Boy, are my arms tired! - Spinster Librarian

BOOK REVIEWS: RATING THE CURRENT FICTION AND NON-FICTION.

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Slammerkin
Emma Donoghue
Harcourt Press

Mary Saunders is 14, pregnant from her first sexual encounter — an alleyway rape — and alone on the grimy, cobbled streets of 1762 London. What’s a girl with no family or friends to do to keep body and soul together? Doll Higgins, the young Miss who pulls Mary out of a ditch, advises that she should, “use what you’ve got. Sell it while you’re young and the market’s high.” So begins Mary’s life selling cunny on the corner.

Mary’s initial months away from the confines of her parents’ grinding poverty convince her that their lifestyle is not one to which she will every willingly return. Under Doll’s tutelage she has her first tastes of rum, gin and liberty. Doll also introduces her to something that will become a more powerful intoxicant than alcohol could ever be. Mary who feels only numb contempt for the men she services is overcome with lust for fancy gowns, bright fabrics and beautiful clothes of all kinds.

It is within the realm of clothes that she imagines she will make her fortune. Not as a seamstress, sewing her fingers to the bone as her mother had. No, she fancies that just by acquiring the right outfits she will be able transform herself into the wealthy, respected woman she longs to be.

But the winter of 1762 is shaping up to be the coldest Londoners have felt in many years, and Mary, ill with a hacking cough, is forced to abandon Doll to enter the Magdalene Hospital, a home for girls who are no longer pure. Here, amid the first cleanliness and order in her life, she discovers that she has an innate talent for the very thing she eschews: sewing. Not only is she good at it, but, to her surprise, she actually enjoys the work.

However, the hospital, with its strictures and confinements does not suit her need for freedom. So she takes back to the streets, and then out of the city entirely, to the outskirts of Wales. By now, Mary, an often-unlikable protagonist, has been hardened almost beyond redemption. She’s been a whore, had an abortion, gotten the clap, watched friends die and is only just fifteen. Still, in Monmouth she plans to start a new life at the home of her mother’s best friend, Jane Jones. But, despite her best intentions, and her many near misses with respectability, it is at the Jones’ house that she gets into the trouble from which she will never redeem herself.

In “Slammerkin,” Donoghue combines an obviously vast knowledge of historical details and some actual bygone events with page-turning, literally-bodice-ripping storytelling. This is a fine, entertaining novel that will leave you feeling grateful that you were not born during the eighteen century.

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The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios
Yann Martel
Harcourt

“The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios” is the title of the novella that opens this collection of old stories from Yann Martel, author of the acclaimed novel. “Life of Pi.” What is striking about this, and the other early works contained in this reissued anthology, first printed in Canada in1993, is Martel’s remarkable display of raw creativity. His stories never fall along completely familiar lines, but take subjects others might handle prosaically and imbue them with cold magic.

The eponymous novella that opens the book is the story of two straight, male, college friends, one of whom, Paul, is dying of AIDS. Like many stories of hard, drawn-out deaths, this one explores the shopworn ideas of loss and tragedy. However, unlike other tales of undeserved woe, this one diverges from the kind of self-pitying drivel that characterizes stories of bereavement, by introducing a novel concept. The unnamed narrator, Paul’s friend, decides to pass the time with his dying pal by having them write a story together. It is a biography of the fictional Roccamatio family from Helsinki, and, it is his idea that the family's saga will follow and incorporate the events of the twentieth century. Paul’s friend can, in this way engage Paul in life, history, drama, and keep him involved with the living as long as possible – if only with these historical or imagined lives.

Interspersed between growingly horrific descriptions of Paul’s disease and its wasting effects on his body, the story of the last century is told — beginning with the death of Queen Victoria and ending with the imagined death of Queen Elizabeth. The device works wonderfully as an interesting point of friendship as well as a useful narrative device. What’s more, it introduces an intellectual hopefulness into the bleak reality of the inevitable death awaiting Paul and the reader.

In another story, a different unnamed narrator discovers a decrepit Washington D. C. theater, slated for demolition, in which a symphony is to be debuted. He attends the concert, and is inspired by a composition, written by a drunkard and performed in a hall that resembles a WWII battlement. Martel’s descriptions of the music and atmosphere bring the concert to life in its entire moldering, bittersweet, transformative splendor.

The last tale, called “The Vita Aeterna Mirror Company, Mirrors to Last till Kingdom Come,” is particularly imaginative in both subject and presentation. It begins as the story of a young man visiting his grandmother. He is bored by her recollections, which the reader discerns by the running commentary of his inner voice, printed in a column adjacent to the his grandmother’s ennui-producing recitation of people and places he niether knows nor cares about.

It is only when he finds a gothic, and imaginary, antique mirror-making machine in her overstuffed attic, that he begins to become interested in the secrets the old lady may hold. To make a mirror with the machine, she explains, one must mix the ingredients and then combine them with memories. While he watches her speak into the ancient, ivory horn that feeds into the machine, he is struck by the splendor of the contraption and its mystical implications, but never so much that the tale become a cloying cliché of “now I realize how much I love my Grandma and whatever she says is worthwhile and I’ll be sorry when she’s dead.”

No, there is something about Martel’s voice that is always a bit removed from the situations he describes. Though all these stories are of different types of transformation and spiritual redemption, Martel retains a tone something less than heartwarming. While this may turn off readers who want to spend their feel-good Tuesdays with Morrie, it will work like a refreshing tonic on those who wish to see their beauty mixed with the honest despair that is often its companion.

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To whom would an expensive, thick, full-color book that primarily features photos of blended fruit drinks appeal? Yes, Squeezed: 250 Juices, Smoothies and Spritzers, is attractively bound and boasts artful food styling. Yes, it does have recipes explaining different combinations of fruits and herbs one can throw together in the Mixmaster. But who couldn’t figure this out themselves? It’s not brain surgery, after all. One would be better served to spend the $24.95 on ingredients and experiment on their own.

Similarly, Clean House, with its glossy photos of wood polish and nicely folded linens seems like an utter waste of time. Though some people clearly have no innate sense of order and can’t clean their houses to save their lives, they – whether they would benefit or not – are not the ones who are going to be plunking down $12.95 for a beautifully made book on how to freshen up their pig stys. Those who know how to clean will not bother to buy it either because they don’t need one more useless possession to dust. The book is indeed filled with great tips on how to clean silver, remove stains and even polish shoes. It explains food safety, from the temperatures at which various meats should be stored to what kind of weevils are living your neatly marked flour canister. It’s riveting stuff, no doubt, but like all good advice, it will likely never be heard by the sow's ears who need it most.

Laurel Glen Publishing, who has put out both of these books, does a fine job of producing good-looking, coffee table volumes. But the editors there seem to lack the ability to determine what constitutes a good reason to cut down a forest and what does not. To be fair, the same distributor who puts out the Laurel Glen titles also published a book called Other People’s Dirt, a couple of years back. It is a memoir, of sorts, by a housekeeper who reveals the insights she has accumulated about people from cleaning their homes. There’s a lot exposed by the placement of our errant pubic hairs and used pregnancy tests — not to mention how much we clean before the maid even arrives. This book is a much better choice for cleanliness aficionados than Clean House, because it affirms what they have always thought about messy folks anyway.