Book review: Paradise Lost: A Graphic Novel

Undertaking to reinterpret a classic is always an ambitious and perilous endeavor. To do it right requires herculean effort. The artist must re-imagine, but at the same time, remain faithful to the original work. More often than not, the effort falls short somewhere. The new work either fails to attain the peaks set for it by the original, or the artist, enchanted with his own vision, loses sight of what made the original profound and significant. Examples are too many to count.

(And we do note the significance of this latter propensity in the context of the title here being discussed!)

Not so Pablo Auladell's graphical representation of John Milton's classic epic poem, Paradise Lost. Auladell's imagery, at times stark, at times deliberately vague, adds severity and depth to the abridged verse that captions the story-line. In particular, Auladell has a gift for depicting facial expressions: Satan's horror and glee, Adam's innocence and corruption, Beelzebub's unfathomable non-expression.

When first I read the original work, decades ago, I was intrigued by the romantic vision of the ultimate anti-hero, just as Milton intended. (Judge Holden, Captain Ahab, meet the original!) Now, with the temperance of middle age and with Auladell's illustrations as a study guide, I more readily saw past the seduction of Satan's seemingly valiant defiance, clear through to the perversity and depredation behind it.

I savored this book, poring over each illustration, parsing carefully the verse, comparing it to the haunting expressions of the characters.

Paradise Lost is a disturbing tale --check that --it is the disturbing tale. In addition, it is the literary prototype for the anti-hero motif. Auladell treats the original work with the reverence it deserves and offers his own convincing interpretation.

The unease that crowds my awareness at this moment, several days after reading it, attest to the power of the story itself.

Book review: All the Light We Cannot See

As near as I can tell, Anthony Doerr's latest novel, All the Light We Cannot See, is the current favorite of book clubs all across America. I learned of the book because my mother had read it as the selection for her book club. And fellow book club member Jim Kidwell's mother had also read the novel because it was the choice for her book club. It stands to reason, considering that the novel was this year awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. And judging from the reception the novel has received from the literary press, Anthony Doerr has set his feet firmly on the path toward that most elusive of states: "successful novelist."

All the Light... is set in the small seaside town of Saint-Malo in France during World War II. A blind French girl, Marie-Laure, huddles in the home of her eccentric uncle, abandoned and alone, the unwitting guardian of a secret treasure. At the same time, a conscripted German soldier, Werner, the orphaned German boy with a talent for understanding radio circuitry, works to find the source of radio signals that have been emitting from within Saint-Malo, relaying information to the French Resistance. Even as the two of them ponder their respective predicaments, pamphlets warning of impending bombardment blow through the streets of the nearly-empty town.

As the novel progresses, we learn the circumstances and events that have led to this situation. Marie-Laure is the daughter of the locksmith at the Paris Museum of Natural History, separated by the tides of war from her father and her Paris home. Werner, because of his technical acumen, has been conscripted into the National Socialist movement, where he is told that cruelty and ruthless efficiency are virtues. As the war grinds forward, these two protagonists, seemingly set upon divergent and opposing paths, are somehow drawn together, somehow presented with an opportunity to bring about the triumph of compassion and humanity over unspeakable evil.

I found Doerr's prose to be compelling and humane. He masterfully sets a mood of dreadful expectation in the opening lines of the novel and that expectation is maintained. He has a knack for inserting descriptive sentences at precise intervals so that the reader never loses a sense of being present in the moment. I found it interesting and perhaps suiting that Doerr does not delve deeply into the specifics of Nazi cruelty, but skirts delicately around the most horrible events.

Consider this excerpt. Werner has come to the sick ward of the Nazi youth training camp to check on his friend, Frederik, who was beaten by bigger, stronger boys in the school:

A single bed with blood in it. Blood on the pillow and on the sheets and even on the enameled metal of the bed frame. Pink rags in a basin. Half-unrolled bandage on the floor. The nurse bustles over and grimaces at Werner. Outside of the kitchens, she is the only woman at the school.
"Why so much blood?" he asks.
She sets four fingers across her lips. Debating perhaps whether to tell him or pretend she does not know. Accusation or resignation or complicity.
"Where is he?
"Leipzig. For surgery." She touches a round white button on her uniform with what might be an inconveniently trembling finger. Otherwise her manner is entirely stern.
"What happened?"
"Shouldn't you be at noontime meal?"
Each time he blinks, he sees the men of his childhood, laid-off miners drifting through back alleys, men with hooks for fingers and vacuums for eyes; he sees Bastian standing over a smoking river, snow falling all around him. Führer, folk, fatherland. Steel your body, steel your soul.
"When will he be back?"
"Oh, she says, a soft enough word. She shakes her head.

So much is said without elaborating on the horrible details of what happened to the boy. Some might call this a cop-out, but I disagree. In much of today's literature, gruesomeness and unsettling details seem to be the trend. (Read any Cormac McCarthy novel for examples.) But I found Doerr's approach more palatable and no less effective. Any book that deals with Nazis and World War II is necessarily going to touch on some nasty subject matter. But this novel is written in such a way that even my delicately sensitive mother could enjoy it. And one can easily argue that by leaving the details to the reader's imagination, the cruelty is more mysterious and terrible.

All the Light We Cannot See is a poignant coming-of-age novel, with well-drawn characters that I genuinely cared about. It successfully depicts the cruelty of war and the corruption of National Socialism, of how it victimizes even its own adherents.

After reading this book, I'm eagerly anticipating Doerr's next novel, whatever it may be. I highly recommend this novel.

Book review: Replay

Remember the 1993 Harold Ramis film, Groundhog's Day?

If you've seen the movie, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, you'll recall that the protagonist, Phil Connors (Murray), is stuck in a temporal loop that requires him to relive one particular day in his life until he gets it right.

Ken Grimwood's novel, Replay, first published in 1986, reminded me of that film. When I read Grimwood's novel, and realized its premise, my first thought was of the Ramis flick.

The comparison is manifestly unfair, of course. Grimwood published his novel seven years previous to the film. So to the extent that the concept of reliving one's life while retaining memories is original, the credit goes to Grimwood.

You see, as the novel opens, the protagonist, Jeff Winston, a 43-year-old radio journalist, dies of a massive heart attack while on the phone with his wife only to return to his life 20 years earlier as a college student in Atlanta, retaining the memories from his previous existence.

Something of a mind-blowing concept, no? If you had a chance to do it all over again, with foreknowledge of what is to come, how would your life choices differ? Jeff Winston gets the opportunity to find out. Several times.

Over the course of the novel, Jeff repeats his life multiple times, each time choosing a different path: fabulously rich tycoon (his foreknowledge of events allows him to make millions betting on sporting events), ascetic hermit, humanitarian, and more. Whenever he reaches the age of 43, he is again felled by a heart attack. However, after several repetitions, he notices that each return to life advances his starting age slightly. As the novel progresses, Jeff and his reincarnating companion, Pamela Phillips, begin to wonder what will happen when they return to life at the precise moment of their respective deaths.

I enjoyed this book, but mostly because of the originality of plot and story line. Grimwood is imaginative and readers will recognize the love that the author put into his work. (Grimwood himself succumbed to a heart attack in 2003. Kinda eerie, eh?)

