#74 - The Sympathizer - Viet Thanh Nguyen

#74

Title:  The Sympathizer

Author:   Viet Thanh Nguyen

Genre:  Fiction

Rating:  B

Published:  2015

Dates:  10/11/16 – 11/14/16

Pages: 393

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016 Nguyen is also the recipient of many other awards including the Edgar Award for Best First Novel.  Based upon the awesomeness of the Vietnam War Nguyen takes us into the depths of human and inhuman existence.  While this award winning author was born in Viet Nam he grew up in Los Angeles, California and had to decide whether to embrace his Asian roots or his adopted country.  He chose the US.  Each sentence is one you’ve never read before.  There is no need to punctuate dialogue because the words are so riveting.  Some characters have names – Man, Bon, Claude and Violet – others are the crapulent major, the Auteur, the Congressman, the baby faced guard and others.  Our unnamed protagonist is a double agent, and you’ll forget you’re reading fiction from the fall of Saigon to the chilling nightmare of the courageous boat people.

Some are calling this novel “extraordinary,” “a page-turner ...”, “an optic tilt about Vietnam and what America did there as profound as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s Beloved were to the legacy of racism and slavery.”

#73 - Dickens' Bleak House - Robert Beum

#73

Title:  Dickens’ Bleak House (Cliffs Notes)

Author:   Robert Beum

Genre:  Non-Fiction   823.8

Rating:  B

Published:  1991

Dates:  10/18/16 – 11/14/16

Pages:  89

This companion to Bleak House helped fill in the gaps that I missed as I was listening to my latest Dickens “read”.

In addition to the cast of endless characters were summaries and commentaries of each chapter.  Under his critical essays, Beum discussed characterization which he likened to Shakespeare; theme, or in the case of Bleak House, themes that include legal codes and Chancery Court; technique and style which may turn off today’s generation due to details and vocabulary and as Beum mentions, "today’s readers are no longer well-practiced readers due to television and film being a preferred pastime"; plot and sub-plots, the latter of which isn’t always related to the main plot but enjoy them since, in my estimation, there’s nothing worse than a plotless story; setting where most of the action takes place around London, Lincolnshire, St. Albans, and lastly Yorkshire where new Bleak House is located and some rural scenes; the fog which in Bleak House symbolizes “muddles and miseries” and symbolism that includes foreshadowing, helpful in dealing with things to come such as Richard Carstone’s inability to “see” in the mental and spiritual fog generated by the High Court of Chancery.

#72 - Bleak House - Charles Dickens

#72

Title:  Bleak House

Author:   Charles Dickens

Read by: David Case
Illustrations by:  Phiz

Genre:  Fiction

Rating:  B

Published:  originally - 1852

Dates:  10/11/16 – 11/14/16

CDs/Hours: 31/39.5

Hailed more for being his best novel, not his best book, Bleak House represents Dickens’ highest point of his intellectual maturity.  So says G. K. Chesterton in his introduction to the story from the Everyman’s edition.

While very long, drawn out and including characters and situations not germane to the book, Dickens will delight readers who love tomes of this length.  Before the story was complete, Dickens serialized it over a period of 19 months from March 1852 to September 1853.  Along with his readers who wanted to know what came next, Dickens, too, wrote by the “seat of his pants” so to speak, as he met each deadline!

The story is brilliant when you consider it’s a love story, a murder mystery and a comedy of sorts and very much about social criticism.   The subordinate characters are as outrageous as other main characters are sublime.   Esther Summerson, in part, narrates.  We find her as a young girl living with her aunt, though she doesn’t know at the time it is her aunt.  Before she’s very old off to Bleak House she goes, along with Richard Carstone and Ada Clare – all wards of Mr. Jarndyce.  Despite its’ bleakness it has a happy ending.  And Bleak House isn’t bleak at all but a haven for the three young people that Jarndyce enfolds into his care.

The pen and ink drawings by Phiz are delightful.  I also checked out both the Everyman’s Library publication and Penguin Classics – each with their own notes and summaries of Dickens and his masterpiece.