"Snow Flower and the Secret Fan : a novel" by Lisa See
Fiction, 2005, 253 pages
Ratings: 4.5 (Amazon 4.5) Book Club: NY - B &N Women's Book Club, (Aug, 2007)
Summary:
From Publishers Weekly: Lisa See's engrossing novel set in remote 19th-century China details the deeply affecting story of lifelong, intimate friends (laotong, or "old sames") Lily and Snow Flower, their imprisonment by rigid codes of conduct for women and their betrayal by pride and love. While granting immediacy to Lily's voice, See (Flower Net) adroitly transmits historical background in graceful prose. Her in-depth research into women's ceremonies and duties in China's rural interior brings fascinating revelations about arranged marriages, women's inferior status in both their natal and married homes, and the Confucian proverbs and myriad superstitions that informed daily life. Beginning with a detailed and heartbreaking description of Lily and her sisters' foot binding ("Only through pain will you have beauty. Only through suffering will you have peace"), the story widens to a vivid portrait of family and village life. Most impressive is See's incorporation of nu shu, a secret written phonetic code among women—here between Lily and Snow Flower—that dates back 1,000 years in the southwestern Hunan province ("My writing is soaked with the tears of my heart,/ An invisible rebellion that no man can see"). This is both a suspenseful and poignant story as well as an absorbing historical chronicle.
What I enjoyed about the book was gaining a better understanding about the confining, difficult life Chinese women led including the painful practice of foot binding.
Favorite Passages:
pg 24: ...."how girls and women should behave."
......Whether you are rich or poor, emperor or slave, the domestic sphere is for women and the outside sphere is for men. Women should not pass beyond the inner chambers in their thoughts or in their actions. I also understand that two Confucian ideals ruled our lives. The first was the Three Obediences: "When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son." The second was the Four Virtues, which delineate women's behavior, speech, carriage and occupation: "Be chaste and yielding, calm and upright in attitude; be quiet and agreeable in words; be restrained and exquisite in movement; be perfect in handiwork and embroidery." If girls do not stray from these principles, they will grow in virtuous women.
pg 25....."foot binding"
....Mama and Aunt resumed their pre-binding activities, making more bandages. ...... Everyone was happy, singing, laughing, talking. Now I know there were many things no one said. (No one said I could die. It wasn't until I moved to my husband's home that my mother-in-law told me that one in ten girls died from footbinding, not only in our county but across the whole of China.)
........my goal was to achieve a pair of perfectly bound feet with seven distinct attributes: They should be small, narrow, straight, pointed, and arched, yet still fragrant and soft in texture. Of these requirements, length is the most important. Seven centimeters - about the length of a thumb - is ideal.....
pg. 59....."women's place"
We women are expected to love our children as soon as they leave our bodies, but who among us has not felt disappointment at the sight of a daughter or felt dark gloom that settles upon the mind even when holding a precious son, if he does nothing but cry and makes your mother-in-law look at you as though your milk were soar? We may love our daughters...but we must train them through pain. We love our sons....but we can never be part of their world.... We love our parents because they take care of us, but we are considered worthless branches on the family tree. We drain the family resources. We are raised by one family for another....
pg. 106...."women's wedding customs"
........my body and soul were weak from hunger, because a bride is not allowed to eat for the final ten days of her wedding festivities. Do we follow this custom to make us sadder at leaving our families, to make us more yielding whem we go to our husbands' homes, or to make us appear more pure to our husbands?.......Mama, like most mothers----hid a few hard-boiled eggs for me in the women's chambers, but these did little to give me strength, and my emotions weakened with each new event.
Recommendation: I enjoyed this book because I learned about China's women and their customs and how they shared their hopes, fears and emotions. What was done as "custom" with footbinding was horrible....you wonder how and why it ever began. I also like the brave, courageous women in this novel.
Monday, August 6, 2007
Monday, July 30, 2007
The White
"The White" by Deborah Larsen
Fiction, 2003, 240 pages
Book Club: NY - B&N Women's Book Club (June, '07)
Ratings : 4.0 (3.5 on Amazon)
Booklist: Larsen takes the true story of Mary Jemison, a white woman captured by the Shawnee before the American Revolution, as the subject for her accomplished first novel. After her parents are killed, 16-year-old Mary is given to two Seneca sisters. Renamed Two-Falling-Voices, she falls into total apathy. Gradually her sisters draw her out, and a young man from the Delaware tribe takes her for his wife. At first Mary resists the idea of the marriage, but her patient husband soon wins her over. Their first child is stillborn, but their second is a healthy son, and Mary is happy until her husband dies on a trading mission. Mary is grief-stricken, but when she meets Hiokatoo, an older warrior, she once again falls in love. Throughout her life, Mary struggles with her heritage and her new life; she has several opportunities to return to white society, and takes none of them. Larsen handles Mary's complex emotions and her dueling desires with subtlety, and her elegant prose vividly brings Mary's world and thoughts to life. Mary Jemison's story took place in the Northeast, and a monument to her spirit is in Lechworth Park in New York. She was know as the "Old White Woman of Genesse" and lived on her land in Gardeau Flat until 1831 when she moved to an Indian reservation near Buffalo where she died in 1833 at the age of 90. As I was reading this book, I learned more about Mary, and later visited Lechworth park to she her monument and the cabin of her daughter Nancy. What didn't you like about the book : Some of the book seem to include "text" from the book about Mary written in 1824 by James Seaver or possibly notes of his interview with Mary in 1823. When this was done it was rather disjointed and choppy. Recommendation: I would recommend this book to others. I enjoyed reading a fictional account of a the real person, Mary Jamison.
Fiction, 2003, 240 pages
Book Club: NY - B&N Women's Book Club (June, '07)
Ratings : 4.0 (3.5 on Amazon)
Summary :
Booklist: Larsen takes the true story of Mary Jemison, a white woman captured by the Shawnee before the American Revolution, as the subject for her accomplished first novel. After her parents are killed, 16-year-old Mary is given to two Seneca sisters. Renamed Two-Falling-Voices, she falls into total apathy. Gradually her sisters draw her out, and a young man from the Delaware tribe takes her for his wife. At first Mary resists the idea of the marriage, but her patient husband soon wins her over. Their first child is stillborn, but their second is a healthy son, and Mary is happy until her husband dies on a trading mission. Mary is grief-stricken, but when she meets Hiokatoo, an older warrior, she once again falls in love. Throughout her life, Mary struggles with her heritage and her new life; she has several opportunities to return to white society, and takes none of them. Larsen handles Mary's complex emotions and her dueling desires with subtlety, and her elegant prose vividly brings Mary's world and thoughts to life. Mary Jemison's story took place in the Northeast, and a monument to her spirit is in Lechworth Park in New York. She was know as the "Old White Woman of Genesse" and lived on her land in Gardeau Flat until 1831 when she moved to an Indian reservation near Buffalo where she died in 1833 at the age of 90. As I was reading this book, I learned more about Mary, and later visited Lechworth park to she her monument and the cabin of her daughter Nancy. What didn't you like about the book : Some of the book seem to include "text" from the book about Mary written in 1824 by James Seaver or possibly notes of his interview with Mary in 1823. When this was done it was rather disjointed and choppy. Recommendation: I would recommend this book to others. I enjoyed reading a fictional account of a the real person, Mary Jamison.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
"The Unbearbable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera
Fiction, 1984, 314 pages (Translated from Czech)
Book Club: NY - B&N Night of Novel Approaches (July, '07)
Ratings: 3.5 (Amazon 4.5)
Summary:
From Book Cover: A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover -- these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.
The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature: Novel by Milan Kundera, first published in 1984 in an English translation and in a French translation as L'Insoutenable Legerete de l'etre. In 1985 the work was published in the original Czech as Nesnesitelna lehkost byti, but it was banned in Czechoslovakia until 1989. Set against the background of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, the novel concerns a young Czech physician who substitutes a series of erotic adventures over which he thinks he can maintain control for becoming involved in his country's politics, where he feels he can have no power or freedom. Inevitably, he is drawn into Czechoslovakia's political unrest. In a parallel vein, he is forced to choose among the women with whom he is involved.
