There is a woman author named Mary Roach who has been writing one word humorous science books about bodily functions. I heard about her when I read a review about her latest, Gut, about the human intestinal tract. I want to read this instead of making an appointment for a colonoscopy. So that book is on reserve and meanwhile I read Bonk about well sex. Seems like my lust list keeps going on and on.
Roach brings back my bias that the Irish have a wonderful gift of language and humor. I left out loud when Roach compared a certain adapted stimulating machine to a buffing shoe shiner. A lot of her recounting of early 20th century scientific experiments were flash backs to my lust list reading but her perspective is more an SNL or Mad magazine take.
As I mentioned in my review of Bel Canto, I am typing this while watching the endless loop of the Boston Marathon bombing. All else pales and I won't even be writing this except I want the books returned tonight or tomorrow.
Monday, April 15, 2013
The Notes are a Little Flat
April's book club was Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. We were all very polite in our comments. The club sometimes seems too false: we don't want to hurt the feelings of our hostess or those among us who consider the selection to be one of their favorite books.
Bel Canto was published in 2002 long after the prevalence of hostage taking political tactics. This one occurs in an unnamed South American country at an international event honoring an Asian potential investor who only attends the event because it is a birthday party for him where his favorite opera singer is performing. Despite being called Bel Canto, the book themes the importance of all arts as civilizing factors in an otherwise hostile, threatening and incomprehensible world.
I struggled to finish the book in order to be done before our meeting and the ending is absolutely dissonant and did not make sense given the plot development preceding it.
I really can't write more about the book or the club meeting as I am typing this while watching the bombs at the Boston Marathon, thinking about how political extremists no longer take hostages but kill.
Bel Canto was published in 2002 long after the prevalence of hostage taking political tactics. This one occurs in an unnamed South American country at an international event honoring an Asian potential investor who only attends the event because it is a birthday party for him where his favorite opera singer is performing. Despite being called Bel Canto, the book themes the importance of all arts as civilizing factors in an otherwise hostile, threatening and incomprehensible world.
I struggled to finish the book in order to be done before our meeting and the ending is absolutely dissonant and did not make sense given the plot development preceding it.
I really can't write more about the book or the club meeting as I am typing this while watching the bombs at the Boston Marathon, thinking about how political extremists no longer take hostages but kill.
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
They All Die
I have jumped over the book club selection for April to read May: Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks. Believe it or not, a Pulitzer Prize winner. Not. Who gets to sit on the awarding committee? Liberal leaning balance the history types who feel compelled to "honor" an oppressive time in American history?
I strongly disliked this book. It reminded me a lot of Ahab's Wife, another historical novel about a notable male told from a woman's perspective in an age when women were oppressed downtrodden ignored demeaned discriminated against under-educated yadda yadda yadda.
Essentially the story is Bethia Mayhew's life:
Her twin brother dies
Her mother dies in childbirth
That baby drowns in the back yard
Her father drowns at sea
Her best friend, Caleb, an Indian on Martha's Vineyard, dies of consumption after graduating Harvard
His best first Joel is clubbed to death returning to Boston to give the valedictory speech
Have we pulled enough heart strings to reach the conclusions that:
Harvard was racist
All of Massachusetts colonists were sexist
Women were indentured officially or de facto
Indians were exterminated but also heathen brutalizers
Enough said
I strongly disliked this book. It reminded me a lot of Ahab's Wife, another historical novel about a notable male told from a woman's perspective in an age when women were oppressed downtrodden ignored demeaned discriminated against under-educated yadda yadda yadda.
Essentially the story is Bethia Mayhew's life:
Her twin brother dies
Her mother dies in childbirth
That baby drowns in the back yard
Her father drowns at sea
Her best friend, Caleb, an Indian on Martha's Vineyard, dies of consumption after graduating Harvard
His best first Joel is clubbed to death returning to Boston to give the valedictory speech
Have we pulled enough heart strings to reach the conclusions that:
Harvard was racist
All of Massachusetts colonists were sexist
Women were indentured officially or de facto
Indians were exterminated but also heathen brutalizers
Enough said
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Girl Gone
The other good-read I discovered in a NYT's review is Girl Gone by Gillian Flynn (maybe I should do a year of just Irish surnamed authors?). I've already put Flynn's other two murder mysteries on reserve at the library.
The two main characters in this story are Nick and Amy Dunne, a 21st century over-exaggerated George and Martha from Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe. Actually, this could be a story about how they become undone.
The structure is a big part of the story. I failed to notice the big black almost bland pages that separated the book into three sections. I was plowing along as the girl was gone and her husband is investigated as the only subject of her disappearance/kidnapping/death. Half way into the book, it seems like the story is over and then I noticed part two. In that section, although Flynn continues to alternate chapters from the male and female perspective, it is Amy whose psychological profile and posing comes more clearly into focus. Now she is more like Delmar's own sociopath. Now Nick really wants to kill her.