But I found the novel's prose to be overburdened and awkward, and frankly, I found the characters to be rather flat. And then, the novel's core supposition (dealing with the limits of free will in a clockwork Universe) seems contradictory and un-thought-out.

Replay is a fast and worthwhile read, though. I'd recommend it as a great vacation book. Good beach reading.

Book review: Kindred

Once again, I find myself the lonely curmudgeon. My book club's selection for this go-round, was Octavia E. Butler's "slave narrative" novel, Kindred. Everyone in our group not only enjoyed it, but sang its praises to the heavens. Except me. I didn't like it.

Octavia Butler is a celebrated author and something of a pioneer in that she is a black woman, writing in the science-fiction genre, which is largely dominated by white men. We're all familiar with Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, and Ray Bradbury, right?

I suppose Kindred could legitimately be considered science-fiction. It does, after all, involve time travel. But it is science-fiction only in the loosest sense.

Really this book has very little to do with science and more to do with sociology and evolving social mores. It centers around Dana, an African-American woman in Los Angeles in 1976, who is transported "magically" to early nineteenth century Maryland. Her experience is somehow tied to the experiences of Rufus, a white slaveholder with a propensity to put himself in life-threatening situations. Dana is transported between these two time periods several times over the course of the narrative. The novel examines the evolution of her perceptions and attitudes as she alternates between existence as an independent, self-determining black woman and a submissive, shackled slave with no rights.

An interesting premise, to be sure. The parallels between Dana's relationships in her two existences are intriguing, and the potential for social commentary is undeniable.

But, unfortunately, Butler doesn't deliver. Firstly, I was put off by the careless manner in which the time travel element was assumed. It didn't make sense and it wasn't explained satisfactorily. Over the course of the novel, all the characters --Dana, herself, her modern-day husband, Kevin, her "owner," Rufus, her fellow slaves --all seem to casually accept this impossible phenomenon. It didn't ring true.

But more than that, I found Butler's prose to be dull and colorless. The narrative was detached. There was very little imagery and almost no sense of immediacy. Butler seems to studiously avoid the whole "show, don't tell" writer's adage. Here's a sample:

"A couple of Kevin's friends came over on the Fourth of July and tried to get us to go to the Rose Bowl with them for the fireworks. Kevin wanted to go --more to get out of the house than for any other reason, I suspected. I told him to go ahead, but he wouldn't go without me. As it turned out, there was no chance for me to go, anyway. As Kevin's friends left the house, I began to feel dizzy.

I stumbled toward my bag, fell before I reached it, crawled toward it, grabbed it just as Kevin came in from saying good-bye to his friends.

'Dana,' he was saying, 'we can't stay cooped up in this house any longer waiting for something that isn't...'

He was gone."

Here we have an incident that is ripe with potential. But Butler's dull voice makes it fall dead. No drama, no life. Wouldn't it be more effective and entertaining for readers to infer Kevin's desire to see the fireworks through imagery and dialog? Wouldn't the scene be more engaging if we knew something about Kevin's friends? If we heard the actual exchange of words that occurred between them? Couldn't Butler have come up with a more vivid description of Dana's fit than "feel[ing] dizzy?"

There were times, reading this book, when every single sentence I read irritated me. They seemed more likely to have been written by an amateur, by an 8th grade literary arts pupil.

Well, considering that the novel is widely acclaimed, and that it has sold nearly 500,000 copies, there is something in this book that people seem to appreciate. But for me it just didn't work. Hats off to Ms. Butler for breaking new ground for African-American women writers, but I might have hoped that that particular demographic could have produced a more engaging writer.

Book review: The Girl with All the Gifts

Whatever it may say about Western culture these days, a particularly dark, pessimistic genre of art seems to have arisen in the last couple decades. A neighbor of mine once referred to it as "zombie porn." It's a variation on the holocaust meme that ran through earlier books like, On the Beach or Lord of the Flies, but with a twist. Instead of portraying a world in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust (the Soviet Union is some 25 years gone, after all), the new spin on apocalypse is infrastructure collapse, viral infections, or some other equally terrifying cataclysm, in the aftermath of which, survivors must contend with hordes of cannibals or zombies.

M. R. Carey's The Girl with All the Gifts is one such book.

A young girl, Melanie, exists in a strange world where she and other children are held captive, isolated but for their time in a school classroom, where they are bound to their chairs and taught mathematics, reading, writing, and (especially) Greek mythology. Their lessons are taught by a compassionate young woman, Ms. Justineau, for whom Melanie has developed an admiring crush. An austere administrator, Dr. Caldwell oversees the school and the children. A menacing, hard-boiled military man, Sargent Parks, provides security for the facility.

That's about as much of the plot I want to reveal, since Carey goes to pains to conceal the nature of the world so that the reader may discover it over the course of the opening chapters. Suffice it to say that mankind is under assault, and that civilization teeters on annihilation. (If you really want to know, go to the Wikipedia page. They blab.)

In fact, the process of discovery, which occurs over the first half of the book, is the most intriguing and compelling part of the novel. Unfortunately, once the truth is laid out, a significant event transpires, transforming the story to a standard "zombie gauntlet run."

At times, Carey's prose became tedious. He seemed to overuse the adjective "really" to the point of abuse, which became distracting and annoying. But, all in all, I found Carey to be a decent writer. He put effort into character development. Although I wouldn't call the characters in this novel "complex," he does provide them with plausible backgrounds and motivations. That's more than you'll get from a lot of genre fiction writers.

Carey's creation may lack the eloquence and beauty of McCarthy's The Road, but it is certainly more intriguing than Atwood's drab, half-hearted Oryx and Crake.

All in all, The Girl with All the Gifts is a good, fast read. The perfect pastime for a rainy Portland winter.

Book review: The Bone Clocks

David Mitchell's sixth novel, The Bone Clocks, was an inevitable pick for my book club. We'd already read three of his previous novels (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Cloud Atlas, and Ghostwritten) all of which were unanimously and thoroughly enjoyed. So Mitchell's latest seemed like a sure thing.

Well, although the novel is certainly an entertaining read, it failed to meet my expectations in some ways. And, among the members of my book club, I'm not alone. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Bone Clocks is the story of (among other things) an Irish woman named Holly Sykes. Rather than try to summarize the plot myself, I'll rely on Sceptre, David Mitchell's publisher:

In 1984, teenager Holly Sykes runs away from home, a Gravesend pub. Sixty years later, she is to be found in the far west of Ireland, raising a granddaughter as the world's climate collapses. In between, Holly is encountered as a barmaid in a Swiss resort by an undergraduate sociopath in 1991; has a child with a foreign correspondent covering the Iraq War in 2003; and, widowed, becomes the confidante of a self-obsessed author of fading powers and reputation during the present decade. Yet these changing personae are only part of the story, as Holly’s life is repeatedly intersected by a slow-motion war between a cult of predatory soul-decanters and a band of vigilantes led by one Doctor Marinus. Holly begins as an unwitting pawn in this war – but may prove to be its decisive weapon.

A much better synopsis than I could provide, with the added benefit that I can now proceed to what it is I like about the novel, and what I found lacking.

What I liked about the novel, first and foremost I suppose, is that it is David Mitchell. The man has a sublime talent for writing engaging, vivid prose. His dialog is so sharp it could slice sponge cake. The worlds he creates are not only mind-blowing but, more importantly, consistent and true to their own laws.

Which brings up another aspect of the novel that I particularly enjoyed: the continued unveiling of the David Mitchell universe. The Bone Clocks makes reference (in subtle ways) to all of the other David Mitchell novels published to date. The book is chock full of these "Easter eggs." I won't mention any specifics (wouldn't want to reveal any spoilers), but suffice it to say, I was regularly delighted, as I read this book, to discover that various characters were the very same that appeared in Black Swan Green or number9dream or Ghostwritten. Scenes that occurred in other novels are referenced in The Bone Clocks. I noticed many such references while reading this book, and I'm quite sure there are many I missed.

Also, The Bone Clocks is a contemporary novel in every sense of the word. Holly, the protagonist, is a teenager in 1984, which makes her a few years younger than me. At the end of the novel, she's in her sunset years living in a world that seems all too inevitable. Well, God willing, I'll live to see the accuracy of David Mitchell's future and I hope he's wrong!

What I didn't like about the novel: I found the long expository conversations about the nature of the two supernatural factions, the soul-decanters and the reincarnating vigilantes, to be tedious and a bit confusing. I'm sure David Mitchell has it all sorted in his head, and he relates the information through dialog rather than taking the easy way out (the way Margaret Atwood did with Oryx and Crake). Nonetheless, once the idea is fully exposed, it loses some of its intrigue. I found it much more tantalizing in Mitchell's other novels, when readers could only guess at the nature of the strange beings that appear from time to time.

But mostly, what I found disappointing about the novel was this: running throughout, there is a whiff (and just a whiff, mind you) of self-satisfaction. David Mitchell is widely acknowledged as one of the day's gifted novelists and I'm one of his biggest fans. But success is heady stuff. Or maybe it is that, when a writer attains a certain level of success, his editors become a bit more reluctant to use their red pens. In any case, The Bone Clocks seemed less "tight," less perfected than Mitchell's previous books.

That's the problem with being a virtuoso, I suppose. When you set the bar that high, people come to expect so much.

Book review: Here's to you, Jesúsa!

Here's to you, Jesúsa!, Elena Poniatowska's semi-fictional novel about the life of a Mexican peasant woman in the early 20th century, reads like the transcription of a long, rambling monologue.

In the foreword to the novel, Poniatowska explains that the main character of the book, Jesúsa Palancares, is based on a campesina named Josefina Bórquez whom the author befriended while living in Mexico City.

The novel is a recounting of Jesúsa's life. It begins with dim memories of her mother's burial, and continues through her childhood as she tags along behind her roustabout father, a foot soldier for the rebellion in the unsuccessful Mexican revolution. From there, the story progresses through the period of Jesúsa's marriage to an abusive cavalry officer, her widowhood, and her hard-bitten existence as a servant for the Mexican upper classes. It's a story of hardship, brutality, and poverty with only the briefest glimpses of love, laughter, and happiness.

Sounds like a downer, doesn't it? But really, it is not. The virtue of the novel is in its portrayal of Jesúsa's astounding resolution. Jesúsa is a suspicious, unforgiving woman, prone to believe the very worst about people. (And who could blame her?) And, yet, behind the unconquerable defenses of her pessimism and irascibility is a woman who yearns for a justice that can only be delivered by God. 

The book conforms to a uniquely Latin American tradition in literature, the testimonio.  It's not a form I had previously encountered, but Wendy Gimbel of the New York Times describes it as "basically a survival story, [that establishes] credibility by means of language that is direct, never ambiguous."

Consider this passage from the opening chapter:

This is my third time back on Earth, but I've never suffered as much as I have now. I was a queen in my last reincarnation, I know, because I saw my train during a revelation. I was standing in a beauty shop and there were these huge, long mirrors that went from floor to ceiling and I saw my dress and the train. It stretched back really far, and way back there almost at the end, at the tip, there was a triangle of marbled black and yellow tiger stripes. My clothing was all white, like a bridal gown, except for that forked piece of tiger skin, tike the very tip of the devil's tail. Columbine and Pierrot peered into the mirror on either side of me, both dressed in white with those black polka dots they always wear.
    I told them about my revelation at the Obra Espiritual and they said that the royal white clothing was what I was supposed to wear at my final judgment hour, and that the Lord had allowed me to see what I'd been like one of the three times that I came to Earth.
    —That spot on the train of your dress is all you have left to whiten, and if you don't, it will devour your innocence.
    I was wearing a queen's dress with wide sleeves covered with trim. Pierrot and Columbine were my servants but they didn't attend to me as they should have; they spent the whole time fooling around with each other. Queens are always alone. I also told them at the temple that I'd seen a large valley full of spotted cows:
    —It's the herd that the Lord has entrusted to you and you must return them to Him cleansed.
    I have a lot of things going on right now and I don't know when I'm going to get my herd together to remove their stains, if it'll be in this lifetime or in the next, when I evolve again ...

Direct and unambiguous language, just as Gimbel suggests.

The passage also reveals the narrator's deep-seated wisdom. It's a wisdom earned from a lifetime of hardship and from a secret hope and belief that there is more to existence than the bleakness of grinding poverty.

When at first I finished the novel, I wasn't particularly sympathetic to its protagonist. Nor was I all that enamored of the book. But now that I've digested it a bit more, I can see why Here's to you, Jesúsa! is revered among Mexican literary circles. It's a window into a world that is too often ignored and an homage to the Mexican spirit --a spirit that continues to endure even through the country's present-day torments.

Here's to you, indeed, Jesúsa!

Book review: Down in the River

Ryan Blacketter, author of Down in the River, used to teach a class at PCC, entitled "High-Risk Fiction." I had the good fortune to experience the class back in 2011, in which Blacketter led us in examinations of great works of fiction (mostly short stories), examining them line by line and explaining how everything in these works --every change of perspective, every phrase, every sentence, every long vowel --is significant. 

After reading Down in the River, Blacketter's first novel, it's apparent that he puts his conviction into practice.

Down in the River is the story of Lyle Rettew, a troubled youth struggling to find his place in the world after the suicide death of his twin sister. Lyle, his unstable mother and authoritarian older brother (the family patriarch) find themselves in the alien world of Eugene, Oregon. His sister's death, caused the family to be uprooted from their Idaho home, ostracized by their religious community. Lyle has a history of psychological instability made all the more pronounced by his peculiar family life and his adolescent struggle to find acceptance among peers from his new school. In his attempt to find acceptance and to come to terms with his sister's death (a subject which is strictly avoided among his family) Lyle chooses a dark and perplexing course of action.

As I stated, in class, Blacketter emphasized how in great works of fiction, nothing is insignificant. Down in the River is a clear demonstration of that precept.

First of all, there are the characters. Besides Lyle, there is Rosa, Lyle's girlfriend, and her sister, Shanta, who come from a troubled hispanic (and very Catholic) family. And there is the bitter albino, Martin, who is the first among the Eugene social set to befriend Lyle (albeit for morbid and vengeful reasons). These characters are significant, of course.  But beyond them, even the minor characters --the cardigan-wearing Catholic priest, the mannish Sergeant Krune who heads-up the juvenile detention facility --project special significance on the canvass of the larger story.

