Bitchy Blood, Bones and Butter

Reading Gabrielle Hamilton's autobiography, Blood, Bones and Butter, reminds me about how much I prefer to find a life story about someone I don't know and who I am glad to have discovered. Gabrielle is not a nice person: for all practical purposes, left to grow up on her own from age 13 and falling into all sorts of temptations -- cocaine, grand theft auto, skimming profits from NYC restaurant where she was working underage. Ignored and cast off as a result of her parents divorce, Gabrielle flounders, attending free-form colleges and taking off for an around the world jaunt with no money, deciding she's lesbian. What's to like. She refuses to see her mother for twenty years, blaming her diabetes for her distance from her children and husband.

Yet Gabrielle can be her mother in her verbal chiding of her staff when she opens her restaurant in the City, Prune, her childhood nickname. She too eventually suffers from sugar highs and lows, lashing out at her husband, an Italian doctor who seems to have married her in a green card charade. GH idolized her parents growing up as the youngest of five in a ruin of a house on the Delaware River. Her mother pampered her and took her to all the local farms to purchase milk, fruit and vegetables; taught her how to forage for Chanterelles; always had her by her side in the kitchen where she made all things French. Her seminal memory is of lamb roasts in the back yard when her father entertained dozens and wine was cooled in the creek. Despite the hint that her father was the adulterous party, Gabrielle attributes their divorce to her mother, simply because she was the one to announce it to the children.

When she finally visits her 70 year old mother living in remote Vermont, Gabrielle vets all her pent up frustration, anger and guilt, about how niggardly her mother has become, wearing Payless shoes and holding up her socks with rubber bands. It seems she cannot write more nastily when she has an insight: "When you have some style and taste, but you don't have the cash, you brag about your "finds" from the thrift store. You sit in your chair with great satisfaction when you pull off a delicious dinner for ten people for only forty bucks, the same way my mother fed a family of seven on tails and carcasses and marrow bones. But seeing her now and how uncannily similar we are, I fear that it won't be long before I, too, am so obsessed with thrift ... How far down the path am I already if I make Prune's dishwashers nest the bowls properly ... and if I stop a cook from throwing away the onion tops ... How can it be, after all the concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother?"

And again: "... most people (in her childhood home town) ate frozen fish sticks .. macaroni and cheese ... and bologna, but we ate coq au vin ... and le puy lentils for less money than the store=bought stuff. Other people had rec rooms and television, but we were forced to entertain ourselves outdoors ... Other kids got ... Snack Pack puddings, but we got ratatouille sandwiches on homemade bread in oily brown paper lunch bags. And we were taught by her to see ourselves as infinitely better for our dedication to high culture. I have been trying for twenty years to rid myself of this Gallic snobbism. When I now see my ... mom pour herself a tumbler of wine cooler, the oppressive heavy wet blanket of snow slides off the roof of my soul in one giant thawing chunk and suddenly I feel clear, light and permissive."

And so she becomes emotionally reconciled to this old woman, and thereby likeable for a page or two, until the focus shifts to her own marriage. Gabrielle has visited her husband's mother's villa in July for five or six years, fantasizing about how much more lovable his mother is than hers. She lugs her two boys with her and during the last trip over as they head to the airport: "Michele and I can and do spend the entire year isolated from and unknown to each other, but as soon as we get in the car on the way to the airport, we smile at each other with a kind of bond, and we are unified, however briefly, by a nostalgia for the moment about to come July in Italy ... I don't look at him but I am fully attentive, expectant. It never ever ends how I wish it would, how I fantasize it will ... Ever since I understood that I was actually married, I have hoped for it to be everything I think a real marriage should be, an intimacy of the highest order ... I have readied myself ... for the luminous pearls of his inner life, some word from his heart, some revelation of what he thinks about or fears or loves or agonizes over, which never arrives."

When Michele reveals what he was going to say -- buying a new cell phone -- Gabrielle like her intolerant mother, shuts herself off emotionally from him for half of the vacation. It is the beginning of the end, despite her fulfilled wish of finally being able to cook for his extended family.

The book is brutally honest, revealing soul buried secrets that women only divulge to best friends after bottles of wine. Her bitchiness, her complete devotion to her career, her confused dismay of understanding generations and partners, is what makes her so unlikeable, so known, so every woman.

Food As Metaphor - Balzac's Omelette

I am not knowledgeable enough to validate whether Anka Muhlstein's premise that Honore Balzac was the first novelist to write about food as a prime theme in his stories. What about Fielding's Tom Jones? What about other nations' literature? Yes, Balzac predates Zola's Belly of Paris and Proust's madelaines, but is he obviously and solely the first? I can't say.

Maybe because Muhlstein's literary analysis encompasses all of the Human Comedy, it seems impossible to put one's intellectual arms around. Characters are introduced for their relationship not so much with the taste of food but its presentation. Muhlstein gives enough of Balzac's early life -- the first four years with a wet nurse, shipped off to a boarding school where the food was awful and scarce -- to suggest that his upbringing lacked both the comfort of a family meal around a happy table and no introduction to the mystery of kitchen chemistry. These deficits cannot be overcome in fully developed scenes of comfort and warmth associated with a cook who teaches you how to make something out of nothing or something special out of the best or with a mother whose love is expressed through meals.

His characters' fates are colored along a continuum from the near-starvation of young students to prosperous old men's death by gluttony. Women starved for sexual satisfaction waste away from anorexia. Unfortunately in her presentation any chronology or clear linking of one HC novel's characters to another is lost. Clearly Muhlstein notes Balzac's differentiation between Parisians and provincials and she does overlay this with the evolution of restaurants in early 1800s France, but there does not seem to be any larger perspective as the cultural attitude towards dining evolves.

She notes Balzac equates gluttony with larger character flaws and a righteous demise. She also niches Balzac from his successors, Zola and Flaubert, who are more apt to describe a delicious meal as foreplay. To Balzac, food is an indication of caste and not a vehicle of seduction.

With the sweet pen and pencil drawings inside the covers, laden with oyster shells, skimpy frilly panties nigh to the snails and Camembert, evening slippers that appear to have be used for sipping Champagne, I had hoped the treatise would be more of a 19th Century French version of Allende's Aphrodite. Instead, feasts turn into bouts of drunkenness, ne'er orgies. Alas, this book was no segue from gluttony to lust.

Darkness and LIght for Months

Sometimes it takes me months to read a book: currently, I am reading Corelli's Mandolin and it is such a treasure, so lyrically written, that I approach it reverently, taking it in small morsels, and wanting to own it instead of renewing it repeatedly from the library. Other books languish on my nightstand, only finished out of a sense of obligation, not interest. The latter case applies to Darkness and Light by John Harvey. This was a book I started reading this August when I had a short day and a half vacation with my son up at a lake in the Adirondacks. Our gracious hosts accommodated John in their basement pool room and me in the second floor under the rafters of their comfortable camp. Retiring early, I borrowed a book, said Darkness and Light. It began well enough but a day of fresh air cruising on the lake but me swiftly to sleep. I brought it home to finish and to pass on to someone else.

There are so few British mysteries that engage me. Is it because I overdosed on Brit Lit in college or is it my visceral animosity to all things English based on personalities? I love American mysteries, the faster the pace, the more I enjoy them. The more violent the crime and the more eccentric the detective/good guy, the deeper I fall into the plot and the faster I read the book. John Harvey's plot moves slowly. His retired investigator, Elder, has the now typical family problems and as a consultant, has the experience but not the respect (boy does that also hit home).

The story line like the recent fad of Scandinavian best sellers has an obvious focus on crimes against women and even minor characters or secondary suspects all are actively hostile, if not criminal, when it comes to their relationships with women. This is not the angle I want to pursue vis a vis the last month of the lust list.

There are two or three others in this series but Elder does not call to me, nor does Harvey. I must tiptoe back to Corelli, cherishing the writing quite similarly to my switching the car radio to listen to classical music and fell myself decompress a couple of times a week instead of hyping myself up on Southern rock.

Backcounty Delta

Another instance to reaffirm my pledge not to read any same-year released fiction reviewed in the New York Times. Rick Gavin is a first time murder mystery writer with the release this year of his murder mystery Ranchero. Set in impoverished Mississippi delta country, Gavin captures the dialect of the region but his portrayal of the Blacks, crooked cops, and meth-brewing good ol' boys are way too stereotypical. The motivation of the "good guy" to go after his landlady's dead husband's restored Ranchero is shallow and much ado about nothing. Not one I'd recommend, but then I am in a pre-holiday funk anyway.

Learn by Their Mistakes: Blueprints for Building Better Girls

I'm making my first New Year's resolution for 2012: I will not read a book published in 2012 based on a review from the New York Times magazine. Two times I did such a thing in 2011, for the Julian Barnes Man Booker award novel and now for Elissa Schappell's Blueprints for Building Better Girls, I have been on the whole disappointed ... although I do find Barnes' theme butting into my mind as I read other books. I have no such qualms about Schappell's stories recurring in my mind.

This is a small collection of eight short stories about girls behaving badly, seemingly without recourse or comeuppance. The two longest ones are the ones that are the most dark and for that dire portrayal of girls way in over their heads the are tales of morality, by the lack thereof. It struck me when I finished that with its lipstick red cover with a black cherry on it (a cherry that also looks somewhat like a bomb) that Schappell wanted the book to be used in high school advanced English classes as yet another one of those contemporary stories of dysfunctional families and children who act out badly. I can just hear the teacher saying, "now class, would you be friends in college with Bender?" Or "is Jane just a girl torn between two men or just a tease?"

In addition to these two dark tales of teenage wild children, Schappell writes about bored mothers and empty marriages, and nothing about lustful love. Her only other book, which was nominated for the PEN Faulkner, is titled Use Me, and here I thought I might find a lusty book for December's chilly nights. Nah, the summary sounds again to be about two self-obsessed women. Between Schappell and Barnes, one might come to think that there no longer is any love between the sexes.

Also upon turning the last page, I thanked my lucky stars that I have sons and decided not to mention this collection in Tuesday night's upcoming book club meeting lest those poor women with daughters will lose their minds with worry.

Bundling a Wiki Search: Choice Cuts

What an appropriate day -- Thanksgiving -- on which to review Mark Kurlansky's Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History. This is the last of a bunch of Kurlansky's books I read, none really measuring up to his history of Salt and Cod: 1968, Oyster and now Choice Cuts are all really grade B. CC is such an amalgamation that it reads as disjointedly as if it were prepared by a student who search Wiki for "food" and copied down snippets of every primary, secondary and tertiary hit he got. Until Oyster, CC is not overloaded with repetitious recipes. It is more like an all you can eat buffet, sometimes showing the quality of the cheese grater hotel in Montreal, but more often like the Golden Corral.

I have a closet full of cookbooks on shelves next to the kitchen, some are old reliables, some more souvenirs of other times or places. I subscribe to Food and Wine and probably have too many old Gourmets in the basement, magazines I thought my sons might clip for history or geography of Europe projects in school that never materialized. Like my recent review of why I, or anyone, assemble jigsaw puzzles, I refer to the last entry in Kurlansky's book, by MFK Fisher on why she writes about food: "It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the other."

I have been working in the kitchen today since 6:30 AM, putting together a meal that will make memories for my son, attest to my willingness to adapt the menu to his favorite foods, and express my creativity and signal love and appreciation. I cannot put together a Thanksgiving menu without recalling my mother's or the ones I cooked for her first in my apartment and then this old house. There always was an homage as well as a tease: always a side of Brussel sprouts which she detested. Dessert must be a pie, often sweet potato instead of pumpkin, and more recently chocolate pecan, a pie John would sell his soul for. Very infrequently a turkey, more often a goose when there were enough of us around the table to do it justice, and this year a duck for the three of us. (A duck that will always remind me of setting the oven on fire in my apartment and dowsing it with the glass of beer I happened to have in my hand when I opened the stove.) Always seasonal vegetables, this year replacing the dreaded sprouts, maybe never to be served on holidays again since my mother died this summer, are roasted kohlrabi with butternut squash. Stuffing more like hers, with sausage, since no one here likes chestnuts, and John won't eat oysters ... sorry Kurlansky.

Proust was right ... and a neuroscientist ... that certain food bring unsolicited, pleasant memories. Yet, a chef, as I fancy myself, is also conscientiously intentional about creating those memories. We all recall the year I decided the pilgrims must have tried lobster and we cooked an eight pounder, too big for all our pots, and beyond the reference of friends in Maine who had no idea how long to cook it. Or the year Nana drank so much champagne before dinner that several parts of it were missing or undercooked, but she didn't care at all. Bill is making his own memory today, doing a variation of mac and cheese, gnocchi with Gruyere, as a gift to his friend's parents' supper.

Strangely today on Epicurious was a quick survey about how people regard chocolate: do they share it with a spouse, a friend, or keep it for themselves. I checked off option two, and found myself in the small minority. I always have good chocolate in my desk drawer at work, and people know that and stop by asking for a taste or two. When I get my favorite Vosges chocolate at The Fresh Market, I buy enough to give my college roommate a bar when she comes trick or treating. Finger sticky chocolate is best licked off by another.

Kurlansky delves not only into home cooking but the meaning of dining out. He cites the common reaction of a diner who wants to rush home to try to replicate a meal enjoyed in a restaurant, something I inevitably want to do, with the possible exception of cooking sweetbreads. He does not give enough credence to the importance of one's fellow diners. I select a restaurant with complete regard to the person with whom I am going out to eat: certain places are marked in my mind for special friends and no one else need attend them. I scout new restaurants not only for their specialties or ambiance, but as setting for table mates.

Again, towards the conclusion of his book, Kurlansky cites Balzac on the politics of food: "Just as the first enthusiasts of abstinence were undoubtedly maladjusted, the first enthusiasts of moderation were surely people lacking in appetite ... Aristippe observed that philosophers who distrust wealth are penniless. Diogenes was broke when he was a cynic ... That is the way it is with detractors of appetite, of the tendency that is inherent in well-born men of happy constitution. It is not the first time that charlatans misguided and well spoken, have come to consider a virtue, that which is a well-organized vice." I never want to be abstinent, or even do most things in moderation. I am not a glutton, but an epicure; I am not a trollop, but a sensualist.

