Currently viewing the category: "Book review"

A Bridge to Somewhere (mostly unpleasant)

By On May 25, 2015 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction

Here’s a unique novel structure. Evan Connell, Jr., wrote two novels, Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr. Bridge (1969), set in 1930s Kansas City, the same family, the same marriage, the same events, but from the two different point of views, apparently to much acclaim at the time. As a unique novel reading experience, I read […]

Here’s a unique novel structure. Evan Connell, Jr., wrote two novels, Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr. Bridge (1969), set in 1930s Kansas City, the same family, the same marriage, the same events, but from the two different point of views, apparently to much acclaim at the time. As a unique novel reading experience, I read both of them simultaneously as overlapping waves, fifty pages nominally in one, and fifty in the other. What fun! Apparently, as a learned at a Memorial Day back yard dinner at the neighbors, movies have been based on the novels.

I’m not sure I could stomach the movies. If you take Ward and June Cleaver, and stiffen them for a generation or two prior, you’d approximate Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. Like most novels worthy of their readers, you can’t help but eagerly turn the pages of Connell’s books, even though you know it’s not going to end badly or well. Clearly, there’s going to be no end at all to the narrow, early suburban lives of these affluent, politically, and socially conservative Americans. Every page is a turn of the torture machine crank, the ring of an old grandfather clock marking off yet another interminable hour in the silent, suffering,pathetic destiny for this stripe of America.

In some ways, it’s a different form of muckraking journalism in novel form – I’m thinking of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle – showing us how the American “free market” caste system works, but in this case from the top down, not the bottom up.

What kept me reading these 600+ pages over a three-day weekend? Always hard to capture, but here’s what I think:

You can read the Bridge novels as a diatribe against prejudice and racism (the poor, blacks, Jews, Italians, gays, women, are all victims), a portrayal of capitalism vs socialism and the New Deal, the vices of classism, and lots of other -isms. You can read the Bridge novels as an indictment of the institution of traditional marriage with traditional gender roles. You can even read the Bridge novels as a damning inability of a couple to recognize, communicate about, and resolve their issues. You can probably guess that all issues faced by this couple are swept under the rug, which in a figurative sense, is the only thing “left standing” by the end.

I think what kept me going, although I hadn’t realized it until I was close to finished, is how all of us (certainly all Americans, maybe everyone), if we are able and willing to listen to the tape recorder in our heads (the one that no one can hear), suffer from/with all of the afflictions and ailments presented through this couple. Even if we think we “aren’t like that,” we are victims of parents, teachers, community leaders, and significant others who “are like that,” or were. I don’t mean just the negative (and what may come across today as stereotypical) traits of the Bridges’ (e.g., prejudice, stubbornness) but the positive ones too (work ethic,  loyalty, ambition). Society as a whole has a rate of change but we as individuals have our own rate of change. We aren’t always as enlightened as we wish to believe.

It’s fascinating that Mrs. Bridge came first. I think it’s easy to see it was a bit more difficult for the author to let Mrs. Bridge become her own character, than Mr. Bridge. The “Missus” gets one hundred fewer pages, too. I also wonder if Connell was projecting the rebellious nature of the 1960s onto his 1930s characters (especially the children), but then I realized that the large social trends often begin with the the affluent, leisure classes.

One thing’s for sure: Mrs. Bridge ends with the most heartbreaking scene imaginable. I can’t think of an ending that so embodies not only the character portrayed but indeed the oppression of the social “system” as a whole over the individual.

These are novels well worth reading, even if the experience resembles taking medicine that’s tastes awful but is good for you.

 

Us Conductors: A Potent Blend of Love, Music, Russia, New York, Physics, Espionage, and Gulags

By On March 24, 2015 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Music

I’d much rather read a debut novel that aims high and falls short than one that aims low, or like much commercial fiction, doesn’t need to aim at all. When said novel combines a few of my favorite themes – New York City, Russia, music, technology, and a earnest love story – and the publicity […]

I’d much rather read a debut novel that aims high and falls short than one that aims low, or like much commercial fiction, doesn’t need to aim at all. When said novel combines a few of my favorite themes – New York City, Russia, music, technology, and a earnest love story – and the publicity machine behind the novel is silent and rusted, I’m in.

Sean Michaels’ Us Conductors centers on the invention of a very strange instrument, the Theremin, which makes sound by the conductance of electric current through the human body. (You make sounds/notes by waving your arms around, much like an orchestra conductor or band leader). Around this invention, at the beginning of the last century, Michaels builds an elaborate decades-spanning tale of U.S. – Russian espionage, fierce competition among U.S. corporations for new gadgets and devices, other more nefarious applications of the scientific (physics) principles behind the theremin (e.g., bugging devices), American prosperity and depression, birth of Lenin’s communism and its growth into oppressive regimes under Stalin and later rulers, musical composition and performance, and more.

But what clearly challenges Michaels’ imagination is the love story between  Clara, the violinist in Manhattan who becomes his star pupil/player of his instrument, and Dr. Termen, the often naive, self-absorbed behavior obsessive compulsive inventor, if not genius. From early in the story to near the end, Termen is a prisoner, first as a corporate/state spy for Russia in America (how he enters the country), then as an accused traitor who betrayed his country. Without the love story, the beauty of the musical interludes, some human dignity passages in the gulag, and Termen’s will to survive, the reader would suffocate breathing in the tragedy of this man’s life, especially in the second half of the novel.

Fortunately, for a novel with more moving and stationary pieces and parts than a Steinway piano, Michaels’ use of mostly short, choppy sentences, brisk dialogue, lots of white space, and a first-person narration keeps the story from getting mired in the mud. There were moments when I feared the story would fall into melodrama. At one point, I thought, Michaels must have just watched The Shawshank Redemption. At another, I thought he must have just listened to Quartet for the End of Time composed by Messiaen (or read the story behind its birth, a tale of musicians in prison during WWII).

