I finished reading Everything Matters by Ron Currie, Jr. last week but wanted to wait a bit before writing about the novel. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because the last pages are still echoing in my mind, like a bell vibrating long after being struck. Currie has a distinctive and distinctly modern voice and I recognize in his writing if not direct influences than certainly reminders of other writers I love: he is like a modern Vonnegut, but with less ironic detachment and more poignancy; he is less full of himself than John Irving but writes with the same grand, epic, message-delivery type of style; his portrait of small-town life is as gritty, gutsy, and funny as Richard Russo's stories of small New England towns. I have a feeling that this is a book I will remember for a long time.
The basic premise is that a child is born and, thanks to an all-knowing God-like voice that he hears throughout his life (written to us in the second-person), he learns the exact date that the earth will end via a collision with a comet. The title character, Junior (perhaps a stand-in for Currie, Jr.), lives a tortured, troubled life, a tragic existence dominated by the overwhelming shadow of death, of non-existence. He is sent home from school for drawing monstrous, violent pictures, then placed in a "special" class where he meets the love of his life, Amy. Amy's own life is a horror, too, with a violently abusive mother, but she and Junior find a connection that sustains them, until the day he finally gets up the courage to tell her about the voice he hears and what he has learned. How does knowing the ultimate end of everything change--or not change--the way you live your life?
Everything Matters is a strange book in many ways but haunting nonetheless, filled with damaged souls, from the physcially deformed (his father lost two fingers in Vietnam; crazy-ass Reggie Fox, the paraplegic; Rodney, Junior's mentally challenged older brother) to the psychically deformed (Junior's silent, alcoholic mother; Amy, Junior). Each person has their story and their pain; Currie makes each of their stories distinctive and different, but all filled with pain and longing. Everyone wants something different--happiness, peace, respect, love--and they don't know how to get it.
The "God" chapters (which are numbered, counting down to the end, with one final twist) sound the most like Vonnegut, filled with wise humor and ironic detachment. The voice knows everything there is to know and seems to enjoy revealing the secrets that only it (or he...or she) can know due to its omniscience: the secret thoughts, desires, and memories of every being in the world. The book twists and turns, but Currie has a way of making the implausible, plausible.
I also wondered why the cover was filled with so many different comets. Is it related to the idea of the multiverse, which is in itself a very Vonnegutian idea, the idea that one self always exists at a particular moment and that multiple selves branch off from that moment—every moment—along with the butterfly effect-ian idea that you don't know how a small moment can change things, how one small action, no matter how small, has the power to alter the universe—you step on a bumble bee, one thing happens; you don't step on it, the bee lives on, affecting lives so far down the road, you wouldn't be able to connect the two events if you tried.
Big ideas, powerful ideas. Not new ideas, perhaps, but certainly worth pondering. In Currie's world (and our own), teetering with the spectre of nuclear annihalation, haunted by the images of towers falling, and entertained with cinematic visions of the end of the world, you wonder how anything can mean anything--does it really matter what you say or do or believe? But in the end, after you turn the last page of this deeply affecting, strange novel, you understand why everything matters, even when nothing should matter.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Memory & Loss
I just finished two books this week that made me think quite a bit about the dual (dueling?) problems of memory and loss. The two books are Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers and Myla Goldberg's The False Friend. In each of these suburban-set novels, the quiet peace of middle class life is upset by a tragedy some years ago. In Perrotta's book, it is (as the government calls it) "a Rapture-like phenomenon" that gobbled up thousands of people around the world in the blink of an eye; in Goldberg's novel, it is the abduction of a childhood friend some twenty years before. In each book, the main characters are trying to figure out what to make of their lives in the face of their losses, and how to deal with the memories they're left with. Do we remember people as better than they were? Worse? Can we trust the important details of our memories or are they like dreams, half invented, half experienced?
In The Leftovers, Perrotta deftly weaves not a moralistic tale about the ridiculousness of those who believe in the Rapture (which would have been an incredibly easy mark) but, rather, the effects of the event on a small town and its inhabitants. It's a much smaller canvas he's working with and one that has echoes of the years after 9/11. This is especially true because the people who've been whisked away were not necessarily the saved. They weren't even necessarily Christian. Like 9/11, the people who disappeared were random: the old, the young, of all faiths and backgrounds, and--most disturbingly to one of the local ministers in Mapleton--the good and the bad. The minister is so frustrated by the Lord's mistake in not taking him and the thousands of true-believers, he publishes a gossip-filled rag in which he attempts to reveal just how awful some of the disappeared were.
