Marjorie Morningstar

This is an old novel (1955) by Herman Wouk.  I picked it up as it was recommended in The End of Your Life Book Club - as one of their all time favourite novels.  It was long which was a bit daunting but it's definitely withstood the test of time.  It tells the story of five years in the life of Marjorie Morgenstern (stage name, Morningstar) starting from when she was 17; though the last chapter tells us where she is at 15 years later.
Marjorie was the daughter of immigrant Jewish parents living in New York who are trying desperately to create a glamourous life for their daughter notwithstanding the depression.  For a short time she lives on Central Park West but her father's business cannot maintain that lifestyle when times get really tough and the family must move further into the West Side.  Her parents also want her to be educated but cannot afford an Ivy League college so she is a day student and Hunter College for women.  But she aspires for more and hangs out first with Columbia students and eventually an arsty crowd as she's sure she's destined for a career on Broadway.
Her parents are protective of her but an eccentric friends gets her a job as a drama counsellor at a summer camp where she sneaks across the lake to an adult resort and meets the man who becomes the love of her life, Noel Airman.  Noel, really Saul Ehrmann, is more than 10 years older than her, a drifter and probably bipolar, the black sheep of his high class German Jewish family.  He wants to be a songwriter, and stage a Broadway musical, and Marjorie believes in him.  But he doesn't really have as much talent as he thinks and he certainly doesn't have the drive to stick with a job though given opportunities both in the movie business and the advertising business.
The book essentially follows Marjorie and Noel's on-again, off-again romance over the next five years - as she subconsciously hopes to "tame" him and make him her husband and he fights falling into that convention, abandoning her more than once when he thinks he's close to capitulating.  In the end she follows him to Paris - and succeeds in extracting a proposal but responds in a surprising way.
There are also interesting side stories showing Marjorie's relationship with her parents, her large extended family (the Uncle, Samson-Aaron, was one of my favourite characters), her sometimes supportive, other times lying and scheming friend, Marsha Zelenko, Noel's young assistant, Wally, who moons over her for years, if not decades, and another somewhat crazy man she befriends crossing the ocean to Paris, Michael Eden, who is working undercover to rescue Jews from Nazi Germany and whose fate is never revealed).
Though there is not a lot of action, the character development make this book a fascinating, though lengthy, read.  I recommend it for those with the time and the patience.

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

From the description I thought this book sounded fascinating, in fact the long-winded, descriptive prose left me bored.  It's written by a creative writing grad who served with the US army in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 and is a fictional account of the experiences of Private Bartle, a young soldier serving in Iraq at that time.  In training, at the request of his superior, Sterling, he takes a teenaged soldier, Private Murphy, under his wing and promises Murphy's mother he'll bring him home safely.  As Sterling wisely tells him, he made a mistake as there are no promises in war.  The book moves back and forth between what happened in training and then Iraq and the consequences for Bartle after the war.  It certainly is very colourful in its description of the horrors of war - even for the so-called lucky survivors.  But I just found the descriptions of place and mood went on for too long.  The story would have had more impact if it moved more quickly.

Brooklyn

A beautifully written novel by the Irish author, Colm Toibin.  His writing flows so smoothly it's a pleasure to read - and sucks you into the lives of his characters.  This book focuses on Eilis Lacey, a young woman living in small town Ireland in the early 1950s.  She's unable to find work at home except for a Sunday job with an elderly shopkeeper who mistreats and underpays her.  So she and her widowed mother rely on the salary of her sister, Rose who works in an office and the small amounts her three brothers are able to send from England where they've gone to seek work.  One day Eilis' luck changes when an Irish Priest now living in Brooklyn arranges for her to immigrate to the US - he finds her work in a shop and an Irish boarding house to live in.
Eilis has a difficult crossing and suffers from terrible homesickness but eventually succeeds at the shop and begins night school courses in bookkeeping.  She also falls in love with Tony, the son of Italian immigrants, and is welcomed into his warm, though different family.  When everything seems to finally be going well for Eilis she must return home due to a family tragedy.  At first she feels out of place and longs to return to Brooklyn and Tony.  But soon her relationship with her mother improves, she gets back together with old friends, finds temporary bookkeeping work and is pursued by a local boy who'd snubbed her before she left.  At the end she's left with deciding where to pursue her future.  I won't give it away - but I think she makes the right choice.

