Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett

Good example of a current-affairs novel that really works. Uses the first Gulf War as a back-story, and the mortage-securities-Wall Street meltdown as front-story.

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Bit of a slog, but I liked this. Read Johnson's Fiskadoro many years ago, when he was first getting published, and liked it alot. This is the first Vietnam novel that I've read in years and years. There's a certain Apocalypse Now build-up to it, one central character behind a mythical American advisor who may or may not have "crossed over" to the native side, out of an obscure faith in the power and imagery of the Viet Cong's nativism. The CIA ma, the "colonel's" nephew, waits patiently for his assignment, the running of a double agent.

Another narrative thread concerns two brothers, one in the military in Southeast Asia, and the younger brother who stays behind. Their roots are desperate lower-class, blue-collar, white-trash American Southwest, and Johnson weaves a series of phone calls and brief meetings over the years where the brothers finally get to know each other for the first time.

Another interesting character is a woman involved with a charity mission in Thailand and Vietnam, slowly going crazy from her isolation and exposure to the horrors of the plight of children in nations completely obliterated by wars being fought between superpowers that use their tiny backward nation as a battlefield.

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Re-read this, first time since mid 1970s. Loved it. It seems more commonplace now, some of the literary conventions Vonnegut uses and reuses here -- the author-as-character, the coincidences, the sci-fi plot tie-ins -- but I think for the time, 1973, it was revolutionary.

Three to See The King by Magnus Mills

Odd odd book about a man who lives in some odd unnamed contemporary desert and cavern wilderness in a tin house. Seems to be a savior-fable, centering on a cult of drifters on a western pilgrimmage to build and live in their own tin houses, under the leadership of a charismatic messiah-like man. Weird, weird. Unsatisfying. But I read it anyway, because I like Mills' other two books so much.

All Quiet on the Orient Express by Magnus Mills

A book that seems to be a first version of The Restraint of Beasts: again, a rootless young man
stays on after summering in a caravan in rural Britain, takes on a job doing odd jobs for an eccentric man, painting rowboats, fixing machinery, running errands, delivering milk.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer

A beautiful and profound book. Two sections, two different stories -- or are they about the same person? or are they different versions of the same story. In the first, Jeff, a bitter, disillusioned freelance writer, attends the Bienale art exhibition in Venice, mostly because he's bored of London and wants the free stuff he'll get as a travelling reporter for a magazine. He meets a beautiful, mysterious, passionate American woman and has a torrid affair.

In the second, an unnamed narrator travels to Varanasi, again bitter, again disillusion, and undergoes a spiritual and metaphysical catharsis, ending as a bearded, homeless ascetic who seems to be falling into psychosis.

The only connection between the two novellas? In the first, the woman mentions to the man that she might next be travelling to Varanasi, and he says that he too also wants to go there at some point.

Yellow Dog by Martin Amis

Liked it, at least until the last third or so when it became boring and lost momentum, pitching and yawing about like the jet plane about to plummet to the air, one of the main plot developments of the conclusion.

Amis does not write a careless sentence, there are no quotidian moments.

Made the mistake after finishing it of looking up some reviews, which were almost universally bad.







a rawther fetching picture of MA from London's National Portrait Gallery, sort of like a Mick Jagger who stayed in school.

Await Your Reply

The Man in the Wooden Hat

Inglourious Basterds

I'm no enormous Tarantino fan -- the train started and stopped at Pulp Fiction for me -- but I thought this was a tremendous movie, mostly for the extraordinary performance of Christopher Waltz, who managed to in three languages to be the most menacing, attractive, complex antagonist I think I've seen in film in years. If he hadn't been a Nazi, I would think he would have been nominated for Best Actor.

The three languages thing, for me, was a big deal. Sure, Brad Pitt's a cutie, and I understand he studied for months with a serious Ozark Mountains dialogue coach so he could sound so convincingly Carolina as he did -- but come on! Waltz sounded menancing and competent and human and believable in THREE ROMANCE LANGUAGES -- I'm quite sure he didn't need an "accent" coach in any of them.

The Tin Drum - new translation by Breon Mitchell

This will not comment on the new translation, too much: having read in the early 1980s, the original acclaimed Ralph Manheim translation originally published in 1959, I can't pretend to remember that version clearly enough to compare the two, although my copious excited undergraduate notes in the margin bear witness to how struck I was with the language of whatever the original might be. All I can do is compare my original underlinings with the same passages in the new one.

Mitchell, to his credit and to my slight discomfort, adds an intriguing afterword about the differences between the two translations. He wants to make clear that there were things in the original manuscript that just couldn't be printed in 1959 (although not that many, as one of Grass's multitude of prodigious literary gifts is his ability to lyrically and cryptically euphemize without quite having to hand you the keys to the car -- Martin Amis comes to mind, among others, although I'm sure both Amis and Grass would point to Nabokov as the more unitary model in dressing up one's salaciousness). Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman also comes to mind, since we hear the narrator's voice incessantly on every detail of existence preceding his birth, although he is not born until the end of chapter 3 ("Besides, the nurse had already cut my umbilical cord. There was nothing more to be done" in the original, substitute a semi-colon for the period after "cord" in the new translation. Can you hear me now? Mitchell seems to be saying.)

Or, for instance, in the original, "As always where the future of Poland is at stake, the Virgin Mary was in on the proceedings" has become "As always when the future of Poland was at stake, the Virgin Mary appeared in the crowds at these conflagrations," leading me easily to pick the former over the latter, going with easy colloquialism of Manheim over the anti-slanging of Mitchell. "Impersonating a meat-colored baby" is now "Impersonating a reddish blue baby." Little stuff like that. To Mitchell's credit, he does claim to have restored Grass's original long sentences in many places that Manheim had turned to a series of short sentences, softening some of Grass's rhapsodical, poetic stretches as a way of introducing him to a large American audienc. The long sentences as paragraphs are great stuff, and seem totally authentic to Grass's intent.

My notes of old go some distance in proving that, in 1981, I was struck by the forest, not the trees: I liked quotes, back then, stuff that could be plucked out and read aloud, as aphorisms. And there are certainl lots of them. But reading it now, relatively quickly, utterly sober, it is the sweep of the narrative that amazes me, and the intricate realistic sculpture of the landscape of Danzig, what Grass refers to as the "provincialism" of his novel, in his preface, where he also recalls wondering as a 29 year old why any self-respecting publisher would be interested in such a story steeped in a small-town locale like Danzig.

Faith Fox by Jane Gardham

Homeless Photographs by Tom Stone

http://tomstonegallery.com/

The Restraint of Beasts

This is a very funny, very dark and very powerful book. Kafka isn't the exact forbear, but he's up there in the tree someplace. For me the more immediate touchstone is Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, one of my very favorite novels. It concerns a fencing business in Scotland. The narrator has just been named foreman of a three-man team, by his efficient and stern boss, who is interested only in the improvement of the art of putting up cattle fences. The foreman tried to control his team of sullen, silent, lazy and disturbed workers, but to no avail. The plot revolves around (spoiler) the manslaughters they commit each of the three times they are sent on a job to either construct or create a farmer's cattle fence. It's hard to describe, obviously. And doesn's parse well into quotable moments, as the whole narrative

The Rivalry at Ford's Theatre

AMERICA Magazine's Outstanding Catholic Chief Executive of 2009

Michael Sean Winter's named Governor Martin O'Malley of Maryland as 2009's Catholic Executive of the Year (now that's a weird-looking trophy, one would guess), and blogged about it in AMERICA magazine here.

I added a comment in defense at the bottom of a chain of pro-lifer's complaints about Governor O'Malley's perceived "inaction" on abortion.

The Fallen Idol, directed by Carol Reed

Pure pleasure. From the director of The Third Man. Monumental score, creepy little touches everywhere, exquisite casting, and a happy ending.

Ralph Richardson is heartbreaking as the butler, earnest, witty, caring, and love-lost. The boy, played by Bobby Henrey, is wondrous. The tightly-plotted mystery can't help but bring to mind Hitchcock.

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

"As he often did when he left a place and his body was leaden with booze, he felt fat and orphaned."

"Two engineers walked behind him, talking about a busted flange, how it was going to take two hours, maybe three, to fix, and Ruth though, Two hours in this shithole? and then he heard it again -- a dry distant crack, and he knew that on the other side of those trees someone was playing baseball."

The Gathering by Anne Enright

It took me three different false starts, but I finally read The Gathering by Anne Enright (no relation, goddamnit) and found it, finally, very powerful, very moving.

That said, the first person narrator is one of the most singularly unpleasant voices I've ever head. Negative is her only tune.