Quickie Review: Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

 

 

Bring Up The Bodies

Hilary Mantel

Quick Thoughts:
Who is telling the story is as important as the story itself.

Bring Up the Bodies could easily be called The World According to Thomas. I would much rather read Thomas Cromwell's interpretation of the Tudor world, its subtle complexities of relationships and not so subtle power schemes, than another histrionic rendering of Henry done Anne wrong. And Henry most certainly did do Anne wrong. But, enough.

Thomas Cromwell set out to make or mar. He was successful in both.

England's Reformation and the morality play of Henry and Anne is recounted through Thomas Cromwell's ever watchful eyes, and told with the humorous and razor sharp intelligent voice Hilary Mantel channeled for Henry VIII's most loyal and adept subject.

Tudor England is equal parts ideological revolution, bawdy soap opera, and den of wolves. Henry is the alpha wolf, while the majority of his court are biding time, sharpening their claws, and waiting for the sight of vulnerable bared flesh to sate their blood lust.

Henry VIII tore his country apart, spat in Rome's eye, and in the process became both Church and State. He discarded his Queen and made his daughter Mary a bastard, ruthlessly murdered scholars, advisers, friends, on a whim and with impunity,  all for a woman he eventually tired of, and had killed.

Thomas Cromwell served his lord and master well. He made Henry rich. He granted Henry's every wish. If Henry wanted a new wife, he got him a divorce, or a beheading. If Henry wanted a new law, He, Cromwell, made it so.

He, Cromwell, was the man that made England. Thomas Cromwell pushed England kicking and screaming out of the Middle Ages into the golden light of what would become the Renaissance under Elizabeth.

Through Mantel's brilliant and gripping prose, Cromwell emerges as a self-made Renaissance man, second to none in power and ability. This was his downfall. We'll have to wait to learn the specifics of his fate, in Mantel's third, and last Book of Thomas, The Mirror and the Light.

Favorite Parts:
p. 8 "In this part of England our forefathers the giants left their earthworks, their barrows and standing stones. we still have, every Englishman and woman, some drops of giant blood in our veins."
p. 29 "The king is wearing an expression he has seen before, though on beast, rather than man. He looks stunned, like a veal calf knocked on the head by a butcher."
p. 33 "Where the word of a king is, there is power, and who may say to him, what doest thou?"
p. 34 "Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters."
p. 41 "But look, never mind all this. Queens come and go. So recent history has shown us. Let us think about how to pay for England, her king's great charges, the cost of charity and the cost of justice, the cost of keeping her enemies beyond her shores."
p. 43 "In a generation everything can change."
p. 63 "All our labors, our sophistry, all our learning both acquired or pretended; the stratagems of state, the lawyers' decrees, the churchmen's curses, and the grave resolutions of judges, sacred and secular; all and each can be defeated by a woman's body, can they not?
p. 67 "He thinks of what Gardiner said: you should write a book yourself, that would be something to see. If he did, it would be The Book Called Henry: how to read him, how to serve him, how pest to preserve him."
p. 91 "God is beyond translation."
p. 136 "Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged elsewhere, he will batter down your door, walk in and wipe his boots on you."
p. 179 "Who can understand the lives of women?"
p. 209 "You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws."
p. 239 "The queen is plotting something, I know not what, something devious, something dark, perhaps so dark she herself does not know what it is, and as yet is only dreaming of it: but I must be quick, I must dream it for her, I shall dream it into being."
p. 281 "The things you think are disasters in your life are not the disasters really. almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it."
p. 299 "He, Cromwell, takes hold of her -- since no one else will do it -- and sets her back on her feet. She weighs nothing, and as he lifts her, her wail breaks off as if her breath had been stopped. Silent, she steadies herself against his shoulder, leans into him: intent, complicit, ready for the next thing they will do together, which is kill her."
p. 330 "Life pays you out."
p. 331 "He once thought he might die of grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But the pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm."
p. 334 "Henry killed his father's councillors. He killed the Duke of Buckingham. He destroyed the cardinal and harried him to his death, and struck the head off one of Europe's great scholars. Now he plans to kill his wife and her family and Norris who has been his closest friend. What makes you think it will be different with you, that you are not equal of any of these men?"
p. 353 "He changes his mind, day to day. he would like to rework the past. He would like never to have seen Anne. He would like to have seen her, but to have seen through her. Mostly he wishes her dead."
p. 387 "...the king, like the minotaur, breathes unseen in a labyrinth of rooms."
p. 397 "The man is behind Anne, she is misdirected, she does not sense him. There is a groan, one single sound from the whole crowd. Then a silence, and into that silence, a sharp sigh or sound like a whistle through a keyhole: the body exsanguinates, and its flat little presence becomes a puddle of gore."
p. 400 "A gentleman asked me, if this is what Cromwell does to the cardinal's lesser enemies, what will he do by and by to the king himself?"
p. 405 "...this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash."
p. 406 "His next task is somehow to reconcile the king and the Lady Mary, to save Henry from killing his own daughter; and before that, to stop Mary's friends from killing him. He has helped them to their new world, the world without Anne Boleyn, and now they will think they can do without Cromwell too."
p. 407 "...they will sift through what remains and remark, here is an old deed, and old draft, an old letter from Thomas Cromwell's time: they will turn the page over, and write on me."

Author Bio:
British Council Literature

Best Reviews:
The New York Review of Books
The Washington Times
The New Yorker
The Telegraph
The Guardian

Vocabulary:
p. torsion
p. 67 crenellate
p. 93 tonsured
p. 121 oppobrious
p. 135 exigency
p. 144 stertorous
p. 172 suborn
p. 193 emollience
p. 218 condign
p. 235 sotto
p. 322 equipoise
p. 351subfuse
 

The Book of Mormon Girl: A Memoir of an American Faith - Joanna Brooks: Quickie Review

Book of Mormon Girl

Joanna Brooks

FYI: Joanna Brooks will be reading from her memoir at Weller Book Works this Thursday, August 23 at 7 P.M! It's a small space with room for fifty, so get there early and save a seat for me! If you didn't catch her interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, check it out here and here. 

Copious Thoughts otherwise known as Quick Thoughts:

There is a lot of talk that Mitt Romney running for President of the United States, is the Mormon Moment, (and I suppose if he is elected, the talk will be that it is now a post-religious America).

With all the dissembling and mean-spiritedness inherent in political elections, Joanna Brook's speaking her truth and speaking truth to power in her fearless memoir, just may turn out to be the dark horse Mormon Moment.  

From what we know about the major historical movements of the United States, it is always the voices on the margins that change the course of history. The majority of our leaders rarely introduce any type of radical change to the status quo, but look for a popular movement and run like hell to get in front of it and proclaim themselves its leader.

Think about this: a handful of Quakers, on the fringe of society and considered fanatics and not allowed to hold public office, opposed slavery, which to simplify, led to the formation of the Abolitionist Movement, which led to the Civil War, and eventually the Emancipation Proclamation.

Women's Suffrage, The Civil Rights Movement, The Women's Movement, The LGBT Movement, the Occupy Movement, both tea parties, all began on the margins with a handful of committed individuals who dared to imagine a better, more inclusive democracy.

Try to silence or dismiss an idea, an entire gender or population, and listen to the quiet swell of voices rising to a deafening cry for justice.

Instead of silencing voices that tell a story outside of accepted narratives, these unorthodox, questioning, dissenting voices may lead to the realization that the Mormon religion is not so weird, that it isn't scary or a cult. Mormons may have their own book and prophet, but they also have the Bible and Jesus. Rather than being threatened by the voices on the margin of the Church, a greater transparency may lead to the realization that this church has more in common with world religions than differences.

Joanna Brooks is an unorthodox Mormon woman who loves her faith, yet could not keep silent, nor find a place for herself within the Church. She is a woman who refuses to be silenced. And for this, I am grateful. There are many stories about this dynamic, complex, industrious, flawed, and very young American faith, that need to be told. 

