Book Review

Book Review: Like You’d Understand Anyway by Jim Shephard

/ jpbohannon / 3 Comments

I don’t often read short story collections. My rhythms, I guess, are more geared towards the novel. And most of the short stories I read are in magazines or journals, not in collections where one follows the other. But I did pick up and read Jim Shepherd’s  Like You’d Understand, Anyway.

Someone once explained a short-story to me like this: imagine a brick wall is a person’s life. A short-story is just one of the bricks removed. We have little real knowledge of the bricks surrounding this one brick, just the one. solitary brick. Just this moment in a person’s life.  I don’t how accurate this is for all stories (it’s very Joycean) but I refer to it often.

Well, Jim Shephard’s stories are pieces not of a brick wall but from an extraordinary mural. The stories are all over the place and all over time.

There is a general fatalistic theme running through them, a feeling of being unprepared, unsuited, or even uninterested in facing the battles of life. And if that sounds like a very modern view of the world, it is.  Except Shepards’s characters are from all over history.

“Eros 7,” my particular favorite, is a sweet love story taken from the diary of a female cosmonaut in 1963, the early days of the  Russian-US space race.

“Hadrian’s Wall” is a sensitive look at young soldier in the Roman legion–lacking confidence and skill–as he is stationed in 2nd-century Britain.

There are stories that take place during the Chernobyl accident, during the French Reign of Terror, during an early ascent of the Himalayan peaks, during the 19th-century days of Australian exploration.

But there are also simple domestic stories. “Proto Scorpions of the Silurian” depicts a young man trying to deal with his overwrought parents who, in turn, are trying to cope with his mentally unbalanced brother. Another story,  “Courtesy for Beginnings,” shows a young boy who is terribly miserable at a horrible summer camp but who is forced to console his parents by phone who are also struggling with an unbalanced sibling.

But whether in Ancient Greece or modern Connecticut, each of these stories brings a modern sensibility of doubt, isolation and struggle. Each is a sensitive portrayal of a character far different than most of us, but very similar all the same.

Sunday Book Review: Hitch-22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens

/ jpbohannon / 2 Comments

It is a cliché that one should never meet the writer’s that one admires–disappointment is surely to be the outcome.  Well, Christopher Hitchens is the exception to the rule.

I admire him even more having read his memoir.

As one of the most prolific and provocative essayists of the last thirty-odd years, Hitchens seemed to be everywhere–his journalist’s beat the places where injustice, cruelty, and war loomed most horribly.  From Belfast during the heights of the “Troubles,” to Argentina during the period of the “disappeared,” to Poland at the beginnings of the “Solidarity” movement, to Zimbabwe, Mogadishu, Romania, Cyprus, Iraq, and Iran, Hitchens brought his sensible eye and exquisite writing style to reveal to the world the frequent cruelty and inanity of world politics, exposing the greed and stupidity of many of the political leaders who claim to have the “peoples’ interests” at heart.

It is that principled, observant eye and the exquisite sense of writing that defines Hitchens memoir–for his biography is one of two sides: the principled, political advocate and the Oxford educated, man of letters. And the people he encounters come from both of these worlds as well.

On one hand, he is with a young Bill Clinton at Oxford when he infamously “did not inhale.”  (Hitchens says that is probably correct because Clinton was terribly allergic to smoke. However, he adds, he certainly consumed more than his share of the “brownies.”) He meets Margaret Thatcher when she is made head of the Tory party. (He immediately got in a disagreement with her and she smacked his bottom with rolled up program to terminate the discussion.)  He meets the vile General Videla of Argentina; the future first elected president of Iraq,  Jalal Talabani; the Cypriot president, Archbishop Makarios. He debates Western pundits and arranges lectures for some of the world’s most unsung champions of the people.

On the other hand, his closest friends are major lights of the British literary world: the novelists, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, and the poet James Fenton.  His accounts of their times together rival any of the apocryphal stories of the Algonquin Table.  (My favorite line is the critic’s Clive James’ review of Pumping Iron, the documentary on body-building that introduced Arnold Schwarzneggger to the world.  James said that Schwarzenegger looked like “a brown condom stuffed with walnuts.”)

But what stands out in Hitch-22 is not the list of notables with whom Hitchens associated or fought against. It is the dedication to principle with which he lived his life.  As a young man he was a dedicated member of the International Socialist party and later became a dedicated member of the Labour Party. Both of these he jettisoned when he believed that the party had strayed from its principles–and he continually called them on it.

As he traveled from hot-spot to hot-spot, he began to trust the leaders of all these revolutionary movements less and less. Here’s what he says:

I eventually came to appreciate a feature of the situation that since helped me to understand similar obduracy in Lebanon, Gaza, Cyprus, and several other spots. The local leadership that are generated by the “troubles” in such places do not want there to be a solution. A solution would mean that they were no longer deferred to by visiting UN or American mediators, no longer invited to ritzy high-profile international conferences, no longer treated with deference by the mass media, and no longer able to make a second living by smuggling and protection-racketeering.

A bit cynical to be sure, but this is from a man who has entered the belly of the beast and refuses to swallow the muck he sees there.

Always an iconoclast, Hitchens attacks those he believes deserve it, no matter what their status or reputation. For example, early on, he admits that he felt separated from the rest of the world in November, 1963 for not mourning sufficiently  the assassination of the American president.   The sainted Jack Kennedy he condemns as a “high risk narcissist” for the game of chicken that he played with Russia over the Cuba missile crisis.  (This event  very likely sowed his interest in geopolitics.) He very famously debunked Mother Theresa and was called in by the Vatican to present a case against her when she was up for canonization. (This used to be called “The Devil’s Advocate,”  a position that the Vatican eliminated by the time Hitchens was called in. He jokingly said that he  must then be advocating for the devil, pro bono.)

Like any good thinker, Hitchens is not afraid to change his mind, to reconsider his position, when presented by new facts.

More than anything else, it is this life as a DELIBERATE THINKING HUMAN that impresses me more than anything else in his story. Hitchens considered the world around him with open, unprejudiced eyes, tried to make sense of it, and tried to expose what he saw as nonsense.

Hitchens died 15, December 2011, after a struggle with esophagal cancer.  His writings live on. I have two collections of his essays on hold at our public library.  I can’t wait to tackle them.

A footnote on The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner

/ jpbohannon / Leave a comment

Despite my misgivings, I plowed ahead and finished The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner.  My original appraisal was unchanged. I felt it was infantile, too enamored with its own cleverness, and pointless. It wasn’t a pleasant read–the effort in no way equaled the payoff.

However, I did notice something that I hadn’t before.  I was proofreading what I had written last week about the novel on a different platform. The tablet had shrunk the margins so that the text ran narrow like a newspaper column.  I had originally quoted this text:

“What subculture is evinced by Ike‘s clothes and his shtick, by the non-Semitic contours of his nose and his dick, by the feral fatalism of all his looney tics–like the petit-mal fluttering of his long-lashed lids and the Mussolini torticollis of his Schick-nicked neck, and the staring and the glaring and the daring and the hectoring, and the tapping on the table with his aluminum wedding ring, as he hums those tunes from his childhood albums and, after a spasm of Keith Moon air-drums, returns to his lewd mandala of Italian breadcrumbs?

But in the “newspaper column” format the passage ran quite poetically like this:

“What subculture is evinced by Ike‘s clothes and his shtick,
by the non-Semitic contours of his nose and his dick,
by the feral fatalism of all his looney tics–
like the petit-mal fluttering of his long-lashed lids
and the Mussolini torticollis of his Schick-nicked neck,
and the staring and the glaring and the daring
and the hectoring, and the tapping on the table
with his aluminum wedding ring, as he hums
those tunes from his childhood albums
and, after a spasm of Keith Moon air-drums,
returns to his lewd mandala of Italian breadcrumbs?

There is a rhyme scheme to the passage, a rhythm that I had missed when reading the prose. I went through the novel for similar riffs and they are a few but they are there for no intrinsic reason–they seem to occur only when Leyner is in a rhythm himself, apart from the needs or function of the novel.

It was fun to discover but it didn’t change my opinion.

 

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner: When does one stop reading a book?

/ jpbohannon / 7 Comments

When is it time to stop reading a novel?  And why do I feel so guilty about it?

I decided today to go no further in Mark Leyner’s The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.  Was it bad?  No, it was quite entertaining?  Was it difficult?  No, not in the way say Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or DFW’s Infinite Jest is difficult.

To be truthful, it is simply a tiring read.

The title refers to poor Ike Karton, the “nutbag” as he is called in his neighborhood in Jersey City, New Jersey.  Here is his introduction (35 pages in):

“What subculture is evinced by Ike‘s clothes and his shtick, by the non-Semitic contours of his nose and his dick, by the feral fatalism of all his looney tics–like the petit-mal fluttering of his long-lashed lids and the Mussolini torticollis of his Schick-nicked neck, and the staring and the glaring and the daring and the hectoring, and the tapping on the table with his aluminum wedding ring, as he hums those tunes from his childhood albums and, after a spasm of Keith Moon air-drums, returns to his lewd mandala of Italian breadcrumbs?

