Recent Reviews
The Giver of Stars Jojo Moyes
Thanks to my fantastic DJKKS book club, I recently read Jojo Moyes’s historical novel The Giver of Stars. This uplifting story is about the power of books to change lives. Set in Baileyville, a small Kentucky mining town, the story celebrates five women who stand up to patriarchy. Moyes has developed wonderful characters that uniquely and collectively fight against the sexism, racism and hypocrisy of their time. Despite their struggles or maybe because of their efforts, I found the novel gratifying and inspiring.
During the Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration to improve the lives of suffering Americans. The WPA provided jobs and income to the unemployed. (Something to consider during this time of COVID-19). Under the auspices of the WPA, Eleanor Roosevelt led the effort to create the Pack Horse Library Project. From 1935-1943, the government paid women to deliver books to families in rural communities.
Into this history, Jojo Moyes begins her story. The year is 1937, and the five women librarians in Baileyville are grateful to have jobs that bring knowledge and joy to impoverished families. On horseback, they traverse beautiful landscapes, but the lives they witness are bleak. They learn that poor folks don’t want charity, but they do want books. The leader of the library ladies is Margery O’Hare, a feisty and determined woman who doesn’t pay attention to social conventions or listen to men. Her lover, Sven Gustavsson, wants to marry her, but as much as she loves him, she “won’t be owned by nobody. “ Margery’s father was an alcoholic who beat her. After Margery’s father dies, the town exhales with relief. Yet, soon their small-town hypocrisy is revealed. Few folks attend his funeral. But Margery is mocked as the girl who did not cry at her father’s service.
Another wonderful character is Alice Van Cleave, an English woman who marries a local man, Bennett Van Cleve. Alice thought leaving London would give her more freedom, but Eastern Kentucky proves just as provincial. Her unctuous father-in-law, with whom they live, manages the Hoffman Mining Company, the largest employer in town. Obsessed with his reputation and indifferent to injustice, he is a loathsome person. Aligned with one of the pastors in town, the senior Van Cleve attempts to shut down the library, arguing that domestic life is where women should find contentment. But Van Cleve’s opposition also derives from his greed An educated workforce might unionize. An educated populace might resist the paltry amounts offered for their valuable land. Alice and her fellow librarians know what is at stake and courageously resist attempts to stop their work.
The book is layered with themes and sub-plots. There is a love story, a trial, friendships, betrayals, an environmental catastrophe, redemption, reconciliation and enriching references to specific books and poems. Moyes has captured the way books can change how people feel and think. The Giver of Stars is also a testament to the power of women to make lasting change.
interpreter of maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for her collection of stories titled interpreter of maladies. These beautifully written narratives focus on the joys and sorrows of immigrants from the Bengalese region of India as they navigate their new lives in Boston. They feel grateful for the opportunities they have been given to live and work in America. While adapting to American culture, they still cling to their customs from home. They long for the familiar food, smells and sounds of India. Lahiri captures the intimate feelings of both the mundane aspects of their new lives as well as the significant milestones of living in the diaspora.
All the stories are strong. Perspectives vary as we hear from people of different genders, class and abilities. The Blessed House is about a married Hindu Indian couple who move into a suburban Connecticut house and discover that the prior owners left various Catholic trinkets. The husband wants to discard the items and the wife wants to display them. The husband realizes that he agreed to an arranged marriage because he thought his life lacked love. However, as he and his new wife discuss the Catholic knickknacks, he realizes he does not understand who he married and what love entails.
The stories crescendo to my favorite and final story of the book, The Third and Final Continent. After studying in London, a nameless young man returns to India. With his consent, his brother and his wife have arranged for him to marry before he moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work at an MIT library. His wife, Mala, whom he barely knows, will soon join him. He rents a room from Mrs. Croft, a 100-year-old woman. His tender, patient response to her diminishment gives us many clues to his empathic character. This man’s gentleness and compassion grace the story. Thirty years later, he reflects on his physical and emotional journey from his Bengalese roots to his life in suburban Boston. He says with awe, “Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary, as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”
Lahiri’s gorgeous collection of stories allows readers to understand the experience of another culture and its people. With an abundance of historical, social and political context, she transports us into the hearts and minds of Indians living in America in the 1970s. Due to her writing skills and deep humanity, she interprets the maladies of those we meet with insight and compassion.
