Author: Justin Torres

2011, Houghton Mifflin

Filed under: Literary

An avalanche of hype covered this book when it was published last summer. Its flap copy claims it is “an exquisite, blistering debut” full of “magical language” and “unforgettable images.”

That’s not exactly accurate, but it’s on the right track. Torres is not an especially gifted prose stylist; he falls into a fairly standard contemporary “young fiction” voice. Clipped sentences, long lists, lightly abraded grammar—all the hallmarks are here. It’s not bad, just not very unique. Like this:

These days, I sleep with peacocks, lions, on a bed of leaves. I’ve lost my pack. I dream of standing upright, of uncurled knuckles, of a simpler life—no hot muzzles, no fangs, no claws, no obscene plumage—strolling gaily, with an upright air.

You could’ve plucked that paragraph from a dozen debut novels this year. Luckily, Torres has a much more unique skill. He’s not a wordsmith, and not really a constructor of sentences, but there is poetry in his characters.

We the Animals should be rightly called a novella, both because it barely breaks a hundred pages, and because the story it tells features no real arc. Instead, Torres sets out to portray the emotional life of a young, poor family (evidently based on his own experiences growing up), and the nuanced web of relationships stretched among each of its members.

Three boys live with a listless, spineless mother, and a sometimes abusive, sometimes magnetically charismatic, sometimes absent father. The boys, their father is quick to tell them, do not belong much of anywhere.

We the Animals is about not fitting in and about loving your parents, and hating them, loving your family and hating them. It’s about being the smart one in the family, and also the weak one.  It’s about the whorl of emotions that come up when there’s not enough for everybody. It’s about trauma. The traumas from outside are tough but predicatable. Those traumas that come from within the family are devastating.

It’s a simple tale about three brothers trying to find their way in the world, and it’s simultaneously an infinitely detailed catalog of familial strife. And it’s one of the few books in the world still available as a library ebook. So there’s no excuse not to read it.

Similar books: Love and Shame and Love, by Peter Orner; The Believers, by Zoe Heller

Author: Raymond Chandler

1939, Alfred A. Knopf

Filed Under: Mystery, Literary

As part of my quest to immerse myself in the mystery genre, I’ve been asking what books to pick up. Chandler’s books came up frequently, so I started with his first and most famous. For reasons that become immediately apparent upon reading, this is a seminal work in modern detective stories, and Phillip Marlowe (Chandler’s recurring protagonist, though this is his first novel) is the quintessential gumshoe. He’s tough, clever, wisecracking, and suave (and he drinks a lot).

Marlow is hired by a dying billionaire to uncover a blackmailer. He ends up embroiled in a large plot with many players. This is a hardboiled detective novel through and through. It’s full of socialites with dirty laundry, lowlifes with secrets, gamblers, pornographers, racketeers, and murderers. But it also has much greater literary chops than I expected. While there’s plenty of now-cliche hyperbole (“She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen’s lunch”), there’s also more eloquent writing found throughout. Lines like this:

Her eyes were wide open. The dark slate color of the iris had devoured the pupil. They were mad eyes. She seemed to be unconscious, but she didn’t have the pose of unconsciousness. She looked as if, in her mind, she was doing something very important and making a fine job of it. Out of her mouth came a tinny chuckling noise which didn’t change her expression or even move her lips.

The billionaire’s two wild daughters are at the heart of the blackmailing scheme. Eventually Marlow stumbles upon the younger daughter, drugged, naked, and posed for a camera. Beside the camera, a dead man. As he follows the case from clue to clue and suspect to suspect, Marlowe continually observes scenes with keen detail, giving the reader not just a visual, but a subtle sizing up of every person and place.

It’s not an overly literary book by any means, though. Roughly halfway through the book, the case seems pretty sewn up. But a few details nag at Marlowe, and acting on a hunch, he uncovers a whole ‘nother layer of plot. Here the book really kicks into hardboiled gear. I won’t spoil anything, but bodies pile up and Marlowe both deals out and receives plenty of pain. He keeps a cool head through it all though, eventually unravelling the mystery. Everything ties up in a very satisfying conclusion. I was caught a bit by surprise, but not due to any deus ex machina curveballs by Chandler. Just turns out Marlowe was a better detective than me.

This book is short and awesome. If you like mysteries and crime fiction at all–even if all you’ve read is Steig Larsson–and you haven’t already read The Big Sleep, go for it

Similar Reads: The Thin Man (Hammett), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Larsson).

