Category: Books

White Teeth, Perdido Street Station, and Last Evenings on Earth

Edwin Turner3 Comments

white teeth

And so well with the help of Jenny Sterlin’s narration and my handy-dandy portable mp3-playing device, I finally made it through Zadie Smith‘s 2000 novel White Teeth, and, having digested all of it, am now fit to declare it hilarious in places, larded with moments of intensely brilliant prose, wildly ambitious, and ultimately hollow, overstuffed with flat characters who, despite Smith’s best efforts, do not manage to earn the Big Important Climax she shoves them toward. Smith succeeds in communicating the multicultural problematics of late-twentieth-century London, but her massive scope (the audiobook is 23 hours and my unfinished paperback runs to nearly 500 pages) is just too massive. Smith seems to think that loads of concrete detail will automatically conjure emotional force, but what we get instead verges on soap opera at times–more bathos than pathos.It doesn’t help reader expectations of course that White Teeth was wildly overpraised after its debut. While White Teeth‘s attempt to reconcile the personal traumas of a postcolonial world with the demands of family, tradition, and personal worth is admirable, its aim exceeds its grasp, and the end disappoints. Still, I enjoyed it as an audiobook–Jenny Sterlin mugs enthusiastically through the various accents and argots of a melting pot London, and Smith’s concrete emphasis on detail makes it an ideal listen for a few summer afternoons of gardening or housework. Not the Great Book we’ve been told it is, but a fine listen nonetheless.

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Summer is, of course, a great time for audiobooks, and I’m thrilled that China Miéville‘s breakthrough second novel Perdido Street Station is finally available on mp3. I’ve been wanting to read Miéville for quite some time now, but the length of his dystopian tomes has made it difficult until now (I am a very busy, important man, with busy, important things to do). Perdido Street Station, set in a bizarre, gross world of humans, Re-mades, and other sundry races, is weird fiction at its finest (so far)–a great hybrid of Charles Dickens and PK Dick, HP Lovecraft and JG Ballard. It trawls the line between real and surreal, art and science, grime and enlightenment, in lovely, if dense prose, that could never be mistaken as genre fiction. Great stuff, so far.

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Also great stuff, so far, is Roberto Bolaño‘s collection of short stories, Last Evenings on Earth. I read the first three tales in succession last night, unable to put the book down although it was well-past my well-established “you must go to bed now or your toddler daughter will wreak havoc on you in the AM” bedtime. The first three stories are about, get this, (big surprise if you’ve read Bolaño), writers–good, bad, indifferent writers, failed, semi-failed, miserable writers. Sad writers, mad writers. The opener “Sensini” tells the story of an epistolary relationship between a young writer and an aging, uncelebrated writer. It’s sad yet measured in its pathos, and it earns its happy ending by loading that ending with the seed of potential disaster. The next story, “Henri Simon Leprince,” is the hilarious (and sad) tale of a miserable writer, a hack who teams up with the Resistance in WWII France. Despite his best intentions, he’s roundly despised by all those he helps. And he’s a terrible writer. The third story, “Enrique Martín,” literally made me laugh out loud, several times, to the point of tears. Narrated by Arturo Belano, Bolaño’s literary stand-in, it tells the desperate story of the titular failed poet, a would-be artist and sometime UFO hunter who slowly watches his dreams disintegrate.

All of Bolaño’s stories so far have extended past the mad force of his own strong voice(s) and implanted themselves into my mind, reaching into my own past; his characters, in hashing out their strange young lives (from a bit of distance, now) repeatedly evoked my own youthful memories, stuff I hadn’t thought about in years. There’s a sad brilliance under all of Bolaño’s stuff, like bright noon sun perceived through an ambiguous tear resting on your eye. Reading the beginning of Last Evenings on Earth last night, it occurred to me for the first time that Bolaño had died, and he’d died really young, and there weren’t going to be anymore books from him. But that’s a bummer note to end on. Let’s leave it at this–Last Evenings on Earth is some seriously great stuff.

In the Land of Invented Languages — Arika Okrent

Edwin Turner3 Comments

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Arika Okrent‘s new book In the Land of Invented Languages (released in hard back last month from Spiegel & Grau) confidently traverses the thin line between pop nonfiction and academic linguistics. Subtitled Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language, Okrent’s book delves the weird world of invented languages. While many folks are familiar enough with the idealism behind Esperanto or the sadness behind, ahem, Klingon, what about Lingua Ignota, or Dritok, the chipmunk language? How much do you know about John Wilkins’s 1668 invention “Philosophical Language” (pictured below)?

wilkins1668_sampleOkrent, after explaining her fascination with invented languages, or “conlangs,” more or less uses Wilkins as a starting place, using his massive project as a measuring stick for all the invented languages that followed it. While detailing the history and implementation of Esperanto, Charles Bliss’s language of symbols, and the logical logjammin’ of Lojban, Okrent balances the erudition of complex linguistics with a humorous, human tone. In the Land of Invented Languages is filled with tree diagrams and symbol charts that will not be wholly unfamiliar to those who studied a little linguistics back in college (or even those who, like the Biblioklept, changed their major from linguistics to English when they discovered they’d have to take, gasp!, statistics). These visuals are both fun and stimulating, and help to explicate what can be pretty heady stuff at times.

