Two Perspectives on Getting Old

Neither of these two books is explicitly about aging, but both of them made me think a lot about getting old.

It started with The Madonnas Of Leningrad, by Debra Dean. About a third of the way through the book, I was so upset that Garrett was urging me to read something else. As the central character, Marina , slips into the never-never land of Alzheimer's disease, her family struggles to get a grip on how to cope with the disease and how it will affect their own lives. That was the part that I found so terrifying, but there's another whole story being told that is really fascinating and that eventually, I could appreciate. During the siege of Leningrad in 1941-43, Marina had been working at the Hermitage Museum, carefully packing away paintings and other treasures to protect them from Nazi bombs. She and her colleague committed each painting to memory and these are the memories that stick with her, along with memories of starvation and death, when she can't even recognize her own children some 60 years later. It's a really interesting device to tell the story of the siege while also exploring the nature and permanence of memory.

Next I read Any Human Heart by William Boyd. This novel is written in the form of a series of journals written by (the fictitious) Logan Mountstuart beginning in the early 1900s. Born in Uruguay to British parents, Mountstuart goes to prep school in England and then on to Oxford, where he decides to become a writer. There is nothing extraordinary about Mountstuart... his story meanders through the decades and he is modestly successful at pretty much everything he does. But in the process of living his ordinary life, he crosses paths with some extraordinary people, including writers such as Evelyn Waugh and Ernest Hemingway, as well as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Ian Fleming recruits him to be a spy in the Naval Intelligence Division during WWII, and that leads to some interesting adventures. Boyd stays true to the journal format, writing in a very personal way about the major events of the 20th century, particularly about the decline of British power. There's humor, romance, sex, and heartbreak, and through it all Logan continues to move along on not much more than inertia. As he approaches his later years, he adjusts his life to accommodate his declining health in a way that is refreshing in its ordinariness. Getting old no longer felt so frightening.

A New Kindle!

Amazon just announced it's new Kindle DX, a bigger version that's supposed to display native pdfs and supposedly will be better for newspaper formats. The price has gone up to $489 and it won't be available until the summer. I think I'll stick with my old Kindle 1, although I can see how this could be great for people who have to view a lot of pdfs.

I'd love to hear what other people think.

Cutting for Stone

When I heard about Cutting for Stone, it sounded like a book I was guaranteed to like. Years ago, I read and really enjoyed Abraham Verghese's memoir, My Own Country. Now he has written a novel that combines his skills as a doctor with those of a writer. I saw that it had gotten excellent reviews and was excited to read it.

But I was disappointed. The plot did not really engage me until the last third or so of the book, and the characters felt a little bit flat and not fully developed. But what really annoyed me about this book was Verghese's overuse of detailed medical/surgical descriptions to help move the plot along.

"She first put a catheter through the urethra into the bladder to divert the urine away from the fistula to allow the wet, macerated tissues to dry and heal... She had to carefully dissect out the edges of fistula, trying to find what had once been discrete layers of bladder lining, bladder wall, and then vaginal wall and vaginal lining..."

It didn't work for me. It felt to me like Verghese didn't trust his skill as a writer or storyteller to move the story along; he had to resort to what he really knows, and that's medicine. I'm reminded of the fact that Khaled Hosseini, who wrote the excellent books The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, is also a physician. Thankfully, he told us stories without constantly reminding us that he's a doctor too (although I do not believe he still practices medicine).