In Other Rooms Other Wonders

This is a collection of interrelated short stories by Daniyal Mueenuddin.  Set in Pakistan (except for one where the characters visit Paris), the stories all deal with an old wealthy landowner, his family members and their various servants.  We get insight into the relationships between the monied and the poor, the old and the young, men and women.  What they all have in common is terrible unhappiness.  While the language is vivid, describing both the characters and their surroundings, not a single story has an uplifting ending - though maybe that's more realistic.  I enjoyed reading this but it left me feeling down.

The Bite of the Mango

This book, a memoir by Mariatu Kamara with an assist by the Canadian journalist, Susan McClelland, was one featured in The End of Your Life Book Club.  It tells the story of Kamara's childhood in Sierra Leone which was rudely interrupted by a rape by a local man then an attack by rebels who cut off her hands so she could not vote for the President (ironically, at the time she did not even know what a president was).  She somehow escaped alive and walked her way to a clinic days away on foot and then was transported to a hospital in the capital Freetown where she was operated on then nursed to health by extended family and a friend she made on the transport bus to the hospital - even though those people had nothing either.  She lived with the family (including 3 cousins who'd also had there hands cut off) in a refugee camp for amputees and their families surviving on the pittance she and her cousins earned by begging in town.  Her baby was born healthy but died of malnutrition at 10 months leading to her depression and guilt as she felt the baby was taken from her as she did not love him enough. She gets her spirit back when she joins a theatre troupe in the refugee camp and performs in plays about local issues (including the civil war and HIV/AIDS which thankfully she escaped).  Her story is reported on by a Canadian journalist causing a Toronto family to take interest in her and eventually bring her to Toronto where she joins another extended family from Sierra Leone, learns English and goes to high school.  She gets the idea of writing a book from McClelland who introduces her to Ishmael Beah, the former child soldier from Sierra Leone whose memoir became a best seller.  After visiting her country again with UNICEF representatives, and seeing the horrifying conditions her family still lives in, she decided the best way to help them is to make money and raise awareness by telling her story.  She even meets with the President - now that she knows what a President is.  An interesting story by a remarkably strong young girl.

My Winter Vacation Reads

For some reason this winter break I've read more non-fiction than fiction - but most of it was very enjoyable.  Here's a taste...

The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe

I avoided this book when it first came out because I thought it would be too depressing, but I'm glad I relented as in fact, though sad, it was generally uplifting and certainly interesting.  It also gave me ideas for a bunch of future reads. The book is the author's tale of a "book club" of two which he shares with his mother from her diagnosis with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer until her death almost 2 years later.  Schwalbe and his mother share books and discuss them in doctors' waiting rooms, while his mother receives chemotherapy and, later in her home when she's on palliative care and too sick to leave her home.  Though they always had a close relationship, the books bring them together and provide a basis for talking about the tough issues (like facing death and life for the family following the death of a loved one).  Through the themes they explore in various books, they are able to face their personal situations - and not just the mother's illness but also the son's dissatisfaction with his job and other more "trivial" issues.  The books they read are an eclectic mix of old classics, new popular fiction and self-help or spiritual guides.  Schwalbe's mother was also a fascinating woman and the book tells us a lot about her life.  She was really ahead of her time in fighting for women's rights throughout the world and continued to do so until her death.  I really recommend this book for anyone who loves reading and/or is interested in family dynamics during a difficult period.

