Classification: Fiction

Is there anything better than being delightfully surprised by a book that you weren’t expecting to like?

I had never heard of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society when I picked up a paperback copy of the novel last spring, from the display table at my favorite used bookstore. The title nearly put me off – it sounds so silly, worse than The Friday Night Knitting Club (which I had also recently read, and about which I will not be posting.) Also, the book has two authors – Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows – which is often a red flag for clunkiness.

I read the “critical acclaim” blurbs on the covers and the first few pages, and they were very good. What clinched it, for me, was a front cover blurb by Elizabeth Gilbert, in which she said “Treat yourself to this book, please…” I had recently read Eat, Pray, Love by Gilbert, and since her own writing is superb, I figured she knew what she was talking about. After dithering for only a few minutes, I bought the book.

The entire story is told in the form of letters written from various characters to other characters. There are no editorial explanations, other than a notation at the top of each letter, stating whom the letter was from, and to. This tactic could easily have become gimmicky, or worse, it could have made the narrative sound choppy or confusing. None of these things happened, thanks to the beauty and strength of the writing.

The book, published in 2008, is set in 1946 – but it sounds timeless, not dated.
(It is also one of the very few “squeaky-clean” novels I will be recommending. Approved for all audiences.) It is, at heart, a love story, filled with witty people I wish I knew – by the end of the book, they don’t seem fictional.

Nutshell: the main character, Juliet, a writer who lives in England, becomes pen pals with a man who belongs to a reading group on the small island of Guernsey. He first writes to her because he has acquired a book that once belonged to her (her name and address are penciled inside) – it is a collection of essays by an author they both admire. Juliet, who is searching for a topic for her next book, begins corresponding with him and with several members of his reading group. Eventually, she visits the island for an extended period of time.

The book is light-hearted and fun – sort of like a literary beach-read. What I cannot get over, is how much technical skill the authors displayed. Imagine how tricky it would be to develop all sorts of diverse characters without using the editorializing of either a first-person or third-person narrator. When you create an entire story using fictional letters, you have to describe people and actions with extreme subtlety. The moment you start abusing the system, by trying to cram in extra description that you just really need the reader to know, it will blare out like a foghorn. There’s a reason more writers don’t try to use this format – it’s dang hard.

The poignant back-story of the book is explained in an Afterward. The main author, Mary Ann Shaffer, fell ill and died just before the book was published, so she never got to see the wide acclaim it received. This was her first book. Her niece, Annie Barrows, did the final rewrites on the book, when Mary Ann was too sick to finish. Whatever work the niece did, it fits in seamlessly.

I honestly can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t like this book. I’m sure they exist, I just can’t come up with any, off the top of my head. The story, and the people in it, are simply that charming.

The death of Mary Ann Shaffer is our loss; I would have very much liked to read other work by her. Instead, we are left with this nearly perfect little novel. I guess that’s not a bad legacy to have.

Classification: Fiction

I will concede right off the bat that Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, will not appeal to everyone. But I’ve got to tell you – dude can write.

The book was a best seller when it was published, and won a bunch of awards and other critical praise, but I resisted reading it for years. I got the impression, from the cover illustration, that the book involved a guy and a tiger that sat in a boat and talked to each other. I have nearly zero tolerance for “magic realism,” as it is called in literature – a dislike that probably revokes my literary credentials. (I once eagerly bought and read the fanatically acclaimed One Hundred Years of Solitude – and I hated it.)

Anyway, my oldest brother and I were at Powell’s, an independent bookstore that takes up an entire city block and goes on for days. (Every time I go in there, I’m tempted to tie a bell and a rope around my ankle, in case I need to be hauled out like an Old Testament priest.) We were in the main lobby, hanging out by the bargain table, which is my section of choice these post-income days. My brother saw Life of Pi on the table and said that I should get it.

“I don’t do talking tigers,” I said. I pointedly turned to a different book.

“I don’t think that’s what it’s about,” he protested.

I scowled and sighed, then picked up Life of Pi and flipped through it. I started reading passages aloud to my brother. Within minutes, we were bent double over the table, chortling madly while the other customers gave us a wide berth. The plot isn’t a comedy; the writing is just that marvelously clever. Who was I to resist? I bought the book.

