Dystopian imagining of a future Ireland; didn't work for me.
The Stark family (father a senior trades union leader) find themselves on the wrong siDystopian imagining of a future Ireland; didn't work for me.
The Stark family (father a senior trades union leader) find themselves on the wrong side of history as Ireland slips into fascism, with echoes of Argentina's Dirty War of the late-1970s and Northern Ireland's decades-long "Troubles".
Lynch does not provide the backstory for Ireland's political collapse, perhaps viewing it as needing no justification, given the global upswing in nativism and anti-immigrant policies under Trump, Brexit, Le Pen, etc.
Even if the political context is only loosely defined, the slow disintegration of the world around the Stark family is mapped out with chilling precision. Anti-trades union propaganda is followed by "anti-terrorist" detentions; international travel is subject to loyalty checks; a military draft is introduced; and teachers who challenge the party line lose their jobs. While some in the community flee abroad, the Starks stay on to care for an ageing relative with Alzheimer's.
The Stark family is very much unexceptional. The father is a stubborn union boss, but far from a revolutionary (we see him return home each evening to don his slippers). The kids are the usual blend of rebellious teenagers verging on adulthood, the insecure middle-schooler, and the delightful but needy toddler. Mom's politics are unstated; her main concerns are pragmatic, how to combine her roles as mother and scientist. The family members are not exactly puppets, but one senses that they have been made deliberately "normal" in order to highlight the everyday effects of the fascist takeover.
Despite the raw brutalities of the politics, Lynch brings a poetic style to the writing of Prophet Song. There is considerable emphasis on the atmosphere around the family: the feel of the garden under a chilly night sky; the sounds of an empty house; the panic caused by a threatening phone call or the mood after troubled sleep. One writerly quirk (possibly overused) is to surprise the reader with unusual verbs created from related nouns: "Simon horns his nose into a handkerchief..."; "She drives to the supermarket and coins free a trolley...".
I was initially inclined to give this a four-star rating. But the story is relentlessly grim. In terms of the story arc, Prophet Song takes an early dive downwards, grinds along at a depressed level, and then lurches lower still. This is not a story to inspire and encourage.
While I respect the artistry of the writing, I had a sense that this is a novel inspired by political beliefs rather than by the complexities of real people. The subtext seems to be the need for greater sympathy for migrants fleeing failed states: they could so easily be us with just a little imagination about where today's politics are heading. I agree wholeheartedly, but don't turn to novels to have these views affirmed. But that's just me; Lynch's novel has a large and enthusiastic following. So a minority three-star rating....more
An outstanding study of contemporary Japanese ceramics.
Two of the three authors, Alice and Halsey North, bought Japanese ceramics for more than thAn outstanding study of contemporary Japanese ceramics.
Two of the three authors, Alice and Halsey North, bought Japanese ceramics for more than three decades, with their collection showcased in the excellent 2005 publication, Contemporary Clay (see link below). In Listening to Clay, they collaborate with Louise Cort, former curator of ceramics at the National Museum of Asian Art, who has published extensively on Asian ceramics.
The title, "Listening to Clay", touches on two themes. It references two decades of interviews with 16 artists and 5 dealers that make up the bulk of the book. It also describes the approach of several of the selected artists, who, rather than imposing their vision on their materials, "listen" to what the clay wants to become.
This is a hugely informative book about the lives of the highlighted artists. It contains four of five color illustrations of representative works of each artist, but the main value lies in the artists' memories of their introduction to ceramics, how they found their "voice", and the evolution of their respective careers.
There is much that is personal to each artist; but also some common themes. For example, many emerged from an apprenticeship system in which they worked as young potters with more established artists. Oddly, they rarely received verbal guidance on either the basics of potting or feedback on their own artistic choices. Rather, they learned by observing and were forced to find their own path by trial and error. The value of working with a master potter was to see him (and usually they were men) in action; and once the apprentice reached a high level of expertise, perhaps after five or even ten years, the master would vouch for his student and connect them with dealers so that they could exhibit under their own name.
Listening to Clay is that rare book which is fascinating as an introduction to the artistry of contemporary Japanese ceramics while providing profound insights into the evolving way of life of the artists who have given their lives to the discipline. Richly deserves a five-star rating.
Based on the 2023 exhibition by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Explores the iconography of early Buddhist InMassive, learned, informative.
Based on the 2023 exhibition by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Explores the iconography of early Buddhist India (roughly 200BCE-300CE) based on the surviving stone carvings from stupas (the mound-shaped constructions that memorialized the life of the Buddha and acted as sites of religious worship linked to neighboring monasteries).
For those interested in this period, this is a fascinating source. The book provides detailed information on 147 objects with high-quality photos and art historical analysis. There are also a dozen essays that focus on aspects of early Buddhism (the architecture of the stupas, the iconography of the carvings, the lives of the associated monastic communities, the role of donors and devotees, the sources of wealth from domestic and foreign trade, etc.)
The format does not make for an easy read, however. Perhaps inevitably, there is a good deal of duplication across the catalogued items as well as with the essays. This becomes a little frustrating, and a better approach would have been to provide some of the detailed knowledge in text boxes with links to the latter from the object descriptions.
For the majority of readers, this is a book to browse through and dip into, rather than something that can be read with enjoyment from front to back. A shame, given the massive resources devoted to the exhibition. That said, a five-star book as a reference work. ...more
A strange book in many ways. McDaniel, a publisher of Buddhist lit, decided to interview 42 Zen teaA breezy read; multiple teachers' views on Zen.
A strange book in many ways. McDaniel, a publisher of Buddhist lit, decided to interview 42 Zen teachers (mostly US, some Canadians) about what the practice means to them. The book collects snippets of conversation, divided into six chapters, as follows:
1. Discovering Zen: Essentially what led the teachers to the practice. Rather a limp start to the book. Some came through reading the West-Coast beat writers, some through psychedelic drugs, lots by happenstance.
2. The function of Zen: This chapter seems oddly titled, since Zen doesn't have a function in the sense of "gaining" something. The book provides different takes, however, on the old Soto-Rinzai debate of whether actively encouraging kensho through koan or similar practices is better than "just sitting".
3. Zen Practice: Some overlap here with Chapter 2. Looks at the different approaches to Zen across the diversity of the 42 teachers and their respective Zen groups.
4. Adapting Zen to the West: What should American Zen look like? Should it replicate some of the formalities of Japanese Zen? Or completely reinvent itself? Be formalistic? Or free form?
5. Compassionate Action: To what extent should Zen communities actively pursue sangha-based community engagement? Or can one assume that individuals, through Zen practice, will become more compassionate and therefore engaged without any organizing structure?
