Author: annsepstein@att.net

My Goodreads and Amazon review of This Strange Eventful History: A Novel by Claire Messud (Rated 3) – Barren Territory. This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud traverses decades, continents, and viewpoints to portray the three-generation history of a French-Algerian family. The novel starts strong with memorable characters and fraught events, but detours into peripheral names, happenings, and literary and philosophical ruminations. Messud’s “erudite” writing is self-indulgent and begs for a firm editorial hand. Ultimately the book is a screed against forgetting — multiple figures have Alzheimer’s — and near the end, a dying father recollects life’s small moments, especially those spent with family. The passage would have been more poignant had the book not been stuffed with irrelevant tangents whose clutter stifles explorations into character. For example, there is a stark contrast between the patriarch besotted by his wife and the strained relations between subsequent generations whose emotional connections are as uprooted as their peripatetic family. Messud paints them with broad swaths of exposition, rarely revealing the roots beneath their feelings. Messud merely implies that love is blind or has no rhyme or reason. But as a novelist myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I believe our role is to spark insights into emotions. Messud’s book offers this promise initially, then migrates into barren territory.

A rambling portrait of a French-Algerian family

Why writers read: “Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?” – Annie Dillard

My Goodreads and Amazon review of Ashes, Ashes by Fred Soukup (Rated 5) – Above the Smoldering Remains. It’s difficult for a writer to make readers care about characters whose lives are far from enviable — people who, while trying to befriend others, become their own worst enemies. Yet that is the challenge Fred Soukup sets for himself in Ashes, Ashes, and brilliantly achieves. As if surmounting that hurdle wasn’t high enough, he’s wraps his portrayal in a Rashomon-like murder mystery. The story is told from multiple points of view, each with a distinctive voice. It damns the foster care system and the callous society that looks the other way as its victims land on the trash heap. As a novelist myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admire Soukup’s ability to elicit compassion for unlikable characters who seek salvation but will settle for a salvage operation. This is a bleak book and yet, because the protagonists don’t give up on themselves, readers can’t give up hoping for them. Soukup’s creations cling to life, determined to realize dreams and find redemption. They may differ from us on the surface, but underneath their scars, these throwaways embody a deep and abiding humanity. Soukup reveals the dark underbelly of the nursery rhyme we all learned as children, most of us unaware that it refers to a deadly plague. We’re not innocent children, but Ashes, Ashes challenges readers to rise above the smoldering remains.

Elicits compassion for unlikeable characters

Why writers read: “We ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? – Franz Kafka