This is Literary Lollapalooza, August 2010 Edition.
Books Read This Month:
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert
What is the What by Dave Eggers
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
Books Acquired:
Fiction: A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, I am Number Four by Pittacus Lore, The Acid House by Irvine Welsh, Filth by Irvine Welsh, Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh, Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov, The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst
Non-Fiction:
E-Books: Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
Books Borrowed: Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert, Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
Currently Reading: I am Number Four by Pittacus Lore
Reviews of This Months’ Books:
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
I actually read this book in July, but realized I had not included it after I posted July’s Lit ‘Palooza. I include it here, in apologia.
Netherland is a fascinating read. Told in first person by the narrator, Hans van den Broek, a Dutch-born and London-educated financial consultant who has found himself living in New York following the events of 9/11. At heart this is the story of a man living abroad in a strange place, and trying to find his place in a new home.
Hans is a likeable protagonist who connects with his home and with New York by playing cricket with a variety of working-class immigrants in Brooklyn. Among these cricket enthusiasts Hans meets Chuck Ramkisoon, a fast-talking, charismatic man with many capitalist interests and dreams of making cricket mainstream in America.
Told with the same thoughtful, well-paced plotting and vividly drawn characters one would find with Paul Auster or Don Delillo, this book is a slow burn. Slowly drawing you in, gradually enveloping you into the literary world, by the end you have lived in van den Broek’s distorted, alien, and ultimately life-changing Brooklyn. The character of Chuck Ramkisoon is a revelation, and when he is pulled, handcuffed from a New York reservoir many years later, it only deepens the mystery and lore you are already so entangled in.
At the beginning of Obama’s presidency in ’08 he was reading this book, and it has garnered numerous literary honors and awards since then. An eye-opening look at immigrant culture in the United States, this is a thought-provoking and deeply enriching novel.
Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert
This is not the first Batman tale by Neil Gaiman (those earlier tales are collected here as well), but this is the latest and most likely the last. In fact, it IS the last. The last Batman story that can be told: The story of his death.
As Batman attends a funeral populated by all his villains, friends, and allies after a long and storied career, he converses with an unseen female companion about all that he sees. Through different artistic styles, Gaiman and Kubert take a walk down memory lane reliving various important moments in the Dark Knight’s mythos by recreating the drawing and writing style of Batman creators throughout the 90 year history of the world’s greatest detective.
The result is a bittersweet farewell to a character that has had many lives. Of course the character of Batman can never really die, but that is the beauty of what Gaiman does here: by honoring Batman’s death, he is celebrating the immortality the character has attained.
Not the best Batman story ever told, but definitely the last…and a fitting tribute to my favorite of all comic book heroes.
What is the What by Dave Eggers
This is another tale about a U.S. immigrant, but in this case, he is Valentino Achek Deng, and he is a real person living and breathing in the United States.
Eggers, a brilliant biographer, as attested by his own autobiographical A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the astounding Zeitoun, about an Islamic man in post-Katrina New Orleans. What is the What is the life story of a surviving “Lost Boy” of the Sudan. Told in the first person, but greatly enhanced by the author’s imagination, this biography is considered by author and subject to be a novel based on true events.
The story is a heartbreaking one of many trials and tribulations. As a warning it moves much slower than Eggers’ other works, without the optimistic zeal that keeps the others moving forward of their own volition. This is a bit of a slug-fest, but it is totally worth slugging through it.
Valentino Achek Deng is having a hard time adjusting to Atlanta. For one, his home has been just been invaded and robbed, and he has been beaten and tied up on the floor of his apartment, left for dead. As he awaits his roommate’s possible return, or a neighbor to hear his muffled yells or panicked kicks at the walls and door, he recounts the long and storied events that led to his being in his current state. That story involves constant starvation, fear, death, and the abandonment of family and of anything resembling home and safety.
His is a horrible story about great wrongs suffered upon a people by another. Sadly he is not alone. Thousands of others share his grief, and his horrific past. Like Zeitoun this is an incredibly true story about one man’s overcoming great odds to survive and live happily as an outsider in the United States.
Seriously, Eggers is one hell of a writer. If you haven’t read his others, go read Zeitoun. Then you’ll want to make your way through each of his other books. This is number three for me and there are two more novels to go. I can’t wait.
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
I find it odd, but it seems like almost every book I read this month took place post 9/11, and is greatly shaped by that momentous day.
