Unsheltered
1 journaler for this copy...
Bought in a charity shop in Thirsk yesterday.
I just adored this book. It's a long one but I just couldn't put it down and have flown through it. My first Kingsolver read, and I know I have a couple of her other books in the house yet to read - what treats wait for me.
This book works in so many ways. There is fantastic writing. Wonderful characters. Engaging plots and scenarios to make you mad. And, if you want to be profound, a lot of thinking to do about the state of the world and how we treat fellow humans and the rest of the natural world and the planet. And is the way we live the best way to live, or do we need to be brave and shake things up a little? For one, not living in the States, I find the medical insurance system there both baffling and terrifying and am thankful I don't have to live with a system. How a system can let poor people fall through the cracks like that. I mean, a guy with legs weeping and in agony, sitting in a doctor's surgery, but they don't accept his insurance so no one will see him?!?! What has the world and humanity come to? It must be awful for the health care professionals over there as well to be put in that position as well, having to be burocrats first.
Anyhoo, there are two plots alternating in this book which are connected very much in several ways, the most obvious being that they happened in the same couple of houses, just with about 150 years between them. The action happens in Vineland, a supposed utopia community set up by a guy called Landis, that people could move to and set up in, except everything has to follow the prescriptive perfect that Landis sees, poor people are taken advantage of, and old school world views continue. Let's just say the ideas of Darwin do not go down well here. And you've got to feel for Thatcher Greenwood, trying to have a discussion with people and explain the theory of evolution to people who don't know it, haven't read the book but view it all as the devil's work regardless and quote random biblical passages in their defence. Infuriating. Driven to the point of evangelicalism that a defenceless man is shot in the BACK of the head by one of the said people, and the town is so in awe/afraid of this world order that they automatically assume the murderer must have had good reason and really he must be innocent. It just beggars belief. But this is also a time where they are terrified of losing the control and order with other crazy happenings, like women in trousers, foreigners getting proper jobs, running competitive papers... But the 1800s story is wonderful, the most wonderful part being Mary Treat, Greenwood's eccentric neighbour. Apparently she was real, I've never heard of her but I must look her up. Abandoned by her husband, she blooms with the freedom of her house and space to focus on her work. She's a self taught biologist/ecologist/natural historian, and writes and discusses with all the big names in her field of the day, including Darwin himself.
And through to a couple of years ago, set during the presidential elections when Trump won (he's not mentioned by name, but it's so obvious who is being referred to), and Greek-American family... I can't think of the family name, but they end up inheriting the house on this street in Vineland. And they have to move there because they have nothing else. They've bought into this dream of study hard, work hard, save, you'll get your reward and your home and things will be ever better, and better for your kids.... and life hasn't worked out. Willa, the mother, is redundant from a magazine writer job, and her husband, Iaono (sorry, my spelling is hopeless today) is on a uni teaching job basically paying him what he would have got when he just started the rat run. Kind of depressing when you're in your 50s? Or does it depend on your life expectations... anyway, along with them there's the father-in-law Nick, who worked hard, smoked hard all his life and now he's permanently on oxygen and his extremeties are basically rotting off before the rest of him. He's also an angry old bigot, Trump supporter etc whose life hasn't worked out as rosy as he might have liked. There's younger daughter Tig, whom I just loved, and I loved the developing and improving mother-daughter relationship that grows in this book. She's little and angry, was the lesser favoured child so didn't have expectations on her, she's a bit of a hippy, distressed at climate change and the obsessive materialistic-consumerism culture that just can't keep expanding. She's back living at home having disappeared to Cuba for some time - that story eventually comes out as well, and honestly, it's done nothing but increase my fascination for that country. And there's Zeke, the eldest child, golden boy who went to the posh unis, has a mountain of student debt, was working as an intern (ie for free - still don't get the justification of that system) is very into corporate, investments, money money, had a designer label girlfriend who was on medication for depression, came off it all when she got pregnant, and when her son is a tiny baby, commits suicide. The golden boy can't even afford a roof over their heads, so he and the baby, eventually to be known as Dusty, come to live with the family, before Zeke, who never really bonds with his son, runs off back to Boston to pick up his so-called sucessfull progressive lifestyle. The house the family is living in is literally splitting apart and collapsing around them. They don't have the money to fix it. They have no where to go. So Willa starts to research the historical provenance of the house (which is how Treat and Greenwood come in) to see if she can get some kind of grant to save their home.
And in both stories, you can see this fear of people clinging to the current world order in fear of anything new, even though the writing is on the wall. Women in trousers. Votes for women. Darwinism. Climate Change. Reuse and recycle. Stop the consumerism. Racism. Different principles, but they all seem to boil down to the same base fears. I guess human behaviour is cyclical. And there are just so many thought-provoking quotes in here...
People can change their minds about little things, but on the big ones they'd rather die first. A used-up planet scares the piss out of them, after they spent their whole lives thinking the cupboard would never go bare. (p. 453). Actually, I wonder if getting to the root of why some people are so scared of such issues may help in making progress and changing how people deal with climate issues for example.
This wonderfulness from Cuba - dining in Cuba versus running a restaurant in America:
"...they have to re-order every year because it gets chipped and messed up. People are careless. If they break it, there's always more. But in Cuba whatever it is, you probably can't get more, so people take care. When you pick up a glass it's like you're raising a toast to all the people that drank from it before." (p 359)
This book works in so many ways. There is fantastic writing. Wonderful characters. Engaging plots and scenarios to make you mad. And, if you want to be profound, a lot of thinking to do about the state of the world and how we treat fellow humans and the rest of the natural world and the planet. And is the way we live the best way to live, or do we need to be brave and shake things up a little? For one, not living in the States, I find the medical insurance system there both baffling and terrifying and am thankful I don't have to live with a system. How a system can let poor people fall through the cracks like that. I mean, a guy with legs weeping and in agony, sitting in a doctor's surgery, but they don't accept his insurance so no one will see him?!?! What has the world and humanity come to? It must be awful for the health care professionals over there as well to be put in that position as well, having to be burocrats first.
Anyhoo, there are two plots alternating in this book which are connected very much in several ways, the most obvious being that they happened in the same couple of houses, just with about 150 years between them. The action happens in Vineland, a supposed utopia community set up by a guy called Landis, that people could move to and set up in, except everything has to follow the prescriptive perfect that Landis sees, poor people are taken advantage of, and old school world views continue. Let's just say the ideas of Darwin do not go down well here. And you've got to feel for Thatcher Greenwood, trying to have a discussion with people and explain the theory of evolution to people who don't know it, haven't read the book but view it all as the devil's work regardless and quote random biblical passages in their defence. Infuriating. Driven to the point of evangelicalism that a defenceless man is shot in the BACK of the head by one of the said people, and the town is so in awe/afraid of this world order that they automatically assume the murderer must have had good reason and really he must be innocent. It just beggars belief. But this is also a time where they are terrified of losing the control and order with other crazy happenings, like women in trousers, foreigners getting proper jobs, running competitive papers... But the 1800s story is wonderful, the most wonderful part being Mary Treat, Greenwood's eccentric neighbour. Apparently she was real, I've never heard of her but I must look her up. Abandoned by her husband, she blooms with the freedom of her house and space to focus on her work. She's a self taught biologist/ecologist/natural historian, and writes and discusses with all the big names in her field of the day, including Darwin himself.
And through to a couple of years ago, set during the presidential elections when Trump won (he's not mentioned by name, but it's so obvious who is being referred to), and Greek-American family... I can't think of the family name, but they end up inheriting the house on this street in Vineland. And they have to move there because they have nothing else. They've bought into this dream of study hard, work hard, save, you'll get your reward and your home and things will be ever better, and better for your kids.... and life hasn't worked out. Willa, the mother, is redundant from a magazine writer job, and her husband, Iaono (sorry, my spelling is hopeless today) is on a uni teaching job basically paying him what he would have got when he just started the rat run. Kind of depressing when you're in your 50s? Or does it depend on your life expectations... anyway, along with them there's the father-in-law Nick, who worked hard, smoked hard all his life and now he's permanently on oxygen and his extremeties are basically rotting off before the rest of him. He's also an angry old bigot, Trump supporter etc whose life hasn't worked out as rosy as he might have liked. There's younger daughter Tig, whom I just loved, and I loved the developing and improving mother-daughter relationship that grows in this book. She's little and angry, was the lesser favoured child so didn't have expectations on her, she's a bit of a hippy, distressed at climate change and the obsessive materialistic-consumerism culture that just can't keep expanding. She's back living at home having disappeared to Cuba for some time - that story eventually comes out as well, and honestly, it's done nothing but increase my fascination for that country. And there's Zeke, the eldest child, golden boy who went to the posh unis, has a mountain of student debt, was working as an intern (ie for free - still don't get the justification of that system) is very into corporate, investments, money money, had a designer label girlfriend who was on medication for depression, came off it all when she got pregnant, and when her son is a tiny baby, commits suicide. The golden boy can't even afford a roof over their heads, so he and the baby, eventually to be known as Dusty, come to live with the family, before Zeke, who never really bonds with his son, runs off back to Boston to pick up his so-called sucessfull progressive lifestyle. The house the family is living in is literally splitting apart and collapsing around them. They don't have the money to fix it. They have no where to go. So Willa starts to research the historical provenance of the house (which is how Treat and Greenwood come in) to see if she can get some kind of grant to save their home.
And in both stories, you can see this fear of people clinging to the current world order in fear of anything new, even though the writing is on the wall. Women in trousers. Votes for women. Darwinism. Climate Change. Reuse and recycle. Stop the consumerism. Racism. Different principles, but they all seem to boil down to the same base fears. I guess human behaviour is cyclical. And there are just so many thought-provoking quotes in here...
People can change their minds about little things, but on the big ones they'd rather die first. A used-up planet scares the piss out of them, after they spent their whole lives thinking the cupboard would never go bare. (p. 453). Actually, I wonder if getting to the root of why some people are so scared of such issues may help in making progress and changing how people deal with climate issues for example.
This wonderfulness from Cuba - dining in Cuba versus running a restaurant in America:
"...they have to re-order every year because it gets chipped and messed up. People are careless. If they break it, there's always more. But in Cuba whatever it is, you probably can't get more, so people take care. When you pick up a glass it's like you're raising a toast to all the people that drank from it before." (p 359)
