More from the Goon Squad

Returning to Egan.... I listened to Slate's discussion and had a couple takeaways.

First of all, I really need to join a book club. I wanted to be able to chime in on that discussion several times.

Second, I learned from them that the PP chapter got a lot of buzz (both good and bad) and I was gratified to hear that it worked for them as well. They also discussed the ways in which we see characters at various points in their lives (and filtered through different perspectives). Where I didn't talk about this before was with respect to the "flash forward." We don't just know what happens to characters by meeting or hearing about them again (or before), even within a story we are suddenly taken years into the future and told what becomes of a person. For example, we get Sasha's story when she's around 30 and again in college, but then we see her at 19 where we find out where she is in her 40s. (This is good, b/c it gives us a foundation to understand the next chapter, written in her daughter's voice.) But the flash forward doesn't always necessarily serve that kind of narrative purpose (the book club's example was finding out what happened to the grandson of an African tribal dancer, who appears as a very minor character much later, which I hadn't noticed) and I found it intensely comforting somehow. More so, I think, than they did.

And finally, not related to the podcast, I couldn't get over the fact that Alex and Sasha are both diminutives of the same Alexand(e)r(a), which made their date seem strangely awkward. (Probably just because I've used both as nicknames.)

Story + story + story = novel?

A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010)


This book won a bunch of awards. (Or a least the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer.) And I had been sitting on a Slate Audio Book Club podcast since last August. And fiiiiinally I got around to getting a copy.

Here's where it turns out that I had already read a bunch of the book. Probably a third or so. Damn New Yorker. About three stories in, I found myself really frustrated. None of this was really new. Sigh, grr, etc. But then, this is where the structure of the book kicked in and argued its case. For it's not just a collection of short stories. It's a collection of stories that tie together and interconnect. A character in one story reappears in another. And while it seems like the threads that connect them are weak and few in number, they build upon one another, and you realize that you're getting the rich backstory to a throwaway line from 150 pages earlier.

We start in what is roughly the present, then dive back, then way back, then hang out somewhere between the 70s and now for awhile, and eventually finish in the future. Each story uses its own devices - third person, first person, at least one tale told in the second-person you. Another is an article (of the DFW persuasion) detailing a celebrity interview we already know (from however many stories previous) ends badly. But then there's chapter 12, "Great Rock and Roll Pauses," written by an adolescent daughter of characters we knew before. It's essentially a PowerPoint presentation, and it's tremendously effective for all that it's gimmicky. I waxed poetic about this to my boyfriend, venturing out into a reverie on why all the white space is so meaningful in a story about pauses and what is left unsaid. And so he's taken the fall for you, who only have to know that I had lots to say - of varying coherence - on the topic.

And I love the idea that in the not-so-distant future, this is how I children will tell stories. That in its own way, the PowerPoint can be a surprisingly eloquent medium. And then I lost it in the final story, which takes place roughly in that same period(ish). It's a mildly dystopic future NYC that looks quite a bit like Shteyngart's, in which handheld devices have kinda taken over (with a bit of Brooklyn hipster resistance thrown in too). For whatever reason, this felt overdone. Or at the very least out of place with the rest of the book. Ends get tied together, sure. But I didn't need this final story to feel the heft and power of the whole.

(next post coming after I actually listen to the audio book club podcast, scheduled for tonight's drive home...)

Book club!

Slate's Audio Book Club tackled Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which I read last December. (I like the book club better when I've actually read the book they're discussing.) This is a good one; give it a listen.

A descent into...?

Atmospheric Disturbances - Rivka Galchen
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

This book had been on my To Read list since sometime last year, but it got bumped to the library request list when it appeared as a Slate audio book club selection in May. (Then I had to wait to actually get and read the book, so finally just listened to the podcast last week.)

This is one of those books that's so clever that I sort of feel like I won't be able to say anything sufficiently clever about it. But not in an annoying way, just in a "it is what it is" sort of way. Leo is a psychiatrist, which somehow gives him enough mental credibility that you want to believe him when one day an impostor comes home instead of his wife. Despite being right to almost the slightest detail, he knows she's not his Rema. So he goes off looking for here, and gets caught up with the Royal Academy of Meteorologists, with which one of his clients (also missing, like Rema) claims to be a secret agent. Long story short, the line between what is real and what is in Leo's head is constantly shifting as the simulacrum tries to persuade Leo to come home to her.