At its core, Invented Languages is about dreamers and schemers, the kind of idealistic perfectionists who would go to the trouble to invent something as heavy and impossible as a language. As Okrent savvily points out in her introductory chapter, real languages–that is, the natural languages that people really speak and communicate in–are organic and don’t really require rules. They just “happen.” That’s what makes this book so much fun–all the crazy cranks that try to force their perfect philosophical systems onto the world. In the Land of Invented Languages is a rewarding exploration of meaning and language, how language means, and what happens when we try to make meaning. Recommended.

For more info, check out In the Land of Invented Language‘s fun and thorough website.

Listening Library’s Fantasy Road Trip Contest

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PrintWe’re big advocates of audiobooks here at Biblioklept. A good audiobook helps the most mundane of chores zip by, making you a more educated, conscientious, and cultured person in the process (probably). Audiobooks are also essential to any road trip, and the good folks at Random House’s Listening Library labs have a new contest to help encourage parents and their kids to listen to audiobooks this summer. The contest, open to teens ages 13 to 18, is to create a video that addresses the following prompt: “If you could go on a road trip with a character from your favorite audio series, where would you go? What would you do along the way? How would you travel?” The winner will get an 8GB iPod Touch, as well as signed copies of audiobooks by the contest judges authors Libba Bray, Tamora Pierce, and Rick Riordan, all accomplished writers of young adult fantasy series. Get full details of the contest at Listening Library’s website. Seems pretty cool.

Movie Trailer for Hillcoat’s Adaptation of McCarthy’s The Road

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Australian director John Hillcoat’s movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy‘s bleak and beautiful novel The Road finally has a proper trailer as well as (another) release date, October 16th, 2009. Here’s the trailer:

I weighed in on the possible merits (and possible demerits) of a film adaptation of The Road way back in October of last year, back when the movie was planned for a Thanksgiving release (what better time than Turkey Day to watch a story with baby cannibalism?)

The trailer makes the movie look kinda “big”–explosions, way more people than I remember being in the novel, and what appears to be a heavily expanded role for the wife, played by Cherlize Theron. Still. I wanna see this. At the same time, the trailer seems to scream “Go read the book, now!” And you should. It’s great.

Will Eisner’s Adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick

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Will Eisner’s adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick was one of his last works, completed in 2001 just four years before his death. While no comic book adaptation can match Ishmael’s expansive voice, Eisner’s work here does capture the spirit of adventure and the wish for communion that underpins Melville’s tome. We think it would make a great introduction for younger readers to Melville’s massive book, and will surely interest older readers apprehensive of Moby-Dick. Great stuff.

Eisner Moby-DickMore here.

Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors — Bill Bryson

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That Bill Bryson’s Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors (new this week in paperback from Anchor Books) should surpass utility and be loads of fun as well seems almost unfair. Aren’t dictionaries and style manuals meant to be dry? brysonBryson’s title here is pretty honest; he’s made a dictionary of hard-to-remember/easy-to-forget words, including plenty of commonly misspelled words. In the age of spell-check, it’s not so much Bryson’s spellings that are essential as it is the context in which he puts his words. For instance, do you know the difference between “gabardine” and “gaberdine”? (“The first is a type of worsted cloth, the second a long cloak”). Bryson goes further (not farther!) than mere distinctions between words like “creole” and “pidgin” or “bravado” and “bravery”: he actually gets into the fray of how one ought to use words. Consider the entry on “past”:

“Often a space waster, as in this example: ‘Davis said the dry conditions had been a recurrent problem for the past thirty years.’ In this sentence, and in countless others like it, ‘the past’ could be deleted without any loss of sense. Equally tautological and to be avoided are such expressions as past records, past history, past achievements, and past precedents.”

The exasperation is almost palpable! When I first picked up the dictionary, I immediately checked out what Bryson had to say on one of my own pet peeves, “couldn’t of” as the contracted form of “couldn’t have.” Here’s Bryson, in a solution that mixes humor with a bit of common sense:

“As a shortened form of ‘couldn’t have,’ couldn’t of does unquestionably avoid the clumsy double contraction couldn’t’ve, a form not often seen in print since J.D. Salinger stopped writing. However, I would submit that that does not make it satisfactory. Using the preposition of as a surrogate for ‘ve seems to me simply to be swapping an ungainly form for an illiterate one. If couldn’t’ve is too painful to use, I would suggest simply writing couldn’t have and allowing the reader’s imagination to supply the appropriate inflection.

As we see, Bryson’s interest isn’t so much on presenting himself as an absolute authority on the English language as it is in helping writers to be more lucid. We see this again–with the same wittiness–when discussing the differences between “Shakespearean” and “Shakespearian”:

“The first is the usual spelling in America and the second is the usual spelling in Britain, but, interestingly, don’t look to The Oxford English Dictionary for guidance on any spellings concerning England’s greatest poet. Perversely and charmingly, but entirely unhelpfully, the OED insists on spelling the name Shakspere, a decision it based on one of the six spellings Shakespeare himself used. It does, however, acknowledge that Shakespeare is ‘perhaps’ the commonest spelling now used.

While Bryson’s Dictionary is plenty of fun for word nerds, it’s utility and ease-of-use are really what make it a must-have for writers. Bryson devotes 11 pages of his short, useful appendix to punctuation, a section that every young (or not so young) writer should read (the three pages he devotes to comma use are particularly insightful). In sum, Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors is a witty and intuitive aid that many a writer will love having on their desk. I know I do. Highly recommended.

