Estates Large and Small

 by Ray Robertson

I bought this book because it was getting good reviews, because it was about a bookseller, but I didn't know what the book was really about.  If I had I probably wouldn't have bought it.  However, I am glad I did buy it.

The book takes place in covid times.  It is about Phil Cooper who has reluctantly had to close his used book business.  He is drowning his sorrows taking drugs and listening to the Grateful Dead.  He is sorry he as lost his business but especially misses his contact with customers.

He has all his book inventory in his house and is getting an online website set up with the assistane of his nephew and a young woman techie who is in a wheelchair.

The title reflects what Phil does, he goes to peeople's homes to evaluate the book collections of the deceased.  However, one day when he goes to check out a collection he is startled to learn that the woman he meets is actually the owner of the book collection he is evaluating.  She has stage 4 cancer.  He agrees to wait until she is gone to buy the books from her.  The woman invites him to visit her and they strike up a friendship and eventually become lovers.

In addition to the man's lover we also meet a favourite customer of his who comes to visit him along with his dog.  The man's mother is in a care home because she has dementia.

Phil had been trying to learn about the history of Philosophy.  As his friendship with Caroline develops he suggests they study the history of philosophy together so they meet regularly with wine and marijunan spicing their discussions to talk about the Philosophers and their key philosophical thoughts.  I think they continue doing it because they are trying to figure out the meaning of life, what makes a good life, from the philosophers.

Phil's customer's dog dies and one day Caroline tells Phil she doesn't want to suffer to the end.  She wants to die after a good day. 

 Kant - A single moment is no different from eternity (Pg.254)

She also tells him she wants him to be with her when she takes the medicine.  Phil isn't sure he can deal with this.  But he is there with her/for her when she decides to end her life.

This book appealed to me as a book lover, the author really captured the addiction to books of the bibliophile.  It was tough to read with the talk of impending death.  It was about loss, loss of life, loss of your business, loss of your memories, loss of a beloved pet.  But it is also about the vital importance of human connection.

It was very painful to read, I cried at the end, but while I want to give it away because I don't know if I will ever want to read it again, I feel it is brilliantly, beautifully written so I won't give it away for now,

The Librarian Spy

 by Madeline Martin

This book takes place during the second world war and involves two stories, one about an American Librarian who is hired and sent to Lisbon to pick up newspapers and microfilm them and send them to the U.S.  The goverment officials scan these papers for tips about what is going on in France and other parts of Europe.  

The other story is about a woman in Paris whose husband disappears.  She finds out he was working for the resistance and he never told her.  She eventually joins the resistance and ends up giving a Jewish woman her ID.  She then works to give the woman a safe place to live and works to get her out of France,.

The woman is working on publishing resistance papers.  She puts a coded message in the papers asking someone to help get the Jewish woman and her son out of France.

The American girl sees the message and works in Portugal to get the woman and son to Portugal.

Maybe it is my chemo brain fog but I found the book a bit difficult to follow, especially the work of the American in Lisbon.

It was an okay story, they do manage to get the woman out of France and eventually get her reunited with her husband who had managed to get to the U.S.  The book does a good job of explaining the danger the resistance people faced.

Trust

 by Hernan Diaz

This is actually four books in one.  It took me a while to figure out exactly what was going on.

The first story is a fiction book about a reclusive New York business man who gets rich by manipulating the stock market.  He brags about how successful he has been and how he has saved the American economy especially during the time of the crash.  His wife enjoys music and contributes to charities.   Her father had mental problems and disappeared from a facility in Switzerland.  In the end the woman has mental issues and ends up in the same institution where she dies.

The second book starts with a man bragging about how his ancestors were early arrivals in America.  They were dirt poor but managed to gain a fortune.  He brags about how he has built on this, taking advantage of the stock market, saving the American economy etc.  Again no humility here either.  At points there are a few notes made of things to talk about later.   Curious...

The third book is about a young woman who applies for a job at the second man's firm.  She is very poor, her father is a typesetter with communist leanings.  There are many candidates for the job but when as part of the interview process she is asked to write about her life she writes an entirely fictional account.  She is hired but then finds out she whill not be a secretary or stenographer, rather she will write a book to counter the lies the owner of the company feels were in the first book.  He and all of New York society know the first book was written about him and his wife.  The girl learns that the man's wife was involved in society and charities in New York and a very generous philanthropist.  The man creates a foundation for her charitable endeavours.  His wife died of cancer and was in Switzerland at a hospital for treatment when she died.  The man pays the girl handsomely.  She never tells her father what he real job is she knows he will be outraged that she is working for a rich man helping him write a memoir to justify his behaviour.  However, she comes back and tells the housekeeper that she has permission to see it.  The room is very stark and empty.  Not at all the fitting with the description the man gave of his wife and her interests.  Curiouser and curiouser. The book is never completed as the man dies suddenly.  The one thing the man had told her that she cannot see is the wife's bedroom.

