Author: Edwin Turner

Child of God — Cormac McCarthy

Edwin Turner7 Comments

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In Greek drama, acts of violence or sex were “ob skena” and had to take place off stage. Thus, the horrific violence of Oedipus gouging out his eyes is not shown, but rather reported by a messenger. We see the same tradition in Shakespeare, of course, as well as the modern novel. And while many writers elide scenes too taboo or offensive to the sensibilities of the general reading public, books like Ulysses, Lolita, and Tropic of Capricorn, demonstrate that novels are often the site of debate over what can and cannot be shown or described or articulated plainly in our culture. Our concept of “the obscene” (the Greek “ob skena” simply translates to “off stage”) demands that certain actions might only be referred to or implied, but not graphically depicted, that the offensive action takes place out of our vision. The great lie or paradox of the obscene then is that in pushing the offensive action off stage, the author necessitates that the audience must envision that very action that was removed, that they must articulate their own understanding or schema or representation of what is taboo. While this strategy can often be quite effective and affecting (think of Tarantino pulling the camera away as Mr. Blonde cuts off the cop’s ear in Reservoir Dogs), in a character-centered novel it can also lead to a larger denial, a larger exclusion. What if one’s whole life was obscene? In his third novel, Child of God, Cormac McCarthy tells the story of a man who has been pushed from life’s stage, who exists in the uncanny and indigent margins of society.

The ersatz protagonist of Child of God, Lester Ballard, is a poor, stooped, abject wretch of a man. The book opens with Ballard losing his house in a humiliating debacle. From there, he wanders the earth, finding an abandoned shack and barely eking out the means to leave. Ballard is an outsider, literally, always looking in at the lives of more normal, more stable people. His voyeurism leads him to creep up to parked cars to spy on the lovers inside. Wanting some connection or sense of love–or perhaps just out of general dejected weirdness–he masturbates against the cars, watching the people inside. His identity as voyeur is magnified in his only apparent skill. Ballard is an ace sharpshooter who carries his rifle almost everywhere he goes, surreptitiously spying on the normal folks through its lethal scope.

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As the book develops in McCarthy’s spare, terse prose, Ballard becomes more and more unhinged. Everywhere he goes he is slighted or outright rejected and cheated by his fellow man. The indignities and affronts against Ballard range from being falsely accused of rape to simply being ignored by his neighbors. At the same time, Ballard is a creep, a loser, and seems largely deserving of this treatment. And yet, as McCarthy points out early in the novel, he is a “child of God, much like yourself perhaps.” This early call to identify with Ballard as a fellow human being is constantly strained by his wildly antisocial behavior, and yet it’s McCarthy’s genius as a writer that anchors the novel in some measure of sympathy for such a wretched anti-hero. When a young girl rejects Ballard’s advances, she taunts him, saying, “You ain’t even a man. You’re just a crazy thing.” In many ways, this is the major question of the novel: Is Ballard a man, or a thing? What makes a person a person, and not simply an object estranged from the human race? To test this question, McCarthy has Ballard plumb almost every conceivable taboo, from murder to arson to necrophilia. However, Ballard isn’t the only one in these Tennessee backwoods who behaves despicably: there’s the father who rapes his daughter, the gangster behavior of the Ku Klux Klan, and the mob justice of the townspeople as a whole. Still, Ballard’s descent into violence and madness–graphically portrayed by McCarthy–is the central action in this compelling novel.

Readers looking for redemptive story arcs or tales of heroism will likely be turned off by Child of God, and squeamish readers will probably not get past the first fifty pages. Those interested in McCarthy’s fiction will find more in common here with the visceral grit of The Road or Blood Meridian than the reflective romanticism of his “Border Trilogy” novels (including crowd pleaser All the Pretty Horses). Child of God is in many ways a response to the Gothicisms of Carson McCullers and William Faulkner, and certainly bears favorable comparison to those writers’ works. And like those writers’ works, McCarthy’s novel has its challengers–just as recently as 2007 an English teacher found himself in quite a bit of trouble for loaning the book to a student. Those who see the book as obscene are perhaps right, in the sense that the word implies “that which must be shown off stage.” However, one of the legal definitions of obscenity necessitates that the work “lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value,” a claim that I do not think can be seriously substantiated against Child of God. Don’t believe me? Read it for yourself.

2666 – Roberto Bolaño

Edwin Turner18 Comments

2666

Where to start, where to start…

Do I say that the book is good, great, fantastic, a literary achievement? These words don’t seem big enough, or they seem like hackneyed clichés, ugly inadequacies. Here’s a very short review: go get the book and read it. Worried that 900 pages is too long? Don’t worry. They fly by. I read the book in less than a month, usually in forty or fifty page sittings, something I usually don’t make time to do. But hang on, I’m already off to a bad start I admit, there’s no context here, is there? Let me try again.

2666 is Chilean exile Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous magnum opus. The book comprises five sections, each focusing on a separate but often overlapping set of characters and locations. The book is, in my paperback edition (composed of three separate books) 893 pages long. The book is excellent, addictive, full of pain and pathos and humanity. Most of the sentences are very, very long. What is it about, then? There are too many answers to that question, but here goes–

There are two major, intertwined plot threads in 2666, one about a series of gruesome rapes and murders in the fictional city of Santa Teresa, Mexico, and the other concerning an obscure German writer with the improbable name Benno Von Archimboldi. These two threads weave through the labyrinth that is 2666, connecting the many themes and tropes and moods and tones of this massive novel. Bolaño’s styles shift and weave and morph throughout the book, evoking laughter and rage and pity and anticipation and overwhelming sadness. He’s very often philosophical but never abstract, lyrical but grounded, and always entertaining. Bolaño’s command of thousands of different voices is on display here, whether he’s telling the tale of an ex-Black Panther or an exiled Russian sci-fi writer, a Romanian general or a crippled Italian critic. Bolaño’s voices layer upon each other in a strange chorus; often I found myself shocked at how, 300 pages later, a different character in a different place and time will hit on the same note–a comment about semblances and reality, or graveyards, or fate and chance and choice, or mirrors, or dreams and nightmares, or giants, or insane asylums, or aliases and pseudonyms–only this new character will express this note in a new or different tone, adding to the richness and dazzling complexity of the tale. Bolaño’s voices are often framed in a series of tales like Russian nesting dolls, only, where a writer like John Barth might explicitly announce or call attention to this device, Bolaño’s storytelling has a humanistic, natural quality, a quality that provokes and calls attention to the limits of human memory and our collective capabilities to narrativize our lives. But hang on again, I’ve gotten away from plot summary, haven’t I? Do you really need a summary? Yes? Will, “It’s about everything. Life, death, all that shit,” will that not do? Okay. Another attempt, then.

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The first section of 2666, “The Part About The Critics,” tells the story of four critics from four European countries who specialize in Archimboldi; in fact, two of the critics pretty much invent Archimboldi studies. Through their critical endeavors, the obscure, unphotographed writer rises to greater prominence. The four set out to find him, initiating the novel’s detective lit thread. They wind up in Santa Teresa, a city experiencing a seemingly endless slew of murders. In Santa Teresa, they meet a Chilean professor named Amalfitano, who (obviously) features heavily in the next section, “The Part About Amalfitano.” At this point, we start discover more about the unsolved rapes and murders of young women in Santa Teresa, but these crimes linger in the background, the story of Amalfitano, his ex-wife, his daughter, and a geometry book hanging from a clothes line at the fore. Amalfitano’s teenage daughter returns in the third section, “The Part About Fate.” This part of the novel details Oscar Fate, an African-American reporter who travels to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match only a few days after the death of his mother. “The Part About Fate” builds to a rapid, grotesque, nightmarish climax, where the journalist, alien and impartial visitor, silent observer, becomes implicated in the ugly violence and grim desperation of Santa Teresa. This rhetorical move leads the reader into the longest section of 2666, “The Part About The Crimes,” in which we finally learn about the gruesome murders–hundreds and hundreds of murders–of the young women who work in the factories of Santa Teresa. The final section, “The Part About Archimboldi,” works as a partial bildungsroman, revealing the life story of the man who becomes Benno von Archimboldi. But does “The Part About Archimboldi” wrap up all the riddles, seal the deal, lead us out of the labyrinth and into the light–do we get answers? Let’s see–

Readers enthralled by the murder-mystery aspects of the novel, particularly the throbbing detective beat of “The Part About The Crimes,” may find themselves disappointed by the seemingly ambiguous or inconclusive or open-ended ending(s) of 2666. While the final moments of “The Part About Archimboldi” dramatically tie directly into the “Crimes” and “Fate” sections, they hardly provide the types of conclusive, definitive answers that many readers demand. However, I think that the ending is perfect, and that far from providing no answers, the novel is larded with answers, bursting at the seams with answers, too many answers to swallow and digest in one sitting. Like a promising, strangely familiar turn in the labyrinth, the last page of the book invites the reader back to another, previously visited corridor, a hidden passage perhaps, a thread now charged with new importance. Like Ulysses or Moby-Dick or Infinite Jest before it–and yes, yes, I would class this book with those without batting an eye–2666 is a book that demands multiple readings. Fortunately, despite its grim subject, it’s endlessly entertaining, rich with literally hundreds and hundreds of stories, stories that impel and compel you to read, read, read. But, again like Ulysses or Moby-Dick or Infinite Jest before it, 2666 is not for everyone.

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I’ll quote from the only negative review at Amazon right now, by one Mr. Nathan King, who writes, “This is not an enjoyable/pleasurable book to read. . . . this book is a GRUESOME and HORRIFICALLY VIOLENT book. The largest section of the book is basically 300+ pages of autopsy reports. You will read the words “vaginally and anally raped” over and over and over, until it runs through your mind day and night.” King’s review is accurate in several ways, although I fundamentally disagree with his overall assessment, of course. The book’s violence will run through your mind day and night: the book is awfully affecting. One of Bolaño’s missions in the book, it seems, is to continually press on the reader a horrific assemblage of dead, raped, mutilated bodies, bodies found in Dumpsters, trash heaps, ditches, alleys; violated, nameless, unclaimed bodies. While “The Part About The Crimes ” clearly contains most of these horrors, disposable bodies litter the entire book, whether they are Jews to be executed by Nazis in WWII or young men murdered in prison while the wardens watch. Bolaño’s method then is to confront his readers with all these unsolved, perhaps unsolvable crimes, and ask how one can witness to the horrors of life without giving in to despair or madness or suicide. Callous or cynical readers, looking for a simple answer to “Whodunnit?” will miss the multiplicity of answers that Bolaño provides, which might be boiled to: We all did it. We are all responsible for these crimes.

At many points throughout the massive tome Bolaño addresses this central problem, but this passage from “The Part About Amalfitano” sums up one possible solution quite beautifully. Amalfitano, slowly going insane, wondering about existence and movement and sleep and reality, thinks–

Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.

To systematize, to narrativize then, to try to put order and meaning into one’s life, or the lives around you, to witness to others’ pain by claiming it as your own, these moves then betray one’s ability to accurately, or sanely, perceive the world. It’s this great cost that Bolaño navigates in 2666, and he does so with aplomb and precision and grace.

Have I still not convinced you to read 2666? I could keep going and going, on and on, and I won’t be the only one–Bolaño’s book will be one for posterity, a great work that literary critics (much like the ones he sympathetically parodies and valorizes here) will debate over, ponder over, discuss, write about, love, and be tortured by for ages to come. At the same time, this is not a book that one should feel is only for the “literary élite” (whatever that means)–with its force and vitality and inventiveness, with its rich, detailed dream/nightmare world, 2666 is a book that you, dear reader, should read, must read. Very highly recommended.

Toward A New Zeitgeist

Edwin Turner1 Comment

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

For the past eight years, inspired by their own dangerous, sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity, the Bush Gang has perpetuated myriad crimes against humanity and the planet. They didn’t do it alone, of course–the United States is, after all, a Democratic Republic, and its populace–us, we, I mean–stood by like inert zombies after the 9/11 attacks and let Bush and his cronies get away with an illegal war, openly spying on American citizens, detaining prisoners without charging them or giving them legal recourse, and even torturing prisoners. Walt Whitman said that there “is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance,” and surely many of us, most of us, were soft and complicit when we should have been rougher and more defiant. Not that many didn’t protest and fight, but the zeitgeist in America this decade was one of hushed zealotry, where the old American values of dissent, protest, and even curiosity were eschewed as the terrain of those awful liberal elitists who might actually, you know, ask questions.

The oughties, or the 2000s, or the noughties, or whatever we’ll call them, really began November 8, 2000, the day after one of the most contested elections in American history. A bad start, really, and many of us will always believe that the neocons stole the election. A year later, after the 9/11 attacks, it became evident that this would be a decade of fear and violence and repression and silence. By the time the neocons were ramping up their illegal war against Iraq–a war that they’d had planned for years before 9/11–many of us felt worn down to cynical little nubs, still in groggy disbelief at what was happening. A 2004 story in The Onion, “Nations Liberals Suffering From Outrage Fatigue,” perfectly captured how I felt, and also signaled that it would be satire and distance and cynicism that would communicate the extraordinarily dangerous ignorance and stupidity of this decade. Getting news of the Bush Gang’s malfeasance from satirical sources like SNL‘s “Weekend Update” or The Daily Show with John Stewart made the cruel realities of this decade somehow more palatable, but at the same time these sources underlined the disengagement that many of us allowed ourselves to fall into, the deep ironic defense reaction against a spirit of the age with which we felt unable to communicate. In short, many of us dropped out; our “Outrage Fatigue” could only last so long. Inertia and cynicism spiked with brief episodes of outrage slowly evolved (or, rather, devolved) into what I would call “The Bush Show,” a long, long cycle of events, each new episode topping the last in terms of its deviousness, ignorance, and stupidity. Am I just railing now, perhaps, recapping what you already know? Sorry.

Here’s my point: Right after the election, I stated in a post I wrote from my gut that the election of Obama shattered my cynical shell, that I felt open and happy and even positive about politics for the first time since I was a kid. I have not and never will lose my skepticism, but, as I pointed out in that post and repeat here, by simply choosing someone so different–and I refer here not to Obama’s dark skin but rather to his knowledge and intellect and openness (in contrast to Bush’s “sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity”)–by choosing someone like Obama, we have signaled a shift in the spirit of the age. And here is what I propose: Let’s end the decade today, or at 11:59 a.m. tomorrow. Let’s agree that the awful oughties are over, and that a new decade has begun. We don’t have to change any physical documents–calendars, etc.–we just have to all know that a new zeitgeist has been initiated. The New Dark Age of the Bush Years has passed, but we can learn from it as negative example, as an abysmal signal of what not to do ever again.

The Nation Guide to the Nation–Richard Lingeman

Edwin Turner1 Comment

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Part travel guide, part almanac, The Nation Guide to the Nation aims to be the go-to resource for progressive liberals around the U.S. The editors of America’s oldest liberal organ, The Nation, have compiled their Guide to help you answer burning questions: Need to find a “100 percent vegetarian restaurant” in Bloomington, Indiana? Interested in checking out “The world’s only unionized, worker-owned peep show co-op” ? Want to “wear a hemp dress at your wedding”? ( “It’s a cool thing to do,” the text assures us). Look no further. Organized into six sections — Cultural, Social, Environmental, Organizations, Media, and Goods and Services — The Nation Guide to the Nation covers everything from fair trade coffee to anarchist film festivals to organic soul food. Interspersed throughout the book are sections labeled the “Left Heritage Trail,” a shot at attempting to institute a sort of “must-see” registry of sites in the history of the progressive left. The “Left Heritage Trail” sections also serve as a (very brief) history of labor, environmental, and Civil Rights movements in the United States. The editors attempt to further expand the scope of the book by adding sections like “25 Greatest Political Films” (a fairly successful list), “A Left Mystery Tour” (do we really need our mystery novels to have a liberal bent?), and “Anthems of the Left” (Ugh. Their (hopelessly out-of-touch) top ten list includes frat boy favorite “Get Up, Stand Up” by Bob Marley and U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)”).

The book’s entries are short and informative, providing addresses, numbers, and websites, and in this sense, it’s really quite successful. However, its overall tone veers into a sort-of “How to Be a Liberal for Dummies” territory. It seems that most progressive thinkers already have the resources or networks to discover this stuff on their own, if they don’t already know about it. For example, do we really need help finding progressive radio stations in Berkeley or San Francisco, and is it especially revelatory to note that New York City has some great bookstores? Still, I will concede that there is probably a young kid in Iowa who would be quite turned on to see what else is out there (no offense to Iowa; apparently the Cedar Falls Farmers’ Market is a great place “to chat, hug, cuddle babies” and just generally have a great Saturday). It is really the uninitiated (or, I suppose, the poseur) who will benefit the most from this guide. Hopefully, as our new President takes office, Americans will begin to see that “liberal” is not a dirty word, and that progressive ideas and radical movements have driven most of the positive social changes in this country, from ending slavery to instituting a 40 hour work week to extending suffrage to women. Those uninitiated in–or resistant to–these historical realities would be well-served by checking out The Nation Guide to the Nation.

The Book of Dead Philosophers — Simon Critchley

Edwin Turner2 Comments

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A cursory glance at Simon Critchley’s skinny new work, The Book of Dead Philosophers, might lead one to misjudge the book as an ephemeral, superfluous, and even downright jokey sort of “Philosophy for Dummies.” That would be a mistake. While The Book of Dead Philosophers does aim for a broad, popular appeal, Critchley’s wily cataloging of the deaths of nearly 200 philosophers is hardly insubstantial reading. Working from Cicero’s maxim that “To philosophize is to learn how to die,” Critchley sets out to contextualize these philosophers’ writings on death against the very deaths of those philosophers. Ranging from the sophists of ancient Greece to the Classical Buddhists of China to post-modern gadflies like Foucault and Derrida, Critchley’s writing evokes both humor and pathos, and works in some ways as an overview of the history of philosophy without ever becoming didactic or overreaching its central goal.

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The Death of Socrates - Jacques-Louis David

While Critchely’s main purpose in Dead Philosophers seems to be to entertain and perhaps enlighten, he doesn’t shy from injecting his own attitude about his subject. In his introduction he addresses philosophies that emphasize an afterlife, arguing “that they cultivate the belief that death is an illusion to be overcome with the right spiritual preparations. However, it is not an illusion, it is a reality that has to be accepted. I would go further and argue that it is in relation to the reality of death that one’s existence should be structured.” Later, Critchley condemns the metaphysical, Platonist tradition further, and, at the same time, provides a greater rationale for his book: “I hope to show the material quality of the many lives and deaths that we will review disrupts the move to something like “Spirit” and places a certain way of doing philosophy in question. To that extent, there is something intensely arrogant, even hubristic, about a philosopher’s disregard for the lives and deaths of other philosophers.” Critchley’s materialist philosophy leads to an occasionally snarky–and quite humorous–tone when writing about the likes of Anslem, Thomas Aquinas, or even Heidegger and Schopenhauer. His sympathies are more earnestly apparent when he addresses the death of someone whose outlook he shares. Critchley on Bertrand Russell: “Any conception of the immortality of the soul is therefore both iniquitous, because it is untrue, and destructive of the possibility of happiness, which requires that we accept our finitude.”

Derrida Queries DeMan -- Mark Tansey
Derrida Queries DeMan -- Mark Tansey

Arranged both chronologically and geographically into short sections ranging from a few sentences to a few pages, Dead Philosophers encourages jumpy, discontinuous, and episodic readings. Still, despite his caveat that he is presenting a “messy and plural ragbag of lives and deaths that cannot simply be ordered into a coherent conceptual schema,” Critchley nonetheless manages to create nuance, layer, and perhaps even a touch of narrative to this work. In one of the final entries of the book, a touching tribute to Jacques Derrida (at three pages, one of the longest in the book–twice as long as the section on Plato), Critchley writes, “the dead live on, they live on within us in a way that disturbs any self-satisfaction, but which troubles us and invites on us to reflect on them further. We might say that wherever a philosopher is read, he or she is not dead. If you want to communicate with the dead, then read a book.” Lovely.

The American publication of The Book of Dead Philosophers is available February 10th, 2009 from Vintage Books.

Many readers will may also be interested in Simon Critchley’s essay on Barack Obama and metaphysical philosophy, “The American Void,” published in last November’s issue of Harper’s Magazine, or the post-victory essay, “What’s Left After Obama?” published last November in Adbusters.

The Best and Worst Movies of 2008

Edwin Turner10 Comments

THE WORST

The Dark Knight

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We liked the first act of Nolan’s second Batman movie very much. In fact, nothing in the whole movie could top the robbery scene at the beginning. Yes, we loved Heath Ledger’s Joker. He wasn’t in it enough. But we were getting pretty bored by the end of the second act, and by the time it became clear that Two Face would be a villain in this Batman film and not the next sequel, well, we were downright exhausted. The clunky editing, clumsy fight scenes (you really couldn’t see anything in the film), and convoluted plot turns didn’t help a film where the hero endorses the Bush administration’s methods (torture; spying on its citizens). And don’t even get us started on Bale’s silly “Batman voice.” Worst of all was all the praise this film garnered, as if everyone had been primed to love it and had no other choice. The Dark Knight is a crushing fascist vision; that its true hero is the Joker will be lost on all.

Hancock

An interesting premise and a funny opening scene quickly devolve into an incoherent mythology and a superhero story absent of any real villain. We usually like our films short, but Hancock felt thin at under 90 minutes. What was cut?

Speed Racer

Speed Racer, a psychedelic cartoon blur of flat characters and unfun nonsense should be the nail in the Wachowski’s brother-sized coffin. We’re beginning to think that The Matrix was just a matter of the right William Gibson rip-off at the right time (right time here = right technology). Ugh.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

You saw that South Park episode, “The China Probrem,” right? Where Spielberg and Lucas literally rape Indy? That’s about right…

The Happening

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Shyamalan owes us the ninety minutes he stole from us. We suggest he show up at Biblioklept World Headquarters (shamefaced, of course) prepared to work–there’s always some caulking and mowing and painting that needs doing. On second thought, we’re sure he’d figure out a way to fuck up even the simplest chore. Possibly the worst movie we’ve ever seen.

THE BEST

Iron Man

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Where The Dark Knight plumbed the worst aspects of human nature, Iron Man gave us a hero with a truly redemptive arc, and did so in a way both moving and humorous. Iron Man also looked great, and featured the best origin story of any of the big superhero movies of the past decade. In fact, we’re calling it: Iron Man is the best superhero movie of the decade.

 

Be Kind Rewind

We laughed, we cried, we wrote a review.

Burn After Reading

Coming after No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers’ shaggy dog comedy felt light and even superfluous at times. Still, elements of the story stuck with us long after the viewing, and, as usual, the Coen’s get great performances out of their cast.

