The Cephalopod Coffeehouse: Waiting to be Heard

By now, you’ve probably heard of Amanda Knox. You may even have an opinion about her case and whether or not you think she was involved in the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher. My interest in the case started when Amanda was acquitted a couple of years ago, but it grew with recent developments (in January, her appeal was reversed). In addition to the popularity of the case, I became interested in her memoir as a source of research for my third novel since it also deals with an exchange student who gets into trouble abroad.

After all that has been said about Amanda on news shows, magazines, the internet and even a made-for-TV movie, Amanda finally gives us her version of the story. In a prose that is easy to follow and insightful, we meet Amanda a few months before she moves to Perugia, Italy. We get to know her parents, her siblings and her sometimes quirky and adventurous nature in her native Seattle, where she has planned in some detail her year of studies in Italy—a lifelong dream of hers.

Amanda is not very different from other people her age who travel abroad. I also traveled to Europe in my early twenties and Amanda seemed as ordinary as any other girl I met during my trip. I won’t go into too much detail about her story since: a) it’s all over the internet and b) if I tell you too much, you won’t want to read it (and if you’re interested in her story, I believe it’s worth reading. Especially because we’re so used to making quick judgments based on what the media tells us.)  I’ll just say that Amanda goes into great detail about those first months in Italy, the people she associated with, her relationship with her roommates, the boys she met, etc. She doesn’t portray herself as a saint as she admits to having smoked pot and engaged in sexual activity with two or three guys. This, she says, were mistakes the media and the prosecution exploited during her first trial.

Amanda claims her relationship with Meredith was good. According to her, they were confidents and friends who explored the city together and shared similar experiences (both were English speakers trying to find their way through a new culture and a new language). Then she describes the moment she met Raffaele—her then boyfriend and partner in this ordeal—their short-lived but intense relationship, the day Meredith died, the police interrogations, her two trials and her life in prison. She brings insight into a few things that are not explored much on the internet or news shows:

• What, according to Amanda, happened during the interrogation where she accused her boss of killing Meredith (and later admitted to lying about it). She offers a theory as to why she lied that night.

• During her appeal, there was an important testimony from a man who’d been imprisoned with Meredith’s convicted killer (Rudy Guede, who’s DNA was all over Meredith’s room). This man said Guede confessed to having raped and stabbed Meredith in conjunction with “a friend” (who wasn’t Raffaele or Amanda, which is what the prosecution alleges). In fact, Guede was supposedly having a moral dilemma as to what to say during their appeal. (Guede had a separate trial and conviction from Amanda and Raffaele.) This story made more sense to me than the prosecution’s theories of a “sexual game gone bad” or a “Halloween Eve sacrifice.”

• Explanations as to why there were traces of Amanda and Raffaele’s DNA in a couple of items that the prosecution assigned as proof of their culpability.

• Insights on the people in Amanda’s life in prison and outside. I was especially touched by three people in her life: a Catholic priest who befriended Amanda—an agnostic—during her hardest times in prison (Don Saulo); one of her best friends from Seattle who moved to Perugia to be near Amanda after she was sentenced to 26 years in prison (Madison) and Laura, an American inmate who grew up in Ecuador and became sort of a foster mom or older sister to her. Amanda’s family is also commendable as they never abandoned Amanda and during her four-year-ordeal always made sure someone was in Italy on visiting days. Her stepfather went as far as to move to Perugia for some time. Amanda’s story, as sad as it is, also serves as a testimony that goodness is sometimes found in the most unexpected places.