I expected this to be mostly a meditation on the ways in which we fall out of love, or love changes, and the person you loved is suddenly gone and replaced by someone else. It's a great metaphor. But it's that, and more and less than that too. It's about perception and love and loss and the lies we tell ourselves and those around us, and the impossibility of ever perfectly knowing another person. And it's about the ache you feel for Leo (and his wife) when you see how he almost loves this replacement Rema, and wants to love her, and yet there is this block that prevents him from seeing her for who she is.

Some points:

• I noted some similarities - in title mostly, but also in style - with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and was annoyed with the book club for pointing out the same thing and making me feel less original.
• Completion error: "with any incomplete perception - and needless to say all perceptions are incomplete - the observer 'fills in' by extrapolating from experience. Or from desire. Or from desire's other face, aversion. So basically, we focus fuzzy images by transforming them into what we expect to see, or what we wish we could see, or what we most dread to see." I love this quote in its own right, but I love it even more for Leo's further statement of being reassured that he knew right away that the impostress wasn't Rema instead of falling into completion error, without having considering that he is just committing the opposite completion error.
• Too lazy to check whether Leo's attribution to Freud is accurate, but he credits Freud with the belief that "there's always a thicket of past people between any two lovers." Leo then goes on to disagree, but really, isn't love about sorting one's way through the thicket in order to truly find each other?
• The book gets surprisingly and randomly funny toward the end, perhaps to mitigate how tragic everything is starting to feel, with a set of mistranslated drinks on a menu: Bloody Girl & Bloody Great. Also "I crash." (The first two seem to be sangria, the last maybe cocoa?)

And so that's it. Clever to be sure. But also quite touching. And disturbing too. But it was melancholy and yearning that stuck with me.

The Golden Compass

One of the reasons I was slow in getting to The Girl with No Shadow is that I was determined to finish the next book club selection first. Some date tbd we are going to meet to discuss Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, the first entry in the "His Dark Materials" trilogy.

While reading, I was reminded of how lovely stories for young readers can be. How magical, and allegorical, and balanced between danger and safety. I was too old when this series first appeared to read it as a child, and I often found myself wondering what the experience would have been. Would I have identified with young Lyra? Or were there little moments in which Pullman hit false notes? Would they have mattered? (I have always leaned toward getting swept away by books - I am good at suspending my disbelief.)

Reading the novel now, I thought instead about the parallel universe in which Lyra lives, where people's souls (to oversimplify) reside in animal daemons. I thought about the little nods toward history - or moments in history where two paths diverged into separate universes. I wondered about how different things would be if the emotions you normally learned to keep hidden were on overt display. I meditated on the notion of loneliness - Lyra is terrified by the very notion of what it would be like to ever be without her daemon, Pantalaimon - and whether children feel that intense loneliness. I puzzled over the class distinctions, particularly at first before the plot took off and left most of those questions behind.

And perhaps most strangely, I stopped and thought about this passage, and wondered why it reminded me of Derrida:

The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.

Not only did I play with it as far as an idea of meaning residing on the margins, which is where Lyra leaves her plan so that it cannot disappear, but I also stopped to consider myself and my friends. Our predilection toward overanalysis. This right here seems to me an simple and elegant explanation for why we should stop making ourselves crazy by overthinking. Grasping at straws (to begin some fun mixing of metaphors) we cause the very soap bubble we desire to pop.

I'll eventually take on books two and three. Looking forward to seeing where Lyra's adventures take her.

Hopeless romantic

That is me. I kind of like this about myself - I think it's endearing. (If you don't think so, please don't burst my bubble by telling me as much.)

Anyway, I've been reading more sporadically than usual (and catching up on Stanford magazine, actually) but after several nights in a row where something kept me from the final 40 pages of The Painted Veil (by W. Somerset Maugham), I am through it.

This is the July book club selection, and is a particularly exciting choice because there will also be pizza and movie during the meeting. (Hooray!) I don't like to blog about books before the meeting, b/c then I am over all my "interesting" thoughts. But then I don't like to blog after, b/c by then I'm ready to move on. (This is clearly a dilemma. If you have solutions, let me know. Perhaps I could live-blog the meeting? Because that clearly wouldn't be annoying.)

I really liked this book. I could just start and end there; it was thought-provoking and human and obnoxious and unsatisfying and thus terribly satisfying. I was often distracted thinking about the film adaptation and wondering what they would change and whom they cast, etc. And I also found myself drawing analogies to Gone with the Wind, which I think was first published a decade later than this.

Instead of getting into all of those things, I'll just leave you with this early passage:

He did not speak because he had nothing to say. But if nobody spoke unless he had something to say, Kitty reflected, with a smile, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.

The Places We Go For Love

A thematic, dual review...

First up is book club selection Candide, which was fun to revisit for the first time since high school. Voltaire is funny and also complicated. I felt like I wasn't deep enough when I was reading it, if that makes sense. But it's an impressively modern-feeling satire, skewering our beliefs in progress, our obsession with money and being right, and of course our hypocrisy about most everything. The translation I chose was a recent one, from 2005, by Burton Raffel. Comparing mine with other club readers' editions today, I'm pretty fond of Raffel's, with one exception. He notes in an introduction that "il faut cultiver notre jardin" has been mistranslated for ages now. Since garden/jardin meant something closer to "fields," he ends the book with "we need to work our fields." Are you kidding me? Sometimes you've just got to go with the famous line. Which isn't to say that it's not useful to know that Candide isn't just talking about pruning roses but actually tending to crops and plants intended for use. But dude, "we need to work our fields"? Yuck.

(PS - To make it clear for readers who have forgotten or never experienced the novella, it fits into my theme because Candide's rather ridiculous travels and travails all stem from his love for Cunegonde and desire to be with her.)

Next up is yet another of my Eastern European ex-pat books, this one a memoir by journalist Jennifer Beth Cohen. The title, Lying Together, provides a delicious double-meaning that frames her Cohen's affair with the one who got away, a fellow college student and Russophile that at the start of the action is working in St. Petersberg and has leads Cohen needs for a story. Within weeks they are engaged and she is on a plane. And that's where the fun begins. I can't believe how much happens in what I believe is apparently just 11 months. Maybe there was an extra year there that I missed. Dunno. Anyway, Cohen does a fantastic job of recreating the seduction of a good scoop, and the heady first days of love, and the heady crazy capitalism of 1990s Russia. But when Jennifer & Kevin start to fall apart, things get hazy and the book loses focus. Which is fine, b/c by then it's almost over and for a book that you can read in just about one sitting (despite the heat! oh the heat in Los Angeles this weekend!) you can forgiven a weak ending when it's got a strong beginning. Plus it mimics their deterioration.

(PS for this one - do you ever mark pages and notes on bookmarks when you are reading and then come back to them and wonder why exactly you felt this passage was worth noting?)

Dance Dance Dance

I never really bought into the metaphor that creates the title of this Murakami (Haruki, not Takashi) novel, but other than that, I found this book utterly enchanting.

I'm a big fan of Murakami's brand of fatalistic magical realism. And I'm particularly fascinated by his male characters. They are insightful and sensitive, and yet aloof and difficult. And they tend to like women who are like wounded birds. Women love them, and yet leave them more often that not, for whatever (sometimes metaphysical) reasons.

Anyway, am saving up some of my DDD thoughts for my book club (like trying to puzzle out the commentary on late capitalism), but I still want to share a passage, as the protagonist contemplates the teen who has become essentially his charge:

Humans achieve their peak in different ways. But whoever you are, once you're over the summit, it's downhill all the way. Nothing anyone can do about it. And the worst of it is, you never know where that peak is. You think you're still going strong, when suddenly you've crossed the great divide. [and it goes on, but I don't want to type the whole book. It's pages 209-10 of the Vintage trade paperback edition, if you want to find it]

Dancing? or floating along? How do we choose which will comprise our lives? Or do we struggle to find another action altogether?

Wrapping up the inaugural book club meeting

In the last few weeks I've been far more interested in reading than in writing. (There has also been a fair amount of misc. drama and way too many hours at work in front of the computer.) So instead of a standard analysis of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and our first book club meeting, I will just share some passages from the book.

I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. I could use it to run, push buttons of one sort or another, make things happen. There were limits, but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me.
Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am.

I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name, remind msyelf of what I once could do, how others saw me.
I want to steal something.

The other two I had marked are too long to retype. But they are about how it all started, with political assassination blamed on Islamic fundamentalism. And about the loss of memory for young girls, who have no idea of a world before this, where they were more than their fertility. And yet, the societal ills of the world before did exist. It wasn't perfect then either; that much is true.

