Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

I have only one thing to add, really, to the enormous pile of both professional and amateur Potter-related commentary online. Plot summary at Wikipedia, many interviews where Rowling finally "tells all," and of course enduring speculation. What did the Hufflepuff common room look like? What kind of toothpaste must Snape have used in order to manage a purple Patronus? Etc.
I've read and loved all the Harry Potter books -- they are literary confection and I truly enjoyed this final episode, even if the book won't count for my home study doctorate. ;)

Here's my thought, and it doesn't even contain any spoilers. About halfway through the book, it occurred to me that Harry's mental anguish, his internal conflict, his disappointment with his past and his longing for family, will all be resolved and his life will be fixed when he becomes a father. Seeing him in this light was strange and unfamiliar, and the fact that I had this thought told me that Rowling had done something special in following this boy from childhood into what obviously had become adulthood. If I was brought to the point where I realized that redemption was possible through having kids, then I was seeing him in a much different light than I saw him in book one, and Rowling's project, showing this coming of age in multiple thousands of pages, was a success.

That impressed me -- to bring your reader to his/her own realization of the "proper" outcome, just by showing the plot happening, is the ultimate accomplishment, for a writer of any kind of fiction. I thought she did a magnificent job and I really respect her for that.

I also appreciate that she added the "years later" epilogue. I think a lot of writers would have stuck up their noses at that type of thing, and acted all mysterious and "you'll have to imagine" or "no one can say" but she went ahead and drew out the whole thing clearly for her readers, and I don't think anyone felt that such a neatly tied bow at the end of the series was anything less than appropriate and kind. Well done.

Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Months ago, I abandoned this book halfway through. I was mystified at the incredible laudits it had received, the awards, the blurbs, the iconic status. I had read other Ursula Le Guin books, finding them completely awesome and wonderful, but this one, maybe her best known and most praised, I just couldn't penetrate.



I didn't like it. It was so political. So dry. With a few exceptions, where chapters would suddenly jump into the mythology of the alien planet, it was all so trudgingly expository.

On this planet, Gethen, humans are without gender. That is, they only have a gender during a few days out of the month, when they become sexually active. During these things, they could go either way -- one month male, another month female, it just depends on who's around. The main character is an envoy to this planet from an interplanetary alliance, and he is their first contact with the outside universe. Male. All the time male. So, during the first half of the book, or so, there's a lot of palaver over what they're going to do with him, and he drifts around making little progress as a diplomat, finding out more about the planet. Nothing terribly urgent happens.



This summer, I'm trying to finish some books that I'd given up on. You may recognize some of these sentiments from the last review. So, I picked up the book and read a few more pages of politlcal this and that. THEN the second half of the book happened, and it all became magically clear, why everyone raves about the book, and loves it, and considers it so revelatory, so sublime. The envoy suddenly experiences everything you want characters in novels to experience -- danger, love, and a challenge to his intellect -- bang, bang, bang, right on through to the end. Now all the imagery makes sense. Now all the exposition pays off. It's all struck into bright definition, like a chalk drawing that's been fadoodled over with light grey strokes for hours and then instantly becomes a dragon with three bold lines of a darker shade.

Did she have to go through all that, to get to this place? Maybe she did. Obviously it worked. And for those weak souls like me who have to flog themselves through the first half, where everything seems cold and dry, and nothing seems to be moving, take heart, keep flogging, and get some sleep too, because once you get on the truck headed north, you're going to have trouble putting the book down.

The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch

When I acquired The Sacred and Profane Love Machine I also acquired The Black Prince, and when I was disappointed by the former I was still determined to try the latter. After all, Iris Murdoch has been so effusively praised by people I respect. Maybe the first book was an anomaly.

