Book of the Week: Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon

Posted on April 8, 2012 by kwohlrob

The subtitle of Dirty Snow should have been, Take That Camus! While not a specific counter-punch to Camus’ L’Étranger, Simenon’s dark story of a murderer with no regrets shares a similar bent, neither pulling any punches with the reader. Maybe that is why the book, along with Simenon’s The Widow, which was published in the 40s as well, is so often compared to Camus first masterwork. While L’Étranger is infused with Camus’ humanistic worldview and the influences of his Algerian upbringing, Dirty Snow one-ups the score with Simenon’s cold remove and stripping of existential underpinnings. There is no philosophy to be had here — the world is an ugly place and that’s the short of it.

To call Dirty Snow bleak would be an understatement. It makes Simenon’s own The Man Who Watched Trains Go By read like a Sophie Kinsella novel. You leave this book covered in a disgusting film of human degradation (and yet somehow, all credit to Simenon, eagerly along for the ride). This is a testament to Simenon’s skill at trapping us in the head of man we detest, unable to look away as he drags us through one vile act to the next. There is no letup. We are never given leave of his gaze, never allowed a moment to gasp for clean air. And when the tables are finally turned on this horrible creature, we see the downfall through the antagonist’s eyes, causing our perception of him to change.
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Book of the Week: The Face of Another by Kōbō Abe

Posted on February 6, 2012 by kwohlrob

It is not surprising that readers, even if they are devout fans of Kōbō Abe, don’t take to The Face of Another in the same manner as The Woman in the Dunes or some of his other novels. It may be because of the uncomfortable feeling a reader gets being stuck in the narrator’s head for an entire novel (much like Camus’ The Stranger). The story is built on the premise of a wife finding her husband’s notebooks which are filled with solipsistic meanderings, repeated excursuses, counter-arguments directed at her, and endless musings about identity and self. But you can forgive the man — after all, he’s had his face horribly scarred and burned in a laboratory fire. He is isolated and alone, even from his wife. But he has a plan, a carefully schemed revenge, and it starts with getting a new face. Thus, Abe takes us into fascinating exploration of identity and self.

The scientist, who is as scarred psychologically as physically, has it in for his wife. Continue reading →

Book of the Week: Stranger Will by Caleb J. Ross

Posted on November 13, 2011 by kwohlrob

Having already been a fan of Caleb J. Ross from his short story collection, Charactered Pieces, it was nice to see him make a big leap with his first novel, Stranger Will. In fact, he jumped himself right into Ira Levin territory with this macabre tale of evil that lives right next door (if not right inside the protagonist). It’s been a while since I have read a solid, eerie tale of actual human depravity — let’s face it, most writers are too zombie and vampire obsessed these days — but Stranger Will hits the mark perfectly. As Levin did with Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, Ross sets Stranger Will in a our world, one too familiar, where a slight twist, a nudge in the wrong direction send’s the protagonist Will into the presence of secret movement that exists just beneath the surface. Their plans… well, without giving anything away, are as nefarious as the old folks in Levin’s satanic opus.
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Book of the Week: Rampart & Toulouse by Kristin Fouquet

Posted on November 5, 2011 by kwohlrob

I’m not sure which came first: the photography or the writing. What I do know is that Kristin Fouquet’s love of photography infuses her storytelling. Her tales have that feel of old photographs you discover in a thrift store bin — you don’t know these people, but you can see their lives boiled down into that moment. It’s because of this that the stories in Rampart & Toulouse and her previous collection Twenty Stories never feel over-told. They unfold simply and capture that poignant moment for the character. You don’t need to know the rest. Everything is in that snapshot.

“Becoming Obsolete” and “Paris is the Pretty One” — two of the short stories in this collection that also includes a novella — both capture that quality in Fouquet’s writing. The former is a tale of refrigerators and New Orleans social hierarchy, the latter is a story of two sisters and a horror-show trip to Paris. For the characters in each, there is a line of demarcation, a point of no return that comes to them not as a sudden surprise but a moment they can only accept with resignation. The author doesn’t force them upon the reader, but with some confidence, lets us see what ultimately becomes obvious to the character, even if they are powerless to change that fateful day.

