Three more
Did I say I was going to get better at blogging about book after I finished them? sorry.
HEAVEN LAKE by John Dalton
CRAWLING AT NIGHT by Nani Power
THAT EYE, THE SKY by Tim Winton
HEAVEN LAKE by John Dalton
I didn’t really enjoy reading this book too much but mom had loaned it to me and wondered what I would think of it. I always have had some degree of difficulty with people going overseas with the sole purpose of trying to convert people to Christianity even though I was raised Christian and believe in God. This book is about a man who leaves Illinois and goes to the small town of Toulio, Taiwan and offers free English lessons with a Bible study afterwards. The Bible study isn’t completely compulsory but the idea is to attract people in the town with the idea of learning first. The people in the town identify Vincent Saunders, the main character as a “Jesus teacher” But Vincent soon finds himself in a great deal of trouble because of the choices he’s made in the town with people who trusted him. He must confront these choices but pretty much makes other choices to try to get out of the trouble he has gotten himself into.
Vincent travels to China at one point as part of a choice he makes to earn him some money and get out of Toulio but missing is a real sense of lyric poetry about the landscape that captures the beauty Dalton is trying to describe. He is perhaps at his best when describing the human tragedies that he sees occurring along the way. In a sense, I felt Heaven Lake was also meant to be a character study but with an unbelievable character change occurring a third of the way through the book. I felt this book would have undoubtedly been better if it had been written from the perspective of a townsperson in Toulio or by an author from there. It was clear Dalton did some research but ultimately it was not the perspective of a man from Missouri that I really longed to hear. I will say that the highlight of the book was the confrontations between Vincent and Alec, a Scotsman living in Toulio also teaching English who becomes an unlikely friend. The anger and bitterness expressed by Alec whenever he is mistaken for English is pretty priceless and reminded me that I should re-read Trainspotting.
CRAWLING AT NIGHT by Nani Power
Set partly in NYC and partly in Japan, Crawling at Night delves into the lives of two main characters and a couple of minor ones. The characters are connected in their drifting and in the sense of the fact that they have lived through some personal tragedies, if only they could just help eachother out and let themselves change; stop drifting. Each chapter begins with a new menu to tell us what to expect as the perspectives alternate and change and because one of the (secondary) characters, Xiu Xiu is a prostitute in Japan and another a prostitute in NYC, it can at times be rather lewd. As far as the two primary characters, their main issue is that they aren’t facing up to the truth of their past. They have run away or chosen to fill their lives with bad habits instead. Until they can come to terms with the past tragedies of their lives as well as the mistakes they have made, the reader senses they will never change as people. Of course, to tell you whether they change would sort of spoil the entire ending, wouldn’t it? Oh and there’s a nice little twist at the end.
THAT EYE, THE SKY by Tim Winton
Set in Austalia with a very poetic metaphorical twinge, That Eye, the Sky is a book told from the first person point of view of Ort, an adolescent who most of the other characters feel has a cognitive disability. I would say it is possible that he may have a learning disability but I think the real issue here is that he is just different from the others around him. He has a really creative imagination, which helps make the book a worthwhile read and I think he is on the search for the meaningful things that others like his sister and mother don’t notice. While the main character deals with the perils of his freshman year of high school, the real struggle is that his father early on the book was in a bad accident and is now left with only the ability to perform the most basic body functions. His father is unresponsive and the family struggles with the burden of taking care of him as well as his grandmother, who Ort notices is “into herself.” Caring for two dependents in poverty in the country of which a vast approaching city keeps spreading closer to is a large burden until almost miraculously a stranger offers help. The stranger’s mtives and how the family changes is an interesting read. The ending makes it even more worthwhile. Oh, how I lve a book with a good ending!
(now playing: The Czars: Goodbye)