Review: The Mussel Feast

The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

From the publisher blurb:
A mother and her two teenage children sit at the dinner table. In the middle stands a large pot of cooked mussels. Why has the father not returned home? As the evening wears on, we glimpse the issues that are tearing this family apart.

'I wrote this book in August 1989, just before the Fall of the Berlin Wall. I wanted to understand how revolutions start. It seemed logical to use the figure of a tyrannical father and turn the story into a German family saga.' Birgit Vanderbeke

Peirene intentionally publishes shorter, read in one sitting, translated works - it would have been hard to take much more of this one in the sense that you really get a sense of the dictator father and how his behavior has controlled the family. It is told from the perspective of the oldest daughter, and at least in the ebook there are no chapter or paragraph breaks. It's like being in the family yourself, oppressed with no end in sight.

I know it's supposed to be a metaphor for East Berlin and the wall coming down or something like this but it's also an uncomfortably accurate depiction of how one tyrannical person can limit the lives of the people he controls (okay, I see it now, this is also what happens in oppressive regimes, got it.)

The novel starts with the mother cleaning mussels for her husband's homecoming - he expects meals to be a certain way and she complies, even though as she has said on multiple occasions, she does not herself care for mussels. Everything must be done his way.

Another point in the novel, it says "...Music, my father said, was pure excess and would never get any engine started. He said this because ever since their escape to the West my mother’s violin had lain in their bedroom wardrobe, and only occasionally." He also refuses to go to the mountains for vacation, criticizes her appearance and wardrobe, and won't let the narrator play the piano.

I loved the ending, and will look for more from this press. I was happy to read this from the books I already had for Women in Translation month; this is translated from the German.

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Jenny's Books Added May 2014

It's time for another edition of the books that followed me home!  I have to say this month is a vibrant pile of books I hope I read someday. 

These books fit pretty nicely into distinct categories.  And all of them have ties to reading communities in the state of South Carolina! 

Category #1 - The SC Book Festival
I went to the SC Book Festival this month, and prior to that had finally read Serena by Ron Rash.  I bought another book of his so I could stand in line for him to sign it (The Cove) and tracked another book down through Paperbackswap (Saints at the River).

Category #2 - International Book Club of the Upstate
I have this wonderful book club; I'm sure I've mentioned it.  In May we had our annual potluck dinner at one of the member's houses, where we swap books we no longer want and discuss potential books for the next year.  Our list had over 60, so it was a long night!  I picked up Lie Down in Darkness and We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families through the swap, and ended up finding copies of Death Comes to Pemberley, La Cucina, City of Thieves, and The Geography of Bliss because they sounded so good during our discussion.  It doesn't matter if they don't end up on the official list for next year, but I will wait to read them in case they do.  I'll find that out at our last meeting of the year, on Monday.  (We break for summer but have a book we're supposed to read during those three months.)

Oh yeah and I've owned The Geography of Bliss three times now.  I enjoyed it the first time but kept giving my copy away.  It is his chapter on Iceland that started my obsession with going there!

Category #3 -  The Open Book Series at the University of South Carolina
I so enjoyed meeting David Mitchell and hearing him speak this past spring that I am clearing my schedule for the five authors coming in the fall for this series.  I have to drive two hours to get there, but I was impressed by the attendance and avid readers showing up for this series!  I've seen a list of the authors coming in the fall although I notice it isn't updated on their website.  David Bajo and Kate Christensen will be two of them, so I decided I should find copies of their books. 

Perhaps Jeff VanderMeer's book Authority doesn't have an immediate connection to South Carolina.  But he spends several weeks every summer at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, to run the Shared Worlds writing program for teens.  That's why I've met him, and that's where I first heard him read from the first book in this Southern Reach Trilogy, pre-publication.  However I bought this book in North Carolina.  I was at Malaprop's and couldn't leave empty-handed!  He'll be doing a reading there July 9, but I think I will miss him this year since I may be in Oregon at that time. 

Reading Envy 006: Bailey's Women's Prize 2014

For a slightly different podcast episode, Jenny and Scott got together to focus on this year's Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist. Jenny read the lot and Scott adds a bunch to his to-read list.

• The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (Jenny's review)
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (Jenny's review)
• Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (Jenny's review)
• Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Jenny's review)
• The Undertaking by Audrey Magee (Jenny's review)
• A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride (Jenny's review)

Links from our discussion (all lists. gosh we love lists.):

• Bailey's Womens Prize for Fiction
• Pulitzer Prize:
• Jhumpa Lahiri wins in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies
• Donna Tartt wins in 2014 for The Goldfinch
• Man Booker Prize
• Goldsmiths Award
• Folio Prize
• The Morning News Tournament of Books

Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 006: Bailey's Prize 2014

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The Lighthouse by Alison Moore

The Lighthouse by Alison Moore
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Another one from the 2012 Booker shortlist....

