Author Archives: mollyblieden3947

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, by Meg Elison

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Notably written before the appearance of Covid 19, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife recounts the story of a global pandemic through the eyes of a nurse working in the maternity ward of a hospital in San Francisco when it first appeared.

The virus was deadly, but particularly so to pregnant women and their unborn children. Suddenly, on her ward, every newborn died and many of the mothers. As the pandemic reached a global scale, the female population takes a nosedive.

After awaking in the hospital morgue, our narrator stumbles home amidst the dead, only to be awaken by a rapist who breaks into her apartment. She is able to kill the rapist but realizes it is no longer safe to be a woman. She chops her hair, gets a girdle to flatten her chest, and sneaks out of SF to find safer havens.

This book shares many elements with Station Eleven except for its focus on women and the effect of their scarcity. In the world of men, the few remaining women seem to be reduced to either sex slave or queen bee. In both cases this occurs in extreme form- either they are forced to crawling around in their underwear with a chain around their neck, or they are calling the shots for massive orgies with 20 men meeting their every need.

It is well past the halfway point when we meet some secluded communities who seem to have maintained their value system. Perhaps I’m naive but it was a little hard to believe. Believability aside, it still made a good read, so I give this book 3.5👍 out of 5👍.

O Caledonia, by Elspeth Parker

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This dreamy literary tale starts off with the discovery of Janet’s dead body, and the absence of a murderer. However it is not a detective story, but rather the lonely tale of the oldest daughter of Vera and Hector. Janet never follows convention, and is happiest when buried in a book of mythology or poetry.

The novel is peppered with quotes from the classics she loves. The references were a bit lost on me although they underscore’s Janet’s deep love of language and literature.

Her descriptions of the Scottish landscape north of Edinburgh where the family lived was the highlight of the book.

Winter descended on the glen; in mid-October came the first thin fall of snow, gone an hour later in the wet wind. The deer ventured down from the hills at dusk, tawny owls shrieked as they hunted through the darkness and shooting stars fled across the night sky. Leafless, the beeches and ashes shivered; the grass was parched with cold; pine and monkey-puzzle stood black and dominant. Only the red earth of the hill tracks retained its colour; the puddles looked like pools of blood.

I give this book 4👍 out of 5👍.

The Running Grave, Robert Galbraith

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In The Running Grave, Cormoran Strike and Robin take on a client who’s son has joined a cult, the Universal Humanitarian Church. The client is concerned that their son Will has lost a significant amount of weight, seems to have his communications controlled, and is giving away his inheritance to the Church. The UHC has become a powerful organization and can afford media and legal consultants to squash or discredit any former members who try to speak out against it. One former member who started a very public blog is found dead.

Robin goes undercover to try to expose the organization, which uses classic brainwashing techniques to transform its members to their insidious ways, including “Spirit Bonding” a term used for the requirement that women have un-protected sex with any male member of the church upon demand (enforced rape). Hard physical work, insufficient food, lack of sleep, and extreme group dynamics make the story a challenge to get through – I was sort of hooked and repulsed, and relieved to get to the end.

The Running Grave continues with the ongoing sexual tension between Cameron and Robin, which still does not resolve at the end of the novel. Galbraith (aka JK Rowling) is a great storyteller and brings life to the psyche of the characters. I give this book 4👍 out of 5👍.

Birnam Wood, Eleanore Catton

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“Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill Shall come against him”.

Birnam Wood is both a reference to Macbeth and the appropriated name of an activist gardening collective in New Zealand, the brainchild of Mira Bunting. On paper Birnam Wood plants food crops on unused land, or in gardens where owners give permission in exchange for the portions of the produce. The rest is distributed to those in need or sold to cover their expenses. Birnam Wood also has some Guerilla activites off the books where they maintain crops on median strips, abandon lots, and other hidden parcels which they struggle to maintain.

The group epitomizes a politically correct horizontal organization. Rotating directors lead caucuses at the quarterly “hui’s” (Maori word for “gathering”) where everyone votes on all management issues related to the group, and all financial records are kept on shared documents with total transparency. In spite of this Mira is the unspoken leader and her decisions shape the direction of the group. The novel begins with Mira reading about an abandon property which was taken off the market when a landslide cut off the main access to it and the remote town of Thorndike at the foothills of the Korowai ranges. Mira, Seong opportunity to upscale the organization, journeys 5 hours to Thorndike, treks through the woods around the landslide, and sneaks onto the property. But her reconnaissance is interrupted by a man in an expensive track suit, the billionaire Robert Lemoine.

