On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever

The chances of me being snowed in this winter are virtually nil, seeing as I am in either lowcountry South Carolina or central Florida. But I remember what it’s like to be warm inside when the world is white outside, and I have no choice but to spend the days and nights lost in a good book. A girl can dream, right?

And best be prepared. Even though I just recently finished these three, I know I’ll reread them given the opportunity. They’re all big books in the best sense of the word — expansive in length, Dickensian in plot and character, generous with detail, gorgeously written. Books to get lost in, which are for me the best kind.

Reviews of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (Little, Brown, purchased e-book) almost inevitably invoke the name of Charles Dickens (I did so myself), because the book is as rich as  Christmas fruitcake with amazing coincidences, memorable characters, assorted orphans (real and metaphorical), an immersive narrative. Tartt herself references Dickens, noting that Boris, the best pal of narrator/hero Theo, is something of an Artful Dodger. But Tartt artfully twists her Oliver Twist-like saga to her own ends.

The story begins with 14-year-old Theo surviving a terrorist explosion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which kills his adored bohemian mother, changing his life forever. Theo’s grief, along with the small painting of a chained bird he carries out of the rubble, become his secret history as he is taken in by a privileged schoolmate’s family, mentored by an antiques dealer, whisked away to Las Vegas by his scoundrel father, gives into drugs of all kinds, gets caught up in the world of black-market art in New York and Amsterdam. He is haunted by memories of his mother — he desperately wants to tell her things — and by Pippa, an elusive girl he spots minutes before his world literally blows up. Love, loss, obsession and outrageous fortune all color the book’s vivid pages.

“And the flavor of Pippa’s kiss — bittersweet and strange — stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.”

The words “sweeping saga” seem expressly made to describe Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things (Viking, purchased e-book), although I never imagined myself being swept up and away by a novel starring a resolute “polite” (i.e. female) botanist who spends many years of the 19th century studying mosses.  “Alma put the magnifying lens to eye and looked again. Now the miniature forest below her gaze fell into majestic detail. She felt her breath catch. This was the Amazon jungle as seen from the back of a harpy eagle. She rode her eye above the surprising landscape, following its path in every direction. Here were rich, abundant valleys filled with tiny trees of braided mermaid hair and minuscule, tangled vines.”

Gilbert, best known for her memoir Eat, Pray, Love, uses both magnifying glass and kaleidoscope to tell of the mind and heart of Alma Whittaker, born in 1800 to wealthy, upstart botanical importer Henry and his stolid Dutch wife Beatrix. Very much her father’s daughter, Alma has more brains than beauty, and grows up on his Philadelphia estate a spinster scientist whose bodily passions are subsumed by her research and prodigious intellect. But in late middle age, Alma finds a soulmate in a younger man, the eccentric, mystical orchid painter Ambrose Pike. Much to Alma’s dismay, she discovers her beloved follows Jacob Boehme, looking for God’s divine signature in all living things, “the cross of God in a slice of cabbage.” It is all too much — and not enough — for spirited Alma, who will eventually travel to Tahiti and then to Holland, seeking answers scientific, philosophic, romantic, revolutionary/evolutionary.

Tartt beings to mind Charles Dickens; Elizabeth Gilbert appears more George Eliot. In his epic The Woman Who Lost Her Soul (Grove Atlantic, digital galley and purchased e-book), Bob Shacochis ventures into the heart of darkness in the company of Joseph Conrad, Graham Green and John le Carre. It’s a novel of love and espionage, war and history, lost innocence, vaulting ambition, deception and lies. It touches down in the States, Haiti, the Balkans and Istanbul during the unruly last half of the 20th century.  Several of its characters — an American diplomat/spy, a Special Forces soldier, an enigmatic photojournalist — are larger than life, at least to human rights lawyer Tom Harrington, who returns to chaotic 1998 Haiti to help investigate the murder of a drug dealer’s wife. He knew her in a previous life under a different name, and she once asked him to help her find a voodoo priest to restore her soul.

The backstory to this backstory takes readers further back in time and elsewhere in place for a good chunk of the book before returning to war-ravaged, poverty-stricken Haiti, as complex a character as any in this complex book. But thanks to Shacochis’ storytelling prowess and atmospheric set pieces, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul remains involving and haunting.

“He had come to understand that we choose the lies in which we participate, and in choosing, define ourselves and our actions for a very long time, perhaps forever — Haiti invited such participation, Haiti was a feeding trough for the manifest appetites and illusions and simple scenes of rescue, Haiti offered its players a culture of impunity not just for the atrocities that devoured body and soul, but for the self-deceptions best described as crimes of enlightenment.”

Open book:  “I like big books and I cannot lie” merchandise, like the book bag pictured  above, is available at cafepress.com