Irish Author John Boyne's "The Heart's Invisible Furies" - Irish Cruelty, Hypocrisy in a Saga Spanning Decades

John Boyne (b Ireland 1977) is a novelist for adults & young adults.  He also wrote the book "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" which was made into a film.  Boyne's latest novel "The Invisible Furies of the Heart" is an epic sage whose main character Cyril Avery was given up for adoption by his unwed mother Catherine Goggins in August of 1945.  Catherine is cruelly humiliated and tossed out of her local Catholic Church in a small Irish town when it becomes apparent that she is with child & unwed. Women were always the whores and priests always ran the country.  Homosexuality was illegal and reviled.  Ireland in the 20th C was a backward hole of a country run by vicious, evil minded, sadistic priests and a govt. led by the priesthood.  The general consensus was it would be far better if all the gays were rounded up and shot.  Cyril's peculiar upbringing was in a household where neither parent was paternal nor abusive other than to insist upon him as their adopted son; "not really one of them."  Cyril is a clever, precocious & likable young man whom we come to sympathize.  Circumstances seem to keep Catherine & Cyril crossing paths so it is no surprise when the circuitous epiphany arises they Catherine is his birth mother.  It's Cyril's school years that are most charming and where we see Cyril's infatuation with his roommate, the handsome & charismatic Julian as unrequited love.  But to act upon his sexual urges was a crime that included jail time.  There are Dickens twists to the plot; evil people and remarkable human beings.  Many flamboyant & intriguing characters enter Cyril's life but Julian is the one who possesses Cyril's heart's invisible furies.  The epic tale has plenty of humor & heart throughout this novel depicting gay bashing & female trashing.  Maude Avery, Cyril's adopted mother and burgeoning author wrote in one of her novels "Am I alone in thinking that the world becomes a more repulsive place every day?"  The journey is epic and harsh but not without its familial bondings which at times are too doltish to be endearing.  Boyne has written an overly long novel about how cruel, unkind, judgmental & ugly people can be towards others.  There is ridicule & retribution for the idiotic small minded bigots.  The fallible fable is simple - it would be a much healthier place if we allowed each other to love exactly as we desired without puritanical & punitive rules enforcing how to conduct our sex lives.  We should free to live & love as we choose.  The saga did grow overly tiresome & repetitive but the commendable & clear messages were furiously apparent.

Kelly Corrigan's Memoir "Tell Me More" Is More or Less More of What She's Written Before

Kelly Corrigan (b Amer 1967) is non-fiction writer whose previous novels "Glitter and Glue" & "The Middle Place" are contemplative memoirs meant to be both self-deprecating, reflective and wrapped in wisdom.  The wisdom come's from life's hard knocks that knocks everyone about: grief, illness and feelings of failures.  Corrigan comes from a Catholic family whose patriarch was a beloved saint.  She paints her father in every shade of love and his loss exacts a heavy toll. All told, she's already explored her family's history, loves and loss her wonders & frustrations of raising children, and her own breast cancer diagnosis.  In "Tell Me More" Kelly's two girls are now teens and all the headaches that means.  She's also reeling from the loss of a dear friend.  Some will find her imbalance relatable, comforting, touching and charming.   Her life is an open book which can be endearing and off-putting.  Her writing is endearing in her candidness and off-putting in its preachiness.  Pretty much of what she's written in "Tell Me More" she's shared with us before and one memoir blurs into the other except as she's older, wiser but still the same old same old.

