Tag: Reviews

Three Days Before the Shooting . . . — Beginning Ralph Ellison’s Posthumous Second Novel

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In 1952, Ralph Ellison secured his place in the American literary canon with the publication of his picaresque verbal tour de force, Invisible Man. He never published another novel in his lifetime. Five years after his death in 1994 saw the publication of Juneteenth, a book cobbled together from the sundry drafts that Ellison had spent over forty years crafting and revising. Those papers ran to over 2000 pages. Now, editors John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley have made good on the promise to release an expanded version of Ellison’s proposed second novel. That effort, new in hardback this month from Random House’s Modern Library series, is Three Days Before the Shooting . . ., a massive, complex, and perplexing volume running to 1101 pages — not including editors’ notes, chronology, prefaces, and introductions.

I usually eschew introductions (or at least read them after I’ve read the text proper) in the hopes of not having my reading colored by some critic’s own thoughts, but in the case of Three Days, with its bulk, with its mystery, it seemed necessary to see what Callahan and Bradley had to say. What, exactly, would I be reading? How was it put together? Is there a real novel here? Our esteemed editors point out that:

. . . one might reasonably have expected to find among [Ellison’s] papers a single manuscript very near to completion, bearing evidence of the difficult choices he had made during the protracted period of the novel’s composition. One might have expected, perhaps, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, a fragmented with a clearly drafted, clearly delineated beginning and middle, whose author’s notes and drafts pointed toward two or three endings, each of which followed and resolved the projected novel as a whole. Or, to cite a more contemporary example, it might have resembled Roberto Bolaño’s 2666; upon its posthumous publication in 2008, Bolaño’s editor remarked that, had the author lived to see it through to publication, “its dimensions, its general content would by no means have been very different from what they are now.” In the extreme, one might have expected something like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a glorious mess of a novel that defies the very generic restraints of the form.

Callahan and Bradley pose these novels only as examples to contrast Ellison’s work as “something else entirely: a series of related narrative fragments, several of which extend to over three hundred manuscript pages in length, that appear to cohere without truly completing one another.” There’s a fun laundry list of where and on what Ellison composed the work, including the various types of paper he used and the different machines on which he wrote. The logistics are important from an editors perspective, of course, and as an interested reader it’s fascinating to see how Callahan and Bradley put all of Ellison’s disparate sources together. But what becomes most apparent in their general introduction to the work is that, even as he was always writing, Ellison was stalling, hoping to revise his novel in light of social changes–only, those social changes were happening relatively rapidly. It took Ellison over eight years to produce and edit Invisible Man, a novel that brilliantly captures American identity in the postwar era. For his second novel, Ellison clearly wanted to engage in such a critique again, but the rapidity of social and cultural change seems to have outpaced his ability to write and edit. He satisfied his public and the literary establishment by publishing excerpts of the novel (eight in total, all reproduced in Three Days), but most of his writing career, at least in terms of publishing, was spent writing (and revising) essays and critiques.

Still. Forty years and only eight published snippets? Really? Our fearless editors seem exasperated themselves, writing, “The longer one puzzles over what Ellison left behind, the more maddening it seems that he did not simply will himself to bring the book to a close, that he didn’t find his way to that ‘meaningful form’ he sought.” And there is so much narrative here; Ellison’s major concern — beyond revising in light of cultural and social upheaval — was simply fitting his pieces into a coherent whole. Not that there isn’t a plot. To borrow again from our generous editors:

The basic plot of Ellison’s novel as it emerges in these manuscripts centers upon the connection, estrangement, and reconciliation of two characters. The one is a black jazzman-turned-preacher named Alonzo Hickman, the other a racist ‘white’ New England Senator named Adam Sunraider, formerly known as Bliss–a child of indeterminate race whom Hickman had raised from infancy to adolescence. The action of the novel concerns Hickman’s efforts to stave off Sunraider’s assassination at the hands of the Senator’s own estranged son, a young man named Severen.

Callahan and Bradley go on to point out that, of course, this is simply the bare bones of the plot; that Three Days teems with characters and voices and motifs and strange little riffs. So far, my reading of the book upholds this assertion–and also suggests that the best way to enjoy this book is simply to dive right in. Yeah, that’s right. Ignore all the context. Skip Callahan and Bradley’s prefatory material completely–it’s well-written, highly informative, and will get right in your way. Just start at page one and enjoy Ellison’s rhythm, his inimitable language, his bizarre sense of humor and his deep pathos.

The book opens with a prologue that details a visit Hickman and his congregation make to Washington, D.C. three days before the shooting of Senator Sunraider. They attempt to warn him but are blocked at all turns. Book One then opens immediately with that assassination attempt, seen from the perspective of a journalist named McIntyre who narrates Book One in first-person. The first few chapters are set in the panicked claustrophobia of the post-shooting Senate where police detain everyone present. These chapters detail the strange rumors that circulate about Sunraider, including

. . . the rumor that for a time during his youth the Senator had been the leader of an organization which wore black hoods and practiced obscene ceremonials with the ugliest and most worn-out prostitutes they could find. Like certain motorcycle gangs of today they also engaged in acts of violence and hooliganism and were accused of torturing people — derelicts and such. They were also said to have distributed Christmas baskets and comic books to the poor.

What a great punchline. These early episodes made me laugh out loud at least three times. They’re also rather unsettling, and, more than anything, intriguing. In short, so far the book compels reading, and it’s hard to believe that such inspired riffs won’t add up to greater things. Our editors warn that the book doesn’t so much “end” as simply “stop,” but, right now, I’m fine with that. Ellison fans who don’t own this will want to pick it up forthwith; anyone daunted by its size, scope, or the context of its creation might miss some really great writing. More to come.

Bright Star — Campion Does Keats

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So I finally got around to watching Jane Campion’s Bright Star last night, a film that quietly studies the final years of Romantic poet John Keats and his relationship with Fanny Brawne. When Keats moves next door to the Brawnes, eldest daughter Fanny, a talented seamstress and flighty flirt, soon becomes intrigued by the poet. Keats, with his love for beauty and truth, represents a world of greater depth than the wits and dandies who usually attempt to court Brawne. Their relationship is, of course, doomed from the outset. Perpetually broke Keats doesn’t have the moolah or means to properly engage Brawne in marriage, but that doesn’t stop the pair from undertaking a furtive, pensive love affair, carried out in long walks on the heath and passionate letters. Oh, and Keats gets sick and dies at 25. That shouldn’t be a spoiler if you’ve studied your Romantics properly, now should it?

Both Abbie Cornish who plays Brawne and Ben Whishaw who plays Keats are excellent in their understatement and reserve, but the standout turn in the movie comes from actor Paul Schneider (from NBC’s Parks & Recreation) who plays Keats’s bankrolling friend Charles Armitage Brown. Brown is a lesser poet whose love and envy of Keats leads him to vex Brawne and Keats’s love at every turn, plaguing them with doubt, and that enemy of Romance, Reason. Schneider invests his character with a boorish charm that never veers into the rote tropes that afflict modern romance film. It’s emblematic of the Campion’s film in a way: Bright Star has every opportunity to devolve into a mundane exercise in doomed romance or a stuffy period piece, but under Campion’s delicate care it manages to match the depth of its subject matter.