After reading Amanda’s memoir, I conclude that yes, she made MANY mistakes, primarily not taking the police interrogations seriously—she didn’t wait for a lawyer to be present and she never called the American embassy before answering questions in a language that she didn’t speak well. Her lying during one of her confessions, I admit, is hard to understand and made me wonder if she was covering up for something else (heavy drug use?) however, I do not believe she was involved in Meredith’s attack. It just doesn’t make sense. Our civilization has become SO reliant on technology that sometimes we drop common sense out the window. The prosecution claims that a girl like Amanda—with no prior convictions and a model student who came from a good family—is guilty of murdering (savagely) and raping her friend (when she doesn’t even have the *right* equipment, if you know what I mean). What we do know is that there is no motive. The prosecution claimed Amanda and Meredith argued over the bathroom’s cleanliness, but only a psychopath would kill over this, right? Not to mention the fact that there is no evidence of her presence in Meredith’s room. The prosecution claimed Amanda and Raffaele wiped their own DNA in the room but left Guede’s, as though it was possible to see DNA! Plus, there was no proven relationship between Guede and Amanda or Raffaele (Raffaele said he’d never met the man and Amanda said she saw Guede once or twice with her downstairs neighbors but couldn’t even remember his name.) 

I truly believe that Amanda’s problems stemmed from her immaturity and naivety at the time of her trip. Not only was she cavalier about who she spent time with (including working at a bar with people she barely knew) smoking pot on a regular basis and having sex with guys she’d just met. Unfortunately, this is not uncommon in people her age. When I moved to the US to go to college, I had the fortune of having a couple of family members here to guide me through the process of moving to a different country and start a new life as an adult. Also, my parents came with me and helped me settle in the dorms. When Amanda arrived to Italy, she had nowhere to live and found her new roommates on a bulletin board. I know, LOTS of college kids do this, but this doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. ESPECIALLY in a different country where you barely speak the language and you don’t know the “rules of the land.”

By the end of the book, however, you see Amanda as a different woman. Not sure this has to do with the fact that Amanda is a writer (currently studying Creative Writing in Seattle) and she knows that in every journey, the hero must show change and growth, or that she truly matured with all the hardship she went through, but her transformation was evident to me.

Have you been following this case or read her memoir? Do you believe in her innocence? What do you think will happen now that her appeal got reversed? Do you think the US will extradite her to Italy? Do you think it’s fair that she was tried twice for the same crime?

Check out these coffeehouse reviews!

1.	The Armchair Squid	2.	My Creatively Random Life
3.	Wishbone Soup Cures Everything	4.	Valerie Nunez and the Flying Platypi
5.	Huntress	6.	Servitor Ludi
7.	MOCK	8.	StrangePegs -- Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
9.	Words Incorporated	10.	Agatha Friggin' Christie
11.	Ed&Reub	12.	The Writing Sisterhood
13.	Read, Write, Repeat	14.	V's Reads
15.	The Cephalopod Coffeehouse: April 2014	16.	Debi O'Neille, writing against the wind

The Cephalopod Coffeehouse: The Infatuations

Ever since I started writing in English, I’ve been reading mostly American and British authors. Not only as a tool to become more proficient in the language, but also to understand what’s selling in English-speaking markets and how their stories are told. Once in a while, though, I’ll dig into world literature and look at what’s selling outside the US, mostly in Latin America and Spain.

This month I ran across a Spanish author called Javier Marías, who is apparently making waves across the Atlantic. From what I understand, there’s even Nobel Prize talk. His latest work, The Infatuations (in Spanish, Los Enamoramientos) is a literary novel (but honestly, what Spanish/Latin American author doesn’t write literary?) with elements of crime, obsession and love—or more specifically, elements of “falling in love,” which is not the same thing, according to the author. As Alfaguara (the Spanish publisher of this novel) indicates on its website, this is "a book about the state of being in love, which seems to justify everything."

The plot is simple: María Dolz is a book editor who’s been watching a couple at a café every morning for years (whom she affectionately calls “The Perfect Couple”) until one day, they stop coming. By chance, she learns that the Perfect Husband (Miguel) had been stabbed to death. When María sees the Perfect Wife again at the café, she approaches her for the first time and offers her condolences. The now-widow invites her to her home for a chat and opens her heart to María (known to them as “The Prudent Young Woman”). At the widow’s house, María meets a family friend (Javier) and from the prudent, distant observer she once was, María becomes entangled in the lives of these strangers until their fate lies in her hands.

Oddly, in this novel—which may seem so intriguing and juicy—the plot is not the most important thing. As the author himself tells us through one of his characters (in reference to another novel):

“What happened is the least of it. It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matter are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.”

The author’s philosophy comes through in his work since, for example, we know very little about his protagonist. We come to know how María thinks and feels, but little to nothing about her past, her family or even her age. We’re stuck in this one anecdote of her life, this brief season where we learn the bare minimum about her (where she works and some of the people she associates with) in order to understand her choices and actions. This is a novel where the human condition (our fear of death, our unfulfilled desires, the things we do for love, the process of grieving after losing someone) becomes the focus of the story.

I found the novel to be both refreshing and frustrating. While the prose is engaging and identifiable (as I mentioned earlier, the author analyzes in great deal feelings and experiences most of us have had) he repeats his discourse in a way that the plot becomes sometimes static. I did enjoy his reflections and repeated motifs (he uses the same examples to illustrate his views on injustice and grief) but at the same time, I wanted the action to move along, I wanted to see the characters interact in different ways—as opposed to being told what they did and simply witnessing their philosophical conversations in almost every scene, which leads me to my other objection: the characters sounded (mostly) the same in their views of life (sort of cynical) and they all engage in super long monologues.

Despite my grievances, the novel is also refreshing and here’s why: the story doesn’t follow “the hero’s journey” or any predictable pattern (even though the reader is definitely intrigued to know what will happen and what did in fact happen to Miguel). It’s more of a “slice of life” type of story with no perceivable change in the protagonist or any of the other characters (aside from the end of a natural grieving process). I loved this because I am so tired of books and films that follow a formula as though it was a manual of instructions to install a dishwasher. It seems contradictory, doesn’t it? The same things that made it refreshing (the differences from the traditional storytelling model) also presented a source of frustration for me. In the end, though, the novel touches on much deeper issues than who killed Miguel and why or what will happen with the protagonist’s love life. It talks about how our perspective and memory may affect the truth (or what we perceive as such), it talks about how humans adjust to the loss of a loved one to the point where if that person were to come back, he or she may no longer have a place in our lives, and it talks about justice and impunity. In summary, it’s one of those novels that will leave you pondering for days and perhaps make you examine your own philosophies and fears.

Spanish edition of The Infatuations. Which cover do you like better?

Have you read this novel? If so, what did you think? Do you agree with the author in his assessment that ideas are more important than events in fiction? 

Check out these Cephalopod Coffeehouse reviews!

1.	The Armchair Squid	2.	What's up, MOCK?!
3.	Words Incorporated	4.	Scouring Monk
5.	Huntress	6.	A Creative Exercise
7.	Libby Heily	8.	Trisha @ WORD STUFF
9.	Wishbone Soup Cures Everything	10.	mainewords
11.	Julie Flanders	12.	Hungry Enough To Eat Six
13.	Yolanda Renee	14.	M.J. Fifield
15.	StrangePegs -- Turn Coat	16.	The Writing Sisterhood
17.	Ed and Reub	18.	StrangePegs -- Vader's Offspring

The Cephalopod Coffeehouse: Those Who Save Us

Warning: this review contains some spoilers.

Many books have been written about World War II and the Holocaust. I, for one, didn’t think there was anything new anybody could say on this subject. But apparently, I was wrong. Jenna Blum had lots to say.

Those Who Save Us is a novel that offers a different perspective of the war. It’s not a novel about the battlefield and the soldiers who fought and perished there, or the people who got sent to concentration camps to die. This novel focuses on the Germans who helped the Jews—or didn’t—and the price they had to pay for their actions. It’s not a novel of moral absolutes; it’s one filled with grays.

The story is told in two timelines by two women: Anna in the early 40s, a baker’s apprentice who has a relationship with a Jewish doctor that leaves her pregnant in the midst of an antisemitic world; and her daughter Trudy, a history professor in the 90s who grows up in Minnesota trying to understand who she is and how to muffle the shame of what her German ancestors did.

As Trudy embarks on a series of interviews to understand the German perspective during the war–a cleansing of sorts–her mother Anna locks herself in silence and baking. While Anna tries to leave the past behind, Trudy is determined to uncover it and understand it, creating increasing friction with her mother. But Anna’s past unfolds in front of our eyes with painful detail. In her youth, we see her as a woman whose initial naïveté and playfulness transforms into courage and bitterness. She often has to do things she doesn’t want to do, things that will haunt her for the rest of her life, but we also see her generous spirit and her tenacity as she puts herself in danger to help others. This mixture of guilt, impotence and the drive to survive makes her a fascinating character.

Blum does a good job at introducing the romance between Anna and the Jewish doctor, but I can’t say she’s equally convincing in a romance that flourishes later on. The novel seems to sag a little at times (particularly during the years where Anna has a relationship with an SS officer) and has a few scenes of what some may consider gratuitous sex. But overall, the story flows well, and Trudy’s interviews are dynamic and interesting.

With a literary style that is sometimes frustrating (Blum chooses to do without quotation marks during her dialogues) but most often satisfying for the richness in language and the vivid descriptions and imagery, Blum shows us a different, a very human face of the war. Sure, there is a fair share of one-dimensional villains and victims thrown in the mix, but there are many characters in-between. And those are the ones who kept me reading.

I recommend this novel to those who have sometimes been disappointed with books about the Holocaust because of how predictable and/or repetitive they seem, and want to explore a different perspective. But this novel is not for everyone. There are a few violent scenes toward women and children. The subject is one that elicits a lot of emotion, pain and anger, and as such, it can feel daunting and depressing to some readers. It is in no way a light read. However, sometimes these sad stories are the ones that touch audiences the most. The resolution—and the story as a whole—definitely does that.

Check out these other Cephalopod Coffeehouse reviews!

1.	The Armchair Squid	2.	Counterintuitivity
3.	Subliminal Coffee	4.	Scouring Monk
5.	A ARTE DE NEWTON AVELINO	6.	The Random Book Review
7.	StrangePegs -- The Ocean at The End of the Lane	8.	Ed & Reub
9.	What's Up, MOCK?	10.	My Creatively Random Life
11.	Jim Devitt	12.	Hungry Enough to Eat Six!
13.	Bird's Nest	14.	Divine Secrets of the Writing Sisterhood
15.	Words Incorporated	16.	Spill Beans
17.	M.J. Fifield	18.	Servitor Ludi

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: Hollywood by Gore Vidal

Okay, so I'm throwing my hat in the ring for the Cephalopod Coffeehouse Book Club with my review of Gore Vidal's historical novel Hollywood. And boy, did I pick a doozy!

You see, I have this thing for historical novels, a real love for the way an author can weave history into a fascinating tale, using names and places from so long ago. Unfortunately for any poor soul wishing to read this "novel" way too many names of people you probably haven't even heard of get thrown into the mix. In the end, this "novel" reads like nothing more than a history book that I would've been forced to read in high school.

Oh, where to start! I guess I'll start with how many names get dropped throughout the novel, most of them occurring within the first hundred pages. Sure, there are names that are easily recognizable, like Woodrow Wilson, W.G. Harding, the Roosevelts, and so on. But then there are many many other obscure names muddying the storytelling. To be quite honest, I wasn't sure who to follow, who held the most importance in this wordy storyline. I'm going to say three people pop out because they are followed the closest when it comes to POV: Jess, Caroline, and Burden.

Next up is the fact that the book is called Hollywood, but it takes over a hundred pages to even get to Hollywood. Vidal spends more time mucking through the halls of Congress and the White House than he ever spends on the vivid transformation taking place on the West Coast. More than anything, I found this to be completely frustrating. I picked out the book because the main focus described would be Hollywood and those early golden years when everything in the film business was beginning to take shape. Instead of a larger view of what was taking place out in California, Vidal focuses on Caroline's character, how she gets roped into making "photo-plays", and then we're right back in Washington D.C. listening to the banal history concerning Wilson and WWI. If you have no interest in Wilson's WWI policies or all the names getting dropped for the 1920 presidential election, then I suggest you find your historical novel fix elsewhere.

Vidal's writing just gets tedious. I'd always wanted to read one of his novels, but now I feel like I'm kicking myself over having chosen this book. History is important, but when a storyteller can't create a story beyond historical facts then he's only going to lose his audience. In the end, this is how I felt every time I picked up to read  Hollywood:

Yep, it was that boring!

Make sure to check out other reviewers takes on their chosen books this week!

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: The Dinner

Note: I am double-posting this review here and at Words Incorporated. 

For the inaugural Cephalopod Coffeehouse, I have chosen to review a book that's making pretty big waves in Europe, but hasn't quite reached the same level of buzz here in the States: The Dinner, by Dutch author Herman Koch. I'm always interested in reading books written in languages other than English, but usually they have to become megabestsellers before someone will translate them. And so it is with The Dinner. Written while George W. Bush was still president (he is referenced several times in the narrative), the book wasn't translated into English until 2012, and it's only recently been reviewed by major newspapers here.

"A European Gone Girl." —The Wall Street Journal

"An internationally bestselling phenomenon: the darkly suspenseful,
highly controversial tale of two families struggling to make the
hardest decision of their lives — all over the course of one meal."

The premise: two brothers and their wives sit down to a fancy dinner in Amsterdam in order to discuss a rather serious problem that has arisen with their respective sons. The nature of the problem is revealed fairly early on, but details are added as the novel progresses. And it's pretty grim. The novel's comparison to Gone Girl is not inaccurate: they are both compulsively-readable novels with unreliable narrators, a cast of appalling characters, and head-spinning plot twists.

In case you're wondering how a novel could take place just over the course of one dinner: it doesn't. While it's structured (rather cleverly) around the titular dinner, with each course representing a new development in the family saga, the action ranges far beyond the restaurant: we travel back in time with the narrator, Paul, who fills in the family history via recalled anecdotes. Of course, all these recollections are filtered through the black veil of his mind: you can trust what you're told only after you learn to interpret Paul's reality.

Paul Lohman. Humbert Humbert. Amy Elliot Dunne. It must be so much fun to write characters like these: twisted people who justify their unjustifiable actions to the reader. Characters who, as awful as they are, retain a certain charm. Who dare us to empathize with them, just a little bit. When you see the lengths these characters go to to exculpate themselves, you start to wonder about your own mind: do we all have a little Paul Lohman in us?

Paul starts off the novel as merely curmudgeonly, and invites the reader to sympathize with him as he mocks the pretentiousness of the restaurant and rails against his brother's slick political persona. Some reviewers who initially liked Paul found themselves unsettled when Paul goes from justifiably grumpy to pretty much unhinged. Maybe because I'd already been through that with Amy Elliot Dunne in Gone Girl, I wasn't so troubled by Paul's ever-worsening character. What bothered me more was Koch's decision to [slight spoiler alert] make Paul's personality into a neurological condition: somehow, locating the problem in the brain makes the story less urgent.

But this twist does bring up the problem of evil, free will, and heritability. Is the bad son that way because he made bad decisions of his own free will? Or was he a blank slate his dad trained into evilness? Or was he always going to be evil, due to the Evil Gene his father apparently has? The involvement of two cousins — one related, one adopted — further touches on the what-makes-men-wicked question. It's not explored directly, but Koch lets it hang there, ready for book-club discussion.

As interesting as these Bad Boys are, the truly interesting character (for me) ended up being Paul's wife, Claire. We have strong indications about why Paul and his son are the way they are, but what makes Claire a willing participant in the unfolding insanity? Because the premise is only the start of it: the two families have to decide what to do about their sons, now that the misdeed has surfaced. The brothers are set up to have conflicting solutions, but it's the wives who surprise us.

Koch makes a number of references to Tolstoy's famous line about families: "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I wasn't really sure why he kept referencing this line at first, except to show how doggedly Paul was forcing his own family into that mold, in spite of all the awfulness that was being uncovered. But now I'm wondering if Koch wrote the book to overturn Tolstoy's maxim. Perhaps he wanted to show that happy families (and you could argue that the Lohmans are, in fact, a happy family) are not all alike. That happy families can have as many skeletons-in-closets and as much drama as the unhappy ones.

Visit the other Coffeehouses to read more reviews!

1.	The Armchair Squid	2.	Cygnus
3.	Scouring Monk	4.	My Creatively Random Life
5.	Words Incorporated	6.	StrangePegs
7.	Subliminal Coffee	8.	Ed&Reub
9.	Back Porchervations	10.	WearingLemon
11.	more...MILLVALLISON	12.	The Bird's Nest
13.	Trisha @ WORD STUFF	14.	Writer's Block
15.	Choice City Native	16.	Counterintuitivity
17.	What's Up, MOCK?	18.	What It Is Like To Be A Frog (You Think?)
19.	The Random Book Review

Sunday Book Review: Me Before You

It’s not often that a fiction writer falls in love with a novel. In fact, the more you write, the pickier you get. I debated whether or not to write a review about Jojo Moyes’ latest novel, Me Before You, because frankly, it’s easier to analyze something that is poorly written or breaks every publishing commandment, than praise a book so much you start sounding like a broken record. At running the risk of boring you, dear reader, I decided to talk about this book because as much as we learn from other writers’ mistakes (as well as our own), we can learn from those who excel in their craft.

Me Before You centers around Louisa Clark, a waitress who reluctantly accepts the position of care giver to quadriplegic after she loses her safe and cozy job at a café in her small English hometown. Her new employer, Will Traynor, is a 35-year-old former businessman/playboy/adventurer who’s turned bitter and hopeless after an accident left him paralyzed. Lou has few ambitions in life other than supporting her quaint family and hanging out at a local pub with her long-time boyfriend, Patrick, whereas Will comes to this stand still point after living a “big life,” as he calls it. After the initial clash between the two characters (Will’s mom is the one to hire Lou against her son’s wishes) Will grows used to Lou’s eccentric fashion sense and easy-going, optimistic nature. When Lou finds out Will has lost his will to live, she is determined to change his mind by showing him “fun” ways for him to enjoy life (often with questionable results). The big questions the novel asks are whether or not Lou will change Will’s attitude toward his situation, and whether a life without movement is worth living.

With humor but also moments of intense poignancy, Moyes captures the reader from page one. Her strengths as a novelist are many: not only has she built a plot that screams tension from the very beginning, but she also manages to create relatable and believable characters. Her style is easy and quick, but not flat. The dialogue is sharp and realistic. The first person narration helps us relate to Lou and the prologue serves the purpose of intriguing the reader. Perhaps the only questionable decision was to include four more point-of-view characters into the narrative, which in my opinion offered little else to the development of the story. Sure, Moyes gave us insight into the other characters’ thoughts, but to me, it came at the expense of slowing down the novel’s pace.

Moyes was also successful at making the reader aware of the limitations of life as a quadriplegic (particularly in Europe) where the streets are narrow and there are not a lot of handicap-friendly facilities. As witnesses of Will’s struggles, we realize the harsh realities and daily pain quadriplegics face. This is one of those “book club” novels that will send you directly to a Google search about the intricacies of this condition and certain organizations mentioned in the novel. Moreover, the story will stay with you long after you’ve finished it.

I highly recommend it.

The author, Jojo Moyes.

Have you read this novel? If so, what did you think of it?