Publisher summary: 

The Lighthouse begins on a North Sea ferry, on whose blustery outer deck stands Futh, a middle-aged, recently separated man heading to Germany for a restorative walking holiday.

Spending his first night in Hellhaus at a small, family-run hotel, he finds the landlady hospitable but is troubled by an encounter with an inexplicably hostile barman.

In the morning, Futh puts the episode behind him and sets out on his week-long circular walk along the Rhine. As he travels, he contemplates his childhood; a complicated friendship with the son of a lonely neighbour; his parents’ broken marriage and his own. But the story he keeps coming back to, the person and the event affecting all others, is his mother and her abandonment of him as a boy, which left him with a void to fill, a substitute to find.

He recalls his first trip to Germany with his newly single father. He is mindful of something he neglected to do there, an omission which threatens to have devastating repercussions for him this time around.

At the end of the week, Futh, sunburnt and blistered, comes to the end of his circular walk, returning to what he sees as the sanctuary of the Hellhaus hotel, unaware of the events which have been unfolding there in his absence.

The Lighthouse is a brief novel, following two characters that interact only at the beginning and end. Both live lonely, isolated, unhappy lives; both seem powerless to change anything.

I did enjoy how the book was written. It felt like at least four simultaneous stories were being told - Futh in present day, where he and his wife have separated and he is doing a walking loop in Germany; Futh as a child right as his mother has left; Futh as a young adult, newly married; Ester in the present day, helping her husband Bernard run an inn. Despite everything going on, it was never confusing, and the characters themselves seemed to be reliving the memories during the story, making this was very effective. In some ways this is a book of memory and how bad decisions impact the future, sometimes not even your own bad decisions.

Sigh... poor Futh:
"He could not stop thinking about all the ways in which he had annoyed his wife during their marriage."

There isn't much more I can say without giving away most of the plot. It could have seemed imitative but the characters were written very realistically, albeit hopelessly. I'd consider this a very strong first novel, but I wouldn't expect it to win the Booker (however I'm usually wrong). I'm teetering between three and four stars here, and I think this is worth the read - it only took me an evening to read.

City of Women by David R. Gillham

 

City of Women by David R. Gillham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Around the World: 37 of 52 (Germany)

I received an eARC of this from the publisher as part of the Penguin First Flights program. I'm happy to be done with it so I can participate in the live author chat this coming week!

At first, I wasn't certain I'd enjoy the book. I've stayed away from most wartime literature, particularly WW2, particularly anything having to do with the Holocaust. This is simply because I was inundated with this kind of lit when I was younger, and while I think it is important, sometimes authors seem to use the worst historical periods as an easy way to get an emotional response from the reader.

That wasn't the case here. People aren't all good or all bad, and I appreciated the sense of reality that the blurry lines and flawed characters brought to the novel.

City of Women is set in Berlin, where the only men around are either 'foreigners' or 'still in short-pants.' Sigrid, the main character, is living with her mother-in-law, who is a Party member, since her husband is fighting on the eastern front. The author does a good job of describing this very bleak setting, where women are making do with very little while being asked to give up their warm clothing.

Sigrid ends up falling in with a woman who is helping Jewish people escape the country, as well as other groups who are in trouble - homosexuals, deserters, etc. Even this is a presented as a very complex issue, with varying reasons for involvement and danger in every direction, including the extra layer of Jewish people who are in cahoots with the Gestapo.

There is somewhat awkward sex in this book, including a lot going on in movie theaters, but it all makes sense when one scene at the beginning comes back around in an unexpected way.

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It took a long time to get to this book. When it was nominated for the Booker, and then for the Giller prize, it still wasn't available for purchase in the USA.  (You can refresh your memory with my rant here.) Edugyan won the Giller prize for Half Blood Blues, and then was also included on the long list for the Orange Prize. I finally tracked a copy down, and I am so glad I did.

Half Blood Blues goes back and forth between 1939 in Berlin, 1940 in Paris, and 1992 in a handful of countries, circling around the world of jazz musicians from the Berlin scene and how their lives were impacted by World War II, particularly Nazi racial politics.

I don't usually gravitate towards war novels, but that is merely the background of the story. The way the author is able to combine dialects from Baltimore to the German-Africans to just the jazz culture - without it being grating - is laudable. More than anything, the characters are imperfect but incredibly likeable, and the ending was amazing.

Plus, it is about jazz in Berlin, which I simply don't know enough about. I would be completely shocked if this didn't end up on the Orange Prize shortlist, with its other accolades as well as my own positive experience.