Me, My Books and Irene

Had this blog almost all composed in my head last night when the power went out and I had to assist in the basement baling. Strange to lose electricity for the first and only time almost 24 hours after the rain started falling. Picture tonight on the front page of the paper, a wide shot of the Mohawk Basin. It looks like the floods in Fargo: red, raging and unimpeded.

Of course no venturing out at all on Sunday (except for some quickie dog duty), so I read a lot, finishing Spousonomics by Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson. It was a book I picked up to read from helpful hints to launch the soon to be married. I hated economics in college and took the allowable cuts to at least secure a B. MBA courses were only marginally better (see I did learn about margins and cost/benefits but most of the expertise in those areas came from on the job action in the Capitol).

In a 300 page book, my only dog-ear as a potential quote was in the introduction. Actually the book went on at length just reiterating these few recommendations: "... Never let your own happiness outweigh that of your spouse. Always try to anticipate his next move before launching into negotiation. Divide the housework not fifty/fifty, but according to who does what better. Don't be afraid to use incentives to get what you want. Be willing to lose an argument."

These authors look young, scrubbed faces with career-set husbands. Never admits to how long they have been married. As a long-married woman, my own economic distillation is: do what you have to do yourself to live like you want to. If picking up is important to your sense of order, don't wait on other family members. If you rate your worth by how your front yard looks to the neighbors, tend it or hire someone with your own funds. Let meals be the center of life and save some part of the evening for personal preferences. There is no point in arguing TV versus reading.

The better book I am reading is All About Love and hope to finish it tomorrow and get a compare and contrast blog posted.

Remembering Smell by Bonnie Blodgett

To me, this book is not that big of a divergence from the lust list because in lust, all the sense are in hyper-drive. Lust moves us from the plebeian sight and sound that navigate us through all daily activity, to get us close enough to touch / caress and to inhale deeply. A lover surely can sweet-talk a way into your brain through your ear, but the scent of a woman (or man) lingers longer in the memory. “Unlike images and sounds, one pathway for odors goes directly to the brain’s emotion and memory centers without being filtered by the circuits involved in higher intelligence.”

Blodgett lost her sense of smell from one careless dousing of Zicam, an over the counter nasal spray that the FDA finally banned years after its manufacturer settled a $12 million lawsuit to hundreds of injured people. She writes about the isolation and depression that sets in from not picking up on both dangerous smells (metal burning on the stove) or the aromas of preparing food or working in the earth to clear a perennial garden. “Is smell’s ability to trick us into losing ourselves in the moment (in pure delight) a cornerstone of human happiness?”

This book does not read like a disease of the week television show (not that I ever watch them) but like introspective musings. Blodgett weighs her life against her sensory loss, delves into the Internet as all us symptom-searching fanatics, and exposes an array of doctors and researchers, as well as occasionally referencing her tale to Proustian literary legacies. How can a person make a caricature of herself using only one stroke, one sense? What bodily infirmity does one dream-dread at night, loss of sight, becoming crippled? In one paragraph, she explains herself, per se:

“Smell used to ground me in the here and now. It took the edge off my essential solitude. It challenged my irrational (or not) fear that reality is unreliable and can slip away at any moment. Certain smells are ravishing and others foul, but all of them possess an animal component that is absent from sight and hearing. You can’t over think a smell. It’s there whether you want it or not, having its way with you, like music, but more potent for its subtlety, its immunity to reason, how it affects you without your knowing it, how it makes things real on their own terms. Makes you real in a way that has nothing to do with you.”

So now I think about my own inventory of smell. I find it nigh onto impossible. The memories as Blodgett knows are only triggered by the smell. It is not the aroma that is cherished for itself, but for the waves of endorphins that was through the body in its recall. “ … like Sleeping Beauty, who can only be awakened by a certain kiss from a special prince, smell and all its attendant emotions lie dormant until triggered by smell itself.” I wiggle my nose like the witch in I Dream of Jeannie …. I am itching for my transporting fragrance.

Binging on Laura Lippman

I feel like I'm a preteen, devouring Nancy Drew, at a pop of one a day, over my summer vacation, sitting in the dining room by the window with the violets in it. What innocent escapism. But 50 years later, I am reading Laura Lippman, who I discovered in my search to read only award winning authors for the rest of the year.

