Let the chill winds blow, we're exploring America

This December, as the bitter winds blow, let these authors light a fire in your book club. Some novels read like fact, while some non-fiction is so intriguing it could have been an invention. These selections blur the lines. Have some great reading fun, and a thoughtful holiday season.

The Lacuna (2009)
Barbara Kingsolver

Harrison William Shepard is the ultimate outsider. Although he is born in Washington DC, his mother Mexican and his father a low level diplomat, he is never quite at home in either country. His mother's vagabond life, jumping from lover to lover, forces him back to his cold father; while his other “situation” – he’s homosexual -- leads to expulsion from his boarding school and back into the warm arms of Mexico. There, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera give shelter to him, along with Leon Trotsky.

Lacuna means “hole,” and Harrison’s endless journal writing fills in some holes in history, Kingsolver style. (This is one of her big books.) In her eyes, Trotsky certainly gets a bum rap from both Stalin and the United States. However, if Kingsolver had read Gulag Boss (see below), before writing this historical novel, she might have realized that America’s red scares were a holiday picnic compared to Stalinism. But this is a great read. Kingsolver infuses lots of her power into Harrison, an historical writer after her own heart. Lots of fodder for book groups.

Native Speaker (1995)
Chang-Rae Lee

Henry Park is also an outsider: a first-generation American, he knows no English when he starts kindergarten. He is forced to visit the school speech therapist to become a native speaker (the author says this is impossible for someone “not born an American,”) and in another ironic twist, Henry marries a speech therapist. Meanwhile, he makes his living as a spy -- which works well to make this a unique novel, adding freshness to a subject much explored.

Lee's 1995 debut sets him a few rungs higher. His writing is sharp, well paced and this is a fascinating read on many different levels. Although he does give lots of details about growing up with Korean parents and culture, this is a book about all foreigners making their way to American shores. When Henry is sent to spy on an up-and-coming Korean politician from Flushing, Queens, this suspenseful novel shows us how we are all outsiders. Lee, a creative writing professor at Princeton University, has since written quite a few novels, including the acclaimed Aloft, about the aftermath of 9/11.

Freedom (2010)
Jonathan Franzen

Book Clubs love Jonathan Franzen, and with good reason. And not only because his new tour de force about Bush-era America just made the New York Times’ 10 most notable books of the year list. (His previous book, The Corrections, not only made the NYT list, he also was chosen as an Oprah pick . . . made an unfortunate wisecrack about that . . . . Oprah was miffed . . . . and the rest is history. A truly American story, probably worthy of a novella.) His characters are tragic and funny at the same time, and give you the feeling that maybe they live next door.

Patty and Walter Berglund are just such neighbors and at times you might hide rather than meet them out by the garbage cans. There's so much emotional baggage here, carried in from so many different parts of the country.  The Berglunds are not doing so well these days, but this is one enjoyable read, political correctness aside. Although this comic tragedy doesn't endorse visiting family, bring this with you on your holiday travels.

Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir - Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky (2010) Edited and translated by Deborah Kaple

 

Imagine being a 22 year old engineering school graduate who is sent by the Soviet Communist Party to work north of the Arctic Circle in the year 1940. Your assignment: supervise a prison work-camp in building a railroad to get coal out of recently-divided Poland. Fyodor and his school chums are told that the prisoners, political and criminal, are being reformed so that they can return to become productive socialists. But a different picture greets the three idealistic Party members after a perilous journey by steam boats, small boats and over the permafrost.

The author, a sociology lecturer and scholar from Princeton University, met Mochulsky in the early 1990s while she was working on another project in Russia. Mochulsky handed her a packet of papers and photos and asked her to edit and translate his memoirs as a young Gulag Boss. Fascinating story. We usually only hear from the prisoners, here's the boss' explanation. Believe it or not.