Book Review: Vacation

Soooo… we went on a cruise.  There was a lot of music but also a lot of time between flying there… waiting to board…hanging out in the room and reading before bed.  Lots of time to read.  I finished a 2016/2017 book “The Underground Railroad” which deserves its own review but I had also picked up for the trip a book appropriately called “Vacation” by a woman named Deb Olin Unferth.  The book had been recommended by a podcaster I follow who does the “Welcome To Nightvale” and “I Only Listen To The Mountain Goats” podcasts and he said he picked up  this book a couple of years ago after he moved to New York and he thought he could write.  Then he read the book and realized, “Oh… I can't write at all and I have a lot of work to do.”  I thought, that as very high praise and ordered it immediately and I was not disappointed.

The book takes place at various points in NYC, Syracuse NY, Coney Island NY, Panama and various sad, SAD places in Nicaragua.  It involves two (at least) shitty marriages and more than a handful of deeply and profoundly damaged, mundane, confused, vaguely interesting characters.  It also has a guy who untrains dolphins.  Untrains is not a word.  Good for Deb.

The concept of the book is unremarkable.  Two somewhat damaged people find each other and get married.  He thinks he has hit jackpot and she is just looking for something and hoping it is him.  It turns out not to be him.  She discovers (or thinks she discovers) something about his past (relating to his cartoonish head) and sees it as betrayal and goes off the rails with her own abhorrent behavior.  He doesn’t know what happened but discovers it, and ultimately leaves her to find an old college chum (who his wife might have been following around for 4 plus months). The chum is supposed to be in Syracuse (but is not) and then he follows him to Nicaragua (where he isn’t) and loses his job trying to get to the beautiful… Corn Island.

There is another character… the daughter of the untrainer.  Searching for her father...

The story is beautifully, cleverly written.  Occasionally it verges into the dreaded “look mom no hands” cleverness with language that only comes from people who have spent too much time in writers workshops but there are some brilliant lines, brilliant dialogue and some pretty deep introspection on life, relationships and the treadmill we are all secretly just barely able to teeter forward on each day and know falling, and not breaking our neck or a list a wrist… until we do.  It was a GREAT vacation book and I will now go see what else she has written and try and consume that as well.  I think, there is a possibility she might be a great writer.  It is also an easy read at around 200 pages and that is hard to beat when on Vacation.

Spoiler Alert! It does not necesarily end with sunshine and roses.

Universal Harvest: John Darnielle

Soooo….John Darnielle… lead guitarist, songwriter, singer, leader of “The Mountain Goats” who also aspires as an author.  His first novel “The Wolf In The White Van” was nominated for the National Book Award and was in a lot of ways a great little book.  That is one of the nicest things I can say about an author, that they write “little” books.  There is tendency especially after the first novel to, for lack of a better term bloviate, following their success, believing (apparently) that they have so much more to share.  Kudos to Darnielle for not getting to impressed with himself.

That being said it is a difficult book.  Set primarily in Iowa.  It explores families and according to Darnielle in particular mothers. It is fitting to be banking out a review of it on Mother’s Day but it is part of Darnielle’s somewhat dark take on the world that it is difficult to view this as a “homage”.  We have mothers who have disappeared and mothers who have apparently died. Families seem to come unmoored, at best, when bereft of even a mentally ill mother.

It all kind of starts around a spooky premise of a guy working at a video store who starts to get reports that “there is something weird” on this tape.  The story is set in the 80’s primarily and it is heartening to the baby boomer in me to have such detailed discussions of VCR’s and small video rental stores which used to be a hallmark of the suburbs and small towns and he name checks a lot of movies as he sets the stage.  The “something” tends to be someone recording over a portion of the video for some vaguely described yet very disturbing “vignettes”.  Implied violence...perhaps even torture but certainly troubling images that disturb people's days, nights, sleep and for some, their lives, which is the case of the video store owner who recognizes in these tapes something familiar and goes to investigate.

For me, perhaps due to disjointed reading I found the book somewhat confusing even though well written.  He really does a good job dealing with basic family, basic dysfunction, basic dysfunctional families. Some of the relationships just seem very personal but very real.  There is not a lot of action in the book but there is a lot of, relationship...dialogue and angst...especially in the context of Iowa.  One of the big things I took from it all was that there is a lot of trouble in even the calmest, most boring and apparently sedate households.  Almost Biblical… there is always more than enough trouble to go around and that old canard that happy families are always happy in the same way and unhappy families… there are a million ways and Darnielle explores a couple.

I cant tell you to buy this and read it but it is well written and it is interesting and if I had read it sober each night it might have fit together better for me.  

Soooo….an author friend of mine chided me for not reading the collective works of Heinrich Boll prior to my 50’s...55 to be exact.  He told me that he broke up with a girl in college for not having read him.  Naturally this exacerbated my mid life feelings of inadequacy.  I then ran in to references of Boll’s work in some Latin authors and finally… I had to break down and see what all the hubbub is about… or was about.  I started with “Billiards At Half Past Nine”.  It was a difficult read but an excellent read.  A lot of complexity and flashing back in Germany pre and post war.  Beautifully written but hard.

It was good enough that I wanted more so the next time I went for “The Train Was On Time”.   Boll was born in 1917 and saw the rise of Nazi Germany and was later drafted into the Wehrmarcht where he served in eastern Europe prior to being captured by the Americans in 1945.  

The book...the book “The Train Was On Time” is a 133 page jewel of depression and hoplessness.  The story line could not be simpler.  A soldier gets on a train to go to the Eastern front.  He knows he is going to die at a particular place and time… and the whole trip is just he and the other children...traveling towards their and particularly his fate.  

I dont think I have ever read a story that so convincingly tells the tale of how was degrades and dehumanizes the participants.  The hopelessness of the whole enterprise for those actually called to carry it out.  He makes friends.  They ride on the train.  The sleep.  They drink Schnaaps.  The go places.  

All on a relentless journey as he remembers where he came from and moves towards his inevitable demise.  You crawl inside his head as he rides.  He remembers.  He describes the other soldiers.  He befriends two.  One of them a sergeant.  They travel together to Lvov.  Who knew Lvov actually existed.  A city in the Ukraine… occupied.  The sergeant takes him and he spends the last night of his life deconstructing himself in conversations with a partisan prostitute.  Devestating in its bleakness.  

This book is a great read because the story doesnt have any action.  It just has an internal monologue and some dialogue and the dialogue is sparse.  Our protagonist Andreas gets on the train in Germany, screaming out the window unheard over the screech of the train, “I DONT WANT TO DIE.”  And the you go on a ride to Lvov…

What could go wrong?

The Nix: Nathan Hill

Soooo…. We are well into the new year and I am just finishing the book I was reading when the year ended.  Not because it was hard to read but because I am an old man who only gets in 10-20 pages a night before the eyes just get too… heavy.  Very sad, brain plasticity among so many other things deteriorating.  Ah well.  

So this book was on a lot of short lists for best book of 2016 and it is with good reason:

http://ew.com/gallery/best-books-2016/the-20-best-books-of-2016

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28251002-the-nix

A New York Times 2016 Notable Book

Entertainment Weekly's #1 Book of the Year

A Washington Post 2016 Notable Book

A Slate Top Ten Book

I would concur with the gushing.  It is author Nathan Hill’s first novel and other than winning some prizes for his short stories he had not been on anyone’s radar.  This is a really ambitious first novel, essentially the story of a screwed up (really, really screwed up) mother son relationship and you spend a great deal of time dealing with the results of the dysfunction but more importantly he unravels the causes of it and at the same time pokes at, but does not really explore our current societal, political maelstrom with a blowhard hate speech candidate.

The main backstory in the novel unfolds during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago  and it is a pretty dark picture.  Walter Cronkite appears as a beleaguered hero of sorts, Hubert Humphrey cannot believe his crowning moment is unfolding amongst violence, pepper spray and the stink of blood and death from the convention which was close to the Chicago Stockyards.  In what I hope was an apocryphal scene the candidate is obsessively showering to get the stink off of him.  There is some pretty good commentary about police, policing and the specter of violence and the manipulation of these images and Alan Ginsberg makes a brief appearance.

But that is not the only story as our main protagonist, the son, a failing writer/college professor is dealing with an entitled co ed when his long estranged mother is arrested for terrorism (throwing a handful of pebbles at the Trumpian candidate).  After that...events begin to unfold with childhood nightmares and romances disclosed and ultimately explained.  In a portion of the novel we delve into the son’s excessive video game immersion as an adult and his on line friend Pwnage who is the mightiest of warriors in ElfQuest.  This gaming series and exploration of the characters relationships in real life and on line is...troubling.

With 50 pages left I was a little frustrated because I could not imagine how he would tie it up successfully but… he does.  He does not put a bow on it but ends it honestly with the characters working towards reconciliation of relationships as they try and first reconcile with themselves.  

I think this is the best modern literary fiction has to offer and it is worth the extended pages.  Read it.  You will see things in the narrative that resonate.

My Documents: Alejandro Zambra

A Beautifully written, perfect book of longish stories. All connected by nothing other than Chile and a male narrator. I could travel to Chile and in fact hope to, and never will experience the depth of the culture Zambra paints of a beautiful and historically rich culture with a serious politics problem.

He paints beautiful pictures with each story of a place that has confused Orwellian juxtapositions of meaning, without all the other aspects of an obvious police state. Most of these political aspects are background noise related to the fall and return of Pinochet. 11 stories in 5 sections and translated by Megan Mc Dowell.  The narrator is inevitably either a boy or a young man negotiating the complexity of family, school, computers, smoking, sex, soccer migraines, writing and relationships sometimes with a feeling similar to the lead character in the novel "Being There".  His story of a writer quitting smoking made me want to take it up myself. He does the math on the cash outlays for cigarettes in his life and determines that he is the type of person who chose to smoke, rather than to buy a house.

The writing is just... perfect and the lines resonate as do the confused processes of adolescence when one of his characters insists on classifying everything in his life as "true" or "false".  The narrator is at once involved from all the action and removed from it. He creates worlds inside and outside of his characters' heads and allows us to... Fall in.

A great vacation book. I found it on Mc Sweeneys. Always a great filter for the new and the bold. Your welcome.
http://www.mcsweeneys.net

"The Tsar of Love and Techno"...the Diner Review

Soooo…. the Diner Review has been absent and perhaps…. unmissed.  Perhaps 2016 will be different.  Perhaps not.  The future with this writer is as always…. sketchy.  We are coming up on the year end however and that leads to some reflections, some lists and perhaps even some new year's resolutions.  While not getting to the other two as of yet, you should resolve to read “The Tsar of Love and Techno”.  This 332 page tome by Anthony Marra is the best thing that I read in 2015 and I am grateful that it will be the last thing I finish for the year.  I will bo go back and read his previous novel, “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” because this was just so good. My devotion to the book is evidenced by my continuation of reading it, even after my dog devoured a portion of it.

The book is more than a little fantastic on a number of levels but follows some nine “related” individuals through 80 years from Stalin to modern (post Chechen) Russia.  It starts with an artist who has found himself in the job of correcting art and photographs of Mother Russia, post revolution where people were, purged, murdered or sent to Siberia.  He erases these individuals images from the state record and does it both quickly and artistically.  For reasons known only to him he replaces the images of these individuals with a picture of someone else, always the same person...artfully rendered.

When he is finally “reported” as a traitor and suffers his fate the story moves to the Arctic Circle and a community that produces nickel for the State in a way that is not totally environmentally friendly and we follow the actors, and a painting down through the generations and the Chechen War and love and death and drug dealing and panhandling and failures… and more failures with very little sense of triumph, other than the spirit or lack thereof of his characters and the sense that every life is a noble struggle, even if the face of relentless marginalization imposed by the State and meaningless related once again to the state.

His characters and tone perfect and he writes with seeming first hand knowledge of the Orwellian society imposed by Communism and even more insidiously… in post Communism.  The Russian people have never really suffered a day of Democracy and although it certainly is not a cure all one wonders whether a real representative government would have made a difference...or not.  The characters are dense and there are a lot of them to follow and with the Russian names and my limited brain plasticity it was sometimes a challenge but in the end… this is a great book and a great read that will take you outside your mind and outside the problems of our own country and maybe to the realization that we continue to be the luckiest people in the world, and yet our lives without all the imposed suffering, might be a little less meaningful.

