Pascali's Island by Barry Unsworth

Corruption, paranoia in a crumbling corner of the Ottoman Empire.

My room, scene of my labors over the years, scene of triumphs of a higher order than that of mere physical superbia, yet seemed cramped and mean to me, the hold at the end of my burrowing life. I looked at my miserable paraphernalia of pleasure, books, hookah, coffee cup and bowl; at my shabby clothes and unkempt person, still sour from sleep. A kind of rebellious misery rose in me. Why should I sit here, hatching other people's motives and purposes?

"How Annandale Went Out " by E. A. Robinson

"They called it Annandale--and I was there
To flourish, to find words, and to attend:
Liar, physician, hypocrite, and friend,
I watched him; and the sight was not so fair
As one or two that I have seen elsewhere:
An apparatus not for me to mend--
A wreck, with hell between him and the end,
Remained of Annandale; and I was there.

"I knew the ruin as I knew the man;
So put the two together, if you can,
Remembering the worst you know of me.
Now view yourself as I was, on the spot--
With a slight kind of engine. Do you see?
Like this. . . You wouldn't hang me? I thought not."

The Cut by George Pelecanos

Home-town hero George Pelecanos adds another impeccable crime novel to his collection. More DC than just about anybody, Pelecanos writes about DC neighborhodd with granular, unmistakable precision, particularly N.E. and the Petworth/Georgia Avenue corridor. By rendering such a relatively limited scope to his novel's setting, he works a handful of well-drawn characters deeply into the landscape: they have always been there, and they always will remain, they were almost all born there, and die there (we see more than a couple do so in front of our eyes).

His hero, Lucas Spero, the adopted son of a Greek-American couple, has returned from active duty in Iraq and now works as a "finder" for a local attorney: he finds people, he finds money, he finds stuff. He also finds "the right way": guided by his beloved, deceased father's ghost, Spero struggles to keep promises, punish bad guys, and assist the less fortunate. Pelecanos' sense of moral ourage is a wonder to examine.

Maybe Speros goes down a little too easy with the ladies, maybe the lady characters exist to be attracted to him and flirt with him. But that's a small bother.

(His musical references are also stellar: Drive By Truckers, Black Uhuru, The Hold Steady, just to name a few.)

The Parking Lot Movie

Great movie. A bunch of disgruntled grad students, skate-boarders and malcontents administ The Corner Lot in Charlottesville, Virginia. A marxist critique of the American service economy, as well as a juvenile attack on the fraternity system. Essential.

February 22 2012

A Sketch of the Great Dejection
by Thom Gunn

Having read the promise of the hedgerow
the body set out anew on its adventures.
At length it came to a place of poverty,
of inner and outer famine,
where all movement had stopped
except for that of the wind, which was continual
and came from elsewhere, from the sea,
moving across unplanted fields and between headstones
in the little churchyard dogged with nettles
where no one came between Sundays, and few then.
The wind was like a punishment to the face and hands.
These were marshes of privation:
the mud of the ditches oozed scummy water,
the grey reeds were arrested in growth,
the sun did not show, even as a blur,
and the uneven lands were without definition
as I was without potent words,
inert.
I sat upon a disintegrating gravestone.
How can I continue, I asked?
I longed to whet my senses, but upon what?
On mud? It was a desert of raw mud.
I was tempted by fantasies of the past,
but my body rejected them, for only in the present
could it pursue the promise,
keeping open to its fulfilment.
I would not, either, sink into the mud,
warming it with the warmth I brought to it,
as in a sty of sloth.
My body insisted on restlessness
having been promised love,
as my mind insisted on words
having been promised the imagination.
So I remained alert, confused and uncomforted.
I fared on and, though the landscape did not change,
it came to seem after a while like a place of recuperation.

Life Times by Nadine Gordimer

Again and again she seems to effortlessly cross the imaginative line between a patronizing liberal sympathy and a truly creative and understanding empathy with the victims of apartheid in South Africa.
"The Soft Voice of the Serpent," the only non-racially-centered story so far, a gentle, tragic portrayal of a young man in a wheelchair feeling his limits.
"The Amateurs," about a white theatre troupe going into the camps to perform Oscar Wilde, not realizing until too late just how vast the imaginative distance is between themselves and their audience.
"Six Feet of the Country" about the struggle of a black family to get back the dead body of their child, an illegal immigrant, in order that they can bury him appropriately.
"Face from Atlantis"
"Which New Era Would That Be?" about a
"The Smell of Death and Flowers." That was one of the things she held against the missionaries: how they stressed Christ's submission to humiliation by the white man.
"Not for Publication"
"Through time and Distance"
"A Chip of Glass Ruby," about a widowed Hindu mother of five and adoptive mother of four more, who has married a Hindu widower, and she gets arrested for her work organizing and participating in anti-apartheid activies for the black population.
"Some Monday For Sure." It reads like a Frank O'Connor story about the IRA. A young man becomes involved with the anti-apartheid forces through his sister's husband, who drives a "dynamite truck" for a construction. He participates in an armed robbery of the truck, and escapes with his sister and brother in law to Rhodesia, where they are forced to live for years. Odd long second half, after the robbery, where the husband has returned to South Africa, and the sister and her younger brother remain in exile, the boy hopeful and optimistic that he will return to freedom-fighting, but his sister despondent about the loss of her previous life.

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

To End all Wars by Adam Hochschild

Incredible documentation of the intersection of the war industry and peace forces mostly in Great Britain during the run up to World War I and throughout that horrendously destructive conflict.

The execution of several members of the Bantam Battalions, composed of men who were above 5 feet tall but less than 5 foot three inches tall, and so had missed the height minimum for the first round of conscription.

The proximity of the German and Allied lines during the first 18 months of the war, and how the opposing forces would declare impromptu cease-fires and socialize.

The Color of Night by Madison Smartt Bell

Bell's Haitian novels are tremendous documents, exciting and soulful and desperate and dark. This slight novel, though, was disappointing to me. It seems to want to be his Don Delillo move, or even TC Boyle, but it had no power. The deranged former hippy chick obsessed with the twin towers falling, journeying back to her abusive childhood where she was raped by her brother from when she was 11 to 14, to her years as a drifter in the 1960s in Airzona and points west, and the Haight and LA, a sometimes hooker and then member of cult not unlike Charles Manson's storied Family: it sound melodramatic and pitch-friendly, like Bell thought it would be a movie on a page. But it's not. It stays on the page.

King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher

A novel about privacy, society, obsession and civility. A young girl in a small town in western England is abducted. First everyone is suspected, and then, as the media horde loses interest, Hensher's lens moves in on the private lives of the town's citizen. Aint nobody squeaky clean

I enjoyed Hensher's The Northern Clemency but that did not prepare me for this. The swerve from a creepy-Church-of-Dead-Girls-suspense novel to full boxer-bunching gay orgies was unnerving. But I stuck with it!

A Village Life by Louise Gluck and Chronic by D.A. Powell

First Snow
by Louise Gluck

Like a child, the earth's going to sleep,
or so the story goes.

But I'm not tired, it says.
And the mother says, You may not be tired but I'm tired-

You can see it in her face, everyone can.
So the snow has to fall, sleep has to come.
Because the mother's sick to death of her life
and needs silence.

This poem (for Gluck's very quiet, extraordinarily graceful volume of poems) had resonance for me. I've been struggling for some time over a poem for my very sick mother:

The Subjunctive Blues

by Sean Enright

If should could be finale of would…

We hiked on that sudden warming February day:
girls shrieking in the woods suddenly full of people,
dog splashdowns into the icy low creek,
plastic trash caught in fallen branches,
golden pools of thick scum-bubbles,
everything still dead, still completely gone, dull brown.