In all these stories, there are wonderful scenes that Fouquet conjures up, never forced, suddenly unraveling in the midst of a story. A woman standing in her bedroom window, watching a bottle of wine in she left in the courtyard, waiting for it’s intended recipient to appear. A Soprano, dressed in a robe and towel, waving her arms while practicing an aria in the privacy of her Paris apartment, unaware of the spectator watching her from across the street. A procession of ad hoc mourners singing “Sweet Sue Just You” as they march from the St. Louis cemetery in New Orleans, honoring a woman they never knew.

Like a perfect photograph, Fouquet’s stories leave one feeling as if they’ve only caught a glimpse of these lives, but that’s enough to tell the tale, and to know the fates.

Book of the Week: A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter

Posted on October 8, 2011 by kwohlrob

Jesuachristo, the prose! More than any other writer I have read, Salter could do so much with so little. He has a scalpel-like precision with his prose — it is always just enough, nothing more. Quite a few writers should read Salter if for no other reason than studying how a few simply crafted sentences can say more than endless flowery paragraphs that serve more as literary gymnastics than good writing. The opening chapters of A Sport and a Pastime, where the narrator is travelling via train through the French countryside, read like a Van Gogh painting.

“Canals, rich as jade, pass beneath us, canals in which wide barges lie. The water is green with scum. One could almost write on the surface.

Hayfields in long, rectangular patterns. There are hills now, not very high. Poplars. Empty soccer fields. Montereau — a boy on a bicycle waiting near the station. There are churches with weathervanes. Smalls streams with rowboats moored beneath the trees…. The pattern of fields is passing, some pale as bread, others sea-dark.”

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Book of the Week: For All These Wretched, Beautiful, & Insignificant Things So Uselessly & Carelessly Destroyed… by Hosho McCreesh

Posted on August 21, 2011 by kwohlrob

Don’t let the title of this book, or the those of the 20 poems in this collection, fool you. Hosho McCreesh is razor sharp in his poetry. Not a word is wasted. And flying through all 20 in one sitting, you get caught up in McCreeh’s view of the world. It’s soaked in whiskey-and-wine and the disappointment of every challenge that we’ll never be able to overcome. Yet, it has a beauty to it, like a good Mark Lanegan song.

In the first nine poems, McCreesh has an axe to grind. Not with you, or me for that matter, but with us. In McCreesh’s eyes we’ve pissed it all away, or are incapable of redeeming the pile of crap that was handed to us. It’s dark, hell-bent, screaming, confrontational poetry, and in most hands it would be an clichéd and ridiculous homage to Bukowski. But McCreesh has heart and as angry as he is, he empathizes with us. He knows we can’t help it:

“We are forced to search out
small fires, a little light,
some warmth, &
a little bit of
madness
to help drag us through
all this so-called
sanity
It’s usually not much.
It usually doesn’t last
But it helps…

In the second batch of poems, McCreesh gets optimistic, but in his own cynical way. Sure, we’re still screwed, but there are the small victories. And again, it is McCreesh’s economy with words that wins you over. Such as the simple argument he makes in “Seems Everyone These Days Wants Some Magical Cure for Death…”

I want a
cackling, drunken
cure
for lives
poorly
lived…”

Amen to that brother.

Book of the Week: You Can Make Him Like You by Ben Tanzer

Posted on May 22, 2011 by Ken Wohlrob

You can run but you can’t hide. At least not from your own life. Keith, the self-absorbed protagonist of Ben Tanzer’s You Can Make Him Like You, is sucker-punched by this lesson over and over again. Yet, as one can expect from Tanzer, the blows are at turns funny, tragic, and often spot-on in revealing the anxieties that scratch beneath our own skins.

What ails Keith is life itself. Or rather an adult life with all its complications and irresolvable issues that always require a bit of character sacrifice. His life is neatly ordered and sorted, a well-crafted mix of job, friends and a wife. But there’s temptation everywhere Keith looks. And sure, he would never do anything to ruin his marriage, right? Right? Liz, headstrong and the adult of the two, also won’t budge on having a child, an event that Keith views more as an intrusion than bundle of joy. Order is quickly becoming uncertainty and a lack of control. Keith, who never wants to confront anything and would prefer to suppress these difficult issues with a jog in the cool Chicago air, is better at avoiding life or trying to hide in the checklist of cultural touchstones he surrounds himself with. He ties his emotional issues to romantic comedies, Hold Steady songs, Michael Chiklis’ Vic Mackey character on The Shield, and even Patrick Ewing. So when the kid finally does arrive, and things don’t go as planned, not even Vic Mackey can save him.

At first impulse, if you read the plot on the back of a book, it would all sound a little too cliché. Yet, Tanzer’s love of writing pop stories, that reveling in what can be new and poignant in oft-tread ground, wins the day. His greatest skill — and it’s been this way through all of his novels and short stories — is to take the normal, the everyday we all know and live through, and to turn that into great tragicomedy. Like his protagonist, Tanzer is obsessed with the art of a great pop song: Three chords, three minutes, and out. But the emotion is so pure, you can’t deny it. You Can Make Him Like You hits the reader like that and hits it just right.

Ask anyone who has tried: often those are the hardest songs to write.

Book of the Week: The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli by Ginnetta Correli

Posted on April 16, 2011 by Ken Wohlrob

Full points to Ginnetta Correli. The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli could have fallen flat on its face with what story-wise is well-trod ground: a coming-of-age tale of a teenage girl. But her bent, the life of the misfortunate title-character as told in a series of vignettes that play more like episodes from a warped sitcom, is original, gritty, raw, and heartbreaking. It is growing-up story as an open wound.

The best example of this is when Beatie’s mom, convinced that she is Lucy Ricardo, goes to her daughter’s elementary school, dressed as a nurse (which she is indeed not), to threaten a teacher she believes has seduced Ricky (or rather Beatie’s actual father who she keeps referring to as Ricky). The shocked teacher, who is indeed not sleeping with Ricky, is no match for the sneak attack, and loses control quickly, along with an American flag that is quickly incorporated into Lucy’s rendition of “Babaloo.” Seen through Beatie’s eyes, you cringe with the child, and yet the absurdity can’t help but wrench a smile out of you.
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Book of the Week: Stories by Scott McClanahan

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Ken Wohlrob

Let the story do the talking is the mantra that Scott McClanahan follows. And it serves him well.

This collection of seventeen short stories reads more like a conversation with a fellow patron in a rundown bar along the side of a road in West Virginia. The prose is sparse, cut to the bone, and makes no attempts to dazzle the reader with clever wordplay. McClanahan is confident enough in the tale not to wallpaper it – the grit and the grime will keep you locked in for the duration.

Often a story will kick off as if the reader sat down midway through the narrator’s diatribe.

“And then there was the time my Dad got into it at a NASCAR race in Charlotte.”

It gives the stories a great conversational aspect, where the narrator is really having a talk with the reader, telling him the story of his life.

As for the stories themselves, there is great pain in these tales of the downtrodden, heaps of regret, but also a great black humor that arises when one realizes you’re so completely screwed what else can you do but laugh. And of course there’s great heart in McClanahan’s stories, yet it never drifts into being sappy or cliché. Both “The Prettiest Girl in Texas” and “Poopdeck Pappy” are great examples of how McClanahan can take a single incident, line it with slivers of humor and satire, but also render pure heartbreak for the main characters involved. Then there are stories like “ODB, The Mud Puppy, and Me” where the narrative drifts from folk tale to absurd comedy to bloody horror as the parties involved try render an act of kindness on a suffering animal.

That story really gets to the heart of McClanahan’s bent with this collection: that life can be absurd and horrific, and often even your best intentions will make a mess of things. In these postcards from West Virginia and small towns throughout the south, the characters usually can’t see how the road is going to twist in front of them, and most are inevitably thrown. But in the author’s honest storytelling, that never editorializes, who are we to judge them?

Book of the Week: Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartes by Spencer Dew

Posted on February 27, 2011 by Ken Wohlrob

Often it is what you don’t write that matters more. This is the case with Spencer Dew. Reading Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartes, what is more important to the story, and to what Dew is trying to get across, is within the cracks — the unspoken insinuations hidden in the sparse prose.

That’s not to say that Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartes is lacking in anything. It’s a very intelligent, well-crafted, and even deeply emotional. Yet it never falls into any of the traps that one might expect. It has a high concept: a young woman struggling with the grips of a family tragedy buries herself in Henry Adams’ treatise on medieval architecture and his own feelings of insignificance at the dawn of the 20th century (which shares the same title as Dew’s book). It is melodramatic: I’m not giving anything away that the plot involves a death of someone close to the protagonist, who drifts between states of cold removal and emotional train wreck. It has an oft-used device: the book-within-a-book scenario that can become hackneyed in the unskilled hands of too many writers.
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