→ May 31, 2010
→ By

Angels on Toast.

I’ve got a new first-round projection up on ESPN.com, and am headed to the studio shortly to appear on ESPNEWS at 2:40 pm EDT today.

—

After reading and loving Dawn Powell’s A Time to Be Born, I loaded up my swaptree want list with her other titles and ended up with at least four of them. Angels on Toast is the first I’ve read so far, and it has the same dry, sardonic style as Time, but unlike the likeable scoundrels at the heart of that novel, Angels‘ lead characters all seem to be rotten at their cores.

The main conceit of Angels on Toast is that everyone is on the make, whether for a business deal or a romantic liaison, and if you’re not looking to take someone or something you’ll end up getting taken. Lou and Jay are businessmen and friends who enjoy a drink and a run about town; Lou was happily married but has grown bored with his wife and her snobby relatives, while Jay makes no bones about having a long-term affair as a reprieve fro his battleaxe wife. The two end up covering for each other, using their shared interest in a crazy hotel get-rich-quick scheme as part of their stories to their wives, with both of their wives reacting differently to their husbands’ infidelities. Meanwhile, Lou’s paramour is herself stringing along another guy, and then adds another to the list, all while demanding that Lou divorce his wife and marry her – probably so she can get U.S. Citizenship. And Lou’s first wife – of whose existence his current wife is unaware – saunters back in the picture to soak Lou for a little pity money.

Powell mined humor more from her observational prose than from comic situations, such as this chapter opening on Lou’s wife, the mousy Mary, when she begins to realize that her husband is cheating on her:

Lately Mary ahd thought more and more about going to a psychoanalyst. Something was going queer in her mind, but the trouble was she was not having hallucinations, she was having facts. What could the doctors do about that? Well, doctor, she would say if she went to one of Them – (she always thought of the psychoanalysts as Them) I was perfectly normal for the first twenty-nine years of my life, I lived on a normal diet of hallucinations; an unusally intelligent and cultured upbringing enabled me to conduct my life decently blindfolded, but lately my mind seems to be shaking. Doctor, I think I’m going sane. Then the doctor, of course, would say, Nonsense, Mrs. Donovan, you can’t tell me that an intelligent woman like you is beginning to doubt your insanity. Why, Mrs. Donovan, he would say, smiling indulgently, I assure you on my word of honor as a medical man you are as insane as anybody in this room.

One of Powell’s specialties was the character who came to the big city – usually New York – and whipped up a life for himself through a combination of his wits, half-truths, and fabrications, but those characters live more on the fringes of this novel, like the hustler T.V. Truesdale, who disappears for several chapters after a strong introduction that depicts him as an opportunist of the highest order, with the camera lens focusing instead on Lou’s jumbled personal life. It makes for an amusing novel that could have been something more, funnier or deeper, had the camera panned back to show more of the picture. A Time to Be Born had that depth, along with the ingenue-heroine to grab the reader’s empathy.

Next up: Walter Moers’ Rumo: And His Miraculous Adventures.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ May 28, 2010
→ By

Shades of Grey.

I did a quick chat today on my flight back from the SEC tournament, although the connection was a little sluggish and I didn’t get to as many questions as I usually do. I wrote about Drew Pomeranz and Anthony Ranaudo on Wednesday evening, and did a now-somewhat-dated first-round projection on Monday. I’ll update that projection over the weekend, and the new version should be out on Memorial Day.

—

I’m an unabashed Jasper Fforde ffan, recommending his books to friends, family members, and just about any of you who ask for a book recommendation. His original series involved the literary detective Thursday Next and was set in an alternate reality where the world inside books exists and can even interact with and be manipulated by people in our world. (Oddly enough, this reality also has Wales as an independent communist state.) The first book involves a villain who kills a minor character in Martin Chuzzlewit and stops the plot of Jane Eyre in its tracks. His second series, Nursery Crimes, branched off from Thursday Next’s world, instead playing with the characters from childrens’ stories, including a menacing Gingerbread Man and the happily married Punch and Judy, who still beat the tar out of each other.

