John Irving is no stranger to me — I’ve read The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire, which can be both superficially described as kilometric readings. I seriously enjoyed both, and I think of Irving as someone who always finds the comic in dark matters. Severing of body parts, rape, and deaths in the family are recurring themes in his novels, and I’m glad to take a quick break from these in A Prayer for Owen Meany, which provides a scrutiny of faith and religion — and an amusing look at the small-town American life — through the enduring friendship of two boys from the fictitious town of Gravesend, New Hampshire. Read more…
There’s an ominous ring to it, really, much like someone rising from the dead or reclaiming her piece of the earth. But anyway it’s hard to be prosaic-sounding about it, so I’m just saying that I’m reviving this book blog. It’s been a good year or so, and I figure that I would again need a repository for my book thoughts. It surprises me a great deal that I can still feel strongly about a book or a story even after my long reading hiatus (and that long list of distractions that don’t even deserve to be mentioned), which gives me the impression that you’ll never lose it. It’s right there for you to reacquaint yourself with.
So this is me dusting myself off the non-reading ground, and maybe sending books overseas again! Visit Bookmooch to know how much fun it is.
Where to start? Jessica Zafra‘s latest essay collection, Twisted 8 1/2. I wolfed this down in an hour or so. Not because of its size, but because the writer has always wielded that power to make such invested readers out of old fans and fresh converts alike.
I decided to get my friends “generic” gifts this Christmas. I ordered copies from the writer herself via SMS, who willingly agreed to an afternoon meetup. Gahd, Rockwell in Christmas. Everyone was hoarding sweets and pastries like crazy, and the huge cartons carted off by even the most well-meaning gift-givers crept me out a bit. Cupcakes were sold out, “rich fudge brownies” and “food for the gods” seemed to be spelled out on every forehead coming my way. Read more…
I first encountered Arthur Koestler in college, in a local anthology of creative nonfiction where he is quoted on something about the “politics of creativity.” Right then I’ve already found the guy’s ideas brilliant, but it took me a good six years to finally purchase my first Koestler book, The Yogi and the Commissar.
Divided into three parts, this collection of essays written in the 1940s discusses literature and maps out the socio-political terrain of its time. The third part, “Explorations,” specifically lays down a “well-documented survey of the Soviet experiment with the conclusions to be derived from it.”
Koestler isn’t merely a lurker, or perhaps a dabbler in these affairs. Born in Budapest with Hungarian-Austrian roots, he studied science, engineering and psychology and, not unlike the many intellectuals of his time, joined the Communist party in 1931. Disillusioned during the height of the Stalinist purges, he left the party, was imprisoned during the Spanish Civil War, and eventually joined the British Army. His novel Darkness At Noon, set during the Moscow show trials, is said to provide a searing examination of socialism and masterfully reflect the dialectics he had written about for the better part of his life. Read more…
T.C. Boyle – The Inner Circle John Milk, not so self-assured and practically sex shy, finds himself working for Alfred Kinsey, a zoology professor known in the university as Dr. Sex. Dealing with his own marital issues, Milk becomes a part of the “inner circle,” and he is initiated into a series of uninhibited sexual experiments. The novel takes on a searing reexamination of love and carnal knowledge,and what sexual liberation can actually mean within the context of marriage and commitment.
T.C. Boyle – The Tortilla Curtain A scrutiny of the American Dream is always enticing to read. Boyle extends this invitation with this novel on two illegal Mexican immigrants trying to find their piece of the moon in the US. Their lives get entwined with those of American liberals Delaney and Kyra, and the two couples become unwilling players in a series of dark, comic events. I’m a fan of T.C. Boyle and stories on parallel lives and race and immigration, but there’s something amiss in the characterization. At one point you would get irate and wonder about motivation, what probably propels them toward their inaction and all. At any rate, the language and style I came to love about Boyle is a vivid element here. In the final instance, though, I still can’t decide about this book.
Nadine Gordimer – A Sport of Nature What does it mean to be a sport of nature, especially in apartheid-era South Africa? This novel is a political and sexual awakening spun by a fine literary hand.
