Author: bythefirelight

Hugo House Reading – January 4, 2010

~ bythefirelight

I went over to the Hugo House to read part of a short story today. It went well and I got a laugh where I wanted one and I think there was some genuine interest in the story, although it is hard to tell from the bright lights.

It was a much more interesting event this month, partly because prose outweighed poetry. And the prose was actually quite good. One fellow read his Sadris influenced Christmas story about Rudolph in NY and another had a witty story about a drug dealing friend of his. All in all it was a nice change from poetry, although, five minutes is never enough time for prose.

Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco Reviewed at the LA Times

~ bythefirelight

The LA Times gives a warm review to Joe Sacco’s newest book, Footnotes in Gaza. It is a slight shift from his usual approach in that he is reporting on a historical event. At the same time, though, he brings the issues forward to the endless conflict in Palestine. As always, though, he seems to bring a sense of the conflicted history to the story.

Nowhere is this as clear as when Sacco reproduces a eulogy for a kibbutznik killed by Palestinian infiltrators, delivered in 1956 by Moshe Dayan. “Let us not today cast blame on the murderers,” Dayan notes. “What can we say against their terrible hatred of us? For eight years now they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their lands and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home.” It’s a stunningly empathetic statement — perhaps the most empathetic statement in the book — and it stands as an epitaph, not just for the dead of Rafah or Khan Younis, but also for everyone caught up in the endless turmoil of the Gaza Strip. Fittingly, it is Khaled who offers the Palestinian counterpoint. “It’s not a matter of victory,” he says in the closing pages. “It’s a matter of resisting till the end.” His posture, slumped, resigned, his face marked with sadness, tells us all we need to know about the toll.

Sex and the American Male Novelist

~ bythefirelight

Katie Roiphe has an interesting article at the New York Times suggesting that if American Male novelists like Updike, Roth and Mailer wrote about in sex in graphic, yet sexist terms, newer writers such as David Foster Wallace and Michael Chabon have only gotten rid of the graphic element, but are implicitly navel gazing authors who make their women characters at best flat. Not having read any of these authors (perhaps I should one day) I can only go with the quotes she mentions, but she does have a point.

In this same essay, Wallace goes on to attack Updike and, in passing, Roth and Mailer for being narcissists. But does this mean that the new generation of novelists is not narcissistic? I would suspect, narcissism being about as common among male novelists as brown eyes in the general public, that it does not. It means that we are simply witnessing the flowering of a new narcissism: boys too busy gazing at themselves in the mirror to think much about girls, boys lost in the beautiful vanity of “I was warm and wanted her to be warm,” or the noble purity of being just a tiny bit repelled by the crude advances of the desiring world.

After the sweep of the last half-century, our bookshelves look different than they did to the young Kate Millett, drinking her nightly martini in her downtown apartment, shoring up her courage to take great writers to task in “Sexual Politics” for the ways in which their sex scenes demeaned, insulted or oppressed women. These days the revolutionary attitude may be to stop dwelling on the drearier aspects of our more explicit literature. In contrast to their cautious, entangled, ambivalent, endlessly ironic heirs, there is something almost romantic in the old guard’s view of sex: it has a mystery and a power, at least. It makes things happen.

Kate Millett might prefer that Norman Mailer have a different taste in sexual position, or that Bellow’s fragrant ladies bear slightly less resemblance to one another, or that Rabbit not sleep with his daughter-in-law the day he comes home from heart surgery, but there is in these old paperbacks an abiding interest in the sexual connection.

Compared with the new purity, the self-conscious paralysis, the self-regarding ambivalence, Updike’s notion of sex as an “imaginative quest” has a certain vanished grandeur. The fluidity of Updike’s Tarbox, with its boozy volleyball games and adulterous couples copulating al­fresco, has disappeared into the Starbucks lattes and minivans of our current suburbs, and our towns and cities are more solid, our marriages safer; we have landed upon a more conservative time. Why, then, should we be bothered by our literary lions’ continuing obsession with sex? Why should it threaten our insistent modern cynicism, our stern belief that sex is no cure for what David Foster Wallace called “ontological despair”? Why don’t we look at these older writers, who want to defeat death with sex, with the same fondness as we do the inventors of the first, failed airplanes, who stood on the tarmac with their unwieldy, impossible machines, and looked up at the sky?

The German Mujahid, by Boualem Sansal – A Review

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

The German Mujahid
Boualem Sansal, pg 227

Boualem Sansal’s The German Mujahid tries to link Islamist violence, the Holocaust, and the Algerian police state into a larger statement about totalitarian regimes and intolerance. In one way it is an ambitious idea: link seemingly disparate historical events like the Holocaust and Islamist violence in Paris suburbs, while creating a narrative that can plausibly hold the elements together. On the other hand, a book with such themes could easily veer into didactic sermonizing about the evils of totalitarian regimes, lumping them all into one group and not exploring what made them so horrible. While The German Mujahid does put together a plausible narrative, it also suffers from the later problem so that at times it seems as if Sansal can’t afford to wait any longer to tell us about how horrible these regimes are and has to shout it. If I lived in Algeria as he does perhaps I would be shouting, too. But as a work of literature it has a few deficiencies that don’t make it a bad book, just one that doesn’t understand subtly.

The German Mujahid is about two brothers, Rachel and his younger brother Malrich. They have lived in France since childhood, but their parents still live in rural Algeria, the Bled. Their mother is Berber but their father is German, a veteran of the Algerian war of independence.  In 1994, in the midst of the Islamist war in Algeria, their parents and several other villagers are murdered. Rachel returns to the village to take care of the estate and he finds a box with his father’s papers, which indicate that he had been, among other things, an SS officer at Auschwitz. It is a damning realization and Rachel sinks into a depression as he slowly untangles his father’s involvement in the Holocaust and then his subsequent flight to Egypt and Algeria. It is too overwhelming and Rachel sizes on the idea that he has to pay for the sins of the father.  Since his father died without atoning or facing justice, he will do it for him, dying in his garage overcome by car exhaust fumes.

Malrich, a petty criminal living in one of the high rise residences on the outskirts of Paris, follows the same investigation as Rachel. Using Rachel’s diary, Malrich also comes to terms with his father’s past. But Malrich, instead of wanting to pay for the sins of the father, internalizes the role of the victim and sees around him in the residence and in Algeria just more Nazis using whatever ideology they can to control and brutalize. Malrich sees the local imam and his thuggish Islamist  toughs as just a new incarnation of the Gestapo. He wants to take them on, fight them before they can start new death camps, which he fears the residences will become. Yet the French government seems unwilling to take on this fight at the end of the book he gives his summation of the state of things.

The Islamists are already here, they’re settled and here we are,  bound hand and foot, caught in the trap. If they don’t exterminate us, they’ll stop us from living. Worse still, they’ll turn us into our own guards, deferential to the emir, merciless to each other. We’ll be Kapos.

It is clear that Sansal sees the Islamist’s goals are not too dissimilar to those of the Nazi’s. He is not subtle about this at all. He also extends his criticism, though, to the government in Algeria, whose socialist state has been repressive from the beginning, only getting worse when it put down the Islamist terror campaign in the 90s.

While equivalency between horrors is wasted math, the totalitarian traits of all the groups is not in question and Sansal is right to make the links. In the context of Arab and Algerian literature, too, the book is important because it addresses topics that have either been avoided, or baned. Sansal it seems is trying to break the Islamist and Algerian issues from their respective religious and nationalistic imperatives, and make a comparison that is outside of the specific grievances that make for easy justifications, and say, look, you are doing the same.

The question, then, is how well does Sansal do this? Does he address the responsibility for guilt? Does he link the themes together adequately? In many ways he doesn’t succeed. The problem is the two brothers are so extreme they become embodiments of an inflexible rhetorical position that seems everything in black and white. Their approach to confronting these issues is to either die or to become paranoid, which could be called a psychic shock as the confront the past, but in reality makes them unable to actually confront the horrors they want to confront. Suicide is a private act that redeems no one and Malrich’s street tough persona doesn’t yet have the ability to organize and confront what he fears. And this is Sansal’s problem: he describes the problem, but doesn’t know what else to do but collapse in desperation.

The sense of desperation is partly from the literary device he uses: each brother writes their own journal entries. The journals are detailed and move the story along quickly, but they also create a myopia that places the individual’s experience at the center of the story and becomes a self reinforcing set of complaints, so that instead of seeing their lives in a larger context (even against the third person description of a street) you only have the one frame. While no writer has to put a story in context, Sansal seems to want to make a larger point, but what he produces is panic. A personal panic set against shadowy terror. Perhaps panic is the emotion you would feels if you were Malrich, but in the book it comes across an author more interested in warning the world than writing literature.