Book Reviews: "The Unknowns" and "David and Goliath"

Sooooo… This could hypothetically be a good year for reading.  I have just finished two more books that I was reading...simultaneously!  Unbelievable  I did not know I could read anymore but denying myself the newspapers and news might have been healthy.  So two books… “David and Goliath” by Malcolm Gladwell… arguably non fiction and “The Unknowns” by Gabriel Roth.  I had read another of Gladwell's books but never one of his big insight books like “The Outliers”.  I had never read the Roth guy before.  I think it might be his first book.

“David and Goliath” was really good.  It starts with the the recounting of the Biblical story of…. David and Goliath.  It is all based on the premise that we look at a lot of things wrong.  In regard to David and Goliath we are talking about the view that David, over unbelievable odds pulled off this miracle slaying of Goliath.  Gladwell informs us that the story could not have ended any other way.  A talented guy with a sling can land it on a face 200 yards away and Goliath (and King Saul) were all expecting a hand to hand battle.  So David did not wine because of God or destiny.  He one because he was thinking of a different battle, he prepared for that battle and he destroyed his opponent… who according to Gladwell, never had a chance.

Gladwell then goes on to give a bunch more examples of this type of thinking from classroom size, to money and parenting, successful dyslexics and underdog teams.   The premise is that adversity  can be an advantage.  I like books like this because they make me think but… from my limited perspective he draws well researched examples and uses them to illustrate whatever point he is trying to make.  This is one of the reasons that demagogues like Glenn Beck LOVE Gladwell because he, like they, uses these examples to support their false narratives.  I don’t know whether Gladwell is right but it gets pedantic and uninteresting as he pulls aberrant examples of things which in his mind disprove the norm.  Not a bad read but… miss it.

The second book however is excellent fiction read. Gabriel Roth has written what I think is his debut called “The Unknowns”.  It is the story of a nerd and it is a pretty good one. It opens with the nerd who has killed it with a start up going to a party and in attempting to meet the love of his life ends up going home and doing ecstasy with the girl he did not mean to be with.  I have no experience with that particular drug but from his description of how it felt when he was done, it seems like something for an old man to avoid.

The book flashes back to how he got molded into a dot.com millionaire with his high school nerd friend and all the social awkwardness and family problems that damaged him but eventually he finds (stalks) the aformentioned girl of his dreams.  She is indeed the girl of his dreams but like everyone has some damaged baggage.  He handles the difficulties related with the trust issues involved in every relationship… not so well.  

It is well written and a good read and of the two books if I was looking to get outside my life (and I always am) I would recommend the Roth book.  Read, have fun.  Be a human being. It could still happen. Even for you.

Book Review of Nicholson Baker's "The Traveling Sprinkler"

Soooo…. Nicholson Baker.  A national treasure?  Maybe not.  A really, REALLY solid contemporary author...absolutely.  This guys body of work is as good as it gets for a guy still kicking around.  “Vox” and “The Fermatta” knocked me out 20 years ago and he has published good work since those.  He is a maturing guy who after those books had the elbow room to write what he wants.  The books range from Presidential assassination fantasies to diatribes questioning the politically correct narratives of World War II.  All of it cogently written in a particular voice.  That voice also lent itself to storytelling in “The Everlasting Story of Nori”.  If you want an overview of a diverse writers life, check his Wiki page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholson_Baker

“The Traveling Sprinker” brings us back poet/anthologist Paul Chowder (from his prior book “The Anthologist” who is struggling to write poems but instead forays into popular songwriting, dance music, electronica and beats.  It is a classic middle aged man’s take on his own mid-life crisis as he deals with:

Not knowing what to do with his life

Failed relationships that are not quite dead yet

Health issues

Cigars

Drinking

Childlessness…

and the like.  He uses the title subject as a nice metaphor for...everything. It is one of those things I refer to as a "tractor" sprinkler but it follows the course of the hose that feeds it as it goes on whatever path is set for it and waters and... lets just say there are a lot of metaphorical opportunities there.

But it is an endearing book and an easy read as he learns about modern music and listens to it and creates his own amidst what appears to be the abundant debris of his life.

He cannot keep his liberal politics out of it but throws off shattering statistics regarding deaths related to drone warfare while remembering his passion for the bassoon as he smokes cigars and tries to write, primarily in his car.  The portrait is one of a talented guy who is occasionally brilliant as he wanders, literally through his life and… other than the brilliant part, I could certainly relate.  

The lead character is also a Quaker and I know nothing about Quakers so found that interesting.  The idea of going to a “meeting” and sitting in silence and contemplation for an hour or so seems… very healthy.  I tend to only go to “meetings” where people are fighting about money or opening by saying, “Hi, my name is Mike and I am an…”.  I guess this is what I like about Baker as an author.  He takes me outside my realm of experience and really outside my normal way of thinking about things and there is something liberating about that in a book, but here is a comfortableness and reality to his characters that ring true.

Wives should read this to have a better handle on what a mess their husbands are.  Younger men should read it so they can see what they will become (and that is assuming everything works out) and middle aged men should read it so you can go, “that seems about right”.  

It is a nice read from a nice author.

Diner Book Review of "The Circle" by Dave Eggers

Soooo...Dave Eggers has been writing some of the better modern American prose for several years along with running his brilliant literary site Mc Sweeneys. This from Wikipedia:

Nonfiction

• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)
• Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers (co-authored with Daniel Moulthrop and Nínive Clements Calegari) (2005)
• Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated (co-compiled with Lola Vollen; with an introduction by Scott Turow) (2005)
• Zeitoun (2009)
• Visitants (2014)

Fiction

• You Shall Know Our Velocity (novel) (2002)
• Sacrament (revised and expanded version of You Shall Know Our Velocity) (2003)
• The Unforbidden is Compulsory; or, Optimism (novella) (2004)
• How We Are Hungry (short stories) (2004)
• Short Short Stories (short stories, part of the Pocket Penguin series) (2005)
• What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (novel) (2006)
• How the Water Feels to the Fishes (short stories; part of One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box) (2007)
• The Wild Things – novel inspired by Where the Wild Things Are (2009)
• A Hologram for the King (2012)
• The Circle (2013)

So lets call him “prolific”. I have always liked his stuff but he seems to write so elegantly that it sometimes seems to easy that it has the dreaded “look no hands” quality.  From the above I could whole heartedly recomend “Zeitoun”, his take on “The Wild Things”, “You Shgall Know Our Velocity” and “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”. His newest book, “The Circle” is a gem and extremely topical in the Google/Snowden/NSA world that we seem to live in now.  

The books narrator and main character is a young women who leaves college, works a little bit with her liberal arts degree at a local water company and lives with her parents who have health problems in her old home town.  But she gets hold of her best friend who is on the rise at “The Circle” which seems to be a thinly disguised substitute for Google (“Don’t Be Evil”).

She arrives on their campus and takes her entry level job but is soon swept up in the culture and the relentless nature of her job.  Clearly jobs at The Circle become much more like a life or a religion.  It is all in a veneer of “goodness”.  The greater good.  The good of the community.  Your own good.

But outliers become apparent even as The Circle extends health care to her ailing father and promotes her and entertains her.  The one thing never mentioned is actual compensation but that definitely seems secondary. A few men enter the picture.  her old boyfriend and two new love interests within The Circle, one of whom is very mysterious and might be a spy..for someone.  The Circle is relentlessly developing new products for the greater good.  Cheap, high resolution blue tooth cameras with audio for one and wrist monitors which monitor your vitals so you can track them and ultimately a plan to implant chips in all children so they will never be “lost”.  Soon there is a quest for everyone, espcially politicians to be “transparent” and have cameras on them all the time so that we, the public can know there are no backroom deals.  When our heroine has a minor abherant incidient with a kayak she comes to Jesus and becomes a transparency experiment and immediately has millions of people following her every word and actvity other than in the bathroom.  “Privacy is theft” and other concepts are introduced and adopted in a creepily believable way.

The Circle also among it’s many products develops a micro submarine allowing them to recover sea creatures from the Marianas Trench which they bring back to their own aquarium and it serves as a brilliant metaphor as novel develops with a particularly sinister shark.  The Circle moves towards its ultimate goal of “completion” wherein we are all connected for our own good and for the good of the community with the final act making it mandatory for all citizens of the US to have Circle accounts so that they can participate in mandatory voting for the ultimate participatory democracy.

He weaves and excellent but obviously evil spell and as the book itself moves towards “completion” there is a chance that are narrator could come to the rescue and… you really should read it.  Dystopia does not just happen, it starts with us voluntarily giving up freedoms for covenience.  A slippery slope indeed and Eggers really did a nice job here.  Buy it.