'A Visit from the Goon Squad' and 'Sputnik Sweetheart'

 

This week I finished reading Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart from 2002 and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, last year's Pulitzer Prize winner.

It's not fair to compare them; the Murakami book is shorter and lighter and doesn't attempt nearly as much as Egan's. But I was reading them the same week, so comparisons are inevitable.

I have to say I was disappointed with the Murakami, though I keep thinking that it's somehow unfair of me to feel that way. The book is what it is, and he went on to more ambitious and serious things afterward. While I did find the last 35 pages or so compelling, the first 200 pages were like a warm, light breeze on a hot day, a breeze that doesn't do anything to cool you off.

"A Visit From the Goon Squad," on the other hand, was really exciting -- the chronological scope, the chances she took with characters, the choice to imagine more than 60 years of American history past and future. Very admirable.

Next up: Finishing the serialized chapters of "The Third Reich," then Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, then David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Neither of which are short works. To relax I'm reading Patricia Highsmith, and rereading one of my favorite novels ever, Peter Handke's 1972 novella Short Letter, Long Farewell, which has been reissued by New York Review Books.

Question of the year

I know I'm entering my period of holiday-induced crabbiness when blog posts like this annoy me.

Are you blogging to the wrong audience?

There are two reasons I want to post more often. One is to expand my readership beyond other writers. Social media queen Kristen Lamb has written some great posts on this topic. One titled Solid Platform, Wrong Audience is my favorite and has links to her previous posts. My memoir, which I completed earlier this week, is about the six years I spent working as a fashion model in Europe and Japan. My current WIP is a collection of humorous parenting essays. And my next project is something different altogether. As much as I love blogging about writing and social media, it's time for me to expand to also write about parenting and fashion and modeling and all the other topics I’m interested in, like rock climbing and geo-caching and Settlers of Catan. ...

Now, here's an exercise to determine whether you are blogging to the wrong audience: Profile your audience. Make a list of the different groups of people you imagine buying your book. Who are they? Are they teen girls? Middle-aged women? Men who like to read thrillers? How old are they? What do they do for a living? How do they spend their free time? What products do they buy? Make lists. Then, once you've got that down, think about what topics those people are interested in reading about. What concerns them? What are their thoughts preoccupied with? (Boys? Sex? Making money? Finding God? Decluttering their homes?) Make another list. And finally, ask yourself: Are you blogging about the topics on that last list? Why or why not?

When I saw this, my reaction was: Does Don DeLillo give a flying fuck what I blog about? And if not, why should I care what anyone else thinks? You think I'm trying to build some kind of "platform"? No, I'm talking to like five people here.

But I did really love that sentence:

My memoir, which I completed earlier this week, is about the six years I spent working as a fashion model in Europe and Japan.

For some reason that just cracks me up.

L.A. Times really excited about novel concepts of book serialization, packaging

Yesterday on Twitter I mocked the hype about a new novel by Mark Z. Danielewski, a novel which will be -- shocking new idea!! -- serialized in 27 "volumes." Today there's more information about it in this L.A. Times column.

From this article I want to draw a single quote, emphasis mine:

It's possible that [our publishing] schedule could be accelerated. We're constantly open to new ideas -- where will we be in 2014? Maybe digital releases every week, every few months a trade paperback or hardcover. The novel is designed to accommodate, anticipate various platforms.

I take it that he means this particular novel has been designed to "accommodate" (not to mention "anticipate" -- wow!) "various platforms" -- not that The Novel generically is. Although that's an interesting idea to investigate, maybe a good topic for a master's thesis -- that the novel is, by its nature, flexible enough to accommodate changing media.

But what struck me was this. This is not just a long book that the publisher decided, hey, let's go back to that whole serialization thing that worked so well in the 19th century. After all, it's working for the Paris Review to serialize Roberto Bolaño's "The Third Reich" into four parts -- that's garnered lots of attention (and did, in fact, motivate me to subscribe to the Paris review for the first time ever) -- not to mention the multi-book franchises of Harry Potter and other fantasy creations.

No, according to the author, he designed the books to a) be super-ass long, and b) "accommodate various platforms," like so:

Danielewski was paid a reported $1 million for the first 10 volumes; he's thinking of them as two 5-volume seasons, like a television series.

Uh huh. Now I know why it's the L.A. Times that is the one getting excited about it. Seriously, is this really anything that the awful teen-novel book-packaging industry (cf. "Sweet Valley High," etc. etc.) hasn't already pioneered?

Conflicted about reading

I've been thinking lately about my reading and how it influences my writing. I don't know about other people, but I can think of three main ways I'm influenced:

1. Good: An author inspires me and makes me believe that I, too can accomplish something like that author achieved. For example, I was enormously inspired by The Savage Detectives, which was like a fresh breeze blowing through my soul. I immediately got a bunch of ideas for a book of my own and couldn't wait to start working on it.
2. Bad: A book is intimidatingly good; it confuses me, makes me feel like I could never come close to doing something like that, and makes me want to quit writing altogether. The work of Toni Morrison affects me like this.
3. Good and bad: I love reading mid-century authors like Greene, Highsmith, Roth, McMurtry, Salter, Updike and so on, and I'd like to write books like them, but mid-century realism is very out of style, and I can't quite do it well enough. For example, Larry McMurtry's huge novel Moving On contains everything I'd ever want to do in a novel. It's got humor, domestic complexity, a slew of distinctive characters, and best of all it's a genuine document of a time and place -- mostly the cosmopolitan part of Houston in the 1960s, though it also ventures to the Bay Area (where McMurtry was a Stegner fellow at Stanford). (Check out this review in the NYT, which criticizes the book for its length, but in light of totalistic books of 45 years later like Infinite Jest or 2666 makes it seem prophetic.)

So my problem is loving and wanting to imitate books like Moving On. And it's becoming a real problem with my own reading. I haven't read all of Graham Greene yet, or much of Salter, or a lot of Roth, etc. etc. -- so I'm really conflicted when I read an article like this one:

Bloomsbury venture to bring books "back from dead"

LONDON (Reuters) -- Bloomsbury Publishing, home to the Harry Potter books in Britain, launched its first purely digital imprint on Wednesday which it said would bring out-of-print titles "back from the dead."

Bloomsbury Reader has signed up a string of authors including Monica Dickens, great grand-daughter of Charles, politicians Alan Clark and Ted Heath, crime writer H.R.F. Keating and novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett.

The publisher is focusing on books which are out of print and where all English-language rights have reverted back to the author or the author's estate.... "In my experience, if people read a book by an author and they love that author, they suddenly want to read everything by that author and that's where this can fit in," said Stephanie Duncan, digital media director at Bloomsbury Publishing. "Once you've read every Inspector Ghote mystery then you think, well what else has H.R.F. Keating written, and that's where Bloomsbury Reader comes in ..."

Without knowing who any of those authors are, I think, wonderful! I could read everything by H.R.F. Keating -- whoever that is. But even if I had time, would it be a good idea?

Right now I'm reading (while still making my way through Infinite Jest) Martín Solares' The Black Minutes, which I've had on my shelves for several months. There isn't much I need to worry about copying in terms of the voice, as the translation is good and entertaining but not a bolt of lightning like the work of Bolaño translator Natasha Wimmer, but simply in order to enjoy the book I have to take time with it. I'm not a very slow reader, but if I speed up intentionally, I miss most of what I get out of reading in the first place. While I'm reading Solares, there's a ton of Bolaño and other authors on my shelves waiting, as I tend to buy first and find time to read later. Some things have been on my shelf for three or four years.