Book of Mormon Girl is a personal accounting of Brook's experience. It is her Mormon story, but it is not the definitive story. Hers is only one story. There are a million plus more.  

There is room for all the stories, for all the voices. All of them. America needs them. The world needs them.  To my surprise, I need them. 

I found myself in these pages. There were brief phrases and passages where I found that I literally couldn't breathe. There were a few times I had to put the book down and walk away. I cried and raged. A lot. I will never, ever, lend my copy of the book out because of the nature of the commentary I wrote in the margins.  

I find it remarkable that Joanna Brooks is so deeply committed to her faith, and although she could not find a way to remain active and true to herself, she is an unorthodox advocate for a religion in which she is considered a dissident. Some call her an apostate, which implies a dangerous enemy, but in reality, is a person who renounces or abandons a belief, religious or political. Brooks has neither renounced, nor abandoned her faith, her religion.

Brooks unflinching account of her experiences resonated, and in the process of a few hours of reading, unlocked the door I had closed, nearly three decades ago.

As a very young child, I loved Primary. I loved the songs, the activities. I remember the thought of how lucky I was to be born a Mormon and in Utah! I really believed the Earth was seven-thousand years old.  I read the Book of Mormon, and although I didn't receive the burning testimony everyone else was claiming to have experienced, I had an intense desire to create my own versions of the Golden Plates. I wrapped an old brick with tinfoil, wrote on it, and then buried it under the tree in the pasture behind the house. When I dreamed about the Church, Michelangelo's Moses was always a menacing presence, horned hair and angry eyes enough to keep my restless self in check. As a young girl, I loved girl's camp: hiking, canoeing, swimming in the lake and the horror or leeches; hobo dinners around the campfire, crafts, huge assembly-like breakfasts, sack lunches, and starchy dinners. I loved the skits and programs. The program when the Lamanites turned white because they were so faithful was always popular, even if it was weird, and of course in retrospect, condescending and racist. I hated all the praying, probably because it went on too long, and the person giving the prayer usually cried or their voice quavered. I came to dread the last day of camp because there was an unspoken expectation to bear one's testimony. Each year as we sat in our groups around the fire, when it was my turn, I remained silent until the girl next to me finally got the hint and spoke up. I wasn't being defiant. I refused to bear testimony because I had doubts. I couldn't pretend something I didn't feel. I knew I had forced an invisible wedge between myself and other girls. Of course I got in trouble. I was always getting in trouble. I asked a lot of questions. I needed answers. 

I was livid that boys got the priesthood. Livid! And that boys that I knew who were totally unworthy were blessing the sacrament. I refused to take the sacrament in protest. I got in so much trouble! Later, I refused to be baptized for the dead because I thought the living made their choices and I hated it when anyone made decisions for me, and, who was I to go against the living or dead's wishes?  I was not allowed to refuse the trip to the temple, but once there, I refused to do anything but sit on a bench and wait for the girls to finish. I don't remember the drive home. It goes without saying I got in trouble. I do remember I never had to go for baptisms again. I didn't refuse Seminary. I enjoyed it my Sophomore and Junior year, especially the scripture study and memorization contests. We got a new teacher Senior year that moralized on proper conduct for girls and boys, mostly girls, and made examples of modesty infractions. I started wearing tank tops and mini skirts. I remember he told me that, football was my god. I had no idea what he was talking about. I still don't. I know he was earnest and well-meaning. I also know the only life he saw for me was very limited.

I remember the thought that as soon as it was legal to leave, I was out. Legal meant 18 and moved out of my childhood home. I had tried very, very hard to stay, but there was no place for me. I knew it was my right to be a full partner, not a helpmate. I asked questions and kept asking and wouldn't accept vague answers. Once I was legal, I made a great show of slamming the door, but eventually grew up and gently closed the door for good, and just forgot about it, and wondered every now and then what all that distant knocking was. What I am slowly learning is that locked doors shift and unhinge with time and demand to be opened.  Demand validation and resolution.

Reading Book of Mormon Girl also prompted the thought, lose one woman and you have lost countless generations.

I respect the religion of my youth. I do not regret that I walked away. I credit the Church with a lot my core strengths.  I see the joy of community, of belonging, the comfort of belief and faith in lives of my neighbors, friends and family. And I see the struggle, the quiet desperation of silent questioning. I have made a community and belief system of my own. It is a work in progress. By walking away, I have had to find my own path. And my own light.

Lose one woman and you have lost countless generations. I haven't been to church, unless it was to support a family member's baptism or blessing or primary program. I have not spoken against, nor in favor of the religion of my youth, to my children. All three children chose to be baptized, but none are currently active. Two of my children now have young children of their own. They did not have them blessed. If recent history serves, these grandchildren may chose to be baptized. Time will tell if they will remain active participants.

It could have been different. I chose to leave. I chose to listen to my own voice, telling me I needed a safer place, where my voice could be heard, where it was possible for me to lead, rather than follow. The faith of my youth has lost far too many women. I know great inroads have been made, are being made, to rectify this. Even so, by walking away, I found I have walked back to myself.

First Sentence:

"On Monday nights, my father and mother gathered their four children around the kitchen table in our tract house on the edge of the orange groves and taught us how the universe worked."

Favorite Parts:

p. 11 "In the world I grew up in, it was not okay to tell unorthodox stories. We did not hear them in church. We did not read them in scripture. But sooner or later they break through to the surface in every Mormon life, in every human life, in every life of faith. I am not afraid of them. Because this is the story life has given me to tell."

p. 26 "When I was eight years old, I could not yet see the shadows in my world of sparkling difference, the hard edges of the lines we drew to distinguish ourselves from others."

p. 28 "These are the unspoken legacies we inherit when we belong to a people: not only luminous visions of eternal expanses of loving-kindness, but actual human histories of exclusions and rank prejudice. We inherit not only the glorious histories of our ancestors, but their satisfactions with easy contradictions; their wisdom as well as their ignorance, arrogance, and presumption, as our own. we inherit all the ways in which our ancestors and parents and teachers were wrong, as well as the ways they were right: their sparkling differences, and their human failings. There is no unmixing of the two."

P. 36 "I learned that if the United States of America adopted into its Constitution the statement that "equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex," these words would in fact not correct long-standing gender inequities but rather endanger our families, demean the special and sacred roles of women, and harm the nation."

p. 43 "We grew up always ready to abandon this world, to take out small backpacks of bottled water, freeze-dried food, first-aid kits, and candles, and simply walk away, walk as far as Missouri if we had to, if that was where the New Jerusalem would be built."

p. 47 "The year we all turned twelve, the boys in my Sunday School class received the priesthood; the spiritual authority to lead, bless, and baptized, passed from Mormon father to Mormon son by the laying on of hands... I got Marie Osmond's Guide to Beauty, Health & Style."

p. 64 "You and me, Marie, wrestling the dark energies of childhood depressions and nascent eating disorders. You and me, with visions of self-harm, dark impulses we could only describe as religious."

p. 74 "Threatening? Us? Mormons?"

p. 84 "We waved our pom-poms for Utah, for pioneer grandmothers, for wheat sealed in tins against the apocalypse...I waved my pom-poms because I was not afraid of polygamy, sacred underwear, or the idea of eternal godhood..."

p. 98 "...I tried to get used to the feeling of being in the backseat, never driving, always driven, headed for destinations not of my choosing and vast beyond my control."

p. 111 "You, your body, your self---you are not an object lesson."

