November is  promising to be a happy month -- a new job for my husband and I stumbled upon a last minute idea for my Nanowrimo novel.  The madness begins.  Drop me a line if you're writing a novel this month. 

Oh, and here's a ink to my book review of AS Byatt's Booker-nominated The Children's Book.  It feels like ages since I've had a review up.  Teaching is fun, but it sure does take away from writing.  So why am I doing Nanowrimo?  Like I said, madness.

 

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
by Pierre Bayard
(Bloomsbury, 2007)

I must admit, I didn't think I would buy this book when I first read about it two years ago, but something made me pick it up the other day when I had an hour to kill and, of course, hurried to my nearest bookstore.  And when I read this line in the preface -- "Because I teach literature at the university level, there is, in fact, no way to avoid commenting on books that most of the time I haven't even opened." -- I decided this book was written for me, right here, right now.  I've a real gap in my YA literature knowledge and I'm student teaching in an 8th grade class.  My teaching credential program has me doing all kinds of lesson plan busywork and leaves me no time to read the books being discussed in my class. This situation has left me feeling guilty and inadequate.  How could I have not read John Steinbeck or Jack London?  Well, because when I was a youth in New York, Hemingway and Fitzgerald were considered THE must-read authors, why read those West Coast guys?  What do they know about the real world?  Well, this might not be the true reasons these classics didn't make it onto my syllabus, but it makes a good excuse.  And that, is one of the sticky situations Bayard addresses in his book. 

Interestingly, Bayard does not argue that book reviews can help those who can't keep up with their To Read pile, because he seems to agree with Oscar Wilde (Guilty Confession:  I have not read Wilde, I've only seen one of his plays) that literary criticism is more a reflection of the critic than the actual book being criticised.  The book critic in me wants to scream: "That's certainly not true," but I  can't because, at some level, the review is all about my engagement with the book and is not at all objective.  (Of course, what passes for a review in the NYT might actually be the kind of review that Wilde and Bayard might find helpful -- neutral plot summaries.) 

Here's a brief reflection from Bayard on the topic:

"For the critic, thus, literature or art occupy the same secondary position as nature for the writer or painter.  Their function is not to serve as the object of his work, but to stimulate him to write.  For the only true object of criticism is not the work it discusses, but itself." 

The Call of the Wild
by Jack London
(1903)

I've missed blogging terribly.  Since my husband's job loss, I've had to increase my tutoring hours, so whenever I'm not student teaching or attending classes, I'm helping students write their essays on Holden Caulfield or The Kite Runner or, lucky me, The Call of the Wild.  The time I get to read feels like a long lost luxury and all the more pleasurable when I am able to snatch a few minutes. 

Today, I ran across this marvelous paragraph in The Call of the Wild that spoke to the hope I hold in my heart that our family will emerge from this bitter winter and find a springtime full of gold, like Buck's masters did. Solace and hope ... literature is a gift that doesn't depend on a paycheck. 

"Spring came on once more, and at the end of all their wandering they found, not the Lost Cabin, but a shallow placer in a broad valley where the gold showed like yellow butter across the bottom of the washing pan.  They sought no farther.  Eac h day they worked earned them thousands of dollars in clean dust and nuggets, and they worked every day.  The gold was sacked in moose-hide bags, fifty pounds to the bag, and piled like so much firewood outside the spruce-bough lodge.  Like giants they toiled, days flashing on the heels of days like dreams as they heaped the treasure up. "


 

Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing
by Lydia Peelle
(Harper Collins, 2009)

Happy news!  Lydia Peelle has been selected as a recipient of the National Book Foundation's 2009 "5 Under 35" award.
It's so rewarding to be a book critic when you get to review a wonderful book, and it's even more rewarding when others heep their praise onto that wonderful book.  You can find my review in the September 2009 edition of Open Letters. 