“The Jungle Is Obscene” — Werner Herzog’s Visceral Nature Writing

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This month’s issue of Harper’s features a fantastic collection of diary entries by German film director Werner Herzog. These entries are excerpted from the forthcoming book Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo. Released in 1982, Fitzcarraldo tells the story of a would-be rubber magnate who attempts to haul a steamship over a small mountain in Peru so that he can access an area rich in rubber trees. The infamous Klaus Kinski plays Fitzcarraldo, a European who pushes his crew to the breaking point in this mad quest; the semi-fictional plot was doubled in the real-life production disasters that plagued the movie. Fitzcarraldo dramatizes one of the oldest narrative conflicts, man vs. nature, in an earnest yet completely unromantic way. Fitzcarraldo, the opera-lover who brings ice to the natives, shatters any romantic illusions one might have about the power and majesty of nature in his mad schemes. This theme repeats throughout Herzog’s work, from the conquistador opus Aguirre, the Wrath of God to his outstanding 2005 documentary Grizzly Man. Again and again, Herzog’s films ironize, disrupt, or otherwise show the folly of romanticizing nature. His diary entries from Conquest of the Useless lay these sentiments bare in ways both bleakly poetic and terribly funny.

Take this entry from December 8, 1980: “The jungle is obscene. Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin.” Here, Herzog provides a succinct antithesis to Rousseau’s concept of the “noble savage.” Herzog’s view of man—de-politicized, that is—seems more Hobbesian, actually. In an entry from April 6, 1981, he writes:

“This morning I woke up to terror such as I have never experienced before: I was entirely stripped of feeling. Everything was gone; it was as if I had lost something that had been entrusted to me the previous evening, something I was supposed to take special care of overnight. I was in the position of someone who has been assigned to guard an entire sleeping army, but suddenly finds himself mysteriously blinded, deaf, and effaced. Everything was gone. I was completely empty, without pain, without longing, without love, without warmth and friendship, without anger, without hate. Nothing, nothing was there anymore, and I was left like a suit of armor with no knight inside. It took a long time before I even felt alarmed.”

Nature seems to nullify Herzog, to void any essential humanity he might have had. His repetition of “Nothing, nothing was there anymore” reminds me of King Lear’s famous lines “Never, never, never, never, never.” Although Lear is weeping over the body of his kind daughter Cordelia, the psychology of these lines surely reflect his own terrible experiences, his own nullified identity of homelessness on the wild heath.

For Herzog, nature is a war, nature will eat you. “Moss grows on lianas, and in the knobby places where the moss is thicker, a leafy plant like a slender hare’s ear grows out of the moss: a parasite on a parasite on a parasite,” he observes. If Herzog is melancholy or mordant in these grim reckonings, he’s also very, very funny. Take this hilarious June 4th entry concerning a giant albino turkey that’s been terrorizing the set:

“The camp is silent with resignation; only the turkey is making a racket. It attacked me, overestimating its own strength, and I quickly grabbed its neck, which squirmed and tried to swallow, slapped him left-right with the casual elegance of the arrogant cavaliers I had seen in French Three Musketeers films who go on to prettily cross swords, and then let the vain albino go. His feelings hurt, he trotted away, wiggling his rump but with his wings still spread in conceited display.”

And yet one senses that Herzog’s humor is a defense against the absurdity of nature, one that derives from an acute awareness that humanity is at once of and apart from nature, and at that by its own definition, its own choice. In a June 2nd entry featuring his nemesis the albino turkey, Herzog details an incident that highlights the essential ugliness of a Darwinian world:

“Our kitchen crew slaughtered our last four ducks. While they were still alive, Julian plucked their neck feathers, before chopping off their heads on the execution block. The white turkey, that vain creature, the survivor of so many roast chickens and ducks transformed into soup, came over to inspect, gobbling and displaying, and used his ugly feet to push one of the beheaded ducks, as it lay there on the ground bleeding and flapping its wings, into what he thought was a proper position and making gurgling sounds while his bluish-red wattles swelled, he mounted the dying duck and copulated with it.”

There we go. We get it all, all the order of nature. Food, sex, death, the whole deal, laid out keenly and with grim humor, neatly compacted into a single, grotesque episode. If these excerpts are any indication of the rest of the book’s trajectory, Conquest of the Useless promises to transcend standard making-of fare. Indeed, Herzog’s book seems nothing less than a profound meditation on the intersection of man, nature, terror, and mortality.

Conquest of the Useless: Reflections on the Making of Fitzcarraldo is available June 30th from HarperCollins.

The Belly of Paris – Émile Zola

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It’s totally appropriate that food-writer Mark Kurlansky should helm Modern Library Classics’ new translation of Émile Zola’s The Belly of Paris. Not only does he have a keen ear for Zola’s revolutionary naturalism, he also captures the passion at the heart (or gut) of The Belly of Paris–a passion for food. To be clear, Zola’s book is not so much about gourmet preparations (although they’re there, to be sure) as it is about the production and marketing of food, and, more specifically, the ways in which food delineates class lines.