So begins the story of Ike Karton, a story variously called throughout history Ike‘s Agony, T.G.I.F. (Ten Gods I’d Fuck), and The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. This is a story that’s been told, how many times? –over and over and over again, …”

Ike is a believer in a pantheon of Gods who have played havoc with the universe for billions of years.  Earlier we learn that

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is the story of a man, a mortal, an unemployed butcher, in fact, who lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, in a two-story brick house that is approximately twenty feet tall. This man is the hero IKE KARTON. The epic ends with Ike’s violent death.  If only Ike had used for his defense “silence, exile, and cunning.” But that isn’t Ike. Ike is the Warlord of his Stoop.  Ike is a man who is “singled out.” A man marked by fate. A man of Gods, attuned to the Gods. A man anathematized by his neighbors. A man beloved by La Felina and Fast-Cooking Ali, and a man whose mind is ineradicably inscribed by XOXO. [these are the names of gods we’ve already met]. Ike’s brain is riddled with the tiny, meticulous longhand of the mind-fucking God XOXO, whose very name bespeaks life’s irreconcilable conntradictions, symbolizing both love (hugs and kisses) and war (the diagramming of football plays).

Are you tired yet?  I am…(but I have such a developed sense of guilt that I will probably return to it before the evening’s out.)

The  novel begins with the beginnings of the universe. This gaggle of gods arrive on a school-bus, blaring the Mister Softee jingle, like a bunch of college students “Gone Wild” on spring break.  Like the gods of other mythologies, they are petty and mischievous and promiscuous and quite often harmful to humanity. Now, they are living in the tallest (and most opulent) building in the world (now they are in Dubai, but they have had to move several times as humans keep building taller buildings.) Bored and propelled by their own machinations and relations they have become obsessed with Ike Kantor.

The novel plays with meta-fiction to a large degree. A sentence is repeated. Then the sentence that makes the repetition is repeated again including the original sentence. And again. And again.  It is tiring…and soon loses its cleverness.

But the book is not the theme of this post; it is is the decision to give up on one.  Why do some people (myself to be sure) feel a sense of obligation to finish a book once he or she has begun it?  Is it financial, in that you’ve invested fifteen bucks in a book you might as well get your money’s worth?  I don’t think so.

Is it something that happened to us when we were school children? Are we afraid that the nuns, headmasters, schoolmarms are going to rap our knuckles with a ruler for not completing our assignment?

Or is it respect for the artist?  Do we feel the need to stick with something, to see where it leads to, out of respect and admiration for the writer’s work?

I don’t know.

But I have a day and half free–so I’ll probably end up finishing it anyway.

Sunday Book Review: Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd

/ jpbohannon / 2 Comments

For ninety-percent of the novel Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd, I was enthralled.

Vienna before the first World War, London on the eve of war, the no-man’s land between the trenches, neutral Geneva at the height of hostilities, London during zeppelin bombing raids. The settings are dramatic and richly drawn.

As was the plot: A young actor, following his famous father’s footsteps (if that’s not Oedipal enough for him, his mother catches him at his first experience at masturbation to boot), goes to Vienna to find a cure for a sexual condition–to Vienna, the center of the burgeoning new concept of psychoanalysis. Although he meets Freud himself, it is Freud’s English speaking neighbor who takes Lysander Rief on–and who successfully cures him.  And we know he is cured because his four month affair with the English bohemian Hettie Bull ends in a pregnancy and his arrest for rape by the Viennese authorities.

When two British diplomats arrange for Rief’s escape, they also arrange for his indenture to British intelligence.

Soon after Rief returns to London, his rescuers called in his debt and he is asked to enter Geneva via  the front lines. He is successful at his mission, survives seven bullet wounds, and completes the assignment that he had been ordered to finish.  And then he is given a second mission.

The action–of both the military and intelligence escapades and Rief’s romantic life–is riveting, fast paced and cleverly intertwined. Each character seems to be connected to another and no one is entirely innocent. And Rief’s inner-life is subtly and intelligently revealed. One learns much about military ordinance, psychoanalytic practices, the British class system and the early 20th-century British world of theater. And the information is never pedantic or overwhelming but richly woven into the plot.

Yet the solution of Rief’s intelligence mission and the resolution of his own personal quests seems to be lacking.  As the Novel wraps up and the various strands are pulled together, the story begins to limp rather than gain strength.  By the end, I felt I was reading a Hardy Boys’ Adventure. The solution was pat and somewhat anti-climactic.

I had been look forward to Waiting for Sunrise for several months and to be quite honest I enjoyed reading it very, very much. Until the end that is.  I was disappointed. It seemed that Boyd had simply decided to quit.

William Boyd

I like William Boyd very much. I feel he is greatly underrated among his contemporaries and is a wonderful stylist with a perfect ear for the nuances of an age.

I had previously read several Boyd novels and do not remember this falling off, this disappointment before. The novels all successfully re-create historic eras, describing its people, its culture, its ethos, its fears, all braced by an intelligent understanding and description of the scientific theories and advancements that are at that moment being born. For instance, Brazzaville Beach deals with mathematical chaos theory and the sociology of chimpanzees.  The New Confessions (modeled on Rousseau’s Confessions) also deals with World War I–as with Waiting for Sunrise–moves through Hollywood and Berlin, treats the horrors of World War II and then ends with the Hollywood Communist  trials, the whole while treating  us to the internal workings of the Hollywood film industry.  The Blue Afternoon (my personal favorite) is centered on the United States invasion of Manilla and its ultimate acquisition of the Philippines through the Treaty of Versaille and travels from Lisbon, Manilla and Los Angeles, from 1902 through the 1930s, while leading the reader through advancements in surgery and trends in architecture.

All of Boyd’s novels are rich with fascinating information, realistic period details, and memorable human stories. And all are vastly enjoyable and worthwhile.  Waiting for Sunrise, however, for me, ends a little too quickly and a little too weakly.

Tuesday Book Review: Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

/ jpbohannon / Leave a comment

I read Wonder Boys last week.  I had read it previously, at least twenty years ago, and, boy, had I misremembered it.  As a younger man, I found inspiration in the “wunderkind” writing student and was fascinated by the famous writing teacher who is famously blocked with his novel (also called Wonderboys) that is going on past 2600 pages long.  This time around I did not have the same reactions.

Part of the problem is also that I could not get the film adaptation out of my head– a film I had seen in the long interim between readings.  In the film, the famous writing teacher is played by Michael Douglas, his cynical, jaded literary agent by Robert Downey, Jr., and the fabulous writing student by Tobey Maguire.  And while I remember enjoying the movie greatly–and understand why marquee actors are used–I think  it was terribly miscast.

Grady Tripp is the dissolute writing teacher.  He smokes way too much dope, he is cavalier in his relationships, and he is always looking out to score. In the novel, he is over-large, a big hulking bear of a man.  In one scene, when he is spiraling into what might be a catastrophic relationship with a young student who rents a room in his basement, he notices his reflection in the mirror. He sees a middle-aged, bearish man slumped down over this young college girl as they slow dance together. It is a moment of self-awareness–aided by a large quantity of pills, dope, and alcohol enhanced by pounding adrenelain after a slapstick night of antics. The man he sees in the mirror no way is the stylish professor played by Michael Douglas.

The young writing student is a-social and painfully awkward which Tobey Maguire captures but he is not nearly dark enough. In the novel, James Leer is very dark, in a long overcoat of indeterminate material and age.  And Robert Downey Jr. did not match my vision either. I know that most people quibble with the casting of books they’ve read when they are made into movies.  And this is my quibble: the cast is too handsome.

But enough about the movie…

The novel starts out on a rollicking tear. On the night that the novel begins Grady Tripp finds a note from his wife saying she has left him, he picks up his agent and the transvestite he met on the plane, his mistress–Chancellor of the school and wife of his Department Chairman–tells him she is pregnant, he gets bit in the leg by a dog, and he is traveling around with a tuba, a dead dog, the coat Marilyn Monroe wore at her wedding to Joe DiMaggio and a student who may or may not be suicidal…or truthful.  It reminded me of John Irving at his best.

An academic farce, there are set scenes of college gatherings and festival lectures. There are Tripp’s musings on the requirements of good writing, his praise for James Leer’s young but promising work, and insights into a truly blocked artist–one who comes to no longer believe in the work he is doing.

The female characters, his wife, his mistress, the student living in his house, however, are very shallow–cardboard figures created for Tripp to act or react against.

