A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks

Mad talented writer, Faulks.  Tore through this novel of contemporary London -- the interlinked lives of a financial derivatives trader, a poor barrister, a working class young women who drives a subway train, a disgruntled youth flirting with Muslim extremism, an ignored teen from incredible wealth experimenting with drugs.  Not at all like Birdsong, Faulks' incredible WWI novel.  Not at all, but still wonderful, vivid, complete writing.  Each life he touches is more interesting that the last.  I'm so thankful for such wonderful, beautiful, talented writers -- and so annoyed, at the end of the day.  Highly recommended.

Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War by Sebastian Faulks

Don't know quite where to begin with this novel. Powerful, sweeping, moving World War I narrative, that begins with an ordinary provincial love affair in France in 1910, then jumps to the outbreak of the war, then jumps to 1978-1979, then jumps back again. Faulks prose is effortlessly detailed. Each character is fully believable. Heroism is undercut by cowardism and selfishness, which is further cut again with heroism and love.

The futility, horror and grand scale of trench warfare is rendered in an utterly personal manner: each soldier thinks he is doing something important and worthwhile, and each soldier knows with almost complete certainty that he will soon be dead.

Stephen Wraysford is a young Englishman who joins the army in 1914 and commands of a miner brigade. They tunnel beneath the German lines and set explosions under them. The underground combat scenes are incredibly brutal and disturbing. Stephen, rootless and exiled from home after a love affair in France before the war, becomes almost addicted to the danger and impossibility of surviving combat.

It felt as though she were being penetrated by a knitting needle with large walnuts midway up its shaft.

The supressed frustrations and unexpressed violence of his life were turned into hatred of the Germans.

"He's shouting for his mother," said the orderly as they brought him into the tent.
"They always do," said the medical officer, peeling back the field dressing Byrne had applied almost thirty hours before.

Then, as the fever in his abandoned body reached its height and he moved toward the welcome of oblivion, he heard a voice, not human, but clear and urgent. It was the sound of his life leaving him. Its tone was mocking. It offered him, instead of the peace he longed for, the possibility of return. At this late stage he could go back to his body and to the brutal perversion of life that was lived in the turned soil and torn flesh of the war; he could, if he made the effort of courage and will, come back to the awkward, compromised, and unconquerable existence that made up human life on earth. The voice was calling him; it appealed to his sense of shame and of curiosity unfulfilled: but if he did not heed it he would surely die.

Within minutes the hillside was seething with movement of the wounded as they attempted to get themselves back to their line.
"Christ," said Weir. "I had no idea there were so many men out there."
It was like a resurrection in a cemetery twelve miles long.

He heard nothing at first. Then, as the last pieces of displaced earth settled in the tunnel, he heard a long thick sigh; it was a sound he had never heard before, but he knew that it was the noise of several men expiring simultaneously.

The hedgerows were deep and ragged where he walked, covered with the lace of cow parsley. The air had a feeling of purity as though it had never been breathed; it was just starting to be cool with the first breeze of the evening. From the tall elms he could see at the end of the field there was the sound of rooks, and a gentler calling of wood pigeons close at hand. He stopped, and leaned against a gate. The quietness of the world about him seemed to stand outside of time; there was no human voice to place it.

Above him he saw the white moon, early and low above the elms. Over and behind it were long jagged wisps of cloud that ran in ribbed lies back into the pale blue of the sky, then trailed away in gestures of vapourous white.

Stephen felt himself overtaken by a climactic surge of feeling. It frightened him because he thought it would have some physical issue in spasm or bleeding or death. Then he saw that what he felt was not an assault but a passionate affinity. It was for the rough field running down to the trees and for the pathgoing back into the village where he could see the tower of the church: these and the forgiving distance of the sky were not separate, but part of of creation, and he too, still by any sane judgement a young man, by the repeated tiny pulsing of his blood, was one with them. He looked up and saw the sky as it would be trailed with stars under darkness, the crawling nebulae and smudged lights of infinite distance; these were not different worlds it now seemed clear to him, but bound through the mind of creation to the shredded white clouds, the unbreathed air of May, to the soil that lay beneath the damp grass at his feet. He held tightly on to the gate and laid his head on his arms, in some residual fear that the force of binding love he felt would sweep him from the earth. He wanted to stretch out his arms and enfold in them the fields, the sky, the elms with their sounding birds; he wanted to hold them with the unending forgiveness of a father to his prodigal errant but beloved son . . . nothing was immoral or beyond redemption, all could be brought together, understood in the long perspective of forgiveness. As he clung to the wood, he wanted also to be forgiven for all that he had done; he longed for the unity of the world’s creation to melt his sin and anger, because his soul was joined to it.

The Stranger's Child by Alan Holinghurst

The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

A tale of two gunmen in the old American West told in a narrative voice that more resembles that of a Protestant religious reformer than your typical shoot-em-up cowboy. Odd, unusual transitions, and an undramatic style: started out reading it very coldly, ready to bail, but have grown to like it for its oddness.

Video: SeanEnright.com

Video: SeanEnright.com

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.