books

Recommended Reading: All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

/ Carolyn O / 8 Comments

photo (91)Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See* follows two young people, Marie-Laure and Werner, as Europe teeters on the brink of World War II and then falls into the abyss. All the Light We Cannot See is one of the most beautiful books I’ve read all year; Mr. Doerr’s prose is elegant, luminous, and unflinching. Secondary characters are finely rendered and remembered throughout the novel (one of my favorites is a classmate of Werner’s who reminded me of Helen Burns from Jane Eyre); no-one is lost. Every page offers beautiful sentences and lovingly rendered textures of places and things.

Here’s just one passage that I marked for its perfect description:

Hours later, he wakes to see the silhouette of an airplane blot stars as it lurches east. It makes a soft tearing sound as it passes overhead. Then it disappears. The ground concusses a moment later.

A corner of the night sky, beyond a wall of trees, blooms red. In the lurid, flickering light, he sees that the airplane was not alone, that the sky teems with them, a dozen swooping back and forth, racing in all directions, and in a moment of disorientation, he feels that he’s looking not up but down, as though a spotlight has been shined into a wedge of bloodshot water, and the sky has become the sea, and the airplanes are hungry fish, harrying their prey in the dark. (90-91)

 

Marie-Laure goes blind as a young girl. Her father, who works with locks at Paris’s Museum of Natural History and fashions puzzle boxes for each of Marie-Laure’s birthday, constructs a tiny scale model of their neighborhood so that she can learn to navigate on her own. When the Nazis invade, however, they’re forced to flee Paris for the home of Marie-Laure’s eccentric and reclusive uncle, haunted by what he witnessed during the First World War. In new surroundings and faced with constant fear, Marie-Laure learns to make do — with the Resistance rising around her. 

In Germany, Werner lives in an orphanage with his younger sister, dreading the day when he’ll be old enough to work in the mines that killed his father. By chance, he and Jutta find a broken radio, and Werner fixes it as if by magic. At night they listen surreptitiously, enraptured by what they hear, especially a children’s program in French. Before long, Werner’s radio repair skills are famous in their town, and he wins entry to a school for Hitler Youth — his escape from the mines. But he’s unprepared for the cruelty he finds there, and for what he finds himself doing in the army.

Eventually, but inexorably, Werner and Marie-Laure enter each other’s orbits. Part of All the Light We Cannot See‘s brilliance is its structure, which allows for maximum description (the book was ten years in the making, apparently) and maximum suspense. Scenes from Marie-Laure’s and Werner’s days in the same town — incredibly suspenseful — are suspended between the chapters devoted to exploring their individual adolescences. All the Light We Cannot See is quite long — more than five hundred pages — but it moves with the pace of a much shorter book.

Both Werner and Marie-Laure attempt to bring small works of order to a world that’s gone mad,  Werner working his equations and Marie-Laure counting her steps. Both love to lose themselves in other worlds — in Werner’s case, it’s the world of radio, of those untethered voices shimmering in the air, while Marie-Laure adores Jules Verne, racing her fingers across braille editions of his novels. That the pair prefer imagined worlds is unsurprising given the terrors of their own; it’s their tenacity, their determination to survive, that’s so heartbreaking and wondrous.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Recommended Reading: Kate Racculia’s Bellweather Rhapsody

/ Carolyn O / 12 Comments

Bellweather RhapsodyIn Bellweather Rhapsody*, her second novel, Kate Racculia conjures up a tale of conductors, students, chaperones, guests, and hotel staff thrown together at a statewide high school music festival — at a very creepy hotel in 1997 upstate New York. Everyone has a secret, no-one’s being completely honest, and there’s a snowstorm coming.

Then a girl goes missing from Room 712 — the same room where a murder-suicide took place fifteen years earlier, and those secrets aren’t safe anymore.

Bellweather Rhapsody is a piquant mixture of genres and tones — mystery, comedy, bildungsroman, thriller — which together form a perfectly seasoned piece of literary fiction. It’s that rare kind of novel that captures not only what it’s like to be a teenager on the verge of adulthood, but also what it’s like to be an adult and wonder if you’re getting it all wrong.

The characters are unforgettable: Rabbit Hatmaker, a shy bassoonist; Alice, his diva-like twin sister; their chaperone Mrs. Wilson, who has a gun and might have used it once; Fisher Brodie, Scottish conductor who once was a piano virtuoso and now comes across as rather mad; Minnie, a young woman still reeling from the traumatic events she witnessed years before, comforted now only by her deaf dog and horror movies; Mr. Hastings, a genteel concierge who remembers the Bellweather in her glory days; and Viola Fabian, a Lady Macbeth-style sociopath — with a daughter.

As its title suggests, Bellweather Rhapsody is about not only the characters gathered under the hotel’s roof, but also about music itself, and its strange power. Ms. Racculia clearly loves music and understands it. Her descriptions of the experience of music — hearing it, playing it — are thrilling in their accuracy. If you’ve ever lost your breath listening to Holst or Beethoven or Debussy, this book is for you. And if you haven’t, read this book, and you will.

(Bonus: Delightful and sly 90s references!)

Friday: An interview with Kate Racculia, author of Bellweather Rhapsody

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

An Interview with Darragh McKeon, Author of All That Is Solid Melts into Air

/ Carolyn O / 1 Comment

Recently, I reviewed Mr. McKeon’s haunting debut novel, All That Is Solid Melts into Air. Mr. McKeon graciously agreed to be interviewed via email. 

What first drew you to the Chernobyl disaster and its aftermath as a subject for the novel?

Darragh McKeon Author Photograph (c) Ana Schecter

Darragh McKeon
Author Photograph (c) Ana Schecter

DM: I’m from Ireland and it’s quite a present issue there due to the work of an Irish charity ‘Chernobyl Children International’. Since the early 1990s, they’ve brought about 20,000 children from the area to Ireland for recuperation. Some of these children came to my hometown when I was a teenager and they were amongst the first foreigners I’d ever met.

As readers may know, you’re a successful theatre director. How did working in theatre influence the composition of All That Is Solid Melts into Air?

DM: I’m sure it’s influenced me in many ways I’m not even aware of, but primarily as a director you learn to observe. I’ve spent countless hours watching actors in a rehearsal room and gradually I probably honed my awareness of all of the elements that impact upon the work – rhythm, pacing, personality, anxiety, lighting etc etc. Every scene in theatre must carry a certain dynamic. When it’s absent, the scene has no life. Identifying the central dynamic of a situation is a useful ability to carry into novel writing.

photo (85)Your four main characters are a doctor, a child piano prodigy, a dissident-turned-steelworker, and a teenage boy living in a Belarusian village. With such disparate occupations and perspectives to consider, how did you go about conducting research for the novel?

DM: By reading. A lot. I didn’t research with any particular direction or strategy, just ingested anything I could find. I did eventually travel to Moscow for specific research, but by that stage the novel was near completion.

Which writers do you read while writing? Do your reading choices change depending on the writing project at hand?

DM: On a basic level, writing a novel is a process of accumulating sentences. So I try to read and re-read great sentence writers: DeLillo, Ondaatje, Andrei Makine for a start, as well as plenty of poetry.

In the essay included with All That Is Solid Melts into Air, “The Empty City,” you make it clear that the devastating effects of Chernobyl are ongoing. How can readers help?

DM: The problems associated with nuclear energy are so vast and complicated that it’s difficult to suggest a starting point. I would encourage people to donate to Chernobyl Children International. I’ve seen their work first hand and they really are a lifeline to people in the region.

What kinds of writing projects will you be working on next?

DM: Right now I’m doing a lot of reading, I’ll hopefully be starting on another novel in the near future.

My thanks again to Mr. McKeon for his time and thoughtful answers. You can read more about All That Is Solid Melts into Air and Darragh McKeon’s work at www.darraghmckeon.com.

Recommended Reading: An Untamed State, by Roxane Gay

/ Carolyn O / 12 Comments

Critics have been calling Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State* “breathless” and “gripping” and “harrowing.” They’re right.

Tom Perrotta sums it up best: “An Untamed State is a harrowing, suspenseful novel about the connections between sexual violence and political rage, narrated in a voice at once traumatized and eerily controlled. Roxane Gay is a remarkable writer, an astute observer of Haitian society and a deeply sympathetic, unflinching chronicler of the compromises people make in order to survive under the most extreme conditions.”

