Review: The Bird Sisters by Rebecca Rasmussen

The Bird Sisters is the author's debut novel and a truly decent piece of work. Rebecca Rasmussen has lyric and cadence, and most importantly, heart. It was easy reading: I felt drawn into the contours of its rough countryside, to its decrepit house with the purple meadow and the algae-infested pond, and to the tension within a family to whom happiness required painful effort that it almost resembles a kind of Spring trying to break through an unyielding Winter. I lingered and read the book through to see whether Spring would indeed arrive.

The story is about two sisters growing up in rural Wisconsin, who possess such opposite personalities, but who cling to each other for emotional survival and protection as the family falls apart. Milly is a beautiful, sensitive soul with the blonde hair, full figure and brilliant green eyes to go with it. She is wise beyond her age, graceful, responsible, and admirable in the kitchen. She is exactly the kind of daughter parents in those days wished to have: marry-able. She even possesses the spunk to go after her true love; but when fate lands him on her lap, Milly responds by revealing her strongest virtue– which also turns out to be her worst flaw. Twiss, a couple of years younger, is a tomboyish free spirit: her father's dream daughter and her mother's bane. The book resounds with her sweet laughter and wrathful poundings and, at the height of her coming-of-age, the crackle of her broken spirit. The story explores themes of forgiveness and healing.

It opens when the sisters are in their seventies; the reader is introduced to their quiet life in the old family home now shamelessly falling apart and with a garden overgrown by weeds. The reader takes a journey with them, hither and thither in time, as each sister relives memories and reflects on their shared history through the daily assault of forgetfulness and brittle bones. We meet their dead mother, an unhappy woman who had married for love and reaped all its bitter fruits, and their father, a passionate man who was forever burdened by his poor, humble origins and who lacked the courage required to bring love to pass. We linger at one particular summer and witness the arrival of Bett, a pale, sickly cousin– unbelievably more impoverished than they were– whose thin, frail frame managed to finish off the family's upheaval. From the present through to various instances in the sisters' childhood, we are taken backwards and forwards in time in a jumble of memories as we try to get at the reason that made them live together to their old age.

Though it is beautifully written, I cannot help being disappointed that there wasn't more of it. I felt the elderly sisters' characters were not much different from their younger selves and so, many times, I lacked the feeling of the passage of time. The characters were more round and lifelike when they were presented as teenagers than as the two elderly sisters facing the close of their lives. I think it's a pity that there was no clue as to what happened between their teenage and their elderly years: six decades during which they must have acquired experiences, other loves, other angers, wisdom. I almost get the feeling that the author knew them only as teenagers as well. There were also characters in the village which I felt were promising and would have provided a fuller, richer, more realistic backdrop for the story if they had come to the fore. Rebecca Rasmussen has amazing talent. I see no reason why she shouldn't dive into her story with abandon as Forster did, or the Brontes, or any literary writer for that matter. That would have been more enjoyable, at least for this reader.

The fact remains though: The Bird Sisters is a charming book. I have no doubt it will attract many fans of contemporary realistic fiction. I can already see it being made into a movie. For my part, however, although the book was a delight to read, it's the kind I would happily lend to a friend without perhaps missing it on the shelf.

Cuurently Reading: The Bird Sisters by Rebecca Rasmussen

Lined up next.....

The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk

Review: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

If you’re the type to have Shakespeare’s King Lear on your bathroom shelf, then perhaps you’ll have the patience to withstand the madness of this book.



I say perhaps because, though I am a fan of Shakespeare, I still find Laurence Sterne’s indefatigable wit and humour something like running a marathon on a steep hill. It is absolutely funny, over-the-top hilarious, and quite "post-modern" for its time. It was published first in 1759 in what’s now of course old-fashioned English. It was a triumph, in my opinion, of courage, lunacy, and creativity.

The story belongs to Tristram Shandy, a narcissistic gentleman who is struggling to write his autobiography. In order to do this perfectly, he feels he must familiarise the reader with every detail that is pertinent to his life and birth. He is earnest in his mission and reveals every thing– from a curious mishap during his parents’ coitus, to his uncle’s love of miniature canons, which had all somehow affected his fate. But Tristram Shandy is a man who loves to digress. In his book, he inserts a bold advertisement targeted to the nobility, a legal document between his mother and father, and the whole ritual of excommunication from the Catholic church, among many others. On page 100, or thereabouts depending on the edition, he presents the reader with a joke that would have made me fall into a chair if I hadn’t been already reading on the bed. Reading Laurence Sterne is like inviting a stand-up comic to your home. You will not exhaust him in one night, or one weekend. You have to invite him for dinner multiple times until he finishes his story.

Experimental or post-modern literature can often be serious, abstract, even bland. Tristram Shandy is refreshingly none of these. It is playful and experimental– but not in the Twilight Zone kind of way. Laurence Sterne blows you away like a hurricane, lifting you from the box you built to house your thoughts. Follow him, like Don Quixote, and you’ll emerge on the other side of your mind.

Stories of Lu Xun. A Glimpse of the Chinese Short Story.

I love short story collections, and aside from the bang-for-your-buck Chekhov volumes, I find that I love a few good ones from Asia as well.

Lu Xun was a writer who lived at the height of China’s quarrel with its thousand-year-old monarchy. It was 1918. The citizenry was crawling in the depths of poverty and abuse. New groups composed of energetic, radical youths were proposing dangerous solutions. Lu Xun, a writer both disenchanted with the monarchy and unimpressed by the apathetic peasantry, penned stories that echoed the hope and melancholy of his soul. They are poignant.

“The Diary of A Madman” is about a man who visits an ill friend in the country. He finds, however, that his friend is no longer there– cured according to his family, now in the pink of health and looking for a job in the city. What is left of him in the house is his diary in which he confesses his anguish and paranoia at being cannibalised by his family and neighbours whom he suspects of eating humans. He thinks they can sense that he is different from them. It is perhaps a reflection of Lu Xun’s times: when a culture used to conformity had to grapple with radical thoughts taking root inside their own homes. There is a lot of rumination in Lu Xun about the perils of being different. One senses his sadness at not being able to reach his people.

Another story, My Old Home, written in 1921, tells of the awkward meeting between two former childhood friends and the gap that opens up irreparably between them through no fault of theirs. It is one of my favourites in the volume. It is a dirge to the death of a friendship, and a look at how one can be estranged from the source of one’s inspiration– indeed from the most pleasurable and innocent dreams of one’s own soul. Estranged childhood friends are not uncommon in literature; the way Lu Xun captures the awkwardness of a friendship that is taking its last breath has an authentic ring and is unforgettable.

I picked up this collection because I wanted to know more about the Chinese culture. My grandfather, to whom I was extremely close when I was a child, was Chinese but shared very little of his world with me. He used the abacus and chewed on Chinese delicacies and listened to Chinese opera every night, but he could not teach me his language. He tried to enrol me into Chinese classes once, but it did not work out. And so while I went with him on visits to friends, I never understood what they were talking about. I was an outsider looking in– still an outsider looking in.

Only a tiny part of Chinese literature has ever been translated into English. One great volume that I truly enjoyed reading years ago was The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry: The Full 3000 Year Tradition by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping, which gives a taste of a few of China’s greatest poets. But I really wanted to get my hand at the short stories, to get a pulse of the lives of the common people, their habits, their perspectives. Lu Xun gives a glimpse of that. And what I see beyond the strangeness of habits foreign to me is the vastness of the Chinese cultural landscape, and the differences between and among the Chinese peoples themselves. Humans tend to stereotype things that are foreign to them. Once we have been properly introduced though, then we see all the colours of the spectrum, and we can pick out some that are similar to ours. So yes, Lu Xun made my grandfather’s world a little bit more understandable to me. He was a good introduction to Chinese life and literature. And like all good literature, the stories made me celebrate our common struggles as human beings, even as he wrote from a world and from a language that was foreign to me.

I believe those differences and similarities are still current. Many people travel to foreign lands to learn about its people and culture, and while nothing beats walking into a Chinese temple or down a Shanghai street, reading their literature is a cheaper, more thoughtful, not quite inferior alternative.

What Self-Respecting Edgar Allan Poe Fan Would Not Like To Poke Their Snub Little Nose Into The Mystery of His Death?

  REVIEW: The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl

I’m a great fan of Edgar Allan Poe. Few writers can match the mental acuity he exhibits in his short stories. That cunning skill by which he cloaks his scorn of society’s malignant ways then reveals it, flashing, at the tail-end of a whip. His boldness to dive into mysteries– to dark depths– diving, as it were, with me into my own dark heart. His puzzles, challenging the reader to see that what seems is not what is. His obsession with the push and pull of Beauty and Terror– that quality which earlier, wiser generations of writers referred to as the Sublime. He teases me endlessly to undo the fringes of my imagination, and delivers that feeling of Dread associated with the Divine which is often missing from the works of contemporary authors. Who can match the cloud of enigma to which Edgar Allan Poe draws us?

Add to this the baffling circumstances of his death (discovered unconscious in a dark corner of a Baltimore pub when he should have been miles away in Virginia; haphazardly dressed in clothes that did not fit him) which made him look like a character in his own story– and the Author himself ascends to Mystery-hood. In his dying hour, the grand master Edgar Allan Poe left his fans a puzzle to which he must eternally hold the key. A going-away gift to his loving readers perhaps.

It is into this mystery that Matthew Pearl dips his nimble mind. In his book, The Poe Shadow, Pearl asks us to imagine Quentin, a young Baltimore lawyer, possessing more of the poetic nature than a solicitor's, who suddenly realizes that the queer burial he witnessed one night was that of his favourite author Edgar Poe. Convinced that Poe should be celebrated more by the ignorant American public who despised his morbid stories, Quentin risks his reputation as a responsible, level-headed law partner in order to investigate Poe's death. Quentin leaves his fiance and his practice to travel to Paris in search of the real man who was the basis for Poe's greatest creation: the literary grandfather of Sherlock Holmes, Auguste Dupin. The only person in the world, Quentin believes, who can solve the mystery of Poe's death. However, he meets not one man, but two. And in the clash of techniques between the two Dupins, the reader, as well as Quentin, is forced to struggle with the possibility that Poe might have just truly conjured up Dupin out of the fog in his brain.

Matthew Pearl not only gives us an action-packed mystery, a story which fans would love, but truly an interpretation of the facts as they came to light in his research. The dates and places in the novel, as they relate to Poe, are all factual. Persons who were there at the time of Poe's death were also brought into the drama by Pearl, some given new names. The novel is essentially Pearl's thesis on the death of Poe. And his theory, in the tradition of Dupin, is unbelievably, impressively simple.