Customer Reviews

The Book Borrower: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

I don't think I have ever noticed an editor's work before this book, but The Book Borrower's editing makes it incredibly difficult to read. What would be a great narrative story is ruined by incomprehensible use of italics and lack of punctuation. As the story switches back and forth from present life to a century earlier, quotation marks to identify the speaker--a normal tool--would clarify not only the speaker, but the century as well. And, as earlier noted, the author chooses to call her protagonist by her last name, but the other characters by their first names. Honestly, this book is better than most, but its confusing delivery took its toll, not just on the book, but on me, too.

I guess I expected a much more traditional story of friendship and a nostalgic look at a past generation. Instead I got this unusual, exasperating, at times confusing book. Having said that, if you start, do read it through. It will reward you with its riches. It's the kind of book that will keep coming back at you long after you're finished. At first I thought, people don't talk this way, don't act this way, don't do these things, don't have families like these, and then I thought about it some more, and told myself....yes they do. The characters will make you uncomfortable. You will not know whether to love them or hate them, and you may go back and forth, just like in life. My one complaint, although I argue with myself about it -why call Deborah, Deborah, but call Toby throughout the book by her last name - Rubin? I found it contrived. Maybe I have to get out of a rut in my thinking. I think it's probably just a gender thing, but it still jolted. I got used to it... but just a little.

At first I wasn't sure I was going to like this book. The style is sparse and mysterious, especially at the beginning, and I didn't think I wanted to embark on such a challenging journey. Yet something on the page beckoned; the fine writing pulled me in and seduced me, as did the characters. It was the same feeling I had while reading THE ENGLISH PATIENT and THE HOURS. A whisper... trust me, trust me. And so I did, and was not disappointed!

I found The Book Borrower to be the most compelling book I've read in months. The terse, lovely style; the unflinching look at friendship between women; the strange and fascinating dialogue combined to make this an unforgettable book. I felt I understood more about the daily lives of real people after I read it. As soon as I finished it, I picked it up and started over again at the beginning.

This book is very, well, for lack of a better word, real. The experieces that the characters have are real. The lives they live are real. The feelings they have are real indeed. This book plumbs the depths of female to female relationships, and the result is so close to the bone that it hurts.

I won't synopsize the plot, others have done so and you can read it above as well. What I will say is that this is an illuminating book, a difficult book, a sometimes contrived book. I felt that Mattison put her finger directly on the pulse of how some women are friends and how they relate to each other. I felt she was able to express the way loss can touch us endlessly, long past when we should be "over it". I also found the manner in which she wrote the book seemed artificial at first, but the reasoning came clear as I read. It started out difficult, and got more absorbing and easier as I went along.

The long and the short of it is, this is not a mind candy potboiler beach novel, this is a book which will take attention and effort, but will reward those with illumination and feeling. If you're willing to make the effort, then buy this book, if not, pass it by.

It is gratifying to read novels that interweave books into the lives of the characters. Sometimes the books scatter ghosts into the present, sometimes they haunt the characters. Michael Cunningham's tremendously popular novel "The Hours" reverberates off Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway." In "The Book Borrower," it's "Trolley Girl," a book set in the 1920s and passed between two friends, Deborah and Toby, in a playground in 1975.

"Trolley Girl's" story floats through this one--the story of a friendship between two mothers. It is gracefully done--the tone of the older book infects the tone of the present; details, exclamation points, oddities in thought and conversation have a Dickensian feel to them, even as Patty Hearst is acquitted in the background. But the really fine thing about Alice Mattison 's style is her sense of proportion. Taking a friendship that spans several decades, in which careers are pursued, children hatched and educated, husbands argued with and loved, dogs patted, she makes the friendship into the novel's sun, shining and absorbing light from those other details. When the friends are separated, all of the planets go spinning askew. It's a marvelous galaxy the author has created. Some of the atmospheric pressures between these friends are familiar--jealousy, different talents, different relationships--but many are private, as though the friendship had its own soul that lives on after it's over, even after the book is closed. *

The Book Borrower was about friends bonding even when they have evil, negative thoughts brewing. Alice Mattison was inside the narrators head. Even when I wanted to shake Toby Ruben, (and why was she called Rubin throughout?) she was human. It may be the vogue not to have quotation marks as characters speak / think all in one sentence. I got the drift of this quickly. Bringing history into the book with Rubin's flashback to her childhood, immigrant parents and trolley strikes was interesting. I thought the book was well written. Other reviewers thought otherwise.Read John Steinbecks short storys before this book. That is a hard act to follow.When is the next Alice Mattison?Could hardly wait to pass on to friend.

The first several pages of "The Book Borrower" were a little difficult but I'm so glad I didn't give up. Alice Mattison weaves tales of wonderful women in various periods of American life. I loved the way the reader could remember a fact that the character had forgotten. Toby Ruben got herself out of the grief of losing Deborah by talking to her. The final scene with the book being placed in Jeremiah's screen door is just right. I plan to read more by Mattison.

I wanted to like this book and the two women, but I found a lot of it mundane and some of it not believable. I've read any number of books about 1970s friendships begun in playgrounds that become profound bonds between women for 30 years. In real life I'm not sure I believe this happens. I think it is wishful thinking. I just never felt totally engrossed in these women's lives. I liked the "book within the book," but, again, didn't find the characters that new.

The book-within-a-book technique is not easy, but this author kept me interested in both stories and both sets of characters, who come together in the end. The one thing I did find confusing was the author's use of names. One of the main characters is always referred to by her last name (yet called by her first name when other characters speak to her). Her son is given a silly nickname for no apparent reason. The author of the book the characters read, Trolley Girl, changes her sister's first name in the memoir, but keeps the actual last name and everyone else's first names the same. The sister later turns up using a completely different first and last name. I'm not sure of the reason for all this, but it made the book harder to follow, especially as one story was embedded in another.