3 posts tagged “sad”

Synopsis: "Oskar Schell is not your average nine-year-old. A budding inventor, he spends his time imagining wonderful creations. He also collects random photographs for his scrapbook and sends letters to scientists. When his father dies in the World Trade Center collapse, Oskar shifts his boundless energy to a quest for answers. He finds a key hidden in his father's things that doesn't fit any lock in their New York City apartment; its container is labeled "Black." Using flawless kid logic, Oskar sets out to speak to everyone in New York City with the last name of Black. A retired journalist who keeps a card catalog with entries for everyone he's ever met is just one of the colorful characters the boy meets. As in Everything Is Illuminated (Houghton, 2002), Foer takes a dark subject and works in offbeat humor with puns and wordplay. But Extremely Loud pushes further with the inclusion of photographs, illustrations, and mild experiments in typography reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (Dell, 1973). The humor works as a deceptive, glitzy cover for a fairly serious tale about loss and recovery. For balance, Foer includes the subplot of Oskar's grandfather, who survived the World War II bombing of Dresden. Although this story is not quite as evocative as Oskar's, it does carry forward and connect firmly to the rest of the novel. The two stories finally intersect in a powerful conclusion that will make even the most jaded hearts fall." (from School Library Journal)

Impressions: Excellent book! One of the best of the year!

Rating: 5 of 5 stars.

Synopsis: "Like many of Murakami Haruki's English reading fans, I read A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance without knowledge that the former book was the third in a trilogy and that the latter book was an addition that came a few years later. However, if the reader pays closer attention to A Wild Sheep Chase one can really see that the characters within the book seem to be established and that they already have their personal histories which are not coming completely new from the pages of A Wild Sheep Chase. Almost a year after picking up A Wild Sheep Chase for the first time, I read Jay Rubin's highly informative book Haruki Murakami & the Music of Words and learned about Murakami's first two novels: Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 both of which had been translated into English by Alfred Birnbaum.

Hear the Wind Sing begins with the narrator, aged 29, talking about writing and how difficult it was for him to finally put down words on paper. It took him eight years in fact to put down his thoughts on the summer of 1970 and the people he was involved with during that year. Why 1970? 1970 was the year after the student activist group the Zenkyoto was forced out of the building they had commandeered and soon afterwards those who had been its greatest supporters were sucked back into the system to become automatons of mainstream society. For Murakami, the destruction of the student movement left a deep wound in his being and it pained him to see his fellows go to a more conservative, rightist path.

However, within the being of the narrator it might be hard to find a politically charged individual. This is instead found within the being of the narrator's best friend the Rat. Yet, the Rat's sense of aggravation towards modern society is quite impotent, so he instead fills his emptiness with beer and liquor. The Narrator, a more introspective fellow, spends his time consumed in the books of dead writers, the memories of his dead girlfriend, and pursuing the girl with four fingers on her left hand.

At the time he wrote this thin tome, Murakami owned a jazz bar called the Peter Cat and had little time for actual writing so his sentences within this volume tended to be quite pithy. Also, the short, pithy styles of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan influenced his writing. The book itself is more a collection of vignettes than one coherent novel and the order of the book was originally quite different that the final version.

While it does not hold a candle to some of his later works, Murakami's first novel is quite important in his body of work and it shows his early interest in such subjects as language, memory, China, and the student movement. Definitely a book worth seeking for the Murakami fan, hopefully, one day, along with Pinball, 1973, it will be given a wider release to Murakami's English reading fans." (by Michael W.)

Rating: 5 of 5 stars.

Synopsis: In 1932, two North Carolina teenagers from opposite sides of the tracks fall in love. Spending one idyllic summer together in the small town of New Bern, Noah Calhoun and Allie Nelson do not meet again for 14 years. Noah has returned from WWII to restore the house of his dreams, having inherited a large sum of money. Allie, programmed by family and the "caste system of the South" to marry an ambitious, prosperous man, has become engaged to powerful attorney Lon Hammond. When she reads a newspaper story about Noah's restoration project, she shows up on his porch step, re-entering his life for two days. Will Allie leave Lon for Noah? What renders Sparks's sentimental story somewhat distinctive are two chapters, which take place in a nursing home in the '90s, that frame the central story. The first sets the stage for the reading of the eponymous notebook, while the later one takes the characters into the land beyond happily ever after, a future rarely examined in books of this nature. Early on, Noah claims that theirs may be either a tragedy or a love story, depending on the perspective. (from Publisher's Weekly)

Impressions: Thus I began book number one. After Message in a Bottle, I wondered how Sparks would write a novel that would elicit similar feelings without readers already knowing the storyline beforehand. I liked the setting in the Southwest; the time period taking place shortly at the end of World War II. It seemed a very short, minimalist, and simple story consisting of very few characters. Because it was so short and enthralling it took just a few hours to read. The beginning was somewhat confusing because I failed to understand who was who due to the omission of names. Sparks carried this forth when switching the setting to a 1990's nursing home where Noah and Allie had been forced to live out the end of their lives. I liked the characters of Noah and Allie more so than Theresa and Garrett. I think the reasons for this are because 1) The story was (though not entirely) a happy ending story and 2) Both Noah and Allie understood each other, even if it was once in the past, and that their devotion for one other stood the test of time. It was very disheartening that Allie was forced to suffer from Alzheimer's, for it was the memory of the love they shared that was made victim of the disease. I know how very devastating it is: My grandmother developed it about several years before and it was hard to watch and be with her and comfort her as it progressed and began stealing her entire memory. At first it was very slow and my mom had spent a long time reading about how to care for and deal with the oncoming progresion... but it took no more than 4 or 5 years before it had taken its final toll, despite our best efforts. The brief moments of sudden realization that Noah helped to inspire in Allie were what radiated the very last rays of hope into this almost fate-decided story. As Sparks I think knew, we are all subject to time-- and the lives that we lead and the lives that we have led, no matter the consequences of age and the results of loss, will forever hold the memory of love and caring for those that we cherish. There is something great in the simplicity of such stories and I believe that Sparks understands well the range of human emotion.

Rating: 5 of 5 stars.