NOTICE!

For some reason I can add sidebars, but not new posts. Please check back later. I have been working on a variety of things including switching my blog soon from this one, which was set up with my now-defunct West Wisconsin Telcom account. I hope to have my new blog through Gmail up soon. I will provide a link and announcement when I've got everything straight. 7/2/11




Sunday, June 15, 2008

Recently read: Joanne Harris’ Five Quarters of the Orange



Harris is a novelist and food writer (what a wonderful career combination!) who draws on her French mother’s heritage for both subjects. This book, which has the dreamy vague quality of literary writers like Joyce Carol Oates and Henry James (neither of whom are big favorites of mine), is worth wading through the vagueness. By the time I’d gotten past the first 100 pages, I was captured by the plot and the complex characters, not to mention how it weaves childhood in Nazi-occupied France with the present day.

The narrator returns to her the village where she lived until 1942. Her memories and understanding of what was happening then were limited by the fact she was only nine years old. Now, in her sixties, she comes to grips with a secret she holds, long memories in the country town, and a truly dysfunction family.

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