Agony and the Ecstasy, The.  This is a biographical novel of Michelangelo Buonarroti: "His time—the turbulent Renaissance, the years of poisoning princes, warring Popes, the all-powerful d'Medici family, the fanatic monk Savonarola... His loves—the frail and lovely daughter of Lorenzo d'Medici; the ardent mistress of Marco Aldovrandi; and his last, greatest love—the beautiful, unhappy Vittoria Collonna... His genius—a God-driven fury from which he wrested the greatest art the world has ever known..." 

I read half the book's 800 pages in June 2000 while on our honeymoon (the other half once we returned). Although our visit to Florence was brief, we walked quickly through many of the major attractions, all of which were settings in the book.  I stood next to Michelangelo's extraordinary David, and in this book I learned about the artist's physical and emotional struggles to produce such powerful beauty. Stone's evocative and compelling writing made the locations and art of Florence live. It was a long read, but I found myself reluctant to put it down, and when it was over, I felt saddened by the death of this passionate artist and closer to his art.

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Atonement. First of all, this is a book that one must read to the end to get the real impact of the story. The full weight and meaning of "atonement" are not achieved until the very last page. It is masterfully written (many critics said it was more worthy of the Booker prize than the work for which McEwan won the award, Amsterdam). Its characters are complex and their relationships complicated. It is successful at depicting a range of settings that feel real, from the privileged hallways of an English manor house in the 1930s to the horrors of Dunkirk during WWII. And the menace and suspense that McEwan builds, slowly and inexorably, toward the book's pivotal disaster are tangible and sometimes nearly unbearable. And yet... although I appreciated the skill of the writing and the exploration of the moral dilemma and its consequences, in the end I found myself intellectually prodded but emotionally unmoved by the characters' fates. I was left feeling intellectual admiration but emotional dissatisfaction. 

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Blue Rodeo. Although this fast read can't be described as great literature, I thoroughly enjoyed the sweet, "second-chance" romance. 

To establish residency so that her newly deaf son can attend a special school, Margaret Yearwood moves to Blue Dog, New Mexico, leaving behind her life as a suburban housewife and her 18-year marriage to a Hollywood film producer. Her new neighbor, sheepherder Owen Garrett, a former alcoholic hell-raiser, has kept his life low-key and safe, until he catches sight of Margaret. He squires her to the local festival and rodeo, introduces her to sopaipillas and tortilla soup, and takes her to meet master rug weaver Verbena Youngblood. These two unlikely, middle-aged people fall passionately in love and see their romance as that rare, lucky second chance in life; this time, they intend to do it right. However, Owen's past difficulties with the law and Margaret's fractious son test their bond. In this bittersweet story, ordinary people must learn to heal family bonds before they are permanently severed.

"A romantic, elegant, low-keyed Western for our time." —Los Angeles Times

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Brave New World.  This is a book that I knew I should have read long ago and finally got around to. Right book, right time. First published in 1932, in light of recent events it remains as relevant as ever. 

The basic story is about Bernard Marx, who feels odd and lonely in a scientific and industrialized utopia. In his world, there is no violence and everyone is provided for. However, babies are cloned and "decanted" in laboratories, everyone finds hope and well being by consuming daily grams of soma, and the media exist for the sole purpose of distracting people from their lives. Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their culture allow. The struggles of a "savage" brought from the Americas highlight the differences between new worlds and old. 

Huxley's novel exerted great influence on intellectual thought of the 20th century. Proponents of capitalism and western traditions could use Huxley's well-organized world as a model for communist and socialist states where the individual is sacrificed for the common good; socialist and communist proponents could use this same utopia of science and commercialism as a model for greedy capitalist states where consumption and exploitation have become a religion; and moralists could disparage the Brave New World as an example of what happens when traditional values of family, sex, and marriage are forgotten.

After the events of 9/11, issues of security are paramount in Americans' lives. Huxley's World State's motto is "Community, Identity, Stability," which seems innocuous and even potentially admirable. But in Huxley's story this motto was created in the aftermath of a cataclysmic war in which anthrax bombs decimated the Earth's population. Thus the book raises relevant questions about the kinds of trade-offs that security is worth to us in 2002—what kind of motto we want to live by.  Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today, and his world is alarmingly closer than anybody could have imagined.

