My favorite passage from Paul Auster's "Oracle Night"

"Early in our friendship, Trause told me a story about a French writer he had known in Paris in the early fifties. I can't remember his name, but John said he had published two novels and a collection of stories and was considered to be one of the shining lights of the younger generation.  He also wrote some poetry, and not long before John returned to America in 1958 (he lived in Paris for six years), this writer acquaintance published a book-length narrative poem that revolved around the drowning death of a young child.  Two months after the book was released, the writer and his family went on a vacation to the Normandy coast, and on the last day of their trip his five-year-old daughter waded into the choppy waters of the English Channel and drowned.  The writer was a rational man, John said, a person known for his lucidity and sharpness of mind, but he blamed the poem for his daughter's death. Lost in the throes of grief, he persuaded himself that the words he'd written about an imaginary drowning had caused a real drowning, that a fictional tragedy had provoked a real tragedy in the real world.  As a consequence, this immensely gifted writer, this man who had been born to write books, vowed never to write again.  Words could kill, he discovered.  Words could alter reality, and therefore they were too dangerous to be entrusted to a man who loved them above all else.  When John told me the story, the daughter had been dead for twenty-one years, and the writer still hadn't broken his vow.  In French literary circles, that silence had turned him into a legendary figure.  He was held in the highest regard for the dignity of his suffering, pitied by all who knew him, looked upon with awe.

John and I talked about this story at some length...[John] said that the writer's decision made perfect sense to him and that he admired his friend for having kept his promise. 'Thoughts are real,' he said. 'Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it.  We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment.  Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid.  Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future.' "

~Paul Auster, Oracle Night (page 220)

The weight of their words...

"...'But it's always when a thing sounds not true that it is true,' he says.

Of course.  I know that...You imagine the carefully-pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth.  That is just what it isn't.  The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you will see the truth."

~Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

Review: How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

title: How Should A Person Be?  [purchase here]

author: Sheila Heti

pages:  306

genre: fiction

published: 2012

source:   I received an advanced reader's copy from Henry Holt via 

LibraryThing in exchange for an honest review.

"Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn't take them off.  Then there are those who cannot put them on.  They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people.  They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be human."  (p.60)

Expose herself she does.  And how.  Part confessional, part fiction, Heti doesn't hold anything back as she explores the title's question: How Should a Person Be?

This novel is far more conversationally driven than action driven, which really works for the topic Heti has chosen.  Things do happen (the main character, Sheila, meets her close friend, Margaux; Margaux and another artist named Sholem have an "ugly painting" contest; Sheila and Margaux go to Art Basel in Miami) but the most compelling aspect to the piece were the characters themselves, presumably based on people in Heti's own life (Heti is friends with Canadian artist Margaux Williamson, acted with Sholem Krishtalka in Williamson's 2006 film "Teenager Hamlet", and co-wrote The Chairs Are Where The People Go with Misha Glouberman, and all appear as characters in the story).  Part narrative, part philosophy, part transcript, part self-help guide, the narrative structure really works.  

Heti is supremely gifted at conveying largely universal truth and sentiment in fresh and original terms, something all writers aspire to...and she does it with such frankness and ease!  I read the first 150+ pages in one feverish sitting on a Greyhound bus ride from NYC to Baltimore, and found myself underlining passages and flagging pages far more than usual.

A few gems:

"They like me for who I am, and I would rather be liked for who I appear to be, and for who I appear to be, to be who I am."  (p. 3)

"We don't know the effects we have on each other, but we have them." (p. 25)

"The only one you are given is the one to put a fence around. Life is not a harvest.  Just because you have an apple doesn't mean you have an orchard.  You have an apple. Put a fence around it." (p. 300)

There was a bit of a dip toward the middle of the book; I felt like it was on a slightly different pace than the rest of the narrative.  And there was an entire chapter (Chapter 14: Sheila Wanders In The Copy Shop) that's only purpose seemed to set up a recurring line ("He was just another man who wanted to teach me something.") and, in my opinion, could have been cut entirely.  But other than that small detail, I found the book fresh, insightful, vibrant, sagacious, exploratory, original and enormously honest.

Rubric rating: 8.  I am absolutely adding The Chairs Are Where The People Go and Ticknor to the list of books I want to read that will probably distract me from completing my 30-Before-30 Literary Bucket List.

Review: Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

title:  Desperate Characters [purchase here]

author:  Paula Fox

genre: literary fiction

pages: 156

published: 1970

source:  New York Public Library

"Monday had always been a terrible trouble--once she had tried to stay awake all Sunday night to forestall her mother's grim and unforgiving presence in her doorway--but she had fallen asleep just before dawn, to be awakened two hours later by her mother clapping her hands relentlessly over the bed, her face shining from her morning scrub, dressed in a starched house dress, saying over and over, "Early risers are the winners."  It had been thirty years since Sophie had been roused by that derisive applause; she had not yet discovered the nature of the prize her mother's words had once led her to believe existed.  Perhaps winning had simply meant the tyranny of waking others."  (p. 147)

Some authors are amazing at creating a compelling story.  Others, at creating compelling, realistically-rendered characters.  Few are adept at both.  Paula Fox's Desperate Characters places her firmly in the character-development camp, and inhabits a place in the spectrum somewhere between Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, a novel that is super character-driven but where a ton happens, and Teju Cole's Open City, which is almost entirely character-driven and very little happens.  

As I read this book, the opening line from Anna Karenina kept popping into my head ("All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."). Jonathan Franzen loves Desperate Characters, and its influence on his writing is obvious.  Franzen is the patron saint of unhappy-middle-class-white-families, and often his characters are so intricately and realistically rendered that they're often polarizingly (I like to turn things into adverbs) unlikable.  In fact, I know of more people who stopped reading The Corrections because they hated everyone in it, than I know people who finished it.  All of Fox's characters that make up Desperate Characters' unhappy-middle-class-white-family are fairly self-involved, which, at least for me, created enough space that I found it hard to empathize with them.  Usually, self-absorbed characters can be a turn off for me, but Fox's skill was so evident that, for once, surprisingly, it didn't matter.  

The story follows Sophie and Otto, a middle-aged married couple, who are each unhappy in their own way. I would argue that it's not that they're unhappily married; it's that they're unhappy, and also married.  Their unhappiness seems to go beyond how they feel about the other.  In the first few pages of the story, Sophie, the main character, is bit by a stray cat.  The entirety of the action takes place over the course of several days, during which the bite swells and everyone and their mother tries to persuade her to get it checked out by a doctor, an idea Sophie staunchly resists.  At the same time, Otto, a lawyer, has parted ways with his longtime legal partner, Charlie, and Charlie isn't taking the separation well (i.e. he gets drunk. And makes creepy phone calls).  For such a short span of time and only 156 pages, a lot happens.  Otto and Sophie attend a party.  Charlie gets bombed and shows up on their doorstep in the middle of the night.  Sophie has lunch with an old friend who has one of the most dysfunctional, codependent divorce situations I've ever encountered in literature.  They catch the stray cat.  No one gets much sleep.  


As I mentioned, I struggled to like both Sophie and Otto.  Sophie, through her persistent passivity, seems to be her own worst enemy.  Otto is all opinions all the time, though he doesn't come across as the most reflective person.  But even for their unattractive qualities, both were wholly presented and developed over the course of the narrative; even if I didn't like them per se, I still found them compelling.  I wanted to see what happened to them next, not because I cared about them, but because I wanted to follow Fox where she was going.  I can see why Franzen returns to this piece again and again.


Also, in terms of craft, Fox is a technically astounding:

"Sophie stood motionless in the hall.  The living room looked smudged, flat.  Objects, their outlines beginning to harden in the growing light, had a shadowy, totemic menace.  Chairs, tables, and lamps seemed to have only just assumed their accustomed positions.  There was an echo in the air, a peculiar pulsation as of interrupted motion." (p. 47)

I mean, damn.  What an image!


Rubric rating:  7.5.  Strong.  I'll definitely pick up more by Fox in the future.

Review: The Old Child & Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck

title:  The Old Child & Other Stories  [purchase here]

author:  Jenny Erpenbeck

translated from German by: Susan Bernofsky

genre:  novella, short stories

pages: 120

published: 2005 (translation date)

source:  New York Public Library

"The girl used to be constantly looking around to the right and left to be sure of doing whatever the right thing was, but now that she can see more clearly and perceives the great variety of human beings moving all around her in a thousand different ways, she can no longer choose what is right, she no longer knows what the right thing is.  Everything she does seems to her wrong even while she is doing it, so utterly wrong that she'd like to take it back again--never would she have wished to offer offense to anyone, but now she is forced to realize that there is virtually no action at all that is free of the possibility of causing offense.  At the same time, this state of being prevented from acting cannot merely be described as a lack of independence, as is so often done by the girl's teachers with pedagogical intent, it is more like a paralysis.  Even transforming a simple thought into action, such as, for example, wanting to lift one's hand, is becoming more and more impossible for the girl the longer she remains in the institution.  If you lift your hand, you must, a moment before, have wanted to lift your hand, if you laugh, you must have wanted to laugh, if you say no or yes, you must have wanted to say no or yes, in other words every time you do something, you must have wanted, a moment earlier, to do what you are doing.  The moment you do anything at all, your volition can be seen standing naked behind it, and this the girl finds so utterly embarrassing that she chooses to want nothing.  She wants what all the others want, but there is no such thing.  And the moment she realizes this, she realizes also that her strength is waning."  (p. 65, The Old Child).

If Melissa Pritchard, Anne Carson and Herta Müller could somehow procreate, their child's writing might sound like Jenny Erpenbeck, which in my book is a wholehearted compliment.  

In this collection of short stories and a novella, Erpenbeck's characters are hauntingly memorable and scenes vividly dreamlike.  

The title novella, The Old Child, tells the story of a young girl, found  standing in the street, devoid of memory, with an empty bucket in her hand.  The girl is then taken by the authorities to an children's institution where all possessions are communal, and she finds comfort in the anonymity of routine and procedure.  Throughout the novella, the reader watches the girl gain, then lose, discover then reject parts of her authentic self as she struggles to find her place among the other children.  The telling of the story was so nuanced and the character of the girl so complex...I have a feeling I'll discover something new with each reading, which is the mark of true craftsmanship on the part of Erpenbeck.  I keep coming across the phrase "verbal economy" associated with Erpenbeck's writing, and it's an apt one; what she is able to accomplish in 120 pages, lesser authors spend 300+ pages attempting.  

Other highlights:

Hale and Hallowed:  The story of a woman who pays an unexpected nighttime visit to the woman she shared a hospital room with at the birth of her son, and the pace/cadence of this story was phenomenal.  

Light a Fire or Leave: Erpenbeck is supremely skilled at dropping right in to the core of the matter in a way that just reverberates for the rest of the story.  The first few lines: "That I was going to die, this I always knew.  Already at ten, at twelve, I could see myself lying there: in the deepest forest, in a puddle, unburied, my body a home to vermin.  What I didn't know is that I could grow old.  My life seemed to me only a rough draft, a sketch to which I could keep applying the eraser, it seemed to me I was simultaneously at home in all my ages, I saw the phases of my life sitting in a circle around Death, the way the twelve months in the fairy tale sit around the fire.  I never believed age could really drive two people apart, I thought everyone knew everything at all times, and the only difference was in the concrete shapes this knowledge assumed.  I always felt I had plenty of time."  (page 117).  

Rubric rating:  9.  Reading this collection was like taking a master class.  Erpenbeck is ridiculously talented and I'm absolutely going to read everything of hers I can get my hands on, such as Visitation and The Book of Words.

Update:  I've now finished 5 of the 30 titles (25 to go!) on my 30-before-30 literary bucket list, with a few 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    (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 (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: Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst

title: Fiction Ruined My Family: A Memoir 

author: Jeanne Darst

genre: memoir

pages: 303

published:  2011

source:  New York Public Library

Oh man, Jean-Joe.  Where to start?

Jeanne Darst, youngest of four sisters, was raised by an alcoholic mother (she gives Joan Crawford a la Mommy Dearest a run for her money) and a father obsessed with the idea of being a writer, and rarely produces any actual writing.  Her childhood was spent just outside of New York, during which her father attempts to shop around his novel (no one bites) and her mother cooks, drinks and mourns her lost youth.  As Jeanne approaches adulthood, three things become clear: 

1) she's an alcoholic like her mother

2) she's a "writer" like her father

3) she's completely self-absorbed, a trait she inherited from both.  Genetically speaking, she was fucked.  

Fiction Ruined My Family had all the makings for a terrific memoir:  potential for triumph (or at least growth) over a dysfunctional upbringing, incredibly rich characters in her parents, oodles of family history...but it just didn't work for me for two reasons:

1) The writing.

2) Jeanne Darst.

1) The writing:

Darst's style is not my favorite: tell, not show.  There are very few passages with any description or reflection in the book, creating so many missed opportunities!  For your consideration, I give you a typical passage:  (to set the scene, Jeanne and her sister Julia have just walked into the apartment during Christmas from college to find their alcoholic mother facedown in a pool of her own blood. Massive craft opportunity)

"I opened the door and Mom was lying facedown in the ivory-colored carpet. The rug around her head was red and black. I went to her and pulled her up by her shoulders as well as I could, her head drooping forward and gushing blood onto my T-shirt and jeans.  I called out to Julia. She phoned 911.  They told me to apply pressure to where her head was spurting blood until the ambulance got there, which was within about four minutes.  They took her to the Doctors Hospital around the corner.  We walked the block and a half there ourselves, rather than get in the ambulance.  I had a lot of blood on my shirt and hands." (page 126). 

*facepalm*

Tell tell tell tell tell.  Very little show. And the little show there was...was so utilitarian! 

Ironically, throughout the book, Jeanne's father suggests multiple tomes he thinks Jeanne should check out (Gardner, Cather, Frank O'Connor, Keats, etc) for the benefit of her writerly development, advice which Darst flippantly blows off.  

Excuse me!  Move over, John Updike.  Here comes Jeanne Darst.  And, apparently, she can't learn anything from you.

2)  Jeanne Darst: 

I really wanted to like her.  And the only reason I finished reading the book is because I kept waiting for her to exhibit some sort of genuine self-reflection, some iota of empathy, any tiny bit of honest self-scrutiny.  

Nada. 

She has to be one of the most self-absorbed, deluded, self-aggrandizing people I've ever had the displeasure of spending 300 pages with (or at least she presents herself that way.  I've never met her and thus cannot make a definitive statement as to the veracity/degree of her awfulness/self-preoccupation.  I can only go on what she's chosen to share.  And the self she decided to share sucks).  The reason:  she (or the she Darst has chosen to share with the reader) completely lacks empathy.  Darst seems to inhabit planet Jeanne and very seldom seems willing to emerge from her bubble and look at the world from any perspective but her own.  Now, for a decent portion of events in the book, Darst is a raging alcoholic making all kinds of destructive decisions, and I get that, in the moment, asking that she experience any real empathy is asking too much...but this is a memoir.  Not a case history.  A central part of the memoirist's job is to engage in a process of honest self-scrutiny, to not just regurgitate their history but react to it.  Darst's telling comes off as smug, at times arrogant, at all times oblivious to those around her, and at worst self-congratulatory.  And it's incredibly unattractive, which made it really hard for me to want to stick with her throughout the rest of the book.  

Example the first: Darst, when in college, unknowingly contracted crabs when borrowing a nightgown from a high school friend.  She then inadvertently passed them on to her boyfriend (via the usual means) and to her sister (by sharing a pull out couch over Christmas break).  Now, a decent person would feel AWFUL about the situation and would express that, if not in the moment, at least in the retelling.  Nope.  Darst is more concerned with setting up a funny anecdote about her mothers divorce lawyer walking into the apartment to catch her walking around topless with a garbage bag duct taped to her lower half (in theory, so she wouldn't reinfect the pull out couch in case the anti-crab medicine didn't work).   

Example the second: In the quote I shared in "1) the writing" section, notice how much emphasis is placed on the blood on her clothes, the number of times she uses the word "I"?   For the record, she never does share exactly what happened that rendered her mother near death, soaked in her own coagulating fluids, but man, does she have time to make another crabs related joke!  

Example the third: Darst's supposed close friend Kristina got a job as Anthony Mazzola's secretary at Harper's Bazaar, a job many a young fashionista would die for (insert skinny-bitches-eye-gouging-with-Louboutins reference here).  Darst decided, on the day of a big gala Mazzola was throwing, to prank call Kristina at work.  She pretended to be Lauren Hutton, as Kristina had shared she had left a message for Ms. Hutton earlier in the day to inquire as to whether or not she would be attending said gala.  Darst, as Hutton, proceeded to tell Kristina that she wanted to go down on her in quite explicit language.  And hangs up. Without telling Kristina that it was a joke.  Kristina, shook up from the call and believing that she was going to show up at the gala to find Lauren Hutton ready to lady rape her, told her boss about the sexual harassment she'd been subjected to. Thankfully, Darst serendipitously calls Kristina before Mazzola calls Hutton to confront her about her lascivious intentions for his office manager...Jesus H. Christ.  

Example the fourth:  There's a chapter ( A CHAPTER!) about the time she defecated into a plastic bag in her living room (she was living in two rooms and with a shared, and unfortunately occupied, bathroom) and cranked up NPR to mask the sound ("Pulling the bags away from my butt, I thought that, all things considered, Linda Wertheimer, it worked very well." page 205).   An entire chapter.  About shitting in a bag.  Just to set up an NPR joke.  For shame.

Example the fifth:  Darst finally decides to see a therapist, Hildey, who unfortunately has Lyme Disease that's causing all sorts of health problems.  During one of their (last few) sessions, Hildey experiences a slew of unfortunate events over the course of a brief period of time (her lunch explodes in the microwave and sprays chicken vindaloo all over the break room, the receptionist at her doctor's office calls and is particularly hostile regarding an upcoming Lyme Disease related appointment, compounding the stress caused by the Lyme Disease itself) and Hildey begins to cry.  We've all had one of those days, where a universe of small disappointments seems to come crashing down on us at once.  Darst's reaction:  "I walked out onto University Place wondering why all the people who were supposed to be in the stability biz--mothers, fathers, therapists--fell apart on me...Each week after that I was meaner and meaner to Hildey.  I couldn't help it.  She wasn't capable of doing her job.  She lost her shit.  Maybe she should have taken a day off."  (pg 219).   

*headdesk*

I wish I could stuff this critique into the middle a nice little compliment sandwich...but there was only one part of the book that worked for me, and that was when Darst reflects (and yes, this is one of the few places in the book where there is evidence of reflection) on cleaning out her mother's apartment after Mommy Darst finally succumbs to a stroke.  Her description of the apartment, her mother's personal affects, the memories they evoked...the start of some really great stuff.  I recall there was a particularly nice description of a lamp.  I could see glimpses of what Darst is capable of when she takes a moment and lets herself be serious, honest and reflective...when she stops writing with what reads like the desire to be seen as this outrageous-shock-jock-esque-nonstop hilarious-anecdote-machine, and lets us glimpse briefly at what's underneath the facade her former-alcoholic-self's-go-to-defense-mechanism has erected.  

Rubric rating. 4.  What was supposed to be hilarious sharing of family history felt both exhibitionist and pathetic.  I probably wouldn't have been so critical about the manner in which the story was told, or even the story itself for that matter, if Darst hadn't presented herself as so incredibly and completely self-involved, and thus virtually unlikable.  And maybe that was the point.  Some genius intentional stylistic decision.  To write as to portray herself like the jackass she was when she was at her worst, and to only give the reader fleeting peripheral glances into the person she's capable of being. To inflict on the reader just a teeny bit of the frustration her nearest and dearest must have felt with her throughout the years. Regardless, it just didn't work for me.  

Review: Zipper Mouth by Laurie Weeks

title:  Zipper Mouth [purchase here]

author:  Laurie Weeks

pages: 167

genre: fiction

publication: 2011

source:  New York Public Library

"Outside my window it was cold, bare trees shaved in a bitter wind.  Or maybe it was summer, who can know.  The TV's dismal flow leaked across my sheets. Jesus, close eyes. What did the day used to be like. I drifted to a memory of a happy time when I brought home a poem in second grade about clouds. "Clouds" was misspelled:  The fluffy clods are floating in the sky.  My mother's loving laughter, my beautiful young mother, at the time she would've been thirty-one, her laugh a fizzy feeling, both of us dissolving into giggles, sadly ignorant of the bloody five-car pileup of life I was hurtling blissfully toward." (page 159).  

I came to Zipper Mouth in a roundabout way:  I was reading an awesome piece over at The Awl on the merits (and inherent problems) with author readings and book tours, and I really enjoyed reading the thoughts contributed by Laurie Weeks and Tao Lin.  When I researched Weeks, I quickly found out that parts of Zipper Mouth had appeared in Dave Eggers' The Best American Nonrequired Reading, I immediately put a hold on it at the library.  (Those of you who are fluent in my particular brand of literary snobbery know that I take the recommendations from "The Daves" very seriously, "The Daves" being David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and David Sedaris.  They walk among the gods who reign supreme in my personal pantheon of prolific prose-makers).  Per usual, Eggers' recommendation was spot on.  

The narrator of Laurie Week's Zipper Mouth has a problem  several problems:

1)  She has a substance abuse problem.  Her drug of choice:  ALL OF THEM.  Heroin, speed, coke, booze, weed, nicotine...if you can crush it, snort it, or smoke it, apparently it either has been or will be in her at some point over the course of the narrative.

2)  Due to said substance abuse problem, she has an employment problem (she seems to gain and lose various temp jobs throughout the text) which, combined with the substance abuse problem, results in a financial problem that leaves her unable/almost unable to pay her rent/bills or, at one point, buy a bagel for breakfast.  Her ability to stretch even the smallest amount of money while ensuring the purchase of some sort of illegal substances boggles the mind.  

3) And to top if off, she has an unrequited love problem, as she's hopelessly infatuated with her best friend, Jane, a straight girl who gets high on the attention and free drugs that come with said infatuation. 

Set mostly in NYC's Lower East Side, the novel itself is a nonlinear collage of images, scenes, lists, memories, amends and letters (to dead celebrities like Sylvia Plath, Vivien Leigh, and Judy Davis, and to her very much alive addict friends) that work together to create a rich, vivid picture of the narrator's life.  The protagonist, though presented in a reflective yet unselfconscious and nonjudgmental manner by the author, at times seems to embody the verb "waste":  she wastes her potential, her intelligence, her passions and talent; she wastes her heart on a woman who isn't going to love her in a healthy way; she is literally wasted for most of the book.  As the reader (and as an overly empathetic being),  I couldn't help but feel for her, to want more for her. Though flawed (and aren't we all!!), the protagonist is so warm, so genuine and funny (!!!) and unpretentious, so realistic and raw and reflective and aware that I rooted for her every step of the way.  And THANK GOD that Weeks has created a piece of work that pushes the reader out of a passive comfort zone, to really feel something, even if that something is, at times,  discomfort and anxiety.  (sidebar:  FACT: after reading the scene in which the protagonist wakes up, hungover, only to realize that she vaguely recalls she may or may not have a test that day ("What fucking test?  In what banal way with nonetheless enormous consequences was I about to fuck up today?" (page64)), I woke up at 2:24am in a cold sweat and could not for the life of me fall back asleep before I had reviewed and re-reviewed my "to do" list no less that 13 times and I was reasonably sure that I hadn't dropped the ball on anything. THAT'S how much I empathized with the protagonist...I actually adopted some of her anxiety as my own. You know you have an empathy problem when you start taking on the stress of the fictitious...).  

I loved Week's utilization of multiple and alternative forms for her narrative (lists, flashbacks, letters, etc).  It reminded me of Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad in terms of how successfully utilized and how incredibly contemporary those choices felt (n.b. for those of you who haven't read A Visit From the Goon Squad yet, DO!  It's phenomenal!  There's an entire chapter done a as series of power-point slides that illustrates my point and, stylistically, works wonderfully!).  My favorite list came on page 46:

"10 Bonus Accomplishments of Today

1. Battled Satan

2. Didn't smoke pot(so far)

3. Swept floor, tied newspapers

4. Organized four files

5. Went to work in spite of spirit being broken on Rack of Menstrual Pain

6. Ate broccoli, 'the colon's broom'

7. Endured lengthy conversation with X; faked waves of empathy

8. Didn't smoke for three hours after getting up

9. Walked to the gym instead of taking a cab

10.  Celebrated diversity"  

I actually do the same thing when I'm feeling especially unproductive and/or am feeling the desire to be self-congratulatory.  Here's mine from today:

Jack's 10 Bonus Accomplishments of Today

1.  Wrote email from bed to Marketing at 5:33am (to make up for email I forgot to send before I left work yesterday...ooops)

2.  Only had 1 1/2 cans of Coke despite running on less than 5 hours sleep

3.  Wrote Zipper Mouth review, which has been at the top of my "to review" pile for at least a week and a half

4.  Remembered to take all 6 supplements

5. Called Mom; experienced genuine empathy

6.  Remembered to ask Mom for Grandma's new email address

7.  Cleaned off couch (i.e. the world's largest, most comfortable junk drawer)

8.  Requested Pinterest invite

9.  Made a dent in the dirty dishes

10.  Celebrated diversity

This one was mostly self-congratulatory ;)

I would also be remiss if I didn't talk about how damn beautiful the language was!  Weeks is so skilled at putting together some infuriatingly gorgeous sentences.  Comme ci: 

"I couldn't focus.  Nicotine deprivation revealed to me what a vacuum I was, what a suction machine of need and desire.  God I love everything, I thought, gazing out my window at passersby several stories below.  Blossoms dripping from the trees, robins in love warbling among the peeping spring budlets, trash spilling festively from an orange dumpster...That emaciated visionary walking his mangy dogs beneath the ginko trees  like he did every day in a paradigm-shattering costume of sandals and socks beneath an overstretched Speedo and bare rib cage--I worshipped him.  The periwinke sky and its cloud scallops arched up from behind the jumbled gothic architecture of rooftops across the street.  I loved that shade of blue, what a sharp sensation it produced in my lungs!  What chemical floodgate does a color open in your mind?  Love leaked from my pituitary and converted on contact with my bloodstream into panic and I was swelling up, threatening to leave the ground and float off fast.  I needed a cigarette, the tap-dancing kind, three feet long."  (page 48)

C'est magnifique!  

Rubric rating: 8.5.  Can't wait to read more from her!!!  

FYI:  There's a great interview with Weeks here at The Rumpus on Zipper Mouth.  

Review: The Mystery Guest: An Account by Gregoire Bouillier

title:  The Mystery Guest: An Account [purchase here]

by: Gregoire Bouillier

translated by: Lorin Stein

pages: 120

genre: memoir

source:  New York Public Library

I have needed this book several times over the past six years without knowing it.

The Mystery Guest is Bouillier's true account of what happened when the love of his life, who, without any warning, literally walked out on him five years prior, calls him out of the blue and invites him to be the "mystery guest" at a birthday party for an artist he's never met, where he ends up (unknowingly) participating in an uncomfortably personal piece of performance art.

The first half of the book is dedicated to Bouillier processing what happens when someone he cared for deeply inserts herself back into his life as abruptly as she withdrew years before.  Reading his processing was incredibly cathartic for me, as I've been the person abruptly dropped several times in my romantic past:

• Six years ago, months into what I considered to be developing into a pretty strong connection, K called on a gorgeous Friday afternoon to end things with me as he ran his errands. I had been napping (I was in my first year of teaching first grade at the time, and by Friday afternoons, I had given all of the energy I had to my little kiddies and desperately needed to recharge) and through the fog of newly abandoned sleep, all I caught was something about dry cleaning, that he felt he could only pursue something serious with me, that he wasn't in a place to be pursuing anything serious right now, and that he was about to lose the connection as he was getting on the subway.  It was an elevated, delicate variation on the "it's not you, it's me" theme, and seemed an inaccurate, incomplete picture.  The blow took three minutes to deliver and weeks to recover from.
• Five-ish years ago, I had been dating S for several months and had met his friends and his father (which is a story in and of itself! His father makes for epic storytelling, and I mean that in the best possible way...), when he disappeared.  Poof!  Gone.  Two or three weeks went by when I finally got word that he was very busy at work but could spare half an hour to meet me for a drink, during which I basically broke up with myself because he was too exhausted/burnt out/wasn't present enough/didn't care to say what needed to be said.  I left him in the bar with 25 min left in his 30 minute break.  It's surprisingly easy to end things with yourself when you're the only one doing any of the talking.

Bouiller and I share many parallel experiences.

Like Bouillier, I like clarity.  I'm not good with ambiguity.  My mind wanders into a zone of over-analysis that can, at its worst, be crippling and excessively annoying to those I'm closest to.  Almost against my conscious will, I replay conversations, moments, interactions over and over again trying to pinpoint the exact moment when something shifted, so I can figure out what exactly I did wrong (so I never do it again!).   I vacillate between giving the other person a benefit of the doubt far more generous than any reasonable person would allow, to inditing them as the coldest, most unfeeling man to have ever encountered, and pause everywhere in between, searching for WHY?????.  But the gods of circumstance shined on Bouillier, and he receives his answers in the most perfect manner for a writer.  On page 93, he writes "And just when you think you've thought of everything...you forget the book sitting right there on the bedside table."  Without giving too much away, I envy Bouillier in that he finds some sort of explanation in the pages of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. He gains some (wonderfully artistic and perfectly literary) insight into the ever elusive WHY?????, can take it in and move on.  If all human behavior were that simple, and if all answers could be found in the book on the bedside table...

Like Bouillier, I have also been woken from a dead sleep by an unanticipated voice at the other end of the line.  His offered a hello, mine a goodbye.  Of this moment, he writes: "I could hear how soft and gummy my voice was, how drowsy-sounding, and without even giving it any thought I realized that she must under no circumstances be allowed to know she'd woken me up.  That was crucial, even if it meant sounding cold and detached--and why on earth did she have to call...when I was fast asleep and at my most vulnerable, my least up to answering the phone...In real life, it goes without saying, the ideal situation eludes us, and no doubt that's a good thing for humanity in general, but just then I'd have done anything to keep her from guessing that she'd caught me sound asleep in the middle of the afternoon." (page 6).  In my situation with K, the last thing I wanted, when I was about to be cast aside, was to appear at any more of a disadvantage than I already was, and Bouillier's fear of being perceived as weak completely resonated with me.

Like Bouillier, I've had long lost lovers reappear out of nowhere.  S asked me to lunch last summer, for no other discernible reason other than that he was in town.  K found me on Facebook a few weeks ago and messaged me to find out if I were still teaching.  Personally, I prefer the past to stay there, unless there's a compelling reason that benefits us both for their reappearance. It's as if they only considered how they would feel talking to me, and gave no thought to the fact that I would experience some sort of emotion having to, in turn, talk to them.  They certainly felt some urgency years ago to put distance and silence between us, so why reach out now? And the WHY?????? reappears...WHY???????  I hate the WHY?????

