No, not Dutton's!

Why does no one love independent bookstores anymore? Wait, that's not really all that accurate. I think the love is there, but apparently not the money. Or not enough money.

Today's LA Times reports that the Brentwood Dutton's may be in danger. Property owner Charles T. Munger, of Munger, Tolles & Olson, wants to develop:

"It's the ultimate redevelopment site," Munger said, adding, "We've always been straight with Doug and told him the property would be developed in due course. The more time goes by, the closer we are to due course."

Hmph. Munger claims he wants to keep Dutton's in the new site, or at the very least an independent bookstore, but how would it be the same without the meandering buildings and the crammed coziness, particularly in the fiction section?

Or, as the Times puts it:

Arguably Los Angeles' signature independent bookshop, the store is a beacon for both prominent authors and passionate readers. A move would indelibly alter the store's identity, many feel. Dutton's, with its irregular layout, ripped carpet and books overflowing their shelves onto old flagstone floors, is considered by many to be not just a city institution but one of the nation's great idiosyncratic bookstores.

And author Carolyn See refers to the store as a "secular church."

I'm hoping that this article is largely a way to drum up outrage and prevent/put off redevelopment plans. But the larger trend away from indie bookstores is clear. And I too have been guilty of turning to Borders or B&N for my book fix.

But I challenge myself, and all of you, to go indie again. Support your local bookseller. My goal: a book a month.

Simon battles the blue mousey

AWW!

Thanks Siel, for providing my little panther with a taste of fame!

Re-discoveries, Russian style (part 2)

One of my favorite things about Leonid Tsypkin's Summer in Baden-Baden is saying Baden-Baden out loud. And that really proves what a big dork I am b/c there is so much to like about this novel.

I first learned about it sometime in the fall of 2001, when Susan Sontag wrote about it in the New Yorker. It was a lost novel, written in the 1970s Soviet Union in secret. Sontag gushed, and provided the introduction for the English translation. (Kudos to the translators, Roger and Angela Keys, who must have had their hands full, but more on that later.) I haven't read much Sontag, so couldn't know whether our tastes aligned, but this was one of the best book recommendations I've ever gotten. (That same fall, the New Yorker also turned me on to Orhan Pamuk and My Name is Red - there must have been some sort of perfect storm of literary taste-making.)

Tsypkin - more or less - is one main character of the novel; he's on a train to Leningrad, reading the diary of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's wife Anna. At the same time, Fyodor and Anna are traveling to Baden-Baden, Germany, to take the waters. Also, Dostoyevsky falls prey to a gambling addiction, a humiliating run-in with Ivan Turgenev, and some epileptic fits. It becomes painfully clear how difficult - and yet still rewarding - it must have been to be Anna, amanuensis and caretaker. Reading the final pages of the book (in the sunshine out behind my Berkeley apartment - memorable for whatever reason), tears came to my eyes. I was in love with this book.

Like Dostoyevsky, Tsypkin shows a great eye for detail, demonstrating the Russian realism that was warped into Soviet socialist realism. And as is much easier to do in Russian than English (but done, thanks to the Keys's), he employs run-on sentences and paragraphs, building clauses upon one another for a rich layered effect. Plus Tsypkin - most likely typical for any thinking Soviet citizen of his era - is keenly aware of the juxtaposition of the ridiculous and the sublime.

To sum up, Summer in Baden-Baden is extraordinary.

The Curse of the Supersmart?

There is a list of authors who make me mad. Chief among the members are husband and wife team Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss. Really I'm just jealous because they are incredibly talented and doing something they love and are just about my age. Added to the list is Marisha Pessl, the precocious-seeming author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

This book enjoyed a good deal of buzz, although less than Claire Messud did for her book (see my review below). Like Foer and a growing number of young authors, she is a master of the gimmick. In this case, her protagonist is hyper-read, perhaps even more precocious than Pessl herself. Blue Van Meer narrates (from the distance of a year) her senior year in high school, the first time that she and her itinerant lecturer father have settled in a place for an entire academic year. Blue fills her narrative with in-text references to other works - of fiction and non-fiction. She mixes real and fake works willy-nilly. (I was particularly disappointed to note that "British chick-lit classic 'One Night Stand' (Zev, 2002)" does not seem to exist.) But these details add humor and insight to Blue's observations, and strengthen Pessl's characterization of Blue as a preternaturally smart young lady who really only knows things based on books, her father's proclamations, and her distanced analyses of her peers. When life gets "real" on her, she can barely cope.

But luckily (I guess), real life for Blue Van Meer is bizarre as f***. We know we're in a murder mystery, but the first 300 pages of what really is a tome are lead-in. With Blue as the Lindsey Lohan character in Mean Girls, more or less. It's a stronger and more sympathetic satire of (privileged) high school culture than Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep (more here and here). And then we get to the murder mystery and all hell breaks loose. I spent the last 200 pages wondering what on earth was going on. Blue has an over-active imagination, and it's a good thing she does, because otherwise she'd never keep up with real events.

