A Gate on the Stairs

"The wrinkly recursiveness of her language seems lodged at the layer of consciousness itself, where Moore demands readers’ attention to the innate thingliness of words." Says Jonathan Lethem in the NYT's about The Gate in the Stairs by Lorrie Moore..... huh?

Anyway Lorrie Moore traditionally writes short stories and this probably was one once. However in bulking it up, detail after detail is piled on needlessly. She seems to have decided it needs to be an important book with larger themes so threw in---just to name a few---global warming, 9/11, racism, child abuse, the Iran Iraq war, terrorism, the food industry, etc etc. She has clever little opinions and bon mots on pretty much everything, usually smug, usually extraneous. Underneath it all, like a slim little toddler in a snowsuit, is a wisp of a story of a college girl who works as a nanny for parents of an adopted biracial girl. It must be the innate thingliness of words that I object to. Less thingliness please.

Don't Go Down that Road!

I know Cormac McCarthy is a spectacular writer. I read All the Pretty Horses and was very very impressed with the writing. However he writes in this kind of romanticized tough guy way that it's like some Clint Eastwood movie. (Like Pale Rider which was actually quite delicious in it's silent macho kind of way). However for my romance I prefer Jane Austen not a dystopic wasteland with small children present.

But The Road won a Pulitzer and I feel like everyone has read it and so I should too. So I bought it at the Book Sale and finally opened it up. So....as I rise and stand tottering in that cold autistic dark with my arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in my skull crank out their reckonings....as Cormac says....I realize I can't do it. My vestibular calculations cranked away and when I have to spend that much time unraveling a sentence and ...it's in English, I feel safe in putting the book down.

Sadly as you can see above in the photo my brief time on the paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands did affect my looks somewhat. But imagine what I would look like if I read the whole book....and be thankful.

Juliet Naked

I read Juliet Naked and liked it fine. No more or less than any other of his books and I am quite fond of Nick Hornby. It's about an aged reclusive rock star who releases an acoustic album of his greatest all time album 'Juliet' and  connects to the girlfriend of one of his biggest fans. Neither the boyfriend nor the aged rock star are particularly appealing and you spend the whole book hoping the girlfriend will dump them both and listen to the new Peter Doherty album instead.

The Thing Around Your Neck

These stories by the woman I call "that Nigerian writer" for obvious reasons are quite good. She writes very well and there are some very haunting images in them. I read her Half a Yellow Sun last winter in Mexico and liked that too. I would tell people about her but can't ever remember or pronounce her name to let them know to read her. Alas.

Kindle-cita

(Big news over the holidays was that Santa brought me a Kindle. So now you may have to endure various photos of Mommy's wittle Kindle-windle in many cute poses. )

I have one small gripe with the Kindle other than the enormous one that IT IS NOT A BOOK and that is: it has no backlighting and on a dark plane flight the Kindle is as dark as a book. So in the one slim instance where the Kindle might actually trounce the book it sadly falls short.

But on to what was on the Kindle's screen for some of the holidays. I read Juliet, Naked on it and Wolf's Hall.

Wolf's Hall was surprise for me. It was  historical fiction about Thomas Cromwell who for a time was Henry VIII's closest advisor. It was very engaging from the begining and the writing was very intimate and immediate without being romanticized. Hillary Mantel apparently was trying to put a better spin on Cromwell's character than history and the Cromwell she depicts is almost like a girl he's so sensitive and likable. I wonder about that since when I wiki-ed old Cromwell's ass (easy to do right from the Kindle btw) he was actually spending a lot of time boiling the heads of his enemies and putting them on spikes. Ah mere details in the way of the fiction!

She had a very odd use of pronouns, the very intimacy of the story with Cromwell called merely "he" backfires on her somewhat.  When there are many possible 'he's' in a scene and you get confused you wish she's call them by their actual names. Then suddenly she uses a 'we' and you're really confused.

But other than that it was a pretty solid read and  she quite enjoyed it.

Tracy Kidder

This was, as all of Tracy Kidder's work, very good. A young man, Deo, from Burundi escapes his war torn country and comes to America. He lives in Central Park for awhile and through sheer persistence, luck and intelligence ends up in med school. He meets Paul Farmer from Tracy Kidder's previous book Mountains Beyond Mountains and becomes involved in Partners for Health.
There are some very endearing stories of the immigrant experience tucked into a lot of tragic ones. One story was how Deo learned that you could bargain with the men who would fix the pay phones for immigrants so that they could call home. The first time he uses it it's $5 but sometimes he can bargain them down to $3. After learning that Deo goes down to the subway station and tries to bargain with the subway worker for the tokens. It doesn't work.
My only quibble about this book is that Tracy Kidder is so far away from this young man in culture, upbringing, economic status....everything, that all he can do is stand and marvel at him. Deo is still a mystery at the end. We get the story through the eyes of a 63 year old white intellectual who picks out the important bits for his story, it is not through Deo's eyes. But of course Deo probably can't write half as well as Tracy Kidder so I suppose I should not complain.