Archive for November, 2014

30 Nov

‘The Book of Strange New Things’ by Michel Faber – Bringing Our Religion to Another Planet

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , .

‘The Book of Strange New Things’ by Michel Faber   (2014) – 500 pages

 

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‘The Book of Strange New Things’, the new novel by Michel Faber, is much different from his ‘The Crimson Petal and the White’ which had a Victorian setting.  ‘Strange New Things’ mostly takes place in some unspecified future time on the planet Oasis.   A man called Peter travels there in order to bring Christianity to the sentient creatures who live there.  ‘The Book of Strange New Things’ is what these aliens call the Bible.

The novel itself is almost as big as a Bible, weighing in at 500 large gold-leafed pages.

Perhaps the best way to give you an idea of what this novel is like is to quote Peter’s description of these alien Oasan creatures.

 ‘Here was a face that was nothing like a face. Instead, it was a massive whitish-pink walnut kernel. Or no: even more, it resembled a placenta with two foetuses – maybe three-months-old twins, hairless and blind – nestled head to head, knee to forehead. Their swollen heads constituted the Oasan’s clefted cheeks, their spindly arms and webbed feet merged into a tangle of translucent flesh that might contain – in some form unrecognisable to him – a mouth, nose, eyes’. 

 Peter knew the Oasans had some sort of viewing units instead of eyes, but he couldn’t figure out where they were located.  The aliens have difficulty speaking sibilants.  Compared to the creatures one usually finds in science fiction, these are rather drab, ‘gentle, kind, humble, hard-working people’.

Peter keeps in frequent written communication with his wife Bea back on Earth via a device called the Shoot   Bea lets him know that things are falling apart on Earth with earthquakes and floods and other natural and man-made calamities devastating large areas of the world.

One of the reviewers on ‘GoodReads’, Mary Lins, wrote in regard to this novel that ‘I know I will be thinking about it for the next few days’.  Well I completed the book several days ago, and I have not thought about it since.  Michel Faber is a strong storyteller, and the story was quite interesting while I was reading it.  However I did not get any startling or original ideas or insights from the novel.  The Christian evangelizing was old hat even if it was on another planet.   It seemed like Faber made the landscape and the creatures of this planet Oasis as drab and commonplace as possible.

I must admit that science fiction is not a genre I often read, but I did like Michel Faber’s first sci-fi novel ‘Under the Skin’ a lot, and ‘The Crimson Petal and the White’ was wonderful.  In ‘Strange New Things’ there just did not seem to be enough story to warrant all the writing.

For me, the pay-off did not match the time and effort spent on ‘The Book of Strange New Things’.

 

23 Nov

‘Effi Briest’ by Theodor Fontane – Effi B. versus Emma B.

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , .

‘Effi Briest’ by Theodor Fontane  (1896) – 235 pages    Translated by William A. Cooper

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Having read ‘Effi Briest’ now and re-read ‘Madame Bovary’ quite recently, I am in the somewhat fortunate position to be able to compare and contrast these two young women with the same initials and quite similar fates.

‘Effi Briest’ begins with seventeen year old Effi in the backyard playing with her friends Bertha, Hertha, and Hulda.  Effi is a high-spirited and fun loving girl. Parents usually want the best for their daughters, and the parents of Effi are no exception.  So when a financially well-established man, Innstetten, asks the parents for Effi’s hand in marriage, they agree.  Innstetten is an old friend of the family, in fact a former suitor of the mother.    He is more than twenty years older than Effi, and the parents do have doubts about the arrangement, but they do decide it is for the best.

screen-shot-2014-09-24-at-07-23-25For me one of the most poignant scenes in ‘Effi Briest’ is after the wedding when her parents sit around the kitchen table discussing the suitability of this arranged marriage.  I wonder how often today parents pause to discuss the quality of their children’s marriages.

Meanwhile the marriage in ‘Madame Bovary’ is not an arranged one as Charles Bovary actively courts Emma Rouault before they marry.  Still he too is about twenty years older than Emma.   Charles Bovary is a doctor who is dedicated to his work, and soon Emma is making fun of him behind his back.  She regards him as boring and a stick-in-the-mud, and her contempt for him grows.  She is fascinated with Parisian high society and has little use for the dull doctor, her husband.  She also spends a lot of the good doctor’s hard-earned money.

At the same time Effi Briest admires her husband even though he is somewhat cold and distant. ‘Innstetten was kind and good but he was not a lover.’  The problem here is that he lives far to the north in Germany in the seaport town of Kessin.  Effi must leave her parents and friends, and she is somewhat lost and lonely in her new surroundings.

So here is a major difference between Effi and Emma.  Effi is essentially a good girl who is overwhelmed and distracted by her severe isolation.  However Emma is mischievous and ready for trouble from the very beginning.

Trouble does arrive for both Emma and Effi in the form of a young man.  I suppose there has never been a shortage of young men out to seduce pretty young women.  Rodolphe of ‘Madame Bovary’ and Major Crampas in ‘Effi Briest’ are both womanizers of the first order.

Hanna Schygulla as Effi Briest

Hanna Schygulla as Effi Briest

Theodor Fontane is quite discreet about Effi’s affair with Major Crampas.  Effi goes off alone for long walks in the woods or along the river and comes back alone a couple of hours later.  We never have a scene of the two of them by themselves together.  Meanwhile in ‘Madame Bovary’, Rodolphe is not Emma’s first affair, and we do actually see them getting it on in the woods during their horse riding.  Although ‘Effi Briest’ was written nearly forty years after ‘Madame Bovary’, ‘Madame Bovary’ is the much more explicit novel.

Since both Effi and Emma have committed that most heinous of crimes, adultery, they both must be punished severely.  In both cases the adultery is found out by hidden secret letters several years later. In Emma’s case, adultery didn’t bring her down; it was her spendthrift ways. Effi Briest remains a kind worthy person until the bitter end.

The difference between Effi Briest and Emma Bovary is as follows.  Effi is a good young woman driven by loneliness to temporarily go bad.  Emma is a forever mischievous troublemaker but loveable.

 

 

My review of ‘Madame Bovary’ can be found here.

 

16 Nov

‘F’ by Daniel Kehlmann – How Do We Mediocre People Live?

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , .

‘F’ by Daniel Kehlmann (2013) – 272 pages     Translated by Carol Brown Janeway

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‘F’ raises some of the major questions of life, yet somehow manages to be playful.  At the same time it is a well-constructed work of fiction.

‘F’ is about a father and his three sons coming to terms or not coming to terms with our post-modern world.  Not that the modern world before had been all that great what with the Great Depression and World War II.

But in the post-modern world, even the priests don’t believe in the sacraments they perform or even in God.  Many businessmen and politicians cheat and defraud but are rarely punished.  And of course the art world and museums are rife with hype and fakes.  ‘Sheer noise triumphs over quality.’

36fac0f98daab33866b736ced92788b1The father Arthur is an author who walks out on his family to pursue his writing after an auto-suggestion from the hypnotist, the Great Lindemann. The sons grow up.  One son Martin is a fat priest who still is intrigued by the Rubik’s Cube, one son Eric is a stock broker living the high life but contemplating suicide, and one son Ivan is a gay artist and art critic.

‘F’ is by no means what I would call a ‘straight line’ traditional novel.  It is definitely post-modern.  It resists any simple plot explanation and it raises a lot of questions it doesn’t answer.  That is a good thing.  Each of the sons gets to tell his story.

One of the many questions ‘F’ asks is ‘How do people who are mediocre manage to live their lives?’  Ivan wrote his dissertation on ‘Mediocrity as an Aesthetic Phenomenon’.

“Ivan often wondered how people with no particular gifts put up with their existence.” 

Each brother has his own way of dealing with Ivan’s question — how do you live with mediocrity, why do you keep on going?   The general answer in ‘F’ seems to be that we fake it.

“If I kept on painting, I would be average at best.  Would that be terrible? Most people are average by definition.”

Although the tone of ‘F’ is light and playful, it is not an easy novel. However it is a rewarding one.  I had to listen to the entire novel twice to get its full effect.  One chapter is a story, ‘Family’, the father Arthur wrote.  He has no memory at all of his own father, but he traces his ancestors back to medieval times. The story seems to point out how random and stupid fate is that we are here today.

18339155So what does the ‘F’ stand for?  My best guesses are ‘Fate’ or ‘Fake’.  Maybe the two are interchangeable in our post-modern world.

 

My review of ‘Fame’, Daniel Kehlmann’s previous novel, can be found here.

 

13 Nov

‘Brewster’ by Mark Slouka – In High School During the Late Sixties

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , .

‘Brewster’ by Mark Slouka  (2013) – 281 pages

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‘Brewster’ is centered on a guy in high school growing up in the town of Brewster in New York during the late Sixties and 1970.  The temptation and the downfall of many novels about the late Sixties is to overdo it, the hippies, Right On!, Make Love not War, Power to the People, Woodstock Nation, the Mansons, Flower Power.  All have become stereotypes, clichés of a past time that is long gone.   ‘Brewster’ pretty much avoids the cliché problem by concentrating on its dramatic high school story.

Sixteen year old Jon Mosher is somewhat of a lonely figure in his high school, eating lunch by himself most days.  Then his World History teacher notices Jon and sees that he has just the right build, tall and thin, for long distance running on the high school track team.   It turns out that Jon is well-suited for competition, and soon he is devoted to practicing and running races at which he excels. In track, Jon has found something he can believe in, and that makes all the difference.  These are some of the best scenes in ‘Brewster’.

Jon’s parents are German-Jewish refugees from World War II who “slipped through the closing door with a suitcase apiece and started again”.  When Jon was four, he lost a brother due to a household accident, and his mother continues to be distraught over this twelve years later.

 “I think now they just broke.  People break, just like anything else.  They’d lost just about everything once, now they’d lost it again.  And they broke.  No more to it.

 I’m not making any claim to anything.  You read worse stories in the paper every day.”

 At high school, Jon makes a close friend in Ray Cappicciano who is much different from himself.  Ray is a rebel and a fighter who has family problems of his own.  Soon Ray gets a girlfriend Karen and the three teenagers hang out together.

So in ‘Brewster’, we have scenes of track field drama juxtaposed with scenes of intense sometimes violent family drama.  This is a novel of foreboding where the tension mounts as the story progresses.  This is neither a humorous novel nor an intellectual novel.  It is about some high school kids growing up and finding out some more about what life is like.  The background music is of course the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Credence Clearwater Revival and Jimi Hendrix, and these high school boys know that their future is probably either college or Vietnam.

Mark Slouka is a very sure storyteller, and ‘Brewster’ held my interest throughout.  I became heavily involved in these young people’s lives and kept reading to find out what will happen next.

 

9 Nov

‘Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?’ by Roz Chast

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

‘Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?’ by Roz Chast   a graphic memoir   (2014) –  228 pages

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Can you imagine a graphic memoir that contains cartoon pictures of the writer’s aged parents just after they have died?  There are a whole series of pictures here of the author’s mother as she goes through the last stages before death.  Yes, the decline and ultimate death of one’s aging parents which is the subject of this book is unpleasant.  It is a natural part of life.

In this graphic memoir Roz Chast gives an honest account of her parents’ final days told from the perspective of a usually caring but sometimes exasperated daughter.

Both parents are in their nineties.  The two parents take different routes to their final destination.  He is prone to forgetting things, a touch of senile dementia which steadily increases.  The mother has mainly physical symptoms like high blood pressure, arthritis, and digestive ailments.  The mother has been and still is a demanding person, and the daughter still has unresolved issues with her from childhood.

The financial considerations are covered here too as she sees her parents’ life savings evaporate with the huge costs of assisted living.  Chast makes no attempt to prettify the whole aging and death process.   She throws in her own mixed feelings about her parents and their situation.  This openness about the subject of parental decline and death that has been shrouded in secrecy is refreshing.

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The visuals really drove this story home for me.  As well as the cartoons which reminded me of Jules Feiffer in their loose style, Chast includes actual photographs from her childhood of her parents and herself.   In one ten-page section she shows us photographs of all the objects and clutter in her parents’ last home after they moved into assisted living.  Nearly all of it will be thrown away.

 “I began the massive, deeply weird, and heartbreaking job of going through my parents’ possessions – almost fifty years’ worth, crammed into four rooms.  If I wanted mementos, it was now or never.”

 The book even deals with what to do with the urns that contain her parents’ ash remains, a thorny problem.

In my own case, I was one of those offspring that left the immediate area where my parents lived, so I did not have to deal with all these aging parents’ problems.  I had a brother and sister-in-law that handled all of that for me.  ‘Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?’ gave me a good idea of what it must have been like for them.

 

6 Nov

‘The Night of the Iguana’ by Tennessee Williams – At the End of their Ropes

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , .

‘The Night of the Iguana’ by Tennessee Williams   a play (1961) – 137 pages

‘Nothing human disgusts me, Mr. Shannon, unless it is unkind or violent.’ – Tennessee Williams,  The Night of the Iguana

‘If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.’ – Tennessee Williams, Conversations With Tennessee Williams

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‘The Night of the Iguana’, written in 1961, was Tennessee Williams’ last hit play, running for ten months and 316 performances on Broadway in its original run.  As Howard Taubman in his original review of the play stated, Williams is “writing at the top of his form”.  Williams had had a spectacular run of hits on Broadway and in the movies including ‘The Glass Menagerie’, ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’, ‘The Rose Tattoo’, and ‘Sweet Bird of Youth’ as well as the movie ‘Baby Doll’.

In 1963 Williams lost his long-time lover and personal secretary Frank Merlo who must have been a stabilizing influence on him.  The loss plunged him into a near catatonic depression and increasing drug and alcohol use resulting in several hospitalizations and commitments.

But Williams’ fabulous glory days were beyond compare.  He dominated the American theatre in the late 1940s and 1950s as no one has done since.  Nearly all of his plays then were turned into well-regarded movies. The film rights to ‘The Glass Menagerie’ were the highest that had ever been paid for a Broadway play.  Even today his plays are constantly being revived on Broadway.  A new production of ‘The Night of the Iguana’ is scheduled for Broadway in 2015.

‘The Night of the Iguana’ is unique in that it takes place in an exotic resort on the west coast of Mexico.  Just like the two iguanas tied up at this cheap hotel, the humans here are trying to escape their personal plights but are at the end of their ropes.

The play centers on a bus driver named Shannon.  A former minister who was kicked out of his church, Shannon is now driving a tour bus full of traveling woman teachers.  Shannon has a brief adventure with an underage girl accompanying the group, and the group leader wants to report him to the bus company management.  So Shannon deflects the bus from its normal route to this remote resort run by his friends, in hopes of not getting reported.  The woman who runs the resort, Maxine, has lost her husband about a month ago and is trying to lure Shannon with her sexual charms to stay and help her run the resort. Shannon resists. Meanwhile there are an old man and his granddaughter, Nonno and Hannah, staying at the hotel who are also trapped in a hopeless gypsy-like existence.  The conversation between Shannon and Hannah near the end of the play is one of the most moving scenes in all of theater.

The timeframe of the play is 1940, and there are some German tourists at the resort who are rejoicing in the bombings of London which they hear about on their radio, much to the unspoken annoyance of everyone else.

USDespite its Mexican backdrop, ‘The Night of the Iguana’ is still very much a Southern Gothic like most of Williams plays.  Nearly all the main characters are transplanted from the American South.   It contains what you would expect from a Tennessee Williams play, raunchy flamboyant characters who are emotionally overwrought and seeking moral redemption.   Williams is particularly good with his female characters in that each has her own distinct personality and way of being.

”Purists of the craft may object that, strictly speaking, The Night of the Iguana does not go anywhere. In the deepest sense, it does not need to. It is already there, at the moving, tormented heart of the human condition.” – TIME magazine reviewer

I also watched the excellent movie adaptation of ‘The Night of the Iguana’ starring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, and Deborah Kerr.

A new biography of this tortured genius, ‘Tennessee Williams – Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh’ by John Lahr, has recently been published.

 

2 Nov

‘Truth in Advertising’ by John Kenney – Humor at the Office

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , .

‘Truth in Advertising’ by John Kenney   (2013) – 306 pages

 

Truth_In_Advertsing‘Truth in Advertising’ won this year’s James Thurber prize for American humor.  It is a devastatingly sharp satire on corporate life, particularly the advertising world.

 “There are two kinds of creative people in advertising.  Those who think they are smarter than the client and those who are successful.”

 Our hero, Finbar Dolan, works on the diaper account for a large ad agency in New York.  The joke here is that all these high level executives, creative directors, and creative writers go about their job of making diaper advertisements for TV with the utmost seriousness.  Their ultimate challenge is to make a diaper commercial to be aired during the Super Bowl.

  “Then there’s the rest of us. Me and my coworkers. We do diapers. We do little chocolate candies. We do detergent and dishwashing liquid and air fresheners and toilet paper and paper towels and prescription drugs. Our commercials have cartoon animals or talking germs. It’s the stuff you see and think, Blessed Mother of God, what idiot did that? That idiot would be me. I make the commercials wherein you turn the sound down or run to the toilet.”

 John Kenney writes humor pieces for the New Yorker.  This is his first novel and he does capture the ridiculousness of office life with a mocking vengeance.  I know, I’ve been there.

Finbar quotes one of his bosses on advertising:

 “It’s my religion, it’s my personal Jesus.  And it is also incredibly profitable.  Can I refresh your drink?”

 Actually there are two stories in ‘Truth in Advertising’.  One is this uproarious story about office life at the ad agency, but also there is the poignant personal and family story involving the death of Finbar’s estranged father.  The tone of these two stories is so totally different that they don’t fit together so well.  While the tone of the ad agency story is super wise guy and cynical, the tone of the family story winds up being somewhat sentimental.   The comedy shines; the melodrama is somewhat sappy.

But the parallel stories do hold together due to the voice of Finbar Dolan, the main character. Finbar’s quest for meaning takes him far afield from the advertising world.  ‘Truth in Advertising’ has the familiar theme that perhaps the best way to having a good life is not living larger but instead living better.

The bottom line on ‘Truth in Advertising’ is that it captures the wild-ass comedy of the advertising world, not so much the family drama.

 “Cynicism is very dangerous in advertising.  You must be a believer.  If you stray, if you start questioning its worth and validity, its credibility, you are in for a very long day.”

 Read ‘Truth in Advertising’ for its insights into advertising and office life.