And like Bouillier, I've felt compelled to change something about myself when finding myself suddenly by myself.  Bouillier goes through a lengthy turtleneck phase post-breakup.  Of it, he writes:  "Since I'd always hated turtlenecks worn as undershirts and despised the men who wore them as the lowest kind of pseudo-sportsmen with, as they say, the lamest kind of collar, I started wearing turtlenecks as undershirts the moment she left.  Basically, I never took them off.  No doubt this was magical thinking on my part (if I never took them off, nothing would ever take off on me); at any rate, these turtleneck undershirts erupted in my life without my noticing until it was too late and I was under their curse.  You could even say they'd inflicted themselves on me, so that now I hardly remembered the wind on my neck, which is the very feeling of freedom itself." (page 18).  I thought a lot about this idea of the "freedom" he was trying to gird himself against, and upon reflection I realized that several of my tattoos have come about post-heartbreak, but for the opposite reason.  My method of self-protection seems to be to race toward that "freedom," to get back on the horse as soon as possible, to show myself and the world that I'M FINE, so then maybe I will be.  The idea for the tattoo has usually been percolating for months and has nothing to do with the relationship at hand, but there's something about finding myself alone that lights a fire in me to get it NOW.  My first tattoo came on the heels of K, and my most recent came after H  (about a month ago, H, the Chekhov enthusiast I mentioned previously, made his hasty unanticipated exit).  It's almost as if I'm subconsciously (as Bouillier was no doubt conversely doing with his turtlenecks) trying to reassure myself that life is continuing and I'm actively participating in it.  I'm evolving.  I'm changing.  And the person who walked away doesn't know the person I am now, at this moment, anymore.  That they'll never know that I've changed is irrelevant. It's the act of moving forward where I find comfort.

I'm absolutely going to purchase a copy of this book.  It was (and is) reassuring to know that there's someone, somewhere, as neurotic and overly-analytical as I am when it comes to affairs of the heart, who has been dropped and has lived to tell the tale.  I'm sure this is a book I'll come back to again and again, as my romantic history unfortunately tends to repeat itself, but next time at least I'll know to look to the book on the bedside table. 

Rubric rating:  9.  

Review: Darling Beastlettes by Gina Abelkop

title:  Darling Beastlettes [purchase here]

author:  Gina Abelkop

genre:  poetry

published: 2011

source:  I purchased a copy at her reading at the Mustard Beak.

"Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words."

~Paul Engle, New York Times ( 17 Feb. 1957)

Have you ever read something and come across a phrase or a line that made you stop and think "DAMN I *wish* I had written that!"?  That happened more than a few times as I read Darling Beastlettes over the weekend.  Gina's stunning collection made the 2 1/2 hour Greyhound bus ride to Hartford, CT surprisingly enjoyable (despite the dude sitting next to me who took  "Greyhound bus" to mean "moving booze-free karaoke bar" and rapped aloud to himself for all 2 1/2 hours...with choreography...).

Poet Gina Abelkop, founder and editor of feminist press Birds of Lace, is supremely gifted at creating haunting, otherworldly images and turning out gorgeous verse.  At the heart of her poems are women, real and imagined, recognizable and authentic.  Adroitly observant, the themes Gina tackles aren't new (gender roles, sexuality, femininity, love, lust, etc) but they feel that way due to the welcome freshness and honesty of her perspective.  

My favorite stanza from "Heather in Curls":

"Ask for a hideaway bedroom, one with a secret fireplace, a stack 

of fabric that leads in well-tread steps to another country, one with mountains. 

You can cry over them as much as you'd like, they'll be there forever."  (p. 39)

A snippet from "Greta" (my FAVORITE piece in the collection):

"...At night

opened her breast like a gushing fruit

and fed reveries of love.

Nightingale wanted some

she could crawl inside.

Others looked upon her snidely,

ripped at her raw chest, 

wouldn't fit,

closed their own in return.

All this gore and nothing." (p. 61)

GAH!  Just...wow.  Brutally observant, her delivery is at times as fanciful as it is raw...which isn't easy to pull off without coming across a tad manic (which she does not).  As I said in a previous post, I don't know much about what experts say makes a poem "good," BUT I know what speaks to me, and Gina does.

Rubric rating:  8. I am absolutely keeping an eye out for her future work :)

You can read poems by Gina Abelkop at:  La Fovea, Two Serious Ladies, and Everyday Genius, among other places (check out her blog for a far more comprehensive list).  And if you happen to be in LA, check her out at The Empty Globe at Pieter Projects w/ Kate Durbin @ 8pm, or at the Saturday Night Special Reading Series @ Nick's Lounge, both on May 25th.