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Cane River. This riveting family saga, based on the real family of author Lalita Tademy, chronicles four generations of women born into slavery along the Cane River in Louisiana. It is also a tale about the blurring of racial boundaries (as well as an explanation of skin-color biases among blacks): great-grandmother Elisabeth notices an unmistakable "bleaching of the line" as first her daughter Suzette, then her granddaughter Philomene, and finally her great-granddaughter Emily choose (or are forced) to bear the illegitimate offspring of the area's white French planters. In many cases the children are loved by their fathers, and their paternity is widely acknowledged. However, neither state law nor local custom allows them to inherit wealth or property.

Plantation society was rigidly hierarchical, particularly on the heels of the Civil War and the economic hardships that came with Reconstruction. The only permissible path upward for hard-working, ambitious African Americans was indirect. A meteoric rise, or too obvious an appearance of prosperity, would be swiftly punished. To enable the slow but steady advance of their clan, the black women of Cane River plot, plead, deceive, and manipulate their way through history, extracting crucial gifts of money and property along the way.

The characters in this book are realistically flawed but always sympathetic, and I felt compelled to keep turning pages to learn about their fates. Their situations made me despair, especially when I considered what it would feel like to think, like Tademy, that my ancestors had been forced to experience such immense shame, cruel abuse, unimaginable loss, and wrenching tragedy. The fact that they chose to continue on, always fighting for a better life for their children, makes their stories inspiring.

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Ella Minnow Pea. This is a delightful story, a wonderful light "summer read," that, despite its humor and easy approach, is also a satire and commentary on censorship and totalitarianism. Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." However, as the letters from this sentence fall one by one from a memorial statue of Nollop, the island's High Council decides to ban the use of each in both speech and writing, with dire consequences for violators. Ella then finds herself fighting against encroaching tyranny for freedom of expression, and simultaneously the reader experiences the difficulty of living without words as the novel discontinues each letter's use. 

For someone who loves the English language they way I do, Ella Minnow Pea (Get it? L-M-N-O-P?) was terrific fun, a learning experience (wonderful vocabulary!), and satire at its humorous best.

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Feast of Love, The. Charles Baxter is best known for short stories, and this very enjoyable novel combines the best of both genres. As the book begins, Baxter himself wakes from a nightmare and takes a moonlit walk. While sitting on a park bench, he is joined by his friend Bradley. Bradley gives Baxter the name for the novel Baxter is struggling to write and even offers himself as a character. In fact, Bradley suggests that he send people to Baxter to write about. "Everybody's got a story, and we'll just start telling you the stories we have."

What follows is a narrative of love "in its sublime, agonizing, and eternal complexity." Through Bradley, Baxter meets Chloé, a young waitress at Bradley's espresso bar, and her ex-junkie boyfriend, Oscar; Bradley's next door neighbors, Harry Ginsburg, an elderly philosophy professor, and his wife, Esther; and Kathryn and Diana, Bradley's two ex-wives. The characters take turns narrating, even commenting on and correcting versions of events mentioned by other characters. The stories' intertwined subplots—Oscar and Chloé's involvement in the porn industry; Esther and Harry's agonized relationship with their mentally ill son; Bradley's travails in love, art, and dog ownership—are funny and engrossing.  As the novel progresses, these separate strands gradually merge, and by the time Baxter brings his tale of love, loss and redemption to a close, his characters have all joined the feast.

