August 27, 2023
A Bakery in Paris
By Aimie K Runyan
Published by William Morrow Paperbacks (Published: August 1, 2023), Paperback – $18.99, 384 pages
Paperback edition
Kindle edition
Reviewed by David Arndt
One of the many things Paris is known for is its many boulangeries. From humble baguettes and breads to decadent and delicious desserts, this famous city has supplied locals and tourists with many a fulfilling treat. In Aimie K Runyan’s A Bakery in Paris, the author explores two women’s love of baking from different time periods, and how their passion and skill help their families and communities.
Lisette Vigneau is the daughter of a wealthy Parisian upper class family, and her story debuts at the end of the Second Empire. Disillusioned by the shallow lifestyle her family embraces, this rebellious spirit longs to find some measure of independence and meaning. When a National Guardsman enters her life, she is swept up in his determination to help his fellow downtrodden worker. She runs away from her family with their frivolous social ambitions and a groom seeking a compliant bride and joins the guardsman in Montmartre. As the siege of Paris under the Prussians continues and life becomes increasingly desperate, Lisette manages to open a bakery to supply a lifeline of sustenance to the Parisians starving around her.
The other story is that of Micheline Chartier, an orphan in care of her two younger sisters after the devastating events of World War II. The global conflict has ended and routines have started down the path to return to normalcy, yet her life remains in turmoil. With her father deceased and her mother missing, Micheline is desperate to find a way to support her younger sisters, shielding them from the deprivations of misery and borderline poverty. With the encouragement and financial assistance of a devoted neighbor, she enrolls in a baking school, determined to open a bakery in the abandoned restaurant beneath their apartment, thus obtaining financial independence and success for herself and her sisters.
A Bakery in Paris is a compelling novel recounting the stories of two women from distinctly different backgrounds striving to overcome the challenges of their respective societies. Yet it is also a generational novel, as Lisette is the grandmother of Micheline. The book is one of trials and tribulations and how the characters overcome them, finding purpose, success and love in order to overcome their difficulties. Filled with mouthwatering descriptions of pastries and familial recipes of baked goods, this story will capture the heart of romantics, bread lovers and Francophiles alike.
KALA
by Colin Walsh
Published by Doubleday (Published: July 25, 2023), Hardback – $28, 416 pages
Hardback edition
Paperback edition
Kindle edition
Reviewed by Penny A Parrish
Memories of our high school years … for most of us there were times of great joy and fun, times of uncertainty, times of belonging, and times of being an outsider. That reflects the thoughts and emotions of the six 15-year old kids in 2003 who we meet in this intriguing book.
It is now 2018, and a wedding has brought them together again, to the town of Kinlough on the coast of Ireland. But not all of the teens from fifteen years ago are there and the author slowly reveals why.
Chapters are told in the voices of three of the teens, who go back and forth between memories and the present. Mush is still in Kinlough, working in his mom’s café where he serves lattes and cappuccinos to locals and tourists alike. He lives for closing time, when he sits at a window, drinks beer, and watches the world outside, unwilling to show the horrible scars that cover half of his face.
Helen now lives in Canada, where she is a journalist. She has barely been in touch with her sister or father since she left years ago. Why did she leave, and why is her father now marrying the mother of one of her teenage friends?
Other chapters are voiced by Joe, the star student, the brilliant athlete who became a rock star. His return to Kinlough has him surrounded by groupies, since he’s the one who “made it.” Or did he?
If there were six friends in 2003, that means we are not hearing from three others in this book. It becomes clear early on that the glue that held the group together was Kala, who disappeared at age 15. No trace, no body, no answers.
Aiden is also missing and we learn he is dead, but we don’t know how or why. The sixth friend, Aoife, once an integral part of the group, has severed ties with those remaining. Why?
I loved so many things about this book. The plot kept me turning pages and the writing is beautiful. As Helen thinks about Kala, “Grief is like falling in love; it is always narcissistic. Some catastrophe cuts through your life and immediately you reshape the world to make this disaster the secret heartbeat of all things, the buried truth of the universe.”
Walsh is Irish, and his writing reflects his homeland. I had to look up several words and phrases, and I now know what “shifting” is (google it). This book is also intriguing with the actual font – the title page shows the single word KALA split in half horizontally – a white space between the top of the letters and the bottom. Like she’s there but not there. It’s a perfect symbol of the story itself.