But then if I read only things written in the last, say, ten years -- so my work isn't influenced by mid-century realism -- then I miss out on a huge amount, especially works that transcend time and place. For example, the roman durs of Georges Simenon! They're a freaking touchstone! And they are available only because New York Review Books is doing the same thing as Bloomsbury has announced it will do, reprint classic out-of-print 20th century literature.

I have no solution to this problem, I write only to articulate it.

Summer of Infinite Jest 10 - the Randy Lenz episode

Pages 521-619 are almost wholly taken up by a series of events at and around Ennet House having to do with a particularly unctuous and recalcitrant resident named Randy Lenz, who in addition to having a seriously complicated past as a druggie/drug dealer is also personality-disordered. His foibles lead to a turning point in the Ennet House-related part of the book, as a street confrontation turns into a battle royale. In this tragicomic farce, the character who has emerged as the protagonist of the Ennet House-related parts, Don Gately, is injured.

In this sequence -- the whole 98 pages, not just the climactic battle -- the author once again demonstrates his mastery of the world of drug addiction and recovery. Not only the everyday doings of a halfway house and the endless AA meetings, but the mindset and behavior of an addict, and not just one addict but a whole range of mentalities and behaviors which various characters illustrate. It goes without saying that these 98 pages could have been -- would have been, by any other author -- compressed into 20 or 25 or at most 40. And if 40, then they would be the climax of an entire novel, not just one thread of a much larger novel where, in fact, they take place only 3/5 of the way through the book.

Think how many of the incidents in the book so far would have made up the ultimate climax of many lesser books: The conversation between the brothers in which Hal reveals to Orin the details of their father's suicide. The Eschaton match. Perhaps the sequence leading up to the suicide attempt of Joelle Van Dyne, although somehow it's not given as much weight as the others -- or maybe it is, because I had to skip several pages of that insufferable film grad student party. And finally the battle royale between Gately and three mysterious Canadian malefactors.

Of course, having so many momentous events and revelations so early in the book only raises the stakes for its ending. And I've heard that "Infinite Jest" doesn't necessarily pay off in the way readers expect a novel to, that like "The Sopranos" it just sort of ends. (See a post I wrote a couple years ago on theRumpus.net where I explored this phenomenon.) But I think just about anyone who has made it to this point in the book, except maybe the most narrow-minded, will be willing to grant the author his preference in doing whatever he wants, because that's how he's gotten us to this point.

I don't want to focus only on these technical aspects, except to say to those who will expect a neat ending: You know how hard this is? Not the neat ending, though that is hard in itself to pull off well, but the sheer aspect of juggling dozens of characters and at least three major plot lines over hundreds of pages?

In a perhaps unrelated note, I was thinking this morning about what books I would consider the best of the American 20th century's second half, and what immediately sprang to mind were "Revolutionary Road" and "Catch-22." Those are two books I would, if I had the time, read every year. Non-American books: "The Remains of the Day" and "The Savage Detectives," surely. But don't get me started.

Summer of Infinite Jest 9 - Pleasure and addiction; my inability to separate the author from the work

One of the main themes of "Infinite Jest" becomes quite clear by the end (at least I hope it's the end) of the drawn-out conversation between the two secret agents, who have for no particular reason stayed up all night on a ridge overlooking Tucson discussing the philosophical reasons behind "the Entertainment." And that theme is simply the trade-offs between pleasure and addiction and the moral implications of choosing, or shall we say acceding to, an addiction.

"The Entertainment" is what they call the weaponized video "cartridge," prepared by an unknown agency, which is so compellingly pleasurable to watch that it puts all who view it into a spell they cannot break. Anyone who watches even one second of the video is instantly bewitched, such that they want only to keep their eyes glued to the video, forsaking everything else in life. They do not -- seemingly cannot -- break away even for a moment, not to eat or drink or (the author makes quite clear) to use the toilet; and they stay in that state, enraptured by the video, until they die. The mechanism by which this happens, whether it is magical or has some scientific basis, is not explained; neither do we have a clue as to what is on the video, at least not at this point around page 530. The mechanism is unimportant; what's important is that this literary conceit allows the characters to explore questions about pleasure, selfhood, addiction, free will, and other philosophical issues.

