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| Book Reviews |
I took a vacation from reviewing during the first seven months of 2008. Here is a lightly annotated list of the books I read during that time, from the perspective of a few months later. My two favorites appear in bold.
This memoir from 1905 was voted by the Modern Library as the best American non-fiction book of the twentieth century. Henry Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams, wrote this memoir in an odd third-person voice. He describes his "education," by which he means the life lessons that are intended to prepare a person for the future. He concludes that education in this sense is impossible: the lessons are based on the past and cannot prepare you for the future. Adams came of age in a transitional period of American history, from the Civil War through the turn of the century, and he felt that his education would have been appropriate to someone in the eighteenth century.
The book is an unusual mixture of biography, history, social commentary, and philosophy. Adams has a talent for aphorisms and off-hand insights, and his descriptions provide an interesting insider perspective on the events of the period. Adams' father was the foreign minister to England during the Civil War, when the English were waffling about which side to support. I am sure the book would be a God-sent treasure-trove to historians. However, I would need a lot of footnotes to understand all of the references to then-current events, and I would often lose the thread of his thought during his frequent tangents.
I prefer the number two book on the Modern Library list, William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience.
An impulse bookstore purchase, Harbor is the story of an illegal Algerian immigrant and his experiences in the shady netherworld of Muslim illegals. He tries to make a go of it in his new country while harboring suspicions about what his friends and relatives are up to.
There is something strange about Adams' prose, partly because she is trying to capture the rhythm of non-native English even in the third-person descriptions. It is a bit disorienting, which works well in the early chapters when Aziz is himself disoriented but less well later in the book.
I had high hopes for this book for the first couple of chapters, which describe Aziz's arrival in the United States (by stowing away on a tanker). His first benefactor is an Egyptian, whose helpfulness evaporates when he learns that Aziz is from Algeria. It dragged a bit in the middle, but picked up again near the end. Overall, it presents a non-cliched vision of immigrant life.
This book by the former Secretary of State explores the relationship between foreign policy and religion. She does not advocate a foreign policy derived from a religious vision, but says we must recognize that most people and countries are driven, at least in part, by religious motives. The goal of diplomacy should be to focus attention on the common aspirations of all religions.
The book provides a nice primer on the bottom-line issues at play in the Middle East and elsewhere. Albright provides a clear, straightforward account of the history of our involvement in the region and of the differing perspectives of the United States and the Muslim world. I wouldn't read the book for concrete policy recommendations, but she lays out a reasonable, hopeful, and clearly liberal platform from which to approach the issues. I felt more hopeful after reading it.
The Bounty calls itself "the true story of the Mutiny on the Bounty." Caroline Alexander is the author of another true-life nautical adventure, The Endurance. For this book, she researched all available sources — published narratives, private letters, courts-martial records — in an attempt to provide a definitive account of the mutiny and its aftermath.
Alexander tells the story non-sequentially, in a way that reminded me of the film Reservoir Dogs: the first chapter describes a scene from before the mutiny, then jumps to a point after the mutiny. The dramatization of the mutiny itself occurs much latter in the book. One reason for this approach is that Alexander wants to show how public perception of the mutiny and its participants changed over time and to give a theory about how it happened. I suspect she assumes her readers know the story from the Nordhoff and Hall books or one of the film versions.
The author has clear sympathy for "Captain" (actually Lieutenant) Bligh. She believes that his reputation for harshness is largely undeserved. The main goal of her book, it seems to me, is to reclaim the very positive reputation Bligh had at the time and to show how the social position of the protagonists, the political climate, and the dawn of the Romantic period led to the story as we most often hear it today.
This book is nowhere near as dramatic as other versions of the tale. In fact, Alexander's focus on the conflicting testimony of witnesses leaches much of the drama from what are clearly thrilling episodes. It is also disappointing that the final truth of the matter is beyond our reach, although Alexander obviously can't be blamed for that.
I read a glowing review of this novel a few years ago, but forgot about it until I saw the book on the bookstore shelf. The description made it sound funny and surrealistic, something like a Robert Coover novel or a Donald Barthelme story:
One April night, a group of psychologists from the Krakower Institute meet at a pancake house, where they order breakfast foods and engage in shop talk and the occasional flirtation. At the center of this maelstrom of pyschobabble and unrequited lust sits Tom, program coordinator for the Young Women of Strength, who has been known to sob uncontrollably at meetings. When Tom tries to initiate a food fight, a rival psychologist bear hugs him into submission, resulting in an out-of-body experience that leaves our Tom hovering over his colleagues.
And that was an accurate impression. Reading The Verificationist, I realized how this kind of self-conscious post-modern writing follows standard conventions just as much as detective or romance novels. The book was an okay example of the genre, but felt derivative despite its crazy premise.
I decided to read this world classic because I am interested in conversion stories. I personally love the feeling that comes when my way of thinking undergoes a sudden shift into a new view, and I like to read about it too. Augustine's Confessions is perhaps THE classic of the genre.
I was under the impression that Augustine underwent a sudden visceral conversion from a profligate secular lifestyle to a religious one. However, he was really converted from one religious point of view (Manichaeism) to another (mainstream Catholic). Furthermore, his conversion came across as more intellectual than emotional. I was disappointed in this aspect of the book, although in retrospect I should have expected it. On the other hand, Augustine does have a quotable way with language and many interesting points to make. Here is a description of his infancy:
Little by little I began to be aware where I was and wanted to manifest my wishes to those who could fulfill them as I could not... So I threw my limbs about and uttered sounds... When I did not get my way,... I used to be indignant with my seniors for their disobedience, and with free people who were not slaves to my interests; and I would revenge myself upon them by weeping.
What a nice way of saying it! Augustine's discussion of the interpretation of the Books of Moses in Chapter XII is amazingly modern for a book written in the year 397: he talks about the role of the author's intentions and the possibility of multiple "true" interpretations.
A word is in order about my rating system. By giving Augustine's Confessions two and a half stars, I don't mean to imply that it is no better a book than Donald Antrim's The Verificationist or Rick Bragg's All Over But the Shouting, to name two other books to which I gave the same rating. The rating relates to my enjoyment of the book and to the likelihood that I would recommend it to other readers. Without question, Confessions is a far more important book, and in the right context might be indispensible. But I don't recommend reading it for pleasure. For a more involving conversion narrative, I recommend The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
U and I is literary criticism of an altogether different sort. It's subject is John Updike (the U of the title). Rather than analyzing Updike's work in detail to see how he does what he does, and how those techniques have influenced Baker (the I of the title), Baker wants to analyze what he remembers about Updike and his writings. After all, it is his beliefs about Updike and his half-remembered quotes that really comprise Updike's day-to-day influence on him.
I find this approach very interesting and perfectly valid. On page 14, Baker describes his goal in writing: "to capture pieces of mental life as truly as possible, as they unfold, with all the surrounding forces of circumstance that bear on the blastula of understanding allowed to intrude to the extent that they give a more accurate picture." Exactly! That's what I loved about The Mezzanine: it made me realize how much of our experience of life is determined by contingent details rather than big events and analysis. Similarly, this book makes me realize (anew) how the influence that a book like, say, The Sportswriter has on me comes from what I remember about it, not what's actually in it. When I go back and read it again, I may find that it isn't at all what I remember. And how much more this would apply if I was a writer, as Baker is.
As usual, of course, Baker's prose is fun to read too.
I've been a fan of Nicholson Baker's since reading his first novel, The Mezzanine. The message I took from that book was that the way our lives feel to us is determined largely by the small intimate details we rarely focus on. Baker always approaches subjects working from the small details to the bigger issues, and I love the way he almost sneaks his themes in under the cover of obsessive detail.
The Everlasting Story of Nory is the story of a 9-year old American girl going to school in England. As usual, Baker has the details exactly, vividly right. His writing style mirrors a child's way of thinking and speaking perfectly. It was a lot of fun to read, but I was left at the end wondering what it all added up to. Unlike in some of his other books, I didn't detect an overarching theme. Instead the book read like a collection of Lynda Barry's Ernie Pook's Comics (thanks to Evelyn for this observation).
A true wisp of a book, more of a novella or a sketch than a novel. As always, Baker's prose is filled with fine descriptions of the joys hidden in everyday tasks like doing the dishes or taking a shower. By focusing attention on small details, Baker shows me how the Buddhist maxim of attending to the spirituality of the everyday can apply to my American suburban life — a heavy sounding idea to draw from such a slight book. In his earlier examples of this genre, I felt like there was thematic development, but this one seems like nothing beyond the tidbits. However, I did enjoy reading it and especially enjoyed the stories about the narrator's pet duck.
P.S. Looking at the fly-leaf on this book, I see that I have read all of Nicholson Baker's books, fiction and non-fiction!
This novel of almost classical surrealism was an impulse bookstore purchase based largely on an endorsement from Tom McCarthy, the author of my favorite book of 2007. While reading the newspaper in a park one day, our protagonist hears the dying words of a man who claims to know about a dangerous conspiracy. The next day, he is kidnapped and taken to a "verisylum," a mental hospital governed by a complex set of arbitrary rules. Can he stop the conspiracy... if indeed there is a conspiracy?
The plot and tone of Samedi the Deafness reminded me of the TV show "The Prisoner." Some of the short chapters seemed as if they were composed using indeterminate methods like the I Ching. Interesting tidbits were sprinkled throughout, but the pieces did not work together (or against each other) to build a compelling whole.
This novel by the author of Crash is a surprisingly straightforward thriller with only the lighest sprinkling of Ballardian commentary on the perversions of the modern condition. The story takes place at an international business park on the Cote d'Azur, where an idealistic English doctor shattered the apparent calm with a murder spree. What motivated him?
The thriller plot was solid up through the chapter where the main villain explains everything — over 100 pages from the end! I was disappointed by the banality of Ballard's "insights" about the human need for violence: ideas are the reason to read his books. The character motivations were completely confused and unbelievable in the latter stages of the story.
My favorite thing about the book is the evocative photograph of an empty corridor on the cover. The Craig Kalpakjian photo captures the mood and ambiguity that I was hoping for from the book itself.
John Banville's writing style is very smooth, erudite, and occasionally funny. The two books of his I have read (this one and The Book of Evidence) have featured charming, unreliable narrators, which is one of my favorite postmodern devices. However, I never feel like I'm able to penetrate beneath the surface of the characters so that they seem three-dimensional.
The Book of Evidence was a clever shaggy dog story; the narrator tells a long story in order to exonerate himself, but if isn't clear until the very end what he is really being accused of. I expected The Untouchable to be more insightful, since it deals with a true-life situation—the Cambridge spies. I wanted to learn more about what motivated them and how it felt to be a spy, but I didn't. Instead I got an interesting narrator who played his cards a bit too close to his chest for me to truly understand him.
A French novel, reportedly very popular in its home country, about two characters who try to keep their intellectual tendencies hidden. The first is the concierge for an upper-class apartment building; she hides her intelligence in order to conform to people's stereotype of a concierge. The second is a young girl in the building; she has learned that intelligence is pointless. A new tenant in the building draws the women out.
The book is very well written and introduces interesting ideas, but unfortunately it gets less interesting as it goes along (because the "message" becomes too explicit). It also has a stereotypical French ending. I think this novel could have been a magnificent short story.
Before reading this book, all I knew about the Battle of Agincourt is that it happened on Saint Crispin's Day and that Henry V led the English to an unexpected victory. In other words, I knew it solely from the famous "We few, we happy few" speech in Shakespeare's Henry V. This acclaimed book puts the battle into its historical context.
My eyes glazed over at the labyrinthine political details and the roll call of earls, dukes, and seneschals. However, Barker's descriptions of the preparations and the campaign are clear and exciting, and she provides lots of interesting detail about medieval political and military strategies. Very enjoyable.
I was first turned on to Frederick Barthelme through his short-story collection Law of Averages. I loved his laconic style and his focus on the types of everyday events that other writers skip over. It enabled him to capture feelings and ideas that speak directly to me and that no other writer even tries to capture. On top of my enjoyment of it, Law of Averages also made me want to write stories myself.
Elroy Nights is a novel about a small-college art professor, but the plot was irrelevant to me. What I like about Barthelme is his descriptions of a suburban milieu and lifestyle. One of the pull-quotes on the back cover says, "Barthelme's writing is so good I'd follow Elroy to a paint-drying festival." I agree, but unfortunately the middle section of the book really did seem like a paint-drying festival. I enjoyed the beginning and though the end was surprisingly strong, but a bulk of the middle had me feeling the way I'll bet some readers always feel when reading Barthelme: bored and missing the point.
This book is a personal appreciation of William James by the erudite Jacques Barzun, author of From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. It is not the right place to learn the details of William James philosophy (or psychology), but it gives a good sense of its flavor. It also provides a brief sketch of the man himself.
If I could have dinner with one historical figure, it would be William James. He had a wide range of interests, having made lasting contributions as a philosopher, a psychologist, a theologian, and a social critic. His writing style is clear, accessible, and filled with vivid examples. He also lived in a time of great changes in all areas of art and science (1842-1910).
My favorite thing about James’ philosophy is that it focuses attention on the richness of human experience rather than reducing it to abstract concepts. Reading James reminds me about the wonderful jumble of thoughts and emotions that make up our thinking, even our reasoning. As he would say, our experience is “thick” and any single conceptual understanding of it is “thin.” He says that our conscious experience of the world is the reality we need to account for (contra most other philosophical systems, which treat the external world as reality and consciousness as an imperfect reflection of it). Beliefs are as real as hammers, since we act on them and thereby change the world. He further suggests that the consequences of a belief are the sole criteria for evaluating its truth.
In both his philosophy and his personality, James encouraged relativism in its best sense: understanding other points of view from the inside and taking pleasure in learning to see the world from that perspective. It is this aspect of his temperament that I would find most congenial during our dinner together.
As for Barzun, he has a talent for concisely conveying interesting ideas. His pages can be dense with insights, tied together seamlessly with flowing prose. Too dense sometimes: by the time I finish a page, I feel like I have forgotten two or three thoughts that he slipped in to sentences with a different major point. Here is an example from page 290:
“James was surprised to find that whereas in English he could in one day produce at most twenty-five 8x10 pages in large longhand, he could write forty in French. The reason, of course, was that in a foreign tongue the range of locutions at one’s command is limited, which in turn limits self-criticism: one perforce uses the word that presents itself, and that part of meaning that resides in style remains untapped.” (p 290)
The first sentence supports the insight stated in the second sentence, but also packs in details about James’s writing habits: he wrote in longhand on 8x10 pages, and his handwriting was large. When one sentence makes two unrelated points, it can be hard to absorb them both.
These stories are very good, but they also remind me what I don't like about reading short fiction.
The good things first. In broad outline, the stories are very traditional — conflict, complication, climax, resolution — sometimes to the point of feeling overly obvious. However, Bausch fills in these outlines with subtlety and grace. He is especially good at creating complex characters and conveying complex emotions concisely. Most of the stories involve characters who exhibit an inner loneliness because their feelings are quite different from the feelings other people expect him or her to have.
What happens is that I enjoy a story very much, reading it in one sitting, and the next day I'm trying to remember what it was about. The problem is particularly severe with this type of character-driven story. I get involved with the surprising emotional life of a character, but because I don't return to the character again and again, I don't spend enough time with him or her to make him or her indelible.
The title notwithstanding, this book does not give advice about bluffing your way through a literary discussion. In fact, its main thesis is that our relationship with books is more complex than just whether we have read them or not. We know many books by reputation or from descriptions of them. We barely remember many of the books we have read. We have (valid) opinions about many more books than the ones whose details we recollect. The theme reminds me of Nicholson Baker's book U and I, in which Baker reflects on how his memory of John Updike's books has influenced him.
While Bayard has interesting points to make, his writing style is vague and elusive in the manner of Continental philosophers. His examples from literature don't seem as well-chosen as they could be.
One point that Bayard makes near the end of the books is particularly relevant on this page of reviews: literary criticism is largely a work of autobiography. It is the "record of a soul, and that soul is its deep object, not the transitory literary works that serve as supports in that quest" (p 176). In other words, you can learn more about me from reading my reviews than you can about the books.
This "True Story of Extreme Heroism on the High Seas" is the saga of the merchant marine vessel SS Badger State, which in 1969 encountered storms in the Pacific while carrying a load of bombs to Vietnam. Huge waves rolled the ship violently enough to break loose the deadly cargo, resulting in an explosion and the call to abandon ship.
Benedetto is a former Coast Guard search-and-rescue specialist who understands his subject. He is a good technical writer, conveying information clearly, concisely, and unobtrusively. He is not a good novelist, however. The formal, matter-of-fact writing style leaches all drama from the inherently dramatic story. The interspersed stories of merchant marine history, while interesting in themselves, bring the tension and forward momentum to a halt. (2/2009)
Women in Their Beds was a pure bookstore purchase. I'd never heard of the author or read a review of the book. Something about its cover, the quotes of endorsement, and the prose of the first page attracted me. It apparently won both the Pen/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1996. I was also intriuged by some of the great story titles, like "The Infinite Passion of Expectation."
I really enjoyed Berriault's short stories because of the subtlety of her writing style. She does an excellent job of creating depth in her characterizations and expressing conflicting concerns. For example, one of my favorite stories, "A Dream of Fair Women," starts like this:
Like a night sentry on the border between India and dream country, Singh, the restauranteur, watched her from the lamplit bar, his post. Over six feet tall, he was made even taller by his emerald green turban, and his Nehru jacket was white as Himalayan snow. Alma was the last waitress to arrive, and even though she was on time the near-miss must seem to his a portent of ruin. The most famous of roving gourmets was to be his guest that night, a man who would either place his restaurant on the map of the world or obliterate it with a few cruelly chosen words or no words at all.
The tiled cubicle restroom was still fragrant with the colognes of the other waitresses who, by arriving early and lighting the candles on all the tables, were like angels promising a celestial ending to this night. She slipped her costume on, drawing up the long cotton underskirt, smoothing the snug silk vest over her breasts, draping the red silk sari around her waist and over one shoulder, her hands weak with fear over her own night apart from the restaurant's night. While she was at work this night, her lover would take away his possessions... "
In these two paragraphs, Berriault gets us thinking about Singh's nervousness and Alma's preoccupation while giving a vivid description of the restaurant. Brilliant. My favorite stories were "A Dream of Fair Women," "The Island of Ven," and "The Diary of K.W.".
While I was enjoying this book, I tried to think about why I don't read more short fiction. Stories have a lot of advantages over novels: you can read a whole piece in one sitting, writers can experiment with different stylistic devices more easily, and it's easier to reread ones that you come to love. My resistance to them comes down to two things, I think. First, many short stories feel more like sketches to me, and I often feel like I've missed the point (if there is one).Second, and more important, I love the experience of plunging back into the world of a character I've grown to care about; with short stories, I'm starting fresh each time I pick up the book.
This book contains all of Borges' stories. I read the collection Ficciones many years ago — and even read one of its stories in the original Spanish . His sui generis stories were astounding and memorable. Most of the stories are short, but they're bursting with mind-bending ideas. In particular, check out "The Babylon Lottery", "The Library of Babel," and "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Teris."
I must admit, though, that I often find Borges' prose stilted and academic-sounding. This is by intention, I think. He writes in an older, 19th-century style, and most of his stories pretend to be non-fiction. He has a way with aphorisms — the stories are filled with quotable bits — but his sentences and paragraphs are complex and off-putting.
I highly recommend reading the classic Ficciones. If it whets your appetite for more, move on to The Aleph or The Maker.
This very short story sounds like a Paul Auster story, although it purports to be true. The most interesting thing about it is the premise that gives the book its title: an artist celebrates her birthday each year with a party to which she invites the number of guests corresponding to her age, plus one "mystery guest" representing the upcoming year. Our narrator gets a call out of the blue from his ex-girlfriend, asking him to be this year's mystery guest. His thoughts on gift-giving are interesting as well.
A Distant Episode is a collection of Bowles' short stories. Almost all of them paint a vivid picture of a place, usually in the African desert or South America, and concern a character who is either transformed by the place or destroyed by misunderstanding its customs. I find myself slightly confused at the end of many of the stories, because I don't understand the character's strange motivations, but the images are always haunting.
The title story (which, by the way, reads like a study for The Sheltering Sky) is a perfect example of his style. It starts with a vivid description of a North African town from the point of view of a visitor. About half way through, the main character allows himself to be lead into a dangerous situation for the thrill of it. He gets swept up in the strangeness of the alien culture, and his motivations become murky.
As I read the book, I wondered whether they were in anything like chronological order. They definitely were grouped somewhat thematically. I like the stories in the middle of the book best.
Reading Paul Theroux’s The Pillar of Hercules got my psyched to read something by Paul Bowles. (Theroux visits Bowles in his Tangiers home near the end of his book.) I read Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky several years ago and enjoyed it very much.
I picked up Up Above the World because its theme seemed to be classic Bowles: an American couple traveling in a foreign country meet an apparently charming man who really means them harm. That’s what it was about all right, but it went in a different direction than I expected.
What I expected was a situation where the tourists manage to misunderstand the intentions of the man because they want to believe they’re having a unique experience of “local color.” He seems nice, so they allow themselves to be drawn into some kind of con. Instead, the book reads more like a traditional thriller; you know from early on that the man is up to no good, and the tourists’ experience doesn’t depend on their American gullibility or condescension. While reading, I thought about the plot (“What’s he up to?”), not the characters (“Look how she’s missing all these clues because she finds him a charming Latin type”).
Despite my misplaced expectations, I enjoyed the book quite a bit. Bowles is an excellent writer, able to conjure a mood, a place, or an emotion with a minimum of words. For example, in the first several pages of the book he describes a scene where the tourist couple sits down to breakfast, determined to enjoy it but worrying about missing their boat. I had a vivid sense of the settings and their emotions.
A perfect example of a three-star book in my rating system: If you like this kind of book, you'll find it to be a solid example of the genre... but nothing more. In this case, the genre is spy thriller. A woman learns that her mother was a spy during the Second World War and may be in danger now (in 1976). Chapters alternate between 1976 and 1939-1941, with the WWII chapters being far more interesting. The author misses out on the opportunity to explore questions of personal identity, which are common in more literary spy novels.
Our local paper, the Valley Times, has a “book club.” Once every six weeks or so, they select a new book. Anyone who wants to can read the book and send comments to the paper. They select half a dozen readers, take them out to dinner to discuss the book, then publish the comments in the paper. The Tortilla Curtain is the book club book for February 1998. I sent in my review and was selected to participate.
The book is about two couples in the hills outside Los Angeles, a yuppie couple (he’s a writer, she’s an upscale realtor) and newly married illegal immigrants living in the canyon. The story starts when the writer accidentally hits the Mexican man. Alternating chapters follow the two couples, whose lives are gradually becoming intertwined.
I wasn’t expecting much after the first few chapters. I was impressed by the middle section, though, so the weak ending was a disappointment.
Early on, I thought the story was going to rip off Bonfire of the Vanities—a rich man runs over a minority man, whose injuries turn out to be worse than they first appear, sparking social outrage. When the immigrant woman’s name turned out to be America, I braced myself for over-obvious symbolism.
But the story gained strength as it went along. It didn’t have a cookie-cutter plot or stereotypical characters, no unfeeling bourgeois or noble savage. Boyle does a good job of showing how different the world is for the Mossbachers and the Rincons even though they live in the same place. The description of immigrant life is vivid. He sets up a number of thematic contrasts: the Mossbachers and the Rincons, immigrants and coyotes, camping as “liberation” (for Delaney) and camping as unfortunate necessity (for Candido).
For me, the high point was the three-chapter stretch starting with Candido and America’s trip into Canoga Park. America’s excitement about spending the night in a motel (a real bed! running water!) drove home how much we take for granted. The next chapter, Delaney’s newspaper column about coyotes, nicely summed up the repeated theme of “displaced populations.” In the third chapter, Delaney laments the inevitable racism of his son, then has a pair of confrontations (with Todd Sweet and the “bad” Mexican) that leave him questioning his own racism. It does an effective job of showing the ambivalence that lurks even in liberal souls. These chapters encapsulate what is best about the book, and I looked forward to how Boyle would deepen their insights.
Unfortunately, it is all downhill after that. Plot developments become predictable, Delaney and America start acting out of character, and we get natural disasters instead of thoughtful resolution. The final section doesn’t follow up on any of the earlier themes.
It reminded me of the frustration I felt when I read The Mill on the Floss. The author sets up a seemingly irresolvable conflict, invites us to wonder how it will all come out, then “resolves” the plot with a dramatically unsatisfying natural disaster.
All Over But the Shouting is a memoir about growing up poor and white in the South, written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His intent is to describe his roots and to celebrate his mother's sacrifices.
I don't know about his newspaper writing, but his narrative style in this book is supremely annoying. His descriptions of his family and their hardships never transcend two dimensions and cliches. He is honest about the chip he has on his shoulder, but that doesn't make him any more pleasant as a person. He manages the tricky feat of coming across as self-centered and arrogant while protesting how humble he is. (For example, check out the chapter on winning the Pulitzer.)
The Death of Virgil was published in German in 1945. When the Vintage International edition of this book was published in 1995, I picked it up in a bookstore and read the first paragraph:
Steel-blue and light, ruffled by a soft, scarcely perceptible cross-wind, the waves of the Adriatic streamed against the imperial squadron as it steered toward the harbor of Brundisium, the flat hills of the Calabrian coast coming gradually nearer on the left. And here, as the sunny yet deathly loneliness of the sea changed with the peaceful stir of friendly human activity where the channel, softly enhanced by the proximity of human life and human living, was populated by all sorts of craft—by some that were also approaching the harbor, by others heading out to sea and by the ubiquitous brown-sailed fishing boats already setting out for the evening catch from the little breakwaters which protected the many villages and settlements along the white-sprayed coast—here the water had become mirror-smooth; mother-of-pearl spread over the open shell of heaven, evening came on, and the pungence of wood fires was carried from the hearths whenever the sound of life, a hammering or a summons, was blown over from the shore.
I was extremely taken with the poetic description, especially with the images of the water. However, I could tell that this 400+ page novel would require the kind of careful attention you need to read poetry, so it was a few years before I got to it. (I read the Aeniad in the meantime too.)
This first paragraph sums up a lot of what's good and bad about the novel. On the plus side, it creates a mood using detailed, vivid images. On the minus side, the sentences can be long-winded, roundabout, and overly "profound." The heart of the novel is Part II, which chronicles a long night during which Virgil ponders the meaning of life and of art. While it contains a number of very interesting ideas and deep images, it hides them amongst pseudo-profound prose along the lines of "the forecourt of reality was merely a sham-reality." At times it reads like Broch read too much European deconstructionist analysis, even though deconstruction postdates the novel.
I have to admit to frequent bouts of impatience. However, I got a lot more from this novel than I ever got from Joyce's Ulysses, which was harder to read. I feel sure The Death of Virgil would reward closer reading.
This novel tells two parallel stories. One of the stories takes place in the city where the recently dead... um... live? exist?... until everyone who is left alive has forgotten them. At least that's the theory they have, since no one can tell them for sure. The second story concerns Laura Byrd, a researcher trapped in Antarctica after her radio breaks down. The residents of the city learn (from the recently dead) about a deadly virus sweeping across the world. Surprisingly, the pandemic makes the city increasingly less crowded. Meanwhile, Laura sets out from her research station to try to re-establish contact with the world.
True to its title, the book is brief and a quick, enjoyable read. By focusing his narrative on the experiences of people in the city, Brockmeier avoids having to answer uncomfortable questions about the metaphysics of how the city works. Their ignorance is our ignorance. Laura's adventures are well told. I found the story touching, and occasionally exciting and thought-provoking. It would make a good book-club book, I think. However, it seems more like a long short-story to me than a novel: it lacks the depth and complexity of a true novel.
The chapters of this book alternate between a history of the guitar and the story of the author having a custom guitar built for him. It is a perfect literary analogue of a story on NPR's All Things Considered: a pleasant, friendly voice gliding lightly over an interesting subject. Appropriate, I guess, since Tim Brookes is a regular contributor to NPR's Weekend Edition.
I found the early chapters to be a tad superficial, leaving me with questions. The later chapters were better, I thought. They had more detail about the music and about technique without losing the smooth narrative tone.
Evelyn read this book to me while I washed the dishes. It tells the story of a village in England during the Black Plague. Under guidance from their minister, the village decides to cut itself off from the outside world, hoping to prevent the spread of the disease. The narrator is a young woman whose husband and children are among the first to die.
The main problem with the book is that the narrator and the minister's wife come across as much too modern. They instantly adopt a scientific attitude and rebuke those who see the plague as God's will. They are proto-feminists too, without a single qualm. I think it would have been a much more engaging story with realistic 17th century characters struggling to transcend their superstitions.
I am interested in the patterns in the manmade world around me. That's why I periodically pick up a book like Infrastructure, Edge City, and this one. Bruegman argues that "suburban sprawl" is by no means unique to the postwar United States, but has in fact happened for as long as there have been cities. He also suggests that unplanned growth is not the unmitigated evil that its opponents claim it is.
I like Bruegman's contrarian viewpoint. His claim that past attempts to control sprawl have been ineffective is fairly convincing. However, he does admit that some planning measures have had partial success at a local level, albeit with unintended consequences. I would have liked the book to explore the trade-offs more carefully, instead of clinging firmly to an anti-anti-sprawl agenda. I would have been especially interested in a deeper discussion of the Portland Project.
Here's an interesting fact: "The total amount of developed land today is probably no more than about 5 percent of the total of nearly 2 billion acres in the continental United States. ... It would be possible to accommodate the entire population of the United States...at suburban densities within the slightly over 65,000 square miles of the state of Wisconsin" (page 143).
Budnitz has a distinctive and funny narrative voice that reminds me of George Saunders. Her unusual stories are engaging, although they often don't resolve themselves in a satisfying way. I would be interested in reading more of her stuff in the future.
This detective novel falls prey to many of the cliches of the genre: a complexly executed murder, an honorable detective, characters giving speeches to explain their motivations, and larger conspiracies revealed by the investigation. However, the story is well told, pleasingly sordid with heaping helpings of Thai atmosphere. Along the way, the narrator makes many interesting observations about the differences between East and West. It's ultimately unbelievable, but it's a fun ride.
I have to assume that this book was among the most popular of all time simply because of the sex. It is very racy for 1933. The social commentary is bare-bones and ridiculous, and the comic atmosphere is poisoned by stereotypes. I did, however, get a fun new exclamation from it: "What in the pluperfect hell..."
The back cover of this book says it is about a woman whose dreams about a fantasy world start to bleed over into real life. I was intrigued by the early chapters while I tried to guess how events in the skillfully rendered dream world of Rondua would link to the narrator's waking life. When it became clear that no meaningful link was going to be established, I lost interest in both halves of the story.
I read another Jonathan Carroll book several years ago, From the Teeth of Angels. I found it far more interesting than this one, although there is something indefinable about Carroll's writing style that makes his characters less than full-bodied.
Burning Your Boats is the collected short stories of Angela Carter. I had been meaning to read some of Carter's stories ever since seeing the film A Company of Wolves, which was based on a couple of stories from The Bloody Chamber (a great title). I decided to read the book to Evelyn, since she's a fan of the gothic style of Joyce Carol Oates and I thought Carter's style might have the same elements.
I loved the way the language of Carter's sentences flows. She is fond of her wide vocabulary, but the words rolled smoothly off my tongue as I read aloud. She can set a mood effectively, and nearly every story had beautiful, unexpected descriptions and analogies. However, I found the plot of many of the stories less satisfactory. Carter has the tendency to dwell too much on making a didactic point rather than coming to a conclusion that is dramatically satisfying.
In short, I find Carter's writing style mesmerizing, but many of the stories don't live up to its promise.
This book imagines a dinner party held in Cambridge in 1949, attended by five famous intellectuals who were there at the time: C.P. Snow, Alan Turing, J.B.S. Haldane, Erwin Schrodinger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. They get together to discuss the central question of artificial intelligence—is it possible to create a machine that thinks? Each chapter corresponds to one course of the meal and one major issue in the debate.
I found the fictional situation and the characterizations annoying and amateurish. However, Casti does a good job of laying out the basic arguments concisely. I could imagine going back to this book if I ever needed a short summary of one of these issues.
I came across this book while we were vacationing in New Mexico. Cioran is a Rumanian philosopher who I hadn't heard of. I was attracted by the theatrically depressing titles of his books (such as On the Heights of Despair and The Trouble with Being Born) and by the quotes on the back that refer to his "uncompromising pessimism" and his "seductive handling of words." I was reminded of the fun I had reading another despairing philosopher with style, Arthur Schopenhauer. I am also interested in his main subject, which is the inability of modern philosophy to escape the idea that objective truth does not exist.
I was disappointed. I enjoyed the clear presentation in Susan Sontag's introduction more than Cioran's essays themselves. Cioran is no Schopenhauer when it comes to writing style; he fits into the modern European philosophical style, which I frequently find incomprehensible. True to the advertising, Cioran doesn't construct a carefully reasoned argument, but focuses instead on attempts at clever phrasing. He seems to repeat himself a lot, which causes me to lose interest.
Because of his anecdotal approach, the best essay was "Rages and Resignations," which isn't really an essay at all but a collection of short pieces. The other ones I liked better were "Some Blind Alleys: A Letter" (where he tries to talk a friend out of becoming a writer) and "A People of Solitaries" (which may be anti-Semitic, but got me thinking about how it would feel to be Jewish).
This 850-page novel takes place in 19th-century England. Several centuries before, there were great magicians in England, but the discipline fell into disuse after the disappearance of the Raven King. The two eponymous men begin to revive English magic, a task that is not without peril since it involves summoning notoriously unreliable faeries. Although it was written in 2004, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell is a perfect example of what Henry James called a "loose baggy monster." I like to read loose baggy monsters when I go on vacation, so I brought it with me to the Toronto Film Festival in 2006.
The early chapters have a lively, Austen-esque feeling. Once the plot kicks into gear with Mr Norell's resurrection of Lady Pole, the writing style becomes a tad dusty and the mood unrelentingly dreary. Through the vast mid-section of the novel, narrative threads are dropped and picked up again at unpredictable intervals. The plot really starts moving through the last ten chapters, making the reader away of how slowly it has been developing up to that point. I enjoyed reading it, but I do think that it could have lost a hundred pages from the middle, and would have benefited from more intermediate climaxes.
I did not know Jonathan Coe at all before reading this pair of novels about a group of friends in Birmingham, England. He is a very good writer in most ways. He creates compelling characters, describes situations well, and maintains an engaged and entertaining tone. Despite these talents, however, I found myself increasingly uninvolved with the actual plot. The incidents in the story did not come together to create a greater whole.
The story uses real world events as a backdrop. I think Coe was striving for a social novel along the lines of Vanity Fair or Trollope, but I never got a sense of how the character's lives were informed by the events around them.
Michael Connelly usually writes detective novels that are very well crafted even if they don't bring anything new to the genre. The narrator of The Lincoln Lawyer is a lawyer rather than a detective, but the fine craftsmanship remains. The crime at the center of the story is outlandish and unbelievable, as is usual for this type of book, but the courtroom drama is excellent, insightful, and feels realistic.
Minor spoiler: At one point the narrator shoots someone in self-defense. I appreciated that Connelly acknowledges the emotional consequences of this act: "I am a killer now. Being state sanctioned only tempers slightly the feelings that come with that" (pg 403).
I haven't cared much for the Conrad works I have read in the past, but I decided to give this one a chance because (a) I like espionage books, (b) it's on the list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century, and (c) it was a significant influence on Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist, which I really liked. The plot was interesting and well constructed, but I continue to have problems with Conrad's writing style.
Conrad is considered a great prose stylist, but I find his writing to be static, heavy, and hard to follow. His greatest vice, in my opinion, is loading down his sentences with subordinate clauses. Here's an example from page 8:
"When he had reached the age of fourteen a friend of his late father, an agent for a foreign preserved milk firm, having given him an opening as office-boy, he was discovered one foggy afternoon, in his chief's absence, busy letting off fireworks on the staircase."
Another problem is that he tends to introduce people in an impersonal style:
"Another door opened noiselessly, and Mr. Verloc immobilizing his glance in that direction saw at first only black clothes, the bald top of a head, and a drooping dark grey whisker on each side of a pair of wrinkled hands. The person who had entered was holding a batch of papers before his eyes..."
Combine these two tendencies and the result is an imposing edifice of prose. I kept having to reread sentences and paragraphs.
I was skeptical about a book by CNN personality Anderson Cooper, but I was impressed by the quality of his writing. He does a good job of raising key questions about journalism (Is he a vulture preying on the misery of others? Is it ethical to package their deaths for TV stories? Does reporting from disaster areas do any good?), and an even better job of showing how his job links to his personal demons. I winced occasionally when he seemed to be comparing his experience of his father's death to the experience of disaster and war victims, but the approach pays off at the end. The final short chapter about the Day of the Dead summarizes how our personal stories and international stories relate to one another. Cooper ultimately doesn't have anything new to say, but the short book is enjoyable.
I was very disappointed in this book. First off, it's very short, barely even long enough to qualify as a novella (102 pages with wide margins). Secondly, I didn't get it—I'm assuming that the story did have a point, something to do with rituals. Lastly, I didn't find it at all erotic, despite the recommendation of Daphne Merkin in the New Yorker (as one of her favorite S/M books).
I’ve been interesting in reading a Robert Coover novel for a few years now, ever since I read a short story of his called (I think) The Babysitter. That story was about a couple that goes out for the evening, leaving their child with a nubile teenage babysitter. It weaves together the actual unremarkable events of the evening with the fantasies of the husband, wife, and babysitter. The babysitter is watching a horror movie on TV and imagining killers outside the house, the husband is imagining going home early and having sex with the babysitter, and the wife... well, I can’t remember what she was up to. As the story goes on, the separate fantasies start to blend together. It’s a great story.
I picked up John’s Wife because the style of the first few pages really caught me. It funny and written with flair. Here’s the start of the book:
“...Once, there was a man named John. John had money, power, good health, high regard, many friends. Though he worked hard for these things, he actually found it difficult not to succeed; though not easily satisfied, he was often satisfied, a man whose considerable resources matched his considerable desires. A fortunate man, John. He was a builder by trade: where he walked, the earth changed, because he wished it so, and, like as not, his wishes all came true. Closed doors opened to him and obstacles fell. His enthusiasms were legendary. He ate and drank heartily but not to excess, played a tough but jocular game of golf, roamed the world on extended business trips, collected guns and cars and exotic fishing tackle, had the pleasure of many woman, flew airplanes, contemplated running for Congress just for the sport of it. In spite of all that happened to his wife and friends, John lived happily ever after, as though this were somehow his destiny and his due.
Floyd, less favored, worked for John. He managed John’s Main Street hardware business, envied John’s power, having none of his own, and coveted John’s wife. ‘Covet’ was Floyd’s word, out of his respect for the bible, and because he knew what an evil man he was.”
The story goes on to talk about how all the people in the town feel about John’s wife, whose name isn’t given. Some of them love her, some are obsessed by her, and some are threatened by her.
I loved the writing style, and individual sections where very engrossing. On the down side, though, Coover seemed to skip from character to character and from past to present in a way that made it seem like the story wasn’t progressing. Then, about three quarters of the way through, things start to get surreal, much as in The Babysitter. Although I generally preferred the “realistic” parts, at least the long dreamlike day moves the plot forward to its conclusion.
So, in summary, I loved the writing, liked many parts of the book, but it didn’t all add up for me.
While I've only read a couple of things by Robert Coover, I think of him as a perfect example of the kind of author I like: a smooth, entertaining writing style, with just the right touch of postmodern trickery in the storytelling.
Pinocchio in Venice tells the story of an aged Pinocchio returning to his hometown in search of inspiration for the final chapter of his memoirs. Unfortunately, he is immediately duped by some of his old enemies. Plus, as his health deteriorates he is turning back into wood.
I really enjoyed the book. In addition to its "carnivalesque" description of Venice and the colorful dialogue of its characters, it explores interesting ideas about the meaning of a human life. Pinocchio sees his relationship with the Blue Fairy quite differently than it was presented in the movie: rather than she giving him life, he brought her to life through his desire to be a human boy. Rather than being a gift bestowed upon him, life is a choice he made—and must continue to make. He suggests that we're all puppets unless we find a purpose to pursue. Being alive isn't easy, though, because there are always temptations and tricksters looking to sidetrack us. Even his old puppet friends give him a hard time for trying to be better than they are.
The story is funny, poignant, and well told. My only regret is that I didn't remember the story of Pinocchio better, because many of the events parallel incidents from the original
This book covers the history of world cinema from the first films in the 1880s through the 90-minute single-take digital film Russian Ark in 2002. It focuses on the art and technique of filmmaking, not the business side, and it attempts to weave the numerous innovations into one coherent narrative.
The first several chapters of the book, covering the silent film era and pre-WWI sound films, is chock-full of interesting insights on nearly every page as it describes the thrill of discovering editing techniques, tracking shots, and storytelling devices. Some of these techniques are so familiar now that it's hard to remember that someone had to discover them. Cousins provides succinct summaries of various world cinema styles (theatre-based benshi-supported films in Japan, editing experiments in Russia, and so on), and shows how technical innovations and world events affect the history of film. Very entertaining and insightful.
The last couple of chapters, covering the past twenty years or so, are a bit less intriguing as the cross-pollination of global film styles complicates Cousins' attempt to tell a single story. These chapters can read more like mere lists of important films. They still contain thoughtful insights, however. For example, he identifies four approaches to cinema:
You can place films on a grid based on how much they reflect these four approaches.
Cousins is optimistic about the future of film. He quotes Walter Murch, who compared digital filmmaking to Renaissance painting. "In moving from painting frescoes using pigment in wet plaster to painting in oils on canvas, artists went from an expensive, collaborative process requiring patronage and dedicated to 'public' subjects, to a cheap, individual process depicting more personal situations and themes" (page 491).
A short book about the role of architecture in our lives. "If one room can alter how we feel, if our happiness can hang on the colour of the walls or the shape of a door, what will happen to us in most of the places we are forced to inhabit?" de Bottom's prose manages to be both clear and poetic, and the book includes lots of pictures.
Libra is yet another fictional retelling of the JFK assassination, told mostly as a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald. Reading it changed the way I think about conspiracy theories.
In Libra, a lot of groups would like to see Kennedy die, and some even start planning an assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald gets involved, but the carefully laid plans of the conspirators go awry because Oswald is a complex human being with ideas and motivations outside of the ones that make him attractive to the conspirators. I was fascinated by the idea that far-reaching conspiracies are impossible because they are composed of many people, all of whom have their own motivations that aren’t in line with each other.
Underworld was one of the best reviewed books of 1997. Like Libra, Underworld mixes real-life characters with fictional characters, real events with imagined events. It is a sweeping social epic, spanning four decades and over 800 pages. It starts in 1951 at the final game between the Giants and the Dodgers, the game that ended with the home run that got called The Shot Heard Round the World. On that same day, Russia conducts a nuclear bomb test. DeLillo links these two events and presents them as the end of innocence and the beginning of the Cold War.
The prologue, set at the baseball game, is fantastic. It is 60 pages of the best writing you’re likely to come across. It successfully interweaves the stories of the game, a young fan in the bleachers who ends up getting the home-run ball, and J. Edgar Hoover, who learns about the bomb tests while watching the game. DeLillo captures the mood of the scene while also setting up his major themes. I even love the prologue’s title, “The Triumph of Death.”
Unfortunately, the remaining 750+ pages don’t live up to the beginning. There are certainly some really good parts, but they don’t add up for me. The book has more ideas in it than any five books, but the characterizations and dialogue are weak. After the baseball game, DeLillo tells the story roughly in reverse, with each section set ten years or so before the preceding one. It’s an interesting idea, and it occasionally yields an interesting reading experience.
Although he’s not the main character, the person who represents the heart of the story is Marvin Lundy, the baseball memorabilia collector who traces the history of the Thomson home-run ball. His theory of how you can reconstruct a whole world just by investigating all aspects of a single event perfectly describes the organizing principle of Underworld.
I think Underworld has all the elements to be a great book, but that it fails in two respects. First, as I mentioned earlier, I frequently find DeLillo’s dialogue and characters unpersuasive. Second, the book has so many themes and threads in it that DeLillo can’t pull them all together into a cohesive novel.
This book examines the effect of the welfare reform measures instituted during the mid 1990s. It alternates between the abstract policy discussions in Washington and the specific stories of three single mothers in Wisconsin. It is the women's stories, and how they illuminate the oversimplifications of the policy discussions, that makes the book fascinating. DeParle describes their day-to-day life in a non-judgmental, sympathetic tone, but doesn't hesitate to point out when their decisions reinforce the stereotypes about welfare recipients. DeParle also includes a couple of chapters from the point of view of a reluctant welfare caseworker.
Overall, the book is a non-ideological look at the problem of poverty in America. It is entertaining where it could easily be preachy, and DeParle does not pretend to have the answers to the issues it raises.
I bought this slim novel at the Bequia Bookshop in Port Elizabeth, hoping that I'd discovered a European novelist who was a hidden treasure. Five Photos of My Wife is the story of a man whose wife dies after nearly fifty years of marriage. He commissions several artists to paint a portrait of her. According to the book jacket, he learns that he didn't know he wife as well as he thought he did, but that's not the message I got from the book itself. Rather, it seemed like a meditation on the purpose of art.
Although I was disappointed, I must admit that Agnes Desarthe is a fine writer. There were several short passages that seemed to contain deep insights. For example, in the penultimate chapter a neighbor describes how for many years she had made up dreams to describe to her husband each morning because he loved to hear about them. One morning she wakes up from an actual dream to find that her husband had died during the night.
Not surprisingly, Bob Dylan's autobiography approaches its subject obliquely and poetically. Rather than starting with "I was born..." and moving in order through his early years, the first few chapters paint an impressionistic picture of Greenwich Village during the late 1950s and Dylan's reaction to it. He tells stories from his life much like you would tell stories about yourself to a friend, drifting from subject to subject in a way that appears to illustrate the way he thinks. Much of the second chapter takes place in a friend's apartment where Dylan stayed. There are so many treasures to be found in this apartment, from its library to its eclectic furnishings and its view, that I suspect it to be metaphorical.
From there, Dylan jumps without warning to the middle 1970s, then to creating the album Oh Mercy in the early 1980s, then a reprise of the New York section. In many ways, I found the book to be structured like a song, with a return to the chorus at the end. It is an odd book, full of treasures like that apartment. I can certainly imagine returning to it again, reading sections at random for their offbeat charm. I look forward to Volume 2.
"My haystacks weren't tied down, and I was beginning to fear the wind."
The 19th Wife is a fictional counterpart to Under the Banner of Heaven. Like Jon Krakauer's book, it tells parallel stories of a contemporary murder in a fundamentalist Mormon community and historical episodes from the Mormom church. While the contemporary story started strong, I grew less interested as it progressed. I found the historical story more interesting, although I could imagine others feeling like it moves too slowly. The best parts occur when Eberhoff captures the characters' feelings about being caught between their faith and their moral reasoning.
I definitely recommend Krakauer's book over The 19th Wife, but this book is a decent companion for those who can't get enough of Mormon history. (2/2009)
Two cousins reunite after twenty years to renovate an old German castle. The Keep kept me guessing with its gothic elements and odd narrative structure. Is it a ghost story? A revenge plot? An allegory? Who is the mysterious, ageless baroness that lives in the castle keep? And what relation does it all have to the convicted murderer who serves as the narrator? I was intrigued by the story, and by the offbeat psychology of the main character Danny. Danny’s addiction to his phone and Internet connection allowed the author to explore the idea that we live our lives in a ghostly disembodied world, living here and there simultaneously.
The plot and the characters are well-constructed, but the prose is often awkward. The awkwardness is “explained” by having an untrained narrator, but then how do we account for the solid character development? For me, this contrast contributed to the tension of reading the story.
As is often true for thrillers, the resolution of the story was not as satisfying as the mystery. I was disappointed by the mundane ending to Danny’s story. The gothic atmosphere evaporated without a trace, leaving questions behind. (Why did the baroness appear young to Danny?) Meanwhile, the resolution of the narrator’s story seemed like it was lifted from Ian McEwan’s Atonement.
I enjoyed The Keep while I was reading it, but was left disappointed.
L.A. Confidential is the third and best book in Ellroy’s four-volume series of novels about post-war Los Angeles. I really think you should start with the first two—The Black Dahlia and The Big Nowhere—but you might want to read L.A. Confidential before seeing the movie version.
All of Ellroy’s books are police procedurals with vivid and violent characters. He has a distinctive narrative voice that imitates the style of 1950s tabloids. Every character has some kind of strange obsession and the murders are grisly. The stories are told against a big backdrop that includes some real-life characters (like Howard Hughes and the gangster Johnny Stampanado) mixed in with the fictional ones. In fact, the books have such an epic scope that it’s amazing they were able to condense L.A. Confidential into a screenplay.
Even though the movie is good and stands on its own, the book is far richer and more wide-reaching.
This book is a nonfiction account of the unsolved murder of Ellroy’s mother when he was 10, the effect the murder had on him, and the investigation that Ellroy undertook a few years ago to solve the case. It’s written in basically the same hopped-up style as his fiction.
I found the sections dealing with the original investigation and with Ellroy’s teenage years very engrossing. The murder felt tawdry because of its sheer ordinariness. The reconstruction of the night leading up to the murder painted an effective picture of sad people in a backwater suburb. I could imagine similar stories from Dublin or Pleasanton. The description of the investigation felt realistic too. No brilliant detectives figuring out obscure clues, just police procedure: calling witnesses, tracking down leads, and the occasional lucky break. Ellroy also has a real feel for the time and place where the action occurs, putting it into the context of Los Angeles politics in an economical way.
In the autobiographical section of the book, Ellroy does a good job of explaining the thought processes that lead him through his life of petty crime, and of tying it all back to his mother’s murder. I was particularly interested in how he would break into friends’ families houses and just hang out there, pretending he lived a “normal” life like they did. That image, the underlying sadness of it, stays with me.
The second half of the book, where Ellroy reopens the murder case—for the sake of publicity, mostly—isn’t very successful. Nothing in the investigation is qualitatively different from the initial investigation, no conclusions are reached, and neither of the main characters (Detective Bill Steiner and Ellroy himself) is very interesting. I got bored, and I also got annoyed with the self-congratulatory-but-humble way Ellroy presented himself.
This book is worth reading if you get hooked on Ellroy through his L.A. Quartet novels, such as L.A. Confidential. You can stop once he meets up with Bill Steiner.
The stories in this collection are well crafted, but far too typical in their subject matter and tone. There were moments and turns of phrase that captured my attention, but mostly I was bored. On the plus side, the more recent stories were the best ones, so perhaps Enright's future is bright.
Is this book science fiction or surrealism or what? All I know is that Steve Erickson is the best writer I know for conjuring up dreamlike images from the printed page. The first section of Rubicon Beach takes place in a Los Angeles (of the future? of the imagination?) that is underwater due to the melting of the polar ice caps. The narrator is returning from the penal colony of northern Washington. The buildings in L.A. are half-submerged and people travel by boat. The water running through the buildings gives each one a distinctive sound, so people give directions by whistling.
All of Erickson’s books have vivid images that I always remember, but Rubicon Beach is the book where they best hang together as a story. If you enjoy it, try Arc d’X or Days Between Stations next.
I liked The Sea Came In At Midnight much better than Erickson's previous book, Amnesiascope. It had more of the qualities I like in Erickson—vivid dreamlike imagery—and less of the qualities I dislike—vague self-important drivel. It doesn't measure up to Rubicon Beach or Arc d'X, but it helps me believe Erickson still may have a great book in him
I read this review of the book from a reader at Amazon.com. I think he or she hits the nail on the head about Erickson's strengths and weaknesses:
Erickson is a skilled writer, but he is no Pynchon or DeLillo, at least not yet. This book is clever, and vastly ambitious, both in its subject and in its sheer temporal scope . . . but it's often over-written and un-focused, with a self-conscious significance that feels forced and unnecessary. Erickson's writing is often provocative and daring, but just as often it's pretentious and obtuse; the characters are intriguing, but the story is so aloof from them that it remains unmoving.
I too find his books frequently "over-written" in a way I find annoying. However, I find the imagery and imaginative plotting compelling. In fact, I frequently have the experience of enjoying the book and finding it annoying at the same time, in almost equal measures.
Our Ecstatic Days is a sequel of sorts to The Sea Came In At Midnight and also contains at least one allusion to Rubicon Beach. Everything I said in my reviews of those books applies to this one as well. The major theme in Our Ecstatic Days is motherhood and the impossibility of protecting our loved ones from the chaos of life. It takes place in two major locations: around a lake that is overtaking Los Angeles, and at a remote, nearly empty hotel in the Southwest that is plagued by thunderstorms.
Once or twice a year I browse at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in Opera Plaza in San Francisco. Every time I am there I notice a gushing recommendation, written by one of the employees, for A Fan's Notes. I pick it up. The cover says it is "the best novel written in the English language since The Great Gatsby" and has a rave from Kurt Vonnegut. But the plot concerns a "long failure" and is said to be a "powerful and bruising experience," so for several years I set the book back on its shelf.
During a break from the San Francisco International Film Festival 2005, I finally decide to pick up A Fan's Notes. By coincidence, the cashier is the person who wrote the recommendation that eventually wore down my defenses. He assures me that I will love the book... and tells me to avoid Exley's other books, which are terrible.
I read it. Do I love it? It would be more accurate to say that I admire it. It is a unique book, sui generis, with a reticence about its themes that makes it refreshingly subtle and unpredictable. It is impossible to give a plot description. The narrator's voice is the key attraction: he is forthright about his not-admirable actions and has a low-key humor that made him sound British to my ears. The book defeats any expectations you might have about it, but it has an offbeat charm that sneaks up on you. I can certainly see why the book speaks deeply to some readers... and why many other readers would find it dull and pointless. I'm closer to the former than the latter, but it didn't pull me all the way in. I might reread it again in a few years; it seems like the kind of book that could grow on me.
Coincidentally, I watched the film Stone Reader while I was reading A Fan's Notes, and the book appears in the filmmaker's pile of the greatest first novels of the 20th century. One of the questions the film asks is why so many writers write a great first novel then disappear or fail to write another of similar quality. Fred Exley fits well into this theme.
This collection of essays changed my way of thinking about affirmative action programs, First Amendment arguments, and moral relativism. Fish’s writing style can be annoying sometimes, particularly if you have a low tolerance for academic style, but it’s worth reading just an essay or two.
He hooked me right on the first page of the introduction. He talks about the play How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. At one point, the son of the owner is passed over for a promotion in favor of the hard-working hero. The owner’s son cries, “That’s not fair,” and it’s supposed to be a joke. But, Fish says, he’s right: according to the rules set forth for the owner’s son, nepotism is the way to get ahead, and promoting someone else (by a different set of criteria) isn’t fair. Fish’s point is that fairness is not something you can measure objectively. It always depends on the scale you set up.
How can you not be interested in the subject of this book? It is a survey of the various routes people have taken to invest their lives with meaning. It is similar to the various titles in the Oxford Press "Very Short Introduction" series: broad rather than deep, well-written and focused. It may not have told me anything I didn't already know, but it organized and clarified my thoughts. And anyone who includes William James on his list of dream dinner companions is okay in my book. I found it valuable.
I love this book, The Sportswriter. The main character, Frank Bascombe, is just a regular guy who is trying to come to terms with the fact that his life hasn't turned out the way he expected it to. His life is a good if unremarkable one, and he does his best to focus on the positives. The story, the locale, and the character are all as mundane as can be, but I've never read a better or more complex portrait of a regular guy. What can I say? It speaks to me.
Ford wrote a sequel in 1995, titled Independence Day. It won the Pulitzer Prize and is generally considered better than The Sportswriter. I like The Sportswriter better because Independence Day, while it is a fine book too, primarily concerns Frank’s relationship with his son, and I don’t have a son. I find Frank an intriguing character whose ruminations on life and the struggle for happiness mean a lot to me. I don't always know what he is getting at, but I find myself wanting to puzzle it out because so much of his worldview accords with mine.
The Lay of the Land is the latest, the longest, and the weakest of the Frank Bascombe trilogy (although nowhere near as weak as the weakest of the Rabbit Angstrom novels). Several plot points feel unlikely and forced: his second wife leaves him when her missing first husband reappears; his first wife talks about getting back together; he is a member of a surely fictional group called Sponsors Anonymous. However, Frank's narrative voice and ruminations remain a joy. I didn't buy the scene where his first wife Ann suggests getting back together, but was completely convinced by his reaction to the incident.
While I enjoyed most of the eleven novellas contained in this collection, Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth stood out as the best and also as the one that felt most like a short novel rather than a long story. I've avoided Roth in the past, but won't any longer. My other favorites were The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley, which portrayed family life quite incisively, and The Long March, by William Styron.
With Richard Ford as the editor, nearly all of the selections demonstrated the realism that American authors are best known for. The notable exception was The Making of Ashenden by Stanley Elkin, which builds to a wild finish that you've got to read to believe.
This book is relatively obscure and possibly out of print. It’s one of my all time favorites, though. I read it whenever I’m feeling depressed. If you read it, you may be surprised that it’s one of my favorites: it doesn’t match the profile of the kind of book I usually read.
Dixiana Moon is “the mapcap, manic-depressive story of Joe Mahaffey, irrespressible optimist... High on life, New York City, and Monica, the girl of his dreams, he gets so carried away with his pitches that he begins to believe them himself.”
Joe meets a Southern hustler named Buck Brody, and together they hatch a scheme to make big money. When the deal goes sour, Buck skips town, back to the south. Joe tracks him down. Buck is now running the Great Mozingo-Arlo Waters Jubilee and Famous Life of Christ Show, a traveling “religious” carnival that includes snake handling, a crazy preacher, and all the scams you can think of. Joe gets involved in the jubilee, and things are going so well he decides to invite Monica down to show her what a great and rich guy he is.
What I love about this book is how the situations veer suddenly from unrelentingly positive to wholly negative, then back again. The description of the story as “manic-depressive” is apt: at each turn in the story, Joe’s mood plunges headlong into the spirit.
This excellent book explores the question of why so many Americans in the so-called "red states" vote Republican, which seems like a vote against their own economic and social interests. Frank looks particularly at his home state of Kansas, which used to be reliably liberal, even radical. The book is very well written, clear, concise, and even ocassionally funny. While some of its conclusions seem straightforward, I found that its overall analysis resisted oversimplification and kept me thinking. The book also provides a perfect picture of our political culture today. I enjoyed it and I learned from it — what more can I say?
Although What's the Matter with Kansas? is obviously a political book, the best thing about it is how it illustrates the dialectic between our self image and our politics. We choose our politics based on how we see ourselves, not on our economic interests. Frank makes a convincing case that conservatives offer a worldview that is attractive to working-class Kansans even as it serves to reduce their chances of economic success.
The conservative movement, while saying little about the material problems that plague us, nevertheless presents Kansans with an attractive and even a seductive way of dealing with an unfair universe. [It provides] a theory of how the political world works, but it also provides a ready-made identity in which the glamor of authenticity, combined with the narcissism of victimhood, is available to almost anyone. (p 157)
Although Frank doesn't explicitly say so, the same principle clearly applies to rich, educated Democrats; they are voting against their best economic interests too. We need a book as smart as this one that analyzes the liberal worldview.
At the heart of the conservative revolution is "a way of thinking about class that both encourages class hostility...and simultaneously denies the economic basis of the grievance" (p 113). Conservatives (with help from center-seeking Democrats) redefine class based on lifestyle rather than income, thereby transforming the nature of the class warfare. It is no longer working man versus capitalist, but rather working man versus effete intellectual know-it-alls. On this basis, they also tap into "several legitimate, even honorable, anti-intellectual traditions" (p 194), such as the Protestant view of direct contact with God and the suspicion of professional expertise. This viewpoint also shifts the focus from economic issues to social ones like abortion and gay marriage.
The increased cost of running a successful national political campaign is a major factor that drives Democrats to the right. They must have a pro-business stance in order to attract corporate donors. "What politician in this success-worshipping country really wants to be the voice of poor people? Where's the soft money in that?" (p 243)
Frank quotes Gary Bauer: "Joe Six-Pack doesn't understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn't have a say in it" (p 254). Frank suggests that it is capitalism, not liberalism, that feeds identity politics and the other symptoms of "cultural decline." For example, the rise of a gay culture provides an opportunity for targeted marketing to that demographic. He also emphasizes that culture war issues are inherently impossible to defeat, and are therefore designed primarily to enflame. "Why shouldn't our culture just get worse and worse, if making it worse will only cause the people who worsen it to grow wealthier and wealthier?" (p 250).
All of this perhaps sounds dry and/or obvious, but I was entertained and engaged throughout.
Frank clearly has a liberal bias. The very premise of the book depends on an assumption with which conservatives would presumably not agree: that the Republican Party works against the economic interests of the working class. In the early chapters I worried that Frank was indulging in the same sort of stereotyping that he ridicules from the other side. As the book progressed, however, I found his analysis of rank-and-file conservatives to be nuanced. (His presentation of certain Republican leaders was rather less so.) If you removed Frank's value judgments about the shift, I think you're left with an analysis that conservatives can agree with. "Yes, I am a Republican because values matter more than economics... or at least that's where the clear difference is between the poltical parties." But I am a member of the dreaded latte liberal elite; I would be interested to hear what a conservative reader has to say about Frank's ideas. The conservative reader may have a hard time looking past the author's value judgment. I deduct half a star for Frank's failure to acknowledge that liberals (try to) use some of the same tricks.
A few discussion questions I am left with:
I had two people mention this book to me in the space of a week, so I had to pick it up. It is a classic of psychology. Frankl briefly tells the story of his internment in the Nazi concentration camps, then talks about his theory of logotherapy, which grew partially from those experiences. (The preface and the organization of the book suggest that logotherapy came from Frankl’s experiences, but he talks about having a manuscript when he first gets to the camp.)
The basic premise of logotherapy is that humans need to feel their lives are meaningful. “Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a secondary rationalization of instinctual drives.” This idea contrasts with Freudian psychology, which posits the pursuit of pleasure as the primary motivation, and with Adlerian psychology, which talks about the will to power. I completely agree with this premise, and I think Frankl’s thoughts about what constitutes “the meaning of life” are interesting. He basically says that asking “What is the meaning of life?” in the abstract is like asking a chess master “What is the best move in the world?” It all depends on the context; the meaning of life emerges from your responses to the challenges life throws your way.
The book is short—I read most of it while waiting for my car to be repaired one afternoon—but I do think you can read the second part of the book, “Logotherapy in a Nutshell,” without reading the autobiographical story. Or, if you don’t have much tolerance for theoretical prose, you might find just the autobiographical part interesting.
Booksellers, take note: This book is a case study in how to entice me into buying a book I’ve never heard of. Most of the time I choose books I’ve read reviews of or know the author of. The Twenty-Seventh City, though, was a pure impulse buy.
First, I was attracted by the cover design. The artwork is graphically interesting. That’s what made me pick it up. Next, I read the plot description on the back cover and, more importantly, the pull quotes from reviewers. I look to see who they have quotes from, what other authors and which periodicals. You can tell a lot about a book from the people the publisher sends review copies to. I look for authors whose work I respect and for the New York Times Book Review. This book got points off for having a prominent quote from People magazine, but it does have a Times Book Review quote and one from Terrence Rafferty in the New Yorker. If it still sounds interesting, then I read the first page or two to get a sense of the style. If it’s good, I’m hooked and I buy it, even if it’s over 500 pages long, like The Twenty-Seventh City is.
So what’s the book about? The city of St. Louis appoints an Indian woman (from Bombay) as its police chief amidst some controversy. Soon after, the city is plunged into a large political scandal or conspiracy. The quotes from reviewers lead me to expect that the story has some surrealistic elements and some suspense, while also being a multi-layered epic in the Dickens mode.
It turned out to be less surrealistic than I expected. The only aspect of the story that required a suspension of disbelief was the idea that a small group of foreign conspirators could coordinate a grand conspiracy that involved planting bugs in the homes of all prominent citizens, kidnapping, and terrorism. I was surprised that the Indian police chief was the person behind the conspiracy rather than the one trying to uncover it.
The book was very well written and the story easily held my interest. Its depiction of city politics seemed realistic once you accepted the premise, and a few of the characters were intriguing. I felt like I learned something about the history of St. Louis. So I enjoyed it, although I doubt it’ll stick with me for a long time.
The title, by the way, refers to the fact that St. Louis is the twenty-seventh largest city in the United States.
Aspiring writers should study books like Thirteen Moons. Not because they provide a model to emulate, but because they show what can go wrong for even talented writers. Charles Frazier can write beautiful, vivid descriptions of traveling through the mountains, with a special emphasis on trailside cuisine. He is capable of providing emotional depth to action scenes. He has great source material for his plot (the removal of the Cherokee to reservations out west). Despite all of these prime ingredients, however, Thirteen Moons has a surprising lack of narrative drive and nary an interesting character. If I were a fiction writer, I would analyze this book to learn what shortcuts not to take.
The first half of the book, up through the Cherokee removal, is much stronger than the second half. It was a solid three-star book up to page 250 or so. Everything that was vivid in the first half is vague in the second half. For example, the plot of the second half depends crucially on our narrator's complex business dealings, but we never get a sense of those dealings beyond sketchy references to disorganized piles of papers. I never felt a connection between Will and Claire that would justify their supposedly star-crossed love; Will's horse Waverly was a more complete character.
Still, though, this is the book to read if you want a recipe for yellow-jacket soup (p. 69).
I pick up this collection once every couple of years. (This year it was a Christmas gift from Evelyn.) It’s usually a grab-bag, with essays ranging from dull or trite to great. There’s usually at least one that ends up sticking with me for a long time, possibly turning me on to a new author. I discovered Philip Lopate one year; another year I read a fascinating essay on truck drivers in central Africa and their role in the spread of AIDS; and I remember a well-argued essay called Liberty and Pornography. The great ones are rarely the ones from authors I know or on topics I’m interested in—that is, they are rarely the ones that made me buy the book.
The essays in the 1997 collection are generally pretty short and not terribly interesting. A lot of them are nostalgic descriptions of one of the author’s relatives.
The essay that most captured my imagination is “The Fourth State of Matter,” by Jo Ann Beard. It creates a strong mood, and takes an unexpected turn halfway through.
If you like historical World War II novels or spy stories, then I recommend the author Alan Furst. His books don’t have the breathless pace of Robert Ludlum novels, but they immerse you completely in the mood of wartime Europe.
Furst writes literary spy novels that take place in Europe, usually Eastern Europe, just before and during World War II. He is able to conjure up an excellent sense of atmosphere, of the time and place. His heroes are never professional spies, but rather regular people who get caught up in the difficult times. As a reviewer on Amazon.com says, “The author seems to have a view of the mundane populace of an occupied country, and what they do or say or when they go on vacation. When they spy…, they do so for mundane reasons.” The spy business seems realistic, which means not as convoluted as a Le Carre novel. The people are often not even aware of the larger operations that their personal contributions relate to.
Blood of Victory describes an attempt to block the shipment of oil from Romania to Germany. The hero, a Russian emigre writer, is first involved in gathering intelligence from a former network of industrial spies, then in devising a plan, and finally in executing the plan. Furst's trademark style is in place, although I felt as if some of the characters discussed the details of their operations a bit too explicitly. One of the things I appreciate about Furst's books is that the bigger picture usually comes together more gradually. Still, though, an enjoyable story from one of my new favorite authors.
Dark Voyage continues Alan Furst's transition from spy novels to war novels. Whereas his previous books take place away from the front lines, this one unfolds in the middle of the sea fighting. The danger of getting killed is always present. It feels somewhat like a conscious attempt to broaden his audience. Unfortunately, I think this more direct approach does not play to Furst's strengths. The story lacks the relentless action that readers of war novels expect, and has less of the noirish atmosphere of his spy novels.
A better title for this book would be The Philosophy of William James: A Systemization. It is not really an introduction, because it assumes familiarity with James' ideas and with the most common objections to them. The book is valuable as a secondary source for those who have already read James, but would definitely not be the place to start on this wonderful philosopher. Start with James himself: he is a clear writer and a fine literary companion.
James' approach was not as rigorous as most American philosophers. His key ideas were spread throughout his works, leaving it to the reader to piece together how they fit into a coherent system. As Gale says on page 188:
At every moment in his career [James] was of several minds about everything, and that is why his philosophical writings are like a philosophical wheel of fortune. Whatever doctrine it stopped on and temporarily illuminated reaped a rich payoff, since every one of his many philosophies was espoused with incredible brilliance and passion. Whether James would defend pragmatism or mysticism on any given day depended on his mood...
Gale attempts to provide a nearly Kant-like system for James' thought. He does a very good job of showing how the various strands of James' philosophy fit together and illuminate his personality. Sadly, however, Gale is not as entertaining a writer as James. His style is sterotypically academic, and he assumes a bit more background in analytic philosophy than he pretends to.
One thing I really appreciate about James is the richness that his philosophy gives to life. Here is an extended quote about love from his Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1899), from page 179 in Gale's book:
Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more vital insight into the nature of Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being victims of a pathological anaesthesia as regards Jill's magical importance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs are among the wonders of creation, are worthy of this sympathetic interest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He struggles toward a union with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires, understanding her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately too; for he also is afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst we, dead clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are contented that that portion of external fact named Jill should be for us as if it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way of taking it — so importantly — is the true and serious way; and she responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously too. May the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again! Where would any of us be, were there no one willing to know us as we really are or ready to repay us for our insight by making recognizant return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way.