Mira learns that Lemoine had been in negotiation with the property owner Owen Darvish prior to the landslide. After an initial intimidating encounter, he offers her $10,000 to help Birnam Wood set up operations in Thorndike. He tells her he is a prepper and is buying the property to embed a doomsday bunker in the land. Although he does not yet own the property, Darvish has invited him to use the house and use its airfield for his private plane. He convinces Mira that he will be ultimately purchasing the property and that they both might trespass together.

Meanwhile Tony Gallo, one of the founding members of Birnam Wood and a former (somewhat fraught) fling of Mira’s shows up at Mira’s house unannounced. Mira is on her way to her fact-finding mission in Thorndike, so Tony instead talks with Mira’s roommate and Birnam Wood co-director Shelley. We learn that Shelley is disaffected with the organization and trying to figure out her exit strategy. She thinks a one-night stand with Tony might give her the out she needs so the two of them head out for drinks. But the evening ends badly when Shelley realizes Tony is still interested in Mira.

So it is that Tony arrives at the next Birnam hui, hackles raised. First he gets into a loud debate with Amber, the owner of the cafe who hosts the hui, and who feeds the group using (of course) vegetables grown by Birnam Wood. The discussion, which seems to be a parody of me-too one-up-manship ends in Tony arguing that “Polyamory is so fucking capitalistic. Yet again. you’re proving my point. You literally couldn’t have picked a more individualistic example.” Amber looked confused. “What?” “It’s Consumerism 101!” Tony burst out. “It’s like going to a department store! The idea that this partner gives you a little bit of this and this partner gives you a little bit of that, and you don’t want to risk missing out, so you buy them both – it’s a hedge!“

The “caucus” has turned against Tony when Mira suddenly walks in late, excited about her news of Thorndike, and is confronted by the appearance of Tony who she hasn’t seen in years, and the hostile vibe in the room. Mira pushes forward her presentation of the project, not telling the group that Lemoine doesn’t actually own the property. Tony immediately objects, saying that Lemoine and his Autonomo surveillance technology company represents the opposite of their values. A heated debate ensues and Tony ends up being asked to leave. The rest of the group vote in favor of Thorndike and begin to mobilize the move.

Catton constantly shifts perspective in her narrative style and the reader is thrust from one first person narrative to the next with little warning. The first half of the book which I have summarized above took me some time to engage with, as we are introduced to so many characters with their extreme value systems. But as Birnam moves to Thorndike, and we learn more and more about Lemoine’s sinister maneuvering, we can see the conflict taking shape long before it happens, and wonder why none of the other characters can.

So it is that we learn Lemoine has hacked Mira’s cell phone and can now track, interrupt, and modify all her calls texts and emails. Her moves are further tracked by the Automono Surveillance drones which monitor the property. Lemoine, as the reader may have expected, is a billionaire on a mission, which has nothing to do with doomsday. His discovery of rare earth metals used for computer chips and cell phones in the Korowai ranges has prompted an extreme and secretive plan for extracting them. He has no intention of living in his doomsday bunker, but instead of filling it up with the extracted minerals he is illegally mining from the adjacent national park, and then secreting the product out of the country in the bunker. It is unclear to the reader, and perhaps even to Lemoine, how his support of Birnam Wood will play into his plans, which seem very fluid and have layers and layers of redundancy.

But when the Birnam Wood collective sets up camp in Thorndike, Tony starts to research the activities of Lemoine. Up to this point, Tony has seemed just an intellectual with few social skills, but he now demonstrates his extreme survival skills and ability to avoid the surveillance state. Sneaking behind the Darvish farm up in the hills of the Korowai range, he stays off the main path, keeps his phone in an aluminum pouch, and soon discovers Lemoine’s secret extraction site. The hapless Tony is able to avoid the guards, the surveillance drones, and Lemoine’s increasingly aggressive efforts to capture him.

But it is Mira’s failure to heed his warnings that ironically leads to his downfall. Not knowing (or believing) that her phone has already been compromised, she comes out at night to find Tony, immediately leading Lemoine to his hiding place.

If the lesson of Macbeth is the destruction wrought by unconstrained ambition, it seems none of these characters will escape their fate. Tony is blinded by his visions of fame and glory for revealing the sinister plot to harvest precious metals from National parkland. Mira’s vision of a vital Birnam Wood collective blinds her to Lemoine’s manipulations. Lemoine is the classic victim of wealth and power. Thus the ending – which seemed so abrupt – should have been foreseen, and in fact Catton makes no effort to hide the details. Nonetheless my first reaction was to look on line for a potential sequel – apparently I too willfully ignored all the clues.

I give this book 4.9👍 out of 5👍.

Trust, by Hernan Diaz

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Trust is a book within a book- actually three books within a book- that tell the same story three different ways.

The novel starts out with Bonds: A Novel by Harold Vanner. Bonds tells the story of financial tycoon Benjamin Rask, who we later learn is thinly disguised as the tycoon Andrew Bevel. Rask comes from a long line of successful financiers. “Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise: his was not a story of resilience and perseverance or the tale of an unbreakable will forging a golden destiny for itself out of little more than dross.”

In Bonds the reclusive Rask falls in love with the brilliant Helen Brevoort. Helen’s amazing performances of her photographic memory (rereading text verbatim, backwards, or two texts interspersed after one reading) was trotted out in front of high society soirées as a way to maintain the Brevoorts’ status. As Mrs. Rask, Helen becomes an important philanthropist, supporting the arts, and contemporary musicians specifically. She and Benjamin, neither of whom liked to socialize, enjoyed having chamber music concerts in their home. Rask even starts a Charitable Investment Fund to coordinate Helen’s activities and giving.

Helen develops an undefined mania and slowly withdraws from reality, writing obsessively in her journals. She asks to be taken to Zurich to convalesce, and Rask soon takes over her care with medical specialists from one of his German investment concerns. The doctors giver Helen a series of shots that cause extreme convulsions, sort of a pre-cursor to Electric Shock Therapy. Rask is not allowed in the room while Helen received the “treatment” but during one session he sees a nurse leave the room visibly upset, and she stares at Rask with hatred. The third treatment proves too much for Helen and her heart fails her, but not before suffering extreme pain and convulsions so strong her collar bone is broken.

Infuriated by this gruesome account of his life with his wife, Andrew Bevel writes the second novel of the book, My Life. This saccharine tale recounts his family’s successful history, his own genius in the stock market, how his financial acumen also served the public good, and the “true” story of his wife Mildred’s life and illness. “My actions safeguarded American industry and business. I protected our economy from unethical operators and destroyers of confidence. I also shielded free enterprise from the dictatorial presence of the Federal Government.”

In My Life, Andrew Brevel’s wife Mildred is a gentle warm companion. Like Helen she supports the arts through her philanthropic activities, but supports a more classic repertoire. Flower arranging is another hobby. When she becomes ill, the problem is cancer, not mental illness. She dies peacefully in a sanatorium in Switzerland.

It is only through A Memoir, Remembered by Ida Partenza that the true story of Andrew and Mildred are revealed. We meet Ida in her 70s, returning to the Brevel mansion which has now become a museum. Ida hasn’t been back since her 20s when she worked with Brevel assisting him in writing his biography. Although Mildred has been long gone by the time Ida starts the job, she feels a strange kinship with her, and questions why Brevel seems to want to water down her intellect and business acumen, calling her philanthropy chaotic and haphazard.

After digging through boxes of Mildred’s papers, which primarily consist of her date books, and thank you letters for her philanthropic activities, Ida discovers a thin journal hidden in one of Mildred’s large appointment books. (Spoiler alert). The journal reveals the breadth and depth of Mildred’s intellect and success in the market. It was first discovered by Andrew when he noticed her charitable fund was performing better than his commercial funds and she begins to guide him on his investment strategies. It is Mildred who brings him his outsized financial success, who sees the upcoming crash in the 30s, and advises him to short the market. Brevel hide’s his wife’s contribution until the bitter end.

I know this book has received numerous prestigious awards, and conceptually I liked the Rashomon framework of a story being retold through multiple voices. The political message – behind every great man is an even greater woman – is elegantly explicated here. But I have to confess I did not particularly enjoy reading the book, even though the aspects I didn’t enjoy were likely intended by the author. Bonds was horrible but salacious. My Life was saccharine and had long tedious texts about the market. By the time I got to A Memoir, Remembered I was totally confused and it took me several chapters to reengage with the narrative. Against the backdrop of the legal proceedings against Trump, Trust is a timely novel, but the relevance of the story did not help my enjoyment level. I give this book 3.5👍 out of 5👍.

T

House on Endless Waters, by Emuna Elon

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Israeli writer Yoel Blum’s books have been translated into more than 20 languages. He and his wife Bat-Ami have travelled the world over promoting them. But when his publisher arranges a series of events in Amsterdam, Yoel refuses. The dying wish of his mother, Sonia, had been that he never set foot in Holland.

Yoel’s publisher prevails, and with Bat-Ami’s prodding they are soon enjoying a fancy (not Kosher) hotel in central Amsterdam. When his lectures and events are over he and Bat-Ami visit the Jewish History Museum which preserved remnants of the vibrant Jewish life in Amsterdam pre-Nazi occupation. Of the approximately one hundred and forty thousand Jews of Holland, only about thirty-eight thousand survived the war years. Yoel sees Bat-Ami captivated by an old black and white film of a Jewish wedding. Yoel sits with his wife and suddenly his mother Sonia looks up at the camera with his sister Nettie to one side, and a baby in her arms. But Yoel can clearly see that the blond baby in her arms is not himself.

When Yoel and Bat-Ami return to Israel he calls Nettie and she reluctantly tells him (but not the reader) the story. He is compelled to return to Amsterdam, literally to rewrite his history. With Nettie’s help he finds the neighborhood in Amsterdam where Sonia and Eddy lived, along with Eddy’s friend Martin and his wife Anouk, their son Sebastian, and Anouk’s parents, the wealthy Jewish bankers, the Rosso’s.

Martin had a small shop selling art which is now a real estate office. Eddy worked at the nearby Jewish hospital where Sonia had once been a nurse which is still a medical facility. Yoel finds a small hotel with a room overlooking the back yards of all the neighboring houses. The large unshuttered windows allow Yoel to look in on his neighbors’ lives, a bit of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but here the crime happened decades before the story begins.

Yoel both imagines those lives he sees from his hotel balcony, and the life of Sonia and Eddy, as the persecution of the Jews unfolds. First Jews are not allowed in non-Jewish shops. They lose their jobs in non-Jewish establishments. They are not allowed to go to school, given food rations, made to wear yellow stars. Raids begin and large groups of Jews are taken away by trains to work camps, some to Poland and Germany where they never return.

The narrative between past and present become increasingly fluid. In one paragraph Yoel is observing a mother and her children return home to a basement apartment he imagined Sonia had lived. In the next paragraph Sonia has a visit from a member of the underground, having made the difficult decision to save her children by sending them to be hidden with a Christian family.

We understand that it is only a matter of time before Sonia too will be taken away. The house where her daughter Nettie has been hidden is raided and Nettie is taken to the children’s dormitory with all the other Jewish children about to be sent to the camps. The underground manage to free her from this place and return her to Sonia. The two of them are hiding in their old house, now stripped of furniture and all belongings, not even wanting to turn on a light for fear of discovery. It is excruciating reading and our narrator seems to dissolve as we reach the origin of his story.

I don’t want to be a spoiler, and frankly by the time you get to the end of the story you have a pretty good idea of what has happened. But the process of getting there is worth the read so I won’t spoil it here. I give this book 4.5👍 out of 5👍.

Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan

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Bill Furlong’s mother had worked as a maid at the Wilson home in the small town of New Ross Ireland. One summer his mother had become pregnant and her family disowned her. But Mrs.Wilson took her mother in, and raised Bill as her own child.

This story begins with Furlong running a successful business delivering coal and lumber, happily married and father of fiver girls. This wisp of a novel takes us through his hard-working life and the routine and the small pleasures of his life.

This is also a story of the Magdalene Laundries, of which I only learned upon reading this book. Founded to help “fallen women”, or simply women with no families to support them, many became work-houses where girls were forced to labor long hours with no pay and under wretched conditions, run by Catholic nuns. Thousands of infants were killed, and a mass grave was discovered in 1993 which finally resulted in the UN Committee for the Rights of Children to demand a government investigation. The last Laundry in Ireland was closed in 1996.

Furlong’s encounter with the Laundry and his personal journey related to what he discovers there, is the spare but moving story of this book. I give Small Things Like These 4.5👍 out of 5👍.