The young girl is shocked and dismayed that a reporter, who had apparently been courting her has actually stolen some of her notes when she wasn't home.  She gets a ransom note saying that if she doesn't turn over more info her father will be outed as a communist.  But she gives the young courier a bribe and he tells her the name of the man who sent him -- her boyfriend.  She suspends contact with him.

Part four of the book occurs as the Rich man's home has been turned into a museum.  The young girl, a seventy year old woman now finds she can now face going back.  She has done research in the museum and finds out it was the man's wife who actually had the financial and mathematical acumen and not him.

A fascinsting read with lots of twists and turns.  Plus a critique? commentary? on whether well can really benefit/save an economy or are the rich deluding themselves when they say that. Especially these days as the rich are getting richer because of the pandemic and with the large inflation the rest of us are fallling farther and farther behind.

 

Sutra of the Pearl

 by Lee Kaiser

This is another book I bought on impulse at Chapters.  It is supposed to be by a local author but the bio is very brief.  I think the book is self-published.

At first I didn't think much of the book but by the end I felt that maybe I should read it again.

Page 193 "Do you know a pearl starts as a parasite?  Over time these foul innards inside the oyster release a protective coating around the poison.  That becomes the pearl.  If nature can create the strength and purity of a pearl from such ugliness , why not believe that people can change no matter how far they've strayed..

At first I didn't like the book.  The main character, Julie was a bit of a hysterical, dependent person. The first sentence in the books is "Julia Paglia was a crackerjack of a liar, just like her mother".

The book seemed a bit disjointed at first.  Julia travels the world as a travel writer.  Her goal is to be published in National Geographic.  Julia hates her drug addict mother who is dying of lung cancer.  She believes her mother killed her young brother years ago.  She thinks of turning her mother in to the police.

She goes to India because she found an article that says that Jesus spent some time in India.  She thinks if she can find proof she could get rich and famous.  But when she gets to India she gets obsessed with saving all the diseased dogs she finds in the street.  She frantically tries to save them or at least give them a peaceful death.  

She hears about an underwater city and finally finds a group of people who will take her out in a boat to look at it at night.  The area is in a goverment restricted area, that is why they have to do the dive at night.  She gets some good pix and sends some to National Geographic.  She is shocked to learn that the people who took her out are really terrorists who want to destroy a nuclear plant that is on land near where she was diving, that is why there is a restricted zone.

She develops a relationship one particular Indian man and a few other people.  A friend from Canada also comes to join her.  The authorities eventually find out she was in the restricted area and they put out an arrest warrant for her.  Her friends remove the images from her computer so that should be no evidence against her.  

Her boyfriend is estranged from his brother (one of the terrorists) and his father.  She eventually meets the man's father and likes him.  She can't understand why her boyfriend doesn't get on with him.  The man gives her a book of Buddhist prayers/thoughts. 

She is eventually located and deported.

However, a few years later she sneaks back into India thanks to a back door into India and bribes to officials by her boyfriend. She learns that the father was very poor initially but became rich when he bought some land (from which others were evicted) from some officials who were re-allocating the land.  The father gives her a book and asks her to take it to someone he knew years before.

Disaster stikes when the terrorists take the brakes off a train loaded with fuel.  They think it will careen down a hill and into the nuclear plant but instead it crashes on a curve in a nearby village.  Much of  the village is destroyed and many people are killed or maimed.  The girl, her boyfriend and others, including his father rush to rescue the injured as police say emegency vehicles will not enter the area. The father is shot trying to rescue the injured.

The girl eventually gets the book to the man per her boyfriend's father's instructions.  She finds that the inscription in the book gives the recipient the father's share of the business.  The recipient is one of the people the father wronged years before.

Julia is devastated when she learns her boyfriend is leaving her to marry his mistress in Sweden who is pregnant with his child.  She and the man had planned to marry.  

Finally Julia decides to set out for Nepal to seek out the writings that would confirm Christ spent time in India.  She spends time at a monastery where in return for some help around the monastery, and promising to attend daily meditation, she is allowed access to the monastery's library.  The head monk is an American.  On her last day at the monastery he gives her the writings she is looking for.

She takes the writings or at least a copy and deposits them at the National Geographic office anonymously.

There was a lot going on in this book and a lot to think about -- unintended consequences for eg.  A lot of people did some bad things, the questions arose, can you change once you have done bad things? can you make amends for the wrongs you have done? The author seems to think yes and yes.

