Category: book reviews / recommendations
I knew that The Confessions of Max Tivoli was one of my favorite books of last year when I started to give copies of it away to friends. At a cover price of $23, it was getting to be an expensive habit. But now that it’s out in paperback, I may be able to indulge in compulsive gifting once again.
The novel tells the story of Max Tivoli, born with the physical attributes of an old man–wrinkled skin, bald head, and liver spots. As he ages, he grows more youthful in appearance, so that, at the age of fourteen, he appears to be a man in his fifties; in his thirties, his physical and inner age coincide, however briefly; and then, in his fifties, he looks like a teenager, with pimples and a changing voice.
Max’s condition forces him into a lonely, difficult existence, made bearable only by the friendship of his tutor’s son, Hughie, and by the love he feels for young Alice, whom he meets as a teenager. But Max’s appearance makes it impossible for him to pursue Alice, to whom he appears as a drooling Humbert. Still, when their paths cross again, years later, Max looks closer to his real age, and now he can dare to have hope that Alice might notice him. “We are each the love of someone’s life,” he says early on in his journal, and this truth is given its full share of exploration in the novel.
The Confessions of Max Tivoli is a book like no other–a mix of sci-fi, love story, and classic tragedy, but it’s done so brilliantly that I simply couldn’t put it down. And it has such beautiful prose that I found myself re-reading sentences and underlining entire paragraphs. I recommend it unreservedly.
If you read the literary news even casually, you’ve no doubt heard the oft-repeated details surrounding the publication of Sightseeing, Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s debut collection: Thai-American writer, 25 years old, six-figure book deal. Unfailingly repeated in every review, they tend to work as signifiers in themselves, overshadowing what matters most: the work.
The stories in Sightseeing, all told in first-person, all set in Thailand, are narrated (mostly) by young men who journey from innocence to realization in convincingly subtle ways. “At the Cafe Lovely” tells the tale of a young boy whose older brother, Anek, takes him to see a prostitute at the tender age of 11. The boy’s admiration, his desire to emulate, lead him to follow in Anek’s footsteps, even when they lead to the abandonment of their mother. In the very touching “Draft Day,” a young man and his best friend, each from disparate social classes, spend the day together, waiting to hear the results of a rigged lottery that will decide whether they are to serve in the army or can go free. The narrator’s guilt over the bribe his parents paid to get him off, and his shame at knowing that his best friend won’t get lucky is nearly palpable.
I found it refreshing that Lapcharoensap navigates what might seem to others as exotic, but doesn’t give in to the titillating detail; his work is vivid without being gratuitously colorful. At times, though, his stylistic choices seem completely odd. The dialogue between characters is rife with American slang, even if one allows for the fact that the text is a rendering in English. And his efforts at observing foreigners (“farangs”) are too one-note, too superficial to have the effect that they were probably intended to have. But when Lapcharoensap allows himself to take the time to invest in his characters, the efforts can result in stunningly beautiful work, like the novella “Cockfighter,” in which a young girl watches as her father, a once proud fighter with the best roosters in town, starts to lose everything to his gambling habit.
If you do not believe that George W. Bush stole the 2000 election; that the Iraq war was a monumental mistake; that gay people are second-class citizens in this country; that the current administation is waging a war against the poor; that serious voter intimidation and outright fraud occurred yet again in 2004; stop reading. This book is not for you.
What We Do Now is clear about its audience: The half of the country who thinks that an election should be decided by voters, not by the judicial system or partisan secretaries of state; that we should not attack people unless we are attacked; that the rich should pay their fair share of taxes; and that the Democrats fucked up again in 2004. It’s a book for those who feel a despair of nearly unspeakable proportions, even when they hide behind brave faces.
There are essays, thoughts, recriminations, recommendations, and suggestions by Lewis Lapham, Percival Everett, Steve Almond, Maud Newton, Greg Palast, Howard Dean, George Saunders and many others. I’ve been dragging my copy to the gym, the coffee shop, the office, for the last few days, as an antidote to the televised coronation of Bush. You might like to do the same.
The novel opens when Ka, a Turkish poet living in exile in Germany, returns to Istanbul for his mother’s funeral. While there, he is hired by a newspaper to write a piece about a string of mysterious suicides in the remote city of Kars. In a resurgence of religious devotion, schoolgirls in Kars have been wearing headscarves, in defiance of laws drafted under Ataturk. Rather than give up the scarves to attend school, the girls have been killing themselves.
Ka’s real reason for accepting the assignment, however, is the recently divorced Ipek, an old flame from his college days, who’s moved to the city with her father and sister, where they manage the Snow Palace Hotel. After Ka’s arrival, a snow storm seals the city from the rest of the world for three days. Still, Ka gets to work on his assignment; he visits the bereaved families, asks questions, and runs into the usual troubles with the police.
Soon, though, Ka is distracted from his interviews by a cast of characters, each bent on giving their two cents: Ipek’s sister Kadife, who’s considered the leader of the covered girls; Blue, a terrifying yet seductive religious fundamentalist; Serdar Bey, a journalist who writes news before they happen; Funda Eser and Sunay Zaim, a couple of thespians who’ve been staging Jacobin plays for years; Necip, a religious teenager who’s working on an ‘Islamic sci-fi novel;’ a few communists, a couple of Army officers, and even a character named Orhan, who appears in the first couple of pages of the novel to tell us he’s narrating and reappears again at the end.
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According to a recent Gallup poll, a staggering 42% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Given the 9/11 Commission’s findings to the contrary, it would be fair to say that these 42% of Americans are, well, misinformed. And who can be blamed for it but the media? Newspapers, magazines, and especially TV media seemed so eager to play nice with the administration that they blindly reported President Bush and Vice-President Cheney’s claims that Saddam had links with Al-Qaeda.
In this climate, a book like Misstating the State of The Union becomes a must read. Prepared by the Media Matters Network, it provides a catalog of all the distortions, obfuscations, omissions, or outright lies told by right-wing commentators like Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, or (my personal favorite) Bill O’Reilly. Among the false claims propounded on fair and balanced news: that Bush inherited a recession (it began after he took office); that he is fiscally conservative (under his leadership, the U.S. went from a $200B surplus to a $400B deficit in just 4 years); that the war in Iraq was necessary (the country did not have weapons of mass destruction); that Bush cares about education (he under-funded his own No Child Left Behind act); or that he is tough on crime (the number of violent crimes has risen under him.) As we head into what is sure to be a contested election, voters would do well to read up on the real record of George W. Bush, not the one fabricated in Karl Rove’s office and repeated on Rupert Murdoch’s stations.
To be fair, though, Misstating the State of The Union is also a book with an agenda. Besides exposing lies or fabrications, it also wants to prove that things were better under President Clinton. I should say en passant that I was not a huge fan of Clinton (and, boy, did my Republican friends love me then!) and while I agree that, by nearly every possible measure, America was better off four years ago, I’m not convinced that it’s all attributable to Clinton (as opposed to other factors that worked in his favor.) Still, at least he had people laughing at us, an immeasurably better reaction than hating us.
In going through Dennis Loy Johnson’s The Big Chill, an eyewitness account of George W. Bush’s inauguration day in January 2001, it is hard to believe that one is reading about the president of the world’s biggest superpower rather than about the potentate of a banana republic, who, fearful of the masses, must be protected by an army of police officers and members of the secret service just so he can go from one building to the next on his inauguration day.
Johnson had traveled to the presidential inauguration with the intent of joining a demonstration organized by the National Organization of Women and a nonprofit group called Voter Rights. But what he witnessed was far larger than anything he’d been prepared for. The protesters had turned up en masse, despite the freezing rain, the checkpoints that had been put in place, the frisking by police, the stiff rules about signage, and a host of other disincentives that could have compelled them to stay at home.
In meticulous detail, Johnson describes the mounting protests, the chants (Hail to the Thief!), the signs (my favorite was “Clarence Thomas: The Only Black Vote That Was Counted”), and the skirmishes with police. He dispels the notion that the protesters were a “fringe element” composed of young kids, anarchists or WTO sympathizers. Instead, he says, his fellow protesters were both young and old, some angry with the election itself and some objecting to what the man who stole it stood for.
This could have made for fantastic news coverage were it not for the fact that the press hurried by in two trucks, with their video cameras and telephoto lenses lowered. They went past the crowd and waited inside the heavily guarded area around the White House. Soon after, and in a break with a twenty year old tradition, George W. Bush rushed by in his limo down Pennsylvania Avenue to the compound of the White House, where the invitation-only crowd was composed of generous donors to his campaign.
After the protest, Johnson went home to find that the NY Times had achieved the impossible: on its front page, it had a picture of a smiling President and First Lady, waving at the crowd during the inauguration parade. How could that be? Johnson provides a survey of the rest of the press, which, with the exception of the Post and NPR, largely followed the Times’ lead. The failure of the press to play the role it should have in a democracy is the biggest question in this book and one that continues to be raised long after that inauguration day. But, once people started communicating their thoughts by email and putting them up on the Internet, (that last bastion of free speech) news of what really happened that day came out. Johnson provides the testimonials of people who managed to get inside the compound (since they weren’t allowed to carry signs, they had written their messages on their arms and torsoes and waited for an opportune moment to strip.)
If, like many others, you stared in shock at the footage of the inaugural day protests during Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, you would do well to read this first-person account of what really happened. The Big Chill is an important document, made all the more relevant by the upcoming election.