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.
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 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.”
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 world—or at least a large percentage of the people I see on my commute—could use a lesson in manners. Alford, a “humorist” (a kludgy word for a supposedly fluid entity), offers a “whimsically haphazard” survey of manners. While certain of Alford’s strategies sound more passive-aggressive than effective, maybe that’s sounder than my personal tactic of staring at bus-riding cell phone talkers and pointedly following their conversation until they get creeped out and hang up.
Smut, by Alan Bennett, reviewed by David L. Ulin (L.A. Times)
David L. Ulin quietly but insightfully dissects Alan Bennett’s new pair of novellas. This is the kind of thing Ulin excels at:
Here, Bennett highlights a conflict central to both novellas: that there is a difference between pretense and self-preservation, and the roles we play (matron, widow) often serve to protect our inner selves. At the same time, there’s more at work here—since what we try to conceal is often obvious anyway.
In the end, Smut doesn’t sound like my kind of book. But the review is worth your time.
Terrorists in Love, by Ken Ballen, reviewed by Dina Temple-Raston (Washington Post)
This arresting nonfiction book attempts to discover and explain the reasons that Islamists turn to violent jihad. It’s composed of six anecdotal stories about men who were involved in violent jihad for various reasons. Ballen, the founder of an anti-terrorism nonprofit, comes to the conclusion that a lack of love on earth inspires these wayward souls to win God’s favor in the afterlife. It is, as Temple-Raston notes, not a very all-inclusive theory, but the discussion about it is quite interesting.
Treasure Island!!!, by Sara Levine, reviewed by Rebecca Barry (New York Times)
“I’m partial,” confesses Barry, in the opening of this review, “to a book with exclamation points in its title.” Not me. I’m gunshy about them, ever since the one in Swamplandia!turned out to be a bear trap. However, I am partial to “a rollicking tale, shameless, funny and intelligent,” which Barry claims for Treasure Island!!!. Before I get my hopes up, there’s no mention of either treasure or islands. It sounds, honestly, like another one of these literary novels whose purpose is to subvert all your expectations. It better be funny.
In brief: A “pale, lifeless” Jeff Bezos biography disappoints. … Houllebecq’s latest is also his first to feature a main character not modeled on himself. … The guy who named the main character of a long-running series “Harry Hole” writes a series of children’s books about farts? That makes sense, actually. And Simon & Schuster, the publisher who will readily sell their dignity, publishes it? That also makes sense. Carry on. … Christopher Paolini’s house is crazy. (Also, kids, when a major paper comes to do a profile on you, put on some damn shoes for the pictures.)
[In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.] . Distrust That Particular Flavor, by William Gibson. Reviewed by Dwight Garner (New York Times).
When I think of William Gibson, I think of cyberpunk, not journalism. Still, it’s nice to see an author step away from his normal genre and offer something that is, by the very nature of an essay collection, more keenly focused on writing rather than story. Gibson, much like Phillip K. Dick, is a sci-fi master known for his own particular ambiance and outlook that transcends most of the more lowly genre far. I’ve never read too much of either of them, but smaller portions of writing that a presumedly less heady than most of Gibson’s collection of work is something I’m certainly interested in reading. . Into the Silence, by Wade Davis. Reviewed by Richard Raynor (Chicago Tribune).
This book looks interesting enough, but I’m mostly including it because I liked reading Raynor’s review. Here’s an example of how to nicely sum a a book in a relatively short paragraph:
In his magnificent, if perhaps overlong, new book, “Into the Silence,” Wade Davis tells the full story behind this almost mythic story, imbuing it with historic scope and epic sweep, perceiving the quest to conquer Everest as an emblem of Britain’s damaged nobility and infatuation with heroic failure. The background here, the foul compost from which the grail-like purity of the Everest endeavor grew, was World War I, the “Great War,” which signaled curtains for the great, lumbering European empires and obliterated almost an entire generation of young men. The few who survived the apocalypse in the mud of France came back broken and haunted.
If you’re into history books or (or mountaineering) this book looks worth a peek. The review goes on to be written just as well as that excerpt, so it’s worth reading regardless. .
So Carrie Fischer has memory loss from elective electroshock depression therapy and that’s her impetus for writing her recent books? Whoa. A book by Princess Lea about depression doesn’t really interest me at all. But I do remember hearing good things about her first memoir. This appears to be more of a collection of anecdotes of weird things that happened with random celebrities, which is kind of funny. Stein certainly seemed to enjoy reading it, so maybe it’s deserving of a shot.
. Quickly: One last 2011 recap, with capsule reviews. An Umberto Eco interview I’m bummed I missed the first time around. Semi-accurate visions of tomorrow. A more accurate vision of the past (in which Britons mock dwarves and rape victims). And here’s an interesting bit on lycanthropy. . Bonus Book Trailer: Captain Nobody actually seems like a decent enough YA book. The trailer has some interesting art, but also a lot of pictures that appear to be of random people pulled from the internet. And the narration sounds like they called someone in off the street and recorded him in one take.
[In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]
[sic], by Joshua Cody, reviewed by Dwight Garner (New York Times)
[sic] has been building buzz for a couple of months now, since its release in October, but its cloying title has always kept me from taking a closer look. I was missing “such filthy and ecstatic sex writing that the author makes you feel you’ve been, your entire life, doing it feebly and wrong.” So that’s too bad. But it’s also just the start. In addition to an unabashed sex fiend and drug aficionado, Cody is a composer and a professor of music, and he includes a handful of insights about music and culture, ranging from the technical to the poetic. Then there’s the fact that, as if all this wasn’t enough, [sic] is actually about Cody’s fight against an aggressive cancer that came quite close to killing him. These threads braid together in mesmerizing ways, like the twisted scene in which Cody has sex with a fellow cancer patient. Take a look.
Another book that I haven’t paid enough attention to is this one, a nonfiction volume by the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things. As fiction fans might not know, Roy has spent the 14 years since her one and only novel becoming an outspoken political leader in India. Walking With the Comrades explains and recounts the conflict between the Indian powers that be, and ragtag (though numerous) marginalized indigenous left-wing gangs known as Maoists. It’s a first-hand account of these Maoists’ operations, including their violent, distinctly un-Gandhian methods, which have gotten better results than a series of nonviolent campaigns.
Why We Broke Up, by Daniel Handler, reviewed by Susan Carpenter (L.A. Times)
Daniel Handler writes the Lemony Snicket children’s books, and also an assortment of novels for various ages under his own name. His latest, meant for readers age 15 and older, is an illustrated account of a high-school breakup. Carpenter finds few surprises in its construction (from its cliched opposites-attract conceit to its predictable ending), but is still notably charmed by Handler’s style, which is quite understandable (Adverbs is my favorite novel of his).
Savage Messiah, by Laura Oldfield Ford, reviewed by Iain Sinclair (Guardian)
I’m not entirely sure what to make of this book. It seems to be a collection of “post-authorial” guerilla pamphlets, whatever those are. If you figure it out let me know.
In brief: The first paragraph of this review of the new Pauline Kael biography is funny in an oddball way. … Publishers square off against libraries; generally, anytime you find yourself on the other side of a fight with a library, you are wrong. … The best literary moments of the year, in cartoon. … Let’s not forget that Lenore Hart is a plagiarist and that her publisher still refuses to admit it. The latest news is that Hart has been asked to take a leave of absence from her fellowship at the Norman Mailer Center.
[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 Unconquered, by Scott Wallace. Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle (Washington Post).
I really like stories about explorers or the Naturalist expeditions of the olden days. The cover/title combination of this book evokes for me a modern adventure in that vein and is what drew me in on this one, and Drabelle really nails it:
It sounds like the beginning of a pulp adventure novel. A journalist gets a phone call from a magazine editor offering a tantalizing assignment: Go to the Amazon and catch up with an expedition bent on making contact with a tribe so remote and self-contained that it knows virtually nothing of modern civilization.
The review is pretty short and unhelpful, and I didn’t find much on this book elsewhere, but if you see it on a shelf give it a peek.
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Holidays in Heck, by P.J. O’Rourke. Reviewed by Chris Erskine (Chicago Tribune).
A collection of travel essays from a prolific humorist, focusing on vacation stories mostly. That’s probably enough to tell you if you’d like this book or not (and if you would, then you likely know who O’Rourke is already). But if you want to know more, Erskine takes the time to get fairly in-depth in the review. This is the kind of book I like to pick through when I’m sitting in an airport, so if you’re flying somewhere this week, you may want to combine this collection with those Bloody Marys from the airport Chili’s to take the edge off.
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The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick DeWitt. Reviewed by Katherine A. Powers (Barnes and Noble Review).
Yeah, I know, Sisters Brothers again. Not one, but two of our guys so far has picked it for Best Books 2011. It makes the top of Ms. Powers’s list too. Her review is well-constructed, so if you want to read more about the book (after reading Nico’s review, of course), check it out. I’m mostly putting this up here to reinforce my promise to myself to finally read this guy while away for the holidays. You should probably do the same.
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Quickly: NYT round-up of cool pop-up books. And here’s the Tribune‘s round-up of recent YA books worth a look. Three books on public disgrace rounded up by WaPo.
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Bonus Book Trailer: Ugh, the whole PowerPoint approach to making book trailers continues to be ghastly. Check this out for the awful music, it sounds like what I imagine you’d hear if you called the information desk at a children’s museum jungle exhibit in the very early 90s and they put you on hold (really kicks into gear around the 0:44 mark).
The Mirage, by Matt Ruff. Reviewed by David L. Ulin in the L.A. Times.
