Saul Bellow,Henderson the Rain King.

Saul Bellow,Henderson the Rain King. Henderson is a striving man, a failure, a bully. A millionaire strong man with broken crowns. He is "A bungled lump of humanity." A mythical Africa is the backdrop for a decaying giant and the explication of his failure.This is a book about suffering and perhaps even more the struggle - Henderson refers again and again to his capacity for striving: "It was a question of spirit, too, for when it comes to struggling I am in a special class. From earliest times I have struggled without rest."

Once again Bellow is obsessed with the decay of the flesh, with its betrayals. It's the comic tone of Vonnegut with the same vision of the absurdity of the human body. At the same time he recalls Hesse and the search to stop desire, to get off the wheel. "Only to repeat fear and desire without a change? ... Any good man will try to break the cycle. There is no issue from that cycle for a man who does not take things into his own hands."

Anyway - I identify with Henderson strongly. I feel so many of his same yearnings - at the same time grandiose and pathetic - wanting to do good while screwing up royally. I also liked what he said about reading:

"I am a nervous and emotional reader. I hold a book up to my face and it takes only one good sentence to turn my brain into a volcano; I begin thinking of everything at once and a regular lava of thoughts pours down my sides."

"When I started to read something about France, I realized I didn't know anything about Rome, which came first, and then Greece, and then Egypt, going backward all the time to the primitive abyss. As a matter of fact, I didn't know enough to read one single book."

Homer

I was just assigned the Odyssey for school. Coincidentally I had just bought a new translation of the Iliad (Robert Fagles' translation) this summer and was about half way through it. So I put Achilles and Agamemnon down and picked up the sequel. Transitioning from one to the other is very jarring; the Odyssey is so much more like a novel and instantly engaging, while the Iliad is more clearly a spoken poem. I love the characters and the drive in the Iliad, but the story is more accessible in the Odyssey - part of the difference might be the translations (I'm reading Fitzgerald's Odyssey) but most is in the narrative and the pacing. I find myself enjoying both much more than I did as a child, which is the reverse of what usually happens when I reread a classic - often I was far more captivated when I was younger, and my older self is disappointed. Maybe this time I have a larger context to put it into and so I can connect to it more easily. Anyway, as I get deeper in to both books I'll write some more.

Trial Writely

School starts tomorrow. Rosie and Callie are watching Scrubs. Mark has woken up and refuses to go back to sleep. I knew that latte was a terrible idea. I just shut off the irrigation water so our house sits in a lake. I don't know why I want the grass to grow any longer. I'm taking biochem (not the hard one for majors), genetics, history of medicine, history of ancient Greece, and medical parasitology. I'm exited about the parasites, but it's not till Tuesday. I exhausted myself last week and I feel like a convalescent today. I lay lazily around, reading books and watching my sisters play with my boys. We don't have the truck back from the shop yet, so I'm taking the bus tomorrow. If I get to school in decent time, I'll keep taking it - save gas and get reading time to myself. I'm using this word processor that Google has. Writley - it's still in beta, but I thought I'd try it out. It's strange, I was thinking I'd like to store my docs on-line because I do so much school work on the campus computers and emailing documents as attachments is so shoddy and iffy for me, and I heard about this right afterward. I also hate losing all my word files every time I have to replace a hard drive because I either forget to back up, or my back up doesn't work. So far, I like this. It has a good spell check (great actually, better than the old version of word I use - important for me because I spell abominably) auto-save, save in word or HTML or pdf or whatever you want. I'm sending this to my book blog, just to test it out.

Ron Hanson

Atticus. A prodigal son. A bit of a detective story. An expatriate community in Mexico. Mental illness/ bipolar disorder. Failed love affair. The deep love of a parent for a child, and the judgment given by both parties. I enjoyed this book. I've been trying not to read for pleasure at all, because I should be studying for the MCAT, but this was a short book.

The Quarterly, Winter 1992 (24)

I just picked up Q 24 for a quarter, so I read it. I didn't get Wayne Hogan's cartoons at all. I enjoy short fiction, but reading the whole collection at once is like bingeing on chocolates. The best stories were the two near the beginning, by Gary Lutz. Incredibly bleak, but so believably real. Perfect snapshots of the worst, dreariest reality of being human. Some of the poetry was a little cute, I thought. I don't think this magazine is around anymore, as I can't find it on the web, or even back issues on amazon. Just a random mystery book.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Middlesex. I stayed up all night reading this book. It's a rambling, multi-generational, transcontinental book about an intersexual person named Calliope (later Cal). He was raised as a girl but is genetically male (he has 5-alpha-reductase deficiency; here's a link to the wikipedia article). It begins as an omniscient narration of the events that lead to cal's conception, beginning with the story of her grandparents life in a village in Turkey. They were Greeks who fled as refugees from the destruction of Smyrna. - the second book this summer that I've read that featured that event. Also oddly enough, the second book that included brother-sister incest. But any details or summary I give about this book will not do it justice - it is simply too large and ranging for me to get a concise little picture down about it. Anyway, it was riveting.

