March

A book so well-written, it causes envy and jealousy within me. How could I possibly expect to write as well as this? If all published works had to be this well-written, few authors would stand a chance.

I realized while reading this that most of Geraldine Brooks's sentences were detail-in-action. (And certainly not the other way around, which mars many works of good writers.) Her sentences are doing one of two things: they're either description, or they are action. Too much of either one would be boring, even if it's well-written and boring. Therefore most of her sentences are a combination of the two, detail-in-action.

In this, she takes a mostly-absent character from Alcott's Little Women (which, embarrassingly, I have never read, though I have it around here somewhere) and fills in his gaps. Where did March go when he enlisted? What did he do? Well, he did these things.

This book is a masterpiece (and therefore worthy of its Pulitzer) of its time, and of its rendition of the people of its time. Yet like all good works, it makes the reader understand that the people of its time are also the people of this time, and vice-versa. Here you have racism among the Northerners and the Southerners, and neither is treated like a stereotype. And so it is today. March comes home a bitter soldier who has seen and done too much, and who has brought with him a PTSD and a Blakian Experience that will never be undone. And so it is with returning soldiers today.

This is a book of all times, of all wars, of all soldiers and of all victims. Wars in Iraq, Syria, and anywhere else of any time will be similar to Brooks's Civil War rendition here.

The sudden POV shift jarred a little, and the shift back to March disoriented a little (I had to go back  to be sure that it was his turn again), but the reader will see the necessity of the shifts. Brooks could have superficially prepared the reader, perhaps by placing character names at the beginning of each chapter--a la George R. R. Martin in his Song of Ice and Fire books--but such is not her way. You'll be able to bear it and move on.

She does an interesting thing with Grace, who seems to turn up a little bit more coincidentally than maybe she should--but the reader will see the necessity for this as well. Brooks gets away with these two things that would have torpedoed lesser writers (such as myself).

This was a quick, intelligent and gripping read that sounds all too true, and will perhaps leave you a little emotional throughout, and certainly at its end. But you owe it to yourself to read it, if not for the great writing and experience, then perhaps to better understand a returning soldier you happen to know today.

The Cockroaches (Harry Hole #2) by Jo Nesbo--Book Review

Photo: Jo Nesbo, from his official website

Extremely well-written follow-up to Nesbo's The Bat, this book takes Hole's character and adds a little more depth to him.  We see more of his sister, and we see the ex-girlfriend, Kristin--mentioned in the first book--even more here, to good effect.  The girlfriend from the first novel is mentioned frequently here, too, as is his compunction for alcohol--though he may have a new drug of choice by the end of this one.  But then, if I had to spend this much time in the traffic and heat and humidity of Bangkok, Thailand, I might feel the need as well.  (I'm a wuss; I need the central air.)

Anyway, the plot of this novel is quite intricate, though the reader shouldn't be hard-pressed to figure out who done it.  The "Why?" and the "How?" may throw the reader; however, when you learn the how, you won't feel badly about not figuring it out.  Nobody would, or could, have.  Except Hole, of course, who is so good at this kind of thing that two characters openly marvel at it.

Nesbo, the Raymond Chandler of Nordic Noir, writes a book that is a classic of its kind.  The bad guy is memorable, as well, especially in a scene right out of Titus Andronicus near the end.  (This has to be on purpose, because Hole finishes it all off with an instrument from Shakespeare's early play as well.)  I always saw the guy who plays Jaime Lannister in Game of Thrones as the villain, though I'm not sure he's described that way.  Weird.  At any rate, Nesbo varies the writing a bit here from his last: some chapters show the villain straight out doing his villainy, especially at the end; more chapters start off with a minor character's POV before quickly focusing on Hole once again.  A couple of chapters don't feature Hole at all, which is also different from the first book.  (I think only one chapter was without Hole in the first book.)

I read this book in less than 24 hours.  I'm on vacation, so I can do that.  You might not, but you'll read it quickly.  It's that good.  And as openly depressing as its predecessor, so be forewarned.