Both summaries above give a brief overview of the novel, each with a different emphasis. The novel is a story of one main couple, Tomas, a physician, and Tereza, his wife. The second couple is Sabina, a painter & Tomas mistress, and Franz, her lover. Kundera uses the lives of these four people to present ideas about the world and "being" as well as to let us know what it is like to live in the political state in Prague during the Russian occupation.
Favorite Passages:
What I enjoyed about the book were the ideas presented which gave me something to consider.
pg 40....."an interesting, unusual description of the body and face"
A long time ago, man would listen in amazement to the sound of regular beats in his chest, never suspecting what they were. .......
Today, of course, the body is no longer unfamiliar: we know the beating in our chest is the heart and the nose is the noozle of a hose sticking out of the body to take oxygen to the lungs. The face is nothing but an instrument panel registering all the body mechanisms: digestion, sight, hearing, respiration thought.
pg 48....."chance speaks to us"
......his (Tomas) acquaintance with Tereza was the result of six improbable fortuities.
But is no an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?
Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.
pg 185....."life in a police state"
....Since no one had thought to praise Tomas in quite some time, he listened to the plump official very carefully,...... How defenseless we are in the face of flattery! Tomas was unable to prevent himself from taking seriously what the Ministry official said.
But it was not out of mere vanity. More important was Tomas' lack of experience. When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful and polite, you have a hard time reminding yourself that nothing he say is true, that nothing is sincere. Maintaining nonbelief (constantly, systematically, without the slightest vacillation) requires tremendous effort and the proper training -- in other words, frequent police interrogations. Tomas lacked that training.
pg 221 ....."characters in a novel"
And once more I see him the way he appeared to me at the very beginning of the novel: standing at the window and staring across the courtyard at the walls opposite.
This is the image from which he was born. As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thiniks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
pg 222....."our decisions"
And again he thought the thought we already know: Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decision.
Recommendation: I enjoyed to book, but with so many choices on books to read, will probably not read another Kundera book. I was written in an unusual style, things not always happening in sequence. I felt the story was a vehicle to describe his philosophies more than a just a novel.
Fiction, 1984, 314 pages (Translated from Czech)
Book Club: NY - B&N Night of Novel Approaches (July, '07)
Ratings: 3.5 (Amazon 4.5)
Summary:
From Book Cover: A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover -- these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.
The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature: Novel by Milan Kundera, first published in 1984 in an English translation and in a French translation as L'Insoutenable Legerete de l'etre. In 1985 the work was published in the original Czech as Nesnesitelna lehkost byti, but it was banned in Czechoslovakia until 1989. Set against the background of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, the novel concerns a young Czech physician who substitutes a series of erotic adventures over which he thinks he can maintain control for becoming involved in his country's politics, where he feels he can have no power or freedom. Inevitably, he is drawn into Czechoslovakia's political unrest. In a parallel vein, he is forced to choose among the women with whom he is involved.
Both summaries above give a brief overview of the novel, each with a different emphasis. The novel is a story of one main couple, Tomas, a physician, and Tereza, his wife. The second couple is Sabina, a painter & Tomas mistress, and Franz, her lover. Kundera uses the lives of these four people to present ideas about the world and "being" as well as to let us know what it is like to live in the political state in Prague during the Russian occupation.
Favorite Passages:
What I enjoyed about the book were the ideas presented which gave me something to consider.
pg 40....."an interesting, unusual description of the body and face"
A long time ago, man would listen in amazement to the sound of regular beats in his chest, never suspecting what they were. .......
Today, of course, the body is no longer unfamiliar: we know the beating in our chest is the heart and the nose is the noozle of a hose sticking out of the body to take oxygen to the lungs. The face is nothing but an instrument panel registering all the body mechanisms: digestion, sight, hearing, respiration thought.
pg 48....."chance speaks to us"
......his (Tomas) acquaintance with Tereza was the result of six improbable fortuities.
