Miss Smilla and her cast of characters were so quirky that after 100 pages I found all this quirk over the front of my shirt, all over the dining tabl...moreMiss Smilla and her cast of characters were so quirky that after 100 pages I found all this quirk over the front of my shirt, all over the dining table (well, I call it a dining table) and stuck between the keys on my keyboard. Had to get it out with a Swiss Army knife, once it had dried. Sent a sample off to the lab and the results came back "two parts David Lynch, three parts frankly unbelievable heroine, three parts uninvolving plot which moves at the speed of an exhausted glacier". As I thought.(less)
Marco Polo : Now I shall tell you of the beautiful city of Nottingham where the buildings are made mostly of blue glass, onyx and sausagemeat. The men...more Marco Polo : Now I shall tell you of the beautiful city of Nottingham where the buildings are made mostly of blue glass, onyx and sausagemeat. The men of the city trade in fur, spices and photographs of each other with their respective spouses. All the men have large phalluses, sometimes so large they must cut pieces out of the tops of their front doors before they can exit their houses in the morning. This is a city of dreamers and anthropophagi, of astronomers and chess players, all with the largest of phalluses. The women of the city are the most voluptuous and lively. They wear clothes. Many times I have observed them gambolling and performing handsprings for sheer joy of being in Nottingham. The dogs of Nottingham are all sly and well-read. They play canasta and billiards mostly, but also trade junk bonds and enjoy swapping photographs of the men of Nottingham with their respective spouses. But describing the cats of Nottingham will tax me to the very limit of my powers, O mighty Lord -
Kublai Khan : One moment, Sr. Polo. You will see the sun is high. I must now bathe in Turkish Delight and oxtail soup. We will recommence in the cool of the evening.
Marco Polo : I await your pleasure, my Lord.
Kublai Khan to his chief fixer the Grand Weirdo of All The Kingdoms : Later this afternoon I wish you to tell Sr Marco I have died.
You know in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind they've invented this brilliant device for erasing specific memories and the whole plot revolves aro...moreYou know in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind they've invented this brilliant device for erasing specific memories and the whole plot revolves around people who meet each other after they've had their memories of each other already erased, so they re-meet and re-love and it's all poignant and kind of whoah and oops I kind of gave the plot away - well, you should have seen it by now, come on, it's years old. Anyway, I'd love that particular invention to be true true true so that I could hustle down to the memory doctor's office and after having ALL of my romantic entanglements DELETED from my brain, obviously that would be the very first thing to do, then I'd present the doctor with a list of books to delete; and The Crimson Petal and the White would be right there in that little list, and it would, of course, be just so that I could have the pure unsullied delectable pleasure of reading it for the first time - again.
This is such a corking good page turner like if some giant Dickens and The Quincunx and The Worm in the Bud (great book about the Victorian sexual underworld) and some other stuff were shoved in the blender and then written up by a guy who really knows what he's doing.
Now, the ENDING of this huge novel was criticised greatly as being NOT AN ENDING at all but merely a dribbling away. So please note that there is a book called THE APPLE which is short stories accounting for the rest of all the characters' lives, and that's great and essential too.
I envy you people who have not read this.
And I'd also ask for my memory of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to be deleted too, that would just be a little bit of post modern humour to share with the memory doctor. Oh, and the memory of writing this review.(less)
Conscience impels me to remove one star from my original 5. I'm bewitched, bothered and bewildered.
When this gorgeously written, completely eccentric...moreConscience impels me to remove one star from my original 5. I'm bewitched, bothered and bewildered.
When this gorgeously written, completely eccentric and endearing memoir came out in 2004 I loved it, and my original review is included below. In the years since then, Dylan fans and commentators have been finding out stuff, and it opens a big can of worms, the worms of
PLAGIARISM
Because, it seems, if the rabid batgooglers and archive monkeys are to be believed, large parts - maybe all - of Chronicles are not original writing by Bob Dylan at all but an original mosaic of other people's phrases stitched together by Bob Dylan. I quote from some of these findings on the Expecting Rain website :
from a book called Really the Blues (1946) by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, in which a hipster introduces "his chick" to Mezzrow:
Baby this that powerful man with that good grass that'll make you tip through the highways and byways like a Maltese kitten. Mezz, this is my new dinner and she's a solid viper.
And now, part of Dylan's description of his friend Ray's girl, Chloe Kiel:
She was cool as pie, hip from head to toe, a Maltese kitten, a solid viper — always hit the nail on the head. I don't know how much weed she smoked, but a lot. (Chronicles, p. 102)
And later in Really the Blues, a black man was "sitting there actually talking to a white woman cool as pie."
Really The Blues, page 241:
"I never tried to make a real business out of the gauge, but the demand for it just sprang up by itself, and even after giving the other guys their cut I always had a couple of hundred bucks come the end of the week. I was able to take care of Bonnie and her kid real good, with some new furniture in the house, plenty of clothes, and everything else they needed. My name was getting around the country like wildfire."
Chronicles, page 103:
"Maybe someday your name will get around the country like wildfire," she'd say. "If you ever get a couple of hundred bucks, buy me something.
Really The Blues, page 245: "...and empty garbage cans loaded with bricks on the heads of the Irish cops on the beat."
Chronicles, page 103 - 104: "I crossed over from Hudson to Spring, passed a garbage can loaded with bricks and stopped into a coffee shop."
Really The Blues, page 174: "There was The Big Apple dangling right in front of my nose, shiny red and round and juicy."
Chronicles, page 104: "The whole city was dangling in front of my nose."
Chronicles, page 47: "The kind of people who come from out of nowhere and go right back into it — a pistol-packing rabbi, a snaggle-toothed girl with a big crucifix between her breasts - all kinds of characters looking for the inner heat."
Really The Blues, page 6:
"I found myself running with a literary ex-pug, a pistol-packing rabbi, and a peewee jockey whose onliest riding crop was a stick of marihuana."
Really The Blues, page 203:
"These two fly chicks got up on their high-horse when we quizzed them about it - one insisted she was pure Spanish, and sported a crucifix right over her breastworks to prove it..."
Really The Blues, page 210:
"He had razor legs, snaggle teeth and dribble lips..."
Chronicles, page 47:
"A frantic atmosphere - all kinds of characters talking fast, moving fast - some debonair, some rakish."
Really The Blues, page 212: "...a light gray felt for me with the brim turned down on one side, kind of debonair and rakish."
Chronicles, page 47:
"Some people even had titles - 'The Man Who Made History,' 'The Link Between The Races" - that's how they'd want to be referred to."
Really The Blues, page 210:
"On The Corner I was to become known as the Reefer King, the Link Between the Races, The Philosopher, the Mezz, Poppa Mezz, Pop's Boy, the White Mayor of Harlem, the Man about Town, the Man that Hipped the World, the Man that Made History, the Man with the Righteous Bush, He Who Diggeth the Digger, Father Neptune."
From Chronicles page 4:
"Outside the wind was blowing, straggling cloud wisps, snow whirling in the red lanterned streets..."
From The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1916) by Sax Rohmer:
"The moon sailed clear of the straggling cloud wisps which alone told of the recent storm..."
From Chronicles page 95, regarding Monk:
"Even then, he summoned magic shadows into being."
From The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1916) by Sax Rohmer:
"To-night the moon was come, raising her Aladdin's lamp up to the star world and summoning magic shadows into being."
Ed Cook had noted a passage in Chronicles that comes from a different Sax Rohmer novel:
Sax Rohmer, Dope (1919), A tiny spaniel lay beside the fire, his beady black eyes following the nervous movements of the master of the house.
Chronicles, p. 167: A tiny spaniel lay at the guy's feet, the dog's beady black eyes following the nervous movements of his master.
Then there's this -
Chronicles, page 50:
"Suspense always had a creaking door more horrible-sounding than any door you could imagine — nerve-wracking, stomach-turning tales week after week."
Raised on Radio by Gerald Nachman, page 313:
"The writing of each play, over the years, has been a nerve wracking, stomach-turning, head-spinning series of week-after-week crises."
Chronicles, page 51:
"I asked the guy who made the sound effects for the radio shows how he got the sound of the electric chair and he said it was bacon sizzling. What about broken bones? The guy took a LifeSaver and crushed it between his teeth"
Raised on Radio by Gerald Nachman, page 313"
"His scare tactics included the sound of a man frying in the electric chair (sizzling bacon), bones being snapped (spareribs or Life Savers crushed between teeth)..."
Chronicles, page 26: "...he was like an old wolf, gaunt and battle-scarred..."
