Shropshire Hills in Nigeria

I am reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half a Yellow Sun and the quoted lines appear in the memories of one of the characters:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

I had to look it up it was so lovely and wistful. It's from A.E. Houseman's A Shropshire Lad which according to Wikipedia was in many British mens' pockets when they left to World War I. According to 'Wiki' it has influenced such varied folk as Vaughn Williams, Samuel Barber, Dennis Potter, Allan Bennet, the Simpsons and in a further African connection, in a Chinua Achebe novel 'the main character Obi frequently refers to Housman's poetry'. I suppose I should get to it at some point.

NYTBR Names Ten Best Books

While I have read Goethe and still ponder what intellectual musings I will share with you about it, the NYT is busy assembling the list of the ten best books of the year.

Dangerous Laughter
Steven Millhauser

A Mercy
Toni Morrison

2666
Roberto Bolaño

Netherland
Joseph O'Neill

Unaccustomed Earth
Jhumpa Lahiri

The Dark Side. The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals
Jane Mayer

The Forever War
Dexter Filkins.

Nothing to be Frightened Of
Julian Barnes

The Republic of Suffering
Death and the American Civil War
Drew Gilpin Faust.

The World is What it Is
The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
Patrick French.

I see they had the decency to keep Edward Sawtelle off. No surprises here, these are all books they're reviewed everywhere. I've read all the dirty bits in the V.S.Naipaul biography, the Jhumpa Lahiri and Netherland. I will consider the Toni Morrison and Julian Barnes. I have Bolaño's Savage Detectives teetering on my nightstand so 2666, in all its 900 pages, is possible if I am inspired by his 500 page book first. I know who Drew Gilpin Faust (President of Harvard!) is, don't like Steven Milhauser and the other two will exist without my reading them.

Elective Affinities

This book was not what I thought it would be. Much lighter and sillier than I thought a German can be. Apparently Goethe when attacked on it's frivolity reponded that it was a novel written for women. He did not mean it to be serious. It's the story of a wealthy couple who marry later in life. Having been childhood sweethearts, their first marriages had been against their wishes, their love affair is seen as High Romance until two others appear on the scene. A childhood architect friend of the man and the young goddaughter of the woman.

As Goethe has them early on in the book explaining the scientific theory of elective affinities you know what you're in for. The couple are pulled apart and cleave to the other newly introduced particles---I mean---characters. All this is dealt with rather glibly including the death of a child from the couple that was conceived while they were both fantasizing about the other new person. The child, interestingly enough, doesn't look anything like it's parents and more wittily looks exactly like the fantasized characters. The book ends in a highly dramatized fashion and somehow reminded me of Garcia Marquez in some of the themes: the folk tale quality to the story telling, the perennial old goat lusting after an 18 year old girl.

Ssshhhhhh......

Quiet everyone! Gaye is reading Goethe! Actually I am making a big show of reading Elective Affinities in the hopes that everyone will forgive me for my former lapses in taste. Although not sure if fellow T-riders know about these lapses. But I still make intellectual faces every time I pull it out of my bag just in case. You never know.

I am just going outside, and may be some time...

The Anglo Files by Sarah Lyall. I enjoyed this book and immediately passed it on to another Anglophile. Just some essays about certain aspects of the British character, particularly their understatement and tendency towards stoicism. She includes one of my favorite stories of British stiff upper lip-iness to illustrate their manly resolve. Robert Falcon Scott's doomed journey to the South Pole where the Norwegian explorer got there a month before him in a race and Scott died coming back, 11 miles away from a supply depot. His journal entry "I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships,help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past." (!) Not to be outdone his companion, Captain Oates, who was sick announced as he stumbled out of the tent "I am just going outside, and may be some time." before he marched out into a blizzard, never to be seen again.

When the British were asked to come up with a statement of British values in 2007, sort of a catchy mission statement or motto some of the entries were:

"Dipso,Fatso,Bingo,Asbo, Tesco"

"Once mighty empire, slightly used."

"At least we're not French."

"We apologize for the inconvenience."

and finally, the winner:

"No motto please, we're British."

Good Good Thief

I really liked this book. I kept waiting for a false step but there were none. Just like Obama's campaign! It's just a very exciting compelling story about an one handed orphan named Ren, set in New England in the 1800's, who's adopted by a pair of thieves. It never gets overly sentimental and never lets up. Quite satisfying.

Unpaid Political Announcement

Go Billy! (whoops! not supposed to call him that anymore).

The Good, the Bad and....the Undecided

Reading Hannah Tinti's The Good Thief and have two alternate pictures to choose from.

No Dutch Treats

Just read Netherland by Joseph O'Neil. Not sure exactly what all the fuss was about. The NYTBR comparing it to The Great Gatsby, the glowing blurbs on the back cover. I didn't feel it was the masterpiece everyone claimed. It wasn't terrible though. I learned a couple things about cricket and New York.

It is a post 9/11 novel apparently, although I would argue anything written after 9/11/01 is ! (This is a post 9/11 blog by the way.) He can write though and he does say some good things including the following on....you guessed it! 9/11:

“For those under the age of 45 it seemed that world events had finally contrived a meaningful test of their capacity for conscientious political thought. Many of my acquaintances, I realized, had passed the last decade or two in a state of intellectual and psychic yearning for such a moment — or, if they hadn’t, were able to quickly assemble an expert arguer’s arsenal of thrusts and statistics and ripostes and gambits and examples and salient facts and rhetorical maneuvers. I, however, was almost completely caught out.”

I guess my problem with the novel was that the action was too distant to really care about the main interesting character: the Dutch narrator Hans, whose wife and child just left him, writes about this Trinidadian dreamer and hustler Chuck Ramkissoun (sic) in new York City. Some of the observations seem a little too tacked on, as if he had some scraps of writing leftover from his diary that he thought were so wonderful that he threw them in and made Hans say them. So, not unlike Hans, it just meanders along aimlessly until then... it's over. Chuck is always too far away to really care about and Hans is not so interested in exploring his life beyond what he allows.

When Hans finally figures out what Chuck is up too besides cricket and acts all shocked and horrified you want to say "About time! What did you expect?" This is post 9/11 after all Hans!

New York Times Bestseller List, The Prophecy

Sunday October 12, 2008

HARDCOVER FICTION


1. THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE, by David Wroblewski

2. HEAT LIGHTNING, John Sandford

3. THE GIVEN DAY Dennis Lehane

A Picture Speaks a 1000 Words

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Anita Loo's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a bit dated but quite funny. And sometimes she speaks the truth:
"I seem to be quite depressed this morning as I always am when there is nothing to put my mind to. Because I decided not to read the book by Mr. Cellini. I mean it was quite amuseing (sic) in spots because it was really quite riskay (sic)but the spots were not so close together and I never seem to like to always be hunting clear through a book for the spots I am looking for, especially when there are really not so many spots that seem to be so amuseing after all."
From the mouths of babes----or blondes.

In Which Our Heroine (me) Learns a Lesson

Yep, a valuable lesson. Like I just listened to Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife on CD on a long commute back and forth from Springfield and I have nobody but myself to blame. I never liked her book Prep, the narrator and all the characters were very unlikable and so basically then why bother with this? But I did not learn a valuable lesson that time and I listened all the way to the end and now I want to complain about her poor writing, boring undeveloped characters (a thinly drawn and thinly disguised George and Laura Bush) and lack of anything mildly redeeming in it. I think the reason she wrote it about Laura Bush is because she completely lacked the imagination to flesh out a full story or character and just set this on top of Laura Bush so that all the numerous blanks would be filled in with the real story.
But it's like when a friend of yours has a rotten boyfriend who she tells you all the time that she doesn't really like but she hangs out with him whenever he calls and cancels your plans to see him and then expects you to feel sorry for her when he treats her badly and you're supposed to let her complain about it all over again. Umm... excuse me...no complaining allowed if you're still insisting on dating them! Stiff upper lip! I don't want to hear it.
But really I was 3 1/2 hours in the car on the way back back from Springfield and then I had nothing else to listen to, and I never liked her first book Prep and....oh I get it...it's my own fault and you're not going to feel sorry for me. Stiff upper lip. I know! I know!

Requiem, Mass

I am not sure why but I have a very soft spot for John Dufresne and his writing. I've read Louisiana Power and Light and Love Warps the Mind a Little and his writing never fails to tickle me (in Requiem Mass one of the patients in a pysch ward wears a t-shirt that says "I'm not a gynecologist but I'll take a look.")
A synopsis of Love Warps the Mind a Little from the publisher:
"Ever since Lafayette Proulx quit his day job, left his wife, hauled his dog and his Royal portable across town to Judi Dubey’s house, and set out at last to be a fiction writer, his life has been a sordid mess. Judi’s exotically dysfunctional family isn’t all to blame. Sure, the murders are disconcerting. And, yes, Judi’s father’s gone off the deep end. Worse are the vicious rejection letters Laf gets from editors. To top it off, Laf’s falling for Judi at the same time he’s nettled with guilt, is in marriage counseling with his wife, and is writing his long-hoped-for novel. When Judi is diagnosed with stage IV cancer, they both struggle to find the memory that will comfort, the truth that will redeem in a world where everyone suffers some kind of love disorder. John Dufresne, called “a highly readable Faulkner,” will once again take the literary world by storm with this new tragicomic tale."
You get the picture. Anyway Requiem Mass was not his best effort, a brother and a sister growing up with a mentally ill mother and a truck driver father who has a family at every truck stop. The boy grows up to be a writer and this is his memoir which he had started writing as fiction. It made me giggle but it never resonated like Love did. At best it just reminds us how children, no matter how abysmal their parents are, always love their parents.

NYT and Oprah Following Vineyard Bookgroup

New York Times

September 19, 2008

"On Friday’s edition of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Ms. Winfrey announced her latest book club pick: “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle,” the debut novel by David Wroblewski, below, which came out in June and was warmly received by critics. The story, influenced by both “Hamlet” and the works of Stephen King, is about a mute boy with a deep connection to the dogs bred at his family’s Wisconsin kennel. “I think this book is right up there with the greatest American novels ever written, I really do,” Ms. Winfrey said. The book was a popular summer read and was ranked ninth on the most recent New York Times best-seller list, where it has held a place for 13 weeks. “When you read it, you will understand why I had to choose it,” Ms. Winfrey said. The endorsement is likely to make the book even hotter, and throughout the day on Friday it was slowly moving up the top-selling book lists on both Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com."

What can I say? You saw(telle) it here first.

Homewrecker

Well I will admit that Housekeeping was a near perfect book and 20 years later Gilead was a quiet masterpiece. But Home is not so great. It's the same quiet sorts of people, 'religious folk' in the same small town Gilead. But there is nothing compelling or true about it as Gilead. The new minister character Reverend Broughton instead of seeming saintly seems just like an idiot. When he starts to apologize to his wastrel son Jack who got a woman pregnant and then left town 20 years ago, for his not baptising the baby he is just a martyr not a human being.
The language too is a bit sanctimonious, people don't drink water they drink "good cold water" (is there bad cold water?). I don't know, maybe from a Christian perspective you would hallelujah the Reverend and his daughter as they practically trip over themselves trying not to judge or blame Jack but to me they just look like suckers. Maybe Ms. Robinson should take another 20 year hiatus between novels. It worked the other time.

My Dog Tulip is a Bitch

Perhaps I was so traumatized by the reading of My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley that I forgot to post about it. Anyway I think this is the antidote to all those cute dog books out there. Ole J.R. spares us nothing....from the joys of Tulip's impacted anal glands we pass on to a grueling chapter on her coming into heat and then just when I thought we could go no further.... finding her a mate and hearing about their sexual dysfunction. J.R. is like Dr. Phil right there guiding them at all times, he can't even let her do that alone! There is something a tad unnatural in J.R.'s love for Tulip

I began to suspect something nasty in the woodshed when I read this moving passage :

"There came a day, however, when we were walking in Wimbledon woods and she suddenly added my urine, which I had been obliged to void, to the other privileged objects of her social attention. How touched I was! How honored I felt! "Oh Tulip! Thank you," I said."

Tulip is apparently a very high strung possesive dog which while J.R. tut-tuts in company, in secret I believe he is overjoyed about. Someone loves him and looking at J.R. on the cover I believe she may be the best he can get. Needless to say: it is not a healthy relationship.

Travels With Alice

OK, so Calvin Trillin is like David Sedaris for oldsters. His persona in Travels With Alice is much the same character as the Sedaris formula playing always the innocent with the wrong end of the stick. Alice is his Hugh, superior and all knowing, and...deeply loved. It's one of those books you put down and wistfully wish someone would love you that much and immortalize you , I want to be Sedaris' Hugh, John Bayley's Iris or Trillin's Alice. Also it's one of those books when you wish you had enough money for the eternal vacation in the South of France that Trillin is always on. Send me there and I SWEAR my blog will be funny too. Please?

Brother, I'm Dying

I had read Edwige Danticat a long time ago and thought her writing a bit too self conscious and ----dare I say it?---lyrical. But someone told me to read Brother I'm Dying and I did and rather liked it. It's a memoir of Danticat's father and uncle; her father goes to the States with her mother and leaves her behind with her younger brother at her uncle's in a poor neighborhood in Haiti. The uncle is a very good person, a pastor in his church and very close to his brother. The whole tone of the book is dispassionate and precise: no preciousness, no lyricism.

Unlike most current memoirs there is no incest or abusiveness, just loving and responsible adults caught in a terrible economic and political situation. It's actually quite good for giving a picture of growing up in Haiti. The odd thing is that the focus is primarily on the men and the women, her mother and her Aunt Denise, are giving scant attention. I imagine she has a memoir planned about the women and the absence was deliberate. The book serves as a just tribute to the two men in her life though.

Of Webs and Butter

Since we were in Maine, E.B. White country, I thought the spider who made this web may have been one of descendents of Charlotte and her web. Alas, I was unable to verify it for literary historical purposes.

Also while in Maine we bought some heavy cream at the little farm stand and made our own butter. Basically the recipe calls for heavy cream and a pinch of salt and a jar to shake it in. With the leftover buttermilk we made pancakes the next morning which those not on a diet covered with pats of our homemade butter. It prompted an interesting discussion on the chicken and egg theory.

I'm sorry we didn't make our no-knead bread to go with the butter. It's the sort of thing the River Cottage people would have approved of. But this is a very nice cookbook for kids or adults . It's British (I think you knew that by looking at their rather poncey names) and written with the same sensibility as Jamie Oliver.

Kidnapping, Runaways and Mistresses

Yes, I've been reading children's lit again. Well, I know why kids don't read Kidnapped anymore. Great story but the language is impenetrable. All the Scottish dialect is exhausting to read. With dialect you can't read it in a normal way, you have to manufacture a little "reading aloud" voice inside your head and sound it out loud. But with this I sat on the beach whispering out "Ah, but I'll begowk ye there! cried the gentleman" in my best Scottish burr....and still had no idea what it meant.
From kidnapping children to runaway children....on a recent drive Olivia and I listened to the audio version of From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler which I adored when I was young. Claudia and her younger brother run away and live in the Metropolitan Museum for a couple of weeks and solve a mystery of an unattributed statue. When I was young I loved the book and Olivia loved it too the other day. But this time I had a different reaction, while Claudia and her brother were taking baths in the fountain and sleeping in the antique beds I was sick to my stomach thinking of their parents worried to death about them. This had never occurred to me when I was young, all the adventure had gone out of it for me. Just the horror left!
Someone on the Nancy Pearl book podcast, which I am fond of, mentioned Madensky Square by Eva Ibbotsen as being a book she often re-read, Nancy Pearl raved about it too (she raves about most books actually, she just loves them all in their own little way). Anyway it seemed to be out of print and classified as a Young Adult novel by the library system. I duly ordered it and duly received my gravy stained copy from the library. Not sure what the young adults are up to these days but perhaps the story of a turn of the century Viennese dressmaker who is quite happily a mistress to some sort of Field Marshall will inspire them. It is actually a cozy little book and quite innocuous.

As the Vineyard Bookgroup Goes...So Goes the Nation

So once more a book plucked from obscurity by our fearless twosome catapults up the Best Seller List on the NYT. Number six for The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/books/bestseller/besthardfiction.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Not sure why though. Neither of us liked it much. Both of us agreed that it was overlong, one of us thought it had too much happening, the other that not enough happened. And what's with all the natural disasters? The tornados, the wind spouts, the fires? We spent a whole week on the Vineyard and were spared a typhoon apparently. Not Edgar---he got them all. He should move to the Vineyard.

We both slogged through though. The individual characters of the dogs we thought were nicely drawn and there was one very engaging character who belonged in another book or in a short story all his own. The dog training is never fully explained so it's a mystery what was so special about the dogs. The author has this annoying tendency to get all vague and "writerly" when something important happens so you're never sure exactly what happened in the important bits (like a murder say) but in the 'whelping pen' it's all clarity and boring detail (unfortunately).

Some of the language was a bit too precious..."the egret rose, white and archaic." Now I'm sure the egret was white but archaic? Other than that he liked the sound of it, it's complete nonsense. Having said that however, one of us who suffered greatly from mosquito bites over the last week forgave him all when she came to his rapturous descriptions of insect repellent that populated the portion when Edgar and his dogs live in the woods. Off! "the magical elixir" Mr. Wroblewski called it and she nodded her head sagely. He could do no wrong there, a master of prose. But then it's away from the glories of OFF! and back to that infernal whelping pen and a complicated bit with syringes, old letters and some natural disasters that neither of us could quite figure out and then it was over. Phew.

Anyway too late now for us to do a recall on all those copies sold. Our Oprah like powers have been unleashed. There is no turning back.

Martha's Vineyard's Bookgroup Meeting

A bookgroup composed of two members will be meeting shortly on the Vineyard. This is their annual meeting and the book of choice is The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Last year's book Eat, Drink, Stink, Love catapulted to superstardom so expect the same with this years choice. Their meetings are few, but their powers are legend in the literary world.

First Stop: Chilangos

Chilangos are what people who are from Mexico City, the "D.F" are called. David Lida has been living in Mexico City for 15 years and although some of First Stop in the New World, Mexico City the Capital of the 21rst Century is more for gringos, a lot of it is interesting to chilangos or tapatios for that matter. Mr.Lida talks about taxicabs, high rents, prostitutes, drug addicts, street kids, Carlos Slim etc. He even talks to some old vedettes and mentions Olga Briskin and Lyn May. Vedettes are female performers who have shows and are always provocative and scantily dressed. Olga Briskin used to come to Guadalajara and in the paper El Informador there would be an ad for her show with her dressed like Elvira, but playing a violin. Very cultured. I had forgotten her presence in this world.

The Constant Reader on Pooh

There is a funny bit in last week's New Yorker in an article on a children's librarian at the NYC Public Library; it talks about Dorothy Parker in a book review column called 'The Constant Reader' reviewing The House at Pooh Corner.

"Pooh's wasn't just a Good Hum and a Hopeful Hum, Parker noted. It was a hummy hum. "And it is that word 'hummy', my darlings," Parker wrote, "that marks the first place in 'the House at Pooh Corner' at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up."

Well my darlings, in case anyone was drawing a line in the sand, for your information, the Chain Weader never fwowed up on poor Pooh Bear! Chain Weader wuvs Pooh bear. Bery much. So there.

Treasure Island Exciting

This was so exciting. I don't think I had ever read it. Now I want to read Kidnapped and Dr.Jekyl and Mr.Hyde. All books should be so well written and exciting. Cross out Salman Rushdie's "Lyrical!" on book jackets and write 'Robert Louis Stevenson says "Exciting!"' and I'll buy it!

I also just read Once Upon a Time in the North which is a short sort of prequel to Philip Pullman's The Dark Materials which I also must say was quite 'Exciting!' ('Exciting!' says Gaye Gentes.)

Rich Man's Diseases

Inspired by that piece in the NYT I bought the Allen Shawn book, Wish I Could be There. Wish I Could Not Have! Self-indulgent to the core. Any interest in his family is put aside to long chapters on brain science and more particularly His Brain. Who cares? It reminds me of that scene in Bertolucci's The Last Emperor where all the palace physicians gather around the little boy emperors' chamber pot to peer in intently. Well, Allen, I'm not peering in with them. Sorry.

The Unrest Cure

I read a very funny short story by Saki today called The Unrest Cure. His stories are extremely short, like 6 pages each. In the start of the story Clovis is on the train in a railway carriage with a 'solid, sedate individual' with a very stodgy and prim suitcase, who 'one could have gauged fairly accurately by the temperment and mental outlook of the traveling bag's owner. But he seemed unwilling to leave anything to the imagination of a casual observer, and his talk grew presently personal and introspective'. OK so I know it was written in 1911, but does this sound like the conversations you often are forced to hear on the train, only on people's cellphones? How prescient.

My Summer Reading Plans

Substitute brunette for blonde and Proust for Joyce and you get the picture.....

Seven Degrees of Separation from Proust

http://www.gnooks.com/

Go to this site and type in your favorite author and it supposedly creates a sort of constellation of all similar authors that you might like. I typed in Margot Livesey and got all the usual and predictable suspects: Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, Anthony Powell, Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch. The fun is the sort of initial big bang when the names all go flying off the central name and then hover as if thinking and reconsidering...'should Somerset Maugham go here next to A.S. Byatt or over here near Ian McEwan?' And the most pleasing thing was that Proust showed up in the constellation, I am feeling a small glow of accomplishment already. Today Margot Livesey...tomorrow Proust....

The House on Fortune Street

I just read House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey. I always wonder if she's related to Roger Livesey (red headed Scottish star of my two all time favorite old movies (Emeric-Pressburger of course), Do You Know Where You're Going? and Colonel Blimp.) She is Scottish but I have never heard Roger mentioned in any review. Maybe Livesey is the Scottish equivalent of the Vietnamese Nguyen?

Anyway the book is quite good, four different characters retelling the same relationships through different eyes. In comparison to last weeks Post Birthday World, it's not as torturous or self involved, and the character's voices are from people you might possibly care about. My only hesitation is that Livesey might have meant the two different central women had different attitudes to the men in their lives because of their fathers. More pyschological work than I cared to do...so I let that possible subtext wash over me.

One of female characters is quite shy and very insecure with men, when she's going out to meet yet another loser, her office mate tells her 'Remember Pavorotti': apparently when someone asked Pavorotti if a particular audience would like him, he replied" the question is--- will I like them?" A nice way to put it.

A Book I Won't be Reading

O.K. It sounds amazing and like something I should read but....I can't do it. One story is supposedly about a Kenyan street family in which the wage earner is a 12-year-old prostitute and the parents give their children glue to sniff because it’s cheaper than food and makes them forget they're hungry. According to the NYT today: “As translucent a style as I’ve read in a long while,” Alan Cheuse wrote in The Chicago Tribune, adding that the subjects “nearly render the mind helpless and throw the heart into a hopeless erratic rhythm out of fear, out of pity, out of the shame of being only a few degrees of separation removed from these monstrous modern circumstances.”
What has happened to me? Single childless Gaye read Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and loved it and laughed at Todd Solentz films. She was made of sterner stuff. Have I become a timid tremulous little person living in Swampscott and ignoring the cries of the oppressed? Apparently---yes. I will leave it to Angelina Jolie to read.

Allen Shawn

A really lovely little essay in the NYT magazine this weekend entitled Family Meal. Allen Shawn is son of the New Yorker editor and brother of that odd hummunculus of a man Wallace Shawn. Allen Shawn apparently has a twin sister Mary who was mentally retarded and institutionalized.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22Food-t-001.html?oref=login#

It's a story of the sister Mary's annual visit home with the family for her birthday when their mother is 99 and completely infirm. The piece ends with the lines: 'How could I not cry when Piergiorgio recited these lines in Italian from a poem by Salvatore Quasimodo:

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra

trafitto da un raggio di sole:

ed è subito sera.

Everyone stands alone on the heart of the earth

transfixed by a sun ray:

and suddenly it is evening. '

The Post-Birthday World

This was exhausting...500 pages of a self involved heroine slogging through her boring life. The conceit is that a live-in couple in London have a friend they see every year for his birthday. The woman one birthday goes out alone with him and wants to kiss him, the narrative breaks into two threads, one where she kisses him, one where she doesn't and it's 450 more pages of the years that follow with the consequences for the characters. Michiko Kakutani from the NYT loved it I might add.
On top of this annoyance the author has the temerity to write in italics what I imagine are meant to be the character's imaginings of what one of the men is doing at that very moment. ARGGHHH...layer on layer of deception. This teeters perilously close to authors recounting character's dreams in books and expecting you to read them(I mean they're fiction and then they have dreams? Please.)...anyway this is something that WILL NOT BE TOLERATED by our heroine (me, in case you forgot.).
So don't bother with the book, but if you like the idea of the different paths our lives can take by chance I would say watch Kristof Kieslowski's Blind Chance or even that Gwyneth Paltrow film Sliding Doors. (the first hinging on catching or not catching a plane, the second (lower budget?) a subway.)This is probably where Ms. Shriver got the idea from.
Come to think of it maybe in a parallel universe somewhere I am not reading Post Birthday World and Michiko Kakutani is stranded on a desert island with only it to read...

Mas! Mas! Mas!

I have a very small collection of old Mexican movie posters, my favorite being the one above. It's from a movie called El Vestido de Novia (The Bridal Gown) with the provocative question below: ?Pierde la pecadora el derecho de llevarlo...? (Does the sinner lose the right to wear it?). This film stars someone named Ana Luisa Peluffo. I just Googled her and apparently she exists, was born in 1931 and made El Vestido de Novia in 1959. She is known for being the first actress to be seen nude on the Mexican screen. There are nude pictures of her on the web(not sure if she was the first on the web too) but since this is a family site I will leave it to you to Google them. She made 201 movies, according to them she made her name by appearing nude in the 50's, got bigger more serious opportunities in drama as a result, and then "returned to her roots" in the 70's. Meanwhile here she is in the flesh (well not all of it).

I didn't realise there were books about Mexican movie posters too and so I just got one called Mas Cine Mexicano which had some very wonderful old posters but none of the same ones I have. The Mas indicates that there was a prior book which I must have missed. Maybe Ana Luisa Peluffo will be immortalized in there returning to "her roots".

Careful Use of Compliments

Just whipped through Careful Use of Compliments by Alexander McCall Smith. On 7 day loan from the library, it was a space filler, a time waster. It was one of those books you can read quickly, which is good since all I wanted to do was get to the end. Not very good, but once you get invested in characters you are pretty much stuck. I am stuck with Isabel Dalhousie now, this is the 4th or 5th book, but at this point I just tolerate her.

Abort! Abort!

Did I tell you to read Any Human Heart by William Boyd? If so, sorry. Not that it's bad, just that it went on and on ...and on. At some point I realised that it would go on until the narrator reached the age of 83. I stopped at 38.

New York Times Kills Fiction

Last month I renewed my subscription to the New York Times. For a few heady weeks I was on top of it, reading every article and wanting to talk about it all. Poor George, after one particularly long current event laden phone conversation, there was a lull in the conversation, I could hear him sighing in relief. He is not used to having to talk about anything more pressing than 'what's for dinner?" with me. "Do you think they really had nuclear weapons in Syria? " I said. Gentle Reader, I can not repeat his response.

But fortunately for my relationship, reading the NYT and keeping up with it requires eternal vigilance---one moment of weakness, one skim of an article, one memo taken home to read on the train, one dipping into my novel in the morning and---I'm behind. It's like Ursula in 100 Years of Solitude constantly fighting off the ants invading the house in Macondo. She is always bustling through the rooms fighting them off with poisons and her energy. All the characters laugh at her and she seems like a crazy woman obsessed, but she never stops. The minute she dies though, they take over the house. I'll probably be found dead under a load of back issues of the NYT and the New Yorker. Suspect George!

Cranford

I just watched a BBC production of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford. I always loved the book, very unlike all of Elizabeth Gaskell's other serious social issues sort of work, the book was light and fun. The show was 5 episodes and according to the credits based on 3 of her novels...not just Cranford. They must have thrown them in a blender. But still I loved it, anything with Imelda Staunton needs to be watched. She can make you laugh just by looking at her with her tough little frame and piggy eyes and nose and her proud carriage. If I were in Hollywood I would be pitching a romantic comedy with her. She could replace Cameron Diaz! Anyway, there is a reason perhaps I am not in Hollywood and am confined to watching the industry unfold on a 14 inch screen in the front room. Anyway Cranford had Staunton, Eileen Atkins, Michael Gambon, Judi Dench but no Ashton Kutcher. Needless to say it was marvellous.

Old but Great Expectations

Watched David Lean's Great Expectations with Liv in our old movie quest. She actually liked it and acted out all the parts the next day in retelling. Herbert Pocket is played by an extremely young Alec Guiness and she said that whenever he was on the screen she felt safe. As in How Green Was my Valley there is all sorts of awful stuff happening to children. I don't think she'll ever be a candidate for the Lemony Snicket school of children's book with all sorts of nasty things happening to the kids. She likes fairies, small furry animals and happy kids in her books.

We were at Borders the other day getting a book about a fairy and a furry animal and felt quite well read as a mother was looking for the new Penderwick book and Liv got to tell her the name. Then another woman was hunting for the Ivy and Bean books and we got to nod solemnly at each other like literary critics.

Jhumping In

Just read Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of her short stories. Some had already been published in the New Yorker. She's a beautiful writer, as always, although her characters remind me of Anita Brookner's: isolated and removed from life and the humans around them . Too much prolonged exposure to them makes you start to feel itchy and claustrophobic. Makes me long for E.M. Forster to march in and slap them on the side of the head and yell "Only connect!".

Speak Nabokov

Just finished Speak Memory yesterday. Slow going with sentences like "nor am I alluding to the so-called muscae volitantes--shadows cast upon the retinal rods by motes in the vitreous humor, which are seen as transparent threads drifting across the visual field." to liven things up just when I'm nodding off in bed. (I love how he thinks that's a helpful explanation.)
For a lover of straight narrative: there is none. For the eschewer of the lyrical: stay away. But then there are some lovely bits where he describes how real memory becomes eaten up by our narratives until it is no longer a real memory but a part of a story. "houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore, and the portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own."

Books For Children?

Billed as a Young Adult Novel, How I Live Now by Meg Rossof won all sorts of awards in Britain. I think Adult is the operative word since right as our 15 year old anorexic American heroine gets off the plane in England she meets her cigarette smoking 14 year old male cousin, they hop in a car with him driving and a few chapters later they are having sex. What's so young about that? Anyway it's actually quite a good book set in a very vague future World War situation where the heroine ends up having to survive off the land.

Speaking of actual children's books Olivia and are reading The Penderwicks on Gardham Street and really enjoying it. They're quite good, both the first one and the second. The author obviously read a lot of the same fiction that I did when I was young. It has shades of Elizabeth Enright or E.E. Nesbit, not too trendy or pandering. Very satisfying.

Kennedys

Just read very quickly Laurie Graham's Importance of being Kennedy. I enjoyed the similar book she wrote about the Duke of Windsor. This was not so good. It just reminded me what an unattractive and calculating people the Kennedy's were. Teddy is seen as a nasty little tubber, old Rose Kennedy was a total shrew and all the dead ones were ok. Apparently young simple Rosie Kennedy was tolerated until the hormones kicked in and then she was given a botched lobotomy and sent off to lala land. It's all told through the eyes of the Irish nanny.

The Young Picasso

So I finished that big biography of Picasso last night, it ends right before he painted the above at 26. Although I did feel the book was a bit tedious in all the details of minor figures who came and went in the space of a paragraph, I also felt awe at the speed with which Picasso worked through an idea, conquered it and moved on. Blink and you miss the Rose Period or the Blue Period. You can see other artists near Picasso being left behind still puttering around with something he left years ago. It seems he always had that single minded purpose to create art, everything else in his life is incidental.
It was fun to hear of some of the art you have to peer at in a crowd being so accessible in the early 1900's. A friend of Picasso, no one special or rich, had a Gauguin hanging in his living room that Picasso used to go visit frequently. A lot of Picasso's early work is lost since he had to paint it over because he couldn't afford new canvases. The level of his poverty was a surprise fror me but even in those days grown up sons apparently moved back in with their parents and brought their dirty laundry home. Some things never change.
I plan on reading the next 2 volumes.

Picasso

With the pile next to my bed teetering close to collapse I thought it was time to eliminate the fattest offender so I'm reading the Picasso biography by John Richardson. Not exactly a page turner. And I'm only half way through it but I am sorry that the photos are not in color---black and white doesn't do justice to the Blue Period and I think to tell the story visually you need that progression of color in the work. Richardson seems to be a bit petty in the begining hinting that Picasso rather than acknowledging his juvenalia instead destroyed it all to preserve the myth that he sprang fully formed as an artist from the head of his very mediocre artist father.
But it reads a bit like a social diary recounting names of everyone he ever crossed paths with and all his addresses and mistresses, most of them described by Richardson as "Cecilia, a whore, Rosita, a whore...".
It's fun to read about Picasso's supersticions about age, he would never let old people sleep in his house in case it rubbed off. So when an 80 year old bosom friend visits, the 80 year old Picasso makes him stay in a hotel just in case death enters the house. Apparently he would also steal his son's clothes and keep his toys near him in case "the youthfulness might still cling to them" and rejuvenate him . I have taken to carrying a couple of Liv's Hamtaro's in my pockets. I'll get back to you on the results.

Why Did I Read This?

Because I got it at the best damm booksale in North America...that's why! Marblehead Public Library for some reason has a fantastic booksale every 3 months or so. It is a blood sport however with agressive dealers elbowing aside the more timid or...bookish customers. I have gotten some great books there though. A week or so though ago I got confused and thought the booksale was on and parked in front of the library right at 10 am on the dot. I marched boldly downstairs and towards the sale room armed with steel nerves, sharp elbows and two tote bags. A grey haired woman looked at me questioningly and I saw no one else was there....it turns out they had booked the room for a memorial service (perhaps for a timid book consumer from last quarter's sale?) and the book sale was actually not until the next month. Whoops.
The book, instantly forgetable, had charm only that it reminded me faintly of my mother since the author was in the same era as she, with gardenia corsages and a newsy sort of voice. Don't bother though. But go to the booksale. It's at the end of this month. Or maybe that'll be my memorial service...

Zippy Redeux

The second book wasn't as good. She Got Up Off the Couch, although interesting in a 'Gee I wonder what happened after' way, felt more like everyone had showed up at her readings for Zippy who she would have trashed and she felt like she had to say how nice they were. So if felt much less honest. Alas.