[menu]

In The Half Light
Anthony Lawrence
Carroll & Graf Publishers, NY, 2002

The story of the childhood and early adulthood of a guy plagued with mental problems. He grows up in Australia, but moves to Ireland, chasing an older woman whom he hardly knew but who affected him profoundly. The author perfectly renders the female points of view from the narrator's very male perspective, capturing the essential reality of male/female relations. Well-drawn Australian and Irish characters, all flawed yet lovable. Watch for the clever apparent change of authorial point of view near the end.

Enemy Women
Paulette Jiles
HarperCollins, N.Y. 2002

A young woman, coming of age, struggles with reality and with her conventional fantasies as she is forced out of her home and into the "hospitality" of the enemy during the Missouri Raids of the American Civil War.

This book presents an excellent insight into the way things actually were, there and then, and an analogy for how war is in all times, with evil on both sides and very little good in any of it.

Unfortunately the plot tends toward that of a romance novel. But the book is perfectly written and technically flawless. Good history as well as entertainment.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Robert M. Pirsig
Bantam Books, 1974

A father takes his son go on an extended vacation on a motorcycle to visit places where they had lived earlier, while the father, the narrator, relates his backstory about his mental difficulties.

This is a trip through the darkening mind of a former rhetorician/philosopher who experienced psychological problems leading to a serious breakdown, remembered by a later self who is trying to make sense of his former life of/in the mind. [That kind of gives away a part of the plot. Sorry.]

This book gives a perfect explanation of how science and philosophy interact with the everyday world. It should be required study by every first-year student of philosophy and writing. And it would hurt for future scientists to read it too. [Make sure you get the 1984 edition with the afterword by Pirsig, ten years later.]

How To Make Your Analyst Love You
Dr. Theodor Saretsky
Citadel Press, 1993

A tongue-in-cheek book that is yet somewhat serious, pointing out genuine psychoanalytical concerns in a lighthearted way, and poking fun at both patients and analysts in the process.

This is a postmod collection of bits and pieces of analyst/patient interaction and analytic lore. It's not quite serious enough to be taken seriously, but not quite bent enough to be hilarious. The device wears off quickly after the first two or three (short) chapters. Fortunately, though, it's a short book.

Angels & Demons
Dan Brown
Atria Books, 2000

I read this book after read The Da Vinci Code, which is fortunate, because if I had read this first, I suspect the latter would have disappointed me. This is more well-structured book, although, perhaps, believability is a bit more strained here than in the other. But, after all, they are both really only fiction, aren't they?

Herein, Robert Langdon, Harvard professor and symbologist extraordinaire, is enticed to travel to CERN in Switzerland by a mysterious early morning phone call. When he arrives, he is shown a bizarre murder scene and asked to interpret the symbol burned onto the chest of the corpse.

Thus begins a day and a night of cat-and-mouse intrigue as he and a young woman (of course), the daughter of the murder victim, speed in a "space-jet" to Vatican City where they begin a search for the killer who threatens to literally annihilate the place with CERN's most recent project, a small container of anti-matter held in suspension by a mini-magnetic field to keep it from touching the sides.

Okay, it's a bit of a stretch. But it moves along, the characters are well drawn, and although the plot is conventional and yet at times outlandish, it works. Still, it's not great literature. Brown is a popular novelist. But despite his conspiratorial themes and pop culture orientation, he's just okay.

The Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown
Doubleday, 2003

Robert Langdon, symbologist, races through Paris with the estranged daughter of the murdered curator of the Louvre, interpreting code that moves the plot along and leads the two of them to the solution of the mystery of the young woman's life.

Good structure and a clever plot and story. But I didn't like the writing style, which is typical of popular novelists who subvert a subtler rendering in order to communicate the specific content of their pet agendas. (In other words, I could see the seams.) I guess I just expect too much of popular authors. That's what an academic literary education will do to you. (It's a shame not to be a member of the proletariat.)

