Thursday, July 19, 2012

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker is a beautiful book. My favorite of the summer so far.

In the beginning of the novel, eleven-year-old Julia's world changes when scientists announce that they have observed a slowing of the earth's rotation. The cause is unknown, the effects, for the most part, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Slowly, the days lengthen, gravity shifts, the power flickers, seagulls and whales, then grass and eucalyptus become extinct. All the while, Julia and the adults around her struggle to understand what is happening to them and look for ways to keep the world as they know it, one precious moment of daylight at a time.

Walker's end-of-the-world is no fiery apocalypse. It is one where the taste of grapes and strawberries, then even the smell of grass and the sounds of birds, are forgotten, but human life on earth goes on, in its persistence, insensible to the loss of these great beauties.

And before the backdrop of these cosmic miracles Julia's own life unfolds: she takes piano, plays soccer. She is good at math, she loses her best friend Hanna, she eats lunch alone in the library, her birthday is forgotten, she forms a bond with Seth Moreno. Her parents fight. She and Seth visit the ocean to help to save the whales beached there, casualties of the shifting tides and magnetic fields of earth:

We rushed to fill our cups with water and then ran back across the thick band of mud. We looked for the driest whale, the one most in need. We found it at the edge of the group, and we imagined that it was older than the others. Its skin was striped white with scars. I shooed flies from its eyes, one eye at a time. Seth poured our meager water supply over its head and into its mouth. He petted its side. I felt an urgency like love.

"Hey, kids," someone called from behind us. It was a man in a beach hat, an empty white bucket swinging from one hand. A gust of wind drowned out what he said, so he shouted it again: "That one's already dead."

The futile beauty of this scene almost made me cry, and as Julia's world's tragedy unfolds, this futile beauty only grows.

And her days grow to 40, then 64, then 78 hours; tortuously hot periods of dangerous radiation followed by frigid deserts of dark.

This is not an adventure story. Nor is it, exactly, a coming of age story. Julia, though relatable, is somehow transparent as a narrator. The plot is simple, but effectively so. Julia's voice invites readers to overlay their own adolescences onto the backdrop of the slow and inexorable end of life as we know it.

And at the same time, Walker asks, perhaps begs, her readers to see their own lives reflected in Julia's, not out of some environmentalist crusade (noble though those may be), but out of something much more simple:

Nothing is certain.

Not the tide not the birds not the sun.

But our world is very beautiful.

Julia's story is an unhurried narrative that becomes, in so many ways, an elegy for the world that we are so lucky to still have hold of. At least for now. Nothing I've read in a long time has made me feel so acutely the beauty and promise of this Earth we still have, and its incredible fragility.

One day, Julia's street is destroyed as repair crews work feverishly to keep up with the damage the radiation storms are wreaking on the power grid. She and Seth leave their names in wet cement. Shortly thereafter, she looses him.

Looking back, Julia remembers:

We dipped our fingers in the wet cement, and we wrote the truest, simplest things we knew -- our names, the date, and these words.

We were here.

Reading this novel on a summer afternoon, I emerged from its pages and the coffee shop where I had been reading alongside a friend. The heat index in Baltimore had reached 113 that day, a storm was brewing, and we looked up together at remarkable clouds that she remembered from her childhood as a presage of tornadoes. As we walked down the street and hot wind whipped up the day's dust in front of us, I wasn't quite sure if I was in the real world or back in Walker's luminous pages.

This, Dear Reader, is a book worth reading.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine

In Treasure Island!!! by first-time novelist Sara Levine, our unnamed heroine/pirate swashbuckles her way through a job (that she hates), a boyfriend (who isn't really into boldness, turns out), her sister (fat), a very-expensive parrot named Little Richard (She wants him to squawk "Steer the boat, girlfriend!" but he really only gets as far as "boat!" before she feeds him mac-and-cheese poisoned with prescription meds, and he winds up in her mother's already over-crowded freezer), a best friend (also, like boyfriend, not big on boldness), and possibly one of the major veins that runs through said-sister's right hand. The last of these with a cake knife; the other damages requiring no weapon more dangerous than our heroine's deliciously misguided sense of self-importance.