The Golden Calf
by Ilf and Petrov
(Open Letter, 2009)


I'm in desperate need for humor in my life.  Thank goodness I have my advance copy of The Golden Calf to keep me smilin'.  I decided to check my New Yorker archives and lo' and behold, Ilf and Petrov received star billing in the November 9, 1935 edition in an "About Town" piece entitled "Soviet Funny Men."  (Never thought I'd see those three words lined up together without punctuation).  I can't resist giving you nearly the whole excerpt because it's so good.  Enjoy!

"Communist humor is enjoying such a boom here, what with Rober Forsythe's book and "Squaring the Circle," a Marxian farce, that we went around to the Shelton last week to visit Ilf and Petrov, recognized as the leading humorists of the Soviets, who are here to do a book about the United States.  They're going to visit Detroit and Hollywood, and many other places.  We wondered if the second Five-Year Plan had anything to say about humor.  It hasn't, Petrov told us. He was out of bed a little earlier than his collaborator.  "It is because life is so tragical that we write funny books," he said.  Or that's what his interpreter said.  The writers speak only Russian.  "They are children of the revolution," the interpreter explained, with reverence.  Petrov said they had spent the previous day in Hartford, seeing the Mark Twain home. Ilf, whose full name is Ilya Andronovitch, came into the living-room just in time to catch Twain's name.  He began to talk to the interpreter with vehemence. "He says," the interpreter translated, "that Mark Twain had a very tragical life.  Dark, gloomy." Ilf grinned happily.  He is tall, blond, and gaunt.  Petrov is tall, too, but black-haired.  Both are in their thirties. "The LIttle Golden Calf," their most successful book, has sold 120,000 copies in Russia.
The hero of their first book, "Diamonds to Sit On," and of "The Little Golden Calf" is Ostap Bender, a swindler, a frankly profit-seeking reactionary.  In the first book, Ilf and Petrov tried to square themselves with Soviet mortality by having another character cut Bender's throat. At the end of the second book, Bender (who survived the throat-cutting) is thoroughly disgraced.  But the authors came in for a good deal of criticism.  The Soviet Commissar for Education said, "Further sympathy for such a type assumes the nature of anarchism." He conceded that there might be some use for satire while there still existed imperfections to satirize. "But," he warned, "it is easy to fall into humor." The writers are somewhat concerned at this attitude.  We asked them what they would do when there was nothing left to satirize, and Petrov said that there would always remain some material: standard stuff like mothers-in-law."

The Catcher in the Rye
by JD Salinger
(LIttle, Brown & Co., 1946)

 I spent two hours last night re-reading  The Catcher in the Rye.  t's been about 15 years since I read this novel (amazingly, I missed out on the pleasure of discussing this book in any of my high school English classes).  Last time I read Catcher, I was pursuing my MFA and was particularly obsessed by issues of voice in a novel.  Whatever your feelings about Catcher, its voice is undeniably distinctive and, for that reason alone, it deserves its place in American literary annals. 

This time, I'm returning to Catcher while juggling classes both as a student and as a teacher.  Interestingly, I took an education class this past summer about Special Education and was especially unnerved last night by Holden's scenes with teachers and administrators.  If this book were written today, assessments, special educators, counselors, and prescribed drugs would probably overwhelm the narrative.  

In any case, I will be spending this afternoon helping a high school student "get" the Catcher.  This book is so rich in character and voice and conflict, that I'm quite excited to be teaching it. Of course, when I mentioned that I'd be teaching this book today to my class of high school students yesterday, they groaned in unison.  Then one student piped up and said they would've enjoyed this book if they had read it as an adult.  I must admit, if forced to read this book in high school, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as much, and would have spent the whole class making snide remarks to my friends about horny boys.  Is it a mistake to teach this book in high school? Under the guidance of the right teacher, no, but if badly handled, it could easily fall into "books I hated reading in high school" category. That said I hope I do Catcher justice this afternoon.  Wish me luck.

And here's an excerpt from the opening:

 

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They’re nice and all – I’m not saying that – but they’re also touchy as hell. Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddamn autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.


 

 

  

The Road through the Wall
by Shirley Jackson
(Farrar, Straus, 1948)

I had the good fortune to read two Shirley Jackson stories this week, "The Lottery" and "Charles."  I even had the good fortune to teach "Charles"  to an 8th grade class.  I love having an excuse to rediscover old friends.  Though I haven't read nearly enough Jackson, I still consider her a friend. 

