Spanish Lit Month: The Island of Eternal Love by Daina Chaviano

Publisher: Riverhead
Translator: Andrea G. Labinger
Date: 2006 (English trans. 2008)
Format: hardback
Source: purchased used
Read: for Spanish Lit Month
Pages: 315
Reading time: three days

Country: Cuba. Chaviano is noted as being among the three top female authors of Spanish-language speculative fiction. Though she has written many novels and collections of short stories, The Island of Eternal Love is currently the only book of hers to be published in English. Chaviano moved from Cuba to the U.S. in 1991.

From GoodReads: Cecilia is alone in a city that haunts her. Life in Miami evokes memories of Cuba: a scent in the breeze like the sea at the Malecon; the beat of a clave recalls island evenings when couples danced to forgotten rhythms. Far from her family, her history, and her home, Cecilia seeks refuge in a bar in Little Havana, where a mysterious old woman's fascinating tale keeps her returning night after night. It is a story of three families from opposite corners of the world - from Africa, Spain, and China - that spans more than a century. Within it, a Chinese widow seeks protection for her daughter in her family's idols; an African slave brings the rhythms of her birth to an enchanted island; and a curse dances before the female descendants of a charmed Spanish matriarch, forming the mythic origins of one family's indestructible bond. The connection strengthens with each generation into a legendary, unbreakable love. Under the story's heady sway, Cecilia begins to discover the source of the elusive shadows that plague her and, along with it, a link to the past she cannot shake. 

My review: The Island of Eternal Love is a great combination of historical fiction and the fantastic. I loved learning more about Cuba's history - and the different immigrant nationalities and cultures that have shaped it - as Cecilia hears stories from Havana's past. I occasionally got names and generations confused, but each family's tales were engaging and alternately happy and heartbreaking. I loved how history and myth interweave through the characters' personal stories, finally connecting with Cecilia in the near-present day.

I had problems connecting with Cecilia herself, though. Her part of the story is interesting for expressing some of the personal issues faced by Cuban immigrants, but emotionally, I thought her character fell a bit flat. I didn't feel as intrigued by her story as I did by those of the Cubans from the past. I wish the author had gone more in-depth into what Cecilia had experienced before leaving Cuba, but Cecilia usually seemed to be trying to repress most of her memories. It's one of the few things I disliked about this otherwise fascinating and informative read.

In My Mailbox #32 and a Giveaway

Another two-week edition.

For review:
Gone to the Forest by Katie Kitamura (publisher)
Duplicate copy = giveaway time!

Won:
Sonoma Rose by Jennifer Chiaverini

From LibraryThing:
One of the members was trying to offload books from this historical series, so I thought I'd give it a try.
The Chevalier (Morland Dynasty #7) by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
The Flood-Tide (Morland Dynasty #9) by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
The Tangled Thread (Morland Dynasty #10) by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Purchased:
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
For a LibraryThing group read.

I ended up with an extra ARC of Gone to the Forest by Katie Kitamura, so that means a giveaway! I was going to wait until I post my review around August 7, but I'm leaving for college on the 13th and need to have it mailed out before then...

Synopsis from GoodReads: Set on a struggling farm in a fiercely beautiful colonial country teetering on the brink of civil war, this second novel by one of literature’s rising young stars weaves a brilliant tale of family drama and political turmoil. Since his mother’s death ten years earlier, Tom and his father have fashioned a strained peace on their family farm. Everything is frozen under the old man’s vicious, relentless control—even, Tom soon discovers, his own future. When a young woman named Carine enters their lives, the complex triangle of intrigue and affections escalates the tension between the two men to the breaking point. After a catastrophic volcanic eruption ignites the nation’s smoldering discontent into open revolution, Tom, his father, and Carine find themselves questioning their loyalties to one another and their determination to salvage their way of life.     With the author’s trademark spare, spellbinding prose, Gone to the Forest delivers a powerful tale of unfathomable loss and ultimate redemption.


Details: Open to US addresses only (sorry, but my shipping budget is extremely limited). Ends 8/5/12.


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My Favorite Author Wrote WHAT?

Have you ever had this happen to you? You pigeon-hole authors into genres - you know we all do this - and then, at some point, you're surfing through a list of their works or a list of books in other genres and realize that they wrote something pretty unexpected. Here are some examples:

My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl (1979)
Thank you to Cracked.com for pointing out this one. Personally, I think this would be a hilarious read, but it's definitely an adult book and not appropriate for the children reading the likes of Dahl's more famous books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, etc.

The Coming of the Fairies by Arthur Conan Doyle (1921)
We all know that Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes books. A lot of us may also remember that he wrote the Professor Challenger series as well as historical novels. Heck, some of us may even know that he was really into spiritualism and some of his works - like Professor Challenger #3, The Land of Mist - deal with his beliefs. But writing a nonfiction endorsement of the Cottingley fairy photographs, later proved to be a hoax, seems to be stretching it a bit too much.

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (1909)
From the author of the classics A Passage to India, A Room with a View, and Howards End comes a dystopian novella. It's really good, too. Another unexpected novel from Forster is Maurice, which, being about a homosexual man, wasn't published until 1971.