Michael Chabon

That the novel famously echoes Chabon’s early writing life makes reading it this much later in his career offer its own rewards.  Like James Lear, the young student, Chabon received a book contract for The Mysteries of Pittsburgh when his writing professor–unknown to Chabon–passed the manuscript on to his own literary agent.  And like Grady Tripp, Chabon worked years on a follow-up novel–a novel that grew enormously large before he himself destroyed it.

Since The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonderboys, Chabon has continued to win great praise and loyal readership.  His novel, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitizer Prize for fiction in 2000 and his 2007 novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union won the Hugo, Nebula, Sidewise and Ignotus awards. (An aside–I was in Quebec city one week and needed something to read. There was primarily only French book stores. In one that I stepped into there was a small rack with about a dozen books written in English. It was there that I bought the Yiddish Policemen’s Union.)

And while his first novel–The Mysteries of Pittsburgh–and the novels following Wonderboys deal directly with Jewishness and Judaism, it is a very minor theme in Wonderboys.  There are touches of it when Tripp and James go visit his Korean ex-wife for Passover Seder and bumps against it when James’ own history is revealed, but it is not forefront in the novel.

Instead this is very much a novel about writing–or not writing as is Tripp’s case.  It is academic because it takes place on a university campus and deals with chancellors and professors and students and chairmen, but there is no scenes within a classroom. It tries to be a novel about love and contentment–but Tripp’s long road there, it is his third wife that leaves him and his tentative gestures towards his pregnant mistress are filled with doubt and fear.

All in all, though, Wonderboys is a wonderful read.  The beginning is peerless–quick moving, deft character sketches, and hilarious plotting. If the second-half seems to suffer from a bit of a hangover, it is because nothing could keep up with the original momentum. The novel must switch rhythms to mirror Grady Tripp’s more thoughtful musings, fears, and discoveries.

Do read Wonderboys or, if you want, rent the film.  Both are very enjoyable.  Just don’t do both too close together. And when you finish with those give Chabon’s other titles a try. Any of them are well worth the time spent.

Clockwork Orange and City of Bohane

/ jpbohannon / 6 Comments

The Guardian had an article today noting the 50th Anniversary of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Mind you, it is the anniversary of the book not Stanley Kubrick’s iconic movie, which has taken on a life of its own.

I first read the novel when I was seventeen. I read it a month later when I learned there was an edition with a glossary in the back. The glossary didn’t enhance the read that much; everything could be inferred from context  without too much trouble. (I had heard the glossary was only in the American edition, but I am not positive of that.) Anyway, what I remember most was the language: it was playful, edgy, smart, and alive. It was a mixture of joycean word play, street jive, cockney, rhyming, Slavic slang. And it was what set me off reading a lot of Burgess, from the Enderby novels to the majestic Napoleon’s Symphony to the various autobiographies.

The movie was another thing.  I was hitch-hiking across Canada from Vancouver to Toronto and winter was coming on a lot earlier than it came where I was from. It was only the last week of August, but we woke up under a thin sheet of snow in Regina.  Earlier, to stay out of the cold, and since nothing seemed to be coming along Canada’s Highway 1, we went into the town of Regina and bought tickets to see Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. It was very stylish and engrossing, with a narrative that I already knew.  I don’t remember now being struck by the ultra-violence. I do remember the music and the Skinner-like experiments and the tragic ending.  

But anyway, today, in their piece on the 50th anniversary of the book, the Guardian said this:

Fifty years ago today, Anthony Burgess published his ninth novel, A Clockwork Orange. Reviewing it in the Observer, Kingsley Amis called the book “the curiosity of the day.” Five decades later there is still nothing like it.

I beg to differ.

Kevin Barry’s first novel, The City of Bohane is channeling Burgess big time.  Set in a dystopian future, in what could be an unrecognizable Dublin of 2053, it is full of violence, sex, drugs, and turf wars. And again, the language  is at the forefront. Here is Barry describing DeValera Street:
[DeValera Street] leases are kept cheap and easy– bucksee enterprises appear overnight and fold as quick. There are soothsayers,. There are purveyors of goat’s blood cures for marital difficulties. There are dark caverns of record stores specialising in ancient  calypso 78s –oh we have an old wiggle to the hip in Bohane, if you get us going at all. There are palmists. There are knackers selling combination socket wrench sets. Discount threads are flogged from suitcases mounted on bakers’ pallets, there are cages of live poultry, and trinket stores devoted gaudily to the worship of the Sweet Baba Jay. There are herbalists, and veg stalls, and poolhalls. Such is the life of DeValera Street… .