Call of the Wild : "Then an old wolf, gaunt and battle-scarred, came forward."
Walking back to the main house, I caught a glimpse of the sea through the leafy boughs of the pines. I wasn't near it, but could feel the power beneath its colors. (Chronicles, p. 162)
Compare that to this longer passage from Marcel Proust's Within a Budding Grove:
But when, Mme. de Ville-parisis’s carriage having reached high ground, I caught a glimpse of the sea through the leafy boughs of trees, then no doubt at such a distance those temporal details which had set the sea, as it were, apart from nature and history disappeared ... But on the other hand I was no longer near enough to the sea which seemed to me not a living thing now, but fixed; I no longer felt any power beneath its colours, spread like those of a picture among the leaves, through which it appeared as inconsistent as the sky and only of an intenser blue.
I don't think there can be any doubt that Bob had to have consciously taken these sentences and, with some revision, passed them off as his own.
Another example is from a book that I imagine Dylan knows well, Huckleberry Finn:
Every night we passed towns, some of them away up on black hillsides, nothing but just a shiny bed of lights; not a house could you see. ... There warn't a sound there; everybody was asleep. And now look at Chronicles, p. 165:
One night when everyone was asleep and I was sitting at the kitchen table, nothing on the hillside but a shiny bed of lights ... My last exhibit (a less exact quote) comes from a book called Really the Blues (1946) by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, in which a hipster introduces "his chick" to Mezzrow:
Baby this that powerful man with that good grass that'll make you tip through the highways and byways like a Maltese kitten. Mezz, this is my new dinner and she's a solid viper. And now, part of Dylan's description of his friend Ray's girl, Chloe Kiel:
She was cool as pie, hip from head to toe, a Maltese kitten, a solid viper — always hit the nail on the head. I don't know how much weed she smoked, but a lot. (Chronicles, p. 102)
And later in Really the Blues, a black man was "sitting there actually talking to a white woman cool as pie."
Now what are we to think of these "borrowings"? I know that borrowing and revising tunes and song lyrics is standard practice in folk and blues music, and Dylan has done plenty of that, quite openly, as have others. That doesn't bother me. But in a sustained piece of prose that is not meant to be sung or played, but taken as the author's own composition, it is not standard practice. In the instances given above, I think Bob comes pretty close to real plagiarism, and for all I know there are more instances in Chronicles yet to be identified. Frankly, as a Dylan fan from way back, I'm a little disappointed. Say it ain't so, Bob.
UPDATE: A couple more.
Jack London, Children of the Frost:
"Rum meeting place, though," he added, casting an embracing glance over the primordial landscape ...
Chronicles, p. 167: I cast an embracing glance over the primordial landscape ...
Jack London, Tales of the Klondyke:
Another tremendous section of the glacier rumbled earthward. The wind whipped in at the open doorway ...
Chronicles, p. 217: Wind whipped in the open doorway and another kicking storm was rumbling earthward.
UPDATE II: Yet more:
Sax Rohmer, Dope (1919), A tiny spaniel lay beside the fire, his beady black eyes following the nervous movements of the master of the house.
Chronicles, p. 167: A tiny spaniel lay at the guy's feet, the dog's beady black eyes following the nervous movements of his master.
London, Children of the Frost: And then they are amazingly simple. No complexity about them, no thousand and one subtle ramifications to every single emotion they experience. They love, fear, hate, are angered, or made happy, in common, ordinary, and unmistakable terms.
Chronicles, p. 169: Yet to me, it's amazingly simple, no complications, everything pans out. As long as the things you see don't go by in a blur of light and shade, you're okay. Love, fear, hate, happiness all in unmistakable terms, a thousand and one subtle ramifications.
UPDATE III (Oct. 2): Jack London, Tales of the Klondyke: Through this the afternoon sun broke feebly, throwing a vague radiance to earth, and unreal shadows.
Chronicles, p. 112: The afternoon sun was breaking, throwing a vague radiance to the earth.
Jack London, White Fang: He carried himself with pride, as though, forsooth, he had achieved a deed praiseworthy and meritorious.
Chronicles, p. 63: He didn't need to say much—you knew he had been through a lot, achieved some great deed, praiseworthy and meritorious, yet unspoken about it.
