Good writing, but what a horrible joyless book. Do I need to be hit over the head to be empathetic? No. As someone that is already fairly empathetic, reading this was stressful and awful for every minute of reading, and like having your insides ripped out in the least enlightening way possible. I can't believe I even finished it, and I definitely shouldn't have. Life is too short to read this.

Ugh. This book drove me batty. I have a like-hate relationshop with this book. I was so annoyed while reading it because of the characters. I understand that some books have characters that you do not like or cannot relate to, but there was just something about them that made me uninterested in them. Yet, the book stayed with me when I finished it. Then it intrigued me enough to make me rent the movie verson. I have to think about how many stars to give it. I'm so conflicted. It is a short read, so that makes me say, "What the hell, read the damn thing. It will only take a rainy Sunday to finish."

I have to say, I really did not enjoy this book at all. When I first picked up House of Sand and Fog, I was intrigued and also a little confused by it's plot description. But I had heard it was a popular book, so I was curious to see what drew people to it. However, after reading this book I have to say I don't understand the appeal at all. While I do appreciate that Dubus alternates between different points of view, those of Kathy's and the Colonel's, getting inside these character's heads only seemed to make their personalities less appealing to me. Kathy is a recovering drug addict struggling in the wake of her husband's abandonment, and her struggle only intensifies when she is wrongfully evicted from her home by the county. Although I think some people may sympathize with her hard life, her constant focus on ruining the colonel's life seems misguided and selfish. Instead, I feel as though she should have fought her war against the county, who wrongly evicted her from her home after misfiling paperwork, and then subsequently sold the home to the colonel in an auction. However, she refuses, instead focusing on trying to intimidate the colonel out of her former home, choosing to constantly harass him and show up uninvited. Meanwhile, the colonel buys the house to try and better his family's life, since they have been struggling since they fled their home country in fear of execution. However, his focus solely on vanity and appearing wealthy to his peers makes me see him as somewhat shallow, and I can't wrap my brain around his way of thinking either. His subsequent actions in the novel also heightened my disdain for him, and no matter how hard I try I can only sympathize with his family members, and not the colonel himself. Overall, I have to say this book was not an enjoyable read for me, and it left me with nothing but disdain for its main characters.

This book gets some stars because the writing is fairly impressive. The author tells the story by going back and forth between two distinct character voices, and he does this very well. Now the reason this book gave me a headache and, well to be quite honest with you, pissed me off was the fact that, although the characters are intriguing, none of them are likable. The wife and son of Mr. Behrani are ok, I guess, but the characters you read the most about are awful! They are psychotic, pathetic, proud, and just messed up. I spent most of this book rolling my eyes and thinking how much these people suck, and the end of it was a bummer. Anyway, that's what I thought.

Most of this book was incredibly well-crafted. Dubus is exceptional at two things: 1) making real life struggles feel like a page-turner and 2) creating characters that alternate between likeable an unlikable, hero and villain. These two things make the book worth reading. But the book also has one huge flaw: the trigger for the plot is unrealistic and makes the main character unsympathetic throughout. Still recommended but at the expense of my suspension of disbelief.

Too many paragraphs like "Around noon, I picked up my mail at the post office, then went to a shopping center sandwich shop to sift through it all while I ate. It was only ten days' worth but it took up all of my table, and I put it in two piles, one for the trash can on the way out, one to keep. The trash pile was mostly junk mail, the other was bills: car insurance, gas, my final phone, electric. The electric bill was the most recent and I opened it and read the cutoff date for the last billing period: just two days ago. I tore into my turkey sandwich and drank down some Diet Coke, and I shook my head at how fucked-up this was. It was the same with the gas bill."

“And that's what I wanted: obliteration. Decimation. Just an instant smear of me right out of all this rising and falling and nothing changing that feels like living.”

In the beginning there was Kathy Nicolo.

She is an addict who has been through a drug rehabilitation program. She has been flying straight for a while. She cleans houses for a modest living. She spends most of her free time watching movies, one after the other. All is going okay until she has a dispute with the county over the house her father left her and her brother. They claim she owes back taxes. She goes down to the county offices and gets it “sorted out”, but she continues to get letters from the county office which she promptly throws away without opening.

