Off Topic---Novel: Prayers For Sale

Prayers for Sale, Sandra Dallas, 320 pages, St. Martin's Press, $24.95 Hardcover, $34.95 Compact Disks, 2009.

CWL bought Prayers For Sale on compact disk while driving back from New Orleans through Nashville. Reading the cover/box, my wife and I agreed that it would suit both of us for the next ten hours of the drive.

An unconventional friendship between Hennie Comfort, a natural storyteller entering the twilight of her life, and Nit Spindle, a naïve young newlywed, is forged in the isolated mining town of Middle Swan, Colorado, during the Great Depression. Both women have stories that are similar yet also diverge. The novel's time span is Civil War era through the Great Depression. Hennie Comfort's 86 years of solo and community quilting has allowed her to accumulate plenty of tales. As a Tennessee teen wife married to a teen husband immediately before the Civil War, through a migration to Colorado as something close to a catalog wife, through the late 1870s and 1880s gold rushes, Hennie Comfort endures the Rocky Mountain frontier.

During the winter of 1936, 17-year-old Nit Spindle turns up on Hennie's front porch; Nit is not unlike Hennie was when she was 17: a migrant from the South, a new bride who has lost a baby. Prayer's For Sale is a story of women's friendships. Where is the best raspberry patch? What stories in the quilting circle can be believed and what stories will never be told? And what about the town's prostitutes? Where any once married and in the quilting circle? Lost husbands, lost fortunes, lost children, lost limbs, lost loves may be the true history of this mining community. Nit learns both quilting and storytelling from Hennie and the quilting circle. The novel is about young woman finding her voice.

The author gathered enough history, dialect, regional metaphors and engaging characters to satisfy both CWL and his spouse. Some people have beach books. CWL has long automobile trip books. Another Sandra Dallas novel would do just fine.

Off Topic Novels----Cormac McCarthy's Desolate Dixie

The Orchard Keeper and Outer Darkness, Cormac McCarthy, 1965 and 1973, Vintage Books, $14.95 each

Cormac McCarthy, a novelist with about 30 years of fiction writing on his resume, has moved into the cultural limelight with his last two novels: No Country For Old Men and The Road, the former having become a heavily award nominated film and the later having been chosen by Oprah for her bookclub. His obscure first two novels are both similar and different from the last two that have made newspapers' entertainment page headline news.

The Orchard Keeper and Outer Darkness are set in Appalachian Dixie during the 1920s and 1930s. A topsoil erosion that includes the spirit and morality sweeps the farms into the rivers and the farmers into the sediment. The communities that once were organized by seasonal agriculture are losing their cohesiveness due to the displacement of men by the war and the Great Depression. The movement from a subsistence farm economy to a credit-wit--debt economy is corrosive to the land and the farmer. In the final pages of The Orchard Keeper, the author declares that the mountain farmers have fled or been banished and that they have left no ghosts that linger on the dilapidated farms. The independent farmers, hunters, and moonshiners who are emblematic of the South have been exiled and their progeny are dimwits who accidently break a cow's neck by trying to pull it with a tractor or stupidly burn oxen in order to get them to work.

Violence lingers as the communities and the soil erode; hope lingers even as the essential elements of the mountains are destroyed. But, the land will heal itself if left undisturbed. After reading these two Faulkner-esque novels, the Civil War librarian recommends Wendell Berry's The Gift of a Good Land or his collected essays.

There are no obvious or easy moral lessons in McCarhy's first two novels; they are inscrutable. The reader will look for commas and quotation marks in vain. McCarthy's words on the page appear to be epic poems: the descriptions are dazzling for several paragraphs but a degree of numbness can set in during a ten to twenty page reading. Just what the hell are these characters doing and why are they doing it? Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is a tale of a hero on a quest through the Appalachians for love, devotion and personal surrender; Charles McCarthy's first two novels are tales of the sons and daughters of heroes whose treasures of land and wisdom have been swept away and their present has very little sound or fury and signifys nothing except extinction. Yet the land will remain and heal itself.

Suggested Readings: 'The Lay of the Land in Cormac McCarthy's Appalachia', K.W. Berry in Cormac McCarthy: New Directions edited by James D. Lilley, University of New Mexico Press, pp 47-73 and Sacred Violence: Cormace McCarthy's Appalachian Works, Rick Wallick and Wade Hall, editors, University of University of Texas (El Paso) Press, 2002.

