Month: November 2012
Book Review: Mo Said She Was Quirky by James Kelman
James Kelman
I first started reading James Kelman back in 1994 when his novel How Late It Was, How Late had just won the Man Booker Award. The novel was entrancing. Driven by a rough Glaswegian dialect that was musical, whimsical and earthy, the novel followed the Kafkaesque troubles of an ex-con who has been beaten, blinded and abandoned. I remember the plot only faintly, but the language itself will stay with me forever.
It was as if Samuel Beckett had plopped down into Glasgow, went on a long bender, and lived to tell the tale.
After that introduction, I read his short story collection, Busted Scotch. Again, while I enjoyed the stories, it was the language that remained. Lively, working-class language, filled with imaginative slang and time-born wisdom.
I remember being excited when I learned of his next novel, You Have to Be Careful In the Land of the Free when it came out in 2005. How wonderful, I thought, to hear that raspy, magical, glittering voice unleashed in the vastness of the Americas. But I was greatly disappointed. Storyline was never his strong point, but here even the voice had faded. I was off Kelman for a while.
And I guess to my detriment, because Kelman’s next work was widely praised. Kieron Smith, Boy was a story of an urban and lonely childhood and it was called both “magnificent and important.” But I missed it and now it’s at the bottom of a long list of must reads.
But I did pick up Kelman’s latest novel, Mo Said She Was Quirky–mainly because of the intriguing title. And once again, the language is at the forefront. Once again we are in a Beckettian world of isolation and words. Yet, unlike anything he did before, in Mo Said She Was Quirky, Kelman’s lyrical speaker is a woman, Helen. The novel is told primarily in the first person, much an extended interior monologue. Other characters appear, but we see and hear them only through Helen’s eyes.
Helen works the night shift at a London casino, where she and her daughter have moved to get away from her no-account husband in Glasgow and where they now share a small, one-bedroom flat with her Pakistani lover, Mo.
In a cab on the way home one night, Helen stares at two homeless men stagger across the intersection in front of the taxi. One of the me stares intently into the cab and Helen recognizes him as her brother. This recognition begins her long night of self-examination, self-incrimination, and self-rationalization. Why is she here? Why is he there? How dysfunctional was her and her brother’s growing up or is this the state of all humanity? Helen is generous in her compassion and stingy with her self-pity. Many have it worse than she, she deliberates, and then realizes that misery, sorrow, and pain are very relative and the fact that she has a hot shower and another person does not does not make her pain any easier or lighter to bear.
Completely knackered and unused to the night-shift, Helen, nevertheless, cannot sleep. Her mind races with memories of her brother, her damaged parents, her child, her ex, and the kind man she lives with, Mo. She waits until Mo and her daughter waken, watches them go off to school, and yet, still, she cannot sleep. She thinks greatly about the differences between men and women, the posturing and bullying of those she has known, the favorites that her parents very obviously played. She thinks about racism and worries about Mo. She thinks of the urban jungle and worries about her daughter.
As night turns into day, as Mo takes her child to work, she grabs a few hours of rest but her mind is increasingly racing. And as it does we learn more why this simple-hearted woman is so fraught with worry about the future, so done-in by her present, and so haunted by her past.
I give Kelman a lot of credit for trying what he does so well in a woman’s voice. At times, Helen’s monologue seems to drag but at others it is riveting, revealling bits and bits of a single life and illuminating the mind of a woman who lives in constant worry about the world around her–and the past that formed her.
I’m not really sure yet how I feel about Mo Said She Was Quirky. I do know that Kelman’s voice in it has me returning to reread How Late It Was, How Late. That’s the novel of his that I loved the most, and the others have yet to measure up.
Aventuras de Avril, Reader Appreciation Award, and some blogs to check out
For a long while, the country that was third or fourth in readership of my blog was Ecuador. 
That was mainly because of a woman named April who writes a wonderful blog herself and whose comments on my own postings were always amusing, thoughtful and enjoyable.
April is a remarkable woman. About a year ago, she decided to change her life. Not something superficial like a new hair-style, a new tattoo (I don’t know if she has even one!) or a change in diet. April picked up and moved to Ecuador. As she said “I filled up a backpack, bought a ticket to Ecuador and left, without speaking any Spanish, with no job lined up, and just a starting point and a general goal.”
She has been living there for nine months now and she has been recording her adventures in a delightful blog called AVENTURAS de AVRIL. You should check it out. Her enthusiasm for her new world, her new language and the many new people that are in her life is uplifting, and her writing and photography are special. I had read two pieces this week–one in the NYTimes and one in the preface to the Best American Short Stories of 2011–which advised one to pick up his or her things, move to a place where the language is unknown, and discover something special about one’s self. April has successfully taken that to heart. So be sure to check out her blog by clicking on the link above.
So why am I writing about April? To THANK HER. She has recommended me for a Reader Appreciation Award–a recognition that she herself just won. In the large scale of things, this is a very unassuming award, meaningful and known to only a few. But it is a simple recognition from someone out there who’s reading. And that is very, very much appreciated. So THANK YOU very much April! Keep writing and keep wringing everything you can out of life.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The Rules:
1. Provide a link and thank the blogger who nominated you for this award.
2. Answer 10 questions.
3. Choose 10-12 blogs that you find a joy to read.
4. Provide links to these blogs and kindly let the recipients know that they have been chosen.
5. Include the award logo within your blog post.
The Questions:
Your favorite color? I like grey in all its many shades. (This is not a literary reference. Hah!)
Your favorite animal? Otters
Your favorite non-alcoholic drink? Chocolate Milk
Facebook® or Twitter®? Neither.
Your favorite pattern? Very small checks.
Getting or giving presents? I very much dislike receiving gifts. I love giving gifts when I am truly excited about what I am giving.
Your favorite number? 18
Your favorite day of the week? Every day. I see no differences in them.
Your favorite flower? Bird of Paradise.
What is your passion? To learn to write well.
The Blogs I Appreciate:
Two of these are the blogs of a personal friend and a niece. The rest are by people that I have connected with since I began writing my blog at the beginning of March and are part of a very neat community. Some I read for advice, others I read for inspiration, and still others I read for the shear joy of it. So, here they are in no particular order:
Sue Healy – An Irish born writer whose short stories and dramas have won numerous awards. Her blog addresses the day-ins and day-outs of the writing craft.
Diane Bones – The very humorous opinions of a very funny writer. Diane opines on everything from SPAM to National Elections, from Award Shows to urban violence. A great and wonderful read.
me myself and ela –a Romanian woman living in London, her blog is filled with magnificent photographs, music videos, and her own musings.
O Lumi in Imagini –another Romanian blog, this one focusing on art and film. A bit avant garde but fun to look at.
Courtney Gillette— a young Brooklyn writer who is literate, interesting, funny and saavy.
The Coevas–I am not sure what this is or how I got here. It’s from a middle-European writing/creative collective that is putting together a novel and the film to go with it all at once on the site. Pretty dramatic images and a beautiful site.
francescannotwrite–“so let these writers impress you instead” states the header of this blog. I think she’s being modest. Francess Antoinette is well travelled and posts her amazing photos and amusing thoughts on her blog. It’s a very nice read.
Pretty Feet, Pop Toe–post after post, this is one of the funnier blogs I read. A snarky complaint about all the things that drive all of us mad, written well and with a unique sense of humor.
apk: an art diary–I have probably forwarded posts from this blog site more than any other. It is like a digital art gallery that posts extraordinary art work from artists (all unknown to me) from around the world. Truly wonderful.
The Saturday Morning Post–as the title says, it is a blog that delivers a post each and every Saturday. It discusses the writing life in all its aspects, from successes to rejection, from inspiration to business. Well written, serious, and informative.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
So THANKS to all of you for reading my blog. I was seriously considering putting my blog to sleep–but I’ve developed a strange relationship with it. So maybe we’ll go on for a bit longer. Go check out some of the blogs listed above. I’m sure you’ll find them interesting.
And thank you to April for sending me this Reader Appreciation Award. Please be sure to check out her blog. She’s a fascinating person.
Do What You Love: The Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show
David D’Imperio’s sculptured lighting
On Friday past, I went to the Philadelphia Art Museum’s annual Craft Show. Now this isn’t your usual craft show with knitted tea cozies, outré Christmas decorations, and cute tchotchkes for the home. This is major art. The exhibitors were potters and metal workers, fabric artists and glass blowers, painters, fashion designers and jewelers, woodworkers and stone carvers. This was some major stuff–and more often than not far above my price range.
Yet it was all beautiful. At one point, I called over one of the women I was with to see these magnificent glass platters. The artist corrected me: what I thought was glass was actually wood. All his pieces were wood. Yet they were so translucent and brilliant and delicate that one would never first believe that they were wood.
Mark Schuler’s wooden bowl.
Two fashion designers–at opposite ends of the “elegance” scale–were both kicky and inventive. Their dresses and capes and skirts and pants were flowing with ruched materials or angular draping. One woman painted gorgeous canvasses, part abstract/part folk art, and treated them so they could be use as floor coverings. Runners for hallways, area mats for large rooms. They were exquisite.
There was exquisite furniture and graceful pots, jewelry both elegant and extreme. There was a perpetual motion glass wine aerator and eyeglasses made of wood. There were graceful ceramics and fun metal sculptures. There was simply aisle after aisle in the cavernous Convention Center filled with magnificent works of human artistry.
And that was the true beauty of this collection. Hundreds of people from around the world were simply doing what they loved–creating things of beauty. How lucky one must be to be able to do what he or she loves as not their job but as their vocation, to be able to start the day with nothing and end up with something. For the artist does not go to work, he is always at work. He eats and sleeps and breathes his work. And while not all of these crafts were to my taste–though many, many were–all were to my liking. For something inside me loves the idea that human beings are a species that does create, and often creates piece not for their utility but for their simple and utter beauty.
Movie Review: A Late Quartet–Harmony within the Dissonance
I received an e-mail last Monday that read like this:
Ciao Gianni,
Ho visto un film ieri sera si chiamo “A Last Quartet”. Ho pensato molto a Biggs perche un uomo ha Parkinson’s. Interesante Buon giorno!!
“Biggs” was a friend of ours who struggled with Parkinson’s until the end of her life and Parkinsons plays a major role in the plot of Yaron Zilberman’s film A Late Quartet. I had read about the film in those end-of-summer write-ups of films that would be arriving in the coming months, but had forgotten completely about it. And now, here it was in town.
And while a diagnosis of Parkinson’s comes early in the movie, it is not the only malfunction in the story. The film is about the tensions, dysfunctions, rivalries, and bickerings that take place within a famous string quartet, “The Fugue String Quartet.” Celebrating its 25th anniversary together, the quartet reveals a shattering disharmony in an ensemble devoted to creating celestial harmony.
The film begins as the ensemble gathers for its first rehearsal after a short period apart. The cello player, Peter (Christopher Walken) cuts the practice short as he finds he is losing control and strength in his hand. After some visits to the doctor, he learns he has the onset of Parkinson’s disease, and he calls the group together to tell them and to announce that the first concert of the new season will be his final performance.
Yet Peter’s debilitating disease plays underneath the rest of the melodrama–much like his cello plays under the melodies of the quartet. Robert (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Juliette (Catherine Keener) have been married through most of the quartet’s existence, and the strains within the marriage seem to be becoming more and more taut. There is a silent dissatisfaction and regret running through the both of them. And finally, the first violinist Daniel (Mark Ivanir) is an exacting, domineering, egoist whose suppressed passion erupts in an affair that may fracture the quartet. (No, gentle readers. Although Juliette and he were once lovers before she married, she is not the focus of his attentions.)
