Mixed Blessings

I guess there really isn’t such a thing as a mixed blessing. A blessing is a blessing. My emotions about them are mixed. On a trip to France I have to wear a walking boot to immobilize a possibly broken toe. Call me vain, but I have cried tears about how clunky I look in this boot and how clumsy I feel. Do you have any idea how many stairs I have to traipse up and down and down and up with two suitcases—in this ridiculous boot—in just one tiny train station? Then when I get to the monstrous mother of all train stations, Gare Montparnasse, how will I even hope to manage?

Philippians 4:8 reminds me to think on what is pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy, so I will have to be on intentional lookout for blessings of the boot.

I am very thankful for the blessing of this trip. I love France. I am thankful for the boot, which will enable my toe to heal. And guess what—in my first few train trips, kind young people helped me on stairs inside the train and in the stations. Before I left home, I looked up how to apologetically ask in French for help or thank someone by explaining I’m clumsy in this boot. I was just about to say, “Merci. Je suis maladroite dans cette chaussure,” when the young lady who had offered in French to help me down some narrow, curving stairs, said in perfect English, “I am used to this. I travel with my mother all the time.”

You might think I’d be insulted by the mother inference, but I was not. In fact, this young lady looked to be about 20, so I figure I’m actually old enough to be her grandmother. And if her 40-year-old mother needs help with luggage, suddenly I feel pretty spry, not to mention blessed.

Postscript: Now Françoise tells me my boot would be a botte. Chaussure is shoe. And I have conquered massive Gare Montparnasse in my botte, grâce à many escalators and rolling sidewalks, two young people who offered to carry my larger suitcase down long staircases, and some muscles I built hauling luggage earlier in this trip.

 

Review of Khaled Hosseini's And the Mountains Echoed

Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed still reverberates in my mind. Abdullah, Pari, their Uncle Nabi, Idris and Timur, Adel, Marcos, Thalia, and the rest of the novel’s cast of characters pad about my brain as though real people in my life. Their stories span the years between 1949 and 2010, the globe—Afghanistan, Greece, Paris, California—and an expansive range of human experiences. Just as the characters’ older selves are bound to their younger selves and loved ones, so each reader is bound in his own life.

I also felt bound to the fictional Afghan village of Shadbagh and especially to the huge oak tree that played an important part in the lives of so many. To me, the tree represents the histories of the characters and the ax, the seismic changes they saw in their lifetimes. Yet even as the village progresses from mud huts to houses with satellite dishes, our humanity—family ties, cruelty and contempt, compassion and kindness, loyalty, betrayal—stays the same … like Uncle Nabi’s 1940s-model American car that remains behind his house in Kabul for years after his death more than half a century later.

Hosseini’s individual but interrelated stories captivated me. He is a masterful storyteller with an eye for details that bring places and people to life. Chapters in the novel leapfrog years, which I found a little hard to follow. He introduces characters, then gives new vignettes to introduce others, then crisscrosses their stories, then revisits them at key junctures of their lives. I cannot say that Hosseini ties up every loose end, but I found the ending satisfying.

If I better understood Afghanistan’s political history and if Hosseini had kept his stories in chronological order, I would have benefited, but in fact, the individual stories could stand on their own. Each is strong human drama. Also, from his stories, I did get a sense of the Afghan people’s heartache and struggles against corruption and terrorism.

Certain aspects of And the Mountains Echoed touched me more than others. For example, I loved the affection between parents and children in some stories. Here is a particularly sweet anecdote (page 345 in my edition): “When I was a little girl, my father and I had a nightly ritual. After I’d said my twenty-one Bismillahs and he had tucked me into bed, he would sit at my side and pluck bad dreams from my head with his thumb and forefinger. His fingers would hop from my forehead to my temples, patiently searching behind my ears, at the back of my head, and he’d make a pop sound—like a bottle being uncorked—with each nightmare he purged from my brain. He stashed the dreams, one by one, into an invisible sack in his lap and pulled the drawstring tightly. He would then scour the air, looking for happy dreams to replace the ones he had sequestered away. I watched as he cocked his head slightly and frowned, his eyes roaming side to side, like he was straining to hear distant music. I held my breath, waiting for the moment when my father’s face unfurled into a smile, when he sang, Ah, here is one, when he cupped his hands, let the dream land in his palms like a petal slowly twirling down from a tree. Gently, then, so very gently—my father said all good things in life were fragile and easily lost—he would raise his hands to my face, rub his palms against my brow and happiness into my head.” Her childhood memory continues in this enchanting fashion.

Another more sobering story that touched me was Idris’ return to California after a visit to a Kabul hospital as he struggled with how to put compassion into action. And I was fascinated to see in Hosseini’s multigenerational stories how childhood events and feelings shaped the adults. And the Mountains Echoed is rich in potential touching moments, and I hope you will read this novel to find your own.

Review: First French Essais: Venturing into Writing, Marriage, & France

American Kristin Espinasse has compiled 28 pleasant essays about her life in France after she met and married a French man. The book grew out of her French Word-A-Day blog. As with each blog post, she includes a few French words and definitions in each chapter, as well as interesting photos. Essays touch on quaint customs, colorful observations, small human dramas, family anecdotes. Reading this book feels like strolling through gently rolling French countryside, finding a grassy spot for your blue-and-white-checked picnic cloth, and resting against your wicker picnic basket all afternoon to gaze quietly over farms and villages as little everyday French scenes play out before you.

I have subscribed to and enjoyed Kristin’s blog for several years. As an American, I like discovering differences in French culture (like doggy bags and parking meters) along with Kristin. I like learning handy French words and expressions (like la bagnole for car) that often don’t show up in textbooks or even dictionaries. I believe First French Essais has more vocabulary than the blog, and I like that. In the book, for some odd reason, Kristin teaches that la belle-mère means the mother-in-law at least three times. After the first mention, she could have used the space on her vocabulary blackboard graphics for fresh words.

And I would say that for the book’s language lessons to stick, a reader would have to already have some foundational grammar pegs to hang the new expressions on. Even if a reader did not pick up a single new French word, however, First French Essais: Venturing into Writing, Marriage, & France is an enjoyable read. The simple stories are charmingly well-told, and you can identify with the emotions of the people in the stories. Two bonuses at the end: a hidden-word puzzle and a dual-language story of how Monsieur Farjon, “the plant man,” ended up on the book’s cover. I enjoy Kristin’s openness to cross-cultural experiences and her candor about both failures and successes.

Review of Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín

If you decide to read Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, pack a steamer trunk because you’re going on a voyage. Several voyages, in fact. You’ll take literal journeys, twice across the Atlantic on steamer ships, and side trips in and around Ireland and Brooklyn, New York. Not long after World War Two, young Eilis Lacey goes to Brooklyn to find a better life than she might have had in small-town Ireland

This novel will take you on figurative journeys, too, as Eilis goes from having decisions made for her to deciding what she wants; as she leaves lifelong friends to forge new friendships; as she falls into a new, unfamiliar culture custom by custom; as she leaves insecurity and heads toward confidence. Brooklyn represents a triple trip—immigration from Ireland to America, another cross-cultural adventure when she dates an Italian boy, and still another when Eilis is chosen to be the first worker to serve black women at the department store where she works.

Quiet, serious Eilis Lacey thinks and feels her way into each new culture, and into womanhood. She tests the waters before she trusts. She distances herself from office, college, dating, and boarding house politics as she observes others and her own reactions. She deliberates about what secrets to reveal to whom, when to speak, when to remain silent. Eilis has no shortage of temptations to return to familiar comforts of her Irish family and life; as each temptation unfolds, she fields it with steady thoughtfulness. In this novel, she travels from gawky and unsure to poised and sophisticated. She navigates the choppy waters of complete upheaval with some angst but mostly admirable composure.

Eilis Lacey is a heroine I cared about. I liked her honesty, her strength, her vulnerability. I also liked Colm Tóibín’s portrayal of the early 1950s, when tradition, courtesy, and respectability reigned—and resulted in Eilis’ finding new family. Customs in Brooklyn’s Irish and Italian neighborhoods, and the role of the Catholic Church, were interesting as well. Back then, television was newfangled, and Eilis’ house mother deemed it a fad that wouldn’t last due to a dearth of programming. Ha! Tóibín’s writing style in this book (I’ve not read anything else by him, so don’t know what style is typical) was plain and simple, which fit Eilis’ character.

Book Review of The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen

Sarah Addison Allen’s The Peach Keeper is a gentle read—a cozy mystery to curl up with in your favorite armchair. I liked that the story is a multigenerational journey; the characters who are 30 delve into their small town’s history to solve a mystery begun by their 90ish grandmothers. In the process, the 30-somethings work out issues with their parents. A number of subplots keep the reader in suspense. The romantic ones are fairly predictable, although some subplot discoveries surprise. And the overarching plotline—the story behind the skeleton unearthed during remodeling of the old mansion—intrigues throughout. That The Peach Keeper is at its core a story of loyalty and friendship is what I most enjoyed.

Book Review of The Fall of a Sparrow by Robert Hellenga

In The Fall of a Sparrow, Robert Hellenga gives the reader many interesting points to ponder and varied locations to visit, Iowa, Massachusetts, and Italy among them. Woody and Hannah Woodhull had three daughters, Cookie, Sara, and Ludi. In 1980 Cookie, age 22, was killed in a terrorist bombing in Italy. This novel, partly written in the third person about Woody and partly written in the first person by Sara, tells how the waters of the Woodhull family’s lives rippled out in years following this tragic event hurled into their pond by God or the gods.

I mention God because before part one begins, the author gives three quotes. One is from the bible, Matthew 10:29, “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And yet one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father knowing.” But that quote is perhaps the last evidence of any faith that God cares about Cookie and the Woodhull family. Since Woody is a classics professor, his line of thinking almost always supports mythological views of distant, impersonal, capricious gods that cannot shed light on baffling Why’s after a bombing. And Woody’s faith life seems empty; he believes he is on his own in this world with no divine comfort or guidance.

The second quote, from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, uses sparrow imagery to describe the fragility of life. Reading The Fall of a Sparrow certainly accentuated that sense of vulnerability. The third quote, “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” is from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, V.II. When I saw Woodhull family members work through their grief and figure out who they were and wanted to be after Cookie’s senseless death, I could see the aptness of that quote. Indeed, Hellenga reminds us of the Shakespeare quote toward the end of the novel.

I truly liked and empathized with the characters in this novel. Some parts, like the sexually explicit exploits of a middle-aged man, I could not identify with and found uncomfortable to read. But other aspects, like Woody’s questioning his relevance and identity and abilities in middle age, resonated with me. The stories of Woody’s, Hannah’s, Sara’s, and Ludi’s lostness leading to foundness give four very real pictures of grief. Woody’s being in academia influences the novel’s verbiage; many academic references were above my head. As I mentioned earlier, the spiritual emptiness of classical civilizations permeated this story, and I found grief with no hope of joy depressing. That the story is rich in music, growth, and cross-cultural experiences makes it worth a read though.