I have never worked this hard to finish a book this short and this good. The prose is a wade through the thick jelly of the collective consciousness t...moreI have never worked this hard to finish a book this short and this good. The prose is a wade through the thick jelly of the collective consciousness that condones, participates in and suffers slavery, arduous and unrelenting, yet Jones casts every single person in the mix with such vivid humanity, framing their virtues with their failures that you need to see it through. It's one of those rare books that I suspect I'll continue reading in the wake of having finished it.(less)
A free ebook from Amazon, easily worth ten times the price. I hope the young lions embrace the short ebook as a platform and make it their own. This t...moreA free ebook from Amazon, easily worth ten times the price. I hope the young lions embrace the short ebook as a platform and make it their own. This three-story set from the author of Burn Notice series is sharp yet breezy. The second-person narrative of the opening story is effortless in how it injects you into the life of a loser teenager becoming a successful adult; it's almost as if the narrator is the childhood home the protagonist revisits, though, if that is the case, it's not glaringly so. The second story about the twilight of a golf pro is like Wells Tower titrated for television, but the third, a glowing tableau of jerk water ennui, is worth a look. I have yet to delve into the extra material, "the story behind the story" end material, but I'm kinda thrilled it's there. It speaks to the potential of the platform and how a good story or three with dimension aren't going to be fenced in by something as flat as a page.(less)
I read only two essays in this collection. The title one speaks to the beautiful and horrific American sense of inflated reality as it manifests in it...moreI read only two essays in this collection. The title one speaks to the beautiful and horrific American sense of inflated reality as it manifests in its tourist spectacles, citing as examples a number of places I've been: San Simeon, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Disneyland and Disney World, and particularly the Madonna Inn, an over-the-top, theme-roomed Swiss chalet hotel in San Luis Obispo, CA where I spent my honeymoon. Eco doesn't sign off on the life-as-circus as he sees it here, but he gets why we do it, how the inflated story culled from a million facts and misunderstandings is the story we tell ourselves, the myth that we believe. Eco's prose is so evocative, you will want to drop everything and visit the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library, or at least the one that appears in the text.
Here is San Simeon aka Hearst Castle aka Xanadu from Citizen Cane
The striking aspect of the whole is not the quantity of antique pieces plundered from half of Europe, or the nonchalance with which the artificial tissue seamlessly connects fake and genuine, but rather the sense of fullness, the obsessive determination not to leave a single space that doesn't suggest something, and hence the masterpiece of bricolage, haunted by horror vacui, that is here achieved.
and here he goes into metaphoric overdrive attempting to depict the Madonna Inn:
Let's say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overgenerous dose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli. But that doesn't give you an idea. Let's say Arcimboldi builds the Sagrada Familia for Dolly Parton. Or: Carmen Miranda designs a Tiffany locale for the Jolly Hotel chain. Or D'Annunzio's Vittoriale imagined by Bob Cratchit, Calvino's Invisible Cities described by Judith Krantz and executed by Leonor Fini for the plush-doll industry, Chopin's Sonata in B flat minor sung by Perry Como in an arrangement by Liberace and accompanied by the Marine Band. No, that still isn't right. Let's try telling about the rest rooms.
The other essay I read, "Cogito Interruptus", is largely a critique and appreciation of Marshall McLuhan, which, if you are a McLuhan nerd like me, you'll be all into, but otherwise might not grab you.
Generally, the contemporariness of the prose is astounding. I felt a bit of a stomach punch when I saw a date of 1980 while thinking how "now" his messages are, how he's the kind of writer you feel yourself always trailing behind. Plus, both essays were funny. Nothing is better than a funny egghead.
I had an occasion recently to peck away on someone else's manual typewriter - it was at a party a poet was having and a poem was sitting there reeled...moreI had an occasion recently to peck away on someone else's manual typewriter - it was at a party a poet was having and a poem was sitting there reeled up on his little desk being ruined by his guests, so I joined in and I added a line and then suddenly couldn't remember how to do a carriage return. I grew up with the things so I knew but technological adoption had pushed this minor skill to a box in the attic. I knew there was a bell when you got to the end and the speed by which you get to that bell is very satisfying, tethering the text to the paper, making the word a very real thing. I can see why poets like these things.
I feel that schism is one of the many being bridged in Agapē Agape, one endless paragraph that went on for a tidy 100 Kindle screens in which a fading Beckettian old man bounced around his walls, lamenting the passing of how you used to do things. I like the way Mr. Gaddis frequently finishes a phrase with "the" e.g., "...the only game in town, because that's what America's wait, little card falling on the, there!" It's like this thing is dying to be a poem but he's long forgotten how to do a carriage return. It's like a thought starts dying the second it hits the air, like the aliens in War of the Worlds.
One of the supplemental essays offers that Agapē Agape started as an essay on player pianos, and I can see that, but it diminishes what's going on here. It's about a million little alliterative conceits, mixing up Puskhkin and pushpin, Agapē vs. Agape, pitting Plato and Philo T. Farnsworth against each other. It is hallucinatory and gibberish-y in the best way, like a hose put to your brain one last time before the tower is drained of water.(less)
First time I read Neuromancer about 15 years ago, I was excited about the profligacy of computer networks that laid before me, and now that I taught a...moreFirst time I read Neuromancer about 15 years ago, I was excited about the profligacy of computer networks that laid before me, and now that I taught a course in digital branding last semester, it is interesting to see how we are still catching up to Gibson's fever dream of dicey cognitive perception and dissolution of the physical self into a loosely wrought digital world. Great science fiction is like great science (and great fiction, too) in that the world it proposes is both terrifying and dazzling, impossible and very real. I'd finished the book sooner had I not read it in my iPad where I could with a few gestures leave the stream and join my own shimmering digital environment. When you check Facebook a few times during a passage where a character is jacking into different digital existences like flipping TV channels, the story starts to bleed into life.
Luminous. I'm embarrassed to admit this is the first Joan Didion book I have read. As you probably already know, it's full of meditative simple lines ...moreLuminous. I'm embarrassed to admit this is the first Joan Didion book I have read. As you probably already know, it's full of meditative simple lines about death and grief and moving on but the one that keeps ringing in my head is "I just can't see an upside in this." I don't think I've ever read a more honest reaction to death. Or to anything.(less)
Patrick Fermor possesses in this text a conversational way with history that I openly envy. He can talk about the first Apostlic King of Christian Hun...morePatrick Fermor possesses in this text a conversational way with history that I openly envy. He can talk about the first Apostlic King of Christian Hungary as easily and normally as we might allude to so-and-so from the office. Plus , I am a sucker for any book where someone walks from one place to a distant other - in the is case, from Holland to the Danube; this book details the first half of a trek to Constantinople at the eve of World War II. He captures the all-encompassing hallucinatory intake of a walk. He leaves no little musings out, which can make a reader glaze over pretty quickly. It did so to me enough times that I had to thumb back plenty of times just to remember where we actually were in the trip.
So, if the destination and the expediency of getting there are the key points to your travelling, this book is not for you. If you need to grasp everything that is said in a conversation, read elsewhere. But, if you believe that life's literal and literary journeys are like auditing an infinitude of brilliant lectures, and that each traveller arrives at their own destinations on said journeys, then this will beckon you down the road. I have BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER, volume two of this set waiting for me in my bag just as soon as I'm ready to resume our walk.
There is a great joint profile of Fermor and similar writer Bruce Chatwin in the Decembe 2011 Harper's that led me to his cuious doorstep.(less)
This book took me forever to read only because you can run yourself through the wringer only so quickly, not rushing each snapping bone or squashed or...moreThis book took me forever to read only because you can run yourself through the wringer only so quickly, not rushing each snapping bone or squashed organ, not hurrying the deflated emotional pancake of a person this book will make of you. It started out a marital horror story, the kind where you yell at the screen "No! don't go there! Just say she was good in the play! Don't try to fix anything!" to become a vigil over a heart monitor or a bomb, either way one that periodically stops beeping and you are a little relieved and then it it starts beating faster and faster until you can do nothing but watch the clock run out on love. Devastating, ruthless and, in that, beautiful.(less)
I love Ready Player One. It is nerds-ahoy fun, a jumble of 80's pop culture, D&D, and video game ephemera gathered up into a Magic Mountain ride with ...moreI love Ready Player One. It is nerds-ahoy fun, a jumble of 80's pop culture, D&D, and video game ephemera gathered up into a Magic Mountain ride with a prize at the end. It folds nostalgia into an origami Space Invader. I love how upends the usual misfit frame of role-playing games and Atari and presents them as ways to expand one's world, mostly because that's what they were to me. Ii won't give away too much to say there is a part where the protagonist must re-enact War Games within a game inside a simulation inside the book and it all works.
And, it contains some of the best social media takeover u/dys-topia talk of any novel I've read. Virtual world cascade into each other, filters layered upon layer until when the characters are plunged into the physical world, it's more disorienting than any virtual reality. The players in the giant game that comprises the story are intimately familiar with game rules and controls and even the imagery, but not at all with reality.
The physical world in RP1 is as believable a post-collapse America as any, where an omnipresent virtual world served as a solution. You go to school, take vacations, have jobs in the virtual; the physical serves mostly as a loose gaggle of internet access points quivering in the shadows of a multiple-corporations that threaten to ruin everything in a Net Neutrality nightmare: login fees, ads everywhere, the Man basically turning existence in the virtual world into a profit channel.
I like how the virtual world is post-screen-and-keyboard, all visors and haptic gloves. That's how it's gonna go.
The dialog is pitch-perfect: juvenile in it's Spielbergian lack of dread, progressing like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. The adventurer's zeal and the love story get a little cloying, the avalanche of Rush and Atari references will solicit a "we get it, yr nerds" from the deepest dork reader. But that's OK, you are in the party, the guild, the quest team, whatever you need to call it, and putting the book down is akin to logging off the Internet to "get some real work done" - it sits there blinking in the periphery until you jump back in. (less)
I enjoyed Amsterdam while reading but felt nonplussed about it the second I step away from the text. It's about a consortium of men dealing with the p...moreI enjoyed Amsterdam while reading but felt nonplussed about it the second I step away from the text. It's about a consortium of men dealing with the passing of a vivacious, free-spirited woman, with whom they were all a lover. No one can say a bad thing about the gal though she seems like she might have been fun but also a bit of a pain in the ass. People are never clear cut in life, why should they be expected to be so out of life? Why is that our tendency to make them so? Is it because the closest we get to understanding is "calling it" ?
I'm waited for Amsterdamto coalesce, make a pearl from this grain of sand or another, but it never did. It was men orbiting the black hole of the death of a woman they all loved, trying to collide and doing so with grand flourish when they do, but mostly, floating through space.(less)
I might be too close to DIRTDOBBER BLUES to give it an objective review: my class is doing an digital marketing plan for it, same publisher as my fort...moreI might be too close to DIRTDOBBER BLUES to give it an objective review: my class is doing an digital marketing plan for it, same publisher as my forthcoming book, I know personally some of the people in the book, and my house is down the street from one of the locations in which shoulda-been Louisiana singer-songwriter Butch Hornsby's troubled yet charmed life plays out. I can say the people and places I know are depicted accurately, and that Butch, who I didn't know, comes vividly alive.
Butch thrives in accelerated glory time, when the world seemingly stands still while he drunkenly destroys/builds the mythic presence that sustains him when he downshifts into human time, where the pound of flesh gets collected. Similarly, Vetter's prose is the most lucid in the glory days, though at points during the quiet years, you can almost hear the tree frogs in the yard.
The Kindle version begins each chapter with a link to a song (nice touch!); the paper book comes with a CD, both allowing the reader to tap into Butch's unique gifts as a songwriter, as a visual artist - his
primitivist paintings and collages permeate the text as well. You get to know a guy you wish you'd known, which seems the highest compliment one can pay a biography. If you are a Bobby Charles, Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker type, you need some Butch Hornsby in your liquor cabinet.(less)
What a perfect little Western, a stiff wind blowing off the crags between man and nature conquering each other, and yet what an epic. Johnson is a gen...moreWhat a perfect little Western, a stiff wind blowing off the crags between man and nature conquering each other, and yet what an epic. Johnson is a genius at placing people in a waking dream - the drug scenarios of JESUS' SON, the tribal apocalypse of FISKADORO, Vietnam in TREE OF SMOKE, Bakersfield in NOBODY MOVE. TRAIN DREAMS places a version of Johnson's simple man in the lower echelons of the frontier, working train gangs, living in the woods with people he loves and then alone. Grainier's life is like that of a ghost haunting the spirit of Western Expansion; he just wants to live quietly and simply and life is just too loud and complex to allow it. His wanderings are spectral stumbles through odd jobs, odd people, the occasional bit of the supernatural.
The best part, though, is the poetry through which the scenes are illuminated. Like:
"She probably don't even speak English," he said aloud, and realized that nobody else was present. He was all alone in his cabin in the woods, talking to himself, startled by his own voice. Even his dog was off wandering and hadn't come back for the night. He stared at the firelight flickering from the gaps in the stone and at the enclosing shifting curtain of utter dark.
I can see where other reviewers are calling Johnson's existential Western "Cormac McCarthy for softies", but really, the authors are chasing different birds. McCarthy is all hawks and buzzards; Jonson is sparrows and grey doves, cooing, being shooed off by the noisier birds, but ultimately persisting and pecking their way through the mystery of existence. Grainier's life might be as slight as this little volume, but it is also as huge as the whole of the sky.
(less)
War and War seemed to be the world; those sentences stretched to catch the wind coming of every moment, from every direction or, maybe forming densely...moreWar and War seemed to be the world; those sentences stretched to catch the wind coming of every moment, from every direction or, maybe forming densely marked butcher paper charts detailing the full studied genome of one atomized part of a thing, tacked up next to the next one, just as dense, so involved you get with their density that when one of the sentences clocks in at a breezy hundred words, it feels like a period, a road sign, a jolt. Either way, it was a world in a blink of an eye, an old man being accosted on a bridge, accosted in that history-is-still-warm manner of Easter European books, the assimilation of systemic failure acted out among grand storied architecture. I hoped this scene would use up the whole book, use up the guy on the bridge, the author, the reader, everything but whatever polluted Hungarian waterway that ran underfoot having been witness to countless little tyrannies just like it before. But, things started to happen, it turned into a story of something like a story, and that's where I got lost.
I think it's because I'm not much of a follower, I'm one of those deluded types that needs to believe I am the one cutting the trail through the thicket, and with most books, even the gnarlier of contemporary word warrens drained of love and life and feeling and even motion of plot and punctuation and everything, I can still Lewis and Clark it through the thing. But not this book.
I asked the friend that suggested it to me, so, where was he in the end? What exactly happened between the translator and that sad woman in the apartment? Was that the same woman who... But it was like we read different books. She planted her hiking stick in the interior story, the one that Korin, the guy on the bridge, came to New York to type into a website? It seemed like a good story, but I wondered why it was there. It reminded me of reading the repeated, updated political tracts in Orwell's 1984, years ago in high school (in 1984, actually); I got that documents are the deliverable of politics and through those papers are the ideas of civilization filtered and sieves, but do they really need to be there? Isn't the real story on the surface?
I thought I had it when Korin passed a display of priceless diamonds at the airport, a compression of facets that is as valuable a thing that exists, surrounded by guards right there in the open. War and War is likely about more than facets, angles through which the shared light is refracted and bent into a pure beam, one that cuts through dust and gas and whatever is in the air, or is the air, but whatever else it's about must be viewed through one of those facets in which I failed to peer.
I still loved it, either way. His spiraling, endless sentences bore the genius touch of Beckett and Faulkner, but without the former's aridity and the latter's gush of blood. They were those beams of light, tightroping off to some point at the limit of our consciousness, taught rope bridges across misty chasms. Zip lines to the vanishing point. And, unlike B. and F., fun to read! War and War is a syntactic, grammatical, and lyrical singularity. It's a hoot.
I still think I might have been right about the diamond/facet thing. Korin makes his way to a Mario Merz museum somewhere and requests to go in one of the sculptures. Merz was a key practitioner in arte povera, an Italian movement in the 60s dedicated to manifesting their humanity in new, ways, like every movement I guess. Merz built igloos, rickety gorgeous domes composed of little more than frameworks of twigs, sometimes complicated things with neon and tarps and who knows what else. To sit inside one would, I imagine, be quite the art thrill, a means tone at the center of a diamond, to be the locus of all those angles and planes that give the diamond it's cheesy luster and ultimately, its value. You would become the light from within the work.
I'm not giving it away to say that near its conclusion, you are confronted with a giant black rectangle filling most of a page. I stared into that black rectangle until I couldn’t anymore, hoping this density would unravel in a nice, array where I could “oh” and “ah” and “I see” but it never came because it never does anyway and you read books like War and War to confront the void and boom, there it is!
This was a great blur of a book, devoured in the time it took my daughter to find her books at the library. It is 60-odd stories on 80-odd pages, whit...moreThis was a great blur of a book, devoured in the time it took my daughter to find her books at the library. It is 60-odd stories on 80-odd pages, white space taking up both a big chunk of Blatnik's prose and the book itself. A quantifiably high majority of the microstories cover this arc: you play the movie of your life, whether it's one you wrote/directed/starred in or simply rented and watched; you press pause and ponder the rictus of the characters caught in mid speech, sigh at the eternal suspended animation of a sleeping one night stand as you slip on your shoes in the dark; then you press play again and the movie is totally different, or maybe you weren't following the plot is closely as you thought.(less)
Zeitoun is a Katrina book, a Muslim-in-America book, a delicately hung sail on the ship of creative nonfiction, but most of all, it is a book about sy...moreZeitoun is a Katrina book, a Muslim-in-America book, a delicately hung sail on the ship of creative nonfiction, but most of all, it is a book about system failure and how, pretty much, with the right attitude, it won't phase you. While it didn't have the magically expanding frame with which What is the What contained its subject(s), it is a careful story with careful characters taking careful steps as the world went to shit and those running the world went shittier.
I blow up at work or cast darts through my social circle or do whatever crappy thing I do in the course of my daily humanity and then bounce it up against Zeitoun's dedication and suffering and persistent great attitude and I feel like a worm, so thanks for that Mr. Eggers! Once I'm over that feeling, though, I'm inspired by this story to be a kinder and more patient person.(less)
I'll temper this rating by saying I only read the first/title story in this collection and the final one, "Screeno", to get a taste. Both st...moreI'll temper this rating by saying I only read the first/title story in this collection and the final one, "Screeno", to get a taste. Both stories are about movies and the act of going to the movies and the act of action and a general theory of projections and a confounding of dreams and not-dreams and how the fabric of our self-understanding is a dense plaid woven of all these things.
And in both stories I read, the fabric rips and no matter how good you think you might be at sewing, you can always see exactly where the seam broke.(less)
A hypnotic book about that line between deciding to live and deciding not to, and also those lines we mark around what is lived in a life, SUICIDE's r...moreA hypnotic book about that line between deciding to live and deciding not to, and also those lines we mark around what is lived in a life, SUICIDE's river-runs-through-it of a friend's life after a self-inflicted death, narrator addressing the dead friend in second person, is diverted into an unavoidable forensic direction by the author's own suicide shortly after delivering the manuscript. Which is a bummer; not because Levé took himself across the line - the unwavering steadiness in tone seems to say the author was resolved with his decision - but because you cannot separate the book from it, and you spend the book trying to piece together the life of the author with in the outline of his subject's demise.
I think the book does a tremendous job underscoring the fact that one's life is much bigger than one's death, all that cataloguing of what the "you" in the book did. I like how it ends on a poem listing off how things affect "me" as if to say "you" and "me" are indistinguishable only in the fact that our lines are drawn differently, our overlapping timelines begin arbitrarily and end decisively at different points. We are all of the same ether to which we eventually return.
I'm morbid and goth enough to even groove a little on the shadow cast across it by the author's passing, lending the book a cruel humor, a conceptual punch to the kidneys, but that also ruins it a little. Life is like that, I guess; a tidy little system that gets mucked up by our living it. In saying that the author's suicide ruins his book about suicide, is that a bigger disservice to the author or the book?
I kept thinking back to Dazai's NO LONGER HUMAN, a somewhat similar novel that wallowed in the author's ennui-driven cruelty towards others, and Artaud's "Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society", an exploration of how a true, wild human is ultimately failed by a systematic world, but really, I might as well tack in the lyric sheet for Nirvana's IN UTERO to my little bibliography here. We gotta know. Levé's narrator is asking his dead friend what we want to now ask Levé. Suicide inevitably leads the living to pore over "why" because maybe the base impulse of living is avoiding the asking "why not?" when we can only answer either of those questions for ourselves.(less)
I think I was titillated, bored, horrified and exasperated with this book to the degree which the author intended and while I was feeling a...more I think I was titillated, bored, horrified and exasperated with this book to the degree which the author intended and while I was feeling any of the above, I was awaiting the next emotion coming around on the wheel. Maybe that's why his books make great movies, he's actually pretty good on twitter and I'm kinda into his empire/post-empire pop deconstruction thing: he knows how to guide the wheel with a steady touch. I almost wonder if the books are a means to those extra-literary ends, much like how all the characters in IMPERIAL BEDROOMS generally and cruelly regard each other as stepping stones until they become obstacles.
I totally buy everybody in this book, perhaps because their price tags are on such prominent display, and I buy the character Ellis presents in his recent interviews and believe him to not just be Patrick Bateman in real life but that he is Christian Bale playing Patrick Bateman in real life, some post-empire construct pieced together from the wreckage of old empire-ass Bret Easton Ellis and for that, I think he might be a better author than I think.
But the book: 3 stars. It gets the job done. There was no transcendence in the horror therein. In those particular grisly explicit parts at the end, I was thinking of the gallows scene in Burroughs' NAKED LUNCH, a prime example of how to get mortified in a transcendent way. IMPERIAL BEDROOM's horror orgy was gross enough, but didn't have that alchemy of abjection, and maybe that is his point. Is our worst behavior ever anything more than simply effective? Is it worth the cost? (less)
There are in LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN a few distracting bits character slippage, people saying things they would never say, an issue compounded by the...moreThere are in LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN a few distracting bits character slippage, people saying things they would never say, an issue compounded by the whole multi-narrator thng, but otherwise it's a breeze of heaviness, like the extended sighs in a Zadie Smith novel. It's about life going on as that French guy walks the highwire strung between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1977, the guy from MAN ON A WIRE; he appears in a couple different ways, but it's not about him. It's about walking all sorts of lines. Priests. Prostitutes. Adoptive parents. Guilty parties that get away with it. Relative innocents that don't.
I imagine walking a tightrope involves a million slippages and recoveries and really, if you make it to the other side and managed your little flips and wire tricks on that single dimension (and the characters have their share of monodimensionality, expertly drafted to illuminate the straightedges we refuse to believe define our lives) or whatever and didn't plummet to the sidewalk a hundred and ten stories below, it's a rousing success and all the girls will cheer you if but for a moment and then it is up to you to seize that moment.
So yes, ultimately the book makes it across the very ambitious wire it strings up and afterward, the line is cut loose and ties things up rather beautifully and even surprisingly; a neat coiling up rather than a snap-and-dangle. Quite a feat.
Oh, and despite the presence of the World Trade Center throughout it, it's not at all a 9/11 book. There were plenty of cruises on the Lusitania before it was sunk. (less)
This artful and clever meditation on light, language, and love could become the most poetic Julia Roberts/Tom Hanks movie ever with the right director...moreThis artful and clever meditation on light, language, and love could become the most poetic Julia Roberts/Tom Hanks movie ever with the right director lacing together these stories rife with cinema-ready devices: how a book of love notes passes from hand to hand and life to life, how suddenly all of our pain manifests itself as light hanging around and pouring from our bodies, how we are yadda-yadda interconnected by our yadda-yadda living in the world. I don't mean this any of this as a negative; Brokmeier takes these Themes of Literature and arrays them just so like the desert table at a gala and even when it gets a little thick - the one with the autistic-ish kid - or it is still believable, embraceable and, yes even a little luminous. Really, somebody make a movie out of this thing.
Edited to add: my favorite thing about its fantastic premise is how easily everyone assimilates the sudden visual manifestation of pain as light and it really doesn't make everyone more empathetic or open or anything. It's just a thing we do now, give off light. I think that's exactly how it would go down if the miraculous were to suddenly take place. (less)
Tom Franklin's pen is filled with quiet, viscous gravity, causing a story to fall across the pages at a natural speed, only gaining velocity because ...moreTom Franklin's pen is filled with quiet, viscous gravity, causing a story to fall across the pages at a natural speed, only gaining velocity because things go a little faster the more the fall. His characters drop from a precipice of idea to become the messy, perfectly shattered splats on the last page with just enough parachute provided to pick up and walk away from the landing. It is a logical and natural way to pace a story, so how come nobody else does it this way? Because they have to hurry up to go splat? Because they get too caught up in those I-can-see-my-house-from-up-here moments during the descent? Who knows why people do what they do. Great book.(less)
Architecture can be seen as a contrivance that makes purposed shelter happen, and in that sense, Mitchell has erected a powerfully huge big top tent o...moreArchitecture can be seen as a contrivance that makes purposed shelter happen, and in that sense, Mitchell has erected a powerfully huge big top tent of a book with Cloud Atlas. I was going to compare it to a pyramid, because the book is built of 5 stories stacked atop each other reaching a near-inaccessible point in the sky, but unless you are the guy buried inside with your mummified cats and organs in clay jars, pyramid visitors are generally walking up the outer walls like a ramp. You are most certainly inside the conic dimensionality of this book.
In Cloud Atlas, you are left in the hands of a number of highly self-involved guides pulled from the cast of a cosmic circus. Unlike most of the literature I read, this book was a lot of fun, with cliff-hanger transitions and a slow boiling a-ha on the back burner. The fun aspect left me suspect of its total quality as a book, which says more about me as a reader than it does Mitchell as a writer, and truthfully, I'm not sure I followed all the threads supposedly connecting the stories. And after taking in Super Sad True Love Story and Wells Tower's epic tales of personalized environmental and financial ruin, I'm a little tired of the morality playing with our impending financial meltdown. I get it, writers; we're fucked! I look to books to reveal the Truth in over-the-shoulder glances as they take me away before whatever thugs hired by the plutocrats really do take me away.
And in that sense, Cloud Atlas is the greatest show on earth, a tent vast enough to hold the circus we are with spotlights trained on a few key high-wire acts and clown car rallies. (less)
I heard that in years past, pigs were drawn into the slaughterhouses of the Chicago stockyards by hooks attached to their noses. A pig is a smart anim...moreI heard that in years past, pigs were drawn into the slaughterhouses of the Chicago stockyards by hooks attached to their noses. A pig is a smart animal, but this placed the decision elsewhere. It was in this spirit I headed once more to White Sulfur Springs to pay a call on Jocelyn Boyce. (Ch. 14)
also
Napoleon said that if it weren't for religion the poor would kill the rich. (Ch. 15)
The library's Overdrive system up and deleted Driving on the Rim right out from under me upon the due date, or rather, made me delete it, as if it was teaching me a lesson. I had 4 more chapters to go but I'm OK with letting go at this late point. I felt the protagonist, approaching a trial for an event I kinda don't remember from the beginning of the book, should have likewise let it go and just enjoyed the sweet funny moments as they happened until they didn't happen anymore. Similarly, I loved almost every sentence of the book while feeling ambivalent about the coalescence. I'm thinking that's the theme.(less)
This is one of the most surprising books I've read in years. What seemed like a pretty good character study about former/present/aspiring rockers take...moreThis is one of the most surprising books I've read in years. What seemed like a pretty good character study about former/present/aspiring rockers takes one sharp stylistic turn after another - incorporating everything from celebrity interviews to PowerPoint slideshows - to thrilling coalescence. It's like working a bulletin board into becoming a painting.
It's a beautiful ensemble story broken into layers of shards that line up with enough shuffling, though I suspect the shuffle is the real story. Egan writes both fiction and non-fiction, and this is the brilliant example of the former made out of the techniques of the latter all us non-fiction writers want to pull off in a novel. (less)
This was probably the Bolaño book I've liked the least, and I still liked it. Bolaño appeared to readers like me, unaware of him before he was already...moreThis was probably the Bolaño book I've liked the least, and I still liked it. Bolaño appeared to readers like me, unaware of him before he was already a sensation (and recently departed), fully-formed, in possession of a weirdly snide and detached brand of river-deep lyricism and that is present in these pieces. He has a curious way of framing a story inside a story and that trait is particularly pronounced in this collection, in fact it made me wonder if we were reaching diminishing returns at this point in his translated work.
Then, about 2/3 way in, you get to "Prefiguration of Lalo Cura" (excerpted here in the New Yorker)a 5 star story in a 3.5 star collection, a luminous tale of detectives and pornographers and addicts rendered in the most glowing colors, as if they are defined by light streaming in from forgotten distant windows. It's even a little funny in points: there was a vignette of an actress, pregnant with the narrator, lubricating a fellow performer in frank language followed by "She already has the sure, delicate touch of a mother." Good one!(less)
![Dirtdobber Blues [With 14 Songs]](http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1300505832s/10579393.jpg "Dirtdobber Blues [With 14 Songs]")
Loading...
