Enter to Win in the Fifth Literary Blog Hop

Once again I’m participating in the Literary Giveaway Blog Hop hosted by Leeswammes’ Blog.  This means you can enter to win literary books of all types from the bloggers listed at the event site.

Since I mostly read e-books, I don’t have a pile of gently used favorites to give away.  But I like to highlight some of my favorite reads since the last Hop and give you the option of entering to win the book that interests you most.

So for this Hop, you can enter to win one of the following:

The Count of Monte Cristo (paperback since the e-book is already free): this book has been on my TBR list for decades — or at least Alexandre Dumas has, since I’ve never quite been able to decide between Monte Cristo and Three Musketeers.  Monte Cristo sounded darker and more dramatic, and it didn’t disappoint.  This book has it all – adventure, love, treasure, and revenge.  But what sounds simple isn’t at all.  This book is a time commitment and requires some patience as you let the story unravel.  But it’s all in there.

The Sisters Brothers (paperback or Kindle): It’s a little hard to explain why this book is literary but it showed up on a ton of best-of lists last year.  It’s the story of two brothers heading out to Gold Rush-era Oregon and California.  They’re assassins on a job to find and kill a man; only Eli Sisters is having second thoughts about a quieter life.  I found the style of writing a little hard to get used to, but once I did the book really took off.  Eli is a character you won’t forget any time soon.

The Earthquake Machine (Kindle only): This is author Mary Pauline Lowry’s first book and it’s amazing.  Forget that it’s marketed as young adult fiction; this is a really adult read.  Yes, it’s about the life of a troubled fourteen year old.  But Lowry doesn’t hold back in this really honest and thoughtful portrayal of what it means to be fourteen and have your whole world fall apart.  Rhonda goes on the kind of adventure I fantasized about as a teen, only I never had the nerve to do a tenth of the things she does.   Be warned, this is an untraditional, no-holds-barred read that will make you uncomfortable at times but will also take you deep into the teenage mind. 

Now, here are the rules to enter:

1)      Tell me which book you’re interested in (be sure to note the available format).  I’ll pick a winner for each of the three books.  Please don’t enter for all three unless you’re really interested in reading all three.

2)      Tell me about one of your favorite books this year.  What book do you recommend and why?  (Your entry will not be considered if you don’t provide a recommendation.)

3)      International entries welcome.  I always seem to send my books to far off places.

4)      There’s no requirement to follow my blog but I hope you’ll consider signing up as an email or Twitter follower.

5)      Entries accepted until midnight June 27.

Enjoy the Hop and please visit the other participating blogs.  Good luck!

Well Worth a Read: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

The Sisters Brothers doesn’t seem like a book a lot of people have read – but those who’ve read it loved it, including the geeky-cool Wil Wheaton, who said “I had to restrain myself from reading The Sisters Brothers in one sitting.”

The Sisters Brothers was selected for the Man Booker shortlist in 2011.  The book seems an unlikely candidate for critical acclaim, being a sort of rough and violent tale of two brothers in the 1850’s Wild West.  This book is full of fighting, death, and sex but it’s also about the relationship between these brothers and one man’s desire to lead a quieter life.

It tells the story of Eli Sisters and his brother Charlie, as they travel to San Francisco to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm.  The Sisters Brothers are notorious assassins, only Eli’s starting to think about giving up this career for something more peaceful, something that might involve settling down, finding a woman and opening up a shop.  The only problem is that Charlie loves the violent life, and Eli puts his brother above all else.

When I started the book, I was really thrown by DeWitt’s use of dialect – or rather the lack of dialect.  In this tale of semi-literate Wild West assassins I expected shortened words, poor grammar, lots of swearing.  Instead you get a strangely formal dialect that even the most educated person doesn’t use.  Most problematic for me was the infrequent and inconsistent use of contractions.  For example: “Morris is waiting for us at a hotel in San Francisco.  He will point Warm out and we will be on our way.  It’s a good place to kill someone, I have heard.”

This distracted me so much I nearly put the book down.  But people love it so much I pushed on, and while I still found the dialogue stilted throughout the entire book, the story certainly draws you in, and the character of Eli quickly wins you over.

In many ways, this book plays on all the stereotypes of the Wild West story.  We have crazy prospectors, thugs, whores, crime bosses, and the man who is trying to go straight but life just won’t let him.  What’s startling – and powerful – about this book is how DeWitt can go from base thuggery to poetry in the space of a single page.  The other thing about this book that really stands out is that Eli is more than just a sensitive outlaw.  His struggles to endear himself to women, to earn the respect of his brother, and even to be a good son to his mother, make him something more than a stock character.

That, and the story just doesn’t stop.  It’s exactly what you want in a Wild West/road trip/last adventure kind of tale.

