Six Random Things

Hmmmmm . . . I just got tagged by Karen Vanuska for the Six Random Things About Myself game. I am now torn between my enjoyment of making lists and my sister's admonition: "Just because it happened to you, doesn't make it interesting." But add in that I get to tag six other people, which means another list, and I see on which side this is tilting: 1. The first book review I ever wrote was of The Borrowers Aloft when I was in the first grade. 2. There are 799 books on my TBR list, according to my LibraryThing library. 3. My current ratio of attorney billing hours to reading time is approximately 4 to 1. 4. I have read books while walking outside since I was in Kindergarden. The invention of the iPod, which allows me to download audiobooks, has saved me from chronic dorkiness, twisted ankles, or worse. 5. When I was 12, I wrote a book called Sixth Grade: The Way it Really Happened, which, while it may have been derivative of Judy Bloom (my favorite at the time), would have been a blockbuster had it not blown away in a Nebraska blizzard while waiting for the school bus. 6. I am currently working on 96 book lists, according to ListsOfBests. The list I am most likely to finish is Prose Books by Jim Harrison, which I am 94%+ of the way through (with only 100 pages left of Off to the Side). The list I am least likely to finish is Outside Magazine's 26 Essential Books for the Well-Read Explorer, which I added only for Christmas present ideas for Hubby. The six book bloggers I tagged for this are: The Tip of the Iceberg Books 'n Border Collies The Lists Reading, Writing, and Retirement Leafing Through Life DaBookLady Read and Release It was hard to find six who hadn't done it yet. And maybe some of these have. Sorry to tag you twice if that's the case.

Review: The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury is much easier to understand if you realize that it cannot be understood from the get go, but only when it is complete. To borrow a line from The Big Chill, sometimes you have to let art flow over you.

The book is divided into four parts, the first three of which are told in first-person, stream of conscious narrative from the perspective of three Compson brothers: Benjy, Quentin, and Jason.  Benjy’s section is particularly difficult to follow because he is mentally retarded and does not talk, but only narrates what he hears, in no particular chronological order.  Quentin’s and Jason’s sections are progressively more comprehensible as pieces of the story develop.  The final section is told by an omniscient third-person narrator, ties the loose ends together, and brings the story to its exciting close.

The first-person accounts are made even more confusing by the multiplicity of names.  Because this is the story of a large Southern family, many family members share first names.  There are two Moreys, although the younger of the two is renamed Benjamin, the first narrator.  The two Jasons, father and son, can usually be told apart, but the two Quentins, uncle and niece, are particularly confusing when introduced in Benjy’s section because the absence of chronological consistency brings both Quentins into the story at the same time, although the niece was born after the uncle’s death.

Reading The Sound and the Fury is like watching a masterpiece being painted.  Each brushstroke brings out more of the picture until the whole, beautiful composition is revealed.

OTHER REVIEWS

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NOTES

Reading The Sound and the Fury is also particularly satisfying for compulsive "list" readers, since it shows up on so many "best of" lists, including the following:

Books by Nobel Prize winners
The Modern Library's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century
Radcliffe's competing list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century
Time Magazine's All-Time Best 100 Novels (1923 to the Present)
The Well-Stocked Bookcase (Book of the Month Club)

The Internet Review of Books

Oh! I am pleased as Punch because The Internet review of Books is going to publish a review of mine. This is heady stuff for a book geek. It looks like a longer version of my review of Franklin and Lucy will be showing up in the June edition. How exciting!

Review: The Size of the World

The Size of the World by Joan Silber is less a novel than a collection of loosely interconnected short stories – sort of a literary game of tag in which a character in one story has a connection with one, sometimes more, of the characters in the next story.  This structure is gimmicky, but clever. Ultimately, the stories come full circle when the hero of the final “chapter” sells the defective airplane screws that caused the problem that brought the hero of the first “chapter” to Vietnam to solve.

Silber’s writing is graceful and stories are interesting enough to pull a reader through to the end, but the book as a whole lacks depth. Several characters make adventurous choices to live and marry in foreign lands, but the short story structure does not give Silber room to examine the cross-cultural riffs she reveals.  Analysis of the relationships is thin.

Likewise, Silber’s bigger themes are nothing new.  The idea that, while the world may be a big place, people come together by personal connections, is intriguing if not startling.  But the premise that colonialism, corporations, and the military are heartless and bad is a pretty shop-worn formula.  All in all, there is not much to The Size of the World to keep a reader thinking after closing the back cover.

OTHER REVIEWS

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Review: Franklin and Lucy

Franklin and Lucy is an intimate look into the personal life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the women close to him.

Joseph Persico examines the roles played by Roosevelt’s mother, wife, dearest lover, closest companion, daughter, and a cadre of others. While Persico occasionally makes assumptions based on no more than reasonable speculation, most of his conclusions are well-supported and persuasive.

The title is somewhat misleading in suggesting that the book focuses primarily on Lucy Mercer Rutherford, who became Franklin’s lover while working as Eleanor’s personal secretary during World War I, but then played only a peripheral role in his life until late in his third term as President.

Persico’s point seems to be that Lucy was Franklin’s true love. However, the same point could have been made about Missy LeHand, Franklin’s long-time secretary and best friend, who lived with him for decades. Although the timing is fuzzy, a case could be made that, had Franklin not discarded Missy when she suffered a series of mental and physical breakdowns, she, not Lucy, would have deserved top billing in the book’s title.

Just to describe this minor flaw in the book is to demonstrate its absorbing appeal. Persico keeps the tone personal rather than prurient, but the intimate details are thoroughly discussed. He shows Franklin’s domineering mother Sara using the family purse strings to direct Franklin’s life. He explores Eleanor’s complex relationship as simultaneous inspiration and aggravation, as well as describing her own personal intrigues as she led her parallel life as an international do-gooder. He considers Franklin’s lifelong appeal to women and his delight in their company, despite being crippled by polio.

Although designed to fit a niche in collection of FDR biographies, Franklin and Lucy provides enough context to provide a good introduction to the man’s life. The book is entertaining, thorough, and readable.

Review: The Golden Bowl

Only Henry James can take a beguiling idea like quasi-incestuous adultery, add an Italian prince, a billionaire art collector, and exotic foreign travel, and make a story so tedious that it is a true chore to read.

James writes in wisps of ideas, continually layering these wisps until there is a shimmery, translucent image that gives an idea of what he is trying to get at. These literary holograms are sometimes pretty, often interesting up to a point, but there is no substance to them. By the time the image emerges from the wisps, all I can think is, “So what?”

I can appreciate the talent it took to write an entire novel without saying anything directly. James definitely had a skill that he developed to the utmost. But while I admire the talent, I have no desire to make it a part of my life. I appreciate James’s talent the way I appreciate that of the artists who can paint the face of Jesus on a grain of rice. Impressive, but I’m not going to collect a gallery of rice portraits.

OTHER REVIEWS

(If you would like your review of this book or any other Henry James book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add your post.)

NOTES

This was one of the three Henry James books on the Modern Library's list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century.

Review: Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

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Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, a collection of short stories by South African Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer, has its hits and misses. The misses include a story about a tapeworm from the tapeworm’s perspective; a reminiscence of a cockroach trapped in a typewriter that doesn’t rise above casual anecdote; and the self-indulgent “Dreaming of the Dead” in which Gordimer recounts a dream of having dinner with Susan Sontag and two other deceased friends.

The hits more than make up for weaknesses in the collection. Gordimer’s elegant writing raises ordinary events above the tawdry and mundane, pulling out bigger ideas and themes, including the theme of personal identity in a changing world. In the title story, for instance, the protagonist goes on a half-hearted search for black relatives possibly descended from his white, diamond-prospecting great-grandfather. Gordimer subtly makes it clear that his search is driven by more than genealogical curiosity as he searches for a family that would unify his prior anti-apartheid political efforts and his personal history.

Likewise, in “A Beneficiary,” a young woman faced with the early death of her actress mother struggles to determine which is her real identity – daughter of the famous actor who sired her, or the loving businessman who raised her knowing she was the product of his wife’s brief, illicit affair.

Gordimer is at her best writing about marriage and its challenges. Adultery and sexual history are common elements. In “Alternative Endings,” for example, Gordimer examines adulterous affairs in three stories, using a different one of the five senses as the focus of each. Unfortunately, while one of the three involves hearing and another scent, it is entirely unclear which sense was featured in the third. More confusing, especially since this trilogy ends the book, is why Gordimer didn’t write five stories so as to feature each of the five senses.

Overall, this is a worthwhile collection of stories and a good introduction to Gordimer’s sophisticated writing.

