Brooklyn

This was a very reserved and careful little book. A miniature really about a young Irish girl, Eilis Lacey, who leaves home in the early 50's and comes to Brooklyn, works in a dress shop, goes to night school, meets an Italian boy and...I will draw a veil over the rest. But Colm Toibin writes very well. No word out of place or unconsidered. Nothing extraneous. Everything packed neatly and folded like in the two suitcases Eilis carries across the Atlantic. No trailing bits and pieces. Very nice.

The Anthologist

I am very fond of Nicholson Baker. I like how his mind works and you can see it working away in his books. It's like one of those clocks with the transparent backs where you can see all the inner workings clicking away (although now with digital clocks who knows what the inner workings look like.). Anyway The Anthologist has him ruminating about poetry. The story is pretty slim: a poet must write the introduction to an anthology and his girlfriend just left him. But he goes on about enjambments, rhyme and iambic pentameter (which he says comes from French and is not natural to our language, ditto with Haiku only with Japanese this time)  with such fervour and enthusiam you're carried throughout the whole book without realizing there's not much story. I still am very fond of Nicolson Baker.

Take the Blame

I had read Michelle Huneven's earlier books Round Rock and Jamesland and remembered liking them but this was pre-blog so can not verify why. But I know I liked them. This compelled me to rush out and buy her new book Blame in hardcover. All of her books deal with AA and getting sober. This is a story of a woman,Patsy, a college professor who goes to jail after a drunken black out after which she wakes up to be told she killed a mother and a daughter while driving drunk.

For something so raw and horrendous Huneven surprisingly writes from a distance from the main character and the whole book is at arms length. I'm not saying it was bad just that it felt a bit as if she were coddling her characters. Patsy gets out of prison and (as most convicts do) goes right back to her tenured teaching job, the husband of the victims forgives her and she marries a very wealthy older man who buys her a Morgan horse. Maybe AA is all about not beating yourself up ...but that doesn't mean Huneven can't beat Patsy up just a little. I guess I don't mind her writing about AA but I don't want the story told through a lense of their philosophy.

The Road Home

This book was pleasant enough. The story of an Eastern European immigrant who comes to London to make a better living for his daughter and mother back in their home country. The story is pretty predictable. There's a lot of nobility going on but it's not so bad. Glowing reviews all over the jacket and inside make me wonder if maybe they're referring to a hardcover version that somehow was mysteriously better than the paperback version I ended up with. It wasn't awful, it just wasn't the "at once timeless and bitingly contemporary" "gem of a novel" that makes "us hear English anew" I was expecting.

Where the Wild Things Are

I went to see this today with Olivia. I think they captured the unease of the book quite well; the perilous sense of danger in the monsters and the loneliness and rage in Max. It's a wonderful film. That being said this is not a child's movie.  The recurring themes are loneliness, anguish at why things have to change and out and out anger. These are all things children feel but not things children like to see necessarily. At the end Olivia said the monsters were Max's story just told in a different way. She said it made her feel uncomfortable (in a bad way). I concur.(but in a good way). Our favorite read aloud books were always funny anyway, George and Martha, Ernest and Celestine and Bread and Jam for Frances got us every time. No disquiet there and doubtless they will never be made into motion pictures for adults. But Liv and I would go see them happily.

Hons and Rebels

I read Jessica Mitford's Hons and Rebels last week and really was interested by the Mitford sisters. One, Unity, was an intimate of Hitlers, another, Diana, married Walter Mosley, a British Fascist, Nancy Mitford was a novelist and Jessica ran off with a Communist to fight in the Spanish Civil War. She later on wrote The American Way of Death exposing the American funeral industry. The book is a rather quick account of their eccentric childhoods, parents and adolescence. I got rather overexcited by the whole thing and ordered the Mitford Sisters which just got here in the mail. It looks rather large and I'm not sure if my interest will be sustained throughout the weight of the book.