Toibin imagines the life of Thomas Mann, focusing less on his work and artistic development than on his unconventional marriage, his complicated relationship with Germany through both world wars, and his homoerotic preoccupation with young men. A vivid and engaging read if you're curious about Mann, particularly the strains of suicide, open homo- and bisexuality, and marriages of convenience that seem to recur in the family.
However, be warned:
If you like intelligent, disturbing literary thrillers that challenge your beliefs about violence and its perpetrators, this book’s for you.
Two young teenaged girls have turned up dead in the past year in a small Missouri town. A Chicago reporter, who grew up there, is sent to cover the story. She has recently emerged from a stay in a psych ward and is struggling to refrain from her habit of carving words into her own skin.
Trauma
At 66, when I look back over my early life, I see the typical manifestations of trauma. I began to “forget” the abuse— dissociate---well before the age of 5. I experienced a first depression at 12. By 14 I had developed an eating disorder, alternating periods of anorexia and bingeing. At 17, I considered suicide. In college, I would walk for hours to calm anxiety attacks that seemed to come from nowhere. In my early 20s, I fell in love with an alcoholic, a relationship that ended after two and a half exhausting years of anger and mistrust.
Powers is in a league all his own when it comes to writing about the environment and impending climate catastrophe. He speaks with crystalline emotional and moral clarity about the natural world crashing down around us; we should be terrified, he says, and we must confront the political and economic powers invested in keeping us blithely indifferent.
Like everyone, I'm exhausted. Minnesota has one of the highest covid transmission rates in the country and has held that position for weeks. I've been afraid to do much of anything outside our home, other than the usual and necessary errands.
It's becoming apparent that this way of living is not sustainable. I feel depression creeping up. So F. and I are going out for breakfast tomorrow, early, to escape the crowds. I hate to take the risk of getting or transmitting covid, mostly because our doctors and nurses are desperate for relief. But depression can be just as dangerous as covid--it makes me push away those I love most.
I'm trying to cling to the news that is most hopeful: the omicron virus is less deadly, the Pfizer antiviral pill is 90 percent effective early in the disease. I need that hope. For the first time I see why Jesus listed it among the top three: faith, hope, and love.
As a survivor of childhood abuse, I've noticed a pattern: I feel my worst just before a memory or insight that propels intense growth. I hope the pandemic is like that. I hope it precedes a world-wide reckoning, a humbling here in the U.S., where our sense of control and entitlement has been blown to smithereens--then ushers in a new era of intense growth and innovation.
I hope.
Oops. I so much wanted to love this. But this sprawling family saga sprawls so far and wide that it's nearly impossible to keep track of who's who, how they're related to each other, and why they do what they do. I was desperate for at least a family tree, or a cast of characters, but there was no help to be found.
There were also descriptions, ideas, and whole paragraphs that struck me as way-too-familiar. Either I'd seen them earlier in the book, or remembered them from Power of the Dog--a disconcerting deja vu. Plus, there were sudden shifts in time, place, and speaker that just ... happened ... from one sentence to the next, with no speaker tag, paragraph break, or segue. Even the two most important characters, The Sheep Queen (Emma) and her daughter Elizabeth, seemed hard to distinguish from each other, which further muddied the central mystery: who, if anyone, gave up her infant daughter for adoption?
Savage can write, no doubt about it. And I think I get what he was intending to do, and partially accomplished at the end. But the book was a slog to get through and I almost gave up several times in frustration.
With some better editing, this book could've been great. As it is, it feels like a rough draft--a messy pool of scenes and people and events not yet honed into a work of art.
I love discovering new authors--or in this case, old, dead authors--whose works are vivid, powerful, and not-widely-known. As for Power of the Dog, you may have seen the movie with Benedict Cumberbatch (always worth watching!) and been either mystified or blown away by its ending. Whether you have or haven't seen the movie, it's well worth reading the book. The novel fleshes out some of the more mysterious elements of the plot and characters--especially what motivates two of the central characters, Phil and Peter. The abusive Phil of the novel is more sympathetic, and the Peter of the novel more chillingly remote.
