Wednesday, January 29, 2014

A Defender of Loners and Misfits

“A mile above Oz, the Witch balanced on the wind’s forward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the land itself, flung up and sent wheeling away by the turbulent air. White and purple summer thunderheads mounded around her. Below, the Yellow Brick Road looped back on itself, like a relaxed noose. Though winter storms and the crowbars of agitators had torn up the road, still it led, relentlessly, to the Emerald City. The Witch could see the companions trudging alone, maneuvering around the buckled sections, skirting trenches, skipping when the way was clear. They seemed oblivious of their fate. But it was not up to the Witch to enlighten them.
            She used the broom as a sort of balustrade, stepping down from the sky like one of her flying monkeys. She finished up on the topmost bough of a black willow tree. Beneath, hidden by the fronds, her prey had paused to take their rest. The Witch tucked her broom under her arm. Crablike and quiet, she scuttled down a little at a time, until she was a mere twenty feet above them. Wind moved the dangling tendrils of the tree. The Witch stared and listened.”

From, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire


Maguire’s brilliant imagining of the life of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, before the story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Dorothy is told, has become itself a classic novel and phenomenal musical.

This is a book for adults. Its themes and language are for those who welcome imagination and are open to reading something completely different about a subject as familiar and prized as Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz.

There are many familiar characters in Maguire’s novel but the one who hoists the story into literary history is Elphaba. Green skinned, socially awkward, misunderstood, and mistreated, Elphaba develops a tough exterior and learns to fight for herself. She is a heroine of extraordinary gifts. She longs for tolerance. She champions the rights of animals. She defends loners and misfits, which she knows all too well about. 

This novel has been welcomed by enthusiastic fans of all ages and backgrounds since it was first published in 1995. But what we clearly have here is a book for older girls and young women in the throes of heartbreaking issues: body image, self loathing, defeating inner voices, fears of enormous power, and the urge to simply belong and be accepted without cruel and demoralizing demands from others.

Elphaba rises above these defeating emotions and lives a life, though troubled and attacked, with intrepid courage and a relentless pushing of herself to overcome.

“I don’t cause commotions,” says Elphaba, “I am one.”

This book is right at the top with all of my favorites.

Friday, January 24, 2014

Human Needs and Human Relationships

“By Sunday the wedding would be over, and for that Winn Van Meter was grateful. It was Thursday. He woke early, alone in his Connecticut house, a few late stars still burning above the treetops. His wife and two daughters were already on Waskeke, in the island house, and as he came swimming up out of sleep, he thought of them in their beds there: Biddy keeping to her side, his daughters’ hair fanned over their pillows. But first he thought of a different girl (or barely thought of her—she was a bubble bursting on the surface of a dream) who was also asleep on Waskeke. She would be in one of the brass guest beds up on the third floor, under the eaves; she was one of his daughters’ bridesmaids.”

From Seating Arrangements, by Maggie Shipstead

I admit I had a difficult time liking this novel. I list it only because I think I need to be reminded now and then of the pretenses I and perhaps all of us often wear and how the fear of being human can drive us to respond to life in such wishy-washy ways.

The main character, Winn Van Meter, is a vain, petulant, emotionally immature man with plenty of money and even more angst. At times I fume at him and at other times I feel sorry for him. His oldest daughter, pregnant and silly and self-absorbed herself, is getting married and the book revolves around the wedding preparations and festivities at their New England summer home.

Here we see how the most privileged can slosh about in emotional unhealthiness. Jealousy, pride, rejection, resentment, arrogance, loneliness and fear shadow the lives of these often shallow people and keep them off balance. But there are redeeming and revealing moments and some of the cast in this truly fractured family remind us of our worst and better selves.

Observing this weekend of both joy and confusion shows us that family, marriage, fidelity, aging, siblings, and life itself is often a messy undertaking. Think of Downton Abbey… without the servants. 


Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Who is Writing Your as Yet Uncompleted Biography?

“Something wakes you at three in the morning—a forgotten face reappears in a dream, a familiar apprehension stirs slumber, some ache agitates the soul. Or, driving on the expressway, hurrying home, a moment long ago leaks through psyche’s floorboard into consciousness, and you wonder why it came to the surface just now, in this quiet different place. You see your child, or grandchild, and recall a moment like that, and wonder where it all got lost, and how it all led to this place you are now obliged to call your life. You wonder how you became the person you think you are. How is it that you married the person you married? How is that familiar doubts, self-sabotaging behaviors, predictable outcomes still govern your choices? Who is writing your as yet uncompleted biography—you, someone else, or unnamed sinister agencies? Just how is it that you got to this place, so different from the beginning of the journey, and how do you get back to where you lost your track amid the blizzard of necessary choices?”

From What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life, by James Hollis, PhD


Spirituality & Practice reviewers, Frederick and Mary Ann Brussat, have called this “a thorough book,” and say it is filled with “insights on learning to tolerate ambiguity, feeding the soul, respecting the power of Eros, stepping into largeness, risking growth over security,” and much more.

Hollis is a Jungian Analyst, professor, and much published author. I love his writing style. His brilliance sometimes gets in the way of his very useful counsel. But he is still one of my favorite writers on how to confront our sometimes phony lives and learn to be ourselves with fierce courage, honesty, delight and meaning.


If you are struggling with any secret personal issues this book will knock you off your feet and then help lift you back up into possible healthy solutions.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

A Detective's Relentless Search for Truth, at Work and Within

“What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception. The truth is the most desirable woman in the world and we are the most jealous lovers, reflexively denying anyone else the slightest glimpse of her. We betray her routinely, spending hours and days stupor-deep in lies, and then turn back to her holding out the lover’s ultimate (claim): But I only did it because I love you so much.
          I have a pretty knack for imagery, especially the cheap, facile kind. Don’t let me fool you into seeing us as a bunch of parfit gentil knights galloping off in doublets after Lady Truth on her white palfrey. What we do is crude, crass and nasty. A girl gives her boyfriend an alibi for the evening when we suspect him of robbing a north-side Centra and stabbing the clerk. I flirt with her at first, telling her why I see why he would want to stay home when he’s got her; she is peroxided and greasy, with the flat, stunted features of generations of malnutrition, and privately I am thinking that if I were her boyfriend I would be relieved to trade her even for a hairy cellmate named Razor. Then I tell her we’ve found marked bills from the till in his classy white tracksuit bottoms, and he’s claiming that she went out that evening and gave them to him when she got back.
          I do it so convincingly, with such delicate crosshatching of discomfort and compassion at her man’s betrayal, that finally her faith in four shared years disintegrates like a sand castle and through tears and snot, while her man sits with my partner in the next interview room saying nothing except ‘Fuck off, I was home with Jackie,’ she tells me everything from the time he left the house to the details of his sexual shortcomings. Then I pat her gently on the shoulder and give her a tissue and a cup of tea, and a statement sheet.
          This is my job, and you don’t go into it—or, if you do, you don’t last—without some natural affinity for its priorities and demands. What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this—two things: I crave truth. And I lie.”

From In the Woods, by Tana French


I love this author. Her books are filled with terrific metaphors and just great writing and storytelling skill. Her characters have such interesting personalities—human, flawed, struggling in all the ways most of us do in our attempt to fit the pieces of life’s puzzle together.

Her Irish heritage, setting, language, and culture often pop up within these pages and it gives an interesting look into another country’s particularities while at the same time reminding us we’re all, wherever we live, pretty much alike.

This was her first novel and it is terrific. Dealing with the vulnerability and innocence of children, the worst news a parent can get, the strange obsessions and violence of the deranged, and an unflinching ragged detective caught in forlornness and misgivings, French weaves a story of alarm and mystery that holds the reader’s attention from page to page.


This novel led me to the ones that follow and you will want to read them as well.


Monday, January 13, 2014

The Absolute Mystery of Good and Evil

“In the late autumn of 1909, two men who would each transform the world were living in Vienna, Austria. They were in almost every way what the poet William Blake called ‘spiritual enemies.’ One was Sigmund Freud, the creator of psychoanalysis, who would become the most renowned and controversial thinker of the twentieth century. In 1909, Freud was in vigorous middle age, fifty-three years old and at the height of his powers. The other man, whose impact on humanity would be yet greater, was young.
          The young man had come to Vienna in hopes of making his fortune as an architect and an artist….People who met the man sometimes had doubts about his sanity: none of them imagined that Adolf Hitler, for that, of course, is who the young man was, would ever be of consequence in the world.”