The Belly of Paris is the third of Zola’s twenty-novel naturalist cycle Les Rougon-Macquart, a series of books examining two intertwined families–one rich and respectable, the other poor and disreputable–during the rise of the Industrial Revolution in France. Belly takes Florent Quenu (one of the poor and disreputable) for its protagonist. Quenu, wrongfully accused of a crime, escapes imprisonment on Devil’s Island and attempts to start a new life in Les Halles, the great, sprawling market known as “the belly of Paris.” Readers are treated to lovingly detailed depictions of Les Halles and its produce stands, fish shops, cheese markets, butcheries, both through the eyes of Quenu and many other characters. There are those who work in the great market and their children (who also, of course, work in the market); artists and rabble rousers; the nouveau riche and the would-be revolutionaries.

Zola evokes a lust for life centered around this great belly, even as he dramatizes the sharp disparity between the rich and the poor. While Zola is hardly preachy, his sympathies are clearly with the poor and downtrodden. Like America’s great literary naturalist John Steinbeck, Zola’s major rhetorical gesture is to avoid the romanticism of metaphor in favor of a tightly-drawn Darwinian realism. Like Steinbeck, this means a strong focus not just on the symbolic registry of food–food as communion, for example–but also on the real-world consequences of not having enough food. Put another way, Zola’s not afraid to get his hands dirty, and there’s quite a bit of dirt in Belly. It’s easy even now to see why Zola’s naturalism was something of a minor scandal in its day (this translated into sales for Zola, of course).

Contemporary English-reading audiences will have no difficulties with Zola’s late nineteenth-century France. Kurlansky’s deft translation zips along with vivid intensity, and his detailed endnotes inform the text without intrusion. While Francophiles pining for romantic visions of a pristine Paris will likely be put off by Zola’s gritty visions, lovers of food writing and social fiction alike will undoubtedly enjoy The Belly of Paris. Recommended.

The Belly of Paris is available from Random House’s Modern Library Classics on May 12th, 2009.

Chicken with Plums – Marjane Satrapi

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In Chicken with Plums, new in paperback from Pantheon, acclaimed author Marjane Satrapi tells the story of the life and death of her great uncle Nasser Ali, a renowned Iranian tar player who decides to die after his wife destroys his beloved instrument. Satrapi organizes her narrative around Ali’s last eight days alive in November, 1958–from the time he decides to quit eating and not leave his bedroom, to his eventual, somewhat unexplained death. Ali’s life story–and the reasons for his slow suicide–are revealed in a series of dreams, fantasies, flashbacks (and flashbacks within flashbacks!), and even a few flash forwards. Although the context of the recentish 1953 CIA-backed coup informs the plot, Chicken with Plums is far less concerned with Iranian politics than was the book that made her famous, her stunning debut graphic novel, Persepolis. Instead, Chicken plumbs loss and love, art and passion, family and disappointment, and the ways in which the small comforts in life–a favorite meal of say, chicken with plums, or a Sophia Loren flick, ultimately offer no protection against death.

Casual readers to comics often make the error of supposing that the medium is merely words with accompanying pictures. Satrapi’s deft work here might do wonders in correcting this ignorance. There isn’t a wasted panel in Chicken with Plums, and Satrapi commands intense emotion from her thick, black lines. There’s a seamless quality to Chicken with Plums; the text and the pictures, indivisible, add up to more than the sum of their parts. Satrapi knows when to hold back and let her simple black and white images tell the story. There is a certain economy of storytelling that great comic writers can achieve in ways entirely possible in prose, and here Satrapi has surpassed her earlier work in Persepolis, which, while great, often relied heavily on textual exposition. In Chicken with Plums, Satrapi’s evocations of troubled family life, unfulfilled love, the perils of Iranian immigration to California, and Sufi mysticism all blend into a poignant, often-funny, and occasionally devastating portrait that exemplifies the best of the comics medium.

While comparisons to her Persepolis series will undoubtedly hang over all of Satrapi’s work, Chicken with Plums is a wonderful successor, and in some senses, a more achieved work. Although it doesn’t convey the first-person immediacy of Persepolis, nor that memoir’s dramatic scope, the story of Nasser Ali is intimately detailed and achieves something rare in an age of overstuffed books: it leaves its readers hungry for more. Highly recommended.

Salon published a seven page excerpt from Chicken with Plums when the book was originally published in hardback.

The Ramen King and I — Andy Raskin

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In his new memoir The Ramen King and I, Andy Raskin connects sex, desire, Japanese culture, and instant noodles in an often funny, sometimes poignant, and ultimately redemptive narrative that memoir-enthusiasts (and Japanese food fans) will enjoy. Raskin’s narrative works along several tracks that eventually intertwine. The book begins with Raskin’s obsession over Momofuku Ando, inventor of instant ramen (and gifted inspirational author, to boot), backtracking in time to slowly reveal just how a kid from Long Island got to be so wound up in the writings and philosophy of an ancient Japanese businessman. Raskin balances a straightforward, chronological narrative with intensely personal letters (supposedly) written to Momofuku. These letters often read like diary entries and help to expose the core of Raskin’s dilemma: in short, he’s an emotionally detached womanizer with extreme fears of commitment (in some of the memoir’s skeevier sections, we’re treated to Raskin’s descriptions of making “dates” via Craigslist). Raskin relates his life as a tech and business writer, and his frequent trips to Japan. Eventually, after a chance encounter in a sushi bar, Raskin enters the strange world of ramen, a world that eventually leads him to Momofuku, whose zen writings in turn lead Raskin to a transcendental breakthrough.

Raskin lets his audience get to know Momofuku too, both through the narrative proper and also through short, scattered sections titled “A Very Brief History of Momofuku.” Each part delivers another pithy bit of wisdom from the ramen master (who, strangely enough, invented instant noodles in a wood shack in his back yard). It’s easy to see why Raskin admires Momofuku, especially when we’re treated to a koan like “In a line, you can see the desires of the world” (to clarify, Momofuku is referring to a queue). Raskin’s descriptions actually make readers want to pick up Mr. Ando’s books–who could resist a chapter title like “I Am a Salad Bar Man,” from Momofuku’s collection of food essays Praise the Appetite. Indeed, the best parts of The Ramen King and I center around food and Japanese culture. Raskin is particularly passionate when describing his favorite semi-secret sushi spot (in one of the book’s saddest moments, he’s banned–this only helps to facilitate that redemptive arc, though, folks); the book also shines when Raskin details the rigmarole of the ordering ritual at Ramen Jiro–a Tokyo ramen shop complete with its own shaming ceremonies. Raskin’s evocations of sushi and ramen manga also fascinates. I lived in Tokyo long enough myself to know that the Japanese have comic books about everything, but I must admit I was still surprised by the range of sushi comics Raskin describes. He also takes one of the books major thematic cues from a Japanese game show called Go Forth, where the young hosts blurt out “I wanna _____!” and fill in that blank with a random phrase; they then go attempt to fulfill their task.

On the other hand, the parts of The Ramen King and I which center on Raskin’s relationships with women often drag, or at least blur into each other. Raskin seems to understand his “ex-girl to the next-girl” mentality is detrimental to his mental health, but he’s rarely reflective about it in a meaningful way, and he certainly doesn’t attempt to plumb its roots. However, he often admits as much, pointing out that the details he remembers from relationships–even long term ones–tend to be pretty ephemeral (and, not coincidentally, attached to food). On the whole though, Raskin’s book reads at a quick, easily digestible pace without resorting to the clichés or stock phrasing that often plague memoirs. Sure, the book follows a pretty predictable pattern of fall and redemption, but it does so in a manner that enlightens without being didactic. Memoir fans, foodies, and anyone interested in contemporary Japanese culture will likely enjoy The Ramen King and I. Recommended.

The Ramen King and I is available May 7th, 2009 from Gotham/Penguin.

The Rings of Saturn — W.G. Sebald

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Early on in W.G. Sebald‘s strange and beautiful novel The Rings of Saturn, the erudite narrator (seemingly) offhandedly alludes to Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving Melencolia I. Rings is larded with such references, stuffed to the gills with analysis of history and literature and art (and so much more), but the quick allusion to Melencolia I seems a particularly informative way of interpreting–or at least comprehending–Sebald’s grand, glorious book. Before we begin though, it will be useful to quickly summarize the plot: In 1992, a German intellectual named W.G. Sebald takes a walking tour of the east coast of England. He visits old English manors, the homes of dead writers, decaying seaside resorts, abandoned islands, and many other melancholy spots. In true King Lear style, he wanders the heath a bit. But this walking tour is not the real plot: no, instead, Sebald, in a casual, sometimes wryly humorous, and mostly melancholy tone reflects on the global and historical implications of a host of subjects far too numerous to try to list here. In other words, this is a very smart book about everything.

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The Rings of Saturn, as its title suggests, is a book about melancholy (Renaissance medical texts identified Saturn with the bodily humor melancholy–black bile–indicated by sluggishness and moroseness, paradoxically paired with an eagerness for action (hence the modern word saturnine)). The melancholy of Rings pervades the whole text and even infiltrates each sentence. Like Dürer’s engraving, Sebald’s text is complexly and richly detailed, overflowing with allusion and symbolic registry that defies simple or easy interpretation. Just as Dürer situates the winged figure of genius at the (slightly off-) center of his image, contemplative yet dreamy, we find Sebald’s narrator to be a flighty genius made forlorn by the world he sees. And yet, just as Dürer’s figure is ultimately ambiguous (is he despondent or merely in the throes of absent fancy? Is he shirking his duty or contemplating a new grand work?) so too does Sebald’s narrator resist any simple interpretation. The narrative bulk of Rings consists of the narrator’s perspectives on history and memory, art and economics, literature and suffering. Like the myriad strange objects that surround the figure of genius in Dürer’s engraving, the connections between the subjects of the narrator’s lessons seem tenuous at first (indeed, several interpretations of Dürer’s piece have argued that it is simply a failed allegorical vision). As the text develops, we begin to see how the narrator’s obsession with, say, Thomas Browne’s skull connects to a biographical account of Joseph Conrad, or early English colonial forays into Imperial China, or reflections on the life cycle of the herring. Like the objects that litter Dürer’s engraving, the narrator’s varied lessons are detailed things, concretizations of history, or art, or literature, or science, and, at the same time–like Dürer’s objects–the narrator’s lessons are also symbols connected to grander abstractions. The work–and joy–of the reader is to link these symbols, these abstractions, into meaning. This is no simple task, but Sebald’s masterful writing ensures that it is a rewarding (and downright fun) adventure.

