In my February Book Radar, The Mirage earned the unillustrious bottom spot, reserved for books I think I’ll probably hate. Ulin, with characteristic insightfulness, explains what I might have been feeling: while couched as alternative history, Ruff’s construction turns out to be “a high concept, in which reality is less important than spectacle.” Ulin compares Mirage to Philip K. Dick’s alternative history novel The Man in the High Castle. In Castle, the Allies lost World War II and America is split between two occupiers, Germany on the east coast, and Japan on the west—Dick takes a real historical event and branches out at a specific point, exploring history through fictional alternatives. Ruff’s novel, on the other hand, takes the details of a real event (9/11) and projects their mirror images in a pseudo-fictional near-satire, with no real message behind itself. In Mirage, Osama bin Laden is a special agent for the United Arab States (but he still acts like a terrorist), and LBJ leads Timothy McVeigh and David Koresh in a religious attack on the World Trade Center in Baghdad. Ulin calls it a terrific setup, but laments how poorly the pieces play out, and how hollow they feel, being, as the title implies, an illusion separate from the “real world.” I think “terrific” is a stretch for this premise: to me it feels like an arbitrary, even exploitative, reshuffling of history, made for shock value and not meaningfulness.
A few weeks after slews of breathless blurbs got me all pumped up for Geoff Dyer’s new book, some real reviews have given me pause. In this one, Sandhu praises Dyer’s engaging, approachable handling of a very difficult-to-watch movie (Stalker, by Andrei Tarkovsky)—but I don’t really care about Dyer’s handling of the movie, I care about his weird non-sequiturs, and the unpredictable rambling I was promised. Regarding those, Sandhu says the book is mostly a movie synopsis, accompanied by “riffs and asides more whimsical than enlightening.” Dyer’s prose, meanwhile, lacks the “bruised lyricism that lit up earlier works.” I won’t be pulling the trigger on this one just yet.
Evidently Britain loves its Gypsies. Gypsy Boy, just the first of a passel of Gypsy memoirs slowly making their way to America, concerns Mikey Walsh, the descendant of a long line of Gypsy bareknuckle boxing champions (the descriptions reminded me a lot of Snatch). There’s only one problem: Mikey is gay, and because of that his father put a bounty on his head. Dwight Garner, one of the Times’s premier book reviewers, can’t quite bring himself to whole-heartedly recommend Gypsy Boy, calling it “melodrama” and “grim” by turns. But the pleasure he took in reading it is undisguiseable.
Train Wreck is an English professor’s exploration of why we all find disaster so enthralling. Lewis describes it as a comfortably written book, even if its subject matter (like the market for Jeffrey Dahmer memorabilia) is sometimes distasteful.
[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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What We Talk About When we Talk About Anne Frank, by Nathan Englander. Reviewed by Michiko Kakutani (New York Times).
What a great title. Not only does it allude to one of the great short story writers, but it conveys a lot about this story collection in just a few words by walking the fine line of irreverance. Englander’s got chops, so a new collection by him is exciting. Like Carver’s collection, Englander ties his stories with a theme, but in his case, a much more direct one:
Whereas Carver’s stories focus on the difficulties of emotional connection and tend to feature isolated characters living in a present quite divorced from conventional social and political concerns, Mr. Englander’s people define themselves largely through their embrace — or rejection — of Jewish orthodoxy and tradition.
Woah, Anne Rice is moving on from vampires? Is she going to explore new creative angles and maybe write something literary and deeply personal? What’s that, it’s about werewolves? Oh.
Given the date, I gotta have at least one sex thing on here. This book looks like it might be a slog (though a far cry from stumbling through Foucoult). But the review is interesting enough. How the “origin” of sex was about 400 years ago in Britain is beyond me, but you can’t fault the guy too much for an imprecise title.
It’s everyone’s favorite Hallmark-and-FTD-invented holiday. So grab your honey or your favorite anime lady body pillow, light some scented candles, unwrap some chocolates, and cozy up with a book tonight. If you want some snarky* suggestions of what to read, here are some of our favorite books about pedophiles.
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The End of Alice, by A.M. Homes
This book contains one of the most graphic, stomach-churning scenes I’ve ever read (second only to one Charlotte Roche writes in Wetlands). If that’s not enough to entice you to read it, Homes’ track record of quality writing should.
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The End of Everything, by Megan Abbot
This book caught me by surprise. It manages to be both unnerving and touching (pardon the pun), and Abbott is no slouch of a writer. At times this book flirts with being over-written, but on the whole it is very good and pretty moving. Worth a look. (Read our review.)
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Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it a thousand times, Lolita is one of the best books ever written. If you haven’t read it before, you should drop whatever your reading and pick this up. At the very least, it’s definitely the best book every written with a child predator for a narrator. (Read our review.)
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Touched, by Jerry Sandusky
I’m not sure if the existence of this book (pre boy-rape allegations) and the irony of its title are more funny or sad, but I’m leaning towards sad. Even the picture is unnerving. (Note: I haven’t actually read this book, and don’t plan to. You shouldn’t either.)
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Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer
The Twilight books are not good books by any definition we care to acknowledge, but they do do a good job of doing what they set out to do–one of those things, of course, is to tell a “love” saga about an underage girl and an older, predatory monster asserting power over her through sexual manipulation. (Note: I actually have read this book and its sequels. You shouldn’t bother.)
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*We in no way support the idea of actual pedophilia, please choose a valentine appropriate for your age, and keep in mind that if you actually spend tonight reading any of these books alone it’s a little creepy.
With the modern publishing world edging ever closer to the abyss, it’s at least diverting to read about its heyday, when a young literature buff in Paris discovered and doggedly championed the work of an entirely unknown Irish writer named Samuel Beckett. Most of the rest of the memoir seems to be less historically important, but it sounds uniformly entertaining.
Agent 6, by Tom Rob Smith, reviewed by Paula Woods (L.A. Times)
Woods is disappointed with this final volume in Smith’s Leo Demidov trilogy—and it does sound like Smith keeps going back to a well that he rather expertly emptied in the trilogy’s first book, the excellent Child 44. I’ve been taking my time with the second book, and it looks like I should continue to dawdle.
This slight review—which seems to expend more effort on a (good) discussion of Voice’s cover than a discussion of the book’s real merits—sums up Lezard’s praise of Emma Forrest in a single simple phrase: “she can write.” Voice is a “memoir of madness” written by a talented young madwoman. Fair enough.
Da Vinci’s Ghost, by Toby Lester, reviewed by Jonathan Lopez (New York Times)
Another brief review, with a rather brief thesis statement: the Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci’s (or perhaps anyone’s) most famous drawing, is not the pinnacle of his career, but rather a play for respect from the patrons of his day who favored ancient, sometimes unsound texts like the one by Virtuvius which inspired the sketch. It’s difficult to see how the book would satisfy, given that the story it tells is wrapped up in the few hundred words of Lopez’s review, but that review is worth the five minutes it takes.
[This feature is a brief monthly summary of interesting books coming out this month. Follow it here. Click the pictures or the title links to find these books at Goodreads.]
The subtitle is “A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room.” It’s a rumination on Stalker, a weird old Russian sci-fi movie considered to be one of the best films of all time. So far this sounds utterly boring, but Dyer has a secret weapon: he’s unpredictable and his thought process is entirely unique. A really weird book is at least better than a bad book. The flap copy says, “the film is only the entry point for a radically original investigation of the enduring questions of life, faith, and how to live.” And James Wood, in the New Yorker, says Dyer “combines fiction, autobiography, travel writing, cultural criticism, literary theory, and a kind of comic English whining. The result ought to be a mutant mulch but is almost always a louche and canny delight.” Sounds like a dice-roll, but one with a good prize for a winner.
Englander has a world of talent, and his books are reliably very good, if perhaps not always phenomenal. The eight stories in Englander’s second collection explore themes as big in scope as the nature of evil and justice, and as personal as sexual longing and intimacy. One of these stories even apppears in the Best American Short Stories of 2011.
When the Booker prize shortlist was announced five months ago, several of the books weren’t yet available in America. Rather miraculously (if the incompetence of publishers can be considered a miracle), one of them still isn’t available, and it’s the one I wanted to read most (except for the one I’d already read). Half Blood Blues follows a black German trumpeteer who gets vanished by the Nazis during WWII. Fifty years later, his bandmates embark on a journey to find out exactly what happened to him, and who betrayed him.
In post-Civil War Boston, the fifteen-member inaugural class of the newly formed Massachusetts Institute of Technology is nearing graduation, when a series of mysterious explosions in Boston Harbor pits them against the more well-renowned (but less scientifically masterful) Harvard. That appears to actually be the premise of Matthew Pearl’s new thriller. It sounds pretty far-fetched for historical fiction, but Pearl comes highly recommended. I’m on the fence. … Continue reading »
This book sounds really good. The son of a kidnapped mother and orphanage warden father living in North Korea eventually becomes a kidnapper himself. By Powers’s account, Johnson has done his research and recreated a very complete, and harrowing, vision of a world that is very difficult for much of the West to fully comprehend. If the writing is as good as she makes it out to be, and the “crafty, even devious story work” Johnson uses employs holds up, this could become a book we hear a lot more people talking about.
I really like meticulously plotted novels. This book–a “big snowball: an avalanche of events that starts with the mugging of an elderly woman”–looks to be just that. I’ve never heard of Penelope Lively, but after reading Kakutani’s review, I think maybe I should have. Her impression of the book is astute and worth checking out.
This one’s pretty heavy, but also looks quite interesting. Scheffer “was the Clinton administration’s point man on international justice … [and] senior adviser and counsel to Madeleine Albright.” During the mid-to-late 90s, the U.S. and Albright (along with other countries in the U.N. Security Council) launched an “effort to entrench accountability for mass atrocities as a central principle in international affairs.” In other words, trials for war crimes such as the world had not seen since Nuremberg. The U.N. focused first on Slobodan Milosevic and the genocide in Yugoslavia. I could keep going, but if international politics interests you, just read Dworkin’s review for yourself.
Bonus Book Trailer: You’ll need some of those old red and blue 3D glasses for this one. The purple coloration really makes the boobs in this (NSFW) video really something to look at.
[In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]
The Flame Alphabet, by Ben Marcus, reviewed by J. Robert Lennon (New York Times)
Ben Marcus, while an excellent prose stylist, has never written a book with a “traditional narrative.” His latest, the uber-hyped Flame Alphabet, has only metaphorical plot struts (children’s voices become toxic to adults), but “It has a plot, and a protagonist, and at times it even threatens to become a thriller,” which makes it, as Lennon sees it, a hybrid of experimentation and traditional narrative. As should be expected, by virtue of Marcus’s extensive experience with experimentation, and null experience with narrative, the traditional implodes and the experimental succeeds. The implosion, says Lennon, takes with it the thrill of Marcus’s sentences, his greatest strength. I was on the fence about Flame Alphabet. Now I am not.
The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung, reviewed by David L. Ulin (L.A. Times)
Chan Koonchung’s first novel to be translated into English imagines 2013 in China, after a devastating economic collapse has crippled the rest of the world, and the Chinese government, thriving according to the Chinese government, has loosened its grip on its people. As the narrator says, “90 percent, or even more, of all subjects can be freely discussed, and 90 percent, or even more, of all activities are no longer subject to government control. Isn’t that enough?” It’s simultaneously a satire of contemporary China, in which only being censored a little would be a big improvement, and the West, where freedoms of speech and information are fiercely protected, but most citizens are too lazy to take advantage of them. David L. Ulin sorts this all out, as well as the role of atmosphere in fiction.
The Face Thief, by Eli Gottlieb, reviewed by Anna Mundow (B&N Review)
This thriller about face-reading and con artistry appears to be brash and melodramatic, if this line—spoken by the deceptive, seductive female lead—is any indication: “The real reason we have faces is to hold back what we’re thinking from the world.” That rather soapy philosophy hints at a narrative less rigorously realistic than perhaps a novel about the quite-real science of face-reading should be. But it could also be fun.
Emerson’s own Margot Livesey has a new novel, and it’s been getting a ton of press. Gemma Hardy is a combination and “recasting” of Jane Eyre and Livesey’s own childhood. Towers calls it “a delight.”
[At the end of each month, Aaron surveys the comics he read, celebrates the best, considers the rest, and takes stock of what it means to be a contemporary comic fan. Follow "The State of My Pull List" here.]
Spotlight
Secret Avengers #20
In his 2011 mini-series The Red Wing, one of my favorite comics of last year, Jonathan Hickman uses time travel as more than just a plot device meant to complicate the narrative and give readers a fun puzzle to solve by the final issue. That isn’t to say that the plot isn’t so tangled that it can’t be untied, but simply that Hickman describes his concept of time travel in more poetic terms (aided, it’s worth nothing, by diagrams drawn into the scene by series artist Nick Pittara) and seems less interested in the mechanics of time travel than in its effects on the story’s emotional arc. By playing with our expectations of what time travel means Hickman brings some of the danger and volatility to that sci-fi trope. Warren Ellis does the same thing in Secret Avengers #20, but from the opposite direction – rather than eschewing the paradoxes and details of time travel, Ellis luxuriates in them, creating an elaborate puzzlebox of a story that doubles as a character study of Black Widow. … Continue reading »
Here’s an Irish student systematically savaging a terrible sounding fantasy book. She does a few things here I really like: 1. Offer the author a pass since it was originally a self-published title, but criticize the publisher and editors who picked it up for not doing anything to fix it. 2. Dissect Sullivan’s ignorance of Early Modern grammar. 3. Summarize the book in a lengthy write up that is undoubtedly more entertaining than the book itself. It might be a little mean, but sometimes it’s really fun to read someone just lay in to a bad book (or movie), and besides team Sullivan comes out looking like chumps more than anything. Good stuff.
This review is comprehensive to say the least. Read it if you want the skinny on Boudinot’s career and an overview on slipstream fiction in addition to a review of this book. It’s actually a pretty informative overview, so the review is worth the read just for that. Also, this book sounds pretty cool, and Di Filippo reviews it aptly. I like lines like this in reviews:
Boudinot takes this finely wrought but perhaps thematically underpowered mimetic-absurdist vehicle and drops in a rocket-powered speculative engine.
I’m pretty sure I saw Nico with this book not too long ago, so I’ll leave the C4 judgment to him. Look for his review sometime soon.
A collection of “work [from] more than 50 zombie poets” might be a fun read. Who knew there were any “zombie poets,” let alone fifty? I’m not very well-versed (sorry) in modern poets, so I’ve never heard of any of those Grimes mentions or quotes, but poetry readers sould give it a gander and see if there’s anyone they recognize. And for those who still like zombie books like I do, the review’s a short but interesting read in its own right.
The Mirage, by Matt Ruff. Reviewed by David L. Ulin in the L.A. Times.
