the garfield book review

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is nothing if not a good read, and it’s for precisely this reason that I hesitate to, well, read too much into it. The novel is artfully paced, different enough to know you’re not wasting your time but a familiar enough archetype that you also know the narrative won’t deviate from the “surprise” tropes and ambiguous endings that books of this sort feel they owe their readers. That said, I can almost guarantee you’ll languish in bed for hours, flipping pages as if your life depends on it. Gone Girl purports to be a thriller, of course, and a psychological character study, but there’s also just enough incisive social commentary to elevate the novel to good good. The nature of the plot ensures the book’s primary readers will most likely be women, and if those women are anything like me, they’ll crumple a few pages (or crack their Kindle screens) in some choice eureka moments when Flynn just hits the proverbial nail on the head.   Continue reading →

“Werther identifies himself with the madman, with the footman. As a reader, I can identify myself with Werther. Historically, thousands of subjects have done so, suffering, killing themselves, dressing, perfuming themselves, writing as if they were Werther (songs, poems, candy boxes, belt buckles, colognes à la Werther). A long chain of equivalences links all the lovers in the world.”  - Roland Barthes

In May, before I moved back to the United States from Germany, I made a four-day sojourn to Goethe’s hometown of Weimar, about 3 and a half hours east of Berlin. Weimar, of course, was the capital of Germany’s failed interwar democratic federation, chosen for its cultural history: Goethe lived and wrote there, as did Schiller; the Bauhaus movement was also founded there, and there’s a beautiful museum dedicated to it on Theaterplatz. Weimar is a delightful town with a fascinating history, though its beauty is tempered by the fact that one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, Buchenwald, was built just outside the city (the Soviets also used the camp for prisoners of war after the fall of the Third Reich.) I spent a few hours in Goethe’s house, ascending his grand staircase and wandering through his gardens, and finished The Sorrows of Young Werther several hours later at my guest house.   Continue reading →

Samantha Power’s 2002 book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, must have been quite an undertaking. The book recaps not just the US response to the genocides of the twentieth century (the Turkish massacres of Armenians; the Holocaust; the Cambodian killing fields; the gassing of the Kurdish minority in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; the Serb-sponsored ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in 1993; the Rwandan genocide; and Serbia’s mass murder of Kosovars in 1999), but also charts the laborious process of US ratification of the UN Genocide Convention and the political coincidences that enabled movement on international humanitarian law (Ronald Reagan’s ill-fated trip to Bitburg Cemetery, for example). Power is a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, serves on President Obama’s National Security Council (incidentally, she was the one who resigned from Obama’s 2008 campaign staff after referring to Hillary Clinton as a “monster”), and served as a war correspondent in Bosnia when the UN-protected “safe area” of Srebrenica fell to Bosnian-Serb General Radko Mladic and his forces. In other words, her credentials are airtight, and her book is fascinating, heartbreaking and highly informative. It’s clearly intended as a call to arms, a no-holds-barred defense of humanitarian intervention and US recognition of and compliance with international law. And while I was essentially on her side already, she certainly lays out a compelling case here.   Continue reading →

Edith Wharton, while not British herself, is usually placed firmly in the camp of Victorian novelists like Jane Austen, George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë, but her books twist the genre in one crucial way: Wharton doesn’t like happy endings. No joyful proposal announcements or wedding parties to wrap everything up and vindicate all those long years of female suffering. All the Victorian novelists attacked convention, but Wharton really took it out on her characters. The Age of Innocence was, by Wharton’s own contention, meant to serve as an apologia of sorts for The House of Mirth, in which the beautiful Lily Bart is ruined, and killed, by ultimately meaningless social pressures. In Innocence—and I suppose I should include a spoiler alert, though the story is likely old hat to most readers—protagonist Newland Archer chooses his responsibility to his pregnant wife, May Welland, over his ardor for May’s cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, who has left Europe and her philandering husband to return in ignominy to New York. After an almost completely chaste courtship, Newland hurriedly plans to leave May for Ellen and follow his true love to France, until he is stymied by the news of his unborn son. It is Ellen, really, who makes the “responsible” choice, permitting Newland to “act” through inaction. Newland doesn’t stay; he simply doesn’t go.   Continue reading →

Well, I finally read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the “controversial” 2009 memoir by Amy Chua, a Yale Law professor married to another Yale Law professor, who raised two daughters, Sophia and Louisa (Lulu), the “Chinese way.” (Chua’s husband, for what it’s worth, is Jewish.) Unless you’ve been living on Pluto, you know Chua got a lot of flack for her tough-love, no-nonsense, achievement-above-all-else approach to parenting, embracing tactics that included threatening to burn Sophia’s stuffed animals if the next run-through at the piano wasn’t perfect; crumpling up birthday cards she deemed insufficiently thoughtful, tossing them in her daughters’ faces and demanding they try again; refusing to let either girl attend a sleepover or a playdate; demanding perfect grades “in every subject except gym and drama”; and calling Sophia “garbage,” the way Chua’s own father once reprimanded his daughter in their native Hokkien Chinese. “But it didn’t damage my self-esteem or anything like that,” Chua is quick to assure her more liberal-minded (read: Western) readers.   Continue reading →

I’ll be the first to concede that I enjoy pretty much everything I read—not just because I happen to have impeccable literary taste (kidding) but also because I firmly believe there is something of value in all but the very worst books, and I plant myself firmly in the so-called “reader response” camp of literary criticism: Novels, which do not exist in vaccums,  may be assessed based on the unique reactions they elicit in individual readers, making said reader’s experience an integral part of the work itself. On that note, while I recognize that Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, isn’t “perfect” in any real sense, I can’t remember enjoying a contemporary novel (with the possible exceptions of anything in Curtis Sittenfeld’s oeuvre) more. I loved every single second of it, and I’m not sure there’s a better feeling in this world than immersing yourself in a book you hope never ends.   Continue reading →