Recent Reading

Charles de Lint, Moonlight and Vines
ISBN: 978-0765309174

I admire Charles de Lint's writing immensely. As a prose stylist, you could do worse. Far worse. He has a wonderful eye for detail in drawing his settings and people, and a deft touch in drawing together the natural, the urban, and the supernatural. His characters are interesting, the kind of people you wished you were sitting down in a coffee shop with. Still, there was something dissatisfying about this collection of interlinked short stories. It is like listening to some of Glenn Gould's records: after the zillionth etude your mind rebels and craves either something really different or some larger overarching structure. Something with the size of a symphony shouldn't should like the same little thing over and over. This book strikes me the same way. Each story was fine by itself, and many were very fine indeed, but the interlinked characters leads you into wanting something more akin to the structure of a novel, and it just isn't there. De Lint attempts to draw the book together by making the last story circle back to the first, but it is very unconvincing. The last story isn't, fundamentally, a story. It reads like a 2am confessional from the author. The characters in it bear little relation to the ones introduced in the first story. Still, worth reading. Just read it in pieces.

Barbara Robinette Moss, Change Me Into Zeus's Daughter, A Memoir
ISBN: 978-0743202190

This is eight tenths of a fantastic book. Moss recalls her appallingly poor childhood as one of seven children of an alcoholic and violent father. What makes it only a partial success is that Moss writes towards an ending where she gets her terrible teeth fixed and emerges swam-like into her new beautiful reality. But the suffering because of her teeth isn't the central thrust of the narrative, we don't get any of the payoff of the emergence, and honestly, the most interesting thread of this story is her mother. Here is a woman who has records with her own voice recording on, who has a love of learning and reading and poetry which she somehow manages to pass on to her children under the most appalling circumstances, who holds the kids together as best she can, and sticks with an terrible husband through thin and thinner, but who finally, finally breaks free. And we get that story only in glimpes. The moment when Moss' father, now remarried in a more stable (emotionally and financially) environment refuses to help with her educational fees is set up as some kind of key emotional moment, but it looks whiny. What did you expect? The moment that we didn't get a good view in was when Moss' mother finally leaves the bum. One of the most heart-rending moments for me, in part because it is told with such flat affect, was when the children destroy the mother's records by tossing them around the yard like frisbees when they are to be left behind in yet another forced-out-again move. What must she have been feeling at that moment? How does hope die? How, after all that, do you finally decide enough is enough? Why? All unanswered, alas. Still, a good and moving read.