Book Review: Blindness – Jose Saramango

Recommended to me over a year ago by a friend, this book idled on my wishlist overly long. A truly stunning work of imaginative fiction, it should be experienced by all. Since I know you’ll be running out to the store to buy it right away, I’ll keep the synopsis spare: everyone goes blind and all hell breaks loose.

Like so much disaster literature (apocalyptic, dystopian, war, holocaust, Russian) the revealing bits are not so much the events or scenarios but how the people react to the atrocities. And I find it fascinating to see how quickly relatively stable social institutions break down when the animal spirit dominates. Surely everyone has pondered their behaviour under duress: who would you take with you in a fire, would you throw yourself in front of a bullet for your lover, would you starve to feed your child, would you kill, who? Saramango has the answers. And most of them are disappointing.

While the style seems intimidating, there are no quotes or paragraphs, just page after page of square blocked text, he is such an adept writer that it doesn’t seem cumbersome. Plus there is a very clever conceit revealed about the style which makes it all the more rewarding.

I understand that after many years of rebuffing Hollywood advances this book is finally being made into a film and by talented people too. It will make a great movie, I have no doubt. There is a great deal of nudity, dirty sex (literally), violence, horror, and plenty of occasions for strong acting moments. But because the truly stunning moments of the novel are inward looking, fans will be well served to spend a couple of hours alone with it before it gets laid out for them. It would seem fitting too that a story about the blind be heard rather than seen. Call me. I’ll read it to you.

Book Review: A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway wrote simply and beautifully and was an asshole.

In his posthumously published memoir, A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes about his time as a struggling artist in Paris in the 1920s. In his stark, almost childish style he offers up a rather detailed series of vignettes of his life and times there and they were wonderful. Some are poignantly sad, some are quite funny, and some are downright bitchy. All are staggeringly self-aggrandizing.

It is clear to me that as much as the world has loved Hem, no one could love Hem as much as Hem did. His best times were when he was alone, walking the deserted streets of the city. Or fishing, smoking. Or at the track, betting. Or skiing, and climbing. Hem was no team player. His worst times were when someone interrupted him. In many a scene he proudly recounts how he berated some idiot for even sitting at the same café where he worked. And there were plenty of idiots.

And so it was with great ambivalence that I motored through this little book because truly, he writes beautifully. There is complete clarity of message. No room for nuance, whatsoever. Which, if you think about it, only contributes to the arrogance: not a single word is hedged; without adjectives, nothing is modified. It was as I say it was. It is as I say it is. I do what I say I do.

In addition to the anecdotes of his friends and lifestyle (oysters, bookstores, cafes, banging models, skiing with the rich, talking about art with Gloria Steinem, and bopping around in a topless convertible with an effete and desperately drunk F. Scott Fitzgerald) he talks a great deal about writing. How he feels about it, how he did it, where he did it, why he did it. And it is in these passages that pretense and romanticism are finally shed. It makes them less sensational, but there is a palpable sense that he’s finally telling the truth.

The truth is a theme that comes up a great deal when he talks about writing. He feels that the truer you write, the better you write. So if truth is the essence of writing, and the truth is always accessible to you if you really look hard enough, then good writing will always be there.

Vaguely addressing writers block and why it’s simply never been a problem for him, he says: Whenever I am not sure where the next story will come from, I simply sit down and force myself to write one true sentence. Once that sentence is there, the rest will follow.

So I tried it. See above. He was right.


(To be fair to the man, I do understand from subsequent reading that his fourth wife, Mary, had a heavy hand in editing his nearly finished work going as far as to outright cut a lengthy apology to his first wife, Hadley. Perhaps Mary trimmed some of the humility too, but somehow I doubt it.)

Book Review: What is the What – Dave Eggers

It will come as no surprise to any of those who know me or (or those few who read what I write) that I have a very soft spot in my heart for Dave and his McSweeney family. I won’t get into why. I will agree, though, that he hasn’t written a good novel yet. Even his short fiction has never even come close to his debut memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But even as it seemed that he was possibly fading into the late 90’s and becoming simply an aging crack-pot celebrity philanthropist, it turns out he was up to much, much more.

Over the four years (2002-2006) he worked with Valentino Achak Deng to bring his story to our attention. With the same deft touch that he exhibited in AHWOSG, What is the What is touching, funny, and startlingly easy to identify with. There is virtually no hit of Eggers smarmy earnestness, the narration is given with a complete purity of voice. It is very difficult to tell where the writer leaves off and the narrator begins, but you quickly warm to Valentino, becoming engrossed in his complete melodrama of a life.

There are structural issues and a few low bits where a history lesson obtusely interrupts the action, but I wish to leave my issues aside. I have not been touched by a book (or maybe a person) in the way that I was by What is the What.

I encourage anyone who wants to know more about the Sudan and the Lost Boys who fled the country during its prolonged civil war to read it. I encourage anyone who wishes they could make the lives of others better to read it. I encourage anyone who thinks they didn’t get what they wanted for Christmas to read it.

