Are you in or are you out? (Books - Exiles in the Garden by Ward Just)

I had yet to read a book by Ward Just before picking up his latest, Exiles in the Garden. It is set in Washington D. C. and concerns Alec Malone, a senator's son who rejects a life in politics in favor of one as a photographer. It also concerns the women in his life, particularly Lucia, a Swiss emigre searching for a sense of belonging. Actually, that is what everyone in this book is doing, looking to belong somewhere or to something or someone. All the characters we meet from the 1960s to the 2000s are in various stages of aloneness or togetherness. We watch Alec's father's protracted final illness in which he searches his memory for clues of what connected him to life - politics - and his incomprehension at his son's disinterest in pursuing that calling. For a while, Alec and Lucia live in a house with a garden in Georgetown next to one inhabited by Central European immigrants, ambassadors and attaches, who hold frequent parties that are typical of the life Lucia misses in Switzerland. She hungrily attends them to bathe in that sense of familiarity, while Alec is more of a loner, a voyeur (not inappropriate for a photographer). Alec begins his professional life as a photojournalist but later becomes an independent artist.

The key event of the book is Alec's refusal of a job shooting the Vietnam War, ostensibly because Lucia doesn't want him to go, but mainly because he is troubled by the fact that most photography is useless and the pictures would not contribute anything of value. They were not service to country at all - they would have just a sham sort of meaning.

Alec wondered if he had made a mistake refusing the managing editor's offer. And did doubt lead him to his father's office seeking - what? Absolution? An argument? In the newspaper business war was the jewel in the crown. And his father was correct, he did have the eye for it and the agility. At the age of ten, Alec was taking photographs for the old man's campaign, learning to blend into the scenery, though the trick was to make not yourself but your camera disappear. Your eyes did the work but in the excitement of the moment your eyes were filled with emotion. Probably the same was true for a war, perhaps more emotion than your eyes could accept, not that it mattered now. Whether his father was correct about fear was another question, one that could be answered only in the event. The truth was, Alec had no desire for the war, and desire always came first. Without desire you were not a craftsman but a careerist doing what they told you to do in hopes that something wonderful would happen, a prize or a shot such as Capa's of the falling militiaman.

This choice of Alec's is the crux of the novel, and an interesting one too given that Just himself was a war correspondent turned novelist. Are you in or are you out - this book asks. It is hardly an accident that Lucia is Swiss - the supposedly neutral nation (although inaction is action too, of a sort, it has consequences at any rate). Both Alec and Lucia's relationships to their fathers are central to this story. Alec has a troubled relationship to his, as his choices in life are driven by very different engines. Lucia romanticizes hers, who she never met as he disappeared during the war and supposedly died there, but there are rumors that he was a resistance fighter and ultimately survived.

This book is about exile versus belonging - does one live in the fray or outside it? It doesn't pass judgment on the choice but rather examines the kind of people who make each - what motivates them, their satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Actually, that's not completely true, I felt the narrator ultimately did judge Lucia - despised her even - but that is because the story is ultimately Alec's. While Lucia is an exile in the sense that she lives away from her country of origin, Alec is an outsider wherever he goes. He lives on the fringe, observing and capturing bits of time. Focusing on Alec, it is not inappropriate that the book's voice is a detached one, gliding across 50 years time, landing just on the key episodes that end up joining together as a tale of key episodes rather than as a conventionally detailed plot. For a while I was dissatisfied by the sense that I was never really getting to know the characters, the narrative was composed of great swathes of generalities. But I found that the details accumulated and by the book's end I knew these people, could anticipate their behavior, and cared about their choices.

Having read this latest book of Just's, I am now interested to read an earlier one. Any recommendations?

The blurb...

Suggested by Jennysbooks: Something I’ve been thinking about lately: “What words/phrases in a blurb make a book irresistible? What words/phrases will make you put the book back down immediately?”

I don't think there is a word or phrase in a blurb or review quote that will make or break me. Perhaps if a blurb characterized a book as full of blood and gore, or if something in it indicated that the subject or narrator of the book were obnoxiously holy, racist, sexist, or homophobic I would probably put down the book, but it's the general thrust of blurbs that speak to me. It puts me off when there are too many blurbs. Some paperbacks have pages of them from every newspaper in the world. Make a choice. They rarely say anything different. Many compare the writer to another writer, usually one that has sold many books. Sometimes I am aware that a blurb was only stuck in because it mentioned yet another author's name, on the chance that that one comparison will be the only writer the prospective customer has ever heard of. It's especially ridiculous when two successive blurbs compare the author to such different authors that the comparisons clearly don't reflect the publisher's opinion about they book, they just reflect their desire to sell more copies by appealing to different markets - say, "reminds me of Nicholas Sparks..." and "this is a great novel in the tradition of Faulkner." Desperation is the greatest turn-off in book sales. The surest way to get me not to buy a book is to use hyperbole. "The greatest," "the best," "it will change your life," "more meaningful than the bible, only shorter." Give me a break.

Generally it is the quality of the author of the blurb or quote makes a difference, unless I know that there is an established connection between the blurb author and the book's. I have seen blurb's written by an author's mentor. That like having a review written by your mother. But if the blurb writer is a talented writer and says something specific about the book that makes me think that it has an original voice or tells an involving, moving, or important story, combines ideas in unique ways, or captures a period or place I'm interested in creatively, I might go for it. If it's a review quote I am also swayed, snob that I am, by the literary quality of the publication the review came from. Basically, if a good writer tells me this book or writer has value and the subject matter or genre doesn't put me off, I might be reeled in. Just don't try too hard.

That would be the perfect costume for a literary Halloween party - go as The Blurb! But if you do it, please remember to credit me.

Ex-cop, ex-Marxist, gourmet noir (Books - Tattoo by Manuel Vazquez Montalban)

I received a review copy of the re-issue of of Manuel Vazquez Montalban's Tattoo last week. Serpent's Tail press has reissued several of his Pepe Carvalho mysteries in attractive paperback editions with retro covers. The time is the mid 1970's as Spain is extricating itself from dictatorship. The setting - Barcelona and Amsterdam. The plot is uncomplicated. It features the mystery of a corpse found floating in the sea, its face so badly destroyed he can only be identified by a tatoo. Pepe Carvalho is hired to find out who it was. It was perfect timing for a book like this as I am knocked out by a nasty upper respiratory bug and was in desperate need of something occupying and not too heavy. This is noir with a wink. Montalban's Carvalho is a hardboiled philosopher who has checked out of caring too much about anything except sex and food, or as Montalban writes:

'What are you exactly? A cop? A Marxist? A gourmet?'

'I'm an ex-cop, an ex-Marxist and a gourmet.'

What I enjoyed most is how Montalban didn't merely dress up a classic mystery with Carvalho's quirks. He informed even his detective's crime solving skills with these same characteristics:

His mind began to fill with the old logic that sought links between cause and effect, between good and evil. But as soon as this logic became demanding and insistent, an alarm bell went off in his head, and he dismissed all the arguments. He wanted nothing more to do with any analysis of the world he lived in. He had long since decided he was on the journey between childhood and old age of a personal, non-transferable destiny, of a life that nobody else could ever live for him, no more, no less, no better, no worse. Everybody else could go get stuffed. He had deliberately restricted his capacity for abstract emotion to what he could get from the landscape around him. All his other emotions were immediate, skin deep.