However, if nothing in the paragraph above struck you as particularly funny, this probably isn't the book for you.

Levine's voice is true, our Heroine (henceforth in this review known as "H") truly abhorrent, and the mayhem that results is a well-spent summer afternoon.

Our tale begins when H's sister Adrianna leaves a library copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island lying around the house, after she decides not to read it with her third grade class ("I hate a book with no girls, sister Adrianna proclaims on the the second page.) H picks it up and decides to cleave to "boy hero Jim Hawkins' best qualities":

BOLDNESS
RESOLUTION
INDEPENDENCE
HORN-BLOWING


(Rebecca Barry's NYTimes review intelligently explicates what exactly "horn-blowing" just might be, but personally I recommend you just leave it up to your imagination. Trust me, you'll come up with a few things.)

To be honest, I frequently find picaresque novels tiresome, but Island!!! is smart, fast-paced, and allowed me to live quite happily within our heroine's warped and thwarted logic. As H plunders and pillages her way through her own life as a 25-year-old person patently without purpose or aim, her deeply misguided attempts at self-actualization may feel vaguely familiar to anyone who has been recently (or ever) a 25-year-old non-hornblowing person without purpose or aim. At one moment, as she sits in a doctor's office in pursuit of anxiety medication, her doctor notes, "You do seem anxious. You shredded your gown," and H replies:

"Well, it takes an awful lot of energy to give birth to one-self. It's not as though you do one bold thing and then you are bold. The thing about adventure is that you have to keep doing it, day in and day out. I don't know, can it ever be definitively accomplished?"

Can I get a "Steer the boat, girlfriend!"?

Levine's creation of a heroine so totally ridiculous and yet so recognizable is truly an accomplishment, and if the climax feels a little forced, this reader will forgive her, particularly after reading the flawlessly hilarious events of the final few pages. As you might imagine, nothing ends well for H, Adrianna, or the rest of the crew, but the novel will leave you laughing, and yes, perhaps seeking a little horn-blowing of your own, long after the few happy hours you will spend in its pages.








Thursday, July 5, 2012

I enter the Blogosphere...


So thanks to Goodreads, this morning I just discovered Insatiable Booksluts...

...and all of these awesome blogs...

and I am both thrilled and overwhelmed by how many people are already doing what The Inattentive Reader is trying to do in so many incredibly successful ways.

Anyhow, point is, you should probably give up on this little nascent project of a blog and just read their stuff.

I probably will.

And these people know what they're doing.



Monday, July 2, 2012

1Q84, by Haruki Murakami

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84 is a quiet, introspective, and character-driven thriller. It divulges its secrets delicately, and never completely, and the other world in which our heroine and hero find themselves never fits neatly into the tidy framework that American readers may expect from their dystopias. 

But when it comes down to it, why should a dystopia always answer the questions we readers ask of it?

This is by no means a novel for the reader who hopes to get to the answers, or the end, quickly. By turns lucid, strange, and downright disgusting, the world of 1Q84 is, in all the right ways, not unlike, and yet completely separate from, our own. Its main characters, Aomame, the unlikely assassin, and her childhood love, the long-lost writer Tengo, are beautifully realized from the novel's earliest pages, and even in their diurnal  meanderings, which, I warn you, are extensive, I found them fascinating.

As Aomame is forced to flee after a particularly high-profile assassination, she looks back at the apartment that had been her home:

Standing by the front door, she turned for one last look, aware that she would never be coming back. The thought made the apartment appear unbelievably shabby, like a prison that only locked from the inside, bereft of any picture or vase. The only thing left was the bargain-sale rubber plant on the balcony, which she had bought instead of a goldfish. She could hardly believe she had spent years of her life in this place without question or discontent.


"Good-bye," she murmured, bidding farewell not so much to the apartment as to the self that had lived here.

Rich in allusion and psychological depth, 1Q84 is a book to be lived in, explored, questioned, doubted, and believed it.

But, as is so often the case with self-knowledge, demand reasons or a rapid resolution, and you will be disappointed.