From, The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days, by Mark Edmundson

This excellent biography reads like a novel. And a thrilling one at that. Edmundson captures the peculiar personalities of Freud and Hitler with amazing clarity and offers some ghastly yet warm surprises about both their lives. Adolph Hitler loved animals. Sigmund Freud smoked 20 cigars a day. Do we ever really get to know all there is about anyone? Both men poured their lives into their work until there wasn't anything left of either of them. The consequences, of course, were dramatically different.

Even if you are not at all interested in psychology or Freud or Hitler, that’s okay; this book is about humanity and how people often do the most extraordinary and sometimes shocking things in the pursuit of ambition and need. And it’s also about how every person is fundamentally shaped by all of their experiences, especially the experiences of childhood. Those experiences could not have been more contrasting for these two powerful and perplexing men.


This is a book I will read again.


Saturday, January 11, 2014

An Unstoppable Force in a Fragile Female Character

It happened every year. Was almost a ritual. And this was his eighty-second birthday. When, as usual, the flower was delivered, he took off the wrapping paper and then picked up the telephone to call Detective Superintendent Morell who, when he retired, had moved to Lake Siljan in Dalarna. They were not only the same age, they had been born on the same day—which was something of an irony under the circumstances. The old policeman was sitting with his coffee, waiting, expecting the call.
“It arrived.”
“What is it this year?”
“I don't know what kind it is. I'll have to get someone to tell me what it is. It's white.”
“No letter, I suppose.”
“Just the flower. The frame is the same kind as last year. One of those do-it-yourself ones.”
“Postmark?”
“Stockholm.”
“Handwriting?”
“Same as always. All in capitals. Upright, neat lettering.”
With that, the subject was exhausted, and not another word was exchanged for almost a minute. The retired policeman leaned back in his kitchen chair and drew on his pipe. He knew he was no longer expected to come up with a pithy comment or any sharp question which would shed new light on the case. Those days had long since passed, and the exchange between the two men seemed like a ritual attaching to a mystery which no one else in the whole world had the least interest in unraveling.


From The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson


Unraveling things is the genius behind Larsson's fantastic Millennial Trilogy, this book being the first in the series.

I saw the original Swedish movie with English subtitles first and I was completely captivated. I had never heard of Stieg Larsson and just happened one Saturday afternoon to wander into the Angelika theater here in Dallas and saw “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

The movies and the books became instant successes. How could they not have been? Larsson's skill as a writer was brilliance at work. The characters in this series come to life with amazing reality.

In this first book we meet a star, a heroine of such extraordinary strength, quirkiness, bad ass bravery, vulnerability and enthralling fierceness that she immediately wins our hearts. That is Lisbeth Salander, and her character carries all three novels and movies into monumental publishing and film history.

Actress Noomi Rapache played Lisbeth in the three Swedish movies and became overnight a celebrated new talent.

It has been written that Larsson based his character Lisbeth on the children's book character Pipi Longstocking imagining her now as a young woman, tormented, perhaps with Attention Deficit Disorder, failing to fit into regular society but unstoppable when confronted with a challenge.

Sounds about right to me.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and the series. And I keep it in plain sight in my book stack to remind me of how entertaining and satisfying a read these books are.

Friday, January 10, 2014

Great Divisions in a Small World

“It was one of those rare summer evenings when it did not rain, and the smoke cleared from the atmosphere, leaving the sky a deep blue color, and the air soft and fresh and balmy. It was the kind of evening when people brought their stiff-backed wooden kitchen chairs out to the front to sit and smoke, and perhaps listen to the Forshaw’s gramophone. They were the only people on our street who had one, and they left their door open so that everyone could hear. In the meantime, the sun would sink, a huge red ball, behind the square brick tower of the India Mill. After it disappeared, there would be fiery streaks in the sky, and these would fade gradually as the sky became very pale, and twilight would fall gently, and you would see the glow of pipes or cigarettes along both sides of the street.
          We had finished our tea, and my two sisters had quickly disappeared before my mother could get them to clear the table and wash up. My two brothers were about to do the same. Having gulped down the last of their tea, and still chewing on their bread and butter, they were half way out the door to join their friends in the street when my mother stopped them.”

From, The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers, by Harry Bernstein

This was Bernstein’s first book written at age 93 and published when he was 96. He went on to write three more books before his death in 2011 at the age of 101.

