Category: Reviews
Ma
Room is an “it book” at the moment. Everyone I know is reading it, just finished reading it, or wants to read it. It’s an easy sell – a sensational, ripped-from-the-headlines situation, great pacing, compelling characters, all wrapped up in a quick and easy-to-read package.
The basic, spoiler-free premise: Five year old Jack is our narrator, and his is the only perspective we are privy to. His “Ma” has been locked up in a small room for about seven years by the mysterious “Old Nick”. Jack has spent his entire life in “Room” and doesn’t know that there is a world on the other side of the walls, or that there is anything there is anything unique about his situation.
The book is all ostensibly all about Jack, but for me it is all about Ma.
On a superficial level, when my son is getting on my last nerve, I think about Ma and realize I don’t have it so bad. I go to work during the week. I go to yoga classes some evenings. I have date nights with my husband. I have a support network of friends, family and daycare workers I can lean on. Ma has none of these things. She has been in the same room as her son for five years. This truly makes me shudder when I think about it too hard!
On a deeper level, Ma challenges the martyr-mommy archetype. There’s an pervasive notion out there that moms should put their family’s needs ahead of their own, at all times, and anything less is failure.
Spoilers follow…
Freedom! Horrible, Horrible Freedom!
The Corrections is #43 in the 2007 edition of The 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Freedom is not on the list yet, but odds are it will be.
Freedom was only $10 on the Kobo, a steal compared to buying a hardcover and much faster than waiting for a hold at the library. But it’s really hard to blog about a book read on Kobo. I can’t flip back and find plot points and quotes. It’s been weeks since I finished and my memory is abysmal. I couldn’t remember the word “norm” tonight. And then I lost my keys. So, bear with me.
I am not nearly as impressed with Freedom as I feel I ought to be. I felt the same way about The Corrections (hardcover sitting on my bookshelf; Wee Book Inn score). Jonathan Franzen is a great writer, but I can just feel how hard he’s trying to say something smart/ironic/witty/whatever. I keep thinking, “oh, I see what you’re doing there”.
I am, however, impressed by any writer that guest stars on The Simpsons.
I wish the whole book was about Patty, a natural urban mama before it was cool to be one, and Richard, the hipster musician she loves and can’t have. Franzen uses their story to explore different meanings of “freedom” – from worry, from commitment, from love – and the whole thing is just drop dead romantic. He writes an album for her. Enough said!
But there’s a LONG interlude about her husband’s environmental crusade and affair with his young assistant. The environmental crusade becomes a bit of a soapbox for the childfree movement. I felt like I was reading Atlas Shrugged; I couldn’t tell if we were still on the story, or if I was now just reading someone’s political views (Franzen’s? He is childfree, but by default; it’s his wife who didn’t want kids). While this was all rather interesting, it was jarring and out of place. Or maybe, being a breeder and all, I don’t wanna think about how my precious babies will destroy the planet and just wanna read about loooove.
Weeks later, I’m struggling to remember everything important about this book, but the characters, particularly Patty, have stuck with me. I’m not as impressed as I ought to be, but I’m very impressed when a childfree guy like Jonathan Franzen creates such a real and complex character who happens to be a stay-at-home-mom.
“She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.”
Love in the Time of Runny Noses
Love in the Time of Cholera is #236 in the 2007 edition of 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.
L
ove in the Time of Cholera is one of those divisive books. People love it, people hate it. I love it, and it’s Valentine’s Day, so it’s on my mind. It’s also on The List. Bonus!
With Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you have to suspend your disbelief. His stories are crazy, epic, and bigger than a character or a character’s lifetime. “Love…” is about love at its most romantic, and at its most realistic, at the same time. Hopeless, unrequited love is at the centre of the story and Marquez`s writing will make your heart ache. The fact that the romantic hero spends most of his time with various prostitutes and lovers doesn`t take away from it… at least for me! I think that`s where the book loses a lot of people. Either that, or the detailed, descriptive writing style. If you can just let yourself go with it, it’s so worth it.
I read it for the first time while on holiday in Radium with Jason and some friends. It was pretty early in our relationship, so maybe I was just in the right time and place to be swept away. I wonder how it would stand up to another read? Is there room for romance among the runny noses and loads of laundry? Hmm…
“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”
Reading in Bed 