The Literary Link List

Links to pieces, old and new, on literature:  

• Betting on the Nobel Prize in Lit?  Head over to BookRiot and check out your favorite author's odds of winning.
• Darryl Campbell on what a book review should be over at The Millions
• Jeffrey Brown speaks with Tea Obreht over at PBS's Art Beat
• An interview with DT Max about his recent biography of DFW (which I need to own ASAP), also over at The Millions
• On sucking at reading challenges (which I can absolutely relate to, as I am currently biting-the-mat-on-the-verge-of-abandoning-altogether my 30 Before 30 personal literary bucket list due to total lack of self-control when it comes to new books) over at Dead White Guys

And now, James Dean reading.  Though he looks a lot like James Franco here.  Regardless, you're welcome.

Review: The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus

title: The Flame Alphabet [purchase here]

by: Ben Marcus

pages: 287

genre: literary fiction

published: 2012

source:  New York Public Library

"In his early writings, Thoreau called the alphabet the saddest song.  Later in his life he would renounce this position and say it produced only dissonant music.
     Letters, Montaigne said, are a necessary evil.
     But are they? asked Blake, years later.  I shall write of the world without them.
     I would grow mold on the language, said Pasteur.  Except nothing can grow on that cold, dead surface.
     Of words Teresa of Avila said, I did not live to erase them all.
     They make me sick, said Luther.  Yours and yours and yours. Even sometimes my own."  (page 187)


This book *almost* made it on to my 30-Before-30 list, and has been on my holds list at the library for ages.  It's a bit funny, actually, that I ended up reading it instead of one of my 30-Before-30 titles.  But look at the cover!  I am a sucker for a gorgeous cover!  I really have no self control when it comes to gorgeous books...superficial, I know!


Marcus' The Flame Alphabet has a fabulous premise:  an epidemic gradually spreads across the country wherein the speech of children has become toxic to adults.  The story follows one family (Sam, his wife Claire, and their teen daughter Esther), and Sam in particular, as he cares for his wife and adjusts to find a means of coexisting with the lethal member of the family.  


This book takes on a lot:  the bonds of marriage and family; religion (in the story, Sam and Claire are "forest Jews," Jews who venture to the forest once a week to a hidden hut to worship, but are forbidden to speak about their practice, even to each other); science; ethics; morality; and, above all, how a world communicates when communication itself is lethal, which in and of itself would pose a massive challenge to the novice writer.


The first third of the book was incredibly strong.  I really respect how Marcus treats his reader as an equal; he writes as if we already have the context we need, and he trusts in the reader's intelligence.  As opposed to over-explaining, he lets us make discoveries and draw conclusions for ourselves as we read, which I really appreciated.  Marcus is really good at world-building.  This reality he constructs for his characters is chilling but also super consistent and easy to imagine considering the events in the story.


The one problem I had was with the character of LeBov.  I don't want to give anything away, but there was a scene or two between LeBov and Sam toward the middle of the story where it definitely felt as if Marcus was directly channeling some sort of Bond-era super villain, which took me out of the story a bit.  Seriously, throughout the whole second part of the book, every time LeBov entered a room, despite Marcus' descriptions, this is who I pictured (and consequently giggled a bit):

Part three of the book was a bit jarring.  The story stopped and picked up at a completely different point, which at first felt a bit like cheating on Marcus' part, as he had seemed to have written himself into a hole at the end of part 2 (for those of you who have read the book, that was a deliciously unintentional pun).  Marcus does, a few chapters down the line, fill in the gaps, but this jump still interrupted the flow a bit and as a result, the last part of the book didn't flow as easily as the first two.  But from a stylistic perspective, considering the events of the end of the narrative, this jolt and stumble may have been intentional. 


Rubric rating: 7.  I'm absolutely going to check out The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women at some point.  

Review: Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe

title:  Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids [purchase here]

author: Kenzaburo Oe

genre: literary fiction

pages: 189

published: 1958

source: New York Public Library

"Nonetheless, for aliens like captured wild beasts to be safe before others watching them, it is best to lead the will-less, eyeless existence of a stone, flower or tree: a purely observed existence.  My brother, since, he persisted in being the eye that watched the villagers, was struck on his cheeks by thick yellowish gobs of spittle rolled on women's tongues, and stones thrown by the children.  But, smiling, he would wipe his cheeks with his large bird-embroidered pocket facecloth and go on staring in wonderment at the villagers who had insulted him." (p. 23)

Clocking in at 189 pages, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids may at first glance seem like a quick read, but due to Oe's mastery of economy of language, this book is far fuller than one might expect.

