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| 0199571287
| 9780199571284
| 0199571287
| 3.68
| 130
| 1835
| Dec 01, 2012
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it was amazing
| The Irresistible Woman I picked up this slim volume while reading Balzac's Le Colonel Chabert in French, and these notes are something of an exten The Irresistible Woman I picked up this slim volume while reading Balzac's Le Colonel Chabert in French, and these notes are something of an extension to what I have already said in reviewing that. In addition to the title novella, the present book contains two shorter stories, "Sarrasine" and "The Unknown Masterpiece," all from the first half of Balzac's career. Although the author was known as a realist (and there are some wonderfully precise descriptions in the two books, spanning everything from high life to that of the common people), what the stories in this book have in common is a heightened color, a willingness to go over the top, even a sexual exoticism that is far from the sober tales that realism normally implies.* The cover has a detail of Women of Algiers by Delacroix, to whom Balzac dedicated the title novella, which culminates in scenes set in an oriental divan. The parallel is deliberate and exact, although unlike the other two stories in the book, which are explicitly about artists, art as such is not mentioned in "The Girl with the Golden Eyes." [image] Delacroix: Women of Algiers, 1849 Rather, all three stories center around a romantic ideal of womanhood. The brilliant young sculptor who is the title character in "Sarrasine" pursues a singer in the theaters of Rome who turns out to be very different from what she appears. The hero of "The Girl" is a young Parisian dandy who becomes infatuated with the beautiful young woman of the title, only to find himself led into areas of dangerous eroticism where he completely loses his bearings. Set in the 17th century, "The Lost Masterpiece" is apparently more restrained, and two at least of its characters are not made up but real: the former court painter François Porbus (1569-1622) and the very young Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665). They both meet an older Flemish painter whom Balzac calls Frenhofer. This character establishes his credentials in an extended passage which must be one of the best discussions of art I have ever encountered in fiction, culminating in a demontration in which the older man transforms one of Porbus' paintings with a few swift touches of his brush. But his own pursuit of the ideal woman leads him to create a painting that verges on madness, especially as compared to the very real humanity of Poussin's young model and lover, Gilette. [image] Picasso: illustration to Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, 1934 The translations by Peter Collier were certainly serviceable, although I found their frequent use of modern phrases a jolt after reading the previous Balzac volume in French. But this should not put readers off exploring these extraordinary products of an extraordinary mind. And Collier's introduction and notes are scholarly, detailed, and immensely informative. *(view spoiler)[The first and last stories in the book contain between them overtones (though not the explicit acts) of male-male attraction, lesbianism, transvestism, and brother-sister incest. Perhaps no more than Byron implies in his Don Juan, but still a very heady atmosphere for such brief stories. Apparently the licentious strain in the 18th century, as represented say by De Sade, was not swept away by the new era but pressed into more suggestive forms by the Romantic lust for color, drama, and sensation. (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 14, 2013
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Sep 18, 2013
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Jul 17, 2018
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| 0374166676
| 9780374166670
| 0374166676
| 4.05
| 4,219
| 2010
| Nov 10, 2015
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really liked it
| Not Your Normal Novel [NOTE: After posting the first half of this review, I received a thoughtful defense of the book by the friend who had first reco Not Your Normal Novel [NOTE: After posting the first half of this review, I received a thoughtful defense of the book by the friend who had first recommended it to me, Anna. Since she was so eloquent, and my own experience incomplete, I obtained her permission to post her account also, as a counterweight to my own review. My star rating now reflects both reviews: 3 stars for my own experience, 5 for hers, averaged to 4. rb] ====== ROGER'S TAKE: "Precisely. Because all through the ages there have been people who want to 'revolve primarily around literature.' Like all of us here!" The teacher laughed. "And then there are the Colonel Bibikovs, who are charged with keeping a close eye on them. Yes, such are the times."This book was recommended to me by a reader from Eastern Europe, Anna, who regards it as one of the great Russian novels of the last half-century. And I can see why she might feel a personal stake in it. In a culture where one's choice of reading—or even the pursuit of literature itself—can be cause for suspicion (Bibikov was the government spy keeping an eye on Pushkin), a tribute to the dissidents who defy it would be cause for celebration. Especially if you are a reader and critic yourself. So I started, hoping to join her in her praise. But a nearly 600-page tome is a lot, and although I was enjoying most of what I read, after about 250 pages, I simply saw no point in continuing. One reason is the perpetual problem with Russian names. For the most part, both men and women are referred to by given name and patronymic, the combined names being long and difficult to keep straight if there are a lot of them. The surnames, by which Western readers mentally organize their characters, are less often mentioned, or sometimes not at all. And people make have nicknames, flattering or otherwise. So the author may reference Stalin, for instance, as Josef Vissarionovich, Dzhugashvili, Soso, or The Big Samekh, because her readers will recognize them. This is just something that readers of Russian novels have to put up with. But this is worse—far worse. For Ulitskaya, rather like Roberto Bolaño, uses names also as talismans, for what they will represent to initiated readers. The book is crammed with names of figures from Russian history and literature whose actions or writings struck a blow for freedom. To educated Russian readers, each name will carry an electric charge, but non-Russians may feel they are stumbling in the dark. The second problem for me was structure. The first six chapters, 120 pages in all, work like a normal novel. We meet three boys, Ilya, Mikha, and Sanya, who form a close friendship at school and, under the mentorship of a charismatic teacher, form a club called the Lovers of Russian Literature (LORL). Then everything shifts in a 36-page chapter with the same title as the book, "The Big Green Tent"; the phrase comes from a dream about a world in which all the marginalized, exiled, and murdered may finally be united. The shift is that it only peripherally concerns the LORLs or continues the steadily advancing time-frame. Decades long, it is a whole-life story of Olga, the daughter of party apparatchiks, whose ideas shift 180 degrees which she is in college, leading her to join the group. I wondered, actually, if it might have been published before the rest of the book, as a standalone story. Nor does the continuity of characters or time resume any time soon. I read six more chapters, each a separate story, focused on some peripheral character, and told out of sequence. Paradoxically, I enjoyed many of these more than the earlier chapters, but at the expense of any sense of onward momentum. Were this a normal novel, I would read to the end, wanting to know what happens. With a book of short stories, however, I do not feel that compunction. Once I realized that the nature of the book had changed, there seemed no pressing need for me to go on. I'm glad to have read what I did, but saw no compelling reason to continue. So I didn't. ====== ANNAS'S TAKE: I understand why this, or her other novels except maybe for Daniel Stein, her least Russian novel, holds less appeal for Western readers. The greatness of this novel does not lie in its vertical (i.e. psychological) depth, but its horizontal scope. Ulitskaya does not paint portraits, she paints landscapes. I see her novels, particularly this one, as a web or a mosaic. Is there a starting point or arrival in a mosaic? In her narrative web, the ‘capsule’ stories of the secondary characters with the unrememberable names are essential, as she memorializes a whole nation, not just a few representative characters who suffered. Her multi-generational cast exemplifies the ‘Russian metaphysical depression’ perfectly and also demonstrates that everyone was affected. This novel is unique in that – more than her other writings – it is a tribute also to those who could not resist the regime and either became informers or committed suicide. She never judges them. History here does not just serve as the backdrop, it is the foreground that has an existential weight. For a strange reason, Eastern European society, at least its artistic representations, seems to be more than just the sum of its individuals. Hard to accept from a western liberal point of view, isn’t it? Beyond all this, she shows that there is more to individual life than the shared suffering. And also that, sadly, this is no consolation when there is nothing more to a specific individual life of a Son Parentovich or a Daughter Parentevna than the common tribulations. For me, the Tent was an oratorio of life and death, of physical and moral survival or the impossibility of such survival. I’ve read no other piece of literature that captured this as perfectly, humorously, and yet dramatically, as this novel. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 30, 2018
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Aug 03, 2018
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Jun 07, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0747561419
| 9780747561415
| 0747561419
| 3.30
| 159
| 2002
| Jan 01, 2003
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it was amazing
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Warmth in the Snow On the face of it, The Big Snow,the title story in this collection of five is a police procedural, but I don’t think that is its mai Warmth in the Snow On the face of it, The Big Snow,the title story in this collection of five is a police procedural, but I don’t think that is its main point. At 137 pages it is a novella really, half the length of the whole book, and its mystery is insufficient to justify that proportion on its own. But put together with the other four stories, all of which are set in Northern Ireland during the severe blizzard of 1963, it completes a quietly marvelous collection of character studies, all featuring people who are socially awkward or wrong-footed by the extreme conditions, and treating them with love and understanding. Forget the title; this is a warm book. And an especially meaningful one for me, who grew up in that part of the world, and would have been about the same age as the two youngest protagonists. The opening story, The Light of the World, is the shortest, and hauntingly beautiful. I don’t want to say too much about it (or any of the stories) as Park is so skillful at controlling information. But it concerns a man leafing through a volume of Ansel Adams photographs while talking to his wife, who is also a photographer. She is lying in bed, and he is standing at the window, watching the falling snow, and everything is connected by beauty, pain, and that pure, pure light. [image] The Wedding Dress is almost as short, and equally mesmerizing. A woman scans the papers for a used bridal dress to buy for her own upcoming wedding, before she too goes out into the snow. White on white, its secret is a terrible one, and oh so sad. At 35 pages, Against the Cold is more substantial. Mr. Peel, the headmaster of a Belfast school, works with one of his teachers, Miss Lewis, to see the pupils safely home before snow closes them down. Conscious of his noblesse oblige, he escorts her to her door. She invites him in for a cup of tea before he starts his own long trek home, but the snow falls harder and harder. Peel is the only one of the five protagonists we do not like immediately. He is authoritarian and patronizing; he fantasizes about one of the other teachers, and looks down on Miss Lewis; he is a prude, who disapproves of her having a reproduction of a couple kissing on her living-room wall (he has probably never heard of Dante Gabriel Rossetti). But they have a long day ahead of them, and things can change.