Here's the review of Jackson's first novel, The Road Through the Wall, from the Feburary 21, 1948 edition of The New Yorker.  The praise might be left-handed, but the reviewer was dead-on when he calls Jackson's style "a sublte and resourceful instrument."

"Suburban life in America has been so exhaustively catalogued in the fiction of the past twenty years that to select it as the subject for a first novel, as Miss Jackson has done, amounts to an act of daring.  Nevertheless, her story, which has to do with the fortunes of a dozen families who live on one block in a small California town, comes off very well.  A climax hung on the gruesome death of two children accounts for some of the story's effectiveness, but most of its success derives from the author's style, a supple and resourceful instrument that makes her shopworn material appear much fresher than it is."

 

Oh, I've missed that champagne spray!  It's not that I haven't been writing, but, given my schedule as both teacher and student,  I haven't had time to celebrate my writing here on my blog. 

But here are the fruits of my most recent labor.  Over at Open Letters, you'll find  my review of Lydia Peelle's The Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, a collection of short stories that shouldn't be missed.  And my feature article on Dubravka Ugresic at The Quarterly Conversation, a labor of love if ever there was one. And please check out both journals for litcrit that mustn't be missed while cruising the crowded digital highways.

Thanks for dropping by! 

A Barthes Reader
ed. with introduction by Susan Sontag
(Barnes & Noble Rediscovers by arrangement with FS&G, 2009)

I almost missed the table.  Whoever really looks at the book table stuck in the back of the store between the travel games and the commuter mugs?  Barnes & Noble certainly doesn't want to give up valuable space in the front of the store for "hardvcover editions ... of special merit in literature, philosophy, history, religion, the arts and the sciences." (Quote from the back cover blurb).  Thankfully, I looked down at the table and Susan Sontag's name caught my eye.  The last time I saw a book cover with her blurb on it (Dubravka Ugresic), I was not disappointed.  Ahh... Roland Barthes!  Yes, she had a thing for the French, didn't she?  Literary criticism of the highest order?  Well, I must get it on my shelves.  It's going to be heavy reading, but I feel that reading Barthes comes under the heading of "Professional Duty."  After a thorough skim-through, I've decided this volume will be more than worth my time.  The essay entitled "Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers" looks especially interesting.  

In the meantime, I checked through my New Yorker archives and, naturally, found John Updike singing Barthes praises in the November 24, 1975 edition.  Here's a bit of Updike at his finest::

"Barthes scattered, playful apercus in search of 'pleasure' are, like the rigorous anaylsis of "S/Z," a way of combatting the 'deceptively univocal reading' that castrates. "The Pleasure of the Text" is a little flirt of a text, but she ends splayed by a hearty assault of sexual imagery from Barthes, who demands to hear, as he reads, 'the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony,' who asks writing to be 'as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal's muzzle,' who defines his critical lust as the wish to admit 'the anonymous body of the actor into my ear.' Such is his bliss; such is the strenuous relationship he proposes between the literate and literature.  Strenuous, but scarcely admitting of qualitative distinctions.  The muzzle that his own prose presses at our ear smiles a little curiously, even smirks, like the author's photograph on the back of these two jackets.  Barthes compels our respect more by what he demands than by what he delivers; his criticism lacks only the quality of inspiring trust.  It is never relaxed. He teaches us to see mutilple layers of reader-writer interaction hovering above every page; above his own pages there is, faint but obscuring, a frosted layer of irony that blurs opus and commentary into a single plane."

(And a playful apercus is ...?)

 

The Autumn Ball:
Scenes of City Life
by Mati Unt
(Periodika, 1985)

I tried to find a book cover photo of The Autumn Ball, but had to settle for the movie poster.  I have an amazing harcover English translation copy of this book that I found on Alibris: it's the size and heft of Harold and the Purple Crayon, printed in Tallinn in 1985 and has that shiny paper and typewriter font of Soviet-era books.  

