Already Dead, Denis Johnson

Already Dead: A California Gothic, by Denis Johnson, is among the stranger books I've read in a while, and for followers of this blog, you know that takes a bit of doing. It is a loose, freewheeling drug-trip (quite intentionally) of a novel, maybe more delightful to reluctant Californians like me than to True Believers in the Golden State. The characters ramble through a semi-mythical Northern CA filled with redwoods and pot groves and hippies and witches and a giant and the deeply, criminally insane. Nobody in the book is remotely likable, but the poetic style of the prose of the book becomes almost a character, unto itself. It will be off-putting to many readers, I think, but I found it lovely for long stretches. A paragraph should suffice to tell you if you want in or not:

"Past the boardwalk onto the street, the gauntlet of shops and beachside people, the quantum dregs, the never-ending pavement in their sighs, and always that music, dark rock. And you kept going, beyond the seaside part of town. Homes of stucco in the ashy twilight, the street no longer dabbed with sand. Past the edges, way way past, out into the big place east of town, they call it America."

Give it a second read. Lovely.

The shifting narrators, the loosely stitched plot, and the poetry of the text make the ostensible noir crime drama seem like an existential investigation, which surely is the intent. The hard-boiled detective genre washes ashore in this romantic 'California Gothic' tale, leaving me, at any rate, delighted.

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

You might be wondering what such a title is doing on my list, following such books as Mutants, Pigtopia, and The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break. However, you would only be wondering if you were unaware of Quirk Books new series of what might be considered fan fiction, of a sort, with adaptations of classic English novels into, eh-hem, rather new forms.

I read the first of these offerings, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a few months ago, to great delight. I read Sense and Sensibility as a warm-up for the second in the series, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

That said, I found the original, monster-free though it is, to be quite good. Not quite as strong as Pride and Prejudice, but enjoyable front to back. It concerns, as is the formula for Austen, a family of lovely young women, eager to find husbands. They fall first for the flashy man-about-town types, only to be heartbroken by them, and then to come eventually to see the attractions of the quieter, more sensible and stable types.

The family intricacies, here were a bit difficult to keep track of (*Who* is Lucy, again?), but such problems do not mar an enjoyment of Austen's sharp, satirical wit. Here, it is again the E. sister (Elizabeth in P&P, Elinor in S&S) who is the smart, sensible one, but even she is often skewered by Austen's constant jibes. I am left to wonder at her original audience's reception. Surely, they were the very sort of people that she routinely attacks. Did they, as her characters surely would, merely look across the ballroom at other members of their set, and assume that Austen was mocking those types, unaware that they themselves were, likewise, targets?

Tune in again for a review of S&S&S-M, when I've had the chance to read it...

Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body

Over the summer, I was staying with some friends at their flat in London -- a lovely couple I have known for years. He also works on medieval monsters, and has just finished his Ph.D. working on the subject. His bookshelf was therefore of great interest to me. They had to go to work the morning I left, so I was to let myself out. I did so, "borrowing" their copy of Armand Marie Leroi's Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body (as well as their Oystercard for the London tube... Both will be returned, I swear...).

And I am so glad I did! First off, the Oystercard saved me several pounds on the ride to Heathrow. More importantly, though, the book is fascinating! It moves back and forth between the history of medicine -- how various genetic issues were viewed in the past -- and contemporary genetic science. Some of the denizens of the text are familiar to folks (like me) interested in these matters, Pygmies and "thyroid giants," for example. But many were completely new and some quite shocking. Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, for example, causes bone to grow in response to injuries, rather than muscle and skin, so that the body slowly is overtaken by a second, ossified skeleton.

The volume is well-illustrated, and written in a very accessible manner. Even this humble art historian was able to follow most of the scientific explanations. Really, I learned a great deal about human genetics and physiology from the book.

