It's Monday! No, Wait! It's Wednesday!

It's not really Monday.

This is a combination post. I thought I’d be writing an It’s Monday! post, but it somehow turned into Wednesday before I noticed. I also thought I’d write a review of The Forgotten Girls by Sarah Blaedel, but I’m still too furious to deal with it. So this is going to be a bookish stir-fry – a little protein, a little vegetable, and a splash of sauce.

Last week I read Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, and that slim book aroused all of my political sensibilities. Over the weekend, I thought I’d turn down the volume and read a light mystery/thriller. I chose The Forgotten Girls because it had been well-reviewed elsewhere, and I love a good missing persons storyline.

As it turns out, once my political fire is ignited, there’s no way back. I finished The Forgotten Girls on Sunday, and I’m still gnashing my teeth.

If I had written this review at the half-way point of the book, I would have said the following: this is a fun, somewhat predictable Danish police procedural. Louise is the independent, sassy detective recently assigned to lead a Missing Persons Unit. She is joined by Eik, a handsome but unreliable detective side kick. They tackle a case that involves an unidentified woman in the woods -- and of course, nothing good happens in the woods. The story grows to include a sinister old mental institution, creepy woods-dwelling people, and some connections to other murders.

So far, so good. But then! THEN! It turns out that there’s a plot line in this book that steers pretty close to asserting the idea that men are biologically wired to be violent toward women. And as much as I never turn to thrillers for feminism, I found this development so distasteful and irresponsible that I almost threw it across the room.

I thought I would go on and on about my outrage over this issue, but now that I’m in front of the computer, I don’t have anything more to say about it. We are better than that, even if we live deep in the backwoods of Denmark.

In other news, there is a teachers’ strike in Seattle, so summer continues for the youths in my house. Their presence is interfering with my back-to-school read: Purity by Jonathan Franzen! I was so excited when this arrived for me at the library last weekend. The bad news is that it is nearly 600 pages, with tiny font and few chapter breaks.

Of course, you might be ready to point out that Franzen is no stranger to sexism (though, presumably, he doesn’t live in the woods). The author of a recent Bustle magazine article writes, “Misogyny seems to follow him like a cloud; even if you don't know about his exploits, you catch a whiff of them when he passes by.”

There is an ongoing conversation about whether a reader needs to like/approve of an author in order to enjoy/purchase a book. I’ll let you know what I think as I progress through the novel.

Hope you’re having a great week, internetters! Oh, and if you’re a Danish sleuth, I have a small piece of advice: if you know that a madman is on the loose in the woods, don’t go out into the woods! Go have a delicious pastry instead.

Review of A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

A few weeks ago, just after finishing Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, I told you that I would be hanging out in the Rainbows and Unicorns section of the bookstore for a while. I needed a break from literary despair.

Well, guess what? While in the Rainbows and Unicorns section, I found the PERFECT book to cleanse my reading palate: A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman. I need to say that usually I steer wide and clear from any book that has “heartwarming” as part of its description, but this book was an exquisite bowl of orange sorbet between my usual courses of doom and gloom.

There’s a catch, however. This is a novel about grief.

You’re probably scratching your puzzled head right about now, but you’re going to have to trust me. This is an utterly charming, often hilarious, very heartwarming book about grief.

The title character, Ove, is a curmudgeon in every sense of the word. His main activity is policing his community and criticizing his neighbors for minor infractions. Over the course of the novel, the reader learns about how he came to be so cantankerous and also follows his reluctant but growing relationships with others.

Truthfully, this has all the elements of a book that is much too sweet. But the author manages to avoid being excessively darling, mostly by inserting bits that are laugh-out-loud funny. I even read some of the comedic parts out loud to my family at the dinner table.

If you’re looking to try a book in translation, this one provides a great opportunity. It was originally published in Backman’s native Swedish, and I didn’t even realize that this was a translated novel until I finished.

Reading and enjoying this book made me think about novels that find you at just the right moment. I’ve thought about why I like certain books, and often it comes down to pacing or depth of character. But what about timing? Does the WHEN of a reading experience matter as much as the WHAT?

I did a little googling about the author, and it turns out that he began writing about Ove on his blog. Needless to say, I love reading about bloggers who become published authors. You can find an interesting interview with him here.

Review of Boy In the Twilight by Yu Hua

Yu Hua’s Boy in the Twilight: Stories of the Hidden China is a collection of stories translated from Chinese. Until I read this book, I was unfamiliar with this author, and, truthfully, any knowledge of modern China other than what I see on the news.

My feelings about this book have changed somewhat since I finished it.  It helped to discuss it in my book club, where my questions transitioned from “Why is this book so awful to read?” to “What does all the violence and treachery represent?”

I found the stories to be disturbing. There is an assortment of un-powerful people trying to assert power over even weaker people.  Bullies are everywhere, in the form of gangs of young men tormenting disabled people, shrewish women taking freedom away from husbands, regular commuters jockeying violently for a place on crowded buses home, corrupt corporations rewarding workers unfairly…and on and on. The reading experience, for me, was unpleasant.

After some time and reflection, I have to admit that the stories do make me curious to find out more about how this author is received in China. He has quite a bibliography – five novels, six story collections, and three essay collections – and he has won a host of prizes.  In what ways do people resonate with the ideas that his stories consider? What other reading would I need to do to better sink into and understand the post-Cultural Revolution experiences he portrays? And the title – “Stories of the Hidden China?” Hidden from whom? (And one of our book club members asked if the English version of the title was actually created by the author….)

Of course, the internet carries some answers. Here’s an interesting interview with the author (with some commentary on Chinese censorship of books).  Here’s an older article about the author from 2009, and a newer New York Times column he wrote about modern Chinese life.