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Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences
Novels
Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino, translated by Rebecca Copeland
(Knopf) Kirino is huge in Japan. Her first novel to come out in
English,
Out: A Novel, was a stunner. This second English translation,
Grotesque shows us a writer with all the tools.
Three women attend an exclusive Tokyo high school. Two of them are
sisters. The smart but homely one is the narrator. As the book opens
the other two girls, her gorgeous but empty-headed sister and their
former classmate have been found murdered in similar circumstances.
They were both prostitutes and both were strangled.
Our narrator seems to hate everybody except perhaps, her
grandfather. She really hated her pretty sister. Flashbacks show us
their schoolgirl days and the paths that they took. Twisted stuff.
In the present day, Tokyo circa 2000, a Chinese man is being tried
for their murders and readers find a noir city where decadence and
dark secrets lure women to their deaths. The Japanese economic
collapse left a society in turmoil.
Natsuo Kirino made a spectacular fiction debut on these shores with
the publication of Edgar Award-nominated Out (“Daring and disturbing
. . . Prepared to push the limits of this world . . .
Remarkable”—Los Angeles Times). Unanimously lauded for her unique,
psychologically complex, darkly compelling vision and voice, she
garnered a multitude of enthusiastic fans eager for more.
In her riveting new novel
Grotesque, Kirino once again depicts a barely known Japan. This
is the story of three Japanese women and the interconnectedness of
beauty and cruelty, sex and violence, ugliness and ambition in their
lives.
Tokyo prostitutes Yuriko and Kazue have been brutally murdered,
their deaths leaving a wake of unanswered questions about who they
were, who their murderer is, and how their lives came to this end.
As their stories unfurl in an ingeniously layered narrative, coolly
mediated by Yuriko’s older sister, we are taken back to their time
in a prestigious girls’ high school—where a strict social hierarchy
decided their fates—and follow them through the years as they
struggle against rigid societal conventions.
Shedding light on the most hidden precincts of Japanese society
today, Grotesque is both a psychological investigation into the
female psyche and a classic work of noir fiction. It is a stunning
novel, a book that confirms Natsuo Kirino’s electrifying gifts.
Publisher’s Weekly: Kirino takes you inside the heads of these
troubled women. It's a sociological tour de force.
Readers with a taste for ambiguity and oddball characters will enjoy
this twisted novel of suspense from Japanese author Kirino (Out).
The Apartment Serial Murders case, which involved the brutal
killings of two Tokyo prostitutes, has gripped the country, leading
to the arrest of a Chinese immigrant, Zhang Zhe-zhong, for the
crimes. Strangely, Zhang freely admits to murdering the first
victim, Yuriko Hirata, but denies the near-identical slaying 10
months later of Kazue Sato. The events leading to the killings are
related from a variety of perspectives—that of Yuriko's unnamed
older sister, bitterly jealous of her sibling's good looks; of each
victim; and of the accused. Unusual connections—for example, Kazue
was a classmate of the older sister—cast doubt on the veracity of
individual narrators. This mesmerizing tale of betrayal reveals some
sobering truths about Japan's social hierarchy. Copyright © Reed
Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights
reserved.
House of Leaves by Mark Z.
Danielewski (Pantheon) (Paperback)
Debut novel written is an epigraphic style, similar to
text-messaging without the cute spelling. The page is set up as a
text visual space and coherence of message with text is supplied by
the reader and not in the sub-narrative conventions. All told it
message is the medium book that presupposes hypertextuality and even
manual manuplition of the book page and continuity. If I left you
agast and wondering what is so interestion about this novel and its
follow up, then I’ve got your attention.
Mark Z. Danielewski stunned readers with his debut,
House of Leaves a bizarre
down-the-rabbit-hole tale of madness, surreality and a house where
space is unending.
Just flipping through the pages of this novel could give you a headache, but it's one of the most intriguing books to come out in the last few years, maybe the decade.