That's it. I think anything more would start to give too much away. Blue and Pessl both take some getting used to. But if you take the time to get into it, you'll be rewarded with a strange and funny and almost Usual Suspects-like mystery.

Re-discoveries: Murakami

I love Haruki Murakami. My first encounter with him was probably in a New Yorker short story, but I first discovered him the summer after graduating from college, reading Norwegian Wood. It was haunting and sad and lovely. Most of his short stories are as well. And then there is the utterly bizarre The Wind-up Bird Chronicles. This novel is fantastical and nonsensical - like a dream that seems normal while you're in it, and then you wake up and think "what?!" Like Tom Robbins. (Another re-discovery that should be on my list: Jitterbug Perfume.)

I have heard (but have no immediate source) that Murakami is somewhat derided in Japan for his embrace of Western pop culture and literary style. Having no deep knowledge of the Japanese version of either of these, I can't tell. But I do know that his commentary of the isolation and search for human connections in modern life rings true to me.

Secrets

Thanks to greenLAgirl, I am able to brighten up this blog with the occasional meme. So here goes...

Five things you didn't know about me (with a slightly literary spin):

1. I cheated on a spelling test in second grade so that I could get a perfect score. (I believe the word in question was "swiming" (sic).)

2. I had (have?) a huge crush on Ramses Emerson. (Thank you Elizabeth Peters for my absolute favorite guilty pleasure reading.)

3. Bob Saget cut in front of me in line at the buffet table during a taping of "America's Funniest Home Videos." Oh, and I was on the show too.

4. When I was 9 or 10, I penned a "tome" called "The Book about Everything." I think it was about 6 pages long.

5. I served in the honor guard at a police funeral.

Who should I tag? This isn't really my thing, but Lyen & Becky, you're up. Michael too.

Countdown to 9/11

I love the LA Public Library's "Hot off the Press" program. They make a selection of popular new books available at the branches for a 7-day loan period. So you have to read fast, but you don't have to wait forever on the hold list.

This is how I got my hands of Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children. It's on pretty much every best books of 2006 list, but has apparently also become fashionable to hate on as of late. (I'd provide links, but I'm on this 7 day deadline. Maybe later.) But I'm not a hater by nature, and even if I were inclined to be, I loved this book.

Messud's characters are awesome - they move in rarefied circles and are comfortable in the kind of intellectual banter that most of us don't get on a daily basis. So in some ways it's hard for me - even as a graduate of another elite university - to identify with them. On the other hand, they are charmingly flawed and selfish. And oddly enough, I love the ways that they are frustrated by the petty imperfections of those they love the most. Because after all, who doesn't carp about their friends?

Anyway, the book starts in March of 2001, and jumps through the odd numbered months through to September, to that fateful day, and then beyond to November. As the reader, you know all along what's coming, and how it will - must - affect their lives and plans. And at the same time, I at least found myself reliving my own pre-9/11 live, just out of college, and wondering if it would have been different had I known what lay ahead.

If you've read the book, let me know what you thought of the characters. I was most drawn to Danielle, and wasn't sure if that was the author's intention, or a reflection on myself. And insights into Ludo are particularly welcome.

Snarky

This week's surprisingly quick read was Vile Bodies, by Evelyn Waugh. First published in 1930, it details the mostly vapid lives of London's "Bright Young Things." Waugh has a sharp wit and is often very funny, but I was somewhat unsatisfied. He just seems so mean-spirited; I started feeling uncomfortable that no one had any particularly redeeming characteristics. I guess I prefer a slightly more tender bite.

But I'm willing to give Waugh another try - he was young when he wrote Vile Bodies, so I'll have to see if he softened a bit with age. Besides, how can you not love someone who writes this about the Prime Minister:

" '...You treat me like a child,' he said. It was all like one of those Cabinet meetings, when they all talked about something he didn't understand and paid no attention to him."

Who knew Bush was prime minister in the 20s?

Re-discoveries, mad romantic

The English Patient has pulled off the accomplishment of being among my all-time favorites in both novel and movie form. (The film's soundtrack, for one, is stunning.) Michael Ondaatje is amazing - when I read the novel at age 17, I had never come across anything quite like it.

While the film has two main narratives (present and past), each goes in roughly chronological order. The novel goes into the past of more characters, and completely mixes up the chronology in favor of an unveiling, piece by piece, of the characters and their tales. And the descriptions - they are lyrical and haunting. Ondaatje has also published collections of poetry, and it shows in his prose.

God, I love this book. It's been so long since I've read it, I can't give specific details. But reading it is like stepping into a whole other world, and putting yourself into Ondaatje's very sure hands.

