Backlog #3: The Salter-palooza

Two more Salters round out my Salter mini-obsession: Dusk and Other Stories and his first novel A Sport and a Pastime. The novel suffered a little from the lens of his autobiography. It ended up feeling like regurgitated bits of experience tied together with some fantasy. The overall structure of an envious writer looking in on the lovers, imagining their happiness and falling away I found more distracting than helpful--the details of Dean and Anne Marie are lovely and delicately drawn--to be reminded that they are imagined diminishes them, and the whole enterprise of telling their story.

The writing is spare and sharp, as ever, though in places it is less assured. Reading him out of order in this way makes his grace feel more like a style, more mannered, as he finds his way to it--close to a parody of his later writing. This is unfair, of course, but such is the experience of it. Still the prose is fine, and makes me wish for France, and for a huge heavy metal car, aristocratically engineered, for those long roads, and for cafes out of the cold, for those doors opening to those hours:

He puts her to bed in warm pajamas. She is innocent, he decides. She smiles softly, the calm of a long convalescence in her face. Finally he turns to go but, at the door her voice stops him. Yes? Turn out the light , she says. He does. like Lucifer, he creates darkness and he descends.

Dusk and Other Stories, on the other hand, is stronger, and in those stories, the intense compression of his prose works to dazzling effect, pulling together the threads of the story into dense passages that are lovely and rich as novels. Some of the stories are sketches, to be sure--little exercises that have taken on some substance, but the best of them (and they are very good, especially the endings) are remarkable. It is as if the strengths of his work is the same in the good stories as in the novels, without all of the intervening prose, which is lovely, but did not add corresponding weight or depth to the emotion of the words. I think of the contrast with something like Edward Jones' The Known World, where there were long, meandering stretches of story that did not seem to be going anywhere in particular, but then, abruptly, took on great force and added great power to a specific scene.

This is not an opening or a closing, not the first line, but just lovely:

That afternoon he had seen a robin picking at something near the edge of the grass, seizing it, throwing it in the air, seizing it again: a toad, its small, stunned legs fanned out. The bird threw it again. In ravenous burrows, the blind shrews hunted ceaselessly, the pointed tongues of reptiles were testing the air, there was the crunch of abdomens, the passivity of the trapped,the soft throes of mating. His daughters were asleep down the hall. Nothing is safe except for an hour.

Will Lawrence finally come? soon, soon, though it is neglect rather than attention that delays him...
posted by Ben at 8:24 AM

Backlog #2: Written Lives by Javier Marias
This is a charming, insubstantial book of literary gossip-- four to five page biographies of writers (and talkers). Marias says he is treating these writers "as if they were fictional characters,which may well be how all writers, whether famous or obscure, would secretly like to be treated." He presents a few facets of each in a spirit of 'affection and humor', making no judgments about the work, and no claims for anything other than pleasure.

The result is very entertaining and slight--like the company of an aging uncle who has known an array of fascinating people, but seems to have forgotten the very best--most salacious, most outrageous--anecdotes. You get some sense of that it might have been like to be in their company (almost all, as he notes, "fairly disastrous individuals"). Marias likes most of the writers; when he does not, he seems to dwell on the author's sexual deviancy as a way of illustrating antipathy(though not the cause). He doesn't like Joyce (obsessed with women's soiled underwear), Mann (obsessed with the bodies of young men), and Mishima ('erotic fascination with manly bodies tortured, dismembered, flayed, butchered, or impaled'). Like Marias, I have dwelt too long already on the minor faults of pleasant book. This is a book of the texture of writer's company, and Marias is an excellent companion for that--he has a good eye for detail, an amused but sympathetic regard for self-destruction, and deft, lyrical prose.

It is a book of an afternoon--similar to Rachel Cohen's A Chance Encounter--what People magazine might be if focused on dead writers and written by our drunken uncles who had spent the meat of their lives at dinner parties with one and then another. 2.5 furry lobsters.

"According to somewhat kitsch literary legend, William Faulkner wrote his novel As I Lay Dying in the space of six weeks and in the most precarious of situations, namely, while he was working on the night shift down a mine, with the pages resting on an upturned wheelbarrow and lit only by the dim rats of a lamp affixed to his own dust-caked helment."
posted by Ben at 6:08 AM

Backlog #1: The James Salter Reading Festival continues.

I read Salter's autobiography Burning the Days. He says, in his Preface, that he is writing about people and events that were important to him--what he remembers, noting that memory is a measure of the value of things (and forgetting is as well). Beginning with the now-ad-nauseum caveat that he is a beautiful writer, I finished the book very struck by what had been omitted from his narrative. He spends rhapsodic pages talking about coming out to hangars in the morning for flights (he spent 15 years as a fighter pilot), and equally long (lovely, lyrical)pages about his mistresses, but almost none about his wife (selected for him, it seems, by a married woman he loved, because she presented no threat). He does say, twice, that it is impossible to write about the death of a child, but there were two others and they appear almost not at all. And I was struck that there was so little about books--so few that seemed to have landed and shaped his own thinking, his writing and writing life--except in the context of envy. And there was an undercurrent of him actively seeking out celebrity, of a kind of hungry networking that ran against the confidence of his voice, as if he were obscuring some aspect of himself behind his talents for self-expression.

In his defense (if he needs it at all), he writes well about friendship--and indeed this is mostly a chronicle of loves and friends, and his honesty on those fronts can be very moving. But I came out of the book finding him both alien and unsympathetic, and seeing a new coldness in his sharp prose. I am contintuing to read his fiction (Dusk, currently, as well as A Sport and a Pastime), and will be interested to see how altered my opinion of him becomes as result of reading this. (two stars)

The true chronicler of my life, a tall, soft-looking man with watery eyes, came up to me at the gathering and said, as if he had been waiting a long time to tell me, that he knew everything. I had never seen him before.
posted by Ben at 2:09 PM

Once more, a flurry of reading--too much business travel provides some small consolation for the airport hours and the stale air. I am still digesting DH Lawrence's Apocalypse (best line:'What the ass wants is carrots...').

In its place, twin James'.

James #1: James Lasdun's The Horned Man was an excellent, meaty thriller--one of those books so fluid you don't really notice you're reading until you are halfway through and then the book already seems far too short. Lasdun does a fine job of building dread--setting traps--masking decisions of consequence in ordindary choices. It's got surprising heft hidden inside its streamlined, precise story--beautiful, smart writing, some great scences and a relentless pace. It reminded a lot of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, though less abstract and absurd--it takes a surreal turn at the end, which is surprising and, with some digesting, quite good. Three stars.

One afternoon earlier this winter, in a moment of idle curiousity, I took a book from the shelf in my office and began reading it where it fell open on a piece of compressed tissue that had evidently been used as a bookmark.

James #2: I've gushed in the past and James Salter, and I'm not stopping now. I blasted through his recent story collection Last Night; his writing is so complex--every sentence like a blow that hits--he hits and hits and hits. (And for someone who professes not much love for the short story, I seem to be finding and liking them of late). Salter's stories are all about marriage, fidelity and its lack, about moments of disintegration and the memories of happiness that lie behind them.
--I'd never steal anyone's man, Adele said then. Never. Her face had a tone of weariness when she drank, a weariness that knew the answer to everything. And I'd never break a vow.
--I don't think you would, Phil said.
--I'd never fall for a twenty-year-old, either.
--No, you wouldn't.
--He left his wife, Adele told them.
There was silence.
Phil's bit of smile had gone but his face was still pleasant.
--I didn't leave my wife, he said quietly. She threw me out.
--He left his wife and children, Adele said.
--I didn't leave them. Anyway it was over between us. It had been for more than a year. He said it evenly, almost as if it had happened to someone else It was my son's tutor, he explained. I fell in love with her.
--And you began something with her? Morrissey suggested.
--Oh, yes.
There is love when you lose the power to speak, when you cannot even breathe.
--Within two or three days, he confessed.
--There in the house?
Phil shook his head. He had a strange, helpless feeling. He was abandoning himself.
--I didn't do anything in the house.
--He left his wife and children, Adele repeated.
--You knew that, Phil said.
--Just walked out on them. They'd been married fifteen years, since he was nineteen.
--We hadn't been married fifteen years.
--They had three children, she said, one of them retarded.
Something had happened--he was becoming speechless, he could feel it in his chest like a kind of nausea. As if he were giving up portions of an intimate past.
--He wasn't retarded, he managed to say. He was....having trouble learning to read, that's all.
At that instant an aching image of himself and his son from years before came to him. They had rowed one afternoon to the middle of a friend's pond and jumped in, just the two of them. It was summer. his son was six or seven. There was a layer of warm water over deeper, cooler water, the faded green of frogs and weeds. They swam to teh far side and then all the way back, the blond head and anxious face of his boy above the surface like a dog's. Year of joy.
--So tell them the rest of it, Adele said.

Painful and lovely. Some of the stories feel (are) slight, but some are so compressed that you can't imagine them being sustained for a novel--they must relent at some point. More Salter is on the docket, once the blizzard here lifts.

One odd outside note: I went yesterday in search of reading down to my local bookstore (Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA) and it was at the center of a maelstrom of ambulances, fire trucks, cops, yellow tape. Someone had driven their huge white SUV over a parking sign and through the front winow of the store, coming to rest in a pile of twisted metal and glass half in and half out of the little cafe. I did not see injured people, but at least one ambulance had left by the time I arrived. The store is in the corner of a cramped parking lot that is invariably crowded--which is to say that there is no way to build up a head of steam and accidentally end up driving through the storefront. It's possible that someone could have had some kind of seizure and jammed their accelerator down. But it seemed more likely that it had been intentional somehow, and I have been puzzling the intent all day. The store is pleasant and unpretentious--the staff genuinely helpful, with none of the condescension that would seem inevitable in the confluence of Cambridge and independent bookstore.

I have been digging around for a news story, but so far there is nothing--the blizzard has knocked everything else off the news. It seems to be an act of outsize violence to pass unnoticed, but so far remains a mystery. If anyone knows, please tell me--it's killing me...
posted by Ben at 7:51 AM

I am a terrible procrastinator for Christmas shopping (not so terrible that I haven't finished yet), but always the late, last rushed rollick through the stores to find suitable presents. This year, I resolved to get novels for everyone--all that I had not read, so that I could request book reports from everyone and build out my list. I spent a lunch hour in the bookstore and, in one of those rare confluences of energy and abundance, found so many books that I had enough to give out and a few left over as well.