Off Topic Novel---In Cold Blood, A Non-Fiction Novel?

In Cold Blood, the 1965 bestseller about the murder of the Clutter family and the men who killed them, was labelled a 'nonfiction novel' by its author, Truman Capote. Not a documentary novel and not an historical novel but something new, he felt. It was nonfiction because the author was willing to be held responsible for the content as being factual. It was a novel because he used, like other art forms, evocative scenes, dramatic developments, slightly askew chronology, and a reliance on psychological suspense.

This brushes against Daniel Defoe's Robinson Caruso; Defoe was a fact-checking journalist and popular biography author when he took headline news and elaborated and fictionalized the facts. Interviews, with the interviewer editing himself of the final draft, is a style that worked for Oscar Lewis in The Children of Sanchez and William Faulkner in As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury. After Stephen Crane filed a report to his newspaper editor regarding the sinking of a Cuban gunrunner, he used the facts to generate his short much anthologized story The Open Boat. At times the conventions of journalism are left behind to get at the meaning of the experience.

On the other hand John Hersey's WWII novel, The Wall, is a composition of imagined diaries, journals, notebooks and documents from the inhabitants of Warsaw , and its Jewish Ghetto within the Polish city in order to evoke realism. Hersey, in chosing the August 1945 detonation of an atomic bomb, did not fictionalize the event but used techniques used in fiction writing. Hiroshima uses the voice of each sufferer and entwines it into a single point of view.

Journalism's instincts are to inform and and discuss. Capote infuses into journalism sociological and psychological methods of discovery. Capote exploits the novelistic technique of cross-cutting between the Clutter home and the road trip of the murderers. The two stories are independent until their car is parked in the Clutter driveway; the Clutters know nothing of the strangers and the strangers know nothing of the Clutters except what one other convict has told one of the strangers.
The method of discovery and investigation of the crime is both subtle, church goers stop by the crime scene, and volcanic, the community erupts in fear and suspicion.

One precursor to Capote's 1965 In Cold Blood is J.B. Martin's true crime writing set in Chicago and published in the 1950s. Martin worked in the Police Gazette journalistic environment of the 1940s and 1950s and wrote true crime stories with sociological and psychological insights to the murderers, victims and their communities.

Was Capote the first to write a nonfiction novel? Probably not. Was he the first to claim his writing was uniquely a non-fiction novel? Probably so. He was a thoughful literary marketer with the writing talent to back up his claims. In Cold Blood is a masterful work of description, characterization, suspense, psychology, sociology, pacing and plot/scene development.

CWL recommends the book on audio compact disk from Blackstone Audio and in trade paperback. Having the book read to the listener gives an intimacy to the evocative language of which Capote is a master. The print version will allow the reader to return to the brillant scenes. Also, the film Capote is quite good and provides a visual description of the Clutter farmhouse and the murder, which as an event is places near the very end of the non-fiction novel.

Truman Capote's publications:
Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948, novel)
A Tree of Night and Other Stories (1949, short stories)
Local Color (1950, articles)
The Grass Harp (1951, novel)
The Muses Are Heard (1956, articles)
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958, novel)
Selected Writings (1963, articles)
A Christmas Memory (1966, short stories)
In Cold Blood (1966, novel)
The Thanksgiving Visitor (1968, novel)
The Dogs Bark (1973, articles)
Music for Chameleons (1981, articles)

Source: The Non-Fiction Novel, Wiliiam Weigand, New Mexico Quarterly, Autumn 1967, 37:243-257 and www.nndb.com/people/841/000024769/

(Sort Of) Off Topic Novel--- Something From Down Under

Damnation Falls, Edward Wright, Orion Press, 320 pp., U.S. hardcover $24.95, Australian paperback $20.20

Damnation Falls, Sue Turnbull, reviewer, Sydney (Australia) Chronicle, December 21, 2007.

It begins with a button and a prophecy. Tramping the Tennessee backwoods with his dad, Randall Wilkes turns up an American Civil War relic. His historian father, typically withholding and impassive in the face of his young son's enthusiasm, comes over all doom-laden about the potential significance of the find. "Whatever's here," he intones with patriarchal pomposity, "one day the earth will give up."

Fast forward a few decades and the earth is giving up a whole closet full of skeletons with which Randall has to deal, as does his now aged father who has since won a Pulitzer Prize for his Civil War histories. Much is at stake chez Wilkes and the truth will out, whatever the consequences.

