Writing From The Body

            This book touched on many subjects, love, money, magic, and spanned many years in the narrator’s life.   I found myself immersed in the realities of a different land, as well as a different culture.   Just these two subjects could have been the main focus of the book, but they served more as the background to Marc’s story.   Marc goes from a teen to his mid twenties in this book, and his story deals a lot with growing up, but the book is far from stereotypical.   Marc is a complex character and even rebelling from his father feels fresh and different when told from his perspective.   Marc feels largely reliable to the reader, Marie-Laure’s affection for him made me give him some credit, but his father’s succinct summary of his inappropriate behavior while a teen made me question him.   I was interested in Marc as a character, I didn’t always understand him or agree with what he was doing,...

By Lila Kalick Lillian Howan's novel, "The Charm Buyers," is breathtaking. I'm still spinning around from reading it, trying to sort through its tales of love, magic, truth and beauty; trying to remove my mind from the vivid setting of the Tahitian islands, while my body remains un-transported in my East Bay apartment. As the novel progresses, we follow Marc Antoine Chen, the narrator, through his childhood/teenage years and then into his 20s. We hear about stories from his great grandmother A-tei who raised him, are embroiled in the difficult circumstances and constantly shifting landscape of his family dynamic, and navigate two intersecting love affairs he has with his cousin Marie-Laure and Aurore du Chatelet, a woman 20 years his senior from an aristocratic background. Much of the book focuses on illusion: the illusion of love that Marc has difficulty navigating in his obsession with Aurore, the illusion of power and wealth that he emits but cannot live up t...

The Charm Buyers Response Melody Our narrator, Marc, has his believable attributes.    Through his descriptions of people and events, we figure out who he likes and who he doesn't. He likes Radish, A-tai, Marie-Laurie, and Aurore. He doesn't like Cecile, and the feeling is mutual.    Marc doesn't play social games, and so we appreciate his honesty in this regard. Initially, when he discusses magic, he does so from a safe distance.    As if the charms and Monsieur Li's activities are just a cultural, historical relic that still exist on the island. So we see these details from a quaint, anthropological perspective. DeKoning is simply a foreigner who wants to believe in something magical.    But then, through other characters' dialogue, we see that Marc is actually quite superstitious, even though he won't admit this to anyone. His reliability is called into question because his words contradict his actions.   When he sells his ...

This book is full of uncertainty—the story takes place on the edge of what we know and don’t know, in the gaps between silence and words.  This edge is the ocean, what separates life from death:  “The water was unpredictable and unforgiving, the bodies disappearing, washed out to sea” (51), a hint at Uncle Florian and Arthur’s deaths 200 pages later, when they die in a car accident while driving during a storm.  The view from the cemetery is the ocean (143), and Marc describes the meeting with MuSan in which he loses his wealth “as if the calm, unimposing ocean had silently gathered itself into a great, dark wave” (202).  The ocean also holds black pearls, the source of his parents’ wealth, the wealth from which Marc is excluded.  This edge is magic charms.  We never really do find out if the bead saved Marie-Laure, just as we never know if it is the cause of Marc’s misfortunes, which seemed waiting to happen as it were.  Tahiti is on the edge of ...

Blog Response – The Charm Buyers             In Lillian Howan’s book entitled The Charm Buyers we follow the life’s story of Marc Antoine, who belongs to the Hakka people. A nomadic people of China, though the story takes place on the island of Tahiti and islands near them. What I appreciated about this story was the focus on Marc Antoine’s relationship with Aroure, his relationship with Marie-Laure, his relationship with his great grand-mother A-Tai and the very well written dichotomy of the “pretty” world of his family to the coldness inside of him versus this sort of magical realism underlying inside of the plot. Throughout this story I was un-impressed with Marc’s ability to emote. It seems there was something that always stopped him from annunciating clearly how he felt. We see this a few times in the beginning of the book with Marie-Laure, when she invited him to the party that he hadn’t originally planned to go to. Whe...

Trying to focus on the topic of historical memory and the question of how to prepare a reliable narration while reading The Charm Buyers really stumped me. Historical memory, in and of itself, is massively unreliable. History is so often told from the perspective of those in power at the time. Our knowledge today of what happened in the past largely comes from what was recorded back then and from word of mouth reiterated through the generations; both of which are not entirely verifiable. Memory is just as untrustworthy as history, if not more so. If we learned anything from Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember , it’s that memory does not equate to truth. Plus, a lot of The Charm Buyers was focused on highly subjective and abstract concepts like love and magic.             The Charm Buyers has a richly developed setting and a whole host of subplots, but to me, the heart of Lillian Howen’s novel was centered on Marc Antoine and...

This novel immediately reminded me of Isabel Allende's novels, set also in a world where magic and reality blend seamlessly together. Howan writes of magic, "I think it's like love--I know, it sounds stupid, but think about it. You can't ever really know for sure if someone loves you." On one level , the novel is an exploration of whether love exists between two people and, if so, how it is possible to know. Marc becomes involved with his cousin, Marie-Laure, when both are quite young. Nonetheless, he never quite gets over being stood up by her as a teenager, left wearing the clothes that she asked him to wear. Years later, when someone suggests that she was simply behaving as any self-conscious teen girl might, afraid of being judged for being so much uglier than her attractive cousin, Marc cannot believe this narrative. Instead, he insists on the romance of his relationship with Aurore, the older woman and Marquise who insists on keeping their relationship secre...