Book reviews

Thank you to Nicole L for the rec for Fallen, by David Maine.  I had my temple's library order it for our collection, and then coincidentally (of course!) I was the first one to check it out.  Maine tells the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve in reverse chronological order, starting with Cain on his deathbed and tracing back to Eden.  I liked it, but there was something missing, I'm still trying to figure out what.  It's like he tried so hard to be symbolic and write a "historically" character-driven tale that he missed out on the motivations for his characters to do what they do.  I think it would be a great pick for a temple book club, and it's fun easy reading, but don't expect to delve too deeply.

At that same temple librarian's recommendation, I read Tessie and Pearlie: A Granddaughter's Story by Joy Horowitz.  Savta, I'm sending this one to you in Israel.  It's pure memoir, the result of the author interviewing both her 90-odd year old grandmothers in the early 1990s.  It took me a while to get into, simply because I found it so hard to relate to both grandmothers in the beginning.  Then I realized; the author is my mother's generation, and the grandmothers in question would by my great-grandmothers!  I've never met them, so of course I would have trouble seeing through their eyes at first.  One was born in Brooklyn and the other came over on Ellis Island, and they are both very, very different women.  But their love for their children, their relationship to Judaism and America, and their attitude toward aging was eye-opening for me.  No matter the era one lives in, people really do have the same cares of the heart.   I wasn't always entranced by Horowitz's writing style, but I did get verklempt about her family tree.

But perhaps I'm being overly critical of the above two books, merely because I followed them up with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon.  OH. MY. GOD.  The man is sheer genius.  It's one of the best books I've read in years.  Then I looked it up, and duh, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001.  The book traces the lives of two cousins, one in pre-WWII Prague and the other in NY, how they come together to form a comic book partnership in NY in 1939, and what they do through the 1950s.  But that previous sentence really says nothing; I know nothing about comic books and it drew me in.  The novel is about what it means to have family, to dream about something bigger, to figure out who you are, about what it means to live and not just survive.  Chabon is an excellent writer who creates an entire world out of details, interweaving real-life history with his fictional characters so well that I forgot what was history and what wasn't.  I've read The Yiddish Policeman's Union and a couple of other books of his, but I liked this one best so far.  The NY Times review called it his "magnum opus," and I heartily agree.  Go, get offline and check it out of the library or buy it on Amazon - just read!