Haruki Murakami - (one early and one recent)
Norweigian Wood - when Norwegian Wood was first published in Japan, it promptly sold more than 4 million copies and transformed Haruki Murakami into a pop-culture icon. The horrified author fled his native land for Europe and the United States, returning only in 1995, by which time the celebrity spotlight had found some fresher targets. And now he's finally authorized a translation for the English-speaking audience, turning to the estimable Jay Rubin, who did a fine job with his big-canvas production The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Readers of Murakami's later work will discover an affecting if atypical novel, and while the author himself has denied the book's autobiographical import--"If I had simply written the literal truth of my own life, the novel would have been no more than fifteen pages long"--it's hard not to read as at least a partial portrait of the artist as a young man. Norwegian Wood is a simple coming-of-age tale, primarily set in 1969-70, when the author was attending university. The political upheavals and student strikes of the period form the novel's backdrop. But the focus here is the young Watanabe's love affairs, and the pain and pleasure and attendant losses of growing up. The collapse of a romance (and this is one among many!) leaves him in a metaphysical shambles: 296 Pages - Paperback
Sputnik Sweetheart - Throughout
Murakami's novels and stories, whether the broad-canvas epics (Hard-Boiled
Wonderland or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) or the more intimate love
stories (Norwegian Wood or South of the Border, West of the Sun),
there is one constant: the tantalizing nearness of the "other side,"
which may take the form of secret selves, conflicting identities, or alternate
worlds. Are these multiple realities equally real, or are they a metaphor for
alienation, not only from other people but from the self? You never know for
sure with Murakami, and in that uncertainty comes much of the power of his
unique, mind-expanding fiction. In his latest work to be translated into
English, Sputnik Sweetheart, he returns to the
intimate canvas, focusing on another troubled couple torn asunder by the demands
of too many worlds. 224 Pages - Paperback
Nick Hornby
How to Be Good In Nick Hornby's How to Be Good, Katie Carr is certainly trying to be. That's why she became a GP. That's why she cares about Third World debt and homelessness, and struggles to raise her children with a conscience. It's also why she puts up with her husband David, the self-styled Angriest Man in Holloway. But one fateful day, she finds herself in a Leeds parking lot, having just slept with another man. What Katie doesn't yet realize is that her fall from grace is just the first step on a spiritual journey more torturous than the interstate at rush hour. Because, prompted by his wife's actions, David is about to stop being angry. He's about to become good--not politically correct, organic-food-eating good, but good in the fashion of the Gospels. And that's no easier in modern-day Holloway than it was in ancient Israel.
Hornby means us to take his title literally: How can we be good, and what does that mean? However, quite apart from demanding that his readers scrub their souls with the nearest available Brillo pad, he also mesmerizes us with that cocktail of wit and compassion that has become his trademark. The result is a multifaceted jewel of a book: a hilarious romp, a painstaking dissection of middle-class mores, and a powerfully sympathetic portrait of a marriage in its death throes. It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry as we watch David forcing his kids to give away their computers, drawing up schemes for the mass redistribution of wealth, and inviting his wife's most desolate patients round for a Sunday roast. But that's because How to Be Good manages to be both brutally truthful and full of hope. It won't outsell the Bible, but it's a lot funnier - 320 Pages - Paperback
John Casey
The Half Life of Happiness
Although The Half-Life of Happiness begins "For no reason he could think of, Mike felt terrific," the reader is not reassured. The details accrue with disturbing precision during Mike's walk across Charlottesville's Courthouse Square: clear spring sky, soft breeze, pretty tax specialist, bouncy tap-dance teacher, languorous bookstore clerk, charmingly stuttering woman doctor. Then we glimpse the house he shares with his wife and their two daughters: ramshackle, cluttered, incomplete--"a series of partly assembled kits for family happiness." Clearly, this is one marriage--one family--with trouble in its future. Of course, without trouble, there'd be no novel. Only in this case, the family is so fun, their circle of bright, articulate, bohemian friends so very winning, that watching them careen toward disaster has the same nasty inevitability as a horror movie: one wants to throw up a hand and say, "Wait! Don't go see what was making that noise upstairs!" . The author of the National Book Award-winning Spartina, Casey brings new energy to what could be a familiar story, and his take on the domestic novel, late 1970s style, is a masterpiece of finely drawn characters and meticulous detail. -- 528 Pages - Paperback
Tim O'Brien
Tomcat in Love To date, Tim O'Brien's novels have all shared common traits: his heroes hail from the Midwest, usually Minnesota; Vietnam figures prominently; and the stories he tells, though invested with mordant wit, are usually pretty grim. So an O'Brien fan coming to Tomcat in Love on the heels of his earlier novels can be forgiven for occasionally checking the name on the cover (and the photo on the dust jacket) just to be sure this is, indeed, the same Tim O'Brien who wrote Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried, If I Die in a Combat Zone, and In the Lake of the Woods.
In Tomcat in Love O'Brien introduces us to a very different hero: "In summary, then, my circumstances were these. Something over forty-nine years of age. Recently divorced. Pursued. Prone to late-night weeping. Betrayed not once but threefold: by the girl of my dreams, by her Pilate of a brother, and by a Tampa real-estate tycoon whose name I have vowed never again to utter." Thomas H. Chippering, professor of linguistics, war hero, and sex magnet--in his own mind, at least, has recently lost his childhood sweetheart and wife of 20 years to another man, the Tampa magnate, and Lorna Sue's desertion has clearly unhinged him. He has taken to flying down to Tampa from Minnesota on weekends to spy on his ex-wife and plot revenge against her, the tycoon, and Lorna Sue's brother, Herbie, whom he blames for destroying his marriage. 342 Pages - Paperback
And two that were suggested previously, by Sue, I think:
Sandra Cisneros
Caramelo , Sandra Cisneros's first novel since her celebrated The House on Mango Street, weaves a large yet intricate pattern, much like the decorative fringe on a rebozo, the traditional Mexican shawl. Through the eyes of young Celaya, or Lala, the Reyes family saga twists and turns over three generations of truths, half-truths, and outright lies. And, like Celaya's grandmother's prized caramelo (striped) rebozo, so is "the universe a cloth, and all humanity interwoven.... Pull one string and the whole thing comes undone." The Reyes clan, from Awful Grandmother Soledad and her favorite son Inocencio to Celaya, follow their destinies from Mexico City to the U.S. armed forces, jobs upholstering furniture, and to Chicago and San Antonio. 448 pages Hardcover
Esmeralda Santiago
America's Dreams América Gonzalez is a hotel housekeeper on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico, cleaning up after wealthy foreigners who don't look her In the eye. Her alcoholic mother resents her; her married boyfriend, Correa, beats her; and their fourteen-year-old daughter thinks life would be better anywhere but with América. So when América is offered the chance to work as a live-in housekeeper and nanny for a family in Westchester County, New York, she takes it as a sign that a door to escape has been opened. Yet even as América revels in the comparative luxury of her new life, daring to care about a man other than Correa, she is faced with dramatic proof that no matter what she does, she can't get away from her past. 325 Pages - Paperback