Nice Surprise

I got a nice surprise this morning. My book I.O.U. SEX is featured today on Red Adept’s website. [Red Adept Reviews] The “Casting Call” column gives authors the opportunity to present their books as if they were movies, naming actors and actresses to play the main characters, assigning a director, etc. My co-author and I had lots of fun deciding who’d play the roles of Kiki, June, and Peggy! Although I wish the Red Adept people hadn’t edited the synopsis down to a single phrase, it was still fun to see the book presented there.

Sandy Nachlinger
I.O.U. Sex

When A Crocodile Eats The Sun

by Ruth Harris

In this devastating memoir, journalist Peter Godwin tells the story of a family, a family secret and a dictator’s malevolent destruction of a country and its citizens.  Peter Godwin, who grew up in Zimbabwe and later became a writer, teacher and BBC-TV reporter, returns to Zimbabwe to visit his family home and his aging parents.  There he finds that the once-prosperous country he — and they — love has been turned from the breadbasket of Africa into an impoverished state on the verge of famine and collapse.  Savings have been wiped out by 1000% inflation, money is worthless, an education system that was once considered the best on the continent no longer exists.  Farms, factories, businesses, hospitals, hotels have been destroyed;  the once-lucrative tourist trade has been demolished.  Corruption and brutality taint everyday life.  In Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe there is no safety and no hope.

In clean, elegant prose, Godwin tells his parents’ stories without self-pity or hyped-up drama.  His father has lived with a carefully-guarded secret that has shadowed his life and his relationships.  His mother, a doctor, struggles valiantly with a dying husband and a  country in free fall where not even long-time friends and associates can be trusted.   WHEN A CROCODILE EATS THE SUN is  everything a memoir can be:  personal, political, cultural.  This is not light diversion but  haunting, tragic and tender…serious, satisfying reading of superior quality that, at times, moved me to tears.

This note at the end of the Back Bay Books edition explains the title:  “In some remove villages of Zimbabwe, it is believed that a solar eclipse occurs when a crocodile eats the sun.  This celestial crocodile, they say, briefly consumes our life-giving star as a warning that he is much displeased with the behavior of man below.  It is the very worst of omens.”

 

Review: Man In the Woods by Scott Spencer

Man in the Woods by Scott Spencer

by Lynn Schneider

This is not the first book I have read by Scott Spencer, but I guess I’d have to say it’s the best I’ve read so far. But I might feel that way, because I’ve just read it. I probably felt the same way after all the others.

 There’s just something about Mr. Spencer’s books, his judicious use of passive voice and present tense, that makes his writing lyrical and melancholy. That’s the feeling I got from this novel, an underlying sadness. Something happened, something that was never supposed to happen, that could have been avoided if only Paul, the main character, hadn’t been where he was at the time he was. And still the event could have been avoided even then, but it happened and it was just plain bad luck that it did. It was traumatic. Life changing.

 Once the event has taken place, and everything has changed, Paul has to adjust to it. And not only does it change his life, but the life of Kate, the woman with whom he lives. Kate showed up earlier in A Ship Made of Paper and I liked her then too, but since that time, she’s become a recovering alcoholic and written a self-help book called Prays Well With Others. She feels she’s been helped by God, that she has seen the light, that her life is now guided and she shares it with her readers, and because she is a superb writer, she becomes very successful. She and Paul live with her daughter, Ruby, in a rural farmhouse in upstate New York.

 The event involves a dog. The dog witnessed the event, and Paul takes the dog to live with him. And Mr. Spencer proves he can capture the essence of the dog, as well as he does his other characters. The dog has a personality, a quiet animal with good days and bad days. He’s predictably sweet and Paul, Kate and Ruby settle in with him, until they can’t remember when he wasn’t around.

 Paul is the strong, handsome type, a carpenter, completely smitten with Kate, and Kate loves Paul with a love so all-encompassing, it matters little that there are differences and silences between them. It’s a beautiful love story, and Kate might be a little quicker-witted than Paul, and she makes the majority of the money that supports their household, but that doesn’t matter to her. To be trite, he “completes” her.

 There are internalizations of Paul and Kate, which seem to be essays in themselves. No dialogue, just beautiful words, masterful sentences. One of my favorites was one of Kate’s. She is on a timetable, always plotting, planning time for she and Paul to be alone together. He’s a little more casual, he doesn’t seem to recognize that there might be a half hour here or there, when they could be “together” like Kate does. She hurries through life in order to get back to Paul while his path through life is less planned.

 An example:

 She doesn’t mind doing the work, because of the reward. The slow fill of him as he notches his hips inch by inch closer to her, she enjoys the anticipation of the bright delirium sex unleashes in her, an extremity of emotion and abandon that she has never before experienced and never actually believed other people experienced, either, and she enjoys moving things around in her schedule so there is more time for them to be together. It’s like clearing brush so the flowers can be seen. But there is no question in her mind that if Paul were in her position right now he would not be thinking of how to get out of the city in time to be home so that there was a chance to lie next to her.

 Scott Spencer is one of those authors who says so much in a few words, it’s as if each word is carefully chosen. I like to think of his wonderful sentences rolling off the keyboard one after another, but they are so perfect, I doubt that’s how it happens.

 He is also a master of adult love affairs, the positive and negative aspects and with obsessive love, evident in his earlier novel, Endless Love, which was made into a movie. I have yet to see it, and maybe I never will because I’ve heard it’s different from the book and a bit, well, cheesy.

 Once in a while, a graphic detail might pop out at you, and it can be a little shocking. I saw it in a couple of his other books but not this one so much.

 When I’m reading a Scott Spencer novel, I like to read a chapter and think about what I’ve read before starting another. I’m going to be very disappointed when there’s no Scott Spencer books I haven’t read. I like to wait a while between reading them, because I find myself thinking for weeks about what I’ve read.

 I give this novel five stars. An enthusiastic five stars.