Joanne had the practice of giving a book one chapter. If the first chapter failed to engage her she'd move on to another book. With that in mind I was very close to moving on from Absolution, by Alice McDermott. It's one of those novels that improved the farther one read. the first chapters descriptions of who was wear what quickly gave way to an interesting story.
Tricia, newly married, accompanies her engineer husband to an assignment in Saigon, Vietnam, in the early sixties. They were there only a short time but that experience, her reflections on it, and the relationships she established create the gist of the book. She's the primary narrator of the story and only later do we learn to whom she's narrating. Then that subject narrates her story and the narrations go between them,
On the book's jacket Tim O'Brian writes "With Absolution, Alice McDermott delivers another elegantly written, immaculately conceived novel that immerses the reader in the contradictions and moral ambiguities of the human heart." This is accurate and well said. At 324 pages it was a quick read.
It also gave me opportunity for indulging my smug sense of superiority as I found an inaccuracy. 😁 On more than one occasion (see p. 40, e.g.) it names the piastres as Vietnamese currency. That's Middle Eastern money and is not used in South Asia. In Vietnam the Dong is used and on December 5, $1.00 was worth 24,272 dong.
One of of my two readers, if not you then the other one, reported having read A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, by Timothy Egan. He was rightly impressed by it. I read it on Kindle, which has the disadvantage that it cannot be leant to another. It's a very valuable book.
Takk for alt,
Al
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