Title Chase: The Grapes of Wrath

Yesterday we sniffed out the title of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country. Today we do the same for John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Why did the one book make me think of the other? Well, despite their vastly different subject matter the two books are very similar stylistically. Paton came across Steinbeck's masterpiece on the same international tour of penal institutions during which he wrote his own novel. You can trace the American writer's influence in Paton's use of a preliminary dash to offset dialogue and, as we discussed yesterday, his use of intercalary chapters to make one family's tragedy a symbolic statement about the world at large.

Steinbeck's intercalaries are some of the most interesting parts of Grapes in my view. They range from abstract descriptions of banks as insatiable monsters, to bits of dialogue set on used car lots and roadside shanty towns. They allow Steinbeck to turn the Joad familiy's plight into a broad condemnation of the Depression Era powers that be.

So where do we get the title, The Grapes of Wrath? From the heartrending descriptions of agricultural waste that have left Oakies and migrant workers like the Joads hungry and destitute:

"The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. 

"And the smell of rot fills the country... 

"The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

-Page 477 in my 1972 Viking Compass paperback

Title Chase: Cry, the Beloved Country

There are a few things I always pay attention to when reading any book. If it happens to have an interesting title, one of the things I keep an eye out for is the passage where the title originates.

Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country was a book that had spent a few years on my bookshelf before I finally cracked it open. And I'd always wondered where that particular title could have come from. Certainly not in dialogue- people just don't talk that way. And it didn't sound like any sort of standard narrative description, so what then? Maybe a song? A Poem? I just didn't know.

Turns out it comes from Paton's use of intercalary chapters to tell his story. Intercalary chapters are simply passages that are inserted in between various sections of the narrative to expand the scope or provide context for the central characters and their story. Rather than disturb the flow, they're meant to create a mood, or show flashes of what's happening in the larger world. In Cry, the Beloved Country, intercalaries are used to cast Stephen Kumalo's story against the backdrop of percolating racial tensions in South Africa, and against the ruthless gravitational pull that large cities seem to exert on the rural poor.

The effect is pure awesomeness. Here's the intercalary passage that gave the book its title:

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

But I'm not alone in thinking it's a great title. There's an interesting story about how this exact passage was chosen. Paton was staying with two acquaintances in California, on the condition that they read his manuscript. When they finished it they asked him what he would call it. He suggested that they have a little competition. Each of them would write their own proposed title, and then they would compare notes. When they showed each other their suggestions, all three of them had written "Cry, the Beloved Country."

First Line Friday!

Today's first line is from a novel I have never read, which was written by a writer that I once happened upon on a shockingly sunny evening in a Colorado library while I was supposed to be studying for the Colorado Bar Exam. I read the first line that evening, and oh how I wished I could have thrown down my legal books and read the damn Beckett novel. But no, my discipline got the best of me, and I stopped reading with this first and immortal line.

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

Ten words that convey a boat-load of tone! Just by reading this line, I can assume that the feeling of the novel will be bleak, monotonous, and somewhat cynical. Further, there are two images / phrases that I love in this brief line. First, the idea of the sun shining because it has no alternative? It's wonderfully jaded. Second, the sun shines on the "nothing new," a beautiful alternative to saying the "same old." I suppose that's why Beckett was a genius.

Perhaps someday I'll read something other than this first line.

Two men walk into a Bar(d)...

Well, yesterday I intimated that Hemingway was a simpleton. A pox upon me. To make amends, I thought we’d stack him up against his flowery old nemesis, Faulkner, and measure them both against the greatest wordsmith of them all: William Shakespeare.

To do this, I’m pulling two passages from Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, both describing "languor," - one by Faulkner, the other by Hemingway- and plugging them into the Oxford Dictionaries’ “How Shakespearean Are You?” tool. You may be surprised, as I was, by the results:

"He did not still feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in his well state the body is slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body’s pleasure instead of the body thrall to time’s headlong course."        The tool's verdict: Your English is 84 percent Shakespearean. The waters of the Avon almost lap at your feet.

"Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited."        The tool's verdict: Your English is 92 percent Shakespearean. Do you live at the Rose Theatre?