Perhaps given Sansal’s theme that is not a bad thing.

Antonio Muñoz Molina Interview Video on El Público Lee – Spanish Only

~ bythefirelight

For those of you who understand Spanish, El Público Lee has an interview with Antonio Muñoz Molina from 2004. It is about an hour long and El Público Lee is ususally worth the trouble.

Antonio Muñoz Molina – Chat at El País

~ bythefirelight

This already happened, but if you want to read a recent chat between Antonio Muñoz Molina and his readers, you can head on over to El País and read the transcript.

Javier Marías Interview Video in English at the Guardian UK

~ bythefirelight

It is an interesting interview, but he doesn’t explain how he can dislike long modern novels, and yet write such monsters himself. Other topics covered:

The Spanish author Javier Marías talks to Richard Lea about the looping trajectory of his three-volume epic, Your Face Tomorrow, his father’s wish to see himself portrayed in fiction and why he prefers his own novel in translation

Vindication: The NY Times Doesn’t Like Season of Ash Either

~ bythefirelight

Perhaps I’m being a little snarky, but when you write a negative review and NPR and the like says it is one of the best translated books of the year, you might feel a little annoyed. But now Scott at the Quarterly Conversation points out that the NY Times has given it a bad review, too.  It is a harsh review, harsher than I thought needed, but funny. One cannot not get any harsher than this, “Instead, he has written “Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’: A Novel.”

John Updike once opened a review with this cruel gallantry: “I wanted very much to like this book, and the fact that I wound up hating it amounts to a painful personal failure.” The Mexican writer Jorge Volpi’s latest novel, “Season of Ash,” is also a book one very much wants to like. It is thoughtful, has epic sweep and contains many notionally appealing characters. What it is not: surprising, involving or at all interesting. What it lacks: any occasions of arresting language or appreciable drama.

“Season of Ash” is about nearly everything that has happened over the last 50 years: Chernobyl, the collapse of Communism, the rise of biogenetics and environmental terrorism. Other, equally significant events make their way into the narrative as well. Hello, Challenger explosion. Greetings, AIDS. Salaam, Soviet war in Afghanistan. Wassup, W.T.O. riots. Volpi is a leading member of the so-called Crack group, an upstart literary movement of Mexican writers understandably bored by the devices and expectations of magical realism. Until one actually reads it, “Season of Ash” looks poised to become a foundational repudiation of everything one has come to expect from the literature of the Spanish-speaking Americas. From his novel’s first sentence (“Enough rot, howled Anatoly Diatlov”), Volpi attempts to be the first great Russian novelist who is not actually Russian. Instead, he has written “Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’: A Novel.”

I will say I think Tom Bissell missed the Homeric references in the book. Although, Bissell rightly points out they don’t add much to the story.

Volpi additionally insists on saddling cities and walk-on historical personages with weird, mock comic agnomens: Moscow is not Moscow but “Moscow, that city of wide avenues.” Berlin is not Berlin but “Berlin, the island surrounded by cannibals.” Mikhail Gorbachev is “Gorbachev, shepherd of men.” Andrei Sakharov is “Sakharov, maker of light.” Ronald Reagan is “Reagan, sovereign of heaven.” Why Volpi does this for the novel’s entirety is as impossible to fathom as so many of his other decisions. “Season of Ash” may well mean to challenge fiction’s conventions. Instead, in its failures, it grimly confirms them.

Nadirs by Herta Müller – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Nadirs
Herta Müller, pg 122

Nadirs poses a problem: how does one describe a child’s vision of the world? And once that is asked the next is only logical: can you? In Nadirs Herta Müller constructs an almost privativist child, one who is not only unable to understand the social world around her, but unable to construct a narrative of her own life. In constructing such a narrator Müller has dispensed with the narrative arc which links events in one’s life into a series of logical steps to some end. For Müller incidents don’t explicitly describe the what has made someone the way they are, nor do her incidents describe a world. Instead, she use the implicit—father beats the child; father has sex with his sister-in-law; mother slaps her for inappropriate questions—interspersed with the everyday—how the cats sleep; how the organist plays. Each item is brief, a thought, and there is no linkage between them other than the narrator says they are hers. It is a completely atemporal world that neither grows nor moves forward in time.

To say that narrative is artificial is to state the obvious, but so is the lack of narative. In casting away narrative Müller suggests children are incapable of putting together coherent thoughts, that they can only explain, not theorize about their world. She may not believe that, but the effect is the same: a jumble of sensations that amount to little. The problem is not that she is breaking one or another rule of narrative fiction, it is that she has not created a new form for the genre. Her work is part memoir, part history and customs and the pastiche of the two doesn’t blend in a way that reinforce how the history and customs reflect in the memoir. Certainly, a child would not be able to place context on the events, but would a child spit out such small fragments either? Who really is the teller here: the child or an embodiment of the child? And this is the problem, because the book is not about a child’s view of the world, either one that searches for meaning or one that just relates what it knows, it is about creating a stark wasteland of memory where the author can put together all the grimy bits without having to explain why they are important. Just that they are there is enough (although knowing Müller’s history seems to enliven the book). Unfortunately, the pastiche becomes a tiresome mix of of partially worked out ideas and tedious banalities. Certainly, a book that is just one horror after another would be just as bad, but although the banal is part of every life, the banal seldom rises to insight in a work.

Despite the repetitiveness the book has its moments:

Every time I sat in front in the children’s pew, the Madonna had her finger raised. But she always had a friendly face at the same time, so I was not afraid of her. She also wore that light blue long dress and had beautiful red lips. And when the priest said that lipsticks are made from the blood of fleas and other disgusting animals I asked myself why the Madonna at the side altar was using lipstick. I also asked the priest and then he beat my hands sore with this ruler and sent me home immediately. I couldn’t bend my fingers for several days afterward.

That is Müller at her best, blending the logic of childhood together to create question the logic of the adult world. But passages like that are few and far between and more often resemble the following imagistic pasage:

Squealing salamanders in a nest that resembles a handful of frazzled corn fibers. Glued-shut eyes ooze from every naked mouse. Thin little legs like wet thread. Crooked Toes.

Dust trickles down from wooden planks.

You get chalky fingers from it, and it settles on the skin of your face so that you get the feeling of being dried out.

Whether or not that is a child’s voice may not really matter, it is the simple repetition that is either delightful or agonizing that makes or breaks the book. Given the pages and pages of fragmentary thoughts, Nadirs is not a rewarding book to read. While reality may only be narrative applied to the past, narrative, no matter how unreliable, still structures a child’s thoughts, and what may be most interesting is seeing how they structure the narrative, not the flight from it.

No Tomorrow by Vivant Denon – A Review

~ bythefirelight

No Tomorrow (New York Review Books Classics)
Vivant Denon, pg 63

No Tomorrow is neither a love story, nor the remnants of a siliceous affair. It is a suggestion that doesn’t state, a book filled with lacuna where a modern would explain. Yet the story in its scant 30 pages (the other 30 is in French) is a reminder that the erotic need not be explicit.

The story follows a young man who has been having an affair with a Comtesse but she jilts him and by seeming chance he meets her friend Mme de T— in the Comtesse’s opera box. They begin a flirtation during the opera and she invites him back to her place, which is a mansion in the countryside she has begun to share again with her husband. Her husband is a sick man who she has agreed to reconcile with after man years. After he goes to bed, the narrator and Mme de T— go for a walk in the dark, stopping occasionally to embrace, kiss and talk. Finally, they end up in her room where he spends the night, only rushing from it when day light comes and her husband is beginning to wake.

Yet the night reveals more about what could be than what is. The farthest the narrator goes is to kiss and though he talks of love’s embrace, the night is part allegory and part ode to love, both physical and romantic. Where a modern would describe the act, the narrator and the Mme only talk. Yet it is obvious that if the affair continues it could go beyond what has occurred. Mme is very matter of fact in describing her other affairs and the separation she has had from her husband. So while the book is a celebration of desire and restrained passion, it plays against a back drop of long affairs and open marriages that suggests that the playfully suggestive can easily become more.

However, the book ends just as suddenly as it begins, as if it was just a brief interlude, a moment of pure pleasure without any repercussions. It is in that brief and free encounter that you see the ideal libertine romance: open, free, and playful. No Tomorrow is probably not a guide to love, but perhaps a tendency, a longing that despite its Ancien Régime setting is still easily recognizable.

More publishers put the brakes on electronic books – According to Tech Flash

~ bythefirelight

It looks like there is some push back on the e-readers from publishers. According to TechFlash publishers think e-reader sales should come between hard backs and paper backs. We will see how this works out. The film industry is fighting this battle right now with studios wanting simultaneous release on all channels. Will there be someone who blinks first and goes simultaious?

It’s a sign that parts of the book publishing industry are hardening their opposition to the widespread retailer practice — spearheaded by Amazon.com — of selling electronic versions of new release books at a heavily discounted $9.99.

Simon & Schuster and Hachette Book Group are the two publishers delaying more titles. Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy told the Journal that the “right place for the e-book is after the hardcover but before the paperback,” acknowledging that some readers will be “disappointed” by that timeline. Upcoming Simon & Schuster titles affected by the new policy include Don DeLillo’s “Point Omega” and the Karl Rove memoir “Courage and Consequence.”

Elliott Bay Books Is Moving to Capital Hill

~ bythefirelight

It is official, Elliott Bay Books is moving to 1521 10th Avenue Capital Hill. From the email sent out today, it looks like a good move and I for one will be more likely to go there more often now that it is near things I goto, instead of a separate trip into Pioneer Square. I would hate to loose their great line-up of author events.

After many weeks of speculation about the future of The Elliott Bay Book Company, I am now able to confirm that the book store will be moving to a new location on Capitol Hill in the spring of next year.
The past two years have been a difficult, painful period of exploring and evaluating possibilities in an attempt to determine what would be best–and necessary–to ensure the long-term health and vitality of the store. And while the thought, and the practicalities, of moving from the site and the locale which have been home for the past 36 years are daunting to say the least, I am convinced that this upcoming relocation will afford us the best opportunity to remain, and further develop as a thriving enterprise.

First–about the new location. We will be moving into a beautiful vintage building on 10th Avenue between Pike and Pine. The building dates from 1918–and was the original Ford truck service center for Seattle. The space will be comparable to the current store (in fact a bit larger), and will incorporate a café and a room dedicated to author appearances. It has the fir floor–complete with creaks–we’re used to treading, and gorgeous high wood ceiling-including massive wood beams–and skylights. While no space could exactly duplicate the charm of the original store, I can promise that the new building will offer a warm, comfortable and cozy environment that will be true to the beautiful place Walter Carr founded on Main Street.

The building has its own parking below street level-and between this and a nearby lot we will be able provide ample validated parking. In addition the new space will offer something we’ve never been able to offer before–wheelchair access to all levels.

The neighborhood is one of incredible vitality. I’m confidant that this move will boost our business to the level necessary to maintain our commercial viability–and to facilitate the ongoing investment necessary to keep any business vital.

Season of Ash Review Available at The Quarterly Conversation

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

My review of Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash is now available at the Quarterly Conversation. I wrote the review before many reviews had come out and it has been interesting to see how much positive press he has gotten. NPR named it one of the best books of foreign fiction this year. As you will see from the review I thought the book had some flaws, but it has its moments.

New Quarterly Conversation Out Now

~ bythefirelight

The Winter 2009 issue of the Quarterly Conversation went up on Monday, as usual it has a great mix of features and reviews. Some of the things that caught my eye were

Translate This Book!

We’ve talked to some of the top translators into English working today; we’ve talked to publishers big and small; we’ve talked to agents, journalists, and foreign-language authors. We’ve asked them all for the best books that still aren’t in English. And have they responded. They’ve told us TRANSLATE THIS BOOK!, and now we pass that on to you.
By Scott Esposito and Annie Janusch

Tracing Mahmoud Darwish’s Map

Mahmoud Darwish was a poet essential to Palestinian concepts of identity an nationhood. Here, George Fragopoulos looks at four recently published book by the prolific writer, tracing an outline of the map Darwish left for his readers to follow.
By George Fragopoulos

Blogging to Gorbachev: Stanislaw Borokowski’s Letters to a Latter Day Cold War Hero

Blog, farce, open letters, or all? Austrian-Polish author Stanislaw Borokowski has been writing a blog to the Soviet Union’s final General Secretary, touching on everything from glasnost to the former world leader’s romantic songs. [more]
By Chris Michalski

False Truths: How Fact Is Fiction in Machado de Assis

Widely considered Brazil’s greatest writer, Machado de Assis was a unique writer. Like a Laurence Stern across the Atlantic, this freed slave wrote postmodern literature long before the 20th century.
By Michael Moreci

Only Poems Can Translate Poems: On the Impossibility and Necessity of Translation

Robert Frost famously said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” But what if it’s really not so black and white?

By Ellen Welcker

From The Mezzanine by Nikos Kachtitsis

Read this chapter from The Mezzanine by Nikos Kachtitsis, the first time it’s ever been published in English.

By George Fragopoulos and Lyssi Athanasiou Krikeli

Nikos Kachtitsis’s Dark Night of the Soul and The Mezzanine

George Fragopoulos explains why he wanted to translate The Mezzanine, a book that brings to mind Kafka, Conrad, Dostoevsky, Joyce, and even Proust.

By George Fragopoulos

From Jerzy Pilch’s A Thousand Peaceful Cities

An excerpt from Polish author Jerzy Pilch’s next novel, available next year.
By Jerzy Pilch (translated by David Frick)

Notes on Jerzy Pilch’s A Thousand Peaceful Cities

Matt Jakubowski introduced Jerzy Pilch’s latest novel, available next year.
By Matt Jakubowski

Jose Emilio Pacheco Has Won the Cervantes Prize

~ bythefirelight

Jose Emilio Pacheco, Mexican poet and novelist, has won the most important Spanish language literary prize. From what I have read it is deserved. His Battles in the Desert is an excellent book about Mexico in a certain epoch.

My review of Battles in the Desert

An appreciation from Elena Poniatowska I translated.

Emilio, los chistes y la muerte – A Review

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Emilio, los chistes y la muerte
Fabio Morabito , 173 pg

I read this because of a review—a good one—but a review that focused on the style of the writing whose clarity and precision showed a master stylist at work. Emilio is certainly sparse and there are few pharagraphs of more the five sentences. Most of the book is given over to short moments of dialogue, a dialogue of inquisitiviness that makes the book concise and interesting.

The book follows Emilio a 12 year-old boy who has moved to a new neighboorhod in Mexico City and as he doesn’t know anyone, he begins to spend time in a cemetary looking for his name on the grave stones while carrying a joke detector (a metal tuble that plays recorded jokes). He meets a woman who has lost her son and comes weekly to place flowers on his grave. Her son was about the same age as Emilio so they strike up a friendship after Emilio guards her emgerency trip to the bushes to urinate. From the story continues as a strange menalnge of youthful infatuation as Emilio falls in love with the woman, the loneliness of devorced women as Emilio’ mother and the woman began a tentative friendship initiatied by a message, and a sexual discovery. Yet in the same maner that the language is brief, the exploration of these themes is brief. It is as if the novel is the unfolding of a child’s understanding, which leaves the same questions that the child has, but unlike the child has a few ideas of what is happening. Unfortunately, that approach, too, can lead to a fractured story that doesn’t quite seem to finish.

The growth of the child is evident when he and the woman slowly draw closer and he asks to kiss her and latter touch her breasts to ‘see if they are bigger than his mother’s’, which he saw during the message. The boy’s curiosity is understandable, but what makes the woman let him touch her? Is Emilio the surrogate for her late son, and if so what was their relationship? It is never clear what drives her friendship—it is one of the many intriguing mysteries of the novel—but it is fairly clear that Emilio has begun to leave boyhood. Yet as the story ends it takes a different turn as Emilio descends into a cave under the cemetery with the androgynous altar boy he has seen at all the interments.  The altar boy who has been sexually abused in some manner by the local priest asks if Emilio wants to kiss him. The altar boy who knows what the joke detector really is and likes to smoke, is older than his years. But Emilio, too, is searching and he wants to kiss the boy to see if he is gay. They kiss, but it is inconclusive and when the altar boy falls in the river the novel closes as Emilio is running from the dark cavern to the light of the cemetery.

The novel leaves many questions unanswered, but many of those are intriguing, such as what motivates the woman. But the ending seems a little week. Sure, one could say that as he leaves the cavern he is moving into a new phase of life. And what can one say at the end of a coming of age story: he triumphed in the end? However, its concision is a puzzle that leads to a strange novel, yet one that seems to end abruptly. You can’t help but wanting to know more about Emilio’s adventures. He is such an intriguing boy.

