forty-two: october 2004

10.31.2004 sunday
 The Notebook by Agota Kristof The best thing about this novel is its narration: twin boys, sent to an unidentified countryside to wait out a war, write as an undifferentiated, unnamed "we." Clear-eyed naifs, innocent of morality, they coldly observe and experiment on themselves and their neighbors.
-Diana
 10.29.2004 friday
 All ARound What Empties Out by Linh Dinh Dinh's book has a toilet seat on the cover, and a pungent sense of an eliminative churn--the mind tasting itself in whatever (waste product, cultural inheritance) is present before it at the (vaguely repellent, or sadly absurd) moment --then ruthlessly digesting.
-Erika
 10.28.2004 thursday
 An Underground Education by Richard Zacks In a somewhat smug, bet-you-didn’t-know-that style, Zacks’s book mostly entertains, but sometimes bores the hell out of the reader. I found dreary his account of the electricity scandal, but otherwise this airing of history’s dirty laundry is fascinating. Gossipy schadenfreude awaits you.
- Eve
 10.27.2004 wednesday
 Guy Mannering by Walter Scott Astrologers and gypsies, treacherous thugs and good-hearted country folk, swooning women and tongue-tied priests; it would be easy to dismiss Scott's second novel as pastiche if not for the fact that it remains quintessentially rip-roaring entertainment. Love is rewarded and nobility restored.
-Timothy
 10.26.2004 tuesday
 The Burke Novels (Flood, Strega, Blue Belle, Hard Candy, Blossom, Sacrifice, Down in the Zero, Footsteps of the Hawk, False Allegations, Safe House, Choice of Evil, Dead and Gone, Pain Management, Only Child, Down Here) by Andrew Vachss A couple of my favorite kinds of writing: agitprop and black comedy. Vachss writes only from love and from hate. With his only eye he doesn’t see the depth of things, but the edges are always sharp. Blue Belle is my favorite.
-Brian
 10.24.2004 sunday
 Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome by Alexander Kluge Kluge's only sci-fi novel seems like an alternate history: what if Nazis had won? But the book isn't an "if this, then that" scheme. It's an experiment in scale, illustrating a motto for our own times: "This war, as such, never ended."
-Diana
 10.23.2004 saturday
 One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana by C.D. Wright and Deborah Luster Some collaborators. Wright’s text is meditation, conversation, all voices including hers from a sounding board both hard and kind, “self”-aware. Luster’s photos similarly bounce, reflection, what is evident, human, comes back. He sends his photo to his girlfriend who is also jailed.
-Jen
 10.22.2004 friday
 Burnt House to Paw Paw: Appalachian Notes by Merrill Gilfillan Slowly, Gilfillan enters the warp and weft of the place, its vertical topography and the laid-down line of its melancholy time. He writes gently, like a man with his nose to the wind, smelling for sassafras, hunting Appalachia's peculiar bituminous sheen.
-Erika
 10.21.2004 thursday
 Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut An uneven story collection with his trademark touching, personal, absurdist preface. I marked my favorites in pen in the index: a man pretends poverty for love of piano jazz; actors can live only through their characters; Holocaust survivors rejoice over their firstborn.
-Eve
 10.20.2004 wednesday
 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing Brilliantly summarizing the century's first half, from Joyce to Stalin, Lessing's mammoth novel is as forthright and disquieting on everything from madness to orgasm as it was fifty years ago. Seen as a feminist treatise, but also a reclamation of the individual.
-Timothy
 10.19.2004 tuesday
 Victory by Joseph Conrad Anytime Joe writes about a woman, things will get silly. As soon as the heroine announces that people call her either Alma or Magdalen, though, it’s clear the we’ve left planet earth to roam through JC’s fantasy life. Not near his best.
-Brian
 10.18.2004 monday
 The Inland Ice and other stories by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne After a year or so the goat stopped coming. Interspersed with women who advance or are advanced upon, same old exposure but well told, still sharp when inhaled. You keep waiting for the goat to return and what will it get you.
-Jen
 10.17.2004 sunday
 Pig City Model Farm by Rob Kovitz More ambitious than Kovitz’s similarly constructed photo-montage "Room Behavior” (see previous review). If you bring together farms, Fourier, concentration camps, and architecture in one book, you must comment. Kovitz's implied conclusion: fascism is the logical end of every revolutionary desire. Ho hum.
-Diana
 10.16.2004 saturday
 The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson With his signature wit, Bryson leads the reader on a tour of English in all its variety, changeability, and irregularity. I loved the chapters on cursing and word games. The book could use updating, to reflect the computer world’s influence on English.
-Becky
 10.15.2004 friday
 Aureole by Carole Maso This is the story that a story loses in the hip and heft of another's breathing. It breaks, sighs, reshapes itself: erotically and, like the water that suffuses it, in pulses and threads. Fiction, in refraction, smells and sidles forward like poetry.
-Erika
 10.14.2004 thursday
 The Big Book of Hell by Matt Groening A best-of compilation from the youth of Groening’s nine-panel comic strip,"Life in Hell." Not merely sight gags and sex jokes, the minutiae of life’s annoyances and unfairnesses play out in an existential shrug. Features bucktoothed rabbits and gay, short, fez-wearing men.
-Eve
 10.13.2004 wednesday
 Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer by Edwin Muir A short and rather beautiful argument: there can be no great poetry written in a given language if there is not great prose written in it also. Only when we think and feel in the same tongue can we fully express ourselves.
-Timothy
 10.12.2004 tuesday
 Birth of a Nation by Aaron Mcgruder, Reginald Hudlin, and Kyle Baker Following a contested election and some Florida-style vote suppression, East St. Louis secedes from the Union and proclaims itself Blackland. Sweet and satisfying, albeit a little too Hollywood. The best part is the national anthem (sung to the tune of Good Times).
-Brian
 10.11.2004 monday
 William Faulkner: The Man and the Artist by Stephen B. Oates What is more disheartening: the details of your favorite fiction writer’s struggles with adultery, alcoholism, and depression or the godawfully unimaginative prose by which those details emerge? An uninspired storyteller tries to explain a truly enigmatic, difficult individual and inevitably falls short.
-Jen
 10.10.2004 sunday
 Michael by Elfriede Jelinek Two unloved salesgirl-apprentices. The narrative wanders into 60’s American TV as rebroadcast in 80’s Austria with a Guignol twist: sadistic scenes between moppets Buffy and Jody and kindly butler Mr. French. Flipper turns out to be a crueler dolphin than you thought.
-Diana
 10.9.2004 saturday
 Cork Boat by John Pollack John Pollack, a thirtysomething former Clinton speechwriter, built a seaworthy boat with165,321 wine corks, 15,000 rubber bands, fishnetting, and the support of hundreds of hands-on volunteers and thousands of nameless cheerleaders. A inspirational tale of individual determination, supportive community, and sheer serendipity.
-Becky
 10.8.2004 friday
 The Midnight by Susan Howe As if history were contained and crying within each grain of the present, Howe skips from her Irish mother’s immigration to recent trips to the library at Harvard, then to Olmsted, siting parks: books themselves, the central trope. Compressed lines; puzzlepiece prose.
-Erika
 10.7.2004 thursday
 A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole Considered by many to be a personification of New Orleans in the late 1960s, this novel paints a cast of barely likeable characters in beautifully hilarious, over-the-top detail. Our protagonist, an elitist medieval scholar, a grotesque lummox, is a rare, filthy gem.
-Eve
 10.6.2004 wednesday
 Chess Openings: Traps & Zaps by Bruce Pandolfini Most chess books suck for mere woodpushers like me. I don’t need to understand Grandmaster play, because the tyros I take on are as bad as myself. This book analyzes stupid moves made by players like the guys down at the bookstore.
-Brian
Ulysses by James Joyce Famously set in a single day, but quite difficult to read in one. Takes 600 pages to get going, but once it does... wowie! What's shocking is that all the storied snarls of prose give way to something quite funny and sweet.
-Timothy
 10.5.2004 tuesday
 Posterity : Letters of Great Americans to Their Children edited by Dorie McCullough Lawson From inspiring (N.C. Wyeth) to incendiary (Jack London), these letters give a glimpse into the home lives, parenting skills, and values of such notables as Woody Guthrie, Mary Todd Lincoln, Laura Ingalls Wilder and John J. Pershing. Thought-provoking reading for anyone’s child.
-Becky
 10.4.2004 monday
 Goest by Cole Swensen Moves as landscape painter and also as historian, sketching the scene. Swensen’s sense of “white” space—on the page and within the poem—is nervy and incandescent. These poems move as the body will move in a scenery made out of language.
-Jen
 10.3.2004 sunday
 The Filth by Grant Morrison, Chris Weston, Gary Erskine, et al. 1. Us vs. Them; 2. Perfect Victim; 3. Structures & Ultrastructures; 4. Shit Happens; 5. Pornomancer; 6. The World of Anders Klimakks; 7. Zero Democracy; 8. Fuck Police; 9. Inside The Hand; 10. Man Made God; 11. A Very English Nervous Breakdown; 12. Schizotype; 13. Them vs. Us Sick-making, but horribly funny. Number 5 has the best title. Number 3 is meta-fictional genius: “Ultrahumanitarian” smashes into the page’s fourth wall, utterly bewildering his colleagues; in another dimension, lonely superhero named “Secret Original” watches endless porn versions of his former life.
-Diana
 10.2.2004 saturday
 Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy A lyrical, introspective, yet detached recounting of Grealy’s childhood battle with cancer and the years of reconstructive surgery that followed. I get the feeling there's more to this story, and that Grealy might have told it in subsequent books, had she lived.
-Becky
 10.1.2004 friday
 The Niobe Poems by Kate Daniels Niobe’s children were murdered by the gods; then her husband killed himself and she turned to stone. That’s the myth. Not re-tellings so much as explorations, these poems visit the event from various vantage points, before, after, and as it takes place.
-Stevie




back to forty-two