Enough about the physical book, it's the narrative that I want to gush about.  Having read and reviewed  a lot of early Soviet literature this year (The Foundation Pit and The White Guard to name but two), it's quite a thrill to read this late-Soviet work and get my mind spinning around the differences.  Of course, if I had read this novel in 1985, not knowing how near we were to the end of the Communist-era, would I have given this book the same read?  Interestingly, I think so.  Having lived for a few months in this part of the world at that time, you could feel the fraying at the edges of Communism, a sense that some kind of end was in sight, but the form it would take was anyone's guess. But Mati Unt saw the writing on the wall.  Perhaps it was his Baltic perspective, poised as he was at the edge of the Soviet empire, that gave him a clear-eyed view.  Yes, this narrative is full of dead-of-night encounters with militia and vodka being sold from the back of taxi cabs, but in the tradtion of Tolstoy, Unt kept his eye on the soul of his characters and it was clear the souls were suffering.   

In terms of story, drop your western-reader expectations of a plot.  This is first and foremost a character-driven novel.  Its structure alternates viewpoints between the lives of a poet, an architect, a barber, a doorman (bouncer, actually), a divorced mother and her son who all live in the same district in the city of Tallin, capital of Estonia.  There are some tenuous threads which ultimately connect these characters, but truly it is the little details of their thoughts and lives which propel the drama of this book.  Oddly, compared to A Happy Marriage, these lives are not nearly as tragic, but they feel much more important.  Okay, I'm not making sense at this point .. but frankly, this is just the beginning of my Mati Unt initiation.  I have three more books of his to read, the latest of which, Brecht at Night, I'm reviewing for the winter edition The Quarterly Conversation.  I promise to refine my thoughts on this novel and get back to you. 

In the meantime, here is a passage introducing us to one of my favorite characters in this novel, Theo, the doorman. 

"It must be made clear from the very start that in the mornings, Theo didn't think of his doorman's job as his main occupation.  Yet he knew he was a doorman.  What am I? he asked himself sometimes in the morning, scrutinizing himself in the mirror.  Where has the path of life lead me? What social class do I belong to after all?  His place in the contemporary social hierarchy was a problem for Theo.  True, there was a multi-volume work (L. Thorndike. A History of Magic and Experimental Science, New York, 1923-1958) lying on his table, but next to it were some sausage skins and glasses with traces of liqueur in them; some tarts had recently left the place, there was theosophical literature around, but his member was sore again, and pustules marred his face.  Theo considered himself an intellectual and awdebauchee at the same time, or perhaps neither.  He rubbed his forehead with some eau de Cologne and inspected himself, asking, What am I?"

A Happy Marriage
by Rafael Yglesias
(Scribner, 2009)

A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias came to me through the Librarything Early Reviewers program.  This story of a husband's last days with his dying wife and his memories of their 30-year marriage is told from the heart.  Unfortunately, the reader is nothing but a passive observer to this bittersweet tale.  The narrative stays cleanly in place behind a plate of glass and we do not have to get ourselves messy with end-of-life issues or conflicts.  All is taken care of by the very humble, warm-hearted narrator.  The language, the lack of dramatic surprises, and frankly the lack emotional spikes in this book made the word "happy" in the title all too apt (and not ironic, as I mistakenly assumed).  These are sad events in the lives of well-heeled and completely normal people, the kind of events we see all too much in our daily lives.  I need much more from my fiction. 

edited by John Biguenet and Sidney Wade
(Two Lines World Writing in Translation XV, 2008)

This lovely anthology of world literature came to me from Scott Esposito over at The Quarterly Conversation.  There are extraordinary excerpts from novels and short stories and whole poems (with the original language next to the translated English text) from around the globe:  Bangladesh, Spain, Guatemala, France, Israel, Portugal, Poland, Lithuania, Mexico, Turkey, Ireland, Mexico, Brazil, Romania, Haiti, El Salvador, Philippines, Algeria, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Palestine, and, a pleasant surprise, Latvia. 

Many assume upon seeing my name that I am Russian, but my husband (whose name I love and was quite eager to take as my own 21 years ago) and his family are Latvian.  I had the pleasure of visiting Latvia before I ever met my husband, back in 1984 when I was on a study tour in the former Soviet Union.  Most of the Latvian literature I've seen over the years that has been translated into English are memoirs about wartime and refugee experiences and children's folktales.  So I was quite thrilled to find two Latvian poems represented in Strange Harbors.  The poems are by Peters Bruveris from a collection entitled Black Thrush, Red Cherries.  Reading the poem "Parting from Semba" below, I was reminded of charcoal-colored stones, the cobbled square of Old Town Riga, the spire of its central cathedral whose lines are reminiscent of German soldier helmuts. I also remembered the tale my husband told me when I gave him a gift one Christmas of a traditional Latvian Namejs Ring.  He told me that an ancient King of Latvia wore that ring.  When his country was about to be invaded (sadly an eternal part of Latvian history), he ordered that all male subjects of Latvia wear copies of this ring so the invaders would not be able to distinguish the Royal family from its subjects and so the lives of the King and his sons would be spared and to live and fight another day.  

"Parting from Semba"

I remember little: fog lay
over the field, in fir crests
blackened
the features of forgotten warriors; down the trail
no one came,
in the skies voiceless
reeled
my destiny, but at the well's edge,
covered with a burdock learf
a toad squatted;
(you'll no longer awaken --
the red deer, on whose horns
your Sun set,
is hunted down, dead.)
in the distance the clash of weaponry quieted,
a black raven's wing
covered
my snow-white hand,
closed my eyes,
and I no longer see
what I'm wrestling with --
with mist, with night?
with a crystal tortoise king's chthonic breath?

 

The Decapitated Chicken & Other Stories
by Horacio Quiroga
translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden
(University of Texas, 1976)

Browsing through the archives this week, I couldn't resist the title The Decapitated Chicken & Other Stories (for some reason, the "& other stories" part makes me laugh even more than the headless chicken).  After reading The New Yorker's August 9, 1976 review of this story collection, I wasn't laughing, but I was more than a little curious about this author.  My search turned the title story itself online.  (Warning:  Do not read this story if you are at all squeemish).  Gruesome as this story is, there is something I couldn't resist about this story;  I wanted more.  I've added this book to my wishlist.  Here's the review from The New Yorker to give you a taste of what you're in for if you decide to follow me down this dark path.

"Twelve horror-filled stories -- appearing in English for the first time -- about death, ilness, madness, or bad fortune by a prolific Uruguayan writer who was born in El Salto, Uruguay in 1878 and died in Buenos Aires in 1937.  Quiroga was a kind of adventurer who spent a great part of his life in the jungles of northern Argentina, the setting of many of these stories.  All his tales are in some way marked by violence and tragedy, as was a great part of his life.  His father was accidentally shot on a picnic when Quiroga was an infant; his stepfather shot himself (and Quiroga was the first to discover the body); Quiroga accidentally killed a friend with a pistol when he was in his twenties; his first wife, unable to cope with life in the jungle, poisoned herself; and Quiroga himself committed suicide when he learned that he was dying of cancer.  Although the morbidity is unrelieved, all the stories in this collection but three (in which animals talk) are lucid and written with great economy.  Quiroga was far less rich a writer than Poe, with whom he has been compared, but his stories -- about a widower who loses his only son, and a backwoods bureaucrat who nearly kills himself trying to save his job, and a peasant who waits years to avenge himself on a cruel overseer--are, like Poe's, full of psychological shocks and eerie effects, and are bracingly, if ruthlessly, realistic." 

Julie & Julia                              The Years
by Julie Powell                        by Virginia Woolf
(Back Bay Books, 2005)                    (Harcourt, 1965)

Upon finishing my guilty pleasure,  Julie & Julia, I dove into Virginia Woolf's The Years.  Who knew that the theme of 20-something angst unite these novels?  But whereas in Julie & Julia, the angst was the weakest, if not the worst, part of the book, Woolf knows how to bring it all home in a paragraph.  What better argument could be made for the difference between books as entertainment vs. books as literature than to compare these two paragraphs -- the first written by Julie Powell in that whine-about-your-problems style that's so prevalent in entertainment novels, and one written subtly as an aside to a larger moment as all true angst should be written. 