One I just finished was Albert Camus' Exile and the Kingdom, a set of six short stories, uneven in quality both within and across the stories. But there is something compelling about reading minor works--when you can see the awkward threads, the experiments, the mis-steps that show tendencies not yet matured. Camus is kicking around ideas here, pushing the language around. The stories are not the cold little gems that writing programs seem to be generating. Uneven as they are, there are still striking moments in them, when he rises up past the stories and into something more--vague and hyperbolic and yet still substantial, blooded:

Is there another love than that of darkness, a love that would cry aloud in daylight? She didn't know, but she did know that Marcel needed her and that she needed that need, that she lived on it night and day, at night especially--every night when he didn't want to be alone, or to age and die, with that set expression he assumed which she occasionally recognized on other men's faces, the only common expression of those madmen hiding under an appearance of wisdom, until the madness seizes them and hurls them desperately toward a woman's body to bury in it, without desire, everything terrifying that solitude and night reveals to them.
posted by Ben at 9:08 PM

I struggled with Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles. He's a beautiful writer and the book is a perplexing, lyrical hallucination that stubbornly refused to take shape for me. He is certainly original--a series of short scenes that veer back and forth between dense realism, and a nightmarish fantasy buoyed up by a dark humor--a kind of relish. His father turns variously into a bird and a cockroach, wastes into nothing, rises up as a kind of terrible prophet, and disappears again. The narrator attempts to act, but mostly watches as the city--the world--wrenches itself into fantastical shapes around him, during which it is difficult to understand what bearing these nightmares have to any sort of particular reality. None is the likely answer, or, rather, who cares? Schultz is hunting other beasts here--a drama of the imagination that is potent and engaging:

"They were the distant, forgotten progeny of that generation of birds which at one time Adela had chased away to the four points of the sky. That brood of freaks, that malformed, wasted tribe of birds, was now returning degenerated or overgrown. Nonsensically large, stupidly developed, the birds were empty and lifeless inside. All of their vitality when into their plumage, into external adornment. They were like exhibits of extinct species in a museum, the lumber room of a birds' paradise....Only now, from nearby by did Father notice the wretchedness of that wasted generation, the nonsense of its second-rate anatomy. They had been nothing but enormous bunches of feathers, stuffed carelessly with old carrion....."

The recommendation for it came from a friend of mine who is a poet and who, I suspect will be delighted by my verdict of its powerful incoherence.

In that vein, I am reading DH Lawrence's Apocalypse, about the astrological symbolism of the Book of Revelations--heady stuff, with steady doses of Lawrentian bile to hold your attention. More on that as it develops.
posted by Ben at 3:36 PM

A review by John Berger of Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment led me to read it. Only later I realized that Dyer had written a book about Berger and they were linked as writers-polymaths, interested in tracing out ideas of interest to them without real reference to external systems of logic--mixing observation, reflection, philosophy, fact and speculation in idiosyncratic amalgamations that are often beautifully written.
In Dyer's case, this was a book about photography, that is built around looping associations of subjects, rather than chronology, photographer, style, or any other typical referent. Dyer constructs dialogs between photographers based around intent (implied or explicit) and results across common subjects--blind people, men's hats, gas stations, white picket fences, out car windows. Though it can be self-indulgent in places, it mostly delightful and strange and thought provoking--it is one of those books that seems full of novels--seeds that could easily spawn epics. For those of you wrestling with what to write about, here is some starter yeast, courtesy of Dyer. If you can't make a novel out of one of these (or at least a good short story), you might want to think about another vocation.

Seed #1
From Diane Arbus: "...people who appear like metaphors somewhere further out than we do, beckoned,not driven, invented by belief, each the author and hero of a real dream by which our own courage and cunning are testing and tried; so that we may wonder all over again what is veritable and inevitable and possible and what it is to become whoever we may be." Ok, so The Great Gatsby has already been written, but it could easily be another, or another dozen.

Seed #2
From a description of Paris, from Colin Westerbeck: "More than a time, night is a place here."

Seed #3
Dyer himself: "The value of a life cannot be assessed chronologically, sequentially. If that were the case then the only bit that matters--like the closing instants of a race--would be how you felt in the seconds before your death....the acts that redeem a life can come in advance of everything requiring redemption. Chronology can, sometimes, obscure this." That should be sending novels screaming from your fingertips--the idea not of sinning and working to redemption, but of being redeemed and then falling into a state requiring the redemption already achieved/won....

Seed #4
From Cheever's Journals: "The most wonderful thing about life seems to be that we hardly tap our potential for self-destruction. We may desire it, it may be what we dream of, but we are dissuaded by a beam of light, a change in the wind." As suits Cheever, maybe better for a story in itself, but a long and dense and a rich one--digging into our thwarted dreams of self-destruction.

Seed #5
Dyer: "The fact that someone is passing through makes those who are staying put conscious of their fate so that their resignation becomes disturbed and unsettled by the possibility--even if it is never acted upon--of moving on. In turn moving on acquires a taint of desperation: the fear of being one of the abandoned, one of those doomed to stay put." Both sides contaminated by the idea of movement becoming a permanent disconnection from pleasure--the doom of staying put that eradicates the possibility of now--sort of the dark underside of Black Elk's idea that anywhere can be the center of the world.

Seed #6
Dyer again: "These were colors that emptied the world, made it seem like a dream--not a human dream, but the dream a room or road might have of itself." The dreams of roads and rooms--not just a seed, but nearly an excellent title for your fine short story collection.

You are welcome. I will await the fruits of your labors.
posted by Ben at 11:39 AM

The reading has been slow and scattered of late--some stories (Tim Winton, Anders Monson)--one of those times when keeping up with the magazines feels like a chore. But I did sneak a short one between the powerpoints and the emails. Canongate has commissioned writers to re-tell the ancient myths, and a number of them look very promising (Atwood's The Penelopiad, The Helmet of Horror by some young Russian--for Theseus). I started with Jeanette Winterston's The Weight. I think Winterson is a dazzlingly talented writer--one of the few who can write with a steady, searing clarity--like Annie Dillard in this respect. She can hook you into a prose that is so compelling as to seem inevitable, yet still fresh and unexpected. Her attentions and ambitions are broad, however, and I don't always care for where she goes--some of her highly intellectual flights of fancy have no blood in them for me. I've been waiting for a return to the substance of books like Written on the Body (one of the finest openings of a book ever. Ever.)

So I'm always hopeful when she has something new come out. In Weight, she is retelling Atlas and Hercules, and it opens well: "The free man never dreams of escape." There are actually three openings, but that is the story itself. She mixes the myth with astronomy and autobiography to talk about the self-created burdens of the past and how they shape the present, about creation and casting off. After a promising start it mired for a while, feeling like she had to get the story out of the way in order to get to what she was interested in--and some sloppy modern language decisions--odd slang that deflected from the thrust of the narrative and diffused her focus. For a time, you feel the commissioned nature of the book--a sense of obligation that taints the tone And a chunk about the Russian space dog, Laika that was tritely cute. .

But she mounts back up as she nears the end and gets to the heart of the ideas that interest her. The last two sections (Boundaries and Desire), bristle with ideas and emotion and erase the clunky text that precedes. I'm always a fan of unevenly dazzling work as opposed to competent balance (Blake more than Updike), and on this measure, Winterson is excellent--her great is very great and, for the rest, well, it's a short book. (3.5 stars).
posted by Ben at 11:31 AM

I picked up Mari Sandoz's biography Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas thanks to a review in the excellent The Morning News. Sandoz is not Indian but, like Kurban Said/Lev Nussimbaum, an immensely sympathetic outsider who manages to articulate the animating spirit of a culture and way of being from the inside out. Her bio is written from the perspective of the Sioux as the whites arrive, settle, and overrun the Plains Indians in the latter half of the 19th century. Though the text has many locutions that sound, to my cliche-addled ears, like bad Hollywood (I think Peter Pan has ruined the image of an Indian saying 'How!', or as Sandoz has it, 'Hou'), there is much in it that has an authentic oddness.

The story itself is remarkable, complex, and powerful. Crazy Horse is a figure easy to mythologize as there is very little direct information about him, just a competing set of recollections drawn from audiences with competing and shifting agendas. Sandoz does an excellent job of pointing to some of the untranslatable gaps between the cultures and not trying to tie them up neatly. The Sioux are noble, but also treacherous, petty, greedy. When they feel bad, they go killing and stealing horses. Crazy Horse himself is insanely brave, and compassionate, but also nearly launches a destructive war because of his awkward love for Black Buffalo Woman (who is, at the margin, someone worth a novel or several).

One of the most compelling parts of the book for me is reading about the rituals of the Sioux designed to foster clarity of purpose--dances, sweat lodges, isolation, visions. I was struck by the contrast with our own--how much of the Sioux process of coming to meaning is structured around these rituals--drawing medicine into oneself, or accessing the latent medicine of your being or character. This has particular poignancy for Crazy Horse as the arc of his life moves towards its inevitable defeat, his surrender, betrayal and death. He emerges from this as an odd sort of saint, with his greatness thrust upon him. He reminded this image of Merton's:
...when the solidtary finds that his solitude has taken on the character of a mission, he discovers that he has become a force that reacts on the very heart of the society in which he lives, a power that disturbs and impedes and accuses the forces of selfishness and pride, reminding others of their own need for solitude and for charity and for peace with God.

To see Crazy Horse gradually take on this role, this mission, to see him try to adapt as the world he knew disappears, raises all of the fascinating and tragic questions of how to be in the world as it changes--what adaptation is necessary and what destroys us--what is inevitable, what change is possible--what may be essential to our nature in our way of being and what we may be able to accomodate or deny or reject. These are vital questions for any moment in time, but especially now, in the midst of turbulent change, some aspects of which are surely inevitable, and others which we are being vigorously harangued to believe are inevitable (and not just inevitable, but good, positive). (4 stars)

In order to sate some of my Crazy Horse jones, I read the Larry McMurtry bio of him that is a part of the Penguin Lives series. The bio itself is good--more of a commentary on other bios and their authors than a stand-alone bio. I enjoyed it, and it was a quick read (141 roomy pages), but I'm not sold on the short-form bio--it provokes mroe questions than it answers, and I can't imagine being interested enough to read a book on someone and being satisfied by the pith of a bio like this one. McMurtry is far more skeptical than Sandoz (and he is quite skeptical of her, and does a little damning with faint praise). It opened up some other lines of inquiry for me, in particular a desire to read more about the Sioux language, and to take another look at Brian Hall's dense, rich I Should be Extremely Happy in Your Company. As for the Penguin lives, I was given a set of four, and will give them another try (maybe Mary Gordon on Joan of Arc? Garry Willis on Saint Augustine?). Perhaps something in the interplay of writer and subject will bring more than thougthful competence. (2 stars) And, by the way, who thought Patricia Bosworth on Marlon Brando was a worthy subject for the series? Is that one sponsored by OK magazine?
posted by Ben at 8:24 AM

And here I was thinking I was keeping up as a stealthy month glides past. Too much work, and the start of school, a lovely fall, the days both full and empty. I have two, so i'll be brief, but both are excellent.