This is a man who uses old copies of Don Quixote from his library of several thousand volumes as kindling so that he can have the comfort of a fire while he eats the bacalhao he prepared. You will sooner see him sauteeing onions and tomatoes than packing a pistol and trailing suspects, though he does his reluctant share of those more typical detective-like activities as well. Carvalho may be nihilistic but Tattoo is entertaining as well as swift-moving. I noticed that there is another mystery set in Buenos Aires. I may try that one next.

Novelties I

I'm going to institute an occasional series - Novelties, I think I'll call it. About once a month I'm going to list a new thing (or two) I've: eaten, drunk, watched, listened to, visited on the web, and learned lately - since life should be full of novelty, of newness. What would York be without the New? What a shot in the arm Orleans got. Feel free to join in...

Eating: kholrabi slaw - julienned kholrabi (or green cabbage), sliced radishes, lots of fresh cilantro, in mustard cumin dressing - mmmmm.

Drinking: Gobelsburger Gruner Veltliner

Watching: The films of Almodovar -bought a boxed set with most of this master filmmaker's work - an amazing and singular body of work.

Listening: Der Rosenkavalier - I've been listening to the classic 1950s von Karajan recording with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Christa Ludwig, but I have the Solti recording with Regine Crespin and Yvonne Minton coming in the mail.

New places I'm visiting on the web: Seven Impossible Things..., The Hermitage, Armel Gaulme.

New thing I learned: That such a thing as a knitwear comb or sweater comb exists. They are meant to comb away the pills on your knit clothes and make them look like new. Now to find one...

Lunching with Chekhov...

If you could ask your favorite author (alive or dead) one question … who would you ask, and what would the question be?

I would ask Anton Chekhov to tell me as much as he could about what it was like to collaborate with Stanislavski and all the Moscow Art Theatre folks on THE THREE SISTERS and THE CHERRY ORCHARD. I would serve a long lunch and there would be several bottles of wine (or vodka if he preferred) so that I could ply as much out of him as I possibly could.

You must remember this...

Nicholas Wade reports in today's Science Times on the work of Dr. Gero Miesenböck's lab. Its carnival-barker headline cries: Researchers Create Artificial Memories in the Brain of a Fruitfly. If one reads the article, its claims are a little more circumspect but no less impressive. The lab identified dopamine producing neurons in the nervous system of flies that seem to perpetuate shock avoidance behaviors. These cells do their work by converging on a second class of neurons - Kenyon cells - which receive information about stimuli from the fly's antennae. Typically the fly can be conditioned to learn avoidance of a stimulus other than the shock - like a particular odor perceived by the antennae or a flash of light - through conditioning. Conditioning creates an association between the shock and the new stimulus which results in the fly behaving to the light or odor as it would naturally behave to a shock - by avoiding it. Miesenböck and friends genetically manipulated the flies so that their Kenyon cells would automatically respond to the light flash as though it were a shock without ever having been conditioned to do so. Then they then tested their manipulation by doing a typical conditioning experiment through which the flies would learn to associate a smell with the light, reacting with avoidance.

When lasting learning is accomplished, exposure to certain stimuli perpetuates structural or chemical changes in neurons. Any time cell structure is altered, a gene must first be induced to create a chemical template that leads to the assembly of a protein. Proteins are the basic units of cellular components, whether structural or chemical. The presence of these proteins, then result in the proper change in the cell which might be the production of a neurotransmitter, or the insertion or removal of a particular type of channel into a neuron membrane. The researchers in this case, altered the gene directly, creating a fly that never had to learn to respond to a light flash as though it were a shock. Through multiple experiments like these they hope to map the neural circuits that associate stimuli with behavior and lay bare the circuitry through which creatures learn.

It all makes me think of this little ditty, sung by Sam in Casablanca (words and music by Herman Hupfeld). It seems today to typify associative learning. Now, if we decide it, flies must remember this. No fundamental rules apply...

This day and age we're living in
Gives cause for apprehension
With speed and new invention
And things like fourth dimension.

Yet we get a trifle weary
With Mr. Einstein's theory.
So we must get down to earth at times
Relax relieve the tension

And no matter what the progress
Or what may yet be proved
The simple facts of life are such
They cannot be removed.]

You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.

And when two lovers woo
They still say, "I love you."
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by.

Moonlight and love songs
Never out of date.
Hearts full of passion
Jealousy and hate.
Woman needs man
And man must have his mate
That no one can deny.

It's still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die.
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.

Oh yes, the world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.

A refusal to be ordinary (Books - The Victoria Vanishes by Christopher Fowler)

The Victoria Vanishes was a funny, smart, and satisfying mystery, containing Christopher Fowler's trademark detective team - Bryant and May and their Peculiar Crimes Unit - and driven by a disdain for the ordinary.

'I hate small-mindedness,' he suddenly announced after several minutes of contemplative silence. 'The notices everywhere warning us not to trip over or turn left or take our dogs off leads. That annoying recorded voice in post offices telling you which counter is free. I bought some peas in the supermarket last week and do you know what it said on the packet? "Does not contain nuts." I hate the endless admonishments of a nanny state that lives in fear of its lawyers...

Once our children played on bomb sites and collected exploded shells. Now they're driven to school by paranoid parents in SUVs. The determination of dullards can always be counted upon to challenge the merits of innovators.' He noisily sucked on the pipe until the bowl's embers sparkled against the cloud-grey waters. 'To be popular in this city you have to be average, and the PCUs unusual approach to the attainment of excellence won't allow it to survive.'

Bryant's cranky refusal to be ordinary (as if it were a choice) is the amusing common theme of this entertaining detective series and an older London that is visible beneath the veneer of the contemporary one is its backdrop. Fowler celebrates the value of people who don't fit in with wonderfully written characters, and weaves the treasures of his city's history cleverly into the intriguing plots of his mysteries. This one had a particularly good twist, although I found the denoument a little on the long winded side. The final pages offer a list of the pubs and their addresses that Fowler mentions (pubs are the important element of London history that figure in this book). An excellent resource for my next trip to London!

Here are my other posts on The Victoria Vanishes 1, 2.

Adding to the bookish frenzy...

After all that noble stuff in my last post about my great weeding habits (I sound like Elmer Fudd) I must now report that it is all bunk. Don't believe that guy who wrote here on Thursday. On Friday I acquired 3 new treasures and I'm darn pleased about it.

Having reading Irish novelist Deirdre Madden's latest, Molly Fox's Birthday, this summer and raved about it, and then having read an earlier work of her's - One by One in the Darkness - and confirmed my admiration of the humanity of her vision and the sophistication of her voice, I decided I wanted to see from whence it all came. I ordered her first novel - Hidden Symptoms (1986) - from a second hand bookseller and it arrived yesterday. Theresa, a university student, experiences her faith come up against the cruelty of the violent death of her brother. Her The Birds of the Innocent Wood, Authenticity, and Remembering Light and Stone also sound like thoughtful and complex works that are going to be worth reading. Much to look forward to!