Here again is Barry introducing Girly Hartnett, the 90-year old matriarch of the major family:

Here was Girly, after the picture show, drugged on schmaltz, in equatorial heat beneath the piled eiderdowns, a little whiskey-glazed and pill-zapped, in her ninetieth–Sweet Baba help us–Bohane winter, and she found herself with the oddest inclination.

I always found the world of A Clockwork Orange to be too sterile, too sharp-edged, even the thugs were dressed in sparkling white.  Bohane City is many things, but sterile it is not.  There is a richness of detail, texture, smell. Even in memory, Alex and his droogies seem too slick compared to the denizens of Bohane. For in this dystopic future, the world has not been re-shaped by technology–in fact, technology is surprisingly absent.  There is an elevated train, but no cars. Communication is done face-to-face…and at times angry-face-to-angry-face. Newspaper writers get their stories in pubs or brothels; the hunchback photographer pegs his developing photos in a morbid array across a room.  Although this is the future, it is not one overrun with gadgets!

The violence is real–but somehow not graphic. The economy runs on sex, alcohol, and drugs. There is an outer world, beyond the pale, but it doesn’t intervene, seemingly content to let Bohane run its own violent course.

And it is so, so visual.

Here’s a description of the major characters as they prepare for the momentous battle at the center of the novel:

“Logan Hartnett [the albino leader of the Bohane Trace] suavely walked the ranks and he offered his smiles and his whispers of encouragement. There was confidence to be read in the sly pursing of his lips, and atop a most elegant cut of an Eyetie suit he wore, ceremonially, an oyster-grey top hat.”

“Fucker Burke was bare-armed beneath a denim waistcoat and wore his finest brass-toed bovvers.”

“Jenni Ching carried a spiked ball on a chain and swung it over her head. She wore an all-in-one black nylon jumpsuit, so tightly fitted it might have been applied with a spray-can, and she smoked a black cheroot to match it, and her mouth was a hard slash of crimson lippy.”

“Wolfie Stanners, however, was widely acknowledged to have taken the prize. Wolfie was dressed to kill in an electric-blue ska suit and white vinyl brothel-creepers with steel toecaps inlaid. Four shkelps were readied on a custom-made cross-belt.”

[Macu–Logan’s wife–wore] “a pair of suede capri pants dyed to a shade approaching the dull radiance of turmeric, a ribbed black top of sheer silk that hugged her lithe frame, a wrap of golden fur cut from an Iberian lynx…and…an expression unreadable.”

My god, look at the attention to clothing–not futuristic, Buck Rogers’ one-pieces, but clothing that has been taken from a vibrant past.  It is as if the costume designers from Game of Thrones, Gangs of New York, and My Fair Lady got together to outfit the cast for this rumble.

And what City of Bohane also has that A Clockwork Orange doesn’t  is a love story.  Granted it is a story of disappointed love and jealous love and abandoned love, but the emotions of these characters are real and painful and poignant. For  while Logan Hartnett and his antagonist, the Broderick Gant, may have run the machinery of their town with brutality and violence, they are both bowed when set against the forces of love.

Now there’s something to pass on to Alex and his droogies!

Book Review: Suddenly, A Knock on the Door by Etgar Keret

/ jpbohannon / Leave a comment

There is a weird zeitgeist about my reading these days.  I will pick up a book that I am unfamiliar with, because of a friend’s recommendation or a short review in the Sunday papers, and then all of a sudden I am seeing it everywhere.  I began reading Etgar Keret’s collection of short stories, Suddenly a Knock on the Door, after seeing it reviewed in the Sunday NYTimes two weeks ago (15 April). While I was half way through it, I was tidying up the house when a magazine from back in February fell open to a review of the book announcing its upcoming publication. I had read the review back then, but had forgotten completely about it. And then again on Wednesday in the Metro–the free paper given to commuters each day and hardly a go-to read for  literary suggestions–the book was advertised on the front page and reviewed inside. On Friday, a co-worker told me the library had called to tell him the book he had on hold had arrived: Suddenly a Knock on the Door.

What is with all the buzz?  Keret’s publicists must be very good.

And to a large degree it is worth it.  Keret’s thirty-seven stories (translated by three people) are short, zippy, and fun.  They straddle the world between stark realism (suicide bombers and bratty children) and magic (talking fish, pissed-off angels). The subject matter often seems to be fiction itself–the fictions of the literary mind and the fictions of liars.

The collection is bookended by two stories in which they author is forced to write a story in front of us.  In the final story, he is being filmed by German Television and they want to film him writing, want to record the actual creative process. In the first, he is being forced by three men–a terrorist, a poll taker, and pizza delivery man–who have invaded his home and demand a story. Violence is threatened if he doesn’t come through with a story they approve of.  When the narrator begins telling a story about what is actually happening at the time–the most current form of realism–the pizza delivery man demands something more magical: “Things are tough,” he says. “Unemployment, suicide bombings, Iranians. People are hungry for something else.”

And something else is what Keret gives us.

In one story, “Lieland,” a man is pulled into a world where all his past lies have come alive. The fabrications he has made up throughout his life in order to deceive his mother, his employers, his girlfriends all confront him in a world that is harrowing and freeing.  In “Unzipping,” a woman, tired of her current lover, finds a zipper in the man’s mouth, and unzips it to reveal a new person inside, who is indeed a different sort of lover. In still another, a woman has only slept with men named Ari–twenty-eight of them previously and now her current boyfriend and the landlord.

Yet all is not silliness.

The number of suicides and suicide bombings in the stories are many. One beautiful story, “Not Completely Alone” begins “Three of the guys she dated tried to commit suicide. …One of them even succeeded.”  The last paragraph begins “Four of the guys she dated tried to commit suicide. Two of them succeeded.”  It’s only after going back to read the first sentence that we realize the narrator is the fourth guy–and the second success. In another, a man’s life is completely changed after emerging from a extended coma that was caused by a  jumper landing on his head after falling eleven stories to his death.  In another story “Joseph,” a smarmy producer in a cafe boasts about his talent for reading people but is not clever enough to spot the sweating man with the bomb strapped to him.  After a discussion of final words by those who die a violent death, we learn of one bombing victim whose last words are the bathetic “Without cheese” as he orders a kosher “cheeseburger” in the story “Cheesus Christ.”

In “Pick a Color,” a black man is beaten badly when he moves into a white neighborhood. In the hospital, he falls in love with the white nurse who tends to him, and, whom, confined to a wheelchair, he marries  in a ceremony presided by a Yellow priest whose family also had been beaten because of their color. When the white nurse is murdered by brown men, the man turns to the Yellow priest for explanation, explanation of “the God who loves you and wishes you all the best.” When that God shows up, in a wheel chair like the black man, the explanation that God gives is not what any of us probably expected.

In relating these stories here , they seem much darker than they are upon first reading. The stories do zip by, some of them only a page and a half long.  There is much “smoke-and-mirror” playing with reality, turns with truth and illusion.  There is banality, as there is always in life, and there is beauty. A young son gives animal names to the prostitutes who visit the old man on the floor above…a dying man gets his dying wish for peace on earth…a mourning widow comes to some closure through cooking in her diner.

Nathan Englander, in the title story of his collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, has a character say that the difference between Israel and Miami is “the space” –that there is none in Israel.  In Etgar Keret’s collection (in which Englander translated seven of the stories), space is also the focus. Ketger looks closely at the spaces between lies and truth, between life and illusion, between hope and reality.  The stories are clever, witty, and fun. There are enough “wow” moments, enough times when you breathe out in relief or exasperation, and plenty of times when you simply smile knowingly to yourself.

In the blurbs on the paperback edition, there are statements by Salmon Rushdie, Amos Oz, Yann Martel.  But my favorite is by Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story. Talking about Keret’s novel The Nimrod Flipout, Shteyngart calls it “the best work of literature to come out of Israel in the last five thousand years… .” That’s quite a claim.  Maybe I’ll see if it’s in our library.

Book Review: The Night Swimmer by Matt Bondurant

/ jpbohannon / 1 Comment

A goat that walks on its hind legs…a woman who swims in the dangerously cold North Atlantic…hallucinogenics…two Irish pubs…a violent underworld…a blind goatherd…a dubious fiddler…9/11…an ancient tragedy.  These all are elements that come together in the magnificent novel The Night Swimmer by Matt Bondurant.

I wrote about this novel in an earlier blog; I had only been a few chapters in at the time and was focusing on the urge to live somewhere else. Indeed, the examination of this urge is part of the narrator’s train of thought. But I had no idea where this story was going and how vividly it would be told.

The novel is about an American couple who move to Ireland, when the husband wins a pub in the town of Baltimore in southwestern County Cork. The husband has aspirations of writing and feels that the pub will give him ample time and material to do something great. He certainly has both–but is unable to fashion anything with it.

