Category Archives: what’s on your bedside table

The Monday Book is on Tuesday this Month….

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WRITE COMES TO THE CUMBERLANDS is a busy weekend for all of us, so we’re just getting back on schedule with the Monday Book.

Yes, I know; it’s Tuesday.

cover_pierTHE DIVE FROM CLAUSEN’S PIER by Ann Packer is about a couple on the verge of breaking up, except he has a terrible accident that leaves him paralyzed.

And she still breaks up with him. Because she’s found someone else.

That’s pretty much it, but you can imagine the stuff going on around that. This is a book where most of the action takes place inside people’s hearts.

The details in the book – she loves to sew, doesn’t have a lot of money, carefully parses money to make herself a sexy dress that kind of isn’t because she’s broken up with her boyfriend, but still – are lovely, subtle, not overwhelming, all undergirding the plot and characters.

This is really a character-driven plot, and each person is fully etched. Here’s a random sample of the kind of thing I mean: “Kilroy gave Simon an amused nod, but he crossed his arms over his chest, and some kind of inner turbulence seeped out of him.”

She’s got a nice, almost journalistic, way with her words, and her use of big themes like wealth vs. want, or love vs. lust, is set in almost embossed relief against the small day-to-day details of the lives she’s describing.

It also has a surprisingly satisfying ending, for this kind of book where somebody’s heart is going to get broken, no matter what. Avoiding cliche, it still brings resolution.

 

The Monday Book: WAITING by Ha Jin

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I read this on holiday at a friend’s house, so of course I had to read quickly in order to leave it there. What struck me about the book was how it made you feel you could see inside a China that is usually invisible to guests and visitors, the one that runs on paperwork and bribes. And yet, at the same time, it made you feel like issues surrounding love and human hearts are the same the world over: when you’ve got what you want, you want something else.

WAITING is about a man in an arranged marriage to a woman from his former village. He now works as a doctor in the city, and wants to divorce her and marry a nurse from his hospital. It has elements of rural/urban divisions as well as cultural divides within China.

Some people might find this a depressing read, but I found the buoyant bits between the “well, that didn’t work” parts satisfying. Also, the prose is… stiff, but in a positive way. You don’t notice how Ha Jin writes so much as the story he is telling; the words don’t get in the way. I actually thought it had been translated at first; it had that feel, but he writes and teaches in English – in Georgia.

If Iago is your favorite Shakespearean villain, if you’re interested in other cultures, if you like to read about women’s lives in China, if you plain like good storytelling, this is a good book for you. If you like a lot of zip and action and stiff prose bothers you, you won’t like it.

I loved it, enough to stay up late and finish it the night before we flew out of our friend Jane’s place.