Sarnath Banerjee, The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers

I stumbled across The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers last weekend while browsing the "graphic novel" (comics?) shelves in Borders. Part of the draw, I suppose, was the memory of some Satyajit Ray films I saw last fall. And enjoyed.

The story of Barn Owl -- such as there is (since there's really not just one story) -- is interesting enough, and a bit of a history lesson, such as it is. I enjoyed it certainly.

The drawing is a bit pedestrian. Pleasant, but not spectacular or particularly innovative. Banerjee does, though, employ an interesting technique in places: a photograph as background with a drawn character placed in the scene. To rather striking effect.

Banerjee's website is a bit of a disappointment but I will keep an eye out for other works by him.

Tod Wodicka, All Shall Be Well, and All Shall Be Well, and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well

I seem to have found my way to reading stories of old men at the end of their lives, stories written by younger men (some much younger if Wodicka's book jacket photo is any indication) cutting right to the bone.

Or maybe it's just what I imagine to be the bone.

Cutting nonetheless.

Another excellent book, All Shall be Well... Perhaps not as deeply, profoundly affecting as Out Stealing Horses but only, perhaps only because it is far more of a rollic at times, especially early in the book, than Stealing ever is (or tries to be). It's a bit shaking, in fact, how much fun the early chapters are, to be followed with the very moving and very difficult mid-section, when the narrator, Burt Hecker, an old man with a disfigured nose and broken family life, looks back.

It is so interesting, but the brief reviews I've read make it seem so bloodless (talk of Burt as a medieval re-enactor, folk musicians, his family lawyer, etc & et al) -- all of which are there, are a part, and a substantial part, but written out in a review sapped of all their power and play. And yet I make my way to the New York Times review of the book, one of the longer reviews, and I disagree: "the artless, wordy and underarticulated writing that makes “All Shall Be Well” such a Black Death of a chore to read"?

Really?!? Not for me.

But maybe I just have an artless, wordy, underarticulated soul...

Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

Good lord, I have seen the future -- and certainly if my reaction is any measure, at least substantial echoes of the present -- and it is in Trond Sander, the narrator of Petterson's Out Stealing Horses.

It's still so fresh and, because of the power of it -- the understated power of it (is this a Scandinavian trait? I'm sure there are plenty who might ascribe it thus) -- raw... But that doesn't really do it proper justice. I actually started this book a week ago? Two? But have delayed, time and again for the past 4 or 5 days (I pick up the newspaper, I turn on the television, I fall asleep reading The New Yorker -- almost anything but pick up the book), in part because I don't think I want it to end, in part because it rubs up against so much.

Not unpleasantly. But achingly. Quietly. Like an anticipated fever.

It has won prizes and gotten laudatory reviews elsewhere -- including in the New York Times -- that can speak to the specifics far better than I. Not only is it surprisingly emotionally powerful; the characters -- lightly sketched -- are amazingly vivid; and the story -- or rather the telling of the story -- is ingeniously and masterfully structured.

And I can only hope that Trond is right, echoing his father at the close of the book, that "we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt."

Boy, oh boy, have I made some lousy decisions; but some good and proper ones too. Kiss.

Fred Kaplan, Daydream Believers

There is nothing shocking in Fred Kaplan's Daydream Believers. Nothing that will make you slap your head and exclaim "Now I understand!" (though I did want to slap my head any number of times and exclaim "You must be kidding me!!").

But it is a lucid, engaging, and to my mind fairly well-balanced review of how we got into the mess we're in.

And by "mess we're in" I do not mean -- nor does Kaplan mean -- just Iraq.

Rather, Kaplan stretches back, back, back to Truman (though only briefly) and works his way up, exploring how various ideas, both grand and not so grand, concerning how the United States could and should approach the world and global security challenges were put into practice through the years. And resulted in an over-stretched and under-resourced military, a foreign policy that has left us more isolated than we need to be, and money pouring into projects that have little bearing on the threats this country does face.

It's a smooth read, avoiding much of the repetition that comes with books born out of stories written for other outlets (which Kaplan notes though is quick to point out that this is not a collection of previously written pieces), filled with lots of detail that I was not aware of (and names of "obscure" figures -- and names that recur and made me thing, "huh?" until I realized that it didn't really matter whether I remembered just exactly what everybody did at every step of the way), and tying together neatly, and not at all as a patchwork, the various players in the current drama.

It is astounding how all of the pieces fit together (and how all of the players owe and are owed by the others); and it is almost laughable, at points, how so many of the folks Kaplan discusses have just sort of stumbled through their work and into positions of greater and greater responsibility (which they were unprepared for and/or sometimes just willfully ignorant of with regard to the impact they could and would have).

Almost laughable, if it weren't so deadly serious.

JM Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year

JM Coetzee is one of those "can't miss" authors for me. Or has been. Until now. Even books I haven't really known what to make of going into them, or worried I'd be utterly bored -- such as Elizabeth Costello or The Master of Petersburg or The Lives of Animals -- have, in the end, in the reading, gripped, shaped, shaken, excited, or just left me thinking. Deep.

Until Diary of a Bad Year that is.

Maybe it's the gimmicky split level narrative. Maybe... Oh, hell, I don't know. It's gotten plenty of laudatory reviews: from Book Forum, the New York Times and elsewhere (including a rather more thorough reflection in Slate).

So take their word for it. Not mine. Coetzee's always worth reading (and apparently worth discussing, formally, as the Penguin Reading Guide illustrates). Just don't read this one first. You'll miss all the real good stuff.

Hummingbird: Magazine of the Short Poem 18.2 (March 2008)

Ah yes, another Hummingbird arrived earlier today. Fitting considering the time of year. Though not quite; not at these latitudes.

Always such a pleasure to flip through it though this time around nothing outstanding. Nothing distinguishing. Other than the little magazine's return from the dead.

So still, as ever, pleased with it's arrival and happy to have spent the time with it. Something akin to eating a roll of Smarties.

Dean Young, Skid

I had a hankering for a bit of surrealism. Albeit at some remove from the banal but occasionally... surreal is too dramatic a term for those moments in life... "surprising"?... And connected, where I could connect. Unlike the Simic I had read many years ago that just seemed like so much word play (and not very fun at that). So...

Start again.

I had a hankering for a bit of surrealism and found it in Dean Young's Skid.

I wasn't swept away by the collection, but I never am -- with either verse or prose -- when I enter into it expecting anything, let alone to be carried on. And somehow, for some reason -- seduced by the cover blurbs perhaps, by something I read online of his other collections -- I was expecting the world. Instead I found little crystals.

When young, fall in and out of love like a window
that is open and only about a foot off the ground.
Occasionally land in lilacs
or roses if you must
but remember, the roses
have been landed in many times.

"Whale Watch" (40)

And...

There was my famous use of humor
that Jordan said was the avoidance of emotion.

"Even Funnier Looking Now" (81)

But isn't that all we can hope to find, are lucky to find? Crystals that speak to us in the moment?

What a good horse he is...

Christopher Hope, My Mother's Lovers

Back to South Africa.

I've really enjoyed the books of Christopher Hope's that I've read. I haven't read a lot of them -- the most egregious gap being the seminal, A Separate Development -- but I've always been engaged and entertained. And they've compelled me to think. Less about the book (which I am too busy enjoying) than about the world around me, and the world he evokes.

My Mother's Lovers is no different. It is an acerbic, pointed portrayal not just of the "new" South Africa but of the role, place, and imagination of whites in Africa more generally. I was, for the most part, thinking as much as I was enjoying -- and loving both. Through a long stretch of the book, at least.

Somewhere about the middle of the book, though, it starts to teeter on a May-December romance which never quite breaks to the banal but threatens to. And the ending is almost Coetzeean in its easy acceptance (among the characters) of the reality of what, on the surface at least, is an almost absurd swapping out of identities.

I probably should, and have erased a number of sweeping characterizations about the book being "well worth the read" because such are trite and not really all that instructive. Tastes differ, after all; and I am sure -- to read the back cover blurbs is enough to confirm this -- that others will engage this book in a very different way than I did. But this is a book that I could fairly easily work up a conference paper around (or, at least with it and the issues raised at the paper's center), and be happy doing so: rereading and mulling it all over, that is.

Tony Hoagland, Hard Rain

Tony Hoagland has to be one of the smartest, unabashed poets working in the English language today. I haven't loved everything he's written, but then that would just be weird.

Hard Rain is a great, short piece of work -- a chapbook of delight.

If I were a better poet -- hell, if I were a poet -- I could have written and dedicated "Visitation" to my past love ("I kneel and weep a little there") while "Dialectical Materialism" is the closest thing to an ode to globalization (that works) that I've read.

Talk about a crazy range; despite "how difficult it is // to be both skillful and sincere". Hoagland succeeds, I'm convinced, because he leavens both with skepticism and clear-eyed self-awareness, tapping his and our own doubts about what it is that makes up our poetry and our lives, writ both large and small.