The novel is composed of a series of events that also hint at something larger that is occurring beneath the surface. A pipe bomb blows the lock to a mausoleum. A distressed wild goose crash lands on a bridge that spans a river. A pair of delinquent youths are mistaken for respectable Canadian tourists.

There is a lot to think about in this novel. However, I have to admit that, overall, I found the book to be obscure. I recognized that the aforementioned events and characters were significant, but I wasn't always able to make the connection. Also, I generally found the dialog to be colorless.

Which is not to say that Blacketter lacks eloquence. Scattered throughout the work are lines that stand out, McCarthy-like, approaching poetry:

"Martin slipped his BB pistol into the back of his pants and opened the front door, gesturing grandly for Lyle to go first, as though introducing him to the night."

"The land gathered into desert promontories above the Columbia. When the dusty hills swung away, a valley fell before them. The road was a thin line that would take them into its distance."

One last nit-picky observation: I'm not sure I'd call Down in the River a novel. It is perhaps too long to qualify as a short story, but on the other hand, there is only the single plot line and the single main character. I'd argue, rather, that this book is a novella. (But, then again, I might be a little too persnickety.)

All in all, Down in the River is a success. Blacketter succeeds in winning sympathy for his characters. And if, in the end, readers are unsettled by the novel's conclusions, isn't that one of art's primary functions?

Book review: Maribou Stork Nightmares

Sometimes, in order to hook into a novel or some other work of art, you need to broaden your perspective. That's a big advantage to participating in a book group. In the last four years or so, the lads and I have read 36 books together. And more than once, after discussing a particular book at our semi-regular meetings, I've come away with a changed impression of the work. Indeed, books that I hadn't thought I'd liked all that much gain a new appreciation as a result of the widened perspective.

So it is with Irvine Welsh's Marabou Stork Nightmares. When first I finished the book, which is a sordid story of gritty, nasty Scotland (with a bit of apartheid South Africa thrown in), I was pretty much disgusted.

Welsh's claim to fame is his authorship of the novel Trainspotting which was adapted into a smash hit flick by Danny Boyle. And while I enjoyed Trainspotting, the film, I felt at first that Marabou Stork Nightmares transcended the bounds of good taste with its ugly descriptions of life in the Scottish tenements, with the casual brutality of its principle characters, and with its excessive use of profanity. (Picking 3 pages at random I count 9 uses of the words "fuck," "shit," and "cunt.")

Further, Welsh's prose alternates between "regular" English and a Scottish-phonetic invention of his own that, at first, was interesting, but quickly became annoying. Example: "They were scruffy cunts glad to be let intae some cunt's hoose even if it wis the Strangs." Or: "He'd just come back tae the scheme n aw; tae stey wi his auld man eftir being in Moredun wi his auntie." Imagine wading through pages of that!

The novel, by the by, is the story of the Strang family, a working class and highly dysfunctional gang of neer-do-well Scots rising like scum to the top of the slop bucket that is blue-collar Scotland --at least as Welsh describes it. The story is told from the perspective of Roy Strang, a computer programmer and street ruffian who, at the time of the story, exists in a coma-induced dream state, from which he recounts the events of his life that led him to his current situation.

Mary Poppins, it ain't. Nonetheless, as my book-reading pals pointed out, there is a larger theme at work in this rough-cut novel. Redemption, regardless of how it is attained, is still an admirable achievement. Cruelty and barbarous acts are generally the downstream symptoms of some evil that has gone before. I doubt I would have noticed these lessons if I'd read the book by myself, without the benefit of the perspectives of Mssrs. Kemmerer, Johnson, Insera, and Kidwell.

All in all, I wouldn't say Maribou Stork Nightmares is a must-read. Not by any means. But it's not a waste of time, either.

Like I said, it's good to be in a book group.

Book review: Confederates in the Attic

Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist's recounting of his experiences when he undertook to explore the subculture, prevalent in much of the Deep South, that holds in idyllic remembrance the not-quite-dead Confederacy.

Horwitz confesses that, as a boy, he was fascinated by Civil War history. Nothing uncommon in that, methinks. I know many American boys who entertained the same fascination (including myself). But, because of a chance encounter with Civil War reenactors outside his home in the 90s, Horwitz's boyhood fascination was reawakened.

As we learn in the book, Civil War reenactors invest themselves in their hobby by degrees. On one end of the spectrum is the weekend warrior who views reenactments as weekend getaways, role-playing camping trips, diversions. On the other are men like Robert Lee Hodge, a hard-core enthusiast, determined to relive the Civil War experience as authentically as possible. (That's Hodge himself on the book cover.) And, just as with any other hobby (take it from a lifelong war-game enthusiast; I know), reenactors impose a hierarchy on their brethren. The more "into it" you are, the higher your esteem within the community. As Horwitz writes, Hodge is at the pinnacle of the reenactment crowd, insisting on authentic fabric for his attire, grooming himself in the manner of the day, eating only foods that were available to Confederate soldiers, and so on. Hodge sneeringly refers to less dedicated reenactors as "farbs," a term which has special meaning within the reenactor community.

But an examination of the Civil War reenactment community is only half of Horwitz's book. The other half looks at the disaffected and unhappy demographic within the United States that holds the Confederacy as a paradise lost. This is a world where Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and even Henry Wirz, the  commandant of the Confederacy's infamous Andersonville prison camp, are viewed as heroes rather than traitors and villains. There is irony, as Horwitz points out, in this mentality. He tours each state in the Old South and many of the regions where the Confederacy is most revered were pro-Union during the time of the actual war. Further, many of the vociferous and angry people proclaiming their Confederate "heritage" seem incapable of articulating what it is in today's society that they object to (beyond, of course, their antipathy toward racial and religious minorities).

It's just as well that I didn't I read this book when it was first published in 1998. The subsequent rise of the Tea Party as a political "thing" has been appalling enough without having it presaged by the content of Horwitz's book.

This is a well-written and enjoyable book. Horwitz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, quite capable of humor and poetic flourish. He writes with sincerity, magnanimity, and objectivity. He does not condescend toward his subjects, despite the fact that he interviewed people who flatly stated they hate Jews, blacks, and other minorities. (Horwitz is himself Jewish).

He's a better man than me.

Book review: Oryx and Crake

Most of the time, I try to refrain from ragging too hard on authors when they produce books I consider sub-par. Writing a novel is a difficult feat. But Margaret Atwood, known mostly for her novel, The Handmaid's Tale, is an established writer. As such, she gets no leniency.

Flat-out: Oryx and Crake, her dystopian novel that purports to depict a near-future in which genetic modifications to plants and animals has brought about an apocalypse, is a drab and monotonous read. It sucks.

The story goes like this: Snowman is a survivor of a man-made cataclysm that has all but obliterated humanity. He lives in a tree where he gazes out over the much-risen sea at the ruined towers of a drowned human city. Mankind's heirs to the earth, a genetically-modified human-like species with blue skin and pacifist temperament, looks to Snowman as a sage --a guru from the crumbling past. Snowman, in a half-hearted determination to survive, is not above using his position of authority to convince the new "people" to do his bidding. Clad in a bed sheet and half-starved, Snowman remembers the world as it was just before the apocalypse: dystopian and starkly divided between the haves and have-nots. Snowman, we learn, lived among the corporate elites, the haves, by virtue of his well-educated, professional parents. As an adolescent, he befriends a classmate, Crake, who is on track to become a brilliant bio-geneticist. As the novel progresses, Snowman cynically recalls how Crake changed the world.

I wonder, is the prose in Atwood's other books as wooden and unpolished as in this one? At times, in her attempts to explain the world of Oryx and Crake, Atwood takes the easy out with drab, expository sentences. At other times, she affects the sneering, cynical tone of her wholly unsympathetic main protagonist. No eloquence. No lyricism. No polish. Her prose doesn't evoke imagery. Rather, it sketches out stick-figure drawings and relies on the reader to insert the color.

The book has no emotional depth. The two title characters, Oryx (a child prostitute from Southeast Asia) and Crake are thinly drawn. We never, for example, learn Crake's motive for doing what he does. Snowman, the one character in the book that is reasonably fleshed-out, is annoying and unlikeable.

The novel lacks suspense. Everything is foreshadowed. There are no real surprises. And there are gaping holes in the plot. Atwood does not recount how Crake found Oryx. She does not reveal the nature of the relationship between them.

Atwood makes a start at a decent subplot (Snowman's mother, Sharon, rebels against the status quo, abandons husband and child and becomes a political subversive), but never satisfactorily ties it up. (Everything to do with Sharon happens "off-stage." When she dies, there is no emotional impact. It's never even clear what she was trying to accomplish.)

This is the first Margaret Atwood book I've read. Very probably, it will be the last. It's very disappointing when an established and acclaimed author turns out to be a hack. But so be it.

Among living authors, I prefer Eleanor Catton. Or David Mitchell. Or Cormac McCarthy.

Book review: The Rehearsal

A while back I reviewed a novel by Eleanor Catton, New Zealand's new writing sensation. That novel, The Luminaries, is Catton's second novel. It won the Man Booker Prize for fiction and it is a marvel of plotting and structure. I was and am astonished that such a young writer (Catton is 28 years old) could produce such a profound and delightful work.

In fact, The Luminaries was such a great read that I was compelled to purchase and read Catton's other book--her debut novel --The Rehearsal.

The Rehearsal is a coming-of-age story set in modern-day New Zealand. The main protagonist, Isolde, is a student at Abbey Grange, a girl's prep school rocked by scandal. It has recently been discovered that Mr. Saladin, the school's jazz instructor was involved in a love affair with one of the students, Isolde's sister, Victoria. The taboo relationship is the subject of dark, guilty fascination by the girls and of consternation by their clueless parents. Isolde, overshadowed and forgotten in all the concern over her sister, confides in her saxophone teacher who provides private lessons in an attic room near the school. The sax teacher --enigmatic, cold, and secretly passionate --has an agenda of her own. She takes vicarious pleasure in hearing the stories her students tell her about their lives. Meanwhile, Stanley, an aspiring young actor, has enrolled in "the Institute," a drama school situated across the square from Abbey Grange. He and the other acting students decide to create a dramatic production of the scandal as their first-year project.

What unfolds from there is a subtle tale of angst and youthful confusion. It is a good read, but not a whimsical one.

The Rehearsal challenges readers in a number of ways. Much of the action takes place "off-stage" and requires the reader to infer what has happened in the gaps. The timeline jumps around between present and past and it is sometimes difficult to keep track of the chronological sequence of events as the characters progress through the year.

In her experiments with structure, Catton reveals herself as a student of David Mitchell. (In fact, she names Cloud Atlas as one of her Top Twenty Novels of All Time.) The Rehearsal seems to be taking place on stage. Characters sometimes deliver theater-like soliloquies, complete with spotlight and faded out surroundings. At other times, the narrative is "live" and taking place in the here-and-now. This transition can sometimes occur within a single scene.

Catton is a superb writer. Her prose is polished, and well-crafted; intricate despite its simplicity. She makes good use of symbols and populates the story with ample allusions to theatrical classics like Equus, Barefoot in the Park (to name just two).

I enjoyed this book, but at times it felt arduous. The novel is universal enough that I had sympathy with the characters, but really, I think it will mostly speak to young women. That is, young women will probably have the easiest time accessing the insights that Catton offers. (And, I must say, I continue to be amazed that such a young person could have such keen perceptions when it comes to human motives.)

After reading The Luminaries, I added Eleanor Catton to my list of must-read authors, and The Rehearsal does nothing to make me doubt my decision. But for all the craft and skill that went into its creation, The Rehearsal is a mere prolegomenon for The Luminaries which I found to be exponentially more enjoyable.

If her next novel surpasses her second by the same margin, we could be witnessing the birth of a new Emily Brontë. But a Brontë with a David Mitchell twist!

Book review: Cambodia's Curse

Joel Brinkley's book of recent history in Southeast Asia, Cambodia's Curse, is an arduous read. Not because of its density, nor its length, nor its obscurity. In fact, the book is neither dense, nor lengthy, nor obscure. What makes this book a difficult read is the subject matter and the depressing picture it paints.

Brinkley is a veteran foreign journalist who made his name reporting on Cambodia at the time of the fall from power of Pol Pott's murderous Khmer Rouge regime. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Vietnamese invasion that occurred in 1979.

Cambodia's Curse, however, deals with the post-Khmer Rouge years of Cambodia. Mercifully, Brinkley does not dwell on the abuses that occurred during the Pol Pott days. They're mentioned, but I expect he deemed that enough has already been written about that. And what he does write about is bad enough.

After a brief historical synopsis, Brinkley launches into an exposition of the state of Cambodia in the immediate aftermath of the genocidal years. Cambodia became a laboratory for high-minded United Nations experimentation. The UN and its constituent members found a state in utter chaos and poverty and responded with a generous attempt (to the tune of $3 billion) to create a modern nation-state ready to join the community of nations. The UN attempted to introduce notions of self-determination and good government to the traumatized Cambodia people. But, Brinkley reports, Cambodia wasn't ready for it. Cambodians were mostly illiterate and uneducated and their history, since the days of the great Angkhor kings in the 8th century, was of a land governed by feudalism.

Brinkley chronicles how the well-intentioned efforts of the global community fell victim to the  Cambodian curse of government nepotism and corruption. He relates how the people, downtrodden and despondent, have learned to accept their condition.

Cambodia is a nation that will not face its past. For example, Khmer Rouge war criminals live among the people they once wantonly killed without fear of being held to account for their crimes. Mental health experts estimate that much of the population suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. (Remember, Pol Pott and his gang murdered nearly one quarter of the nation's entire population.)

Cambodian government is little more than organized crime. Government leaders, among them crafty strongman Hun Sen, jealous princeling Norodom Ranariddh, and Sam Rainsy, the clownish opposition leader, spend tremendous energies vying against one another, playing to foreign governments, maneuvering for political position, and generally ignoring the needs of their desperate people. As foreign aid money pour into the country, the cancer of corruption metastasizes.

Brinkley also describes the plight of everyday Cambodians: survivors of the notorious Killing Fields, impoverished farmers, people displaced by aribtrary and corrupt government policies. Cambodian children often grow stunted from the effects of malnutrition. There are precious few doctors and educators and other professionals in the country. No one is free from the effects of corruption. Those children lucky enough to attend school are expected to provide bribes for their teachers who, in turn, pass a portion of their cut up to the principal. Government services are pay-to-play. Poor sanitation, nationwide, lead to regular outbreaks of sanitary-related diseases.

