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Book Rate: June 20, 2006
A
digested book "review": cheap shots, glib commentary,
shameless advocacy of insidious ideology of social and economic
justice and idiosyncratic and totally arbitrary choices of books
that come our way via our gallant and steadfast UPS drivers and
other routes...
Maybe.
Posted: June 20, 2006
Note: The following entries come from Robert
Birnbaum and Matt
Borondy
Books covered this week include:
The Foreign Correspondent
by Alan Furst
Best of Tin House: Stories
foreword by Dorothy Allison
Voices of Time: A Life in Stories
by Eduardo Galeano, translated by Mark Fried
The Din in the Head: Essays
by Cynthia Ozick
The First Hurt
by Rachel Sherman
A Spy's Fate by
Arnaldo Correa
The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories
by Valerie Martin
kittens in the boiler
by Delphine Lecompte
The Foreign Correspondent
by Alan Furst (Random House, 273 pages)
Alan
Furst has (correctly, I think) been enshrined with masters of
the political thriller such as Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, and John
LeCarre. In slightly less than two decades Furst has written Night
Soldiers, Dark Star, The Polish Officer, The World at Night, Red
Gold, Kingdom of Shadows, Blood of Victory, Dark Voyage, and
now The Foreign Correspondent—all riveting novels
of Europe in the grips of World War II.
Here a British spy explains:
"Still no matter what happens politically, you'll want the
support of the emigres."
"It's always nice to have friends but they are not a crucial
element, by far, not. We're a traditional service and we operate
on the classic assumptions. Which means we concentrate on the
three C's: Crown, Capitol and Clergy. That's where the influence
is, that's how a state changes sides, when the leader, king premiere,
whatever he calls himself and the big money—captains of
industry—and the religious leaders, whatever God they pray
to, when these people want a new policy, the things change. So
emigres can help but they are famously a pain in the ass, every
day some new problem. Forgive me Wiez, for being frank with you,
but the same with journalists—journalists work for other
people, for Capitol and that's who gets to tell them what to write.
Nations are run by oligarchies, by whoever is powerful and that's
where my service will commit its resources and this is what we
are doing in Italy."
Random House describes the new book:
"By 1938, hundreds of Italian intellectuals, lawyers and
journalists, university professors and scientists, had escaped
Mussolini’s fascist government and fled to Paris. There,
amidst the struggles of émigré life, they founded
an Italian resistance, with an underground press that smuggled
news and encouragement back to Italy. Fighting fascism with typewriters,
they produced five hundred and twelve clandestine newspapers.
The Foreign Correspondent is their story."
And yes, once more the Brasserie Heininger makes an appearance.
My kind of guy—indeed.
-Robert Birnbaum
____________
Best
of Tin House: Stories
foreword by Dorothy Allison (Tin House Books, 337 pages)
Tin House, an eight-year-old literary quarterly, has consistently
published some of the best short-form fiction in America, making
this best-of a real bonanza—I’m going to name names
here: Steve Almond, Aimee Bender, David Benioff, Amy
Bloom, Deborah Eisenberg, Robert Olen Butler, Denis Johnson,
Martha
McPhee, Anthony Swofford, Jim
Shepard, Elizabeth Tallent, and others.
Here’s Francine Prose, no slouch herself, opining on Tin
House’s glories:
"Like many people, and most writers I know, I read every
issue of Tin House, from cover to cover, for three reasons.
One: Because it makes me believe that we still live in a world
in which people care about writing, language, literature, and
art. Two: Because there is nothing else like it. And three: Because
it’s so consistently smart, surprising, and so amazingly
good."
-Robert Birnbaum
____________
Voices
of Time: A Life in Stories
by Eduardo Galeano, translated by Mark Fried (Henry Holt,
341 pages)
Since I discovered Eduardo
Galeano via a New Yorker profile of him by Lawrence
Weschler, I have admired his writing, beginning with his unparalleled
trilogy Memories of Fire (1000 stories broken up into three
volumes).
Voices of Time comprises 341 stories from Galeano’s
life, with Peruvian illustrations thousands of years old, which
he rightfully points out are eerily fresh, adorning many pages.
He explains, “When they were still loose threads and not yet
part of one cloth, a few of these stories were published in newspapers
and magazines. In the process of weaving, the original changed their
color and shape.”
Here are a few examples:
Time Tells
We are made of time.
We are its feet and its voice.
The feet of time walk in our shoes.
Sooner or later, we all know, the winds of time will erase the
tracks.
Passage of nothing, steps of no one? The voices of time tell of
the voyage.
The Voyage
Oriol Vall, who works with newborns at a hospital in Barcelona,
says that the first human gesture is the embrace. After coming
into the world, at the beginning of their days, babies wave their
arms as if seeking someone.
Other doctors, who work with people who have already lived their
lives, say that the aged, at the end of their days, die trying
to raise their arms.
And that’s it, that’s all, no matter how hard we strive
or how many words we pile on. Everything comes down to this: between
two flutterings, with no more explanation, the voyage occurs.
Witnesses
The professor and the journalist walk in the garden.
The professor, Jean-Marie Pelt, stops, points, and says, “Allow
me to introduce you to our grandparents.”
The journalist, Jacques Girardon, crouches down and finds a ball
of foam peeking out from the blades of grass.
The ball is a town of microscopic blue algae. On very humid days,
the blue algae allow themselves to be seen. They look like a wad
of spit. The French journalist wrinkles his nose; the origin of
life isn’t what we might call attractive, but from that
spittle, from that mess, come all of us who have legs or roots
or wings.
Before there was a before, when the world was barely a baby, without
color or sound, there was blue algae. Streaming oxygen, they gave
color to the sea and the sky. Then one fine day, a day that lasted
millions of years, some blue algae decided to turn green. And
bit by tiny bit, the green algae begat lichens, mushrooms, mold,
medusas, and all the color and sound that came later, as did we,
to unsettle the sea and the land.
Other blue algae preferred to carry on as they were.
And still are.
From the distant world that was, they observe the world that is.
What they think of it we do not know.
Greeneries
When the sea became the sea, the land was still nothing but naked
rock.
Then lichens, born of the sea, made meadows. They invaded the
kingdom of stone, conquered it, turned it green.
That happened in the yesterday of yesterdays, and it is still
going on. Lichens live where no one lives: on the frozen steppe,
in the burning desert, on the peaks of the highest mountains.
Lichens live only as long as the marriage lasts between an alga
and her son, the mushroom. If the marriage breaks up, the lichens
break down.
Sometimes, fighting and disagreements lead the alga and mushroom
to part. She complains that he keeps her hidden from the light.
He says she makes him sick, feeding him sugar day and night.
Footprints
A couple was walking across the savannah in East Africa at the
beginning of the rainy season. The woman and the man still looked
a lot like apes, truth be told, although they were standing upright
and had no tails.
A nearby volcano, now called Sadiman, was belching ash. The rain
of ash preserved the couple’s footprints, from that moment
through time. Beneath their gray blanket, the tracks remained
intact. Those footprints show that this Eve and that Adam had
been walking side by side; at a certain point she stopped, turned
away, and took a few steps on her own. Then she returned to the
path they shared.
The world’s oldest human footprints left traces of doubt.
A few years have gone by. The doubt remains.
-Robert Birnbaum
____________
The
Din in the Head: Essays
by Cynthia Ozick (Houghton Mifflin, 243 pages)
Ever since the movie of the same name, I have thought that “a
beautiful mind” is a wonderfully apt description of the creatively
ambidextrous novelist/essayist Cynthia
Ozick. She follows her 2004 novel, Heir to A Glimmering
World, with a collection of essays devoted to literary subjects,
though she does demur—a demurral that is a wonderfully ripe
piece of Ozickian thinking:
"I cannot say that all the essays in this book are unified
by a single theme, though I suppose (like the ass straining to
keep up with the ox) I could laboriously invent one for the occasion.
On the other hand, most—not all—may be connected by
what they are not, what they do not do. By and large, they do
not celebrate trivia or hunger after the lesser—not, I hope,
out of some monomaniacal purist arrogance to which they are not
entitled, but because some matters are, in truth, more urgent,
and significant, than others."