--- "How badly I want her to know that after many years of confusion, she will come home to a house she chose herself, with a man she chose herself, a man whose body does not menace, a man who does not dream of owning her."

p. 115 "What is to stop a people who have sized up the infinite forest of human souls tangled and uprooted by the avalanche of time, and said, cheerfully, yes, we will sort it all out and have it stacked as neatly as a cordwood by sundown."

p. 122 "So it happened that I was there at Brigham Young University just in time to witness a remarkable upwelling in Mormon feminism, a feminism that started very simply in basement classrooms with the idea that all were alike unto God."

p. 130 "I graduated from BYU, without a husband, returned my diploma in protest, and left Utah for a PhD program in Los Angeles."

p. 132 "Though I spoke very few words about it to the people with whom I shared my everyday life, during this decade, Mormons like me found ourselves in the grip of a terrible turn in Mormon history, in the grip of a fear provoked in part by the strength of our Mormon feminist vision: a fear of the full, glorious, strange, and difficult humanity of our Mormon past; a fear of women who openly claimed the power of a Heavenly Mother; a fear of mothers and fathers who refused to sacrifice their children to protect the public image of the Church; a fear of our own gay and lesbian relatives who refused the confines of the closet."

p. 136 "To my family, my choosing to marry David would mean that I was choosing not to be with them in heaven. But for me, choosing David meant placing my trust in a God bigger than doctrine."

p. 144 "No one should be left to believe that she is the only Mormon girl who walked alone into the dark. No one should be left to feel like she is the only one broken and seeking."

p. 150 "Forced to choose between my nostalgia for the faith of my childhood and my dignity as an adult, I... drove away."

p. 156 "What will I leave my own daughters, my own granddaughters? What stories will accompany them across the miles they will travel in their lifetimes? For their sakes, finally, I decide to stop feeling like a bad daughter in my own tradition. For their sakes, I decide I must make and tell my own version of the Mormon story."

p. 160 "I am not an orthodox Mormon woman like my mother. I am an unorthodox Mormon woman with a fierce and hungry faith... I need to remember all the risks being forgotten in a Mormonism where telling unorthodox versions of our story is sometimes viewed as the work of enemies and apostates.

I am not an enemy, and I will not be disappeared from the faith of my ancestors. I am a descendant of the Mormon pioneers."

p. 168 "I stare at a wooden Jesus on the cross suspended above the altar. It is an unfamiliar sight: this Jesus, arms outstretched and bound, on a cross, suspended in the chapel. Mormons do not have crucifixes in our chapels."

p. 171 "The Church as said that it respects the rights of its members with dissenting opinions. Still, as I write my speech, terror sits on my chest. I wrestle with the specter of excommunication that haunts every dissenting Mormon who writes or speak in public."

p. 177 "I hold my tongue, but I also hold my seat. This is a church inhabited by people willing to give up their own children for being gay. This is also a church of Millie Watts and the church of my grandmothers. This is a church of tenderness and arrogance, of sparkling differences and human feelings. There is no unmixing of the two."

p. 179 "My name is Joanna," I say. "And I am a straight Mormon feminist."

p. 181 "Sometimes the world does split apart, but writing can help but it back together."

p. 183 "As I wrote, I brought myself back from my own exile, the silent excommunication I subjected myself to when I was convinced Mormonism was not safe for women like me."

p. 186 "I am a believing Mormon woman, and I'm worried that the church seems to be losing so many women."

p. 188 "There is no way forward, I believe, but to tell our whole story. Not the made-for-television version, but the entire very imperfect story, the one that reveals the human flaws of the ones who came before us."

p. 189 "An orthodox story is nothing to be ashamed of. It is something that deserves to be shared."

Author Bio:

Joanna Brooks is a national voice on faith in American life and an award-winning scholar of religion and American culture. The author of The Book of Mormon Girl: Stories from an American Faith (Free Press), she is a senior correspondent for the on-line magazine ReligionDispatches.org and has been named one of “50 Politicos to Watch” by Politico.com and one of “13 Religious Women to Watch” by the Center for American Progress. She is the recipient of the 2012 Eve Award from the Mormon Women’s Forum. She lives in San Diego with her husband and two children.

Best Reviews:

Kirkus Review - Joanna Brooks: ‘The Book of Mormon Girl’

Publisher's Weekly - Book of Mormon Girl

The New Yorker - I, Nephi

By Common Consent - The Book of Mormon Girl

Quickie Review: Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel

Quick Thoughts:

Thomas Cromwell was born near the lowest rung on the English social ladder, but through the relentless force of his inexhaustible and dogged skill and will, he came as close to the top as was possible without displacing his mercurial lord and master, King Henry VIII.  

Henry's court never forgave him for proving the merit of a blacksmith's son superior to theirs.

Power was his currency. Had he been born in the United States in the country's latter centuries, he most certainly would have been a Vanderbilt or Rockefeller, a Teddy Roosevelt, Truman or Nixon. At the very least a Rove.

Hilary Mantel is a masterful writer. She imagines it is Cromwell, not cruel, torture fanatic, heretic burning More, who is the man for all seasons. 

Mantel takes a much maligned and somewhat forgotten historical figure like Cromwell, who over the centuries has been portrayed as one of English history's villains and makes of him a man who rejected the cards Fortune had given him and played himself out of the muck and into the glittering world of the Tudors.

True, Cromwell was no respecter of title or persons. He deftly removed Katherine from Queen to Dowager, made Princess Mary a bastard. He made the dubious Boleyn girl Queen, over the objections of the entire world, and the God of the land. He oversaw the fall of Thomas More, and the downfall of any enemy, perceived or real, of the realm. Cromwell masterminded the most audacious judicial murder of his time, the downfall and execution of Queen Anne. Not to mention he played hardball with the Pope, and won. Cromwell remade England, and changed the course of the world.

Hilary Mantel breathes a conflicted and complicated, yet always human oxygen into the lungs of Thomas Cromwell and thereby raises him from ignominy. He is a dangerously humorous, sometimes calculated, sometimes vulnerable, greedy and generous, fully realized character you cannot help but admire, if not love. 

The Thomas Cromwell of Wolf Hall lives and breathes England and Henry VIII. 

I love his wicked sense of humor, his character defining observances of Uncle Norfolk glaring at the fire as if to ignite it, George Boleyn's penchant for puffing his silks, his creation of teasing stories of pious Cranmer's outrages as Wolsey once told of him. He was fiercely loyal to Wolsey when it was not politically expedient to be so. However, Cromwell was not willing to go down with the ship, he was not a martyr for friendship or his conscience; he saved his own skin and that of his household, and advanced himself during this time. His quiet grief over the fall of his cardinal and the too many deaths of his wife, children, and family felled by the plague, is a telling character trait, for the man, known more as the devil who chased Rome out of every nook and cranny of England, and back to Italy.

So too, is the reality that Cromwell had a long memory, and any slight or cruelty was paid out, no matter how many years he had to wait. And he waited. He was terrifying in his single-minded service to his mercurial king. He cut down anyone or anything that stood between Henry's wishes and his own success.

It is truly sad when Cromwell believes he will outlive his enemies. He believes himself to be indispensable to England and Henry's future. And he is. But Henry is a raging child, who in his fit breaks his favorite toy, then bemoans its loss.

From what English history we know, Cromwell's relentless work to bring England out of the Middle Ages, and grant any wish for his king, will end blood drenched. And badly. 