From the reviews I read, I worried the book would be too violent for me.  It wasn’t. Everything about the lives of these characters is violent, and has to be for the story to work.  For me, it’s not gunfight violence that bothers me, but torture and rape kinds of violence.  In fact the part of this book that had me squirming the most involved surgery on Eli’s horse.  Although violence towards animals often bothers us more than violence to humans, doesn’t it?  Something about them being helpless and innocent, and not understanding what’s happening to them.  I can tell you most of the human deaths in this book didn’t bother me much.

Going back to the dialect issue, I thought I’d see what Man Booker and the New York Times had to say.  Does DeWitt’s strange use of speech contribute to these rave reviews, or like me, detract from them just a little?  Is anyone else in the world bothered by the absence of contractions or am I just weird?

Here’s what Man Booker had to say:

Told in deWitt’s darkly comic and arresting style, The Sisters Brothers is the kind of western the Coen Brothers might write – stark, unsettling and with a keen eye for the perversity of human motivation. Like his debut novel Ablutions, it is a novel about the things you tell yourself in order to be able to continue to live the life you find yourself in, and what happens when those stories no longer work. It is an inventive and strange and beautifully controlled piece of fiction and displays an exciting expansion of Dewitt’s range.

The New York Times covered the topic a bit more.

Eli Sisters tells the story in a loftily formal fashion, doggedly literal, vulgar and polite at turns, squeezing humor out of stating the obvious with flowery melodrama. “Tub!” Eli cries at one point, “I am stuck inside the cabin of the vile gypsy-witch. . . . Tub! Assist me in my time of need!”

This is dime-novel speech, and DeWitt’s version of it raises interesting questions. Did real-life Western vernacular sound like this snippet from George Ruxton’s 1849 travel narrative, “Life in the Far West”: “Do ’ee hyar now, you darned crittur?” Or did it sound like this, from “The Sisters Brothers”: “ ‘Your hat is tattered, also.’ ‘I like my hat.’ ‘You seem to have known each other a long while, judging by the sweat rings.’ My face darkened and I said, ‘It is impolite to speak of other people’s clothing like that.’ ”

The answer is neither. When eye dialect is, thankfully, no longer the fashion, reported speech like that in Ruxton seems magically to vanish from the historical record. And when formal politeness is in fashion (thanks to Charles Portis’s “True Grit”), sometimes, to be sure, combined with numbing expletives (thanks to the HBO series “Deadwood”), its ultimate source is novels written by Eastern authors who were taught in school that good writing displays a horror of contractions. DeWitt’s version of this vernacular is a stylized abstraction of Western speech after it originated in the South, found a niche in the Civil War and crossed the Mississippi, where it passed through any number of filters: political orations, florid journalism and mouths too full of chaw to say much, to name just a few.

So, you’ve got my opinion, and the opinion of people who are maybe more qualified than I am to judge.  I’ll give Wheaton the last word, who says Eli’s voice “wasn’t the easiest thing for me to get used to.”

Still, this book was a hundred percent worth the read, contractions or not.

Note: Article first published as Book Review: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt on Blogcritics.

Literary Blog Hop: Books that are hyped as literary, but are they?

This weekend’s Literary Blog Hop, hosted by The Blue Bookcase, poses an interesting question: describe a book that was widely considered to be “literary” but in your opinion, was not.

I wonder if every book blogger has a book they “love to hate”?  I do, so the answer to this question came quickly: Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld.

My husband asked, upon hearing this question, how do you determine whether something is considered literary?  There are a lot of ways to answer that question, and we’ve discussed this before — including strong writing, meaningful messages, characters that resonate and teach us something, and new ways to look at important times and places in history.  But in the case of Prep, I have a pretty easy answer.  Prep was actually picked by the New York Times Book Review as the best novel of 2005.

They described the book as:

This calm and memorably incisive first novel, about a scholarship girl who heads east to attend an elite prep school, casts an unshakable spell and has plenty to say about class, sex and character.

I can actually remember shaking the paper in disgust when that pronouncement came out.

I understand that every year has its “It” books — say Freedom or The Passage — and those books aren’t going to appeal to everyone.  But I found Prep to be trite, annoying, and overwritten.  It’s the story about a teenage girl who goes to an elite boarding school, gets caught up in her poor self-esteem, and basically spends most of her time sleeping with a guy who (she knows) won’t actually date her.

I understand about self-esteem issues.  I understand about trying to figure yourself out in high school, navigating the perils of teen sexuality and dating, and dealing with issues of appearance, class, and academic competition.  I lived all those things, although not in a fancy prep school.  And yet I failed utterly to sympathize with the main character in this book. All of the characters felt stereotypical and the story trite and unimaginative.  I feel like there are so many more great books about the high school experience.  This book is no Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace.  There are those who considered this book the definitive novel about girls’ teenage experience in the 80s.  It was not that for me.

I read this book six years ago so I can’t describe it in more detail than that.  I finished it grudgingly, expecting it to get better and it did not; and the fact of its literary success just made me hate it more.

Review of Trespass by Rose Tremain

Trespass is a book you probably haven’t heard of, by an author you probably haven’t heard of.  Rose Tremain has written 15 books, many of them award winners or nominees (Whitbread Awards, Booker Prize, and Orange Prize).  Her best known work is Restoration, a historical novel about a 17th century physician that was made into a movie with Robert Downey Jr. in 1995.  I really enjoyed Restoration, and was expecting something similar when I picked up this book.  What I got was very different but just as compelling.

Trespass takes place in present-day Southern France, in an area called Cevennes.  It’s about two pairs of siblings, both with troubled family pasts who are trying to move forward.

Audrun and her brother Aramon Lunel own land and a family home in Cevennes.  Audrun, however, lives in a small bungalow erected in the shadow of the home, the Mas Lunel.  Anthony Verey, in London, is a formerly-successful antiques dealer.  He adores his treasures but has no one in his life besides his sister, Veronica.  All of these characters are in their sixties but in many ways are still locked in their pasts.

Anthony becomes depressed because of his failing business and consequent lack of status in his community, realizes his life is fairly empty, and turns to his sister for help.  He comes to France to visit her and decides he wants to stay. Veronica lives with her partner, Kitty, who is immediately resentful (and almost fearful) of Anthony’s intrusion in their lives. Kitty’s resentment is selfish but not entirely unjustified.  Since childhood, Veronica has made it her life’s work to take care of Anthony, to make up for the neglect of their mother.  Anthony decides to look for a home in France – he has extremely high tastes, unclear finances, and is not terribly practical, so Veronica and Kitty help him in his search.

Veronica and Anthony’s relationship, and its impact on Veronica’s relationship with Kitty, is troubling but not uncommon. However, it’s clear from the beginning that Audrun and Aramon have a much darker history.  They hate each other but seem unable to leave each other.  Audrun is devoted to the land and content to live under the dominion of a clearly abusive brother.  We find out, for example, that Aramon told Audrun when she was a very young girl that not only was she adopted, but that her mother was a whore and her father a Nazi.  You know from that point that there is something very troubled in a brother who would hurt his sister like that.  Aramon also keeps a pack of hunting dogs penned up that he periodically forgets to feed or care for; their presence throughout the book is haunting.

Aramon seems to be some combination of  mentally ill, sick, or drunk.  He decides to sell the house, which he owns, and threatens to knock down Audrun’s bungalow as well.  The French in the region are nervous about a wave of English tourists coming to buy homes in their area and driving up prices, but Aramon is only thinking about making a profit.  Audrun, on the other hand, is absolutely devoted to the land and is devastated at the thought of having to leave, or of having a stranger living over her.  Even though that stranger may well be an improvement over her brother.

The story is framed with the story of a ten year old girl, Melodie, who moves to Cevennes when her father takes a new job.  Melodie is devastated to leave Paris and does not adapt well to the new area.  Her classmates, feeling immediately that her love of Paris means she is putting them down, are cruel to her.  Melodie has a traumatic experience in the beginning of the book that is only explained at the end.  But she is also a vivid example of the traumas of childhood; in this case the need for home and stability.  It’s not clear why she hates Cevennes so much but it is clear that someone needs to address her needs.

The term “trespass” is first used in reference to people’s encroachment upon the land that Audrun so treasures:

In one season, the burned or washed limestone could be green again.  Then in the autumn gales, in the drenching rains falling under Mount Aigoual, berries and seeds fell onto the lichen and took root.  Box and bracken began to grow there, and in time wild pear, hawthorn, pine and beech.  And so it went on: from naked stone to forest, in a single generation.  On and on.

Except there could be trespass.

“People can come and steal from you, Audrun,” whispered her mother, Bernadette, long ago. “Strangers can come.  And others who might not be strangers.  Anything that has existence can be stolen or destroyed.  So you must be vigilant.”

She’d tried never to cease this vigil.

Trespass is not subtle but wonderfully layered.  The story is simple, haunting, and powerful, and while you’re reading it that’s what you’re thinking about.  Then you put it down and start thinking about the title and all the different meanings Tremain brings to a simple word.  Trespass refers, at different times, to the encroachment of foreigners (the English in France); the encroachment of family upon relationships; the childhood betrayals of parents and siblings; and our need to create a space around us that makes us feel safe, and what happens when those spaces are threatened.

Tremain’s prose is beautiful, and while the story starts out slow, it builds until you can’t stop reading.  For a little while I had no idea how all these characters related to each other and where the story was going. Then it all comes together.  I highly recommend this book but be warned – this is not a light read.