Bookworm Press

I would like to share a sensitive and insightful review of my novel Love of a Stonemason by Crystal Fulcher at her book blog My Reading Room.

Why I read this: The author sent me information about the book asking if I would like to review it, I was intrigued by the premise and agreed (and I am really glad I did).

How is the novel driven: Characters are the driving force in this book. It’s about Karla, Andreas, family and friends.

My Thoughts: The first thing that went through my mind when I finished this book on Friday night was simply “Wow”. I felt like I had been told a full story and while I wanted more of Karla and Andreas at the end, the story really was complete. I don’t know when was the last time I truly felt that when I finished a book. Ms. Polkinhorn did a magnificient job crafting this story and getting it on the page. The characters, scenery and happenings in the book really came alive for me and I felt like I was watching and feeling Karla and Andreas through the full book.

How to classify this book – I first thought it sounded like a romance, but after finishing it, I would say it is more general fiction. Romance is key, Karla and Andreas’ relationship is very key to the book. But most romance novels stop after dating and marriage usually, sometimes with glimpses of family life if there are several books in a series. The beauty of Ms. Polkinhorn’s novel is that it continues through the years after they marry and delves much deeper into the characters of Karla and Andreas as they tackle the new ups and downs of marriage, of their art and of family.

Love of a Stonemason never lags in plot. Whether you are looking into depression, the ups of a great art career, the separation (distance-wise) of Andreas and Karla, starting a family, all of this flowed together so well and made a great story. I was never bored and wondering when something good would happen. It was all interesting and attention getting. It’s as edge-of-your-seat as a non-thriller work can get. I was always wondering what would happen next, what aspect of life would be shown.

The realism is beautiful too. Love of a Stonemason truly shows the ups and downs of life, love and family. No family or person is perfect, there are always problems and always two sides to a story and that is what this book really looks into. I love that every aspect is shown and I really enjoyed the growth of the characters. Andreas and Karla are not superficial, you really get to know them through the whole book. I felt as though I knew them personally. The foreign setting and descriptions of landscapes and cities is also well-done. I also enjoyed learning about the art world, something that never really interested me before, but the author does a great job of making it interesting.

I laughed, I cried, I was frustrated with the characters (in a good way). I think I ran through most every emotion with this book. And what I love most is the feeling of the complete story and it’s a story that will stick with me for some time. I found myself thinking of Karla and Andreas and the other people in their lives through the weekend. Really letting the story settle over me and how I feel now is that this is a definite reread in my book and that is saying something since I don’t really reread books. My true hope is Ms. Polkinhorn will have another book on the way so I have another one of her books to enjoy. She brings realism to the story without it depressing you and leaving you down for days and I really like that. I do not have any complaints about this book and I think those of you who enjoy general fiction with a foreign-flair and romance will really enjoy this book.

My Rating: 5.0/5.0

About the Book:

The young painter, Karla Bocelli, is all too familiar with loss. When she was five years old, her mother died in a car crash in the south of Switzerland. Her Peruvian father lives at the other end of the world, and a year ago, her aunt and guardian passed away. Now, at age twenty-four, Karla almost gets hit by a speeding car. As if this wasn’t fateful enough, Andreas, the driver, turns out to be a sculptor and carver of tombstones. In spite of his profession, Andreas is anything but morbid. Quick-tempered and intense, he exudes a rough-and-tumble energy. After a tumultuous start of their relationship, Karla comes to see in Andreas the “rock in her life,” the perfect antidote to her fears of abandonment and bouts of depression. Andreas, however, wrestles with his own ghosts: an alcoholic father who abused him as a child and his own fits of anger. Together, the two artists must confront the demons that haunt them. Love of a Stonemason is a story about the struggle of two artists with their past, their family, their creativity, and their love for each other. Told from the point of view of Karla, it depicts the world through her painter’s sensibility. It takes the reader on a journey full of sights, smells, tastes, and sounds from the south of Switzerland to Italy and the Peruvian Andes.

About the Author:

Christa Polkinhorn, originally from Switzerland, lives and works as writer and translator in Santa Monica, California. She divides her time between the United States and Switzerland and has strong ties to both countries. Her poems have appeared in various poetry magazines. She is the author of Path of Fire, a collection of poems published by Finishing Line Press. Love of a Stonemason is her first novel.

The other day, I read a post on one of the blogs I follow, which happened to be a very critical and quite negative review of one of my favorite novels, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. I studied Joyce back at the University of Zurich and at the University of California in San Diego. I took seminars with a well-known Joyce scholar back in Zurich by the name of Friedrich Senn. His enthusiasm about Joyce as a writer was contagious and I began to like his admittedly difficult and often obscure writing. I thoroughly enjoyed his short stories The Dubliners and his early novel The Portrait of the Artist. At the same time, I have to admit that I didn’t make it past page 50 of Ulysses and kind of skipped Finnegan’s Wake. He lost me there but in spite of that, I admire his ingenuity and his challenging work.

So, when Stuart Allison of the blog “must mutter” (a wonderful blog by the way!) called his work “puerile, uninteresting drivel,” I had to protest and tell him he was full of youknowwhat (of course, I didn’t put it that way, after all, we are polite people). Anyway, this lead to an interesting exchange of ideas and although we didn’t agree on Joyce and art in general, we came to a point where we could agree to disagree. This discussion, however, raised a question which is really the point of my blog post.

There seem to be two major camps in literature: the group of the “academic” authors and the “contemporary genre” writers (for lack of a better expression). The academics are the ones we study in college, the ones that have received the stamp of approval by the scholars and professors of literature. They usually consist of the classics and of the writers which have been considered “experimental” but worthy of acceptance into the High Art of Literature. Interestingly enough, those radicals of the literary world were often condemned, banned, and ridiculed by the very “literary intelligentsia” which later touted them as geniuses (Joyce is just one good example).

I received my literary education in academia and went even on to the PhD program in comparative literature (English, German, and French). Halfway through my studies, events in my personal life and the realization that I wasn’t really made for academia, made me abandon the program. Many years later, after an extended detour from the study of literature via a degree in computer science (don’t ask me why, long story), to my own translation work, I began to write myself, first poetry and later novels. I published my debut novel this year as an independent author with my own micro publishing company, Bookworm Press, on Amazon and Smashwords.

My background in academia and my experience as a midlist independent author brought me in touch with both camps I mentioned earlier, the “traditional academics and experimental authors” and the “contemporary, genre-oriented authors,” and I noticed for the first time the hostile attitude that seemed to exist between those two groups. It’s almost as bad as the adversity between the traditional large publishing empires and the newly developing independent publishing ventures. Hatred galore. But why?

Why, in god’s name can’t we all get along? An author friend of mine once said we should burn the books of authors such as Joyce, Faulkner, and the likes, those who don’t have plot and a traditional sequence of events. On the other side of the isle is the professor or language poet who sneers at the “amateurs” out there who enjoy plot- and content- or character-driven literature or the so-called Trivialliteratur (trivial literature), the German word for entertaining, easily accessible prose.

There are times when I enjoy a difficult book from an author who experiments with language, one you have to read several times to get something out of it, one that doesn’t answer all the questions but asks questions (linguistic, social, political questions and questions of content), one that keeps language and literature alive and changing. It’s demanding, it makes you think and ponder, it may leave you dissatisfied and questioning in the end. What’s wrong with that? I just read an article in a Swiss newspaper (I’m in my original home country at the time) about a German author by the name of Reinhard Jirgl who received the Büchner prize, the coveted literary award for German literature. I have never read anything of his but he seems to be an extremely inventive author, one that people who love plot would probably hate. When the interviewer pointed out to him that his books are “difficult,” he shook his head and said: “Not difficult but TIME CONSUMING.”

That made me realize why many people shun such books. We don’t seem to have the time or the willingness to invest the time to dig into a difficult book, one that doesn’t slap us in the face on the first page, or even with the first sentence. We want instant gratification. By “we” I mean the everyday reader, the man or woman who comes home in the evening after a day of work, tired. We don’t want to think anymore but would rather watch TV or, if we read a book, then it should be one that doesn’t require a lot of “tiresome thinking,” or, even worse, one for which we have to grab a dictionary to make some kind of sense out of it. That’s understandable.

However, there are people who read and enjoy such stuff. They may be students or teachers of literature, professors, academics, or even everyday readers such as myself who once in a while like the challenge. So, why should we deprive those people of the books they like? Another friend who complained about some of the “plotless” garbage also mentioned that such books only serve to support jobs at the university level. Pray tell, what’s wrong with that? Not everybody studies literature at the university and goes on to teach it, but those who do provide a service. They support literature, they organize readings for authors, they help students enjoy a wide variety of books AND they pay taxes. That in defense of academia. And those among them, who categorically sneer at accessible literature, can sneer themselves into oblivion, as far as I am concerned. There are narrow-minded people in all walks of society.

I enjoy many types of literature. I devoured Harry Potter, I love a good mystery, I keep discovering interesting paranormal books, thrillers, even romances, if they are well written. But at the same time, I also love books by Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce, etc. etc. It depends on my mood and my state of mind.

I myself write books which have plot and are accessible because that’s what I naturally gravitate toward. When I first began to write, I tried to imitate the stream-of-consciousness novels written by Virginia Woolf, another one of my favorite authors. I failed miserably. Don’t think those books don’t have structure and order, they definitely do. And that kind of order is a lot more difficult to create than a general plot with a traditional beginning, a middle, and an end.

I’m in favor of democracy in literature, a buzz word of all those independent authors (including myself) who now toss their work into the world in form of ebooks and print-on-demand paperbacks and all that at a reasonable price. That’s great; I welcome it. But we don’t have to kill the other camp. They do their job. We can learn from each other. But that means we need to be a little less arrogant and a little more open-minded, on both sides of the isle, so to speak.

And I respect Stuart Allison, who tore Joyce apart, because he did it in an intelligent, thoughtful way. I don’t agree with him but the point is, it got a discussion started. The two camps (and I counted myself to the defending camp of Joyce in this instance) actually discussed opposing views rather than just ignore or sneer at each other. And, in addition, the discussion led me to a new author, a new blog, and it gave me the opportunity to be interviewed by him in December.

Democracy only works when people are sophisticated and open-minded enough to have their own point of view but still accept diversity. And by all means, defend what you believe in but don’t kill or burn the other side!

Happy Reading, Happy Halloween, and Happy End of the Year!

PS: In case you are interested in reading Stuart’s and my exchange about James Joyce, here is the link.