Customer Reviews

Red Weather: A Novel

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We Latvians are a small nation, but oh, we are a proud people! We are a nation beaten and battered by many wars over many hundreds, even thousands of years, but our culture and life sense still thrive: the Latvian language is one of the oldest in existence today, still actively used. Perhaps that is our greatest source of pride, then: we are survivors.

When Pauls Toutonghi's new novel, Red Weather, came upon the literary scene, I was greatly pleased. I've been an avid reader in both languages - Latvian and English - since earliest childhood, but however many good books I read about the war and later experiences of Latvians immigrating to other countries and cultures, it was rare to come across a worthy tome in English. History books, yes, but far more rare, a good attention-grabbing novel that I could proudly share with non-Latvian friends.

Now, here's Pauls. With one Latvian parent, it is my understanding he has grown up in the Milwaukee area, active in the Latvian community and, having visited Latvia, is well-acquainted, one would suppose, with the culture and something of the nation's history. For these reasons, I read the novel with high expectation and excitement.

Pauls' writing abilities do not disappoint. Still quite young, he has already accrued an impressive publishing history, and has won the Pushcart Prize. His descriptions are lively, his storyline pulls us along, his sense of humor is intact.

And yet. The further I read, the more I realized, no, this was not going to be the book that I would pass on to Latvians I know, or to non-Latvians I'd like to invite a little more intimately into my multi-cultural world. The novel works as an entertaining read for non-Latvians, perhaps, but for those who do know the history and culture, well, not so much. I think my sense of humor is healthy, but I can't help feeling, for instance, that describing Latvians visiting the United States as being so dense as to put ketchup on every possible food, even bananas, craving to taste the American life, is taking the joke into the much less fun realm of ridicule. Or the Latvian mother as so eye-rollingly lacking in self-awareness as to walk Milwaukee streets wearing a Pabst hardhat with a beer can on it as if she were wearing a Parisian fashion statement. Surely not. I cringed in embarrassment. Humor is often built on slapstick and exaggeration, but would those who have no other knowledge of Latvians, perhaps never will have any other exposure than this novel, think this is what it means to be a Latvian? Bumbling fools?

Perhaps even more worthy of remark are some historic inaccuracies. Although this is a fictional work, even fiction must keep its feet firmly on factually solid ground before branching into fantasy. One such example is the allusion to Latvia's president, Karlis Ulmanis, and his attempt to escape to Finland during the Soviet invasion of World War II (see page 166). In fact, President Ulmanis held his place, broadcasting over the radio waves to the nation even as the Soviet tanks crossed the Russian border, keeping down the panic and requesting all to remain in their places, thus saving many Latvian lives. He was taken by force from his office by the occupying army, and was never seen alive again. Educated guesses are that he was deported to Siberia, where he died in a Gulag (concentration camp), but his body has never been found.

Having finished the novel, wondering at how very different the author's experience of his Latvian roots and culture were from mine, indeed from anyone I have known with Latvian roots and having gone through the immigrant experience, I wanted to think - hey, there's always the exception to the rule. If by 1989, when this story is set, any Latvian immigrant I or my family knew had established themselves in relative financial security (the fictional Balodis family still lived in squalor), had attained some measure of their new country's education and achieved something of their own immigrant American dream, then the Balodis family was certainly a lone exception to the rule. Nor could I imagine my own father, or fathers of my friends, being so easygoing about the political lines the young man in this novel, Yuri (Juris), crossed in his lovelorn relationship with a socialist girl (my own, and dare I say any typical, Latvian father, would have gone through the roof, to put it very, very lightly).

As a reality check, I shared Red Weather with my parents, who shared it with several of their friends. Their reactions were the same. They expressed admiration for the author's skill, but also expressed a pained disappointment in the skewed image of Latvian immigrants to the U.S. The image the book leaves is of a people who are gullible, not particularly industrious, and rather dim-witted.

An opportunity lost. My subjective opinion, but I'm sure shared by more than a few of my countrymen and women.

Two unusual elements take front and center stage in this novel: Latvian culture and the city of Milwaukee, both woefully underrepresented in todays literature. Red Weather is a welcome treat and introduction to both.

What perhaps makes it all the more unusual is that our first-generation Latvian-American teenage hero, Yuri, actually desires to learn of his parents' language and culture. It is they that put the kibosh on this,a not-so-unusual phenom among new emigres. Yuri finds himself attracted to an odd-shaped Latvian book his parents had (which proves to be a major identifier for him later on in the story). He feels that "My parents had kept me from participating in my cultural identity as much as possible" yet "In some ways I envied my Dad's separation from the larger part of American life. He lived within certain limits...it was simple." Furthermore, Uncle Ivan remarks that young Rigans today want to speak Latvian, learn Latvian customs and fly the Latvian flag.

I can so readily identify with Yuri when he compares himself to his cousin Eriks and feels "culturally impoverished."

The Wallace Stevens poems at the beginning of each new phase in the story add nothing, though, to the content of the book.

I loved to see Yuri's father's reaction to the pampered, surreal, safe, suburban "communists" at Marquette et al...talk about reality meeting idealism! Wish there'd been more discussion between Hannah and Erik's disagreement on socialism!

Riga earns frequent mention in RW, another Westernly neglected city.

I am excited to share my opinion about this new novel, and new writer who I discovered a few weeks ago, after hearing his novel reviewed on NPR.

I loved this book. The narration was touching and light-hearted. Maybe not as funny as I would have liked in places, but it definitely kept me hooked and moving forward.

I loved the scenes with the father. Red Weather has truly captured -- at least in my opinion -- the essence of the father-son relationship. It was a book that reminded me of my own dad (recently passed away). I could hear his voice in the father's voice, and that was tremendously moving to me.

When I logged on, I noticed that one reviewer, in particular, took objection to a couple things here and there in the book. It seems funny to me to take objection to small factual mistakes in a novel; everything in a novel is subjective, right? Did these characters actually exist? Of course not. Why would you imagine that everything they say would be perfectly accurate? It's the heart of the details that matter!

And Toutonghi's attention to detail is wonderful. I did a little bit of simple research and noticed that he got his MFA in poetry -- not fiction -- from Cornell University. So: his work is hardly the derivative product of an MFA program.

A funny book! I really loved it.

I picked up this novel after reading favorable reviews. I truly enjoyed the first 50 pages of this book. Having grown up in the Milwaukee area in the 1980's, I recognized my home town in the novel. I enjoyed the characters in Yuri's life such as his parents and his cousins. He describes his family life with such humorous honesty. I really enjoyed the way he met Hannah and became seduced by her socialist perspective. I was looking forward to getting to know her better. I thought he had the makings of a great plot as Hannah's socialist ideals would conflict with his parents' experience of the U.S.S.R.

And then ...

I thought this novel got lost in a bunch of plot twists designed to entertain the reader more accustomed to the standard movie thriller. Towards the end of the book the action is fast and furious. All this action obscures the richness of the characters. Hannah, for example, never emerges beyond the Communist caricature. We never learn why she is attending an inner city high school even though she lives in a posh suburb. So many plot turns prevent us from learning much about Yuri's family - such as his mother, his uncle, his uncle's wife and his cousin.

I put down this novel worrying about how the success of the da Vinci code is influencing the new generation of American writers. Must every novel have a simple screen play that will appeal to some Hollywood producer? Must every rich story include car chases, car crashes and people jumping off balconies? I get the sense the Pauls Toutonghi could have written a much better book, but he perceives the need to "dumb-down" his story for his audience.

Wow! Each paragraph brings unexpected & unforced giggles that seem to just creep up! Paul's insight into people, their motivations, aspirations & daring is refreshing, to say the least. As a Latvian-American familiar with Latvian pagan tradition, I am just amazed at his delicacy of spirit & understanding of the sources of this tradition's solace and power - e.g. sitting in a tree. What a broad vision of the human spirit! Savor each word!
Nebrauc tik dikti, tie nav tavi kumelini!

I get coffee everyday from a bookstore here in Milwaukee. It's not often that you find a book that's 'about' Milwaukee, so imagine my surprise when I walked into my store and saw 'Red Weather.' At first, I was nervous that it might not be up my alley. But by the time I finished I was so in love with this book that I bought it for my husband AND my dad.

Also, I bought it here, on Amazon, because it's so much less expensive than in a store!

The novel is really funny. I mean, it's hilarious. I don't normally write these kinds of reviews, but I just had to after I finished this book. I didn't think I would connect with the 15-year old narrator, but his voice reminded me of my son (who's now eighteen).

But it's sad, too. And so much of the cultural stuff was interesting and made me want to know more about that time period. I'd read this on a rainy day -- but, then again -- I'd also read it on the beach!

Buy this book for your husband or your dad or your son. And then read it yourself.

(Pauls read at my reading series on June 2, 2006. This is from my introduction)

"Red Weather" takes a simple idea--the working and actions of an adolescent--and stretches it in wonderful and engrossing directions. In lesser hands, Yuri's story could easily have slipped into cliché--a typical coming of age story. But Pauls Toutonghi does not take the easy way out. Because his protagonist is essentially more acted upon than pro-active, his lurches toward decisiveness draw us in that much more; although a lot of the time, we are watching him through the fingers on the hands clamped over our eyes, waiting for the crash, literal and figurative.

Pauls surrounds Yuri with a distinctive cast who grow on us as people as our main character grows during the course of the novel. Pauls plays with standard immigrant scenes--yes, we visit a supermarket--but over the course of the book, deepens the shades slowly and imperceptibly, surprising us, making us know and care about the whole clan, as well as the other non-Latvian characters in "Red Weather."

There are several brilliant set pieces: In particular amongst them, one involving a furtive car ride gone awry, and another an "attempted" day of tourism, could easily stand alone and merit repeated readings. There are huge surprises, shocks really, that utterly alter our view of the now-familiar characters, and our protagonists' understanding of them, and his own life.

This is a book whose character's experience reminds us to actually be in the moment, to reckon and recognize that which is around us, those intimate to us, which we sometimes take for granted. To try and see things for what they actually are now, so that later, when that which could've deepened our experience and brought us closer to those near to us is gone, we do not regret things undone, words unsaid. "Red Weather" is a beautiful novel of discovery, frustration and regret, whose themes and unforced emotion burrow down deep with in the reader, page by magical page.

The novel is fairly slow-moving and the various threads fall apart by the end of the book. I think the author is better with shorter fiction as in his first book LIVE CARGO. A disappointing follow-up.

Despite some pretty good writing from time to time and some excellent scenes, this book was disappointing. The coming of age story is pedestrian and predictable, and Yuri--the narrator--is not a particularly bright bulb, even though the writer seems to be presenting him as a thoughtful and original person. Toutonghi just doesn't seem to get very deeply into Yuri's emotions, and often has Yuri describe his feelings in flat adjectives, instead of letting scene and setting draw out the emotions. Yuri's father is the more interesting and better realized character. This book has the quirkiness that seems to be a growing norm in MFA graduates' fiction, but there's a depth and richness missing.

Toutonghi is a good writer of short stories, which is perhaps why some of the extended scenes work well but the overall novel does not. Many of his better short stories are set back in time, or in places where the author could not have been at the time being written about.

His success in such stories makes it all the more strange that he is careless with detail about Milwaukee, where the novel is set. The examples of this carelessness are so numerous that an enumeration would be tedious, so just two examples. He has Yuri living in Milwaukee's Third Ward, a rather magnificently tattered industrial relic of the late 19th and early 20th century, and has him smelling paper mills and hearing the baseball crowd noise from Milwaukee County Stadium. But County Stadium is about seven miles from the Third Ward, and there isn't a paper mill within 90 miles of Milwaukee. (Never has been, as paper mills tend to be build near to forests, their source of raw material.)

A small (tedious?) complaint? But first rate literature is usually a collection of sharply observed detail that illuminates a larger subject. This writer was too careless with both the physical and emotional detail of his story.

I loved this book. It took me longer than usual to read it, about two weeks. I just wanted to savour it and not end it. I loved the "cast" in the book and found my heart racing at the anxiety of the narrator! The capturing of the 2nd generation aspect was DEAD ON (2nd generation Persian_italian here). WOW WOW WOW!!! Pauls, come to CA so I can lavish you with praise. My new favorite author. Just ordered another of his works.