Showing 91 - 100 of 1288 Fiction annotations

The Wilderness

Harvey, Samantha

Last Updated: Dec-13-2016
Annotated by:
Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Jake Jameson is an architect who came of age in immediate post World War II London. He grew up in “the wilderness” of the English moors and peat bogs far from London. He returns to this wilderness with a wife and an infant son, and to where his mother, a childhood friend, and many memories still live. We read about his successful career, his Jewish mother and her flight from her native Austria, his marriage to Helen and her unexpected death after about 30 years of marriage, his infidelities, his son’s incarceration in a prison he designed, his daughter’s death as a young child, and how eventually the wilderness he lived in moved from the moors to his brain. We don’t learn all of this easily because it comes in one form through Jake’s damaged memory and in another form through the tellings of more reliable witnesses. We are left in our own confused state about certain parts of story until the corrections and clarifications come later in the book. For example, we can go far into the novel thinking that Helen could have died from falling from a cherry tree until we learn near the very end that she died from a stroke, probably.

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Emergency Room Notebook, 1977

Berlin, Lucia

Last Updated: Nov-28-2016
Annotated by:
Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

The narrator Lucia works in a California city emergency room. Her job title is not specified - possibly a registration clerk or triage nurse. She enjoys working in the ER and marvels at the human body: "I am fascinated by two fingers in a baggie, a glittering switchblade all the way out of a lean pimp's back" (p90). Death, however, is a regular visitor.

All day, ambulances back up to the emergency room, gurneys rumble by, and charts accumulate. The staff is too busy. Patients are restless, frightened, and angry. She notes how everything associated with the ER appears gray - patient's skin, blankets, emergency vehicles. And perhaps the prognosis of patients as well: "Everything is reparable, or not" (p90).

Lucia describes Code Blues, the deaths of gypsies, an encounter with a blind man whose wife was DOA, drunks, and suicide attempts. She wonders why the elderly fall down so frequently. She's frustrated by the large number of people who come to the ER without an actual emergency and longs for "a good cut-and-dried stabbing or a gunshot wound" (p93). But Lucia worries that she has become too desensitized working in the emergency room, maybe even inhuman. Yet the flow of patients doesn't slow down - those with true life-threatening conditions and those who probably don't need to be there.

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Mijito

Berlin, Lucia

Last Updated: Nov-28-2016
Annotated by:
Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

It is a strange and cruel world that Amelia finds herself in. The 17-year-old woman from Mexico who speaks very little English travels to Oakland, California to marry her boyfriend Manolo. Soon after, he is sentenced to 8 years in prison. Amelia is already pregnant. She and her newborn son, Jesus Romero, move in with Manolo's aunt and uncle. Amelia refers to the baby as "mijito" (an affectionate Spanish term for "little son"). He cries constantly and has a hernia that requires repair. But the teenage mother is overwhelmed and frightened. She receives little support.

Amelia and Jesus go to the Oakland Children's Hospital where they meet a cynical but kind nurse who works with a group of 6 pediatric surgeons. Most of the surgical practice consists of Medi-Cal welfare patients and lots of illegal aliens. The nurse encounters crack babies, kids with AIDS, and plenty of disabled children. When the surgeon examines Jesus, he notes bruises on the baby's arms. They are the result of Amelia squeezing him too hard to stifle his incessant crying. Surgery is scheduled but doesn't get done.

Later, the uncle makes sexual advances and, while drunk, rapes Amelia in the bathroom. The aunt insists Amelia and Jesus leave the apartment. She deposits them at a homeless shelter. Amelia spends her days riding buses and her nights at the shelter where she is harassed and robbed. All the while, Jesus cries. Amelia notices his hernia is protruding and she is unable to push it back in place as she was instructed. After office hours, the same nurse evaluates the situation and accompanies them to the emergency room where surgery is performed.

Amelia and Jesus return to the ER. She has been sedated and is staring blankly. Jesus is dead with a broken neck. The nurse from the surgical clinic is at Amelia's side and learns that Jesus was crying in the homeless shelter and keeping others there awake. Amelia shook the infant to try to quell the crying. She didn't know what else to do.