Fforde has left this literary realm for a new series, with the first book released in December after a delay of over a year. Shades of Grey has its own alternate reality, a world many centuries (perhaps over a millennium) in the future where humans have devolved (or bred) to where most people can only see a single color, and which color you see and how strongly you see it affects your social and economic standing. The society of the book is called The Collective, a socialist enterprise with a long and strict set of rules known as the Word of Munsell – a reference to Albert Henry Munsell, who devised a three-dimensional taxonomy for classifying colors. And there seems to be a chronic shortage of spoons.

Enter the protagonist, nineteen-year-old Eddie Russett, who has been sent with his color-healer father to the distant town of East Carmine as a punishment, ostensibly for a prank played on the son of a prefect in his original town, but who begins to sense that East Carmine is rife with corruption and might have even seen a murder, allegedly a thing of the past in Chromatacia. As Eddie begins to dig – while trying to avoid Jane Grey, who has a reputation for doing violence to anyone who crosses her or mentions her quite retroussé nose – he runs afoul of the Gamboge family, who wield tremendous power in East Carmine, and is also taxed in trying to maintain his half-promised engagement to Constance Oxblood, a wealthy family desperate to marry its daughter off to someone with high red perception like Eddie.

Shades of Grey is macabre, twisted, and funny, like all Fforde novels, but with a stronger undercurrent of even social criticism. Much of Chromatacia’s social structure resembles that of the old Catholic Church, from strict adherence to scripture (the aforementioned Word of Munsell) to the ruling class’ use of fear and uncertainty as a tool to keep the lower classes, particularly the laboring Greys, who are one step above slaves, oppressed. Chromatacia’s socialist system also comes in for some withering satire, as the system is inherently corrupt and open to abuse by people at all levels who shirk their duties or find ways to line their pockets outside of the official reckoning. And, of course, there are obvious parallels to racial or socioeconomic prejudices, although Fforde doesn’t overplay them, and the perceptive-versus-Grey dichotomy is muted by all of the infighting among Yellows, Reds, and Purples.

Fforde’s wordplay, a huge element in his earlier series, is still in evidence here, including the references to Munsell and the name of the test used to determine color perception – Ishihara, named for the man who devised those circles of dots used to test for color blindness. He has fun with names, delving into some obscure colors while also offering some puns and other almost-unforgivable combinations like the Grey named Zane, and he even crafts a little slang for his artificial world, such as the term used for people who abuse certain shades of green that heal pain or give pleasure when viewed – “chasing the frog.”

The great benefit of Shades of Grey for anyone new to Fforde is that it requires no foreknowledge – you’ll catch more allusions if you’re familiar with colors and a little of the science of color, but you could read this book cold and still enjoy it. The Eyre Affair and its sequels are fantastic, but if you don’t know a little about British literature, you’ll miss too many of the jokes – I ended up re-reading the book after reading Jane Eyre, and only then did I fully understand why the book’s conclusion is so funny. Even the Nursery Crimes books, starting with The Big Over Easy (starring detective Jack Spratt and … well, you probably know about his wife), need a little knowledge of nursery rhymes for maximum enjoyment. I recommend everything he’s written, but Shades of Grey gives you an opportunity to enter the demented, witty mind of Jasper Fforde without having to finish any prereq’s.

Next up: Dawn Powell’s Angels on Toast.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ May 20, 2010
→ By

The True History of the Kelly Gang.

I’ve now filed 75 full draft capsules plus a few shorter ones, many of which are accessible through my most recent ranking of the top 100 draft prospects. I chatted yesterday – transcript here – and next week’s will probably be on Friday the 28th.

On Monday, I updated my ranking of the top 25 prospects in the minors, deleting anyone who reached the majors this spring. I also answered a number of questions on other prospects in that article’s Conversation.