The flip side to melancholy is the potential energy writhing within its dramatic inertia. The very nature of the narrator’s simple quest–a walking tour–dramatizes this energy; at the same time, the decay and erosion of English coastal life threatens to overwhelm it for good. The narrator’s access to so much human knowledge, both miserable and horrible, attests to the power of history to survive through–but also to paradoxically crush–the living. This paradox of melancholy, dramatized in Dürer’s Melencolia I, is neatly summed up in a line from the first page of The Rings of Saturn (a page I immediately returned to after finishing the book, I must add):

At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident to me even in that remote place.

In this “remote place,” this forlorn milieu, Sebald’s narrator (Sebald?) again and again uses the lens of history to–again paradoxically–attempt to come to terms with history, both collective and individual.

The result of all this is a wonderful, engaging read, on par with the greatest books I’ve read. Sebald’s command of language, his ability to dip into another’s voice recalls Roberto Bolaño’s great work 2666; Sebald’s narrator, in his will to understand and catalog recalls Ishmael in Melville’s masterpiece Moby-Dick, as does his human sympathy, humor, and sensitivity. At the same time, Sebald’s scope spills out of the conventional borders of what we’ve come to know as the novel. While hardly as dry–or neutral–as a history or science text, Sebald’s narrator’s takes on sericulture, or the life of Joseph Conrad, or the relationship between art museums and the sugar trade of the 18th century all vibrate with an intense truthfulness that informs and engages the reader without ever falling into didactic prattle.

At the end of The Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s narrator returns to Thomas Browne’s skull again–only this time resurrected, a living brain. He discusses at length Browne’s Musaem Clausum, an imaginary library that Browne invented containing texts, artifacts, and relics of every manner of wonder. Sebald’s narrator goes on for pages listing the contents of Musaem Clausum with fervor and passion–the reader realizes that the book, and the narrator, could go on and on, detailing these wonders and their connected histories under more intense scrutiny. Rings replicates both Browne’s Musaem Clausum and Dürer’s engraving, offering readers a tour through myriad marvels–and if the walk is melancholy and strange, it is also profound and beautiful, and very, very rewarding. Very highly recommended.

The 2009 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories

Edwin Turner2 Comments

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The short story often gets short shrift. While Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is an astounding feat of economy, it’s rarely mentioned in the canon of Hemingway’s masterpieces like For Whom the Bell Tolls. There’s a strong case to be made that Kafka’s little fables are far more perfect than his unfinished novels, and yet The Trial, incomplete as it is, is still considered his finest work. I would take any one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales over the interminable stuffiness of The Scarlet Letter. There exists, perhaps, a feeling that the short story as art form is incapable of making Grand Gestures or Big Important Statements. Collections that are lauded tend to function (or at least pretend to function) as homogeneous “novels in short story” –which can be great, of course (see Denis Johnson’s inimitable volume Jesus’ Son) — but why should that be? To often, readers dismiss short stories, particularly short stories, as little more than time-fillers, neat little chunks of text to occupy specific moments in time: a subway ride, an term in a waiting room, a spare half-hour. Sometimes we set aside our real Reading Time for those oh-so important novels, so that we might Learn and Grow as a Person (or whatever). And while the tales comprising the 2009 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories certainly won’t disappoint as time-fillers, they offer so much more than simple leisure reading.

Repeatedly, the stories in this collection explore what is at stake in the human condition, and a sense of loss underpins many (if not most) of the tales. Take the lead story, Graham Joyce’s “An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen,” for instance. This story of a British Army officer who may or may not have been exposed to toxic nerve gas during the first Gulf War unfurls in a realistic, funny, and often affecting voice. Joyce’s tale dips from a military procedural into uncanny, fantastic territory, making the reader question the perception of the narrator, who never wavers in his beliefs about the strange events (namely, meeting a djinn) that are (maybe) happening to him. I thought about “An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen” for days after I read it and I made a colleague read it so that I could force him to discuss it with me. Karen Brown’s “Isobel’s Daughter” also explores loss, communicating the profundity of those everyday tragedies we often look away from. (Brown’s evocation of Tampa, Florida is spot-on, I must add). In “Purple Bamboo Park,” E.V. Slate lets us peer into the life of an old maid in modern China. The story is heartbreaking from the get-go, and yet her protagonist is not a wholly sympathetic character; Slate’s handle on human failure and our investment in mundane adventures is crushing–who knew we could have so much in common with an aging domestic worker? Caitlin Horrocks literalizes loss in “This Is Not Your City,” thrusting her readers into the panic of Russian immigrants whose daughter goes missing. In “The Order of Things,” Judy Troy examines loss and meaning through an affair, concluding that “Feeling came first and though after; that was the order of things,” much to the surprise of her protagonist. And while Paul Theroux’s “Twenty-two Stories” is more playful in both structure and content (it is comprised of twenty-two short short short stories), again we find characters pondering loss and the circumstances of their losses. Theroux’s characters, like those in James Joyce’s Dubliners, repeatedly come to negative epiphanies, whether they lose their faith in God and religion or realize that they were unfit parents. The closing story, Junot Díaz’s “Wildwood” makes me kind of ashamed that I still haven’t read Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I will remedy this omission forthwith.

