The BookReport

A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

It has a simple cover, an even simpler name. The first thing I mention to those who pick up A Short History of Women is to not to be deterred by either fact -- because Kate Walbert’s new novel is anything but shallow. Rather, it’s an enthralling journey through five generations of women, connected by both blood and admirable passions. 

Having never read any of Kate Walbert’s work (Our Kind was a National Book Award finalist), I looked to the first chapter to draw me in. Just as I had hoped, the first lines describe an extraordinary yet flawed woman Dorothy, immediately defined by her starvation protest during the women’s rights movement in Britain. Certainly dramatic. In 1914, her willful but untimely death sparks a sense of activism in her successors for years to come (though she is not the first woman, chronologically, in the "History". Each chapter is a family member’s story, following the same line of kin - the Barretts, and eventually the Townshends and Deels - with delightful cameos, male and female, in between. 

Just as you have grown familiar with one woman, a new, refreshing life picks up where they left off, always exposing true-to-life patterns in the relationships of mothers and daughters. As the faces and eras shifted, I found that the characters could be raising children, working towards their degree, or marching in opposition to various wars, yet they all retain their wit and their sensitivity to the changing tides surrounding them.

Their journeys are complicated, to be sure, a tapestry of perpetual loss and sought identity, but I felt that each word was as deliberate as a poem’s. So deliberate, in fact, that each of its fifteen chapters warranted my closest attention, specifically to the way Walbert weaves the women together before the final pages. Walbert bounces between narrators and subjects so masterfully that  the 19th century feels as pertinent as the 21st. 

I do warn you that this book is not, contrary to first impressions, a history of women as a whole. What it does do is make us question the roles of women in culture and family without providing concrete answers or even solace, for now. Perhaps their struggles serve as a reason to call an older relative or simply write down your family tree... No matter what, it will without a doubt keep you enraptured with its impeccable writing and heart-wrenching dialogue from start to finish. 

-- Tile Wolfe

Censoring An Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour

To write of love, in modern Iran, is not so easy; not only are published works censored for signs of sensuousness, religious unorthodoxy, and political subversion, but the basic formulas of romantic fiction are thrown off in a country crawling with "morals police," whose job it is prevent the sort of casual mingling of the sexes that leads to the basic boy-meets-girl scenarios (to say nothing of the challenges that face Iran's underground - but very real - gay community...)

But as any artist knows, no constraint exists which cannot, by talent and craft, be turned into a source of inspiration. Shahriar Mandanipour's recent novel Censoring an Iranian Love Story (his first translated into English) playfully makes use of the censor's black marker in a tale of two lovers trying to elude the will of the theocracy. Sadly, this intelligent and skillful novel is still of the sort that can only be published in exile. But it makes us look forward to the day to come – perhaps sooner than we even now can dare to hope – when Iran's ancient and enduring literary genius will be free from all state-imposed shackles.

 

Click here to get to my list of Iranian Themed Books which I have read and loved; you'll find my short assessment of each book. I hope you'll try out Censoring, and then these stylistically diverse masterpieces! 

-- Billy Taylor

Contact BookHampton for your copy of CENSORING AN IRANIAN LOVE STORY

Jeremy is Reading: Gabriel García Marquez: A Life

 

I've just finished Gerald Martin's Gabriel García Marquez: A Life, which got such wonderful reviews in The New York Times  and elsewhere. 

I have to say that I am usually skeptical about biographies of living authors, being afraid of being told more than I want to know about someone whom I have hitherto known only through his/her work. Much biography these days, in addition, is dedicated to showing how awful some great writer (or composer or poet) really was in private life, as though this made their talent more comprehensible (isn't it surely the case that awfulness is much more widely distributed than talent?) 

Martin is an academic specializing in Latin American literature and was given unprecedented access to Garcia Marquez himself. He was able over a period of many, many years to interview many who participated in Garcia Marquez's life and has presented a portrait that, although justifiably enthusiastic about his subject's work, is neither gushingly effusive nor needlessly critical/judgmental; in short, the picture is sober, balanced and therefore immensely realistic. Although the text of the book is more than 550 pages in length, Mr. Martin informs us that this is in fact a shortened version of an immense biography which he still wants to complete one day; he decided to publish in this form, he says, so that its subject could actually have the chance to read it.

Garcia Marquez himself wrote a spell-binding memoir of his early years, entitled Living to Tell the Tale, which of course covers much the same ground as the early portions of the new biography and does so with the author's customary mastery and charm (but also with his novelistic powers of invention!); it was the stories from those years that are most embedded in One Hundred Years of Solitude--on anyone's short list of the greatest novels of the 20th century--and they will perhaps be of the greatest interest to many readers. I found myself more interested in reading of his immense and continuing journalistic activities, of his struggles to identify himself --and survive!-- as a writer, and of his interaction, more and more frequent as he got older and became more famous, with the great and powerful of the world; Castro of course, but also Bill Clinton and the Pope and the King of Spain (to name a few at Random).

