And of the Year and Everything Else

Emily left two more books behind when she flew back to Texas from her first visit north of the Carolinas. We graciously were able to provide a mini-blizzard for her snow-angel enjoyment. And for my enjoyment, I finished The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt, a fictionalized biography of the last few months in the life of Nikola Tesla.

Why bother recapping the facts of Tesla's life when they are exhaustively available on Wiki. Hunt holds true to that chronology, introducing supporting characters who really were Tesla's friends and acquaintances, including Mark Twain who for chapters here is the mysterious "Sam." So the question is why does Hunt write a novel instead of a biography? She contrasts Tesla's science and hobby interests with an invented character Louisa, a maid at the Hotel New Yorker in 1943 where Tesla lived his last years. Like Tesla, she has a father prone to invention and raising homing pigeons. I suppose a lot of the plot intentionally plays the famous against the wanna-be scientist and how people relate to them. A time machine created by her father and his best friend on Long Island is as fantastic as Tesla's death machine.

Despite this contrasting interplay, I find it difficult to conclude why a fictionalized rendition is better than a true life story. Maybe Hunt is hoping to reach a different audience. Nevertheless, she writes engagingly and I have reserved her other novel to pursue her style and voice.

I have moved on to the other book passed on to me: Ahab's Wife which I am loving, never having actually sat down to read Moby Dick even though Herman Melville graduated from Albany Academy. Guess I have another gap in my knowledge of literature. Anyway, thanks again to Em for a good read.

Ten Days Early: Know When I See It and This Isn't

Sorry to begin too early, Slackers, but I put through a reserve request and the library garnered most of them right away. I finished A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter in a couple of days since it is less than 200 pages. Bosh! It was not time well spent.

What I left out from the summary of Paz' analysis of love and eroticism are his catalogues of what they are not. They are not found in the libertine, nor the person who objectifies his love object desiring to possess that person, only to discover that this passion of "greed" turns the object into a person who subjugates the libertine into an object himself.

Such a person is Phillipe Dean, a Yale dropout (one of the reasons I selected the book knowing a couple myself) who is financially dependent on his father (again a reprise for me) and who believes that a mistress is a prerequisite of his grand tour of France. Dean is in his early twenties and his lust interest, Anne-Marie just out of her teens. Dean's debasement and abuse of Anne-Marie is not sexual, although there is plenty of the wanna-be voyeur in the story. His is a socio-economic humiliation. He craves her body while finding disgust in her teeth and breath; he transports her around French countryside chateaux and auberges in a rusty Delange but feigns not knowing the language when he visits her parents and eats in their kitchen. He marries her with full intent of deserting her and flying back to America.

Maybe one could look at the story from Anne-Marie's point of view and hope that the red flame of passion turned into the blue flame of love, but her motives too are financial, expecting an improvement in class and life style that Dean cannot pay for on his own. The reader has no sympathy or identification with either of them.

What is more disturbing is that the entire story is told by an unnamed narrator, who seems to be a Yale grad hobnobbing with the Northeastern blue bloods who emigrated to Paris to intermarry. The narrator, who could not possibly know Dean and Anne-Marie's itinerary let alone the couplings in there hotels, concedes: "I am inventing him. I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must always remember that."

Perhaps the most author-revealing quote is: "Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future. But there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change." (Unlike Paz, the only quote worth citing at length.)

Is this story then just a fantasy of the narrator, a projection of his frustrated attraction to his friend's wife Claude? Is it an embodiment of his alienation from France? Personally, I don't care. Even if I wasn't looking for lust as a manifestation of love, this novel would not appeal to me. Salter considered it his best work. I can't imagine reading his others (even though they are basically war stories.)

Hate to start the new year like this, but Slackers, I read the first couple of pages of Zola's Nana waiting for my annual mammogram at 7 this morning and I believe that one bodes well.

A Reference and Clarifyer: The Double Flame

The blog theme for 2011 is "lust." Providing we can find enough of it; otherwise we might add other deadly sins. But quite honestly, I am not looking for another year of sensational posturing like I encountered in the year of picaresque novels. Maybe I'm "looking for love in all the wrong places," because I am not added erotica, sado-mas themes nor romantic unrequited love stories. I want novels/biographies of people who loved passionately.

And so I decided to benchmark and establish criteria by resorting to Octavio Paz' literary criticism of love and eroticism, The Double Flame. His examples rely heavily on classical Greek, Latin and Renaissance Italian and Spanish masterpieces and he does not give laurels to any contemporary efforts. In fact, he quite succinctly echoes the observation some of the Slackers have made:

"The period we are living through is not sterile, even though serious damage has been done to artistic productions by the scourges of commercialism, profiteering, and publicity. Painting and the novel, for example, have been turned into products subject to fashion -- painting by means of the fetishism of the unique object, the novel by means of mass production ... Our time ... is simplistic, superficial, and merciless. Having fallen into the idolatry of ideological systems, our century has ended by worshiping Things. What place does love have in such a world?"

After that introduction to our pursuit of lustful love, here is Paz' definition of the double flame:

"According to the Dicionario de Autoridades, the flame is 'the most subtle part of fire, moving upward and rising itself above in the shape of a pyramid.' The original, primordial fire, sexuality, raises the red flame of eroticism, and this in turn raises and feeds another flame, tremulous and blue: the flame of love."

Love will by force provide wonderful tensions in the selected readings and the following quotes in essence become those characteristics I am looking for in the 2011 selections:

"In love, predestination and choice, objective and subjective, fate and freedom intersect. The realm of love is a space magnetized by encounter"

"Our flesh covets what our reason condemns."

"The mystery of the human condition lies in its freedom: it is both fall and flight. And therein resides the immense allure that love has for us. It does not offer a way of salvation; neither is it idolatry. It begins with the admiration of a person who is physically present, followed by excitement, and culminates in the passion that leads us to happiness or disaster. Love is a test that ennobles all of us, those who are happy and those who are wretched."

"Almost always, love manifests itself as a rupture or violation of the social order; it is a challenge to the customs and institutions of the community. A passion that, uniting the lovers, separates them from society."

"Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion."

"In all loves, even the most tragic, there is an instant of happiness that it is no exaggeration to call superhuman: it is a victory over time, a glimpse of the other side, of the there that is here, where nothing changes and everything that is, truly is."

"In love, everything is two and everything strives to be one ... The beloved is then both terra incognita and the house where we were born, what is unknown and what is recognized."

Like The Perfect Orgy's analysis of Madame Bovary and the components of a great, unforgettable novel, Paz' short reprise on the elements of love as found in literature should be a well-worn reference for serious readers. As I typed up these quotes, I was pulling off a blizzard of post-it notes from a volume that runs only 275 pages. His insights are poetic and as such capture the evasiveness of the most personal of human emotions.

Back on the Reservation

It was a hit! Everyone who came to book club last night loved Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues, the novel I read for the state of Washington for the 2009 blog theme. We had great discussions on the tension between alienation and assimilation and the need to preserve cultural heritage without demonizing the majority. We talked about how he advances plot seamlessly using dialogue and how much more readily we could suspend disbelief for the magical realism in this story as opposed to A Hundred Years of Solitude. I think we have tempted another person to join our group after she "audited" the get together last night. And everyone loved the Christmas cookies and went home with doggie bags. Here's hoping our selections for 2011 are all as rich.

Preview of 2011

Christmas week is not a time to still be dealing with wallpaper hangers and enormously heavy boxes of doors parked on the front porch. Compound that with book club here tonight and only one tree up if not decorated fully since I can't find the storage box with the smaller icicles in it. Blame the spring flood. At least the elves came during the lunar eclipse last night and cleaned off the table so I could start arranging the goodies for tonight.

Meanwhile, working with one of the Slackers to redecorate her home office, we digressed to plan the upcoming year's theme. Because it has been significantly absent from the plots of the stories the face-to-face group has selected, we decided "lust" would be appropriate and enjoyable ... see how vicariously middle aged women live. So, after this lengthy apologia, I admit to only being able to garner eight titles so far. Here they are, to be supplemented, I promise, next week with more of the same, or failing that, another deadly sin:

The Double Flame by Octavio Paz (I actually finished this book yesterday, hoping that it would clarify the lust them and distinguish it from sadistic erotica and bodice rippers and that it contained a lengthy bibliography pointing me to novels to add to the 2011 list. It met my expectations in the former but was completing lacking in the latter. A more detailed review come the New Year.)

A Sport and A Pastime by James Salter

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D H Lawrence

Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

The Pure and the Impure by Colette

The Lover by Marguerite Duras

Nana by Emile Zola

Possession by A S Byatt

Compelled Me to Inventory: Something Missing

The wallpapering was finished in the dining room, officially, yesterday with the sconces re-hung and the rug moved back in from the family room. As I began to reload the crystal cabinet and the silver chest, I had a strange Virgo-like need to write up a count of how many of each piece I have. Am I doing this to round out service sets? To know what I should be on the look out for on eBay? Or because I am spooked after reading Something Missing by Matthew Hicks?

This is the last of four books sent by Emily in my birthday box and like the other three, a good read. This is the story of an antisocial man, Martin Railsback who supplements his pitiful job at Starbucks with stealing from several residences on an on-going basis, in one case, for over nine years. Martin is compulsive in his research and requirements for becoming one of his “clients:” certain demographics and surroundings are paramount. In addition, he has strict standards for his own entry, surveillance and targeted items. He comes with a “shopping list” of groceries written in French, watching expiration dates and only taking a small number of items the home owners have in bulk. But he needs to make money besides being well fed so he photographs jewelry, china, silver and crystal to notice their lack of use, therefore, their likelihood of not being immediately missed.