Edward Wright, author of Damnation Falls, already has a swag of real-life awards over the shoulder. His first three crime novels - set in 1940s Los Angeles and featuring B-movie western alumnus John Ray Horn and his native American sidekick, Joseph Mad Crow - have garnered in sequence the British Crime Writers' Association Debut Award, a Shamus Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the British association's Ellis Peters Historical Award. If you missed them, it may be time for a rewind.

Meanwhile, clearly not overawed by past success, Wright has stepped out of series with Damnation Falls, a stand-alone crime novel that dramatises American history by means of contemporary small-town relationships depicted with the kind of hothouse intensity writers from the American south seem manifestly destined to portray but with rather more restraint. Wright is a much less flamboyant and more subtle prose stylist than James Lee Burke, for instance.

Like Wright himself, the character of Randall Wilkes is a former newspaper man but one whose departure from the newsfront is precipitated by an ill-judged substitution of fiction for fact while working on a Chicago newspaper. Disgraced and out of a job, Randall returns to Nashville at his old friend Sonny's behest to embark on what he suspects is a piece of puffery, Sonny's memoirs. Given that Sonny is a former governor of Tennessee, what Randall wants to know is whether this will be a "summing-up kind of book or a curtain-raising kind of book".

Whatever Sonny's original intention, the invitation initiates both a kind of curtain raising and a kind of reckoning, with Wright setting things up carefully from the start, so that what unfolds as Wilkes sets about his task of memorialising Sonny is both shocking and inevitable. There are some nice narrative symmetries.

And an intriguing footnote: Wright was born in the same Arkansas town of Hot Springs as erstwhile American president Bill Clinton. Comparisons may be odorous (as Mrs Malaprop once said) but Sonny McMahan, the fictional former governor of Tennessee, is a man so charismatic that when he walks into a Nashville restaurant all the diners turn to watch his progress, "lifting their faces as if towards the sun". Further allusions to Clinton's Arkansas days and the Whitewater property scandal are never spelled out but lurk suggestively in the background as McMahan is revealed to be up to his clean-cut jaw in something not entirely kosher.

The action converges on the fictional small town of Pilgrim's Rest, established on the Cumberland plateau during the 19th century by a breakaway religious sect on a water source they christened Redemption Spring, just above the eponymous Damnation Falls. Wright draws attention to the religious foundations of America's political present, as well as the bitterness wrought by civil war. It's paradise well and truly lost.

Pilgrim's Rest is where Randall and McMahan began their friendship, united in the adolescent crime of pot-shotting at a neighbour's cats with their Daisy Red Ryder BB guns (some kind of American rite of passage, predictably involving firearms). And Pilgrim's Rest is the place to which they return as the victims of the past begin to emerge, forcing Randall, Sonny and the whole community finally to come to terms with the legacy of that darn button. Complex, layered but never laboured, Damnation Falls weaves between fact and fiction, the past and the present, truth and lies, without ever missing a beat. Nice work.

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/12/21/1198175290385.html

CWL---From Amazon.com it appears that the U.S. release date for the hardcover is August 5, 2008. What is for sale at Amazon.com is the Australian hardcover and tradepaper editions. The top illustration is of the U.S. harcover. The bottom illustration is of the Australian trade paperback.

The Australian hardcover retails for $35 but available from AmazonZshops for $17.
The Australian trade paper retails for $20 but is available from Amazon.com for $16.
The U.S. hardcover will retail for $24.95 and Amazon is offering it for $16.50.

Check the Amazon.com site:
http://www.amazon.com/Damnation-Falls-Edward-Wright/dp/0312380011/ref=ed_oe_h

Off Topic Novel--Not a Vampire Story, But A Story With Vampires In It

I Am Legend (Audio CD), Richard Matheson, Robertson Dean (Narrator), Blackstone Audio Inc.; Unabridged edition, $19.95, 2007.

The Civil War Librarian doesn't read vampire stories; I rank them just above musicals that feature dancing cowboys. Yes, I have read one Anne Rice novel and one Stephen King vampire novel. But, a really well written novel in the horror genre will always attract me. Peter Straub's Ghost Story is a favorite and now beside it on the bookshelf is Richard Matheson's I Am Legend.

