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Today's Book Review section raves about Jane Smiley's new offering, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. Referring to Smiley's "unmediated voice - blunt, uncompromising and witty," the review details the path that led the author to a year of reading that spanned the history of the novel, and what she learned about what has changed, and more importantly what has stayed the same. It's a defense of the novel: if there's one thing she believes, it's that reading fiction broadens our sympathies and stretches our imagination so we understand that even bad guys have their reasons.
I heartily enjoyed listening to Smiley speak back in April and so plan to gather even more of her thoughts by reading this book.
Also, Adam Gopnik, of New Yorker fame, has branched out into the world of young adult literature with The King in the Window, about an American boy's adventures in Paris. I loved (and heartily recommend - and may even lend) his collection of Parisian esays Paris to the Moon, and thus agree with the reviewer: "The only question ... is an obvious one: How long must readers wait before Gopnik writes a Parisian novel aimed at his legions of adult fans?"
The LA Times Magazine takes a look at the recent spate of memoirs written by soldiers returning from the action in Iraq. After hemming and hawing a little bit about the quality of an immediate response, without the years of gestation and rumination that apparently make for a good war memoir, Michael Slenske decides that these books are good for the American people, who need to have the real war brought into their homes. For confirmation, he turns to none other than John McCain, who opines:
Most historians would agree that definitive histories are written at a minimum of 20 to 30 years after a conflict is over. But that doesn't detract from a personal account of an individual's involvement. ... Firsthand experiences are always helpful in contributing to the knowledge of people who haven't been there.
Plus, speaking as a historian, I know that these memoirs will be a treasure trove for the historians of the future when they write about the Iraq war. (Of course, they will have to take into account people's biases and motivations, the pressures of publishing, etc. but good historians will do that. Good readers now should attempt to do so as well.)
My favorite description of any of the memoirs comes courtesy of Kirkus Reviews, which said of Colby Buzzell's My War: Killing Time in Iraq: "If military recruitment is down now, wait till the kids read this book." The Times article also includes a great excerpt.
I don't know that I'll be reading any of these any time soon, but I definitely agree that we should be listening to the soldiers as an important voice in the conversation on the war.
One thing that I don't recommend when you're reading a fictional memoir about high school is to receive several boxes of childhood stuff from your parents who are moving. This past Monday, somewhere in the middle of Lee's (from Prep, see last entry) sophomore year, my dad appeared with a box of dance trophies, a pile of random school papers, certificates, and diplomas, assorted other stuff, and all four of my high school yearbooks. I spent part of the evening with the book from my senior year, finding all the pictures of me, marvelling again at my classmates who were votes "most popular," "best hair," etc. (I didn't even remember quite a few of them), and wondering about all of the ways my high school experience was both wonderful and terrible. How much I could identify with Lee (and could identify the popular perfect people at TOHS who had their counterparts in Prep). How much I have grown since then, and how much I cherish that growth, but yet can still miss how much I felt part of that community.
In the end, I felt that it allowed me to finish reading Prep in a different way; it complicated the novel a lot. You can both love and hate high school, and I think that Sittenfeld should have emphasized that more. She should have teased out more of how some people only belong to a community when they are physically removed from it. Above all, though, I wish she hadn't ended with a little "where are they now?" about some of her main characters, although thankfully she spared us her protagonist's future.
Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the book. It was a fun read, replete with all the secondhand discomfort and recognition of the embarrassing things that you did when you were a teenager. It'll be interesting to see what Sittenfeld - currently teaching at a private school in DC, just up the street from my old apartment - takes on next, and how she grows (or doesn't) as a writer.
Catty alert: reading Curtis Sittenfeld's fictionalized boarding school expose (damn html: how do I make accents?) has kindled in me my inner teenage queen bee bitch. Sure, I can identify with her alter ego, the awkward scholarship recipient Lee Fiora, but it's really more fun to be one of the members of the "in" crowd.
But really Curtis, just because you have an unusual name for a female, and just because the rich do occasionally have some crazy names (Apple? Paris and her former fiance Paris? Blanket?!?) doesn't mean that all rich people have crazy names. I'm only through Lee's freshman year, and have already met Aspeth, Little, Gates (female), and Cross. Really?!