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At the Heart of the Universe

Shem, Samuel (Stephen Bergman)

Last Updated: Nov-23-2016
Annotated by:
Carter, III, Albert Howard

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

This ambitious novel presents unusual events ten years after an international adoption.  Because of the Chinese one-child policy, Chinese peasant woman Xiao Lu abandons her second daughter Chun in a rural market, knowing that the child will be sent to an orphanage. An American couple adopt the child, calling her Katie. As a celebration for Katie’s tenth birthday, they return to southwest China, hoping to meet the birth mother.  

In a series of unusual events, they find Xiao Lu, and it is, at first, a joyous event. Troubles mount, however, as the birth mother wants Katie to stay with her, and Katie feels a mystical bond between them. Xiao Lu, having left her husband, now lives as a hermit in a hut on the slopes of The One Hundred Mile Mountain. She sweeps the 100 steps of The Elephant Temple daily and practices calligraphy in her hut.  

Pep and Clio Macy, having married late, could not get pregnant. The novel satirizes them as aging Yuppies, spoiled and materialistic. Clio wears a Movado watch worth hundreds if not thousands of dollars. The family’s cockerpoo has been boarded at home. Katie dislikes being the only Chinese American in her private school.  

After the birth mother has been found, the mood of the book changes. Xiao Lu wants her child returned, and the Macys fear that they are in danger. In the last 100 pages, nature itself attacks the Americans with snakes, monkeys, bats, a huge millipede, and even the weather. Pep is injured and receives rough, traditional medical treatment from a monk; it appears to be effective, however, in healing his heart physically and spiritually—a resonance with the book’s title. Katie becomes more and more like Xiao, learning calligraphy and some Chinese language. When Xiao is grievously injured by the monkeys, the Macys effectively care for her, and previous conflicts are resolved.

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The People in the Trees

Yanagihara, Hanya

Last Updated: Oct-10-2016
Annotated by:
Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

The novel takes the form of a memoir written from prison. The fictional author is Dr. Norton Perina who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering what caused some people on a remote Micronesian island to live for up to 250 years or longer. Dr. Ronald Kubodera, Perina’s long-time colleague, convinced him to write the memoir while he was in prison. Perina sent Kubodera a chapter at a time, which he would then “lightly edit” and add occasional footnotes to elaborate on a given section. 

Perina is in prison for being convicted on “two counts of sexual assault,” (p. 349) though we can believe he is guilty of many more counts. All of these transgressions involved children, many of whom were under his care as their adopted father. However, the bulk of the memoir is not about the behavior that lands him in prison. Instead, it tells of Perina’s successful scientific investigations of a hidden people in a secluded partition of an unknown island in Micronesia. He came to this place while stumbling around for a career direction after medical school, and then came to discover the hidden people when stumbling upon one lying on the forest floor.

Perina eventually linked the consumption of the meat of a particular turtle on this island to a prolongation of life measured in hundreds of years. Only the inhabitants who reached around 60 years were given the turtle meat and only during a ceremony to mark the milestone. While the bodies of these people remained as they were physically when they consumed the turtle meat, their minds did not. As they aged they became non compos mentis—“all they could do was jitter and babble and laugh at nothing, the neighing laughter of the brainless.” (p. 95) Perina’s published papers called attention to a possible fountain of youth and produced the expected rush among pharmaceutical companies to distill the turtle’s magic into a pill. All they managed to do instead was to destroy the island’s habitats, corrupt its people, and hunt the turtles into extinction.  

Very little is said in Perina’s memoir about any activities leading to his pedophilia conviction until the very end; however, occasional hints that Perina could be a pedophile appear before then. At one point in particular he describes an encounter with a 10-year old boy from the village that might have awakened any such tendencies that had been dormant. Another time he admits “some of the only comfort (and certainly the only amusement) I’d found had been with the village’s children.” (p. 267). During subsequent trips to the island over the next few decades, Perina adopted 43 island children and brought them home to raise as his own. He was drawn to children, but in not so innocent a manner. Only at the very end of book, and only in the postscript, do we get any details about how he preyed upon these children.