I can't pretend to be able to really understand, or even follow, the philosophical questions. I never took a philosophy course, and it's hard enough for me even to follow the discussions on the radio show "Philosophy Talk." If there's anything I'm going to understand about this important part of the book, it's by approaching it from a literary angle, as one of the book's themes. And understood that way, in the context of the rest of the book, it seems simple: If seeking pleasure leads swiftly to addiction, as it did for all the characters in the AA-related scenes, then is pleasure-seeking advisable at all? And if not, what does that imply about Western culture, given that so many people live their lives in pursuit of pleasure?

Worthwhile questions in a great book, but the author's own death makes it impossible to leave it there. My friend who is a literature scholar will object, but I'm going to say that no matter how convincingly the author explicates these themes, in this and other works (such as the tour de force essay on pleasure cruises, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" [pdf]), whatever he has to say about the pursuit of pleasure is, for me, undercut by his suicide. Whatever he had to say about pleasure, responsibility, caution, personal growth or duty is, for me, drowned out by that act of violence.

So while it's possible for me to suspend disbelief when I consider the literary conceit of the magically compelling "Entertainment" cartridge, and it's possible for me to put aside my knowledge of the author's ultimate statement while I'm reading this book, when I close the book I am thrown back on what I know about the author. It doesn't spoil the book for me, but it taints it.

A little later: I just found this passage in DFW's introduction, reprinted on the NYT's website, to the non-fiction collection "A Supposedly Fun Thing..." -- a passage which says, in 100 words, a great deal about the themes of his novel:

... we (tennis players in the middle of a long session of drills) were both in the fugue-state that exhaustion through repetition brings on, a fugue-state I've decided that my whole time playing tennis was spent chasing, a fugue-state I associated too with plowing and seeding and detasseling and spreading herbicides back and forth in sentry duty along perfect lines, up and back, or military marching on flat blacktop, hypnotic, a mental state at once flat and lush, numbing and yet exquisitely felt. We were young, we didn't know when to stop.

There it all is -- addiction, a hypnotic state with paradoxical effects, and the pursuit of it.

Summer of Infinite Jest 8 -- Waiting for the other shoe to drop

I'm about a hundred pages on in "Infinite Jest," page 526 exactly. Hal Incandenza has been sitting outside the office of the tennis academy's headmaster, or whatever title they use for him, along with a few other seniors, waiting to hear how much trouble they will get into for not stopping the Eschaton match, a holiday entertainment which ended in chaos, injuring several younger academicians. (At the end of it, it seemed as if one or two might have actually been killed, but since no one has mentioned it, I guess not.) Hal and the others wait, and we wait along with them, subjected to one of the author's now-familiar tactics of inflating a scene by describing the setting, the background noises and movements, the physical and mental state of various characters, one or two side trips into backstory, and so on. That's not counting the footnotes, which I have been pretty roundly ignoring, though I looked at a recent one to see what "Coatlicue Complex" (sic) meant, and was rewarded with this footnote: "No clue." Ha.

My friend who roped me into reading "Infinite Jest" with her has long since quit, a choice I respect, though I tend to stick with great big books to the end. Maybe there's a little bit of so-I-can-truly-say-I-read-it feeling behind this, and maybe a bit of Stockholm Syndrome as it applies to the reading of large novels. But mainly I stick with the long novels I've decided to start out of respect for the author's own tenacity and the author's own achievement. If it would be a sad world if we all felt condemned to finish everything we started, it would also be a sad world in which no one actually finishes reading "Infinite Jest," "2666," or "Europe Central."