Frank McCourt – Angela’s Ashes I find this more poetic than prosaic, every line brimming with the honesty of childhood emotions. Hands down, this is the best and most affective autobiography ever. RIP Frank McCourt.
The voice in Mark Haddon‘s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is unmistakable. It is the voice of someone with Special Needs, as psychology and social labels would tell one. It is the voice of Christopher who, in his yawning impotence in the face of complicated human emotions, finds refuge in mathematics and the sciences. It is the voice of a young man who refuses to be touched, disdains metaphors and the color yellow, and spreads out his fingers in a fan to express love for his father and mother.
Christopher, who likes prime numbers and solves quadratic equations in his head out of boredom or panic, discovers the murder of Wellington, a dog in the neighborhood. He embarks on a detective work largely patterned after Sherlock Holmes’s; he interviewed strangers, picked out a Red Herring and a prime suspect, and adopted a chain of reasoning. He puts to good use his photographic memory. Read more…
Joshua Ferris is one funny little possum, but more than the terrific humor in Then We Came To The End (2007), there’s that clear eye in describing the all-too familiar terrain called the workplace. Who else has already ventured in this? Why oh why does it take a full-time fiction writer (though an after-college stint at an advertising agency lent him the experience) to tell us that we office workers are often the “mismanaged inventory,” that there are many faces to that soul-draining corporate citizenship, but that often it all boils down to us being bored and too pampered by the establishment?
There’s the ragbag of characters, too: the Jewish raconteur, the one who always dishes out the juicy tales even if it’s way past breaktime; the substandard copywriter who keeps coming back even while he was already “walked Spanish down the hall”; the many lovely women who are stuck with ghastly haircuts or are too beautiful or are decisive about keeping some other woman’s husband’s child. Read more…
My problem is that I don’t have a bit of a problem with The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History, Jonathan Franzen‘s autobiography published in 2006. I’m a fan, to begin with. I now recall his allegedly bitter tirade against Oprah. (Remember his National Book Award-winning novel The Corrections and its ouster from the Book Club?) Guess he would never give the Queen the time of the day.
This lack of a problem begins and ends with the beauty of having read The Corrections, which I can remember now as about a conservative Midwestern family life, the contradicting feelings toward filial love, and the emergence of a radically new person. Franzen’s own life is not far from this, if not exactly identical to. Read more…
J.M. Coetzee used to be a vague memory out of a drowsy UP classroom, where an esteemed CL prof gushed over his works. I was initially uninterested in this book, his 1999 Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace, because I’ve practically begun outgrowing the whole apartheid thing after seven or so Nadine Gordimer books I’ve devoured. But the copy was there, and it runs the length of a short novella, so I gave it a try.
David Lurie, a middle-aged, twice-divorced English professor at a technical university in Cape Town, is catapulted to shame and scandal after his steamy affair with his student is exposed to the university public. He decides to quit and to retreat to his daughter Lucy’s Eastern Cape farm, where a violent situation leads him to a reexamination of justice and punishment (or lack thereof) and the changing social and political landscapes. Read more…
It’s Maundy Thursday, there’s three more free days left after it. But let’s talk about creativity. I feel like a dried-up well in this department lately, although there’s no shortage in the things (banal and foreign alike) to be written about. For one, I’m buying this “books impression” idea from Mich, one that dictates I jot down notes on novels / short stories recently read. The idea’s brilliant, really; what other way to fight a cheating memory but to immortalize ideas in print (or, in this case, in the electronic grapevine)?
I return, however, to the problem of lack in focus or, to examine deeper, bad writing. Flex those creative muscles, says the inner adult, but really, how do shake off the fact that your happiness is somehow inversely proportional to your creative energy? Complacency at work, yo. Read more…
I get high on a really good read. T.C. Boyle, Jonathan Franzen, and Nadine Gordimer top my long list of authors. Tagalog movie lines and short story quotes are like snot coming out of my nose. I train myself not to merely skim through or hoard books. I like reading about the darknesses of the American Dream and writers and sloppy dreamers. 
Katt Reads 