Getting Back, Slowly--Peter Straub's A Dark Matter

Interesting read from the POV of a writer.  Might have liked it less if I'd read it when I first encountered Straub in the 80s, solely as a reader.  What I mean is, the ending isn't really in doubt, per se, in the sense that you're not worried about any of the characters.  You know they'll be okay.  It's a little like The Decameron, in a way, maybe like Canterbury Tales as well: basically a small bunch of specifically designed people (they're not stock characters; that's important) who all tell their angle or POV of the same instance.  Speaking of which, An Instance of the Fingerpost springs to mind, as well.  Anyway, you never see one of the major characters--except maybe briefly in an airport, and in a hotel lobby and elevator--and the whole thing may just be an excuse for Straub to go phantasmagoric on us (which he does well), but as a stream-of-consciousness step into evil, and a bit into the unknown, it holds up well.  The existential scene with the boy and the cards and colors representing the realities he thinks he's experiencing was a nice touch.  He still goes on a little too long about the mundane--where they're eating; what they're eating--which is a constant slight, and sometimes not-so-slight, critique of Straub as a writer for me, but he gets away with it.  (One gets the feeling at this time that Straub himself cares a great deal about where he's eating and what he's eating, and that he likes the good stuff.)  In short, if you like various views of the same scenes in a book, and how they're all different, yet the same, you'll like this book, and if you don't, you won't.

Graves and Gravediggers

Photo: Crypt, in West Greenwich Cemetery #2, where bodies were placed until the ground thawed.

Please click on the Flickr link above to see 75 photos (many of them creepy) I took to go look at for locals, descriptions, and just the overall feel for some scenes in The Gravediggers.  Of particular interest, and use for the story, is the crypt you'll see from a distance and close-up.

I made sure not to stand directly in front of any stone, so that I wasn't standing directly over somebody.  And any graves knocked over, or etched into, or otherwise defaced were not done so by me.  I take particular care with such things.  I am seriously offended when I see defaced or knocked-over graves.  This happened in a little cemetery on my father's street.  The descendants of the buried people had giant hedges planted in front of the cemetery, thereby hiding it from the little side street.  Sure enough, local teens entered, knocked them all down, piled them all in one or two corners, and used it as a pot den.  If I ever catch any of the ones who did that...

The work on the WIP is coming along really well.  I've decided that it's to be epistolary: third-person shifting POVs, past, present, diaries, journals, newspaper articles, etc.  I'm very excited about this work.  I've done a ton of research, with more to do, but it's coming along well in concept and in actuality.  (They don't always.  First, yes; latter, no so much.)  I look forward to working, editing, writing, researching, or reading about this project every day.  It's been a long time since I could say that about a novel.  And for those of you who read this blog consistently, you know I'm never at a loss for novel ideas.  But following one all the way through...

A shout out to Joe who helped with the pictures, and to Bry and Erika who helped with some reading and critiquing.  I'll put you all on the acknowledgements page...

No, really.  I will.

Gotta be positive.

The Terror

Photo: Cover of the novel's first edition, from its Wikipedia page

I've beat the Dan Simmons drum before, with the recently-read Drood.  That book had been very good; for a look at my review on this blog, go here.  But now, let's talk about The Terror.

This book is much longer, and much more brilliant.  At 955 very thin, paperback pages, the most brilliant thing about The Terror is that, with the resolution not in doubt--the back, and associated blurbs, tell you that the whole of Sir John Franklin's expedition died while looking for the non-existent Northwest Passage.  If you don't read the backs of books, you probably Google interesting things, and no one will read 955 pages in one sitting.  So you Google it, or go to Wikipedia, and you find out that all of the men aboard died of scurvy, starvation, frostbite, gangrene, and poisoning from the ill-prepared cans of food, and that most of the bodies were never found.  You know that Franklin's spirited wife, Lady Jane Franklin, who had more money than he did, sent expeditions herself looking for his, all of which mostly failed.  You know that there were some graves found later, and some information in cairns, and the Erebus burned and sank at a given spot, and the Terror burned and sank at a spot about 90 miles from where it should've been, and that one man was found frozen on a small boat in the ice--and that's all you know.  But the fact that all the men perish is known from the outset.

So, the brilliance of The Terror is that all 955 pages are still compulsively read.  It's a rare thing that you're reading a page-turner even though you know how it all ends.  But such is the case.  Part of its greatness is that it works a metaphor that combines the fact that life itself is a non-winning struggle ("No one here gets out alive," Jim Morrison once intoned), and that the lives of the men is a non-winning struggle, and that the reading of the book itself is in many ways that same struggle.  We all know how all three of them end, and it's not for the best, and yet you read on like you fight on, because reading can be addictive like life itself, and what else are you gonna do?

