New Zadie Smith? Yes, please!

Zadie Smith's new novel, NW, is due out September 4th!  Mark your calendars!!!

 

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

B*tches in Bookshops

It's my crack ;)

Review: When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man by Nick Dybek

title: When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man [purchase here]

author: Nick Dybek

genre: fiction

pages: 304

date: due out in hardcover April 12, 2012 

source:  I received an advanced reader's copy from Riverhead Books via 

LibraryThing in exchange for an honest review.

This evening, the conclusion of Nick Dybek's debut novel left me on the verge of doing two things that I seldom do:

1) missing my subway stop

2) crying in public

I say "on the verge of" because, though teary-eyed, I was narrowly able to squeeze out of the closing doors.  Damn you, Dybek!

Point being: When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man was THAT captivating a read.  Especially the last half. Straphangers, you have been warned.

Dybek's story follows fifteen-year-old Cal during a pivotal time in his life in Loyalty Island, a seaside community that owes their livelihood to the winter king crabbing season in Alaska and the Gaunt family.  When John Gaunt, the patriarch whose very lineage is the core of town mythology, passes away, the fate of the town is left  in the hands of Richard, his prodigal son.  What Richard decides to do with the crabbing fleet will have huge ramifications, and what happens next begs the question:  how far would you go to protect and preserve your way of life? 

In what could have been merely a typical boy-becomes-man/coming-of-age story, Dybek manages to uniquely and originally tackle some pretty major themes/issues:  loyalty; honor; moral relativism (sidebar: the majority of the book metaphorically lives in a moral "gray area" and literally takes place in one of the grayest areas of the country. Pretty damn perfect); the fact that, to some extent, we all end up becoming our parents (sometimes the best of them, sometimes the worst) despite our youthful Sisyphean efforts; sacrifice; self-determination..

Dybek's strength is the story, and in the deliberate, minimalistic voice which he expertly wields to tell it. (By minimalistic,  I mean that I was pleased that there wasn't any noticeable excess, that stuff that some debut/newer authors tend to pack into their work to make it seem more "writer-ly".  The telling fit the tale).  And the characters Dybek creates are as complex and dynamic as his prose is deliberate and tight.  He's created multiple scenes that have stuck with me throughout my reading of the book.  One occurs fairly early on, a scene where Cal's mother (to call her a music-lover would be an understatement) asks Cal to pick a record for them to listen to as they cook and dance to celebrate the finding of Cal's father's boat, which had briefly lost radio contact with the outside world.  Cal selects Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time** (because he liked the title).    I *wish* I could put an excerpt here, but I have the uncorrected proof and am thus not supposed to quote from it. Womp womp (says the sad trumpet).  Regardless, super powerful image (the dichotomy of Cal and his mother celebratory dancing and the haunting musical selection) , and one of many, in this precise, incredibly tight narrative. 

Mini-spoiler:  if you're expecting a feel-good, warm-and-fuzzy ending, this is not the novel for you (hence my hasty, leaky-eyed narrow escape from the N train this evening).  From page 290 on, even though I KNEW in my gut what was about to happen, the last 14 pages were CRUSHING and left me feeling so incredibly conflicted.   Well done.

Rubric rating: 7.5.  Impressive debut.  I'm excited to see what the future holds for Dybek. 

 **n.b. Messiaen wrote this piece while interned in a German prison camp in 1940.  Super haunting.  Personally, my kitchen dancing usually involves 80s new wave or Otis Redding a la Ducky in Pretty in Pink, but to each his own.  You can listen to Quartet for the End of Time for free here, courtesy of the Luna Nova Ensemble.

30 before 30!

A week or so ago, I turned the big 2-9, and given that I only have just under 360 days left in my 20s, I'm putting together a literary bucket list of sorts:  My 30 before 30.  This is comprised of books I've either been dying to read, should have read by this point, or want to revisit with the perspective of age.


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


Of course I'll supplement with my typical diet of new releases and review all along the way.  Looking forward to getting started!!!

Review: Drifting House by Krys Lee

title: Drifting House [purchase here]

author: Krys Lee

genre: short story

pages: 224

source: I received an advanced reader's copy via Netgalley 

in exchange for an honest review.

