Sukey's Favorite

Rules for Old Men Waiting
By Peter Pouncey
Random House Audio, $29.95
7 hours unabridged
ISBN 0739321080

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A brilliant fiction debut is usually the prerogative of the young, but Peter Pouncey, president emeritus of Amherst College, defies that generalization with Rules for Old Men Waiting, a small gem that is spare, beautifully crafted and intensely moving. Robert MacIver, a long-retired war historian who once played rugby for Scotland, is the old man who makes the rules—rules to get himself through his last days alone in his house on Cape Cod where his beloved wife recently died. One of his rules is to work every day, and that "work" evolves into a smaller, equally brilliant story-within-a-story of class and honor and betrayal in the trenches of the First World War. But when MacIver sits alone, living in his own thoughts, we hear his story of wars, one that took his father, one that took his son and the marriage and love that withstood loss and rage. Simon Vance's faultless reading mirrors every nuance in this extraordinary novel.

An Afghan epic

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Somehow I missed the audio version of Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel, The Kite Runner when it was released earlier this year. But I've caught up and highly recommend it, even to those who have already read the book. What takes this poignant coming-of-age story far from the usual is its Afghan setting, so hearing its author read—as he does so well here—using the proper pronunciation of Afghan names, places and terms of respect, enhances its reality, easing the listener into a culture that's so important for us to understand. Amir, the son of a wealthy, gregarious, bigger-than-life Kabul kingpin, narrates the tale of his complex, conflicted friendship with Hassan, the son of their household servant. Amir's betrayal of that friendship colors his whole life and leads to a dark and difficult redemption played out against the harsh panorama of Afghanistan's war-ravaged, Taliban-tormented recent history. A provocative, vivid audio experience.


Sabotage on the South Side

There was a time when female detectives were a rare breed. Though the subgenre has mushroomed, Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski series remains one of the very best. In Fire Sale, the 12th in the series, narrated by Sandra Burr, Paretsky and V.I. are in top form, taking on social and economic injustice while going head-to-head with the bad guys. Returning to her South Side roots to coach the girls basketball team at her old high school, V.I. gets involved with her team, their working-poor parents and their many troubles—troubles that entangle her in the sabotage of a local factory, with a hotheaded, overzealous Mexican pastor and the feuding, super-rich, super-righteous family that owns a dominant mega-discount chain. Not enough? Add one brutal murder, nearly being buried alive in Chicago's vast dump and revelations about the cutthroat practices of bigger-than-big business.


A modern classic

Marilynne Robinson's second novel Gilead won this year's Pulitzer Prize, and that fortunately lead to a rekindling of interest in her first, Housekeeping. Published in 1982 to much acclaim, it's now available on audio, read by Becket Royce with the sad lyricism the text demands. This is not an easy book, and I mean that as praise. Ruth and her sister, Lucille, were abandoned by their mother, first to a reclusive grandmother, then to inept grand-aunts and finally to Sylvie, their mother's younger sister. Sylvie cares little for society's norms, driving Lucille to rigid conformity and drawing Ruth into her world where transience is as permanent as imagination is illusory. Listen carefully as Ruth conjures up this odd girlhood and seamlessly weaves it into a meditation on the persistence and insistence of memory. Give it a go, you'll be well rewarded.


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