Blank Slate

Man Walks Into a Room - Nicole Krauss
New York: Anchor Books, 2002

After the excitement of Stanford and Venice Blvd, I was able to get down to concentrating on the rest of Krauss' novel. It's haunting and minimalist and bizarre. It's not as deeply moving as The History of Love, but beautiful and interesting in its own right. The main character, Samson, a lit professor in his mid-30s, is found walking through the desert with no idea who he is. After a brain tumor is removed, his memory returns, but only through age 12. The last two dozen years: empty. But he embraces the emptiness, and his experiences as he puzzles through what it means and what it's worth to make connections with others make for a challenging and thought-provoking read. A couple moments that I highlighted:

• wanting to say to his estranged wife, with whom he cannot remember falling in love:

  "Tell me, was I the sort of person who took your elbow when cars passed on the street, touched your cheek while you talked, combed your wet hair, stopped by the side of the road in the country to point out certain constellations, standing behind you so that you had the advantage of leaning and looking up? and so on [...] But he didn't ask because he didn't know if he wanted the answers."

• on loneliness: "How can a mind know how alone it is until it brushes up against some other mind? [...] and now the magnitude of his own loss was impossible for Samson to ignore. It was breathtaking."
• and do I agree with this or not? How can you know for certain? "The mind cannot abide any presence but its own."
• Oh, and the epilogue. Which I wasn't expecting, but which completely fit.
  

Dislocation

I am currently reading Man Walks Into a Room, by Nicole Krauss. (I've written a little before about how I am terribly jealous of her.) Apparently sometimes I am bitchy. Case in point: when amnesiac Samson flies into LA, he tells the neuroscientist who picks him up, "I probably came [here] once or twice when I was a kid. I feel like I've been here." And the response: "You watch a lot of movies? Because it unsettles even people who live in L.A.: the nagging sense that they've seen a part of the city before, exactly like this." Um, I really don't feel that way. I recognize things, and am pleased or not, depending. It's certainly not unsettling. So minus points to Krauss.

Except then... 12 pages later another character tells Samson about sticking around at Stanford after finishing his degree, and hanging out with guys in Symbolic Systems. SymSys?? I didn't expect to see that in a book. And then, in another 4 pages: "They ate dinner at a plastic picinic table outside the India Sweets and Spices Mart on Venice Boulevard." Wait, where? The cheap Indian place down the street where they yell at you if you don't order quickly enough? The one I walked by this afternoon on my way back from Trader Joe's? And there, perhaps, is the feeling the neuroscientist mentioned. Unsettling, as though characters have been walking through my world.

So in the end, Krauss (if I attribute her character's observation to her) is right. Except for me, it happens in books, not in film.

"On beauty and being wrong"

On Beauty - Zadie Smith
New York: Penguin Press, 2005

I like Zadie Smith. I like her characters. They are rich and interesting and thoughtful and flawed and confusing. And not really all that much like me. At least, I don't find myself identifying with their foibles. Which is maybe why they interest me so much - they are entirely new people to learn about.

So On Beauty... is about a family. The middle-aged British professor, who is sympathetic despite being an intellectual prick, so far as I can tell, and engaging in a whole variety of stupid and hurtful actions. His wife, described by another character as being like an "African queen," big in body and spirit. Three children, all finding their own identities and wrestling with questions of being mixed-race and middle class. And another family, that of another professor, a bitter rival of the first. And the ways their families mix and interact.

In both this novel and White Teeth, I felt Smith was far stronger in developing her characters and setting a stage than in moving the plot along. The climaxes seemed strange and perhaps forced, as though they couldn't live up to everything that came before. But if you read more for character and less for plot, that becomes less of an issue. You have to leave the characters and hope for the best for them, rather than trust that Smith will bring them where you want them to be.

PS - a favorite moment: "When [the cab] arrived, the driver's door opened and a young Turk in the literal sense leaned out and asked Howard a rather metaphysical question: 'Is it you?' "
I don't know why, but I love that.

