amulet

by Roberto Bolaño, 1999
184pp
12/14/07-12/22/07

I'd probably never regret the act of reading, were it not for the certainty that there are so damned many good books out there I'd like to read. Every week the New York Times, Fresh Air, and the front table at Borders bring ten or twenty noteworthy new books to my attention; of these, a good three or four sound worth reading, at least until I forget about them, or they're revealed as massive hoaxes. So when I try out a book and don't like it, I'm keenly aware of the book I could've been reading.

I was taken in by some year-end hype when I picked up this book. Bolaño's The Savage Detectives appeared on NYT's "Top 10 Novels of 2007" list. That book was made to sound interesting, but its length made it a dodgy proposition. I decided to sample some of Bolaño's shorter writing.

Also of some relevance when I picked up this book: I've particularly enjoyed a few Hispanic/Latin American creators the past year or so: the Hernandez brothers, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Salvador Plascencia, even Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to a certain extent. I figured I was on some kind of kick, and thought I'd follow through with "[h]is generation's premier Latin-American writer."

To be sure, maybe I would've appreciated this book if I actually knew a thing or two about Latin American writers of any generation. This is the first-person account of the toothless, Uruguayan "Mother of Mexican Poetry." Though she writes no poetry herself, she cavorts with the artists and Bohemians of Mexico City in the late 60s. Kind of like A Moveable Feast, only the Mexican version. Despite my recent interest, I am entirely ignorant of Mexican writers (or Latin American, for that matter), so I'm unclear as to whether the writers & artists the narrator spends her time with are fictitious, or actual pillars of a genuine Mexican literary scene. I could quickly consult Wikipedia to clear this up, but am for some reason disinclined.

Further proof of my ignorance: this book largely centers around the apparently notorious political unrest of Mexico City, 1968. Eurocentric that I am, I was rather more familiar with Paris's troubles of that year. Apparently the University of Mexico was invaded by the Army, and it seems that this event was seared into the consciousness of the Mexican people. What next, Mexican Situationists?


So, I'm thinking an art director designed a really good dust jacket for this book, but on her way down the hall to her boss's office, she bumped into an art director who happened to be working on some homoerotic bodice-ripper, papers flew from the portfolio of the one art director into the portfolio of the other art director, and amulet ended up with this gay-ass cover.

Pnin

by Vladimir Nabokov
191pp
11/24/07-12/14/07

This is as good a place as any for an apology. I've gotten way behind in my blogging. I apologize to the internet, and to the housing market, for good measure.

Thus I really can't remember why exactly I picked up this book almost couple of months ago. I seem to recall there being some mention of Nabokov. And then he came up again in that godawful "Sex Children" piece in Best American Essays. So I guess I felt like finally getting around to reading Nabokov, if not at the most obvious starting point. My selection probably had something to do with its mention in this cute piece in Slate.

Is "academic satire" a genre? I suppose this is a sort of "campus novel", one that, like Lucky Jim, is more concerned with professors than coeds. Professor Timofey Pnin is a sweetly foreign professor at a small Eastern college a decade before campus unrest; a time when academia was an elbow-patched, cocktail-swilling, boys' club. Pnin seems socially inept, but it's more fair to say he's doubly out of place, in America & in its rarefied university atmosphere. Pnin's frequent confusion and mangled English are played for comic effect, or at least the kind of comic effect that ran in The New Yorker in the Fifties. That's really about all I remember about the book.

One memory of the act of reading it stands out, however: I had to wait several minutes on a cold MARTA platform, entertaining a three year-old until the train arrived. I'd not been prepared for this, and had only this paperback in my pocket. Anyhow, I must have kept her attention for twenty minutes with this book. The book's action couldn't have interested her--something about renting an apartment in a university town--but the words kept her attention, which struck me as a serious testament to Nabokov's craft. A creative writing workshop could probably do worse than require students to read their pieces to three year-olds.



This cover initially struck me as terribly bland & unimaginative, but while reading the book I realized the photo's practically a literal illustration, and may well have been staged for just this purpose. The image of a man and a squirrel on a path comes up two or three times, and I don't know that I would have noticed if not for the cover.

Four Trials

by John Edwards, 2004
236pp
Read 11/20 - 12/10

For his unconventional 2004 campaign book, John Edwards chose to write an experimental sequel to Kafka' The Trial, making him the first candidate since Nixon (Six Crises, The Public Burning) to win the support of both postmodernist and expressionist voting blocks.

Sigh. In my world, Edwards secured the '04 nomination, and went on to win the presidency.

This in no ways constitutes an endorsement on the part of this humble blog, but I really think a lot of people--people well outside his current base--would warm up to Edwards after reading this book. (It could similarly affect attitudes toward plaintiffs' attorneys). Which, yes, is the point of campaign lit. And no, I've never read a single other presidential campaign book. I pretty willfully avoid them, and as such I presume to know a thing or two about them. Thus I can tell you that this is not a typical campaign book. It doesn't set forth any bold visions for America, nor does it primarily concern itself with relating Edwards' biography. Granted, it's impossible to read this book without coming away with a sense of Edwards' thoughts on personal & social justice, and you ought to be able to pass a quiz on his background and family. But the book cleverly embeds the electioneering inside a collection of compelling courtroom dramas. The real-life story arcs here are amazing, as is Edwards' finesse. Having taken trial practice classes in a North Carolina law school, I'd pretty well had it drilled into my head that Edwards is technically brilliant, but the book gives the reader some idea how superhumanly dedicated and hardworking that kind of lawyer has to be.

There is a single point, though, where Edwards' credibility falters: waiting on a jury verdict, he advises his client to reject a large settlement offer because it was less than his client "deserved." Bullshit. Edwards is a calculating professional, and he rejected the offer based solely on the probability of a higher award from the jury. Haughtily snubbing the offer out of abstract concerns for what his client "deserved" was never an option.



Borrowed book! I borrowed a book! Terrible human being that I am, I read this despite having at least two other borrowed books in the queue whose indulgent owners are probably running out of patience.

The Best American Essays: 2007

Edited by David Foster Wallace
307pp
Read 11/22 - 11/24

If you haven't figured out that the guy blogging about his favorite books is an elitist douche, consider this: over the Thanksgiving break, while so much of America (including my own family) spends a couple days straight eating leftovers and watching nonstop football, I had pretty much the equivalent binge with this collection of contemporary essays.

Which actually made for a nice holiday. I doubt I'd've enjoyed reading a novel of comparable length over the same time; at some point boredom, familiarity, and L-tryptophan would have gotten the better of me. I don't often read any kind of anthology, but I really enjoyed this little prose Whitman's Sampler.

Not to say that it was uniformly great. I'll freely admit to skimming the latter half of one of the Iraq pieces, and the insufferable exploration of teen sex appeal. As if that's even a topic. If anything, I'd maybe sacrifice some of the collection's dazzling diversity (while acknowledging that a diverse offering is a strength in this kind of collection) in favor of a greater emphasis on "craft."

Maybe this opinion is a vestige of AP English, or the "Art of Prose" course I once took, but, aside from poetry, nowhere is the painstaking effort and deliberation of the writer made more apparent than in a well-written essay. Here, the piece about Cesar, "the dog whisperer," serves as a good example. In 15 pages, Malcom Gladwell's keen eye reduces Cesar's "presence" to its constituent gestures, he renders them in lucid prose, and then extrapolates a couple of lessons in nonverbal communication and animal psychology. In the hands of the essayist, the stuff of everyday life is plainly, nakedly exposed in such a way that we see what we'd never noticed, and the universe is revealed in the quotidian. (In one of the above-mentioned courses, I remember reading Annie Dillard's piece about coming across a frog beset by a giant water bug, watching it ruck, rumple and fall. And somewhere between that description, those lilting verbs, and the exercise of labeling paragraphs descriptive, informative, or speculative, I had a blinding revelation.)

But affecting as it is, I sadly don't often read that kind of writing today. I've never really considered why, but I'm inclined to blame my cynicism. So I'd secretly hoped that this book would provide an occasion for that sort of reading. And it sometimes was. Everything I read was good, but only a couple of writers really put me in awe of their talent. And I'm convinced there could've been more of that kind of writing. In his introduction, DFW says something about how our nation's complicity in the reelection of GWB means that he left out "descriptive pieces on ferns" in favor of screeds about how America flaunts the rules of war. Which--speaking as someone who lets liberal guilt dictate a shameful number of daily decisions--I could give a shit about political whinging when considering good writing.



I've pretty much never seen David Foster Wallace's name on something and not bought it. Not that his introduction here is spectacular: the obligatory footnotes, a stale stab at political humor (an extended "decider" joke? really?), and some unimaginative wordplay (one can almost picture the scene, a high schooler in French II: "So 'essay' means 'to try?' I'm totally gonna use that in my next English composition!").

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel

by Rebecca Goldstein, 2005
296pp
10/18/07 - 11/11/07

When I was an undergrad, I read a lot more science than I do now: popular science writing, science biographies, and philosophy of science. This, in hindsight, is one of the few ways I'll acknowledge that going to an engineering school actually molded me. Not that my own studies had anything to do with any real engineering, science or math, but my friends mostly came from the computer science and physics schools. I don't know that I was aware of it at the time, but the people I surrounded myself with shared a peculiar set of reading habits. Very few people read literature--probably a good many would have told you that fiction doesn't matter--and everyone else seemed to pick their books from this limited pool of science books. James Gleick's Chaos was ubiquitous (I still remember the student bookstore's huge yellow piles of his FSTR, when that book came out), and so many people were reading the 25th anniversary edition of Gödel, Escher, Bach, that I'd assumed it had been assigned for some freshman lit class. And so for a couple of years there I let my peers' reading habits rub off on me. I suppose that if I'd been at a liberal arts college, I'd've been reading Dante, or whatever one reads to look deep and impress girls (which might be a nutshell summation of my understanding of a liberal arts education). Obviously, my current reading preferences have turned toward literature, and postmodern fiction in particular, but I probably have more of a taste for science writing than I would've had I not gone to Georgia Tech.

My choice of this particular book was prompted by two things: I'm currently in the middle of an audiobook version of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (incidentally I don't blog about audiobooks. Nor comic books or law books), and I came across this interview with R. Goldstein.

Despite having gotten about a third to halfway through the aforementioned GEB--the usual length for that book--I could not have told you a damned thing about the Incompleteness Theorems of Kurt Gödel, aside from how to pronounce his name. Maybe. Having read this book, I'm in a somewhat better position. Six months from now I will have forgotten entirely.

To be sure, this is 99% my own fault. This kind of explicatory writing about abstruse subjects cannot be read casually, or in short bursts. Often I would pick up the book, and spend ten or fifteen minutes refreshing myself as to, say, the technical meaning of "consistency" or Euclid's fifth postulate. Had I really dedicated myself to seriously reading Goldstein's explanation of incompleteness, I would not have so often lost her train of thought.

Having spoken in defense of Goldstein's writing, I can now proceed to offer criticism, hoping that Steven Pinker will not come to my apartment to beat me up.

Right in the heart of the densest, most difficult part of the book, when Goldstein's explaining the First Incompleteness Theorem, the reader--which reader obviously came to the table hoping to wrap his head around this central piece of 20th Cent mathematics--is asked to take a pretty huge leap of faith. After performing the admirable task of making Gödel numbering clear, Goldstein tells us that Pr(x), the property of "provability", is "a formally expressibly arithmetical property, albeit one that is extremely complicated, not anything that we can explicitly give here." Really? Not even, like, a little bit? I get that this is way too much math for my little head, I really do, but a sentence like that, stuck in this kind of book, bears a whiff of prestidigitation. Goldstein is in the process of blowing my mind by telling me (I think), that so abstract a property as the provability of a proposition, given the arbitrary system of Gödel numbers, can be expressed as a function, when she then tells me I'll just have to trust her (& 20th Cent mathematics) on that one. Which, I mean, I do. But I'd really appreciate it if as great and lucid writer as Goldstein at least made an attempt at my halfway understanding that particular point.

There's a lot more to this book than just Goldstein's accessible explanation of that remote area of math, even though that's the part (pp 150-188) that readers might be most interested in. It starts with a good bit of intellectual history, describing the Wiener Kreis to set the stage for a discussion of the philosophical implications of the Incompleteness Theorems. There's a really charming part at the end, where Goldstein describes her time as a grad student at Princeton, fascinated by the luminary in her own backyard. She then briefly and respectfully moves on to Gödel's paranoid demise; unfortunately the man was so withdrawn that I doubt anyone will ever be able to credibly write at length about the no-doubt fascinating world of his inner delusions.



This book comes to us from the "Great Discoveries" imprint, a hit-or-miss series of "Great Thinkers Thinking about Great Thinkers" books. I'm a big fan of DFW's Everything & More from this line, and Incompleteness could almost be read as the sequel to that book, or the next book in modern mathematics syllabus.

Strangely, between this book and American Prometheus I am accidentally getting a history of the Institute for Advanced Studies.

Bowl of Cherries

by Millard Kaufman, 2007
326pp
10/06/07 - 10/18/07

This book smells. Not a musty old book-smell. This book had an odor more like a rank cheese, or an active young boy who has not yet acquired proper hygiene habits. The odor summoned memories of certain children's books checked out from the local branch library when I was a kid. To be fair, the scent has diminished substantially since I brought the book home, but it's still there; you don't have to bury your nose between the pages to find it.

I mention the whole odor thing because McSweeney's "Rectangulars" imprint is remarkable, not just for the quality of literature published, but for quality in every aspect of the books they print. I can only surmise that San Francisco was particularly choked by a thick haze of bad incense on the day the galley proofs came to the office.

If I were asked to hold my nose and describe Bowl of Cherries in a single word, I suppose it might be "picaresque." Which adjective is perhaps too-easily overused in summaries and book reviews. This novel's protagonist/narrator, however, is not particularly charming, and though it does move a bit around the map, the action feels lackadaisically tugged from one place to the other, with little urgent purpose dictating the movement.

Judd Breslau, the narrator, is one of these improbably gifted young men of fiction. I was reminded of Hal Incandenza, not just because of his impressive vocabulary, but also because of his brilliance coupled with lack of purpose. When Judd is drummed out of Yale at age fourteen, and is sitting in his graduate advisor's office, I half-expected him to begin screeching.

It's a little curious that Kaufman makes his narrator a teenager, given that Kaufman himself is ninety. Breslau could have been ten years older and still have been a bright and youthful character. I realize that certain themes of wasted potential & the struggle to find purpose are identified with adolescence, but perhaps Mr. Kaufman doesn't realize the extremes to which adolescence has been stretched. I.e., thirty is the new twenty-one, or whatever Parade Magazine and the rest say.

This book is best when at its most bookish. In it's impressive first few pages. Breslau's narration takes us through Mesopotamian history, from the Stone Age to present day in the space of a page or two. Elsewhere he displays a casual familiarity with history & great thinkers, effortlessly expressed with some great words (e.g., "fettle"). I was interested in reading the adventures of this young intellectual. Through most of the book, though, Breslau behaves as a pretty ordinary young man, particularly when driven by a young man's hormones.



It should be obvious by now that I have no problem discussing a book without thoroughly addressing its plot. Likewise, I have no compunction about dropping spoilers, not that this book's flashback-narrative structure leaves much room for "spoliation." I do have one comment to make about Bowl of Cherries' plot: the unexpected reemergence of the narrator's absent father at a novel's end is every bit as ineluctable as the firing of the gun introduced in a play's first act.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

by James Hogg, 1824
248pp
09/07/07 - 10/06/07

Sometimes a book takes too long. I liked this book, but spent two or three weeks wishing I was done with it. Part of this is owing to the book itself: older novels tend to go slower for me, likewise novels that are driven largely by internal, psychological action. My own circumstances contributed as well: I moved to a new town and started a new job; sometimes even people who make time for reading find that there's simply no time for reading. To be sure, I'm glad I read the book, and at no time was I willing to put it down without finishing it, but it's a shame when the reading experience is tainted by impatience like that.

When I started this book, I was on an 18th Century kick (though written in 1824, the book is set mostly in 1704), which began with Tristram Shandy, and carried me through a re-watching of Barry Lyndon, as well as a few others.

Maybe my thinking here is influenced by having recently read Tristram Shandy, but in some ways this reads more like a contemporary novel than an 18th Cent. Scottish gothic novel. There's a weird theme of "doubling" here. People repeatedly have some sort of mirror images: the main character is presented as his brother's nemesis; at the same time he is paired with a shape-shifting figure who seems to be his spiritual twin, but who assumes the form of his brother. The first hundred or so pages of the novel are told in the third-person, from a perspective sympathetic the main character's brother. Most of the book, though, is a text-within-a-text, the "confessions," which begin by re-telling the same events from the protagonist's perspective. It's as though the character was a drop of ink on a page that is folded in half vertically, then horizontally, etc.

The protagonist here, a young man named Robert Wringham, is a religious zealot of the Antinomian variety. Apparently the doctrine of predestination was the subject of heated disagreement in early Eighteenth Century Scotland; Wringham is brought up in the radical fringe of Calvinism (I'm not clear what denomination this makes him, or if it's at all analogous to any contemporary church). Which, taken to its extreme, Calvinism is a kind of scary idea. Wringham is convinced of his status as one of the Elect. To him, the notion that his earthly deeds might cost him the Salvation that was ordained before Creation is the basest heresy. Thus Wringham is lead down the path to sin and murder by the Devil, who appears to him as a strange changeling whose beliefs about predestination exceed Wringham's own.

There's probably an apt literary category to deploy here. I don't know it. But I would place this book alongside other contemplative, psychological--not necessarily existential--works as Hunger, The Stranger, and Notes from Underground. Even though there is a fair amount of plot--murder, rivalry, demons--the primary focus remains on the narrator's deliberations. What makes this book more "readable" than many such books is its sparing use of humor (e.g., Wringham, told that his supernatural Tempter is "a prince," concludes he is in the presence of Peter I of Russia), as well as the equally-understated presence of the supernatural. Hogg rather nonchalantly inserts a downright Lovecraftian incident of demonic torment in the space of a page or so, before returning to an extended exploration of the narrator's doubts and vacillations.



I suppose I'm pretty big on brand-loyalty when it comes to publishers. This is the third book I've read from the NYRB Classics line, and I've been consistently impressed. They tend to select quality books, often in some degree of neglect. Their cover designs are great, as well as the little touches: typeface, paper weight, stiffness of cover. My favorite bit is the way the inside covers are always some vivid color, coordinated to the cover design.

This book had a brief glossary of archaic Scottish dialect in the back--Hogg, though Scottish himself, made his Scottish peasants sound more caricatured than Moira MacTaggert. The inclusion of a glossary made me pleasantly nostalgic for middle school Language Arts.