The Group by Mary McCarthy – A Reappraisal at the Guardian

~ bythefirelight

The Guardian UK has a nice appraisal of Mary McCarthy’s The Group. It is a book I had long heard of but could never really understand what the attraction was. It was an artifact of another time—I still remember her obituary in the NY Times and even then she seemed so distant. I tried reading Memories of a Catholic Girlhood but did not get far. I had always thought The Group was the story about the lives of some privileged Vassar grads, which didn’t seem to interesting since I didn’t go to Vassar. However, Elizabeth Day has written an intriguing article about the book that has made me curious. Although, she did make a few comparisons to Sex and the City and having seen the show that is either unfair or a bad omen. Hopefully, it is the former. At worst, it could be a Revolutionary Road or a Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which still make it an interesting piece of mid century Americana.

Although McCarthy repeatedly distanced herself from the idea of being a “feminist” writer (she once described feminism as a cocktail of “self-pity, shrillness and greed”), her insistence on seeing women as they truly were, rather than how society wanted them to be, was in its own way revolutionary. The Group was published at a time of considerable flux in America. It was the year that Kennedy was assassinated, a time when the myth of the contented domesticity of previous generations was beginning to be challenged. A few months before it came out, Betty Friedan had published The  Feminine Mystique, a sociological study that brought to light the lack of fulfilment in women’s lives based on the results of a questionnaire sent to 200 of her university contemporaries. Friedan called it “the problem with no name”: the nagging dissatisfaction that lay at the heart of many women’s experience despite a gloss of financial security.

McCarthy’s novel was set in 1933, but it dealt with precisely the same issues that Friedan had identified. In The Group, the female characters set out to make their own way in Roosevelt’s New Deal America, only to discover that they are just as economically and emotionally dependent on men as their mothers were. They believe in romantic love even though it costs them their independence and their idealistic, liberal politics come to nothing when the novel ends with the outbreak of the Second World War.

Is the Best American Writing of the Last 10 Years Sexist?

~ bythefirelight

Mark Athitakis reports that what have been called the best novels of the last ten years have all had a similar theme: “Men struggling against a society whose rules and limits are defined by women.” If I had actually read some of these works I could comment, but many have never really piqued my interest. However, it is a thesis worth noting and I would like to see it explored more. Definitely, worth exploring the threads he mentions.

A week or so back, Andrew Seal spent some time testing an argument by literary scholar Nina Baym that critics’ favorite works of American literature tends to adhere to a particular theme: Men struggling against a society whose rules and limits are defined by women. To celebrate such books, the argument goes, is to bolster a particular American myth. (At least, that’s how I understand the argument; I haven’t read the Baym essay that Seal discusses.) To investigate the matter, Seal picks a few consensus favorites from the past ten years—The Corrections, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Netherland, The Road—as well asKeith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men, I suppose just for the sake of slapping it around a bit more.

Translation is a Love Affair – A Novel from Quebec

~ bythefirelight

I haven’t read Translation is a Love Affair yet, but it seems to be popping up all over my radar screen. First Three Percent has posted a review of it and Nick’s Book Club is going to be discussing it Monday, December 28 in Seattle. I am looking forward to reviewing the book soon. I have never read anything from Quebec and though I think the idea of national literature is a little over done, it will be a welcome change.

World War II: Now In HD Color – A Review

~ bythefirelight

I wasn’t sure if the History Channel’s World War II in HD was going to be more over the top disaster/war channel material, the kind of thing that celebrates the extreme nature of the subject, rather than a respectful presentation. But two episodes in, the show seems to be in the latter camp. It is an American history, not only in focus, but in vocabulary: the narrator uses we/our often when describing American forces; and the term greatest generation has shown up once. Yet it isn’t jingoistic, just proud; Steven Ambrose had nothing to do with this, fortunately. Seeing combat in color makes the war seem more recent, as if it was an extension of the Vietnam fotage. Distance gives one a chance to apprase the past; closeness blurs the opportunity, and the remaking of the war in color has the ability to make the war seem rosy again, America’s greates monent—in other words, the return of the Greatest Generation dreams. Yet the show also has some of the most graphic images of that or any war and the film makers haven’t refrained from showing the dead nor the wounded, esspecially those undergoing medical treatment. At times it can be disturbing, but those are the rewards of war and considering the sanitization of the last 3 wars, it is a needed reminder.

I don’t know how many times the war needs to be watched, but if you are going to watch the war it is a quality production wrapped in some HD hype.