Human Nature, reduced

I had a few minutes to read yesterday sitting in front of the Central Library, waiting for my students to appear. And this moment, in a profile of movie marketing exec Tim Palen, made me laugh:

The collective wisdom is that young males like explosions, blood, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, “you’re so gay” banter, and sex—but not romance. Young women like friendship, pop music, fashion, sarcasm, sensitive boys who think with their hearts, and romance—but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it).

Collective wisdom is awesome. And sad. Ooh, and it stays good even as we get older:

Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies: they are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit. They enjoy seeing an older woman having her pick of men; they hate seeing a child in danger. ... Older men like darker films, classic genres such as Westerns and war movies, men protecting their homes, and men behaving like idiots. Older men are easy to please, particularly if a film stars Clint Eastwood and is about guys just like them.

So if you've ever wondered how exactly the film industry saw you, now you know.

Tiny Tim, grown up

Mr. Timothy - Louis Bayard
New York: Perennial, 2004 (trade paperback)

I stopped reading books for about a month. I got distracted by things, such as:

• the inauguration
• work
• magazines (1, 2, 3)
• school
• a trip to the ER (albeit a largely unnecessary one)
• old tv shows about teen detectives

But this past week I was ready for an actual book again, so picked up one that has been on my bookshelf since my "Auntie Mame" (and yes, someday I will actually have to read the book and/or watch the movie) gave it to me for Christmas probably 5 years ago.

The book? Louis Bayard's Mr. Timothy, a thriller about the grown Tiny Tim and his efforts to save a young girl from a sexual predator. Interspersed among the action, and Timothy's quite touching relationship with two strong-willed and yet vulnerable urchins, is enough backstory to catch us up on what happened in the years after The Christmas Carol and Ebenezer Scrooge's change of heart. Tim is still trying to make sense of his relationships with his father and his benefactor, each of whom projected their own sense of whom Tim needed to be. Now, he's still trying to figure out his own identity. And finds it, unexpectedly, through his interaction with the two children.

The story moved quickly, and did not feel close to 400 pages. Yet it's not an easy read either, per se. It's an evocative, and disturbing, at times confusing, yet ultimately satisfying novel. And for a girl who hasn't particularly liked revisiting Dickensian London for probably 10 or more years, it was an unexpected pleasure.

Why my messy apartment is like Wikipedia

Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder - David Weinberger
New York: Holt, 2007

The semester starts later this week. I guess I don't mind, but it's not something I'm looking forward to in the way that I used to look forward to the new quarter and my new classes. Maybe because I'm only taking one class, and because I'm doing it during my busy time at work. Anyway, to prepare, my professor asked us to read the book above, in order to get a perspective about the possibilities for information in the digital age.

Weinberger's got a little Malcolm Gladwell in him; he likes to use interesting anecdotes to illuminate a broader theory. In this case, the theme is that instead of having an order of a single place and category for everything, we can now assign things multiple places and categories, sorting and resorting them according to our own individual needs and wants at that moment. (Note to self: should tag blog posts and photos better)

This argument necessarily embraces a seeming paradox about the desireability of having a glut of information. For example, "if [businesses] make their information messier, it'll be easier to find" and (italics Weinberger's) "the solution to the overabundance of information is more information."

While talking about some of the most popular Web 2.0 sites out there (and the way other sites have incorporated similar strategies), Weinberger has also reminded me about how exciting it will be to be a social historian of this era, sorting through this messy and miscellaneous pile of information about ourselves and what we deem important. Flickr alone could keep a researcher going for years. (Of course, what a historian leaves out is almost as interesting as what she includes, and with all this information, there will be an awful lot to leave out.)

What will be truly interesting will be to see how Weinberger's analysis stands up over time, as the trends towards miscellany continue and shift, and maybe reverse. What will the online world look like in the future?

Lost in Translation (going for the easy pun)

The Translator, by Leila Aboulela
New York: Black Cat, 1999

This book is seriously beautiful. And soothing. Even when Sammar, the main protagonist, is agonizing over circumstances and sad, it is oddly calming. Which reflects the role that Islam plays in Sammar's life, sustaining her through a tragic loss, her reawakening and love (which forms the actual substance of the novel), and the way her growth is challenged and reaffirmed.