House on Endless Waters by Emuna Elon
I hope you are adjusting to your new routines as we all do our part to flatten the curve of new infections.
Emuna Elon’s exquisite novel House on Endless Waters bears witness to one man’s search for the truth about his childhood during WWII in Amsterdam. The book, translated from the Hebrew by Anthony Berris and Linda Yechiel, illustrates how instinct, unconscious and repressed memories can burst into a person’s consciousness. Beautifully written and structurally unique, Elon’s novel is a magnificent example of how a seemingly unknowable past can shape a person without their consent.
Yoel Blum is a writer and the protagonist of the narrative. When he speaks about the theme of the books he has written, he says, “The past cannot be hidden.” But ironically, this Israeli husband, father and grandfather’s past has always been hidden. When Yoel’s publisher persuades him to include Amsterdam on a book tour, he struggles whether to visit the city of his birth. He hesitates to break his deceased mother’s edict: Never visit Amsterdam. But he does.
While visiting the Amsterdam Jewish Historical Museum, he sees a grainy black and white film about the abundant cultural life of Amsterdam’s Jews before WWII. His mother, father, sister and a small boy appear in several frames, startling Yoel. He initially thinks he is the boy in his mother’s arms, but after watching the film over and over again, Yoel realizes he is not that small child.
Yoel disrupts his life and moves to the dwindling Jewish section of Amsterdam and researches at the Jewish Historical Museum. Rotating between WWII Amsterdam and present-day Amsterdam, we travel with Yoel on his emotional journey to learn the identity of the boy in the film and the true story of how his family moved to Israel. We learn of the cruelty inflicted on the Jewish population of Amsterdam during WWII. Yoel’s father was taken away and never heard from again. Yoel’s mother chose to allow Christian families to hide her children.
The most potent aspect of the novel is the way Elon writes about Yoel’s experience discovering the truth about his early years. The rain hovers, the mist descends, there is almost a dream sense to this story. Many of the scenes occur inside Yoel Blum’s mind.
Yoel tries to imagine growing up In Amsterdam, speaking Dutch and, attending the Esnoga Synagogue. In a scene at the Anne Frank Museum, Yoel merges the past and present. When Bat-Ami, his wife shows him that her cell phone could connect to the Anne Frank House Wi-Fi, he became confused: “If the Frank family hideout is connected to the net, why don’t those hiding use it to tell the world of their plight? Why are they not using the internet to call for help?”
Though Yoel’s mother’s experienced severe trauma, she told Yoel not to go to Amsterdam not because of her complicated past, but because of his. As a writer and researcher, Yoel discovers more about the suffering of his mother, her fellow Jews and his tumultuous beginnings. The novel becomes a book within a book as we learn how Yoel incorporates his present-day experiences into a fictionalized account of his family’s plight during the War. It is a grim story for his family and Amsterdam’s Jewish community; the anti-Semitic fervor spread like a plague. Only 8000 of Amsterdam’s 140,000 Jews survived WWII.
Emotional nuance permeates the novel as Elon comprehends the emotional weight he has carried from his childhood. Taken from their families and hidden, many children, like Yoel, learned to detach themselves emotionally.
The book is one man’s introspective journey to come to terms with the psychic pain and emotional cruelty that effected his family during WWII in Amsterdam. Yoel Blum comes to understand that the repercussions ripple into his present life. “Yoel discovers that there is no difference between past, present and future.” And by the end of the story, he feels more peaceful now that he knows the truth about his life. A beautiful story.