Premise:  Set during WWII, a group of teenage boys from a reformatory are marched through the woods (presumably on the remote island of Shikoku, Japan, since that's where the author spent most of his life...but no specific geographic location is ever named) and evacuated to a rural village.  Upon their arrival, they're made to bury piles of corpses of rotting animals, infected with the plague.  The villagers soon flee and abandon the boys in the plague-infested village, where they are left to their own devices to determine a means of survival. 

There's a lot going on in such a petite volume:  there's the relationship between the narrator and his younger brother, between the narrator and the rest of the group of boys, between the narrator and his love interest; the juxtaposition of order and chaos; the dividing line between childhood and adulthood; the notion of the "other"; themes of abandonment and responsibility to self v. responsibility to the community v. responsibility to family...and Oe was only 23 when this book was published.    

Warning: There's also a lot of penis-related discussion.  I get that it's a story about adolescent boys, but I swear once a chapter the narrator is either mentioning his erection, talking about someone else's erection, peeing in the snow, etc.  It's a lot.  I understand its purpose (perpetuating this undercurrent of rushed sexuality that invades the narrative from time to time) and it's a bit unsettling considering the age of the characters.  But I can appreciate why Oe made the choice to include such details in terms of character development/establishment...and I like it when something I read makes me FEEL something, even if the feeling isn't necessarily pleasant.  

Penis talk aside, I really valued the experience of reading this book.  It was unlike anything I had read before.  Dark and unsettling, thought-provoking, at times spare, and at times rich...I could picture the action and characters so vividly as I read.  Oe does an amazing job of establishing tone in his work. The entire piece just worked.  I will definitely search out more of Oe's translated works in the future.

Rubric rating: 7.5.  I can absolutely appreciate why Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.  

And with this, I knocked another one off my 30-Before-30 Literary Bucket List...though now that I'm 4 months in I'm growing a bit skeptical as to whether or not I can actually finish it!  My book ADD is out of control.  I'm at different points in no less than five books at present...and it's not as if I was driven to pick up another book because the one I was reading was awful/boring/overwhelming.  No!  It's always because I get too excited about the next book I'm going to read and want to start right away, which is why I usually finish books in waves.  Anyway, here's how I'm doing thus far...23 to go!

Classics:  
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald **
Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger **
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy **
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Pale Fire by Vladmir Nabokov


Contemporary:  
Arcadia by Lauren Groff  (in progress)
Celebrity Chekhov by Ben Greenman
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe
Blindness by Jose Saramago **
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruiki Murakami
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart 
Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta    (in progress)  
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson **   (in progress) 
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notely **
Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
The Old Child and Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck 

Spirit Seizures by Melissa Pritchard

Nonfiction/Essays: 
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell 
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Possessed by Elif Batuman
Zona by Geoff Dyer
Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford


** rereading

Review: The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman

title:  The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books 

and the People Who Read Them [purchase here]

author:  Elif Batuman

genre: literary nonfiction essays

pages: 296

published: 2010

source:  New York Public Library

"In fact I had no historical consciousness in those days, and no interest in acquiring one.  It struck me as narrow-minded to privilege historical events, simply because things happened to have worked out that way. Why be a slave to the arbitrary truth? I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty.  It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they are really the same thing."  (page 10)

I added Batuman's The Possessed to my 30 Before 30 Literary Bucket List for several reasons: 

1) I follow her on Twitter and find her tweets hilarious and endearing (and her twitter handle is nothing short of amazing).

2) I LOVE narrative nonfiction.  I personally feel like I absorb more information when it's contextualized within the author's personal experience.

3) I've read her work for The New Yorker before (I especially liked her piece on the Davilov bells).

4)  I'm rereading Anna Karenina this summer, and figured a refresher course of sorts on Russian literature was probably in order.  I read Crime and Punishment in high school and a few Chekhov plays in college, so my Russian lit experience is fairly limited.  Any additional historical/biographical content/context can be nothing but helpful.

I was not disappointed.  Batuman is nothing short of delightful!  The Possessed was perfectly balanced between incredibly interesting information (from Babel to Tolstoy to Dostoevsky and back again) and Batuman's anecdotes, and was completely accessible.  The flow, the pace, the style...it just worked.