James Salter's Light Days is a novel of the sort that I have been, in the past, reductively lukewarm towards--closely observed shifts of relationship in otherwise unexceptional lives. And yet it is dazzling. The writing has an almost-ponderous fullness, as if he paused at the end of each sentence and said to himself "what is everything this next sentence could possibly say?" It is rich, and beautiful, like this:

You are not obscure, they told him. You have friends. people admire your work. He was, after all, a good father--that is, an ineffective man. Real goodness was different, it was irresistible, murderous, it had victims like any other aggressions, in short, it conquered. We must be vague, we must be gentle, we are killing people otherwise, whatever our intentions, we are crushing them beneath a vision of light. It is the idiot, the weakling, he thought, the son who has failed; once beyond that there is no virtue possible.

Night falls. The cold lies in the fields. The grass turns to stone. In bed, he lay like a man in prison, dreaming of life.

Salter gets 4 stars--and I have just had his book Dusk recommended also, so stay tuned for more Salter (though I didn't think much of his book Solo Faces).

Here is the opening of Light Days:

We dash the black river, its flats smooth as stone.

The second book is Jim Crace's Being Dead. If there is another love story half as beautiful that opens with the lovers brutally murdered, I have never read it. Being Dead is a tricky book, because it starts out on the high wire and shouts "Look! Look!" The book opens with the savage beating to death of an old couple, and its action takes place over the 6 or so days until their bodies are discovered--during which time they decompose. And yet, and yet, without calling us to look away, or to imagine other worlds, but just by looking at this one in exquisite, precise language and with great generosity of spirit, Crace writes a rich and lovely book--pulls off his highwire act (3.5 stars--might deserve 4, but for my poor attention in the reading...)

Here is Crace's opening:
For old times' sake, the doctors of zoology had driven out of town that Tuesday afternoon to make a final visit to the singing salt dunes at Baritone Bay.
posted by Ben at 8:10 PM

August Reading #3 and #4

I picked up Gustaf Sobin's The Fly-Truffler after reading his obit in the Times. Judging by the fact that my order was delayed by several weeks, I was not the only one; perhaps there is someone toiling in the bowels of the obit section whose skills would be better suited to book publicity. This book was, once again, a book that seemed like I should love it--the center of the book is a professor of the rapidly waning Provencal language (dying languages! score 1); he discovers that eating truffles causes him to dream of his beloved, now dead wife, in a sequence that leads toward the birth of their child. He loses sense of the boundaries between the real world (his crumbling ancestral estate, job, life) and this truffle-driven world of his dreams. He wanders the remains of his property, rousing pockets of golden flies that point to the presence of truffles. Sobin is a poet, and his language is frequently lovely and rich, but he is a sloppy novelist (or perhaps in need of a better editor). He reminds us of cutesy facts, often in exactly the same language he has previously used. The effect of this is to make his poetic language cloying at times, and to create some mistrust of his grasp of the narrative as a whole. There are some marvelous passages in this book, and it is almost a book I found amazing. But failing that, it was a disappointment. 2 stars:
He'd take the same path, now, nearly every morning.

A Woman in Berlin is the newly republished diary of a 30-year-old German female journalist, written during the two months that Berlin fell to the Russians. It is a remarkable book--remarkable to understand the detail of the rending of the fabric of a civil society--first the water is turned off, then the gas. People huddle in basements, forage for food--eat nettles growing in the sidewalks. Buildings become small communities, and then these break down as the Russians advance. There is a chaotic period of frequent rape and abject hunger, then an economy of rape and sets of moralities emerge--when is taking stealing? Who owns what now that everyone has lost nearly everything? There are moments of shocking generousity and painful constricted selfishness. The German men are either absent or utterly ineffectual; the women shape this new order. Gradually some measure of civic order returns, and the book abruptly ends.

The author's voice is remarkably clear and thoughtful throughout--unsparing of the choices she is making, and must make, to survive. Her eye for the groups that emerge and breakdown is very sharp, as is her unsentimental but not cold presentation of both sides--the germans in defeat and the russians in triumph. The city degenerates into a few spare blocks, and then just theirs, and then builds back up into a vast ruin with odd pockets of life and its past persisting. She writes beautifully (at times so much so that I found it inauthentic--there is the eye of a fiction writer). It's an excellent read, provoking, especially in the wake of Katrina. 4 stars:

It's true. War is rolling towards Berlin.
posted by Ben at 7:52 AM

August Reading #3

You have no choice but to love Kelly Link--starts her own press, does the book design, publishes books that are good--how can you not? Well, envy for one. But I was psyched once I got a look at Magic For Beginners, which, to read the blogs (or Jonathan Lethem) is even better than sliced bread.

I'm not a huge reader of short stories--the bad ones are terrible and the good ones feel like novels anyone. And I usually feel like story collections have one good story in them, and then diminishing variations on that one.

Which raises a question I have about story collections--how do you decide the order? Even the writer can't honestly think, like your first grade teacher that everyone is equally excellent, just different. Strong enough to be included is a lower bar than strong (and I think I have noted previously in this space, it is heartening to read some of the BAD Cheever, for example).

I say this because I hated the first story, The Faery Handbag, it was awkward, cloying, contrived. I put the book down. Buried it in the to-be-reads. Scornfully considered the hypocrisy of the glowing blurbers.

But I figured the whole starting-a-press thing warranted another story or two. Some Zombie Contingency Plans was much better--funny, lighter, still plenty odd, but more coherent. The Stone Animals, which was really excellent--amazing. And then a few others to see if they went in new directions, or if they felt like variations on the excellence of Stone Animals. I found them the latter--good--funny, sharp, very well-written, but none on a par with that one.

I wonder that about books too--how many authors write more than one real masterpiece? Some, but I often feel like authors write towards their one big book, and then away. Some feel like they never quite bring it into focus--write a series of books getting better and better, and then worse, as if they passed their mark without ever hitting it.

Which returns me to my question about balancing the stories within a collection. I'm sure there are schools of thought around it--that, like great rock albums back when albums mattered, there are whole complex structures of meaning across the arc of the stories that, read in order, add more pleasure to the mix. I don't read them in order, and don't often venture in at all, so disliking the first story made for rough sledding. But she's got a unique eye, and voice, and she's started her own press and the books are good. This one is good (3 stars)

Here's the opening of Stone Animals: "Henry asked a question. He was joking."
posted by Ben at 9:38 PM

August Reading #2

They had come in from the country. So begins Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting, a delightful, slight, rich book of imaginative non-fiction. The book presents a series of encounters between American artists and writers beginning with Mathew Brady and Henry James and ending 36 encounters later with Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell. Each chapter presents the encounters between two or three people--some life-long friendships, some passing ships; the chapters themselves are addictively short--around 10 pages or so--and present intimate, sidelong looks into longer lives of all veins and varieties--struggle and triumph, modest, steady achievement and blazing success, careers on wax and wane. The encounters themselves are based on substance--letters, reports, etc., but then also atmospherically imagined. I didn't like the combination at first--it felt forced, contrived. But they grew in assurance, and I to like them until I found myself racing unhappily toward the end.

The encounters draw in history, race, culture, politics, all around the edges of the threads of artistic flux. It is full of good lines from letters and diaries, and good anecdotes without needing to bear the burdens of completeness--it is full of savors and finds its own shape. A few:

Hearing the story behind Joseph Cornell's inspiration for Taglioni's Jewel Casket when 'the great ballerina Maria Taglioni had been pulled out of her carriage by a Russian highwayman and forced to dance naked on a panther's skin on the snow, an experience that had thrilled Taglioni so deeply that legend had it she forever kept a piece of ice in her jewel box to remember it by.'

That Carl Van Vechten: "barked to show enthusiasm...and had been known to bite people whom he liked and didn't like."

Or this line of Henry James's, in which he condemns historical novel in exactly the language I was struggling to find to praise Ali and Nino (see below):

The "historic" novel is, for me, condemned, even in cases of labor as delicate as yours, to a fatal cheapness....You may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures & documents, relics & prints, as much as you like--the real thing is almost impossible to do & in its absence the whole effect is as nought; I mean the invention, the representation of the old consciousness, the soul, the sense, the horizon, the vision of the individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world were non-existent....

The strongest chapter in the book is about 3 people who I know only a little (and am not especially drawn to read--Willa Cather, Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett). The delicate richness of their friendship is lovely. It reminded of a Norton Anthology of Friendship, put together by Ron Sharp and Eudora Welty. I studied with Ron at Kenyon for a summer, and he explained that for most of human history, friendship has been a major topic--of literature, poetry and philosophy--much examined, dissected and portrayed--and that it is only in our modern sexualized age that it has faded to the point where the idea of an anthology of friendship seems odd and quaint and full of cloying pablum. The book itself is not--one highlight is the exchange of letters between TS Eliot and Groucho Marx--affectionate, funny and sweet.

A Chance Meeting also reminded me of a collection of criticism I found in the American Library in Paris called A Shock of Recognition--it was an anthology of American writers writing criticism of other American writers--Poe, Melville and DH Lawrence on Hawthorne, TS Eliot on Henry James, Dos Passos on EE Cummings, etc. (The best of that is reading DH Lawrence rant about Hester Prynne: "Hester Prynne was a devil. Even when she was so meekly going around as a sick-nurse. Poor Hester. part of her wanted to be saved from her own devilishness. And another part wanted to go on and on in devilishness, for revenge. Revenge! REVENGE!"--you can see Lawrence starting to foam at the mouth--he starts shouting FIE! later on--demented and hilarious and delightful.

So, A Chance Meeting--quite unusual, but certainly worth a read (4 stars).

And stay tuned--we're just starting to crack the stack....
posted by Ben at 9:00 PM

August Reading #1

Work has meant travel, and travel has meant lots of reading, but little writing--that and a concurrent state of bewilderment, of the world in stubborn parts. But the stack is built to toppling, so here at least is notes.

First, The Letters of Robert Lowell. I haven't ever been drawn to his poetry, and even after reading this (all 600+ pages of it), I still find it unreadable. But the letters were still a pleasure. In places he writes beautifully, as in this description of Delmore Schwartz:

He was much more bruised and swollen, when I knew him well, an intimate gruelling year, a year or so before you and I met--Jean and he and I, sedentary, indoors souls, talking about books and literary gossip over glasses of milk, strengthened with Maine vodka, the milk intended to restore what the vodka tore down--Delmore in an unpressed mustard gabardine, a little winded, husky voiced, unhealthy, but with a carton of varied vitamin bottles, the color of oil, quickening with Jewish humor, and in-the-knowness, and his own genius, every person, every book--motives for everything, Freud in his blood, great webs of causation, then suspicion, then rushes of rage. He was more reasonable than us, but obsessed, a much better mind, but one already chasing the dust--it was like living with a sluggish, sometimes angry spider--no hurry, no motion, Delmore's voice, almost inaudible, dead, intuitive, pointing somewhere, then the strings tightening, the roar of rage--too much, too much for us!

But the real pleasures of the letters are seeing his humanness, his lack of distance. For most of his life, Lowell was hospitalized once a year or so with intense manic episodes--these mounted over a period of months, often involving a torrid (or misguided, or attempted) affair, often some dramatic scenes. In the letters, there are threads--they get longer, grander, sometimes hard to follow. Then some months of silence--a gap in the record--then very short, contrite letters as he attempts to undo the damage he has caused. And so he goes, in and out of asylums, marriages, jobs--gossiping and struggling, trying to be a better tennis player, supporting his friends. His letters are not luminous, in the way that Cheever's journals are, but they provide an excellent portrait of a person, living along, obedient to the idea of making art amid chaos. 3 stars.
posted by Ben at 3:40 PM

I've been tripped amid a set of fragmented books--Robert Lowell's Letters, Ben Marcus's The Age of Wire and String, Kelly Link's Magic for Beginngers--and nothing quite come into focus for reporting on.

A friend recommended Ali and Nino by Kurban Said with a set of undercutting disclaimers--that it was a good eye into a region I have been thinking of writing about (central asia), that regardless it was a quick read, that it would be enjoyable if not transformative. So, tired of the fragments, I gave it a shot.

We were a very mixed lot, we forty schoolboys who were having a geography lesson one hot afternoon in the Imperial Russian Humanistic High School of Baku, Transcaucasia: thiry Mohammmedans, four Armenians, two Poles, three Sectarians, and one Russian.

It's a great book that feels like it keeps slipping into some diminished version of itself as I describe what makes it great. Vivid evovacations of place, great characters, a great plot that moves and moves; it seems about to slip into parody, a cardboard edge about to reveal itself, but it doesn't. It seems about to invite cynicism, but remains defiantly and compellingly sincere.

Kurban Said is a pen name of Essad Bey, which is a pen name for Lev Nussimbaum, a German Jew born in Baku. But the book was written also with an Austrian Baronness, Elfriede Ehrenfels--though the exact extent of their collaboration is unknown. Nussimbaum himself is a fascinating character, and the subject of a recent biography, The Orientalist. I feel a little at a loss at how to describe the book--something short of astonishing, but certainly excellent--3.5 menhirs worth of good reading, and one that makes you want to travel to places that may, perhaps, be impossible to arrive at.
posted by Ben at 7:43 AM

I picked up W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz at the suggestion of a friend and former writing teacher who thought I might like it--particularly its style. I did. Sebald writes beautifully--long, elliptical, dreamy sentences that gently illuminate places and moments that we are all surely having in our own lives--sights we could see, but are missing, moments that we may only understand as significant in another ten years, etc. One odd and pricking point of interest is that the story begins, in some ways, in the town of Bala in northern Wales; I spent a few weeks there when I was 12--my father was managing the US National Canoe and Kayaking team and we were there for the world championships. It is an otherwise (as far as I know) unremarkable town, though lovely--and I got a charge every time Sebald returned there. He also offered a few settings that I am a complete sucker for--disused train stations, ruined stone buildings in the midst of fields, flooded cities. This is the passage that prompted my friend to think I might like it:
...Elias stopped the pony-trap on the banks of this lake and walked out with me to the middle of the dam, where he told me about his family home lying down there at a depth of about a hundred feet under the dark water, and not just his own family home but at least forty other houses and farms, together with the church of St. John of Jerusalem, three chapels, and three pubs, all of them drowned when the dam was finished in the autumn of 1888. In the years before its submersion, so Elias had told him, said Austerlitz, Llanwddyn had been particularly famous for its games of football on the village green when the full moon shone in summer, often lasting all night and played over by ten dozen youths and men of almost every age, some of them from neighboring villages. The story of the football games of Llanwddyn occupied my imagination for a long time, said Austerlitz, first and foremost, I am sure, because Elias never told me anything about his own life either before or afterwards.
At this one moment on the Vyrnwy dam when, intentionally or unintentionally, he allowed me a glimpse into his clerical heart, I felt for him so much that he, the righteous man, seemed to me like the only survivor of the deluge which had destroyed Llanwddyn, while I imagined all the others -- his parents, his brothers and sisters, his relations, their neighbors, all the other villagers -- still down in the depths, sitting in their houses and walking along the road, unable to speak and with their eyes opened far too wide....

At night, before I fell asleep in my cold room, I often felt as if I too had been submerged in that dark water, and like the poor souls of Vyrnwy must keep my eyes wide open to catch a faint glimmer of light far above me, and see the reflection, broken by ripples, of the stone tower standing in such fearsome isolation on the wooded bank. Sometimes I had imagined that I had seen one or other of the people from the photographs in the album walking down the road in Bala, or out in the fields, particularly around noon on hot summer days, even when there was no one else about and the air flickered hazily. Elias said I was not to speak of such things, so instead I spent every free moment I could with Evan the cobler, whose workshop was not far from the manse and who had a reputation for seeing ghosts....Unlike Elias who had always connected illness and death with tribulations, just punishment, and guilt, Evan told tales of the dead who had been struck down by fate untimely, who knew it.

They had been cheated of what was due to them and tried to return to life. If you had an eye for them they were to be seen quite often, said Evan. At first glance they seemed to be normal people, but when you looked more closely their faces would blur or flicker slightly at the edges. And they were usually a little shorter than theyhad been in life, for the experience of death, said Evan, diminished us, just as a piece of linen shrinks when you first wash it....and it was certainly Evan, said Austerlitz, who once told me that nothing but a piece of silk like that separates us from the next world.

The book integrates a set of photos and images that is not as striking as it seems like it might be (given the attention accorded to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close for doing the same thing, for example); I found it a small, interesting addition, but nothing astonishing.

The writing led for me from scene to scene in a drifty way, not accreting into a larger structure (for which I willingly point the finger at my own scattered attentions); Sebald seems to be mounting a charge as a "writer's writer", as a hidden genius that people mention as the shibboleth that marks their membership in a particularly urbane and sensitive company. Who cares. The book is a fine one and worth a read. (3.5 stars) Here's the opening:
In the second half of the 1960s I traveled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to me, staying sometimes for just one or two days, sometimes for several weeks. Not a car chase, to be sure...
posted by Ben at 7:34 AM

Books are emerging from boxes and with them the recollection that I have not yet noted them here though the reading has gone on. Reading in the midst of upheaval is an odd combination of skittering through books--the idea of reading is a comfort and seems like it should help shape the world back into order, but I lack fundamental purchase and find eyes passing merely over words--a page passes or ten, or a sentence. Books drift as a set of words and even the idea of reading seems grasping. And then there is a strike--word, image, idea--that in the middle of the shallow jostling stirs something raw, and whole shapes emerge into understanding again.

I am on the early end of that--still in the idea-of-reading stage, looking for solace, shape, end to this time of beginnings, terrible beginnings. So this will not be full of revelations, but some of progress for the idea of progress as a good, as ground passing beneath the feet with the faith that such movement must bring new worlds into view (I kept trying to use "hove" in that sentence, but couldn't wrestle it in).

So, in descending order from the really excellent to the powerful but flawed:

The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins is a great book (5 stars). He traces the history of human evolution back to the origins of life with great clarity, insight, and poetry. I have already written a recommendation of it for the fine folks at Post Road magazine, so you can find more there, but a taste: Dawkins has an eye for the poetic incongruity of life in evolution, and he draws our gaze in on wonderful moments in this our fecund history:

Here is a line that could easily launch a thousand novels:
Everything about an animal or plant, including its bodily form, its inherited behavior and the chemistry of its cells is a coded message about the worlds in which its ancestors survived; the food they sought; the predators they escaped; the climates they endured; the mates they beguiled.

The book constantly provokes us to understand our selves and the world around us differently, more richly and oddly, more humbly--we are all drawn from shrew-like nocturnal insectivores who snuck out when the mighty dinosaurs fell asleep--the whale gallops through the sea--40,000 years ago the human population shrank down to a mere 15,000 individuals. Full of delights.

A much more peculiar book--powerful and beautiful and often incomprehensible, Nightwood is a shadowy book that has moments of dazzling electricity, and undeniable currents of force. Here is the opening:

Early in 1880, in spite of a well-founded suspicion as to the advisability of perpetuating that race which has the sanction of the Lord and the disapporval of the people, Hedvig Volkbein--a Viennese woman of great strength and military beauty, lying upon a canopied bed of a rich spectacular crimson, the valance stamped with the bifurcated wings of the House of Hapsburg, the feather coverlet an envelope of satin on which, in massive and tarnished gold threads, stood the Volkbein arms--gave birth, at the age of forty-five, to an only child, a son, seven days after her physician predicted that she would be taken.

Djuna Barnes, like a lot of the modernists, seduces our sense of our own intelligence with obscure, dense writing that is laden with meanings but never resolves. This lets us draw in as many shapes as we have the energy to bring--a thousand women's studies theses--sub-industries of exposition.

It put me in the mind of the refreshing, but unsettling, pleasure of swimming in ponds--of extending a cautious foot down with no idea what you might find at the bottom.

She writes beautifully, and the book is flourless--short but so dense it feels heavy--dense with pleasures and more than an edge of madness. Here is a line that is a novel of its own, had someone the patience to write it:

I will love what she has loved, and then I will find her again.

3.5 stars

And. AND. I told you it had been a while.

Continuing in that flawed-with-power vein, Tapping the Source is alternately called the best surfing novel ever and "surfer noir". It may be either or both of those things. It's a good read--violent, with odd depths and shallownesses--almost always better than you are expecting it to be, with all of the limitations inherent in that, but good. It collapses in the end under its own implausibilities, but that doesn't do it much harm--it is so far gone at that point. The opening:
Ike Tucker was adjusting the Knuckle's chain the day the stranger came asking for him.
2.5 stars

More to come, with sleep and rainy days....
posted by Ben at 9:44 PM

I've been out doing some readings for the paperback release of The Rope Eater, during what has been a long and cold winter, and in the midst of a turbulent and sad time. I have found that my perspective on the book is shifting--I finished writing it almost four years ago now--and the world was a very different one then.

For the paperback readings, I've chosen different sections of the book to read, to keep the material fresh for myself and to make sure I was not just telling the same stories over and over ('yes, the Shackleton ad, the figure-skater, we get it already!'). And different sections of the book have taken on new meaning and resonance, while others have faded. At the risk of great narcissism, I thought I'd share one that has been echoing steadily of late:

You want for your heart to break and it doesn't, for your body to fail and it doesn't--for the world to end, but, remorseless world without end, the punishing sun arises and winds begin again to blow.

Some call this bleak (!), but it has in it also the seeds of what I see as redemptive--that the continuity forces change, and teaches that change is inevitable--the mind wants to hold onto what it knows, but there is no holding and that causes great pain. It is the sun that is bringing that message--dawn, light, beginnings. I think the pain of endings is easy enough to see, but the pain of beginnings, of needing to begin and begin again is something else entirely.

posted by Ben at 12:09 PM

Graham Greene says that Orient Express is the first book he ever wrote for money; he draws a famous distinction between his novels and his "entertainments" of which this is the first. Faulkner responded to a critical question about the meaning of one of his novels (Sanctuary?), 'I wrote that book because I had a horse I wanted to buy.'--a posture, however artificial, that i like. I went into Orient Expresscurious to see how badly he could write--the answer is, obviously, not very badly at all. Here's the opening:
The purser took the last landing-card in his hand and watched the passengers cross the grey wet quay, over a wilderness of rails and points, round the corners of abandoned trucks.

Not shabby, but not dazzling, to my eye. In the book itself, he seems to swing back and forth between lazy beginnings and virtuoso escapes. He begins with a rash of stock characters--the solitary, greedy Jew, the showgirl with the sweet, weak heart, the heroic, fallen Dr. Czinner (surely the secret agent could find a cleverer code than that?)etc. And then he writes himself inside them--making them rich and, almost uniformly, sweet and sympathetic--Mabel Warren, the drunken lesbian is completely charming and funny. Coral and Myatt grow beyond their rough strokes, struggle genuinely, are whole people before they recede again to types. The minor characters are mostly flat (the soldier who only strives to have something interesting to tell his wife), but some sparkle even so (the mad driver who carries Myatt back to find Coral).

The plot moves well and yet it is here that the "entertainment" side shows--it does not build, but merely resolve--at the end, the pieces slide together with a too-neat click, like the engineered wedding at the end of a minor comedy. It is hard to tell whether Greene has simply given up at the end, or whether he had no great aim as he set out, and merely infused these small pieces with some care and thought--most likely the latter. It is a good read (3 stars), but minor--as, I suppose, Greene intended.
posted by Ben at 9:05 PM

I read on a lit blog somewhere a note about how many blog entries (and how many letters also) begin with a lament about how long it has taken to write--so I'm abandoning that herd. Look! How swiftly! Must be the springtime--though there was SNOW in Boston yesterday.

Nicholas Christopher's excellent A Trip to the Stars is one of those slightly obscure, completely wonderful books that we all love to recommend--it makes us feel well-read and possessors of fine taste for having discovered him. (I came upon him as a present from my sister, who gives good rec.)

So when I saw his book Veronica in a book store, I thought I would open myself up to further dazzlement. Veronica is like a protoype for A Trip to the Stars. It has many of the same elements--specific, odd bits of information, peculiar mystical symbols, a fascination with magic, and a noir-ish sensibility and pace--but the components don't come together into as satisfying a whole. The book feels scattered into pieces as the overlapping symbols return and return (the crescent of stars, the locks that sound like stones underwater, the blue and gold bird, etc.); they are too many and too variable, and the action too choppy, to build up into a narrative that actually sweeps us up. The book is freighted with external knowledge (he even provides a reading list at the end)--the effect is that he doesn't seem to trust his own powers of engagement, or the worth of what he has made from the pieces he found. The short chapters (many are 3 or 4 pages) keep the narrative moving, but in a way that doesn't let us care for the characters in the way we do for the characters in A Trip to the Stars.

And so it feels like a first pass at a book that got fully realized later; for that reason it is interesting to read--to tease out the balance of elements and judge why they don't quite work. None of this against Mr. Christopher--he is an excellent writer and the book is solid--but A Trip to the Stars is far better. And I will be looking forward to reading whatever he writes next. But this one? 2 stars.

In Lower Manhattan there is an improbable point where Waverly Place intersects Waverly Place.
posted by Ben at 6:15 AM

Almost a month? For shame, for shame, especially with books to write about. But it was a wild and woolsome month, so I will do some catching up (now? Just as the weather turns warmish? I'll take what I can get.

Every review that Gilead got sounded like a book I should read--it was this drumbeat of ideas I thought I'd like to find--the kind of writing--the kind of book. And then it won the Pulitzer, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Sure signs of trouble.

Here is the opening line:
I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old.

This hints at some of the quiet pleasures of this book, but it didn't grip me--and so it was with the book. It sustains a remarkable focus on small joys--moments of pleasure--reflections on good things--in a way that is never sanctimonious or reductive. The writing is clear and strong, though not dazzling in the way The Great Fire.

But there was too much relfection and too little revelation in it for me--it accurately presented this world--inhabited it--but that was not enough for me. I don't know whether it is a question of my own ambitions for what I want a book to hold, or what I actually found in the book itself. Whichever it was, it was not enough.

Now I am arguing against the book because it has been so highly and exhaustively praised. I did enjoy it, and found, in some moments, that it really sang, like this one:

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and see amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition comparted to what awaits us, but it is only lovlier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great, bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy I believe, and that all that has passed here will be the eopic of the universe, the balland they sing in the streets.

As I went back through and copied out my notes, I found I liked it better than I had remembered when I finised reading it--that the net impression was less than the sum of its parts.

Some irritations: the narrators dwells on the worth of the boxes of sermons in his attic and what to do with them, without ever resolving them to value or not, or really even exploring whether they have value. This felt loose.

And he claims to have spent a lifetime reading--in both spiritual and heretical texts, late into the nights (though he does explain that he feel asleep often, and got credit for reading more than he did). Still I expected there to be more of the wisdom of his reading, or its fruits, or a rejection of them. But it was simply the assertion that he had done a lot of reading. So? Good, but not great: 3 stars.
posted by Ben at 6:20 PM

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell has received ample praise and recognition (including a victory in The Morning News Tournament of Books, downing many worthy opponents and some unworthy, including me. It is an excellent book (though it takes a little while to get going), and he moves so easily across styles and times that is dazzling. he gets beyond dazzling however, with some very substantial character development and real emotional depth. The writing is brisk and rich, the plot engaging. You can almost hear the but coming, can't you?

Cloud Atlas reminds me exactly of Atonement, in that it is filled with excellence--great writing, rich imagination--both excellent, excellent books. But both are, I think, nearly ruined by their last two pages, where the imaginative gold of imagination turns to leaden message giving. "Here's what I meant with all of this," says Mitchell. "Here's how the pieces fit together." I started to cringe and am cringing still in some ways. And the worst part was that it didn't feel organic to the sly suggestiveness of the novel--it felt like the editor, holding a gun to the head of the author, and dictating a clarifying conclusion so that the sewing circle/reading groups could pat themselves on the back for having understood this big, hard book. Other people seem to have had less strong reactions to both books. I'll still give it 3.5 stars, but I may tear out the last two pages and give it 4. Here's the opening:
Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints.
posted by Ben at 10:24 AM

"On July 18, 1926, the British freighter SS Shelley weighed anchor in Rotterdam, the great port of the Netherlands."

Ok so the opening line is not as great as Coetzee's, but Mark Steven's and Annalyn Swan's de Kooning an American Masterwas terrific. Let me start by saying I have no particular grounding in, or love of, modern art movements (or much art history at all--a series of physical mishaps in college (dislocated shoulder, oral surgery, badly sprained foot--all at once) conspired to pull me out of the one major survey course I took, though not before I had fallen asleep in many, many of the classes). I certainly claim no understanding of de Kooning's work or that of his peers, or even a visual vocabulary to navigate from one movement to the next.

What is remarkable about this biography is their unsentimental portayal of his pursuit--the integrity of his choices to paint and paint and paint--and of the consequences of that for his relationships, his family, his friends. The sheer relentlessness of it is very inspiring--makes me feel profoundly lazy. I was struck, in particular, by the section covering the 30s--when de Kooning and his peers had little prospect of making much money and there was no real fame to be had as an American painter. On and on they paint, in their grimy, freezing studios, grubbing for money--switching to house paint because it is cheaper. I think every person who imagines an artistic life sees some montage of this flash by on their way to fulfillment (and naturally, the economic freedom from worry). But to think of them there for 10 years, painting on and on, arguing about what they are doing. 10 years. More really, though Pollock starts to break ground for them, starts to create a model of success.

I think it is impossible for us now to think about that same kind of pursuit in that same vacuum--even if we push it off, the narratives of success are so pervasive that we are reacting to it.

There is much else that is rich in the book, but the other element most striking to me was of de Kooning's decline--of the period when he clearly begun to lose touch with reality and on and on painted--the grooves of that work worn so deeply into who he was that they persisted past speech and memory. (4 stars)

There is plenty else of merit--fine, clear writing, an excellent survey of modern american art, the growth of the commercial art world, reflections on the impacts of fame and money, the ongoing struggle of de Kooning despite all of his success to subside ever into ease with his art. The struggle remains the struggle, but for some moments free of it. An excellent book for anyone serious about making art.
posted by Ben at 9:40 PM

A few readings for the paperback, a flurry at work, the inordinate tumult of days, and somehow I have ended up a couple thousand pages behind in these notes--so some catch-up is in order. Today's installment: Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee (in keeping with a trend of recent Bookers). Since I seem to be focused on openings, I'll start there, because I think Coetzee's is excellent:

For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved
the problem of sex rather well.

In contrast to so many of the short story openings, this one starts with resolution, not problem. The problem of sex is solved. Well, not solved, but solved to his mind. For a man of his age. And what is the problem of sex exactly anyway. Deviously simple and yet we are caught. And, in his age, Coetzee has David Lurie leaning-still upright--but leaning and about to fall, and we begin to brace to think about it.

More? yes, there is. Lurie's character is in here also: self-satisfied, focused on his own appetites, complacent, arrogant. Here is a line that caught me more than the thousand mysterious dead bodies, or half-glimpsed beautiful women, or backward looking regrets. It is masterful.

The book doesn't disappoint--it pulls you along into awkward and ugly places and Coetzee does an interesting thing: he doesn't make us like his characters much, but he always makes us interested in what is happening to them. This is a tricky line--and runs in the face of much of the bad advice given to young writers about making characters sympathetic. Coetzee keeps us at a distance, but riveted. So as Lurie has sex with Melanie (not rape, he tells us, but undesired), he is completely repulsive, his delusions apparent, his greed appalling. But we need to know now what happens--how does punishment descend and will he come to understand it?

Coetzee doesn't release our interest and this creates a welcome, but difficult pressure--he doesn't let us love them--any of them, not even Lucy, who seems like she should be victim and yet refuses to descend to that--she keeps and makes her choices and these hold us off from her in a way that makes us look at our own choices, our own judgements about her rape and response to it.

An excellent book (4 stars), in a string of excellent books--stay tuned for more coming.
posted by Ben at 7:55 AM

Footracing the opening lines: Now that you've had plenty of time to reflect, here are my choices for the good and the ugly. (Note: I am making no comment on the excellence or lack of it in the stories, no aspersions on authors, genres, publishers, the merits of leafy vegetables, the bullies from the playgrounds of my childhood, etc.--just the openings).

First, the schadenfreude:
Budgel Wolfscale, a telegraph clerk from Missouri on his way to Montana to search for the yellow metal, stopped at a Wyoming road ranch one day in 1898 for a supper of fried venison and coffee, heard there was good range.

First, the name is so absurd as to be impossible to overcome, no matter how excellent the line or the story. It just stops you dead. Unless the story is now about the burdens of ridiculous names, I have lost my trust in the author's choices already (even given the likely historical accuracy of it--truth beyond plausibility does not engage me). And the sentence's sins are compounded by the careless, pointless "yellow metal". This doesn't strike me as a vital tonal choice--just an evasion that makes us do a little bit of unnecessary processing to no end.

Runner-up:
Once they were out in the street, Grace, his dog, paid no attention to John Hillman, unless she wanted to range farther than her leash permitted.

Man/dog relationship nuance does not drive me into a story. This one's virtues may lie further in, but the drama of the leash is not starting me out strongly.

Now, the best, or the better anyway--I confess that this exercise made me a litle too aware of the strain in all of these lines and I think my praise of them is still the measured praise of craft, rather than the gush of enthusiasm.

The Kashigawa district, two hours from the Endos' home in Tokyo, was an isolated farming community with two claims to distinction: indigenous harrier monkeys up in the hills, and a new restaurant--Fireside Rations--that served "rice" made from locally grown yams.

The odd set of images--harrier monkeys have grabbed me already, and then the rice from yams--and these as the primary marks of distinction--provokes a set of questions about each (why rice from yams? is harrier a description of behavior or a name? Both?) and then about their connection and impending intersection--I'm starting to dread the potential for a restaurant overrun with screeching monkeys flinging yams. I like a subtext of mayhem to keep me reading.

Runner-up:
The weather had absolutely nothing to do with it--though the rain had been falling off and on throughout the day and the way the gutters were dripping made me feel as if despair were the mildest term in the dictionary--because I would have gone down to Daggett's that afternoon even if the sun were shining and all the fronds of the palm trees were gilded with light.

What I like in this line is the way he uses language to create a range of moods (abrupt? yes, but I think it works). The "despair were the mildest term in the dictionary" is a little mawkish, but the bad to lovely transition brings me into the story--I'm curious about what ground this emotional range will lead us into.

Favorites? Disagree with my choices?

posted by Ben at 9:06 AM

So I, like everyone else, like endings and beginnings. When I am deciding whether to read something, I read, like everyone else, the beginning. And the blurbs-I know they are all meaningless hyperbole, but are they the right kind of meaningless hyperbole--is the vein all about dark prophetic essentiality? is it bleakly spiritual? (never concerned with "faith"--though I am--because books with blurbs about faith are inevitably callow--Thomas Kinkade books, where you have a sense that for an appropriate price, a specially trained retoucher might name a dog after you, or set an episode at your old and much beloved summer camp.) And are the blurbs from the right people? Is the book good enough to compel someone I respect to forsake some small measure of integrity to offer up this hyperbole? It must be good. Once past the semiotics of the blurbs, it is the opening that is its first and last best chance to grab me (not the jacket copy--that only tells you how good a writer the editorial assistant was). I like sensing the effort--the opening has been paid particular attention, revised, slaved over, worried at--the writer is at his or her most solicitous, most desperate, most carnival barkery. They are establishing voice, style, tone; they are laying out the knot they will unravel. They are setting off, auditioning, with all of the fraught ambition that brings, and I love them for it.

I have been reading the new Best American Short Stories this year (Lorrie Moore likes'em loooong....), and thought it would be interesting to put up the openings of the stories (reflections on the aggregate to follow typing them all in). In order:

"One day you have a home and the next you don't, but I'm not going to tell you my particular reasons for being homeless, because it's my secret story, and Indians have to work hard to keep secrets from hungry white folks."

"The weather had absolutely nothing to do with it--though the rain had been falling off and on throughout the day and the way the gutters were dripping made me feel as if despair were the mildest term in the dictionary--because I would have gone down to Daggett's that afternoon even if the sun were shining and all the fronds of the palm trees were gilded with light."

"Hassan comes to me on Tuesday nights."

"It wasn't even Halloween yet, but Ms. Hempel was already thinking about her anecdotals."

"How as I supposed to know that any mention of suicide to the phalanx of doctors making Friday rounds would warrant the loss of not only weekend-pass privileges but also the liberty to take a leak in private?"

"Sundays have always been depressing enough without having to do a job."

"I don't know why I committed us to any of those things," said Otto."

"Once they were out in the street, Grace, his dog, paid no attention to John Hillman, unless she wanted to range farther than her leash permitted."

"She was an American girl, but one who apparently kept Bombay time, because it was 3:30 when she arrived for their 1:00 appointment."

"Horace and Loneese Perkins--one child, one grandchild--lived most unhappily together for more than twelve years in Apartment 320 at Sunset House, a building for senior citizens at 1202 Thirteenth Street Northwest."

"The morning after her granddaughter's frantic phone call, Lorraine skipped her usual coffee session at the Limestone Diner and drove out to the accident scene instead."

"The intervention is not Marilyn's idea, but it might as well be."

"The day we planned the trip, I told Louise that I didn't like going to Idaho via the Gallatin Canyon."

"Carla heard the car coming before it topped the little rise in the road that around here they called a hill."

"Word was that the missionary kid had a demon, though no one was supposed to know."

"Budgel Wolfscale, a telegraph clerk from Missouri on his way to Montana to search for the yellow metal, stopped at a Wyoming road ranch one day in 1898 for a supper of fried venison and coffee, heard there was good range."

"Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, from hither and yon, and welcome to the Lee Chapel on the campus of historic Washington and Lee University."

"Their class had graduated from Olinger High School in 1952, just before the name was regionalized out of existence."

"The Kashigawa district, two hours from the Endos' home in Tokyo, was an isolated farming community with two claims to distinction: indigenous harrier monkeys up in the hills, and a new restaurant--Fireside Rations--that served "rice" made from locally grown yams."

"I have a friend with a son in prison."

It is interesting, in typing these, to feel the choices in them, the effortful push off. Each one has a hook, though some straining more than others--often just a word (anecdotals). I was struck by the number that begin with a negative assertion: "not Marilyn's idea", "paid no attention", "depressing enough without", "The weather had absolutely nothing to do with it"--establishing some resistance for the story to work against--starting action with reaction. More thoughts will come, but for now I'll let you digest. Footrace them--best and worst?

posted by Ben at 5:56 PM

I have been doing much reading of late, but little writing--often the case when I find myself bewildered as I have been of late. Bewildered is too mild a word for what I am, but never mind. I tend to write best when I have a kind of focused curiosity--what will he do next? How can these pieces fit together? What happens if? I tend to read as a means of broader exploration--what kinds of questions are interesting enough to spend some time one--I find fodder in reading, and, after a fashion, answers.

People often try to explain the purpose of reading. I have never been in the measured camp of aesthetes who believe the function is some sublime apprehension of craft, some celebration of mimesis, or some equally pretentious and bloodless nonsense. I read because I know little, understand little, and hope in books to understand more. I am shameless in rooting out little bits that inform my own experiences, that shed light on my own struggles and questions. This is often denigrated as a primitive reason to read--if so I am a primitive. Books must have some blood in them for me, and if they do it is because they connect to my own experience of the human--they expand my understanding of people and what is possible, how to bear pain, what dignity might be, and faith. That as a means of saying I have been more bewildered than usual of late--and so more reading than writing, but here is the first catch-up.

The Bone People by Keri Hulme is a rich and strange book that I liked a great deal--it is a book with great strengths and some pronounced weaknesses, but ambitious in a way that I respect and successful on its own terms in a way that I admire.

The minor bad: there were a few false notes--story elements thrown in for narrative convenience that never seemed to be true--how Kerewin got her money, or her extraordinary fighting skills--these seemed too easy and not a part of the whole.

The major good: The book as two real triumphs--one is the interplay between Kerewin, Simon and Joe: Hulme keeps them so alive to each other and to us--their edges, their powerful and incomplete affections, the gaps between their feelings and their actions. This alone would make it extraordinary. The second is both a triumph and, at points, wearying--that is the language itself. The story skips around--Kerewin loves wordplay--and the story text varies between the straightforward and the poetic (and the Maori). Mostly I found this excellent--a whole and complete means of expression only lightly tethered to other writing, and using its new linguistic and narrative terrain to real advantage. There were a few points where it dragged, felt overlong and I felt myself skimming to get past it and back to the story.

The major less-good: I felt that the book lost its way a little after the final beating of Simon. First it seemed unnecessarily brutal--did he need his skull caved and implants to be able to hear? I felt something underneath or outside of the story intruding there--like it had to match up to some unarticulated reality that I didn't find in the story itself. And then each of their journeys back had more unresolved and unsatisfying mysticism in them (and I am a big mystic).

But the end pulled together and some digestion has made the books strengths considerably overshadow its weaknesses: 4 stars

Here's the opening:
He walks down the street. The asphalt reels by him.
It is all silence.
posted by Ben at 10:42 PM

Some of you have complained that I like all these books so much--what about the ones I don't like? I try to avoid reading any of those, as a general rule, and books are so hard to write that I try to find something to like regardless. However, here was one that I didn't: The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner. Now Stegner can write very well--I was actually surprised how much I liked Angle of Repose when I read it. And The Spectator Bird won The National Book Award, so I had high hopes. Here was the opening:

On a February morning, when a weather front is moving in off the Pacific but
has not quite arrived, and the winds are changeable and gusty and clouds
drive over and an occasional flurry of fine rain darkens the terrace bricks,
this place conforms to none of the cliches about California with which they
advertise the Sunshine Cities for the Sunset Years. No bland sky, no cool
morning overcast, no placid afternoons fading into chilly evenings.

Nothing spectacular, except from hints of tone that could be promising. But I found the first part of the book--his lamentations about the process of ageing, the decline of his friends--to be gloomy and uncompelling--bland even. (I perfer my gloom compelling...).

The second section of the book--the trip to Denmark and the mysterious countess--began to pick up, but then the book took a completely unbalanced and implausible turn--the incest and the genetics experiments, the past shame uncovered, etc. The parts seemed wholly out of balance, as if they came from different books and Stegner were making little attempt to reconcile them.

The kiss and near-affair (which by this time we had been awaiting for a hundred pages or so) was wel-enough drawn, but the shadow of the lurid history of her family battered the delicacy out of it. It was no longer a human situation, but a kind of historical and political one, yet there was no recognition of this in the narrative.

1 star. Stegner's good, but not here. The National Book Award??
posted by Ben at 3:42 PM

I enjoyed The Great Fire tremendously--one of those rare books that calls out during the day to be read, that usurps the days because you want to get back to it. This was a function of a few things, but mostly the writing itself--clear is a weak word for its directness and force, for the rhythm of it. I stopped a number of times to unpack what made it so good--the choices she made about what to omit, the gaps that she leaves that make every sentence feel essential. No sentence felt workmanlike, had that air of "now I need to get them out of the room before I can get back to the meat". it was all meat.

Here's the opening:
"Now they were starting. Finality ran through the train, an exhalation. There were thuds, hoots, whistles, and the shrieks of late arrivals. From a megaphone, announcements were incomprehensible in American and Japanese. Before the train had moved at all, the platform faces receded into the expression of those who remain.

I don't think this is the best of her writing--good, but not that which really struck me. Here is a more representative passage:

"Filth was in fact on Peter Exley's mind in those first weeks;the accretion filming the orient, the shimmer of sweat or excrement. A railing or handle one's fingers would not willingly grasp; walls and objects grimed with existence; the limp, soiled colonial money, soiled notes curled and withered, like shavings from some discoloured central lode. Ammoniac reek, or worse, in paved alleys and under stuccoed arcades. Shaved heads of children, blotched with sores; grey polls of infants lolling from the swag that bound them to the mother's back. And the great clots and blobs of tubercular spittle shot with blood, unavoidable underfoot: what Rysom called "poached eggs." In such uncleanness, nothing could appear innocent, not the infants themselves or even diseased chow dogs, roaming the Chinese streets, or scrawny chickens, pecking at street dirt."

Friends who liked the book less than I did found the language stilted, and I think it is in places--and also that I like language that works a little harder than most and so am inclined to be more forgiving of that particular sin.

The atmosphere, characters, situations, development, all excellent, with one exception: in the core love story between Leith and Helen, I found the unwavering state of their desire when they were separated to be implausible. I can believe that they loved each other, were able to sustain their feelings despite their distance and the obstacles that lay between them. But that there was no doubt in it ever, no wavering, no frustration or unevenness between how one felt and the other and when they felt it, seems false, unnecessarily fixed and rigid. The other relationships--Exley and Miss Xavier and Audrey Fellowes, for example, are all delicately and realistically drawn.

Still a very fine book, and writing worthy of study and emulation, and the best book in a while (4 stars), but with this odd sticking in the center.
posted by Ben at 11:57 AM

And I forgot the first lines; here they are:

Midnight's Children
I was born in the city of Bombay. . . once upon a time.

The Power and the Glory
Mr. Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust.

Neither, to my mind, revealing the eventual excellence of the books that follow.
posted by Ben at 6:35 AM

Midnight's Childrenby Salman Rushdie (did you need me to tell you?) is an excellent book that only selectively engaged me. Some of its excellencies: the core image of the children born in the hour after midnight being joined by a diverse set of magical powers, including the telepathic joining through the narrator; the overlapping narratives begun with a startling and peculiar image (that felt mannered at the start, then overdone, but finally won me over with its sheer exuberance); the story of a doctor's seduction through a sheet with a hole--seeing a different part of his beloved each visit as he summoned to diagnose a new ailment; the ruination by the monkeys; the trip into the jungle; there are lots of these--imaginative, sharply written, lovely.

And yet...his imagination takes odd turns that I can't absorb into the overall narrative--that make no clear sense and yet return again and again--the relentless emphasis on snot--Saleem getting his powers triggered by the flow far up into his sinuses; the villainous Shiva with his murderous knees--knees? prehensile knees? I can't even understand what that might look like--and couldn't ever manage to summon fear in the imagining of it.

So the reading went in and out--drawn into one story and then another, then scratching my head a little as I tried to figure out if there were an allegorical reason behind a jarring note. 3 stars

I also spent a few hours at big, bland bookstores trying to be struck by something to read next--thinking a lot about what I ought to read--the stacks of shoulds--do I need to read Naipaul? Amos Oz? What about the minor works of people who have written something I thought tremendous (what else of Saramago's? Faulkner? DH Lawrence?) I settled on Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory and powered through it. Greene has great craft at moving the story forward effortlessly, economically. The book, like his others, is short; he keeps a steady tension up and the story turning and turning and rarely coming to rest.

The book itself had less meat than The Heart of the Matter or The End of the Affair; the flight of the unnamed whiskey priest had some moments of real majesty and lots of struggle, but there did not seem to be as much at stake. It seemed a little like there was some context missing--like the Communist subtext might have lost some resonance.

By the end, his struggles came to resemble Beckett more than any of the other books--protracted struggles that by their very persistence come to take on meaning and resonance. I can still feel the digestion of the book happening, so perhaps I will improve my opinion with a little more time. 3 stars.
posted by Ben at 5:44 PM

One mystery has been half-solved. Despite a rash of online research, and email from anglo friends, colindancia remained opaque. Then this morning,a colleague said it had something to do with property--real estate transactions; and then a browse through the dictionaries (4 dictionaries! Including an unabridged harper-collins English/Spanish). The closest I came was colindante, which was boundary or border. So I am decided by associate fiat, therefore, that it means plot of land--which fits, and seems not wrong if not exact. Certainly sufficient for a Monday morning.
posted by Ben at 1:03 PM

Next up is an excellent and problematic read through of Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing (thanks Barbara). As is my anti-book review preference, I'll start with the bad and move to the good. Here's the opening:
When they came south out of Grant County Boyd was not much more than a baby and the newly formed county they'd named Hidalgo was itself little older than the child.

So here is where I struggle with McCarthy. I speak no Spanish, and a little French, and stumble every time I hit one of his conversations in Spanish without translation. Some I can piece together from context and cognates; some he shifts into summary and I can backtrack to what I need to know. But many of the conversations pass unremarked--and by their length and substance I suspect that some essential information is passed in them, but I cannot access it. This raises a very fundamental issue of reader/writer responsibility. Do I need to learn some Spanish to enjoy McCarthy fully? Should I read with a Spanish-English dictionary along? Should there be footnotes for the ignorant few (or many)? I suspect McCarthy would laugh at the notion of having some responsibility for helping people understand more than he already does. And yet a significant part of the experience of reading the book was, solely as a result of this dynamic, an irritating one. And I finished the book with a sense of dissatisfaction despite its many evident strengths and pleasures (pleasures is perhaps not the right word for what is good in McCarthy). I still haven't resolved this one, so opinions on it are welcome. I have Cities of the Plain in my stack (and, yes, Melville II, Hersh), but am reluctant to go back into the morass of frustrating Spanish fumbling.

Outside of that experience, I took a while to warm to McCarthy's prose. I am all for the Old Testament rhythms, for the portentous pronouncements, the epic sweep, etc. And yet I was not quite ready to buy passages like this one:

In the jars dark liquids. Dried viscera. Liver, gall, kidneys. The inward parts of a beast who dreams of man and has so dreamt in running dreams a hundred thousand years and more. Dreams of that malignant lesser god come pale and naked and alien to slaughter all his clan and kin and rout them from their house. A god insatiable whom no ceding could appease nor any measure of blood.

I want to believe, but reading this felt like a reverent parody of McCarthy more than the man himself. It took the first third of the book before than niggling suspicion of parody faded and I became absorbed in the narrative (until, at least, the Spanish bumped me out again).

And then some writing of undeniable power and force and rich strangeness that make me at my most irritated unable to dismiss him. Here is an extended passage that I think is remarkable. It is one of a series of parable-like stories that Boyd is told and make up, I think, the heart of the book; it describes a priest in his back-and-forth with a holy fool of sorts:

He [the priest] was a reasonable man and he believed that there was love in his heart.

There was not. Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay in his presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom He has spoken can contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair. Trees and stones are no part of it. So. The priest in the very generosity of his spirit stood in mortal peril and knew it not. He believed in a boundless God without center or circumference. By this very formlessness he'd sought to make God manageable. This was his colindancia*. In his grandness he had ceded all terrain. And in this colindancia Goad had no say at all.

To see god everywhere is to see Him nowhere. We go from day to day, one day much like the next, and then on a certain day all unannounced we come upon a man or we see this man who is perhaps already known to us and is a man like all men but who makes a certain gesture of himself that is like the piling of one's goods upon an altar and in this gesture we recognize that which is buried in our hearts and is never truly lost to us nor ever can be and it is this moment, you see. This same moment. It is this which we long for and are afraid to seek and which alone can save us.

I think this is remarkable--like the best of what I like in Merton and rich and in the same stroke baffling and true. (*and I can't figure out what colindancia means--online dictionaries have been no help--anyone?).

There is more of equal richness and strangeness--the final scene with the malformed dog is resonant and odd and, with the weight of the book behind it, very moving. Four stars for The Crossing, though I need to solve the Spanish piece before I take on Cities of the Plain.


posted by Ben at 1:25 PM

With a little help from the discredited Columbus, I am getting this up over the weekend as promised. I haven't wrestled The Crossing to the ground, but here are the promised two at least. And reading in one of the lit weblogs, I enjoyed the practice of collecting first lines, so, by way of introduction to these two books, I'll start with first lines.

First, Orhan Pamuk's Snow: "The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of the poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow."

Pamuk is everywhere right now (reading in Boston tomorrow night, as a matter of fact--and unfortunately the same night as the talented David Gilbert, whose reading I'm afraid I will also likely miss, but you should not because his book is very funny). There is much to admire in Snow, and some problems as well. Rather than starting with the good and then damning it with faint praise, I'll go the other way. The biggest problem I had with the book was with the tone, which never fully resolved for me into something that felt real. There were parts that ought to have been menacing, or brutal, but the whole narrative seemed to carry with it a wash of the absurd--like Robert Coover. So the conflicts seemed, to my mind, faintly ridiculous, rather than powerful, and the power struggles pathetic rather than significant. ("But that's the point", the arch voices whisper, "he is both portraying and commenting on the human condition at the same time.")

Thus the animating politics of the novel, for which I had summoned an appropriately responsible enthusiasm, never rose to a level that engaged me, but always held me off.

There is much in it that I thought excellent--the premise of the poet returning to his home town, unable to write poems for many years--the newspaper that publishes events that come to be true--the love and desire of Ka for Ipek--the structure of the book of poems and, perhaps best in the book--the allusive coming together (absurd and sweet and moving) of the poems themselves--and the radical students writing their science fiction novel. A lot here to like, certainly, and yet I kept trying to like the book as a whole and did not.

One review I read explained that the book seemed to run out of gas about halfway through and never really regained its momentum, and I agree. The tropes of the snow, of the back and forth of Ipek, seem to repeat until they had lost meaning. And when they finally resovled, I had lost some measure of interest. This is a book that was better than the recounting here, but not as good as the international gush that is welling up around Pamuk--though he is certainly interesting and worthy, and My Name is Red has joined the queue. (3.5 menhirs)

The second book is Meatless Daysby Sara Suleri--a book that came so highly recommended from a surpassingly literate friend that I feared a little I wouldn't be able to read it fairly. The opening: "Leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of women." Suleri's book is a loose memoir about her family, relationships, and food; its chapters are more like essays that loop back rather than parts of a larger structure. She writes beautifully and sharply, though with some whiffs of the academic sneaking in here and there. She presents her family, and her life, with such a grace and spirit that it is hard not to find yourself at least a little in love with her as you read. That, I suppose is recommendation enough. Some of the essay-chapters are stronger than others, and I did not find that the whole built an edifice up beyond the sum of its delightful parts, but that is a substantial sum. (3 menhirs)
posted by Ben at 9:10 PM

A fall of hectic travel and continued discombobulation (I know that onomatopeia is words that sound like what they represent, but I wonder what the word is for words that feel coming through your mouth like what they represent--that the saying of them is like a little experience of them--discombobulation fits that in my book--I wonder what others there are?). I have continued to do a great deal of reading, but less writing about that reading. For the faithful few--thank you for checking--I am alive and still very much enjoying getting your emails. For new visitors, take your time with the old posts, as I am slow to update.

I have two and nearly three books to write about Meatless Days, Snow, and The Crossing, but those will have to wait for the weekend (this weekend, I promise!). In the meantime, I need to spare some minutes to appease the howling demons of powerpoint (which is turning me rapidly into a full scale anarchist). Patience, readers, I am returning. And, as I'm about to finish The Crossing, on the prowl for what to read next, so suggestions are welcome. Harry--I'll take a closer look at the rest of Pat Barker on your recommendation--but somehow I think I'm in the mood for something a little more Old Testament--which McCarthy may cure me of, but I doubt it. I've got a hearty appetite for rageful prophets.
posted by Ben at 7:36 PM

A turbulent summer and the new rhythms of a job and commute have been good for reading, but not so good for getting the notes out. I'm mired in a few longer books (Holmes's bio of Shelley, The Idiot) and starting others willy-nilly. But I have finished a round of quite good reading--one excellent, one quite good, and one solid.

I was very struck by Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter (4 stars). I had read it before, in some ambitious and brainless moment as a teenager and remembered nothing about it--not even whether I had liked it or not. Now no longer so young and foolish, I found it really terrific--gripping even. Despite his reputation of ambivalence, I found that he is up to something quite specific--he creates out of our limitations the inevitability of faith--whether or not his characters respond to it with growth or fear--the traps of Scobie, his lack of energy and desire to be good and to avoid inflicting pain--the selfishness of Bendrix and his passions and impatience. It some ways it demonstrates the necessary evils in us--the spaces they carve out that let belief in--doubt amid goodness is thin beer.

The pathos of Scobie struck me:
He had prayed between the two knocks that anger might still be there behind the door, that he wouldn't be wanted. He couldn't shut his eyes or ears to any human need of him; he was not the centurion, but the man in the ranks who had to do the bidding of a hundred centurions, and when he opened the door, he could tell the command was going to be given again--the command to stay, to love, to accept responsibility, to lie."

And this:

He felt tired by all the lies he would have some time to tell; he felt the wounds of those victims who had not yet bled. Lying back on the pillow, he stared sleeplessly out towards the grey early morning tide. Somewhere on the face of those obscure waters moved the sense of yet another wrong and another victim, not Louise, nor Helen.

The darkness of difficulty of the ending felt real and substantial to me, and the ways in which Scobie drew nearer and fell away from his faith were beautifully drawn.

That led me in turn to The End of the Affair. (3.5 stars). It was a less even book than The Heart of the Matter. The opening is excellent, and the setup is a terrific one. If it is as autobiographical as people claim, it must have been a wild time to be Greene. I liked it less because it seemed to slip into complex contrivance about 3/4 of the way through as Sarah explored her faith with Smythe--as if Greene became more focused on the philosophical exploration and lost touch with the humanity of his characters for a while. This is a shading, not a train wreck--the book is a very good one, but not so powerful for me as The Heart of the Matter.

The third book in this installment was Pat Barker's Regeneration, and I'm still not entirely clear why I didn't like it more. I liked the premise (Siegfried Sassoon invalided to a mental hospital for objecting to the progress of WWI--his doctor, who agrees with him, has the duty to try to convince him to return to the trenches); I liked the setting--the combination of physical and mental horrors of the wounded soldiers and the ways they are making their way back to health; I think she is a skillful writer--economical and precise but without the coldness that those adjectives often imply. I have read some interviews with her, and liked how she spoke and thought about writing (and was looking for a special reading project--thinking of her trilogy). Perhaps Regenerationis improving in my estimation with a little digestion, but as I finished it seemed a good, solid book with a lot in it, but not extraordinary, not especially rich and transformative. I think it is a better book than that--perhaps in another few weeks I will have reconsidered it into excellence (3 stars).
posted by Ben at 10:16 PM

Reading has been happening, amid our nomadic days, and herewith some of what has risen to the top. First, two grave disappointments--I have liked CS Lewis's writing on Christianity--Screwtape, Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy. I found some of the same expressive honesty that I like in Merton, and some of the same passionate, muted, intellectual self-awareness. So I picked up two more of his: The Great Divorce and The Business of Heaven. I read the intro of The Great Divorce and was excited--it is an extended allegory exploring how we must forsake all earthly things to reach heaven (and when we do we will discover earth as a kind of hell relative to heaven), and if the ways in which we cannot--our attachments and contortions, our self-deceptions. Lewis cited as a source of inspiration a scifi story about a man who travels back in time and finds the past is immutable--that the rain hits him like bullets, and food is like concrete--because he has no power to change it. Sounds promising, right? Unfortunately the whole of The Great Divorce does not travel far beyond that, and there are a lot of waterfalls and angels and unicorns in between. Other than that idea (of the eternal feeling immutable to us, and the idea that our souls must adapt by shedding our connection to earth to be drawn heavenward), the story obscured rather than clarified. The set of conversations were more suited to Davey and Goliath than to what I hoped for from Lewis. One star.

Then I turned to The Business of Heaven ('Surely joy is the serious business of heaven'). This is an edited compilation of reflections, drawn from a bunch of Lewis's other writing. Again, high hopes as I started skipping around. But I stumbled on an entry where Lewis celebrates the British monarchy:
"We Britons should rejoice that we have contrived to reach much legal democracy [we still need more of the economic] without losing our ceremonial monarchy." he claims that we all have a craving for inequality, that it is our "taproot in Eden", and that those who are without it are "men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch". I wavered a little here, hoping he would rescue himself with a defense of beauty rather than status quo, but here was his conclusion:

"Where men are forbidden to honor a king, they honor millionaires, athletes or film stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison." This is about as short-sighted a justification of the status quo as I have ever read, dressed up in spiritual language. Why are the kings food and the others poison? because a thousand years ago they had a generation of thuggish relatives that were able to seize power? That they have managed to manipulate the preservation of their own property for so long that they somehow now serve a social function as objects of veneration? My respect for Lewis has plummeted. Both books are away, and it will take a great deal for me to turn to them again. Lewis is off the list.

On the good reading, I am reading some Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter, and just finishing The End of the Affair), of which responses soon.

posted by Ben at 10:13 AM

Life has intruded (pesky life!) in ways that have held off both reading and writing, but the hiatus is ending. One of the blessings of difficult times is that it lets you see how much people care for you, and for them, it lets them demonstrate their affection and desire to be helpful without feeling overwhelming or inappropriate. There is a sweet coming together of need and the desire (and love) to provide that lets us all lay bare the goodness in us--the generosity and kindness and thoughtfulness. It makes apparent how muted we are in the general run of our days when those veins are hidden or suppressed. Thank you my many great good friends for your support and thoughts and I wish we could all feel this affection without adversity to provoke it.

I finished up Edward Jones' The Known World a few weeks ago; it has been getting a ton of critical attention and it deserves all of the good things said about it. It's an excellent book in a remarkably quiet way. Jones is writing about an explosive topic (black slave owners), and there is room in his story for all manner of violence, horror, sentimentality, brutality, etc. And what he does is tell layers of stories with all of their good and bad in a manner that came to seem both rich and diffuse. Two things worth noting about it:

His real strength, I think, is in his writing of scenes (as opposed to language, or dialogue, or plotting, etc.) The novel overall is an accumulation of small moments that rise to a number of extraordinary scenes that overtake you before you realize it. Thus the history of Augustus Townsend, his modest dignity and years of careful planning, his structured peace, the delicate balance he has made between the white world and the black, builds to the moment when the patrollers eat his papers and sell him back into slavery. Jones provides no commentary--there is almost no inflection in the prose at all--none is needed. I found myself reading--skipping ahead, thinking this can't be happening--this can't be happening. It is intensely horrible and its power is in revealing the horror that is there rather than building something up to be horrible, or manufacturing elements that combine to be horrible. It is masterfully done.

One other note--Jones uses an odd--mostly compelling, sometimes frustrating structure to tell his stories. He lights on a series of events--some small and some larger, and then has the narrative ripple out from there. So he stakes out an event--when Oden cuts off part of