R. L. Stevenson, Providence and the Guitar: As Leon looked at her, in her low-bodied maroon dress, with her arms bare to the shoulder, and a red flower set provocatively in her corset, he repeated to himself for the many hundredth time that she was one of the loveliest creatures in the world of women.
Chronicles, p. 127: I bought a red flower for my wife, one of the loveliest creatures in the world of women.
On and on it goes. They found dozens of phrases from a single issue of Time magazine April 1961 embedded in Dylan's text - clearly he wanted to give a lot of pungent contemporary detail in his memories of Greenwich Village and instead of doing what most writers would do, soaking himself in the writings of the time & then writing his own account in his own words, he assembled his memoir by taking the phrases he liked verbatim.
Plagiarism I think is legally defined as consisting of seven words in an identical sequence, and I don't think Bob ever does precisely that, so, legally, maybe, he isn't a plagiarist. But it sure feels like he is.
I loved this book and I'm quite shaken up to find out all this stuff. Rabid Dylan fans are brushing the whole thing aside, saying oh well, if you scrutinised any book by anyone else as much as Chronicles has been you'd find the same. But that's just insane, of course you wouldn't.
“Everybody’s wearing a disguise/To hide what they’ve got left behind their eyes” – okay, so what’s Bob got left behind his eyes? A billion synapses connected to a million memories, that’s what, and they burn with an intensity that only sharpens as he finally gets some of them down on paper. Quotable quotes leap from every page. On Guthrie: “For me it was like an epiphany, like some heavy anchor had just plunged into the waters of the harbour.” On reading American history: “I crammed my head full of as much of this stuff as I could stand and locked it away in my mind out of sight, left it alone. Figured I could send a truck back for it later.” On the year 1962: “The whole city was dangling in front of my nose. I had a vivid idea of where everything was.”
At least half of this book is “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bohemian Folkie”. “What I was going to do as soon as I left home was just call myself Robert Allen…” but then there was a sax player called David Allyn, and that looked good. So he changed to Robert Allyn – “more exotic, more inscrutable”. Then later “I’d seen some poems by Dylan Thomas. Dylan and Allyn sounded similar. Robert Dylan. Robert Allyn. I couldn’t decide – the letter D came on stronger.” He breathlessly captures the entrancement folk songs laid on his 19 year old self : “Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension… It was life magnified…I scheduled my life around it”. To us here in 2009, it looks like Bob became a folk star with very little effort, but he had to take a couple of lumps on the way. After memorising the whole Woody Guthrie songbook, a guy he describes as the Minneapolis Commissioner of the Folk Police escorts him to a phonograph player and plays him Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who'd already been doing pinpoint recreations of Woody for years. “I felt like I’d been cast into sudden hell… Elliott was far beyond me”.
After 100 pages on the Greenwich Village scene, we jump to 1966 and the tone darkens. Since 1963 he’d been continually hyped and glorified – “the conscience of a generation” and so on. It became intolerable. He tried to get out of the pressure cooker by moving to Woodstock but he found that “roadmaps to our homestead must have been posted in all fifty states for gangs of dropouts and druggies.” Under seige on all sides, he used the minor motorcycle accident of 1966 to get some breathing space but the pressure never let up. Even his friends piled it on – in one jarring page Dylan tells of a car ride during which Robbie Robertson asks “Where do you think you’re gonna take it?” Take what? “You know, the whole music scene.” Dylan: “It was like dealing with a conspiracy. No place was far enough away. I don’t know what everyone else was fantasizing about, but what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the back yard. That would have been nice… After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can’t buy it back.” Around that time he went to see a business broker looking over a portfolio of businesses for sale, in a futile attempt to get out of the show business into something less insane, like curtain rods or freight haulage. Sometimes the story of Bob Dylan is exactly like the Life of Brian:
Bob: You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves. You're all individuals!
Bob’s many followers, after a pause: Tell us how to think for ourselves, O Bob!
There’s nothing at all about going electric, nothing about Christianity, nothing about Rolling Thunder. Instead of those dramas, Bob regales us with ninety-pages on the making of one of his albums – song by song, session by session. Wow – which one? Could it be Freewheelin’, or Blonde on Blonde? Blood on the Tracks perhaps? Nope, of course it’s Oh Mercy. (Expect similar treatment of Knocked Out Loaded in Volume Two.) This section includes six pages on a truly crackbrained theory about all popular music being based on the number 2, but Lonnie Johnson one time showed him how you could base it on the number three. Hey, whoah there - three??– “I don’t know why the number 3 is more metaphysically powerful than the number 2, but it is.” He explains how this way of performing will revolutionise his art: “My playing was going to be an impellant in equanimity to my voice and I would use different algorithms that the ear is not accustomed to.” Say what, Bob? Come again? But a few pages later we also get Bob’s delight in buying a bumper sticker which said “World’s Greatest Grandpa”. This is a man of many parts.
