Showing posts with label IFBC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IFBC. Show all posts

Monday, January 16, 2012

Walk like an Egyptian

Next on the Imaginary Friends Book Club list is Cleopatra: A Life. Technically our reviews were due yesterday but I played hooky. So you get it a day late. Also I’ll be frank—I’m not one for writing book reviews in the conventional sense. If you want a more learned approach to these books we’ve been reading, I suggest you go here or here. Otherwise, you get how I experienced the book.

Sometimes a book will just smack me in the gut. It’s as though whatever is going on in my life sort of links up with the book to create a great big hell yeah. Even if the book isn’t all that well written, if the message hits home for me, I’m tone deaf to any flaws.

The Song of the Lark did that for me. Thea’s story of talent and ambition and what it cost her to pursue her dreams illustrated how hard it is for women to even have those dreams, let alone do anything about them. I’ve never reread the book, even though I reread almost everything. I’m afraid the book’s magic was less about Willa Cather’s writing and more about where I was in my life when I read it.

The movie Gattaca did that for me also. There’s one line close to the end of the movie when Anton demands to know how Vincent, who is genetically inferior to him, has been able to beat him swimming across a bay. Vincent tells his brother that he never saves anything for the trip back. For whatever reason, that movie and especially that line absolutely hit home. I've also never rewatched the movie, and for the same reason I haven't reread Lark.

So on to Cleopatra: A Life.

I loved it, absolutely and without reservation and even though I knew the ending. Others in the group have been voicing less positive opinions and I get it and might feel the same way if we were discussing a similarly long-dead, almost mythological male ruler. But it’s Cleopatra, who was known not only for her extreme beauty but was also apparently quite well educated. I love it that she had it all—looks and brains and ambition—and she won it all, if only for a while.

I read the book almost as soon as our book club formed and I haven’t gone back and reread it so I can’t quote you bits and pieces to back up my opinion. But that’s OK, that’s all this is—my opinion. Cleopatra seems to exactly illustrate Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s oft-used quote about well-behaved women. You don’t see Cleopatra behaving properly by Roman standards.

Much like Song of the Lark, I probably won’t reread this book. And I don’t really think this is some kind of feminist manifesto. It's more of a speculative look at a woman who even now is larger than life. And to me it does beg the question of why it’s OK for men to have behaved the way Cleopatra did and not receive the kind of condemnation she did. Why do we still put up with double standards?

Thursday, September 15, 2011

I remember Dimples

I finished reading The Help on Tuesday, just in time for our IFBC deadline (other reviews are here, here and here). I would never have picked up this book to read on my own, but that’s partly why I wanted to be part of this book club. I get stuck in reading ruts and having someone else make the book choice pushes me to shift a little. But I have to say I didn’t want to read this book at all, mostly because I thought it fell in the chick literature category. I still think that it does and don’t see myself looking for other, similar books in the future.

However, it wasn’t as bad as I feared, although I still found myself frequently annoyed with the way in which the three main white female characters behaved. I mean, seriously, did none of those women have a spine? I leave it to others in the club to provide a proper literary review. My take on it is different because the book reminded me that my mother and also my stepmother had help sort of like the maids in the book.

My mother and father moved to Nashville shortly after my brother was born. My brother is only 11 months younger than I am, so much like the young, Southern women in the book, my mother was a 23 year old woman with two tiny children. I vaguely remember the house we lived in. I believe it was a white house, with a porch that had immensely tall pillars from my perspective. I’m sure they weren’t tall at all but to my eyes they were.

I think that’s when we had Dimples. She was a fat, black woman and that’s about all I remember about her. My one firm memory is actually after my parents divorced. I was probably three and certainly no older than four. Dimples came to see us in the duplex my mother found (an upstairs/downstairs duplex—we lived on the first floor and I loved the upstairs neighbor). Dimples had a real thing for Doug, she just adored him and he loved her right back. I remember her sitting in a chair, I think a kitchen chair, and my mother saying she’d come to see us. That’s all I remember about her. But it would make sense that my father would hire someone like that because he was all about appearances and he loved wearing all the accoutrements of a successful life.