Dicks structure is that of the all-knowing narrator, one who not only observes Martin in the minutest detail but describes what is going on in his thoughts. The logic and planning of his burglaries belie the image of the dumb criminal. He is no Cary Grant cat burglar though, bereft with phobias, misreading social situations and needing to rehearse all conversations that he cannot avoid in the first instance. Eventually, the story line develops this second layer – that what is missing is not the cache of luxury items but a piece of Martin’s personality.

Dicks brings this deficits much more into play in the second half of the book as Martin’s strategies to know his clients without ever feeling for them begins to fall apart: he is still in one house when the owners show up unexpectedly early; he encounters pets and children, two of his disqualifications for becoming a client; and most importantly, he begins to influence the behaviors of his clients by obliquely contacting them. He overhears a wife bemoaning never getting flowers and sends an anonymous note to the husband; he listens to a phone message that would expose a surprise birthday party and intervenes to ensure the wife in this case has time to delete the message and hide the gift.

As these near misses occur with more frequency, the reader wonders if it is inevitable that Martin is caught and undone. The reader fights with the balance of seeing his thefts as justified, harmless, and maybe done for a higher purpose, especially when Martin saves a client from attack. To become “Super Yegg” Martin finds himself reconnecting with a father he hasn’t seen in twenty years and dating.

Several blog reviews lately have commented on the author introducing into his work the self-disclosing aspects of the need to write, the search for an appropriate topic and voice, and the tension between the writer’s life experiences and fictionalized facts. It is the use of the all-knowing narrator that makes this book so “itchy.” In the about the author section at the back of the book, Dicks’ youthful peccadilloes are listed, his late-blooming straight career plus a disclaimer “that he is not, himself, a thief.” Why does that word “himself” bother me so much? Stopping the review now – forgot to write down how many cocktail forks I have.

Comfort Food – The Girl with No Shadow

This is the perfect time of year to read The Girl with No Shadow by Joanne Harris, the sequel to her better know story, Chocolat. I don’t recall how many years ago it was that I watched the movie version of Harris’ novel; all I remember in a haze of favorite things are the French chocolaterie, Juliet Binoche, Lena Olin and a young and gorgeous Johnny Depp. So it was somehow new and fresh to discover the overplot of magic and danger steeped in this book. Heretofore, I thought the allure of the chocolate bon bons was the addition of chili.

Since the movie, I have discovered the vast array of scented and spiced chocolate, finding Vosges bars with chili, hemp and best of all bacon. I even went so far as to buy candy molds shaped like pigs to try my hand at making bacon chocolates, only giving myself a mediocre “C” for my efforts. This kitchen magic alludes me.

But back to TGWNS. Harris narrates the story alternating chapters as told by Yanne, her pre-teen daughter Anouk and the mysterious Cyndi Lauper like Zozie. After some time on the run, Yanne ends up in Paris, on Montmartre in charge of a failing chocolaterie. She is trying to blend in to the environment and not draw attention to herself and her daughters by becoming average and shedding all vestiges of her magical powers. Flamboyant Zozie upsets these plans, hexing the shop into success and tempting Anouk to dabble in the black arts as a vehicle to combat school yard bullying.

Yanne’s engagement to a “plain vanilla” kind of man falls apart as her business becomes more profitable and she gains back her self-confidence. Her former lover also reappears and while she can weigh the relative worth of comfort and security over passion, her daughters want Roux back in their lives.

Zozie collects people. At first, she seems like another gypsy con artist or identity thief but there are those ominous charms on her bracelet, one for each life.

The author is telling a tale about writing a fiction of one’s life as it is lived. The main two female characters change their names so often their true selves seem buried too deep. These masks cover other events in their younger lives that are mightily being suppressed. The plot moves quickly over two months, from Halloween to Christmas, the time of year itself loaded with traditions and ancient beliefs. At the end of the story, Harris has sent a message that each of us not only has chosen our own family, but our own history and identity. That only through honesty, trust and originality can individuals find completeness in parents, children and lovers.

This is yet another of the perfect books that Emily sent me for my birthday. I hope when she visits, she will rummage through my book case and borrow as many as catch her eye.

Junk Food versus Gourmet

I can't believe it's almost the end of the year (except for maybe the horrifically cold temperatures and howling winds) and I have to acknowledge the failure of the 2010 theme of picaresque novels and work my brain to find something more fruitful for next year. In the meantime, I have been reading a rag-tag assortment of books. When in doubt, or in a lusty mood, a revert to J. D. Robb and her "In Death" series. The latest is Indulgence in Death which I just now finished. Not one of her better ones, terribly formulaic, making its predictability not comforting but contrived. This series is set in the not too distant future in NYC after a class war. Yet social strata survive and villains abound. Normally, I adore the release Eve Dallas and Rourke find in each other and the fleshing out of the minor characters, Eve's friends on and off the force, but they seemed very superficial in this installment. The bad guys are over-indulged inherited-it-all thrill seekers and the concluding chapters are now where near as dangerous as other installments. Had I time enough and audience, it would be a scholarly challenge to decode Robb's stock format with that of Dick Francis.

But Robb attracts me like potato chips. I swear off them several times a month, only to succumb when I find a new bag in the cupboard.

What has proven again to be an unexpected delight is to discover the intrigue, wonder, and enjoyment of those books my Emily sent me for my birthday. As I opened another one and found another charming note from her, I must conclude that she has a much better sense for good contemporary literature than my book club members do. I loved Zafon and now have discovered Seldon Edward's The Little Book. Where is the buzz on this book? Here is a well-educated author who spent decades researching and polishing his manuscript to turn it into an engaging novel of time traveling to Vienna in 1897.

Unlike the book club's November selection, A Short History of Women, here is a book where both sexes are strong, loving and supporting each other in a successive generations of family and friends. Place and time are integral. Supporting characters play six degrees of separation with well known figures -- Mahler, Freud, WWII French resistance and 19th Century Boston Brahmins -- all intermingling. Actually, I think this is the first time travel book I've read, but to call it that is to do it injustice. Edwards counterpoints Freud's theories against the generational tensions between fathers and sons and contradicts his premises with strong female heroines.

The main characters are unforgettable: Weezie, Wheeler, Dilly and the Haze. When the author admits in his afterword that he developed them over decades of polishing, the reader believes him since all are so multi-dimensional and fraught with human concerns.

As much as I liked Zafon's Barcelona, Edwards' Vienna is more familiar to me. My visit was in 1976, an Olympic year and a time when early OPEC was holding its first meetings. I toured St Stephens, the Imperial Gardens, ate my schlagg and then returned to my hotel to watch international sports with young Arabs. Vienna was surreal even then.

There are still two Emily books next to my bed and the ever present daunting tome of Drood. Holiday busywork will impede my efforts to close 2010 with a flurry of wintertime reading and a new assignment at work has expressed itself as "cut back on the blog and write what we need." But The Little Book is a solid "A" and one that I will pass along to my Slackers.

The Possessed: The Angel’s Game

The Angel’s Game is the second in a four part series of books by Carlos Ruiz Zafon set in Barcelona and having as the theme, the importance and lives of books. The Shadow of the Wind is the first in the series but this volume predates its events, although it does introduce Senor Sempere’s bookstore and the Cemetery of Lost Books.

Here the main character is David Martin. When the story begins, he is a lowly , orphaned copy boy for a second-rate newspaper, where he gets the chance to fill in the back page with lurid crime fiction. Thus is born a successful writing career and the jealousy of his fellow workers. David is fired and begins to compose similar hack stories for a couple of sleazy publishers. His talents are nonetheless appreciated by one Andreas Corelli who makes him an offer he can’t refuse.

It was last week when I had just started reading TAG right after I was talking to a co-worker about losing and reclaiming one’s faith and the incomprehensibility of celebrity Scientologists, when off-handily joked that either of us should have established our own religion. The conversation/jesting ended and I returned to the book, only to have a serendipitous start to see that was the nature of the book Corelli wanted Martin to write – one that explored the human needs for religion and would proffer a new variation on the theme. Like Robert Johnson at his crossroads (and anticipating a rereading of Reservation Blues for book club next month) menacing Corelli, despite his angel lapel pin, is demonic.

Thus spake Corelli: “Are you not tempted to create a story for which men and women would live and die, for which they would be capable of killing and allowing themselves to be killed, or sacrificing and condemning themselves, of handling over their souls? What greater challenge for your career than to create a story so powerful that it transcends fiction and becomes revealed truth?”

And continuing his bargain: “What I want from you is the form, not the content. The content is always the same and has been in place since human life began. It’s engraved in your heart with a serial number. What I want you to do is find an intelligent and seductive way of answering the questions we ask ourselves, and you should do so using your own reading of the human soul, putting into practice your art and your profession. I want you to bring me a narrative that awakens the soul.

The book is much more occult than TSOTW and the dangers are otherworldly making the pace page-turning. But below the dangers, intrigue and threatening characters, Zafon is himself allured into writing an unforgettable book, one that teaches universal moral/religious principles be observing the actions and thoughts of men. In addition to Martin’s doubts and despairs, Zafon postures the research librarian Eulalia and the elder Sempere as two counterpoints to institutionalized dogma, believing in the life and nobility of ideas as housed in books.

Corelli, publisher of a firm named Lux Aeterna, like all memorable devils is most like the fallen archangel Lucifer from Paradise Lost. But his insights about “true religion” are not Miltonian. Rather than read like commentary on jihadists: “The first step for believing passionately is fear. Fear of losing our identity, our life, our status, or our beliefs. Fear is the gunpowder and hatred is the fuse. Dogma, the final ingredient is only a lighted match.”

Given the overload of witches, ghosts, haunted houses and gloomy, polluted Barcelona in the early 20^th Century, it seems inevitable that Zafon’s novel, like Dan Brown, will be adapted to the screen. It will be interesting to see how the demons of Hollywood and Vine adapt a story that is not anti-Christian and one that advances the life redeeming virtues of the written word.

The Importance of an Unforgettable Book – The Shadow of the Wind

In some ways, belonging to a book club has exacerbated my distrust of any novel that makes its way onto the New York Times best seller list (maybe with the wonderful exception of stumbling on The Monster of Florence last year). When the club members recommend those books they have either seen reviewed in the latest NYT’s Sunday insert or those prominently displayed by the library check out desk in the seven-day loan case, I mentally quiver, dreading another couple of days of wasted time.

So there I was delving further into my being relived youth, reconstructing Edwin Drood’s disappearance last week when I decided laying a four pound, 800 page tome on my stomach while reading in bed was not the most comfortable thing to do. I reached into the massive pending bill on the “unread” and picked up a lighter paperback, The Shadow of the Wind, that Bill’s Emily sent me in my goodie box of birthday presents. I opened it, and surprise, out fluttered Emily’s notepaper with her glowing, insightful recommendation. I started reading, and like her and her mother, was hooked.

I was not familiar with the author, Carlos Ruiz Zafon. WIKI mentions him as a writer of children’s literature with this story being his first venture into a genre that is part Great Expectations, part murder mystery/crime thriller, and most of all, a paean to loving books. Several of the books I have blogged on have been layered with the writer’s writing about writing. Zafon writes about reading. What an instantaneous match for a book devourer.

Zafron relishes independent book stores, sellers who purchase estate libraries, and readers who cherish the first book that appealed to them with all the ardor and bliss of first love. Daniel, the protagonist, son of a bookseller, discovers his favorite book, The Shadow of the Wind, in the cemetery of forgotten books. Like me, he then feels compelled to read everything else written by its author Julian Carax, a writer who seems to be not only out of print but one whose novels are relentlessly being destroyed. Set in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and WWII, the reader first suspects there might be something politically dangerous in Carax’s stories, drawing the wrath of military censorship. Soon a mysterious dark and threatening person approaches Daniel to buy the book. He hides it back in the cemetery’s winding corridors.

Although most of the back story deals with Carax’s early life, friends, school, and family, and how his time and place factors in the stories he wrote, Daniel’s quest to discovery the author’s past exposes him to corrupt policemen, disowning families, and friendships deteriorating into hatreds. Daniel is joined in his pursuit by a colorful character, Fermin de Torres. Echoes of Cervantes, Dickens and Flaubert, as well as more contemporary Spanish-speaking writers pepper almost every page. Time and place is reemphasized as Zafon includes a map to make a walking tour of the places in Barcelona depicted in the book.

Emily, I too loved the book and it was like finding it on a shelf of unappreciated novels. I loved the cross generational parallels of the story, the importance placed on family and friends, despite their dysfunctionality and tensions (how uniquely un-American). I will stop at the library tonight to pick up Zafon’s second , The Angel’s Game, which is a prequel to TSOTW, and the second in what will be a four part series.

Edwin Drood Ascendant Over Emma Bovary

When my Slacker fellow English major got all atwitter about my discovery of Llosa’s The Perfect Orgy and my finally reading Madame Bovary, I too fell into the nostalgia of reliving thesis topics and decided to revisit The Mystery of Edwin Drood and two of the more recent adaptations of the story: The Last Dickens and Drood.

First I reread Dickens after a hiatus of … no I don’t think I want to admit how many decades it’s been contemplated writing my magnum opus on it instead of sitting for comps, which is what I eventually ended up doing anyway. Because this novel is not capping off a course wherein I read oodles of Dickens, I have lost my sense of where it actually might rank against Boz’ masterpieces. In all honesty, on this reading, I found it pale. I don’t mean to diminish its dark themes, but more to comment on my not considering it a weighty work.

For a relatively new genre of murder mysteries, I have to expect that Dickens would not make the crime or the suspects transparent or even readily deduced. Jasper is villainous but is he the arch-criminal, acting alone only motivated by jealousy unleashed by opium. Nor am I comfortable with an interpretation that treats Drood as a polemic against drug addiction, as it is unjust to view Oliver Twist as a diatribe against child labor. These two scourges of the London poor are critically important time and place settings, but it is the characters that make Dickens unforgettable.

Like Elizabethan dramatists, Dickens overloads his novels with quirky supporting characters to make his crisply evil or tragic stars seem more believable when aligned next two folk an audience recognizes from daily living. With an unfinished story, it is almost impossible to decide which of these outer constellation characters will assume meteoric importance in the denouement.

And so I moved on to Matthew Pearl’s The Last Dickens. Like previous two novels about Holmes/Emerson/Longfellow and Poe, Pearl writes stories set in the 1800s as though he is a contemporaneous observer. As historical fiction, they are steeped in accuracy and these facts make the creative assumptions highly plausible.

Pearl uses his main characters, publisher James Osgood and bookkeeper Rebecca Sand as detectives attempting to find the missing six installments in Dickens estate. Motivating Osgood is the benefit to accrue to his company struggling against the nefarious Harper brothers and their cut-throat “bookaneers.” Another layer is added in having Drood based on true crime and the real world criminals intent on the ending never being made known.

It is an excellent book and all the minor players, be they based on actual people or literary devices, are tidied up at the end, an ending that is a highly-visual, fast-paced page turner.

Now I move on to Drood, a tome of about 700 pages that starts off splendidly, as a true story being retold by Wilkie Collins. I would have continued reading this story that immediately captured my interest, but for not wanting to lug a four pound book to read during my lunch breaks at work … TLD runs just under 400 pages and is much more portable. Already several of the sections found in Drood recur as facts and background in Pearl’s book, so it will be like reading the different version of weekly events from the perspective of my son and his girlfriend’s blogs.

Another Llosa -- The Way to Paradise

I don't think I would have finished this novel except that it read too much like my second passion after murder mysteries, that being biographies. Llosa alternates chapters between the lives of painter Paul Gauguin and his maternal grandmother Flora Tristan, famous in her own right as one of the first female socialists in France in the mid 1800s.

Both are rebels; are less than perfect parents; are possessed with wanderlust and a cause to be noted for something completely different than the prevailing mores of their generations; have painful diseases in middle age that results in their addiction to opiates.

Llosa uses many structural devices to move the story along -- changing the intervention and commentary of the narrator, especially in Flora's story and here too juxtaposing her current travels with those when she returned to Peru to try to get a piece of her family's wealth. His talents as a writer are transparent to the strong lives of the two characters and he rarely intrudes with judgments or any moralistic interpretations. As a result, the novel reads more like a documentary and the only quote worth ruminating on is only 40 pages or so from the ending when Gauguin is thinking back on those people who influenced his art. Recalling a Turkish artist, philosopher and theologian whom he read in his early career, Mani Velibi-Zumbul-Zadi: "... Color, according to him, was something deeper and more subjective than could be found in the natural world. It was a manifestation of human sentiments, beliefs, fantasies. All the spirituality of an age, and all its ... angels and demons were expressed in the values given to different colors, and the way color was used. That was why real artists shouldn't feel themselves bound to literal representation when faced with the natural world ... It was their obligation to use colors in accordance with their innermost compulsions, or simply their private whim ... " As an aspiring mercenary decorator, I recognized the need to express my feelings in colors and patterns that spoke primarily to me but also elicited a sense of contemporary style.

I also want to extend this definition of an artist's use of color to a writer's use of words. Palinuro in Mexico is a novel length poem, lush with startling similes and metaphors that would otherwise, and maybe still is, scandalous in its topics. More to come on that one.

Like all good biographies, the six degrees of separation comes into play as Flora encounters Karl Marx and Gauguin interacts with contemporary Impressionists.

Suggestible, With Proclivities – Emma Bovary

I finished Madame Bovary yesterday but gave myself a night to sleep on it, to ensure that I would write a review that might say something new after Llosa’s seminal criticism and that might also appeal to that Slacker member who regards the novel as her favorite. (I think my favorite novel from school days is Weathering Heights, a book I found on rereading for book club continued to resonate with me.)

Madame Bovary seemed almost a second reading after the thorough analysis found in The Perfect Orgy. With large sections quoted therein, I plot and progress of the story were familiar and yet captivating. Despite all of Llosa’s dissections of narration, time and grammar, I was oblivious to them as the story itself seduced me, in parallel with Emma’s own dalliances.

To me, Emma resounded with the echo of Paradise Lost. Emma is Eve. Not the happy creative sprite found in Mark Twain’s Diaries but one much more classically Old Testament. She was eminently susceptible to the sweet talk of the Serpent as personified first in Rodolphe and later in L’Heureux. Both of these men saw Emma as a woman to not such much corrupt as benefit from.

Although fantasizing about an alternate life of passion, she did not acting on it until Rodolphe decided to have her. Unlike the visual allure of the ball and the mental reveries of being a heroic, cherished fictionalized heroine, Rodolphe appealed to her through her sense of hearing. He sweet talked her over the hawking of the merchants and the absurdity of country fair prizes. He then made her life less sedentary by getting her out riding and away from her house. By nature, she was a thrill seeker and too readily became another in a line of Rodolphe’s conquests.

In her subsequent affair, Leon was the prime mover, again the one making the decision to seduce her. These were not relationships born of love or mutual lust. Emma was prey. Flaubert wrote beautifully on the eternal art of seduction but the story was larger: one that essentially contrasted comfort with boredom as they are confused in Emma’s mind. Her husband Charles was boring to her because his job took him away for most of each day, brought him home too exhausted to converse with her, and was so satisfied with his wife and child that he could not suspect anything intruding into his Eden.

L’Heureux was the most viperous of all Emma’s temptations. He tapped not into lust but into the guileless simplicity in her character. Living with boredom between affairs and designing a stage on which to perform her life, Emma compulsively redecorated the house and succumbed to Parisian styles; it was finances rather than flirtations that was her final fall.

A novel this old has to attract and mean something to a contemporary reader, without being deconstructed into meaninglessness. And so the story, Emma, and the other characters have to be identifiable in current society. The universality of marital unfaithfulness seems tawdry when screamed from today’s mass media yet the scandal sticks more to the fallen woman, even today. Emma was a woman alone. She had no mother, no close female friends, no neighbors to gossip with. Her reality was never tested; her fantasy raced unreined.

The men in the novel were engaged in the community and more importantly had attainable if challenging goals and plans. Homais, the pharmacist eventually got his Legion of Honor; L’Heureux expanded his usurious store into extensive property holdings and transportation routes. Leon post-Emma finished his schooling, became gainfully employed and married well.

Emma’s goals were hallucinations of intense rapture, goals that even when occasionally attained self-destructed when she supported their continuation by recreating the home life comforts she was otherwise oblivious to.

Widowed and impoverished Charles arose as the hero of the story. He was the one, true to his milieu more than his religion or his family, who created a peaceable home, tolerating Emma’s highs and lows as an undiagnosed manic-depressive. His tolerance and conformance made an environment that was like a conservatory, but one that Emma regarded as too confining for an exotic flower. Never did she realized that when Rodolphe seduced her during the award for best manure was being given to a local farmer, that she was being given the same line of “compost.” She never could appreciate the comfort of the predictable, ye boring.

Flaubert's language is perfect as exhaustively discussed by Llosa. Two quotes are my favorites. The first occurring shortly after the birth of her daughter condenses the story's entire theme: "A man is free, at least -- free to range the passions and the world, to surmount obstacles, to taste the rarest pleasures. Whereas a woman is continually thwarted. Inert, compliant, she has to struggle against her physical weakness and legal subjection. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat, quivers with every breeze: there is always a desire that entices, always a convention that restrains."

The other quote, that despite illustrating Flaubert's low opinion of the Catholic Church, I find to be the sexiest lines in the novel, at Emma's Extreme Unction: "First he anointed her eyes, once so covetous of all earthly luxuries; then her nostrils, so gluttonous of caressing breezes and amorous scents; then her mouth, so prompt to lie, so defiant in pride, so loud in lust; then her hands, that had thrilled to voluptuous contacts; and finally the soles of her feet, once so swift when she had hastened to slake her desires, and now never to walk again"

Should This Be My Last Llosa -- Aunt Julia and the Script-Writer

I double checked to see where this novel fell in the chronological order of Llosa's books because it reads like an author who has not yet discovered his forte. Thinking about how to describe it last night, I thought of a clothes line. Conveniently, Llosa can write a series of short unrelated vignettes (the wash) and just string them together by having the narrator and other main character work in a radio station writing news and soap operas, respectively. The script-writer is named Pedro Camacho and I guess this was one of Llosa's favorites as he mentions him in The Language of Passion. However, Pedro is not an unforgettable character per se, only through the clever tales he tells.

Which brings up my main problem with the book ... specifically, all the mini-stories scattered herein have practically no dialogue in them. Now, how can they be produced for radio without characters talking through the plot?

In addition, the novel is supposed to be hilariously funny. One convection Llosa uses is to have the characters from one soap opera move into another and those who have met untimely death or accidents return in other scenes resurrected and in full health but with slightly different careers. Maybe as a male, Llosa never spent his sick days watching American soap operas when drugged up with anti-histamines so the stories always got mixed up in the viewer's (my) mind.

The laundry line that is used as the device to support the short stories is Mario's crush on his aunt who is fourteen years or so older than him and divorced. (I just flipped over to Wiki again and this is extremely autobiographical as Llosa married his maternal uncle's sister-in-law when he was 19 and she ten years older.) Llosa recounts the scandal this brought on his family and the funniest part of the book is their traveling through the countryside trying to find a magistrate willing to break the law and marry an underage man.

After nineteen chapters of this unrequited courtship, elopement and setting up a household in Paris, chapter twenty begins: "The marriage to Aunt Julia was really a success and it lasted a good bit longer than all the parents and even herself feared, wished, or predicted: eight years."
With that Llosa dispenses with her without any hint of why they broke up or what the intervening years meant to him. As dismissive as he is to his ex-wife, Pedro reemerges when Mario returns to Peru for his annual visit as an office boy / errand runner for a failing scandal sheet newspaper. Pedro does not remember him, Lima is crowded with people from the country drawn to scant opportunity in the city, oh and by the way, Mario is married now to his cousin. Shades of 100 Years' incest?

I only have one more Llosa book in my pile, the one about Gaughin and his grandmother, and when I started it, it didn't grab me. Maybe his masterpiece is Conversations in the Cathedral and I should at least skim through it, but I think I am off South American literature for a while. Started Madame Bovary based on Llosa's fantastic critique of it and to meet my pledge to one of the Slackers who considers it her favorite book. It is like deja vu reading it because Llosa quoted it so extensively. So maybe like reliving her graduate school high points, I will go back to finish Edwin Drood and the recent book that writes an ending for it.

Political Analysis Where I Least Expected It -- The Language of Passion

Still skirting around the novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, I found another one of his books of nonfiction; this one a collection of op ed pieces published in a Spanish newspaper in the 1990's -- The Language of Passion. (I love the Latin romance of this man who gives most of his books titillating titles this one, The Perpetual Orgy, The Bad Girl, The Way to Paradise, and then composes something completely unexpected and non-erotic.)

There are 46 essays in the book, covering a wide swath of then-contemporary issues. Many are Llosa's paeans to various artists, from Frida Kahlo to Bob Marley to Monet. His opinions on artists and other public figures that he holds in lesser regard are never scathing attacks, but well-thought critiques (except maybe in the case of George Soros, who in my opinion, deserves all this and more.) But there were three themes that appealed to me most: his continuing appreciation for literary criticism, his acknowledgment of the place of unwavering absolutism of all religions, and, unexpectedly, political analysis much more on point than what I encountered in P. J. O'Rourke's book.

First the criticism. In an article called Postmodernism and Frivolity, Llosa acknowledges the importance of Lionel Trilling. He concludes: "This generation regarded literature as a perfect testament to the ideas, myths, beliefs, and dreams that make society work, and glimpsed in literature the secret frustrations and impulses that explain individual conduct." And again to quote a sentence that sums up my drive to read on end: "... grew out of deep and sometimes heartrending experiences and real human sacrifices, and their true valuation must be decided not from the lectern but from the private and concentrated intimacy of reading, and must be measured by the effects and repercussions of reading on the private life of the reader."

In another essay, The Death of the Great Writer, I found another argument for my frustration with my book club's selections: " the book, stripped of its status as religious or mythical object, becomes a mere good at the mercy of the frenetic ups and downs ... of supply and demand ... the effect ... is the banalization of literature, since it counts now only as a product of immediate consumption, an ephemeral entertainment, or a source of information that expires as soon as it appears." And continuing, referring to the man who predicted all this would happen: "... we have reached level of grim degradation best anticipated by Tocqueville: the era of writers who 'prefer success to glory.'"

Llosa finds deconstructionism an anathema. He extols literature as the mental food of a small slice of society to: "... return to its former rigor, good prose, inventiveness, ideas, persuasive illusions, freedom and audacities that are notable for their absence in the great majority of books that now usurp the title of literature."

On to politics and government. In the piece called The Hour of the Charlatans, Llosa deals with the virtual reality created for the public by the mass media. "Real world events can no longer be objective. Their truth and ontological consistency are undermined from the start by the corrosive process of their projection as the manipulated and falsified images of virtual reality; these are the only images admissible and comprehensible to a humanity tamed by the media fantasy ... Besides abolishing history, television 'news' also vanquishes time, since it eliminates all critical perspective on what is happening: the broadcasts occur at the same time as the events ... and these events last no longer than the fleeting instant in which they are enunciated, then disappear, swept away by others which in turn are annihilated ... This vertiginous denaturalization of the actual world has resulted, purely and simply, in its evaporation and in its replacement by the truth of media-created fiction."

Llosa not only expands one's knowledge of South American regimes, but writes cogently on the impact of immigration in all countries, on his changing expectations of Israeli peace, and on the continuing sexual revolution, particularly when the advance of women runs smack-dab against "cultural" practices and religious dogma.

Llosa might have won the Nobel prize for literature, but his breadth of talents cannot be misconstrued to think that it is merely in fiction that he excels. I am almost done with Aunt Julia, but I'd rather think with Mario than laugh with him.

Election Reading: P. J. O'Rourke

To get in the mood for Tuesday, I read Don't Vote It Only Encourages the Bastards by P. J. O'Rourke. It got a fairly decent review in the New York Times a week or so ago, but I should have picked up on a populist innuendo when it was readily available from the library, despite being a recently published book.

I never read Parliament of Whores, nor any of PJOR's ouevre. Maybe I would type a couple of quotes for this review, had I not lent it to the man who sits next to me at work. He is a fan of Dave Berry and to some extent that is what this book is, an exclusively political, shallow opining of being a Conservative. I wanted something much more substantive and more analytical. Sound bites I can get on "harangue" TV. Putting them between the covers instead of on the screen does not add weight to the zingers.

I loved going to the Legislative Correspondent Association's annual show, the New York equivalent of Capitol Steps, and laughed raucously at satire jabbing both the Democrats and Republicans. PJOR can laugh at them all and probably at himself as well, but his audience is neither broad-based nor scholarly. The fellow next to me at work will read it and vote the bastards out but the guys down the aisle would never crack the binding.

Another Ellory: A Simple Act of Violence

Well, this is my third Ellory and alternating chapters with a stream of consciousness insight is definitely his signature style. This one would rank third of those I've finished, putting Anniversary Man first, A Quiet Belief in Angels second, and then A Simple Act of Violence.

ASAOV is overloaded with CIA intrigue from the Nicaragua/Oliver North drug financing era. In this mystery, the commentary chapters are from the major suspect in a string of murders in Washington DC. Perpetuating the bomb-fogging and misdirection of the CIA, John Robey is clearly guilty of killing his fellow agent and girlfriend. The others, well, you're not so sure. The detective, Miller, is coming back from an internal affairs investigation, cynical and unsure of whether he wants to continue as a cop. The frustration of these murders and the innumerable dead ends and interference from the FBI, judiciary, etc., don't seem to tip him one way or another by the end of the book.

Ellory is British and it is amazing how right on he is in describing DC, middle America and NYC. This is the last of his books in our library network, so back to Llosa and Madame Bovary.

The Style of R. J. Ellory

Found another marvelous murder mystery write whose stories I am compulsively reading: R. J. Ellory. The first of his I finished is A Quiet Belief in Angels. Ellory alternates stream of consciousness chapters exploring the thoughts of a main character with ones advancing the chronology of the plot. This format is also used in his book, A Simple Act of Violence, which I expect to finish later today and append to this blog post.

In Quiet Belief we follow the life of Joseph Vaughan beginning grammar school in rural Georgia where young girls from his classes are being brutally killed. Joseph is an observant smart boy who is encouraged to write by his teacher; he is also a champion of the community as he organizes a group of his peers, the Guardians, to protect the girls from attack. The story is set against the threats and engagements of World War 11 and depicts the fears and biases of his town as they citizens and law suspect a local rich German as the murderer.


Despite his heroics and talents, Joseph leads the life of Job, coming under suspicions himself as the murders continue even after the German's suicide, he loses his wife and unborn child in a tragic accident, he moves to Brooklyn to pursue his hopes to be an author and while he has an acclaimed first novel, his new love is killed similar to those from Georgia, and once again his is the main suspect. He goes to trial and is convicted and sent to Auburn. There after a decade of imprisonment, he begins to write again, penning A Quiet Belief in Angels, a recapitulation of the events of his life leading up to his conviction. His case is appealed, he is released and returns to Georgia to find the killer. And no, I am not going to divulge the ending.

What I liked about this book so much are three things: first, like Stansberry's The Confession, the stream of consciousness reflections are humanly ambiguous enough that Joseph himself remains a possible suspect despite his early age when the serial murders began. However these ruminations are much more poetic than the self-aggrandizing bravado of Stansberry's forensic psychologist. Second, Ellory's depiction of life in prison is much more frightening than Hugo's Last Day of a Condemned Man. Hugo is writing for prison reform and his book is a polemic of the societal effects of isolation of criminals versus their rehabilitation. Ellory, a former convict himself, writes from personal experience. He does not dwell on inmate on inmate brutality; he writes about the grinding down of the spirit and the soul. Finally, like The Anniversary Man, the writing has a wonderful fast pace, the plot twists and the words are lyrical.

Who Cares Who Killed Palomino Molero

I’m sorry Nobel Prize winner Llosa. This murder mystery would not even be nominated for an Edgar. It appears to be an exercise in a genre done for a lark or to use that type of story to continue your theme of corruption in the military and government. The local policemen are portrayed as buffoons, even the lieutenant who majestically seems to intuit the motive and criminal. Townspeople are even more stereotypical, frightened of strangers, seeing intrigue and plots beyond facts staring them in the face. The book is so short, it does not merit an analysis of structural devices or the use of language. I hope I find one of your novels I like. I don’t want to end up like that woman in the elevator yesterday who when I asked her which of your books she liked the best after she noticed me carrying The Perpetual Orgy to the library, said she didn’t like then at all … her husband did.

Though I Was Easing into LLosa

When someone wins a Nobel Prize for literature and I haven’t read his works, I attempt to make up this deficit. Rushing to Wiki to skim through the titles and themes of his oeuvre, I decided that novels of South American politics were not something I wanted to start with, especially with rereading A Hundred Years of Solitude for book club this month. So, I reserved several volumes to ease myself into Mario Vargas Llosa’s world.

I couldn’t have selected a more atypical and challenging beginning than The Perfect Orgy. Not to be confused with a topic like Isabel Allende’s Aphrodite, this book reads like a PhD thesis on the structure and technique Flaubert employed in writing Madame Bovary and the novel’s subsequent influence on other authors.

The book is divided into three major sections. The first is Llosa’s apologia for why he loves Emma Bovary so much, both as an unforgettable literary character and as a respite for his personal throes. Part Two has two subdivisions: Pen Man, is a series of questions and answers that investigates possible story sources and events in Flaubert’s life that influenced the content; and the much more analytical, parsing of the structure, The Added Element. Replicating most of the subtitles herein best gives an idea about the comprehensiveness and intelligence Llosa displays:
Things humanized and human beings turned into things
A binary world, including money and love and a masculinized Emma
The use of time – singular or specific, circular or repetitious, immobile or plastic eternity, and imaginary time
Variations on the narrator – the plural, omniscient, and singular-character
The innovative use of italics and the creation of style indirect libre

Finally in Part Three, Llosa acknowledges Madame Bovary as the First Modern Novel, for it containing the first anti-hero, the first use of interior monologue, and the first recognition that non-extreme topics/people are valid subjects.

This book should be a contemporary bible for literary critics. It made me realize that all my attempts to uplift book club discussions are still rather rudimentary and sophomoric. When one of the Slackers was over yesterday afternoon, the woman who wrote two mini-theses in graduate school on style including one on the use of circular time in comedy, I offered to lend her the book, renew it if necessary to make her feel like a fully mentally engaged student again. I told her that even though I am almost finished with my second reading of A Hundred Years of Solitude, I know now I have completely overlooked the role of the narrator and the construct of time advancing plot.

I certainly will expect Llosa to use such understructure in his novels and will aggressively try to spot them. I have started two other of his novels: a parallel fictionalized biography of Paul Gauguin and his grandmother (again a title that seduced me, The Way to Paradise) and a much more reader-friendly murder mystery, Who Killed Palomino Molero? Perhaps these two are not substantial enough to evidence a Bovary-like composition, but I will more consciously look for that.

Deadline Reading

I did it: I finished both of the murder mysteries that the main library gave me only seven days to read.

First finished was the Man Who Never Returned by Peter Quinn. I vaguely remember seeing a review in the New York Times book review and can’t remember whether it was favorable or not. It is however steeped in New York State history – a fictionalized attempt to solve the case of a missing person, namely Judge Crater who disappeared from the streets of NYC in 1930. Quinn is himself a former speech writer for two NY governors and fascinated by this legend through his father’s interest in the case.

The solution proposed by Quinn is both fantastical and possible, although once-removing the perpetrator from the likely male suspect to his daughter is a stretch. Quinn employees his series detective, Fin Dunne, to reconstruct the crime for a sensational headline in a new magazine to be first published twenty-five years after the disappearance of Crater.

Quinn introduces each chapter with a quote from Dante and forces his supporting characters to connect the literary reference to the progress of the investigation. It does not work. The tension and twists and political corruption is not Infernal. Quinn also intrudes too much in the story line by having his professional characters mock their Jesuit and Ursuline education, all the while evoking the talents of an author who must have been similarly well-trained.

The story is visual enough to imagine it being readily converted to a screenplay, but it reads as if it is slightly modified/plagiarized first hand police reports and adaptations of Depression era scandal sheets.

Much better and page turning is R. J. Ellroy’s The Anniversary Man. I don’t know how a book becomes a nominee for an Edgar or other murder mystery award but this should be on someone’s short list of candidates. From the introduction where Ellroy uses stream of consciousness to delve into mass murderer survivor John Costello’s mind and his succinct depiction of Costello’s life before the attack, the words sing off the page:

“ … Jersey City … always the smell of the Hudson; place looked like a fistfight, even on a Sunday morning when most of the Irish and Italians were dressed up for church … Costello’s father … standing out front of The Connemara diner – named after the mountains where his ancestors fished … and hauled their catch home after dusklight, and lit fires and told tales and sang songs that sounded like history before the first verse was done.”

Costello’s behaviors to cope with surviving are near psychotic. He has worked for over twenty years as a researcher for a NYC newspaper where he is quick to pick up a pattern underlying several seemingly unrelated murders of teenagers. He convinces his editor to draft a story showing that these crimes are re-enactments of ones from convicted mass murderers.

Ray Irving, the detective investigating one of these murders, leads an uncanny parallel life to Costello’s: alone after the death of his sweetheart, totally consumed by the work he does, a creature of habit in terms of where and what he eats and how little socializing he engages in. Seventeen people are murdered over the course of five or six months as the complicated relationship and suspicions between Irving, Costello and his editor Karen Langley play out. The tension of these relationships is almost as raw edged as the replication of the murders.

Here is a story with less apologia; the author knows he is mining true crime and using it to tell his story but it is not as contrived nor apparent as Quinn’s effort. As I raced through the last few chapters of a book almost 400 pages long, I was reverting to childhood postures of security, my shawl snuggled under my nose to be safe from the danger.

Irving may be the crime solver but it is Costello’s book. Costello’s terror-caused view of humanity and the inability to understand the motives of a mass murderer make the story all the more scary and real. His ability to live with the first hand knowledge of violence and its aftermath is a wonderful counterpoint to the more typical cop jaundiced distancing from the crime scenes’ victims.

Need to bump Ellroy up on my must read list. See already I am starting my 2011 list to read broadly and then everything written by a captivating writer. Ellroy fits the bill.

Quail in Rose Petals

Only have a couple of chapters left to go on my effort to reread One Hundred Years of Solitude for book club by the end of the month. Then, Mario Vargas Llosa goes and wins the Nobel Prize, first South American since Gabi and I decide I have to read him before the next get together as well. Checked out the availability of his books on the Internet catalog and saw that the main library downtown had a couple and walked there noon time on Friday. Alas, the ones I wanted were gone already, here with me thinking inner city borrowers were not likely to take out these novels despite the press. So I wandered over to the DVD section. For an affiliation of several libraries in two counties, each seems to have a wide berth in how it chooses to sort movie titles. At my library, everything is alphabetical by title, with only two small shelves dedicated to family night suitable viewing and staff favorites. At the main branch, all foreign made movies are sorted out separately. Strange though, they only stock the sleeves on the shelves and you have to get the actual disks at the check out counter. And you only get them for four days as contrasted to a week here in the suburbs.

So, I took out two foreign films: Like Water for Chocolate, in keeping with the Hispanic theme I have going, and Gabrielle, a French story set at the turn of the Century. First LWFC.

If I had a private stock of DVDs, I would add this to my make believe collection of favorite movies, right up there with Chocolat and Love in the Time of Cholera. Like the latter, this story is about first love. The story begins at a ranch in Mexico at the time of the last revolution. A woman gives birth to her third daughter, the daughter marked by tradition to remain an old maid, taking care of her into her old age. The father dies shortly after the birth of Tita when his friends tease him about not making sons and go to far telling him his second daughter is not his, thereafter succumbing to a heart attack. The girls live a quasi-idyllic life, except for the shrew that is their mother. When Tita is about sixteen, handsome Pedro falls in love with her. He is thwarted by Tita's mother who insists her fate as caretaker is sealed by tradition and Pedro marries the oldest sister only to be close to Tita.

Pedro is a cautious person who one day gives Tita a gorgeous bouquet of roses. Her mother grabs them from her and Tita uses them to make a feast worthy of Isabelle Allende's orgies: quail in rose petal sauce. All around the table, the family succumbs to the sensuality of a perfect sensory overload meal. The middle daughter, titillated enough to need a cold shower, runs off to join the guerrillas after they set fire to the bathhouse. Pedro and his wife and young son are banished to Texas. Life goes on, eventually Tita, like her counterpart in LITTOC, marries her physician. Decades later at the wedding of her niece, after the death of Pedro's wife, they become lovers, dying in the actual flames of their passion. Wow, what a story.

I've figured out that I love movies about unrequited love, love that lasts for years even through separations and "other lives." I also like stories where food is erotic. Chocolat fits that bill more so than other classics like Babette's Feast or that Italian movie where they make the huge timpani. Food and lavish table are showcased in Gabrielle, but this is a movie about the complete absence of passion.

Jean, a rich Parisian, married Gabrielle ten years previous to the start of the story. They live in a mansion in the City and entertain every Thursday, trying to create a salon of musicians, wits and other demimonde. The china, silver and food at their banquets are reminiscent of Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. However, their lives are all productions, stylized appearances where they both drift around the margins of their guests, not engaging in conversation be it gossipy or erudite. Jean comes home early the day after to find a note from Gabrielle that she has left him for another man. Within five hours, she returns home. The rest of the movie is a distanced conversation as Jean tries to intellectualize her motives and Gabrielle enhances her icy aloof facade to exact revenge. Neither character is admirable although the acting, costumes and scenery are superb.

What a contrast with LWFC. Gabrielle purposefully lives a life without love. Tita bids her time for one night of culminating passion. Maybe I should read Llosa's nonfiction study of Flaubert and Madame Bovary to rekindle a belief in Gallic passion to rival Latin devotion.

Tapped Out the Libaray Collection

No more Domenic Stansberry books at my library. Finished Chasing the Dragon and The Big Boom this weekend, both of them part of the Dante Mancuso series. CTD is the first with Dante who has been ordered by the Company to return to San Francisco from his stint in New Orleans, still susceptible to the bad habits he picked up there and and haunted by the violence he participated in. The Big Boom is a bit more current, with the boom being the bust of the tech bubble.

Actually, I think I am also tapped out on Stansberry. Not that I liked them any less, but that there seemed to be nothing new, nothing quotable in them. Looking back, I think I liked The Confession the best, as best crafted and scariest.

Not sure where my wandering eyes will take me next. Closing in on November, I have reserved some political satire and am still rereading A Hundred Years of Solitude for book club this month. Actually feel like a breather, wanting to race through seasons two and three of Mad Men.

A Writer Writing About a Writer Writing a Book

Okay, it reads a bit like a writing class device, but it still is a Stansberry. Manifesto for the Dead unlike his other stories is set in Los Angeles, in the seventies when Hollywood and Vine was at its seediest. The main character is based on a real author, Jim Thompson. I did my WIKI research a couple of days ago, eeriely on his birthday, 9/27/06. I knew nothing about him, never seeking out his pulp fiction genre, but discovered he wrote The Killer Inside Me and The Grifters. His write-up is an unbelievable six degrees of separation mentioning Thompson's affiliations with Kubrick, Peckinpah, Redford. I'll need to watch again Farewell, My Lovely, the Mitchum version as Thompson plays the judge.

So Stansberry enters the chain of Thompson devotees. I hear Stansberry's thoughts in about tensing reality against lurid mental crimes in Thompson's words: "... up against that wall himself, clutching all those ragged ends, stories within stories that almost webbed together, the various pieces fraying and disappearing into a darkness that swallowed all calculation. Meanwhile, the killer you had created roamed the city. Your careful plan -- out of control." Echoes of The Confession in this rumination, a theme of Stansberry that the mental deviousness behind the brutal crime is equally, if not more, interesting than the blood splatter patterns. More obviously, the detective in Manifesto asks Thompson: "... Let me ask you something ... I got a chance to look at some of those books of yours. And I been wondering. They got much biography in them? Auto, I mean. Tales of the self ... I mean, you seem like a nice guy. And I ask myself, how could a nice guy write books like those. I tell myself, well, all of us, we got something a little weird inside ..." I can imagine this as a mental debate in Stansberry's head, if not actual cocktail party banter.

His voice is much more raw in this book but despite all the references to the inopportune manifestations of male anatomical parts, there is no actual sex in the book, it's more a love affair with alcohol.

Already started another Stansberry last night, the first of the Dante Mancuso series. Am I hungering to become jaded? What vicarious thrills am I looking for? Am I an author-wanna-be with less guts than Stansberry because I cannot imagine writing this luridly, vividly?

Plothunter

Why do I even bother polishing off the stragglers on my picaresque list? I have had Uwe Timm's Headhunter on my table only occasionally picking it up to read some more baffling, wandering and plot-less rants of the main character, whose name I cannot even recall. The premise sounded good -- a financial con man -- but I glean nothing from the almost 300 pages I read and how absolutely no curiosity to see what might happen. Nothing from the pages I read suggests it is moving towards any crisis or revelation.

Off to the library to pick up three more Stanberry mysteries.

Another Niche Publishing House: Hard Case Crime For Every Secret Revealed, Another is More Deeply Hidden

There used to be a second hand bookstore down by the bus depot where the books they sold all had lurid covers, mangled pages and appealed to a certain type of buyer. Oh, they stocked some political polemics there too, but I collected that bit of information from a friend, never having the nerve to do more than furtively glance in the windows and quickly move on. So it was almost in shame that I walked around the past couple of days carrying the paperback by Domenic Stansberry, The Confession, with it garish drawing of a frightened, big-busted red head and the shadowy, darkened hands of her assailant, wielding a tie to choke her.

Stansberry once again sets his story around San Francisco, this time narrated by Jake Danser, a forensic psychologist who usually testifies as to an accused criminal’s insanity. Danser’s knowledge of psychopathic behaviors and his self-aggrandizement, coupled with en pointe phrasing and structure by Stansberry, makes this book a page turner, one that has tension building from the very beginning, and tone that is fast paced and flippant in contrast to the operatic elegy of his Last Days of Il Duce.

Danser writes his story as self-analysis, a report on the mental health of someone who only wants to reveal so much about himself, mostly the attractive angles. His flirtation with a more full disclosure becomes a bit more explicit with the start of chapter seven: “Absent death, the attention flags. Every newspaper editor knows this, as does every writer of lurid tales. Those of you who do not know my story – who missed it as it ran though the tabloids – may find yourself impatient. Of what am I accused? What are my crimes, you wonder, and what is my motive for this so-called confession? To deceive.”

As Danser prepares his expert witness testimony for alleged wife murderer, a defense of situational memory loss, he quotes from Kleindst, that this syndrome is easily feigned among criminal populations and “practiced with great flair by psychopaths and other malingerers.” A few pages later, Danser on the stand displays his own kind of sociopathic behavior: “ … I paused, my eyes skittering over the jurors, drawing in first one, then another. I was flirting with them, I suppose, the way a speaker flirts with a crowd, bestowing a glance here, there (and his oral argument resumes) … But their social dexterity is a mask. Underneath, psychopaths lack compassion …”

By chapter fifteen as Danser continues his treatise, touting his expertise, he opines: “… This kind of memory loss, though, is relatively rare. At leas that is the current thinking. Most of these amnesiacs, in criminal cases, they are liars. In reality, they remember every instant. They relish their crimes. They compose memoirs, elaborate testimonials that feign innocence yet contain within them the secret admission of guilt. When cornered, they place the blame elsewhere – on some associate, perhaps, scheming against them." Okay, here you have the plot in a nutshell: Danser’s dalliance, his mistress herself being strangled, his squaring off against the prosecutor who is seen quite often with Danser’s wife, low-life, seedy private investigators, high-stakes gamblers pursued by the mob -- a cast of usual suspects.

Stansberry advances the story line with almost imperceptible increments – just the right word, an off-hand comment or aside, faint childhood memory – to plant enough doubt and no court room solid way to prove guilt.

Like the other ones of his I’ve read so far, Stansberry is writing about crime or sin or passion as having its roots deep within a person, arising from his family and surroundings. Danser mulls while jogging: “… thinking about the notion that the things that happen to us, they are not just arbitrary, but a reflection of our inner state. The turmoil of the self is the turmoil of the world.”

The Confession won Stansberry another Edgar and I continue to race through his mysteries, reserving yet another two at the library yesterday. But given the other mounds of awards that the books published by Hard Case Crime, I will also look for:

Little Girl Lost by Richard Aleas
Kiss Her Goodbye by Allan Guthrie
Robbie’s Wife by Russell Hill
Money Shot by Christa Faust
Fade to Blonde by Max Phillips

All Good Things Italian

I guess I'm celebrating my own Feast of St. Genaro in a way, reading nothing but Stansberry noir mysteries, eating tiramisu for breakfast and plodding along filling in the enormous monochromatic sky in my latest jig saw puzzle, Canaletto's painting of St. Mark's Plaza in Venice. Oh and drinking Prosecco as a last fling of summer. And watching Italian movies -- Scorcese's Last Temptation of Christ (with a wonderful compadre depiction of Judas by Harvey Kietel), and with subtitles, the Cannes winner The Son's Room.

But this is a book-based blog, so on to Stansberry. The Last Days of Il Duce is once again set in the old once Italian, now Chinese North Beach neighborhood of San Fransisco. It is one of his earlier books, not starring Dante Mancuso, but introducing other local characters who reappear in later stories. The introductory paragraph is one of the best I've encountered in years:

"My name is Niccolo Jones, and I'm writing this down in the prison yard at Coldwater Penitentiary. Three people I used to know are dead. Two of them I loved, the other I hated -- though lately I am less sure about the difference between those feelings. I tell myself it doesn't matter ... " How penultimately noir. Only after finishing the book, did I find out it not only won an Edgar in its category, but also was nominated for a Hammett, and he does write a la Dashiell.

Stansberry's San Fransisco is vivid, as engaging as Burke's bayous or Kennedy's Albany. These books are ones that should have been on our place-based book list last year. The sense of a lost community, still populated with living ghosts, echoing memories and faded photographs under the glass in empty neighborhood bars, not only created a threatening, dark atmosphere, but set the motivation of all characters. Family and history prevail, expressing themselves in genetic lust, avarice and ultimately, criminality.

This is not the kind of book that surprises you because you never could quite figure out who done it. Nick is not the only guilty party. The book is a development of his motivation and the crime (and lifetime of events) that brings him to shoot two. The two victims, as foretold in that first paragraph, can only in hindsight be categorized as heroine or villainess, corrupt capo or benefactor.

Hot on the heels of tearing through Il Duce, I read The Ancient Rain, thereby discovering the role of the title in a Stansberry plot. Like Il Duce, Ancient Rain evokes a time past, a series of events from decades ago that are the seeds that produce the crimes. This story is one of the Dante Mancuso series. Here Dante is gathering evidence for the defense of a man suspected as killing a bystander in an SLA bank robbery twenty-seven years ago.

Stansberry weaves character lines: the man who may not have done the crime, the daughter of the victim who becomes mentally unbalanced and impoverished financially and emotionally from witnessing her death, the vengeful detectives and prosecutors who take advantage of the post 9/11 terrorism fear to resurrect this cold case. It explores the case from the personal motives of all involved, wherein their own profiles and press are prime movers.

Taken side by side with Il Duce, and setting Dante aside, Nick begins his story in jail, admitting his guilt; Owens never reveals if he participated in the bank heist. The book plays with that ambiguity. The reader suspects but never knows for sure and the vigilante justice at the end does not feel truly just. Also comparing Ancient Rain with Hugo's Condemned Man and other books I've recently read on crime and punishment, I conclude the crime engages me more than the administering of the justice. Hugo's condemned man, because he never acknowledges either is charge or his complicity, is merely a mouthpiece for social reform, never a man learning from his remorse.

The Equivalent of a "Get-Away Day" Book

Since I only could take it out for seven days, I rushed to finish the last English horse racing murder mystery by Dick Francis, Crossfire. This was also a fitting week to read it since the get away day at "our" track was Monday.

His last four books have been co-authored with his Baby Huey sized son, Felix -- at least the physical difference is blatant on the cover when Felix stands next to former steeplechase jockey, frail Francis.

Although I am sure I'd never get an advisor willing to endorse this subject, I would love to write a graduate thesis on the structure and themes of all Dick's books. The last two are classics: a somewhat anti-social hero, major family dysfunctions, a tentative love interest, corruption in the racing industry, and absolutely gruesome, horrid tortures. Something for everyone.

Dick also frequently resorts to double entendre titles and Crossfire refers to some esoteric racing term explaining a horse's missteps, clipping his own hooves. It also applies to the hero, Tom Forsythe, a recuperating British officer wounded by an IED in Afghanistan. And finally, cross fire figures in the story's gun battle conclusion.

I'm sure Felix's contribution for the last few books goes beyond research duties. I wonder if he will join my lost of rare second generation authors, a list that now only includes Alaistar Burke, daughter of James Lee, as a most readable successor. I will always have my memory of meeting Dick Francis at the Horsing Racing Hall of Fame where he autographed his book for my older son.

I have read everyone one of his books. There are a few other authors who I consume soup to nuts: Kinky Friedman (well maybe only his earlier ones); JD Robb's In Death series; Dickens for my studies in college. Thinking over this habit last night, I am toying with hopefully a more successful book list for 2011; namely, Broadly and Deeply. I plan on finding several writers with page turning books and then reading everything they have written. How does that grab you oh silent Slackers?

Just Get to the Story ... Skip the Forward and Introduction

Remember in public speaking, the instructor chanted "first you tell them what you're going to tell them, then you tell them, then you remind them what you told them." Maybe that is just fine in oral instructions, but it is tedious and falsely page-filling in a novella. Victor Hugo's The Last Day of a Condemned Man was published in 1832, with memories still fresh from the French Revolution and the guillotine used much more broadly. Hugo could picket in front of state capitals or on the eve of executions today. He believed (1) society made the criminal what he is and could not blame anything else for his falling into a life of crime when all other opportunities were cut off and (2) more than the criminal suffered by his death, namely his family. Hence, there was no moral authority for capital punishment by the state.

If his wasn't so blatantly stated in both the interpretive foreword and by Hugo himself in his introduction, TLDOACM seems more neutral -- depicting the depravity of the inmates, the intentional distancing of surviving family members of the convicted. Because he never divulges the crime, Hugo leaves open to interpretation whether this incarceration and verdict was a political travesty/vendetta or just punishment for a violation of the sacred norms of society. Had it been disclosed, a lot of Hugo's argument would have been weakened. He argues against all facts, a charge he levels against his perceived biases in those who favor capital punishment.

All in all, an A.

Keeping in my French lit vein, I watched an "art house" movie last night, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Set in China during the worst of the reign of Chairman Mao, it is a Jules and Jim kind of story of two young men, sent to remote mountains to be reeducated from their bourgeois ways. Instead they influence the village with their violin music, knowledge of dentistry and love of French literature. They take on the education of a teenage girl, the granddaughter of the local tailor. All in French and Chinese, the scenery is beautiful, the dialogue succinct and the tension precisely toned. A wonderful movie about a horrible time in a nation I still find without allure.

Still Reading Murder Mysteries by the Light of the Naked Moon

Browsing through the two week take-outs in the library, picked up Naked Moon by Domenic Stansberry only because it was a new moon, the sturgeon moon this month. Unfamiliar with the author, but he has won an Edgar and been nominated for both a Shamus and Hammett. This story gets off to a slow and confusing start, maybe because I am picking up the series mid-stride. Set in an old part of San Fransisco, a former Italian now Chinese neighborhood, the lead, Dante Mancuso of the pelican nose, faces intrigue from "the company" ... an ill-defined organization with either/or or both underworld and governmental ties. Trust no one. Dante is not a noble protagonist but surely a memorable one. I have reserved three of Stansberry's other books to continue my delving into this threatening milieu.