Often taught in college English courses as an example of superlative interior monolog, I Am Legend is the story of what may be the last ordinary man on earth. A plague devastes the human population of the west coast of the United States, or maybe the planet. Written in 1954 and set in 1976, the novel tells the story of Robert Neville, a survivor who suffers the constant threat of vampires. Living outside in daylight, and bunkered into his well-adapted house during the night, Neville is beseiged by vampires, his conscience, and the precariousness of finding food and fuel.

Neville may be immune to the disease due to a slight infection he had a decade before in Central America; parts of the novel are stories of Neville's scientific experiements on his blood and the blood of vampires. Other parts deal with the pragmatics of securing his home against the night predators. Other segments involve Neville's hunting expedition's for food, a pet, and any other survivors. Using flasbacks, Matheson describes the loss of the protagonist's wife to the plague and then later her murder. Matheson visits his daughter's grave and his wife's pyre, at which the U.S. government commanded all infected bodies be burned. By the end of the book the fire is still burning. in part from Neville's contributions to it.

. . . and the ending took me by surprise. Not a surprise that is cheap or hidden, not a deus ex machina either. It is a wind up that is so tight, so well written, so logical that I almost held my breath through it . . . and I was driving my car. I am a big fan of unabridged audio books and Blackstone Audiobooks is my favorite production company. Blackstone's narrators are superb and the production is always top notch.

Off Topic Novels----Life During Wartime in Afghanistan

The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini, Riverhead Inc., 2003, hardcover $24.95, paper $14.95, audio compact disk $39.95,

A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini, Riverhead Inc., 2007, hardcover $25.95, audio compact disk $39.95

CWL recommends both books for several reasons. The real war seldom gets into the books, newspapers, TV news. Hosseini presents elements of the human suffering by civilians during wartime, whether in wartime Dixie or wartime Afghanistan. By their natures race, gender, class, religion and violence are divisive. How children, families, workers and immigrants suffer is difficult to describe and sometimes fiction presents a more nuanced and emotionally evocative story than the very best of peer-reviewed scholarship.

Also, The Kite Runner, read by the author and A Thousand Splendid Suns, read by Atoss Leoni, are accessible means for a reader/listerner to widen their knowledge base of contemporary history. The novels cover about 30 years of Afghanistan history as lived by some of its citizens. What were once headline news in the 1980s for the CWL are now personalized through family history. Much of the news today is not about Iraqis but about Americans in Iraq. It is not a stretch to understand that the cultural forces presented in these novels are also at work in Iraq.

Text From Publishers Weekly
Hosseini's stunning debut novel starts as an eloquent Afghan version of the American immigrant experience in the late 20th century, but betrayal and redemption come to the forefront when the narrator, a writer, returns to his ravaged homeland to rescue the son of his childhood friend after the boy's parents are shot during the Taliban takeover in the mid '90s. Amir, the son of a well-to-do Kabul merchant, is the first-person narrator, who marries, moves to California and becomes a successful novelist. But he remains haunted by a childhood incident in which he betrayed the trust of his best friend, a Hazara boy named Hassan, who receives a brutal beating from some local bullies. After establishing himself in America, Amir learns that the Taliban have murdered Hassan and his wife, raising questions about the fate of his son, Sohrab. Spurred on by childhood guilt, Amir makes the difficult journey to Kabul, only to learn the boy has been enslaved by a former childhood bully who has become a prominent Taliban official. The price Amir must pay to recover the boy is just one of several brilliant, startling plot twists that make this book memorable both as a political chronicle and a deeply personal tale about how childhood choices affect our adult lives. The character studies alone would make this a noteworthy debut, from the portrait of the sensitive, insecure Amir to the multilayered development of his father, Baba, whose sacrifices and scandalous behavior are fully revealed only when Amir returns to Afghanistan and learns the true nature of his relationship to Hassan. Add an incisive, perceptive examination of recent Afghan history and its ramifications in both America and the Middle East, and the result is a complete work of literature that succeeds in exploring the culture of a previously obscure nation that has become a pivot point in the global politics of the new millennium.