"Sometimes, when it gets really bad, I contemplate just going ahead and bursting into tears.  I figure that's just the kind of namby-pamby crap they expect from a democrat, and maybe I'll get luck and they'll shake their heads and let me go home with a cold compress. But I have a reputation to uphold. I am not a crier -- well, not at work, anyway."

"The family joke was, 'Look out.  Elanor's broody.  It's her Grove day.' Eleanor was ashamed, but she always was irritable for some reason when she came back from the Grove -- so many different things were going on in hter head at the same time:  Canning Place; Amercorn Terrace; this room; that room.  There was the old Jewess sitting up in bed in her hot little room, then one came back here, and there was Mama ill; Papa grumpy; and Delia and Milly quarrelling about a party ...But she checked herself. She ought to try to say something to amuse her sister."

Deep sigh... it's fun to be entertained, but there's deeper satisfaction to be found in literary writing.  
 

Oblomov                                       At Swim-Two-Birds
by Ivan Goncharov                   by Flann O'Brien
(Seven Stories, 2008)             (Everyman, 2009)


The August 13 edition of The New York Review of Books has a brilliant article by Fintan O'Toole which, besides giving us a down-and-dirty on early twentieth century Irish literature, also compares Flann O'Brien with Goncharov and O'Brien's characters in At Swim-Two-Birds with Goncharov's Oblomov.  Having reviewed Oblomov this past spring for The Quarterly Conversation, I was quite interested in O'Toole's comparison.  Call me poorly-read, but I've not read a literary criticism that compares the influence of Russian on Irish literature, but given the nature of the civil disturbances which affected both nations in the late 19th/early20th centuries, I think there might be some interesting comparisons drawn between Irish and Russian literature of the period.  Unfortunately O'Toole's comparison comes down to a few slim observations: 1. "Beckett read and greatly admired Goncharov's novel --his lover Peggy Guggenheim actually called Beckett "Oblomov" -- and his indolent narrators bear the mark;" 2. "O'Brien's leading characters are even more deeply devoted than Beckett's to the pleasures of adopting a prone position in their bedrooms;" and 3. "Like Goncharov, Flann O'Brien was a government official of relatively conservative disposition."   Alas, that is far as O'Toole takes the theory, making me question if he has read Oblomov.  I'm at a bit of a disadvantage her in that I haven't yet read At Swim-Two-Birds, though it is sitting on my shelf patiently waiting for me.  Well, the time has come.  I think there's more digging to be done here. 

The Years
by Virginia Woolf
(Harcourt, 1965)

I picked up way too many books during The Quarterly Conversations Independent Book Store Tour of San Francisco today, but I have not one regret. During my browsings in The Booksmith in Haight-Ashbury, I happened upon Virginia Woolf's The Years and realized that I haven't read my annual Woolf novel yet.  The April 10, 1937 edition of The New Yorker had a Clifton Fadiman review of The Years.  It seemed to cause him much pain to criticize Woolf and, I must say, he did it so gently that I'm more eager than ever to read this novel.

"It is hardly useful at this late date to praise Mrs. Woolf's style, which must be the despair of hundreds of envious users of English.  It suffuses this book like light, clear and lovely.  Nor is it worth while to repeat what has so often been said of the delicacy of her perceptions.  She misses much, enormous areas of human experience escape her, but what she grasps she grasps infallibly. What the eye, the heart, and the memory, acting in harmonious combination, can do, she does.  For other things one must to other people.
Still, while I do not wish to go down in history as the boy who decried Woolf, candor forces to to add -- may God and Bloomsbury forgive me -- that, lovely as it is, The Years is just the merest mite dull."

The Taker and other Stories
by Rubem Fonseca
(Open Letter, 2008)

It’s not often that a story collection blindsides me.  Afterall, writers, both mystery and literary, devote much time to crafting stories so readers expectations are artfully managed – we receive just enough information to make us feel smart in anticipating plot twists and character downfalls, but not so much information that we aren’t delightfully or thrillingly surprised every once in a while.  Rubem Fonseca breaks all those polite rules in The Taker and other Stories.  By the time you reach the end of the opening story “Night Drive” you know you’re in for a rollercoaster-in-the-dark kind of ride – no predicting what will happen next.  In “Account of the Incident” – if you think you’re going to find out what happens to the victims of a bus crash, forget it.  Instead, you watch with horror as victims are left in a ditch while the bystanders fight over the butchering of the now-dead cow that the bus has hit.  And what happens with the residents of an old age home revolt for a decent meal in “The Eleventh of May?”  Not pretty.  Turns out when they’re not being medicated, these old guys have a lot of kick left in them:  “The Director opens the door. Pharoux grabs him, Cortines gets a stranglehold on him. Pharoux pricks the Director’s face with the knife, drawing a drop of blood.” The Taker and Other Stories will stand out in my summer reading because its stories were dark and unpredictable, filled with lots of characters you don’t want to spend much time with, but feel delightfully bad because you did.
 

A Jury of Her Peers: 
American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx
by Elaine Showalter
(Knopf, 2009)

A tag search on this title in my blog will show that I've been reading, thinking and writing about this book since March.  I'm happy to announce that the fruits of my labor has gone online for all to read today in the latest issue of Critical Distance, a fabulous new ezine that gives critics a chance to engage books on a much deeper level than most print venues allow.  Given the length of my piece, there is a handy feature that permits you to access my essay in PDF format.  I've also included a link to a radio interview with the author in my piece.  Hope you can carve out some time to read it and, if so moved, send me some of your thoughts.   

The Shadow of the Sun
by A.S. Byatt
(Harcourt, Brace & World), 1964)

I'm not at all sure why I'm so ambivalent about the works of A.S. Byatt.  I've only read Angels & Insects and Possession and have let all the others pass me by.  though leary of the word "saga" being attached to it,  I've decided to give her newest novel, The Children's Book a go.  When I glanced at the list of works, I decided to dig into my New Yorker archives and see how well her debut was received back in September of 1964.  Not well, I fear.  However, to be fair, the limp review and its unknown author are so dismal, I'm not even going to quote the whole short review. 

"Mrs. Byatt's tale of youth and middle age, and of envy struggling to hurt the talent it adores, is set ina  group of highly articulate and outspoken English people who are nervously aware of everything except what they have in comon -- that they are all very dull.  In the course of the story, a gret many carefully complete conversations take place, while the action turns ponderously this way and that, so that the principal characters are all displaced without being in the least changed. [Many ponderous sentences of plot summary ensue, followed by this shameful epitaph]...Mrs. byatt is an able young woman who need to take a much longer view of the scene she surveys.  This is her first novel. [And luckily, she lived to write another day]

 

The Second Pass felt like kickin' some sand in our eyes and getting a rise out of us this week when they posted "Fired From the Canon" in their "Backlist" column.  The ten books they'd like to see shot from the canon are DeLillo's White Noise, Faulkner's Absalom,Abasalom, Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, McCarthy's The Road, Lawrence's The Rainbow, Kerouac's On The Road, Franzen's The Corrections, Dos Passos' The USA Trilogy, Woolf's Jacob's Room, and Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities.  I'm can't get worked up one way or another about any of their choices, except for McCarthy's The Road -- completely over-rated; the only thing good that can be said about it is it was a quick read.  Come to think of it, I'd love to see it come roaring out of that canon in flames!  And there's the problem with canons -- their good for blasting, but not much when it comes to reverence, because there will always be a contrarian in the bunch.  Let's just admit it -- a little mayhem in the form of  blasting a book that others revere can be fun.  Who doesn't like to be the bad girl now and then?  But seriously, can we just forget the whole business of a literary canon and just get down to reading?  How else are we going to find the really good books?