Leroi is rarely sensationalistic, and generally quite sympathetic to the issues he covers, rightly attempting, when possible, to see these genetic "abnormalities" not as diseases (What, exactly, is "diseased" with being a certain height? Having an uncommon shape? Being between the two poles of gender?) but as part of the great, sweeping variety that composes the human species throughout the globe. This one is highly recommended, though do be forewarned: Some of the content is rather haunting, and will stay with you for days.

Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler

I adore Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, a wistful meditation on the meaning of place and identity that I have now read several times. This inspired me to read a few of his other works. If on a winter's night a traveler is a similarly cerebral novel, if I can fairly call it a novel, at all. It is a series of nested narratives, with each chapter breaking off mid-stride and leaving the reader frustrated, just at the point of interest. As the work progresses, though, the larger narrative emerges. The Reader (you, holding the book) becomes the protagonist, and his (my, your) frustration becomes central to the flow of the plot.

Just as Invisible Cities was about a larger concept than its literal subject (place, itself, and memory), so too, If on a winter's night comes to be about the very process of reading and writing, about what it means to construct a narrative out of an infinite number of possible narratives, and about authorship. The notion of "the author" is one that has been much discussed in critical literary theory (and famously killed off by Roland Barthes in his The Death of the Author), but Calvino approaches the subject obliquely. He constructs his image of The Author slowly, over the course of the fragmentary chapters (signaled by the fragmentary title), so that the reader considers the subject before even realizing that he has.

I do find one irony, here, which is that every sentence bears the clear authorial presence of Calvino, a writer with a very distinct voice. If fakes and forgeries and "real" works of fiction cannot (and need not) be distinguished, why can I never loose sight of Calvino, himself? He is the only real thread tying the work together.

I almost gave up on this book twice, but in the end, have come to think it something brilliant. Give it a shot, and persevere through to "the end."

Pigtopia

Not all reads can be what you hope. Pigtopia, by Kitty Fitzgerald, is the story of a macrocephalic man who, due to the abuses heaped on him by his mother, thinks that he is a pig-man. Sounds like a great setup (to me, anyway), and it begins well enough, with his strange, subterranean Pig Palace, where he lives with a "tribe" of pigs bearing names redolent of medieval gods, with the great sow Freya as their chief.

Clearly, Fitzgerald is heavily influenced by Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, with two narrators telling the same story, but separated by a gulf of understanding. As with Faulker, one narrator (the "hogboy" Jack Plum) is fairly inarticulate, but here, he not unintelligent, just deeply stunted by his limited contact with the outside world; other narrator (Holly Lock, a lonely girl who lives down the road) is likewise intelligent, but while worldly in so far as a young teen can be, she is limited by the perspective of her years. Both, though, make tragically bad choices as a result of their limited knowledge of the world, and the story becomes more gruesome than compelling at points. As an exercise in point-of-view for a writing course, it succeeds marvelously. As a novel, though, it comes up quite short.

The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

I have just finished The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill, a strange novel that I found absolutely compelling. The 5000 year old Minotaur, the eternal bull-headed man of Greek myth, is alive and well, working as a chef in a southern town. People react to him as if he were an unusual, but not extraordinary person, and in many ways, this suits the context: everyone he meets is a bit fractured, broken, bifurcated in some way. He is merely more literal about this, with his division visible for all to see. His coworkers internal schisms are under the surface.

While obviously surreal in its basic premise, once this is accepted, Sherrill's terse prose convey a clarity that creates a strong sense of realism.

The novel certainly is not for everyone, but I was riveted. It is a story of profound loneliness and isolation. If you thought that monsters were somehow different from us, this should break down the illusion. If you want something fairly far out of the norm, give it a shot.

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

I have just finished Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, the first novel I have read that has an official website, appropriate to a work set in a dystopic near future.

The book was near enough to our world, with genetic modification of plants and animals, corporations running the show, and marketing taking over as the main form of literature, for the book to be more chilling than humorous. Even bits of satire that were probably intended to be funny are often disturbing and haunting.

I'd highly recommend this one, though not a cheerful read.