Still Alice by Lisa Genova

I'm quoting Lisa Genova:

STILL ALICE is about a young woman's descent into dementia through early-onset Alzheimer's disease.  Alice is a 51 year old psychology professor at Harvard when she starts experiencing moments of forgetting and confusion....she at first attributes these signs to normal aging, too much stress, not enough sleep, and so on.  But as things get worse....she eventually sees a neurologist and learns that she has early-onset Alzheimer's."

This was a scary book to read, because I can see little things I do that are similar, and it makes you wonder.  I think the author is more of a professor than a writer, but she has found a way to communicate to her audience how the patient feels: how she matters: to herself, her family, her colleagues.  The speech  Alice gives, starting on page 250 is quite illuminating, as is the conversation with the author at the book's conclusion.

I just didn't feel it was a "novel": it wasn't literary at all, but I understand what the author was trying to do.

Book Count as of today

I think I read 24 books in Florida! Amazing!

MIDDLESEX: Jeffery Eugenides

I've known about this book, and its central theme, for some time, but I didn't think I'd like it.  I didn't like the title, or the author's name, believe it or not: I thought it would be too intellectual, deeper than I wanted to go in my reading.  Mildred read this, and mentioned several times last summer how much she enjoyed it, so I was a little more interested.  When I had a coupon for Borders, I bought it, and read it while returning home from Florida.

Am I ever glad I did!  I loved it: it's a big, rich, funny, touching family story, beginning with Desdemona and Lefty, who are brother and sister, also third cousins, who end up marrying one another.  Calliope, the "girl" in the novel, is their grand-daughter: raised as a girl, she discovers her true sexuality on her 16th birthday. Calliope has inherited a recessive mutation gene, passed on through families where there is incest or inbreeding.

This is a Greek-American family: the story starts in Greece before the first war, then continues in the depression years in Detroit.  Middlesex is the name of the family's street addres in Detroit"; it's an unusual house, without any standard doors; Calliope's father has made his money  in hot dog stands all across America.  The fact that the street address is used as the title  is significant, because so is Calliope: with characteristics and physical traits both male and female. Calliope, incidentally, was the name given to the Greek muse of eloquence and epic poetry.

Eugenides won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel and deservedly so: it is a sweeping portrait of America: its politics, sexual mores, coming- of-age, cars, scams, hitch-hiking, a real trip through time. Eugenides, in his interview with Oprah, which is worth a second-look online, calls the book " a modern myth".  He also acknowledges that, although the word "hermaphrodite" was chosen because of its Greek derivation: the Greek god Tiresias was a hermaphrodite, he does acknowledge that a better word, and one without  pejorative connotations  would be "intersex".

CUTTING FOR STONE: Abraham Verghese

A family saga , set mostly in Addis Ababa,  with medicine at the central focus.  Sister Mary Praise gives birth to twin sons, Shiva and Marion, delivered by the twins' father, Dr. Thomas Stone.  Sister Mary dies in childbirth, Dr. Stone disappears.  The twins are raised by two other doctors, Hema, a gynecologist, and Ghosh, a GP who becomes the surgeon at the Missing Hospital after Stone leaves.

The twins grow up to become doctors themselves; Marion comes to America after he is threatened by arrest after being unwittingly implicated in a rebellion.  Shiva is also a doctor, but not formally trained as such. Typically, the twins are mysteriously connected , coming to age as Ethiopia is on the brink of revolution, but a shared passion for Genet, their childhood friend, tears them apart. 

Marion finally meets his father, and they are reconciled, but not before Marion's life is threatened with illness, an illness which brings the twins back together again.

There is some excellent story-telling in this novel, although I found the medical parts somewhat lengthy and boring.  Verghese is himself a medical professor, so he is very familiar with the field. I've never read a book set in Ethiopia, and I remember Haile Selassie from my own girlhood, so I found that interesting.

Not riveting reading all the way through, but I'd give it three stars for sure!  The novel is well-organized to keep the reader on course: we don't find out near the end what really happened between Sister Mary Praise and Thomas Stone.  I just found there were parts when I thought" Ho-hum, this is boring" and then he'd catch my interest yet again.

The term "cutting for stone" comes from the Hippocratic oath, and the inference is that a surgeon must always think of the overall well-being of his/her patient.  The Stones were surgeons, and one Stone saved another by cutting away part of himself.

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM by Kate Atkinson

Well, well, well, yet another book by Kate Atkinson, this one her first novel, and  not a mystery novel, as were the others I read this winter.  

From the book jacket:   Ruby Lennox begins narrating her own life at the moment of her conception and from there takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of a girl determined to learn more about her family and the secrets it keeps.

Set in Yorkshire, the book is extremely rich in detail and wit.  It's Atkinson's wit that I enjoy the most, I think: the scenes when the family goes on a summer farm trip with the next-door neighbours, the wedding scene in Chapter 10, are hilarious as much for her wry observation of life with the Lennox family as for the situations.

The novel is about family, but more specifically, I think, the relationship between mothers and daughters.  Ruby's mother, Bunty, was about as bad a mother as you can get, but there were reasons for her behaviour.

This is worth considering as a recommendation for Book Club next year. There is a Readers' Guide available on-line at Picador: I bookmarked it.

The book was published in 1999, and Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread Prize for best first novel in Great Britain for this book.