The World (or at least NYC) is His Oyster

I'm not sure that one of my ideas for a theme next year will work: namely, finding authors I like and then reading pretty much everything they've written. I will finish the Mark Kurlansky I am a quarter through, but The Big Oyster - History on the Half Shell, didn't engage me as much as some others of his. I loved his Salt and Cod probably because the influence of these food stuffs were depicted on a world wide stage. While Kurlansky garnishes this entree with references to other oyster beds in the southern states, Maine and Europe, he is writing about the growth of NYC and the demise of its harbors and estuaries.

Sometimes the book seemed to be an amalgamation of citations he garnered from a Wiki search. Too many recipes for the same stew, too many Guiness-like records of the hundreds of oysters guzzled on the half shell. His description of oyster cellars and the birth of Delmonico's was interesting but his linking of the entire environmental movement from the pollution of Hudson breeding grounds is a bit of a leap. And I did find one tangent to pursue: his portrait of life in Five Points spurred me to reserve The Gangs of New York at the library.

As a side note also bolstering my disappointment in finding all books by an author to be memorable -- after all, there were a few Dickens I never liked -- I also read Before She Met Me, Love Etc. and Talking It Over by Julian Barnes, this year's Man Booker award winner. The latter two read more like theatrical monologues and were interesting if a bit lengthy, especially after plowing through LE, the sequel to TIO, which over chews the adulterous relationship between a man's wife and his best friend. BSMM is the work on an immature storyteller. Enough said.

Hybred Genre: The Pattern in the Carpet

Recently, my husband has been receiving unsolicited major league baseball junk in the mail, he thinks because he signed up for insider information to help with his betting on winning teams. Instead he has been barraged with schlock, stuff he wouldn’t ever be tempted to look at in a ball park, let alone buy. It was with similar confusion that I received a package from my college roommate in “amongst” the daily pile of eBay purchases. Inside were two books that she found at a sale, she said silently calling out my name and that of my soon-to-be daughter in law: The latter, a murder mystery about baking muffins, and mine an autobiography of Margaret Drabble, The Pattern in the Carpet, subtitled A Personal History with Jigsaws. I am a jigsaw junkie. I finished the book more quickly than my usual concentrated efforts on 1,000 piece Pomegrantes.

Drabble set out to write a book about the history of puzzles tracing them back to an origin of teaching tools -- whereby children could put together maps of France or England and learn their geography. Drabble occasionally migrates from this intent to overlay her research with reflections on the place puzzles played in her own childhood and again as an adult. Lots of the book seems to echo my implicit thoughts about puzzles: such as, start with the corner pieces and frame edges, move on to related color segments, join these larger assembled pieces together, then realize that it’s time to proceed from a color-based to a shape-based approach to fill in all the background, sit back and enjoy the finished product for a couple of days, take apart and stow away forever. (I am attempting, as I inch into becoming an eBay seller as well as buyer, to offload my puzzles, so far to no success. But alas, I think I have found a semi-willing pack rat who thinks they will be something to do as she recovers from surgery in December. I hope to get rid of at least half of them.)

Drabble associates puzzles with her aunt, the woman in her family who takes the place of an unstable mother whom she really never likes. Auntie Phyl is no Mary Poppins herself but is tolerant of young children, having been a primary school teacher.

Drabble’s writing style defies the logic of her approach to completing puzzles: she is all over the map, using puzzles as a metaphor to understand her need to impose order and get the big picture of her life and her relationships. She goes on many a tangent, investigating mosaics, comparing the items in museum shops vis a vis their art collections, and digressing into London’s industry of publishing children’s books.

In a way she is like Pamuk's Museum of Innocence and his story of collecting the detritus of his beloved’s life as a vehicle to explain his city and his soul. She itemizes those puzzles depicting English cottages similar to the inn her grandparents operated, trying to capture reality onto a "game" medium. She briefly self-discloses when she writes: “… and now that I am old I recognize that I may be condemned to live with an unresolved story and an incomplete picture. I may never fully know why my mother was so unhappy and so angry … But I cannot resist continuing to try to piece things together.”

In one of those six degrees of separation moments, Drabble writes that Julian Barnes loves jigsaw puzzles and her reprise towards the end of her book hearkens to Barnes’ theme in The Sense of an Ending about making up one’s own life story: “We invent our own family tree, we construct our own ancestry, we collect our own fragments, we ignore the pieces that don’t fit, we deny the stories we don’t like … We throw the extra pieces into a bucket, and pretend they belong to some other design, some other puzzle.”

She makes shorter shrift of the "missing piece," not extending that metaphor into her constructing her life and reflecting on it. Personally, as I work on a puzzle, I am outraged when the dog grabs a piece and chews it into an almost unrecognizable pulp. My goal of perfection has been destroyed, even if I manage to force fit the distended cardboard into the pattern. And a lost piece absolutely negates all of my efforts with the other 999 pieces. So too is my life. So much so, I bought a couple of wine glasses etched with a ring of puzzle pieces to acknowledge that as I continue to go about constructing my life story, all pieces must be accounted for and those long lost cherished as a prodigal.

There is one other apt quote in Drabble's book that makes me wonder whether my roommate looked beyond the inside blurbs. Drabble writes about her Aunt Phyl's little white dog in much the same vein as my friend might describe my Bichon: "the dog became so naughty because my aunt had de-trained him, and that, by allowing him to pee on the carpet, lick her face and feet, masturbate against her ankles, jump at visitors and bounce on beds, she was expressing the bad behavior that had been pent up in her by a lifetime of ... propriety ..."

Somehow I'd rather sit down and tackle a new puzzle than train JJ.

Lust in Translation

Pun on that awful Bill Murray movie, Pamela Druckerman's book, Lust in Translation - The Rules of Infidelity from Toyko to Tennessee, is less than mediocre. Druckerman is a former Wall Street Journal writer so if this were bonds, I'd rate it B-.

Without any training in psychology or counseling, she travels the globe attempting to rank the nations from least to most faithful to monogamy -- this as she approaches her first marriage. She is not looking from common traits (or flaws) but wants to compile the effects of various religions, economics and culture on as causes or deterrents to adultery. The behaviors she depicts in Moscow and South Africa lead one to conclude that they would not want to be married there, let alone live in such hotbeds of infidelity. In the former, an increase of wealth spurs cheating; in the latter, lack of any opportunity to make money urges both sexes to get any kind of pleasure whenever possible, and at a huge risk to contracting AIDS.

Her portrait of Japanese marriage is so unappetizing that it's a wonder people start a family. The tradition of Geishas was deteriorated to sex clubs where men go to play. Things are similar in China except there a newly rich class at least can afford to set up a second family in a neighboring town. Druckerman's final observation, I think much to her comfort, is that Americans and the French are way down in the lust poll but for different reasons: in the USA, Puritanism has evolved into a sort of marriage cult where one's spouse equates to the sole person who can fulfill own's pursuit of happiness; in France, the tradition of "five to seven" (PM) still holds some sway.

And perhaps, it is this theory of structuring time, that she leaves least explored. She hints about American women from the 50s and 60s as having more chunks for free time in which to engage in finding a lover as contrasted with overscheduled hours now. She also mentions that there is a notable demarcation in the progress of a relationship when it moves into actually spending the night sleeping with one's lover. But she never explores what do lovers do with the rest of the day when they awaken. Is that those long day light hours that turn lust into obligations? How erotic do partners remain when they rake the lawn together, take each other to the dentist or go to the laundromat? Given those mundane realities, the scales of one's life need to be balanced with some passionate arousal. Druckerman reaches no conclusion of how far one can or should look for such fulfillment.

You Had to be There: 1968 The Year That Rocked the World

After finishing The Belly of Paris, newly translated by Mark Kurlansky, I checked out his other books, remembered I enjoyed Salt and Cod, and reserved 1968. While Kurlansky organizes this book by time rather than commodity, he presents a global view of what was happening concurrently each month, in Paris, Prague, Mexico City, as well as Chicago and My Lai. But this is not exclusively a political reprise. Although focusing primarily on street demonstrations and university occupations, he interprets such events as the cause of an all volunteer army and military control of media coverage, of the rise of image over substance in politicians, oddly traced back to Pierre Trudeau, and of White backlash becoming an underlying platform of the Republican party.

The ability to broadcast news live to my thinking, was the most critical paradigm shift. There were not longer delays, interpretations, cropping of film; news went to an hour, editorial comment seeped in, and the theater aspects of violence came to predominate coverage. All causes had to compete for air time and action-backed clips.

But being there, actually turning 21 the fall of '68 what I remember most is a palpable change in one's sense of security. Concerts on campus were no longer an afternoon with Horowitz, but hours of ear-blasting Cream; diversions were no longer sneaking into the all-male operated radio station but salvaging thrown out stuff on the Grand Concourse. Pill box hats were out, headbands were in. I swore for the first time at one of my roommates whose father was a General in Viet Nam. Graduation was celebrated with John Lindsay as commencement speaker and by the senior class doing its version of Hair.

Those few LPs that have made it through several moves and changes of equipment are cherished and blasted by my youngest son and when my other roommate visits she always asks him "aren't they your mother's records?" even when he has programmed them on Pandora.

68 has deep roots, the kudzu of America and the world. I just toggled over to Internet news and the Basque ETA says they are laying down their arms; my high school friend who occupied Grayson Kirk's office, went to the Democratic convention and to other landmark events of that year, emailed me back as he participated in Occupy Philadelphia.

Strangely, I feel almost like Tony Webster from The Sense of an Ending. I have filtered and made revisionist history of how 68 impacted me personally. Not only do I selectively remember people and events from that tumultuous year, but I pride myself in how much I've changed (or reverted to pre 1967) me. Some of that year's culture remains iconic, most has so infiltrated our daily lives that it is difficult to attribute so much to one span of twelve months. Maybe I should read 1492.

Even a Faster Read: The Sense of an Ending

Finished reading Julian Barnes' latest novel, The Sense of an Ending, the day after it won the Man Booker award. It is an excellent short novel even if its construction is a bit obvious, sort of like those new ecto skeletal buildings ... you see everything blatantly that holds it together, but still marvel.

Barnes' protagonist, Tony Webster, is a man who decides how to construct his own life, making it comfortable and avoiding conflicts. He is not a person typically lost in the past nor analyzing how he came to be where he is -- divorced, retired, pretty much out of contact with friends from the past. When that past intrudes, it comes back almost with footnotes. Webster filters out his memories of school lessons, outings and events so that they inform and reinforce his perceived character. It is a lesson in filtering past experiences, assigning import, and force fitting patterns, a worthy uber theme of novel writing itself. What does the author purposefully include to advance the plot, provide a subtheme and develop characters and relationships? Barnes asks the reader to think how are these intentions different from how a person writes his own internal autobiography.

An interesting book and marvelously written. I have already reserved a couple other of his novels to appreciate his complete oeuvre, novels that contributed to the Man Booker this time around after four previous nominations.

Damn the Snooze Alarm: Sex at Dawn

Now here's a 300 page book that can be read, avidly, in a day: Sex at Dawn -- The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha. The authors are both research psychologists but the book focuses on their interpretive view of anthropology and evolution brought crashingly up against social mores and dictates. Ryan and Jetha's intent is blow to smithereens the long held "scientific" given that human monogamy is biologically preordained and that human sexuality is a zero sum economic transaction of trading a clear paternal line of heritage for protection and material benefit. R & J say, nope, humans are more like bonobos and present evolutionary physical bodily manifestations to support their theory that by nature, both men and women came from a prehistoric age of foragers who readily shared and sought out many sexual partners. And they do this all with wit and laugh out loud quotes.

In the introduction, they state what they want to prove in the book: " What is the essence of human sexuality and how did it get to be that way? ... we'll explain how seismic cultural shifts that began about ten thousand years ago (basically, the shift from foraging to farming) rendered the true story of human sexuality so subversive and threatening that for centuries it has been silenced by religious authorities, pathologized physicians, studiously ignored by scientists, and covered up by the moralizing therapists."

Getting a bit more polemic, the authors go on to espouse: "The campaign to obscure the true nature of our species' sexuality leaves half our marriages collapsing under an unstoppable tide of swirling sexual frustration, libido-killing boredom, impulsive betrayal, dysfunction, confusion and shame. Serial monogamy stretches before (and behind) many of us like an archipelago of failure: isolated islands of transitory happiness in a cold, dark sea of disappointment. And how many of the couples who manage to stay together for the long haul have done so by resigning themselves to sacrificing their eroticism on the altar of three of life's irreplaceable joys ..."

By chapter three, the humor is more prevalent, making an otherwise scholarly thesis a fun read: "Willpower fortified with plenty of guilt, fear, shame, and mutilation of body and soul may provide some control over these urges and impulses. Sometimes. Occasionally. Once in a blue moon. But even when controlled, they refuse to be ignored. As ... Schopenhauer pointed out, One can choose what to do, but not what to want."

In a chapter on jealousy, R & J align sex against other loves: "First-born children often feel jealous when a younger sibling is born. Wise parents make a special point of reassuring the child that shell always be special, that the baby doesn't represent any kind of threat to her status, and that there's plenty of love for everyone. Why is it so easy to believe that a mother's love isn't a zero-sum proposition, but that sexual love is a finite resource?"

I love the following analogy about the difference between male sexual sprinters vis a vis female marathoners: "The symmetry of dual disappointment illustrates the almost comical incompatibility between men's and women's sexual response in the context of monogamous mating. You have to wonder: if men and women evolved together in sexually monogamous couples for millions of years, how did we end up being so incompatible? It's as if we were sitting down to dinner together ... but half of us can't help wolfing down everything in a few frantic, sloppy minutes, while the other half are still setting the table and lighting candles."

And the 180 view of When Harry Met Sally: " ... but if the roles were reversed, the scene wouldn't be funny -- it wouldn't even make sense. Imagine: Billy Crystal sits at the restaurant table, he starts breathing harder, maybe his eyes bug out a bit, he grunts a few times, takes a few bites of his sandwich, and falls asleep. No big laughs. Nobody in the deli even notices. If male orgasm is a muffled crash of cymbals, female orgasm is a full-on opera."

Of all the non-fiction books on the lust list this year, this was certainly the most fun, the most thought provocative, and the lustiest.

Trying Out Another Deadly Sin: Gluttony

A week or so ago, the New York Times magazine did the entire issue on food. Most of the articles were written in question and answer format, and one in particular caught my hungry eye: what was the best book about food ever written? Several were mentioned, but the responder acclaimed The Belly of Paris by Emile Zola as the hands down winner. Even though I could not progress very far into Zola's lust list book, Nana, I devoured TBOP.

The novel is set in 1858 Paris in the neighborhood of the recently completed Les Halles market place. It is the depiction of the various food stalls, the delivery wagons' congestion in the approaching streets, the smells of the slaughtering of live animals in its cellars that makes the book an overstuffed panorama. What keeps it from being a glossy spread from a mad version of Gourmet is the overlay of the people who keep the stalls and their small business owner counterparts in the becoming gentrified neighborhood. These characters are the worms in the apples, the mold on the meat.

Zola writes unforgettable characters, all flawed, some idealistic, some simple, but most devious and self-serving. Most memorable are the Beautiful Lisa and her challenger for local ideal woman, the Beautiful Norman (not a man but from Normandy); and the three neighborhood magpies whose gossip more than any political intrigue brings down the key male characters and sets the supporting females and other minor inhabitants back into their bourgeois orbits.

All the people who populate the story in one way or another have jobs in the "food industry." Florent the convict who escaped from his exile in Devil's Island because an inspector at Les Halles; Gavard sells poultry; Quenu, Florent's brother, owns a charcuterie; with the exception of Q, most men meet nightly at the local bistro to drink and conspire yet another popular uprising to overthrow the latest corrupt French government. (How odd to be reading about a conspiracy to pack the streets with dissidents as the "Wall Street" demonstrations spread to other cities and people I know whose blood still boils from the anti-war movement of the 60s rush to participate ... making Florent's internalized, personalized oppression wrapped in idealistic reform seem more believable.)

This 2009 translation is by Mark Kurlansky whose books Salt and Cod I read and enjoyed a couple of years ago. His style is probably what is making this particular Zola easier to get through than Nana. I reserved a couple other of Kurlansky's book and in keeping with the political rather than the epicurean theme, the first one I started reading in the pile is 1968.

Same Time, Next Year: Nostalgic but Still Teared Up

I saw this play on Broadway either in 1977 or 1978, just about the time when the story line ends in the movie version that covers 1951 when Doris and George first meet to 1977, not when they stop their annual rendezvous but when George asks Doris to marry him after his wife dies.

Although I can't remember who starred in the production in NYC, several of the key events remained etched in my memory and I always held the premise of such a long term affair as believable and natural. What struck me more this time was how each of the lovers tried on different personae through the years, displaying outward poses and contemporary facades that often clashed with their lover's ideology at that point in time. But despite chafing politics, out of sync cycles in business careers, and other events of everyday life, their relationship rested on bedrock.

What also dated the premise is of course, the setting is well before cell phones and email and they never contact each other the other 363 days of the year. At times of stress, they might have called but hung up before anyone answered. Trying to catch up on a year of experiences over a long weekend strikes me like those horrible notes people stick in their Christmas cards to recap to long lost and seldom thought of acquaintances only those banner headline events that happened over the past twelve months.

Although Doris does not accept George's marriage offer, she is in anguish, trying to balance an annual weekend of passion and love against those other 51 weeks where she lives with a family who knows who her favorite movie actors are and the name of her perfume. George does not give her up despite her saying no, because it is not a negation of their long lasting love. They have a treasure that does not tarnish or diminish from time or distance or convention.

Product Placing: City of Secrets

Eventually, I stopped reading Kinky Friedman murder mysteries because he spent more time and words describing his cigars and espresso machine than he did on plot or character development. His smoking and drinking habits overwhelmed his story telling, like those of a resident barfly at a local pub who never had anything new to say.

So too I find Kelli Stanley. Even before finishing her second novel, City of Secrets, I wished I could deface this library book with a highlighter, coloring in the many sentences on every page that referenced her Chesterfield cigarettes and the various lighting implements she used to strike up her “sticks.” I really believe the book would be fifty or more pages shorter. It was one long ad for smoking. (Why aren’t the anti-smoking police, so avid in their monitoring of movies, focusing on the printed word, yellowed with nicotine?) While I was reading this book, coincidentally, I was selling an old Chesterfield tin on eBay, one that I found in my mother’s flotsam and jetsam from before my long deceased from lung cancer father switched brand loyalty to Camels. It was not getting much attention at auction and I was sorely tempted to contact Ms. Stanley and tell her it had her name written all over it for a mere $5.00; eventually, I believe it was some college student in North Carolina who snatched it up.

I digress into my own issues because there is so little to say about CoS. Yes it has won a couple of awards, but the type that is the equivalent of a ceremonial key to a city, praise for her depiction of pre-WW2 San Francisco. Perhaps the setting rings true, but the detective, Miranda Corbie, the Chesterfield addict, does not. Stanley mimics a choppy, phrase as sentence, noir style of dime crime novel detectives, but grafting them onto an ex-hooker seems forced and too much of a contemporary revisionist device. Corbie deals with crimes against a background of anti-Semitism; I guess her previous novel used a similar backdrop of anti-Japanese.

Which brings me to the uber-question I ask about each storyteller: why does she write the book; what truth is she trying to have the reader discover? Rather than answering what I got or didn’t get out of CoS, I only want to comment that as I’ve asked myself such questions, I’ve come to realize that the more blatant the message, the less interpretative and personally identifiable, the less I enjoy the writer’s effort. Kelli Stanley is a novelist who I will neither read again nor recommend to others, even as we in the “real world” book club focus more on the importance of place to plot. Could these murders only have happened at this time in San Francisco … probably; could they have been solved by Miranda, never.

Second Thoughts on Courtesans

You know how sometimes you lie awake at night and give your pillow the most perfect speech or write the most literary op ed ... both without a recorder or lap top? So it was last night as I rethought the book about courtesans and whether they were, in fact, lusty lovers. I decided not.

As both the author and myself believe, milieu is everything. Given that these women had no other options for financial success, the life of a well-kept woman was an economic decision above all. Not to say that modern women don't weigh a mate from a cost benefit perspective, but that is an assessment for the long run. Passion and lust rarely looks that far in advance. The payback must be immediate, yes recurring is nice, but intense is better.

A passionate lover does not look to trade up like a courtesan. There is no rational thought involved. Body rules mind. Body wins.

A courtesan scorns social rules as does a passionate lover. Both can parade their attachments proudly, publicly. But a courtesan does so to array the trappings: the clothes, the jewels, the salon. Consumed lovers are oblivious to the afterglow spectacle they present, not offering a show, and shocked by the comments of observers because they are not conscious of their appearance.

Because Griffin is writing about the "career" of being a courtesan and not the inevitability of being a passionate, lustful lover, she omits characteristics such as abandonment, oblivion, and a complete rationalization of otherwise adhered to morals or standards. Her courtesans are too calculating, misers, hoarders, if you will. Lovers do not keep ledgers.

Virtuous Courtesans

There is a horse running this summer who has the best name ... Seven Lively Sins. There is something pulsating about a "good" round of sinning and who better to be the paragons of lusty virtues but notable courtesans.

Susan Griffin compiled a catalogue of virtues possessed by courtesans across the centuries from 15th Century Rome, through the Renaissance, as best typified by Parisian kept women from the courts of the Louis to Belle Epoque, up to Sarah Bernhardt's time. Griffin does not array her courtesans chronologically, even though she stresses that to be the penultimate courtesan, the setting must be perfect, aligned. Instead, she illustrates their talents over seven chapters: timing, beauty, cheek, brilliance, gaiety, grace and charm, sort of the basic merit badges of kept women. At the end of each chapter, she adds in an erotic station, a corruption perhaps of the stations of the cross, themselves with come-hither titles: flirtation, suggestion, arousal, seduction, rapture and afterglow. What promises these end notes seem to promise but alas, Griffin teases us with minuscule vignettes written about lovers seen from the wrong end of binoculars. The boudoir is never entered. The charms are all those publicly flaunted, granted with much more style and taste than over-sexed movie, reality TV and rock stars.

Griffin is a historian, not an author of how-to manuals, yet she does interpret the virtues, especially charm, as key to an arousing relationship:

"Although it is clear that the courtesan would need to have carnal knowledge, what has not always been so evident is the profound nature of what she knew. The realm of sexual pleasure is also the realm of the psyche. To love or be loved, to touch, be touched, feel pleasure, passion ecstasy, to surrender and release engages every human faculty, not sensual adroitness alone but intelligence of every kind. As well as being willing to give pleasure, a good lover must be sensitive and aware, registering what kind of touch, for instance, on which part of the body arouses desire, knowing which mood calls for a robust approach, which moment requires gentleness, able to laugh or tease while at the same time probing both the mind and body of the loved one for gateways to greater feeling."

Remember charm schools? Maybe they were important after all; Griffin writes:
"Faced with a charming woman, for instance, you will feel yourself ceding control almost immediately. Suddenly, your body seems to have a mind of its own. Perhaps you sense a spreading feeling of warmth and then an excitement, one that enlivens both body and soul, almost as if you were being reborn. It hardly surprises you therefore that soon you find yourself letting down your guard. You may reveal to her what you never intended to reveal to anyone or laugh at what you never found humorous before. Then you realize you have agreed to what, in different company, you might have found to be rather wild propositions. And all the time you feel loser somehow in your limbs, closer to liquid than substance. Have you become putty in her hands? Even if this were true, the pleasure is too delicious for you to worry about and such consideration. On the contrary, you are more than happy to stay in her hands for as long as it is conceivably possible and by any means necessary."

These two quotes are the closest Griffin comes to Anais Nin.

Her organization, by quality rather than character, and her erotic vignettes closing out each virtue make the book choppy. The stations seem to have no connection to the virtue under discussion and often focus more on the feelings of the courtesan's protector than on her embodiment of a given talent.

Griffin has other books with tantalizing titles: The Eros in Everyday Life, What Her Body Thought, and Women and Nature - The Roaring Inside Her. Hoping for a bit more lustiness, I reserved the last title, written in the mid-70s. How dated ... what a feminist polemic against male domination. Has Griffin come a long way baby in the past 35 years? Nah

The Epicurean Psychopath or How to Murder a Book

When I was reading The Epicure's Lament, I saw a cross reference to The Debt to Pleasure, a book about another self-absorbed male, compulsive about food and Provence, who was described as an evil foodie. Tarquin Winot (is that "Win-ot" ... no I think, Why Not) is more a Ripley reprise.

Unlike Hugo Whittier in the Hudson Valley who at least attempts to portray his family members and contemporaries, Tarq is penultimately self-centered, keeping the references to his parents, brother and other family functionaries to highly interpreted asides, nothing of the nature of a direct quote and neutral portrayal. All the world is depicted through Tarq's mind.

He protests that this book is his journey through England and France as his taste buds are refined. But alas, through double entendres and interviews with a reporter interested in his brother Bartholomew's life, Tarq alludes to his murdering mater and pater, resident tutor, aforesaid brother, and finally boldly acceding to poisoning the interviewer and her husband, bragging about his knowledge of poisonous mushrooms and justifying it as mirroring I, Claudius.

Like Ripley, all these people get in the way of his complete enjoyment of the good life. He kills for an inheritance, to eliminate a more talented sibling, eventually just because he can. But unlike Ripley where the reader can be attracted to Tom's skill and chutzpah, John Lancaster's novel never makes Tarq appealing or in the end even interesting. Towards the end, where Lancaster intrudes using Tarq's voice to explain how he wrote this story, he says:

"Only the style of the book would remain consistent, driving, forceful (not), its stable nature underlying the chaos and limitless mutability of everything else in the narrative -- though it would no longer be clear if the book was a narrative since the essential mechanisms of propulsion, surprise, development, would seem largely to be forgotten ... gradually as the stability of lot and character fell away (well, that's reason alone not to pursue to the finish line), and all certainties became erased, the work would become more troubling ... until the appalled readers, unable to understand what was happening either to them or to the story... would watch the wholesale metastasization of the characters into one another, the collapse of the very idea of plot, of structure, of movement, of self, so that when the finally put down the book they are aware only of having been protagonists in a deep and violent dream whose sole purpose is their incurable unease." Ya think ya want to read this?

Again, closer to the end, Lancaster writes about the inferiority of an artist who creates something when compared to a murderer who creates the absence of someone. Tarq's rationalizing arguments at the summation evoke de Sade's writings of the self against all societal norms, because evil exists, because violence is common and unprosecuted in all instances. These debates are as bland and irritating as they were centuries ago.

Speaking of the Dick Francis Mystery Formula

Displayed at the library's check out desk on seven day loan was the latest "Francis" horse racing murder mystery, Gamble, by Felix Francis, son of Dick and recent co-author. There is so little difference between father and son, "just the bob of a head," that it makes one wonder how much of Dick's most recent books were completely ghost-written.

All elements present and accounted for: overbearing parent, strained relationship with significant other, series of violent deaths, hero attacked viciously, decadent horse owners and all too human jockeys and trainers.

Even a mediocre Francis story is a quick, exciting ride.

Another Lippman: Every Secret Thing

Reading Laura Lippman is like reading Dick Francis: if you like revisiting a variation on a plot, you're happy with the talented technique. Lippman writes about crime in Baltimore, crimes involving pre-teen girls, depicting single parent households and strained race relations, both contributing factors in the lives of the criminals, victims, survivors, investigators and counselors. Everyone appears tainted by the poverty and white flight from the city. Crime is inevitable but somehow unsympathetic.

After my first Lippman, I reserved all I could track down. One I couldn't even pretend to get into. Every Secret Thing is engaging, if formulaic. Two white girls, aged 11, abduct a black infant, the granddaughter of a prominent judge. Both are sentenced to seven years in juvenile facilities as it is impossible to determine which of them killed the baby. Upon there release and return to their old neighborhood, another black toddler disappears. Suspicion focuses on them, directed by the mother of their first victim. Everyone, every woman, in the book is flawed: the said mother and her marriage and her relation or lack thereof with her replacement daughter; the investigating newswoman; the policewoman who found the first victim and seems to have been selected again to take a fall; the self-aggrandizing defense lawyer who may herself be the illegitimate daughter of a former mayor; etc etc. Lippman loads the story with losers.

Nonetheless, she still weaves a plot with hidden clues and surprise, if out of left field, endings. Good enough to make me move on to her What the Dead Know.

PS The day after: finished What the Dead Know and found it way too over-constructed. This plot has two sisters being abducted and a woman showing up thirty years later claiming to be one of them but reluctant to reveal her assumed identity in order to preserve her anonymity. The Baltimore detectives return along with the themes of dissolving families. Not as good as EST.

Prescient Artists

When my oldest son was a boy, at the end of each school year, I would get a notice from the administration that either he couldn't advance or his grades would be held because he had never returned several books to the library. He just could not turn back in those ones he cherished the most. Only occasionally do I have the same feelings and being a better financed adult, I usually can get my own copy at the store. One such book I read a couple of years ago was Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer. Maybe I lent the library copy to a friend or it vanished under the car seat, but then it was the library notifying me of a past due and ultimately lost book. I paid the cover cost grudgingly.

And time went by, thought of the book often, but only bought it last week as part of the order for Pat Conroy works for my younger son. I probably used up all the ink in a ball point pen underlining ideas that were insightful, beautifully written. This book will now join those august few I designate coffee table books, an eclectic collection including de Tocqueville, A Year of Magical Thinking, and French Women Don't Get Fat.

Lehrer was a post-graduate technician in a neuroscience lab reading Proust waiting for an experiment to finish. Those two juxtaposed talents bode well for the rest theses that in striving to understand sensory perceptions and the mind, many geniuses articulated biological facts years before science caught up to their ideas and proved them true. Not only does Lehrer explain how Proust's madeline triggered childhood memories, but also how Cezanne drew the observer into his paintings by having them fill in his blank spaces or delineate objects crisply. He explores Escoffier's gestalt for fine dining and the importance of aroma (quick on the heels of Remembering Smell). For Stravinsky, he concludes that all art must be jarring and break with the unexpected; for Whitman, he agrees that the soul is created by the body.

Equally well analyzed but more difficult geniuses are Gertrude Stein and Virginia Wolfe, the former for her attempt to emphasize the structure of languages over the content of words. Extending her ideas to Pinker is fine, but somehow, Lehrer does not compel his reader to move on to Tender Buttons. I was motivated to pick up the copy of The Waves that was in the pile of books to read next to my bed and I finished about ten pages when I gave up. Lehrer is correct when he says the mind imposes logic and order and predictability ... it was too late at night to struggle with Wolfe's rhythmic and inundating prose.

Read this book.

My Reading Life, Not Pat Conroy's

Face to face book club, as opposed to this virtual one, has leeched into my postings. The Slacker who belongs to both groups received a copy of Pat Conroy's My Reading Life as a birthday present from her son, who knows her to be a person to whom books come in a close second to daily sustenance. And my younger son is a big Conroy fan, urging me to read Lords of Discipline which he read when himself in military school. So with this confluence, I ordered Conroy's latest, South of Broad to read with my son and the club this fall.

Back to My Reading Life: Conroy writes not only about influential books, but equally wonderfully about the people who introduced him to all kinds of literature. His essays on his favorite teacher and first book rep are lyrical. The ones set in places, the Old New York Book Shop in Atlanta, and being a Southerner in Paris, a personal disclosures on the importance of "being there." And best of all, is the one on being a military brat, the quintessential Conroy.

I don't think I want to adhere to a 2012 list on Conroy-inspired books; however, he has pointed out my lack of essentials and I am committed to read both War and Peace and Gone With The Wind next year ... and South of Broad as soon as I can wrench it out of my son's grip.

All About Love -- Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

I recently read a review for All About Love by Lisa Appignanesi and decided it came close enough to add to the 2011 lust list. It reminds me of one of those forgettable nonfictional "love" psycho-anthologies I read earlier in the year (not worth trying to figure out which one, as the same sin seems to pervade all such compendiums). The authors try to define and explain "love" in all its permutations, from first love attraction, to passionate lust, to married comfort with its ancillary risks of adultery and divorce. It is almost that they have to be politically correct and push on to cover maternal love and friendship. Maybe love is too broad a word to write about ... it's like writing about "walk" ... to many various interpretations.

That said, LA has flashes of brilliant writing; her her insights when writing about Poe:

"... love ... a return to a primal sense of oneness where lover and beloved merge ... and there is no demarcation between inside and outside. We are recognized, known by, and know the other ... our best self comes into being, one filled with new potential ... the abiding loneliness, that emptiness that human beings are prone to recedes, at least momentarily ... a sense of pastoral at-homeness reigns ..."

As I culled her topics for wise words to impart to my soon to be married son and his wonderful fiance, I found plenty of quotes:

"Core to keeping the hopes we have of a relationship alive and making them as successful as we can may be a re-estimation of habit ... Our world of plenty and constant stimulus, our enshrinement of the excitements of youth and novelty, shroud habit with a negative aura ... A habit, as the dictionary tells us, is the protective garment we put on to go out into the social world ... Habit is also our "habitation," a place of security and our settled disposition, the way we prefer to live"

Her summary of Emmanuel Levinas' understanding of love:

"... a uniquely ambiguous relation, at once possessive and deferential ... Though motivated by desire and need, loves comes into authentic being only when a reciprocity is set up with the other; there is a simultaneous sense of needing without being able to bring the other into possession, the sense of being needed, but without surrendering to exploitation ... that freedom and bondage here coexist."

Quoting Shelley's The Cencis, a poem about libidinal siblings, near books end, LA reminds us all that desire is all in the yearning and recollection:

"Our breath shall intermix ... and our veins beat together; and our lips with other eloquence than words, eclipse the soul that burns between them, and the wells which boil under our being's inmost cells."

Me, My Books and Irene

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

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

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

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

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

Remembering Smell by Bonnie Blodgett

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

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

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

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

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

Binging on Laura Lippman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Serialist by David Gordon

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

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

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

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

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

Clueless: Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante

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

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

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

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

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

Two Books I Don't Have Much to Say About

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

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

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

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

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

Off to Award-Winning Books -- Goodbye Passion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Done With Ripley

Although I did read them out of order, I finished my last Mr Ripley “murder mystery” today – The Boy Who Followed Ripley – which was actually the fourth of the Ripliad, coming before Under Water. Highsmith wrote about her protagonist over a period of thirty-six years, constituting a time line where Ripley held true to his talented traits, continuing to kill with blunt instruments and witnessing suicides and accidental deaths always near water. Maybe others have delved for symbolic meaning, but I do not feel up to it, or even interested.

As the Ripley saga matures, Highsmith endows his victims with baser qualities, connections to criminal activities themselves whether art forgeries, kidnapping or the Mob. Somehow, this might lead a reader to decide Ripley’s murders are more justifiable. Others could conclude that through his associates, he is lured into executing his proclivities towards the use of violence.

Ripley becomes “heroic” only because he encounters incompetence in his pursuers, indifference in his victims’ survivors and indulgence in his wife. Although not quite as unsettling as Ripley’s Game where he orchestrates the corruption and demise of a neighbor, in TBWFR, he tries to allay the guilt of a teenager who killed his father, initially as coldly and without apparent motivation as Tom’s youthful murders. Tom wants Frank Pierson to shed his guilt, enjoy his family’s wealth and get on with his life. Like Ripley, Frank’s family does not believe him guilty and the only person who does, like most of the characters Highsmith populates the Ripliad with, is made out to be unstable and unbelievable herself.

There will never be a Sherlock Holmes or even Columbo antagonist to bring Ripley to justice. His charm will forever cover his depravity and greed. A reader looking for an uber-theme has to focus on the concept of justice and retribution. One is left to question how comfortable it is to live in a world wherein the scales are not balanced all of the time. How ironic that I was reading these books during the trial of Casey Anthony acquitted in the murder of her three year old daughter. Will Casey become rich from writing her own “If I Did It” book? Will she revert to her partying days? Marry? Ever birth another child? The wisdom of the crowd calls for her punishment, as do those who get to know the fictional Mr. Ripley.

Two More Ripleys Done

Now all that is left is The Boy Who Followed Ripley which I started last night. Read Ripley's Game out of sequence, after I read Ripley Under Water. Will review them however in chronological order. Ripley's Game is most unsettling. In Ripley Under Ground, Highsmith played with layer upon layer of false identities; here she introduces a pyramid of men each and all looking to find an agent to perform a criminal act so as to avoid being personally guilty of murder. Who is more guilty: Ripley for suggesting Trevanny to Reeves or Reeves for asking Ripley to find him some unsuspecting innocent to kill a couple of Mafioso looking to take over illegal gambling in Hamburg?

Is Trevanny less guilty in accepting the "job" because he is terminally ill with leukemia or because he is motivated to provide an inheritance for his wife and son? There is a review quote on the front of TBWFR from the Cleveland Plain Dealer that expresses my thoughts most clearly: "Highsmith skews your sense of literary justice, tilting your internal scales of right and wrong." Coincidentally, when a co-worker mentioned he saw John Malkovich as Ripley in RG and asked me whether I thought Ripley was a good guy or bad guy. I immediately said "bad," especially as in this novel, he entertains himself by using Trevanny as the hit man.

Later that night, I was mentally comparing Ripley to James Bond. Both pile up bodies, live high, and suffer no lasting consequences of their violent acts. But Bond has a license to kill ... Ripley acts exclusively out of self interest, to maintain a high society life style. His veneer of financially endowed well breeding is his cover for being a sociopath. His neighbors and fellow townsmen all seem to ignore the coincidences and rumors that surround his life. To quote: "Tom ... was aware of his reputation, that many people mistrusted him, avoided him. Tom had often thought that his ego would have been shattered long ago -- the ego of an average person would have been shattered -- except for the fact that people, once they got to know him ... and spent an evening, liked him ..." Only Madame Trevanny at the conclusion of the book expresses the readers' appraisal: she spits on him ... but then she doesn't go to the police, preserving her own husband's reputation and the ill-gotten gains that permit her to move out of the small village and move up in social standing.

On the other hand, Ripley Under Water seems to me to be the most contrived of Highsmith's plots so far. While it ties back to Ripley's dumping Murchison's corpse in a nearby canal, his victim from Ripley Under Ground, the character of David Pritchard who comes to France to dredge the waterways for his body seems to have dropped in with no clear motive or cause of justice. Pritchard and his wife are perceived by Ripley as low class almost hippie Americans, completely unworthy opponents. They are so beneath him intellectually, that his doesn't even have to dirty his hands killing them; there greed makes them self-destruct. It was not suspenseful, merely a bridge between others in the series, marking time.

In the meantime, I've squeezed in some movie nights and afternoons, finally finding The King's Speech perchance on the library shelves, despite being 182 in line on the reserve list. I liked it but not as much as the Hollywood hype lead me to expect as well as elevator talk at work. A bigger surprise and enjoyment was Nowhere Boy, the late teen years of Lennon as he grows into music. Excellent performances and engaging story.

Ripliad

Our face to face book club is on summer hiatus. At the June meeting, several of us suggested we just meet showing our true reading addictions -- mystery novels. Blog buddy mentioned she'd like to read The Talented Mr. Ripley and maybe double header the group get together with the movie. No date was agreed to, but off I went into the wealth of Patricia Highsmith.

Finished TTMR over a week ago, and the movie, as I recall it, holds remarkably true to the novel. If anything, Ripley comes across as more swarmy, a very high functioning sociopath. What surprised me was that TTMR was the first of five Ripley-centered novels Highsmith wrote. Finished the second in the series published fifteen years later, Ripley Under Ground. These books are well-written page turners and I could hardly wait for Tom to kill his first victim and construct his rationalization and sit back for his alibis to successfully acquit him.

RUP has Tom involved in art forgeries. The theme of being something that is not appears everywhere in the plot line. As well as the artwork being faked, Tom and another character maintain disguises, both pretending to be the long-dead forged artist Derwatt. Now Tom has garnered a couple of slightly awry accomplices: the unexplained wife Heloise and Reeves who uses Tom to convey incriminating tapes.

Highsmith does not follow the standard murder mystery formula: Tom is not brought to justice. He is not a likeable rogue; she portrays him as a cold-blooded opportunist with a dandy's demeanor, hungry for the finest trappings life affords. Can't wait to finish the other three.

Summer Escape Movies

The past few weeks, I have been neither scholarly nor dedicated about reading or even watching movies, only marginally adhering to the 2011 lust list theme. Last night, did an old chick flick, the 1991 Oscar- nominated Prince of Tides -- mainly because I remembered the story was written by Pat Conroy, not for any movie idolatry of either star, Nick Nolte (before we knew he was a drunk) and Barbra Streisand at the acme of her NYC Jewish princess cycle. The movie is so old that Blythe Danner is Nolte's wife, but she still evidences the source of Gwenyth's acting ability and good genes.

And yes, the story is about adultery and Nick leaves NYC and returns to his wife and three daughters in South Carolina. Conroy writes of violence and repression and has a wonderful subplot of what it took Nick/Tom's mother to claw her way to social prominence whereas both Blythe and Barbra are credentialed doctors. Nick seems to have inherited his mother's dissatisfaction with life and it is only after another family crisis and a time of reaffirmation coaching Barbra's son, that he can re-center. I was going to say when I started writing about Conroy that most of his characters are portrayed as worthy. Even Barbra's cheating, taunting husband has passed his musical genius on to their son; Nick's mother, despite her greed and cultivated false facade, has made him resilient and sturdy.

In contrast, last week I watched Swept Away by Lina Wertmuller, that is the original 1974 version in Italian, not the remake with Madonna (I can't even imagine). Yes, the male lead slaps his women around and the sex with the wealthy woman he becomes shipwrecked with is at times rough. Funny, I remembered that I saw the movie before not during those scenes of sex on the beach, but when Giannini is in the phone booth at the end of the movie trying to convince Mariangela not to return to her husband. So how do I stretch a comparison of these two films? At the end of each, both are couples are back with their wedded partners. The movie-viewer is left to imagine which marriages will last, be happy, or even be improved from the adulteries. In my mind, Nick fares the best. Although he pines for a parallel life in NYC, he has matured and returns to an intact, functioning family where his wife's infidelity itself only was a call for attention. Barbra might lose her post-coital smile but she is left with her career and probably significant alimony. Mariangela's class identification and lust for money prevails ; her interlude of passion occurred only because of timing, place and crises. Comfort and status are restored and her previous posture and politics readily resumed. Giannini, too, seems to revert to his class surprisingly to a wife who has the innate talents to hold her own with his machismo.

Finally, a comment about both films having been directed by women (Streisand did hers). Although Prince of Tide is a stronger narrative thanks to the talents of Conroy, Barbra's version seems to women's movement dominant to me, with the heroine successful in terms of outer appearances and status symbols. Wertmuller's subliminal message is European class distinctions and the dance of their interactions and envies. Both cover themes in ways that are not nostalgic despite their releases 20 and 40 years ago.