Pop Matters, a pretty decent cultural review site, is seeking book bloggers and reviewers. They are looking for non-fiction reviewers in particularly, so I probably wouldn't find my niche here, but I thought that I might pass it a long to the rest of you.
Link: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/submissions/call-books
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
I find that suspense is a thing difficult to find done well. All too often suspense, whether it be on books, in film, or worst of all on television, seems formulaic and hollow. In how many episodes of Monk or CSI are you able to guess the killer within the episode's first fifteen minutes? If you assumed that House's patients all had a rare parasite, wouldn't you be right, like, ninety percent of the time? Are you ever really shocked or surprised?
All of which makes Rebecca all the more awesome--it actually has its "holy shit" moments, including one that takes everything you thought about the novel and flips it on its head. Everything you thought you knew about Rebecca, after its first two acts, turns out to be wrong, and yet everything leading up to the reveal makes perfect sense--like The Sixth Sense. You know, where Bruce Willis turns out to be a man. I might be thinking of The Crying Game, come to think of it. And then, Rebecca flips everything again, and then a third time. None of these big reveals are expected, and yet all of them make perfect sense.
The story begins with an young, unnamed girl working as a companion--a sort of half-friend half-secretary--for an older American woman in Monte Carlo, where they meet Maxim de Winter, a handsome aristocrat who has recently lost his wife in a drowning accident. Maxim and the girl fall quickly in love, and are as quickly married, and the girl becomes the mistress of Maxim's famous family mansion, Manderley. But she finds that, as she feared, she is unprepared to preside over such a household, and finds that she cannot fill the shoes of Maxim's late wife.
The wife, of course, is Rebecca--a brilliant touch, of course, refusing to even give the girl the title of her own book. There was no one like Rebecca: accomplished, independent, in control, and beautiful--"the most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life"--one character remarks. The girl, by contrast, is kind-hearted but meek and eternally out of place; she resides not at Manderley but in her own mind. She is constantly imagining would-be encounters or the unheard conversations of others, in all of which she is compared unfavorably to Rebecca. Of course, she has justification, particularly from Mrs. Danvers, the chief house servant who was devoted to Rebecca and, despite her outward deference, the girl suspects of plotting against her out of fealty to her former mistress. Even Maxim's senile grandmother seems to want Rebecca back, driving the girl to abject misery:
He did not belong to me at all, he belonged to Rebecca. He still thought about Rebecca. She was in the hosue s till, as Mrs Danvers had said; she was in that room in the west wing, she was in the library, in the morning-room, in the gallery above the hall. Even in the little flower-room, where her mackintosh still hung... Rebecca was still mistress of Manderley. Rebecca was still Mrs de Winter. I had no business here at all. I had come blundering like a poor fool on ground that was preserved. "Where is Rebecca?" Maxim's grandmother had cried. "I want Rebecca. What have you done with Rebecca?"
Sloth is an original graphic novel by Gilbert Hernandez, one of the Hernandez Brothers behind Love and Rockets, possibly the longest running and most influential indie comic going. I haven't been able to track down a collection of L&R yet, but wanted to sample some of the Hernandez's work.
Sloth is short, easily the shortest book I've read this year, but what it lacks in size, it makes up in sheer bizarreness. The story follows three Hispanic teens, Miguel, Lita, and Romeo. When the story opens, Miguel has just awoken from a year long coma and is trying to restart his life. The coma itself is a mystery, mostly because no medical reason for it can be found. To all appearances, Miguel willed himself into the coma out of boredom and a general malaise. He returns to Lita, his girlfriend who may or may not have developed an attraction to Romeo during his year MIA. He also can't help but notice that trying to move at any speed besides "slow" causes his joints to burn.
To this point, the story is quirky but not exactly surreal. The strangeness starts when the three go to an orchard where a mysterious goatman is said to reside, coming out only at night. According to legend, the goatman offers those who see it a chance to change places. If they agree, they become the goatman and have to find someone to switch with.
The story only gets stranger from there, as the three encounter the goatman, Miguel finds that he may or may not be able to fly, and a major and completely unexpected twist at the 2/3rds point when (spoiler) Miguel actually becomes Lita in some alternate universe featuring all the same characters (except Miguel) in drastically different roles.
As far as conclusions, that's tough. The primary theme seems to be identity, but the specific applications Hernandez is making are unclear, as is the narrative arc. Is the implication that one of the three switched places with the goatman changing the fabric of reality? Is it all a dream inside of a still comatose teen's head? By the end of the story, all three teens have switched identities and willed themselves into comas, although not simultaneously. There's something beautifully tragic about the dreamworlds of the protgaonists, if that's what they are: the worlds aren't perfect, but they are realities where things happen, where there are rockstars, goatmen, and adventures.
The story of Oedipus is well-worn: Boy meets girl. Boy saves girl's city from riddle-obsessed monster. Boy discovers that he's actually girl's son, and that he killed his own dad years ago without knowing but it's too late because they've already boned. It's almost cliche.
To be more specific, Oedipus is the king of Thebes, a position he inherited when, wandering from his home in Corinth, he encountered the Sphinx, who was eating any Theban who could not answer his riddle. Oedipus answered it, and saved the city, and now has married its queen Jocasta, the former king being recently murdered. A plague has struck the city, and the oracle of Apollo says that it will only pass when the former king's murderer is put to justice. With the help of the prophet Teiresias, Oedipus discovers that he is the murderer, recalling a fight in which he killed an unknown man years ago, and that he is really Jocasta's son, expelled from Thebes as an infant because of a prophecy that said he would do exactly what he ends up doing.
But it is, of course, the essential work of ancient Greek tragedy. It is the most oft-used example Aristotle gives when he outlines tragedy for us in the Poetics, suggesting that shows remarkable purity of genre. All the elements are there: a hero is neither a great man nor a villain, but the bearer of a fatal flaw that eventually leads to his downfall. There is a startling revelation (peripeteia), a sudden reversal of fortune (anagnorisis), and an ending so bleak and ruinous that you might call it a catastrophe (catastrophe).
Of course, it is also the basis for Freud's theory of the Oedipal complex, making it one of the most essential texts in the development of Freudian criticism and literary criticism as a whole. In this way, its relevance spans a vast stretch of time, and it is an excellent illustration of the way that we regard literature differently than our predecessors.
Unlike The Odyssey, I find Oedipus the King wanting for emotional heft to complement its academic fecundity. All tragedies are meant to act as funhouse mirrors in which we see ourselves, but Oedipus' basic humanity is less apparent to me than Odysseus', whose longing for his home and his wife is truly affecting. One issue may be the translation, which I feel is a little banal. See the way that this translator, Benard Knox, renders Oedipus' opening address to the priests who are gathered in supplication to the gods:
My sons! Newest generation of this ancient city of Thebes! Why are you here? Why are you seated there at the altar, with these branches of supplication? The city is filled with the smoke of burning incense, with hymns to the healing god, with laments for the dead.
Children, you modern brood of Cadmus old,
What mean you, sitting in your sessions here,
High-coronalled with votive olive-boughs,
While the whole city teems with incense-smoke,
And paean hymns, and sounds of woe the while?
I read Little Scarlet after reading This Year You Write Your Novel. Thought it might give the book some context to see what sort of fiction Mosley turns out. After finishing Little Scarlett, I think he produces work I'd probably enjoy. On the other hand, I had some issues with this book, although they're mostly my fault.
I didn't realize when I bought Little Scarlet that it was book 6 in the Easy Rawlins series, for one thing. With a lot of mystery or crime novels, chronology isn't particularly important, but Little Scarlet picks up immediately following a huge race riot and told me virtually nothing about Rawlins himself. It wasn't until I was nearly 1/3rd of the way through that I realized it was set in the 60's, which made Rawlin's extreme racial sensitivity and (well-rendered) impotent rage more understandable, as well as explaining why most of the white characters in the book exhibit behavior that would be considered inappropriate publicly now, but which, in the 60's, was hardly uncommon.
The story itself is a pretty hard-boiled detective story, as Rawlins investigates the mysterious circumstances surrounding the murder of Little Scarlet, a young girl murdered during the riot. The twists are there, and the character of Rawlins seems like an interesting one. Ultimately though, it was hard for me to get a good read on Mosley from this book. His themes of racial identity are well-integrated into the plot, and the characters are strong. It's just a case of too little information, a situation I'll try to remedy soon.
If you've ever wanted to spend several hours listening to Charles Grodin, of The Heartbreak Kid, Beethoven and MSNBC fame, share anecdotes about various people--mostly unnamed--that he's worked with throughout his 30-odd years in show business, this is the book for you. Of course, if you read I Like It Better When You're Funny and find that it isn't exactly the book on Charles Grodin you want to read, you can always pick up one of his other four memoirs. Just for comparison's sake, Grodin's various memoirs combined are approximately the size of Lord of the Rings. Spy, author, philosopher, and all-around awesome guy Graham Greene got only a two volume set.
I don't know why I picked this up, but I'm sort of glad I did. Grodin is approximately as grouchy as you might expect, and is alternately self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating. Once you've read ILYBWYF, you'll come to understand that Grodin's instincts are always correct, but that he sometimes goes against them and makes embarrassing mistakes. You'll also learn that he has a great deal of respect for pretty much everyone he's ever worked with, and that most of them loved him too, and found him much nicer and easier to work with than expected. If you don't really know who Charles Grodin is, big deal. Once you finish this book, you'll know more.
If you look to the right, just under the 50 Bookers 2009 list, you'll see that 50B now has a search box. Use it wisely.
This is a collection of short stories. They are rather cerebral in cerebral. Most could be described as psychological dramas. For example, in "Button, Button" a man and his wife are given a button mounted on a box (think Deal or No Deal) and told that if they push it they we be given a large sum of money if they push it, but also that somewhere in the world, someone that they don't know will die. Matheson originally published this story in Playboy in 1970. It was used as a storyline for an episode of The Twilight Zone (1985) and has been made into a recently-released feature-length movie. Another essay involves on a psychic who is with a man who exploits her abilities, making people pay them for what she knows.
Many of the essays involve technology in some way, often highlighting the darker side of innovations. They put me in mind of some of the work of Philip K. Dick.
I'll be completely honest, I had no clue that Truman Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's until I saw the movie Capote. I have intended to read In Cold Blood for a while now, so when I saw this book in a little coffee shop/bookstore combo in Chattanooga, I picked it up.
I love the way Capote frames this story. It is told from the perspective of Paul Varjak, a struggling writer living in Manhattan's Upper East Side. The book is made up of Paul's recollections of his encounters with Holly Golightly, a woman who lives in the same brownstone that Paul does on the Upper East Side of New York City. I forget where I heard it, but the best description I have heard of Holly Golightly is "a grown-up Lolita." She is sexual but innocent, coy but boisterous. She is described in the book as a "bad little good girl adrift in New York."
After reading and enjoying the book, I watch the movie, which I hadn't seen in a long time. Oh god, it was dumb. It took a story replete with complex emotions and human desires and reduced it to a kitschy love story. Lost in Translation bears more resemblance to Capote's book than the Hepburn/Peppard movie does. This is a great story, and the version that I bought came with a few other short stories that were good as well.
If you ask me how I remember the island, what it was like to be stranded there by misadventure for nearly three months, I would answer that it was a time and landscape of the mind if I did not have the visible signs to summon its materiality: my journal, the cat, the newspaper cuttings, the curiosity of my friends; and my sisters--how they always look at me, I think, as one returned from the dead.
There is no more appropriate island on which to be shipwrecked, I suppos, than one named Robinson. There was Robinson Crusoe, for one, and the Swiss Family Robinson, who weren't actually named Robinson (come on, they were Swiss) but instead were meant to be a Swiss version of Crusoe, and I guess a family version too. Muriel Spark's Robinson cuts through all that nomenclature and presents himself only as "Robinson," and calls the island on which he lives the same. Like the streamlining and concision of all of Spark's novels, here's the island-dwelling icon whittled to his essence.
Robinson lives all alone on his island with his young helper Miguel, and is not exactly pleased when a plane crashes on it. The only survivors are Jimmie Waterford, a Scandinavian (not his real name) who happens to be Robinson's cousin, an oily, disagreeable New Age huckster named Tom Wells, and the protagonist, a young woman named January Marlow. As put out as Robinson is, his guests are even more put out to discover that the next boat out doesn't arrive at Robinson for another three months.
During their time on the island, Robinson cares well for the three survivors, if with a characteristically annoyed detachment. January begins to manifest feelings toward Jimmie, and as it turns out nobody likes Tom Wells. Spark juggles this dynamic for half the book, before suddenly, strangely, Robinson disappears, though his torn, bloody clothes have been left behind en route to a man-sized volcanic fissure in the island's surface. What follows is a tense standoff between the three survivors, while January tries to figure out who the murderer is and if she might be next. It wouldn't be in Spark's style to have this tension descend into violence, but the island is riddled with secret tunnels and provides a good setting for a pretty rousing, if low-key, mystery-adventure tale.
In many ways, Robinson struck me as a "beach read"--fraught with suspense, but light and mildly forgettable. Of course, the writing is a thousand times better than your average Patricia Cornwell book ("the mustard field staring at me with a yellow eye, the blue and green lake seeing in me a hard turquoise stone") and, as in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Spark does marvelous work making her characters seem full and alive in a minimum of brush strokes.
Watership Down is one of my all-time favorite novels. So I was excited to read something else by Richard Adams. I can't remember why I chose this book or why I decided to order it from ABEbooks.com, but I did not really see the cover or anything until I had already paid for the book. You can't see from the picture, but on the front cover right above the title is this phrase from the New York Times Book Review, "Beautiful haunting erotic love and an absolutely terrifying ghost story." I turned the book over and on the back, "Stunning. . . a novel of love and beauty, mystery and horror." Right above that blurb from Vogue, the main female character is described as "a seductress of erotic mystery and exquisite sexual genius." I remember thinking, Geez, what have I gotten myself into?
As it turns out, almost none of what is written all over the cover of this book is true. The book occasionally deals with sex, there is some mystery surround the female lead Kathe, and there is technically a ghost. However, the ghost plays such a small role in the story that I would never refer to this as a ghost story, definitely not haunting. There were a few parts that were a little spooky, but not "terrifying," "chilling," or "terrible" as the hyperbolic cover suggests. However, this is not to say that the book was bad. It was a good, slow-moving story of a man who falls in love with a woman he knows little about. I wonder if I would have enjoyed the books better had the cover not set me completely on the wrong path. I know that I would have enjoyed the ending much more than I did.
So, I didn't really like The Girl in A Swing, but it was not so bad that I won't give Adams another shot.
I took a little over a year off from John Grisham (Skipping Grisham?). No reason, in fact, The Chamber--last book of his that I read--was really quite good, and I had heard that The Rainmaker was good as well. I believe that it is Brent's favorite Grisham novel. So I was happy to come back to him (Grisham...not Brent).
I started reading this during the height of the health care "debate." You know: screaming about death panels; calling Obama a communist, fascist, baby-killing, euthanizer, and incorrectly stating that we have the best healthcare system in the world...and that was all just on Sarah Palin's Facebook page. I was surprised to see that the problems with our current healthcare system have were pretty much exactly the same back in 1995, when The Rainmaker was published.
The story is told from the perspective of Rudy Baylor, a law student on the verge of graduating and in desperate search of employment. He is managing only two clients, one of which is the older woman from whom he rents. She is trying to get her estate in order, largely at the behest of her greedy children. Rudy's other client is the Black family. Their adult son, Donnie Ray, was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. Medical intervention could have spared his life, but the Great Benefit Insurance Company denied their claim, preventing Donny Ray from getting a life-saving bone marrow transplant. Rudy and the Blacks decide to take Great Benefit to court and make public what they did.
What really comes across when reading this book is Grisham's disdain for insurance companies. Here is part of an exchange between Rudy and another lawyer regarding the way Great Benefit makes money:
"How many policies are out there?"
"Just under a hundred thousand. If you figure a claim rate of ten percent, that's ten thousand claims a year, about the average for the industry. Let's say they deny, just for the hell of it, half of the claims. Down to five thousand. The average claim is ten thousand dollars. Five thousand times ten thousand is fifty million bucks. And let's say they spend ten million, just a figure from the air, to settle the few lawsuits that pop up. They clear forty million with their little plot, then maybe the next year they start paying the legitimate claims again. Skip a year, go back to the denial routine. Cook up another scheme. They make so damned much money they can afford to screw anybody."
Grisham hinted at this with his Jake Brigance character in A Time to Kill, but it is nowhere close to the utter contempt he shows with The Rainmaker.
While this book is fiction, the story at is core is about as real as it can get. There is something horribly wrong about people making money off of people's illnesses, diseases, or lack thereof. It is worth noting that the dedication of this book reads "To American trial lawyers" not "To tort reform."
I wish I were popular and beautiful and wealthy and talented.
-
My mind possessed the wisdoms of the ages, and there were no words adequate to describe them.
---
Go Ask Alice purports to be the honest-to-goodness real diary of a poor girl who starts off as a sterling, if somewhat shy, student and is gradually drawn deep into a web of drugs, alcohol, illicit sex, and suspiciously aggressive potheads. Of course, once the book became a hit, Beatrice Sparks, a Mormon psychologist and youth counselor, came forward, claiming to be the book's compiler and editor, though not it's actual author who was, of course, Alice. or, well, not really. Actually, Alice is in the book for about 3 sentences, but for simplicity's sake, I'm going to assume the anonymous diarist is named Alice as well.
Anyone who actually reads the book, however, will start suspecting early on that either Alice or Beatrice is making things up as they go along. I could buy that Alice started drinking out of peer pressure and a desire to be cool. I could buy that she started smoking pot for the same reason. I found it harder to believe that she became a voracious addict to LSD after being secretly given a spiked glass of beer. Credulity is stretched to the breaking point, however, after the second time Alice's addict friends break into her house to plant drugs then, later, inject the candy bowl at the neighbor's house with cocaine and call the police. Alice, of course, winds up on the street, alternately transcribing her pathetic sexual escapes and waxing philosophical in ways that your average teenager doesn't. In the last several entries, Alice kicks the habit but then mysteriously dies in a postscript that, presumably, was not part of the original diary.
Later, Dr. Sparks published a series of books, all with the "real-life diary" angle, dealing with a boy who falls into Satanism, a homeless teen, and a knocked-up teen. These, fittingly enough, were shelved under fiction, ensuring that their terribly contrived, retarded, didactic stories will never be taken as seriously as Alice's. Sparks's most recent book? Open and Say Ah: The Story of a Lying Psychologist.
"Alma? I wonder if you could help me..."
Yes, Mr. Siegl.
"Some pages seem to be lost. This writing I've been doing in the dining room. I've looked everywhere, I can't understand how these pages could be lost..."
Desperate he was sounding. Pathetic. Why didn't he summon the Blumenthal woman, needing help?
Alma murmured Yes, she would look.
In her heart laughing at the grown man so stricken by the loss of his precious pages! Like he'd shit his pants when he couldn't find them. Graven images. Those that boast themselves of idols.
It was the Tattooed Girl who had stolen away the pages. Torn them into shreds. Poetry some of it was. And all of it bullshit. Who gave a fuck for what the Jew was scribbling hour after hour, sweating like a pig in a fever? Printed pages in books, who gives a damn for them? If the books added up to anything there would not be so many of them but only a few. The Tattooed Girl had come to think that since becoming Joshua Siegl's assistant that those who practiced such bullshit knew what its true meaning was. Yet the hypocrites prevailed.
Joyce Carol Oates wrote one of my absolute favorite stories of all time, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" but I had never had the occasion to read one of her novels. I ignored the advice of others (I've heard Rape: A Love Story is good but I find it difficult to pick up because of its melodramatic, Lifetime-y premise) and bought this one, because the blurb--Jewish author hires a pretty young assistant, not knowing that she is a virulent anti-Semite--sounded interesting.
It isn't. Or perhaps I'm being too harsh--the problem isn't that it's uninteresting, but rather that it is deeply unappealing. The two main characters are difficult to follow for vastly different reasons: The protagonist, Joshua Siegl, is a writer in his thirties who has recently been diagnosed with a severe neurological disease, and has decided to hire an assistant. He is melancholy, self-loathing, and prone to pretension; with his disease and his glum indolence it is jarring to be reminded that not only is Siegl young, he is widely thought to be handsome. He also enjoys some sort of local celebrity in Rochester, where the novel is set, and is frequently recognized at his favorite restaurant--a fact that recalls to me the way that people used to recognize Kelsey Grammar on Frasier because he was that guy from the radio show. Oates is an author; shouldn't she know that minor writers don't get recognized in restaurants?
In any case, Siegl lacks anything that might approximate a likable characteristic, but worse is the girl he eventually hires to be his assistant, Alma. He passes over many well-educated male candidates because none seems perfect enough, but he is taken by Alma for some reason, and seeing her working at a local bookstore hires her on the spot.
It may be because she is beautiful, but though many men lust after Alma, Oates' physical descriptions of her tend to be vaguely nauseating, her "big beautiful white breasts like bags of warm milk," her "white mollusc-body heaving and bucking." And it isn't because of her intelligence, either, because Oates takes pains to point out that Alma is as dumb as aforementioned mollusc:
Though words sometimes puzzled Alma, she never looked up any word in any dictionary; a word was like a pebble to be turned briefly in the hand, and tossed away, with no expectation that it would be encountered again.
"
Love is ridiculous."
The Tale of Despereaux is a modern-day fairy tale. In fact, one might even suspect Kate DiCamillo of attempting to add her tale to the children' canon. After all, all the ingredients are here: an anthropomorphic rodent protagonist, an antagonist who eventually sees the light, a second antagonist who gets what's coming to him, the magic of courage/love, soup, and, of course, a beautiful princess.
The thing is, the truth of the tale is in the telling. If DiCamillo didn't write so openly and so enthusiastically, it would be easy to feel cynical. But honestly, this tale of the one brave mouse and how he eventually saves everyone didn't feel contrived to me at all. It almost feels like a love letter to the classics, albeit a letter without horrible recompense as a postscript.
The movie is pretty good too, unless you're Chris and have a crippling fear of computer-generated rodents.
