Injuring Eternity offers readers a variety of voices, techniques, and subjects. There are first person confessions, third person narratives, and linguistically adventurous lyric poems. The work addresses family, love, politics, art, and religion. It tackles current events, popular culture, and spares a few asides for Miles Davis. It’s an ambitious collection that takes a lot of risks.
Unfortunately, that ambition isn’t always realized, and the risks don’t always pay off. Reading Injuring Eternity, I found myself starting and stopping, entranced one moment, puzzled the next. The good poems are good enough to make the weaker ones all the more disappointing. There’s a lot of talent in these verses, and a lot of promise, but overall the whole collection leaves an impression of potential rather than accomplishment. … Continue reading »
This is, by all accounts, a very good novel. What immediately strikes you upon reading this is that it is not funny. I don’t mean that it fails to be funny, I meant that it doesn’t try–and doesn’t need humor to succeed. Steve Martin is one of the most recognizable comedians in the world, so you kind of assume he’s going dip into his wit every so often.
But Martin never pulls from that pool. The book is more successful for that restraint. I knew coming into this book that Martin is an excellent writer. I loved his memoir, Born Standing Up, and whenever I see his name on the contents table in a New Yorker issue, I read it immediately. He is well-read, and skilled with words, and his dry wit is unmatched in precision. … Continue reading »
These days, writing a solid mystery is often not enough for an author trying to distinguish himself from the pack—he has to include a gimmick. Of course, I only call it a gimmick when it doesn’t work, such as the annoying Indian detective Vish Puri, or the defense attorney who becomes a special prosecutor for just one case. When there’s an interesting book behind it, a gimmick feels more like a unique frame for a good story—such as Millard Kaufman’s excellent tale about a real estate agent who gets embroiled in a murder.
As these things go, Gerald Elias’s Danse Macabre is extremely gimmicky, because the story at its core is cliched and poorly written. Instead of framing an interesting story, the gimmicks, plural (there are three), only draw attention to Elias’s poor judgment. … Continue reading »
Aging, tranquility, the death of friends and the cyclical nature of time are a few of the themes touched upon in Derek Walcott’s White Egrets. He finds beauty in the flight of birds, the crumbling of buildings, in broken dialects, and always in the sea.
Water and the sea feature in almost all of the 54 poems, as Walcott’s verses traverse the world–from Saint Lucia in the Caribbean, to Spain’s Mediterranean and Italy’s Adriatic, from the Congo river, to the canals of Amsterdam. Rain and the sea, rivers, marshes, wells, waterfalls–water is the central motif, expressing the flow of time, the seasons, the rain cycle, and the recurrent struggles of man, as generation after generation loves and dies. … Continue reading »
There’s been a lot of both hype and backlash about this book; the NYT’s skeptical, skewering review is the best I’ve read. Maslin convincingly paints Chua as a narcissistic psycho, willing to sacrifice the mental wellbeing of her daughters on her tyrant’s quest to raise productive, excellent, joyless offspring. Maslin shares a few of Chua’s insane adventures, draws parallels to Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, and sympathizes darkly with Chua’s poor husband. It’s a good read.
Ulin is a solid reviewer who’s appeared several times even recently in this column. This time around he discusses the new biography of J.D. Salinger. Obviously, writing the biography of a notorious recluse is a tricky proposition, and Slawenski’s methods—including a lot of conjecture—make for interesting review fodder, as does Ulin’s commentary on those methods. I probably won’t be picking up the book, but the review itself is a great read for anyone even slightly interested in Salinger.
Infinite City sounds like a fascinating book: it’s half atlas and half essay collection, it comes printed on either cloth or paper, and basically every description of it is captivating. This review is must-read for everybody who lives or has lived in San Francisco. For everybody else: you should endeavor to find Infinite City and flip through it the next time you’re in a bookstore.
Patton Oswalt is one of the smartest, funniest comedians working today. Perhaps the best praise Spanko can give his new memoir is that Oswalt “successfully transport[s] his comedic voice from the stage to the essay.” Still, this is a slim book at sub-200 pages, and the snippets Spanko presents are less than hilarious. It’s a tough call. But whatever you decide, make sure you check out Oswalt’s special, No Reason to Complain, his comedy-tour documentary, The Comedians of Comedy, and the companion live-performance feature, The Comedians of Comedy: Live at the El Rey. All are available on Netflix Instant Streaming.
The 2011 Edgar Award nominees have been announced. Originally Edgars were given exclusively to outstanding mystery novels (thus the reference to Edgar Allen Poe, one of the grandfathers of the mystery novel), but these days they encompass genres like thriller and crime, and mediums like nonfiction books, biographies, stage plays, and TV shows.
Sometimes that reach can bring interesting work to a wider audience, like Hampton Sides’s account of the hunt for MLK’s murderer, Hellhound on His Trail. Other times the Edgars reach beyond their grasp, like spotlighting Sherlock Holmes for Dummies, or last year’s nomination of the utterly atrocious The Girl She Used to Be.
All this is to say: just like last year, I’m going to be reading all the nominees in the Best Novel category in order to sift through the duds and highlight the real contenders. Then I’ll handicap the race heading into the award presentation in April. Unlike last year, I won’t be reading all the Best First Novel entries, but I will take a swing at a few.
Trying to handicap this year’s Best Novel category is, unfortunately, something of a fool’s errand, since Faithful Place will win. I don’t want it to win; I’ve already read it, and it’s not nearly as good as the hype. It’s poorly plotted, but some people evidently confuse that with depth or literary merit—people like the “editors” of Amazon, who named Faithful Place the second best novel of the year, over Freedom and The Imperfectionists, both genuinely great novels.
In any case, I’m not picking it to win, unless the rest of the field is intensely disappointing. On that note, a few predictions about this year’s field:
Judging by their covers and jacket descriptions, I’m guessing I’ll like The Queen of Patpong best, because it has the most unique setting, and The Lock Artist least, because it has the least interesting core concept.
Again judging solely by cover, Caught and The Lock Artist look like cranked-out bestseller schlock, which means they’re likely to feature the worst prose in the field. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter and I’d Know You Anywhere look like literary crossover mysteries, which means they’re likely to have weak plots.
The one Best First Novel contender that I’ll definitely read is Rogue Island.
At least one of the following statements is true: 1) The “literary mash-up” genre had its flash-in-the-pan moment with Pride and Prejudice and Zombiesand is no longer interesting. 2) Ben H. Winters isn’t very good at writing literary mash-ups. I’m pretty sure the second is true, but I wouldn’t fight very hard if you argued for the first or both. … Continue reading »
[Bad Idea Books is a column in which we read an old (or perhaps not) book that is not without merit, but happens to have a very flawed premise. Read other entries here.]
Reviewer’s note: I’m choosing something a little different from the above description this time, as this book isn’t yet published, and I haven’t read it. It is undeniably a bad idea though.
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Author: Coleridge Cook (and Franz Kafka, supposedly)
Published: 2011, Quirk Classics
Genre: Literary Mash-up
Bad Idea: “Instead of turning into a bug in ‘The Metamorphosis’, Gregor Samsa should turn into a cat!”
Synopsis: I’m going to let this one speak for itself. Here’s the jacket copy:
The phenomenal success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies inspired a massively popular literary-remix movement. Now Quirk Classics once again charts bold new territory, turning the monster-mash-up formula inside out to infuse Franz Kafka’s horrific masterpiece, “The Metamorphosis,” with the fuzziest, snuggliest, most adorable creatures possible: kittens!
Gregor Samsa is a humble young man who supports his unemployed parents and teenage sister by working as a traveling fabric salesman. But his life goes strangely wrong in the very first sentence of The Meowmorphosis, when he wakes up late for work and discovers that he has inexplicably become an adorable kitten. His family must admit that, yes, their son is now OMG so cute—but what good is cute when there are bills to pay? How can Gregor be so selfish as to devote his attention to a ball of yarn? And how dare he jump out the bedroom window to wander through Kafka’s literary landscape? Never before has a cat’s tale been so poignant, strange, and horrifyingly funny.
The only way this could be lamer is if it were also written in teh kitteh LOLcats voiz. ROFLMFAO.
What Can Go Right?: Nothing. This is quite possibly the stupidest idea for a book I’ve ever heard. The Quirk Classics that have come since Pride and Prejudice and Zombies have been uninspired cash-ins that read like sophomoric rush jobs with a not-that-creative twist. I’m talking about the mashups, but the PaPaZ sequel also looks like a greedy, bad idea too. This takes that to a whole new level.