For those of us with mixed memories of our teenage years, who drift into and out of the lives of friends who once surrounded us, this stunning debut novel with heartbreak and horror, will ring true to who we are now and who we have been.
I Will Greet the Sun Again
by Khashar J, Khabushani
Published by Hogarth (Published: August 1, 2023), Hardback – $27, 240 pages
Hardback edition
Kindle edition
Reviewed by Ashely Riggleson
Before the publisher contacted me, I had never heard of Khashayar J. Khabushani’s debut novel, I Will Greet the Sun Again. But this quiet and unassuming work deserves to be recognized. I loved it!
This bildungsroman follows a young boy called K who is nine years old as the novel opens. He is from a family of Iranian immigrants, and he and his bothers want nothing more than to be American boys. But, although K wishes to fit in, he knows from an early age that he is different. His complicated and abusive father gambles rather than works. And there is more. He notices other men in a way that sets him apart, and he has a crush on his best friend, Johnny. While the love of K’s mother and brothers sustains him, K struggles to navigate these parts of his life. And things become even more complicated when K’s father discovers that his wife, a fiercely independent woman, meets other men (romantically or platonically? The difference does not seem to matter) in the ordinary course of her work and school days. Reacting against this discovery, K’s father takes the three boys back to Iran, hoping to curb his wife’s ambitions by forcing her to return to their more conservative country of origin.
Readers quickly discover that, although K’s mother loves her children, she will not be cowed. She does not come to Iran, and what happens over K’s time there leaves an indelible mark. (Readers should be warned that sexual abuse of a child is a key part of the plot.) And the outcome of this novel initially seems that it will be very bleak indeed. It soon becomes apparent, however, that though K and his mother are worlds apart, she has not forgotten her sons.
As Westerners it seems that readers are taught to view Iran as a dark place in which there are few freedoms. Khabushani does not shy away from this perception. He shows that Iran is flawed. But he refuses to be reductive. Instead, I Will Greet the Sun Again, shows Iran in all its many facets, depicting this oft maligned nation as imperfect but also beautiful.
This restrained and quiet novel also explores very personal themes, love (romantic and familial), how trauma impacts children and their relationships, migration, queerness, identity, and more. Yet Khabushani also uses this text to explore national issues. He confronts readers with some difficult truths, critiquing, among other things, the pervasive idea that the so-called “American Dream” is available to everyone. (K’s father, in particular, suffers when his admiring portrait of America is replaced with a darker reality. Though Khabushani in no way condones his abusive behavior, his depiction of K’s father is not reductive either.)
My admiration of this novel only increases when I realize that Khabushani has managed to convey all of this through the eyes of a child narrator. K is neither too naïve nor too perceptive, and this perfect balance increases the novel’s emotional heft. And, while there are many extraordinary events in this novel—events most readers would not be able to imagine—what strikes me most is how ordinary these boys are. Khabushani captures the simultaneous magic and pain of growing up and trying to see what kind of person you want to be.
I Will Greet the Sun Again is a short novel that covers a huge span of time, and yet it never feels rushed, and readers will not feel that they are missing out on important events. Instead, Khabushani takes a minimalist approach, and his prose is simple without being simplistic. Rather, this deceptively straightforward and poignant novel pulled on my heartstrings in a way I did not expect. I was so invested in the fates of these boys that now, days after finishing, a piece of my heart remains in its pages, and I cannot wait to see what Khabushani does next.
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When illiterates and literates agree to quit being human – We have sealed our demise
by Martin Davis
FOUNDER AND EDITOR
In a previous professional life, I was immersed in the world of monastic scribes.
The study of long-deceased scribes and scripts is valuable if for no other reason than this. It reminds us that reading and writing does more than transmit culture. It sits at the core of our humanity.
To the uninitiated, the attraction can be hard to explain. But to those who’ve held 1,000-plus year-old documents in their hands, and poured over the clues left by those who wrote them to identify individual scribes and follow their careers, the experience is intoxicating.
It was a world open to very few – both then and now. The average person in medieval Europe couldn’t read, much less access the chanceries where the monks worked their magic. Today, far too few people – even those fluent in Latin – know how to read the texts left behind by scribal hands. Paleography (no offense, but look it up) is considered an “impractical” discipline that is frequently skewered as high-browed and elitist with no practical application. That is, there are no jobs one can do with it. (A statement which reflects the limited worldview of those who make it of paleography – as well as history, English, and related liberal arts disciplines.)
