Book Reviews

BEE SEASON

by Myla Goldberg

If you were good in school, a popular overachiever with straight A's and more friends than you knew what to do with, stop reading right now. If you were picked first for every sports team, always had a boyfriend, and never got detention, please, just put the paper down. If you were a perfect child, with stickers and stars on every homework assignment, I mean itÑ walk away. I have nothing to say to you. And neither does Myla Goldberg, author of Bee Season. This is a book for the dorks, the dummies, the kids who sat alone at the lunch table and prayed that someday they would be good at something other than mediocrity.

Eliza, Bee Season's central character, is a below-average fifth grader with no friends, bad grades, a genius older brother, and a dad who has basically given up hope of her ever becoming much of anything. All Eliza wants is to be special, and the sad fact is that she isn't. That is, until Eliza wins the school spelling bee. Suddenly this C student realizes she has a real talent, and her dad, who has up to this point pretty much ignored her in favor of her musically and intellectually gifted brother, begins to shower her with attention.

No longer the center of his father's universe, Eliza's older brother secretly joins the Hare Krishna's. Eliza's mother, equally ignored, begins breaking into strangers' houses at night and going on stealing rampages. In an attempt to get her husband to notice her, she even performs illicit sexual acts on his sleeping body, sometimes becoming so violent that the couple awakes to bloody sheets. Through all this, Eliza's father only has eyes for his daughter's newly discovered brilliance, and he will spend every moment he has to train her to win the national spelling bee.

With the family falling apart-- Eliza's brother passing up opportunities to go to college in favor of selling flowers at the airport, and Eliza's mom winding up in jailÑ Eliza's father notices nothing. He spends every waking hour quizzing Eliza about the dictionary. His daughter might not be perfect just yet, but under his watchful eye, she will become someone capable of making him proud.

When Eliza was just a regular kid with bad grades and no one to eat with at lunch, she hadn't been worth a second glance from her father. Now, with a pile of spelling trophies and gold stars on every one of her homework assignments, she has her father's love. But her brother won't talk to her anymore. And her mom has become a thief. Now that she's finally special, the perfect little girl she always wanted to be, Eliza has to wonder if she wouldn't be better off with a crappy report card, sitting alone in the cafeteria, eating lunch all by herself. A

--Cecilia Johnson

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

by Jean-Dominique Bauby

Monsieur Bauby, while he was alive, found himself claustrophobically trapped in the most horrible of all cages: the human body. Amassive stroke left the young editor-in-chief of France's Elle completely paralyzed in a bizarre and rare condition called locked-in syndrome; the only body part he could move was his left eyelid. It was in this condition that he wrote his poignant memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Using a laborious process of winking while a nurse recited the alphabetÑ no shitÑ Bauby wrote this slim book in two months, ruminating over everything from his new circumstances to past romantic trysts. In fact, Bauby turned his remarkably dead body into a perfect vessel for a style of writing perfected by another French writer: Marcel Proust. Every blurry sight, every distorted sound, and every tantalizing smell triggered a flood of memories and wishes that Bauby clenched, as best he could, in the fist of his mind until it was time to wink it out one exhausting letter at a time. Some people dismiss Proust as a lonely bird who, in the process of recapturing a past, lost his present. It's impossible to be so callous to Bauby.

The titular objects serve as metaphors for Bauby's condition: the diving bell representing his sinking, painful, useless body; the butterfly symbolizing his thoughts escaping, audibly, into the world on the other side of his one good eye. Bauby is very French ... he is given to excusable flights of fancy and long-winded examinations of his dealings with ex-girl-friends. He displays a tremendous wit, one which has been clapped shut by the communicative barrier around his brain. This is a remarkable book ... a must-read ... the closest we, as living humans, can get to the state of being nothing but pure soul. A

--Chris J. Magyar