2011, Harper Perennial

Filed under: Literary

Goodreads

The first few pages of The Call can be a bit discombobulating. The main character, a 40ish man named David, is a veterinarian in rural New England. He answers calls from surrounding farms and ranches, and drives out to tend to different animals. The novel takes the form of David’s work diary, in which he records the calls he takes, his actions, the results, and his thoughts along the way. Like this:

CALL: A cow with her dead calf half-born.

ACTION: Put on boots and pulled dead calf out while standing in a field full of mud.

RESULT: Hind legs tore off from dead calf while I pulled. Head, forelegs, and torso still inside the mother.

THOUGHTS ON DRIVE HOME WHILE PASSING RED AND GOLD LEAVES ON MAPLE TREES: Is there a nicer place to live?

Quickly, the pages of the diary become a place for David to ponder and exposit about his life and the world. The form of the diary—with its procedural headings that David coopts to better reflect his own experiences—becomes a counterpoint for his interior life.

It’s a “voice-driven” novel in the sense that the voices of characters, especially David, form the experience of reading it. Luckily, David’s voice is charming and calm and occasionally funny, and that experience is a pleasure.

Here’s another sample:

CALL: Alpaca down.

ACTION: Drove to farm. Remembered not to look alpaca in the eye.

RESULT: Looked alpaca in the eye by mistake. Got spit in the eye. Alpaca nice and angry now. Alpaca got up. Owner thankful. Handed me a rag that smelled like gasoline. I wiped my eye. Asked owner if he had seen the bright lights, the object moving back and forth in the sky the night before. The owner shook his head, he hadn’t seen anything.

There are a few dramatic happenings in The Call, like those lights in the sky that he ascribes (not really believing it) to a spaceship. There’s also his semi-contentious relationship with his wife, which gets significantly more contentious after David goes hunting with his teenage son, Sam, and the boy gets shot by an unseen hunter, falls out of a deer stand onto his head, and winds up in a coma.

Later, David’s other son (conceived by sperm donation and unknown to David until he shows up unannounced) appears suddenly, with something of a secret.

But, even though Murphy plays a few of these for dramatic tension, she stays far away from the neat resolutions and even plot beats of an airport thriller. David’s mission isn’t to find the right response to things, or even necessarily to act. His mission is to live in such a way that he can still enjoy his drive home after he pull the legs off a dead breached calf.

Similarly, The Call isn’t about epiphanies in the Joycean sense, it’s about the slow small moments of life that can be either enjoyed or trod upon. Ultimately it’s time enjoyably spent with a wise country vet.

Similar books: The Sportswriter, and the rest of the Frank Bascombe trilogy, by Richard Ford

Author: Jessica Anya Blau

2011, Harper Perennial

Filed Under: Literary

Jessica Anya Blau’s Drinking Closer to Home is a sort of amped-up Anne Tyler novel, the story of a funny, chaotic family that fumbles its way to loving and supporting one another despite personal failings and the usual resentments that occur in families. Think of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant on steroids – or without any clothes on!

In Tyler’s 1982 novel, Pearl Tull, the 85-year old matriarch ruminates, “Something was wrong with all of her children. They were so frustrating – attractive, likable people, the three of them, but closed off from her in some perverse way that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. … She wondered if her children blamed her for something.” This could be Louise Stein’s reflection after she suffers her “massive” heart attack in Santa Barbara, California, in 1993, and her three children return home from their east coast locations to be with their mother and father, Buzzy, over the course of the next two weeks as Louise receives treatment. Only, Louise couldn’t care less what her children think of her, in the last analysis, as much as she loves them.

Drinking Closer to Home is arranged in alternating chapters, time present (1993), related in the present tense, and every other chapter related in the past tense, reviewing the history of the Stein family from 1968, with details from even further back. While told by an omniscient narrator, the focus is on the three children’s generation. Anna is the oldest, a person with a history of bulimia, anorexia, drug addiction, sex addiction, who is now married to a dull but devoted husband in Vermont. (“If Anna were to have a heart attack, her husband would be like Buzzy, Anna thinks, sitting by her side like a Seeing Eye dog.”) They have a three-year old boy named Blue and Anna has serial affairs, requiring stimulation she just can’t find at home. Portia is the middle child, with the middle child’s invisibility, or calm (mistaken for stupidity), nowhere near as excitable or as agitated as her older sister. She too has a small child, Esmé, but her husband has just left her for another woman, back home in Connecticut. She hadn’t seen it coming, believing her life was hunky dory, until she walked in on her husband in flagrante with a woman at work, the one he’s dumped her for. The third child, the baby, Emery, is gay, and his lover, Alejandro, has accompanied him to Santa Barbara. They live in New York. The children do indeed harbor resentments against their parents, blame them for their personal shortcomings, but Buzzy and Louise would just say, “Fuck ’em, that’s their problem, not ours.” Still, the fact that the children have dropped everything to come to their parents’ assistance tells you all you really need to know.