I read a few chapters of The Black Prince and had trouble going on. Everyone was so unsavory. Everyone had a hole in their stockings and a bit of pink marbled flesh protruding. Or greasy hair. Or was pallid and sweating. I mean everyone. With one exception, the entire cast were middle aged English people, ruthlessly portrayed in all their greying sagging glory by a middle aged English novelist, the main character, Bradley Pearson. Everyone was foul and mean and preoccupied and irritable. But not in entertaining or interesting ways -- in ugly little sour ways. Halfway through the book I was just having to force myself to continue. After all, Kate Winslet played her in the movie based on her life. I owed her at least to finish the lousy book.

I will tell you that the book improved dramatically halfway through, and continued to get better and better as it bounced along toward the ending. And then I will tell you that the ending really did redeem the whole book, made it very retroactively interesting in terms of what a writer is, what fiction is, what "truth" is, what a reliable narrator is and isn't, and other complex questions.

The book is very smart, and it does at the end pull back its scalp and reveal there is a large and whizzing brain inside, which has been there all along, under that peeling, sparse scalp. The problem here is, friends, that you have to read a whole lot about the ugly and small agendas of a lot of people you'd rather not get to know, in order to understand the point that's being made about art. As to the apparently thrilling (to critics) question about whether or not the narrator is a homosexual in denial, I don't think that's really interesting or relevant. I'd rather hear more people discussing whatever the heck happened to him at the end, and who P.L. was. All that seemed much more mysterious than the gayness. But then, discussions of whether people are gay or not don't tend to fascinate me (take note, friends, this extends to Herman M.).



The Black Prince is a book I enjoyed having read, but not a book I enjoyed reading. It is an experimental book, all the more so because it appears to be a very traditional book. Things are not always as they seem -- take heart if you are toiling through this novel by choice or on order from an educator -- there will be a payoff, and it will all end eventually.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

For the first 250 pages of this book, I was wondering, so what?

The author seemed content to play with the idea of time travelling, let us know how and when it works in this book, fill in the landscape of the place and the characters, and just let the novelty of the concept pull us along. The characters, they are so sensitive, so learned, so eloquent. The scenery, it is so hip, so rich, so Chicago. And who doesn't love time travel? Especially when you don't have all those annoying scifi considerations like logic. Sure, the character can meet himself in the past. No, he doesn't change the outcome of his own life, except in small, poignant ways. Everything is convenient, this is literature, not science fiction, it doesn't have to jive like it would in a Ray Bradbury story. Time travel is so interesting, when it doesn't have to make sense. Surely that would be reason enough to keep turning pages.

Apparently, it was. But I was waiting for the engine to engage, waiting for the coconut husks to go up in a blaze, waiting for myself to start to care. There were three things that bothered me in this beginning half of the book. First, I was unable to fully digest the fact that he was visiting his wife as a six-year-old. That is, she was six. He was thirty-eight. He held her on his lap. That was weird for me. Second, there was a glancing mention that whenever he met up with himself in the past and had a spare moment, he was... somehow masturbating? With himself? Or something? It was just a suggestion, and nothing was ever shown, but it was a haunting one. Third, the suffocating elitism of the characters, their artiness, their social status, it was all so precious. As if, of course, these characters are worth caring about -- look at their travails -- and they read Borges for pleasure! Naturally they, they, these beautiful souls, must feel things more exquisitely and tragically than the rest of us fools. Imagine if time travel had been wasted on a troglodyte like me. I might not have put it in the proper literary context, given my lack of ability with French.

Then, I think it was on page 259 of my paperback, the engine engaged. 1. Henry has never come back to the past from beyond the age of forty-three. (What happens at 43? Does he die or is he cured?) 2. Henry has to stay in one place long enough to get through a wedding ceremony without blinking out of his clothes. (He can't control the time travel and he arrives naked returns naked. He leaves little piles of clothes behind him. Stress seems to activate it.) 3. Henry and Clare want to have a child. (Will they be able to? Will it be a time traveler?)

Everything after that was much much more interesting. And at the end of the book, I was very moved. And very invested. And all that stuff. After it was over, I found myself missing Henry and Clare, with all their intellectual nonsense, and all their tragedy. I moved on to another book, but I would have happily read this one for 500 more pages.

