Catching Up

I’ve gotten behind in my book reviews. My excuse is that I was out in California hanging out with my sisters while my father had surgery, which was very successful. Before long, he’ll be feeling like a 20 year old. You’ll have to ask him if you want to hear the rest of the story!

In any case, I read three very interesting (and different) books.

Being Dead by Jim Crace is a very unusual book that details the consequences (biological as well as emotional) of the deaths of two people, Joseph and Celice. They had headed out to the beach where they had first met, for nostalgia’s sake and to lay to rest ghosts from the past, but are brutally murdered by a man who only wants to rob them of their money and somewhat meager possessions. Before their bodies are found a week or so later by their estranged daughter, we learn about their initial meeting, their emotionally empty life together, and about the natural processes by which decaying bodies are returned to the earth, if not interrupted. Crace’s writing is tight, vivid, poetic, and compelling. Here, he conveys their daughter’s thoughts at her parent’s funeral:

But she had at least an answer to the lesser question. How would the dying spend their time when life’s short portion shrinks with every waking day? She’d walked to see mortality that Sunday afternoon and found her parents irredeemable. Her gene suppliers had closed shop. Their daughter was next in line. She could not duck out of the queue. So she should not waste her time in this black universe. The world’s small, breathing denizens, its quaking congregations and its stargazers, were fools to sacrifice the flaring briefness of their lives in hopes of paradise or fears of hell. No one transcends. There is no future and no past. There is no remedy for death – or birth – except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.

Next, I read The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. I’m not going to write about that now, but will save that until after my book club meets to discuss it. Maybe I can get some of the other book clubbers to post their thoughts.

This morning I finished An Unfinished Life by Mark Spragg. Though not nearly as literary or profound as these other books, this was a book that I just could not put down. It tells the story of a fractured family, and the events that lead them back together. The emotional core of the story is a 9-year-old girl named Griff. Griff and her mother flee her mother’s abusive boyfriend, returning to Wyoming, which her mother left before Griff was born in order to escape her guilt and sorrow after the death of her husband (and Griffs father). In Wyoming, Griff comes to know her grandfather (whom she thought was dead) and his life-long friend, Mitch, who was grotesquely maimed after an encounter with a grizzly bear. You can probably guess what happens in this book, nothing is particularly novel or surprising. But the characters are drawn with so much heart, and their desires and fears are so universal, that the story completely drew me in.