novels

The first line

/ lynnkanter / 4 Comments
Photo: jason-denys

Photo: jason-denys

They say the first line of a novel is supposed to tell you all you need to know about the book and the reading experience ahead of you. (Is that true? Beats me. You know how they are always going around saying things.)

But it did make me think. And what I thought was: Let’s have a contest!

 A contest!

I’ll list the first line of ten novels I loved. Let’s see how many of the novels you can identify based only on the first line. Of course, you could simply google the lines and figure out all ten, but where’s the fun in that?

There’s a prize

The first person who correctly identifies the most titles will win a copy of Egg Heaven, a collection of gorgeous short stories by the award-winning writer Robin Parks. It’s the first book that will be published by Shade Mountain Press, which a month later will publish my novel. Egg Heaven will be available in October; you can preview it here.

The first lines

1. “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish onboard.”

2. “They shoot the white girl first.”

3. “It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.”

4. “That night when he came to claim her, he stood on the short lawn before her house, his knees bent, his fists driven into his thighs, and bellowed her name with such passion that even the friends who surrounded him, who had come to support him, to drag her from the house, to murder her family if they had to, let the chains the carried go limp in their hands.”

5. “Dear God, I am fourteen years old.”

6. “Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly.”

7. “’Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay.”

8. “I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old.”

9. “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.”

10. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Here’s a hint

These are all women writers.

The deadline is Sunday, June 8. Ready? Guess.

Help me re-name a major character in my novel!

/ lynnkanter / 22 Comments

I started working on Her Own Vietnam more than a decade ago. The main character – the nurse who served in Vietnam – is named Della Brown. I named her sister, another major character, Rosalie Brown.

In a plot twist I could not have invented, my publisher is also named Rosalie. And she doesn’t think a major character should be named after her.

Darn it, she’s right.

Here’s where you come in

Can you help me come up with a new first name for my character? Her last name, of course, will remain Brown.

I will give you some parameters, and you can post your suggestions here. I am on a deadline, so all suggestions need to be posted by midnight (Eastern USA time) on Wednesday, April 23.

If I choose a name you suggested, I’ll thank you on the book’s acknowledgement page.

What you need to know about the character formerly known as Rosalie Brown

  • She was born in 1953 to a middle class white family in upstate New York.
  • Her other family members are older sister Della Brown; mother Ruth Brown; father Thomas (Tommy) Brown; partner Anne Isaacs.
  • The name needs to be three syllables long. (Why? Because otherwise the rhythm will be messed up in every sentence that currently includes Rosalie.)

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Ready? Re-name!

For a novelist, naming a fictional character is personal, like naming a child. It’s possible I will come up with my own new name for her – and it’s certain that my decision will be based on subjective criteria (the name is pretty, it reminds me of my second cousin, it just feels right, etc.).

I will miss Rosalie Brown terribly. But I’m looking forward to seeing the names you suggest before midnight on Wednesday the 23rd of April.

Hope springs eternal.

Hope springs eternal.

(Scary) Update from Book World!

/ lynnkanter / Leave a comment
Three sharp red pencils.

My editor gets down to business. (Photo by Horia Varlan.)

My publisher (who’s also my editor) told me she has almost finished editing my book. She will send me the edited version of Her Own Vietnam on Monday. That means she’s probably bent over my manuscript right this minute, her red pencils honed to scalpel sharpness, the sawdust scent of pencil shavings fresh in the air.

Okay, no pencils are actually involved. She’s using Track Changes.

But still – scary.

Want to know more about this formidable creature, the publisher and writer Rosalie Morales Kearns? (She IS formidable. She’s also warm and hilarious.)

Check out the Shade Mountain Press website below. There you can find info about the press and the publisher; the first official descriptions of my novel and Egg Heaven, the amazing short story collection by Robin Parks; AND a call for submissions for Shade Mountain’s 2015 books.

Are you a woman writer? A novelist who’s a woman of color? Shade Mountain Press is looking for you.

While you explore the website, I’ll just be here, waiting for my marked-up manuscript and biting my nails.

http://www.shademountainpress.com/index.php

 

On rereading “Mrs. Dalloway”

/ lynnkanter / 3 Comments

 

Can't. Stop. Reading. Photo: David McSpadden

Can’t. Stop. Reading.
Photo: David McSpadden

Every decade or so I reread Mrs. Dalloway, the stunning 1925 novel by Virginia Woolf. Each time I find something new to admire and appreciate.

The novel takes place in London, during a single June day in 1923. World War One is over, but its impact can be felt everywhere. Clarissa Dalloway, an upper class woman in her 50’s, is preparing to throw a party. Peter Walsh, who once loved her and whom she rejected for the more predictable Richard Dalloway, has just returned to London after five years in India. A veteran is going mad in a way that makes perfect sense after the horrors of the war, and his immigrant wife is growing desperate. All of these people, and more, connect and intertwine and pull apart in unexpected ways as Clarissa Dalloway’s past and present collide.