Sweet Suite

After finishing Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise, I decided I needed a few days to mull over what I wanted to write here. But then I waited too long, and I have to return the book right after work. So here is my capsule review:

This novel is gorgeous - the descriptions are so lush, and the people are real even as they are archetypes. (I also loved the scene in which the cat goes exploring, arriving back at his owner's bed seconds before an air raid.) The juxtaposition of love and life with invasion and occupation is fascinating and very moving - the French were not innocent in their loss to the Germans, but nor should they be held fully accountable for collaboration. There were so many shades of grey.

But what makes the book truly amazing is the story of its genesis. Nemirovsky was a well-known writer in France before the war, a Ukrainian Jewish refugee from the Soviet Revolution. She wrote the novel essentially contemporaneously with events, and while struggling to survive. A losing battle, it turned out; she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz in summer 1942. Her husband followed her a few months later, but her two daughters lived, hidden, with her notebooks.

In the 1990s, they revisited the notebooks, which were previously too great a source of pain, and discovered that in addition to notes and a journal, there was a full-fledged novel taking shape. Suite Francaise is only the first two sections of what was to be a full "suite" of France during the war and occupation, a difficult task for Nemirovsky, as she did not know France's fate. After the body of the novel, the book includes Nemirovsky's journal and notes, laying out a rough sketch of her plans for the future parts. One guiding light was Tolstoy and War and Peace, which should give you a sense of why I liked this book so much.

Anyway, it is stunning. Purely stunning. I will be looking for more of her work in translation (or possibly even in the original French).

Re-discoveries, Russian style

The random choice for this week turned out to be Resurrection, by David Remnick. It's the follow-up to his Pulitzer-Prize winning Lenin's Tomb, from his reporting from the final days of the Soviet Union. These books are stunning - and Remnick became my hero, a status that only grew when he took over at the New Yorker.

These are both long books, especially the latter, but are well worth the read. Remnick is an amazing observer, and weaves the incredible tale of Glasnost into a coherent narrative. In Resurrection, the story is the nascent Russian democracy, and the Yeltsin's struggle for reelection. It's less than ten years old, but already you can see how far the Russian republic has slipped from its post-Soviet aspirations. There was a period where the enormous wealth and corruption didn't necessarily have to lead to an autocratic president.

As a trained Russian historian, these two books are obviously a little form of nirvana (I took Lenin's Tomb with me to Italy) but anyone interested in current events and politics - or even just excellent reporting - will get a lot out of Remnick's work.

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Re-discoveries

A weekly series where I comment on a book that I read before the launch of the Library

The inaugural feature, chosen semi-randomly (I ran my hand down the bookshelf) is Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker, by Ved Mehta, a long-time staff-writer at the magazine. It's a memoir of his years writing for Mr. Shawn, and an ode to Shawn's career as an editor.

I read this book a year of so after becoming enamored with the New Yorker, and its rhapsodizing tone suited my admiration. But even at the time I recognized it was a little much. Shawn wasn't superhuman. (btw, Shawn is also known for being the father of Wallace Shawn, who played Vizzini in Princess Bride)

What I liked best about this book was the detailed description of how an article makes its way from germ of idea to the pages of the magazine. And the characters that peopled the magazine during the era.

In all, a charming read :)

A little bit of whimsy

I finished Literacy and Longing in L.A. this afternoon. I stick with my previous statement that it was a bit of a letdown. But still sweet. Dora may be shallow, but she is also giving. And the ending, while unsatisfyingly written, is at least satisfying in terms of plot.

One thing I loved was the occasional reference to landmarks that are part of my LA as well. Like Dutton's. Although it's called McKenzie's, the central bookstore is unmistakable. It was nice to see such a haven for books get a starring role in a novel.

On a different note, I saw The Science of Sleep tonight. Michel Gondry, who wrote and directed, is an odd one. His protagonist, Stephane, can barely tell the difference between sleep and wakefulness, and therefore often neither can we. But the love story between him and his neighbor, Stephanie, is both quirky and heartwarming. It's only in his dreams that Stephanie reassures him that they are on the right track. When awake, things never seem to go quite as well. And yet you believe it is the sleeping Stephane and Stephanie that represent the true nature of their relationship.

The Westside Crazy Book Lady

No, that's not me. I still live in Hollywood, so I'm safe for now. But I'm reading Literacy and Longing in LA, a joint project by two Angelenas (is that a real term?). It's about a woman who is having a life crisis, and handles all crises by locking herself up and reading voraciously.

Much of this I can identify with. But I have to admit that I'm a little disappointed with the book so far. Dora, the protagonist, seems a little flaky, even if she is intelligent. And it's hard to believe her when she bemoans the shallowness of the Brentwood/West LA population when you discover that she lives (at 35) on a trust fund, thinks her size 12 sister seems fat (for LA, admittedly), and spends her days flitting around book stores and spying on her estranged husband.

But it IS white Los Angeles, so what is objectively shallow seems to make perfect sense within the context. I guess I just expected to identify with her more, and I'm finding that I don't want to be like her. (Although I wouldn't mind having a trust fund.)

The novel will probably grow on me. Expect a more positive review coming soon.