Category: Article

Like his previous novels, Snow Falling on Cedars and East of the Mountains, David Guterson’s latest, Our Lady of the Forest, follows another band of confused, rain-chilled characters battling tragic pasts and uncertain futures. In the sodden forests of North Fork, Washington, a homeless and asthmatic teenage pothead named Ann Holmes claims to be visited by the Virgin Mary. Word spreads across the weary logging town and Ann quickly garners a cult of followers, bringing the believer, the cynic, the hopeful, and the wounded out of the woodwork; among them an eye-rolling, misanthropic fellow mushroom picker, and a trailer-dwelling priest with a nagging attraction to the reverent waif. While Guterson’s story has all the ingredients for a predictable, maudlin piece of religious mumbo-jumbo, he stays wry yet sympathetic to his characters as they explore the complexities of modern faith.
Ruminator, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 699-0587, www.ruminator.com

As a playwright, Ann-Marie MacDonald is best known for the lighthearted Shakespeare parody Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), but her novels travel a considerably darker emotional terrain. In her Oprah-blessed debut Fall on Your Knees, she detailed the corrosive secrets and lies destroying a dysfunctional Nova Scotian family. Her followup, The Way the Crow Flies, uses its setting in the early sixties as a backdrop for two shattering losses of innocence: Canadian Air Force desk jockey Jack McCarthy, who’s about to be caught up in the machinations of the Cold War; and, perhaps more heartbreaking, his eight-year-old daughter Madeleine, whose idyllic world is shattered when a classmate is found strangled in a nearby meadow, and whose teacher hides an abusive side from the community. A portrait of a family who struggles to figure out how to do what’s right in the face of harsh and confusing reality, this is heavy stuff, but MacDonald has a talent for drawing characters that pull you into the story all the way to the end.
Bound to Be Read, 870 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 646-2665, www.boundtoberead.com

A whisper in your ear: Canadian author Itani’s debut novel, Deafening, is a true joy, a moving and observant story of love, sorrow, and survival during the days of World War I. It’s made up of three entwining stories: a girl named Grania (inspired by Itani’s grandmother) learning how to cope with profound deafness in a world designed for the hearing; how she falls in love with a hearing man named Jim; and Jim’s hellish experiences in the bloody cacophony of the European trenches. Deafening is clearly a labor of love-Itani spent six years researching deaf schools and the Great War, and even became fluent in sign language. She’s a perceptive, sensitive prose stylist who’s gone the extra mile and more to really live in her characters’ skin and breathe the air of their time. That care comes through on every page.
Ruminator, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 699-0587, www.ruminator.com

Children’s books are not immune to the trends of adult publishing-in fact some grand old pretensions of the book trade do best in titles for the little people, like pop-ups and picture books. Czech-born Peter Sís is an extraordinary artist whose books are works of fine art that can be cherished by and for generations. Though published by a large house using modern methods, books like Tibet: Through the Red Box look and feel as though they were hand-produced with letterpress and lithograph. Sís’s latest book, The Tree of Life, is a dense scrapbook-like exploration of the life and work of Charles Darwin. We met Sís the last time he was in town, and he’s delightful and approachable-making him awfully popular with Mom, we noticed.
Wild Rumpus, 2720 W. 43rd St.,
(612) 920-5005, www.wildrumpusbooks.com
Red Balloon, 891 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 224-8320,
www.redballoonbookshop.com

This fall’s two new exhibits at the Science Museum showcase the spookier side of the invertebrate world. Glow explores the fascinating topic of bioluminescence-that is, how creatures like fireflies and jellyfish have the ability to produce their own light. This whole glowing thing is useful in mating rituals, prey attraction, and cancer research (by humans, not jellyfish), but given how ugly some bioluminescent fish are, you have to wonder if they wouldn’t be better off under cover of darkness. The museum’s other new exhibit is even creepier and crawlier, delving into the grisly police work that is forensic entomology. Inspired by the hit TV show, but without all the bad one-liners, CSI looks at how scientists use corpse-loving insects to establish crucial information about suspicious deaths. A morbid discipline, to be sure, but important. Lawyers aren’t the only lower life forms working to bring criminals to justice.
Science Museum, 120 W. Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul, (651) 221-9444, www.smm.org

The original Singing Detective, Dennis Potter’s 1986 BBC miniseries, was one of those bizarre and unrepeatable triumphs of pure creativity over the strictures of narrative form-a hallucinatory mix of noir film, paranoid fever dream, and Fosse-esque musical that built up and intertwined layers of story just so it could rip them apart and recombine them. Unrepeatable, and yet here’s this movie, which would seem to have no reason for being except that its translation from the small screen was Potter’s final project before his death from cancer in 1994. It’s challenging and strange material, and with a running time shorter than a quarter of the miniseries it also can’t possibly be as rich as the original. Indeed, it’s one of the year’s most critically divisive, loved by a few and hated by a few more, since its debut at Sundance last January. (Even so, it’s as uncontroversial as an episode of Friends compared to producer Mel Gibson’s upcoming The Passion of Christ.) We suspect that reviews are kind of superfluous with movies like this in any case; if you’re going, go with your mind open and your hopes medium-high, and know that the presence of Robert Downey Jr. in the lead can’t help being a positive.
Uptown Theater, 2906 Hennepin Ave., (612) 925-6006, www.landmarktheatres.com

If Pirates of the Caribbean was any indication, there is an unmet public appetite for seafaring and swashbuckling, which bodes well for what could be a long series of movie adaptations of the well-loved series of historical novels by Patrick O’Brian. In a way, casting Russell Crowe as a hard-fighting Napoleon-era British sea captain is our dream come true, at least in that our dream is to set him adrift in a small boat in the middle of the Pacific. But we’ll grudgingly admit that he’s well cast as Jack Aubrey, O’Brian’s brave but decidedly imperfect hero. The action is here is actually taken from the tenth book, which has one of the series’ meatiest plots, with Aubrey and his spy/surgeon buddy Stephen Maturin chasing a powerful enemy frigate around South America. Purists will grumble about any number of changes, for instance that the bad guys are no longer Americans, but French-leading us to wonder whether they’re also changing that infamous Churchill quip to “rum, freedom fries, and the lash.”

These four films from the most productive decade of Humphrey Bogart’s career might be second-tier in the Bogie canon, but only because pretty much anything is second-tier to Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. Included here are two of the last films of his pre-leading-man days when he was still playing villains and supporting charactersÑthe gritty noirs High Sierra and They Drive by Night, directed by the sometimes workmanlike Raoul Walsh near the top of his form. 1944’s To Have and Have Not, the legend goes, was the result of a bar bet between Ernest Hemingway and director Howard Hawks. Papa claimed Hawks couldn’t make a good film from his worst novel; Hawks got William Faulkner to write the script and won the bet. The weirdest one here is the 1947 thriller Dark Passage, in which Bogie’s wrongfully accused fugitive gets plastic surgery to hide himself while tracking down his wife’s killer-and for the first hour, while the bandages are on, the film is told entirely through a Bogart’s-eye camera view. Gimmicky, yes, but it gives new meaning to “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

We go back and forth about which of Sergio Leone’s mid-sixties spaghetti Westerns is our favorite, like an indecisive diner trying to choose between their four favorite pie flavors at Bakers Square. Right now we lean toward For a Few Dollars More, but if anyone wanted to argue for West, the last, longest and most operatic of the quartet, we wouldn’t make them draw pistols at high noon. On the downside, Charles Bronson’s expressionless, flinty hero is simply not as compelling as the expressionless, flinty hero played by Clint Eastwood in the previous three films. And the pacing is, truth be told, pretty slow. But Leone did pull off a brilliant bit of stunt casting by convincing Henry Fonda, for the only time in his career, to be the bad guy. He’s just terrific. Those clear blue eyes, icons of benevolence in everything else he did, here become emblems of pure and icy evil.

After six years out of the music scene since 1997’s Surfacing was the toast of Lilith Fair, Sarah McLachlan is resurfacing with a new album. About time. While Surfacing’s “Angel” is a good song, we’re ready to hear that brilliant voice sing a different tune. And true to McLachlan’s success, Afterglow’s lead single “Fallen” has already made its way to the top of the pop charts. But it’s the less overplayed, more thoughtful songs that have made us grow to love McLachlan and her music. And she’s had plenty to think about. In the half-decade since her last album, McLachlan gave birth to daughter Indie and lost her mother to cancer. She deals with these events in the candid and expressive style we’ve come to expect. It’s a blend of the old and the new. Six years is a long time, but it was worth the wait.