The novel focuses on one family in Mapleton who, ironically, didn't lose anyone: Kevin and Laurie and their two teen aged children, Tom and Jill. Each responds differently to the losses around them, Laurie and Tom joining cults, Jill and Kevin struggling for connection in the rippling wake of the grief and mourning around them. Townspeople gather in bars and all-night block parties and reminisce about the missing, conversations taking on a predictable ebb and flow--asking if someone remembered a particular name, the blank statement "he's gone", then the flood of associations and memories. With no particular enemy, no one to get mad at or go to war against, no rhyme or reason for the disappearances, the people who remain helplessly flail against what's left of their lives.
Even so, this is not a post-apocalyptic, end-of-the-world type of novel. It's about how life goes on. Softball games are played, people go to their jobs, the paper gets delivered, religious nuts still are everywhere (and the wickedness of the horny preachers is always revealed in the end). There's humor and connection among the sadness, and maybe even a bit of redemption.
The canvas for Goldberg's novel is even smaller: the memory of one woman, repentant and ashamed for something she did years ago. As the novel opens, Celia is haunted by the voice and image of a cruel and powerful childhood friend, Djuna. Her friend, the Queen Bee of a small group of 11 year old girls, disappeared one day, becoming a face on the back of a milk carton. Though everyone knows she got into a car with a stranger (the story she told to the police), Celia is tormented by the memory of Djuna falling into a hole. Her lie pointed the searchers in the wrong direction. Djuna was never found. Though this event forms the central fulcrum for the novel, the story really is more about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, what we remember, and how it affects us. Can we ever forgive ourselves for the supposed sins of our childhood?
It's not Djuna's disappearance that haunts the other characters in the novel. It's Celia and Djuna's cruelty to them that they cannot forget. A few of the characters had hoped and even prayed that the Queen Bee, who gave one girl a daily grade on her appearance, dress, and "presence", would disappear or die. Josie, an artist, baldly uses the painful images of her tormentors in her artwork; Leanne, a tortured and troubled child to begin with, left her identity behind; and Becky, smart and self-assured, turned to Chabad and the plentitude of children as a refuge. Celia's parents meanwhile, prefer to be blissfully unaware and disbelieving, an aging Ozzie and Harriet. They can no more believe that their daughter would lie than believe that Celia would do something to disturb their quiet afternoons (despite the slowly encroaching decrepitude of their neighborhood and their own house). Celia's brother Jeremy was the "bad" one, the one who almost overdosed as a teenager. Yet he redeemed himself in his parents' eyes because he was happily married and had a son, with another on the way. That fact, a slap in the face of Celia's long and unproductive relationship with her stoner boyfriend Huck, mingles with so many other unsatisfying aspects in Celia's life. As Huck observes toward the end of the book, she needs a whole lot of therapy.
In many ways, the novel leaves many questions open and unanswered: what did actually happen on the day Djuna disappeared? What really is the attraction between Huck and Celia? Is it really possible that the four remaining girls had not seen each other for twenty years, as they kept saying, having lived in the same small town through high school? But those are small questions, small nits to pick in an otherwise thought-provoking, troubling and personal book. For any of us with a slight bent towards regret and self-loathing, it's a disturbing book, although perhaps in the end it offers us some chance at redemption: maybe the past isn't as bad as we remember it. Maybe we weren't really horrible people, causing insult and injury to those around us. Or maybe we were worse than we thought.
One final question: why "false friend"? Who was it in the book who was false? Celia? Djuna? Huck? The title really is a nod to the reader to not trouble yourself with the mystery as to what really happened to Djuna, but to pay attention to those left behind, another group of sad "leftovers".
In The Leftovers, Perrotta deftly weaves not a moralistic tale about the ridiculousness of those who believe in the Rapture (which would have been an incredibly easy mark) but, rather, the effects of the event on a small town and its inhabitants. It's a much smaller canvas he's working with and one that has echoes of the years after 9/11. This is especially true because the people who've been whisked away were not necessarily the saved. They weren't even necessarily Christian. Like 9/11, the people who disappeared were random: the old, the young, of all faiths and backgrounds, and--most disturbingly to one of the local ministers in Mapleton--the good and the bad. The minister is so frustrated by the Lord's mistake in not taking him and the thousands of true-believers, he publishes a gossip-filled rag in which he attempts to reveal just how awful some of the disappeared were.
