Mrs. O'Dell Reads

As soon as I picked up this book, I wrote the following note: “I think I am skeptical of  ‘How-I-Help-People’ memoirs.”

Which was probably unfair. But I have to tell you that I walked into this (beautiful!) book with a lot of preconceived notions … that this was just the product of a greedy publishing company looking to make a buck on a rip off of Three Cups of Tea.

I can admit it: I was wrong. This book was beautiful inside and out, worthy of the incredible amount of publicity launched by the publisher, a book I will likely pass to many, many of my students and might even put on my school’s summer reading list, and this is just the beginning of my rave review.

In 2004, successful 29-year-old Conor Grennan (a fellow Wahoo!) finds himself bored working abroad and begin planning a round-the-world-savings-account-killing-trip. But it’s hard to tell people that you’re just going to stop working and travel for a year purely for your own amusement.  Thus, Grennan finds an orphanage in Nepal at which he can volunteer for four months;  Grennan rationalizes that after this act of sacrifice, his pleasure trip will be completely justified.

However, everything changes when this committment-phobe falls in love with the children living at The Little Princes, most of whom had been taken away from their parents during a civil war. When Grennan’s four months are up, he finishes his world tour, returns to New York, and finds himself longing for Nepal. He develops a plan to start a nonprofit whose two-fold mission would be to establish a children’s home for other Nepali orphans and to help locate their parents.

Grennan travels back to Nepal, falls in love with an American girl via email, takes daring trips through the mountains of Nepal, establishes his children’s home, and, of course, finds himself in the process.

Little Princes definitely lives up to all of its claims of heart-warming inspiration. Grennan’s determination in the face of seemingly impossible odds mixed with his humility is a refreshing twist to this American-helps-a-third-world-country-tale. Grennan is a reluctant, and even unlikely, hero. His narrative is more than just edifying — it’s authentic.

The beginning, as Grennan sets the context of Nepal and life at The Little Princes,  is a little slow and maybe in need of some more heavy-handed editing.  It took me about 75 pages to get really, page-turningly hooked.  These vignettes are more disjointed than the narrative that follows when the plot really picks up with Grennan’s plan to establish Next Generation Nepal. Still, Grennans voice is strong and relatable — like a friend telling you this amazing story.  And the image he paints of the children is utterly enchanting. A recurring motif through the story is the boys’ constant obsession with Conor finding a wife. When he says goodbye to the boys for the second time, they discuss his marital prospects:

I told them the truth. I told them I loved Nepal, I loved spending time with them and living here in the village. But I had to go home, and I would likely not be able to make it back for a few years, when they were all much bigger. I had to start a new career. I was completely broke, and I had to buy food and rent a home.

“And get married, yes, Brother?” said Santosh, smiling.

“Uh — yeah. Well, no — not really, to be honest. I think you will be married before me, Santosh,” I said, happy that the children took this as a joke.

Then the children started with a chorus of “What about me, Brother? You will be married before me?” and I had to go through the whole list of children, all the way down to assuring Raju that yes, even he would probably be married before me.

Later, after meeting and falling in love with Liz, Grennan writes,

The Little Princes, well, they were a different story. They knew me too well; I couldn’t keep anything from them if I tried. I tested out the same line on them, and the boys laughed as if I had just told them the single greatest joke in Nepalese history.

“Brother, your lie very terrible! We have seen many American movies now. We know not much arranged marriage in your country,” Santosh said, wiping the tears from his eyes. “We meet Liz on her visit. She very very beautiful. You very love her, Brother! You love her!”

If all of this isn’t enough to induce you to buy this book on January 25, when it becomes available, proceeds from this book go to the care of the orphans in the care of Next Generation Nepal, Grennan’s non-profit, which has now rehomed these children in their native village!  In short, you’ve got to read this book; I suspect that pretty soon, everyone will be reading it!

Many, many thanks to William Morrow for an advance copy of this book!

Take the nostalgia of The Wonder Years, add the boys’ club feeling of The Sandlot, and mix in the dark and complicated narration of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, and you will arrive at an approximation of the tenor of Hannah Pittard’s debut, The Fates Will Find Their Way.

In a time that must be somewhere in the mid-Atlantic around the mid-1980s, a group of boys comes of age. Yet, in the midst of their growing up, a neighborhood girl, Nora Lindell, an object of their admiration, goes missing on Halloween night. Her fate is never known. The boys — who later become young men, husbands, and fathers — are undeterred in their mental pursuit of her, spending their lives hypothesizing about Nora Lindell’s whereabouts.  But while the boys take them as imaginary gospel truths, they are just that — ever-shifting hypotheses.  Imagining Nora as the wife of an older Mexican man in Arizona, the narrator says,

“Let’s say it was a summer day. One that was uncharacteristically hot, even for Arizona. It was like this — it had to be like this — because heat alone — isolated, confined — can make a person crazy, can turn a good thing bad, if only for a moment. And don’t forget that we like the Mexican. We like him because, like us, he loves Nora. He has cared for Nora and her two babies. So let’s say it was hot. Let’s say there was enough heat to excuse any sing, any crime, any transgression, just this once.”

Beyond the hypothetical tone that permeates the entire novel,  the most fascinating feature of this book is highlighted in the above passage — the use of a first person plural point of view.  While the boys are named, the narrative voice transcends the point of view of any single young man; they are “we” as boys and “we” are adults. The narrative voice is none of them and all of them at the same time, perfectly expressing the follies of childhood from the safe distance of adulthood,

We were sophomores, newly sixteen, a year shy of missing Nora Lindell terribly. We were creeps, jerks, idiots. We were boys; we couldn’t help ourselves.

Partially due to this narrative perspective, the novel lacks a linear plot. This isn’t a murder mystery. It isn’t a tale of boyhood adventure. Each chapter is more like a vignette, capturing a particular incident in this life of this group of friends — moments pushing them from childhood to the acceptance of their adulthood.

And that’s really what the Nora Lindell obsession is about — a hesitance to let go of the things of childhood and grow up.  Preferring to obsess on their youth, the men age and accept adult responsibilities without emotional maturation.

This is a debut that, without a doubt, will catapult Pittard into the literary elite. It’s experimental and fresh without being self-conscious. The writing is impeccable … and exciting.  This is a novel that creeps up on you in all the best ways.  Pre-order a copy of this book! You won’t regret being among the first in your circle to devour this novel, and you’ll feel proud to have “discovered” this rare new talent!

Thanks to Harper Collins for an advance copy of The Fates Will Have Their Way.

I often wish that I could go back in time to sixth grade and read Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre for the very first time.   Though I often re-read my desert-island favorites, and while they certainly continue to bloom on the tenth or twentieth perusal, what was it like to read them the first time without preconception? Without favorite heroes and loathed villains and oft-quoted treasured sentences?

In spite of my myopic English studies in college, almost always focused on 19th century British literature when I could possibly help it, I had never read Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, a novel written after her initial though anonymous success with Jane Eyre and largely considered to be autobiographical. Famously, Virginia Woolf claimed that this was Bronte’s “finest novel.”

To read a Bronte for the very first time — the perfect way to wrap up a year of reading.

In Villette, a family tragedy leaves young Lucy Snowe impoverished and without hope or family, excepting her godmother Mrs. Bretton and her son Graham.  Living with them until her own young adulthood, Lucy then sets out on adventure, rather accidentally travelling to a foreign city, Villette (modeled on Brussels). There,  Lucy stumbles upon a job in a boarding school, first as a governess, then promoted into the position of an English teacher.

Lucy becomes acquaintances with a handsome young doctor who tends to the young girls at the school.  As fate would have it, it is the self-same young man in whose home Lucy was raised — Graham Bretton, now ”Dr. John.” Friendship blossoms anew between Dr. John, Lucy, and his mother; and, naturally, infatuation isn’t far behind. All the while, Lucy battles with an ornery literature professor, M. Paul Emmanuel, who challenge’s Lucy’s intellect and fortitude.

Can you figure out where this goes?  Dr. John falls in love with another (prompting one of my new favorite lines in all of literature: “Goodnight, Dr. John; you are good, you are beautiful, but you are not mine.”), and Lucy falls in love with the brooding and complicated M. Paul.

But, wait: I don’t want you to think this is just a romance. Bronte is never “chick lit”. That is not true of Jane Eyre, and it is even less true of Villette.  Yes, in broad strokes, there is a young lady coming of age who meets her match and falls in love. But that is not solely what these 559 pages are made of.  Much to my students’ frequent chagrin, Bronte doesn’t really care about plot — keeping the story moving along or enticing the reader to stay interested. No, while Jane Austen (the apple of my bookish eye and more frequent proprietor of  ye olde chick lit) writes the plot of “four or five families in a country village”, Bronte writes about the emotional landscape of one individual’s life. This frequently requires the detailing of little moments, insignificant conversations, and microscopic little nuances and opinions that an author enslaved to plot would never reveal.  Austen gives the reader the best parts; Bronte gives the reader everything.

(This is all tangentially to say that to love Austen is not to necessarily love Bronte, and to equate one with the other is like Nicholas Sparks equating himself with Hemingway. Well, maybe it’s not that heinous a literary crime … but you get the idea.)

So, Reader, is Villette superior to Jane Eyre, for, after all, that was the question I sought to answer in my year-end reading escapade. Well, not for me.  Perhaps because there is nothing like the blind devotion of first love. I thoroughly enjoyedVillette, but it didn’t have the wildness, the passion, the lack of self-possession that is often demonstrated in Jane Eyre. And I would posit that this is probably the exact reason that Virginia Woolf felt the opposite.

Villette is measured, reasoned, and much more grown up than Jane Eyre.  It was great to read something real.  Something substantial. Something to be sipped and savored rather than gulped and judged. Something transcendent. Something worthy of being my 79th book in 2010 — a perfect bookend to a delightful reading year.

In an anonymous country on New Year’s Day, no one dies. No one dies the next day either. Or the next. Seemingly, death has been (accidentally) vanquished, and celebrations and patriotism abound throughout the countryside. That is until the people realize what a life without death really means.

You see,  those who are aging, ill, or lingering on the line between life and death are not miraculously cured. They just won’t die.  Families are left to watch their loved ones suffer and left to care for them indefinitely. Major industries, too, are left in turmoil. What will become of the funerary industry or life insurance in a world in which death has no place?  What will become of religion, whose dominant source of power is that of life after death?

Soon, the country and government falls into turmoil. Maphiosos (spelled with a “ph” to distinguish them from the other mafia) control large human smuggling rings that transport the dying to neighboring countries so that they can finally pass over into death. The neighboring nations, in turn, threaten war. What seemed utopian quickly turns catastrophic for the nation who thought they could overcome death.

Death With Interruptions is a fascinating, challenging, read. Admittedly, this is my first encounter with reading Saramago, but I was surprised by the heaviness of the text — very few paragraphs and lost of words on a page. There is little capitalization (a point the narrator makes himself) and virtually no characters.  Death, a woman, and the cellist with whom she becomes infatuated in the second half of the book are the only characters Saramago’s narrative follows — and even that is merely two-dimensional.

Rather, the narrator himself/herself/theirselves becomes the primary protagonist, with an incredibly strong, tongue-in-cheek tone that had me laughing out loud more than once. Self-referential and sly, the narrator is at once thoroughly modern and also ancient — like a Greek chorus commenting on the folly of the human players below.

While Saramago’s prose is beautiful, taking surprising turns throughout the novel, I found myself marvelling at the skill of a good translator — a translator like Maragaret Jull Costa here.  With Saramago’s unusual vocabulary and interesting syntax, I was so impressed by someone with such a command of not only English but also Saramago’s native Portugese.

This is a book that I would love to teach — it’s fresh and strange. It’s difficult.  It’s philosophical yet sarcastic. I had not finished the first chapter before knowing that this is the kind of book that bears hundreds  of re-reads.  Next time,  I am pulling out the “reading kit” my students made for me last year, full of colored pens and highlighters and post-it notes.  Death With Interruptions is the kind of book that makes me excited to be a reader, always uncovering new personal treasures to spend hours pouring over.

I love a memoir about a spunky girl moving to a different culture and learning to cope. (Just look at my reading list; it’s true.)

Elizabeth Bard’s Lunch in Paris is just another in a long line of memoirs I love. As a grad student in England, Bard meets Gwendal (pronounced Gwen-DAL), a Frenchman with a passion for cinema. What begins as weekend trysts en Paris becomes marriage and a proper expatriotism to Paris. Bard recounts eight years in Paris — from the time she had her first lunch with Gwendal to their marriage, learning to cook, and buying an apartment.  It’s sort of Under the Tuscan Sun in Paris.

Although Bard’s memoir might not be purely original (there are many other excellent memoirs in this genre, not the least of which is Julia Child’s delightful My Life in France), it is a lovely, light read — especially as I fell passionately in love with Paris this winter and was delighted to travel its streets and cafes again with Bard.  Bard is heartfelt — she doesn’t skip the difficulties of being an American in France. She doesn’t glorify Paris beyond its deserts (see the episode where a snarky French shoe salesman refuses to accept her return). And, of course, she made me giggle. Here she butchers her first fish:

“I took the knife and pressed its pointed tip into the belly of the fish. I hesitated, searching for something civilized to think about during my upcoming act of brutality. Had Jane Austen ever gutted a fish?

The knife made a ripping sound, like an uncooperative zipper.

It is a truth universally acknowledged…

I had a hold of something now, soft and dense, like a clot of blood.

…that a single man in possession of a good fortune,…

I pulled out the tiny heaert and liver.

…must be in want of a wife.

I yanked out the final membrane, guts dripping from my hands” (68-69).

I really enjoyed Lunch in Paris, and I read it in one sitting. It’s a great example of a genre I love — excellent for summer reading!