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Tell

Itani, Frances

Last Updated: Sep-22-2016
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Kenan Oak returns from World War I to a small Ontario town. He is virtually unable to speak and dares not venture from his home. Adopted by a reclusive uncle at an early age, he has no immediate family but his wife, Tressa, who loves him and accepts his disability with good grace. They have been trying to have a child without success, and the glimmers of Kenan’s recovery are dauntingly few and faint. Slowly with the help of his uncle Am, he begins to go out at night for walks in the woods and skating on the ice of the lake.  

Am and his wife Maggie have a strained marriage. She loves to sing and once aspired to a career in music, but instead she opted for Am and a farm—although now they live in town. Lukas, a gifted new musician arrives to direct the choir; he is a postwar immigrant from an unnamed European country, possibly Germany. He notices her talent and encourages her to sing solo at the upcoming New Year’s concert. Unused to the attention, she is captivated by him, his mystique, his appreciation of her, and the return of joy through song. They have an affair, which is discovered by Am.  

Well into the story, it emerges that Am and Maggie had lost two children to diphtheria, and this trauma is at the heart of their marital strife. It is why they left their farm and have grown apart.  But Maggie imposed an edict of silence on this exquisitely painful past. In contrast, Tressa slowly encourages her silent husband to tell—by inventing stories for him and letting him revise.  His adoptive uncle gives him a postage-stamp sized photograph of his nameless mother and grandmother; together they construct a story.  

Maggie falls pregnant with Lukas’s baby. She goes away to have the child but Am cannot accept it. Compounding Maggie’s woe, she stays with Am—for all their strife, they are bound in their loss. She allows Tressa and Kenan to adopt her beloved baby.  

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Archangel

Updike, John

Last Updated: Sep-13-2016
Annotated by:
Clark, Mark

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

The speaker of this dramatic monologue in prose is an archangel.  He attempts to tell his listeners—mortals, presumably—of the beauty to be treasured in the extraordinary ordinary of the everyday world.  The Archangel speaks in nothing less than glorious diction, baroque syntax, and enchanting rhythm: he labors, rhetorically, to communicate in a language congruent with the complex, extravagant beauty of the world he describes.  He pleads with his audience to listen to him and share in the profound aesthetic experience so readily available—but he pleads to no avail: his audience will not listen.  In response to his audience's attempted departure, the Archangel implores, “Wait.  Listen.  I will begin again.”

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Lifeguard

Updike, John

Last Updated: Aug-17-2016
Annotated by:
Clark, Mark

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

The narrator of this story is a lifeguard who contemplates his identity and life-roles as he lounges in his lifeguard chair, elevated above the crowd of beachgoers.  In the winter months, he is a student of divinity; in the summer months, he ascends the throne marked with a red cross in the hopes of guarding the lives of those at play before him.  While he remains vigilant for calls of help, those calls never come, and the lifeguard confronts the troubling insight of the limited contributions he’s devoting his life to make.

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Haematology

Swift, Graham

Last Updated: Aug-09-2016
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

On February 7, 1649 –one week after the execution by decapitation of Charles I, his royal physician, William Harvey (1578-1657), discoverer of the circulation of the blood, writes to his cousin, Edward Francis, a lawyer, once his friend but now firmly in the camp of Cromwell. Harvey muses on how his responsibilities as physician to the king must place him in the royalist camp. But as a doctor he will tend to anybody – Every Body—because all bodies are governed by the same natural laws. He wonders what his place will be in the new political order. And he wonders if his cousin noticed him when he stood by the king in battle – and if they will ever meet again in friendship.  

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Ordinary Grace

Krueger, William

Last Updated: Aug-02-2016
Annotated by:
McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction — Secondary Category: Literature /

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Frank Drum, 13, and his younger brother Jake are catapulted into adulthood the summer of 1961 in their small Minnesota town as they become involved in investigation of a series of violent deaths.  Their father, a Methodist minister, and their mother, a singer and musician, can’t protect them from knowing more than children perhaps should know about suicide, mental illness, and unprovoked violence.  The story is Frank’s retrospective, 40 years later, on that summer and its lasting impact on their family, including what he and his brother learned about the complicated ways people are driven to violence and the equally complicated range of ways people respond to violence and loss—grief, anger, depression, and sometimes slow and discerning forgiveness.  

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