Lippman is noted for her Tess Monaghan series and I have intentionally avoided those, first looking for stand alone stories. The first I read was I'd Know You Anywhere, a story very much like the recent headlines of young girls abducted and ultimately found by either sexual predators or serial killers. Lippman lards her story with ancillary characters influencing the flow and denoument, like the anti-death penalty advocate and her diminished older sister. A good story of character ... how people can and cannot change their "stripes."

Next I read her Life Sentences, a story about young girls growing up and apart in Baltimore. The major plot entailed a woman who went to jail rather than provide any information about what happened to her missing child. While at first glance the back story seemed to be about disclosing the identity of the child's father, the uber plot pondered how much your childhood friends changed from when you first knew them. A solid B- mystery.

The third one I finished is In a Strange City, this one a Tess Moynahan installment. I liked this one. It reminded me of the speculative reconstruction of Poe's death that I read last year or so and also of the book about the museum dedicated to one's life and love set in the mid-East, a review that I never finished writing. Here the mysterious man who leaves a half full bottle of brandy and three red roses at the grave of EAP each year on the anniversary is the pivot point of the plot. But the over story is an exploration about why certain memorabilia play such an important part in the lives of both collectors and everyone. Tess herself is refurbishing a dilpidated house, pondering how "authentic" to restore it. Supporting characters and prime suspects are all engaged in collecting things, whether kitsch or museum quality.

She writes: "But this feeling -- this was the reason people fought to save buildings and why things, mere things, sometimes mattered. It was not because of the old Santayana cliche, the one about being condemned to repeat the past if you failed to remember it. Remembering one's mistakes was no talisman; Tess had repeated her own over and over again in full knowledge. The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been."

Her characters steal and horde for profit, because they think they are more deserving than the current owner, to articulate their own personal rendition of what's important historically. But all of us describe out personality and our heritage by our possessions. Coincidentally, in today's New York Times, a woman wrote about her childhood interest in doll houses and how that urge to create and control space resurfaced with her first too tiny NYC apartment. How that echoed my recent flourish with recreating miniature rooms and its expansion into compulsive redecorating our house. I still want people to know me through space and decor. I guess I am not that unusual.

A Crotchety Eat Pray Love (and Forget about the Praying)

The Epicure’s Lament by Kate Christensen takes place in the mid-Hudson Valley with the main character, Hugo Whittier, stopping at Stewart’s every day for cigarettes and contemplating going to the Columbia County fair. I am easily hooked by local novels, witness my abiding love of T. C. Boyle’s World’s End.

Christensen has her characters be decadent descendants of Dutch settlers living in deteriorating mansions, displaying eccentricities associated with a too much inter-breeding or adulterous dalliances. Sounds like T. C., and is often funny, but very darkly comedic.

Hugo wants to be a recluse living off the family fortune completely disconnected from his family, contemporaneous and historic. He has an incurable debilitating disease that he intentionally exacerbates by smoking and drinking incessantly; oh and incidentally keeping a diary a la Montaigne.

His other literary hero is MFK Fisher as he fancies himself a gourmet cook. There is about as much culinary arts in The Epicure’s Lament as there is high fashion and style in The Clothes on Their Backs. Christensen’s few recipes remind me only tangentially of Isabel Allende’s Aphrodite – A Memoir of the Senses. When Isabel makes reconciliation mushroom soup, you know she is doing it to seduce her man; when Hugo pulls up nettles from his overgrown, weedy garden, while it might be equally mouth-watering, it is more of a metaphor of his prickly personality and his self-gratification.

But to interpret my not so cryptic review title, Hugo is a curmudgeon, but an oversexed one, hence the double entendre in crotchety. Like Gilbert’s book whose mantra is dine well and charm a loved one, Christensen loads her novel with themes of dysfunctional families, adulteries, illegitimate children, pedophiles, frustrated artists, aging homosexuals … all readers invited. Instead of coming across as a 21^st century Shakespearean romp, the pages are filled with omphalosceptics, all so self-focused that none are appealing memorable. Hugo is never as diabolical as Humbert Humbert. He is misanthropic, hypochondriac, never lovable. This is not an A+ read.