Why Is This Being Published?: I’m over the literary mash-up thing (and by the way, Quirk, it’s not a movement if you’re more or less the only one doing it–also, the postmodernists beat you to the core concept by a few decades), but even still there are a thousand choices that would actually be creative and work better than this (off the top of my head: All’s Quiet on the Western Front of Armageddon, ThoughtCrime and Punishment, A Midsummer’s Nightmare). The other mashups at least combined the plot and characters of a classic work with a wholly foreign setting and different set of fictional rules. Kafka’s character already woke up in his same world to find he’d become another creature entirely. This does the exact same thing, except it will be a different creature and is written by a nobody who’s at best not any better than Ben H. Winters. There is absolutely no reason why this book should exist. Quirk is clearly a group of people cranking out books that take very little effort to write, and less to sell.
Verdict: Please nobody buy any more of Quirk’s books, maybe that will convince them to go away.
Readers familiar with Karen Joy Fowler most likely know her through her best selling novels, The Jane Austen Book Club, Wit’s End, and Sister Noon. But Fowler began her career as a writer of wildly imaginative short stories. Her newest collection is sure to add to this. What I Didn’t See is one of her strongest yet.
For some authors, a short story collections is like a science lab. The stories in this collection, published over a span of nearly two decades, show Fowler experimenting with many different styles and forms distinct from her novels. But no matter the genre or subject, the author retains what makes her full-length books so successful: an attention to detail, an ear for language, and compassion for her characters. For those who have found Fowler through her novels, these stories offer a chance to encounter an imaginative storyteller as she moves from subject to subject. … Continue reading »
[In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]
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The Weird Sisters, by Eleanor Brown. Reviewed by Janet Maslin (New York Times).
If you don’t know that this book’s title is an allusion to MacBeth, you probably won’t care about its content in the slightest. The whole book is fan service for Shakespeare dorks. It concerns the three daughters of an eccentric Shakespeare scholar who are named after some of the bard’s characters (Rosalind, Bianca, Cordelia) and speak in Shakespearean dialect. As Maslin describes it–and as that brief synopsis shows–the novel is rife with allusion and direct pulls from Shakespeare. That sounds great to me, though I do fear it could get gimmicky quickly. The review gives a decent taste of the book, give it a read and see what you think.
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Stolen World, by Jennie Erin Smith. Reviewed by Laura Miller (Salon.com via Barnes and Noble Review).
This review is pretty fascinating, and I suspect the book is, too. It’s nonfiction and tells the story of two men who smuggle rare animals. The two seem rather crazy, but that particular kind of crazy that confuses itself with brilliance. I surmise this is one of those cases of literary journalism that tells a story we might not have any reason to care about at first, but we end up finding incredibly engrossing. Also, I really enjoy that the Fish & Game officers are referred to as “duck cops” so hopefully who whole book is funny, too.
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India: A Portrait, by Patrick French. Reviewed Aravind Adiga (The Observer).
Adiga’s review is pretty glowing. He gives the book high praise as both literature (comparing it to V.S. Naipaul) and journalism. I really liked Adiga’s TheWhite Tiger, so I’m inclined to trust his review. French appears to have done thorough research and displays a keen eye for how to describe a place on the page. The review’s not unforgiving, however. French’s prose, which Adiga described as “close to perfection” in a previous work, is called here “over-ripe.”
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Behind the Dream, by Clarence B. Jones. Reviewed by Jonathan Rosenberg (Christian Science Monitor).
Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day, a holiday during which some people get off work and others don’t, and most school kids with an off day don’t really grasp the meaning of the day. Jones knew King well (he was his lawyer and aide) so he seems like a great candidate to contextualize Dr. King’s most famous speech for an increasingly out-of-touch audience. Rosenberg recognizes this and sets up his review nicely by opening with a few lines about Glenn Beck’s rally last summer, which some Americans somehow thought was an appropriate thing to do on the anniversary of King’s speech. The review is concise and informed, and the book looks like something a lot of schoolchildren and forgetful, over-privileged adult Americans should read.
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Bonus Book Trailer: What if Jennifer Aniston was your pen pal? What if someone thought that was a good question to write a book answering?
Author: Millicent Borges Accardi
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