The “flashback” chapters focus on various developmental stages in the lives of the children: their move from Ann Arbor to Santa Barbara (“where the days are so sunny you’d swear a nuclear reactor had exploded”); visits from Buzzy’s Jewish parents and visits to Louise’s family in Vermont; Buzzy and Louise’s unorthodox lifestyle – they grow marijuana in the backyard, have a sort of laissez-faire attitude toward child-rearing, their house is overrun by animals, and Louise is something of a nudist. Chain-smoking Louise at one point throws in the towel on being a housewife and delegates the duties to her young daughters – washing, cooking, cleaning up, caring for Emery. These chapters, titled by the year in which they occur – 1968, 1971, 1975, 1976, 1981, 1984, etc. – focus on one child or another as he or she goes through a critical developmental stage – college, sex, marriage, rehab, coming out. A chapter on Anna relates her time as an undercover drug agent in Vermont law enforcement, the life-threatening danger and the extramarital affairs both.

Apart from Louise’s condition (will she live or die?), the drama in the story – what keeps this from being a merely episodic, sort of “coming of age” novel – is Emery’s and Alejandro’s plan to ask one of Emery’s sisters to donate an egg so that they can raise a child. The egg will be fertilized with Alejandro’s sperm. Over the course of many days (time present’s chapters are titled by the day after Louise’s heart attack – Day Two, Day Three, Day Ten, etc.), they finally work up the nerve, but only after we’ve learned the background of each child. In terms of the overall thrust of the novel, this signifies the perpetuity of the Stein DNA, a positive message of endurance amidst calamity, the continuation of the family through time.

Drinking Closer to Home is full of charming anecdotes about the family, part of the lore that binds the Steins together in a family narrative. Indeed, the title comes from just such a yarn. It refers to a time in the early forties when Louise was a baby and her parents, Otto and Billie, left her out in the car while they drank in a roadside inn in Vermont. Because they were so far from home, they decided to spend the night at the inn, forgetting about Louise in the car. When they discovered their mistake the next day, they were able to get her to a hospital and save her life, but the real lesson they drew from the experience was that next time, they’d find a place to drink that was closer to home. This becomes a running joke in the family. Another term from Vermont family lore is the “Stinky,” a husband’s lover on the side, and this plays an important role in the novel as we go through the family’s messy life over the years.

Through it all, the family is more or less intact at the end, despite the scars. Without giving away the ending, in the final chapter, when the family are all together in Santa Barbara Portia, who is still coming to terms with her failed marriage, makes a pithy observation that nevertheless sums the story up. “We are, Portia decides, the people we love.”

Jessica Blau writes with such warm humor that you are immediately sucked into the family and totally charmed by the oddball things they do. Her observations make you chuckle, as when Anna, looking critically at Portia at her wedding, thinks: “She looked sexless and earnest in the dress, like one of the multiple wives of an extremist Mormon hiding out in the mountains of Utah.” Bitchy, yeah, but can’t you feel the love?

Author: Joan Leegant

2010, W.W. Norton & Co.

Filed under: Literary

Wherever You Go is set primarily in Jerusalem and the surrounding territories, though it focuses on the lives of three Americans with complicated relationships with Judaism. Yona wants to reconnect with her extremely devout sister; Greenglass, once saved from a life of drugs by religion, is suffering a crisis of faith; and Aaron aims to prove to his father and the rest of the world that he is a worthy son of the Holy Land.

Each of the individual narratives works well enough at first, but they never come together in any sort of a satisfying way. When the strands do begin to intertwine, about two thirds of the way through the book, their interactions seem more convenient than anything else, providing the characters with contrived opportunities to bring their stories to some kind of closure.

For me, the biggest disappointment was the failure to make the most of the setting. Wherever You Go does very little to evoke any kind of a textured world or to convey any sense of what makes Jerusalem and the rest of Israel unique. People eat falafel and cucumber and tomato salad. Most of the Israelis are “from central casting.” It’s very hot. That’s about it.
In fact, many of the book’s descriptions focus on how Jerusalem and the territories are just like anywhere else. The territory settlement where Yona’s sister lives looks “like a planned community in Florida,” a description which is nicely undercut by details like “passengers alighting bulletproof bus number 170,” but for the most part there’s too much of the former and not enough of the latter. The descriptions insist on the setting being just like anywhere else without accounting for why that might be surprising or interesting.

The book’s greatest strength lies in its characters. Greenglass is compelling and likeable. Aaron is compelling and infuriating. Only Yona seems a bit flat, but that also seems to be her problem with herself; she doesn’t like herself much or have much faith in herself, which only makes her appeals to her sister all the more desperate. These characters could be the cast of an interesting novel, but they would need to interact more in a setting that seemed as alive as they are. As it is, they don’t work together nearly well enough to carry the novel.

Recommended reads: For books that abound with vibrant settings, try W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants or E.M. Forester’s A Passage to India.

[A review was requested and a review copy provided. Ms. Leegant has also contributed writing to Chamber Four, and an advertisement for this book has appeared on the site.]

Author: Bradford Morrow

2011, Pegasus

Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary

The Uninnocent is a collection of dark, but not morbid, stories which grow from or end in acts that on the surface seem quite vile: fratricide and murder, incest, animal cruelty, etc. Through skillful characterization and just the right quantity of acerbic humor, Morrow manages to take topics rooted in drear and craft enjoyable stories. Plausibility is not always there, and sometimes the plots work out a bit too conveniently, but as long as realism isn’t what you’re looking for, you’ll come away from this collection quite pleased.

My favorite of Morrow’s techniques is a temporal slight of hand he pulls a few times. He’ll set something up, then subtly skip ahead to an outcome, leaving the reader tantalized. For instance in the space of a page from “Ellie’s Idea,” we learn three things about Eleanor Mead: she is (or at least was) married, then that she is in some sort of moral if not actual trouble, then that “Waking by herself still felt strange.” What she’s fretting over and why a married woman is alone is left for the story to fill in. Similarly, in “The Enigma of Grover’s Mill” the teenage narrator, in talking about a girl he’d been spending time with, mentions kissing her “again” in the first reference to them ever kissing–leaving a big gap for the reader to fill in. This does a wonderful job of helping to characterize this secretive loner of a narrator in particular.

“Grover’s Mill” is probably the best story of the bunch, not only for the above moment. It’s put together well structurally, and also quite engrossing from a story standpoint. Wyatt’s father drowned himself during the broadcast of Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radioplay for fear of the invading Martians (Grover’s Mill is the setting in which Welles version takes place, and the center of the real-life hysteria that it effected). His mother orphaned him not long after by drunkenly drowning herself in the same pond that swallowed her husband. This leaves Wyatt with his grandma and Franklin, a pompous know-it-all who Wyatt believes is pulling a con on his grandmother.

Wyatt (like the unnamed narrator from “The Hoarder,” and nearly all the book’s other main characters) is a bit of a delinquent weirdo who sees the world differently than those around him. But he’s not a bad person. He means well, and does a fine job of articulating his thoughts and emotions in the narrative. This is a recurring motif in the book, perhaps what Morrow means by uninnocent: his characters experience terrible things and perform terrible acts, but there’s a sort of purity at the root of it all. This book is full of monsters, but these monsters are some of the most human characters you’ll come across.

Other stories–like “(Mis)laid,” which uses an (almost) schizophrenic amount of parenthetical statements to characterize its (control freak) hostage-taker protagonist, or the title story which tries its best to tell a confession story without ever revealing what exactly is being confessed to–work to greater or lesser effect. None of these conceits drags a story down, but none really lift any above average either. On the whole this is an enjoyable selection of stories. The subject matter is dark for sure, but there’s a lot of positivity buried in here. At turns funny and touching on poignancy, it’s a book fans of short stories slightly edgier than you might find in the typical New Yorker should give a shot.

Similar Reads: The Outlaw Album (Woodrell); Give Me Your Heart, Tales of Mystery and Suspense (Oates).

[A review copy was provided. This book is currently being advertised on the site, I was unaware of this when writing the review.]