This is why Cambodia's Curse is an arduous read. It is a depressing and near-hopeless portrait. When I got to the end, I didn't see any reason to expect anything better for Cambodians in the foreseeable future. Quite sad, really.

Brinkley has a matter-of-fact delivery. His language is plain. His assessment of politics is thorough. One nit I had with the book was that I could have used more instruction on the pronunciation of Cambodian words.

Cambodia's Curse is informative and factual. I can't say I enjoyed it. But I learned from it. That's enough to make it worthwhile.

Book review: The Luminaries

With Eleanor Catton's Man Booker Prize-winning second novel, The Luminaries, the young New Zealand author has established herself as a more-than-accomplished writer. Ms. Catton was 27 years old at the time of the book's first printing, and given the astuteness of her perception, her skill as a plot developer, and her convincing (and at times, playful) narrative voice, that is an amazing fact. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Luminaries is set on the western coast of New Zealand in 1866. A gold rush is on at this, the far frontier of civilization. A disillusioned and disinherited young Scot named Walter Moody arrives at the small seaport of Hokitika where he hopes to earn his fortune panning for "color." Mr. Moody has had a harrowing voyage; he's the witness to a sight that has left him disquieted and in doubt. But he finds no respite when he seeks to relax in the smoking room of his hotel that evening. Rather, he interrupts an urgent conference between 12 men of diverse appearances, social classes, and races. A series of unexplained events have occurred in Hokitika. A hermit prospector has been murdered; a fallen woman has made an attempt on her own life; and an ambitious politician has arrived in town. Each man at the gathering has a piece of the puzzle that connects these events, and each has an interest in learning the truth about them, although for widely divergent reasons. All of this is made clear to Mr. Moody as the men turn to him for advice and perspective.

What unfolds from there is an intricately-plotted, haunting and beautiful tale of betrayals and deceptions, isolation, disillusionment, honor and dishonor, and love-in-spite-of-everything. It's an ambitious and daunting achievement.

There are many aspects of this multifaceted novel that bespeak Catton's extraordinary skill.

Like David Mitchell, Ms. Catton experiments with structure. The Luminaries mimics the progression of the zodiac in its composition. Each chapter of the novel is prefaced with a zodiacal chart. The chapters wane in length like the phases of the moon. The first chapter, "A Sphere Within a Sphere" is the longest (the moon is full). Subsequent chapters are sequentially shorter (the moon wanes) up to the last chapter, "The Old Moon in the Young Moon's Arms," which is but 2 pages in length.

The narrative voice the author employs is Victorian (think Charles Dickens or Emily Brontë) and it is spot on. Catton's prose evokes vivid imagery and reveals an astuteness toward human nature that is astonishing for such a young writer.

The characters are so well-drawn and vivid that, as my friend Kurt Kemmerer wrote of them: "The folks were standing in my living room as I read." 

Further, Catton exhibits a genius for plotting. The Luminaries is a complex novel. A score of major characters appear, each with his or her own motives, agenda, and goals. The reader is challenged to keep track of how the agendas of the characters interlock and relate to one another. The timeline jumps forward and backward. Foreshadowing, mirroring, and rich symbolism permeate.

And just to give you a sample of her beautiful prose, I include here an excerpt from the book. This is a pivotal scene and it comes late in the book. See what you think:

The Maori man carried a greenstone club upon his hip, thrust through his belt in the way that one might wear a crop or a pistol. The club had been carved into the shape of a paddle, and polished to a shine: the stone was a rippled olive green, shot through with bursts of yellow, as if tiny garlands of kowhai had been melted and then pressed into glass.

Carver, having delivered his message, was about to bid the other man goodbye when the stone caught the light, and seemed suddenly to brighten; curious, he pointed at it, saying, "What's that --a paddle?"

"Patu pounamu," said Tauwhare.

"Let me see," said Carver, holding out his hand. "Let me hold it."

Tauwhare took the club off his belt, but he did not hand it to the other man. He stood very still, staring at Carver, the club loose in his hand, and then suddenly, he leaped forward, and mimed jabbing Carver in the throat, and then in the chest; finally he raised the club up high above his shoulder, and brought it down, very slowly, stopping just before the weapon made contact with Carver's temple. "Harder than steel," he said.

"Is it?" said Carver. He had not flinched. "Harder than steel?"

Tawhare shrugged. He stepped back and thrust the club back into his belt; he appraised Carver for a long moment, his chin lifted, his jaw set, and then he smiled coldly, and turned away.

The book is a weighty 800+ pages in length. A considerable effort, but one that is well-worth making. I've undertaken to give it another go even as I write this. The plot is so complex and interwoven that this book demands a second reading.

Elizabeth Catton is on my must-read list. I can't wait to see her next effort.

Book review: Angels

Long flights are perfect for short novels. So my 13-hour flight from Shanghai to San Fransisco was an apt interval for absorbing Denis Johnson's disturbing debut novel, Angels. Which I did. Johnson is primarily known for his poetry and his short stories. Angels was published in 1983 and since then Johnson has penned another 8 novels, including the critically-acclaimed Tree of Smoke.

Angels is the story of two souls cast adrift in an American wasteland of booze, violence, and mystic-Christian fanaticism. The novel opens with Jamie Mays and her two young children seated on a Greyhound bus headed east from Oakland, California. Jamie has just abandoned her husband and their trailer-park mobile home. As she conjoins herself and her daughters with the flotsam of discarded America, she meets Bill Houston, an ex-Navy man with "eyes drowning in gin" and covered with tattoos. Bill has a past. The two of them don't so much fall in love as collapse onto one another. A cross-country journey filled with peril and desperation ensues as they make their way, ultimately, to Arizona, where live Bill's superstitious and bigoted mother and his two brothers. One of the brothers makes his living repossessing vehicles from survivalists. The other is a heroin-addict.

You get the picture.

Reading this novel, one can tell that Johnson is a poet. His prose is beautiful and captivating. For example:

“Memories assailed him of how gently she had spoken, touched, and moved; of how she'd loved him fiercely despite his mistakes and obsessions and weaknesses. And the conviction descended on him that love like theirs couldn't possibly suffer any change.”

Shades of Cormac McCarthy, eh? I've heard that Johnson is also an admirer of Raymond Carver and that is plainly evident in the simmering menace that pervades this novel. (The most powerful (and disturbing) scene occurs when Jamie is lured into a low-rent apartment by a man she meets on the streets of Chicago. I won't elaborate.)

But while I certainly won't deny Johnson's eloquence, I felt in the end, that the novel failed to deliver. Angels riffs on the tried-and-true theme of redemption through fire, but I found the denouement lacking. It seemed inconsistent with the rest of the novel.

In fact, I'm not sure it is accurate to call this book a novel. The condensed cast and relatively simple storyline are more befitting a short story or a novella than a full-fledged novel. (Well, Johnson is primarily a poet and short-story writer, after all.)

I did enjoy this book and I will certainly read more of Johnson in the future. But I think next time, I'll try a short story collection.

Book review: Black Swan Green

I finished reading David Mitchell's bildungsroman*, Black Swan Green, my first morning in Shanghai. Jet-lagged, I awoke at three in the morning Shanghai time, and read the last couple chapters. I'd burned through most of it on the interminable LA-to-Shanghai leg of my trip earlier in the day (or was it the day before?) and so finished the book (and, thus, the Mitchell canon) while engaged in the travel-hustle from one side of the globe to the other.

Black Swan Green is an autobiographical novel about a tween-aged boy in Worcestershire, England in the 80s. Jason Taylor is a thoughtful, decent lad who, like many other teenage boys, is tormented by angst and diffidence. But adding to Jason's woes is his speech impediment (Jason calls it "hangman") which causes him to stammer and has earned him the ridicule of some of his meaner classmates. (Are there any so cruel as middle-school children?) When strange anonymous phone calls start coming to the home Jason shares with his middle-class parents and older sister, Jason's world starts to crumble.

As I said, Black Swan Green completes the Mitchell canon for me. I've now read all five of his thus-far published novels and I'm an unequivocal fan. Black Swan Green is my least favorite.

Which is not to say that Black Swan Green is not a rewarding read. Far from it. With Jason Taylor, Mitchell succeeds in creating a sympathetic protagonist that readers can't help but root for. As Jason faces up to life's challenges, Mitchell's masterful writing brings back memories of what it is like to be a boy on the verge of manhood.

But somehow, Black Swan Green is less ambitious, more condensed in scope, than Mitchell's other novels. While Cloud Atlas spans the globe and encompasses centuries, while Jacob de Zoet explores dark and terrible questions about morality, Black Swan Green is really just a story about being a boy in middle-class England.

The book is billed as an autobiography (Mitchell, like Jason Taylor, has a stammer), so I suppose Mitchell aimed a little lower with this effort than with others. Black Swan Green is firmly rooted in the world that we know and see around us everyday. I wouldn't call it a mundane novel, but it is certainly more so than Mitchell's other bildungsroman, number9dream.

But it's a touching story, a story that is sure to speak to the millions of awkward pre-teen boys struggling to define themselves in a world they discover to be far more complex than they'd previously realized. Definitely worth reading.

And I simply can't wait to see what Mitchell comes up with next.

*(Cool word, eh? bildungsroman : a novel about the moral and psychological growth of the main character.)

Book review: The Angel's Game

The Angel's Game, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, serves as prequel to that author's successful novel, The Shadow of the Wind.

The Angel's Game is set in Barcelona in pre-Civil War Spain of the 1920s and 1930s. It's the story of a young writer, David Martín, who works his way up from errand boy at the local news rag to become a successful novelist. Although Martín is widely-read and prolific, for various murky (and sinister) reasons, his name is unknown to most of his readers. As he struggles to find his identity, Martín is approached by a mysterious Faustian figure, Andreas Corelli, who promises to make him famous and wealthy if Martín will use his writing skills to help Corelli "invent a new religion."

No sooner does Martín accept Corelli's bargain than a series of mysterious events --gruesome murders, unexplained fires, destroyed careers --begin to occur around Barcelona, all of them somehow connected to Martín and his literary ambitions.

Just as with the earlier book in the series, The Angel's Game is populated with colorful, well-drawn characters (even minor characters are well-described and as often as not, completed with elaborate backgrounds that provide depth and insight). Zafón has a penchant for complicated plots that weave and twist like the alleyways of Barcelona's Raval Quarter, where much of the action takes place.

But unlike the earlier novel which seemed to jump between comedy and horror, The Angel's Game is more cut-and-dried Gothic horror. There is less humor and more darkness, less levity, more foreboding.

Which is not to say that The Angel's Game lacks Zafón's trademark witty, sharp-edged dialog. Much of the book's menace and satire occurs between quotation marks. And nearly every exchange between characters includes some pearl of homespun wisdom.

In addition to his dialog, though, Zafón is a master of narrative voice. Consider this excerpt:

A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price. 

My first time came one faraway day in December 1917. I was seventeen and worked at The Voice of Industry, a newspaper that had seen better days and now languished in a barn of a building that had once housed a sulfuric acid factory. The walls still oozed the corrosive vapor that ate away at furniture and clothes, sapping the spirits, consuming even the soles of shoes. The newspaper’s headquarters rose behind the forest of angels and crosses of the Pueblo Nuevo cemetery; from afar, its outline merged with the mausoleums silhouetted against the horizon—a skyline stabbed by hundreds of chimneys and factories that wove a perpetual twilight of scarlet and black above Barcelona.

On the night that was about to change the course of my life, the newspaper’s deputy editor, Don Basilio Moragas, saw fit to summon me, just before closing time, to the dark cubicle at the far end of the editorial staff room that doubled as his office and cigar den. Don Basilio was a forbidding- looking man with a bushy moustache who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.

Any journalist prone to florid prose would be sent off to write funeral notices for three weeks. If, after this penance, the culprit relapsed, Don Basilio would ship him off permanently to the "House and Home" pages. We were all terrified of him, and he knew it.

Sets things up nicely, doesn't it?  But apart from the opening paragraph of this excerpt, Zafón doesn't write much about the exaltation and the sense of fulfillment that comes from producing a successful piece of writing. (And by "successful," I mean something that the writer feels adequately conveys his thoughts, rather than "successful" in the commercial sense.)

As Zafón describes it, being a writer is a hellish existence. He covers well all the fear, the guilt, and the doubt that comes with the calling.  His descriptions of Barcelona evoke images of Hell itself, and the ending leaves the reader with an ominous foreboding that the worst is yet to come.

There is a third book in the series, The Prisoner of Heaven. It's on my list. I can't wait.

Book review: Hawthorn & Child

Keith Ridgway's Hawthorn & Child is a perplexing novel. That is, if you want to call it a novel. I'm not so sure the designation fits. Rather, Hawthorn & Child is a series of vignettes that, taken together, offer a disturbing and complex vision of dirty, seamy (and terrifying) London in the 21st century.

To the extent that the book has any discernible protagonists, they are the two eponymous mid-level detectives. Hawthorn is a lonely gay man, prone to fits of spontaneous weeping; Child is a hard-edged and sour black man who is losing the last vestiges of hope. But while many of the episodic chapters in the book feature one or both of these characters, many do not.

I selected this book for my book club solely on the strength of an article Ridgway wrote for the New Yorker that I read last summer. I was greatly impressed by Ridgway's prose and his clear articulation. And Hawthorn & Child demonstrates that his abilities on those scores are genuine. Consider this passage, which describes how an (unnamed) pickpocket and his girlfriend drifted in to sadomasochism:

They couldn't talk. They were not good talkers, either of them. And once, long ago now, she had bought a notebook for a course. It lay empty and forgotten on the kitchen table until one afternoon, when she had gone out to the shops and he was worried that she would be killed by a bus or by lightning, he opened the notebook and he wrote lines about how he loved her, the way he loved her, about his fucking heart and crap like that, about his body brimful and his scrambled head. All that. She came back from the shops. He left the notebook where it was, and he didn't mention it. And it wasn't until about a week later that he noticed it again, and he flicked it open, and he saw his lines followed by lines from her. She'd written words that she had never said. He sat down. He read them over and over for a long time. Then he wrote a paragraph for her to find.

This went on for ages before either of them said anything about it. But he thought that maybe they touched each other differently. It was like the book freed stuff up, allowed it to happen, that the tenderness was covered, they had it covered, they had all the love and kindness and gentleness covered, and the sex became something else.

Simple language, but deep thoughts. Much more is implied than described. These are signs of a skilled writer.

One of the more frustrating challenges of the book is that, with each new chapter, all of which are presented in limited third-person perspective, the reader must discern who is the subject. Many characters are not named. The reader must distinguish each by his thoughts.

The stories within the book vary widely. There is a coming-of-age story about an art-loving girl who finds love with a misfit schoolboy. There is the story about the aforementioned London pickpocket who drives a car for an Asian gangster and who delves into S&M sex with his girlfriend. There is a story of a religious psychotic with an interesting theory about the "lost years" of Jesus who finds himself in a strange house with a sleeping infant as the police surround his hiding place. There is an entire chapter that cuts between a gay orgy and a police action during a riot.

As I read, I expected that Ridgway would somehow tie all the stories together to illustrate some theme or leitmotif. So when I finished, I was perturbed to realize that there was none. London's Guardian newspaper referred to Hawthorn & Child as an anti-novel, and I'd say that's an apt description.

Ridgway, it seems to me, is trying to break new ground with this book. And I admire him for that. Hawthorn & Child is not like any other novel I've read. But I was vaguely dissatisfied at the huge gaps in the narrative, at the lack of resolution.

Ridgway's skills demand that I give him another try and I will. There's something worth investigating here.

What's this cat trying to get at?

Book review: Wild

This interval's book club selection was wild by Pacific Northwest author Cheryl Strayed. The book is Strayed's memoir of her adventures on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) in the 90s.

It's a very personal story. Strayed recounts how the life she strove to create --that of a strong, independent and successful woman --was shattered through a combination of tragic events and her own personal failings. The death of her free-thinking, extraordinary mother, the dissolution of her happy but unsatisfying marriage, and the rupture of her family left Strayed adrift and aimless. She relates how the PCT gave her an alternative to the self-destructive course on which she found herself in the wake of her myriad disasters.

Despite all the acclaim the book has received, I found it wanting in a number of aspects.

I found the book to be extravagantly self-indulgent. Granted, it is a memoir, and memoirs are, by their nature, introspective. But I felt that Strayed relied too much on the sympathy of her readers.

Everyone knows the devastation that comes with losing a loved one. But I found little that made Cheryl's grief unique. We all lose our mothers. We all grieve. We all find methods (both self-destructive and innovative) to deal with our grief.

After her mother's death, Cheryl spiraled into self-destruction. Common enough. She found her way out of it by putting herself in an alien environment. Heroic, but also common.

Nonetheless, the book could work were it not for Strayed's often belabored and awkward sentences. Try this, for example:

"She still had the ribbons when she died. I packed them in a box that was now in Lisa's basement in Portland. A yellow third for barrel racing, a pink fifth for walk, trot, canter; green for showmanship and participation; and a single blue ribbon for riding her horse through all the gaits smoothly over a course lined with mud pits and tight corners, laughing clowns and blaring horns, while she balanced an egg on a silver spoon in her outstretched hand for longer than anyone else could or did."

Like a mouthful of cotton candy, eh? The illusion of substance melts away to nothing. The book is rife with these unnecessarily long, relatively empty sentences. Strayed seems to eschew the concept of "economy of words." (I lost track of the number of times the phrase "The Pacific Crest Trail Volume 1: California" appeared. Strayed not only assigns the phrase as a chapter in the book, but repeats it in its entirety seemingly every other paragraph.)

Further, I found the characters in the book, especially the people Cheryl encounters on the PCT, to be two-dimensional and largely interchangeable. I couldn't keep track of who was whom. None of them had anything that stood him apart from any of the others. Strayed describes them only in terms of how they affect her, not as individuals enduring their own struggles and doubts. As I said, this book is self-indulgent.

There was an overall lack of imagery, which for a recounting of a PCT hike, is befuddling. There are precious few descriptions of the vistas and forests that surround the trail. And those few that exist are wooden and uninspired. All of which suggests the possibility that Strayed was so wrapped up in her mountain of woe that she couldn't be bothered to even notice the beauty around her.

Generally, I found the narrative to be detached. I had mild sympathy for Cheryl, but I wasn't moved by her trials. I never laughed or cried; I never had any strong feelings at all. It was a mildly interesting recounting of a more or less ordinary personal transition.

Surprisingly, our group discussion of Strayed's work led to the most vociferous debate we've had about books since we formed this group 3 years ago. Perhaps not so surprisingly, I found myself alone in finding the book less than satisfying.

I suppose I'm being rather harsh. I certainly don't want to diminish Strayed's achievement.

It takes considerable wherewithal and determination to write a book (to say nothing of the wherewithal and determination it takes to hike the PCT). And Cheryl Strayed has done both. My hat is off to her for that.

Book review: The Shadow of the Wind

Carlos Ruiz Zafón's fascinating and highly-entertaining novel, The Shadow of the Wind, is difficult to describe. Is it a coming-of-age story? A comedy? A Gothic horror? The novel contains elements that lend themselves to each of those genres. Convincingly so. But Zafón is an adept and versatile writer and his novel defies blanket categorization.

The Shadow of the Wind is the first of four planned novels (as of this writing I believe only two of them have been written) that deal with a mysterious bibliotheca in Barcelona called the Cemetery of Lost Books.The novel's protagonist, Daniel Sempere, learns of the Cemetery when, at 10 years of age, his father takes him there to distract him from the death of his mother. The Cemetery is a labyrinth populated with obscure, mostly forgotten books. Daniel finds a book entitled "The Shadow of the Wind" by a mysterious author named Julián Carax, which Daniel reads and becomes enamored with. The book is such a rare find that, when a book collector catches wind of Daniel's discovery, word soon spreads. A host of characters, both good and evil, come into Daniel's life as a result, setting in motion a series of events that evoke dark shadows from Barcelona's past. All of this takes place against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and Franco's dictatorship.

The novel benefits from a complex plot and an extensive cast of fascinating, well-drawn characters. Zafón obviously delights in story-telling. Every character, from Daniel's sage and hilarious mentor, Fermín Romero de Torres to sinister Inspector Fumero, and even including the minor characters (taxi drivers, prostitutes, servants), has an elaborate background and history. The relationships between the characters and the complicated plot lines are testament to Zafón's skills as a novelist. It takes an enormous amount of skill to pull something like this off.

Although the novel is translated from Spanish, I think it was one of the better translations I've read. The prose was vivid and highly descriptive and the humor came through very well. (Parts of the novel, in particular some of the exchanges between Fermín and Daniel, were knee-slapping funny.)

I especially enjoyed references to places I had visited (Les Quatre Gats, for example) when I was in Barcelona in 1999.

The obvious comparison for any Spanish-language author is, of course, Gabriel García Márquez. But due to his sure-footed genre-hopping, I'd also compare Zafón with David Mitchell. In both cases, Zafón holds his own quite well.

The Shadow of the Wind is a great book. If you get the chance, read it!