i'm a very very complex person

I was on vacation last week, so I have a fair amount of reading to report on. The first book I read was Pigs In Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver. As you may recall, I read The Bean Trees a few months ago and found it to be fun and engaging, not Great Literature by any means, but a promising first novel. Unfortunately, Pigs In Heaven is about as disappointing a sequel as you could imagine. The plot seems highly contrived, characters' motivations are not well developed, and it really fails to deliver on the promise found in The Bean Trees. I was especially disappointed with Kingsolver's depiction of the Cherokees, which seemed remarkably stereotypical for a book that seems to want to raise awareness. All of the Cherokee characters are portrayed as a giant extended family, every single one of them poor but happy, the children respectful, the elders wise... I found it really annoying, and thought that Kingsolver really could have done better.

Next, I read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, which I found rather fascinating. I don't think I've read any other African writers, and therefore it was very different from just about anything else I've ever read; the rhythms in which the story was told, the way the narrative was patterned, even the word choice and sentence structure all seemed deeply African in a way that I really can't explain. Saying that makes me feel like a silly white girl pretending to understand things I actually have no knowledge about, but that's the feeling I got from the book. Reading it was an interesting experience because it really took me a long time to figure out the way the storytelling worked and to allow myself to fall into the rhythm of it. At first I found the book to be surprisingly unemotional, but Achebe surprised me with an ending that had remarkable emotional and political impact.

And speaking of emotional and political impact, the last book that I read while on vacation was In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez. This was by far my favorite of my three vacation books. Alvarez did a great job taking a true story of mythical proportions and imagining it fictionally on a human scale. I was fascinated by the lives of the Mirabal sisters, and I felt that Alvarez did a very good job of demonstrating the way each of them fell into their heroism in different ways. She gave each of the sisters her own distinct, believable personality and unique voice. I loved the fact that the story was narrated by each of the sisters, each of them responsible for telling different parts of the story, each in her own tone, with her own concerns and preoccupations. All in all, it made me very curious to find out how much of the story is factual, and how much is known about the lives of las mariposas. I found it to be a much more inspiring and realistic story about revolution than The House of the Spirits for instance.

And now I am reading Cavedweller by Dorothy Allison. I'm not even halfway into it yet, so I don't have too much to say. It seems pretty decent, although not quite good as Bastard Out of Carolina. The main problem that I have with it at this point is with Cissy. She's supposed to be a fairly young child, but many of her perceptions and the things that she says seem far too adult to be realistic. Now, certainly there are children that grow up quickly, and Cissy did grow up in circumstances that might cause a kid to mature fast, but I still find that some of the ways she sees the world just don't ring true for a kid her age. Allison did a much better job with a young protagonist in Bastard.