The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

 

May he have an accident shaped like an umbrella. [p. 13]

Finally reading this after owning it for almost 40 years. Collection of short "fictions" - first one, "Argon," while fascinating, is a completely off-putting journey through the narrator's family tree, mined with Yiddish and Hebrew words and puns. Started it several times and drowned in it as the first story. It's now more appealing to me, since I understand the central metaphor of the book -- and that argon, as one of the "inert" (noble/rare) gases, completely stands in for his distant relatives of whom he knew very little, except in scattered anecdotes and memories and phrases. 

The rest of the stories are marvelous and much less obscure - each concerns a chemical element in a fictional/fairy tale/historical setting.

"Nitrogen" is a strong example - about a lipstick manufacturer who hires young women as workers and insists on kissing each one eight times each morning to "test" the lipstick.

The concluding story, "Carbon," magnificently pulls it all together.

Camino Island by John Grisham

 

Solid but not great. I turned the pages dutifully, but the plot and milieu -- F Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts, small Southern seashore bookstores, the creative writing community --is a little nauseating.

Too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash.

Somebody's Fool by Richard Russo

Scratching my head on this. I love Russo's work, but don't really remember the first two FOOL novels, so this one isn't snapping into place. There is a sameness to his ironic tone that I'm finding deadening -- every character seems to hear the same omniscient sarcastic voice. Not moving me.

If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi

 

Mesmerizing, intricate, heavy novel about a band of Jewish partisans in Russia and Poland during the waning days of WWII.

Unbelievably moving account of the war winding down.

On the contrary, I believe it doesn't make much sense to say that one man is worth more than another. One man can be stronger than another but less wise. Or more educated but not so brave. Or more generous but also more stupid. So his value depends on what you want from him; a man can be very good at his job, and worthless if you set him to do some other job. [110]

Do you recognize us? We're the sheep of the ghetto,

Shorn for a thousand years, resigned to outrage.

We are the tailors, the scribes and the cantors,

Withered in the shadow of the cross.

Now we have learned the paths of the forest,

We have learned to shoot, and we aim straight. 

        If I'm not for myself, who will be for me?

        If not this way, how? And if not now, when?

Our brothers have gone to heaven

Through the chimneys of Sobibor and Treblinka,

They have dug themselves a grave in the air.

Only we few have survived

For the honor of our submerged people,

For revenge and to bear witness.

        If I'm not for myself, who will be for me?

        If not this way, how? And if not now, when?

We are the sons of David, the hardheaded sons of Masada.

Each of us carries in his pocket the stone

That shattered the forehead of Goliath.

Brothers, away from this Europe of graves:

Let us climb together towards the land

Where we will be men among men.

        If I'm not for myself, who will be for me?

        If not this way, how? And if not now, when?

Written by me, Martin Fontasch, about to die. Saturday 13 June 1943. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. [168]

[254]

[279]

The Confession by John Grisham

 

Couldn't put it down. Grisham has the thing, that knack for the last paragraph of each (short ish) chapter - he puts some torque on the story and you have to turn the page.

Rogue Lawyer by John Grisham

 

Another good one. I know a rogue lawyer. 

His philosophy: "Everyone’s awful, lawyers are the worst, cops are the second worst, criminals are kinda fun, I’m also the worst but also the greatest, so show me your tits."

They are entertaining and good company.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

 

Finally read this after owning it for 20 years. More of a story than a poem. Based on myth but playing out in a contemporary setting in South America. 

Excellent and strange.

Going Zero by Anthony McCarten

Liked this. Recent novel about a contest sponsored by a digital surveillance company and the feds, they select ten random Americans and challenge them to "stay off the grid" and avoid detection for 30 days. 

Nova by Samuel R. Delaney

 

Wacky. Interesting. Got halfway through!

If This Is a Man/The Truce by Primo Levi

 

This book (two books, actually) is amazing, a take on concentration camps unlike any other I've read. Levi was an Italian Jew who went to Auschwitz for the last ten months of the war. The first volume, IF THIS IS A MAN, contains his sociological, often clinical descriptions of the prison camp industry is astounding, how even with almost nothing the prisoners still had a "thriving" economy of barter and favoritism which seemed, perversely, to keep the survivors sane as 90% of the other inmates disappeared into the crematoriums. Sane in spite of the sickness, the filth, the freezing temperatures, the backbreaking labor.

The second book, THE TRUCE, follows his circuitous journey home after liberation, a winding trail through Eastern Europe and Russia which took over a year.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

 

Annie Dunne by Sebastian Barry

 

Another great one. Two single women in their 60s in western Ireland care for their grand-niece and nephew one summer, and suffer spiritual torpor. And enlightenment! Barry is a stunning prose stylist. There, I've said it again.

Looking at Pictures by Robert Walser

 

from "The Artist" --

He feels it, that’s all, and that’s how he finds it. He instantly separates the things of the highest importance from the unimportant ones, leaving everything extraneous or illusory to be what it will. He can gather his thoughts in a flash, his mind lucid, his consciousness alert. He is swift to discern what is not a matter of indifference, and for this reason always has both the inclination and cause to be of good cheer. His optimism waxes along with his predisposition to dispense with worry. When others ask: “What now?” and do not know the way forward, he has already found his own. He doesn’t see his path clearly, but also doesn’t consider this absolutely necessary; he strikes out in some direction or other, and one thing leads to the next. All paths lead to lives of some sort, and that’s all he requires, for every life promises a great deal and is replete with possibilities enchantingly fulfilled. He most certainly does not overtax his mind, and rightly so. Not everything needs to be puzzled out, and racking one’s brains does not necessarily result in cleverness. A higher power punishes us when we try to be more knowledgeable than befits us. What is fitting is to trust in ourselves and the world. Who feels this better than the artist? When he was poor, he believed more than ever in his abilities; when he began to grow weary, he was urged on more powerfully still by the image and idea that it is beautiful to pull oneself together. No one understands devotion to life, nor exhaustion, better than he, nor that Nature has willed it so, and that true industry and the heartfelt wish to produce work have their source in seasons of inertia. If this isn’t a natural growth process, what else can it be? Even the fruits of the field require time to grow; enough: he senses his fate, intuits the constraints and unconstrainedness of the destiny chosen for him and makes his peace with them. Does anyone know more vividly than he what it means to be utterly satisfied with oneself while at the same time being filled with numerous dissatisfactions? Both feelings lead him ever further on his path. Finding himself at a standstill once, it occurred to him to believe that all was nonetheless well with him; and when others gave voice to the opinion that he had lost his abilities, he made a point of showing what he was capable of in the loveliest light, giving the lie to the misconceptions of those who proved incapable of sound, calm judgment. He was always cautious when it came to believing or not believing in his journey, and this preserved him from both hubris and capitulation. When his modesty elicited condescension, he still did not falter in his belief that modesty was his bedrock. Space continued to favor him, time was well-disposed, and the world was as faithful to him as he was to it, and that was all he needed to continue in his development. Always he found talent to be intimately linked to joie de vivre, ability to gaiety, and craftsmanship to human flourishing, and he proceeded accordingly, with sometimes greater, sometimes lesser success and skill. If he failed at something, he did not cast it aside, but instead let it sit for a day, then examined it again, and since he returned to it, deeming it worthy of renewed attention, it proved to be serviceable. Over time, he learned to be patient and gentle, both in life and in his workshop. He owed his happiest hours to this circumstance. Once he was great; later, seeing himself diminished, he was on the point of feeling resentment, but the gift he possessed and his need to foster unity within himself prompted him to value even this smallness until such time as he could lift himself up again. As he sat in his room one evening, just as the bells were ringing and the streets filled with people looking forward to Sunday, he made his decision. No one who strives to bring new life to something significant should be too quick to abandon the hope that he will succeed in this endeavor, for that would be a shame; but as things are, all is well.

The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay

 

Doomsdayish, apocalyptic, dystopian novel, about two gay dads and their adoped Chinese daugter in remote New Hampshire, visited by four mysterious individuals who tell them the three must sacrifice one of the three or the world will end.  Tremblay did keep me reading, but the prose is a little overgrown with detailed descriptions of gestures and the air inside the cabin and the way blood appears, etc.

The Wrecking Crew by Kent Hartman

 

Randy: The Full and Complete Unedited Biography and Memoir of the Amazing Life and Times of Randy S. by Mike Sacks

 

If I read a stupid book, does that make me stupid too?

Angels & Demons by Dan Brown

 

Ridiculously bald melodramatic writing style covers a hyperactive conspiracy plot over the course of about 24 hours. Still, the wealth of historical detail is pleasing.  Brown would make a great tour guide of Vatican City and Rome.

Science itself created half the problems it was trying to solve.

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moorer

 

The car sped forward. Glued to the windshield, in the form of the rearview mirror, was a little landscape painting of the very recent past. [122]

But nothing was Lily's home, though he did not say this. It was not her fault that her sudden hectic love was always like that- a flash mob that emerged from nowhere, a dance that twisted out of anonymous movement, then receded back into the crowd, which was sometimes shouting, "The whole world is watching" and sometimes "Free Barabbas." [135]

Damnably unsatisfactory novel. Moore's sentences, as regularly described, are jewel-like: hilarious and bracing and perceptive. I could read them infinitely. But the stories - if I can call them that - go nowhere: a present tense narrative about a trouble relationship between a man and his suicidal female partner, who seems to die early but won't go away (or shut up), and a historical narrative conveyed in a couple of letters from a woman to her (dead?) sister, in the aftermath of the civil war. The man in the present tense seems to find a copy of the Civil War correspondence, but that's it for resonance, as far as I could tell. And the present tense tale of the man driving his (dead?) wife across the country in a car also falls flat. Or maybe I'm just bitchy. 

Anyway, endless quotable sentences. I'd pull some out and type them up here, but there are a dozen on every page. Lorrie Moore is something else.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

 

Another understated, gorgeous story. A coal vendor rescues a girl from a convent, after reviewing, in almost total silence, the quality of his own life and feeling urgency about what was left to do.

A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry

 

The further adventures of the native American adopted daughter of the two gay civil war soldiers from DAYS WITHOUT END. A little wandering in the prose but that is how Barry does it and if you stick around he always delivers.

How was I so lucky to have those good-as-woman men? Only a woman knows how to live I believe because a man is too hasty, too half-cocked, mostly. That half-cocked gun hurts at random. [48]

about drinking whiskey: Two glasses heaven, three glasses hell. [62]

A wagon of thought that drove itself on and on and myself only the hapless rider...The stream reaches another stream and they mingle their waters as natural as you like, that was what it seemed. [175-175]

Paradais by Fernanda Melchor

 

Good, compact, harrowing story of two young men so beliquored and frustrated sexually and financially that they embark on a murderous spree among the upper class in Mexico.

Collected Works of Charles Portis

 

Finally getting to him, on my mind for years, recently re-watched the TRUE GRIT remake, so, yeah, here we go.

NORWOOD great, reminded me of Flannery O'Connor and Nelson Algren, little Mark Twain maybe.

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

 

Revisiting this after 27 years. Still pretty great. The first-person voice now seems a little tedious. I remember well how shocking and powerful I found it in 1996.

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

 

If Maryland ain't pretty country God's a girl. [151]

Amazing Barry streak continues. This is in America, mid 19th century, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, points west toward Montana. 

Two gay soldiers raise a Native American girl they orphaned. One cross dresses for their years in vaudevill.

They fight in the Indian Wars and in the Civil War. They farm and travel. Everything about Barry's prose style continues to delight, confound, and elude me - how does he do it? Echoes of Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy and maybe Melville. Can be arduous for short periods, but his characters and journey-plot always come back to save one.

Antarctica by Claire Keegan

 

The Temporary Gentleman by Sebastian Barry

 

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

 

The 1974 busing crisis in Boston is the backdrop for racial tensions in Southie. Familiar Lehane territory - and satisfying as usual. The working-class mother on mission of vengeance against the Irish mob and everything she grew up in is marvelous.

A Girl's Story bu Annie Ernaux

This one is ringing more finely than the previous Ernaux books I have read. Don't know why: have I matured in my reading of her, or is this a better book? Familiar pattern of female obsession with the lover. But in this case it's a 17 year old camp counselor losing her viriginity to a callous older guy (21? 24?).

But what is the point of writing if not to unearth things, or even just one thing that cannot be reduced to any kind of psychological or sociological explanation and is not the result of a preconceived idea or demonstration but a narrative: something that emerges from the creases when a story is unfolded, and can help us understand--endure--events that occur and the things that we do? [98]

I am not a culture hound, the only thing that matters to me is to seize life and time, understand, and take pleasure. [149]

It is the absence of meaning in what one lives, at the moment one lives it, which multiplies the possibility of wring...

Explore the gulf between the stupefying reality of things that happen, at the moment they happen, and, years later, the strange unreality in which the things that happened are enveloped. [final page]

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

Strange, disorienting, but still beautiful. A Dublin detective in his late 60s retires to a seaside castle flat to dwell on his past, as his mind goes but his will for redemption grows stronger.

Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux

 

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

 

Another powerhouse. Madness, murder, mayhem in the Irish 20th century. The tragic life of Roseanne Clear McNulty, daughter of a Presbyterian graveskeeper in Sligo, and her awful manhandling by Catholics, and others. Told from her viewpoint in the present time, turning 100 years old, in her flashbacks over the century, and in the voice of a concerned doctor in the present time who uncovers at least two versions of her sad story.

There are pits of grief obviously that only the grieving know. It is a voyage to the center of the earth, a huge heavy machine boring down into the crust of the earth. And a little man growing wild at the controls. Terrified, terrified, and no turning back. [165]

Morality has its own civil wars, with its own victims in their own time and place.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett

 

No One Left to Come Looking for You by Sam Lipsyte

 

Nice to read Lipsyte again. And I liked this novel, by the end. Was a little underwhelmed in first half though: prose about punk music almost always leaves me a little underwhelmed. Although Lipsyte is as surprising and wizardly as ever with his sentences. Echoes of Lester Bangs on meth.

I liked his cross-hatching of real-life music references with fictional music references, when they worked - but sometimes I didn't understand at all what style he was pointing toward.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power - Volume 1

 

On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry

 

Sebastian Barry was completely unknown to me before I read the recent New Yorker profile about him.

This is a gorgeous book. The prose reads like poetry in long stretches, almost impossible to quote. And the plot coils very, very quietly, waiting to strike.

Her sense of the delicious is maybe part of that effort, not to dwell on terrible things.

'Telling his beads, o'er and o'er. [130]

How is it that the human body is designed sometimes to melt into a white lineny bed, in the city of New York, and couples on linen beds in all the cities of the world, trying to climb into each other's skins? That's one queer, wonderful creature. [138]

'The past is a crying child, that's for sure,' said Joe, 'but it will all be made up to him in the coming times. Yes, sir.' [141]

But for those moments he had brought me back to the pact we make with life. That we will see through and live it according to the length of time bestowed on us. The gift of life, oftentimes so difficult to accept, the horse whose teeth we are so often inclined to inspect. [171]

'I want you to tell Bill that his father loves him dearly, will you do that?'

'Of course I will.'
I was thinking, it's hard for a child to understand a love like that. He would rather go fishing with his father than hear such a declaration. But I knew Ed existed in a parsimonious place. He had only the farthings and pence of love to give. [229]

Foster by Claire Keegan

 

A stunning story. Haven't seen the film but plan. Just amazing, the compression of the story and characters.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

 

Interesting, compelling read. About video/computer games which is not my wheelhouse. But the central drama about the two childhood friends who become influential game designers together, and apart, is interestingly done.

The Water Cure by Percival Everett

 

Strange and difficult reading. A man apparently seeks revenge on his young daughter's killer by kidnapping an torturing. First, though, Everett tortures us with linguistic grammaritications and philosophical blowing.

Half an Inch of Water by Percival Everett

 

Hope: A Tragedy

 

Put it down halfway through. Didn't care. Endless offense delivered humorously.

The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

 

Astonishing novel about the Dominican Republic by Peruvian Llosa. Nothing less than a thirty year chronicle of the Trujillo dictatorship, it employs three points of view: in the present time, the return of daughter of Trujillo's minister after 30 years in the U.S, as she revisits the trauma of her 14th and final year in DR; the four assasins waiting in a car to murder Trujillo in May of 1961l; and a roaming point of view that encompasses Trujillo and many of his most prominent ministers.

The flashback technique is incredible. Great book. All news to me.

Anyone Who Had a Heart by Burt Bacharach with Robert Greenfield

 

Assumption by Percival Everett

 Liked it but got lost at the end. Sort of Jim Thompson crossed with Thomas McGuane. Down on his luck deputy sheriff in New Mexico grows increasingly despondent and bitter while investigating seemingly unrelated murders.

Continental Drift by Russell Banks

 

Mesmerizingly beautiful. How the fates of a New Hampshire oil furnace repairman and a distressed Haitian new mother intertwine over the course of years. Tectonically growing closer to each other. I'm in awe of Banks. Reminds me of Updike a little, but with more heart.

The Haitian religious ceremonies rendered are completely unhinged and terrifying. Mostly in the Haitian Creole patois, they involved demonic possession, animal sacrifice, rhythmic music and dance, but Banks provides them with an unnerving logic and character relevance.

He doesn't know if he has been a good man or merely a stupid or scared man. Most people, like Bob, unchurched since childhood, now and then reach that point of not knowing... [60]

... the three children and mother become one unit, and he became a solitary, outriding, secondary unit, like a comet accidentally passing through their solar system and moving on into deep space alone. [273]

So Much Blue by Percival Everett

 

My obsession continues. Another good, took awhile to get going for me, but in the end, I really liked how three different time settings/plots came together. A painter takes a much younger lover in Paris, remembers a long-ago trauma in El Salvador, and somehow heals his marriage.

Telephone by Percival Everett

My Percival Everett journey continues. Another twist in the road: TELEPHONE is an unflinching story of a man losing his 10 year old daughter to a deadly medical condition that slowly over a couple of months destroys her mind.

Not for the faint of heart.

At the same time, the father receives mysterious messages of distress in shirts he orders online, and takes off to New Mexico to attempt a rescue.

Yikes.

Very different in feel from THE TREES and DR. NO, but Everett's intelligence and obsession with, well, everything, shine through.

Mother for Dinner by Shalom Auslander

Very funny, very black, very disturbing satiric novel about the race of "Cannibal-Americans," or "Can-Ams," the death of a Can-Am matriarch, and the struggles of her thirteen children to properly dispose of her remains.

See title.

Sending up the immigrant experience in America, tribal religions, and the family, it's hilarious and upsetting.

Foregone by Russell Banks

 Terrific, moving, mysterious. An American film-maker consents to a documentary ostensibly about his career in Canada making films after dodging the Vietnam War draft and escaping north. Instead, he spends several hours relating, sometimes out loud, and sometimes internally, the mixed up pieces of his past and his emotional reckoning of how and why he had lived.

But it was her memoir, not theirs, her memories, not theirs. And if all her memories were self-serving rationalizations of behavior that, seen in another's light, 

would seem stupid, narcissistic or superficial, in her own view her memories were redemptive. They revealed the reasons for her life of pain and suffering and confusion. They made sense of an otherwise incomprehensible, meaningless life and, in her own eyes, redeemed it.

Is that why Fife is trying to do? Tell his autobiography as he remembers it? Yes, he says, that is what he's trying to do today and tomorrow and for however long he is trying to tell it. [136]

Korsakoff syndrome: confabulation is a symptom, fairly common with advanced alcoholism. [238]