On a serious note, I think Sittenfeld has interesting things to say about the high school experience and particularly about class matters. And as another Stanford alum, I think we both saw how wealth bubbled under the surface. She has a great line about how "there were different kinds of rich... There was normal rich, dignified rich, which you didn't talk about, and then there was extreme, comical, unsubtle rich - like having your dorm room professionally decorated, or riding a limousine into Boston to meet your mother - and that was permissible to discuss."
It was like an observation that I always knew but had never quite gotten around to making. This, rather than the satirical commentaries on boarding school life, are what have made this book strong thus far. I hope that as the novel continues I get more of the good stuff and less of the ridiculous...
(Also, regarding heroines named Lee: I have a hard time disassociating this Lee with Maggie Gyllenhaal's wonderful Lee in Secretary. I loved the movie - the short story it was based on proved to be a big disappointment.)
The above is the after-the-jump title for an excerpt of Nelofer Pazira's memoir A Bed of Red Flowers: In Search of My Afghanistan printed in the LA Times over the weekend. It's not fair, really, but her love letter to her father's library does recall Azar Nafisi's blockbuster of a few years back. Anyway, it's a beautiful elegy. The smuggler insists we cannot take even a piece of paper with us, let alone books. Even if we could take a couple, which ones would I choose? I think of Mohammad Hajozee's essay that describes a young woman in a flower shop sorting and separating flowers for two bouquets, one for a wedding, the other for a funeral, having to decide which will end up in the hands of a bride and which will lie over the dark soil of a grave. I understand this. Perhaps it will be easier not to take any at all.
Finally, a book to review! I just finished Muriel Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington, a 75 cent find at a library book sale. If I've read Spark before, it was in a high school English textbook, which is barely reading at all, often enough, so it was a joy to discover her.
The narrator reminisces from several decades remove on her time in 1950s London as a young war widow living in a boardinghouse and working in a series of odd publishing jobs. She's a fascinatingly strong character, but not overt about her strength. No nonsense without being stern. And she relates her history and her community of coworkers and fellow boarders warmly, matter-of-factly, and sympathetically all at once. I almost felt as though I, the reader, were like a granddaughter, or rather a young researcher seeking an oral history.
None of what I've written really explains why I (punning on the title) decided to stress how unique this novel struck me as being. Maybe it's Spark's voice - that oral history quality. Even more so, she doesn't force feelings or reactions on you, allowing you to take it in however you so choose. It's cerebral, a bit, but not demanding. In that way perhaps a bit like the main character herself. If the rest of Spark's work is of the same vein, I will have found myself a new author.
... life events have gotten away from me, and taking away from both reading and blogging time. But I hope to have more time for both as we transition from late summer into fall. But I have been reading a little.
Earlier this month, our book club discussed Tobias Wolff's Old School, a fictionalized memoir of life at a tony boarding school in the 60s. The whims of teenage star crushes are illuminated in loving detail, and Wolff notes the class tensions simmering below the surface for a scholarship boy. Plus great sendups of Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway. A read that manages to be fun and light as well as thoughtful.
Right now, I'm working slowly through another short read, this one by Muriel Spark. More on that as I move closer to finishing...
Maybe not that new, actually, but I've been out of it. My recent absence attests to that. But the Google backlash has maybe begun? This week, the lamely titled "Current" section of the LA Times takes on the latest class action suit against Google... by a group of authors no less.
Xeni Jardin, BoingBoing editor and apparent gadfly is "Current's" blog correspondent, reporting in about online trends for the sad folks still reading the dead medium of newsprint. So clearly, you'd expect her to have a technophilic perspective. And she does skewer the Authors Guild and other writers for claiming that Google's attempt to create"the world's most ginormous digital card catalog" will irrevocably damage the meaning of the copyright. Google is copying with commercial intent (as it will sell ads on its search pages) and authors who do not want to be included have the burden of opting out.
But as Jardin notes, Google makes things (websites, and eventually books) easier to find, and "any product that is more easily found online can be more easily sold." Another great quote, from an anonymous author who spoke to Jardin, "fear of obscurity, not digital indexing, is what keeps most authors awake at night."