Niffenegger invented a new reason to be sad in a relationship. And illustrated it beautifully. In some ways, I guess you could say that this time traveling, meeting up in different stages of life, coming and going, sometimes synchronizing and sometimes missing each other entirely, is a metaphor for all relationships and the ups and downs thereof, but I'd rather see it as something entirely other, with different rules, different reactions. Something I could never experience. I really respect Niffenegger's bravery in tackling this complete mess of material, and her competence in organizing it into an accesible narrative. Makes me feel shame for being baffled by my much-less-complicated novel. It will be interesting to see what she tackles next.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

This book is a memoir about life in Iran. Its formal structure expands from the discussions of a secret book club that meets in the author's living room in Tehran to read and discuss banned books like Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, and Pride and Prejudice. Beyond the book club, the author reminisces about life before, during, and after the revolution, the ascendence of the Ayatollah, and how life became so wretched for women in this country that was once so progressive.

The first fifty pages of this book I really disliked. I find the descriptions of the book club meetings overly precious and romantic, all the "magical mornings" and the "they bloomed into color" and how she dwells on their separate personalities. It all reads as very contrived, to me, since she said in the beginning that none of the characters were actually characters, that they are amalgams and distillations of actual people, renamed, combined, separated. So why dwell on each invented person's invented personality, especially in a "memoir"? I kind of liked her reading of Lolita. She is painfully aware of how her critical perspective is informed and skewed by her identification of Humbert as the Ayatollah, though. Which is good. But I'm not automatically receptive to feminism, even coming from someone in a chabor.

Then, for serious and for real, it started getting good. I think the beginning of the part that made my ears perk up was the anecdote about Nassrin (I think it was her) missing class and then coming back to report she had been jailed for 48 hours because the morality police had accused her of having "A Western attitude." And then CANED her for it? Lord. Makes me want to smack crabby academic feminists in this country in the head and say, "Dumbass, you think you've got problems?!" I realize that's probably irrational, but that's the reaction I had.

The Gatsby section I liked much better. I am flabbergasted by the way the Muslim fundamentalists and the Marxist extremists collaborated on the Islamic revolution. I had no idea that was going on -- how Marxist women in combat fatiques with shaved heads and totally, like, hardass communist ideas (communism being ideally genderless, in terms of all proletariats being equal) putting on VEILS to help the revolution, just because they wanted the Western influence out of Iran. Like, how shortsighted was THAT? Has to be one of the most idiotic political choices ever. You can just imagine some avid Marxist... and that "Adopt the veil to rid us of the West" speech must have been the last one she ever got to make in public. And the last time she got to walk down the street without her husband or father to walk behind.

The book makes a clear distinction between the people who had always been devout Muslims and those who adopted more extreme religious beliefs in order to gain political or social power. I think it's obviously necessary to separate people serving God in an honest and arduous way from people consciously using religion to oppress each other. I also, though, believe that what's corrupt at the top can be honest at the bottom -- that is, that there are people who virtuously and sincerely believe and follow oppressive rules because they genuinely believe that God wants them to, when in reality it's the people up at the top of the religion, handing down these strictures to enforce their agendas. So who to blame? There's a very blurry line between those who are conscious that it's all about power and control, and those who are blind to the human element at work, and only see God's will.

I have to believe that it's impossible for me to understand anyone in that part of the world -- totally impossible, because my cultural context is so foreign. So for me to look at those public virginity tests and say "What the hell!?" means nothing. Of course I can't understand it, it's beyond my scope and outside my experience. What's good about this book is seeing that there are people within that system for whom it is repulsive and horrifying as well. And not just those who have been to America and seen the contrast.

I stalled out reading this when I was still on the James section. I'd inadvertantly started reading about 10 books... forgetting I was already in progress on others that I'd just left lying around the house or car. I wanted to finish this, to get to the Jane Austen section, but I accidentally just read Persuasion instead.

