Winterlust: Finding Beauty in the Fiercest Season

 

By Bernd Brunner

Greystone Books    2019

262 Pages           Nonfiction

I wanted to wait until there was a cold snap or a significant snowstorm to review Winterlust. I wanted to be sitting in my quiet, warm winter spot, watching the snow fall as I was reading. But like everything else this winter, nothing happened as expected and here it is January 31, and there is just now enough snow and cold weather to be what I would call “winter.” On the other hand, you have to remember that I grew up in northern Minnesota and have lived all my adult life in the snow belt of Michigan.

Winterlust is filled with interesting information about the history of winter, the reader always aware of the fact that people who have to survive winter now have it a lot better than people who survived winter in antiquity. Each chapter is filled with information about what people did to keep warm. We learn that the Japanese have a word for the first snowfall of winter, hatsuyuki. In the Norwegian town of Rjukan, people placed three large mirrors above the city to redirect scarce winter sunlight into the valley and cheer up the residents. In Montreal, residents have evaded the winter gloom by building a brightly lit network of tunnels “where half a million people can move about without ever having to come into contact with the cold air outside.” Most all of the significant buildings in my home town of Duluth, Minnesota are connected by heated over-the-street walkways. The University is connected the same way. You can get all over without having to go outside.

With a variety of word pictures and representative historic paintings, Brunner reminds us of all the beautiful things of winter. The book is so beautifully written, the reader can’t help but agree with Brunner that our lives would be much less without winter. As I was reading by the fire, gazing at tender flakes of snow falling outside, I celebrated my 78^th winter, happy to watch out the window but also happy to be inside—warm and cozy.

I will never forget watching a great scene in the movie Fargo, the one where the two men are talking to each other—parka hoods up over their heads and steam coming out of their mouths. When I saw the movie for the first time, I laughed out loud at the absurdity and appropriateness of that scene. Duh! I was in Kalamazoo, and I was the only one laughing.

Today, I watched the little boy across the street pile into a friend’s car with two or three sleds, obviously off for a snowy adventure. He was so excited. Some of my own grandchildren went sledding yesterday. That is the best of winter, and in Winterlust, Brunner reminds us of the best of winter as well, from the paintings through the centuries to the representative poetry and prose as well.

Here’s a good review in the Christian Science Monitor.

Bernd Brunner is a well-known German writer. His nonfiction titles include Birdmania and Bears, A Brief History.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Water Dancer

 By Ta-Nehisi Coates

One World     2019

410 pages     Historical Fiction

I finished reading The Water Dancer this afternoon, and I am exhausted. We will discuss it tomorrow night at book club, and I needed to finish it for that purpose, but I also needed to release my mind and emotions from the intense pressure the book was creating. There are few books so powerful that you just can’t stop thinking about them. This is one of those books.

First, we need to discuss terminology. In Coates frame of reference regarding the plantations of Virginia in the mid-1800s, family slaves are called the “Tasked.” Plantation owners are called the “Quality,” and the ordinary white working people are the “Lows.” The shacks where the slaves live are called the “street,” but they may also live under the big house in the “warrens.” If you have visited Monticello or any other Southern plantations, you are already familiar with those living arrangements.

Now a bit about plot. Hiram Walker is the son of a plantation owner, Howell Walker, and a water-dancing slave girl, Rose. He is a brilliant young man with a near-photographic memory, which his father recognizes and encourages by having a tutor teach him to read and write. The tutor is part of the Underground, and he creates an awareness of Hiram to Corrine Quincy, a Southern belle and the leader of the Virginia Underground. After Hiram is recruited to the Underground, he is taken to Philadelphia for training, and then returns to Virginia to work as a conductor.

One of the most interesting, and at the same time confusing, aspects of the plot is the term “conduction.” Coates intends it to be magical realism, and indeed there is magical realism in the way Hiram escorts the runaways. Conduction is a magical gift that transports certain gifted individuals from one place to another by way of a blue light that lifts and carries them along or across bodies of water. As Hiram realizes his special conduction abilities, he is connected with the Moses of the Underground movement—Harriet Tubman. When he first meets Harriet, he is completely overwhelmed—and I heard myself gasp aloud.

Because of the presence of Tubman in the book, the role of the women in the novel take on special significance. The Tasked women face huge amounts of trauma, enormous challenges, and tremendous work tasks. They are also the keepers of the families and their stories.  And when they are sold, the family stories go with them. The job of Hiram and the other Underground conductors is to get the families together again.

Observations that I really connected with.

·         Many of the Tasked are smarter than the Quality. It is the Tasked that keep the households going, the children cared for, and the crops harvested. The Tasked are very aware that they are smarter and have more ability.

·         The land in Virginia was becoming depleted in the mid-1800s, and slaves were sold and sent to other areas of the South to keep up the appearance of wealth and status for the landed Virginia gentry. This I had to do some research about, because the Tasked are always worried that they are going to be sent to Natchez, and the concept of Natchez is not very well explained.

·         Grief is constantly with the Tasked, for most of them have been separated from some, if not all,  of their family members. Most of the time, they never see those family members again. Hiram has a marvelous memory, but he cannot remember his mother, who was sold when he was a young boy.

The Water Dancer is not without its imperfections. I would recommend that readers make a list of characters because one character may be gone for a hundred pages or more and then show up again. I missed an important character reveal because I couldn’t remember the name of the tutor when it was revealed that he was one of the leaders of the Underground. I also missed the magical realism connection until I was explaining the plot to my husband today, and all of a sudden, the concept of “conduction” and its importance to Hiram’s ability to work in the Underground came clear to me.

The book is so beautifully written that it is very easy to get caught up in the poetry of the writing and lose track of the plot line. Coates has multiple purposes in the concepts he develops in the book, and sometimes it is hard to grasp all those purposes. The Kirkus reviewer says, “even his most melodramatic effects are deepened by historical facts and contemporary urgency.”

At the same time, there is transformative power in the words Coates writes and the characters he has developed. This is a book that will stay with me a long time.

A terrific article in The Atlantic where Coates discusses writing fiction.

My posting about Between the World and Me, a love letter from Coates to his son.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Accra Noir

 

Edited by Nana-Ama Danquah

Akashic Books    2020

256 pages     Noir

Well, dear readers, you already know how much I love this noir series of books published by Akashic. I stepped out of my comfort zone to read Accra Noir, because, frankly, I am embarrassed to say that I had no idea where Ghana was on the map of Africa, let alone try to find Accra on a map. In case you are having trouble with your map skills, here are a couple of maps to help.

The primary theme of Accra Noir is money—and all the things the people of the capital city have to do to make a buck. Money is the essential component of each story. As one narrator says, “he was nothing there without money, nobody was. Not even the air of ancient entitlement that he wore held meaning. The one and only thing that held meaning anymore was money.”

I believe that each author had  the true intent of noir in the composition of their stories, and there is a lot of cruelty and murder among the stories. My favorite story involved a dead lover and the butcher in the neighboring market stall. Several of the stories discuss the plight of the women of Accra, and just perhaps, their ideas of vengeance. The Publisher’s Weekly review says that Accra Noir is one of the better Akashic anthologies.

Nana-Ama Danquah, the book’s editor, is a well-known author living in the United States. All the authors in the anthology have an intimate relationship with Accra and its stories. That relationship really adds authenticity to the reader. She says, “Everything in the culture revolves around story, and every story has a moral or theme, one that can be encapsulated in a pithy phrase.” These stories all bear witness to that tradition.

Frankly, I was blown away by these stories, and would encourage lovers of noir fiction to try these out. They are gritty enough to fill your noir needs. I have several new Akashic noir books on my Kindle, and I can’t wait to dig into them. Watch this space.

 

Moonflower Murders

 By Anthony Horowitz

Harper Collins    2020

608 pages     Mystery

I am ashamed to say that I had never read any Anthony Horowitz, even though I had Magpie Murders, the first of this particular 2-book series, on my shelf for a couple of years. Not sure how I missed reading it, because I absolutely loved Moonflower Murders. But, oh my goodness, is it ever complicated—and long! When you read a book on a Kindle, you have no idea how long the book is, so I was quite shocked when I saw that I had just read a 600+ page book. Actually—two books, for Moonflower Murders is two books in one.

Here is the basic plotline.

Retired publisher Susan Ryeland is living the good life. She is running a small hotel on a Greek island with her long-term boyfriend Andreas. It should be everything she's always wanted. But is it? She's exhausted with the responsibilities of making everything work on an island where nothing ever does, and truth be told she's beginning to miss London.

And then the Trehearnes come to stay. The strange and mysterious story they tell, about an unfortunate murder that took place on the same day and in the same hotel in which their daughter was married—a picturesque inn on the Suffolk coast named Branlow Hall—fascinates Susan and piques her editor’s instincts. 

One of her former writers, the late Alan Conway, author of the fictional Magpie Murders, knew the murder victim—an advertising executive named Frank Parris—and once visited Branlow Hall. Conway based the third book in his detective series, Atticus Pund Takes the Cake, on that very crime. 

The Trehearne’s, daughter, Cecily, read Conway’s mystery and believed the book proves that the man convicted of Parris’s murder—a Romanian immigrant who was the hotel’s handyman—is innocent. When the Trehearnes reveal that Cecily is now missing, Susan knows that she must return to England and find out what really happened.

When Susan gets to the Branlaw Hall hotel, she reads Atticus Pund Takes the Cake once again to see what Cecily discovered during her reading of the book, but the clues aren’t so obvious to Susan. So, then, we are compelled to read this Agatha Christie-style mystery with a Hercule Poirot-type detective. Astoundingly, the entire novel can be found within the pages of Moonflower Murders, every last page, including the table of contents and the dedication page. I was so shocked when I got to the title page of Atticus Pund Takes the Cake, I had to go back to the table of contents of Moonflower Murders to see what was going on. After I read the Atticus Pund mystery, I still couldn’t figure out who had murdered who—in either case—when I returned to the Moonflower mystery.

And this is where I had trouble. There is a huge cast of characters in both books, and because the whole thing is 600+ pages long, I had trouble getting back into the Moonflower Murders section, not remembering all of the characters and their names. I spent the next 50 pages or more just trying to get everybody straight. This, however, did nothing to waylay the brilliance of the book or of the author. Apparently Horowitz has used this book-within-a-book technique in other books, most especially Magpie Murders, which, of course, I didn’t read. (I might suggest that you read it before you read Moonflower Murders.)

Although I knew who Anthony Horowitz is, I had never read any of his books. I knew about the Alex Rider series, and the Foyles War TV series, but when I looked up his output, I found that he has written several books every year since the 1980s, when he was just a young man. I also found while searching my Advanced Reader data base that I had missed reading The Sentence is Death and The Word is Murder in addition to The Magpie Murder, all of which are on my Kindle.

I am astounded at Horowitz’s productivity as well as his expertise. Moonflower Murders is mystery writing at its best.

Here is the review in the New York Times. The book has made many of the lists of 2020’s best books.