"We are treated to nothing less than a full and rich exploration of love in all varieties and ages and stages...in this most generous novel, a bittersweet comedy that resonates long in the imagination." —Chicago Tribune

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Five Quarters of the Orange. Harris's previous novel, Chocolat, a sweet morsel of French love story and mystic fable, was my favorite read of 2000. This book was more serious—and in my opinion less endearing and successful. Still using culinary metaphors, quirky characters, and slightly surreal incidents, Harris presents a complicated tale involving tragedy, revenge, suspicion, and love. Feisty yet sensitive Framboise Dartigen grew up in the gossip-ridden hamlet of Les Laveuses on the banks of the Loire. Beset by WWII privations, the people of Les Laveuses were a mixture of resistance fighters, collaborators, and financial opportunists. Striving for attention and power, nine-year-old Framboise played nasty tricks on her headstrong, mentally vulnerable mother, Mirabelle (who had an odd allergy to oranges that produced terrible migraines if she even smelled the fruit). When Framboise and her siblings found unforeseen trouble after trading secrets about their neighbors to German soldiers for chocolate and comic books, mother and children were forced to flee. As Framboise tells the tale 50 years later, she has returned to Les Laveuses and her childhood home, posing as a widow under a pseudonym. When the café she owns is reviewed in a national food magazine, her cover is blown, and she must finally face the mysterious tragedy of her past. 

The book's plot is multilayered, punctuated with descriptions of French delicacies and capped off with a bittersweet yet hopeful ending. Harris also offers unflinchingly honest insight into children's capacity for treachery and cruelty. But in the end, the characters seemed a bit flat and unreal, with too few redeeming qualities, particularly Mirabelle. Although I was intrigued by the unfolding mystery of the plot, I had trouble truly caring about the ultimate outcome of the characters.

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Gesture Life, A. This is a quiet story, a beautiful, graceful book. The main theme is the dilemma of being an outsider—and the corrupt, heartbreaking bargains an outsider will make to adapt to his surroundings. Franklin Hata has spent his whole life donning one camouflage or another. First, as a native-born Korean, he must fit into Japanese culture during WWII. After the war, he tries to adapt in the sleepy New York suburb of Bedley Run. But in neither case does he quite succeed, which gives the novel a hushed sense of tragedy. By flashback, the reader learns that Hata was a medical officer in Japan's Imperial Army. Posted to a tiny installation in rural Burma, he was ordered to oversee a fresh detachment of Korean "comfort women," victims of institutionalized gang rape. At first he maintained his professional distance. But eventually he was drawn into a relationship with one of the women, whose bloody and horrific experience permanently affected his detachment. In the present-tense, American half of the story, Hata adopts, alienates, and finally forms a shaky rapport with his daughter, Sunny. Hata's suburban melancholy, underscored by the gradual disclosure of his past, is compelling. In the end, Lee enables the reader to live inside the skin of a man who, "if he could choose, might always go silent and unseen."

"A Gesture Life is...a beautiful, solitary, remarkably tender book that reveals the shadows that fall constantly from the past, the ones that move darkly on the lawns of the here and now."—New York Times Book Review

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God of Small Things, The. This Booker Prize recipient is a haunting book. The events and characters have stayed with me long after I turned the last page. The book is basically the small story of young twins Rahel and Estha and their family in India, but in focusing on several interconnected tragedies and their lifelong effects on the characters, it is Faulknerian in its ambitious tackling of family, race, and class; Dickensian in its sharp-eyed observation of society and character. I came to know Untouchables and Touchables, third world Communists, inbred Syrian Christians—Indians with modern attitudes that carry the influences of a colonial past, Marxism, and American culture. The characters' world is both exotic and familiar to the Western reader, presented in a lyrical narrative that flows like water, an English invigorated by Indian influences of culture and language. 

"This outstanding novel is a banquet for all the senses we bring to reading."—Newsweek

"Roy has written this passionate and tragic tale in language so vivid, so imaginative, that at times it seems to take on the shape of the things it describes."—The Seattle Times

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Heat and Dust. This book, winner of the 1983 Booker Prize (and eventually the basis for a motion picture starring Julie Christie), reminded me of A Passage to India because of its themes of Anglo-Indian relationships and the inexorable pull of India on those who are open to its terrible beauty. "Yes, concluded the Major, it is all very well to love and admire India—intellectually, aesthetically, he did not mention sexually but he must have been aware of that factor too—but always with a virile, measured, European feeling. One should never, he warned, allow oneself to become softened (like Indians) by an excess of feeling; because the moment that happens—the moment one exceeds one's measure—one is in danger of being dragged over to the other side."

