LITERATURE & BOOKS

Book Fever
By Marcia Loy March 14, 2008 San Miguel de Allende


Book Fever looks at debutants

You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.

—Lloyd Jones

I loved the above quote because once I was so absorbed in a book while eating breakfast I didn’t realize I’d left the skillet on with grease in it and I never noticed until the dining room filled with smoke. It helped that I can’t smell. I wish I could remember which book it was.

I love to discover new writers and follow their careers from their first book, watching them grow as writers, their plots and characters becoming more complex and mature. Here are some first novels that suggest promising careers for their authors.

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, Kiran Desai, 1998. Desai paints her characters with humor and affection in this tale of a young Indian man, Sampath, who works at the post office, runs away from home and finds his calling. His sister Pinky, the Hungry Hop boy, his parents, the Chawlas, and the villagers around the guava orchard create a charming story by the daughter of writer Anita Desai.

Excerpt: The wedding of the daughter of the head of the post office was to be held at the Badshah Gardens, adjoining his house, at the beginning of the wedding season. At that very moment they should have been engrossed in making arrangements with bands and kebab and rickshaw men, and doing the hundreds of other important tasks that must be undertaken at an occasion like this. For, of course, when it comes to a wedding, all official work should stop and the staff of any office whose boss’s family is having a wedding must assist in making the appropriate arrangements. This is customary office protocol. They had all been given their own appointed tasks to carry out.

Three Dollars, Elliot Perlman, 1998. This is a first novel by the Australian author of Seven Types of Ambiguity. Perlman won several Australian awards for this book, and when he co-wrote the screenplay he won the equivalent of an Academy Award. I found this a compelling story of a man trying to do the right thing for himself and his family in a hostile corporate world. I loved the relationship between the protagonist, Eddie, and his daughter, Abby.

Excerpt: (The time is the early 1970s. Eddie and his girlfriend Tanya are discussing a play she’s auditioning for.) 

“Well, we’re putting on Hamlet and the auditions are meant to have started already,” Tanya continued.

“And you’ve fallen behind schedule?”

“Yes, but that’s not the problem. It’s the director.”

“Isn’t he any good?”

“How did you know it was a him?”

“Well, you said your membership of the women’s executive committee had something to do with it so I just assumed that a difficult director was probably a male. Who is he?”

“Anatol Lerner.”

“Anatol Lerner? I thought you said Anatol Lerner was a catch, a find, a dream.”

“Yeah, well I thought he was.”

“So, what happened?”

“Well, he’s got some really worrying old-fashioned and patriarchal ideas about Hamlet. They are already evident at the audition stage.”

“Really, like what?”

“He wants Hamlet to be a man.”

Love Invents Us, Amy Bloom, 1997. Short story writer Amy Bloom turns her considerable talent to the novel, creating Elizabeth, a young woman who grows up in Great Neck, Long Island. Love Invents Us was a National Book Award finalist and a New York Times Notable Book. It’s funny, sad, and moving.

From the first page: I wasn’t surprised to find myself in the back of Mr. Klein’s store, wearing only my undershirt and panties, surrounded by sable.

“Sable is right for you, Lizbet,” Mr. Klein said, draping a shawl-collared jacket over me. “Perfect for your skin and your eyes. A million times a day the boys must tell you. Such skin.”

No one except Mr. Klein had ever suggested that my appearance was pleasing. My mother took time out from filling half the houses on Long Island with large French cachepots and small porcelain dogs to take me shopping at Lord and Taylor’s Pretty Plus; her aesthetic sense made her look the other way when the saleswoman dragged me out in navy blue A-line dresses and plaid jumpers. Looking at me sideways, she saw the chewed ends of my hair, smudged pink harlequin glasses, a bad attitude.

Have you read a good first novel lately? If you’d like to share it with readers of Atención please send the title, author, copyright date, three or four sentences about the book and an excerpt to marciabookfever@hotmail.com. Happy reading.

Marcia Loy is a member of the steering committee of the Authors’ Sala and a volunteer at the Biblioteca Pública.

Word Watch
By Bill Gallacher

albur (noun m.) Because of the frequency of homonyms in English (words that sound the same but are spelled differently), punning is more common in English than in other languages. Un albur is a not-so-common Spanish noun for a pun. For the verb to pun, you would have to go to the somewhat verbose hacer juegos de palabras.

alerta (adverb) A common highway sign is MANTENGASE ALERTA (stay alert). In the English translation, the word “alert” appears to be an adjective, so why the “a” ending in Spanish? Is it only female drivers who need to be reminded? No, because alerta is being used as an adverb, and adverbs are often derived from adjectives by taking the feminine adjective and tacking on -mente. Here, the -mente has been dropped.

amanecer (noun m. or verb) Can be used both as a noun and as a verb, meaning the dawn, or to dawn. Not to be confused with the verb amenazar (to threaten). One way of remembering amenazar is to think of the word “menace.” Also potentially confusing is the verb amenizar, which means to liven up. Fortunately, it is rarely used.