The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

    He raised his menu.
    She consulted hers. "You don't like sweet-and-sour, do you."
    "No," he confirmed. "I want food that can make up its mind."

I had a real difficult time connecting to the people, the story, this book – but early on, I came upon this exchange between a man and a young girl – Tooly, the protagonist. That was enough to keep me going – that, and Rachman's previous work, The Imperfectionists.

There are three storylines running through most of this book – Tooly in 1988, Tooly in 1999, and Tooly in 2011. We see her as a child, still growing up; we see her all grown, but still figuring out her place in the world; and then as an established adult who's made a place in the world – but she's still expecting/looking for the same one she tried to find in ‘99.

I spent most of the novel not really sure where any of these stories were going – maybe 2/3 of it. It didn't take me too terribly long to suss that out, so I decided to just enjoy the ride. Which was so easy to do – Tooly spent her life surrounded by a great menagerie of people – Paul, a traveling computer technician working for various U.S. embassies in the 80s; Venn, a very charming con man; Humphrey, a Russian ex-pat and armchair intellectual; Fogg, a small-town bookseller; Sarah, a – I don't know how to describe her, a histrionic woman with a short attention span (I guess, you eventually learn a lot more); a lout of a lawyer (whose name escapes me at the moment), who really isn't that much of a lout; and others. It doesn't matter what they're talking about, you want to hear them talk, you want to see the interactions between these people and each other, or these people and Tooly. The actual plot seems secondary as long as you get bits of conversation like this (like the above quotation, this is from 1988's story):

    “I know exactly what you're like,” Sarah affirmed.
    After a long pause, Tooly responded, “What are you like?”
    “Me? Well, I like bread with strawberry jam and believe raspberry jam ruins everything. I think those who joke around with such matters are barbarians. And I'm right about everything. Except in the morning, when I'm wrong.”

    “Books,” he said, “are like mushrooms. They grow when you are not looking. Books increase by rule of compound interest: one interest leads to another interest, and this compounds into third. Next, you have so much interest there is no space in closet.”
    “At my house, we put clothes in the closets.”
    He sneered at this misapplication of furniture. “But where you keep literature?”

The Rise & Fall of Great Power

Recently I've started my reading/reviewing process differently. I go to Goodreads and find a one or two star review (hopefully one without spoilers) and learn exactly how bad the book can be. Then I open the book and start to read. What happens? I am almost always pleasantly surprised.

This is the case with Tom Rachman's The Rise & Fall of Great Powers. After reading the bad review I expected to be bored and confused. However, after finishing the book, I found the writing and story to be engaging and really easy to follow.

Tooly Zylberberg had an unconventional childhood. She was raised by a group of drifters, thieves and scoundrels after she was ‘taken' from her home in Maryland. Now in her early thirties she is the owner of a second hand bookstore in Wales. After her ex-boyfriend calls to say that her father is ill, she decides to venture to New York to confront the characters from her past and learn the truth about her upbringing.
The novel alternates between 1988, 1999 and 2011. Some say that this alternating structure is confusing, and while there is an array of colourful characters, they are so distinct that I didn't feel at all lost.

While the story is a mystery, at the heart of the novel are the characters. Humphrey, an old Russian intellectual and great reader; Sarah – a flighty and flirtatious groupie; Paul – a rather odd bird enthusiast; Venn – the mysterious and charismatic leader of the group, and many others you will love and/or hate.

It is interesting to follow Tooly through her discoveries and you realise that events from her childhood did not actually happen as she remembered them. The fallibility of memory, especially when we were young, is a core theme of the book. How well do we really know the people who raised us?

This is an enjoyable read with some breath-taking prose and philosophical ideas.