Author: Meg Pokrass

Press 53, 2011

Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary

Damn Sure Right is a collection of 88 (by my count) flash fiction pieces in about twice that number of pages. In general, flash fiction is to fiction kind of like what haiku are to poetry: hard to isolate one from all the others and appreciate it on its own.  You need to take the collection as a whole since some flash fictions are more successful than others. This is not to say that Meg Pokrass’ collection is “uneven,” but some of the stories are better than the others, and when they’re good, her stories are really good, terrifically comical at the same time that they are poignantly tragic, all in the space of a page or two.

The whole book is compelling; Pokrass keeps you wanting to read more, even when some stories are less satisfying than others, not as cohesive. This is the challenge any collection faces, of course, poetry, short stories, essays, but with flash fictions, each is like a bump in the road, you haven’t invested too much time or commitment to any single one; you can put the book aside at any point and pick it back up again when you want.

Flash fiction partakes of all the classic story elements – a protagonist/narrator, conflict, and usually a sense of resolution, an image of completion, or explanation. Because the form is so compact, lots is left up to the reader to infer, and this can be the truly powerful thing about flash fiction, the way it engages the reader’s imagination, to fill in the blanks, connect the dots.

Take Pokrass’ story, “Thirty-nine.” Told by a nameless female narrator, it’s about a woman breaking up with her hunk boyfriend, a medical student but kind of slacker, you realize as you’re reading the story. She’s been an aspiring actress up until now but at thirty-nine she wants more stability, feels her age creeping up on her (“I’m squinting – accentuating my crow’s feet.”).  She’s taking real estate classes but hasn’t told her boyfriend, who likes the idea of her being an actress, as if it’s that glamour that appeals to him. It’s this idea he has of her and her own self-assessment that clash and result in her leaving him. None of this is explained, but it’s what we come to realize in the space of a few hundred words. The story concludes: “The wind, as usual, gusts strongly when walking directly north.  I have to push against it to move forward.” What a metaphor.

A common theme in these stories is people using other people, sometimes violently. John Updike once wrote of Ray Carver that his stories depict lives “beneath the threshold of any aspiration higher than day-to-day survival.” This sometimes feels true about Pokrass’s stories.  The characters are generally young, unsettled, looking to get some sort of advantage, often by exploiting others somehow. Or, as Pokrass writes in the story called “So I Drew Him a Poodle”:

I faced the door and decided to walk before anything worse happened, before I could tell him or he could tell me that everything was really fucked, had always been and would always be so…

Or again, in the story called “Crocodilian”:

I learned that my mother’s luck was a wan cup of Pepsi that has been out all night for a sick child, flat and then discarded.  On our stoop, luck cleared its throat like a Mormon missionary and walked away.

In “Her Bottom,” told by the less talented, less attractive friend of an aspiring actress (with an enormous ass), we realize by the end of the story what a soul-sucking person Haley, the talented actress is. Having milked her friend for comfort over a disappointing boyfriend, she winds up in a show on the Disney channel and it’s with a shock that the narrator realizes, hearing her own words of consolation parroted back, “She is using my inflection, my voice.” (She’s also lost her big ass, which leaves her with “no character.”) Other violations aren’t as subtle. Rape, physical and emotional abuse, theft, shabby treatment.

In the title story (one of the truly great ones in this collection) a woman is raped in some unspeakably violent way that we’re left to imagine from the way she’s approached by her attacker and her slurred speech, broken jaw afterward.  But the collateral damage to her relationship with her ineffectual boyfriend may be even more moving.  Years later when her husband takes her from behind she recalls the rape – as the reader does, by this very act of intimacy – and she can still vividly summon “his flannel shirt and the smell of his fear and the things he did that he thought would help.”

But for all the bleakness we encounter in these stories, Pokrass is exuberantly funny, fun to read.  Her sentences are gorgeous.  In “Extinction” she writes, “The Big One, the nine-pointer on the San Andreas fault is looming like an angry landlord.”  In “The Mask of Politeness” she observes, “The rest of them turn toward me as if I am a piece of sharp bone that made its way into the dinner soup.” In “Terribly Light and Small,” commenting on the décor of a health food store:  “The word ‘antioxidant’ is displayed everywhere you look in here, like mouse ears at the Disneyland Hotel.” “Blood Sugar”:  “Life feels like being stuck in a bus, next to a skinny bitch – the kind that keeps blinking.” “Foreign Accent Syndrome”: “Her fancy-sounding accent whizzed overhead like a dragonfly – harmless, colorful.”  The story “Zelda” begins, “My sex drive walked back in the door with a broken suitcase.”  You can’t help but chuckle, even as you recognize the drab, depressing reality that underlies the words.