But it is the third part that makes this book more than a clever mystery or thriller. It is here that Flynn obliquely articulates her over-theme: are we all actors and actresses in the tragi-comedy of love? Was Amy, like most young women today, assuming a popular persona or type to be attractive to eligible males? Did she assume another societally-imposed role as happy young wife? At what point in a relationship do such veneers begin to crack? How easy is it for two people to live together without falling into typecasting? Amy's parents play out the older saccharine version of a happily ever after couple but their entire life has been dedicated to profiting off a fabrication of an ideal girl, the children's series of Amazing Amy, were Amy always triumphs. So with this upbringing, Amy becomes the author of her own life and any and all nonconforming subplots are summarily ended.
Similarly, Amy comes to realize that Desi, her boyfriend from college, cannot be her savior because he too is in "character" and has prescripted (no pun intended) what their relationship had to be: ..."I look at Desi with outright disgust now. Sometimes I feel my skin must be hot with repulsion and with the effort to keep that repulsion hidden ... The manipulation, the purring persuasion, the delicate bullying. A man who finds guilt erotic. And if he doesn't get his way, he'll pull his little levers and set his punishment in motion." Wait a minute, is Amy looking in a mirror or projecting?
However, Nick is equally programmed to assume postures and dialogue that has leeched into his personality from popular culture. As he is investigated by the police, he thinks in the interrogation room: ..."I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing ... is the second hand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say ... It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters."
Part three shows the couple being "catastrophically romantic." Where they are quasi-comfortable in their Punch and Judy hostage taking marriage.
I think Flynn's forte is not the plot twists and turns but the entire idea that if "real" people are less than real, how can an author possibly make her protagonists believable! She does so, unforgettably so.
The two main characters in this story are Nick and Amy Dunne, a 21st century over-exaggerated George and Martha from Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe. Actually, this could be a story about how they become undone.
The structure is a big part of the story. I failed to notice the big black almost bland pages that separated the book into three sections. I was plowing along as the girl was gone and her husband is investigated as the only subject of her disappearance/kidnapping/death. Half way into the book, it seems like the story is over and then I noticed part two. In that section, although Flynn continues to alternate chapters from the male and female perspective, it is Amy whose psychological profile and posing comes more clearly into focus. Now she is more like Delmar's own sociopath. Now Nick really wants to kill her.
But it is the third part that makes this book more than a clever mystery or thriller. It is here that Flynn obliquely articulates her over-theme: are we all actors and actresses in the tragi-comedy of love? Was Amy, like most young women today, assuming a popular persona or type to be attractive to eligible males? Did she assume another societally-imposed role as happy young wife? At what point in a relationship do such veneers begin to crack? How easy is it for two people to live together without falling into typecasting? Amy's parents play out the older saccharine version of a happily ever after couple but their entire life has been dedicated to profiting off a fabrication of an ideal girl, the children's series of Amazing Amy, were Amy always triumphs. So with this upbringing, Amy becomes the author of her own life and any and all nonconforming subplots are summarily ended.
Similarly, Amy comes to realize that Desi, her boyfriend from college, cannot be her savior because he too is in "character" and has prescripted (no pun intended) what their relationship had to be: ..."I look at Desi with outright disgust now. Sometimes I feel my skin must be hot with repulsion and with the effort to keep that repulsion hidden ... The manipulation, the purring persuasion, the delicate bullying. A man who finds guilt erotic. And if he doesn't get his way, he'll pull his little levers and set his punishment in motion." Wait a minute, is Amy looking in a mirror or projecting?
However, Nick is equally programmed to assume postures and dialogue that has leeched into his personality from popular culture. As he is investigated by the police, he thinks in the interrogation room: ..."I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing ... is the second hand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say ... It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters."
Part three shows the couple being "catastrophically romantic." Where they are quasi-comfortable in their Punch and Judy hostage taking marriage.
I think Flynn's forte is not the plot twists and turns but the entire idea that if "real" people are less than real, how can an author possibly make her protagonists believable! She does so, unforgettably so.
Need to Know
Hooray. I have just finished two excellent books. Can I hope for this streak to continue? Considering that I discovered both of them in that unreliable compendium of miserable current books, the Sunday New York Times book review section, this takes on an even more special aura ... pearls before swine. Although I finished this one last, I will review it first.
After Visiting Friends is Michael Hainey's story about finding out under what circumstances his father died when he was six years old. I don't really want to describe Hainey's father's death, the cover up or his family's omerta like repression of talking about it. Nor do I want to focus on Hainey's dogged research as an expression of his inherited and ingrained reporting instincts. I loved the book for his family.
