Look Ma! No Hands! And my Umbrella is Staying Up

Than you Daily Mail for today's invention. From a cabbie, no less: "Cabbie Ibra Ahmed hopes his hands-free umbrella will be ideal for ladies who struggle carrying their brolly and other items." Now, why this should only be for women, I don't know. Seems to me that men might want to text while walking in the rain, too. So after Mr. Ahmed makes his initial fortune with "Hands Free Brolly Bag" maybe he will turn his attention to the other half of the population and create a brolly with a man bag.

Of course, there is competition out there. So wish Mr. Ahmed luck against The Hands Free Brolly Company, Ltd. (for those who push prams or wheelchairs) and, of course, the often featured Nubrella.

Book Covers: Cutting for Stone

Another book, another apparent fiction best seller, another book I had not heard of. This time we have an umbrella on the cover of the U.S. 2010 Vintage paperback edition of Abraham Verghese's "Cutting for Stone." [There is no such image on the original hardback or paperback covers.] So, let's go fishing.

No clues on Amazon--a lot about doctors and twining medicine into fiction but nothing about umbrellas. Not looking for rain either, since the umbrella holder appears to be in a sunny meadow. So on to Google. First hit is Google books with an excerpt with the word umbrella in it; from page 295:

One morning, as I went down to the gate, umbrella in hand, I saw a woman coming up the hill to Missing, rivulets of water pouring off her umbrella.

That's nice, but has nothing to do with the cover image. Second hit not good at all: A reading guide which tells us that an early part of the story takes place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which, among other things, retains "Campari umbrellas" left behind by the Italians. Well, I do like Campari and bitter lemon, but that isn't a Campari umbrella.

Not doing any better with remaining hits. Do hit a gold mine--for book covers, but not this book--on the second page of hits with a link to a Goodreads Listopia on Umbrellas: 78 book covers with umbrellas on; I can go two months plus now without doing any searching on my own!

Well, further refining of searches is getting me nowhere. I get other references about the story: family saga, three continents, doctors, Siamese Twins, but no umbrellas. So, tell me, Internet, who is on the cover and why the umbrella?

Book Covers: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Okay ... a long absence, I start a new theme. Book covers with umbrellas on them. Today's random selection is the U.S. edition of "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet" by Jamie Ford. So, I know nothing about this novel, see that it is selling well and need to know why there are two people holding umbrellas on the cover.

First, the word "umbrella" does not show on Amazon's listing for the book. It shows Publisher's Weekly saying that Ford's "strained debut concerns Henry Lee, a Chinese-American in Seattle who, in 1986, has just lost his wife to cancer," and Seattle is notoriously rainy, so maybe that is it? Wild guess, but the word "rain" also doesn't show up in any of the first page of reader reviews either.

Second, on to Google. Well, I find that searching for the book and umbrella is mightily productive. The very first hit (and will this entry now beat that?) is for someone else's discovery of the number of book covers she has with umbrellas on them (hint--source for my next pick?). Anwyay, the Infinite Shelf finds that on this cover "the tones are beautiful, sweet and melancholic," but still no answer to why umbrellas.

Second Google hit does better. This time a review of the book by Andrea Ruiz in which she tells us that Lee is wandering by a hotel where the current owners, "who want to restore the building, find the belongings of Japanese-Americans who were sent to the internment camp. Each artifact is brought outside and shown to the public, and Henry sees an umbrella with a koi painted on it. This brings a rush of emotion and he is overwhelmed with memories of his past." Well, this is good, an umbrella as a key to memory, a la Proust's madeleine ("involuntary memory" according to Wikipedia).

So, not bad. Don't get anything out of any subsequent hits except for this exact excerpt:

The new hotel owner, a slender Caucasian woman, slightly younger than Henry, walked up the steps holding . . . an umbrella? She popped it open, and Henry’s heart beat a little faster as he saw it for what it was. A Japanese parasol, made from bamboo, bright red and white—with orange koi painted on it, carp that looked like giant goldfish. It shed a film of dust that floated, suspended momentarily in the air as the hotel owner twirled the fragile-looking artifact for the cameras.

So, I am better off, but still don't know why there are two people holding umbrellas on the cover!

Addendum (1/25/2012): I picked up a copy of the book at a sale table at my local library, and the reviewer was indeed correct--the umbrella (parasol) is a memory key for the protagonist (Henry). There is also at least one other umbrella, his own, a necessary accessory in rainy Seattle, where the story takes place.