Campion wrote the screenplay, presumably using letters from the principals as her primary source. She honors her viewers’ intelligence — far too rare these days — by never cobbling her plot together with easy exposition or forced narrative developments, and it’s that sense of history that lends the film authenticity. Cornish’s Brawne is a protagonist whose personality transformations read as real, and Whishaw’s Keats is never a cartoonish mystic or a moody caricature, but a fully-drawn human. Campion also has the good judgment to let her cinematography convey her story, letting gorgeous shots of the English countryside and cloistered chambers alike convey the mood and rhythm of her story. At times, Bright Star‘s beautiful camerawork recalls Terrence Malick, another director who allows film to “happen” to the viewer as an evocative experience rather than a spoon-feeding. Campion also shows considerable restraint with the film’s wonderful score, never allowing it to color a scene unduly when her actors can do a great job on their own. Bright Star avoids all of the pitfalls that might afflict a period piece, and does a far better job handling the subject of Romantic poetry than a movie has any right to. The film is hardly for everyone (sorry guys, no Jason Statham), but it’s very, very good. Recommended.

Historic Photos of Florida Ghost Towns

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Historic Photos of Florida Ghost Towns, new from Turner Publishing, pairs beautiful black and white archival photos with detailed commentary by Steve Rajtar to offer a counter-narrative to the traditional history of Florida. Florida’s history is often told in terms of exponential growth, focusing on the Sunshine State’s ecological bounty as a reason for immigration and tourism. Ghost Towns takes a look at the many historical sites in Florida that were destroyed, absorbed, or abandoned as the state bounded to modernity. Rajtar and his editors have organized the book around all the different ways that a town might become a ghost town, including economic (company closings, plantation declines, railroad expansion), sociopolitical (absorption, abandonment, government mandates), and natural (fires, floods, hurricanes).

Appropriate for its title, there’s something haunting about many of the images in the book. Like all images from the past, they speak for what no longer exists, but there’s something melancholy here too. Take for example this 1897 image of the Lamb family from the ironically-named plantation township of Hopewell. Their dour expressions communicate a sense of the difficulties of an agrarian life in Florida over a century ago — more Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings than Miami Vice. What happened to these people after their farms collapsed? Where are their descendants today?

Historic Photos of Florida Ghost Towns will be a welcome addition to any Florida history buff’s library, as well as a handsome book for any Floridian’s coffee table. It’s also a worthy document to testify to an an alternate and often overlooked element of Florida history. Florida has a rich, storied past, and Ghost Towns helps to honor that. As the state heads into an uncertain future, the book also might make some of us reappraise our own cities’ chances of withstanding the test of time. Recommended.

David Peace’s Red Riding Film Adaptations Debut in the US

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The film adaptations of David Peace‘s Red Riding quartet make their American debut this weekend. The films look pretty cool — kinda like Zodiac. The screen adaptations drop the 1977 segment of Peace’s original quartet, opting instead for the trilogy treatment. You can read Manohla Dargis’s detailed review for The New York Times here and Keith Phipps favorable review at the AV Club here. Trailer:

Occupied City — David Peace

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“You want to know what happened, yes?” an old detective asks near the beginning of Occupied City. “No? You want to know the truth? Make up your mind! Which do you want to know; what happened, or the truth?” This preoccupation of “what happened” vs. “the truth” fuels the central tension in David Peace’s new novel, a postmodern noir exercise set in the desolation of 1948 Tokyo. Based on the true story of the Teikoku Bank Massacre, Occupied City investigates the postwar slaying of twelve bank employees who were poisoned by a man dressed (perhaps) as a government official. There’s a parenthetical “perhaps” around just about everything in Peace’s book; he cites Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s short stories “In a Grove” and “Rashomon” (as well as Kurosawa’s film adaptation of that story) as inspirations for the structure of Occupied City.

And rightly so. The few witnesses who survived the massacre get to tell “what happened”; their testimony is combined in a pastiche of sources including official government documents, a detective’s notes, newspaper reports, and personal and professional letters from an obsessed American Lieutenant Colonel. There’s a classically-neutral narrator whose reportorial rationality is undercut at every turn by the interceding lamentations of a Beckettian speaker dipping into madness. And there are the dead, the victims who cry out to be seen as more than just victims. Peace’s techniques are somehow both stochastic and tightly controlled at the same time, as he weaves the disparate voices through his tale to square the different perspectives of “what happened” in an attempt to reach “the truth.” Peace’s language frequently vacillates between elliptical and elusive abstraction and the visceral immediacy one would expect from a detective novel. The verbal tics add up to a visual poetry, as Peace’s repetitions, redaction, strike-throughs, and columns reinvigorate a genre that too-often relies on stodgy convention. For many readers, this eclectic style will be at times challenging or even come off as pretentious, but those who submit to Peace’s tumult of language are in for quite a ride.

Occupied City is a smart, well-researched historical thriller that recalls the verbal grit and energy of James Ellroy, who Peace interviewed earlier thie year. Like Ellory, Peace’s detectives investigate the seamy gaps in history from myriad perspectives, prodding readers into violent alien territory. And like Ellroy’s work, there’s no easy “truth” at the bottom of this book, but there are plenty of unsettling questions. Occupied City is a stark, bewildering challenge from a writer who deserves a wider audience. Recommended.

Occupied City is new in hardback from Knopf this week.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned — Wells Tower

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Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned takes its title from the name of the final story in the collection, but the phrase is also an apt descriptor for the underlying themes that most of these stories explore. Tower’s world is a neatly drawn parallel reality populated by down-on-their-luck protagonists who we always root for, despite our better judgment, even as they inadvertently destroy whatever vestiges of grace are bestowed upon them.

There’s Bob Monroe in “The Brown Coast,” who has “perpetrated three major fuckups that would be a long time in smoothing over.” He’s lost his wife and his job, but he finds a measure of solace in adding fish to an aquarium–until that project is ravaged. There’s the father of “Down through the Valley” — estranged against his will — who attempts to make nice by driving his ex’s injured new husband home from a New Age retreat. The poor guy, like so many of the characters here, stumbles into one bad situation after another. He’s not the only dad here — there are plenty of fathers in Everything Ravaged, and there’s also a strong undercurrent of Oedipal rage. In “Leopard,” (written in that rare beast, the second-person), Tower explores the psyche of an angry pre-adolescent boy who hates his dickish stepfather. When the lad discovers a flier warning that a pet leopard is on the loose, he fantasizes that the creature will solve his problem. The teenage lead of “Wild America” — the only female protagonist in the book — lives with the shame of having “tried to stab her shy father with a nail file.” In “The Brown Coast,” Bob calls his home to find that his Uncle has taken up with his wife. “Executors of Important Energies” brims with Oedipal tension, as a failed inventor has to come to terms with his father’s dementia. He’s had to live most of his life in ambivalence over his stepmother, who splits the age difference between him and his father:

The particulars weren’t absolutely clear, but I had a hunch that somewhere around my sixteenth birthday, he was going to take me out to a desert overlook where the sun was going down and announce that he was giving Lucy to me, along with his Mustang fastback, along with some Schlitz, and maybe a cassette tape that was nothing but “Night Moves” by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band.”

If “Night Moves” is the dream, Seger’s “Beautiful Loser” is the reality for most of the characters in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. And Tower’s world is strangely beautiful, an evocatively drawn portrait of the little rural pockets that permeate the American Southeast. Sure, there’s a story set in New York City, and “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” is about Vikings in the Dark Ages, but for the most part Tower sticks to the weird, unstable borders between civilization and wilderness. It’s a world where seemingly peripheral characters all of a sudden fall into the narrative as essential players; it’s a violent world–and an engrossing one.

“Retreat” might be the finest of the stories here. It tells the story of two long-warring brothers who try, at least on the surface, to make amends. The protagonists (or, more rightly mutual antagonists) are typical of Tower: rough and physical, but also prone to moodiness and obsessive self-reflection. There are two versions of the story, initially published in issues 23 and 30 of McSweeney’s. The one published here is the later version, told from the perspective of the more financially-prosperous brother (the first is told from the viewpoint of the less well-off brother. Both brothers are total assholes). We kinda sorta wish that both versions were included in the collection, because they’ve come to form a composite story in our mind, but hey, you can’t always get what you want. “Retreat” unfurls in muscular, organic prose, bristling with fresh metaphors and similes. Great stuff.

Tower is a writing talent that we’ve been following for awhile now, and Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is the sort of book that makes you want to track down the stray stories not collected here (a good starting place for those interested: “Raw Water” in McSweeney’s 32). And while we’ll never knock the short story as a lesser form, surely this man has a novel waiting in the wings. We’d love to read it. We very highly recommend Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is available today in trade paperback from Picador.

Point Omega — Don DeLillo

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Don DeLillo’s latest work Point Omega takes an oblique, subtle, and unnerving tackle at themes of time, perception, family, and, ultimately, personal apocalypse. It’s not a particularly fun book nor does it yield any direct answers, but it’s also a rewarding, engaging, and often challenging read.

Point Omega pretends to be a novel about two subjects: the Iraq War and film. Its narrator Jim Finley is an experimental filmmaker who travels to the Arizona desert in an attempt to convince aging intellectual Richard Elster to participate in a film comprised solely of one long, unedited take of Elster talking about whatever he likes. Although Finley repeatedly claims that Elster can talk about whatever he chooses to in the film, it’s clear that that the younger man wishes for the subject to be Elster’s involvement in the planning of the Iraq War, a sort of mea culpa from the intellectual elite who rolled over to the Bush administration. Elster’s involvement was essentially to provide academic credibility to the invasion:

He was the outsider, a scholar with an approval rating but no experience in government. He sat at a table in a secure conference room with the strategic planners and military analysts. He was there to conceptualize, his words, in quotes, to apply overarching ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counter-insurgency. He was cleared to read classified manuscripts, he said, and he listened to the chatter of the resident experts, the metaphysicians in the intelligence agencies, the fantasists in the Pentagon.

Elster becomes disillusioned with the whole process soon; he comes to realize the hollowness of his role and soon moves to the desert. “He’d exchanged all that for space and time,” writes DeLillo, announcing his theme. Later in the novella, Elster claims that the geologic time of the desert allows him to feel, “Time falling away . . . Time becoming slowly older. Enormously old. Not day by day. This is deep time, epochal time.” He contrasts this “deep time” with the time of cities:

It’s all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It’s all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature is meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

Elster appears concerned that humanity is approaching Teilhard’s omega point, the maximum level of complexity of consciousness toward which the universe is evolving. He concedes that this idea might be “a case of language that’s struggling toward some idea our experience.” For Elster, the omega point is inevitable and leads to either “a sublime transformation of mind and soul or some worldly convulsion.” Ultimately, his viewpoint seems nihilistic: he’d rather human beings somehow be transformed into stones, be somehow absorbed into a new time, a geologic time.

The obsession with time and film literally wraps the book in two short chapters called “Anonymity” (a prologue) and “Anonymity 2” (an epilogue (or a prescient epitaph, perhaps?)). Both sections describe a man who spends all of his time at MOMA’s presentation of Douglas Gordon’s videowork 24 Hour Psycho, a silent showing of Hitchcock’s Psycho over 24 hours. Neither section is narrated by Finley, although it later becomes clear that he–along with other principals in the story–is present at the showing. The unnamed man whose consciousness permeates these chapters finds his own omega point in the crawling pace of the film. 24 Hour Psycho divorces itself from the healing powers that stories give us, the power to narrativize all the gaps and crevices of life. It’s no longer the medicine that Elster suggests literature (or film) might be. It now exists outside of narrative cohesion and somehow resonates with the purity or transcendence of geologic time.

Fortunately, DeLillo is gracious enough to his readers to not attempt replicating the pace of geologic time in his book. Point Omega is particularly slim–under 120 pages in hardback–and reads with a the conciseness and clarity which has been a hallmark of DeLillo’s style. As perhaps the signal writer of post-postmodernism (whatever that means), DeLillo continues to engage and anticipate new and emerging forms of alienation, and he does so without gimmicks or trickery, just the purity of considered ideas. Point Omega works best when he allows those ideas some room to breathe; the late-night scotch-soaked dialogues between Elster and Finley are some of the finest passages of the book and it’s a pity there aren’t more of them.

But it seems like we’ve digressed from some of our starting points, doesn’t it? Many critics will call Point Omega DeLillo’s “Iraq War novel,” which is a mistake akin to calling Underworld a book about baseball or White Noise a book about Hitler. The war is merely an entry point to the greater, more personal tragedy that underlies the book, a tragedy that will perhaps make Elster reassess his own value system. We won’t name the trauma at the core of the book–to do so might spoil a twist in a book largely devoid of conventional concrete plotting–but it is worth noting that DeLillo optimizes suspense and tension as the novel builds to its own omega point. While many will feel left cold by the book’s ultimately ambiguous invocation of personal calamity, we found in it a meaningful counterpoint to Elster’s explicit commentary on time and identity. DeLillo’s novel, in the end, requires an intellectual–or perhaps, dare we say spiritual–leap. Point Omega is hardly a satisfying read, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Highly recommended.

Point Omega is available February 2nd, 2010 from Scribner.

Jane Bites Back — Michael Thomas Ford

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In Michael Thomas Ford’s novel Jane Bites Back, Jane Austen (you know, the Jane Austen) is an incognito vampire/bookstore clerk in upstate New York. Poor Jane is trying to get a new novel published (under a pseudonym, of course), but she suffers scores of rejection letters for her new work. Even worse is the horror of the Jane Austen industry, which, under the auspices of public domain laws, clutters Jane’s own bookshop with awful books that, like, don’t “get” the Austen oeuvre (in the climactic scene of the book’s opening chapter, Vampire Jane gets some measure of revenge by consuming the boorish author of an execrable volume entitled Waiting for Mr. Darcy). Of course, there’s got to be a plot, so Jane does get an offer for a book deal, one that’s complicated by accusations of plagiarism and other woes. To make matters worse, her old lover Lord Byron shows up (yeah, Byron, duh. How else would Jane Austen catch the vampirism?) There are other ghosts of literary past who show up, too, but why spoil surprises?

Jane Bites Back reveres its subject, Jane Austen, even as it blatantly cashes in on the very trend that it satirizes. The book’s program shouldn’t be confused with the absurdity behind Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters (which we liked) or the wackiness of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (which we didn’t like), but it does adhere to the same sense of fun. Ford seems to delight in corny, over the top passages, and we’ll take it for granted that his literary tongue is in his cheek when he writes a paragraph like:

When his hand cupped her breasts she gasped, and when his mouth touched her skin she felt her knees buckle. He caught her, sweeping her up in his arms and carrying her to the bed. He placed her atop the sheets and stepped back. She watched through half-closed eyes as he removed his clothes. His chest was lean, his skin pale as milk. When stepped from his trousers she glanced briefly at his manhood before looking away.

His “manhood”?! Jeez, we hope this is parody. In any case, we were laughing. (Sidenote: How does this stack up against the sex scenes in the Twilight books? Are there sex scenes in the Twilight books? What Biblioklept reader will even admit to having read Twilight?)

Ford’s style is, on the whole, redolent with the tropes of YA fiction–not that Jane Bites Back is necessarily YA–but there’s not a challenging sentence in the book, which may or may not be a compliment for the writer. Clear, lucid writing is difficult to do. Still, we tend to value ambiguity around here; being perplexed and furious is a good reaction from time to time. Jane Bites Back reads with an anonymous speed that’s not particularly invigorating.

If we were really feeling adventurous today, we might wax heavy on the all the implications, meta- and otherwise, of a book that purports to criticize the Austen fad while at the same time indulging in it…but we’re not feeling up to it. There’s also a neat Venn diagram in all of this: vampires, Jane Austen, feminism (yeah, there are feminist themes here. Did we forget to mention them? Sorry). Suffice to say that any reader whose ears perk up at the notion of “Jane Austen + vampires” will not be disappointed in this book.

Jane Bites Back is new from Ballantine Books.

Nazi Literature in the Americas — Roberto Bolaño

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I was talking with a friend last weekend about Roberto Bolaño and he remarked that many of the early slim novels from this remarkable writer tend to read like sketches for his masterwork 2666. This is a more than fair assessment and also one that shouldn’t–and doesn’t–detract from enjoying these books. But it’s difficult to read the nightmare-rant of By Night in Chile or the paranoiac dread invested in the tales in Last Evenings on Earth without recalling the layered themes of violence and art that underpin 2666. Bolaño’s fake-encyclopedia, Nazi Literature in the Americas is perhaps, by its very nature, the sketchiest of these sketches, yet that term, “sketch” — well it’s just plain wrong here. While most of the book’s entries are marked by brevity, none are undercooked. Rather–and I hate that I’m about to crib from critic Francisco Goldman’s blurb on the back of the book, but he’s spot on–the book is a “key cosmology to Bolaño’s literary universe.” In short, Nazi Literature in the Americas helps to confirm that, like J.R.R. Tolkien, Bolaño was a writer with a fully-realized universe at his disposal, one with its own heroes and villains, histories and myths, and yes, like Tolkien, its own literature.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is a stunning, ugly, highly-enjoyable, and often hilarious book. It details the exploits, both literary and non-, of over two dozen fictional writers from North, Central, and South America. While few of the writers are actually practicing Nazis, all are right-wingers and most are crazy failures. Big surprise that Bolaño would write about crazy, failed writers, right? And that is the central paradox of the book: while the writers here are anti-Semites and fascists and neo-Nazis who represent the worst in human values and ethics, they also darkly mirror Bolaño himself, or at least his fictional stand-ins. For example, the (anti-)heroes Ignacio Zubieta and Jesús Fernández-Gómez are Colombian writers who side first with the fascists and then the Nazis, yet they come across as doubles for the Mexican lefty poets Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, the (anti-)heroes of The Savage Detectives. The pair pops up a few times in the course of the book as well, most notably in the section on Daniela de Montecriesto, who was a minor character in 2666.

She’s not the only character to traverse Bolaño books. The final chapter of Nazi Literature, its longest, tells the story of Ramírez Hoffman, the aviator-poet-serial killer whose story is extended in the novella Distant Star. Hoffman’s entry, besides being the longest, is also the only written in the first-person. The narrator is even identified as “Bolaño.”

At times the reader will find himself sympathizing with Bolaño’s monsters. The sci-fi writer Gustavo Border says: “I have been tormented, spat on, and deceived so often–the only way I could go on living and writing was to find spiritual refuge in an ideal place.” Bolaño immediately cuts the pathos with humor; Border ends his sad comment: “In a way, I’m like a woman trapped in a man’s body.” Elsewhere, what’s most shocking is not how much sympathy Bolaño evokes, but how interesting the literature he describes sounds. Take Segundo José Heredia’s Saturnalia, for instance:

Saturnalia, the story of two young friends who in the course of a week-long journey through France are confronted with the most horrendous acts they have ever witnessed, without being able to tell for sure whether or not they are dreaming. The novel includes scenes of rape, sexual and workplace sadism, incest, impaling, and human sacrifice in prisons crowded to the physical limit; there are convoluted murder plots in the tradition of Conan Doyle, colorful and realistic descriptions of every Paris neighborhood, and, incidentally, one of the most vivid and spine-chilling female characters in Venezuelan literature since 1950: Elisenda, the enemy of the two young men.

It sounds horrific but I’d love to read it. It also sounds like a Bolaño novel, with its nightmare violence, prisons, and detective plots.

In one telling aside, one of Bolaño’s writers realizes that “literature . . . is a surreptitious form of violence.” Bolaño’s oeuvre seems to work from this thesis, or perhaps work to enact this thesis. If the writers of of Nazi Literature are villains, they are also sympathetic in their villainy, not for their racist viewpoints, which are subtly but repeatedly mocked and condemned, but rather for the fact that as writers and artists they have no hope; like Oedipus they are fated to violence. Like Bolaño himself, they both channel and engender violence. Their failure, of course, is to seek to regulate or otherwise give meaning to that violence via ideology and dogma. Tellingly, Bolaño investigates–and perhaps corrects–this failure in his opus 2666 which resists easy answers and scapegoats.

And so to return to our point of entry: Nazi Literature in the Americas will probably be enjoyed most by those who’ve trucked through 2666 or some of Bolaño’s other works. It’s a quick, propulsive read, and while quite funny–and at times scary–it’s most fascinating as a document that further fleshes out the Bolañoverse. Highly recommended.

The Spare Room — Helen Garner

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We’ve all had house guests who stay too long. But what happens when a house guest who overstays her welcome is dying? What if you invited her there hoping to prove in yourself some measure of humanity, humility, maybe even heroism, by taking good care of her? What if you found her irritating? Grating? Self-absorbed? What if  she didn’t seem to even notice what a great caretaker you were? What if she didn’t seem to appreciate your prowess as a host? What if she outright ignored the disease that was killing her, just refused to even mention it, denying you any hope of closure? Worst of all would be the shame that compounded all of these feelings about the dying house guest, the sense that you are wrong, inhuman, cowardly, right? Helen Garner’s novella The Spare Room (new in trade paperback from Picador) tackles these questions and the emotional turmoil behind them in measured, spare prose making a compelling and rewarding read.

Little irks me more in journalism than a book review (or any media review, really) that seeks to intertwine the personal dramas of the reviewer. I am about to do just that right now, gentle reader, so you are forewarned. Stop reading now if you wish and know that Biblioklept recommends The Spare Room. It’s a marvelous piece of writing, one that gives proof to the cliché “brutally honest.”

Reading The Spare Room I could not help but identify with its narrator, an Australian woman in her 60s named Helen who takes care of her free-wheeling, slightly daffy, cancer-infested friend Nicola. I am not an Australian woman in my 60s, but, like Helen, I know what it is like to live with and care for a person whom you love who also happens to be dying. From the time I was 12 years old, my maternal grandmother Mama Dot lived with my family. The doctors, prognosticating wise men all, gave Mama Dot just a year or two to live and my folks wanted her to spend that time with us. She was very sick, and, as if to prove the verity of certain stereotypes about Southern women,  she was also very stubborn–mulishly so (the woman could hold a grudge). She went on to live another 10 years with my parents, during which time both my brother and myself of course left the house (but always came back to visit). I loved her very, very much and, perhaps as a result of that love, fought with her constantly and fiercely about any little thing. Unlike the narrator Helen, who bottles up her irritation with Nicola (particularly her fury at her friend’s pursuit of quackish cures), I found it easier to confront my grandmother about her faults in illness–her lapses of memory and judgment, her lack of cooperation, her unbearable slowness. I could even be mean. But like Helen, I always felt bad about it too. What makes The Spare Room such an affecting, gripping read is Garner’s honesty, her ability to capture the negative, selfish feelings that we all must feel when comforting the sick.

Narratives about the dying often disengage the emotional turmoil of the caretaker by applying a veneer of sentimentality, morality, or even whimsy. Garner handles her subject matter with a realism that denies sentimentality and faces the ugliness of death head on. Her narrator is compassionate toward her friend but it’s always clear that the book is not about Nicola–it’s about how Helen reacts to Nicola. It’s about what it means to be selfish at the very moment you are trying to be selfless. It’s about how hard it is to get past your flaws as a human being. Take the book’s humor, for instance: The Spare Room is frequently hilarious, yet the humor never seeks transcendence or escape. When Helen seems to mutter to her audience, “God bless morphine” at the beginning of a chapter, she isn’t drolly avoiding her friend’s pain–she’s thankful that the drug has given both of them a night’s sleep. Similarly, her observation that the “station was a seven-minute walk from my house, twenty if you had cancer,” reveals that Helen’s selfishness is wrapped in minute details, details that compound in the narrative and build tension toward its awful final sentence (a final sentence that I won’t spoil by revealing here, dear reader).

The Spare Room is a tightly-compressed novella that one might read in an afternoon or two, yet the book will undoubtedly stay with most readers for a long time to come. We might not all be like Helen (and, thankfully, not all of our patients are as trying as Nicola) but there is certainly bound to be some measure of her in even the best of us. Garner has captured here some of that rage against the dying of the light that Dylan Thomas encouraged of us, and she’s revealed that that rage, falling impotent against illimitable death, might end up aimed at those we love dearest–as well as ourselves. Highly recommended.

Sandokan — Nanni Balestrini

Edwin Turner3 Comments

Nanni Balestrini’s novella Sandokan, new in English translation from Melville House, tells the story of the rise of the Camorra crime syndicate in the small, poverty-stricken cities around Naples. Balestrini’s unnamed narrator occupies a fascinating insider-outsider perspective: one one hand, he, unlike many of his peers, does not join the gang, or “clan,” as its called–in fact, their behavior repulses him. On the other hand, he’s a native of the small town where Francesco Schiavone (aka Sandokan), Antonio Bardellino, and their henchman rule mercilessly, an eye-witness to the brutality and inhumanity of organized crime. The narrator is a sensitive young man who delineates clearly how the crime cartel was able to achieve such economic prosperity and power in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, detailing the various rackets the clan imposed upon the town, like stealing elections, peddling drugs, and manipulating the agribusiness that is the main source of income for average Neapolitan peasants. The narrator also explores why these small towns fall so easily into the terror of organized crime. The main reason: boredom stemming from little or nothing to do.

Balestrini’s narrator’s description of the Camorra is systematic, detailing the awful history and brutal practices of the syndicate in spare, concrete terms. His explications of the clan’s violence is not so much thrilling as  it is ugly, as the narrator always shows how “normal people” (his words) are cheated, killed, or otherwise harmed by the Camorra. The narrator’s tone is often journalistic but never clinical; he always shows what’s at stake for the “normal people,” how they are affected by these crimes. At times the narrator is wryly funny, a tone that results in large part from his observation that the townspeople, the people he grew up around, begin to normalize the violence. It becomes part of their daily lives and affects them so directly that it becomes casual, and the sensitive narrator is one of only a few not to bow to it, ignore it, or take part in it–yet the violence and crime is so overwhelming that to live with it is to live with absurdity. Balestrini employs a punctuation-free rhetorical style in Sandokan that captures the breathless energy and frustration of the narrator. While many readers might balk at the lack of commas, periods, or semi-colons, I found the technique quite liberating. It enhances the immediacy of the narrator’s voice, the rushed sense of importance to his tale. It also promotes sustained readings of the text–I read most of Sandokan in three enthralled sittings.

Sandokan has its cinematic twin in the 2008 film Gomorra, directed by Matteo Garrone. The film, like the book, illustrates the affect that crime has on a range of “normal people,” mostly occupants of a housing project outside of Naples. As in Sandokan, the ordinary citizens find that they have no choice but to choose between sides as an absurd, petty gang war ravages their already decimated landscape. Where Balestrini’s punctuation-free rhetoric allows readers closer access to his narrator’s pathos-driven story, Garrone lets his camera wander freely over the grim landscape without ever imposing any clear narrative structure. It is not until the film’s final third that the five disparate stories he tells coalesce, and even then, it remains unclear who is on whose side. What is clear is that the violence and crime is quickly stealing–and killing–another generation.

In an age where violence is sensationalized and glamorized, particularly in gangster films and TV shows (do I really need to list them?), Sandokan and Gomorra both lay bare the Darwinian cost of crime. In both narratives, the violence is mundane and inescapable, meaningless yet awful, and very, very dark. Neither narrative is didactic in the least–or even hopeful, for that matter–but their is an implicit suggestion that if only there were some alternative to the Camorra–libraries, social clubs, movie houses–there might be another prospect for the young people in this area.

I highly recommend both Sandokan and Gomorra. As an end note, I’d love to see more of Nanni Balestrini’s work come into English translation, perhaps via Antony Shugaar and Melville House, who’ve done a lovely job here.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao — Junot Díaz

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What better way to initiate a new year (or new decade, really) than to review a book that has been universally praised since its release in 2007? Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as topping or placing high on plenty of year-end and decade-end lists. NYT critic Michiko Kakutani gushed that it was “Mario Vargas Llosa meets “Star Trek” meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West,” an apt description, we suppose, although it’s more Lord of the Rings than Star Trek, really. The book is, in short, already beloved, and we liked it as well (even if it doesn’t quite stick its ending).

Oscar Wao loosely centers on a fat Dominican-American nerd named Oscar, but really he’s just a complex prop for Díaz to tell the story of the Dominican diaspora during (and after) the brutal regime of Rafael Trujillo. Obese and obsessed with fantasy novels, sci-fi, and role-playing games, Oscar is girl-bane, repellent to the opposite sex–completely the opposite of the male Dominican ideal. In this sense, he doesn’t fit in with his gorgeous mother Belicia or his athletic sister Lola, but that doesn’t stop them from putting him at the center of their lives. Lola’s on-again-off-again boyfriend Yunior narrates the book; he often compares himself to The Watcher, a fitting simile given his ability to infiltrate the psyches of characters and historical figures alike. We might as well go ahead and note that if you didn’t catch the reference to the Marvel Comics character The Watcher, chances are you’ll need to look up many of this book’s myriad allusions to nerd culture. Díaz uses The Lord of the Rings in particular as a template throughout the book, framing large parts of the book’s Trujillo narrative as a good vs evil epic. We particularly enjoyed these parts, which mix self-deprecating humor with the dire seriousness of Trujillo’s inhuman reign. The novel moves freely from the 1940s to the 1990s, measuring the toll of Trujillo’s dictatorship in each of the characters’ lives over four generations. Tellingly, Trujillo is one of the book’s most well-drawn characters, and even if he’s depicted as cartoonishly evil at times, his crimes are treated with utter seriousness. The narrative of Oscar’s mother Beli is also fascinating, particularly in the manner Díaz reveals her story, beginning essentially backwards with her contemporary life in New Jersey and moving as the narrative progresses to her earliest days in the DR. The story of her father Abelard was our favorite section. It comes late in the novel and helps to tie together several missing threads.

How Yunior is privy to all this info nevertheless remains a mystery but his voice engages and sustains the novel throughout, plot holes be damned. Language is the key constituent to Oscar Wao and a pretentious prick of a reviewer might call the novel’s mix of Dominican slang, literary academic jargon, and nerd-speak a dialogic carnival of intermingling voices. But we won’t do that. Suffice to say that the novel’s commanding voice compels and sustains long reading sessions and kept us up late for a few nights last week. The narrative voice of Oscar Wao is so strong and compelling, in fact, that it makes up for the novel’s greatest weakness–the character of Oscar himself, who lacks complexity or detail, especially when contrasted with the other characters in the novel. In a sense, Díaz’s master narrative might be reduced to Oscar’s epic quest to get laid, with a heavy dash of DR history thrown into the mix. But that’s too reductive. Still, as the novel dashes to its epiphanic climax (don’t worry, no big spoilers here), it’s hard to accept–or even understand–Oscar’s heroic metamorphosis. The transformation feels unearned–for either Díaz or Oscar–and it leads to a weak, lazy ending. (Related aside: We can’t help but compare this novel now to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, another multigenerational/multicultural novel (another dialogic carnival of voices, says the academic prig) that doesn’t really pull off its conclusion. But we liked both books anyway). Recommended.

Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview

Edwin Turner4 Comments

I hate reviews that hem and haw too much over context, but I feel that a proper review of Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview has to begin with some background information. But because I love you, gentle reader, as much as I hate context-driven reviews, here’s the quick version: if you, like me, have found yourself compelled to read everything by Bolaño that you could get your hands on in the the past year or two, then you should buy and read The Last Interview because you will enjoy it. Now for the context:

When Bolaño died at age 50 in 2003, he was only just rising to prominence as a fiction writer, with most of that prominence still restricted to the Spanish-speaking world. Bolaño’s tremendous success has been mostly posthumous and there really aren’t that many interviews with the man. Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview collects four of them, scattered between 1999 and 2003. Up until now, not all of these interviews were available in English (unless you took the time to put them in a translator program like Babel Fish. Which I did. Quick note: Sybil Perez’s translations here are better than the syntax soup I got via Babel Fish). The book gets its name from Bolaño’s last interview, conducted by Mónica Maristain in a 2003 issue of the Mexican edition of Playboy; that longish interview makes up the bulk of this book. There’s also an essay entitled “Alone Among the Ghosts” by Marcela Valdes, previously published in a 2008 issue of The Nation.

“Alone Among the Ghosts” works as a sort of preface for the interviews, providing a brief overview of Bolaño’s oeuvre and shedding light on his working methods. In particular, “Ghosts” details how Bolaño researched the gruesome crimes at the heart of 2666. The interviews that follow range in tone from flighty (Maristain’s Playboy interview) to intimate (Carmen Boullosa’s inteview in Bomb), but all share one common trait: each interviewer attempts to get Roberto Bolaño to name his place in the canons of Spanish and world literature. The interviews, much like Bolaño’s at-times-esoteric (at least to this English speaker) novel The Savage Detectives, are chock full of literary references to Spanish-language writers, poets, and critics, and each interviewer seems to delight in pushing Bolaño into saying something provocative about other writers. Tom McCartan’s annotations, located in the margins of this extra-wide book, help to enlighten those of us who are unfamiliar with the greater (and lesser) fights and scandals of Latin American literature. In his books, Bolaño often satirized the petty in-fighting between various literary groups, at the same time revealing the paradoxically serious nature of these conflicts. One of the best examples comes from The Savage Detectives–Bolaño’s stand-in Arturo Belano fights a duel with a critic on a beach in an episode that’s both hilarious, pathetic, and slightly horrifying. In the interviews, you get the sense that Bolaño is both provoking literary battles and, at the same time, downplaying them. He’s serious about his aesthetic values but knows that most of the world is not–he knows that most of the world is concerned with more immediate and perhaps weightier concerns like family, sex, and death. It’s on these subjects that Bolaño the interviewee is more poignant and candid–and fun.

There is a sense of creation in these interviews, of Bolaño creating a public self through his answers. It’s at these times that you can almost sense Bolaño writing. On the one hand, it’s a treat to see his voice so fresh and immediate, but on the other hand, in the context of an interview, it lends credence to the notion that he’s resisting presenting an authentic “self” (please put aside all postmodern arguments about authenticity, identity, and textuality for a few moments). Consider his response to his “enemies”:

Every time I read that someone has spoken badly of me I begin to cry, I drag myself across the floor, I scratch myself, I stop writing indefinitely, I lose my appetite, I smoke less, I engage in sport, I go for walks on the edge of the sea, which by the way is less than 30 meters from my house, and I ask the seagulls, whose ancestors ate the fish who ate Ulysses: Why me? Why? I’ve done you no harm.

A lovely passage. Apparent sincerity gives way to hyperbole gives way to healthy habits gives way to literary allusion–and perhaps hints of bathos. I get the sense that Bolaño is pulling a collective leg here, yet, there must be a kernel of truth to the notion that his critics affect him. In any case, the response, in its compelling rhythm and pathetic humor, might fit neatly into one of Bolaño’s books, where the author has often blurred the lines between fact and fiction.

These interviews will no doubt be pored over as “Bolaño Studies” hits academia hard, and would-be Bolaño scholars try to parse out their own narratives against the myriad gaps in Bolaño’s record. For more on the many inconsistencies in Bolaño’s life, check out this story from the The New York Times, which interviews family, friends, and literary associates to tease truth out of some of Bolaño’s grander embellishments. Of course, Bolaño was not solely responsible for all exaggerations. From the interview first published in Turia:

“It’s the typical Latin American tango. In the first book edited for me in Germany, they give me one month in prison; in the second book–seeing that the first one hadn’t sold so well–they raise it to three months; in the third book I’m up to four months, in the fourth it’s five. The way it’s going, I should still be a prisoner now.”

The New York Times article questions whether Bolaño even spent the eight days in a Chilean prison that he claims he did. Whether or not that ruins the authenticity of Bolaño’s short story “Dance Card,” collected in Last Evenings on Earth, is totally up to you of course, dear reader, but I think that self-invention has always been the privilege of the writer. If the interviews collected in The Last Interview reveal a myth-maker creating a self, they are also transparent and humorous in these creations. Highly recommended.

Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview is now available from Melville House. For a detailed account of the authors mentioned in the interviews, read Tom McCartan’s fantastic series “What Bolaño Read.”

Christmas in the Heart — Bob Dylan

Biblioklept4 Comments

When Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart came out a few months ago, most critics obsessed over the ironic possibilities of a Bob Dylan Christmas album, especially one called Christmas in the Heart, especially one with that cover. Had these critics forgotten that Dylan has always held his cards tight to his chest? That he’s been producing his albums for years now under the kinda-Christmasy pseudonym Jack Frost? That he only does what he really wants to do? For many of these critics, the fact that all proceeds of the album go to Feeding America functioned almost as an excuse for (more) weird behavior from Dylan. All one has to do, of course, is simply listen to the music to find that Christmas in the Heart is a minor masterpiece in the Christmas music genre and a wonderful, strange fit in the Dylan canon.

Dylan tackles fifteen carols and classics in a consistent, old-timey style evocative of Les Paul and Mary Ford and other hybrid Country & Western of the immediate post-WWII era. Dylan’s production is warm and simple, showcasing the talent of his players and backup singers. Opener “Here Comes Santa Claus” sets a lively pace that slows down over the course of the album’s first side, through a lush “Do You Hear What I Hear?” to a version of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” that wrangles just the right mix of bitter and sweet. Dylan’s version of “Little Drummer Boy” is downright ethereal. The album picks up again with its only barnburner, a fired-up version of Lawrence Welk’s polka, “Must Be Christmas.” Do yourself a favor and enrich your life by watching the marvelous video (seriously watch it, if for nothing else than for Dylan’s surreal wig):

The energy and strange, chaotic madness of “Must Be Christmas” makes for the lively climax of the album, and the video clearly represents Dylan’s vision of Christmas as carnival. Not that it’s all ritual madness, of course. The commercial/spiritual paradox of Christmas comes out in the end, as the record winds down with the secular melancholy of “The Christmas Song” followed by the stirring hymn “O’ Little Town of Bethlehem.” If there’s any concern that Dylan is somehow not entirely earnest in his Christmas music–or too earnest in his irony, perhaps–one simply has to listen to the spirit in his gravelly, aging voice. Christmas in the Heart may be ironic, but that shouldn’t diminish its pleasures at all: it’s a self-conscious, loving irony, far from sneering, and certainly not a trick on the listener. It’s a gift of music, really (as corny as that sounds), one that asks the reader to laugh along with it, but also to feel genuine sentiment in the beauty here. Highly recommended–especially on 180 gram vinyl (the vinyl addition includes the album on CD and a 7″ single of “Must Be Christmas” and a B-side of Bob reading “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” with backing music by John Fahey).

Distant Star — Roberto Bolaño

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Roberto Bolaño’s slim novel Distant Star begins a few months prior to Pinochet’s bloody 1973 coup and continues into the mid-nineties, crossing through several countries in the process. The unnamed narrator (presumably the “Arturo B.” mentioned in a brief preface, surely Arturo Belano, Bolaño’s alter-ego) is so busy with the future of Chilean poetry that the violence of the coup–in which scores of students are arrested, killed, or disappeared–takes him by total surprise. He’s obsessed with a quiet and intense poet close to his age named Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, who seems to be, according to all sources prior to the coup, a harbinger of a new age in Chilean writing. Ruiz-Tagle, it turns out, is actually an Air Force officer named Carlos Wieder, who writes his death-obsessed poetry in a WWII Messerschmitt airplane. Wieder’s sky-written poems cause a sensation (however illegible some are), but not one nearly as great as his magnum opus–a multimedia installation cataloging and detailing Wieder’s sadistic, ritualistic murders of students and other dissidents. His art is beyond the pale of even the new military regime, and he’s forced out of the Air Force to live a life under pseudonyms in other countries, much like the other Chilean exiles who populate this book. Bolaño’s narrator, a savage detective, takes great pains to reconstruct the lives of these escaped artists, but as time passes the truth becomes ever-murkier. He writes at one point that “the melancholy folklore of exile” is “made up of stories that, as often as not, are fabrications or pale copies of what really happened.” The narrator’s detective work, aided by old friends, attempts to reconstruct the whereabouts (or fates) of Chile’s exiles, but more often than not the trails lead to a perplexing pastiche of possibilities–not dead ends, but inconclusive answers. The story builds to a tense, sinister, and perhaps incomplete (yet satisfying) climax as a “real” detective–a former cop turned PI–enlists the narrator to track down a man who may or may not be Wieder. And I won’t spoil what happens after that.

I read most of Distant Star over the course of one afternoon, and then re-read most of it again earlier this week. It seems to me that the book is something of a trial-run for Bolaño’s opus, 2666, and when I say that, I don’t mean to diminish Distant Star at all, only to note that, more so than The Savage Detectives or By Night in Chile, this book is markedly horrific and at times profoundly violent. It is, of course, something of a companion piece for By Night in Chile (both, by the way, translated by Chris Andrews). That book is a confession from a critic-priest who had flourished under the right-wing regime; Distant Star gives us the other side of the story. Distant Star is also an investigation (by way of digression, to be sure) into the relationship between power and art and evil, and there’s a coldness at its core that almost hurts. It is both painful and beautiful. This is not the best starting place for Bolaño. I’ll continue to contend that 2666 is a fine and dandy place to jump in, or Last Evenings on Earth, if 900 pages is too much for you, but if you read those and dig them, you’ll want to read Distant Star, and its evil twin By Night in Chile. In some sense, all of Bolaño’s work (at least what I’ve read so far) composes a grand and (in)complete and sweeping collective body, like Faulkner, who provides Distant Star its epigraph: “What star falls unseen?” Highly recommended.

Best Books of 2009

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Here are our favorite books published in 2009 (the ones that we read–we can’t read every book, you know). The list includes books new in print after a long time as well as first editions of trade paperbacks. All links are to Biblioklept reviews. The list is more or less chronological, beginning in January of 2009.

The Book of Dead Philosophers — Simon Critchley

Sum — David Eagleman

Chicken with Plums (trade paperback) — Marjane Satrapi

The 2009 PEN/O. Henry Prize Short Stories

Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image — Michael Casey

Bodies — Susie Orbach

Inherent Vice — Thomas Pynchon

A Better Angel (trade paperback) — Chris Adrian

The City & The City — China Miéville

2666 (trade paperback (yes, yes, putting it on the 2009 list is away of amending the fact that we didn’t finish it until January 2009 and thus didn’t get it on last year’s best of lists)) — Roberto Bolaño

Bicycle Diaries — David Byrne

Asterios Polyp — David Mazzucchelli

The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. IV

Lucinella — Lore Segal

Every Man Dies Alone — Hans Fallada


Cormac McCarthy’s Issues of Life and Death, Hans Fallada’s Complex Resistance, and Jonathan Lethem’s Bloodless Prose

Edwin Turner8 Comments

In a 1992 interview with The New York Times, Cormac McCarthy famously said that he only cares for writers who  “deal with issues of life and death.” He disses Proust and Henry James, saying “I don’t understand them . . . that’s not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange.” Because he has granted so few interviews–and come off so guarded in those he has done–McCarthy’s dictum on “good writers” has perhaps become a bit inflated, elevated from one man’s opinion to a grand litmus test of literary worth. Still, I often find myself putting the books I read under the McCarthy stress-test: do they narrativize the Darwinian drama of life and death? Or are they simply bloodless spectacles of rhetoric, ephemeral social critiques, or faddish forays into solipsism? McCarthy’s targets, Proust and James, arguably do address life and death issues in their works, but when compared to McCarthy’s heroes–Melville, Faulkner, Dostoevsky–the social fictions of Proust and James seem wan, or at least too subtle and overly-coded. The two novels I’m currently working through, Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City and Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, illustrate not just the poles of McCarthy’s dichotomy, but also why many readers (myself included) tend to prefer that their novels address matters of life and death.

Every Man Dies Alone, first published in German in 1947, is available for the first time ever in English, thanks to translator Michael Hoffman (if you’ve read Kafka in English, you’ve probably read Hoffman’s work) and the good folks at Melville House. Fallada’s novel tells the story of German resistance to the Nazi regime, not at an aristocratic or militaristic level (this isn’t Valkyrie), or even a literary or philosophical level, but at the level of every day, ordinary existence. After the death of their son in battle, Otto and Anna Quangel initiate a campaign of resistance to the Nazi party, one that is of course doomed from the outset. The Quangels soon involve Eva Kluge, among others, in their covert resistance cell. Kluge is a letter-carrier who becomes disgusted with the moral implications of the regime; she’s also deeply embittered by the way Nazi rule has systemically destroyed her family. Kluge’s peripatetic job helps to enact Fallada’s major rhetorical gesture, a sweeping busyness that vividly recreates the life of ordinary Germans during the rule of the Third Reich. We might begin in Kluge’s mind as she embarks to deliver a letter, only to find ourselves awash in the thoughts of its recipient a few pages later. Fallada’s omniscient third-person narrator moves freely from one character’s consciousness to another’s, shifting fluidly from the immediacy of present tense to the solidity of past tense. It’s modernism (whatever that means)–Tolstoy without the rich and famous, Joyce without the mythos and erudition, but deeply engaging in its scope. WWII has produced a seemingly endless myriad of narratives, yet Fallada’s tome is the first that I’ve experienced of its kind. Perhaps its subject matter–the lives of ordinary Germans and their unsuccessful attempts to resist the mundane evil all around them–is simply not the stuff that we want from our war stories, and perhaps this is why the book has been absent so long from an English translation. It’s evocative of a world that I had never really considered before: after all, the narrative of WWII is far easier to comprehend if you retain the simplicity of the good guys (the Allies), the bad guys (the Nazis), and the victims (the Jewish population of Europe). Ordinary Germans have only one place in this uncomplicated system, which is why the story of the Quangels and their cohort is so profound (oh, the Quangels are based on the real-life Nazi resisters Otto and Elise Hampel, if you must know). Driven in part by despair, they seek to forge meaning in their lives, even if its at the cost of death, or the horrors of a concentration camp. To return to McCarthy’s caveat, Fallada’s novel is a work that dramatizes life and death against a decidedly unheroic backdrop, a novel that makes its reader repeatedly ask himself whether or not he would be, to use another McCarthyism (from The Road) one of the “good guys.” Great stuff, and so far one of the better novels we’ve read this year. Go get it.

It’s perhaps unfair to lump Lethem’s latest in a review with Fallada, given the historical complexity of Every Man Dies Alone‘s milieu. Still, I’ve been reading my review copies of both novels over this long weekend, trying to catch up, and I find that I would almost always rather pick up Fallada’s book. It compels me, whereas, half way through Chronic City, I still find nothing to care about, no risk, no cost, no guts. No matters of life and death. The novel centers around former-child actor Chase Insteadman, whose directionless existence seems to thematically underpin the book. Chase moves from party to party in a fictitious Manhattan, charming various socialites and keeping boredom (marginally) at bay. He soon hooks up with Perkus Tooth, a marijuana-addicted pop culture critic, whose characteristics will be familiar to pretty much anyone who earned a liberal arts degree in college. Tooth seems to function largely as a mouthpiece for Lethem to espouse various opinions on movies and books and art. It’s a clumsy device as it doesn’t shade the character–it’s simply Lethem couching his cultural criticism in the comfort of a work of fiction. In a particularly telling scene, Perkus picks up a copy of The New York Times and thinks that it feels too light. He looks up at the right-hand corner: “WAR FREE EDITION. Ah yes, he’d heard about this. You could opt out now.” Perkus seems to deliver the line as a criticism, but it’s Lethem who’s opting out. He drops hints of destruction and annihilation and disintegration in the novel–there’s a giant tiger on the loose somewhere in Manhattan; Chase’s fiancée floats estranged in space, stranded on the International Space Station; a crooked mayor is up to dastardly shenanigans–but Lethem protects his characters from it all in an insulating cocoon of marijuana smoke and pop trivia. Their forays into the darkness of Manhattan’s mysteries are meant to play both humorously but also with enough danger to fully invest a reader’s attention (think of Lethem’s more successful sci-noir Gun, with Occasional Music, or his detective thriller Motherless Brooklyn). Instead, the adventures fall flat, collapsing back into Perkus’s apartment, a vortex of (ultimately meaningless) pop culture. While the novel is by no means terrible–it’s well-written, of course–there is simply a tremendous lack of the “life and death” stuff that McCarthy–and other readers–require. In short–and in contrast with Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone–it does not compel itself to be read. Which is a shame of course. I still think Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude was one of the finest books of the decade, and I was deeply disappointed in his last novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet. Chronic City is a much finer book than that silly train wreck, but it lacks the urgency of Lethem’s finest works, Fortress and Motherless Brooklyn, which temper a love of popular culture with genuine characters and an affecting plot.

I’ll conclude by returning to Cormac McCarthy, this time to his latest interview (in The Wall Street Journal). He says, on writing novels: “Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.” And later: “Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything.” For McCarthy, literature, in its final product–the reader reading the book–is the direct communication of the pain of creation, the awkward and incomplete translation of ideas exchanged from author to audience. Perhaps the pain was too much for Fallada, who died in 1947 of a morphine overdose, but that pain–that spirit–exists in the book. A similar spirit exists in Lethem’s earlier works; I’d love to see him tap into it again in his next venture.

Every Man Dies Alone is now available in hardback from Melville House.

Chronic City is now available in hardback from Double Day.