book reviews Archive

Book of the Week: Inside the Mind of a Python ( Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years by Michael Palin)

– August 7, 2010

A publicity biography of Michael Palin, written by John Cleese, is included in the introduction for (Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years):

“Michael Palin is not just one of Britain’s foremost comedy character actors…he also talks a lot.

Michael chats, quips, fantasises, reminisces, commiserates, encourages, plans, discusses, and elaborates. Then, some nights, when everyone else has gone to bed, he goes home and writes up a diary.”

You can almost hear Cleese’s signature tone of ire in your head as you read that last line. But it sums up this collection of Michael Palin’s diaries from Monty Python’s definitive years perfectly. At 673 pages (not counting the index), this hefty tome takes you deep inside Palin’s head during a period of almost exhaustive creative output, constant travel, financial wranglings, headbutting within the Python camp, and ultimately, great success.

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Book of the Week: Even the Dead Are Smiling ( The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh)

– July 23, 2010

In the hand of any other writer, a macabre little book such as this would come across as overwrought and fall apart from too much nudging and winking at the reader. But only a Brit of Evelyn Waugh’s superb wit and writing prowess could concoct a story of death, cemeteries, suicide, and Hollywood that expertly skewers the American way of life (and the writer’s own countrymen).

Whenever a discussion of satirical novels comes up, the two masterpieces I always think of are Terry Southern’s Blue Movie and Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. While the former is stuffed with Southern’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink style of satire, Waugh’s tome is decidedly more British – spare, dry, and razor sharp in its humor. Southern was such a fan of The Loved One, he wrote a movie adaptation of the novel (although a very Southern-ized version that didn’t quite work as a film).

What still fascinates me to this day about the The Loved One is its perfectness. It is a small novel, almost a novella at 164 pages. But not a word is wasted. Each turn of phrase or change in tone is used to maximum impact.

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Book of the Week: “Hello this is God, I’m not in right now…”

– April 27, 2010

Silence by Shusaku EndoSilence by Shusaku Endo

It is a testament to Endo’s devastating, yet spare prose that the most complex argument against Christianity is boiled down to a simple realization: the silence of God.

At the beginning of Silence, a Portuguese priest, Father Sebastian Rodrigues, travels to Japan at the height of Christian persecution in the 17th Century. He knows that Christians are being tortured and put to death by the local officials and samurai. He knows that his predecessor, the highly-respected missionary Ferreria, apostatized, supposedly renouncing his religious beliefs after undergoing the torture of the pit. Yet, Rodrigues is secure in his religious piety. As a colleague of his states prior to landing on Japanese soil, “Someone must go to give them courage and to ensure that the tiny flame of faith does not die out.” Unfortunately, this righteousness makes Rodrigues blind not only to the social realities of Japan but to the flaws in the purpose of his mission.

As the story unfolds, Rodrigues is put through the religious wringer, forced to question how a loving God could allow his poorest, most wretched citizens to suffer, and ultimately, whether or not this soul-saving quest is indeed fool’s errand.

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Book of the Week: Twenty Stories by Kristin Fouquet

– April 6, 2010

I have to admit that I concur with Caleb Ross’ review of Twenty Stories. Ms. Fouquet’s tales grow on you, line-by-line, page-by-page, slowly creeping under the skin, as you dig deeper into the collection. But perhaps that is the point. What else would you expect from a bunch of tales set in low and lazy New Orleans? If you’ve walked the streets, you know that nothing is rushed. Even redemption and remorse. So by the time you hit “Another Initiation” on page 6, then stumble upon “The Painters” on page 15, before catching “Boy in Waiting” on page 36, and then finally reaching “Blue No More” on page 43, you’re hip deep in the sordid lives of the New Orleans locals.

I would call these tales postcards rather than traditional stories. Most are snapshots of lives not quite lived but misdirected. There are the not-so-usual missteps and miscalculations. Such as the main character’s longing for a tough-loving lounge singer in “The Moon is New, But Love is Old.” Or the painter who misjudges his landlord’s appreciation of art in “The Painters.” But in all these tales, Fouquet presents characters, people you already know. If you’ve ever spent time in the sweaty watering holes of the South, you recognize them as locals. They ring true of the landscape. Maybe that’s why their trip-ups make for good reading.

