Monday, July 26, 2010

Confessions

I confess:  growing up I wanted Pa (played by Michael Landon) from Little House On the Prairie to be my dad.  Didn't everyone?  He was hardworking, tender, handsome, honorable, and well-respected.   Moreover, I imagined what it would be like to live in that "little house," in Walnut Grove, attending a one-room schoolhouse.  Looking back, it's a little silly.  But like many viewers, I found myself drawn the wholesomeness of it all.   It's this nostalgia which drew me to read Alison Arngram's new book, Confessions Of A Prairie Bitch:  How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated.  It is, of course, an autobiography:  we learn of Arngram's sexual abuse as a child, and how this spurned her political activism as an adult.  These parts of the book are mildly interesting.  By comparison, what most fans of the show will look for are Arngram's "behind the scenes" stories--how the relationships developed from the Pilot episode; how Laura (played by Melissa Gilbert) and Nellie actually got along, and it was Mary (played by Melissa Anderson) who was a bit of a diva.  Readers will learn things, of course, about the show--but they'll also find themselves taking a bit of a trip down memory lane.  Arngram has a good sense of humor, and tells a good enough of a story.  But like Melissa Gilbert's Prairie Tale: A Memoir (2009), this one's for fans of the show only. 

Sunday, July 18, 2010

A Beautiful Equation

Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper & the Professor (otherwise entitled in Japan as The Professor's Beautiful Equation) is an original, simple, lovely story about the relevance of memory and the redefinition of family.  As the title references, the story involves an uneducated single mother who keeps house for a former Professor and math genius whose memory stops in 1975 and whose new memories last an exact 80 minutes.  As one might imagine, this creates for an interesting, if not redundant, relationship between the two.  Each morning when the housekeeper arrives, the two engage in similar, if not identical, conversations and series of events.  And after every 80 minute period of time passes, everything begins anew.  Fortunately, the Professor keeps post-it notes attached to his suit to help act as his memory.  (The housekeeper need only point to the note with her image--a stick figure-like sketch--with the words "the new housekeeper".)  What the title fails to mention is a third, crucial character:  the housekeeper's son, whom the Professor grows to teach and protect and share his love of baseball.  What develops is an ironic relationship between the three:  a family of strangers without the potential to develop their relationship.

Plot-wise, not much happens in The Housekeeper & the Professor, but that doesn't matter:  what's paramount are the characters themselves, whose unusual relationship easily maintains the readers' interest on its own.