Chronicles is stuffed full of Bob’s Most Memorable Characters (Fred Neil, Dave Van Ronk, John Hammond, Ray Gooch) and Most Memorable Records (including a great section where Hammond gives him an advance copy of King of the Delta Blues Singers by Robert Johnson, and an account of How “Pirate Jenny” Changed My Life). There’s funny accounts of the folk purists versus the commercialisers. The whole book is drenched in music. You’re tapping your foot as you read. Well, okay, but what about the private life? It’s a little strange there. I was thinking he’s just going to avoid the whole subject but no – right at the end, a sweet few pages on Suze Rotolo (the tone of which is considerably at variance with her public reminiscences) and a portrait of Joan Baez – “she seemed very mature, seductive, intense, magical. Nothing she did didn’t work” – before he got to meet her. Aww. But no, no Sara. Discretion and the usual cabal of lawyers would have made sure of that. And in the Oh Mercy section, many mentions of “my wife” but never is she named. Pretty odd. So. Don’t look back? I should coco. When Bob looks back, it’s warm, inclusive, annoying, incomprehensible, panoramic, diamond hard, inspirational, and it’s book of the month, no contest.
****
The Peter Lang Anecdote
Peter Lang, a great fingerstyle guitarist, was booked to play at Stamford Arts Centre by my friend David who manages it. After the gig Peter came back to David's house and amongst other things told us his Dylan Anecdote. So this is from memory.
'I was working on a project in Minneapolis with David Zimmerman, Bob's brother. One day I called David. A very famous voice answered the phone. I said "Er.... is that Bob?" He said "Yeah, this is Bob". Wow! I thought hard. What should be the first thing you ask Bob Dylan? Eventually I said "Is David there?" Bob said "Sure, I'll get him." And that was my first and last conversation with Bob Dylan.'(less)
A real bowl of literary prawn crackers - you eat and eat and they taste of nothing, they're entirely synthetic, like a form of extruded plastic, but y...moreA real bowl of literary prawn crackers - you eat and eat and they taste of nothing, they're entirely synthetic, like a form of extruded plastic, but you can't stop and then you realise the whole bowl is gone and what was that all about? This is not a good book and yet it was compelling, I can't deny it, a smooth, snaky insinuating monologue which in retrospect and often in real-time spect is a ridiculous tissue of allegory, you've seen all this in other reviews but it's all horribly true - our reluctant hero's name is Changez - that's right
Ch-ch-ch-changez to you!
and his svelte not-quite-attainable lurve is (Am) Erica
I hope Mohsin Hamid wakes up in hot sweats in the middle of the night thinking Oh God, how could I have done that!
The fundamentalism of the title is from the business slogan of the arbitrage company he works for in New York, "focus on the fundamentals" - that's the fundamentalism he's reluctant about. Okay, nice joke.
That said, a lot of the reviews of this book would have you believe it's an apology for al Qaeda - no, it's not, Changez is an extraordinarily secular Muslim - I think the M word is used once only in the whole book, and nowhere does he speak of Islam. The opposition to America which is eventually accepted and embodied by our troubled young man is entirely political - he does give a faint but pertinent impression of America as the lover who kills you or as the murderer who loves you. But oh dear, this kind of thing is not good :
"I had always resented the manner in which America conducted itself in the world; your country's constant interference in the affairs of others was insufferable. Vietnam, Korea, the straits of Taiwan ..."
I thought there was so much more to be said about how the East wants what the West has got without wanting to be colonised and disembowelled by the West, and how America is the very embodiment of guilty pleasure, and how this love hate thing is like to drive entire countryfuls of young men raving mad, given the repressive anti-sex poverty-stricken societies they come from, and how this explains a whole lot, but Hamsid's touch was so light you could almost have mistaken it for shallowness.
