#69 REVIEW OF PEDRO PARAMO

 #69 Review of Pedro Paramo

Tom Wells

Praised as the greatest work of Mexican fiction by the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes, this is a challenging piece chock full of theme, character, setting, mood and imagery but almost no plot.  Juan Rulfo reportedly wrote a 400-page novel and then stripped it back to its barest essence. What is left are a series of snippets about the occupants of the town of Calamo, a once thriving pueblo driven by the cruel, megalomaniacal Pedro Páramo to ruin and dereliction, peopled mostly by apparitions, now literally a ghost town. Rulfo’s microcosm encompasses what I imagine to be the major themes of Mexican life and history: the thin line between the living and the dead; the brutality of those in authority and the collusion of the Church in enabling it; the bubbling undercurrent of violent revolution.  My difficulty with the book is two-fold: by not knowing Spanish, I feel I am missing the doubtless lyricism of the prose; and by having lived all my life in quiet First World suburbs, I can only imagine the angry joylessness of the few at the top and the unremitting hardship endured by everybody else. 

****

REVIEW #68 A RISING MAN

#68  REVIEW OF A RISING MAN

Tom Wells

Sometimes all you want is book that: has simple, prosaic sentences: transports you to another world but doesn’t take you out of this one; shows a certain level of research but not so much that you feel you should be able to construct an atom smasher or, at the very least, a ham radio.   A Rising Man is just such a book. Set in Calcutta in 1919, it gives you a flavour of what it must have been like to be a policeman in the British Raj without immersing you in the ugly horrors of poverty, corruption and racism. After all, this is a book where the hero does all the right things, even as he fights a fairly mild morphine addiction (courtesy of His Majesty’s participation in The Great War) and the good guys triumph in the end.  It’s what I call a good read. And sometimes that’s all you want.

***½

JFDI #70 CLOUD CUCKOO LAND Anthony Doerr

 

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

Anthony Doerr

JFDI #69 PEDRO PÁRAMO

PEDRO PÁRAMO

Juan Rulfo

A surreal and byzantine tour of a ghost town 

JFDI #68 A RISING MAN Abir Mukherjee

 

A RISING MAN 

by Abir Mukherjee

Detective story in Calcutta

 REVIEW OF #67 EARLY MORNING RISER

Review by Tom

Katherine Heiny has written a well-reviewed/-received book full of wry, witty and yet (for me) unfunny observations about life in a small Michigan town. The seven chapters spread over a period of seventeen years constitute not so much a novel as the seven seasons of an above-average sitcom. As a result, other than the narrator Jane and her sister-in-law Aggie, the supporting characters come off as the sort of two-dimensional oddballs you got in Newhart or Cheers, not as flesh and blood in small-town America. 

The narrator, Jane, is a second-grade teacher who falls for local stud, Duncan, who has bedded a fair percentage of the local female population on the strength of looks like the Brawny Paper Towel Guy. Never mind that Duncan is a man of few words and a work ethic even more casual than his approach to sex, he has a laser-like aim for Jane’s G-spot, making him the embodiment of 1970s Man in a novel published by a woman in the 2020s about a period in the 21st C.  Weird. 

In the tradition of 1970s women, Jane longs to marry Duncan, who has vowed never to marry again after his ex-wife Aggie dumped him for Gary, who looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy, is unable to function in even a small social circle and yet somehow has a moderately successful insurance agency. But then Duncan does ask for Jane’s hand because marriage is the most expedient way for him and her to care for Jimmy, the simple-minded employee of Duncan’s woodworking business, who has been duped out of $80k in the book’s only scene with any real dramatic tension and yet one that ends abruptly in less than twenty pages. Duncan marries again, not so much out of love for Jane, but out of concern for his little buddy.  In classic 1970s style. 

Which may just be the point. Katherine Heiny is not writing a book about human relations as we’d like to think they’ve progressed, but rather as they are in Boyne City, Michigan, where her bio says she lived when she wasn’t in London, the Hague or her current residence of Bethesda, Maryland. So maybe she’s recalling a place she experienced in the 1970s. What she’s remembered, though, after time in big cosmopolitan cities, comes off as a view more condescending than affectionate for a slice of the populace content with, or confined to, life in a rural cloister. 

**½

JFDI #67 EARLY MORNING RISER- Katherine Heiny

 EARLY MORNING RISER

by Katherine Heiny

A rollicking saga of a woman's life in a small Michigan town. Family. Lover. Children. Neighbours. Laughter, the mundane and tragedy in equal measure.