Book # 29 of 2020: The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen

I like to consider myself well-read, with a fairly wide experience of World Lit and a strong knowledge of American and European novels. But Elizabeth Bowen has somehow eluded my erratic truffle-hunting. What a great novel!

The book is divided into three chunks. In the first a young English girl is dropped at a house in Paris en route to visit her grandmother in the south of France. She encounters a young boy who is also waiting here, a boy adopted who is to meet his birth mother for the first time that day. Henrietta and Leopold are mysterious and their encounter is unpleasant. We watch them behaving without adult supervision and it's a bit creepy how adult they are despite the stuffed animal toy and their reliance on Miss Fisher as they transit to their next destinations. There are a lot of echoes of The Turn of the Screw: the children seem unnaturally aware of the adult world, as though they've been exposed to some grown-up grotesquerie which the narrator hides. Something is haunting them, but not necessarily supernatural.

In the second chunk we find out about Leopold's parents and their connection to Miss Fisher. There is an affair with profound consequences. Leopold and who he is and why become more clear. The haunting is rendered less mysterious.

In the third chunk we return to the present of the novel. I shall say no more lest I spoil it.

Bowen's prose is exquisite, particularly so in her rendering of place. The characters are real people with depth, and their pain is first rendered with tender clues and only eventually made manifest through back story. Were I to choose a current writer of similar skill it would be Colm Toibin.

Book #17 of 2020: All Souls' Rising by Madison Smartt Bell

Historical fiction does not get better than this. An enormous cast of characters and a dense web of events with global repercussions, all unspooling outward from Haiti at the end of the 18th century. I was flabbergasted by this novel. Each character is painted with master strokes, and each point of view is captured believably and situated within the complex political, economic, racial, religious, intellectual, and revolutionary realities of the era.

There are two more in the trilogy--but I shan't dive right in. This book was far too harrowing. Its literary merits are obvious and the scholarship and research in its formulation daunting. But there are extended passages of the most DeSadean brutality--nothing ahistorical, mind you--but this was a time of casual and elegantly contrived brutality. And Bell's prose scintillates when bringing the most exquisitely awful scenarios to vivid life. I need a break before part 2!

The latest books: 21 so far in 2019

Just reading books by Jung or Jungians or memoirs of the individuation process by those who work with Jungians causes me to have delicious and mysterious dreams. I've been doing a lot of dreamwork with the Shadow, Anima, and Mother archetype lately.

The best bits of this book are those which use Biblical stories and religious symbols to explain Jungian concepts. And the best of those is the discussion of Job. Probably only interesting or useful if you're fairly deep in the Jungiverse.



There are several reviewers on Amazon who trashed this book because it's called "AMERICAN" short stories but there's a lot of stories about Africans, Asians, gray parrots, etc. Make the Best American Short Stories the Best Again! Whatever. I used to read these annuals religiously but stopped about 20 years ago; thought I should see what was happening with the short story lately.

I found this collection was excellent and interesting BECAUSE it didn't feature the painfully empty interior lives of a series of alienated suburban white people who had never even heard of Marx or Sartre or Chomsky and were unable to find a theorist to diagnose their malaise in US Weekly and People magazines. And the story about the parrot, narrated by a parrot, is an all-time great I can use with my middle school students. One of the classic devastating last lines!

 

Having met James Ellroy, and having spoken with him about JFK conspiracy books and novels, and having watched him scrawl "Blood rage rules!" in my copy of his American Tabloid, and having enjoyed several of his books, I thought I'd give the latest prisoner turned literary darling a shot. Cherry is a worthy first effort. Sometimes the narrator's voice is searing, clear, and white-hot, and that voice carries you along and surprises you with what captures the narrator's attention, and the curious tidbits he knows about literature and history sprinkled into the junky talk and soldier lingo. There is a lot of blood rage here, or at least blood hunger.

But other times the voice is clumsy and the narrator becomes a familiar type (I lived in West Baltimore for years--I saw these guys and gals daily. The reality of this "familiar type" is quite real to me). If you've read or seen The Corner you have heard this story. If you read Russell Banks's Rule of the Bone you've heard this story and met this character. You need some humor to sustain the plot, the way Trainspotting is just fucking awful and then awfully funny and then just awful again. Cherry has a lot of the awful but loses its sardonic humor at some point.

I dunno why I'm nitpicking a pretty strong first novel--it just feels like I've read this before, and done better. But the descriptions of the Iraq War and its consequences and the attitudes of the soldiers are top-notch. The first half of the book is very strong. Something about the narrator and the characters just can't sustain the second half.

 

Just great. Points out the resurgence of Native American population numbers, and while the well-documented and notorious facts of centuries of ethnic cleansing and genocide are noted and examined here, the book is mostly concerned with celebrating survival--and despite the grim data, a great deal of success. A really fantastic historic overview of government policy and indigenous response, of activism and combat, of submission and fealty and betrayal. The Epilogue is some deep shit.

Book 30 of 2018

What a great little novel! It's a classic haunted house tale with a multi-dimensional twist. Once you figure out what's happening to the victims you wish, as many do at horror films, that you could intervene somehow and stop them from doing what they are about to do. That's what makes dramatic irony so cool, right?

