Read This Now!
I’ll post mini-reviews of books I’ve read and enjoyed/admired or want to read. If I’ve talked you into reading a given book too, there’ll be a handy buy link after I sound off.
a chair keeps the floor down
Susan Dambroff is my favorite living poet. Her most recent collection, A CHAIR KEEPS THE FLOOR DOWN, is based on her career as a teacher, especially of children with special needs. Among the lessons Susan learned from kids is that they see the world differently. She celebrates the child point of view in the poems of this collection. The title is reported wisdom from one of her students. In many of the poems, Susan presents remembered children in a stanza, what they liked best, what they did most, who they were. But she never forgets the whole child. In “What’s Done Is Done,” she describes her life work. “I was the teacher/opening boxes of surprise…I was the conductor and the witness/I was the magician and the mother/and the child I once was/remembering.’ The best poetry reverberates in your mind after you have heard or read it. A CHAIR KEEPS THE FLOOR DOWN is full of reverberation.
like water and other stories
LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES by Olga Zilberbourg is a story-collection replete with insight and humor, just like its author. I laughed out loud throughout “Bananas for Sale,”a three-page story about a woman who aggressively sells unwanted bananas before they go bad in a St. Petersburg, Russia winter. “The bananas were a new venture…they’d been purchased on an unsecured loan. They had to be sold.” The stories in this collection are as long as a few pages and as short as a paragraph. I did not believe a story could be told in a thousand words, much less a hundred. Now I believe in both, thanks to Olga Zilberbourg. Many of the pieces reflect her life in Russia, before she came to the U.S. for college. She writes of the immigrant experience, especially from the former Soviet Union. Others were inspired by motherhood. Her children are joys to her and to the readers of her work. A book to sit with over a cup of tea or glass of wine.
Lazarus in St. Petersburg
LAZARUS IN ST. PETERSBURG by Wayne Goodman is the story of a man who cannot die. Hundreds of years earlier, the title character came down with a mysterious ailment that killed almost everyone around him but left him immortal and forever young. He lives various lives in various locations but in this novel, he has relocated to St. Petersburg of the the 1870’s, a golden age for music, literature, and gay people in Russia. Lazarus makes a living as a healer because, also as a result of the mysterious illness, he can see into the near future. He knows whether the sick person who comes to him will live or die. If they live, they credit Lazarus. If they die, well, he has promised them nothing. In St. Petersburg, he enjoys the acquaintance of great artists like Tolstoy and Rimsky-Korsakov. If you like historical fiction with a twist, this is the book for you. A strong sense of the time and place.
twister
TWISTER, a novel by Genanne Walsh, is the story of what happens in a small Midwestern town before and after a tornado, a twister, sweeps through it. This book is remarkable for its story and its structure. The structure follows that of a twister. The plot swirls more and more tightly until there is a moment of still clarity before it whirls away, leaving devastation. Before the twister comes, the town is mourning the loss of a local hero, Lance, a young soldier killed in war. Gradually, then faster and faster, the reader becomes privy to the secrets of his survivors, their intrigues, and intertwined histories. A mother and aunt who do not talk. Sylvie, Lance’s girlfriend, and her doubts. Her parents who covert the mother’s land and would have had it had Lance not died. Scottie, a shoe repairman with a fetish for shoes. The Old Man, mentally rewired by a lightning strike. Awarded the Big Moose Prize for the Novel.