A Literary Life

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)

The tale of one day in the life of a simple man, once a soldier, who’d been an enemy prisoner during WWII for a matter of days and therefore classified as spy. He’s spent eight years of his 10-year sentence for such the terrible crime of being an overpowered, under-prepared pawn of his country’s army in Soviet work camps, during the time of the book in a gulag in Siberia.

With the typical bluntness of many Russian authors — but none of the complex sentence structure and pretense of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, for instance, IMHO — the reader climbs into Shukov’s (as he’s called) shoes. His cold, cold boots stuffed with rags, which he is allowed to dry on the stove every third night. We put on his scanty and ragged clothing (anything more than regulation will be taken away) against the chill, and our muscles ache from the hard work of laying bricks in weather so frigid that the mortar freezes if the work’s not completed quickly. The turnip broth turns cold on the table and the bread freezes solid.

Did I mention it’s cold? Siberian cold? Yes? Perhaps I stress this fact because I read this book, the WHOLE book, during a very slow day of volunteering for the El Paso County primary elections, held in a room whose AC was powerful enough to personally contribute to global warning. The volunteer next to me pulled up his hood. I rubbed my hands between my legs as I read. I felt Shukov’s pain.

As, of course, the reader is meant to. The book was one of the first that told the inside story of the Soviet work camps, and was therefore quite shocking and influential. Today, it remains so, but for different reasons. Yes, the gulag depicted is an awful place to be: I’d chose hell over this place, because I’d rather sweat to death than feel ice crystals forming in my blood. But what I found amazing was Shukov and his fellow prisoner’s attitudes toward their imprisonment. Illustrating the ultimate in human adaptation, they don’t rail against their unjust treatment. There’s nothing to be done, after all. They get by, they trade cigarettes, they finagle extra meal portions, they stamp their feet in the cold, they pester the guards. Although I’m hardly an expert, their attitude of basic survival — even cheerful survival when they can — seems so very Soviet. They allow themselves to be molded be the camp, accepting what they cannot change. They work the system when they can, but they sigh and let the system work them when they can’t. They’ve seen what disobedience causes, and it’s often not worth the high price. In other words, they accept that they’re pawns in a machine that eats pawns for breakfast, so they squeeze joy out of camaraderie, nicotine and the absence of pain.

Read in honor of the author, who died Aug. 3, 2008. I’m sorry only his passing caused me to take up his work, which I find clean, concise and cutting. Oh and cold. Very, very cold. Brrr.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection

All the Pretty Horses (Cormac McCarthy)

As most people who have talked to me about books in the last year know, I love The Road. I’ve often said so with a sigh in my voice and a twinkle in my eye, because despite the seriousness of the subject matter, I fell in love. That novel made me feel as if I was discovering something for the first time: a talent, a voice, a world, an ever-present human story only now articulated.

But I’m self-aggrandizing, I know. The sharp, artful voice and aching melancholy of Cormac McCarthy has been there since he set pen to page, continued to be there as he won the National Book Award and wasn’t discovered when MY eyes met his words. All the Pretty Horses, written in 1992, proves that. However, I can’t help but feel again that I have stumbled upon something momentous, something meant just for me in a small way, something beautiful that will make my eyes twinkle and my voice sigh when I try to convey just how remarkable an accomplishment All the Pretty Horses is.

But McCarthy describes that startling feeling of discovery better than me in his stark, biting dialog.

“I never knowed there was such a place as this.
I guess there’s probably every kind of place you can think of.
Rawlins nodded. I wouldn’t have thought of this one, he said.”

In this case, the two main characters — teenagers from Texas ranches who travel into Mexico looking for work as cowboys — have found a level of pain and misery and degradation previously unimaginable. Their coming-of-age trek has been blown off course by the harsh desert wind, slapped about by the hand of fate, which knocks out of them the idea that they’re entitled success, happiness, even life. It all begins with a chance meeting with a younger stranger who claims his name is Blevins, and that one chance snowballs through love, talent, destiny, friendship, hope and crushing loss until we wind up in a place that’s brutal and bloody yet truthful.

And somehow beautiful:

“He picked out the smallest doe among them and shot her … The sky was dark and a cold wind ran through the bajada and in the dying light a cold blue cast had turned the doe’s eyes to but one thing more of the things she lay among in the darkening landscape. Grass and blood. Blood and stone. Stone and dark medallions that the first flat drops of rain caused upon them. He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he’d first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he’d presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”

Only McCarthy could explain to me this masculine strength and honor and adventure so deftly, me! Who usually shies away from Westerns and is allergic to horses. Even I can see how the stark lines (and again, stark prose) of the landscape and of these characters’ lives are somehow more telling, more primal than every flowery, curl-i-que tale. The latter rely on embellishment and literary trickery to establish depth. Whereas the pure, beautiful depth of McCarthy’s work aches in your bones and raises goosebumps on your skin.