When I finished the book I felt a strong compulsion to start rereading Garcia Marquez's novels and stories, which I have been doing for the past few days; I think this is exactly what a great literary biography should bring about and is a tribute to this book.

-- Jeremy Nussbaum

  

 

Jeremy is Reading: The Angel's Game

 

 Carlos Ruiz Zafon has a new book, called The Angel's Game, and this is very welcome news to the many admirers of his last book (I believe it was also his first), The Shadow of the Wind, which was something of an international sensation and was hugely popular at BookHampton as well. 

 

Aside from its merits as a work of literature and an adventure story, The Shadow of the Wind was perhaps irresistible because the main character is the son of a bookseller, and much of the action takes place in and around a bookstore; moreover the book begins with a visit to the "Cemetery of Forgotten Books" --I'm not going to explain what this is!-- which I'm pleased to see is visited, albeit more briefly, in the new book as well. Both books are set in Barcelona, but at different times: the earlier book in 1945, with memories of the Spanish Civil War still fresh, while the new one starts in 1917 and extends the over the next few years.

The hero of The Angel's Game is a writer, and perhaps its theme (one of them anyhow) is how writing so often seems to be a form of prostitution. This writer, David Martin, writes potboiler adventure sagas under a pseudonym, whereas the work he takes seriously arouses no interest at all. He is offered an opportunity to write what might be a kind of new bible, for immense sums of money from a mysterious "publisher", who might just be the devil or one of the devil's agents. Try as he may, David cannot escape this publisher and his project, which also begins to tie together with certain mysteries concerning the home the David has bought with his new-found wealth. 

This book is not only thoughtful and provocative, it is also a real page-turner, a down-home thriller that literally kept me on the edge of my seat  much of the way. I'm not convinced that Zafon actually catches all the balls he throws in the air, but his ability to keep them spinning as long as he does is simply exhilarating.

-- Jeremy Nussbaum

Jeremy is Reading: Zeitoun

I just read Dave Eggers's new book Zeitoun (McSweeney's Books), a non-fiction story of a family caught up in the disaster of Katrina in New Orleans. 

This is not the brash Eggers of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius --the book that made him famous and is very much worth reading-- but follows his more recent What is the What, a novelistically-presented true story told with what I can characterize as liberal (or at least liberally-minded) passion with a fine sense of outrage at what could happen to ordinary, decent people in our supposedly caring society. 

Zeitoun himself was born in Syria and was a practicing Muslim; in New Orleans he became a very successful building contractor and builder, who also owned a number of buildings for rental. He married a native-born American woman who had previously converted to Islam and they and their children were observant Muslims. But their practice was not the heavy-handed repressive brand of Islam described so vividly in Censoring: An Iranian Love Story and the other Iranian/Persian books that Billy Taylor describes so vividly elsewhere on our website, and this is therefore a useful corrective to the stereotype of fanatical Muslims that appears with such frequency in our media.

 When Katrina came to New Orleans, Zeitoun's wife and children had already fled (eventually to the home of a friend in Phoenix) but he remained, to look after their house and the other buildings he owned--also to help people who needed it, and who were unable to get it from the authorities. Some of those "authorities" turned out to be National Guard personnel, recently returned from Iraq or Afghanistan, whose reaction to coming across an "Arab" is all too predictable. I don't want to give away too much because the second part of the book that tells this frightening story reads like a thriller. Don't miss it.

One might also want to check out Dave Egger's new non-profit foundation for Katrina relief, The Zeitoun Foundation.

-- Jeremy Nussbaum

 

 

Iranian-Themed Books

  Here's a list of Iranian-themed books, lovingly compiled and reviewed by BookHampton's own William Taylor:   
The Shahnameh

by Abolqasem Ferdowsi (translated by Dick Davis)

The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, the most esteemed poet in all of Persian literature, occupies a central place in the Iranian national imagination; perhaps the only comparison one can make is to the role of the Homeric epics in the life of Greece. Other poets are venerated for their mystic hymns or odes to earthly pleasures, but Ferdowsi alone captured the glorious sweep of Iran's epic history.

Though grandly told, his tales of kings and wars are filled with humor, irony, and human foibles, and are colored by a lament for an independent past that was swept away when Arab invaders brought a new faith to the land in the seventh century. His work is filled with an ambivalence towards orthodox beliefs that can surprise readers today.

 

 

THE RUBA'IYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM 

(translated by Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs)

The Rubaiyat was once known to millions in the English-speaking world through the medium of Edward Fitzgerald's beautiful but paraphrastic adaptation. It's popularity declined in the twentieth century, inexplicably, but surely now is a time to take another look, perhaps in the recent faithful translation of Avery and Heath-Stubbs.

Omar Khayyam was a mathematician, an astronomer, a drinker, and a poet; this last vocation he might have rated the least worthy, though anyone who ever been beguiled by a line of his would have to disagree. We cannot be faithful readers of the Rubaiyat and claim that it will abide forever, for no poet has ever been clearer than Khayyam on the absolute brevity and impermanence of life; but surely as long as mortals have eyes to see and hearts that break, they will turn and turn again to this volume that charms and chills with its irreligious insights.