Last night, before meeting an old friend for dinner, I was near a bookstore - a rare occurrence these days - and dropped in for a browse. A few dollars later I was the proud owner of two new novels - Ward Just's recent Exiles in the Garden. He is an often praised novelist I have yet to read. This work sounds an interesting mix of politics and moral choices from an American as well as a European perspective. The other is Joseph Kertes new epic novel set in Hungary under Nazi occupation. Gratitude involves fictional characters interacting with Raoul Wallenberg, an actual figure from recent history - a Swedish humanitarian who worked to rescue Jews from murder by the Nazis. The novel is compared to The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, that's a jacket blurb to live up to. I'm excited to see how it holds up!

Controlling the bookish frenzy

When’s the last time you weeded out your library? Do you regularly keep it pared down to your reading essentials? Or does it blossom into something out of control the minute you turn your back, like a garden after a Spring rain? Or do you simply not get rid of books? At all? (This would have described me for most of my life, by the way.) And–when you DO weed out books from your collection (assuming that you do) …what do you do with them? Throw them away (gasp)? Donate them to a charity or used bookstore? SELL them to a used bookstore? Trade them on Paperback Book Swap or some other exchange program?

I live in a New York City-sized apartment and therefore weed my library regularly. For a while, early in my career working as a theatre-artist, I ate my way (literally) through many books and LPs. I would sell them off a little at a time to meet my bills for rent or food. Occasionally I will look for a book and think, what ever happened to that one, and then think - Oh! I must have eaten it. Nowadays I weed the collection to make sure there is only one row of books per shelf and to keep the piles of books-to-be-read to a controlled frenzy. Generally I'll bring them to Strand Book Store and get a little cash for them. Sometimes I'll give one away here or to a friend. I have yet to use a trading forum.

The feeling of having time stretch before you... (Books - The Pattern in the Carpet by Margaret Drabble)

Margaret Drabble writes in the introduction to The Pattern in the Carpet about the discomfort she experienced in writing about members of her family in her novel The Peppered Moth.

I wrote brutally about my mother's depression, and I never wish to enter that terrain again. It is too near, too ready to engulf me as it engulfed her...I had hoped that writing about her would make me feel better about her. But it didn't. It made me feel worse.

Uncomfortable or not, Drabble is at it again, writing in this book about her Autie Phyl and in the even less-disguised form of a memoir, although the book is doing double-duty as a history of puzzles and other pastimes. Whether her reticence is cultural or personal, healthy or not I am glad she's gotten over it.

As she went to bed that night, she said that she wished we had been able to finish the jigsaw. 'It's a pity,' she said, as she gave up. 'It's a pity.' It was the last evening of the last summer. We had tried to finish it. We sat up late, past midnight, struggling with patches of tree and fern and grass and sky. In the morning, we would have to drive away and leave it incomplete on its table, for others to finish another day. It was unsatisfactory. She knew she would never come back. She knew it was her last summer with us It was Thursday, 7 August 1997, and she was eighty-eight. She was getting older, and I was getting older, and the journey back to her home was across country and very long. Next year, even if she were still alive, it would be too much for both of us. Neither of us mentioned this. There were many things we never mentioned. But she knew, and she knew I knew.

In a way this is a book of unmentionables, since Drabble was never going to write about family again. The tone she sets with that opening paragraph is calm and measured. It feels, indeed, like one of those late summer evenings that feel they could go on for ever. I found myself reading the narrative bibliography of this book before starting the story-proper. Drabble seems to have had a grand time researching childhood pastimes, card games, collections, and puzzles. Her description of how one title led to another made me envious of her research in the subject, before remembering that I have nothing to envy. I have a least two papers to write this semester and if I find that pastime so romantic, why haven't I made more progress?

Drabble's description of how and why she did, and still does, puzzles:

We always started with the frame. Auntie Phyl taught my sisters and me how to pick out all the straight-edged pieces of jigsaw first, to find the corners, and to build up the four sides. then we would begin to sort the colours, and to construct areas of the picture. Unlike some people, we did not have a set procedure for this stage of the puzzle, and we were never of the willfully austere school that does not look at the picutre on the box. Looking at the picture for us was part of the pleasure. Doing a jigsaw was not an intelligence test, or a personality assessment programme; it was a pursuit that lay somewhere between creation and imitation and discovery and reverie. And it was not, fur us, a form of competition.

That is just how my grandmother and mother taught us to do puzzles. I loved the feeling of having time stretch in that seemingly endless way before me! The last two sentences in the above paragraph interested me particularly. Drabble defines puzzles very much in the negative, and since her rivalrous relationship with her sister A. S. Byatt is somewhat renowned, it is interesting that one of the attractions she feels towards puzzles is that they provided a refuge from competition. In any event, more on this book as I continue my reading of it.

Water, water everywhere... (Books - A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore)

I read Lorrie Moore's new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, as a subtle tragedy on the wastefulness of our recent past, using a personal narrative to tell a story of wide-reaching cultural disconnect. How, in this world, we can have had the ultimate in freedom but have failed to be responsible, so much desire but have failed to connect, so much knowledge and yet have been so unwise. We trade rhetoric about racial prejudice in America like tupperware, but the words are hollow and lack follow through. We have betrayed our role as stewards of the free world.

Tassie, the young narrator in A Gate at the Stairs, faced with the possibility to learn of a rich world at her university, fills her time with courses on wine tasting and film scores (not that those are inherently bad subjects). A young woman adopts a baby and then immediately goes back to work, leaving someone else in charge. This book is filled with a deep aching loss in the midst of abundance. It is rendered elegiacally, almost calmly (except for one key narrative of heart-racing tension), yet it is filled with Lorrie Moore's trademark humor too and an almost accidental quality to the action. Ultimately it leaves the reader, I think, with a glimmer of hope in our ability to learn from our lives. I found it poignantly beautiful and have continued to think about it since I finished it. Here are my other posts on it 1, 2, 3.

The uses of poppycock.

In today's Science Times Benedict Carey reports on a series of studies about total nonsense.

The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns. When those patterns break down - as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky - the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense...The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.

Experimentally this was investigated by Drs. Travis Proulx at University of California and Steven J. Heine at University of British Columbia by exposing subjects to either an absurd short story or to a more conventional one. Following this exposure, the students studied strings of letters with no apparent relationship to one another. Those students exposed to the absurd story remembered the letter strings far more accurately than the group that read the other story. The experimenters attribute that accuracy to their ability to create new patterns. Here's a link to the study.

Artists have used this technique for years. Courting a sense of disorientation can often be better fuel for creative explosion than a technique or rehearsal process that proceeds logically through steps of increasing knowledge and order. I'd love to do a variation on the reported study. It might be meaningful to find two varying situations for the same story rather than test two different stories, that is, create or identify one group for whom the story or some other stimulus is absurd and another for whom it is not and test their memory accuracy. A religious stimulus could be interesting - there are people for whom certain patterns of information or iconography possess serious meaning but which non-believers find to be absurd nonsense. How would these groups perform on the memory test if exposed to the exact same stimuli? This makes me want to run out and read Jabberwocky rather than an article on sub-cortical brain systems involved in visual perception in order to prepare for this morning's test.

First prize for most beautifully painted toenails goes to... (Books - The Victoria Vanishes by Christopher Fowler)

Have I mentioned what a funny writer Christopher Fowler's is? He writes the quirkiness of his detective duo - Bryant and May - with insight into what it is that makes certain people uncomfortable about those who think and behave differently from themselves. The Peculiar Crimes Unit may be abused as a garbage heap for unsolved cases, a place to lay blame for failure, but at its best it is meant to take advantages of the eccentricities of Bryant and May in solving the unusual crime, finding the unordinary criminal thinking - an unconventional mind is going to have greater success getting inside the mind of an unconventional criminal.

I did mention that the first chapter of The Victoria Vanishes sports a murder. The second sports a wake, the wake of the PCU's coroner - Oswald Finch who dies under his own examination table in the morgue, as Arthur Bryant eulogizes:

'...and now he'll never get to enjoy his twilight years in that freezing, smelly fisherman's hut he'd bought for himself on the beach in Hastings. Now I know some of you will be thinking "And bloody good riddance, you miserable old sod," because he could be a horrible old man, but I like to believe that Oswald was only bad-tempered because nobody liked him. He had dedicated his life to dead people, and now he's joined them.'

One of the station house girls burst into tears. Bryant held up his hands for quiet. 'This afternoon, in a reflective mood, I sat at my desk and tried to remember all the good things about him. I couldn't come up with anything, I'm afraid, but the intention was there. I even phoned Oswald's oldest school friend to ask him for amusing stories, but sadly he went mad some while back and now lives in a mental home in Wales.'

Bryant paused for a moment of contemplation. A mood of despondency settle over the room like a damp flannel. 'Oswald was a true professional. He was determined not to let his total lack of sociability get in the way of his career. True, he was depressing to be around, and everyone complained that he smelled funny, but that was because of the chemicals he used. And the flatulence...'

I can just imagine Fowler chortling at his desk as he wrote Bryant's eulogy for Oswald. It's black humor, to be sure, but it's not that often that reading gives me a good old out-loud guffaw. Evidently the book won 2009's Last Laugh Award for funniest crime novel - it sounds like the awards they think up for children in elementary school or summer camp just so that everyone gets one and doesn't burst into tears. 'And Virginia wins first prize for most beautifully painted toenails on the left foot...'

Unconventional crime solving and coming of age in a void (Books - The Victoria Vanishes & A Gate at the Stairs)

Classes + 3 experiments + seeing patients has thrown me into overdrive and my entire schedule out of whack. It is leaving me much less time for reading not related to school. When I do find the time, it seems to be in smaller chunks because I fall asleep - I can't get up a good head of steam on any of my reading right now much as I enjoy the few minutes I can snatch each night. Lately I've been flitting back and forth between books already started and a bunch of recently acquired treasures:

I have written about Christopher Fowler's less than ordinary detective team - Bryant and May - and their Peculiar Crimes Unit
before here and here. When all other units fail, this rag tag bunch of thinkers-out-of-the-box handles crimes that don't fit the conventional mold. Fowler combines a good sense of comedy, an enjoyment of London history (the theatre during WW II, underground waterways, and now the venerable institution of the English pub), and a well-plotted mystery. I have been looking forward to another one. The Victoria Vanishes opens with a murder that gives an example of the way Fowler's writing combines a good sense of atmosphere and an intense energy:

It was ridiculous, she was surrounded by people but the noise of laughter and conversation was drowning her out. The crush of customers made her even more invisible. He was hurting her now. She tried to squirm out of his embrace.

Something stung her face hard. She brought her free hand to her cheek, but there was nothing. It felt like an angry wasp, trapped and maddened in the crowded room. Wasn't it too early in the year for such insects?

And then he released her arm, and she was dropping away through the beery friendship of the bar, away from the laughter and yeasty warmth of life, into a place of icy, infinite starlight.

Into death.

I am struck currently in Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs by the character of Sarah - a white, yuppie restaurant owner who adopts an African American child. She ends up, because she experiences the racist comments of some of her neighbors, creating a support group for multi-racial families. Moore can at once treat the subject seriously and mine it for great comedy. We experience the group meeting through Tassie's ears - the college student hired to babysit Sarah's adopted daughter Mary-Emma - as a desultory stream of empty rhetoric about Muslims, black hair, racism, vegetarians, Jews, Karl Rove, Pete Seeger, and humane treatment of chimpanzees. The group seems, like the adoption, to be another of Sarah's empty promises. It's full of the surface of the thing, but not the intellectual focus or the depth of love needed to do it seriously. Just like television. I laugh at Moore's script of these meetings, but I cringe too as this is Tassie's coming of age story and rather than an environment rich in love, good or outlandish taste, complex political discussion (conservative or liberal), or even drugs or music, it is filled with an unloved baby, a loveless marriage, professional ambition, uninformed fear of others, college courses in wine tasting, and people who cannot talk to each other. They engage in parallel monologues so empty of substance that the air can be heard to whistle through them.

I wanted to write about Margaret Drabble's new memoir The Pattern in the Carpet too, but I am going to hold off on that as I have to get to the lab (yes, on Sunday).

Liar, liar, pants on fire

Suggested by Monibo. Saw this article (from March) and thought it would make a good BTT confessional question:

Two-thirds of Brits have lied about reading books they haven’t. Have you? Why? What book?

We don't do that on this side of the Atlantic (yeah, right). I know that there are any number of school assignments I have suggested that I read by nodding knowingly. As an undergraduate I couldn't stand Dickens's Bleak House. I now love it, but at the time I could not get through it and so I had my roommate tell me the story in order to write my final. I think I may also have claimed to have read all of Shakespeare's work in my time and there are probably a couple of poems and plays I still haven't gotten around to (I find Henry VI and Henry VIII deadly boring). For the most part, the vast amount of books I haven't read just provides me with the certainty that there is lots out there to look forward to. I don't feel as though I have to lie about it.

The push and pull of it (Books - A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore)

I wrote in my last post on Lorrie Moore's new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, about the desperate need of the characters to feel connected, to touch and be touched. As I continue to read, Moore has me notice all the ways that human beings undercut that ability - depersonalize the most intimate of transactions. Sarah and Edward, an intellectual yuppie couple, adopt Mary-Emma:

"Here," Edward said, indicating, and they resumed their eading and signing. And then the strangest: they were writing checks, separate checks.

"Edward and I are splitting this down the middle," said Sarah. She was scribbling something on a scrap of paper, doing the arithmetic. "We like everything to be even between us." She pause, then murmured, "Though usually they're not even - just odd."

What would Solomon the Wise say about that?

