Literary Lollapalooza, January 2010 Edition

Another decade begins, and I attempt to chronicle yet another year of my reading habits. This isn’t your typical book review blog, and it isn’t just a reading list. Ladies and gentlemen, this is everything I read this month and what I thought about each one…

This is Literary Lollapalooza, January 2010 Edition.

Books Read This Month: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, The Body Artist by Don DeLillo, and Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff.

Books Acquired:

Fiction: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Copeland, My Education by William S. Burroughs, God Hates Us All by Hank Moody

Non-Fiction: Likewise by Ariel Schrag, Reach of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman, Pillar of Fire by Taylor Branch, I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter, Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

E-Books:

Books Borrowed: The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, Point Omega by Don DeLillo

Currently Reading: Point Omega by Don DeLillo

Reviews of This Month’s Books:

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

House of Leaves has been a cult phenomenon and bestseller for years now. Released in 2000 by Pantheon Books, it had already built up a bit of a cult status by being gradually released over the internet before publication.
House of Leaves is an odd book. It is several stories told at once. The main text is a scholarly dissertation about a documentary film called The Navidson Record written by an old blind man, recently deceased, named Zampaño. This text is found by an LA tattoo-shop apprentice by the name of Johnny Truant. The pages, locked away in an old trunk, become young Johnny’s obsession as he edits the manuscript, writing his own thoughts and experiences in the footnotes of the text. The text is then further edited and commented upon by (we assume) multiple editors at the publishing house. The first problem with the manuscript: The documentary The Navidson Record doesn’t seem to actually exist. In fact, many of the people who are quoted in the text, among them famous writers like Stephen King and Anne Rice, and literary critics like Harold Bloom claim to have never met Zampaño or ever even heard of the film or the people the film chronicles.
The story of the film is that an award-winning photographer, Will Navidson, moves into an idyllic country home in Virginia to settle down with his common-law wife and two children only to discover that the house is, when carefully measured, actually larger on the inside than it is on the outside. The film starts out chronicling the leisurely family interaction in their new home but soon becomes an exploration of the house that begins to develop rooms and doorways that weren’t already there. The labyrinth that the house reveals seems to mirror the emotional lives of Navidson and his family, and the pages that follow as the maze is explored and those walls keep on shifting is harrowing to say the least.
Included are film and audio tape transcripts from Navidson’s brother Tom, interviews with participants like Navidson’s partner Karen, and even a series of letters written to Johnny Truant from his institutionalized mother, from the Whalestoe Institute (also published as a stand-alone volume called The Whalestoe Letters.) Along with photographs, sketches, poems, extensive foot-notes, and a maddening series of puzzles and codes embedded in the text (and footnotes) makes this a wholly encompassing read.
I found myself reading this book compulsively and obsessing over every little detail, lest something should be missed. It took me nearly three weeks to read the damned thing and it dominated my thoughts for that period of time. Upon completion I still hadn’t grasped exactly what I had just read. I had to digest it a bit. To tell the truth, even now I am a bit haunted by it. It will do that if you let it. (The message boards at the official website and forum are constantly abuzz with chatter about the mysteries and deepening meanings readers find in their own lives.)
The thing about a book like this is that it requires much from the reader: 1) you must first of all buy into the mystery and the hype just a little bit 2) you must be patient. The shifting voices and tangential nature of the footnotes and appendices require a felicity most modern readers won’t accommodate. You have to let go of control and let the book take over. And finally 3) you HAVE to let the book take over. If you don’t surrender to it, you will not enjoy it. You probably won’t even finish it. Those needing a clear path and a well-lit view will steer clear. And it’s good they do. This isn’t for them.
It’s for me. And people like me, that like to believe that books matter, and that words hold power, and that maybe, just maybe the impossible is not only possible, but it is actually quite probable, no matter how insane that might sound.
This is by far one of the most unusual and challenging books I have ever read. It consists of interlocked multiple stories told by multiple narrators (none of which are terribly reliable). The main text is written largely as a scholarly text complete with footnotes, appendices, and an index. The fonts change style and color to indicate stylistic or tonal changes, and the typeface layout changes frequently making turning the book sideways or upside down necessary, and a couple of times text burrows through the pages in “wormholes” forcing one to skip around the book in order to follow the continuity. It is often labeled and shelved in the horror section of the bookstore, but this odd gem defies such simple delineation. It is an unconventional novel about a mystery, a soul-quivering exploration of the impossible, and finally a love story. This one will be with me forever.

Postscript: (To further complicate matters Danielewski’s sister, recording artist Poe, released a companion piece to this book, a full-length album called Haunted. The two siblings collaborated on these pieces over two years and the works ended up cross-pollinating, creating what Poe refers to as “parallax views of the same story”. Many of the songs on the album refer to characters and events in House of Leaves and Danielewski references Poe and her songs several times in the text as well, although they are often veiled references.)