A book for the ages – my ages

I first encountered Mrs. Dalloway when I was in college. I was intoxicated by the novel’s glittering, faceted language, its swirling points of view, its complex sentences and circuitous paragraphs.

I was also struck at 19 or 20 by the fact that this acclaimed novel dealt with something I was just beginning to discover myself: that women of all kinds sometimes fall in love with other women – intense and romantic, even when utterly chaste. The long-married Mrs. Dalloway, looking back on her years, considers the moment at 18 when Sally Seton kissed her as one of the happiest of her life. “Had that not, after all, been love?”

The first time I read the book, Clarissa Dalloway was older than my mother. Today I am older than Clarissa Dalloway, and I understand and appreciate her character in ways that were unavailable to me earlier. The discursive, stream of consciousness inner monologue; the way Clarissa’s thoughts swoop like birds through time, alighting briefly on instants in her youth, then the present day, then back to childhood; the power and presence in her daily life of people long gone – all of these are familiar to me now.

Laughing out loud

For such a serious book, which broke all kinds of narrative conventions and introduced new ways of creating character, the novel is full of wit. I laughed out loud at this caricature of myself and my activist friends, people whose “causes” had “made them callous”:

Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive torture, so insensible was she…[S]he was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it…

 Keeping some secrets

Despite many readings, the book has yet to yield all its secrets. For instance, why is the phrase “very upright” repeated so often and in so many contexts, starting with a description of Mrs. Dalloway herself? What is the purpose of the roses that appear in so many scenes?

Of course, there is a tremendous amount of scholarship on Virginia Woolf’s work, and it’s likely I could find the answers to my questions there. But for now I prefer to mine the novel’s meaning myself, through the slow pleasure of reading and rereading.

After all, it is not the book that changes over the years, but the reader.

 

The best book club book of all time

/ lynnkanter / 4 Comments

My book group has gathered every month for more than 20 years to read books by and about women. After all that time and all those books, is it possible we have agreed on a favorite?

Yes. Our favorite book club book of all time is Triangle, a novel by Katharine Weber.

The book weaves together the stories of Esther Gottesfeld, the last living survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of 1911; her scientist granddaughter; and a feminist researcher who asks Esther to share her memories and then listens a bit too carefully. The novel is riveting and challenging, with complex characters.

Who owns history?

Weber deftly builds both the mystery at the heart of the novel and the tense drama of the Triangle inferno. Small details that at first seem to provide only texture to the story later loom with horrifying impact.

The ending of the novel sent me racing back to the beginning with a new understanding – or at least new questions – about the plot. Triangle does not yield its insights easily, which makes it the best kind of book group selection, ripe for animated discussion.

Who owns history? The person whose story you believe.

 A tragedy and a legacy

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire took place 103 years ago this week. It was a predictable and preventable tragedy that killed 146 workers – mostly young immigrant women – at a clothing factory in New York.

Dozens of the workers leaped to their deaths from the top floors of the blazing building, an image that anyone who lived through 9/11 can conjure all too easily. Even more people burned to death, many of them trapped behind locked doors in flaming workrooms. Others crawled onto rickety fire escapes that collapsed and sent them plunging to the sidewalk.

More than 350,000 people marched in the streets of New York to mourn the garment workers. Outraged by their needless and excruciating deaths, factory workers organized and won many of the workplace safety laws we take for granted today.

A story less known

A year before the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, some 20,000 women who worked in garment factories had gone on strike to demand better wages, a shorter workweek (52 hours), and specific safety measures. These working class women, many of them Yiddish-speaking immigrants, drew the support of New York’s suffragists, some of whom were women from the city’s wealthiest families.

The suffragists raised funds for the workers, bailed them out of jail, and organized mass rallies to generate public solidarity. Across the city, factories conceded to the workers’ demands, acknowledged the unions, and improved workplace safety.

Not the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. The two owners – Max Blanck and Isaac Harris – refused to unionize and refused to address safety concerns, including workers’ calls to leave factory doors unlocked and provide functional fire escapes.

A year later, these safety issues cost 146 people their lives. But they cost the factory owners nothing – in fact, the two men profited from the tragedy. While they settled lawsuits by paying family members $75 for each lost life, the owners received insurance settlements of $400 for each worker killed. The two men went on to run other factories, accumulating and ignoring citations for the very safety violations that had led to the carnage at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory.

Haunted

It may seem we’ve strayed pretty far from the topic of favorite book club selections. But that’s the power of a good book: it takes you on a journey out of your world and into another. And with a haunting novel like Triangle, part of you is likely to remain there for a long, long time.

Triangle book cover