Author Mark Munger (Cloquet River Press)

Zenith City: Stories from Duluth by Michael Fedo (2014. University of Minnesota Press. 9780816691104)

I was looking for a linear memoir so I bought this book. Why? Like all writers of a certain age, I am thinking about what my life has been, what I’ve experienced, the choices I’ve made, and whether in all that confusion, upheaval, surprise, lust,  loss, and love, there are pearls of wisdom and/or stories that might strike readers as worthy of repetition. I should’ve read the back jacket of this book before I ordered it from the Bookstore at Fitger’s. Or done a bit more research. While there are indeed elements of autobiographical history strewn throughout this slim book, the pieces are essentially stand-alone essays, not connected chapters of Mr. Fedo’s well-lived life. And in that difference lies my disappointment.

Not that there are not some very, very powerful, humorous, or evocative tales within this volume. Though a bit off-putting, the beginning piece, “This is Duluth”, has some fine, fine moments. It reminds me, quite frankly, of discussions I had back in my adolescence with my buddies, when, having found my father’s stash of Windsor and having polished off the quart, the three of us, in our newly-found intelligence, composed a letter to the editors of the Duluth News Tribune about what a shit hole of a place Duluth was in the 1970s. That, as Fedo later reflects, has changed a bit. His introductory story, though, was a reminder of the blue collar/rust belt city that formed my youth.

“Miss Wedel and the Rats”, the second piece in the collection, felt truncated and flat. I’m not certain where the story went, but it did. “The Hill”, on the other hand, had me grinning with my own recollections of trying to climb some of Duluth’s steeper slopes in the ice coated depths of winter. Probably my favorite essay in the book, which essentially has absolutely nothing to do with the author, and hence, is an unlikely piece to be found in something bearing the moniker (on the back cover description) “”Fedo’s memories” because, well, there is nothing in the story that comes from the author’s life or memory, is “Joe Dimaggio”. That essay is a recounting of the slugger’s infatuation and eventual marriage to Duluth girl, Dorothy Olson. It’s tightly written, well crafted, and worth reading as a stand-alone story. It is also interesting to note that the Dimaggio essay had not been previously published, at least as disclosed in the “Publishing History” section at the end of the book. I liked the story a great deal, but, as indicated, in my search for a well-crafted memoir about Duluth well, the essay didn’t fit the parameters of my quest. Maybe that’s my fault. Maybe not.

Of all the pieces in the book, “Cousin Jean” struck me as the most authentic, the most revelatory in terms of memoir or personal history. The sadness depicted in Fedo’s retelling of his relative’s brush with greatness and subsequent fall, and his interactions with Jean over the years, was touching.

In the end, Fedo is a solid writer but I am uncertain what this collection was trying to accomplish. There are tales from the author’s youth that fit well in a memoir. There are other pieces, such as “A Life Formed By Lynching”, that don’t. Fedo’s recounting of his work on the book that eventually became The Lynchings in Duluth, and his chronicling of the actual event and the book’s journey to publication is important as a study of self-publishing, small presses, and charlatans as well, of course, of the horrendous history behind the tale. The piece is so strong, I would have enjoyed an expanded version of the trials and tribulations Michael went through in creating that book, rather than spending time reading a story about pyloric stenosis.

After finishing the last of the essays in my tent in the BWCA, I came to the conclusion that, for the most part, the stories told in this volume have merit but I remain uncertain as to whether they make sense in a collected work.

3 and 1/2 stars out of 5.

Symmetry: The Talking Stick Vol. 23 (2014. Jackpine Writer’s Bloc. ISBN 9781928690269)

Every year, I have a table at the Northwoods Arts Festival and Book Fair held in Hackensack, MN. Over the span of a decade, I’ve met many members of the local writers group, Jackpine Writer’s Bloc, and on one occasion I conducted a self-publishing workshop for those folks, trying to impart the little knowledge that I have about publishing, marketing, and the like. Great folks. Some fine writers. So, whenever I’m at the festival, I pick up a copy of the latest volume of The Talking Stick, Jackpine’s compendium of fiction, non-fiction prose, and poetry complied as a “best of” collective effort for the year. Because it is a volume featuring unknown writers (much like me), the included pieces are often uneven: gleaming gems cast amongst rougher, less polished stones. This year’s volume is no exception.

First, the highlights. “Walking the Line”, a short story by Cheyenne Marco is a fine, fine piece of fiction. It’s not difficult to understand why Cheyenne’s tale was the winner in the fiction category:

She always walked the tracks when she needed to think. She mounted the rail, walking the thin line like a tightrope walker…Every time she did she saw the same thing: her clothes falling away. Zack’s sure hands on her hips, his lips against her neck…(S)he held onto these moments…calling them to memory with fondness and a flush she could feel all the way to her toes. Until the strip turned pink.

See what I mean? “Josephine” a short story by Paisley Kaufman is nearly as well-crafted and evocative. In the non-fiction category, though not adjudged a winner, my favorite essay of the lot is “Touching Wild” by Michael Forbes. I’m sure I enjoyed the imagery so much because, well, it’s familiar and something I wish I’d written:

I walked far upstream before entering the river. The evening was still too bright for the trout and too hot for me so I stood in the water, waiting. While my fly drifted in lazy S-curves below me, a summer-red doe parted the green curtain of grass…

Anyone who has fished for browns or brookies in Minnesota can relate. I certainly did.

Not being a poet, I hesitate to delve into critiquing verse. But “Tornado”, a poem by Lina Belar, a piece also not recognized by the judges, sang like a winner to me:

Here at the center there is nothing

undamaged, unturned, unskewed…

Unskewed. What a marvelous word choice!

Other selections are as equally powerful, though there are some, sadly, that do not reach the level of expertise or imagination established by the best of this collection. I won’t list the poems, essays, or short stories that fail to meet the mark, because, quite frankly, who am I to judge? But I will say this: After reading through this slender volume, I was struck that there was a sameness to many of the pieces, fictional or not, that reflected cancer, death, departure, loss and the like. Of course, in the end, those are universal themes that most writers rely upon as linchpins for their work. But I found this lack of variety in theme somewhat boring and repetitive. The book contains good work, for certain, by many of the Jackpine writers I know as friends and acquaintances. But I can only hope that next year’s judges seek out a larger variety of themes and topics to flesh out an otherwise noble endeavor.

Peace.

Mark

3 1/2 stars out of 5

A Stricken Field by Martha Gellhorn (2011. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226286969)

Known as a brilliant war correspondent who covered the Spanish Civil War with her lover and eventual husband, Ernest Hemingway, as well as the Winter War in Finland and many other conflicts up to and including Vietnam, Martha Gellhorn’s fiction reads, in this reviewer’s opinion, much differently than analytical reportage. A Stricken Field is, in many ways, Gellhorn’s apology to the Czech people.

Within the book’s structure, Gellhorn adopts the persona of American reporter Mary Douglas to tell the micro story of Hitler’s usurping of Czechoslovakian independence through Douglas’s eyes and those of Rita, a German communist who has had been expelled from Germany and expatriated to Prague only to await further degradation, torture, and eventually, the horrors of the concentration camps. The author explicitly avoids retelling the macro story of Hitler’s rise to power or the larger tensions between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia that fed Hitler’s paranoia and his need a land buffer between Germany and the U.S.S.R..The author’s choice in this regard is a good one: telling an individual tale of dread and sorrow and fear brings home the era of the slow, agonizing dismantlement of much of free and republican Europe by a madman in ways that, for example, my own novel of the war, Sukulaiaset, cannot. With only a small facet of the messy and complex war to cover, Gellhorn’s choice to narrow her focus is deliberate and smartly crafted.

The juxtaposition of the gaiety and fine dining and good wine enjoyed by Douglas and the other American, English, and French reporters covering the story of appeasement-by which England and France turned their collective backs on their treaties with Czechoslovakia, allowing Germany to gobble up the Sudetenland area of Czech soil, a German-speaking area of the Czech Republic Hitler alleged was being discriminated against by the Czechoslovakian government-and the degradation being experienced by Jewish and communist refugees who had fled Germany and the Sudetenland for Prague is well wrought.