But is no an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?
Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.
pg 185....."life in a police state"
....Since no one had thought to praise Tomas in quite some time, he listened to the plump official very carefully,...... How defenseless we are in the face of flattery! Tomas was unable to prevent himself from taking seriously what the Ministry official said.
But it was not out of mere vanity. More important was Tomas' lack of experience. When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful and polite, you have a hard time reminding yourself that nothing he say is true, that nothing is sincere. Maintaining nonbelief (constantly, systematically, without the slightest vacillation) requires tremendous effort and the proper training -- in other words, frequent police interrogations. Tomas lacked that training.
pg 221 ....."characters in a novel"
And once more I see him the way he appeared to me at the very beginning of the novel: standing at the window and staring across the courtyard at the walls opposite.
This is the image from which he was born. As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thiniks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
pg 222....."our decisions"
And again he thought the thought we already know: Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decision.
Recommendation: I enjoyed to book, but with so many choices on books to read, will probably not read another Kundera book. I was written in an unusual style, things not always happening in sequence. I felt the story was a vehicle to describe his philosophies more than a just a novel.
Monday, June 4, 2007
The Glass Castle
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Memoir; 2005; p 288
Read : 5/07
Recommended by: Member of the Novel Night Book Club in Florida; FL-Cross Creek Book Club - 4/08
Rating: 4.5 / 4.5
Recommendation: I enjoyed and was amazed by this book. The neglect which these children overcame to become responsible, productive adults was amazing. The point that struck me was that they all read and were able to change their lives through education.....however, they all were probably of above average intelligence.
*Summary :
From Amazon.com Jeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat" and there's perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically. In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices. But while Rex and Rose Mary firmly believed children learned best from their own mistakes, they themselves never seemed to do so, repeating the same disastrous patterns that eventually landed them on the streets. Walls describes in fascinating detail what it was to be a child in this family, from the embarrassing (wearing shoes held together with safety pins; using markers to color her skin in an effort to camouflage holes in her pants) to the horrific (being told, after a creepy uncle pleasured himself in close proximity, that sexual assault is a crime of perception; and being pimped by her father at a bar). Though Walls has well earned the right to complain, at no point does she play the victim. In fact, Walls' removed, nonjudgmental stance is initially startling, since many of the circumstances she describes could be categorized as abusive (and unquestioningly neglectful). But on the contrary, Walls respects her parents' knack for making hardships feel like adventures, and her love for them--despite their overwhelming self-absorption--resonates from cover to cover.
From Publishers Weekly
Freelance writer Walls doesn't pull her punches. She opens her memoir by describing looking out the window of her taxi, wondering if she's "overdressed for the evening" and spotting her mother on the sidewalk, "rooting through a Dumpster." Walls's parents—just two of the unforgettable characters in this excellent, unusual book—were a matched pair of eccentrics, and raising four children didn't conventionalize either of them. Her father was a self-taught man, a would-be inventor who could stay longer at a poker table than at most jobs and had "a little bit of a drinking situation," as her mother put it. With a fantastic storytelling knack, Walls describes her artist mom's great gift for rationalizing. Apartment walls so thin they heard all their neighbors? What a bonus—they'd "pick up a little Spanish without even studying." Why feed their pets? They'd be helping them "by not allowing them to become dependent." While Walls's father's version of Christmas presents—walking each child into the Arizona desert at night and letting each one claim a star—was delightful, he wasn't so dear when he stole the kids' hard-earned savings to go on a bender. The Walls children learned to support themselves, eating out of trashcans at school or painting their skin so the holes in their pants didn't show. Buck-toothed Jeannette even tried making her own braces when she heard what orthodontia cost. One by one, each child escaped to New York City. Still, it wasn't long before their parents appeared on their doorsteps. "Why not?" Mom said. "Being homeless is an adventure."
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