What a pleasure to read that the characters I had come to dislike, cruel hateful people, brought about their own destruction through their evil behavior. How just and satisfying.
But what about the others? Well, this isn’t a fairy tale. In Nathan Harris’s The Sweetness of Water, there is no “other side;” there are no knights in shining armor. There are just ordinary people, full of flaws, who stumble through life, usually doing what is easiest. But the opportunity to do something that matters comes to them. The ones who make the brave choice are not immediately showered with success and happiness.
The setting is the South at the end of the Civil War when slaves have just been emancipated, and Confederate soldiers are returning home. Two young black men, freed slaves, are living in the woods, making their way to one of the tent cities that have sprung up. Two white men, soldiers about the same age, best friends since school, have just come home.
One set of parents welcomes the social changes. They have often held views that were different from their small-town neighbors, and they do so now when they employ the two freed blacks to work on their farm and pay them fairly. The other set of parents insists that things will go back to how they rightfully were. Maybe the Negroes won’t be slaves, but they will be kept in their place.
The returning school mates share a secret that, when exposed, becomes the match to the tinder. Deep seated prejudices explode, damaging more lives than the war.
When I heard that Olga Tokarczuk had a new book, I put myself on the waiting list. I loved Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, the book she won a Nobel prize for.
But House of Day, House of Night isn’t new. It was written twenty years before Plow, and has just been republished to take advantage of the interest in her since she won the Nobel in 2018.
The term for it is “constellation” novel. There are fragments of stories, ideas, observations, which range from one page to a full chapter. The main character, who is unnamed, lives in a small rural town in Poland with her husband/partner R. She tells about her days walking in the woods and mushroom hunting. (I never heard of so many unusual kinds.) There is an elderly neighbor, a wig maker, who emerges only in the spring. They tell each other folk tales such as the one about Saint Kummernis, written by a monk who very much wanted to be a woman.
In the book, one subject sparks another and Tokarczuk doesn’t hesitate to move from one odd, creative idea to another. Two or three characters return periodically to give the book some cohesion. There is the recurrence of her online dream group, people who post their dreams from the previous night. We are taught the history of the area which had originally belonged to Germany but is now repopulated with Poles from the eastern part of Poland which had been ceded to Russia.
I love her use of metaphor, personification in particular, which is creative and edgy. I have to remember though that this is a translation. How much is Tokarczuk and how much is her translator? Here are some favorites:
…the clouds drew aside, revealing the moon, suspended like a bombshell, which began to rise over the allotments, got tangled in the fruit trees, and then shot straight into the sky, clearly on view as it took possession of the entire earth.
The sun was slowly disappearing…the shadow on the floorboards was creeping farther forward…finally it reached our backs…painlessly and imperceptibly, it swallowed us.
Of interest to the gardeners out there: R tells the story of the slug family. He describes the master of the house. At night he glides through the grass…he eats wet lettuce and tender young zucchini shoots. He enjoys gnawing holes in them, but it’s not out of malice – it is his form of creativity.
If you’re interested in something quirky, with regular pop ups of perceptive ideas, this is a book to try. If you want a traditional story, I’d pass.
The Busybody Book Club by Freya Sampson is one of those relaxing mysteries which are great to read on a lazy afternoon. The coincidences that move the plot along are a little much but there are some unexpected twists, and I was glad to read something with a happy ending.
Nova has moved to a small Cornish town with her fiancé where, as part of her job in a community center, she starts a book club. One of the members, a Miss Marple wannabe with time on her hands, has many theories about murder. Arthur, a caregiver for a wife unable to read any more, is looking for reading suggestions and company. Ash, a gangly lovesick teen wants to impress a would-be boyfriend.
Trouble comes to the community center when money earmarked for a new roof is stolen. When the mother of the prime suspect is murdered, the book group mobilizes to find the murderer and save the center and Nova’s job.
Great new word: Zoodle. Zucchini is in the etymology, but etymology is not destiny. These days zoodle often means any vegetable noodle, even when no zucchini is involved.
If that bothers you, feel free to say swoodles (sweet potato), coodles (cucumber), or broodles (broccoli). Just don’t let the terminology spiral out of control, or you might end up with an impasta on your plate.
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