A Debut Novel IDAHO - I Dunno Why It's been Nominated for an E A Poe Best 1st Novel Award

IDAHO is an expansive novel that attempts to achieve an emotional scope of love & sacrifice.  It also tries to whittle down life's essence to its core.  Memories are what is deep inside us and give life its meaning.  Emily Ruskovich's foray into dementia and its life stealing curse may be worse for loved one's for whom they are no longer recognizable.  The novel's title is the state in which this saga is set.  The majesty and expansive beauty of Idaho make it the land into its own character in a novel that is strewn with too many characters, timelines & struggles.  The novel becomes a laborious sojourn burdened by horrendous tragedies and convoluted relationships; most of which are left unresolved.  Wade & his first wife Jenny are happily married with two young girls atop a rustic mountainside.  All seems serene until Jenny murders their youngest daughter May while the family is out chopping wood one fine summer day.  This horrendous scenario is inexplicable.  The older daughter June is left alone while Wade hurriedly drives his wife and fatally wounded daughter for help.  June is gone when Wade returns and remains missing.  Jenny is imprisoned for life.   The novel explores life within the prison for Jenny.  Wade marries Ann, the school's music teacher whom he'd taken piano lessons from while his wife was alive.  There are other tangents to this torrid tale that bury the story's allegory of "sacrifice, giving and giving at the expense, only, of happiness".  Ruskovich demonstrates craftiness in her writing style, but the reader will "search for meaning and there is no meaning to be found."

THE IMMORTALISTS by Chloe Benjamin - Jewish Siblings and Religious Quibbling

THE IMMORTALISTS is a novel about 4 Jewish siblings born in NYC born to 1st generation parents.  The plot subdivides into 4 whirling orbits and the center of gravity spins around the youngsters in co-hoots in a visit to a fortune teller who predicts their fated demise.  Author Chloe Benjamin (b Amer) is able to conjure some mystifying plots and the vectors on which their lives spread out has some entertaining attractions.  But the epiphanies of religion, superstition assimilation and prophecies are not clever as they're intended to be. "They wanted to measure time, to plot and control it.  In their pursuit of the future, though, they only drew closer to the fortune teller's prophecies."   In the summer of 1969, when the children are still each other's keepers, the story holds its charm.  The 4 are connected in a way they never will be again.  As each sibling goes off on their own paths, their shifting away from each other makes the plot muddled, untethered and disorienting.  As Gertie, the overbearing matriarch who holds onto Jewish tradition with a taut grip says, "I don't care about relevance I care about family."  After the family's dissociations the novel's theological & astrological communique are too contrived.  As the magical chemistry holding the family together disappears the novel's interest transforms into a vacuum.  "As long as you can transform, my friends, you cannot die."  Life's too short to spend turning the pages on THE IMMORTALISTS.

Jeremy Irons Recites T S Elliot's "Four Quartets" at the 92ndY

Jeremy Irons is a British actor of the highest order having received numerous honors & awards in film, TV and theater.  In March, Irons released a recording of the Complete Works of T. S. Elliot (TSE).  For those fortunate to have been at the 92ndY to hear Irons' oration of Eliot's "4 Quartets" it was a luxurious and intoxicating experience that washed over the listener in resplendent waves that were awe-inspiring and serene.  Elliot is an American poet with family ties to the UK.  He's received the Nobel Prize for Lit & the Presidential Meal of Freedom among numerous other accolades both in the US & England.  Why is poetry is hard and most people never ready for it?  "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood" (TSE)  Irons was jovial and assured the audience,"Let it go and wait.  See what happens.  Something greater happens."  Irons briefly suggested some topics Elliot refers to such as age, time, one's essence, stillness and "the cracks where the light gets in."  With good nature humor, Irons said for the one or two of you in this audience not familiar with Elliot & the "4 Quartets" "Laurence Fishburne being one of them."  He then asked Mr. Fishburne to stand who was received with guffaws warm applause.  I acknowledge being the 2nd person lacking depth of familiarity.  Elliot had intended this collection to be set to chamber music:  Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding.  I was informed that 1st public reading by Mr. Elliot's of the "4 Quartets" occurred at the 92ndY.  Irons invited the audience to relax and feel free to nod off.  Many in the audience followed his suggestion and dozed.  I was invigorated and calmed listening to Mr. Irons'  reading.  The 1st quartet felt Irons was reading as a parent to a child; in a patient and loving manner.  The 2nd & 3rd quartets seemed an intimate conversation between adult peers.  In the last quartet, Irons took on a more sombre and railing dialogue.  It felt as though he was holding a conversation with himself as one approaches the end of life while clinging to memories, regrets and a final flailing to embrace life. "What we call the beginnings is often the end.  And to make an end is to make a beginning.  The end is where we start from".  I was enthralled by Elliot's majestic poetry and Irons immersive interpretation.  "You are the music while the music lasts."

Pulitzer Prize Winning Author Marilynne Robinson's "What Are We Doing Here?: Essays

Marilynne Robinson (b Amer 1943) is a literary giant.  She's a prolific author whose previous books HOUSEKEEPING received a Pulitzer Prize nomination, HOME an Orange Prize and GILEAD won the Pulitzer Prize.  I have read and cherished these 3 novels among some of her other works.  Her new collection of essays "What are We Doing Here" is a collection of speeches she presented at various venues in recent years.  Her writing is imbued with a spirituality if not morality.  I found Robinson essays too proselytizing and pandering.  Her religious proclivities which are tempered through her fictional characters are less palatable in her preaching.  Though she argues for one's own conscience to be our guiding voice it is her's that comes through as dogmatic and demanding.  Had I been in attendance to her this revered author present one of her essays, I might have been swayed by her eloquence & inspirational intellect.  However, as a compilation I felt buried & burden by a repetitive messaging that was assertive and self-congratulatory.  I admire her prose which is for me but will stay away from her essay format.  

Irish Literary Luminaries Poet Greg Delanty in Conversation with Author Colum McCann

At the Irish Arts Center, Greg Delanty (b Ireland 1958) delighted the audience with his poetry & pondering as prodded by author Colum McCann (b Ireland 1965).  The evening was introduced as a comfortable fireside chat with internationally celebrated poet Greg Delanty (Patrick Kavanagh Award) and National Book Award winning writer Colum McCann.  The evening was a deliLast night at the Irish Aghtful and intimate experience.  McCann set a comfortable rapport with his friend and the audience.  He explained there wasn't going to be a formal structure of reciting & then analyzing poetry.  The camaraderie and mutual imbibing was inviting.  Delanty, in a very thick Irish brogue  was appealing but not always decipherable said ,"I know that most of you probably came out because this guy {Colum McCann} is here and don't have any idea who I am."  This brought laughter and in my case, this was true.   It's also true this was an especially enchanting evening.  Delanty read poems from his newest collection "Selected Delanty" chosen by McCann in random order.  Delanty spoke haltingly (with personal interjections) and divinely.  He was even gleeful and proud when McCann chose 2 poems that he loved.  An "American Wake" was a poem Delanty said he didn't care for "...the memory of memory lost, breaking the heart's of ghosts."  There was much to admire and revel in the readings.  McCann might tell Delanty how he entered & responded to a poem after its reading.  "An American Wake" McCann described it like a prayer.   McCann recited other lines he was smitten with "playing the harp backwards".  Delanty said it was the image he sees in the Brooklyn Bridge and refers to not looking back in regret at leaving Ireland. "Open sesame country" was also a fragment of the poem an allegory for the Statue of Liberty & our nation.  The two spoke about the wakes given to the 'livin in Ireland knowing the person was leaving for good. It's a joyous celebration with the person present along with plenty of good cheer & whiskey.   As the two talked and drank with each othe the audience became an invisible participant in their bantering and rantings.  Delanty was harsh on fellow Irishmen Frank McCourt's writings he felt characterized Ireland as a country of pathetic indigent people.  McCann took issue with this (although that was my sense from "Angela's Ashes").   When asked how Delanty comes to his poems, he was pensive before responding. "Poems come from the back of me all the people who come before us, an awareness of our fragility and a desire to be part of all the people who will follow." Q&A was held outside the theater bar side.  Delanty's poems possess an agility and depth, pathos with layers of the comic & tragic.