I for one think it's awesome that Google is compiling this amazing source of knowledge. It's like the Alexandria library or something. And I admit to a little bit of school pride in knowing my alma mater is among the chosen sites (of course, it's also the alma mater of the Google founders too, so not that surprising). I have benefitted from the openness of libraries - both the LA Public Library's exchange program that sends the equivalent of a branch library through its system every day, matching book with reader across the city; and from the DC college consortium, which allowed me to check out books not available at Georgetown, but in plentiful supply at Catholic University or George Mason. Continuing the trend of making books more accessible to readers should be every author's goal.
The LA Times provided its seasonal preview of upcoming books, noting the return of some favorite authors. Since the link won't last forever, here are some of the books I am looking forward to:
- Joan Didion's memoir of losing her husband and almost losing her daughter, The Year of Magical Thinking
- Salman Rushdie' s Shalimar the Clown (I need to read more of his work in general)
- Barbara Ehrenreich has another undercover expose of working America, this time as a white-collar worker
- Simon Winchester (he of The Professor and the Madman on the making of the OED, an awesome nerd book) has a "geologic and cultural history of the quake that changed the face of California, giving rise to many of the myths by which we define ourselves."
- And Margaret Cho and Zadie Smith also have new books, taking on culture in America in different ways
Should be yet another busy season for reading. As it should be...
Samina Ali's first novel, and I'm curious to know how autobiographical it is. Like her protagonist, Layla, Ali grew up in both India and the US - and she has a lot to say about how living in two worlds can mean you belong in neither.
This is in many ways a crushing novel. Ali is harsh on her characters, and particuarly unforgiving of the way that they allow tradition and religion to dictate their actions even at the cost of hurting loved ones. Layla suffered a lonely childhood, dedicated to easing her mother's troubles; at age 20, all she wants is to belong, to have a home - badly enough to acquiesce to an arranged marriage. Everyone has secrets that threaten societal rules - particularly both Layla and her husband-to-be - and efforts to keep these secrets cause a great deal of (unnecessary, to my areligious and Western mind) pain.
And yet Ali is lush in her description of India, despite the misogyny and terrible religious strife (Layla's family is Muslim, but tensions with Hindus play a significant role). Layla strongly considers staying, making her home and becoming fully Indian.
In the end, Madras on Rainy Days is an indictment of the clash of old and new, tradition and modernity, East and West. Each threatens the other, and yet, with a couple days remove, I would like to sense that there is some hope of reconciling the two in a way that preserves the best aspects of both.
***Re: New Orleans. I know that many of the few of you who read this blog don't have much to spare, but I urge you to give whatever you can to the relief effort. Good thoughts, prayers, blood, cash, time, whatever. The Red Cross is a good place to start, but so is the Louisiana SPCA - trying to save abandoned pets and hopefully reunite them with their owners - and Planned Parenthood has lost all the clinics in the affected area and are raising money to provide services and rebuild. Habitat for Humanity hopes to begin building homes for those left homeless by the end of the month. I'm reminded of Rudy Guiliani in the aftermath of 9/11 saying that the devastation will be worse than anything "we can possibly imagine".... But we can make that so much better.
I guess I'm kind of over this book, because I can't think of anything else interesting to write about it. I think I waited too long after finishing it to get back online. Anyway, you should all read Rahul's comment to the previous post. He makes a lot of good comments about how crowds get hijacked - something I wish Surowiecki did a better job explaining how to avoid.
Nonetheless, here are a couple more comments/recaps that I missed last time around:
*The "four conditions that characterize wise crowds" are: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation (p 10). When these are missing, you end up with stock bubbles, sheep-like crowds okaying a war in Iraq, etc.
*Football teams should practically always go for it on 4th down instead of punting. Coaches don't make that call b/c of both tradition and aversion to risk. (Also a factor, I think, Monday-morning quarterbacks)
*Surowiecki notes that the sciences are more collaborative than the humanities. It's an intriguing point, and I think would certainly disturb many of my former colleagues and professors. But his main evidence is the fact that many papers in the sciences have tons of co-authors and there's an emphasis on getting information out. I think the humanities collaborate in a different way - certainly I think that the concept of a "crowd" of scholars eventually reaching a wise conclusion isn't as prevalent.
