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Readers makes one think of life’s importance
Book Review
By Derryll White
Bivald, Katarina (2015). The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend.
The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? – Henry David Thoreau.
I was struck by the oddity of the setting when placing this volume on the shelves at Lotus Books. Originally written in Swedish, Alice Menzies has done an excellent job of translating the story to English. But a Swedish writer in Sweden constructs a story of a young girl arriving in Iowa, knowing little of America except the books she has read which were sent to her by a now-dead woman living in Broken Wheel – a quickly declining small Iowa farming community (637 residents to be exact).
As soon as I started to understand the level of books being exchanged between Amy (Iowa) and Sara (Sweden), I knew I had to read this novel. After all, that’s what I do – books. As Bivald says, “Reading books isn’t a bad way to spend your life.”
There is something unique, in this age of globalization, about thinking of a town as an aggregation of people – individual, defined people – who look out for and after, each other. Broken Wheel, Iowa, is the hub for a wide cast of characters who work in their odd and independent ways to construct a community. And in Katarina Bivald’s creation it exhibits all the traditional elements of community – caring, sharing, working together for the common good. People taking care of people.
And at the centre, as I believe it should be, was the bookstore that Sara created. That bookstore becomes a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but throughout the power of books as a transformative force is clear. I understand Sara when she takes pleasure in placing just the right book in the hands of just the right person. It’s a marriage.
This is a novel that breaks rules. It shows a disregard for bureaucracy, and for the trite forms of behaviour that society manufactures. Bivald asks the reader to consider what is important, what informs a life so that it can be lived in a more joyous manner. There is a rebelliousness in this novel that is infectious. Book clubs will argue about it with great glee.
‘The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend’ is a novel that allows one to think of what is really important in life. It suggests that we should maybe take a look at our neighbours and help where we can, care as we should. It suggests that love is a remarkable thing, found everywhere if one looks. This is a highly readable book with a great number of insights into other books, classical and modern, which readers will enjoy. And finally, it suggests that a town without a bookstore is a town without mystery or a soul. I loved it.
****
Excerpts from the novel:
LIFE: “If you play by their rules, they’ll beat you every time. It’s like the saying, don’t ever argue with an idiot. They’ll drag you down to their level and then beat you with their experience. The same applies to the way you should live your life… Never live your life according to the idiot’s rules. Because they’ll drag you down to their level, they’ll win, and you’ll have a damned awful time in the process”
BOOKS – “open it properly… Can you smell it? The scent of new books. Unread adventures. Friends you haven’t met yet, hours of magical escapism awaiting you.”
HAPPINESS – He wondered whether there was really any future anywhere, whether people were happier in the bigger cities where they were constantly on the hunt for that new job, that new house, that new wife. From what he had seen of the world so far, he didn’t see that people in Broken Wheel were any less happy than you could expect to be anywhere else.
CHAIN OF EVENTS – It was part of an acknowledgement in an obscure book about machine learning in computer science. The authors, Forsyth and Rada, wrote that many people, not just the author, contributed to the making of a book, from the person who had the bright idea of alphabetic writing through the inventors of movable type to the lumberjacks who felled the trees that were pulped for its printing. It wasn’t customary to acknowledge the trees themselves, they went on, even though their commitment was total.
MEN – “Isn’t it funny that you can be together with men who are so wrong for you that afterward you fell like you’ve been ‘cured’ of them?” said Claire. “Like a cold. You get them, you get cured, you move on.”
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
Lotus Books is pleased to sponsor book reviews by Derryll White. If you are interested in a book that Derryll has reviewed you can shop online at https://lotusbooks.ca/, call us at 250-426-3415 or please visit us at 33 10th Ave. S. Cranbrook, and we would be happy to help you find a great read.