… [image] My favorite story was the second longest at 65 pages, Snow Trails. Peter, its principal character, is the son of the local undertaker, in his first year studying French at university, and longing to get away from the small country town. He is attracted to the young wife of a Belfast businessman, who has recently bought property on the outskirts. She is at least a decade older than him, but that doesn’t lessen the intensity of his crush. When they meet, he is reading Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier [ The Lost Estate ], and is thrilled that she has read it too. Indeed, the whole story might almost be a retelling of Alain-Fournier's impossible-to-recapture romantic dream, but it is no less effective in its own terms. And it is a similarly young protagonist, not the mystery, that is the focus of The Big Snow. Like the young Morse in Endeavour, probationary detective constable Swift is better educated and smarter than most of the people around him. But he is also green behind the ears and touchingly insecure. He is paired with an old-school sergeant named Gracey, who has no time for niceties but gets results by concentrating on the most likely culprit and squeezing a confession out of him. Only this time, Swift reckons he is wrong; most readers too will probably see the way the wind is blowing well before the halfway mark. But the real interest is in the relationship between the cub and the old grizzly, which takes some surprising turns, and in the character of Swift himself. He identifies strongly with the young murder victim, who is probably the first woman he has seen unclothed, and treats the case as a personal chivalric crusade. Once again, Park gets what it is to be young, sensitive, and bright. So it is a pity that, in developing a type he had captured so perfectly in the shorter story, he moves a little too close to melodrama in the longer one. Were this the whole book, my rating would be no more than four stars. But given the strength of the others, I can certainly go to five. ===== This is the fourth David Park book I have read. I begin to think he has a special affinity for short to medium length fiction. The very fine The Poet's Wives consists of three novellas, focusing on the wives of William Blake, Osip Mandelstam, and a fictional contemporary Irish poet. His The Light of Amsterdam and The Truth Commissioner are full novels, but each consists of several distinct strands that eventually interweave; I was a little lukewarm about the Amsterdam book, but the other is one of the most constructive responses to the Troubles in Northern Ireland that I have read. Long or short, I recommend anything he writes. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 24, 2018
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Apr 27, 2018
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Apr 24, 2018
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| 030022334X
| 9780300223347
| 030022334X
| 3.62
| 804
| 1982
| Aug 29, 2017
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really liked it
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Whatever Happened to . . . ? "Charell, McFowles, Desoto, Newman, Karvé, Moncef el Okbi, Corcueta, Archibald, Firouz, Monterey, Coemtzopoulos, who was h Whatever Happened to . . . ? "Charell, McFowles, Desoto, Newman, Karvé, Moncef el Okbi, Corcueta, Archibald, Firouz, Monterey, Coemtzopoulos, who was half-Greek and half-Ethiopian…". Another list of names, a cosmopolitan mixture of the ordinary and outré. Typical Modiano? No, actually, not quite. For these are some of the pupils at the Valvert School, a boarding prep school that the narrator attends for some years around 1960. Despite being called a novel, this 1982 book is better seen as a collection of a dozen short stories, with a prologue and epilogue. All but two of the stories gives a glimpse into the life of one or other of these school friends, five, ten, or twenty years on. And although Modiano is no more than a narrator or observer in these stories, and only twice identifies himself by name, the implication is that this is his story too. Why should he be any more able to escape the malaise and loss of identity that seems to have afflicted all the young princes of his generation, born in the years immediately after the War? I said "all but two of these stories"; let’s look first at the two exceptions. One of them (Chapter VIII) is about a former star athlete known as Johnny for his resemblance to Johnny Weissmuller, the original Tarzan; we never know his real name. He refuses his mother’s invitation to accompany her to America, feeling that he is on top of the world in Paris. But that is before the War and the Occupation…. The story seems a tiny sketch for Modiano’s masterpiece Dora Bruder, but it is nonetheless effective in its brevity. The other exception is Chapter IV, narrated by an unnamed older alumnus of Valvert, telling of his time (during the Occupation, I believe) as tutor to a small girl called Little Jewel, who is forced into films by her mother, a mysterious "Countess" who appears to lead a busy social life of her own. As fellow-Nobelist JMG Le Clézio points out in his introduction, much of the story is unusually tender for Modiano, despite the coldness of the mother. The author would take up the girl’s story again in his 2001 novel Little Jewel, now showing her as a young adult cast adrift. Characters like Jewel’s mother, socialites of uncertain origins who are none too scrupulous about how they make their money, are found elsewhere in Modiano’s work, and there are at least two other examples here. Chapter VII has an even more disturbing example of a beautiful young woman, a childhood playmate of the narrator’s and sister of one of his school friends, who looks as though she might be destined to fall into the same pattern. And Chapter X shows a man and woman caught in the net together. Alain Charell and his wife Suzanne have a nice house in Neuilly, but live a mysterious after-dark life in the seedy area around the Gare du Nord. Charell keeps saying "I’ll explain," but he never does, and the story moves more deeply into the author’s characteristic noir domain than any other in the book. I was not surprised to see that the story was made into a short film. But for the most part, the stories concern the fates of individual young men whom the narrator know at school. As might be expected of prep-school alumni, most of them come from wealthy families and are able to live lives of luxury after graduation. But these tend to go nowhere. Two of the stories (Chapters III and VI) end in mental illness: We, the veterans of Valvert, were prone to inexplicable bouts of melancholy, waves of sadness that we tried to ward off each in our own way. As our chemistry teacher Mr. Lafaure used to say, we all had a touch of it.But the one I like best, because its ending sneaks up on you unawares, is Chapter V. It is about a young man called Philippe Yotlande who is already a known face on the Champs Elysées by the time he is expelled from school at 18, a reputation that is clinched a year later when he appears in the paper with the [real] Danish film star Annette Stroyberg. But time passes, and before you know it…. I want to quote the last few lines as an example of the relative lightness and clarity of this novel as compared to Modiano’s more usual shadows, but will do so in a spoiler for those who want to find out for themselves. (view spoiler)[ A few tables away, a girl of about twenty was sitting with a gray-haired man, who held his head high and looked like a gentleman rider, with an official decoration on his lapel. Her grandfather, thought Yotlande. The man stood up and walked into the café, leaning on a cane.So what’s the verdict? It is true that this is a unique work in Modiano’s oeuvre, as Le Clézio suggests, showing many of his themes developing in miniature. It is lighter in texture, and so perhaps attractive to first-time readers. But by the same token, it lacks Modiano’s characteristic ability to plunge the reader into an ever-darkening nightmare, and as such does not quite earn my fifth star. ====== Here, finally, is a set of links to my reviews of all the Modiano novels I have read so far, whether in French or English. In three instances, I have upped my rating from 5 to 6 (or in one case 7) stars, as a guide to people who may be interested, but do not know where to begin. The dates are those of original French publication: 1968 La Place de l'étoile [F, 4*] 1969 The Night Watch [E, 5*] 1972 Ring Roads [E, 5*] 1978 Rue des boutiques obscures [F, 6*] 1982 Such Fine Boys [E, 4*] 1988 Suspended Sentences [E, 4*] 1991 Flowers of Ruin [E, 4*] 1992 After the Circus [E, 3*] 1993 Afterimage [E, 4*] 1997 Dora Bruder [F, 7*] 2003 Paris Nocturne [E, 3*] 2007 Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue [F, 6*] 2012 The Black Notebook [E, 5*] 2014 So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood [E, 4*] 2017 Souvenirs dormants [F, 5*] It's a lot of books, but he wrote many more. Earlier this morning, I looked through the Modiano shelf in my local bookstore, and wrote down four that I still wanted to read. Much to my surprise, however, when I checked these against my list on Goodreads, I found that two of the four, After the Circus and Paris Nocturne, I actually had read (though not rated especially high). Read, but forgot. It would seem to play into the common idea that, as Modiano is constantly returning to the same obsessions, there is no point in reading multiple titles. Except that the man is addictive, and even his weaker novels work their spell. Reading Such Fine Boys makes me more, not less, eager to buy the other two books I mentioned (though preferably in French): Une jeunesse (translated as Young Once) of 1981 and Pedigree of 2004. Together, they would seem to form a trilogy with Such Fine Boys in finding three quite different ways—novel, autobiography, and stories—of recapturing the experience of youth. And that, for Modiano, is the well-spring of all his work. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 30, 2018
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Jan 31, 2018
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Jan 31, 2018
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Paperback
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| 039332687X
| 9780393326871
| 039332687X
| 3.91
| 755
| 2005
| Jun 17, 2005
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really liked it
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Finding Grace Through Loss [Review from 2006] I usually read only novels, but this is what the author calls a ring of six first-person stories, linked Finding Grace Through Loss [Review from 2006] I usually read only novels, but this is what the author calls a ring of six first-person stories, linked by the device of having a person or idea mentioned in a minor way in one story becoming the main subject of the next. Far more important than these surface links, however, is the commonality of theme that ties these first-person narratives together, even though their narrators alternate between male and female and their locales range from Renaissance Venice and 19th-century China to more-or-less-contemporary New York and Paris. Few of these life-stories (for each typically spans several decades) deal with great figures, and many are humdrum or downright uneventful. Most of the tales are about love found and lost again, through stupidity, tragedy, or the mere passage of time. Yet each ends in a state of acceptance, compromise perhaps, but increasingly verging on religious grace; the book-jacket comparison with William Trevor is not inapt. And the book's power is cumulative, enfolding the reader in a moral universe that is more consistent and consoling than in many a novel. In short, excellently conceived and executed; the missing star is simply due to the fact that the book keeps a relatively low profile, without the emotional range of many of the books to which I have awarded five stars. ...more |
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Feb 22, 2006
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Feb 24, 2006
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Jan 02, 2018
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Paperback
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| 1619029715
| 9781619029712
| B072C51C2K
| 3.52
| 5,942
| Nov 01, 2017
| Nov 01, 2017
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it was amazing
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It’s a Connected World Darisse was secretly becoming more religious, but in private; she had her own rituals. She sat on her bed with her eyes closeIt’s a Connected World Darisse was secretly becoming more religious, but in private; she had her own rituals. She sat on her bed with her eyes closed; she thought of the walls of the room turning into air. Air from a larger space. The point was to ask for strength. Improvement wasn’t coming any other way. She was doing this almost every night and there was an aftereffect that pleased her.First, some background. I have been interested in Joan Silber ever since reading her Ideas of Heaven in 2006. Called a "Ring of Stories," each of the six longish stories in the collection links to its predecessor, and the last back to the first, though they span several centuries and three continents. The principal link, though, is the author's moral viewpoint, which I summarized in the title of my review, "Finding Grace Through Loss." Fools, the second collection of hers that I read, does not have the same linking device, though the stories overlap in subtle ways. They all have a 20th-century setting and involve Americans, and all explore the paradoxes inherent in the lives of people who—often despite themselves—find a faith or some way of doing good. As I wrote at the end of my review, "it is heartening to see people as ordinary and confused as the rest of us getting along as best they can, and somehow coming to their various understandings of what is truly important. And that is priceless." I say all this because I don't know that I would have been so receptive to the subtle and often seemingly random things that Silber does in Improvement if I had not been sensitized by her previous collections. But it may well be the best of the three. She calls it a novel, perhaps because its focus is that much more concentrated: its main time-frame is New York City in 2012, with a number of flashbacks to Turkey in the 1970s, and all the major characters feature in more than one chapter. But it is still structured as a set of stories, much as the novels of Colum McCann or especially Elizabeth Strout tend to be. And they are all linked by a single moral theme: the "Improvement" of the title. But there is nothing whatsoever sappy about this; the upward trajectories are generally small, though of vital importance to the characters themselves. Fools opened with a story about a modern saint, Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement. There is no such clear moral elevation here. Reyna, the narrator of the first two and last of the eight stories, is a single mother living with a young black man currently imprisoned on Riker's Island for dealing pot. When he gets out, his friends involve him in a scheme to smuggle cigarettes from Virginia to New York, an operation that threatens to involve Reyna herself. And indeed it does involve her, though not in the way you might think, and makes her feel guilty when it goes tragically wrong. This is all in the first two chapters. The next two are about two people only peripherally involved in the tragedy. A hospice worker and a truck driver, there is nothing especially remarkable, or even especially admirable, about their lives. But both are placed in situations where they have to make choices and, though difficult, those choices are the right ones. The next three chapters develop the Turkish plot. Reyna has an aunt, Kiki, who scandalized her bourgeois Jewish family by going off to Turkey in the seventies, marrying a failed rug dealer, and going to live with him on a remote farm. This is mentioned at the very start of the book, but it is not until Chapter 5 that we hear the details. She too comes into contact with a group of amateur smugglers, three young Germans on the hunt for antiquities. The next two chapters then tell their stories, bringing the action forward by a generation and returning to New York. The final chapter joins all the stories together, filling in what happens with most of the major characters. It will involve one of the carpets that Kiki brought back from Turkey (hence the beautiful book cover), but what is really important about it is that it is Reyna's effort to set a bad situation right. For all the clever connections between the stories, Silber does not make the mistake of engineering outcomes that are too pat. Most of the stories are open-ended, without punchlines—but they reflect the reality of life. And though the "improvements" are mostly small ones, they do exist, and they tie the separate stories together into a novel. I like Joan Silber's moral sense, and I like her underlying optimism. Which is enough to push a borderline rating up into the five-star category. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 31, 2017
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Jan 02, 2018
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Dec 31, 2017
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Kindle Edition
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| 1590518799
| B01N9S4GRO
| 4.07
| 12,505
| 2015
| Oct 10, 2017
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it was amazing
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[image] Three Super Stories The Encyclopedia of Ideas helped me remember that the first floor, which [Freud] called the id, contains all our impulses an[image] Three Super Stories The Encyclopedia of Ideas helped me remember that the first floor, which [Freud] called the id, contains all our impulses and urges. The middle floor is the ego, which tries to mediate between our desires and reality. And the uppermost level, the third floor, is the domain of His Majesty, the superego, which calls us to order sternly and demands that we take into account the effects of our actions on society.The original Hebrew title of Eshkol Nevo’s novel, Shalosh Qomot, apparently translates as “Three Stories,” which would have been a better title than the present one, assuming that the pun between “storey” and “story” still works. Literally, these are three novellas, each involving the residents of a given floor in an apartment building, in what one of them describes as “Bourgeoisville,” some way out of Tel Aviv. But this is indeed a novel, not just because of the minor references in each novella to the characters of the other two, but because of the moral themes running through all three. And between them, they exemplify Freud’s metaphor of the Id, ego, and superego, as in the quotation above. On the lower floor, Arno, a father with poor impulse control, comes to believe that the husband of the elderly couple opposite, whom they exploit as underpaid baby-sitters, has paedophilic designs on his young daughter. In fact, the man is merely suffering from dementia. Arno tells the story directly to the novelist, who was apparently a college friend, under the assumption that he will exonerate him. It is painful to listen to, as he makes one appalling judgement after another, all in the arrogant conviction that he is in the right. But in the translation by Sondra Silverston, it is quite unstoppable. The second story is also a confession, this time by a woman called Hani writing to a friend in America. While her husband is away on one of his many trips, she receives a visit from his long-estranged brother who is on the run from the law. She knows she should turn him in, but he immediately wins the love of her two young children and begins to arouse feelings in her too. At least, this is what seems to be happening, but there is a strong element of the unreliable narrator in play here too. Reliable or not, though, her voice is infectious, and you read on in bemused delight. With the third storey/story, though, the novel opens out into a quite different dimension. The narrator this time, Devora, is a retired judge, dictating her confession onto the tape of an old answering machine that she has found among her late husband’s things. At first, she believe she needs him as her confidant, but as the story goes on it becomes clear that she is leaving behind, not only her judicial robes, but also the behavioral assumptions she had taken for granted in her marriage. Before long, she will put her apartment up for sale, become involved with a youth protest movement in Tel Aviv, meet a man of her age who appears to know a surprising amount about her, and travel to an isolated desert farm at the far reaches of the country. The outward journey towards a future also turns out to be a reckoning with her past, and especially the mistakes she and her husband made in bringing up their misfit son, Adar. The ending, though far from simplistic, is charged with hope and utterly satisfying. I am sure that Israeli readers would pick up on all sorts of other layers to these stories, but their human values are obvious to anyone. Not to mention their sheer readability. Without question, this joins my list of contenders for Top Ten of 2017—remarkably so, since there are already two other Israeli novels on it: Judas, by Amos Oz and A Horse Walked into a Bar, by David Grossman. Remarkable year. Remarkable country. ====== [image] My Top Ten list this year is selected from a smaller than usual pool. I really only started reading again in May, and even then deliberately kept new books to under 50% of my total. In compiling the list, I also did not exactly follow mu original star ratings, but rather the takeaway value after time has passed. In particular, there are two books, Lincoln in the Bardo and Go, Went, Gone) to which I gave only 4 stars, but which I recognize as important books, with more staying power than many that I enjoyed more at the time, but have since forgotten. For some reason, three of the ten books (Forest Dark, A Horse Walks into a Bar, and Three Floors Up) are by Jewish authors, set in Israel. To those, I would add a fourth: Judas by Amos Oz, read at the same time and of similar quality, but actually published at the end of 2016. The ten titles below are in descending order (i.e. with The Essex Serpent being my favorite). The links are to my reviews: 1. The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry 2. Autumn by Ali Smith 3. Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss 4. The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne 5. Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor 6. A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman 7. Exit West by Moshin Hamid 8. Three Floors Up by Eshkol Nevo 9. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders 10. Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck And half that number again that didn't quite make it, in alphabetical order by authors: 11. Souvenirs dormants by Patrick Modiano 12. All We Shall Know by Donal Ryan 13. Improvement by Joan Silber 14. Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout 15. Rose & Poe by Jack Todd ...more |
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Kindle Edition
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| 0316206296
| 9780316206297
| 0316206296
| 3.57
| 6,650
| Sep 05, 2012
| Oct 30, 2012
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really liked it
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All We Like Sheep I started this book in the wonderful sound recording, its stories read by a variety of different performers. My long car trip over, I All We Like Sheep I started this book in the wonderful sound recording, its stories read by a variety of different performers. My long car trip over, I then read the second half in print. Both forms are marvelous, the recording especially confirming the variety of Donoghue's voice. Five of the fourteen stories are in the first person; two others are told through letters; the remainder vary in style according to their place and period, everything from Puritan New England in 1639 to Ontario in 1967, with side trips to Dickensian London and antebellum French Louisiana. It is not surprising that the recording needed multiple readers, British and American, male and female; Donoghue's writing has all this range and more. For what she has done is to hunt through old civic records, letters, and works of history to find parallels to her own situation as an emigrant. (A double emigrant, actually, moving from Ireland to London first, and thence to the New World; exactly the pattern of my own journey, as it happens.) She is interested in the liminal nature of emigration, the special conditions that drive us to it, and our ambiguous situation upon arrival, being at the same time both acute observers and ignorant outsiders. Many of her stories are also spiritual journeys. As she writes in her Afterword: "Straying has always had a moral component as well as a geographical one, and the two are connected. If your ethical compass is formed by the place you grow up, which way will its needle swing when you are far from home?" The stories are grouped in three sections. The first, headed "Departures," blasts off like a double-barreled shotgun: a cockeyed conversation between the keeper at the London Zoo and his charge, the first elephant imported by PT Barnum, and a heart-breakingly sensitive account of an orphaned young woman forced into genteel prostitution in order to bring up her younger brother. The middle section, "In Transit," is less focused, but I was especially moved by the story of an Irish wife sailing to join her husband in Canada (touching on the same ground as Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever ), and by the series of letters tracing a mother's attempts to find news of her daughter given up for adoption in New York and eventually sent all the way to Iowa. The final section, "Arrivals and Aftermaths," contains two of the strongest stories of all: a complaint by an early Puritan of the licentiousness in the Plymouth Colony, while remaining totally blind to the flaws in his own character, and "The Hunt," a beautiful and terrible story of a lonely teenage conscript in the Hessian army fighting against the Revolution, whose first experience of love is sullied by inevitable betrayal. This last story is up for a major prize, as well it should be, for Donoghue has the essential gift of making her characters come to life on the page. Historical though they may be, the stories seem so personal. Many of them show a confident feminism, featuring strong women behaving in unexpected ways. There are also several hints of same-sex relationships. But male or female, old or young, early colonist or recent arrival, all her characters emerge as living, breathing human beings, treated with the miraculous compassion that is surely the author's greatest gift. ...more |
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| 1940436443
| 9781940436449
| 1940436443
| 4.07
| 123
| Feb 01, 2017
| Feb 14, 2017
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liked it
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The Escalation of Horror I had never heard of Rachel Ingalls. I've never heard of Daniel Handler either, although I gather he has written children's bo The Escalation of Horror I had never heard of Rachel Ingalls. I've never heard of Daniel Handler either, although I gather he has written children's books under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket. But I fail to see why writing a two-paragraph introduction and selecting the three long stories here should entitle him to a cover billing more prominent than the author herself. Especially since the "selecting" consists merely of taking two stories from a previously published 1985 trilogy and replacing the third by a story from another set—in my opinion, the least successful of the three and the odd one out. OK, rant over. Ingalls, an American writer who moved to Britain in her twenties, is the author of a prizewinning novel, Mrs. Caliban, and several collections of short novellas. I might compare her to Angela Carter in her taste for the macabre, though on the evidence of these at least, she lacks Carter's originality of imagination. But this comparative normality may be her strength. In the first of these stories, "I See a Long Journey," a young wife goes with her very rich husband and his bodyguard on a holiday to New Caledonia. Some small but relatively normal things begin to go wrong, until at the end things suddenly go very wrong indeed. I wouldn't call the story gripping from beginning to end, but it has a very well-controlled escalation of horror. "On Ice," the last story in the volume, about an American girl on a Bavarian skiing holiday with her German boyfriend, has a similar trajectory, although it moves into almost Stephen King territory at the end. But controlled escalation is exactly what the middle story, "Friends in the Country," lacks. This is the one "selected" by Mr. Handler to accompany the other two. But although it has certain similarities to the ending of "On Ice," how could he not see that without this slight but gradual deviation from normality, it occupies a different genre entirely? A young couple, on their way to dinner in the country with a friend of a friend, become lost in the fog and arrive at a decrepit mansion where they are greeted by a pair of butlers with candles. Only six pages into the story, and we are deep in cobwebbed Gothic already; where else is there to go but from fantastic to more fantastic? But the point of the other two—and the thing that in my opinion makes Ingalls worth reading—is that the denouement when it comes is only the realization of the social and emotional tensions we have seen building in the real world. Without that reality—and in particular Ingalls' understanding of women trapped in controlling relationships—we have nothing. ...more |
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Jul 07, 2017
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Jul 04, 2017
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Paperback
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| 0141186798
| 9780141186795
| 0141186798
| 3.80
| 10
| unknown
| Nov 01, 2001
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really liked it
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Far From Parochial I must have read some of the Father Brown stories in my youth, but now know of the character mainly through the British television s Far From Parochial I must have read some of the Father Brown stories in my youth, but now know of the character mainly through the British television series starring Mark Williams. Despite the actor's skill in capturing something of the essence of Chesterton's modest yet perceptive priest, the programs annoyed me by setting him in the middle of a vapid situation comedy and, worse, making him the parish priest of an English village (complete with Lady of the Manor), as though there had never been a Reformation, and English society was still Catholic. Coming upon this Penguin anthology, I wanted to see what Chesterton himself did when he began the series in 1910. Reading the originals reveals the adaptation as sheer travesty. In none of the eleven stories collected here do we see Father Brown as a parish priest, even in his own community. He is presented as a reticent figure who crops up in incongruous situations, often without anybody quite knowing why he is there. And it is striking how varied these settings are. Yes, one of them—the famous "Hammer of God"—is the parish church of an English village, but the vicar is the brother of the licentious squire, and very much an Anglican. Other settings include a boat train, a walled garden, an exclusive hotel, a Scottish moor, and a haunted castle in Cornwall. I had not realized how much Chesterton owes to Edgar Allan Poe in the Gothic ambience of his stories; his verbal mastery of the style, as in this opening paragraph from "The Honour of Israel Gow," is superb: A stormy evening of olive and silver was closing in, as Father Brown, wrapped in a grey Scotch plaid, came to the end of a grey Scotch valley and beheld the strange castle of Glengyle. It stopped one end of the glen or hollow like a blind alley; and it looked like the end of the world. Rising in steep roofs and spires of seagreen slate in the manner of the old French-Scottish châteaux, it reminded an Englishman of the sinister steeple-hats of witches in fairy tales; and the pine woods that rocked round the green turrets looked, by comparison, as black as numberless flocks of ravens. This note of a dreamy, almost a sleepy devilry, was no mere fancy from the landscape. For there did rest on the place one of those clouds of pride and madness and mysterious sorrow which lie more heavily on the noble houses of Scotland than on any other of the children of men. For Scotland has a double dose of the poison called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, and the sense of doom in the Calvinist.What do I like most about Father Brown? His ability to emerge from the shadows with the one modest observation that will reveal the case in a new light. The fact that these observations are based as much on his knowledge of mankind from the confessional as on more physical clues. And his spiritual insight, which sees questions of guilt and innocence in theological rather than legal terms, occasionally more terrible than the written law, but generally with a touching gentleness of understanding. These characteristics make him the opposite of a Sherlock Holmes, who strides in and takes charge. Father Brown is rarely the leading sleuth in a case, but rather the bystander who offers suggestions from the sidelines. As a result, he is seldom the hero of his own stories, and often most of the narration is carried by others. In the first half-dozen stories here, the balance is nonetheless right. But the last few rather disappointed me. For at the same time as Chesterton is moving to ever more fantastic settings—brigands in the Italian mountains, warring factions in Brazil, convicts in a Chicago prison—he also tends to sideline his title character more and more. A pity. Perhaps we need a little more of that English parish after all? ...more |
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Jun 17, 2017
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| 0812989406
| 9780812989403
| 0812989406
| 3.78
| 69,099
| Apr 27, 2017
| Apr 25, 2017
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it was amazing
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ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE by Elizabeth Strout Lucy Barton's Old Neighbors In the first of the nine stories that comprise this loosely-structured novel, the ol ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE by Elizabeth Strout Lucy Barton's Old Neighbors In the first of the nine stories that comprise this loosely-structured novel, the old former janitor of a school in rural Illinois remembers Lucy Barton, the youngest child of a dirt-poor family who escaped to New York and found success as a writer. She has just come out with a memoir, which one gathers is Strout's miracle novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton. Lucy is mentioned in two or three of the other stories also, and in one, "Sisters," she actually appears, her first return in decades. You do not have to have read the earlier novel to enjoy this one, but it offers a curious payback for those that have. For most of Lucy Barton, as I noted in my review, you were waiting for the shoe to drop about what happened to Lucy in her childhood; one of Strout's great strokes of grace came in letting the footwear fall very gently, hinting enough to satisfy but leaving it at that. Here, though, she is much more specific; the almost feral background of Lucy and her family comes across with near-Gothic shock. Too much? I might have been disappointed, were it not that the distinctive quality of the earlier book—its grace—is found in abundance here also. Strout returns to the structure of her Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge, depicting a loose community of interconnected characters through stories, each with its own focus and conclusion, but with the same figures mentioned in others. But the New England orneriness that had soured the earlier collection for me is here replaced by a Midwestern warmth. It is not sappy—many of the characters are edgy and awkward, often elderly too—but there is also a gentleness of understanding that reminds me of Kent Haruf or even Marilynne Robinson. One example must suffice. Tommy Guptill, the janitor in the opening story, once owned a successful dairy farm, until his inheritance was wiped out by a disastrous fire. But Tommy has a secret that he has not shared even with his wife: Privately, he thought of the fire as a sign from God to keep this gift tightly to him. Privately, because he did not want to be thought of as a man who made up excuses for a tragedy; and he did not want anyone—not even his dearly beloved wife—to think he would do this. But he had felt that night, while his wife kept the children over by the road—he had rushed them from the house when he saw that the barn was on fire—as he watched the enormous flames flying into the nighttime sky, then heard the terrible screaming sounds of the cows as they died, he had felt many things, but it was just as the roof of his house crashed in, fell into the house itself, right into their bedrooms and the living room below with all the photos of the children and his parents, as he saw this happen he had felt—undeniably—what he could only think was the presence of God, and he understood why angels had always been portrayed as having wings, because there had been a sensation of that—of a rushing sound, or not even a sound, and then it was as though God, who had no face, but was God, pressed up against him and conveyed to him without words—so briefly, so fleetingly—some message that Tommy understood to be: It’s all right, Tommy.Few episodes in the book share the drama of this one, which takes place well before the novel opens. But the quiet moment with which the story ends, when Tommy finally shares his secret, is utterly typical and, I feel, even more amazing: And then Tommy understood: that what he had kept from her their whole lives was, in fact, easily acceptable to her, and what he would keep from her now—his doubt (his sudden belief that God had never come to him)—was a new secret replacing the first. He took his hand from hers. “You might be right,” he said. A paltry thing he added, but it was true: He said, “I love you, Shirley.” And then he looked at the ceiling; he could not look at her for a moment or two.I read the first few stories in growing wonder and deepening joy. Later, Strout expands her rural focus, including a wealthy arts patron, a successful actress, and a company director among her characters, and moving her setting to a small city, northern New England, or the Ligurian coast. I began to fear that the intensity of the opening might become dissipated. But, as with My Name Is Lucy Barton, no matter how far the people travel they never forget the simplicity of their roots. And the last story of all ends with a spiritual return so magical that I can only urge you to savor Strout's book slowly and wait for it. ...more |
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Jun 06, 2017
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Jun 09, 2017
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Jun 11, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0062225553
| 9780062225559
| 0062225553
| 3.80
| 33,891
| Nov 22, 2016
| Nov 22, 2016
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really liked it
| Brilliant . . . so what's my problem? In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to confirm with memory, narrative p Brilliant . . . so what's my problem? In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to confirm with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Whatever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with identities, motivations, and interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.What a brilliant Author's Note! Moonglow may be a memoir of the author's grandfather, but Chabon has always been a wizard at telling stories. Now, right at the start of the book, he gives due notice that he will let nothing—not even fact—stand in the way of a good one. His grandfather leaps off these pages as tearaway, mischief-maker, jail-bird, space-nut, special operations officer in WW2, inventor, failed businessman, businessman again, and elderly Don Quixote battling a pet-eating python in a Florida retirement village. To impress a Dulcinea, naturally; from beginning to end, he shows a fine capacity for love and making love, even if his marriage to the author's grandmother, a Holocaust survivor and fiery actress, was by no means plain sailing. Chabon brings scene after scene to life with his marvelous gift for description, such as this V2 attack in London during the war: The physics of the rocket's detonation had sucked the show windows from the front of Selfridges. The windows had been decorated for the season with ice floes and ice mountains of pasteboard and sequins. A frolic of pasteboard Eskimos and penguins. The aurora borealis or australis in arcs of colored foil. A mannequin Father Christmas in Scott Expedition drag. Now the sidewalk was buried in snowbanks of shattered glass. Christmas trees lay scattered like tenpins. Their needles drifted down onto my grandfather's hat and the epaulets of his greatcoat. When he hung up his trousers that night before bed, cellophane snowflakes snowed down from the upturned cuffs. Pasteboard Eskimos and penguins, headless, torn in half, continued their inaccurate cohabitation. Father Christmas was found the next morning in a dovecote on a nearby rooftop, intact and unharmed apart from a holiday frosting of pigeon shit.I got the book two years ago as a review copy from Amazon Vine. When I finally opened it, I kicked myself for not having done so sooner; it felt like digging into one of those cornucopia of stories I devoured as a boy. But then, roughly halfway through, I suddenly realized that I did not particularly want to read any more. Nothing had changed; I'd just had enough. So what was the problem? Perhaps my difficulty with classification is a clue. Is it fiction (which I enjoy) or a non-fiction memoir (which generally I don't)? Because of its many brilliant free-standing episodes, I have put it on my "stories" shelf, but does it also add up to be a novel? It works in the moment, but does it also work as a 400-page whole? As I see it, there are three ways in which an author might generate ongoing momentum. He can make the individual sections so wonderful that the reader cannot stop. Call this the box of chocolates approach; it works for a while, but you still must allow for indigestion. Or he can make us readers so interested in his grandfather as a person that we are anxious to see what happens to him. Chabon almost succeeds in this, I think, especially once his grandmother and mother come into the picture. But (personal failing) I am not a fan of memoir and biography generally, and it is difficult to truly invest in someone who is never given a proper name. Thirdly, the author can give succeeding chapters an increasing gravity or complexity, building up themes that can be developed into a true novel. Again, I think I saw Chabon beginning to do this roughly a third of the way through the book, but it was not quite enough to capture my loyalty. I stopped at about the halfway point, then read the last four chapters in detail. Nothing in them, I'm afraid, made me regret my decision to skip—though someone who is into non-fiction might not have had my problem. All the same, Michael Chabon is indeed brilliant, and I do not want to make this a negative review. So let me end with the first passage which made me think that this might be a novel after all. The grandfather, with the allied forces invading Germany in the last winter of the War, comes upon a priest in a rural village. He has a name, Father Nickel, and in the two or three chapters in which he features, becomes almost as well filled-out a character as the grandfather himself. Moreover Chabon, who has emphasized throughout the book that this is a Jewish story, creates a character from a very different belief system, and does so with a glowing generosity that I shall remember even after the rest has faded: "We've has a very cold winter," the old priest said. He was sitting up front, next to Gatto. Everyone agrees that this was unquestionably the case. "I gave out the pews and reredos and so forth. The beautiful oak pulpit, which a professor-doctor from Tübingen dated to the thirteenth century. I told them to take the crucifix too. It was quite large. Used prudently, it might have heated a dozen homes for a night or two. But there they drew the line. They were shocked, I think. I tried to explain that if He would give His life to save their souls, He would not mind parting with His image to warm their bones." He shook his head, looking at the ruin of his church. "Of course, in the end it went to waste."...more |
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Jun 02, 2018
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Jun 09, 2018
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Sep 11, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0141021195
| 9780141021195
| 0141021195
| 3.54
| 750
| Jul 05, 2005
| Aug 03, 2006
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really liked it
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An Anti-Memoir To write fiction is to make a succession of choices, to send the narrative and the characters in one direction rather than another. SAn Anti-Memoir To write fiction is to make a succession of choices, to send the narrative and the characters in one direction rather than another. Story is navigation: successful story is the triumphant progress down exactly the right paths, avoiding the dead ends, the unsatisfactory turns. Life, of course, is not at all like that. There is no shrewd navigator, just a person's own haphazard lurching from one decision to another. Which is why life so often seems to lack the authenticity of fiction. And when a writer contemplates her own life, there is an irresistible compulsion to tinker with it, to try out a crucial adjustment here or there. What follows in one such tinkering. The protagonist is not myself, her experience and her associates are invented, but she is perhaps a suggestion of another outcome.The "other outcome" in this section of Penelope Lively's fascinating "anti-memoir" of 2005 is her imagining what might have happened if, instead of continuing in her humble research assistant job at Oxford, she had accepted the suggestion of a visiting American professor that she apply for a fellowship at his transatlantic university. Her alter-ego protagonist, now in her middle years, accompanies her new husband for a guest lecture in Oxford then goes on to visit some relatives she hardly knows. Lively may be imagining a different life for herself, but her portrait of a British expatriate coming back is dead on the money, and (genders reversed) virtually mirrors my own. Let me quote three more of her cues, which I often find more engaging than the stories themselves: Everything pointed to a German assault on Cairo. Now there was a serious exodus. Many went to Palestine, as it then was; others to Kenya, Tanganyika, Aden. And those who could get a passage boarded ships bound for South Africa. Cape Town was said to be delightful.So Jean, Lively's childhood alter-ego, instead of going from Cairo to Palestine, as her real family did, sails for Cape Town in the charge of her nanny—and never gets there. We dance and dance, and sometime in the small hours we leave for his flat. There is only one way in which this night