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Ellen Marks' Profile
Customer Reviews: 14
Reviewer Rank: 49601
Helpful Votes: 109
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Reviews Written by
Ellen Marks (Chicago, IL United States)
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11 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
Stunning, September 7, 2006
Are we ready for a literature about September 11? With its deft and powerful handling in Claire Messud's new novel, the answer seems to be yes.
The Emperor's Children focuses on a group of 30-year-old friends who have not yet managed to come fully into adulthood: Marina Thwaite, living at home again and trying to finish a book to which she is no longer committed; Danielle Minkoff, who produces documentaries but cannot get the funding to make them on the subjects about which she is passionate; and Julius Clarke, who writes reviews for the Village Voice but mostly supports himself with temp work. Even some of the sentences from these characters' perspectives seem to share their lack of direction: they wander off into parentheticals and asides and have to be brought forcibly back to the conclusion. Messud handles the awkwardness of their relationships with their parents (and each others' parents) with insight and humor, and does an effective job of conveying their frustration at still being unsettled at an age when they expected to be fully established and to have done great things.
But there is a larger social commentary in the novel. Like War and Peace, to which Messud's characters refer frequently, The Emperor's Children opens with a party at which there is talk of revolution: in this case a cultural revolution that Ludovic Seeley, an Australian editor about to move to New York, wants to bring about by deflating popular beliefs as myths. One of his primary targets is Marina's father, Murray Thwaite--his first and last name are almost always used together in the way of celebrities--a famed liberal journalist who sees no contradiction in the fact that his personal ethics do not rise to the level of his public ones. And there is also Murray's nephew, Frederick "Bootie" Tubb, who at 19 wants to be an intellectual but finds college a farce, who sees in Murray the embodiment of his ideals and who brings to the novel a dangerous mixture of idealism and rage.
Messud's characters talk, in sharp, clever dialogue, about entitlement and morality as they struggle with their personal dilemmas. But our knowledge of the approach of September 11 gives them an overarching innocence to which they are oblivious: we feel it rushing toward them, but it comes upon them as it came upon us five years ago, as a cataclysm, altering their perceptions of everything in their lives. Messud's characters may be the emperor's children, forced suddenly to look at the world stripped bare of some of their most precious illusions--but she reminds us, with this wrenching work, that so too were we. A stunning, richly metaphoric novel.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Mesmerizing, September 2, 2006
Austerlitz seems, at first, to be a quiet novel. It moves slowly through its opening sequences--a chance meeting in a railroad terminal, a visit to a fortress and a zoo--and so its narrative power takes you a bit by surprise, as if you had been sitting on a train which had been easing out of the station and find suddenly that it has accelerated and is racing through the countryside.
I can't remember reading another book in which the accretion of imagery is as careful and powerful as it is here. The images are all vivid and beautifully drawn, but also metaphorically significant as Austerlitz's story unfolds--evacuated from Prague at age 4-1/2 to save him the Nazis, raised in Wales with no recollection of his earlier life, and finding himself as an adult trying to reclaim that forgotten past. There is the story, for instance, of the homing pigeon that for three days walked home after its wing was broken. Sebald didn't write Austerlitz with the usual white space that one expects in novels (at paragraph breaks and dialogue, for instance)--but he relieves what would otherwise be a stark presentation by including a sequence of photographs. This approach, too, seems integral to the novel and not merely stylistic--for Austerlitz, the character, there are no true blank spaces.
This does not feel like a Holocaust novel--and even with foreknowledge, the fact that it is can take a reader by surprise in the much the same way that it surprises Sebald's characters. This is a beautiful, haunting novel, and I cannot remember reading anything else that feels like it. Not a straightforward read, but richly rewarding.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Read Paula instead, August 25, 2006
I read this when it first came out, and after reading Paula this summer (her earlier memoir written during her daughter's critical illness) I went back to it to see how Allende had managed to cover so much of the same territory in a way that was fresh enough to merit a second memoir. And the answer, unfortunately, was that she hadn't. My Invented Country provides some interesting information about the people and country of Chile (often in the form of sweeping generalizations that I suspect are no more uniformly true than any sort of broad characterization one could make about Americans), and does so with Allende's characteristically sharp and funny prose (I particularly enjoyed her explanation on why it is unwise to faint in a Chilean supermarket). But the parts that I recall as being the most interesting--the political history of Chile and her own decision to go into exile--are covered so much more completely, and in so much more compelling a fashion, in Paula, that reading My Invented Country after Paula feels like being told the same story repeatedly by a storyteller who has lost interest in the tale and no longer thinks the details are very important. My best recommendation is to skip this one but do read Paula: a brilliant, moving and often very funny memoir that closely examines Allende's life and the loss of her country and daughter.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A great gorilla!, August 21, 2006
When my son was born, two of our friends independently decided that the best way to buy him a baby gift was to take their young daughters to a book store and let them choose books they thought he would like. This was the only one they both selected. Our son is still in the "I licked the corner and it was good" stage of book appreciation, but I've enjoyed reading it to him. The pictures are colorful and interesting, with lots to point out to a small child. And the storyline is surprisingly gentle, with the gorilla leading a parade of zoo animals to the zookeeper's home where they all curl up around his bedroom for sleep. It's easy to see how this one made it onto the favorites list.
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40 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
Wonderful practical guidebook for new parents, August 18, 2006
There are people who already have a great depth of infant care experience when they have their first child--have changed so many diapers they can do it with their teeth, can get a onesie over a newborn's head without waking her, can swaddle a baby into immobility with a flick of the wrist. We are not those people. We needed help, and we found a lot of it here.
My husband and I both read this book cover to cover before we brought our son home from the hospital, and referred to it often afterward. It has terrific practical advice for the new parent, with informative illustrations--such as demonstrating how to get those cute new outfits on your infant when they have clearly been designed by someone who has never actually dressed a baby-- and is written in a casual, clear style that makes it easily readable and memorable. We went back to it often: "What colors of poop did it say were okay?" "What did it say about the difference between projectile spit up and vomiting?" (Asked as something ran down a wall two feet away.) "Is it possible the baby really wants to eat every 45 minutes?" We suspect its discussion of growth spurts saved our sanity, if not our lives.
This book focuses on the nitty-gritty of the new obsessions you'll have with the bodily functions and sleep habits of your new arrival, and how to balance them with your own. It is a cheerful, engaging, sympathetic and nonjudgmental guidebook, and we appreciated it tremendously in our early weeks home. Highly recommended.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
A great set of toys, August 2, 2006
We received these as a gift, and have only just realized that they are by the same company that makes all of our son's favorite toys. He's been playing with them from about 1-2 months. He loves these boxes, especially the red one with the mirror on the end. They have interesting things for him to grab onto and look at, varied textures, and make different sounds that he likes. He'll get his hand into the rings, clutch the boxes to his chest and chew on their corners, but he'll also spend minutes just staring at the red one and cooing happily. We thought he was looking at himself in the mirror when he did that, and sometimes he is--but as often as not he's just admiring the patterning on the side. Great toys for a small infant.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
One of the best books I have ever read, July 31, 2006
I have a close friend who teaches literature in a university out East, and for many years she and I would talk to each other excitedly whenever we found a book we especially loved. We haven't found time to do that much recently, but as soon as I finished The Known World I called her to say, "Have you read this yet?" "Read it?" she said. "I've already taught it." And then we spent a half hour gushing over what made this such a stunning reading experience.
Jones employs an unusual twist for a slave narrative: he sets the novel on a black-owned plantation. And with that one decision, he eradicates every stereotype and cliche about race that we have come to expect in a novel of this type, and lays bare the institution of slavery itself. Every character in this novel--black or white, slave or free--is tainted by slavery; every relationship is warped by it; and Jones lays bare the delusions and justifications that damage even those who convince themselves they have taken a moral stance in opposition to it but have remained within the bounds of the community. Characters claim to love each other when the status of ownership makes true love impossible; and they fail to realize they love each other for the same reason. Some of them break your heart; others make you want to howl with rage.
This novel has been criticized for having too many characters, but I did not find that to be the case: it is a portrait of an entire community, and it has a corresponding scope uncommon for novels these days. Jones also has been criticized for jumping through time, telling us in the midst of the narrative what happens to his characters 20 or 40 or 60 years later. This is not sloppy writing: it is clearly a deliberate choice to show the ways that slavery continues to resonate through these characters' lives long after it and the events he narrates have come to an end. The prose is lovely, the characters are compelling, and I have rarely read a book that feels so completely whole at the end. This is a novel of such finely nuanced moral complexity that it took my breath away; for days after I finished it I would find myself thinking about it. I can't recommend it highly enough.
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Animal Dreams
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by Barbara Kingsolver
Edition: Paperback |
| Price: $11.20 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Worth rereading, July 11, 2006
I first read Animal Dreams ten or twelve years ago, and at the time put it on my "read again someday" list. I just went back to it, and found that decision to be wholly right--this is a lovely novel that bears rereading. I find that I want to quote specific sentences here to explain why Animal Dreams is so good, but there are so many that are either brilliantly insightful or wonderfully funny that I don't know how to choose. But here's one from the first page, as a father watches his daughters sleep: "Dr. Homer Noline holds his breath, trying to see movement there in the darkness, the way he's watched pregnant women close their eyes and listen inside themselves trying to feel life." Kingsolver has a keen eye for detail and uses figurative language the way it should be used: not only to create an image but also to create a deeper resonance.
Animal Dreams is a novel about so many things: the gulf of miscommunication between parents and children; love; grief; war; the environment; personal responsibility; finding one's way home. Codi Noline, the primary narrator, navigates these subjects with a startling honesty, humor and wisdom. She's also someone you'd want to have coffee with a few times a week for the rest of your life--as are many of the characters who populate Kingsolver's Grace, Arizona. A moving, powerful novel.
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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
A virtuoso portrait of a family, June 29, 2006
Have you ever found yourself seated in a public place--a restaurant or a train, for instance--too close to a family that is in the middle of a bitter and petulant argument that they have clearly been having for days (if not years)? That's what reading The Corrections feels like. Jonathan Franzen provides an uncomfortably intimate experience of the Lambert family, in all their warty, embarrassing humanity. In many ways it is unpleasant reading--and at the same time it is perhaps the most brilliant rendering of an American family I have ever read. We don't necessarily like the Lamberts, but we know them, we recognize them, and they are among the most fully realized characters in modern fiction. I couldn't put this down (though there were times I wanted to), and I found it surprisingly uplifting and resonant at the end. I would rarely recommend a book this highly when I did not particularly enjoy reading it--but The Corrections is essential reading.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Ouch!, June 28, 2006
Now that we've used duct tape to secure a half-inch of foam pipe insulation around the hard wooden arms whose knobs protude in dangerous proximity to the baby's head while he's nursing, this is a perfectly serviceable, though unattractive and rather narrow, glider.
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(Chicago, IL United States)