I will have to re-read it again to get all the details straight and also get a better understanding of the many complex issues.

 

Murder at the Book Club

 by Betsy Reavley

I picked this book up on impulse at Chapters.  It is about a very disfunctional bookclub. Some people met on an online bookclub and decided to start meeting in person.  They invited others to join.  One of their bookclub members is killed and as police investigate they find that the people in the book club don't like each other and often squabble with each other.  It makes you wonder why they belong to the club as it is so stressful.  

When a second member of the book club is killed the police suspect it really has something to do with the book club.

This wasn't a very interesting book.

State of Wonder

 by Ann Patchett

This is the second book I have read by this author.  The first book I read, Bel Canto, is one of my favourite books.

This book is about a woman researcher who is sent into the Amazonian jungle to find out 1)why/how one of her colleagues who was sent down died 2)how the research is going to find a product to extend women's fertility later in life.

The woman arrives in a city and eventually makes contact with people who are looking after the apartment of the Head Researcher.  They won't take her to see the researcher and say they don't know when the woman will come back to town for supplies.

Eventually the researcher does show up and the other researcher insists on going back into the jungle with her.  The pilot on their boat is a native boy, about 6 years of age, who is deaf.

The women and boy arrive at the spot where the Lakshmi live.  The second researcher's luggage disappears and she is eventully coaxed out of her last clothing and put in a dress the local women wear.  She is introduced to the trees that the local women visit in the forest.  The women chew the bark.  It is thought that chewing the tree keeps the women fertile and also prevents malaria. The head researcher is wanting to work on the fertility discovery but she also wants to pursue a cure for malaria, something she knows her company won't be interested in so she keeps stalling with her researcher.  There may be some kind of connection between the trees, mushrooms that grow at the base of tress and a moth that is attracted to the bark where women have chewed.

The second researcher is shocked to learn that the Main Researcher, her former mentor, is pregnant at 73 years of age.  The researcher is shocked at what her mentor has done and eventually has to perform a c-section on her boss to remove her deformed fetus which has died (the fetus had a mermaid tail rather than legs).  While there the researcher does a c-section on another woman, saves the deaf boy from an anaconda so she has a lot of status in the community.

Eventually she figures out that her co-worker is not dead but is at another village of cannibals.  She and the deaf boy go to rescue him.  The only way she can rescue her co-worker is to give up the boy to the cannibals.  The Mentor is furious with her for having done this.  

The woman and her co-worker return to the U.S. in the next couple days.

This was an interesting story with lots to think about.  One review I read said the book is not as good as some of her other works but I really enjoyed it.

French Braid

 by Anne Tyler

Pg. 2344"They would start with two skeins of hair high up near her temples, very skinny and tight, ad then join in with two thicker braids lower down".

"Oh, a French Braid", Greta said.

"That's it.  And then when she undid them her hair would still be in ripples, little left over squiggles for hours and hours afterward"...

"Well", David said, "that's how families work too.  You think you're free of them, but you're never reall free; the ripples are crimpled in forever".

This is the story of the Garrett family over several generations.  The book is a true picture of a family that interacts but doesn't really connect.  There are the "good" ones and the "bad" (unconventional) ones.  There are memories and jealousies and a lot unspoken.  The book covers several families and generations.

The matriarch of the family was never a good mother, she preferred painting to looking after her kids.  After her last child moved out she gradually moved to a "studio" to paint and gradually moved over her clothes and other items.  She never divorced her husband, they never talked about it, and the kids did not talk or ask her about this arrangement.  One of her granddaughters likes to paint and joins her grandmother in the studio to paint one afternoon a week.  The gradmother takes her granddaughter to New York one day to see an exhibit of one of her artist friends.  The grandmother dies on the train ride home.

The author does a great job of portraying a somewhat disfunctional family.  They don't communicate regularly or well.  Members have a habit of showing up with a fiancee or going off and getting married and then telling the family.  Family members are often puzzled by behavior of other family members, for example the brother who marries and older woman.  He had announced one day he was bringing someone when he came to visit and arrived with the woman and her young daughter.  Later the woman contacts the family to say that they had gotten married.  Near the end of the book the character David, tells his wife that he believes his father didn't like him.  What a pain to have carried.  His father did not treat him well.  The family was surprised that he did not keep in touch when he went away to college.  No surprise.

The book did a very sensitive, insightful job of portraying the disfunctional family. The book is very poignant at times, for example one of the family members is afraid to tell the family that he is gay.  His lover tells him... they know.....

This author has written more than 20 books.  I was surprised to learn this is the first book of hers I have read.  She is often on the best seller list and has won the pulitzer for a previous book.