Good Books ~ 2012

If the books I loved best this year had one common thread, it was that they were populated by good men.

The Book Thief.  We were in Chicago and The Book Thief  was their big city/ all city read. I’d started it once years earlier and didn't get far. This time I was struck immediately. The voice reminded me of Jonathan Safran Foer’s in that the author Markus Zusak is a chance-taker, a writer whose words collect and gather and move about in ways that are new, a writer who has Death narrate the book, Death who sees and speaks in colors. The focus of the book is Liesel who comes to live with a sharp-tongued foster mother named Rosa Hubermann and her foster father or Papa, Hans Hubermann. He was, to the world, “an unspecial person,”  barely visible, but Liesel saw immediately all he was, that his eyes were made of “kindness and silver” and that “Hans Hubermann was worth a lot.” He made the book for me.

Hans played the accordion, breathing it to life; he taught Liesel to read, encouraged her art, told funny stories, kept her safe as the Holocaust raged on around them.  “Trust was accumulated quickly, due primarily to the brute strength of the man’s gentleness, his thereness” (Zusak 35).

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce.  I’d heard about this book on NPR and liked the premise, that a man in his 60’s, whose life had grown quite small, whose marriage had been foundering for years, receives a letter from an old friend. She tells him she is dying and while he sets off to the post to mail a letter to her, he decides to keep walking. He later decides that he will walk all the 500 miles to see her, telling her to wait, to stay alive until he can get there.  The book unfolds at a walker’s pace, a lovely, sometimes sad, always thoughtful meandering, as if we are walking along with him, seeing the sights, meeting the people he does. His world begins to expand. So does his wife Maureen’s; she is back home.

Harold made me think about how having faith in something or someone can prop us up and push us forward. He reminded me too about that magic part of living, that there are second chances and third and fourth chances too. What will we make of them?

The Round House. Joe, who narrates Louise Erdrich’s new novel, wants to be a good man as he grows but he also wants to avenge a crime against his mother. From the start he is earnest; he’s real. He is thirteen, a member of the Ojibwe tribe, wrapped securely in his family of three, mother, father, Joe.  Something tragic happens to upend who they each are and all that they are together.  The world beyond the reservation won’t step in; justice, he feels, is left up to him. His is a heartbreaking and messy quest, a terrible but understandable yearning to fix what is broken.
 
The last good man I met (again) this reading season was Fezziwig  in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I like rereading the novella every few years around the holidays, mostly for him. Scrooge is being escorted back to his earlier life by the ghost of Christmas past. He stops in where he was once a clerk, at Fezziwig’s firm. It’s Christmas Eve and old Fezziwig cries, “Hilli-ho,” and gets his two young clerks to stop working and to clear the place out for a party for the office and for friends and family from all around. There’s dancing, and more dancing “and cake…a great piece of Cold roast … mince pies…” (Dickens 42) and unfettered joy all around. After the party, Ebenezer and the other clerk talk and talk about what a man that Fezziwig is.

The ghost can’t make sense of it and says, “A small matter to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.”

               Scrooge, looking down at the scene says, “Small!”

               “Why! Is it not? He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money. ..Is that so much that he deserves this praise?”  the spirit asks.
              “It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count `em up: what then? The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune” (44).

           “He has the power to render us happy or unhappy, to make our service light or burdensome…" That line, these characters, will walk around with me for a while.