This book, a Christmas gift from Evelyn, is a poetic meditation on the sport of soccer from a Uruguayan author. Each chapter or section runs about a page, with titles like "the bicycle kick," "professionalism," "world cup 1950," and "goal by scarone." His major theme is that "the history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty. When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots." He revels in the moments of joy and beauty while describing the transformation of the business.
Just as hockey fans do, he complains about the focus on not losing. "The history of soccer in the twentieth century, a journey from daring to fear, is a trip from the 2-3-5 to the 5-4-1 by way of the 4-3-3 and the 4-4-2" (p 11). He yawns over the World Cup tournaments decided by penalty kicks, but can still be thrilled by great plays.
The ball reached the center on a cross from the right. Zico, who was in the semi-circle, leapt forward. But he jumped too soon: when he realized the ball was behind him, he turned a somersault in mid air and with his face to the ground he drove it in with his heel. It was a backwards overhead volley.
"Tell me about that goal," pleaded the blind.
It was an enjoyable book, a quick read, wonderfully packaged with little drawings on every page. It would have been even better if I was better versed in soccer history and lore.
Martin Gardner is best known as a science writer and as the author of The Annotated Alice. This wide-ranging collection includes essays from his entire career and covers many topics that I am interested in. Just take a look at the section titles: Physical Science, Social Science, Pseudoscience, Mathematics, The Arts, Philosophy, and Religion. I was anxious to read almost every one of the essays, but unfortunately I came away disappointed.
Gardner's writing style is admirably clear but uninspiring. Because most of the pieces were written for magazines, they tackle their subjects superficially and oversimplify them. Gardner starts out investigating an fascinating and potentially thorny issue, but he has at most one insight about it. The rest of the article is filled with biographical trivia or a return to one of Gardner's pet themes. By the end I felt less interested in the topic than when I started.
Despite Gardner's claim that he relishes pondering the ultimate mysteries of like, the essays paint a picture of a man with a conservative philosophy and an intolerance for uncertainty. Where uncertainty is unavoidable, for example when discussing the motivations of Werner Heisenberg who stayed in Germany during World War II, he still emphasizes that there is a truth to be discovered.
Gardner's tendency to oversimplify was particularly egregious in the Philosophy section of the book. His summary of pragmatism in "Why I Am Not a Pragmatist" misrepresents it in a way that makes it seem trivially wrong. I can't tell whether he himself misunderstands it or whether he simply lost the nuance in his quest for clarity. I suspect he misunderstands it, despite his proclaimed fondness for William James. His essay about W.V.O. Quine shows a similar misunderstanding about Quine's attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction. In both of these Philosophy essays, he also says that the philosophical approaches in question have lost their force in modern philosophy, which I know to be false.
This book about how city planning has been changed by the rise of the suburbs is particularly interesting for those of us living and working in an “edge city,” a former suburb that is now a destination for work, home, and shopping. Garreau talks about how this new idea about urban organization reflects new ideas about what Americans think “the good life” looks like. He also explains when and how an edge city is ready to support a good book store or cafe. (Pleasanton only recently reached this point.) Reading the book makes you look again at your surroundings, and shows you patterns that you only dimly noticed before.
This book was more interesting and entertaining than any book on a dry subject like urban planning has a right to be.
This book is a collection of essays, written by a young surgeon, about the human dimension of practicing medicine. The collection is divided into three thematic parts: "Fallibility" focuses on the fact that doctors are human beings who share the same faults as the rest of us; "Mystery" focuses on important areas of medicine where we know very little; and "Uncertainty" focuses on the fact that doctors can rarely be certain that they have the correct diagnosis, but must proceed anyway.
Gawande's prose style is nothing special — it is the typical style for magazine articles — but his essays are clear and concise. Each essay makes one or two points that seem obvious in retrospect, but that you had never thought about before, at least not from the perspective that Gawande presents. For example, one essay is about how doctors have to learn their craft by treating patients. Of course they do, and of course you'd rather not have your doctor learning on you or your family. Gawande asks us to think about this issue from a different point of view: Given the necessity, how can we minimize the risks?
I wonder how someone already mistrustful of doctors would feel after reading this book? I imagine some would see it as confirming their opinion and possibly miss Gawande's main point, which is this: Doctors make mistakes. Often. Not because they are bad doctors or arrogant people but because of the complexity of the human body. Our society needs to acknowledge this fact and devise a productive way of learning from the mistakes. The current punative approach, where we demand perfection and sue when we don't get it, is counterproductive. Doctors need to be able to admit and discuss their mistakes without fear of retribution. We need to take an approach to accident analysis and prevention similar to the one that has been so successful in the aviation industry.
The author does an excellent job of describing the various strands — both musical and social — that went into the development of jazz. He notes that jazz is one of the few forms of "ethnic" music that celebrates innovation rather than conservatism, perhaps reflecting the era when it was born. He pinpoints the key stylistic devices of different jazz styles concisely, providing insight that enhances my enjoyment of the music. (Of course, I only understand his insight if I am familiar with the style; it's impossible to really understand musical descriptions if you haven't heard the music. I was happy to discover that I was familiar with most of the major styles.) The later chapters are inevitably less focused than the earlier chapters: it is impossible to know which current developments will be decisive for the future of jazz.
Incompleteness is from the Great Discoveries series, from which I also read Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. In each book in this series, a novelist undertakes to explain a great scientific discovery in literary terms without oversimplifying the technical details. In this case, Rebecca Goldstein tackles Godel's incompleteness theorems. One of her main goals is to show that Godel had a quite different idea about the consequences of his theorem than many others did. He emphatically did not subscribe to the idea that it undermines the objective nature of truth. Au contraire.
Goldstein is able to paint a very clear picture of the ways in which philosophers and mathematicians misunderstand each other due to theoretical bias and personal style. She spends more time talking about events in Godel's life than about the proof, which I wouldn't normally like, but she manages to describe the events so that their relevance to his work — and to the intellectual developments of the twentieth century — take priority over the gossip. Without particularly focusing on it, she also presents a surprisingly convincing defense of Platonism.
An impulse purchase from the Crocker Museum of Art, A Little History of the World is an account of all human history written for young readers in a fairy-tale-like style. I enjoyed it while I stood reading it in the museum gift shop and decided I couldn't put it back down.
For adults as well as for children, the book provides a simplified overview of world history that makes it all seem like one consistent story. Gombrich associates specific imagery with each phase of civilization, providing a memorable visual link. He also provides clever and simple accounts of the transitions from one stage to the next. For example, he suggests that the success of Greek civilization was due to their fondness for new things rather than for tradition like the other civilizations around it.
I really enjoyed the chapters up to the Middle Ages or so. I have to say that even Gombrich had trouble making a coherent story out of the Thirty Years War and the back-and-forth between principalities in Europe. Nonetheless, I recommend the book as enjoyable and informative.
This book of art history has the same strengths and weaknesses as the author's A Little History of the World. Gombrich has a talent for identifying one key point that serves as the memorable tag for a period or style, and for blending all of his threads into a coherent narrative. For example, he notes that the ancient Egyptians drew each element in a painting from its most representative angle, so that a person's torso appears frontally but his head in profile. This approach recurs in the twentieth century with Cubism.
I bought the pocket edition, which is the size of a (fat) mass-market paperback. This edition has the advantage of portability, but it is inconvenient to flip between the text and the plates.
I picked up this pair of short novels from the Staff Recommendations shelf at Stacey's Books in San Francisco. The person recommending it described the narrator of Cosmos as "obsessive," which is music to my ears.
Both novels are odd and rather abstract. I really liked Cosmos, in which a hanged sparrow, a servant with a mouth injury, and a man creating little balls of bread all figure into a story about how man invests the universe with meaning. Pornographia was less intriguing albeit more theatrical.
I'll file this book next to the pair of Robbe-Grillet novels that will appeal to the same kind of readers.
I was intrigued enough by the style and oddness of Cosmos to delve deeper into Gombrowicz's oeuvre. These stories are from early in his career, so my expectations were appropriately modest. They are enjoyably odd, with Gombrowicz's perennial theme already in place: how we contort the world so that its facts fit into our preconceived notions. My favorite story is "Adventures," with its account of floating glass eggs and cannibalistic lepers. The book title, by the way, is the name of the street in Buenos Aires where Gombrowicz lived in exile.
Naked Airport provides a somewhat superficial but nonetheless interesting history of airports. It is intriguing to realize how many of the things we take for granted could have turned out differently. The word "airport" for example: other contenders were air station, air depot, and aerodrome.
Early airports were built based on the model of train stations. After World War II, there was a lot of money available for building airports and a feeling of air travel as a symbol of modern living. These factors combined to create a great deal of architectural experimentation in airports. Then, in the 1970s and later, issues of efficiency overtook the romance of flight.
This impulse buy from the Philosophy section at Borders argues that humanism and our belief in progress are based on a fallacious belief in the specialness of humanity. John Gray (a British economics professor, not the Mars-Venus guy) lays out the consequences of recognizing that humans are no different from other animals and cannot transcend the world. While I agree with his general points about the myth of progress and the religious aspects of science, I was increasingly annoyed by his approach. In the early chapters, he oversimplifies the views of most major philosophers to suit his point, thereby misrepresenting them. In later chapters, he starts making unsupported proclamations like "Financial markets are moved by contagion and hysteria. New communications technologies magnify suggestibility." Maybe so, but he doesn't support the claim at all.
This fat book explains how the Federal Reserve Bank works. I read it so I could understand how the central bank controls the money supply: I knew it wasn’t just a matter of how much money gets printed, but I didn’t have any idea how it might work. This book clarified that issue for me, plus a lot of other economic mysteries, in an entertaining fashion.
The great thing about this book is that it tells a story instead of dryly explaining the mechanics. The story starts during the Carter administration when inflation was rampant. Carter appointed Paul Volcker as the Federal Reserve chairman, not realizing the immense impact his actions would have on the economy. During Volcker’s tenure, the Fed experimented with a monetary policy based on the theories of Milton Friedman and dealt with the unanticipated effects of allowing interest-bearing checking accounts. All in all, the book taught me a lot and told me an interesting story. Don’t be scared by the length; go ahead and skip the footnotes.
John Grisham's first work of non-fiction is the story of a man wrongly convicted of murder and sent to death row. As Grisham says in his author's note, "Not in my most creative moment could I conjure up a story as rich and as layered as Ron [Williamson]'s ... bad police work, junk science, faulty eyewitness identifications, bad defense lawyers, lazy prosecutors, arrogant prosecuters" and untreated mental illness. The blatant disregard for due process is humbling: the story includes no fewer than five people wrongly convicted of serious crimes. However, Grisham fumbles in the telling of the rich story.
The biggest problem is that he tells just one side of the story. Although the book is written in a flat journalistic style, its point of view and its anger make it sound like it came from a member of the Williamson family. As presented, the facts of the case are so clear that the conviction and rejected appeals are hardly credible. I needed to know more about the police point of view, the district attorney's point of view, the court of appeals point of view. Did they truly believe Ron was the culprit, or were they pushing to convict anyone? If they believed it, what made the evidence convincing to them? If they were just looking for a conviction, why did they ignore the obvious suspect (the man last seen with the victim)? Conspiracy or incompetence? The same question applies to the procedural problems in the trial: if they were so very obvious, why did the court of appeals let the conviction stand? It is horrifying that there are so many wrongful convictions, but I would be even more horrified if the convictions resulted from honest mistakes or systemic problems. Ron Williamson's case, as presented here, makes it seem like wrongful convictions are easy to identify for the properly motivated person. I doubt that is true.
Here is an example of the kind of subtle bias that could lead to wrongful convictions: When Ron was in the county jail during his trial, he would loudly proclaim his innocence all day and night. "The jailers had fine-tuned the Thorazine. When Ron was in his cell and they wanted peace, they pumped him full and everybody was happy. But when he was scheduled to be in court, they reduced the dosage so he would appear louder, more intense, more belligerent" (p 160). I wish the book had included more telling details of this sort.
This book is a collection of interviews with writers, actors, and artists from the National Public Radio show Fresh Air. Terry Gross generally does good interviews, which explore subjects that are more interesting than most celebrity journalism. The book reads very much like an anniversary issue of a favorite magazine: lots of fine moments, some of which I remember from the show, but also a sense of excerpting. I recommend the book if you are interested in the people she interviews.
This novel is about a fifty-eight year old Russian artist who abandoned his talent for a comfortable existence as a government-sponsored art critic. A series of events makes him question whether he made the right decision.
The book is ambitious in its themes and in its prose style. It has some very strong sections where everything comes together for a rich, dreamlike atmosphere. However, for me the character of Anatoly Sukhanov remains resolutely two dimensional. His tendency to ignore or misunderstand people feels like a plot device rather than an organic part of his character. The plot too seemed constructed rather than organic: I could see the seams where the author put it together. Overall, the book was like a roughly constructed desk made of beautiful wood.
I read this book based on a review from Nick Hornby in his collection of book reviews, The Polysyllabic Spree. The books he raved about have been uniformly good and often excellent. Hangover Square takes place in pre-WWII Britain, which is also when Patrick Hamilton wrote it. The hero, George Bone, is an ineffectual drunkard who dreams of having a relationship with Netta, a scheming would-be actress. George suffers from a mental disorder that periodically compels him to plan Netta's murder.
The plot, and indeed much of the writing style, reminded me of Patricia Highsmith. Hamilton is a very good writer. I enjoyed his prose even when I felt the story was repeating itself.
This installment of the Very Short Introduction series covers classical Indian philosophy from a unique perspective. The introduction notes that the major ideas cannot be separated from the religious environment in which they were developed, but subsequent chapters present those ideas in a fashion designed to interest Western (non-religious) philosophers. That is, the author downplays the religious aspects of the ideas and plays up the commonalities with Western philosophy.
The first few chapters really captured my interest, especially the chapter on early Buddhism. Subsequent chapters were less impressive. Hamilton clearly knows Buddhist thought better than she does Hindu thought. As a result, the descriptions of Vedic schools were less clear. Nonetheless, I am intrigued enough that I may look for the book mentioned most frequently in the bibliography, Richard King's Indian Philosophy. That's the intent of a very short introduction, isn't it? To make me want to learn more?
Dashiell Hammett's first novel is a bit different from his later detective novels The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. It starts out as a murder mystery along the lines of those classics, but changes into something else when the murder is solved a third of the way through the book. From that point on, the detective narrator sets out to "clean up the town" by pitting the town's rival gang leaders against each other. His approach has served as the inspiration for numerous films, including Kurosawa's Yojimbo and Leone's Fistful of Dollars (which is a nearly shot-for-shot remake of Yojimbo). The writing is appropriately hard-boiled.
Not at all what I expected, by fascinating nonetheless.
Knut Hamsun is a Norwegian novelist and playwright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. I discovered him on the bookshelves of the humbly named World's Biggest Bookstore in Toronto. Mysteries is his second novel, written in 1897. The back cover describes it as the story of what happens when an enigmatic stranger comes to a coastal Norwegian town. I expected a portrait of a local society which finds its settled ways challenged by the customs of an interloper. Instead, Mysteries is told primarily from the point of view of the stranger, whose seemingly contradictory behaviour is even more baffling to us readers than it is to the townspeople. Is he up to something? Is he manic-depressive? Do his contradictions make a deeper kind of sense?
Mysteries reads more like a twentieth-century novel than a nineteenth-century one. Rather than a "social" novel, it is a psychological novel that caused me to think about how much my understanding of a character depends on constructing my own sense of his or her motivations. The prose style and general approach reminded me of Paul Auster, author of The Music of Chance. Like in an Auster story, I find the character of Nagel to be simultaneously fascinating and inscrutable. I subsequently learned that Auster had written a preface for a recent edition of Hamsun's earlier novel, Hunger, and named one of his essay collections The Art of Hunger.
Harris uses the five films nominated for Best Picture in 1967 to tell the story of the end of the studio era and "the birth of the new Hollywood." The five films were Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and Doctor Dolittle. The book tracks the films from their inception to Oscar night.
The book has a lot of interesting material about the development of these films, and Harris does a good job conveying the intentions of the filmmakers. I especially liked the descriptions of how the screenplays were developed from the source novels for In the Heat of the Night and The Graduate. I was also interested in the influence of foreign films on the US film industry in the mid-1960s. The story is told chronologically, so that you definitely notice the long gestation of some films compared to others. The chronological organization makes for awkward thematic shifts at times.
This book offers good fodder for a discussion of the "great man" theory of (cinematic) history. To what extent were Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate influential because of their own virtues, and to what extent were they merely representatives of larger cultural changes?
I found this book on the shelf in our cabin at The Other Place when we went with Suzette and Evelyn's parents. I read the first couple of short chapters and was intrigued enough to buy a copy. The story takes place in a small town in eastern Colorado (the plain part, not the mountain part). Those first chapters had a quiet melancholy tone that reminded me of The Last Picture Show.
Haruf's characters are all nice, honest people dealing with everyday issues. The town of Holt is blessedly free of colorful characters. There are no huge life-changing events, just the slow build-up of relationships. That may sound like the kind of "woman's literature" that I wouldn't like, but Haruf manages to avoid crossing the line into sentimentality very often. He manages it through a spare writing style that eschews too much introspection. I really appreciated how caring all of the characters were; for example, when the pregnant Vicky visits the doctor, I was expecting a traumatic exam, which made the doctor's kindness all the more refreshing.
My favorite characters were the two old bachelors brother who take Vicky into their home. Their dialogue and old-style country gallantry were quite entertaining, although their scenes with Vicky did occasionally veer into the easy sentimentality I just praised Haruf for mostly avoiding.
I had problems with two aspects of the book. First, Tom Guthrie's wife had the kind of vague psychological affliction that appears only in stories. It was one time where Haruf's reluctance to explore his character's feelings didn't pay off. She felt like a plot device. Second, I didn't believe that Vicky would leave for Denver (with the baby's father) without saying something to the McPheron brothers. She was young and confused, yes, but she was thoughtful too.
This book, which I read in a tattered paperback that Evelyn picked up at a book swap, is a memoir by the actor best known to me as Jack Ripper in Doctor Strangelove and Captain McClosky in The Godfather. Before I read this book, I did not know that Hayden had also been a schooner captain, war hero, and controversial character. The main story concerns the time when he defied a court order and sailed for Tahiti with his small children.
I really liked this book. Hayden is a fascinating character with his mixture of anxiety and bravado, and he is generally forthright about the less attractive aspects of his personality. He is definitely a lonely man, retreating to the sea and to privacy whenever he encounters trouble. There's lots of sailing: I was surprised to learn how much commercial shipping was still under sail in the years preceding World War II. Hayden's writing style makes the book read more like an adventure novel than a memoir. My only complaints are his stylistic tic of switching between the first, second, and third persons, and his uncharacteristic reticence when it comes to his relationships with women.
This informative and entertaining book provides an overview of how systems of the man-made world work, from mines and power plants to cell-phones and roads. Hayes approaches these subjects from a distinctive and brilliant angle: as a field guide to help the reader identify and understand the industrial artifacts we see every day, such as utility poles or cell-phone towers. Working from photographs, Hayes explains the processes at the level of detail necessary for us to understand what the visible parts are used for.
In addition to supplying plenty of "a-ha" moments — so THAT'S what the green boxes are — the book reminded me of the extent of the human ingenuity that have gone into providing me with the services I take for granted.
The book has a coffee-table format and probably shouldn't be read all at once. I read it one or two chapters at a time.
Richard Helms served in the CIA from its inception until 1973. He began with U.S. intelligence services in the OSS during World War II and ended as director for Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Nixon let him go after he refused to let the CIA take the heat for the Watergate break-in.
Readers looking for insights into infamous CIA operations, such as the Bay of Pigs or the Vietnam War will be disappointed. In most cases, Helms skips over the details, saying that they have been covered elsewhere. Instead, Helms provides an interesting perspective on the intelligence business. He talks about the CIA the way a CEO would about his company. For example, he describes the political wrangling over the charter of the agency, the personnel issues that are endemic to intelligence work, and the problems caused by the necessary secrecy. In one chapter he tells how the first director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, promoted covert action (as opposed to more passive intelligence gathering) because it was a better way to justify the agency budget. It's a different perspective on the spy game.
Helms comes across as a conservative voice, generally opposed to covert action and to making policy judgements that should be left to elected officials. He tells several stories where this aspect of his personality brought him into conflict with his superiors. Inevitably, he also sounds self-justifying at times.
Helms' writing style is generally clear, except that he sometimes lists too many names and titles: "LBJ instigated what came to be known as his Tuesday lunch, a weekly gathering of his closest advisors — Secretary of State Dean Rusk; Secretary of Defense Bob MacNamara (later Clark Clifford); General Earle 'Bus' Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...." In the early going I was annoyed by what I'd call "memoir-speak," where each person introduced is a "lively, intelligent" person who "went on to become ambassador." The most interesting and informative part of the book was the middle section, describing the creation of the CIA from the ashes of the wartime intelligence services and the transition from the war to the Cold War.
What is the distinction between prose and poetry? Beyond certain formal differences having to do with meter, I think the key difference is that poetry exhibits a high degree of compression (with individual words and images carrying weight on multiple levels) and focuses attention on emotional impact rather than narrative drive. To my mind, Amy Hempel's stories are close to poetry. Her writing style is strong, with concise (often funny) depictions of complex emotional states; the stories convey a precise mood but have very little in the way of incident or plot.
I was impressed by Hempel's writing more than I enjoyed it. Mining the full riches from the stories would require the same concentrated attention as reading poetry, and I can't maintain that level of concentration for long. I found myself wishing for more narrative context. To end on a positive note, however, I will say that the stories are riddled with beautiful images and intriguing metaphors. To wit:
I filled the dog's water bowl about half the way full. I set it back on the porch. I could use a larger bowl, but I would rather the dog see me fill it many times in a day, see me think of her needs and move to meet those needs oh so many times each day.
Funnier that Saint Augustine. Tony Hendra is a British comedian best known to Americans as Spinal Tap's manager. This book is something of a spiritual biography about his relationship with a Benedictine monk named Father Joe. Part 1, which describes his "conversion" and initial meetings with Father Joe, is excellent. He is able to describe his thought processes and post-war England concisely. As a writer, I am impressed by the apparent effortlessness of the prose. Part 2, which describes his years away from the Church and his career, is less interesting but still successful.
Although Hendra can be funny, Father Joe is a warm and ultimately serious tribute to his spiritual advisor. Hendra has a no-nonsense approach to religion that is far more refreshing and convincing (to me) than over-pious preaching would be. I found it pleasant and mildly thought-provoking. More people should approach their autobiographies in this kind of circumscribed way.
Reading the first chapter of Robert Nozick's Invariances reminded me that I wanted to learn more about quantum mechanics. Nozick, like many philosophers, makes arguments based on the counter-intuitive results of this field of physics. I chose Herbert's book because it purported to discuss the "tentative images of the world proposed by quantum physicists," not just the experimental results themselves.
This book approached the subject of quantum physics in exactly the way I hoped that it would. It focused on the question of how to interpret the results of quantum experiments to get to the reality they imply, without advocating any one of the possibilities. The physics was presented at a level I could understand, without seeming too oversimplified. There were a few places where I could have used more detail, and several places where the author repeated himself, but overall the book gave me a good platform for tackling other works on this subject if I want to.
The theory of quantum mechanics was developed in response to several experimental results that seemed surprising and counterintuitive:
Quantum theory has a perfect track record for predicting experimental results. However, the theory implies that certain properties of particles do not exist until someone measures them and that entangled particles can affect each other at faster than the speed of light. Attempting to explain these facts results in very strange beliefs about the reality of our universe. My conclusion is that our understanding of subatomic phenomena (and the universe) must be flawed in some non-obvious way.
"There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe that there ever was such a time. ... On the other hand, I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. ... Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, `But how can it be like that?', because you will get `down the drain' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that." --- Richard Feynman
I hadn't read a Carl Hiaasen book before, but I felt like I had. His writing style was exactly what I expected it to be: sitcom-level comic. Like all Hiaasen's books, Skinny Dip takes place in south Florida. The main character is a shiftless marine biologist who throws his wife overboard from a cruise ship in an attempt to murder her. She survives the attempt and comes back to "haunt and taunt" her husband. The story is not a mystery (because we know who is doing what) but rather a comic thriller, where the enjoyment comes from seeing how the wife torments the unsympathetic husband.
Skinny Dip is the kind of book where every character, from the protagonists to the most minor, has quirky traits that define them. The husband is a biologist who hates the outdoors; the wife inherited millions of dollars when her parents died in a plane crash with a drunken circus bear in the co-pilot's seat; the goon assigned to watch the husband collects roadside crosses; the detective has pet snakes. You can be sure that each of these quirks will come into play. Every aspect of the story is unbelievable, but it moves along in a pleasant entertaining way. Hiaasen can be a good writer; Chapter 9, for instance, starts with a very nice page-and-a half summary of the history and ecology of the Everglades. His dialogue, though, is definitely of the airport-novel variety.
The films of the 1960s represent a "dreamed" version of the decade, reflecting how Americans felt about the changes around them and how they attempted to deal with them. Kennedy's presidency was filled with political thrillers (The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, Advise and Consent); Johnson's presidency saw revisionist Westerns (Fistful of Dollars, The Wild Bunch), violence (Bonnie and Clyde, The Dirty Dozen), and counterculture films (Easy Rider, Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song); and Nixon brought the revenge of the "silent majority" (Patton, Joe, Dirty Harry).
I was drawn to this book by its theme and its promise of interesting takes on the political content of films. While I did find the occasional tidbit — such as Hoberman's description of The Magnificent Seven as an allegory for US Special Forces (p. 32) — most of the book was a endless litany of events, both real and filmed, without any well-argued insight into the zeitgeist. I wish Hoberman had focused more, and perhaps offered an alternate history of the 1960s as seen through its movies.
A straightforward mystery novel by the guy who wrote and sang "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)" many years ago. Swing takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1940. The narrator is a jazz musician who gets involved in a death at the Golden Gate Exposition held that year on Treasure Island.
I found Holmes' writing style to be a bit amateurish. The dialogue was often stilted as the author awkwardly showed off his period research or inserted clues to the mystery. The characters are standard mystery novel cliches, and the story builds to one of those scenes where both hero and criminal give long speeches to explain the plot.
Not surprisingly, the best parts of the book were the musical ones. The hero helps to orchestrate a piece written for piano, and I was intrigued by the process. The Bay Area setting was enjoyable for a local boy, although I did notice one "error": the hero and the girl take a leisurely stroll from the UC campus to the Berkeley pier, which in reality is quite a trek.
The book comes with a CD of accompanying music, Like the book itself, the music is okay but unspectacular.
It is easy to see what made The Kite Runner such a popular book. It takes place in a foreign locale that people are curious about (Afganistan) and tells a story of personal redemption that can be easily seen as symbolic of the larger political situation. It is better written than the majority of popular fiction, without being too complex, subtle, or challenging. As Ella Taylor says in her review of the movie version, "Hosseini is an instinctive and unpretentious storyteller whose direct prose, transparent plot symmetries, and exotic locales have made him a middlebrow unifier of reading publics high and low."
I enjoyed the story but remained always conscious that it was a story. The characters never transcended their role in the plot. You could describe each one with a single word and never be surprised by their actions: Hassan is loyal, Amir is weak-willed, Baba is disapproving, Assef is a bully. The plot too is somewhat predictable. The straightforward prose does its job but isn't remarkably vivid. And there is the occasional clunker:
"A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about cliches: 'Avoid them like the plague.' Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always though cliches got a bum rap. Because often they're dead-on. But the aptness of the cliched saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliche. For example, the 'elephant in the room' saying. Nothing could more correctly describe the initial moments of my reunion with Rahim Khan."
I enjoyed the imaginative storyline of this surreal workplace comedy, but Hynes' prose annoyed me. At least when read aloud, his dialogue scenes seemed cluttered with unnecessary details about each person's every movement. Paul moved his arm, Rick shifted his weight, Colonel took two steps forward. Also, the main character Paul is annoyingly passive. If you can look past these failings, you might enjoy the unpredictable story.
A crime thriller from France, "the first book in the legendary Marseilles Trilogy." I picked it up from the Staff Recommendations shelf at Stacey's Books, from which I've had success in the past. Izzo is the French George Pelecanos: a crime writer whose love for his native city gives his stories a strong sense of place. The portrait of Marseilles is the main reason to read Total Chaos. The plot and the characters are standard-issue police drama, but the setting and the tossed-off insights about the city raise it above the norm.
Kay Redfield Jamison is one of the foremost experts on manic-depression, an illness she herself suffers from. An Unquiet Mind is the story of her struggles with the illness and the lessons she draws from the experiences about the proper way to deal with manic depression.
Manic depression is hard to treat for a few interesting reasons. First of all, the symptoms are just extreme versions of everyone’s normal mood swings. The manic depressive can come to see the manias and the depressions as simply their personality. When they take drugs to control the extremes, they may feel they are suppressing their true selves. Second, the manic states can be quite exhilarating and productive, so the person may be reluctant to give them up, even though they are inevitably followed by a suicidal depression. For these reasons, most manic depressives resist taking their medication (lithium) regularly. Redfield Jamison stopped taking it a few times herself.
Redfield Jamison tells her personal story simply and straightforwardly. It’s like listening to a friend tell you about her life. And just as when you’re listening to a friend, you occasionally have to let some questions you have about the story go by. She talks about several different men she had deep emotional relationships with, and she talks about each one as if he were the most important person in her life. It wasn’t clear to me what unique qualities each man had, so it started to sound to me like she was either exaggerating her attachment to some of them or was more dependent on male support than the self confident tone of her story would indicate.
The quotes on the cover of Hidden portray it as a thriller and a character-driven literary work. It is far more the latter than the former. A reader looking for a suspenseful plot will be sorely disappointed. A reader interested in quiet character studies will find more to enjoy, as I did.
On page 1, Maggie Wilson barely survives a violent assault. She accuses her husband, who goes to prison, but six years later another man confesses to the crime. Maggie spends the rest of the book trying to reconcile her memories with the apparent facts of the case.
With a plot summary like this one, the book could easily have been an overly expressive wallow in emotional pain. However, the (male) author created a pulled-in, reticient voice for Maggie, which makes her emotions come across subtly rather than extravagantly. The success of a book like this one depends on whether you relate to the character, and while I suspect many people would find Maggie uninteresting, I was drawn in to her plight. I identified with her conflicting needs for being appreciated and staying hidden.
I look forward to Paul Jaskunas' next book.
Andrei Tarkovsky is a Russian director who made one of my favorite films, Stalker. I read this book during a period when the UC Theater in Berkeley was showing Russian films, including four of Tarkovsky’s seven movies: Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Nostalghia, and The Sacrifice. These are the kinds of movies that make people tremble when they think of foreign films: long, slow moving, subtitled, with abstract speeches about deep philosophical themes. An acquired taste to be sure, but I have acquired it.
The book is very well written for an academic treatise on a “difficult” director. It provides just the right amount of detail about the conditions under which each movie was made, analysis of the major themes, and what the critical reception was both in and out of the Soviet Union. It doesn’t over-analyze the films. Too much film criticism goes overboard with speculation about what apples or horses mean in the films, and Tarkovsky’s films do plenty to invite such wild theorizing.
I think Johnson and Petrie get to the heart of what makes Tarkovsky’s films interesting: his theme of maintaining spirituality in the modern world, his use of dreams, and—most of all—his visual style: “long, slowly paced sequence shots, sometimes six or seven minutes in length, the absence of conventional musical scoring, a minimal narrative in which theme takes precedence over plot, and a dreamlike atmosphere which blurs the borders between dream or fantasy and waking reality...” These last two aspects of Tarkovsky’s style, combined with his interest in textures, remind me of an otherwise very different director, David Lynch.
If you ever get a chance, I recommend doing what I did: watching Tarkovsky’s films in order, reading the appropriate sections of this book after each one.
The subtitle is Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. I wanted a book on meditation, and this one takes an interesting and realistic approach to it.
Kabat-Zinn doesn’t present meditation as something you have to force yourself to sit down and do, but rather as a particular way of thinking (or “not-thinking”) that you can do any time. His presentation makes meditation seem more accessible—and closer to my normal way of thinking—than similar books I’ve looked at have. He presents it as stepping out of the “incessant stream of thoughts...[that] winds up submerging our lives as it carries us to places we may not wish to go” rather than as forcefully shutting off all thought. This idea seems more realistic to me.
I like the way his book focuses on mindfulness rather than meditation per se. He describes the advantages that come from being fully present in the moment, and doesn’t insist that you commit hours each day. He also describes very well how to “goal” of meditation is not to accomplish anything, but to accept things—and more importantly, accept yourself—the way they are. He frequently warns against expecting mystical experiences or worrying about whether you’re making progress. His approach relates more directly to Buddhist ideals than others I’ve read about.
From reading this book, I’ve already started focusing on my breathing and using other techniques to bring myself into the present and embrace the current situation in all its complexity. I recommend this low-key book.
Do we have free will? Kane does a decent job of laying out the various issues that bear on the question: the extent to which the universe is deterministic, what kind of freedom we mean, whether free will is necessary for assigning personal responsibility, and so on. However, he doesn't present the issues in a way that highlights the conundrum of free will; rather, he seems to suggest that there are several "solutions" we can choose between based on our preferences.
Every once in a while I am struck by the desire to read some hard core philosophy. Do you need any further proof that I’m a not-so-closeted academic wannabe?
I have read a lot of American analytic philosophy, particularly in the philosophy of language, but not much European philosophy. European philosophers have the reputation of being hard to read, due to different stylistic standards and issues of translation. My experience reading Foucault didn’t do much to dispel this reputation, but the ideas were interesting enough to make the effort worthwhile.
This book is an anthology of essays by the leading modern European philosophers—Husserl, Heidegger, Satre, Habermas, Foucault, Ricoeur, and so on—with brief introductions from the editors. A collection like this one is my favorite way to introduce myself to the various philosophers and decide who I want to read more of. I’d much rather read something written by the actual thinkers than a survey book.
All of the selections come from twentieth-century philosophers. Judging from this book, the two most influential Continental philosophers from the past were Immanuel Kant (filtered through Heidegger) and G.W.F. Hegel (filtered through Marx).
My favorite selections were those by Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Ricoeur, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Generally speaking, I found the French writers clearer than the German writers. Sartre was the clearest writer, but then the central idea of his philosophy is pretty straightforward. I have no idea what Martin Heidegger was talking about. The book ended with another impenetrable writer, Jacques Derrida.
Although the book is a collection of disparate philosophers, it is organized so it illustrates a common thread of development. Here is my summary of the development of 20th century Continental philosophy in one paragraph:
Many phenomena that we used to think of as being objectively out in the world are actually concepts we project onto the world (phenomenology, existentialism). Although some of these concepts may be innate, most of them are taught to us by the culture we live in (hermeneutics). The dominant social class determines which concepts are promoted, and it always chooses ones that maintain the status quo (Marxism). The reason we think these concepts exist objectively is that they are supported by an implicit, culturally determined world view we have internalized (structuralism). The structure is invisible and therefore usually unchallenged; the only way to escape the structure is to expose it and show how it limits experience (deconstruction).
The picture that emerges from this train of thought can be depressing. Our understanding of the world is not and can never be objectively true. We can’t escape this limitation and see the world “as it is.” Every understanding comes by means of a theoretical structure that represses certain aspects of experience. The structure is usually forced on us by the dominant culture, which doesn’t have our interests at heart.
Personally, I accept most of the conclusions, but don’t find the final picture depressing; on the contrary, I think it’s quite rosy. For a slightly more detailed synopsis of what I understood, and for a summary of my ideas in this area, click here.
A well-constructed by-the-numbers page-turner. The two Kellerman books I've read follow the standard formula for supermarket thrillers, but are very good examples of the genre. The characters have some depth, the police procedural elements sound realistic, and the plot twists aren't too outlandish. I always feel like I know who the real killer is; about the time the characters are coming to the same conclusion, I start to think it's someone else. Kind of fun.
The plot description on the cover of Billy Straight is a bit misleading. It suggests that the main story involves a cop and a killer trying to locate the 12-year-old witness to a murder. However, no one knows about the witness until over half way through the story. Most of the book alternates between the police investigation and a description of life on the streets for Billy. You know the stories are related and will come together eventually, but it doesn't happen until later in the book. I'm not complaining, just pointing it out.
This short book takes as its starting point the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. Kierkegaard describes four possible interpretations of the story and points out the difficulties with each one. At the heart of the story is a paradox: we admire Abraham's faith even though his outward actions make him a murderer. The book explores this paradox and its consequences.
I found the book interesting as an exercise in literary criticism, investigating the ideas that make a classic story endlessly fascinating. On the other hand, I was unmoved by the philosophy, which I didn't exert enough effort to understand.
Out is a combination crime thriller and social novel. The main characters are four women who barely keep their families afloat by working nights at a boxed-lunch factory. One of the women snaps and kills her husband, and her co-worker friends help her to cover it up by disposing of the body. The author is at least as interested in describing life on the fringes in Japan as she is in the suspense plot.
The first half of the book is a solid, standard murder novel. The interpersonal tensions between the women appear always on the verge of revealing their crime. The second half takes a surprising turn and has a different feel from the first half. It is less realistic but more atmospheric. I would have ended the story differently, with more cat-and-mouse between Masako and Satake. (I would have used Kanji's key to pin the crime on Satake!)
Kirino introduces characters well, providing depth in their back story and engaging us right away with their problems and personalities. The characterizations simplify as the story progresses, but by then you are hooked by the plot.
A terrible disappointment. Mission to America has an intriguing premise: proselytizers from an isolated religious group tour America looking for converts to save their dying creed. But the writing is awkward, the narrator doesn't have a distinctive outsider world view, and the plot goes nowhere. The book has nothing to say about America or about religion.
You just need to look at the list of reviews on this page to see that I don’t read much “popular” fiction. Every year at Christmas, though, Evelyn buys me a few paperbacks from the bestseller list. Sole Survivor is the first one from this year. It’s my first exposure to the very popular Dean Koontz.
I really enjoyed the setup in the first few chapters. Joe Carpenter is a former reporter struggling to overcome the death of his wife and daughters in a plane crash one year ago. He goes to the beach to settle his mind before visiting their graves, and he notices some men watching him. He assumes they’ve mistaken him for a drug dealer or something, but soon finds that they are actually watching him. These first few chapters are genuinely suspenseful, but the story soon descends into a typical unrealistic chase story, where a common-man character is able to outwit a ruthless, well-equipped organization to discover a “shocking,” outlandish conspiracy. The story gets progressively wilder, until it involves plane crash survivors, secret government projects, magical photographs, mutant children, telekinetic powers, and the secret of life-after-death. Well, at least it’s not predictable.
The thing I hate most about books like this is the lame dialogue and unrealistic conversations. They are full of scenes where the hero meets some character who has vital information for him, but “there’s no time for that right now...,” even though there is time for all kinds of other extraneous information. For example, there’s a scene late in Sole Survivor where Joe is finally about to meet Rose, the survivor of the plane crash that killed his family and the key player who will be able to answer all his questions (p. 298). He is making a narrow escape from the bad guys with the help of a friend of Rose’s. She’s rushing him into a elevator with no time to spare, but she gives him a two-page explanation about how she knows Rose!
After reading this book, I fear nothing so much as having to read another Dean Koontz book. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) Like Sole Survivor, my previous exposure to Koontz, this book features an increasingly crazy story, conversations where people pass up opportunities to clarify what's going on, and unrealistic dialogue meant to show how fond the characters are of each other. People have been killed, lives are in danger, and the narrator exchanges smiling pleasantries with his friends. Did his love perhaps make him forget for a moment about the killer mutant monkeys?!!
Another thing that really annoys me in both books is that the main character often makes intuitive leaps about what's going on, guesses based on very little evidence, and they are invariably right. For example, Fear Nothing takes place mostly over a single night. As daylight starts to come, our narrator, referring to the evil monkeys, says, "By day they go to ground somewhere." How does he know that? He didn't know they existed until this very night. Noam Chomsky used the fact that children can learn language on the basis of very little evidence to show that we have an innate capacity for language. Maybe Dean Koontz characters have an innate capacity for understanding elaborate government projects involving supernatural research.
Just two more complaints.
(1) Overstatement of the dangers as a way to make the reader more fearful, as in this paragraph from page 234: "Compared to the project at Wyvern, Pandora's fabled box, from which had been unleashed all the evils that plague humanity—wars, pestilence, diseases, famines, floods—might prove to have held only a collection of petty nuisances." All I can say is WOW.
(2) This book in particular didn't resolve the situation. They saved themselves from the mutant monkeys, but the bigger threat remained. I'm supposed to buy the next book.
Tim Krabbe is the Dutch author who wrote the novel upon which the film The Vanishing was based. The Cave, which I read while we toured Holland, is similar in that it takes the form of a thiller but has deeper psychological things on its mind. The first section of the book, wherein a mild-mannered geologist prepares for a drug transaction in a south Asian country, is tense and excellent despite some questionable English translation. The second section, which provides some of the backstory, is too cliched in its account of Alex, the bad boy who grows up to be a famous drug dealer. The third and fourth sections are unexpected, and they reveal what Krabbe really has in mind.
This book, ostensibly the story of two brothers who murdered their sister-in-law because God told them to, is largely a history of the Mormon church and a sensationalist description of current Mormon fundamentalist sects. The Mormon history is fascinating, and the historical chapters are largely even-handed. However, Krakauer starts the book with lurid stories about insular polygamist communities and returns to them with such regularity that mainstream Mormon readers must be forgiven for feeling that it casts aspersions on their church (even if Krakauer did not intend to). I could have done with more history and theology and less Hard-Copy expose. Although I have to say that I was intrigued with contemporary cities like Colorado City, AZ, comprised exclusively of Mormon fundamentalists. What happens when an outsider wants to buy something at the WalMart?
I consider this book to be one of the most important of the twentieth century. It’s about how scientists go about their work. The reality is quite different from the popular conception and involves “paradigm shifts,” a term that Kuhn invented.
Indecision is a comic novel about an indecisive man who takes an experimental drug that purports to make him decisive. His life takes an abrupt change soon after he starts taking the drug, but is it because he is more decisive?
As a man with a lingering reputation for indecisiveness, I was hoping the book would explore the question of how much of our lives is really affected by our own decisions. It didn't. As our hero travels through an adventure in Ecuador, he often attributes his actions to the drug, but I didn't see why. I was disappointed in the book, which seemed superficial wherever it meant to be profound. There was an occasional interesting sentence, but that's it.
This comic novel about globalization concerns an Indian man who unleashes a computer virus in a misguided attempt to save his job. The virus has farther-reaching implications than he had anticipated. The story has wide scope, encompassing outsourcing, Bollywood, international marketing, and culture clashes. The plot is interesting, although the various strands remain rather separate rather than intertwining. Kunzru gets a lot of the little details right — for example, the kinds of email questionnaires that circulate at software companies — but I found the writing a bit flat. Truth be told, it sounded like something I might write (when I take an immodest view of my skills). I wish Neil Stephenson had written it: it would have been three times longer, but have more passion in it.
The book gets an extra half-star for little touches along the way. For one thing, it shows how computer-based metaphors are becoming part of our lives: on page 50, the main character says that "Redmond was a town with nice graphics and an intuitive user interface," and on page 166, Dubai is described as "the future, arriving at mouse-click velocity, CAD/CAM sketches cloaking themselves in concrete and steel...." He gives a pitch-perfect description of a Bollywood film plot on pages 33-36. But my favorite line came from the HR person who told the main character he was being laid off: "Virugenix can no longer offer you a context for your self-development." (p 92)
This book tells the fascinating true story of two shipwreck divers who discover a German U-Boat not far from the New Jersey coast. They set out to identify it and learn its story through both diving adventures and historical research. You learn about the thrills and dangers of deep-sea diving, glean facts about the U-Boat war in World War II, and get insights into the nitty-gritty of how the historical record is constructed.
The author does a good job of organizing the narrative and including the appropriate amount of detail for the reader. However, I found his sentence-by-sentence prose to be distractingly pedestrian:
The boat's external running lights, configured white on the mast, red on the port side, green on the starboard to indicate a "motor vessel under way," now stood as the only evidence of fourteen men who had decided to take a chance.
The dialogue in particular sounds expository rather than natural. The weakest parts of the book, I felt, were the chapters decribing the diver's childhoods. The author was trying hard to make it all significant, but it sounded forced. The men never became more than two-dimensional characters. In the second half of the book, a sentence like this one appears every 10 pages or so: "He now believed himself minutes away from the answer to the mystery." Nonetheless, the inherent interest of the story carries the day.
"At a time when every last patch of land is claimed by one government or another, and when citizenship is treated as an absolute condition of human existence, the ocean is a realm that remains radically free."
This book collects together several magazine articles that Langewiesche wrote about the anarchy of the oceans that cover three-quarters of our planet. He finds not a libertarian paradise but a dangerously amoral world of unscrupulous ship owners, exploited sailors, modern pirates, and terrorists. Langewiesche is an excellent writer with a particular talent for laying out the complexities of the situation: ships registered in one country, owned by convoluted trusts from another country, operating in yet another country, with safety inspections made according to unenforceable standards by inspectors who are contracted by the shipowners themselves. I particularly liked the first two chapters, about the merchant shipping industry and piracy, and his description of the investigation into the sinking of the ferry Estonia concisely illustrates the knotty politics. However, the book betrays its origins as a collection of magazine articles by repeating itself and making no attempt to recommend solutions.
P.S. If you are wondering how to pronounce the author's name, click here.
Each of the stories in this collection takes place in Thailand, but outside of their exotic locale they sound like stories written by the star student in an American creative writing program. They follow standard short post-Carver short story conventions, and the narrator's voice sounds perfectly Western. They are good examples of the genre — the title story in particular is strong — but they don't transcend it.
This book explores the idea that liberals and progressives cling to an untenable belief in progress, and that this belief leads us away from a meaningful life. This book showed up a few times in the footnotes of What's the Matter with Kansas?, always associated with an interesting point. I am also interested in the general question of progress: Is there such a thing?
I was disappointed with this book for a couple of reasons. First, Lasch defines the word "progress" in a narrow and unusual way: as the idea that "human wants, being insatiable, require an indefinite expansion of the productive forces necessary to satify them." That is, he is concerned with a particular kind of progress (economic), not with the general concept of progress. Second, while his definition of "progress" is narrow, his range of topics wanders all over the map. I came across lots of interesting little tidbits — the kind of points that showed up in those What's the Matter with Kansas? footnotes — but the structure of his larger argument eluded me. Humans have limits and cannot become the moral paragons imagined in liberal utopias. Lasch seems to believe that this somewhat trite point invalidates the entire liberal, aka progressive, world view. It's weird: individual sections of this book reveal that Lasch can be an incisive thinker, but the organization and the overarching argument seem weak.
If you want to know how it feels to live in a modern ghetto, read this book. Random Family is a non-fiction portrait of two Hispanic families who live in the poorest section of the Bronx. It follows the lives of two women in particular, Jessica and Coco, over the course of more than a decade. It is written in a novelistic style with very little authorial commentary.
The fascinating thing about a book that looks closely at individual lives is how those lives both confirm and belie common stereotypes. Both Jessica and Coco have multiple children from multiple fathers, starting in their teens. Jessica gets involved with the drug trade through one of her boyfriends, and Coco fails to follow through on opportunities that could help her and her family. Cesar, who is Jessica's brother and Coco's first love, ends up in prison. However, we learn enough about their lives to understand why things play out the way they do, how their bad decisions arise from their personalities and the difficulties of their lives.
The author does an excellent job of choosing the details, incidents, and feelings to describe. Her sentence-by-sentence prose is often flat and a bit confusing, though. The biggest problem, especially during the early chapters, is keeping track of who is who. Lots of people drift in and out of the story, and LeBlanc is not too adept at drawing memorable secondary characters. Here is a sample:
By the spring of 1987, the house was packed: Besides Jessica, Serena, Caesar, Robert, Elaine, Lourdes, Big Daddy, Lourdes alleged brother, Que-Que, and the guests, there was Elaine's boyfriend, Angel, and Shirley, Robert's girl. Elaine was pregnant. Shirley was also pregnant, and her father had kicked her out. (page 14)
Are you going to remember who Shirley is two pages later when she shows up again?
The book is filled with small insights that make the milieu come to life. For example, Jessica goes into a party supply store where wedding favors are in a glass case, but trinkets for baby showers filled the aisles. I learned that young guys are more romantic to their girlfriends when they are in prison, that imprisoned people are more likely to get an education than those who have to find a way to live on the outside, and that drug trials are a good place to get educated about the latest police surveillance techniques.
Drinking men... bought beer, bottle by bottle, at the corner store: better that way than a six-pack, even though the single bottles cost more. Otherwise, you either shared your beer or got the reputation of being greedy for refusing your friends... (page 146)
In addition to the details scattered throughout the book, there are several chapters that work as nearly self-contained stories. The chapter describing the summer when Coco sends her daughters Mercedes and Nikki to camp (Chapter 28) is especially strong. It starts with one of those interesting insights: Coco's family disapproved of the idea of camp, because "in her community, good mothering was premised on keeping one's children away from authorities." The description of dropping the girls at the camp is vivid, as is the description of what Coco does to combat her uneasiness when the girls are gone. But the very best part is the account of when Coco goes to pick up the girls at the end of the camp. The impact of the experience is clear in the girls' behavior. Coco doesn't know how to deal with the changes, and by the time they get home, Mercedes has started reverting to her previous behavior.
I was also fascinated by the industry and the social conventions that have grown around prison visits. There are busing companies specializing in prison trips, hotels that cater to prison visitors, and other similar businesses. The many prison visits in the book paint a much different picture from anything I knew before.
This book is a good companion to Jason DeParle's American Dream, which describes a similar setting along with explicit discussion of the social policy issues the people's plight raises.
I bought this book reluctantly based on its back cover blurbs. The quotes compare it to Updike's Rabbit books, and I am also reminded of Richard Ford's The Sportswriter. These books are among my all-time favorites. However, novels about ordinary guys trying to come to grips with their ordinary sense of dissatisfaction are often unbearably literary and metaphorical.
You can judge this book by its cover. The prose in Aloft sounds very much like Updike, and the main character's job as a travel agent is used for the same effect as Frank Bascombe's real estate job in Ford's Independence Day. The story is well-written and pitch-perfect, albeit uncompelling. I never identified with the character's dilemmas. Frankly, I never quite believed he was a self-involved as the other characters made him out to be.
I was impressed with Mystic River, and I was looking for an "airplane book" for our trip to Hawaii. The plot description on the back cover of Shutter Island made it sound like a combination murder mystery and gothic potboiler: perfect.
By about half-way through, it was clear that Lehane wasn't going to develop his characters as richly as he did in Mystic River, and I felt the story drifting into the dreaded Dean Koontz territory (secret experiments, odd coincidences, and amazingly accurate guesses from the hero). Not long after, I figured out that it was turning instead into an M. Night Shyamalan story: better, but still not as engaging as I had hoped when I started.
The Light of Falling Stars is the latest selection of the Times Book Club. A plane crashes in a small Montana town, and the story describes the effects on the residents of the town. Sounds a bit like The Sweet Hereafter. I sent my comments to the Times and have exchanged email with the woman running the book club, but I’ve already been to a dinner so at most I’ll get quoted in the “other comments” section of the article.
I didn’t care for “The Light of Falling Stars.” The premise sounded interesting, and in the first few chapters, Lennon does an excellent job of setting up the characters and the town of Marshall. He is able to paint vivid pictures with few words. I was impressed by his ability to paint vivid characters in a single scene. But I didn’t feel that any of the characters or situations developed in insightful or even realistic ways.
I wanted an exploration of how a random, tragic event can change the lives of the survivors in subtle or unexpected ways. I was most interested in the relationship between Paul and Anita, and how witnessing the plane crash would alter the truce they’d worked out to avoid facing the central issue of their marriage (whether or not to have children). But their relationship never showed any of the complexity of a real marriage. I felt that Anita’s affair was insufficiently motivated. Was she looking for someone who wanted children? Someone who validated her as a woman? Someone more perceptive than Paul? I don’t know.
Although the plane crash seems to be the central event of the novel, it actually had very little to do with how the story developed. Most of the subsequent action---most importantly, the psychological action---could just as easily have taken place without the crash. Paul already had his new job; Anita could have met someone at the bank; Bernardo’s reluctance to visit his son was motivated by much more than the plane crash; and Trixie’s memories of her husband didn’t require his death.
My favorite character was Lars. I liked his straightforward way of dealing with grief, his concern for his friend Toth and for Megan’s family, and his self-awareness. Unfortunately, I found Christine extremely one-dimensional and their relationship boring. I wish he’d spent more time with his cat Hodge.
Based on the opening and on the occasional gem of a paragraph, I would consider reading Lennon’s next book. I have to cut him some slack as a first time writer.
I was disappointed with this book. I have really liked the other books I’ve read by Doris Lessing—The Good Terrorist, The Fifth Child, and The Golden Notebook. She has a way of creating characters with psychological complexity without a lot of long paragraphs analyzing the character’s mental state.
Love, Again is the story of Sarah, a woman in her fifties who falls ‘in love’ with a young actor, then with the director of the play they’re working on. She had thought she was beyond the terrible passions of love. I was disappointed because I didn’t think Lessing made her ‘love’ seem like anything more than lust, and didn’t give me a sense of what attracted Sarah to the actor.
There were two things I liked about the book, though. First, I thought it presented an interesting range of relationships between Sarah and a variety of men. Some of them seem like ideal candidates for a love relationship, but remain friendships; others seem unlikely, but end in passion. It made me think about what constitutes love and the range of feelings we can have for others. Second, it was interesting how Lessing presents love as primarily negative, like an illness.
“Am I really to believe that the awful crushing anguish, the longing so terrible it seems one’s heart is being squeezed by cruel finger---all that is only what a baby feels when it is hungry and wants its mother? Is a baby, even if not much larger than a cat, only an empty bag waiting to be filled with milk and then cuddles? That baby is wanting more: It is longing for something just out of its memory; it is longing for where it came from, and when need starts up in its stomach for milk, that need revives another, grander need...
“To fall in love is to remember one is an exile, and that is why the sufferer does not want to be cured, even while crying, ‘I can’t endure this non-life..’.”
The first Lessing book I read was The Good Terrorist, which gave an intimate look at a group of people who fancied themselves radicals and showed how the group dynamics led them to an act of terrorism. I thought it did a brilliant job of showing how each person came to the group with his or her own agenda, his or her own needs to fill, and how all these people interacted with each other. It seemed very realistic.
The next one was The Fifth Child, the story of an idyllic family that has a baby from hell. This book was a horror story, really. Some of the events in the book are more exaggerated than realistic, as befits a horror story, but it deals realistically with the effects the baby has on the family. And some of the images—like the asylum they take the baby to—have stayed with me.
I also read Lessing’s most famous book, The Golden Notebook. It has a reputation as a feminist novel, but to me it seemed like a great presentation of the disillusionment that comes over people when they lose faith in their ideals; in particular, with the disillusionment of socialists when the great Soviet experiment failed.
I resisted this acclaimed novel for more than a year because it is a New York coming-of-age story whose title makes a comic book reference. I enjoyed Lethem's previous book, Motherless Brooklyn, but didn't find it as distinctive as its reviews suggested. However, the tide of praise ("the richest, messiest, most ambitious, most interesting" novel of the year) eventually won me over. I was particularly influenced by Nick Hornby's enthusiasm in his book of reviews The Polysyllabic Spree.
I share Nick's enthusiasm. The Fortress of Solitude tells the story of the only white kid growing up in an ethnic neighborhood in Brooklyn and of his friendship with a black kid who moves in down the street. The first three-quarters of this book are nearly perfect, presenting a rich portrait of an urban neighborhood on the cusp of gentrification. Lethem describes the event's of Dylan's childhood with just the right combination of childish perspective and authorial distance.
"Let me see it for a minute."
Let me see it: you saw a basketball or a pack of baseball cards or a plastic water gun by taking it into your hands, and what happened after that was in doubt. Ownership depended on mostly not letting anyone see anything. If you let a kid see a bottle of Yoo-Hoo for a minute he'd drink what was left in it. (pg 40)
The story is particularly strong in presenting the subtle effects of race on Dylan's relationships with other kids, especially with his best friend Mingus and with Arthur Lomb, the other white kid. The fact that Dylan is white in a predominately black neighborhood is the source of his feeling disconnected. Except in isolated moments, such as the day he makes several brilliant catches playing stoopball, Dylan's race prevents him from feeling entirely part of the world to which he belongs. When he leaves Brooklyn for college, though, he is lost in the non-urban environment. I identified with his dilemma even though my background is very different: among intellectuals I feel like an outdoorsman; among mountaineers I feel like an intellectual.
The final section of the book, which Dylan narrates as an adult, is not as strong as the childhood section, although I still found interesting ideas in it. Some of these ideas occur in passing (such as the first excerpt below) and others are more central to the themes of the book (such as the second excerpt below).
The sound which defines soul is epitomized by the configuration [of]...a Detroit- or "Nothern"-style high school harmony group fronted by a rougher, churchified, "Southern"-style lead. This collision of grit and elegance, or raw R&B lust and repentance with polished, crossover-seeking pop is also the crossroads where sufferation and exile briefly joins hands with new-glimpsed possibilities of middle-class striving and conformity. (p 298)
"I've wasted my life."
This as the last thing I made out before my father was drowned in the ovation. A two-way masochism was at work here, made possible by the total insularity of the gathering...My father was their pet heretic, their designated griever for lost and abandoned possibility. The way he brandished his failure thrilled the crowd...By accepting his contempt like a lash on their backs, the Elk Lodge of ForbiddenCon 7 could feel ratified in their unworthy worthiness, their good sense of humor about themselves and their chosen deficiencies. (p 344-45)
My only reservation about The Fortress of Solitude is its one non-realistic plot device: Dylan is given a ring that confers the superpowers of flying and invisibility. In the first section of the book, it is not clear whether the ring has real powers or whether Dylan and Mingus simply believe that it does. All doubt is removed in the final pages of the book. I found the ring jarring and too nakedly metaphorical for a book that is otherwise realistic, subtle, and thought-provoking. I will read this book again.
I was intrigued by the premise of this short novel. A quiet, bland man briefly glimpses something he can't explain out of the corner of his eye, and finds his life changed. I appreciated that the main character remained steadfast in his uncertainty about whether he had witnessed the supernatural, even as everyone tried to force him to take sides. Lightman's writing has sections of subtle beauty with occasional lapses. Many of the characters feel that an experience of the supernatural will somehow give their lives meaning, but Lightman's lovely descriptions of the natural world make it seem like a far better source of meaning and mystery. On the down side, I found the plot to be artificially blown out of proportion.
A disappointing amalgam that combines the worst cliches of spy novels and detective stories. The story concerns a retired spy who becomes a private detective. As a spy, he was an expert at creating "legends," which are deep undercover identities. He was so good, in fact, that he is no longer certain which of his many identities is his true one. A woman tries to hire him to find her missing brother-in-law. He turns down the job at first, but reconsiders after his former boss at the CIA warns him not to take it. The search takes him around the world and into his past.
The story and the characters are completely unbelievable. For a reputed master spy, our hero is too profligate with sharing information and too trusting of his contacts. His experiences in espionage are supposed to be so horrific that he has suppressed them, but they didn't seem very horrible to me. Perhaps my biggest pet peeve about books like this one is how characters who have just met give long speeches explaining their lives and motivations, resulting in instant emotional bonds.
The MIT Press doesn't often publish murder mysteries, but that is what Radiant Cool (partly) is. Dan Lloyd is a philosophy professor at Trinity College in Connecticut. This book presents his theory on the nature of consciousness through a fictional story in which his protagonist discovers the new theory while attempting to solve an apparent murder. Following the story is a more traditional presentation of Lloyd's approach.
While the mystery story provides narrative interest, I personally found the fictional elements pedestrian and somewhat distracting from the ideas that Lloyd is presenting. I preferred the second and more technical part, proving yet again that I am a geek. He doesn't present a new theory of consciousness so much as provide suggestions about more fruitful approaches to the subject. He is an advocate of consciousness as an emergent property of a distributed system. Following the philosopher Edward Husserl, he believes that the most fundamental feature of consciousness is its temporality, and that the key to unlocking the mystery is to understand our internal time consciousness. In discussing some simple distributed computer models, Lloyd shows how traditional cognitive science techniques and theories would lead to unhelpful and incorrect conclusions about what is happening, then suggests a new set of metaphors and approaches. He uses multidimensional analysis a lot, to the point where I think he's suggesting that conscious awareness is the endpoint of internally performing multidimensional analysis on brain activity.
Lloyd is a very good technical writer — he even manages to make clear the ideas he borrowed from the notoriously unreadable Edward Husserl.
Here are a few random quotes that got me thinking:
A door that might open is a very different door from one that is likely to stay closed. At 6 or 7 AM, no one is in these offices, and the doors are just part of the wall. You could pound on them, it wouldn't matter. But now, when your professor might be in, you respond to the door differently. Doors then and now are physically the same. They're visually the same. But they couldn't be more different. ... Your experience of the door changes. (p 12)
Consciousness lives in a world heaped up with meanings. They [the various interpretations] are all there in my little drawing, and in every moment of awareness. (p 11)
The market has too many variables [to predict]... and even then it's just too noisy. The daily jump from pure randomness will be bigger than the trend line. ... Whenever one of those [big investmest companies] upgrades the rating on a stock, the stock will bump. ... You don't have to predict the market. You just have to predict what the advisors will say about the market. The matrix on that is about a tenth the size. (p 213)
Real things...always seem to have aspects that go beyond what can be sensed. ...Phenomonology calls this transcendence.(p 258-9)
I have been a fan of Philip Lopate ever since I read his essay “Against Joie de Vivre” in one of the Best American Essays collections. In that essay, Lopate talks about how people in certain situations carry on about how much they enjoy life and are seizing it, and how they practically demand that you join in or at least respect them for their vitality. Lopate objects to this “forced conviviality,” and doesn’t believe that such people really feel the intense enjoyment they present to you. It seemed like a bold essay to me, admitting to feelings that are likely to get him branded a curmudgeon or worse, and I agreed with practically every word of it. Lopate has a knack for expressing an opinion that seems controversial at first, but then analyzing his ideas closely to show how reasonable it is (or providing self-justification if you happen not to agree with him). I heartily recommend the essay, which later appeared as the title essay in his second collection.
Lopate is the epitome of a personal essayist, writing about the minutiae of his life as a bachelor intellectual in New York. Sometimes the subject doesn’t grab me and I don’t get much from an essay, but his thought processes always seem similar to mine.
Portrait of My Body is his latest essay collection. I found the book rather bland. Many of the essays seemed aimless; in the words of the subtitle for his Greenwich Village essay, “A Meander.” I started reading them superficially and nothing ever came along to pull me in.
I like to read his essays because his way of thinking almost always matches mine more than any author I’ve ever read. I noticed it in this book to, but I mostly noticed the aspects of his personality that annoy me. The annoyance took on special force because the traits are the same ones I don’t like about myself—passivity and skepticism in social situations, a mistrust of emotional reactions, and what amounts to a fear of being “tricked” into feeling something. For example, in his essay about the birth of his daughter he says:
Often I allow myself to be made captive to my wife’s moods, registering in an instant her first signs of discontent, and trying (usually without success) to gentle her out of it. I suspect that catering to her anxiety is really laziness on my part: it saves me the trouble of having to initiate emotions on my own.
Ask my wife if this doesn’t sound like me.
In fact, Lopate goes so far as to apologize at the end of one of his essays. Evelyn often tells the story from our high school days in which she was given an essay of mine to critique. The essay was about my fresh Outward Bound experience, and the concluding paragraphs apologized for my inability to convey the importance of the experience to me. She’s never let me forget it. Now, here’s Lopate near the end of his essay about his colleague Donald Barthelme:
I have been assessing him in these pages through the prism of my needs, hence probably misjuding him. Certainly it is perverse of me to have manufactured a drama of being rejected by Barthelme, when the objective truth is that he was always kind to me... It has not been easy to conjure up a man who, for all his commanding presence, had something of the ghost about him.
Reading this book was like reading a collection of essays I would write, and discovering that I don’t particularly care for the wimpy narrator.
This book, by the former editor of Nature, talks about the fundamental questions that remain unanswered in current theories about the universe, subatomic structure, and the life sciences. In the preface, Maddox makes a convincing case about how impossible it is to actually predict what discoveries will be made and what effect those discoveries will have on our theories. What he can do, however, is identify the unknowns and paradoxes that drive scientists today.
The book seems to be Maddox's response to recent enthusiastic proposals that we've nearly figured everything out. To quote Stephen Hawking, "I believe there are grounds for cautious optimism that we may be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature." Maddox vehemently disagrees. As he talks about what we don't know, he points out that the answers to these questions are likely to lead us in unexpected directions and force us to reevaluate our current "knowledge." I can say that some of the theories he describes—and for which there is incontrovertible scientific evidence—sound suspiciously like 19th-century theories involving phlogiston; I can imagine a revolutionary discovery that simplifies our understanding and makes future generations wonder how we ever could have believed such nonsense.
When Maddox was describing scientific theories that I generally understand, I liked the way he pulled the threads together to present a consistent current understanding of the world. When he was describing theories I don't understand, his descriptions didn't help me. I was more impressed with the first section, on the universe, than I was with the sections covering the life sciences. In describing our understanding of life processes, Maddox made it seem like we do understand all the basic processes and that we just have to fill in the blanks. Almost certainly not true, and definitely not as interesting as the paradoxes that confront, say, physics.
Bryan Magee is apparently well-known in Britain for his television series' on philosophical topics, maybe like an English Bill Moyers. In any case, this book explores the ideas of the great philosophers in the context of Magee's philosophical autobiography. I like the idea of approaching a history of thought in this way. (For a small example of me trying to do this kind of thing, see my summary of Continental philosophy.)
Magee has a great talent for summarizing philosophical ideas and systems concisely and clearly. I was especially impressed by his accounts of Kant and Schopenhauer—not coincidentally his favorite philosophers. I liked his account of how we can believe that there's more to reality than we can ever know without resorting to religious thought. I can imagine coming back to this book for some of these expositions.
On the other hand, I found myself liking Magee less and less as the book went on. My major complaint is his complete, unconditional dismissal of most philosophers, with special wrath directed toward analytical philosophy. Okay, so he's not interested in the problems this brand of philosophy addresses itself to. But to dismiss it all out of hand as bankrupt is too harsh. I personally take the attitude that if intelligent people believe something, then there must be something to it; I might not agree with it or be interested in it, but there's something there. On top of that, I know a little something about analytic philosophy and can say he appears to miss the point of it. Overall, his partisan attitude reminded me of the worst of academic politics (even though Magee isn't an academic). It made his strong support for Karl Popper sound biased, and made me less inclined to forgive his occassionally self-congratulatory tone.. I'll admit, though, that he made me want to read some Popper, which I subsequently did.
A friend loaned me this book as a counterpoint to our quest to visit the state highpoints. Malusa rides his bicycle to the lowest point on each of the six continents (excluding Antarctica). Malusa is a good writer who seems to do everything right — friendly funny tone, good anecdotes — but something was missing. I found the book flat. Despite the well-crafted prose, his trips felt like a string of incidents rather than having any thematic cohesion. His descriptions appear to be detailed enough, but for some reason they did not paint a mental picture for me — a critical shortcoming in a travel book.
Giorgio Manganelli is an Italian author who was part of an avant-garde group with Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco. This book is a collection of 100 stories, each of which was written on a single over-sized sheet of paper (a page and a half in printed form). While the stories include such wondrous things as killers, ghosts, dragons, lovers, women who give birth to spheres, and thieves, they most definitely have an abstract feel to them. Most of the stories end with the main character thinking exactly the opposite of what he or she thought at the beginning. Some of my favorites were Four (about a man who prves the existence of god), Fourteen (about a man hurrying to ask a woman to marry him who gets caught in a civil war), Eighteen (about a man who hopes to be a killer), Seventy-Three (about a cry heard in the night), Eighty (about a custodian of public toilets), Ninety-two (a Borgesian story about bandits), and Ninety-Seven (about Hell on the day before the creation of the world).
I gave this book two and a half stars the first time I read it. Based on the cover blurbs ("a Middle Eastern Turn of the Screw,"), I was expecting a taut psychological thriller along the lines of a Ruth Rendell novel, and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street fails on that score. Although it does have a suspense-style plot — a professional woman who joins her engineer husband in Saudi Arabia hears suspicious noises from the upstairs flat, but everyone assures her there is no one and nothing up there — the plot is practically an afterthought. The real interest is its depiction of living in Saudi Arabia. In the years since I first read it, I found that its evocation of the modern Middle East kept coming to mind. I felt like I could imagine what it would be like to live there, with the nondescript apartment blocks, incongruous modern architecture, traffic, empty malls, and fast food joints where "small Korean men in a uniform of check shirts and cowboy hats grilled hamburgers..." I reread the book with adjusted expectations, and a corresponding upgrade to its rating.
I still wish that the plot was handled better. Mantel doesn't slowly build tension, nor did I feel a true sense of danger.
The cover describes Beyond Black as a darkly comic novel about a British medium, and compares its tone to Flannery O'Conner. The comparison is apt in that the author manages the O'Conner trick of being both mocking and empathetic at the same time. I was somewhat preoccupied with trying to understand the metaphysics of the Spirit World, and I think the plot could have used a few more incidents, but overall I enjoyed the book very much, especially the relationship between the two sharply drawn characters Colette and Alison. The story is somewhat unusual and very well written.
I am going to reassess my original rating of Mantel's Eight Months on Ghazzah Street based on my enjoyment of Beyond Black and on the fact that I remember Ghazzah Street's descriptions of Middle Eastern life years later. I just need to find a copy of the book...
This collection includes stories from authors whose work I have enjoyed before (George Saunders, David Foster Wallace) and from authors I had been curious about (A.M. Homes, Jhumpa Lahiri). The stories were chosen for the distinctive ways they approach storytelling, so they are somewhat experimental.
The collection started strong — I loved the first three stories from George Saunders, Wells Tower, and A.M. Homes. By the middle of the book, though, I had read too many stories that didn't speak to me. I appreciated the distinctive approaches, but I wasn't sure what the authors were trying to get at. A.M. Homes is the author I am most likely to check out further. Her story was conventional by the standards of this collection, but its tone was perfectly balanced between sad and funny.
This one’s a supermarket-rack thriller, the kind of book that quotes the US Magazine review on the back cover. I also see it was Larry King’s favorite book of 1993. It was pretty good as books like this go. Margolin takes an interesting approach to the story, combining a detective/serial killer story with a courtroom drama. The characters are well drawn, and the story did keep me guessing. I always felt like I was one step ahead of the characters in terms of figuring out who the killer was; by the time the characters started to suspect my prime suspect for the past 80 pages, I had moved on to a different suspect.
Javier Marias is an internationally known Spanish author. I read one of his novels a few years ago (Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me). I thought the first half of it was brilliant, but that it fell apart a bit near the end. This book is a short collection of short stories — no chance for them to fall apart near the end. They are the kind of stories that describe little incidents. I enjoyed them, but don't have much to say about them.
Despite the title, the book has nothing to do with the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, unless you count a preoccupation with "language games." This experimental novel doesn't have a plot as such. Rather, it is the musings of a woman who is apparently the only person left on Earth. She describes a bit about her plight — her travels around the world looking for other people, the various museums she lived it — but for the most part she relates facts that she remembers the world from before she went "mad" and wondering how she knows this trivia. She talks a lot about art, particularly the Greek literature related to Troy and Renaissance painting, and artists. She worries a lot about using language properly (If a house burns down, is it still a house? If the toilet from the second floor bathroom is still fastened to its pipes, is it still on the second floor when the house is gone? Can you be said to be "hearing music" if it is only in your head? ). She once got a pair of Japanese stereo speakers, and the instructions said to place them "equidistant from each other." But of course! The style might be called stream of consciousness, but it is very different from the style that usually goes by that name.
Like most experimental works of art, the book is more interesting than it is affecting. I enjoyed the writing and the philosophical issues the narrator implicitly raises, and it was funny at times. I did occassionally miss the engine of a plot, although the story does come to a conclusion of sorts.
"Would it make any sense whatsoever if I said that the woman in my novel would have one day actually gotten more accustomed to a world without any people in it than she ever could have gotten to a world without such a thing as The Descent from the Cross, by Rogier van der Weyden, by the way?
Or without the Iliad? Or Antonio Vivaldi?
Life of Pi tells the story of a young Indian man who ends up sharing a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with an adult Bengal tiger.
The first part covers Pi's childhood as the son of a zookeeper in India. His experiences give him an interest in zoology and in the various religions he comes into contact with. Pi considers himself Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian, and clings to all three faiths despite everyone's attempts to make him choose one. Pi also makes an empassioned case for the positive moral propriety of zoos. His points about both religion and zoos are quite interesting, but he repeats them a few too many times, making Part I of the book feel too long.
In Part II, Pi and his family are emigrating to Canada with some of the animals when their ship sinks. Pi ends up in a lifeboat with an injured zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and the aforementioned tiger. This part, the longest and most dramatic in the book, tells how he survives his ordeal at sea. His narrative starts to sound a tad implausible near the end, but the implausibility turns out to be important in the final part.
In Part III, two investigators from the shipping company interview Pi for information about how and why their ship sank. He can't help them, but his story leads them to a philosophical discussion. I won't go into details about their discussion, because it goes to the heart of the themes of the book. You'll have to read it yourself.
I enjoyed the book both for its narrative interest and its deeper purposes. I found the prose to be lackluster at times. Evelyn was bothered by the repetitiveness of Part I as well as its unnecessary flash-forwards to the present. She really enjoyed the rest of the book, though, and was especially happy with its final sentence. (Again, you'll have to read the book to know why.) The book provoked some discussion between us, so it was an excellent choice for a dishwashing book.
This novel takes a distinctive approach to telling the story of a turtle-hunting trip from the Cayman Islands. The narrative is broken up into short paragraphs of pure description or pure dialogue. The time of day is often indicated with a drawing of the sun or the moon. The text is sometimes laid out as if it were verse. The cumulative effect is to give the story a timeless feel and a deep connection to the natural world. It is remarkable and sui generis.
A cool night wind, and stars.
In the bows, a clank of chain and shriek of ratchet; a
storm lamp shudders in the galley.
Silhouettes on the night sky.
Over the engine hatch, the yellow bulb rolls with the
ship, shifting the shadows. Raib is crouched over the
hole, hands on knees, peering below; his voice is
muted, in respect for darkness.
Last night you hear me say we sailin at three dis
mornin, and you wait till I wakes you to oil dem
engines? No, mon! Dass no good!
A silence. In the darkness of the hold, Brown's eyes gleam in the reflected light.
This National Book Award winner from 2008 tells the story of an Everglades sugar baron who was murdered in the early years of the 20th century. It is a fictional rendering of a true story. It is also a "new rendering" of a trilogy that Matthiessen published in the early 1990s. The three books have been reworked into a single book as Matthiessen originally intended and distilled down to 900 pages(!).
The first book, titled Killing Mr. Watson in the original trilogy, is excellent. Many different characters tell parts of the Edgar Watson story from their point of view. It balances vivid descriptions of life in the Everglades with a portrait of an intriguing character.
The second book, originally Lost Man River, has problems. It follows one of Watson's sons as he tries to discover what really happened to his father and why. This book tackles many of the trilogy's themes most directly, but it suffers from narrative problems. The family tree gets confusing, as does Lucius Watson's motivation, and several incidents would seem more appropriate in a cheap detective novel. (The author must have been aware of the problems, because this book was revised and shortened more than the others. Some sections read like summaries of excised material.) Despite the issues, though, there are some strong sections as well.
The third book (Bone by Bone) revisits the story from Edgar Watson's point of view. He has an interesting story to tell, and it is fun to learn the truth behind some of the Watson legends. As far as I can tell, Matthiessen intends us to take Watson as a reliable narrator, which reduces some of the mystery that the first book built up.
I could definitely imagine reading just the first book and being satisfied. It is the kind of book that will forever color my impressions of a place. The remaining books add shading to the first while also laying bare Mattheissen's thematic interests, but you have to wade through some problematic patches to appreciate them. The title, by the way, relates to one of the themes: a "shadow cousin" is the family member whose nefarious exploits are known to everyone but never spoken of; a "shadow country" is the unspoken truth about how our country was built. (5/2009)
This book is the memoir of an Englishman who traveled to Baffin Island in 1930 to manage a trading post for the Hudson Bay Company. He was sixteen years old. He learned to speak Inuktitut and became more involved with the local Eskimos than he was supposed to.
After a slow start, the book builds into an excellent and sympathetic portrait of Inuit life. The writing becomes much more focused after he settles in at the trading post, presumably because he began keeping a better diary at that time. I learned about Inuit hunting methods, day-to-day life in the frozen North, and the fur-trading economy. Maurice is particularly good at describing his personal relationships with the local natives. His growing relationship with Innuk in the second half of the book is handled delicately and is quite moving. Maurice's prose style is clear and conversational; my only complaint was that I found his descriptions of the topography hard to follow.
The Tears of Autumn is a classic espionage novel from 1975, recently republished along with Charles McCarry's other books. The hero, Paul Christopher, is a CIA agent who sets out to gather evidence of his theory of the Kennedy assassination. He has to quit the service to pursue the truth, because the White House would rather not deal with the consequences if Christopher's theory is true.*
The book differs from most spy novels in that the agent (and the reader) knows the basics of the plot from the beginning; the agent is gathering "explanation" rather than learning new, actionable "intelligence." This fact dampens the suspense; where most spy novels are mystery novels, this one is more of a police procedural. However, the character of Paul Christopher is well drawn and the tradecraft in Vietnam is quite convincing and exciting. The story raises questions about whether it is worth risking one's life to learn the truth about something that has already happended. The writing only rarely succumbs to the hyperbole that is too common in pulp novels: I sensed it most in the descriptions of the Greek agents Christopher hires to help interrogate Frankie Pigeon.
I am intrigued and will probably read other McCarry novels.
* His theory is that the Vietnamese were behind the assassination, in retaliation for the coup against Ngo Dinh Diem. The White House does not like the implication that Kennedy brought the assassination on through his actions, and also knows that the public would demand a nuclear response against Vietnam were the theory proven.
I was familiar with Cormac McCarthy only by reputation as the author of popular literary Westerns. I have not read any of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy" (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain). I was surprised to find that No Country for Old Men is a straightforward action book, much like James Patterson or Michael Connelly crime novels except for the Western setting. Like those books, it features an implacable killer with a distinctive MO.
McCarthy writes in a terse prose style that is intended to sound Western. I got a bit tired of everyone talking in laconic sound bites. ("It's a mess, aint it Sheriff?" "If it aint, itll do til one comes along.") The last twenty pages are intended to inject literary pretensions into the book, but I think they fall flat.
Remainder belongs in the category of books that I love but can't recommend to most other people. I'll put it on the shelf next to Alexander Theroux's An Adultery and David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, two other books in that same category. I have empirical evidence that most other people won't like it: the local newspaper's book club read Remainder, and I was the only admirer at the meeting. Too bad, because I was excited and primed to talk about its virtues.
The unnamed narrator was nearly killed in a mysterious accident. As a result of his accident, he feels “neutral” and disoriented. His physical therapy “rerouting” makes him feel that his actions take a “detour” through intellectual understanding and that they are less authentic as a result. He wants to become engaged again, to return to a time when his actions were “perfect, seamless.” When he receives a huge settlement from the company responsible for the accident, he uses the money to re-enact moments from his past life, hiring actors to run through the situations again and again.
Remainder got me thinking about big questions — What is the difference between reality and a simulation? What makes an action authentic? Can you plan to be un-self-conscious? — and always made me feel tantalizingly close to a profound insight. The precise details of the narrator’s mental state are odd, compelling, and frequently hilarious. The story itself offers several explanations for why the narrator acts like he does, each of which captures something intriguing, but none give complete understanding. Fitting the pieces together is a fascinating puzzle. It feels like all these stimulating ideas fit together, but it’s hard to say exactly how. The result, for me, is a tingling not unlike what the narrator feels at critical moments. He re-enacts those moments to explore their “intense significance.” As a reader without eight and a half million pounds, I re-enact them in my mind for the same reason.
I found the book so thought provoking that I have several pages of notes about it. You can read them by clicking here.
A pure bookstore purchase. A gothic plot (insane asylum, passionate woman, seductive madman) packaged to look like a literary novel (Vintage Contemporaries, quotes from The New York Times and Tobias Wolff). I decided to give it a try because of my positive experience when I blindly picked up a Ruth Rendell novel (The Bridesmaid) that similarly promised a "psychological thriller."
It was obvious from early on that the first-person narrator was of the unreliable variety. So while I was following the plot, I simultaneously wondered how and why the narrator might be misleading me. I came up with all kinds of wild theories, which enhanced my reading enjoyment I must admit. However, the denouement was less interesting than the most pedestrian of my ideas.
As for the plot itself, I enjoyed the first half of the story, up to when our protagonist Stella returns home from London. Up to that point it had elements of a page-turner plus what seemed to me a realistic psychology of sexual obsession. The remainder felt less plausible to me, as well as less menacing. And no payoff in the form of a true surprise ending.
One of the few true-crime books I’ve read, Fatal Vision is the story of Jeffrey MacDonald, a decorated military surgeon with a seemingly perfect marriage whose wife and daughters are brutally murdered. He is eventually convicted of the crimes, although to this day he protests his innocence. Joe McGuiness was hired by MacDonald to write about the case during the trial, expecting McGuiness to clear his name. But as the story progressed, McGuiness became convinced that MacDonald was indeed guilty.
The thing I love about this book is how it successfully puts the reader through the same experience that McGuiness and MacDonald’s in-laws had. You start by believing that MacDonald is a fine, wonderful man who loved his wife, and are horrified when he becomes a suspect. But as the evidence mounts, you start to become less sure. It wasn’t until the very end that I became pretty sure he was guilty (though I’d feel a lot better if he confessed). McGuiness presents a very nuanced psychological portrait of MacDonald.
Subtitled The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, this book is a dual biography of their life together. They never married and spent a lot of time apart, but they were always a part of each other’s lives.
I don’t really know much about Lillian Hellman—I’ve never read any of her work. I was interested in this book because of the 1977 movie Julia, starring Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman and Jason Robards as Dashiell Hammett. I remember next to nothing about the movie, but I do remember a scene between the two of them that somehow caught my fancy. Something made me think they had an interesting relationship.
They had an interesting relationship all right. By the time they met, Hammett has written all his classic books and was basically washed up. He was a drunk, slept around, and was abusive. But Lillian Hellman felt that she couldn’t write without him, so she endured his abuse and frequent betrayals. She alternated between trying to domesticate him and trying to play the game his way—drinking a lot, seducing men, and treating her closest friends badly. Whenever she left him, he would become needy and say he loved her, and she would come back.
The story has a lot of potential, but I’m annoyed by Mellon’s writing style. Rather than describing individual events, she describes what generally happened (“Throughout this period, Lillian would frequently come home from the theater to find Dash drunk”). Not very vivid. Almost every sentence includes a facile psychological conclusion about why Lily did this or Dash did that. I would much prefer a straightforward narrative about what happened. Save the conclusions for the end of the chapter, and tell me something that isn’t immediately obvious.
It’s a long book, though, befitting a long relationship. After a while I do get a good sense of what Hellman and Hammett were like, despite the lack of vivid incidents. In the early part of the book, Hammett seems to get the author’s scorn for his drinking, womanizing, and cruelty to Hellman. After WWII, though, Hellmen gets her turn as the unpleasant one, failing Hammett when he needed her and ruthlessly remaking the image of their relationship after his death.
When I read Moby-Dick back in high school or college, I found it too long (with its non-narrative chapters cataloguing whales and whale products) and its imagery overly explicit (such as when Ishmael explains that using a coffin as a life preserver is a bad omen — who would have thought?). On the other hand, many images from the story have stayed with me: the ship-like church in New Bedford, hearing Ahab pacing the deck at night before ever seeing him, and the aforementioned coffin/life preserver. For Christmas 2004 I received the beautiful Arion Press edition, and it was time to reread this daunting classic.
I enjoyed it much more this time. Perhaps I have a higher tolerance for symbolism than I used to, or am more interested in the documentary details of whaling and sailing. Whatever the case, I interpreted the book as a comprehensive attempt to come to grips with the mystery of life. To me, that's what the White Whale represented: not God or the Devil but the mystery of life and existence. The book features a hodge-podge of different styles as Ishmael tries approaching the subject from different angles, but the core of mystery remains. I'm sure this interpretation says more about me than it does about Moby-Dick: throughout the ages, critics' interpretations of the book have reflected the concerns of their time.
The basic structure of the book is an adventure story. Between the adventure chapters, and overwhelming them in terms of length, are chapters providing non-fiction details about whales and whaling. The details are presented in frankly symbolic terms, although what they symbolize is a matter of debate. There are also chapters written as scenes in a play, with stage directions and quasi-Shakespearian language. Most readers, I imagine, get frustrated with the interpolations into the action of the story. I think it's inevitable that some sections are going to get on your nerves, given the scope of the book. Personally, I didn't care for Ahab's soliloquys, and I felt that the power of the symbolism faded in the last 100 pages or so. Nonetheless, I found it a fascinating and important book that I'd be interested in discussing with others. Like Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," I find Moby-Dick very modern (that is, 20th century) in its approach.
American Savior is a comic novel in which Jesus returns and runs for President of the United States. It is not really very funny, and its political and religious satire is uninspired. I cringed when the campaign visits journalists Lenny Queen, Hurry Linneament, and Roger Popopoffolous — that's the kind of thing that passes for humor. However.... the author made the excellent decision to focus on the doubts and feelings of the narrator, who was chosen pretty much at random to be Jesus' security chief. The best feature of the book is how it slyly addresses the question of belief in this modern, cynical age. So rather than working as a satire, for me the book made me think about what a modern gospel would be like — a rather heavy burden for such a light book. (4/2009)
Breaking my general rule about not reading science fiction/fantasy, because the vivid atmospheric descriptions at the beginning of the book reminded me of Steve Erickson's Rubicon Beach. When this book first came out in paperback, I was inexplicably drawn to it: something about the cover design. I would pick it up, discover that it was sci-fi/fantasy, and put it back down. Then one day in Cody's I saw it on a rack in the "normal" smaller paperback size, and I decided to give it a try. (I like to read standard-sized paperbacks because they feel less pretentious somehow.)
Anyway, the story takes place in a city called New Crobuzon, which appears to be built on the remains of a huge prehistoric beast whose ribs still dominate the skyline. The city is home to various species living in uneasy proximity. The main characters are a human scientist and his khepri lover. A khepri has a body like a human woman and an insect head -- or, as a khepri would say, humans have a khepri body and a head like a shaved baboon.
The book has a lot to recommend it, especially in its description of the city, which is both dreamlike and realistic at the same time. I see from the author's biography that Mieville has degrees in social anthropology and economics, which may explain why he is so clear and vivid in his neighborhoods and social issues. The backdrop fits uneasily with the plot, however. Mieville's individual characters and situations are more two-dimensional, more like a well-constructed supermarket potboiler. The effect is something like an animated film where the settings are artfully rendered 3D computer animation and the characters are traditional hand-drawn 2D. Both are good, and putting them together creates some interesting effects, but there is a lingering feeling of mismatch. I imagine that fans of plot-driven fiction would get tired of the descriptive detail (especially in the first 100 pages before the plot kicks in), just as I was disappointed when the plot turned on horror-novel cliches (albeit well executed ones).
Subtitled The Tale of an American Dreamer, this book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1996. It tells the story of an entrepreneur around the turn of the century in New York, following his rise from working in his father's cigar store to becoming the builder of grand hotels—so grand, in fact, that they become metaphors for the modern world.
Martin Dressler is written in an interesting style, almost like a biography rather than a novel. The best things about the book are its descriptions of nineteenth century New York and its account of Martin's "visions," which lead him to his calling:
"What seized his innermost attention...was the sense of a great, elaborate structure, a system of order, a well-planned machine that drew all these people to itself and carried them up and down in iron cages and arranged them in private rooms. He admired the hotel as an invention, an ingenious design, a kind of idea..." (p.24)
The book has a curiously static quality about it, though. The plot moves forward, but I didn't get a sense of progress in Martin's character or in the novel's themes. Part of the reason for this quality is that the descriptions tend to be lists rather than action ("...the heavy room keys hanging on a board behind the desk clerks, the chairs grouped in twos and threes around small tables, the gentleman with gloves and a fancy walking stick..."). Another reason is the repetitiveness of Martin's progress: he tackles a new challenge, succeeds, gets restless, has a vision of how everything fits together, then repeats the process.
Martin's final project, the Grand Cosmo, is the culmination of everything he's been striving for, and is transparently a metaphor for the vast and confusing modern world. It too is described by a grand list of strange and wonderful things. Reading about it, I couldn't help but think about Borges story "The Library of Babel," which uses a library much as Millhauser uses the hotel here. Borges did it all in 10 pages.
My main irritation was Martin's relationship with his wife. The wrongness of it made me uncomfortable, and I frankly didn't understand his motivations.
This highly acclaimed novel is made up of six separate narratives, each set in a different time and place (both past and future), each written in a different prose style, and with each one broken off mid-action in the first half of the book. The second half returns to each story in reverse order, giving the entire book a structure like Russian nesting dolls.
Mitchell is clearly a talented writer. Each of the six sections is engaging, and the styles are completely different. The various stories do relate to each other, but thankfully Mitchell doesn't try to overdo the links between them as he did in Ghostwritten, which took a similar approach but ruined it with a lame supernatural resolution. My favorite narrator was Robert Frobisher, the dissolute composer from the 1930s. I really liked how his descriptions incorporated musical imagery in a way that seemed realistic for a composer.
I bought this book during our trip to the 2006 Toronto Film Festival. Browsing bookstores in Canada is slightly disorienting in a good way. The store looks exactly like a US store, but the shelves are filled with books by unfamiliar authors or with different cover designs. Lisa Moore is just such an unfamiliar author, a Canadian who has clearly received a lot of attention in Canada but none in the United States. Unlike many of the other authors in this category, her book is not a historical romance set against a backdrop of dramatic Canadian scenery. Alligator takes place in contemporary Newfoundland, and the pull quotes compare Moore to Flannery O'Connor rather than, say, Alistair Macleod.
Moore is clearly a short-story writer who has made the leap to a novel. She does a good job of describing small incidents that illuminate well-drawn characters. However, Alligator lacks the depth and complexity of a novel. I didn't feel like the characters developed at all after the first few chapters, nor did their relationships or situations take on more shading. I enjoyed the individual chapters as I read them, but didn't find myself looking for chances to get back to it after I put it down.
I read strong reviews of this short story collection when it came out in hardcover. I purchased the paperback version as soon as I saw it, at a bookstore in New Orleans.
Moore has the kind of writing style that amazes me. She can pack so much meaning and emotion into ordinary sounding sentences. All of the stories in this book feature characters who are disappointed with their lives, especially their relationships, but are doing their best to cope with the disappointment. It's a theme I find compelling, and that reminds me of Richard Ford's The Sportswriter.
Moore's stories can be heartbreaking and hilarious at the same time. Impressive sentences and paragraphs abound: the first one I laughed out loud at was on page 14: "She was trying to tease him, but it came out wrong, like a lizard with a little hat on."
This odd novel is not what I was expecting... in a good way. It is a clearly allegorical story about a shiftless black man who rents his basement to a mysterious white stranger. The plot is a simple scaffolding on which Mosley builds a book of ideas: about evil, personal responsibility, family history, and race. The narrator is a fairly unpleasant character, but in a realistic way.
I appreciated the fact that Mosley approaches his ideas obliquely, never stating a direct conclusion, although I imagine some people might find that maddening. It kept me thinking the whole time, even when the story felt a bit out of whack. The narrator's conversations with his tenant were vague at times, and I can't tell whether that was on purpose (to increase their suggestiveness) or due to vagueness on Mosley's part.
The relatively short book has rough edges and interesting but elusive ideas, which is just the recipe for bringing me back to it in the future.
"But if your hands are clean and people are still dying, then how can you say that you did better than me?" (page 159)
This novel is a solid if unspectacular film noir type of story. Its other ambition is to capture the atmosphere of San Francisco in 1948, especially the newspaper business and boxing. The narrator is a popular boxing columnist who gets mixed up in a murder (possibly) committed by a young heavyweight contender.
The most effective scenes are two situations where the narrator and another character try to figure out how much the other person knows. The boxing metaphor works well, and the conversation is engaging. Muller also adds a few scenes of unexpected tenderness and a terrific boxing match finale. The tough-guy patter is more generic, as is the overall story, and the book is a tad slow in parts.
This novel was very different, mostly in good ways. In the early going, the tone and writing style reminded me of Paul Auster: a little bit distant with a passive narrator to whom strange things begin to happen. The story gets stranger as it goes along. Up to the point where the narrator lowers himself into a dry well for several days, I found that the unusual goings-on made perfect sense in a twisted way. After that, I found individual chapters and situations intriguing, but started to lose track of the theme, which made it all seem strange without a purpose. The ending helped redeem it somewhat, but not entirely.
Some readers have complained about the fact that Murakami doesn't tie up all of the loose ends in the story. It didn't bother me: in recent years I find myself preferring stories that don't tie everything up in a neat bundle. Art should leave the core of mystery intact while seeming to bring us closer to solving it. However, I did learn that the English translation of this book is abridged from the original Japanese, which makes me wonder which loose ends are intentional and which are the result of the incomplete translation. It's good I didn't know about it until after I finished, because I probably would never have read it.
This collection of philosophical essays addresses the big questions, like death and the meaning of life. They share a common conclusion: that many of the most perennial questions, like the mind/body distinction, remain intractable because they result from viewing common subject matter from incommensurable viewpoints. For example, our sense of the absurdity of life comes from recognizing (intellectually) that everything we do means very little in the grand scheme of things while still having to take our own lives seriously.
I don't agree with everything Nagel says, but his prose is clear and thought-provoking. As a reader of academic philosophy, I know some of the technical complexities that he glosses over, by he does a fine job of presenting the essence of the issues concisely. Like Robert Nozick, Nagel is more interested in thinking about interesting questions than trying to provide answers (partly because he doesn't believe there are any).
This biography of the American painter Jackson Pollock is so much more than the story of an artist whose work probably leaves most people cold. Pollock was an abstract expressionist whose style inspires dismissive comments about modern art: "anybody could do that," "looks like a child's fingerpainting," and so on.
I didn't know anything about Pollock or about modern art when I read this book. In addition to gaining an appreciation for what Pollock was doing and why artists and art critics consider his work great and important, I learned a lot about the development of art in the 20th century. On top of that, the authors paint a vivid picture of Pollock's character and milieu, which are interesting even if you don't care about him as an artist. Pollock's family moved to Arizona when he was a boy, and I still remember the descriptions of Phoenix as a farming community. Pollock spends time in Los Angeles and New York, works under the Depression-era WPA projects, and meets famous artists along the way.
A complex, full-bodied character. A vivid historical context. Art theory and art history. The best biography I've ever read.
This novel about everyday life in Nazi-occupied France was written at the time (in 1940 and 1941) but only published in 2006. I avoided it for a while despite its phenomenal reviews because I feared a heavy Holocaust drama or melodramatic war story. The author, after all, died in Auschwitz before finishing the book. On the contrary, though, Suite Francaise is a closely observed social portrait that comments on big issues with the lightest of touches. Nemirovsky has perfect control over the tone and mood, both of which are surprisingly delicate given the subject matter. The characters, social milieu, and mise-en-scene reminded me of Tolstoy. The natural descriptions blended perfectly with the insightful human interactions. The only shortcoming — possibly a reflection of its being unfinished — is the lack of a strong foreground narrative. It's almost like Anna Karenina with the title character's story removed.
This book was the October 1999 selection of the Times book club. I decided to give it a try. Here's the review I submitted:
On page 261, Miss Delbo warns me, "It is simpleminded arrogance to think, I wish she or he would have— You have only what is right in front of you to judge. Every brushstroke is the artist's opinion about existence." In that case, I have to conclude that Howard Norman, while obviously a talented writer, has a simplistic opinion about existence. The Museum Guard has interesting ideas, but they happen in the margins. The central story of Imogen Linny's transformation is melodramatic hokum.
Norman had promising material, but he rarely develops it to the point where he provides any insights. Imogen feels unconnected to the world and the flow of history, so she gradually takes on an identity that connects her both to art and to the events unfolding in Europe. Good start, but we don't learn anything about the nature of personal identity once she "becomes" the Jewess.
When I read a novel whose setting is a different time and place, I want to get a sense of that time and place, and I want the setting to matter. Does it matter that the characters live in Halifax? Couldn't they equally well live in Saskatoon or Rhode Island? I never got a feel for the place.
The time matters, of course, because Norman uses the Holocaust as a key plot device. Setting the novel during World War II seems like a lazy choice to me, giving the author an all-purpose "evil threat" without requiring any development of suspense. Again, I didn't feel like I learned anything about the Holocaust or people's reaction to it.
My favorite character was Uncle Edward. I felt like he had something to teach
me. I am still intrigued by his views on personal faults:
"I've worked to near-exhaustion at keeping my flaws front and center every minute
of my own life. In order not to forgive myself." (page 85)
"[Miss Delbo] detects my flaws…And it unnerves her….that she's attracted to
my flaws. She's with perfection too much; really, she desires the opposite.
I'm a temptation." (page 119)
There were fascinating moments throughout the novel---for example, DeFoe's great allegorical description of the painting Sunday Flower Market---but they consistently fell by the wayside in favor of the less interesting story. I wish Norman would have- Ahhh, but that's simpleminded arrogance on my part.
Kathleen Norris is a poet who has spent a few years living in a Benedictine monastery. The book is partly her diary, partly a description of various aspects of monastic life, and partly a collection of essays on religion and creativity. I picked it up because it promised to talk about how a contemplative, religious life is relevant to our lives today.
I was disappointed in the first few chapters, which were mostly a diary of her stay. Not coming from a religious background, I didn’t connect with her feelings about the readings she was hearing in the daily liturgy. Once I got into the book, though, I’ve found a lot of interesting ideas in the essays, mostly in the connections she makes between religious practice, creativity, and the struggles we face every day.
In the end, I’d say that the book had some interesting thoughts and ideas in it, and had a very relaxing tone and pace, but there was too much of it that didn’t connect with me.
The philosopher Robert Nozick is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which provides a philosophical (as opposed to political) argument for libertarianism. I have also read his book for a more general audience, The Examined Life. Nozick is not the most rigorous of philosophers, but his approach of raising questions and suggesting directions can be stimulating.
I was disappointed with Invariances however. When I was in graduate school, my advisor once proclaimed that I had misunderstood, or at least seriously oversimplified, the arguments of the position I was arguing against. In the first chapter of Invariances, I was tempted on several occasions to level the same charge against Nozick, even though I knew better than to believe he was unaware of the arguments. The chapter was disappointing because he was arguing the opposite position from mine, but did not offer compelling arguments. Too often he simply said that either the absolutist or relativist position was possible given present knowledge, and that he found the relativist position “implausible.” I think it is an interesting and important point to acknowledge that philosophical positions often come down to preferences, but I felt like he did not offer enough of a defense for his. And while I appreciate Nozick’s willingness to suggest ideas and approaches rather than provide proofs, I think he can take a bit too long to get to his point.
I also started to feel that the position he was arguing had very little pragmatic application. He wants to believe that there is a single truth function that applies across the board. Suppose that’s true. What difference does it make if the function is the same but its result when applied in different contexts is a different truth value? I started to feel like the idea of “truth” is like the idea of “God”: an extrapolation of an intrinsic value from an instrumental idea.
The book did contain some interesting ideas:
This last idea is followed by my favorite quote from the book, which feels representative of Nozick’s style: “I feel that at best I am groping toward an insight here; I would be far more comfortable if I understood my own proposal more clearly.”
Another clever quip is on page 136. Nozick argues that there are no “necessary” truths, and that those we consider necessary are simply those we can’t imagine being different. It is a failure of imagination. He says, “Lack of invention is the mother of necessity.”
Here are a couple of other interesting passages:
Comedy, when it does not strike you funny, feels curiously flat. You can see the jokes and why they might be funny, but the timing or something seems off. The same goes for surrealism of the sort in this book. When it works, like it did for me in Remainder and Cosmos, there's nothing better. When it doesn't, like it didn't in The Third Policeman, it seems interminable.
I picked up this novel because I remembered being impressed by Ondaatje's ability to create an atmosphere in The English Patient. (I have also enjoyed what little of his poetry I have read.) Anil's Ghost takes place in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje's birthplace, and I hoped to get a feel for that place. As I read, however, I was reminded of the things I didn't care for in The English Patient. In fact, the story evolves into a sort of English Patient II in that Ondaatje contrives to isolate three "damaged" characters in an abandoned villa during a war.
The early chapters are comparatively plot driven. Anil, a Sri Lankan woman who left fiften years before to study forensic anthropology, returns to Sri Lanka as part of an international human rights investigation into an organized campaign of political murders. She finds the skeleton of a recently killed man and sets out to determine his identity even though she faces political pressure not to. (The government likely had him killed.) By the middle of the book, though, the plot takes a back seat to the characters' noble and romantic attempts to come to terms with their pasts. While individual scenes are nicely done, the overall effect is of a soporific cloud. At the end, the plot returns, but it is a simplistic story that doesn't really hold together. And the story could have taken place anywhere; I learned and felt nothing about Sri Lanka.
W.V.O. Quine (1908-2000) was one of the titans of late-20th century philosophy. His influence is felt everywhere, in American philosophy especially, although his single-minded focus on a small set of technical issues (in mathematical logic and the philosophy of science) prevented him from reaching a general audience.
Quine's paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" was important to my intellectual development, second only to Hilary Putnam's "The Meaning of 'Meaning'" in spurring my interest in the philosophy of language and science. Like Putnam, he is a lively writer who argues his positions clearly and entertainingly. In his book Word and Object, for example, he characterizes our experience of the outside world as consisting solely of "surface irritations." When I disagree with his conclusions, I feel compelled to figure out why, because his arguments sound right. Invariably, he has distilled the issues down to their esssence. I think his narrow focus is one of his greatest virtues.
Orenstein does a good job of showing how Quine's work on various topics fits into a consistent worldview. The foundational issue for Quine is ontology, or as the title of a famous paper puts it, "On What There Is." He argues that the idea of the "meaning" of words is incoherent, which is a conclusion I don't want to accept. Nonetheless, Quine clearly identifies the questions that any theory of meaning must answer.
While this book provides a clear and concise overview of Quine's thought, it does require a background in the controversies that occupy contemporary analytic philosophy. Furthermore, it doesn't provide as much context as I'd like about how Quine differs from other philosophers. If I ever get back to thinking/writing seriously on the subject of meaning, I will certainly come back to this book and to Quine.
This book describes the history of the world's languages or, more accurately, of the world's language communities. It investigates how languages spread or contract, how some languages become global lingua francas while others do not. For example, the British Empire spread English across its breadth, but few former Dutch colonies speak Dutch. Why is that? Similarly, Germanic tribes conquered most of Europe during the latter days of the Roman Empire, but the countries in southern Europe speak Romance languages, not Germanic ones.
The subject matter of the book is unique and intriguing, but its organization was rambling and its layout confusing. Like many academic authors, Dr Ostler needs an editor.
The narrator of this novel, a twenty-five-year-old Aramaic scholar in Paris, determines to become stupid after discovering that intelligence is the cause of his misery. I bought this short book on the strength of this premise, but I was disappointed. The first chapters are strong, as he describes the reasons he came to his conclusion and decides to become an alcoholic by first reading every book he can find on the subject. Once he starts taking the drug Happyzac, though, the story lost my interest.
I rarely purchase hardcover novels, but the reviews led me to grab this one from the New Releases table. Pamuk is a Turkish author. In Snow, a writer visits a remote Turkish village where several girls have committed suicide after being forbidden to wear head scarves in school. The reviews praised the book for its nuanced treatment of the conflict between secularism and fundamentalism, for its presentation of modern Turkey, and for its writing style, which was compared to "Kafka, Borges, García Márquez, DeLillo and Auster, with the Hammett-and-Chandler noir thriller thrown in for good measure." Any one of these features would make me interested in reading it; the hope of all three prevented me from waiting for the paperback.
I admired the book quite a bit and enjoyed it only slightly less so. The writing style reminded me most of Paul Auster. The story had the sound of a parable, with characters representing viewpoints rather than being fully fleshed out, but it was more complex and thoughtful than this description makes it sound. It kept me thinking and interested in what would happen next, but rarely managed to involve me on an emotional level. Nonetheless, I could imagine coming back to it again.
A man's wife dies under mysterious circumstances: she fell from a backyard tree, and earlier that day she had rearranged the books on their bookshelves and cooked a steak for their dog, who was the only witness. The man tries to teach the dog to talk, so that it can explain to him what happened. Despite this wacky premise, the novel tries to be realistic in its portrait of a marriage.
After a compelling introductory chapter, I found the next 100 pages kind of dull. The story picks up steam again when he meets an underground group of "canine linguists," but that is also when it becomes less believable. The book's fatal flaw is that the characters never come alive. A major theme of the book is how unknowable other people (and dogs) are, which is a noble theme that demands more complex characters than Paul and Lexy and Lorelei (the Rhodesian Ridgeback). The author Parkhurst had some good ideas, but they are not fleshed out. Disappointing.
George Pelecanos is a critically acclaimed writer whose crime novels take place in Washington D.C. He also wrote several episodes of the great HBO show The Wire. Like The Wire, his books create meaningful characters on both sides of the law. The Sweet Forever uses a relatively minor incident in the summer of 1986 (a drug dealer trying to recover some stolen money) as a springboard for describing a complex community of characters.
I had been meaning to read something of Pelecanos' for a while, but I hestitated because, like the majority of crime novels, his books feature recurring characters. I don't like series, because I'm never sure where to start. The first one? The latest one? The consensus "best" one? And indeed, I ocassionally came across sentences like this one from page 93: "The last time Karras had seen the Stephanos kid was Bicentennial weekend, right after that bad shit had gone down with Wilton Cooper and the others."
On the plus side, the story is driven by character and place rather than by convoluted plot mechanics. Pelecanos works a little too hard sometimes to fit in period details ("Donna's Susanna Hoffs-style haircut... the medium length cut from the cover of the All Over the Place album, not the redone Hoffs look off the new LP"..). However, he conveys character very economically and the story feels perfectly realistic.
The prose and the plot construction in The Night Gardener match the formula for a standard police procedural. However, there are a few ways that you can tell it was written by George Pelecanos rather than Michael Connelly or Jonathan Kellerman: the story takes place in Washington D.C., characters frequently refer to current pop songs, and the police work is always realistic. A connoisseur of crime dramas might complain about a lack of plot twists or amazing deductions, but in my opinion the strong characters more than compensate. The Ramone family is particularly well drawn; Pelecanos conveys some fairly complex family dynamics without straying too far from the main plot.
The Twenty-One Balloons tells the story of a retired school teacher and inventor who, in 1883, builds a balloon to fly across the Pacific. He ends up landing on the island of Krakatoa, which turns out to be inhabited by twenty families whose names are simply A through T. Each family lives in a fantastic house built in the style of a country whose name starts with the same letter (such as Mr. F and his French palace). The Krakatoans occupy their time by inventing things like a spinning balloon merry-go-round (the "airy-go-round"), a bed you never have to make, and electric living room furniture.
I read The Twenty-One Balloons when I was a kid, and certain details from it have stayed lodged in my mind ever since. It's easy to see why this book would appeal to me. On top of the adventure, it describes a bunch of inventions of the sort that make perfect sense to a kid. I love Professor Sherman's balloon house.
I was underwhelmed by this National Book Award winner from 1961. I had heard great things about it over the years. It was very well written for sure, but it never involved me in its story. The best thing about it was the character of Kate, the emotionally fragile cousin. I believed in her more than any other similar character in literature.
This big, ambitious novel borrows its title from a famous book of literary criticism. It uses seven narrators to tell the story of how Simon briefly abducts his former girlfriend's son and of the consequences of this act. Why did Simon abduct the kid? Each narrator has his or her own take on the matter; for a while, each new narrator makes you less sure about Simon's motivations. By the end, you see that the author has really big ideas on his mind, about the human condition, about self-understanding, and about the effect of one generation on the next.
The story is carefully constructed and rather, um, cerebral. The book engaged me intellectually but not really emotionally. The main barrier to empathy is that the various narrators all speak with the same detached, well-educated voice. Even the uneducated characters use words like "risible." I also felt that too many of the narrators — and, by extension, the author — gave the character of Simon a free pass; that is, they found him uniquely admirable in a way that was inconsistent with his overbearing nature.
The subject matter of this book — the unfulfilled lives of young suburban wives and husbands — marks it as literary fiction, while the writing style more closely matches the concise transparency of a supermarket thriller. It was an enjoyable, quick read. The main characters were well drawn, with surprising little touches. (For example, Todd feels proud of the fact that he is having an affair with a woman less attractive than his wife: "It made him feel like he'd grown up a little, expanded his vision, like he'd traveled to a faraway place or learned to appreciate an exotic food.") A few of the minor characters were two-dimensional, a few plot points too obvious, but overall the story felt realistic. I really liked the ending, where Sarah giggles in response to the question of what she's doing on the playground at night.
In my senior year of college, on the advice of my honors advisor, I read a philosophical essay that changed my life: “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” by Hilary Putnam.
In the essay, Putnam sets out to show that the meanings of words can’t possibly be concepts in the minds of a language’s speakers: “Cut the pie any way you like, ‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head!”. For a person like myself who believes that language provides a mirror of the mind, Putnam’s conclusion was unacceptable: what do you mean we can’t know the meaning of the words we use?. But damned if his arguments weren’t convincing. I thought about this essay a lot, finding ways to argue against its conclusions. These musings led me to an ever-increasing interest in the philosophy of language, to a doomed dissertation topic, and to my current (brilliant) views about meaning.
Apparently I wasn’t alone in being fascinated by the essay. The Twin Earth Chronicles is a collection of responses to the issues raised in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’.” The title refers to a “thought experiment” from Putnam’s essay. He asks readers to imagine a world called Twin Earth, which is identical to our Earth in every way except one: on Twin Earth, the chemical composition of water is not H2O but XYZ. All its other properties are the same as water. In Putnam’s view, when I use the word “water” and my Doppelganger on Twin Earth uses the word “water,” we mean different things because the actual object referred to is different. We’re in the exact same mental state, but we’re referring to different things; since the meaning of a word is supposed to determine what objects it refers to, the meaning can’t be identical to the mental state.
I should say that Putnam’s essay was as entertaining as it was provocative. In addition to the Twin Earth examples, he asks us to consider situations where we discover that pencils are (and have always been) complex living organisms or that cats are really robots remotely controlled from Mars. It’s fun to think about these scenarios even independently of the issues they illustrate. (Fun for me, anyway. I can’t seem to get Evelyn to find them as diverting as I do.)
The Twin Earth idea raises a number of interesting questions, extending beyond the original issues Putnam was investigating. This book includes essays about language, the mind, our capacity for self-knowledge, and the nature of reality.
Because I have fairly well thought-out views on the issues—views I worked out entirely on my own—I had a mixed reaction to the responses from professional philosophers. Many of them made the same points against Putnam's argument as I would. On the one hand, it made me feel good about independently coming to the same conclusions as the professionals; on the other hand, it made those conclusions seem less insightful than I'd like them to be. Pretty much every element of my personally developed theory of meaning appears somewhere in this book. On the plus side, though, no one puts the pieces together the way I do, so I still have some promise as a philosopher.
Arthur Phillips' first two novels, Prague and The Egyptologist, are quite different in plot and tone, but I find that they share the same virtues and shortcomings. Prague was an overpraised account of young Americans living in Budapest but believing that they should be in Prague; that's where the real action was. I found the theme intriguing and the young callow characters well drawn, but the story was disappointing and static. The Egyptologist promised to be a change of pace: a rollicking, comic, plot-driven adventure. And indeed it was. However, Phillips still shows no feel for narrative drive.
The Egyptologist tells the story of an explorer named Ralph Trilipush who believes he knows the location of the tomb of a possibly fictional ancient Egyptian king. From the start he is clearly delusional about his prospects, and the scope of his delusions grows as the book progresses. In a parallel story, an Australian detective tracks a young man who disappeared in Egypt at the end of World War I. I guessed the link between these stories very early, which may have influenced my impression that the author took far too long to move the plot forward. Phillips introduces interesting ideas amidst the comedy, but then he belabors the point. For example, Trilipush "discovers" a series of hieroglyphs describing the reign of King Atum-hadu, and he interprets them in a way that clearly parallels his own life. Interesting and funny, but Phillips/Trilipush goes on for well over a dozen of them; by the fifth the point is made and the joy is lost.
I believe this could have been a great book with a good editor to remove about 100 or 150 pages.
Although I was annoyed by the closed-mindedness evident in Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher, it did make me want to read more by his favorite 20th-century philosopher, Karl Popper. I fall into a category that Magee claims is a big one: people who know about Popper's work but have never read him.
Popper is best known for his principle of falsifiability. He says that scientific theories can never be proven correct, they can only be proven incorrect (falsified). If a theory cannot possibly be falsified by any evidence—such as the theory that God exists, for example—then it is not a scientific theory. Scientific experimentation does not seek to prove a theory, but to put it to the most rigorous tests possible to try to disprove it. Over time, our understanding comes to more and more approximate the real truth—although we can never know that for sure.
For a summary of what I learned and found most interesting in Karl Popper's philosophy, click here. I found Popper's writing style clear enough, but a bit sloppy and long-winded. He was far easier to read than the so-called Continental philosophers, but seemed to lack the rigor of most analytic philosophers or the flair of someone like Schopenhauer or even Quine.
My parents gave my an autographed copy of this courtroom drama for Christmas. The author is a lawyer in Sacramento, and the story takes place there.
The plot is not as fast-paced or convoluted as these types of thrillers often are. For what it lacks in intrigue it makes up for in realism. I'm sure many would become impatient with the mechanics of how our hero gets involved with the case — it turns on technicalities about the type of petition filed by the Diocese of Sacramento — but to me it had the ring of truth. Poswall definitely knows his way around the courts. The final surprise at the end of the book undermines the versimilitude. (1/2009)
After a near-fatal car accident, Mark Schluter develops Capgras syndrome. He believes that his sister Karin is an imposter, and that his dog and his house have been replaced with high-quality replicas. These beliefs lead inevitably to paranoia: who is going to all of this trouble and why?
Based on this plot description, you may expect The Echo Maker to be a psychological thriller. It is not. Rather, it is a careful character study that explores some big questions: What makes us who we are? What draws us to other people? Do we all have a kind of Capgras syndrome with respect to the world around us? Karin and Mark are well-drawn characters, and the Nebraska setting is vivid.
Many readers will find the story too slow, but I found the (mundane) characters and the (quiet) exploration of the themes fascinating and illuminating... up until the last fifty pages or so, when the prose heats up and the characters lose their credibility. Still, I will read this book again for the thoughts it lead me through before it veered off the road. I can imagine my own alternate ending. I will also read other books by Richard Powers.
The Wild Trees is a book about an adventure sport disguised as a book about science. The protagonists are people whose interest in botany seems to follow from their desire to climb really tall trees rather than vice versa. The science in the book could easily fit in a magazine article, with the bulk of the story describing the lives of the eccentric people who discover and climb trees over 350 feet tall. With that said, it is interesting to learn about the amazing ecosystem that thrives high above the forect floor: plants, animals, water, caves, all thirty stories above the ground. The descriptions of sleeping in the swaying trees are also attractive.(4/2009)
Clockers is the story of a young man living in a housing project in New Jersey. He is basically a good-hearted boy, although he is a small-time drug dealer whose main father figure is the local drug lord. He starts to question his life and his values when two things happen: an even younger boy starts looking up to him as a role model, and his straight-laced "good" brother is accused of a senseless murder.
Clockers paints an extremely vivid picture of the fictional town of Dempsy, New Jersey, of the pressures on young black men growing up in the projects, and of the relationships that grow up in a lower class neighborhood. Price conveys this picture effortlessly as part of the police drama that moves the story forward.
I read Richard Price's novel Clockers several years ago, and I find that my ideas about what it's like to live in or around a housing project are based in large measure on images I formed reading that book. In fact, it's a book that has gotten better in my memory as time has gone on; when I first read it, I remember feeling that parts of the plot where a bit too simple.
Freedomland takes place in the same fictional New Jersey town as Clockers: Dempsy. The story begins with a dazed women walking through the projects to the emergency room, claiming that she was carjacked and that her 4-year old son was in the car. Is she telling the truth? Will the police pressure to solve the case cause a riot in the projects? It is a thriller with bigger issues on its mind.
On the surface Price's writing style and plotting aren't much different from many popular police-story novelists. However, his characters are far more complex and realistic, and his situations play themselves out in a more natural, less sensationalistic way. Addicts of grocery-store fiction will likely find his story too slow-moving and the "mystery" too obvious.
There are a couple of scenes in Freedomland that I especially liked, each of which was peripheral to the main story. The first was an old boyfriend's description of Brenda Martin (the victim) visiting him for the weekend, then acting very strangely toward her son at the railway station (p 332 - 336). The second is when Lorenzo (the detective on the case) visits a woman's boyfriend to tell him to stop hitting her (p 399 - 410). In this latter scene, the boyfriend becomes a full-bodied character in an extremely short time. I was touched by the way he seemed stunned by his girlfriend's report ("That's.... Oh wow...") and how tears ran down his face "as if disconnected to the face, the voice." The complexity of the situation feels real.
The demonstration that follows the resolution of the case felt anti-climatic, but that was part of the point. It felt anti-climatic to the characters.
The third in Price's Dempsy trilogy (following Clockers and Freedomland), Samaritan is about a guy who returns to his old neighborhood to try to help and ends up getting beaten almost to death for it. He refuses to say who assaulted him, and the detective on the case is a childhood friend of his. It is more a character study than a thriller. I continue to be amazed by Price's ability to write realistic dialogue scenes, although this one doesn't show off his ability to describe a place as well as the previous two. Many readers will find the story slow-going, but I relished the conversations, the characters, and the sociological point hidden not too deeply.
The first half of this novel, set in the gentrifying Lower East Side of Manhattan, is flat-out five-star excellent. Price is able to paint a portrait of the neighborhood, the people in it, and the tensions between them almost entirely through dialogue. It is very much like The Wire, a series that Price wrote for and even appeared in (leading a reading group in the prison library in season 2). Some fans of detective fiction may find it too slow or not convoluted enough, but fans of realism will be impressed.
The second half sags a bit under the burden of its realism. The resolution of the story is realistically anti-climactic. (3/2009)
V.S. Pritchett is one of those well-respected British authors from the last generation who never made an impression here in America. He is known for his work in a variety of genres, especially travel writing, literary reviews, and short stories. This collection includes samples of his best work in all these areas. The title refers to the fact that Pritchett was born in 1900 and died in 1997, making his life almost exactly match the twentieth century.
Pritchett has the kind of writing style that seems artless and effortless, but which paints a vivid picture. If I were trying to learn the secret to great writing, I would study Pritchett's writing to try to figure out how he does it.
Although Pritchett is most well regarded for his short stories, I enjoyed his non-fiction the best, especially his autobiography. The characters of his family and the atmosphere of London in the early part of the century will remain with me the longest. My favorite character was Pritchett's uncle, a farmer who loved to bike and had a passion for hand-worked carpentry; he visits the cathedral and engages the minister in a conversation about the contruction of the pews.
The travel writing was very good too. In addition to his ability to describe a place, Pritchett is a master of the the brief generalization that rings true. He is able to give what feels like authentic insights into the people. The same insightfulness seems to be true of his literary reviews, but unfortunately I haven't read most of the literature he reviews in this book.
Because of their shared initials and their common influence on Paul Theroux, I've always mixed Pritchett up with V.S. Naipaul. Now that I've read this book, I should be able to keep them straight. (I've already read, and loved, Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas.)
For some inexplicable reason, when I go on vacation I like to read big sprawling 19th century novels, the kind of book Henry James called "loose baggy monsters." With a couple of trips in August 1999, I decided to tackle one of the loosest, baggiest monsters, Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (sometimes translated Remembrance of Things Past, but in Modern Library edition I'm reading, In Search of Lost Time). Swann's Way is the first of several volumes, and it alone is over 600 pages. Okay, the novel was written in the early 20th century, but it has a 19th century feeling to it.
I decided to tackle this classic because I like the packaging for the new Modern Library paperbacks. The books are a nice size (standard rather than trade), there's a painting by John Singer Sargent on the cover of Swann's Way, and the Modern Library used the newest and reputedly most accurate translation.
I can appreciate the points made by both critics and admirers of Proust. There's no question that his discursive long-winded writing style is easy to parody (like Faulkner's and Herman Hesse's are), and his scenes with dialogue are amazingly uninspired. However, he does an amazing job of capturing the "stream of consciousness" without resorting to stylistic tricks that ultimately distance the reader from the material (as, for example, Joyce does).
The true subject of the novel, as the title In Search of Lost Time suggests, is how our experience of every moment is intimately tied up in our experiences from the past. To truly understand what a person is feeling, you also have to understand what he or she felt in related situations in the past. This passage from page 147 describes a spatial version of what Proust is getting at with respect to time:
"Each time I've been to Jouy I've seen a bit of canal in one place, and then I've turned a corner and seen another, but when I saw the second I could no longer see the first. I tried to put them together in my mind's eye; it was no good. But from the top of Saint-Hillaire it's quite another matter—a regular network in which the place is enclosed. Only you can't see the water... To get it all quite perfect, you would have to be in both places at once; up at the top of the steeple of Saint-Hillaire and down there at Jouy-le-Vicomte."
In order to get the feeling of an event quite perfect, you have to be in both the past and the present at once. A surprisingly philosophical theme, I think, for a book whose form is otherwise non-modern.
I enjoyed the first couple of sections, covering the narrator's childhood reminiscences, more than I did the sections dealing with Swann's obsessive love for Odette. I found the setting and vivid descriptions more satisfying than the purely psychological landscape of Swann. The section Swann in Love, with Swann obsessing over the meaning of everything Odette does, reminded me of Alexander Theroux's novel, An Adultery, a book I loved but would be reluctant to recommend to anyone.
Hilary Putnam is the philosopher who got me started reading academic analytic philosophy. This book is a very disappointing set of lectures from 2002 in which Putnam argues that ethical judgments can be "true" without requiring us to commit to a Platonic metaphysics where "the Good" is an abstract object. One of the things I have always liked about Putnam is his precision and his clear examples, neither of which is in evidence in this volume. He waves his hands in the direction of the arguments he wants to make, often referring us explicitly to some other book. If I wasn't already familiar with his philosophy, I would have been completely lost. Instead, I was just completely bored. Luckily the book was short.
Given my reading habits, it seems like I would have read this book a long time ago, doesn't it? It is widely considered one of the greatest modern novels. I did start it once, but as the cover says, Gravity's Rainbow is "large, complex, funny, perplexing, daring, and weird." You've got to be in an ambitious frame of mind to tackle it. What better time than the long winter nights right after I've accepted a promotion at work?
Gravity's Rainbow takes place during the last year of World War II. British Intelligence discovers that "a map of the city pinpointing the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, U.S. Army, corresponds identically to a map showing the V-2 [rocket bomb] impact sites." Based on this discovery, they send Slothrop to Europe in an attempt to capture a V-2 rocket. Slothrop eludes their grasp, and following V-E day travels across Europe trying to locate a specific rocket—the last one fired—which seems to have a tie to something in his past. Several other groups are also on the trail of Rocket 00000 for their own purposes.
No question that the book is ambitious, with themes ranging from the evil of multinational corporations to Western civilization's love affair with death. It is also dense with allusions and references to everything from popular music to obscure local details. The book is largely successful at fitting all of these pieces into a coherent whole, and I found some of the subplots intriguing—especially the one related to the development of plastics and all the offshoots from that. But, oh man, do I find Pynchon's writing style annoying! Purposely obscure, self-consciously clever, with unexpected shifts in tone, I felt that the style detracted from the positives rather than enhancing them. I felt like I was trying to see a great painting through the gaps in an ugly quilt thrown over top of it. In the end, there were scenes and images that stayed with me—small pieces in the mosaic—but the overall book was more trouble than it was worth.
Gravity's Rainbow is sui generis. The closest comparisons I can make are Joyce's Ulysses and Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat: dense narratives with complex organizational schemes that seem more important than the story or the themes, designed to generate doctoral dissertations rather than to entertain. I also feel like Gravity's Rainbow was an important influence on Don DeLillo, especially in Underworld.
While reading, I had on hand A Gravity's Rainbow Companion, which provides annotations for Pynchon's many allusions and obscure historical references. It was helpful, although it concentrates more on the specific details than on the deeper meanings. I would have liked the book to also include some critical essays in the manner of a Norton Critical Edition.
This early novel of Jonathan Raban's reminded me of Paul Theroux's early books. The setting (post-colonial Africa and England), the theme (displacement and wanderlust), and satirical tone were all similar to Theroux, although Raban is more low-key. I read Raban's Coasting not long before, so I could also identify some of the true-life incidents that inspired the story. For example, I recognized Raban's father and their family trips to look at fossils.
I enjoyed most of the book, but did not care for the long chapter where people from his past visited him (spectrally) on his boat. That chapter felt too contrived. The ending seemed inconclusive at first, but I found it satisfying when I thought about a bit more.
I discovered Jonathan Raban a few years ago when I picked up his book Passage to Juneau, which told a story of his trip up the Inside Passage. I read it because of my obsession with the Inside Passage, and enjoyed it even more than I expected to. It's not a travel book so much as a meditation on a place. Raban is able to combine historical narrative, natural history, and personal observation in a seamless way that made it all interesting. His descriptions are unflashy but vivid. He's the kind of guy who tells you what books he has with him on his trip.
Coasting recounts Raban's sailing trip around his native England. It has many of the same virtues as Passage to Juneau: concise but expressive descriptions, seamless transitions from personal to historical to sociological insights, and an understated way of illustrating his conclusions. His descriptions of sailing are quite nice, especially because he avoids the specialized vocabulary. However, Coasting does feel more like a travel book than Passage to Juneau did; a cameo appearance by Paul Theroux doesn't help in that regard.
This novel takes place in Seattle in 1999. Tom is an expatriate Englishman of Hungarian heritage who teaches literature at the University of Washington and delivers short essays on "All Things Considered." His wife, who works at a dot-com startup, moves out because she is frustrated by Tom's lack of engagement. Later in the book, Tom becomes a suspect in a missing child case because he doesn't pay attention to the world around him.
Raban is very good at capturing the small moments and thoughts of average people. There is something ineffable about his writing style that I really like: it is clear and vivid without being showy. I found Tom to be a convincing character in ways that are more subtle than most authors attempt. However, Raban has a casual way with plotting that ends up making the book unfulfilling. Based on the two novels of his I have read, he tends to END his books in medias res.
One minor thing that was disproportionally annoying to me was the text font. The capital E looked like a backwards 3. It's surprising how many capital Es you find when they jump out from the page.
This book is a collection of essays by contemporary American philosophers, many of whom I had read before (such as Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Stanley Cavell, Thomas Kuhn, Ian Hacking) and several of whom I had not. I picked this collection because it purported to place these disparate philosophers in a context, showing how their work is a reaction to the "failure" of analytic philosophy.
Analytic philosophy is (or was, depending on your definition of it) the dominant philosophy in English-speaking countries in this century. It is (or was) an attempt to provide a firm foundation for rationality and science through the use of technical formal logic and analysis. In the end, it was only able to show that no infallible foundation was possible. As the introductory essay by John Rajchman says, "The negative accomplishment [of analytic philosophy] was to show in great technical detail that the problem of 'how words hook onto the world' does not admit of a solution, and that rationality in science or in ethics does not consist in the possession of a formal method for appraisal and adjudication."
Although the book includes a few interesting essays, I found most of it to be second-rate. Part of the problem is that most of the essays are intended as overviews rather than original contributions, and they fall prey to the abstractness and generality that is common in overviews. I found my eyes glazing over too many times.
The exception, and the one essay that I am sure to return to, is Donald Davidson's "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme." Not coincidentally, this essay is the only one that I have seen references to in the past, including in Rochard Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism, which I just recently finished. Davidson argues that we cannot coherently talk about different conceptual schemes that "carve up the world" differently, because there can be no scheme-independent point of reference (that is, no world) for the schemes to carve up differently. If two conceptualizations share enough to be inter-translatable, then they are not different schemes in any interesting sense; if they do not share enough to be inter-translatable, then we, from the point of view of our scheme, would not recognize the other as a conceptual scheme. Davidson makes subtle points, some of which I disagree with and will chew on for years to come.
I also enjoyed Thomas Kuhn's paper, although it was more of a history of science than philosophy. Cornel West's afterward gave a nice, brief, clear summary of how neo-pragmatism arose in the United States.
I have always wanted to learn what Ayn Rand was all about. I know she's a controversial figure who developed an idiosyncratic philosophy and expressed it not-so-subtlely through her fictional characters. I know that many people find her philosophy to be odious and fascistic in its emphasis on individualism, and that others find her brilliant. I know that her books are loooong, and I suspect them of having an essayistic style, with characters giving speeches all the time like in Aldous Huxley novels. So where to start? A one-volume selection, of course. The Ayn Rand Reader contains excerpts from all her novels, plus supporting material from her non-fiction writing.
My conclusion is that she's a mediocre writer who steadfastly promotes her unoriginal ideas as if they were revolutionary. Her fiction reads like a romance novel, albeit with an interesting twist provided by her strange moral worldview. I think she is right to say that selfishness is not necessarily a bad thing—as she says, denouncing it establishes "the beneficiary of an action [as] the only criterion of moral value" (p. 80). However, she makes the same mistake by denouncing altruism, which is also defined by its beneficiary not its content. She argues against it using a very lame caricature of the altruistic view, one that I'm sure no one actually holds. (Check out her complete misunderstanding of Kant starting on page 300.) In my opinion, her fictional "ideal men" don't help her case either, because they show the absolute isolationism required by her moral views.
She insists that her political philosophy is vitally different from libertarianism and that her ontology differs from Platonic essentialism, but I don't see how. She has the annoying and self-congratulatory habit of quoting no one but herself; she never shows that she had read any other philosophers, so she never talks about how her views diverge from them. The basics of Objectivism seem pretty simplistic to me.
King of the World recounts the events surrounding Muhammad Ali's two fights with Sonny Liston in 1964 and 1965. In addition to just telling the story, Remnick tries to show how Ali transformed "America's racial politics, its popular culture, and its notions of heroism."
It's an interesting story for sure, and Ali is a colorful character. However, Remnick's writing style felt too much like a magazine article, giving me the impression of superficiality. If I think about it, he was able to introduce a lot of ideas in a relatively short book, but I felt like some of the ideas could have been developed more deeply.
As its subtitle explains, this book explores music during the period "Postpunk 1978-1984." Those years happens to coincide with my high school and college years, which means that it was the time I cared most about popular music. However, this book is written from a British perspective, and so talked about a lot of bands I knew of but didn't really know.
Reynolds sees this period as a "golden age" for music. The energy and do-it-yourself spirit of punk (which came alive in 1977) inspired more ambitious and intellectual artists as well.
"The vanguard that came to be known as postpunk... saw 1977 not as a return to raw rock 'n' roll but as a chance to make a break with tradition... These postpunk years from 1978 to 1984 saw the systematic ransacking of twentieth-century modernist art and literature. The entire postpunk period looks like an attempt to replay virtually every major modernist theme and technique via the medium of pop music." (pages 1-2)
Reynolds does a very good job with both the musical and social sides of his project. He is able to relate musical trends and social trends in a way similar to Greil Marcus but with much cleaner, less academic, prose. For example, he talks about how postpunk artists purged (black) American influences from their music:
The sound was as skinny as the ties worn by so many New Wave bands, consisting of choppy rhythm guitar (with hardly any lead playing), fast tempos, and often keyboards. The songs often had stop-start structures and melody lines that were angular and jumpy rather than gently curving... As part of its revolt against the 'Old Wave', New Wave purged many of the black-music-derived properties — a relaxed jamming feel, swing, bluesy note bending — that innately juiced rock music in the sixties and early seventies. Devoid of raspy blues grit or rock'n'roll drawl, New Wave vocals tended to be high pitched, geeky, and suburban... [With early Talking Heads,] you could hear the urge to get down, but checked and frustrated by an uptight WASPishness. (160)
This musical style reinforces a social fact about the bands: "The near absence of black musicians, punk's penchant for using racist language (all part of its antiliberal, we-hate-everybody-equally attitude), and the perilous ambiguity of punk's flirtation with Nazi imagery" (page 153) gave rise to a perceived racism among the mostly liberal (even socialist) musicians.
I learned a lot about the web of musical influences ("Some groups, such as the Clash and the Ruts, picked up primarily on the protest aspect of roots reggae... the more adventurous postpunk bands responded to reggae as a purely sonic revolution" [page 18]) and about how external factors affected the development of the music scene (the New Wave in New York ended when there was an "explosion of the downtown art scene, which definitely eclipsed music as a career option for many of the city's Renaissance men and women" [page 277]; the "second British invasion" was largely the result of British bands having videos available when MTV was starved for content). The transformation of modernist postpunk into post-modernist new pop is a fascinating case study of how innovations get incorporated into the mainstream.
On top of all that, I got tips for several great albums from the period.
I have said before that William James is the historical person I would most like to have dinner with. I identify with most of his philosophical positions, appreciate his wide range of interests, and understand that he was an engaging conversationalist. He also lived during an interesting time (1842-1910), coming to age around the time of the Civil War and living into the twentieth century. This recent biography "seeks to understand his life through his work, not the other way around."
Richardson does a very good job of presenting James' ideas and their development over time. He is not as successful at presenting James the man. He effectively captures the "neurasthenic" James who is a self-conscious, indecisive, and depressive, but not the companionable, social James described by nearly everyone who met him. Based on the portrait painted here, William James would not have made an engaging dinner guest in his younger days. He seems to have spent most of his 20s complaining about his health.
This entertaining book looks at the various things we do or have done with corpses: dissect them in anatomy class, perform impact tests on them, study the stages of decay, practice plastic surgery, and so on. Roach has a breezy, humorous style that rarely crosses the line into disrespectful. My only complaint is that several of the later chapters read like magazine pieces that are incompletely integrated into the book. We start to hear more wacky stories about Mary's adventures.
Some time ago, somewhere, I read or heard something about Alain Robbe-Grillet's novella Jealousy, about how he captured the complex emotion even though the narrator describes only the details of what he sees. (The first sentence describes the shadow cast by the pillar of the veranda.) I was intrigued, especially after seeing the film Last Year in Marienbad, which showed Robbe-Grillet's experimental style in cinematic form. However, since the book was definitely an experiment, I waited until I found a copy at the used book store.
The style is very interesting, and surprisingly similar to Last Year at Marienbad. In addition to focusing on the geometric arrangement of objects, the narrator of Jealousy never refers to himself; instead, he reverts to the passive voice. It gives an odd detachment. In the Labyrinth is similar in some ways, but felt more Kafka-esque. It tells the story of a former soldier trying to find his way through an unfamiliar city to deliver a package whose contents he is no longer sure of.
I recommend these novellas to adventurous readers, and warn the less adventurous away. They are short, so if they don't float your boat it's over fast.
The title says it all. This book follows several high-school kids at a highly competitive school as they try to meet their parents' and friends' expectations and get into the college of their dreams.
The strongest aspect of the book is its perceptive and empathetic descriptions of the students' lives. The students give the book its character and make it enjoyable to read, even though the overriding emotion in all cases is stress. The author also does a good job of showing how the entire system conspires to increase the pressure. However, I wasn't able to get too passionate about the problem, because (a) the price of "failure" is low for these well-off students and (b) the solution is comparatively obvious. As the author says on page 389:
The driving force behind much of the frenzy is the belief that a person must attend a top-ranked university in order to succeed in life. Thus, the most important messages we can send students and parents are that: 1) this myth has been debunked; 2) the prestige of a school's name is no longer commensurate with the quality of its education; and 3) there are hundreds of excellent schools to which the majority of applicants can gain admission.
If you like Jon Krakauer’s books (Into Thin Air; Into the Wild) or mountaineering adventure stories, you should definitely check out this book by Jon’s mentor David Roberts.
David Roberts is a mountain climber who writes eloquently about the joys and costs of mountaineering. His classic essay "Moments of Doubt," published in Outside magazine in 1980, described how Roberts' first climbing partner fell to his death and how Roberts decided to keep climbing despite the tragedy. He went on to become one of the best American mountaineers of the 1970s and 1980s. He is now in his 60s. On the Ridge Between Life and Death is both a memoir of his adventures and a re-examination of the toll that mountaineering takes on its practitioners.
This book maintains an excellent balance between mountaineering adventure and self-reflective assessment of what drove Roberts to his dangerous choices. There are thrilling climbing sequences, perceptive descriptions of the interpersonal tensions between climbers, and musings about what drives men to risk their lives in the mountains. The final chapter, where Roberts goes to talk to people who knew his first climbing partner, is very moving.
“In the human heart...there are nobler feelings than pride. And there are more important things in life than joy.”
The only thing that could have improved the book is photographs of the mountains and routes that Roberts climbed.
I liked Gilead so much that I went right out and bought a copy of Marilynne Robinson's acclaimed first novel, her only other novel, published in 1980. It is very well written, but is mostly the kind of intimate coming-of-age story that I don't care for. I will remember this book for its setting, the lakeside town of Fingerbone, Idaho, and for its unusual resolution. I won't remember the characters despite the author's attempts to make them colorful.
Remarkable and beautiful. This novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, takes the form of a letter written by an elderly Midwestern minister to his young son. The minister, whose name is John Ames, believes that he may die soon from a heart condition. He wants to leave behind a document to give his son a sense of who he was and what wisdom he would like to pass along. (He imagines his son reading the letter as an adult, years after Ames himself is gone.) "I'm trying to tell you things I might never have thought to tell you if I had brought you up myself, father and son, in the usual companionable way."