Equally limiting is how many of us isolate ourselves almost reflexively with judgment of others. Moore shows us that in the racism of the residents of Troy, the small town in which Sarah, Edward, Mary-Emma, and the book's narrator Tassie, live. Sarah and Edward are white and they adopt a child who is part African-American. This really raises the hackles of many of the town's people, who seem unable to fathom a racially mixed family. Moore's talent is to deliver this criticsm of our social poverty with humor. This book seems to be all about the push and pull of human connection. Every pull toward the love of others is met by a complementary push away. Sarah desperately wants a child, but hires Tassie even before the adoption to care for her. Even a simple interaction between mother and daughter - a trip to the children's library - is clouded by Sarah needing to bake the library books she borrows for Mary-Emma in the oven, to kill any bacteria that might lurk on their pages before she is willing for her to touch them! The ultimate in control for a reader - sterilizing ones books! But nature has an odd sense of humor. The flip side of trying to control all sources of infection with disinfecting sprays and hand- wash is that we render ourselves less able to tolerate the simple invasions of daily existence. Overuse of antibiotics in medical care and in our food supply has produced in us less ability to resist infection and may even be responsible for the onslought of allergies so many suffer. When we suffer a wounded heart from loss of someone we love we often behave in ways that close us down to others, limiting even more one of the chief sources of our ability to recover. That seems to be true on a national level as well - one big attack has made us hypervigilant of future invasions - and at the same time has limited our openness to and tolerance for others, the flexibility of our legal system. Are we perfect now? Are we impervious? Will we never hurt again? And are we better for it? Those are the qualities of our modern world that reading Moore's book evokes for me, but it does so with subtlety and humor. Its environment is local - a specific small town. Its narrative is a personal journey, and yet it seems to be about the whole world.

A meme, if you need a little distraction and, evidently, I do...

How on earth did this evolve? This is sooooo random. Thanks Matt.

1. Do you like blue cheese? Yumm. Especially with figs and a great white wine.

2. Have you ever been drunk? Are you kidding? Um, yes.

3. Do you own a gun? No. But I've fired a rifle so stay clear.

4. What flavor of Kool Aid was your favorite? Probably grape, but I don't really remember, the very though now is disgusting.

5. Do you get nervous before doctor appointments? Yes.

6. What do you think of hot dogs? To be honest I don't think of them at all. Weisswurst, knockwurst and bratwurst I enjoy on occasion.

7. Favorite Christmas movie? I don't go back to traditional favorites at Christmas or most other times. If I have free time I tend to watch something new.

8. What do you prefer to drink in the morning? Tea.

9. Can you do push ups? Yes, but not very well.

10. What’s your favorite piece of jewelry? I don't wear any unless a shirt requires cufflinks.

11. Favorite hobby? This is a book blog, any guesses?

12. Do you have A.D.D.? Diagnosed, no. But I am a multitasker.

13. What’s your favorite shoe? I have two feet, it would be more practical to have favorite shoeS.

14. Middle name? Not saying, I don't like sharing personal information on the internet.

15. Name 3 thoughts at this exact moment? 1) How old is the person who wrote this? 2)I really should be reading three articles related to my research. 3)This is really good tea.

16. Name 3 drinks you regularly drink? Tea, coffee, wine.

17. Current worry? My exams.

18. Current hate right now? Housework, especially laundry, and middle age spread.

19. Dum da dum dummmm what is that? That's the theme from Dragnet, isn't it?

20. How did you bring in the new year? We had a marvelous party, as Noel Coward would have said.

21. Where would you like to go? Portugal, France, Quebec, and Vancouver.

22. Name three people who will complete this? You know who you are.

23. Do you own slippers? Birkenstocks.

24. What color shirt are you wearing right now? Olive.

25. Do you like sleeping on Satin sheets? Not really, I have to keep picking myself off the floor when I slide out of bed.

26. Can you whistle? Yup.

27. Favorite color? Purple.

28. Would you be a pirate? Under what circumstances - who's offering what? Speak to my agent.

29. What songs do you sing in the shower? Usually classical stuff I have floating through my head - Verdi's Requium, some Mozart aria, or occasionally Soliloquoy from Carousel.

30. Favorite Girl’s Name? Emma.

31. Favorite boy’s name? Aaron.

32. What’s in your pocket right now? A tissue.

33. Last thing that made you laugh? Reading Lorrie Moore's new book.

34. Best bed sheets as a child? I had some with jungle animals on them.

35. Worst injury you’ve ever had as a child? Probably a fall I took in 1st grade which cut both knees, both elbows and my face.

36. Do you love where you live? I love my apartment and my neighborhood.

37. Revenge of the Nerds or Fast Times at Ridgemont High? Neither. But Diner is ok.

38. Who is your loudest friend? Laugher? Crier? Screamer? I will not say on the grounds that it may incriminate me.

39. How many dogs do you have? None. My life doesn't permit it. Neither does my apartment bulilding.

40. Does someone have a crush on you? No idea.

41. What is your favorite book? There are too many - see my side bar. Hopeful Monsters, The Gold Bug Variations, For Kings and Planets, The Chosen, Crime and Punishment..... are my usual answers.

42. What is your favorite candy? I don't really like candy but if pressed, very dark chocolate.

43. Favorite Sports Team? I don't see the point of watching team sports, but tennis is ok.

44. What song do you want played at your funeral? I haven't planned that far in advance.

Despearately seeking others to love (Books - A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore)

An aimless literature student at a small town college, Tassie Keltjin, answers an advertisement for a job as a babysitter. She ends up (at least by page 100) accompanying Sarah Brink, an aggressive yuppie restaurant owner, on trips to adoption agencies to meet mothers giving up their babies for adoption, one of them destined to become her charge. Tassie is an awkward, word-loving innocent who is out of her depth in this strange role - who wouldn't be? A babysitter without a baby. Each of the characters in this novel seems to be reaching out blindly for connection with others, their arms flailing in the empty space before them, only rarely striking a body or face to feel and then stumbling on again. The narrative voice is the first person - Tassie's - but she is telling this story from some time in the future by which everything has changed. It is tinted by Lorrie Moore's ruthless camera-like eye for character and her trademark humor, which I find laugh-out-loud funny, if a trifle vicious.

The woman of the house opened the door. She was pale and compact, no sags or pouches, linen skin tight across the bone. The hollows of her cheeks were powdered darkly, as if with the pollen of a tiger lily. Her hair was cropped short and dyed the fashionable bright auburn of a ladybug. Her earrings were buttons of deepest orange, her leggings mahogany, her sweater rust-colored, and her lips maroonish brown. She looked like a highly controlled oxidation experiment. "Come in," she said, and I entered, mutely at first and then, as always, apologetically, as if I were late, though I wasn't At that time in my life I was never late. Only a year later would I suddenly have difficulty hanging on to any sense of time, leaving friends sitting, invariably, for a half hour here or there. Time would waft past me undetectably or absurdly - laughably when I could laugh - in quantities I was incapable of measuring or obeying.

But that year, when I was twenty, I was as punctual as a priest. Were priests punctual? Cave-raised, divinely dazed, I believed them to be.

This combination of perspectives gives Tassie a strange combination of naivetee and wisdom and plumps this quiet story full of a subtle kind of suspense. It pushes me gently forward to see around the next bend how this clueless foal becomes the woman who narrates this story. More on it soon.

Boo hoo!

What’s the saddest book you’ve read recently?

