Before the Coffee Gets Cold

 by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Serendipity --

I recently saw the quote by Viktor Frankl

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves".

This is a very powerful sentiment for me right now with what I am going through.  I saw positive comments about this book and decided to pick up a copy of a whim and I am so glad I did.

The story is set in Tokyo in a little basement cafe where it is rumoured people can go back in time.  The story starts with a young woman whose boyfriend broke up with her at the cafe, telling her he is going to the US to work.  She is devastated as she thought he was going to propose.  She is so startled she doesn't say anything and he leaves.

She goes back to the restaurant and says she wants to go back in time to tell her boyfriend she doesn't want him to go.  The hosts of the cafe tell her she can go back but nothing she does will change the present, she can only go back for the time it takes for a cup of coffee to cool off, if she doesn't return on time she will become a ghost (there is one lady ghost in the cafe).  She goes back to the time her boyfriend broke off with her.  She does tell him that she doesn't want him to go and as she returns to the present she hears him say he will be back in three years.

The next customer is the wife of a cafe customer who has rapidly developing Alzheimers.  Her husband has left a letter for her at the cafe but she hasn't wanted to read it.  She wants to go back in time to when her husband can still remember her.  They meet and she confirms to him that she knows about his diagnosis.  He seems relieved that she knows about it.  The letter he gave her tells her she doesn't have to feel obliged to stay with him.  However, this meetings cements her commitment to care for him whatever happens (she is a nurse).

The third story is about a young woman who runs a restaurant near the cafe. She is estranged from her family. Her sister had kept coming to Tokyo to try to convince her to come home and help run the family in.  The woman hides from her sister because she feels either her sister is jealous of her or that her sister doesn't want to run the inn and wants her to have the responsibility.  On the last time the sister comes to visit she is killed in a car accident.  The young woman is devastated, she feels reponsible for her sister's death as do her parents.  She goes back in time to the sister's last visit and the sister tells her that her dream was to have the two of them run the inn together.  The restuarant owner promises her sister she will go back and run the inn in her sister's memory.

The last story is about the wife of the owner of the cafe,  she dies in childbirth because of a heart condition,  Years after the woman died a young woman comes into the restaurant and goes back in time to meet her.  Later the woman asks to go into the future and she meets the young woman, realizing she is her daughter.  The woman had been worried that her daughter would be angry at her for not being around to raise her but the young woman thanks her for giving her her life.

While nothing changes about the sad things in these stories, all the characters seem to find a new perspective going forward.  

I think this book is amazing, at least for me right now!

The Secret Life of Sunflowers

 by Marta Molnar and Dana Morton

This book was getting a lot of positive comments recently.  It is about the wife of Theo Van Gogh (Van Gogh's sister-in-law fought to get Van Gogh's art into the public attention after Vincent and Theo's deaths.  It was an interesting story but not as engaging as some of the comments I read implied it would be.  The death of the Van Gogh's occur early in the book, there is very little detail about Van Gogh's art development or his life.

Bandit Queens

 by Parini Shroff

This book was on the best seller list, I didn't really know anything about it.  It certainly was not anything I expected.  The book takes place in India.  The main character is part of a group of women who get loans to create home crafts.  She is feared in the village because people believe she murdered her husband.  One of the women in her group, whose husband beats her and steals the money she makes to buy booze, comes to the woman and asks for help killing her husband.  The woman is shocked and doesn't want to have any part in this but the woman keeps nagging her so eventually she does help the woman accomplish the task by suggesting how to make a poison.

However, this turns out badly for her beause the woman whose husband was murdered comes to her and says now that her husband is dead she needs money to support her family and she insists the woman give her money or she will go to the police.  The widow says she will deny all knowledge of the murder.

Then another woman comes to her asking for help to murder a man.  She reluctantly agrees to assist with a distraction so the woman can get some poison in a garden.  But in the end the woman ends up murdering the man herself beause he tries to rape her.

One day, the main character's husband shows up claiming he is blind.  He steals her money but tries to endear himself to her.  Eventually she figures out he is faking blindness.  She tries to get him to leave with no success.

While this has all been occuring the woman had met a man who was a bootlegger who was mixing gasoline in with his alcohol, testing concoctions on stray dogs.  She steals one of his dogs and threatens to report him.

At the end of the book the bootlegger shows up at her house.  Her husband had agreed to let the bootlegger beat up his wife in payment for debts he owes the bootlegger.  In the rucus some of her female friends arrive at the house, her husband is shot in the leg by the bootlegger and the woman convinces him that if he leaves her alone she will not report him.

The woman someone gets her husband to leave and at the end delivers divorce papers to him at his parent's house where he is sponging off them.  It is very difficult for women to get a divorce even if spouses are abusive, the woman had to have a local council that would believer her.

This was a very strange book, but an interesting read.

The War Librarian

 by Addison Armstrong

This is another one of the books where the author combines a stories in the past and present and the stories connect at the end.  Why are so many authors doing this these days?  Why isn't one good story enough?

The story starts with a young woman whose grand mother has died.  She is working in a lost letter office trying to get letters that have not been delivered  back to their source.  I guess people may not have put return addresses on them.  She starts working on a letter and finds it is from a young man she grew up with and whom she likes very much.  He is writing from Europe to a New York debutante asking her to write him. It sounds like he hopes to marry her.  However the young woman know the debutante has recently married.  She is angry that the debutante did not have the guts/courtesy to write him back and tell him she is married  It is against the rules but the girl writes back to him as if she were the debutante.

Shortly after that she volunteers to go to France to work as a librarian in medical camps.  When she gets to France she is befriended by a young ambulance driver and wonder of wonders meets up with the soldier she wrote the letter to.  I can't remember if she tells him his girlfriend is married.

The other story is of a young man in the 70's who has been accepted into the U.S marine corps, the first class to accept women.  The women all go through terrible trials by the men and one man in particular takes a dislike to her and assaults her and sets her up for downfall.

The young woman and soldier become closer and eventually have sex.  While this is going on there is a campaign to not allow certain books about war, by germans, etc to be read.  If they show up in boxes of books donated the librarian she is supposed to destroy them.  The young woman reads a letter about a Librarian in the U.S. who is fired becasue he refuses to abide by these rules.  She and her soldier friend write a letter to the newspaper in the Librarian's city urging support for him.  In the meantime the girl has been hiding some forbidden books in her room.  She is discovered and sentenced for treason.  She is to be taken to a court in another city by the ambulance driver but the driver wants to get her to freedom. They change clothes for the drive.  Unfortunately their car is hit by a bomb and the ambulance driver is killed.  As the other young woman is dressed like the driver she takes her ID and eventually gets back to America.  She is pregnant.

In the end it turns out that the cadet's grandmother is the war librarian.

It was an okay story....

The Last Heir to Blackwood Library

 by Hester Fox

I would descibe this as a Gothic Horror with of course a romantic twist.

A young, poor woman from London is contacted by a lawyer to tell her she is the last surviving member of the Hayworth clan and she has inherited the family estate.  The only proviso is she must live there.

She is shocked but delighted and sets off to her new home.  There is a small staff who treat her respectfully but the Housekeeper is reluctant to let her go into the huge library.  She eventually gets her way and goes into the library to start cataloguing the contents.  She is puzzled at times by strange feelings when she is in the library.

She is a bit lonely so when a young man, from the local gentry befriends her she is delighted, despite warnings about him from the staff at her house.

Eventually we find out the young man is part of of group of people who want to get control of the house and especially the library.  Gradualy the young woman gets weaker and weaker.  Her male friend asks her to marry him and she agrees.  He locks her into a room, telling her it is for her own good, telling her they are married. She doesn't remember the wedding.

Eventually she sets a fire in her room and escapes, not before she and a young man who works on the estate find and destroy the tomb of a monk.  It seems this monk's "apostles" were looking for a secret book and the spell which would bring the monk back to life.

It was an okay summer read.

Victory City

 by Salman Rushdie

This is the story of a young woman who, after seeing her mother die on a funeral pyre, takes some seeds and creates a city from them.  I have not read anything by Rushdie before.  He has a lovely writing style however while it was a good story I didn't feel it said anything particularly new or profound, as one review says "His new novel is about a kingdom that is founded on pluralism but fails to live up to its ideals".

Two cattle herders? come to the city and take power as King, first one brother and then the other.  The young woman, Pampa, ends up marrying them both.  She attempts to direct things to a society where women are equal and all views are respected but has limited and no lasting success.  The story is all about how people scheme and fight for power and in the end the city is destroyed. Pampa lives to be almost two hundred years old so she is witness to, and documents, the history of her city.

 

Lessons

 by Ian McEwan

I really enjoyed the last book I read by McEwan, Machines Like Me.  It was fascinating and thought provoking.

I absolutely hated this book and had to force myself to finish it....I skimmed over the last 60 pages.

This is the story of a man Roland Baines who really has a sad life.  As a child his soldier father and mother ship him off to boarding school at an early age.  His mother had two children from a previous marriage but they also have been shipped off so he does not have much contact with them til he is an adult.

While he is at boarding school the Cuban Missle Crisis occurs.  The boys at the school are worried about the end of the world and that they will die without having had sex.  Roland starts taking music lessons with a female music teacher.  She thinks he has talent but she also lusts after him.  Roland quits lessons and his school work suffers but eventually he goes to her place and they start having an affair.  Eventually he goes to live with her and she basically keeps him trapped in her house, wearing pajamas all the time.  She plans for them to go to Scotland when he is 16 where it will be legal for them to marry.  He is shocked at this news and leaves her.

It was thought he could have a brilliant musical career but he doesn't go on to university and instead drifts around different jobs and with different women.  He seems obsessed with sex but unable to commit.

Eventually he meets a woman and marries her.  He is trying a career as a poet without much success.   They have a baby and when the baby is about 18 months old his wife leaves him.  At first the police think he may have killed her but she sends sporadic postcards for awhile.

When he happens to be in Berlin at the fall of the  wall he happens to see his wife in a restaurant.  She a become a successful author.  She tells him she wants no contact with him or her son.  Her mother felt that her life was ruined, her career plans erased, when she had children and Roland's wife doesn't want that to be her fate.

Roland reads her books and realizes she is a great author and that she probably couldn't have achieved what she did staying with him.  He raises their son and seems to be a caring father.  He seems to scrape by playing piano in a hotel bar at night.

Eventually he meets another woman and they start a relationship but while their two sets of kids get along they keep separate households. He thinks of asking her to marry him but doesn't get around to it.  He is sad when she decides to get back with her abusive husband.

His son eventually finds his mother and she basically slams the door in his face saying she wants nothing to do with him.

At one point Roland goes to see the piano teacher and threatens to expose her.  She doesn't think he has proof but he has the train tickets and marriage licence.  He decides not to proceed with anything.

Eventually Roland gets back with the second woman, who has divorced her husband.  He asks her to marry him but before they get married she finds she has stage 4 cancer.  He looks after her til she dies.... what is the world trying to tell me, many thinks I have read/watched laterly are about spouses dying o cancer.  It is so depressing.....

Anyway, the woman asked Roland to sprinkle her ashes but a bridge in the country but only when he was ready to do it. Her ex starts bugging him to get the ashes to disperse them or come along.  Roland knows his wife wants her ex not to have anything to do with that.  He sets off to the country and is in the process of scattering the ashes when the ex shows up.  They wrestle, the ex pushes him off the bridge and dumps the ashes.

Roland returns home "somewhat sad" about what transpired.  He is not alone.  He seems to have a good family around him, his son, step children and their partners and a german granddaugter who really loves him.

Shortly after his ex wife gets in contact with him through her publisher.  She says she wants to see him.  She is in a wheelchair as she has had to have a foot amputated.  He is furious with her because in her last book she wrote of a couple, living in the town they lived in.  The woman in the story left an abusive husband.  He believes people will think she is writing about him.  She dismisses this saying people will know it is fiction.  She tells him that she really did love him but his neediness was too much for her. 

Various stages of the man's life mention major historical events: Bay of Pigs, Chernobyl, Berlin wall coming down, Brexit and the pandemic.  Not sure what the point of that was... other than to place his life in a particular time period.

I hated this guy, he had no drive, just seemed to float through life.  The only thing he seems to have done right was his care for his son. I know he had a traumatic childhood but geeze pick yourself up and make some decisions.  I hated the guys wife for what she did to him and their child. The piano teacher was despicable.

Some reviewers say the book is reflecting the ennui of our times.... maybe.  But I certainly did not enjoy any part of it.