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Book of the Week: Charactered Pieces: stories by Caleb J. Ross

– February 13, 2010

In the opening story of Caleb J. Ross’ new collection, the main character invents the term charactered pieces as a euphemism for diamonds with obvious cracks and flaws. In many ways Lori is a charactered piece herself – mostly due to the foot of her fetus-in-fetu sister that protrudes from her belly. Then of course there is mom, a bit of a flawed gem herself, who had half-her face blown off in a beer-commercial mishap. Yet, she seems convinced that somehow all the defects can be covered up, if only by glops of makeup.

That opening tale served as a nice introduction to the off-kilter, macabre, black-sense of humor that made me instantly like most of the stories in Charactered Pieces. The people who stumble and wander through Ross’ stories, much like Lori’s diamonds, have obvious flaws, glaring even. It’s an ugly humanity but one that’s too real to dismiss. Take the divorced, ex-drug-addict, father who slaves away as the lone gringo in a Chinese kitchen. He’s too angry, too bullheaded, and too self-centered to take responsibility for his mistakes. He views them as unavoidable obstructions that he had no more control over than the snow storm that starts a series of unfortunate events. As he says midway through the tale, “Mother Nature doesn’t want a person to live.” Where Ross keeps this from becoming cliché is his compassion for the characters. There is beauty in the flaws, or at least humanity.

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Book of the Week: Dusk and Other Stories by James Salter

– November 10, 2009

Dusk and Other StoriesIt is a sad commentary on the state of the short story when a collection such as this is allowed to go out of print. After all, Dusk and Other Stories did win the PEN/Faulkner award when it was first released in 1989. And this collection did become a textbook for dedicated short story writers — maybe not as popular with the general reading public as Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, but more of an insider’s pick, like the films of Sam Fuller. The sad fact is that I had to read a photocopy of one of the out-of-print editions that someone was gracious enough to loan me.

The main reason short story writers gravitate towards this book is the prose. Short, punchy and poetic. Salter can say more about a character in a few sparsely worded sentences than most writers can in an entire chapter. Salter wasn’t just hacking away at his sentences for pure economy, he was pairing down his prose to its barest bones, leaving only what he felt was utterly necessary. When writing coaches and teachers scribble “show don’t tell” or “don’t over-write” on countless stories, they are trying to turn their protégés into Salter. A character’s actions speak volumes. A few lines of dialogue become an entire biography.

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Book of the Week: The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave

– October 15, 2009

The Death of Bunny MunroWhat a difference twenty years makes. Nick Cave’s first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, which was released in 1989, opens with:

“Three greasy brother crows wheel, beak to heel, cutting a circle into the bruised and troubled sky, making fast, dark rings through the thicksome bloats of smoke.”

His new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, released in 2009, strikes a slightly more minimalist note with its first sentence:

“I am damned, thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die.”

Much like comparing his dark, brooding, classic early music to the simpler, more straightforward approach of his later albums, the author’s two books really are the work of two completely different Nick Caves. How can you possibly match the younger songwriter who so perfectly channels the final anguish of a condemned man on “The Mercy Seat” with the sarcastic older gent who has a laugh at the expense of the Bible’s most notorious zombie on “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!”? It would be an exercise for the Cave-obsessed and does the man no justice. To expect the author to write in the same style as he did in 1989 makes no sense.

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Book of the Week: The Red Album of Asbury Park by Alex Austin

– September 7, 2009

Having been born and raised in New Jersey, I’m often asked by non-Jersians, “What was it like?” I usually get odd stares when I respond with, “Like the circus left town.”

There is a sadness to New Jersey. If you’ve lived there you know what I’m talking about. It’s hard to see past the state borders. Things outside of New Jersey just don’t seem possible. Maybe that is why, too often, people never leave New Jersey. They usually wind up just staying put, residing two towns over from where they grew up, still hanging out with the same high school friends. As they get older, their worldview may expand, but often it’s too late. New Jersey has them. To leave it all behind would be to rip themselves from the womb. I was lucky enough to leave when I was 18. Looking back on those that didn’t, I realized that was the sadness of New Jersey: being trapped in place that never offered much promise to begin with. Seeing it now, it always feels like the circus just left town, a pale memory of it drifting down the turnpike.

That sense of sadness is all over Alex Austin’s The Red Album of Asbury Park. It is in the setting: Springsteen-land in the late 1960s, a once thriving seaside getaway, now a rundown hulk of decaying buildings, degenerates, dive bars, thieves, decrepit amusements, gangsters, and junkies. (Go there now and you’ll see not much has changed, except the amusements are gone). It is also in the main character. Vet Sam Nesbitt has just come back from Vietnam. He’s one of the lucky ones. The horrors of war have given him a worldview that goes beyond Ocean Avenue. He wants out. He wants to make something of himself, to escape the ghosts of days past, and not become another lost cause walking the streets of Asbury Park. That’s more than once can say of his binge-drinking mother, his deceased father (who had his own secrets), and his unmotivated brother (or perhaps just motivated in the wrong directions).

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Book of the Week: The Man Who Watched Trains Go By by Georges Simenon

– July 1, 2009

He was a quiet man. That’s what they always say about the guy who one day picks up an axe and wipes out the whole family. Kees Popinga, the central character of Georges Simenon’s The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, is just such a fellow. He’s got everything dialed nice and tight. He’s obsessed with having constructed a first rate life: a wife, a daughter, a stove, and a house all of the “highest quality.” And then in the course of one evening, as Popinga discovers that the company that helped provide this postcard-perfect life is now bankrupt, it all goes to pot. Kees Popinga snaps, kisses his whole life goodbye in one bold stroke, and embarks on a violent spree that leads him across three countries and makes him the killer du jour of the European press.

Thus, Simenon rendered one of his best roman durs, or hard novels, so named because they involve uncomfortable situations. The pacing of the novel is impeccable; Simenon allows the reader no breathing room. Perhaps it was due to the fact that The Man Who Watched Trains Go By was Simenon’s eleventh novel published in 1938. That’s right, eleventh. Simenon’s reputation for cranking out the prose is almost unparalleled. His record was 40 novels published in 1929 (all written under various pseudonyms according to Luc Sante’s introduction). Once Popinga has made up his mind to leave his old life, we are dragged by the shirt collars along with this once simple man, as he drifts further and further into madness. The bodies start to pile up and in no time, Popinga has changed from an accidental madman to a cold-calculating psychopath.

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Book of the Week: The Rebels by Sándor Márai

– May 30, 2009

I was lucky enough to read Sándor Márai’s The Rebels while traveling through Budapest, Bratislava, and Prague. This was part of my standing rule of reading a novel from the country you are visiting while traveling. In paid off well with Stevenson in the UK and Strindberg in Sweden. It did not serve me well with Bowles in Morocco. In the case of Márai it was a perfect fit. Having had my feet on the ground, mangling the Hungarian language in my worst attempts at communicate with the locals, I experienced the feeling of Budapest for myself.

There is a mellowness and peace to Hungarians these days. It may be due to the fact that until recently, Hungary was constantly being conquered by one empire or military power after another. The Turks, Habsburgs, Nazis, and Stalinists all took their turn. For a brief period, leading up to and into World War I, Hungary merged with Austria, forming the second largest country in Europe. However, the defeat of the central powers in World War I, including Austria-Hungary, lead to 70 years of dark days for the country. It is at that stumbling point — Austria-Hungary’s entry in the war — that Márai sets the book, having experienced first hand the embarrassing (for Hungarians) dissolution of the dual monarchy and its multi-ethnic society.

I state all this not to drone on about trivia, but to point out the context of The Rebels and the historical reality of what Márai experienced at the time of the writing the novel. For some reason, Americans don’t seem to ‘get’ The Rebels. I’ve seen reviews where readers say the book is too foreign to enjoy, have labeled Márai as anti-Semitic and homophobic, and even more absurd, state that they cannot relate to the characters because they are all adolescent males. Take that Holden Caulfield. These sad misperceptions of The Rebels cause these readers to miss out on what is a superb novel. Dated, perhaps. Esoteric to western culture? No more than any Russian novel. Anti-everything-under-the-sun? Considering that Márai pined for multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Hungary in his Memoir of Hungary, was highly critical of the Nazis (a dangerous stance under the Arrow Cross Government), and soundly against the subsequent puppet-communist regime installed by Stalin, it is very doubtful the book has a prejudice against anything except oppression and senseless death.

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