The movie (directed by Jane Campion, best known for The Piano) is beautiful and deeply affecting, and treats us to a wholly unanticipated ending. In the novel, the ending is shocking but also deeply poignant. We question the neatness of good and bad, and experience the tragedy of simply being human.
Read the book.
Klara is a robot, one of many designed to serve as nannies/companions for children. Ishiguro traces the development of her emotions and understanding as she cares for a young girl, and ultimately asks: what makes us human? Can a robot be more compassionate, more loving, more self-sacrificing, than ourselves? Like everything by Ishiguro, a fascinating, thought-provoking, and touching read.
The Vixen
At his first job as a slush-pile editor, Simon, a young Jewish man grapples with fallout from the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Should he help bring to market a book that portrays Ethel as a seductive, greedy, and fully complicit traitor? As Simon's anxiety grows, the truth becomes ever harder to pin down.
Prose forces us to confront our own desires for approval, money, and influence, and see our complicity in the lies perpetuated by those who will benefit from them most.
Max got his first shot at Lloyd’s Pharmacy, in its temporary location. It’s just a few blocks away from the original site, where the building burnt to the ground.
There are days I feel the presence and consolation of God’s protection, and days I don’t. The sinister variants are still out there. But it’s unseasonably warm here in Minnesota--that season when everything is tossed up in the air: brilliant and warm one day, a snowy blizzard the next. I feel vulnerable, a little afraid, a little hesitant about leaving my winter’s cocoon. I am not quite sure I can meet the demands of a life more exposed.
I’m trying to stay positive, focus on the two little girls I’m teaching to read, getting Max through his two courses. Hoping for a vaccine for F. in the next weeks or months. Still in a sort of stasis but trying to envision a realistic future. On April 15, two weeks past my second dose of vaccine, I’m going to celebrate: get together with my best friend and her partner, get my hair cut! Small, wondrous things.
Tim, Joe’s brother, has just died of covid. This feels like a crushing defeat. I remember Tim from my teens, as young and slim, sandy-haired and blue-eyed. (This may or may not be accurate). Defined by the tantalizing news that he played minor-league baseball—and was later drafted by the Atlanta Braves. A sort of golden boy, fascinating but remote, like a beautiful planet.
I feel an implacable undertow of grief. Death is too close and out of my control.
The state kept its word. I got my first dose of vaccine yesterday. Sitting in the vast amphitheater of the Minneapolis Convention Center, I felt a teary upwelling of gratitude, for the scientists and doctors and nurses and truckdrivers who had carried me to this moment. I was one of the lucky ones—selected at random from a pool of some 300,000 seniors--surely there were other in more precarious health? At 63, F. is still waiting.
When I got back home, I
was exhausted. Not just from the vaccine, I think, but also from all the weeks
and months of battling fear. I secluded myself upstairs, lay down on the floor
with a book. My attention kept slipping off the page. Eventually I gave into
the undertow of profound fatigue and closed my eyes.
For the first time in
almost a year I have a sense of protection, an infusion of efficacy; I’m less
terrified of moving about in the world. I can just glimpse a room full of light
through a door cracked open.
At the last minute, Max switched from game development courses to two gen-ed requirements: interpersonal communication and health psychology, both online. They’re required for a 2-year degree in sport and exercise science. Now he’s struggling through them. The college has not been helpful in providing tutors, so I’ve been putting in 2-3 hours a day, growing exhausted and resentful about my lost freedom. But I finally rounded up two college girls to take over four of the seven days a week, at $20 per hour. It’s worth it. The two young women are close to his age, and patient, and Max is happy to interact with someone other than his parents and his typical circle of friends.
Devastated. My appointment for a first dose of the vaccine has been cancelled, because of the snowstorm in Texas. Despite the official reassurances, I’m terrified it’ll take weeks to get another appointment.
2/15/21
Can’t get the proportions
of the nose right. The problem is I just
don’t like noses, the way they stick out from the face in profile. I keep wanting to make them smaller than they
are.
2/17/21
I tend to draw too
lightly. Need to go back to darken the shadows. Make the face, especially, pop into
three-dimensions.
2/19/21
Finally getting
close. Took a photo and posted it to my
phone, to compare to later iterations.