—

It is history Mr Kelly it should always be a little rough that way we know it is the truth

Peter Carey’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel True History of the Kelly Gang is an impressive feat of historical fiction because he chose a character and a story that is actually pretty well-documented – the story of the inadvertent criminal enterprise headed by Ned Kelly that was fueled by the outrage of the lower classes in Australia in the mid-1800s. Ned Kelly became a folk hero for decades, and his own memoirs of a sort were published many years after his death. As far as I can tell from reading synopses of those memoirs, Carey was reasonably true to the historical record, yet still managed to craft a compelling story and character despite the lack of flexibility in creating the novel.

The story begins in Ned’s childhood, focusing on the hard life of settlers on the Australian plains and the corruption of the local authorities in handing out land rights and meting out justice. His father abandoned the family and his mother had what we might call unfortunate taste in men, including a bushranger who trains Ned in that particular line of “work,” giving him survival skills but also fueling Ned’s rage against the oppressive forces that govern his life and those of the other settlers in the outback. Carey presents Ned’s outlaw career as the inevitable consequence of his training as a bushranger and the injustice of local authorities against his family, including the eventual jailing of his mother when the authorities can’t catch Ned, causing local newspapers to mock the police for incompetence.

I imagine that someone familiar with Australian colonial history would take more from this novel as a social document, but I enjoyed it as just a tragic adventure around an interesting central character who had to survive by his wits and worked out his own personal philosophy and ethics without benefit of education. But my ignorance of Australian history probably did rob me of another level of understanding that I’d get from a similar novel about American history.

One note on the text for those who might tackle the book: Carey’s wrote the book as a long letter from Kelly to his then-infant daughter, and his prose attempts to mimic the style of Kelly’s own writings, light on punctuation with many grammatical errors, euphemisms, or blotted-out words, something that took me a good 30-40 pages to get past to the point where I could read the text smoothly; it added authenticity to the narrative voice but I imagine it’ll be a turn-off for the same readers who can’t stand Faulkner’s meandering sentences.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s The Magician’s Assistant.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ May 17, 2010
→ By

Norwegian Wood.

Haruki Murakami is one of the most intense, imaginative authors I’ve ever come across. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, #15 on the Klaw 100, destroys the line between our world and the world in our dreams in a way that goes beyond mere magical realism, creating a second, parallel existence for its characters and the reader. Kafka on the Shore (#92) mines similar territory, with a slightly more mystical bent, while Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World mixed in a scientific explanation for a fantastical setting and saw the main character jumping back and forth from reality to a strange world that exists only inside his head.

Norwegian Wood, an earlier Murakami novel that wasn’t translated into English until 2000, is a much more mundane work, a coming-of-age novel that focuses not just on the standard material of that genre (sex, mostly, and there is a lot of it) but on life, death, and the way we must deal with our loss of innocence about our mortality.

The protagonist, Toru, is a stand-in for Holden Caulfield but is more directed and a lot less frustrating to follow. He’s in a relationship with Naoko, formerly the girlfriend of Toru’s best friend who killed himself without warning or explanation one night, and the suicide has left both Toru and Naoko broken inside. Naoko comes undone gradually over the course of the novel as Toru happens into another relationship with the unpredictable, liberated, impetuous Midori, who co-opts Toru to fill the holes but ends up finding more meaning in their relationship than she does in the one she has with her boyfriend. Toru is gradually drifting through university as these various affairs occur, where he has a foil in Nagasawa, a materialistic, cynical boy who mistreats his subservient girlfriend yet can’t seem to feel remorse or stop his selfish behavior.

Even without his usual conceits of alternate realities, Murakami still writes in bold strokes, leaving Norwegian Wood open to quite a bit of interpretation, and the novel’s postscript implies that he wasn’t thrilled when the novel became a favorite among Japanese teenagers who read it as a straightforward story of love, sex, and loss. I found it largely unromantic, but at the same time Murakami was offering a view on what Aldous Huxley referred to in Island as “the Essential Horror” – the knowledge that we must die, and, in Norwegian Wood, that many of the people we love will die before us, leaving us to deal with grief, loneliness, and depression. He litters the book with examples of characters who choose not to deal – some kill themselves, others withdraw from society or flee their existing lives – but, of course, Toru does not choose an easy exit and instead has to face the reality of our existence, first choosing to live …

I’m never sure if it’s Murakami’s style or a loss in translation, but his characters often speak in an unrealistic manner even as what they’re saying is interesting, clever, or witty:

“I’m much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That’s just the kind of person I am. I’m the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that’s fine with me. I don’t mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.”

I love that analogy, but have never come across anyone who speaks remotely like that. Then again, Norwegian Wood is populated by characters who dance on the edge between sanity and insanity, and over the course of the book several of them fall into the abyss, so one might forgive the author his creation of characters with slightly stilted or awkward speech.

Nagasawa was the one poorly drawn character among those who appear for more than a page or two, and he’s more of a stand-in for a way of life Toru rejects, one that sits between stoicism and nihilism with a healthy dose of selfishness mixed in. But I did enjoy his take on languages, even if I can’t share his view on the fairer sex:

“The more languages you know the better. And I’ve got a knack for them. I taught myself French and it’s practically perfect. Languages are like games. You learn the rules for one, and they all work the same way. Like women.

There is, as I mentioned above, a lot of sex in this novel, and I saw one review that referred to it as Murakami’s “most erotic” work. That deprecates Murakami unfairly, since the novel is attacking larger themes and – I hate to break this to you – people have sex, especially people in romantic relationships, so it’s not as if he went out of his way to include it. More importantly, the different ways various characters in the novel view and approach sex gives the reader windows into their personalities, and to me made it more apparent that, for example, Naoko was a stand-in for an unsupportable path through life, where one refuses to give up one’s innocence and then is unprepared to cope with tragedy or loss.

Next up: Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel, True History of the Kelly Gang.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ May 16, 2010
→ By

Atlanta & Dallas eats.

The updated draft top 100 went up on Friday, and I just went into the Conversation to answer your questions.

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I was only on the ground in Atlanta for about 24 hours last week but did end up eating at three new places.

Big Daddy’s is a well-reviewed and inexpensive soul food place just south of the airport where you order at the counter from steam trays, much like the meat-and-three places I found in Nashville a few years ago. The one surprise to me was the lack of fried dishes – they offer fried fish to order but no fried chicken, which I think of as a staple of Southern cuisine. I’m assuming that they don’t offer it because fried chicken that has been sitting is just not good eats. The service was extremely friendly, but the food – roasted chicken, cornbread stuffing that was way too salty, steamed okra that was just slimy, and collard greens – was unremarkable. Grade 45.

I met a friend of mine from high school for dinner at Milton’s in the town of that name in Fulton County, where we ended up ordering the same thing, the panko-crusted trout with black sesame seeds, which the server told us was their most popular dish. The fish was excellent, very fresh, pan-fried but not greasy, and the sweet red chili sauce underneath was a good complement to the slightly salty taste of the breading. The dish was overloaded with sides, including shrimp-sweet potato fritters that looked amazing but were kind of gummy, and some ho-hum mashed potatoes. I’d give them a 50 for the fish but they may be trying too hard with the extras.

The best meal of the trip came on a tip from Friend of the Dish Richard Dansky, whose novel Firefly Rain earned my recommendation last month. The Buckhead Bread Company is part bakery, part upscale brunch spot. I’m not normally a French toast guy, but I figured that was a smart order in restaurant attached to a bakery. The chef uses rounds cut from brioche and must finish them under a broiler to add a sweet, crunchy crumb topping, and the dish comes with a blueberry sauce and fresh blueberries, strawberries, and blackberries. I also had the sausage patties, which were on the savory side for breakfast and were overcooked, but the saltiness was a good offset to the sweetness of the French toast, which could easily have been on the dessert menu for a fine restaurant. (Pain perdu, the French version of French toast, is served as dessert in France, not as breakfast.) The menu wasn’t extensive but they had several other offerings I wanted to try, so between that and the high quality of what I got, it’s a 55.

