Book of the Week: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Posted on June 9, 2013 by kwohlrob

It’s almost impossible to discuss As I Lay Dying without bringing up the book that immediately preceded it — The Sound and the Fury. Published one year prior, the latter book was Faulkner’s favorite novel and self-admittedly his greatest failure (listen to the words from the man himself here). The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner’s first attempt at employing stream-of-consciousness storytelling and the somewhat hard to follow narrative damned the book, leading to a critical and commercial failure (even if it is now revered and the author still felt it was his most worthwhile effort). In that light, As I Lay Dying can be seen as an immediate counterpunch to The Sound and the Fury. Rather than slaving away on the narrative, Faulkner wrote the text in a mere six weeks, and according to accounts, didn’t change a word of it. That change in approach made all the difference. You can feel that Faulkner took a “never again” approach to the text. Keep it simple, keep it punchy, make every word count. Where readers often felt lost in the heads of Benjy and Quentin in The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying delivered short and direct snapshots of the thoughts of the various members of the Bundren family and their assorted neighbors. Where a reader can feel mired in The Sound and the Fury, wandering through the swamp-like text, As I Lay Dying is almost meant to be read in a single sitting — a story you feel infinitely compelled to keep reading.

The strengths of the novel lay in the story itself — a mournful southern gothic tale centered around the last days of Addie Bundren and her family’s burden to return her to the ground of Jackson, Mississippi. The story opens with the sick Addie, on her deathbed, watching her son Cash building her coffin. Those somber moments – including the vultures that come to haunt Addie’s journey, the mules who die beneath the river, and the fire that comes later but leads to the family’s final undoing — give the book a black thread that draws you in. As dark as the events are, the thoughts of Addie and her family can be darker. The locals question Addie’s husband, Anse, and his motives for agreeing to his wife’s dying request to be buried in Jackson. That request, along with one very key event, in many ways serves as Addie’s revenge against her family. And reading what transpires after her death, one almost can’t fault her sticking it to her family one last time.

For the Bundrens are not an ideal family. There isn’t an honorable character in the lot. Quickly, as the journey to Jackson leads to mishap after mishap, we learn that each of the Bundrens is more out for themselves than thinking of poor dead mom. Even Anse, who at first seems a model of devotion, delivers the final insult in the book (without revealing too much). You’re left questioning, “Did he really want to go to Jackson just to bury her?” Then of course, there’s son Darl, who in a single moment tries to render the greatest kindness to his mother and also destroys his own future. Daughter Dewey Dell who is a little more focused on fixing a problem left to her by a local farm hand. And there is Jewel, the son most loved by Addie, but who seems different than the rest for very specific reasons. It is probably the closest Faulkner ever came to crafting a Shakespeare play. Characters fly in and out from all directions, as they would in a stage play, to reveal their inner faults and foibles before running off to the background.

What Faulkner ultimately is questioning in As I Lay Dying is the fragility our existence, that fine veil where one moment we can suddenly cease to be. As Darl, reasons when his younger brother Vardaman asks, “Then what is your ma, Darl?”

“I haven’t got ere one,” Darl said. “Because if I had one, it is was. And if it is was, it cant be is. Can it?”
“No,” I said.
“Then I am not,” Darl said. “Am I?”

Midway through the novel, Addie makes a surprise return appearance, where you’re never quite sure if her narrative is a flashback or the woman speaking from inside the coffin. In one of the book’s more memorable quotes, she sums up the fragility of human existence as seen through Faulkner’s eyes:

“I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”

Book of the Week: Jesus’ Son: Stories by Denis Johnson

Posted on March 26, 2013 by kwohlrob

It’s probably no accident that so many of Denis Johnson’s characters find themselves in cars heading to nowhere. The misfits and sinners that populate his stories are lost, sometimes physically, but most often emotionally. They’ve succumbed to their past, which usually didn’t set them on a good path, so they can only keep driving forward even if its going in the wrong direction. The enthralling part of Johnson’s writing is that no matter how appalling we find the characters, we understand and sympathize with this motley crew of addicts, bad husbands, deadbeats, and alcoholics. Mostly because Johnson is able to show the reader how much those nine-time losers resemble us.

From the opening story, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” Denis Johnson ropes you in with his raw, stripped-to-the-bone prose. You feel as if Johnson has nervously gnawed down each of his lines, like a rough set of dirty fingernails, leaving pure and simple prose that can be ugly, beautiful, sick, and sad all in a single short sentence. Descriptions such as “I knew every raindrop by its name,” and “The blood ran off him in strings” knock you back with their ability to say so much with so little. Even when he gets more expansive, he makes every word count:

“Under Midwestern clouds like great grey brains we left the superhighway with a drifting sensation and entered Kansas City’s rush hour with a sensation of running aground.”

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Book of the Week: The Day of Judgment by Salvatore Satta

Posted on July 21, 2012 by kwohlrob

Certain novels are of a place. In the case of The Day of Judgment, that place is Sardinia. Or more specifically, the small city of Nuoro, Salvatore Satta’s home in his youth. I was lucky enough to read this book while travelling through Sardinia and even took the opportunity to visit Nuoro. The small world depicted by Satta is still there, maybe because Sardinia really is its own place, much like Sicily, even if it has been absorbed into Italy. There is something in the soil and seawater and rough-hewn mountains that gets into the veins of the local citizens. Satta knew that all too well and breathed so much life into the characters in this posthumous (and unfinished) book.

Granted, the world of The Day of Judgment is pre World War II, before the fascists but right as socialism begins to creep into Italy and the rest of Europe. So Nuoro has still retained some of its agrarian roots including the constant obsession with land ownership, which builds wealth for some but destroys others. Told as reminiscences from his youth, Satta revives the ghosts from the graveyards of Nuoro and delivers a cast of characters who betray themselves with their own ambitions and beliefs. With a great ear for satiric twists and an effortless flowing style to his writing, Satta weaves together these sad and ironic tales into a beautiful canvas. You walk away feeling as if the author told you the stories while sharing a bottle of cannonau, the dark and dry wine of Oliena just south of Nuoro.
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Book of the Week: Taking Doreen Out Of The Sky by Alan Beard

Posted on June 24, 2012 by kwohlrob

What haunts you? Sitting there late at night, in the silence, while that beer on the table gets warmer, and the rollback of the years flashes before your eyes? In many ways, the tales in Alan Beard’s superb collection feel like ghost stories. Not in the traditional sense — no white spectres wandering the halls or loud rappings on the walls from unseen hands. Rather, the citizens of the council flats in and around Birmingham are all haunted by their own past. What could they have been? Or how could their lives have been better?

With razor sharp prose, a dry British wit, and fearless dedication to not pulling any punches on his characters, Alan Beard gives you the West Midlands in all its grim glory. Akin to great Japanese writers, Beard cuts his prose to the bone, not bothering to waste any words on showing off his writing skills. It’s important, as that style gives the stories much more character as well as imbuing them with that superb reserved understatement that is born and bred in citizens of the Midlands.
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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: 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: 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?

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