Child of my Heart by Alice McDermott

Wow, this book was so uplifting and hilarious, I think I'll go and kill myself now! Hey! If you ever wondered whether children get the shortest, sharpest, boringest end of the stick in life, this book if your proof. If you belligerently insist that people are essentially good; adultery, abuse, neglect, and disinterest in their children notwithstanding; then you too can cling to the adolescent narrator for comfort. She introduces fantasy and love into the lives of all the sad little children she knows, and she knows only the saddest of little children. In the end, most of them survive. Survive to continue to endure the effects of their parents' ignorance and selfishness! Hooray!

This book makes me look around and feel profound gratefulness for my big pretty house, my loving husband, and my two healthy happy children that I adore. It makes me feel lucky that I had parents who loved me and a cool nanny who played silly pretend games with me.

Here's something funny: The book itself references the maudlin sentimentality in which some books about dead children indulge. The Publisher's Weekly review of this book accuses it of indulging in maudlin sentimentality. I can't find the exact quote in the book at this moment, with my daughter sitting on my lap helping, but I remember thinking, "Hmm," at the time.

The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch

Everyone always says, O Iris Murdoch. Brutal, brilliant, irascible Iris Murdoch. She is so blazingly legendary. I watched the movie, "Iris," as I do slavishly watch all movies Kate Winslet graces, and I realized, I am supposed to love her. But I had never read one of her books, though I always meant to. Recently I picked up two Iris Murdoch books -- this one and The Black Prince, from a friend's book trading shelf. I was, I am sorry to confess, underwhelmed. Now I will say that I read it with great interest and at times felt very can't-put-it-down. But it did not delight me.

This book was brilliant realism. It was about a love triangle and some children were involved. One of the characters, Montague Small, was original in my experience -- I have not met a character like him before. There was a lot of anguish, and a depth of experience that was engrossing. I can't say I enjoyed reading the book. Taking a step back from the oppressive entanglements and all the emotions, I realized that the same characters and landscape, in a P.G. Wodehouse novel, would be hilarious. It is, in a way, bizarrely the same universe. P.G. Wodehouse is brutal, but so deeply cheerful. Murdoch's treatment is so close, so smothering, so dark. I was expecting more of the satire, less of the despair.

I will move on to The Black Prince -- I've already started it. It's hitting me a little like Humbert McHumbertson, so I dunno if I'm going to get the haw haw haw I'm looking for. Having read such a staggering lot of P.G. Wodehouse, since I was a little kid, and seeing the British upper class skewered in this very la-la pass-the-port way and hasn't everyone got a ridiculous name, it was maybe good for me, or something, to see this grittier and less raucous version of it. I mean, it's probably considered obscene to even compare these two writers, and I'll be met outside by a few stern feminists and beheaded for failing to appreciate Iris Murdoch. I said I would give her another shot. I have the next book in my bag. 'Kay?

Girl Imagined by Chance by Lance Olsen

First let me say that I read this book very quickly and kind of hungrily. It has a very specific voice and a kind of ethos that was very addictive, when I was reading it. I came away thinking, wow, what a masterful control he exhibited over that mess of material. I have to stand back and sincerely congratulate him for that. This book was deliberate, measured, never even remotely hysterical, unrigorous, or disconnected. I kept examining the method he used to get there, and found myself focusing on specifics. Sentences were manipulated in consistent and repetitious ways. For example, I remember specifically the quote, "Moving is as easy as changing your mind. Changing your mind is as easy as moving." That construct recurred. The narrator kept saying that some word or other was "perhaps too strong a word." There were a variety of different language constructions that made the book feel very specific, very contained. Like repetitions of objects or behaviors, like what the characters were eating or how they moved through their house. The "Snaggy Scree" bar recurred. (Which led me to look up "scree," and it means "bunch of little rocks around the foot of a mountain.") I found myself fascinated with these little manipulations, because while it *seems* like it would become tiresome/obvious/heavy, they were sprinkled in at a wavelength that just barely allowed you to forget about them before they popped up again. So they were comfortable, like being comfortably inside the book. Very well done. I can't think when I've seen second person present tense successfully managed without being kind of hyper and indulgent. This may have been the key to it. Control. Well, imagine that.

The book is about a couple who move from urban New Jersey to extremely rural Idaho, and take advantage of their safely remote location to invent a pregnancy and a child, satisfying the folks at home who are sufficiently distant and can neither verify nor disprove their claims. Apparently the pressure to reproduce (produce?) is really really intense. The wife is a photographer. The husband is a writer and web designer. The grandmother they are placating is supposed to die soon, but will she die before they have to make a visit?

The story is told in 12 sections, each starting out with a photograph, first of the wife, then of the fake baby. The book forces its "you" character to examine questions of authenticity by examining these old photographs of his wife as a baby, now faked by him to represent the fake child. (And in a secondary (tertiary?) way faked by the author to represent this fake autobiography -- WHEW!) What are they now? What were they then? He is examining in his own work the life of Virginia Dentatia, who died making the point that a human female body cannot survive the surgeries necessary to literally look like Barbie. So there's that. Real, fake, remembered, imagined, felt, dreamed, produced, reproduced. I thought it was acutely interesting to compare photography with having babies. I thought the whole book was extremely smart, very challenging, and also very grounded.

My only difficulty probably stems from the fact that I am a mother of two small children, and yes, I used to live more the "life of the mind" and yes, I do live now more the "life of the diaper." Am I defensive about giving up my whatever for my something else? Just as the book refuses to draw clear lines between autobiography and fiction (the author is also from New Jersey, living in Idaho, married to a photographer named Andi, and has no kids), I claim the right to refuse to draw a line between my strictly literary response to the book and my personal response. You could say I'm troubled because it's all. so. true. Or you could say I have a really admirable academic distance from the topic. Either way.

The narrator indulged in a lot of whacking away at some easy targets: kids at the mall, toddlers with runny noses, idealistic new parents, etc. The loathing. The eye-rolling. The revulsion. Yes, I do understand that when I am reading a first person narrator, I am not hearing the author's private thoughts, and I do not obviously blame Lance Olsen for this narrator's lapses into this kind of minor meanness. I like Lance Olsen a whole lot. But those pot shots did color the way I read the rest of the narrator's ideas about children and "reproduction" -- the fact that the examples he chose to use were so obvious and so thin. Show me a traditionally beautiful example of parenting and point out its weakness -- I love you. Show me a hackneyed example of of weak parenting (kids at the mall: so demanding! so impatient! so irritating!) and crow over it -- not so much. If he had taken a picture of a mother reading to an attentive child, and turned it inside out, shown how it was foul, shown how it was lies, that would be something.

I think any parent reading this book would look at this narrator and say, "You just don't get it." As it was, you just come away thinking that it's like trying to explain sex to a virgin -- unless you experience it, you just don't know. I thought for a while that he was going to fall kind of in love with his fake child, and have some kind of epiphanic moment, but thank god he didn't -- that would have been tragic on the other side of the spectrum. I think that the character did have some extremely redemptive moments, and by no means did I reject him based on his feelings about kids with runny noses (who really likes them anyway). There was a character in the book who had a child, Nadie, that I think the main character didn't actively despise. Certainly the wife character managed to pet the kid's hair. Seeing the way the couple responded to this one "good" example of parenting really illuminated how deep the damage was, as manifested in some of the "broken" photographs, that led them to the state they were in. Which was Idaho. And the ability to make up a baby and then kill it. I ended up thinking that in some ways his wife was his child, and he was hers.

This book was a really engaging read, from start to finish. Ask the poor souls who reached me on the phone while reading it -- I was yakking about it to anyone who would listen. The premise is wonderful, the intellect is inspiring, and the prose is so so so right. Buy, read, and rant.