Shorter, indeed, but more consistent (easier to do? but surely only just...) than What Narcissism Means to Me -- the first I read of Hoagland and the collection that drew me into his verse -- I have a feeling I will return to Hard Rain over the coming years. Happily, not regretfully, so.

Donald Revell, The Art of Attention: The Poet's Eye

As much as it pains me to write this, The Art of Attention was a misery.

It has been awhile since I really felt like I had to slog through a book, but this was surely one. Perhaps this is mere pretense on my part -- not recognizing how often artists (and everyone) does this, day to day -- but it's almost unseemly how Revell uses his own poetry in the latter half of the book to illustrate his points.

Whatever they might happen to be. And I'm not sure what they are.

As best I can tell, Revell holds to the mystical notion that poetry springs from... mystery. Or rather: Mystery. I wouldn't disagree, but it's hard to get a whole book out of such. Hence, perhaps, his reliance on self-consumption... and regurgitation.

It's like listening to a particularly earnest and ecstatic executive chef (and an insufferably self-focused one at that) -- say, for Applebees -- wax "lyrical" and obtusely over the marvel of souffles.

To Revell's credit, he does not trumpet himself as master -- it is not nearly so gross as that -- but there is an unsettling egotism to the entire book.

All that said, there are some interesting bits: reminding the reader of Wallace Stevens' admonition that "being there together is enough" and Revell's own assertion that "Composition is taxidermy." And there's this little gem of an exercise:

"Sometimes I like to ask my students to translate one of their own poems into a nonexistent language of their own invention." (71)

That strikes a masterful note. Noteworthy, unfortunately, for how it stands out among the clanging, tiresome rest.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America

Quick, quick as it's time for me to fly. Or actually drive. But this last little bit I've been engaged reading about Amerigo Vespucci. Judicious, engaging, balanced (if rather critical of Vespucci, Columbus, and the lot of the early European explorers of the "New World"), Amerigo succeeds in sketching the man, from limited sources (very limited sources), and the world he lived, worked, explored (to some extent), and puffed himself up in.

Vespucci, it turns out, was sort of a shit. But as Fernández-Armesto points out, most of "them" were. The book, however, isn't.

Tenaya Darlington, Madame Deluxe

My god, almost two weeks since I finished anything of substance?!? Maybe that's why I'm feeling so funky. That's funky in a bad way, not in the Madame Deluxe way.

But the read itself was enjoyable... enough? No, that's damning by faint praise. Not everything worked (as you would expect) but I suppose, for me, that the "failures" -- those passages and pieces that don't quite connect -- are more glaring in poetry than in prose. Certainly than in novels, where the scope and expanse of the narrative (and the sheer weight of the words) tends to sweep through and over the infelicities. In the very engaging works, at least.

But even the most engaging poetry collection isn't enough to swamp the failures. Which is not to say that there are failures in Tenaya Darlington's Madame Deluxe -- certainly none that have stuck with me.

These are poems with an edge and a spice mildly reminiscent of perhaps the greatest (to my mind) book-length poem of all time: Suzy Zeus Gets Organized. A bit more holistically playful than Suzy Zeus, and certainly more poetically, formally "inventive" (Darlington is at play with the words and forms deployed -- and they are "deployed", quite consciously, or so the collection reads).

Her "The Student Asks the Poet Basho: What is Victoria's Secret?" is one of the great examples of the above. It could have become too cloying, too clever, and far too obvious. It's none of those.

And it is all very much worth the time it takes to read.

Félix Fénéon, Novels in Three Lines

Novels in Three Lines is a fascinating, evocative, and somewhat disturbing collection of newspaper filler written in 1906 by Félix Fénéon. A sample (at random):

"During a pleasure outing in an ill-famed neighborhood of Toulon, Brigadier Hory, of the 3rd Colonial, was stabbed to death." (13)

"Twirling a lasso and yahooing, Kieffer, of Montreuil, committed thrice in two years, galloped away. He vanished. He went on to hang himself." (56)

"Too bad! Mentré of Longwy, who revealed to us he was the winner of the 250,000 francs in the tuberculosis lottery, seems to have been hoaxed."(107)

Well, the last wasn't wholly at random. I scanned the pages trying to find one that did not involve yet another accident (crushed thorax), suicide, or murder.

It is a brutish, violent world that comes across in these "novels" -- but perhaps only proper as Fénéon is compelled to come right to the denoument, the world tied up as it is among and before the three lines.

I did tire of them at times, having to put the book down and rest. Get some space. It was... just too much unhappiness and death, at the hands of others and oneself. But a fascinating way to see a frantic, mad, and bloody world, not unlike our own.

