The Man from Beijing and I Capture the Castle

This month my lady's bookclub chose two excellent books to read - The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell, and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.  Vastly different, they both satisfied.

The Man from Beijing is my second Mankell read so far, the first being Faceless Killers (the first book of the Kurt Wallander mysteries).  Beijing is a stand-alone story with characters unfamiliar from Mankell's other books with the exception of the cold weather and countryside.  I appreciated the Kurt Wallander book as a true depiction of mystery solving via methodical (and often slow) police procedure.  This book contains minimal procedure and requires suspension of disbelief to follow the tale.  It is widesweeping (in geography and motivations) as the reader is taken from Denmark to London, Beijing and 1800's United States.  It is a far-fetched story of revenge, clashes of culture and tough decisions regarding whom to trust.  I appreciated the central character's authenticity but was disappointed by the number of coincidences that led to solving the case.  Ultimately, I found this a better story for learning something about early America and modern-day China than a mystery.  Mankell has his own impressive style and research behind the book again which is why I plan to return to his tales and I would still recommend the story for fiction readers, but I think die-hard mystery fans would find it troublesome. 

I Capture the Castle has gained many fans as a result of its recent re-printing.  The book was out-of-print for decades after its introduction to the world after WWII.  Thank goodness - It is a delight! 

I've read numerous books in the past year taking place in England so the eccentricities of the characters are nothing new.   Aside from the characteristic scenery, mouldering architecture and quirky characters though, this book could be a wonderful coming-of-age story for any land.  The narrator Cassandra voices the tale through her diary which is a difficult task for an author to pull off effectively.  She succeeds in injecting the exuberance, ecstasy and agony of teenagedom throughout Cassandra's tale and the ending was satisfyingly real (which means unsatisfying unlike most rom-coms today).  I highly recommend reading this book - especially for the literature lovers out there as she loves alluding to Jane Austen, quoting poetry (did everyone memorize poetry in the first half of the century!?) or starting interesting debates such as "Would you rather have a little Jane in your Catherine or a little Catherine in your Jane?" - now really, don't we all want to have that discussion?!

Two Books I'm Telling Everyone to Read

These haven't much to do with each other except that they both have amazing voices and subtly powerful stories of mystical quality. I've been telling (okay, haranguing and often forcing my own copies upon) everyone I know to read these two, and each time they stop answering phone calls, e-mails or smoke signals until they finish.

The first is Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, a tiny book about two educated, city boys relocated to the backwoods of China as part of the Cultural Revolution. They stumble across a suitcase of illicit Western classics and come of age accompanied by nighttime readings of French literature and daytime attempts to woo the local beauty. The tale is so tiny and light it was over almost as soon as it started but along the way I realized the beautiful writing and very human tale had swept me up and I wasn't ready for it to end.

The second is a National Jewish Book Award winner I tripped over by accident at my beloved Powells Bookstore. The book is The World to Come by Dara Horn and the central family is introduced via the theft of a Chagall painting from the local Jewish Art Museum (security against bomb threats, little security for actual art) by a recently divorced man who remembers the painting from his childhood. I never dog-ear (shudder at the thought!) but I used receipts, notepad pages & ribbons to mark passages to read over and over again for the sheer pleasure of the lovely thought(s) (on love, family, death, rebirth) captured in a paragraph.

One such paragraph, "When twins are in the womb and one of them is born - the twin who remains behind watches his sole companion vanish and suffers an agony almost too devastating to bear. Only a moment later, he will understand that his twin has not died, but quite the opposite, that his vanished friend is closer to him than he can know. This, is also the way of real death and the world to come. Just because we think people have disappeared doesn't mean they have. They are closer than we think.

Sara was the younger Ziskind twin by a matter of minutes. But even before she heard this story, Sara had been aware of a silence within her bones, a residual sorrow that flowed quietly in her bood - the legacy of the ten minutes before her life began, when her twin brother left her behind. Those ten minutes also gave her something that few others had: a knowledge, a hard fact that she carried within her like a dark and polished stone, that people who were supposed to have disappeared really hadn't. She had seen Ben disappear and knew better. Vanished people were a breath away. One only needed to breathe."

In case you're not onhand to foist these books upon your persons, please be advised: YOU MUST READ THESE BOOKS - THEY ARE NOT TO BE MISSED!