Sammar's faith was actually the most difficult aspect of the book for me. I just could not relate. And the fact that a happy outcome depends on bringing another character into the faith... well, it was hard for me. But also an excellent reminder that my secular humanist view of the world isn't the only one.

A couple passages that I found worth noting:

Benches. White curved metal, each and every one bore a placard, In Loving Memory of this person or that. As if people must die so that others can sit in the Winter Garden.

An observation that just hit me as funny and poignant. And on the second page no less, setting the tone for this reader for the rest of the novel.

On the strange paradox of time passing:

The days were numbered. They dwindled and by their nature could not increase. But they were not normal days, they expanded as if by magic, they stretched out like trees, and the hours passed like the hours of a child, they did not flicker or melt deceptively away. She thought that it was not true what people said, that time passed quickly when you were happy and passed slowly when you were sad. For on her darkest days after Tarig died, grief had burned away time, devoured the hours effortlessly [...] Now each day stretched long and when Rae spoke to her a few words, when they only saw each other for a few minutes, these minutes expanded and these words multiplied and filled up time with what she wanted to take with her, what she did not want to leave behind.

(Also, back in the day, I read this other love story titled The Translator. Also recommended. Ooh, and you can read my review of it for the Daily Cal. I used to have a lot more to say, I guess.)

Salman Rushdie writes better than I do (duh)

After I read Midnight's Children, I went around thinking in the cadences and magic of Rushdie's prose for weeks. I don't know if the same will happen after The Enchantress of Florence - it's magical foreignness may be too far afield to take my own style captive again.

But I digress. Since I'd much rather read Rushdie than myself, I figure I would share some of my favorite passages from Enchantress, which is pretty and lush and bizarre and just absolutely all over the place, which is what I love most about Rushdie. He is large. He contains multitudes.

Perhaps Rushdie's overarching theme, here stated by the Florentine who is an enchanter in his own right: "This may be the curse of the human race. Not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike."

" 'For a woman to please a man,' the emperor said, 'it is necessary that' " and the list goes on and on. The Florentine "Mughal of Love" replies that well-bred women of Italy are not at all like this. " 'But the courtesan, she fulfills all your ideals, except, possibly, for the business about the stained glass.' 'Never make love to a woman who is bad with stained glass,' the emperor said solemnly, giving no indication of humorous intent. 'Such a woman is an ignorant shrew.' "

"Women have always moaned about men [...] but it turns out that their deepest complaints are reserved for one another, because while they expect men to be fickle, treacherous, and weak, they judge their own sex by higher standards, they expect more from their own sex - loyalty, understanding, trustworthiness, love - and apparently they have all collectively decided those expectations were misplaced." [In this instance, the spate of jealous animosity was cured by having all the women go naked for a day, so they could see each other for all their faults.]

And in the New World, "the ordinary laws of space and time did not apply," moving forward, backward, and at different speeds. A statement that could be applied to Rushdie's created world, where historical figures and magic and intrigue and the past and less-past all come weaving into and around one another.

Revisiting 2008

Running a program and being back in school don't exactly lend themselves to lots of reading and writing and thinking about reading and writing. Well, thinking some. I was constantly sad that I didn't have more time to read. Or didn't make more time to read. Probably both.

Anyway, I wanted to revisit a couple of the goals I had mentioned for the year. Last year I set the goal of finishing all of my 2007 New Yorkers before the end of the year. (And succeeded with 2 days to spare.) This year, I am still working on the November 17 issue. So I will finish this year 5 issues behind. (Also, it is dangerous to read coverage of Election Night, even now, while at the gym, b/c when you get all weepy and choked up, you then start worrying that people are thinking you are going to pass out b/c the elliptical machine is clearly just too much for you.)