The Serialist by David Gordon

There are parts of this murder mystery that annoy me as much as the letters and newspaper clippings in Lacuna; namely, the lead character in the book is a hack author who makes his living writing pornography, sci fi, blaxploitation, and vampire novels And he includes chapters excerpting whole chapters from them, at first padding the length of this his first published work, but eventually contributing to the bizarre, dangerous, confusing world in which Harry Bloch and Darian Clay live.

Harry is the author who is contacted by Darian, a serial killer in Sing Sing, to write his true crime story before he is executed in three months. Darian discovered Harry’s talents reading Raunchy magazine in jail and makes a devil’s bargain with him – he will give Harry installments of his life if Harry in turn visits the women who have written him love letters in jail and write up a short erotic version of these meetings. Sick, but Harry is only otherwise writing term papers for rich prep school children at fifty bucks an hour.

So there is a lot of black humor in the story until the first grizzly murder of one of these lovelorn fans shortly after Harry’s interview. Eventually, all are mutilated and the story shifts into a who could have done it with Darian imprisoned.

Supporting characters are vivid and it is a very quick, page turning read. Like many first time authors, Gordon intrudes into Harry’s musings to opine on why people read and why writers write. He also speaks to the reader at certain fulcrums in the narrative, explaining how he writes the first and last sentence and when the plot pivots in the murder mystery genre. It coincidentally has a riff about violence as art, echoing the book club’s latest selections to read about the creative urge.

A great read. Will be watching for more from Gordon, as long as he does not revert to sci fi vampire robots.

Clueless: Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante

I think I saw a review of this murder mystery in the New York Times and reserved it at the library. When I picked it up, the woman at the desk reminded me I only could take it out for two weeks since it was a new book. Finished it in two days! Wow what a book and from a first time author.

Dr Jennifer White is a renowned orthopedist in Chicago specializing in reconstructive hand surgery. She is only 64 but already has early onset Alzheimer’s and is forced to retire. Her friend and neighbor Amanda is killed and four of her fingers cleanly sliced off – Jennifer becomes the prime suspect but her illness has so eroded her memory and though process that she cannot remember anything that happened recently.

Jennifer narrates the story with all the confusion and flashbacks of her early years that keep intruding. Her mind continues its downward progression until she does not recognize her family or caretaker and becomes more of danger to herself. Her children sell her house and have her admitted to a nursing home, all the while the detectives keep trying to jar her into remembering anything about the day of Amanda’s death.

Jennifer’s life and her relationship with husband, children and friend Amanda are all presented to the reader in the randomness of her recollections, sort of a stream of unconsciousness, devoid of chronology or cause and effect.

It is a powerful book for its novel literary device, insight into a family devouring disease, and masterful writing. A book to recommend to strangers on the street.

Two Books I Don't Have Much to Say About

At first, I thought The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver was a bang-up book. I even mentioned that to the woman who recommended it for the September book club selection when I ran into her at the grocery store on Thursday. The farther I went into the story, the less I liked it: both for its blatant left-leaning stance and for its being padded with fictionalized fan letters and newspaper clippings referencing the main character Harrison Shepherd. When I was liking the book, it was retelling the story of Frida Kahlo's stormy relationship with Diego Rivera. I loved the movie Frida with Salma Hayek. Even though I knew the course of events with regard to Leon Trotsky, I liked Kingsolver's rendition. I guess her forte is all things Central American. She makes Mexico tolerably acceptable.

I have learned to be cautious of male authors with female leads and vice versa. Kingsolver mitigates this uncomfortable voice by making Harrison gay and aloof and the teller of the tale, Violent Brown, a sexless widow almost a score older than Harry. I read a review on the Internet today that compared Harry to Zeligman or maybe Forrest Gump, there when historic and unpleasant things were happening in America and either not understanding them or falling within their trap. Once the story ventured into the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, it lost me.

Kingsolver's ur-message was too blatant in this choice of topic. It would have been more interesting had Harrison not committed suicide and lived another 20 or 30 years to interpret both the media's and government's new messages. The 50's were no worse, just different from today. Tom Cuddy, Harrison's assignation heralds Mad Men and political spin doctors.