Meanwhile, I also finished the book for book club Tuesday night, a Booker prize winner, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Funny, I mentioned this book to Hamagrael who was vacationing "back home" this week, and she said she avoided this book hearing about its vulgar language. I told her the book is written as if by Paddy at age ten so the swearing is juvenile bravado, testing out dirty words almost like the boys do at Catholic grammar school learning a new word in vocabulary lessons. The tone of this book is marvelous. All the "growing up" stories that are familiar, be it Tom Sawyer, Tin Drum or Painted Bird, still leak the dexterity of a class A writer. This book not only has the language but also the random memory structure and absence of motives that are the realities of a young boy's mind. I will not enthusiastically endorse the book, though, being more intrigued by another Booker winner I am reading, The Famished Road by Ben Oki.

Meanwhile, ran a double feature on my DVD last night, finally getting a long-reserved copy of A Single Man and chancing on a copy of Changeling. I wanted to see the former because I thought I liked Julianne Moore; I was reluctant to watch the latter because I strongly dislike Jolie. What a surprise. I guess I forgot Eastwood directed Changeling and it was a perfectly, if violently rendered true story that holds its own against the greats of LA corruption, as good as Chinatown.

Funny while Hamagrael was home, we were both reading Victor Hugo, she Toilers of the Sea that I picked up for her here since her library system isn't deep, and me reading Last Day of a Condemned Man on the Hesperus Press list. While neither of us have finished, we both remarked on the blaring anti death penalty polemic that saturates these books.

I feel like the lethargy of summer is ending and I want to read more. Just one more weekend of picnics and parties and my life hopefully resumes its more natural rhythms.

First Course in Murder

Okay, I have completely abandoned "meaningful" reading selections and have reverted to my habit of murder mysteries with The Grave Gourmet by Alexander Campion. Although I have recommended it to the best-traveled Slacker since the story is set in Paris where she travels every year, the book is only a "one star" ... generous at that. Got to love the heroine's name, Capucine, French for nasturtium by the way, one of my favorite flowers, but as a young detective on her first murder after slogging away in financial crimes behind computers, she seems clueless and only clarifies her deductions with the assistance of her older, much wiser, restaurant critic husband Alexandre (the author's alter ego, peut etre?). Can't figure out how to make that look grammatically correct.

I was hoping for -- if not a Nick and Nora couple of sleuths-- at least a duo as vital as my secret addiction: Eve Dallas and Rourke of J. D. Robb's In Death series. Capucine and spouse come no where close. The death staged at a three star restaurant from apparent food poisoning is really a case of industrial espionage, an area Capucine has no understanding of whatsoever.

In the epilogue, Alexandre and the chef/owner of the place where the body was stashed catch up on what has happened to them and to Capucine during the year since the murder. The chef has relocated to New York City because his Parisian regulars deserted him and only tourists came to gawk at the scene of the crime. To quote the chef: "... The French patron is knowledgeable, but he is cynical too, and that makes him difficult. In America, they know nothing." Strangely, this seems to sum up Capucine, as a flic, she knows nothing.

Maybe If It Was Told Around a Campfire

One Thousand and One Ghosts never hit that tally and never had the fright level one expects in tales about encounters with spectres. The style is recognizably Dumas and there is enough French history post reign of terror to make stories about vengeful nobles timely. I suspect his dealing with the barbary of the guillotine is less diatribe than the Hugo on the Hesperus list.

I am still finding it difficult to find something noteworthy, let alone erudite, to write about these novellas, distracted as I am by several good movies I have interspersed given my long empty work-less (pay-less) afternoons. Today, before finishing Dumas, I watched An Education which is a fine rendition of the seduced sixteen year old by the older lying married man and read the subtitles from A Heart in Winter while my younger son vacuumed the house. That story more typical of French cinema has the characters never acting as you hope they do; always finding more honesty in their frustrations and daily lives than from a Hollywood glossed story where no love goes unfulfilled. Work and self knowledge are esteemed as more meaningful than flings. Quite a contrast to An Education where the plot is so formulaic and predictable. I liked the portrayal of French community which is sorely absent in the British flic ... from all the overheard conversations in the bistro, in friends houses in the middle of the night. The dialogue from An Education is not as tangential, more moralistic teachers at school or stark vacuity of bimbo hanger-ons.

I guess I have to attack the book selected for my face-to-face book club for the 31st. Got a reminder from the co-chair today. It is a Booker Prize book so hopefully once I get further into it, I'll get engaged and finally be happy about summer reading. Think a comedy movie might help as well. As would challenging work.

The Compulsion of Lists

Read the other Bulgakov book published by Hesperus, The Fatal Eggs. This one was even worse than A Dog's Heart. Once again, the plot centers in Moscow after the Revolution with a "aristo" scientist trying to cope with the stupidity of the committee members. This experiment entails a "red ray" that the scientist directs on to frogs which causes them to mature and reproduce quickly and expotentially. All this is occurring during one of the first USSR agricultural crisis -- some poultry disease. The good comrades decide to usurp the scientist's red ray and use it on imported eggs to jump start the industry. Unfortunately, the eggs sent to the committee are not chickens, but an assortment of reptiles with the sci-fi predictable mutations and loss of lives.

Well that's about it, my summary without engagement of any kind with the author, his bland style, dated crusade, et cetera, et cetera.

At least the next book to review, One Thousand and One Ghosts by Dumas is a goodie.

But the Other Parts are Bolshevik

Even Hesperus has some "eh" books. Finished one such a couple of days ago, namely Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov. It is a novella set close to a decade after the Russian Revolution at a time when the newly minted Communists were all for singing at dawn and breaking up the larger apartments into more equitable "cubbies." The main character is a well-to-do doctor/mad scientist (oh I forgot to mention, this falls in the satiric sci-fi genre) who takes home a mongrel from the streets, fattens him up and transplants the pituitary gland and gonads of a common criminal. (N0, this isn't heading into the successful realms of The Charlatan.)

Neither is it as memorable as Frankenstein because the manifest political message. Which is, I decipher, the Russian classes were either 1) oblivious to the masses but overlaying a "culture" on the country or 2) so downtrodden as to become near-dogs themselves ... scrounging for food or attacking. Being written in the mid 1920's, the medicinal/psychiatric side effects lack the more frightening parodies that could be expressed post-DNA and more organ transplant operations. The story ends with the doctor restoring the doggie-ness to the "patient," implying the author's belief in the comfortable, if imperfect known world.

In the Beginning, Was the Word

Wow, two in one day. My drive to get books back pre-Woods Hole continues. Another Hesperus amuse bouche finished. This time, The Diary of Adam and Eve, by Mark Twain, as unknown as the Hawaiian diaries and equally enjoyable. Even though this one can be read in the length of a TV comedy hour.

Of all people to write the forward, Hesperus chose John Updike. Okay. There is a marked different world view when it comes to the battle of the sexes. Updike points out how shallow and undeveloped Twain's vapid female counterpoints are to his male leads. Okay granted. But in this book, given the time and contemporary buzz of Darwin and emerging psychoanalysis, Eve is portrayed charmingly. She is not the she-devils of Zola. She is stereotypical, but only in a post-feminist decade. She does have some glaring gaps: her only attempt to cook is to throw one of her cherished apples into the fire, fire that she, not "man" discovered. Twain portrays her is consumed by curiosity, a scientist who experiments, but not to the expense of her awe of beauty, and the recognition of worth being defined by something other than usefulness.

Twain's take on the acclimation of one sex to the quirks of the other's is a wondrous filling in of the blanks in Genesis. How did they come to adjust to each other? How did the acclimate to gender based traits? The device of using a dairy to interpret the same events first by Adam, with his world view and then by Eve, is a perfect way to explain away how to this day a man and a woman regard the same thing as polarly different and holding innately different relevance. It is especially clever how they explain the appearance of Cain, and Eve's "crazy" protective stance to something that Adam thinks could be a fish or a kangaroo or a bear without a tail. Even with their consumption with discovering the cause of all things, and documenting a quasi-theorem for all things around them, Adam simplistically believes that Eve found Cain in the forest and goes looking for more of this unknown species; he is jealous of her good luck in finding another one, Abel, after he has searched so far and wide.

I loved Eve's appreciation of beauty, beauty that is so much more valued because it is mysterious. Being someone enamoured of the Moon, her perception on day two of her life: ..."The moon got loose last night, and slid down and fell out of the scheme - a very great loss. It breaks my heart to think of it. There isn't another thing among the ornaments and decorations that is comparable to it for beauty and finish. It should have been fastened better. If only we can get it back again. But of course there is no telling where it went to. And besides, whoever gets it will hide it. I believe I can be honest in all other matters, but I already begin to realise that the core and centre of my nature is love of the beautiful, a passion for the beautiful ... For I do love moons, they are so pretty and so romantic. I wish we had five or six. I would never go to bed. I should never get tired lying on the moss-bank and looking up at them." Would there be moon glow disturbing my bedchamber this evening.

If one can overlook Updike's imposition of his own more "modern" interpretation of the stance between the sexes and his similar compulsion to belittle religion and project that firmly onto Twain, he does put a publishing reality on the collection. Much like Dickens did with A House to Let, these six stories were reworked over time, given the interest of a paying publisher. That adds to the humor of Eden being Niagara Falls, there being no buffalo in Buffalo and the overall barrenness of Tonawanda. (We New Yorkers are often to ignorant or oblivious to Twain's time in Buffalo -- I ate in this green house when I was visiting the county motor vehicle office out thataway in the 70s -- but at least the final snippet rehashes the absurdity of countermanding the theory of evolution by erecting a statue to Adam in Elmira, commercially assuring a place in history to an otherwise inaccessible, but quaint town. Today, it can claim the fame of Tommy Hilfiger.)

Would that I find a couple more Hesperus hours of humor.