machine seemed like an incantation, and the fact that my work PC reads my fingerprint seemed suddenly frightening.
"Notable American Women" reminded me variously of Haruki Murakami, Flann O'Brien and William Gass, but it's truly an anomaly. It made 'normal' novels seem so stubborn and narrow-minded, and I enthusiastically recommend it to those that appreciate the varied wonders of the English language.
Karen Russell's new novella-length story is her bleakest and most unsettling so far, taking place in an America blighted by a mysterious insomnia epidemic that can only be alleviated by the titular donations, drawn from healthy sleepers by a nonprofit calling itself the Slumber Corps. The protagonist is a Corps recruiter named Trish, who signs donors by relating the story of her own sister's harrowing insomnia-death.
This is a work that forgoes apocalyptic pyrotechnics in favor of exploring psychological and ethical quandaries, and that's both a strength and a burden. When an infant girl with a 'pure' sleep is discovered and milked for the maximum allowable sleep withdrawal, Trish's resulting internal struggle consumes much of the narrative. It's admirably realistic, but repetitive, from a narrator that didn't quite cohere for me. And the dry, effortless humor of Russell's earlier books is pretty much absent - 'Sleep Donation' is serious-minded stuff.
But this is still Karen Russell, and her powers of imagination are magnificent (a single man's nightmare infects the sleep 'supply' and is so unspeakably horrible that people FORCE themselves awake) and her sentences are wondrous (a nocturnal hawk's cry "rips through the deep quiet of the sky like a skunk strike drawn through black fur"). 'Sleep Donation' conjures a haunting world that will force you to appreciate every moment of precious, precious sleep: but read 'Swamplandia!' first, by all means.
This is a work that forgoes apocalyptic pyrotechnics in favor of exploring psychological and ethical quandaries, and that's both a strength and a burden. When an infant girl with a 'pure' sleep is discovered and milked for the maximum allowable sleep withdrawal, Trish's resulting internal struggle consumes much of the narrative. It's admirably realistic, but repetitive, from a narrator that didn't quite cohere for me. And the dry, effortless humor of Russell's earlier books is pretty much absent - 'Sleep Donation' is serious-minded stuff.
But this is still Karen Russell, and her powers of imagination are magnificent (a single man's nightmare infects the sleep 'supply' and is so unspeakably horrible that people FORCE themselves awake) and her sentences are wondrous (a nocturnal hawk's cry "rips through the deep quiet of the sky like a skunk strike drawn through black fur"). 'Sleep Donation' conjures a haunting world that will force you to appreciate every moment of precious, precious sleep: but read 'Swamplandia!' first, by all means.
This is a book I've been meaning to get to for more than a decade, ever since I was intrigued to see Harold Bloom include a seemingly obscure 1981 fantasy along with celebrated works by fellows like Pynchon, DeLillo, and McCarthy in his list of the 5 greatest novels by living writers (!). Now I've finally tackled 'Little, Big' and I can vouch for its being a rich, mysterious anomaly of American literature, even if I wasn't quite as stupefied as some other reviewers.
Set mostly in what seems to be anonymous versions of upstate New York/New England and Manhattan, 'Little, Big' centers on an aimless fellow named Smoky Barnable who courts and marries an ethereal country girl named Daily Alice Drinkwater and moves to her rambling family estate (Edgewood). An odd, isolated, hippie-ish family which may have some kind of long-standing entanglement with the fairy world of old legend, and may have foreseen Smoky's entrance as part of a vast 'Tale' encompassing the past and future of the clan, if not all existence.
Crowley's novel has a remarkable scope, reaching back to 19-century Drinkwaters, and then jumping forward to a dystopian 21st century NYC to relate the tribulations of Smoky's son. The book has something for everyone - upper-class domestic drama, seething eroticism, talking animals, philosophy, satire, mystery (and unfortunately a Magical Negro character named - wait for it- Fred Savage). But readers expecting a standard fantasy (as it originally seemed to be marketed) will certainly be put off within the first few pages. Crowley writes in long, dense, sinuous sentences laden in semicolons that discourage speed-reading. And he doesn't like to spell things out: a vagueness that's either incredibly frustrating or liberating, depending on your readerly attitude. For the most part I fall in the latter camp; I like to do a little mental work (or internet research) in my reading, because it makes the discoveries or connections that much more special. And if it's a supernatural story, vagueness is more haunting, more magical. Susanna Clarke's 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell' and the works of Neil Gaiman are spiritual descendants of 'Little, Big' and function similarly, although Crowley goes a lot farther. It's almost a modernist book. I readily admit that I haven't grasped all of its allusions and symbols, and that it would require a second reading just to properly sort all of its events.
But it's beautifully, beautifully written. Crowley deserves a place among those other aforementioned old white guys for his style alone. As three main characters watch a meteor shower: "...and if the stars had been as near and full of faces as they seemed, they would have looked down and seen those three as a single asterism, a linked wheel against the wheeling dark sky of the meadow". A child's piano chords "run together like tears down a cheek." Crowley is also a lover of puns and paradoxes, and certain phrases echo throughout the book; many a room or hallway is described as "smaller than it looked, or bigger than it seemed."
For all its obscurities and challenges, 'Little, Big' has a deeply moving and satisfying ending. It's a book that uses centuries of folklore and exquisite English to examine fate and memory and the depths of human emotion, and does so most perfectly in its last 5 pages, which made me want to hurry home and hug my wife.
Set mostly in what seems to be anonymous versions of upstate New York/New England and Manhattan, 'Little, Big' centers on an aimless fellow named Smoky Barnable who courts and marries an ethereal country girl named Daily Alice Drinkwater and moves to her rambling family estate (Edgewood). An odd, isolated, hippie-ish family which may have some kind of long-standing entanglement with the fairy world of old legend, and may have foreseen Smoky's entrance as part of a vast 'Tale' encompassing the past and future of the clan, if not all existence.
Crowley's novel has a remarkable scope, reaching back to 19-century Drinkwaters, and then jumping forward to a dystopian 21st century NYC to relate the tribulations of Smoky's son. The book has something for everyone - upper-class domestic drama, seething eroticism, talking animals, philosophy, satire, mystery (and unfortunately a Magical Negro character named - wait for it- Fred Savage). But readers expecting a standard fantasy (as it originally seemed to be marketed) will certainly be put off within the first few pages. Crowley writes in long, dense, sinuous sentences laden in semicolons that discourage speed-reading. And he doesn't like to spell things out: a vagueness that's either incredibly frustrating or liberating, depending on your readerly attitude. For the most part I fall in the latter camp; I like to do a little mental work (or internet research) in my reading, because it makes the discoveries or connections that much more special. And if it's a supernatural story, vagueness is more haunting, more magical. Susanna Clarke's 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell' and the works of Neil Gaiman are spiritual descendants of 'Little, Big' and function similarly, although Crowley goes a lot farther. It's almost a modernist book. I readily admit that I haven't grasped all of its allusions and symbols, and that it would require a second reading just to properly sort all of its events.
But it's beautifully, beautifully written. Crowley deserves a place among those other aforementioned old white guys for his style alone. As three main characters watch a meteor shower: "...and if the stars had been as near and full of faces as they seemed, they would have looked down and seen those three as a single asterism, a linked wheel against the wheeling dark sky of the meadow". A child's piano chords "run together like tears down a cheek." Crowley is also a lover of puns and paradoxes, and certain phrases echo throughout the book; many a room or hallway is described as "smaller than it looked, or bigger than it seemed."
For all its obscurities and challenges, 'Little, Big' has a deeply moving and satisfying ending. It's a book that uses centuries of folklore and exquisite English to examine fate and memory and the depths of human emotion, and does so most perfectly in its last 5 pages, which made me want to hurry home and hug my wife.
As a first-time father with a wife that's 6 1/2 months along in her first pregnancy, I can't truly assess the guidance in this book until that day that my life changes forever, sometime in late July or early August. Not to mention that 'The Birth Partner' is the first baby book I've read, so I have no comparison. But I certainly feel better after finishing it, creepy cover illustration notwithstanding.
Penny Simkin is a Seattle physical therapist and a doula guru of sorts, and this book is a concise, amazingly thorough instruction manual covering the time spanning from the few weeks before labor through the few weeks afterward. I inferred that Simkin leans toward the natural, drug-free side of the divide, but her book is never the least bit hectoring or judgmental. It covers every option, possibility, and complication, while listing the range of emotions to be expected from the mother and yourself. Simkin shares a few anecdotes and quotations from new parents along the way, emphasizing how a strong, loving support figure eases even the physical aspect of labor. Much recommended.
Penny Simkin is a Seattle physical therapist and a doula guru of sorts, and this book is a concise, amazingly thorough instruction manual covering the time spanning from the few weeks before labor through the few weeks afterward. I inferred that Simkin leans toward the natural, drug-free side of the divide, but her book is never the least bit hectoring or judgmental. It covers every option, possibility, and complication, while listing the range of emotions to be expected from the mother and yourself. Simkin shares a few anecdotes and quotations from new parents along the way, emphasizing how a strong, loving support figure eases even the physical aspect of labor. Much recommended.