Addicted - Amelia Betts

Forever Yours (Grand Central Publishing),

October 13, 2015.

Three Stars

Addicted takes a somewhat silly premise, combined with a gimmicky plot, and uses it to make a serious comment on addiction as mental illness. As you can imagine, parts were successful, while others were not. The characters often slipped into clichés, without enough background information to make me really believe or understand their addictions. However, the story was funny and sometimes clever, and the commentary on addiction did ring true at times.

While the plot was kind of meandering with lots of loose ends, the novel was really focused on character. Liam, the sex addict, was described as so ridiculously perfect that it was hard to believe. We are told that he is so attractive and amazing, but to me he came across as slimy and really just a creep. Maybe I just don’t have much empathy for a gorgeous, wealthy, rockstar/chef who is cursed with having sex with equally gorgeous women. I also felt that Liam’s addiction was trivialized, while Mischa’s was treated with more care.

Mischa is a food addict who uses calorie counting and binge eating to control her feelings. She is studying to be a nutritionist, while working on a juice cleanse plan for her thesis – but in spite of all this food-related knowledge, she treats her own body with little respect. Her internal voice became boring and repetitive as we were forced to listen to her tedious descriptions of food. However, her addiction still felt much more realistic than Liam’s. I also appreciated the use of Cecile, the young daughter of Mischa’s landlord, as she becomes the voice of Mischa’s addiction. Mischa reflects that Cecile’s “blatant, adolescent self-consciousness is a good reminder that my inner voice too often sounded like hers: self-hating, judgemental, joyless.” (Loc. 1467) It is only when Mischa can find joy in food – and more importantly, in life – that she can stop hating her body.

Aside from Mischa and Liam, the minor characters were mostly underdeveloped and often unnecessary. Mischa has a best friend to talk to so that her whole story won’t be inner monologue, but she never felt like a real person. Likewise, there are threads of a love story that were so random and pointless, I didn’t see what they added to the story aside from Mischa trying to make Liam jealous. Mischa is addictive and self-absorbed with men as well as food, and she could only become a strong individual when she gave up both addictions. Because of this, Addicted was not a traditional love story, but the author tried to force it into one, which made it less enjoyable for me.

I received this book for free from Forever Yours (Grand Central Publishing) and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Where My Heart Used To Beat - Sebastian Faulks

Bond Street Books, Oct. 27, 2015.

Three Stars

Robert Hendricks is a psychiatrist with some mental issues of his own. As his relationships slowly fall apart around him, he is offered an unexpected reprieve – an invitation to a small French island. The invitation is issued by another psychiatrist named Pereira who claims to have some information about Robert’s father, who was killed during World War I when Robert was still a small child. However, over the course of several visits to the island, Robert has still not learned anything about his father. Instead, he is seemingly overcome with the need to pour out his own story to this virtual stranger – the story of his own experiences as a soldier.

Where My Heart Used to Beat is ostensibly the story of Robert Hendricks, but more than that, it is the story of the last century and the many atrocities it witnessed. The novel questions the authenticity of memory and fact, and whether we can trust our own version of the past. Above all, it asks whether humans have been altered irretrievably, due to the acts we have not only witnessed but also perpetrated in the past hundred years or so.

There was some really lovely and unusual language in the novel, but it was hidden amongst pages of reflections on both world wars. I found myself skimming over Robert’s impromptu therapy sessions with Pereira, in favour of the theoretical conversations between the two men.  Their ideas about what makes us human were so interesting, such as discussions of the “billion firing synapses” that make us “believe” we are human (p. 60-61) to the thought that it is only a “dynamic function” or piece of neural tissue that separates us from other animals. (p. 130)

Robert believes that madness is merely a function of the brain, a physical problem. As humans are the only species to go “mad,” he asks whether it has some Darwinian advantage to our survival. It may be “the secret of what we are” (p. 199) and yet it causes pain and distress, much like our proclivity towards violence and war. Robert tells Pereira that the past century of world wars has fundamentally changed the psyche – is this what makes us human?

Aside from these philosophical debates on the nature of humanity, I didn’t find anything new or interesting to hold my attention. This is my first novel by Faulks, and apparently the themes of war and memory are his usual ones. The style reminded me of many other writers as I was reading, and that’s not necessarily a good thing – I didn’t feel like the writing was truly original. There were also some odd sexual incidents with young girls that didn’t add anything to the story except to make me see Robert as a Humbert-like character.

Most of the time, Robert was emotionally cold and generally unlikeable. Over many conversations, he hashes through all of his memories of war and decides to track down his former love – but when he finds her, he’s not all that interested in her. I suppose the point is that it was really only the memory of her that he loved, but I still felt that the scenes between the two could have used more elaboration. I did like the hints that Robert was an unreliable narrator of his own life, but again, I wish that theme had been developed further. Overall, I felt like Faulks started writing with a clear premise – that the world wars ended the importance of individual lives – and that he forced his plot and his characters to fit that idea, no matter how awkward or unbelievable the story became. It was like a fictionalized version of a psychiatric case study, and it could have been read more clearly as non-fiction.

I received this novel from Goodreads First Reads and Bond Street Books in exchange for an honest review.

And West is West - Ron Childress

Algonquin Books, October 13, 2015.

Four Stars

And West is West is the most recent winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for socially engaged fiction, and I think it is well deserved. Childress’s novel is a powerful comment on the use of technology in all aspects of our lives today, from high finance to tactical warfare – it also illustrates how this technology protects us from the immediate consequences of our actions, allowing people to make decisions from a distance that may come back to haunt them later.

Jessica is an Airforce drone pilot who must follow orders to launch a missile at a suspected terrorist – but in the process she knowingly kills several civilians. Unable to live with her actions, Jessica sabotages her military career by writing top secret information to her father in prison, leading to a general discharge. Lost without the military structure, Jessica goes off the grid – and discovers that she will not be permitted to leave quietly because she knows too much.

Meanwhile, Ethan is a “quant” at a huge American bank, crunching numbers and creating algorithms that turn wars and terror attacks into profit for his investors. After a misplaced decimal point loses billions of dollars, Ethan is fired from his job and, like Jessica, cast out by a system that has failed him and many others. He ends up on a cross-country journey of accidental self-discovery which intersects with Jessica’s new path in unexpected ways.

Childress writes about how small actions can have huge consequences that reverberate around the world. Jessica and Ethan are both products of a corrupt system, blamed for decisions that were forced on them by the current socio-political climate. The novel is scary because it is so realistic and topical. The plot is intriguing, exposing the dark and gritty side of our political and economic systems – the side that is usually sanitized for the public.

The characters are strongly written, including the minor ones – I was pulled right into their lives. Their inner conflicts are raw and exposed, as they explore their own consciences. While Jessica carries the blame for the “collateral damage” she caused, it is really the responsibility of all people who not only support war but also those that are ambivalent about current events. In contrast, Ethan is willing to look away to preserve his quality of life, and his ambivalence is a product of the distancing effect of technology.

When we rely on computers to make all of our decisions, there is no longer a moral compass to guide us. Surprisingly, the most morally thoughtful and analytical character in the novel is Jessica’s convict father, Don, whose letters punctuate the story with philosophical reflections about the nature of the world. As his letters follow Jessica’s flight across country, the pacing of the novel speeds up and consequences become inevitable. Jessica and Ethan struggle to regain agency over their own lives, accepting and processing the decisions they made in the past.

The novel is filled with witty, quippy, realistic descriptions of life in a security state, in a constant state of war. The language brings the novel from political thriller to literary fiction with lines such as this: “She just knows too many damn things. She’s a risk to the security of the security state, to the state of things as they are, to the status quo of war.” (Loc. 2086)

I received this book for free from Algonquin Books and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Death By Water - Kenzaburo Oe

Grove Press, October 6, 2015.

Three Stars

I have read Kenzaburo Oe in the past and really enjoyed it, but I had a hard time getting into this novel. It is an elaborately woven story of reality and myth, in which Oe’s literary alter-ego, Kogito Choko sets out to complete his literary masterpiece: the story of his father’s death by water.

The title of the novel is a euphemism for drowning that comes from a T.S. Eliot poem. Kogito uses it to describe the suspicious death of his father that occurred many years before. Kogito’s father was travelling by boat to an unknown destination, and after his death, all that was left was a red suitcase filled with important documents. Although his father risked his own life, he ensured that the suitcase would be found; however, Kogito’s mother refuses to let him access the secrets within.

Kogito is obsessed with recording the story of his father’s death – partly to cement his fame as a writer, and partly to allow himself to understand the events that led to the death. As he sifts through his own memories, facts are altered by imagination. He plans to use a fictional format to finally understand the death by water in what he calls “the drowning novel.” Kogito is easily discouraged, but he becomes inspired by the members of an avant-garde theatre group who are in the process of dramatizing his earlier novels – he is then re-inspired to create new work and preserve his legacy as a writer.

Like Kogito, his father also seemed preoccupied with his legacy. He hid his important papers and potential clues to his death so they wouldn’t be found – but he also ensured that they wouldn’t be lost. This is possibly hubris on his part, as a last hope for immortality. Kogito tells us that his father was on his way to “commit a doomed act of heroism when he drowned,” which has echoes of ritual suicide and reminds us of the deeply Japanese roots of this story. I think the cultural identity of this novel is important in understanding both Kogito’s and his father’s motivations, as well as the general tone and pace of the novel – it is slow and repetitive, but also complex.

I found the most interesting part to be the interactions between Kogito and his mother, although she has been deceased for ten years as the novel opens. She left the red suitcase in the safekeeping of Kogito’s sister, not allowing him to open it until a decade after her death. The many layers of Kogito’s identity are peeled back in the poem written by his mother, which is repeatedly analyzed by Kogito and the theatre group. She writes, “You didn’t get Kogii ready to go up into the forest,” which they read as a reflection on preparedness (or lack thereof) for death – both for Kogito himself, his father, and the future of Kogito’s son.

Mortality is a theme touched on repeatedly in Death By Water, and I don’t think Kogito ever truly comes to terms with it, but he does his best to explore its complexities. Losing his father at a young age made him more aware of his own mortality, and that of his son. He continually circles back to these issues, and while it becomes repetitive, I think Oe is successful in making the point that life is cyclical, and our legacy will live on through the next generation, if they choose to embrace it.

I received this book for free from Grove Press and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll, illustrated by Salvador Dali

Princeton University Press, October 7, 2015.

Five Stars

I think there have been more than enough reviews of Carroll’s classic story over the years, and I’m not ready to add anything new. So my review will focus on this edition, which includes surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s gorgeous illustrations, published just in time for Alice’s 150^th anniversary.

The surreal yet logical world of Wonderland perfectly fits Dali’s aesthetic, in which fantasy and geometry collide. The intersection between these two elements is explained in two informative introductory essays, one by Dali expert Mark Burstein, and the second by mathematician and friend of Dali, Thomas Banchoff.

Burstein begins by citing the obvious as well as the potential connections between Carroll and Dali. One instance was that Dali’s time at the Disney studios was concurrent with the production of the Disney version of “Alice in Wonderland”. He may not have directly influenced the animated version, but his creative process was certainly similar to that of Lewis Carroll. Surrealist processes such as automatism and the Exquisite Corpse game (in which a piece of paper was folded up and each artist contributed a part of the picture, creating an accidentally surreal whole) could have easily led to Wonderland. Marcel Duchamp referred directly to Alice’s story as part of the creative process: “I am convinced that, like Alice in Wonderland, [the young artist of tomorrow] will be led to pass through the looking-glass of the retina, to reach a more profound expression.” (Loc. 46)

Dali did not directly translate the story of Wonderland into pictures – instead, he provided a “complementary experience,” (Loc. 108) a place in which the mind can escape to contemplate Alice’s adventures. Banchoff explains that Dali used a previously completed motif, a girl with a rope, to represent Alice – the rope expanded around her to also represent the rabbit hole.

Dali’s work, like the world of Wonderland, is in a constant state of flux, or metamorphosis – what Burstein calls, “an uninterrupted becoming.” (Loc. 113) His abstract, yet mathematically precise, view of the world is a perfect place for Alice to explore. Overall, Dali’s incredibly rich, mostly non-figurative paintings give us the experience of Wonderland – the reader’s mind is free to fill in the blanks with details from own fantasy worlds. I will definitely be purchasing a physical copy of this edition in the future!

I received this book for free from Princeton University Press and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.