Frequently, Michaels use of similes and analogies seemed out of step. “The sound of the snow was like pepper crushed in a mortar.” I kept trying to square these two sounds and couldn’t. Or this: “Now, in a bare room across the world, I leave commas on the page…like eyelashes.” And this: “The wind howled like an abandoned child.” This is the kind of writing that sounds lovely, until I think about whether it actually works. I can also see where other readers would disagree. How about this: “Slowly you raised your bow and began to saw low notes like a comet at low velocity.” Has anyone heard a comet at low velocity? I suppose it’s a legitimate observation from the character’s mind (a physicist) but for us readers, not so sure.

But then this will appear on a the page: “The sum of all those years draining away, meaningless, before the empty fact of the present.” What a brilliant description of the exact point between his life in America and his emerging one as a traitor/prisoner back in Russia! There is a lengthy scene where Termen sneaks into a building (to steal corporate files) and kills a man, which I had trouble visualizing. However, I will say the last lines are a brilliant, nerdy, soul-crushing summation of his love for Clara.

I suppose this qualifies as historical fiction as much of the story is based on Termen’s life. The author acknowledges his debt to Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage, Albert Glinsky, but adds that his account is full of distortions, omissions, and lies.

Best of all, I stumbled into this novel browsing one of our local independent bookstores. I hadn’t even heard of the title or the author (and I spend a great deal of time searching for offbeat novels like this one). In the world of fiction (or music for that matter), nothing is more satisfying than discovering a new artist who pushes all your buttons and getting acquainted without any introductions or pre-conceived notions from others. I prefer not to be “played” by the constant drone of publicity (though how realistic is that?)

I certainly don’t wish for Michaels to toil in obscurity, though. I hope this blog post will turn other readers on to Us Conductors. It aims high – very high – but only falls a bit short.

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Solitude becomes the end

By On March 11, 2015 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

I just finished two of the most depressing novels ever. One was great. One was not. Both are, at base, about solitude. It’s not a happy place.

Stoner, John Williams, published in 1965, doesn’t rest on the tip of the collective tongue when it comes to great novels or novelists. Several times the past few […]

I just finished two of the most depressing novels ever. One was great. One was not. Both are, at base, about solitude. It’s not a happy place.

Stoner, John Williams, published in 1965, doesn’t rest on the tip of the collective tongue when it comes to great novels or novelists. Several times the past few years it appeared on my radar. Finally I bought it, and the bookstore clerk raved when I brought it to the cashier. Still, it took me a while to get to it.

In some ways it’s a recast of the biblical story of Job. Shit rains on this guy, William Stoner, son of a Missouri dirt farmer, who becomes a professor of English at the University of Missouri. That’s about where the positivity ends.

The timeline spans pre WWI to after WWII. Stoner’s father sends him off to college to become an agricultural engineer. He returns (briefly) as an English major, then leaves for good to pursue a graduate degree.

Two institutions which can nurture you as an adult, your family and your workplace, don’t for Stoner. His wife should be on meds if they had the right ones back then. His academic department has it in for him. His two buddies, if you can call them that, go to war (WWI) and Stoner does not. One comes home in a box. The other becomes head of the English department. He tries to do right by Stoner but he is contradicted by the larger powers of the academic institution.

The life of the mind becomes the only aspect of life where Stoner finds relief. But it is solitary relief. Even his daughter, with the help of her mother, becomes distant.

In middle age, Stoner has an affair with a young graduate student. She leaves so that they both avoid the inevitable scandal.  He publishes a scholarly book that “was forgotten and that served no use.” He dies of cancer at the end.

Yet, his plight is riveting. His will to survive, to be someone other than a dirt farmer, to progress from physical toil to life of the mind and educate others, to rise above the anguish and his station in life, gripped me. Stoner truly is about shoveling shit against the tide and believing at death that you somehow beat the odds. “…we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive – because we have to.” (p. 32). ”

And of that useless book, his thoughts in the moments before life is extinguished: “He did not have the illusion that he would find himself there, in that fading print; and yet, he knew, a small part of him that he could not deny was there, and would be there.” The novel and his life end while he his fondling the book.

This isn’t a spoiler because the plot will have nothing to do with your enjoyment. It’s all in the language, the economy, the precision, how haunting it is in its portrayal of a “normal” life. And it is a normal life. We will all find ourselves here, with Stoner, not forever, and maybe not for very long, but at some point(s), for no one lives without doubt about what it all means and why we have to suffer so.

In the end, Stoner is about the reality of life, the pain of the soul exposed by the erosion of almost all things that might protect it with meaning, the things we might have left behind, the connections with others which might live on, but will also end, and how we must rise above it all to keep on, because we must.

“A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.”

[I have to add here that the lyrics at the end of the Moody Blues song, “The Balance” (from A Question of Balance), appeared as I read the ending two weeks ago and those words have not left my head since. “Just open your mind, and realize…the way it’s al–ways been, just open your heart…”]

And so maybe it is because I live in Missouri now, but lived in NYC for many years, and read The Transcriptionist back to back with Stoner, that I pair them in a single blog post. It’s probably not fair. This is Amy Rowland’d debut novel. It also is about the solitary life, in similar ways to Stoner, the discarded life.

Lena, the protagonist, transcribes stories for a major New York Newspaper (assumed to be the Times because Rowland herself was a transcriptionist for the paper). She’s the only one transcriptionist left and occupies an old room once filled with many toiling at the same function.

She lives the life you’ve read about, heard about, seen movies about, the single female in Manhattan -poor, lonely, creeping towards middle age, on the edge. Mercifully, through a pigeon on the ledge of her office and a woman more on the edge than Lena, whom Lena encounters briefly on a bus, Rowland leads Lena to salvation, away from the edge (and more accurately, the ledge) and exposes for us her new-found dignity as a member of the human race, a member who no longer needs the newspaper.

