Review: The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey

So, I’ve mentioned the Monkey Wrench Gang  a couple times already, but now that I’m through with it I might as well put a few thoughts together by way of review. What an entertaining book! It’s its own strange mix of humor and melancholy, hope and defeat, beauty and crassness.

Dubbed by Larry McMurtry as the Thoreau of the American West, Abbey can paint effortless word pictures like this one…

“He remembered the real Colorado, before damnation, when the river flowed unchained and unchanneled in the joyous floods of May and June, swollen with snow melt. Boulders crunching and clacking and grumbling, tumbling along on the river’s bedrock bed, the noise like that of grinding molars in a giant jaw.”

… and a minute later, refer to a truck’s “seared differential scrota” without batting an eyelash. The biggest coups he manages to pull off, though, are the well-drawn, memorable characters: the loveable Jack-Mormon river guide, the crude PTSD-stricken Viet Nam vet, the refined and aging surgeon, the beautiful yet aimless female Brooklyn transplant, and of course, the stunning, forbidding, alluring canyon country of southern Utah and northern Arizona, which is perhaps the most important character of all. Even the villains jump off the page and make a deep impression.

There’s plenty of pastoral contemplation coupled with truckloads of surprise and suspense, and the whole time the reader is drawn right into the characters’ eco-activist conspiracy. There are cliffhangers (like, literally) and a surprise ending that made me want to go right out and buy the sequel. (There really is one!) Anyway, I highly recommend it.

Review: Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

In his book Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut once gave out letter grades to his own works. He handed out some Bs, Cs and Ds, but he also gave Mother Night , God Bless You Mr. Rosewater  and Jailbird  a grade of “A.” Of those, I’ve only read Mother Night , and absolutely loved it. So far so good.

To two other books, he awarded “A+”s:  Slaughterhouse-Five , which is kind of a universally accepted no-brainer, and Cat’s Cradle , which I hadn’t read until this week. So the question I naturally kept asking myself was this:  is Cat’s Cradle  really as good as Slaughterhouse–Five? And is it really better than Mother Night ?

And even though it was nominated for a Hugo Award, the answer I kept coming back to is… not a chance. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, mind you, but I don’t think it really measures up.  Now, it’s certainly as funny as either one of them, but I just got the impression it wasn’t really about  anything.

He starts out strong, unraveling a mystery for the reader that is equal parts family history and geopolitical intrigue, and piecing together the fictional religion of Bokononism, which is wildly entertaining and has, I suppose, some decent satirical purposes. But from there we’re just kind of sucked through a vortex where everything happens so suddenly, and ends so quickly, that it  almost left me with the impression  Vonnegut was too bored to follow through and make it a book about something important. Either that, or he wasn’t sure how to end it, so he just cut it short in a “betcha-didn’t-see-that-coming” sort of a way.

Anyway, it’d be fine as a beach read. It packs a few punches, and it will definitely make you laugh. But if you’re looking for A-level Vonnegut, you might want to look elsewhere. Just my $0.02.

Review: The Sea is My Brother, by Jack Kerouac

A week or two ago I picked up The Sea is My Brother,  the so-called “lost” novel by Jack Kerouac, and a thinly veiled account of his days in the merchant marine.

I’ve been told by people who have dipped further into the Kerouac mystique than I have, that while  “good” Kerouac is great,  “bad” Kerouac is pretty terrible. For evidence, I was invited to read Visions of Cody  or Big Sur  —each of which reportedly indulges in drug-induced poetry binges for hundreds of pages. I have not read them, and probably never will. But having loved On the Road  so much, I was intrigued to find out just how an early  Kerouac might read.

Turns out it’s pretty uneven. There are small flashes of the style that would evolve in later years, but he spends way too much time cataloguing how many beers each of the characters consume at a sitting, or letting one of them wax philosophical about life and literature in a way that is pretty obviously a soapbox for the author rather than believable dialogue. Oh, and every tenth sentence ends with an all-too-enthusiastic “, by George!” Not only that, but the story is pretty unbelievable (a college professor is granted a sabbatical to ship out to sea in the middle of the war with about 15 minutes’ notice) and there are lots of little mistakes (a character smokes his last cigarette and then produces another a minute later.)

Even the larger narrative feels unbalanced. With a title like The Sea is My Brother , you’d expect the characters to put out to sea, right? Well, it finally happens seven eighths of the way through the book. The rest of it is just a poor man’s On the Road , a hitchhiking debauch from Manhatten to Boston, where the characters are flat broke, but always magically coming  up with food, liquor, cigarettes and costly government documents out of thin air. And while the principals do manage to move from point A to point B, it’s really more of a loose sketch than a fully developed novel. In all honesty, I kinda wish I had this one back. I’ll bet Kerouac does, too.

Review: The Garden of Eden, by Ernest Hemingway

I don’t expect much when I pick up a posthumous work of a great author. I expect even less when it’s the fourth, and final, posthumous work of that author to find its way to publication. But I was pleasantly surprised when I finished Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden the other day.

What starts out innocently enough as a story of two newlyweds honeymooning on the post-war Riviera, quickly becomes a Fitzgeraldesque tale of an artist struggling to ply his trade with a crazy wife who is jealous of her husband’s writing. Then it veers into a sticky half-fictional situation like Hemingway experienced vacationing in the South of France with his wife Hadley, and live-in girlfriend and future-wife, Pauline Pfeiffer—only with a few important details altered to make the male character come off a little better than he did in real life.

There is lots of swimming, lots of tanning, lots of passive-aggressive dialogue, lots of mixed drinks, and lots of hair styling. Yes, that’s right, hair-styling. In the end, though, this is a book about writing. Which is why it works for me. Hemingway brilliantly works a couple short stories, and the process of writing them, into the main story of love gone sour. Though the reader never actually reads them, they see the main character of David Bourne reliving the childhood experiences on which they are based as he writes them, and therefore come to a deeper understanding of who he is as a person.

Ironically, in a story where a writer reading his own press clippings becomes a major plot point to his own detriment, Hemingway leaves a few clues that he, too, was guilty of reading his own press clippings, dropping references to his newspaperman style and his iceberg theory of writing:

“He wrote it in simple declarative sentences with all of the problems ahead to be lived through and made to come alive.”

“Finally he knew what his father had thought and knowing it, he did not put it in the story.”

“He had, really, only to remember accurately and the form came by what he would choose to leave out. Then, of course, he could close it like the diaphragm of a camera and intensify it so it could be concentrated to the point where the heat shone bright and the smoke began to rise. He knew that he was getting this now.”

He also talks through his editing process, and his conviction that the work has to marinate on its own:

“It was a very young boy’s story, he knew, when he had finished it. He read it over and saw the gaps he must fill in to make it so that whoever read would feel it was truly happening as it was read and he marked the gaps in the margin.”

“He cared about the writing more than about anything else, and he cared about many things, but he know that when he was doing it he must not worry about it or finger it nor handle it any more than he would open up the door of the darkroom to see how a negative was developing. Leave it alone, he told himself. You are a bloody fool but you know that much.”

Last of all, Hemingway puts into fiction what he must have experienced when his wife lost nearly every page of his years of hard work:

“You can write them again.” 

“No,” David told her. “When it’s right you can’t remember. Every time you read it again it comes as a great and unbelievable surprise. You can’t believe you did it. When it’s once right you never can do it again. You only do it once for each thing. And you’re only allowed so many in your life.” 

“So many what?” 

“So many good ones.”

The bottom line is that this novel is probably less interesting for the story it tells, than for the insights it gives us into the life of the author as he surveyed his 60 years and wove it into his fiction. I liked it. You might, too.

Review: Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner

I really enjoyed this one.

We’ve talked about the sentence level writing here. It’s clever, it’s funny, and for an aspiring writer of my tastes, anyway, Stegner’s prose just hurts so  good. He’ll blow my mind with an amazingly simple simile or description (“the sun lay on my back like a poultice”) that both makes the reading a pleasure, and simultaneously crushes my hopes of ever having a shred of his talent. He’s one of the few writers about whom I think we should make a much bigger deal.

Stegner was among the first graduates of the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and he founded the Creative Writing Program at Stanford, teaching authors like Ken Kesey, Edward Abbey, Gordon Lish and Larry McMurtry. The man’s got a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, and yet you never hear the name of this ‘Dean of Western Writers’. As a westerner myself, I guess I feel a special affinity for him. Plus, we went to the same high school (see also Barr, Roseanne, class of ’70). Go Leopards! So there’s that.

Anyway, the book is littered with literary references— from the Bible, from the classics, from history, from novels and poems, of which I probably only grasp about 40%. But that 40% makes me feel awfully smart, and the remaining 60 just makes me want to read more. But what he really does that amazes me, is create interesting stories out of everyday lives and experiences. His narrator even addresses this issue in the text:

“There are further considerations I might raise. How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the  promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?”

Without all the lurid crap that populates so much of literary fiction, he still stitches together a story about things that truly matter: marriage, friendship, family, work, adversity, history, etc.

There was  one stretch where a whole lot of backstory was jammed uncomfortably into a few pages of dialogue, but that’s about the only fault I can find with the book. You should check it out- it was his swan song, afterall:

Review: Don Quixote Part II, by Miguel Cervantes

Why is this book getting two reviews? Well, because Parts I and II were originally published as two different novels, ten years apart. Also, because it’s Don  Freaking Quixote .

Now, in my review of Part I, I expressed my admiration for the brilliant satire, and for literature willing to poke some fun at itself. But I also kind of lamented Cervantes’ penchant for narrative wandering, for squeezing unrelated stories and novellas into his tale of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. I think I might have used the phrases “storyteller’s orgy” and “a Canterbury Tales  Smorgasbord of travellers’ yarns.”

Thankfully, Part II opens up with some frank admissions of the author’s prior lack of focus, and a commitment to stick to the main story in the second part. There are even times later on in the book when he is tempted to launch into something more, but restrains himself:

“Here the author depicts all the details of Don Diego’s house, portraying for us what the house of a wealthy gentleman farmer contains, but the translator of this history decided to pass over these and other similar minutiae in silence, because they did not accord with the principal purposed of the history, whose strength lies more in its truth than in cold digressions.”

But even with a greater focus on the core story of his famous knight errant, this book is a long one. And rather than apologize for his verbosity, Cervantes hangs a lantern on it and helps the reader appreciate the author’s attention to detail:

“Really and truly, all those who enjoy histories like this one ought to show their gratitude to Cide Hamete, its first author, for his care in telling us its smallest details and clearly bringing everything, no matter how trivial, to light. He depicts thoughts, reveals imaginations, responds to tacit questions, clarifies doubts, resolves arguments; in short, he expresses the smallest points that curiosity might ever desire to know. O celebrated author! O fortunate Don Quixote! O famous Dulcinea! O comical Sancho Panza! Together and separately may you live an infinite number of years, bringing pleasure and widespread diversion to the living.”

And what a pantload of awesome detail we get. I love how Cervantes takes the 17^th century reader reaction to Part I, and makes it a plot driver in Part II. He’s interacting with his audience and blurring the lines between fiction and reality in a way that was lightyears ahead of its time. And he’s hilarious while doing it. Sancho is a veritable proverb-generating machine, and in a “didn’t-see-that-coming” plot turn, he also turns out to be a pretty competent governor. Don Quixote, too, is a fount of eternal wisdom in Part II—to the point where other characters are constantly asking themselves how such a well-spoken, reasonable man can be so completely off his rocker when it comes to knight errantry. Which brings me to Cervantes’ real piece-de-resistance: his turning the question of Quixote’s insanity completely on its head.

We’re absolutely convinced, when he descends into the Caves of Montesino and produces a fanciful tale of all the wonders he saw there, that the man is flat-out delusional. But after the knight and his squire are supposedly flown blindfolded through the sky on what is actually a stationary wooden horse in front of a mocking audience, and Sancho makes up a story every other character knows to be false, Quixote delivers an aside that made me question all my assumptions up to that point:

“Sancho, just as you want people to believe what you have seen in the sky, I want you to believe what I saw in the Cave of Montesinos. And that is all I have to say.”

By the end of the book the reader is forced to say, wait a second, who’s actually crazy here? The supposed lunatic? Or all the people who make fun of him, but who may in fact be falling for some masterful, rope-a-dope scheme by an old man trying to carve a little adventure out of his remaining years? I was leaning toward the latter, even before Cervantes gives us this passage:

“Cide Hamete goes on to say that in his opinion the deceivers are as mad as the deceived, and that the duke and duchess came very close to seeming like fools since they went to such lengths to deceive two fools…”

Part I, despite its faults, was entertaining. In Part II, we see Miguel Cervantes flat out kicking ass and taking names. Quixote finally earns some long-overdue victories (along with one crushing defeat), fiction melts into reality, the stupid turn out to be wise, and the crazy may not be who we think they are. Oh, and he absolutely eviscerates AlonsoFernandez de Avelleneda for infringement on his Intellectual Property. How this thing was written in the early 1600s absolutely blows my mind. I highly, highly recommend it.

Review: The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane

My reading’s been all over the map this year, but since I hadn’t tackled any Civil War-era war stories, I didn’t see any reason to turn my nose up at Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage .

Truth is, I had no idea what I was about to read. If you asked me a week ago, I would have been hard-pressed to tell you the difference between Captains Courageous , Profiles in Courage , and The Red Badge of Courage . All reportedly great books, all on my mental To-Be-Read list for years, but all of them a confusing jumble of "courage" in my poorly-read head.

Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage , as it turns out, is not a daring rescue at sea or an examination of valiant senators, it is a fictionalized account of the Battle of Chancellorsville, and of the second bloodiest day of the American Civil War as told from the perspective of a “youth” who is seeing battle for the very first time. And while there’s lots of tactical blow-by-blow, that’s not what makes it great. What makes it great is Crane’s fascinating probing into the psyche of soldiers who are in fact scared spitless.

You see them wrestling with the same questions we would all probably face in their shoes: Will I run when it gets ugly? Or will I have what it takes to stand up and fight? And what’s great about it is that we get to follow a main character whose experience runs the gamut: over the course of a few days he turns tail and runs, he deserts wounded comrades, he finds his regiment again and then fights bravely, he picks up the flag when the color sergeant goes down- and through it all he doesn’t come to consider himself a coward or a hero, so much as he comes to truly know himself and grow through the experience. It’s a book that’ll make you think.

And the language is beautiful. Here’s the first paragraph:

“The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army's feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills.”

Anyway, it’s short, and it’s sweet. You should do yourself the favor of checking it out.

Review: The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain

So when the title sounds like chick-lit, and the cover looks like chick-lit, you expect chick-lit, right? But I was actually pretty pleasantly surprised when I opened up Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife  a few weeks ago. It’s a view of Hemingway’s Paris years through the eyes of his first wife Hadley, and I’m happy to report that anyone with a predilection for the writer, and for Paris in the 20’s, will probably enjoy the book.

Now, I’ll admit that I didn’t read it like a novel, though the writing is fine and the story is certainly strong enough to carry the reader along. Rather, I read it like a Hemingway biography. Call me a pig, but that’s what I was interested in. And say what you will about McLain as a novelist, the woman did some pretty serious research to get the thing off the ground.

I was looking for fresh angles on familiar characters (the Fitzgeralds do not come off well, Joyce barely shows up at all), new tid-bits I’d never heard before (did you know it was almost Rome, and not Paris, for example?) and Hadley’s take on some of the bigger plot points (how would she handle the tragic loss all of Hemingway’s early work at the Gare de Lyon? Or the affair with Pauleen Pfeiffer?).