Ame spotted the severed foreleg of a deer
draped across a low branch,
we all circled back to look,
the white bone at the haunch showing,
the hoof and lower leg still covered with fur,
and I kept looking for other remnants as we walked back;

winter day that was the last moment of that death
before life was to begin again,
and I thought of the opposite,
the last moment of life, and you were in my mind
as you always have been this past year
who would never walk these woods again,
will essentially never walk anywhere again,

except little steps you watch from above
without any connection to your feet
this is ridiculous 1 2 3 4
and we put it to music take a little one step
two step three step come a little closer please
learning forward until something primitive in your mind
catches and your hips startle, knees quiver

and feet inch forward
always with your forehead down, searching for those steps
that got away, giving you an attitude of shame,
so cowed by your ordeal, don’t want to be seen,
and still it has not broken you; little pitfalls

of snowdrops seen here and there
through the transparent woods,
their faint sick antiseptic smell, but still,
born again, never again to die, until the next time,
free to live late winter long
like a crown on a corpse.

My poem first came after the hike with my family, and recalling this poem by Wordsworth:

To A Snowdrop
by William Wordsworth

LONE Flower, hemmed in with snows and white as they
But hardier far, once more I see thee bend
Thy forehead, as if fearful to offend,
Like an unbidden guest. Though day by day,
Storms, sallying from the mountain-tops, waylay
The rising sun, and on the plains descend;
Yet art thou welcome, welcome as a friend
Whose zeal outruns his promise! Blue-eyed May
Shall soon behold this border thickly set
With bright jonquils, their odours lavishing
On the soft west-wind and his frolic peers;
Nor will I then thy modest grace forget,
Chaste Snowdrop, venturous harbinger of Spring,
And pensive monitor of fleeting years!

Chronic, poems by D. A. Powell, is more inscrutable to me, but I'm drawn to the poems, and titles, particularly the title "meditating upon the meaning of the line 'clams on the halfshell and rollerskates' in the song good times by chic."

A Kind of Loving by Stan Barstow

Beautiful 1960 British novel, about a working class young man who falls in love and suffers the usual dire consequences. There is a truthfulness and a familiarity about Barstow's narrator voice (the young man's voice) that is refreshing and seems unusual for that particular moment in pre-sexual-revolution Britain.

Astounding use of northern England slang, too, dozens of words and phrases I'd never seen before, like "take a butcher's" (to look at).

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

A great title, but the book itself never really moved me.

This is Not Your City: Stories by Caitlin Horrocks

Very beautiful stories. The first one a strange, second-person singular narration. The second about a rural girl caring for her 40ish mother crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, and the lonely girl befriends a philosophical Amish young woman: story is in the form of a make-up term paper to earn her high school equivalency.

Orientation and Other Stories by Daniel Orozco

We the Animals by Justin Torres

Quarantine by Jim Crace

Inscrutable. Although I tried to scroot it.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Too scrutable. I remember 1982 and English majors and college, if only through my cave paintings from the time. These undergraduates are wholly too adult and perfectly-formed neurotics to be realistic.

Pym by Mat Johnson

Tres bizarre. Supposed I should have read up on the original Poe story before I dove into this. Didn't. Seemed like a whacked adventure story (Cool Runnings?) crossed with a cultural critique a la John Henry Days.

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

A little bloodless so far. I loved Tomalin's Mrs. Jordan's Profession, but this seems much more subdued.

Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta

I threw it across the room halfway through. Probably better than that, but I have no patience for novels about rock music. This one seems particularly false to it.

Turn of Mind by Alice LePlante

The initial conceit of the novel -- that a distinguished, brilliant orthopedic surgeon specializing in hand surgery now suffers from Alzheimers and assorted dementia and can no longer remember clearly whether or not she did or did not kill her best friend (who was found with four fingers severed from her hand) who lives three houses down -- is great. But it suffers in execution, as credulity is strained in accepting an effecting, detailed first-person narration spanning 60 years by someone with memory problems. However, the whodunit plot begins to fade in importance as the narrator's world becomes increasingly facetted and simultaneously dim. As a portrait of a mind giving its own eulogy, the book is alive and ferocious.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

A vision of an apocalyptic plague-infested New York City, as narrated by Whitehead's extremely intelligent narrative voice, as peopled by "Mark Spitz," a mediocre man try to live in a world with no future. Employed as a civilian "sweeper" to rid lower Manhattan of plague-infected humans-turned-cannibal, Spit mediates on his own very average pre-plague existence and longs for a return to its normalcy. Or does he? He also seems to hate his past, a little: as a young man, he was waiting for the future to be better. Spooky, mesmerizing, stunning book. First one of his books I've finished.

Extrememly Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

Couldn't get traction, even after 100 pages. Liked the pages with one word or one sentence, or pictures. They went by fast.

A Confederacy of Dunces

I used a recent trip to New Orleans as occasion to re-read one of my favorite books of all time, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, written in the late 1960s and then abandoned after a large New York publishing house sat on the manuscript after several revisions, and Toole then committed suicide in 1969. His mother lugged the manuscript to Walker Percy at Loyola University in New Orleans, who had published quickly after reading it, and the novel won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

A formative book for me, having read it (in all its surrounding mystique and legend and romance) shortly after it was published. I'd never re-read it, though: it was one of those books that affected me so strongly I shrugged off any impulse to try to re-create that first wondrous reading.

Since then, a cottage industry has developed around the book, its author, its origins. There is a memoir (Ken and Thelma by Joel Fletcher), a biography (Ignatius Rising by Rene Nevils), a theatrical piece, statues in New Orleans, blogs dedicated to the New Orleans streets and alleys and buildings where the book takes place, even a movie made of Neon Bible, a slim novel written by Toole as a teenager. Must search out of all of it.

For re-reading the book, mostly in New Orleans, was a delight. It is a satire of the best sort -- no one escapes the sword. Swiftian in its outrage, Rabeleisian in its low comedy, Confederacy sends up communism, urban development, the Renaissance, the 20th century, poor Southern whites, poor Southern Black, homosexuals, college campuses. There is an amazing sub-plot where Ignatius enlists the help of a gay man from the French Quarter, hoping to infiltrate the US military (and thereafter, armed forces around the world) with homosexuals, and have them take over and spend all the time and effort currently spend on war, on celebrations and fashion. The Peace Movement! Sort of an inversion of Dont Ask Don't Tell.

In some ways too, the book is almost tragic, as Ignatius' mother plots to have him committed to a mental institution at the end of the story, only to have Ignatius barely escape when his old college girlfriend Myrna Minkoff (herself a genius satirical caricature of feminism, free love, radical politics, and Jewishness) shows up and spirits him away in her car back to New York City.

There is Jones, the black janitor/doorman at the Night of Joy bar in the French Quarter. He is the closest thing to a hero in the novel.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

A terribly sad book about stoicism and impossible romance. Very different this time around, reading it: a difference of over 30 years, and my empathies with the book seemed to have enjoyed polar reversals. Now it does matter to me, Jake's great unnamed malady that sidelines him in his life.. Jake's stoicism and refusal to dwell on his own feelings is striking. Brett seems clownish and a little sluttish.

"It's an honest face. It's a face any woman would be safe with."
"She'd never seen it."
"She should have. All women should see it. It's a face that ought to be thrown on every screen in the country. Every woman ought to be given a copy of this face as she leaves the altar. Mothers should tell their daughters about this face. My son" - he pointed the razor at me-"go west with this face and grow up with the country."
He ducked down to the bowl, rinsed his face with cold water, put on some alcohol, and then looked himself carefully in the glass, pulling down his long upper lip.
"My God!" he said, "isn't it an awful face?"

Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.

It was like certain dinners I remember from the way. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.

Then Everything Changed by Jeff Greenfield

Compelling "alternate history" of the second half of the 20th Century. What is JFK had been assassinated in December of 1960 (there was a planned attempt) rather than November 1963? What if RFK had NOT been assassinated. What if Gary Hart had been elected President in 1980?

BONUS INTERESTING THING: My father, Charles "Chuck" Enright is used as a character twice in the White House Situation Room scenes in the JFK section!

Walking to Hollywood by Will Self

Wondrous to me at first, as I had paid no attention to it when it came into, and so read it as fiction. Which it is apparently not. Then wondrously incomprehensible. And then just incomprehensible. Had read the New Yorker interview when Will Self had talked about walking from Kennedy Airpot into Manhattan. Having recently begun taking hour-long walks in the afternoon, it's a subject of interest to me. But Self's prose is so playful and erudite and self-reflecting that I threw down the book in disgust not even halfway through.

Last Orders by Graham Swift

Marvelous Pinter-esque, multiple-POV novel from the author of Waterland.

Jesus, My Father, The CIA, and Me by Ian Morgan Cron

Was so looking forward to this. Couldn't get through fifteen pages. Weak, sappy, cliched prose.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Andromeda Strain meets The Passage meets Lord of the Flies meets Heart of Darkness meets Apocalypse Now. And not in a particularly interesting way.

Skylark by Dezso Kosztolanyi

The Third Reich by Robert Bolano

An 1989 manuscript by Robert Bolano, discovered after his death, and scheduled for release in December 2011. (The Paris Review serially published the novel beginning early in 2011.) Sort of a Borges-meets-Raymond Chandler story set on the Costa Brava in Spain. Noted war-game champion Udo Berger vacations with his girlfriend Ingeborg at a small beachside resort where he spend childhood summers. They meet another couple, Charly and Hanna, and several locals: the Wolf, the Lamb, and most crucially, El Quemado (in Spanish, "burned" or "burned out" or simply "tanned"), a burn victim who runs a pedal-boat service on the beach.

There is much drunkenness, idleness and nighttime clubbing. Berger spends much of his time in the hotel room, staring at his favorite war-game, The Third Reich, which he is supposed to be writing an article on for a big industry publication. He begins pursuing Elsa, the owner of the hotel, a woman he remembers from his childhood, who is later revealed to be caring for her terminally-ill husband in another room in the hotel.

Charly, a bit of a wild man, disappears out at sea while wind-surfing. Berger begins an intense session of The Third Reich with El Quemado, a pathetic figure with severe burn scars, a pedal-boat vendor who lives beneath the "fortress" of pedal-boats he builds each night when the day's work is done. Ingeborg and Hanna return to Stuggart, but Berger stays on, obsessed with his war-game, waiting for Charly's body to be found, and half-enmeshed in a never-consummated romance with Elsa.

It's a Borgesian novel in that it circles obsessively from Berger's single point of view: one thinks variously that Berger is paranoid, paranormal, crippled by nostalgia and trapped by childhood, a violent man, a Nazi-glorifier, in that the story about a game soon becomes actually playing the game and ends up possibly not a game at all, as Berger slowly loses position and strength in the game he is playing with El Quemado (Berger is Germany, El Quemado is the Allies) and ends up on the verge of losing and worrying that El Quemado will demands Berger's own life as a reward. Berger has long, vivid dreams that blur into his waking: was it all imagined, or was some of it real?

It's Chandler in its seedy coastal town mystery of Who Killed Charly? and Where's the Body? Everyone is suspected, nothing is proved.

It's certainly a moody little book: dark and creepy. Berger is not the most reliable narrator, one wonders if he is up to something besides his crippling obsessions and passiveness. The hotel and the local beaches and bars are creepy, filled with lively, chattering passionate drifters. Certainly Bolano is discovering some of the motifs and styles he will later use to much stronger effect.

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

>
Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies—my only talent—smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian fields like a mistral.

For another thing, it is not open to me even to be edifying, since the time is later than his, much too late to edify or do much of anything except plant a foot in the right place as the opportunity presents itself -- if indeed asskicking is properly distinquished from edification.

God on the Rocks by Jane Gardham

Not her best, but still pretty good. The way exposition is handled -- by delay, third-peson reporting, and surprise -- is always deft.

Compass Rose by John Casey

Interesting "sequel" to Spartina.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own by Paul Elie

So far the Thomas Merton material is the most interesting to me.

As a child, Flannery O'Connor wrote books which she saw "as too old for children and too young for grown-ups."

In 1949, when gravediggers in Queens went on strike for higher wages, Cardinal Spellman "ordered seminarians to dig the graves in their stead and refused to negotiate, calling the workers Communists in the press."

O'Connor on Catholic readers: "You can't shut them up before a thing comes out but you can look forward to a long mortified silence afterwards."

Merton: "There is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question."

What, then, was the Catholic Worker? "We are a group of people living together under one roof," she [Day] declared.

Whereas poverty in the Depression had brought people together in a great convergence of need and will, poverty in postwar America divided them from one another.

WP on JFK: The reason he was a great man was that his derisiveness kept pace with his brilliance and his beauty and his love of country. He is the only public man I have ever believed. This is because no man now is believable unless he is derisive.

WP on writer's block: "I am in low estate," Percy told Foote... "But it won't go, I am hung up, alas oh hopelessly hung up, sitting in front of my paper at 9:05 AM and growing sleepier by the minute. Fresh out of malice, piss, the love of God, hatred of things as they are, or whatever it takes, which I don't have."

Merton: "He answers again with his own experience, which is that God is a being to be known, not a problem to be solved, "and we who live the contemplative life have learned by experience that one cannot know God as long as one seeks to solve 'the problem of God.' To seek to solve the problem of God is to seek to see one's own eyes."

The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor

You can't get any poorer than dead.

Interesting as her second, and last novel. But not nearly as interesting as Wise Blood, her first, or the mature stories. The characters are familiar: Francis Marion Tarwater, the orphan raised in the woods by his grandfather, Francis's city-bred uncle Rayber and his brain-damaged son. Orphan makes for city after grandfather drops dead, orphan is torn between uncle's atheism and his grandfather's rabid evangelism, is tormented by a "shadow self" taunting him that he must go and finish his grandfather's work, by baptizing his cousin.

O'Connor's familiar metaphors and allegories are extended, repeated and embellished almost to the point of exhaustion. The plot is simple and not exciting. Worst of all, the characters in almost all instances lack the black comic power of her earlier creations.

You Are Not A Stranger Here by Adam Haslett

Guests of the Nation by Frank O'Connor

In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ojdaatje

Not so much. Characters go from being speechless backwoods Canadians to heavy-breathing poetic wunderkinds in the space of a chapter.

Howard's End by E. M. Forster

Well, it is odd and sad that our minds should be such seed-beds, and we without power to choose the seed. But man is an odd, sad creature as yet, intent on pilfering the earth, and heedless of the growths within himself. He cannot be bored about psychology. he leaves it to the specialist, which is as if she should leave his dinner to be eaten by a steam-engine. He cannot be bothered to digest his own soul.

Still a beautiful, favorite novel, but it seemed a bit doughy this time around, thick with social commentary, narrator asides and the anthropomorphisms of the endless English countryside. Still the plot in the last quarter of the book unwinds with a relentless psychological urgency, as one of the Schlegels' favorite maxims becomes real: Places are more important than people.

"Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever," she [Margaret] said. "This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement, because it will rest on the earth. All the signs are against it now, but I can't help hoping, and very early in the morning in the garden I feel that our house is the future as well as the past."

Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje

I strugged with this novel. The fractured narrative of The English Patient here seems artificial, the plot-line unlikely.

I did like the description of the Ceylonese "eye-painter" whom the forensic team enlists to help them identify their Sailor corpse. And I liked the Van Morrison shout out. But that hardly seems enough.

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

Emily Alone, Stewart O'Nan

Washington Rules by Andrew Bacevich

The House of Tomorrow

Eh.