#84 - Half Broke Horses

Aah, Thanksgiving weekend. Plenty o' reading happening @ Cafe Hazelthyme this week, but precious little blogging -- you can guess the story, but in brief, I was too busy hosting the in-laws and wrangling a big ornery ole turkey. Hence, the next few updates will come like gangbusters, but be fairly brief.

Half Broke Horses, by Jeannette Walls (New York: Scribner, 2009)

Jacket Summary: "'Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did.' So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, Jeannette Walls's no-nonsense, resourceful, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town -- riding five hundred miles on her pony, alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car ('I loved car even more than I loved horses. They didn't need to be fed if they weren't working, and they didn't leave big piles of manure all over the place') and fly a plane. And, with her husband, Jim, she ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one of whom is Jeannette's memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in The Glass Castle.

"Lily survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy. She bristled at prejudice of all kinds -- against women, Native Americans, and anyone else who didn't fit the mold. Rosemary Smith Walls always told Jeannette that she was like her grandmother, and in this true-life novel, Jeannette Walls channels that kindred spirit. Half Broke Horses is Laura Ingalls Wilder for adults, as riveting and dramatic as Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa or Beryl Markham's West with the Night. It will transfix readers everywhere."

Opening Line: "Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did."

My Take: A danged good book, though far better approached as a novel than as an accurate biography of the author's grandmother. Walls' describes Lily a wee bit too perfectly for my tastes (on the first page, she saves herself and two younger siblings from a flash flood by ordering them up a cottonwood tree and keeping the three of them talking and awake all night), but a few of her flaws do manage to come through, and she's a sufficiently likable and compelling character that this is slightly annoying but not fatal. (Besides, who doesn't create some sort of semi-mythical story about their grandparents?) I enjoyed the supporting characters, too -- especially Lily's strong but gentle (and no, that's not the cliche I make it sound like) husband, Jim. Certainly intrigued me enough to make me want to read The Glass Castle and see how Rosemary and eventually Jeannette turn out.

#65 - Summertime

Moving right along, #65 was Summertime, by J. M. Coetzee (New York: Viking, 2009).

Summary: "In the Nobel Laureate's latest novel, a young English writer is in pursuit of first-person testimony to write a biography of an esteemed novelist named J. M. Coetzee. The Englishman wants to focus on the years 1971-77, a period just before Coetzee's importance was recognized, a time the hopeful biographer finds oddly neglected by other biographers; he sees it as seminal because the novelist was finding his feet. From Coetzee's lover, his cousin, the mother of a pupil to whom Coetzee gave English lessons, a cohort who co-taught a college course with him, and another professional affiliate, the biographer elicits details about the man's relationships, amorous and otherwise. These personal accounts are the material from which readers draw a picture of Coetzee and upon which the writer will draw for his future composition. The Coetzee emerging here is an emotionally dessicated man never easy with intercourse of any shade, sexual or social. Assumptions on the reader's part of a parallel between the fictitious Coetzee and the actual one are best left alone, because the result can only be confusion and distraction. It is best, then, to simply see the character as just that and then to recognize the author of the admirable builder of character that he is." (-Brad Hooper, Booklist)

My take: Probably would have been more compelling if I were familiar either with Coetzee's other work or with the Afrikaans experience in South Africa, but this is nonetheless an interesting format for a story and, gradually, one through with a fascinating if less-than-likable portrait of a character emerges.

#62 - Into the Wild

Yes, indeedy, friends; it's Vacation Roundup Redux. #62 was Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer (New York: Villard Books, 1996). I saw the movie with a group of girlfriends several years ago, but hadn't yet gotten around to reading the book, despite having the paperback sitting on a bookshelf for quite some time. But that's what vacations are for, right?

Summary: "In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild. Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life. Admitting an interest that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the drives and desires that propelled McCandless. Digging deeply, he takes an inherently compelling mystery and unravels the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of the American wilderness on our imagination; the allure of high-risk activities to young men of a certain cast of mind; the complex, charged bond between fathers and sons."

Opening line: "Jim Gallien had driven four miles out of Fairbanks when he spotted the hitchhiker standing in the snow beside the road, thumb raises high, shivering in the gray Alaska dawn."

My take: This is a (reasonably) true historical narrative, but reads like a novel. That's not a bad thing, and Krakauer's journalism creds seem pretty solid; I didn't get the impression he was taking a lot of liberties with the story line. In particular, he doesn't take the approach Truman Capote did in In Cold Blood, inventing certain scenes (i.e., private thoughts of and conversations among the Clutter family) he couldn't possibly have been privy to for the sake of moving the narrative forward. Here, in contrast, he sticks to the facts, presenting only those conversations he could reconstruct through interviews with one of the parties. I'd say more were I not so behind, but if you haven't seen the movie -- and even if you have -- this is a fascinating and heartbreaking story, and well-written to boot. Read it.