There were no huge surprises, but there were a few eyebrow raisers. I think we’re all fully prepared to see Hemingway revealed as a bit of an ass, but McLain makes Hadley out to be far more athletic, lythe and attractive than she really was. I mean, not to be mean, but we do have pictures after all. Here’s Pfeiffer, Hemingway and Hadley together in Pamplona:

At the same time, she portrays Hadley as such a weak, accepting, milquetoast of a character, who lets Pfeiffer walk all over her marriage and even right into her bed. (A diligent Googler will find some evidence of Hadley’s easy acquiescence, but no hard proof that the three ever shared the same bed— outside the plot of Hemingway’s posthumous novel The Garden of Eden , which contains a similar episode.)

Regardless of the Hemingway-McLain ‘he said-she said,’ you almost get the impression that you could read The Paris Wife  alongside A Moveable Feast , and between the two of them, start to arrive at some version of the unvarnished truth behind Hemingway’s first marriage. But it was an interesting read, and I’d recommend it to others who suffer from Hemingway "aficion."

Review: The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson

It’s been a couple weeks since Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son  won the Morning News Tournament of Books, and about a week since it nabbed the Pulitzer Prize. So I know what you’re all wondering: “Well, MacEvoy, what do you  think of it?”

Sagely anticipating your question, I have undertaken the reading of it. Here are my thoughts.

First off, it is a really good book, and a very compelling read. For most readers, myself included, it’ll be the first peek you’ve ever gotten inside the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. And you will not be disappointed with the sweep of history, culture and color that Johnson supplies. Some of the vignettes, like a fishing vessel’s discovery of mysterious radio transmissions from the international space station or from a pair of female American rowers working their way across the Pacific, give you a fascinating window into what it must be like for North Koreans to encounter the real world outside their borders.

Now, I’ve never set foot in the DPRK. But while Johnson’s sensationalized portrayal of North Korea doesn’t strike me as completely  believable, I’m going to go ahead and assume he’s done far more research than I’ve ever done on the subject. So, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on the details.

Here’s what’s really wrong with the book: He’s taken his research into a half dozen unrelated facets of life under the Kim regime, and woven them into a single character’s experience. And for me it just doesn’t ring true.

Pak Jun Do is introduced as a tunnel soldier, trained for combat in the pitch darkness of passageways beneath the DMZ. But then he is recruited as a kidnapper, plucking people off the coast of Japan by boat. After that, he becomes an intelligence officer who monitors radio signals on a fishing boat in the Sea of Japan. He is beatified as a hero of the people, and is whisked off on some high-level diplomatic talks with an American Senator in Texas. Then he is thrown into a prison camp. Then he escapes and assumes the identity of a government minister. Etc., etc. It just got to be a little much to swallow.

If you’re asking me— and let’s be honest, nobody is—this book should have been written as a mosaic story, with multiple main characters whose intersecting plot lines are woven together at the end of the book (Think “Crash”, or the “Modern Family” pilot episode.) That would have fixed it for me. Told as it was, with a character who wears just about every possible hat, just so he could observe every possible North Korean atrocity, I half-expected him to be fine-tuning nuclear weapons or performing open-heart surgery on the Dear Leader just because some government goons roughed him up and told him, “Okay, you’re a scientist now” or “ Your next assignment is as a heart surgeon.” Heck, he’d been everything else by that point.

But the sentence-level writing is first class, beautiful stuff. And he brings references from early in the book full circle so that there are plenty of overarching themes for the reader to absorb. I would gladly pick up Johnson’s next book, and I’ll even gladly recommend this one, with the one caveat mentioned above. Check it out.

Review: All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren

Don’t know how I’ve missed mentioning this, but I’ve plowed my way through Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men , and it absolutely blew me away. Brilliant, brilliant book.

Warren melds pitch-perfect descriptive language with deep-fried country-boy-isms to create an extremely distinctive style. Here’s a free-sample tray:

“…her own glance strayed about the room in that abstracted way a good housewife has of looking around to surprise a speck of dust in the act.”

“ ’I know you and the boss was like that.’ He held up two large, white, glistening episcopal fingers as in benediction.”

“Then the boss spied a fellow at the far end of the soda fountain, a tall, gaunt shanked, malarial, leather-faced side of jerked venison wearing jean pants and a brance of mustaches hanging off the kind of face you see in photographs of General Forrest’s cavalrymen…”

I mean, come on, how good is that! Right?

The story doesn’t disappoint either. He weaves links to the past into the story in rewarding, surprising ways. As I’ve mentioned before, this is a sure-fire way to win me over as a reader. He also makes use of something I’ll call the Literary Cosmic Boomerang. It’s not quite Karma, and not poetic justice. But one way or another, the unseen ramifications of a character’s actions come right back to kick him in the crotch and give the story new and deeper meanings. (And even though Willie Stark’s assassination by the same doctor who  just days before had operated on his son should have taken a private tale of corruption public, I can overlook that simple oversight.) I loved it.

There is, however, one chief complaint: The Cass Mastern side story. Our main character, Jack Burden, interrupts his main narrative thread tracing the rise and fall of a folksy southern political star, with a too-long, overly thorough side story of star-crossed lovers in the Civil War era. It was still well-written, and pretty compelling in and of itself, but I was antsy to get back to the main story, and saw little if any parrallels that would justify its inclusion in the book. And yeah, I’ve read the commentary that says the Cass Mastern line of research helps Jack see that every action will have implications and ripples we can’t control, but I just didn’t see the point. Warren and his editor were asleep at the switch on this one.

But it still won the Pulitzer, and it still deserved it. That’s how awesome the rest of the book is. Run, don’t walk…

Review: Don Quixote Part I, by Cervantes

I have finished Part I of Don Quixote, so I thought it would be a good idea to stop and take stock. You’ve no doubt noticed that the book has already spawned quite a few posts, but I haven’t actually sat down to process what I think of it. 

Before picking up the book, my closest encounter with "the Knight of the Sorrowful Face" was a lanky Lladro statuette that graced my family's living room, and whose fragile porcelain sword probably earned me a spanking when it broke in some forgotten, childhood, rough-housing.  Funny that almost 400 years after he made his mark on the world, Quixote is still suffering all kinds of injustices and humiliations. 

Anyway, here are some meandering reactions:

What’s all this garbage about windmills? Seriously, blink and you’ll miss them. My guess is that the windmill episode has settled so prominently into our consciousness, not because it was such a profound moment in the story, but because most readers give up on the book in the first  one-hundred pages, and the windmills just happen to be one of the early vignettes that everybody reads before giving up. If you wanted an iconic image that recurs time and time again, and has an impact on the psyche of the characters, you’d probably be better off choosing the image of Sancho Panza being tossed repeatedly in a blanket to his great shame at the Inn. The Knight and his squire suffer more mishaps and indignities than Ben Stiller in a 'Meet the Parents' movie, but none of the physical punishment they suffer has quite the effect as that simple humiliation.

For better or for worse, Part I is a storyteller’s orgy. For long periods, we leave Don Quixote and Sancho for the unrelated tales of Gristostomo and Marcela,  Cardenio and Dorotea,  Don Fernando and Luscinda,  Anselmo and Lothario, the captive and Zoraida, Don Luis and Clara and her father the Judge and on and on and on. Sometimes it’s a side character’s backstory, other times the travelers simply sit down and read an entire novella with eachother, while Don Quixote sleeps. Towards the end of Part I, when each new arrival at the Inn introduces its own 50 page tangent, it starts to get a little tiresome. If I had gone into the book expecting a Canterbury Tales  Smorgasbord of travellers’ yarns, it might not have bothered me. But since I was expecting to cover lots of fresh ground with Quixote and Panza and windmills… yeah, I lost a little steam at the end there. I was pleased to see Part II, which was published 10 years after Part I, open up with an acknowledgement of his out-of-control tangents. Apparently his countryman had the same reaction as I did.

Having said all of that, it’s a brilliant satire. It must have been to Cervantes’s contemporaries, what a hilarious spoof of Fabio-covered romances would be in our day. But Cervantes raises some important questions about what art is exactly—what the masses want out of it, and what the duties of the author are. I was also amazed at what a profoundly modern feel it has, what with Cervantes referring to himself and his rivals, to contemporary works and pop culture references that must have felt very edgy and relevant when it was first published. By the time Part II kicks off, he’s already weaving then-current reader reactions into the story itself. 

You’re also never quite sure where the narrator stands. Sometimes he complains that the fictional Moorish source documents are probably filled with lies to lessen the stature of Quixote, at other times he openly refers to Quixote as a lunatic.

For all its faults, Don Quixote must have been a groundbreaking work for its time. And there’s good reason why writers and readers still read it and emulate it today. On to Part II…

A Rambling Riff on Remembrance in Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust

It’s been a year since I read my first bit of Proust and started putting down a few random thoughts that came out of the experience, so it’s hard to remember exactly what I expected as I prepared for my first real excursion into his work. I suppose I expected to be daunted and discouraged- maybe even defeated before finishing. But I was hardly prepared to be so totally swept away as I was by Swann’s Way , the first novel in his 7-volume masterwork, In Search of Lost Time .

After all, what could a modern reader possibly have in common with Proust, his narrator, or Charles Swann, that monocled dandy of the Belle Epoque whose story takes up the bulk of the novel? As it turns out, a helluva lot more than I thought.

It wasn’t the plot that knocked my socks off, or even the wonderful prose, but Proust’s thoughtful plunge into memory. I found that some of my own memories flickered to life again as Proust worked the billows on the embers of his own forgotten past. He writes with such precise detail, that the reader is almost forced to participate in his narrative and his memories, rather than play the role of mere spectator.

As someone whose childhood home has recently been gutted by new owners, and whose elementary, junior high, and high schools were all razed and rebuilt before it even occurred to me to go back in search of memories, I found myself deeply moved by the narrator who wanders the Champs-Elysee in search of old haunts, and who closes his book with the following agonizing lines:

“…how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed. …The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”

It’s been exactly one hundred years since he first published those lines, and they are as true today as they must have been in his time. Almost from the outset, Proust introduces us to the concept of Involuntary Memory, the possibility of an unbidden reminiscence triggered by unexpected sensations that carry some magic of our former years. The most famous of these experiences is the episode of the Madaleine:

“And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory- this new sensation having had me on the effect which love has of filling me with a  precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savors, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?...

“And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of Madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea.”

This first involuntary memory, conjured by a few drops of tea, soon gushes into a torrent of childhood memories that come flooding back to the narrator. He spends entire sections of the book detailing the most minute episodes of his boyhood. In doing so, he reminds us that for the child who experiences them, they are anything but minute and insignificant.

In one early example he recounts the angst of being sent to bed without his routine kiss goodnight and the anguish that follows as he waits for his mother to leave the party downstairs and come up to correct the injustice. (Spoiler alert: she never comes!) This small vignette stretches for pages and pages, but never becomes boring. Before the reader knows it, he is no longer a spectator, but a participant. He feels the same angst as the kiss-deprived narrator, because he can no doubt remember certain similar childhood agonies that seemed, at the time, to stretch out forever.

For me, there’s a memory of being inadvertently locked out in the snow by a housesitter/babysitter who didn’t realize that ‘kindergarten me’ couldn’t reach our doorbell or produce a decent knocking on our massive oak front door. How long was I left out in the cold? It’s impossible for me to say. But it can’t have been a short time, since my repentant baby-sitter made reparations by way of a paint-dot coloring book that you transformed with a wet paintbrush- a childhood wonder I don’t think I’ve seen since that trauma. What I do  know, is how long it felt . And that is what Proust makes you feel again.

There’s a mathematical explanation for all of this, of course. A five-year-old has only lived 1,825 days, so each day he experiences makes up .055% of his young life, whereas a thirty-five-year-old has lived 12,775 days, and each of his days only comprises .0078% of his ever-lengthening existence. But whether you put stock in that theory or not hardly matters. Proust doesn’t concoct explanations or posit theories, he simply plumbs the depths of his memories and invites you to do the same, reminding you what it was really like to think with a five-year-old brain.

When he seizes on a memory he wrings from it every last drop of life for the reader. And just when you think he’s ready to move on, he picks up the carcass and helps you suck the marrow right out of the bones. It’s fascinating, fascinating stuff.

Yet some of the memories are fleeting, and still pack all the punch of his lengthier diversions. He describes a memory of watching the play of sunlight on distant bell-towers that seemed to slide from one side of the road to the other as his carriage wound its way along a crooked country path. I couldn’t help recalling my own sense of wonder, gazing through the windows of my family’s station wagon and watching the world zip by on an endless reel. For Proust the magic lived in the ever-shifting church steeples; for me it lived in the telephone wires that dipped and jumped between the poles like the live current they carried.

Later on in the book he writes beautifully about Swann’s coming across a brief musical phrase that gave him no end of pleasure— as if it had been written specifically for him. He explains Swann’s almost frantic search for the name of the piece and the composer, and his aggravating inability to dig up the source and have it played again for him:

“Swann could learn nothing further. He had, of course, a number of musical friends, but, vividly as he could recall the exquisite and inexpressible pleasure with which the little phrase had given him, and could see, still, before his eyes the forms that it had traced in outline, he was quite incapable of humming over to them the air. And so, at last, he ceased to think of it.”

Who can’t relate to the nagging itch of a half-remembered tune? If you can call up some lyrics, sure- even a couple measly words can lead you to paydirt in the age of search engines and YouTube videos. There are a handful of songs, overheard in European grocery stores 15 years ago, that I’ve been able to track down in this way; artists like Scooter or DarioG, that I never would have heard replayed on American radio stations in a lifetime of listening. But what if there are no lyrics? What if all you can do is hum incoherent pieces stupidly to the few people who might miraculously know the answer, and do this for years at a time with no success?

Here again, Swann’s experience called to memory one of my own. My mystery phrase was hidden in the middle of the the Intermezzo Sinfonico from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. For me, the section from 1:28 to 2:30 is about the most sublime and moving piece of music ever written. And I say that knowing full well how ridiculous it is for a thirty-five-year old of my generation to use the word sublime. Have a listen:

Years of fruitlessly checking “best of” classical music compilations and trying to whistle people into some vague recognition of my mystery tune had prepared me to never hear it again. And then one day I did  hear it again. And my relief at finding it again, at putting a name to it, and being able to play it at will was mirrored exactly by the character of Swann:

“But tonight, at Mme. Verdurin’s, scarcely had the little pianist begun to play when, suddenly, after a high note held on through two whole bars, Swann saw it approaching, stealing forth from underneath that resonance, which was prolonged and stretched out over it, like a curtain of sound, to veil the mystery of its birth—and recognized, secret, whispering, articulate, the airy and fragrant phrase that he had loved.”

I could go on, but this is already the longest “review” I’ve ever posted. I haven’t even touched on the story, or the pinpoint perfection of some of the prose. But those aren’t the reasons I would recommend this book in the first place. Swann’s Way  may have a certified “yawner” of a plot, but it’s an absolute thrill-ride for the memory. I’d recommend it to anyone with a past. It’s no wonder Proust is mentioned again and again as an influence by writers from Virginia Woolf to Jennifer Egan.

Take it for a whirl:

Review: Babylon Revisited and Other Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

One of my goals for this year was to knock off one of the handful of books that I’ve started but never finished.

Now, I love me some F. Scott Fitzgerald. I zipped through The Great Gatsby , This Side of Paradise , and Tender is the Night – all three. But the only short story collection of his that I’ve tried, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories , had me snoozing before I finished the first story. Maybe because the tales are so long (they have 6 or 7 chapters apiece.) But when I happened upon the audiobook at my local library, I thought it must be a sign to give it another go. Here's my second appraisal.

The sentence-level writing is, of course, first-rate. But I think I identified the problem I’d been saddled with earlier: the collection is simply pretty boring. I found that I couldn’t really identify with the bulk of his characters- most of whom seem to be uppercrust, Mid-western, young men on the margins of high-society, who are in love with unattainable, snobbish girls. That kind of story is perfectly fine, and he’s done it well elsewhere, but I get bored with the repetitive nature of it.

Fitzgerald is said to have been conflicted over a lot of his stories. He felt like he was whoring himself out for a magazine paycheck rather than concentrating on producing his best work all the time. But I’m not going to dwell on the bad (The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is a highly-sensationalized, pulp-fiction tale that was hard for me to swallow) or the boring (see previous paragraph,) I’d rather talk about a couple I really liked.

“The Ice Palace” is all about cultural differences and assimilation between North and South in America. A southern girl dissatisfied with her sleepy, southern town, decides to marry a northerner. Her first foray into northern society as his fiancée raises some red flags for her and the tension builds slowly, but when she gets left behind and trapped in the labyrinth of a Winter Carnival ice palace, everything becomes clear, and she retreats to the South. Unlike some stories in the collection, things actually happen in this story— it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And it packs enough emotional action to keep you thinking long after you’ve read it.

There were a couple others I enjoyed, but the title story is the coup de grace. “Babylon Revisited” is a brilliant, heart-wrenching tale that lays bare the wasteful decadence of the Jazz Age. In the aftermath of the market crash and too much out-of-control drinking and debauchery in Paris, Fitzgerald shows you the slow transformation and rehabilitation of the main character, who is ready at long last to take back custody of his daughter and to start a new life in Prague. That is, until some of his old friends come crashing in at the last minute to prove that there are some demons you can never quite get away from. It’s sad and brutal and wonderful. And the internet tells me it became the movie “The Last Time I Saw Paris.”

Most of this collection was just okay. I probably wouldn’t have crossed the finish line if some audiobook voice talent hadn’t read it to me. But those two stories really redeemed the collection for me. You may as well check’em out.

Review: Nemesis, by Philip Roth

Philip Roth has been making headlines recently by refusing to publish anything new (he has officially retired from writing.) But I couldn’t really add my voice  to the chorus of voices that are reacting to that news, because I’d never really read the man. That is, until I picked up Nemesis   a couple of weeks ago. So, what is my impression of Roth?

In truth, I don’t feel like my having read his 31^st and final novel gives me too much insight into this perennial Nobel contender. Roth’s got more prestigious awards than you can shake a stick at, and the only award Nemesis  was shortlisted for was the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, which happens to celebrate medicine in literature (the book concerns a war-time Polio epidemic.)

But I was wholly drawn into this story of a young playground director who finds himself battling the scourge of polio at home, while his best friends fight on the front lines of World War II.  What with the baseball backdrop, the overhanging shadow of war, and a New York-area Jewish youth wrestling with religious themes, the book felt like a fitting companion to Chaim Potok’s The Chosen , a book I absolutely loved. (Mr. Cantor? Mr. Galanter? Eh? Eh?) But unlike The Chosen , which ends up affirming religious faith, Nemesis  is the account of faith lost.

The book’s title is never really explained, but since the story unravels like a classic Greek tragedy, we can only assume that “Nemesis” signifies the Greek goddess of vengeful retribution, come in the form of the Polio virus. I’ve spoiled enough of the story as it is, but I’ll just say that Roth breathed enough life  into the time period and setting to make me want to check out some of his other work. You should, too.

Review: Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell

I read and loved Nineteen Eighty-Four , and there’s no denying the lasting influence it has had on our culture. (A-hem!)  I’ve also read Animal Farm , and came away convinced that it, too, was an “important” book to have in one’s arsenal of cultural touchpoints. But man, I don’t know that I enjoyed either one of them as much as I enjoyed Down and Out in Paris and London , Orwell’s very first book. DaOiPaL is a hilarious, instructive and captivating read.

It’s a non fiction account of the days Orwell nearly starved as homeless vagabond in London, and as a lowly dishwasher in Paris’s seedy underbelly, and even though there’s some controversy over how faithfully it records his actual personal history, it’s a book that had me laughing out loud and cringing with disgust pretty regularly.

You can get a lot out of this book. There’s the “back-of-the-house” exposé of the luxurious Hotel “X” (later identified by his wife as the famous Hotel Crillon) where Orwell goes all Upton Sinclair on the filthy working conditions in Fancy French restaurants- a section that may just have you dry-heaving by the time you’re through. There’s his political commentary and ideas on how to improve England’s convoluted ‘Casual Workhouse’ laws, which kept men constantly on the move and of no real use to anyone. But if I recommend it for one reason, it’s for the vivid descriptions of the various characters he meets along the way: Boris, the former Russian military officer he’s attached to in Paris, Paddy the tramp he befriends while exploring London’s underworld, but also the landlords, pawn brokers, scheisters and criminals that add color to the narrative.

Check it out:

Review: Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

If you read for plot, you might not get much out of Delta Wedding .

The story follows the Fairchild family as they gather and make preparations for the wedding of their second oldest daughter to the overseer of the family plantation- a suitor that all of them see as being beneath her. There is little real-time tension beyond the little recurring worries that certain preparations might not pan out in time  (will the Shepardess Crooks ordered specially from Memphis for the bridesmaids make it in time?! Inquiring minds want to know!).

Actually, the most interesting plot points are past events that continue to lurk just beneath the surface: the marriage of George, the family’s favorite uncle, to a lowly storekeeper (again, a marriage far below the Fairchilds’ vaunted station), the early death of an aunt and mother, and the movements of the family between their various estates. And at the center of it all is a near-tragedy on a picnic outing, where George stays in front of an oncoming train to help a mentally disabled cousin get her foot loose from the railroad tracks- an event that has resonance because that day cemented the romance of the young bride and the overseer, but also because it threatens to destroy George’s own marriage.

But these subplots only come to us in glimpses. The real reason to read this book is for the rich characterization, the complex tapestry of family relationships and the unforgettable sense of place- which almost stands in as one of the chief characters- (“The bayou had a warm breath, like a person.”)

Welty is undoubtedly a masterful writer. My only previous experience with her is the short story “Where is the Voice Coming From,” which recounts in first-person the tragic death of Medgar Evers, from the point of view of his racist murderer. It’s hard to believe the same woman wrote both pieces. I probably won’t be recommending Delta Wedding  to friends and family, and probably won’t re-read myself it any time soon, but I can already tell it’s a book I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come. And maybe that’s the only mark of a great book that matters.

Review: Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

I should say up front that Winesburg, Ohio  was not a book that I was just dying to read. We’ve dealt with Sherwood Anderson’s influence here and here, and it was his influence on writers I have loved, more than anything else, that prompted me to check out his most famous book.

So what kind of book is it? Not a novel, that’s for sure. Not even a short story collection in the strictest sense- though each of the stories could technically stand on their own. It’s actually a short story cycle, where a number of stories work together like a mosaic to fill in a picture larger than themselves.

The common theme tying them all together seems to be the notion that meaningful connections with other people, even in a place as small as Winesburg, are a deceptive mirage you can never quite get to. A number of the stories focus on near -connections, typically occurring on long walks about the town (there is a bar in Winesburg, but not much else in the way of entertainment), but ultimately the characters are disappointed to find themselves bereft of the friendship and understanding that they so desperately craved. If I were to sum up the plight of Anderson’s characters in one word, I would say that they yearn .

Inserting obligatory "Yearning" link here.

Now, there are  some repeating characters we get to know a little better than others, especially the character of young George Willard, who serves as a kind of sounding board for the lost souls of his town, and whose decision to leave Winesburg in the last story gives the book its ending. But no matter the length, each story is a kind of simple character sketch, or a study in backstory- almost like a writing exercise. I was impressed with the eloquent way in which he puts their inner lives on display for the reader, as in this quick but precise description:

“In the big empty office the man and the woman sat looking at each other and they were a good deal alike. Their bodies were different, as were also the color of their eyes, the length of their noses, and the circumstances of their existence, but something inside them meant the same thing, wanted the same release, would have left the same impression on the memory of an onlooker.”

Each character’s got a history, and each finds himself in a dilemma, but there aren’t many happy resolutions or neatly tied-up endings. Every story simply adds another tile to the mosaic, which I why I would say that, in the end, the main character is probably Winesburg itself.

It’s worth checking out, as a “founding document” of modern American fiction, if nothing else.

Review: Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

You may have already noticed, but I’m a big fan of Leaving the Atocha Station . In fact, I haven’t been this excited about a book in quite a long time. What is it about the novel that appeals to me? I’m not sure I know. But I’ll take a crack at it.

• First off, I’m a big sucker for expat stories: American poetry fellow abroad in Spain?- check.
• I love meta fiction, in particular books about writers writing (or struggling to write): a main character who fears (knows?) his hackneyed rip-off poetry makes him a literary imposter? – check.
• I love beautiful, witty writing- check and check.
• And I have a huge soft spot for loveable losers- in this case a main character, Adam Gordon, who is in some ways so supremely self-confident, yet plagued by doubts and miscues at every turn- check.

This last factor is, I think, what makes the story work so well. Adam is, for all intents and purposes, a hash-smoking doofus who finds himself in over his head. He’s an intelligent doofus, but he’s a doofus. He coasts by in spite of half-understood exchanges with the Spanish locals. He lies compulsively, as when he tells people his mother is dead, or that his father is a fascist, then flashes to a mental image of his dad, “gentlest of men,” coaxing a spider onto a piece of paper so he can carry the lost creature outside the house to safety. He sabotages relationships and seems set on submarining his own fellowship. His entire purpose in Spain is to research the Spanish Civil War and produce an epic poem on the topic, yet when the Madrid train bombings take place right in front of his eyes, he is oblivious to history:

"I leaned my head against the wheel and felt the full force of my shame. I wasn’t capable of fetching coffee in this country, let alone understanding its civil war. I hadn’t even seen the Alhambra. I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American… I was a pothead, maybe an alcoholic. When history came alive, I was sleeping at the Ritz."

But miraculously, things work out for our flawed hero. He stumbles into meaningful friendships completely by accident. His anti-social screw-ups are accepted as the eccentricities of a creative genius. The two or three lines he memorizes for a panel discussion on current events magically fall into place as the most insightful comments of the night.

"They wanted the input of a young American poet writing and reading abroad and wasn’t that what I was, not just what I was pretending to be? Maybe only my fraudulence was fraudulent."

I have to be honest, I thought the story was headed for a depressing, turd-in-the-punchbowl ending- a suicide, or an epic academic flameout that would ruin Adam’s career, but I couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised. Things are left ambiguous, to be sure, but the trajectory is enough to imply a happy ending.

It is an entertaining, thought-provoking, and ultimately uplifting read. Highly, highly recommended.