Daniel Pinkwater

Daniel Pinkwater. I know and love this author from his children's books and his readings of children's literature on npr with Scott Simon. Boingboing led me to his new serialized fiction, The Neddiad.

a blog i wish was mine....

well it is a neat-o science blog!

McSweeney's

McSweeney's
I'm not quite sure what to think, but I am greatly enjoying reading through all the archives.....

matt- read this bit on that song that has been played a few times in our house, and here's another

Philip Roth

The Human Stain. Books that deal with the touchy subject of race always- oh yeah - sorry Bredon - I'll introduce the book first:
This is a book about a disgraced east-coast professor of classical literature, Coleman Silk. It's narrated by an author who is largely an observer and interpreter (a la Nick Carraway), a neighbor who befriends the professor. The story's set in 1998 at the height of the big blow job scandal (repeatedly mentioned throughout) and is something like an end of the century Scarlet Letter. Professor Silk is having a passionate and secretive affair with an illiterate and abused younger woman. That's all the plot rehash I'm going into.
Anyway, Roth knows how to hit all the hot buttons: race, Vietnam, abuse, anal sex.... If it's a touchy subject, he hit it (although oddly, only an oblique reference to homosexuality). Therefore, I do not recommend this book to my mother! The only thing I found hard to read were the false accusations - for some reason I find those excruciating even in children's cartoons. I have to say that Roth is a master, and he writes about ideas without preaching. Even though I felt this book was a little dated in its focus I'm going to read the rest of his books to get a more solid feel for his writing.

Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine

Last Chance To See: I tried as hard as I could to read this slowly because I didn't want to finish it. Unfortunately this was impossible, thanks to the well known Adams paradox. I often hate to read books about conservation or endangered ecosystems because they are mind-numbingly depressing and infuriating - it's not that I don't care, but that I can't bear to think about it. The last five minutes of any nature video or show are always like that; that's when they show the remaining sliver of habitat getting bulldozed and the last breeding pair carried off by some poverty-stricken poacher. Anyway, Adams managed to avoid this incredible sadness for the most part, while still conveying urgency. Hilarious as always, and really interesting, especially about island ecosystems and evolution. I almost peed my pants reading about the Kakapo mating.

Martha Grimes

The Old Wine Shades. As usual, a fun convoluted mystery with a familiar and funny cast and a hazy ending. The usual children and dogs are found, as well as a bit of vague quantum physics and wine drinking. I think she is a little sick of her own series, and they are starting to repeat themselves. But the thing is, Martha Grimes when not at her best is still phenomenal; I really enjoyed this book-completely farfetched as it was. I loved the parts about plays within a plays, and nested stories like Russian dolls. Grimes has a gift for hilarious dialogue and dry (or not) humor that makes me snort in public. But she's still writing the same book over and over again; it's a book I like, but I know she can do so much better. My guess is she's continuing to write the Jury novels for a steady paycheck, but it's the non-Jury books that she pours her heart into now (Foul Matter, Hotel Paradise, etc...). It is fairly endearing that she pokes fun at herself with the two pot-boiler novelists that are bit players in the Jury books.

Saul Bellow

Well, we've all gotta die sometime. How are we going to do it? What happens afterwards? Who will remember us? This is the basis of Bellow's book Ravelstein. It's a purported biography that slips into autobiography. The narrator chronicles the death and life of his closest friend, an intellectual teacher and philosopher Ravelstein. Ravelstein is a Platonist, and also an atheist. He claims not to believe in an afterlife but often speaks as though he does. In his dying days he returns to religion and the problem of being Jewish in this modern and hostile world. He asks his best friend, a writer who is older than he to write a personal biography. The narrator/friend agrees, but delays the project for years until a sudden and debilitating illness confronts him with the nearness of his own death. Chick (the narrator) has said that after death he thinks the 'pictures will stop'; but he simultaneously possesses an irrational belief that he will see his family and friends in some sort of afterlife.
The good parts in the story are the descriptions of Abe Ravelstein - a big man who spent wildly, lived wildly - a man of both passion and intellect. I think the point of the book was in Ravelstein's preoccupation with great love, or searching for it. Completeness, not only desire. Living with a grand passion is more important than good and evil. Reading this makes me want to reread Plato.
There were a few odd things about the book: read as if written in the early nineties when AIDs was an inexorable scourge,and largely untreatable (Ravelstein was on AZT monotherapy) because it was published in 2000. On second thought, the speaker is writing a memoir of a deceased friend, and so the time-frame of the book is earlier. This book doesn't dwell though, on the reasons for and physical process of death, but on the mental and 'spiritual' journey toward it.
At any rate, you are meant to consider mortality. The finality of death. For those of us who don't believe in an afterlife this is simultaneously terrifying and wondrous.

Arundhati Roy

The God Of Small Things. A small world of a book. Unbelievably poignant. Sad. Still. The winding, indirect method of narration is so true for so many family stories, where the main points are known, and what must be expanded are the details. Even though it seems like well-worn territory - the novel that revisits a traumatic childhood- this story felt true and right emotionally. I sometimes found the stylized language distracting, but on the whole it was lovely. Do I recommend it? I'm not sure. The larger story covered some of the same issues of caste and social discord that Mistry did in A Fine Balance, but more superficially. But the personal story was intricate and tuned. Still, I felt that it was incomplete in some way. Not only the open ending, but some of the people seemed incompletely fleshed out. Especially Ammu, who despite being perhaps the most elaborated on, seemed blurred and contradictory. For such a fighter she gave up with barely a whimper. And her death seemed almost too Dickensian. But a beautiful book.

Chris Bohjalian

The Law of Similars. Terrible book. Dull dialogue, insipid characters, unconvincing emotions, and slow and simplistic plot. Doesn't even get bonus points for including interesting information about homoeopathy (like you might get in a Crichton pulp) - you could get more and better from a Wikipedia article. And even the legal issues involved are nearly ignored although the protagonist is supposed to be a lawyer. Blah. I don't know why I finished it - I was hoping for a surprising twist at the end. If you want a more enjoyable way to waste your time try the old game of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - you'll be pulling out your hair, but in a good way.

The Satanic Verses

Update: fabulous. hilarious. confusing. convoluted. Is it magical realism or schizophrenia? A few of my favorite parts: the tropicalization of London, Our Mutual Friend as a musical, terrible puns (Alleluia Cone's nickname is "ice queen"), the devil is concerned over his bad breath ...

sister

My sister was here and she talked to him!

scifi

I've been reading sci fi short stories at
http://www.futurismic.com/fiction/index.html
pretty fun, found thanks to http://boingboing.net/
if you enjoy william gibson and his descendants....

Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Myra Syal

what I'm reading now:
The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie. Hyperverbal, polylinguic. Intensely reminiscent of Carlos Fuentes. Metafiction, multiple historical time periods, interwoven/repeating characters, obsession with cinema.He's a new author for me, and I am entranced. I'll read everything he's ever written (don't disappoint me!) The way to my heart is too much information - woo me with a superfluity of words.
more to come on this book!

Two other writers with Indian themes I've been reading lately -

The most depressing book in the world: A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry. (I chanced on it at Goodwill: again, it was in Oprah's book club, so there were about six copies.) It was very good; I got deeply attached to the people. One of those books that can make you triumph over small achievements - a good meal, a new shirt, a shared glass of tea...I love books that make you entirely enter their world (best example of this, by far, is Solzenitzen's A Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich.) I loved reading about their initial wary tolerance and eventual family of choice between the four strangers and their daily life doing piecework against the clock. The widow Dina Dalal was my favorite. She quietly made her own small space for herself - her uprightness and inflexibility were monstrously frustrating but she was revolutionary and absolutely admirable as well. However, the book had the most completely horrible ending ever. Think of the worst possible ending and multiply it by four. I was so gloomy after this book; the ending was so excruciatingly awful because you could envision in such detail the possibility for a happier one. Sometimes I hate and detest realism. I never knew or learned much about the post-independence government of India. This book was a great primer on the worst of its corruptions. I had to do quite a bit of background reading in encyclopedias to ground myself. I learned about the partition and way too much about corrupt bureaucracies and usurpation of power (I actually snuck this book in last semester, so I read it over a long period rather than in one gluttonous binge) I recommend this book; but don't read it if you are depressed with the state of the world and human nature in general.

A throwaway chick-lit book: Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee, by Meera Syal. Actually set in the Indian community in London. Not bad if you like the genre. Lots of funny parts about relationships and mother-daughter bonds. Pretty bland and almost formulaic - you could insert any culture and write a ready-made book - although that may be unfair. However, still funny and enjoyable even with wildly improbable plot twists. It's well-written and smart, so I recommend it as a bathtub indulgence read for when you're feeling girly.

npr link - al gore

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5439305
amazing.