Adverbs
Daniel Handler
(7 out of 10)
Category: Fiction
Hardcover: 272 pages
First edition: April 2006
Daniel Handler as an author won’t ring a bell to most. Try Lemony Snicket and maybe 50 million readers would exclaim: A Series of Unfortunate Events! They’re one and the same.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini
(8 out of 10)
Category: Literary Fiction
Hardcover: 384 pages
First Edition: May 22, 2007
Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel, charted on the New York Times bestseller list for 103 weeks. Follow-ups and sophomore efforts of widely-successful debuts are prone to slump. For Hosseini’s case, his second novel does not disappoint.
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson
(9 out of 10)
Category: Literary Fiction
Paperback: 219 pages
First Edition: November 1981
Hailed by Time magazine as one of the 100 Best Novels and considered a modern classic, Housekeeping tells the story of two sisters, Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grew up in their family house in a small town where their grandfather died in a train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. In that house, they had their grandmother to take care of them, until she died, and then two great-aunts who know nothing about housekeeping, then their mother’s eccentric sister.
Housekeeping is voiced through Ruth, and it unfolds slowly with landscapes of the town worded vividly and assuredly like a painted canvass by the masters. She describes their town as “chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.”
Few writers can write such prose without bogging down the whole story. She weaves every sentence into a tapestry of shimmering beauty, capturing loss and sorrow into one perfectly crafted sentence. It brings to mind the movie Lost in Translation, the way both capture the loneliness and isolation; the solitude in which we all exist together yet distinctly separate and unique. How much we fear abandonment and desolation, and the coming of age when we realize how time, place, and family can influence the characters we ultimately play and turn out to be.
This book is meant to be read in bits and pieces to have time for the beauty of the words to sink in. It is definitely not fast-paced; but the kind of book that lingers long after you’ve finished reading it.
Marilynne Robinson’s sophomore novel came out more than 20 years later, Gilead, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A story about a minister, it is just as good.
The Ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories
Susanna Clarke
(7 out of ten)
Category: Fantasy
Hardcover: 256 pages
First Edition: October 16, 2006
Susanna Clarke’s fantastical debut, the Bible-thick tome, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, received lavish praise and dazzled critics and readers alike of fantasy and literary fiction. It won the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards for Best Novel; was longlisted for England’s prestigious literary prize, the Man Booker Award; was nominated for the Whitbread First Novel Award; and was named best novel by Time magazine for 2004.
The book, which took 10 long years to write, showed a historical England in the 1800s filled with magic and mayhem. What set it apart from other fantastical narratives is its blend of history and magic. It’s in the way she recreated England, painstakingly detailed with historical footnotes and stories, as if that England actually existed. Her characters were all fleshed out with their own histories, caprices and aspirations. It’s as if she were retelling a part of history forgotten and buried by the mundane world.
She revisits that England again with her follow-up, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories, a collection of short stories both published and unpublished mostly written at the time when she was writing her debut novel.
Here we see ladies doing magic (The Ladies of Grace Adieu) at the time when women were thought of as inferior to men performing magic. A strong-willed woman battling for her love (Mrs. Mabb). A disgraced and ambitious queen scheming for the demise of her rival (Antickes and Frets). Fairies with arrogant temperaments interacting with peasants, disposing favors with unforeseen consequences (Mr. Simonelli or the Fairy Widower and Tom Brightwind or How the Fairy Bridge Was Built). A duke interfering with a lady embroidering his fate, snipping, unstitching, and re-weaving it to dire results (The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse). A retelling of Rumpelstiltskin (On Lickerish Hill). The greatest magician who ever lived outwitted by his social inferior (John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner).
Susanna Clarke writes them in an old English dialect (”shew” for “show”, “blacke” for “black”, “shadie” for “shady”, etc.) giving them the authenticity of the place and time of the stories. They can be insightful, witty and humorous, and yet they never really soar to the heights and grandeur achieved by her debut novel, limited, perhaps, by the length of a short story.
One can argue that this collection does not really qualify as a follow-up since it’s been written in the same period as her first. It can thus be considered as an appendix to her masterful first novel, and on that accord it gives the England she created a fuller description by telling the stories of those who lived at the time when England was at war and wizards and fairies were in equal parts revered and feared.