Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian
Bel Canto opens with a lavish birthday celebration honoring Japanese businessman Mr. Hosokawa, whose sole reason for visiting this unnamed South American country is to hear the world-famous soprano, Roxane Coss. During the festivities, armed terrorists break into the Vice President's home, where the party is taking place. Their plan to kidnap the President is thwarted when they discover he is not in attendance, and instead, they hold the partygoers captive. The next day, several men and all women (except Roxane Coss) are released, and the captors and hostages settle into their new routines. The hostages are from all over the world, and have only Mr. Hosokawa's translator to assist them in communicating. As days stretch into weeks and weeks stretch into months, the captors and prisoners form strong bonds with each other and with the music that comes to dominate their existence. Life in the house becomes idyllic for many of its inhabitants, and preferable to the world outside the walls surrounding the mansion. Patchett's inspiration for Bel Canto was a 1996 hostage crisis in Lima, Peru, which lasted for more than four months and was said to include soccer games, chess matches between captors and hostages, and pizza delivery. Bel Canto won the Orange Prize for Fiction and was a P.E.N./Faulkner nominee.
November 2005 Archives
Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian
If your family responsibilities over the Thanksgiving holiday involve entertaining your young relatives, make your way up to the fourth floor of Cabell Library to browse through our collection of juvenile and young adult literature. For a festive read, grab An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, which would be good for the fourth- or fifth-graders in your family. It is the story of the Bassett family living in New Hampshire in the mid-1800s. After their parents are called away unexpectedly to visit a sick relative, the seven Bassett children decide to prepare for Thanksgiving themselves. Of course, surprises, cooking mishaps, and misadventures follow but all ends well as a large crowd gathers for a successful Thanksgiving feast. Since it was published first in 1882, the language and New Hampshire dialect may be challenging for young readers, but it is enjoyable nonetheless.
Cabell Library Juvenile Literature (4th floor) PZ7 .A335 O43 1989
Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian
Bee Season is Myla Goldberg's debut novel, and is about a contemporary Jewish family on the verge of falling apart. Eliza Naumann is an average nine-year-old with no expectations of glory. She surprises herself and everyone she knows when she easily wins her school's spelling bee. As she goes on to compete in regional, then national bees, she becomes the object of her father's devotion and love. Her sixteen-year-old brother, a high achiever, had previously been the prized child and is uncomfortable with the shift in family dynamics. He becomes increasingly alienated from his family as immerses himself in a Hare Krishna religious community. Their mother, a lawyer and family breadwinner, is involved in her own private battles with mental illness and obsessive stealing which spirals out of control.
Among the various complex relationships between the Naumann family members, the most engaging is that of Eliza and her father, who is devoted to the study of Jewish mysticism. Eliza craves her father's pleasure and praise resulting from her spelling success, and thrives on the time they spend working together even as her family is breaking apart. At the same time, she blames herself for her family's troubles, and has to decide which is more important: her father's approval or her family's cohesion.
Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Government Information Librarian
Possession begins when Roland, a scholar of the fictitious Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, discovers a letter Ash wrote to Christabel LaMotte, one of the era's first feminist writers. Roland's sleuthing for more information regarding a possible link between the two poets leads him to Maud Bailey, a somewhat haughty and distanced LaMotte scholar. The two embark on a quest together, determined to uncover the truth and find out the extent of the Ash-LaMotte relationship, which could radically alter their lives' work and scholarship. Their journey takes them to the English countryside and France as they unearth old letters and journals that weave the story of this previously unknown romance.
A simple plot summary does not even begin to do justice to this multi-layered novel. Byatt's narrator presents the parallel stories of the present-day scholars and their Victorian subjects through a variety of literary forms, including poetry, letters, diary entries and fairy tales. This postmodern romance also tackles some interesting themes, such as the nature of literary biography and scholarship in light of our incomplete access to the full truth about the stories of authors' lives. Yet for all its intellectualism and wealth of literary allusions, the narrative of Possession seldom lags, and you will soon find yourself wrapped up in the mystery surrounding Ash and LaMotte, which increasingly consumes Maud and Roland. Possession won the 1990 Booker Prize.
Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian
This fascinating novel proves that you don't have to like the characters in order to like a book. A Confederacy of Dunces is highly comedic in its gross caricatures of New Orleans citizens. The main character is Ignatius Reilly, an obnoxious, obese freeloader who, though a middle-aged man, still lives at home with his equally unlikable alcoholic mother. Ignatius imagines himself to be a philosopher and reformer, so when he is forced to get a job, he attempts to galvanize workers to complain about workplace conditions (he names this campaign a "Crusade for Moorish Dignity"). When this plan goes awry and he is fired, he gets a job as a hot dog street vendor where he eats many more hot dogs than he sells and again fails in his revolutionary attempts. He eventually must flee the city to avoid being committed to an asylum.
The story behind this book's publication is as interesting as the novel itself. John Kennedy Toole failed to have it published, and committed suicide in 1969. For the next several years, his mother's attempts to find a publisher was unsuccessful until she insisted on showing it to Walker Percy (The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman) who was teaching at Loyola in New Orleans. Although he was reluctant to read it, he was quickly convinced that it should be published and sent it to Louisiana State University Press. When it was published in 1980, it became an immediate success, both literary and commercial, and even won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981.
Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian
Bill Bryson, who has written nonfiction books on various subjects, including the joys and trials of hiking the Appalachian Trail, his love of England, and small-town America, has outdone himself with A Short History of Nearly Everything. He attempts to explain the history of scientific discovery of our planet and our universe—from to the smallest atomic particles to the largest expanse of space. The highest praise I can offer this book is that despite the fact that it is about science, I was hooked. The tone is funny, entertaining, and educational, and the facts are presented in a way that the reader can understand, whether they are from a scientific background or not. Physics, astronomy, geology, biology, chemistry—it's all there. Bryson weaves these fields of knowledge together to present a whole picture of the world in which we live, and does so in a way that encourages the reader to not take life on earth for granted.
Reviewed by Curtis Lyons, Head, Special Collections and Archives
Beatnik and counter-culture icon Tom Robbins has published 8 novels and a number of popular short stories in which he irreverently looks at institutions and societies from his own enhanced perspective. You can rely on him to bring unusual issues and characters to the forefront in each and every story or book, but his first book, Another Roadside Attraction, offers the most entertaining insights into the thought-processes of some uniquely American movements. Since it was a first attempt, the book does not flow as well as his later and more polished works, especially the best-selling Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (great book, avoid the movie). But Robbins has some important, not to mention outlandish, things to say in this book, arguably to a greater extent than his other novels. If anything, the bits of rather raw writing work into the overall feeling that you are experiencing something as it takes shape instead of just being told a story. I'm not sure I would recommend this as an introduction to Robbins's work (Cowgirls is probably better there), but if you have read other Robbins works but skipped this one then you should pick it up. And if you are not familiar with his work but are in the mood to have your vision of the world expanded, try Cowgirls and then I think you'll run out to taste Another Roadside Attraction.