OTHER REVIEWS 

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Author of the Day: Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald (Dec. 17, 1916 to Apr. 28, 2000) was a prize-winning British poet, essayist, and biographer. She is an inspiration because she did not write her first book until she was in her 60s. She won the 1979 Booker Prize for Offshore the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Prize for The Blue Flower.

Her novels, in chronological order, follow.  Those I have read are in red.  Those on my TBR shelf are ion blue.

The Golden Child (1977)

The Bookshop (1978)

Offshore (1979)

Human Voices (1980)

At Freddie's (1982)

Innocence (1986)

The Beginning of Spring (1988)

The Gate of Angels (1990)

The Blue Flower (1995)

NOTE

Last updated on April 19, 2012.

Nobel Prize

Among my many other reading goals, I am trying to read at least one book by every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. So far, I have read books by the following winners: Harold Pinter J.M. Coetzee V.S. Naipaul Toni Morrison Nadine Gordimer William Golding Gabriel García Márquez Saul Bellow Samuel Beckett John Steinbeck Ernest Hemingway William Faulkner T. S. Eliot Pearl S. Buck Sinclair Lewis Thomas Mann George Bernard Shaw William Butler Yeats Rudyard Kipling Which, according to Lists of Bests means I am 18% of the way through. I just joined a great team blog called Read the Nobels that has a 2008 challenge going to read five (or six) books by Nobel winners before the end of the year.

On a Booker Roll

I recently read two Booker Prize winners, Offshore (1979) and The God of Small Things (1997), when taking a break from slogging through Henry James’s, The Ambassadors. In one of those oddly common instances of literary serendipidy, Offshore and TGST were similar in several respects — both were by women, about women, and involved atypical, insular communities. Offshore is about a group of misfits living in converted barges on the Thames river in London. TGST is about a Syrian Christian family in a small town in India. Also, both were excellent entertainment, although in different ways. Offshore was a little gem that offered a glimpse into this secret world on the river before ending without tying up loose ends. TGST addresses bigger issues, has a more complicated plot, and uses wonderful, Nabokov-like word play. Both have stuck with me.

Review: The Sea

Following the death of his wife, the widowed narrator of The Sea spends a lengthy recuperative and reflective stay at the same beach town where he vacationed as a child. The story goes back and forth between his present grief and his coming-of-age memories.

John Banville, who won the 2005 Booker Prize for this elegant novel, has a graceful way of turning a phrase and more than a few clever lines. For instance: "If there was such a thing a 'long shrift,' I was in need of some" and "He was half way to a half wit" tickled my fancy for word play.  The present-day story of the wife's death is particularly touching. The childhood story is charming, although the end did not work as well, in retrospect, as it seemed to. All in all, an entertaining read.

OTHER REVIEWS

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Review of the Day: How Far Can You Go?

How Far Can You Go? by David Lodge is a fascinating, anthropological novel following the lives and religious development of a group of English Catholics from their days in a college church group in the 1950s, through the tumultuous years of the sexual revolution. The friends question their religious tenant and traditions as they face marriage, families, religious callings, sexual identity, and mortality. At the same time, the Catholic Church wrestled with Vatican II, the battle over contraception, internal reform efforts, and the charismatic movement. The title jokingly refers to the question the young Catholic men asked their priests about “How far can you go with a girl?” But more substantively, the book asks how far the Catholic Church can alter its rituals and adapt to modern mores and still remain the Catholic Church. Or how far individuals can abandon their religious customs and personalize their faith and still remain Catholics or even Christians. On a different level, the title refers to how far a novelist narrator can insert himself into the story and still count the book as a novel. This is an absolutely intriguing novel. It won the Costa (Whitbread) Award for best novel in 1980. Anthony Burgess included the book in his list of the best 99 novels since 1939. Catholics (whether they lived through the changes depicted or came along after), other Christians, and general readers interested in religious cultures should find it mesmerizing.

National Book Award

I just found, at my neighborhood used book store, a 1966 Modern Library edition of Goodbye, Columbus, with a near perfect dustjacket. This puts me in the mood to pursue the goal of reading all the winners of the National Book Award. It got pushed to the back burner while I finished the Modern Library's Top 100 list. But now that I am almost done with that goal, I am looking forward to a new list. I am a big Philip Roth fan, so Goodbye Columbus will be the first one I read.