Like all good historical fiction, it makes you want to read about the real thing.  When I do, I'll bet that I'll find that Dan Simmons exhaustively researched the real thing--his acknowledgements and souce listings are extensive, though in paragraph format and not in bibliography--and then creatively connected the dots as he went through the real thing.  A fictional connect-the-dots of the documented evidence, and of the most learned research and the most educated guesses.

The title itself refers to many things: the main ship itself, of course; the struggle of this existence (referenced many times); death, or Death, and the afterlife, if any; and, most menacingly, a real/mythical super-powerful creature that's basically Predator-on-ice--a gigantic creature with impossible strength that blends in with its surroundings so well you don't see it until it's upon you (or until you see its black, little beady eyes, like a camouflaged octopus).  Simmons is smart enough to know that you can't have a novel surviving on just this creature alone, especially when you're reconstructing actual events (and there's no mention of this creature, of course, in the actual events).

The writing is therefore smart as well.  It jumps between a dozen or so POVs, sometimes the same one in consecutive chapters.  It creates mysterious characters and things--Lady Silence (who the readers, especially the males, will find mysteriously awesome); Crozier's dreams; foreshadowings and almost-prophecies; and the creature, and a mythical/mystical/existential story and belief system that surrounds it--and allows one to live with it.  (I'm not sure I buy this last part--the last 20 pages or so of the novel--but it is effective and interesting.)  Simmons creates tension with simple bad guys, the elements, the creature, starvation, the accidental poisoning of the cans (and the Royal Navy's cheapness that allows for the instant rotting of much of the canned food), the social atmosphere of the time, the life of seamen in Her Majesty's Service, the whiteout conditions and screwy weather of the area.  And, of course, the ice.  Oh, my, the ice.  The wind.  The cold.  You'll believe you're there, in the ice, wind and cold--and if you live in Canada or New England this winter (or, from what I understand, in Oklahoma and much of the Plains for a week or so this winter), you almost were there.  But these men dealt with -100 degree (yes) weather almost every day.  Often it was -30.  Towards the end, it approached 0 and it felt like a heat wave.

Did you know that your own clothing could freeze to you if you sweat from exertion, and then it got very cold?  Or even if you sweat from exertion or fever while it was very cold?  Did you know that you can freeze to death and yet get sunburned at the same time?  Amazing.

Read this book.  It is impressive.  If you're a mystery writer, it is so good that you'll want to emulate it.

Historical (Mystery) Fiction Done Well--Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost

An Instance of the Fingerpost

Before this, the only historical fiction I'd read was Eco's The Name of the Rose--also a great book.  This one is slightly better: It made me feel like I was physically in every scene.  Really immerses you into the time.  The four different POVs are also ingenuously used.  This one made me want to write an historical novel--a task I am not yet up for.  Maybe someday...Actually, I'm trying to do a couple now.

An ingenuously written book that has much to teach writers--or would-be writers--of the genre.

1.  Totally immerse your reader into the time by describing everything to the point where the reader feels he's in every scene, as mentioned above.  This is impossibly difficult because you don't want to bog the reader down with detail, detail, detail; that'll stop the plot from moving foreward and bore your reader.  Yet, you can't sustain the suspension of disbelief for over 700 pages if you don't.  So how does one toe that line?  I don't know, but I DO know that the answer is in this book.  I'd have to read it again, with the eye of a writer this time.

2.  The time described has to be made interesting, in of itself.  Otherwise, why get immersed in it?  The era here is fascinating: England, Protestants vs. Catholics.  The Papists.  The monarchy.  The spies.  The battle between the starkly divided social classes.  It's all here.

3.  The mystery has to be riveting enough to continue reading about.  Immersion takes work for the reader, too.  The writer has to prove to the reader that it'll be worth his while.  This one is simple: What happened to the girl?  Some guys love her; some guys hate her.  The latter actually hate her because they love her, and the power she has over them.

4.  The writing itself has to be very good, and very interesting.  This one is told from 4 different POVs, each one taking up hundreds of pages, each one an interesting charcater, each one variously unreliable.  You care about each one, even the very unlikeable one.  And the Truth that shuffles them all together is exemplified by the final narrator, in the final pages--with a last, lasting mystery on the last page.

Once again I am seeing more and more that I should be learning from what I'm reading, and not just enjoying what I'm reading.  The Name of the Rose sort of gave birth to Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost, and it's difficult--and perhaps unnecessary--to tell which one is better.  They're both great.

Next post will be on Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone, and don't forget to check out my previously unpublished short story, and the prologue and Chapter One of my own mystery novel, at my website.

An Open Door: The Nazis, A Piano Player and A Lot of What-Ifs

from Wikipedia article; picture taken July 2006.  Translation: Work Will Make You Free


Okay, so this is how my mind works.  There's definitely something wrong with me.  On one of my online book/reading/writing clubs is a mention of how one of the members was doing some work on a site.  So I go to that site, and there's a mention of how there's this documentary made about this woman who turned 107 in November--this woman is the oldest Nazi concentration camp survivor.  This 2-minute video blurb tells her story--I'll find the name of the documentary so you can watch it, or I'll at least post the link to the excerpt here.  (Okay, here it is.  The documentary is called Dancing Under the Gallows.  Watch this.)  But I digress, let me finish.  So the camp this woman was in was the one the Nazis used to show the rest of the world how "well" they were treating the Jews.  Things were a tiny bit better than the ones, for instance, in Schindler's List.  For example, women were not separated from their kids here, for the cameras.  The one mandatory thing about this camp was that you had to have some sort of artistic talent so that you could make the Nazis look good on camera.  If you couldn't do that, what good were you?  And if you had no useful purpose...You get the idea.

So this woman could play the piano.  Well.  Really well.  Her son was there, too, and he could sing.  She was 39 when put into this camp.  That's older than I am now.  I try to imagine what that must've been like, for someone a little older than me to be put in a camp and to literally play for her life.  I can't do it.  Can you imagine the stress?

That last question is what led to my idea, as dreadful as it is.  Remember that I'm the same guy who's writing a story about what it must've been like to live in Eyam, England as that town voted to quarantine itself, and then watch as 75% or more of its inhabitants died off.  What if, I thought, I lived there at that time, and dying, one by one, were each member of my family that lived in the Rose Cottage (see blog entry, picture and link below if you're interested).  And, oh, you're immune to the plague, but of course you don't know it, so you think you'll die any second as well.  So, anyway, this led me to think: What if you were brought to this concentration camp because you were the son of a woman who could play the piano, or something--and you couldn't?  And, you couldn't sing, or dance, or play any instrument at all.  But you had to learn.  And you tried.  But you couldn't play anything, or sing anything, to literally save your own life.  And the guards come closer, and closer...and you know if you can't sing or play...and you can't.  This other kid can; this other girl can sing; this other girl can dance.  You see each of them saved by their talent.  And you can't.  Until suddenly you're taken away, pushed roughly against a stone wall, a gun is pointed at your ear...and you sing.  Or you don't.  I haven't "seen" the ending yet.

And there's someone else there who's in charge of teaching the singing, or the dancing, or the playing of instruments.  And you, the teacher, know that if you can't teach this kid who can't sing or dance or play a damn thing...Do you lie for him?  Is anyone there such a good judge of singing that they can't tell?  Maybe you put the kid in a chorus full of people who can sing, and make the kid just mouth the words.  To hide him.  To save him.  Would a guard take him aside and make him sing on his own?  Could you, the teacher, tell the guard that it doesn't matter that he's off-key because he's got the perfect pitch to evenly complement the others in the chorus so that, as a whole, they sound better?  Is that even a valid thing to be able to say?  If not, does it matter?  Is it believable?  I know a chorus teacher at a high school I could ask these things to.  I suspect that there's a chorus teacher somewhere in this country who has done this to a kid who just can't sing a note, but, hey, the Christmas concert is tomorrow night, you know?

Whose POV for this story?  The teacher?  The kid who can't play anything and can't learn?  A guard's?  (Someone has to be able to see the chicanery happening.)  Third person omniscient?  If it's all of them, we're talking at least novella length now, and goodbye short story, hello another novel to work on.  (Don't get me wrong.  Having too many ideas is a VERY good problem to have.  I'm not complaining.)

So, this is how my mind works.  It is a scary place to be, I don't mind telling you.  But it's interesting!

Unaccustomed Earth

A quick plug for Jhumpa Lahiri and Unaccustomed Earth, as I posted on my Goodreads.com page:

As the Pulitzer and many other accolades will tell you, a very talented writer whose work is void of immature characters doing immaturely self-destructive things--a rarity considering most of what I've read for this Masters class.  Eight interconnected stories from differing POVs, none of them with a clunky sentence.  Literature that is easy to read, not highbrow or condescending.  Highly recommended.  30 editions since the 2008 publication date also shows you something.  Very accessible.

I feel like I'll create something tonight, and not just do the business end of sending the stories out, but right now, after running around for the past few weeks, and the past few days, and the last 12 hours, non-stop, I need to re-charge the ol' batteries.  I hope to post later that I got more creating done.  If I don't, I didn't.  That's bad.

Pink Lemonade

Photo credit: Ruzova Limonada (Pink Lemonade) by Honza Groh from Vlastni Fotografie (Own Works)

Right now I am admiring the technology that allows me to type on a Mac at a Dunkin' Donuts, yet still connect to this blog and share my ideas and writing situation.  Truly--what a world is this, that we can so easily connect to others, and yet still so often don't.  Sometimes I think that the connection we forge with others over the net--most of whom we don't even know--come at the cost of those whom we see every day.  We connect, yet we drift...

Well, anyway, I mostly finished another Foster short story that I can submit to my writing group and then, after changes, send out.  The rough draft was written awhile ago, after a friend and I had returned from a very drizzly night at Fenway.  We'd gone to the Unos that's really there, that's also in the story, and we'd really run into--or, more accurately, profiled--the same two people depicted in the story.  One major difference is that we'd shared our thoughts and suppositions with our waiter, who'd also served them, and we had him in hysterics.  We had ourselves in hysterics, too, I have to admit.  My friend had dared me to share our suspicions with the waiter, and so of course I had, because I have brass buttons, for some reason, on our Unos excursions before hitting Fenway.  Our most famous incident is another story, maybe, for another blog.

Anyway, the food items--the salad, the chicken fingers--are all the same, as are the drinks: Sprite for her; pink lemonade for him.  She really did pay the bill, as in the story, and they really did look exactly as described in the story.  And, ultimately, especially after we noticed the pink lemonade towards the end of the night, just like in the story, we had the waiter in agreement with us.  He thought we were so cool and hilarious that he bought us a round of beer, each.  Very cool guy.

So we drew the same conclusions for the same reason as Foster did, and I admit now, as in the story, that people-watching is unbelievably amusing and interesting, but not altogether fair because of the conclusions you sometimes draw, often in spite of yourself.  As Foster says, profiling is not an exact science.  But you play the odds, and so by definition your suppositions will be right--most of the time.

I hope this story gets accepted and published quickly, so that I can share the link with you, and so you'll know what the heck I've been talking about here.  So I wrote the rough draft literally the next afternoon, in a few hours, but I did it in the third person because Cursing the Darkness, the novel on my website (see above) where Foster is the main character, had been in first person, and I wanted to see if a Foster story could survive well without him telling it.  In other words, is it the story that makes Foster shine, or is it his voice?  I decided that the third person with Foster was too mechanical, that the tone was lifeless, and that I needed him to tell it.  And so today I re-worked the whole thing in the first person, and I was 95% of the way done with it before I lost concentration, couldn't get it back, and so spent the next couple of hours catching up on work for my day job instead.

But not a bad night--finishing an entire short story by drastically changing the POV and voice, making the hard decision to do so (see an entry below; writing decisions are hard), and then catching up on work that really needed to be done for my job.  I could've been derailed by losing that creative focus, but I managed to salvage the night and get a lot done.  I tell you, for writers, that's rare.  Very rare.

So now I feel good.  I got a coffee for tomorrow, and an iced pumpkin latte for my better half, and soon I'll go back and hopefully finish the last 5% of the story.  If not, there's tomorrow.  But definitely tomorrow.  Then I'll have yet another story to send out--adding it to the other two.  This weekend, after I finish the rest of the work for the job, my next priority is to send out those stories.  Wish me luck!!!