Save a horse ride a cowgirl

Save a Horse Ride a Cowgirl by Ann Beattie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although Ann Beattie's characters have aged, their world is still recognizable even if their faces and bodies have changed. Many now can afford luxuries, like a showerhead "which approximated a rainstorm that would fall with enough force to blind frogs." Some live in assisted living facilities, petting dogs brought by well-meaning volunteers. If they still live at home, their garden paths are aglow with "solar spotlights allowing the stamens of flowers to puncture the night like so many silent tongues."

One thing that has not changed: most characters are distinguished by the things they still carry, and the references they learned when they were young. Dr. T. D. Eckleburg makes an appearance at a party celebrating Bernie Madoff's sentencing, and when characters dance, the music is not new.

One other thing these characters have in common: they all want to retain control and to shape the narration of the rest of their lives. The reader sometimes listens in as a character relates his or her own actions, blurring the authorial line between showing and telling. Even a dog, whose ears "looked like someone had given up while folding origami," tells us about his view of the lifelong search for love.

Not all of these character-driven stories hold together in the longer form they are given. Maybe Ms. Beattie means for us to lose patience with some. Some characters, though, open themselves to live in old age with people they might not have noticed before, sometimes literally. Those make the reader cheer, and cheer up.

Ms. Beattie's writing is a bit less sparse than it once was, but no less wry or sharp. The details still matter -- the boots, the music, the wine. One looks at people disappearing up a flight of stairs, perhaps "to the roof, from which they'd take flight and clutter the night sky, for all she knew." The reader doesn't know either, but she has met them, and they are real.

Highly recommended. I received this book as an electronic ARC from Net Galley.


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At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others by Sarah Bakewell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It begins with some hard slogging if you're not (I'm not) used to reading philosophy (any more) - but - once you get the focus, it is fascinating, especially once the personalities of the various philosophers begin to interact with each other's thoughts, lives, and politics. I was struck by how truly unpleasant some of the guiding lights of philosophy were, and how ugly their choices in the 1930s.

I was also struck by how similar systems of thought could lead to different conclusions - such as how Albert Camus's decision to oppose the death penalty for war criminals conflicted with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre's support, and Sartre's support for a clearly totalitarian regime in the USSR after his experience as a prisoner of war under National Socialism.

My favorite quote came from Hannah Arendt after the execution of the Rosenbergs: "An unimaginable stupidity must have taken hold in the USA. It frightens us because we are familiar with it." Oh, if she only knew ...

One star taken off because of the dense beginning (although, in truth, it's probably my own brain that was dense, not the writing). 


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The Orphan's Tale

The Orphan's Tale by Pam Jenoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pam Jenoff, former diplomat for the US State Department and noted writer of historical fiction that focuses on WWII, learned about The Unknown Children and European circuses that helped to rescue Jews when she visited Yad Vashem. The two women protagonists in this novel, Astrid and Noa, meet each other and become allies - almost sisters - because of these two specific aspects of the Shoah.

Pretty blonde Noa, driven from her Dutch home by her enraged and shamed family for becoming pregnant by a German soldier, is forced to give up her baby boy by a German home for unwed mothers. The only work she can find is cleaning a tiny train station, through which cars pass daily, carrying Jews. One day, she dares to investigate faint sounds from a stopped train. She opens the door and reels from the stench surrounding piles of babies, some living, most dead. No one is guarding this train; these prisoners are unlikely to escape. On an impulse, she takes one of the babies from the car and runs - and runs - almost dying in the bleak cold of a German forest.

Astrid, a Jewish circus trapeze artist, had left the circus to marry a German soldier. He divorces her, one day, on orders from above: the Reich has ordered all Aryan soldiers to divorce their Jewish wives. She finds her way back to where a rival Jewish circus is rehearsing for its spring season; her own family's circus has been destroyed, its members probably shipped to camps or killed on the spot. The owner, Herr Neuhoff, remembering her from childhood and knowing that she is a star aerialist, hires and protects her to the extent of his power - mostly bribes of money and cognac to the soldiers whose inspections terrify them all.

Noa and the baby, Theo,are taken in by the circus and allowed to stay - if she can become a trapeze performer. Astrid is tasked to train her. The reader meets other circus members, including a Jewish clockmaker and a bitter, disillusioned clown - once Russian royalty - whose act becomes too political for safety.

The novel is told from two viewpoints - Astrid's and Noa's. Each woman is given extraordinary powers of description and observation, giving the reader a gritty, ultra-realistic experience of the life these itinerants have lived, and continue to live as they make do with rations, deprivation, and virtual enslavement in a country becoming more brutal as its power begins to wane.

This is an engrossing, nightmare-producing, rich book. I read it in a day, a long day, punctuated by dark thoughts and tears. Rating it has been difficult. The writing is pungent and specific. But it fails, to me, in the sameness of the voices of the two young women, whose lives have been so different but whose vocabulary and phrasing are so alike, and in plotting, especially in the last third of the book. Nonetheless, the book is important, and gives the reader a glimpse into lesser-known aspects of the Shoah.

I received this book as an ARC. 


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