A cover blurb by Frederick Barthelme (with whom Pokrass works as an editor for the online literary magazine Blip - formerly Mississippi Review) says Pokrass “writes like a brain looking for a body.”  This may be another way of saying the stories are looking for a plot. At their least successful, some of these stories just don’t hang together, and concluding sentences that should be a revelation or a summing-up just aren’t.  Even allowing for the possibility that the fault is with me, the reader, at times I “just don’t get it” after reading and re-reading some of the stories, usually those less than a page, like “Everything Surprises Me” and “The Magician” (but even here there’s a marvelous image: “…cabs call like geese, or the mothers of missing children.”). Still, even after reading these more inscrutable flashes several times, you suspect that there may actually be a body there that goes with the brain.

Similar Reads: Wouldn’t You Like to Know, by Pam Painter and They Could No Longer Contain Themselves, edited by Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney

Author: Ben Loory

2011, Penguin

Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary.

I really wanted to like this book. Though to be honest, my expectations were based entirely on the cover art and jacket copy praise-quotes. This collection, Loory relates in his Acknowledgments section, is the product of a writing workshop–perhaps if I’d known that beforehand I would have exercised more pause than I did.

Loory has his moments: he’s got a very nice way with words and is quite adept at turning a clever phrase. He is a very good writer–that is immediately evident upon reading his work. But this book’s marriage to its conceptual premise is its undoing. This is a 200ish page book full of mostly 2-5 page stories which all (all) follow the same structure.

Here are the opening lines to 5 of the 40 stories, which I’ve (honest) chosen at random:

The boy and the girl live in a small town.

The octopus is spooning sugar into his tea when there is a knock on the door.

A man is walking through the woods when suddenly he sees a Bigfoot.

A man and a woman fall in love and are married, and are happy in every single way.

A hunter returns to his village one night with a severed human head in his hand.

Spot the pattern? You can see how that could get tedious. After a few stories it slips into a pattern which slips into a monotonous hum. Each of these stories has a wannabe allegorical air to it, sometimes to an almost haughty degree. And while I suppose it’s an admiral thing to attempt, it led me to be not at all surprised when I read the collection’s history as a student project. Even Kafka’s Aphorisms is full of duds, and while Loory has talent, Kafka he is not. For every story in which Loory hits an emotional nail on its head, he has three strikeouts. Too often the stories devolve into arbitrary randomness:

The man walks out the door and is eaten by a lion.

Ouch, he says, and gets up and walks on.

So basically Loory’s greatest fault is trying too hard.

Still, the book’s not unworthy of your time. There are some gems to uncover, such as “The Martian.” Moreover, the New Yorker story appended to the end (“The TV”) is quite strong. But his clear reluctance to include it at the expense of his vision (“The following is a longer story not part of the same project included here at the publisher’s request”) only serves to highlight this book’s biggest flaw: not its composition but its conceit. The publisher should have made more requests.

Loory took a one-note idea and ran with it; if his next book utilizes more variety and he attacks it with the same fervor (and writing prowess), it will be a must-read.

Similar Reads: Museum of the Weird (Gray), The Outlaw Album (Woodrell), Guadalajara (Monzó)

Author: Umberto Eco

2011, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Filed Under: Literary, Historical.

Get the book.

There’s but one fictional element to Eco’s newest novel: the main character. Every other character, conversation, and event in this dense novel is pulled from historical records, or else constitutes an amalgamation of real persons or happenings. This is Eco’s claim, and if true–and I’m inclined to believe it is–this book is even more impressive than it would be on a blind read.

Set in Europe in the last quarter of the 19th century, The Prague Cemetery tells the tale of Captain Simonini, a French-Italian document forger who works, more or less freelance, as a subversive agent for a number of different governments. His profession sometimes has him infiltrating radical groups in order to incite incidents (in hopes of swinging public or political favor back to the ruling party), and other times falsifying documents and news stories in order to influence public opinion or have someone tossed in jail. He’s a murderous villain, but Eco’s comprehensive and careful narration makes him easy to cling to as a narrator and as a character–in that regard he’s got a bit of Iago in him.

The improbability of a reader finding Simonini likeable is all the more exacerbated by his personal agenda. Simonini is ferverntly anti-semitic. The novel is steeped in the nationalist ideologies (and fear-mongering) that was so rampant in the decades building up to the great wars of the 20th century. Much of that boiled down to deeply anti-semitic movements across most of Europe. The Prague Cemetery opens with a chapter-long racist tirade, not only denigrating the Jews, but pinpointing and exploiting ethnic and cultural stereotypes and hateful prosaisms about every race and nation in Europe. By opening the book with a tearing-down of everyone, Eco cleans the slate for Simonini. He’s not a fascist, because he would hate the fascists too. Instead Eco has created a character that represents that dark part in our collective mindset, the one that, amongst other things and whether we agree with them or not, recognizes stereotypes and associates them with groups and cultures.

In Simonini’s case, he was indoctrinated with these ideas at an early age. Young Simonini’s grandfather bequeathed him a copy of a letter he’d once wrote to high ranking member of the clergy warning of a conspiracy between the Jews and Freemasons to take over the world (I’m grossly oversimplifying). Hateful conspiracy theory stuff. Simonini, through all his tasks and forgeries, keeps as his own priority the creation of an ever-evolving grand forgery detailing a secret meeting (in a Prague cemetery) between Jewish elders in which they plot the economic and ideological take-over of the world.

Simonini works his document over countless times, taking into account all the political lessons and cultural fears he comes across in his various tasks and subversions. (These sometimes involve defaming someone, sometimes involve constructing and executing a terrorist plot, perhaps to sink an ocean liner or destroy a subway tunnel.) As his document evolves into a powerful piece of progaganda, he also disseminates it in parts. Thus the lies perpetuate into other lies and ideologies. The whole thing sounds insane. A forged document describing a ludicrous conspiracy theory about a secret society of the world’s most powerful Jews meeting in a graveyard to plot world domination. But this part we already know is true: in real life, it is called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and it gave Hitler his justification for the Holocaust.

Its American publication was funded by Henry Ford. It is because something so insane can be real that Eco’s creation is so powerful. The Holocaust wasn’t the Nazis’ fault; it was the world’s for allowing it to happen. Simonini embodies that piece of us as a people that turns its back to atrocities we find politically inconvenient or sees basic human rights as debatable topics. As Simonini puts it: “To hate someone, you don’t have to speak the same language.”

In writing a sweeping history of the past, of a section we like to blot out as vanquished along with the axis of evil, Eco draws connections to our past, like a grandson seeing his visage in a grandfather’s portrait. In The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Eco biographed a culture through pop art and pulp fiction. Here, in much the same way, he cuts up a dark moment in fairly recent human history, and collages together an ugly but honest reflection of our current society. The Prague Cemetery is not the easiest read, but it is an important one.

Similar Reads: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Eco), The Erasers (Robbe-Grillet)

Author: Tom Frick

2011, Burning Books

Filed Under: Literary, Historical.

Set in the early 1800’s in Robin Hood’s territory, Thomas Frick’s The Iron Boys is a real tour de force that takes the mayhem of the Luddites who resisted the Industrial Revolution as its subject.  The term “Luddite” has long been used to describe a person who resists technological change, but it’s a sure bet that not many are really aware of its historical roots as an unorganized, almost spontaneous insurrection against the dehumanizing tendencies of the emerging capitalist economy.

The  Luddites flourished in the second decade of the nineteenth century in the Northern English counties of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire and  Nottinghamshire.  Ned Ludd, the mythical figure after whom the movement was named, was reputed to live in Sherwood Forest.  The Luddites were crafts workers who largely had control over their lives and livelihoods until the advent of the textile factories, which dehumanized workers in the name of profits.  Indeed, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was written to an extent as a reaction to Luddism, an eloquent treatise against the machine.  Byron championed the movement in the House of Lords, a lone voice against the machine.  The Luddites attacked the mills and smashed the machines that were ruining their autonomous way of life.

The Iron Boys in Frick’s novel are Luddites by another name.  Related in the semi-literate first-person voice of Corbel Penner, a paraplegic middle-aged loner, the narrative meanders according to Corbel’s whimsical thinking but ultimately culminates in the Iron Boys’ futile attack on the textile factory owned by George Cogent Meadows Richard Pilfer Withy, a pontificating, greedy capitalist, a comical if slightly sinister character who was made to be played by W.C. Fields.

Corbel is a likeable character.  When we first meet him he is conversing with the birds.  Ricky did it.  Ricky did it, they say, and Corbel responds, Whos Ricky. Whadideedo.  Whos Ricky. Whadideedo. It’s clever the way Frick mimics birdcalls here and puts a human voice to the sounds, onomatopoeically, but it also suggests to us that Corbel is one with the natural world, which in the context of the story is crucial: nature versus machinery.  By the end of the novel Corbel is no longer conversing with the birds, though he has not been conquered by the machines; he has achieved a new maturity, a level of equanimity.

Corbel tells us of his life, his love, his legs–we know that he has lost them but only find out how during the climactic scene, a plot development Frick handles skillfully, just as the turn of Corbel’s love life/family life by novel’s end is also handled with skillful storytelling.

In his meandering, Tristam Shandy-like narrative, Corbel introduces us to the principal characters in the story, including the machine=loving (anti-life) Withy, and the other Iron Boys who will challenge him.  These include the inscrutable Pank, leader of the Iron Boys if there is one, William Dogg, Rose Stonewarden, Maggie Moats and New Billy, a sort of village idiot who may or may not be the pattern of Ned Ludd himself.

Many of the little stories that Corbel tells us along the way, which feel like pure digression, have the force of parables:  the story of Black Whopper, William Dogg’s Lustrabustions, the construction of Withy’s factory compared with “the Babble Tower.”  Corbel frequently mentions “the Black Book,” whose obscure prophecies make one wonder if this is some sort of magical Book of Runes, until it becomes clear he is talking about the Bible.  Indeed, numerology has an importance for Corbel, the magic of numbers.  Numbers also represent the mechanical, as embodied in Withy’s factory’s clock.

Frequently Corbel breaks into song, little bits of doggerel verse – some from the Black Book indeed–that have a sort of psalm-like folk wisdom.  At times they echo with the simple emotion of folk tales.

Will Flowers “63”

Plays the Heavenly Lyre

Born bred & hanged

All in the same shire

The hanging of Will Flowers for killing a factory guard during an attack on a mill is an event that galvanizes the Iron Biys.  Flowers’ father had been forced out of his household shop and so had a justifiable grudge, but it’s also likely he was framed by the authorities, made an example of.  Withy, meanwhile, has delivered his own lecture about how “machines improve men.”

The Iron Boys carry little pouches of iron filings that they superstitiously believe have magical, transformative powers – alchemy – and it is from these that they derive their name.  The Iron Boys take the iron oath:

With this sacred oath

I weave my word and will

With those of every Iron Boy

Our mission to fulfill

Their very words are one

An oath to set us free

And never shall it be undone

Unto eternity

The salient part of  Corbel’s “speech”–of the novel itself–a decision Frick has made, is the lack of punctuation–no apostrophes, no quotation marks, no question marks, no punctuation of any kind except periods at the end of sentences.  The narrative is presented in paragraph-like chunks that are not really “paragraphs” but blocks of thought, or speech.  Words are frequently spelled as they sound.  The intention here is to sink the reader into the stream of Corbel’s thought, as if the entire book were being spoken, an oral presentation rather than a written one.  Indeed, this idea reflects the basic tension between “nature” and “machine”: written language is artificial; grammar is a mechanical device imposed on organic speech; writing is a lifeless (mis)representation of speech.

The hillbilly-like voice is not meant as dialect, therefore, but the reader is still left wondering about it.  Is this the way a person of a certain class in early nineteenth century England talked?  Thought is the shadow of speech, after all.  Even though Frick does not mean to represent “dialect,” the paradox is that this is a written narrative, a “book,” and not really a story being told aloud a la Homer.

At times you can even hear Huck Finn in Corbel’s narrative, as when he satirizes Withy.  Withy the blowhard, the pontificator, makes pompous speeches that borrow Biblical language; he uses phrases like, “Verily I say unto you,” straight from the Sermon on the Mount.   “Not that we eat more but there be ever more that eat he says.” Here Withy seems to be justifying the need for mass production, and Corbel comments with sly innocence, “Although you ask me I think Withy do eat more to judge from what his tailor let out.”

The Iron Boys is definitely a book that makes a reader think. It’s one of those books whose difficulty of style could easily result in a reader simply hurling it across the room in frustration and giving up on it, but it’s satisfying to those who pursue it to its end.  Moreover, in its conflict between man and “progress” the plot has a contemporary relevance.

Similar Reads: Henry James’s The Ambassadors, L.D. Brodsky’s This Here’s a Merica, and Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opionions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman