The Mysteries of Fate

From Tots to Teens, StarMag, 27th January 2008

By DAPHNE LEE
THE MYSTERIOUS EDGE OF THE HEROIC WORLD
By E. L. Konigsburg
Publisher: Atheneum, 244 pages
(ISBN: 978-1416949725)

MOST of the time, coincidences are simply an accidental concurrence of events linked in one way or another.

But what of coincidences that bring people together? In E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, George Emerson says that it’s fate that causes people to be “flung together” and “drawn apart”.

But Mr Beebe the clergyman insists that it is often common interests, purposes or backgrounds that bring people naturally together. Yes, the old birds of a feather theory.

It’s not immediately obvious what Amadeo Kaplan, William Wilcox and Aida Lily Tull have in common that would cause their paths to cross.

The first is a 12-year-old, newly moved to Florida from New York. His secret wish is to make a discovery: he wishes to find something that has remained hidden for so long that no one remembers it or realises it ever existed – and he longs to share that wish with a friend.

William Wilcox is aloof, given to long silences, so self-assured he inspires “awe and fear or both”. Amadeo recognises him from school and is surprised when, one day, William gets off the school bus at his stop. It turns out that William is headed for Mrs Zander’s house. And Mrs Zander is Amadeo’s neighbour and was once Aida Lily Tull, heiress and opera diva.

Amadeo, William and Aida are characters in The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World, the latest novel by E.L. Konigsburg.

Like many of Konigsburg’s characters, they are slightly odd (eccentric, if you will). Amadeo and William are pre-teens who speak like wise (if slightly pompous) old men. Both are only sons, close to their mothers, drawn to Aida, a flamboyant, fabulous woman who likes spectacular outfits, champagne (served in crystal flutes, if you please!) and princess phones.

William is helping his mother, a liquidator, prepare the contents of Aida’s home to be sold off, as Aida is moving into a retirement home.

Amadeo is fascinated by Aida and her house, which, unlike his mother’s tastefully, professionally decorated home, is choc-a-bloc with things both precious and kitschy. He senses that this is where he might make his discovery and persuades William to allow him to help sort through Aida’s stuff.

Of course, Amadeo does make a discovery – in fact, he makes several, not least about love and life, human nature and friendship.

William and Aida open up new worlds to Amadeo, exposing him to unexpected and unusual situations and provoking reactions and emotions that are amazing, surprising and disturbing.

Each experience gives Amadeo fresh insights into himself and his intentions and, finally, plays a part in shaping the action he takes when he finds a sketch of a woman drawn by Amadeo Modigliani, an artist whose work was labelled degenerate by the Nazis during World War II.

The Modigliani is the point at which the long and winding roads walked on by Konigsburg’s various characters converge, but Amadeo’s discovery is not something that no one remembers, but something that haunts the memories and conscience of a number of people.

However, more than simply recovering a lost object and work of art, he helps restore lost dreams and dignity.

The author writes in her usual straightforward style, but her characters are complex, mysterious and secretive, and their actions and motives are unclear, even to themselves.

One might see The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World as a simple but moving story about a boy who gets what he wishes for, but a deeper reading reveals a tale about the profound effect art has on the human spirit, how the past affects the present in ways unimaginable and fantastic, and how beauty can provoke the greatest kindness as well as the most incredible cruelty.

In the end, it is the common desire to set things right as well as the shared belief in the truth and life-changing possibilities of great art that brings Konigsburg’s characters together.

Konigsburg is a two-time winner of the Newberry Medal, for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967) and The View from Saturday (1997).

For a complete list of her books go to this site.

An Affair to Remember

From StarMag, 25th November, 2007

Review by DAPHNE LEE

EVENING
By Susan Minot
Publisher: Vintage Contemporaries, 288 pages
(ISBN: 978-0099273493)

WHEN I’m on my deathbed, I wonder which of my boyfriends I’ll remember as the love of my life.

Reading Susan Minot’s Evening, it occurred to me that one might not be aware that one is experiencing true love while it is actually happening. If you have six lovers your entire life, you would surely need to have had them all before being able to rate them.

Ann Lord, dying of cancer at 65, married thrice and mother of five, is overwhelmed and overtaken by memories of Harris Arden, a man she met when she was 25.

It is the summer of 1954 and she is a bridesmaid at her best friend’s wedding. The bride’s brother comes to meet Ann at the train station and, with him, is a stranger: “She noticed his mouth was full though set in a particular firm way, the combination of which affected her curiously. She felt as if she’d been struck on the forehead with a brick.”

On reading this description, the reader is bound to think, “Ahh ... love at first sight”. But Ann ... does Ann know it’s love? And does she know she will be thinking of this man 40 years hence, while her body is being eaten by disease and her mind is filled with a jumble of words and pictures overlaid by a drug-induced fog?

Visitors come and go, the doctor drops by, her children whisper in the next room. Reality recedes and advances, and is overlaid by and inter-woven with memories, fantasies, visions and dreams.

Ann’s thoughts move seamlessly from the present to the past – Minot uses no quotation marks, which, although confusing at first, is an effective way of portraying Ann’s hazy state of mind.

She is only occasionally aware of where she is and her lives, with various men, in various houses, with various people, merge. She begins a conversation in 1954 and ends it in 1994. Her children are babies, then adults, then toddlers, and then adults again. Her husbands fill her with grief, lust, pity, disappointment, apathy. She is full, full, full of love for Harris. Three days were all they had and then there he is, again, finally. Or is he?