The story is about two women: Olivia, a spoiled, bored English colonial wife in the 1920s and the narrator, Olivia's step-granddaughter fifty years later. Longing for passion and independence, Olivia is drawn into the spell of the Nawab, a minor Indian prince. Olivia eventually outrages the tiny, suffocating town where her husband is a civil servant by eloping with the Nawab. Her step-granddaughter is drawn to India by her fascination with stories of Olivia's mysterious existence and scandal. As she stays in the town where Olivia lived and visits places that influenced Olivia's life, readers witness India's past through Olivia's letters and journals. For Olivia, removed from the day-to-day existence of the Indian people, India "was like being not in a different part of this world but in another world altogether, in another reality." In contrast, the narrator sublets a room that shares a courtyard with an Indian family and enters into their life. In prose as carefully measured as a British colonial's behavior, Jhabvala shows readers both pre- and post-independent India, exposing the similarities and differences of India's impact on both memorable women.

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Hours, The. This Pulitzer Prize winner is a beautiful literary triumph. I was awestruck by the gorgeous use of language and economic presentation of ideas throughout, as well as by the skillful, seamless weaving of not only the stories of three different women in three different times but of Virginia Woolf's life and literary influence into Cunningham's own work.

The Hours was Woolf's working title for what became Mrs. Dalloway, the template for this tale, and Cunningham makes use of Woolf's novel and life story, intertwining them with those of two contemporary women. One gray suburban London morning in 1923, Woolf awakens from a dream that becomes the seed of her book. I

The women's lives are linked both by the 1925 novel and by the few precious moments of happiness and possibility that each returns to. Clarissa eventually realizes, " Beyond themes of life's significance, The Hours is also a reminder that, as Cunningham repeatedly demonstrates, art and reality may not only mirror but truly affect one another.

"[Cunningham] has fashioned a fictional instrument of intricacy and remarkable beauty. It is a kaleidoscope whose four shining and utterly unlike pieces—the lives of two fictional characters, of a real writer, and her novel—combine, separate and tumble in continually shifting and startlingly suggestive patterns." —Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review

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House of Women: A Novel.  The story is that Nalia and her daughter, Theodora, live in a house surrounded by a fence with a padlocked gate, immune to the passions of the outside world. A Holocaust survivor, Nalia wishes to keep her daughter close as a shadow, growing old together, so that she need never be alone. Nalia believes that men are selfish dogs, including Thea's philandering father, as he briefly drifts in and out of their lives. But the years of living so intimately have corrupted the mother/daughter relationship through its natural stages into the roles of captor and prisoner. Then in one shocking afternoon, the padlock on the gate is broken open and 17-year-old Thea, who has begun to chafe against captivity and control, elopes with a mysterious older man, her father's cousin, leaving a desolate Nalia howling with despair. Thea subsequntly finds herself kept and isolated on an island by a possessive husband who refuses to release her. Even when she gives birth to twins, he will not allow her to leave and take the children to meet their grandmother. The two women struggle, each in their own way, to survive their forced separation, both filled with regret. Finally, lives complicated by ancient lies and hidden truths, they find their way back, to forgive the unforgivable. 

Although I appreciated the author's deceptively simple style, which sensually describes daily household details and skillfully conveys complex ideas, relationships and emotions, in the end I found the story a bit too mystical for my taste, the women's relationships too strange. I understood the ideas of the sickly mother/daughter relationship, its seeds and their needs, but I felt that it was too over-the-top: every man was abusive, every character in the story was damaged, every relationship was one of subjugation and control. 

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Instance of the Fingerpost, An. According to Francis Bacon, there is "one instance of a fingerpost which points in one direction only, and allows of no other possibility." The year is 1663, and the setting is Oxford, England, during the height of Restoration political intrigue. When Dr. Robert Grove is found dead in his Oxford room, hands clenched and face frozen in a rictus of pain, all the signs point to poison. The narrative circles around this murder as four characters present their version of events: Marco da Cola, a visiting Italian physician—or so he would like the reader to believe; Jack Prestcott, the son of a traitor who fled the country to avoid execution; Dr. John Wallis, a mathematician and cryptographer with a predilection for conspiracy theories; and Anthony Wood, a mild-mannered Oxford antiquarian, whose tale proves to be the book's instance of the fingerpost. Although the book is 700 pages long, and some of the convoluted politics of the English Civil War detailed in the middle sections left me perplexed, by the time I arrived at Wood's tale I was eager to learn the truth—and I was not disappointed. Everything tied together impeccably, surprisingly, and intelligently. 

This intricately plotted and intellectually ambitious novel has drawn comparisons to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Like it, the principal mystery is not who committed the crime but the nature of truth itself. Along the way, the author displays a keen eye for period details as diverse as early medical procedures, 17th-century religious sects, and the latest  fashion in wigs. Yet he never loses sight of his characters, who manage to be both authentic denizens of the 17th century and authentic human beings.

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In the Fall.  This novel traces three generations following the Civil War. As the story opens, a wounded Union solider named Norman is befriended by Leah, an escaped slave. Eventually, they marry and return to Norman's home in Vermont, where they raise a family despite their neighbors' intolerance. When their children are still young, Leah returns to the South to find the truth about her past; after returning home, she commits suicide. The second section of the book covers the life of son Jamie, who turns his back on his family as a teenager in favor of the anonymous, gas-lit world of bootlegging and nightclubs. He and lover Joey have two children, but Joey and daughter soon die from influenza. Jamie raises his son, Foster, until Jamie becomes entangled with criminals from his past and is killed. The third section of the novel follows Foster, who upon his father's death discovers two aunts whom his father never mentioned. Against his aunts' wishes, Foster travels south to discover and disentangle his family's complicated history. 

Throughout its pages, In the Fall suggests that identity consists of an undeniable duality—that although we can make of ourselves what we will, we can never completely efface what made us. Foster, upon returning to the farm his father had left years before, understands that it is "a world he was not even sure he wanted part of, and yet a part of it belonged to him by the simple fact of his existence." However, unlike his grandmother,  who found only a disillusioning misery in self-discovery, or his father, who shirked the quest, Foster is confident of redemption. Although on occasion the episodes dragged long, and sometimes the dialogue was more intellectually philosophical and portentous than could be reasonably imagined for the characters' background and education, this debut is a carefully detailed chronicle of the persistence of tragedy and the irrefutability of hope. I enjoyed it and recommend it.

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Jacob's Ladder. Permeated with a wealth of scrupulously researched historical detail, this novel conjures up the interlocked lives of masters and slaves in a civil war saga of a Virginia plantation family. The story is about Duncan Gatewood, seventeen and heir to the Gatewood Plantation. Duncan falls in love with Maggie, a mulatto slave, who bears him a son, Jacob. Maggie and Jacob are sold south, and Duncan is packed off by his irate father to the Virginia Military Institute. As a cadet, Duncan guards the gallows of John Brown. Later, he and his brother-in-law, Catesby Byrd, serving with Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, are caught up in ferocious battles and are often witnesses to turning points in these engagements. Duncan, repeatedly wounded, eventually loses an arm. And the seemingly unrelenting Catesby is finally so overwhelmed by four years of slaughter that, after a particularly vicious clash in the Wilderness campaign, he commits suicide. Another Gatewood slave, Jesse—a bright, determined Gatewood slave whose love for Maggie is unrequited—escapes to freedom and enlists in Mr. Lincoln's army; in time he will confront his former masters. Meanwhile, Duncan's former lover Maggie, having been sold to a bordello, is bought by a wealthy cotton-broker turned blockade-runner who marries her, successfully passing her off as white. 

Rather than the love story of Cold Mountain, this complex, seamless book is primarily a story about the war itself, providing an immediate sense of the horrific Virginia battles that occurred, suggesting the complexity of forces that pushed the South into war, and, through the engaging characters, portraying the ways in which relationships in the South altered as the times and "rules" rapidly changed. It neither glosses over the social inequities of the time nor attempts to judge 19th century thoughts and actions with a 20th-century political correctness. 

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Last Time They Met, The. This book begins with two past-lovers meeting unexpectedly at a writer's conference. Proceeding in reverse chronological order, the author recounts the obsessive love between poets Linda Fallon and Thomas Janes, a highly charged affair even though they connect only three times in 35 years. The novel's three sections ("Fifty-Two," "Twenty-Six" and "Seventeen") refer to Linda's ages when she meets and later encounters Thomas. In the first section, Shreve only suggests what their history contains: adultery, a car accident, some illicit encounters in Kenya. The rest of the book leads back to the beginnings of their grand passion. Though each of the novel's segments was powerful, the cumulative effect was especially wrenching because I knew what Linda and Thomas had yet to experience.  However, even though I thought I knew where the story might finally end, Shreve's subtle unfolding of the plot to the final revelations left me dumb-struck and returning to the beginning of the book. 

Through her credible interweaving of past and present, Shreve shows compassion for her characters' human frailties, and their passions, dilemmas, and decisions seemed real in their complexity. The book is a skillful combination of character study, mystery, and romance that hooked my heart and mind through the difficult choices of duty, responsibility, and love.

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Lost Diaries of Frans Hals, The. This biographical novel, which I stumbled upon in a used bookstore, intrigued me because of my recently discovered interest in Dutch art.  I'd seen a number of Hals paintings in the Netherlands, including in the Frans Hals museum in Haarlem. Most of the names and all the public incidents in the book are real. Many were taken from Haarlem town archives. The author cautions that domestic incidents and personalities are imaginary. Nevertheless, the book interestingly portrays the life of a man living in the age of Rembrandt and Descartes. But even more than a description of Hals' life, the book is a modern-day mystery:  ancient notebooks are found, and the job turns to Peter Van Overloop, a Columbia graduate student, to translate them. Are they really Hals' diaries?  Will they be sold in the art underworld before the world is allowed to see them?  Through his investigation, Peter becomes charmed and changed by the 17th century painter. 

It's not great literature, but it is fun, entertaining, and worthwhile if 17th century Holland is of interest.

"Delightful...the beguiling creation of a clever author's whimsy."  —The New Yorker

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Lovely Bones, The. Sebold has taken a grim subject and created a story that is both tragic and full of light and grace. The novel begins swiftly. In the second sentence, Sebold's narrator, Susie Salmon, announces, "I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." Taking a shortcut through a cornfield, Susie is lured by  a neighbor to his hideaway. The description of the crime is chilling, but never vulgar, and Sebold maintains a delicate balance between homely (even funny) and horrid as she describes Susie's family and friends progress through their grief. A unique aspect of the novel is that Susie narrates the story from heaven (a place where wishing is having), providing the warmth of a first-person narrator and the freedom of an omniscient one.During the ten years after her murder, Susie watches over her family and friends as they struggle to cope. She observes their disintegrating lives with compassion, the odd alliances forged and the relationships ruined: the shattered father who buries his sadness trying to gather evidence, the mother who escapes "her ruined heart, in merciful adultery." Occasionally she attempts, sometimes successfully, to communicate her love to them. At the same time, Sebold brings to life an entire suburban community continuing with life even as it also deals with the murder. Although the lives of all who knew Susie well are shaped by her tragic death, eventually her family and friends survive their pain and grief, and Susie, too, learns and grows by observing them. Although the plot description can make this novel sound tawdry, upsetting, or just plain strange, I found that Sebold's clean prose style and unsparing vision transform Susie's tragedy into an ultimately rewarding novel.

"The Lovely Bones is one of the strangest experiences I have had as a reader in a long time, and one of the most memorable. Painfully funny, bracingly tough, terribly sad, it is a feat of imagination and a tribute to the healing power of grief." —Michael Chabon, author

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Lying Awake. In a discalced (shoeless) Carmelite monastery outside present-day Los Angeles, life goes on in a manner virtually unchanged for centuries. Sister John of the Cross has spent years there in the service of God, but lately her life has been electrified by intense mystical visions. Sister John's waking dreams have led her toward the deepest religious ecstasy she has ever known, and they burn a kind of afterglow into her mind that she transcribes into enlightening (and popularly successful and economically beneficial) poetry. But when she learns that that her visions may in fact be the result of mild epileptic seizures, she faces a devastating choice: If her spiritual gifts are symptoms of illness rather than grace, a "cure" could mean the end of her visions and a return to spiritual drought. While this novella gently unveils the misjudged, mysterious life of the modern nun, it raises thought-provoking questions about divine will, artistic inspiration, the power and price of faith, and science versus soul.

"Using a very limited palette, Mark Salzman creates an austere masterpiece. The real miracle of Lying Awake is that it works perfectly on every level: on the realistic surface, it captures the petty squabbles and tiny bursts of radiance of life in a Los Angeles monastery; deeper down it probes the nature of spiritual illumination and the meaning and purpose of prayer in everyday life; and, at bottom, there lurks a profound meditation on the mystery of artistic inspiration."—David Laskin

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Mrs. Dalloway. Whew!  This dense, breathless (chapter-less) book started out slowly, and half-way through I actually let it sit for a month unopened before I returned to it. But the second time around I picked up the rhythm more easily, and at the end I was glad to have made the effort. 

The book is dense with ideas and symbolism and historical in its stylistic significance. It was also worthwhile to read in combination with The Hours, Michael Cunningham's homage to Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway.

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My Russian. This story, in which a woman disappears from her smothered life and returns to examine it in secret, is not only compelling but offers insights about marriage, loyalty, and friendship. Francesca Woodbridge's seemingly normal life as wife and mother in a Midwestern town belies a fierce and consuming "desire for desire." Though she has suppressed her true nature for many years, when her husband, Ren, is shot by a mysterious intruder, she realizes that she cannot, like other people, handle her "roiling dreams, morning sweats ... like pets that can be sent back to obedience school." But this is just the latest in a long string of events that have poisoned her domestic life. She begins to transgress—a liaison with a young man, then an affair with her Russian gardener. But it is when she takes a break from tending Ren after the shooting and goes to Greece—only to sneak home and live in disguise at a motel for a week—that her life is irrevocably altered.

McNamer's novel is infused with a melancholy rooted in her character's awareness of life's fragility. It is this awareness that forces Francesca to be true to her desire for desire, no matter the outcome. "I'm hoping to channel it into something constructive," she says, "but it's possible that that won't happen. It may be my religion, my way of insisting on the existence of some unseeable truth. It may also be a way of going blind. Of missing what's best when it's right before your eyes."

"A careful writer, a master of the small, telling observation."—The New York Times Book Review

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Passion of Artemisia, The. Vreeland follows up Girl in Hyacinth Blue with another novel encompassing themes of art, history, and the lives of women. The story is narrated in voice of Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653), telling the story of her life and career in Renaissance Italy. Publicly humiliated and scorned in Rome after her participation as a defendant in a rape trial in which the accused is her painting teacher (and father's friend and partner) Artemisia accepts a hastily arranged marriage at the age of 18 to Pietro Stiattesi, a Florentine artist. Her marriage, while not a love match, starts out affectionate, and the arrival of her daughter, Palmira, strengthens the bond with her husband. But rifts develop as Artemisia becomes a more successful painter than her husband; she wins the patronage of the Medicis and is the first woman to be elected to the Accademia dell'Arte. Studio and home become the battlefields of Artemisia's life, and Vreeland chronicles 20 years of her struggles to balance motherhood and painting, not just a career but an all-enveloping passion. While Vreeland's writing is simple and not masterly, the storyline is engaging, the descriptions of the artist's process and paintings are interesting, and the underlying themes of familial and artistic reconciliation are satisfyingly developed. I enjoyed finding references to other Florentine people and places I have read about and visited, as well as viewing Vreeland's Web site to read more about the history of Artemisia (Vreeland did take some artistic license) and see the paintings described in the book.

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Shopgirl. This amusing, poignant novella is about Mirabelle, a lonely, vulnerable young woman who has yet to find her life's direction. As a glove saleswoman in Neiman Marcus, Beverly Hills, she spends her days waiting for customers to appear, and at night she pursues an on-off relationship with the hopeless Jeremy, who possesses "a slouch so extreme that he appears to have left his skeleton at home." Then Mr. Ray Porter steps into Mirabelle's life. He is much older, rich, successful, divorced, and selfish, desiring her "without obligation." Complicating the picture is Mirabelle's fellow employee Lisa, who uses sex "for attracting and discarding men." The mutual incomprehension and psychological damage of all four of Martin's characters causes Shopgirl to veer between a comedy of manners and a much darker work. It is both funny and touching, and it rings true... I didn't necessary fall in love with Mirabelle, and yet Martin made me care about her, and in the end this small story affected me.

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Sister of My Heart.  This enchanting book —sharp-tongued one minute and loving the next—who raise them. Sudha is beautiful, tenderhearted and serious; Anju is plain, smart, and defiant. Yet they love each other as sisters, the bond between them so strong it seems nothing can break it. When both are pushed into arranged marriages, however, each cousin discovers a devastating secret that changes their relationship. The story spans many years and zigzags between India, where Sudha remains in a rigid, small-town household, and America, where Anju moves with her new husband. Then tragedy strikes them both, and they rediscover love, friendship, and courage. 

This book captivated me. The author's lyrical prose gave life to exotic India; her understanding highlighted critical differences between her country of birth and her adopted United States; and her compassion revealed emotions and motivations that are universal. The protagonists' fatal flaw in this tragedy is the belief that one can know what is in another's heart. 

"What an irresistibly absorbing immersion in the pleasure and anguish of growing up passionate in a world of duty, where each comfort is hedged with a constraint and love unsettles every plan."—Rosellen Brown 

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Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy.  I admit it, my education in philosophy has been sorely lacking.  This long, dense novel, a bestseller in the author's native Norway and Europe, presents the history of western philosophy, from the pre-Socratics through Jean-Paul Sartre, in an entertaining and accessible way. It is part fictional mystery story, part textbook lesson, part philosophical conundrum. I actually enjoyed the philosophy essays, clearly summarized and presented, more than the surrounding story, but the story holds the philosophy pieces together and gives perspective to the centuries of  ideas.

Sophie Amundsen is about to turn 15 when she receives a letter from Alberto Knox, a philosopher who undertakes to educate her in his craft. Sections of Knox's lessons to Sophie about the pre-Socratics, Plato and St. Augustine alternate with those about Sophie's life with her well-meaning mother. Soon, though, Sophie begins receiving other, stranger missives addressed to a Hilde Moller Knag from her absent father, Albert. As Alberto Knox's lessons approach this century, he and Sophie come to suspect that they are merely characters in a novel written by Albert for his daughter. Teacher and pupil hatch a plot to understand and possibly escape from their situation. The plot is not resolved until the aftermath of a hilarious, disturbing garden party in celebration of both Midsummer's Eve and Sophie's birthday. Even then, the mystery, like the human mystery, is not really resolved, and the left me turning the fictional and philosophical puzzles over and about like a Rubics cube.

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Twins, The.  Twin sisters in pre-WWII Germany are separated when their parents die. Anna, the stronger, is taken in by relatives on a farm in Germany; Lotte, consumptive like their father, is adopted by a Dutch branch of the family. At this point, their lives undergo an inevitable and irreversible change. After nearly 70 years, they meet by chance at a health resort where Anna, hoping for some understanding and reconciliation, forces Lotte to listen to her story and, in turn, tell her own. Their vastly different upbringing and the hardships of WWII dominate their recollections, but more than anything, the barrier of having been on opposite sides of the war has made Lotte firm in her opposition to reconciliation. Both their stories include hardships of hunger, fear, and loss, and de Loo depicts the sisters, their families, and those around them in neither black nor white, neither all good nor all evil, but in varying shades of gray. Obviously, the twins are a metaphor for their respective countries; if two sisters who share flesh and blood can not overcome their disputes, how can the world? My Dutch relatives informed me that his novel was enormously popular in its original Dutch and was even translated into a feature film there.  I found the story compelling, the characters full and sympathetic, and the complex issues delicately presented.

"De Loo's characterizations do not degenerate into allegory, and ethical questions aren't simplified.—William Ferguson, The New York Time Book Review

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