My favorite chapter:  "Who Killed Tolstoy?", in which Batuman shares her experience staying at Yasnaya Polyana (which is the estate where Tolstoy was born, spent most of his life, and wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina) for the International Tolstoy Conference and weaves in research to support her hypothesis that Tolstoy could have potentially been murdered.  Very funny.  Absolutely fascinating.

Fun fact:  

Tolstoy's Yasnaya Polyana estate : snakes :: Earnest Hemingway's Key West house : three toed cats.  

"'There are no cats at the Tolstoy estate at Yasnaya Polyana,' begins Amy Mandelker's well-known study, Framing Anna Karenina:

'Curled, or rather, coiled in the sunny patches in the Tolstoy house, protecting it from pestilential infestations, instead of the expected feline emblems of domesticity...[are] snakes...The ancestors of these ophibian house pets were adopted by Tolstoy's ailurophobic wife, Sofia Andreyevna [Sonya], to rid the house of rodents.'

I was contemplating these lines on the second morning of talks, when I counted a total of four cats actually inside of the conference room.  That said, in fairness to Amy Mandelker, you couldn't accuse Yasnaya Polyana of a shortage of snakes.  At breakfast, one historian had described his experience researching the marginalia in Tolstoy's editions of Kant: he had seen a snake right there in the archive." (page 117)

Rubric rating: 8.5.  I really hope she's working on another book!!!  Or revives her blog.

Update:  I've now finished 6 of the 30 titles on my 30-before-30 literary bucket list, with a few more in progress.  I need to pick up the pace!!!

Classics:  
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald **
Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger **
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy **
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Pale Fire by Vladmir Nabokov


Contemporary:  
Arcadia by Lauren Groff  (in progress)
Celebrity Chekhov by Ben Greenman
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe
Blindness by Jose Saramago **
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruiki Murakami
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart 
Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta    (in progress)  
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson **   (in progress) 
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notely **
Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
The Old Child and Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck 

Spirit Seizures by Melissa Pritchard

Nonfiction/Essays: 
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell 
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Possessed by Elif Batuman
Zona by Geoff Dyer
Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford


** rereading

The Literary Link List

Links to pieces, old and new, on literature:

• The Top 10 Nabokov Short Stories over at Publisher's Weekly
• Envy, or, The Last Infirmity over at Los Angeles Review of Books
• Jonathan Franzen's Book Shelf over at Strand
• Apparently creepy is culturally specific:  10 of the Most Terrifying Children's Book From Around the World over at Flavorwire
• Audio of Jennifer Egan on her writing process and A Visit From The Goon Squad over at PEN American Center
• Do the folks at Flavorwire read my blog??  Probably not...but great minds think alike! 30 Books Everyone Should Read Before Turning 30 
• Seth Fried responds by selecting 3 Books You Should Read Before You Turn 3
• Chuck Klosterman is now The Ethicist over at The New York Times

Review: The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

title:  The Sisters:  The Saga of the Mitford Family [purchase here]

author: Mary S. Lovell

pages: 611

genre:  biography

published:  2001

source:  New York Public Library

"Of course, the whole point of muck-raking, apart from all the jokes, is to try to do something to about what you've been writing about.  You may not be able to change the world but at least you can embarrass the guilty." ~Jessica "Decca" Mitford (p. 481)

The Mitfords are a fascinating family.   

I came to this book via an NPR list of recommended titles, and when I read the blurb, I was intrigued.  A little bit about each of the girls (and Tom):

Nancy Mitford (as photographed by Cecil Beaton!!!): eldest of the seven (!!!) children; author of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate; friends with Evelyn Waugh (!!!); spent most of her adult life in love with Gaston Palewski, who though he enjoyed her attention, still maintained romantic relationships with many other (sometimes married) women.

Pamela Mitford:  arrived after Nancy; nicknamed "Woman"; probably the least controversial of the bunch; preferred farming to scandal.

Tom Mitford: only boy; died relatively young 

Diana Mitford:  next after Tom; infamous for her first marriage to Bryan Guinness, and then relationship with and later marriage to Sir Oswald Mosely, noted Fascist; spent the better part of World War II in a jail cell for social ties to Hitler

Unity Mitford:  so enamored with Nazi politics, she learned German, moved to Germany, and found a way not only to meet Hitler, but to become his close friend; shot herself (and survived) when Germany and England declared war.

Jessica "Decca" Mitford:  politically very different than Diana and Unity in that she was a Communist for years; eloped to Spain with Esmond Romilly (a Churchill descendant); later moved to the US and, after Esmond's death, married Bob Treuhaft and worked in support of the Communist Party and civil rights; wrote The American Way of Death, an indictment of the funeral industry's exploitative practices.