The novel focuses on one family in Mapleton who, ironically, didn't lose anyone: Kevin and Laurie and their two teen aged children, Tom and Jill. Each responds differently to the losses around them, Laurie and Tom joining cults, Jill and Kevin struggling for connection in the rippling wake of the grief and mourning around them. Townspeople gather in bars and all-night block parties and reminisce about the missing, conversations taking on a predictable ebb and flow--asking if someone remembered a particular name, the blank statement "he's gone", then the flood of associations and memories. With no particular enemy, no one to get mad at or go to war against, no rhyme or reason for the disappearances, the people who remain helplessly flail against what's left of their lives.
Even so, this is not a post-apocalyptic, end-of-the-world type of novel. It's about how life goes on. Softball games are played, people go to their jobs, the paper gets delivered, religious nuts still are everywhere (and the wickedness of the horny preachers is always revealed in the end). There's humor and connection among the sadness, and maybe even a bit of redemption.
The canvas for Goldberg's novel is even smaller: the memory of one woman, repentant and ashamed for something she did years ago. As the novel opens, Celia is haunted by the voice and image of a cruel and powerful childhood friend, Djuna. Her friend, the Queen Bee of a small group of 11 year old girls, disappeared one day, becoming a face on the back of a milk carton. Though everyone knows she got into a car with a stranger (the story she told to the police), Celia is tormented by the memory of Djuna falling into a hole. Her lie pointed the searchers in the wrong direction. Djuna was never found. Though this event forms the central fulcrum for the novel, the story really is more about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, what we remember, and how it affects us. Can we ever forgive ourselves for the supposed sins of our childhood?
It's not Djuna's disappearance that haunts the other characters in the novel. It's Celia and Djuna's cruelty to them that they cannot forget. A few of the characters had hoped and even prayed that the Queen Bee, who gave one girl a daily grade on her appearance, dress, and "presence", would disappear or die. Josie, an artist, baldly uses the painful images of her tormentors in her artwork; Leanne, a tortured and troubled child to begin with, left her identity behind; and Becky, smart and self-assured, turned to Chabad and the plentitude of children as a refuge. Celia's parents meanwhile, prefer to be blissfully unaware and disbelieving, an aging Ozzie and Harriet. They can no more believe that their daughter would lie than believe that Celia would do something to disturb their quiet afternoons (despite the slowly encroaching decrepitude of their neighborhood and their own house). Celia's brother Jeremy was the "bad" one, the one who almost overdosed as a teenager. Yet he redeemed himself in his parents' eyes because he was happily married and had a son, with another on the way. That fact, a slap in the face of Celia's long and unproductive relationship with her stoner boyfriend Huck, mingles with so many other unsatisfying aspects in Celia's life. As Huck observes toward the end of the book, she needs a whole lot of therapy.
In many ways, the novel leaves many questions open and unanswered: what did actually happen on the day Djuna disappeared? What really is the attraction between Huck and Celia? Is it really possible that the four remaining girls had not seen each other for twenty years, as they kept saying, having lived in the same small town through high school? But those are small questions, small nits to pick in an otherwise thought-provoking, troubling and personal book. For any of us with a slight bent towards regret and self-loathing, it's a disturbing book, although perhaps in the end it offers us some chance at redemption: maybe the past isn't as bad as we remember it. Maybe we weren't really horrible people, causing insult and injury to those around us. Or maybe we were worse than we thought.
One final question: why "false friend"? Who was it in the book who was false? Celia? Djuna? Huck? The title really is a nod to the reader to not trouble yourself with the mystery as to what really happened to Djuna, but to pay attention to those left behind, another group of sad "leftovers".
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Math as Metaphor for Life
Two recent novels I've read have left me pondering about the beauty of math and mathematical concepts and how they could relate to human relationships: The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa and The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano.
Ogawa's book was a community-wide selection at Brookline High School, suggested by my Swat classmate and Brookline High math teacher Bruce Mallory '83. We had been dicussing the movie "Memento", where the protagonist has lost his short-term memory. Much of the movie is told in multiple flashbacks, leaving the audience to put together what is happening on screen. Similarly, one of the main characters in Ogawa's novel, a brilliant math professor, has lost his short-term memory due to a traffic accident. He can remember things for 84 minutes and then his brain resets. He walks around with hundreds of notes pinned to his clothes, reminding him of who he is, what has happened to him, and who everyone else is in his small, necessarily circumscribed world. We see the action of the novel not through his eyes but through the eyes of his new housekeeper, a single mother struggling to raise her little boy (nicknamed "Root" by the Professor). The Professor, unable to remember anything from one day to the next, greets his housekeeper every morning by asking her what her birth date is or her phone number and then creating a kind of magic trick with the numbers, relating some amazing and intricate mathematical concept revealing a depth and a beauty in the numbers she gives him. It comes down to numbers and to relationships, like in the Professor's description of amicable numbers (two different numbers so related that the sum of the factors of each is equal to the other number, e.g. 220 and 284) or twin primes (prime numbers separated by only one number, e.g. 41 and 43). This is a small, quiet novel about math, baseball, memory and relationships.
Girodano's The Solitude of Prime Numbers is a different kind of book entirely. The two protagonists have each been damaged by a childhood trauma that has left them separate and apart. The world can be cruel and unforgiving, and each has been left with scars. The connection between Mattia and Alice is tenuous and unexplained but it is clear that they are drawn to each other, recognizing in the other the pain and the separateness that defines them: "Mattia thought that he and Alice were like that, twin primes, alone and lost, close but not close enough to really touch each other." Unlike Ogawa, Giordano's prose is bold, brash, and, at times, startling. I felt like he was trying to get a rise out of me, like in his characterization of one of the evil girls who torments Alice through her teenaged years, or in the physical manifestations and repercussions of Mattia's guilt. Even so, the writing is beautiful--it left me wondering about the translator--and I'd be eager to see what Girodano comes up with next (this is his first novel).
Those of you who know me know that math ain't my strong suit. But I love finding new ways to see beauty and elegance, and I can truly appreciate how math can be a vehicle or a lens with which to see and understand beauty in all its forms, especially in human relationships.
Ogawa's book was a community-wide selection at Brookline High School, suggested by my Swat classmate and Brookline High math teacher Bruce Mallory '83. We had been dicussing the movie "Memento", where the protagonist has lost his short-term memory. Much of the movie is told in multiple flashbacks, leaving the audience to put together what is happening on screen. Similarly, one of the main characters in Ogawa's novel, a brilliant math professor, has lost his short-term memory due to a traffic accident. He can remember things for 84 minutes and then his brain resets. He walks around with hundreds of notes pinned to his clothes, reminding him of who he is, what has happened to him, and who everyone else is in his small, necessarily circumscribed world. We see the action of the novel not through his eyes but through the eyes of his new housekeeper, a single mother struggling to raise her little boy (nicknamed "Root" by the Professor). The Professor, unable to remember anything from one day to the next, greets his housekeeper every morning by asking her what her birth date is or her phone number and then creating a kind of magic trick with the numbers, relating some amazing and intricate mathematical concept revealing a depth and a beauty in the numbers she gives him. It comes down to numbers and to relationships, like in the Professor's description of amicable numbers (two different numbers so related that the sum of the factors of each is equal to the other number, e.g. 220 and 284) or twin primes (prime numbers separated by only one number, e.g. 41 and 43). This is a small, quiet novel about math, baseball, memory and relationships.
Girodano's The Solitude of Prime Numbers is a different kind of book entirely. The two protagonists have each been damaged by a childhood trauma that has left them separate and apart. The world can be cruel and unforgiving, and each has been left with scars. The connection between Mattia and Alice is tenuous and unexplained but it is clear that they are drawn to each other, recognizing in the other the pain and the separateness that defines them: "Mattia thought that he and Alice were like that, twin primes, alone and lost, close but not close enough to really touch each other." Unlike Ogawa, Giordano's prose is bold, brash, and, at times, startling. I felt like he was trying to get a rise out of me, like in his characterization of one of the evil girls who torments Alice through her teenaged years, or in the physical manifestations and repercussions of Mattia's guilt. Even so, the writing is beautiful--it left me wondering about the translator--and I'd be eager to see what Girodano comes up with next (this is his first novel).
Those of you who know me know that math ain't my strong suit. But I love finding new ways to see beauty and elegance, and I can truly appreciate how math can be a vehicle or a lens with which to see and understand beauty in all its forms, especially in human relationships.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Why I Don't Like Memoirs...or why I love fiction
I'm not quite sure what it is about the memoir form that has never appealed to me. Perhaps it is the feeling that an author has a burning need to share the details of his or her of life and view of the world, which seems to me to be an egotistical, narcissistic activity. I can't recall reading a memoir I loved or even felt like I learned something from. I'm sure there are terrific examples of memoirs that I'm not aware of, but whenever I find myself reading one, I am so hyper-aware of the author's tendency to novelize his or her life, to have it fit nicely in form and arc and meaning into the shape of a novel, that I can't help but feel manipulated and lied to. I guess the recent unsurprising revelations about fictionalized (read: made up) memoirs have made me even more suspicious.
That said, I actually read three memoirs in recent months. The books are quite different from each other, but all fall into one or more of the traps or failings I mentioned above. The first book is Denial by Jessica Stern, chosen by my book group at work. Stern is a world-renowned expert on terrorism who had never really dealt with her own experience of terrorism: she had been raped as a teenager. The book is a local story, with Concord, Cambridge, and towns in central Massachusetts forming the backdrop for Stern's journey. What is it a journey of (or from)? I guess it's a journey to understand the meaning of why she is such a difficult, unfeeling person, and an attempt to understand her shattered, screwed-up family, especially her cold, unfeeling father. It was not a pleasant experience to read Denial and if you ask me about it, I will deny ever having read it.
I picked up the next memoir because I loved Alison Bechdel, the writer and illustrator of the comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For". Bechdel is funny, smart, and insightful, and she has always had a keen sense of people, politics and the world. Her first memoir (which--shh!!--I actually loved) was in graphic form and was based on her experiences with her father and the books she loved. It was brilliant. I was hoping for more of the same when I bought "Are You My Mother?", but was incredibly disappointed. It could have been titled "Are You My Therapist?" because she deals as much with the therapists she's had over the years as she deals with her relationship with her mother. In the end, however, I wondered why I was reading this and why I should care about her journey (there's that word again) of self-discovery. It felt self-indulgent and self-obsessed. Unlike her first book, I wasn't really that interested in how she got there (plus I couldn't keep her therapists straight).
The third memoir I've read recently was Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend this Never Happened (again chosen by my work book group, but meant as an antidote to Denial). Lawson is a blogger who writes (among various things) about her husband, motherhood, her work, her OCD, her fears, her obsessions, her journey towards normality, her crazy Texas family, taxidermy, and anything else that pops into her strange and funny mind. The first third of this book is drop-dead funny but funny only takes you so far. After a while, I found myself wondering if any of the stuff she describes ever happened (the title is a funny reminder of that), the dead deer, the stuffed squirrel, the kitchen fires, the blurted faux pas, and on and on. There's no real structure to the book, as it feels like loosely-linked blog entries. She also has this meta, parenthetical voice (and footnotes) reminding us that she is there and she is aware of how we might be reading what she has written, kind of like she's given voice to her internal editor. I couldn't finish it.
Themes running through these works: self-obsession, the journey towards self-acceptance, not especially good writing, unlikeable narrators--people I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like to meet.
I'm not going to waste my breath (or my fingers) anymore. I'm done with memoirs for a while.
That said, I actually read three memoirs in recent months. The books are quite different from each other, but all fall into one or more of the traps or failings I mentioned above. The first book is Denial by Jessica Stern, chosen by my book group at work. Stern is a world-renowned expert on terrorism who had never really dealt with her own experience of terrorism: she had been raped as a teenager. The book is a local story, with Concord, Cambridge, and towns in central Massachusetts forming the backdrop for Stern's journey. What is it a journey of (or from)? I guess it's a journey to understand the meaning of why she is such a difficult, unfeeling person, and an attempt to understand her shattered, screwed-up family, especially her cold, unfeeling father. It was not a pleasant experience to read Denial and if you ask me about it, I will deny ever having read it.
I picked up the next memoir because I loved Alison Bechdel, the writer and illustrator of the comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For". Bechdel is funny, smart, and insightful, and she has always had a keen sense of people, politics and the world. Her first memoir (which--shh!!--I actually loved) was in graphic form and was based on her experiences with her father and the books she loved. It was brilliant. I was hoping for more of the same when I bought "Are You My Mother?", but was incredibly disappointed. It could have been titled "Are You My Therapist?" because she deals as much with the therapists she's had over the years as she deals with her relationship with her mother. In the end, however, I wondered why I was reading this and why I should care about her journey (there's that word again) of self-discovery. It felt self-indulgent and self-obsessed. Unlike her first book, I wasn't really that interested in how she got there (plus I couldn't keep her therapists straight).
The third memoir I've read recently was Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend this Never Happened (again chosen by my work book group, but meant as an antidote to Denial). Lawson is a blogger who writes (among various things) about her husband, motherhood, her work, her OCD, her fears, her obsessions, her journey towards normality, her crazy Texas family, taxidermy, and anything else that pops into her strange and funny mind. The first third of this book is drop-dead funny but funny only takes you so far. After a while, I found myself wondering if any of the stuff she describes ever happened (the title is a funny reminder of that), the dead deer, the stuffed squirrel, the kitchen fires, the blurted faux pas, and on and on. There's no real structure to the book, as it feels like loosely-linked blog entries. She also has this meta, parenthetical voice (and footnotes) reminding us that she is there and she is aware of how we might be reading what she has written, kind of like she's given voice to her internal editor. I couldn't finish it.
Themes running through these works: self-obsession, the journey towards self-acceptance, not especially good writing, unlikeable narrators--people I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like to meet.
I'm not going to waste my breath (or my fingers) anymore. I'm done with memoirs for a while.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
What are you reading this summer?
Dear Fellow Bookies,
I have so many things I want to read this summer. What are you planning to read (other than Joseph Andrews, of course)? Some of the things I've read in the last couple of months are in the list below. Click on the Comments section below, then Post a Comment to tell me what you're reading and I'll add it to the list. If you don't see that option in the upper right, then you are not signed in. If you don't want to sign in or create a new account, just email me what you're reading and any comments you might have and I will post for you.
sps
Here's a partial list of things that I have read recently:
Denial, Jessica Stern
Sacre Bleu, Christopher Moore
11-22-63, Stephen King
The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach
Defending Jacob, William Landay
The Solitude of Prime Numbers, Paolo Giordano
Runaway, stories by Alice Munro
The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern
Are You My Mother? Alison Bechdel
The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes
The Housekeeper and the Professor, Yoko Ogawa
Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon
Zeitoun, Dave Eggers
I have so many things I want to read this summer. What are you planning to read (other than Joseph Andrews, of course)? Some of the things I've read in the last couple of months are in the list below. Click on the Comments section below, then Post a Comment to tell me what you're reading and I'll add it to the list. If you don't see that option in the upper right, then you are not signed in. If you don't want to sign in or create a new account, just email me what you're reading and any comments you might have and I will post for you.
sps
Here's a partial list of things that I have read recently:
Denial, Jessica Stern
Sacre Bleu, Christopher Moore
11-22-63, Stephen King
The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach
Defending Jacob, William Landay
The Solitude of Prime Numbers, Paolo Giordano
Runaway, stories by Alice Munro
The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern
Are You My Mother? Alison Bechdel
The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes
The Housekeeper and the Professor, Yoko Ogawa
Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon
Zeitoun, Dave Eggers
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Other Summer Reads
The summer is almost over and, despite my best intentions, I have not kept up with this reading blog. Doesn't mean I didn't read. I just didn't write about what I read. So, in short, here are a few of the books I read this summer, with a few choice words...
Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro is a collection of five short stories, all connected by the theme of music. I enjoyed this book quite a bit, but then, I like everything Ishiguro writes. He is a clever writer and makes me think. My only complaint: as a musician, I'm not so sure Ishiguro himself knows anything about playing music. He sounds like an avid listener who imagines himself playing an instrument.
The Selected Works of TS Spivet by Reif Larsen. I didn't know anything about this book when I picked it up. It reminded me of some of the books by one of my favorite authors, Eric Kraft (Herb 'n' Lorna, Where Do You Stop?, and many others). Kraft's books are filled with nostalgic recreations of a fictitious 1950's Long Island community and sometimes have charts, drawings, and diagrams in the margins. Larsen's book, wider than most paperbacks, also had charts and drawings (maps, I came to realize) in the margins so I imagined the book to have the same kind of fanciful back and forth aspect with its sidenotes. The main character is a young boy who lives on the Continental Divide in Montana whose incredible mapmaking skills brings him an award from the Smithsonian. He sets out across the vast sea of the country by himself to collect the award in an action-packed improbable journey. I had such high hopes for the book but, in the end, it was rather a forced wannabe kind of book—the author wanted his main character to be engaging and amazing in an autistic savant kind of way, yet it all came off as unbelievable and manufactured. Not to say the book is totally without merit, but it felt like a big idea that sort of went pffft at the end. Unbeknownst to me when I bought it, the book was the subject of a huge bidding war in the UK where the first-time author received a gigantic advance and a huge amount of press. I'd never heard of it.
Supreme Courtship by Christopher Buckley. Excellent beach reading. I have loved Buckley's books and this was no exception. He makes me guffaw embarrassingly in public. The set-up: there's a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The over-zealous right wingers on the Senate Judiciary Committee have shot down the president's first two candidates. To get back at them, the president selects a beautiful, popular, down-home, tough as nails former real judge who has found success and stardom as a judge on a reality show. Great send-ups of Washington and the political process, with really funny caricatures of Scalia, Thomas, and others.
Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. Foer is a journalist who became fascinated with memory and the brain after attending the world memory championships. Using some of the techniques he describes and used himself, I quickly learned how to memorize lists of things very easily. This was an interesting and fun book—a journalist's perspective on memory, memory competitions, and the brain. It's amazing to think how much he was able to improve his own memory—if only I could do the same thing in crosswords.
My favorite part of the book was at the end when, after months and months of practice, leading him to win the US memory competition and competing in the world championship, he had an incredible realization: "And yet a few nights after the world championship, I went out to dinner with a couple of friends, took the subway home, and only remembered as I was walking in the door to my parents' house that I'd driven a car to dinner. I hadn't just forgotten where I parked it. I'd forgotten I had it."
Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro is a collection of five short stories, all connected by the theme of music. I enjoyed this book quite a bit, but then, I like everything Ishiguro writes. He is a clever writer and makes me think. My only complaint: as a musician, I'm not so sure Ishiguro himself knows anything about playing music. He sounds like an avid listener who imagines himself playing an instrument.
The Selected Works of TS Spivet by Reif Larsen. I didn't know anything about this book when I picked it up. It reminded me of some of the books by one of my favorite authors, Eric Kraft (Herb 'n' Lorna, Where Do You Stop?, and many others). Kraft's books are filled with nostalgic recreations of a fictitious 1950's Long Island community and sometimes have charts, drawings, and diagrams in the margins. Larsen's book, wider than most paperbacks, also had charts and drawings (maps, I came to realize) in the margins so I imagined the book to have the same kind of fanciful back and forth aspect with its sidenotes. The main character is a young boy who lives on the Continental Divide in Montana whose incredible mapmaking skills brings him an award from the Smithsonian. He sets out across the vast sea of the country by himself to collect the award in an action-packed improbable journey. I had such high hopes for the book but, in the end, it was rather a forced wannabe kind of book—the author wanted his main character to be engaging and amazing in an autistic savant kind of way, yet it all came off as unbelievable and manufactured. Not to say the book is totally without merit, but it felt like a big idea that sort of went pffft at the end. Unbeknownst to me when I bought it, the book was the subject of a huge bidding war in the UK where the first-time author received a gigantic advance and a huge amount of press. I'd never heard of it.
Supreme Courtship by Christopher Buckley. Excellent beach reading. I have loved Buckley's books and this was no exception. He makes me guffaw embarrassingly in public. The set-up: there's a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The over-zealous right wingers on the Senate Judiciary Committee have shot down the president's first two candidates. To get back at them, the president selects a beautiful, popular, down-home, tough as nails former real judge who has found success and stardom as a judge on a reality show. Great send-ups of Washington and the political process, with really funny caricatures of Scalia, Thomas, and others.
Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. Foer is a journalist who became fascinated with memory and the brain after attending the world memory championships. Using some of the techniques he describes and used himself, I quickly learned how to memorize lists of things very easily. This was an interesting and fun book—a journalist's perspective on memory, memory competitions, and the brain. It's amazing to think how much he was able to improve his own memory—if only I could do the same thing in crosswords.
My favorite part of the book was at the end when, after months and months of practice, leading him to win the US memory competition and competing in the world championship, he had an incredible realization: "And yet a few nights after the world championship, I went out to dinner with a couple of friends, took the subway home, and only remembered as I was walking in the door to my parents' house that I'd driven a car to dinner. I hadn't just forgotten where I parked it. I'd forgotten I had it."
But I liked thinking and learning about the role of memory in education and the different types of memories. It's interesting to think about what makes memories "stick" and how you can teach yourself these tricks to improve what all of us older folks think of as the inevitable dying off of brain cells (where are my glasses?). I also enjoyed the part of the book where he describes the Egyptian god giving the king the gift of writing, a replacement for the tradition of telling stories, singing songs, and passing on the knowledge and lore of a society orally, yet the king refuses the gift, saying, "They will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding."
From one who can't believe how much he forgets, it was a fascinating read.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Waiting for Columbus by Thomas Trofimuk
A man washes ashore in modern Spain with no papers, no money, and barely any clothing, claiming to be Columbus. He is sent to a nearby mental hospital where doctors and nurses (one nurse in particular, the lovely and sad Consuela) try to tease out his story. Who is he and why does he think he is the 500 year old explorer? How does he explain the anachronisms and contradictions in his story?
I was surprised how much I liked this novel. The narration flashes back and forth between the modern present-day world of the hospital and the story he tells Consuela. Columbus tells of his attempts to convince the Spanish authorities of the 15th century of his need for ships to find what there is across the western sea, of the many women and families in his life, and of Queen Isabella's lust for him. I found myself searching for answers and hidden meanings in his descriptions and in the "word-pictures" he creates. These "word-pictures" are lengthy descriptions of mental images stuck in his head, clues to who he is or was. The tale is meandering and beautiful, almost like reading Cervantes (something whic may have been intentional) with Columbus's many adventures, his repeating themes, and his many questioning companions. Like Don Quixote, Columbus's plan to sail across the ocean to who knows what is viewed as a ridiculous lark, even heresy; he is made fun of and faces insurmountable obstacles, yet he pushes on, as crazy as he is. That is the story he tells Consuela as he swims laps in a pool. Much to her surprise and embarrassment, she finds herself falling in love with her patient.
I found myself wondering about disorders like this and how people claim they are Jesus or (as in the novel) the Pope. What happens to a person that leads them or their minds to settle on one figure or another? Why Columbus or Elvis or Princess Diana? As a mental health professional, how do you break down that constructed self and find the person and their true story within? Is that how treatment of this kind of disorder works?
The only glaring weakness for me was the character of an Interpol missing persons investigator, hot on the trail of Columbus. Emile's story was neither plausible or engaging. Perhaps the author should have trusted the character of Columbus himself—he was enough to engage us; we didn't need Emile to help us in our search.
But overall, this was a really enjoyable read.
I was surprised how much I liked this novel. The narration flashes back and forth between the modern present-day world of the hospital and the story he tells Consuela. Columbus tells of his attempts to convince the Spanish authorities of the 15th century of his need for ships to find what there is across the western sea, of the many women and families in his life, and of Queen Isabella's lust for him. I found myself searching for answers and hidden meanings in his descriptions and in the "word-pictures" he creates. These "word-pictures" are lengthy descriptions of mental images stuck in his head, clues to who he is or was. The tale is meandering and beautiful, almost like reading Cervantes (something whic may have been intentional) with Columbus's many adventures, his repeating themes, and his many questioning companions. Like Don Quixote, Columbus's plan to sail across the ocean to who knows what is viewed as a ridiculous lark, even heresy; he is made fun of and faces insurmountable obstacles, yet he pushes on, as crazy as he is. That is the story he tells Consuela as he swims laps in a pool. Much to her surprise and embarrassment, she finds herself falling in love with her patient.
I found myself wondering about disorders like this and how people claim they are Jesus or (as in the novel) the Pope. What happens to a person that leads them or their minds to settle on one figure or another? Why Columbus or Elvis or Princess Diana? As a mental health professional, how do you break down that constructed self and find the person and their true story within? Is that how treatment of this kind of disorder works?
The only glaring weakness for me was the character of an Interpol missing persons investigator, hot on the trail of Columbus. Emile's story was neither plausible or engaging. Perhaps the author should have trusted the character of Columbus himself—he was enough to engage us; we didn't need Emile to help us in our search.
But overall, this was a really enjoyable read.
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