6. Ecodharma: Essentially an extension of Chapter 5. Does Zen practice lead to a compassionate engagement with other living beings that, in turn, prompts efforts to tackle environmental degradation?
While one applauds McDaniel for taking on this project, there is something scattershot, half-baked about the end result. With each conversation limited to a page or two (and sometimes just a paragraph), we get multiple different, usually unconnected sound-bites from the 42 teachers, rather than a deep-dive into their thinking. The book raises a lot of questions, but doesn't take the reader very far in exploring possible answers. That said, asking questions is often a good start, and warrants the three-star rating rating.
Joshua Cohen befriended the much older literary critic, Harold Bloom, in his final years. In each vStylish comic writing, but doesn't go anywhere.
Joshua Cohen befriended the much older literary critic, Harold Bloom, in his final years. In each visit, Cohen was quizzed on the latest literary gossip while Bloom, in turn, recounted stories of his literary past. One such anecdote concerned the time when Bloom was asked to coordinate a disastrous campus visit by the Israeli historian, Ben-Zion Netanyahu. Cohen found the material too good to waste, and decided to fictionalize the episode, elaborated here as an extravagantly comic novel featuring Ruben Blum, struggling academic at Corbin College.
Cohen's writing balances rich situational comedy with an intelligent take on the religious tensions and parochial academic intrigues of 1950s American small-town college life. Many will appreciate Cohen's post-modern blending of fact and fiction.
I enjoyed reading The Netanyahus but found myself little moved at the end. There is considerable pathos in Blum's precarious position as Corbin College's token Jewish academic. But the almost over-the-top comedic writing undercuts the power of the book as social criticism. Similarly, while Netanyahu's visit to Corbin is richly fictionalized, the embroidered anecdote falls well short of a full novel. Given this, The Netanyahus seems destined to be a literary oddity, great fun, but in the category of "he also wrote..."...more
Published by the Freer Gallery of Art on the occasion of the exhibition The Peacock Room Comes to AmericNice tourist souvenir, strong on pictures.
Published by the Freer Gallery of Art on the occasion of the exhibition The Peacock Room Comes to America, which opened April 9, 2011, and reprinted in 2023 with minor additions on the occasion of the centennial of the Freer Gallery.
The glossy publication is strongest in its gorgeous and informative illustrations of the Peacock Room in its different incarnations. We have a sketch of its likely pre-Whistler 1876 condition in London when first designed by Thomas Jeckyll; an 1892 photo of its London status after modification by Whistler; photos from 1908 and 1910 of its reinstallation in Detroit after purchase by Charles Lang Freer; and contemporary photos from its current location in the Freer Gallery in Washington DC after a major cleaning from 1989-1992. The latest photos show it variously without ceramics on the shelves; with the sort of blue-and-white Chinese porcelain that it held when in London; and with Freer's collection of diverse Asian ceramics as he arranged it in his Detroit home.
The emphasis throughout the catalogue is on the life of the Peacock Room after its completion: its ownership and use in London; its subsequent sale to Freer and transport to America; Freer's use of it as a laboratory in Detroit for showcasing and comparing his Asian ceramics; and its eventual home in the Freer Gallery, Washington DC, where it has been carefully conserved.
The book short-changes the reader, however, on the story of the creation of the Peacock Room. The original design by the Aesthetic movement architect, Thomas Jeckyll, is mentioned only in passing. And we hear very little about the artistic background and motivation behind James McNeil Whistler's painterly reimagining of the room in the second half of 1876. Where there are details, they seem contradictory: at one point we are told that Whistler redecorated the room "inspired by the delicate patterns and vivid colors of the ceramics on display" (page 7) while later we read that Whistler reworked the room because its original color scheme "clashed with the palette of [his own] painting", The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, that hung prominently at one end of the room (page 47). Whistler's contributions in painting the room are divided, indeed, between three different sections of the book, on pages 7, 47, and 50 (perhaps with different contributing authors?)
Sadly, the book completely ignores the wonderful story about Whistler's painting of two enormous peacocks at the end of the room, the final centerpiece of his decorative reworking, as depicted prominently on the book's cover. This design was added after Whistler's bitter, prolonged quarrel with his London patron, Frederick Leyland, regarding payment for his work. Entitled by Whistler as "Art and Money", it is widely interpreted as a visual representation of the face-off between the graceful Whistler (peacock left) and the flustered Leyland (peacock right, apparently grasping with its claws at scattered gold coins).
A final bugbear is that my copy of the book has periodic words with missing letters, indicative of publishing flaws. Just to take one example, on page 44, we read that the poet Robert Hayden was the "firs" (rather than "first") Black poet-in-residence at the Library of Congress and that he wrote a poem about the Peacock Room, of which the first line is quoted as "Exotic, fin de siècle, unrea". Presumably, "unreal"?...more
A fascinating book on living longer and better, but with notable shortcomings.
OK, it’s a sign of ageing when you start a new Goodreads shelf for A fascinating book on living longer and better, but with notable shortcomings.
OK, it’s a sign of ageing when you start a new Goodreads shelf for “health” books with the first one subtitled “The Science and Art of Longevity.” Attia starts a valuable discussion, though. He argues that the standard practice of medicine has moved from 1.0 (the discovery and adoption of antibiotics and vaccines) to 2.0 (organ transplants, coronary bypasses, radiation therapy and chemotherapy for cancer, etc.) In his view, this has successfully extended the average US lifespan (notwithstanding setbacks in recent years from drug overdoses, suicides, etc.) but has not resulted in a commensurate extension of good quality life. Thus, the last decade of life is too often spent with little mobility and socially isolated.
In Attia’s view, medicine needs to move to 3.0, in which far greater attention is paid to early preventive investments in maintaining good health. Steps should be taken much earlier than at present to mitigate late-life risks from heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. To take one example, rather than waiting for cholesterol or blood sugar levels to reach a “high” threshold before intervention, steps should be taken to improve diet and exercise and possibly take preventive medication as soon as test results become slightly elevated.
This is a good introductory work but has some weaknesses. For those with a scientific bent, Attia provides lots of information on how the body is affected by diet and exercise, drawing on the latest research, and with lots of scientific detail. But it can get pretty heady, despite the best efforts by co-author Bill Gifford to keep it accessible to people like me. Thus, a not atypical sentence runs: “It affects the cleavage of the amyloid precursor protein, producing loads of amyloid.” Phew!