I’m afraid to say there’s going to be lots more Cormac McCarthy on my plate and on my bookshelves in the future. Anyone know which one I should tackle next?

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Buy the hardcover

Spin (Robert Charles Wilson)

I’ve haven’t reviewed many books on the blog that I’ve not read with my eyes — in other words, those I’ve “read” as audiobooks — but I’m beginning to think that practice is prejudicial. I didn’t review The Pillars of the Earth, my first download from Audible, and it’s been too long since I finished hearing it to try now. However, I will henceforth make no such distinctions between the written and the recorded book, to find a place where all books are created equal. Audiobooks are stories, too, Man! If you tear them, do they not … Oh wait, that doesn’t quite work, but you see my absurd logic point.

I can’t, however, stop myself from thinking that certain books are more audio-y. I wouldn’t want to hear something dense or intellectual through my earbuds, because I’m usually exercising, painting, sewing or otherwise physically engaged while listening, unable to give it my full attention. So audiobooks are my vacation stories: historical fiction, westerns, sci fi, chick lit. My version of a summer blockbuster movie — pure entertainment and a gripping tale.

This work of science fiction didn’t disappoint. It’s the story of three modern-age childhood friends who experience a unique era of the Earth, when some sort of field thingy blots out the stars and places the planet in a static time-warp thingy. (For descriptions of the plot that don’t involve the word “thingy,” pick up the book. HE makes it all make sense.) In other words, while only minutes go by on Earth, thousands of years pass in the outside universe. Suddenly, the fact that the sun will go supernova in a few billion years becomes vitally important, and human culture reacts in such interesting ways when they know their days are numbered and they’re powerless to stop it.

“Or are they?” says the blockbuster movie announcer man in his booming voice. The three main characters march toward their doom, each doing their own thing to change the world’s destiny, and a terrific suspense (and suspense of disbelief) builds. It was really a fun story, a tale that ended in a nice sequence opp that I might just download next time around.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars - Book club vacation reading

Tidbit No. 33

From a very interesting article about the button-pushing bastards of the Internet, who are apparently more organized than I could have imagined. From hacking flashing images into a site about epilepsy to creating Dead Space for My Space pages/tributes to the dead, these “trolls” are sadistic and snarky little specimens.

Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech?

One promising answer comes from the computer scientist Jon Postel, now known as “god of the Internet” for the influence he exercised over the emerging network. In 1981, he formulated what’s known as Postel’s Law: “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.” Originally intended to foster “interoperability,” the ability of multiple computer systems to understand one another, Postel’s Law is now recognized as having wider applications. To build a robust global network with no central authority, engineers were encouraged to write code that could “speak” as clearly as possible yet “listen” to the widest possible range of other speakers, including those who do not conform perfectly to the rules of the road. The human equivalent of this robustness is a combination of eloquence and tolerance — the spirit of good conversation. Trolls embody the opposite principle. They are liberal in what they do and conservative in what they construe as acceptable behavior from others. You, the troll says, are not worthy of my understanding; I, therefore, will do everything I can to confound you.

Via Shakesville.

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz)

It’s been a while since I liked a book this much, since a book actually made me feel as if I were discovering something never before touched by my eyes, a style never conceived of in my tiny little brain. It’s obvious when I really like a book from the beginning solely because I talk about it often — and in some detail — with my non-reader fiance, who listens attentively but will probably never pick up the novel I’m extolling. (I’m just being honest here, Love. I know you have your best intentions.) But I would probably talk about this book to anyone with earshot when I have it in my hands, about how irreverent yet honest the story is, how deep it digs into Dominican-American culture, how funny, how true to life, how simultaneously down to earth and moving.