I also joined the Russian Reading Challenge and made it through all 4 (plus one) of those books. In that post, I also claimed I would read another 5 books that I already owned. It appears that I read 7 (there were a couple more, but they were books I purchased this year, so don't count). In total, I read something more than 38 books. (There are some that don't get posts because they are texts for class or I am embarrassed about them. Plus I did a fair amount of re-reading of older books this year too. But anyway...)

Goals for next year? Honestly, I don't know what to expect. 2009 promises to bring a LOT of changes, and I don't know what that's going to mean for me and reading. I guess that I should commit to reading another 10 books that I already own. This would probably be easier if I selected them and listed them here, but that's just not going to happen. Not tonight.

Happy New Year to all! May 2009 bring a lot of happy change for us all.

Anne's secret diary? Kinda boring

Since this has seemed to be a kind of Elizabethan year (not providing links to past entries), I figured I would bring it to a close with the novel my mom lent me: The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn, by Robin Maxwell. I knew it wasn't likely to be "good" but I figured it could probably be pretty fun. And it's kind of a kick to compare all the pop culture portrayals of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Plus, this offered the bonus of juxtaposing young Elizabeth settling into her reign while learning her mother's fate through her long-hidden diary.

Um, no. It wasn't bad per se, and the idea that it was Anne's fate that led Elizabeth to spurn marriage where she would have to submit to a man is a nice conceit, but it didn't really have any kick. Perhaps I'm just spoiled now and want something sexier and more colorful. Or perhaps I'm really ready to return to more serious fare. Either way, I'd say it's probably time to move on.

Light & serious reading = Egypt & Afghanistan

I've been trying to trade off between lighter fare and actual literary fiction. So this week I started out with an Elizabeth Peters mystery - Serpent on the Crown - and then moved on to The Kite Runner, the rather well-known book by Khaled Hosseini. I know there was a movie at the end of 2007, but I don't remember the source of the hype before. Was it a big book club selection?

Anyway, I knew what to expect with the Peters, although really I miss having Ramses as a more interesting character. I'm not sure she knows what to do with him as a full-fledged adult. Somehow I managed to not know much about The Kite Runner, except vaguely about one of the climactic scenes. And I think that Hosseini is a doctor, like Chekhov. (Yep.) But this novel seriously wore me down. Every time you think, okay, enough tragedy, something else goes wrong. Yet I think that Hosseini managed to avoid melodrama, which is impressive. The book is famous enough that I don't really feel like I'll have anything to add to the conversation, esp not today, when I am worn out from hiking in Griffith Park and very ready to go to bed. Perhaps next time I read a book, I'll manage to blog about it when I'm more awake...

New books are just more fun?

See? Just the other day I wrote about how I have a hard time reading the books I actually own. And today I come across a Booklist blog on the same topic. Based on this WSJ article and its comments, Keir Graff muses on the to-read pile.

And yet I still buy and hoard books. I’ve joked–joked–that I’ll have to quit my job as a book reviewer in order to read books. But given that I won’t, I imagine I’ll spend my first months of retirement doing math, dividing the number of pages per day I can read into the number of years I think I have left–and weeding my thousands of books to read accordingly.

Jesus, I hadn't even thought about doing that math. I need to get on this.

But it's mildly reassuring to remember that I'm not alone, b/c we all have more books to read than we ever will read. And we all let books sit for far too long. I think I might be unusual in that I am more likely to use the "But I will like it so much I just want to save it for a little longer" excuse. But in the end, it is still an excuse. And one that gives me time for re-reading Emma and watching deliciously bad teen shows.

Oops (which is also something a Soviet artist who gave up his dreams might say)

I am realizing that I'm not a very good blogger. I forget to post. I prattle on about the wrong things. But then, since I pretty much always intended this as a reading journal, perhaps it doesn't matter that much.

I am also not very good about reading books in a timely manner. Some books, yes. But others will languish unread for years. And strangely enough, this is not because I don't want to read them. (Well, sometimes maybe.) Rather, it is that I am looking so forward to them that I want to prolong the anticipation. I used to do the same thing with my favorite Halloween candy, which backfired when my parents ended up eating all my Twix. And there would often been Cadbury cream eggs in the refrigerator into the fall.