This is one of the crap dodgily picaresque (= not really got a plot) very early Dickens which have no merit at all except being complete fun and a jo...moreThis is one of the crap dodgily picaresque (= not really got a plot) very early Dickens which have no merit at all except being complete fun and a joy to read. But they have no purpose. Just joy and fun. So you can probably skip this.(less)
I didn't like Kraken at all, found it way too silly and jokey, I've often thought another world like a sitcom on bad acid, but since all my goodreads...moreI didn't like Kraken at all, found it way too silly and jokey, I've often thought another world like a sitcom on bad acid, but since all my goodreads friends indeed, that another mind occupies the exact same space as my mind seem to like this particular novel, That's why I keep forgetting I'm gonna give it a go. It's premise is very intriguing inhabits our world. where I left my keys.(less)
I remember reading this one, years ago, in a really bad flat in Mapperley Park. It was so horribly dusty all the time. That was because I never dusted...moreI remember reading this one, years ago, in a really bad flat in Mapperley Park. It was so horribly dusty all the time. That was because I never dusted. And when I looked out of my window I saw a wall. And when I looked out of my other window, I saw a different wall.
Much like the hero of this brilliant novel - metaphorically speaking. And then, one day, in the wall, he notices a door. And he wants to open it and pass through to somewhere better. The very thing that other reviewers didn't like about this whopping novel was what made it another of my great reading experiences (which I remember like the memory of passing through something tremendous as if it was the Grand Canyon and not a novel at all) : they didn't like, but I did, the painful awful awe-full inevitability of the events, the doom of the characters, the dance of death we get drawn into for the last 200 pages - it's a quadrille, very formal, the partners are the characters, the plot, the author and ourselves, us, the readers. It's like a nightmare you can't wake up from. We know that, the characters know that, they're screaming, we're screaming, Dreiser has us caught in his fist of words and won't let us go until we know how it is that ordinary people can do terrible things which they never wanted to, they would have sold their souls not to, but they did. (less)
Hate List is a YA novel about the aftermath of a school shooting. Okay, you do get the pre-math and the math itself, a little bit, but 90% is about th...moreHate List is a YA novel about the aftermath of a school shooting. Okay, you do get the pre-math and the math itself, a little bit, but 90% is about the aftermath. I don't read YA novels because I'm an A and no longer Y but I read this one because life is pretty random, just like school shootings. One here, one there, who knows where the next one will be? All you know is, there will be a next one.
This is an anguished tale told in the voice of 16 or 17 year old Valerie, and she went out with this lovely guy called Nick for three years, since she was 14 or 15 I guess, but he figured it was time for a crime like Columbine and he terminated their relationship by shooting a lot of their schoolmates, one teacher, Valerie herself, and then himself. After that, there was no possibility of a reconciliation. Some things can't be unsaid.
This book follows the complicated and frankly horrendous emotional, physical, familial and of course psychological fallout from the shooting. For instance, most of the school thinks Valerie was in cahoots with Nick, after all, she was his girlfriend and she wrote the famous hate List which is exposed to all by the police. But some think no, on the day of the massacre she was trying to stop him. It gets messy and depressing and I confess there were big globby tears in my eyes as I read the final scenes, which I had to surreptitiously wipe away in case my daughter spotted me as she was in the room, but I think I got away with it.
Yes there were a few things to complain about – for instance, Jennifer Brown, you need to check your head – please never again call your characters stupid names like Dr. Hieler (!) - and the shooting boyfriend is Nick Levil !! Give me a break. Also, but this is probably only a reflection of reality, if you took three words out of the conversations in this book, it would be 50 pages shorter – can you guess the words? Yes – cool, lame, and totally.
Our narrator Valerie writes in a minimalist zoned-out style which I found completely believable. I'm not saying she's the new Emma Bovary but she comes alive. She does say quite a few things like :
I had to bite my palms when I stepped out of the elevator on the fourth floor into the vestibule of the psychiatric ward at Garvin general.
Sample dialogue - Valerie is visiting a shooting victim who has been left disfigured.
"Yeah, they make suicides stay for three days or something like that. But most of them end up staying longer because their parents are so freaked out. Is your mom freaked out?"
"She is so beyond freaked you have no idea."
