The Best Laid Plans...

I finished Terry Fallis' The Best Laid Plans this morning, which turned out to be the perfect literary palate cleanser after reading Sarah Blake's The Postmistress and Peter Cameron's Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You.

As is usually the case, I always feel the need for something light after reading a novel set in WWII - the third section of The Postmistress, Spring 1941, was particularly hard to read at some points as Frankie Bard, the intrepid radio broadcaster rode the trains through Nazi-occupied Europe to get the real truth about what was happening to the Jews. 

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You was a recommendation by Lainey.  The writing is smart and funny and it's set in Manhattan 2003 which was different enough for me but I still felt a little unsettled by the ending...it wasn't the "happy ending" I was looking for...so I browsed my bookcase and settled on The Best Laid Plans. Perfeito!

The Best Laid Plans had an unconventional start as a free weekly podcast by its author, Terry Fallis.  It's a book about, of all things, Canadian Federal politics and it's FUNNY!  SO FUNNY!  I know...it's totally weird for me to see politics and funny in the same sentence but it's true! Read it for yourself, or listen to the podcast here. 

From the back covers:
 
Terry Fallis got tired of waiting for a literary agent or a publisher to decide to take on his book.  So he recorded a reading of his novel, and released it, chapter by chapter, as a podcast.  People really liked it.  Encouraged by that reaction, he published the book on his own.  Again, people really liked it.

Then it won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, beating out major authors published by the big houses.  And people really liked that.
...
It's a satire on Canadian politics, especially the modern Ottawa version, and it's full of unforgettable characters and a story that will sweep you along.  Sex in the hallowed halls of Parliament, caucus manipulation, melon-throwing violence, culturally stunted engineers, chessboard battles, and even a personal hovercraft all feature in this plot.  Not to mention true love, and good guys winning.

In 1940, Iris James is the postmistress in coastal Franklin, Massachusetts.  Iris knows more about the townspeople than she will ever say - for example, that Emma Trask has come to marry the town's doctor, and that Harry Vale watches the ocean for U-boats.  Iris believes her job is to deliver secrets.  Yet one day she does the unthinkable: slips a letter into her pocket, reads it, and doesn't deliver it.

Meanwhile, Frankie Bard broadcasts from overseas with Edward R. Murrow.  Her dispatches beg listeners to pay heed as the Nazis bomb London nightly.  Most of the townspeople of Franklin think the war can't touch them.  But Iris and Emma and Frankie know better...

The Postmistress is a tale of tow worlds - one shattered by violence, the other willfully naive - and of two women whose jobs are to deliver the news, yet who find themselves unable to do so.  Through their eyes, and the eyes of everyday people caught in history's tide, it examines how we tell each other stories, and how we bear the fact of war as we live ordinary lives.

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the story of James Sveck, a sophisticated, vulnerable young man with a deep appreciation for the world and no idea how to live in it.  James is eighteen, the child of divorced parents living in Manhattan.  Articulate, sensitive, and cynical, he rejects all of the assumptions that govern the adult world around him - including the expectation that he will go to college in the fall.  He would prefer to move to an old house in a small town somewhere in the Midwest.  Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You takes place over a few broiling days in the summer of 2003 as James confides in his sympathetic grandmother, stymies his canny therapist, deplores his pretentious sister, and devises a fake online identity in order to pursue his crush on a much older coworker.  Nothing turns out how he'd expected.

The Angel's Game

I took the day off today and had planned on sleeping in but the construction outside my window that typically starts around 7am makes it impossible to do so.  Instead, I slept until just before 8 this morning and spent my first hour finishing Carlos Ruiz Zafon's prequel to Shadow of The Wind, The Angel's Game, which was actually written 5 years after.

As this was a prequel, we're taken back to Barcelona, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and the Sempere & Sons bookshop - the descriptions of which, real and imagined, made me wish I could return again for a visit. 

On the story though - this effort felt more gothic and sinister and there was a twist near the end which was unexpected - and I like to think that I'm a pretty smart reader.  There were definitely shades of Dorian Grey here, too, as Daniel seizes to age as the years go on, and while I've never actually read Wilde's novel, I do know that this detail figures hugely in the plot. 

The end was...unsatisfying...it seemed rather hurried and maybe a bit ambiguous...and that's all I'll say without giving away the ending.

From the dust jacket:

'The whole of Barcelona stretched out at my feet and I wanted to believe that, when I opened those windows, its streets would whisper stories to me, secrets I could capture on paper and narrate to whoever cared to listen.'

In an abandoned mansion at the heart of Barcelona, a young man, David MartÌn, makes his living by writing sensationalist novels under a pseudonym. The survivor of a troubled childhood, he has taken refuge in the world of books, and spends his nights spinning baroque tales about the city's underworld. But perhaps his dark imaginings are not as strange as they seem, for in a locked room deep within the house lie photographs and letters hinting at the mysterious death of the previous owner.

Like a slow poison, the history of the place seeps into his bones as he struggles with an impossible love. Close to despair, David receives a letter from a reclusive French editor, Andreas Corelli, who makes him the offer of a lifetime. He is to write a book unlike anything that has existed - a book with the power to change hearts and minds. In return, he will receive a fortune, perhaps more. But as David begins the work, he realises that there is a connection between this haunting book and the shadows that surround his home.

The Swan Thieves

I finally finished the doorstopper that is Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves early this morning. I stayed over night at my mother's and was woken up by her alarm clock just before 7 this morning.

Anyway - I had never read her debut, The Historian, but was impressed by all the critical acclaim so picked this one up because the story sounded interested.

The novel was s-l-o-w to start for me and continued to plod along jumping from the present to the past and back again as the parallel stories unfolded.  The ending came together well enough, although it felt hasty - almost like Kostova had decided about 500 pages in that it was time to wrap things up.    I'm glad I finished it but am doubtful that I'll be reading any more of her titles in the future.

From the back cover:
This richly told, beautifully imagined novel takes us on a journey into the lives of the women left behind by the renowned painter Robert Oliver.

After attacking a canvas in the National Gallery of Art, Oliver maintains a stubborn silence, prompting his psychiatrist, Andrew Marlow, to embark on an unconventional pursuit of the answers his patient won't provide.  As Marlow is pulled deeper within Oliver's troubled mind, he uncovers a tale of love, betrayal, and artistic obsession, and finds surprising possibilities in a package of nineteenth-century love letters.  Does the key to unlocking Robert Oliver's mystery lie in a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism?

Across centuries and continents, from young love to last love, Elizabeth Kostova deftly explores the painter's universe - passion, creativity, secrets, madness - and conjures a world that lingers long after the final page has turned.