Every Note Played

Courage And Grace

Many would remember the Ice Bucket Challenge, which had celebrities (and others) dumping a bucket of ice and water over their heads, to promote awareness of the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) also known as motor neurone disease. However, unvarnished facts about just what ALS is and how devastating it can be, are to be found in Lisa Genova’s Every Note Played.

Genova is the author of Still Alice that chronicled the suffering of a woman with premature dementia (made into an award-winning film, starring Julianne Moore), and how she and her family cope with it.  In the new book, also about a debilitating medical condition, a famous concert pianist is diagnosed with ALS. He loses the use of hands first, and has to give up his career. He becomes increasingly dependent on home care professionals, and after one particularly humiliating episode when he is locked out of his house and soils his clothes, he has to accept his bitter ex-wife Karina’s offer of shelter and care.

But as the disease progresses and one by one the patient’s muscles shut down, he cannot swallow, eat, speak clearly or even breathe without invasive machines. In spite of an acrimonious divorce caused by Richard’s repeated infidelity, Karina is driven by mercy to help him (no girlfriend is willing to put up with this condition of the man), but even she does not comprehend the magnitude of the sacrifice demanded of her. She can barely leave the house, her sleep is constantly interrupted by alarms from Richard’s room, she has to do every menial task for him and be alert 24X7. Their daughter Grace, who is not informed immediately of her father’s condition, is shocked into sullen silence when she comes home from college.

The characters in the book can afford the expensive gadgets and machines required to manage the disease, one cannot even imagine how a poor person could survive. Most patients live for three to five years in a state of utter helplessness—Stephen Hawking was the only exception, who lived for many years, but completely immobile..

Genova does not spare the reader the agony Richard and Karina go through and he still he wants to live. The one positive in their life is the home health aide, Bill, whose chronic cheerfulness covers his deep compassion, without which no one can do the work he does.

The book is painful to read, but also unputdownable. The raw emotions, the unflinching portrayal of a man’s decline and a test of a woman’s patience make for a book that is as terrifying as it is tragic.

Every Note Played

By Lisa Genova

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 320

In The Midst Of Winter

Healed By Love

Isabel Allende’s latest novel gets it title from an Albert Camus quote: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

This beautiful line evoking hope, and maybe love, becomes the foundation of Allende’s In The Midst Of Winter (translated by Nick Calstor and Amanda Hopkinson), about three people damaged by their past, but coping with their despair in their own way.  A freak snowstorm brings them together, and the innate decency of two of them propels the story forward.

After her powerful debut, The House Of The Sprits, Allende keeps returning to the political turmoil in Latin America, particularly Chile where she was born and witnessed Pinochet’s reign of terror. In this book, the suffering of Lucia Maraz in Chile and Evelyn Ortega in Guatemala and the chronic guilt of Richard Bowmaster caused by a personal tragedy, sit uneasily between the noir adventure that they get involved in.

Lucia is a professor who had escaped the political pogrom in Chile, and after a miserable marriage that produced a lovely daughter, she divorced her uncaring husband; she now teaches in Richard Bowmaster’s department at NYU and lives as a tenant in his dank basement. In her early sixties, Lucia still “misses sex, romance, and love. The first of these she could obtain every so often, the second was a matter of luck, and the third was a gift from the gods that would probably never happen,” Allende writes of her situation.

Her colleague and landlord, Richard, lives like a hermit and rebuffs all of Lucia’s offers of friendship and food. One day, when Brooklyn is hit by an awful snowstorm that brings the city to a halt, Richard is out driving in the snow because one of his cats is sick, when he hits the back of a car driven by Evelyn, a Guatemalan nanny, who works for a New York gangster, with false papers. Richard gives her his card so that he can pay for repairs later. However, the girl turns up his apartments, terrified and incoherent, because there is a corpse in the trunk of the car, which she was not permitted to drive in the first place. Now that car is damaged and she has seen the body, she is afraid of her boss’s wrath.

Richard is unable to understand what Evelyn is saying, so he calls Lucia to help translate. While they decide what to do, they share their stories—which is a bit of a clumsy device. Evelyn’s brothers were brutally killed and she was raped, before her grandmother makes arrangements to send her to the US, with a “coyote” or agent who helps illegal migrants cross the border to the US. Feeling sorry for her, Lucia decides they must help Evelyn by dumping the car and the body—the harebrained enterprise made easier with the snow all around, but also tough, because it is madness to get out and drive in poor visibility and biting cold.

Allende tries to blend black comedy with horrific tragedy and strong emotions, which can be disconcerting for the reader; but she also manages to somehow ennoble the crime of the characters, because of what they have been through.  Allende’s writing, even in translation, has passages of lyricism that makes this book readable, though it cannot be counted among her best.

In The Midst Of Winter

By Isabel Allende

Publisher: Atria

Pages: 336

Fairytale & The Right Time

Wine And Thorns

The very prolific  (164 books and counting!) Danielle Steel’s new novel, Fairytale is about a modern-day Cinderella, who has to deal with a vicious stepmother and two nasty stepbrothers.

In her usual rushed style, Steel races through the romance and marriage of Christophe and Joy Lamennais, their setting up of a successful winery in the Napa Valley and the birth of their daughter Camille.

It is interesting to read about how the business of wines, and life among the vinters of the region, their connections and traditions—apart from Christophe, there is his best friend Sam, his wife Barbara and son Phillip.

Soon, Joy dies of cancer, and Barbara does too. Camille throws herself into the work of running the winery and supporting her grieving and lonely father. Then, into the tightly knit social circle of the Valley, comes the glamorous French widow, Maxine de Pantin.

She makes a play for Sam, who is not taken in by her charm, but Christophe is bewitched. She uses her polished seduction techniques to hook him and before he knows it, she is married to him and installed in the chateau that Camille’s parents has built with such love.  She gets her tentacle into the business and summons her wastrel sons, Alexandre and Gabriel to the Lamennais home and starts throwing her weight and her new husband’s money around.

Like the evil stepmother of the classic fairytale, she is horrid to Camille and does everything she can to get her hands on the chateau and the winery. The fairy godmother turns out to be Maxine’s own delightfully French mother, the independent and plain-speaking Simone.

In popular bestsellers there is usually no veering away from the formula so Maxine’s unsavoury past is exposed and her spoilt, greedy sons defeated; it is interesting and funny to read how.  This one has more plot and substance than some of Steel’s other recent books—a quick and entertaining read.

Fairytale

By Danielle Steel

Publisher: PanMacmillan

Pages: 288

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Jagged Edge

Just before Fairytale, Danielle Steel’s The Right Time was released—about Alexandra Window, who has a talent for writing crime novels. Because her single and sexist father tell her, “If you’re going to write mystery books, you’ll either have to write cozy mysteries, like a woman called Agatha Christie, or if you write crime stories like I and a lot of men read, you should probably do it under a man’s name,” that’s what she does. She writes bestselling crime fiction under the name of Alexander Green, and insists that her agent and publisher keep her real identity a secret. She has to go to great lengths to cover up for the lie; when one of the books is turned into a film, she has to pretend to the assistant of the eccentric, reclusive writer.

She gets used to the double life over her time of studying, working, travelling and meeting very unsuitable men.  Again, Steel rushes through the story without much character development, and one never sees a sample of these wonderful chart-busting thriller Alexander/a writes, one simply has to take Steel’s word for it, that the books are suitably ‘manly’ to fool the most perceptive reader. But all this subterfuge for what purpose? Once she has proved herself there seems to be no reason for Alexander to remain ‘male’.  Like all Steel books, this one too can be read in one sitting.

The Right Time

By Danielle Steel

Publisher: PanMacmillan

Pages: 336

House Of Beauty

Bogota And The Beast

At the centre of Colombian author Melba Escobar’s novel, House Of Beauty (her first book to be translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer) is a beauty parlour in Bogota, where Karen works.

She has come to the capital after an unfortunate affair that left her with an illegitimate son. She works long hours at an upmarket beauty salon, run by a stern owner, and sends money to her mother, who looks after the child. She hopes to save enough to get an apartment and bring her son to live with her.  She puts up with the snobbery of rich socialites and the unasked for confidences of the unhappy clients, hiding the tips she gets under her mattress. It’s a struggle to survive in the crime-ridden city, in which women—especially non-white-- are exploited with impunity. Karen herself is robbed and raped by her vicious landlord and she cannot do anything; enduring the trauma is preferable to going to the police.

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One day, a young girl called Sabrina Guzman comes to Karen for a beauty treatment and tells her that she has intimate date with her boyfriend. Later the girl is found brutally murdered, and the cops cover up the crime, calling it suicide by an overdose of drugs. Sabrina’s grief-stricken mother, however, refuses to give up and probes the murder herself, with the help of a private detective. Karen was the last to see Sabrina alive, and knows the name of the man she was going to meet.

The book has a disjointed narrative; Karen’s story is interspersed with the observations of Claire Dalvard, a French woman who grew up in Columbia and returns there after her divorce to practice as a psychoanalyst. She is fascinated by Karen’s skill and her beauty, and nudges her story out of her. Then there is the point of view of Clarie’s friend, the astonishingly subservient Lucia Estrada, who writes popular self-help books and lets her husband publish them under his name.

Karen is lured into prostitution by a workmate, and unwittingly walks into a trap that tightens around her. There is a scam afoot that involves a politician, gangsters and the unfaithful creep who made a fortune from his wife’s writing.

Escobar writes about Columbian society from stifling small town shacks to lavish city mansions, and is quite upfront about the racism, crime and corruption in her country. (The situation is not too different in India). Her descriptions are so vivid that the reader can visualize the rushed, heartless city and smell the stench of packed buses and human degradation, even though the translation is often flat and the dialogue stilted.

Perhaps because Escobar wants to portray the injustice that the poor have to suffer when the rich are in control, the ending is too contrived;  still, the book has turned out to be an international bestseller.

House Of Beauty

By Melba Escobar

Published by: 4^th Estate

Pages: 256

The Great Alone

Love And Loneliness In Alaska 

The title of Kristin Hannah's new novel comes from a 1907 poem by Robert Service called The Shooting of Dan McGrew, which has these lines:

Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,

And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear?

The Great Alone is set amidst the splendid beauty and bleak winters of Alaska. Those who go there to get away from civilisation are bewitched by it. If they are able to survive one bitter winter with the eighteen hours of darkness, they invariably stay on.

Hannah, whose last book, The Nightingale, was a bestseller, was inspired by her own family’s history for this novel. In the 1980s, her parents established the Great Alaska Adventure Lodge, which is still operating. So when she writes about the isolation of vast snow-bound landscapes, she can find the right words and emotions.

The story opens in 1974 when a mentally damaged army veteran, Ernt Allbright inherits a cabin and some land an Alaska, from Bo, an army mate, who was killed in Vietnam. Ernt's restlessness, alcoholism, violent rages and inability to hold on to a job have already dragged his long-suffering wife Cora and teenage daughter Leni from one place to another. To make up for uprooting them yet again, he promises that this time they will settle down for good on their own homestead. 

It does not matter to him that neither he nor his wife have any skills to survive the tough conditions in Alaska. When he tells Cora to think of, “A house that’s ours. That we own. In a place where we can be self-sufficient, grow our vegetables, hunt our meat, and be free,” he has no idea of what they are in for.

The cabin is decrepit shack, without electricity, running water or telephone; there is no police station in the tiny peninsular settlement, and the nearest neighbour is too far to call for help. They don't know how to grow vegetables or hunt for meat, or that they will have to stock firewood and food for the long, dark winter, or risk starving and freezing to death. If it weren't for the incredibly helpful townsfolk, the Allbrights would be totally lost.

Still, in this harsh land, Cora and Leni find unconditional friendship and a sense of community. Unfortunately,  Ernt befriends Bo’s father, Crazy Earl, who shares his love for booze and nutty conspiracy theories;  the already unhinged man goes dangerously berserk. His relationship with Cora is described by Leni as “toxic.” 

Cora puts up with savage beatings because she takes it as a sign of her husband's love. Also, having broken off with her well off parents who disapproved of Ernt, she has no one to turn to, except the generous neighbour and provision store owner, Large Marge. 

Leni finds love in the form of Matthew, whose father Tom Walker is wealthy and wants to develop the town into a tourist spot. This enrages Ernt, whose destructive streak, pushes his family to the brink of tragedy.

Hannah goes from the epic to the mundane by the end of the book, but by then the reader is so invested in the characters’ fates that it doesn't matter. Alaska is the star and driving force behind the fascinating novel.

The Great Alone

By Kristin Hannah

Publisher: St Martin's

Pages: 440