Spring has arrived and with it comes variety! Ah, the spice of life. How wonderful to have strange little oddities, unexpected beauties, and yes, even horrendous wastes of time. You see, a wise person once said “You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the Facts of Life.” Sometimes a soul-deadening torturously boring book is just what you need to kick-start better decision making in the future. Welcome Spring!
This is Literary Lollapalooza, March 2010 Edition.
Books Read This Month: 90 Classic Books for People in a Hurry by Henrik Lange, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, Lobby Hero by Kenneth Lonergan, Osama Van Halen by Michael Muhhamad Knight, Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Books Acquired:
Fiction: The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
Non-Fiction:
E-Books:
Books Borrowed: Never Let Me Go by Kashuo Ishiguro and Y: The Last Man by Vaughn, Guerra, and Marzan
Currently Reading: Never Let Me Go by Kashuo Ishiguro
Reviews of This Month’s Books:
99 Classic Books for People in a Hurry by Henrik Lange
This is a graphic novel with the conceit that it will relay the gist of 99 classic and genre favorite books in single page, 4-paneled illustrations. Each book in 4 simple, illustrated panels. The results are mixed.
It’s a great concept, and most any book lover will get a kick out of it. Just don’t take it as a cliff’s notes version, as most summaries are either wildly inaccurate, simplified to a fault, or changed slightly to make a funnier entry. Sometimes this book-as-a-one-page-joke formula falls flat and produces some pretty lame entries. But others are inspired, inventive, funny, and sometimes very silly. My favorite is The Bible, but Master and Margarita, and 2001: A Space Odyssey are also very good. The bright points keep you moving along, and trust me this is a very fast read. A one-sit read if ever there was one.
It’s not the height of literature, or the height of graphic novels, but it’s a fun and whimsical distraction, and it may even inspire you to pick up one or two if these great classic novels. Any thing that might get you to pick up a copy of Bulgakov or Kafka, I can whole-heartedly endorse.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers wrote this, her debut novel, at the age of 23 in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1940. It became a literary sensation, skyrocketing to the top of the bestseller lists in 1940. McCullers would go on to write several more novels highlighting the plight of the oppressed, and Hunter gained its place in the pantheon of great American novels.
At the heart of the story is John Singer, a deaf-mute, whose deaf-mute mentally impaired companion gets committed to an asylum. Singer moves into a room at the house of the Kelly’s. Young Mick Kelly, daughter of the Kelly’s, is a teenager in love with music and seeking to fit in. She frequently visits the bar run by Biff Brannon, where we meet Jake Blount, an alcoholic labor agitator. Jake becomes friends with Singer, cleans up and starts working at an arcade. The Kelly’s maid is Portia, a young black woman, whose brother gets arrested and imprisoned, and her father is the highly-educated and idealistic Dr. Powell who anchors the African-American community with his community dinners and awards for best essay written by a black teenager.
I am certain that at one time in this country this was considered a shocking vision of race and class that shook people to the core. In my heart of hearts I believe that. Why else would so many people praise it as a masterpiece? Sadly, it is a master-piece-of-shit (ya, see what I did there?). This book has not aged well. At all. Mostly it is about the conditions in the south that lead to racism and of fat cats taking advantage of the working class, this reads today as overly romantic, racist, ignorant, Marxist claptrap. We not only have a (black) character named Karl Marx, we have a character whose soul purpose is to spout the Marxist philosophy. “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” This quote gets reiterated a hundred times. Oh! And then there’s the black characters who are written in uneducated, ‘black talk’: “Nothing us could do would make no difference. Best thing us can do is keep our mouth shut.” Seriously. Oh, and the coup de grace is when respected old Dr. Powell sits thinking about how much he wishes he were white, oh to have fair skin, and thin lips, etc.
The fact that I slogged through 1/3 of this horrendous nightmare of a book before giving up and putting it aside is a testament to either my stupidity or my stubbornness. In the end it ended up taking up 2½ weeks of this month, so I’m sorry if I’m a bit bitter. I should’ve listened to Jim when he said, “Why are you reading that? It’s awful. Life is too short to read bad books.” Too true, Jim. Life IS too short to read bad books, even if I sometimes think I need a challenge. Trust me folks, pass this “classic” by.
Lobby Hero by Kenneth Lonergan
Okay, so this was homework for class, but someone a few months ago asked why I didn’t read more plays and now I have. So there. You’re welcome.
