Vacation Reading

I've just returned from a lovely vacation which afforded me loads of time to luxuriate in good books (and also sunshine, lots and lots of sunshine). Rather than write a separate review for each of the four books I read, I figured I'd write give a quickie review of each of them here. If you want more details on any of them, just ask.

All Our Worldly Goods - Irène Némirovsky

I actually read two Némirovsky books on vacation, but preferred this one, which is similar in tone and style to Suite Française. The book is set in France between 1910 and 1940 and follows the love and life of a single couple, Pierre and Agnes, across the decades. As the book cover notes, they marry against the wishes of their family, provoking a multi-generational feud with ramifications cascading through time. (And if this weren't enough of a cross to bear, the time period covers two world wars and the depression.) Némirovsky's characters are endearing and believable and what I admire about her writing is how concisely she tells her stories. After all, she covers 30 years in only 264 pages. At times, the lack of detail can be frustrating (wait, did seven years of communal life just pass in a single sentence?), but the whole is better than the sum of the parts and I found myself caring what happened to the protagonists through the very end. That said, this book lacks the poignant urgency of Suite Française, which I ultimately preferred to either of the books I read this past week.

A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway

I have been wanting to read this book ever since I finished A Paris Wife last year, and really the two go hand-in-hand. A Paris Wife takes a more intimate look at the day-to-day life of the Hemingways in Paris, and especially their relationship with one another, but A Moveable Feast paints a beautiful picture of a time and place that exists today only in literature and the imagination. Hemingway opens the book with a preface that some names, places, and faces may have been omitted or changed, but really the expatriate world of 1920s Paris is the star: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, and entirely too much time imbibing wine in smoky cafes while filling reams of paper with the books that were to become a staple of many a high school's American literature courses. Turning the pages of this book, the reader can not only picture but can truly feel Paris as it was.

America, But Better - Chris Cannon

According to Amazon.com, this book is based on a "hilarious viral campaign" in which a new candidate - Canada - announces its "Canadacy" for president in 2012. I must have heard of this book during that campaign, because I added it to my list sometime last fall. It is certainly a witty and satirical look at, essentially, all the ways in which Canada is alike, and yet superior to, the United States. The book is cleverly done (although honestly the over-reliance on hockey references came to seem lazy). The first half, especially the maps and timeline of U.S. Canadian History, was probably a bit better than the second half, but at only 100 pages or so, it's worth the read for anyone looking for a bit of cynical amusement.

The Wine of Solitude - Irène Némirovsky

This is the second of the Némirovsky books I read on vacation, and although I ultimately preferred All Our Worldly Goods, I enjoyed the change of setting with this one. Unlike her other novels that I've read, The Wine of Solitude is not set (entirely) within France. The book begins in a small Ukrainian town (a fictionalized Kiev, according to the description on the book jacket), then winding through St. Petersburg, rural Finland, Helsinki, Nice, and finally Paris, it is the story of an unhappy White Russian family whose fortunes rise and fall like the world around them. Like Goods, this book covers a vast expanse of time (roughly 15 years) and weaves in the geopolitical situation with which Némirovsky herself was only too familiar. At their core, Némirovsky's works seem to revolve around a few central relationships, and Wine is no different. It is an intricately spun coming-of-age story of a mother and her daughter, a daughter and her father, the daughter and the governess, and how love, anger, jealousy, and hatred make and undermine a family. World war, revolution, and depression are the backdrop against which decisions are made, but Némirovsky gives us protagonists whose characters seemed forged (of iron) almost independently of the events around them.