As you can tell from this description, Gilead is not a page-tuner. On the other hand, it is not as sad or sentimental as it might sound either. It is a quiet, meditative book that requires you to read it quietly and meditatively. It has essentially no plot, and the central conflict is entirely internal to the narrator.
I loved it. It presents a meaningful portrait of a fine and graceful worldview, one which illuminates the beauty of life without ignoring its irritations and disappointments. Indeed, it provides a point of view that transforms life’s irritations and disappointments into blessings. I was impressed throughout by Ames' (and Robinson's) insights and the simple, direct way he (and she) communicates them. “When someone remarked in [my grandfather’s] hearing that he had lost an eye in the Civil War, he said, ‘I prefer to remember that I have kept one.’”
The joy comes from seeing the world through Ames' eyes, following his thoughts as the wrestles with his mortality and his imperfections. The writing is excellent in an unshowy way. The noticeable literary devices — such as the repetition of water imagery and the parallels to Bible stories — are exactly the devices a preacher would use in his sermons.
Despite the differences between the narrator and myself, the book spoke to me and moved me. I recommend Gilead to anyone with the patience to read it on its own terms.
A stocking stuffer and a quick read. I really enjoyed the first section of the book, where Rock concentrates on the experience of being a black man. He didn't really say anything new, but somehow he painted a concise and humorous picture. I was less impressed by his material about women, although I'll remember how "love is like broccoli and cheese."
Jim Rogers is an investment advisor, formerly a fund manager, who traveled around the world on his BMW motorcycle. The book recounts his travels while also dispensing tidbits of advice about choosing investments. It is not too interesting as a travel book, but it offers a unique worldview. This is how the world would look if you evaluated every destination for its investment opportunities. Rogers presents a very conservative social philosophy that he illustrates with his descriptions of the countries he travels through. His perspective is more convincing when presented this way, with examples and without any opposing viewpoint.
The travelogue in the first few chapters sounds very realistic in an odd way: he spends far more time talking about the road conditions, bike repairs, and concerns about his traveling partner/girlfriend than he does about the places he is traveling through. One paragraph about Hungary as "a vast, flat plain," then two pages about fixing a leaky gas tank. Every five pages or so he asks himself whether he should have allowed his less experienced partner come on the trip. Don't we all spend too much time on vacation worrying about logistics?
From a traveling point of view, the destinations he lauds the most are Samarkind (in Turkestan), the Xi'an bird market, and Machu Picchu. But read the book for its financial insights, not its travel recommendations. I was most interested by his thoughts on currency markets: using the black market rates to determine how protectionist a government is, how "everything, except the government monopoly on paper money, is subject to a capital-gains tax "(p 99), how protecting your country's currency is a losing proposition. He presents a rosy case for free trade and globalization, and a decidedly unrosy forecast for the future of the United States (although he predicts that we'll never have another Democratic president). "Everywhere we'd been, every society was untying the statist knots that had strangled it for decades, centuries in some cases. Everyone was throwing off all sorts of social and economic shackles, but the United States was heading in the opposite direction... Our statist nightmare goes on and on" (p 368).
A memoir organized like an encyclopedia, with short alphabetical entries on a variety of everyday subjects. It's a good idea, and the book was diverting. The individual entries didn't add up to a greater whole, like they do in Pale Fire for example. The author had other ideas for innovative approaches to a memoir, such as hiring a private detective to write a report, some of which also sound like good ideas.
This critical history of classical music in the 20th century gave me an appreciation for the range of styles assayed during the period. (I thought it was all twelve-tone density and experimental angularity.) I was especially surprised by the continued centrality of opera and other theatrical forms, at least in Ross' telling. The book describes how social factors influence the development of music at least as much as purely musical considerations do. I found it interesting to think about the parallels between music and other art forms in the 20th century — a subject that Ross talks about explicitly only during the avant-garde period of the 1950s and 1960s.
The Rest is Noise is the third book of musical history I've read in the past year, joining Rip It Up and Start Again and The History of Jazz. All of these books lead me to great new music.
Flicker tells the story of a rediscovered filmmaker whose films from the 1930s cast a strange spell over their viewers. It turns out he had developed various techniques for displaying disturbing images under the level of conscious awareness, in a subliminal fashion. His films might be part of a larger conspiracy to influence us all in an unhealthy way. Whatever happened to the filmmaker? He seems to have disappeared.
This book is a cinephile's Da Vinci Code, presenting a hidden history of the movies and a global religious cabal. Flicker is better written and more thought-provoking than Dan Brown's book, although it is slower, longer, and more interested in realism (until page 460 or so). It includes a lot of historical and philosophical ideas about "the metaphysics of moviemaking" (Kirkus Reviews). The ideas fascinated me enough to overcome the flat characters who give the kinds of long hyperbolic speeches all too common in thrillers of this type ("For the next few hours, Angelotti dilated upon the crimes of the Vatican...it was a story of ecclesiastical espionage that dwarfed anything I knew in the world of modern politics" [p 465]").
A novel of "alternate history" from Philip Roth, the author widely expected to be the next American Nobel Prize winner. The Plot Against America imagines that Charles Lindbergh was elected president in 1940 on a platform of staying out of World War II. Lindbergh was a well-known anti-Semite, so the Roth family, like many Jews, feared persecution while the rest of the country adored its new president.
The Plot Against America would make an excellent book-club selection. Is the Lindbergh relocation program anti-Semitic? How does the Jewish experience in the story compare to the real-life experience of American blacks? Would we intervene in a European war if it happened today? Should we have stayed out of World War II? Discuss.
Roth is strongest when he focuses on the small details of family life. The descriptions of the larger political events seemed too schematic. I had trouble with the narrative voice, which switched without warning between the limited point of view of the seven-year-old Philip and journalistic prose describing the news of the day. Also, the ending was rather abrupt.
This book is a collection of poems selected and laid out to encourage the enjoyment of reading aloud. It is a very nice collection of short, relatively easy poems—although it does include some harder pieces like a selection from "The Waste Land." The target audience is people who don't read poetry. The notes in the margins are simple and practical, including reading tips like "read the first part as if you're talking to a friend..." It succeeded in making me feel like reading more poetry. (I don't read much poetry because, frankly, I don't have the patience for it. I have a hard time giving it the deep attention it deserves. I wish I could; I feel like a Philistine.)
There are many great poems in here, including "Jabberwocky," "The Second Coming," "Dover Beach," "Delight in Disorder," and the prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
This book was named the best book of the past 25 years by the folks who award the Booker Prize for books written in the British Commonwealth. It tells the story of a man who was born at the precise moment when India achieved independence from Britain. He has a kind of psychic link with other people who were born in the first hour. The writing style is an interesting combination of Garcia Marquez-style magic realism and relatively transparent symbolism (with our hero representing India).
I have to say that the book didn't really speak to me. The style was interesting for a while, and some of the episodes worked, but overall I never got involved in the story. I got annoyed by how many chapters started with either a summary of what had happened so far or a cryptic (supposedly tantalizing) clue about what was yet to come.
I might have enjoyed the book more if I was more familiar with Indian history. That story sounds quite interesting.
I read this science-fiction novel to Evelyn as part of our dishwashing series. It tells the story of a small group of people, led by three Jesuit priests, who travel to an alien planet after intercepting radio transmissions from it. One of the Jesuits is a linguist! The major themes of the book are religious: How would contact with an alien race affect our feelings about our relationship with God? To what extent does God lead us to a personal destiny? How can we believe in God when awful things happen? It’s also a cautionary tale, warning us that we can cause disaster by misunderstanding alien culture just as easily as benighted explorers of the past did.
The story is told in flashback, so you know from the very beginning that the mission ended in disaster. You don’t learn the true dimensions of the disaster until the very end.
The Sparrow is very ambitious and addresses some very interesting themes. However, I felt that it took too long to start developing its major themes—the first 100 pages introduce the characters and the pre-mission situation, the next hundred the trip to the planet, which left very little time to describe the critical action. I also found Russell’s dialogue a bit too clever to be realistic. (Evelyn was willing to forgive this first-time author more than I was.)
Evelyn pointed out that the main character never prays to God, even though he’s a Jesuit.
The latest book for the Valley Times book club, Straight Man is an academic comedy. Although I have to admit to reservations about books described on the jacket as "uproarious" and "hilarious," I was interested in reading something by Richard Russo, and I like participating in the Times book club.
I enjoyed Straight Man; in fact, I think it was almost a great novel. The narrative voice was entertaining, the minor characters were sharply drawn, and the story got richer and better as it went along. If the main character, Hank Devereaux, had a tad more psychological complexity, I would have loved the book.
I liked Hank from the beginning, and generally understood where he was coming from. He enjoyed his reputation as a loose cannon and cultivated it by exasperating his colleagues. His refusal to take anything seriously allowed him to avoid the turmoil that everyone else was feeling.
Although I understood Hank in general terms, I couldn't quite get a handle on him. He kept describing himself in terms of what he wasn't ("I'm not a {whatever} by nature, but I can play that role"), and for a long time I didn't feel I was making progress toward learning what he was by nature. As Hank would say to his writing class, I couldn't complete the sentence "I know you, Hank…." There was a vagueness about his character that seemed similar to Russo's sloppy use of the principle of Occam's Razor: Occam's Razor has a very specific application, but Russo uses it to just mean "keep it simple."
I started to learn more about Hank in the second half of the book, as the potential of serious consequences descended on him. The thing that prevents Straight Man from developing into a great novel is that the "secret" to Hank's motivations is kind of trite: he felt abandoned by his father and wants to please him and punish him at the same time. If Hank's feelings toward his father were more complex, or had manifested themselves more subtlely in his actions, it would have given the book the depth it needed.
My favorite character was Tony Coniglia. He was hilarious. I was hooked immediately by Hank's description of their racquetball games and the elaborate bets Tony put together ("I never know who's won…until he tells me"). Now that's the way to show character through action!
Bottom line, Straight Man was fun to read, but fell just short of "uproarious," "side-splitting," and "complex," as advertised on the cover.
One last note. This book provides me with the final proof that I'm a fuddy-duddy. Check out this sentence from page 70:
"There was a time when these birds migrated, but anymore they're year round residents…"
In my day, you couldn't use the word "anymore" in a sentence that didn't have the word "not" (or something similarly negative) in it; my linguistics professors would call it a 'negative polarity item.' I've heard people use "anymore" in a positive sentence like this in conversation, but when a respected novelist uses it, I know it's now acceptable English. It still sounds bad to me.
Captain Blood is a wildly entertaining swashbuckler of the old school. It has adventure, romance, social commentary, and sailing. I can't imagine anyone not enjoying it.
I never really connected with The Catcher in the Rye, so I never read any of J.D. Salinger's other books. One of my colleagues (Greg Sawyer) loaned me Nine Stories after he had referred a few times to the first story, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." Of course, I couldn't read just the one story, particularly since the book was such a quick read.
I enjoyed the style of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," but I found the collection as a whole a bit repetitive. Most of the stories had similar elements; in particular, almost every one featured a phone conversation or a relationship between an adult and a child. I thought perhaps a few of them shared the character of Seymour Glass from "Bananafish"; some stories referred to a character that sounded suspiciously like him, but not by name.
Nine Stories provides a perfect example of what I like and don't like about reading short fiction. On the one hand, a short story is a bite-sized piece of self-contained writing; on the other hand, there is no time to develop the characters, situations, and themes very far.
Salinger's writing sometimes reminded me of another New England writer, John Updike.
Saramago is a Portugese writer who won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. Blindness is his latest novel. From the jacket description:
"A city is struck by an epidemic of white blindness... Authorities confine the blind to a vacant mental hospital secured by armed guards... Inside, the criminal element among the blind holds the rest captive... The compound is set ablaze, and the blind escape into what is now a deserted city, strewn with litter and unburied corpses... The only eyewitness to this nightmare is the doctor's wife, who faked blindness in order to join her husband in the camp. She guides seven strangers through the barren streets..."
I enjoyed the story very much. I appreciated that it works as a literal story even though the situation is clearly ripe for allegorical interpretation (eyesight = hope or religious conviction?). Too often when a character "represents" something, he or she doesn't act like a real person, and the situation doesn't unfold in a realistic way. That's not a problem here: despite being about blind people, the storytelling has a cinematic quality to it that enrichs the allegory. The scenes are quite vivid as the situation gets worse and worse.
Saramago's style sounds very European, reading like a cross between Camus and Borges. One Camus-like touch is that none of the characters have names; they are all known by a description like "the doctor's wife," "the girl wearing dark glasses," or "the old man with the black eyepatch." Another interesting stylistic device is that many sentences are separated by commas rather than periods. Even in dialog, the switch from one character to another is indicated with just an initial capital:
"They wouldn't allow us to bring the food, said one of them, and the other two repeated his words, They wouldn't allow us, Who, the soldiers, asked some voice or other, No, the blind internees, What blind internees, we're all blind here, We don't know who they are, said the pharmacist's assistant, but I think they must belong to the group that all arrived together, the last group to arrive, And what's this about not allowing you to bring the food, asked the doctor, so far there hasn't been any problem, They say that's all over, from now on anyone who wants to eat will have to pay."
It might seem like this style would be hard to read, but I didn't have trouble with it. And it makes a period really mean something, the real punctuation, as at the end of the passage quoted above.
I will definitely read other Saramago books in the future.
This book is the latest from the Nobel Prize-winning author that I have become such a fan of. Or at least the latest to be translated into English. It tells the story of a potter whose livelihood is threatened when his only customer, a huge planned-living complex called The Center, decides not to order any more of his work. He tries to adjust to his situation while also hanging on to his old ways. Eventually he has to move into The Center with his daughter and son-in-law.
I was surprised and a bit disappointed that the plot focused almost exclusively on the first part of the story, with life in The Center reduced to a couple dozen pages. I would have liked more balance. Saramago's writing style is still a delight, however. He is particularly strong at showing loving relationships by coming at them in an oblique way through the thoughts of the people involved. In this book, he also creates a compelling dog character named Found.
It was clear from the beginning that this novel is more specifically Portuguese than Saramago's other books — and that was before I learned (on the Web) that Ricardo Reis was a fictional persona for the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who also appears in the story. The story takes place in 1936. Ricardo Reis has just returned to Lisbon after 16 years in Brazil. The descriptions of the rainy city of Lisbon are vivid, probably even more so for Portuguese readers who recognize the cultural and historical references. Saramago is able to maintain a dreamy if somewhat dreary mood. This book is more clearly a "modern" novel than some of his others, with its self-conscious references to Borges and Pessoa for example. It is impressive, but not as lovable as The History of the Siege of Lisbon or as entertaining as Blindness.
Seeing is an allegory in the mode of Blindness. In fact, it takes place in the same capital city as the earlier book and eventually refers back to the events described there. Turnout on election day is high, but more than 70% of the votes cast are blank. The government and the various political parties react and overreact to this inexplicable message from the voters.
I really enjoyed the first two thirds of Seeing, as it explored the meaning of the blank votes. (I concluded that the voters were aware of how everything they say is spun into whatever meaning the government and media want, so their only option was to refuse to communicate. Cf. Bartleby the Scrivener.) The book heads of on a tangent in the final third, one which makes it a sequel of sorts to Blindness. I found this portion less compelling. However, I never tire of Saramago's narrative voice.
I have only read two graphic novels, both of them memoirs: Art Speigelman's Maus and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. I wholeheartedly recommend them both. They show how the apparently simple medium allows insight to sneak up on you. I was reminded at times of Lynda Barry's Ernie Pook's Comeek, which manages to convey the complex emotions of childhood in the space of four to six panels.
Persepolis is the story of a girl who grew up in Iran, fled the violence of the Iran-Iraq War to go to (high) school in Austria, then returned to Iran. Her parents were moderate intellectuals who cheered the fall of the Shah but were horrified by the rise of fundamentalism. The foreground of the story is Marjane's teenage years, so the political and social issues are presented based on how they affect the everyday lives of her family. The issues are much more vivid and humanized when presented this way.
Persepolis was published in the United States in two parts.
George Saunders writes absurdist short stories that I find hilarious. They take place in a world not too different from our own, just slightly more ridiculous. This collection, his third, seems to represent a transitional style for him. The stories are more direct in their satire, and they are organized into thematic groups. Is he becoming a traditionalist?
I didn't laugh out loud at any of the stories, like I did at "Sea Oak" from his previous book Pastoralia, but I still find them intriguing. My favorite story from this collection was "Jon," about a man raised at a market research center. He is considering leaving the center for the outside world, but is afraid he'll be unable to communicate with his wife. The commercials and movies they have seen express emotions so much more clearly than they can. I'll think of this story every time I refer to a movie as a means of expressing an idea.
This collection of non-fiction confirms that George Saunders is a funny writer. He doesn't have a lot of new things to say in these essays, but I was laughing a lot anyway. The essays fall into three main categories: travel essays (to Dubai, the U.S.-Mexican border, and Nepal), writing-class essays (about Johnny Tremain, Slaughterhouse-Five, Huckleberry Finn, and Donald Barthelme), and cultural satire. The first two categories are generally more successful than the last category, although I enjoyed "Nostalgia."
Whenever I talk to a young person — like some of the teenagers in my neighborhood, or this one toddler, Maxie, or even a couple of fetuses I run into occasionally — I say to them: trust me, guys, enjoy your youth, because the level of sex and violence is going to continue to escalate, and by the time you're my age, the world of your youth will seem a distant, innocent paradise. The teenagers and the toddler, Maxie, sometimes they seem to get it, but the fetuses — well, you know fetuses, they're arrogant. To them it's always going to be a soft gentle ride in a warm comfortable space. (page 99)
The essays cover a range of topics, but taken together they argue that we should attend to our common everyday humanity as an antidote to the generalizations and abstractions that drive us apart.
I’ve been interested in reading Schopenhauer for a while now, particularly since hearing him mentioned frequently in the UC Extension class I took last fall on twentieth century thought. (He was a big influence on Freud.) I wasn’t ambitious enough to take on his two-volume magnum opus, The World as Will and Idea. Instead, I found this collection of shorter works from later in his career.
Schopenhauer is known as a very pessimistic guy, and his philosophy reflects it. The first two essays are titled “On the Suffering of the World” and “On the Vanity of Existence.” He believes that all pleasure and happiness is just the absence of pain and suffering. Generally, all positive qualities are merely the absence of the negative qualities. Here’s a quick sample of his view on life:
“If you imagine...the sum total of distress, pain, and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will have to admit it would have been much better if the sun had been able to call up the phenomenon of life as little on the earth as on the moon...
You can look upon our life as an episode unprofitably disturbing the blessed calm of nothingness...
If the act of procreation were neither the outcome of a desire nor accompanied by feelings of pleasure, but a matter decided on the basis of purely rational considerations, is it likely the human race would still exist? Would each of us not rather have felt so much pity for the coming generation as to prefer to spare it the burden of existence?... For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.”
You might think that reading Schopenhauer would be a depressing proposition, particularly if you’re reading it on a beach in French Polynesia as I was. But he can be pretty funny in a bitter, sarcastic way, and his opinions are so over the top sometimes you just have to laugh.
Plus, he does have some interesting and valuable ideas. Schopenhauer is primarily concerned with Kant’s distinction between the objects in the world as they truly are (which we can never know) and the objects as we perceive them. He has some interesting points to make about this: for example, he points out that every explanation, all knowledge, quickly gets down to “the inexplicable.” We have a few basic ideas that we impose on the world, like the notion of cause and effect, but otherwise we don’t know why objects act the way they do.
He also has interesting ideas on religion, having studied both western and eastern religions. He characterizes Judaism as a realistic and optimistic religion, focused on living in the current world, which is a “pleasing gift”; Buddhism, on the other hand, is an idealistic and pessimistic religion, which “allows the world only a dream-like existence and regards life as the consequence of our sins.” Christianity, on this view, is an uneasy amalgam of both types: the Old Testament is realistic and optimistic, the New Testament is idealistic and pessimistic. Schopenhauer sees many of the doctrinal problems in Christian religions as based in the tension between these views. The essay “On Religion: A Dialogue” is interesting too.
This book includes a nice introduction that gives an overview of Schopenhauer’s life and philosophy.
An exhaustive and exhausting biography of Warren Buffett. The author is able to explain the mechanics of Buffett's financial dealings very well, and of course she focuses on them. The book contains plenty of business intrigue, with hostile takeovers, proxy fights, and financial system collapses. She also paints a convincing picture of Buffett's personality and its development. Over the course of the book she also presents mini-portraits of other interesting characters, such as Buffett's wife Susie, Katherine Graham (editor of the Washington Post), and the colorful managers who attract Buffett to buy their companies.
For the first 400 pages — up through when Buffett dissolved his first set of partnerships — I was more intrigued than I expected to be. I wasn't even half way through the book! When Buffett started buying companies rather than stocks, the story got a little more disjointed and tiring. I also had trouble reconciling the business failures with Buffett's ascending forture. The later parts of the book slip into hagiography. The author's sympathy for Buffett's point of view leads her to gloss over criticisms that deserve more attention. (Buffett is not the most sensitive manager in the world.) She also starts to attribute undue power to Buffett as an individual: for example, she seems to claim that tech companies started reporting stock options as expenses just because Buffett thought they should. She makes a special effort to show how he warned about the real estate bubble years before it happened.
The book won't teach you how to get rich, although you'll get folky wisdom like "If you're looking for a gold needle in a haystack of gold, it's not better to find the gold needle" (page 256). However, the book will help you to understand different investment philosophies (such as Buffett's "cigar butts" vs Charlie Munger's "great companies") and tricky financial concepts like derivatives in the context of a story.
I have been impressed with most of the books I have read from the Very Short Introduction series from Oxford University Press. (The one on Quantum Mechanics was an exception.) The books are small (3 x 5), never much more than 100 pages, and provide an overview of their subject from an expert. You can read them in a few sittings. I am finding this introduction to Kant to be very good even by the standards of the series. Kant is a very important and very complex philosopher, and Scruton does an amazing job of distilling it in a clear manner. It is dense to be sure, and I have the advantage of knowing a thing or two about Kant already, but I am sure I will refer back to this book when I want a concise statement of Kant's major contributions.
As the quotes on the back cover say, The Rings of Saturn is "strange," "enigmatic," and "brilliantly allusive." I have never read anything like it. It creates a mood that I can only liken to a visit to a deserted seaside resort in early winter. I think the book is about the inevitable decline of all human endeavors, and more specifically the decline of the British empire, but it never addresses this theme directly. Instead the narrator tells us seemingly unrelated stories about a man building a matchstick model of Jerusalem, herring fishing, Chinese history, and British coastal towns. I noticed a suspiciously high number of references to silk worms, whose significance I almost grasped.
I found the book too detached and oblique at first, but I got into the rhythm of it as I went along.
A gothic tale with a hint of self-referential tomfoolery, The Thirteenth Tale tells the story of the famous author Vida Winter whose first book, Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, had only twelve stories in it. Vida is a reclusive woman who has refused over the years to answer questions about her early life or about the thirteenth tale. As the book begins, she summons a young girl who works in her father's antiquarian bookshop to her estate on the moors, to write her biography. But is it the true story of her life, or is it the missing thirteen tale?
The prose is as overheated as the story, in a style that is surely intended to remind us of Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. Both books are mentioned repeatedly, and several of their plot elements recur here (governesses, ghosts, madwomen). If a character is ever sad or upset, their emotions always drive them to lock themselves in a room for years. The conventional gothic elements are so thick that the reader can't help but think that we're being told a story rather than the "truth" about Vida Winter's life.
On the plus side, the book is a good page-tuner. I did always wonder what was going to happen next. On the minus side, the framing story involving the narrator (the young girl from the book store) was lame and filled with the kind of leaps of logic that I have complained about before. I was waiting for the revelation that the narrator was a fictional character, to explain the odd gaps and her remarkable intuition. The resolution of Vida's story is implausible and nowhere near as interesting as the mystery that leads up to it.
When Amish youths turn sixteen, they go through a period called rumspringa ("running around") when they are allowed to experiment with the outside world before deciding whether to commit to the church. This non-fiction book is built around interviews with several Amish teenagers and their parents as they go through this period. It presents a picture of contemporary Amish culture from this perspective.
While it is an interesting subject, I found the book rather flat. It didn't tell me anything about the Amish that I wouldn't have guessed on my own. The author had a lot of good source material, both interviews and research articles, and he organized it in the way a graduate student would organize a thesis paper. He makes many undersubstaniated claims — for example, "The Amish differ from most other American Christians in the degree to which they practice what they preach" (p 122) and many sentences about what "many Amish" think — and includes his own evaluations a bit too liberallly ("As a parent... I am troubled by Amish schooling practices" [p 113]). The chapters describing the "plain" Amish lifestyle had a positive spin to them, while those dealing with their theology had a subtly negative spin. The most egregious example comes on page 129: "They have a sense of martyrdom. That sense is less acute with those Amish who do not suffer from psychological illness, but it is still there in the majority."
The narrator of this novel spent ten years in prison for killing a man in a bar fight. During his sentence, he develops prayerstyle, which is a method of focusing your intension by writing and repeating poetry that expresses your desire using specific imagery. He writes a book about prayerstyle and becomes a huge success. He is ambivalent about his celebrity and attracts unwanted enemies among the religious community. He may have also accidentally conjured up an evil spirit.
The book went a different direction than I thought it would. I expected an exploration of the moral dilemma that would arise if an evil person was granted the power to answer prayers. Wardlin Stuart, the narrator, is not an evil person. Instead, the book combines a hard-boiled genre story with elements of fantasy. I was impressed with the idea of prayerstyle, which seemed completely plausible to me. However, I didn't think that the quoted prayers\poems conformed to Wardlin's description of his method. They were too literary. There is a scene in the later part of the book where Wardlin helps a woman improve her prayer by making it more specific; he needed to follow his own advice. Wardlin's narrative voice suffered from the same problem: it sounded too educated and literary to fit his character.
I am always nervous about reading books advertised as "hilarious" satires, but the universally positive reviews and the irresistible title won me over. My reaction is mixed. The background elements — the international settings and the political intrigue — are impressive, but the characters and main plot are cartoonish. It's as if characters from a Carl Hiaasen story stumbled into a John LeCarre novel. I have trouble reconciling quality writing like this:
We landed at the Viennese airport, taxiing past the glassed-in main terminal where the planes always ran on time, to a problematic side-show of a building reserved for flights to the not-quite-ready-for-Europe places like Kosovo, Tirana, Belgrade, Sarajevo, and my native St. Leninsburg. There were no jetways at this diminished building; two buses came to pick us up... Walking down the stairs, I made sure to breathe in the fine European Union air before being bused to the cigarette-smoke-filled terminal where the rest of my YugoSovietMongol brethren waited unhappily for their flights back to Tartary. I tried to make my way to the main terminal, but you had to pass an immigration counter with a normal Western passport before you could buy cigarettes duty-free or move your bowels astride the latest model of Austrian toilet. (page 110)
and astute observations like this:
We Sevo live along the coastline, and the Svani live in the mountains, the valleys, and the desert. For a thousand years, the Svani have been farmers and herders, and we've been the traditional merchant class... That's why our churches are empty and theirs are full. That's why ever since trading became more important than farming, we're the ones with the big bucks.
with a silly story about a fat Russian who likes to rap and has unlikely success with women.
The Terror has an interesting premise — a combination of historical novel and horror story in which a nineteenth century British expedition to find the Northwest Passage encounters a monster on the ice. The author clearly researched his subject and is capable of vivid descriptions of the hardships on the ice. However, both the story and the descriptions get repetitive over the course of 750 pages. I grew impatient with it.
Corporate Warriors is about the rise of private military contract firms and the issues they raise. I heard an interview with the author on NPR last year, long before "contractors" from such firms were killed in Iraq. He told a story from the civil war in Sierra Leone. The government hired a private army (essentially) by promising the company that they could have the proceeds from a diamond mine in rebel-held territory. What effect does the profit motive have on warfare? How does the unclear chain of command affect operations and the accountability of the government conducting the war?
This book is definitely written like a report from a think tank: very structured, academic in tone, and somewhat turgid. However, it makes many interesting points about possible effects of privatizing violence, from many different perspectives. The richest people will always have the best armies. Governments pay to train armed forces, but lose the best ones to private contractors. Governments can commit to wars without paying the political price of sending their citizens to war. Soldiers become subcontractors, with all of the communication issues that apply in any contracting situation...but now with lives on the line.
The Ruins is a straightforward horror novel about two young couples whose Mexican vacation goes terribly wrong. It's great strength is the attention that Smith pays to the psychology of the characters. You may still shout "NO!" to some of the things the characters do, but you certainly believe that they would do them.
A fine feat of technical writing. This popular account of the invention of the chronometer for determining longitude packs a lot of information and several colorful stories into its short length. If you are interested in geography, the history of science, clocks, navigation, or the age of exploration, you should definitely check it out.
This book is unrelated to the movie by the same name. The book is about an author who writes knock-off books with titles like Traveling with Your Pet or An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Pro Football under a pseudonym. Of course he wants to be writing serious literature. Unexpectedly, one of his quickie books—Visitors from Above, about UFOs—becomes a bestseller, and he has to deal with being famous for a book he’s not proud of and that doesn’t have his real name on it.
I bought the book because I thought it had an interesting idea to explore, and I liked the description on the first page of our hero coming on to his wife in the morning:
“This morning, I had awakened from dreams of sex, and with full prior knowledge I would not be winning any popularity contests with the gesture, I nevertheless turned toward Olivia and pulled her close. She wore a cotton nightgown, ankle length; she took care to keep herself warm, even wore socks to bed. That used to drive me crazy, but now I sort of liked it; there was something a little wonderful about making love to a woman who was wearing kelly-green mid-calf socks.”
As it turned out, though, the book was more about a guy dealing with family problems: connecting with his teenage son, deciding whether to tell his wife about an affair he had, and balancing a career with family life. The story was fine, and there was an occasional passage that I really liked, but overall I wasn’t all that impressed with the depth or sensitivity. The scenes between the father and son reminded me of the far better novel by Richard Ford, Independence Day (also having no relation to the movie by the same name). Both novels even have an identical incident in which the son is hit with a baseball.
Damascus Gate takes place in modern-day Israel and concerns a reporter who stumbles upon a terrorist plot while writing an article on the Jerusalem Syndrome (a mental disorder that makes you believe you are Christ). It purports to be a "thinking man's thriller."
Although all the elements for a great book are there—an interesting setting, a real-life backdrop, religion and politics, complex characters—Damascus Gate never engaged me. I am willing to believe that the problem is with me: I found myself somewhat confused a lot of the time about what the various religious and political groups stood for. I wanted to learn more about what is happening in Israel, but instead Stone seemed to presuppose that I already knew. I also wish that the main character's religious yearnings had been better developed.
This book was written, in Italian, during the heyday of literary modernism (the early 1920s). Zeno's psychoanalyst suggests that he write his memoirs as part of his treatment. Although Zeno is skeptical about its usefulness, he does it. The result is a humorous excursion into the mind of a neurotic as he tries to quit smoking, woo a wife, and become a successful businessman.
Zeno's narrative voice is funny and well controlled. Especially funny are his rationalizations for his strange, self-serving behavior. I laughed out loud a few times in the early going. However, the plot is rather dull, and Zeno's inconstancy got repetitive instead of more interesting. I enjoyed many isolated moments, but found myself slogging through pages to reach them.
The book reminded me of John Banville's The Book of Evidence. In that novel, like this one, a raconteur tells an elaborate shaggy-dog story whose main purpose is to justify his bizarre behavior. In both cases, I wanted to like the story better than I did.
There are several biographies of Miles Davis available, and each one has its advocates. It's exactly the kind of situation that freezes me in place, not knowing which one to choose since I plan to read only one. I settled on this one, which happens to be the most recent, because it is written by a music journalist and seemed to be more interested in exploring how his personality influenced his music than in including all of the dates and a complete discography. The review quotes on the cover imply that the author does not try to simplify the man or rationalize his inconsistencies.
While the book provides a readable overview of Davis' life and music, it didn't provide me with any insights into the man, his music, or the relationship between them. Miles did this, then Miles did that... but what motivated him to do that? The author obviously can't know Miles' true motivations, but I was hoping for more character development. Similarly, Szwed's descriptions of Miles' musical innovations were fine but not inspiring. I was expecting to need to buy several more Miles Davis CDs as I read the book, but I didn't feel that urge very often.
The best part of the book, in my opinion, was the "Interlude" that came just after the chapter about the Kind of Blue album. It describes Miles' persona and the public reaction to it, and ties it to other cultural developments around the same time, such as the rise of Method acting. It shows what Szwed is capable of as a writer, and is more in line with what I was hoping for from the rest of the book.
This philosophical adventure story tells the story of a man who moves his family into the jungles of Honduras to live self-sufficiently, free from the troubles of modern society. In addition to telling a compelling story, it explores ideas about the pros and cons of the modern world and the possibility of returning to nature. Narrated by the man’s son, it also shows a boy learning that his father isn’t perfect. Theroux writes a lot of travel literature, and his vivid descriptions of Honduras are one of the best things about this book.
The Mosquito Coast was made into a movie starring Harrison Ford and River Phoenix, which you can skip.
Paul Theroux may be better known for his travel books than his novels, and this book about his travels “By Train Through China” is my favorite. Theroux’s books are different from other travel books I’ve read in that they are more about him as a character than they are about the places he visits. He writes them more like novels than like travelogues. He doesn’t try to be a perfect tour guide or tell me what I should or shouldn’t see. He is just himself, and he’s not afraid to show his irritability and his feeling of superiority. He presents himself as a full-bodied, three-dimensional character—and “Paul Theroux” in the travel books is almost certainly a (fictional) character, even though you sometimes feel like you know the real Paul Theroux. This feeling is part of what makes his recent book My Other Life so interesting to his fans.
I found the early chapters of this trip around the Mediterranean kind of tedious despite the occasional interesting observation (like how the differences in pornography tell us something about the differences between countries). I wonder if Theroux put less effort into vividly describing the places he went in Europe because they’re so familiar. At any rate, the book got a bit better once he left Italy for Slovenia, Croatia, and Albania.
I found it interesting how Theroux’s expectations about places were shaped by literature, ranging from The Odyssey to modern memoirs like Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli. It made me think about how my impressions of places are shaped by what I’ve read, including Theroux’s books, and how the interplay between these expectations and reality is an important part of the travel experience. In some cases, it also made me want to rush out and read the books he talked about.
Probably the most interesting part for me, though, was when Theroux returned to some of the places he’d already visited, this time on a luxury cruise. Given Theroux’s traveling style and writing style, you’d expect him to ridicule cruise passengers. On the contrary, I think he gives an even-handed and subtle presentation of how traveling in luxury changes the travel experience. On the one hand he was lazier and had fewer “authentic” local experiences; on the other hand, he enjoyed some of the places much more than he had before.