First Sentence:

"So now get up"

Favorite Parts:

p. 14 " Kat had given him a holy medal to wear...He touches it with his lips, for luck. He drops it; it whispers into the water. He will remember his first sight of the open sea; a gray wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream."

p. 18 "In the case of his man Cromwell, the cardinal has two jokes, which sometimes unite to form one. The first is that he walks in demanding cherries in April and lettuce in December. The other is that he goes about the countryside committing outrages, and charging them to the cardinal's accounts."

p. 25 "He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities."

p. 61 "Beneath every history, another history."

p. 91 "Try always, the cardinal says, to find out what people wear under their clothes, for it's not just their skin. Turn the kind inside out, and you will find his scaly ancestors; his warm, solid, serpentine flesh."

p 142 "All Hallows Day: grief comes in waves. Now it threatens to capsize him He doesn't believe that the dead come back; but that doesn't stop him from feeling the brush of their fingertips, wing tips, against his shoulder."

p. 189 "There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible. a world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn't. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before."

p. 238 "Don't ask, don't get, he thinks."

p. 240 "What was England before Wolsey? A little offshore island, poor and cold."

p. 246 "The entertainment is this: a vast scarlet figure, supine, is dragged across the floor, howling, by actors dressed as devils. There are four devils, one for each limb of the dead man. The devils wear masks. They have tridents with which they prick the cardinal, making him twitch and writhe and beg. He had hoped the cardinal died without pain, but Cavendish had said no. He died conscious, talking of the king. He had started out of sleep and said, whose is that shadow on the wall?"

p. 255 "The dead grip the living."

p. 260 "Thomas More says, Now you are a member of the council, I hope you will tell the king what he ought to do, not merely what he can do. If the lion knew his own strength, it would be hard to rule him."

p. 376 " You see this councillor of mine? I warn you, never play any game wit him. for he will not respect your ancestry. He has no coat of arms and no name, but he believes he is bred to win."

p. 437 " Already there are too many books in the world. There are more every day. One man cannot hope to read them all."

p. 444 "Death is a japester; call him and he will not come. He is a joker and lurks in the dark, a black cloth over his face."

p. 479 " ...we all walk in circles to our destination."

p. 495 "Henry says, Do what you have to do. I will back you.

It's like hearing words you've waited all your life to hear. it's like hearing a perfect line of poetry, in a language you knew before you were born."

p. 519 "...it's all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it's no good at all if you don't have a plan for tomorrow."

p. 531 "The saying comes to him, homo homini lupus, man is wolf to man."

p. 533 "When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them."

p. 561 "Last week Chapuys said to him, in this kingdom now you are all the cardinal was, and more."

p. 566 "The fate of peoples are mad like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh."

p. 568 "They talk about his heart; he overhears them. He feels they should not: the book of y heart is a private book, it is not an order book left o the counter for any passing clerk to scrawl in."

p. 574 " Henry is frightened of you.

He shakes his head. who frightens the lion of England?"

p. 576 "He reemerges into the world. Knock him down and he will get up. Death has called to inspect him, she has measured him, breathed into his face; walked away again.

p. 580 "I have never understood where the line is drawn, between sacrifice and self-slaughter.

Christ drew it.

You don't see anything wrong wit the comparison?"

p. 583 Anne says, It's all about me...When finally you have out of More what troubles his singular conscience, you will find that what is at the root of it is that he will not bend his knee to my queenship...She is small and white and angry. Long fingers tip to tip, bending each other back; eyes bright."

p. 584 "She suspects, and she is right, that her man Cromwell is more interested in the friendship of the German princes than in an alliance with France; but she has to pick her time for that quarrel, and she says she will have no peace till Fisher is dead, till More is dead. So now she circles the room, agitated, less than regal, and she keeps veering toward Henry, touching his sleeve, touching his hand, and he brushes her away, each time, as if she were a fly.

p. 585 "Do I retain you for what is easy? Jesus pity my simplicity, I have promoted you to a place in this kingdom that no one, no one of your breeding has ever held in the whole of the history of the realm...I keep  you, Master Cromwell , because you are as cunning as a bag of serpents. but do not be a viper in my bosom. You know my decision. Execute it."

-- "He drew the blind down. I asked him why, ad he said, the goods are taken aways, so now I am closing the shop.

He can hardly bear it, to think of More sitting in the dark."

p. 589 "The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it's just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a  little point of light preserving ones solitary soul like a flame under a glass...I truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better."

p. 591 "It's England against Rome, he says. The living against the dead."

p. 602 "It's the living that turn and chase the dead."

p. 603 "The past moves heavily inside him."

Author Bio:

Born in Derbyshire in 1952 and educated in Cheshire, Hilary Mantel read law at the LSE. Married at 20, she finished her degree at Sheffield University. She tried social work, then sold frocks in order to write in the evenings. She lived in Africa in the late Seventies. In 1982 she remarried her husband and his job took them to Saudi Arabia. Her first published novel was Every Day is Mother's Day. She won the Hawthornden Prize for An Experiment in Love, and the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing. Her other novels include Fludd, The Giant O'Brien and A Place of Greater Safety. A memoir, Giving Up The Ghost, and the short stories Learning To Talk (out in July), are published by Fourth Estate. Hilary Mantel lives with her husband in a flat in a converted lunatic asylum.

Best Reviews:

Atlantic Magazine - The Men Who Made England

The Guardian - Henry's Fighting Dog

The New Yorker - Tudor Tales

Christian Science Monitor - Wolf Hall

The Book of Salt - Monique Truong: Quickie Review

The Book of Salt
Monique Truong

Quick Thoughts:
I wish I had written this book. I cannot express this enough. This book has much to teach me about writing, and reading. I have three other books that this is true of: Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens, and The True Story of Hansel and Gretel by Louise Murphy. The Book of Salt is an impeccable book. The gift of this book is its narrator, Binh, a young man expelled from his position in a grand house, and from his father's house, for nothing more than bringing shame on the household for loving a man. He travels from Vietnam to France, a stranger in a strange land, cooks his way through a string of households, until he answers an ad placed by two American ladies, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tolkas. From the vantage point of his kitchen, the reader is witness to these two luminaries, their salons, the steady stream of acolytes, but it is Binh that truly fascinates. Truong's beautiful prose limns the ordinary life of Vietnamese domestic cook Binh, with layers of gold leaf. His life, his sadness, his yearning for love that dare not speak its name, to be at home in a city, a country not his own, to feel, even blade sharp pain, to be drawn momentarily into the intimate circle of his Madame and Madame, is far more interesting than the larger than life genius of "that typewriter in a dress", Gertrude Stein, to quote poet Lynn Emmanuel from the poem Inside Gertrude Stein. I did not want this book to end. I had the urge after I finished the last sentence to turn to the first, and begin again. I think you will too.

First Sentence:
"Of that day I have two photographs and, of course, my memories."

Favorite Parts:
"I sniffed the envelope before opening it. It smelled of a faraway city, pungent with anticipation fro rain. If my Mesdames had not been in the room, I would have tasted it with my tongue. I was certain to find the familiar sting of salt, but what I needed to know was what kind: kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea." p. 5

"Desperation was extending its stay...An evil little wish had come true. The Parisians missed the money all right, but no one missed the Americans." p. 6

"...the vocabulary of servitude is not built upon my knowledge of foreign words, but rather on my ability to swallow them." p. 13

"I am forced into an avid, adoring courtship with the boulevards of this city. I must admit that in truly desperate times, my intimate knowledge of the city has saved me. Paris is a Madam with a heart." p. 15

"Wielding my words like a rusty kitchen knife, I can ask for, reject, and ultimately locate that precise specimen that will grace tonight's pot." p. 18

"I have sold myself in exchange for less. Under their gentle guidance, their velvet questions, even I can disgorge enough pathos and cheap souvenir tragedies to sustain them...I forget that there will be days when it is I who will have the craving, the red, raw need to expose all my neglected, unkempt days. And forget that I will wait, like a supplicant at the temple's gate, because all the rooms of the house are somber and silent." p. 20

"This is a temple, not a home." p. 22

"...these women are to be feared because they make a mockery out of the marriage union, hat their children's preordained faces proclaim too loudly that the man is irrelevant, that maybe he is not needed at all." p. 24

"As I slipped into the South China Sea, as water erased the shoreline, absolving it of my sins, I began to believe that conflict and strife were landlocked. Too sweat-stained and cumbersome for sea travel..." --

"Miss Toklas...is a pagan who secretly years for High Mass." p. 27

"The modern world is without limits, she tells Miss Toklas, so the modern story must accommodate the possibilities--a road where she can get lost if she so chooses or go slow and touch each blade of grass." p. 28