Here’s the summary from the publisher:

Mireille Duval Jameson is living a fairy tale. The strong-willed youngest daughter of one of Haiti’s richest sons, she has an adoring husband, a precocious infant son, by all appearances a perfect life. The fairy tale ends one day when Mireille is kidnapped in broad daylight by a gang of heavily armed men, in front of her father’s Port au Prince estate. Held captive by a man who calls himself The Commander, Mireille waits for her father to pay her ransom. As it becomes clear her father intends to resist the kidnappers, Mireille must endure the torments of a man who resents everything she represents.

An Untamed State is a novel of privilege in the face of crushing poverty, and of the lawless anger that corrupt governments produce. It is the story of a willful woman attempting to find her way back to the person she once was, and of how redemption is found in the most unexpected of places.

I’m having a difficult time writing about the novel, which is unsurprising since I’m pretty sure that my usually low blood pressure was elevated to unhealthy levels while I was reading it. On every level –plotting, pacing, dialogue, characterization — the novel is pitch perfect. The subject matter simply makes it extraordinary difficult to read. An Untamed State is photo (87)an important book, because it lays bare the traumas —  emotional, sexual, racial, economic — that we don’t like to think about because of their painful nature.

One of my favorite people once asked me why I (sometimes) read fiction that’s so dark, that imagines such terrible things — isn’t there enough violence and sorrow in the world already? The news — no matter where you live — seems always to be showing us some new predator, some new house of horrors. No hometown is safe, not mine and not yours. People are ferocious creatures.

It’s a valid question, and I’ve struggled to find the right answer. I don’t read horror (rest easy, I’m not talking about Stephen King) or watch torture-porn (Saw, etc.) because I take no pleasure in being frightened, in watching the pain of others; it seems to me that no-one is served by that kind of violence. And I cannot watch those police procedurals that show only the aftermath of violence. I believe the creators of these shows have good intentions: to try to offer even a small measure of justice for victims and to draw attention to the impact and extent of sexual violence, but these shows never tell the full story.

But books like An Untamed State, Louise Erdich’s The Round House, and Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing (and there are many more) give voice to victims and survivors of violence, particularly sexual violence, which has been so deeply stigmatized for so very long. We cannot expect real-life survivors to relive or retell their experiences for us — though we should be very, very grateful when they do — and so fiction offers us a way to empathize with survivors without infringing on their privacy. Fiction gives us access to thoughts and emotions with nuance and depth that can’t be conveyed on a screen; books contain enough pages to tell what comes after, and what came before.

Rory, in her review of Cynthia Bond’s Ruby (another difficult-but-necessary novel), pointed to an essay by Ms. Bond in which she discussed her own experience (scroll down to find the essay), and these words have stayed with me every since: “Somewhere along the way, working with at risk and homeless youth in Los Angeles for 15 years, living with my own abuse, and hearing stories of such pain and torment, I thought—If you can bear to have lived it, I can at least bear to listen.”

Exactly. I read An Untamed State because somewhere out there, someone has lived it. And I can at least bear to listen.

* I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

 

RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network): https://www.rainn.org/get-involved

National Violence Against Women Research Prevention Center: https://www.musc.edu/vawprevention/

What Men Can Do to Stop Violence Against Women: http://www.stsm.org/sexual-assault-and-abuse/what-men-can-do-stop-violence-against-women

 

An Interview with Alexi Zentner, Author of The Lobster Kings

/ Carolyn O / 2 Comments

On Monday, I reviewed Mr. Zentner’s new novel, The Lobster Kings. Mr. Zentner graciously agreed to be interviewed via email. 

How would you describe the inception of The Lobster Kings? What was the writing process like?

Alexi Zentner Author Photo (c) Laurie Willick

Alexi Zentner
Author Photo (c) Laurie Willick

AZ: The day after I sold my first novel, Touch, in 2009, I drove out to Wyoming to spend a month at a writing residency, and that’s where I started writing The Lobster Kings. I’d been planning the novel for a while, however. I tend to brood on a story for months or years, until I’m ready to write it, but starting it in rural Wyoming was a bit odd, because so much of the inception of the novel came from the landscape down east. I was struck by the rugged beauty of the coast, and wanted to, at least partially, capture that. But a lot of the struggle of writing the book came from understanding who Cordelia was and capturing her voice, and once I had that a lot of the rest of the book followed.

The novel is inspired by King Lear, and in it myth and realism are tangled together. Did other contemporary retellings of folktales and fairy stories inform your writing? Do you have any favorite contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare?

AZ:  The Lobster Kings mixes common myths, like that of the selkie, with myths that are particular to Loosewood Island, where the novel is set, and while I used King Lear as a jumping off point, the novel is very much its own thing. It’s a riff on Lear rather than a retelling; I was more interested in the question of what does it mean for Cordelia to inherit the island than the question of what it means for the father to give it away. I’m fascinated by the way that certain aspects of folktales and fairy stories get tangled up in contemporary stories, and I’m more preoccupied with how to move those stories forward than how to retell them. And there are so many contemporary versions of Shakespearean plays – we see them in the movies, television, books. The Disney movie, The Lion King, is a version of Hamlet, and the television show, House of Cards, borrows from Macbeth.

Did you conduct research for The Lobster Kings? If so, how did you go about it?

photo (5)AZ: My goal as a fiction writer is to do as little research as possible. What I mean by that, is that I need to do enough research to make it feel real, without doing so much research that I end up writing some sort of a book report. I spent a fair amount of time in the area, talked to lobstermen, and did my research. But part of the reason I set it on Loosewood Island, which is fictional, is that I wasn’t trying to hold up a mirror to the life of a lobsterman. Fiction isn’t about the facts so much as it is about the truth, and I wanted to give a person, a family, an island, that felt real, and to do that, I had to base it in the truth but also imagine it fully.

The Lobster Kings is set about ten years ago; why did you choose a setting in the recent past?

AZ: I’m a big believer in the idea that it is easier to see where you were more clearly than where you are. I wanted to write a contemporary novel, one that deals with the questions we are dealing with now, but setting it just a few years ago – it’s set in 2005, and it was 2009 when I started writing it – gave me enough distance that I was able to capture some of the larger questions of the novel. I think if I’d set it right now, I would have missed some of those things. We often realize only later what was the important issue of the day.

The novel tackles weighty subjects — the pull of history (personal and otherwise), sibling rivalry, the incursion of meth into vulnerable communities, attitudes toward aging and work, just to name a few — but does so with a kick of humor. How did you find that balance?

AZ: So much of the humor comes from Cordelia herself. She’s tough and determined and can hold her own, but she’s also her father’s daughter, and her father – as traditional as he was in so many ways – was a bit of an odd duck. I think, for Cordelia, who is a woman in a job that has traditionally been a man’s, she’s had to have a slightly different way of looking at things. She’s the engine that drives the story, and though a lot of tough things happen, she’s not the kind of person for whom that can dampen things.

What kinds of projects are you working on now?

AZ:  I’m working on a story collection and a pair of novels. One of the novels is probably more in the literary vein, while the other is, I think, more toward the mainstream. The mainstream one is pretty scary. But it’s fun.

My thanks again to Mr. Zentner for his time and thoughtful answers. You can read more about The Lobster Kings and Alexi Zentner’s work at alexizentner.com. 

 

Recommended Reading: All That Is Solid Melts into Air, by Darragh McKeon

/ Carolyn O / 10 Comments

photo (85)Darragh McKeon’s debut novel, as both an account of the Chernobyl disaster’s human toll and a portrait of Soviet Russia’s collapse, concerns itself with decay. As the familiar falls away, what’s concealed beneath is difficult to confront.

All That Is Solid Melts into Air* follows four characters. First, we meet Yevgeni, a nine-year-old piano prodigy mercilessly bullied by his peers. Yevgeni’s fingers are forced to hover over the keyboard — the family can’t afford a piano — in the tiny Moscow apartment he shares with his mother and aunt, because the neighbors can’t stand the “noise.”

His aunt, Maria, was once a writer who clandestinely circulated news of Poland’s Solidarity movement; revealed as a dissident, she now works at a factory, making car parts and wondering if all hope for reform is lost. She is wholly devoted to Yevgeni and loves her sister dearly, though the two struggle with tension stemming from their deceased father’s awful past.

Maria’s estranged husband, Grigory, is one of Moscow’s most promising surgeons when he’s called away on an urgent — and secret — matter: to advise the Soviet officials presiding over the Chernobyl disaster.  Outraged by the combination of blindness and cowardice he finds, Grigory attempts to protect refugees and residents of areas near the accident site, only to find himself swiftly deprived of authority. Instead of returning to Moscow, he stays in the displacement camps, operating on children who’ve suddenly developed thyroid cancer and witnessing firsthand the devastation radiation inflicts on the human body.

One of Grigory’s patients is Artyom, a teenage peasant who’s the first in his village to notice that something is terribly wrong: the cows are bleeding from their ears. It’s only the beginning of a hellish journey for Artyom, his parents, and his sister. Betrayed by the Soviet system, counted as expendables, the family is one of thousands who lose everything. Artyom is the only major character in the story who seems to fade from view — just like the people whose stories his is drawn from.

Mr. McKeon’s prose is careful, eschewing the sensational in favor of measured, occasionally lyrical depictions of everyday life in Moscow and Artyom’s village near the Chernobyl plant. The plight of people affected by the disaster, crushed under weight of Soviet indifference and forced invisibility runs parallel to the plight of ordinary citizens of Moscow, miles away, just as crushed by a system that breathes fear and breeds violence.

Only three years from the fall of the Berlin Wall, even would-be dissidents are more than cautious. Maria tells a friend, “Sometimes I hear these words, ‘glasnost,’ ‘perestroika,’ and they sound to me like the final breaths of an empire” — only to hear her friend remind her of dashed hopes thirty years before: “So we went back to doing what we do so well: watching, deluding ourselves with fragile hopes, with an occasional moment of grace or luck; holding on to these things as omens. Hoping ourselves into inaction. Perhaps in a year we’ll be shot for daring to tell a stupid chicken-farmer joke” (255).

Ultimately, All That Is Solid Melts into Air is Grigory’s story. He’s the hub of the novel’s spoking plotlines, intimately involved in the tragic aftermath of Chernobyl. Like Maria in Moscow, who lives in drudgery to help her nephew escape the same fate, Grigory finds in Artyom a child who helps him keep his hold on hope. He drifts, doing all the good in his power even though he knows it will never, ever be enough:

During these nights, he gazes at them in their cots. Nothing so unimaginable that it cannot be true, this is what he things, beauty and ugliness resting within the single body of a diseased infant, the two faces of nature brought into stark relief.

No officials have made their way here, despite his daily entreaties. He wants them to walk into this room, a place where ideology, political systems, hierarchy, dogma, are relegated to mere words, belonging to files, banished to some dusty office. There is no system of belief that can account for this. The medical staff know that, in comparison, nothing that has gone before in their lives has any significance. There are only these months, these rooms, these people. (198)

Decay is inevitable, surely. All That is Solid Melts into Air offers the consolations of memory and witness.

Coming Soon: An Interview with Darragh McKeon, author of All That Is Solid Melts into Air

* I received a review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Literary Wives: The Crane Wife, by Patrick Ness

/ Carolyn O / 12 Comments

literarywives2If you’re new to Literary Wives, here’s the summary: we’re an online bookclub of five to six book bloggers, and we post every other month about a different book with the word “wife” in the title. When we read these books, we have two questions in mind:

1. What does this book say about wives or the experience of being a wife?

2. In what way does this woman define “wife”—or in what way is she defined by “wife”?

This month, we’re talking about Patrick Ness’s latest novel, The Crane Wife*.  We invite you to join the discussion by commenting on our blogs (links below) or posting your own review on our shiny new Facebook page.

We also hope you’ll join us next time, on Monday, August 4, when we’ll be discussing Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife (poetry! hooray!).

photo (83)I’ve had my eye on The Crane Wife for a few months. I like novels that bend myths and folklore in new ways, and Patrick Ness has been the recipient of all kinds of praise. And isn’t the cover just gorgeous?

Here’s the summary from the publisher:

George Duncan is an American living and working in London. At forty-eight, he owns a small print shop, is divorced, and is lonelier than he realizes. All of the women with whom he has relationships eventually leave him for being too nice. But one night he is waked by an astonishing sound—a terrific keening, which is coming from somewhere in his garden. When he investigates he finds a great white crane, a bird taller than himself. It has been shot through the wing with an arrow. Moved more than he can say, George struggles to take out the arrow from the bird’s wing, saving its life before it flies away into the night sky.

The next morning, a shaken George tries to go about his daily life, retreating to the back of his store and making cuttings from discarded books—a harmless personal hobby—when a woman walks through the front door of the shop. Her name is Kumiko, and she asks George to help her with her own artwork. George is dumbstruck by her beauty and her enigmatic nature and begins to fall desperately in love with her. She seems to hold the potential to change his entire life, if he could only get her to reveal the secret of who she is and why she has brought her artwork to him.

You see where that’s going, right? I think we’re meant to; as we (the readers) read to understand how and why Kumiko and the crane are connected, George busies himself just trying to learn who Kumiko is — she’s evasive, to say the least; the most personal information she’ll share is a mythic story about a crane and a volcano that she’s depicting in a private series of works.

The novel is at its best when it focuses on the everyday lives of its characters. George is a thoughtful, kind man (a real treat to read about, in this day and age), and his daughter, Amanda, was my favorite character. Angry and overworked on both the professional and the domestic fronts, Amanda has trouble fitting in with other women at work, who discount her passionate opinions and remain oblivious to her particular brand of humor. She’s still in love with her ex-husband and delights in their rambunctious son. Like George, like everyone, she’s entranced by Kumiko. I was entranced by Amanda, by her intensity and her awareness and by how much she cares for her family. Throughout the novel, I preferred realism to the hazy sort of philosophy that Kumiko seems to represent.

I have three quibbles with the novel’s style. First, Mr. Ness italicizes words for emphasis, which drove me crazy. (See?) Once I could overlook, but it happens repeatedly. Second, the tone occasionally veers into the maudlin and sentimental, which was distracting. Third, several long sections consist entirely of dialogue (which is fine), with pauses indicated by ellipses in quotation marks. Would it have been so difficult to write, “He paused.”? And how is an ellipsis spoken?

The Crane Wife is a gentle, sometimes sentimental novel with memorable characters. If that’s your kind of book, I think you’ll like it.

And now, on to the Literary Wives questions:

1. What does this book say about wives or the experience of being a wife?

Despite the title, neither of the main female characters — Kumiko and Amanda — are properly wives. George’s ex-wife is refreshingly non-harpy-like, and happily remarried. Amanda’s experience of marriage — what little we see of it — was difficult because of the two personalities involved. There’s no cohesive picture of what it means to be a wife, and that’s just fine.

2. In what way does this woman define “wife”—or in what way is she defined by “wife”?

Again, a difficult question to answer, since, properly, the Crane Wife is a folktale/mythological/fairytale figure, and in this instance she seems to be the crane in Kumiko’s story, who must see the world for what it is, be willing to suffer for love, and ultimately forgive those who hurt her (this is all a bit fuzzy, to tell the truth). I don’t think I like this vision of what it means to be a wife — see feminist credentials, mine — but this is all wrapped up in the “hazy philosophy” I mentioned above, so I will forgo the rant for now.

*I, along with the other Literary Wives bloggers, received a review copy of this novel from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Please visit the other Literary Wives bloggers to get their takes on the book! 

Emily at The Bookshelf of Emily J. 

Ariel at One Little Library

Cecilia at Only You

Kay at WhatMeRead

Lynn at Smoke and Mirrors

(Audra at Unabridged Chick is on hiatus)

An Interview with Michael Blanding, Author of The Map Thief

/ Carolyn O / 2 Comments

Yesterday, I reviewed Mr. Blanding’s newest book, The Map Thief. Mr. Blanding graciously agreed to be interviewed via email. 

How would you describe the inception of The Map Thief? What was the writing process like?

Michael Blanding Author Photograph (c) Kevin Day Photography

Michael Blanding
Author Photograph (c) Kevin Day Photography

MB: I have always been interested in maps, and was struck by Smiley’s story when I first read it in the New Yorker back in 2006. I was fascinated by how much people were willing to pay for antiquarian maps and how Smiley was able to exploit that desire for these rare objects in perpetrating his thefts. When I heard he was out of prison in 2011, I approached him for an interview and found him very willing to talk and tell his story. As I started working on the book, however, he suddenly stopped cooperating, and I had to work hard to report around him through other dealers and libraries in order to piece together the story. It added a lot more work to the writing and reporting — so that it eventually took me three years in all.

Writing the book clearly involved a great deal of research into the world of maps; is there a particular cartographic time period or geographical region that was a favorite with you?

photo (82)MB: As a lifelong resident of New England, I was fascinated to learn about the early settlement of this region by the English in the1600s. Smiley was also a New England native and specialized in this period, and so I was able to learn a lot from the maps he traded and eventually stole… At the time, the Dutch “golden age” of mapmaking was waning and the English were the upstarts in colonizing the area — so their first maps are very crude. But very quickly over the course of the century you can see them filling in details and creating more accurate depictions of the area as their knowledge and power increased. It’s very cool to see that happen right on the pages of these maps and atlases.

Many of the events of The Map Thief take place in the Northeast, and the Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library figures prominently in the book. Since you are a Boston-area-based writer, can you recommend any other locations in Boston where new cartophiles might find interesting maps to peruse?

MB: Interestingly, before Smiley started stealing maps, he was a successful map dealer for many years — and his first and most important client was Boston real estate developer Norman Leventhal. Over the years, Smiley helped him acquire the largest collection of maps of Boston and New England ever assembled. While Leventhal eventually donated money to endow the map center at the Boston Public Library, he kept the rarest and most valuable maps in his possession — and they can now be viewed in a permanent exhibit at the Boston Harbor Hotel. The exhibit offers a fascinating glimpse at the history of Boston on multiple walls of its lobby and conference rooms, and I really recommend it to visitors of the city.

Given the inaccuracies and inconsistencies in his self-portrayal, would you be interested in interviewing E. Forbes Smiley III again if he decided to grant interviews once more? Do you think there’s anything left to be gleaned there?

MB: Though Smiley gave me a lot of information about himself and his thefts in the six hours he spoke with me, there were still pieces of the story he promised to tell me before he cut off contact — including exactly how he stole the maps and which maps he stole when. I was able to piece much of this information together from other sources, but still had to speculate on some ofthe chronology of the thefts. I would have liked to go through this chronology in more detail and cross-reference it with information he provided to the FBI to try and pin down these details.

What kinds of projects are you working on now?

MB: I don’t have another book project as of yet, but I am working on some interesting magazine stories, including an article for WIRED magazine about issues surrounding electronics manufacturing overseas. I’m also putting together a proposal for a new book that combines investigative reporting and memoir — we’ll see if that comes together! At the moment, though, I’m very excited to work on publicizing The Map Thief through media and speaking events — and finally sharing my baby with the world after three years of work.

My thanks again to Mr. Blanding for his time and thoughtful answers. You can read more about The Map Thief and Michael Blanding’s work at www.michaelblanding.com. 

If you’re in the Boston area, head over to the Brookline Booksmith on June 3 from 7-9pm for a reading, reception, and signing with Michael Blanding. 

Out Today and Recommended: The Map Thief, by Michael Blanding

/ Carolyn O / 6 Comments

photo (82)For years, E. Forbes Smiley III seemed to be the kind of man who matched his name’s connotations: moneyed, educated, successful. An antiquarian map dealer, Smiley shuttled between both sides of the Atlantic, becoming an expert in valuable and rare maps, particularly early maps of New England.

He was also stealing them.

In The Map Thief*, Michael Blanding investigates the paradox that Smiley represents. How could a man who treasured maps, who taught himself about them by poring over them in some of the world’s finest libraries, desecrate the very documents he valued and betray the people who shared his interests?

Mr. Blanding delves into Smiley’s life and work, bringing to life Smiley’s quixotic attempt to shape the world to fit his vision. (For instance, Smiley tried to reinvigorate a Maine town on his own, without much consideration of residents’ input, which turned into a spectacular failure.) His friends came up with the term “Forbes dollars”: “a personal accounting system in which Smiley always spent less than he had and was always owed more than he was” (83). As his career progressed, Smiley sank deeper into debt, impulsively buying maps even if he didn’t have the funds ready to pay for them.

In one instance, Smiley bought a rare atlas from another dealer for $50,000. When his check bounced, the other dealer demanded the atlas back, but it was too late: “he had taken the atlas apart right on the train up to Boston, selling several charts of Boston Harbor to Leventhal and keeping the rest, hoping to sell them to other clients to recoup the cost. [. . . ] he [the other dealer] couldn’t help but be appalled that Smiley had so cavalierly taken apart a book with less than ten known copies in the world” (73).

