Avid Reader's Musings: San Francisco

Showing posts with label San Francisco. Show all posts

Frog Music

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Frog Music
by Emma Donoghue
★★★☆

This highly anticipated novel from the author of Room takes readers into the sordid world of San Francisco in 1876. Using the known facts of an unsolved murder, Donoghue weaves the intricate story of Blanche Beunon, a former circus performer turned burlesque dancer with a bit of prostitution on the side.

Blanche is suffering through a harsh heat wave and a smallpox epidemic when she meets the feisty Jenny Bonnet, who we learn in the first chapter is murdered. Before meeting Jenny, Blanche’s life consists of an unhealthy relationship with Arthur, a brute who is hard to stomach and a constant string of “jobs” with random men. The constant shifts in the time in the narrative were hard to follow. In one moments we’re in the hours following Jenny’s death and a second later we’re month or years in the past.

I found the historical aspects of the book fascinating. Learning about the smallpox epidemic, burlesques, Chinese neighborhoods, and French circus was so interesting. It was the fictional elements of the book that fell flat at times for me. Blanche became an exhausting character to read about. She seemed to constantly put herself in bad situations or be surprised when awful people betrayed her. Jenny is the heart and soul of the book and I wish she had played a bigger part in the action. Her fiery demeanor and lust for life infected everyone around her.

**SPOILER**
I was incredibly disappointed when Blanche and Jenny slept together. I understand that it was important to the plot, but it was such a letdown. Blanche sleeps with everyone, from Arthur to his friend Ernest to her clients; she uses her body to make money. But Jenny was the person that was a true friend to her. She wasn’t scared to give her an objective point about her life and she was there for Blanche in a way to no one else was. I was frustrated that they slept together because to me it cheapened their relationship. I felt like there was more depth to their friendship when sex was not on the table because sex was so common and cheap in Blanche’s world.
**SPOILER OVER**

BOTTOM LINE: Interesting, well writing and great on audio, but I tired of hearing about Blanche’s troubles and I wished we heard more from Jenny.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Monday, March 10, 2014

Posted by Melissa (Avid Reader)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem
by Joan Didion
★★★★

Didion’s famous collection of nonfiction essays gives readers a glimpse into the rapidly changing world of California in the 1960s. From hippies in San Francisco to a piece on Joan Baez and her Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, Didion traces the paths of a new generation of Americans across the state.

Her prose takes your breath away with it’s descriptive beauty. Regardless of the subject matter, it's so easy to get lost in her words. She tells each person's story without condemning or praising their belief system.

"She does try, perhaps unconsciously, to hang on to the innocence and turbulence and capacity for wonder, however ersatz or shallow, of her own or of anyone's adolescence."

I felt like the essays on Didion's personal life and experiences were a little stronger than the rest. There was also a story that opens the book, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," that really stayed with me. It's about a woman convicted on murdering her husband in a burning car. It was a haunting tale, as so many things are in Didion's hands. Even a trip to the tropical isles of Hawaii becomes a morose reflection for her.

"Las Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification."

One of my favorite pieces in the book is about how we change when we return to our childhood homes. Our personalities revert back to the roles we took on within our family dynamic. Our spouses often can’t understand the strained relationships or odd attachments that we have with the place and the people there.

“I had by all objective accounts a ‘normal’ and a ‘happy’ family situation, and yet I was almost thirty years old before I could talk to my family on the telephone without crying after I had hung up. We did not fight. Nothing was wrong. And yet some nameless anxiety colored the emotional charges between me and the place I came from.”

BOTTOM LINE: As with most short story collections, not every single piece was my favorite, but with a writer like Didion you’re sure to find some gems. Didion conveys moods and feelings with such incredible talent and this collection is one of her best.

“I have said that the trip back is difficult, and it is – difficult in a way that magnifies the ordinary ambiguities of sentimental journeys.”

"Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself."