I thoroughly enjoyed Pinky’s recollection of meeting Rupert Pole, Anais Nin’s husband and caretaker, while canvassing door to door in Los Angeles 16 years ago.
Serendipitous
Staying Sane: A Year in Reading (Part 3)
I switched gears with Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, which describes the author’s travels through the South upon his return to the United States. Miller was very disgruntled when he returned to New York from Paris. He thought the outlook of the community was narrow, the morals corrupt, and the industrial greed an instrument of spiritual death. Hence, he embarked on a drive that took him down south and west to California, a trip during which he marvels at how the rural, farming South kept its soul and culture and did not succumb to the machines and skyscrapers of the North. It is an interesting account, a praise for the warm, hospitable South, and a big outburst at, and a rejection of, what the North offers. An Air Conditioned Nightmare is entertaining and deep, filled with interesting characters and encounters along the way, and depressing with regards to the industrial monster of a picture Miller paints regarding the United States.At this time, I felt the urge for a break and picked up J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories. The genius of Salinger is probably unparalleled and Nine Stories is a good testimony to it. The bizarre stories and intricate web of characters leaves the reader dazzled at the end of the 6 hours in which you fly through the pages. Nine Stories is a great collection that you can keep in your bathroom, on your coffee table or on the bedside table, and pick at any random moment for instant joy. Nine Stories put me in such a good mood that I decided to give Italo Calvino, whose Invisible Cities I read under undesirable circumstances and did not enjoy much, a second try. The novel was The Baron in the Trees. The book is one of Calvino’s earlier novels and is heavily influenced by his studies of Italian folk literature. The rebellion of the heir baron to his family’s strict rules places him on top of a tree, which he refuses to leave. From these circumstances a character is born who is at first considered a lunatic and then a hero, who fights fires and supports Napoleon’s troops, lectures the town on citizenship, falls in love with a duchess, and meets other people who are exiled to tree tops by the Spanish church. A marvelous story, with great wit and imagination, and all the characteristics of love, chivalry, betrayal, family ties, dilemmas and unreal circumstances found in the favorite tales of childhood. A very happy book indeed.
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Books Far and Wide
Ms. Millions and I embarked upon a whirlwind trip to the East Coast this weekend for equal parts partying and wedding planning, and although Jet Blue’s inflight television distracted me from my reading, I managed to get some done, as did several other folks that I spotted in airports and on the planes. Lots of folks had their noses in the usual, low impact airport reading, but I also noticed quite a few people diverting themselves with some pretty literary fare. Off the top of my head I can remember spotting Family History by Dani Shapiro and Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds by America’s super intellectual, Harold Bloom, but there were others as well. It was good to see people getting some reading in on their way to their far flung destinations, which reminded me about an award I heard about last week that celebrates books that take place in far flung destinations. The Kiriyama Prize recognizes books “that will contribute to greater understanding of and among the peoples and nations of the Pacific Rim and South Asia” in two categories, fiction and non-fiction. Here’s their map of the Pacific Rim. The fiction finalists are Brick Lane by Monica Ali, My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard, The Girl Who Played Go by Shan Sa, and The Guru of Love by Samrat Upadhyay: five highly regarded books from last year. It’s interesting to see an award that groups books by subject matter and setting rather than the location, nationality, or gender of the author. Here are the non-fiction finalists.
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New Books: Clare Allan, Scott Anderson, Guillermo Arriaga, Peter Carey
A debut novel called Poppy Shakespeare is getting rave reviews in England. The book, by Claire Allan, follows the narrator “N” and the eponymous Poppy at the Dorothy Fish, a mental institution, among 25 residents, one for each letter of the alphabet, “the ‘X’ chair is vacant.” Some quotes from the British press: “Allan’s story comes armed with a voyeuristic potency, because she spent 10 years inside the kind of institutions she satirises so well.” – from The Independent. “Her voice is so idiosyncratic in its rhythms and terminology… her habit of exaggeration so surreal and her use of metaphor so extravagant, as to subtly transform the reader’s perspective of the natural order of things.” – from the Telegraph. In the Times (London), a profile of Allan charts her course through mental illness to become a published author. Also, the British cover is way cooler than the American one. An excerpt is available.Set in the fictional Middle Eastern kingdom of Kutar in 1983, Scott Anderson’s Midnight Hotel sounds like a broad satire of America’s travails in that region. Diplomat David Richards first toes the party line, but ends up abandoned in the country watching as American meddling goes awry. An excerpt is available. Scott Anderson is also a war correspondent like his brother Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer for the New Yorker, author of The Fall of Baghdad, and one of my favorite writers.Guillermo Arriaga wrote the screenplays for Amores Perros (which I loved) and 21 Grams (which I hated). The Night Buffalo is his first novel to be published in the U.S, though he originally wrote it 11 years ago. He’s also bringing it to the silver screen (as El Bufalo de la noche). In a profile, the Financial Times compares the novel to Amores Perros, saying that both are steeped in violence, but it sounds to me like 21 Grams, steeped in melodrama. From the jacket: “The Night Buffalo is set in Mexico City, revolving around the mysterious suicide of Gregorio, a charismatic but troubled young man who was betrayed by the two people he trusted most.” Still, I’ll see any movie he writes, so perhaps his novel is worth a try, too.Two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey has a new book out, Theft: A Love Story. The big news about this book is the claim that it is a thinly veiled attack on his ex-wife. The Independent has ex-wife Alison Summers’ side of the story: “The phrase ‘alimony whore,’ repeated within the pages of Theft: A Love Story, has left her feeling ‘devastated’ by Carey’s version of events.” Controversy aside, the Sydney Morning Herald sidesteps the drama and says of the book, which is, indeed, about a man who has been divorced and bankrupted by his former wife, “All in all, Carey’s new show contains much that is lively, engaging and teasingly self-referential.” An excerpt is available.
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New Books: Ben Ehrenreich, Jeffrey Ford, Kate Grenville
The Suitors, a debut novel by Ben Ehrenreich, draws from Homer’s Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses. The story is another rewrite of those famous epics – there are so many, but then again it’s a fertile place to start – set, as PW puts it, “in a never-never land equal parts contemporary America and classical antiquity.” Ehrenreich is best-known as a widely published journalist whose work regularly appears in the Village Voice, LA Weekly, and The Believer. Ehrenreich is the son of participatory journalist, Barbara, author of the best-selling Nickel and Dimed, in which she tried to get by on minimum wage.Jeffrey Ford’s excellent novel The Girl in the Glass is currently being discussed in exhaustive detail at the Litblog Co-op blog, but he’s got a new book out, too. The Empire of Ice Cream is a collection of stories. Ford, as I recently had the pleasure of discovering, is like very few others writing today. Though he might be labeled as a writer of “speculative fiction,” his work doesn’t really need a label at all, as it is sure to be enjoyed by anyone who likes a good story told well. To see what I mean, check out a few stories from The Empire of Ice Cream: “The Annals of Eelin-Ok,” “The Empire of Ice Cream,” and “A Man of Light.”Kate Grenville’s novel, The Secret River, has already won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and has been shortlisted for the Miles Frankin Prize awarded to the year’s best Australian novel. The Secret River is a historical novel about the convict settlement of Australia and follows the story of a particular convict named William Thornhill. The Guardian writes: “There isn’t much underlying moral ambiguity in this book: the costs of settlement are appalling, which makes Thornhill its villain, even while he carries its sympathetic weight.” Grenville previously won the Orange Prize in 2001 for her novel The Idea of Perfection.
Ship breaking
Anybody who read William Langewiesche’s book The Outlaw Sea or is simply interested in the modern day high seas should take a look at Brendan Corr’s photo essay from Foreign Policy magazine. It chronicles ship breaking in Bangladesh, the process by which the world’s tankers and freighters, ready to be retired but unwanted by any developed nation, are dismantled by hand for scrap metal. It’s remarkable and post-apocolyptic and when I heard it in Langewiesche’s book (I listened to it on audio) I couldn’t quite visualize it because it seemed so outlandish, but these pictures tell the story.
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Diversions and Distractions Part 1: A Reading Journal
I am back. My long hiatus was partially due to grad school applications, heavy workload, holiday binge drinking and just sheer laziness. I have been meaning write about all the books I read, some of which definitely stand out, as (I hope) you will see. The first book I want to mention is Crash by J.G. Ballard. I rarely stop reading books that I begin, even if I strongly dislike them. The only book/memoir I stopped reading in the recent years is Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy by Carlos Eire, which I found pompous, belittling and badly written. Nevertheless, that is not why I stopped reading Crash. I intend to finish Crash one of these days. That is, if I can overcome the absurdity of the main character Vaughan’s obsession with car crashes and reconstruction of scenes for erotic purposes, which did not resonate too well with me. I am an avid fan of weird and disturbing situations (e.g. Henry Miller’s Under the Roofs of Paris), but Ballard’s dry, calm style and heavy language adds another layer of complicity to an already shocking storyline. I have by no means given up on Crash, though I find it difficult to return to the read. Good luck to any and all that pick up this novel. FYI: I have not seen the movie, but I heard that it is quite weird and disturbing.Around the period that I was reading Crash, I was also studying for the GREs and took a week off from work to visit my aunt in Madison, WI to study and get away from NYC. I figured that Crash was not the best book to read while trying to study for the GREs and turned to Harry Potter for a dose of happiness, as well as to clear my mind. I had not read The Order of the Phoenix and borrowed it from my roommate Uzay. I started on the plane and by the time I landed in Madison I was, as with the previous four novels, hooked. So much for studying for the GREs. I read straight through The Order of the Phoenix and was pleasantly surprised to find that J.K. Rowling decided to reveal a darker side of Harry Potter. I was curious to see if Rowling would ever cast Potter as the not-so-perfect adolescent, which she successfully did in this installment. I enjoyed the clash between Dumbledore and the Ministry, the background stories that came with the introduction of the Order, the blackmailing campaigns that attempt to undermine evidence of Voldemort’s return and the developing relationship between Sirius Black and Potter. After a long sleepless night and not studying for the GREs, I headed straight to Borders and picked up The Half Blood Prince, which had been published very recently.The Half Blood Prince was an entertaining transition to the approaching grand finale. There were the cutesy parts of love stories and jealousies between Hermione and Ron, and Potter and Ginny Weasley, as well as the development of a closer camaraderie between Dumbledore and Potter, which I had long anticipated. The mystery surrounding the identity of the Half Blood Prince is well crafted and kept me guessing until the very end. Potter’s rival at Hogwarts Draco Malfoy has, in the meanwhile, been recruited by Voldemort to carry on mysterious activities at the school. As Dumbledore is showing Potter Voldemort’s past and preparing him for the looming battle (one book away, I dare say) Malfoy is brewing his own plans. The Half Blood Prince is a good staging book, with clever twists and turns, that left me hungry for the last novel. I am a big Harry Potter fan for a number of reasons (they’re easy to read, fun, thrilling and I feel like I’m on Prozac when I read them) but the series’ foremost quality is its continuity and how, at the end of each book, it gets me waiting for the next one. I hope it is soon.Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5See Also: Emre’s previous reading journal
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