Bonus Book Review

I didn't read much. In part that's because I don't read quickly and in part that's because $600 in books I was required to buy never arrived and because $400 in books that did arrive to my mother-in-law's home in the States were lost or stolen in Geraldo's luggage in October.

But as we wrap up this South American adventure and I think about all I will miss about Chile, I must admit that the simple pleasure of reading novels on dark, rainy days--the many, many rainy days--while looking out over the water and landscape behind our rented house stands out. That's not particularly Chilean, I know. There will be more to say about all of that. But my feeling of being here is bound up with books and rain and this view.

In particular, a book I didn't think I would like keeps coming to my mind: The Signature of

All Things. I suspected it would be silly because it was written by the Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert. But because her name reminds me of Laura Ingalls, I condescendingly forgave her the silliness I imparted to her and I opened the book. My neighbor, an American biologist, loaned me the book after I ran out of English words to read about six weeks into the trip. I was desperate, having traveled with just a few titles plus a last-minute airport buy that I did enjoy very much -- a fictionalization of Margaret Mead's life called Euphoria. I also read the few English titles I could get at the university library, but no bookstore in town carries English novels and my Spanish is not yet good enough to allow for languid pleasure reading.

I am glad Signature came to me because it linked my consciousness with the incredible plant life around me. The book imagines a woman whose own studies precede Darwin's "discovery" of evolution. In this character's slow lifetime of botanical work on moss, I was reminded of Evelyn Fox Keller's biography of Barbara McClintock, A Feeling For the Organism. I imagined McClintock's daily detailed study of the chromosomes of corn in Alma Whittaker's daily observations of the undersides of rocks and fallen trees. Gilbert is not silly at all, and I was wrong to assume she was. The book reveals her detailed understanding of the scientific process, the world of plants, and the internal lives of complicated characters whose relationships with each other are communicated through subtle gestures more than words.

A crazy book that leaves me feeling very blue is The News From Paraguay, by Lily Tuck. Like Euphoria, this is a fictionalized account of real people's lives, based on the scant evidence that remains about them and the country. It was thoroughly depressing, but not stupid like The Marriage of Opposites, the account of the life of the mother of impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. It's simplistic, tropey, and all too neat. I got this one on the electronic tablet I finally broke down and bought after it became clear that paper books in English would not find my hands for too many weeks running. I can easily say that I like neither the tablet nor any of the books I have read on it. Because I am a curmudgeon. Period.

I will let this book review end as I pick up a book by a man--a rare activity for me--The Known World, by Edward P. Jones, a faculty member at GW. Although I will read it on the tablet, which will unfairly skew my feelings, the guy has a Pulitzer Prize so I am allowing my hopes to be high.

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