→ January 15, 2010
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The Brothers Bloom.

I saw bits of The Brothers Bloom on the flight back from Arizona in October – and when I say “saw,” I mean that in a literal sense, as I didn’t put on headphones – and was interested enough to add it to our Netflix queue, but promptly forgot to do so. Seeing the title on a ten-best-films-of-2009 list (CNN’s, I believe) two weeks ago reminded me, and it was right up my alley.

The Brothers Bloom had a number of things working in its favor before I even pressed play. I love movies or books about con men – it doesn’t get much better than The Sting, despite the movie’s massive musical anachronism, and many of the hard-boiled detective novels I read are built around cons of one sort or another. It alludes to a number of literary works I’ve read – including, as you might guess, the one I’m struggling through reading right now. (And that is a major reason I’m reading Ulysses; without that experience, I often feel like I’m ignorant of a secret language that later authors used in their works.) It’s filmed all over Europe. It stars Adrien Brody, who I thought very much deserved his Oscar for The Pianist. (Or, one might argue, he deserved what he took along with the award.) It’s witty. And it has heart without excessive sentimentality.

The Brothers, Stephen (older) and Bloom (younger), are passed from foster home to foster home as children, earning their tickets out of each home for one sort of mischief or another, a pattern that culminates in a con that launches them on a roughly twenty-year spree of defrauding wealthy people as a way of life. Bloom, whose first name is never revealed, is always telling Stephen he wants out of the racket, but can’t commit to such a decision. When they pull what is to be Bloom’s “final” con, on wealthy, beautiful loner Penelope Stamp, Bloom falls in love with the mark while she finds the excitement her life has always lacked. Oh, and their Japanese sidekick, known as Bang Bang, never speaks but is a wizard with explosives.

Rachel Weisz ends up stealing much of the show in her role as Penelope as she manages to produce a fairly compelling display of social awkwardness and low self-confidence. Her effusive celebration when she pulls off, against all odds, her part in their biggest con, has an endearingly nerdy quality to it – she can’t believe she did it, and her celebration lacks the self-restraint of someone more conscious of how she looks to others around her. Brody’s performance was as strong, but the weakness and passivity of his character blended him into the background more than you’d expect for an actor of his caliber. Mark Ruffalo, as Stephen, oozes with confidence in a role that calls for a little overacting. Rinko Kikuchi says three more words as Bang Bang than she did in Babel, although she looks great throughout the film.

The richness and pace of the script were what made the movie work for me, even more than the performances or the con man angle. Everything is quick, quick cuts, short scenes, and no drawn-out monologues or lingering tension until the movie’s final sequence; it’s a hard-boiled movie, right down to the bantering among the characters and the remorselessness of the head fraudster. Writer Rian Johnson must be a fan of classic literature, from the overt reference to Herman Melville’s final novel, The Confidence Man, to the names Stephen (Dedalus) and (Leopold) Bloom (the two main characters in Ulysses) to Robbie “Hagrid” Coltrane’s stint as a Belgian man who pays far too much attention to his thick mustache (a nod to M. Poirot, I presume), which I admit is a cheap and easy way to win points with me. I haven’t seen anything of Johnson’s before, but I see he made a hard-boiled detective film in 2005 called Brick; if any of you have seen it, I’d like to hear your thoughts.

The Brothers Bloom did fall short in one regard – the path to the climax, where Bloom is forced by the script to make some, in my opinion, unrealistic choices, leading to an unrealistic (but poetic) choice by Stephen. Bloom’s desire to keep Penelope out of the con game is much more easily solved by him leaving the con game than by what ultimately unfolds, but having him simply walk away would have eliminated the slam-bang finish, where only Bang Bang’s exit is truly clever or memorable. It’s a forgivable flaw given the strength of the first 90 minutes, but I am, as always, a sucker for movies with a little heart.

Filed Under: DVDs Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 13, 2010
→ By

Who Killed Iago?

James Walton’s Who Killed Iago?: A Book of Fiendishly Challenging Literary Quizzes is, as the title implies, a book of trivia tests about literature, trending heavily towards classics and Brit lit. It’s based on a radio program in England called The Write Stuff which, in the tradition of British quiz shows, makes the typical American quiz show look like Chutes and Ladders*. I’ve read plenty of the classics and know a little bit about nearly all the classics I haven’t read, and I struggled to score around 50% for the book as a whole – which, of course, makes it fun.