It is the story — duh — of Oscar Wao, the first-generation son of a single mother from the Dominican Republic. While the Dominicans (especially the men) have a reputation for masculine prowess and womanizing (I don’t know Spanish that well, but the book must have at least six Spanish words for pussy vagina), Oscar is instead an overweight and over-vocabularied nerd of the highest degree. Sci Fi and fantasy novels, comic books, anime: You name it, Oscar loves it, and the narrator inserts these great nerd references whenever humanly possible. Check out the geek speak when describing the binding thread of the Oscar’s family’s story, a supposed curse or fuku placed on Oscar’s grandfather but common in many Dominican stories:

“It’s important to remember that fuku doesn’t always strike like lightning. Sometimes it works patiently, drowning a nigger by degrees, like with the Admiral or the U.S. in paddies outside Saigon. Sometimes it’s slow and sometimes it’s fast. It’s doomish in that way, makes it harder to put a finger on, to brace yourself against. But be assured: like Darkseid’s Omega Effect, the Morgoth’s bane, no matter how many turns and digressions this shit might take, it always — and I mean always — gets its man. “

Yes, this book won the Pulitzer Prize. And yes, it cusses like this on almost every page. And hell yes, I love what the world of literature is coming to. (No sarcasm here. I promise.) Diaz can be simultaneous crass and erudite. While cussing can often be juvenile, Diaz uses it like a cultural weapon and proves he’s doing it deftly, purposefully. The below, for instance, is a description of Oscar’s mother as a girl:

“I mean, what straight middle-aged brother had not attempted to regenerate himself through the alchemy of young pussy. And if what she often said to her daughter was true, Beli had some of the finest pussy around. The sexy isthmus of her waist alone could have launched a thousand yolas.”

An allusion to Helen of Troy and the word pussy on the same page? With vocab biggies like isthmus and alchemy? Wow, or rather Wao.

And while Oscar may be a lumbering, pitiful and heart-rendingly sweet geek, he’s still a Dominican, passionately interested in women, who thinks girls “were the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, the DC and the Marvel. Homes had it bad.”

I loved joining Oscar on his quest for romance, in his depths of self pity and despair. I loved watching the present and the past of the story unfold, seeing the patterns but being left wanting more, wondering, my mind tripping back over the story to make connections. But perhaps above all, I loved this witty, bantering voice Diaz masters in the narrator. He’s part David Foster Wallace with his footnotes and educated allusions, and he’s part street-level shit talking at its finest, silver tongued and savvy. It’s simply excellent prose, even if you get a little confused at the Spanish sections — don’t worry, everything absolutely vital is translated. Much like Oscar’s life, the novel was wondrous, taking the nitty-gritty everyday and sprinkling some magic dust and cuss words to take it to the next level of meaning.

Can I put this on our wedding registry? Anyone?

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Buy the hardcover

The Center of Everything (Laura Moriarty)

This quick, easy read was something that I needed after the long haul of Sacred Hunger, so quick I finished it in a few days and so easy that I’d really classify it as young adult/teen reading. It is, of course, about a teenager living in Kansas — aren’t all teens at “the center of everything,” at the center of their own universes? In the standard after-school-special fashion, Evelyn has to make the tough but typical choices about what to believe, who to emulate, how to be true to herself and what she really wants out of life.

Though I found the novel lukewarm in general, I did enjoy the comparison between the main character and some of her friends who make different (read: not so great) decisions, which accurately portrayed how little things (or things you think are small potatoes) you do in your teens can change your entire life. That the main character emerges unscathed from the morass of high school is depicted as a mixture of brains and luck, which is really what it takes get through those stormy years. At least, so it seems to me in hindsight. I often think that if I was given another set of circumstances or thrown a curve ball or two, it would have been very, very easy to stumble off a cliff, changing my life as I know it. As a teen, you’re really unaware about how precarious it all is and, again, how much pure luck factors into things.

This little teen tale will soon disappear from my brain as quickly as it was absorbed, I’m sure, but it was just what the doctor ordered: Like a sorbet between courses, easy reading sometimes cleanses the palate, making reading fun again after a particularly heavy tome. Not every book has to be meaningful or unique. Sometimes you just want to hear a story, any story, just to reawaken your joy of books.

Books, books, books. So many books.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Vacation reading

Sacred Hunger (Barry Unsworth)

It took me an embarrassing long time to read this book for several reasons: more home improvement (I know, the excuse is getting old), addiction to the book on tape I recently downloaded and the fact that it was overdue at the library. You see, when a book is overdue and can no longer be renewed, you’re paying by the day. At least for me, this makes it more of a challenge and I’ll never throw in the towel. NEVER!