Who'd have thunk it? My own first paragraph up above grades out at an 80. Type your own text into the tool and tell us how Shakespearean you are.

The Writer's Voice

Sometimes we become so immersed in the distinctive literary voice of an author, that when we hear that same author's actual speaking voice, it can be a little jolting. 

Because of his use of short, declarative sentences, Hemingway is often praised as a pioneer of economical and understated prose. But one listen to his slow, halting speech in this recording, and you may be convinced that that simple style was all he was capable of.

A little digging seems to reveal that this is Hemingway’s own parody of his widely-panned novel Across the River and Into the Trees, which we’ve talked about before. Whether he was inebriated when he recorded this is left to question. But it’s worth a listen in either case.

The Lending Library

Most of the books that line my shelves can jog some memory of the place where I originally acquired them: Used Book Stores, Museum gift shops, online retailers and so forth. But there are a handful of books that conjure up not only a place, but a corresponding twinge of guilt whenever I catch a glimpse of their spines. These are the books I am indefinitely “borrowing” from lending libraries on three different continents.

I could have titled this post “Books I’ve Stolen In My Travels,” but that wouldn’t exactly be accurate. Not, that is, if you believe like I do, that lodging-based lending libraries are more akin to the “leave a penny, take a penny” cups at your local convenience store than they are to your nearest municipal library. I have always tried to leave a book when taking one, but in the grand reckoning of my lending library balance, I suppose I have withdrawn more than I have deposited. So it’s with some remorse (and zero intent to make restitution) that I publish a list of my permanently borrowed books:

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad:

This book was picked up this past summer in a small penzion off of Campo San Polo in Venice, Italy. It was the third day of an unexpectedly long stopover while we waited for a standby flight back to Atlanta. I snatched it from the common bookcase and laid it on the nightstand with all the best intentions. But I’m sad to admit I didn’t even try to start this one. Three mornings of standby hell followed by three afternoons of lugging little kids through the tourist-packed streets of Venice will crush the desire to read anything out of just about anybody.

The Red Dancer, by Richard Skinner and Why We Want You To Be Rich, by Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki:

Both of these were picked up in a Buenos Aires youth hostel in 2009. It was admittedly very slim pickings. I was in Argentina for a business school Colloquium and didn’t think I’d have time for any reading outside of the assigned business cases I brought with me from the states. Turns out I was right, but I took them anyway. The first book, historical fiction about the life of Mata Hari, wasn’t read until this past year, and the other has not been cracked open as of this writing.

Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes:

Nestled beneath the Air Traffic Control Tower at the Salt Lake City airport, there is a squat, beige building that houses a Delta Reservations call center. It’s where I worked for the last two and a half years of my undergraduate program. Inside that building is a fairly robust lending library filled with all kinds of the regular crap you’d expect people to take on a weekend trip to Paris and promptly dump in the break room upon their return. Still, I’d scour the shelves for anything remotely decent, and was surprised one evening to find something that actually struck my interest: The above named Nebula Award-winning novel by Daniel Keyes. Unfortunately, I must have been engrossed in another read, because seven years later it still sits unread on my shelf. (By now you’re noticing a pattern…)

Stop-Time by Frank Conroy:

In June of 2003, the woes of stand-by travel once again reared their ugly head. Instead of luxuriating in a business class seat on an overnight flight to meet some friends in Eastern Europe, I spent a very long night folded across two benches at Gate 12 of JFK’s Terminal 3. As a consequence, I burned through my reading material much faster than expected, and had nothing to read by the time we left Budapest for Prague. Luckily, future Shelf Actualization co-blogger Tucker McCann reached into his ‘already read’ pile and tossed me what is still quite possibly the best memoir I have ever read. (He’d picked it up for a dollar out of a clearance basket at the University Bookstore). I never returned the book, and now that we live in separate cities, I imagine I never will. Sorry Tucker.

What about you? What have you taken, and where? Spill it.

In which we discuss resolutions for the new year

Whether we write them down or not, we all make New Years Resolutions. So let's have'em. Out with your 2012 reading resolutions! Mine are relatively simple, because I'll foul up anything even remotely complex. Here they are:

#1) Read more women:

Some of my all-time favorite books have been written by authors like Harper Lee, Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, but anybody who's read my 2011 reading recap will see that I've been swirling in an eddy of literary testosterone for the better part of a year: One female author, out of twenty-eight read last year. Yikes.

In fact, let's just look at eminent American authoresses for a moment: if you were to ask me right now to tell you the difference between Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers, the best I could come up with is that Flannery O'Connor raised peacocks in Milledgeville, Georgia- and that's because I live in Georgia. I hope to remedy that in 2012 (the cluelessness about women authors, that is- not the living in Georgia.)

#2) Read an Agatha Christie Poirot novel:

This second goal supports goal number one, but it also gives me one last chance to actually read a Poirot mystery before David Suchet acts out the final handful of stories on my TV. Not high literature, but hey, I've got to switch things up from time to time.

#3) Read a foreign language novel in the original:

Little-known fact about me: I speak Slovene, along with about two million other people on earth. But the only adult book that I have actually completed in the language is a cheap translation of a Barbara Cartland romance that I bummed off my wife when I had run through my own reading material at the beach one year.

I did read Camus' L'Etranger in college French, but that was more a linguistic adventure than a literary one. So, this year I vow to finally get over the hump and tackle a great work of Slovene literature, probably Boris Pahor's Trg Oberdan.

What are you're reading resolutions for 2012?

Happy New Year!

Most of us are waking up this morning after a very late, if not altogether crazy, night of celebration. And before long we'll turn our thoughts to the New Year and the many new beginnings it promises. Given those two prompts (the morning-after funk, and the appeal of a clean slate), there's no better story to share with you today than the Jay McInerney tale "It's 6 a.m., Do You Know Where You Are?"

Originally published by the Paris Review, this story later became the opening chapter to McInerney's classic novel Bright Lights, Big City. Since the story is written in the second person, the narrator is, well... the reader. It's the story of a man who 'comes to' out of a drug-addled haze, and continues his cocaine-fueled romp until he is brought to the realization that his life is in tatters. 

In the closing lines he is so desperate for real nourishment that he trades his designer silk jacket for a bag of warm rolls. It is a glimmer of hope that suggests things are about to turn around for this sorry addict:

"You tear the bag open and the smell of warm dough rushes over you. The first bites sticks in your throat and you almost gag. You will have to go slowly. You will have to learn everything over again."

It's a nice message for New Year's Day. Give it a listen. The 20 minute recording was made for a recent Selected Shorts podcast. Start at 3:00 minutes in if you want to hear Jay McInerney talk about the genesis of the story, or jump to 7:00 minutes in to start listening to the story itself (you can click ahead just above the green line in the player.)

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Happy New Year.

My shelf life: 2011

Alright. The year is quickly coming to a close, so it only makes sense to bare my 2011 reading list to the world. Let's all pretend you care for just a moment.

I'm not sure how to label myself as a reader. I plowed through 32 books and a total of 11,358 pages this year. That puts me at just over 31 pages per day. In other words, I'm a piker compared to other book bloggers, and a veritable reading machine compared to the general public. Given everything that's on my plate, I'd give myself a grade of "not too shabby" for 2011.

Here's the complete list, in the order I tackled them, along with their respective page counts (top 10 reads are in bold):

1. Blue Heaven, C.J. Box   352
2. On Writing, Stephen King   288
3. The Red Dancer, Richard Skinner   272
4. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking   248
5. All the Pretty Horses, Cormack McCarthy   301
6. The Lost City of Z, David Gann   352
7. King Solomon’s Mines, H. Rider Haggard    320
8. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card   324
9. Our Town, Thornton Wilder   112
10. The Road, Cormack McCarthy   256
11. Trojan Oddyssey, Clive Cussler   480
12. Smoke From This Alter, Louis L’Amour   75
13. The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour, Vol IV   672
14. Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck   619
15. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky   480
16. The Associate, John Grisham   434
17. Cry, The Beloved Country, Alan Paton  256
18. The Appeal, John Grisham   384
19. Animal Farm, George Orwell   128
20. 2666, Roberto Bolano   912
21. The Chosen, Chaim Potok   284
22. A Mercy, Toni Morrison   176
23. Don Segundo Sombra, Ricardo Guiraldes   212
24. Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev   226
25. The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon   565
26. 1984, George Orwell   326
27. The Elements of Style, Strunk & White   176
28. Death in Venice & Other Tales, Thomas Mann   476
29. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner   288
30. A Room With A View, E.M. Forster   321
31. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad   451
32. Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner   592

As you can see above, I'm not a complete book snob, though my favorites tended overwhelmingly to be classics or high literary fiction. All told, that's 17 so-called classics, 7 works of commercial fiction, 2 short story collections, 2 non-fiction reads, 2 books on writing, 1 poetry collection and 1 play. Continuing on the assumption that you care, here is the breakdown by page count:

It's kind of interesting to take a look back and see how you spent your reading life in the past year. What about you? What did you read this year? What were your favorites? What stunk? What should I pick up in 2012? Show us your cards...

First Line Friday!

Today is officially the last Friday of 2011 (sigh). As such, today's first line is the last piece of prose to roll around in your mind as the clock strikes midnight tomorrow night. And, it's a dandy.

"If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog."

Great opening line, right? Well, it's from Saul Bellow's "Herzog." Again, it's short (15 words), but says so much. And I love love love the name Moses Herzog. Moses Herzog? Are you kidding me? Great name.

But listen. The real reason that this first line is so astounding is that, after reading the whole novel, one realizes that this 15 word introductory sentence is basically a prolific summary of the novel as a whole; a novel where the reader, and the protagonist himself, wonder aloud whether or not Herzog's mind is slipping, and, if his mind has indeed slipped, is it all right to be out of one's mind?

One more plug: Herzog is far and away my favorite Saul Bellow novel. I've struggled with many of Bellow's novels (especially Augie March), but absolutely loved Herzog.

Happy Bellovian New Year . . .

Sticking the Landing (and avoiding the faceplant)

With ‘First Line Fridays’ we talk pretty regularly about beginnings, so sooner or later it only makes sense that we make some noise about endings. Today we’ll tell a tale of two stories; both by the same author, and both incredibly compelling up until that crucial moment at the end. One of them gets a fantastic ending, and the other is maddeningly bad. If you want to make your own assessment before I begin my bloviation, take a few minutes to read "Class Picture" and "Bullet in the Brain", both by the very talented Tobias Wolff.

The Faceplant:

Let’s start with “Class Picture.” This is a story that I loved right off the bat, and one that just continued to grow on me as Wolff brought the thing to a crescendo. Here’s the premise: students in a Dead Poets Society-style prep school await the arrival of the poet Robert Frost. A poetry contest judged by Mr. Frost will determine which of the boys will be awarded a personal appointment with the great man. What follows is a fascinating look at prep-school politics and the rivalry between young, aspiring men of letters. The fragments of poems and stories are especially funny, like when the narrator and his roommate poke fun at Hemingway:

“That is your bed, and it is a good bed, and you must make it and you must make it well.

“Today is the day of meat loaf. The meat loaf is swell. It is swell but when it is gone the not-having meat loaf is tragic and the meatloaf man will not come anymore.”

Anyway, despite the narrator’s best efforts, it is his friend George who wins the honor with a poem entitled “First Frost.” Still, we anxiously await whatever words of wisdom the great poet will share with the winner. I'm sad to say that it has been longed for and built up and fought over for so long that when the great moment arrives, Wolff performs the storytelling equivalent of a bellyflop:

'Mr. Frost told me I was wasting my time in school. He said I should go to Kamchatka. Or Brazil."

There is some confused debate between the two boys about what the advice could possibly mean, and then the story closes with the narrator’s search for answers in the library:

I closed the encyclopedia and sat listening to the wind rattle the mullioned panes behind me. What was it about Kamchatka, that a young writer should forsake his schooling and go there? Spectacle, maybe. The drama of strange people living strangely. Danger. All this could be good matter for stories and poems. But Frost himself had lived in New England all his life at no cost to his art, and I wondered if he'd ever actually been there. I guessed not. But it meant something to him, Kamchatka, something to do with the writer's life, and what else could it mean but hardship? Solitude, darkness, and hardship. But he had also mentioned Brazil. I rose from my deep chair and crossed the room past boys dozing over books and exchanged the "K" volume for "B."

And that's it. Ugh. You can tell me I missed the whole point of that ending, and you can tell me it was an intentional letdown, but you can’t tell me it’s anything other than a turd in the punchbowl. Or if that’s too strong, at least a band-aid in the ice bucket. And let me state once again: I absolutely loved that story up until that dud of an ending. But hey, the New Yorker bought it, so what do I know. On to the next ending!

The Perfect 10:

“Bullet in the Brain” is the story of a book critic, Anders, who finds himself at the center of a bank robbery. Upon entering the bank he criticizes the woman in front of him in line, criticizes the canned jargon of the jittery robbers who break in and, with a pistol under his chin, criticizes the fresco on the ceiling of the bank. He finally bursts into laughter when the hold-up man threatens him with that ultimate cliché of warning, “capiche,” and as the title of the story foreshadows, he get a bullet right through his brain.

But here’s where Wolff takes the story to another level. After some quick anatomical description of the damage to Anders’s grey matter, he recounts all the images one might expect to have flashed before his eyes in such a moment. And then, he focuses our attention so beautifully on the unexpected, fleeting memory that did become his last.

You’ve got the link above, so I won’t spoil the imagery for you here, but what Wolff does with the ending is turn this story into a profound statement about language and words and “their pure unexpectedness and their music.” He transports us from what is essentially a dark comedy at the beginning, to a deeply moving look at life’s smallest moments at the end. It’s an incredible finesse job, and an incredible ending to a great story.

What did you think? Anyone want to pile on? Contradict? Share other good or bad endings?

Haiku-ption Contest #3

It's that time once again. Previous rounds are here. My entry's below, and yours are in the comments. May the best man win.

Outside chance, you said?

How d'you like my lion, sir?

Outside chance, me arse.

The floor is yours, ladies and gentlemen. Comment your entries below...



An ear for authentic dialogue

Writing good dialogue is tough. Getting the dialogue of children to ring true adds an even higher degree of difficulty. A lot of decent writers just don’t have the ear to pull it off. Their young characters are either petulant, whining brats or super-genius wunderkinds that talk just like the adults. It’s rare that someone truly nails the child’s voice in an authentic, powerful way. Cormack McCarthy does exactly that in his post-apocalyptic novel The Road.

The following passage highlights one such interaction between the two main characters, a man and his young son. Earlier in the day they had broken into a locked cellar in search of food, and were horrified to discover a pitiful collection of fellow human beings who were being held captive as a source of food. Now, after having been chased away by that pathetic assembly, the two of them are settling down for the night:



Can we have a fire? The boy said.

We don’t have a lighter.

The boy looked away.

I’m sorry. I dropped it. I didn’t want to tell you.

That’s okay.

I’ll find us some flint. I’ve been looking. And we’ve still got the little bottle of gasoline.

Okay.

Are you very cold?

I’m okay.

The boy lay with his head in the man’s lap. After a while he said: They’re going to kill those people, arent they?

Yes.

Why do they have to do that?

I don’t know.

Are they going to eat them?

I don’t know.

They’re going to eat them, aren’t they?

Yes.

And that’s why we couldn’t help them.

Yes.

Okay.

 ...

They sat by the side of the road and ate the last of the apples.

What is it? The man said.

Nothing.

We’ll find something to eat. We always do.

The boy didn’t answer. The man watched him.

That’s not it, is it?

It’s okay.

Tell me.

The boy looked away down the road.

I want you to tell me. It’s okay.

He shook his head.

Look at me, the man said.

He turned and looked. He looked like he’d been crying.

Just tell me.

We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?

No. Of course not.

Even if we were starving?

We’re starving now.

You said we werent.

I said we werent dying. I didn’t say we werent starving.

But we wouldnt.

No. We wouldnt.

No matter what.

No. No matter what.

Because we’re the good guys.

Yes.

And we’re carrying the fire.

And we’re carrying the fire. Yes.

Okay.

If you ask me, this is an absolutely amazing passage. Some will look down their nose at McCarthy’s stubborn avoidance of quotation marks. Others will fault him for his apostrophe-less contractions. But neither of those eccentricities is material in my view. The biggest charge that will be leveled against this passage is that it flaunts the modern adage that every single word of dialogue has to move the story forward. Dogmatic, by-the-book critics will argue that McCarthy’s action gets stalled in the repetitive back and forth between father and child. But that’s precisely why it works. The plot may not be barreling forward, but the emotional story is growing more and more complex.

Here’s what makes this so good: The dialogue of both characters is incredibly telling in what is not said. The boy’s sparse words and long pauses put his cognitive processes on full view for the reader. We can see the wheels turning inside his head. And anyone with little kids will see the authenticity in this kind of multi-layered communication. The father’s simple explanations and one-word answers reveal his own compassion for the boy, and his empathy for someone trying to figure out why the world is the way it is.

The boy puts up a stoic front, as most kids would in his situation, but he can’t hide his fears from a caring, probing father. Meanwhile, the father stonewalls some of his son’s direct questions. He is set on protecting his child from the hellish realities of life on the road, yet quickly perceives when it’s time to level with the boy. They were going to eat those people. That knowledge not only explains why they had to abandon them, but it reinforces the reasons that father and son have to stick together. It illustrates exactly what they’re up against.

Finally, the familiar refrain of “carrying the fire” leaves us with the impression that this is only one of many such discussions they’ve had since the world went to hell. It is their private rallying cry. It’s their only real reason for moving forward. It’s the only reason for refusing to give up, as their wife and mother had done.

I think the whole thing is just brilliant. Buy the book.

What do you think? Who else really hits the mark when writing children?

Is Murakami a Letdown?

Oh Murakami . . .

His novel, 1Q84, was the most hyped literary release of the year (its English translation, that is). I mean, a huge deal. The novel was published in Japan two years ago, and finally hit the shelves in the US in April. So, how critically acclaimed has the novel been? Well, not very . . .

"1Q84 is an enormous letdown - rather like a big budget, much publicized Hollywood film that cost over $200 million but leaves you feeling that it was overstuffed and 45 minutes too long . . . Trying to say anything definite about 1Q84 is like trying to nail Jello to a wall. It's an elaborate puzzle in which the pieces seem to change shape just as you try to fit then into place or a puzzle which, when assembled, adds up to a picture of a perfect blank." - Allen Barra (The Atlantic)

"Don't get stuck in the quicksand of 1Q84. You, sucker, will wade through nearly one thousand uneventful pages . . . 1Q84 has even Murakami's most ardent fans doing back flips as they try to justify this book's glaring troubles." - Janet Maslin (The New York Times)

A year or two ago, I agreed to read a Murakami novel with some friends of mine. We decided upon A Wild Sheep Chase. And, as I read these reviews for 1Q84, I felt like I had already read a Murakami novel that is so amorphous and bizarre, with hints of great writing and sensible characters, that I don't need another Murakami experience. My friends, on the other hand, loved A Wild Sheep Chase. But for me, it was too hard to tie down. As we discussed the novel back then, we decided that the randomness of the novel can be attributed to Japanese culture (which none of us claim to understand). But I'm just not sure.

That is my opinion on Murakami: I'm just not sure.

And it sounds like 1Q84 is more of the same?

Happy Holidays!

As usual, we mark the holiday with some short fiction appropriate for the occasion. Here is John Cheever's "Christmas Is A Sad Season For the Poor," (which is hardly a sad story, it should be pointed out.)

Christmas is a sad season. The phrase came to Charlie an instant after the alarm clock had waked him, and named for him an amorphous depression that had troubled him all the previous evening. The sky outside his window was black. He sat up in bed and pulled the light chain that hung in front of his nose. Christmas is a very sad day of the year, he thought. Of all the millions of people in New York, I am practically the only one who has to get up in the cold black of 6 a.m. on Christmas Day in the morning; I am practically the only one.

Read more...

Home for the holidays (in a manor of speaking...)

Well, the holidays are upon us at last. And while I’m looking forward to another day or two of full-blown Christmas cheer, there’s a part of me that is already longing for that post-holiday exhalation that every parent of small children knows. I’m eating too much, sleeping too little, and I’ve got Rankin-Bass TV Christmas Specials coming out my ears. It will be nice to collapse on the couch tomorrow night and watch something normal for a change. For Mrs. DeMarest and me, this probably means working our way back through Season 1 of Downton Abbey on PBS.

Yes, go ahead and make fun. I’ll just say my wife is a very lucky woman. I have an amazing tolerance for chick-flicks in general, and an undeniable affinity for well-done series like Downton Abbey. Then again, who doesn’t love a little English Manor intrigue?

For any of the rest of you who are gearing up for Season 2, and even for those who aren’t, I thought we’d share a few reading suggestions to slake your thirst for that venerable institution known as the English Country Estate, courtesy of the Guardian:

"Evelyn Waugh came to regret Brideshead Revisited… That his novel would still be popular more than half a century later would have surprised Waugh. He would be even more surprised to find that novels with an English country house setting are among the most acclaimed written in recent years, among them Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989), Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001) and Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger (2009). Next month brings another notable addition to the genre, Alan Hollinghurst's compelling new novel The Stranger's Child, set partly in a 3,000-acre estate called Corley Court. All these are historical novels, set at different points of the last century, with Hollinghurst's spanning 95 years and concluding in 2008. Like Waugh's novel, they're also revealing about present-day preoccupations. And what they confirm is the continuing attraction of the English country house to the literary imagination.

              

There are plenty more, to be sure. What other books bring the English country house to life for you? Share your favorites in the comments.



First Line Friday!

"Mother Died Today."



What novel is it? Start the guessing, and NO Googling!

The Writer's Voice

Sometimes we become so immersed in the distinctive literary voice of an author, that when we hear that same author's actual speaking voice, it can be a little jolting. Have a listen below, and try to tell me that Virginia Woolf doesn't remind you just a little bit of Dame Edna:

So You Wanna Be A Writer? Join the Merchant Marines!

Who among us hasn’t felt the urge to chip paint, swab the poop deck, or keep the midnight watch over a commercial shipping vessel at one time or another? Who can honestly say he’s never heard the call of the sea?

One thing’s for sure, many a great author has been groomed on the high seas. The literary world is replete with writers who have tackled a stint in the merchant marines: Joseph Conrad, Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville, Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, Alex Haley, Saul Bellow, Langston Hughes, Louis L’Amour, Eugene O’Neill, there are simply too many to name… One could throw in Jack London, who worked a sealing vessel, Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a ship's surgeon, or Ernest Hemingway, who hunted U-boats in the Caribbean. They probably all dreamed, like Conrad’s Lord Jim, of a life filled with adventure:

“He could see the big ships departing, the broad-beamed ferries constantly on the move, the little boats floating far below his feet with the hazy splendor of the sea in the distance and the hope of a stirring life in the world of adventure.

“On the lower deck, in the Babel of two-hundred voices, he would forget himself and beforehand live in his mind the sea life of light literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line, or as a lonely castaway, barefooted and half-naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men. Always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.”

What’s not to love about any of that? Sign me up! But Conrad quickly follows that passage with this dampening dose of reality:

“After two years of training he went to sea, and entering the region so well known to his imagination, found them strangely barren of adventure. He made many voyages. He knew the magical monotony of existence between sky and water. He had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread, but whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work. This reward eluded him. Yet, he could not go back, because there is nothing more enticing, disenchanting and enslaving than the life at sea.”

So, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies. So what? It still sounds like a nice gig, if you can get it. And the literary merits have been proven time and time again. Like the great authors named above, you could pluck your ideas and experiences from exotic foreign ports and use the long hours at sea to let your material marinate and develop for our benefit. 

So go ahead. Set sail for literary distinction. Be a writer, be a merchant marine.

What do Tom Joad, Darl Bundren and Macon “Milkman” Dead III all have in common?

Yes, all three are famous literary characters, and each is the tragic protagonist of the story he inhabits. But there’s something more… They all have sisters with crazy-ass names.

Rose of Sharon? Dewey Dell? First Corinthians and Magdelena Called Lena? What is it with these families? What is it about 20^th Century American fiction that requires the injudicious and reckless naming of baby girls?

Now, sometimes it’s the guys who get a profligate christening (Soaphead Church and Tea Cake come to mind), but by and large, it is the fairer sex that gets saddled with awkward handles. Scout? Skeeter? Idgie? Sabbath Lily? I could go on and on...

What does all of this mean to you and me? Well, that depends. If your sister’s name is Sarah or Emily or Anne or Jane, it probably means nothing at all.

On the other hand, if you have a sister named “Gypsy Sunrise” or “Heaven’s Own Rays” or something absurd like that- I don't mean to get all Stranger than Fiction on you, but there’s a decent chance that your reality- your entire life as you know it- is nothing more than the figment of some author’s imagination.

The nice thing about this scenario is that your story will be taught to high school students and revered by serious readers for generations. The flip side of that coin is that you're probably headed for some great calamity.    So, you know... be careful.

See Venice! Read a novel!

Image from Gerald Brimacombe Photography

If Levar Burton has taught me anything, it's that when I pick up a book, "I can go anywhere." If you're an intrepid mental traveler like me, you'll enjoy trotting across the globe with our See The World series. We kick things off in one of the most beautiful locations on the globe: Venice, Italy. Here are some excerpts from three great books that will take you there:

Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann

“And so he saw it once again. The most amazing of landing places, the dazzling composition of fantastic architecture that the Republic presented to the worshipful gazes of approaching mariners. The airy magnificence of the Doge’s Palace and the Bridge of Sighs, the columns depicting lions and saints on the shore, the splendid and projected flank of the fairy tale temple, the view of the gateway and the gigantic clock. And while contemplating this scene, he mused that arriving by the Venice railroad station by land, was like entering a palace through a back door, and that one could only do as he had done, sail across the high seas in order to reach the most improbable of cities.”

The Aspern Papers, by Henry James

"The gondola stopped, the old palace was there; it was a house of the class which in Venice carries even in extreme dilapidation the dignified name. “How charming! It’s grey and pink!” my companion exclaimed; and that is the most comprehensive description of it. It was not particularly old, only two or three centuries; and it had an air not so much of decay as of quiet discouragement, as if it had rather missed its career. But its wide front, with a stone balcony from end to end of the piano nobile, or most important floor, was architectural enough, with the aid of various pilasters and arches; and the stucco with which in the intervals it had long ago been endued was rosy in the April afternoon. It overlooked a clean melancholy rather lonely canal, which had a narrow riva or convenient footway on either side."

"…I spent the late hours either on the water- the moonlights of Venice are famous- or in the splendid square which serves as a vast forecourt to the strange old church of Saint Mark. I sat in from of Florian’s café eating ices, listening to music, talking with acquaintances: the traveler will remember how the immense cluster of tables and little chairs stretches like a promontory into the smooth lake of the Piazza. The whole place, of a summer’s evening, under the stars and with all the lamps, all the voices and light footsteps on marble- the only sounds of the immense arcade that encloses it- is an open-air saloon dedicated to cooling drinks and to a still finer degustation, that of the splendid impressions received during the day."

Across the River and Into the Trees, by Ernest Hemingway

"He penetrated into the far side of the city, the side that finally fronted the Adriatic, and that he liked the best. He was going in by a very narrow street, and he was going to not keep track of the number of more or less north and south streets that he crossed, nor count the bridges, and then try and orient himself so he would come out at the market without getting up any dead ends.

"It was a game you play, as some people used to play double Canfield or any solitary card games. But it had the advantage of you moving while you do it and that you look at the houses, the minor vistas, the shops and the trattorias and at old palaces of the city of Venice while you are walking. If you loved the city of Venice it was an excellent game. 

"It is a sort of solitaire ambulante and what you win is the happiness of your eye and heart. If you made the market, on this side of town, without ever being stymied, you won the game. But you must not make it too easy and you must not count."

Which other books bring the City of Canals to life for readers?