She does address variously Helen Keller, young Tolstoy, John Updike,
Saul Bellow, Sylvia Plath, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, and Robert
Alter, and as Sven
Birkerts reverently intones:
"…she has made herself an indispensable presence in
our embattled literary scene. Her new collection, The Din
in the Head, catches her in full polemical stride: The critic
takes on a culture muddled by its aesthetic priorities and distracted
by “this hubbub, this heaving rumble of zigzag static,”
the electronic chaos invoked in her title essay. Ozick is our
arch defender of the independent rights and powers of literature,
and of the novel in particular. She is old school; her views are
clear and her tone brooks no opposition. Open the collection anywhere—I
guarantee it—and you will feel the bite of her distinctive
voice. If you are a reviewer, you will want to quote her."
-Robert Birnbaum
____________
The
First Hurt
by Rachel Sherman (Open City Books, 148 pages)
New York literary magazine Open City has a small imprint
which provides some opportunity for writers that it believes in—such
as it should be. Rachel Sherman has done the usual turn, education
via an MFA at Columbia and publication in McSweeney’s,
Open City, Post Road, n+1, and Story Quarterly, and
in the book Full Frontal Fiction: The Best of Nerve. Last
year’s literary poster boy Sam Lipsyte expiates:
“Rachel Sherman’s stories are real wonders—brave,
dangerous fictions full of heart and wit. She gets to the creepy,
despairing, hilarious core of adolescence like few writers I’ve
read. This is an amazing debut.”
-Robert Birnbaum
____________
A
Spy’s Fate
by Arnaldo Correa (Akashic Books, 303 pages)
Who knows who comes up with this, uh, stuff but somewhere Cuban
Arnaldo Correa is referred to as the “Godfather of Cuban Noir.”
He was born in rural Cuba, the Escambray Mountains, Cuba, in 1935.
And he has been his publishing fiction for more than 40 years—A
Spy’s Fate was his first novel in English translation
published in 2002, followed by Cold Havana Ground. Correa
currently lives in Havana. William Hefferman, no noir slouch himself,
opines: “Arnaldo Correa is the undisputed master of Cuban
noir. Spy’s Fate is a courageous book that offers
a true insider’s view of the new Cuba that neither the U.S.
nor Fidel Castro want you to know about.” For those of you
who, like me, are fascinated with the bizarre U.S.-Cuban connection
and additionally are mesmerized by Cuban culture, this novel satiates
those tastes.
-Robert Birnbaum
____________
The
Unfinished Novel and Other Stories
by Valerie Martin (Vintage Books, 212 pages)
From the Missouri-born author of Mary Reilly and the Orange
Prize-winning Property comes this collection of six short
(actually kind of long) stories about the complicated lives of artists
and writers. Most of the narratives involve fierce competitiveness
and/or awkward relationships (some of which, of course, are sexual).
All of the stories display a deep understanding of the creative
mind's struggles to translate its inner brilliance into the external
world--and to satisfy its own often inelegant worldly needs.
-Matt Borondy
____________
kittens
in the boiler
by Delphine Lecompte (Thieves Jargon Press, 208 pages)
This book uses the word "cunt" enough to make Henry Miller
proud. An all-lowercase work of subversive fiction from former hooker,
milk-bottle stacker and barmaid Delphine Lecompte, kittens in
the boiler is one of two
releases from Massachusetts-based Thieves
Jargon Press.
The Thieves
Jargon manifesto states:
"We’re interested in finding stories about drifters
and hustlers and dreamers finding beauty in things they never
thought they would. Or stuff about fighting or gambling. Or about
doin’ it. Tell me us good story, preferably one I could
tell my favorite bartender."
kittens in the boiler is certainly aligned with that statement.
Here's a clip from the book:
"the only thing i have in common with my father is that
we both hate my mother; the man sitting across from me at the
kitchen table is probably my father, although he looks nothing
like me he's just as spiteful and vindictive, he's a beautiful
man, i'd shag him, he's got thick dark hair, dark skin and a slender
body, nothing like this here miserable dwarf, and we're drinking
wine, and we're listening to the beatles (how can someone so spiteful
love the beatles? oh yes, i forgot: charles manson)"
-Matt Borondy
____________
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