THE ROAD TO OXIANA by Robert Byron

Robert Byron was rather distant kin to the other more famous Byron, but he shared with his lordly relation a longing for exotic lands and a biting sarcasm about the journeys required to get to them. The Road to Oxiana is the story of an architecture-obsessed adventure in Central Asia that took him through Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and the length and breadth of Iran. The country at the time (1934 or thereabouts) was in the process of being fitfully modernised by Reza Khan, the despotic former Cossack who elevated himself to the first Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty. Byron slyly refers to the All-Hearing Shah as "Marjoribanks" as he secretly records his witty criticisms.

THE BLIND OWL by Sadegh Hedayat
Sadegh Hedayat may have been the greatest Iranian writer of the twentieth century – he was certainly the most experimental – but in his life he was rejected by his countrymen and almost unheard of by foreigners. His following has grown in the years since his suicide in Paris in 1951, but his haunting symbolist works remain banned in his homeland. One only has to read his novel THE BLIND OWL to see why. The story is of one man's descent into opium-fueled madness, possesed by the memory of the fleetingly glimpsed eyes of a phantasmic woman, the only soul he has ever loved. Hedayat's still-shocking prose owes a debt to Edgar Allen Poe and the French Decadents, but he fuses their inspiration with an authentically Persian sense of the tragedy of existence.

ALL THE SHAH'S MEN by Stephen Kinzer
A well-researched and highly readably account, by a long-time Middle Eastern reporter, of Iran's brief moment of liberal democracy under the nationalist, reforming premiership of Mohammed Mosadegh in the 1950s, and of the terribly misguided Western-backed coup that reinstated the Shah as Iran's autocratic leader. This sorry tale, which remains embarassingly ill-known in the two countries most responsible for it – America and Britain – continues to resound in the Iranian consciousness.

MY UNCLE NAPOLEON by Iraj Pezeshkzad
It's nice to turn from the (admittedly unavoidable) tragic side of Iranian history to one of the great comic novels in the Persian language, which appeared in the final years before the convulsive Revolution at the end of the 1970s.  This portrait of a family afflicted by the eccentric energies of its Dear Uncle will remind some readers of that great American classic The Confederacy of Dunces, others of the finest works of Wodehouse and Waugh.

THE SHAH OF SHAHS by Ryszard Kapuściński

A brief but brilliant account of the 1979 Islamic Revolution that combines Kapuściński's impressions of his travels in Iran with stories wrought from Iranian citizens, along with a scrapbook of collated historical horrors. The backbone of the book explores how the massive corruption of the monarchical regime, combined with the terrors induced by the Shah's secret police, so deformed Iran's once tolerant and sceptical society that the masses turned themselves over to clerical zealots for their salvation. In addition to history and journalistic anecdote, Kapuściński probes into the analytical question of the nature of revolution. The common cause of all revolution, he observes, is that at a certain moment the people, almost by accident, lose their fear – and at that moment tyranny becomes powerless over them.

-- William Taylor

Charline's Choice: Education of an American dreamer

 

 

 I am an unabashed Studs Terkel addict. I love ‘real life stories’, (not tv – literature!) about men and women whose decency and grit helped them pull forward into the American Dream.

George Petropoulos arrived in America at age 17, worked for the railroad, laying track or washing dishes. He opened a 24-hour diner near the railroad tracks of Kearney, Nebraska the veritable center-of-America. He changed the family name from Petropoulos (son of Peter) to Peterson. 

His son, Peter grew up to be Peter G. Peterson, CEO of Lehman Brothers in the ‘70s, Secretary of Commerce in the Nixon Administration, and before that CEO of Lehman Brothers,  and ultimately  the Founder of the mega-hedge-fund Blackstone Group;  and Mr.Petropoulos’s son Peter, born of immigrant parents right smack in the middle of the USA, became a billionaire.

He also became a wonderful writer. His motivation, so he says, is that his kids and all kids should be taught to watch  where  the money goes (and perhaps who taking it there.)

Education of an American Dreamer, Peterson’s memoir, is written in a forthright voice, the kind that hallmarks some of the greats: Stegner, Steinbeck, and Fanté (if you don’t know the writing of John Fanté that’s easily corrected: ”Full of Life” is a masterpiece.)

Mr. Peterson’s very first chapter  opens the door for an outstanding autobiography. He is at his very best when he is telling us his ‘story.’ If he gives up his day job, he’s got a great future ahead…

-- Charline Spektor

W Magazine is a fan of BookHampton!

 

 Click Here to Check out W Magazine's BookHampton Interview

W Magazine interviewed our co-owner, Charline Spektor, about what to look forward to reading this Summer...

Read the article, and get inspired!  From Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to David Sedaris to 2666, there's a Summer book for everyone... Come by the store, or email us today!