A Costa Rican Interlude

So, for the two week break from which the weary, disillusioned interns are allowed to flee the hospital and and nurture our minds, our mates, our pets and our non-medical pastimes, James and I went to the tiny Central American country of Costa Rica.  In between investigating poison dart frogs, cursing monkeys for dropping their seed pods onto our tin roof at 4am, and searching for the ever elusive jaguar, we read a ton of books.  Several great ones.  Here, a synopsis.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Marina Signh, A talented MD-turned-pharmacologist, diligently works on cholesterol drugs in her well funded lab, while her previous mentor, the acerbic Annick, has disappeared into the Amazon, along with millions of dollars of lab equipment and funding.  Marina is sent to fetch her; to leave her comfortable and quiet lab and venture beyond the borders of her beloved Minnesota, and track down the rogue researcher.  The last person they sent to do the job was Marina's friend, and he wound up dead, with a terse note from Annick weeks after the fact.

With a heavy heart, Marina flies to South America and begins the task of finding her mentor.  Marina becomes lonely, and the special sat-phone that her boss, and lately lover, doesn't do the trick of cheering her up.  When Marina finally manages to stumble upon Annick, she is taken on a long, dark voyage by boat up the jungle waterways to Annick's lab.  Marina eventually begins to see the beauty of what they are creating, and becomes part of the lab community, which they share with the local tribe.  The tribe holds the key to the working drug, and if completed, the drug would allow women in the developed world to bear children after menopause.

Delightfully interjecting himself into most activities is Easter, a 12 year old boy who belonged to a savage tribe, but was somehow able to escape, despite being deaf, and be adopted by Annick's scientific family.  Easter officiously drives the boat, protects Marina from jungle insects and dangers, prepares her meals, and in him, she finds the son she never had.

The pinnacle of the book is a descent into a crater of darkness and a victory that is daring and provocative.

All Over the Map by Laura Frasier

It's fun to read travel books when you're traveling, and Ms. Frasier conjures up a book full of pleasures for her readers.  The narrative starts with the end of a relationship to the French Professor, and continues on with a travel map thrown to the wind at the whim of travel magazines that she writes for.  She describes a bicycling trip to France filled with lavender, incandescent wine, cheese, and other French culinary marvels.  She details a provocative trip to the South Pacific to interview Tahiti's lady-boys, and the trip ends in fear and anxiety after she is assaulted.  Shaken by this trip, the once aggressive Fraser becomes afraid and withdrawn, but eventually regains her strength, and on a lark, she buys a house in San Miguel de Allende.  Her wanderings through Central Mexico are suffused with the magical realism in the heritage of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Paulo Coelho, which provides a lovely ending to a turbulent tale.

 A Thousand Sisters by Lisa Shannon

Lisa Shannon travels into the dark void of the Congo to provide local women with small donations to help them start sustainable businesses.  She unflinchingly details the horrors of the DRC, from the staggering statistics of rape (90% of all women in Congo), to the fluid relationship between military and paramilitary, to the everyday violence in the streets.   The beauty of the book is in the sisters' eyes: their brown eyes sparkling with the hope of sponsorship and the transformations they create for themselves, their families, and for their proud communities.  This book reiterates one of my favorite messages from volunteering in the third world- that a little bit of hope and a few small deeds go along way to transform lives.

A Couple of Our Costa Rican Friends

The Art of Fielding

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

In a small Division III school, the Westish Harpooners baseball team have doggedly trained, with lackluster results, for the duration of their existence.  Henry, an unassuming, scrawny speck of a shortstop, was keenly scouted by his team captain Mike ,who is a man about campus with a talent for football, baseball, beers and literary history.  Henry soon rockets his team into national visibility.  Henry comes across as simple, especially compared to his erudite and eminently scholarshipped roommate Owen, who is a fellow teammate (although with an entirely more casual attitude towards practice), but Henry's transcendental understanding of Aparicio Rodriguez's baseball bible, reveals the talent of Henry's sporting mind.

Intertwining with the players are Guert Affenlight, the enigmatic Westish president, and his disaster-courting daughter Pella.  Affenlight's beautiful affair with a student leaves one grappling with preconceived ideas of morality, while Pella's bohemian approach to life and love which leaves many messes in her wake ultimately makes her less lovable.

Wonderfully intertwined into this book are spot-on literary references, which were never over done.  There is a lot of Melville in this book, which imbues the pages with a bit of a literary affair.  Harbach's prose is crisp and succinct and rich with subtext, and he has placed himself in the esteemed footsteps of the American literary giants.

The Night Circus

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

"There is so much that glows in the circus, from flames to lanterns to stars.  I have heard the expression "trick of the light" applied to sights within Le Cirque des Reves so frequently that I sometimes suspect the entirety of the circus is itself a complex illusion of illumination."

Ephemeral, dark, elegant and daring, Ms. Morgenstern creates a tale of the enigmatic night circus which appears in cities unannounced, and is open only during the midnight hours.  What most circus-goers don't realize is that the circus is a clever venue for two of the most talented magicians of the century in which they battle each other for supremacy.  Their ever more daring and risky feats are the creation of increasingly more elaborate schemes and attractions within the circus itself.  

Set in the 1900s in London and traveling throughout cities of the world, this book provides a delicious glimpse into the opulent details of Victorian life, with a delicate edge of mysticism imbued into every day affairs, and a dark current of malice lingering in the shadows.  Spanning the book is a mercurial love story, which results in the fiery near-annihilation of the equally matched protagonists as they struggle to outdo each other and they barely escape, although they become fractured from the world as they knew it but wander in the fringes, carefully imbuing the circus with the life-force they give it.

Ms. Morgenstern's crisp prose will leave you wondering when Le Cirque des Reves will be arriving under the cloak of midnight sky to enchant your town.