Safekeeping by Karen Hesse (Sep. 2012)
Karen Hesse, author of fantastic historical novels in verse, is about to have her dystopian sci-fi novel published. Usually I think my dictum "every famous author wrote a speculative fiction book" applies just to Victorian novelists, but here we have it recurring in the modern world.

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (1935)
(Cough cough, my favorite book.) Lewis is well-known for his satirical novels like Main Street and Babbitt that attack middle-class American social life, but this particular book is a terrifying vision of what could have happened to the country during the Great Depression. It is, by far, the most realistic and hard-hitting of the dystopias I've read.

Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov (1947)
From the author of Lolita and Pale Fire comes a dystopian novel.

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck (1976)
The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men...and an Arthurian retelling.

Love Among the Ruins by Evelyn Waugh (1953)
Like Brideshead Revisited and Waugh's other novels, this book is satirical. Unlike his other novels, this is a dystopia.








I apologize that this is so dystopia-heavy, but it's the genre I've researched the most. It's really amazing how many Victorian authors wrote at least one speculative fiction story or novel - Jack London, Anthony Trollope, Upton Sinclair, H. Rider Haggard (I know he wrote fantasy - duh - but he also had a couple more sf-oriented works), W.E.B. Du Bois, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (of "It was a dark and stormy night..." fame). And then there's other authors like Cyrano de Bergerac...but I'll stop there.

Do you have any examples?

Classic Sci-Fi: The Clock of the Centuries by Albert Robida

Publisher: Black Coat Press
Translator: Brian Stableford
Date: 1902 (2008)
Format: paperback
Source: gift
Read: as part of the pre-college TBR cleanout
Pages: 230
Reading time: four days

From GoodReads: The Clock of the Centuries, originally published in 1902, is notable as the first full-length literary account of time in reverse. In it, time starts running backwards, the dead come back to life, and society is thrown into chaos.

My review: The most exciting part of The Clock of the Centuries is the prologue, where the earth is undergoing apocalyptic cataclysms and society is on the brink of extinction. With the entire world rearranged, the few survivors eventually realize that time is now running backwards - history is literally repeating itself, this time in reverse.

Maybe because Robida is a science fiction author, I took The Clock of the Centuries too seriously. The concept of the book, though intriguing, came off more as confusing and uninteresting. There were too many plot holes with how this concept would work - the biological clock is running backwards, but there's inconsistencies in society acting in reverse. Some people are returning before their times, so obviously not everything can happen again (only in reverse) the way it did before. I'll concede to Robida that technology regresses because of people's mindsets from previous eras because, well, society being better for returning to the past is kind of his point. Yet it was never clear to me whether or not people actually had choice in repeating their pasts; the author seemed to pick-and-choose some of the events that returned. Perhaps the novel's original humor would have added more spark to the story, but whatever satire there is didn't translate over very well from the French.

A note on the edition: I noticed a lot of typos and punctuation errors in my copy. This edition also includes Robida's 1890 short story "Yesterday Now," a satirical tale in which Louis XIV and his entourage appear in Paris in 1889. I caught more glimpses of humor in this story, though I think a greater familiarity with 17th-century French history would have allowed me to understand more of it. Stableford's occasional footnotes were helpful in understanding some of the subtleties of language that are more difficult to translate.

Sci-Fi/Fantasy: Shadow Show ed. by Sam Weller and Mort Castle

Subtitle: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury
Publisher: William Morrow
Date: July 10, 2012
Format: ARC
Source: LibraryThing Early Reviewers
Read: for review (disclaimer: I received my copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)
Pages: 445
Reading time: three weeks

From GoodReads: You might see rockets to Mars. Or bizarre circuses where otherworldly acts whirl in the center ring. Perhaps you travel to a dystopian future, where books are set ablaze . . . or to an out-of-the-way sideshow, where animated illustrations crawl across human skin. Or maybe, suddenly, you're returned to a simpler time in small-town America, where summer perfumes the air and life is almost perfect . . . "almost."

Ray Bradbury--peerless storyteller, poet of the impossible, and one of America's most beloved authors--is a literary giant whose remarkable career has spanned seven decades. Now twenty-six of today's most diverse and celebrated authors offer new short works in honor of the master; stories of heart, intelligence, and dark wonder from a remarkable range of creative artists.


My review: It's been a while since I read a book by Ray Bradbury, which, as this anthology reminded me, is really unfortunate. The stories included here truly capture the essence of Bradbury's unique storytelling - the sense of wonder, the correlation between everyday life and the extraordinary, the transportation of the reader to other worlds. It is, ironically, also a very timely anthology, as its publication date falls only a little over a month after Bradbury's death.

As with most (or all?) anthologies, some stories stick out to you and some don't. A lot of the beginning selections did not stick with me, and I often felt like the endings didn't offer much closure. The more I read, though, the more the stories became memorable. I loved "Young Pilgrims" by Joe Meno, which for me felt as much a Nathaniel Hawthorne-inspired tale as it did Ray Bradbury. It had a similar theme taken from New England, Puritanical history. "Conjure" by Alice Hoffman was perhaps my favorite - I loved the unexpected, kick-butt heroine ending. "Earth (A Gift Shop)" by Charles Yu was probably the funniest, while "Who Knocks?" by Dave Eggers wins for both one of the shortest stories and one of the most terrifying. "Two Houses" by Kelly Link also had a fantastic ghost story embedded in it. "Reservation 2020" by Bayo Ojikutu had the most interesting futuristic scenario, and Harlan Ellison's notes about Ray Bradbury provided an excellent and moving conclusion to the collection.

Spanish Lit Month: Tales from the Town of Widows by James Canon

Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date: 2007
Format: paperback
Source: purchased
Read: as part of the pre-college TBR cleanout/for Spanish Lit Month
Pages: 337
Reading time: three days

Country: Columbia. Technically, Tales from the Town of Widows doesn't quite fit into Spanish Lit Month, as it was originally published in English. However, the author grew up and attended university in Columbia before moving to New York in the 1990s.

From GoodReads: Set against the backdrop of the ongoing Colombian war, this brilliant novel tells the story of Mariquita, a mountain village that’s forever altered the day a band of communist guerrillas forcibly recruits all but three of its men. Left to fend for themselves with an ethically challenged priest, a transvestite and a withdrawn gay man, the virtual widows slowly emerge from their supporting roles as wives and daughters to become unwitting founders of a remarkable new society: an all-female utopia that, ironically, is founded on the very socialist values the guerrillas claim to be fighting for but have betrayed. And when some of the men come home after their 16-year absence and try to reclaim their power, things get really interesting . . . . 

My review: Tales from the Town of Widows wasn't quite what I had expected, at least in terms of style and plot. In just about every other way, though, it exceeded my expectations. The story and writing are very engaging, alternating at times between humor (both dark and more lighthearted) and some pretty tough glimpses at the effects of civil war in Columbia. The novel may look from the cover and whatnot to be a fairly light read, but the underlying content - satire on the Church, war, and politics; the destruction and death brought by fighting - is dark. It's at once an entertaining read, an eye-opener on the socio-political situation in  village Columbia, and, towards the end, a fascinating feminist utopia. An all-around great book.

Historical Fiction: The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian

Publisher: Doubleday
Date: July 17, 2012
Format: ARC
Source: publisher
Read: for review (disclaimer: I received my copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)
Pages: 300
Reading time: four days

From GoodReads: When Elizabeth Endicott arrives in Syria, she has a diploma from Mount Holyoke College, a crash course in nursing, and only the most basic grasp of the Armenian language. The First World War is spreading across Europe, and she has volunteered on behalf of the Boston-based Friends of Armenia to deliver food and medical aid to refugees of the Armenian genocide. There, Elizabeth becomes friendly with Armen, a young Armenian engineer who has already lost his wife and infant daughter. When Armen leaves Aleppo to join the British Army in Egypt, he begins to write Elizabeth letters, and comes to realize that he has fallen in love with the wealthy, young American woman who is so different from the wife he lost. Flash forward to the present, where we meet Laura Petrosian, a novelist living in suburban New York. Although her grandparents’ ornate Pelham home was affectionately nicknamed the “Ottoman Annex,” Laura has never really given her Armenian heritage much thought. But when an old friend calls, claiming to have seen a newspaper photo of Laura’s grandmother promoting an exhibit at a Boston museum, Laura embarks on a journey back through her family’s history that reveals love, loss—and a wrenching secret that has been buried for generations.

My review: By nature of the subject about which it is written, The Sandcastle Girls can be a difficult read. The Armenian Genocide during the First World War - nicknamed here as The Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About - is much less known to the average person than genocides such as the Holocaust and that which occurred in Rwanda, but it equals them in gruesomeness and atrocities perpetrated on our fellow human beings. Personally, my introduction to the event came with The Road from Home (David Kherdian) in middle school, but at that time I don't think I realized the true significance and scale of the genocide.

The Sandcastle Girls takes a nuanced approach to the slaughter. As in real life, there are 'good guys' and 'villains' on every side - you have Turks committing crimes against humanity, Turks who don't agree with their nation's treatment of the Armenians, Germans who are only concerned about diplomacy, Germans who are speaking out against the genocide, Americans who are very kind-hearted and open-minded, Americans who are more pusillanimous, etc. No character is perfect; everyone has skeletons in their closets or has done things not above moral questioning.

Though the novel takes for its characters only a small cross-section of the people involved in the genocide, it covers a remarkable survey of related WWI-era events: the Armenian crossing of the desert, their 'camps' afterward in Aleppo and Der-al-Zor, fighting in the Dardanelles, the sinking of the Lusitania, and even a brief bit of the brief life of the separate Armenian republic. The story focuses primarily on a few key characters, but the larger picture is always present in the background. In this way, the author combines the emotional intensity that comes from the reader's intimacy with a few individuals and the historical knowledge that comes with a broader look at events. The result is an eye-opening and engaging look at a horrific part of modern history.