Anybody who has ever dealt with any level of bureaucracy knows that issues are not always “sorted out” the first time. The problem is that Kathy doesn’t have much experience dealing with anything. She avoids, evades, and hits the escape hatch any time anything gets too real. The next thing she knows the cops are on her doorstep explaining to her that she has an order to vacate. Her property has been seized.

She meets Deputy Sheriff Lester Burdon as he is escorting her off her property. She can tell by the way he is looking at her that he is attracted to her. She is pretty, waifish, and vulnerable. He has a wife and two kids, but every time he makes love with his wife it feels like he is making out with his sister. They are best friends, comfortable with each other, and like a lot of people he interprets that to mean the spark is gone from the marriage.

Kathy, as he soon finds out, is much more than a spark. She is more like a full on raging forest fire.

The county sells her property quickly. This is where Colonel Massoud Behrani enters the plot. He and his family were lucky to escape Iran when the Shah is ousted. He was high enough up in the government to see his name appear on the blacklists. His wife has never really forgiven him for the circumstances that have made them immigrants in America. They did escape with some money, but much of that has been eaten up by keeping up appearances with the community of Persians in California. Behrani works two crappy jobs, one picking up trash along the highways and the other as a late night convenience clerk. Both jobs that are difficult to hire Americans to do at any price.

“For our excess we lost everything.”

It is no wonder to me that immigrants excel in the United States. They take chances. They work hard. They don’t expect anything for nothing. Behrani is no exception and when Kathy’s house comes up for auction he takes the last of their savings and buys the house. As it turns out he is also lucky that only two other bidders show up and he buys the house for a fraction of the value. Now I say lucky, but I always feel we make our own luck. Luck never just happens, you have to give luck a chance to reward you. In his mind he can already see the real estate empire that this first house will help finance.

Kathy and Lester hit it off. ”I felt a little better as I pulled the T-shirt over my head and caught the faint scent of vomit and gun oil. Me and Lester.” They are screwing like bunnies and when they are together everything is fine, but when they are apart it becomes readily apparent that their relationship is built out of sand. He starts thinking about how easily she fell into bed with him. She starts thinking he is going to go back to his wife and kids.

Kathy really hates the idea of Colonel Behrani and his family in HER house. The county admits it made a mistake, but the sales transaction with Behrani is legal. He would have to agree to sell the house back to the county for what he paid for it.

His visions of a hefty profit float up into the fog.

Kathy isn’t adhering to the program. ”And I knew to any of my counselors back East my life wouldn’t look very manageable; I was drinking again, and smoking; I was sleeping with a man who’d just left his family, all while I was supposed to be getting back the house I’d somehow lost. I knew they would call the drinking a slip, the smoking a crutch, the love making ‘sex as medication,’ and the house fiasco a disaster my lack of recovery had invited upon itself, and on me.” Embracing those addictions is making her unstable world spin faster while her mind spins slower.

It is an unusual situation with all parties being victims of an unresolvable issue with the county. Given what we know about Behrani he isn’t who Kathy thinks he is. Kathy isn’t really who he thinks she is either. As the plot advances we also find out that Lester isn’t who anyone thinks he is either. Of course, Kathy is like nitroglycerin in his head.

It always amazes me how one little mistake can lead to such complete chaos. Andre Dubus III keeps adding snakes to the plot until it is all so twisted together that only the sword of Alexander the Great will untie it. Dubus reveals all the characters, even the second tier characters, with such depth that I felt like I know these people. My mind even now is still weighing all the ramifications from everyone’s decisions as if this is an ongoing crisis that is still yet to be resolved.

n  n
Andre Dubus has done his homework on this very American novel.

I enjoyed the real estate aspects of the plot. I also liked the way that Dubus has us ride along with each character giving us free access to their inner thoughts, their hopes, and desires. He also shows how many chances people get to turn their life around. The many hands that are outstretched to keep them from falling too far. Sometimes it just doesn’t matter how much help someone receives they continue to make the same bad decisions until tragedy overtakes them sometimes with equally tragic results for others.

They made a movie out of this book in 2003. I’ve not seen the film. I, as usual, skipped the film until I had a chance to read the book. From what I’ve read about the movie they significantly changed the ending, leaving some very important and pivotal scenes in the book out of the plot of the movie. I’m not discouraged because I know that films are a different entity from the book that inspired them. I will report back after watching the movie.

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I am a little surprised reading all of the reviews by other people of this book. No one supports Kathy in this endeavor. Everyone has mainly sympathy for Behrani and his moral stance and I must admit, i find that a bit shocking. Let me get this straight, I don't particularly like Kathy, or Behrani, or Les for that matter and I do understand each of their viewpoints. However, I'm shocked that people would consider a bureaucratic error fair reason for losing your home. People keep referring to her as the former owner, but truthfully, the house was always her. She and her brother owned it and the county sold something that was never there's by mistake. Would anyone feel okay if a home that was legally bought and paid for, was sold out from under them and then evicted from their own property? Would anyone just say, oh darn, county did it again. Guess I should just move on? Really? She didn't owe the property taxes that were the reason behind her eviction. Yeah, she was lazy and should have opened her mail to see what they were saying but moderate negligence shouldn't mean that a mistake couldn't be rectified.

Moving on, each of the characters seemed awful to me. Weak-willed and aimless Kathy, recovering drug addict, always avoiding responsibility and just letting others guide her actions. Les, the adulterer, plants evidence, and bullies those around him due to his feelings of impotence. Colonel Behrani, militant and domineering but trying to support his family after fleeing his homeland and losing the affluence and influence from which he is accustomed. They are all wonderfully drawn, detailed and nuanced, incredibly human and intrinsically awful. Behrani for all his high values, hates the country that shelters him, beats his wife when she disagrees and continuously deceives everyone he cares about. Kathy, never develops at all, just spirals downward to a life where she doesn't have to try, just be mute and go along. Les, well, he just seems to be a little boy pretending to be a man. It's hard to want to empathize with people you would never want to meet.

The pacing started out strong for me, but about halfway through, I got tired of the slow buildup, this agonizing crawl to a collision. The tension that had been created became exhausting and I wish the author had started to capitalize sooner on it. But the time the climax had finally arrived I just wanted it to end. It was like an awful accident you couldn't turn your gaze from, hoping at each point that someone would give way and end the inevitable calamity.

So, while I feel that it was well written in many ways, I can't say I particularly liked the book or even enjoyed it. But, I must say, I do want to discuss it!

Wasnt sure I liked this book after a couple chapters but! Im glad I sticked with it! Really good book. Wow.

Trágico y dramático.

REVIEW: I had this book for ages but never got around to reading it cos it seemed like it would be boring. Wow… let me tell you the first 100 pages are some of the most moreish page-turning chapters and intensely real setup I’ve come across in anything in contemporary fiction. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book with such differing perspectives that explains the motivations of two wholly realised, totally different characters and the reasons behind their actions. It loses a bit of steam in Part II, I mean: how can it keep up with the nail-biting premise it sets up? Does it slide into cliche, if a bit? Do some passages plod a little? Could it have gotten where it’s going a bit faster? Are some of the final chapters unnecessary? Possibly. But it’s still getting 4.5/5 as a whole - I was quite amazed by this book. Could not put it down.
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#houseofsandandfog #andredubusiii

I had a hard time with this one. On one hand, it was like a train-wreck - I kept turning the pages, unable to look away. But on the other hand, I was frustrated because there just wasn't enough character development or background to compensate for the general unlikeableness (is that even a word?) of the protagonists. The author tried to create an epic tragedy wherein the reader sympathizes with both sides of the story and sees it leading to an inevitable and dramatic end. But he fails to achieve that sense of inevitability that makes classic tragedy so compelling; instead I ended up feeling that the whole denouement was an entirely avoidable result of the characters' inexplicable and bizarre overreactions to their situation. I guess I'm glad Kathy and Les didn't get away scot free, but geez - what a depressing ending. I'll probably have to watch the movie now anyway, just to see if it makes me less angry.