Breaking Matthew

A sequel to Healing Ruby by Jennifer H. Westall, this novel picked up a few years later.  Ruby is a young woman with a gift for faith healing.  Matthew is a young man God healed through Ruby’s gift.  They are obviously meant to be together, and I read this whole book waiting for that resolution and waiting for the resolution of Ruby’s troubles with the law over taking the blame for something she didn’t do.

The theme of sacrificial suffering in order to protect someone else from harm is excellently portrayed.  Ruby’s family and Matthew all struggle greatly with her decision to protect someone else at her own peril.  Their anguish at experiencing God’s silence is real.  Listen in as Matthew and Ruby deal with the pain of “unanswered” prayer:

‘But He didn’t come though.  I did everything I could think of, and I prayed and prayed.  He didn’t answer.’

She smiled.  ‘Yes, He did.  Matthew, just because things didn’t happen the way you wanted doesn’t mean you didn’t get an answer.’  She placed her hand over mine, sending a tingle of warmth through me.  ‘You’ll see.  It will be exactly what we need when we need it.’

Their faith continues to be tested throughout the book, with various characters responding in different ways.  Matthew and Ruby also progress in sorting out their feelings for each other.  Although I didn’t appreciate the cliffhanger ending, the exploration of holding onto faith through suffering and trials was movingly portrayed.

This is a good book, but it is definitely not a stand-alone novel.  It will only truly be enjoyed as part of a trilogy.  While it’s worth reading with engaging characters and interesting themes, I was disappointed that it took such a long time to develop this time, and now will require a third book to find out how everything turns out.  It might be worth your while to wait until the third book is released, then just read all three together.

The Sun Also Rises

My son said I should read Hemingway, and specifically The Sun Also Rises, with an open mind.  So I did.  I’m not sure if the “open minded” admonition was because he thought I would be offended by the foul language, the incessant drinking, the immorality, or simply the style of story-telling.  I was not offended.  Hemingway’s descriptions of town and countryside, of bullfights and matadors and spectators is told in “lean, hard, athletic narrative prose.” (quote from the New York Times on the web article “Marital Tragedy”).  His concise language conveys a picture so vividly, you can almost taste the heavy dust and feel the summer heat.  However, I felt rather stupid when I got to the end and wondered why this is a highly-revered classic.

Before it begins, Hemingway quotes Ecclesiastes as a clue that the characters will struggle with what they view as the meaninglessness of their lives.  I understand that the characters drank continuously out of psychological and spiritual torment, boredom, in order to forget, and to avoid life. There was so much drinking: constant imbibing of vast quantities of beer, wine, absinthe and countless other beverages morning, noon and night and quantified by Marty Beckerman in “How to drink the Hemingway Way.”

The book’s characters drank more than a hundred and fifty types of alcohol on nearly eight hundred occasions, just like their creator before lunch. A decade and a half later, at the ripe old age of forty, Hemingway — who wrote what he knew — suffered from kidney and liver problems, hypertension, cramps, diabetes, insomnia, bloody urine, and (worst of all) erectile dysfunction.

The constant drinking certainly provided the hollow, deadened background that Hemingway was going for– am I right?  In the book, Robert Cohn agonizes,

Listen, Jake,… don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it?  Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?…. Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we’ll be dead?

In addition to this angst over one’s own mortality, all the men in the story loved titled socialite Brett, but the only one she loved back was Jake, whose war injury left him unable to “perform” (if you know what I mean).  She described her unfulfilled love for him to be “hell on earth.”  The story chronicles a slow, spiraling, dysfunctional descent of her relationship with each of the men who love her and of their relationships with one another.

The constant flow of alcohol aided this group’s desperate and false camaraderie and also abetted the impending and certain unravelling of those superficial friendships.  As Jake noted on one occasion,

There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening.  Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy.  It seemed they were all such nice people.

But they weren’t nice at all.  They were an unsettling mixture of sadness, vanity, emptiness, bravado and despair.  These people were bankrupt in every way.  Perhaps Ian Crouch had the right idea in his New Yorker article entitled “Hemingway’s Hidden Metafictions” :

[The Sun Also Rises] is a wink at the marketplace—readers want lively, lighthearted tales from abroad—and alludes to the novel’s central dark, repeated joke: that everything awful in life, in all of its sadness and melancholy, is better laughed at.

