Carson McCullers’ eyes on me
July 23, 2010
I noticed this the other day. Walking down the stairs and turning to go out the front door, there she was, as if she’d casually leaned over and looked out from the side of the bookshelf to gaze at me.
This photo of Carson McCullers is from the back of her sixth book, Clock Without Hands, published in 1961, twenty-one years after her acclaimed first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I’ve read the latter, as well as McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Café, but not the former, even though it’s sitting on my bookshelf.
I purchased my copy of Clock Without Hands – a first edition — because the dust jacket is pristine, and it’s tough to find a first edition dust jacket in such fine condition. A circle is cut out of the center of it, framing the title and emulating a clock, and that makes the dust jacket fragile. It’s typically damaged.
Clock Without Hands got panned by The New York Times in a review on September 17, 1961. The critic regarded it as less successful than McCullers’ earlier books and said the most “disturbing” quality “is the lethargic flatness of the prose.” The story summary from the dust jacket’s inner flap of my edition says: “Here is a book which faces directly the overwhelming question of good and evil and reaffirms our faith in the dignity of life. J. T. Malone, the unwilling hero of this powerful novel, is engaged in an inner struggle that parallels his impending death. Through extreme moral suffering he discovers the greatest danger is not death but the loss of one’s own self in life, and because of a decision of conscience, he acts and finds himself.”
I’m not inclined to read Clock Without Hands, being it’s not one of McCullers’ best, but I’ve been thinking lately to re-read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. It’s a recurring thought that existed before I noticed McCullers leaning over and having a look beyond the bookshelf. I read the acclaimed classic long ago in a college lit class, and I don’t remember much of it beyond scenes from the movie flickering in and out of memory. Perhaps it’s time to get to it, what with those watchful eyes. Either that or I move Clock Without Hands to another bookcase.
Alan Furst’s new day in the barrel
July 21, 2010
For a little more than 20 years, Alan Furst has been spinning irresistible espionage set in Europe’s dark time leading up to and including World War II. He’s considered a master at combining history, politics, espionage and romance in a spellbinding style that drops you into the moment. But Alan Furst hasn’t always been a big hit. His first novel published in 1976, Your Day in the Barrel, is a comic murder mystery, which he followed with two more of similar theme in 1980 and 1981. You won’t find these three embarrassments listed under “books by Alan Furst,” though. In remarks about them to The New York Times, Furst said, “All I was doing was showing how smart I was.” Next came Shadow Trade in 1983, a contemporary spy thriller that transitioned him to Night Soldiers (1988), the first of his historical WWII spy fiction for which he’s now known. But Night Soldiers and, next, Dark Star (1991) didn’t skyrocket his popularity and sales, either, although a cult following sprouted around them and grew. With each successive book about espionage set during what’s become Furst’s signature historical time, more and more readers came on board. Now when Furst publishes a new book, it hits the best-seller list, including this summer’s Spies of the Balkans.
Spies of the Balkans takes place in northern Greece close to the borders of Bulgaria and Turkey. It is 1940 and Mussolini and Hitler are eagerly looking to add Greece to their empires. The book opens with the protagonist, special police agent Costa Zannis, chasing a German spy. When captured, the German’s briefcase reveals photographs of the Greek-Bulgarian border. What follows is the usual suspenseful plotline set in the WWII dark time of uncertainty with history’s people and events expertly threaded through the scenes and a complicating romance hanging in the background. Zannis collaborates with a Jewish woman in Berlin, married to a high-ranking protestant Nazi, in setting up an escape route through Austria, Hungary and the Balkans to Greece and a safe exit to Turkey. He also gets involved with the British in moving an important RAF pilot out of Nazi-occupied Paris in a series of unforgettable, harrowing scenes. This is the good stuff fans rely on, that Furst consistently delivers.
If espionage captures you and Spies of the Balkans is your first Furst, you’ll come away wanting more, which you can satisfy with the 10 previous novels in the series. You can get a complete list with plot summaries on Alan Furst’s website, under About the Books. Regarding those beginning novels Furst would rather ignore, they’re no longer in print yet fetch a nice penny in the collectibles market, with a signed first edition of Your Day in the Barrel commanding between $500 and $1,000.
Books from the week: war, mud & more
July 16, 2010
I recently contributed a guest post to the National Book Critics Circle blog, Critical Mass, on the topic “How do you decide what to read next?” In writing about my ongoing hunt for books and where that hunt takes me, it occurred to me to share on TLC some of what I encounter along the way. Books that catch my eye. Books I may acknowledge, but then move on. They could be from reviews or an auction of rare books or a reference in another book I’m reading. And so, a few from this week:
On the Spartacus Road: A Journey Through Ancient Italy by Peter Stothard
From the publisher’s website: “He was the Thracian gladiator who rose up from slavery in 73 B.C. to defeat every Roman army sent to destroy him—before his defeat and crucifixion. Trained at the gladiatorial school, Spartacus escaped. Joined by approximately seventy followers, his army increased to allegedly 140,000 slaves.” In a recent All Things Considered interview, host Guy Raz talks with Stothard about his battle with cancer and how it lead him to write about this slave uprising over 2,000 years ago.
Other People’s Rejection Letters: Relationship Enders, Career Killers, and 150 Other Letters You’ll Be Glad You Didn’t Receive by Bill Shapiro
Published in May this year, Shapiro’s collection of rejection letters come from all sides of life. Check out the preview on the publisher’s website (turn off your pop-up blocker) or the “see inside” from online sellers to get an idea of the book. While this may be a collection of dreaded nasty-grams, Shapiro’s outlook from what he learned is uplifting: “I saw all these people taking beautiful chances with their lives.”
In Parenthesis by David Jones
Originally published in 1937, this prose/poetry work is currently in print thanks to the New York Review of Books Classics editions. From the NYRB website: “… a work that is among the most powerful imaginative efforts to grapple with the carnage of the First World War, a book celebrated by W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot as one of the masterpieces of modern literature. Fusing poetry and prose, gutter talk and high music, wartime terror and ancient myth, Jones, who served as an infantryman on the Western Front, presents a picture at once panoramic and intimate of a world of interminable waiting and unforeseen death.”
Edward II by J.R.S. Phillips
Published this year by Yale University Press, a biography of this King of England who “was the object of ignominy during his lifetime and calumny since it.” The book’s website also says the biography ”tackles the contentious issue of whether Edward II did not die in 1327, murdered under barbaric circumstances, but lived on as a captive in England and then a wanderer on the Continent.” Part of Yale’s English Monarchs Series.
Mud: Stories of Sex and Love by Michèle Roberts
A paperback published this year by Virago in the U.K. From the June 25, 2010 print Times Literary Supplement: “The power of these short stories lies in the moments where they describe distress. Michele Roberts draws emotional pain with precision, describing confusion with a limpid finesse. As stories about women in love, they have a refreshingly broad sense of what that can mean.”
From The Guardian June 26,2010: “The short story is an intimate, subtle and enigmatic form: Michèle Roberts reminds us in this virtuoso collection that she is one of our foremost practitioners of the art.”
Six short story books & a big prize
July 12, 2010
The six finalists for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award have been announced. This is the sixth year for the award that’s part of a literary festival in Cork, Ireland, home of the renowned Irish short story writer for which it’s named. The cash prize of 35,000 euros is the richest to be given for a short story collection. According to the Munster Literature Centre, the award sponsor, “[The prize] is awarded to what is judged to be the best, original collection of stories published in English in the 12 months preceding its award in September.” Five of the six books for the 2010 prize are by U.S. authors.
Frank O’Connor (1903 – 1966), a pseudonym for Michael O’Donovan, achieved instant fame in 1931 for his story collection Guests of the Nation. He went on to write several more story collections, as well as plays, criticism and autobiographies.
It’s nice to see the short story so handsomely celebrated with this award. While publishers support this fiction form, it’s no secret that a short story collection brings in small, if any, profit. Like poetry, it’s an important and necessary contribution to literature, but it stays afloat at the big publishing houses on the profitable tail winds of novels.
Not even the many short story writers churned out by the creative writing workshops and MFA programs support their literary art in print, given their interactions with literary journals. These journals are the forums where short stories flourish, indeed, the very forums that give many short story writers their first publications. Yet, according to an article in the Spring 2010 Wilson Quarterly, literary journals receive thousands of submissions by short story writers looking to get published but few subscribe. According to the article, “The average literary journal prints fewer than 1,500 copies. Yet the volume of submissions to these publications has exploded.”
Here are the six finalists for the Frank O’Connor award that the judges believe are among the best this year. They’re great suggestions for the reading table in this celebration and support of the short story.
If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black
NPR book critic Alan Cheuse’s review of Black’s book for the Chicago Tribune included this: “I want to shout about how just when you thought no one could write a story with any tinge of freshness let alone originality about childhood Black has done it, in the story called ‘Harriett Eliot’. And how just when you thought no one could write a story with any tinge of freshness let alone originality about marriage Black has done it, in the story called ‘Gaining Ground’.”
Mattaponi Queen by Belle Boggs
From a review in The Rumpus: “Boggs’s stories are connected subtly and organically, filled with damaged creatures who live out their tough, wise-cracking existences in Virginia’s semi-rural Mattaponi River region—in its reservation and nearby towns—where four hundred years ago stood the Mattaponi chief Powhattan, his daughter Pocahontas, her eventual husband John Smith, and English colonists who launched an era of violence still felt by Boggs’s people, Indian, white, and black alike.”
Wild Child by T.C. Boyle
From the Los Angeles Times review: “Here are stories of personal apocalypses and the outrageous tragicomedy in seemingly ordinary lives, all delivered with the author’s trademark explosive style.”
The Shieling by David Constantine
The Guardian’s review includes this: “It’s possible to resist Constantine for a page, half a page, of each story. Perhaps it’s the obliquity of the narrative; more likely it’s something in the characters you don’t want to know, something about their lives or their thoughts that reminds you too intimately of your own. Then suddenly you can’t stop reading. You’ve embraced the story in the exact moment it captivated you.”
Burning Bright by Ron Rash
From The Seattle Times review: “He ensures his stature as a truly national treasure with ‘Burning Bright,’ a collection of short stories that combine the lush but rough-edged atmosphere of Appalachia with ice-pick-sharp dialogue, the kind that plunges right to the heart of a character in one vicious, glorious stroke.”
What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us by Laura van den Berg
From a review on Bookslut: “It’s a beautiful, moving, and accomplished collection — if the short story really is dead, nobody told van den Berg. Thank God.”
Where are the wrong books, please?
July 8, 2010
I’ve run across some interesting lists lately. My favorite is The Best Bad Books You’ve Never Read. This obviously isn’t a shopping list, rather a hilarious column by a reader whose bookshelves include Crabs on the Rampage and God Is for Real, Man. He’s also the author of Bad Book Club: One Man’s Quest to Uncover the Books That Taste Forgot. It’s available on Amazon’s Kindle or via U.K. sellers. Robin Ince writes:
“It’s easy to find a classic – there’s no epic journey required to get your hands on one. How much trickier it is to track down exquisite drivel, horribly misguided prose plumbing unimaginable depths, dreadful hacks who traverse the mundane to make the bland blissful. You can’t walk into a bookshop and say: ‘Where are the wrong books, please? Do you stock any books that should never have been published?’”
A more useful list is Publisher’s Weekly’s Start-ups for Fall: First Fictions. Here are 10 debut novels considered promising. You get a plot summary, a pitch from the publisher, first lines of the novel and more. One of the 10, The Wake of Forgiveness, has gotten attention from a few other sources and is on my own list for fall books to consider.
Tired of the predictable beach reads? Here’s some eclectic choices from Library Journal’s Classic Returns: Reprints, Updates, and Bargains. An odd list of four, for sure, that includes The Trade by Fred Stenson — “One critic likened it to Lonesome Dove with beavers replacing cattle. Fans of that book and sprawling adventure stories in general will go for this.”
The beavers provide a nice segue to Audubon Magazine. Its online edition published a list of Top 11 Climate Change Books. No escape reading here, but the topic fits the moment, considering we’re boiling up in this hot summer of 2010.
Finally, to settle things down a bit, In Defense of Privacy: The 20th Century’s Most Reclusive Authors. No real surprises in the list of Marcel Proust, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy and Harper Lee, but the stories are interesting. (I didn’t know Pynchon studied under Nabokov at Cornell.) The source, Flavorwire, explains “…we decided to examine why a few authors of a certain age chose to shut themselves away from the media, and in some cases, from publication and society, as well.”
A comedy routine in print
June 28, 2010
Here’s a book written to make you laugh. Sometimes out loud. Sometimes with a big smile. How Did You Get This Number is the second collection of essays from the 30-something New Yorker Sloane Crosley proving she’s the real thing: a writer who sees life in all its hilarity, even when it’s painful.
Some essays are funnier than others, which isn’t a problem. The up and down on the humor meter is as acceptable here as it is in a comedian’s routine, where some jokes are hilarious and others amusing. Also much like comedy routines, the best humor is in the essays where Crosley writes emotionally close to home. So the essays about the smelly New York cabs or New York apartments she lived in post-college or her childhood pets fall into the amusing category compared to the story behind her terrible sense of direction, a condition beyond a quirky personality trait. Crosley is diagnosed with temporal-spatial deficit, a right-left brain discrepancy that gives her zero spatial relations skills — she can’t read maps, play cards or tell time on an analog clock. Aptly titled “Lost in Space,” the essay falls into the laugh-out-loud category as she explains what it’s like to have the village idiot camped out in half her brain.
“Off the Back of a Truck” stands out by far as the best among the nine essays, a reflection on a year of spending too much on things and people she couldn’t afford. Blinded by romantic hope, Crosley mortgages logic for a boyfriend she doesn’t trust. She simultaneously mortgages logic for expensive Fifth Avenue home furnishings way out of her league. They become in her league thanks to a burly guy named Daryl who steals from the warehouse and offers them at much reduced prices. “Some people have coke guys. I had an upholstery guy,” Crosley writes. One of the longest essays, it’s the most revealing and Crosley at her funniest.
The essays take place in New York, Lisbon, Paris and Anchorage, Alaska. They are for the most part about Crosley’s young adult struggles from socializing with Portuguese clowns in Lisbon to reconciling with her middle-school nemesis, Zooey Ellis. As much as they are funny, the essays reach out to say more. In “Lost in Space” she writes, “I grew up watching TV with my mother while she diagnosed the characters as having hyperactivity or attention-deficit disorder. I rolled my eyes and wondered why there weren’t any stupid kids anymore. Why did there have to be something to explain everyone? Were the cave people on Ritalin? I didn’t think so.”
Crosley’s first collection of essays, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, was a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. This new collection of essays is right up there in prize-calibre territory. Sloane Crosley, or Solange, as the burly guy named Daryl called her, is too funny to miss.
“The Twin” gets this year’s IMPAC
June 24, 2010
The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award surprises me this time every year when I bump into its announcement. Overwhelmed by beach-read lists and new summer books, I’m not watching for this literary award, let alone anticipating it. And yet it offers the largest prize money given for a single novel — a nice purse of 100,000 Euros ($123,000, according to the New York Times). Another unique factor, nominations for the IMPAC are made by libraries from around the world. This year’s shortlist of eight contenders included novels nominated by libraries in Russia, Austria, France, Hungary and Germany.
The 2010 IMPAC winner is The Twin, a debut novel by Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker. It’s the story of a young man named Helmer who long ago responsibly left his college studies to help run the family farm in the remote Dutch countryside after his twin brother was killed in a car accident. From the publisher’s website: “Ostensibly a novel about the countryside, The Twin is ultimately about the possibility or impossibility of taking life into one’s own hands. It chronicles a way of life that has resisted modernity, a world culturally apart yet laden with romantic longing.”
In a statement about The Twin, the IMPAC judging panel said: “There are intriguing ambiguities, but no false notes. Nothing and no one is predictable, and yet we believe in them all: the regular tanker driver, the next door neighbour with her two bouncing children, and Jaap, the old farm labourer from the twins’ childhood who comes back to the farm in time for the last great upheaval, as Helmer finally takes charge of what is left of his own life.”
The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is organized by Dublin (Ireland) City Libraries on behalf of the Dublin City Council and sponsored by IMPAC, an international management productivity company. It’s open to novels written in any language, provided the work has been translated and published in English. The 2010 award will be shared between the author Gerbrand Bakker and David Colmer, who translated The Twin from the original Dutch into English.
Camilla Lackberg’s “The Ice Princess”
June 20, 2010
Camilla Läckberg’s crime novel The Ice Princess debuted in Sweden in 2003. From then on, every year for seven years, she’s published a new story of murder in the real-life Swedish fishing town of Fjällbacka, where Läckberg grew up, with huge popularity for the series. While she’s the #1 female crime writer in Sweden, Läckberg’s debut is just this summer arriving in the U.S. via publisher Pegasus Books –translated by Steven T. Murray and fresh on the heels of the American love fest for fellow Swede Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.
The principal characters of The Ice Princess are Erica Falck, a writer of biographies, and Patrik Hedström, a local detective. Erica has returned to her hometown Fjälbacka from Stockholm to clean out her parent’s house and settle the estate after their death in a car accident. She takes a walk for a writing break and is waved down by local townsman Eilert Berg, who’s discovered the dead body of the beautiful, removed Alexandra Wijkner – she’s half-frozen in her bathtub. Erica takes an interest in what happened to her long-lost childhood best friend, and what unfolds – with intricately rendered psychological detail and connections between characters – is a town secret.
The book’s strength is the multi-layered plot. While the murder is being solved by Patrik and Erica, a love story blossoms between them. There’s also a disturbing struggle between Erica and her sister Anna over the sale of the family house, creating tension.
Many townspeople make appearances and, because they’re treated more than bit players to move the plot, they become singularly engaging for their place in this small “everybody knows everybody” coastal setting. An example is the strong but minor role of police superintendent Mellberg, a conceited, imperfect man who’s been outcast to small town police work for his failure in the larger nearby city of Göteborg. He believes solving the murder of Alexandra Wijkner will reprieve his shunned status, even though it’s Patrik who works the case. As disgusting a person as he is, with his long hair wound into a crow’s nest on the top of his head to hide his bald spot, Mellberg is a kick.
Verdict: The first 100 pages are slow going, with much of the set-up taking place. Also, overused, common reactions spot an otherwise original narrative. They’re easy to forgive and breeze past under the spell of the mystery and the psychological interplay among characters. This is a story rich and intriguing on many levels. I’m not an avid reader of mysteries/crime novels; however, I’ll follow Läckberg’s Fjällbacka series because of the depth she brings to her stories beyond a mere whodunnit.