In Bruges

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We don’t want to give away too many details from In Bruges, but it’s worth pointing out that the trailers and ads totally missed–or misrepresented–the tone of the movie. In Bruges is funny, but it’s hardly a buddy film–at it’s core it’s a sad, even philosophical, reflection on loss and guilt. Great stuff.

Pineapple Express

Enough has been written at this point on Judd Apatow’s crew and the successes they’ve had in recent years that we don’t need to comment, except to point out that we loved Freaks and Geeks when it originally aired and it’s great to see what all these kids have done since then. Seth Rogen is hilarious, but James Franco steals the show here as a dope dealing loser who just needs a friend. Great action scenes too. Forgetting Sarah Marshall, also featuring Apatow cohorts, was pretty good too, of course.

Wall-E

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Who knew a post-apocalyptic film criticizing consumerist culture and our ever-increasing loss of connection to both the natural world and our own bodies would be so good? We loved, loved, loved Wall-E. Best film of 2008.

Films we still haven’t seen but in which we have interest: Rachel Getting Married, Synecdoche, New York, Hamlet 2, Hellboy 2, The Wrestler, Quantum of Solace, Let the Right One In.

Amerika — Franz Kafka

Edwin Turner3 Comments

amerika

I had a (very, very minor) Kafkaesque moment when Mark Harman’s new translation of Franz Kafka’s unfinished first novel, Amerika first arrived at Biblioklept International Headquarters. Wanting to compare the style of Harman’s translation to Edwin and Willa Muir’s work, I searched for my old copy of Amerika. I figured I’d re-read the first chapter, “The Stoker,” the only part of the novel that Kafka reworked (it was published as a short story). So I looked and looked and it turns out that I don’t own Amerika, despite the obligatory Kafka phase I went through in high school (followed by a post-bac Kafka phase years later). But I knew I’d read “The Stoker,” or at least it seemed likely that I’d read “The Stoker,” and it turned up in a collection of Kafka’s short stories that I own–only it was the Donna Freed translation. So I re-read it, only I’m not sure that I was re-reading it. I didn’t remember any of it, other than the famous opening image of a Statue of Liberty armed with a sword. I’m still not sure that I ever read it before now; that is, I’m not sure that I read the Muir translation that Harman seeks to amend. I guess it doesn’t matter, and it seems appropriate that a Kafka review begin with a meandering false start. Where were we?

Yes. Harman’s translation. With Amerika, Harman continues a project he initiated with his translation of another unfinished Kafka novel, The Castle. (This book was published in 1998, and I listened to the audio book last summer, incidentally, and it was really, really good). Harman’s translations aim to restore some of the humor, ambiguity, and modernism that the Muirs’ early translations occlude in favor of their own religious readings. Harman also takes great pains to remove Max Brod’s editorial interventions, even going as far as to keep many of Kafka’s consistent solecisms (“Oklahoma” is restored to Kafka’s original – and consistent – “Oklahama”). Now, my Kafkaesque confusion over whether or not I’ve read the Muirs’ translation of Amerika prevents me from commenting here on Harman’s apparent restoration of Kafka’s humor, but I do think that Amerika is often funny, and often terrifying. Its protagonist Karl finds himself in a parallel-universe America (one constructed wholly from Kafka’s imagination, and announced in its surreal glory from the opening image of a Statue of Liberty armed with sword), one where he’s consistently misled, swindled, cornered, cramped, and generally mistreated by various enigmatic authority figures (yes, its Kafkaesque, if you’ll allow the tautology). As noted, Kafka never finished writing the book (or any of his three novels, for that matter), and Harman makes no attempt to reconcile the plot, opting instead to simply reproduce (in frank English, of course) the words Kafka wrote.

Amerika is not the starting place for those new to Kafka’s work–I would suggest readers who weren’t turned off by their high school English teacher’s inept bungling of The Metamorphosis start with a collection of the short stories. However, I think Harman’s translation is not only essential for fans who wish to rediscover an old favorite, I also believe that it will quickly become the definitive translation. It’s modern and terse and funny, and it also pays subtle respect to the dialogic interplay between Karl’s point of view and that of the omniscient narrator, often creating moments of intense and delicious irony. Reading a translation of Kafka focusing on his oft-neglected humor brought to mind the late great David Foster Wallace’s essay, “A Series of Remarks on the Funniness of Kafka, from Which Not Enough Has Been Removed” (read it here or get the mp3 of DFW reading it here). Here is Wallace, explaining why American undergrads don’t get Kafka’s humor:

And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance. It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get — the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke — that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

Wallace’s observation stealthily acknowledges why the heroes of Amerika and The Trial and The Castle never get to where they’re going, why Kafka could never wrap up his big stories. Kafka, the first modern writer, embraced the “horrific struggle” of humanity and never sought easy reconciliation or pat conclusions. Harman’s new translation brings this critical aspect of Kafka’s writing to the fore, and he achieves this in the most simplistic manner: unobtrusively letting Kafka’s words stand on their own. Recommended.

Amerika is now available from Schocken Books.

The Best Books of 2008

Edwin Turner2 Comments

We read many, many books this year, but most of the books we read–especially the very best ones–were not published this year. And as usual, we’re always playing catch up. Case in point: we finally finished Roberto Bolaño’s much-lauded-in-2007 hit The Savage Detectives just last month, and despite feeling that it was kinda overrated we couldn’t help picking up his much-lauded-in-2008 hit 2666 at Green Apple Books in San Francisco this weekend (sidebar that will not surprise any San Francisco reader: San Francisco has the best book shops. Sick). So, we will spend at least the first part of 2009 getting through that massive tome.

Bar none, the best book we read in 2008 was Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece Blood Meridian, published back in 1985. So good we read it twice, and so should you. We also loved loved loved Philip Pullman’s Nietzschean sci-fi trilogy His Dark Materials. Finally, we must highly recommend E.L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, which we finally got around to reading this year (last week, so, no review). This book is great, and you will wonder why you haven’t read it before now. A somewhat neglected classic. But. Let us move on.

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There were a couple of fantastic highlights in 2008, of course, most notably Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, a novel on which we cannot heap enough praise. In a time of overstuffed, overlong novels, A Mercy is rich and complex yet lean at just over 170 pages, and, as many critics and reviewers have pointed out, the novel serves as a touching counterpoint for her 1988 masterpiece Beloved.

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We also loved–and frequently returned to–Slavoj Žižek’s Violence, a work of cultural criticism that managed to be fun and infuriating and serious and frivolous at the same time. Too often reviewers fall back on hackneyed phrases like “thought provoking,” but Žižek’s work really is provoking, often to the point of confrontation. Like Plato, Nietzsche, and Derrida before him, Žižek is the gadfly, the upsetter, the spoiler. He has earned his haters.

The Paris Review Interviews, Volume III and The O. Henry Prize Stories collections were also sublime–great interviews, great stories, lovely tasty morsels. Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, Stephen Millhauser–what’s not to love? We also really were digging Mark Reibstein and Ed Young’s sumptuous children’s book, Wabi Sabi. You’d think a book that included a haiku on each page would be cheesy or cloying or too precious, but no. Great stuff.

wabi-sabi

We’d also be remiss not to give props (again) to Wendell Berry’s essay “Faustian Economics,” published in the May, 2008 issue of Harper’s. Berry’s piece is beautiful and sad and timely, and everyone should read it. It was one of the best things we read all year. Speaking of Harper’s, the latest issue includes–along with a touching memorial to critic John Leonard, who died last month–the remarks of those who spoke (including Zadie Smith and Don DeLillo) at David Foster Wallace’s memorial service this October. Wallace’s suicide was and is awful, and remarking on it in a “Best of 2008” section seems tacky, but we can’t help it. We love his work and are sad that there won’t be any more, or at least much more, or at least any “finished” work from the man, but, as George Saunders puts it in his portion of the memorial: “In time–but not yet–the sadness that there will be no new stories from him will be replaced by a deepening awareness of what a treasure we have in the existing work.” So, if we remark on DFW here, it is only because he was one of the best, and he died this year, and in some sense, we need to remark on it yet again, despite having written too much already.

But let’s not end on a sad or sour note. Plenty of great reads in 2008, and surely we neglected a tome or three in this rehash, but hey, we’re human, we err, etc. We look forward to more reading in 2009, and perhaps, improbably (we lie to ourselves, who doesn’t though?) we may actually defeat that stack of books by the bed, on the night stand, on the coffee table.

The Eight Best Songs of 2008

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In no particular order…

Fleet Foxes – “White Winter Hymnal”

Beyoncé (Sasha Fierce) – “Single Ladies”

Crystal Castles – “Crimewave”

Deerhunter – “Nothing Ever Happened”

Kanye West – “Love Lockdown”

Marnie Stern – “Transformer”

Max Tundra – “Will Get Fooled Again”

MIA – “Paper Planes”

The Eight Best Albums of 2008

Edwin Turner1 Comment

2008 was a relatively disappointing year in music. My Bloody Valentine played some shows, but didn’t put out that album they promised. Axl Rose put out Chinese Democracy, and, um, yeah. Plenty of our favorite bands put out decent but inessential albums (we’re looking at you, Stephen Malkmus, Lambchop, Stereolab, Deerhoof, Destroyer, Girl Talk, Wolf Parade, Max Tundra, and Magnetic Fields), while other cherished artists hit (what will hopefully be) their nadir (Fiery Furnaces’ interminable live album, Mercury Rev’s atrocity, Silver Jews’ unfun silliness). Chalk it up to heightened expectations and an engorged sense of entitlement derived from a decade of internet piracy. Still, there were some great records that came out this year. These were our favorite. We haven’t spent much time putting them in order, but the top three are pretty concrete.

THE EIGHT BEST ALBUMS OF 2008

My Morning Jacket, Evil Urges

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People kind of hated this album, but we thought it was a hoot. Sure, in a sense, it wasn’t Z Part II, but it did live up to that 2006 effort’s relentless genre-hopping. From the opening title track’s clumsy soul-singing, to the James Taylor schmaltz of “Sec Walkin,” to the Cameo-isms of “Highly Suspicious” (peanut butter puddin’ surprise, anyone?) the album is all over the place. But we like that. “Smokin’ from Shootin'” is lovely, and album closer “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream pt 2” is funtastic krautrock done right. If Ween had made Evil Urges, we’re sure it would’ve been roundly lauded. I guess there was a general concern that MMJ were serious about these songs. Give it a second (or first!) listen.

Fucked Up, The Chemistry of Modern Life

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So Kevin Shields didn’t get a new MBV record out. So what? The Chemistry of Modern Life isn’t a substitution or replacement, but an extension of MBV’s signature shoegaze sound, only brought up to date for the angry aughties via vocalist Pink Eye’s hardcore vocals. Fucked Up’s record is sorta like putting all those great SST records you grew up on (early Dinosaur, Black Flag, the Minutemen, Sister) in a blender. Great result.

Gang Gang Dance, Saint Dymphna

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Speaking of blending influences, Gang Gang Dance’s Saint Dymphna does a great job of mixing genres and cultures without ever seeming calculated or cynical or hackneyed. Tracks like “First Communion” and “House Jam” are fun and serious psychedelic dance music, and “Princes,” guest-starring rapper Tinchy Stryder sorta creates a new genre all together. We like.

Fennesz, Black Sea

fenneszBlack Sea might be a strange counterpart to Fucked Up’s Chemistry. It’s harsher than Endless Summer, and lacks the warmth of Venice, but Christian Fennesz’s new album–like Fucked Up’s–orchestrates beauty from (cognitive) dissonance and distills some of the grim anger that’s characterized world politics for the latter part of this decade into a thick, sometimes lovely-sometimes frightening haze. A record that the listener is asked to feel.

Animal Collective, Water Curses

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Sure, it’s an EP, but Animal Collective’s Water Curses was on repeat around Biblioklept World Headquarters for most of the year. The jovial title track has a pop immediacy that doesn’t wear out its welcome even after the hundredth listen, but it’s Avey Tare’s “Street Flash,” weird and beautiful and slow, that really steals the show. Water Curses is that rare gem, a series of outtakes that actually outshines the album from which they were excised (Strawberry Jam). Animal Collective have proven to be one of the best new bands of this rapidly aging decade, and the recently-leaked “Brother Sport” from their upcoming LP indicates that they will only get better with age.

TV On The Radio, Dear Science

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Chock full of hooks, horn blasts, and hand claps, Dear Science should sound cluttered and overstuffed. Instead, TV On The Radio have followed up 2006’s outstanding effort Return to Cookie Mountain with a fantastic pop rock record, where all the bells and whistles (including the horn section from Antibalas) simply add to the listening experience. Where Cookie Mountain‘s songs seemed constructed out of gorgeous textures layered around Tunde Adebimpe’s sonorous voice, Dear Science comes across as a more focused album comprised of radio-ready songs. Opener “Halfway Home” builds to epic speed, “Crying” is death-disco done perfect, “Dancing Choose” channels “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in both its anger and its humor, while songs like “Family Tree” and “Love Dog” showcase Adebimpe’s cathartic voice. What many of the bands detractors might not get is that funky tracks like “Golden Age” and “Red Dress” should be pop radio staples right now–TV On The Radio aren’t experimental art rock, they’re an alternate future-now for pop music.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Lie Down in the Light

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We are pretty old. In fact, we’re old enough to have thought it was weird when the Palace Brothers became Palace Music (this didn’t get in the way of loving Viva Last Blues (which we listened to on audiocassette, on our Walkman!)). So by the time Palace had become Will Oldham had become Bonnie “Prince” Billy, there were so many 7″s and Spanish import EPs and live bootlegs (oh the live bootlegs!) that it all became a bit too much to keep track of. Not to say that we didn’t enjoy Ease on Down the Road or the strange strings on The Letting Go, but Will seems to put out a new record every Tuesday. So we were slow to respond to Lie Down in the Light. Which is a shame. Because it is probably his best record. We imagine that many people interested in Oldham might be daunted by his vast back catalog. If you, dear reader, are such a person, take heed: Lie Down in the Light is a fantastic place to start. The songs on Lie Down are about family and friends, singing, sex, closeness, and a good, good God. The death, weirdness, incest, loss, and stark pain that’s permeated many of Oldham’s previous recordings might seem absent here, but that darkness is here–in Oldham’s voice. How else could he sound so convincing on the title track when he sings: “Who’s gonna hold my heart / Who’s gonna be my own own own? / Who’s gonna know when all is dark that she is not alone?”

The Walkmen, You & Me

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A night album, a moon album, a growler, a grower. We listened to it once, and then put it on again. And then again. And then again. Let’s start with the music: the main instrument is Hamilton Leithauser’s world-weary voice, and the rest of the band works around it, with meticulous percussion and bass lines that carry the musicality of each song. The guitars, organs, and extra touches like horns and strings are used to grand effect, but never crowd the track. And the music is really, really great. Adding another layer of complexity to You & Me, Leithauser’s lyrics seem to tell an impressionistic story over the course of the album’s fifty minutes. The opener, “Dónde Está la Playa,” seems to tell the story of a soured affair with a married woman the narrator has while on vacation. The same narrator seems to move, quite literally, through the songs, lamenting about a life on the road while also recognizing the small joys and adventures that come with such a lifestyle. On “Seven Years of Holidays,” Leithauser cries “Well, I’ve traveled so far and I’m worn / And I’ve lived in a suitcase for too long” before conceding that “The whole world around us is too small.” On the gorgeous and lilting “Red Moon,” he pines: “Tomorrow morning / I hope to be home / By your side,” but he has to admit that “The riptide is pulling me under / I’m drifting, drifting away.” Tracks like “New Country” and “Canadian Girl” take a more positive outlook, but it’s the stellar build of “In the New Year” that best captures the feel of the album. “Oh, I’m just like you, I never hear the bad news / And I never will” Leithauser growls over a triumphant organ riff. “We won by a landslide / Our troubles are over” he continues, before taking the dream to a hyperbole beyond reality: “My sisters are married to all of my friends.” But as the song builds, the organ becomes dissonant, breaking into the sweetness of the fantasy. By the end of the album, the fantasy is totally punctured, as evidenced in the wistful closer “If Only It Were True.” And that’s when the listener hits repeat. You & Me is an album-album, not simply a collection of great songs, and we’d love to hear more works like this next year. Great stuff.

A Mercy — Toni Morrison

Edwin Turner1 Comment

a-mercy

With her latest novel A Mercy, Toni Morrison offers up more evidence of why she is possibly America’s greatest living author. As in earlier works like Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, in A Mercy Morrison examines the strange intersections of race and geography, family and culture, memory and storytelling. And like those great novels before it, at the center of A Mercy (a center, mind you that Morrison frequently works to decenter) is that great post-modern question: what is identity?

The late-seventeenth-century America of A Mercy is at once paradoxically both alien and familiar. This America is seemingly wild and free and unconstrained, yet the land–purchased with the blood of the native Indians–is worked by slaves and indentured servants. The freedom to be viciously intolerant of anyone else’s religion abounds. A lazy eye might get you burned for a witch. Life is cheap and difficult, but there is also much beauty here, and for a time, the makeshift family of characters who populate A Mercy seems happy enough. Morrison’s genius in this novel, however, is to only present these moments of contentment and happiness in fragments, interspersed between each of her character’ desires for freedom, future, family, and ultimately, self. We see glimpses of one character’s joys or sufferings through the eyes of another character, a technique that builds and layers and enriches a narrative where, honestly, very little happens. A farmer-turned-trader gets sick and dies, never finishing the house he was building. Then his wife gets sick, and sends her young slave to get the blacksmith, a free black man, who she believes can heal her. By the time he arrives, she’s better, but her ersatz family is forever sundered. Summarized, the linear plot sounds thin, but the depth of storytelling around Morrison’s deceptively simple story is marvelous. Morrison achieves this depth via the different voices and perspectives that propel her novel.

The voice of the young enslaved girl Florens initiates the novel with the enigmatic opening line, “Don’t be afraid.” Her opening command both engages and disorients (and, sign of a great novel, begs to be read again after completing the book). “Stranger things happen all the time everywhere,” she recognizes, before asking “One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?” Right away, Morrison tells us this a novel about how to read, where to find cause, and possibly, how to create one’s own agency in a world that makes slaves and servants–or food–out of almost everybody.

William Blake - Europe Supported by Africa and America (1796)
William Blake - Europe Supported by Africa and America (1796)

This question of agency runs throughout each of the chapters that alternate with Florens’s first person narrative. There’s Jacob Vaark, who takes Florens as part of a debt owed him by a fading aristocrat. Vaark is disgusted at the aristocrat’s lavish lifestyle, and although the slave trade repels him – “God help me if this is not the most wretched business” – he agrees to take Florens at the pleading of her mother (Florens will be haunted forever by what she interprets as abandonment). Vaark is, however, smitten by the slaver’s elaborate house and vows to build one just as grand. His attempt to build a castle from his own labor in the New World, a castle free from any title or rank or order is his own claim to agency. There’s also the voice of his wife Rebekkah, who spends her chapter in a pox-ridden fever dream that dips and floats and weaves through time and space. Her father essentially sells her mail-order to Jacob. She leaves the dirty, crowded Old World on a dirty, crowded ship. Stuck in dark steerage, she makes a community with a group of whores, “Women of and for men,” who, in transit, exist in a strange uncomfortable comfort, a “blank where a past did not haunt nor a future beckon.” Rebekkah will attempt to forge another strange, transitory family when she arrives in America. She grows quickly to love Jacob; soon, she even loves Lina, the enslaved Indian girl Jacob buys for both pity and service. Lina and Rebekkah forge an alliance, weathering the death of the Vaark’s children, as well as Jacob’s extended absences as he expands his trade. They are less ready to accept another foundling, Sorrow, who Jacob brings home (solely for pity); a little bit crazy (“daft”), she spends much of the novel mysteriously pregnant. However, Lina quickly warms to Florens, treating her as her own daughter, even if Rebekkah will not. Also there are Scully and Willard, two indentured servants who may never gain their freedom. Willard imagines the family they all comprise: “A good-hearted couple (parents), and three female servants (sisters, say) and them helpful sons.” But it’s not family, or community, or the idea of a country that A Mercy will validate. Instead, the novel suggests these concepts are ultimately transitory–like a passage over the Atlantic–and that there can only be a claiming of self.

Throughout the book, some characters gain agency, others die trying, and several lose themselves to grief and loss. But it’s Florens’s narrative that binds the text. She grows from a lovesick kid, desperate to please everyone, to a realized person with a conscious sense of her self. “The beginning begins with the shoes,” she says. “When a child I am never able to abide being barefoot and always beg for shoes, anybody’s shoes.” By the end of the novel she can go barefoot, free, in a sense, the soles of her feet “hard as cypress” – and this New World requires hard soles. And even if Morrison suggests that we need to learn to walk, hard-soled on our own feet, there is a great pleasure–a sad, sometimes sour, shocking pleasure–to be gained in walking for just a little while in these characters’ shoes. Very highly recommended.

A Mercy is now available from Knopf.

The Savage Detectives — Roberto Bolaño

Edwin Turner14 Comments

savage

I give up. I don’t know how to review The Savage Detectives.

Everyone told me I was supposed to love this book, but I didn’t. There, that’s a review. Not a good review, but there. I can’t remember a book ever taking me so long to finish or a book that I put down so often. When I truly love a book, I am moved. Often physically. Sometimes I have to stand up to read a book, I’m so moved. That’s a good book. (I never had to stand up during The Savage Detectives, although I often had to force myself to read thoroughly and not just skim). When I truly love a book, I’m a little sad and deflated when it’s over. I know a book is great if I’m compelled to go back and immediately reread sections. (Again, with Detectives, this didn’t happen). But it looks like I’m trashing the book. I shouldn’t. It has a lot going for it.

I read the first 140 pages, the journal entries of young Garcia Madero, in a blur. Funny and passionate, Madero’s voice explodes with the immediacy and intensity of youth. He joins up with the visceral realists, a group of anti-establishment poets (who no one cares about). Led by two enigmatic outsiders, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, the visceral realists gripe about the state of Mexican and Latin American literature, screw around, and argue with each other (no one else will listen to them). Madero paints Mexico City in the mid-1970s as vibrant, a place full of poetry and art. He becomes a biblioklept, God bless him (yet he ethically agrees not to steal from a poor old blind bookseller). He writes poems. He has sex. He runs away from home, sort of. There’s a breathless energy to Madero’s narrative that makes the book hard to put down, and the first section of The Savage Detectives, “Mexicans Lost in Mexico” culminates in one of the book’s most exciting events. Madero, Lima, and Belano help a young girl named Lupe escape from her belligerent pimp. Then, that portion of the story unresolved, the narrative shifts dramatically.

In the second section, “The Savage Detectives,” we are treated to, or subjected to, or made to endure, or made to navigate–pick your verb, please–over 450 pages of (one-sided) interviews spanning 20 years. Some of the interviewees appear consistently throughout this section, like Amadeo Salvatierra, who helps Lima and Belano in their quest to find the lost original visceral realist, Cesárea Tinajero. Other voices only pop up once to tell a weird story about Lima or Belano–or more accurately, a weird story about themselves with Lima or Belano playing bit parts. Some of these stories, like Lima’s strange time in a Tel Aviv prison, or Belano’s tenure as a national park guard in France are great; other times they are painfully tedious or repetitive (you know, like real life).

Technically, The Savage Detectives is quite an achievement. The myriad stories in the book’s main section represent the fragmented narratives that might compose a person’s life–a series of perspectives that others have about us, views that can never add up to a unified truth. The bulk of these stories are very much about poetry, art, and travel. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Detectives is a peripatetic novel, full of specific locations and very, very explicit directions (Joyce famously claimed that were Dublin destroyed in a catastrophe, it could be rebuilt based on his novel; the same seems true for Bolaño’s Mexico City). Also like Ulysses, Detectives is an epic about the banal, ordinary things that fill our lives: jobs and eating and getting to places and having one’s friendships sour and being disappointed and so on. Lots and lots of “and so on.” This isn’t to say that there aren’t moments of heroism and adventure–saving kids from satanic caves, stow-away sea voyages, and dodging bullets from Liberian rebels make for interesting narrative peaks. However, most of the novel remains rooted in a realism that is often dreadfully visceral in its painstaking replication of just how depressing a life could be. As the seventies and eighties turn into the nineties, things get more bleak and more depressing for Lima and Belano. And it all adds up to an incomplete picture (literally; check out the last page of the book if you don’t believe me).

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By the time we return to Madero’s journals in the third and final part of the novel, “The Sonora Desert,” the sadness and deflation of the previous section infects and tints every aspect of the narrative. Lima and Belano, with Madero and Lupe in tow, search desperately for the forgotten poet Cesárea Tinajero. Their search works as a pitiful parallel to “The Savage Detectives” section, a comment on the elusive nature of identity, and the strange disappointments that punctuate our expectations. Even the novel’s climactic ending seems understated after the monolithic middle section. And while this deflationary technique is undoubtedly a carefully considered conceit on Bolaño’s part, the payoff for the reader–this reader anyway–did not merit the effort and concentration that the book required. Or, to put it another way, after hours of time invested, I was unmoved.

As rave reviews of the English translation of his last novel 2666 begin seeping out of the critical woodwork (this month’s Harper’s has devoted a full four pages to the book), it seems that Bolaño will top most critics’ lists again this year. At over 900 pages and reportedly full of grim, bleak violence, it’s hard to imagine 2666 will be any easier to get through, and as FS&G summarily ignored our requests for a review copy, there’s no pressing obligation, I suppose. The critical praise heaped on 2666 this year will surely lead interested readers to The Savage Detectives. I think Mark Twain’s infamous note at the beginning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would provide the best warning to these potential readers: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” While no serious critic could dismiss Bolaño’s lyrical skill and complex control of the many voices that populate Detectives, I think a number of readers–serious readers–would not be wrong for considering the tome a bit overrated.

The Tenth Muse — Judith Jones

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tenth-muse

Judith Jones’s memoir The Tenth Muse, aptly subtitled My Life in Food, chronicles the life of one of the most influential foodies you’ve never heard of. The book moves quickly through Jones’s terse blueblooded Vermont childhood, through her time at Bennington College, and her first trip to Paris, all the while keeping Jones’s passion for food as its focus. This passion leads her to move to Paris after her college days, where she and future husband (and fellow writer) Evan Jones can eat pâté to their hearts’ content while palling around with writers, artists, and other beautiful people (even Balthus pops up in her narrative here). After some years of bohemian bliss, Jones returns to the U.S. to champion Julia Child, working hard to get her seminal cook book Mastering the Art of French Cooking to an American audience (she also manages to get The Diary of Anne Frank translated for publication as well). Shocked at the paltry selection of fresh foods in New York City, Jones and her now-husband Evan learn to make many of the fine French foods they enjoyed in their Paris days. At the same time, they continue to introduce a wider audience of Americans to cooks like James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher and Edna Lewis. Through it all, food (rich, thick, luscious French food) remains the primary focus, with the art of writing–and editing–a close second. Jones’s narrative abounds with anecdotes of chefs (Claudia Roden, Lidia Bastianich), editors, and writers (Camus, Capote, Updike), but readers who pine for psychological introspection or juicy melodrama won’t find much to chew on here.

Jones tends to gloss over information that most memoirs would milk for maximum drama. Evan was married when she first began living with him, a fact that would’ve scandalized many women in the 1950s but here goes largely unremarked. Two teenage children are adopted with little explanation or follow-up. Even the focus of Jones’s mastectomy returns to food, her pre-op meal, which Evans sneaks in to the hospital (“good pâté de campagne, some ripe cheese, a baguette, and a bottle of wine”). Also, readers who tend to pay attention to matters of class and economics might find Jones’s complete lack of self-reflection on how her wealth and background have allowed her to live and eat so richly a bit distasteful, particularly when she rails against the state of the modern American kitchen (too unused, or too full of processed, “quick and easy solutions.” Jones would have us killing and dressing beavers we catch on our vast estates, apparently. (Relax, I’m exaggerating (although she does prepare a beaver her son-in-law shoots)–but seriously, preparing a duck for dinner is not nearly as easy as she cheerily suggests)). But ultimately in The Tenth Muse, such lack of reflection simply leaves room for the food, which is really why you want to read this book anyway.

Jones caps off her book with over 80 pages of recipes, lovingly arranged in their own sort of narrative, one that parallels her life story. Jones includes favorite dishes from her early youth (“Spaghetti and Cheese”), plenty of French favorites (“Boudin Blanc,” simple “Baguettes,” “Brains with a Mustard Coating”), and recipes from her country estate (“Gooseberry Tart”). The selection of recipes at the end, “Cooking for One,” inspired by her continued love of complex cooking even after the death of her husband, is particularly poignant (Jones includes seven things to make from one duck).

The Tenth Muse may not meet the usual memoir-reader’s needs for salacious detail or analytical introspection, but those who simply want a glimpse into the life of an influential foodie–and some great recipes to boot–will not be disappointed. Recommended.

The Tenth Muse is now available in paperback from Anchor Books.

The Wasted Vigil — Nadeem Aslam

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the-wasted-vigil

Nadeem Aslam’s new novel The Wasted Vigil ambitiously attempts to contextualize three decades of conflict in Afghanistan through the lives of its three main characters: Marcus, an English doctor living near Tora Bora, whose Afghani wife was killed by the Taliban, Lara, a Russian woman searching for her missing brother who disappeared during the Soviet invasion, and David, the ex-CIA operative tortured by his past. There’s also the young Islamic fundamentalist Casa, who dreams of jihad–possibly the novel’s most interesting character. Aslam weaves these stories together in a meditation on art and war, beauty and violence, and family and politics, never shying away from the brutality of a good stoning or elective amputation.

The Wasted Vigil works best when Aslam restrains his language and communicates in a more journalistic style. These moments are few and far between, however; most of the time, Aslam is overly concerned with explicitly announcing every allusion and broadly indicating the critical or aesthetic importance of even the slightest of his characters’ actions. Aslam’s prose is far more satisfying when he backs away from overblown, overwritten sentences and simply lets his readers figure out what’s going on for themselves. That said, Aslam can certainly turn an artful phrase–it’s just that artful phrase piled upon artful phrase becomes showy, even tacky. Restraint allows prose to build rhythmically and payoff meaningfully, but there isn’t enough restraint here.

Of course, Aslam’s subject matter is hardly restrained. Afghanistan is a place of remarkable violence and brutality, but also a place rich with history and culture. Perhaps Aslam’s editors believed his audience deserved an overtly complex representation of Afghanistan, and perhaps they are right in this belief. After all, the country has been very much in the background of the West’s political conscience for the past decade (translating in to big success for other books about Afghanistan, notably Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner). Undoubtedly, there are a great many who will enjoy The Wasted Vigil. Those fascinated with Afghanistan and its sad, strange, violent history will have more than enough to mull over in this elaborate, intelligent, thoughtful novel.

The Wasted Vigil is now available in hardback from Knopf.

A Respite from Cynicism

Edwin Turner11 Comments

I am a cynic and skeptic of the worst kind, the type of person who claims to be a realist but who secretly knows that he is a hopeless pessimist. And yet I cannot help but feel more than a little relieved and lightened, very much in spite of myself, at our country’s overwhelming endorsement of a new ideology, one that I believe is different and separate from the politics that survived on the perpetuation of the myth of a “culture war.” I’m talking about Barrack Obama, President Elect, if I haven’t been clear enough.

I’m not naive enough to believe that Obama isn’t a politician, fallible like all before him, and I’m not giddy or silly enough to think of him as a Jesusian savior of America. When the conservative movement mocked Obama’s followers for seemingly seeing in the man a messiah figure, what they didn’t understand was the radical break that Obama represented. It is not so much Obama the man that we longed for, but the idea of Obama–the idea of someone radically different from everything that had come before. And in electing Obama–and the idea of Obama–we immediately achieved something, as Americans, that is wholly independent of anything Obama will do over the next four years as President. We showed the world that our democracy works and that we as a people are not the ignorant xenophobic fundamentalists that the Bush administration worked so hard to paint us as.

I’ve been thinking these past few days about Michelle Obama’s infamous comment during the campaign that she felt proud to be an American for the first time in her adult life. The comment was fodder for right wingers, of course, and at the time it seemed like a bit of a blunder even to some Obama supporters. But now I see it in a new way. My adult life has essentially taken place in this decade, the Bush decade, the 9/11 decade (I turned 21 in the year 2000). While I’ve had moments of pride in individual Americans, it’s been hard to see the (regressive) movement of our country in any positive light. I remember being a child, being taught and believing that this was a special country, a different country, a country that people wanted to come to because it was special and different. In my adult life in this decade, I’ve watched our ideological stock plummet around the globe. I’ve found myself, while traveling abroad, having to explain–with quite a bit of difficulty–that we’re not all ignorant fundamentalists in America. That thinking critically was actually once considered patriotic. That America was really a much better place than its elected leadership exemplified. The policies of the Bush administration–and the nation’s acquiescent and apathetic response to them–slowly drained my energy and hardened my pessimism in politics and people into a thick, cynical shell. I am amazed at how quickly the November 4th, 2008 election shattered this shell.

I know that Obama will make mistakes, that he will have to engage in the same kind of political gamesmanship that every other president has had to in order to push their agenda. But again, to paraphrase Obama himself, this isn’t about him–this is about us, the U.S., and our declared mandate for political and cultural change in this country. So while I will keep my skeptical reservations and pessimism about politics and the two-party system that we let dominate this country, I can’t help but feel a restoration of pride and a sense of possibility for this country.

Jesse Jackson’s Tears

Edwin Turner2 Comments

I was surprised by the emotional response I had to Obama’s sweeping win last night–or rather, I was surprised by the emotional response that I had to the emotional responses I saw on my television. But it was these images of Jesse Jackson crying that intrigued me–and continue to intrigue me–the most:

What are we seeing here? Jackson’s tears, his clenched jaw, his bared teeth–all stand out in strange relief against the cheering, joyous faces around him. What is he thinking? What is he feeling? What is the word for how he feels? Is this catharsis?

Raw and complex, Jackson’s response is not gleeful joy, but some kind of release–not elation, but deflation, it seems. Indeed, Jackson’s tears, his face, seem to reflect and signal the aspiration of a lifetime’s work–his work–achieved now in a different man, a new man, a man for a new and different time. In some sense–and perhaps I’m way overboard here–it seems that Jackson is working through some deep Oedipal anxieties. And yet such a cathartic response, such a purging also seems to indicate and symbolize a dramatic shift in America’s narrative.

In any case, in our heavily mediated age of instant news and “reality TV” (an age saturated with information and scant on wisdom or reflection), Jackson’s tears strike me viscerally. They are wholly real, the abject edges of turmoil and pain, but also the strange fruit of over fifty years of the Civil Rights movement. And while Obama’s ascendancy in no way changes the past, it changes the future, and delivers a promise to the rest of the world that America truly is a land of freedom, opportunity, and hope.

The Paris Review Interviews, Volume III

Edwin Turner2 Comments

How much you enjoy the third collection The Paris Review Interviews will depend entirely on how much you enjoy reading intelligent and thoughtful writers discussing intelligent and thoughtful subjects. I happen to love reading author interviews–even interviews with authors I don’t particularly like–and hence, I enjoyed this book quite a bit.

Covering sixteen disparate authors and fifty-two tumultuous years, the interviews here are by turns insightful, hilarious, strange, and at times, infuriating. The first interview (the book is organized chronologically), a 1955 conversation with Ralph Ellison evokes all of these emotions. One can almost feel Ellison’s restraint as he patiently replies to asinine questions like, “Then you consider your novel a purely literary work as opposed to one in the tradition of social protest?” and, “But isn’t it going to be difficult for the Negro writer to escape provincialism when his literature is concerned with a minority?” If anything, these politicized charges prompt Ellison to some of the most salient observations about literature’s universalizing powers that I’ve ever read.

In his 1964 interview, poet William Carlos Williams also sheds quite a bit of light on his art and craft. Interestingly, his wife is also a major part of the interview, discussing at some length her own role in her husband’s writing. Beyond literature, craft, and writing, Williams also sets another early theme that unites the interviews collected here–dissing other writers. He calls T.S. Eliot a “conformist” determined to set poets back twenty years. Evelyn Waugh picks up on this theme in his 1963 interview. Of Faulkner: “I find Faulkner intolerably bad.” And Raymond Chandler: “I’m bored by all those slugs of whiskey. I don’t care for all the violence either.” Zing!

Don’t feel too bad for Chandler, though; he comes off funny and earthy and sad in his 1983 interview, especially when he discusses his alcoholism, and how and why he quit drinking. Apparently, teaching–and drinking–with John Cheever when the two were teaching at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1973 had a major impact on Chandler’s decision to stop drinking.

John Cheever focuses mostly on the writing craft in his 1976 interview–not much talk of drinking here. He does, however, share this insight: “Plot implies narrative and a lot of crap. It is a calculated attempt to hold the reader’s interest at the sacrifice of moral conviction.” I’ve never liked Cheever’s writing, but he’s a great interview. In his 1994 interview, Achebe–an author whose fiction (and essays) I do like comes off as far more insightful and far less pretentious. On why creative writing classes exist: “I think it’s very important for writers who need something else to do, especially in these precarious times. Many writers can’t make a living. So to be able to teach how to write is a valuable to them. But I don’t really know about its value to the student.” Lovely. MFAs beware!

The interviews collected here are funny, smart, and very entertaining–whether its Achebe on general misunderstandings of his famous Conrad essay, Salman Rushdie on New Wave Cinema, or Joyce Carol Oates on Finnegans Wake, The Paris Review Interviews, Volume III is full of smart people talking about smart things–and what’s better than that? Highly recommended.

The Paris Review Interviews, Volume III is available October 28th, 2008 from Picador.