Taft

This book is really beautifully written. At first, the writing style reminded me a little bit of Kent Haruf's Plainsong (a spectacular book, by the way). But the subject matter is so different, of course the comparison ends of seeming idiosyncratic. Nickel, a brilliant drummer has given up his career and become a night-club manager for the chance to have a relationship with his son and his rightfully embittered wife, only to lose them anyway when his wife decides to move away. Unexpectedly a vulnerable young white girl and no-good younger brother find their way into the emotional void in his life and fill it with some of the worst kinds of trouble. The story is intercut with scenes from the earlier life of the girl and her brother, before the death of their father. Nickel is only a man; he makes mistakes, has moments of weakness and temptation. But what you get in the end is a strong meditation on the nature of fatherhood. The book hit the "fine balance" with what it took from you in the way of sorrow and what it gave back in the way of joy.

Emergency Sex

I found this book at random in a little bookstore-cafe with an idiosyncratic "recommendations" shelf. (I like recommendations so much.) The title, of course, is eye-catching. The rest of the book does not disappoint! It is the separate but intertwined stories of three UN peace-keepers, each with different skills and proclivities, but held together by a curiously strong friendship (nothing more--not a love-triangle story!). They are: a doctor, a lawyer, and a social worker. At the beginning you think that three such eager and conscientious people will join forces and save ... well, if not the world, at least someone, or something. They do have their victories, but the victories are small in the face of a much huger futility. Is it the badness of human nature? of government any government? or just of UN bureaucracy? It's not clear. They're very much in the thick of things, even as they write.

They don't offer very much in the way of sweeping generalizations. Instead they offer a view from the ground, where torture and massacre and horrible prisons and disease and being shot at get almost the same amount emphasis as parties and friendships and sex and the difficulty of trying to fit in and being satisfied with one's existence. The really interesting thing is that the stage of world events and the sphere of the individual do not seem disjoint in this book. They are mutually responsive. I loved this book and stayed up all night reading it. The critique (of the UN, of the US, of pretty much everything) is scathing, but after seeing what they saw, you have to grant them the right to make that critique.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

This was a book loaned to Pocket of Bolts by one of his colleagues. Unsurprisingly, given my current obsessive greediness for reading material, I got at it first. This was two months ago now, and Pocket of Bolts still hasn't read it! Of course, I am so behind in my book draft that I finished the book back when it was still summer and now it is fall and I am only just writing about it... oh well.

It was an interesting book. I never would have chosen it myself. It was about India under Indira Gandhi, basically set around the time I was born (mid-70s). It tells the stories of coincidentally interacting lives: the major characters are two lower caste tailors, a widow, and a young college student who grew up in the mountains. Interesting minor characters also abound, however: the hair-collector, the rent-collector, the Muslim who teaches the tailors their work, the Beggar-master, the widow's arrogant and controlling brother, the proof-reader, the college student's lost friend... Each person's story is given in elaborate detail, and the stories all wind round and round each other.

The plot, which reminds me very much of a pattern seen in traditional Chinese novels, is one of coming together followed by dispersal. Each little episode furthers the story, and most of them add to the characters' suffering. The "fine balance" of the title refers to the ability to a balance between tragedy and redemption. There is a considerable amount of tragedy in the book, tragedies of every kind, but there is just enough redemption that you come away not quite all the way crushed.

Elizabeth George Mysteries

I read A Great Deliverance in Oregon back in June shortly before my wedding. An odd choice, given how dark and strange the story turned out to be, but certainly an effective distraction. On one level, it's a novel about class: the two detectives on the case are the smooth, aristocratic Thomas Lynely and the bitter, working-class Barbara Havers. The case itself has to do with childhood trauma and its unforeseen results. I liked the character development, the degree to which the detectives were also very human, not just fact-finders. The book started off very slow, but by about halfway through I was unable to put it down and spent about half the night finishing it.

I actually did the same with In the Presence of the Enemy a few weeks ago. It's the fourth in the series, numbers two and three being not immediately available in the used bookstore near my house. They're always pretty much self-contained anyway. Presence is a kidnapping plot. Some wobbliness in ability to produce age-appropriate inner monologue for the childhood is more than made up for by the gutsy choice the author made about halfway through. (I won't give it away, but I was surprised!) Not a perfect story, but thoroughly engrossing. Again, I thought character development in unexpected quarters (the newspaper editor, the politician's husband) to be a strong suit.