The best metaphor I can come up with for his mother is Lot's wife. After her husband dies, she becomes as rigid, silent and steadfast as a pillar of salt, her only animation is to drive on the well being of her two young sons. Growing up in the late 50s early 60s, she has the blessing of an extended family to help her cope. Hainey's maternal grandmother and his uncle, also a newspaperman, anchor him, but anchor him next to a gaping emotional hole, the space where a boy's father should reign.
The sworn to secrecy "old boys club" of his dad's contemporary writers at the paper through up blocks and dead ends as he tries to find out any information. From decades of his mother slicing the air with her hand as the penultimate gesture of "don't go there" Hainey's search/adventure becomes more classic, more daring.
After his mother, my next favorite character is the woman at the morgue, one of those true Christians who can read Hainey's anguish and fear and who prays with him to give him strength, courage and stamina. Now I am sure many jaded cosmopolitan East Coast GQ readers will construe this as a literary device, especially attributing a deus ex machina like quality to her random call years latter with no new information but just the need to bring him to closure. No, I know these people exist. They are not preying on our weaknesses, they are praying for our peace. Even lapsed faithfuls like me and Hainey are moved by their public displays of unselfish faith and trust in a guided purpose to our actions.
The counterpoint to Hainey's need to break through a code of silence is his parallel struggle of when and how much to tell his mother about what he finally discovers. Are family secrets best kept in the closet? Should adult children discuss a parent's infidelity with the other spouse? Should Hainey remain as silent as his mother?
The book ends with him and his mom at the kitchen table after she has told him her own personal hidden secrets about his father. There can be no further tarnishing, yet no further polishing of their reputations. He is reconciled with her. But who is he and what secrets has he still kept about himself from his readers?
After Visiting Friends is Michael Hainey's story about finding out under what circumstances his father died when he was six years old. I don't really want to describe Hainey's father's death, the cover up or his family's omerta like repression of talking about it. Nor do I want to focus on Hainey's dogged research as an expression of his inherited and ingrained reporting instincts. I loved the book for his family.
The best metaphor I can come up with for his mother is Lot's wife. After her husband dies, she becomes as rigid, silent and steadfast as a pillar of salt, her only animation is to drive on the well being of her two young sons. Growing up in the late 50s early 60s, she has the blessing of an extended family to help her cope. Hainey's maternal grandmother and his uncle, also a newspaperman, anchor him, but anchor him next to a gaping emotional hole, the space where a boy's father should reign.
The sworn to secrecy "old boys club" of his dad's contemporary writers at the paper through up blocks and dead ends as he tries to find out any information. From decades of his mother slicing the air with her hand as the penultimate gesture of "don't go there" Hainey's search/adventure becomes more classic, more daring.
After his mother, my next favorite character is the woman at the morgue, one of those true Christians who can read Hainey's anguish and fear and who prays with him to give him strength, courage and stamina. Now I am sure many jaded cosmopolitan East Coast GQ readers will construe this as a literary device, especially attributing a deus ex machina like quality to her random call years latter with no new information but just the need to bring him to closure. No, I know these people exist. They are not preying on our weaknesses, they are praying for our peace. Even lapsed faithfuls like me and Hainey are moved by their public displays of unselfish faith and trust in a guided purpose to our actions.
The counterpoint to Hainey's need to break through a code of silence is his parallel struggle of when and how much to tell his mother about what he finally discovers. Are family secrets best kept in the closet? Should adult children discuss a parent's infidelity with the other spouse? Should Hainey remain as silent as his mother?
The book ends with him and his mom at the kitchen table after she has told him her own personal hidden secrets about his father. There can be no further tarnishing, yet no further polishing of their reputations. He is reconciled with her. But who is he and what secrets has he still kept about himself from his readers?
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Y ... Why
After getting 2013 off to a slow and unsatisfying start, book-wise, I decided to venture back to last year's bucket list and nibble away at the unreviewed letters. Where I picked up many of these titles, I don't know, though probably Amazon, as now I discover our library system does not have many of them on the shelves. I hit on Disturbing the Peace by Richard Yates.
Perhaps I should have stopped as soon as I saw that Yates also wrote Revolutionary Road. Maybe I should have checked out Wiki to discover DTP is considered Yates' worst novel. It is. It reminds me a lot of Kingsley Amis and his drunken protagonists in a male dominated culture of omphaloskeptics. Or of an especially badly scripted season of Mad Men.
It's taken me a couple of years to identify a genre that I do not like at all: Amis, now Yates, Philip Roth, John Irving. The exact opposite of "chick lit" these guys, no matter what decade they wrote in, have used the novel to camouflage their own confused, near neurotic lives, endlessly questioning and propounding the following mantras:
I have not earned the fame granted to me, but give me more.
