Received yesterday:
An advanced readers copy of Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs from Stefanie (Thank you, Stefanie! We love Russo in this household.) and, from Amazon, the slipstream anthology Feeling Very Strange, which I'm pretty sure I heard about via Readerville.
On order and still to come:
Identical Strangers, a memoir from Library Thing's Early Reviewers second batch of review copies, and, from Amazon, Charles Baxter's The Art of Subtext and Bernd Heinrich's The Snoring Bird, a memoir I first heard about via MFS.
A Dead Language is a continuation of the story begun in Pinkerton's Sister. Or rather, it chronologically preceeds the earlier volume while taking up where Alice's memories ended up in the first--with the suicide of her father. ADL is really a slo-mo stream -of- consciousness exploration of emotional abuse. Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, Alice Pinkerton's younger brother and Madame Butterfly's future abandoner, is a disappointment to his father, who doesn't regard him as being manly enough to deserve either decent treatment or love. Continually mocked for his physical delicateness and warned off from any of his natural inclinations or interests--books, music, choice of friends-- Ben experiences no emotional reprieve after his father's death; a week before, his father instructed the naturally-sadistic and oh-so-obliging Latin teacher at Ben's new school in how best to humiliate him.
Amo. Amas. Amat. Pater filium amat.
Years of horrific abuse suffered by Ben and the small band of misfit boys come to an end when Oliver, Ben's Oscar Wilde-influenced best friend, takes a fitting revenge against the teacher in the book's final pages.
Yet the emotional wounds are those that won't heal.
And Rushforth died before completing the third novel about the Pinkertons.
Sigh.
I'll put up a commonplace post of quotes in a day or so.
Now I'm reading Patrick O'Brian's The Far Side of the World.
Ooh, I love Patrick O'Brian--hope you enjoy that. And the Pinkerton series sounds fascinating...
ReplyDeleteHey, I love Patrick O'Brian as well! I think I'm on book 13 or 14 right now. It's an amazing series, I think of Aubrey and Maturin as old friends at this point. I really need to get back to those books...
ReplyDeleteyay! Glad you got the book and I hope you enjoy it.
ReplyDeleteHarry Potter ended well, yes?
Good luck on the book acquisition moratorium!
I sure understand doublestacking! I had to ban myself from using bookmooch because my tbr bookcase is so completely doublestacked that I would have to start a new tbr shelf elsewhere if even one more book came in.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to the quotes!