(Hmm, I was just struck with the thought that this delayed gratification streak is one of the things that is really good about getting so many of my books from the library. First, I get the delay while I'm waiting to get to the top of the list. But then! there are deadlines. I have to pick up the book by a certain date, and then I have to get it back to the library, read, just a few weeks later. It's very good for me.)

Anyway, I digress. One of those languishing books, a gift from almost 3 years back, was The Dream Life of Sukhanov, by Olga Grushin. (By the way, should I be spending mental energy wondering why Grushin, who grew up in Moscow & Prague before moving to the US, is Grushin instead of Grushina?) In Dream Life, we meet a self-satisfied art magazine editor in his late 50s, who appears to be on top of the world with a cushy job, all the perks of being high up in the Soviet apparatus, and a lovely family. But it's the mid-1980s, and there is a new Party Secretary, and a bunch else is about to begin to change. And more importantly, a quarter century earlier, Sukhanov, a talented artist, put aside his ideologically impure art in favor of security. Now, the decision is coming back to haunt him, literally.

As the past descends on Sukhanov, his grasp on reality and time grows shaky, as he slips into flashbacks. Grushin emphasizes these transitions by seamlessly switching from a third-person present to a third person past to a first-person past. And the flashbacks become longer, and deeper. Not only does the technique enable to reader to see how and why Sukhanov abandoned what he most loved, it also illustrates the way that he is sinking further and further into this dream life. And perhaps has inherited his father's insanity. The end comes in a dizzying whirl.

This reader's reaction to Sukhanov was complicated. His self-satisfied smugness at the opening is irritating, and I couldn't help being happy that he was going to be taken down a peg or two. And yet, especially as his vulnerability comes through, I pitied him, and wanted him to be okay. To somehow take the action that would save his (artistic) soul while remaining safe from the wild currents of history and madness. And the vagaries of bureaucratic displeasure. What can I say? I have an over-protective nature.

Grushin was a teen in Moscow in the mid1980s. I hope that her fiction will continue to engage this confusing and heady era, shedding light on how Russians of all stripes faced the promise and peril of the times.

AWWWW! I have one of those too.

Cats and books go well together. But you knew that already.

Also, I've been re-reading books in between writing papers. Like comfort food, in tough times I turn to Emma and Helen Fielding.

Interred with their Bones, or the Da Vinci Code for Shakespeare

I was mainly writing papers last weekend, but somehow I also found time to read a fun little mystery a la Dan Brown about Shakespeare. I had heard about this book on a podcast so figured when I saw it at the library that I deserved a change from library science, political blogs, and teenage vampires. (Seriously, what do I read these days?) (Edit: just wrote another two paragraphs without noticing that I hadn't given any other info on the book. It's Interred with their Bones (or "The Shakespeare Secret" outside of the US apparently) by Jennifer Lee Carrell.)

Like with Da Vinci Code, as well as I can remember it, there are two major plots tracking together. The first is the historical treasure hunt, with information that threatens to blow up everything we thought we knew about a historical figure. In this case, it's about a missing Shakespeare play... oh, and his very identity. The second is the willingness of someone to kill to keep the information safe.

I like to think I'm decently perceptive. But when I read or watch mysteries, I really don't get it sooner than the average person. I like to think this is because I enjoy the discovery process more than being right all along, but really, I have no idea if this is true. What is true is that I figured out the twists on the murder plot pretty quickly, and wasn't convinced when Carrell starting throwing up new misinformation. That was a suprise. On the other hand, I didn't mind all that much, because the far more interesting part was trying to follow her and her characters as they march through Elizabethan, Jacobian, and Shakespearean history, plus an overview of the major controversies of Shakespeare scholarship. It made me realize that I totally do not know my Shakespeare well enough. Have I read any of the English king plays? I don't think so. Or Lear? Have I read Lear? (Why, in my "Shakespeare's England" course in college, did we only read Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus? It was a history course, but still...)

I digress. The book is fun, but still sufficiently intelligent. And nicely creepy for curling up in bed at night.