As TV book clubs fall by the wayside in terms of the public’s interest, the “Today Show” club appears willing to make some more off-beat, interesting selections. The most recent pick, chosen for the club by Walter Mosley, is Graceland by the Nigerian Chris Abani. The book, about a Nigerian Elvis impersonator trying to survive in the urban desolation of Lagos, has been out nearly a year – it was well-reviewed but not a big seller – yet it will get a second life thanks to this selection. Here’s an excerpt.
TV book club goes farther afield
Questions for the Librarians
Another installment of Ask the Librarians has arrived at emdashes, and it provides another fascinating look at the New Yorker.In this issue you can learn how the magazine got writers in its early years; who has had the most short stories published in the magazine all time and in a single year; all about the now defunct horse racing column; and most interesting of all, a history of the magazine’s editorial “Comment” column and how it took on a political tone over the years.
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What People Are Reading (Part 1)
First, fiction. It almost goes without saying that people are still reading The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem, but last week I noticed some other new fiction making inroads among the reading public. Mailman the fourth novel by J. Robert Lennon takes its title from the occupation of the main character, Albert Lippencott, “a loner who reads the mail before delivering it.” Ever since I read Thomas Pynchon’s paranoiac masterpiece, The Crying of Lot 49, I’ve thought that there is a wealth of material that might be mined from the machinations of the Postal Service. When you look at it in a certain way, mail is a pretty crazy thing; billions of pieces of paper crisscrossing one another invisibly from one end of the world to the other and so many stories in those letters. Also proving popular, due at least in part to impeccable reviews, is The Known World by Edward P. Jones. And lastly, lots of people are looking to read Charles Baxter’s latest, Saul and Patsy. Like his previous novels, Baxter’s latest is thoughtful, reflective and “quietly triumphant.” Several of my trusted fellow readers have singled out Saul and Patsy as a book they are dying to read.
Correction
In an item posted last weekend, we wrote, “Senator Arlen Specter realizes that there’s no way to endear yourself to Republican primary voters like writing for The New York Review of Books.” The item should have read: “Democratic primary voters.” We apologize for the error.
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I am Prep
While CAAF and others have spent much of the new year discussing and praising Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Prep, I have followed along, blissfully unaware that I could, apparently, be a character in the book. Today, I read this article in the Washington Post, which clued me into Sittenfeld’s tenure as an English teacher at St. Albans where I attended high school, and which she used as inspiration for the novel:”It was almost like cheating,” she says of living at St. Albans. “I’d been writing this book about this kind of place and the kinds of people you might find there, and then there I was, sort of back in it, overhearing pieces of dialogue or something… If I got to a place where I needed to describe some food in the dining hall, well, I’d just go downstairs to the dining hall and have dinner.”Although I wasn’t a boarder there – most of us weren’t – I can imagine that the school would be good material for this sort of book. There’s lots of dark wood, stone edifices, and groves of old trees on the grounds the school shares with the National Cathedral. At the same time, the school, while something of an island, does sit in the city and is a part of the city in a way that the New England boarding schools are not, and this gives St. Albans a different feel. Sittenfeld started out as the Writer in Residence at St. Albans and continues to teach there part time. My alma mater, when mentioned in the Post tends to be labeled “exclusive,” and while this is undoubtedly true I always thought it was pretty cool that we had a writer in residence program. The most notable writer in residence when I was there in the mid ’90s was Matthew Klam. St. Albans alums of a certain age still fondly remember the day that Klam shocked the faculty and riled up the students – it’s an all boy school, by the way – at our weekly assembly with his reading of the title story from his collection, Sam the Cat, a graphic tale about a drunk guy who falls for a girl who turns out not to be a girl. Considering that we were an auditorium full of sheltered and not very worldly young men, it sort of blew our minds.
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New Books and a New Award
Some new books that are getting lots of praise, and some excerpts from those books:Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis — review, excerptLittle Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt — review, excerptYou Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon — review, excerptCrossing California by Adam Langer — reviewAlso of note: the creation of the Man Booker International Prize has been announced. From the press release, “Worth £60,000 to the winner, the prize will be awarded once every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language. The first winner will be announced in mid 2005.” Now Americans will finally be able to get their hands on a Booker.
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Bloody Mary Rules
We are leaving for Chicago very soon, and with no place to live as of yet, I do not know when I will be blogging again… not for a couple of weeks, probably. So, I will leave you with something, though not book-related in any way, that you may find quite useful:One of my favorite beverages is the Bloody Mary: vodka and spicy, peppery tomato juice poured over some ice cubes and garnished with celery and maybe a wedge of lime. It kind of makes you thirsty just thinking about it, doesn’t it? Me too. It reminds me of college, in fact. At the University of Virginia daytime cocktail parties (especially on football weekends) are a mainstay. It was at these parties where I discovered my taste for the Bloody Mary. I also discovered that of the many adult beverages available to us, the Bloody Mary is one of the few that can’t just be consumed anywhere, at any time. You will look silly if you order a Bloody Mary at your local pub on a Friday night and you probably won’t enjoy it very much either. The peculiar thing about the Bloody Mary is that there is most certainly a time and place for them. Over the years, I set out to determine exactly what those times and places are. If you have been nearby while I’ve been drinking a Bloody Mary, you have probably heard my set of rules. Still, I worry that I might forget them one day, so I’ve decided to immortality them in this here blog. I submit now, for your consideration, The Bloody Mary Rules. Enjoy!The Rule of Thumb: No matter where you are, you may drink as many Bloody Marys as you like between dawn and noon. After noon, you may have Bloody Mary as your first drink of the day, but afterwards you must move on to other adult beverages. After sunset, you may not drink any Blood Marys.The Codicils (Or exceptions to The Rule of Thumb, if you like. At any rate, this is where things get interesting): Irrespective of the time of day, you MAY drink Bloody Marys (as many as you like):1. On airplanes1a. At the airport bar, but ONLY if your plane has been delayed2. At wedding receptions3. At horse races4. While bowling5. And, finally, on boats
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The Anatomy of a Break Up
Thoughts of suicide, depression, and listlessness for weeks on end are just a few ways the loss of a lover is mourned. Unrequited love can open an abyss in which time and activities cease, or it can turn us towards life, as Rilke states in The Duino Elegies, sending us trembling like arrows, leaping into the future. Roland Barthes wrote A Lover’s Discourse after separating from a lover: his compendium of reflections from the lover’s perspective makes the solitary sorrow less so, by reflecting on the universal experience of madness, delusion, and exaltation when falling in love, and later the jealousy, anxiety, and sorrow distance imparts. Barthes traces the trajectory of love, which feels so personal and irreplaceable, and in doing so reveals the common course of love: “(‘It develops, grows, causes suffering and passes away’ in the fashion of a Hippocractic disease): the love story (the ‘episode’, the ‘adventure’) is the tribute the lover must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it.”Sophie Calle took the arrow’s course upon her lover’s spurning and transformed her misery into art. As obsessive as Barthes, she explores and classifies love from the perspective of the break-up. Her lover ended their relationship in an email that closed with the line, “Take care of yourself.” Her exhibition now showing at the Paula Cooper Gallery is her response. Calle consulted one hundred and seven women and asked them analyze the letter according to their professions: a markswoman shoots the letter, a parrot chews up the crumpled letter, a copy editor breaks the letter down grammatically and calls it repetitive, the criminal psychologist calls the letter’s author manipulative and psychologically dangerous “or/and a great writer.” Although Calle won’t reveal the author’s identity in the exhibition or in later interviews – according to her, “What I’m putting on show is a dumping… I don’t talk about the man, and all the better. The subject is the letter, the text…” – the psychologist’s analysis is accurate in at least one respect: Calle’s former lover is a respected French writer, Grégoire Bouillier.With the aid of the community of women’s responses, Calle depicts the anatomy of a break-up while on the rebound. In the video of Calle’s session with a family mediator, where the letter sits in a chair across from Calle in place of the lover, Calle works through her grief, her astonishment, and attempts to move past it. Although she didn’t like the letter, she states, it was better than nothing, and transforming it into this exhibition “has done [her] a lot of good.” It was good for her and even better for us, for the ephemeral relationship ended with a relic that Calle has transformed into a poignant meditation on lost love and the lover’s obsession. Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse, “the love which is over and done with passes into another world like a ship into space, lights no longer winking: the loved being once echoed loudly, now that being is entirely without resonance (the other never disappears when or how we expect).” With Take Care of Yourself, Calle bids her love adieu. As she states, in the end, “the project had replaced the man.”
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