I had to think pretty hard to remember these, I guess my memory wears rose colored glasses. Herman Hesse's Beneath the Wheel is certainly the most tragic story I have read lately (within the past two years) and The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst also features a tragic central character who is drawn into a web of immense superficiality. They both are gripping narratives with compelling stories to tell. I also cry about the many unread books sitting on piles throughout my house begging to be read - those might be the saddest books of all!

A war run by psychopaths (Books - The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Antony Beevor)

It was a twisted road that led me to read Antony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945. I have read several works of fiction this year set in Europe during and just after World War II - The Night Watch, Little Boy Lost, and Pictures at an Exhibition. Reading the second two books got me interested in post-war France and when Cornflower Books did a post on Beevor's book about Paris following liberation, I decided I wanted to read it and learn more about that strange, divided time in the history of that wonderful city. I looked Beevor up on line and ordered a second-hand copy and since I could get free shipping if I ordered a second from the same shop and since I remembered seeing Sheila reading his book about the siege of Stalingrad, I looked for that one and they didn't have it and so I ended up ordering his book on Berlin in the final year of the war instead. Usually I am not one for military history, but Beevor does more than discuss the movement of battalions and the shaving habits of famous generals, he is able to get at the tenor of the time, the desperation of the German troops who knew they were being led to slaughter, the sex-starved Russian men who readily raped German women but were reluctant to kill them because 'they weren't barbarians like the Germans.' Beevor really gets into the mind of the characters he is playing and tells the story of war as the story of the forces driving the behavior of crazed men, depicting Hitler's pathological denial of the true state of his campaign in 1945, the internicine rivalry between Himmler and Bormann, and Stalin's utter unpredictability. His general, Chernyakhovsky described him as "a living example of dialectical process. 'It's impossible to understand him. All you can do is to have faith.' Chernyakhovsky was clearly not destined to survive into the post-was Stalinist petrification," Beevor adds. "He was perhaps fortunate to die soon in battle, his faith intact." In these last months of the war, the Russians were able to maneuver their troops faster than the German's were able to relay messages between generals, which meant that the German plans were constantly made upon dated information. It is a fascinating pressure-cooker atmosphere with an unbelievably inhumane amount of carnage and Beevor makes mesmerizing drama of it in his history.

Anti-intellectual bias & pulp, world war & great acting (Books - Night Train to Lisbon & The Fall of Berlin 1945 and Film - Charlotte Gray)

I finished Swiss author Pascal Mercier's controversial book Night Train to Lisbon. So is it brilliant or is it craptacular (a word I just heard on NPR)? For my money it's neither, but it is an engaging story and I would place it into a sort of intellectual pulp-fiction category. The central character, Gregorius, is a teacher of Latin, Greek and Hebrew in a high school. He plays chess for fun. He is a rather staid and sedate creature of habit who has a chance encounter with a Portuguese woman in his home city of Berne, Switzerland. This leads him to discover a philosophical memoir by a Portuguese doctor which seems to speak directly to him and drives him to leave his job and visit Portugal to learn everything he can about the life of Amadeu de Prado, the author of the book - a brilliant intellect, devout atheist, iconoclast, member of the resistance against Salazar, the authoritarian ruler of Portugal until the mid-1970s. Most of the critics who thought the book bombastic crap were American. I wonder if that is because the book is neither fish nor fowl? The writing is low-brow, unimpressive - it gets the job done but no better than the average pulpy thriller and is a little repetitive. And yet, it is filled with lengthy italicized philosophical paragraphs, people who speak dead languages, play chess for fun, doubt the existence of god and say so, and the action is largely of an introspective sort - one man trying to uncover another man's past in order to somehow transform himself. America is many things but our culture has a largely anti-intellectual bent. If something here is "heady" most people want to know and prepare themselves for it, or they want to just have fun, but those two things generally aren't supposed to overlap. You know all that stuff like opera and films you have to read - in Holland where I have worked for many years it always surprised me to see people under 30 years old out on dates for fun at the opera. I almost never saw that in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Santa Fe (any of the American opera houses that I have worked in). To get back to the book, I didn't find Night Train to Lisbon terribly serious and I certainly didn't find it transformative, but the world it was set in was one of self-probing thought and love of literature and was very recognizable to me. The sudden change in this quiet, hypochondrical man was enlivening and what drove his curiosity drove mine and so I was engaged and entertained by it. Imagination, intimacy and language are described as Prado's sanctuaries by one of the characters in the book. That is the kind of place this book is. If you enjoy intellectual and bookish mysteries like those of Carlos Ruiz Zafon then you might also enjoy this book, although its pleasures are a little quieter than Shadow of the Wind. Speaking of pulp...

We saw the film adaptation of Sebastian Faulks's Charlotte Gray last night, which I borrowed from the library because Billy Crudup is in it. I haven't read the book but the film is every bit a trashy romance despite its setting in World War II France and England its action, which concerns a young Scottish woman who, speaking French, becomes an agent for the Brittish to aid the French resistance, and the serious choices Charlotte must make given her involvement with a Jewish family in Nazi-occupied France. The film was an interesting one to me for two reasons. The period is one I am very interested in right now. I am also reading Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude set in a World War II London suburb and I'm reading Antony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945, an excellent military and social history of the end of the war. And also because a completely predictable script rendered in a way I could only describe as flat, stale and unprofitable, was filled with such depth by its cast and the detailed direction of Gillian Armstrong. Cate Blanchett, Michael Gambon, and most of the cast were very good - specific and understated - but, as usual, Billy Crudup had that extra something that allows him to act circles around anyone else near him, whatever the material. He does his job - sure. He is committed to the world of his character, involved in his circumstances, aware of the technical requirements, moved in the right way at the proper times - but it is more than that. He lives in, but also around the character's life. He does more than embody his lines and actions as informed by his back story, he embodies his backstory. He is the circumstances you are witnessing and also the circumstances you haven't seen - things that came before, expectation of things to come, and probably things that are particular to Crudup's being and fantasy - things that are secret from us that we will never know, and yet are alive in Crudup's behavior which creates that which we experience in the film or play as his character. Whenever I see someone of those type of abilities work - Juliette Stevenson, Geraldine Page, Mark Ruffalo - I am reminded what it is I love about great acting. Ode to Billy over.

Now Lorrie Moore's latest waits in the wings and an interesting book entitled Identity and Story: Creating Self in Narrative a book about psychological research in the intertwined sub fields of self and narrative - an intersection I am obsessed with. Not to mention about 200 pages of homework to read by Tuesday.

Reading habits meme

Do you snack while you read? If so, favorite reading snack?

It's easier to ask when I don't snack. Olives, cheese, a glass of wine, a cup of tea are all fair game while I'm reading. Or, if I'm alone at home or at a restaurant, I'll read over a meal.

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?
I mark my school reading. I used to engage in great enthusiastic dialogues with all my books, all over them in ink, but now for my pleasure reading I tend to use little post-it tabs and will occasionally make a note on one of them.

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?

Bookmark. Usually bookmarks take on certain magical meanings related to the last book they marked and will, therefore, seem appropriate or inappropriate to the book in which I'm thinking of using them. I don't buy bookmarks, but when I go to favorite bookstores or visit new bookstores, especially while travelling, I'll try to get a bookmark from the shop. Then if my reading experience from that shop was favorable, that bookmark will become a favorite. Silly of me, I know, but true.