Of course a few of the victims are really distasteful people, so it's fun to see them get their occult comeuppance. But even they don't deserve this fate. Well, maybe the cop does.

As in Cloud Atlas, Mitchell keeps track of multiple narrative lines and characters and they are all fully fleshed out with profound and individual and entertaining back stories. Of course these lines and characters all end in a similar manner because their fate is pulling them gravitationally toward the singularity of Slade House. We get to experience this same fate from different points of view, and that's a fun exercise for a writer, to imagine how different people would experience and describe the same sorrowful fate. And Mitchell shows off by keeping them in character as they are snuffed--the things they notice and how they notice them are well done.

The little alley where Slade House hides itself is carefully and quaintly wrought. All of the settings are classic ghost story with 21st century updates. The House itself is truly entertaining, and its means of haunting is unique.

And the book, though creepy and harrowing, is also funny as hell. All good haunted house novels blend humor and despair. Mitchell does so quite well.

A great Halloween read. You can finish it between handing out candies Wednesday.

Book 2 of 2018

Sometimes I miss working in the book industry. I'll stop simply meandering through whatever books I happen to have decided to read, and suddenly I'll choose to read a buzz book--something that's hot and current. The kind of book I miss because I'm not stacking it in mass quantities on a table or end cap display, and because I don't listen to NPR or watch C-SPAN book shows anymore.

And THIS? THIS is a hot book? THIS?

Synopsis: A whiny, entitled, pseudo-intellectual European dripping with privilege sets about recording his youth and young adulthood and how banal and empty everything is, except for exposure to some art, music, and writing. Everyone is fake and meaningless. We all inhabit a bleak Bergman film where the characters each get to shred themselves and their personae in 15-minute monologues filmed in stark black-and-white close-ups. He calls his work what Hitler called his work in order to underscore some devastating truths or realizations which actually never materialize in the text.

The suburbs are soul-sucking. The middle class are adrift and alienated from their labor, their families, and nature. The death of God and tradition has been replaced with the ascendance of death and materialism unto death.

Yawn.

MY struggle was getting through this monstrosity. And yet there are some quite good passages, passages where Karl Ove is really honest and his writing (in translation) has conveyed a common experience of our era in an interesting way.

But there's not enough there here. And more volumes? Really? FOUR more? Oh hell no...

Recent Books

This is not the first time travel novel I've read. It's not even the first time travel novel I've read which takes place in and around Vienna (at least for a while). This IS the first John Wray novel I've read, and I will likely read others based on its strengths.

The Lost Time Accidents puts Wray into the current crop of male writers of a "certain age" (meaning about my age) who rely on deep and sophisticated knowledge of  4 decades of American pop culture and esoteric nerdy references to Lovecraft and Dungeons and Dragons type fantasy and sci-fi shit. In Wray's case, the novels of Orson Scott Card, L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, Asimov's universe, Relativity; these are blended with deep knowledge of history and literature and we get a references to Fascism, Dickens, Einstein and Bohr--I could go on. If you've read Lethem or Diaz or Chabon or one of those other cats in a similar vein you know what I'm talking about.

The book pegs these things to larger questions about the nature of Time and reincarnation and destiny and cycles of justice and injustice and propaganda. But its sophistication and geeky intellectualism don't ruin the fun of a simple sci-fi romance story. Boy meets girl, gets manipulated by girl, fails to see her for what she is and pursues girl through Time and Space only to get his heart broken. With Nazis and evil religious cults thrown in for fun!



 

Lorrie Moore cracks me up. I mean just out of the blue one of her sentences will make me guffaw. And at the same time she is precise and acerbic and insightful about the Human Condition suffering the rampages of Late-Model Exploitative Capitalism and its associated environmental degradations.

One gets the delicious sense that all her characters are complicit in awful things about which they remain wholly ignorant, or perhaps they are fully aware of these crimes but the desire for convenience and self-medication allow them to justify their many disgusting behaviors.

I like these first sentences from the story "Paper Losses":

Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing,

making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also,

a little pro-nuke.

These stories are high-quality, like perhaps the highest quality. The story "Wings" is a modern retelling of James's Wings of the Dove. James was another master of the short story, with an eye for repressed guilt and the callous manipulations of "good" civilized people whose entire existence was predicated on awful institutions like slavery and colonialism and patriarchy and classicism. This story is a nod to The Master from a master who learned good lessons about craft at his knee. But Moore likes to have more fun with her readers.

Book #1 of 2015

I must admit I almost bailed on Wilton Barnhardt in the middle of chapter one. I found the central consciousness so annoying, so cloying, and so close in maturity and temperament to the middle school students who assail me daily in class that I nearly shelved the book in my "donations" pile. But I persevered, and gladly...because this novel progresses through the points of view of several characters associated with a grand old Southern family not only in decline, but in precipitous free-fall. Many chapters are dark and sardonic in the tradition of Southern Lit, but there is always a lively and wry sense of the humor of things, and some outrageous laugh-out-loud moments. Barndhardt captures the South, and its damnably intractable problems with race, poverty, and historical accuracy. But this South is not your grandparents' Dixie, and it is doomed to fall a second time to the combined civilizing pressures external to it and to those continuing to rise within its boundries.