Bernard MacLaverty's Cal - 150 pages that are as densely packed with passion and tension as any I've read in Dostoyevsky or Hardy. The 19-year-old title character lives in Northern Ireland. A Roman Catholic, he is hounded and physically attacked by the Protestant Orangemen. His friends have joined the IRA in response to the violence with which they are threatened. Cal finds the violence too much for him. The struggles of nations would not be important if they didn't effect the lives of individual people. This book is about the converging of conflicts political and personal - the political and religious struggles of an oppressed people, a first great passionate love, and the dilemmas of a sensitive and thoughtful teenager as he makes the moral choices that are going to shape his whole life. I felt deeply the greatness of these struggles as I read. Read my full rave here.
This book has everything - love, suspense, moral conflict, social criticism, psychological acuity, and crack writing. It is pitch-perfect on the a fast-paced, ostentatious, brutal beauty of Rome. Lambert's writing is rich with observations both interior and exterior that imbue character and place with clarity and instantaneous complexity. This novel, though entertaining to read, is an unambiguous critique of the moral hypocrisy that infects the powerful and the nature of crime which combines an abuse of power with the dehumanization of innocent people. Read my full rave here.
Molly Fox is a celebrated actress - a woman who delves deep into what makes up a 'self.' It is her profession to create characters from that knowledge through the medium of her self. Yet, when it comes to letting others truly know her, she does not. 'Can we ever know another?', this novel asks. The Irish novelist Deirdre Madden fashions a deep and beautiful book on this potentially abstract musing that is redolent with the pain of the distance we have from all others - even those we love most - and simultaneously rich with the rewards of the communion we can make through long acquaintance. She is particularly good at using the processes of the actor and writer to reflect on the ways we can inhabit the inherent contradiction of knowing another, but the mechanisms are so integrated with the events of this narrative that it is difficult to reveal them without ruining your reading of this book. This book is a powerful work of art with an undisturbable sense of wholeness. Read my full rave here.
The struggle to keep the champagne bubbling when it's gone flat is the action filling Evelyn Waugh's 1930 satire Vile Bodies. Stephen Fry's brilliant film adaptation, Bright Young Things released in 2003 captures the feel of a breathless, manic party. Jim Broadbent, Stockard Channing, Peter O'Toole, Simon Callow, Stephen Campbell Moore, Emily Mortimer, James Mcavoy, Imelda Stuanton, and Fenella Woolgar are some of the beautifully cast actors who maintain an understated hysteria, if you can imagine understated hysteria. The love that director and cast have for these characters is what impresses me the most. It would be so easy to show us how vile these people are - how silly, how louche, how fey - but instead they love them to death. Raveworthy. Read my full rave here.
Tell Me Everything by Sarah Salway . I opened this book last night and didn't stop reading it until I had finished it. The nearest voice I can think to compare Sarah Salway's to is Lorrie Moore's, and coming from me that is a big compliment. In it Molly experiences a few breaches of trust as a young woman that leave her seriously wounded. She closes down and protects herself by eating. When we meet her she has become one of life's castaways, seriously overweight without a job, a home, or any sense of herself. She meets five people - Mr. Roberts who gives her a job, Mrs. Roberts, Tim - a man of mystery, Liz - a librarian who recommends French authors, and Miranda, a hairdresser. With these relationships she begins to reclaim herself. The story is full of perfectly wrought descriptions, complex observations of human pain and fantasy, and cogent storytelling. Read my full rave here.
8 comments:
It's interesting (and not all that surprising) that Christian groups are the ones who challenge her books the most. They can't stand that she isn't lockstep with their orthodoxy - she has been bombarded with hate mail from Christians from the very start of her career.
The homogenous attitude you describe is similar to how I have felt living in our community of artists in new York where my opinions are, shall we say, a bit right to the center of everyone else. You cannot believe the rigidity of the conversation - and how impossible it makes it for me to contribute anything without deranged responses when I try to share my (also well-considered, also well-thought-out) viewpoint. I give a contradictory view to the lockstep attitude and it is as THOUGH I have said, "Yum yum, I love to fry up little babies." It's amazing how intolerant the so-called "tolerant" folks can be.
One additional thing: it's not so bad one on one ... where you can actually have a conversation, or at least try to - because I'm good at listening, and I am not at all intolerant of those who have different viewpoints than myself ... but in a group setting, where agreement is ASSUMED ... it is very difficult to interject my own thoughts, without all hell breaking loose.
S - that's interesting re the reaction to her from christian groups - I guess that's the thing about ideologies - people make assumptions, using them as short hand. We use them to bond as groups but everyone - especially a creator with an imagination like L'Engle - is going to have an individual take. It's one of the things that has always interested/annoyed me about organized religion, these rituals of sameness are not an indication that everyone's relationship to god or infinity is the same - that must stay utterly private and in some ways is unshareable, even if we all sway the same way, or kneel at the same time or whatever..
I can totally imagine that has been your experience in the knee-jerk liberal artists' community. Even if I'm sometimes more closely allied w/ those ideas than you have been on certain issues (my socialist roots), I frequently hear a statement starting with "we" in one of those gatherings and think of you and have said "well, not all of us." The ideology of any group can become oppressive to those not carrying a card.
I don't know what it is specifically that made me react this way on this reading. I hadn't before and I'd read it at least two or three times. I didn't feel a lack of respect for her beliefs (at least I don't think I did, I know her religion was very important to her) but the experience didn't welcome me anymore. I felt as though a door shut on my ability to joyously join with the imaginative world.
I totally can see why you would have that response to her book ... I don't so much get it from her fiction (well, not her YA fiction - much of her adult fiction borders on preachy - it can be really gross) ... but she's written a lot of religious books, many of which I ADORE - Her "Genesis Trilogy" has actually deepened my own faith (which, of course, is a totally personal thing) - but she wrote this one book on "Christian art" that made me, at one point, throw it across the room. Literally! I threw it across the room!! She was so ... disturbed, almost ... that artists who were NOT Christians made art that she responded to, as a Christian ... and so she goes thru all this convoluted reasoning as to why that would be. As opposed to just being like: whatever, he was a Muslim, it's a great painting. Or: whatever, she was a Wiccan, that's a great poem.
Like she couldn't just leave it at that - and it is THAT attitude that I have contempt for.
It was so annoying - a really limited side to her that I hadn't seen before.
And yeah, don't even get me started on talking about politics with actors in NYC. I no longer even engage. Someone will say something, and everyone nods in ferocious agreement - and David will glance at me, I'll look back, and we both burst into laughter. Like: I am not even gonna go there!!
It's truly totalitarian, it really is.
If I'm drunk, though, I can't promise that I won't lob some politically "incorrect" bomb into the middle of a group of nodding agreement - just to see what will happen. It's hilarious, and also extremely anti-social behavior, and only comes on when I've had a couple. (See, even the term politically "incorrect" gets my back up, but we'll save that for another day.)
S - I'll enjoy seeing you lob that bomb one day! I love those conversations. You and I have had some good disagreements about what we think government should do. Hasn't gotten in the way of our friendship. Disagreement and deviating from the pack is necessary for development. If deviance is good for the gene pool, then it has got to be good for us.
If it was good enough for John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, it's good enough for us!!
Happy new year, dear friend!
S - And to you, dear friend. We missed you at the party!
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