Pain & Sex

Alison Lurie's Truth and Consequences proved to be the ideal antidote to Snow. The latter was challenging and slow, and above all demanding; the former is a lovely and quick read. I read it on Monday evening, which meant I returned from the holiday weekend with the awesome sense of accomplishment of having finished two novels. (Hoorah!)

Lurie's novel just barely sneaks out from the label of (middle-aged) chick lit. She chooses the popular setting of a small liberal arts college; the four main characters (two couples) are a professor, a visiting fellow, a college administrator, and a former poet. Sounds just like you and your friends, right? But it works. Jane and Alan's marriage is being eroded by his back pain, and I think almost everyone knows how destructive to a relationship the interplay of caregiver and caregetter can be. They aren't perfect, but they are sympathetic, and you want them to figure out a way to get by and be happy again. The other couple, Delia and Henry, aren't as well drawn, but their vagueness drives the novel. If we knew them as intimately as we know Alan and Jane, I don't think it would work.

I imagine you have guessed by now that when the two couples come together, temptation and havoc ensue. But since there are a few different ways the plot could unravel, it's worth the read to discover which route Lurie and her characters choose.

Reading While Listening

Michael has previously written about audiobooks, finding free literature for your iPod at LibriVox. But what of the poor souls who bring make a living by bringing you your commuting literature? The LA Times recently published a feature on narrators. The tease: "Just how does the commuter's salvation, a.k.a. the audio book, make it from page to iPod? Hint: There's a lot of patience required, not to mention Blistex and reverie." The article reminds you of the obvious - it's hard work to talk and talk and talk, pronouncing everything correctly and putting the perfect inflection into dialogue. But what an awesome way to inhabit a book.

Now, I've never really been into the audio book. I think I get more easily distracted when I'm listening to words than when I'm seeing them. Also, if the voice is wrong, it can ruin it for me entirely. (I listened to part of Sister Carrie once, and was convulsing at the narrator's drag queen take on Carrie's voice.) But I think I'd like them for the right books. Does anyone have suggestions?

Snow

It's a little unnerving to read a book entitled Snow while the weather around you toggles between 90 and sunny and 50 and rainy. Especially when the author truly evokes an icy snowscape.

But I'm getting into the review before the disclaimer, which is: I will not be able to do this book justice. Orhan Pamuk defies my abilities.

Snow dominates the novel - shutting the roads and isolating the little town of Kars from the rest of Turkey; and more importantly, providing the hero with the blueprint for his final book of poems. Ka, a exiled poet acting as journalist, has been suffering from writer's block, but upon his arrival the poems begin falling like snowflakes. And he arranges them as on a snowflake, creating the unique pattern that makes up his soul.

But of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. In three days, Kars plays host to an array of interlocking love stories and betrayals, suicides, murder, epiphanies, political intrigue, religious extremism, a coup, and two plays with shocking denouements. It's too much to even begin to recount. And doppelgangers abound. Ka, in Kars in search of a story and his own happiness, is mirrored later by the narrator, a novelist named Orhan, who too comes to Kars in search of a story. The interplay of the snowflake's singularity and the characters' doubles could make a great topic for a paper...

I don't think Pamuk is for everyone. He packs an immense amount of detail, plot, character into each page - not really beach reading, despite my attempt at a half hour in Huntington Beach. You have to be willing to devote yourself to the story, a requirement that led me to take much longer than I expected to finish reading. But he is immensely rewarding - somehow he can tell you in advance how it ends and still make it a surprise. He is just lovely.

Czeslaw Milosz

Milosz may be my favorite intellectual of the 20th century. The Captive Mind was a captivating (sorry about the bad pun) examination of the moral compromises that thinkers and dreamers make in a totalitarian regime. (By the way, Lisa, can you return my copy when you get a chance?) And though he passed away in 2004, there's still new work to read.

Legends of Modernity is a compilation of letters and essays from 1942-43, when Milosz lived in Nazi-occupied Poland, and is being published in English for the first time. Reviewer Robert Fagan describes the Milosz's writing as "concise and penetrating." Here's one example: "Evil has become complicated, it has become more clever and sly, and he who wants to confront it must arm himself with equivalent perspicacity," an excellent reminder of the strange strange condition of living in Poland in the 20th century.

I saw Milosz live as an undergrad; he and translator and friend Robert Hass were discussing the nature of poetry translation. Two things about Milosz struck me; his intense eyebrows (picture) and his easy relationship with genius and art. While Hass spoke of technique and difficulties, Milosz commented in grumbly tones about inspiration, and just knowing something was right.

I hope Milosz turns out to be like Tupac and Biggie, continuing to release new works from beyond the grave.

America!

The worst thing (or second worst thing, depending on how much I miss hockey) about not having cable is that I can't watch Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. Fortunately, I have America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction. I was belated in reading it, due to a strange affliction which causes me to read most books received as gifts one year after receiving them.

Unsurprisingly, the book is a rollicking good read. Since the show largely skewers current events, it's nice to see Stewart and his writers take aim at American history as well. I discovered that apparently my preferred government is a Constitutional Sultanate ("favorite kind of war: pillow fight") and learned the porn name of House members is the largest city in their district plus the state flower. (This unfortunately means that my representative shares the name Los Angeles Poppy with several of her colleagues. Still funny though.) There are other goofy jokes - and a surprising amount of actual information.

I applaud the inspired textbook premise. In addition to allowing for a number of non sequitor jokes that were brilliant, it reminded me of how annoyingly ADD-esque student textbooks are. We wonder why our students have trouble with focus? There are ten other pop-up boxes and insets breaking up the main narrative.

But anyway, read it. It'll remind you - in a strange way - why America is so cool, even when it's frustrating.

Dueling Reviews

Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go definitely struck me as the kind of novel that would impact readers in different ways. In light of that, I'm offering two capsule reviews, one by me and one by Library operative Carolline. Together, I hope they will shine more light on whether this is the book for you.

1. This book is creepy. Even after reading other reviews and discovering what the dark mystery is, from the beginning the ominous tone of the novel affects you. You’re never quite sure if the narrator and her friends are in danger from the rest of society, or if they’re a threat to them. Children of the Corn, with feelings. It’s not until the very end that everything is explained--much like the villain's monologue in a movie--but that’s what keeps you going. At times, the book gets a little slow, describing the narrator’s childhood, and way too many English countryside's, but is overall a good read. Smart, philosophical and creepy.

2. This may be the gentlest dystopia I've ever read. Combining science fiction and that most British of genres - the boarding school Bildungsroman, Ishiguro has created a masterpiece of innocence lost. This is the story of love triangle and the fate that awaits all three, but also a meditation on the human capacity to love and feel, and (there's more?!) an indictment of society's ability to suspend morality in order to feed our insatiable desires. A beautiful, haunting elegy that may never let you go.

The End of History redux

On CSPAN's BookTV this weekend:

A discussion with Bernard-Henri Lévy, Bill Kristol, & Francis Fukuyama

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bernard-Henri Lévy, author of American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, in discussion with Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, as moderated by Francis Fukuyama .

(Sunday 4:00 PM and 10:00 PM ET)

My Name is Relieved

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk is off the hook for insulting the pride of his homeland by referencing the Armenian genocide. His trial was on its way to cause celebre status in Europe, and made Turkey's bid for "Europeaness" look pretty weak.

Plus he's the author of one of my favorite books, My Name is Red, a murder mystery set in the Ottoman Empire (and about illuminated manuscripts - pretty groovy!). And Snow is patiently waiting on my bookshelf.

And on a grander scope, I hope Pamuk's case will continue to push forward trends toward both freedom of speech and recognition of the sins of a nation's past.

Sweet Carolline (bom bom bom)

Introducting guest contributor-to-be, Carolline, of Shirley zines. She writes in with a reminder that I am not the only book blog out there. In fact, some bloggers even know how to upload pictures. In one, my alma mater's superfluous books get put to good use. (I am curious to know what all was in that stack. Any leftovers from the great El Nino flood of '98?) Meanwhile, Israel puts Palo Alto designers to shame.

Book mania in the LA Times

Well, maybe not mania, but a good showing for books in the Sunday edition. Perhaps they're revving up for April. Here's what caught my eye:

• Bernard-Henri Levy channels Tocqueville. In American Vertigo, which came out on Tuesday, Levy, who I last read exploring Daniel Pearl's murder, decides on another roadtrip to figure out America. The profile is notable for announcing that Levy doesn't much like Los Angeles, and for his take on what nationality means for different nations:

  "In France, nationality is considered something that should be granted immediately and without a republican pledge," he said. "In America, there's a kind of course to follow that makes it more difficult, and once the process is achieved it's much more solidly anchored…. The machine that assembles Americans, the factory that produces citizens, works.
  
  "What's right about the American model is accepting ethnic communities as a basis for creating citizens. What's bad about the French model is denying ethnicity in order to conjure a citizen who remains imaginary."

  The review, in which Marianne Wiggins shows a snarky side, notes that Levy seeks out an incomplete picture of America; rather than find a cross-section of the nation, he grativtates to "a milieu more comfortable to him: an A-list of stars and headliners at home and at work in privileged, white America" All of which suggests that it may not be a perfect book, but is probably a fairly entertaining one.
• A review of Jorge Franco's All the Wrong Places discusses Franco's complicated relationship with the magical realist writers he seeks to replace:

  Revolutions are the stuff of literature. In fact, literary movements begin only when new generations of writers set to killing their forebears in an effort to find their voice. The rhetoric of iconoclasm and revolution may be fascinating, but the iconoclasm and revolution are never as total as the rhetoric would suggest.

• And finally, I am very excited to hear about Kiran Desai's second novel, per Jenifer Berman, avoids the sophomore slump. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard was an absolute joy, and while her new effort, The Inheritance of Loss, sounds much darker, it also sounds richer. Berman calls it "a deft and often witty commentary on cultural issues that are all too familiar in an interconnected world where immigration - and the accompanying blight of bigotry - have become an international norm." Even better, she applauds Desai's "innate sense of humor and her genuine compassion for her characters." Expect to see more on this novel on this site in months to come.
  

Literature goes meta

A relatively recent New Yorker article by Louis Menand reviewed James English's The Economy of Prestige and Pascale Casanova's "rather brilliant" The World Republic of Letters. Both discuss the interplay of the global literary economy and the system of awards that has grown up around it. They seek to understand trends that make works of world literature transcendent, whether they eschew place with a (Western) null environment or embrace a local and exotic place and culture, using the particular to get at universal truths. And how literary awards denote value (but in a strange way only because there is the possibility for argument over which works were actually more deserving). It was a little complicated, and I read it a while ago. But it's worth taking a look at. For example:

Of course, as English and Casanova would agree, books are read on this side of the looking glass. We are ourselves products of the culture whose products we consume, and we can’t help taking it, for the most part, on its own terms. Still, their very strong books belong to a general challenge to the usual practices of literary pedagogy. Literature departments are almost always organized by language and country, but Casanova’s book gives us many reasons to doubt whether this captures the way literature really works. She has an excellent account, for example, of the international influence of Faulkner—once his novels had been translated into French. ... Faulkner was the novelist of the American South who demonstrated to novelists of the global South how to represent a marginal community in an advanced literary style, a style that could gain the respect of “Paris.”
English’s and Casanova’s books also challenge the conventional “shock of recognition” idea of influence, which imagines literary history as one soul speaking to another across time and space. The soul may speak, but the international context is the reason it is heard.
...
Literature is conventionally taught as a person-to-person aesthetic experience: the writer (or the poem) addressing the reader. Teachers cut out English’s middlemen, the people who got the poem from the writer to us, apparently confirming his point that we have to deny the economics of cultural value in order to preserve the aesthetics (emphasis mine).

With the examples given by the article (and I guess by English and Casanova) this makes for an interesting exploration of how we assign certain works (A Million Little Pieces anyone?) value in our society.

Books and iPods: a marriage made in heaven

Senior technology correspondent and reading partner Michael officially joins the Erin's Library team with a report on yet another way in which technology is changing reading.

I've been listening to an audio recording of P.G. Wodehouse's Psmith in the City, which is very enjoyable. More about the book below, but in this case, the medium is the message. I downloaded the book from the LibriVox in the form of mp3 files that I listen to through my iPod on the way to work. Actually, I've only downloaded the first 24 chapters (they come in one to three-chapter files). LibriVox is a nonprofit, community run website where amateurs can post readings of public-domain books. Many of the books, including Psmith are collective projects, in which many different readers submit chapters. I was a bit surprised that the changing voices and reading styles didn't bother me very much, although some are certainly better than others. The biggest difficulty I've had so far was when one of the files started stopped midway through. I'm not sure if the problem was with the LibriVox file or iTunes. In the event, I followed the link at the top to the text of the book and read the two missing chapters there, then picked up again with the book.

Besides their price (free), a benefit of listening to books from LibriVox is that the files are plain mp3 files that can be played on any computer or mp3 player. Most, if not all of the audio book companies that sell books for use on mp3 players use a form of digital rights management (DRM) that restricts their use to certain kinds of players and a limited number of computers/mp3 players.

Currently, the LibriVox catalog is limited. There are 16 complete books, 12 short works (or story collections), and 13 works of poetry (there are also two works in languages other than English). There are significantly more projects underway. Only works in the public domain--basically books published before 1923--are allowed.

Psmith is about a couple of young men in England who, for different reasons, go to work for a bank in London instead of university. The premise is thinly drawn, but the scenes at the bank are great and show that office life has not changed very much in a century. Psmith--I'm not sure what the P is for, maybe it is just supposed to be funny--is a lazy and spoiled rich kid who believes he can entertain enyone by talking to them. Psmith's friend Mike, who's father has gone bankrupt, is Psmith's straight man, a harder worker who is along for the ride as Psmith schemes ways to make their life at the bank easier. Psmith succeeds in winning over the notoriously strict head of the stamps department by discussing Manchester United with him; he is less successful, so far, at winning over the higher ups.

I'm intrigued. I love the idea of having books in the commons, available to listen to as well as to read. One day, if we ever have the equipment, we'd like to add a couple items to the LibriVox library. I am thinking of stories by Ivan Bunin. If you have any ideas, send them along.

Silas Marner

While the rest of my book club has plowed through over 400 pages (i.e. half) of Middlemarch, I larked my way through Silas Marner. At 183 pages in the Penguin Classics edition, it was practically a short story.

And George Eliot is just as good at this length. Her characters are incredibly rich and complex - I feel as though she must have known precisely how they would act in any given situation, not just in those that compose the plot. However, we don't know them perfectly; (perhaps as a consequence of a century and a half) some of their inner life remains a mystery.

Silas Marner is a pretty downtrodden fellow, so pitiable that you wonder how he will hold together an entire novel. And yet he does (albeit a short one). Fate works in mysterious ways over the course of the novel. And while the plot ties together neatly, it doesn't seem contrived.

There are times when the going gets a little rough. Some of Eliot's tangents are less useful than others, and her keen ear for provincial dialect makes for a couple pages of incomprehensible dialogue. But keep going through those pages - it's worth it.

Mark your calendars

I recently decided to expand my reading list. Having left DC for my hometown, I realized that while I don't have to give up Wonkette, I should go Hollywood too. So my regular blog checking now includes LAist and LA Observed. I'm still getting the feel for them, and also wouldn't mind other suggestions for LA blogs.

But the positives of the decision were immediately clear when I found out that the LA Times has announced the dates for this year's Book Festival. (Last year's was a blast.) From their site, I discovered that the festival will take place April 29-30 and that it will feature

131,000+ Passionate Readers
370+ Famous Authors
300+ Popular Exhibitors
900+ Loyal Volunteers
6 Exciting Stages
2 Interactive Children’s Areas

Mmm, a little taste of heaven at UCLA. (Another taste of heaven can be found down the hill in Westwood Village, at Diddy Reese.) Hope to see you there.

George Eliot as Prophetess

I'm currently reading Silas Marner, a stand-in for the excellent Middlemarch, which is this month's book club selection and which I've already read.

I'm still gathering my thoughts - in general I can say that I love how richly she develops all of her characters, and that nineteenth-century provincial England is surprisingly interesting - but I wanted to share a line that popped up early in the novel.

Writing of superstitions, medicine, and outsiders, Eliot writes:

There were women in Raveloe, at that present time, who had worn one of the Wise Woman's little bags round their necks, and, in consequence, had never had an idiot child, as Ann Coulter had.

Is it wrong that I found that so amusing?