Fatima's Good Fortune by Joanne & Gerry Dryansky. This was a quirky lovely little book that made me laugh out loud, and long for escape into its sunny pages. Yes sunny. Don't usually long for that. Okay, I do sometimes.
The most extraordinary descriptions of human interactions with very personable animals. Pets I would love to have:
"As if Durand's glance had cued her, the dog, the Countess's ancient Labrador, Emma, strolled in from the hallway, rolling her hips, and began to sniff suspiciously at Monsier Durand's zippered half-boots. The dog trailed a faintly unpleasant smell, resembling the odor of a cellar. Durand hiked his trouser leg nervously and Emma's saliva wet his hairless leg above a low sock. Her teeth grazed his skin. Time, he thought grimly to get back in the literal elevator."
Another scene...
"Cacohouete looked at him in a strange silence when he walked in."
"Don't say it!" Suget shouted at the bird. "Or I'll fillet you like a fish."
"Cacohouete kept mum and turned his back and let go a bit of bird-do. Suget took it as an insult and threw his raincoat over the cage. Perhaps, to be fair, the bird had merely shown that it was terrified, and perhaps on the other hand, if someone who knew bird expressions were looking at Cacahoute full in the face from the other side of the cage, he would have seen a look of sympathy. This from Cacahoute for the first time."
Where does the story start?
"It was the twenty-seventh of August, and rain had been falling on Paris for several days on end. As if in winter, the Eiffel Tower was amputated above the hips by fog. The swollen Seine was splashing the boots of the stone Zouave below le Pont de l'Alma and covering the gangways of the rising houseboats. In the blurred city, on streets that smelled of wood fires lit in yellow-windowed living rooms, the cobbles were all that glistened." And here we meet Rachida, the sister of Fatima, the Tusanian hotel maid who finds herself in France, despite her accursed and life long bad luck...and so the tale begins...
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
I've been meaning to read this one for a while, the 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner, but the opening paragraph deterred me. Serious stuff, best saved for another day when I am made of sterner stuff. Amidst the extreme, and I do mean extreme, busy-ness of my previous children's librarian life (all my own doing, too many things going on, too many jobs, too many people to please, too many activities and involvements) I often grabbed a book on Friday evenings downstairs from the adult department on ending my shift, looking for something straightforward and enjoyable. A light diversion. Now that I'm far from home with more time for reading, I am finally reading some things I should really read. I finding great rewards within the pages! I am currently reading Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown. I am completely immersed, unable to put it aside, a great storyteller indeed and beyond any blog entry review!
The tale opens with Moses, the formidable overseer of the other slaves at a plantation surprisingly owned by another black man. This paradox of slavery and ownership runs through out the tale. This man, Henry Townsend promptly dies, leaving his widow Caldonia to grapple with her role. I did not enjoy the opening, or this character Moses. I did not enjoy how shallow and lifeless Caldonia was in this tale. This was a tale about many people populating a particular time and place however, and we were not to dwell on one woman's story. Intricate layers of family and generation unravel and a beautiful symmetry unfolds and the story reaches it's somewhat violent but inevitable culmination. I loved the detail and care taken, the gift of foresight the author offered at ever turn with every character. A glimpse into the future of the narrative, for this example comes early on, years before it actually occurs...
"Louis, over time, would learn how not to let the eye beome his destiny, for people in that part of Virginia thought a traveling eye a sign of an inattentive and dishonest man. By the time he became friends with Caldonia and Calvin, her brother, at Fern Elston's tiny academy for free Negro children just behind her parlor, Louis would be able to tell the moment when the eye was wandering off just by the look on a person's face. He would blink and the eye would come back. This mean looking full and long into soemone's eyes, and people came to see that as a sign of a man who cared about what was being said. He became an honest man in many people's eyes, honest enough for Caldonia Townsend to say yes when he asked her to marry him. "I never thought I was worthy of you," he said, thinking of the dead Henry, when he asked her to marry him. She said, "We are all worthy of one another."
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