Excerpt from The New Yorker Book Bench Blog:

Larsson’s murder mystery follows the travails of Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist in Stockholm who has been unjustly convicted of libelling a financial baron. Faced with jail time and strapped for cash, he accepts a business proposal from an octogenarian millionaire who lives in a remote village. The proposal: to move to the village and try to solve the mystery of the disappearance of the millionaire’s niece thirty years before. Blomkvist’s story eventually entwines with that of Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old hacker and social misfit who has a tattoo of a dragon on her shoulder.

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” which is translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland, is the first book in a trilogy. Larsson handed in all three manuscripts to his publisher before his death four years ago, at the age of fifty.

I’m reading it.

I almost put it down a couple dozen times, but pushed through. Page 210 was the tipping point; and now, at 295, I find myself reading in a frenzy underneath my desk at work!

I expect I’ll be done Saturday.

For a chuckle in the meantime, read Nora Ephron’s parody: The Girl Who Fixed the Umlat

1. The Book Thief – As the New York Times wrote: “Markus Zusak has not really written ‘Harry Potter and the Holocaust.’ It just feels that way.” Who can argue with that?
2. The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing – Written by a Cornell Alumna, every character and plot development felt eerily familiar and alltogether wonderful.
3. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Having never before read a book about September 11th, this was the perfect stepping stone.

The novel explores the Vel’ d’Hiv’ round-up in Paris on July 16th and 17th, 1942. Over the course of two days, the French police took 12,884 victims—including 4,051 children. Six-year-old Sarah tells her heartbreaking story first hand, while a modern-day journalist named Julia learns about the mass round-up and about Sarah herself. I think that I was so deeply touched because the female characters resonated with me on many levels.

While I won’t ruin the entire book by telling you the key’s significance, there were a few other things that I found most interesting in this book:

• The unbelievable number of children that the French—not German—police took.
• The number of French onlookers and organizers, their willingness to ignore the events as they happened, and their ability to deny them so many years later.
• How Sarah eventually came to live a lie; she moved to America and fully reinvented herself without an ounce of allusion to her true identity.

Click here for more information about the Vel’ d’Hiv’ round-up, and be sure to watch this brief interview with the author of Sarah’s Key, Tatiana de Rosnay:

Lily endures excruciating pain in order to have her feet bound. What reasons are given for this dangerous practice?

Having a wife with bound feet was a status symbol for Chinese men, and, consequently, having bound feet increased a woman’s chances of marriage into a wealthier household. Women took great pride in their feet, which were considered not only beautiful and erotic, but also their best and most important feature.

In addition, because there was such a severe discrepency between the worlds occupied by men and by women, the former thought it to be most important that their wives and daughters stay in their rightful domain: inside the house. Perfectly bound feet, which were difficult to achieve and hardly easy to walk on, kept women “in their place,” further emphasizing the divide.

It can be used to write letters, songs, autobiographies, lessons on womanly duties, prayers to the goddess, and, of course, popular stories.  It can be written with brush and ink on paper or on a fan; it can be embroidered onto a handkerchief or woven into cloth.  It can and should be sung before an audience of other women and girls, but it can also be something that is read and treasured alone.  But the two most important rules are these: Men must never know that it exists, and men must not touch it in any form.  (See, 25)

I’m about half way through the book and expect to finish in the next couple of days, so there are many more details to come.  For now though, I find this secret language extremely interesting.  Here are a few links for further reading:

Wikipedia

Omniglot

Guardian.co.uk

Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mother’s loneliness. Believing that she might discover it in an old book her mother is lovingly translating, she sets out in search of its author. Across New York an old man named Leo Gursky is trying to survive a bit longer. He spends his days dreaming of the lost love who, sixy years ago in Poland, inspired him to write a book. And although he doesn’t know it yet, that book also survived: crossing oceans and generations, and changing lives…. —Nicole Krauss

This is the summary on the back of Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love, which I just finished this morning.  It’s engaging and imaginative, but a truly complicated book to explain succinctly—a story within a story that has many different narrators and lives paralleling one another—so I’ll leave you with that little overview. 

The first character you meet is Leo Gursky, an elderly man who is perpetually afraid of dying, and more than that, of going unnoticed.  He lives alone in Manhattan.  And while he’s eccentrically entertaining, I secretly cringed at the thought of reading an entirely linear novel about the time between now and his imminent death, punctuated with occasional flashbacks to his childhood in Poland and memories of his beloved Alma.

Au contraire!

Gursky, like almost all of Krauss’s characters, is a writer of sorts.  As the plot thickens and history unravels, he and the reader discover together that “The History of Love” is actually a namesake for the book in hand.  It is first the title of a novel that Gursky penned in his youth, meant to be held by an emigrated friend.  Zvi Litvinoff copies and publishes “The History of Love” in his own name, while to the best of Gursky’s knowledge, Litvinoff lost the pages in a flood.  The printed book touches many people’s lives and one such person has a daughter, naming her for the Alma in Gursky/Litvinoff’s “The History of Love.” While Gursky’s history unfolds, this young Alma embarks on a local adventure in search of the Alma for whom she was named.

Half of The History of Love is in Alma’s voice, which is quite whimsical and fresh next to Gursky’s.  And after many intricate developments—no need to ruin the whole plot—their two stories come together, both physically and theoretically.

Alma’s younger brother is an interesting guy.  He thinks he’s a Lamed Vavnik.  A what?  Yeah, I had no idea either.  But one of my favorite things about this book is the Jewish ribbon that wraps around everything and ties seemingly loose ends together.

Final thoughts: The History of Love is heartbreaking, hilarious, and beautifully written.  Every character has a unique voice and a distinct purpose.  It will make you think about parts of your life and about the people you share it with in completely new ways.

In western culture, children typically take their father’s surname.  The Cheyenne Indians, on the other hand, are a matrilineal tribe, which means that a husband will join his wife’s family, and all children are raised accordingly.  In 1854, a Northern Cheyenne chief sought to capitalize on this way of life to assist with the Indians’ hitherto abysmal assimilation into white culture.  He approached President Ulysses S. Grant with a request for one thousand white women as wives for his tribesmen.  The proposal called for the women to birth interracial children with the expectation that they would descend matrilineally and into white civilization.  One thousand Indian horses were offered in exchange.  In reality, this arrangement was immediately rejected; in One Thousand White Women, Jim Fergus imagines that U. S. Grant approved the deal.

The protagonist, May Dodd, was raised in an affluent Chicago home.  She fell in love with one of her father’s employees, had two children out of wedlock, and was subsequently sent to an asylum for exhibiting what her family believed to be uncontrollable promiscuity.  The “Brides for Indians” program, as the aforementioned treaty came to be called, offered May relief from her formidable fate.  The arrangement stipulated that the white women were only legally bound to their Cheyenne husbands for two years, should they decide to leave.  This route, although quite tortuous, was nonetheless a route to freedom for May who would otherwise spend a paradoxical eternity as an institutionalized sane woman. 

With the ultimate goal of reuniting with her children, May volunteers for the program and she is joined by a collection of misfits, criminals, adventurists, and even some truly mentally ill women.  Through a series of journal entries and letters, she shares intimate accounts of her life as Chief Little Wolf’s wife.  Through May, Fergus paints a portrait of Native American history, politics, religion, and love at this pivotal time in history—before the final press of the white man’s civilization.  And through it all, May finds herself caught between two worlds, neither one superior in the end.