On the other hand, last year I gave up on a book by an author I used to love, Peter Handke's "Crossing the Sierra de Gredos," after 300 of its 700 pages, not only because I was bored stiff by the language but because there was absolutely no indication that anything would ever happen. So it's not like I can't cut my losses.

Back to "Infinite Jest." Several times in the last 80 or so pages we were brought back to the ridge overlooking Tucson, where the two secret agents, one Quebecois and one American, discuss the moral philosophy behind what I have referred to as the magically compelling videotape, or as they call it, The Entertainment. This sequence -- the scene is drawn out in ten- and fifteen-page episodes interspersed through much of the book so far -- shows how the author draws out a single scene to great lengths, gradually exposing meaning through events and -- in this case, exclusively -- through dialogue. The two operatives have a long disputatious conversation that acts at times as a chorus, bringing (gradually!) to light the main theme of the book, which is the tension between freedom and choice on the one hand and enslavement and addiction on the other.

More about that in next entry.

Meanwhile I also read, and finished, Manuel Puig's "The Buenos Aires Affair."

Circle squared

Not sure how I ended up here, but I found myself on the iTunes catalog page for "A Penguin Books Amplified Edition" of "On the Road," where I found these cavils listed on the side:

How depressing is that.

First we have to imagine a universe where someone under 12 listens to audio books. (I have a hard enough time imagining a universe where anyone at all does so, but I hear it's a big market for people who spend a lot of time in traffic or mall-walking, so good for them, but there are no 12-year-olds in either group.) Then we have to imagine that, say, a ten-year-old would pay one bit of attention to the first few pages (or minutes) of "On the Road,' with Dean Moriarty coming to New York and eating creampuffs, living in "a cold water flat" and reminding the narrator of "a young Gene Autry."

Above all, what 10-year-old is going to be interested in something with "mild drug use, infrequent/mild profanity or crude humor"? There is probably more drug use, profanity and crude humor on his own playground.

How it cheapens art when you try to rein it in these bureaucratic categories.

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 2

I was wrong in my last entry, I wasn't on page 70, I was on page 60.

Now having read 12 more pages I am thinking about the plot thread having to do with the magically compelling videotape (or whatever the so-called "cartridge" is -- we don't know yet whether it's a feature film, a live shot of something, a hypnotic abstract design, or what -- I'll just call it a videotape until I know more).

First of all, at this early point the author is very cagey about the content of the magic videotape and what makes it compelling. And that's obviously the right choice -- you never show the monster in full light and full figure until the last ten minutes of the movie. And this being a literary novel and not, say, Cloverfield, I'm reading and thinking it doesn't really matter what's on the videotape. It is horrifying? Beautiful? Doesn't matter -- what matters is its effect.

Two points here. First, in the current state of ambiguity as to the content of the videotape and even whether it is horrifying or beautiful, it seems to me the author is saying that horrifying and beautiful are in some sense the same thing -- that they meet on both ends of the spectrum. The word "awesome" in its original meaning would apply, as the viewer's reaction of awe is what's important, not whether or not the material is awful.

What do I think about that -- beautiful is the same as horrifying? What's the author trying to say here? Is he suggesting that this equivalence is true, or is he (with a level of irony) suggesting that modern entertainment issues forth from this position of equivalence? The latter would be a more interesting point. The more you think about it, the truer it seems. Think about today's television. On the one hand, some good programming ("The Wire," "Mad Men," etc.). On the other hand, atrocious shit (take your pick). To the television/cable networks, it doesn't really matter. High class? Low class? Who cares as long as it pulls in the viewers? And the magically compelling videotape is the logical extension of this ad absurdam.

Second point: If I were to try to guess what's on the videotape -- an exercise which the author clearly understands is impossible for the reader to resist -- I can't imagine. Being 55 years old, I'm well aware that the avant garde of horrifying filmmaking has long passed me by. Between films like Hostel, with its images of torture, and those of Sion Sono (cf. Suicide Club, where a certain television commercial has the power to drive people to self-destcructive acts), I recoil from stuff that 23-year-olds eagerly consume. (In fact, I began this process when I was 23, when I walked out of Alien. ) In any case, to effect the weaponized hypnotic effect described in "Infinite Jest," the material would have to be geometrically worse.

If such horror (and let's say it's horror, not beauty) is unimaginable by a softy like me, maybe it would be imaginable by some freaky youngster. But I kind of doubt anyone could imagine anything that bad. Such horror is achievable only by a supernatural power; call it Satan. I assume the author is not writing a book about a literal Satan, so that means I have to suspend my disbelief here. In other words, I don't really buy the magical powers of the special evil videotape. But I'll have to take it on faith.

The way I read is, if I have to consciously do this -- say to myself, Okay, there's a hole here in the author's reasoning, a hole he doesn't want me to notice if I'm to continue to invest myself emotionally in his book -- that's sort of a strike. A book can sustain a number of these, the number varying depending on many factors. The book's reputation means I'll cut it a lot of slack.

 
For further reading: Scott Esposito in The Quarterly Conversation with a perspective on Infinite Jest fifteen years after its advent. I had no idea the book was already fifteen years old.

Brits have no trouble with naughty book title

British newspapers have no trouble publishing the full title of "Go the Fuck to Sleep," the best-selling children's book by American author Adam Mansbach.

By contrast, here's the New York Times, which refuses to print the whole title:

Manifold duels

They don't go out of their way to explain, but as I understand it, in August Melville House Publishing is putting out five books all with the title The Duel. Evidently Conrad, Checkov, Casanova, and two other European authors all wrote stories with that title. And I suspect all are in the public domain.

As soon as I saw it, I thought hey, what about the epic passage in The Savage Detectives in which an author challenges a literary critic to a duel with swords? Well, not in the public domain, I guess. (Although I did see a pile of TSD paperbacks on the sale table, not quite at the remainder price, in a bookstore a couple months ago.)

Books I read: "Red Lights" by Georges Simenon; "Let the Great World Spin" by Column McCann

I spent the weekend reading one of Georges Simenon's American novels, Red Lights (Feux Rouges, 1953). The book is about a couple who quarrel on a road trip and are separated, each of them encountering, at different times, an escaped convict. As usual for Simenon's romans durs (or "hard" novels, a phrase he used to distinguish them from lighter genre fare, particularly his endless series of Maigret detective novels), the story is a tense psychological thriller, bearing down on the spirit of an ordinary man until he breaks.

Filled with mid-century period detail -- the casual practice (if not exactly acceptance) of drunken driving, the difficulty of interstate travel before the interstate highway system, the insanely manual nature of a long-distance telephone call, and the utterly strange mixture of casualness and strictness of the hospitals of the time -- the book is also a curiously off look at American culture. The Belgian author composed the book while living in the U.S. for several years between 1945 and 1955*, and he gets many things right, but there are also many other details which receive a weird emphasis or which are simply wrong. (Adding to the strangeness was the fact that the copy I procured was a British edition and contained an occasional British spelling, such as tyre.) But even though these missteps occasionally were jarring, I didn't really mind them because the pacing and plotting were so effective. A Simenon book is a universe unto itself, rendered in complete detail (and not a detail more than necessary); once inside, the reader surrenders all disbelief.

Just before this, I read another novel of American life by a foreigner, "Let the Great World Spin" by Column McCann, an Irish writer. While the book uses as its centerpiece the World Trade Center tightrope walk by Philippe Petit, none of the characters in the book, except for the judge in whose court he appears after the escapade, ever meets the acrobat. Instead they are people who watched it, or more often merely heard about it. Their lives, ranging from Bronx street hookers to a Park Avenue matron, are decidedly earthbound; the transcendence of Petit's feat is a major contrast.