The woman, Arlene Lebow, is a blind court reporter (get the connection to Lena?) who takes her own life swimming in the moat at the lion’s den in the zoo.

Lena’s colleagues at the newspaper don’t fare well. They serve as stereotypes solely to heighten Lena’s sensitivity to what’s happening around her (the aftermath of 9/11, for one thing). There’s just something off about all these characters. They are too one-dimensional. As an example, a speech by Ralph, the paper’s head honcho, goes like this: “…we are gathered here today to issue escape hoods to our valued staff. It is true that our country is at war. And we, the voice of the people, the voice for the people, we are under attack as well. As I’m sure you know, one of our most esteemed colleagues, Katheryn Keel, received personal threats this week, along with an envelope containing white powder…”

Banal is probably being kind here.

I noted at the top that it wasn’t a great book. It’s not a bad novel either. I am a sucker for novels about NYC, any time period. But this was a rare case when my understanding of, and experience with, the city got in the way of my enjoyment of the story. The ending doesn’t work. Just doesn’t. But I have sympathy. Endings are so difficult. But I could see what the author was striving for: How the craziest things, wanting to save a pigeon (a pigeon?? this ex-New Yorker asks) and demanding an obituary in the “paper of record” for Arlene (Lena essentially holds the paper hostage to achieve this), help you find the meaning in your own life and give you the strength to disrupt it for the better. Depressing, yes. Poignant? Almost. But there’s a lilt to Rowland’s style, a naivete to her protagonist, a minimalist sensibility, and a genuine desire to lampoon modern journalism. These elements work well together.

I’m going to bet Rowland’s second will be worth reading.

 

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Mona Simpson – The Case of an Author I Love But Am Never Sure Why

By On November 23, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

I just finished Mona Simpson’s Casebook. Her most recent novel. I really enjoyed it. I think I have read and enjoyed every novel she has written except one. She reminds me of Anne Tyler, except that Anne Tyler does a great job of writing the same type of story every time. Mona Simpson does not. […]

I just finished Mona Simpson’s Casebook. Her most recent novel. I really enjoyed it. I think I have read and enjoyed every novel she has written except one. She reminds me of Anne Tyler, except that Anne Tyler does a great job of writing the same type of story every time. Mona Simpson does not. Mona Simpson’s novels are deeper, even though I think she is a master of the story in which nothing much happens. In Casebook, a boy nominally proceeding through adolescence during the course of the story engages in his parents divorce and subsequent relationships through espionage. He and his best friend spy on the parents. They record and listen in on private conversations. Some of them are very intimate. They hire a private investigator. These people have pretty weird relationships. But the boys have a purpose: Self preservation. They want to know what is going to happen to them.

Other than in-home espionage, the story is typical white American family privilege and angst. Suffering, outside of the divorce and newly forming relationships, manifests in a slightly receding economic orbit for the mom post-divorce, but frankly not much else. Far from tragic in the scheme of things. Especially if your schema is living in war torn countries overseas, in countries with oppressive governments or cultures, or in economically deprived and racially divided regions of this country. The new man in the mother’s life lies in a despicable way. But let’s face it. A verbal bomb isn’t much like a real bomb. Everything that happens in this story happened yesterday to a few million young American men and their families, and will again tomorrow.

But Simpson’s stories read with ease. Casebook reminds me of a very popular book from my youth, Harriet the Spy (Louise Fitzhugh), which in less direct terms, deals with many of the same issues and from a similar perspective. Perhaps that is the clue as to its appeal for me. I loved Harriet the Spy. I was sucker for books about New York  City (The Catcher in the Rye, The Godfather) way before I ever got there (in 1974). In many ways, this is a version for the next century, as Fitzhugh’s classic came out in 1964, but mostly for adults. And that is the one troubling issue with Casebook. This narrator is able to feel and interpret and express way beyond his age, at least what I would conceive of for that age. Then again, maybe that’s how much the world has changed, I can’t fathom a boy at this age being so worldly, or so blase about things like sex and his parents.

I seem to remember thinking the same thing of Holden Caulfield and Harriet. Perhaps the narrator is telling the story about his earlier years at a much later point in time and therefore he is entitled to add some worldliness. In other words, he is narrating a story, not journaling. Does a teenage boy, not portrayed as academically superior, know what disyllabic means? This one does. Maybe it’s not so logical, but I like the narrator anyway.

Another strange thing for an experienced contemporary female novelist: The female characters are relatively two dimensional, but then again, we see through the eyes of this adolescent narrator, so that may be authenticity rather than character defect.

Anyway, there’s something warm about Simpson’s writing. Cozy. Commanding. The story never gets out of hand. It’s tightly controlled. It’s not too long or too short. No long-winded passages demonstrating literary pyrotechnics. Somehow, in the course of 300+ pages, I felt I had born witness to the maturing of Miles Adler, the narrator. His arc is clear, in the midst of his parents’ divorce, modern grappling with sexual identity, a close-knit group of his parents friends (whose kids are his friends). The kid turns out just fine. Thousands of course do every week, but I still found it reassuring. It’s more about how Miles seeks to exert some control over family events out of his control. His methods may seem shady for an adult, but come off as precocious for a kid.

And there is something comforting about Simpson herself as an author. For me. I read Anywhere But Here in the early 1980s. It was one of the first books I found when I began searching for (1) books by new contemporary authors that were not part of a syllabus, (2) books which no longer were reflecting my age and circumstances (Catcher in the Rye; This Side of Paradise; KinFlicks; Bright Lights, Big City; and others), and (3) books by and about women and their struggles. So it was instructive to read how Simpson would capture a male protagonist, a young ‘un at that.

 

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Arab American Writers: The struggle to revise the revolution being televised

By On September 21, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

Want to be lifted out of your comfortable armchair, earbuds blown out, favorite title from The New York Times best seller list dropped suddenly into your lap? Want literature that still astonishes and amazes? Wanna rise above incessant post-modern commentary on life in these United States of American corporations, calcified institutions, claymation government, and balkanized […]

Want to be lifted out of your comfortable armchair, earbuds blown out, favorite title from The New York Times best seller list dropped suddenly into your lap? Want literature that still astonishes and amazes? Wanna rise above incessant post-modern commentary on life in these United States of American corporations, calcified institutions, claymation government, and balkanized sexual/gender/cultural identities? Get acquainted with some of these authors listed at the links below. Pay attention. The revolution(s) over there is being televised but these American writers bring depth and breadth and passion and sense and frames and authenticity to the revolutions that are really going on, the struggle to fairly represent what our American channels will not.

I just returned from the Radius of Arab American Writers Mizna 5th National Gathering in Minneapolis, MN. I could devote a great deal of space here about my experience, but I would soon be out of character and so bordering on the obsequious that I might have to run and check my look in the mirror and make sure I am still me. Let’s just leave it as, I feel like a saturated solution of salt about to bear crystals.

Normally, I leave readings of short stories, novel excerpts, and poetry diluted and frustrated.

I think I can distill this experience and articulate why I felt like I got more out of two days with these writers and lovers of literature than I probably did at a two-week writers conference I attended a few years ago.

First, most of the writers who read their work at this gathering were talented enough, confident enough, astute enough to add a dimension to their reading that complemented the words, without resorting to multi-media. And they did it in a way that was not only unique, but was deeply personal and as they felt for what they were reading. Two poets read in duet form from poetry they wrote together by email. They had not met until this conference! One woman laced her words as if she were about to self-combust, fiery, angry then imploring then searching, but every move she made, every dynamic and intonation was in keeping with the meaning behind her words. We witnessed a theatre work in progress practice-staged for the first time by two actors, one of whom had only started acting two weeks ago. Another writer used a simple backdrop of an image on a big screen of two windows with curtains being gently moved by the wind to contrast her home in America with her ancestral home in Lebanon. An actor-writer dramatized what it was like to be in Baghdad with her family (in the consulate area) while it was under siege.

It is no small feat to strictly balance the performance element so that it does not overwhelm or underwhelm the reading. Most writers reading their literature don’t even think about this. Most of them sound like they’ve never even practiced reading the work in front of others. A few drown out their words with multi-media pyrotechnics.

To listen to a dozen or more writers so artfully achieve this balance just blew me away.

The second distilled observation is that the venue itself embodied literature. Minneapolis has a literary community, space dedicated to literature and reading and performance, programs to get children reading and writing early and often, and numerous allied arts organizations. It is a city which supports the BOOK. Many cities have vibrant arts programs. Minneapolis-St. Paul has programs focused on the BOOK. It has the Loft Literary Center, a whole building called Open Book, even a Book Lover’s Ball. By the way, I’m told three of the ten largest and most admired independent publishers reside in Minneapolis. Winters may be unbearable, but the twin cities know how to curl up and warm up with good books.

There is a third observation. It is the elephant in the room, the 900-lb gorilla, the tank in the corner, the warplanes overhead, the barrel bombs descending. The Middle East is burning. All of these writers have family, homes, history, stories, fables, myths, voyages, and land torn apart, or otherwise permanently scarred, by regional, sectarian, and religious strife and geopolitics. You’d be hard pressed to name a country in the region that isn’t engulfed in civil war, civil unrest or protest, invasion, or brutal occupation, and those that aren’t probably will be soon, the way things seem headed. The country these writers call home, America, is in the middle of all of these Middle Eastern conflicts one way or another.

There is no shortage of suffering. Suffering breeds passionate writing. Hope for the Middle East right now is barely keeping one nostril above water. The performances from these writers represent submerged energy desperate to be picked up by the sonar of justice, mediation, and peace. And as if that isn’t enough, they grapple with the freedom to fully express themselves as non-stereotypical men, women, LGBT, and other identities in this country, identities far more repressed, shunned even, “over there.” Clashes of culture, clashes of politics.

Want to be lifted out of your comfortable armchair, earbuds blown out, favorite title from The New York Times best seller list dropped suddenly into your lap? Want literature that can astonish and amaze again? Wanna rise above incessant post-modern commentary on life in these United States of American corporations, calcified institutions, claymation government, and balkanized sexual/gender/cultural identities? Get acquainted with some of these authors listed at the links above. Pay attention. The revolution(s) over there is being televised but these American writers bring passion and sense and frames and authenticity to the ones that are really going on here and there, and to the struggle to fairly represent what our American channels will not.

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Ghost Quartet: Take a Walk On the Seamier Side of Getting Ahead In the Arts

By On August 27, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

What makes a novel with a plot you could easily envision for a soap opera episode rise to the level of literary fiction? That’s a question I often ask after reading what in the movie world might be called “indie,” or viewable on Sundance, but not the other 50 movie channels I get on cable.

[…]

What makes a novel with a plot you could easily envision for a soap opera episode rise to the level of literary fiction? That’s a question I often ask after reading what in the movie world might be called “indie,” or viewable on Sundance, but not the other 50 movie channels I get on cable.

The plot of Richard Burgin’s Ghost Quartet is easily captured in one sentence, albeit a sentence with a semi-colon. An ambitious, heterosexual young composer curries favor with a maestro conductor who overtly promises a shove up several rungs on the career ladder in exchange for a sexual relationship; said young composer loses the female love of his life in the process, and the Maestro’s ultra-sensitive former lover is devastated.

Remove the gay theme and the setting in the classical music world and the plot works just as well for an episode of Dallas, The Sopranos, or House of Cards. While Ghost Quartet was published in 1999, it is based in New York (Manhattan and upstate, Tanglewood), so it is difficult to give credit for tackling gay themes earlier than others.

Having played a classical instrument, attended music camps, and played in orchestras and string chamber groups, I was taken in by the music world Burgin depicts. I am also a sucker for books set in Manhattan, especially around the neighborhood of my alma mater, Columbia University.

Burgin’s novel has at least two qualities that answer the question posed at the top. First, the story has momentum. Rarely have I read a novel this length (300+ pages) in such a short amount of time. There is something compelling about the economy and precision of his prose, especially difficult when an author is dealing with neurotic prodigies, talented musicians, and, for lack of a better word, characters who overthink everything. You need many extra words to convey complex, contradictory emotions and behaviors, but none of Burgin’s text is surplus. Burgin’s mastery here surely must be derived from having a professional background in classical music (he is a composer and the son of a famous classical musician) and in writing and literature.

In literary fiction, one looks for themes or connections to issues that present themselves between the lines on the pages, especially if the plot or characters offer little more than the standard moral dilemmas and contrasts we are accustomed to regardless what fiction we read. In Ghost Quartet, I gained a greater understanding of a somewhat vile reality faced by classical musicians and other artists: Beyond a certain point, everyone is talented, the talent pool is an ocean, the few prodigies and stars have been sifted out by the talent recognition and separation system, and those remaining have few choices in their quest to make more than a mere living.

In today’s world, you either learn to wield the tools of self-promotion, or you depend on the kindness of those with coattails you may catch and ride, along with the reputation of the credentials you earn (e.g. a degree from the Juilliard compared to a degree from Southeastern Indiana State College). Coattails, of course, usually have threads attached. I think this is what Burgin captures splendidly, not just the moral dilemma or the economic survival imperative, but the need for something else for which a price must be paid. Rare is the performer or corporate executive or wealthy citizen who did not have to compromise on something for which his soul will punish him for the rest of this life.

Consumers of professional music and art want to believe that cream rises to the top, talent and hard work is rewarded, and the “rock stars” we regard so highly deserve our adoration (and our discretionary spending). Burgin takes the reader on a fast ride through the thick murky waters of the not-so-obvious reasons why one gifted individual is playing in a world-renowned string quartet, and another equally gifted musician is teaching music in public high school No. 143.

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My struggle – to understand why I enjoyed Knausgaard’s My Struggle

By On July 21, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

 It’s like Knausgaard takes a baseball bat to Knausgaard’s pinata of a head and there his life is, his thoughts, strewn all over the lawn for us to collect and consider.

I’m rarely at a loss for words about why I like a book. I just read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 400+ pages My Struggle, faster than […]

 It’s like Knausgaard takes a baseball bat to Knausgaard’s pinata of a head and there his life is, his thoughts, strewn all over the lawn for us to collect and consider.

I’m rarely at a loss for words about why I like a book. I just read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 400+ pages My Struggle, faster than I’ve read a book that long in a long, long time (maybe since Lonesome Dove). My Struggle and Knausgaard have received a ridiculous amount of publicity recently. Sometimes I have to admit, yeah, I was just sucked in by the hype, but then I usually quit reading if it’s no good. I put down The Goldfinch after about twenty pages.  I made it through The Signature of All Things, but wasn’t pleased with my investment of time.

Picking up My Struggle wasn’t easy. When I first read about it, I thought, this has to be duller than dirt. Then the cacophony grew. I read Knausgaard being compared to Proust. I vowed doubly to stay away. James Wood, exalted New Yorker book critic, weighed in effusively. I tripled my vow to remain divorced from reading it. Then a few people I know personally had great things to say. A week ago, I walked into a bookstore to support a fellow local author’s event, saw it in paperback (I thought it was only hardcover), looked up at one of the sales ladies (who knows me from a book group that meets there), and I asked, rhetorically and with a distorted grimace, “Is this any good?” She blurts out, “Oh my God, I Loved it!”

Which was interesting because earlier that day I was arguing with a few other women, who had read that a few other women had written, “this is glorified mommy blogging – if Knausgaard had been a woman…” and, well, you probably know where that conversation went. It went to the restaurant where we had dinner at afterwards because those two ladies were with me.

I bought it. A few pages in later that evening, I was hooked. But why? Why?

First, realize that My Struggle is an anomaly from the get-go. I purchased and read Book 1 in paperback. Book 3 just came out in hardback. It is a six-volume work, something close to 2700 pages, I read somewhere. Two times a trilogy. Harry Pottisfjord’s autobiography under contract. Facing that commitment, maybe you could argue that the publisher has no choice but to alp horn this guy from every mountaintop, force every other author in its stable to blurb it glowingly, and sew up all slotting fees on the store shelves for the next several years. If that’s the case, they can’t even agree on what it is. One reviewer calls it a “giant autobiographical novel cycle,” another calls it just a novel. Everyone talking and reading about it calls it a memoir. Is that the appeal? It defies conventional categorization? I doubt it. Is it that the softcover has a close-up photo of Knausgaard, looking all intense, like he’s Bjorn Borg and he just murdered you in tennis?

One-tenth of Norway has read My Struggle, reportedly (and in the publishing business, the verb “to read” apparently is a synonym for the verb “to buy”). That’s half a million, based on the 2012 Norwegian census. But, you know, Scandinavians are very homogeneous, so they all read the same thing, like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series.

The title grabs you. My struggle. Really? That’s about the least descriptive title I can recall for contemporary fiction. In fact, it’s mis-titled. There’s no “struggle” going on here, at least not in Book 1. He’s an author examining his life, albeit putting some of the more sordid details on display, but as far as I can tell, his is an ordinary life. His struggle is little different from mine, yours, his, hers, theirs, or ours. I examine my life, staring at me like fisheyes in a bowl, whenever I’ve had more than two drinks and I’m alone.

Oh, wait, eureka moment! He’s written a bullet-proof epic autobiographical memoir novel cycle, and the critics can’t dig any dirt up on him. He beat them to it! Politicians have to be thoroughly vetted before the campaign begins. This is an author who self-vets.

You might think, Knausgaard having grown up in Norway and living in Sweden, that life in Scandinavia is a more fascinating struggle than other regions. Perhaps what struck me more than anything is how the culture, the politics, the pop culture, the people, the daily routine, etc, in My Struggle are identical to what I am familiar with in America. Except they eat more fish. Is western civilization so homogenized, I wondered, that the events, the rock star idols of youth, the books, the movies, the aspirations, the successes and failures, charting this guy’s “struggle” feel no less like my own, and everyone else’s I ever knew? An earlier eureka moment had me thinking, well, Scandinavians , especially men, are known for their reticence, for internalizing their, well, personal struggles, more so certainly, than, say, Mediterranean men (my heritage). Knausgaard is honest about his personal feelings…but so what? Lots of authors are. That’s the point of writing about yourself, at least in the literary context. I read Laura Bush’s autobiography. She was pretty honest.

He handles difficult topics, taboo topics? Not really. The narrator is honest about masturbation. But he has nothing on Phillip Roth’s Portnoy. The narrator is honest about his older brother. So was Kevin in The Wonder Years.

So, what is it? First, I am a sucker for reading about painful relationships between a father and a son. Russell Banks’ Affliction immediately comes to mind. Knausgaard lets us in on the tension between a confused young boy and a distant father, with no need to embellish it. So distant, in fact, that it could be called today abuse by neglect. Second, what Knausgaard does so well is refrain from emotional outbursts, or any conclusions, no tidy bows around the wrapping paper. The struggle, I am guessing, is that he has no answers, provides none to the reader. Daily life is made up of confusing, contradictory emotions, and there is no sorting them out. They are what they are. Knausgaard is generous with them, but he does not exaggerate them, does not put his emotions on some pedestal as if they are more interesting, more exalted, more worthy, than mine or yours.

He deals with his dad. He pretty much hates him. But the narrative is about dealing with him, day in and day out, under normal circumstances and tragic ones and what he feels moment to moment. He has friends. He has girlfriends. He has a wife. He has children. He is a writer. He gets along with his brother. He loves his mother. He cries all the time. He’s the John Boehner of contemporary literature. The struggle he is imparting to us is the grind of daily life. He’s not suffering, near as I can tell, not starving, not poor, not crippled, not mentally incapacitated. His struggle is to elevate the ordinariness of existence. Sprinkled in are commentaries on politics, global affairs, art, and the other extremities of existence, but never outside the random or prompted thoughts you would expect of someone immersed in daily living.

Knausgaard has no discernible “message,” no axe to grind (although I did read his family is furious or something, so maybe this changes in subsequent volumes).

He is allowing us into a place somewhere beyond introspective psychoanalysis but short of his spiritual self, his soul, which would make it a spiritual journey, of which there are plenty on today’s bookshelves. He is examining his ordinary life and the only thing extraordinary is that he is chronicling it.

Damned if it isn’t a fascinating place.

I don’t know how much credit goes to the translator or to Knausgaard, but these pages just blow by. Even the dense, non-dialogue stuff that we often hop-scotch through (but never admit to), even these passages move swiftly. Not once did I get the feeling that Knausgaard’s ego is on display, even though, arguably, one of the most egotistical things you can set out to do – you think? – is write a six volume autobiography (but, hey, if a publisher takes it on, more power to ya). Nowhere did I find senseless displays of literary pyrotechnics. The window onto his ordinary life has been wiped clear with Windex. No distortions, no apologies, no histrionics.

Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye came to mind frequently as I read My Struggle, partly because the book opens with his childhood, but mostly because there is an honesty, an authenticity to the first person narration, that hooked me from the first line: “For the heart, life is simple: It beats for as long as it can.” (And what about that rule never to use colons in fiction?). There is nothing to analyze here, nothing to interpret, nothing that requires a literary oracle to divine what the author means. It’s like Knausgaard took a baseball bat to Knausgaard’s pinata of a head and there his life is, his thoughts, strewn all over the lawn for us to collect and consider.

Maybe this passage does as good a job as any to clue you in about what you are in for:

“While previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully, a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock; life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with each passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on.”

And here’s a passage that puts Book 1 in context:

“My father is dead, and I am thinking about the money that will bring me.

So what?

I think what I think.

I can’t help thinking what I think, can I?”

Obviously, he can’t help writing it either. And I can’t help but read it.

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Concentration Camp Life: The Hunger Angel

By On June 9, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

I think more and more these days about novels and their translations, how much of the quality of what we read in English is thanks to the translator, and how non-English speaking readers must be responding to American novels translated into their languages. I recently finished The Hunger Angel, Herta Muller, who won the Nobel […]

I think more and more these days about novels and their translations, how much of the quality of what we read in English is thanks to the translator, and how non-English speaking readers must be responding to American novels translated into their languages. I recently finished The Hunger Angel, Herta Muller, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. It’s a fascinating book, more for stylistic qualities than theme — life in a Russian-run concentration (or worker) camp in the mid- to late 1940s.

As the title suggests, hunger not only is the central fountain of suffering but also the savior of the main character/narrator, helping him to “feel the rawest connection to life.” The bulk of the action takes place in the camp, depressing enough, but the alienation the narrator undergoes when he returns home is worse. The form of the novel is of the narrator writing in a journal of sorts. For the most part, the unjust, brutal, and downright strange life in the work camp is alternately described directly and bluntly (“1 shovel load = 1 gram bread”) and then with a powerful prose/poetry style:

“Hunger is an object. The angel has climbed into my brain. The angel doesn’t think. He thinks straight. He’s never absent. He knows my boundaries and he knows his direction. He knows where I come from and he knows what he does to me. He knew all of this before he met me, and he knows my future.”

An oddity of the novel is that the work camp is a coke processing plant (coke is made from coal and is used in steel production) and the reader is treated to some interesting details of industrial processing through chapters with titles like “Cement, On Coal, On Yellow Sand, On Slag, Cinder Blocks, and On Chemical Substances.” Of course, I am intrigued because I am a chemical engineer, but the beauty of the language is striking, as in this example:

“Anthracene is another chemical substance. It lurks on every path and eats through your rubber galoshes. Anthracene is oily sand, or oil that has crystallized into sand. When you step on it, it instantly reverts to oil, inky blue, silver green like trampled mushrooms.”

The passage alternately reads like entries in a textbook, then poetic descriptions of an evil monster.

Mostly, I note The Hunger Angel, not only as worth your reading time, but as another example of how the “big” non-American novels and novelists choose vastly different central themes, an observation I dwelled on in an earlier post: http://jasonmakansi.com/the-global-american-footprint-in-fiction/

This continues to fascinate me. It’s only an observation based on my own recent reading selections, but there seems to be such a divergence in what American novelists write about and the rest of the world’s authors. There’s plenty of suffering going on in America, but our literary world is more lathered up about the ironic intersection of pop culture, high art, moneyed society, low-brow professionals, media sensationalism, social media, and corrections to the historical record for maligned segments of the population. Perhaps that is the luxury of a largely academically trained literary community writing in the lone superpower country. Even one that just came through the “Great Recession.”

Beyond that, I would love to be privy to the mind meld of author and translator for these non-English authored novels I’ve been reading. It must be difficult enough between writer and editor.

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Ambition is not enough! The author Richard Powers and Orfeo

By On April 8, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

Ambition in a novel is necessary but not sufficient.

…..

Orfeo is about a older man, once a musician (in college) in love with another musician, who has a penchant for home experiments bent on discovering new connections between music and the scientific world, who then “arouses the suspicions of Homeland Security,” runs away, visits […]

Ambition in a novel is necessary but not sufficient.

…..

Orfeo is about a older man, once a musician (in college) in love with another musician, who has a penchant for home experiments bent on discovering new connections between music and the scientific world, who then “arouses the suspicions of Homeland Security,” runs away, visits loved ones, reminisces about his college love, and disgorges thoughts that will remind you of people who got 800s on their SATs but never learned how to tell a joke with their friends.

This is the third Richard Powers’ novel I’ve read. I doubt there’s a novelist out there who I admire more for the ambition of his fiction. I want to love him. I also want to un-torture his story-telling. In an asymptotic way, I see clearly where he wants to go. But in the end he seems to sacrifice story for lofty concept.

I am especially disheartened that I could not finish Orfeo because he weaves music into his prose. I love this! I try to do this with my writing. And damn him, he selects works that are high on my list of all-time faves, like Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Mind you, he doesn’t just refer to these works, or have characters listen to them or talk about them. They are stitched into the text as if you are following the score in parallel with reading the story.

Powers’ doesn’t stop with music. He integrates scientific, engineering, environmental, medical, literature, and just about every other academic discipline into this prose too. If I pulled a passage out to illustrate, I’d have to type ten pages.

Instead, here’s Powers’ on pot:

“Pot was a private aha. All the glories were sealed in the locked room of the smoker’s brain, and turned to a joke when he sobered. Els [main character] was after something more solid, a priori, shared–durable wonder raining down on whole roomfuls of listeners.”

I spent many late nights stoned in my dorm room in college, having edge-of-the-universe conversations with friends. The difference must be that Powers’ went back to his dorm room and recorded all of his. I just crashed.

About a third of the way through the book, Powers’ takes a detour and dwells on this favorite work of mine, Quartet for the End of Time. This is what probably kept me plugging away through the second third, after which I quit. I mean, how many times are writers told, “show, don’t tell?” Between pages 106-121, Powers’ gives us a history lesson on the circumstances surrounding Messiaen’s composing this work in a gulag in France. Okay, he seemingly gets away with it because Els is delivering a lecture to his students. But still. It’s a great story, a heartbreaking story, but in this context, pretty dry stuff, and I suspect it only “moves the story along” if you know and love Messiaen’s work, or you can run down the hall and have a eureka moment with a music humanities professor.

Powers’ is in that league with Pynchon, William Gass, William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, John Barth, and I suppose, Faulkner, Joyce, and others, who are praised for their ambition and scope and audacious intentions, usually by people who make a living off of teaching such novels to students, reminding us how complex but important they are, and making the rest of us feel like Charlie Brown when he is asked by Lucy and Linus what he sees in the clouds. “I thought I saw a horsey and a duckie,” he says, after Linus woos and waxes philosophically.

I wrote the word asymptotically earlier, because one, I love this word, but two, it perfectly describes Powers’ in relation to some of the others in this league. An asymptote is the limit of a curve that is plateauing. Over the course of the x- or y-axis on a graph, the curve approaches the asymptote but never reaches it as the variable goes to infinity. It’s like seeing the goal posts or home plate but never getting there. I guess the fact that I use a word like asymptote tells you I feel a kindred spirit to Powers. Maybe that’s part of my issue. Envy. But I digress. The difference with Powers, say, and the others in his league, is that I see where he is going. I know where the goal posts are when I read his stuff. I don’t lose my bearings because I have context in the three-dimensional plane (unlike Faulkner, early Pynchon, Gass, etc, where I generally have no ideas what’s really going on.). BUT, I am too frustrated, exhausted, and annoyed. I want to punish him by not finishing. I know I shouldn’t but I do. I wish the guy would focus on little

Don’t get me wrong, I love complex stories, ambition, and a literary challenge. But if a horsey and duckie aren’t in there somewhere, I have to wonder whether the intention is to leave a lasting impression in the halls of academia (and The New Yorker) or an enriching (even if challenging) experience with your audience.

As a postscript, several people have told me that The Goldbug Variations is his best novel. I will probably give that one a go if I live long enough. Because I really do want to love this guy.

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At the Triple Point of Reality, Dream, and Imagination: Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore

By On April 1, 2013 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

For whatever reason, I’ve been “into” Asian novels lately. I guess I am just trying to bust out of that Western literary tradition.  I haven’t been all that enthusiastic with what I’ve read so far. I almost checked out Haruki Murakami’s latest, 1Q84, when I was at the library a few weeks ago, even though […]

For whatever reason, I’ve been “into” Asian novels lately. I guess I am just trying to bust out of that Western literary tradition.  I haven’t been all that enthusiastic with what I’ve read so far. I almost checked out Haruki Murakami’s latest, 1Q84, when I was at the library a few weeks ago, even though two stalwart readers told me they couldn’t get through it. Then I thought, hell, I’ll be at this for a few months (the novel comes in three volumes, to give you an idea) and I don’t have that kind of time or patience these days. Lying next to it, somewhat misplaced on the shelf, was Kafka on the Shore. A more modest single volume work, it not only appeared digestible, I knew it had received much acclaim since publication around ten years ago. If I had actually noticed the cover art, the kind of image that shows up at five in the morning, somewhere between the last bit of Rem sleep and the alarm clock, and so scares the crap out of you, the alarm is superfluous, if I had noticed, I would have probably let out a yelp that’d cause the librarian to wonder if the after-school crowd was let in early. If I could explain the image, I would. All I really knew about the novel was that the author was supposed to be one of those magical realism types.

This is a remarkable novel. And I grappled with why. I read lots of novels. I’ve read half a dozen since the start of the year. Why does this one stand out?

It stands above, I’ve decided, because it has an unnerving amount of energy but Murakami controls it, effortlessly, it seems, even as it emanates from four principal sources.

  • Story energy – at the elementary level, it’s a coming of age novel. It reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye, one of the seminal coming-of-age stories of the last century, but kind of in the sense that an apple reminds me of apple pie. (Pie is the only food I will not share, just to give you a clue what I mean by that analogy). And I loved Catcher in the Rye! The fifteen-year old narrator who runs away (he’s two years younger than Holden Caufield) has similar experiences that make a man out of him. I thought Holden got to do mature things for his age, like stay overnight in Manhattan in a hotel and get roughed up by a pimp, but this guy, Kafka Tamura, well, let’s just say he manages to check himself into a library several hundred miles from Tokyo and that’s where his adventures start. He has the mountains to climb and the oceans to cross, but Murakami never belittles his quest with false heroics or manufactured outcomes.
  • Archetypal energy – a great novel in the literary tradition has to artfully include those universal symbols common to all other great novels (“The river is life”). Kafka on the Shore has plenty of them. Not one of them hits you over the head reminding you how intellectual you are reading this. 
  • Spiritual energy – this is perhaps the novel’s greatest strength. The feeling I got reading it was this: We humans, as we float in the ether of our lives, hope that we are anchored to some larger purpose, something eternal, something universal. Kafka on the Shore makes you know this, not just hope it. And yet I can’t say that it’s a novel of redemption or salvation. Never does it drift into the fantasy that life has a purpose that is fathomable 24/7 or, for that matter, ever makes itself fully apparent.
  • Mythological, psychological, philosophical, and pathological energy – there’s incest, family rivalry, father-son and mother-son issues, adolescent dreams and fantasies, talking animals, prophetic simpletons and simple proletarians, abandonment, genetic and familial oddities, and strange coincidences reminiscent of Kazantzakis, Homer, Shakespeare, Kafka, Marquez, Swift, Faulkner, and many others no doubt I can’t name off the top of my head.

One way Murakami keeps this energy from exploding is through the novel’s structure. There are two primary interwoven stories, with parallel main characters. One is told in present tense using Kafka as the first-person narrator. The other is told in past tense using a third person limited or omniscient (sometimes hard to tell) narrator. Another technique is having the main characters connected back to a single event in the past, a tragic but bizarre incident that occurs towards the end of World War II. The anchor location for the story is a small library far from Tokyo in the hinterland of Japan, more of a research institution, funded by a wealthy landowner. What better place for a literary masterpiece to take place than where great stories ultimately reside for the rest of their lives? Can I tell you why structure and place keep the thing from exploding? No.

Does it have flaws? Probably. The only one I can think of is that the story is male-dominated. There are only two female characters and one, on reflection, seems like she could have been axed in rewrite, were it not that she heightens the overtones of incest, and the other almost seems a stand-in for all women-kind, a generic life-mother, an object of male sexual desire, the mythical librarian who is ravishing when she takes off her glasses, and so on. Then again, that’s something else I love about this book. Murakami employs these subtle and not-so-subtle references to popular culture and popular stereotypes that ground the story in everyday life, as mundane and unfortunate as that might be considered out of context.

In the end, I can’t really explain why I loved this book. It’s wonderfully balanced. What does that tell you? Nothing. It doesn’t stretch the credibility of any of its literary licenses, e.g., talking animals, a truck driver who learns to love Beethoven and philosophy, fragmented time sequences, a fifteen year old runaway mature beyond his years by a decade or two. Does that help you? Probably not. See if this helps. There’s something called the triple point in chemistry. It’s the combination of temperature and pressure at which a substance can exist as a solid, a liquid, and a gas. How many books have you read, will you read, that comfortably exists at the equilibrium of reality, dream, and imagination? To me, this is that sort of novel.

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