*I’ve been to England once, when I was 17, and we caught a game show on British TV called Cross-Wits, on which contestants were given clues to a cryptic crossword puzzle and roughly 8 seconds to solve them, which they did with shocking frequency. This was my introduction to cryptic crosswords, now one of my favorite types of puzzles (albeit one for which I rarely have time). Even at the time, none of us could imagine a US television network airing such a program, given how much more difficult it was than any game show we’d ever seen in the U.S., and given the enduring popularity of the ultimate game show for morons, Wheel of Fortune, I feel confident that even the reach of the long tail won’t bring a cryptic crossword show to American airwaves any time soon.

The book comprises ten quizzes, each in five parts. One part revolves around a featured author, with subjects in this volume ranging from Jane Austen (I only scored 5/10, missing two easy questions on my two least favorite Austen novels) to Stephen King to Shakespeare to J.K. Rowling. One part comprises questions in the form of lists of four things – authors, titles, characters, what have you – leaving you to determine the connection between them. The other three parts of each quiz vary in theme, although literary errors pop up a few times, and he runs through some obvious ones like literary firsts and lasts and, my favorite, a set of questions on last lines of famous but long books that most people never finish (2/6, and I’ve never finished either book).

If you’re into literature across the ages, Who Killed Iago? should be up your alley, but it is understandably lighter on contemporary literature with only occasional forays into pop fiction (even Twilight appears once). It even included, in reverse, a Shakespeare question I’d seen before in an online trivia challenge a few months ago – “Which stage direction explains the disappearance of Antigonus from The Winter’s Tale?”

Oh, and if you’re wondering the answer to the question in the book’s title, highlight the line below:
Trick question: Iago is alive at the end of Othello, although he’s being dragged off stage to be tortured.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , ,
→ January 8, 2010
→ By

Zooloretto.

The board game Zooloretto won the Spiel des Jahres award in 2007, beating out four games I’ve never heard of, although I suppose that’s not automatically a bad thing. It’s a fun game, on the lighter side of the German-style games we’ve played, more at the level of Ticket to Ride than, say, Stone Age or Puerto Rico, but it brings the benefit of being very easy to pick up and quick to play.

Each player in Zooloretto has a small board that represents his zoo, with three separate enclosures containing spaces for four, five, and six animals respectively, as well as a barn and several places for vending stalls. Each turn involves drawing tiles from the pool, with tiles including animals of eight different species, vending stalls, and coins that can be used to purchase the right to move animals or stalls around your board, expand your zoo to add one more enclosure, to discard an animal you can’t place, or to buy an animal from another player’s barn. The goal is to maximize the number of victory points for your zoo at the end of the game, with the biggest bonuses coming for filling any enclosure (with the limit of one animal type per enclosure) and other points coming from placing more animals and stalls, but two-point penalties for animals in your barn, which is where you stash any tile you can’t place until you can either place it somewhere or discard it.

The one major twist is that players do not draw tiles directly, but instead must place them on one of several delivery trucks, each with space for three tiles, placed in the center of the table. There’s one truck per player, but no player owns any single truck, and on your turn, you may choose to take one of the trucks (even if it’s only partially filled) instead of placing another tile. So when placing tiles on trucks, you have to consider whether another player will grab the truck you’ve so carefully filled for your own purposes, and sometimes may draw a tile an opponent doesn’t want and thus choose to place it on a truck to discourage him from taking it (or to screw him if he does). There are also some animal tiles labeled with a gender, and if you get a male and a female of the same animal type in an enclosure … wait for it … you get a baby animal tile, free, so you can fill the enclosure faster. There are also coin bonuses for filling your two smaller enclosures as well as the expansion enclosure, and for a single coin you can swap any two groups of animals, which offers opportunities for more points and to potentially duplicate coin bonuses (making it a nearly zero-risk investment if done correctly).

The game is sold as a 2-5 player game, but the two-player version is explicitly listed as a variant in the rules, and the dynamic changes dramatically. The two players use and fill three trucks instead of two, and so instead of competing with other players for a specific animal type, the only constraint is the fact that in each round, one or more tiles will be removed from the game because they were on the truck that neither player chose. Filling enclosures is much easier, there’s less need to buy an animal from the other player’s barn (I think we’ve done that twice in five games), and just generally less tension because you know in all likelihood you’ll get the tiles you need.

I did manage to play this as a simple matching game with my three-year-old daughter, using four animal types for the two of us, just two trucks, no money or stalls, and using the one-type-per-enclosure rule. She thought it was great and even understood when I switched two of her animal types to make room for her to add another panda* to her zoo. My daughter thinks it’s important for everyone to finish whatever game we play, and she’s not concerned about who finishes first and has no concept of points, so it really boiled down to matching and counting. Heck, even stripped down to these simple rules it’s still a better game than Candyland.

*So for some reason, my daughter was pronouncing panda “ponda,” as if she was English. We have no idea where it came from, and while it cracked us up, we did tell her it was pronounced “panda” and, after a few days, she dropped the British accent. The first time she said it correctly, I told her, “You know, you used to say ‘ponda’ bear.”
Her response? “When I was a baby?”
“No, sweetheart. Yesterday.”

I’d definitely recommend this as a starter game for anyone interested in playing better board games but a little wary of the heavier strategy entrants in the field. Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne are more challenging, but Zooloretto’s concept and look put it ahead of Carcassonne, and the scoring in Zooloretto is more intuitive than Carcassonne’s bizarre yet critical farm scoring scheme. I would also guess that this game would be the easiest of all of the games I’ve reviewed here for a child to learn to play well; Ticket to Ride is just as simple to play, but there’s more advance planning required than there is in Zooloretto. And who doesn’t love panda bears?

Filed Under: Games Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 5, 2010
→ By

Pedro Páramo.

Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo is barely a novel at a scant 123 pages and under 40,000 words, but was apparently a major influence on post-colonial literature in Latin America, most famously as the book that inspired Gábriel García Márquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude. Rulfo’s use of magical realism doesn’t seem all that groundbreaking today, but at the time it was published, it was.

Rulfo set the book apart from the beginning through its odd structure – seventy passages of varying lengths, some as short as a paragraph, all written as an interior monologue with very little descriptive prose. The novel includes three separate plot strands, loosely connected but woven together with frequent confusion as to which strand is the current one. Juan Preciado’s mother makes him promise to return to the town of his birth to find his father, Pedro Páramo, whom Juan’s mother abandoned when Juan was very young. On the way there, Juan has an unusual encounter with a strange man who tells him that Pedro PPáramo is his father as well, only to reveal that Páramo has been dead for many years. Juan finds the town, Comala, empty, yet full of ghosts and memories – yes, he sees dead people – and it turns out that the title character is the reason for the town’s decline and death, one that infects Juan as well, leading to an even more bizarre sequence of conversations he has and overhears from within his own grave. (Whether or not Juan is dead the entire novel is apparently a major subject of scholarly debate; I think he’s dead from the start, as the sequence that supposedly describes his death is unusually vague, but he doesn’t know he’s dead until that passage.) He learns that Páramo fathered many children with the women of the town, but became obsessed with the one he couldn’t have, Susana, who eventually returned to the town and married Pedro but never gave him her heart, after which he decided to starve the town to death.

Rulfo wrote the book after a visit to the town where he was born, one that was nearly depopulated as part of the great urbanization in Mexico in the early part of the last century. This shift also meant the destruction of local institutions in the rural towns that were the backbone of Mexican culture. The desolation and loneliness he experienced on that return visit formed the basis for the abandoned Comala of the novel – haunted by sounds and memories without a clear line between life and death (perhaps because everything is on the wrong side of that line). You can play all sorts of matching games between the main characters and the forces or events that shaped that period of Mexico’s history – Susana, for example, could stand in for that siren’s call of the city that ultimately wrecks the towns and people who heeded it – because Rulfo painted them with broad strokes and doesn’t provide a ton of detail in such a short work. He also gave his characters names with obvious metaphorical implications – Páramo is “barren,” Preciado is “precious,” Fulgor is “glow” – which is great fodder for academic interpretation, and I’m not sure it’s possible to read or enjoy this book without looking at that second level of meaning. The plot itself is so thin and unsatisfying that it can’t stand on its own and only rises to greatness when you consider Rulfo’s concern for his country rather than his characters.

Since Pedro Páramo needs analysis for the reader to fully grasp what Rulfo was trying to express, here are a few links I found useful in thinking about the book once I’d finished it:

Next up: Marilynne Robinson’s follow-up to one of my top 100 novels (her 1980 debut, Housekeeping), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ January 2, 2010
→ By

The Mating Season.

I’d rank P.G. Wodehouse’s The Mating Season as perhaps my favorite Jeeves/Wooster novel for its extraordinarily high degree of silliness and slightly more convoluted plot (although Wodehouse’s plots, at least the Jeeves/Wooster ones, are nearly all alike), but above all because Bertie Wooster has a little more character than normal in this novel, as opposed to the many books and stories where he’s a highly amusing fathead.

The story involves, as usual, couples whose intended marriages are either forbidden by forbidding relatives or split up by squabbles, four such couples in this case, including Wodehouse regulars Augustus “Gussie” Fink-Nottle and his aristocrat flower-child fiancée, Madelyn Bassett, who believes the stars are God’s daisy-chain … and that Bertie is hopelessly in love with her, which makes him her backup plan should Gussie fail to deliver the goods. Of course, Gussie does fail to d. the g., while a brother-sister tandem finds their hoped-for nuptuals on hold due to the presence of five forbidding aunts at Deverill Hall, where Bertie arrives pretending to be Gussie, only to have Gussie later arrive pretending to be Bertie, which means that Gussie (as Bertie) gets the use of Jeeves. There’s also an angry dog, a village talent show, some dancing on chairs, and a very inappropriate dinner-table joke.

The plot does bring some narrative greed – you know everything’s going to work out fine, but seeing how Wodehouse (through Jeeves) works his way out of the mess he created for his characters is always a pleasure, and Season doesn’t disappoint. But what draws me back to Wodehouse is his dry wit, which infuses prose and dialogue alike and leaves him without peer among comic novelists. I won’t spoil the dinner-table joke, but I also enjoyed his droll description of a dog chasing a cat while he’s chased by his pudgy female owner:

It was the cat who eased a tense situation. Possibly because it had not yet breakfasted and wished to do so, or it may be because the charm of Bertram Wooster’s society had at last begun to pall, it selected this moment to leave me. It turned on its heel and emerged from the bush with its tail in the air, and the white, woolly dog, sighting it, broke into a canine version of Aunt Charlotte’s A-hunting-we-will-go song and with a brief ‘Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo’ went a-hunting. The pursuit rolled away over brake and over thorn, with Madeline Bassett’s school friend bringing up the rear.

Position at the turn:

1. Cat
2. Dog
3. Madeline Bassett’s school friend

The leaders were well up in a bunch. Several lengths separated 2 and 3.

Interesting to no one but me: Apparently I’ve read The Mating Season before, but I didn’t recall it at all, which means I probably read it in 2001 or 2002 when I first discovered Wodehouse and read many of his Jeeves books in a short period of time. Also, this marked my 86th book read in 2009, a new personal best for a single calendar year (although I suppose you might argue that I’m playing the Arbitrary Endpoints Game with myself). I may be obsessive, but I’m diligent about it.

A few of you have asked me where to start with Wodehouse. The book that got me started is now out of print, but you can still buy it through amazon under its UK title, The World of Jeeves: A Jeeves and Wooster Omnibus. It contains two collections of short stories plus one Jeeves novel.

Next up: Pedro Páramo, a surrealist novel by Juan Rulfo, spurred by a question from reader Kirby in April of 2008.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ December 6, 2009
→ By

Codex.

I’ve got a few new pieces up on the Four-Letter, including reactions to the Noel Argüelles signing, the Chone Figgins signing, and James Paxton’s lawsuit against the University of Kentucky.

—

Pseudo-intellectual thrillers have thrived in recent years as a literary genre, particularly in mass-market paperbacks, with Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code leading the charge, although I think the style dates back to Michael Crichton’s preachy, predictable, very fast-paced novels from the early-to-mid-1990s. They’re potboilers in fancy dress, usually with lots of explanatory text so that you’ll understand the motive of the core crime or why everyone is running very fast. The technique of putting the protagonist in jeopardy and having various suspects and witnesses killed off over the course of a book works well in the spare writing of hard-boiled detective novels, but married with …

Lev Grossman, whose The Magicians was one of the best books I read in 2009, wrote a book in that genre that dispenses with the conventions of body counts, crazy chase scenes, and character cliches (like the beautiful yet brilliant female researcher). Codex, which came out in 2004, creates tension from the core mystery around the titular Codex (a medieval book that may hide a coded message, if it can be found, assuming it even exists) rather than the artificial tension that characterizes the more ponderous entries in the genre.

In Codex, investment banker Edward Wozny finds himself employed to catalog the rare book collection of one of his best clients, an English duke and his wife, and despite his instinctive indignation at the menial task, he takes it on and finds himself gradually sucked into the search for the missing codex, even when he realizes that not everyone involved wants the book to be found. At the same time, Wozny’s friends introduce him to a time-sucking computer game called MOMUS that seems to Edward to offer unexplained parallels and connections to the search for the codex. In both quests, he ends up hopelessly lost and has to enlist the help of others, including a not-beautiful yet brilliant female researcher who specializes in the alleged author of the missing tome.

The stakes are high for the characters in the book, but Grossman ignores the trend of raising the stakes to fate-of-the-world status, recognizing that something as small as a battle between two members of the same family can be serious enough to cause people to throw around large sums of money and throw wrenches in the works of another person’s plans. I found that the pace of Codex accelerated as it went simply because I wanted to know where the codex was, what it meant, and why the person who employs Edward wanted to find it. Grossman also avoids the pat ending, concluding the book on an appropriately ambiguous note, although he does rely on one error of judgment by a main character to get us to the finish line.

Next up: Dawn Powell’s satire of the publishing circles of late 1930s New York (particularly Claire Boothe Luce), a somewhat forgotten novel called A Time to Be Born.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 3, 2009
→ By

Pops Restaurant & the Top Chef semifinal.

Klawchat today at 1 pm. I’m on Rumor Central today talking Donavan Tate’s broken jaw and Polanco to the Phils. Top Chef spoilers at the bottom of this piece.

I had dinner with a friend last night at Pops Restaurant in Boston’s South End, a small place that serves fine-dining-caliber food with prices one level down from what fine-dining places in the South End or Back Bay would charge. I’d recommend it, as the meal was well above-average despite some small issues.

Once I saw the crispy confit duck on the menu, there was no shot I’d order anything else, as duck confit is probably my favorite meat dish and it’s not something I’ve made at home. The duck was close to perfect, with crispy skin with a little bit of spice (I think five-spice, but there was too little for me to say for sure) and outstanding texture; duck skin needs very little seasoning since it has so much flavor of its own. The meat inside was perfect, tender and moist, falling apart like a braised pork shank. The duck comes with a mixture of asparagus, wild rice gnocchi, and a ‘red wine chocolate sauce’ that was astringent and overly salty and that didn’t do much to complement the duck; duck and rice do go well together, but something like a risotto with asparagus would have worked better. The side also contained lardons that were excruciatingly salty – and really, when have you ever known me to say a bad word about any form of bacon? – and weren’t listed on the menu, which, given how many people don’t eat pork for religious reasons, is a little customer-unfriendly. We also ordered a side of French fries at my friend’s suggestion – they’re lightly seasoned with herbs (thyme and rosemary?) and perfectly fried with virtually no grease, reminiscent of the fries at the defunct Back Bay restaurant Excelsior, which made probably the best fries I’ve ever had and served them with a rosemary aioli.

We started with the truffled butternut squash ravioli with sage brown butter and fried egg; the egg was more of a garnish but the ravioli were excellent, just a little too soft, with the squash allowed to come through as the star of the dish. The arugula around the dish seemed like an afterthought but, softened slightly in the brown butter (which was mixed with a little pasta water), it was worth fishing out.

Service was good, not great; the waitress brought me the wrong beer, and it took over an hour from seating to the arrival of the entrees, although I imagine that would have been shorter without the appetizer. On the plus side, I had started at the bar and ordered sparkling water, and forgot about it when my friend arrived, but the bartender brought it back to the table for me after realizing I’d disappeared. The restaurant has two sections; we sat in the back, which is quieter but dimmer and lacks the visual appeal of the tables in the front near the bar and kitchen. The limes from the bar were dried-out, which isn’t a big deal for me but raises a small question about quality control in the back of the house.

—

Quick thoughts on last night’s Top Chef semifinal:

* Is Padma trying to be condescending, or is it just that her natural way of speaking comes off that way? My wife said last night, “I can’t picture her as a mother.” Growing up with a mother who is hot, famous, and sounds incredibly disappointed at the most minor of things is a recipe for a lifetime of therapy, no?

* We need to get Gail Simmons on “What Not to Wear.” It was like someone decided to add melons to the crush party menu. I feel bad for her – it’s not like she’s unattractive, but that dress – and it’s not the first – was not working in her favor.

* Have to try Bryan’s idea of cooking figs with short ribs and then pureeing them with the braising liquid to make a sauce. I’m thinking a dry red wine with good body but not too much fruitiness, but since I know jack about wine, I’m open to suggestions from the oenophiles in the audience.

* Jennifer undercut herself by, in effect, apologizing for making duck confit instead of grilling it. Play it up, talk about how you improvised, you love how it came out, spin it positively. Telling the judges you wish you’d done it another way isn’t going to make them like your food more. Of course, there’s a limit, since Kevin’s line about the undercooked didn’t go over well.

* This elimination was predictable, although I wonder (again) if the decisions are based on the dishes in that specific challenge or on the broader body of work. The weakest remaining chef was sent home; the three best from when I picked up the show about six episodes ago are going to the finals. I’m still sticking with my pick – Bryan.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ October 21, 2009
→ By

Hangover Square.

Sorry for the disappearing act, but it was a long and hectic week in Arizona. I’ll be on the Herd at 11:10 am EDT on Wednesday, and on Mile High Sports 1510 in Denver at 8:25 am MDT.

He walked through Castle Square to the sea. When he reached the sea he saw that dawn was breaking over it, dimly, bluely, feebly, amidst the torn clouds of rain. He smelt the air and felt better. He was glad he had done this. He felt like a walk. He was doing the best thing.
And then he felt a curious snap in his head.

Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, part of the Bloomsbury 100, is an overlooked work from the playwright behind the movies Rope (famous for director Alfred Hitchcock’s use of long takes with disguised cuts) and Gaslight, a psychological novel of a different sort: The protagonist is suffering from what we’d now call dissociative identity disorder*, and one of his personalities wants to murder the woman his other personality loves.

*Dissociative identity disorder is, according to one theory, a reaction to childhood trauma, such as abuse, but Hamilton depicts Bone’s split personality as something he’s had from birth.

George Harvey Bone’s primary personality is the saddest of sacks, a social outcast who spends his time following a group of libertines who abuse him verbally but are all too happy to take advantage of his occasional flush periods. The group includes Netta, an aspiring actress who is neither that talented nor that driven and is primarily hoping for luck or fate to hand her a big break. Bone is in love with her – or perhaps with the idea of her – and she plays with his emotions in a cruel, sadistic manner. Bone’s secondary personality is monomaniacal in its drive to kill Netta, realizing that she is the obstacle to Bone (or his primary personality) getting on with his life.

Hamilton was criticizing the seemingly impermeable barrier between social classes in interwar England, with Netta and her friends exploiting Bone when it suits them but refusing him full entry into their social circle. (Of course, part of their disdain for Bone is what they call his “dumb moods,” when he has actually clicked over to the secondary personality.) That subtext was obvious, but I’ve read several references to Hamilton also depicting fascism through the story, and I just don’t see it. It’s a good thriller, one where Bone’s murderous desires are made a little morally ambiguous by the rotten treatment he receives at the hands of the heartless Netta, and creeping fascism does receives its mentions (through Netta’s sort-of beau, Peter), but I’m hesitant to put more metaphor into the story than Hamilton intended.

The version of Hangover Square currently in print is full of unfortunate typos, and I’m not sure whether they’re from the original text or just sloppy editing by the new publisher. Some errors were unintentionally funny, like roadside “sinposts” (I assume you find those on the Highway to Hell) or, after a phone has been ringing for a while, “at last there was an answering dick,” without actually explaining who the dick was. (Sam Spade, perhaps? Philip Marlowe?)

Next up: I finished The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread while in Arizona; is anyone still reading it, or should I post a writeup with some discussion questions for those who already did? I’ve since moved on to Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ September 13, 2009
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The City of Dreaming Books.

I had two articles posted on Friday, one on the Brewers’ immediate future another on Mat Gamel, Alcides Escobar, and Colby Rasmus. I have also filed a blog entry on Wade Davis that isn’t up yet.

Walter Moers’ The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear was one of my favorite books of 2008 (books I read last year, that is, not books published last year), and his follow-up, The City of Dreaming Books, looked like it was more of the same, with a setting of particular interest to me, literature.

It is, like Bluebear, wildly imaginative, full of wordplay (including fictional author names like Asdrel Chickens) and incredibly sharp characters and settings. Moers has a gift for making the insane seem normal and for precise descriptions of places that evoke clear images in the reader’s mind, and, as in Bluebear, Moers has his main character, Optimus Yarnspinner, go through a series of vaguely ridiculous character-building adventures, although Yarnspinner does less to help his own cause than Bluebear did.

The problem with City is that the action plot isn’t well connected to the character-development plot. Yarnspinner spends 2/3 of the book in the catacombs under Bookholm and, while there’s plenty of action down there, the emphasis is on his development as a storyteller – both the effects his experiences have on his thinking and his ability to actually craft a story. There’s an obvious revenge plot at work, with Yarnspinner and one other prisoner looking for escape and vengeance on their captors, that portion of the plot is set aside for hundreds of pages. Moers brings it back when Yarnspinner and his comrade make their final escape attempt at the end of the book, and the resolution was quick, obvious, and cursory. I’m not arguing with the general plot, but with the lack of integration between that thread and Yarnspinner’s time in the catacombs. City is still a great read, but more for its cleverness and humor than for the action-oriented portion of the plot, and Bluebear was more imaginative and funnier.

Next up: The reissue of Leo Durocher’s classic memoir, Nice Guys Finish Last, due out on Tuesday.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 4, 2009
→ By

Falconer.

John Cheever’s Falconer, another book from the TIME 100*, made little sense to me as anything more than a superficial story of a man in prison until I read a little of Cheever’s biography. If you know two basic things about the author, the novel takes on significantly greater meaning: Cheever was bisexual and struggled to come to terms with this, and he was a lifelong alcoholic, which was probably tied to the first fact. After learning those details of Cheever’s life, I found more meaning Falconer as a story of self-acceptance and recovery.

*This is the 80th book I’ve read on the TIME list, and 90 seems well within reach, but I can already tell you those last five will be a bear, if I even choose to tackle them: Infinite Jest, An American Tragedy, White Noise, Gravity’s Rainbow, and The Recognitions. That’s about 4700 pages across five novels, and three of them have reputations as difficult reads. Ninety-five sounds like a lovely number, don’t you think?

The main character, Farragut, is a husband and father and has more or less had a successful career despite a heroin addiction dating back to his service in World War II, where he became hooked on morphine. For reasons not explained until near the end of the book, Farragut kills his brother, after which he’s sentenced to prison. His marriage, not strong before the murder, falls apart; his dependence on methadone becomes central to his daily life; and, even though he’s “not queer,” he has an affair with a fellow inmate. Although Cheever surrounds Farragut with a cast of wackos in his cell block, the story is entirely about Farragut and his struggle to maintain – or discover – his humanity in jail.

The prison of the book and Farragut’s gradual recovery from addiction and acceptance of his own character seem to be a metaphor for Cheever’s own life, where he struggled to accept his own bisexuality and promiscuity and drowned himself in alcohol, an addiction he apparently kicked around the time he wrote Falconer. Early in his confinement, Farragut is briefly denied his daily methadone dose and ends up suffering withdrawal symptoms, after which he pens three letters, one to the governor, one to his bishop, and one to his wife; armed with the knowledge of Cheever’s troubles, I read those letters as Cheever’s own rebellion against the authority figures in his life and prevented him or pressured him to keep his sexual orientation a secret and to feel shame for it, or just his awakening to the possibilities of a life outside of the oppression of those authority figures. Farragut’s eventual acceptance of himself is neither easy nor predictable, and in some ways it’s incomplete, but that made the book seem more real by giving Farragut antiheroic qualities.

The book is short and moves along quickly between Cheever’s prose and, outside of those three letters, little introspective text. It also moved quickly for me because, once Farragut is settled in prison, Cheever devotes a lot of ink to his main character’s sex life in prison, and I found those sections a lot easier to read if I just didn’t read them at all. The man was clearly obsessed with his own peter; perhaps there’s some Freudian analysis to be made there, but having never read Freud I saw no value in those details.

Next up: I’m still a bit behind, having just finished F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second short story collection, Tales From The Jazz Age, this morning.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,