The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal

This is another memoir but with an interesting twist.  The author inherits a collection of netsuke, tiny Japanese art sculptures, from a great uncle living in Japan and decides to trace their family history.  It starts with their acquisition by his great grandfather's cousin who is living in Paris in the late 1800s.  The family is a Jewish banking dynasty that began as grain traders in Odessa and spread the family business into Vienna and Paris.  Charles, who first acquires the netsuke, is the third son in his branch of the family and therefore is "an extra", spared from playing a role in the Bank and able to pursue his passion for art.  He gives the netsuke to a cousin in Vienna (the author's great grandfather) as a wedding present.  There the netsuke survive the family's financial ruin during World War I and are saved by a loyal former servant when the family is forced to flee Vienna during World War II.  When the author's grandmother returns to Vienna following the War, the maid gives her the netsuke in a suitcase and she takes them to her new home in England where they stay until she gives them to her younger brother who has a business opportunity in Japan and decides to return them to where they came from.  On his death they are passed on to the author who is by now an Anglican raised by his father who was an Anglican minister following the conversion of his grandmother to Christianity.  Though sometimes the book gets a bit too bogged down in the details, it is fascinating to read the history of what was obviously a very prominent Jewish banking family (one cousin married a Rothschild and they were considered peers) destroyed by two wars, scattered throughout the world and, in some cases, completely removed from their Jewish roots.

Paris:  A Love Story by Kati Marton

This is a short autobiography by the journalist and author, Kati Marton.  She writes it in the year following the sudden death of her husband, the diplomat, Richard Holbrooke.  The title is derived from the strong role Paris has played in Marton's life - first as a young student, then through two of her marriages (her second husband, and the father of her grown children, was ABC anchor Peter Jennings), and finally following Holbrooke's death.  She lead an interesting life.  Her parents were political prisoners in Hungary (for a year she and her sister were placed with strangers while her parents were in prison). They then escaped through the American embassy.  She only learns as an adult that she's Jewish as her parents raised her a Catholic and even when she found out her father was reluctant to speak about it.  The book is well written, in  journalistic style, and paints a picture of Marton's relationships with both Jennings and Holbrooke, her parents, her children and many of her famous friends and acquaintances.

Schlepping Through the Alps by Sam Apple

A very odd book that was on my book club list or I'd never have found it, let alone read it.  Sam Apple is a New York based journalist who discovers a Jewish wandering shepherd from Austria who sings Yiddish songs for his sheep and presents slide shows of his sheep accompanied by Yiddish folk songs to audiences in small, historically anti-semitic towns.  Yes, this was non-fiction...At times Apple's observations and hypochondria are very humorous as he follows the shepherd in an effort to gain insights into anti-semitism and neo-Nazism in Austria.  But mostly it's just a very strange story which results in a very strange book.

No One is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel

The only fiction book I read this vacation was another one on my book club list.  I actually enjoyed it more than I expected to based on the description.  The story is about a very isolated town in Hungary during World War II.  The action begins when a victim of a Nazi slaughter in another community washes up from the river on their shores.  In an effort to escape the horror the people in the town decide to imagine the world is beginning anew - including one spouse swap, one child (the narrator) changing parents and cutting off all ties to the rest of the world.  They sustain themselves working off the land and using a complicated barter system.  But, unfortunately they can only hold off the outside world using their imaginations for so long and the village is invaded.  The narrator's husband is dragged away and taken hostage so his wife and two children wander into the countryside in order to avoid further troubles.  We follow the hostage, the wife and children, and the other people in the town through the end of the war - where there are rather obvious horrors and a few surprise results.  Sometimes this book is a little strange too but overall it's not a bad read.

Out of the Blue

This is Jan Wong's very personal account of how workplace stress pushed her into a severe depressive episode that took two years of therapy and anti-depressants to run its course.  Most interestingly perhaps was the fact that she had to self-publish even though she was an oft-published author and award winning journalist.  Apparently Canada's publishing industry is so small no one was willing to take on the Globe together with Wong.

Wong's episode was triggered by her coverage of the Dawson CEGEP shooting in Montreal.  Certain comments she made, which were approved by her editors, led to hate mail and death threats.  The Globe refused to back her - in fact publishing an editorial critical of the piece.  Neither her employer nor the provider of disability insurance believed she was ill despite diagnoses from her family doctor, her psychiatrist and even the independent medical doctor the employer sent her to.  She was denied disability payments and eventually dismissed.  Of course, this is only her side of the story so is undoubtedly somewhat biased but if it's even half true what she had to endure was awful.  And she did eventually get a settlement from the Globe so she must have had a case (especially since they eventually relented on their demand for a gag order - so she was able to tell the story).

A really interesting read - great insights into workplace politics and stress and the toll it can have on a very successful, strong woman and her family.