"After a few minutes he reappeared from the kitchen with a low table heavy with rice, soybean paste soup, beef rubs marinated in honey and soy sauce, and pickled vegetables.  There was her favorite banchan: beef-stuffed chili peppers and candied lotus flower roots.  Men rarely entered the kitchen; the store-bought banchan arranged on small plates was his usual plea for forgiveness.

'I made dinner for you,' he said.

As she sat on the floor and ate his lie, he watched, delighted.  He kissed her on the throat, the earlobe, the mouth, until she said, 'That's enough.'

He kneeled on the bamboo mat beside her.  'I'm a foolish, weak man.'

'I know.'

'I want to be the universe for you.'

She tapped the thin fuzz on his scalp with the fat end of the chopstick.  'That's impossible.'"  (page 154-155, A Small Sorrow).

Lee's debut collection of short stories is a bit uneven, but remarkable nonetheless. Set in both Korea and America, her stories are at times tragic, at times haunting, and always richly tonal.  Lee also seems to be one of the rare contemporary writers who trusts in the intelligence of her reader, in their ability to interpret and infer, which I absolutely appreciate.  

A couple highlights...

A Small Sorrow:  My personal favorite, and in my opinion, the strongest story in the collection, A Small Sorrow takes a peak inside the marriage of Eunkang and  the monogamously-challenged Seongwon.  LOVED the way Lee slowly and deliberately laid out each moment with such lyricism.  If this is any indication of what Lee is capable of, I'm really excited to read more from her!

The Goose Father:  a father, after sending his wife and children to America, takes on a tenant who believes that his pet goose is his mother reincarnated.  I felt that the story itself was stronger than the way it was told, but the story itself was almost otherworldly and far made up for the telling.

Rubric rating: 7.5.  Definitely looking forward to read her novel, How I Became a North Korean, which is coming out next year :)

Review: Open City by Teju Cole

title:  Open City  [purchase here]

author: Teju Cole

genre: literary fiction

pages: 241

source:  I received an advanced reader's copy via Netgalley 

in exchange for an honest review.

"We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities.  The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float." (p. 144)

The past (if there is such a thing) heavily influences the present day of Teju Cole's novel Open City.  The novel follows Julius, Nigerian-born psychiatry resident as he walks around New York City's many neighborhoods during his off hours and ponders each area's unique history.  And that's pretty much the most action you get over the course of the novel:  Julius takes a lot of long walks.  He thinks about New York, his job, his few friends and his family.  He goes on holiday to Brussels, does more thinking, relays the experiences of the people he meets, and talks more about history.  Not much happens.  So if you NEED plot-driven, fast-paced narrative, this is not the book for you.

I, however, do not.  Cole didn't need a lot to happen to create a thought-provoking, quietly beautiful portrait of one man.

I loved the way that Cole gently held our hand as he slowly developed the character of Julius over the course of the book.  Julius, being a psychiatrist, was brilliantly and fittingly rendered as someone who looks at the world in a detached, almost clinical way, observing more than participating at times.  There are several lovely scenes were we learn a lot about Julius through watching him interact with strangers as he gathers their stories and experiences (as psychiatrists are so adept at doing in and out of their office).  One part of the narrative where I think Cole's talent in character development especially shone:  there's a chilling scene late in the book between Julius and the sister of a childhood friend named Moji (which I won't reveal here as to not spoil and/or influence your reading experience, but it starts on 223 in Part Two, Chapter 20, and ends on page 227) where she reveals something so personal and difficult to him, and his reaction to her revelation (to reference a specific story about Nietzsche) says an incredible amount about the inner workings of Julius' mind.  So much of the book was about "definition":  how our past defines our present, how an area or a people are defined by collective experiences, how others define us, and how we define others and ourselves.  

"To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone." (p. 178)

Rubric rating: 8.  This is one of those works that I feel like I'll come back to again and again, and each time, see something different and get a bit more out of it.  

Review: The Odditorium by Melissa Pritchard

title:  The Odditorium  [purchase here]

author: Melissa Pritchard

genre: short stories

pages: 252

source:  I received an Advanced Reader's Copy from Bellevue Literary Press 

in exchange for an honest review.

Melissa Pritchard has some legit authorial street cred.  Thus far, her short fiction has won:

• the Flannery O'Connor Award,
•  the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, 
• the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize,
• a PEN/Nelson Algren Honorary Mention
• TWO O. Henry Prizes,
• TWO Pushcart Prizes,
• the Ortese Prize in North American Literature from the University of Florence,
• the Barnes & Noble Discover Award,
• fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Hawthorne Foundation of Scotland, the Bogliasco Foundation of Italy, and the Howard Foundation at Brown University

AND she's been chosen for NPR's Summer Reading List AND her work has been anthologized many times over.

To say Pritchard was immensely talented would be a careless understatement.

Now, I usually grab short story collections as my subway reading.  I like the feeling of accomplishment I get from being able to finish a short story or two while crushed against complete strangers during my commute. 

 (sidebar the first:  did anyone else die laughing watching Liz Lemon's morning commute on 30 Rock a few weeks ago?  For those of you who don't live in New York, that was not at all exaggeration for comedy's sake.  That was EXACTLY what Newt Gingrich's "elite" New Yorkers face between the hours of 8-10am and 4:30-7:30pm EVERY SINGLE DAY.  Which is probably why we New Yorkers have the reputation of being a bit cranky.  The only thing missing from 30 Rock's vignette was the smell. When you're smashed against multiple people in several compromising positions, there's inevitably someone in close proximity who does not believe in deodorant.  Or likes to pile on the perfume/cologne.  Or who hasn't bathed in several moons.  Or probably should see a physician re: what is making their feet smell like moldy cheese.  Or all of the above.  sidebar the second:  perhaps I hold a grudge for an excessively long time, but I'm still in awe of how out of touch Newt Gingrich's comment about "elite" New Yorkers ride the subway.  In my job, when I'm out working with schools, I ride the subway all day.  I would like to personally invite Newt to commute with me for a day, on my dime, and then ask him how "elite" he feels....might also impact his stance on public school education...two birds, one stone. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming...)

However, this is not the ideal collection for short bursts of reading, because Pritchard is one of those amazingly rare contemporary authors whose prose is so lyrical and so thought-provoking that you're going to want a nice window of quiet time to savor it, like a well poured glass of Malbec on a chilly November evening.  (Also, any author who can use the descriptor "labial pink" in a story without it feeling as tawdry as a bodice rippers' various "throbbing members" is truly a master of their craft). Each story in her collection defies the notion of genre, and as uniquely structured as each piece is, as a whole they form a coherent and well curated collection.

A couple highlights:

Captain Brown and the Royal Victoria Medical Hospital:  My absolute favorite in the collection, this story focuses on Captain Brown, poetry enthusiast who's somewhat incongruous to what one typically pictures as a military commander, as he takes command of the Royal Victoria Medical Hospital post D-Day.  The descriptions of the hospital itself are as haunting as many of the images and characters Pritchard conjures.  A highlight of the collection.

Ecorché: Flayed Man: This story felt a bit like the love child of Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence and anything by the Marquise de Sade.  It follows the crucial players who, while performing their collective tasks of "Collector," "Director" and "Anatomist," work to create and maintain 1798's version of the Bodies exhibit.  I admire Pritchard's graphic and lyrical yet concise language as she describes the various exhibits and the men who maintain them.

Rubric rating: 8.5.  One of the most unique collections I've read in ages.  I can't add her to my "personal pantheon of prolific prose-makers" YET, but I have a feeling once I read more of her work, that's where she'll end up.

PS Check out this piece of marketing genius from Bellevue Literary Press:

Housing Works Bookstore Cafe presents GEEK WEEK

Now, to be clear:  I'm a book nerd, not a "geek" per say (to be specific with our terms of dork-ery), but I thought this was pretty clever marketing.  If they had a "literary snob" week, I'd be ALL OVER THAT.

Salon on the death (??) of chick lit

Is chick lit finally over???? I sure as hell hope so...