Posts Tagged ‘Lily King’

16 Dec

‘Five Tuesdays in Winter’ by Lily King vs. ‘Songs for the Flames’ by Juan Gabriel Vásquez – Round 2, The Final Round

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , .

 

‘Five Tuesdays in Winter’ by Lily King  (2021) – 231 pages

‘Songs for the Flames’ by Juan Gabriel Vásquez  (2018) – 237 pages    Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

Both of these story collections follow the usual pattern with the best stories first, and the stories gradually getting less involving except for the last story which is usually one of the better stories to leave a good impression on the way out.

I have read Lily King’s last two novels, ‘Euphoria’ and ‘Writers and Lovers’, and have much enjoyed her spirited and original emotional insights into her characters’ personal lives. By the same token, I have read two of the previous novels of Juan Gabriel Vásquez, ‘The Sound of Things Falling’ and ‘Reputations’, and have been much impressed with his profound insights into the situation of Colombia. The United States, with its unofficial war on Communism and its unofficial War on Drugs, has been heavily involved in the waves of violence that have shattered Colombia. The result has been more like War on Colombia.

Meanwhile, the stories of Lily King are compelling slices of emotional family life that resonated with my own experiences. One story that in particular held me was ‘When in the Dordogne’. A mother and father are in Europe recovering from the father’s suicide attempt while they leave two young male college students to look after their fourteen year old boy. Contrary to all expectations, the college students and the boy have a fine old time.

The stories in ‘Five Tuesdays in Winter’ are intimate and exhilarating; the stores in ‘Songs for the Flames’ are wide-ranging and devastating in their violence. The two collections could not be more different except for the mastery of each of their territories.

Lily King wins, since her enthusiasm for her stories shines through in her sentences. Of course Juan Gabriel Vásquez was operating at a disadvantage because I had to read his collection in translation.

 

‘Five Tuesdays in Winter’ by Lily King                      Grade: A

‘Songs for the Flames’ by Juan Gabriel Vásquez   Grade: A-

 

 

14 Dec

‘Five Tuesdays in Winter’ by Lily King vs. ‘Songs for the Flames’ by Juan Gabriel Vásquez – Round 1

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , .

 

‘Five Tuesdays in Winter’ by Lily King (2021) – 231 pages

‘Songs for the Flames’ by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (2018) – 237 pages      Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

When I have two collections of short stories I want to read, both by authors whom I admire and whom I have read before, I like to bounce back and forth between the two. I alternate reading the individual stories by the two writers, because somehow that makes both sets of stories more interesting. That way I can compare and contrast. So now my victims are ‘Five Tuesdays in Winter’ by Lily King and ‘Songs for the Flames’ by Juan Gabriel Vásquez. The content and the style of these two collections have almost nothing in common, which makes the effort even more fun for me.

Most of Lily King’s vivacious stories in ‘Five Tuesdays in Winter’ take place in the home, mostly upper and upper-middle class homes. She even makes the distinction between mansions and houses; mansions are stone and houses are wood, a distinction I had not considered but surely rings true. King’s stories are domestic stories of social interactions between members of a family and their friends. Several of the stories are coming of age stories of young people growing up within the family. Lily King has a light touch which I much appreciated. I loved the title story which was all about “the most reticent man in the world”. I found King’s stories to be lively and buoyant.

The stories of Juan Gabriel Vásquez have a much larger canvas. Vásquez is vitally aware of nearly every facet of public life in the nation of Colombia over the past fifty years and has studied the past of Colombia from its earliest days. His stories resonate with the history of Colombia. Colombia has been one of the most war-torn countries during the last fifty years with over 220,000 of its citizens killed, the large majority of them civilians. His stories are cosmopolitan; they often take place in airports or hotels in Bogota or Paris or other places. Nearly all the people who populate Vásquez’s stories are grown-ups dealing with grown up problems.

The stories in ‘Songs for the Flames’ are more substantial and thus require more effort for the reader to understand and appreciate them. The stories involve drug traffickers, paramilitary death squads, hit men, informants, intelligence agents, machine gun fire, the police, the army, persecution by the drug cartels, organized and unorganized crime, and detectives.

On a lighter note, I will leave you today with a line of French which appears untranslated in one of the family stories of Lily King:

“une femme qui rit est une femme au lit”.

Let’s just say this line will be worth your while to translate.

Stay tuned for the next and final round of this contest when I will announce the winner.

 

 

21 Mar

‘Writers and Lovers’ by Lily King – Torn Between Two Lovers

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘Writers and Lovers’ by Lily King  (2020) – 324 pages

I was quite interested in what Lily King would do next after her novel ‘Euphoria’ which was spectacularly well done. Now King’s follow-up novel, ‘Writers and Lovers’, has arrived.

Whereas ‘Euphoria’ takes place in the wilds of the island of New Guinea in the early 1930s, ‘Writers and Lovers’ has a much more conventional setting in Boston in 1997. The two novels are much different from each other, and about the only characteristic that they share is a love triangle.

I almost hesitate to tell you the plot of ‘Writers and Lovers’ for fear of putting you off the book entirely. It is about a young woman in her late twenties who is having difficulty completing her novel which she has been working on for six years. She works in an upscale fashionable restaurant as a waitress and lives in a former potting shed in order to support herself and her writing.

She has just broken up with her last boyfriend.

“I’m usually better at protecting myself from this kind of thing.”

“From heartbreak?”

“Yeah.” My throat is closing. “I can usually get out of the way before it hits me straight on.”

“That’s not really heartbreak then, is it?”

Early on, she meets two new men. One is a somewhat famous writer in his forties whose wife has recently died leaving him with two preschool children. The other man is closer in age to her and is also a writer but so far not remotely successful.

As you can see, this novel is all about the struggles and triumphs of characters writing their fiction and poetry, a theme which is usually a death warrant for a novel. Here is yet another novel by a female writer about a female writer and the problems she encounters. We have an author searching for an adequate subject but not finding it so she writes about her former life. Yes, writing fiction is a struggle, but who wants to read about it?

In ‘Writers and Lovers’ favor, it does have the formidable writing talents of Lily King. She captures exactly what it must be like working in a fashionable expensive restaurant, the painstaking efforts to present the exotic menu items to the customers perfectly and the camaraderie of the restaurant workers. In the dating scenes, King captures the small nuances and the intensity or lack of intensity in her feelings about these two men. King is especially adept in relating female desire.

“My whole body responds to his hand in mine.”

“The desire to press up against him is on a short loop in my head.”

However after the wild and adventurous ‘Euphoria’, ‘Writers and Lovers’ was a bit of a letdown. Like its title, this novel is rather amorphous and prosaic. I did like quite a number of the scenes and attitudes of ‘Writers and Lovers’, but for me it did not quite reach the perfection of ‘Euphoria’.

 

Grade:    B

 

 

26 Jun

‘Euphoria’ by Lily King – A Love Triangle in the Wilds of New Guinea

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , .

‘Euphoria’ by Lily King   (2014) – 257 pages

Euphoria-198x300 (1)

‘Euphoria’ is an exciting mix of the romantic, the erotic and the intellectual, a novel not to be missed.   The novel is inspired by the field work of Margaret Mead on the island of New Guinea in the early 1930s.  It is the fictionalized story of the real-life love triangle between Margaret Mead, her husband Reo Fortune, and fellow anthropologist Gregory Bateson.  It takes place in the remote region along the Sepik River where the tribes had never encountered western civilization before.  The anthropologists are there to study the social, family, and mating habits of the tribal people.

margaret_mead This adventure story just comes alive in Lily King’s hands.  If you have ever wondered what it must have been like for Margaret Mead and her associates to travel to these remote villages and to stay there and become friends and study the people in these tribes, this is the novel for you.

The love triangle starts as these things usually do with the wife Nell (the Margaret Mead stand-in) comparing her husband unfavorably to the other man.  Her husband Fen is highly talented in some areas, but he is just too sure of himself and too impulsive. He blunders into actions which might upset the natives. He also envies his wife’s early success and is abusive, a bully. The other man Bankson is more thoughtful and questions everything he does to make sure he doesn’t unfavorably influence the study of the tribe.  Basically Bankson is more subtle and intelligent, a better anthropologist, than her husband.  Also there is a chemistry between Nell and Bankson.

 “ You know you love someone when you cannot put into words how they make you feel.”  – Margaret Mead

 What makes this type of story so fascinating is that they are there to study tribal behavior, and at the same time their own behavior is just as much a subject of interest.  The sure-handed writing of Lily King makes observing this love triangle just as interesting and exciting as the field work these anthropologists are doing.  She puts us on the scene from the very first page, and we fly through this story without a moment’s hesitation.  This is one of the best novels I’ve read this year.  We feel passionately for the characters’ ideas as well as their personal lives.   It is refreshing to read a novel about characters who are smarter than you are.

Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead

When the three anthropologists invent ‘The Grid’ of various human traits which describe differing societies, we are there.  Lily King  handles both the intellectual story and the emotional story capably.

‘Euphoria’ has been optioned to be made into a movie to be directed by Michael Apted, director of ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’, ‘Gorillas in the Mist’, and the TV series ‘Masters of Sex’.