A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee

Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis

THE MOTHERS

for and after Gwendolyn Brooks
for and after the Kitchenette Building

We meet – sometimes – between the dry hours,
Between clefts in the involuntary plan,
Refusing to think of rent or food – how
Civic the slick to satisfied from man.

And democratic. A Lucky Strike each, we
Sponge each other off, while what’s grayed
In and gray slinks ashamed down the drain.
No need to articulate great restraint,

No need to see each other’s mouth lip
The obvious. Giddy. Fingers garnished
With fumes of onions and garlic, I slip
Back into my shift then watch her hands – wordless –

Reattach her stockings to the martyred
Rubber moons wavering at her garter.

Robin Coste Lewis

Vintage Stuff by Tom Sharpe

so-so.  first half strong, second half falters. as the line goes from Bad Santa, "They can't all be winners, kid."

The Great Pursuit by Thom Sharpe

Another winner, this time squarely in the sights is the world of authorship, publishing -- and penmanship. All farce-y and crazy until the last 30 pages, when it takes on a new serious weight of its own and Sharpe pulls some Borges-ian tricks out.  Mirrors, copies of copies, posthumous pre-quel diaries by dead men.  Has to be read to be believed. Profoundly funny.

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

Anger's my meat; I sup upon myself,
And so shall starve with feeding.

Groff writes terrific brainy evocative prose.  Seems incapable of less than a shining sentence.

The cabdriver, his nose besponged by pores, looked at her for a long while in the rearview mirror and asked her if she was all right.  When she didn't answer, he said soothingly, "You may cry here, cabbage.  Cry as much as you wish.  It is no hardship to watch a pretty woman cry."

Overwhelming, at times though, in how rich the outer and inner lives of her characters seem.  Mathilde, for one:  a super-sweet character:

She did mind something she never said out loud:  she'd wished her husband was better at what he chose to do.

"And she can fuck herself lingeringly with a white-hot pitchfork.  In her dark shit-star of an asshole," Mathilde said.

Porterhouse Blue by Tom Sharpe

Not his best, but still gets it done.  A send-up of English academics and the Cambridge scene.  Little topsy-turvey plot action.  Excellent early scene where graduate student fills two gross of condoms with gas from his dorm room meter and tries to stuff them up the chimney.

The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty

The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura

What was true was that reading and writing about how the greatest utopia men had ever had within their reach had been perverted, diving into the catacombs of a story that seemed more like divine punishment than the work of men drunk with power, eager for control, and with pretensions of historical transcendence, I had learned that true human grandeur lay in the practice of kindness without conditions, in the capacity of giving to those who had nothing, but not what we have left over but rather a part of what little we have -- giving until it hurts without practicing the deceitful philosophy of forcing others to accept our concepts of good and truth because (we believe) they're the only possible ones and because, besides, they should be grateful for what we give them, even when they didn't ask for it.

This massive, towering novel – ostensibly about the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940 by a disgruntled Spanish nationalist – is really about the festering and implosion of Soviet Communism over 50 years.

Three separate storylines cover the 50 years, back and forth, across three continents – a failed Cuban writer who meets a strange ailing man on the beach in Cuba in the late 1990s, the Spanish Communist, Ramon Cortazer, who mortally wounded Trotsky with an ice hatchet, and Trotsky himself, the intellectual original Politburo member who fell out with Stalin in 1925 and was exiled from Russia.

The style – a length, discursive, need I say dialectical style – can be bruising.  Apparently the translator took pains to make it sound like the original Cuban vernacular in which it was written, so dialogue in particular sometimes features some whacked-out syntax decisions.  Long, long compound and complex sentences.

To me it was an enormously educational book (assuming it’s factual) on the evolution of Soviet Communism, Trotsky’s role in digressing from Stalin’s party-line model (which argued for a Soviet-only communist system) and tacking back to Marx’s original model which called for an international worker’s revolution.

The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip by George Saunders (author) and Lane Smith (illustrator)

Odd little book by an author I like a lot (Saunders) and an illustrator I like too (The Stinky Cheese Man.)

Beautiful color illustrations,  text is a little baffling, in that Saunders way.  Not really enough room for him to make his usual dramatic satirical argument.  Suppose it's an allegory about climate change, or political interdependence.  Un clear.

But entertaining!

A Free State by Tom Piazza

Interesting premise and framing to this runaway slave narrative.  But I quickly lost interest in the pulse-less prose.

The Throwback by Tom Sharpe

Delicious violent British farce about a man from the fells who won't give up his property.  Has to be read to be believed.  And some great mock-ballads!

The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli

Interesting, funny at times, a text that unfolds at several levels, including a sort of reverse chronological revelation, a series of black and white photos, oblique quotations that open each section of the book, an author's note explaining her collaborative composition technique, and a translator's appendix that is a chronology of "real events" intertwined with a timeline of the main character of the novel's actions.

Interesting, but not rivetting.

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

[Signet Classic, 1995.  Photo is from original publication, cover illustration by a child, his editor's son? lover's son?]

I have reached the limits of endurance.  My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further.  As far as history goes I am dead.  If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back.  I have found God, but he is insufficient.  I am only spiritually dead.  Physically I am alive.  Morally I am free.  The world which I have departed is a menagerie.  The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws.  If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one:  I go forth to fatten myself.

Wowsa wowsa wowsa! what a book.  At infrequent times irritating and a slog, at more frequent other times a glorious prose poem.  The prose is first-rate throughout.  As a novel, it lacks a plot, and the characters tend to run together.  But the narrator's voice is unimpeachable, a modulated brilliant scream against existence that by its very beauty argues the opposite. It is much a time and place (Paris, 1932-1934) that I will ever get to know.  Published in France in 1934 (the year my mother was born) and only published in the US in 1961 (the year I was born), it appeared in bootleg versions around the world immediately and had a great effect.  It's not the 1940s Paris of Hemingway -- it's the weak-currency, shit-smeared version of Paris in the early 1930s.  And Paris is the star character, in all her glory and decay, her civilization and her madness.

I have taken my time and dogeared many pages and will take care to re-type them here, just for the beauty of the sentences.  And the quotes are long:  Miller was not an epithet-er, but a spinner of great paragraphs.

"'This fucking business is bad, Endree,' he says.  'But I will give you a word that will always make you lucky; you must say it every day, over and over, a million times you must say it.  It is the best word there is, Endree... say it now...OOMAHARUMOOMA!'
'OOMARABOO...'
'No Endree... like this... OOMAHARUMOOMA!'
'OOMAMABOOMBA...'
'No, Endree... like this...'
...but with that the murky light, the botchy print, the tattered cover, the jigjagged page, the fumbling fingers, the foxtrotting fleas, the lie-a-bed lice, the scum on his tongue, the drop in his eye, the lump in his throat, the drink in his pottle, the itch in his palm, the wail of his wind, the grief from his breath, the fog of his brainfag,, the tic of his conscience, the height of his rage, the gush of his fundament, the fire in his gorge, the tickle of his tail, the rats in his garret, the hullabaloo and the dust in his ears, since it took him a month to steal a march, he was hardset to memorize more than a word a week."

[on Van Norden]:  In a sense Van Norden is mad, of that I am convinced.  His one fear is to be left alone, and this fear is so deep and so persistent that even when he is on top of a woman, even when he has welded himself to her, he cannot escape the prison which he has created for himself.  

You can be brilliant sometimes, when you're drunk, but brilliance is out of place in the proofreading department... Just the same it's hard to talk to a man when you have nothing in common with him; you betray yourself, even if you use only monosyllabic words.  He knew god-damn well, the boss, that I didn't take the least bit of interest in his yarns; and yet, explain it how you will, it gave him pleasure to wean me away from my dreams and fill me full of dates and historical events.  It was his way of taking revenge, I suppose.  [p. 168-169]

One can live without friends, as one can live without love, or even without money, that supposed sine qua non. One can live in Paris – I discovered that! – on just grief and anguish. A bitter nourishment - perhaps the best there is for some people.  At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope.  I was only flirting with disaster.  I had time and sentiment enough to spare to peep into other people's lives, to dally with the dread stuff of romance which, however morbid it may be, when it is wrapped between the covers of a book, seems deliciously remote and anonymous. [p. 172]

So true is it that I am almost tempted to say: "Show me a man who over-elaborates and I will show you a great man!" What is called their "over-elaboration" is my meat: it is the sign of the struggle, it is struggle itself with all the fibers clinging to it, the very aura and ambiance of the discordant spirit. And when you show me a man who expresses himself perfectly I will not say that he is not great, but I will say that I am unattracted . . . . I miss the cloying qualities. When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears. [p. 232]

This is from the marvelous penultimate scene in the novel, where the narrator has gone to Dijon as an unpaid English tutor at a monastery school:  Everything frozen tight as scum, the mind locked and rimed with frost, and through the melancholy bales of chitter-wit the choking gargle of louse-eaten saints.  White I am and wrapped in wool, swaddled, fettered, ham-strung, but in this I have no part.  White to the bone, but with a cold alkali base, with saffron-tipped fingers.  White, aye, but no brother of learning, no Catholic heart.  White and ruthless, as the men before me who sailed out of the Elbe.  I look to the sea, to the sky, to what is unintelligible and distantly near. [page 255]

Going back in a flash over the women I've known, it's like a chain which I've forged out of my own misery.  Each one bound to the other .  A fear of living separate, of staying born.  The door of the womb always on the latch.  Dread and longing.  Deep in the blood the pull of Paradise.  The beyond.  Always the beyond.  It must have all started with the navel.  They cut the umbilical cord, give your a slap on the ass, and presto! you're out in the world, adrift, a ship without a rudder.  You look at the stars and then you look at your navel.  You grow eyes everywhere -- in the armpits, between your lips, in the roots of your hair, on the soles of your feet.  What is distant becomes near, what is near becomes distant.  Inner-outer, a constant flux, a shedding of skins,a turning inside out.  You drift around like that for years and years, until you find yourself in the dead center, and there you slowly rot, slowly crumble to pieces, get dispersed again.  Only your name remains. (260)

George Orwell on Henry Miller, from "Inside the Whale":  Miller is simply a hard-boiled person talking about life, an ordinary American businessman with intellectual courage and a gift for words.  It is perhaps significant that he looks exactly like everyone's idea of an American businessman.

Why Are We In Vietnam? by Norman Mailer

with the smell of the North on a September night, a fine tricky clean smell, like a fine nervce washed in alcohol and lightly powdered to get the rut of flesh off.

Copyright 1967.  Thomas Pynchon must have read this book, since Gravity's Rainbow seems to have gotten its central voice from the main character, D.J. Jethroe, the jiving, brilliant, clowning 18 year old consciousness that narrates this psychic hurricane of a novel.  Vietnam not mentioned until the very last sentences, it is instead about American male mad lust, violent charisma and energy, seething through DJ's mind as he sits at a farewell banquet, about to ship off to Vietnam (hot damn) and rememebering his hunting trip to Alaska two years old with his best friend and his father.

An experience of a book.  A little nauseasting, a lotta bewildering, but a reading that is lived.

Blott on the Landscape by Tom Sharpe

Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff

Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello

Just a tremendous book.  Took me forever to read because I kept turning over corners of pages to go seek out the live sets/jazz songs he was talking about on YouTube, but it's unspeakably lively, the whole thing.

What a songwriter, what a poet, what a musician, what a presence!  It's such a boon, such a gift, when a music-maker and performer as tremendous as Costello also has the extreme page-bent and deigns to write the story of his life in song!

Early on, in my mind, I nit-picked some of his choices of what to tell and how to tell it -- his family history, though relevant and well-written (as the whole book is), impede the pop-reader's progress a bit.

But this is a guy who has spend the last 40 years on stage singing all these songs, and grabbing the time when he's not performing TO WRITE THE MARVELOUS THINGS.

So it's really small of ME to question his narrative arc, as so much of his life was spent in the (for me) higher realm of making music (aka, speaking to the angels).

The book drove me back to some seriously deep cuts-- and I thought I was well-represented, as my 'iTunes" data shows I have 34 albums and 460 songs, totalling '1 day' of total listening, but ECs generous, brilliant writing has shown me I have but scratched the surface of his gift to the world.

Postscript:  book gets annoying in last 200 pages.  EC begins quoting his lyrics at greater length, as they become less well-known to me.  His inserted "short stories" are also baffling. His tendency to narrate his encounter with every celebrity becomes irritating.  To me his first three albums tower over the rest of the work, the first album and the next two with the Attractions.  Then he enters a "pop" period that goes on forever and ever, that features his voice and heavily arranged music.  In the late 80s he has another good string with Blood and Chocolate, and King of America.  Spike is half great.  Then from the 90s on he becomes bewildering -- classical music, jazz and near jazz, opera music.  His album, THE RIVER IN REVERSE, has great Toussaint songs but they suffer as sung by EC-- his voice, which he seems to have grown more enamored with over time, is not very great.  he seems to have stopped sounding like himself after King of America, and trying to assume a proto-liberal American voice that was not his own.  Just saying.

Submission by Michel Houellebecq

Interesting, if academic and insular, French novel about a France of the not-distant future that has been politically taken over by a Muslim majority, and changes its culture to reflect that: women cannot work and must be veiled, men can take multiple wives, conversion to Islam helps one in professional advancement.

The narrator, a 40-ish French academic whose speciality is Huymans, spends most of the book in intellectual musing and conversation with other scholars about the political history of  France, and its literature.

It's satiric, in that the narrator is a narrow, selfish, bourgeois most interested in lazing about and having sexual one-off liaisions, and finds himself gradually drawn into Muslim conversion himself, when he realizes it suit his rather self-centered, sexually rapacious lifestyle.

In the article for Oumma, Rediger raised the question whether Islam had been chosen for world domination.  In the end he answered yes.  He hardly bothered with Western societies, since to him they seemed to obviously doomed (liberal individualism triumphed as long as it undermined intermediate structures such as nations, corporations, castes, but when it attacked that ultimate social structure, the family, and thus the birthrate, it signed its own death warrant; Muslim dominance was a foregone conclusion.

Beatlebone by Kevin Barry

Disappointing.  I was expected the sort of completely organic fiction of City of Bohane, with its marvelous imagination of an Ireland in the dystopian future.

Instead, Beatlebone is a treacly "what if?" narrative, as in, what if Barry could get inside John Lennon's head during his broken-down years of 1975-1978?  So we get JL's vaunted scream therapy, we get JL's memories of his beloved mother and his hated father, we get JL's public voice, punny, funny and angry, all set down in a lyrical Irish landscape of the West Coast and western islands.  We got a bizarre late chapter in which Barry writes in first person of his teasing attempts to lace his notes with the real, and a journal of his own visit to JL's supposed Irish island.  We got a late short chapter of JL speaking/singing/rhapsodizing into a microphone of his own stream of consciousness for his great lost ficitional album Beatlebone that he dreamed up on the island.

But the whole thing, frankly, was an effort to read.  Disappointed!

It does make me want to listen to JL's Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey songs.  But it does not make me want to read more Barry, for now.

The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams