Natasha Bauman

Stranger Here Below

tina — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Stranger Here Below tells the stories of three generations of women whose lives are connected by a single institution and a changing America.

Amazing Grace “Maze” Jansen and Mary Elizabeth “M. E.” Cox meet at Berea College in Kentucky in 1961. Maze is a poor white mountain girl and M. E. is one of just a few African American students at the college. The young women come from difficult backgrounds and both have mothers who have struggled. Hinnefeld tells the stories of the four women, mothers and daughters, and a fifth woman named Sister Georgia. Sister Georgia went to Berea College decades earlier and is now the last surviving Shaker in Pleasant Hill, a Shaker community near Berea College.

Maze and M. E. are college roommates and scholarship students, but they are not necessarily fast friends. M. E. was raised by a stern preacher father and by Sarah, a mother who retreats into a strange world where she is incapable of simple communication. Both her race and her family background make M. E. unsure of her place in the world and she seems unable to enjoy her musical talents or her friendship with Maze. Still, Maze pursues their friendship doggedly, inviting M. E. to spend time with her at her mother's home. Maze's mother Vista raised Maze on her own, her husband having abandoned her after one night of marriage. Vista is now Sister Georgia's caretaker and the two young women stay with Vista in Sister Georgia's home.

Together the girls watch Sister Georgia perform her Shaker rituals, her dancing, and her shaking and they go through a Shaker ledger from a century ago that contains herbal remedies and recipes. Sister Georgia is old, alone, and the last member of a religion of celibates. What the two young women do not know about Sister Georgia is that when she was in college she fell in love with a black man, but her father, an abolitionist, forbade her to marry him. Her life, like and Sarah’s, is one marked by loss.

Mary Elizabeth is a talented pianist who was courted by the university for her musical abilities. School officials seemed to imply that it was unusual to see such talent in an African American. M. E. is confused by their attentions and turns away from her music. But in the early 1960’s, Maze imagines a different kind of America. She dreams of a twentieth century communal living experience that would nurture people like the five women of this book.

It's a grand scheme, and this book covers a lot of territory in few pages. Hinnefeld begins in 1968, with Maze writing a letter to her missing friend Mary Elizabeth. The next chapter takes us back to 1872 and the birth of Sister Georgia. The lives of all five women unfold in a nonlinear fashion, in isolated sections, and these sections weave in and out of the book's present and deep into the past. Perhaps this weaving back and forth in time reflects the fractured nature of these women's lives. Sometimes it's hard to put the pieces together, just as it's hard for the women to keep their own lives in order. As readers we have to work for it, but in the end I think it's worth the effort. I cared about these women and the pressures they stood up to in their struggles to make themselves whole.

Written by: Natasha Bauman, November 23rd 2010

Band of Angels

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Julia Gregson

Touchstone

It might be said that at heart, Band of Angels is a love story. But the course of love between Catherine Carreg and her childhood friend Deio is a convoluted, meandering one. Catherine and Deio grew up riding horses together in Wales in the 1850s. But when Catherine matures, her family puts a stop to her adventures with Deio, seeing it as improper for a young lady. After her mother dies in childbirth, Catherine feels lost and isolated. She wants to go out into the world and study medicine so she can help save lives, as a way to redeem a personal failure that she couldn't save her own mother.

Catherine escapes Wales with the help of Deio, who is a cattle driver. She dresses as a man and goes to London with him on a drive. Upon reaching London, Deio seems to want Catherine to stay with him, but she rejects him outright, refusing to see him after their furtive journey together. Catherine's determination to become a nurse or doctor is rewarded when she is accepted into Florence Nightingale's school for nurses. When Nightingale abruptly leaves for the Crimean war, Catherine begs to go with her.

In the meantime, Deio realizes the railroad will soon make his job as a cattle driver obsolete. Looking for other ways to make a living, he decides to sell horses to the Allied forces in the Crimea. He takes a number of his horses to Balaklava, knowing that Catherine is somewhere near there, and hoping he will find her somehow.

Catherine and Nightingale's other nurses end up in Scutari, far from the front, where thousands of wounded and ill soldiers are hospitalized. Here, they live in squalor, and food is a luxury. Soldiers die of typhus and other diseases more often than they die of wounds suffered on the battlefield. This is the most fascinating part of the story, but it takes more than half the book to get us to this point.

Gregson's research is strong, and she succeeds in making Wales, and the cattle drive to London, come alive for the reader. But there could have been much more about Nightingale and the procedures she used in the hospital in Scutari to offer the reader historical insight. Nightingale is a filmy character here, difficult to relate to, and the war itself seems very distant as well.

It is true that Nightingale has been characterized as standoffish in reality, but still, she had the passion to take her across the world and into hospitals where no women had been allowed before. We don't see much of that drive here. Catherine's motivation for going to the Crimea needed further development, as well. In addition, it seems a bit of a leap when Catherine starts longing for Deio after she so assuredly rejected him. The love story seems almost superfluous at times.

In spite of some plot and character flaws, the book, overall, does succeed in drawing the reader into a brutal world that we want to know more about. This is one of those imperfect books that keeps you reading, looking forward to more like this: “Blood was the hardest thing of all to wash out; all of them wore it like a permanent stain. They spent most of their time on the wards trying to take it from their tangled hair and old bandages, from faces and dolls and pictures and handkerchiefs; strange what the men carried closest to their hearts.”

Written by: Natasha Bauman, August 31st 2010

The Piano Teacher

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Janice Y. K. Lee

Penguin Books

Janice Y. K. Lee's debut novel, The Piano Teacher, takes the reader inside the upper social circles of Hong Kong during and ten years after World War II. The book opens in 1950s Hong Kong with Claire Pendleton, a young British wife who is bored and takes a job teaching piano to the daughter of a wealthy Hong Kong couple. “It started as an accident. The small Herend rabbit had fallen into Claire's purse.” In these first two lines of the novel, Claire is stealing an expensive figurine from her employer. This act of theft is a crucial revelation of character. Claire will also soon begin an affair with an Englishman who is her employers' chauffeur. The affair is a kind of emotional theft that seems devoid of passion or purpose, as does the physical theft of the figurine.

In the second section of the novel, Lee moves back in time to war-time Hong Kong. It's here that we meet Will Truesdale, Claire's soon-to-be lover. He is new in Hong Kong, and falling in love with Trudy Liang, a young woman he meets at a party. “She is famous, born of a well-known couple, the mother a Portuguese beauty, the father a Shanghai millionaire with fortunes in trading and money lending.” Trudy is spoiled and self-absorbed, and Will seems to be long suffering in his loyal pursuit of her. But the thing we come to learn about Hong Kong and the people who live there is that nothing is quite as it seems.

I was reminded a bit of The Great Gatsby as I read the war-time sections. Lee has created a group of privileged people who live a life of decadence, partying and dining out and lounging about, while their servants feed and groom them and they grow ever more bored with the routine of their privilege. The post-war sections, on the other hand, are redolent with a sense of the decay that has settled over the leisure class. The war seems to have affected everyone, but no one wants to talk about it. Both representations of Hong Kong are vivid and evocative.

Lee builds tension as she progresses through her story, unfolding the layers that will eventually reveal why it is that, ten years after the war and the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, Will is a chauffeur and Trudy is no longer with him. There is an act of betrayal at the heart of the life Will is leading when Claire meets him. I couldn't put this book down while I was moving through the clues, the bits of character revelation that eventually lead to the story of that betrayal.

Unfortunately, once the act is exposed, the tension seems to vanish. The plot gets mired down in some extraneous intrigue regarding the Crown Collection, a group of Chinese artifacts that disappeared during the war, and the reason behind Will's current employment. The enthralling parts of the novel–the triangle of Will and his current and past lovers, and the ways in which the war and its aftermath affect these lovers–become murky in order to make room for tying up the ends of this intrigue. I much prefer the shadowy struggle between Will's lovers: “She came unbidden to his dreams too, battling with the other woman, the one who haunted him day and night. Claire, with her blond and familiar femininity, English rose to Trudy's scorpion.” The two women, perhaps representative of the battle between cultures that Will finds himself unable to avoid, are beautifully drawn and deserving of holding the stage through to the end of the novel, without the intrusion of this unnecessary Crown Collection detour.

Written by: Natasha Bauman, January 27th 2010

The White Mary

admin — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:01:00 +0000

By Kira Salak

Picador

Marika Vicera is a war reporter who has dedicated herself to telling the stories of oppressed peoples around the world. She is giving a talk at Boston University when she meets a psychology doctoral student named Sebastian Gilman. Seb, as he is known, is in awe of Marika's war reports, which have landed frequently on the covers of major newspapers. Although Marika doesn't think much of the practice of psychology, she is taken with Seb. Marika takes a break from her globe trotting to write a biography of famous journalist Robert Lewis, who recently committed suicide. At the same time, she begins dating Seb, and, eventually, she moves in with him.

Soon, the memories of her near death in the Congo begin to haunt her. She feels the easy life she has in Cambridge is meaningless, and she begins to push Seb away. She refuses to let Seb use any of his psychology skills to help her. When she learns that Robert Lewis may be alive in Papua New Guinea, she uses that as an excuse to run from Seb and the intimacy that is so uncomfortable to her.

Marika has admired Lewis all of her life, and now she is driven to find out what really happened to him. She ends up alone in the “heat and humidity of New Guinea...covered in sweat, her clothes entirely soaked. She accidentally left the top of her tent unzipped, and engorged red mosquito bites cover her body like a series of reprimands: do not underestimate this world.”

There have been a couple of sightings of someone who resembles Lewis near Walwasi Mountain, a distant region. Marika hires a guide, who abandons her before they reach their destination. She recruits Tobo, a medicine man in the village where she is abandoned. He reluctantly agrees to take her, as he sees it as a spiritual obligation. The trip to Walwasi Mountain is harrowing: by the time they reach the village, Marika is near death. She is completely dependent on Tobo, who relies on magic and herbs to keep her alive.

Salak's descriptions of Papua New Guinea are vivid and brutal. The fact that Salak herself actually did walk across the country as a reporter lends credence to the world she creates on the page. Salak describes Krit, a village they pass on the way to Walwasi Mountain that seems to have been cursed, and unflinchingly: “Marika sees a little girl with a distended belly relieving herself under one of the huts. Flies buzz over piles of feces scattered about the village, and a fetid stench wafts to her on the breeze.”

The White Mary is indeed a page turner, though at times the back story about Seb and even Robert Lewis seems to interrupt the Papua New Guinea narrative. The connection between the Marika of Papua New Guinea and the Marika back in the States was tenuous and might have been more carefully interwoven. Salak's examination of Seb's insights into psychology in relation to Marika's own psychological makeup could be a bit less heavy handed as well.

But Marika's journey, in the end, goes beyond a search for Robert Lewis. It becomes a search for her own soul, and her own sense of what really matters in life. Ultimately, Salak has crafted a rousing and ultimately satisfying adventure.

Written by: Natasha Bauman, December 7th 2009

Laura Rider's Masterpiece

admin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:25:00 +0000

By Jane Hamilton

Grand Central Publishing

Jane Hamilton's latest novel has a delightful premise. Laura and Charlie Rider own a Midwestern landscape business, for which Laura writes a newsletter. Charlie is a fantastic lover, a man whose equal doses of femininity and masculinity make his understanding of women profound. Laura suffers from “sexual fatigue,” and after twelve years of marriage, she has decided to stop sleeping with Charlie.

Jenna Faroli, the host of Milwaukee Public Radio's Jenna Faroli Show, has recently moved to Laura and Charlie's town of Hartley. Laura has always greatly admired Jenna. In fact, she has told Charlie that Jenna has “the biggest cranium on the planet.” When Laura meets Jenna at the Hartley Garden Club, she is awe struck, and decides Jenna would be a good person for Charlie to befriend. Laura has always dreamed of writing a novel, and she imagines that if she could bring Charlie and Jenna together, she would have real-life inspiration for the characters in her novel, and at the same time, she would be relieved of the sexual guilt she carries for not sleeping with her very sexual husband.

Hamilton's premise is intriguing, her characters quirky, and the setting is charming. But Laura Rider's Masterpiece seems to barely skim the surface of the complications that might arise from such an unusual triangle. Hamilton uses an omniscient narrator who follows all three main characters. This device might have been more successful had Hamilton not written such a brief novel. Coming in at merely 214 pages, the book doesn't quite give us the chance to know any of the characters well as we move quickly back and forth between them.

There are far too many oddities to be contained within these few pages. Charlie believes he saw a UFO when he was a teenager, and he and Jenna first meet when they see bobbing lights in the night sky. Charlie tells her about the Silver People he saw as a teenager. Jenna, who doesn't believe in UFOs, is taken with Charlie's story nonetheless. The Silver People are referenced frequently when Charlie and Jenna begin an email correspondence, yet ultimately, they serve as nothing more than a red herring in Masterpiece's plot. In addition, Laura's book idea disappears almost completely from the novel, along with the Silver People, while Charlie and Jenna pursue their off-beat romance.

Hamilton's prose is at times simply stunning. Early in the novel, when she is trying to think of ways to bring Charlie and Jenna together, Laura remembers that Charlie has Jenna's e-mail address: “Laura, thinking of that, closed her eyes and saw all at once a small opening, as if in the distance. A prick of light. It was the warm, well-lit tunnel of cyberspace, and she could hear it, too, hear the scurrying, the hum of the channel that would connect Jenna and Charlie.” Masterpiece is peppered with such illuminating passages. The various threads of the plot are all, in themselves, rich ideas, but the story and the characters are deserving of fuller treatment. Ultimately, Laura Rider's Masterpiece leaves the reader wanting more.

Written by: Natasha Bauman, July 29th 2009