Teaser Tuesdays - Peony in Love

TEASER TUESDAYS asks you to:

1. Grab your current read. Let the book fall open to a random page.
   
2. Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
3. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given! Please avoid spoilers!

My project would be my salvation in the coming dark years. I might be locked in my husband's home, but my mind would travel to the Moon-Viewing Pavilion, where I could meet my poet again and again without interruption or fear of being caught.

~ p. 77 Peony in Love by Lisa See.

Reviewed 3/30/09 here.

We interrupt the book reviews...

...to bring you useless, but interesting quiz results.

Which literature classic are you?

Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose. You are a mystery novel dealing with theology, especially with catholic vs liberal issues. You search wisdom and knowledge endlessly, feeling that learning is essential in life.

Well, I've always enjoyed mysteries; I love to study theology and different sides of many issues; Medieval theology is one of my favorite periods, and it doesn't bother me a bit that all pre-Reformation theology was Catholic (Protestants, and especially evangelicals should better know and own their history) - so this is not too surprising of a characterization. I should add this to my TBR list.

Thanks to Calon Lan for the link. Take the quiz yourself if you're interested!

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

To put it simply, I wasn't impressed with Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Maybe it seemed shallow after the rich descriptions and character development in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Or maybe I just didn't care for the coming-of-age exploits of two boys in their late teens.

Perhaps my expectations were too high. From the back cover, I had gathered that the story revolved around the impact of Western literature on two Chinese boys during the Cultural Revolution when Chairman Mao attempted to equalize and redefine class status by sending countless numbers of city children to work among peasants in the countryside and mountainous regions of China. While I did learn about some of the hardships and injustices of the rural re-education program, the effects of Western literature were much less redeeming than I had anticipated. In the words of the narrator, "...we were seduced, overwhelmed, spellbound by the mystery of the outside world, especially the world of women, love and sex as revealed to us by these Western writers..." (109). Granted, the narrator also learned the concept of Western individualism, without which he would have remained "incapable of grasping the notion of one man standing up against the whole world" (110). But even his new found individualism was only employed to further his dreams of women, love, and sex, and, unfortunately, to deal with the consequences of his friends' freedom and experimentation in those categories.

In summary, the historical aspects were interesting, but I'm sure there are other novels or non-fiction accounts that convey the circumstances and effects of the Cultural Revolution with a story-line less driven by testosterone. Another friend who read this book suggested that it might be more of an allegory, a subtle cultural commentary on the ideas of freedom, individualism, and knowledge. I might have enjoyed it more if I had been looking for those deeper threads, but they do indeed run deep, and the surface story was too superficial for my tastes.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is an amazing novel. It incorporates a vast amount of history and cultural details about rural China in the early to mid-1800's. But in a stellar example of historical fiction, the author, Lisa See, seamlessly weaves these details throughout the life story of Lily, a farmer's daughter whose perfectly bound feet earn her a passage out of poverty to become the wife of the eldest son of one of most wealthy and influential families in the county. But the rags-to-riches tale is only the backdrop for an even more moving story of the relationship between Lily and Snow Flower, her laotong, or "old same," a girl whose birth date and other characteristics matched so perfectly that they were united in friendship for life. Like other women in ancient China, the girls learn a secret language, nu shu, by which they communicate when they are apart and with which they record the significant events of their lives on a fan that they share between them.

Lily encapsulates the uniqueness of a laotong relationship by reflecting on love and the place of women in Chinese culture: "We may love our daughters with all our hearts, but we must train them through pain. We love our sons most of all, but we can never be a part of their world, the outer realm of men. We are expected to love our husbands from the day of Contracting a Kin, though we will not see their faces for another six years. We are told to love our in-laws, but we enter those families as strangers, as the lowest person in the household, just one step on the ladder about a servant. We are ordered to love and honor our husbands' ancestors, so we perform the proper duties, even if our hearts quietly call out gratitude to our natal ancestors. We love our parents because they take care of us, but we are considered worthless branches on the family tree. We drain the family resources. We are raised by one family for another. As happy as we are in our natal families, we all know that parting is inevitable. So we love our families, but we understand that this love will end in the sadness of departure. All these types of love come out of duty, respect, and gratitude. Most of them, as the women in my county know, are sources of sadness, rupture, and brutality. But the love between a pair of old sames is something completely different...a laotong relationship is made by choice" (59-60).

Many parts of the novel were brutally honest and painful to read, such as the descriptions of foot binding, the general condition and treatment of women, and the untimely deaths of so many. Conversely, there were points of great beauty and love revealed in family relations and friendships. The author often foreshadows some of the significant crises of the novel, revealing just enough for the reader to take notice, but not enough to fully reveal the plot. For example, early in the novel, we read, "Always Aunt cautioned us to be careful with our words, since by using phonetic characters, as opposed to the pictographic characters of men's writing, our meanings could become lost or confused. 'Every word must be placed in context,' she reminded us each day the end of our lesson. 'Much tragedy could result from a wrong reading'" (69).

Tragedy does indeed come to Lily and Snow Flower through a misreading of nu shu, but for many years they use it to deepen their friendship and survive the challenges of their circumstances. When early in their married lives, Snow Flower breaks with traditional phrases and shares the truth of her situation and feelings, Lily realizes "the true purpose of our secret writing. It was not to compose girlish notes to each other or even to introduce us to the women in our husbands' families. It was to give us a voice. Our nu shu was a means for our bound feet to carry us to each other, for our thoughts to fly across the fields as Snow Flower had written. The men in our households never expected us to have anything important to say. They never expected us to have emotions or express creative thoughts" (160).

This is a story of self-discovery, of learning one's own strengths and weaknesses through fellowship with another. It is a story of regret that some of those lessons were learned too late or all too imperfectly: "it's hard to be truly generous and behave in a forthright manner when you don't know how" (247). It is a story of expectations and disappointments, a story of love and loyalty mixed with jealousy and bitterness, a story about the importance of words, and it ends with these most humble and powerful words, "Please forgive me" (253). Lisa See has crafted a rare novel, one that not only reveals the history and culture of an ancient people, but also shows the frailties of the human heart in any time and culture.

Under a Wing by Reeve Lindbergh

Under a Wing: A Memoir by Reeve Lindbergh was the February selection for Captive Thoughts Book Club, and though I wasn't able to make it to the discussion, I wanted to keep up with the reading schedule anyway. I came to this memoir knowing very little about the Lindbergh family. I knew of Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic, but hardly anything else - I was even clueless about the Lindbergh baby's kidnapping and murder.

Quite honestly, I was a little skeptical about delving into the lives of a celebrity family, even if their notoriety was 50-60 years ago. I wondered if I really wanted to spend my time reading about the private lives of public figures. But, as the youngest of the 6 Lindbergh children, Reeve's writing reveals the personal aspects of their lives, presenting them as very real and very human. My skepticism was quickly dispelled as the Lindbergh family portrait appeared in greater detail with each chapter. In spite of their fame and wealth, or maybe because of it, they dealt with many real issues and concerns that are common to families of any social status. Reeve herself talks of processing this in coming to understand her own history by visiting her father's boyhood home in Minnesota: "It was a hard task, but a familiar one, to reclaim him from his own history and make him mine. This effort in itself causes one of the strangest intermingling I have come to know as the child of famous parents: the give-and-take between public impression and private memory, each informing, educating, correcting, and ultimately humanizing the other, over time" (195).

Reeve's reflections on the significant events that shaped her family's dynamics are perceptive (coming from the youngest child) and sympathetic (understandably so), and this unique perspective allows the reader to easily identify with the historical figures of Charles and Anne Lindbergh. She reveals both strengths and foibles of her famous parents and how their influence shaped the lives of their children. Even when she expresses her frustrations with her father's seemingly endless rules, opinions, and advice, her enduring love and respect for both her parents are evident, as when she writes, "When our father left us to travel around the world, and even when he left the world entirely, at his death in 1974, there was an element of relief in his absence, some quietness that we had not ever known in our lives before. But he left behind a vast hole in our universe, as great as the death of a star" (49).

Or in another passage: "I believed he was unjust, demanding, and difficult, just as often as I believed he was the strongest, most exciting, most intelligent, and most truthful person in the world. I took for granted that he would protect me from all dangers, from floods and blizzards to tooth decay and television. I knew that I could count on him, always, even though he could not always count on me" (77).