Apparently it’s easier to laugh at your own emptiness when you’re drunk.

Eventually, all these flawed characters end up attending the bullfights in Pamplona, Spain and the week-long fiesta surrounding the bullfights and the running of the bulls.

The fiesta was really started.  It kept up day and night for seven days.  The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on.  The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta.  Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though  nothing could have any consequences.  It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta.

 

The events surrounding the bullfights bring all this tension to a dramatic and drunken climax.  The party necessarily breaks up and everyone goes their sad and separate ways.

The end of the book brings Brett and Jake back together once more– again as star-crossed lovers– and seemingly resigned to their roles of Lost Wanderer and Rescuer respectively.  Jake will never “get the girl.”  Brett can’t accept Jake as he is, and realizes that she’ll never find happiness with anyone else.  She laments, “Oh, Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together.”  His final word on the matter also ends the book:  “Yes.  Isn’t it pretty to think so?”  There is no neat tidying up of loose ends or happy ending here.

Since finishing the book, I have waded through a half-dozen websites to try to better understand what others find so gratifying about this work.  That helped.  I can say that I now appreciate the book for what it is.  Hemingway will probably not make it onto my “favorite author” list, but he has certainly expanded my literary horizons.  That’s a good thing.

 

 

The Same Sky

Juxtaposing Carla, living in extreme poverty in Honduras, with Texan, Alice, who has struggled with the fact that she is unable to bear children and has endured failed surrogacy and adoption attempts, this book illustrates two people who appear to be different in every way yet share “the same sky.”  Amanda Eyre Ward’s writing style is blunt.  Harsh.  Nothing is glossed over and rarely relieved with lightness or humor .  The sharp edges of aching grief and desperate need stand in stark relief against a background that offers little hope in any way, shape or form– for a long stretch of pages.  This is a work of fiction, based on gruesome realities and interspersed with occasional crude language (I still wonder when and why the f-word has become acceptable.  I would be happy to never see or hear it again).  On page 76 of 276 pages, I just wanted it to be over.  But I’m reading it as a book club selection for my Chapter Chicks group, so I pressed on.  Plus I wanted to know what happens and how Carla and Alice’s lives end up intersecting.

Note: spoiler alert for the upcoming paragraphs!

Gradually the characters develop more complexity.  Carla urgently needs to get her little brother out of Honduras.  He started sniffing glue at the age of 6, and she knows that this addiction has signed his death warrant unless she can rescue him immediately.

I closed the padlock and lay next to Junior, my arm around his small body.  I knew then what the end of hope smelled like:  yellow glue on your brother’s breath.

She boldly throws her lot in with Ernesto, a young gang member she just met who has agreed to try to escort Carla and Junior around the law and through several borders to reach Carla’s mother who lives as an illegal immigrant in Austin, Texas.  They will risk their lives to ride The Beast (El tren de la muerte– the death train), which means clinging to the top of a hurtling freight train along with murderers, rapists, and other desperate children and adults for 1,450 miles.

Of course Alice and her husband also live in Austin.  We know that her mother died when she was a child, and that she survived breast cancer in her college years.  After a heart-wrenching failed adoption she decides to try to fill the childless void in her life by agreeing to take on a “little sister” from the local high school.  Evian is 15 years old and her life is a mess.  Alice is immediately in over her head.  She no longer believes God has a plan for her life– or anyone else’s.

I didn’t believe there was a plan.  Look at Evian, for C__ ‘s sake.  What was the plan for her?  God had given her a s__ mother, then hooked her up with someone like me, who hadn’t a clue about how to help her…. I felt angry and impotent.  But then I thought– why not?  I wanted to take care of someone, and Evian sure as h__ needed care.

And so the book continues from one distressing or heart-breaking situation to the next.  But the characters are gradually finding out what they want and need and what’s important.  Clara finds out that being in America does not solve every problem.  Alice discovers that maybe her life can be fulfilling even without a baby.  Then suddenly, very suddenly, the story ends with new beginnings for everyone.  I wasn’t ready yet.  For the end.  Fortunately there was a short epilogue set many years after the ending of the main story.  It helps.

I felt the thread that bound us, that ran from the graves of your ancestors north, through Mexico to Texas…. A thread of blood.  A vein of grace.

This is a story worth reading.  It’s uncomfortable.  It contrasts the “haves” with the “have-nots.”  It shines a light on why illegal aliens risk life and limb to come to America.  We see that even though we don’t see or understand God’s plan, it is still there.  It paints a picture of what faith can mean to different people and what it takes to be happy.  One particular quote from Carla encapsulates this idea:

I know how privilege sounds:  haughty, a bit loud, incensed by imagined slights.  Americans don’t seem to laugh as much as we do, in my family.  Maybe they haven’t been forced to see the worst of human nature, to know the true value of joy.

At the very least, The Same Sky has encouraged me to pull gratitude out of my privilege.

 

What Is Your Calling?

Came across this nugget from Brother Andrew, aka Andy van der Bijl, aka “God’s Smuggler.”

As we spend time in scripture and in prayer, it’s important not to get sidetracked in trying to determine whether we’ve received an official call from God or whether we have a clear indication that we are doing God’s will.  It’s too easy to get so caught up in the paralysis of analysis that we fail to act…. We must never make our dreams for success or accomplishment as God’s purpose for us.  God’s end, His purpose for us, is the process…. God has given us in scripture a full revelation of His nature and His character.  And He has given us an unmistakably clear mandate to share Him and His Word with those who have not heard.  If we focus on obeying Him on a daily basis–wherever we are–He will lead us where He wants us to go and to the people He wants us to reach.

If you ever struggle with the day-to-day drudgery of life, this is a great reminder to stay open to opportunities to serve God in the everyday.

 

Quote found in Streams of Joy, published by Barbour Books in 2012.

No Baggage

This little book by Clara Bensen is subtitled “A Tale of Love and Wandering.”  It caught my eye at my local library because it appeared to be a bloggish account of traveling without any luggage.  “One dress, three weeks, eight countries– zero baggage” proclaimed the dust jacket.  I was curious.  Could this be done?  I’ve only recently become able to travel with a carry-on an

d a backpack, letting my large 50-pound suitcase at home!

I got a lot more than I bargained for in what I thought was a simple travel memoir.  Clara details her recent 2-year-long existential post-college crisis (i.e. debilitating anxiety) as well as her exploration of open relationships.  The book was often vulgar– the f-word was scattered throughout along with TMI about love-making locations.  But Clara’s skill in describing her travel through both Europe and life was so engaging, that I wanted to continue seeing where her journey would take her.

Like living embroidered lace, pink bougainvillea and grapevines with green filigree curls traveled across terraces echoing with the clink of wine glasses, over trinket shops selling terra-cotta busts, and up whitewashed walls and bright shutters.  Past and present were all mixed up….

My original intent in reading the book was indeed satisfied.  Clara and unboyfriend Jeff (whom she had met just weeks before the trip on dating website OkCupid) traveled for three weeks in the same clothes, relying on serendipitous lodging arrangements which often included Couchsurfing which is touted at being a mechanism for travelers to “stay with locals for free all over the world.”  Often their hosts would allow them to wash their one outfit and even borrow pajamas.  The only toiletries Clara carried were chapstick, a toothbrush, deoderant and two tampons.  She added toothpaste and more feminine protection after finding out they were more necessary than she thought.

Some travel experiences were painful.

If I were a cartoon, my chin would have quivered as a giant teardrop rolled down my cheek.

And intermixed throughout the travel account were clues to how she got to this point of being willing and able to embark on such a loosey-goosey adventure.

I regularly scrolled through anxiety forums [during her two years of mental crisis] where members posted long strings of medication history like they were battle medallions on a jacket:  Battle at Atarax, The Last Stand at Lexapro, Klonopin Massacre, Valium War II, and Operation Cymbalta.”

The trip itself involved a lot of personal growth for her.  She had to decide to make decisions.

It was easy making decisions for myself, but I’d rather lasso feral tomcats than make decisions for other people.  I was afraid of the responsibility– afraid that I’d choose something that everyone else secretly hated or that every aggravation occurring from that point onward… would somehow be traced back and blamed on my single, less-than-stellar decision.  When it came to minor group decisions, passive flexibility was the safest route to avoiding potential conflict and its fury of attending emotions.  It was a protective mechanism.

Part of her life journey involved abandoning her evangelical Christian, homeschooled upbringing and embracing– everything?  Nothing?  Actually, she embraced having no answers.

Maybe I’d never solve for X.  Maybe I’d never be certain the universe was anything more than a cold, chaotic space littered with stars, ad infinitum.

Of course, what Clara embraces seems to be empty and cold to me even while she considers it to be freeing.  It was interesting to go along on her journey as a way to peek into what goes on in someone else’s mind and heart, even though my personal journey is about as far from hers as it could get.  I’m glad I read No Baggage, although it is certainly not for everyone!

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Reading is a cherished pastime for me.  I enjoy language that flows, that expresses ideas and emotions like music, that paints a picture of what is, what was or what could be.  Mid-20th-Century writer Betty Smith uses words beautifully in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  While reading this book, I entered the world of young Francie Nolan’s Brooklyn of the 19-oughts and 19-teens.  Her world was gritty, impoverished, cold and lonely.  It was full of hardship and longing.  But it was also brimming over with rich experiences of courage, hard work, overcoming and survival through sheer determination.

Francie’s father, Johnny, was a dreamer, a singing waiter who brought light, love and music into their home.  His nickname for Francie was Prima Donna.  He was also an alcoholic, so he spent money on booze while his wife and children lived cold and hungry.  Katie, Francie’s mother, was of hardy stock.  She worked hard to keep a roof over their heads and subsistence level food on the table.  She also instilled in her children the desire to read and learn and be able to stand on their own.

The Rommelys ran to women of strong personalities.  The Nolans ran to weak and talented men.

The story progresses its way though the Nolan family’s life with abundant descriptive detail so that we can feel Francie’s pain and embarrassment over going to school reeking of kerosene which her mother put on her scalp to make sure she didn’t catch lice from other children.  We can appreciate the tight bond of Francie’s mother and aunts as they fight to keep their families afloat amidst hardship, infant mortality, and imperfect husbands they can’t help but love.  We see the joy Johnny brings to the household even while experiencing the pain wrought by his unchecked addiction.  We can be impressed at Francie’s ability to overcome her mother’s obvious favoritism toward Francie’s little brother, Neeley, with the gradually dawning realization that the favoritism is purposefully engendering a spirit of tenacity and independence in Francie which is what she needs for survival and success.  Katie desires a better life for her children and knows Neeley will require educational doors to be opened for him, and understands that Francie will fight and persevere to kick down those doors on her own.

Francie eventually takes responsibility to provide for her family and to persevere in obtaining the education which is her deepest desire.  She becomes a woman in deed long before her body and emotions catch up to adulthood.

The gentle rhythms of the book lead us onward through Francie’s coming-of-age, causing us to grieve with her, root for her, and applaud her resilience.  This book is not a sentimental look back at “simpler days of yore.”  It is an acknowledgement and celebration of how difficult and deadly the “good old days” really were.  In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, we find that Francie is the tree– the kind of tree that keeps sprouting back no matter how many times it is cut back or deprived.  I highly recommend reading this book as a coming-of-age book, as a story about the triumph of the human spirit, as an in-depth historical picture of early 20th century American life, and especially because it will draw you into the Nolan family to see their love, grief, tenacity, and sacrifice without any syrupy glossing over of hard realities.  Yet, all the gritty realness is not ugly or painful to read.  Betty Smith was a great story-teller indeed.

This quote occurs in the beginning of the book as Francie is being introduced to the reader.

The one tree in Francie’s yard was neither a pine nor a hemlock.  It had pointed leaves which grew along green switches which radiated from the bough and made a tree which looked like a lot of opened green umbrellas.  Some people called it the Tree of Heaven.  No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which stuggled to reach the sky.  It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement.  It grew lushly, but only in the tenement districts.