–

My 24 hours in Dallas were less productive from an eating perspective, as I only ate one meal outside a hotel or ballpark. Spring Creek BBQ is a local chain of Q joints, and there’s one not far from UTA’s park that was reasonably convenient for me to hit before hopping my flight out of DFW. Their sliced beef (brisket) was mixed – the ends were flavorful on their own and just needed a little sauce to cut their dryness, while the center slices were almost too moist and had the texture of corned beef (one of the few foods that I absolutely despise). The mild smoked sausage was plus, a salty-sweet-smoky link of porcine goodness. The sides are serve-yourself, which makes me think about how utterly disgusting most people are, but the meal comes with unlimited hot rolls, a little like a large Parker house roll but white rather than slightly yellow inside, which I assume means it’s made with milk but doesn’t contain much butter. It’s a high 50 for me.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ May 9, 2010
→ By

Young Lonigan.

Blogging here will be light for probably the next month as I work overtime on draft content.

WGBH is auctioning off a “Scout with Keith Law” package, where the winner gets to tag along with me to a game somewhere in New England this summer, either a minor league contest or one on the Cape. We did this last year and ended up with two winners, raising over $1800 for the local public television station, which is also a major producer of quality children’s programming. I’m happy to be able to support them with my time.

—

James T. Farrell’s Young Lonigan, the first book of the Studs Lonigan trilogy (#29 on the Modern Library 100), is a gritty, unflinching portrayal of urban life in the 1910s as viewed through the eyes of the city’s teenagers, complete with prejudice, petty theft, casual sex (more discussed than enacted), and worship of violence. Farrell’s emphasis on depicting the city of his youth does come at the expense of a coherent storyline, although that seems to be coming in the two subsequent books.

“Studs” Lonigan is a teenager just out of a Catholic middle school who straddles the line between wannabe and tough, striking poses, getting into street fights (and winning them), grappling with romantic feelings that to him undermine his toughness, and aspiring to gradually greater depths of antisocial behavior. He admires fighters and gangsters and flouts his parents’ authority not as much for a desire for freedom as out of a need to play the part – the older kids he seeks to emulate do the same, so he reenacts the same conversations at home, yet over more trivial matters and with less dramatic results.

Young Lonigan doesn’t have a clear linear plot or a compelling quest for its title character, and Farrell seems as happy to set the scene as he does to create some action:

About the street there seemed to be a supervening beauty of reflected life. The dust, the scraps of paper, the piled-up store windows, the first electric lights sizzling into brightness. Sammie Schmaltz, the paper man, yelling his final box-score editions, a boy’s broken hoop left forgotten against the elevated girder, the people hurrying out of the elevated station and others walking lazily about, all bespoke the life of a community, the tang and sorrow and joy of a people that lived, worked, suffered, procreated, aspired, filled out their little days, and died.

The book was controversial when first published because of its depiction of casual sex among teenagers, including the girl, Iris, who favors many of the boys with “gang shags,” but those passages – tame and almost self-censored by today’s standards – serve to highlight the disaffection of its central characters. Farrell saves his minimal action-oriented writing for a couple of fight scenes, including one where Studs Lonigan thinks he’s making his bones but finds the resulting increase in street cred only slightly and temporarily satisfying.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ May 1, 2010
→ By

An Artist of the Floating World.

Kazuo Ishiguro appears twice on the Klaw 101, at 96 with Never Let Me Go and at 62 with Remains of the Day. That latter novel was preceded by An Artist of the Floating World (#91 on the Guardian 100), an interesting book that seems in many ways to have been Ishiguro’s tuneup for Remains, as both revolve around older men who find themselves forced to reflect on the professional and personal decisions they made earlier in life.