Attia is convincing (at least to me) that diet is important. The high-level findings here are quite simple: avoid tobacco, excessive alcohol, and highly processed sugar- and salt-rich junk foods. Beyond that, science is not yet definitive. Thus, Attia is open-minded about many of the usual health scares: eggs, red meat, glutens, etc. He is also convincing in arguing that the best investment in maintaining a strong body is exercise.
While Outlive tries to offer practical advice on how to implement Attia’s findings, the average reader will likely be confounded. Attia is, by nature, a high achiever, and looks for the absolute best approaches for supporting a long, healthy life. He runs a medical practice that focuses on this goal and, as he describes it, new patients are given a battery of initial tests to identify their individual health risks and are closely monitored through follow-up tests to tailor exercise and diet advice to their evolving health. For those of us without access to such a holistic health practice run by a doctor like Attia, the book can seem frustrating. Too many will read it and conclude that, yes, this makes sense, but no, the US medical system is not currently set up to deliver this kind of support. What Attia needs is a clearer focus on how the average citizen can implement his approach using their own resources and with the limited help available from the current healthcare system....more
The night musings of an insomniac; playful, poignant, weird.
Abby, an economics lecturer, is lying awake at night in her king-size hotel bed next The night musings of an insomniac; playful, poignant, weird.
Abby, an economics lecturer, is lying awake at night in her king-size hotel bed next to her sleeping husband and young daughter. Her bid for tenure was recently rejected, likely because her feminist writing on economic philosophy is outside the academic mainstream. She has been invited to address a group on her book on the early-C20th economist, JM Keynes, (released to critical silence) and her anxiety about the upcoming event is ballooning into a crisis of nerves--about her career setback, the life choices that led her here, and the ominous state of the world (global warming, strip mining, factory farming, the arms race, food deserts, the Trump presidency, ... you name it.)
While the premise sounds depressing, the novel is actually light on its feet, playful in tone. Abby has decided to memorize her talk using the ancient Greek method of mentally assigning sequential parts of the presentation to rooms in her house. Rehearsing the speech, Abby thinks her way through her home, recalling what elements of the presentation should follow which. As she looks at the mental images of her different rooms, her thoughts turn to her life with her family, her college friends and mentors, and her childhood. As a further nice touch, Keynes joins her in her imagined walk through the house, acting as a confidante and stabilizing influence.
The Guest Lecture is an easy, enjoyable read (prompted by a favorable NYRB review) but I was unsure what to take away. There is considerable discussion of Keynes’ book, “The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, which argued that within two generations (i.e., by now) technical progress would have eliminated economic scarcity and the need to work, making the central social question what to do with our abundant leisure time. Abby's insomniac rehearsal of her planned presentation covers Keynes’ goals in writing the book, why he was wrong, and the implications for economic and social policy choices today.
I felt that Riker was prodding the reader towards the conclusion that just because Keynes’ utopian vision was flawed, that doesn’t mean that society and the world are doomed; thus, pragmatic and hopeful social engagement remains key. At the same time, the novel didn’t seem weighty enough to convincingly reach these conclusions (and anyway who would want to read a novel that is a political tract in disguise?) Equally, there was not enough about Abby and her family to make this a character-driven novel and the setting of a single-night of insomnia limits the scope for plot development.
Perhaps this is not a book of which the reader should ask too much. It is a pleasure to read and thought-provoking, which is not nothing. I also particularly enjoyed the final chapter of the novel which shifts to a strikingly different tone, somewhat like a Kafkaesque dream sequence. Riker is a novelist whom I would read again, though so far he is not up with the greats. A borderline four-rating seems about right (though this may be biased upwards by my background as economist)....more
Three Rings draws its inspiration from two of Mendelsohn’s earlier works—an investigation of those iHighly erudite Sebaldian literary confection.
Three Rings draws its inspiration from two of Mendelsohn’s earlier works—an investigation of those in his extended family who survived the Holocaust, and a memoire on his elderly father’s last year, when he audited a class on Homer's Odyssey taught by Mendelsohn himself and who joined his son on an Odyssey-themed cruise through the Mediterranean. From these elements, Three Rings meditates on recurrent episodes of persecution, flight and exile.
These include the departure of Greek-speaking scholars for Italy after Byzantium fell to the Ottoman Muslims in 1453, the expulsion of Jews from Spain after 1492, the flight of Huguenot protestants from France after 1685, and the departure of Jews (those fortunate enough) who left Germany in the 1930s.
Mendelsohn, editor-at-large of the New York Review of Books, also ponders the manner in which stories are told. Drawing on his own struggle in writing the Odyssey-themed memoire of his father, he describes a technique of “ring narration” used by Homer. This is the nesting of a story within a story, with a specific phrase used to define the beginning and end of the digression.
Themes of exile and literary style are interwoven. For example, Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Germany in the 1930s wrote a classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, which discusses the use of ring narration. Mendelsohn, in his writing, is also clearly influenced by WG Sebald, who fled Germany in the 1960s not because of persecution but from a sense of post-War trauma. Sebald wrote indirectly about the Holocaust, finding foretelling echoes of it throughout Western history. In the same way, Mendelsohn’s underlying theme is the Holocaust, but approached obliquely through meditations on how flight and exile have resonated through the history of literature.
Like Sebald, Mendelsohn’s digressive style finds links between events and characters centuries apart. There is something baroque about this interweaving of themes back and forward, with dropped melodies suddenly reappearing. The erudition involved in structuring this short but highly complex work is impressive (though I suspect that those looking for a more forthright statement of plot and argument might reach for words like “pretentious”).
In any event, it had me captivated, and I look forward to reading Mendelsohn’s other work....more
Gothic novel of untamed children; achieves mood but not profundity.
Barba’s novel pictures a remote Latin American town, separated from dense junglGothic novel of untamed children; achieves mood but not profundity.
Barba’s novel pictures a remote Latin American town, separated from dense jungle by a wide, muddy river. Town residents start to notice small gangs of children, roughly 9 to 13-years old, never seen before. The children spend their time engaged in ritualistic games and committing minor thefts of food. Strangely, they speak an undecipherable language apparently unrelated to Spanish or the local indigenous tongue. Over the weeks, their disruptive influence grows, culminating in a violent assault.
Some critics find parallels with Lord of the Flies. One can also see the influence of Dracula. Just as the epistolary nature of Bram Stoker’s novel helped make the case for the existence of vampires, Barba grounds the existence of the “wild children” in contemporary news reports, public hearings, and TV documentaries. The novel also simmers with the same dread of supernatural contagion as Dracula, with the town’s children becoming obsessed, possibly lured away by their mysterious peers.
Luminous Republic is full of potential symbolism: the primeval jungle, the unstoppable flow of the turbid river, the heart-like construction of an underground chamber and its arterial passages. Yet the meaning is far from clear.
Barba appears indebted to his compatriot, Javier Marias, when he reaches for profundity about the nature of human existence. As with Marias, these philosophical musings offer more style than convincing substance:
“What mystery causes our perception of an experience to be concentrated in some images and not others? It would be a comfort to admit that our memories are as arbitrary as our tastes, that they select what we remember as randomly as our palates decide that we like meat but not seafood, and yet something makes us sure that even this, or rather this above all, depends on some code that has to be deciphered and is in no way coincidental.”
In general, Barba tries to stuff too much into a work that is little more than a novella. Despite the suggested complexity of the relationship between the civil servant protagonist and his wife, her character is not well developed. Why, for example, would a mother agree for her new husband to refer to his stepdaughter merely as “the girl”, rather than with her real name? On the plotting, after an intriguing escalation in the mystery surrounding the wild children, the ending is a major anticlimax.
In a foreword to the novel, Edmund White writes that “A Luminous Republic is one of the best books I’ve ever read.” I’ve greatly enjoyed some of White’s novels and I had hoped I could rely on his judgment. Either we have dramatically different tastes, or his assessment was biased by his admitted friendship for Barba. Oh well…...more
Best-suited to those familiar with Lowell and his peers.
Following an enthusiastic review of Robert Lowell’s “Memoirs” (I don’t recall which journaBest-suited to those familiar with Lowell and his peers.
Following an enthusiastic review of Robert Lowell’s “Memoirs” (I don’t recall which journal), I suggested to my wife it could be a welcome Christmas present. In retrospect, it was a bit of a stretch. While sporadically “poetry-curious”, I have not read Lowell’s work nor that of his peers and found myself rather lost in the Memoirs. I sometimes struggled with Lowell’s poetic prose and was at sea when reading about his fellow poets.
Autobiographical sketches
The Memoirs are a grab bag of Lowell’s prose writings, some previously unpublished. It opens with a series of autobiographical sketches developed as part of his psychiatric treatment when hospitalized for bipolar disorder.
We find that the New England Lowells were a distinguished lineage, with a President of Harvard (A. Lawrence Lowell), a couple of poets (James Russell Lowell, Amy Lowell), and an astronomer (Percival Lowell). Indeed, given his privileged background, some were suspicious of Robert Lowell’s seriousness as artist.
The autobiographical contributions are short, some just a couple of pages. They have been ordered into a rough chronology but don’t provide a complete story; rather, they are perspectives or recollections that occurred most forcefully to Lowell at the time.
Lowell is dismissive of his father, a rather characterless navy man, and his mother, more forceful, seems to have been persistently pushing against her husband’s career so that the family could return to her native Boston. Lowell’s strongest connection was with his maternal grandfather, Arthur Winslow, of whom there are multiple recollections. Lowell does not sugar-coat his youth. By his own admission, he was self-centered, willful, a bully, and several times in trouble for theft.
While Lowell’s autobiographical writing is often strong, it would not hold its own against the best memoirists. The appeal is mainly that these are the previously unpublished writings of the great poet. So, if, like me, you had not been aware of Lowell’s greatness, the sketches do not particularly dazzle.
A Life among Writers
The collection also includes reminiscences of poets and other writers, some prepared as Lowell’s introduction to their publications, others as memorial contributions to journals following their deaths.
These pieces draw on Lowell’s extensive network of connections with literary forebears and peers. “By his mid-thirties, he was friends with, among others, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Frost, Santayana, Tate, Ransom, Warren, Jarrell, Bishop, Berryman, Mary McCarthy, J.F. Powers, Peter Taylor, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, and Flannery O’Connor.” (NYRB, June 2005)
Lowell’s drive to build these connections early in his career was astonishing. As a twenty-year old, Lowell visited Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon, finding their southern hospitality already strained by the presence of Ford Madox Ford, his wife, and secretary. Lowell offered himself as an additional house guest but was politely declined, with Tate indicating that there was no room for him unless he pitched a tent on the lawn. Blithely, Lowell returned a few days later with a tent and stayed three months.
Lowell’s recollections are fascinating (or would be if I were more abreast of the writers he eulogizes): Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, Robert Penn Warren, John Berryman, Hannah Arendt, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and (the lone writer with whom I am familiar) William Carlos Williams.
Quotes
Lowell speaking of his father’s graduation from Annapolis Naval Academy: "He had reached, perhaps, his final mental possibilities. He was deep—not with profundity, but with the dumb depths of one who believed in statistics and was dubious of personal experience. In his forties, Father’s soul went underground: as a civilian he kept his high sense of form, his humor, his accuracy, but this accuracy was henceforth unimportant, hors de combat.” (p.62)
And again on his father: “Always, he seemed to treat me as though I were some relation of Mother’s who was visiting and he was waiting to be introduced. He had been told my Christian name and even my nicknames, but somehow or other my surname had escaped. He would rather have had his fingernails pulled one by one than have said anything to me that was impolite, called for, or fatherly.” (p.99)
And again…"He was post-Edwardian, post-Teddy Roosevelt, post-horsemanship, post-panache, post-personality, and post-World War I.” (p.117)
On his maternal grandmother: “[She] wanted the house kept at 80. Warm, small, charming, she came from North Carolina. Ruined by Sherman and brought up on plantation stories, she looked on New Englanders as Vandals and witch-burners.”
On a childhood friend: “Buddy reminded me of the three most exciting objects in the world—(1) Napoleon, as he looked during his Italian campaign, say at Arcola, long-nosed, transparent, mask-like; (2) a girl; and (3) an orangutan.” (p.132)
On Hannah Arendt: “Her imperatives for political freedom still enchant and reproach us, though America has obviously, in black moments one thinks almost totally, slipped from those jaunty years of Harry Truman and the old crusade for international democracy. We couldn’t know how fragile we were, or how much totalitarianism could ameliorate, bend, adulterate itself, and succeed.” (p.307, written 1976)
NYRB, June 2005
“Robert Lowell’s star has waned very considerably since his death in 1977, when his obituarists treated him, along with Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and Wallace Stevens, as one of the handful of unquestionably great twentieth-century poets. The publication two years ago of Frank Bidart and David Gewanter’s massive edition of the Collected Poems did much to restore his work to public and critical view, but even now Lowell’s poems are, I would guess, less widely read, taught, and anthologized than those of his two friends and contemporaries Elizabeth Bishop and John Berryman—a judgment, if that is what it is, that would have astonished serious readers of poetry between the 1950s and the 1970s.” (Jonathan Raban)...more
Offers disappointingly few insights into Kafka's writing.
This is the first volume of Stach's three-part Kafka biography. It covers his family origOffers disappointingly few insights into Kafka's writing.
This is the first volume of Stach's three-part Kafka biography. It covers his family origins and the first 28 years of his life, from birth in Prague (1883) through the summer of 1911. It ends, therefore, just before Kafka's creative breakthrough in 1912, the year he wrote The Judgment and The Metamorphosis. In retrospect, I would gladly have skipped this volume and started with Kafka: The Decisive Years, which runs through 1915 and covers his most important years of work.
Thematically-structured biography
Many biographies have a strong chronological structure: parents' origins, circumstances of birth, trials of infancy and youth, transition to adulthood; all the events of a life, year by year. However, with only scarce biographical material on Kafka's early years, Stach adopts a more thematic structure. His work is only loosely chronological, with its 28 chapters focused on social, economic, and political issues pertinent to Kafka at different stages of his youth.
For example, Chapter 8, titled "A City Energized", deals with events and entertainments in Prague during Kafka's schoolboy days: a massive flood that destroyed the Charles Bridge when Kafka was seven; the first manned balloon flight over the city a year later; the popular Jubilee Exhibition of industry and handicrafts (also in 1891); the first moving picture entertainments (introduced when Kafka was thirteen); and the "swimming schools" operating on the banks of the Vltava River. This chapter, with its outward-looking focus on the city of Prague, is highly informative as popular history but provides only sketchy information on Kafka's own childhood. The most certain fact seems to be that Kafka was a passionate member of the swimming clubs.
The book's thematic chapters require the reader to repeatedly adjust to different time periods. The chapter describing life in Prague (see above) takes Kafka from age eight to around thirteen. This is followed by a chapter on Kafka's relationship to his three sisters, starting from the birth of the youngest when Kafka was eight, and extending through the girls' teenage years, when Kafka was in his twenties. The next chapter is on Kafka's academic studies as a schoolboy, which takes us back again to Kafka at age ten and then forward to his adolescent years. Given this footloose process of seeking evidence on Kafka's youth from different perspectives, the reader is left, in the end, with only an impressionistic picture of the actual chronology of his early years.
Excessive detail
The biography is impressive in the depth of its research, which is a cause for celebration for Kafkologists but TMI for neophytes. Stach's position seems to be that, since Kafka's life is poorly documented, all related materials, even those that are only tangential, are worthy of inclusion.
For example, the penultimate chapter details the early twentieth century enthusiasm for spiritualism and Rudolph Steiner's theosophical movement. Kafka and his friends, like many others, attended seances and Steiner's lectures as a form of entertainment. But since Kafka thought spiritualism to be a joke and was only briefly attracted to Steiner's teachings, the breadth of Stach's coverage of the two topics seems excessive.
Similarly, we learn that Einstein was at Prague University in 1911 and interacted with Kafka's colleagues. However, as regards Kafka, Stach can only claim that “it is highly likely that he was at least introduced to Einstein". Given the speculative and (at best) passing nature of this contact, the introduction of Einstein into the biography adds little more than a “fun fact” (did you know that Kafka possibly…?)
All in all, there is too much tangential material in the biography. The reader concludes with a stronger feeling for turn-of-the-century Prague than for Kafka’s own youth....more
Hypnotically confessional novel on the lasting trauma of extreme poverty and the complications of being a daughter, mother, and wife.
Strout’s thirHypnotically confessional novel on the lasting trauma of extreme poverty and the complications of being a daughter, mother, and wife.
Strout’s third Lucy Barton novel. The language is unadorned, confiding, frank, presented as an account by the writer, Lucy Barton, of her relationship with her first husband, William. She had two daughters with him, then divorced and remarried a second husband, David, from whom she is recently widowed.
William has also remarried and has made a disturbing discovery about his family history on which he seeks emotional support from Lucy. This and other events lead them to travel together, something that deepens Lucy’s reflections on her past relationship with William and how it compared to her marriage to David.
Lucy’s story comes out slowly as she revisits key themes through the novel. Her childhood was one of emotional neglect and extreme poverty, her father suffering post-WW2 PTSD and her mother emotionally distant: “I have no memory of my mother touching any of her children except in violence.”
This background shadows her adult life: “I have never fully understood the whole class business in America, though, because I came from the very bottom of it, and when that happens it never really leaves you. I mean I have never really gotten over it, my beginnings, the poverty, I guess is what I mean.”
Lucy is, in principle, an American success story. She is bright and ambitious, escaped from her home town with a scholarship to a good liberal arts college, became a celebrated writer, had two daughters with whom she is very close, and lives in a New York apartment with river views. At the same time, despite valuable support from a therapist, she has periodic panic attacks and confesses that “on some very fundamental level, I feel invisible in the world.”
Strout’s novel is partly an indictment of the dark side of the American dream. In a trip with William to Maine they enter one town in extreme decline:
“William leaned forward to peer through the windshield. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I said, “Yeah. My God.” “Everything in the town was closed. There was not a car on the street, and there was a place that said Village Commons—an entire building—with a sign on it: FOR LEASE. There was a big First National Bank with pillars; it had been boarded up... Not a coffee shop, not a dress store or a drug store, there was absolutely nothing open in that town, and we drove back up Main Street again where there was not a car in sight, and then we left. “This state is in trouble,” William said, but I could see that he was shaken. I was shaken myself.”
This is not, however, a political novel. It is about the emotional (and perhaps even spiritual) life of one woman and her family. Lucy reflects not only on the legacy of her impoverished childhood, but also on her emotional relationships with her first husband, William, and her second, David. Strout’s writing captures the complicated and sometimes contradictory nature of these feelings.
For Lucy, William provided a sense of authority: “No matter what anyone says, we crave that sense of authority. Of believing that in the presence of this person we are safe.” She tells a friend: “It is like I was a fish swimming round and round and then I bumped into this rock.”
Equally, however, she reflects on the “visceral memory of what a hideous thing marriage was for me at times those years with William: a familiarity so dense it filled up the room, your throat almost clogged with knowledge of the other so that it seemed to practically press into your nostrils—the odor of the other’s thoughts, the slight flicker of an eyebrow slightly raised, the barely perceptible titling of the chin; no one but the other would know what it meant; but you could not be living like that, not ever. “Intimacy can be a ghastly thing.”
Following their divorce, Lucy and William look back on the failings of their marriage (including his affairs with other women) with a degree of distance. Even now, however, Lucy wavers between a sense of irritation with William and the comfort she gets from his company. Despite all their years together, Lucy doesn’t fully understand her relationship with him; and not just that, she can’t even claim to know herself. In the end, the novel is about the mysteries that each one of us is, both to others, and to ourselves.
A fantastic read. Highly recommended.
Sequence of Lucy Barton novels (from Penguin website):
My Name is Lucy Barton (#1): Story of mothers, daughters, and the complexity of family life. When a mother visits her daughter in hospital after many years apart, her unexpected visit forces Lucy to face her buried past, upending the façade of her glossy New York life. From Lucy’s hospital bed, readers are drawn into this family’s story and the memories that bind them together.
Anything is Possible (#2): Lucy returns to her hometown of rural Amgash, Illinois. After seventeen years of absence, she is finally visiting the siblings she left behind. Deepening the family bonds explored in the first book, this sequel underscores themes of hope and reconciliation.
Oh William! (#3): The story of the second half of Lucy Barton’s life. Now navigating the world as a recent widow and parent of adult daughters, Lucy reconnects with her first husband, William, and weaves a portrait of a decades-long partnership.
Lucy by the Sea (#4): Lucy’s ex-husband, William, begs her to escape New York to a coastal house in Maine. The expected trip of a week or two turn into months, and Lucy and William face their complex past together....more
An engrossing thriller, set in the opening years of the Syrian civil war.
Damascus Station convincingly describes espionage tradecraft. We meet ourAn engrossing thriller, set in the opening years of the Syrian civil war.
Damascus Station convincingly describes espionage tradecraft. We meet our CIA protagonist, Sam, as he finishes eight hours winding through Damascus’s streets, confirms he is off radar to Syrian intelligence, and initiates an ill-fated meet with an undercover agent. As Sam rebounds from failure, he gets enmeshed in Syrian bureaucratic rivalries and romantic intrigue.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was a disaster for the spy thriller genre: late Le Carré novels of corporate malfeasance in the Third world could never match the allure of stepping behind the Iron Curtain with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Now, however, McCloskey’s debut novel suggests that there are rich possibilities for the espionage genre in the modern police states of Russia, Iran, and Syria. (I’m probably late to the game, here, missing out on plenty of good post-Carré thrillers.)
Damascus Station is a fictionalized version of the Syrian civil war, set in its early years when, in real life, the US embassy compound was breached by protestors (July 2011), several Assad ministers were killed in an opposition bomb plot (July 2012), and chemical weapons were used against rebel areas (starting 2012). McCloskey is particularly good at describing how Assad maintained power by exploiting religious divides and punishing dissent. Even those opposed to his brutalities felt they and their families had no option but to silently acquiesce (much like in Putin’s Russia today).
The moral values in McCloskey’s espionage world are black-and-white, rather than the grays offered by Le Carré. In Damascus Station, the CIA is a force for good, fighting to prevent Syria from acquiring and using chemical weapons against its own population. This involves rewriting history, with a fictional POTUS ordering punitive bombing of Damascus early in the civil war, whereas in reality the Obama administration did not respond to Syria’s use of chemical weapons through 2012-2016, leaving it to Trump to approve the first response in April 2017, with the bombing of a Syrian airbase that had deployed Sarin.
While Damascus Station seems convincing about the internal rivalries of the Assad regime, it greatly simplifies the story in respect of opposition groups. It describes the urban protests inspired by the Arab Spring but does not detail the various rebel military forces (nationalist, Sunni, Kurdish), some of which received early non-military support from the US (presumably via the CIA). McCloskey probably judged that a realistic portrait of the Syria civil war would just confuse readers.
One weakness of Damascus Station is its sometimes implausible plotting. At one point, even as a mob destroys the American embassy in Damascus causing the death of 14 Americans, a Syrian official delivers a wounded and barely-conscious American to safety there. The practicalities are glossed over: "A raised voice. Gunfire. More shouting...” and then the American wakes up safely inside the embassy. (mmm?)
Still, definitely a compulsive read. One for the beach....more
The Australian author, Au, published Cold Enough eleven years after her debut noveWonderful novella; stylish, controlled, thoughtful, multivalent.
The Australian author, Au, published Cold Enough eleven years after her debut novel, Cargo, which was issued when she was just 25. While Au now regards Cargo as an immature work, Cold Enough has been rapturously received.
Over the past decade, Au has read a lot of Japanese writers (Kawataba, Tanizaki, Soseki), something which influenced her new novella:
“There is a sense of indirectness to the prose in the Japanese novels and there’s a lot of polite conversations going on on top, and it seems very lovely and beautiful but actually if you listen hard enough, the author is leaving you a lot to work out about what goes on underneath that.” (interview with Au, Sydney Morning Herald, Feb 2022)
The surface story of Cold Enough is simple: a young woman invites her aging mother to join her for a short vacation in Japan. We sense that she wants to build a closer relationship, but their conversations are formal and constrained. She introduces her mother to Japanese culture (modern art, contemporary architecture, an artist’s studio) but the older lady is perplexed and cannot respond to her daughter’s enthusiasm. Instead, she delights in small shops where she can buy gifts for her grandchildren back home.
Voiced by the young woman, the account of the shared vacation weaves back and forward in time. Prompted by events in the visit, the young woman reminisces about her childhood, her sister, or the life she has built with her husband. The controlled manner of these elliptical asides is reminiscent of W. G. Sebald, notably his Rings of Saturn in which a walking tour in England prompts digressions on history and literature.
One theme in Cold Enough is the immigrant experience, the transmission of personal history across generations: how so very little is carried over from the mother’s experience, raised in Hong Kong speaking Cantonese, to the daughter’s life, raised in Australia speaking English. How well can we know the inner lives of others, even within our own family?
The novel also explores how the daughter interprets the world around her. She reminisces about her college studies in English literature, a topic that she found enthralling. However, having learned to apply academic analysis, she becomes disillusioned:
”For a long time, I had believed in this language, and I had done my best to become fluent in it. But I said that sometimes, increasingly often in fact, I was beginning to feel like this kind of response too was false, a performance, and not the one I had been looking for.”
The novella, can indeed, be read as a search for the right, most natural way to view the world, nature, and art. Au seems to be challenging us to see the world in its amazing complexity:
”The rain was gentle and consistent. It left a fine layer of water on the ground, which was not asphalt, but a series of small, square tiles, if you cared enough to notice.”
The beauty of the world and of personal relationships is seen in small things, simple actions. In this vein, the novel ends as the mother asks her daughter’s help:
“Could you help me with this? she said, and I saw that she was unable to bend down far enough to reach her shoe. I knelt and, with one swift tug, helped her pull it on.”...more
Stay True offers a fascinating perspective on Taiwanese American culture. Hsu’s paPitch-perfect coming-of-age memoire; nervy, yearning, poignant.
Stay True offers a fascinating perspective on Taiwanese American culture. Hsu’s parents came to the US in the 1960s for its better education and job prospects. Two decades later, the booming semiconductor industry in Taiwan attracted Hsu’s father back for an executive job:
"… he [had] wearied of the [US] corporate ladder, where advancement to the uppermost strata seemed tracked to arbitrary forces, like the color of one’s skin, the subtle quivers in a voice. … he would move back to Taiwan. … Never again would he have to dye his hair or touch the golf clubs.” (p.21)
The family buys two fax machines, and Hsu’s father becomes an active long-distance parent, faxing help with homework and chatting about his son’s interests. His faxes are affecting in their eagerness to stay engaged:
"Last Friday, I overemphasized the toughness. Don’t be scared. The life is full of excitement and surprises. Handle it and enjoy it. Just like you said you like the cross country exercise. After climbing the hill, looking downward, you feel good.” (p.29)
In high school, Hsu gravitates toward music (Nirvana) and counterculture (zines, thrift store clothes):
"I began making a zine because I’d heard it was an easy way to get free CDs from bands and record labels. But it was also a way to find a tribe. My worldview was defined by music. I cultivated a pose that was modest and small, sensitive and sarcastic, skeptical yet secretly passionate. I scoured record stores and mail order catalogues for 7-inch singles that sounded quiet and loud at the same time. I thought I had a lot to say, but I felt timid about saying it. Making a zine was a way of sketching the outlines of a new self, writing a new personality into being.” (p.26)
Describing his high school (Cupertino) and college years (Berkeley), Hsu writes perceptively about the chaotic excitement of discovering the world and your place in it, the role of friendships, music, clothing, sports. In Berkeley, Hsu’s passions broaden to include anthropology, sociology, and philosophy.
The heart of the memoire is Hsu’s close friendship with Ken, a Japanese American fellow student at Berkeley. The two find a close kinship despite Ken’s very different character (more socially confident, preppy, frat member). The shocking, random murder of Ken in his senior year turns Hsu’s life upside down. Grieving, he starts a journal to preserve his memories of Ken: their shared jokes, the way Ken smiled, the way he spoke. Twenty years later, this journal found its way into Stay True, the title being an jokey/ironic parting phrase coined by the two.
This is a wonderful little memoire. The descriptions of free-wheeling student life, the late-night shared car-rides to Seven-Eleven, the tribal passions, the caffeinated excitement, all remind me of my son’s current college experience. It is no surprise that both NYT and the Washington Post have selected it as among the “Top 10 books of 2022”.
My only reservations related to the professorial digressions on Aristotle, Derrida, Malinowski, and Mauss. I didn’t find Hsu’s two-page exposition on Derridean deconstruction and the Politics of Friendship useful in understanding his moving friendship with Ken....more
Each year, six students from among 600-700 applicants join the MFA program at Syracuse University. TAn unmissable master class from Prof. Saunders
Each year, six students from among 600-700 applicants join the MFA program at Syracuse University. There, they can take a class from George Saunders on the Russian short story. Starting in 2021, those unable to devote time or money to an MFA, together with the 99 percent rejected by Syracuse can take the same class through A Swim in a Pond. Indeed, Saunders offers an “enhanced” master class because, in writing up his teaching materials, he discovered even greater depths in the Russian masters than he had recognized earlier.
This is one of the rare occasions when life offers an unmissable, underpriced opportunity. Anyone who appreciates the short story format, or who has an interest in the Russian masters should grab a copy.
Saunders has his class read a short story, then explore how the story works, what it tells us, and whether it does so effectively or not. A Swim in a Pond contains seven stories (three by Chekhov, two by Tolstoy, and one each by Turgenev and Gogol). While Saunders draws on his own craft as a writer to help illustrate the work of the Russians, his own writing is not central to the book.
To paraphrase Saunders (and over-simplify), every short story is a sort of machine. The reader starts with an open mind (a blank slate) and by reading creates a small world. The best short stories have common characteristics. They use energy efficiently: they are specific, and every element, in some way, moves the story forward. There is credible causality, so that a chain of events is plausibly motivated (A->B->C) rather than happenstance. There is a decisive and escalating dynamic, and if there is repetition, it is varied. These elements come together in a highly organized system. To achieve this, authors need to be willing to revise (often radically).
Taking each of the Russian authors and asking exactly how their short story is efficient, credible, or driven by an escalating dynamic is highly instructive. In my case, I was forced to slow down and ask more of the stories than I would normally. In reading Chekhov’s In the Cart, Saunders asks why we care about Marya Vasilyevna, riding home from town? What do we know about her life, her character, her expectations? When she meets the landowner, Hanov, in his carriage how does she feel about him? Where, as a writer, could Chekhov have taken this chance meeting? Why did he develop the plot as he did? While Saunders occasionally brings in interpretations from other academics, there is (thankfully) no resort to esoteric literary theory.
Saunders is a very congenial tutor. He is enthusiastic about the medium of the short story, humble about his own craft while generous in praising others, and optimistic about human potentialities while realistic about our failings. I’ll never take an MFA, never mind enter Syracuse; but I’ve been very happy with my own master class from Prof. Saunders.
Intriguing blend of vipassana meditation and therapy.
Epstein's interest in meditation and Buddhism predated his training as psychologist and therIntriguing blend of vipassana meditation and therapy.
Epstein's interest in meditation and Buddhism predated his training as psychologist and therapist. Both subsequently developed in parallel, and he now offers therapy with an underlying, generally implicit Buddhist/vipassana orientation. (The reference to "Zen" in the book's title is somewhat misleading and presumably a marketing decision; vipassana is a different meditation school than Zen, though there are underlying commonalities.) The book draws on a year-long diary kept by Epstein immediately prior to the Covid pandemic in which he recorded exchanges during therapy that seemed to illustrate commonalities and synergies between mindfulness meditation and therapy.
The book is divided into three sections. The first describes Epstein's early interests in meditation and psychology, and how the two interconnected during the early stages of his professional career. The second, main part of the book draws on Epstein's year of therapy sessions. Each covers one patient and is of just a few pages, comprising background on the patient and their problems, a summary of the interaction with Epstein during therapy, and the latter's views on how the exchange tied in to his vipassana training. A final section provides Epstein's concluding thoughts on the links between meditation and therapy.
This is an unusual book, bridging the popular themes of meditation/Buddhism (on which there are a trillion books) and the fields of therapy and psychology where a number of practitioners have written memorable studies (e.g., Irvin Yalom, Carl Rogers, Oliver Sacks).
To some extent, it suffers as a result. Epstein draws on psychology studies and tenets of therapy in describing his practice that are not straightforward for those outside the field. For example, he references "transference", "affect", and "good-enough parenting", which I still can't say that I fully understand. He is particularly drawn to the psychological writings of Donald Winnicott whose work seems rich in psychological jargon: for example, "Like John Cage, Winnicott envisioned a time when the interpenetration of unlimited centers becomes a lived reality... (p.229)"; or "In this language it is the environment-mother who receives all that can be called affection and sensuous co-existence; it is the object-mother who becomes the target for excited experience backed by crude instinct-tension. It is my thesis that concern turns up in the baby's life as a highly sophisticated experience in the coming-together in the infant's mind of the object-mother and the environment-mother (p.230)."
But these quotes probably overstate the opacity of Epstein's book. When he leaves Winnicott aside, the discussions of the needs of his patients and how they relate to meditation and Buddhist teachings are rewarding. While none of the patients are discussed at length (in the approach adopted by Oliver Sacks, for example), the small insights from the two dozen or so sessions documented by Epstein add up to a clear picture on the connections between meditation and therapy. This is a thoughtful book that merits rereading.
One illustrative quote from Epstein's concluding section on the link between therapy and mindfulness meditation:
Our minds are like children, and mindfulness, like a good therapist or a good-enough parent, "holds" them so that they can grow up and come to their senses. With enough practice, and enough patience, breakthroughs occur. These take many idiosyncratic forms but they are generally of two types.
"On the one hand, there is a loosening of identification with the known self; people see their self-concepts as just concepts that have arisen and accumulated in response to the particular challenges and conditions of their lives but that have no ultimate stigmatizing reality. On the other hand, there is a return to simply "being". This is set in motion when awareness becomes dominant, when the observing mind becomes stronger than that which is being observed. As this observational capacity develops, a change sometime occurs. Instead of one part of the mind observing another--"me" watching "myself"--the whole thing collapses and just "is". These are the Zen states of "thusness" or "suchness" that Winnicott also touched upon when he described the "is-ness" of the mother-infant connection, the replenishment of going to pieces without falling apart. Contact with this in an adult context gives access to a wellspring of positive and life-affirming energy that carries with it an inherent sense of connection." (p.278-279)...more
Author procrastinates in writing his novel; reader gives up after 50 pages.
The LA Times in June 2022 asked "Why are these summer books indebtedAuthor procrastinates in writing his novel; reader gives up after 50 pages.
The LA Times in June 2022 asked "Why are these summer books indebted to an Austrian author of nihilistic rants?" They clearly assumed their readers would not recognize the author, Thomas Bernhard, in their leader, but since I am a great fan of his, I took notice. Of the three Bernhard-influenced novels that they cite, The Novelist by Jordan Castro got the highest goodreads rating, so I ordered a copy.
This was clearly, in retrospect, a dumb move. With music, I've had some luck with recommendations along the lines of "If you like X, then you may like Y." But that approach, doesn't seem to work for authors, or at least no one has marketed an effective algorithm, as far as I know.
What do I like about Bernhard? The musicality of his prose, with repetition of key words like baroque counterpoint; the relentless flow of his writing, like a force of nature; the periodic glimpses of dark humor (the temptation is to quote Beckett here); the over-the-top misanthropy of Bernhard's protagonists, which goes beyond lunacy and approaches the messianic.
And what do I find with Jordan Castro? A sad tale of an author obsessed with his social media ratings on twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. While the Bernhardian character is proud and scornful of society and carves out his own path, Castro's is insecure, self-loathing, and subordinates himself to society. I read the first 50 pages of The Novelist and can guess where it is going. The writer is so distracted by social media and domestic tasks (making tea, bathroom breaks) that he doesn't even start his writing. One assumes that in the remaining three-quarters of the book, this will continue and, hey presto, we will find that what started out as an account of the writing of the novel becomes the novel itself.
I have no problem with literary tricks of this kind, and have a reader's constitution that will take a good deal of punishment if the payoff is good enough. (Bernhard can be hard going, almost monotonous, at times, but the periodic fireworks make it worthwhile.) But in Castro's case, I could not find any pleasure in the writing itself, or at least not enough to keep me from junking this novel in favor of a large pile pleading for attention on my bedside table.
I recognize that other goodreads reviewers have been more welcoming. But Jordan Castro is clearly not for me....more
Humorous, gentle short stories set in North Carolina. Didn't do it for me.
I picked up this Gurganus collection in a second-hand book shop, scanninHumorous, gentle short stories set in North Carolina. Didn't do it for me.
I picked up this Gurganus collection in a second-hand book shop, scanning the bar codes for strong goodreads ratings. With a scorching 4.18 and impressive book jacket praise ("one of the best writers of our time", Anne Patchett; "verbal magician", Edmund White; "blending trenchant satire with outrageous humor", Chicago Tribune), I thought I might have a keeper on my hands. But after just four of the nine stories, I realize that Gurganus is not to my taste.
The stories have a southern gothic feel, with dark themes of sex, illness, and death balanced against a lightness of touch and eccentric humor. Gurganus is clearly interested in people and how they live their lives. To the extent that his short stories have a social setting, it is usually to drill down into the experience of one person, typically surreal or bizarre in aspect. Gurganus is drawn to imagined events of extraordinary nature--the sort of tales that would be passed down as family folklore or the topic of barroom storytelling, elaborated a little further on each accounting.
Gurganus's humor is more subtle than I expected, given the book jacket plaudits ("hilarious", "seriously funny"). It's not a knowing, sarcastic or cynical humor but rather a well-natured "well, what about that!" sort of amazement at the bizarre forms that life and people can take. I kept expecting his stories to have an ironic twist, revealing a deeper level, but no, they maintained their sly, affable, eccentric character through the end. This is certainly not Reader's Digest writing, but it does have some of that feeling of being designed for an American readership that could still claim a common cultural heritage, before being fragmented by culture wars and political partisanship. Perhaps this “out-of-time” feeling is why the Chicago Tribune finds a kinship between Gurganus and Mark Twain.
I'd hate to think I have been ruined by irony and modernism, but Gurganus just doesn't hit the mark for me. So my nice hardback is returning to the secondhand market for its next reader, hopefully more attuned to Gurganus's style.
(And before signing off, what sort of marketing decision was it on the cover artwork that prompted a large photo of the author, gazing pensively into the distance? To my mind, this emphasizes Gurganus as personality over Gurganus as author--even if he is ruggedly photogenic.)...more
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