Window on a sleazy world
May 30, 2009
Living in a drunken stupor may not seem like palatable reading matter, but Patrick deWitt’s unique style in his debut novel Ablutions: Notes for a Novel is – well – addictive.
The story, set in a sleazy Hollywood bar and told by the observations of an alcoholic barback, brings to life pathetic derelicts with energetic, colorful honesty.
Written in the rare second-person viewpoint, as if the nameless barback is taking notes for a book, Ablutions creates impact beyond a typical addiction story by the protection of the distant “you” pronoun and the intimacy of its uninhibited judgments and descriptions.
I was, on the one hand, disgusted with how the drugged-up, liquored-up characters behave and, on the other hand, compassionately fascinated. Their lives are completely foreign to my own, or those of anyone I know.
Perhaps because of that foreignness, I read Ablutions with rapt attention.
No lucky guess, but a lucky child
May 28, 2009
A friend of mine mentors a student through a program with local schools. At a recent event, mentors and their students played “guess the historical person” game.
Everyone wore names on their backs to be guessed by each other.
My friend stepped in to help another mentor who wasn’t getting her student’s clues. To ease mounting frustration, my friend offered “Amsterdam, attic, diary, Nazis,” or some variation thereof.
The mentor, somewhere in midde-age, still couldn’t guess the name.
When finally given the answer, the woman expressed astonishment, but, according to my friend, it was fake, bewildered astonishment. The kind that’s obvious the person doesn’t know a thing about the subject matter. The kind that said she doesn’t know who Anne Frank is.
Pan now to A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy by Thomas Buergenthal published this spring.
Burgenthal recounts the miraculous story of his survival in Auschwitz as a 10-year-old separated from his parents. One of the most horrific scenes is the Auschwitz death march. (Staying alive during the march became a game the young Burgenthal played to win against Hitler and the SS.)
I had just finished reading Buergenthal’s memoir when I heard my friend’s story. What came to mind was this, written by Buergenthal in his Acknowledgements. Buergenthal, BTW, currently serves as the American judge at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
“This book does not have the usual publishing history. I wrote it in English, but it was first published in more than half a dozen other languages. While this is not a unique situation, it is rather rare unless political, religious, or other reasons bar the publication of an author’s books in his native country or language. That was certainly not true in my case. My problem, as I learned on more than one occasion from publishers in the United States and in the United Kingdom, was that ‘Holocaust books don’t sell.’ It is therefore ironic that this book was first published in Germany in 2007 and that it remained on that country’s bestseller list for quite a number of weeks.”
These two stories individually make separate statements. The one about education (how did this woman miss reading Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl?) and the other about the responsibility of publishers.
Together, though, they say something of a greater magnitude, which words can only insufficiently grasp. It has to do with an insidious, slow-moving disregard for the Holocaust that could settle in over time in the United States. It could inch up on us. Signs will appear akin to one person getting a flu virus, the one before the many.
Like one person ignorant of Anne Frank.
But it could be so gradual, so unremarkable, we won’t know it’s happening. And then there we’ll be — Holocaust books won’t be in bookstores, and new generations won’t even know to miss them, let alone what they could learn from them.
Ian Frazier turns 40. Huh? Make that 58.
May 26, 2009
The New Yorker, May 18, 2009, published a poem by Ohio author Ian Frazier claiming he’s turning 40 “in just a couple of days.” Of course, Frazier, a humorist, is spoofing the reality of 58. He was born in 1951 and graduated from Harvard in 1973. “What does it feel like, old bones?”
Frazier wrote an article about his Midwestern roots for The New Yorker in their January 10, 2005, issue – “Out of Ohio: How the Midwest made me.” He lived in Hudson, Ohio, from when he was six years old until he was eighteen.
The article captures his nostalgia for those years and the reasons for leaving his hometown. Here’s an excerpt:
“Why did Hudson enchant me? Why was life, there and then, so sweet? I think a million reasons happened to come together, none of which we grasped at the time. We had plenty of leisure. We had cars to drive. Gasoline was still so cheap it was practically free. Our parents, to whom the cars we drove belonged, had leisure, too. In their case, they were inclined to take long vacations, and indulge us kids. Fathers (and a few mothers) had steady jobs, pensions, health insurance. The economic difficulties that would later take a lot of those away and that I still don’t understand had not yet visibly begun. Vietnam was winding down. The draft had just ended, removing a load from all our minds. Et cetera.”
The New Yorker’s contributor bio for Frazier says his new book, Travels in Siberia, will be published next year.
Where do underpants come from?
May 23, 2009
I’m not sure I need to know the answer to that question, but in case I change my mind, Overlook’s publishing a book in July that will fill me in - Where Do Underpants Come From: From Checkout to Cotton Field – Travels Through the New China and into the New Global Economy by Joe Bennett.
Other summer books catching my eye at the moment are:
Do Not Deny Me: Stories by Jean Thompson published by Simon & Schuster (June)
12 stories that received a Publisher’s Weekly starred review stating “Thompson immerses readers in details and emotions so consuming and convincing that the inane vagaries of modern life can take on near mythic importance.”
City of Strangers by Ian MacKenzie published by Penguin (July)
The Publisher’s Weekly forecast got my attention: “A novel as grim as it is extraordinary, MacKenzie’s debut tells the story of two estranged brothers at odds on how to view their Nazi-sympathizer father….MacKenzie sets up a New York rampant with alienation and misunderstanding, and his visceral narrative, powered by taut prose and braced with sturdy philosophical and psychological underpinnings, is a winner.”
Late Edition: A Love Story by Bob Greene published by St. Martin’s Press (July)
Greene writes about his days working in the newspaper offices of the Columbus Citizen-Journal. It’s about the hometown, so gotta take a look. (My mother read the Citizen-Journal every morning with her cup of coffee.)
St. Martin’s website states, “With current-day developments in the American newspaper industry so grim and dreary, Late Edition is a Valentine to an era that was gleefully cocky and seemingly free from care, a wonderful story as bracing and welcome as the sound of a rolled-up paper thumping onto the front stoop just after dawn.”
That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo published by Knopf (August)
I love Russo’s Bridge of Sighs (that sighs over my neglect, as it sits on my reading table). It’s the reason I’m interested in his new book (and want to hurry up and finish his previous novel).
Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon published by Penguin (August)
I collect Pynchon’s books, only lacking the expensive 1963 novel V. I’d like to think I will read Inherent Vice, not just buy it for the collection.
“The Little Book of Plagiarism”
May 20, 2009
This week’s news about New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd claiming words that belonged to a blogger as her own unsettled me. In this fast-paced blogging, twittering, emailing world of writing and information exchange, all of us could inadvertently cross the line.
Plagiarism is not simply about copying words, but also about copying ideas and expressions and the medium in which it occurs.
Richard A. Posner’s The Little Book of Plagiarism landed on my reference bookshelf a year ago because plagiarism was in the news then, too. I bought the book to understand what plagiarism means today. As Posner writes, “its boundaries are becoming vague and contested.” He also writes, “digitization has made it at once easier to commit and easier to detect.”
I recommend this small book for everyone’s reference bookshelf, a mere $10.95 in its small hardbound form and worth every penny. It’s good stuff to know plus fascinating to read.
Jeffrey Fisher’s “Birds”
May 16, 2009
Chronicle Books published an enchanting book “billed” for bird-lovers’ libraries, yet I – neither a bird lover nor a bird watcher – can’t stop picking it up.
Birds features 46 hand-painted, winsome portraits of our feathered friends. Christine Fisher, Jeffrey’s wife, writes short, colorful descriptions that are utterly delightful as they entertain and inform. Hence, another reason for my tendency to reach for the book.
She writes about the Swift: “If grounded, swifts have difficulty becoming airborne. They can fly very high due to a special blood adaptation and have the ability to enter a state of torpor if weather conditions deteriorate while the swift is nesting.”
My copy of the book roams the house, from kitchen counter to desktop. To look at the portraits or read the words in a stolen moment of the day is like giving myself a spur-of-the-moment, delicious sweet.
The above swift illustration came from the Chronicle website, where you can also see Fisher’s portraits of the bullfinch, galah, green woodpecker and grey heron.
The e-book lacks intimacy
May 13, 2009
A few days ago, I participated on a panel about The Future of the Book. I keep thinking about the comments of author Ann Hagedorn from the audience, confessing her fear and concern about e-books and e-publishing, yet also expressing a desire to think positively.
I’d like to think positively about e-books, but I can’t get there.
I’m a Kindle-owner, but I don’t like it, and the reasons can be chalked up to preference of book format – I’d rather read from a traditional book.
I understand how others love the Kindle or another e-book reader, just as I can understand someone can love lima beans while I detest them. But that’s not what keeps me from the positive frame of mind.
It’s the losses e-books will create, not immediately, but gradually, changing the literary terrain in a way that will leech it of the intimacy the world of books currently gives us in small but impacting ways.
With e-books, there will be…
- No more giving books as gifts and inscribing them with messages (The other day, I opened E. L. Doctorow’s Lives of the Poets: A Novella and Six Stories inscribed to me by a long lost love, Christmas 1984.)
- No more passing down books through generations (I have my grandmother’s set of Charles Dickens, each book inscribed similar to this one, Nicholas Nickleby, “From Papa. To Mamie H. Cooke, Christmas 1884.”)
- No more sharing books (I have a friend’s copy of Siddhartha, and the first page notes where and when he read it, “Taipei, Taiwan, 17 Feb – 24 Feb 1974.”)
- No more regarding books as friends, surrounding us in our homes, cars and offices
- No more book bags to fill up with choice purchases
- No more book stores to browse on a lingering Saturday afternoon
- No more personalized book plates
Here’s another loss of intimacy, from Steven Johnson’s unsettling Wall Street Journal article, “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write:”
“Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity — a direct exchange between author and reader — to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.”
I’m a nay-sayer because we’re heading toward one more exciting new way of living that likely, decades down the road, will make us nostalgic for the original, which made us happier and healthier, yet it will be too late to go back.
I’m a nay-sayer because companies that do not love books, like people love books, are creating an e-reader revolution and making us want it. Hyping its efficiency and convenience and coolness. Its readable screens and easy storage. Its instant purchase gratification. Its iPod readiness.
This better fits our lifestyle, doesn’t it?
To me it feels like more of the gradual downward slide that began with the mega bookstores, barging in and snuffing out the independent bookshop, including Chicago’s long-ago Stuart Brent Books on Michigan Avenue.
During my Chicago years, I frequented Stuart Brent Books on my lunch hours. I’ll never forget Stuart Brent coming up beside me one day, as I pulled Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain off the shelf. He recommended that I wait until I turned 40 (I was in my 20s) to read the immense classic because I’d appreciate it more. He also added a recommendation that I read Proust in my 50s.
The independents are still around – and hard bound books will always be around - but as overshawdowed entities. The one by monolithic stores whose personnel can neither make a knowledgable recommendation nor guide you personally. The other by e-readers spewing out e-books that will mimic a website experience.
It’s intimacy we’re losing with the e-book. Privacy, familiarity, understanding, feeling, solitude, fellowship, love. The stuff we crave but casually let go of in so many areas of this modern life. Do we have to let it go with our books?
Three additions to My Reading Table
May 10, 2009
Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? From the Projects to Prep School: A Memoir by Charlise Lyles
Described on the book’s end cover as “the story of a girl who grew up and out of the Cleveland projects in the 1960s and ’70s,” this memoir landed on my reading table after hearing Charlise read at the Ohioana Book Festival yesterday – more so because a friend who heard more of the reading than I did hurried to buy the book. Word of mouth/suggestion is a powerful sales tool, and so,too, is a brief chat with the author about her memoir.
Loneliness as a Way of Life by Thomas Dumm
Dunn diverges from his political writing to focus on how loneliness permeates and impacts our modern, daily life. This is written with a mix of academic and reader-friendly prose – I’m intrigued with Dumm’s thoughts and premises, as of page 36, when I put the book down to come back to it another time. Consider this that he writes: “In the solitude of our selves we learn something that is otherwise unavailable to us – how to become who we are.”
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
This has been recommended to me by a poetry professor who says the writing is exquisite and an example of “best writing” available. A “must read,” he said with such conviction I can’t ignore it. Originally published in 1961, Yates novel experienced a recent revival due to the movie based on the book starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. On the back cover, speaking of the characters Frank and April Wheeler, “…they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is about to crumble.” (Reminds me of Henry James novella “The Beast in the Jungle,” about John Marcher who believes his life is to be defined by a phenomenal event. He waits for it to happen, while life passes him by.)
