Where'd You Go, Bernadette?
by Maria Semple
 |
|
Ice. It's trippy, symphonies frozen, the unconscious come to life, and smacking of color: blue. (Snow is white; ice is blue. You'll know why, Bee, because you're knowledgeable about these things, but I had no idea.) It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it's tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world's fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman's shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit's cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidden black.
Maria Semple's
Where'd You Go, Bernadette is referred to in multiple reviews as an "epistolary novel"--a fancy way to describe the ultra-modern lack of narrative that makes this book feel as hip and unorthodox as its heroine, and the city she spends most of her time trying to flee. Stitched together from a trail of emails, police reports and handwritten notes,
Bernadette tells the story of crumbling architect Bernadette Fox, a former MacArthur genius gone cuckoo amid the rain and riffraff of Seattle. After Bernadette gradually disconnects from her Microsoft-god husband and disappears without a trace, it falls on her clever daughter, Bee, to find her. Add to the mix a demonic blackberry bush, a swarm of private-school moms collectively known as "the gnats" and a virtual personal assistant named Manjula, and you're not even close to describing the mayhem that animates this unusual novel. It ends with a wild chase across Antarctica--bringing the story, and Bernadette, back to the city she might love after all. I normally wouldn't go for a TV-show type plot like this, but the book's style, in addition to my own love-hate relationship with Seattle, made me appreciate its caffeine-like jolt.
Death and the Penguin
by Andrey Kurkov
Misha had appeared chez Viktor a year before, when the zoo was giving hungry animals away to anyone able to feed them. Viktor had gone along and returned with a king penguin. Abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had been feeling lonely. But Misha had brought his own kind of loneliness, and the result was now two complimentary lonelinesses, creating an impression more of interdependence than amity.
So much for disproving the cold-weather stereotypes:
Death and the Penguin, originally written in Russian by dark humorist Andrey Kurkov, sets the reader in the middle of snowy, post-Soviet Ukraine, packing the place with copious deaths and, yes, even a penguin. The main protagonist is Viktor, a struggling writer getting by on writing advance obituaries for the targets of a local crime ring, who adopts a penguin named Misha, not realizing the pet will become his mute and melancholy alter-ego. Misha bears a touching resemblance to the disoriented post-Soviet man, spending most of his time half-asleep in the "hidey hole" behind the couch and emerging only to guzzle frozen herring and to get a sniff of his master's vodka. At times, the English translation--completed, fittingly, by one George Bird--reads with the unsteadiness of a penguin's waddle, but it's not the language that gives the book its charm. It's the combination of crime noir and communist-era humor, which, thankfully, didn't get lost in translation.
