The Wren, the Wren: A Novel
by Anne Enright
Our Fluttering Existence (8/12/2023)
Reading Anne Enright's "the wren, the wren" is like floating down a mad ,emotional river. Your jostled joints change course with rivets of fresh insight. Then overhead birds and poetry fly by with their complex songs. On page one, we are directed to how minds record their inner lives: with wordless questions, with florid images, with emotion-sensations. Her characters take note. " We don't walk down the same street as the person beside us."
What happens in this novel is not really important. The philosophical flow of humor and moving-on is. Enright's descriptions are doubled-pronged. Readers will shout affirmations knowingly at " red brick streets that started to look curated" and "addicted to the prick of tears- just on the eyeball's rind", and suitcase filled with "clapped out flip flops and badly chosen scarfs". Kitchen gadgets are " like bits of middle class aspirations." Enright's mind works miraculously with humor and pathos.
Kudos , also, to the title " the wren, the wren" in symbolic lower case, the arresting cover, and my favorite line: " There is more to life than being sensible." Enright's is a joy.
Two Storm Wood: A Novel
by Philip Gray
"Two Storm Wood" (2022) (1/6/2022)
Londoner Philip Gray is the new necromancer of war. Gray has conjured a female protagonist on the European Front, searching for her fiancée circa 1918. Standing in the aftermath of WWI, "Two Storm Wood" is a gothic romance with a psychological punch. The sordid aspects of war are horrendous as in the Kevin Powers, Iraq war novel "The Yellow Birds" and as in the Karl Marlantes, Vietnam Nam sorties in his novel , "Matterhorn"; but here, we are not in battle--but picking up the pieces. There are 5,000 unburied bodies for every mile walked. identification of the dead plays the most prominently, disfigurement second, and madness third.
Character driven and thematically focused, "Two Storm Wood" pits practical and idealistic souls in war's moral morass. Great foreshadowing in this heavily plotted tale keeps mystery alive. Underground chambers, colonies of rats, shell holes and trenches cut through burial sites mixed with tagged bodies and demented deserters. Dread builds; drugs, atrocities accumulate; racism and privilege raise their heads. War is seen as a contest of violence not of virtue. Amy, our protagonist, is in the vortex like no other heroine I can recall since Jane Eyre. Masterfully done.
The French Girl
by Lexie Elliott
A Commercial Success Here (9/13/2017)
A ghostly self-possessed companion, a decade dead, keeps appearing in our narrator' s life with the femme-fatale-like name of Severine. Her death will sever the relationships of our Oxford University group of 1990's graspers. Reminiscent of Donna Tartt's 1992 "The Secret History", Gillian Flynn's "Gone Girl, and other spirited page turners, "The French Girl" by Lexie Elliott has a welcomed morality-driven protagonist, who though somewhat irritating, understands the meaning of friendship and ultimately will be liberated by it. The drama of relationships and the beginnings of making one's way in the world should interest thirty to forty-year-olds, who enjoy exploring the motivational underpinnings and the "get ahead " strategies of the striving. I particularly enjoyed the minor characters: the French detective, Paul, Alina, and Gordon. Class divides, shattered psyches, and differences in the British and the French legal systems share pages with "poison-whisperers" and a corporate father figure. This novel is a fun read that ends in love.
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