Deborah "Debo" Mitford: youngest; was growing up in the midst of all the controversy stirred up by her elder sisters; married Andrew Cavendish and became the Duchess of Devonshire and an accomplished businesswoman.

Mary S. Lovell does a wonderful job of trying to avoid redundancy, to not only to consolidate all of the source material on the Mitfords that has accumulated over the years but really present each of the sister's perspective in a non-judgmental way (which is no small task when discussing the polarizing opinions and decisions of Diana and Unity!!!).  I was particularly struck by the delicacy in which she handled Unity's developing relationship with Hitler and Diana's imprisonment during WWII.  She presented the facts, expressed how the family reacted, and let the reader have their own reactions.  

The entire biography was superbly well-researched, yet felt completely accessible considering that I had zero prior knowledge of the Mitford sisters (having been born post 1980).  One thing that makes this bio stand out was the access she had to the remaining Mitford sisters.  Near the end of the biography, Lovell discusses the other biographies written about various members of the Mitford family, each with varying degrees of access to the sisters themselves.  Lovell, because of her access, was able to really speak to how the sisters themselves felt and reacted during different points of the family history,  What I appreciated though was that, for her access, she really tried to present the women as the complex human beings that they were, faults as well as triumphs.  

Rubric rating:  8.  Check out Mitford related postings and pictures here.  Apparently there's a Mitford tumblr.  Who knew??

Further books I'll be checking out:

1.  The American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford 
2.  Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford
3.  Nancy Mitford by Harold Acton
4.  The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford
5.  Wait for Me!  by Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire

Update:  I've now finished 5 of the 30 titles (25 to go!) on my 30-before-30 literary bucket list, with two more in progress.

Classics:  
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald **
Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger **
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy **
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Pale Fire by Vladmir Nabokov


Contemporary:  
Arcadia by Lauren Groff  (in progress)
Celebrity Chekhov by Ben Greenman
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe
Blindness by Jose Saramago **
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruiki Murakami
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart 
Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson **   (in progress) 
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notely **
Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
The Old Child and Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck (review coming soon!!!!!!!)

Spirit Seizures by Melissa Pritchard

Nonfiction/Essays: 
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell 
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Possessed by Elif Batuman
Zona by Geoff Dyer
Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford


** rereading

Review: Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (subtitled: I absolutely overuse parentheticals).

title: Brideshead Revisited [purchase here]

author: Evelyn Waugh

genre: fiction

pages: 315

published: 1944

source:  New York Public Library

GENERAL SPOILER ALERT:  If you've never read Brideshead Revisited, and would like to discover it with no previous knowledge of the plot, I suggest you stop here.  Since it was published in 1944, I'm writing with the assumption that I'm the one late to the party and many of you lovers of literary fiction have probably either read it already or are super familiar with the plot.  So, if not, stop.  Now.  You've been warned.  

Confession time:  Until a few years ago, I thought Evelyn Waugh's name was pronounced Eh-vah-lynn Wow, and that he was a she.  I wish I were kidding.  One of the great epic fails in book snobbery.  Regardless, every time I passed the "W" section at the bookstore or library, I'd see her his titles with their gorgeous cover art...but upon reading the back summary and coming to the words "set against the backdrop of World War II," I usually put the book back on the shelf.  With few exceptions, I love historical fiction...as long as the book doesn't take place entirely in the trenches. Before you yell, please note that I'm sure my bias has kept me from discovering a great many tomes. I just have a hard time getting into several hundred pages of war and destruction and blood and death and politics and guns and moral turmoil and brotherly bonding/bromance, etc.  I know full well that there are many notable works of literature (mostly by dead white dudes) with fabulous plot lines and gorgeous prose (A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls...well, just Hemingway in general, War and Peace,  All Quiet on the Western Front), and I'm sure I'll slug through a few of them for the general-betterment-of-self/expansion-of-overall-cultural-literacy at some point...it's just not my favorite.  

BUT a few months ago, I DVR'd (yes, I still DVR) Brideshead Revisited when it aired on Ovation and fell in love with the story.  And when Waugh's name came up again in the Mitford biography I'm reading (he was friends with Nancy Mitford and is said to have taken inspiration from the Mitford kids among other Bright Young Things of the era), I read up on him and decided to add this and Vile Bodies to my 30-before-30 literary bucket list.

Brideshead Revisited is, in fact, set in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, the years leading up to World War II, though only the prologue takes us anywhere near the trenches (phew!).  Charles Ryder, our narrator, and his unit are stationed at Brideshead, which serves as catalyst for Charles to reflect on how he came to know the house and to tell the story of his two great loves who grew up there: Sebastian and Julia Flyte. 

I know there's debate as to whether the nature of the deep relationship between Charles and Sebastian had a sexual aspect....in my opinion, Charles' love for Sebastian (and vice versa) was absolutely romantic (see the definition), in terms of their relationship being imbued with their desire for adventure and their idealization of and total dependence on the other, often steeped in a reality exclusively their own.  Also, I think they probably had sex at one point. Or at more than one point.  Or at least fooled around.  It was an era of experimentation (booze!  jazz!), and it wasn't super uncommon for young men to experiment that way in boarding school or when away at college, or because they were, in fact, gay or bisexual, etc.  (n.b. Tom Mitford, brother of Nancy Mitford et al, for example, is thought to have had at least one homosexual relationship in his youth and according to this Telegraph UK article, Waugh may or may not have been involved at one point with a gentlemen who has been said to have inspired Sebastian). I loved the contrast Waugh was able to strike between the love shared by Charles and Sebastian and the love shared by Charles and Julia.  Charles and Sebastian's relationship imploded because, in a way, they preferred to cling to the idealized version of the other (it's hard to live in the reality where the person you feel closest to is an alcoholic with some fairly deep emotional problems.  I think, in many ways, Sebastian's flight to Morocco, etc. occurred out of love for Charles, to protect Charles from destructive force he knew he had become.  Maybe on some level, Charles understood it as the gift of a unmarred, idyllic past, as he says on page 203 "These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me.").  Charles and Julia's romance imploded because they failed to move beyond the reality of their situation (i.e. Julia's deeply entrenched Catholic belief system was a tad restrictive, and then there was her nagging insistence upon avoiding eternal damnation...a bit prohibitive to a divorce/second marriage to another divorcee who also happens to be an agnostic).  It's a book as much about denial as it is about desire, and how both can be acts of love.  

My favorite character by far was Cordelia, Sebastian Flyte's young sister, and I died laughing at scene where she talks Catholicism with Charles upon their first meeting:

"[Cordelia says] 'D'you know, if you weren't an agnostic, I should ask you for five shillings to buy a black god-daughter.'

[Charles] 'Nothing will surprise me about your religion.'

[Cordelia] 'It's a new thing a missionary priest started last term.  You send five bob to some nuns in Africa and they christen a baby and name her after you.  I've got six black Cordelias already.  Isn't it lovely?' "(p. 82)

She's so precocious, and fancies herself to be so forward thinking, yet she acts almost as a mirror against which Waugh is able to reflect back everything he saw wrong with the Catholic church at the time (and possibly with religion in general, but given that he and I never discussed the matter, this is purely conjecture), but she's also such a likable character due to her youth and wit.  Through Cordelia especially, Waugh shows us how no person is only one thing; that no thing is either solely good or bad.  

Waugh was such a dynamic and flexible writer.  He possessed such a gift for characterization and voice! I wish I had even a fraction of his stylistic dexterity!  (Just a fraction! I'm not greedy!)  Even at the most tragic moments, Waugh's wit (I can't help noting these observational zingers as evocative of Oscar Wilde at his best in The Picture of Dorian Gray) shines through.  For example, when Lord Marchmain is dying, his mistress Cara says this of his condition:  "His heart; some long word at the heart.  He is dying of a long word."  (p. 288)

Rubric rating: 8.5.  I need to read a few more titles by him before I definitively and officially induct him into the personal pantheon, but DAMN was he talented!

Update:  I've now finished 3 of the 30 titles (27 to go!) on my 30-before-30 literary bucket list, with three more in progress.

Classics:  
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald **
Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger **
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy **
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Pale Fire by Vladmir Nabokov


Contemporary:  
Arcadia by Lauren Groff  (in progress)
Celebrity Chekhov by Ben Greenman
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe
Blindness by Jose Saramago **
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruiki Murakami
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart 
Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson **
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notely **
Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
The Old Child and Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck (in progress)

Spirit Seizures by Melissa Pritchard

Nonfiction/Essays: 
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell 

(in progress) 

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Possessed by Elif Batuman
Zona by Geoff Dyer
Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford


** rereading

ZERO willpower: the overwhelming state of my "to-be-read" pile

I should not be allowed to walk into a library unattended.  It's worse than when I'm left unattended at Strand.  Because the books at the library are free.  I ALWAYS walk out with far more than I could possibly read before they're due.  I walked in to pick up Paula Fox's Desperate Characters (which had come in from my epic holds list), and walked out with Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document.  

Now my current "to-read/to-be-finished" pile consists of those, as well as Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (which I'm almost finished.  Damn good book!) and a halfway finished The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, which weighing in at 600+ pages is a bit too unwieldy to take on the subway.  At least my chronic book ADD hasn't taken me too far off course from my 30 Before 30 self-imposed challenge...

Review: Salinger's "Franny and Zooey" & "Celebrity Chekhov" by Ben Greenman

This week I knocked two titles off my "30 Before 30" literary bucket list.  Not bad at all...

title:  Franny and Zooey [purchase here]

author:  J.D. Salinger

genre: short story & novella/fiction

pages: 201

published: 1961

source:  New York Public Library

I certainly have nothing wildly original to contribute to what's already been written about Salinger and his work.  Originally published in the New Yorker and focused on the youngest of the Glass children, Franny focuses on the genesis of Franny's spiritual/existential crisis and the companion novella Zooey tackles Zooey's reaction as Franny brings her breakdown to the family home in Manhattan.  Salinger's narrative voice is so strong and his characters so dynamic and vibrant.  My favorite scene takes place in the Glass family bathroom as Zooey's bath is interrupted by Bessie, his meddlesome mother. Whether meant as a religious parable or love story, it's certainly thought-provoking and rife with memorable moments and enviable dialogue (I *wish* I could be as intentional, witty and, when appropriate, eviscerating as Zooey when I speak!).

Rubric rating:  8.  I wasn't crazy about Catcher in the Rye the first time around (but then again, the first time around I was a 14 year old girl) and Franny and Zooey made me want to give it another shot.

title:  Celebrity Chekhov [purchase here]

author:  Ben Greenman

genre: short stories/adaptations

pages: 205

published:  2010

source:  New York Public Library

The circumstances surrounding my reading of Greenman's Celebrity Chekhov were, fittingly, Chekhovian.  In March, I was seeing someone who is a fairly substantial Chekhov enthusiast.  He had taken me to see Chekhovek!  (which we decided must be Russian for "bad acting"), a staging of a series of Anton Chekhov's short stories, which piqued my interest in Greenman's "celebritization."  (More on my life's Chekhovian plot twist post-rubric-rating.)  Thankfully, Greenman has a far deeper understanding of Chekhov than the men of Chekhovek!...

Greenman's premise is simple:  he believes that Chekhov's understanding of human nature and error is timeless.  In his introduction he says:

"Chekhov drew his characters from all levels of Russian society in his time: peasants, aristocrats, intense young clerks, disappointed wives.  Today, in America, we have a simple way of identifying these flawed specimens of humanity ruled by ego and insecurity.  They are called 'celebrities.'"

My personal favorite story:  Greenman's retelling of "The Death of a Government Clerk" entitled "The Death of a Redheaded Man," where he recasts the government clerk as Conan O'Brien and the general in the Department of Transport as Larry King.  Super insightful and pitch perfect recasting.

Rubric rating: 8.  I am a New Yorker junkie, so I figured I'd love this collection.  Really want to move his collection "What He's Poised To Do" up in my insanely long "to read" list.

And how were my circumstances Chekhovian, you ask?  Chekhov's characters tend to wear their emotions on their sleeves and are usually either pining over someone they can't have (Chekhov is HUGE on unrequited love) or battling distinct dissatisfaction with their lives and circumstances.  In my case, the gentleman I was seeing, whom I had developed pretty strong feelings for, has recently discovered he does not feel the same about me and ended our affair.  After dealing with the sadness, more bitter than sweet, I've been in a pretty intense state of ennui.  I would laugh at how life has imitated art...if I wasn't so weary...maybe I should work?  

30 Before 30 Literary Bucket List: 2 down, 28 to go!

Classics:  

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald **

Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger **

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy **

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

Pale Fire by Vladmir Nabokov

Contemporary:  

Arcadia by Lauren Groff

Celebrity Chekhov by Ben Greenman

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe

Blindness by Jose Saramago **

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruiki Murakami

Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart 

Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson **

The Descent of Alette by Alice Notely **

Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky

The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal

The Old Child and Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck

Spirit Seizures by Melissa Pritchard

Nonfiction/Essays: 

The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Possessed by Elif Batuman

Zona by Geoff Dyer

Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford

** rereading