The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb

Internationally renowned artist and illustrator Robert Crumb does here what many people thought unthinkable: He made the book of Genesis readable! (See what I did there?) No seriously, if you ever started to read the bible and got caught by all those damn (oops!) begats, (i.e. so and so begat so and so and so and so begat who-ha, and who-ha lived fifty thousand years, etc.) this is the book for you. Okay, it still sucks to go through those lists (and there are a LOT of them), but here you can at least place a face with the name!
The fact that Crumb manages to faithfully reproduce the first book of the bible in beautifully illustrated detail is remarkable. A feat even those of us aware of his immense talents thought impossible.
Yes, this is a graphic novel of the first book of the bible. But every word is true, and lovingly transcribed. The Christian Right may disapprove because (Heavens!) Eve’s breasts are naked (as they would have been), but this is a damn fine literal translation of the first book of the Old Testament, made abundantly accessible to every single denominator, not just the most common. Words are no longer necessary. Crumb’s beautiful but crude drawings tell the whole story. It’s almost as if he included the words because he knew someone would pitch a fit if he didn’t.
This is the story of creation as all God’s children can appreciate it. Jews, Muslims, and Christians are all given equal voice in Crumb’s race sensitive drawings. The elements in which all three faiths believe are given most credence, and the characters are drawn (shockingly!) like they are of middle-eastern descent. Who knew Joseph was Jewish??? Also of note is the fine detail put into each “tribes” slight physical differences over time as a result of area-exclusive breeding. The resulting end of the book revolving around Jacob throws considerable insight into the birth of modern culture and religion (at least as far as the middle east is concerned.)
The truth is, Crumb’s detailed illustrations provide a marvel of cross-cultural understanding. The sad reality is that the majority of the Christian population will probably view this book as blasphemy. Here is hope that mankind might better come to understand and love one another by viewing Crumb’s brilliant illustrations, and love one another as the distant cousins that the bible asserts that we are.



The Body Artist by Don DeLillo

The Body Artist is a short novel by the acclaimed author of White Noise, Underworld, and Falling Man. I had heard of DeLillo ever since I was in circles academic enough to know the name DeLillo. The novels (listed above) placed him amongst the top literati of his (our?) generation. I haven’t read those books though. I decided to start with this one. Because it was damned cheap. I picked this one up in one of Borders’ Bargain Blowout Sales and probably got it for about what it cost to print it.
The Body Artist is the story of a young woman, a body artist, grieving the loss of her husband, a renowned European filmmaker, whose sudden death leaves the artist searching for meaning and truth in the midst of her solitude. The work she creates in response and in reaction to this loss is mind-boggling in its implications.
This is as spare as writing gets. This short novel (only 100 pages or so) packs the emotional wallop of a deeply engrossing domestic drama easily three times its length. If poetry were prose, this would be it. Subtle, nuanced, emotionally charged, terse, full of imagery, and hard to decipher: this is a master of the form making something really, really hard look easy. It is a question mark of a book that lives in the soul rather than the mind. One reads it and absorbs it like one does the lines of Whitman.
This is not, I’m sure, the author’s most accessible work, but I find it transcendent. Like poetry or the finest short stories, it works beyond the crass hard edges of reality to create an emotional rather than an intellectual response.



Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff

Another find in the wondrous Borders’ Bargain Blowout sale, this one had my name all over it. For those of you who may know (you all do now…you’re welcome.) I have a small obsession with monkeys. In point of fact, I collect them. I have a lot of monkeys and none are similar. They are very varied and unique. And I just couldn’t resist a mystery-thriller with a title like Bad Monkeys. I mean, c’mon.
The title refers both to a group of universally reviled human beings: (the super evil: aka the rapist, murderer, child molester) and the super-secret organization pledged to take them down…aka Bad Monkeys. They are part of an over-arching crime fighting syndicate ran by Cost-Benefits and overlooked by Malfeasance. The point of Bad Monkeys is to dispatch the nastiest bits of civilization with an easily diagnosed heart attack or stroke, therefore never raising any questions. However, our narrator is a victim of a very Bad Monkey indeed. Her brother was abducted at the age of ten and she has since been trying to find him. However, he as it turns out, is now a lead operative in the Troop (the band of evil-doers set to destroy the world.) As a recruit with Bad Monkeys, she is set to take the Troop down, but of course, complications get in the way.
Normal expectations for thrillers are turned upside down in this fun and taut thriller/sci-fi field trip. Ruff has a hell of a time at the reader’s expense, and the result is a fun and engaging fantasy about what happens when your fortune cookie comes true. You feel the twist coming at the end of the book, but you never quite guess what surprises await you. I loved this silly and fun read and had it completed in a couple of days. I think you’ll like it, too.

Awesome reading this month! For next month I've already started DeLillo's latest novel Point Omega. It is going to be a good month!


Until next time, take care!