Catching up, again

It's been 6 weeks now, and I just may be smoothly back in the 9-to-5 groove again. The job's pretty good, the commute is unbeatable ... but after 6 months of being able to smell the roses, even if I couldn't afford to buy them, it takes time to change the routine. In other words, I've still been reading quite a bit these last few weeks, but not blogging about it.

In what's more or less the correct order, the books I've read since you saw me last have been ...
#13 - Roots: The Saga of an American Family (30th anniversary ed.), by Alex Haley (New York, 2007).

Summary (from my favorite public library's web site, as I returned the book weeks ago): "One of the most important books and television series ever to appear, Roots galvanized the nation, and created an extraordinary political, racial, social and cultural dialogue that hadn't been seen since the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The book sold over 1,000,000 copies in the first year, and the miniseries was watched by an astonishing 130,000,000 people. Roots opened up the minds of Americans of all colors and faiths to one of the darkest and most painful parts of America's past. Roots also fostered a remarkable dialogue about not just the past, but the then present day 1970's and how America had fared since the days of slavery. Roots: The 30th Anniversary Edition will remind the generation that originally read it (and watched the miniseries) that there are issues that still need to be discussed, and to introduce to a new and younger generation, a book that will help them understand, perhaps for the first time, the drama and reality of what took place during the time period."

My reaction: I liked it. Yes, I'm aware of the controversy about how much of the story was true and how much was (ahem) "inspired by actual events," and tagged it as nonfiction with some qualms. Frankly, though, the book works well even as just a novel, and its impact on public sentiment and popular culture are undeniable.

Just in case there's anyone out there who's even tardier than I am about reading the book, and isn't familiar with the story, it begins in the late 1700s in the Gambia with the birth of a "man-child" called Kunta Kinte. Proportionally, Kunta's boyhood and coming of age get a tremendous amount of air time here, compared to how quickly entire generations seem to pass later in the story, but I think I understand this. If you'll forgive the analogy, it reminds me of what Margaret Mitchell did at the beginning of Gone With the Wind: thorough, painstaking description of a way of life that, once the events of the story get underway, can't possibly be the same again. In Kunta Kinte's case, this transition comes when, while a teenaged man-boy, he is kidnapped by toubob slave traders and, after a horrific trans-Atlantic voyage that kills almost half the human cargo, sold to a Virginia plantation owner.

Some years later, Kunta comes to respect and eventually marry Bell, the cook on "his" plantation. The couple have a daughter, who Kunta names Kizzy (which means "stay put" in his native tongue) in hopes that she'll grow up with them and not be sold away. Heartbreakingly, when their otherwise as-good-as-they-get master discovers that a) Kizzy, now 15, can read and write; and b) more importantly, she's used this knowledge to help another young slave escape, these hopes are thwarted. Kizzy is sold south to a far-away plantation in the Carolinas, where she learns in brutal fashion just what her new owner, Tom Lea, bought her for. The product of her rape is a son, George, who, in time, rises to a favored position in his own master's household as an unparalleled breeder and trainer of fighting cocks (hence, his nickname, "Chicken George.")

George is rather a ladies' man, and (of course) ultimately falls for and marries the one woman he can't get any other way: the devout, beautiful Matilda. Together, the two raise a large family of their own (or rather, Matilda raises them, as George seems to be either traveling to cock fights or preoccupied with who knows what else more often than not), including one son, Tom, whose training and skill as a plantation blacksmith serves him well in the uncertain post-Emancipation South. Tom, his wife Irene, their 8 children, Chicken George, and a handful of neighbors strike out for new territory, opting to try their luck at real freedom, rather than simply hiring on as sharecroppers somewhere. According to Haley, it's Tom and Irene's granddaughter, Bertha -- daughter of their youngest child, Cynthia -- who ultimately marries Simon Alexander Haley, and becomes his mother.

The book's almost 900 pages long as is, but I guess my only real complaint is that later generations of Kinte's descendants and Haley's forbears, after Kizzy and George, seem to get short shrift. George and Matilda, and then Tom and Irene, both have such large families that, with decades passing by in only a page or 2, it's hard to keep track of who's who. I would have liked to know more about Tom and Irene, Cynthia, and even Bertha, and how their lives were affected by the lessons and stories Kunta had passed on to Kizzy and then (presumably, through George and Tom) down to them.