"Paper-white narcissus, one hundred bulbs in shallow pools of moistened pebbles, their roots exposed, clinging, pale anchors steadying the blooms as they angle toward the sun. The windows are never completely closed because the sweet powdery scent would be unbearable. In those corners where sunlight is an unfulfilled promise, there are bowls of varying sizes holding hydrangea clusters, dried, the color of barely brewed tea. With no water to weigh them down, the blooms rattle against their china vessels whenever a draft sidles through the garret. The petals scraping lightly against the bone-enriched walls sing the song of a rainfall. I choose to remember these things only. The rest I will discard." p. 36

"I am acutely aware when I am being watched, a sensitivity born from absence, a grain of salt on the tongue of a man who has tasted only bitter." p. 37

"To answer your question, GertrudeStein, love is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched." p. 40

"The sight of my brother sitting, bareheaded, stilled by disappointment, taught me lessons he never intended." p. 60

"By the time sorrow shows itself in the hands, it is deep and infinite, no longer a wash but an out and out drowning." --

"A little lie makes for a good story." p. 62

"...there is no narrative in sex, in good sex that is. There is no beginning and there is no end, just the rub, the sting, the tickle, the white light of the here and now." p. 63

"We come into their homes with our skills and our bodies, the latter a host for all the vermin and parasites that we have encountered along the way." p. 64

"He knew that to be a good cook I had to first envision the possibilities. I had to close my eyes and see and taste what was not there. I had to dream and discern it all on my tongue." p. 66

"There is a fine line between a cook and a murderer." p. 67

"A kiss freely given is a wonder to watch, even if it is being seen through the slit of a partially closed door." p. 71

"...sometimes when it is deep enough, there is an ache that fools my heart." p. 74

"there is a development, a rise and fall, upon which its salinity becomes apparent, deepens, and then disappears. Think of it as a kiss in the mouth." p. 98

"He, like me, thought that he would be a writer or a scholar someday, but after he traveled the world, life gave him something more practical to do." 99

"Although we strap time to our wrists, stuff it into our pockets, hang it on our walls, a perpetually moving picture for every room of the house, it can still run away, elude and evade, and show itself again only when there are minutes remaining and there is nothing left to do except wait till there are none." p. 100

"And like all servants he had to take solace from wealth and pleasure, even if they were not his own." p. 108

"Men, believe me, are fragile in unexpected ways." p. 125

"The French are all right in France."...he explained, was that when the French are in their colonies they lose their natural inclination toward fraternity, equality, and liberty. They leave those ideals behind in Mother France, leaving them free to treat us like bastards in the land of our birth." p. 137

"It is the recognition that in the darkest streets of the city there is another body like mine, and that it means me no harm." p. 141

"Blood makes me a man." p. 142

"Value, I have heard, is how it all begins. From there, it can deepen into worth, flow into affection, and artery its way toward the muscles of the heart." p. 150-151

"Language is a house with a host of doors, and I am too often uninvited and without the keys." p. 155

"My Madame knows that intrigue, like salt, is best if it is their from the beginning." p. 177

"...the tongues is the organ of truth." p.178

"The first bite is a revelation of flavors, infused and deep. The second bite is a reminder of why we kill and eat the young. The third allows the brain back into the fray to ask, But how is it possible?" p. 179

"GertrudeStein proudly identified their automobile as the mechanized muse. every person and everything has its own throb and rhythm. The automobile...just helps to amplify them as it zooms on by." p. 182

"Wives are never geniuses. Geniuses are never wives." p. 184

"Salt enhances the sweetness." p. 185

"...what do I have to lose? The answer to this question, believe me, depends on what the gambler believes is fixed and constant in his life. What will always be there? What will never change?...Another way of thinking about it is: What does the gambler have faith in?" p. 195

"Salt is an ingredient to be considered and carefully weighed like all others." p. 212

"Winter waited for me on the shores of this country like a vengeful dowager, incensed and cold-shouldered." p. 217

"No one wants to stand to close to desperation." . 220

"...you are a sudden crush of gray. Silk flows from your body, softness that he had taken away. In the city of my birth, you keep the promise we made to each other. We swore not to die on the kitchen floor. We swore not to die under the eaves of his house." p. 221

"Words, my Sweet Sunday Man, do not have twins in every language. Sometimes they have only distant cousins, and sometimes they pretend that they are not even related." p. 223

"My life is moving too quickly, and as always i believe that being closer to the ground will slow it down." p. 227

"In the hopes of easing my sorrow, she had taken the form of a pigeon, a city-worn bird who was passing away. Death believe me, never comes to us first in words." p. 230

"GertrudeStein is a writer, not a reader. ...Writers, I suspect, are in this way like cooks. We practice a craft whose value increases tenfold once its yield is shared and consumed." p. 235-236

"...it is the heart that tells us what is and is not there." --

"Blue is the last bit of beauty that this animal has left to share, before a knife finds its soft underbelly and guts it...blue is the color of all that remains." p.
238

"..."sweet." "Sour" and "bitter"..."salt"...In any language, these four words repeated, emphasized with a shake or a nod, are invaluable to me in the kitchen." p. 241

"Sorrow, even when tempered by sweat and toil into a whisper weight of gold, is still sorrow." p. 242

"I got up and slowly walked my hunger around." p. 244

"I needed a ship that would go out to sea because there the water is deep, deeper than the hemmed-in rivers that I could easily reach by foot. I wanted the deepest water because i wanted to slip into it and allow the moon's reflection to swallow me whole." p. 250

"Wishes, as I have always known, can be cruel in the terms and conditions of their fulfillment." p. 252

"I measured the distance down to the water,...thought about how all the rivers of the world desire to flow to the seas." p. 257

"A "memory" was for me another way of saying a "story." A "story" was another way of saying a "gift." The man on the bridge was a memory, he was a story, he was a gift. Paris gave him to me." p. 258

"For a traveler, it is sometimes necessary to make the world small on purpose. It is the only way to st0p migrating and find a new home." --

"When I got off the train, I was dressed all in white and without the customary hat, and they, in their own way, understood that that meant that I was in mourning." p. 259

"My eyes are closed because thinking, for me, is sometimes aided by the dark." p. 261

"In the dark, I see you smile. I look up instinctually, as if someone has called my name." --

Author Bio:
Monique Truong was born in Saigon in 1968 and moved to the United States at age six. She graduated from Yale University and the Columbia University School of Law, going on to specialize in intellectual property. Truong coedited the anthology Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose. Her first novel,The Book of Salt, a national bestseller, has been awarded the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and the Young Lions Fiction Award, among other honors. Granting Truong an Award of Excellence, the Vietnamese American Studies Center at San Francisco State University called her "a pioneer in the field, as an academic, an advocate, and an artist." Truong now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Best Reviews:
Powell's: Includes a list of review excerpts from a variety of respected sources.

The Story of A Marriage - Andrew Sean Greer: Quickie Review

The Story of A Marriage
Andrew Sean Greer

Quick Thoughts:
Do not be fooled by the feather weight of this book. Pardon my pugilist metaphors, but, I suppose marriage could be considered a prize fight, with a winner, a loser, a draw. Yes, a very bleak analogy, and quite telling, but let's not get into to that. Regardless of how you view marriage, Greer's book should certainly be ranked as a heavyweight among books. I will confess I rolled my eyes at the title, but still opened to the first page. I bought it immediately after reading the first sentence. This book will surprise you in the way any intimate relationship you've ever had has. You, the reader, think you know what a marriage is, thinkn you know your partner, you think you know these characters and their world. The reality is that we can never truly know another person. (Back to the boxing metaphors), After a few brief pages, the book suddenly switches from steady right jabs and throws a surprise left hook that knocks you out of your dogged assurance of who you think the narrator is, and blam!, you're on the ropes, realizing the sentence you just read changes everything you thought you knew, and this knowledge sends you scrambling to the corner to reread. Reading this book you realize assumptions say more about you than the words you speak. All the big issues of every age: politics, religion, gender, race, predilections, preferences, persuasions, are questioned and examined, stealthily.

First Sentence:
"We think we know the ones we love."