Fiction, Non-fiction, or both?
I read both, but I read more fiction for pleasure than non-fiction.

Hard copy or audiobooks?
I read books - those funny objects with ink printed on pages made of paper and those pages bound somehow within paper or hard covers. Audio books aren't books they're another medium, which is fine when I want a radio-like experience, but the auditory and the visual modalities are different. They collect different information from my environment. They require different organs, they use different parts of the brain to process them and, finally, they create different sensory, intellectual, and emotional experiences. When I wish to read, I want a book that I consume with my eyes, in silence. Listening to fiction or drama or journalism is fine, it's just something else altogether, even if the source was a book.

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?
There are books where I cannot stand to not read to the end of the chapter, but it's a book-by-book need for me. It's not a regular neurosis. I can always find my place again in any book that really interests me.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away?
Depends on whether I'm home. If a dictionary is nearby I will probably look it up right away. Otherwise I will infer the meaning from context and will intend to look it up but it may not happen.

What are you currently reading?
I just finished Night Train to Lisbon. I'm in-progress with The Slaves of Solitude, Identity and Story, and The Fall of Berlin 1945 and Lorrie Moore's new book is waiting in the wings (I cannot wait to start that one!)

What is the last book you bought?
Just a few hours ago (shhhhh!) I bought a book called The First Interview - a book on clinical interviewing for my clinical externship and two books by Margaret Drabble, her early novel The Needle's Eye and her new memoir The Pattern in the Carpet.

Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can you read more than one at a time?
As the answer above likely indicated to you, I have several in-progress at once.

Do you have a favorite time of day and/or place to read?
Any time. Any place. On public transportation, in bed, waiting for friends in a restaurant, standing on the subway platform - wherever.

Do you prefer series books or stand alone books?
Stand alone, I'm not opposed to a series, but it can make me a little neurotic about reading it in order or finishing it.

Is there a specific book or author that you find yourself recommending over and over?
Two - Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley and The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers. Over and over and over. And Crime and Punishment of Dostoevsky too.

How do you organize your books? (By genre, title, author’s last name, etc.?)
Loosely by genre and within that genre I might group a given author or theme, but basically by feel.

Cynthia Ozick and the fun quotient

What’s the most enjoyable, most fun, most just-darn-entertaining book you’ve read recently?

The winner in the 'just-darn-entertaining' category this year would go to Cynthia Ozick's The Puttermesser Papers. What really gives this book the fun quotient for me is the fact that it is not merely entertaining. Ozick's prose is can be fluid or sharp but is always tinged by whimsy. Her humor is sophisticated. She can reference the Kabbalah, Shakespeare, and Bloomsbury in a single paragraph - and does. This is a bookish romp.

Artist's Private Spaces

Did you see Daphne Merkin's wonderful portrait of Margaret Drabble in the New York Times Magazine this weekend - Dame of the British Interior? She sets the scene expertly by relating her own experience of her visit to Drabble's home - her garden, and jigsaw puzzles. Among other things, this article stresses Drabble's reticence to make her writing overtly confessional and yet, somehow, Merkin balances that with being revealing enough to make a sympathetic and informative portrait. I have only read one of Drabble's novels - The Peppered Moth - and Merkin's piece made me hungry for more. Above are pictured Drabble's workspace (I love getting a glimpse of artists' spaces) and beneath that, her husband's (the biographer Michael Holroyd).

Breaking free of the emptiness (Books - Night Train to Lisbon & Film - L'Emploi du Temps & Pierrot Le Fou)

The desire to break free of society's template and find one's more true self is, through no specific intention of my own, the theme of both the novel I am reading and the the two films I watched this weekend.

Laurent Cantet's L'Emploi du temps (Timeout is the American title) concerns Vincent, a reasonably well off French family man. Mom and 3 kids are installed in a well equipped and modern home, the in-laws live near by - and Vincent goes off to work, which keeps him on the road all week, calling in from meetings to apologize for yet another missed dinner. The trouble is, Vincent has been unemployed for months and the elaborate lie he embroiders about a potential job with the UN in Switzerland investing money to help under-financed countries develop infrastructure begins to take on a life of its own. He collects hundreds of thousands of francs simply by spouting unspecific rhetoric he has poached by stealing some of the U.N.'s public relations pieces from their lobby. I won't give the whole story away, but two things struck me about this dreamy, leisurely-paced film, one was the psychological insight about deception and especially self-deception, which I found detailed and subtly played Aurelien Recoing and the rest of the cast. The second was the emphasis on how devoid of meaning much of daily commerce is. The domestic scenes, the visits to school sports events and fairs are shot with warmth but distance, but all the scenes in the work world are icily cold, buildings are glass fortresses, people move their mouths in meetings and in phone conversation. Sentences come out, they contain the right catch-words but are devoid of any substance whatever. The biggest question the film left me with (and meant to leave me with, I believe) was whether Vincent really wanted to be in the game or not. It seemed as though his self-worth was really caught up in everyone thinking he was employed at this level. When the people around him thought he was they praised him and gave him money, his wife and parents felt more secure. But Vincent called his wife three or four times a day, not merely out of an insecure need to shore up the elaborate lie he had built, he also seemed to call because he needed connection with her and wanted her love. He seemed to crave connection with people around him and yet the people around him seemed to wish to connect most through his accomplishments. A quietly provocative film and surprisingly similar in some thematic ways to...

Jean Luc Goddard's 1965 Pierrot Le Fou which also explored opting out of society's conventions, but in a more manic and aggressive style. Pierrot who, he keeps telling the camera, is really named Ferdinand, is married to a wealthy Italian woman, lives in Paris, and reads art criticism as she plays tennis and tries to get her husband gainfully employed through Daddy. Early in the film, the couple attends a cocktail party in which the guests seem to spout nothing but platitudes and advertisement slogans. This was remarkably similar to L'Emploi du Temps emphasis on conventional society's reliance on empty rhetoric so that people in the course of daily interaction whether social or economic don't have to think. While Vincent had a quietly desperate need that vacillated between wanting to escape and wanting to take part so that he would be admired, Pierrot le Fou is angrily dismissive, (this is the 1960s, you know) condemnatory of valuing brand-name shampoo as war rages in Vietnam. Pierrot decides unequivocally to "drop out," as they said then, and run to the South of France with the babysitter who, incidentally, is being chased by Algerian gun men. He is played with iconic, cigarette-dangling insouciance by Paul Belmondo. She is played with irrepressible carelessness by Anna Karina. This is a courageously experimental film making with direct-audience address, characters bursting into song, voice-overs of quotes from art criticism, shots with colored filters over the lens. It's part screw-ball comedy, part musical, yet as violent as Quentin Tarratino's films, and is simultaneously serious social criticism. Although both character's want to drop out of conventional life, she is a nihilist, he is an intellectual wastrel. This is film making with both a lively spirit and an intellectual seriousness and that brings me to the book I have been reading over the past week...

Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier, a Swiss author now living in Germany, has received such a contradictory reception from its critics, I find it fascinating. The paperback edition is larded with hyperbolic praise for its seriousness, its philosophy. "It is a handbook for the soul..." the cover screams. "I read it in three nights and was then convinced to change my life," another said. Other critics not plastered across the book's back and front covers or first few pages found it "Fantastical, long-winded and dull..." or "turgid...bombastic." "Think of W.G. Sebald recast for the mass market: stripped of nuance, cooked at high temperature and pounded home, clause after clause." The controversy alone made me want to read it. In a sentence the novel concerns a Swiss teacher of dead languages who comes to life. A chance meeting with a woman on a bridge leads him to a philosophical book by a Portuguese doctor, which leads him to upend a life musty with routine and pursue the story of this man's life; but what this really is is a journey to himself. The passages from the philosophy book are a bit long-winded and very repetitive in theme. There is nothing particularly nuanced about this story (many of the critics blame the translator), but I am finding his book-laden adventure appealing to the bookish romantic in me and I am always a sucker for stories of self-discovery and escape from routine. In fact, it has been quite a weekend for them. I'll let you know when I'm done with it, on which side of the argument I landed.

Information and chance to win a book

What’s the most informative book you’ve read recently?

Goodness, what book worth reading isn't informative, doesn't expose the reader to something new - either in its content or in the way it treats a subject I thought I knew already? Iris Murdoch's novel The Nice and the Good informed me about the experience of judging others while questioning one's own moral sense. The setting of the novel Little Boy Lost informed me about post World War II France. If by informative you mean "packed with facts," then any of the text books I have read for school qualify for that. Take Principles of Neural Science by Kandel, Schwartz and Jessell (I should say - take it, please!). It's about 10 pounds, 1400 pages on the electrical and chemical make-up of neurons and glia, their communicative properties, and how those result in behaviors such as motor movements, remembering, paying attention, perceiving the world. It's a feast of information and an aerobic workout all in one.

Anyone who can guess what the picture has to do with the question will be entered in a drawing to win a book! One answer each, through Friday evening. One winner will be drawn from any multiple correct answers randomly. Actually I didn't really handle that properly, since once one person wrote the answer in the comments, anyone could copy it! So I am going to close the contest and declare the person who gave the first right answer to be the winner in order to be fair to her. Congratulations Isabella! I'll be in touch.

A collection of treasures

Lots of goodies to look forward to in the coming weeks!

Cornflower Books tempted me with a write-up of Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper's Paris After the Liberation 1944-1949, describing what is was like for General DeGaulle's government to receive a France divided into those who cooperated with the collaborationist Vichy government, those who were victims of it, and those who actively resisted. This was the setting of Marghanita Laski's wonderful novel Little Boy Lost. I'm interested to learn more about the period and I have heard a lot of praise for Antony Beevor's books about World War II. I also acquired his The Fall of Berlin 1945, so some history waits in the wings here at Bookeywookey.


I received an ARC of Robert Stone's new volume of short stories Fun With Problems, due out early next year. It is hailed as a collection of unsettling stories about longing, violence, black humor, sex, and drugs. This all gave me the impression that he would be something like Hunter S. Thompson, I writer I loathe, but dipping into the book a little, one of stories begins at a concert of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde and I found myself attracted to the lean, wry prose and easy dialogue. What little I sampled reminded me more of Joan Didion. Stone is supposed to be a strong writer and as I have yet to read anything of his, I'm looking forward to being introduced.

Most of all, I am looking forward to Lorrie Moore's new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, which Jonathan Lethem gushed all over in the New York Times Review of Books a couple of weeks ago. My gosh, I have never read such admiration of one living writer by another. I would read Lorrie Moore's tea leaves, so I am thrilled she has written another full-lenth work of fiction. Her Who Will Run the Frog Hospital is a favorite of mine. Such complex understanding of character expressed deeply, simply, and also suprisingly.

New York, the ecosystem

It is not usual for me to think of the island I live on (Manhattan) as an ecosystem, but whether an environment is urban or rural it is still made up of flora and fauna, its materials exist uncultivated or are put to use as food, shelter, clothes, and means of travel. I live in an ecosystem as much as the next kangaroo and Manahatta, an exhibit currently on at The Museum of the City of New York, means to encourage its visitors to occupy that point of view for a while. It projects the viewer back to Manhattan in 1609 before Henry Hudson arrived, when it was inhabited by the Lenape people, forward to our own time, and beyond to a possible version of Manhattan in 2409. It's interactive maps let you view the island city block-by-city block, with every buildings and subway stations visible, or to see its many plants, its voles, bear, and bird species, where its springs and streams were, and where the Lenape had their trails to walk from camp to camp. Whether you live nearby or are coming for a visit (prior to mid October), I found it a provocative view of a place I generally think of very differently. If you can't make it, Manahatta is also a book and a website. Come and meet New York - the ecological community.

Rich imagery scratched with acid pen... (Books - The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton)

I am in one of those between books places in which I keep flitting from book to book, not really settling anywhere. Perhaps I'm unconsciously waiting for Lorrie Moore's new novel to arrive in the mail. Meanwhile,on John Self's recommendation, I started The Slaves of Solitude which chronicles the lonely lives of the denizens of a suburban boarding house near World War II torn London. Patrick Hamilton regards this petty, claustrophobic universe and its inhabitants with a gimlet eye:

Such was Miss Roach's pink boudoir in Thames Lockdon before dinner at night. Before washing she looked at what she could see of herself in the mirror - at the thin, bird-like nose and face, and the healthy complexion - too healthy for beauty - the open-air, sun-and-wind complexion of a uniform red-brick colour, of a texture and colour to which it would be impossible or absurd to apply make-up of any sort. She had, she knew, the complexion of a farmer's wife and the face of a bird. Her eyes, too, were bird-like - blackly brown, liquid, loving, appealing, confused. Her hair was of a nondescript brown colour, and she parted it in the middle. She was only thirty-nine, but she might have been taken foor forty-five. She had given up "hope" years ago. She had never actually had any "hope." Like so many of her kind - the hopelss - she was too amiable and tried too hard in company and conversation, and so sometimes gave an air, untrue to her character, of being genteel.

If I had been living at the same time as Hamilton (actually we may have barely overlapped but it's unlikely that we met) and had three wishes I would use one of them to wish that I never encountered Hamilton in a bar, train waiting room, or anywhere where we might both sit long enough for him to train lay his eye upon me and draw my portrait with his acid pen. His writing, though his vision is scathing, is redolent of rich imagery. It has an elegance.

London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels.

The men and women imagine they are going into London and coming out again more or less of their own free will, but the crouching monster sees all and knows better.

But what a bleak, black vision.

Big

What’s the biggest book you’ve read recently? (Feel free to think “big” as size, or as popularity, or in any other way you care to interpret.

That would be A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book. It is big in its number of pages, big in its ambitions to encompass many sweeping social, political, and artistic themes of a recent period of history in Europe (in my post on finishing it I called it 'vast'). Big in the cut of humanity it takes - bringing together the breadth of many characters' lives in this period over their whole length and weaving their stories together as a single narrative. Big in the sense that its reading demands much of your time and your brain. Here's what I said about it at length.