It is evident that Reeve learned the craft of writing from her mother, and I found her comments on her mother's writing and her own very interesting. “‘Write it down!’ our mother had told us whenever we said something that particularly interested or touched her: write down that sharp insight, that funny story, that especially appealing turn of phrase. She taught us that any experience worth living through was worth writing about, but beyond this, she made us feel that the act of writing about it significantly affected the experience itself. I did not know whether writing enhanced an even, transforming it into something more important than it would have been had it gone unrecorded, or whether writing simply made it more real…” (177).

On a more personal level, she relates how difficult it was for her as a child to leave her mother alone to write in peace and quiet. "What I did not understand, and only much later began to comprehend, is that my mother's work, that product of our separation, is also the way back to her again. She herself created the pathway, a connection between us that is much deeper and more lasting than any I had ever anticipated in childhood. All I had to do to find it was read her books" (59-60). In a similar vein, Reeve asks some hard questions about a child's perceptions of a parent's inaccessibility: "Is it true that all parents are too busy to pay full attention to their children? Or is the truth instead that no child can ever be satisfied, because no child can have every ounce of a parent’s attention?" (167) I've pondered these questions myself, not as a daughter, but as a parent, as I've sensed my daughter's frustrations to have all of Mommy, all the time.

Reeve's own writing style is transparent, witty, and picturesque. This passage about train travel reminded me of the many reflections on the passage of time in Rebecca: "On trains, even now, I have the same sense that whatever I pass is immediately and forever in the past, whether I am on a familiar line or in a foreign country: this barn, this house, this child on a bicycle, that horse tossing its head in a green meadow, those mountains in the distance, that one quick glimpse of a city street and all its traffic, today's lightening sky with cloud configurations particular to this very morning and no other, all are here together at once, now, with me, and then all are gone. Never again this conjunction, this moment. All gone forever" (103).

Most of all this is a story of a family: a family with its own peculiarities, its own troubles, and its own deep founded love and honor, as expressed so beautifully in this passage: “‘Can’t your family think of any women’s names besides Constance, Elizabeth, and Anne?’ a confused friend crossly asked one of my cousins not long ago. The answer is that we can and have, but there remains in the family an abiding loyalty to those three Morrow sisters and their mother. Something about these small, strong women, held in affection over the generations, makes their daughters and granddaughters look at our own newborn daughters with respect, awe, and that intergenerational astonishment that comes to women who have just given birth. And so we repeat those names: Elizabeth (Elisabeth), and Constance, and Anne” (142).

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by this memoir, but I suppose I really shouldn't have been. I always seem to enjoy memoirs (as long as they are well-written and tasteful). A good memoir can help us to see that the ups and downs of our own lives - the love, fear, joy, anger, grief, and skeletons in the closet, too - are not so uncommon after all.

Nathan Coulter by Wendell Berry

After reading Hannah Coulter last November, I wanted to read more of Wendell Berry's tales of Port William, Kentucky. Berry's first novel about Port William happens to be about the boyhood of Hannah's second husband, Nathan Coulter, so that seemed like a good place to start since some of the characters were sure to be familiar and it might provide another perspective on Hannah's story.

Quite honestly, I didn't find this novel to have the same charm and wisdom as Hannah Coulter. It is a coming-of-age story that offers insights into family relationships and values in a different time and place, but I really felt that the protagonist is underdeveloped. Like Hannah, Nathan Coulter narrates his own story. But while Hannah shares many of her own thoughts and emotions, Nathan is not so transparent, and it seems that he fades into the background of the story while we discover more about his father, older brother Tom, and Uncle Burley from his observations and comments.

The relationships between the men in this multi-generational family could be case studies in themselves. Uncle Burley is quite the character, and we learn some of the antics of his younger years from a boy's perspective. Perhaps most interesting is Tom's growing distance, first from his brother, as Tom's interests shift as he matures, and then from his father, when a fight pushes him out the door to independence and manhood. Nathan doesn't share nearly so much about his own development - physical, emotional, or otherwise - though his attitudes and observations certainly grow in depth and maturity as his story progresses.

The ideas of place and "the Membership" are not as developed in this novel as in Hannah Coulter. Rather the simple ebb and flow of life, from mundane chores to carnival games to matters of life and death, form the theme and structure of the story. As Uncle Burley observes when an older woman of Port William dies one day and a baby is born to another family the next, ". . .that was just the way things were. They put one in and pull another one out" (35).

I'm sure I will return to Port William every so often in my reading journey, and I'd welcome any suggestions for which story to pick up next. Although I doubt that such a place and time could be wholly recreated in the twenty-first century, there are certainly insights to be gained and lessons to be learned by the people and place Berry has created in Port William.

The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery

The Blue Castle wasn't on my to-be-read list, but I thought Carrie's L. M. Montgomery Reading Challenge sounded like fun. As I searched through L. M. Montgomery titles that I hadn't read, I found this little novel that has some unique qualities which set it apart from most of Montgomery's other works. First, it is her only novel that was written for an adult audience, and in fact there are no children, only a few memories of childhood, in the book. Second, it is her only novel with a setting entirely apart from Prince Edward Island. While I dream of someday visiting P.E.I. like any other fan of Anne of Green Gables, this distinctive appealed to me. I wanted to see how Montgomery would describe other parts of Canada.

I was certainly not disappointed in my choice! The Blue Castle has all the charm, wit, and vivid characters of Anne and other Montgomery novels, plenty of picturesque descriptions of nature, and a heartwarming love story, too. What more could you want to curl up with under under a throw or by a fire on a cold winter's day?

Valancy Stirling had lived under the constraints of her mother and extended family's expectations for twenty-nine years. She was timid and submissive to their obsessive habits and sense of decency - which was guided more by gossip and the sake of appearances than any genuine concern for propriety - but she had nothing for which to live, nothing to make the monotonous, dreary days bearable but her dreams of the Blue Castle where she was no longer a wallflower, but a princess with dashing suitors who longed to do her bidding. She was resigned to her fate as a bashful old-maid until faced with the finiteness of her life. In a brief afternoon, she decided that she must really live the remainder of her days. The exchanges that ensue when she begins to speak her mind to her family, tacitly revealing their shallowness, are simply hilarious. Valancy begins to make decisions based on meeting needs and showing love, and in return she finds her Blue Castle and a love that she never could have imagined.

At first, I thought the characters seemed a bit too stereotypical, but in retrospect that merely set the stage for Valancy's transformation of character and its effects on her family. Valancy's integrity (in the sense of being honest and transparent) stands in stark contrast to her family's all-consuming concern for the opinion's of others. It wasn't hard to guess certain aspects of the plot, but other elements took me pleasantly by surprise. It was a delightful story with a good lesson about what really matters in life - a challenge to us all to live authentically!

Here are a few quotable quotes:

"She made a discovery that surprised her; she, who had been afraid of almost everything in life, was not afraid of death. It did not seem in the least terrible to her. And she need not now be afraid of anything else." (37)

"'I've been trying to please other people all my life and failed,' she said. 'After this I shall please myself. I shall never pretend anything again. I've breathed an atmosphere of fibs and pretences and evasions all my life. What a luxury it will be to tell the truth!'" (46)

"'As for Barney Snaith, the only crime he has been guilty of is living to himself and minding his own business. He can, it seems, get along without you. Which is an unpardonable sin, of course, in your little snobocracy.'" Valancy coined that concluding word suddenly and felt that it was in inspiration. That was exactly what they were and not one of them was fit to mend another." (65)

"'Cissy Gay is dying,' she said, 'and it's a shame and disgrace that she is dying in a Christian community with no one to do anything for her. Whatever she's been or done, she's a human being.'" (81)

And after that, I got too interested in the story to mark any more passages. . .

Update on the rest of what I intended to read for the L. M. Montgomery Challenge ~ My daughter and I got off to a great start reading Anne of Green Gables aloud - Daddy even read a few chapters and then finished the book on his own! (He finds Anne's imagination and rapturous speeches quite amusing, which just proves that real men can read Anne of Green Gables!) However, some fairly drastic and time-consuming life events have come our way, and we haven't had time to finish it. I don't think it will happen in the next four days, but we will pick it up again when things settle down. I'm glad that my almost 5-year-old daughter is interested enough in Anne to sit still through several chapters. It is fun to share favorite books with her and start reading more than just picture books!