Looked at from this perspective in 2011, these two books -- one set in the early 1950s, the other in the mid 1970s -- are both set in the long-ago past, and drew my attention to the amount of change that has occurred in the years since. Aside from McCann's excellent writing, which in its way is just as intense and insightful about the human spirit as the dark work of Simenon, I was very much struck by how much New York changed from 1974 -- during the depths of its gritty decay, pre-Saturday Night Live, pre-Times Square cleanup, pre-Yankees resurgence, pre-almost everything we associate with New York these days -- to today. Of course, the subtext is that it is also pre-Nine Eleven, but in drawing attention to the World Trade Center itself, not to mention hinting at the amount of planning and subterfuge that went into staging the tightrope walk between the Twin Towers, it foreshadows their identity as a backdrop for world historical events.

Finally, what struck me was the complete lack of reluctance of non-American authors to take on the American landscape. It makes me feel better about my portrait of Bangalore in my unpublished novel Mango Rain.

* This 1953 Paris Match article sets a profile of Simenon in the house where he lived when writing "Red Lights."

King James -- still number I

The Bible is still full of great, unused titles. How about Upon the Earth as Water?

Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.
Thou shalt not eat it; thou shalt pour it upon the earth as water.--Deut. 12:23-24

I'm sure there's an anti-war novel out there waiting to be written that could use that as a title.

Quelle barbare!

This article in The Australian is about how the French love the "For Dummies" books (in French known as "Pour les nuls"), despite initial fears that subjects such as French poetry and history would not withstand the format. The funniest thing? Their publisher is a man named Vincent Barbare, which means "barbarian"!

Aide read 'Brave New World'' aloud to Bush during stem cell debate

The L.A. times book blog has an entry today with a list of the books George Bush mentions in his memoir. Among the items in the list is this dumbfounding entry:

"Brave New World" (1932) by Aldous Huxley. Read aloud to Bush in the Oval Office by an aide as he was thinking about stem cell research.

Imagine what that must have been like! Some young fellow sitting on a couch in the Oval Office reading the "orgy porgy" scene while Bush stares into space. I wonder if it gave Bush a hard-on. It did to me, but I read it when I was 14.

I wonder what Bush was reading when he was 14. I suspect the answer is nothing, which would explain a lot.

Annoying Columbian novel

I finished reading the novel "The Informers" by Juan Gabriel Vásquez. The language is beautiful, and I haven't read a novel by a Columbian since reading something by Gabriel Garcia Márquez a long time ago, so it was very interesting to read something set in modern-day Columbia and be assured that it is not merely a third world country that was, in the 1980s, very nearly a failed state, but has something of a culture and a history. (The view I have of places like Mexico, Guatemala and Columbia, places where crime lords or secret police have held sway over large swaths of the country if not the entire country, is pretty much the picture Bolaño paints of Santa Teresa in "2666," or in reality in large parts of Mexico these days, so it always surprises me to find out that in these places live people who are literate, educated and cultured, that they're not all at each other's throats.)

But as I say, I was annoyed by this book, because of the author's tendency to obscure the most important information about relationships between characters and the basic events of the plot. I don't think it's just my own denseness, because it was like this all the way through: about the most important narrative and character elements, the author is deliberately vague. So that I enjoyed the reading but not the story so much, and in the end I'm still not quite sure what the relationship was between a few of the major characters, and most of all the central question of the book, which is why the narrator's father betrayed his best friend (and it took 90% of the book to make clear that betrayal had actually happened). I understand the authorial strategy of being sly with information -- Cris compared it to the way a poet shows things through symbolism or other techniques -- especially as a way to mirror the time and effort the narrator takes to find out the same information. But in this book the narrator finds out information fifty pages before the reader does, and then -- and this is the annoying part -- constantly refers to it as if the information had also been shared with the reader, so that as a reader I was constantly asking myself, wait, did I miss something? And like I say, I never learned the main question of the book, which is the motivation for its main action, the act of informing to which the title refers. I don't think it was ever revealed -- but because the author obscures information all along, I'm not sure. so, yeah, annoying.

Child soldier-turned-Marine-turned-fitness coach's story sounds fishy

This Reuters profile is about a man called Tchicaya Missamou, who says is is a former child soldier in Africa who became a US Marine. He is now a fitness instructor in southern California and is on a book tour (which is how he comes to be the subject of a profile. I wonder how many personalities, ideas and language memes first enter the public notice through book tours) for his memoir "In the Shadow of Freedom."

According to the story:

Growing up in Congo-Brazzaville as one of 16 siblings born to his father's seven wives, Missamou's childhood was shaped by the violence that sprung up in the 1990s following the oil-rich central African nation's first democratic elections. Missamou describes how, at around 14, he and his teenage friends were handed guns and a few grenades and put in charge of a checkpoint with orders to block members of rival ethnic groups from entering the area.

"I saw awful things during this time," he wrote in the book... Violence broke out again in 1997, and this time Missamou became a war profiteer. He assembled a convoy of armed men and struck lucrative deals with Brazzaville whites, most of whom had fled, to rescue abandoned suitcases of cash and valuables. "The Congo was falling apart, but I was rich," he wrote.

As Missamou's success grew, so did his notoriety. With the help of his father, a police captain, he fled Africa while still a teenager. He ended up in California and found work at a martial arts studio. There, Missamou met a U.S. marine recruit who encouraged him to enlist. Soon, Missamou was deployed overseas, going to Afghanistan and Iraq to fight for his adopted homeland. Through an executive order that fast-tracked citizenship applications of U.S. soldiers, Missamou became a U.S. citizen in 2003....

But Missamou, who wears his crisp, white U.S. Marines uniform on his book tour, said he also wants to give back to his adopted country. In 2007, he opened The Warrior Fitness Camp in Valencia, California, where he trains students in military techniques as well as the skills he learned as a child in the African bush.

Really? Is this all from the guy's book and from an interview with him? Did the reporter do any checking at all? Is it even possible to do fact-checking on the memoir of someone with a resume like that? Or are we just supposed to take the guy at his word? Of course we are.

It's the "white Marines uniform" that made my bullshit detector go off. Who goes around the country on a book tour in a dress uniform? Not even Colin Powell. I mean, really -- could this guy's story possibly be true?

Marilyn Jaye Lewis's 'Freak Parade'

My friend Marilyn was kind enough to send me her new erotic novel, Freak Parade, about a washed-up pop singer in New York who has to go out and get a job, start taking responsibility for herself, and stop making so many bad decisions. Along the way, she has sex with a lot of people and finally meets the love of her life.

As usual, I really enjoyed Marilyn's direct, passionate and compassionate writing. Her erotic scenes, characterized by a wonderful clarity and sense of pacing, are as messed-up and hot as ever. I wanted even more! And because I like stories that capture a time and place, I loved the glimpses into New York bohemian culture around the end of the 1990s, when apparently even the bohemians, thanks to the trickle down of all that money, found ways to live fairly high off the hog.

That's Freak Parade by Marilyn Jaye Lewis, one of my favorite writers.

technorati: Marilyn Jaye Lewis

Support a small press

Salt -- not to be confused with the Angelia Jolie vehicle about to be released -- is a British literary publisher. Blogger Shigekuni posts:

Salt, the amazing British publisher of prose and poetry, is almost broke. Last year, they launched a campaign called Just one Book to save themselves, and they are doing it this year as well. It’s a plea to buy Just One Book published by Salt. You can buy it directly from them or from your retailer of choice. Spread the word.

I visited their website, which has a US store, and bought a book!

And don't forget that classic fishing book by Richard Brautigan

Other categories that have quite literally come out of nowhere and captured the imagination of readers are Scandinavian crime fiction, particularly the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, and Latin American crime fiction by Roberto Bolano.

Article in the Times of India

A classic case of judging a book by its title.