The Children of Men (1992) by P.D. James

 Audiobook Review

The Children of Men (1992)

by PD James

  I love the movie version of this book- I've watched it several times over the years, and I finally got around to listening to the Audiobook of the original book by PD James.  James made her name as a writer of detective fiction and it's one of three non-detective fiction books she published before her death in 2014.   I believe there are multiple versions of the Audiobook- I would imagine one before the film and one after to capitalize on the revitalized interest.  Whichever version I heard I didn't like the narrator, who had a stuffy, pedantic English accent (as befits the character in the book).  

  As one might expect, the book tells a related but different story than the film, which was obviously diversified in the hands of director Alfonso Cuaron.  In the book, the harsh treatment of would-be immigrants is mentioned as a concern  but not something encountered by the characters.  In the film, the immigrants and their treatment are at the center of the plot.  I found myself wondering about James and her motivation- my thought is that she was inspired by Margaret Atwood and A Handmaid's Tale, which was published in 1985, so it very well could have been in her mind when she first imagined The Children of Men.  I don't see anything in her detective fiction that would have triggered this dark, dystopian tale of a childless future (and neither did the New York Times, both before and after the movie was released.)

Black Mountain Breakdown (1980) by Lee Smith

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Black Mountain Breakdown (1980)

by Lee Smith

Black Mountain, Virginia

Virginia: 10/17

  Geographically speaking, Black Mountain Breakdown is just down the road from the last book, Big Stone Gap, and the two books combined are the only representatives from far western Virginia.   Unlike the last book, Black Mountain Breakdown is another book which epitomizes the preferred POV of editor Susan Straight:  Adolescent girl protagonist character, can't get her act together for reasons which are hard to understand, spends her life between periods of normalcy where a man takes care of her and longer periods where she is neither barely functional or actually institutionalized.  Crystal Spengler is the lady in question and maybe the best thing I have to say about this book is that the writing style was sophisticated/modernist enough to give me trouble in actually comprehending the book.   Only the last portion, where Crystal becomes the wife of a rising Virginia politician, really stuck in my memory.  Published in 1980, Black Mountain Breakdown still belongs to the gauzy/hazy era of mental health where people were afflicted with nameless maladies and institutionalized for reasons that had more to do with the judgments of the people around them than any desire to help the sufferer get better. 

Big Stone Gap (2001) by Adriana Trigiani

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Big Stone Gap (2001)

by Adriana Trigiani

Big Stone Gap, Virginia

Virginia: 9/17

  Finally, a book from this part of the country that wasn't narrated by a sad, abused white girl or her African-American counterpart.  My overwhelming impression of the entire 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is that of the perspective of an adolescent or pre-adolescent woman living on the margins of American society.  Which is fine, but it's hard to distinguish the perspectives from each other since every protagonist has almost the exact same background: limited/poor education, extremely limited geographical horizons and challenging family.

   Big Stone Gap, on the other hand, has an interesting and relatively sophisticated narrator- Ave Maria, the 30 something "town spinster" of Big Stone Gap, which guards the entrance to the Appalachians.  She runs the town pharmacy, which she inherited from her Dad and she has recently buried her Mother, who died after a long illness.  Her mother, an Italian immigrant, throws Ave's well ordered world into chaos when she reveals, after her death, that the man Ave thought was her biological father is not, and that instead her mom emigrated to the US from Italy after getting knocked up by a married man in her Italian village.

   This startling revelation sets off a chain of activity and provides most of the plot.  Generally speaking, Big Stone Gap is Hallmark movie/rom-com territory but I actually enjoyed listening to Audiobook Ave Maria and hearing about her life.  Some of Ave's tropes made me roll my eyes- like her insistence that she was the town spinster in her mid 30's, and her refusal to see the love that has eluded her has, in fact, been in front of her the whole time, but those are the rules of the rom-com/Hallmark movie.  I also enjoyed listening to her country accent- the Audiobook was narrated by the Author, so that was a treat. I wouldn't recommend this book but I didn't mind listening to it as part of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.

Frederick Douglass (2018) by David W. Blight

 Audiobook Review

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018)

by David W. Blight

   Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight is another pick from the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Time (#86).  I'm also looking for non-fiction titles to round out my fiction heavy reading list, and the Times list has plenty of non fiction titles.  Even within the non fiction world, "great man" biographies aren't my favorite, but Frederick Douglass strikes me as a worthy candidate, since he is the first African-American, chronologically speaking, who would merit this treatment under any "great man" type theory of history. This is as compared to the "ordinary man"/annales school of history which focuses on normal folks, in which case there are many possible candidates for the honor.

   I knew nothing about Douglass beyond the bare biographical details of his life: Born a slave in Western Maryland, he learned to read and write at a young age and then fled slavery to the north as a young man, where he became known as a strong and urgent voice for the end of slavery. As the book reveals, he spent most of his life on lecture tours although in the post Civil War era he assumed several government positions, including being the US Marshall for Washington DC and as an envoy to Haiti- the only sinecure for African-American diplomats in the world at the time.  The Audiobook runs 36 hours, and it is easy to imagine the exact same story as a work of fiction- any individual who charts a career path as an "orator" as Douglass did- in an era before amplification of the human voice- is bound to have a flair for the dramatic in his personal and professional life.  

  For most of his life- and certainly the early pre-Civil War part, Douglass worked closely with white abolitionists, who were both his sponsors and his audience. These relationships were often fraught with issues of financial dependency, and it's hard to not to see Douglass' desire to emancipate both African-American slaves AND himself from white partners as a double theme of the book through the end of the civil war.  Beyond his work as an advocate, Douglass was one of the first (the first?) African-Americans to travel the world (American and Europe anyway) and his biography also does justice to those impressions.  For example, there are at least a dozen descriptions of Douglass encountering racial segregation on trains and boats- including the detail that when he was appointed as the American envoy to Haiti he had to find a new ship to take because the captain of the first ship refused to transport blacks and whites together. 

   After the Civil War, Douglass' legacy is a mixed bag: He was there when the Freedman's Bank- a post Civil War financial institution designed to help newly freed slaves obtain financial independence- collapsed, taking the savings of many of its (black) patrons.  He also advocated for the annexation of Haiti and other Caribbean and Central American polities and generally served as an apologist/advocate for American colonization. Finally, after his long suffering wife died, Douglass married a white lady. which, again, was close to being a unique circumstance at the time.

  His family doesn't come off particularly well. Douglass felt a strong obligation to support his children and their children, but none them amounted to anything, and a few were out and out failures.   

The Kitchen House (2010) by Katherine Grissom

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Kitchen House (2010)

by Katherine Grissom

Tidewater, Virginia

Virginia: 8/17

   The Kitchen House by Katherine Grissom resides squarely in the "white lady book club" category.  It has a cover quote from Alice Walker(!) comparing it to The Help and my paperback copy had one of those complicated, multi-flap covers that only come with "Recommended by Jenna" stickers added or the like. Grissom blends the stories of a white child who is brought to a Virginia plantation with the story of her African-American counter-part, Belle, slightly older and way wiser in the troubling ways of pre-emancipation Virginia.  To whit, the ability of any white man to force himself on any black woman with legal impunity, and indeed, the ability to sell his own child should the mood or need arise.

  This dynamic is at the heart of Grissom's tale, and perhaps it is why an author like Alice Walker would agree to blurb the book jacket of a white author telling a story involving narrators of both races.  Here, the dramatic tension is maintained by the white Irish servant girl's very naivete about such matters.   Compared to other characters in the same circumstances, her ignorance often seemed comical but I suppose that is book-club land for you.