Time of the Child by Niall Williams returns us to the setting for his last novel, This is Happiness. We’re deposited back in the rural Irish village of Faha, where the men work hard and douse end-of-workday frustrations at the local bars while their long-suffering wives tend to domestic chores and ride herd on multiple …
Category: Culture
Learning about ourselves from our families’ pasts
To the Midnight Sun: A Story of Exile and Return by Stephen Saletan is another search for one’s own identity by researching a close relative, in this case, Saletan’s Russian-born grandmother, Eda Grigorievna Bamuner. As a child in suburban New York, Saletan spent weekends together and enjoyed a special relationship with her. From the elderly …
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Spring and a growing handful of stand-ups bring hope
The azaleas, daffodils and hyacinths are blooming; Passover and Easter celebrate rebirth. Spring blooms, however, are evanescent. We look for more lasting signs of hope, especially in the chaotic political world around us. Dare we see this as such a sign? Harvard University has straightened its institutional backbone and is standing up to Donald Trump. …
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Two novels to take you elsewhere
Safekeep, a debut novel by Yael van der Wouden, won the 2024 Booker Prize, and the award was well deserved. Set in the Netherlands in 1961, it focuses on Isabel, the only one of three siblings caring for the big old house in which she grew up. Brother Hendrick has moved on to a gay …
Social Security and Frances Perkins: Trump doesn’t get it
Becoming Madame Secretary by Stephanie Dray is a piece of historical fiction about Frances Perkins, named by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be the Secretary of Labor, the first woman elevated to a cabinet position and the longest service Labor Secretary ever (for all 16 years of the FDR presidency.) There have been biographies written …
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A message to Pete Hegseth about women in combat
A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell is a wonderful biography about an extraordinary woman who played a key role in the defeat of the Nazis in the 1940’s, a woman of courage and powerful leadership skills, a woman of whom most people have never heard, a woman whose life should be instructive to …
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Ukrainian novel reveals history of suffering
No Country for Love by Yaroslav Trofimov, the Ukrainian-born chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, covers Ukraine from 1930-1954 and is based on the real-life experiences of his own grandmother, whom he interviewed right up to the time of her death at 96. What was happening at the time is historically accurate, …
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An Iranian novel that resonates politically
The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali is a timely read, a coming-of-age story by the author of The Stationery Store, which also draws on her Iranian background. Dedicated “to the brave women of Iran,” it is told in the first person, primarily by its chief protagonist, an Iranian girl named Elaheh or Ellie, …
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This Novel is a Challenge
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald has a little bit of Marcel Proust, something of James Joyce, a dose of Freud and a lot of post-WWII PTSD. The landscape is usually desolate, the lighting dark; the often-abandoned buildings are old, dank and soot-stained, all reeking of imagined history. Even when there are crowds, there is loneliness, setting …
Splendid history answers Russian riddles
The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes is an amazing and accessible book on the history of Russia, the central theme of which traces Russia’s mythologies as a key to the Russian character, leadership and major events. There are lots of maps (ever-changing due to Russia’s thirst for acquiring lands and people near its always-expanding …
Marjorie Arons-Barron 