From a book club's vantage, it will be interested to focus a discussion on the distance between an artist and his / her work and the danger of that opus being interpreted by "officials."

I also finished a murder mystery, really more pulp noir novel called Galveston, a book written last year by Nic Pizzolatto. Like the Ripliad, this book does not satisfy my craving for social justice. The main character, after serving 13 years in Angola prison, after killing many while being hounded himself by the shady underworld characters he associates with, supposedly finds redemption by explaining a mother's death to an abandoned child twenty years later, just before he either succumbs to the ravages of lung cancer or the devastation of Hurricane Ike. Nothing I would recommend to the aging Nancy Drew gang.

Off to Award-Winning Books -- Goodbye Passion

Am I ready to admit that the 2011 list of books has been cast aside, maybe for good. Yes, there are several more left without a corresponding check off date and even a couple that have been on library-reserve for months, but it is no longer seducing me.

So desperate for substantial themes to read, I looked up nominees and winners for Man Booker, National, et cetera awards. The first I finished is The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant, short listed for Man Booker in 2008.

It is the story of Hungarian refugees. One brother, a quiet unassuming jeweler with a mousy wife, living in a flat with eccentric neighbors. The story is narrated by his daughter, Vivian. The other brother skirts the law and eventually ends up imprisoned for being a slum landlord. Vivian, anxious to learn about her family history, maneuvers into becoming his scribe as he dictates his memories in Eastern Europe and London.

As a literary conceit, Grant does not use the metaphors of clothes as disguises or conveyors of social status heavy-handedly. Only the title reminds the reader to look for such references. Instead, rather quickly, the novel focuses on what it means to be dislocated and how that trauma effects not only the émigrés but their families for generations. Vivian so describes her parents:

“… Logic. Which nobody in my family had ever considered to be a trait worth cultivating or a methodology with any discernible purpose to it. You operated on instinct and emotions, mainly fear and cowardice. Principles were for other people, the kind who had sideboards and cut-glass decanters and documents with their names on that nobody in a uniform could quibble about. They were a luxury, like fresh flowers in vases and meals out in restaurants; you could aspire to be one day the sort of person who had the status and disposable income to afford principle, but the foundations of your existence were distrust and, if you were endowed with brains, cunning.”

The nest her parents constructed admitted no outsiders, and allowed contact with the world only to the extent that they left the news on when they were afraid that turning the set off after the game shows were over would cause it to go dead. Vivian grows up like a frail root-bound violet, escaping only to attend a second or third rate university, where surprisingly she meets her husband when he rushes into the bathroom when she is lolling smoking a cigarette soaking in the tub. The tall thin son of a vicar, he admits to marrying her to beef up his gene pool. Poor Alexander dies on their honeymoon and rather than falling back into the trap of her parents’ apartment, she goes to live in one of her uncle’s buildings.

This transition of her life into a rootless young widow, coming mid-point in the story is the most obvious play on the title:

“ … It was very hard in those days to stay up all night in London, you had to know where to look to find the young vampires … I was apprehensive. I didn’t know how to behave or dress … Looking back over that summer, I remember almost everything I wore. I can recount my whole wardrobe, but this night is a blank. I changed and changed and changed until the bed was piled with discarded clothes, mountains of silks, crepes, velvets, belts, scarves, high-heeled shoes, jeans, bell-bottom trousers, bras and knickers. Deep uncertainty about what to put on has wiped clean the memory’s slate and what the final choice was.”

So she is introduced to the edgy counterculture of London’s youth in the 70s, with its threatening skin heads, so reminiscent of the terror in Hungary in 1956. The threat of paramilitary thugs against the weak is compounded with the introduction of Vivian’s uncle’s girlfriend who is a Black woman from Wales who works in a chic boutique selling designer clothes. Eunice, more than Vivian, believes her outward perfect appearance is her ticket to social acceptance.

I am left with a sense that Grant used the perfect double-entendre title for it is not about disclosing or hiding oneself using apparel, but what it is like to be strangers in a strange land who had escaped with nothing but the clothes on their backs.