May 27, 2011 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS Goldie Goldbloom
Picador
ISBN NA
$15
Reviewed by Nora Krug
Sudden love in the Outback
Goldie Goldbloom's life story is the stuff of a novel, if not the one she wrote. A 46-year-old Hasidic Jew and lesbian from Australia, she now lives in Chicago with her eight children. About her writing regimen she has said: "I have paper with me in my car and I'll drive my kids to school and while I'm waiting for them to get out of the car I'll write a line, another line, another line." Her first novel, "The Paperbark Shoe" (Picador, $15), a love story set in the Australian hinterlands in the waning days of World War II, seems far from these modern concerns. Yet its themes of exile, dashed dreams and hopes reconsidered are universal and timeless.
The narrator, Gin Boyle, takes something from Cinderella, Hester Prynne and Ibsen's Nora yet is wholly original. Gin is an albino shunned by society as "an evil omen, a pale and hunched ghost whose own mother wouldn't have warmed her with a kiss." Her life is a series of could've-beens. A gifted pianist with a fancy education, she ends up a farmer and reluctant mother in a loveless marriage (after an involuntary stay at a mental hospital). Gin believes she's not worthy of anything better than her misogynist husband, named Toad. In addition to his general nastiness, he collects women's corsets and eats the dead skin from his toes.
This may be grim, but it's rarely depressing, thanks to Gin's narration, which is both lyrical and plain-spoken: "I had not wished for love," she recalls. "I had not had the strength to wish for anything except the smallest, most possible things: a chop, a cup of sugar, a pair of scissors." But then history sweeps through to change Gin's dreary life: Two Italian prisoners of war come to work on the farm, singing Verdi while they toil and making shoes in their spare time. What ensues is an "unholy entanglement," and Gin at last thinks she has found not only love but also salvation. Whether that love is real or enduring is the question that will haunt readers through the rest of this imaginative novel.
From our previous reviews:
Wil Haygood called "The Last Hero" (Anchor, $16.95), Howard Bryant's biography of Hank Aaron, "beautifully written and culturally important." Bryant "tells the Aaron story with gusto and a ferocious sweep," Haygood noted.
The legendary World War II mission known as "Operation Mincemeat" fooled the Nazis and later inspired many a spy novelist. In "Operation Mincemeat" (Broadway, $15), British journalist Ben Macintyre uncovers "the complete story with its full cast of characters," according to Joseph Kanon. The result is "pure catnip to fans of World War II thrillers and a lot of fun for everyone else."
As a teenager, the novelist Darin Strauss accidentally hit and killed a high-school classmate. In "Half a Life" (Random House, $13), he offers "a starkly honest account of that fateful moment and his life thereafter," wrote Sarah Halzack. The book, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, "is a penetrating, thought-provoking examination of the human mind and the bleak, meandering path down which catastrophe can send it."
"A Little Book of Language" (Yale Univ., $17), by David Crystal, is a charming primer on linguistics written with "clarity and authority," on subjects ranging "from ancient etymologies to modern text-messaging," noted Michael Dirda.
Set in 19th-century Jamaica, Andrea Levy's "The Long Song" (Picador, $15) is "the extraordinary life of a woman who lived as a slave," wrote Tayari Jones.
John Waters "has the ability to show humanity at its most ridiculous and make that funny rather than repellent," wrote Jonathan Yardley. It's a quality that animates Waters' memoir "Role Models" (Farrar Straus Giroux, $15), a homage to the people who have shaped him.
"Father of the Rain" (Grove, $14.95), by Lily King, is a "surprising and wise" novel about "the conflicted relationship between an alcoholic and his only daughter ... by a writer who understands the horrible burden of trying to save someone who's ruining your life," according to Ron Charles.
In the memoir "Losing My Cool" (Penguin, $15), Thomas Chatterton Williams writes about growing up torn between "the tumult of hip-hop" and his father's strict, guiding hand, according to Jabari Asim. The book "contains some of the most compelling writing about black fathers in recent literature."
Nora Krug reviews paperbacks every month for The Washington Post.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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