Books: Olga Grushin’s “The Line”

by anneMoore on July 14, 2011

A line stretches from a closed kiosk day after day for a year. Place numbers are assigned. Family members take turns waiting, sometimes paying each other for their time. What’s for sale? What could be worth losing your job, your savings, your marriage, your family?

Concert tickets.

Once issued, what will you do with the ticket? Keep it? Give it to someone you love? Sell it?

Based on a line that formed for a 1962 Stravinksy concert in Leningrad, this story focuses on Anna and Sergei, an unhappy middle-age couple; their teenage son, Alex, and Anna’s mother, a one-time ballet star. It’s set in the recent past, when people lived under State rule, unable to leave, with State controls on reading, listening, conversing.

After Sergei talks to a foreigner in a men’s room, he is reported and demoted.

Anna works as a physics teacher and pines for a relationship with Sergei, who ignores her. Initially mocked by colleagues and family for joining the line, Anna’s place in it gives her a new life. Not a happier life, just a different one. Calling in sick too often — to stand in line — she loses her job. Helping out a friend she’s made on line, Anna agrees to man another kiosk, filled sometimes with intoxicating pleasures: chocolates or nylons, perfumes or scarves. The same friend advises Anna on wooing Sergei, with disastrous results.

Meanwhile, Sergei falls in love with Sofia, the young State “widow” who stands beside him in line. His yearning for her is aching, believable and fully realized.

“Sergei saw the hollow palpitating like a pale bruise at the base of her neck, just where a delicate, pearly button of her blouse had come undone, and looked away quickly….(as he) stepped back into the night’s expanding darkness, he witnessed a different, unrecognizable city come into being before him, one that was foreign, perhaps even vaguely dangerous, yet somehow larger than the earlier city, its great obscure stretches sheltering unpredictable, mysterious happenings and emotions. He felt unmoored.”

Less convincing is teen Alex’s downward spiral. His parents are too invested in his education and future to be unaware of his truancy and life of crime.

“The Line” is a slow tale told with skill and grace. The story unspools in quiet but surprising ways. It’s a lovely read. Thanks, Jacquie.

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Books: Erik Larson’s “In the Garden of Beasts”

by anneMoore on June 22, 2011

I’m one of the few readers on earth who didn’t finish Erik Larson’s 2004 mega-hit, “Devil in the White City.” I had researched and written about the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago — the White City — so those chapters bored me. The serial killer chapters scared me. I couldn’t read it!

Now Larson has put out “In the Garden of Beasts,” a widely praised nonfiction account of an American ambassador and his family posted to Berlin in 1933, as the Nazis come to power. Its first pages pulled me in. William E. Dodd is chairman of the history department at University of Chicago. An aging scholar, what Dodd wants most is to finish his multi-volume history of the South and retire to his Virginia farm. A call from Washington changes his life.

Off to Berlin with him is wife Mattie and their two adult children Martha, 24 and Bill, 28. (Endearingly frugal, Dodd ships their Chevrolet.) Recently divorced, Martha’s affairs on both sides of the pond cause even a modern gal to blush. Strangely, Martha hardly comes to life, even though we’re let in on her teas and parties, her lakeside and late night outings.

I’d like to say this is a thrilling read. It’s not. It is well written, and sobering. There’s the drip drip drip of Nazi aggression coupled with Dodd’s well-meaning but ineffective diplomacy. He’s a decent man in a magnificent country headed by murderous statesmen. Dodd gives speeches, he brings warnings to high places. No one listens.

Is this a time and place worth revisiting?

Dodd is dull but admirable. I pined with him as he ached to spend time on his farm, and worried with him that he’d die before finishing his “Old South” manuscript. Berlin comes to life, but the Dodd family barely registers. (Indeed, I was more concerned for the Jewish family who rented the Dodds their mansion, then hid in its attic.) The Nazis and their brutal rise to power overwhelms this story.

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Chicago: Lunch in the Sun

by anneMoore on June 15, 2011

After a particularly brutal winter and a long, cold spring we here in Chicago are desperate for sun and warmth. People stand at street corners or outside office buildings, faces lifted to the sun. Not waiting for the Rapture. Or sneaking a smoke. They’re jones-ing for a hit of sunshine.

So it’s understandable that we who work at desks seek out lunch spots in the sun.

A lunch meeting in the Loop the other day had me frantically searching for a tasty meal outdoors. I found one for us, beside the Chicago River. Newly opened this spring, Bridge House Tavern (321 N. Clark St.) offers a long, attractively furnished patio open to the sky. Tour boats pass, tourists wave, the river glows (from the sun!)

Salads, shared plates, entrees: theirs is a broad, enticing menu. We ordered sandwiches ($10 – $14) that were tasty and inventive (bacon milkshake anyone?) sided with thin-cut fries. Service was attentive. We’ll be back.

I brought my New York foodie friends for lunch in the sun at Floriole, a bakery and cafe at 1220 W. Webster St. Frittatas, tartines, pizzettes, salads, baguettes spread with butter and mustard, layered with ham and cheese. Fresh, organic, seasonal, locally sourced, prepared on site: pure and delicious. The cafe opens completely to the street, so even inside you’re outside. Too, their sidewalk tables offer a place in the sun.

More midday sun spots: Coco Pazzo Cafe (636 N. St. Clair St.) for sophisticated pastas, roast vegetables, salads. Also kissed by the sun, Trattoria Roma (1535 N. Wells St.) serves thin-crust pizza, crisp calamari, my favorite fennel salad, and big bowls of pasta.

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Books: “The Free World” by David Bezmozgis

by anneMoore on May 31, 2011

I was so taken in by the beginning of David Bezmozgis’ “The Free World,” I missed my “el” stop. Later the same day I stood on another “el” platform, gobbling up this story of immigration, and nearly missed my train home. There it stood, doors open. When had it pulled into the station? How is it I hadn’t heard its “Brown Line to Ravenswood” call? I seemed to be hermetically sealed within a book.

Bliss!

A Jewish family leaves the Soviet Union in 1978, bound for the United States, Canada, maybe Israel.  Alec and Polina are newlyweds. Karl and Rosa have two rambunctious young boys. The men’s parents are Samuel and Emma. None would leave Russia without the other; now in Rome, none will leave without Samuel, whose age and health holds up their application. The family’s extended time in Rome frames this novel’s story.

Its first page entrances: Alec should be helping his family with luggage but he’s distracted by two girls, American tourists.  He ” traced a line of smooth, tanned skin from heel to calf to thigh, interrupted ultimately by the frayed edge of cutoff blue jeans. …They sat on their backpacks and leaned casually against each other. Their faces were lovely and vacant. They seemed beyond train schedules and obligations.”

Oh, to be one of those girls!

Instead, Alec plays the dutiful son, the faithful husband, the good brother.  He and Polina find work, and a shared apartment of their own.

Stuck in Rome, what drives this story forward? Will playboy Alec be true to Polina? Will Rosa get her way, and steer the family to Israel? Will roommate Llyova reach the United States?

Bezmozgis takes us backwards, to the horrific pogroms of Samuel’s youth, Samuel’s valor and despair serving in the Red Army, his embrace of Communism.  We also relive Polina’s decision to leave her husband, her family and her homeland for Alec.

Rich stuff. Unfortunately, Bezmozgis brings his story to a close with a teenager who causes the family violence, death and breakups. Deux ex machina!

Still, I held this book close for more than a week. I ached for its characters. I savored its prose. This is David Bezmozgis’ first novel. I look forward to more.

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Books: Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven”

by anneMoore on May 13, 2011

I began this blog with a post about the companionship a book provides. Tucked inside a handbag, a suitcase, a backpack, it’s there for us.

That’s how I felt about Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven,” a thick paperback I picked up, half-price, at a college bookstore. (The book I’d brought for the trip, Howard Norman’s “What is Left the Daughter,” was so bad I left it on the airplane. Plodding, predictable: curses on the reviewer who sent me to it!)

So there I was in the newly green Philadelphia suburbs without a book.

Their yard sale; my salvation.

