PEOPLE'S CHOICE LITERATURE: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels...fascinating!

PEOPLE'S CHOICE LITERATURE: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels
TOM COMITTA
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: What do Americans truly want in a novel? What would it look like if their preferences and aversions materialized in book form? In People’s Choice Literature, Tom Comitta has taken up this challenge, writing two groundbreaking novels based on a nationwide poll about literary taste—one featuring the story elements Americans most desire and another containing everything Americans despise.

The Most Wanted Novel is a fast-paced thriller evoking page-turners by Dan Brown, David Baldacci, and Janet Evanovich. It follows a California woman pulled into a tech tycoon’s apocalyptic ambitions after her brother’s kidnapping, teaming up with a hunky FBI agent with a tragic past. The Most Unwanted Novel is a genre-bending an epistolary Christmas novel set on a near-future Mars, where elderly aristocratic tennis players scour the globe for lost love, venturing from the coldest of arctic wastelands to the darkest caverns of the macabre. Variously recalling Kathy Acker, César Aira, and Phillip K. Dick, it features sentient robots, talking animals, and a hundred-page collection of horror stories.

People’s Choice Literature is inspired by the artists Komar and Melamid, who created two now-infamous paintings based on opinion polling. A similar experiment by Dave Soldier produced “The Most Wanted Song” and “The Most Unwanted Song.” Comitta has adapted these methods to fiction, drawing on readers’ preferences about everything from genre to verb tense to characters’ identity. Audacious and shockingly entertaining, People’s Choice Literature also asks big questions about taste, authorship, and the notion of “good writing.”

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A jeu d'esprit comparable to Patchwork in its fun, wacky, sneakily serious affect. I said in that review: "It's refreshing, to say the least, when someone looks afresh at shibboleths like Literature and sees what's under its underpants instead of reverently praising its court dresses."

It's still true. This iteration of Author Comitta's most-ridden literary hobbyhorse is no less interesting, no less impactful, and because of its release's timing, it is a sage observer's warning of the encroachment of AI slop into the realm of literature.

Could it be these are the future of idea consumption via text?

It could.

Will it be?

Dunno. I guarantee you this: Read these two pieces, and you will will come away radicalized. Pro or con, you can't look at these works and not see the message staring back at you.

I'm impressed with Author Comitta's work in these oddball, offputting stories, though if someone tried to sell either of them to me without a knowing wink, I'd be outraged. Columbia's tipped a wink or two. I won't give all five stars because I got the joke before the the enterprise ended. I solved that problem for myself by reading the stories each until I got bored, then jumping into the explanatory and analytical parts; this way I didn't waste an undue amount of my precious remaining eyeblinks on stuff I hated, or just mildly didn't care for; that's as good as it ever got.

Art is not about consensus. Art is not created in committee meetings. Literature is art.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

JAGUARS' TOMB, a #WITMonth read whose time came

JAGUARS' TOMB
ANGÉLICA GORODISCHER (tr. Amalia Gladhart)
Vanderbilt University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Jaguars' Tomb is a novel in three parts, written by three interconnected characters. Part one, "Hidden Variables" by María Celina Igarzábal, is narrated by Bruno Seguer. Seguer in turn is the author of the second part, "Recounting from Zero" ("Contar desde zero"), in which Evelynne Harrington, author of the third, is a central character. Harrington, finally, is the author of "Uncertainty" ("La incertidumbre"), whose protagonist is the dying Igarzábal. Each of the three parts revolves around the octagonal room that is alternately the jaguars' tomb, the central space of the torture center, and the heart of an abandoned house that hides an adulterous affair.

The novel, by Argentine author Angélica Gorodischer, is both an intriguing puzzle and a meditation on how to write about, or through, violence, injustice, and loss. Among Gorodischer's many novels, Jaguars' Tomb most directly addresses the abductions and disappearances that occurred under the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976-83. This is the fourth of Gorodischer's books translated into English. The first, Kalpa Imperial—translated by Ursula Le Guin—was selected for the New York Times summer reading list in 2003.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Y'all remember me talking up Kalpa Imperial, right? The link is above for refreshing of memories. This novel, made up of three novellas "by" three writer-characters, is like that collection of SFF stories in the sense that she is using the narrative form to make a bigger point that really means more than than it would if she just sat down and typed out the story.

Oh dear. That sounded like a rush to the exit.

The Dirty War against the Argentine military junta's enemies started almost fifty years ago...officially...but it won't really be over while there are survivors bearing scars. If you're wondering how long that will be...read A FLOWER TRAVELED IN MY BLOOD: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children. These are nation-defining scars inflicted in the name of...what, greed? cruelty for its own sake?...these questions are the ones Author Gorodischer treats in these three novellas.

I think a lot of people, hearing that a novel is woven of shorter story-strands, aren't inclined to do more than nod absently that they've heard the description. Add another layer of artifice, fictional authors telling these fictional stories, and *click* out go the lights as brains head upstairs to bed.

Wake up now, drink some of Author Gorodischer's strong, bitter coffee, and think about what could cause so much pain that the story must be wrapped in a big layer cake of artifice in order to bring the impact down to bearable levels. That is the case with these intertwined tales of the horrors of life under a government that kidnaps, tortures, and kills its citizens who are guilty of nothing but disagreeing with the very government that is committing these horrible acts.

Layering, padding, defenses against the mere idea of direct head-on confrontation with the terrible subject...well, yeah, I think that would never be less than a helpful coping strategy. And as the layers are constructed they reveal what they were made to obscure. The very title of the novel is an uneasy nod to the avoided reality. There are many things this technique does well, eg making the empty space the center of the story's arc much as the absence of los desaparecidos is the center of those left behind's lives.

Like any technique, though, every benefit has a cost. Avoidance of difficult topics can end up with the literary equivalent of avoidant personality disorder. The bitterness of self-judgment, the harsh inner gaze that spotlights things not done, the Inquisition-level blaming of everyone especially the self for things not reasonably in their control, all so reasonably justified and so irrational on examination, all here. It's not an easy read though it's written in lovely prose. The depths of loss and rage...these are never easy topics to treat. It's greatly to Author Gorodischer's credit that she does not use her padding as a cop-out, a way of prettifying horrifying behavior.

It is inevitable that splitting the story into three narratives by three different people who are all writing about each other does not create deep investment in each character. While I can see this as a deliberate choice made to reinforce the central absence as painful, it also makes the read more effortful in the moment. I read this book to about the 33% mark during the Biden administration's extraordinary rendition kerfuffle (he'd publicly opposed it in 2007 but it continued as fact if not policy). It felt artificial, a stylistic tic to me then.