I guess that's about it. I reiterate my earlier point about how much I like Surowiecki. He's a great writer. Two things I take away from the book: 1 - keep reading his columns in the New Yorker and anywhere I can find them; and 2 (the real one) - aim to pose the unpopular opinion from time to time instead of going along with the group. Value debate over consensus - at least sometimes - and get as diverse a group as possible to maximize the group's ability to make a wise decision. All obvious, but it's easy to forget them.
James Surowiecki - The Wisdom of Crowds
or, as Michael likes to call it, The Opposite of Blink. (Though it should be said that Gladwell and Surowiecki are colleagues at the New Yorker, and the former provided a blurb while the latter praises The Tipping Point in his book.) I think the argument of the book is relatively self-evident: crowds as a whole end up making smarter decisions than individuals. When they don't, there are things they could have done differently to make smarter choices - if they know those strategies, they can make them work again.
It's a pretty upbeat book, if you think about it. Crowds tend to make the right choices in the end, particularly if you define a crowd as a market or some other virtual, not physical, entity. Just as Gladwell wants to help us harness the power of our unconscious, Surowiecki wants to help us recognize and appreciate the power of our collective (un?)conscious.
This is another in-progress review, so I'm mostly going to leave it at that. Surowiecki's "Financial Page" columns in the New Yorker have always made me happy. (I'm going to try to remember to come back and link to a couple of archives if I can find them.) He's such an elegant writer, good at interweaving story and theory. And I appreciate his ability to change my mind on Starbucks. While they may indeed be a corporate behemoth, they - by creating a market for fancy coffee drinks that didn't really exist before - actually grew the market for small independent coffee houses, of which there are more now than there were in pre-Starbucks days. So I can drink my frappuccino without feeling too guilty, as long as I patronize the indie places too. (Hurrah for justification.)
Anyway, Surowiecki is awesome.
I waited too long, and now you have to pay for the LA Times link, but I am totally excited about reading this book. (Not as excited about what a big nerd that makes me.)
Before I wanted to be a historian, I was really into translation. Learning language made me realize what an artistic - and important! - task it is. Doomed to failure in some respects, open to all sorts of possibilities in others. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The book is If This Be Treason, a memoir by prolific translator Gregory Rabassa. Reviewer Michael Henry Heim, on Rabassa's "commitment to ... cultural mediation as represented by translation:"
Much as he argues against the notion of translation as a betrayal of the original - and he does so with great gusto - he is also perfectly willing to concede the point: In the end, what matters is not so much that a work comes through the translation process unscathed as that it enriches the culture it enters. Even if translation is treason to the original, he argues, we should make the most of it."
I liked it. It's nice to be nervous reading a book, and to be rooting for the characters, to be embarrassed for them. I almost hate that I can't ruin the ending for you, because it's a pretty exciting one. But I can be patient and wait for you to read the book yourself...
I'm currently reading A Changed Man, by Francine Prose. It got a lot of attention in newspaper reviews, as it's about a neo-Nazi who has a change of heart and flees to Brotherhood Watch, run by a renown Holocaust survivor. His stated goal: "to help keep guys like me from becoming guys like me" (fortunately, he knows how cheesy a line that is). For the head of the organization and his adoring development director, this is a miracle that can get them the publicity (and money) they've been needing. So our divorcee development director takes him in.A little far-fetched, I admit.We are treated to in depth looks at the minds of Vincent, the former racist; Meyer Maslow, world-famous but narcissistic survivor; Bonnie, his acolyte; and Danny, her teenage son. Prose is brilliant at showing the constant mental dialogue that runs through all of our doings and interactions with others. The characters are, like most of us, incredibly perceptive about some things, and utterly oblivious to others. They become intensely real.I find myself rooting for these characters. But I'm suspicious. I'd like to have a happy ending, but I don't really see that happening. How can it? How cliche? And yet... wouldn't it be something for even "serious" fiction to be light-hearted about its endings from time to time?