Long story short — unlike my excuse — the book sat with it’s book mark 80 pages from the end for almost two weeks, even though it was an artful and compelling novel, a book worthy of it’s Booker Prize. Tackling vast philosophic and historical issues like imperialism, capitalism, slavery and racism, you might think that the tale would be preachy or snobbish. But instead, the author fleshes out characters that feel right at home in this (to the modern mentality) foreign, brutal and immoral world. The rich son of a trader whose religion is commerce and revenge. His cousin, a fallen-from-society doctor who signs onto a slaving ship, writing himself off into whatever pain he can find. The conscripted sailors, the seasoned and brutal captain, the cringe-worthy depictions of Africans sold into slavery.

All told in a somewhat formal style. In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of the writers of the time period of the book — probably an intentional touch meant to drive the reader deeper into the past. However, the prose lacked the confusing flourishes of the period enough to lull a modern reader in, and the style was often striking and original.

(The slave ship was) a member of a vast fleet sent forth by men of enterprise and vision all over Europe, engaged in the greatest commercial venture the world had ever seen, changing the course of history, brining death and degredation and profits on a scale hitherto undreamed of.

That the ship was a mere corpuscle in this nourishing bloodstream was not easy to imagine for the men aboard her. To them she was a universe of routine tasks and routine sounds — the bell marking the half hours, shouted orders, the way of the waves, the wincing tune of the timbers as they were exercised by the sway of the sea. Forces less tangible but equally determinate worked on the men and they were set in relation to one another in sympathy or antipathy, as happens in all communities.

The title refers to trade, to the blindly ambitious commercial and imperial endeavors of the day, which were sanctioned by king, country and God.

Money is sacred, as everyone knows, he said. So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it.

To take something as vile and despicable as slavery and immerse a reader in a world in which the practice is defended, is seen as common sense and morally just — and then to slowly have the characters wake up to a sense of disgust … I believe it takes an author of real talent to succeed at such a large undertaking, especially without denigrating or simplifying the historical figures involved, keeping them human and complex.

Deep? Yes.  Light reading? No. But Sacred Hunger (I agree with what I’ve heard) is just as worthy of critical praise and readership as the other book that shared the Booker Prize that year, The English Patient. And I think it could make just as good of a movie, too, replete with lots of ocean panoramas and violence, exotic locales and people and ideas.

And I think it’s worth the $2.10 I owe the library for the privilege of reading this intense novel.

The Gilded Chamber (Rebecca Kohn)

I did not go to Bible school as a child, nor was relating Christian parables a regular part of my family life. Outside of Noah, Cain and Abel, and that Technicolor Dreamcoat guy — oh, and Jesus, of course — the cast of characters in the Bible are strangers to me. (Hm. And who was the women who asked for a head on a platter? I suppose if I don’t know her name without a Google search, it doesn’t really count.) But lack of knowledge doesn’t reflect lack of interest. On the contrary, I think the rich, human stories of the Christian holy book are definitely worth reading, studying, discussing. I just haven’t actually read, studied or discussed any of them as yet.

So yay for shortcuts, like this easy, breezy novel about Queen Esther, a young Jewish virgin taken forcibly into the harem of King Xerxes and who beguiles him to the point that he makes her Queen. From the throne — where she’s given little power but lots of almond-oil beauty treatments, fancy clothing and tweezings — she is able to prevent the massacre of Jews in Xerxes’ Persian empire. As a story of girl power, it’s lacking. Esther only gets what she wants because she’s a beauty and she becomes a master of feminine persuasion. (No requests for heads on platters here.) But it was an interesting look into the female world of antiquity, especially of the drugged, catty harem women.

I’m told The Red Tent needs to be next on my list of biblical fictionalizations that flesh out the lives of women in traditionally male-dominated Christianity. And even if it makes me look like an up-tight nerd to put such a book on my list of summer/vacation reads, so be it because No. 1, I’m comfortable in my nerdiness. And No. 2, those chick-lit-reading beachgoers just won’t go to heaven because of their ignorance of the (fictionalized) Bible, right? Right?

Yeah, yeah, I know. I have a lot more about Christianity to learn.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Vacation reading

The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)

Meet two-egg (fraternal) twins Estha and Rahel, two kids growing up in the India state of Kerala in the turbulent 1960s. Welcome to the imaginative, confusing, flowing world of two connected siblings, who see the world through each others’ (vibrantly, innocently descriptive) eyes, yet understand only shallowly the events unfolding around around them. Join them as they discover — over the course of childhood and with the distance of adulthood — “the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.”

This Booker Prize-winning novel definitely deserved its accolades. Though it took me much, much longer than normal to get through the book (my fault, not the novel’s), I loved every little description, every meaningful encounter, every private thought. Though the story ostensibly revolves around a tragedy of youth where a young relative visiting from England dies, the tale encompasses so much more and paints a thoughtful portrait of India during that time period.