The woman–the narrator–has an rare skin condition, a subcutaneous level of fat, that allows her to withstand extremely low water temperatures. She is an open sea swimmer and the move to Ireland allows her to revel in this activity, in water that is frigid and dangerous. She spends much of her time on Clear Island, where she swims and begins to attract the attention of the islanders as well as of a little goat that walks upright. The islanders are very suspicious of strangers–blow-ins they call them–and they are particularly concerned about this young woman who swims in their harbor. They are also going through some large shifts that threaten to change their centuries-old way of life.

As Elly, the narrator, spends more and more time on the island, she begins to feel, to a small degree, a part of the island–but she knows that this is a false feeling. She befriends a blind goat-herder and  learns of his heartbreaking personal tragedy, and then discovers a much larger tragedy that once wiped out an entire generation of islanders–except for two. She also begins to see that her marriage is not strong enough to withstand the battering that the move across the ocean occasions. She watches it erode and sadly understands why this is occurring.

The novel is many things–it is a domestic novel about marriage infused with a magical realism built on folk lore and village life.  It is a novel about enterprise and failure. About love and its withdraw. About the fear of strangers and the resistance to change. Elly attempts twice to swim to Fastnet Island–something no one has actually ever done–and in describing this momentous feat, Bondurant elevates his already lofty writing into something sublime.  Neither attempt is successful, but both are certainly memorable. In a whirling world of deep open-sea, hallucinogenic visions, and towering inspirations, Elly’s swimming anchors this already magnificent read.

Because of the epigraphs taken from the journals of John Cheever and the various allusions to him and his stories throughout The Night Swimmer, there have been the expected comparisons between the two. I find this a little wrong. For while the epigraphs from Cheever’s journals are appropriate and thoughtful,  and the thematic focus on dualities similar to that in Cheever’s own stories, the writing of The Night Swimmer seems so much fuller, fatter, more exuberant.  Cheever’s writing, for me, reflects the dessicated suburbias that he depicts, and reflects it in a much leaner style of writing.

In many ways I wish that the novel ended one chapter before it did. There is an epilogue of sorts, a tying-up of things, that I found unsatisfying. I would have rather left Elly on Clear Island, with both her and the reader trying to figure out the impact of what just happened, of where the future lies.

Book Review: What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander

/ jpbohannon / Leave a comment

  I was prepared not to like this book.  The hype was too much.  I had read a “life-style” piece in the NYTimes Metropolitan section about Englander, an interview with him in The Guardian,  a front page review in the NYTimes Sunday Book Review, another in the London Review of Books, and a handful of smaller reviews. The title and the author seemed to be everywhere.  And yet, I was wrong.  The hype was deserved–the eight stories in the collection are gem-like in their perfection. Solid, thoughtful, inventive, poignant and droll.

The title of the collection famously alludes to Raymond Carver’s story and collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.  In Englander’s title story two couples sit around in a sunny kitchen drinking hard–just as they did in Carver’s story. The difference is that we are not in Carver’s Mid-West; we are in Florida, and Englander’s two couples are a secular Jewish couple who live there and a Hasidic couple from Israel, visiting after many years.  The conversation is tense, the husband uneasy with these Hasidic guests that he has just met, and the ending surprising and sad. (Go here to read Carver’s original story: “What we Talk About… and here to read it as it finally appeared with editor Gordon Lish’s revisions, “What We Talk About…”)

Several of the reviews I read mentioned how Englander’s stories seem to channel Kafka through Woody Allen, and the example they site is the story “Peep Show.” In fact, this Kafka/Woody Allen connection is what drew me to the collection.  In this particular story, a secular Jewish man walks into a peep show, advertising “live girls” and gets 5 tokens. Inserting the first token, he encounters several women, one of whom particularly arouses him. After the partition closes, he deposits another token, but this time, when the barrier opens, it reveals three rabbis from his past who begin to scold him; subsequent tokens reveal his scolding mother, his pregnant wife, and himself.

There are other stories that touch have a similar absurdity and wryness–particularly one about a gang of Long Island Jewish boys dismally failing to wreak revenge on an anti-Semitic bully and another about a summer camp for senior citizens–but overall this is not the tone of the collection. The final story “Free Fruit for Young Widows” and the second story “Sister Hills”  are memorable and distinct vignettes of life in Jerusalem.  Both have a historical sweep and a personal sadness. Both are extraordinary.

“The Reader” and “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” seem the most personal of the collection, and they too are brilliant. The language in these–as in all the stories–is clean and efficient, but beautiful and evocative.

As I said, I was a little put off by all the hype. But it was well deserved.  These are stories that will stay with me for a while and which I will return to often.