If the thought of Smiley tearing apart an atlas he (ostensibly) bought makes you shudder, the actual thefts will repel you. The gravity of the thefts — the number, the institutions affected, the rarity of the works taken, the fact that many are still unrecovered — is simply outrageous; Smiley’s prison sentence seems ridiculously light. I’ve had the privilege of handling two or three rare books, and the thought of someone opening one too swiftly sets my heart racing — the thought of someone ripping out a page is painful.

Though Smiley is the subject of The Map Thief, and Mr. Blanding places him in the context of the lively and sometimes strange world of rare map aficionados (dealers, collectors, and librarians), the book shines brightest when Mr. Blanding recounts the history of the rare maps themselves and the people who created them. The research is meticulous, and the historical characters fascinating. The book includes several full-color plates of some of the maps discussed in the text, and they’re just glorious (this comes, by the way, from a person whose only displayed map is one of Middle Earth). If you aren’t a map person before you read this book, you very well may be one afterward.

Tomorrow: An Interview with Michael Blanding, author of The Map Thief

*I received a review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

 

Recommended Reading: Next Life Might Be Kinder and I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place, by Howard Norman

/ Carolyn O / 6 Comments

Howard Norman is the kind of writer who gives you the bad news up front. Take the opening paragraph of his best-known novel, The Bird Artist (1994):

My name is Fabian Vas. I live in Witless Bay, Newfoundland. You would not have heard of me. Obscurity is not necessarily failure, though; I am a a bird artist, and have more or less made a living at it. Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how I think of myself.

(If you haven’t read The Bird Artist, you should rectify the situation immediately.)

photo 1 (18)Mr. Norman’s new novel (out last week), Next Life Might Be Kinder*, begins: “After my wife, Elizabeth Church, was murdered by the bellman Alfonse Padgett in the Essex hotel, she did not leave me.” It’s a bold strategy, to declare in one’s opening sentence the plot points other writers might build toward — but for Mr. Norman, the strategy always works.

Writer Sam Lattimore, Next Life Might Be Kinder‘s narrator, finds himself living in a small cottage hours away from the Essex Hotel, where he and his wife spent the early months — the only months — of their marriage. He’s meeting with a therapist, evading the film director who bought the rights to his tragic story — and the director’s assistant, and seeing his wife on the beach at night. He’s angry, and he’s desperately in love with Elizabeth. As the novel unfolds, Sam recalls how he and Elizabeth fell in love, what their life was like before she died, and the lurking menace of Alphonse Padgett.

Mr. Norman’s writing is, as ever, beautiful. The characters — Sam, Elizabeth, Sam’s new neighbors Cynthia and Philip, Dr. Nissensen the therapist, the unhinged Norwegian film director, even Marghanita Laski, whose work is the subject of Elizabeth’s dissertation — are finely delineated. Objects and places are imbued with significance; the two-page chapter called “Still Life with Underwood Typewriter,” which describes Elizabeth’s desk, is the best characterization-by-catalogue I’ve ever read.

Elizabeth’s appearances to Sam are mysterious, but never campy or sentimental. Sam loves his wife immensely but doesn’t sanctify her: “And I don’t need metaphor to try and elevate her to a deity. She is just Elizabeth. She made good soups and stews. She was writing a book. She used pencils” (80). Next Life Might Be Kinder is, quite simply, a perfect exploration of the particularities of grief.

photo 2 (15)After I finished the novel — in two sittings — I happened upon a review that mentioned its relationship to some of the writing in I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place, a memoir by Mr. Norman published last year. I went to the library and read it immediately, then bought my own copy, because it’s a wonderful memoir, and I’ve never much liked the genre. In five sections, Mr. Norman explores pivotal periods in his life; several of the events echo in Next Life Might Be Kinder.

I’ll let the writer himself summarize I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place:

What is remembered here? A bookmobile and an elusive father in the Midwest. A landscape painter whose plane crashed in Saskatchewan. A murder-suicide in my family’s house. A Quagmiriut Inuit rock band specializing in the songs of John Lennon. And in Vermont, a missing cat, a well drilling, and my older brother’s requests to be smuggled into Canada. If there is one thing that connects these disparate experiences, it is the hopeful idea of locating myself in beloved landscapes — Northern California, Nova Scotia, Vermont, the Arctic — and of describing how they offered a home for honest introspection, a place to think things through. Often I just wanted to look at birds for days on end, shore birds in particular. (xi-xii)

These are beautiful books, and highly recommended.

*I received a copy of Next Life Might Be Kinder from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.