Text From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Afghan-American novelist Hosseini follows up his bestselling The Kite Runner with another searing epic of Afghanistan in turmoil. The story covers three decades of anti-Soviet jihad, civil war and Taliban tyranny through the lives of two women. Mariam is the scorned illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman, forced at age 15 into marrying the 40-year-old Rasheed, who grows increasingly brutal as she fails to produce a child. Eighteen later, Rasheed takes another wife, 14-year-old Laila, a smart and spirited girl whose only other options, after her parents are killed by rocket fire, are prostitution or starvation. Against a backdrop of unending war, Mariam and Laila become allies in an asymmetrical battle with Rasheed, whose violent misogyny—"There was no cursing, no screaming, no pleading, no surprised yelps, only the systematic business of beating and being beaten"—is endorsed by custom and law. Hosseini gives a forceful but nuanced portrait of a patriarchal despotism where women are agonizingly dependent on fathers, husbands and especially sons, the bearing of male children being their sole path to social status. His tale is a powerful, harrowing depiction of Afghanistan, but also a lyrical evocation of the lives and enduring hopes of its resilient characters.

Off Topic Novel: In The Woods

In the Woods, Tana French, Viking Press, 429 pages,$24.95

Part police procedural, part psychological thriller and part fictional biography, In the Woods is a stunning demonstration of style and nuance by Tana French. Set in Dublin, Ireland the novel focuses on two crimes, nearly three decades apart. The murders occur at the same location, a wooded area that is a playground refuge and also an early Celt archaeological site.

The victims are four children one of which survives. The survivor, as an adult investigates the second, contemporary murder. Rob Ryan, the survivor, lost all memories of his childhood that occurred before the first attack. As his childhood is hidden from him, he has hidden his conflicted past from the police administrators for whom he works. An encroaching highway interchange in the semi-rural community of Knocknaree upsets the delicate balance of community and forest, ancient and contemporary pasts.

The second murder tears apart a family that well hides its dysfunctions. The death of 12 year old Katie Devlin, calls forth memories a 20 year old rape, the manipulations a psychopath and the mischief of local government corruption. Detective Ryan, the child survivor and now adult detective, and Cassie Maddox, psychology grad school drop out and undercover detective, develop both a partnership and friendship that is unique. It is the depth of these characters and those around that that is the chief strength of In The Woods. Murders and memories, psychological pressure and corrupt politics, rise above a story which could have tumbled into a tabloid-like bestseller. The real strengths of the novel is the smart craft and on-the-money metaphors Tana French uses in her memorable first novel of adults dealing with their pasts that contain violence, anger, and resolute wills to survive.

Off Topic Novel: The Book Thief

The Book Thief, Markus Zusak, Knopf Press, 2006, 560 pp., hardcover $16.95

With a title like "Book Thief" any librarian would be entrigued. When I finished, I realized that I had just read Book Sense Journal's 'Book of the Year' in children's literature. Yes, this book is recommended for ages 9 and up and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The Book Thief is not for every nine year old, that's for sure but it will keep the attention of sophisticated teens and most adult readers.

Death, not to be confused with Satan, narrates the World War II-era story. Death notices Liesel Meminger at her brother's funeral. It is the theft of The Gravedigger's Handbook which brings her to the attention of this very busy spirit. Leisel's father and mother, communists, are arrested and the child goes to live with a foster family (the Hubermanns) in a working-class neighborhood of tough kids, acid-tongued, spitting mothers, and loving fathers who earn their living by the work of their hands. Liesel collects more stolen books as well as a peculiar set of friends: the boy Rudy, the Jewish refugee Max, the mayor's reclusive wife who has a whole library from which she allows Liesel to steal.

Death recounts it's exploration of humanity with Liesel dispassionately. Death is not a sentimental storyteller, but it does attend to an array of satisfying details, giving Liesel's story the nuances of chance, folly, and fulfilled expectation. Death, the narrator, is sardonic, wry, darkly humorous, compassionate and doesn't carry a scythe. "I traveled the globe . . . handing souls to the conveyor belt of eternity . . ." "I warned myself that I should keep a good distance from the burial of Liesel Meminger's brother. I did not heed my advice," Death writes.

Stolen books form the spine of the story. Though Liesel's foster father realizes the subject matter isn't ideal, he uses "The Grave Digger's Handbook" to teach her to read. Reading opens new worlds to her. She rescues a book from a pile being burned by the Nazis, then begins stealing more books from the mayor's wife. After a Jewish fist-fighter makes his way to the safety of the Hubermanns' basement, he whitewashes the actual pages of Mein Kampf to create his own book for Liesel, which sustains her through her darkest times. Other books come in handy as diversions during bombing raids or hedges against grief. But it is the book she is writes that, ultimately, will save Liesel's life.

Portions of the text were provided by the posted reviews on Amazon.com by Francisca Goldsmith, of the Berkeley Public Library, CA and by Elizabeth Chang, of The Washington Post.