One big point this novel makes, by implication, is how easily young women can turn into pretty young zombies. Valerie kind of sleepwalks along with her lovely boyfriend. She's influenced by his darkness, his infatuation with death, okay, yes, the G word is not used but this young couple are clearly Goths. Black eyeliner is mentioned. Why Nick is constantly picked on at Garvin High School is also not really explored in much detail, but after the brief scenes which describe his poverty stricken home life and his tatty clothes clearly the motive for the bullying has more than a whiff of class prejudice about it. As Nick's anguish about being a continual target at school deepens, Valerie is still thinking that it's Val&Nick against the world and just by throwing up this screen of hatred expressed in the Hate List she writes up in her journal, they can survive. She doesn't see he's taking it all to a whole other level. Oh those horrendous later realisations! Ah humanity!
I didn't realise you were so unhappy.
I didn't realise what your life was really like.
and worse
I didn't realise you meant it!
At the end of the novel we are presented with an interview with the author who helpfully answers questions like Why was Valerie's dad so mean? (I wondered that too) and after that the first chapter of Jennifer Brown's next novel! How ...er...nice! Thank you! This did not used to happen in the days of Gustave Flaubert or James Joyce but it may have been useful.
All in all, another gothtastic, maxillo-facial read : 3.5 stars.(less)
**spoiler alert** Not a review, just a summary - might be useful...
“Why don’t you dance?”. At a yard sale, a teenage couple dance to a record the man...more**spoiler alert** Not a review, just a summary - might be useful...
“Why don’t you dance?”. At a yard sale, a teenage couple dance to a record the man puts on.
“Viewfinder”. A man with no hand sells sells photographs of people’s houses to the occupiers. He calls on one man whose family have just left him.
“Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit”. A man thinks about how his wife left him and what kind of a man she left him for.
“Gazebo”. A couple who manage a motel are at the end of their tether after he’s had an affair with the Mexican maid.
“I could see the smallest things”. A sleepless woman has a conversation with the next-door neighbour who used to be good friends with her husband.
“Sacks”. A man visits his son and explains the circumstances of his adultery, which led to the divorce.
“The Bath”. First version of “A Small Good Thing”.
“Tell the women we’re going”. Jerry and his pal pick up a couple of girls. Later for no apparent reason Jerry kills both of them.
“After the Denim”. An old couple go to play bingo. They find a longhaired couple sitting in their regular seats and the man becomes irrationally angry. The old woman is ill.
“So much water so close to home”. Three men go on a fishing trip and one finds the body of a girl in the river. They decide to report the body when they’ve finished their fishing trip.
“The third thing that killed my father off”. Dummy has a pond of bass. He allows a man and his son to fish one time in this pond, but he gets mad at them anyway.
“A serious talk”. A man is visiting his separated wife and is on the verge of exploding into violence. He cuts the phone and she throws him out. “He hoped he had made something clear.”
“The calm”. In a barbershop a man tells a tale about how he didn’t kill his deer when out hunting that day, but he did mortally wound it. A dispute breaks out with the other customers who tell him he ought to be out looking for the deer instead of getting his hair cut.
“Popular mechanics”. A couple are arguing and their baby gets in the way.
“Everything stuck to him”. A very young couple’s baby is crying through the night. They have a fight about whether he can go duck hunting. He doesn’t go and they make up.
“What we talk about when we talk about love”. Two couples are out for an evening. Mel, a doctor, tells everyone what he thinks about love, including the story about the two old farts in the real bad accident.
“One more thing”. A man gets into a long argument with his daughter. He thinks she’s gone crazy with new age thinking. When his wife gets home, it’s the last straw – she throws him out. (less)
So I watched the movie, and I really shouldn't have. To quote Pope Pius VII, it sometimes makes you wonder if you're on the right planet. Anthony Hopk...moreSo I watched the movie, and I really shouldn't have. To quote Pope Pius VII, it sometimes makes you wonder if you're on the right planet. Anthony Hopkins plays an extremely white black man! And the ever-crushingly beautiful Nicole Kidman plays an illiterate woman who's a janitor! Yes! And we're supposed to take this seriously! And the actor who plays the young Anthony Hopkins looks absolutely nothing like him! It's so insane. I believe they take a lot of drugs in Hollywood, and this movie appears to prove it. Some of the loonyness belongs to Philip Roth of course. Because the story has the crashingly beautiful even though desperately dressing down Nicole take a shine to the 70-if-he's-a-day Anthony and wants to shag him a lot! And this is the same wish fulfillment fantasy that Philip Roth keeps on writing about in all his late books! Over and over again! This would be funny if it weren't for the many rothophiles running about telling us that he's the greatest living writer of prose and will soon be the greatest dead one too. Ugh.
