This link-up is hosted by Books Are My Favourite and Best, and was inspired by Hungarian writer and poet Frigyes Karinthy. In his 1929 short story, “Chains”, Karinthy coined the phrase ‘six degrees of separation’. The phrase was popularized by a 1990 play written by John Guare, which was later made into a film starring Stockard Channing.

On the first Saturday of every month, Kate chooses a book as a starting point and links that book to six others forming a chain. Bloggers and readers are invited to join in and the beauty of this mini-challenge is that I can decide how and why I make the links in my chain

October’s starting book is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. It’s the story of nine –year-old Oskar who is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York City. His mission is to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. I haven’t read this book but I have read the first novel by this author:

Everything Is Illuminated which is a very busy, self-conscious novel. The main story concerns a young American Jew named Jonathan Safran Foer (yes, the same name as the author, though the book is fiction) who travels to the Ukraine searching for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis in 1941. At the risk of giving you a spoiler, I will tell you that there is a grand betrayal waiting at the end of this tale.

Betrayal is the underlying current in Vasily Grossman’s autobiographical novel Everything Flows. Part of the book features a series of informers who step forward, each making excuses for the inexcusable things that he did—inexcusable and yet, the informers plead, in Stalinist Russia understandable, almost unavoidable.

Life under another Communist government—this one Mao’s China—is examined in Waiting, a novel by Ha Jin. The author portrays the life of Lin Kong, a dedicated doctor torn by his love for two women: one who belongs to the New China of the Cultural Revolution, the other to the ancient traditions of his family’s village.

While we’re talking about love and bad government, let’s move to Lily Tuck’s The News from Paraguay. Amazon describes this: “The year is 1854. In Paris, Francisco Solano –the future dictator of Paraguay—begins his courtship of the young, beautiful Irish courtesan Ella Lynch with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and a horse named Mathilde. Ella follows Franco to Asunción and reigns there as his mistress.”

Another strong woman, married to a famous man, and in a Latin American setting, Frida Kahlo was a real-life artist. Barbara Mujica’s Frida is a haunting and powerful fictional account that chronicles Kahlo’s life, from a childhood shadowed by polio to the accident at eighteen that left her barren, from her marriage to larger-than-life muralist Diego Rivera through her tragic decline into alcoholism and drug abuse. This is the book that inspired the movie of the same name but I don’t recommend either to anyone sensitive about strong language.

(Did you know that you can buy Frida Kahlo paper dolls on Amazon?!)

And finally, my last link – from one artist to another (or two). Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon tells a story set in 1939 New York City, where budding magician Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books, and Sammy and the artistically-gifted Joe team up to produce uber-successful supermen.

There you go – NYC to NYC, albeit in different time periods. What do you think?
 

Why not visit Kate’s blog and see how she made the final connection to The Book of Royal Lists?

P.S. The links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.