By JK, on January 25th, 2010 Probably ever since we rested our tired nomadic feet and decided to settle down to some nice farming, humans have become curators in our own personal museums. Some may be conscious cultivation of our tastes such as art or certain impenetrable classics on the bookcase, while objects are things that we need in day to day life — tools of the trade. And then there’s the sentimental stuff that we are either too lazy or too tender-hearted to dispose of: ticket stubs, event programs, photographs, and shoebox love letters. Anyone who’s tried to move recently can tell you we have far more than we think we do, and yet it’s difficult to part with. And much of that stuff is invested with almost totemic significance, especially the bittersweet flotsam and jetsam of relationships long returned to the sea.
In her clever graphic novel posing as the catalogue for a Valentine’s Day auction, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including, Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry (Macmillan, 2009), Leanne Shapton uses the accumulated detritus of a relationship to tell the story of its rise and fall. For in this catalogue of inanimate objects, a rich [...]
By JK, on December 23rd, 2009 “Isn’t language amazing? I can’t get over it. Sometimes you can just say things and it’s like a bomb that blows all your clothes off and suddenly there you are naked. I don’t know if it’s disgusting or beautiful.”
So says Mathilda Savitch, protagonist of the novel of the same name by Victor Lodato. It’s a lovely quote for lovers of words, but beyond that it encapsulates so many of the prevailing tensions in the book — innocence, violence, and vulnerability. For not only has Mathilda grown up in the age of terror, but this incomprehensible fear, this intangible evil is manifested in her personal life by the death of her cherished older sister Helene. It is a sensless death by train that left Mathilda’s whole family permanently shell-shocked, and their remaining daughter emotionally orphaned by her parents’ inability to let go of their dead daughter. And so Mathilda tries to make sense of her world, tries to achieve some control, pulling out hairs from her head to control errant thoughts, building a bomb shelter in her basement to find some protection from the emotional fallout upstairs, and launching an investigation of what really happened to her sister, even though deep [...]
By JK, on November 16th, 2009 I was given The Time Traveler’s Wife sometime in 2005, about the time it came out in paperback I think. And, like millions of other people, I loved it. I’m a sucker for forbidden love, but it was more than that — its intelligence, its admirable control of language for a first time novelist, and of course, its ability to make me sob my precious heart out. It had both literary and mass appeal. Because of this, I think it was the first book I presented at the real-life KIRBC. My friend Kara stayed up all night after the meeting until she finished it when she called her boyfriend sobbing. Now that’s a good book.
So naturally, when I found out that Niffenegger had a new book coming out, I was thrilled, and for some reason, not the least bit worried for her. Her Fearful Symmetry is a very different beast, and yet, many of the things that made The Time Traveler’s Wife so successful (sans a movie with naked Eric Bana) are at work again here. The same careful consideration of the supernatural (though this time with ghosts, rather than time travel), a swiftly moving plot (though a quibble about [...]
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