Favorite Parts:
"...you know the heart: every night, it grows a thorn." p. 34

"A whisper in my ear: "I need you to marry me." He might have said: "I need you to hide me." p. 41

"Like a protected witness, a life in our little house, calm as can be: a boy, a wife, a barkless dog.Some love in there, for all of us." --

"1953. It was a world with a war that had just ended and, like a devil that grows a new tail after you've chopped one off, another war had begun." p. 45

"Life could be exchanged; could be better, what you'd dreamedd of; could be built on a cliff above the roaring world." p. 48

"A choice: ake this, or nothing." --

"What an attractive fantasy: to believe you could leave race problems behind." p. 52

"Holland chose--as men often have the luxury of choosing--to do nothing." p. 54

"It set the tone for our lives together, those days in a warm seled room, reading books in a whisper, terrified of discovery...Children hiding from our country,, that angry father." p. 57

"How hollow, to have no secrets left, you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone." p. 60

"I am sure we each loved a different man. Because a lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we've married him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person." p. 64

How remarkable we are, in our ability to hide things from ourselves--our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds: jelly fish floating on a vast dark sea of know and deciding...." p. 65

"I do not know wht joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain." p. 71

"I felt like a magician who has decided to retire, and one afternoon, over a drink, tells a younger man all of the secrets to his lifetime of tricks." p. 88

"What a cool, crisp silence we sat in." p. 105

"I thrust my arms out at the open sky, the clouds as bright and crenellated as the grass below, all of it moving, rustling, in the strong wind that smelles of the ocean." p. 125

"Something had been tugging at me throughout the dance, and it turned out to be just myself, as a girl, with some piece of hte past to show me." p. 137

"America, you give a lovely death." p. 147

"...that was how she wore themm, those blackened pearls; as a token, a holy relic around her neck." p. 150

"We would not fight to kill in a war or set the world aright, not for a country who disowned us..." p. 151

"A prison made entirely of light...Nothing keeps you from it; ther is no electric fence or wall around a life, a marriage." p. 153

"This is a war story. It was not meant to be. It started as a love sotry, the story of a marriage, but the war has stuck to it everywhere like shattered glass." p. 156





Author Bio:
Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of The Story of a Marriage, which The New York Times has called an "inspired, lyrical novel," and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named a best book of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune while garnering many other coast-to-coast honors. His first novel, The Path of Minor Planets, and his story collection, How It Was for Me, were also published to wide acclaim. His stories have appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and other national publications, and have been anthologized most recently in The Book of Other People and Best American Nonrequired Reading. He is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. Greer lives in San Francisco.

He was born in Washington, DC, the son of two scientists. He studied writing at Brown University, where he was the Commencement Speaker at his own graduation. After years in New York working as a chauffeur, television extra and unsuccessful writer, he moved to Missoula, MT, where he received his MFA from the University of Montana. He soon moved to San Francisco and began to publish in magazines before releasing a collection of his stories, How It Was for Me. His first novel, The Path of Minor Planets, was published to much acclaim in 2001, and his second book, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, came out in 2004. John Updike first put this novel on the literary map when, in the pages of The New Yorker, he called it "enchanting, in the perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment brought to grandeur by Proust and Nabokov." Mitch Albom then chose Max for the Today Show Book Club and it soon became a bestseller. The New York Times has written that in his new novel, The Story of a Marriage, Greer ascends "to the heights of masters like Marilynne Robinson and William Trevor." from bookbrowse

Best Reviews:
The New York Times Review:Comparisons to Proust, but ultimately makes a case that the novel has roots in Poe's lexicon.

NPR:Glowing review, an excerpt of the novel provided, as well as the author reading from the book.

Oprah.com:Brief review that piques interest.

The Independent:Not the most flattering of reviews, downright devil's advocate, but I like how the review conflates the opening line of Sylvia Plaths,s The Bell Jar with Greer's opening line, to make his case against heavy-handed symbolism, despite the beauty of the writing. Hmmmm.

The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch: Quickie Review

The Chronology of Water
Lidia Yuknavitch


Quick Thoughts:
Before I say anything regarding the book, can we agree on just this: Fathers of the world, sublimate your rage and spare your daughters and sons your particular perversions. And mothers, remember the number one rule of the jungle is to protect your young.

"Make up stories until you find one you can live with."

Therein is the strength and bane of memoir. Telling the truth slant is how we humans understand or make our world real, cut ourselves a break while damning others, or extend generosity through disremembering.

The latest research in neurobiology claims that the only pure memories are those locked away,forgotten, in the secret recesses of our gray matter, and that once a memory is given voice, the narrative alters, ever so slightly, and that a memory recounted numerous times is more fiction than truth. Isn't it just marvelous that our brains and our bodies believe memory is a real experience, that it is happening in real time, just like the brain and body believes the dream state is the same as being awake. It appears that even when a memoirist tells us they are telling it straight, that this is no effing Million Little Pieces, well perhaps just a minute fraction is. Yuknavitch plays on this when she tells us what happens, then tells us she was lying, and then retells it the real way, and then tells us she could say anything and we'd just have to take her word for it. Truth is, I don't care about veracity when it comes to memoir, because what happened only has to be true to the narrative you've chosen for yourself. What is particularly unsettling about this new memory research, it is Lidia's father who has the purest memories.

I did not cry one tear reading this memoir. I'm not saying that I didn't feel every emotion possible. What I'm saying is that I understand her rage, her narrative, her numbness, her escape into water, her ability to seek the very destruction that would take her to the edge of mortality. Help her to feel, something. I'm not appropriating her story or her rage or her brokenness or her stitching her bloody shreds back together again. All I'm saying is that I found a type of common ground. And I think you will too, no matter who you are.

I spent the day reading her life, watching Lidia go down, down the rabbit hole, to emerge somewhere else, the other side perhaps, into another self, another life.

There were sentences and sections that stopped me cold. Word and image like obsidian shards.

Twice, three times, I saw myself reflected exactly in the pages. I too gathered rocks when I was pregnant, lined the perimeter of my living room with field stones, placed head-sized rocks in the transoms, lined the windowsills and counters with miniature menhirs. I still have no idea why or for what purpose, other than I had to do it.

There were times when I lost my patience with Lidia. Thought if I have to hear one more time what is happening in or to her pants while looking at a beautiful man or woman, I would scream cliche or overshare or trite. And then times when I wondered how she survived her life. Also, how the people in her wake survived the tsunami of her. And then, I was grateful she left the details of what her father did with his hands to the imagination. Her pain, her dogged self-destruction, and Dantesque descent into each circle of hell were witness enough. She was generous with her father, who didn't deserve it, not really, even if he'd lost his memory of all that went before. Kind to a mother that didn't protect her, who dove into a bottle and stayed hidden from the reality of her life, her children's lives, in the shallows.

I suppose our makers deserve generosity and kindness, regardless of the dark places they press into us. I believe her father felt remorse but his need was greater than the need to stop. I believe her mother knew, all of it, but believed herself too powerless to stop the hideous reality of her life, her children's lives. Too fearful, I suppose, to just, leave, take her children with her. No regrets. But that isn't this story. The story we know is of a man who damaged, willingly, a woman who looked out the window, willingly, and children who took it until they escaped, and Lidia gave her rage to the world, her body a battering ram, until she found a more gentle way for herself.

Here's the thing: I want to know what happened to the woman who had no English in her, and the fate of her baby. I know about Lidia's penance of working the highways, and I assume if the baby had died there would have been a stronger penalty, but I really don't know California law. I do want to know if there was another deathbaby.

I suppose it depends on who you are and what has happened to you and what stage of grief, recovery, denial, addiction you are in if this book is for you. I think this book is for you and you and you. Each reader will see her or his reflection on the page.

You may not cry, but, you will feel, everything.