Lobby Hero is primarily about two characters, Jeff a twenty-something security guard in a Manhattan hotel lobby, and William, his uptight African-American supervisor. The play takes place entirely in the lobby of said hotel, and unravels as we discover more and more about the characters. Jeff is a self-proclaimed “fuck-up” who got kicked out of the Navy for smoking pot, got himself in deep with some loan sharks after losing big in Poker, and is now living in an apartment with his brother and his brother’s wife. He hopes to start paying his brother rent, but really wants to get out on his own, and he desperately wants to feel like his life has meaning and worth. Meanwhile, William is a self-made man. Through hard work, clean-lined ethics, and a no-nonsense take on following the rules he has risen to the position of Captain, the youngest in the company to ever achieve that. But William has a brother, and his brother has just been arrested for some really bad shit. And his brother has named him as his alibi. Two cops, one a hot superstar, the other a female rookie round out the cast of characters and help bring these secrets and desires crashing down around all of their heads, and none will ever be the same again.
The character is king with Lonergan, whose film You Can Count on Me was a breakout indie hit a few years back. Story is secondary to character, with the plots and subplots building solely out of the motivations and levels of the characters, and this play is an actors’ dream. Lonergan gives the characters nuance and so much pathos that it makes building a character an act of careful unpacking and assembling. This one gets my stamp of approval.
Osama Van Halen by Michael Muhammad Knight
Osama Van Halen is part sequel to Knight’s breakout underground Muslim punk-rock novel The Taqwacores, part autobiography, part metafiction, and part crazy delusional punk rock sojourn across the American landscape with a giant machine gun.
Knight, whose Taqwacores launched a Muslim sub-culture, plays fast and loose with the rules here. It’s more like a short story and essay collection than it is a novel. Threading all of the tales together is Amazing Ayyub, punk rock hero of Taqwacores, who along with Rabeya, the burka-wearing feminist Muslim, kidnap Matt Damon and are holding him hostage. They demand that Hollywood depict Muslims in a more positive light. They want just once to not be portrayed as al Qaeda steretypes. Meanwhile Ayyub, the amazing one, sets off on a personal mission to rid the world of a Muslim emo band by the name of Shah 79. Armed with a cartoonishly giant machine gun Ayyub traverses deserts and plains, often invisible, and along the way he escapes flesh-eating zombies in a mosque off the highway, gets rescued by taqwacore zombie-killer heroes The Kominas, and meets up with some pychobilly jinns. And to confuse matters more Michael Muhammad Knight enters the story as a character and occasionally as the author commenting on the characters and sequences as they occur.
This is a hell of a good time. I don’t know what it is, but I like it. For fans of crazy punk-rawk fiction, it doesn’t get more punk-rawk than this. While making homage to his own characters, he manages to create something wholly unique and original. Trust me, if you want to read this, you know right now. If Muslim emo bands getting massacred and Muslim zombies don’t get you excited, this is not for you. For the others of you (and you know who you are), order it now.
And now, for something completely different…
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for this, her debut collection of short fiction. A reading club favorite since its publication, it’s not the sort of book I gravitate towards. However, as providence would have it, I found it for really cheap on a clearance rack. Cut to several months later: I am finishing Osama Van Halen, looking for something to refresh and cleanse my palette. Interpreter of Maladies seems to fit the bill.
From the very first story I was engrossed and engaged with Lahiri’s remarkable prose. Her writing is elegant and precise, and yet moves with the fierce yearning of love. Her characters are almost all Indian, most Indian-Americans, (Lahiri herself is of Indian descent, born in London and raised in Rhose Island), and yet despite their sometimes exotic Eastern locations and customs, these stories aren’t foreign or alien at all. These stories take simple everyday slices of life from very average characters and reveal the deeply woven reality of these characters’ lives, making them much larger than life. Much like our own lives are so immense and deep and complicated to ever be simple, these stories showcase a literary talent who is at the top of her game. From “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” in which a little girl witnesses war and partition in Pakistan through the eyes of an older visitor, to “Sexy” in which a young woman enjoys playing the part of the kept mistress to a married man, each story is wholly unique and different, each one an entire world of its own.
My favorite story of the collection, “This Blessed House” is the story of a young couple, recently married. Theirs is the product of an arranged marriage, and so a few months in they are still getting to know one another, their quirks and idiosyncrasies. The new house they have purchased and moved into is a bit of a fixer upper, but they are ready for the challenge and look forward to having a home that is uniquely theirs. But free-spirit Twinkle has made a new game of treasure-hunting. It seems the family that lived in the house previously was devout Christians, and the couple is finding things all over the house. Twinkle begins earnestly searching for Christian curios, and she proudly displays them on the mantel, much to the chagrin of strait-laced Muslim Sanjeev. As the Christian artifacts accumulate, so does the tension in the house, culminating in a house-warming party where drunken guests join in the search and Sanjeev reaches a turning point.
This is beautiful and warm prose that gently urges you to keep reading. And when one finishes, you won’t be able to resist diving into the next irresistible world. An incredible debut collection, this is the type of book that as soon as you finish it you want to tell somebody else about it. Don’t resist that urge.
Well, that’s all for March. A bit of a downer of a month, but what a way to finish it! Until next month, keep reading.
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