A Gate at the Stairs is a novel about a young woman coming of age in the Midwest in the year following 9/11. Tassie Keltjin, our young protagonist, is the daughter of a potato farmer in a small town, and has moved to the university town of Troy to attend college. It’s here that she starts working as a nanny for a glamorous and mysterious family, and finds herself drawn deeply into their world, changing her own life forever.
This is a great American novel about those complex years of early adulthood that we later look back on realize truly shaped who we later became. It is a novel about small moments that seem big at the time and is written with all the warmth and humor and firecracker wit one could hope for. Lorrie Moore is an incredible writer: an obvious love for words and their meaning, she attacks each sentence with equal ferocity. But unlike other writers, Moore’s intellectualism isn’t pretentious or self-flattering, but winning and warm.
A great book of sadness, and hope, and triumph, and loss A Gate at the Stairs is an astonishing novel about race and class in modern America. Just like real life, it is at turns hilarious and heartbreaking, and it will make you laugh and cry, often at the same time.
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay is the third and final installment in The Hunger Games trilogy. Picking up immediately following the events of Catching Fire this book follows Katniss Everdeen as she tries to navigate the twisted world, at which she’s found herself the center. The colonies are in revolt, the Capitol is panicked, and Katniss finds herself being used as a pawn in revolutionary Colony 13.
I can’t say enough about this trilogy of young adult novels. Each volume picks up immediately on the heels of the last, and each one raises the stakes and the excitement. As usual there are many shocking deaths and we lose characters we’ve grown to love over the course of the series, but we also find ourselves locked in the middle of a tense love triangle as Katniss has to decide between the staid and loyal Gale, and her fierce protector in the games Peeta.
This novel is my favorite of the three, but of course don’t start here. Go back and start with The Hunger Games. They are truly some of the best dystopic science fiction novels one can find. Great characters, amazing action and suspense, this series will not disappoint!
Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
Wow. I really don’t even know where to start with this comic book super hero inspired coming of age tale cum love letter to a childhood Brooklyn.
Fortress of Solitude is many things. It is an amazing coming of age story following young Dylan Ebdus growing up on the streets of Brooklyn in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. The main story focuses on Dylan’s moving to Brooklyn and his assimilation into the neighborhood: wallball and stickball are cornerstones of his childhood. His father is an artist intent on creating infinite tiny paintings on top of film stock. His mother, a social hippie, intent on raising her son in a classless, raceless Brooklyn, becomes increasingly vacant until she is gone completely. Dylan is left with his newest neighbor, and his best friend Mingus Rude, the son of a lead singer of a 60’s soul group, The Subtle Distinctions. Dylan and Mingus’ lives intertwine with a homeless street person named Aaron X. Doily, who has been spotted flying from rooftop to rooftop in the dusky evening air. After a close call, the homeless bequeaths his magical ring to Dylan and he and Mingus begin flying themselves, taking on the identity of a superhero Dylan and Mingus begin fighting petty crimes with the newly found powers the ring bestows on its’ owners…when they aren’t tagging trains and walls with graffiti and getting high on marijuana or cocaine.
Crossing as many genres and styles as one book can, this is book is a tour-de-force. It is an amazing literary force to be reckoned with, demanding to be taken seriously with its serious social issues of homelessness, gentrification, race wars, class wars, drug use and addiction and heartfelt examination of what it’s like to be raised white in a largely black community. And then it punches through the walls of the normal and introduces super powers like flying and invisibility, and doesn’t treat them as gimmicks, but further terrain that must be negotiated in the tricky world of being human and nurturing adult relationships.
This is one of the most wildly divergent novels I have ever read. It is literally schizophrenic in its make-up. It is both a tough coming of age novel about growing up amid gang and drug influences in Brooklyn, and a fantasy story about a kid who inherits a ring from a dying superhero that bestows magical powers upon the person who wears the ring.
It is astounding fiction. The writing is unbelievably emotional and nostalgic. I have never been taken back to my own childhood as strongly as I was here. Lethem transported me right back to the days when I would get “yoked” by school-yard bullies, and he kept me completely entranced throughout like I was living Dylan and Mingus’ lives right along with them.
An important and devastating novel, this is incredible heights of fiction writing, teetering ever-so-close to the edge and always threatening to fall from the ledge of believability. Luckily Lethem knows how to walk a tightrope and he manages to pull off a heartbreaking, exciting fantasy without one false note.
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