I am in an intellectually barren marriage and horny as hell and seducing any young thing at the drop of a hat (or trousers).
I drink, a lot.
I continue drinking until I am practically psychotic.
I have a nervous breakdown and since I hate shrinks, I drink.
My parents hate me.
I am a fake at work.
So these were the fathers of the middle aged men in England and America now. If they spawned writers, the themes are often just as self-indulgent. If their heirs have found other kinds of lives, they have hardly grown up to be the pride of their generation or their nation.
Give me less self-involved novels, please.
Perhaps I should have stopped as soon as I saw that Yates also wrote Revolutionary Road. Maybe I should have checked out Wiki to discover DTP is considered Yates' worst novel. It is. It reminds me a lot of Kingsley Amis and his drunken protagonists in a male dominated culture of omphaloskeptics. Or of an especially badly scripted season of Mad Men.
It's taken me a couple of years to identify a genre that I do not like at all: Amis, now Yates, Philip Roth, John Irving. The exact opposite of "chick lit" these guys, no matter what decade they wrote in, have used the novel to camouflage their own confused, near neurotic lives, endlessly questioning and propounding the following mantras:
I have not earned the fame granted to me, but give me more.
I am in an intellectually barren marriage and horny as hell and seducing any young thing at the drop of a hat (or trousers).
I drink, a lot.
I continue drinking until I am practically psychotic.
I have a nervous breakdown and since I hate shrinks, I drink.
My parents hate me.
I am a fake at work.
So these were the fathers of the middle aged men in England and America now. If they spawned writers, the themes are often just as self-indulgent. If their heirs have found other kinds of lives, they have hardly grown up to be the pride of their generation or their nation.
Give me less self-involved novels, please.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Movie War Stories
As a complement to All Quiet on the Western Front, I wanted to watch one of my favorite actresses, Audrey Tautou, in A Very Long Engagement. (Seeing recent pictures of Audrey on the Internet, it strikes me that she is no longer the French gamine/ingenue she was but is maturing into a woman who looks like my great aunt, not the Busold side, the Trembley side.)
Anyway, the stupid DVD from the library kept skipping and stalling and all I got to watch last night was the first few minutes and actually that was enough to depict the horrors that Remarque's couldn't do justice to with its scattered pen and ink abstract sketches. It was the disc and not my player as I inserted the other movie I picked up this weekend and it played fine. If I can find another copy of AVLE I want to watch it because it dawned on me that the "engagement" referred to a troop engagement as well as to moving slowly towards a marriage.
So the pitch hitting movie last night was Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Somewhere in this unruly blog I think I wrote up how much I liked the book, vampire junkie that I am. Hated the movie. For two reasons. I resent saying what I liked most about a film was its special effects; and given my sons proclivity to all things Southern and my husband's south of the Mason Dixon line family tree, I could not entertain a version, however fantastical, of Jefferson Davis conspiring with vampires to win the war. One of the most moving days of my life was visiting Gettysburg. It was bloody hot and dusty that day and the boys hung out with the reenactors on the Gray side, sitting with Lee and getting pictures taken with other generals who walked among the tents. I was heart sick when a battle began, mourning both sides, the unnecessary losses to life, family and the flower of our nation's youth. Demonizing one side was a sacrilege to both. I've already decided not to see Lincoln despite my interest in Day-Lewis performances. I recognize Hollywood demonizes certain aspects of history to get across its own political agenda. This took it beyond the pale.
Anyway, the stupid DVD from the library kept skipping and stalling and all I got to watch last night was the first few minutes and actually that was enough to depict the horrors that Remarque's couldn't do justice to with its scattered pen and ink abstract sketches. It was the disc and not my player as I inserted the other movie I picked up this weekend and it played fine. If I can find another copy of AVLE I want to watch it because it dawned on me that the "engagement" referred to a troop engagement as well as to moving slowly towards a marriage.
So the pitch hitting movie last night was Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Somewhere in this unruly blog I think I wrote up how much I liked the book, vampire junkie that I am. Hated the movie. For two reasons. I resent saying what I liked most about a film was its special effects; and given my sons proclivity to all things Southern and my husband's south of the Mason Dixon line family tree, I could not entertain a version, however fantastical, of Jefferson Davis conspiring with vampires to win the war. One of the most moving days of my life was visiting Gettysburg. It was bloody hot and dusty that day and the boys hung out with the reenactors on the Gray side, sitting with Lee and getting pictures taken with other generals who walked among the tents. I was heart sick when a battle began, mourning both sides, the unnecessary losses to life, family and the flower of our nation's youth. Demonizing one side was a sacrilege to both. I've already decided not to see Lincoln despite my interest in Day-Lewis performances. I recognize Hollywood demonizes certain aspects of history to get across its own political agenda. This took it beyond the pale.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