In the end, the book seemed a meditation on the meaning of travel. To quote from near the end: “The Rock of Gibraltar to me was a French tourist on a ledge at the top pinching an ape. I remember Van Gogh’s Arles because I was almost run down by a high-speed train at Arles Station, while entranced by almond blossoms… Places had voices that were not their own; they were backdrops to a greater drama, or else to something astonishingly ordinary.” So true: our experience of the world is a complex interaction between our egocentricity, our expectations, and the places themselves.
Paul Theroux is a favorite author of mine. I’ve read a number of his books: his fiction, his travel books, and a collection of essays. His travel books and essays have included a variety of information about Theroux’s life—he comes from Medford, MA, worked in Africa with the Peace Corps, lived in Malaysia and London for extended periods of time, and relatively recently had marital difficulties. One of his previous books, My Secret History, presented a fictional character named (I think) Andre Parent, who bore a suspicious resemblance to Paul Theroux—he worked in Africa with the Peace Corps, wrote travel books, and had marital difficulties. In short, Theroux has appeared to be forthcoming about his personal life, but always couches the revelations in ways that suggest they may be fiction (much as he makes up biographical details when traveling).
My Other Life takes this approach one step further. The first-person narrator of the book is Paul Theroux and all the verifiable facts are true biographical facts about Paul Theroux, but it is a work of fiction. In the introduction, Theroux says that each chapter describes what would have happened had his life been slightly different—if he’d made a different decision, for example. This gimmick makes you wonder how much of the story is autobiographical and how much is made up.
The premise might make this book sound like a postmodern exercise, but it isn’t really. It has the same clear, vivid, realistic prose that all Theroux’s books do, and the chapters work as stories independently of questions of truth or autobiography. It’s as if he went through his life, found events that shaped him or taught him something, and fictionalized those events to clarify the way it changed him. The result is an interesting story about the development of a normal character who happens to be a writer. It reads more like a first-person story along the lines of Rabbit, Run or The Sportswriter than an autobiography.
My one disappointment is that the book glosses over the issues that led to his separation from his wife. The failure of his marriage is a pivotal event in his life (as you would certainly expect), but he doesn’t talk about it at all, fictionally or non-fictionally. I can respect his wish for privacy, but it’s like a big hole in the middle of the story.
If you’re interested in Paul Theroux, I recommend starting with arguably his most famous book, The Mosquito Coast. It’s far better than the movie version.
A woman who works for in "Ideation and Design" department at a toy company starts receiving mysterious coded messages while at a company offsite meeting. She has no trouble decyphering them, because she has a background in crytography and crossword puzzle design. Who is sending them? Are they related to the new product her team is trying to develop?
The book has a lot of things going for it. The narrator, Alice, is an off-beat character; cryptography is an interesting subject (to me); Alice's ruminations on our conflicting needs to belong to a group and to be an individual are thought-provoking. There was a long period during the middle of the book when I thought the author might be building to an insightful melding of her three major themes (mathematical codes, social roles, and deference to authority). However, the ultimate resolution was disappointingly simplistic.
By reputation and judging from the first several chapters of this book, Nick Tosches is a master of overheated tough-guy prose — scenes where guys swear at and kill each other. In the Hand of Dante alternates between a present-day story in this mode and a description of events from the life of Dante. Books that tell parallel stories in the past and the present, popular since Possession was a surprise best seller, are not usually my cup of tea, but I was intrigued by the idea of juxtaposing Ellroy-esque cynicism with a medieval search for transcendence. And I must admit that I was also drawn in at a superficial level by the cover photograph of a man in some sort of devil's costume. It seemed mysterious and funny.
I really, really liked the first third of this novel. Tosches nicely sets up his theme of trying to transcend our limitations and atone for our mistakes through writing without ever talking about this subject directly. The present-day story was fast and vivid and delightfully cynical, and yet somehow it worked with the pseudo-romantic prose of the Dante chapters. I could see the romance that is just below the surface of the hard-boiled protagonists. I especially enjoyed the early chapters featuring Louie and Nick Tosches himself, including Tosches self-serving rant against book editors.
But soon after Nick and Louie get their hands on the Dante manuscript, the book goes to hell (so to speak). I lost interest in the story surprisingly quickly. The Dante chapters got tiresome while they also got longer. It's too bad, because the first part had raised my hopes for a passionately unruly examination of big themes.
This crime novel takes place in Oakland and Berkeley, which is kind of fun since I know the area. The first few chapters, wherein our hero Maceo Redfield returns to Oakland and catches up with his friends and family, paint a broad portrait of a tightly-knit urban community. Everyone knows — or is related to — everyone else, from the drug kingpins to the social workers to the restaurant workers.
The crime itself is not hard to figure out. At first I thought the author was taking an interesting approach by having the characters refer obliquely to incidents in the past, thereby setting up an additional mystery, but eventually I realized I was reading a sequel to an earlier book.
Bottom line: the book was enjoyable enough, but the author needs to work as hard on creating a compelling plot as she did on creating realistic local color. I could imagine her growing into a fine author in the mold of Walter Mosley.
I bought Couples when I was about halfway through Updike's Rabbit series. In those books, I was impressed by how well Updike wrote about sex—not the mechanics, but the realistic thought processes of the participants during the act. Couples was written around the time of the first Rabbit book (1969), and was marketed as a book about sex in suburbia. I fully expected its "explicit" sexual reporting to be dated, as Rabbit, Run was. However, I wasn't prepared for the superficiality with which Updike treats his subject.
I suppose it's possible that suburban couples really did treat sex and adultery this casually during the early 1960s (pace The Ice Storm). Even if they did, though, it's not really all that interesting to read about. During the first half of the book none of the characters seemed emotionally involved in what they were doing, which was essentially a round-robin of adultery. I guess that would be okay if their ennui was the point of the book, but I didn't get that message. The only good part of the story comes late, when an adulterous couple finally faces some consequences for their actions. But even then, the resolution didn't ring emotionally true to me.
On the plus side, Updike still describes everyday scenes between everyday people very well. And every so often there's a sentence of two that seems to provide an interesting insight into one of the characters. Too few and far between however.
This famous novel, written in 1960, has been on my list for a long time. I finally bought a used copy after reading Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter and Independence Day. Several reviewers compared the character from those novels to Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the main character from Rabbit, Run and three subsequent Rabbit novels.
In Rabbit, Run, former high-school basketball star Rabbit Angstrom decides that he can’t abide his second rate life as a salesman married to an alcoholic wife, so he just drives away, leaving his pregnant wife and small son. He heads for Florida, but gets lost on the way and ends up in the next town over from his home. He moves in with a single woman who had worked off and on as a prostitute. He keeps in touch with what’s happening at home by playing golf with his wife’s family minister. When his daughter is born, he returns to his wife, ...but will he stay?
The book has a lot to recommend it. The first part, where Rabbit is trying to escape his life by driving to Florida, conveys well the anxious feeling you get when you’re impatient to get somewhere. It also gave me a vivid picture of the area in Pennsylvania where the story takes place. I could fully believe Rabbit’s character and the reasons he gives for his actions:
Eccles [the minister] continues, “You speak of this feeling of muddle. What do you think it’s like for other young couples? In what way do you think you’re exceptional?”
“You don’t think there’s an answer to that but there is. I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate. And that little thing Janice and I had going, boy, it was really second-rate.” (p. 101)
[Later, talking to his new love, Ruth:] “I’ll tell you, when I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery.... If you have the guts to be yourself, other people’ll pay the price.” (p. 140)
I have met people like Rabbit, who are irresponsible but who people love for some inexplicable reason. Updike is also good at capturing, with a minimum of prose, complex feelings.
By coincidence, as I was reading Rabbit, Run, I heard an interview with John Updike on the radio. He talked about how this novel was partly his response to the beat writers like Jack Kerouac. Rabbit tries to abandon his responsibilities and go “on the road,” but he is unable to escape his feelings and responsibilities. Interesting, I thought.
I have to say, though, that the book seemed dated. Putting myself back to 1960, I can see how it might have been shocking and liberating to read a book whose main character is so irresponsible and self-involved. The sex scenes are where the datedness comes through most. We’re supposed to be shocked by a scene where Ruth gives Rabbit a blow job—so shocked that Updike writes around the incident with enough euphemisms that it took me a while to be sure what was supposed to be happening. (On the other hand, when he does describe a sex scene, he does an excellent job of including the emotional reactions of the participants. For example, there is an excellent scene between Rabbit and Janice just before Rabbit temporarily leaves again [p 227].)
Updike wrote three other Rabbit novels, with several years between them. He won a Pulitzer Prize for the third one, Rabbit is Rich. I have Rabbit Redux on deck.
Rabbit Redux is the second Rabbit novel, written 11 years after Rabbit, Run. Published in 1971, it takes place in 1969. The main story—Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom learns that his wife Janice has been having an affair—takes place against a backdrop of Apollo 11, 2001, and the Vietnam War. Updike makes it a point to have his characters comment on recent events in a way that makes me believe he intends the personal story to mirror the societal one.
The book doesn’t measure up to Rabbit, Run. For all its social commentary, that novel was a realistic novel about a three-dimensional character. The bulk of Rabbit Redux concerns two major characters who seemed flat and representational to me: Jill, the young rich girl who left home to become a whore (representing lost idealism and innocence), and Skeeter, the black man on the run from the law (“black power” and its corrupting effects). I wasn’t interested in their stories, nor in the ideas they talked about.
The book starts impressively with the story of Janice’s affair and Rabbit’s reaction to it. The emotions feel genuine. But once Janice moves in with her lover, the direction of the book changes, with Rabbit taking in Jill. Suddenly the first part of the book seems like merely a plot device to get Janice out of the house so that Updike can show Rabbit dealing with the issues of the time, personified by Jill and Skeeter. Rabbit’s son Nelson is around too, and could be an interesting character, but he remains undeveloped.
I only really enjoyed Rabbit Redux when it came back to the everyday story of Rabbit and Janice. There’s an interesting scene where Janice’s lover comes to talk to Rabbit about taking Janice back. Although he doesn’t say so, he’s obviously tired of Janice. At the end of the story, the tender reunion of Rabbit and Janice is emotionally affecting, but it feels rushed.
Rabbit Redux is an example of why I rarely get involved in books that are part of a series: I feel compelled to continue even if I don’t care for one of the books. So, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit is Rich is next.
The third Rabbit novel, written in 1981. (See the trend? Rabbit, Run in 1960, Rabbit Redux in 1970, ... Any guess when the last novel, Rabbit at Rest, was published?) This one won the Pultizer Prize, the American Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle award..
And it is the best in the series—so far at least. Knowing that Updike publishes a Rabbit novel at the beginning of each decade and based on my feelings about the middle of Rabbit Redux, I was afraid that Rabbit is Rich would focus on dated social commentary rather than closely observed details about the characters. But the period details are less self-conscious, and Updike’s social commentary grows out of Rabbit’s character rather than being imposed on him. Nelson has blossomed into the interesting character he promised to be in Rabbit Redux; the way he clashes with his father while repeating many of his mistakes drives most of the story.
Updike is a master at describing the thoughts and feelings of everyday characters. His dialogue sounds extremely realistic. He captures the texture of everyday life. Rabbit is Rich doesn’t have any incidents that are as emotionally trying as the adulteries in the previous books, but it’s more consistently insightful. I’ve never read a book that was better at decribing complex feelings economically.
While you could probably read Rabbit is Rich without first reading the first two books, knowing the back story gives extra resonance to brief references to past events: Rabbit’s time with Ruth, Janice’s affair with Charlie, and Nelson’s special feelings for Jill.
Rabbit at Rest is a worthy final chapter in the Rabbit Angstrom saga, although I don’t think it stands up as an independent book. I don’t know that I would have cared about the characters if I didn’t know them so well already. The book closes the series with nice symmetry: Rabbit successfully completes the southward drive he started in Rabbit, Run, and even insinuates himself into a pick-up basketball game as he does on the very first page of Rabbit, Run.
Updike’s descriptive skills are still strong. I got a great sense of place both at the Angstrom’s Florida condo and back in Pennsylvania. I loved the scene of Rabbit’s first heart attack in the Sunfish boat with his granddaughter, especially his humor as he lay on the beach waiting for the paramedics. “It must have been all that parrot food I ate.”
I’ll miss Rabbit now that I’ve finished all the books. I’d give the overall series four stars easily, and maybe five.
Zzzzzzzzzzz.... huh, what? I was just resting my eyes. Villages is unmistakably a John Updike novel: New England setting, serially adulterous protagonist, well-crafted old-fashioned prose. Updike is good as always at writing everyday scenes between everyday people, and there were a half-dozen images that stuck with me. (For example, he describes the pet section at a rundown Woolworths as "a few muttering, demoralized parakeets and canaries..." [p 262]. When the main character has an embarrassing private phone call at work, he "pours his voice through this little electronic hole at his lips" [p 160]). But I never once cared about any character or what was happening. The story, especially the first half, sounded like a biography of an unremarkable person you might know. As for the second half, where the adultery cranks up, I found the plot unbelievable and the characters caricatures. Allow me to quote my own review of Couples, which applies here too:
I suppose it's possible that suburban couples really did treat sex and adultery this casually ... Even if they did, though, it's not really all that interesting to read about.
On the plus side, I really liked the physical look and feel of the book. It's a hardcover in the old-fashioned size of 8 x 6, with nice thick pages and a sturdy Dutch font.
Okay, I gleaned one interesting idea from the book, about modern child-rearing. On page 168, our hero Owen thinks that in previous generations, parents were "stripped of hope for themselves" and therefore invested more in their children. In recent generations, parents retain concern for their own continued development, more so than in the past. True? I don't know, but it's something to think about.
The Golden Spruce tells the true story of an environmental activist who destroys a sacred old-growth tree, then disappears under mysterious circumstances. The setting is one of my favorite literary destinations, the Inside Passage off the coast of British Columbia. The story involves logging, Native American rights, environmentalism, mental illness, and spiritual awakenings. Despite these strengths, however, I was disappointed with the book.
Vaillant is a strong journalistic writer who can give clear explanations of complex topics, but he has absolutely no sense of narrative. The individual chapters make good primers on the logging industry or the biology of trees, but they are arranged in random order and feel curiously static. The inherent drama of the situation and of Grant Hadwin's character are lost.
I have developed a fascination with life in modern ghettos. Richard Price novels and The Wire in fiction; American Dream and Random Family in non-fiction. Off the Books is a non-fiction account of the neighborhood economy around a Chicago housing project. It appeared on Slate.com's list of the best books of 2006.
Although intended for a general (non-academic) audience, Venkatesh is clearly a sociologist. He describes situations in terms of their social dynamics, using a variant of academic-speak. To wit: "At the foundation of their interactions is the appropriation of public space in a way that is viewed as legitimate by the local community of actors" (p 174). The social dynamics he describes are very interesting though.
A distinctive picture of life on the edge emerges through the course of the book. You learn how the underground economy is a nearly inevitable consequence of the way ghetto communities have been cut off from the larger society (a process best illustrated in the chapter on the clergy), and how the poverty promotes a communal and pragmatic approach. ("We're on our own in a precarious situation, and it might be me who needs help tomorrow.") The communal approach is admirable in some ways, although Venkatesh notes that it creates something of a viscious cycle with regard to the community's isolation. It also leads to a different world-view from the one middle-class Americans have. Self-advancement is not valued as highly; people are expected to benefit the entire community and are criticized for selfishness (best illustrated by the story of Marlon in the chapter on street hustlers). With everyone "hustling" to stay afloat, the line between constructive engagement and corruption is harder to draw.
Barbara Vine is a pseudonym for Ruth Rendell, an English author who writes psychological mysteries. The whole pseudonym thing mystifies me a bit, since she writes the same kinds of books under both names, and her name appears on the cover as “Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine.” What the point of using two names?
I’ve read a few previous Rendell books and been impressed by the psychological complexity of her characters. I’m also a slight Anglophile, and I like the way her stories describe everyday life in England.
The Brimstone Wedding is about a woman named Jenny who works as a caregiver at a nursing home. She’s having an affair with a married man and also has a close relationship with a dying woman in her care. The dying woman, Stella, is slowly but surely telling Jenny about an affair she had many years ago. Of course, she drops all kinds of mysterious hints about a bad end to the affair, and you have to assume that Jenny’s affair will come to a similarly bad end.
The book was disappointing. The suspense never build steam after the first few chapters; the resolution isn’t really all that shocking, and doesn’t tie the two stories together in a satisfying way.
You know, now that I think about it, I’ve enjoyed the Ruth Rendell books much more than the Barbara Vine books. I guess there is something to this pseudonym thing.
Derek Walcott is a Nobel-Prize-winning poet and playwright from Saint Lucia. Omeros is a book-length epic poem that transports elements of The Illiad and The Odyssey to the Caribbean. I reread Omeros (a transliteration of "Homer") while we sailed south from Saint Lucia through the Grenadines.
The poem is divided into seven books. The first two books are excellent, vivid, and straightforward verses that effortlessly manage to tell a contemporary story and imbue it with mythic and historical overtones. The contemporary story concerns two St Lucian fisherman, Achille and Hector, vying for the attentions of a proud woman named Helen. Their story is laced together with the history of the island (with England and France vying for its attentions), the tension between traditional ways and modern tourism (with Achille remaining a poor fisherman while Hector becomes a taxi driver), and the differences between the classical world and the new world. Walcott accomplishes all of this without overloading his poetry with dense allusions; the narrative remains quite clear and the imagery vivid. Things become a bit more dense in later books, and the narrative takes a back seat during most of the middle section. However, Omeros remains a highly readable poem. I am inclined to pick up a book of commentary to help me appreciate it all the more.
After Mass one sunrise the canoes entered the troughs
of the surpliced shallows, and their nodding prows
agreed with the waves to forget their lives as trees;
one would serve Hector and another, Achilles
Infinite Jest is David Foster Wallace's Gravity's Rainbow. Like the Pynchon novel, it is "large, complex, funny, perplexing, daring, and weird," and dense with allusions to both high and popular culture. And like the Pynchon novel, Infinite Jest has a complex organizational scheme that often overwhelms the story and the themes. In the end, though, I enjoyed it more than Gravity's Rainbow for three reasons:
Infinite Jest takes place in the near future. Canada and the United States have combined into the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N., which gives a sense of the kinds of jokes). Each year has a major sponsor, so that instead of being, say, 2007, it is the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The book has three entwined but somewhat independent story lines. The first concerns Hal Incandenza, a junior tennis player at a tennis academy founded by his father, the experimental filmmaker James Incandenza. The second follows Don Gately, a former thief and drug addict now working at a halfway house. The third involves a cadre of wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatists. The MacGuffin, corresponding to Rocket 00000 from Gravity's Rainbow, is a film by James Incandenza that is purportedly so entertaining that anyone who views it is incapacitated.
The most engaging storyline for me was Don Gately. He is struggling to remain sober and to understand how the cliches of Alcoholics Anonymous can possibly work. He was the most fully fleshed out character, and his story was the one most directly addressing Wallace's main themes (q.v. note 1 below). Conversely, I was entirely unengaged by the political storyline. It crossed the line into silly.
If I were ever to meet David Foster Wallace, one thing I would ask him about is his use of relative clauses that don't have any grammatical gap in them. For example: "There was no small unpleasantness about it from M.I.T. administration, which it's well known M.I.T. is in bed with Defense." (page 186) I know that Mr Wallace is a fan of prescriptive grammar, and I wonder if this type of construction is part of his regional dialect or part of his writing style.
1. From Wikipedia: "Wallace's fiction is often concerned with what he considers the prevalent contemporary mode of irony, which he believes hinders and complicates authentic communication in fiction and culture as a whole. His essay 'E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction' ... urged literary authors to avoid irony's many pitfalls. Wallace himself does use many different forms of irony in his work but he also focuses on individuals' continued longing for earnest unselfconscious experience and communication in a deeply self-conscious, cynical, media-saturated society..." See also my review of Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.
This collection of essays was entertaining and was littered with interesting observations and insights, but seemed to fall short of its full potential. Wallace tends to ramble and go off on tangents. While his writing style is fun enough to make the side-trips interesting, I tend to lose the thread of his ideas. I’m not surprised that Wallace’s breakthrough novel, Infinite Jest, was over 1000 pages long and divided its audience about whether it was brilliant or merely long-winded.
My two favorite essays were “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” (about playing tennis outdoors in the Midwest and, not coincidentally, the shortest and most focused) and “David Lynch Keeps His Head” (which includes insightful analysis of Lynch’s films). The essay about the professional tennis circuit was good too. The two essays most representative of Wallace’s style are one about a visit to the Illinois State Fair and the title essay about a Caribbean cruise. I was looking forward to the cruise essay—not only did he go on a one-week cruise, but he was on the same cruise line we went on. But although the essay was entertaining for its style, he didn’t have any interesting insights about the experience. He came across as simply condescending.
I think this collection of stories is amazing, entertaining, and important, but I hesitate to recommend it. I imagine most people would find it unbearable. First of all, the writing is experimental: it includes stories told in the form of dictionary definitions, pop quizzes, outlines, and one-sided interviews. Secondly, as the title might suggest, most of its characters are unpleasant: those that are not "hideous" are certainly self-involved and exasperating (in exaggerated but not unrealistic ways). However, I think Wallace manages to convey the difficulties involved in connecting with other people, because of our own self-doubt and our inability to really know what our partners are thinking. He manages to use postmodern literary devices for something far deeper than satire. As he addresses explicitly in "Octet," he is trying to get beyond communication to a real connection. He has something important to say about the human condition, and I come away from the book committed to being a better (and less self-conscious) person.
I'll keep this book on a shelf next to Alexander Theroux's An Adultery, which is another book I love but can't inflict on others.
David Foster Wallace has the smoothest and most entertaining prose style among contemporary "postmodern" writers. In his essays, he is able to explain difficult subjects and convey the experience of learning about them, while being funny at the same time. I think he was an inspired choice to write this book about the concept of infinity.
Wallace believes that you need to understand a certain amount of technical mathematical detail in order to appreciate Georg Cantor's discoveries about infinity, so the book is filled with equations and advanced math concepts. At the same time, Wallace expends of lot of energy trying to keep his readers from felling overwhelmed. The result is an odd duck of a book, sort of literary and sort of technical. The unusual approach is my favorite thing about the book. I also liked pondering the two types of infinity (the "big" infinity towards which the integers lead and the "little" infinity that occurs between any two numbers you can think of) and learning about how early mathematicians avoided or worked around the issues. I must admit, however, that the equations in the latter part of the book put me off. I stopped working my way carefully through them. Perhaps as a result, I still find Cantor's ideas about higher and higher levels of infinity to be too abstract to mean anything to me.
I am a big fan of Wallace's previous story collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and of his entertaining writing style. I enjoyed parts of the stories in Oblivion very much, but didn't feel that they hung together the way stories should. For example, I was intrigued by the theme of "The Suffering Channel" ("the conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance" [p 284] and how it is the root of the American obsession with celebrity), but the story didn't really have an ending. My feelings about the book are well summarized in the Publisher's Weekly description on Amazon.com:
Wallace's trademark ... is an officious specificity, typical of the Grade A student overreaching: shifting levels of microscopic detail and self-reflection. This collection of eight stories highlights both the power and the weakness of these idiosyncrasies. ...While this collection may please Wallace's most rabid fans, others will be disappointed that a writer of so much talent seems content, this time around, to retreat into a set of his most overused stylistic quirks.
One stylistic quirk that I noticed in several of the stories is his way of describing character's facial expressions:
Mr Johnson's was a face whose only memorable characteristic was that it appeared slightly tilted or angled upwards in its position on the front of his head ... And this, together with what was either poor posture or a problem involving his neck, caused Mr Johnson to look as if he were wincing or slightly recoiling from whatever he was saying ("The Soul is Not a Smithy")
The cosmetic surgeon botched it and did something to the musculature of her face which caused her to look insanely frightened at all times. ... Her crow's feet indeed were things of the past but now her face was a chronic mask of insane terror. ("Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature")
Suffice it to say that I tend to remember what Wallace's characters look like. (I can't say that for most authors.)
I am a fan of David Foster Wallace's distinctive writing style, while simultaneously recognizing the annoying things about it. DFW himself could write a fantastic sentence — probably contained in a footnote — that captures this ambivalence. He is a master at demonstrating how our contemporary habit of self-awareness is a double-edged sword when it comes to living well.
Consider the Lobster is a collection of essays from 1998 to 2005, covering a range of subjects from book reviews to porn award shows. As always, Wallace's non-fiction is littered with interesting observations and insights, which often revolve around the issue of making un-ironic connection to an authentic emotion. In Wallace's strongest work — in my opinion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and a few of the essays in this volume — the true underlying subject is the (somewhat ironic) difficulty of cutting through the layers of thinking and self-awareness to reach an unadultered, honest reality. Q.v. "The View from Mrs. Thompson's" and "Up, Simba."
A couple of the book reviews in Consider the Lobster are a bit weak, and the final essay, "Host," doesn't live up to its full potential. Thankfully, the strongest essays are the longest ones: "Authority and American Usage" (about descriptive vs prescriptive linguistics), "Up, Simba" (about John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign and how the modern US political process "makes us US voters feel, inside"), and "Big Red Son" (about the Adult Video News awards show).
This book purports to provide a behind-the-scenes look at how six "maverick" directors from the 1990s changed the studio business from the inside. The directors are Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights), David Fincher (Fight Club), Steven Soderbergh (Traffic), David O. Russell (Three Kings) and Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich) — good and interesting directors all. However, the book is akin to a typical DVD commentary track: rambling, anecdotal, and only occasionally insightful. I really feel like I could write a book like it using commentary tracks as my research.
This classic of sociology and economics was first published in 1904. Weber claims that the "spirit" of modern capitalism, where people pursue money for its own sake, developed as an unexpected and unintended consequence of Protestant (particularly Calvinist) religious views.
The idea that had the biggest impact, in Weber's view, was the doctrine of predestination: since God is all-knowing, your eternal fate is determined before you are even born, and nothing you do (or don't do) can change it. You yourself can't be sure if you are one of the chosen. However, you want to believe that you are chosen, and you want your neighbors to believe it too. This wanting to believe has two consequences—you don't need an external religious authority to monitor your thoughts and actions (you do it yourself), and you see your work as a "calling" that is an end in itself rather than a means to something else. Combine these two consequences with the environment of early industrial capitalism, and you have the Protestant work ethic.
The introductory essay by Anthony Giddens points out a number of problems with the details of Weber's argument. However, Weber's approach and many of his insights are still interesting and probably valid. He shows how intellectual ideas can become a force in the material world and how social ideas can have effects that are quite contrary to their intent.
Here is an interesting passage:
"One of the technical means which the modern employer uses in order to secure the greatest possible amount of work from his men is the device of piece-rates... giving [workmen] an opportunity to earn what is for them a very high wage, to interest them in increasing their own efficiency. But a peculiar difficulty has been met with surprising frequency: raising the piece-rates has often had the result that not more but less has been accomplished in the same time, because the worker reacted to the increase not by increasing but by decreasing the amount of work. A man, for instance, who at the rate of 1 mark per acre mowed 2.5 acres per day earned 2.5 marks, when the rate was raised to 1.25 marks per acre mowed, not 3 acres, as he might easily have done, thus earning 3.75 marks, but only 2 acres, so that he could still earn the 2.5 marks to which he was accustomed. The opportunity of earning more was less attractive than that of working less." (page 59)
This book offers thirty-two short essays, one for each of the nations in the 2006 World Cup, plus a variety of statistics about the tournament and the countries involved. Some of the essays are about soccer, but others are about the countries. The afterword explores the question of which form of government is most likely to win the World Cup.
The book reminds me of one of those season-preview magazines that The Sporting News puts out each year. The difference is that you never know what you'll read about when you start one of the essays. With a few exceptions, I found the essays to be mediocre, but interesting tidbits were sprinkled throughout. I will enjoy having the book on hand when the tournament starts.
This book has a fascinating premise — What would happen to the Earth if human beings disappeared? — and lots of surprising tidbits about our impact on the world. Did you know that it takes 753 pumps to keep the New York subway system from drowning? Or that the DMZ between North and South Korea is an inadvertent nature sanctuary?) However, these significant virtues are muted by poor organization. The book needed a narrative thrust: what would the world be like 10 years after we left? 100 years? 1000 years? Instead, it jumps with abandon between the pre-human past, our profligate present, and possible futures. Lots of thought-provoking points, but they don't cohere into a compelling whole.(2/2009)
The subtitle says it all, "A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary." The Professor and the Madman tells the interesting story of the relationship between the editor of the OED, James Murray, and Dr. William Minor, a Civil War surgeon and delusional murderer who provided a lot of the citations for the dictionary.
The details of the story itself are enticing, from the lurid specifics of Dr.Minor's delusions to the process of creating the big dictionary. On top of that, the story touches on a lot of potentially fascinating subjects: dictionary making, Civil War medicine and politics, Victorian London, the treatment of mental illness, the relationship between the English language and Protestantism. But although Winchester presents all the facts and has clearly researched the related subjects, he doesn't tell the story very well in my opinion. I think the story has the makings of an epic history, illuminating two interesting characters and presenting the world of ideas at the turn of the century. Instead, Winchester tosses off hints of the bigger picture while mostly just presenting the facts. His writing has two other features that I found distracting: he presents unfounded guesses about characters motivations and periodically shifts perpective into the present day.
I hope that someone someday takes up the challenge to tell this story as well as it could be told.
This book provides a selective history of political philosophy from its origins in ancient Greece to the present day. It is 600 pages long, although a good editor could have shaved off at least 100 pages in redundant academic prose.
The book makes many interesting points, but I had a hard time constructing the big picture that Wolin is trying to communicate. (I make my best guess here.) I suspect I would have gotten more out of this book were I more familiar with the received wisdom about political philosophy. Wolin often refers to historical events, such as the British Commonwealth period, clearly assuming that we readers know all about it. Similarly, he notes that his analysis challenges the standard view of, say, Locke, assuming that we know what that standard view is.
The last few chapters, which concentrate on current events, have a completely different tone from the rest of the book. They paint rather a bleak picture, and unfortunately do not recommend any more positive alternatives.
Remembering Satan is the true story of a family from the Pacific Northwest. After years of psychotherapy, the now-adult daughters of a man call up repressed memories of being victims in Satanic rituals presided over by their father. Many leaders in the community were involved in the rituals. The police search all over the state, but can’t find any evidence of the elaborate rituals, even while the sisters remember more an more details. But the father is convicted because he confesses to the crimes.
It turns out, however, that the rituals never took place. The daughters’ repressed memories were fabrications, and the father conjured up repressed memories to match his daughters.
The story is incredible, in the most literal sense. If a fiction writer had made this story up, no one would be able to suspend their disbelief. Fascinating.
The subtitle of this non-fiction historical drama is "Thomas Jefferson, The First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805." It tells the story of William Eaton, a former diplomat and soldier who is sent on a quasi-covert mission to replace the reigning pasha of Tripoli (now Libya). This piratical country was the first ever to declare war on the United States, because the US refused to pay it tribute (aka extortion money) like the European countries did. On Halloween 1803 Tripoli captured 300 sailors from the USS Philadelphia, leading President Thomas Jefferson to approve a plan to help place the Pasha's brother on the throne.
The story has everything you could possibly want in a historical adventure: pirates, political intrigue, colorful and complex characters, sea battles, betrayal, cross-cultural misunderstandings, personal obsessions, key messages lost in transit, dramatic reversals, treasonous plots. However, reading this book I kept imagining a better telling of the story. I felt like I was piecing together the exciting story despite the author's presentation. Zacks can find the telling anecdote that illuminates a person's character or reveals the drama of a plot development, but he puts the story together badly. For example, he'll introduce interesting items in parentheses at random places, as if his research had revealed a fact that he didn't know how to fit into the narrative. It feels flat despite the dramatic content.
You can even see the problem in the subtitle. Although Jefferson and the early Marine Corps figure in the story, they are surely not the focus of the story. And Eaton's mission was not really secret. The emphasis is all wrong. It almost inspires me to take a crack at writing a better book from this rich source material.
I might have given this best-seller from Spain a better rating if I hadn't felt misled by the pull quotes on the cover. Various reviewers compare it to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Victor Hugo, and Paul Auster. Heavyweight company indeed! Based on these raves, I expected the thriller plot to be a disguise for more serious concerns about the nature of identity or the meaning of art or something. However, The Shadow of the Wind is nothing more or less than a quality page-turning mystery with an exotic location (post-war Barcelona). Its pace is more leisurely and old-fashioned than a Michael Connolly or Jonathan Kellerman crime thriller, but it is in the same ballpark. The only thing it has in common with Garcia Marquez and Borges is that it was written in Spanish!
The story concerns a young man who falls in love with a mysterious novel and sets out to learn more about the author. He discovers that someone has destroyed every other copy of the author's work. He is drawn into a web of intrigue, love, and murder as he investigates the author's life, which has surprising parallels to his own life.
Because of the purported literary pedigree, I spent most of the book waiting for the self-reflective twist that would reveal the story to be the narrator's attempt to refashion his life through prose, something like Ian McEwan's Atonement. The numerous parallels between the narrator's life and the mysterious author's life invited this expectation. But many of these parallels turned out to be coincidences or red herrings.
If you're looking for a mystery story with a quasi-Victorian atmosphere, you'll enjoy The Shadow of the Wind. But don't expect more than that!
I picked up Layover after reading a review in a weekly newspaper in New Orleans. It tells the story of a traveling saleswoman who decides she needs to drop out of sight for a while in order to cope with recent hardships in her life. She starts by simply not letting people know which hotels she's staying in on her business trips and not calling home. She figures out a way to stay in hotel rooms without paying for them.
I recognize the impulse to "float," to seek anonymity when life seems like too much, and Zeidner does a good job of capturing the feeling of ennui that accompanies this impulse. I also find the logistics of our heroine's journey interesting, particularly in the early going. I can't connect in quite the same way with Claire's actions in the last third of the book, but the tone remains dead on. I think Zeidner perfectly captures the emotion of grief without being at all melodramatic.
It was fitting that I read this book soon after Pictures at a Revolution. That book examined the time period when our contemporary tastes in film replaced the older traditional tastes. This book does the same for our tastes in comedy. It focuses primarily on the decade of the 1970s, and shows how the influential stand-up comics of the day changed what we think of as funny. It is fun to read a history of a period I lived through, filled with incidents I remember and providing connecting material that I never knew. In addition to the history, the book provides a usual taxonomy of comic legends: observational comics, conceptual comics, confessional comics, and so on. It is a quick read that reminded me of many funny gags.