This book should not be confused with a Heminway war novel. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, Gellhorn’s attempt to place a feminine touch on Farewell to Arms or For Whom the Bell Tolls. While it seems apparent that Papa had an influence on his lover’s style (the curse, short, declarative patterns of Hemingway’s best writing can be detected throughout this novel), this is very much a cerebral story; a dark, foreboding, and somewhat incomplete rendering of what was happening to Rita and the others who had sought refuge from Hitler in a nation that would soon belong to Hitler. The fictional story displays, in the end, despair and resignation-likely emotions that were indeed prevalent and overarching during the slow, deliberate extinguishment of a free society and its people by evil. Gellhorn’s apology, then, is incomplete as she intended it to be. While we all, in reading such historical fiction tinged with memoir, hope and pray for a white knight, a savior such as Oscar Schindler, to stride onto center stage and save at least one of the protagonists populating this tale, that’ s not reality. Gellhorn as Douglas takes no magnificent or deliberate stand against the Gestapo. In the end, Gellhorn as Mary achieves a small victory of sorts-one that I will leave to readers of this fine novel to discover-but as history is clear, she is unable to save those who looked to her with pleading eyes as she flies to safety.

4 and 1/2 stars out of 5. I will read Gellhorn’s other books, including her war reporting and her short stories, based upon the strength of this novel.

Peace.

Mark

Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones (2013. Ballantine. ISBN 9780345526113)

It was a wonderful gift my son Dylan gave me last Christmas. My hardcover version of this massive chronicle of Henson’s life is inscribed “Here’s a book about another creative person…” That alone should have compelled me to dig into Jones’s work earlier than I did. But, with a constant stack of books in my “to be read” pile, each new treasure must wait its turn. Eventually, I get around to reading anything and everything I’ve bought or been gifted. But, I have to say, had I known how expertly this biography was written, and how much of Henson’s story I once knew but had forgotten, well, I would have moved this tome closer to the top of the pile!

Jim Henson, in a nutshell, comes across in this work as a creative, thoughtful, kind, peaceful, generous soul. Though not Buddhist (he was actually a non-practicing Christian Scientist) Henson is portrayed by the author as being infused with Zen-like patience and inscrutability. This depiction is consistent throughout the narrative; whether from business rivals, his estranged wife Jane (they were separated for decades but never divorced and remained a united force in raising their five children despite Jim’s infidelity and wandering eye), his children, or his co-workers at Henson Associates or its London affiliate, Jim’s eternal goodness shines through. If you are looking for demons and addictions (other than an addiction to love, not to be confused with an addiction to sex), you won’t find it within the pages of this biography.

What makes this book worth reading is its comprehensive examination of the creative process and the history of Sesame Street, Kermit, Miss Piggy, The Muppets, Fraggle Rock, and a litany of other Henson-inspired projects. I’d forgotten that the first season of Saturday Night Live included a mystical, Henson-imagined world as a running segment (short-lived to be sure, but memorable none-the-less.) I didn’t know that now Senator Al Franken from Minnesota had been one of the writers of that SNL experiment, or that Jim Belushi affectionately (as only a Samurai cook could) called the puppets and their human operators “those mucking Fuppets.”

We all likely recall how Henson’s life ended far too young at age 53. The author deals with that chapter in Jim Henson’s life deftly, pulling together eye witness accounts of the Muppeteer’s (Henson hated that term!) last days through interviews with Jane and other Henson family members. But the story of Jim Henson and his wildly imaginative creations isn’t about a sad ending. Ever seen a Muppet production that ends in tears? Not likely. At the conclusion of the book, we’re reminded of the blessings Jim Henson’s mind provided to us, some of which, we don’t even recognize or realize thirty years after the master puppeteer’s passing. Case in point: Last night, my three-year old grandson Adrien was over with his four-month old brother while his parents were on a date. As Adrien ate supper, I wandered up to our extra bedroom looking for a video to occupy the kid’s time. I pulled out one of my family’s favorite collections: Dinosaurs, a series that ran on HBO years ago. What I’d forgotten was that the force behind that show was Brian Henson, Jim’s son and the artistic heir to the Muppet empire. Additionally, as the opening credits for the first episode rolled, there it was: a salute to the genius who started it all back in the 1950s:

In Memory of Jim Henson.

4 and 1/2 star out of 5. An exceptionally thorough read.

Mark

The Settlers by Vilhelm Moberg

(1978. Popular Library. ISBN 978-0873513210)

Not as much sex but lots of its aftermath. That’s a glib way of saying that The Settlers, Moberg’s third novel in this four-part series of Swedish immigration to Minnesota is rooted, in many ways, in the story of how Karl Oskar Nilsson and his wife, Kristina, and their five surviving children adjust to a life of desolation, poverty, hardship, and promise on the shores of Chisago Lake in Minnesota Territory’s St. Croix River Valley. Moberg’s emphasis here is on the domestic: on the day-to-day lives of the Nilssons as they carve a family farm from 160 acres of rock, timber, and brush along the lake’s shoreline and, ultimately, move from sod hut to log cabin and finally, into a proper two-story, timber framed farm home that dwarfs any expectations envious onlookers (or Kristina for that matter) believed possible.

Moberg’s writing style is crisp. The dialogue rings true. There are characters, fully developed and not cardboard cutouts, from heroes (Karl Oskar) to the slightly unsavory (Karl’s adventure and fortune seeking younger brother, Robert) that draw you into the story and keep the pages turning. Set during Minnesota’s tumultuous conversion from mere territory to state (1858), a time of intense political intrigue both nationally (the Civil War is only three years distant) and regionally (competing teams of Democratic and Republican territorial legislators are so at odds, they draft competing state constitutions!), Moberg places the struggles of an immigrant family in their proper historical context, a feature of the book much enjoyed by this history/political science major.

Religion, the fundamentalism of the Swedish Lutheran Church placed against the evangelical zeal of apostate Lutherans and other Protestant denominations (featuring my favorite character in the series, Ulrika, the former prostitute turned Baptist preacher’s wife), is explored here not as an afterthought or an adjunct to the main storyline, but as an integral aspect of early immigrant lives. The building of a local school and the first Swedish Lutheran church in the burgeoning community, all hewn from the hardwoods and rapidly dissipating pines of the wilderness being tamed by the industrious Swedes, is a highlight of narrative in the middle section of the book.

Moberg explores the details of Karl and Kristina’s marriage in a very realistic context: the fact that intimacy, at least for fertile women of childbearing age in the 1850s, invariably led to pregnancy and, if the infant survived the trauma of childbirth at home, another mouth to feed in times of hardship. His depiction of the conflict within a married woman’s mind of that era is realistic, detailed, and compelling as we witness Kristina struggle with how to deal with the inevitable aftermath of coupling with Karl. A brilliant scene, wherein Kristina studies her face in a mirror given to her by Ulrika, is a representative example of such introspection:

As a girl, Kristina had often been told that she was beautiful…But where was the girl who so many times blushed at the words, “You are beautiful!” Where now were her full cheeks with the soft little dimples of laughter? What had become of her nicely rounded chin? Where was her blossom-tinted color? Where the young girl’s quick and clear glance? What had become of her lips that were once full as wild strawberries? Every day she met this depressing sight. Was this she? She herself? These gaunt, wrinkled cheeks, this pale-gray color, this sharply etched chin, these tired, fading eyes without a glint, this caved-in mouth with teeth missing—this was herself, what was left of the once beautiful girl Kristina of Duvemala!

             To be fair, there is a lengthy section where Robert’s wanderings towards California after his immigration clashes with the Karl/Kristina story, a section that I found to be overly long, sometimes confusing (due to the back and forth nature of the intersecting narratives), and diminished the flow of the novel. But not every aspect of this portion of the tale is troublesome. Robert’s agonizing demise due to tuberculosis is again, well wrought and imagined and the unresolved conflict between Robert’s dreamy wishfulness and Karl’s pragmatic industry adds another layer of complexity and nuance to the narrative.

In the end, Moberg got it mostly right and I am looking forward to reading the concluding book in this four-part saga of Swedes coming to my “neck of the woods”. 4 stars out of 5.

Last Letter Home by Swedish writer, Wilhelm Moberg (1978. Warner Books. ISBN 0446311316) is the final installment in Moberg’s four volume set depicting the emigration of Swedish settlers, the Nilssons (the Nelsons by the end of this concluding story) from Sweden to the St. Croix River Valley in east central Minnesota. The closing novel depicting the rugged, hardscrabble lives of Karl Oskar, his wife Kristina, and their children as they build a succession of homes in the Center City/Chisago Lakes area just across the border from Wisconsin is, to my way of thinking, the least satisfying of the four books. Here’s my take on Last Letter Home.

Moberg continues to explore the intimate, religious, economic, and political interactions of the Nilssons with their immigrant neighbors, chronicling in some depth the simmering desire between the long married patriarch and matriarch of the clan, mindfully calling the reader’s attention to the dangers of pregnancy for a woman of Katrina’s constitution and age in the hinterlands of rural America in the late 1850s, early 1860s. This theme, one that expands upon Nilssons’s writing of the amorous and sexual relationships between the immigrants he portrays, is well crafted and adds a bit of tension to the story. Moberg also does a masterful job of re-creating the 1862 Sioux uprising in southwestern Minnesota, though the extension of the Nilsson family saga to include the convenient migration of a neighboring family into the Mankato area just before war breaks out on the Plains seems a bit contrived and, while expertly narrated by Moberg, doesn’t really fit the rest of the story, a tale centered on the everyday struggles of farmers and shopkeepers and preachers trying to carve out new lives in a new land.

The author’s juxtaposition of the Civil War, likely the most significant piece of history of the era outside of the Indian uprising (Minnesotans of the day would argue that the pitched battles fought between the natives and Col. Henry Sibley’s forces in the Minnesota River Valley were more significant than rumors of war out East!), with the relatively calm, undisturbed lives that the Nilssons’s were experiencing during a time of rapid economic and geopolitical expansion makes for an interesting comparative analysis of what we learned from middle school American history texts and what the settlers encountered in their everyday lives.

But that having been said, after speeding through all 283 pages of my mass market paperback copy of Last Letter Home, while the plot and characters held my interest, I found the ending fairly predictable and the narrative to be artificially inflated. Yes, there is romance in this tale. Yes, there is tragedy. And yes, there is history, some of which I learned in school and some of which I learned from Moberg’s novel. But it seems to me, upon reflection, that what the author had to say, with the exception of about half of this final installment in the Emigrant series, could have been said in volume III, The Settlers. There just wasn’t enough left in Moberg’s envisioning of Swedish emigration to justify an entire fourth novel.

3 and ½ star of 5. Worth reading to finish the series but not as captivating or compelling as the first three volumes.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (2015. Penguin Audio. ISBN 9781611763731). Alright. My wife Rene’ and I didn’t actually listen to the entire story on our way to Lake Sakakawea State Park to spend a long weekend with our son Dylan and his wife Shelly. We were near the finish line, close the end of this very gripping thriller, when we pulled the blue Pacifica and boat and trailer into our campsite. There were 2 and 1/2 disks left to the tale which, once we finished our time at the park, we gobbled up on the way home. All in all, a satisfying yarn. Here’s what I think.

Hawkins is a master of this slowly unfolding tale , a story reminiscent of Hitchcock at his best. Her writing, however, at times, became a bit bogged down in narrative description when I so urgently wanted the characters to move along. There’s a bit of mystery at the front end of the tale, what with the disappearance of a troubled young wife, Meghan Hipwell from the neighborhood that the protagonist, Rachel Watson, used to live in. Rachel is divorced from Tom, who, during their marriage, took up with Anna. Tom and Anna are now happily married, living with their infant daughter in the bungalow that Tom and Rachel once called home. The Watson house is a few doors down from the home of Meghan and Scott Hipwell. The author does a nice job of describing the trains that roll past the Watson and Hipwell bungalows perched on the edge of a London suburb. It is on one of these local trains that Rachel, pretending to commute to work to appease her landlady, sees what she thinks to be a crime at the Hipwell house. At first, she thinks nothing of what she’s seen. But then, as the disappearance of Meghan remains unsolved, Rachel decides to tell the police what she knows. Or thinks she knows.

Ms. Hawkins has drawn a fine, fine character in giving us Rachel Watson, a woman seemingly stuck in the past, unable to give up a marriage that has long since died, a woman whose affinity for drink renders her version of what she saw from the train suspect and unreliable when she finally reveals what she knows, or thinks she knows, to the police. The actresses portraying the three main characters all fit their parts in this audio version of the book. The voices of Rachel and Meghan are especially compelling. There is plenty of psychological drama to this story though, truth be told, I figured out who the killer was about 1/3 of the way through the story. The fact that the author didn’t do a better job of providing additional suspects, however, doesn’t detract from Girl on the Train being a “good read.”

A great way to spend hours in the car rolling over the North Dakota prairie.

4 stars out of 5.

Peace.

Mark

Ulysses by James Joyce (1990. Vintage Classics Edition. ISBN 9780679722762)

October 4, 2014 through July 26, 2015. That’s how long it took me to plow through Joyce’s so-called “masterpiece” of modernist fiction. I’m sorry, but I must be a dullard, a low intellect, a stupid person. There were, throughout the book (supposedly a chronicle of one day in the life of Dublin advertising agent, Leopold Bloom) moments of clarity where I almost understood what the author was trying to portray or explain. And then there were great long passages of nonsensical gibberish, such as the “dream sequence” written in the form of a script for a very confused and poorly executed stage play. The portion of the book that frustrated me the most, this imagined (I expect by Bloom as he sat drinking with his companion, Stephen Dedalus in various pubs about town after the funeral of a mutual friend) sequence, from page 429-609 in my copy of the tome, made me want to cry out in anguish, like an Irish child enduring famine. My pain was not caused by starvation of the stomach or the organs or my skin, mind you, but of the mind! I am not a scholar. I haven’t read the Odyssey since I was forced to do so by Miss Endrizzi in 11th grade English. So, to my dimwitted mind, if there is a connection between the wanderings of Bloom and Dedalus and the conniving and fornicating of Bloom’s long-suffering songstress wife, Molly, to Homer’ epic poem and its characters, it was completely lost on me.

I read to learn. I read to be entertained. And while Ulysses certainly includes references, either in dialogue or narration, to every possible topic under the sun-from physics to astronomy to Mormonism to Irish history to sex (wholesome or trysts driven by fetish)-the educational attributes of this long winded tale became a blur in my eyes and a headache for my brain. While attempting to make sense of this book, I didn’t keep a dictionary handy to decipher the language choices Joyce weaves into this meandering, mind boggling excursion. If I had looked up every term, every word I didn’t recognize, I would still be trudging through the first one-third of the book a full ten months after I began my reading quest!

I will say this: The unusual, experimental style that Joyce ends the book with-sentences that never end and a complete dearth of punctuation and capitalization-told as it was from the perspective of Molly Bloom, was the most entertaining and intriguing part of the novel. I felt some small measure, as a dogged reader trying to understand and follow Joyce’s various slights of hand that led, in slow, agonizing succession, down literary blind alley after blind alley, of success when I read that last section of the book and came to finally understand Molly Bloom’s perspective regarding a once blissful life lost to domestic drudgery. The ending and the beginning, where we meet young Dedalus, are the only portions of the novel I have any recollection of or appreciation for. The five hundred pages in between? Forgettable, like a bad hangover.

Oh. Just so you know. I’ll not be attempting to navigate through the (reportedly) even more difficult waters of Finnigan’s Wake. I’ve already wasted enough valuable reading time on a story that makes no sense and brought me only the slimmest of enjoyment.

2 stars out of 5. Not a book to read for enjoyment.

Peace.

Mark