A Late Quartet would be considered no more than just a middling film if it weren’t for the performances of Hoffman, Keener, Ivanir and Walken. Walken, who lately seemed to 
be a mere parody of himself (more cowbell, anyone?) is superb. I can’t remember ever seeing him this intense, this openly vulnerable. In the class he teaches, he reads his young prodigies T.S. Eliot on Beethoven and reminisces about his and Pablo Casal’s conversations. He is dying, he is missing his dead wife, and he is suffering as he watches his beloved quartet rip apart. It is a simple, understated performance that echoes the role that his cello brings to the music.
On the other hand, while his character plays second violin in the quartet, Philip Seymour Hoffman is certainly the first violin in this ensemble. It is his quiet emotional rollercoaster, his final refusal to be everyone’s “doormat,” his true declaration of love for the wife whom he has just betrayed that is the masterstroke in this film. The film builds on Hoffman. He and Cathrine Keener have worked in several films together (most notably Capote and Synecdoche, New York) and their comfort with each other is evident. The character she plays is perhaps the least discoverable–she is strong and yet damaged, wise and yet blindered, loving and yet cold. Mark Ivanir (who people will recognize from countless television series as well as three Spielberg films and a couple of DeNiro projects) plays the role of the obsessive Daniel. Focused on passionless precision, he is the counterweight to Hoffman–who inwardly covets Daniel’s role as first violinist.
As well as the ensemble works off each other, the music is perhaps the most memorable. The quartet is preparing Beethoven’s Opus 131 String Quartet (in C-sharp minor), a piece that Beethoven wrote during his last days and which taxes the strength and stamina of the performers as well as the integrity of the instruments. We learn that it is what Schubert asked to be played to him as he was dying. In the film, the music is actually played by the Brentano Quartet, and it is stirringly emotional. If you wish, you can hear it here:
Schubert once said after having heard Opus 131, “After this, what is left for us to write?” The film A Late Quartet falls far short of those heights, yet when I think of Parkinson’s Disease and the people who I knew who have suffered from it, I wonder if the “what is left…?” is the haunting motif. I wonder if the Christoper Walken character–who so much wants the quartet to continue after him–has considered the same.
Zero words, four days drinking and not getting near a mustache!!
In the States, November is the month for all sorts of things. I don’t know why, but it is. In 2000, National Novel Writing Month was begun when Chris Bayley launched an interactive web-site that encouraged writers to produce 50,000 words or more of a novel. (Here is the site, but it’s too late to join this year: www.nanowrimo.org/). The year earlier, Bayley had started the novel writing month in July, but moved it to November the following year to take advantage of the more miserable weather.
Anyway, there was a lot of press in the weeks leading up to November 1, and I had toyed with the idea of doing it on my own without “registering” on the official website. I had already 1700 words of something I had been working on, so I figure I’d cheat a little and have a head start when November came around. Well now it is November 4 and I still have the original 1700 hundred words. November has produced ZERO!
I also figured I would try to cut back a little on the drink and use November as a dry month–sort of like what some people do during Lent. I thought maybe it would get me feeling a bit more energized, a little more clear headed, repair some brain cells, and get a little further along on my “works in progress” (see paragraph above!)
Well it’s now November 4th. I didn’t succeed on the 1st–a few beers with pizza. On the 2nd, I stopped for dinner at my local and had several pints of Guinness and then a couple of glasses of wine when I returned home. Yesterday, the 3rd, I was at a dinner party where the wine was flowing voluminously, and today I am invited again somewhere for dinner. I plan to drink water at the dinner tonight and start my dry month from there. We shall see.
But to be truthful, I haven’t been too successful for the first three days.
And then the oddest of all the November month “challenges,” this month is the November Mustache Growing Month for Prostate Health. Entitled MOVEMBER, the event has been around for nine years now and is instituted to heighten awareness of all men’s health issues. There are celebrities involved, a Mobile App that allows you to time-lapse record the results of your growing and share with other participants, and professionally produced videos celebrating hairy upper lips. I am sure it is a very good cause (my father died of prostate cancer) but Mustache Growing is very scary territory. What happened to the good old 5k run?
Anyway, scarred by too many images of bad mustaches, this is one event I am not getting close to, not by a whisker.
.
Book Review: Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan
A lot of people I know do not like McEwan’s books. However, I do very much. I find that his novels are both literary and very good reads.
McEwan’s novels are always well plotted, full of wonderful local color and specialized information that I did not know, and often times appeal to a particularly personal aspect of my life. I remember very well and with great fondness the exact day that the novel Saturday takes place. (In fact I have written a piece about that particular day as well and am now shopping it around to place somewhere.) The novella On Chesil Beach is in many ways a modernization of the poem “Dover Beach” –a poem which also plays a crucial part in the ending of Saturday–and one on which I had based a short story a long while ago. And despite the time period, Atonement is thoroughly post-modern in its attitude towards time and the historicity of events.
U.K. Cover of McEwan’s Sweet Tooth
McEwan’s new novel Sweet Tooth also plays with post-modernism in its narration. Indeed, the main character Serena Frome–a woman noted for her prolific reading habits–complains about the very type of novel that Sweet Tooth ends up being.
The time is the early 1970s, and Serena Frome is an intelligent young woman who goes off to Cambridge to study maths. It is right before the burgeoning of the women’s rights movement, and in fact, Serena is the only Cambridge female studying mathematics at the time. Yet she does not see herself as a trailblazing feminist, and in fact often distances herself from many aspects of the movement’s agenda.
Yet feminism is not the crux on which this novel hangs. The Cold War is in full swing, and Frome has been recruited by an elderly Cambridge teacher who is also her lover for a position at MI5. Her task is to help wage battle on the cultural lines between the West and the Soviet Union. The government is worried that it is losing the cultural battle as more and more intellectuals, artists, and writers lean further and further left. What it proposes is a plan to set up a false foundation that subsidizes writers with the idea that the intellectual community will see the country as supporting the arts and with the added hope that the writers’ work will fall more in line with its philosophies.
The mission is dubbed “Sweet Tooth” and Frome is given the job to bring in such a writer. She is to introduce herself as part of a panel that has recommended a young, upcoming writer and to offer him a stipend of two years salary to complete a novel.
Unfortunately, she also falls in love with the man.
Illustration: Satoshi Kambayashi/The Guardian
Taken from Guardian’s excerpt from Sweet Tooth
Like many Cold War tales, particularly when dealing with MI5, there are betrayals and mistrust. There are thwarted love affairs, rogue agents, and a general sense of looking over one’s shoulder. And in many ways, Serena is out of her depth.
The story is couched in the gestalt of the 70’s. The IRA campaign in Northern Ireland is emigrating to England, the hippie movement is petering out while the establishment is growing its sideburns, and opposition to the war in Viet Nam is growing exponentially. And all of these elements play a small role in Serena’s world. Even McEwan’s buddy, Martin Amis, shows up to receive an award, along with Serena’s protege.
I was innundated with work (one reason I haven’t posted in three weeks), but had ordered Sweet Tooth from the U.K. (It doesn’t come out in the U.S. until mid-November). And despite being behind in everything else, I picked up the novel and read it in two days. It is fast moving, intricately plotted, and enjoyable. I was told that the beginning was a little slugish and that one had to be patient before things got good, but I did not find this to be the case at all.
And I loved the ending, which put everything in perspective.
My only complaint is the cover of this edition–it is a bit cheesy and, with the title “Sweet Tooth,” it looks like the cover to some sort of girls’ young-adult series, or worse some tarted up middle-class porn. Don’t know what the people at Cape were thinking, but I think they blundered on this one.
j. p. bohannon 