Come January 2025 and Kilmar Abrego García's travails, the idea seemed much more immediate, indeed urgent, to grapple with. I found myself unwilling to confront the horrors head-on, needing some space between myself and the topic's hyperreality.

Rather makes Author Gorodischer's case for her technical choice for her.

I'm hoping this desire to see what the behaviors we are tacitly, by silence, condoning today cost an earlier generation of a society that did then what we are doing now cost them in psychic suffering.

THE SIMPLE ART OF KILLING A WOMAN, brutally honest recounting of the reality of femicide

THE SIMPLE ART OF KILLING A WOMAN
PATRÍCIA MELO (tr. Sophie Lewis)
Restless Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From best-selling Brazilian crime novelist Patrícia Melo comes a genre-defying tale of women in the Amazon and their reckoning with brutal oppression

By turns poetic, humorous, dark, and inspiring. The Simple Art of Killing a Woman vividly conjures the epidemic of femicide in Brazil, the power women can hold in the face of overwhelming male violence, the resilience of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the potential of the jungle to save us all.

To escape her newly aggressive lover, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about the rampant attacks on the region’s women, which have grown so commonplace that the cases quickly fill her large notebook. What she finds in the jungle is not only persistent racism, patriarchy, and deforestation, but a deep longing for answers to her enigmatic past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of Icamiabas, warrior women bent on vengeance―and gradually, she recovers the details of her own mother’s early death.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman resists categorization: it is a series of prose poems lamenting the real-life women murdered by so many men in Brazil; a personal search for history, truth, and belonging; and a modern, exacting, and sometimes fantastical take on very old problems that, despite our better selves, dog us the world over.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: You know a book has said something profound, moving, and honest when more about fifteen hundred Goodreads reviews are very positive to four hundred profoundly negative. Goodreads ain't the Land of Woke, yet four times as many people chose to express a positive opinion of this story of violence and murder against women as bothered to bash it.

I'm praising it, too. The way Author Melo weaves magical, intensely sensual words...

Death has been kind to me, I thought. I haven't been run over by a lorry. I haven't fallen to a stray bullet. I have not been hastened toward death—rather, death has only dreamed of me; it has only knocked at my door. Tap, tap, tap. "I'm thinking of coming for you tonight at nightfall," death had said.
–and–
It seemed to be raising a piece of me that had been forgotten, something stifled inside me, a piece that on coming free levered up another, and so on and so on, down to the last lost piece, the furthest fallen, as good as buried—the one called "mother."

...into lovely images as well as wields word-scalpels as she detachedly discusses the murder of women simply for being (or presenting as) women is brutal and effective in conveying the sickness at the heart of femicide.

You never imagine that a guy like this, a Wittgenstein reader and yoga fan, will hit you in the face at a lawyers’ New Year’s Eve party. But the statistics show that it happens a lot. And that lots of men don’t stop at a slap. They’d actually rather kill you.
–and–
The conclusion I reached by my second week in court was this: we women are dying like flies. You men get hammered and kill us. Men want to fuck and kill us. Men get enraged and kill us. Men want a bit of fun and kill us. Men discover our lovers and kill us. We leave them and men kill us. Men get another lover and kill us. Men come home tired after work and kill us.

It is as Author Melo has Carla say: "It doesn't matter where you are or what social class you belong to and it doesn't matter what you do for a living. It's dangerous being a woman."

From many directions, for reasons and for no reason at all, it is dangerous to be a woman.

That simple, statistically verifiable truth is really all the impetus I think you should need to get and read this book.

I couldn't offer a fifth star, as the subject matter alone merited, because the reading experience was not well-integrated; the tonal shifts were effective but were also overused. The characters aren't really developed because there is so very much to say about the reason we-the-reader are here; but that means, at times, we-the-reader don't get the real horror-movie-esque impact only the documentary, evidentiary disgust and outrage.

A story to admire, to absorb and retain lessons from; not one to follow your spouse or equivalent around, reading bits and snatches to.

FANG FANG's PAGE: SOFT BURIAL: A Novel, the great sweep of History made personal; THE RUNNING FLAME, the intimate violence of one as lens for the pain of billions

THE RUNNING FLAME
FANG FANG (tr. Michael Berry)
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: “She knew that if she didn’t say her piece, that flame would never be extinguished; even after death, it would continue raging.”

The Running Flame opens with its protagonist in prison awaiting execution, desperate to give an account of her life. Yingzhi, a girl from the countryside, sees opportunity in the liberal trends sweeping across China. After high school, she joins a song-and-dance troupe, which allows her to travel and opens her eyes to new people and places. But an unplanned pregnancy brings an abrupt end to all her youthful dreams.

Trapped in a bad marriage, Yingzhi is driven to desperate measures—and eventually a shocking act of violence.

Fang Fang’s explosive short novel inspired widespread social debate in China upon its publication in 2001. In exploring the difficulties of one woman shackled by patriarchal tradition against the backdrop of radical social change, The Running Flame bears witness to widespread experiences of gendered violence and inequality. Fang Fang evocatively captures both the heady feeling of possibility in China’s roaring 1990s and its dark underside, as economic reform unleashed social dislocation in towns and villages. The novel draws loosely from interviews the author conducted with female death row inmates in a Chinese prison.

Equal parts social critique and domestic horror, The Running Flame is a gripping, propulsive narrative that shines a light on the struggles of poor women in China’s countryside.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It is a short novel, on the blurry edge between novel and novella in length; definitely complex enough to merit the "novel" label. YingZhi is a woman driven to the end of her endurance, across a long enough period to see changes in the laws that do not touch her...until she finally snaps.

It's notable that her story *is* a story because she does what is, across most cultures, the prerogative of men to do to women. Her snap, in a man, would not merit a novel, novella, or anything more than a tutting notice on a newspaper's "local crimes" section.

While writing this story, I wonder if the estimable Fang Fang, quite a cultural touchstone in Chinese literary circles, thought of that. In one sense, reading this story humanizes...particularizes...the motive that drove her violence while at the same time reinforcing the abnormality of a woman taking violence into her own hands to dole out on a man.

We're trained, culturally, to see women as victims in every narrative. Even this one. YingZhi dares to want a home of her own, dares to seek personal validation in an art that excludes her husband, dares to be a tiny bit her own person...and suffers for it.

We know this story is based on a factual event and that Fang Fang spoke at length with the woman whose snap provided the base of the tale. Does no one anywhere see that this real person's story told from death row, reinforces the transgression she committed as illegal, yet not the endless provocations to it as immoral?

Am I the crazy one? Is this dark, forbidding shadow not bothering anyone else?

I got more and more appalled by YingZhi's awful life of feeling utterly powerless and slighted for wanting to be her own person. As we spend time "listening" to her unburben herself, I got more and more drenched in the fear and outrage at her culturally enforced voicelessness. As a gay man (a loathed minority in China as well), I could relate to YingZhi's inability to bring happiness the way she wanted and needed to experience it into being.

This is a powerful story told in a style that suited my inner ear. It did not, I'm sorry to say, have scope enough to bring others to clarity in the story being told...too short...but as a deep dive into a woman at the precipice of her end, it was excellent, it was honest about its emotional representation, and it was deeply moving.

A half-star off for choosing to shorten, therefore foreshorten, a story with a lot of scope for even further reflection.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SOFT BURIAL: A Novel
FANG FANG (tr. Michael Berry)
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Fang Fang’s Soft Burial begins with a mysterious, nameless protagonist. Decades earlier she was pulled out of a river in a state of near-death; upon regaining consciousness, she discovered that her entire memory had been erased.

The narrative follows her journey through recovery as she takes a job as a housekeeper in the home of a powerful cadre, marries the doctor who saved her, and starts a family of her own. As the story unfolds, the protective cocoon of amnesia that her subconscious wove around her begins to give way, revealing glimpses of her previous life and the unspeakable trauma that she suffered.

Soft Burial is one of the most remarkable—and most controversial—recent works of Chinese literature. Part mystery, part historical fiction, and part social exposé, the novel intercuts different generations, regions, and time periods. First published in 2016, Soft Burial initially received critical acclaim but soon faced a wave of denunciations and was taken off the shelves of bookstores throughout China. Fang Fang challenged the unspoken rules that govern how Chinese writers portray the past by depicting the human costs of the Land Reform Campaign in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and she was attacked for expressing sympathy toward members of the “landlord class.”

An intimate portrait of historical trauma and the psychological toll of repressed violence, Soft Burial is a landmark in contemporary Chinese fiction.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Your mother was a woman of mystery; so was mine; but I'll bet cash money neither of us had a mother who was a total mystery to herself. Ding Zitao's very identity, her name, her memories...all gone in a process she does not remember but that defines her and forms all her memories ever made after.

Amnesia robs a person of their core, denies them access to their story, causes an insecurity of self that can't be overstated as a devastation. It's not soap-opera-plot simple. It's more akin to dementia, an acquired loss that eats one from the inside out.

This deeply personal violence stands in for what we, in the West, often think of as the Chinese cultural amnesia for what happened during Mao Zedong's rule. (Arrogant of us to assume that we can know this, or that it is the experience of billion people.) The events that gave Ding Zitao the lifelong unmooring from her Self are rooted in the early days of reform in the new People's Republic of China.

In the course of living a long life, Ding Zitao comes through many troublesome personal problems and troubling cultural events. All of the deeds, the ideas, the detritus of relationships and the people that die, a whole and fragmented life goes into the making of an old person. Qinglin, as her son, does what I'd hope was his best to comprehend his old-woman mother's roots. He feels her pain of not knowing herself as his own pain of never fully knowing her. He doesn't...can't...blame her; she had no control over the amnesia that robbed her.

In the course of discovering the roots of what happened to Ding Zitao that made this form of living suicide a better way to be than whatever the alternative was, Qinling confronts China's national past, its cultural reformation, and its procrustean demands in service of ideology...in the fractured, stolen mind of his mother.

We're told this is a story with its roots in a real person known to Fang Fang. Writing and publishing this brutal, honest, unsparing account of the personal damage done in the course of creating the People's Republic of China caused much ferment and discourse inside the country. "To every birth its blood" is an African saying that only sits well with people when the blood is not personalized or particularized; we do not like knowing who exactly did the bleeding, or from where, but that is impossible in this story. As it has made its way around the world it has reminded each reader that the great sweep of history was less the sweep of a broom than a scythe as it happened.

This novel takes its time with you, the reader, spending lingering moments focused on discomfiting facts and events. I'm impressed that Fang Fang was ready and able to be in these moments until they resolved their meanings in their details, while not giving in to prurient pain-gazing for the frisson of safety readers crave.

It got as close to five stars as such an honest account of history can without it being one's own history being told.

Excellent and necessary reading for those whose lives have, or bid fair to, lead them into violent tumultuous change.

THE PORTABLE VEBLEN, family drama played for laughs & MY NAME IS WILL, Shakespeare as countercultural rebel...twice & THE READER, Guilt! GUILT!

THE PORTABLE VEBLEN
ELIZABETH McKENZIE
The Penguin Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The Portable Veblen is a dazzlingly original novel that’s as big-hearted as it is laugh-out-loud funny. Set in and around Palo Alto, amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its pages, The Portable Veblen is an unforgettable look at the way we live now. A young couple on the brink of marriage—the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist—find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they weather everything from each other’s dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, to an intimate tête-à-tête with a very charismatic squirrel.

Veblen (named after the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption”) is one of the most refreshing heroines in recent fiction. Not quite liberated from the burdens of her hypochondriac, narcissistic mother and her institutionalized father, Veblen is an amateur translator and “freelance self”; in other words, she’s adrift. Meanwhile, Paul—the product of good hippies who were bad parents—finds his ambition soaring. His medical research has led to the development of a device to help minimize battlefield brain trauma—an invention that gets him swept up in a high-stakes deal with the Department of Defense, a Bizarro World that McKenzie satirizes with granular specificity.

As Paul is swept up by the promise of fame and fortune, Veblen heroically keeps the peace between all the damaged parties involved in their upcoming wedding, until she finds herself falling for someone—or something—else. Throughout, Elizabeth McKenzie asks: Where do our families end and we begin? How do we stay true to our ideals? And what is that squirrel really thinking? Replete with deadpan photos and sly appendices, The Portable Veblen is at once an honest inquiry into what we look for in love and an electrifying reading experience.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: A debut novel that, for its subject, takes on greed, Othering, and intergenerational family toxicity. While Author McKenzie published stories before this book appeared in 2016, the appearance of the novel was warbled delightedly about by Jeff VanderMeer, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Karen Joy Fowler. Reviews from the New York, and Los Angeles, and Seattle Timeses, the Boston Globe, Library Journal and Kirkus and NPR...several programs!...was longlisted for a National Book Award...you get the idea, it was down as The Next Big Deal.

But I forgot it existed. I read it in the dark year, and I came up dry on things to say about it.

In having a clear-out, I found the ARC again. It's such a strange title that I remembered it straight away. How many people in 2022 recall who Thorstein Veblen was? Not a lot more, or fewer honestly, than did in 2016. It's an odd and slightly off-putting thing to first-name your main character. It does efficiently Other her from the get-go. I wasn't sure that I liked that. I remember thinking that it was a darn good thing that she was the sort of person who could, in all seriousness, ask “Do you think wishful thinking is a psychiatric condition?”

So why did I resurrect this long-ago gift from a publisher who clearly never thought to hear from me about it again? Because, in flipping through it, I was caught by some unusually persuasive turns of phrase:

She had once concluded everyone on earth was a servant to the previous generation—born from the body’s factory for entertainment and use. A life could be spent like an apology—to prove you had been worth it.
–and–
Veblen espoused the Veblenian opinion that wanting a big house full of cheaply produced versions of so-called luxury items was the greatest soul-sucking trap of modern civilization, and that these copycat mansions away from the heart and soul of a city had ensnared their overmortgaged owners—yes, trapped and relocated them like pests.
–and–
The sharing of simple meals and discussing the day's events, of waking up together with plans for the future, things that feel practically bacchanalian when you're used to being on your own.

This is a writer speaking her truth. I love finding these moments. I think I left the book by the wayside because I couldn't, in the dark year, process the anticapitalist message as anything but the confirmation bias of my brain. In the decades of being steadily more and more radicalized by capitalism's failures of me, my chosen people, and the world my descendants will live in, I've resharpened that mental blade many times. This time I felt Author McKenzie's edge slash closer to me than before.

Author McKenzie reserves her loudest klaxon, her angriest blast of Gabriel's horn, for we-the-consumers. The sneaky message under Veblen's dithering disconnectedness is there. It's not unique, nor even original, but it's heartfelt and it's eloquent...and she's correct:

“I pledge allegiance, to the marketplace,
of the United States of America. TM.
And to the conglomerates, for which we shill,
one nation under Exxon-Mobile/Halliburton/Boeing/Walmart,
nonrefundable,
with litter and junk mail for all!”

Awomen.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

MY NAME IS WILL: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare
JESS WINFIELD
Twelve (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$1.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: A tale of two Shakespeares . . .

Struggling UC Santa Cruz grad student Willie Shakespeare Greenberg is trying to write his thesis about the Bard. Kind of . . .

Cut off by his father for laziness, and desperate for dough, Willie agrees to deliver a single giant, psychedelic mushroom to a mysterious collector, making himself an unwitting target in Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs.

Meanwhile, would-be playwright (and oppressed Catholic) William Shakespeare is eighteen years old and stuck teaching Latin in the boondocks of Stratford-upon-Avon. The future Bard’s life is turned upside down when a stranger entrusts him with a sacred relic from Rome . . . This, at a time when adherents of the “Old Faith” are being hanged, drawn, and quartered as traitors.

Seemingly separated in time and place, the lives of Willie and William begin to intersect in curious ways, from harrowing encounters with the law (and a few ex-girlfriends) to dubious experiments with mind-altering substances. Their misadventures could be dismissed as youthful folly. But wise or foolish, the bold choices they make will shape not only the “Shakespeare” each is destined to become . . . but the very course of history itself.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Tediously moralistic look at how Society tames us by taking hostages.

Heteronormative...shocking, I know...look at Will Shakespeare as horndog, transformed by Time (and parenthood) into...ya know what, if you like this kind of stuff you already know you like it. I don't much. Catholicism is a major vector for evil in this world, there's no denying that to anyone not an apologist; but Catholics ran the risk of horrible deaths in order to enact their fantasy of Religion. On the modern side, academia comes in for a lot of unkind "ribbing" that's meant to make one see that everyone is, at heart, a spoiled brat. These things are crumped together like they're somehow morally equivalent. They are not.

But worst of all, from my personal point of view, is the fact that I had to agree with the author about something:

Shakespeare, in some sense, helped create the modern man, didn't he, his influence is that pervasive. He held the mirror up to nature, but he also created that mirror: so the image he created is the very one we hold ourselves up to.

Stop with the deification already, recognize that there was a man called Shakespeare who wrote a bunch of cool stuff and take the rose-colored glasses off, he did whatever he did in his personal life and we can not speak about it because we don't know. Guessing is misleading, because you're going to think he did what you'd've done. Maybe...maybe not.

I didn't like it; I don't particularly recommend it; but it was not a waste of eyeblinks for that one excellent insight.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE READER
BERNHARD SCHLINK (tr. Carol Brown Janeway)
Vintage Books
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany.

When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover—then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Another read I fastened on as I got my Little Free Library bag ready to go. When I won this from, I think, a website now long gone's giveaway, I was under no obligation to review it. I didn't want to...my ephebeophile mother's long, long, long shadow over my life, her dead hands on my emotional neck still tightening spasmodically should I dare for a moment to forget to be unhappy, gave me a terrible and utter avoidance complex for this story.

Does everyone feel this way? When I was young, I was perpetually overconfident or insecure. Either I felt completely useless, unattractive, and worthless, or that I was pretty much a success, and everything I did was bound to succeed. When I was confident, I could overcome the hardest challenges. But all it took was the smallest setback for me to be sure that I was utterly worthless. Regaining my self-confidence had nothing to do with success...whether I experienced it as a failure or triumph was utterly dependent on my mood.
–and–
Exploration! Exploring the past! We students in the camps seminar considered ourselves radical explorers. We tore open the windows and let in the air, the wind that finally whirled away the dust that society had permitted to settle over the horrors of the past. We made sure people could see. And we placed no reliance on legal scholarship. It was evident to us that there had to be convictions. It was just as evident as conviction of this or that camp guard or police enforcer was only the prelude. The generation that had been served by the guards and enforcers, or had done nothing to stop them, or had not banished them from its midst as it could have done after 1945, was in the dock, and we explored it, subjected it to trial by daylight, and condemned it to shame.

There it is, the unvarnished solipsism of Surviving. The truth is we're all young Berg, we're all fucked-up Hanna. We can't make clean breaks with the past because the past is our inner self, our scaffolding. Young Berg learns this before Hanna puts him under the pressure and painful obligation of loving a broken thing.

The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nonetheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear.

And the tectonic pressures are too much for him to bear. They always are, he's not weak or defective. He's just...selfish:

I didn't like the way I looked, the way I dressed and moved, what I achieved and what I felt I was worth. But there was so much energy in me, such belief that one day I'd be handsome and clever and superior and admired, such anticipation when I met new people and new situations. Is that what makes me sad? The eagerness and belief that filled me then and exacted a pledge from life that life could never fulfill? Sometimes I see the same eagerness and belief in the faces of children and teenagers and the sight brings back the same sadness I feel in remembering myself.

One expects this in a boy. But young Berg will only ever be a boy. Hanna did that to him...Hanna enabled that in him.

Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?
–and–
At first I wanted to write our story in order to be free of it. But the memories wouldn’t come back for that. Then I realized our story was slipping away from me and I wanted to recapture it by writing, but that didn’t coax up the memories either. For the last few years I’ve left our story alone. I’ve made peace with it. And it came back, detail by detail and in such a fully rounded fashion, with its own direction and its own sense of completion, that it no longer makes me sad. What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.

And there, at the end of the book, was my source of discontent made plain to me: This entire louche passage in Berg's life...has not meaning whatever. Neither did the similar passage in my own life. They just...were...and they don't mean much to anyone but me.

So why'd I read this again?

TRAIN TO POKIPSE, the last book midwifed by the legendary Barney Rosset

TRAIN TO POKIPSE
RAMI SHAMIR
Underground Editions
$9.99 trade paper, $7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Set in New York during the George W. Bush years, TRAIN TO POKIPSE has become an underground critical sensation since it was first published in a limited, highly sought-after edition in 2012. The last book to be edited and championed by famed publisher Barney Rosset, POKIPSE bookends a literary canon of twentieth century masters that includes Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, and William S. Burroughs. Including a beautiful new introduction from Occupy Wall Street co-creator Micah White, TRAIN TO POKIPSE is finally available to a mass audience in this first-ever digital edition. White, who was named one of Esquire Magazine's most impacting millennials, reasserts TRAIN TO POKIPSE's standing as the the millennial generation's foremost literary work: "The novel you are about to read is a timeless chronicle of the psychological origins—the collective mood and affect—that catalyzed Occupy Wall Street... TRAIN TO POKIPSE deftly captures the essence of what compelled the millennial generation of cognitariat youth, over-educated and burdened with student debt, to suddenly throw aside ironic nihilism and rise up in an earnest spiritual insurrection."

My Review: Rami knows me from Twitter, where we both follow "Barney's Wall," a tribute account to publishing legend Barney Rosset. I got a Kindle copy of the book after we had discussed it for a while; I wasn't sure what I'd find, but had confidence in Barney's taste. It was not misplaced.

I was in Manhattan's downtown scene in the 80s and 90s, and had a blast. That's all I'm going to say in public. I recognized the life that our main character is living as my own attempt to run away from crippling depression and the wretched misery of anxiety that I never knew was there. I figured that was how everyone felt; none of us talked about it because, well, why?

Like Rami's creation, I also had relationships that rotted away from under me; I didn't think it was my fault, of course, but hey presto! comes the dawn and my self-sabotage smacked me in the teeth. Unlike the main character in Rami's novel, I waited until I was 54 to crack under the strain of coping and then spent four and a half months in the bin. I have to wonder, having read this novel, if I wouldn't have done better to have cracked thirty years earlier...but anyway, all of which is to say I relate. I relate to this little pisher's adolescent posturing, angst, escapism, lust...it's all part of me as much as it's part of the narrator.

That's a fine feat of writing, ladies and gents. A man closer to sixty than to forty reads himself into a book written by someone younger than his own child? Impressive prose-making. It's a wonderful feeling to see the art of storytelling safe in the hands of the millennials, even the dangerous high-wire balancing act of non-linear narrative is alive and well. It's there, however, that I grade Rami down a bit.

Non-linear narrative in TRAIN TO POKIPSE, with its time-shifts and varying ages of one narrator, requires something to knit it together. That something is up to the author; Rami chose a big risky knitting yarn in using the cocaine habit. It isn't entirely successful because unless one's been there it's simply repetitive unrelatable woollyness. Coke makes you feel sharp and masterful; then you crash into a vat of lint. (So I'm told.) (It says here.) That's fine for a shortish stint in a novel, but grows dull. What he has written here is faithful to the experience, no argument. But the dullness of the experience is in its many pleasures vanishing in that vat of lint.

But let's not forget that it takes big people to make big mistakes, and that this is a first novel. Rami Shamir. Learn his name, because you'll be hearing it again. And again. Thank the good Muses for that!

AN UNNECESSARY WOMAN, sad and fierce tale of a forgotten woman

AN UNNECESSARY WOMAN
RABIH ALAMEDDINE
Grove Press
$25.00 hardcover, $16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: One of Beirut’s most celebrated voices, Rabih Alameddine follows his international bestseller, The Hakawati, with a heartrending novel that celebrates the singular life of an obsessive introvert, revealing Beirut’s beauties and horrors along the way.

Aaliya Sohbi lives alone in her Beirut apartment, surrounded by stockpiles of books. Godless, fatherless, divorced, and childless, Aaliya is her family’s "unnecessary appendage.” Every year, she translates a new favorite book into Arabic, then stows it away. The thirty-seven books that Aaliya has translated have never been read—by anyone. After overhearing her neighbors, "the three witches,” discussing her too-white hair, Aaliya accidentally dyes her hair too blue.

In this breathtaking portrait of a reclusive woman’s late-life crisis, readers follow Aaliya’s digressive mind as it ricochets across visions of past and present Beirut. Insightful musings on literature, philosophy, and art are invaded by memories of the Lebanese Civil War and Aaliya’s volatile past. As she tries to overcome her aging body and spontaneous emotional upwellings, Aaliya is faced with an unthinkable disaster that threatens to shatter the little life she has left.

A love letter to literature and its power to define who we are, the gifted Rabih Alameddine has given us a nuanced rendering of a single woman's reclusive life in the Middle East.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt is to discuss your favorite novel in translation. So far this year, this is my hands-down favorite novel translated from the furrin. **CORRECTION** The novel was written in English, but it's so beautiful I don't want to take it down!

What does it mean to be invisible? If you choose not to interact with the world, become a recluse, divest yourself of close relationships and divorce yourself from the life of the boudoir, and seal yourself away in a capsule formed of books and words, you are a freak. Aaliya's neighbors think she's a ruined woman. Aaliya's customers at the bookstore she works at, intellectuals all, don't notice her enough to form an opinion, and her family (absent the dearest companion of her life, her *true* family, a departed friend) hasn't given her much attention at all.

She lives in Beirut, that once-fabulous once-gorgeous ruin on the Mediterranean, an early victim of the endless idiotic religious wars of the region. Aaliya represents Beirut's decline from a world-class cultural center to a shuttered mass of broken buildings holding wary, angry people.

Aaliya is an angry woman, or at least I see her as such, and has walled herself in to avoid the nasty consequences of being angry amid armed and angry men. She would not be isolated if Beirut wasn't what it is, I think, because she is a reflection of the energy of that wounded and dying place. She preserves her sanity by translating her beloved books, the beauties of which she renders into the sinuous sonorous rhythms of Arabic. And then, like she does with her self, she packages them up and puts them away. They are safe. They are invisible.

This is tragic. This is a sin. A woman, a mere woman, cannot be her full self; a book, a useless object, cannot spread its beauties for fear that it will not be appreciated or will be used as a weapon by the religious idiots.

And this is the reason I give this book over four stars. Alameddine has created a literary person's most deeply felt example of why the world appears to be headed directly for the bottom of the septic tank: Aaliya reads and thinks on and renders the majesty and magic of words into the language of her people, and then cannot, will not, dare not allow them out of her keeping.

This book should have made me feel claustrophobic. It appears to be a scream from within the coffin that anti-intellectual religious idiots are all but nailing shut around the world. (Creation SCIENCE?! REALLY?!) Instead I felt...uplifted in a curious way, heartened, encouraged. Alameddine sees it too! He created this most marginal of marginal beings, the unmarried childless woman intellectual in an Islamic society, and set her to singing. Aaliya sings her thoughts, sings her translations, warbles her precious quotes to herself, her best and only audience. She makes beauty from beauty as she sits and rots in the cesspool of gawd.

I don't know if this is a cautionary tale, an elegy, or the queitest jeremiad of all time. I do know that I can't, and don't wish to, forget Aaliya.

SOLO by Rana Dasgupta...lovely and unsettling, unnerving and deeply satisfying

SOLO
RANA DASGUPTA
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
various prices, now out of print

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: With an imaginative audacity and lyrical brilliance that puts him in the company of David Mitchell and Alexander Hemon, Rana Dasgupta paints a portrait of a century though the story of a hundred-year-old blind Bulgarian man in a first novel that announces the arrival of an exhilarating new voice in fiction.

In the first movement of Solo we meet Ulrich, the son of a railroad engineer, who has two great passions: the violin and chemistry. Denied the first by his father, he leaves for the Berlin of Einstein and Fritz Haber to study the latter. His studies are cut short when his father’s fortune evaporates, and he must return to Sofia to look after his parents. He never leaves Bulgaria again. Except in his daydreams--and it is those dreams we enter in the volatile second half of the book. In a radical leap from past to present, from life lived to life imagined, Dasgupta follows Ulrich’s fantasy children, born of communism but making their way into a post-communist world of celebrity and violence.

Intertwining science and heartbreak, the old world and the new, the real and imagined, Solo is a virtuoso work.

My Review: It's very tough to reduce this book to a synopsis. Ulrich, born in the dawning years of the 20th century in Sofia, Bulgaria, is the thwarted and stunted son of a Germanophile railway engineer. His Philistine father and dreamy mother battle their lives away, not listening or hearing or caring; they end up deaf. Ulrich ends up unable to feel, to engage with life, or to make sense of the world. His wife and son vanish; his career grows ever thicker and more ungainly to fill the space; then, one day, it too vanishes. What he is left with, after a lifetime of failure and eventual blindness, is...space. He is a void encompassed by flesh. He is one hundred when we meet him. His slow, exquisite dis-integration is the resolution of the story of his life...it is the final act of a mind unable to bear frictionless, affectless existence one more second.

It is beautiful. Rana Dasgupta, the author of Solo, is only now forty. I hate his skinny ass. This is the book James Joyce would've written if he'd ever found his way past the success of the tedious and pretentious Ulysses. And here this guy with a short story collection under his belt unrolls this gorgeous Caucasian carpet of a book before he's forty! Hate is so mild a term for the envious longing and shivering, ecstatic loathing that possesses me as I read his sentences, and twine myself about his fractal geometry of a story.

Rather than try to make things clear to you myself, let me quote to you from pp334-335 of the book:

"He was like the other half of myself," says Boris...Ulrich says, "You haven't lost {him}, you know. I don't know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes.
"He'll find his way inside you, and you'll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you'll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking his opinons, or your hair has turned like his.
"There are no more facts about him -- that part is over. Now is the time for essential things...Gradually you'll grow older than him, and love him as your son.
"You'll live astride the line that separates life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them; you'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgment falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being."

In reading that passage again, I feel like Annie Dillard's bell..."it was as though I had lived my entire life as a bell and never known it until I was struck"...and I finally unraveled the book I'd read: Meditation on failure and grief? No; not that; a more subtle and wonderful thing: Like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", a shout in the face of closed minds to open, to live, to exist fully if only for one glittering moment.

Revisiting THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG by Muriel Barbery

THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG
MURIEL BARBERY (tr. Alison Anderson)
Europa Editions
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.

Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through Renée's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.

My Review: This book is a delightful disappointment, a hugely successful failure, a predictable page-turner.

Since I read a translation by novelist Alison Anderson, whose own novel Hidden Latitudes I read ten or so years ago and quite liked, any comment I make on the writing of this book is misplaced. I don't know what Muriel Barbery's writing is like. I know that Barbery is well served by her translator. Anderson presents us with a text whose twining first-person narratives rather resemble the narrative technique she used in Hidden Latitudes to tell Amelia Earhart's imagined life stranded on a desert island.

What do Paloma, a twelve-year-old child of privilege and Renée, a fifty-four-year-old daughter of poverty have in common? The novel sets out to define their commonality of cause and kinship. That they are sisters under the skin is a set-piece of the book from the start. This really isn't good news, since the characters are not necessarily best understood as being in tandem; they share one central characteristic that organizes each one's life: They hide. Hiding from others, the masks required of those who are different from the norm, this rich seam is well and fully explored in this novel. It is even over-explored. Perhaps “beaten half to death” would be the way to say it. Paloma is far smarter than her elegant Parisian power-couple parents or her very bright (in an average sort of way) college-student sister. She begins her journey through the pages by announcing that, on her next birthday, she will commit suicide and simultaneously burn her home down. Adolescent angst, oh goody, was my first thought. Little Paloma with no problemas wants to kill herself, well sugar, go do that and leave old man Richard alone. Little by little, Paloma records in her two journals the few things she can find in her little world that make life worth living. It is these reflections and observations that make the meat of the book, that give us enough insight into this young person's development to make reading her philosophical ramblings worth the time and effort.

Renée, the adult in the piece, is even less obviously sympathetic; she's decided to hide her intelligence and be, to all outward appearances, the typical working-class occupant of a concierge's loge. She isn't that at all, and she reports to us in her first-person narration that she has no respect for those who employ her since they are so easily fooled into believing her crafted image. So far, so average. What makes this book's whole greater than the sum of its parts is the quality of the philosophical musings the two characters indulge in; they are very well worth the time to read.

I can't say I was happy with the ending of this book and I was distinctly irked by the revelation of the Great Buried Secret in Renée's past, it seemed so pat and contrived and predictable. Paloma's plot line resolves in a great whoosh of predictability, too. But this is a book that uses the formula (loners are people, too! Loneliness is bad! Look around you, there are treasures on every doorstep!) to a very satisfying-to-read end. On balance, recommended reading for anyone who likes underdog stories, and who has an interest in philosophical musings. Worth a read for anyone who simply wants to pass a few pleasant hours. Avoid at all costs if happy endings are the only ones you like. Don't bother with the book if you are looking for any sort of challenge in the reading or the thinking you'll do here.

THE ENCHANTED LIFE OF ADAM HOPE is, in fact, enchanting

THE ENCHANTED LIFE OF ADAM HOPE: A Novel
RHONDA RILEY
Ecco Press
$15.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope is an unconventional and passionately romantic love story that is as breathtaking and wondrous as The Time Traveler's Wife and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.

During WWII, teenager Evelyn Roe is sent to manage the family farm in rural North Carolina, where she finds what she takes to be a badly burned soldier on their property. She rescues him, and it quickly becomes clear he is not a man...and not one of us. The rescued body recovers at an unnatural speed, and just as fast, Evelyn and Adam fall deeply in love. In The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope, Rhonda Riley reveals the exhilarating, terrifying mystery inherent in all relationships: No matter how deeply we love someone, and no matter how much we will sacrifice for them, we can only know them so well...

My Review: The landscape of a life is common as pig-tracks. All the same milestones, either hit or missed, all the same parameters laid down by minor variations in genetic code, broadly indistinguishable. So why is it we're always so interested in others' lives? Why read novels about marriages that last or love affairs that sour or basements that exude more than the natural degree of fungal fetor?

Because solitude isn't loneliness, which isn't grief. All involve a person not having companions. All are intense emotional states. But they spring from causes not dissimilar with effects radically, wildly different from each other. Just like we, architects of or tenants in or travelers through out life's landscape, are intensely and inarguably different from each other.

Stories moves us through those landscapes at speed. The milestones are there, but rather than majestic sweeping mountain vistas seen while hiking, they're glimpsed from the highway while moving at speed. This is wonderful on many levels. We experience many different lives this way, fiction being a highway through the landscape of another's life; but it can lead to a jadedness and a sense of "been there, done that" as we whip past the wedding night, the first child, buying a house...read this how many times now?

So with this in mind, hear what I tell you now: Adam Hope and Evelyn Roe aren't the usual suspects. Adam comes to Evelyn in a wonderful and deeply beautiful metaphorical blaze. I won't spoil it for you, but it left me both amused and so touched and moved that I was always ready to well up at the oddest moments in the tale, remembering that first contact and putting the moments of a life against it.

And, in the final analysis, isn't that the thing one most often does not get and resents the absence of in a story? An ordinary, relatable life rendered truly and beautifully Other by a simple reorientation of one detail?

So hear me clearly. Understand my urgency in telling you this. Life feels bad and unfocused and unlivable and unlovable sometimes. The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope will, if you let it, shift your perception that bubble off true that makes rain into rainbows.

My favorite quote from the novel has all the strengths and all the weaknesses of the book in one place:

“Countless times, I have imagined A. rising through the rivers of this land, to the surface of Florida to be found again, pulled into the air by new hands. The possibilities are endless, but most often I imagine him found by children. Above him, the sky shimmers and undulates blue through transparent springwater. Then four small brown hands break the surface and pull him into the air and into their excited and frightened vocabularies. The delicate bones of their arms and ribs absorb his voice, shattering their knowledge of what is possible.”

THE WASP FACTORY: An Appreciative Review

The late, great Iain (M.) Banks's passing inspired a number of group reads of his books in different Internetty places. I joined one for THE WASP FACTORY over on LibraryThing. A lot of people had ewww-ick responses; my response is here.

This is one great, as in LOLITA-type great, book. It will long, long outlive most (maybe even all) other books published in 1984.

REPOSTING REVIEW 6 FEBRUARY 2017


THE WASP FACTORY
IAIN BANKS
Simon & Schuster
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Frank--no ordinary sixteen-year-old--lives with his father outside a remote Scottish village. Their life is, to say the least, unconventional. Frank's mother abandoned them years ago: his elder brother Eric is confined to a psychiatric hospital; & his father measures out his eccentricities on an imperial scale. Frank has turned to strange acts of violence to vent his frustrations. In the bizarre daily rituals there is some solace. But when news comes of Eric's escape from the hospital Frank has to prepare the ground for his brother's inevitable return--an event that explodes the mysteries of the past & changes Frank utterly.

My Review: Much has been said in disgust and even anger about this polarizing book. Some have called for it to be banned. Others have written the equivalent of a silent finger-down-the-throat mime.

You are all entitled to your opinion. Here is mine: This book is brilliant. It will be remembered long long after the pleasant entertainments of the day are more forgotten than Restoration drama. (Hands up anyone who knows who Colley Cibber is. And don't front. Or use Wikipedia.)

I'm also an ardent partisan of Lolita, that deeply disturbing and very beautiful book by a pedophile about his pursuit of the perfect lover. I loved Mrs. Dalloway, the chilling, near-perfect narrative of a wealthy woman's desperation and crushing ennui.

So here's the deal: Frank, and his brother Eric, aren't role models, aren't people you'd want to be around, aren't amusing compadres for a jaunt along the path to the Banal Canal. They are, like Hum and Lo and Clarissa and Septimus, avatars (in the pre-Internet sense) of the raw, bleeding, agonic (unangled, in this use) purposelessness of life. They are the proof that salvation is a cruel ruse. These characters rip your fears from the base of your brain and move them, puppetlike, eerily masterful withal, into your worst nightmares.

And all without resorting to the supernatural.

Humanity comes off badly in this book. The truth of what made Frank the person he is will leave you more chilled than any silly evocation of a devil in a religious text. Frank's very being is an ambulatory evil act. But the reason for it, the motivating factor, is the absolute worst horror this book contains. All the animal-torture stuff is unpleasant, I agree. It's not as though it's lovingly and lingeringly described. And it pales in comparison to Frank's raison d'etre.

So yes, this book is strong meat. It's got deeply twisted characters enacting their damage before us, the safely removed audience. It's making a serious point about human nature. And it's doing all of that in quite beautifully wrought prose, without so much as one wasted word.

But it's essentially a warning to the reader: Don't go there. Don't do the pale, weak-kneed versions of the rage-and-hate fueled horrors inflicted on Frank, and even on Eric. Pay attention, be mindful of the many ways we as lazy moral actors condone the creation of Erics and Franks in our world.

Pay attention.

TransAtlantic, Colum McCann's polyphonic piece of Irish Abolitionism meets Aeronautical Achievement meets the End of the Troubles

TRANSATLANTIC
COLUM MCCANN
Random House
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.85* of five

The Publisher Says: National Book Award-winning novelist Colum McCann delivers his most ambitious and beautiful novel yet, tying together a series of narratives that span 150 years and two continents in an outstanding act of literary bravura.

In 1845 a black American slave lands in Ireland to champion ideas of democracy and freedom, only to find a famine unfurling at his feet. In 1919, two brave young airmen emerge from the carnage of World War One to pilot the very first transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to the west of Ireland. And in 1998 an American senator criss-crosses the ocean in search of a lasting Irish peace. Bearing witness to these history-making moments of Frederick Douglass, John Alcock and "Teddy" Brown, and George Mitchell, and braiding the story together into one epic tale, are four generations of women from a matriarchal clan, beginning with Irish housemaid Lily Duggan. In this story of dark and light, men and women, history and past, fiction and fact, National Book Award-winning novelist Colum McCann delivers a tour de force that is his most spectacular achievement to date.

My Review: This is an ambitious book indeed. McCann refines storytelling techniques he used in Let the Great World Spin, and layers in more complexity than he created in that National Book Award-winner. For that reason alone, I'd give him high marks.

But as a work of social commentary on Ireland, on its colonial past and its enraged present, the book comes alive. Without ever leaving his focus on the personal lives of people, he limns the results of the struggle of his homeland to be its ownself. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, is in Ireland to raise money for Abolition in the USA. Isn't that a nice cause for turn-about, with the IRA raising money in the USA for its militancy?

Webb took him out onto the verandah by the elbow and said: But Frederick, you cannot bite the hand that feeds.

The stars collandered the Wexford night. He knew Webb was right. There would always be an alignment. There were so many sides to every horizon. He could only choose one. No single mind could hold it all at once. Truth, justice, reality, contradiction. Misunderstandings could arise. He had one cause only. He must cleave to it.

He paced the verandah. A cold wind whipped off the water.

The water, the recurring use of the water, the wind off the water, being in the water, all of it the Atlantic, all of it marking transformation and immersion in the moment of transformation for each character...that's lovely.

The toughness and surivorhood of Ireland's women is a major part of the story. So is the deep-seated need of the Irish to Be Irish.

She stood at the window. It was her one hundred twenty-eighth day of watching men die. They came down the road in wagons pulled by horses. She had never seen such a bath of killing before. The wheels screeched. The line of wagons stretched down the path, into the trees. The trees themselves stretched off into the war.

She came down the stairs, through the open doors, into the wide heat...The men had exhausted their shouts. They were left with small whimperings, tiny gasps of pain...One soldier wore sergeant's stripes on his sleeve, and a gold harp stitched on his lapel. An Irishman. She had tended to so many of them.

So is the quixotic character of men, pushing boundaries that separate them (in their minds) from Glory. (The transAtlantic flight of the title...so very male in its pointless bravado, and in its gauntlet-flinging results of commonplace transAtlantic air travel.)

It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become a myth. The Great War had concussed the world. The unbearable news of sixteen million deaths rolled off the great metal drums of the newspapers. Europe was a crucible of bones.

That's plain old-fashioned beautiful phrase-making.

But in the end, the story large and small is about the strength of women to carry on. The struggles of men against the futility of their existence, a mere accident of evolution's need to stir the pot to keep the soup of life boiling merrily instead of burning irretrievably, are as ever and as always propped up, supported, allowed to exist, by women, evolution's one essential ingredient, carriers of whatever life the planet holds and makers of whatever future the men leave alone in their ceaseless tinkering.

The tap of his cane on the floor. The clank of the water pipes. She is wary of making too much of a fuss. Doesn't want to embarrass him, but he's certainly slowing up these weathers. What she dreads is a thump on the floor, or a falling against the banisters, or worse still a tumble down the stairs. She climbs the stairs before {he} emerges from the bathroom. A quick wrench of worry when there is no sound, but he emerges with a slightly bewildered look on his face. He has left a little shaving foam on the side of his chin, and his shirt is haphazardly buttoned.

...The ancient days of the Grand Opera House, the Hippodrome, the Curzon, the Albert Memorial Clock. The two of them out tripping the light fantastic. So young then. The smell of his tweeds. The Turkish tobacco he used to favor. The charity balls in Belfast, her gown rustling on the steps, {her husband} beside her, bow-tied, brilliantined, tipsy.

Worry for the present...nostalgia for the past...awareness of the short horizon of the future. She will bear it all. He will be borne to his bourn-side bier on the shoulders of this woman.

And the wonder of it is...it goes on.

Fresh Review for 21 April 2013

I've finally put up my review of THE DOG STARS in Literary Fiction and Story Collections.

So near and yet so far.

All reviews posted in this blog are subject to
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Today's Review Posts for 17 April 2013

LAZARUS IS DEAD in Literary Fiction & Story Collections

HOUSEKEEPING vs THE DIRT in Books About Books, Authors & Biblioholism

PALACE OF JUSTICE in Mystery Series

Quality stuff one and all! Come and look.

All reviews posted in this blog are subject to
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Today's Review Posts for 9 April 2013

MORE BATHS, LESS TAKING in Politics & Social Issues

MURDER IN THE RUE ST. ANN in GLBTQ (Chanse MacLeod #2)

WICKED BUGS in Science, Dinosaurs & Environmental Issues

THE PALACE OF ILLUSION in Literary Fiction & Short Story Collections

STILL LIFE (Chief Inspector Gamache #1) in Mystery Series

All reviews posted in this blog are subject to
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.