"What?! Children perched on his wall?! With eight rounds M. Olive, property owner in Toulon, forced them to scramble down all bloodied." (60)

Damn, Toulon was rough!

Poetry 191.4 (January 2008)

I'm now traveling about a month behind in Poetry -- the arrival of the February 2008 edition reminding me to dip into the prior month's that was sitting on my end table.

The poetry itself was engaging but not exceptional this month, nothing struck me as wonderful or notably awful. Though, for that matter, I'm not sure that there has ever been a poem in Poetry that has compelled me to buy a collection.

The prose, the reviews, that's another matter. Though here, this month, I have to say I was disappointed. There has been an edge to the prose of late, of the past year? more? It's hard to tell at this point. But a smart -- it's been criticized as "snarky" -- wit about many of the reviews. This month's were weak. Mackowski's dismissal of Atwood (and celebration of Jamie) perplexed me -- I'm no partisan of Atwood's but I couldn't understand the argument from the examples provided. And Mlinko on Pinsky and Kinzie was a dismal conflation of the worst of the emotive and academic impulses in literary criticism.

Bring back the snarky, please!!

Nadine Gordimer, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories

I keep reminding myself that Nobel Prizes are awarded for past work, not the promise of work to be done.

Nadine Gordimer's latest collection, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, has left me perplexed, disappointed, but I hope not wholly put off her writings.

I first read Gordimer late in my graduate career: on my preliminary exams I explicated one of her short stories for... what? Two hours? Three? And thoroughly enjoyed it. There was depth and nuance that was easily accessible yet not at all superficial.

I should really go back through my files and see if I can find out what that story was.

And then there were her later novels: notably The House Gun and The Pickup, both of which I found to be engaging studies and stories of the "new" South Africa.

But here, in her latest, I struggled early to find anything that I could connect with, a storyline that I could buy into, that felt... that felt like some little piece of home. Instead I stumbled through a memoir of a tapeworm (and a not very engaging one at that -- tapeworm, that is), a memory of a dream of Anthony Sampson, Susan Sontag, and Edward Said. I mean, really...

I haven't read Gordimer widely enough to know reliably whether these are merely exercises she is using to explore new narrative territory for her, or perhaps just struggling to find her way to a topic that moves her -- and while the stories themselves sometimes read a little rough (there were more than a few times I had to reread passages before I could make sense of who or what she was writing of), her style has survived largely intact.

Unlike many collections, this one does strengthen the deeper one pushes into it, as Gordimer begins to imagine and more fully immerse herself, as an artist, in the lives of those who are more distant from her. And while the "Alternative Endings" that close the book are the sort that churn my stomach, each of the three dealing with marital infidelity, they are also among the strongest pieces in the book.

And while I wouldn't want to read an entire collection of such, they were welcome... comfort? No, not comfort; but in looking out and beyond, the dreamworld or the intestinal track, Gordimer connects.

Jeffrey Toobin, The Nine

I am a relatively recent reader of books on current events, any more sustained attention really having come into play over the last three to five years. And that's been driven in no small part by our rather grotesque engagement in Iraq and my desire to try to understand what the hell has happened and where we're heading.

But I'm not a (wholly) narrow interest reader, which is why books like Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court do grab my attention. And why I let that attention (and my grubby little paws) then grab the books.

Well, that and the titled "promise" to pull back the curtain on the wizard...

A book of secrets this is not, however.

I certainly know more having finished the book. And it is both a relatively quick and rather enjoyable primer on the modern Court (though not one that is likely to please the strict constructionists of the world who ask for rigor and footnotes and dispassionate reporting and/or analysis). Dispassionate this is not. Toobin both feels strongly about the Court (and the Justices who once did and currently do sit on the Court) and is willing to channel the strong feelings (be they real, supposed, teased out, or perhaps wholly imagined?) of the Justices themselves.

And to my mind he does a more than credible job in presenting the import both of the cases that have been brought before the Court and the opinions rendered (both majority and in dissent).

It presents a Court that I feel myself to have imagined -- though the close-up portraits of the Justices (many of them rather unflattering) and Toobin's fleshing out of the machinations on the Court (and between the Court and the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Executive) only hinted at in mainstream reporting both titillate and, to my mind at least, inform.

Pleasantly.

Charles Bukowski, The Pleasures of the Damned

Bukowski is still a treat. What does that say about me?

I am not an acolyte. I neither aspire to write the poetry of Bukowski nor to live the life of his poems. My one substantive, if passing, brush with Los Angeles was years and years ago when I took two days to walk the length of Sunset Boulevard from Union Station to the Pacific Coast Highway before hopping on a plane to New Zealand.

But he is getting harder to read, maybe because I am seeing less of the wink and the nod and more of what seems to be the very real struggle and difficulty and hardness in the life portrayed.

This struggle and pain -- raw but also masked by no small bit of bluster -- is set off in The Pleasures of the Damned by the oddly (and uncharacteristically) surreal pieces, and those others -- equally rare and uncharacteristic -- that betray a real tenderness and vulnerability.

What does that say about Bukowski?

I think that he tried.

Marguerite Abouet & Clément Oubrerie, Aya

Aya is the first "African" graphic novel I've come across. At least as an actual, physical specimen. It's a collaboration of an Ivoirean writer (Marguerite Abouet) and French illustrator (Clément Oubrerie) and put out by Drawn & Quarterly.

It's beautifully put together, the illustrations are straight-forward but evocative (and I do enjoy the way that Oubrerie uses washes of color to set the visual tone for the panels), and the story itself couldn't be more simple. I'm not sure that I would refer to it as a "comedy" or even self-consciously "humorous" as various blurbs and reviews have noted. Not that it's humorless -- not by a long shot.

But it is more gentle than anything else: the story, the characterizations, even the illustrations -- there is a softness to this short work that is very appealing.

I seem to rely on the gentle these days.

You can read the opening pages here (pdf). Do so.

David Leavitt, Florence, A Delicate Case

Another long delay between books and... well, inevitably, I feel out of sorts for it. Not plowing through any particularly lengthy tome -- though I am currently working through a few different books and collections in bits and pieces -- but instead I'm settling back into life at home, after another (glorious) reading vacation in Virginia.

To keep to the road show theme, I just finished David Leavitt's rather tepid Florence, A Delicate Case. This too is part of a larger series -- Bloomsbury's The Writer and the City -- and while not a waste of time it was, at best, well... tepid.

Or rather my reaction was such.

It is a very personal and yet at the same time rather distant accounting of primarily the foreign -- that is English -- presence in Florence. Name-dropping (of names that prove I am not nearly as literate as I should be in the British diaspora of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), extended quotations, and quite a bit of "inside baseball" talk as far as the social machinations of the expatriate community -- and how this was all portrayed in various literary works (of mostly middling quality) -- make up the volume.

Now Leavitt acknowledges as much towards the close of this slight book, but awareness (laudable) does not make the book any more enjoyable. I will, to be sure, move on to the other volumes in the series (have already read and thoroughly enjoyed Edmund White's stroll through Paris) but am not particularly inclined to delve into anything else of Leavitt's.

Adam Roberts, The Wonga Coup

I got more and more depressed as I read Adam Roberts' The Wonga Coup. The idea that 75 armed men -- regardless of how well-armed -- could overthrow a government (in this case, Equatorial Guinea) would have been laughable if not for the fact that, well... If they had been a little more discreet and maybe had a bit of luck, they could have done it.

But perhaps depressing is a bit too strong.

Disappointing. I was increasingly disappointed the further I got into the book.

I don't read this sort of book for the swashbuckling adventure of it all. I've gotten a little past that. But Roberts never really figured out what sort of book he wanted to write. It's no wonder that the film rights have been picked up, it has all the elements of a "classic" 1970s mercenary in black Africa flick.

But Roberts, to his credit, also wants to build a case, a dossier. So "revealed for the first time ever" are various facts, testimony, etc.

Oh, how I wish he had actually provided this information. The narrative cries out for appendices (maybe we could actually see some of these documents he touts, read some of the emails he paraphrases, etc), practically begs for citations (or maybe that was me; I mean, how many unsourced 2 paragraph quotations can we swallow?), and is in dire need of a more deft editorial hand.

And here's the rub for me. As you push through the book you start hearing the same lines, the same little snippets of dialogue, the same scenes replayed. Wait? Didn't I just... Yes, you did. Jump back and forth, the same descriptors, the same... It's like he didn't quite know how to write a straight line chronicle, beginning to end, let alone finishing it up.

A bit of an odd criticism to level at a working journalist, but perhaps the sheer length was too much. At times it feels like it; it certainly reads like it.

Not an unpleasant read. Certainly not a difficult read (though keeping up with the cast of characters as Roberts jumps all about became a bit of an exercise in futility and one that I eventually just let go) -- but one that will, I would be willing to bet, be better told on screen.

At least Hollywood often doesn't even bother to try to keep to the facts...