While readers may not love every story collected in The 2009 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, it would take a pretty cold automaton to dismiss most of what’s presented here. The project, helmed by editor Laura Furman with jury prize selections by A.S. Byatt, Anthony Doerr, and Tim O’Brien, is really an exploration of how people handle loss and beauty and family and adventure and boredom and all those things that happen in life (and death). And isn’t that what we ask of our literature? Read this book, but give these stories their proper due. They’re more than just time-fillers; each one is a perfectly crafted little world waiting to be explored. Recommended.

The 2009 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories is available May 5th, 2009 from Anchor Books.

“The Distance from the Moon” — Italo Calvino

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We’re loving this very cool animation of Calvino’s short tale “The Distance from the Moon,” from the collection Cosmicomics. This month’s Harper’s features two funny and thoughtful little fables told by Cosmicomic‘s strange narrator Qfwfq , and if you’re too lazy to buy that, check out The New Yorker‘s recent publication of “The Daughters of the Moon.” Presumably these stories will be published in the upcoming volume Complete Cosmicomics. Stay ahead of the curve by reading them now. Special mp3 bonus: actress Maria Tucci reads from Cosmicomics.

J.G. Ballard Cover Gallery

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Some of our favorite Ballard covers:

1crash_cover2Nice gear shift…

1pocket_crashLove the enthusiasm there…

1drowned_pelham

1atrocityc760

My buddy Tilford lent me his RESearch edition of The Atrocity Exhibition (I didn’t steal it and that makes me a moral being). I think it’s probably the definitive edition. I wish I had it (maybe I should’ve stolen it…).

1impossiblec2143

Pulp fiction.

1terminalbeach1

Why is “Ballard” in katakana?

1highrise-book

This one is sorta Magritte by way of Calvino (if that makes any sense).

For lots more covers and lots more Ballard check out JG Ballard and Ballardian.

Historic Photos of Ernest Hemingway

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Historic Photos of Ernest Hemingway, new this month from Turner Publishing, combines over 200 black and white photographs of Hemingway with text and captions by James Plath to form a sort of visual biography of one of America’s most iconic writers. Spanning the entire 61 years of the author’s life, the book treats us to over a dozen photos of Hemingway’s childhood, including several (surprisingly high resolution) images of Papa as a baby. Admittedly, these are kind of uncanny, but for me, seeing baby Hemingway is not nearly as strange as seeing the many photos of teenage/early 20s Hemingway. The Key West Hemingway–bearded and burly–has become so iconic that seeing the writer in his youth is almost like seeing an entirely different person. He’s very handsome, with a vigorous smile that radiates charm and energy–much like the older Hemingway–but with a certain sheen and optimism missing in the older Hemingway. Even on crutches or in a wheelchair, young Hemingway seems less damaged than old Hemingway.

Hemingway on the Pilar
Hemingway on the Pilar

As you might expect, a majority of the pictures throughout the volume find Hemingway engaged in some sort of sport or activity–sport fishing, hunting, sailing, boxing, skiing, and so on. And drinking. Lots and lots of drinking. There’s plenty of shots of Hemingway with famous friends (fishing, boxing, and, um, drinking), but also many images of Hemingway with his various families (the man had four wives in 25 years). There’s an unexpected vitality in the photos that sustains throughout the volume, due in part perhaps to Hemingway’s engaging, larger-than-life personality, but also attributable to the fact that the book works in some ways as a cultural history of the first half of the 20th century. The images trace Hemingway from his Illinois birth, to Italy in WWI, to his ex-pat glory days in Paris (in particular) and Europe (in general). Of course, there’s plenty of Papa in Key West, as well as his time in Bimini on his boat Pilar. As Hemingway moves from Spain to Communist Cuba, we see his health deteriorate: all that boxing and drinking and loving and fighting has clearly caught up to him. He looks very, very old for a man in his late fifties. With the specter of his impending suicide hanging over the final photos, it’s hard not to read pain and depression into those last images.

Hemingway in Cuba
Hemingway in Cuba

Plath’s text adds greater depth to Hemingway’s biography than one might expect from a coffee table book. He explicates the photos by providing context and background, both historical and literary, and while he’s never gossipy, there’s a wry humor and ironic understatement to many of his captions that help to shade Hemingway’s character (Plath’s deadpan note that Hemingway “broke poet Wallace Steven’s jaw, marooned poet Archibald MacLeish on an abandoned cay after an argument [and] got sore at Fitzgerald when he messed up on timekeeping in a supposedly friendly boxing match” is particularly funny). Plath also proffers insight into Hemingway’s literary works. And about those literary works. They are not dominant in Historic Photos of Ernest Hemingway, nor should they be. If anything, the book makes a solid visual case for Hemingway as icon, a figure that at least appeared to live the life he wrote about. Plath’s text is hardly fawning, pointing to many of Hemingway’s myriad flaws, but it also recognizes Hemingway as a kind of symbol of America’s progression in the 20th century, its movement from isolation to the world stage. Recommended.

