Last Friends by Jane Gardam

Last in the trilogy.  A joy to read.  Finally the story of Terry Veerling's childhood.  Fiscal-Smith's redemption as a sort of bonus.  Gardam's powerful method of exposition ---misdirection and understatement and ellipsis -- make it much more important to pay attention to WHO'S doing the telling and WHEN they're telling it than the act itself.

A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee

Tenth of December by George Saunders

Big fan of Saunders, but found this collection underwhelming.

Stoner by John Williams

She was, he knew-- and had known very early, he supposed -- one of those rare and always lovely humans whose moral nature was so delicate that it must be nourished and cared for that it might be fulfilled.  Alien to the world it had to live where it could not be at home; avid for tenderness and quiet, it had to feed upon indifference and callousness and noise.  It was a nature that, even in the strange and inimical place where it had to live, had not the savagery to fight off the brutal forces that opposed it and could withdraw to a quietness where it was forlorn and small and gently still.
Beautiful, tender quiet masterpiece about a poor farm boy who falls in love with literature and works his entire life in obscurity teaching at a Midwestern university.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

First read this 1995, and remember admiring it enormously -- but that's about the extent of my recollection.  After reading Joseph Anton, I decided to re-read MC (as a warmup to another attempt on The Satatnic Verses).

An overwhelming book.  This time around, it seemed clear to me that Rushie had The Tin Drum in mind as a model for the book -- a personal history of a precocious (and damaged child) whose birth, life and conflicts cunningly mirror his country's fortunes.

Joseph Anton by Salman Rushie

NW by Zadie Smith

Fobbit by David Abrams

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre

Recent poetry and poetry critical thinking: "Incident Light" by H.L. Hix (poems), "Lazy Bastardism" by Carmine Starnino (reviews), "On Poetry" by Glyn Maxwell (essays) and "Alien Vs. Predator" by Michael Robbins (poems)

Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzro

Seaching for Caleb by Anne Tyler

Slow starter but builds terrifically.

Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century

Trying to set aside envy and self-pity is difficult.

The Beats: A Graphic History

Got this from the library-- as a goof! -- and really enjoyed it.  There's something perfect in tracing the memory and legacy of the beats as a series of black and white cartoon panels.  Can't judge the accuracy of the history in contains, but the spirit seems right.

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

Headache inducing.

First extended Kindle experience. Did not enjoy it.

Coincidence?

Like Philip Roth without pleasure.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

A Sport and a Pasttime by James Salter

The celebrated 1968 "short" novel (187 pgs in my edition, although it feels much longer than that, and in a good way) is dense and lingering and smacked full of the senses.  At once a love story and a travelogue of "old France," it features the lovers Dean (a Yale dropout) and Anne-Marie (a French waitress), and a probing, poetic third person narrator who at onces describes their affair in sensual,emotional detail and also seems to be fantasizing into existence, in the same moment.

Begs re-reading, like any good poem, since I had that rushed feeling reading it (like poetry) that only halfway through was I truly begin to understand it narratively, and so need to go back and revisit both the heightened language, the emotional tone, and the plot of it all.

Singular.  Nabokov crossed with John O'Hare.  France seems an infinitely enchanted and endless place.

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut

Was so excited to read this, nostalgic, read Updike's more general appreciation of Vonnegut in his Hugging The Shore and thought I'd really missed something.

Missed nothing.  A terrifically slight book, I thought. Read it in about two hours, felt almost nothing.

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

A brilliant book about war.  I was slow to warm up to Kevin Power's prose, as it is knotty and cerebral, we follow the narrator's complicated thoughts of guilt, complicity,choice and mortality, as he struggles to find meaning in memory of his Iraq tour, the death of his friend Murph, the strength and ferocity of their leader, Sergeant Sterling.  But the last fifty pages or so really tightened for me and I was left astonished, saddened and uplifted at the same time.

The rest is history, they say.  Bullshit, I say.  It's imagination or it's nothing, and must be, because what is created in this world, or made, can be undone, unmade; the threads of a rope can be unwoven.  And if that rope is needed as a guideline for a ferry to a farther shore, then one must invent a way to weave it back, or there will be drownings in the streams that cross our paths.  I accept now, though in truth it took some time, that must must be its own permission.

This sort of consciousness, a voice searching for moral reason and ethical sense and metaphysical reassurance, is dense on every single page of the novel.  And at the same time, constantly present in his prose, beautiful, vivid, haunting concrete physical description of two worlds -- Iraq, and rural southern Virginia -- that never ever meet and yet somehow, in Power's vision, are fused, confused, refused, and unresolved.

Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru

Dear Life: Stories by Alice Munro

Her stories seems shorter and more obscure to me suddenly.

This is How You Lose Her: Stories by Junot Diaz

Not very moved by this collection of stories.  Following Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies might just be too much a task for a human.

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

The staggering achievement of Hilary Mantel's most recent novels about Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VIII of England can not be exaggerated.

The emotional sweep of Cromwell's inner life, the historical intricacy of the cultural and economic moment of the time period, and how that moment defines and limits hundreds of major and minor characters from the era:  all are utterly unique.  Certainly, Mantel cites sources and has talked about the importance of several texts -- the same core history that Shakespeare essentially mines for his history places -- in creating the narratives, but what she has done in imagining the time from Cromwell's point of view is a triumph of poetry and wit and dramatic tension.

The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin

Toibin is a beautiful devious prose writer:  his sentences begin simply and keep going, becoming more like whole paragraphs or even pages, multi-layered narration and impression and character organically blending.

City of Bohane by Kevin Barry

The Passage meets Clockwork Orange meets Ulysses meets Road Warrior meets The Gangs of New York.  Stunning book.  Poetry via fiction.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Big Ray by Michael Kimball

Flat, unaffected, declarative sentences and paragraphs, no chapters, structure partitioned by an asterisk centered alone a line. First person narration, son recalling his father's death and troubled relationships, starting from hearing about the father's death, working back in the past to his father's earliest days, and moving forward a bit to narrator and sister arranging for memorial service.

The narrative was interesting at most -- Big Ray, the father, grows into a 500-pound, abusive, damaged and damaging father.  His marriage crumbles, secrets of his physical, emotioned sexual abuse of his children and wife slowly leak out.

I was curiously unmoved.  Found the unaffected delivery wearying and deadening over time.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Foundation

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

The hardest part of quitting [cigarettes] would be the loss of narrative function...
 
I am torn about this novel, as it's a perfectly-pitched first person story of a young poet on a fellowship in Spain.  Lerner's sentences are flawless.  He creates a diamond-sharp interior consciousness for his narrator, Adam, who is at once intellectually brilliant and social moronic, intensely perceptive and cruel, profound, petty, loathesome and compelling.

If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.

Could be sub-titled, A Self-Conscious Portrait of the Self-Conscious Artist as a Self-Conscious Young Man.  In Spain.  On Hash.

The prose is mesmerizing, and is all about distance from experience and the problem of language, and the problem of translation, and about the insecurities and indecisions of an artist, and all of this adds to a fairly astonishingly large achievement of poetic voice and diction.

But is this a confessional masked as an aesthetic treatise?  Will we ever know?  Does it even matter?  When I read this:  I opened my eyes a little more widely than normal, opened them to a very specific point, raising my eyebrows and also allowing my mouth to curl up into the implication of a smile.  I held this look steady once it had obtained, a look that communicated incredulity cut with familiarity, a boredom arrested only by a vaguely anthropological interest in my surroundings, a look that contained a dose of contempt I hoped could be read as political...

and then see the author's picture on the right, I become confused and it agitates my reading.


cowardice of your convictions

...that nothing was more American, whatever that means, then fleeing the American...


But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where "poem" is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures;...

By Blood by Ellen Ullman

The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle

An unusual, ungainly novel about mental illness and human solidarity that gathers force in its powerful conclusion.

"the devil in silver" (which we learn, late in the game, and awkwardly via exposition from a minor, is a term for an chemical poisoning affliction silver miners suffered from in the late 19th century) here is a half-mythological, half-real resident of a mental hospital in Queens, NY which other patients have witnessed and been attacked by over many years.

