Inbetween Book: The Shadow of the Wind

Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind is described in the NYT Book Review as "Gabriel Garcia Matquez meets Umberto Eco's meets Jorge Luis Borges". That is high praise -- those authors set pretty high water marks. But to my mind, The Shadow of the Wind, while enjoyable, does not belong to that class of work. A comparison to Dickens is truer especially considering the eccentric characters, background of civil war and Zafon's vivid descriptions of character and setting. Especially nice is his treatment of the narrow streets and bookstores in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona.

Zafon gives us a look at fascist Spain through the naive eyes of a teenage boy named Daniel and through the stories of other characters who have been on the receiving end of the fascist tyranny in Spain.

It's a book of suspense, dense and mysterious. There are numerous plot twists and two intersecting parallel stories. One story, shrouded in mystery, takes us on a journey through Spain's political landscape of the 40s and 50s as we learn of a brilliant, missing author, Julian Carax, whose books are being systematically destroyed. The other is Daniel's story detailing his coming-of-age, his discovery of the author, Carax, and Daniel's attempts to unravel the details surrounding Carax's disappearance. 

Young Daniel is obsessed and entangled by things that are out of his league. He falls for a woman 10 years his senior and is shattered when he discovers her with a lover. Upon leaving, he shares a bottle of wine with a loquacious, half-crazy homeless man, Fermin, who just happens to be a former secret service man under the old regime. They become fast friends when Fermin decides to help solve the puzzle of Julian Carax. The combination of the naive teen and the bungling, clown-like Fermin is both very funny and troubling as they inadvertently save and destroy lives while trying to satisfy their own curiosity. 

It's an ambitious tale but Zafon makes it work. In the last sections he neatly ties up the loose ends, leaving the reader free to mull over the book's themes.

The first third of The Shadow of the Wind is stunning with vivid descriptions of Gothic Barcelona and a trip to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. The middle third of the book is less enjoyable -- a bit of a slog even -- as the story focuses on teenage angst. Once through that, the plot moves faster with plot surprises galore. 

There are a number of interesting themes in the parallel stories and in the characters, and watching the themes gel through the plot twists is fun. The book could have used a bit more editing in that there are a number of repeated ideas and even a few repeated phrases. But it's a good book. I recommend it to those who like who like slow unfolding stories with lots of suspense. 486 pages.

The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

It's been only five weeks since I finished Eugenides book, Middlesex, and already I am longing for more of his work. There is something quite familiar about his books - not surprising really since they take place in my hometown, Detroit. But the style feels very comfortable, as if I had heard Eugenides reading his short stories in my high school English class and now get a chance to read the expanded version.

How does one write a book about 5 sisters who commit suicide without making it morose or ugly. If you are Eugenides, you tell it from the viewpoint of the neighborhood boys who worship those girls from afar. It is easy to picture these sweet boys, each in love with one or more of the pretty sisters who live across the street. Each boy happy to be invited to the only party those girls ever throw and devastated to see the youngest drop to her death at  age 13, impaling herself on the metal fence in the backyard.

With one dead, those boys still have four girls to admire and to worry about. And worry they do. The girls are not let out of the house except to go to school. The boys wonder: How are they holding up after the suicide? Are they happy? How do they entertain themselves at home day after day?

When the school's heart-throb appeals to the parents to let the sisters go to the prom, their mother makes them shapeless, high-necked dresses. The sweet boys note that the girls look great anyway and appear to have a good time. But the outing is spoiled. The youngest sister gets drunk, comes home two hours after curfew resulting in the parents pulling them out of school, leaving the sweet boys to while away the hours over games of pool and baseball thinking about how to get the sisters from their captivity. We share the boys' curiosity as they look at the girls with noses pressed to the glass, or fondle a treasured object (a diary, a bra, high-top sneakers) retrieved from the family's trash and, years later, mull over interviews with parents and neighbors.

The boys never determine exactly why the girls commit suicide, but with the trail of breadcrumbs Eugenides leaves us, we can make a very good guess. Eugenides succeeds wonderfully in bringing alive a book on death. It's a sweet, dark book that is not easily forgotten.

Bel Canto

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett.

Background: The story is based on the Lima Crisis of 1996 in which high profile businessmen and government leaders were held captive for six months. Bel Canto adds in the element of opera with the addition of a soprano added to the list of hostages.

Non-Spoiler Summary: In an attempt to attract new industry, a small South American country gives a birthday party for the Japanese CEO of the world's largest electronics company and invites his favorite opera singer - the world's greatest soprano to sing for him. 192 high profile guests arrive at the vice-presidential mansion for dinner and music. The country's president skips the event claiming he needs to work. In fact, he refuses to go because the party is on a Tuesday - the same day that his favorite soap opera is televised. (The whole country stops for this particular soap). The terrorists invade the party planning to kidnap the president and take him to the jungle while they negotiate their demands. But they are completely at a loss when they discover that he is not present. Without a plan B, they decide to stay-put with the guests and use them as hostages.Being rational (as opposed to violent) terrorists, they do not kill their hostages and a stalemate ensues. The story plays out over several months. Hostages and terrorists live in peace and even become friends. But the situation cannot last, and the explosive ending (revealed early on) changes everyone's life forever.

Reading Experience: Fascinating book. It's a well told, gripping story. This felt like a woman's rendition of a hostage crisis, making it more accessible to me. But I'm not sure that the typical male reader (my husband, for example!) would find it as entertaining. 316 pages.

White Noise

I am traveling a lot these days which means that I have a lot of time to read on planes and in hotels, but not much time to write up my thoughts. So I am moving to a simpler format. 

White Noise  by Don DeLillo is a post-modern exploration of American cultural underpinnings: What is around us, what drives us, how do we handle the sounds, scents and visuals that intrude into our space and most important, how do we handle death and our fear of it.

Non-Spoiler Summary:  The story follows a patchwork family: Jack, Babette and their kids from multiple marriages including six year old Wilder who is cognitively impaired. Jack is the department chair at a private liberal arts college and runs the country's most successful Hitler studies program. He has created a persona for himself by wearing dark glasses and copping an attitude when he teaches. At home, he is an average guy and a congenial father and husband. Babette teaches, volunteers and cares for the family. She has a big secret that she is hiding (and, it turns out, other bigger secrets, too). Everyone knows this, but no one can pry them loose from her.

Jack and Babette are both crazy-fearful of death - each afraid to die, but more afraid of being the last one alive. The plot explores the fear of death theme in a myriad ways including Jack and Babbette's denial, angst and rash decisions. When an "airborne toxic event" occurs within view of the family home, Jack and Babette deny the toxic event's danger saying that these sorts of things happen only to the under-privileged - which they are not - and so there is nothing to worry about. (Their children, meanwhile, keep up with radio reports and pack up the car.)

Jack becomes good friends with Murray, a visiting professor of cultural studies, who formally observes, writes notes and then deconstructs everything around him: children playing, people watching TV, a carton of broken eggs on a supermarket aisle floor, and, yes, the way people react to death. It is Murray, in an oracle's role, who provides most of the book's meta-insights.

Once beyond the airborne toxic event, Jack's obsession with death reaches over-the-top proportions and the plot comes along for the ride. I never-ever would have guessed the plot turns. I'm not sure that I care for them, either. Stepping back from the book, it's almost cartoon-ish in nature. Up close, I found it annoying, but truthfully, it works in this post-modern, meta-novel.

Style:  DeLillo shows more interest in his musings and meta-dialogs than in the plot. White Noise's matter-of-fact style reminds me of Camus: there is little emotional content, scant descriptions of people or scenery and no sub-plots to confuse the issue. DeLillo surfaces a few times in the middle of a paragraph to inform the reader that in keeping with post-modern traditions he will fore-go creating a new plot angle or that he will not bother to describe the vivid hues of a fabulous sunset. This all has the effect of keeping the reader at arm's distance from the story and makes for a  reading experience more akin to reading a newspaper: one watches characters rather than empathizing with them as they confront huge challenges. Did I mention that it is a parody of modern culture? Very clever, though it gets old.

Reading Experience: I truly enjoyed the first 200 pages or so. I became annoyed with the characters and plot thereafter. But in the end, I'm glad to have read it - and have enjoyed mulling it over. This is a good book for group exploration - which mean a class because very few book clubs are going to take this one on.

Gearing up for White Noise (and Next)

The little I know about White Noise by Don DeLillo comes from the book cover and the first few pages. I see a preoccupation with death in the text and there appears to be radiation or something like it in the picture on the cover. The writing draws me in.

I have been looking forward to reading White Noise for about 6 months. I've put it off because it's a post-modern book, and that made me suspect that I would need a clear head (i.e. no work projects screaming to be done) to do it justice. So as I'm cooking the Thanksgiving dinner, I plan to read the short chapters and enjoy the spaces in-between. No disgusting sexuality as in Lolita and Naked Lunch. No creepy babies or settings as in Beloved or Never Let Me Go (much as I loved both). No cryptic stream-of-consciousness as in The Sound and the Fury. Just a solid exercise in great reading. This book won the National Book Award, and DeLillo was a Pulitzer prize finalist for two other books.

Next, by James Hines

For some reason, the first few pages of White Noise remind me of a book by James Hines called Next. It is about a man living in Ann Arbor, who in a panic when he suspects his girlfriend is pregnant, decides to drastically change his life. One morning he secretly flies to Austin to apply for a job. Arriving early, he spends a few hours following a pretty woman around town as she runs errands. (She's in on the game). As he fantasizes about being with her he relives key moments in his life - especially his love life. His anxiety increases with his reminiscences and as a result his morning becomes more eventful, but he survives it intact and arrives for his interview on time. The book leads up to a big twist and so I'll stop here. Loved the book. I chewed on it for a few weeks afterward - which is my idea of a what good book should do.

What is it about White Noise that reminds me of Next? There is a sense of calm before the storm. Here's to a Happy Thanksgiving and to some relaxing reading time!

Inbetween Book: The Lace Reader

This Sunday, after a rough work week, I laid on the couch and inhaled The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry. It's a suspense/mystery story with some big twists. The plot has a number of similarities to Beloved although it is not in any way to be mistaken for that great book.

The story takes place in Salem, MA, against a backdrop of tourists visiting modern-day witches while a (Christian) cultist sect exorcises demons. The mystery involves two missing women who are connected to the head of the cult. The main character, Towner, is the great niece of one of those women and the niece of the cult leader. She and her family are psychic and able to see the future in patterns of hand made lace - kindof a fancy crystal ball.We are thrown in and out of psychic phenomenon as Towner tries to understand her dreams and elements of her past and future. The mysteries themselves do some shape-shifting which keep the reader on his-or-her toes. And there is a handsome detective to lend the story some romantic interest.

The Lace Reader is a solid read. I never looked to see how far along I'd gotten (are we there, yet?). I spent time at the end rereading earlier parts to make the mystery's dots connect. They all connected. Another great pallet cleanser after a few hard-to-read Time 100 books.

Lolita - Banning Vs Condoning

Today I got the energy to finish Lolita. A few months ago when I read most of the book, I used the following ploy: I started at the beginning and read until it got disgusting. Then I moved to the last page and read sections backwards until I hit the end of the disgusting part in the middle. I thought I'd missed 20 pages, but the disgusting part was much longer than that. It was also a lot more than disgusting. But I'll get to that.

Before today, I honestly did not know what the middle part contained. When I stopped reading, Humbert Humbert had attempted to drug 12-year-old Lolita to sleep and had joined her in bed expecting to "take advantage" of her as she slept. But she kept waking up. I stopped here and turned to the last pages where he is about to be executed for murdering a man. Safe enough, I turned back further towards the middle... Humbert and Lolita meet when she is older (17?)and she tells him that he ruined her life. She is engaged, pregnant and broke and needs money. He gives her some. I read all of that, and stopped there.

I put the book down - thankfully in the dark - about what may or may not have happened in those middle pages. I noted that Humbart was a fool, that the writing was spectacular, but the material was questionable at best. Several people on a blog I follow mentioned that nothing much happens in that middle section. So I figured that Lolita made a cuckold of Humbert and scampered away unscathed. Today I discovered that "nothing much happens" means that the sex is not explicit, that is, it's not hard-core pornography. Nabokov does, in fact, write about enough details to make scenes come alive.

What a surprise. The nothing much in the middle includes him seducing her (this is statutory rape) on the morning of the sleeping pill and implying that this thirteen year old was fair game because she had had sex with a boy at summer camp. This scene was followed by a year of raping her all across the country. He cajoled her, threatened her and sometimes simply raped her. He paid her money to do "special favors" for him. And then, worried that she might use the money to run away, stole the it back from her.

Whoa.

Academically, this book may be a jewel. Nabakov poured his heart into it. I can see that. It is a treasure of wit and prose. But why would anyone recommend that the general public read it? Why would critics put it on the best-books lists? This is prurient material about children. We should not be recommending prurient material about children to the general public (or our best friends, either!). It even appears on the Radcliffe 100 best books. This is a perverse book in which horrible things happen to a beautiful, pubescent girl. Let's not glamorize this as great literature to be read by all. I don't want us to become so jaded that a book like Lolita doesn't make us squeamish any more.

One critic argued that the book is not erotic because the sexually suggestive material in the first three chapters becomes boring  and so the reader is not aroused by the later material. I am not sure if this commentator reads a lot of pornography and so found Lolita boring or if he keeps his genitals buttoned up very tight and is therefore not affected. My guess is that if it were not erotic - even slightly - it would not have sold 100,000 copies in three weeks.

Others say that Nabokov distances himself from Humbert at the end of the book and makes it clear that Humbert's behavior is despicable. What that says at best is that Nabokov is redeemed at the end, not that Humbert is. Humbert never sees himself for the monster that he is. A large amount of sexually titillating material about a child has been read by the time the reader reaches the end. It's a bit late by then to be distancing oneself.

I am not a prude. I am simply noting that this book about a foolish pedophile has prurient material about a child and we should not put it on our best-books lists. I think that someone has missed the difference between objecting to censorship (which I do) and condoning a sexual book about children (which I don't).

I did not finish reading the book. I won't bother. I hope you don't either.

Truman Capote

Our local book club is reading the trio of holiday stories written by Truman Capote. I found two of the stories each in their own book at the library. But one of them, A Christmas Memory was also part of a collection that included Breakfast at Tiffany's. I had forgotten that Capote had written it. I couldn't resist.

Have I ever read Capote before? Surely I must have. I can almost remember the well-shaped sentences and honey-like descriptions in the holiday stories. But I never read Breakfast at Tiffany's and in fact, barely remembered that Capote had written it. What a delight. The book has all of the same gay, madcap fun and underlying sorrow as the movie. Capote's Holly Golightly is absolute kin to Audrey Hepburn's portrayal of her. But the similarity ends there, the movie was Hollywood-ized and tells a different story. Capote was the master of the "and then he/she went away and I never saw him/her again" ending. And Hollywood? Well you know that the guy gets the girl.

Which is better? I loved them both. Who can resist Audrey Heburn's charm. Who can resist Truman Capote's prose.

Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart is the most widely read novel in Africa. Written by Nigerian national, Chinua Achebe, it details tribal life of a small village both before and during colonization. We see the world through the eyes of yam farmer, warrior and wrestling legend, Okonkwo, a short-tempered, perfectionist with little sympathy for his drunkard father or his sensitive son. Okonkwo is by current-day descriptions, a brute, but he is prosperous and well-respected in his village. He lives a happy life for many years before things begin to fall apart - first within his life in the village and later for the village as a whole as white missionaries and the colonialist government that follows change village cultural ways forever.

Prior to the arrival of the white colonialists, Okonkwo accidentally kills a man during a sacred ritual and is forced out of his village for seven years. He and his three wives and children find refuge in the village of his mother and receive little news from his home village. When he returns, he sees that his people have learned to live peacefully, if not happily, with white (and black) newcomers even to the degree of tolerating a new missionary church and its rituals. But Okonkwo is not adept at negotiating this sort of change. He thinks of his fellow-tribesmen as "soft women" for not fighting the white men. Conflicts arise and tragedy ensues.

Sound like a typical Greek Tragedy? It is. Likewise, it is a classic tale of conflicting cultures.The book is written straight-up and we learn many of the intricacies of life in the Lgbo tribe: the day-to-day events, rites, cultural values and taboos. Achebe writes of a life that existed in the 1890s - around the time his father was growing up. Achebe himself converted to Christianity as a young man and so he sees both sides with a clarity that would be hard to reproduce by a younger writer. The book is chock-full of short folk tales, adages and explanations for the natural world. Here is an example:

When the moon rose late in the night, people said it was refusing food, as a sullen husband refuses his wife's food when they have quarreled.

The matter-of-fact writing prevents it from being a page-turning read, but it's a book one is glad to have read.

Beloved

I made it through Toni Morrison's, Beloved. Whew, what a scary tale! It is a dense story with multiple layers: the historical tale of slavery, the story of a powerful, vengeful ghost with a sad, sad history, and the interesting human story of an extended family who lived through it all.The book opens with a poltergeist shaking the house. Add to that, the dread of the unfolding, brutal story of the characters' escape from slavery and it becomes a book that's both hard to read and hard to put down. In terms of mood, I was reminded occasionally of Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson, which is quite eerie and is populated with characters that evaporate if you look at them too hard. But Housekeeping lacks the powerful storyline of Beloved which gives us a potent history lesson in slavery: how slaves were treated, what it took for them to get away, and what getting away meant.

The writing is dense and sometimes purposefully choppy. I got used to it after about 50 pages, but sections toward the end of the book required 2-3 readings just to make sense of the words. There are 3-4 chapters with stream-of-consciousness writing that hover between poetry and obscurity. Here is a sample:

Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile   her smiling face is the place for me     it is the face I lost   she is my face smiling at me   doing it at last    a hot thing   now we can join   a hot thing

Characterization is fabulous and in 3-D. You can see the characters clearly and understand what drives them. I did not guess how the story would unfold or how it would end, and so it kept me enthralled (while it scared me). I'm not big on scary or creepy books, but Beloved is an amazing book that is worth the effort of the reading.

Never Let Me Go

I surprised myself when I picked up Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro to take on a recent trip. It was a great choice. I read it in a day and digested it in the days that followed. It's a "chewy" book - a startling, sad tale that makes you think of times yet to play out for humankind. The tale speaks of an alternate world in which questionable, ethical decisions have been made that affect thousands of young people in England. The book holds its own on the bookshelf of great futuristic books such as 1984 and Brave New World.  Newsweek called it the best book of the decade. It is the most recently published book on the Time 100 list.

Never Let Me Go is a complex tale and Ishiguro is a master of weaving multiple time periods into a cogent whole. We follow Kathy H., a 31 year old "carer", as she drives around the countryside visiting her clients and reminiscing about her life and her friends and muses on the special fate that she and her friends were prepared for.

Everything else that I say about the book is going to be a spoiler, so if you have not read it, please do so - it is literally a great book.

**SPOILERS FOLLOW***

You can read a good plot summary and some related material on Book Drum. Below is my commentary on the book.

Kathy H. and her friends are clones who are raised solely to provide organs for "real" humans with cancer. The book looks at the issue of cloning humans as a way to grow organs, just as one would grow crops. Clones in this world are typically raised in warehouse-like settings, but Kathy H. and her friends have had better treatment at a boarding school that teaches them the arts and encourages them to showcase their creative talents. Ishiguro lets the story about the group of friends and their teachers play out, and is not overly-focused on the ethical issues surrounding cloning until the end of the book where he shares a few details of the program. Ishiguro instead looks at the sorrow of the cloned beings who give their lives in service and the ways in which they come to terms with their limited lives.

It is indeed a sad book. The student/protagonists have no parents and no friends outside of their community. Adults in their lives, even those championing them, find them repulsive. Once the students are in their early twenties, they become carers who help other slightly older clones recover from a series of surgeries to remove organs. They watch these same people die at a young age once their organs are harvested. We watch Kathy H. care for her best friend, Ruth, and her lover, Tommy, as they proceed along their fated paths.

Is there a way out? In their 2-3 years of freedom after school, the students learn of others before them who have disappeared into the world of humans and thus avoided the role of carer and donor. Kathy H. and her friends, now adults, whisper about this, but they never consider running themselves. Ishiguro leaves us to infer that it would be out of character for them to go. They are deep into their own social world and they have been systematically indoctrinated into their roles, like kidnapped children, who are sympathetic to and obedient to their kidnappers.

What Kathy H. and Tommy attempt to get instead is a stay of leave. They request a few extra years time to spend together before they meet their fates. However, there is no room in the clone organ-harvest system for this kind of leeway. It is during this part of the tale that Ishiguro gives us the few details about the cloning program that he is willing to share as he wraps up a lot of small plot details.

Ishiguro said in an interview that he used the cloning theme as a medium to explore the relationships of a group of young people who were fated to die young. His concern was the relationships of the characters not the scientific or sociological underpinnings of cloning.

And so we are left hanging with questions about the history, politics and ethics of cloning. We do not know to what degree the clones were genetically modified. Were they created as a new species? Who were they cloned from and how were those people selected? Did those who were cloned belong to wealthy families who want to have organs available for their use should they need them? We are also not given details about the warehousing of clone children or of the political struggle to give them better lives. What is the public debate? How does the public manage to ignore the beings who are raised to be donors?

I miss these details, but it is not a lesser book without them. The intimate look at Kathy H, Ruth and Tommy is all the story we need. The writing is superb, the story rich and haunting. It has what feels like a timeless appeal even though, like 1984, it's alternate view of the future is unlikely to play out.

Reading Beloved

I just hit the 100-page mark in Toni Morrison's, Beloved. Had I written this post last night where I left off at page 86, I would have started out with something like, "What a creepy book." In fact, I went up to bed last night hoping not to have ghost-mares. But today the sun was out and the ghosts were at peace as I read daughter, Denver's, heart-warming - or as heart warming as this book is going to get - telling of her own birth story in a boat on the Ohio River.

I'm not the first to say that this book is not at all what you expect from a story of run-away slaves. Not at all. There is a ghost who haunts the house that our heroes live in. They are mostly okay with the ghost, even though it does things like put baby hand prints into birthday cakes. It's certainly a convenient way for three women to live alone without anyone bothering them.

It took a bit of work to get the hang of Morrison's writing style. It's rough. You have to chew on sentences, climb through them. Me, I prefer to chew on the whole book, not a sentence. (That, by the way, is kind-of how she writes.) She moves from past to present without a lot of notice - the reader has to take care to not get tripped up. Morrison's style is quite a contrast to the smooth flowing prose in the last two books I read, Eugenide's, Middlesex and Ishiguro's, Never Let Me Go. Both of these weave the past and present fairly seamlessly. But although both of those tales take on difficult topics, nothing can compare to the outright horror the characters in Beloved have lived through. Rough prose makes sense in that context.

The book is a short 300+ pages long - it reads quickly once you get the hang of it. The good news is that I didn't have any ghost-mares last night, so I can read this as late in the evening as I choose to. Morrison has me hooked wondering why all of this ghost-business is happening and where this tale is going.

By the way, I still plan to write up my thoughts on Never Let Me Go at some point. That book has not yet let me go, and I'm not quite ready to commit my thoughts to the blog entry.

Getting a Tour of My Home Town in Middlesex

What a delight for me as a reader: A Pulitzer Prize winning book set in my hometown, Detroit. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides is a fabulous tour of the place I knew as a child and young adult. This tour comes along for the ride as part of a grand tale about finding and accepting one's identity.

The narrator of the book, Cal, is feeling a rebirth coming one. It will be his third birth. The second one occurred at the age of 14 when he discovered that he was not really a girl. Cal is hoping that this third birth will help him come to terms with his unique hermaphroditic self and clear the way for him to have a successful relationship with a women. And good news, that woman just showed up.

This three-generation tale begins with protagonist Cal/Callie's grandparents surviving the burning of Smyrna on the shifting Greco-Turkish border. The grandparents are brother and sister but unaware of the genetics that cause strange mutations to occur in close-blood relationships, they marry and have children. Fast forward twenty years to Detroit, their daughter marries her second cousin and the recessive gene for a hermaphroditic condition comes alive in their second-born child, Callie. The doctor that delivers Callie has poor vision and poor instincts and so no one knows that Callie is not built like other girls.

Eugenides takes his time telling the tale starting in grandparents' village on Mt. Olympus to their escape from burning Smyrna and journey to US, landing as all immigrants do in Ellis Island. We learn about what an immigrant family must do to stay alive during the depression and how prohibition was the right ingredient for a certain small business to thrive. He takes us into the fifties and sixties as a family restaurant comes alive and then is burned to the ground in the Detroit riots. We watch young Callie grow up unaware of her condition, first in historic Indian Village in Detroit and then in upper class Gross Pointe where she watches her friends bloom into beautiful young girls. As Callie's voice gets lower and her body grows tall but remains free of curves, she begins to wonder about herself. She becomes especially worried when she feels the all-too-physical pangs of love for her best friend. An accident lands her in the emergency room, where a surprised doctor sees what no one else before him has seen - that Callie is actually a boy. The reader, who has known  this for 400 pages finally takes a breath.

The last 150 pages of the book describe the weeks and months after the fateful day in the emergency room. Callie takes it upon herself to make the necessary transitions to become Cal without the intervention of parents or doctors by running away to California. He first hooks up with teenage Dead-heads, then makes a living as a freak in a burlesque show. This second birthing lasts about 5 months. Cal is busted and sent home, where he assumes his role of second son in the family. Eugenides' tale ends here. We are spared scenes depicting the taunts of Cal's classmates which he tossed away with a line on page 1. We are also spared the anguish of his young adult years as he unsuccessfully tries to create relationships with women. But we do get glimmers of the third birthing at the beginning of each chapter and share his hope that this birth is a keeper.

Some are calling this a Great American novel ala Huckleberry Finn. One can make a good case for that with the novel's deep look at ethnicity, race relationships, incest and gender identity. Through Cal's family's eyes, we witness the depression, the race riots, the Vietnam War and the hippie era in California. The book's breadth is huge.

I read Middlesex as a breather book between heady Time 100 books. It has done its job and "wiped the palate" clean after my reading Never Let Me Go and watching the film Naked Lunch. I am now ready to pick up Beloved. But I don't mean to imply that Middlesex is a light book. It is a full, ripe novel that, like Ragtime, is a big treat to read.

Filming Burroughs

Years ago I saw a tantalizing scene from the movie, Naked Lunch, in which a typewriter turned into a giant cockroach spouted off a stream of paranoiac drivel. It was so bizarre as to be laugh-out-loud funny. Earlier that evening, I had turned down the chance to see the whole movie because I was "not going to suffer through more William S. Burroughs, thank you". But this movie was nothing like Burroughs' books. That scene stuck with me and after 20-some years I finally watched this incredible film in its entirety last night.

The film is only loosely based on the book; its true subject is Burroughs himself. Naked Lunch, the film, tells the story of a bug exterminator named William Lee who comes home one day to find his wife "shooting up" bug juice and having a party with his friends. He is a sharp-shooter and often plays William Tell by shooting a glass off his wife's head. He decides to do so this day, and this time, tragically, he misses. She dies from a shot to the head.

Lee flees with his typewriter to Interzone (his drug-induced experience of Algiers). While in his drugged haze, he writes "reports" about the people he meets in Interzone (mostly gay men) and of the paranoiac hallucinations he's experiencing. He stores these reports in his room and mails copies to his friends in the USA (reference Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac), along with pleas for them to join him in Interzone.

Lee does not remember writing these letters and so is surprised when his friends show up. In fact, they have been "blown away" by the writing and have found a publisher for his work. The friends have come to help Lee arrange and edit the pieces (his reports) for publication as the book, Naked Lunch. Lee sobers up for the work. They leave him to complete the writing, and although he falls back into his drug habit (opium this time), he finishes the job and eventually leaves Interzone, but only after having made peace with himself about his wife and about his sexuality.

Screenwriter/director David Cronenberg is working on a lot of levels. One can think of the movie straight-up as a biography of William Burroughs. In fact, a more accurate description includes a number of paranoid hallucinatory scenes including anthropomorphic representations of opium (and people sucking juice from these creatures) and the aforementioned typewriter-turned-cockroach that gives secret-agent Lee assignments to visit certain individuals and write reports based on his findings. Lee does in fact go on these assignments and in this way manages to get out of his room and interact with people in Interzone. By the way, the "reports" are actually the vignettes that become Naked Lunch (the book). Lots of self-referencing here. This is a complex movie that, while not being in any way true to the book, provides a rich film experience.

William Burroughs wrote that it was Joan's death that freed his voice for writing. Look at what came out: searing satire about homosexuals in power who call the shots in the world they live in. Burroughs was a gay man during a time when it was not only frowned upon to be gay, but illegal. He married (as did his friend in Algiers, Paul Bowles - Sheltering Sky) as a way of living a normal life and perhaps providing a cover for his homosexuality.

Burroughs' genius - and it is true genius - is forced into a sometimes passive-aggressive stream of sexual-political consciousness. The prose in his books is raw. The rants are unforgiving. The content of his books is just too hot for film, and so the film of the same name instead tells the story of the blocked writer, Burroughs, who finds his writing voice after shooting his wife. The vignettes of the book are only occasionally reproduced in the film. One is a story recited by Burroughs to the powerful, evil industrialist, A. J.; another is a scene in the aviary at A.J.'s house. Both instances produce a shocking effet in the film but are, in fact, tame examples of the stories in the book.

While I found the book challenging to get through, the movie was accessible to me in its own bizarre way- and even enjoyable -- I laughed out loud a number of times. The movie's noir style works completely. Acting is fabulous, the sets even more so. The setting for the opium den at the end of the film is true genius.

A movie like this obviously has a very limited audience. It is an art movie and so begs to be forgiven for the crude material in the hallucinations. If you are a fan of beat literature, you will find this film fascinating. But a warning to the squeamish there is a typewriter who turns into a bug who talks through his anus. Oh my.

The Lite Read Between the Heavy Reads

Reading one heavy book after another takes its toll on the brain, so I look for books to "cleanse the palate" before I pick up the next Time 100 book.

I'm finding a lot of relief in books of my generation that I eschewed in the past. Tom Robbins's books, for example. I truly do love all of his word games and bad poetry. Meet me in Cognito, Honey. Oh, yes, let's do that. Such a riot!

This past week after three "thinkers" in a row: The Sound and the Fury, The Sun Also Rises and The Moviegoer, I took a "trip" back in time to the 1960s and The Electric Koolaid Acid Test. Tom Wolfe created an incredible history of the antics of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. He was there when Kesey was released from jail and interviewed Kesey and many of the Pranksters including beat-generation hero, Neal Cassidy. Great read! (Or should I say, Great skim!)

I am also finding relief in reading light, feminine books that balance the heavy, male-dominant Time 100 list. Chocalat and Julie & Julia fit the bill here, but I get bored with them quickly. I go for meatier books like The Book Thief and City of Thieves. I picked up Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides last night and am loving it so far. The mind glides across his prose like a skater on ice. Lovely.

So what's the next Time 100 book up? I'm still mulling it over. I sampled Delilo's White Noise last night and it looks very good. But I am expecting the 1st  book of the Powell series, A Dance to the Music of Time, in the mail any day and am anxious to get that started. So stay tuned ....

The Movie Goer

Walker Percy: The Moviegoer 1961

This is a second-read for me. I don't recall anything about the first reading except that I was enamored with the book. That was 25 years ago. Today I'm not quite sure what I saw in it. But since it is a kind-of coming-of-age book for a 30 year old, it makes sense that it would no longer appeal to me. There are definite parallels to Catcher in the Rye - but with somewhat older characters.

The story takes place during mardi gras in New Orleans.The main character, Binx Bolling, is good at making money but is often clueless about how to act with people. In fact, he hasn't figured himself out yet. He deplores leading a typical upper-middle class life because it feels dead and so decides to live apart from friends and family and go on a search to understand Meaning (with a capital M) and perhaps God -- but God without religion. Unfortunately, his hormones keep kicking in and he doesn't get very far with the search. Instead, he chases skirts (this is 1961), goes to the beach and plays the role of obedient nephew to his very successful, very wealthy, and very social aunt and uncle. We're talking Kings and Queens of important mardi gras krewes, here.

Binx's cousin, Kate, is having big, big psychological problems, and Binx tries to help her stay grounded. From our modern eyes she appears to have social phobia along with a poor sense of self. She is seeing a therapist, but is so fragile that one wishes that she had access to our modern pharmacopeia. Kate is complex: at times fragile, even psychotic; other times she seems strong and insightful. Binx has his work cut out keeping her from flipping out, but he doesn't seem to mind. The book moves along without much plot activity other than these things until Binx and Kate take a trip to Chicago where it all begins to both fall apart and come together.

Percy has a way of pacing events so that the story never bogs down. Binx's first person narrative - like that of Holden Caufield's in Catcher in the Rye - gives a delightfully cock-eyed view of his world and of the other characters. Binx has more skill with reading people than he or his family give him credit for and the reader benefits from this. The story's resolution is surprising, producing a situation for each Binx and Kate that, to me, seems shaky even though Percy seems content with it.

As I said, I wasn't crazy about the book this time around, but it brings up issues of meaning, religion, family and neuroticism that a younger reader will probably find illuminating.

The Sun Also Rises

--- Spoilers included ---
Hemingway's, The Sun Also Rises is a simple book: The characters chat, drink, fish, drink, chat, watch bull fights, chat, fight, drink ... and have a lot of sex, too. This is the Lost Generation, the men and women who came back from WWI are unable to find their way through life in America and so instead become the ex-patriots who frequent the salons and cafes in Paris.

Although this is a sad story, Hemingway's choice of title indicates his belief that each day brings a fresh start. Portions of the story are autobiographical - Hemingway lived and loved this fast life as an ex-pat in Paris. His friend, Gertrude Stein coined the term "Lost Generation".

The book is an easy read. The writing is a mix of true-to-life descriptions of fish jumping and bulls running along with inane conversations that give witness to the characters' superficial lives.

The protagonist, is Jake, a young man now sexually impotent due to a  freak accident in the war. He works as a journalist and hangs out in the cafes of Paris with a few war buddies and a lively crowd of aristocrats, artists and writers. The characters live a false, fast-paced life, with drink and sex as covers for deep wounds, presumably left over from an ugly war. Even Jake, who is okay with his groin injury, has bouts of drinking to cover his heart wounds from an on-again, off-again relationship with Brett, a sexy, beautiful divorcee. Brett is a sex addict and so unable to settle with Jake in his injured state. Which is probably a good thing for him because Brett is bad news. She is not only engaged to an alcoholic named Mike, but has affairs with every man who grabs her attention.

Jake is a serious fan of the bull fights in Pamplona and has planned a fishing trip to Spain followed by a week at the bull fights with a friend visiting from New York. Jake's knowledge of the bull fighters and bulls has given him an "in" with the hotelier who puts up the bull fighters and the hotelier arranges for rooms for Jake and his friends. The expectation is that the friends will take up Jake's passion for the fights. However, a recent affair between Brett and a sensitive Jewish writer named Robert (who was a mid-weight boxer in college) colors the scene. When Bret and Mike arrive in Pamplona, Robert is with them, unable to let go of Brett.

Mike pointedly tells Robert to leave. But Robert is too much in love to see that he is unwelcome. The scenes get ugly as the characters turn to heavy drinking. But it gets uglier yet when Brett falls for the star bull fighter and with Jake's help succeeds in meeting him then seducing him. To Mike, this is just another day in the life of being Brett's finance', but Robert becomes unglued and begins messing up faces including the bull fighter's. Robert finally leaves town in shame and sorrow on the last day of the festival. The bull fighting community including the hotelier are outraged at all of this and further incensed when, after the bull fights, they learn that Brett has run off to Madrid with the bull fighter. Jake and his friends are no longer welcome in Pamploma. Mike returns to Scotland, the friend to New York and Jake tells everyone that he will finish his vacation fishing near the French/Spanish border. In truth, he stays in that area in order to be ready for the inevitable call for rescue from Brett once she has had her fill of the handsome bull fighter.

After being rescued, as Brett comes to terms with the drama she has created and decides to return to Mike, she says to Jake, "You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. .. It's sort of what we have instead of God." To which Jake replies, "Some people have God. Quite a lot." Brett replies, "He never worked well with me." And Jake: "Should we have another martini?"

Yes! Lets have another martini. The last 5 bottles of wine were not quite enough to cover these wounds. The story ends with Jake and Brett in a cafe in Madrid imaging the "pretty" life they could have had together.

The Sound and the Fury

When I was in my 20s, Faulkner's, As I Lay Dying was one of my favorite books. I loved the stream-of-conscious writing, and the way that Faulkner used it to penetrate the beings of his characters. A short book, it was dense and cryptic, but penetrable. The Sound and the Fury takes stream-of-consciousness writing up a magnitude in difficulty. It begins with 75 pages of thoughts and flashbacks of Benji, a cognitively impaired (presumably, autistic), 33 year old man. It is a bear to get through. After critical uproar about the book's difficulty, Faulkner put an appendix (with lots of spoilers) at the end of the book and encouraged readers to read it first. Readers are optionally advised to consult a reader's guide which helps to decipher the story even as it gives spoilers.

The story is that of the Comspon family: Jason and Caroline, their four children, Quentin, Caddy, Benji, young Jason and Caddy's daughter, also named Quentin. Other major characters include their black housekeeper, Dilsey, her husband, the estate caretaker, and their offspring,Versh, TP and Luster who are caretakers, in turn, for Benji.

This is not an easy family to belong to. Mother stays in bed and ignores her children (except for her favorite, Jason), demanding that everyone keep Benji quiet so that she can get some rest. Benji is certainly not easy to be with. He is noisy, demanding and requires constant supervision. Father is a nurturing sort of guy in that he gives hugs and spends time with his children, but he is cynical to the degree that his fatherly wisdom destroys the hearts of his children, in particular, Quentin, who is a very sensitive boy. Caddy, having little parental supervision is a wild girl. She is a headstrong, risk-taking beauty who takes one risk too many that spirals into tragic/near-tragic outcomes for each family member in turn. The youngest brother Jason is a cold-hearted, villainous sort of guy who terrorizes Caddy's teenage daughter, Quentin. Quentin for her part is wilder than her mother. Countering all of this neuroticism is the down-to-earth Dilsey, a nurturing, sensible woman who helps keep things together. The antics of her sons and grandson provide the book's comic relief.

The story covers the time period of the children's youth, 1898, to the present, Easter 1928. The book's structure has an outer story that takes place on Benji's birthday, and multiple inner stories that occur as flashback memories of Benji, Quentin and Jason to the years of 1898 - 1910.

The first chapter is seen through Benji's eyes. This is a hard read and bears 2-3 readings as it gives important clues to the events that occur, primarily involving Caddy, whom he adores. Following that is Quentin, the son's story which takes place in 1910 and follows him while a student at Harvard as he painfully relives events with Caddy and his father that took place two years earlier. Next is Jason's story and it takes place mostly in the present. It also relates the story of Caddy's daughter, Quentin. The last chapter takes place on Easter day and mostly follows housekeeper, Dilsey, as she tries to manage the whimperings of both Caroline and Benji while putting on an Easter breakfast and getting herself ready for church. The Sound and the Fury thus begins with the clouds of thoughts in Benji's head, ends with the firmly-rooted Dilsey taking care of the family.

The reader of The Sound and the Fury becomes a detective, slowly piecing together several events from the flash-back thoughts of the brothers. But it is the telling of the story, not the story itself, that is most important. Faulkner's characterizations are incredibly rich.  One gets a tremendous appreciation for his ability to get inside the heads of people. And it is primarily for this talent that he won his Nobel Prize in Literature.

The book is ripe with symbolism, with title and themes coming from Macbeth's soliloquy. (...it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.) I am sure that many a master's thesis has been written on the topics of death, recorded time, shadows and of course, sound and fury - all taken from Shakespeare's verse.

The appendix provides details of the Compson family ancestry, gives a summary of major events in the book and also acts as an epilogue of outcomes for the parents and children. As I mentioned in my last post, Faulkner hoped that people would read the appendix first, spoilers and all. For him, the thoughts and thought patterns of the characters were more important than the story itself and he was concerned that the reader be able to comprehend the cryptic stream-of-conscious story telling. However, because I was unable to avoid spoilers in the appendix and a reader's guide, the actual reading of The Sound and the Fury was a disappointment for me. Had I lots of time on my hands, I would have patiently decoded the book and gotten wonderful rewards.

Spoiled book, aside, was it a great book? Absolutely. Could it be better? Yes, put a family tree with family history for both families at the front of the book, and save the spoilers for an epilog at the back.

Getting Through Chapter 1, The Sound and the Fury

You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith. - William Faulkner

And with faith that the reader would prevail, Faulkner followed in Joyce's footsteps with  76 pages of the stream-of-consciousness thinking of a 33 year old cognitively impaired man named Benji Compson. Benji's thoughts move freely from the present to a variety of scenes in the distant past. The reader is left to guess the time frame as well as the narrative context. Faulkner provided a single clue to decoding the text: he italicized the first line of each time shift. What a difficult book this is!

I made it through As I Lay Dying, but for this book, I had to track down (on Wikipedia) the key that would unlock the time frame. There is a trick. Benji had 3 care takers: one who was with him when he was a child, a second who cared for him as a teen and the third, his current care taker. Note which care taker is telling him to "quiet down" and you know how old he is at that time. That is a huge help, but the context is still tricky, and unless you read the Compson story in the Appendix, you probably have to read the chapter twice. There is one last difficulty. Some of the characters have the same first name and so you need to know that there are 2 Jasons (father and son - easy) and 2 Quentons (one a boy, the other a girl - yikes!).

Twenty years after writing The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner felt bad about the demands he had placed on the reader and wrote a history for the Compson family to be included in the book. (Did his friends, family and other readers send him ranting letters?) He suggested that the new material be placed at the front of the book. The publishers instead made it into an appendix - presumably because it contains spoilers.

Having conquered chapter 1, I am now resting before attempting the next stage of the book and hoping that the worst is behind me.

Making Peach Pies

Today was peach pie day. I bought a box of about 40 Michigan peaches for $8 at the Ann Arbor farmer's market on Wednesday. They were only slightly bruised but oh, so sweet.

I put a pot of water on the stove to boil while I made pie crust dough from flour, nuts (pistachio and walnut), salt, oil, brown sugar, oatmeal flakes and lemon-water.

When the water was rolling, I put 4-5 peaches in at a time for a minute or two, then dunked them into ice water for a second and set them to drain on the counter before removing their skins. I did this for 18 peaches - 3 pies worth.

The next step was to press the dough into the pie plates. It's a cross between a crumble and pie dough, and presses easily. That done, the crusts went into the fridge to stay cold.

Back to the peaches. Now it's time to slice them and coat them with a little tapioca flour and cinnamon.

Finally, I put the peaches into the pan, added more crumble dough on top and baked them in a 425 degree over for 15 minutes and then for another 40 at 350 degrees.

I had enough dough left for a small tart (cook's tart, I call it), so I peeled one more peach and assembled the tart. It was done in 20 minutes. Mmm!

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

Summary: Revolutionary Road is an emotionally charged look at the dysfunctional marriage of Frank and April Wheeler, two city-loving sophisticates now living unhappily in the suburbs with their two young children. "Unhappy" is a key word here and something needs to give, or their marriage will come apart. April comes up with an incredible plan to change their lives for the better (no spoilers here). Their relationship is energized with every step they take to put the new plan into place and they return to being the lovers they once were. But big plans rarely go smoothly in the best of worlds, and this isn't the best. As "stuff" happens, the Wheelers are emotionally challenged to their limits.

Yates is a master of emotional analysis and his insights into human nature are spot-on. He sets up characters and situations that speak to the reader as if to reveal the reader's hidden secrets. It can be that intimate. It is that real of a story.

Yates keeps the story open so that it never paints itself into a corner. At any given point there are a myriad of outcomes, and for me it was impossible to predict where the tale was headed. Even when I predicted a general direction, his story-telling skills were great enough to surprise me with the telling of it. I contrast this to Follett's, "The Pillars of the Earth, which was so transparent that I put it down after 80 pages. It's no fun out-guessing the author.

While it is cited as being one of the most depressing books in literature, what I got from Revolutionary Road was less a sense of depression than of nihilism. April and Frank's lives have little meaning. April was raised by a series of aunts and saw her parents only occasionally. She says repeated, "I don't know who I am". Frank was the "unwanted child" born to middle-aged parents who had already raised their family. He spends time in the mirror creating his image with clothes that are "just so". He practices making his jaw protrude as a way of projecting confidence. Neither of them is secure in their own self, and so they do not have the ease or emotional wisdom to connect with others.

Frank is the healthier of the two and he honestly tries to be a good husband to April. She is just not available. But it is the children of this marriage who are the true losers. If April and Frank are unable to deal with the world, they are even less capable of nurturing their children. And Yates makes you wonder if "what goes around comes around" will be the outcome for these kids.

That's all I'm saying about the plot. No spoilers in this review. I recommend Revolutionary Road to all serious readers of fiction for its insight into the American emotional makeup as well as for the historical insight into the beginnings of huge social changes that made up the 60s. (See my last post.) It is a powerful tale and a satisfying read.

Walking Revolutionary Road with The Feminine Mystique

In the late fifties and early sixties we lived the lives of Ozzie and Harriet - or we thought we should - or wished we could. The suburban dream was rampant - and according to Richard Yates, boring. His book, Revolutionary Road, paints a grim view of that life for both Frank and April McClure now reaching 30, wondering if they can still find the dream they shared 8-10 years earlier. The point of view through much of the book is Frank's - a man's view.

Shift to the other side of town (presumably) where in 1957 Betty Friedan began researching why affluent, happily married housewives with college educations were so unhappy with their suburban lives. We have in Revolutionary Road and and The Feminine Mystique, two different sides of the same coin. Within 2 years, Yates gave spark to what would become counter-culture (his book was a cult classic) and Friedan set off the second wave of the feminist movement. It was a painful transition as men weighed sticking heroically to lifeless jobs vs. opting out, and women struggled to find meaning outside of their homes and families. It would take another decade to begin to sort that out. 

I am 1/3 the way through Revolutionary Road. I know that Frank and April don't stand a chance - this book is thought to be the most depressing book ever written, but I'm still rooting for them.

Naked Lunch

The Title means exactly what the words say: NAKED Lunch --a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork."

 --  William S. Burroughs

What's on the end of Burroughs' fork is not pretty. Not too many people are going to be able to look at it without getting queasy. Burroughs created the pages of notes that ultimately became Naked Lunch  during the 15 year period (age 30-45) he was a junkie. He doesn't recall writing them. After rehab, he rewrote the notes into short vignettes and with Alan Ginsberg's help, organized them first into a European (Grove Press) edition, and then the American (Olympia Press) edition.

The book is political and social satire from the view of a debauched gay junkie genius. It took about half of the book for me to be able to get past the debauchery and see the "naked" social satire. There was one multi-page segment,  "Atrophied Preface", that was fairly incomprehensible. There were other parts in which the genius shone through clearly. There is a 20 page section, "A.J.'s Party", that is indescribably horrendous.

There is no plot and no linear story, but I'm okay with that. The satire is excellent. Burroughs takes on good-old-boys, racism, child molestation and slavery, pornography, corporate greed, medical research, etc., using addiction and sex as metaphors. As I said, it's not pretty, but he makes his points.

Would I recommend this book. No. Not that way. But it begs to be read in the context of the "best books of the 20th century". As I mentioned in my last post, it holds a critical place in literature. There is a "before" and an "after" Burroughs.

Reading Naked Lunch - Time 100 Books

One of my finds at the Borders' going-out-of-business sales was the 50th anniversary version of Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. It is, of course, one very strange book. (I seem to be on a roll with strange books these days.) But it is not as daunting as I feared and I'm making good progress with it. I will review it in a few days.

Naked Lunch is a tale chock full of obscure references and thought provoking, off-the-wall ideas. A number of people have become enthralled with the book, and so there is "online help" in the form of web sites with prefaces, background info and footnotes. One site, Naked Lunch @ 50, provides contextual and background information about New York, Tangiers and Paris, identifies some of the characters and even provides pictures of a few. The Naked Lunch entry on Wikipedia has biographical material. There is even a study guide at Bookrags.com. Naked Lunch was made into a film and the online material about that very different "story" provides insight into the book. (The film has little content in common with the book except that both are composed of a series of autobiographical vignettes seen through Burroughs' drug-hazed eyes.)

As strange a book as Naked Lunch is, it deserves its place on the Time 100 list. The book draws on earlier books on the list such as Brave New World. (Burroughs was a fan of both Paul Bowles and Aldous Huxley.) Alan Ginsberg thought  that Naked Lunch was a work of genius and helped Burroughs edit and find a publisher for it. Burroughs' other great friend, Jack Kerouac, (On the Road) looked up to him as a mentor and teacher. Burroughs' style and subject matter inspired great authors such as Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49) and David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest). 

The Crying of Lot 49

I have just finished reading The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. This strange book is a product of its time and place (1966, California). It was an age of paranoia induced by social issues, assassinations (Kennedy, Kennedy and King), a new war (Viet Nam), marijuana highs, and fear of getting caught being high. LSD was legal and being tested as a therapy for multiple issues including alcoholism. Pynchon rides this wave of paranoia with a book about a possible conspiracy - or more accurately, an anti-conspiracy. As such, in another's hands it might be a deep dark tale. It's not. Think instead of James Bond meets meets Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) meets The Watchman. Lots of sex and booze in a mystery to be unraveled. This could have been a graphic novel.

The experience of reading the book mirrors the experience of dancing to the MC5 at the Grande Ballroom in 1966. The pulsing psychedelic strobe lights illuminate something new each second. Each previous illumination disappears and is quickly forgotten. Oedipa, the book's "heroine" moves from impulse to impulse, rushing into an unknown future ripe with possibilities. And just as with a strobe-lit scene, we don't see much beyond the surface until the music stops and we adjust our eyes to see what is actually there. But we must hurry, because the music will start again soon.One must adjust one's brain to make sense of what is going on in this book, and to focus deeply on the undercurrents.

The story line is deceptively simple: Oedipa Maas, a housewife living in San Francisco with her DJ husband, receives word that her ex-lover, a real-estate tycoon  named Pierce Inverarity, has died and left the job of co-executor of his estate to her. Without giving it a second thought, she takes leave of her husband and drives south to "San Narciso" near L.A, where she finds a sleezy motel room to stay in while she works on inventorying the estate. In a funny scene, Inverarity's very handsome lawyer finds her at the motel, gets her drunk and plays strip poker with her. She puts on multiple layers of clothes to confound him, but after he has fallen asleep, seduces him anyway.  In this fashion, she encounters and plays a part in countless bizarre situations. She accepts the situations at face value until details in events begin to form strange patterns. Clues are everywhere for something big that is hidden. The hidden thing is illuminated and then Oedipa struggles with paranoia, sanity and clarity. As the tale comes to a close, Pynchon suggests that it is America at stake here.

Spoiler Alert: What is hidden is a tale of mistrust of government mail system that reaches back to the 1500s when the company, Thurn & Taxis, had a monopoly on delivering mail in the Holy Roman Empire (parts of Europe and England). As Pynchon's invented tale goes, some people (including William of Orange) mistrusted this service and so a group of rebels headed by a man named Trystero plot to take over the mail. The rebels waylay the mail carriers, kill them, take the mail, and claim the routes, thus preventing the powers-that-be from controlling it. So now move to the 1600s in the USA where immigrant-descendants of Trystero have arrived and brought their underground mail service with them. Somehow the mail service finds its way to California and is embraced by every underground group there: right-wingers, gays, jazz musicians, poets, you-name-it. This is an anti-conspiracy: a mistrust of the government's mail service and of the control over communication. Thinking back to the 1960s and the new underground movement it all fits together and Pynchon is a historian of the day.

"Paranoia strikes deep  
Into your heart it will leap
It starts when you're always afraid 
Step out of line, the man comes and takes you away ..."
 --- Buffalo Springfield

But in fact, Trystero may be an invention and Oedipa is challenged to sort through the facts to find the truth. As she finds evidence of Trystero everywhere she looks, she must decide if it is real, a series of incredible coincidences, a fake (a grand ploy paid for by Inverarity and acted out for her eyes only) or a hallucination. She is not strong enough to do this. The events confound her and she is unable to follow leads to their ends for fear that she will lose her sanity, her friends and perhaps her own life (although she never confesses to this). In the end, she sits and waits for the answer to be given to her, but the reader sees that this wait is futile.

In the pages that end the book, Pynchon tries to make his point about why an underground mail system is inevitable in America. He speaks of an America that is unable to serve those who do not fit in a certain mold. These people - the left-overs of a sort - feel alienated from the country and paranoid about what will happen to them if their true selves are exposed. For their own safety, they opt out of America in the most significant way that they can by going underground with an alternate mail service. As we look back at this bit of history, we can see how well this book illuminates its era: "Turn on, tune in, drop out".  End of Spoiler.

Pynchon was not proud of this book and purportedly called it a "potboiler". Most reviewers recognize it as a great book. It has many of the same themes and is much more accessible then his other tomes. However, it is not a perfect book. In the last few pages, he shifts into a deep think peace on the people who have been left out of America. The essay is dense and hard to follow and in my opinion, does not weave the two stories, Oepedia and Trystero, together smoothly enough for the reader to get the big picture. Oedipa's story is not strong enough to balance the weight of the Trystero tale. The reader has to work hard to fill in the pieces. Having finally "got it", I found it worth the effort.

Pynchon is a very private person and has himself lived "underground" so-to-speak for 30+ years. Whatever must he think about the internet? How interesting it would be if Pynchon were to move his cast of characters and story to the 9/11 era.


Some interesting sites:
Andrew Gordon, now a professor at U Florida, spent an evening with Pynchon in San Fransisco in 1967. Here is his interesting tale.

Also, read the NYT review from 1966. 

The Blind Assasin Review

Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin is a multi-level story. An 83 year old woman, Iris Chase Griffin creates a diary of her days as the wrapper for sections of a bigger tale -- her autobiography. Intermixed with this narrative is a second book called The Blind Assassin which is also multi-layered. The wrapper for this second book is the story of two unnamed lovers, a man on the run and a wealthy woman, who meet in secret on stolen afternoons. The inner story is the science fiction tale that the lovers compose together while idly lying in bed after making love. To these narratives, Atwood adds newspaper clippings that describe social events of the day.

I first read The Blind Assassin 2 years ago. After 70 pages, I was ready to quit it, but the friend who had loaned it to me was so insistent on its quality, that I skimmed much of the rest of the book before returning it to her. I did not like it. But I knew I had not done it justice, and so when it came time to read it as part of the Times 100 list, I decided to read every word. And I did. It is a long book at 520 pages, and longer still because of the long paragraphs filled with lush prose. No matter how beautiful the prose, it rambles. An editor should have trimmed it.

I was glad for the second reading. Each of the tales go through surprise twists and turns and so it begs for a second reading just to make sense of all that has happened.

Iris starts her narrative discussing the death (possible suicide) of her sister Laura who was 25 at the time. She then moves back in time and gives a history of her family and her marriage to Richard Griffin.


There is an intricate structure to the book. In the first 14 pages, we read two news clippings. The first reports Laura's death. The second is Richard's obituary two years later. (The remainder of the book provides the story of how and why these two events occurred.) In that same space of 14 pages, we have also been introduced to all of the tales. The two books: the autobiography and The Blind Assassin, are intertwined and actually meet in time and place about three-fourths of the way through. There are many parallels between the stories. And there is a buried structural symmetry in the telling of Laura's book.

Did I like the book? Out of the 20 on the Time 100 list I've read this past 6 months, it is #3 on my list; I like to chew on books and this is a chewy book. I liked the story of the lovers and their created story. The autobiography of Iris felt like Dickens with pretty prose - but it's not my cup of tea. My biggest disappointment was in not liking Iris - which is why I didn't want to read it the first time around.

So what did I chew on? (Spoilers in here!) Why does Laura not tell Iris about what is happening to her? Is Laura insane? Why doesn't Alex leave Toronto? Why doesn't he try to make a new life in another place? Iris makes a new life for herself, but she never remarries. Is that predictable? There are any number of parallels in the tales. What is the purpose of the science fiction story? Why is the book called The Blind Assassins?

Finding Memories & The Blind Assassin

In OT school, I learned that as we move into our 60s, we begin to look back at our past. We see if we have lived the life we dreamed of. We mull over our successes and failures. As we do this, we come to terms with our life.

So here I am at the age of 61, seeing memories of past days spontaneously flash in my mind. When I see the child down the street in a red wagon, I suddenly see myself in one at the age of 5. This comes unbidden. I  should write them all down. Thus far I haven't.

But that is precisely what 83 year-old Iris in The Blind Assassin does. She is writing her autobiography before she dies. The details are lush. Her past is so clear, one could use her prose to paint pictures of days at picnics or film a movie of children exploring a house. I will save her story for another post ... but quite honestly, it gives me hope for writing or art in my retirement years. 

The Painted Bird

How does one come to terms with a book that depicts all of the evil of mankind through the eyes of a child?

In The Painted Bird a Jewish boy is sent out of harm's way to a foster home prior to Nazis invading his Eastern European country. His new foster mother dies and thereafter he lives by his wits and the occasional kindness of others. As he roams from village to village he experiences cruel mistreatment and witnesses others being cruelly treated. The amount of violence, cruelty, sexual depravity and misconduct is unbelievable ... and in fact, the tale is not to be literally believed as an autobiography would be. It is the bringing together of tales and metaphors to make sense of what happened to Jews and Gypsies in WWII.

The tale covers five years. Each chapter brings a new perversity. Some of the situations seem more native to the concentration camps than to a villages, and I wonder if he took the tales he heard and simply worked them to fit his book which never enters a camp. A small gripe - sexual scenes are sometimes over the top - and indeed author, Kosinski claimed to have had an obsession with sex.

Seeing all of this through the eyes of a child is quite powerful (just as it was in Room). The reader comes away with a certain understanding of how evil is perpetuated as well as how easy it is to indoctrinate a youth into a philosophy or way of life like communism (or Nazism) - and how hard it is to take that from him later.


The Painted Bird was written by Jerzy Kosinski although the authorship is controversial. It may have been written in Polish and then translated and polished extensively by an American editor. This piece of information makes one stop and think a little, but in the end it doesn't matter -- The Painted Bird is a great book.

Positively Great Books

What makes for a truly great book? It's the elements that resonate with us, the elements that stretch us, beautiful writing, a compelling story, the dysfunctional characters, the negativity .... Wait a minute, wait a minute.

As I read through the Time 100 list, I find book after book with highly neurotic characters. Think of Scarlett O'Hara, the narrator in Lolita, and John Self in Money. Now we are all neurotic to some degree, but so many authors on the list use negativity as a key element to attract their audience.

I don't like it and I don't get it. But that's just me ... and it's many of my friends. We still enjoy a great story. We just don't want to be dragged into the inner circuits of a dysfunctional person. Let their psychotherapist do that. I want to read books that have positive elements and characters with some amount of hope. I think of Frank Alpine in Malamud's The Assistant. He's a loser, but he has hope and he redeems himself. Now think of Lolita. The Narrator is a real loser, and has no hope. None whatsoever. Why did I read this? Just to get into the inner workings of a pedophile. Oh.

Anyway, I will continue to read the books on the Time 100 list. But I though I'd compile a list of books that do not rotate around negative people. Which is not to say that the characters do not live in a difficult world. I include The Painted Bird and Ender's Game, for example. Check out the list. It will grow and change with time.

If you'd like to share a list of great books with redeeming characteristics, pass it along!

Helping Border's Books Close

Today I made my 4th pilgrimage to Border's Books since they announced that all the stores were closing. This is a bittersweet affair for me. I get a bit emotional every time I go into one of the stores. I grew up with the original Border's in Ann Arbor - back when it was in a small store and sold used and new books. I've watched them grow and change hands several times. I also watched them put some of the other small book stores out of business. I thought I had stopped caring about the corporation Borders. But in fact, I do care.

For my first visit to the sales, I went to the Ann Arbor store just to get through the sadness. Since then I've been visiting my local store.Today was a big, new sale so I arrived there early and shopped for books on the Time 100 list. It took me 2-3 hours.  I am trying to find the thicker books as well as titles I can't get from my local library. At this point, the shelves at Borders' have lost their order and it's not necessarily easy to find the books you want. But I was lucky and came away with 2 bags filled and overflowing.

I'm guessing that the stores will be closed in the next week or so. I've been holding off on the final good-bye to the Ann Arbor store, but I am still missing a few of the Time 100 books, so I it may be time to make the trip. Bittersweet, indeed.

Wild Saragosso Sea

Just finished Wild Saragossa Sea, Jean Rhys's prequel to Jane Eyre, written about 120 years after Jane Eyre. It is the story of the the early life and marriage of Antoinette Bertha Mason. Antoinette - known as Bertha in Jane Eyre - is the mad woman living in the attic at Thornbury. The book has 3 parts. The first, her childhood, takes place in Jamaica. The second part relates Antoinette and Rochester's honeymoon in her mother's edenic, but run-down estate in Martinique. The last part describes Antoinette's (now called Bertha) life in England.

Spoiler Alert --
The story of Antoinette is dreamlike with elements of a nightmare that allude to her family's madness. There are two types of death, she says. The first is death to the world, the second is death of the body. She is aware that she may follow her mother and namesake into madness. And as we know, this does happen. What is not clear is if the madness is preventable. Antoinette is fragile. Madness is in her genes, but it appears that the traumatic events of her life are the actual causal agents. Her youth is spent in poverty. Her family is now poor, hated by the Creoles and bullied by them. She finds respite from this hatred in a Catholic boarding school in her teens after her mother marries a wealthy man. At 17, Antoinette is given (unwillingly) to Rochester as bride in a prearranged marriage. Surprisingly, during their honeymoon in Martinique he wins her over and she is happy for the first time in her life.

Rochester is brusk but not unkind. He is a product of Imperialistic England, bred to be a leader as opposed to a culturally aware individual. He comes to Jamaica to take a bride and her wealth. He understands that he must care for her and use her riches to her good. He wants to do this and to win her love in the process. That he is unable to follow this plan compassionately is due to his naivete and to the hostile environment they live in. Rhys peoples her book in Jamaica and Martinique with poor Creoles who are as fiery as the heat. They are only just-freed from slavery and hate the English. The honeymoon is set far from urban areas in a dilapidated house with Creole staff and neighbors who taunt the couple and offer Rochester mean advice. When trouble arises, there is no one that Rochester can trust, and so he falls back on lessons gained from his English upbringing to give him insight. It is an imperfect method in this Creole world.

On their honeymoon, Antoinette comes alive to him as a vibrant, sexual being that he is both attracted to and afraid of. Local people insist on telling him of her mad mother, drunken father as well as about the sexual affair she had with her cousin. This destroys the bit of love that had been building in Rochester. He rejects her and sleeps in his dressing room. He cannot get past the ideal of the prudish English women that he was raised with and he cannot see her in her own context. He begins to interpret her gayness and lust for him as madness and will not listen when she or her former nurse try to provide perspective. As he takes his own counsel, he puts in place events that will have tragic outcomes for both of them.

Having failed to communicate with Rochester, Antoinette moves into silence. We hear words from her again only when she is in her attic room in England.

In what could have been a potentially good ending for this story, Antoinette's nurse begs Rochester to take half of the money and head to England, leaving Antoinette behind with the other half of the fortune. He never comprehends this alternative as viable - and in his time and world, it may not have been for he would have been disgraced in the eyes of his father and brother. But as it turns out, his father and brother are both dead upon his return to England. The Ending of Jane Eyre is fixed. Rhys cannot change it. And so we are left to mourn the irony of these events and the pieces of their lives.

Time 100 Books Plus Others to Help Me Cope With Them

I am one of a number of people reading books off the Time 100 list. There are great books on that list such as Catch 22, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, Infinite Jest and The Grapes of Wrath. Unfortunately, there are also a number of slimy books, horribly depressing books, decadent books, boring books and ultra-violent books. (Please forgive me if these books are your favorites ...) For these, I have developed strategies to slog through them.

For Lolita, I read about 100 pages until the pedophilia blossomed. Then I started from the back of the book and read sections until it hit the nasty stuff again. Done. Check that one off the list.

For Martin Amis's, Money, (incredibly decadent and "brutally funny"- yuck) I read 120 pages, skipped 160 pages (I only missed one plot development) then read the last 100 or so. Check.

It was impossible to skip text in The Neuromancer (violent and not my style, though I like sci-fi), but I was able to skim read it successfully. His prose is nothing to brag about - it's the concepts that put this book on the list, so I didn't feel I lost anything. It also helped that I read the book at the same time that Robert, the blogger of 101 Books, did. Misery loves company - he didn't care much for it either.

I have dipped into William Burroughs' Naked Lunch any number of times since my youth without success - so I have no idea if I'm going to be successful with finishing this book. However, I have read an entire Burroughs book (and felt slimy for days afterwards). So maybe I'll cheat and check this one off.

I have not the heart to open the cover of Revolutionary Road which many claim is the most depressing book (and movie) ever written. (Is that how it made the list?) That in itself is depressing since I already had to put down The Corrections for the same reason. All my strategies for The Corrections failed. I tried reading 50 pages then reading another book (Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All, worked well.) Then I read another 50 pages followed by yet another book. This was going well, but at some point I was only able to get through 5 pages of The Corrections before I needed another antidote. I gave up and put it aside. I'll trick myself into picking it up later. I'm really betting that I'll love it if ONLY I can get through the background stories of this dysfunctional family.

I had to put aside Gone With the Wind, too. I made it pretty easily through the first half - the Civil War, but  the idea of Scarlett O'Hara and Ashley going through reconstruction was just more than I could stand. I'll pick it up later.

You might suggest that I just throw in the towel. But in fact, I am really enjoying reading books from the list. There are lots of surprises - even in books I've slogged through. For example, after really struggling through 120 pages of  Malumud's The Assistant, which is a very sad book, I fell in love with it. And I truly slogged through the 1000+ page Infinite Jest, but it's in my top-5 favorites.

And this leads me to my latest and favorite strategy: using Book Drum. I am currently reading Jean Rhys's, Wide Sargasso Sea. It is the story of Rochester's mad wife, Bertha ( in Jane Eyre). It's an unusual book and one that I might have read too quickly. I didn't want to do that - I wanted to appreciate why it was on the list. So I started looking up the geography of the area (The Carribean) and before long, I ran into the Bookmarks on Book Drum for this book. The Bookmarks pages are essentially footnotes. I found that they give me more material to absorb and appreciate ...and I am loving the book because of this.

And I now understand that it was the footnotes in Infinite Jest that made it truly work. The good thing about footnotes is that they give a reader pause, they keep me from falling too deeply into a difficult story. Who knows,by using the footnotes I may even be able to get through Revolutionary Road!