Okay, I admit, the book MUST must must must be better than this wretched loony movie but I will never find out. I got Rothed to death years ago.* This Human Stain movie, it was just a one time thing. It meant nothing. I swear I'll never see it again. Hey, maybe when I'm real old and creepy I'll turn into this giant Rothfan and reread all this stuff and be yelling "yeah, stick it to her one more time, substitute-Rothman, you know she's gagging for your 70 year old flesh". Ew.
TO RECAP :
this is a black man
this is a cleaning lady
I understand the team who made The Human Stain will be producing a biopic on Philip Roth shortly and that the challenging role of Philip Roth, which requires the actor to age from 20 to 70 has gone to
* er... not quite - I did subsequently read Nemesis and since it wasn't anything to do with shagging it was really pretty good, in a Larry David way : "pretty...pretty...pretty good".
With some things you know exactly what they're going to be like before you experience them and you hope you're proved wrong. I saw "A Mighty Wind" rec...moreWith some things you know exactly what they're going to be like before you experience them and you hope you're proved wrong. I saw "A Mighty Wind" recently and shouldn't have bothered - good film well made and all, but utterly predictable. As was Generation X. DC is a snappy writer, he's Tom Wolfe's kid brother, and this book should have been a collection of smart essays like Kandy Kolored Tangerine Streamlined Baby etc. It doesn't really leave the ground as a story with characters. And also, really, he is a bit too self-regardingly clever. So if you don't come from Generation X itself & are therefore reading this out of sheer nostalgia, forget this and check out three funny movies about similar stuff - Clerks, Office Space and Empire Records.(less)
Although I don't think this the comic masterpiece everyone else does, I was very struck by this passage on p93 - written in 1932, and seemingly predic...moreAlthough I don't think this the comic masterpiece everyone else does, I was very struck by this passage on p93 - written in 1932, and seemingly predicting the 1960s. In London our heroine goes to a meeting of the Cinema Society :
"The audience had run to beards and magenta shirts and original ways of arranging its neckwear... it had sat through a film of Japanese life called 'Yes' made by a Norwegian film company in 1915 with Japanese actors, which lasted an hour and three-quarters and contained twelve close-ups of waterlilies lying perfectly still on a scummy pond and four suicides, all done extremely slowly."
Nice one, Stella. This still goes on by the way!(less)
Oh I forgot to list this one! Wow - oversight city! (A city not found on any maps). God knows whether this is really a five star novel, but it was whe...moreOh I forgot to list this one! Wow - oversight city! (A city not found on any maps). God knows whether this is really a five star novel, but it was when I read it as a young teenybopper, and it bopped all over my teeny brain and imploded it into a zillion sparkly pieces which took many months to gradually meld back into a usable item again - I think that's why I did so poorly in my physics exam. It was called Tiger! Tiger! then, partly because Gully Foyle, the antiest of heroes, has a facial tiger tattoo like this
Well, fiercer than that, so that big tough aliens are scared of him, you know. That was him when he was a lot younger. Or maybe his sister, it's hard to tell.
Tiger! Tiger! was written in 1956 so how Alfred Bester could predict both the psychedelic trippiness of the 60s and the extreme facial tattooing of the 90s is beyond me. If you read it closely there's also a reference to Tip-Ex, which wouldn't be invented until 1959, and mouse pads, which didn't come in until years later. What a guy.
So this is another in the series of I-loved-this-to-death-then-but-I-don't-know-what-the-hell-I'd-think-about-it-now useless reviews.(less)
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Possibly it’s not so surprising when a more-than-slightly fanatical working-class autodidact rewrites the Old Testament in order to put back all the sex that the original author left out. That it then astonishes, infuriates, bores and nauseates in jarring alternating spasms is completely expected. That Ken Russell made a movie of it was likewise predictable; but that his movie was a model of good taste was a great disappointment – come on, Ken, where were the tits and bums and the giant plastic phalluses and the naked nuns? DH Lawrence was a unique novelist. If he’d never existed we really wouldn’t have had to invent him. I’m thinking that now he’s subsided entirely into Eng Lit courses where he lurks like a half submerged lamprey, luring the innocent with his new-aginess and biting their soft parts with his fascism.
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