He immediately remarried following the divorce, and he and my stepmother and her four children moved to Philadelphia. In a most unusual custody agreement for those times, he had Doug and me every summer for eight weeks. The year that I was in sixth grade, Mom and he swapped the custody agreement and we went to Philadelphia for the school year. By then, Priscilla was living with Barker (father) and Marian.

Priscilla was a large black woman from Memphis. She had a bedroom on the second floor in the house and shared the upstairs bath with several of us kids. She cooked, cleaned and did shopping, laundry and child sitting for Barker and Marian, and had Sundays off.

Even though it was Philadelphia, a lot of the details about the things the maids did for their employers were spot on for what Priscilla did for us. She had a set routine for when she cleaned what, when and how laundry was done and which meals got cooked on which days. She never met a vegetable she couldn’t turn into gooey mush (which is why I still to this day detest most strong leafy greens), her fried chicken was to die for, and she always served a pitcher of sweet tea and a pitcher of unsweetened tea to us at dinner. She never ate with us.

So the book acted as a catalyst for me. I would love to know more about Dimples, because that’s the vaguest of memories for me. I remember Priscilla quite well because she was around for most of my childhood. I know my brother remembers her, too, although I’m pretty sure he doesn’t remember Dimples.

Monday, March 14, 2011

The Seduction of Water

OK imaginary friends, it’s book report time.

I agree with Roger Ebert’s way of reviewing movies and think it works for books too—take the movie (book) at face value and compare it against what it’s trying to do. Don’t use an absolute scale in reviewing because that’s not fair to fluffy entertainment pieces or to the really dark, gloomy ones. So having said all that, here’s my take on Seduction.

I loved the opening of the book when Iris tells the story her mother told her. Did you ever see the movie The Princess Bride? Do you recall how you forgot that the grandfather was actually reading the story to the little boy, when you became fully immersed into the story? That’s what happened to me within a few pages of the fairy tale (and I’m not a huge fan of fantasy). In fact I had much the same jolt back to the reality of the novel when Iris returns to talking about current events as I did when in the movie, the boy interrupted his grandfather to ask if the book was a kissing book. So that was the initial hook for me and kept me from focusing on the stuff I didn’t like. Also I like mysteries.

I’m not sure what word to use but Iris’ frustration? pain? Whatever you want to call it, the way Iris felt about not knowing more about her mother or her mother’s family hooked me in as well. I have large gaps in my immediate family history due to divorce and other things. Now that entire branch of the family has died off (bio father’s side) so there are things I will just never know. And it does bother me, much as it seems to have bothered Iris.

Having said what I like, let me also list the dislikes—and I’ll be honest. I know at least a couple of these are more because I don’t understand why someone would think or feel the way Iris does.

  • The ABD thing. Holy cow, get that sucker done. This is something I don’t understand in the least, not in the book and not in real life. If you have spent that much time and money pursuing your Ph.D. then finish the damn thing. I know, I know, my puny little thesis for my M.S. does not begin to compare and I’m sure I just don’t understand the stress. Even so, if Iris were a real life friend, I’d be doing my best to get her to finish it. 
  • Fussing about the age difference between Iris and Aiden. Who. CARES. Again, I’ll own that’s probably a personal bias since I’m seven years older than Kent and neither of us seems to have ever given it a second thought.
  • Aiden’s supposed angst over having done jail time. Honestly I think that was Carol Goodman’s angst, and it rang false for me coming from Aiden.
  • Iris’ relationship with Jack. What a wretched, pathetic relationship. It’s like settling for frozen yogurt when what you want and need is full fat, full flavor, glorious ice cream.

All in all, though, I enjoyed the book. It made for a delightful retreat from reality and I’d give it a solid B.