The book is presented as a work written by a fictional blind man named Zapano who dies and leaves behind this tome, which is in turn edited and researched by a pretty weird cat who lives in his building, who in turn has the book published. What's this merry-go-round book about? It's a factual study of the phenomenon concerning the release of a home video by a noted photographer which shows that the house he and his family has moved into is strangely larger on the inside than it is on the outside. When doors and hallways start appearing in the house out of nowhere that lead to impossibly large and creepy places, the fun really begins and the true power of the book starts to reveal itself: it’s a damn creepy read. So creepy and surreal that it has you checking your own closets and doors, I'm not kidding.
The audacity of the author is apparant in a mere flipping of the pages: there are footnotes to passages that go on for pages, some research, but some mere personal musings and stories by the editor. There are pages written sideways. There are pages with one word on them. Everywhere the word "house" appears it is printed in blue ink. There are letters in the back written by the institutionalized mother of the original editor.
I'm not going to lie to you: I don't even get it all. As it turns out, you need to bone up on your Norse mythology a little bit to get all of the author's meanings, but I didn't and still got a hell of a charge from it. I was able to superimpose what I thought was going on and it made it even more personal and creepy for me. This book is like "The Amityville Horror" written by Albert Einstein.
The term "cult classic" gets thrown around a lot, but Mark
Danielewski's House of Leaves is one book that has definitely earned
the title. This is the kind of work that inspires the admiration of
many and the fierce devotion of a select few. The book itself defies
easy description, but I'll give it a shot anyway. I've got time,
even if I may not quite have the words. Anyway, House of Leaves,
much like some other notorious brain-teasers (think Gravity's
Rainbow and Infinite Jest) presents the reader with a multi-levelled
narrative with more twists and turns than the dwelling that gives
the book its title. It's superficially the story of an aimless
tattoo-shop apprentice, Johhny Truant, who discovers disorganized
writings scattered about the apartment of a dead blind octagenarian
known only as Zampano, and finds himself irresistibly drawn to the
herculean task of organizing everything into a coherent form.
Zampano's writing itself, for its part, is the tale of a fictional
documentary film called the Navidson Record, recorded with some help
by a Pulitzer-winning photographer named Will Navidson. And the
documentary (the description of which makes up the bulk of the book)
tells the story of Navidson's and his family's move into a house in
Virginia with some, er supernatural qualities. Not to mention,
Truant regularly interrupts his transcription to inject some
personal notes regarding his own experiences and thoughts while
telling Zampano's story, which turn out to be rather extensive.
Confused yet?
Well, it's not supposed to be light reading, but House of Leaves
provides plenty of payoff for the dedicated.
Essentially, this book obliterates the traditional barriers of the
novelistic form, presenting the reader with an unconventional,
semi-linear narrative that's vast in scope and exacting in detail.
In the end, though, the novel's literary experimentation, while
interesting and distinctive, isn't the reason to read it, or at
least not the best one. Rather, you should read this book because
beneath all the bold innovations and encyclopedic knowledge of its
author there's a real heart that elevates it above the merely
pretentious. The obvious comparisons to David Foster Wallace's
Infinite Jest have already been made (in fact, I think I just made
one), but there's an important difference to be noted as well. Where
Infinite Jest generally sees Wallace holding himself at a distance
from his subjects, observing them with the sort of clinical
detachment characteristic of a lab experiment, Danielewski's novel
boasts a striking level of emotional depth, giving a dramatic weight
to its supernatural story.
While it really is a huge task to try to take it all on in a mere
internet review, suffice to say that the totality of House of Leaves
turns out to be nothing less than a fully realized epic that can
engage your brain, pull at your heartstrings, and crush your soul at
the same time. Danielewski clearly knows how to write a good scary
story, but even more importantly, he manages to get you invested in
his characters and their stories. Writing through Zampano writing
through Johnny Truant, Danielewski turns the tale of Will Navidson,
his family, and a house that's bigger on the inside than the outside
into a catologue of love, loss, regret, and fear. The interpersonal
dynamics that unfold end up becoming just as interesting as the
descriptions of the vast interior of a house that seems to change
shape as soon as anyone starts to figure it out. Danielewski's
writing manages the difficult task of achieving its own sort of
poignancy without seeming to try for it, often in strange
places--just check out the descriptions of the picture that got
Navidson the Pulitzer.
Then there's the parellel narration by Johnny Truant, mostly
incorporated through footnootes, that's probably more frightening
than anything in the main narrative of the novel. Befitting the
subject matter of the novel, Truant is a lost soul living around the
fringes of society when he discovers Zampano's body and the work he
never finished, but there's nothing to prepare him or the reader for
the insanity that quickly starts to set in. Truant's writing paints
a picture of mounting dread and disorientation as his task of
transcribing Zampano's writing becomes more and more of an
obsession, with his writing becoming increasingly claustrophobic as
his world begins caving in around him. Even his usual forms of
self-medication-booze, drugs, sex-cease to give him comfort against
the overwhelming weight that his task comes to assume. The despair
captured in his words isn't always fun to read, but it had me glued
to the page just the same.
I could probably write about fifteen more paragraphs on this book if
I were so inclined, but it would still be difficult for my mediocre
ramblings to do it justice. Cliched thought it may sound, House of
Leaves really is one book that must be read to be believed. The
novel has been around a long time now, but I know of few that
achieve the combination of originality, depth, and intelligence that
Danielewski pulls off here. You can stick this one on the short list
of postmodern classics.
Now six years later, Danielewski has produced his follow-up -- the
equally strange, scintillating road-trip novel "Only Revolutions."
The format is mind-bending, the characters equally strange -- and
Danielewski hasn't lost his touch for the compelling, poignant, the
postmodern, and the post-weird.
Hailey and Sam are a pair of eternal teenagers, apparently untouched
by time either physically or psychologically ("We're always
sixteen!"). They careen through much of American history -- past and
present -- in a changing fleet of cars, touching down in various
important places and times.
But though they have no responsibilities, Hailey and Sam are not
free of cares. As they run through the US, they seem to be enmeshed
in the goings-on of wars, parties, exploration and social revolution
(the Civil War). Will they escape the oppressive THEM pursuing them,
or lose what is most important to them?
For a cult author, there's always a question about whether they can
stay fresh and cutting-edge. Fortunately, Danielewski has outrun
that particular concern. "Only Revolutions" is written in the same
surreal freestyle as "House of Leaves," but the author never forgets
to include the story as well.
And as the Escherian plot unwinds ("unfolds" just doesn't fit), it
becomes obvious that this is actually two stories: a love story, and
a sort of American allegory. They are rebels and free spirits,
running up against bizarre characters -- like the multi-military
Creep -- who seem symbolic of the nastier sides of our society.
Hailey and Sam are the ones who represent the better side of the
country.
Danielewski is still fascinated by places/people where time and
space are warped. That includes the entire book -- every page. Each
page has a scramble of quotes and text on its sides. There is vivid
abstract poetry, blank pages (the future), geometric plotting,
shrinking pages, mysterious side-notes submitted by Danielewski's
fans...
... and oh yeah, you can flip the book upside down and read the two
different "sides" of the story. One is Hailey, one is Sam. They are
compared to legendary lovers like Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and
Juliet, but that's not too far off. Their love evolves as they do,
and by the end they are more endearing if less vibrant than at the
start of their story.
"Only Revolutions" is both a work of postmodern art and an endearing
novel, and while it's hard work to follow Hailey and Sam to the end
of their journey, it's worth the trip. Absolutely brilliant.
Only Revolutions: A Novel by Mark
Z. Danielewski (Pantheon) (Paperback)
Meet Sam. You'll meet him initially on November 22, 1863. It is the
Civil War. Sam is 16 years old.
Meet Hailey. You'll meet her initially on November 22, 1963.
President Kennedy has just been assassinated. Hailey is 16 years
old.
It just may turn out, however, that you'll meet Hailey before you
meet Sam.
Only Revolutions: A Novel is the newest creation from the
incredible mind of Mark Z. Danielewski, the man responsible for
driving readers crazy with
House of Leaves. You have to give Danielewski credit when it
comes to this new work because he obliterates any notions people may
have had about his copying the format of the previous work. The only
manner in which the two books are similar is that they are so far
removed from any way you have ever experienced books.
Trying to describe
Only Revolutions: A Novel is not easy. Trying to explain its
story is even more difficult. The easiest way to give an indication
of the story is to merely explain that you have two characters, Sam
and Hailey, and we follow them through the course of history. From
November 22, 1863 until January 19, 2063, we move through history
with Sam and Hailey, and all along this incredible journey they are
forever 16. Life and the changes in the fabric of time are viewed
through eyes of green and gold, always on the cusp of adulthood but
never those of a child.
Apparently modeled after the French Oulipo (Workshop for
Potential Literature), "Only Revolutions" is a tour de force
exploring the endless combinatorial possibilities of language. The
apparent protagonists, Sam and Hailey, are not so much
representations of human beings as representations of language's
possibilities for endless novelty and renewal. The cycles they
instantiate revolve around the number "8." (The publisher advises
readers to read 8 pages at a time from each narrative, one starting
at one end of the book, the other from the other end). H is the 8th
letter from the beginning of the alphabet; S is the 8th letter from
the end. The text is generated (either manually or algorithmically
or some combination of both) from the words in the concordance,
printed on the book's endpapers in 8 major clusters. 8 + 8 is
sixteen; hence Sam and Hailey are said to be "always sixteen." In
the pseudo-narratives describing (creating) their adventures, the
infinite combinatorial possibilities of language are recycled in
"revolutions." The same letters and words not only create new
combinations but also neologisms--new coinages--made out of parts of
words whose signification we can immediately intuit by putting
together the parts. There are 360 pages in the text, Sam's
pseudo-narrative going from 1863 to 1963, Hailey's from 1963 to
2063, with JFK's assassination providing the single date on which
they can meet. "Revolutions," signifying both circular movement and
radical change, provides the motif for the book's visual
communication, which include colored "O's" and "0's" as well as a
plethora of other dazzling visual effects. At the book's center, the
circular page notation counting Sam's pages on one side of the
circle, Hailey's on the other, shows 180/181 on one side of the
center spread, 181/180 on the other. The offset, the slight
asymmetry signified here, is important in generating endless
novelty, corresponding to what physicists call "symmetry breaking,"
a crucial event in the formation of the universe. This visual/verbal
book, filled with conundrums, verbal and numerical puzzles, clever
plays on the idea of "revolutions," and explorations into the nature
of language, is sure to occupy fans of Mark Danielewski for endless
hours of fun, frustration, puzzlement, and enlightenment. Enter at
your own risk; this is a work that invites readers to cross wits
with this brilliant and endlessly inventive writer.
In looking at the layout of the novel, and it seems awkward to refer
to it as such, you will see some things that strike you as odd right
away. The book is double-sided. Sam and Hailey tell their story, and
in order to get from one to the other you actually have to flip the
book. This is a play on one of the themes: infinity, or eternity.
Reading the book itself is circular, infinite. The page numbers are
contained within a circle along the outside margin halfway down the
page. Since the book has two sides, it has two sets of page numbers,
each within their own circle, contained together within the main
circle. As you turn pages and make your way through the tale, these
circles revolve around one another, just as Sam and Hailey revolve
around each other, just as their stories revolve around each
other's, just as the reader is brought in and encircled by their
tale.
Along the inner margin of the pages you will find a date and a
sequence of events through history. Some are mere events, some are
snippets of quotes. Some talk of people who "go" where it is not too
hard to understand after a brief time that to "go" means to die.
When settling down with the book, the pages may seem overwhelming.
There is the story text, the upside down text from the story running
the other way, the history passages and revolving circles. In an
effort to simplify the experience a reader may be inclined to ignore
what seem to be meaningless historical tags. That would be a
mistake.
Danielewski is a man whose words have meaning and context. The mess
you see on the pages becomes more understood and easier to maneuver
as the story is engaged. And the historical moments relate to the
story. For example, during the time period of August 12, 1865, he
writes in the story "By Forrests of pale harm," which, to my mind,
is a reference to Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Ku Klux Klan, which
is also referenced in the historical line on that page. The story
and the history are one.
Which, I think, is the point. Sam and Hailey move through history,
change history, experience history --- and they never age.
Danielewski, by way of these two figures, tells us before the story
starts, "You were there." The question is, is that simply implying
innocently that we, as the readers, were present at all of these
moments and experienced them all just as Sam and Hailey have? Or is
it a pointed admonishment, implying that we were there and asking us
why we did not do more to change the things that went wrong?
Only Revolutions: A Novel is an astounding work, a mind-boggling
epic poem one would expect if Pynchon, Benet, Homer and Joyce were
miraculously smashed together into one brilliant writer. It will
leave you confused, absorbed, drained, enthralled and wanting to go
through it all again. It is a journey and you, as a reader, are a
participant. You are no mere passerby. As they say, it is not the
destination but the adventure that gets you there that matters.
The beauty within the complexity is that you most likely will not
see
Only Revolutions: A Novel as I did. You may find things I never
thought possible. And so too for others who read it on your
recommendation. The publisher advises reading eight pages of Sam's
story and then switching to eight pages of Hailey's story. You may
decide to start with Hailey. You may decide to read straight through
Sam first. Or vice versa.
However you take up
Only Revolutions: A Novel, you will not be engaging in a light
beach read. This is quality work that, unfortunately, we don't see
enough of
Of God and Madness: A Historical Novel by T. Byram Karasu (Rowman
& Littlefield Publishers) is the story of Adam, an emotionally
troubled young man whose spiritual journey enables him to become a
godly adult. Adam is a child of a Jewish woman (a palace concubine)
and the last sultan of the
This is the story of a person who began searching for God and ended up finding himself, redeeming his spiritual journey.
What they find is a paranoid old woman, her .44 pistol, her German shepherd, and a harrowing night of captivity.
Convinced the couple has come to take her "castle," the old woman locks them in her home and keeps watch over them with her gun and her dog. Alternately threatening and entreating, she waffles between captor and lonely stranger longing for companionship. Annie and Tommy, who could not sit peacefully in a car, must share a mattress in a gloomy, concrete storage room.
Fearing for their lives and trapped together in the dark, they bare all the deep-seated grudges and wounds that have festered for years. In confinement, Tommy and Annie discover something they needed all along. When the ordeal comes to an end, as strangely and abruptly as it began, captor and captives are forever transformed.
The Normals: A Novel by David Gilbert (Bloomsbury USA) With the
millennium fast approaching, twenty-eight-year-old Harvard-educated
Billy Schine finds himself without prospects, a balled-up bit of
litter riding the boom of New York in the nineties. His classmates
make millions on Wall Street and the Internet while Billy makes do
with a series of temp jobs. He has a girlfriend, Sally Hu, but
they're more of a couple by romantic default, sex the only commodity
they're willing to trade in. Time flows by without consequence until
one day Billy receives a letter from Ragnar & Sons, a collection
agency seeking some satisfaction on three years of unpaid student
loans. Death is mentioned as an alternative to payment. Now every
passerby is a potential hitman, and Billy has to flee. But where?
Not home to his unwell parents.
At first, little happens in the research center, the boredom
punctuated only by twice-daily appointments with pills and needles.
Within the group, battle stories are told from the healing fields of
guinea pig, and Billy is pleased. He's rested and well-fed and
possibly in love with the lone female in the study. Then the messy
side effects hit, and everything changes. The normal world is turned
upside-down, the real and unreal merging until spilled blood becomes
the only proof of a beating heart.
Through the sharp-eyed, self-doubting Billy Schine, David Gilbert
exposes the crisis of the contemporary human condition: how to
connect? As funny as it is profound, The Normals is a tour de force
from a writer of astonishing intelligence and imagination.
Billy Schine is a wanted man, in the worst possible way. A glum,
rudderless 28-year-old Harvard grad, he has defaulted on his student
loan, and the brutish collection agency that has taken over his debt
is not playing around. To escape, Billy quits his temp job and
hightails it out of
The Double by Jose Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa
(Harcourt) Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is a history teacher in a
secondary school. He is divorced, involved in a rather one-sided
relationship with a bank clerk, and he is depressed. To lift his
depression, a colleague suggests he rent a certain video. Tertuliano
watches the film and is unimpressed. During the night, noises in his
apartment wake him. He goes into the living room to find that the
VCR is replaying the video, and as he watches in astonishment he
sees a man who looks exactly like him-or, more specifically, exactly
like the man he was five years before, mustachioed and fuller in the
face. He sleeps badly.
Against his own better judgment, Tertuliano decides to pursue his
double. As he establishes the man's identity, what begins as a
whimsical story becomes a dark meditation on identity and, perhaps,
on the crass assumption behind cloning-that we are merely our
outward appearance rather than the sum of our experiences.
From Publishers Weekly
The double motif, which has fascinated authors as diverse as Poe,
Dostoyevski and Nabokov, is revived in this surprisingly listless
novel by Portuguese master Saramago. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is a
history teacher in an unnamed metropolis (presumably
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M.G. Vassanji (Knopf)
Double Giller Prize winner M.G. Vassanji's The In-Between World of
Vikram Lall is a haunting novel of corruption and regret that brings
to life the complexity and turbulence of Kenyan society in the last
five decades. Rich in sensuous detail and historical insight, this
is a powerful story of passionate betrayals and political violence,
racial tension and the strictures of tradition, told in elegant,
assured prose.
The novel begins in 1953, with eight-year-old Vikram Lall a witness
to the celebrations around the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II,
just as the Mau Mau guerilla war for independence from
We follow Vikram through the changes in East African society, the
immense promise of the fifties and sixties. But when that hope is
betrayed by the corruption and violence of the following decades,
Vic is drawn into the Kenyatta government's orbit of graft and
power-broking. Njoroge, his childhood friend, can abandon neither
the idealism of his youth nor his love for Vic's sister Deepa. But
neither the idealism of the one nor the passive cynicism of the
other can avert the tragedies that await them.
In interviews given when the novel was published, Vassanji commented
that The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is the first of his books
to deal with his memories of
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, a compelling record in the
voice of a character described as "a cheat of monstrous and
reptilian cunning," took three years to write. After research
in
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is a profound and careful
examination of one man's search for his place in the world; it also
takes up themes that have run through Vassanji's work, such as the
nature of community in a volatile society, the relations between
colony and colonizer, and the inescapable presence of the
past. It is also, finally, a deeply personal book:
"The major thing that stands out in the book is people who are
in-between. The feeling of belonging and not belonging is very
central to the book. And that also played out in my life. When we
lived in
As an Indian child growing up in 1950s Kenya, Vikram Lall is at the center of two warring worlds—one of childhood innocence, the other "a colonial world of repressive, undignified subjecthood" in which the innocent often meet with the cruelest of fates. He passes his early days in Nakuru playing with his sister, Deepa, their neighborhood friend Njoroge, and English expatriates Annie and Bill Bruce. Though Vic is third-generation African, he understands that Njo is somehow more Kenyan than he or his family will ever be. Police regularly raid Nakuru looking for Mau Mau rebels, who are terrorists in the eyes of Europeans, but freedom fighters to native Kenyans; one day tragedy strikes the Lall family's English friends. Haunted by a grisly description of the crime scene, the Lalls eventually pick up and move to
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights
The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst (Little Brown
& Company) Unabridged
Audio Cassette (Time Warner AudioBooks) a smart novel about coming to terms
with an unexpected death that takes a few perverse turns along the way through
the seasons of grief. Paul Iverson’s life changes in an instant. He returns home
one day to find that his wife Lexy has died under strange circumstances. The
only witness was their dog, Lorelei, whose anguished barking brought help to the
scene—but too late.
In the days and weeks that follow, Paul begins to notice strange "clues" in
their home: books rearranged on their shelves, a mysterious phone call, and
other suggestions that nothing about Lexy’s last afternoon was quite what it
seemed. Reeling from grief, Paul is determined to decipher this evidence and
unlock the mystery of her death.
But he can’t do it alone; he needs Lorelei’s help. A linguist by training, Paul
embarks on an impossible endeavor: a series of experiments designed to teach
Lorelei to communicate what she knows. Perhaps behind her wise and earnest eyes
lies the key to what really happened to the woman he loved.
As Paul’s investigation leads him in unexpected and even perilous directions, he
revisits the pivotal moments of his life with Lexy, the brilliant, enigmatic
woman whose sparkling passion for life and dark, troubled past he embraced
equally.
Written with a quiet elegance and a profound knowledge of love’s hidden places,
The Dogs of Babel is a novel of astonishing and lasting power—a story of
marriage, survival, and devotion that lies too deep for words.
It may sound almost insane that a man would try to teach
his dog to speak but one would have to look at it from Paul's point of view: he
was grief-stricken. He had just lost his wife & wanted what anyone of us would
have wanted had a loved one's death occurred & literally no one was there to
retell the events. He wanted closure.
Yes, this book does contain acts of animal abuse but Paul does not condone the
acts by the group mentioned in the book. In fact, he finds them reprehensible.
Perhaps it's that part of him that's in all of us that has to slow down at the
site of an accident that draws him to initially explore their ideals.
I think that it's a very good book that ties up all of the loose ends without
having an overly happy/unrealistic ending.
The Audio cassette edition is read with clear pacing and
some impersonation by veterian actor Erik Singer.
Drop City by T. Coraghessan Boyle (Viking) T.C. Boyle
has proven himself to be a master storyteller who can do just about anything.
But even his most ardent admirers may be caught off guard by his ninth novel,
for Boyle has delivered something completely unexpected: a serious and richly
rewarding character study that is his most accomplished and deeply satisfying
work to date.
It is 1970, and a down-at-the-heels
Drop City
is not a satire or a nostalgic look at the sixties, though its evocation of the
period is presented with a truth and clarity that no book on that era has
achieved. This is a surprising book, a rich, allusive, and nonsentimental look
at the ideals of a generation and their impact on today's radically transformed
world. Above all, it is a novel infused with the lyricism and take-no-prisoners
storytelling for which T.C. Boyle is justly famous.
The Truth About Celia by
Kevin Brockmeier (Pantheon Books)
From the award-winning author of Things That Fall from the Sky,
a richly nuanced and deeply moving novel about the disappearance of a young
girl, as told by her devastated father. This exploration of grief is written by
Kevin Brockmeier, winner of the
Celia is seven years old on the day she goes missing. Her
father, Christopher Brooks, is giving a tour of their historic house; her
mother, Janet, is at an orchestra rehearsal. Celia is outside playing. She rides
her scooter, lies down in the wet grass, jumps off a stone wall. She throws a
rubber ball against the roof. She disappears. The neighbors offer advice,
the police search for months and missing child posters go up, yet Celia is never
found.
The Truth About Celia is a beautifully written novel of remarkable understanding—an extraordinary exploration of profound loss and inconsolable grief. It exposes the hard truth behind life’s worst realities, a place most of us would rather not be.
Good Faith
by Jane Smiley (Knopf) Jane Smiley brings her extraordinary
gifts—comic timing, empathy, emotional wisdom, an ability to deliver slyly on
big themes and capture the American spirit—to the seductive, wishful, wistful
world of real estate, in which the sport of choice is the mind game. Her funny
and moving new novel is about what happens when the American Dream morphs into a
seven-figure American Fantasy.
Joe Stratford is someone you like at once. He makes an honest living helping
nice people buy and sell nice houses. His not-very-amicable divorce is finally
settled, and he’s ready to begin again. It’s 1982. He is pretty happy, pretty
satisfied. But a different era has dawned; Joe’s new friend, Marcus Burns from
But is Joe ready for the kind of success Marcus promises he can deliver? And
what’s the real scoop on Salt Key Farm? Is this really the development
opportunity of a lifetime?
And then there’s Felicity Ornquist, the lovely, feisty, winning (and married)
daughter of Joe’s mentor and business partner. She has finally owned up to her
feelings for Joe: she’s just been waiting for him to be available.
The question Joe asks himself, over and over, is, Does he have the gumption?
Does he have the smarts and the imagination and the staying power to pay
attention—to Marcus and to Felicity—and reap the rewards?
Good Faith captures the seductions and illusions that can seize
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