This is a beautiful and at times disturbing memoir of his growing up years in the fiercely divided streets of a small mill town in England where Jews lived on one side and Christians on the other. Anti-Semitism was ugly and raw. And tolerance for either group was seen as a dishonorable weakness.

Born into a home of six children with a surly indifferent alcoholic father, Harry’s valorous mother carried alone, the oppressive burdens of so many children and the endless stresses of tiptoeing around an explosive bullying husband. Their poverty was strangling; their lives dismal.


Out of this immense darkness, however, shines glorious beams of light and Bernstein inspires us with stories of humor, bravery, tenacity and tearful affections. There are many worthy life lessons scattered all over these pages. 

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

A China Rabbit on Egypt Street Learns How to Love

“Once, in a house on Egypt Street, there lived a rabbit who was made almost entirely of china. He had china arms and china legs, china paws and a china head, a china torso and a china nose. His arms and legs were jointed and joined by wire so that his china elbows and china knees could be bent, giving him much freedom of movement.
            His ears were made of real rabbit fur, and beneath the fur, there were strong, bendable wires, which allowed the ears to be arranged into poses that reflected the rabbit’s mood—jaunty, tired, full of ennui. His tail, too, was made of real rabbit fur and was fluffy and soft and well shaped.
            The rabbit’s name was Edward Tulane, and he was tall. He measured almost three feet from the tip of his ears to the tip of his feet; his eyes were painted a penetrating and intelligent blue.
            All in all, Edward Tulane felt himself to be an exceptional specimen. Only his whiskers gave him pause. They were long and elegant (as they should be), but they were of uncertain origin. Edward felt quite strongly that they were not the whiskers of a rabbit. Whom the whiskers had belonged to initially—what unsavory animal—was a question that Edward could not bear to consider for too long. And so he did not. He preferred, as a rule, not to think unpleasant thoughts.”

From The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, by Kate DiCamillo

This is the story of Abilene and her china rabbit, Edward Tulane. I read this book to Ingrid when she was little and it became one of her favorite books of all time. "New York Times" reviewer Michael Patrick Hearn said this book "belongs to an undervalued but nonetheless beloved genre concerning the private lives of playthings." Unlike many chapter books and other books for kids today, which Hearn calls "entertaining fluff," The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane has "deeper implications."

This is a terrific book for older children and is filled with adventure, the importance of respect for self and others, courage, loss, endurance, and yes, love. A very wise love.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

The Searing Wounds of Family

It was five o’clock in the afternoon Eastern Standard Time when the telephone rang in my house on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. My wife, Sallie, and I had just sat down for a drink on the porch overlooking Charleston Harbor and the Atlantic. Sallie went in to answer the telephone and I shouted, “Whoever it is, I’m not here.”
“It’s your mother,” Sallie said, returning from the phone.
“Tell her I’m dead,” I pleaded. “Please tell her I died last week and you’ve been too busy to call.”
“Please speak to her. She says it’s urgent.”
“She always says it’s urgent. It’s never urgent when she says it’s urgent.”
“I think it’s urgent this time. She’s crying.”
“When Mom cries, it’s normal. I can’t remember a day when she hasn’t been crying.”
“She's waiting, Tom.”

From The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy

This is a book I have read three times, and every time I am devastated by its themes, by the gorgeous lyrical writing, and the deep human emotions that run entirely through it.

Could there be a more troubled, dysfunctional family than Tom Wingo's? He grew up under the shaming of an angry bitter brutal father. His mother taught him to feel the heartbeat in nature, to love the water and the island he grew up on. But she turns brooding and smothering and manipulative from wounds deep within her. Tom's brother, Luke, is a hero, a free spirit, a person of integrity and grit, but incapable of following rules he considers meaningless and oppressive. Their sister, Savannah, possesses a poet's heart and skill, but she is so desperately damaged by events you will find shocking that her brilliance is wasted in some impenetrable despair. And Tom himself, smart and funny and often tender, is nevertheless a broken man, wrestling with self loathing and rejection and things that make every man less than his potential; he gives an identity to loneliness that we don't ever forget.

The range of human urges and fears and hurts and yes triumphs in this stunning calamitous novel is something to behold. This book is like a Bible to me. I often turn to it for inspiration as a writer and truth as a human being.