Communism and unions and the division of wealth are seen in the family’s ownership of Paradise Pickles and Preserves. Gender roles appear in the “men’s needs door” allowed in the uncles bedroom, contrasted against his sister who left her drunken husband, who is considered immoral. Westernization: Is everything foreign more valuable than what comes out of India, including people?

But yet, the overwhelming theme is loss, tragedy and guilt. Not an uncommon theme, I admit. But the talent of Roy, her offbeat yet poignant descriptive ability, brings the theme to a higher level. Take, for instance, her description of Estha, who retreats into silence in reaction to his cousin’s death:

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It send its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, emtombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it.

I absolutely love the irreverence of Roy’s language. Random capitalization. Repetition. Her unique titling of people and things: Estha becomes Ambassador Pelvis with his special-occasion puff; Rahel is labeled a fountain in a Love in Tokyo due to her hairstyle. Roy reaches into the brain to pull out descriptions I would never have dreamed of, but that immediately bring images to mind. For example, the twins’ mother’s appearance is gauged in toothbrushes. As she stares in the mirror, she thinks she could definitely hold one under the fold of her bottom — several even — but her smaller breasts couldn’t support one.

And unlike heavier works by just-as-gifted authors, the words alone are not the only joy of the novel. The story itself will make you ache, both in its occasional sweetness and innocence as well as its tragedy. The guilt, whether deserved or not — in this world, tragedy almost seems inevitable — is palpable. But sometimes the best of books make you feel the worst, right? And despite it being the author’s first novel, this is definitely one of the best.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Buy the hardcover

Green Grass Grace (Shawn McBride)

This book recommendation has incredible social-networking roots, both physical and virtual. First of all, it’s one of the faves of a co-worker of mine who shares a love of reading. (That’s the physical networking.) Secondly, the subject of the book came up when she mentioned the author of Green Grass Grace requested her friendship on My Space because the book was listed on her home page. (How cool! I wanna be an author’s friend!) With the thoroughly modern way in which the book came to my attention, there was no surprise that the book was thoroughly modern — in its use of cursing and youth-culture slang, in the way it reminisces fondly about the 1980s (a period only recently romanticized as authors of a certain age look backward) and in the way it crossed the young-adult and adult genres so easily, making it great reading for teens as well as older (aka aging, am I really aging already?) bookies like myself.

The title of the novel refers to everything that the narrator, 13-year-old Henry “Hank” Toohey, doesn’t have but wants: the green pastures of the country, grass without lawn ornaments or the clothes of errant spouses who’ve been thrown out strewn about, and Grace, the sharp-tongued, big-hearted girl-next-door he’s in love with. The plot centers on Henry’s quest to bring his brother back from the brink after his fiancee’s death and reunite his parents by declaring his love for Grace in public, reigniting the love within his family’s memory and making things happily ever after once and for all. Yes, it’s a 13-year-old’s logic, but that’s what makes the idea so real, so touching and, of course, so doomed to complications.

Complications include bike riding, television-remote hijacking, seminars on how to take a bra off, haggling with local businessmen (all of whom want you to watch their new cable TV ad; very amusing), sitting on train tracks, neighborhood games of tag, making out behind dumpsters and more. But such juvenile antics are mixed with heavy adult topics like alcohol abuse, unfaithful marriages, death and poverty.

In fact, one of the most vibrant characters is Henry’s neighborhood itself, whose residents and houses are colorful, unique and also incredibly human. Henry’s words can be both humorous and amazingly touching. Take, for instance, his description of the neighborhood church:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the cavernous St. Ignatius Church in the heart of Holmesburg in sunny Philadelphia. Let’s get ready to worship. The temperature inside is 98 degrees with higher humidity, but it still ain’t as hot as Hell, so pipe down and keep the top buttons buttoned. And shut up. And buck up. Open your hearts and your wallets. Bow down before the three oil paintings behind the altar of St. Julius Erving, St. Robert Clarke, and St. Richard Ashburn. Then light a candle at the statued feet of Jesus and Mary, who slouch and suffer on the altar, their hearts torn from thorns and burning like tire fires set by parishoners one dollar at a time in the name of someone dead.

It’s a quick, fun and interesting read. I’m interested to see, however, how this freshman author can take it to the next level, if he’s done anything recently that learns from this book or builds off his first novel experience. I can’t find anything online, though, so I guess I’ll have to ask my friend to check his My Space page.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection