Daniel P. Mannix, The Wolves of Paris

Daniel P. Mannix's The Wolves of Paris was recommended by a friend, or I'd surely never have picked up a copy (I got a 1978 hardback first edition for $2 on Amazon). Based on a kernel of historical information, The Wolves of Paris tells the story of a half-wolf, half-alaunt known as Cortaud (Cut-Tail) who, in the bitter winter of 1439 laid siege to the city of Paris. People within began to starve to death rather than face him and his pack.

The novel is highly anthropomorphizing, with Mannix granting the animal protagonists the full range of human emotions. The wolves love, hate, lust, fear, plot, harbor resentments and plot revenge. The writing style used to convey these emotions is utterly gaudy, matched by the narrations (and there are a great many of these) of extreme violence. The wolves' natural prey of deer and the like have been depleted and mismanaged, and so in desperation they to eating corpses left from the constant state of war that plagued France throughout the fifteenth century. From this, it is only a small step to hunting the living. Mannix gives us scenes in which men, women and children are torn limb from limb, and eaten before they have quite finished dying.

Pitted against a remarkable (quite improbable) series of foes, including a leopard and an eagle, before it is all over, Cortaud shows time and again his fierce, fearless nature. The narration is fairly informative -- filled with medieval hunting terminology and tactics, as well as information about wolves -- but is also absurd, over the top, often laughable and tacky.

And yet, I kept reading. Straight through. Enjoyable, lively, bloody, silly fun. It is something of a folly of a book, well worth the $2 I spent on it.

Embers -- Sándor Márai

I have just closed the covers of Sándor Márai's Embers, translated from Hungarian by Carol Brown Janeway. The novel was originally written in 1942 and so the setting was at the time it was written current, though now it reads as a period piece. Márai was obscure, unknown, until the recent burst of interest in his writing, and this is the first of a planned run of new translations.

The entire plot unfolds in a day and a night, though riddled with reminiscences. Two friends, separated for 41 years, reunite to settle the unfinished business that led to their estrangement. The embers of the title have burned steadily, and provide enough heat to bring about one last fire. When Konrad returns to the General's decaying castle, it is clear both have remained alive through war and disease in order to have this greatly deferred conversation.

After the initial set-up of 75 pages, the remaining 12o or so of this short novel recount the conversation between the friends -- boyhood companions, regimental fellows. But for a few sentences, though, the conversation is a cold monologue, with each image, each phrase, overly considered through the 41 years of waiting. The guest is still and nearly silent. Great questions build, gaining force page after page.

If the mysterious cause of their feud is not a great surprise, if many questions go unanswered, this is well beside the point, by the end. The deep wounds have little to do with the particulars of this or that betrayal. They cut not because of their effects but because of their source.

Howard Norman, The Museum Guard

Howard Norman's The Museum Guard is a quiet novel narrated by its quietest character. DeFoe Russet is one of two museum guards at a small art museum in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The other guard is his uncle, who is his opposite in most ways. Where DeFoe is taciturn, Edward is overly talkative. Where DeFoe is neat and buttoned down, Edward is slovenly and disheveled. And most problematically for him, where DeFoe is fawning and subservient toward his girlfriend (who is borderline emotionally abusive to him), Edward is a carefree ladies' man.

The plot, centered around a Dutch painting by the fictional Joop Heijman titled Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam, unfolds against the backdrop of Hilter's first moves toward expansion. The subject of the painting bears a certain resemblance to DeFoe's girlfriend Imogene who, as she becomes aware of this, begins to loose herself into a strange fantasy life as Heijman's wife, adopting the costume worn by the figure in the painting (who does turn out to be Heijman's wife, killed by the Nazis in some of their first advances) and affecting a transparently false Dutch accent.

The sparse writing of The Museum Guard, which bears few stylistic flourishes, conveys the sense of isolation experienced by DeFoe (orphaned as a young boy by a freak accident), the cold Canadian winter, and the emotional chill cast by the posturing of Hitler and the murmurs of fear passed through the Jewish community from Europe to North America. It is worth noting that none of the central characters here are Jews, but they are increasingly pulled toward the conflict as a Gentile in Canada comes to believe herself to be the Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam.

Bernard Malamud, The Assistant

Toward the end of the slim, mournful novel The Assistant, Helen Bober concludes:

"Only growing in value as a person could she make [her father's] life meaningful, in the sense that she was of him. She must, she thought, in some way eventually earn her degree. It would take years--but was the only way."

This claustrophobic novel won a Pulitzer Prize for Bernard Malamud, probably now best known now for his first, The Natural, and for its movie adaptation. Unlike The Natural, The Assistant might well have been a stage play, with its confined set and small cast of characters. Here, there are no glamorous professions -- a poor Jewish grocer rather than a ballplayer -- and no envious settings -- the Brooklyn store is at several points in the text referred to as a prison and a tomb. The reader feels with every sparse turn of phrase in this economical text the increasing sense of entrapment and futility. Morris Bober is a good, decent man, an honest man (yes, of course, in a dishonest world), but his honesty evokes as much pity as admiration. He is cheated by business partners, by customers and employees alike. His wife frets endlessly, and his daughter cannot afford a college education. What good, then, is his honesty?

If there is an answer provided in a novel neither cynical nor sentimental, it is in the effect it has on Frank Alpine, the "Italianyer" as the Yiddish speaking Jews of the neighborhood call him. Much of the novel conveys his inner struggle, more beset by failings than successes, more filled with self-loathing than self-pity, though enough of the latter appears to maintain realism.

There are no excess turns of phrase, here, no lyrical flourishes. It came as no surprise to find in a bit of research that Malamud was close with Philip Roth (praised here for his deceptively simple prose). But for its simplicity of style, it carries great weight. We feel the oppression of the lives of the Bobers. And those of us fortunate enough to live better lives should read this account not of desperate poverty and misery, but merely of the crushing power of the ordinary cares of the working poor. And for my students, if you are fortunate enough to be able without great toil to afford your tuition, read this book with an eye toward Helen. Much of her life occurs off the page, between scenes, but we sense the manner in which it pulls her toward her parents grave, a bit more each day.

Philip Roth, The Human Stain

Philip Roth is on any serious shortlist for the greatest living American novelist. I have read a few of his books, and each has been profoundly powerful. American Pastoral, The Plot Against America, even to a lesser degree the short Indignation. And now The Human Stain. In each case, I have begun thinking that I am reading a more or less ordinary novel, plainly written. This feeling of slight disappointment in this "great novelist" persists for about half or even two-thirds of the novel.

And then, everything changes. It is as if the wool is pulled from before my eyes. I gasp aloud at sudden revelations that, in retrospect, change the valence of everything that has come before. This experience in The Human Stain caught me, yet again, completely off guard. I thought that I had already grasped the twists and shifts, but again, Roth had me in the palm of his hand.

The story here focuses on a college professor (so I am, of course, sympathetic from the outset). He is put under intense investigation, culminating in his storming out shortly before his retirement, for a supposedly racist remark. The accusation is, we realize, absurd, trumped up, the result of simmering resentments throughout campus. Coleman Silk has been (like many Roth characters), an outspoken and successful Jew who is resented by society. Here, though, race becomes more broadly considered, triangulating between Silk, his white Christian colleagues, and the African-American students who are the supposed target of his remark.

If you think you have a handle on such issues, pick this book up and reconsider. If you don't, pick this book up and consider. This is an excellent choice for college students, in particular, as the setting and concerns should hit home perhaps more than some of Roth's other books. More students are likely to identify with college professors and students than, say, with the glove factory owner in American Pastoral. Roth is the only novelist whose work has caused me to rethink my understandings of my country, my ethnicity, and my personal identity. And he has done so more than once. If this is the book that serves for a reader as an entry point into Roth's work, all the better.

The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind

I would certainly not have picked up William Kamkwamba's stirring The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, were it not Chico State's Book in Common for the year. Reading the book, though, has proved compelling, moving and, more importantly, motivating.

Kamkwamba grew up in a village in Malawi, a small, landlocked country in West Africa. Living in a hut with a thatched roof and no electricity, Kamkwamba lived through famine -- described without a trace of self-pity and therefore all the more moving. An inveterate tinkerer with a shocking degree of mechanical aptitude, he only attended school most sporadically, as his family could not afford the tuition. Consequently, he sweated on his family's farm in the vain hope of coaxing sustenance from the dry ground, while kids his age in our country are going to school, playing video games and watching TV. And eating all they need and more.

But Kamkwamba was not satisfied with the prospect of living out his father's life, and his grandfather's and on and on. Unable to learn in school, he visited a "library" donated by a charity -- just three shelves of books, lined up in no particular order. There, he found a book called "Using Energy" and, with two years of formal education, read this physics textbook, understood it, and from there -- yes, really -- built a functioning windmill.

This should not be dismissed as the miracle story of a young genius. More impressive than his clear and palpable intelligence is his diligence and drive. Our students could learn a lot from Mr. Kamkwamba. Yes, building a windmill is impressive. Building it with absolutely no money is more so. Building it with no tools, yet more so. He had to make his own screwdrivers and drills, even. Everything was done with scrap, torn, prized, and beaten out of rusting hulks in a nearby scrapyard. The tossed-away lines about spending eight hours banging on an old transmission to get a rivet were breathtaking.

Kamkwamba caries on to more and more innovative and impressive feats, but describing them here would be like revealing the end of a novel. Read it and see.

One more thing: Some friends and I have recently formed a non-profit to help children struggling through similar circumstances. We are Feeding Nations Through Education, and in short, this is how it works: We buy a family a pair of bulls and a plow. This lets them grow enough food to sell a surplus. This lets them send their kids to school. And the education of the children of Africa is the only way to end the cycles of poverty and starvation we have all witnessed from afar throughout our lives. So click here, and donate to the cause!

Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman

I begin each release from Neil Gaiman with great optimism. The premises are invariably inventive (in American Gods, for example, all the polytheistic gods are extant, coexisting, and fighting for the attention of the modern world). However, the results never live up to the promise, it seems.

Neverwehere is set in London Below, a sort of extended pun on the London Underground, and many of the settings and characters are literalizations of the fantastic names that apparently caught Gaiman's attention, even when we was a child. Knightsbridge. Blackfriars. Barons Court. Angel. Burnt Oak. Elephant & Castle. To say nothing of Cockfosters.

Here, Angel is the home of an angel. Earls Court is the home of an aging earl. But really, once we are in on the conceit, it is rather unimaginative from there. Blackfriars is home not to the black robe wearing Dominican friars, but to "Black" friars, as in friars of African descent.

The imagery is awash with steampunk and goth flair that make it at once quite easy to visualize the characters but also somewhat dull to do so. Perhaps in part (though only in part) because of its derivative and currently fashionable visuals, the novel feels rather like the film-from-the-bestselling-novel, rather than the more rich source material it ought be. Put Johnny Depp in the role of erstwhile (but hapless) hero Richard and let Tim Burton direct, and you have the film version, made to order.

The only real question that lingered with me as I read was, "Will I get suckered in yet again, and buy his next novel, too?"

Lilian Faschinger's Magdalene the Sinner (translated in the version I read by Shaun Whiteside, to the left above; also available in a translation by Edna McCown, to the right) is a rather disturbed novel, one about a serial killer which handles that subject as if no more important than any of the other elements that fill this short text. The murders take no precedent over the make and model of her motorcycle or the varieties of Austrian pastries she longs for. The narrator is a priest, kidnapped by Magdalene, so we ought by all rights get a more sane narration from him than we have in her long monologues, and yet my impression is that he is equally mad or, perhaps, that Faschinger is the one who is insane. This effect was heightened in the copy I read -- found in a lending library in a coffee shop in Cambridge -- that was billed as "AN UNCORRECTED TYPESCRIPT FOR ADVANCED READING PURPOSES ONLY." The back cover promises that the final release will be accompanied by "high-profile author interviews" and "extensive national review coverage," and yet, though the book appeared in Whiteside's translation in 1996, a search on Amazon suggests that it was only McCown's translation that was published, at least in the US (HarperCollins). Due to the lack of copy editing in my advanced copy, the numerous errors made the book seem as if the late-night ramblings of a madwoman.

I didn't quite like it, nor would I call it a "good novel," and yet I was utterly compelled throughout, unable to put it down, and I'd strongly recommend it. This makes me wonder why I would say I didn't like it and it wasn't good. Its great strangeness, particularly its peculiar diction (possibly in part the result of the translation), carried me through the highly problematic narrative of abuse, murder (sometimes fairly justifiable and sometimes not), eroticism and, briefly and, again, offhandedly (and happily surprising me) monstrosity of the most literal sort (though perhaps this is, again, pure madness). I don't know that I'd buy a copy, but then, if you happen to come across one in a cafe, swipe it without hesitation. Strap on your helmet, jump into the sidecare of Magdalene's Puch 800, and hold on.

Geek Love

I have read a number of strange books over the years but I don't know that I've ever found the equal of Katherine Dunn's Geek Love: A Novel. This is the tale of the Binewski family, a traveling troop of carnival freaks. The siblings -- an albino, hunchbacked dwarf, a pair of conjoined twins, the flippered Aqua-Boy and the paranormally gifted young Chick -- are intentionally created by their parents through a series of chemical experiments conducted during Lil's pregnancies. The more outlandish the bodies of their children, the happier they are with the (profitable) results.

The novel is, especially at the start, scintillating, replete with details that shocked, repulsed, and compelled me. I can think of few works of art or literature more fully embodying Julia Krisetva's notion of abjection, which she characterizes at "the fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from" phenomena in the world.

But really, the proprietors of freak shows knew about abjection long before Kristeva introduced the scholarly world to the notion.

The narrator is Olympia the dwarf, who plays barker and errand runner for her more "gifted" siblings. We move back and forth between her adult present and her childhood past in a layered narrative replete with disturbing revelations (e.g. the scene in which the surviving kids polish the glass jars housing their less fortunate siblings).

The more we get to know the Bineswkis, the more we find (echoing medieval notions of the interior and the exterior) that their "distorted" bodies house disturbed personalities. As Arturo the Aqua-Boy begins his cult (read it, you'll see), we could use more of an answer to why the disenfranchised find his message so compelling, though his own reasons are more clear.

While the end of the novel cannot live up to its powerful opening, even so, it is well worth reading. Give it a chance, but brace yourself.

Frankenstein's Bride, Hilary Bailey

Hilary Bailey's Frankenstein's Bride is bound in a single volume with Mary Shelley's original novel. This is a bit of a trick by the publisher, since the original text is old enough to be out of copyright. I therefore expected Bailey's novel to be, in essence, a genre exercise, an attempt to mimic Shelley's nineteenth-century gothic horror style.

I was therefore not only delighted but rather surprised by the quality of this novel. I found the narrative utterly absorbing. The story of Frankenstein and his hubristic attempt to create human life has been mined by novelists, filmmakers, academics, and on, but the text is so rich that it is far from being exhausted.

Bailey begins after the end of the original novel. Victor Frankenstein has returned to England, having failed to find and destroy his original creation. He has, though, attempted to get on with his life. As the novel progresses, though, it becomes clear that the Monster was not his only, nor his most successful attempt to create a human being. As the title indications, Frankenstein made a bride for the Monster who is far more dangerous than her intended husband.

The writing is somewhat archaic, to match with Shelley's style, but this rarely interferes with the compelling nature of the narrative, which drew me in almost from the first page. I'd highly recommend giving it a read.

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

If you haven't seen this new series offered by Quirk Books you really must. In fact, if you haven't, you may well have been living under a rock for the last six months, but not, it would seem, a storm-tossed rock, capped by a giant, mutant octopus. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is billed as co-authored by Jane Austen and Ben Winters (listen closely -- can you hear Austen spinning in her grave? If they make too many more of these books, she may have to return as a villain in a sequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies).

Essentially, the conceit behind Quirk Books is to take a book out of copyright, like all of Austen's are, due to their age, and produce a sort of fan-fiction edited version. The first of these was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! (follow the link -- the cover is as well done as the book behind it). In this case, something like 85% of the text was retained from the original Pride and Prejudice. The rest was added by Seth Grahame-Smith, and these minimal intrusions transform the book into a horror of the return of the undead. The conceit is actually a bit brilliant, since this creates a satire that points out the deadening nature of the elaborate conventions of the nineteenth century.

As I noted in an earlier post, I prepared to read Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by rereading the original novel. I hadn't read it since I took a "Great Books" course as a college freshman. I really was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. The wit is absolutely cutting.

That said, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is not the wonderful fun that P & P & Zombies is. There is much greater intervention in the original text, and this essentially defeats the cleverness. The shock of P & P & Zombies is the manner in which a few added sentences here and there can transform an entire novel utterly. The more that is added, the less effective the whole becomes. The raw material is also not as good. There is a reason that P & P holds the position it does. It is a masterpiece. I was just blown away by it when I read it again last year (before reading P & P & Zombies, of course). S & S is a good novel, but not as powerful.

So, what I'd suggest is reading P & P and then P & P & Zombies and then calling it a passing on this one. This does seem to be a growing genre -- see, for example, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim: Mark Twain's Classic with Crazy Zombie Goodness. And I want in. How do I get published like this?

Bilal provides a dystopic future, much in the standard sci-fi style, with one interesting twist: the Ancient Egyptian gods are still kicking around. Unfortunately, though, aside from their outward appearance and their status as immortals, there is nothing in the characterization to particularly recall these deities. In this case, I admit, I can't figure out what the fuss is about. I am an occasional reader of graphic novels -- very close in basic structure to many medieval illuminated manuscripts -- but this one left me utterly cold. The art is often praised, but I found it somewhat awkward and staged. The writing is disjointed, and the plotting more so. If you are looking for an interesting graphic novel, I'd suggest looking elsewhere.

Mulengro, Charles de Lint

Note a new feature of the blog -- you can buy the book by clicking the Amazon image and link above!

This is a bit of an unusual choice for me, I admit, but it was recommended by a friend, and I loved it. It is a pretty pulpy read, filled with some rather violent images (people torn to pieces, corpses strewn about, and the like). If you are a horror movie fan, this one would probably entertain you rather more than if you generally read Jane Austen.

The story focuses on the Romany (aka Gypsy) community in Canada and the US. Someone (or something) has been killing off Rom without leaving any clues behind for the Gaje (as in non-Rom) cops (pretty standard cops, right from central casting: the older, world-weary Caucasian and his young, more impulsive African-American partner, but they get the job done).

I don't want to ruin the various plot surprises, but I will say that the book treads in increasingly supernatural waters. Characters deal with their own skepticism, and this helps the reader (or at least, this reader) along with his. And the presentation of Rom beliefs and traditions is fascinating.

Having checked with a Rom friend of mine, the beliefs, passages and phrases in Romany are genuine and largely on target. From the terms used, the language looks fascinating. Made me want to study it. In my abundant spare time. There is a handy glossary at the back, and the vocabulary available to a degree set the terms for the plot. The religion or folklore or belief system is highly syncretic, with a God or gods, with magic and witches and ghosts, all of which make for what amounts not to a flat backdrop or convenient plot device but more of a full character in the novel.

You won't confuse this book with Don DeLillo or Philip Roth, but if this is your sort of read, you'll be highly entertained.