I loved talking with the rest of the group; what was interesting and important to them overlapped and differed in such wonderful ways. In particular the other readers paid more attention to the minor female characters, whereas I got caught up in the central narrative, and then the ways that history is told and retold.

And next month, Haruki Murakami...

Roundup

Between work and illness over the last couple weeks, I just haven't felt like blogging. I have been reading some though, when I can steal time.

First off, I am all set for next week's inaugural book club meeting. We'll be discussing The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, a book that I owned but was likely never going to get around to reading. Oddly enough, my main association with Atwood is the short story "Rape Fantasies" which we read in my AP English class. Anyway, I'll write about the book after the meeting, but suffice it to say that I was apprehensive about it; I don't often like dystopias, and 1980s feminist versions seemed intimidating. But. In the end I really enjoyed it, and was particularly fascinated by the coda chapter.

Speaking of Canadian female writers and rape fantasies, the anniversary issue of the New Yorker featured a short story by Alice Munro that addresses age, fear and fearlessness, and guile in the face of male violence. Thumbs up to "Free Radicals."

The article in that issue that I went crazy for, however, was David Grann's "True Crime" (sadly, the link is just to an abstract, but the article is AWESOME). It's couched as "a postmodern murder mystery" and I think would make a fantastic movie. A Polish detective, looking at a cold case, connects it to an author who wrote (shortly after the murder) a strange, violent, and disturbed novel that may or may not have some connection to the case. Grann talks about the suspect's philosophical bent, and desire to be a Nietzschean superman mixed with Derridean suspicion of language and truth. Oh, and the book - and maybe the murder case - are deeply intertwined with Dostoyevsky and Crime & Punishment. Ooh, I get goosebumps just thinking about how good this article was.

Also happening: BCAM was a lot of fun and hooray for free tickets. And I started reading another new book that was making me apprehensive: Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants. I was like "hmm, this book has been on the paperback best-sellers list for ages. It must be good." So I checked it out and then found out it was about the circus. But 70 pages in, I am pleasantly surprised. Thank goodness.

Not the most uplifting of reading...

I finished Disgrace (J.M. Coetzee) sometime in the last week or so. I haven't written about it mainly because I wasn't sure what to say. Sometime, with the book club selections, it seems to work best to blog my review after the meeting, and incorporate others' views into my own coalesced opinion.

But I got bored of waiting. This novel is filled with disturbing events and internal reveries. In this respect, it reflects - sometimes overtly, sometimes implicitly - the confusion and readjustment of whites (even liberal ones) to the post-apartheid world. Sex is potent as a symbol of asserting manliness and power - as a weapon, a reassurance of attraction, etc. It reminded me a lot of Philip Roth in this respect. (I'm not very convinced that male authors like women very much. Are they representative of the average man's secret fears? I'd prefer to think not.) But there is also a generational dispute between the male pro(?)tagonist and his daughter. Like in Fathers and Sons (thanks to Michael and a review he found for the comparison), in a time of change and confusion, the eternal struggle between parents and children is freighted with extra meaning.

But attempts of erudition aside, what was most striking about Disgrace was how much of it I spent wanting to cover my eyes, urging the main character "What are you thinking?! - Stop." It's not that much fun, and I'm not totally convinced that it deserved the Booker.

For all my ambivalence, however, Disgrace is a far more accomplished novel than the one I just finished: Intuition, by Allegra Goodman. It made it onto my reading list after a promising review earlier this year. Set in a research lab in the mid-80s, Intuition addresses the ups and downs of scientific research and the intuitions (hence the title) that lead people to monomaniacal obsession with proving their instincts correct. In the end, intuition can ruin relationships.

Intuition is a fascinating topic for a book on scientific inquiry, a field that is supposedly ruled by reason and empirical evidence. And Goodman starts out with a fast pace, drawing interesting characters and setting up several intriguing story arcs. But around half-way through, it fizzles out, and the last hundred or more pages was just a slog to the finish. I also wondered why Goodman set the novel in Boston of 1986 rather than today - it was never clear to me why an era two decades past was crucial to her story.

So both books are pretty much downers, and while I wouldn't go so far as to say I disliked either, neither managed to capture my imagination for very long.

Meme, or, How I Learned a New Word Today

Until this afternoon, meme was one of those words (like trope and singularity had once been) that I vaguely knew but mostly dismissed as pretention. Until I got tagged by greenLAgirl, accused of falling for a pyramid scheme by Michael, and figured it was time I got an official definition. Hooray for Dictionary.com which built on Michael's expanded definition of "chain letter/thought virus" and explained that a meme was from same Latin root as "mime" and is "a unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another." Like a gene, except of ideas.