First Sentence:
The day my daughter was stillborn, after I held the future pink and rose-lipped in my shivering arms, lifeless tender, covering her face in tears and kisses, after they handed my dead girl to my sister who kissed her, then to my first husband who kissed her, then to my mother who couldn't bear to hold her, then out of the hospital room door, tiny lifeless swaddled thing, the nurse gave me tranquilizers and a soap and a sponge.

Favorite Parts:
"Little tragedies are difficult to keep straight. they swell and dive in and out between great sinkholes of the brain." p. 25

"It's hard to know what to think of a life when you're knee-deep." --

"Laughter can shake you from the delirium of grief." p. 26

"The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands." p. 33

"Sometimes I think my voice arrived on paper." p. 37

"All the rooms of our house carried the weight of father." p. 46

"I pictured a suitcase... Big enough to fit the rage of a girl." p. 47

"My sister and I, we were selfish. We wanted selves." p. 50

"To be born has many meanings. How many times we leave a life, enter a new one." p. 53

"Even angry girls can be moved to tears." p. 59

"Addiction, she is in me, sure enough." p. 71

"I didn't know yet how wanting ot die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. p. 72

"I didn't know we were our mother's daughters after all." --

"They fed me bible passages. I brought Mary Shelly's Frankenstein with me every day for moral support." p. 73

"This is something I know: damaged women? We don't think we deserve kindness. In fact, when kindness happens to us, we go a little berserk. It's threatening. Deeply. Because if I have to admit how profoundly I need kindness? I have to admit that I hid the me who deserves it down in a sadness well. Seriously. Like abandoning a child at the bottom of a well because it's better than the life she is facing. Not quite killing my little girl me, but damn close." p. 76

"The fact was, we were both adult women now. Living adult women lives. Meaning we had something very deeply inn common: the tyranny of a culture telling women who they should be." p. 77

"I only know my father's anger built the house." p. 81

"The death of our children swam in the water with us, curling around us, keeping us twinned and floating." p. 101

"I felt most alive near death anyway." p. 118

"What's the best thing that's ever happened to you in your life?" p. 121

"I closed my eyes and waited for the hands of a man to do what they did to women like me." p. 122

"I liked books more than people." --

"When I as 13 I confessed my father secrets in the black box of catholic too another father in the house of our father who told me I should not tell lies." "Honor thy father." "Say seven Hail Marys." "It's wicked to make up stories." p. 131

"...Joan of Arc...Girl with a war in her. voice of a father in her head. --

"I'm the rest of my life a burning girl." p. 132

"Jesus. What is a thin man pinned to wood next to the image of a burning woman warrior ablaze?" --

"All that day I stomped around fuming the fumes of a woman who doesn't know how to own her own intellect and blames i on men." p. 139

"Upside down I saw the sun and sky at the surface make silver blue electricity...The upsidedownness of blood in my skull made my head ache." p. 150

"My body in deep water. Weightless. Airless. Daughterless void." p. 151

"In water, like books - you can leave your life." p. 152

"In a beautiful wooden box, I have the hair of people I love." p. 155

"My mother said that as a girl, she let her hair grow log enough to cover her body, her deformed leg, her scars." p. 157

"The transgression will write her very body." p. 165

"...we drink and pass out in Joyce's country...we wish we were part of history we wish we were part of drinking we wish we were part of anything not ourselves we walk and walk but why do the pictures we took of each other have no smiles? p. 177

"Ask me about writing, well, that's fierce private." p. 181

"I am a woman who talks to herself and lies." p. 182

"That's when the two mes had it out." p. 184

"My first book came out of me in a great gushing return of the repressed...There were words and their was y body, and I could see through my own skin." --

"This is what Mary must have looked like after jesus. No way for the body to bear the miracle, the burden, the unbelievable history that moves the world without her body." p. 188

"It is not easy to leave one self and embrace another. Your freedom will scar you. Maybe even kill you. Or one your yous. " p. 190

"You see it as important to understand how damaged people don't always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them. It's a shame we carry. The shame of wanting something good." p. 198

"Addicts have a problem comprehending gravitas." p. 211

"I could see the woman who would pick up a bottle of vodka and never put it down...The marriage that went so horribly wrong, and still she couldn't leave. I can see the mother whose children drifted so quickly away form her like fish cut loose." p. 211

"Sometimes I think I've been everywhere before." p. 227

"Literature is the medium. You have to swim in it." p. 230

"I know you are not used to women saying this, but I wanted him to drive down into me and eat me alive." p. 233

"Sweet hidden life in the water of me - the best thing I had to give." p. 242

"My god. How many ways are there to love men? It's enough to break a heart open." p. 252

"There is a way for anger to come out as an energy you let loose and away. The trick is to give it a form, and not a human target. The trick is to transform rage." p. 259

"Words carry oceans on their small backs." p. 270

"My father lost his memory in the arms of his daughter the swimmer." p. 278

"I drove my father's ashes up to Seattle pretty immediately because I didn't want them. I didn't want them in my house, or my garden, or any waterway near me or my son." p. 282

"We laughed the laugh of women untethered, finally, from their origins." p. 283

"I can still see my mother sitting in her car as I'd come out of swim practice as a kid. The heater running. Whatever else she was, she was there." P. 290

"If your marriage goes busto, make up a different you." p. 292

"Make up stories until you find one you can live with." --

"Make up stories as if your life depended on it."

"...beautiful things. Graceful things. Hopeful things can sometimes appear in dark places." p. 293

Author Bio:
In 1986 my daughter died the day she was born. From her I became a writer.

My writing is informed, deformed, and reformed by these things:

1.I think gender and sexuality are territories of possibility. Nevermind what we've been told or what the choices appear to be. Inside artistic practice the possibilities open back up.
2.I think narrative is quantum.
3.I think the writer is a locus through which intensities pass.
4.I think literature is that which fights back against the oppressive scripts of socialization and good citizenship.
5.I think the space of making art is freedom of being.
6.I think things that happen to us are true. Writing is a whole other body.
7.I believe in art the way other people believe in god.

I have had lots of jobs. Some of my favorites were being on an all male house painting crew, because you could see and touch your labor and it had concrete meaning and I could drink beer, pee standing up, and fart anytime I wanted; seasonal farm work like picking basil and fruit because I got to be outside and meet cool people; working on the road crew with Mexicans two of the times I was arrested.

In the more recent past all my jobs have been bourgeois teaching gigs. I don't know what I think about teaching. Mostly I show up and beg people to have a dialogue with me about ideas. I do feel lucky to have a job and health insurance. Its just hard to be an isolate and do something so public every day.
In Eugene I invented a magazine called two girls review. In Portland my husband and I made a press called Chiasmus (www.chiasmsumedia.net). Both are the result of radical collaborations.

Oh. And I am a very, very good swimmer. Which must be why, as from http://www.lidiayukna my friend Mia says, I have not drowned. When pulled under, kick. from http://www.lidiayuknavitch.net

Best Reviews:
Publisher's Weekly: If and when you ever write a book, this is the kind of review to pray to all the gods to receive.

Paste Magazine: You'll have to scroll down five paragraphs of memoir vs. novel argument to get to the review of Yuknavitch's memoir, so why not just read the whole review? A thorough review which addresses this fierce memoir, it's almost descent into sentimentality or the cliched territory of writing about addiction.

Bookslut:A site where you want to pull up a chair by the fireplace, kick your shoes off, and just let yourself surf until your heart bursts. The review is brief but covers just enough skin to titillate.

The Cult:Writer Chuck Palahniuk's site. A shout out and call to read. A wildly popular writer friend's grassroots campaign to get your book in the hands of as many readers as possible is another reason to genuflect.

The God of Nightmares - Paula Fox: Quickie Review

The God of Nightmares
Paula Fox


I read a lot of books. My house is overcrowded with them. Hello, my name is Danna and I hoard books.

I write in almost every book I read: underline favorite lines, make seriously pithy comments like,(oh sure), chew out the characters, and the author in the margins, makes lists of vocabulary words on the back pages. I talk about books a lot. I am passionate about books. Once, I tore a book in half and threw it across the room because the ending was so ridiculous, (it was a hardbound book, and no, I've never done that again, but I have torn out the last few pages of a book and I wrote a note to the editor about never letting a writer get away with such a lame conceit, and no, I did not send the note to the editor). I also hate movies that wave all the wildness of a plot away with the excuse that it was all a dream. Hate them.

Back to the point. I realized that I spend a great deal of my real time reading and talking about books, but realized I hardly make mention of the books I'm reading on this blog, probably because it would be long, long, long. The solution? Quickie reviews, because sometimes a quickie book review is just as satisfying as... You know exactly what I'm talking about.

Quickie Review will include: book jacket, quick thoughts, first sentence, favorite parts, author bio, best reviews.

So, here goes.

Quick Thoughts:
This is the first novel I've read by Paula Fox, and although the book didn't grab me by the throat and shake me, it did manage subtle tremors and aftershocks. I'm still thinking of Claude and his libation to Epiales, the god of nightmares, of Helen and her inability to forgive her mother, or to keep herself from becoming her, of Gerald and his never ceasing capacity to forgive, and of Marlene and her too small shoes and her reinvention as a sociologist, and most of all, of New Orleans, so much so that I checked homes to rent for a writing retreat vacation. And Lulu, horrible, wonderful Lulu.

Fox's prose is beautiful and spare like a bone picked clean. Her characters inner selves, their secrets and motivations are revealed in the manner of a child's game of guessing what the hand behind your back holds.

I could have done without Part Two where all the loose ends are collected,betrayals unearthed, impotent accusations slung. All too late. But I suppose that is how life is. We have to wait a lifetime to make sense of our choices, of what we chose to see, to ignore, and to forgive ourselves who we are.

First Sentence:
In the early spring of 1941, thirteen years after he'd left home, my father, Lincoln Bynum, died far away from my mother and me in a seaside village in northern California.

Favorite Parts:
"The faint and steady clink of the spoon against the side of the pot suggested a dejected signal of distress." p. 9

"I used to wonder what she imagined the Armenians, restored to life and well-fed, would concern themselves with if not daily life and its troubles, those human concerns that from the huge perspective of catastrophe dwindled down to nothing." p. 12

"...as swiftly as a swallow flying psst a window at dusk, a shadowed image of myself somewhere else came and went." p. 22

"It was as if the whole visible world-- the train and the mysterious, continuously disappearing landscape through which it traveled--had been shaped by the blade of a knife, as sharply did I perceive it all." p. 28

"The air smelled of ripe peaches and unknown flowers and, faintly, of something brackish, watery, ad in the French Market, of a kind of coffee to which chicory gave a bracing bitter sting." p. 32

I stood and looked at the colored jazzmen whose derbies tipped rakishly over their brows; they huddled together on a small platform held up, it seemed, by the thick cigarette smoke, their instruments shining like streaks of gold in their dark-skinned hands." p. 33

"The Royal Street streetcars rumbled along, slow as sleepy mammals, and they had names printed on boards attached to their sides. I kept pace for a long block with Piety." p. 43

"I had the sense of a weight pressing down from above, an extreme darkness. The room was immense, circular. I looked up. The domed ceiling so far above was a blue-black sky across which were flung, like fishermen's nets, the constellations, each star as distinct as a white thorn." p. 45

"I liked gin... It glowed, amber, in the parlor bay window, and all the romance between us was held in those moments like a butterfly still alive in the net that has captured it." p. 57

"They spoke about themselves. It was as though they unfolded maps of their lives: here is a hill, a village, a river, here are the crossroads." p. 58

"Were people utterly unknown to themselves?" p. 71

"This is the end of the country--not the delta, not those vile little settlements in that hellish swamp..." p. 72

"The stars make me feel huge--as if I could eat them all up." p. 73

"People steal into one's consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along." p.79

"A knowledge I didn't want entered me stealthily...But there is a difference between knowing and seeing." p. 81

"Kindly thoughts aren't the issue. Thoughts change anyhow, but they'll never change without fair laws." p. 83

"Gerald's poems were not like any I had read. They didn't rhyme; they were short, eight or ten lines. They were like small explosions in bare rooms, and the last lines had a kind of delayed effect on me, the way you suddenly see something you thought you'd understood forever, in an entirely different way." p. 87

"We're speaking of tribes," Claude said. "In one way or another, it's what people mostly talk about." "And food."... "And love." p. 91

"Laws may be he nearest human beings get to self-criticism." p. 94

"How can sympathy be anything but cheap sentiment if you don't know the dark side?" p. 95

"I imagined poets caught their poems from the air." p. 116

"Poems are found and then made." --

"When we give our favors, we must bear the consequences." p. 128

"I heard in all our voices, in the things we said, a heightened awareness that perilous elements were gathering force at the core of his hidden life--which, in truth, was never truly hidden except in the sense that the ultimate being of another person is always, unavailingly, hidden." p. 151

"First comes the word, then a shove, then a slap and then a fist is doubled up. They both know it will happen. It's not the first time. Why do you suppose they let it happen?" p. 172

"People can defend themselves after all, even if they can't defend life." p. 173

"The ancients said that since we can't attain happiness, we might as well be happy without it." p. 192

"No," she had not married again. "Once was enough. There were more dignified choice for a woman to make." p. 196

"We do not grow old in our secret selves." p.203

"We don't have to face everything at once." p. 224

Author Bio:
Spurned at birth in New York by her mother, Paula Fox had a turbulent childhood in the US and Cuba. At 20 she gave up her own daughter for adoption. She went on to write controversial but award-winning children's books as well as autobiographical novels. At 80, she is enjoying a revival as her adult fiction is championed by a new generation of American writers. Aida Edemariam reports In the past few years Paula Fox has been rediscovered as the author of six novels, at least two of which, Desperate Characters and The Widow's Children - both published in Britain for the first time this month - have a cliam to a place on the list of 20th-century American classics. Fox is already well-known as the author of two dozen much-loved and generously garlanded children's novels. Yet until they were recently reissued in the US with specially commissioned introductions and much fanfare, the last of her adult novels had been out of print since 1992. Most of the earlier books had been unavailable for decades. Jonathan Franzen has, notoriously, ranked her above Roth, Bellow and Updike and others have compared her with Kafka, Chekhov and Flaubert.

Some of the recent fuss has focused on Fox's life. In 2001, prompted in part by a mugging that left her with serious cranial bleeding and a sudden intimation of mortality, she published a memoir of her childhood, Borrowed Finery, which was excerpted in the New Yorker and published here last year. It is a tale of startling neglect, told with a combination of directness and reticence unusual for the form. As with her fiction, the impression is of distanced, though not unfeeling, control - and so what you don't expect is the warmth and vigour of her physical presence (she turned 80 in April, but looks far younger) and her laughter. Then there's her voice: husky, perfectly modulated, very deep, capable of great "tonal drama", to borrow a phrase from The Widow's Children .

Fox's mother Elsie, determined not to have children, had already had three or four abortions, but did not realise she was pregnant with Paula until too late, so the baby was instead deposited at a foundling home in New York. From there she was rescued by Elsie's mother, Candelaria de Sola, once the beautiful Spanish child-wife of a Cuban plantation owner, now sad and passive, "the paid companion of an ancient cuckoo woman" on another Cuban plantation, and temporarily visiting the States. The baby was passed from friend to friend. When she was five months old, a Congregational minister, the Reverend Elwood Corning, doing the rounds of his parishioners in Orange County, New York, noticed her. "I struck him in some way - so he took me and he kept me with him until I was almost six years old." Fox laughs. "Mr Corning was my first conquest. Alas, my mother and father were not."

To read more about Fox, (and you really should, because it's so juicy, it reads like a Dickens novel), check out The Guardian's article, A Qualified Optimist by Aida Edemariam.

Best Reviews:
Boston Review:A thoughtful and incisive review by Randall Curb.

Publisher's Weekly:More a concise synopsis than review.