"Asymmetry" A Stunning Debut Novel that is Demanding and Rewarding by Lisa Hadley

"Asymmetry" attempts & accomplished an innovative structure within literary fiction.  Lisa Hadley (b Amer) assembles a jarring juxtaposition of two distinct tales whose narrative tangents are complex, compelling and highly rewarding.  Hadley managed to create a debut novel that resonates with the brilliance of Philip Roth's writing style & plot while interjecting a distinct middle section "Madness".  At first this is maddening for its interruption of the captivating & irksome love story between the significantly older Ezra and Mary-Alice with the narrative of Amar (an American of Iraqi heritage).  Ezra (Roth's doppelgänger) is a lecherous, narcissistic writer whose grandiose is supported by having received numerous elite literary awards.  Ezra shares Roth's bio of Jewish heritage, agnostic beliefs and harping of bodily ails befitting aging.   Ezra battles his physical decline by maintaining his writing acumen & seducing a sexual relationship with a woman 1/2 his age.  Mary-Alice (a nod to writer Mary Alice Monroe) is an underling editor with literary ambitions.  Ezra brandishes his literary clout to commit "Alice" to a clandestine sexual liaison.  Despite Ezra's selfish & boorish demands the relationship morphs towards a symbiotic connection of affection.  At which point "Madness" takes up the narrative of Amar who is being detained at a London airport where he wished to visit a war correspondent friend before flying to visit his family in Iraq.  Amar was issued both an American & Iraqi passport due to his birth in midair betwixt the 2 countries.  While Amar awaits approval to enter the UK we learn of his life which has straddled an American upbringing with its ease & privileges with his years in the Middle East of violence, turbulence & unforeseeable future.  Hadley's instinctual & intelligent storytelling for such diverse characters and circumstances confuse & compel the reader to draw sensible comparisons.  The unifying theme underlying the novellas within the novel all succumb to shifting dynamics of power whether it be in relationships of love or the atrocities of war whose aim is to command control.   It's in Part III which returns to Ezra during an interview by a young female journalist with his intent to initiate an affair that the ephiphanies between inequitable individuals or sovereignties between nations are made lucid. Ezra tells his fawning interviewer "To forge patterns and proportions where they don't actually exist.  And it is this same urge, this mania to tame and possess-this necessary folly-that sparks and sustains love."  Amar's realizations regarding the perpetual military conflicts in the Middle East and America's seeming indifferent are "After all, humility and silence are surely preferable to ignorance and imperiousness.  And maybe East and West really are eternally irreconcilable-like a curve and its asymptote, geometrically fated never to intersect."  Hadley's remarkable "Asymmetry" has ingeniously & artistically constructed a dissected work "that each on its own had the purity and resonance of a respectable instrument; only in combination did they jar and jam."  Hadley has achieved what Ezra intended with writing; struggling to force meaningful convergence with ravishing prose.

Non-Fiction "A Saint on Death Row" So Much Shame and Sorrow End Capitol Punishment by Tomorrow

"A Saint on Death Row" is the story of Dominique Green.  Dominique was 18 at the time of his arrest in a fatal armed robbery in TX.  Out of the 4 arrested in the robbery, only Dominique was given a death sentence.  (The white accomplice was released without being charged).  This bio is of a remarkable young black man caught up in a pervasive system of oppression, abuse and injustice.  A societal system   culpable of fostering a cycle of criminality that feeds into a corrupt and brutally punitive legal system.  Author Thomas Cahill's book is pronouncedly persuasive arguing against the barbaric enforcement of the death penalty and the torturous use of solitary confinement.  Dominique's story blazons with America's racist oppression and injustice meted out in our legal system.  Cahill's intimate encounters, coverage of his case and revelatory insight into Dominique's humanity is so affecting and shaming it should serve to purge our nation of travesties in our legal system by immediately banning executions, life sentences without parole and inhumane practices of solitary confinements.  It is absolutely imperative to terminate the sentencing of youths to life in prison without parole.  Our criminal justice system has flaws that are untenable and mendable.  The moving narrative of Dominique's 12 years in prison from 18 until his execution at 30 demonstrates remorse, redemption and the travesty of cruelly tossing away the lives of people incarcerated.  Dominique's moving story is one of many.  We are deeply stirred told in Dominique's tempered voice and with the sensitive testaments from those who came to know him, including the victim's family and Desmond Tutu.  This individual story has the power that does not allow for society to turn aside.  We cannot consider ourselves a civilized society that fosters racism and chooses to carry out inhumane & unjust executions.  Reading about Dominique's life, knowing his fated outcome carries a pall of despair.  It weighs heavily upon us noting morality unearthed.  It's shameful society's blatant indifference to the childhood's of poor & neglected children.  We must confront & address the injustices that have been committed and continue to fester and cannot be justified as benefitting society.  There is no morality in keeping prisoners in solitary confinement and no humanity in putting people to death.  We are all guilty of dehumanizing ourselves by permitting these atrocities.    

An AMERICAN MARRIAGE by Tayari Jones Is about Universal Love and Biased Miscarriage of Justice

"An American Marriage" is a tribute to love and relationships as told cleverly from the individual viewpoints of its star crossed young lovers Roy & Celestial.  The third party in a fraught love triangle is Andre, Celestial's childhood.  Andre, the boy next door to Celestial and college cohort of Roy becomes  Celestial's lover while Roy is serving out a 12 year sentence for rape; a crime he didn't commit.  I'm too far forward in the story and need to lay the groundwork on which to build this brilliantly structured tale of the pitfalls of love and the injustices befalling men of color in our country today.  Author Tayari Jones' (b Amer 1970) "An American Marriage" sifts through love, relationships and marriages with a sage and a tender look.  Simultaneously, Jones scrutinizes the stereotypes of African American life.  "She is a black woman and every body already thinks she got 50-11 babies with 50-11 daddies; that she got welfare checks coming in 50-11 people's names."  Jones also scrutinizes the tilted scales of justices weighted unjustly against men of color in society and court of law.  These serious issues are merged with the commitment and confines of marriage.  It is a "peculiar institution" and one that will flounder when it is not approached as a two way street or when there is a failure to perceive the other person's perception.  Even though one can never know the other's mind, it's imperative to acknowledge & be sensitive to one other's position.  Jones cleverly provides the reader exactly what each individual is thinking and experiencing.  A poignant epistolary portion are the letters to and from Roy while incarcerated.  This aligns us with empathy & appreciation for all the characters and their circumstances.  Roy and Celestial's endearing love story is drastically torn apart just a year into their marriage.  Roy is falsely accused of raping a white woman and sentenced to 12 years in prison.  "Just the wrong race and wrong time.  Police are shady as hell.  That's why everybody is locked up."  Roy sanguinely observes "That's your fate as a black man.  Carried by 6 or judged by 12."  The mass incarceration is a scorching social critique.  Regardless, once imprisoned, innocent or not, prison changes you and makes you into a convict.  Three years into Roy's incarceration, Celestial and Andre become a couple which is of no surprise to anyone.  Communication between Roy & Celestial had discontinued but divorce proceedings never commenced.  Roy is released 5 years into his 12 sentence an ventures to ascertain where he fits into Celestial's life, his legal wife even though he fears love can't be started over.  Oprah Winfrey selected "An American Marriage" as one of her book club selections.  This is a fictitious love story that doesn't run smoothly.  And this is an all too true depiction of social injustice and mass incarceration.  The harshness of prison and tenderness of love are both impregnable in this book I highly recommend.  A marriage is more than your heart.  It's your life.  And it needs to be continuous.  "Marriage is like grafting a limb onto a trunk."  Marriage is a fragile growth too easily torn apart.  Mass incarceration is an intolerable enemy of justice and destructor of families.  Still, "Love is the enemy of sound judgement, occasionally this is in the service of the good."