Anyway, but I believe I was tagged to talk about my literary tastes, not my fondness for etymology. So, without further ado:

A book that changed my life
The Fall of a Sparrow, by Robert Hellenga. Friends have challenged this one, but I read it at the exactly the right moment, in the right place.

A book I’ve read more than once
Emma, by Jane Austen. Possibly my all-time favorite book.

A book I’d take with me if I were stuck on a desert island
I am leaning toward Tolstoy, and War and Peace for the epic sweep. But I would also consider The Bible (King James), since I haven't read much of it and I'd have the time to consider a lot of stories.

A book that made me laugh
Anything by Helen Fielding - I am particularly fond of two that I know made me laugh aloud in public: Cause Celeb and Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination

A book that made me cry
A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving. That book tore me apart inside.

A book that I wish had been written
My dissertation? It was going to be on life behind the lines (i.e. where they sent all the promising students and most of the government) in Soviet Union during WWII.

A book that I wish had never been written
So many books have inspired hatred and violence - I could choose one of them. But I won't, because I don't seem to be able to find it in me to wish a book unwritten.

A book I’ve been meaning to read
I've had Herodotus' Histories on the backburner since I got through half of it the first week of my graduate program. Also at least 30 others.

I’m currently reading
In addition to my pile of New Yorkers, I have begun Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee.

Mr. Library (better known to some as the voice behind Vibes Watch) has graciously consented to be tagged. And I am realizing that my blogroll is pretty limited. So.... help me build it up, yo. I recognize that Rahul is probably above this, but just in case, I'll try tagging him too. As well as HH, whose i8 I just discovered. Will you come to LA and cook for me?

Three Lucys

A glimpse at three characters sharing the Library "Name of the Week":

She wore the prettiest sundresses, white and yellow and covered with blue and purple flowers. All wavy and loose. Sometimes she'd wear her hair up, to give her neck some air she said, and she looked nice that way. But then when she'd take it down, the way it tumbled off her heead and rolled across her shoulders in waves, and colored like fire, the way fire is not just one color but about seven, all becoming one another over and back again: that was her hair.

There was something that she did to me, just looking at her, knowing she was close. That was all I did, of course: look, pass her in the hallway on the way to supper, smell the scent of her in my room after she'd cleaned it, her presence everywhere, in this house, on my mind, her note in my pocket.

Now here she is, flowered dress, bare feet and all, in a house full of the smell of baking, no longer a child playing at farmng but a solid countrywoman, a boervrou.

Temptress and Madonna, these Lucys. Or maybe simply Eve. The former two are the magical women at the heart of Daniel Wallace's The Watermelon King; the latter is the stable daughter of a unstable academic in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, my current read and next book club selection.

Generation Gaps

I just reread Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. It's been about 10 years and a whole lot of growing up in the interim, so I was pleased to discover that many of my initial insights still seemed sound: parents and children will always struggle to simultaneously bridge and widen the gap between them; it's tragic when people are so wrapped up with negation that they deny themselves the joy of ever embracing anything; you can enjoy both a simple, sweet love story and a passionate one.

But knowing Russian history and literature enriched the story in so many ways. Reform and revolution were really starting to take hold in younger generations, and the reform had to choose between Europhilism and Slavophilism - learning from the (to be freed) serfs or teaching them, elitism or back-to-the-soil-ism. So after generations of a relatively static caste system, there was about to be room for limited social mobility, and plenty of anxiety about how that would look. The novel was published in 1862 and set in 1859 or '60, and make no mistake - this was a seminal moment in Russian history and book is firmly grounded in it. It is not an explanation of primitive Russian through the ages.

However, what makes it work for a Western audience is that the relationship between fathers and sons (i.e. parents and children) is a universal one, even in harmonious times. And certainly, the generation gaps between Boomers and their parents, and Xers and Boomers are part of the contemporary American consciousness - so we are predisposed to identify with the story of an older generation battling to maintain its hold on society while its children begin their inevitable march to dominance.

I like Turgenev quite a bit. His descriptions and characterizations are vivid, and his attention to detail - finding wonder in the smallest events - lovely. A wonderful introduction to mid-19th century Russia, a place of turmoil and boredom, impoverishment and beauty.