Life of Pi is separated into three sections. (The author divides it up differently than I do. I’ll give you my version.) The first part sets up the main character (Pi’s) childhood in India. It is part narrative, part philosophical conversation. The story tracks Pi as he learns about animals from his zookeeper father, and it follows his childish attempt to embrace three very different religions at once. The author’s descriptions of zoo animal habits and treatment are fascinating. The appealing qualities of Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism are all presented with equal clarity and tenderness. There are many wonderful passages in this section. At one point, Pi muses:

I’ll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we…But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

The second section is the book’s tour de force – and it is sensational. Pi’s father closes down the zoo and decides to take his family and all the animals to North America. Their ship goes down in the Pacific Ocean. Pi makes it onto a lifeboat; the only other survivors are a small group of animals, which includes a large tiger. The tiger quickly kills the other animals, and Pi survives on the lifeboat, with the tiger, for 227 days. This sounds really bizarre, I know – but Martel’s writing is so elegant and rich in detail that you would swear that all of this had actually happened to him. It’s simply riveting. By the end of this part, I felt I knew precisely what it would be like to be set adrift on a small boat with a large tiger for a long period of time.

And then, in the third part, the story takes a swan dive into a sea of surrealism, and loses me completely. Pi takes refuge on an algae island that has trees that come alive and consume creatures at night. There are – oh, I don’t even know what there are. This section is mercifully short. I’m quite sure it is supposed to symbolize something, but I’m either not smart enough or not weird enough to figure it out.

At the end, there are five chapters of wrap-up that turn the story on its head. There is a major twist that may or may not be real. My oldest brother, who is a good deal more sophisticated than I am, enjoyed the ending very much, when he borrowed the book. So there you go.

Wait – is this a recommendation, or not? Well…yes. Although the story itself is more than a little peculiar, and it gets macabre, the prose is so lovely that even the most dreadful parts are not disgusting. The book is a treat for writers, because Martel’s writing is exceptional. As for non-writers – if you don’t mind some strangeness, Life of Pi tells a terribly interesting story.

Just watch out for those ridiculous magical trees.

Classification: Fiction

Great writing is one of my top five favorite things on this earth (it’s actually probably #3, just below God and my family, and just above sunshine and a good plate of fettucine alfredo.) There are so few truly great writers, compared to the vast number of people who publish books. The Great Ones convey information in such a lovely way, you don’t even realize how much information they’re conveying.

Serena by Ron Rash is a beautifully written book. (Small wonder that Rash is an established poet – this is his first novel.) I’m going to give you the book’s first paragraph in a moment.

Here is the information that Rash is going to convey in that first paragraph:

The setting is the early 1900’s.
The protagonist is a man named Pemberton.
He has relocated to the South.
He is wealthy, and has just inherited a large estate.
He is an important man, with underlings.
He is a hard man, careless with those “beneath” him.
He has gotten a young, poor girl pregnant.
The girl’s father has a wary loathing of Pemberton, and intends to kill him.

Now, here it is:

“When Pemberton returned to the North Carolina mountains after three months in Boston settling his father’s estate, among those waiting on the train platform was a young woman pregnant with Pemberton’s child. She was accompanied by her father, who carried beneath his shabby frock coat a bowie knife sharpened with great attentiveness earlier that morning so it would plunge as deep as possible into Pemberton’s heart.”

Can you see how he gave all the information I listed above, in a gorgeous way, sometimes with just a word or two? All of these details are fleshed out in the pages that follow, but you already know them after the first paragraph. A far clunkier writer (like me) would have laid out the facts with a great deal of rambling, relying way too heavily on workaday adjectives.

(Plot, briefly: the book follows Pemberton as he brings home his new wife, Serena, a tough and cruel woman. She helps him run their timber business and won’t let anything stand in her way. Not even Pemberton.)

This book was an absolute pleasure to read, interesting and suspenseful and so rich in details. And that writing! On one page, Rash signals that it’s twilight by referring to “a pale moon impatient for the night.”

In Heaven, I will write like this. God and I have already discussed it.