The study of long-deceased scribes and scripts is valuable if for no other reason than this. It reminds us that reading and writing does more than transmit culture. It sits at the core of our humanity.
The Driving Force of Humanity
The development of writing is no small turning point in time. It marks the beginning of what we know as history – some 5,000 years ago. Our earliest records are mundane – mostly business transactions. They give us names and the products people exchanged and other useful information. Even in this most base form, however, writing tells us a great deal about people long past and how they lived.
But some 4,000 years ago, we took a step forward. We decided to write down not just the mundane, but stories. Stories that explain who we are. Stories like The Epic of Gilgamesh.
It’s a story that explores the meaning of life. As Gilgamesh says:
Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands.
The pessimism of this author more than four millennia ago still resonates with those whose religious views are defined by evangelical strains of Christianity – a tradition that suggests the only meaningful life is that which comes after you’ve lived.
Just as Gilgamesh expressed “Life … you will never find” on this earth, today’s evangelicals denounce the body as sinful and find solace only in escaping the pain of this life for the unbridled joy of a life beyond. Evangelicals, of course, are hardly alone.
The same pessimism infects many strains of the world’s religious traditions.
And why not? It’s an experience of life that is as old as the earliest writing that attempts to explain the meaning of life itself.
Trading meaning and thinking for … AI?
For more than 4,000 years, we have written to make sense of who we are.
The answers we arrive at are far less important, however, than the exercise we go through to put into words what we feel and conclude. Just because Gilgamesh reached conclusions that are shared by many today does not mean people have stopped searching. For no one answer will ever satisfy another. These are answers we must ultimately find for ourselves.
And it’s in the act of writing – whether in Mesopotamia pressing wedges into clay, in medieval chanceries inking words on to vellum, in putting pen to paper, or in stroking keys into a computer – we discover ourselves. And in so doing, we find our connections with all those before us who used writing to explore and define the greatest question of all.
This quest – to know who we are and why we are here – is what education has ultimately been about for more than 4,000 years.
But in the days of Gilgamesh, and through the days of the medieval scribes, and down to the 19th century, education was limited to those in power. Literacy was the glass ceiling that kept the greatest act of being human – using writing to discover ourselves – from ever reaching the hands of the masses.
For all the ills of capitalism, however, its greatest gift was to give that gift of literacy to everyone. Without it, work could not be done. So the keys to our humanity were passed to all.
Suddenly, those who had been denied the ability to write, found their voices, and their own definitions of life. And our understanding of the depths of the human experience has been expanding exponentially ever since.
And now, standing within site of the summit – universal literacy – we are willfully walking away from the summit, and handing our humanity over. To whom or to what, we don’t even know.
We aren’t being taken over by AI. We are blindly and willingly handing the tools of our own destruction to the executioner.
I reference, of course, the book burners and the book banners. Intellectually weak, insecure in their own humanity, but granted power by an equally illiterate populace, these people are acting like the elitists of the pre-capitalist world. They will deny the written word, and dumb learning down to filling in test bubbles, for no other purpose than to retain their own feeble grip on power.
To re-work Karl Marx a bit:
Illiteracy – not religion – is now the opiate of the masses.
More disturbing, however, is the willingness of those who should know better – those who have directly benefitted from a life of literacy – to surrender the art of writing to artificial intelligence.
We aren’t being taken over by AI. We are blindly and willingly handing the tools of our own destruction to the executioner.
And here-in lies the problem.
Yes – the book burners and book banners are fools. Their ignorance so overwhelming that they would force the rest of us to be as stupid.
But today, the literate are also becoming fools. They are willing to trade their very souls, just to avoid the painful process of learning to write. The one tool that allows each of us to discover our humanity.
And when the book burners and the literate have conspired effectively to convince us that reading – and the act of writing – are unnecessary ills that get in the way of a fulfilling life, we are surely staring down a world as bleak and as frightening as that Gilgamesh feared.
For when we cease to read; when we cease to write:
Life, which we look for, we will never find. For when the gods created man, they let illiteracy be his share, and the keys to life – the written word – withheld in their own hands,
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