In You Shall Know Our Velocity!, Eggers muses about the urge to give. If you were shipwrecked on an island and discovered another person there, you would give him half of whatever you have. This would be obvious; no decision to be made. If a week or so later another person washed up, you would share with him too. But somehow, even with this natural urge to keep each other alive, there is some number at which people become not like us and we no longer feel the compulsion to share. Valentino has suffered a great deal and needs our help. It is no accident that Eggers has distilled the problems of a people into this one smiling man.

Please give to him anyways.

Book Review: Murakami – After Dark

It’s hard to tell if Murakami is recently prolific or if it's simply his translators who are are. Nevertheless, this is the fourth book from him in three years, and in that spell, it's his most elegant submission. A “slim” volume, it could be described as Murakami light, but even so it retains all the key elements that longtime fans love so much. Dualism, dream worlds, sinister fascist overlords, coffee, women with small ears, American food, cats, minimalists, and jazz all make their appearances in this light-hearted and ultimately very touching story.

Murakami’s Japan, often criticized in his own country for being too foreign (American), is a strange and spooky place where the characters never really feel at home. Through simplifying their lives, lives which are inevitably complicated by the author, and seeking solitude, they tend to find happiness. It is a most therapeutic journey for a busy western mind to take and I recommend it highly. Think of it as the modern literary equivalent of Zen meditation, but with chicken salad sandwiches and Jazz.

Book Review: Amis – House of Meetings

Amis is deeply interested in Russia. He is an accomplished student of its history, and a huge fan of its literature. With this novel, he has made a very personal attempt to craft his own Russian novel. In fact, I know this because he tells us this in the text.

Most of the story takes place in a Siberian gulag, and this is where the novel’s best scenes take place. Amis’ account of the labour camp is both horrific and thrilling, but also curiously funny in many places. Reminiscent of Primo Levi’s account of Auschwitz, one probably needs the full 70 years of intervening time to find humour in such places, but even so, it is there. But the secrets that bind this text together are ultimately disappointing. Amis lords the Magoffin over the reader in an uncharacteristically clumsy manner.

It will surprise no one to learn that I have not read as much Russian literature as he has. But I do share a deep love for his hero, Nabokov. And, from this perspective, I regret that he has not nearly equaled any of Nabokov’s work, nor Dostoyevsky, for that matter, whom he is also clearly emulating here.

But even as I tire of his increasingly over-ripe leering, and occasional hubris, the fact is I will never tire of Amis’s style. Whatever the topic, and regardless of his age, the man is a delicate (though sometimes brutal) craftsman. I will keep reading him, but certainly won’t advise new readers to pick up this volume of his as their first.

Book Review: Pynchon – Against the Day

So I finished it. And it was pretty darned amazing. I’m not going to say it was an easy six months of my life. No. It certainly wasn’t. There were, of course, the obvious physical challenges of spending all those hours (those miles) with six pounds of hardcover bound small print, hard edges threatening my eye sockets, but that was the least of my problems. My wife did suggest that it was “un-sexy” to wear those sport goggles in bed, and she also threatened to ban it from our marital boudoir after I used it to stop that bathroom flood; wine lovers refer to that smell as “ash” or “barnyard” at worst, and even so they find it sexy.

No, I’m happy to report the real challenges lay in the text. With over a hundred characters to keep track of, working in multiple timelines, sometimes alternated dimensions or even media, there was frankly more than I could often handle. Encyclopedic is probably the best way to describe it, and many reviewers do. Except, it would be more like if someone decided to make a novel out of a “B-side” encyclopedia, compiling stories from all the slightly-less-significant-and-sometimes-even-a-little-obscure people and places of the early 20th century: Salzburg, not Paris; Venice, not Rome; Montenegro and Kazakhstan, not Moscow; Denver.

There were spells when I walked away from it. There was one occasion where I left three rather long voice mails on Liesl Schillinger’s phone. But each time, just when I thought I was on the verge of leaving my dollar-bill bookmark in that bad-boy for the last time, I would wind up with a pair of espressos in my hand and a quiet morning ahead of me. And when approached in this way, the book would roll over and show me its marvelous insides. Complex, funny, strangely touching, it could confuse as well as enlighten.

One of the Pynchon fan-sites that I appealed to for help midway through the first third (this would be, what, February?) offered up some advice that really resonated with me. Paraphrasing: reading Pynchon is like listening to jazz, you can listen and try to understand to as much or as little of it as you like and still enjoy it. If it gets to hectic, or you are not sure what is happening, just lie back and let it wash over you. It’s not supposed to make sense, it’s just meant to make you feel good. Feel good, and think.

Items I have attracted via careful application of The Secret

The admiration of all men

The adoration of all women

Syphallis

An unearned air of erudition

That windswept look

A great deal on gently used all-season radials.

A Jack Russel Terrier named "Champ"

A boxed set of Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" DVDs

The scent of freshly baked bread

A family of swallows in my garage

A bowling 'C' Flight championship

Surprising amounts of lint

Six knee-scuffed and somewhat androgenous kids trailing me on bikes.

A new credit card

A possible lawsuit

A wishing well

$45.90 in small change