Pepper, a 42 year old neer-do-well gets unjustly committed to the hospital for threatening his girlfiend's ex.  a strapping 6 foot three, large and powerful man, he is quickly unhinged and diminished by the hospital's heavy prescription of haldol and lithium.

other patients -- the elderly Dorry, the "mother" of the ward, the teenaged Loochie, Pepper's roommate Coffee, and a well-sketched cast of more minor character patients -- band with Pepper in a demented, helpless, hopeless and eventually successful attempt to subdue "the devil in silver."

Certainly there are elements to the "horror" genre to the story, since "the devil" is literarlly a demented isolated mental patient hiding in the ceiling tours, who looks alternately like a bison and a crazy old man, but Lavalle's book is just to multi-dimensional and culturally alert and busts right out the schlock horror conventions.  Lavalle revistits the desitution and failure of the American mental health treatment of the poor and forgotten -- his gentle, ribald and clever attention to a host of patients (and the pathetic staff of the hospita) make a much larger accomplishment here.

Despite some awkwardness in the prose, including occasional jarring shifts in the point of view, which is chiefly Pepper throughout, the novel has a wonderful idiomatic control and depth to it.  I found it amazing, in the end.

Carry The One by Carol Anshaw.

A novel that, after several brief initial chapters on a wedding and a tragic car accident following, follows the lives of the occupants of the car that kills a 10 year old girl, including the life of the drunken driver.

Very strong.  At times over the years the guilty connection between the car occupants and the increasingly-distant catastrophe victim grow tenuous, but Anshaw completes each of the five lives she follows so densely one begins to forget the accident itself.

Anshaw is witty and has a compelling eye for detail.  Mostly set in Chicago, the narrative covers 30 years, from the early 80s until shortly after 9/11.  

A Land More Kind than Home by Wiley Cash

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

What to say about this exalted book?  Enormous, sweeping, gifted, culturally alluring, multi-dimensional, thickly embroidered, each page is chock-full of surprising language, unique turns of phrase, stunning metaphor.

I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say by Anthony Madrid

Astonishing debut poetry collection.  Riotously cross-cutting, astonishingly leaping.

Never in my life have I laughed so riotously at a Table of Contents alone.  A sampling: "In hell the units are the gallon and the fuck," "I used to manically slick my hair back," "No more epigrams against slaves," "Heaven help the right-handed man who has had his right hand cut off," "I too have been to Candyland," "Jam me in hot hell," "All my life I've been told you must take the baby from the crocodile," "Now that I know I am to be destroyed by a seventeen-year-old girl," "If I am a total washout as a love (and I am)," "Fuck Buddha I'm Buddha Nobody's Buddha quit talking about Buddha."

 

The unit of wine is the cup.  Of LOVE, the unit is the kiss.  That's here.
In hell, the units are the gallon and the fuck.  In Paradise, the drop and the glance.


Here's a twenty-year-old girl with a red collared blouse, tight jeans and the rest of it.
She is not the promised earth, for the EARTH is a fat woman wearing a jungle.



She made a little Baby Jesus and put it in an owl's nest; 
Now she wants to set it afloat, but we say no...

 "Anthony, what can this mean? This language amazes me."
It means I wish I could give you a daughter exactly like yourself.



I am reading Sara Teasdale, whose joys were only three:
Caress; create; and gape at mindless nature. 


Whoever reads more than a dozen ghazals at a time will be over-stimulated.
After a certain number of hits, one is simply wasting a precious drug.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Warn

A pretty amazing book.  Set 10 days before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the novel is narrated by a teenage girl living with her impoverished family (three brothers and father) in low-lying predominantly black and poor Bois Sauvage, Mississippit.  Dramatically centered around her older brother Skeetah's pit bull China giving birth and the childrens' struggles to keep the puppies alive, the narrative soon deepens as fifteen year old  Esch realizes she is pregnant.  She is also obsessed with Greek mythology and reads and dwells upon the story of Medea and Jason, as the family struggles to prepare for the storm, her father is grievously injured, her youngest brother Junior grieves for their dead mother, and her oldest brother Randall attempts to free the family from some of their poverty in his high school basketball career.

Lots going on in this dense, quick book.  The heroine, Esch, is unique and forceful in her narration.  Her brothers are tough and yet enduringly kind to her and to each other.

The Little Drummer Girl by John Le Carre

I am an Executioner by Rajesh Parameswaran

"I am an Executioner"
“Narrative of Agent 97-4702.”
"Demons"
"The Infamous Bengal Ming”
“Four ­Rajeshes”

A Multitude of Sins by Richard Ford

Scenes from early life by Philip Hensher

Slow.

A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks

Five (apparently interlinked) stories across 150 years or so.  Liked each individually, but didn't feel like the connections.  He can write a story though.

The Orphan Master's Son

a staggering look inside a demonic country.  I can only assume that most of it is true.   the very facelessness of the oppressed people is used masterfully by Johnson-- characters are doubled and find themselves vying against versions of themselves created by the state to thwart their spirit -- which I found narratively challenging.  but his landscape and emotional atmosphere is fantatically conjured-- he creates a North Korea so rich in human breath and foible, where for me before there was nothing but a cipher.  Incredible achievement of a novel.  Not even funny, how unusual a thing he has conjured not out of thin air, but out of strange, distant, inaccessible air.

Canada by Richard Ford

Richard Ford's weighty novel on a tragic American family, where the father (a former Air Force man and failed businessman) and mother (intelligent, cynical) decide to rob a bank in Montana.  Point of view is their son Dell, who is taken to a remote prairie town in Sasketchawan and raised by neer do wells.  Very moving, lengthy meditation on childhood, America, human fate and goodness.

My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, Poems by Paul Guest

Wonderful, strange, exciting young poet.

User's Guide to Physical Debilitation
by Paul Guest
Should the painful condition of irreversible paralysis last longer than forever or at least until your death by bowling ball or illegal lawn dart or the culture of death, which really has it out for whoever has seen better days but still enjoys bruising marathons of bird watching, you, or your beleaguered caregiver stirring dark witch's brews of resentment inside what had been her happy life, should turn to page seven where you can learn, assuming higher cognitive functions were not pureed by your selfish misfortune, how to leave the house for the first time in two years. An important first step, with apologies for the thoughtlessly thoughtless metaphor. When not an outright impossibility or form of neurological science fiction, sexual congress will either be with tourists in the kingdom of your tragedy, performing an act of sadistic charity; with the curious, for whom you will be beguilingly blank canvas; or with someone blindly feeling their way through an extended power outage caused by summer storms you once thought romantic. Page twelve instructs you how best to be inspiring to Magnus next door as he throws old Volkswagens into orbit above Alberta. And to Betty in her dark charm confiding a misery, whatever it is, that to her seems equivalent to yours. The curl of her hair that her finger knows better and beyond what you will, even in the hypothesis of heaven when you sleep. This guide is intended to prepare you for falling down and declaring détente with gravity, else you reach the inevitable end of scaring small children by your presence alone. Someone once said of crushing helplessness: it is a good idea to avoid that. We agree with that wisdom but gleaming motorcycles are hard to turn down or safely stop at speeds which melt aluminum. Of special note are sections regarding faith healing, self-loathing, abstract hobbies like theoretical spelunking and extreme atrophy, and what to say to loved ones who won't stop shrieking at Christmas dinner. New to this edition is an index of important terms such as catheter, pain, blackout, pathological deltoid obsession, escort service, magnetic resonance imaging, loss of friends due to superstitious fear, and, of course, amputation above the knee due to pernicious gangrene. It is our hope that this guide will be a valuable resource during this long stretch of boredom and dread and that it may be of some help, however small, to cope with your new life and the gradual, bittersweet loss of every God damned thing you ever loved.

Sweeth Tooth by Ian McEwan

Got halfway through and put it away.  Obscure, somewhat pulse-less.   First one of his I've ever not finished.  Concerns a young woman hired in the late 1960s by British intelligence, caught up in intrigues with lovers/former lovers/future lovers who may or may not be double agents.  Will not find out, in this life.  Of course, I had a University copy of the book, sans the sexy dust cover shown here.  That might have made all of the difference in the world.  But cannot recreate the experience of first picking up the plain black volume and reading half.