The Penelopiad – Margaret Atwood

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thepenelopiad

The Odyssey has long been my go-to example for phallocentric literature in the high school classes I teach. The story of wily Odysseus and his crew wandering the high seas for a decade after the Trojan War prototypifies a literature of masculine fantasy full of adventure, intrigue, and romance. While Odysseus explores the world, bedding nymphs and witches and having every kind of adventure with his boys, his wife Penelope is at home, faithful and chaste, raising kid Telemachus and keeping the would-be usurpers at bay. In short, the story of Odysseus licenses an entire tradition of phallocentric literature wherein the clever protagonist is able to duck familial and social duty and have a great adventure in the process. Think of Huck lighting out for the territory. Same deal. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But as Margaret Atwood saliently demonstrates in The Penelopiad, her reworking of The Odyssey, there’s always another side to that story of masculine escape–and a price to that adventure, as well.

As its title suggests, The Penelopiad tells the story from the perspective of Penelope, a plain but clever girl, who–like Odysseus–must learn to live by her wits. Atwood, working from several myths, details Penelope’s divine parentage (she’s half-naiad), and her upbringing as a young maid in her father’s home. In an early key scene, Penelope’s father supposedly (the details are fuzzy, she admits) tries to murder her by drowning her, after learning that she will weave his shroud. This infanticide echoes the story of Oedipus, and also serves as a dominant motif throughout the story (it’s also twinned with a motif of eating meat–Penelope remarks at one point that she is just “meat” to be eaten). As the story progresses, young, shy Penelope slowly transforms from a naive gal with a chip on her shoulder about her preternaturally beautiful cousin, Helen, into a woman as wily as Odysseus himself. Atwood treats us to Penelope’s inner thoughts on all sorts of subjects, and even though Penelope claims to love Odysseus, it’s repeatedly clear how angry she is at not only him, but also her son.

While Penelope’s story is dominant, Atwood is very concerned with Penelope’s twelve maids, orphaned servants slain by Odysseus and Telemachus after Odysseus’ return. The maids serve as a chorus, interjecting their voice in short chapters written in a variety of styles, ranging from epic poetry to sea shanties to short skits. One of the most fascinating choral sections plays as an anthropological seminar, in which Atwood’s maids suggest that the real story of Odysseus and Penelope is in fact the displacement of a matriarchy by a wandering warrior. There’s also an inspired court scene where Odysseus is tried for killing the suitors, and the maids sue for justice.

Ultimately, Atwood paints the maids, poor orphans and slaves, as the real victims in this ancient tale. While Penelope complains that she is treated as “meat,” Atwood makes it clear that it’s really the maids who are treated as mere flesh to be consumed–slaves forced to clean, bodies subjected to repeated rapes. And while Penelope repeatedly expresses sorrow and dismay for the murder of the maids, complaining that their deaths were a result of tragic miscommunication, the maids have a different story to tell–one that ironizes much of what Penelope has to say. As the story progresses, we are frequently reminded by Penelope herself that she is a liar and storyteller on par with Odysseus and because of this insight we begin to realize that there might be something to some of the slanderous rumors she’s been protesting in her narrative. It would’ve been simple for Atwood to give Penelope a straightforward and strong voice, a voice that communicated the virtue classically identified with Penelope along with a feminist slant of insight. Instead, Atwood’s Penelope is far more complex and human, gossipy and spiteful, sympathetic and ripe for contempt. The Penelopiad ironizes not only The Odyssey (and the phallocentric literary tradition after it), but also itself; its a book that complicates our notions of history, memory, and identity, and it does so in ways both playful and profound. Highly recommended.

Good Friday

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As the B-52s understood so well, we all need some good stuff in our life. Here’s some good stuff:

unaccustomed-earth

Jhumpa Lahiri’s much-lauded collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, is out in paperback from Vintage this week. Although I’ve only read three of the collection’s eight stories so far, it’s already easy to see why the book was so beloved last year. Lahiri explores the intersection of different cultures and the subtleties of generational conflict, but the themes and content of her stories always veer toward universals of domesticity–siblings, marriage, children, and all the troubles that go with them are studied here. I found bits of my own life echoed here in insightful and analytical detail, particularly in the heart breaker “Only Goodness.” Good stuff.

the-story-of-forgetting

Also new in paperback this week from Randomhouse is Stefan Merrill Block’s debut novel The Story of Forgetting, and while I haven’t had a chance to get too far into it, its blend of science, medicine, memory, and fantasy seems pretty intriguing. Block examines Alzheimer’s disease through the lens of an elderly man named Abel, a misanthropic teen named Seth, and a Calvinoesque fantasy world called Isadora–a world without memory. Seems pretty cool; potential good stuff. Trailer here.

For more good stuff, check out our new tumblog Pet Zounds.

Here’s a cool interview from The Times with Bob Dylan on Presidential autobiographies and more. Good stuff.

neko-case-an02

You can also listen to all ninety minutes of Neko Case’s concert at the 9:30 club, broadcast live last night on NPR. Lovely Ms. Case transcends good stuff, of course.

dirty_projectors-bitte_orca-art

Speaking of transcendent good stuff, the new Dirty Projectors album, Bitte Orca, has, ahem, leaked. It’s the sort of greatness that makes you ashamed to be a pirate, the kind of album you can’t wait to actually buy even though you’ve been listening to it in full for a few months (it doesn’t drop until June 9th). Lush and ethereal, somewhere between Kate Bush and Storm & Stress, Bitte Orca is the sort of stuff that would play at high school proms around this country this year if this country had any class. Here they are playing “Stillness is the Move”: