An American Marriage by Tayari Jones: What Rends Asunder

"Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." Mark 10:9

My first fiction read of 2018 is the highly anticipated An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. It is the story of a young marriage tested by the husband's incarceration for a crime he did not commit. It is an exploration of what endures and what holds us together.

The novel is told through the voices of the couple Roy and Celeste and Roy's best friend and Celeste's childhood soulmate Andre.

Roy and Celeste were married only a year and a half, ready to have a baby. Roy was first generation college, a handsome and charming man on the up-and-up, his whole world ahead of him. Celeste was committed to being an artist when Roy swept her off her feet and into marriage. Roy was glad to "set her down" and supported her art.

All their plans were crushed in an instant when Roy was accused of rape, convicted, and imprisoned. In a series of letters we follow their relationship through the early days of separation. Celeste's lawyer uncle works for justice for Roy. Celeste does not divorce Roy or stop depositing money into his account. But she does break off with him.

Roy's college friend Andre grew up next door to Celeste and has always loved her. Celeste loved Andre like a brother, but kept him at a safe distance. Between their childhood houses is Old Hickey, a centennial tree that represents what lasts. Several years into Roy's sentence Celeste and Andre finally consummate their love into a solid relationship, each still living in their childhood homes next to each other. Celeste has moved on, but feels the guilt of abandoning a man who has lost everything.

These characters are vital and real. And so are the supporting characters, their parents and people who raised them. There are many forms of love, marriage, and families in the story, covering a whole range of human experience. Each reveals what lasts and does not last, the nature of love,  and the many ways love is torn asunder.

The long, simmering set up peaks when Roy is finally released after five years and returns home to see if he has a marriage. It culminates in a desperate scene of conflict and Roy's realization of who he is and is not, and what has and has not endured.

The story is set against the reality of the mass incarceration of black men. I wish that Jones had included more about Roy's trial and prison experience as a black man caught in a justice system stacked against him. It would have helped set up the change in Roy, for I had trouble connecting the dapper ladies man to the violence of his later actions. Still, for readers from a background of white privilege, what is in the book may be enough to open eyes. African Americans already know.

What really sunders Roy and Celeste? Was their love too green? Was their love built on sand and not solid ground? Was Celeste to blame, or Andre? Was it society--racism and a justice system--that failed Roy? Or was it the woman who recognized Roy's face and confused him with the rapist in the dark who attacked her?

In the end, each finds a place to belong, a love that lasts. And that is all any of us really wants from life. To be one flesh in the arms of love.

I received a free book from the publisher through a LibraryThing giveaway.

An American Marriage: A Novel
by Tayari Jones
Algonquin Books
ISBN: 9781616201340

“Tayari Jones displays tremendous writing prowess with An American Marriage, an enchanting novel that succeeds at every level. From the very start, An American Marriage pulls the reader in with gorgeous prose. Even beyond its plot, the story soars. It doesn’t just focus on one instance of a marriage; it explores philosophical and political quandaries, including generational expectations of men and women, the place of marriage in modern society, systemic racism, toxic masculinity, and more. It does so in a gentle, subtle way, avoiding didacticism as it nudges the reader to question their own conventions and ideals. There are rarely novels as timely or fitting as An American Marriage. It brings abstract ideas about race and love down to the material level. The story is gripping, and the characters are unforgettable.”
—Foreword Reviews, starred review

Gifts You Can Sew from 1942

Gifts You Can Sew from the Spool Cotton Company sold for 10 cents in 1942. It offered 71 gifts which "you can make yourself at one tenth the cost and ten times the fun." Some of these gift ideas were still floating around in my childhood.

Romantic Notions for the Bride-To-Be included a powder mitt and covered hangars. I remember being given a powder mitt as a girl.

I remember the Hillsdale quilters made a version of hanger covers in the 1990s, some which encased the hanger and included a zipper lining for a secure hiding place.

 It was a time when aprons were still worn.

 The chicken potholder was another item I recall seeing in many homes when I was a girl.

Aprons were also used by men, who ruled the Barbeque. Several types of bags for sewing and needlework were offered.

 Decorating napkins, placemats, and table covers for gift linens was popular.

 Applique and embroidery patterns were provided.

WWII was on everyone's minds, and everyone knew a man in service. Gifts for GIs included a duffle bag, money belt, and sewing kit.

Embroidery patterns in a patriotic theme were offered for a boy's fabric belt.

The necklace in crochet for teens seems quite odd to me. Also the mittens and sock-slippers. It was a different time.

 A rag doll and stuffed animals were suggestions for children's gifts.

 I love these vintage finds.

State of Freedom by Neel Mukherjee

As I was reading the last pages of this uncomfortable and upsetting novel, my eyes were streaming. My grief was overwhelming.

What story set in India is easy to read? E. M. Forster's Passage to India, depicting British racism and the confused heroine nearly destroying a native Indian man's life because he was more attractive than her fiancé? Or Rumor Godden's novels and stories set in the India of her childhood, and where she returned to live with her children, their cook adding ground glass to their food? I have never forgotten her short story Mercy, Pity, and Love where a man of privilege is thinking about this thesis as his wife is on a buying spree, while on the street an starving woman holds her dying baby.

No, India holds such poverty and cruelness next to its beauty and exotic attractions that it is not easy to encounter it.

"...but then he was hopeful and it's hope that kills you in the end"--from A State of Freedom

A State of Freedom is a novel in five stories that are interconnected by characters, each story revealing that character's life and challenges. The characters include native Indians crushed by poverty and desperately hoping for a better life, and those who have gone abroad and return to their homeland to see it with new eyes, the eyes of an outsider.

Can we go home again? We leave and the world changes us so that when we return we can not become again who we were. We know too much, we have assumed new values, or perhaps we just see with fresh vision what we had ignored before, familiar things we once accepted become horrors.

The first story concerns an native Indian who has brought his child to see the land of his nativity, and then is appalled by what they see, starting with a man falling from a tall building. He us upset knowing his child is being exposed to the harsh realities of poverty.

The second story concerns a man visiting his family who becomes overly friendly with the staff; invited to visit the cook's home village he realizes he "had failed to imagine how other people live."

The third story I could not read through; children find a bear cub and ask a man to teach it to be a dancing bear--which the father and son in the first story encounter. When they found the cub they were concerned for it, but the training is cruel and inhumane; the ending is horrifying.

The fourth story concerns Milly who works for the wealthy family in the second story, Her mother sent her away at age eight to be a domestic worker. When she asks when she will return home again, her mother tells her, you won't come back. The girl is desperate to learn, to find a better life. Every few years she is moved to a new position. She finds herself virtually imprisoned in never-ending work. Until rescued from her tower by a clever man.

The last story is stream-of-consciousness, the thoughts of an ailing construction worker desperate to complete his job, his mind wandering to the boy in a car he had seen, wishing he could be "the pampered son of a rich man." But he is betrayed, for neither he or the boy escape their mutual fate.

The novel is dark and painful. Why would I choose to endure such unhappiness? Why should one read this book?

One cannot change the way of the world, or the workings of a foreign society, but one can learn to see beyond the narrow limits of our comfortable world. We can understand how others live, we can learn mercy, pity and compassion.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

A State of Freedom: A Novel
by Neel Mukherjee
W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Date: January 2, 2018
Hardcover $25.95
ISBN: 9780393292909

From the publisher:

A devastating and powerful vision of a people defined by that most unquenchable human urge, the striving for a different life.

Can we transform the possibilities we are born into? A State of Freedom wrests open the central, defining events of our century: displacement and migration. Five characters in very different circumstances—from a domestic cook in Mumbai to a vagrant and his dancing bear—find the meanings of dislocation and the desire to get more out of life. Set in contemporary India and moving between the reality of this world and the shadow of another, this novel of multiple narratives—formally daring, fierce but full of pity—asks the fundamental question: how does one imagine the ways one can live in the world, or even outside it?

About the Author: Neel Mukherjee was born in Calcutta. His first novel, A Life Apart, won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction, among other honors, and his second novel, The Lives of Others, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Prize.

My Classics Reading Challenge: A Secret Sisterhood & Literary Friendships

I won a finished copy of A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf  by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney from The Holiday Cheer Contest sponsored by Bookreporter.com.

I love the book's focus on women writers supporting each other in their craft. The 'big names' in the subtitle are quite familiar, but other than Harriet Beecher Stowe and perhaps Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Gaskell, not all their 'literary' friends are well known.

Jane Austen was friends with Anne Sharp, an aspiring playwright reduced to being a governess, hired by Jane's brother Edward. Charlotte Bronte's school friend Mary Taylor encouraged her to study on the continent, altering her life (for better or worse). In her later life she was friended by Elizabeth Gaskell, who wroter her first biography. George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe corresponded over many years, although their relationship had its ups and downs. As did the friendship between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield.

At university I was privileged to be in an amazing honors course on Jane Austen in which we read everything she wrote, including her juvinilia and letters. A few years back I read Charlotte Bronte and Her Family by Rebbecca Fraser and read most of the works by the Bronte sisters. (Including some of the poetry.) I have read Gaskell's Mary Barton and North and South,  George Eliot's Adam Bede, and Virginia Woolf's novels To The Lighthouse, The Waves, Mrs. Dalloway and also A Room of Her Own. Back in my teenage years I read Harriet Beecher Stowes's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

A Secret Sisterhood made me realize I needed to fill in the 'gaps' especially concerning Eliot. Last year one of my book clubs read Stowe and I sadly could not fit it into my reading. And since I have wanted to read more of the classics this seemed like a great idea.

So, my 2018 reading challenge is to read A Secret Sisterhood along with novels by the authors discussed.

I ran over to Barnes and Noble and (with my membership card) purchased their $4 paperback editions. I can make notes in them without feeling bad. I opted for Eliot's Daniel Deronda over Middlemarch just because it looked a tad thinner. I picked up Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Woolf's Night and Day. I ordered Mansfield's Selected Stories. I downloaded Mary Taylor's The First Duty of Women from the Internet. I will reread Austen's Sense and Sensibility only because I have reread it least of all her works. (And it is pretty short.)

I don't have a schedule in mind. How fast I get through this project will depend on how many galley books I find I 'need' to read!

I still need to make the Bronte sisters quilt I have in my head. All the fabrics are waiting for me to get started.

My 2017 Quilt Projects

2017 was a year of making quilt tops. I finished a few small projects, quilted on my Austen Album quilt, but mostly I did a lot of applique and created a lot of UFOs.

My big achievement was completing the 1857 Album quilt, a pattern offered by Gay Boomers of Sentimental Stitches.

Completed projects were small wall hangings. I completed several 2015 Row By Rows.

This row was from The Pincushion in Imlay City, MI

This row was from Waterford, MI. 

I bought this Jane Sassaman pattern and fabric when she spoke at a local quilt guild.

I just made a printed panel into a wall hanging for my son. He received the panel from a friend at Christmas.

 Of course, it features a Shiba Inu!

I repaired several quilts, including the first quilt I ever made. I replaced worn areas.

And I did extensive repairs to a quilt made by my grandfather's Aunt Carrie Ramer Bobb, which belongs to my Aunt Pat. I appliqued hundreds of 1" squares over fabric that had decayed and resewed seam after seam.

 

I made a number of mug rugs.

After finding some fantastic Neverland fabric I bought Marion Cheever Whiteside Newton's Story Book pattern of Peter Pan. I have been working on those blocks. I will next add embroidery.

And I am back to working on my Great Gatsby Story Book quilt. I am embroidering the completed blocks now. The designs are based on 1924 fashion illustrations.

I made Icicle Days from Bunny Hill using fabrics I won.

 I made two versions of this Big Block Quilt, one for me and one for our son.

 

 I loved this quilt when I saw it. 

 I tried projects from several of the quilt books I reviewed. Below is an embroidery from Stitches From the Harvest.

 And Distinctive Dresdens had me trying my hand at several blocks.

  

I only was able to do a few blocks of a Christmas quilt sew along.

 

And I finally made the vintage sheet quilt. I have had the vintage sheets for years.

This coming year I am going to break down and hire a machine quilter. I have too many quilt tops languishing in the closet!