How to describe this read? It’s not a straightforward survival tale, like his earlier books, “Into the Wild,” and “Into Thin Air.” Extreme behavior is their common thread, but this book is longer, richer, messier. Its footnotes could be a separate read.

“Under the Banner of Heaven” (2003) begins with the brutal death of a young mother and her child in 1984, then turns back and recounts the remarkable and often violent early days of the Mormon Church, beginning in 1830. How the one is linked to the other is, eventually, entirely logical.

Warning: this is not a fluid read. Back and forth and up and down North America, at least two dozen people’s stories color this book. I was never bored, but these real-life characters blend into each other.

Memorable: prophet and founder Joseph Smith, the brothers who murder, the woman and child they slaughter.

Throughout, I was astonished and disgusted by Krakauer’s descriptions of men’s actions in the name of God: polygamy, pedophile, rape, incest, swindling, kidnapping, racism, terror, murder.

If God instructed these men to murder, can they be held accountable? Are they fit to stand trial? Are all believers crazy?

An uncomfortable read. Fascinating history.

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Books: “Solar” by Ian McEwan

by anneMoore on April 25, 2011

Unexpected book grief. Ian McEwan’s “Solar” is that rare thing: a wickedly funny satire about science featuring a wholly unlikeable main character. I loved every page of it.

When we first meet Michael Beard he’s 53 and fat, a Nobel-prize winning physicist riding the high-fee, high-calorie lecture circuit. His (fifth!) marriage is in shambles and his public comments about women’s intellect has made him a reviled household name. Even a boondoggle to a polar region, to witness global warming, turns sour: Beard mangles the skin of his penis when it freezes to his zipper.

And he keeps getting fatter.

Why read on? I fell for the lunacy of Beard’s situation. He’s a snob. It’s great fun seeing him brought to his knees by wives, lovers, thinkers, artists, outdoorsmen, doctors, business associates, scientists and the young daughter he most certainly did not agree to father.

Charmed by a serial adulterer? I was. Beard pines for his wife, nursing himself with excess wine and late night television, listening to Patrice dress for her lover and leave the house. ”No woman had ever looked or sounded so desirable as the wife he suddenly could not have.”

Same with his misadventures in the polar region. Always the last to arrive, in ill-fitting outerwear and cracked goggles, the one who can’t find the “start” button on his ski-doo: Beard tugged at my heartstrings.

I even bought into his complicity in framing Patrice’s lover for a murder.

Not so much his theft of a dead colleague’s research, which he’ll use to create an energy source that could save the planet. Couldn’t he share credit?

Of course not: Beard is liar, thief, cheater, glutton. Beard is the Military/Industrial Complex: brilliant but uncaring, consuming, destroying, polluting.

And he keeps getting fatter.

“As he listened to Parks enumerate his possible futures, he decided not to mention his recent acquisition of a classic symptom, the occasional sensation of tightness around his chest. It would only make him appear even more foolish and doomed. Nor could he admit that he did not have it in him to eat and drink less, that exercise was a fantasy. He could not command his body to do it, he had no will for it. He would rather die than take up jogging or prance to funky music in a church hall with other tracksuited deadbeats.”

McEwan is one of our finest living authors, smart and accessible. His blockbuster “Atonement,” and smaller works such as “Saturday” and “On Chesil Beach” are skillfully told, but serious, even grave.

“Solar” is playful, outrageous. McEwan tells it with great calm, one nutty situation rolling into another. It’s a delicious situation: a man who won’t save himself may hold the key — which he stole! — to saving the planet.

A very funny, uncomfortable read. (My friend Libby hated it.)

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Half a Life by Darin Strauss

by anneMoore on April 4, 2011

It’s no fun throwing daggers at a flawed book but I spent $22 and a few days of my vacation making my way through Darin Strauss’s slender memoir, Half a Life. A better title would be: Half a Memoir.

At 18, in the last days of high school’s senior year, Strauss drives his buddies to a mini-golf course. Bike rider Celine Zilke, 16, swerves into traffic and collides with Strauss’s car. Celine dies; Strauss is held blameless. Strauss finishes school, goes to prom, attends college, dates a lot of girls, publishes novels, marries, fathers twins…and still can’t shake the ghost of Celine Zilke.

Reduced to its essence, this sounds like an interesting read, right? Add Celine’s mother’s admonition to Strauss, to live doubly, and I’m hooked.

But Strauss’s story is so superficial I felt like I was floating above it instead of getting sucked into it.

I bought the book because I’d liked the first page so much. “The breeze did its open-window work on the hair behind my neck and ears. We had a month before high-school graduation. I was at the wheel.” It seemed Strauss would peel back and explore the magic and misery of high school’s senior year. Nope.

Strauss floats over his life; we don’t know his parents, his sister, his friends, the women he dates and drives away with his awkward retelling of the accident. Wife Susannah is the sole dimensional person.

Most problematic for this tale: Strauss didn’t know Celine, and by the end of the book, neither do we. The dead girl is an object in this story; it becomes grotesque reading about his inability to put Celine, and the accident that caused her death, to rest. On and on and on and over and over again: his grief seems like extreme navel-gazing.

Strauss ties up the story by submitting it to us as his cure. (Ew.) He tells us that victims of “complicated grief” make a tape of their story, listen to it, then put it on a shelf. They own it. This book is Strauss’s tape. Now I own it.

Reading this reminded me of why I avoid most memoirs. They tell the story that was, instead of fiction’s what could be.

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Chicago: Unabridged Bookstore

by anneMoore on March 22, 2011

I confess: I loved Borders. I spent many hours and countless dollars there.

Not the store on North Avenue so much, but the one on Michigan Avenue. HIgh ceilings, four full floors of pricey real estate, a cafe with a spectacular view of the avenue, deep collections of poetry, travel, photography and fiction (who cares about the rest, really?)

True, the checkout area was littered with tarot cards and packaged candy and beaded book thongs. And the checkout experience was on par with airline security screening.

Even so, Borders on Michigan Avenue was my nerd heaven: a huge bookstore on the same stretch as Neiman Marcus, Tiffany’s, Ralph Lauren, Dior, Chanel.

And now it’s gone.

What’s a book junkie to do?

Barnes & Noble on Clybourn? Ugh. Save for the original Barnes & Noble in New York, I can’t stand B &N. They’re all the same: beige, and poorly stocked. (For me. See above.) Except for a collector set of J.D. Salinger for my son’s 18th birthday, B&N never surprises me and typically disappoints. I can’t find the book; I can’t even find the section the book would be in.

Setting off for a week in the sun, I needed a few new books. So did my tween daughter. It was too late to order from Amazon, so we went to another North Side neighborhood to a store that’s been selling books since 1980. Unabridged Bookstore, 3251 N. Broadway, Chicago is three adjoined storefronts. Gay and lesbian titles is a focus. One room is devoted to children’s books and young adult books; their offerings are wide and deep.

My daughter found more books than she’d set out for. “Two walls of young adult books!” Shelved within those was Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre.” I hadn’t thought of it as a young read, but we scanned the first few pages and found it just right for her.

Fiction! I found books newly in paperback, including Ian McEwan’s “Solar” (sounds wicked) and Julie Orringer’s “The Invisible Bridge,” a new favorite among my best reader friends. On display, I picked up Darrin Strauss’s memoir, “Half a Life.” I loved the first page; I had to have it. Also “New York Stories,” an Everyman Pocket Library I’d never seen before.

Unabridged clerks are knowledgeable, helpful, approachable. Checking out felt special, even cozy; we were the only ones at the register!

Alex and I left with a heavy bag. We’ll be back.

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Books: Rona Jaffe’s “The Best of Everything”

by anneMoore on March 18, 2011

Do you like television’s “Mad Men?” I sure do.

Imagine my delight, then, to fall into Rona Jaffe’s first novel, “The Best of Everything” (1958). Set in the early Fifties, the story follows a handful of working girls at a Manhattan publishing house.

Leisurely told, Jaffe (1931-2005) has a light touch with heavy themes. I lapped it up.

Caroline Bender makes her way to her first day of work on a “cold, foggy midwinter morning in New York, the kind that makes you think of lung ailments.” That wry tone is the voice of this engaging read. Caroline is a recent college graduate whose heart was broken by her Harvard man, who sailed away for a European summer and returned married to a Texas oil heiress.

What’s a Radcliffe gal to do?

Live at home and work in the city. “The job was more than an economic inconvenience, it was an emotional necessity.”

Also at the publishing house: Mary Agnes, the office gossip, saving up for her wedding in two years. Barbara, divorced, mother of baby Hillary. April and Gregg, sometime actresses, who take temp work at the publishing house to pay rent.

With the exception of the deliciously lazy and mean editor Amanda Farrow, the office is run by “Mad Men” characters. Mr. Shalimar (really!) liquors up the young typists and impresses them with tales of his friendship with Eugene O’Neill. Shalimar manhandles all level of female employees, after hours, and crawls under the table at a company party, like a dog, to admire a girl’s legs. He’s a fool. He’s also the boss. More likable but no less damaged is Mike Rice, an editor, who falls for Caroline. A divorced father living in a hotel, Mike drinks so prodigiously I quit trying to measure.

Caroline is interested in Mike, but pines for Eddie Harris, her Harvard man. She strings along pallid but decent Paul and teases movie idol John Cassaro. Meanwhile, a married ad exec pursues Barbara. Mary Agnes finally marries. April falls for socialite Dexter Key, who seduces her, gets her pregnant, arranges the abortion, then casually dumps her. Afterwards, April goes on a boy bender that made me blush.

Gregg’s love affair with Broadway producer David Wilder Savage is a lovely and tragic sub story. He loves Gregg, but her neediness is so extreme he has to let her go. She stalks him, disastrously.

The end belongs to Caroline: it’s wild and wonderful, surprising but fitting.

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Dining: Vincent bistro Chicago

by anneMoore on March 3, 2011

When was the last time you stumbled on, or into, a great restaurant? It’s the foodie’s curse to know about every new place to try, and why.

That’s what put four of us in a far north Chicago neighborhood, hoping to score platters of mussels, venison ribs and craft beers at Hop Leaf (5148 N Clark Street.) Hop Leaf is a first come, first serve tavern and Saturday night we hit a two hour wait. The bar was so crowded it wasn’t even worth staying for one of those enticing house brews. www.hopleaf.com.

Winter in Chicago is no time to be traipsing an unfamiliar neighborhood looking for a place to eat, but that’s what we did, sloshing and slipping north on Clark Street, from Uptown to Andersonville. Our friend Keith wanted to try Great Lake pizza and knew it was nearby. Jacqui called; there we’d have a 15 minute wait to be seated.

We arrived, and indeed, they would seat us at some point. Problem is, there’s no place to wait inside Great Lake. That’s an observation, not a complaint: Great Lake is spare, serene and holds only an eight-seat communal table. (1477 W. Balmoral Avenue.)

We spilled back into the cold wet night and found, next door, an inviting bistro with not one person sitting at the bar. Surely we four could sit, drink, talk and wait for our table at the ethereal pizza place.

Where were we? Vincent, 1475 W. Balmoral Avenue.

Waiters passed us, bearing platters of mussels. Isn’t that what I’d set out for? A couple sat down beside us at the bar and ordered dinner: more mussels, and frites, and batter-fried haddock. Why leave? The bartender was efficient, charming and knowledgeable. With its mirrored bar and tiled floors, I thought the place Parisian. Jacqui, a Parisian, declared it New York, like Raoul’s. We New Yorkers agreed, but this place seemed spiffier.

We canceled pizza and stayed at Vincent’s bar. What a meal!

Moules frites ($19) five ways. I went for the Provençal, a broth of white wine, tomato, caper, olive, garlic, anchovy. Five days later I’m still dreaming of that broth, their Long Island sourced mussels (long, meaty) and the hunk of baguette served alongside, to mop up the broth. A generous side of salty frites fed all four of us. More perfection: the bartender paired my meal with a crisp Riesling.

Foie gras, duck cassoulet, endive salad and more: this is bistro food at its best. Now that I know it’s there, I can’t wait to return. www.vincentchicago.com.

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