A Momentary Taste of Being

I wanted to find fault with this book.  I looked for fault.  I looked for bad reasoning, bad characters, bad writing, bad anything.  I didn't want to be persuaded of the possible reality of what Ms. Durrow wrote about.  And ultimately, I was not completely persuaded.  I did not find the actions of one of the central character completely comprehensible or even, given the slender thread of what we know, logical within the cracked and warped world of though even of that character. However, that took no part away from the power of this book.  I allowed me a little escape hatch, admittedly, but not much of one.  And I found myself loving this story, these characters, this revelation of identity. The book centers around a mysterious and tragic act that takes place in some projects in Chicago and the life of a girl who survives the horror as she grows up with her grandmother in Portland.  The girl, Rachel, is half-Danish and half African American--a ...

The Imperfectionists is billed as a novel, but it is only a novel in the sense that Winesburg, Ohio can be read as a novel, which is not to put it into bad company, but which  should alter one's expectations of it slightly.  The work consists of eleven short stories that are interrelated and mortared together by a thin stream of a story-line that traces the development of the newspaper for which all of the characters work. The characters and stories are engaging and occasionally touching ranging from the first--the story of an erstwhile freelancer trying to land a story to pay the rent, to the last the story of the publisher who is more interested in his dog than in the success of the publication. Characters repeat throughout the stories, some incidents overlap.  There is at least one story, "Markets Crash Over Fear of China Slowdown," in which I experienced some little bit of schadenfreude because of the central theme.  One could only wish that such things tra...

I had not read anything of John Banville's before this book.  I hard started (several times) The Sea , but felt too overwhelmed my its melancholy to proceed to the finish.  I still intend to read it--perhaps even more so after this book. John Banville can certainly put together some shapely sentences and he has a deft touch with thematic elements.  He can ask serious questions in what amounts to a domestic tragi-comedy and make them stick.  All of that is on the credit side--there is, however, a considerable accounting on the debit side.  His story reads like some sort of hieroglyphic rebus--the bits and pieces are all there, but one feels oneself holding the book at arm's length and trying to bring the whole thing into focus.  It is reasonable to assume that the author had a purpose in throwing together some of the discrepant elements he has introduced, but the purpose is not immediately evident.  They didn't contribute all that must to the story exce...

After I completed my review of Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior , I was offered a review copy of Click:The Magic of Instant Connections , a book about which I had some doubts and reservations because the subject matter wasn't of the same compelling interest (to me) as that of Sway . Nevertheless, I had enjoyed the first book so much, I thought I had nothing to lose and much to gain by taking up the second. And I'm glad that I did.  While the subject matter is not of the same caliber of interest as the first, I found myself gradually warming to the premise.  More than that, the authors indicated that it was their opinion that these magical connections did not have to be happenstance--that there were circumstances and practices that could help cultivate them.  Finally, the magic connections were not all about e-Harmony or e-Chemisty or e-I'm-Desperate-for-Any-Sort-of-Date; indeed, these were in the minority.  Most of the "clicks" described were t...

Drift is a collection of 13 interconnected short stories about the lives of the have-nots, the almost-haves, and the once-hads in Newport Beach, California.  When I first saw notices of it, I thought, "Oh dear, Peyton Place visits California."  But boy was I wrong.  Another case of don't trust the notices.  I picked the book up and I was entranced--immediately and completely.  Victoria Patterson has considerable talent and she has created a world akin to that of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio --complete with grotesques and self-doubting narrator/central figures.  But no one escapes from Newport Beach.  If you want a real sense of this book think Winesburg, Ohio meets Cannery Row . Victoria Patterson is a powerhouse of a writing, creating compelling and engaging characters and weaving story lines in and out of time to show us the lives of those who are often invisible to us. The stories are not connected chronologically and they all seem to ...

I should start this review by saying that I read and enjoyed Beatrice and Virgil, because much of the rest of what I have to say will not sound like I did.  I must also say that I really like Life of Pi mostly before everyone else jumped on board.  I liked it for reasons that, while not opposed, are certainly not in conjunction with most of the comments I've seen on it.  I liked it for sheer surrealism, for comment of religious life, and for the elegance of the mysterious island.  I say this because I find similar elements in Beatrice and Virgil which have me liking the book even while I think it does not quite achieve what the author desired. Beatrice and Virgil is a convoluted play within a story within a metafiction.  It attempts to be philosophical both about the purposes of fiction and about the literary approaches to the holocaust.  An attempt to limn the contours of the story would likely not provide a whole lot of information about what really ...

I do not read books in translation nor books by authors outside the United States simply for the pleasure of being able to claim some sort of faux-eclecticism.  I read a book because something about it engages me, and Ms. Gappah's book of short stories certainly did that.  I've posted numerous excerpts from the book in the recent past, so you already have a sense of the quality and breadth of the writing. An Elegy for Easterly is a book of short stories and it is an uneven book.  Some of the stories are superb--masterful, controlled, eminently entertaining.  Others seem to have lost their sense of purpose and it is at times difficult to make out what the author was trying to get at.  All of the stories have a very highly refined sense of place that allows one a better sense of a small portion of the African continent. Let me start with the perceived flaws: at times it seems that Ms. Gappah wishes to limit her audience to those with a robust knowledge of the...

I don't read a lot of nonfiction and I tend to be very selective about what I do read--it has to amuse me in some way.  This book certainly qualified.  I love books that spell out the obvious and help me codify or qualify observations I have already made.  Sway is that kind of book par excellance .  What Sway sets out to do is to tell us why we sometimes find ourselves doing the oddest, strangest, most counter-intuitive and often counter-productive things. Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman have identified trends in thought or behavior that sometimes dominant our decisions and thought to the point of irrationality: risk aversion, commitment, diagnosis bias, value attribution, fairness, group dynamics.  We've all seen these in action but what Brafman and Brafman do is show us how these trends affect things like fatal airline crashes, losers on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire , the concept of fairness as it varies among cultures, the price of eggs, and the outbreak of ...

I have, after long reading, finished the book.  It is perhaps too early to give a coherent review--books like this one sometimes need to linger on the palate (as it were) before one can truly give them their due.  Be that as it may, I'm going to try to give a sense of the work.  Like Uwem Akpan, I expect that my sense of the work will change over time, and if I'm correct about it, more likely to change for the better, although, as you'll see, I'm starting from a very good place with the book. Ms. Mengiste gives us the story of the transition of the Ethiopian Government from rule under a muddled Emperor with vaguely beneficent intent, to rule by a military Junta becoming progressively more aligned with Soviet and Cuban powers. She tells this story through the family of Hailu, a doctor in Addis Ababa.  Hailu has two sons--Dawit and Yonas, a daughter-in-law Sara, a wife Selam, and a number of other hangers-on who are, for all intents and purposes family. The book st...

The review promised from yesterday's very brief exploration of this intriguing book.  There are so many things to say and so few of them can be said without revealing key points of the book.  Suffice to say that our heroine, Daisy, is shippped from ritzy New York to her relatives in England just prior to the outbreak of a strange sort of war that ends up isolating Great Britain amongst others.  The novel is a chronicle of Daisy and her relatives as they struggle to survive in war time conditions. The experience starts as sort of a lark--a family of underage minors is left in a rambling old house when the mother/aunt is called off to Oslo to help in the peace talks.  They behave much as minors without supervision might, up to and including the sexual encounters that, while not detailed, caused me to look a little askance at the YA designation.  Soon enough the lark turns into the reality of war as the house is made a headquarters for the "good guys" and the ...

What an odd short novel.  I'm still puzzling over what to make of it, and so, in some regard my review of it may be unsatisfactory--but were I to wait until I was done puzzling I might not write. Synopsis--Xiao Yanqiu, star of The Moon Opera throws boiling water on her mentor and understudy in a fit of rage. She is consigned to the role of mentor herself and for twenty years does not take the stage.  And then a businessman sponsors a revival of The Moon Opera and Xiao Yanqiu has the opportunity to mentor a young student herself. from The Moon Opera Bi Feiyu Le Xuefen won over the officer and men of the Armored Division, who saw in her portrayal of Chang'e an echo of the commanding presence of Ke Xiang--PLA cap, straw sandals, and pistol in hand--even though on this night Ke Xiang was in traditional costume. Li Xuefen had a booming voice with a crisp, clear tone, one that bespoke passion. Her sonority had evolved and strengthened over a decade or more, until it was wide...

I have finished my first book of the decade, and I could wish that it had been some other.  Not that this isn't a superb, compact, beautiful, and harrowing book.  It is.  In every respect it is well composed and beautiful executed. However, it is the kind of book that fills me with anxiety and dread--and I can't really say why--only that for me it is so. A synopsis: Helen invites her friend Nicola to stay with her during a short three-week stint at an alternative cancer treatment clinic.  Mayhem, but not hilarity ensues.  Helen needs to come to terms with both Nicola, and in some sense Helen.  And she does.  The book is filled with anger--anger that stems ultimately from fear.  Helen is terrified that Nicola may die while she is staying with Helen.  This is never directly voiced, but it is the subtext of nearly everything that happens in the novel.  Ultimately, anger of this sort stems only from the deepest and most fast-rooted fe...

In several post over the last few days, I've exposed some of what I've considered the weak points of this short and lively survey of part of the world of Detective literature.  Ms. James admittedly confines much of her work to a consideration of the British Detective novel, though truth to tell, this intent does not emerge until late in the book.  So there is no mention of Rex Stout, Ed McBain, or any number of American authors.  All those mentioned tend to be in the mode of the Noir Detective--Raymond Chandler, Ross McDonald, Dashiell Hammett, and so forth. However, once one realizes and and adjusts to the scope of the work, much of what Miss James has to say about individual works and contributions seems accurate, if laden with a certain amount of chronological bias.  Her comments on the Golden Age female writers and treatements of women,while balanced does betray a preference for the "modern" treatment. However, her comments on Agatha Christie, as I pointed out,...

I finished Goldengrove some days ago and wanted a little time to come to terms with my mixed feelings about it.  There are times when I am too picky, too demanding, or too controlling.  Please keep that in mind as you read the comments that follow. A quick resume of the story-- a young girl, Nico,  (about 13) loses her older sister, Margaret, to a drowning incident caused by a known heart condition.  (This happens within the first 10 pages, so there are no spoilers here.)  The story traces the attempts of the Nico, her family, and Margaret's boyfriend. Aaron, as they try to come to terms with this traumatic alteration of their lives. To start with, the things about which I have no qualms whatsoever--the sheer beauty and power of the prose, the wonderful evocation of the warping of time that occurs when one is in an altered emotional state, the powerful oppression of layers of guilt, ambivalence, uncertainty, and self.  All of these are powerful element...

Perhaps one does well to let the author speak for himself: from The White Tiger Aravind Adiga It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power. I guess, Your Excellency, that I too should start off by kissing some god's arse. Which god's arse, though? There are so many choices. See Muslims have one god. The Christians have three gods. And we Hindus have 36,000,000 gods. Making a grand total of 36,000,004 divine arses for me to shoose from. Now there are some, and I don't just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that none of them exist. There's just us and an ocean of dark around us.  I'm no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work--much like our politicians, and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones ...

In Other Room, Other Wonders made several lists of notable books.  It is a sequence of eight closely interrelated short stories that centers around the servants and the family of K. K. Harouni and traces out the lives, hopes, fears, and in some cases the deaths of some of the main characters. What I loved about the book is the sense that it gave me of every level of Pakistani society.  I have gllimpses of the very wealthy, of the middle class, and long excursions with the lower class, the servants, the peasants, and the downtrodden. In the course of this novel in stories, we come to learn about the societal structure of modern Pakistan.  Perhaps what came as the greatest relief is that it wasn't another collection of expatriate stories that tell, from a slightly different point of view, the same woes and trials of any dweller of New York City.  That isn't to say that wealthy expatriates of other countries don't have stories that closely approximate those of urban ...

I found The Family Man on one of the endless lists of "best ofs" that the web seems so populated by. (Although, I think this list may have been in Bookmarks .  This after I had read numerous reviews of Elinor Lipman being the new Jane Austen, writing the comedies of manners of our times. Perhaps.  But then we know all such comparisons and reviews are prone to hyperbole.  So let me indulge in another.  I would probably compare Elinor Lipman to Thorne Smith without most of the fantastic elements.  Ms. Lipman produces fine characters and (if this book is any indication) intricate plots with many twists and turns.  Often referred to as screwball comedy, I had to agree with this evaluation as the plots seem to update Bringing up Baby, The Lady Eve , and other such fare of the thirties and forties. The Family Man --what can I say about it that doesn't give away one feature or another of this incredibly intricate plot? Well, I can say what happens on the firs...

The stories in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers are uniformly good.  They derive their strength from the sometimes mythic overlay on the lives of real, struggling people (as in "Immortal," excerpts of which have been posted before.)  Yiyun Li is still not in full control of her language; there are sometimes awkward phrasings, or perhaps innovative phrasings that don't really accomplish what the author intends (unless momentary disorientation is the effect she wishes to achieve.  One small example is when she has when one character "shoveled" a pot of dregs at her daughter.  These moments are few and my comment is a quibble, but it goes to show that there is a little seasoning required for this author to emerge into her own vast and beautiful domain. While the language has momentary trouble spots, the stories never do. They are intricate, well-told, and often end with epiphanies that can be fully exposed to everyone without giving away anything at all of the s...

Adichie gives us an uneven collection of 12 short stories.  All of them are beautifully written, but some, touching on themes of identity and domesticity quickly become repetitive.  I would start reading a story in the collection and wonder, haven't I read this before?  And realize that I wasn't skipping around in the collection, so I couldn't have, and yet I couldn't shake the feeling I had seen it. The most powerful stories in the collection deal with some of the darker aspects of life in Nigeria.  "Cell One," "The American Embassy," and "Ghosts" all achieve some of their power through the reality of life in Nigeria. "A Private Experience," recounts the story of a Muslim woman and a Christian woman trapped in an abandoned shop during a riot.  The story is reminiscent of some of the bleaker, more desperately moving moments in Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them (a book filled with little but bleak and desperate) .  In ...

Many of you may have encountered this in high school.  Back before we all got canon-shy, it sat alongside Lord Jim as one of those books every junior or senior had to grapple with.  It's what got you those valuable AP credits in English (along with a lot of other works that most seniors in high school are not ready to understand).  One of the disturbing failures of our educational system is the lack of understanding about what a junior or senior in high school can internalize from what they read.  Just because you can read the language does not mean that you can make any sense of the story, theme, or idea that drives the work.  "Billy Budd" is and always has been a work for a mature reader.  I remember blitzing through this in high school and wondering what all the fuss was about.  I also remember sitting through some sort of film version.  Neither made a lasting impression, unless a distaste for Melville and for being bludgeoned to death with ...