The drug-induced hallucinations allow Ann to return to that enchanted summer when she met a wonderful man who made her self-conscious and drop things like a nervous, lovesick schoolgirl. They allow her to revisit the past, allow him to grace the present, allow questions to be asked and answered or asked and left unanswered.

Was Harris really so lovely, his face “lit from within” or is it the morphine talking, transforming someone who was perhaps just rather sexy into a creature so sublime he eclipses everyone who came before and after?

Perhaps he was truly special. Perhaps he was, only because Ann did not see him grow old and bitter and unfaithful.

This 1998 novel was re-issued this year because a movie based on it was made. But watching the interaction on the big screen earlier this year between Claire Danes as the young Ann and Patrick Wilson as Arden, it’s hard to understand the attraction between the couple. Well, obviously, Danes is a beautiful young woman. However, Arden’s attention seems driven solely by lust. Their first meeting is unremarkable; subsequently they seem merely horny, inspired, perhaps, by fine scenery.

But the movie does not have the benefit of Minot’s fine, poetic prose, her ability to spin emotions into vivid pictures that shine with the transparent light of summer evenings and glow with the brilliance of cloudless star-filled skies.

The three days Ann and Harris shared contain a lifetime’s worth of ecstasy and agony. Doomed love usually does, the emotions experienced by its victims are intensified by the futility of the situation. What if they had never met, fallen in love and been forced by convention, good sense and misadventure to go their separate ways? What if they had not parted, but stayed together and become disillusioned and tired of each other?

Happily, the heartbreak of Ann’s loss casts a light on the shadow of her impending death. Imagined and remembered, Harris is probably better than he ever was in real life.

Sink Your Teeth In

A human girl and a luscious male vampire decide to go steady. A werewolf offers the girl an alternative (hot-blooded) romance. Obviously, some females attract all the right monsters!

From StarMag, 30th September 2007

Review by DAPHNE LEE

ECLIPSE

By Stephenie Meyer

Publisher: Little, Brown, 629 pages

(ISBN: 978-0316160209)

THE story so far ... Bella Swan is a regular teenager in a small American town. She moves there in her junior year of high school and promptly falls in love with Edward Cullen, a handsome senior. Edward seems aloof at first, but, as Bella soon discovers, the reason he’s keeping his distance is that he’s a vampire and finds the scent of her blood intoxicating.

In vampirical terms, Bella is one hot (and living) chick, never mind she’s a pretty average-looking (human) girl. Edward is in love (and blood-lust) with her and is terrified that he will harm her. It turns out that he and his undead mates (all equally scrumptious) are reformed vampires who feed on wildlife, not humans. This makes Bella think that there’s a future for her and Edward. Unfortunately, although she’s safe from him and his friends, a group of rogue vamps have marked her as prey.

This is basically what you learn in Twilight, the first of Stephanie Meyer’s series about young love undead-style. In the second book, New Moon, things get decidedly hairier (or rather, furrier): Following an incident involving a paper cut and some seriously thirsty vampires, Edward decides to check out of Bella’s life to ensure her safety. Bella, feeling rejected and angry, decides to drown her sorrows in some reckless behaviour. She starts hanging out with her friend Jacob Black, a young motorcycle-riding Native American wild child. Nothing very naughty happens, though. All the pair gets up to is performing motorcycle stunts.

But then Jacob gets turned into a werewolf and, suddenly, Bella has two extremely personable monsters in her life – we should all be so lucky!

Although Bella gets on really well with Jacob, she can’t forget Edward. The latest book, Eclipse, sees her reunited with the love of her life – cue sighs of pleasure and longing from teenage girls the world over.

Okay, as a certain teenager I know likes to tell me, I am “excruciatingly old” and, thus, probably not the reader Meyer had in mind when whipping up her tale of love, lust and chastity in Forks, Washington, pop 50,000. In Eclipse, Bella and Edward spend an inordinate amount of time snogging. Such scenes always include Bella waxing lyrical about Edward’s cold, hard body, his icy lips, glittering golden eyes, etc. Bella, by the way, is hot to trot, but Edward is a gentleman vampire to the hilt. His self-possession is admirable, astounding even, and also, if you ask me, rather tedious.

My first impression of Eclipse was that of a whole lot of heavy breathing and heaving chests capped inevitably with the breathers and heavers having to metaphorically slap each other with cold towels. I guess all that self-control is kinda sweet, especially coming from a boy who’s really hundreds of years old. However, as I started to lose count of the scenes in which Edward firmly but kindly stops Bella from ripping his clothes off, the word “tease” started to occur to me.

No, no, not Edward. After all, he is just acting according to the will of his creator. Ms Meyer on the other hand ... well, I’d just like to say that there are a great many teenage girls out there who are going to keep on buying these books until Edward and Bella finally do the wild thing.

Meyer, a practising Mormon, has likened the conflicts and challenges faced by her vampire characters to what human teens have to experience in real life. True enough, but I remember being a teenager and I really don’t think that most fans of this series would give a damn about Edward’s inner demons if he weren’t cute.

Is there more to Eclipse than Bella and Edward’s romance? Well, Jacob makes his presence felt more than ever and the rogue vampires are closing in. It looks like Bella is in for a bloody (or even bloodless) graduation, but can you blame the girl for finding it hard to concentrate on werewolves and possible violent death while the monster of her dreams goes on ad nauseum about saving “it” for marriage?

Poor Bella. The desire to find out if she gets her ... erm ... heart’s desire was what kept me turning pages. Obviously, as much as sex sells, abstinence keeps one coming back for more. That’s what Meyer’s books seem to say, anyway.

Bella: She's such a tease!