Since my early summer escapist reading binge, I really have not been reading much but I did manage to read a couple of really good new novels. Make that three good novels, but only two of them could be considered new. Oddly enough they share a common thread, although was not intentional in my selection of them; it was just the way things worked out
Back in July I read The Time it Takes to Fall by Margaret Lazarus Dean after reading a profile of the author in a local paper. Truthfully, had I come at the novel from any other approach, I might have passed it by. I was rather bored with coming of age novels and the challenger disaster itself, although I can see how it may have been a seminal event for a generation younger than myself, would not necessarily have attracted me as an interesting subject. But Ms. Dean makes it work, mixing snippets of fact with the story in a way that highlights tthe personality and struggles of this girl as she makes her way from the innocent hopefullness of childhood to the more murky waters of adulthood. In the end, the author managed to use the space program and the Challenger explosion as a framework around which to build a story, an event which was simultaneously incidental in that the story was really about a girl growing up and learning her own path, and central in the way that the space program in general and the Challenger explosion in particular, provided a framework on which to build one's growing perceptions of the world outside one's own narrow sphere.
Then, last week, I got a note from the local library that The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker was finally mine to read and I plowed through it the afternoon that I picked it up from the library. Like Dean's novel, it uses a seminal event to provide the underlying structure of the story, but in this case the seminal event is not something that has actually happened but a hypothetical future event. Also, this novel is smaller in scope even though the actual event is much greater in consequence. I think this smaller tighter frame of reference makes the book easier in some ways, and it is consistently engaging. The book is narrated, at some time in the future by Julia, who is looking back on the year she turned 11, the "year of the slowing" the year, the year the earth's diurnal cycle changed and slowed. That she is narrating the story tells us that the world did not end, and it also tells us that the focus of the story is not really this, the slowing of the earth, but the story of Julia trying to understand who that 11 year old girl was, and how this change in everything affected who she would become. In that sense it is not a fully realized coming of age story, but a story of someone looking back, trying to find some lost key that connects what was to what becomes. In that sense the story is slow and small in scope. It is not a story of what is happening to the earth, it is the story of what is happening to Julia. It is the story of how an 11 year old girl faces the unravelling of the world around her as if in slow motion. It is the story of memory, told not truly from the perspective of the girl, but not truly from the perspective of her adult self either, more from the perspective of the adult self reflecting back upon her memories of that time. I believe that the narrow focus is the strength of this novel, a reminder that although life and history can be shaped by grand events and themes that are beyond the control of the individual, it is lived in the smaller field of the immediate and the personal.
My favorite book of the three however was The Time In Between by Maria Dueñas. I loved this book. It is a wonderful story, well told, with of course special interest for anyone who is interested in clothes and fabric and sewing. It is a gripping story set in a time a place and time defined by turmoil, but it is also a story of growth and finding one's own strength and purpose in life. Dueñas masterfully blends historical reality with the completely fictional story of Sira and ties it all together seamlessly in a rather gripping read.
It is not a coming of age story. The protagonist, Sira, is physically an adult, although her potential remains unrealized. And yet it is a story of a young woman growing and learning to take responsibility and control of her own fate. In the beginning of the novel Sira seems to be particularly vapid, self-absorbed, shallow and uninteresting, someone whom one could easily dismiss. The young Sira makes terrible mistakes, mistakes that seem obvious to the reader, and make Sira seem oblivious and unsympathetic. One realizes, however, if one perseveres, that Sira herself, through the circumstances of her upbringing and the characters of the particular people who surround her in her youth, has just drifted through youth, unchallenged and untutored. I ended up forgiving her her mistakes, realizing that she truly was naive in the truest sense, existing in the world but really with no cognizance of it, and her parents, although probably doing the best they are capable of, do nothing to help or guide her, sending her on her way with vague admonitions as if sense and caution are innate and not learned, assuming that docility and good behavior imply understanding, or perhaps not even recognizing that Sira herself is capable of making leaps unrecognized by her parents. Sira does learn to rely on herself. She finds she is strong and resourceful, and eventually she learns confidence in her own strength, her own judgement, and she takes control of her life on her own terms. Oddly enough, or really not so oddly when you think of it, others initially see her as having more control than she herself feels, and she lets them use her until she realizes that she is stronger and more competent than she has realized. Sira eventually recognizes her own strength and realizes that she must seize control of her own fate, or forever let others control her.
I felt the conclusion of The Time In Between was completely satisfying although in terms of the historical story it could have gone on for a while longer. But this wasn't really the story of Spain, the Civil War, and World War II; it was the story of Siri Quiroga and the time in between the innocence of youth and the adult realization that, no matter how little we control the events of the world, we control our own role in that world. I could read it again.