The artist of the title is Masuji Ono, a widowed father of two who lost his wife in a bombing and his son in combat during World War II, who has made a name for himself as a painter of patriotic images in support of the imperialist regime that ultimately led the country into that conflict. Now retired, Ono finds his relations with his daughters strained, but seems vaguely unaware of why, as the younger daughter moves towards a potential marriage after an earlier match fell through unexpectedly the previous year.

Ono narrates the book and the reader spends most of it following his peripatetic thoughts, jumping back to his formative years as an artist, his heyday leading an artistic circle in the bars of the “pleasure district,” and through conversations with his daughters and old friends that gradually leave him reeling by forcing him to reexamine his legacy. Yet even as he moves towards a quiet acknowledgment of the current unpopularity of his prior position and role, he retains some pride in his choices – or chooses to rationalize them away:

…I start to think of Sugimura and his schemes, and I confess I am beginning to feel a certain admiration for the man. For indeed, a man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than ordinary, surely deserves admiration, even if in the end he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions. It is my belief, furthermore, that Sugimura did not die an unhappy man. For his failure was quite unlike the undignified failures of most ordinary lives, and a man like Sugimura would have known this. If one has failed only where others have not had the courage or will to try, there is a consolation – indeed a deep satisfaction – to be gained from this observation when looking back over one’s life.”

Remains of the Day succeeded because the main character was so well drawn and his cause for regret so subtle that the reader realized the cause for regret as the protagonist did, but in Artist, Ishiguro made the problem obvious to the reader as his main character fumbles his way towards the conclusion. Ono comes across as obtuse, not just in denial but simply unaware of how he’s seen or why his relations with family members, friends, or colleagues have changed over time. As Richard Russo’s Mohawk felt like a practice run for Empire Falls, this felt like a practice run for Ishiguro’s next novel, a fine read but nowhere near the quality of the two later novels of his that I’ve read.

Next up: James T. Farrell’s Young Lonigan, the first book of the Studs Lonigan Trilogy.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ April 27, 2010
→ By

Mumford and Sons’ Sigh No More.

My first stab at the top 100 prospects for this year’s draft is now live for Insiders, with a companion piece breaking down the top five prospects at each position.

—

I discovered Mumford and Sons quite by accident, hearing “Little Lion Man” on WFNX while driving to a nearby Staples last Sunday, and using Shazam on my Droid to get the artist/song info, thinking maybe it was an Irish-influenced band along the lines of Flogging Molly. On the recommendations of several followers on Twitter, I downloaded the album (just $8 on amazon), and discovered – for myself, that is – a remarkable new album that, while imperfect, seems to be a harbinger of great things to come.

Sigh No More comprises twelve songs in three rough categories: fast songs, slow songs, or slow-then-fast songs. The entirely-slow songs came off as too precious, especially with hypersensitive recording that captures little cracks in Mumford’s voice or the scraping of fingers against acoustic guitar strings, but the songs that find the band, led by singer Marcus Mumford, picking up the pace all worked, with some sounding like back-country hoedowns while others bringing to mind pints raised in the air (and sloshing on the floor) as the bar sings along. They use tempo changes effectively and go from sparse instrumentation to lush within the span of a single song, tricks that only felt like tricks when the underlying music wasn’t strong enough to support it.

“Little Lion Man” is far and away the best song on the album, opening with a staccato guitar pattern and incorporating hints of bluegrass, folk, and even jug-band country as it moves through verse and chorus, with Mumford’s wailing (in a good way) over the bridge leading into a final, devastating pair of choruses, the latter a cappella, that lay bare the singer’s shame at his (unstated) actions and the implications for his character as a whole. The group’s harmonies, strong all over the album, are razor-sharp here, and the track’s production is crisp and clean, letting the music take center stage without some of those minor frills that mar later songs on the disc. If you’re going to start with Mumford and Sons, start with this song.

On the whole, the disc represents a marriage of British/Irish folk music as it might be played in a blue-collar pub, but with the addition of a bluegrass-inflected banjo and three- and four-part harmonies that you’ll feel in your bones. The second-best track on the disc, “Winter Winds,” features a brass backing behind the repeated couplet “And my head told my heart…” that’s reminiscent of the best of Animals That Swim, a British band that married brilliant stories with music I could only describe as tunes to which you should get drunk. I heard hints of AWS all over this record, but this track in particular is more like a brilliant cover of a song the earlier band never actually wrote. The one slow-ish track that works, the seething “White Blank Page,” gets needed roughness when Mumford accentuates the natural rasp in his voice, while the title track starts slow and accelerates to the point where the track’s end may make you forget where you begun.

Mumford and Sons strive to offer intelligent lyrics, and there are flashes of that all over the disc, but if held to that higher standard it falls short, with too many cute phrases and platitudes and overreliance on discussion of the metaphorical soul. Mumford speaks of the soul not in a spiritual or transcendent sense, but as some critical part of our being that must be protected, kept free, or nourished, but these mentions are all vague and ultimately empty. If someone tells you “your soul you must keep totally free,” that sounds great, but what exactly does that mean? They’d do well to replace much of this superficial profundity and delve into the imagery that sets apart truly great lyrics and elevates them into (or perhaps just near) the realm of poetry.

“Roll Away Your Stone” exemplifies what’s right and wrong with the album. It begins with a soft, lilting pattern that morphs into a bluegrass stomp while maintaining the core melody, transitions into a down-tempo chorus with their standard soaring harmony, and finishes with a quiet couplet of just Mumford’s voice over guitar. It’s effective and rousing, and there are hints of lyrical greatness within, yet that promise remains unfulfilled when Mumford misses a chance to extend a metaphor throughout the song. The one image in the opening line, “Roll away your stone and I’ll roll away mine,” never recurs, even with an ideal spot in the closing lines: “And you, you’ve gone too far this time/You have neither reason nor rhyme/With which to take this soul that is so rightfully mine.” Substitute “stone” for “soul” and you’ve opened a world of possible interpretations, not to mention the amusing image of Mumford fiercely protecting a rock (or pebble) that someone is trying to snatch.

Returning, again, to the standout “Little Lion Man,” the lyrics – a despairing offset to the rapid bluegrass-inflected music – are more advanced than those on the remainder of the album, from the image of the title (a nod to the Cowardly Lion?) to the admonition to “learn from your mother or else spend your days biting your own neck” to, by far, the most effective use of the word “fuck” in a popular music song since Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” with a far less crude connotation. If Mumford and Sons can craft a song like this, they can craft a half-dozen or more, and in that skill lies the potential for a tremendous album, one that will do more than reach the top of Billboard‘s folk charts.

I was originally going to compare Sigh No More to Colby Rasmus’ 2009 season, where the performance was littered with the promise of great things to come, but I think Brett Anderson’s 2009 would be more apt, as Sigh is still a terrific album despite its hiccups and flaws, one I’ve listened to repeatedly over the last week not because I needed to do so to write about it, but because five or six of its songs have become lodged in my head to the point where I feel driven to play them again and again.

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 25, 2010
→ By

The Makioka Sisters.

Quick update on the baseball front – my editors have scheduled the top 100 draft prospects list for publication on Monday night, which gave me a chance to make a few major changes based on some last-minute dope.

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Junichiro Tanazaki’s The Makioka Sisters appears on the Bloomsbury 100 as the only Japanese-language novel on the list, which covers novels written prior to 1950. It’s a dense period piece, an observation on the decline of traditional Japanese culture, depicted through the declining fortune of the Makioka family and their struggle to find Yukiko, the third of four sisters, a husband.

Japanese tradition dictates (so I infer from the book) that the youngest daughter may not marry until her older sisters have all done so, and that provides the only real conflict at the heart of this wordy book, as Taeko (also called “Koi-san,” meaning “small daughter”) has already run off once with a beau and is clearly chafing under the thumb of tradition and her hidebound family. Both Taeko and Yukiko live with the second daughter, Sachiko, and her husband, but their lives are also run from afar, the “main house” in Tokyo where the oldest of the four sisters lives with her husband in gradually diminishing surroundings as their family grows.

The entire plot revolves around the family, particularly the three sisters in Ashiya, and repeated failures in the search for an arranged marriage for Yukiko; where the family had once rejected suitors because of their high standards, by the novel’s opening it’s clear that the tides are shifting, where their standards are becoming outdated while the desirability of a Makioka daughter for a wife is lessening. Yukiko herself is slowly revealed as a stuck-up, insular, immature woman in her early 30s, and it’s possible (but never made explicit) that her disinterest in every candidate presented to her is more a function of her fear of change, or a lack of desire to leave a comfortable, easy family life where she’s supported by her sister and brother-in-law and serves as a second mother to Sachiko’s daughter, Etsuko. Taeko, meanwhile, is the most compelling character but is given the least exploration, with Sachiko sitting closer to the novel’s center. Sachiko is trapped by the family’s rigid adherence to tradition, and her escapades become more serious as the novel moves on, some understandable even today (affairs with men of questionable reputation) and some not (she becomes an expert doll-maker and seamstress and earns some money for herself through her work). The same story, told from Taeko’s point of view, would have been twice as compelling, and I wish I’d had her thoughts on why rebellion was preferable to separation from her domineering family.

And, unfortunately, that was my major problem with The Makioka Sisters – 500 pages that hinge on a conflict that now feels dated without enough focus on the most interesting character in the worst position of any of the sisters do not make for a compelling read, and when the prose is dense and rich, it required some effort to get through it.

There was one moment of unintentional humor from this 1957 translation by the eminent Japanese-English translator, Edward G. Seidensticker – this footnote:

“Balls of vinegared rice, highly seasoned and usually topped with strips of raw or cooked fish.”

Yes, in 1957, the word “sushi” was sufficiently foreign to English-speaking readers that it required further explanation.

Next up: Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World.

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→ April 23, 2010
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Mohawk.

We’re having major work done on our house, so we’re living out of a nearby hotel this week (frequent-guest and -flyer points are one of the few compensations for a high-travel job), which has cut down on blogging time, which is a long way of saying I’m sorry for the long gap between posts. I did chat yesterday on ESPN.com, and my top 100 ranking for the upcoming draft is already with my editors, so I’m hopeful we’ll see that on the site later today.

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Richard Russo’s first novel, Mohawk, has most of the elements that made his next four novels (The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, and Empire Falls) so good, but in many ways it’s obvious that it’s his rookie effort, since the well-drawn characters are existing rather than traveling through a coherent plot, and the humor isn’t as easy as it is in his later books.

There’s no single central character in Mohawk, although the ex-spouses Dallas and Anne and their son Randall are fairly close to the center of the book, involved in much of what goes on even though Dallas is more actor than active emotional participant. Anne has to be one of Russo’s best female characters, a middle-aged woman who is still paying for a mistake of teenaged rebellion while pining for a man she knows she can never have and feuding with her mother, a passive-aggressive shrew who would drive the Dalai Lama to drink. Russo fills Mohawk with many of the usual cast of blue-collar characters, including the greasy-spoon owner, the bookie, and the dirty cop, each of whom finds himself woved into one of the various plot strands when he’s not there for comic relief.

While it’s a fun and quick read, like the other four Russo novels, Mohawk doesn’t offer the strong, compelling story of those books, as it’s more a slice of life in a dying northeastern industrial town with the sort of folks Russo has since shown he loves to create. It’s worth reading for Russo fans, especially because it’s a look at a great writer in a formative period, but I wouldn’t recommend this as a starting point to readers just starting out with his work.

Next up: Still slogging through Junichiro Tanazaki’s The Makioka Sisters, kind of a dense, slow period piece. Best part so far is the footnote defining the word “sushi.”

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