Monthly Archives: August 2011

Vanessa Diffenbaugh: The Language of Flowers (2011)

Posted in American Literature, Books, Novel by

The Victorian language of flowers was used to express emotions: honeysuckle for devotion, azaleas for passion, and red roses for love. But for Victoria Jones, it has been more useful in communicating feelings like grief, mistrust and solitude. After a childhood spent in the foster care system, she is unable to get close to anybody, and her only connection to the world is through flowers and their meanings.

I saw The Language of Flowers at a bookshop, spontaneously bought and read it right away. After all the books I read during the last weeks (Sebald, Josipovici and Morante – all upcoming reviews) I felt like reading something “heartbreaking and redemptive” as the book cover states.

Victoria is 18 years old and finally relieved from the foster-care system she has been living in since she was born. Her only chance at adoption went by when she was 10 years old, after that she spent most of her life in homes. She is aggressive and shy, wounded and mistrusting. With nowhere to go she decides to sleep in a public park in San Francisco. Flowers are her only passion, growing them, taking care of them as well as their meaning. She learned all about flowers from Elizabeth.

In chapters that alternate between then and now, we find out who this mysterious Elizabeth was. Elizabeth was the owner of a vineyard. She knew everything about the language of flowers as it was used by the Victorians. I don’t want to spoil this novel, and will only tell you that Elizabeth was Victoria’s only hope to be adopted but a tragic event prevented it.

The Victoria of today soon discovers that even though she can live in the open, she still needs money for food. She is lucky and can convince the local florist of her talent with flowers. Renata hires her, amazed that this wild-looking, unkempt girl has such a talent. While buying flowers at the flower market they meet Grant. Victoria has never been in love and doesn’t want anyone to come close. He is clearly interested but she fights off his advances at first. His knowledge about flowers and, surprisingly, also about their language, helps Victoria to open up. It is a coincidence, but not a too far-fetched one, that Grant turns out to be Elizabeth’s nephew.

As I said, this book has a redemptive ending but the road that leads there is more than bumpy. It’s not a romance but love plays an important role. It’s more the story of a young woman who has been too deeply wounded to trust, a novel about mothers and motherhood and of course about flowers. There was one part in it, involving birth and nursing that is very powerful, to say the least.

Victoria’s gift is so considerable that she will start her own business. Not only does she know about the meaning of flowers, she is capable of arranging them in a way that they affect someone’s life. A person looking for a relationship will find a partner thanks to Victoria’s flowers.

Vanessa Diffenbaugh created a flower dictionary and included it at the end of the book. She went trough many Victorian books, comparing the meanings. Often there was more than one meaning for a flower, occasionally they were even contradicting. She decided what she thought works best. She also added flowers that are more common nowadays and left out those that cannot be found anymore.

The Language of Flowers reminded me a bit of The Mistress of Spices but it is far better. It has been compared to White Oleander which I loved but I didn’t think they had anything in common.

I must admit I wasn’t exactly the right reader for this. It’s hard to describe what problem I had with it. There were moments when I really liked it and others where I was thinking it felt artificial.

One thing  is for sure, the right reader will absolutely adore this book. The combination of the meaning of flowers, a wounded woman who struggles to find happiness and extremely graphic descriptions of giving birth and nursing is quite different.

Peggy Orenstein: Cinderella Ate My Daughter (2011)

Posted in Books, Non-fiction by

An intelligent, candid, and often personal work, Cinderella Ate My Daughter offers an important exploration of the burgeoning girlie-girl culture and what it could mean for our daughters’ identities and their futures.

What happens when a feminist who knows exactly how things should be, gets pregnant and the child is – horror on horror – a girl? This is pretty much how Peggy Orenstein opens her entertaining, thought-provoking and occasionally quite shocking account about what she sub-titles “Dispatches from the front-lines of the new girlie-girl culture”.

In Cinderella Ate my Daughter she explores the world of toys, kid’s beauty pageants, the color pink, superhero figures, fairy tales, the internet and so on and so forth. It is at the same time a cultural exploration as a reflection on how to bring up a daughter. How much can you allow, how well can you shield her from the influences around her and what if you succeed and she will forever be a boyish girl, the odd one out?

A lot of what Peggy Orenstein describes is certainly very American. I have seen items of the Disney Princesses’ brand but never to the extent she describes. The Disney Princesses are a marketing strategy that exploited little girls’ wish to look and dress up like a princess. The main problem, so Orenstein, is the focus on cuteness and looks only. What is also problematic is the fact that, although there are several princesses, they are never found to interact and on pictures showing them together, they all look into different directions.

Orenstein finally had to give in and let her daughter dress up as a princess but she stayed firm when it came to sexualized toys like the Bratz doll. She also explores at length how  even little girls are dressed in more and more sexy ways. Once more it is all about looks and not about feeling. The girls should look sexy but not feel it (of course not, they are only little girls), only if this is a behaviour they learn at a young age, how will they un-learn it?

The chapter on beauty pageants is one of the most controversial. Orenstein showed how confusing it was to speak with the families, to see how much the girls enjoyed it and she wondered finally if it was really all that damaging.

The chapter on pink was an interesting one and I liked how she described that this is rather a new phenomenon. Only a couple of decades back, pink wasn’t so important. Once more there is a marketing strategy behind it. If boys and girls are the same, you sell far less toys. Just imagine, a family has a boy and a girl, they wouldn’t need to buy special boy and girl toys, if there were no differences. Of course, it is more complicated than that, I simplify.

I never expected, when I had a daughter, that one of my most important jobs would be to protect her childhood for becoming a marketers’ land grab.

The chapter Wholesome to Whoresome was another fascinating part. Reading about the case of Miley Cyrus and other girl stars who seem to cross the border from cute child to slut in an instance and how this not only damages their self-esteem but confuses the fans is enlightening. Those girls have to be cute and sexy at a young age but as soon as they become teenagers the problems starts. They should be virginal but they can’t. Britney Spears is another sad example.

I found one of the last chapters on social media and virtual friendships called Just Between You and Me and My 662 BFFs extremely worrying. The umber of so-called friends on Facebook and the like indicates the popularity of a girl. At the same time, all their fears and weaknesses are exposed to the whole world at an age when they can hardly handle it.

The self, Manago (a researcher at the Children’s Digital Media Center in LA) said, becomes a brand, something to be marketed to others rather than developed from within. Instead of intimates with whom you interact for the sake of exchange, friends become your consumers, an audience for whom you perform.

According to Orenstein, recent research has shown, that there is an alarming rise in narcissistic tendencies among young adults as social media encourages self-promotion over self-awareness.

What I liked a lot is how honest Orenstein is about finding out how nice things are in theory and how super difficult and different things get when you face them in real life. Still, she concludes, it is vital, not to let go, to talk to the girls, ask them questions, guide them and to look for role models they can identify with and that will help them develop a strong sense of their self as beings and not as products.

I won’t lie: it takes work to find other options, and if you are anything like me, your life is already brimful with demands.

It is amazing that in all her sorting out of children’s books, cartoons for girls, fairy tales and movies there was only one director in whose films  there are female protagonists who are

refreshingly free of agenda, neither hyperfeminine nor drearily feminist. They simply happen to be girls, as organically as, in other director’s films, they happen to be boys.

The man she is speaking of is Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki who signed such fantastic movies as Laputa: The Castle in the Sky or Kiki’s Delivery Service.

I discovered the book on Fence’s blog. Here is her review.

If you want to know more about Peggy Orenstein and her books you should visit her website Peggy Orenstein.

Steven Millhauser: Enchanted Night (1999)

Posted in American Literature, Books, Novella by

“This is the night of revelation. This is the night the dolls wake. This is the night of the dreamer in the attic. This is the night of the piper in the woods.”

Hot summer nights have a special magic. In the middle of the night, when everyone is sleeping and only night creatures are awake, the hot still air is heavy, time seems to stand still and the world is indeed enchanted. This is the magic captured by Steven Millhauser in his beautiful and poetical novella Enchanted Night. I have never read this book before but the images, the atmosphere felt so familiar. It was a bit like looking into my own imagination.

Thanks to Carl who reviewed the book not long ago (here is his review), I waited for a hot summer night to read it. I’m glad I did. It felt so right to read this novella during one of the very few hot nights we had this summer.

Here is the beginning of this wonderful book.

A hot summer night in southern Connecticut, tide going out and the moon still rising. Laura Engstrom, fourteen years old, sits up in bed and throws the covers off. Her forehead is damp. her hair feels wet. Through the screen of the two half-open windows she can hear a rasp of the crickets and a dim rush of traffic in the distant thruway. Five past twelve. Do you know where your children are? The room is so hot that the heat is a hand gripping her throat. Got to move, got to do something. Moonlight is streaming in past the edges of the closed and slightly raised venetian blinds. She can’t breathe in this room, in this house.

Laura isn’t the only restless being on this hot and sultry night whose quiet darkness is illuminated by moonlight. All over the little town people feel their yearnings and desires, think of their dreams and wishes. Many of them feel lonely and driven by a secret longing. There is the writer who has turned the nights into days. He writes until midnight, then goes out to visit an elderly woman, roams the streets and sleeps until after noon. He is 39 years old, lives with his mother and has been trying for years to write the definite historical novel. Mrs Kasco, the widow he visits in the middle of the night, still regrets that she didn’t seduce him, when he was still a teenager and she a fairly young woman. On the other side of the city a mannequin in a shop window feels a secret stirring and comes to life. A young man who has never made love to a girl is visited by the moon Goddess while he lies in a backyard dreaming. A mysterious piper plays a flute and attracts stray children. Black cats haunt the streets, four girls wearing masks break into houses. A lonely woman walks the street in a pink bathrobe. A sleezy man spies on a young girl who takes a moon bath.

The story of this hot enchanted summer night, in which abandoned dolls come to life in the attics of the houses, is told in small tableaux, little atmospherical sketches that seem to originate in our childhood imagination. I remember how, when I was a child, I used to check in the morning  whether my toys had moved. Like many children I secretly thought and hoped they were alive at night. My biggest wish was to catch a glimpse of their doings.

Millhauser doesn’t only capture childhood dreams and wishes but also those of teenagers, grown-ups and the elderly and interweaves them in this haunting tale which is written in beautiful, melodious prose that seems inspired by lyrics.

He’d like to wipe it all out, start things over again, give the land back to the Indians. Or better yet, give it to him, to Haverstraw, King of the New World: trapper, hunter, fisher, farmer, sower of appleseed, stargazer, trailblazer, pathfinder, deerslayer, barefoot boy with cheek of tan, Huck Finn on the Housatonic, crackerbarrel philosopher, wily old coot in a coonskin cap, shrew-eyed Yankee, inventor of the cotton gin, the printing press, the typewriter, founder of libraries, distributor of American jeans to the Indians, self-made tycoon in a thirty room mansion, a hometown boy, worked his way up, one in a million, lone ranger, a wayfaring stranger, a born loser, a man down on his luck.

I don’t know anything about Millhauser, only that he won the Pulitzer Prize for Martin Dressler, but his style is so accomplished that I’m curious about his other books.  Does anybody know them?

Indonesian Short Stories

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Thanks to Novroz from  Polychrome Interest and Mel U from The Reading Life I discovered Indonesian short stories.

Novroz who is from Indonesia and Mel U who lives in the Philippines are hosting an Indonesian short story month this August and everyone is welcome to join. If you want to know more, check out Novroz’ Introductory Post where you can find suggestions and links to sites where you can read Indonesian short stories online.

I read a few stories but the one I liked the most was by Nenden Lilis A., an author from West Java. I found the story which is called The Rooms Out Back in the issue Tropical Currents of Words Without Borders.

I liked The Rooms Out Back a lot, it opens a door to a world we don’t know, to ways of life we are not familiar with.  There is such a lot in this story, I hardly know where to start.

A young woman, mother of a small child, lives with her husband in a very lively, somewhat chaotic apartment building. Every morning at 7.30 they are woken by the shadow of a cat. Usually they get up at 4.30, do various things, chat with neighbours, pray and nap for a little while until they finally get up for good.

From the first scene we are drawn into this world where a lot happens outside of the apartments and the narrator tells us something about all the inhabitants of the house.

Unlike most of the others she is a happy wife, her husband is kind and gentle and helps a lot while the other husbands tend to drink, have affairs and beat their wives.

What I found extremely fascinating is the narrator’s relationship with Umi, one of the women in the house. Umi has been abandoned by her husband and tries to make a living selling lotions and potions and massaging people.

Reading about this reminded me a lot of my studies of cultural anthropology where I learned how much of the money gained for some households in some countries stems from informal economy. Like housework it is invisible but contributes to a large extent to the family’s survival. These women have to be industrious and ingenious to make a living.

The casualty in their discussions fascinated me, they mention sex naturally and without shame, the body is important and treated as such. Umi offers to massage the narrator because she feels tense. Imagine we would offer that to someone we hardly know?

Just one word on the writing. It isn’t anything special but we have to bear in mind that these stories have been translated from the original language. Maybe the style is more refined in Indonesian.

You can read the story here. I’m interested to read more of her work and to discover other authors.

Simone van der Vlugt: Shadow Sister – Schaduwzuster (2005) A Dutch Thriller

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Married. One child. A career: Lydia has her life in perfect order – if only everyone else around her could be as organised as she is. Her unmarried twin sister Elisa is still struggling to find what she wants to do. And her colleagues at the school where she teaches often fail to reach her high standards.But one day, it all falls apart from Lydia. When she is threatened by one of her pupils, her sister is the first person she turns to. But Elisa is powerless to stop the campaign of intimidation that follows. How far will it go? Or is someone else taking advantage of the situation? And what is Elisa’s part in all of this? Twins are close. Aren’t they?

I was looking forward to reading Shadow Sister because Simone van der Vlugt’s first novel Reunion was excellent, a gripping page-turner with a surprising ending. Shadow Sister wasn’t as good but despite its flaws I couldn’t put it down and thought the ending was not foreseeable.

The story is told from a first person point of view, alternating between the two sisters. While we know early on that Lydia was killed, we still read her chapters. The chapters of the sister start after Lydia has died while hers progress slowly towards her death.

Lydia is a Dutch teacher at a school for immigrant kids. It isn’t an easy job but she loves it. She thinks she can make a difference and that is all that matters to her. The kids aren’t very disciplined and get into fights among each other but mostly they respect her. Until Bilal, a Moroccan boy, feels ridiculed by Lydia and attacks her with a knife. She has him suspended from school and from that moment on she feels threatened. Someone stands in front of her house at night, someone follows her from the school. The police take it very seriously but she just reports it. When she is killed, no one has doubts that it was the boy but Bilal has an alibi.

From her sisters point of view we start to see another side of Lydia. We realize that she was maybe not as perfect as everybody believed and we also realize that there were problems in the marriage. Her husband Raoul is a bit too good-looking and he seems to be having an affair or be in love with someone. We also find out that Elisa has feelings for her brother-in-law.

All this together makes for gripping reading. The description of the school and the problems schoolteachers face nowadays with children who are not motivated, who come from other cultures, who don’t take a woman seriously, who feel threatened in their masculinity the moment you criticize a tiny thing, is interesting. What I didn’t like is the fact that van der Vlugt uses present tense all through the book. And I wouldn’t call Shadow Sister a psychological thriller as there isn’t much in terms of character analysis. Both sisters sound exactly the same and also the other characters are a bit flat. The person that is rendered best is Lydia’s little daughter.  If you are looking for another Ruth Rendell, this isn’t your book but if you look for a gripping page-turner offering social elements, you might enjoy it.

Literature and War Readalong August 26 2011: La Storia – History by Elsa Morante

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The readalong book for August, La Storia or History,  is one of the most important books of Italian literature. It is also quite a substantial book, depending on the edition, it is over 800 pages long which is why I decided to post the introduction already today to give anyone who would like to read along the opportunity to do so.

I’m already on page 150 and fascinated by her writing that reminds me of Latin American literature in its exuberance. Before the individual chapters there are detailed accounts of the history of Italy. La Storia is pretty much the story of a woman, the schoolteacher Ida Ramundo, and the history of a country. Given all the atrocities Germany committed we tend to forget that there were allies like Italy. The history of Italy during WWII is  story of megalomania, bad choices and bad planning and borders quite often on the ridiculous. But there are also stories of resistance and heroism. This, however, is not the topic of this novel.

I did a bit of research and found out that a lot of this novel is based on Morante’s own life. Her mother was half Jewish and a teacher, like Morante herself.

Elsa Morante was married for quite a long time to Alberto Moravia, author of  La Noia (Boredom) and many other outstanding books.

History isn’t Morante’s only novel, she is also the writer of Aracoeli and L’isola di Arturo (Arturo’s Island).

La Storia has been made into a mini-series starring Claudia Cardinale as Ida Ramundo.