Laudable motives, though. There's nothing I'd like better than to see the Catholic (or every Christian) Church take a nosedive, especially at the hands of a feminist agenda. The repression of women and feminine spiritual psychology was a travesty. But to have the Judeo-Christian influence replaced with another equally silly set of superstitions and rituals is not my idea of spiritual advancement.

And great content. I knew a lot of this stuff before (I've read a lot about the Dead Sea Scrolls, apocryphal gospels, Gnosticism, etc.) and so was able to predict most of the plot turns (some of which were pretty lame--I mean, mirror writing? C'mon. I picked that up immediately), but the book puts this material together very succinctly and adds a lot of detail I didn't know, and points out a direction that hadn't occurred to me, i.e., the connection to the New Age movement ala Wicca, etc.

All in all, it was worth reading, if you like novels and you're into conspiracy theory. But ultimately, it's just another novel, after all. What's all the hoopla about?

The Sadness of Sex
Barry Yourgrau
Dell Publishing, 1995

These very short stories are obviously dreams; at least most of them are. And most of them are fairly ordinary and the format quickly becomes repetitive. This is not the kind of book you read straight through, unless your life is so boring itself that you have nothing else to do. But it's a great book to pick up now and again to read a quick story or two.

And some few of the stories turn out to be quite brilliant, like gems that you might discover while pawing through a pile of common rocks, such as the story where the guy removes the top of his girlfriend's skull while she's sleeping and looks around inside her brain to discover things that disturb him. Or the one where a woman's genitals get away from her and go roaming about town causing lots of trouble (as you'd expect) and the task of capturing and returning it falls to the protagonist.

Overall, it's good art that is crying out for expansion via association, almost as if it is incomplete. I like the compactness and containedness of the individual pieces, but I can't help but think that the ideas/experiences would be better rendered in a more expanded form. On the other hand, the stories are a kind of poetry that expansion would ruin. This dual nature is my basic dissatisfaction with the form. At the same time I want it to be both concisely poetic (in a way even more so than it is) and associatively expanded. But it is what it is. And it must stand on its own. And it does. I just want it to be other things. So maybe I'll do it myself, in my own way, and leave Yourgrau to his own device. And a good device it is.

Death in Venice and Other Stories
Thomas Mann
Vintage Books, 1930 (Reprint 1964)

When I began reading Mann, it was with hesitation. I didn't feel all that favorable toward him, but I felt I owed it to myself to fill another small gap in my literary education. After I started to read these stories, I didn't change my mind about him, not for a long while, until I got to "The Blood of the Walsungs" near the end of the book. If you don't want to be bothered reading a lot of Mann's work, make sure you at least read this story. It's one of the most painstakingly drawn, yet it's interesting for the way that the risque content is tastefully done. It really hit me right in one of my favorite fantasies. Twins. How much more intimate can you get?

Because Mann is such a difficult author for me, I typically read only several pages a night. His style is so ponderous and the reading is slow and sometimes difficult to remain focused on, although his ideas are welcome enough. It was a struggle that I managed to get through, and I was rewarded for the effort. The stories are as memorable as the prose style is forgettable.

Other Mann-related stuff here, and here, and here, and here.

homework
Suneeta Peres da Costa
Bloomsbury Publishing, New York, NY. 1999

This is a sort of allegorical story of a young girl in Australia who is born with "feelers" on her head, antenna-like protuberances that respond to her moods. But the author doesn't make as much of this device as I had hoped she would. In fact, she downplays it and instead focuses on the girl's unusual mother and father, using their cultural background as a point of departure into their middle daughter's esoteric world of (mis?)perception.

Throughout the book, the mother increasingly suffers from depression and the grotesque behavior pattern of bird imitation while the father escapes from his wife's mental illness into an underground retreat on the pretext of continually needing to fix the house's electrical wiring. Meanwhile, the older sister, who is of a far superior intellect, maintains a deprecating attitude toward the girl, who is lost and alone in the increasingly bizarre world of her perceptions.

I had a hard time getting into the daughter's psyche, despite the fact the prose style is light and quite readable. And I had an even harder time empathizing with her plight, despite that fact that she is a likable little girl. Maybe there's a cultural gap here that I can't seem to cross. Maybe I'm missing too much. Or maybe the book is just not as deep as I want to think it is.

Cold Snap
Thom Jones
Back Bay Books, 1995

This is good work--literary in a common-man kind of way. The stories are well structured, and yet they flow easily, as if they are being simply told. They hold interest and never bog down. Ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances or extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances, from the West Coast of America through African backcountry to Australia's easter coast, the characters reveal a unique perspective on themes that readers may be quite familiar with from the evening news. They are doctors, an ad-man, a thief, a surfer, a disabled woman, a Marine grunt, and a prize fighter, all with some ethereal trait in common (which is author himself) that affords them each with the ability to comment effectively on human life.

This is the way I would write myself, if I weren't so lazy and wanted to take the time to revise, restructure, and polish my work. This is bare-boned, solid writing, the stuff of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, modernism in a postmod world, yet without seeming at all anachron- istic. It may not be profound fiction, or even so important; but it's good. And what better praise is there than that?

A Quiet Life
Kenzaburo Oe
Grove Press, 1990

The grown daughter of a well-known author keeps a diary while her parents are away on a long-term professional visit to America. She tells of the experiences she has while taking care of the house and her older brother, who is "special," accompanying him to his music and swim classes. Meanwhile her younger brother, who pretty much takes care of himself, studies for his college entrance exams.

Oe is a master of weaving his life into his fiction, and this maybe is one of the closer matches between the two. Not knowing a whole lot about his real life, I am not qualified to comment on the details of the match. But it doesn't matter anyway, because the book works well as fiction. The narrator, the daughter, is intriguing and captivating. Her vision is a joy to watch unfold. When I think of the fact that it is really Oe who is writing her story (or is it?), I become disturbed.

I want it to be the daughter who is actually doing the writing. For the purpose of the story, it is her "Diary as Home" that is the content of the book, so maybe Oe has transformed his daughter's real diary into his fiction. [I should research this, but I'm lazy; at some future date I just know I'm going to be adding an addendum to this review when I discover that this is fact, or not.] But again, it doesn't really matter. Oe's skill at telling the story from the daughter's point of view while he (i.e., the story's father) is selfishly off in America is superb.

There are books to be read once, for the information and/or for the experience. And there are books to be read again and again, because you miss a character's sensibilities and sense of presence. This is one of the latter. After reading this, I can understand why some mystery writers can make a living turning out novel after stupid novel; it's the character the readers want. Not that this story is stupid; it's not. It's first rate fiction--or non-fiction; whichever. It's well worth the time, no matter how many times you read it.

The Dragons of Eden
Carl Sagan
Ballatine Books, 1977

I started reading this book about twenty years ago, became distracted, set it aside, and only got back to it this year (2003). It's surprising how well it has held up over the years. It takes a brilliant and forward-thinking author like Sagan to have written thirty-some years ago a book that is topical today.

It's all about a lot of things that we [at least we scientists, those who aren't associated with Creation Science, that is; but then, they're not real scientists anyway, so it doesn't matter] take for granted today; but back in Sagan's day, this stuff was fairly liberal.

The book surveys the topics of discussion that were then not so firmly established even in the scientific community, from evolution and genetics through archaeology and anthropology to psychology and brain chemistry. It's a more or less introductory, yet not simplistic, preview of those subjects.

There's good reading matter here for non-scientists who nevertheless have developed an ability to think critically and who haven't had their rational sensibilities replaced by postmodern era Hollywood hype; but for casual scientists who keep fairly current with the world of scientific study, the material is somewhat dated.

Yet the book can offer insights into facts and phenomena that may have been forgotten over the last twenty years as we have gone about our daily lives focused on developing events that seem a long way off from Sagan's Cosmos. We are still approaching, even faster now, a cosmically-oriented world; but our human history seems still to be getting in the way as much as it had back then.

Medieval in LA
Jim Paul
Harcourt Brace and Company, 1996

This is the story of a couple who arrive from San Francisco to spend a weekend with friends in LA. The trip starts out on a bad note when, on the plane, the narrator spills tomato juice on his white pants. Thus we are introduced to the concept of "suckholes," accidents or coincidences that alter the course of events and take you places where you hadn't planned to go.

The rest of the book is a collection of short, seemingly superficial tales and character studies, woven together by the narrator's weekend timeline and his preoccupation with medieval history. It's a loose book, and perhaps not a very significant one (I expected a heavy historical tome), but it works.

There is a continuity to this book, though it's difficult to discern through its pastiche-like style, which accurately reflects the LA/postmod scene it describes. One of the techniques used to create the continuity and yet maintain the apparent pieced-together format is introducing characters out of the blue and not revealing until later in the book how they happen to fit in to the ongoing narrative.

It's an enjoyable enough book with enough character detail to keep it interesting, but if you're looking for novel-like content with a standard resolution, look elsewhere. Personally, I'd rather read this kind of open-ended stuff.

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
T.E. Lawrence
A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook
(orig. pub. circa 1920)

Think you know Lawrence of Arabia? You don't if you're basing your knowledge on the popular legend or the Hollywood movie. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom strips away the legend and reveals a man who is working toward an ideal way over his head, in a hostile environment and under increasingly greater degrees of social and personal stress until, at the end, he removes himself in a fit of anticlimax, eschewing the popularity and power he has earned, but not so righteously as he has imagined he would.

The book's themes, like its title, are a bit cryptic and take some figuring out. Lawrence appears to have written a straightforward tale of rebellion and war. But between the desert and oases, there are stories untold, or half-told, or hinted at. Yet still, he reveals a lot, about himself, and about the structure of the war machine and the governments that run it. It's the story of an outsider who unwittingly finds himself in the center of a revolt that is not so much popular as constructed. But he is not, as the media would have us believe, the central figure. Far from it. He is secondary in a lot of ways, as often observing events as determining them, as a host of Arab figures vie for ephemeral control.

Sometimes, he is in direct command, and sometimes he is on the periphery, but always he is used by the figures who would be the better heroes, if events had turned slightly in another direction. It could be argued that Lawrence, through his idealism, made, or helped to make, the Arab revolt. And this is not untrue. Yet in another way, he is marginalized by the confluence of tribal leaders and Allies' operatives, whom he always willingly and unselfishly credits. It's a difficult perspective to sort out who is who, when and where, and Lawrence does a good job of relaying this perspective, so that in the end we must come to realize that there are no truly central figures, even Feisal himself appearing to be as much a mere idol as a strategist.

Lawrence, as he travels the variegated country, reveals intricate details about the hills and wadis, turning what we tend to think of as a barren land into a complexity of landscape. He so painstakingly describes the rock formations that at times it becomes all but boring, and he does the same with his characterizations. But don't forget, this was written in a time when a different prose style predominated. This is not Hemingway, despite its subject matter. This work is almost Old World in its conception, except that its subject matter occurs at the start of the twentieth century, when that world is turning.

This is a fascinating study, of a man and of the environment and people he has chosen to live among. It turns out to be a somewhat maudlin tale, but that is most of its appeal, for me at least. War is not a pretty thing, but Lawrence's story is, almost. His character, and that of those who weave and are woven into his story, is inextricably bound with the times and events. But it is his character that comes to the fore. Why? Because he was at the same time reluctant, yet eager? Because his idealism carried him through when others in his situation would have failed, or given up? Because he drove himself to the very extreme of human endurance and survived, in no small part because of that endurance? All of that, and more. It is the character that determines the events, after all. He is so much not caught up as he is doing (at least some of) the catching.

This book is become appropriate again, in light of recent events in the Mideast. It's good background for the current troubles there. Again and again as I read I drew parallels between the old and the new, how the former has constructed the latter. This book is perhaps more relevant now than at the time it was written. It is said that history has a way of catching up with us, but in this case, we are the ones who are catching up with history. Lawrence wrote history, in his book, and during his two years with the Arab revolt. Now that I've finished the book, I think "I'm going to miss this guy a lot." [Excerpt]

Baby Driver
Jan Kerouac
Thunder's Mouth Press, 1998

Let's face it. We wouldn't care so much about this book if Jack's daughter didn't write it. Still, though, it's good--a competent effort by a writer who might have given us much more if her hard life hadn't shortened itself. This book, like her second, Train Song, hints at Jack's style. It's an on-the-road saga. But it's far more consciously constructed and either rewritten or well edited. [Her father, it is maintained, did not rewrite at all, preferring to think of himself as a jazz musician of the written word. But I'll bet his editors had a few goes at his manuscripts.]

Jan led the kind of life you'd expect, having been abandoned by her father early on, living with her mother, who struggled in poverty trying to make a life for Jan, her younger twin sisters, and her baby brother. She grew up early and left home at the age of sixteen for Mexico with a guy she became involved with after her release from Spofford Detention Home, where she had been sent by the courts after her mother had her institutionalized in Bellevue in a misguided attempt to reform her.

The rest of the book builds upon that early experience as it alternates between Jan's present and that past. It's a good read, and if it were a novel, its logic and structure would work very well. But I have a feeling that the truth is far more complicated. (Isn't it always?) This is good memoir stuff, but like most memoir, it may oversimplify the psychology. But to be fair, there is no psychology presented. It's a straightforward account, and for that we must give the author credit. This is a first rate first work.

my mother: demonology, a novel
Kathy Acker
Grove Press, 1993

In her typical style, Acker weaves her cryptic writings into a pastiche that purports to demonstrate how her mother lives within her, and/or vice versa. As usual with an Acker work, it's not an easy book to figure out. But that's the fun of it. It's better if you just let it flow over you as you read and allow any analysis that might come to arrive much later as you think back. Trying to understand the text intellectually is too much work and is probably futile anyway. It's more experience than literature, which is probably exactly what's intended. Acker leads you through early childhood boarding school situations, vignettes of life, dreams, Bush (the elder's) presidency as a reprobate monk in charge of a monastery that is the White House, and finally on a book tour through Germany with a postmodern writer. It's not a linear trip, but it's interesting and eventful.

A Personal Matter
Kenzaburo Oe
Grove Press, 1969

Bird, a professor of American Literature at a Japanese cram-school, fantasizes about escaping his domestic life by going to Africa. His wife is about to deliver their first child and he worries that family life will tie him down forever. When the child is born abnormal, while the mother remains where she is to recuperate in the company of her mother, Bird accompanies the baby to another hospital where specialists can better assess the problem. There he faces the dilemma of fighting for the life of his newborn son and taking the chance that the child will grow up severely retarded or allowing it to die by withholding quality nutrients. He chooses the latter and the rest of the book deals with how he faces up to the guilt over this and other matters in his life.

Oe is a master of weaving socially relevant issues into a highly readable text that holds readers' interest from beginning to end. I always finish his books wanting to read more. This is a book about an important social issue, but you don't realize this as you're reading it. As with all of his work, this is more an experience of an unusual point of view, with unique and poignant scenes and imagery. Great stuff.

Old Floating Cloud, Two Novellas
Can Xue
Northwestern University Press, 1991

This book may be even more obtuse than Can Xue's later work, which is not a complaint. I like this kind of stuff. I especially like, mostly in the second novella (Old Floating Cloud; the first is entitled Yellow Mud Street), the way it's often uncertain as to who is talking to whom. The basic plot, if it can be called that, is characterized by a recognized identity between two neighbors, who become involved with each other and afterwards feel awkward and perhaps regretful. Meanwhile, a confusing mesh of mothers and fathers interfere with the lives of both sets of neighbors, causing the older woman's husband to leave her in favor of his mother.

In an interview with Laura McCandlish, Can Xue says that Yellow Mud Street is not one of her best books. "The novella Yellow Mud Street was my first work, so it's not very mature. I hesitate in this work." But it's good enough for me. I do like her later works more, but I like this one too. It's going to take several more readings for me to figure out exactly what's going on, if that's possible at all with any of Can Xue's work.

[top] [main menu]