can end. […] I have had two children; they have been the light of my life. But what about the children who never were, the shadow children never born who lurk in the wings? For me, the night of the Chelsea Arts Ball was just a heady rite of passage—but suppose it had been otherwise?The protagonist in this story is not Miranda, Lively's imagined double who falls deep into the hippie culture, but Miranda's daughter Chloe, determined to undo all the mistakes her mother made; will she manage any better? And so, by a whisker, he missed the battle of the Imjin River, into which other national servicemen with the Northumberland Fusiliers were flung, some of them within days of their arrival in Japan for forward posting to Korea. […] I might never have known him. We might never have met. There might never have been out children, and theirs, and the forty-one years of love and life and shared experiences, and those long hard months at the end.Writing in 2005, Lively anticipates Kate Atkinson's brilliant novel of alternative endings, Life After Life. A closer comparison, though, is to Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days, in which she tells the story of a real person (her grandmother) in terms of a series of outcomes that in fact did not happen. But because it contains so much that is real, Erpenbeck's book reads continuously, as a novel. Lively's breaks into a series of short stories, each with different protagonists and settings, with the author's real life continued only in the brief interludes such as those I have quoted. And as stories, they are of mixed quality. All of them show an uncanny feel for the language and the social attitudes that (to British ears at least) so perfectly capture the time and class. But many of them do not go beyond such vignettes. The few stories that do, however, are special. "The Battle of the Imjin River," for example, contains some of the best battle writing I have ever read from any author, let alone a female one. The first story, "The Mozambique Channel," is a wartime romance narrative with a terrifying climax, made all the more special by being filtered through the mind and voice of a children's nanny. And "Comet," in which Lively imagines that she has been killed in air accident and her remains found only decades later, turns into a beautiful and moving story about two loves: one that budded but never bloomed, and another discovered in the autumn of life. I would recommend this book especially to those who have read several of Lively's novels. Its pages are peopled with the cousins of her characters: similar lifestyles, similar education, similar problems, similar jobs. It cements the realization that everything in an author's fiction is distilled somehow from her experience of life—in Lively's case more than most. And it reinforces one of the persistent themes of her novels—shown perhaps most clearly in Consequences —that the "haphazard lurching from one decision to another" in fact leads to other decisions and those to others, making up that texture of interconnections that constitute a well-lived life. ...more |
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Sep 08, 2016
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Sep 10, 2016
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Aug 24, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0701187964
| 9780701187965
| 0701187964
| 4.04
| 2,899
| 2012
| May 02, 2013
|
really liked it
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The Sould of the Kibbutz I have not read any of Amos Oz's major books, so I didn't entirely know what to expect. The one book I did read, Suddenly in t The Sould of the Kibbutz I have not read any of Amos Oz's major books, so I didn't entirely know what to expect. The one book I did read, Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest, is a childlike (but not childish) fable about history, ecology, and perhaps the state of Israel. So I was not surprised by the gentle unassuming style of these stories of kibbutz life in the 1950s, even if they did not seem to have much to say about the political, religious, or social life of Israel towards the end of its first decade. I saw them as pencil sketches, capturing their subjects in a few economical strokes, but making no attempt to fill in the entire picture. What I was not prepared for was the way the eight stories would build on one another to make a whole that is considerably greater than the sum of its parts. Typically, each story introduces a character or two, develops a situation, and then leaves it poignantly unresolved. We meet Zvi Provizor, the meticulous gardener who delights in relaying news of world disasters he picks up on his radio; for a while, it looks as if he will build a relationship with a lonely schoolteacher, but something gets in the way. We meet Osnat the launderess who, when her husband leaves her for another woman, finds herself striking up a kind of friendship with her rival. In the title story, we meet Nahum Asherov, the electrician, whose 17-year-old daughter has moved in with David Dagan, one of the founders of the kibbutz, but a serial womanizer; Nahum's attempt to remonstrate with his old friend gets him nowhere. And we meet a high school junior, Moshe Yashar, a boarder from outside the kibbutz, who receives permission to visit his father in hospital; when somebody sees him taking the bus into town and asks what they have there that they don't have here, Moshe says nothing but thinks of replying: Strangers. At this point, halfway through the book, I started to notice that the same characters would come up again in other stories, so that unfinished plot lines would get tied up in retrospect, or minor characters would take the lead in stories of their own. One example of the latter is Roni Shindlin, the camp comedian, who now makes a devastating appearance as a desperate father trying to protect his five-year-old son from bullying at the children's home. At this point too I realized that I needed to look up more about the kibbutz movement, with its quasi-Marxist history of shared labor and property, gender equality, and community child-rearing. Though determinedly secular, the old-timers, as one character says, "are actually religious people who left their old religion for a new one that's just as full of sins and transgressions, prohibitions and strict rules." Oz clearly has an affection for these people as individuals, but as the fifth, sixth, and seventh stories build in a powerful crescendo, it also becomes clear that he is questioning the whole system. Though the final story is about the most doctrinaire kibbutznik of them all, an old shoemaker named Martin Vandenberg who wants to end wars by teaching everybody Esperanto, it once more ends incomplete on a touching note of pathos, which is perhaps Oz's verdict on the entire movement. ...more |
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Oct 12, 2013
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Oct 13, 2013
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Aug 09, 2016
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| 0385534892
| 9780385534895
| 0385534892
| 3.82
| 3,599
| Aug 13, 2013
| Aug 13, 2013
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really liked it
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Loners and Seekers Just read the first story in this varied, provocative, and often fanciful collection by Aimee Bender. Called "Appleless," it is abou Loners and Seekers Just read the first story in this varied, provocative, and often fanciful collection by Aimee Bender. Called "Appleless," it is about a girl who wouldn't eat apples, as told by others who sit in the orchard all day, cross-legged, eating all the apples that drop into their laps. "They are the threaded Fujis, with streaks of woven jade and beige, or the dark and rosy Rome Beauties. Pippins, Pink Ladies, Braeburns, McIntosh. The orchard grows them all." In two-and-a-half poetic pages, the story goes through many phases: bright, lush, sexual, highly disturbing, and ultimately rather sad. It is a piece I would expect to see anthologized many times over. None of the other stories are this brief, this concentrated, or quite this evocative, but most show similar approaches and concerns. Four or five of them rely on fantasy, in a manner rather like that of Angela Carter, as in the story of a skilled seamstress recruited to go to Malaysia to sew up tigers who have come apart at the seams. The title piece, a spin-off of the Perrault story "Donkeyskin," is about a couturier commissioned to make three dresses for the king's daughter, dyed to the colors of the moon, the sun, and the sky, the dyes made up not only of natural ingredients, but also ground-up jewels, anger, and death. Only in the final story, "The Devourings," about an ogre who accidentally eats his own children, did I feel that the fantasy went too far, with too many ingredients to make a clean resonant myth. The disturbing sexuality of the first story is also present in a number of others. We have a wife who sells herself to her husband as a game, then finds she cannot retreat. We have a young woman who invites two good male friends around to her apartment on a Saturday afternoon, and sets up a situation in which (in reversal of the common male fantasies) she acts as the voyeur. Another young woman in a college town takes part in a protest march that turns into an orgy, which she watches sadly from the shadows of a nearby porch. "Appleless" contrasted a loner (the girl who won't eat apples) with the group, and ended with almost a reversal of values. The other three stories mentioned in the previous paragraph ("The Red Ribbon," "On a Saturday Afternoon," and "Bad Return") also involve loners who either begin that way or find themselves to be so. This is a theme common to most of the stories in the book, even realistic ones like "Lemonade," about a high-school girl who drives a more popular friend to the mall, only to return alone when the friend meets up with others she likes better. Pitch-perfect in its evocation of California teen-speak, it is all the more devastating for being shrugged off as no big deal. "The doctor went to see the rabbi. 'Tell me, rabbi, please,' he said, 'about God.'" Sounds like the first line of a joke, but actually it begins one of the most profound stories, "The Doctor and the Rabbi." He is an atheist and single; she (the rabbi) is married. They meet again. The rabbi gets ill and the doctor is the one managing her blood transfusions. "They slipped into the affair, even though it was not an affair. It was never anything to do with losing clothes. It was not the deep sharing of feelings. It was almost entirely one-sided. It was simple, like he'd slipped slightly into her blood, and she slipped strongly into his thinking." Despite the rich color and raised temperature of many of the other stories, this one appeals to me for being understated, with little action and only a whispered epiphany, yet saying so much about spirituality and the intercourse of ideas. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 27, 2013
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Oct 28, 2013
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Aug 09, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0820343498
| 9780820343495
| 0820343498
| 3.94
| 193
| Sep 15, 2012
| Jan 01, 2012
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liked it
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How Love is Lost Don't open this book expecting happy endings. Of the ten stories in the collection, only one ends in anything much more promising than How Love is Lost Don't open this book expecting happy endings. Of the ten stories in the collection, only one ends in anything much more promising than resigned acceptance. I won't give the name of that one exception, but here is its last sentence: You will be full of hope, will take it on faith that she will be there, waiting for you, with open arms, believing briefly, fervently, though you know it only happens in the movies, that yours will be a Happy Ending.Well, maybe it will; there is always that possibility. The giveaway phrase, though, is "you know it only happens in the movies." Most of E. J. Levy's characters believe that there is little chance of permanent success in the real world, but even the brief periods of contentment are worth much—a fact that stops the book from being entirely depressing; very few of the characters have become cynical. Many of the stories begin with the recent loss of a lover; a few others end with one. There are often flings with other people along the way, briefly welcome or immediately regretted, but they are never the focus. The prevailing tone is elegiac: an almost pastoral lament for a lost idyll; it is a literary mode that has always attracted me. Most of the characters are around what I presume to be the author's age and situation: well-educated thirty-somethings working as adjunct instructors at a university, or something very similar. But the exceptions (most of which come towards the end of the book) are striking. The protagonist of "The Three Christs of Moss Lake, Minnesota," for example, is an orderly in a mental hospital. Those of "Theory of the Leisure Class" are an older couple on a birding tour of Costa Rica, feeling greatly superior to an obnoxious younger pair, until a glimpse of them on the dance floor suddenly makes them reevaluate the fifty years of their own marriage. Another story, "Gravity," is set at a synagogue wedding in Minneapolis, where family tensions lead to the reevaluation of two other relationships: those of the bride's now-separated parents, and of her gay brother. Yes, gay. As the design on the cover so wittily suggests, Levy's relationships of love and heartbreak take place between women and men, but also men and men, and women and women. With the exception of one brief scene of graphic bondage, the gender combinations make surprisingly little difference; these are just people like ourselves. But by the same token, I don't think I will be remembering them very long either. Except for one extraordinary story (again, I won't say which it is) that leads you deeper and deeper into a triangle situation until you suddenly realize that the assumption you had made about the gender of one of the characters may well be wrong. It is a marvelous piece of narrative sleight-of-hand that I shall not quickly forget at all. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 19, 2013
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Nov 21, 2013
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Aug 01, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0307379388
| 9780307379382
| 0307379388
| 3.36
| 1,027
| Jan 07, 2014
| Jan 07, 2014
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liked it
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Sad, Weird, and Weirder "I don't think my mother will die today." You have to have some admiration for an author who begins a story with such a wonderf Sad, Weird, and Weirder "I don't think my mother will die today." You have to have some admiration for an author who begins a story with such a wonderful inversion of Camus' famous opening to The Stranger, even though he soon moves into a clotted dystopia of alienation that makes Camus seem almost cheerful. This particular story, though, "Watching Mysteries With My Mother," is almost normal: a meditation on death (and English mystery series on PBS) that only gradually replaces empathy with detachment. It comes more or less in the middle of a collection of fifteen stories that are thoughtfully arranged, from sad but straightforward at the beginning to weird and still weirder towards the end. All four stories in Part 1 have male sad-sack protagonists, out of shape, no longer young, unhappily married or divorced. Not cheerful reading. But I liked the second, "I Can Say Many Nice Things," about an professor teaching a fiction-writing class on a cruise ship. Marcus' skewering of the students and the pedagogical balancing act required of the professor is so accurate that it made me laugh out loud; I should have treasured the moment, for it would not happen again. Part 2 contains a couple of stories in the form of interviews with sociologists doing work on childhood and hermit behavior respectively. The content is chilling, but the language is such a perfect parody of academic discourse in the social sciences that I have to quote it: The term "adult" is problematic, I think, and it's too easy to say that my childwork is directly divisive to Matures, particularly Rigid or Bolted Matures. I may help accelerate a latent behavior, I may enable conflict vectors along the lines of the Michiganers, who fasted as a form of warfare, and I feign indifference to familial tension, but I think that success itself has been fetishized, and a certain nostalgia for growth has spoiled our thinking.Better buckle up, for similar diction will recur in many of the later stories. Much as in Ben Marcus' novel The Flame Alphabet, they move towards totalitarian or post-apocalyptic societies. In some, as in "The Loyalty Protocol," even normal interactions and family bonds are governed by community vigilantism whose standards the protagonist cannot fathom. In "The Father Costume," life on land has been replaced by rowing in small boats, and language has all but disappeared. In "First Love" and the other stories in Part 5, a primitive pseudo-science has taken over even the normal processes of feeling and expressing love. But "Leaving the Sea," the title story, is a tour-de-force: six pages of increasing madness in a single run-on period, breaking down with devastating effect at the very end into a stuttered gasp of staccato sentences. Yes, Marcus is good—for those that like him—but I can't say I derived much enjoyment myself. But I was pleased when the last story of all, "The Moors," about a man ("fat Thomas the sadness machine") lusting after a colleague in his office, returned to at least some semblance of the real world, linking neatly with the tales with which the collection opened. And a pleasant note to end on: I love the paper-sculpture covers that the publisher gives his books! ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 24, 2013
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Nov 26, 2013
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Aug 01, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1931883343
| 9781931883344
| 1931883343
| 3.52
| 63
| Oct 21, 2013
| Nov 12, 2013
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really liked it
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Surrealism, Alive and Well In scale, this might be called Littell-lite, its elegant 184 pages nowhere near the heft of Littell's 974-page magnum opus T Surrealism, Alive and Well In scale, this might be called Littell-lite, its elegant 184 pages nowhere near the heft of Littell's 974-page magnum opus The Kindly Ones. This edition by Two Lines Press of San Francisco is also a beautiful physical object, a svelte volume, silky to the touch and calming to the eye. The text consists of four pieces that Littell wrote for the Fata Morgana press in Montpellier, France, between 2007 and 2112, varying in length between 30 and 70 pages. Like all Littell's fiction, they were written in French, although the author himself is American. The translation by Charlotte Mandell is exemplary, not because it reads like colloquial English, but because, even in English, it could not be anything but French. For well over 100 years, the French have had a particular affinity for inward-turned writing about memory, emotional states, and question of existence. The classic, of course, is Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913–), but forty years earlier, Rimbaud was exploring inner states through an extraordinary use of imagery in A Season in Hell (1873). France in turn became ground zero for Surrealism, with its interest in dream states and the potency of the absurd, a thread that has continued well beyond the middle of the last century. A particular strand of this is the exploration of pornography, in such works as Georges' Battaile's Story of the Eye (1928)—whose echoes I hear strongly in these pieces by Littell—right through to writers like Michel Houellebecq today. The nearest thing I have read recently in American writing has been Sergio de la Pava's recent Personae, although that is much more complex than the stripped-down simplicity of Littell. The first section, Etudes, consists of four short pieces, each dated with one of the seasons of the year. "A Summer Sunday" seems to be about some ordinary tryst that takes place in a nameless country scarred by an ongoing war. "The Wait," as its title suggests, is one of those Kafkaesque waits for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn, but it also contains an episode of graphic homosexuality. The spirit of Kafka surfaces again in "Between Planes," in which the narrator and his lover keep missing each other over a long sequence of irregular flights and missed connections in what seems like Soviet Europe. "Fait Accompli," finally, is some kind of emotional negotiation that appears to be between lovers in a triangle situation, but it is expressed entirely in terms of logical calculus, with numbered postulates and consequences. Many of these themes—violence, stagnation, loss of identity, and persistent sexuality—recur in the other three pieces, which all have something of the consistency of a dream. The longest and most impressive of them is the last, An Old Story. It starts with the narrator getting out of a swimming pool and running down an ill-lit, twisting corridor with encroaching walls. From time to time, he encounters a door to one side, opens it, and goes through, finding anything from a suburban garden, a family mansion, or a sexual orgy, to a village in the African jungle. Most of the episodes involve sex: at first apparently that of man and wife (with a small child in the middle distance), but gradually blurring not only the nature of the relationships but also the gender of the participants; one scene has him dressed in women's clothing in bed with girls who seem possessed of male appendages. Halfway through, the story stops and starts again, following the same general path, with the same landmarks (a Leonardo reproduction on a wall, an embroidered coverlet on a bed), but now with the sexuality clearly all male. I have little idea what it means, and I wouldn't want to read more than two hundred pages or so. But I do know I'm in the hands of a master, which makes me eager to pick up The Kindly Ones after all. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 30, 2013
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Dec 2013
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Aug 01, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0224099779
| 9780224099776
| 0224099779
| 3.65
| 8,620
| Apr 07, 2016
| Sep 22, 2016
|
really liked it
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And That's All? I considered many possibilities for the title of this review: first The Nine Ages of Man, then Holidays from Hell, then Losers. David S And That's All? I considered many possibilities for the title of this review: first The Nine Ages of Man, then Holidays from Hell, then Losers. David Szalay's nine stories feature men at different stages of their lives, they are all set abroad, and they are uniformly depressing. Although there is only one small connection between them (the 73-year-old reired diplomat in the ninth story is the grandfather of the 17-year-old student in the first), the publisher's blurb suggests that they "aggregate into a picture of a single shared existence." And Szalay's title says that this is a composite portrait of what it is to be a man. If so, I'm not buying it. All these characters are losers, none more so than the pathetic Murray in the seventh story, fired from various jobs, a remittance man trying to survive in a dull village in Croatia, but dogged by failure with everything he tries. His is the longest story of the lot, dismally so, but at least it makes some of the others seem upbeat by comparison. All the same, I stick by my description: Losers. Though, with the younger ones, perhaps not for ever. The sensitive young student in the first story, InterRailing round Europe with a friend who has very different ideas from his, will presumably come into his own as he grows up. And the French college dropout in the second story who goes alone on a package tour to a ramshackle hotel in Cyprus when his friend drops out, will surely not experience anything so horrendous again in his life. The semi-employed Hungarian ex-soldier in the third story, brought along as security for a high-priced call girl's visit to London, appears to have brawn rather than brains, but at least he shows himself to have a heart. With the exception of the wretched Murray, the later characters, at the prime of their lives or in retirement, have all achieved a high measure of success. In the middle stories, we have a brilliant young medieval philologist, the deputy editor of a Copenhagen newspaper, and an international property developer. They are certainly not losers in the eyes of the world, but there is that matter of the heart…. The philologist behaves abominably when he learns his girlfriend is pregnant, but there is some possibility that he can atone. The editor flies to Spain to assure a high-ranking politician that his paper will be discreet in handling the news of his adulterous affair, but has he any intention of doing so? The developer has greater dreams than selling some jerry-built property in an Alpine village, but has he the courage to succeed? The last two stories also feature outwardly successful men, but both in their different ways are contemplating the end of life. One is a Russian tycoon facing ruin on both the financial and personal fronts. The other (and to me the only really sympathetic character of the lot), is Sir Anthony Parson, a retired diplomat facing the end of his days and looking back on a life in which he has mainly acted a character not his own. All the stories take place largely off the character's home turf. The protagonists are Belgian, Danish, English, French, Hungarian, Russian, and Scottish; the settings include Denmark, Germany, Italy, Slovakia, Spain, the French Alps, and a luxury yacht on the Mediterranean. This is a canny strategy on Szalay's part since many of us are tempted to behave differently when away from home. For the most part, though, this is not the glamorous Europe of the travel magazines. Prague is awash with tourists, the hotel in Cyprus is built on waste land a mile from the sea, the Alpine village has been blighted by gimcrack development, and the nearest town to Sir Anthony's Italian villa is famous only for its Museum of the Marshes (really). So why do I not give this three or even two stars, if it presents such a dismal picture of masculine humanity? Mainly because David Szalay writes so well. Like his characters or not, you do get drawn into their stories. His descriptions are evocative and clear, but he also has a marvelous use of the ellipsis, short phrases that go nowhere definite but suggest much (an effect sometimes heightened by subtle uses of typography). In the same vein, he avoids neat endings; you are left with questions rather than answers; you can draw your own conclusions. In this general atmosphere of failure, I found myself looking for the few positive things I could find: a moment of unexpected companionship, a philosophical resignation, the possibility of change. And I have to say that I recognized most of the bad qualities in his masculine gallery from looking into the mirror of my own life at one time or another. But I do not accept that this is All That Man Is. Hence my final title, itself a question: And That's All? And my emphatic answer: NO! However true Szalay is, I know we men can be so much more. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 30, 2017
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Aug 2017
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Jul 27, 2016
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Paperback
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| 1616955236
| 9781616955236
| 1616955236
| 3.63
| 220
| Sep 13, 2016
| Sep 13, 2016
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liked it
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Inventive but Often Gross Well, they warn you: "Dark and disturbing… a virtuoso reimagining of our world." Full credit for that imagination; I just fou Inventive but Often Gross Well, they warn you: "Dark and disturbing… a virtuoso reimagining of our world." Full credit for that imagination; I just found the darkness hard to take. I have read nine of these 18 stories—including the longest at 65 pages, so rather over half—and that is enough for me. Or maybe Red returned not with a line of small girls but with the wolf himself in tow, a rope turned cruel around his neck and her knife wet with his protests. In this version, it wasn't until she reached the village center that she slit the wolf from throat to tail. Too late, she retrieved each and every child from the wolf's stomach, each one bruised and bloodied and without breath. In anger, the villagers filled the wolf's belly with stones while Red held close his howling head, recounting for him the many names of these dead children, the many pounds of shale and limestone it would take to buy their penance.This is from "Wolf Parts," a nightmare compilation of every version of the Little Red Ridinghood tale, with twice that number of his own, all endlessly recurring, in which Red gets eaten by the wolf, gets raped by the wolf, enters the wolf, enters her grandmother. It is full of themes that come up again in the other stories: murder and violence, the subduction and death of children, a wallowing in female sexuality including menstruation and childbirth, the blurring of the line between animal and human, and a dystopian world where nothing is as it should be. The longest story, for example, "Cataclysm Baby," is structured around a list of baby names from Absalom through Zedekiah as this couple (one of the very few still able to do so) keep turning out babies into a polluted world, each coming out more deformed than the last. The title story, which opens the collection, is a bleak Kafkalike fable about a boy imprisoned in a room with an albino ape by a man with rough hands; his only way out is when he shall become the keeper in his turn and imprison another boy. In "Dredge," a story with a more normal setting, a man with a dark childhood pulls a drowned teenage girl out of a pond but, instead of notifying the police takes her home to keep in his freezer. But there are also stories whose originality resides as much in the way they are told than in the horrors they contain. "A Certain Number of Bedrooms" uses house catalogues as a way of alluding to an off-camera family tragedy. "The Collectors" does much the same with a numbered paragraphs to build an inventory of an increasingly macabre situation. And in my favorite, "An Index of How Our Family Was Killed," Bell does just that, providing a 14-page alphabetical index to a crime story we never get to read: Absence of loved ones, never diminishing no matter how much time has passed. [review copy from Amazon Vine] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 09, 2016
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Aug 10, 2016
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| 3.68
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it was amazing
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Sep 18, 2013
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Jul 17, 2018
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| 4.05
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really liked it
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Aug 03, 2018
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Jun 07, 2018
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| 3.30
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it was amazing
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Apr 27, 2018
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Apr 24, 2018
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| 3.62
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really liked it
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Jan 31, 2018
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Jan 31, 2018
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| 3.91
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really liked it
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Feb 24, 2006
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Jan 02, 2018
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| 3.52
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it was amazing
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Jan 02, 2018
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Dec 31, 2017
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| 4.07
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it was amazing
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Dec 31, 2017
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Dec 30, 2017
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| 3.57
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really liked it
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Feb 25, 2013
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Aug 16, 2017
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| 4.07
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liked it
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Jul 07, 2017
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Jul 04, 2017
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| 3.80
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really liked it
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Jun 17, 2017
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Jun 18, 2017
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| 3.78
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it was amazing
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Jun 09, 2017
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Jun 11, 2017
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| 3.80
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really liked it
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Jun 09, 2018
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Sep 11, 2016
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| 3.54
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really liked it
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Sep 10, 2016
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Aug 24, 2016
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| 4.04
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really liked it
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Oct 13, 2013
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Aug 09, 2016
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| 3.82
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really liked it
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Oct 28, 2013
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Aug 09, 2016
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| 3.94
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liked it
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Nov 21, 2013
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Aug 01, 2016
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| 3.36
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liked it
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Nov 26, 2013
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Aug 01, 2016
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| 3.52
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really liked it
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Dec 2013
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Aug 01, 2016
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| 3.65
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really liked it
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Aug 2017
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Jul 27, 2016
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| 3.63
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liked it
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Aug 10, 2016
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Jul 26, 2016
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