Apologies for not posting more often. I wait until I have three or more reads I’ve loved and want to share.
Too, I’m grieving my beautiful sister, Mary Beth, with whom I always discussed books, movies, tv series. In her last months she listened to books, as she couldn’t hold a book in her hands. She died December 26. I’m heartbroken and will miss her forever. She was a “yes” person. She was fun. She wanted us to remember her whole. And she wanted us to love and laugh and live. Take heed.
The Vagrants, by Yiyun Li
This novel, published in 2009, is a masterpiece and already a classic. It’s centered on the provincial city of Muddy River during the 1970’s. It’s a time in China before the 
Tiananmen Square uprising and after the Cultural Revolution. As the story opens, we meet Teacher Gu and his sobbing wife on the morning their daughter Shan is to be executed for renouncing her faith in Communism.
Shan Gu is the glue of this story; every other character is touched by her very public death. (Her vocal chords are cut, so she can’t cry out. Her kidneys are harvested — while she’s still alive — for the benefit of a party official. Once dead, her genitals are hacked off by the local pervert.)
A government crackdown follows Shan’s execution, and sweeps up Kai, a beautiful newscaster who forsakes her husband and child, and Tong, a young boy who signs his father’s name on a petition, with deadly results. The crippled Nini, abused by her family, agrees to be a child bride. She’s my favorite character, because she escapes with a wad of money that sets her and a sweet old couple out into the world as vagrants.
This is a brutal story, beautifully told.
Mrs. Palfrey at The Claremont, by Elizabeth Taylor
Taylor is a mid- 20th century British novelist I’d heard of but never read. This is her last novel, and it’s a joy.
Mrs. Palfrey is on her own after her husband’s death and her daughter’s move to Scotland. To the Claremont Hotel she goes, with its nosy residents. This is a last stop for a generation of Brits who lived through world wars and accepted life in far-off parts. Mrs. Palfrey, for example, was a young bride In Burma (Myanmar). She’s a stiff-upper lip kind of gal, who had been calm even when she found snakes wrapped around the bannisters.
At the Claremont, Mrs. Palfrey brags about her grandson, working nearby at the British Museum. She’s knitting a sweater for him, and it’s nearly finished. Why doesn’t he visit? (It’s a question that goes round and round the dining room.)
Out for a walk, Mrs. Palfrey twists an ankle and is bloodied by the fall. The young and handsome Ludovic Myers scoops her up and tenderly cares for her in his basement apartment. It’s only page 26 –we’re hooked! Enter Ludo, as her grandson.
A sweet short read.
Brawler, by Lauren Groff
I’ll read anything by Lauren Groff and it turns out I’d already read some of the stories in this collection, in The New Yorker. No matter, I was delighted to read them 
again. Typically, these are stories of girls and women surviving as best they can.
A mother escapes an abusive husband, with her children in tow — my heart is still pounding from the terror unleashed in those 12 pages. In another, a newly retired wife is sluggish until she takes a series of classes, including one on gardening. Her husband notes a change and realizes she’s fallen in love with another. Again, the tension! On her way to college, a sister deposits her intellectually disabled brother in a group home after being robbed of the money she needs for books: he’s happily settled, how will she make it? My favorite is the title story, about a teen champion diver caring for her dying mother.
I’m not a fan of short fiction because I feel like I’ve been brought into a world and then dropped. The best of the short story writes — Groff, Alice Adams, John Cheever — make each story feel complete.
The Wax Child, by Olga Ravn, translated from the Dutch by Martin Aiken
This book is long-listed for the Booker Prize, which is where I first learned of it. Witchcraft in 17th century Denmark? Yes, please. It’s only 172 pages but each one is dense with language and story.
The book’s narrator is a wax doll made and carried by a noblewoman who will end up beheaded. The others are tied to a ladder and lowered into flames. Their crimes? Being unwed, associating with other women, being around women who have lost their infants during or after childbirth, marrying a priest, and so on. Mostly they’re guilty of being women.
The story centers on the noblewoman, Christenze Kruckow, who is sure the king will save her. (He does not.) One woman, Apelone, has gone insane in captivity; her testimony surely marks her a witch. “I have a secret. There is a herring swimming inside my head. Soon I am going to fly to the sun.”
An exquisite pierce of historical fiction.
And here’s a nod to PBS, now streaming new versions of Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (delicious) and Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo.