Book Sale!

Blog readers!  James Kuiper is selling off much of his excellent library.  Go and get some books!  I'll certainly be there, buying novels....

Colson Whitehead, Zone One

Zombie narratives tend to fall into two camps:  depressing and ironically funny.  Some are both.  Colson Whitehead's Zone One is both, at times, but it is also beautiful and rich and occasionally profound.  

Zombies tend to be fairly transparent metaphors -- they began as the enslaved workers of Haitian sugar plantations, but then came to be stand-ins for any and all disempowered worked drones.  For Whitehead, though, they reflect all of us.  There are two varieties of "skels" to be fought: the active, hungering type, lumbering around and tearing off hunks of the flesh of the temporarily-still-living; and the "stragglers," who are frozen in a moment, arrested in inscrutable trances.  They stand at copy machines, or gaze blankly at shuttered boutique windows, as apparently oblivious to the ruin within the shops and to the ruin within themselves:  

Why this particular juice joint and not another, why this neighborhood greasy spoon, synagogue, bookstore, 99 cent store? … The window-shopper bewitched before a boarded up department-store window, taking in a long-removed display that nonetheless unfurled its exquisitely arranged baubles behind the plywood.

The protagonist, ironically dubbed "Mark Spitz," after the great Olympic Swimmer, reflects on the stragglers:

They were safe in their houses.  In front of the televisions, of course, a host of this type biding their time until the electricity came back on, the problem was solved, and the program resumed where it had stopped.  All the time in the world.  Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment...

And later, on the plague's impact on his own emotional state:

The world stalled out at his edges.  Sometimes he had trouble speaking to other people, rummaging for language, and it seemed to him that an invisible layer divided him from the rest of the world, a membrane of emotional surface tension.  He was not alone. 'Survivors are slow or incapable of forming new attachments,' or so the latest diagnosis droned, although a cynic might identify this as a feature of modern life merely intensified or fine-tuned with the introduction of the plague.

"Mark Spitz" succeeds in this impossible situation.  He is a survivor not because he is exceptional -- he isn't -- not because is he particularly brave or strong or smart or noble.  He succeeds because the zombie plague reduces everyone to total mediocrity.  The skels staggering around are pathetic.  They are weak and slow and dumb, only dangerous because they are so infectious and so very, very numerous.

There are moments of gore, but they are not the point.  This is not disaster-porn, not horror for the sake of conjuring disgust and revulsion.  It is a cerebral novel, with a great deal to say about us and our condition.

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Over the summer, I was sitting on the roof of a friend's apartment in Jersey City, chatting about novels as the sun set, and he recommend Neuromancer by William Gibson (thanks Josh).  It had been ages -- years and years -- since I read some good, straight-up sci-fi.  This genre was a staple of my teen years (Last week, I was surprised to see that there is a new film coming out of Ender's Game, which was my favorite sic-fi novel at the time, staring a kid named Asa!).

Neuromancer was published in that greatest of science fiction years, 1984, and it depicts a dystopic future in which the rich live lives apart from the rest of society, encapsulated in bubbles of pleasure, and the rest live in squalor, in which everyone is connected by a computer network, and hackers are the elite of the criminal class, in which computer viruses made in China are used by criminals to hack into the world of the rich.  Sound familiar?  What was certainly wild fantasy and speculation thirty years ago is, well, the world we live in.  Ok, I exaggerate.  The rich don't live on space stations, so this world is nothing like ours.

The main character is a fairly unlikeable down-and-out everyman named Case, a former master hacker whose nervous system was altered by an angry former associate in order to stop him from being able to plug himself directly into the Matrix.  Case is hired (somewhat coercively) by a shady individual who wants him to pull off an impossible hack, with the help of a biotechnologically augmented samurai with razor claws named, surprisingly, Molly.  They are also helped by a ROM of Case's old mentor, now dead but kept conscious within a computer.

There is a bit of sex and a lot of drugs, but the most compelling passages are the descriptions of Case's work within the Matrix, a sort-of immersive visualization of the codes within computers.  No, not like Neo and his pals, not really, though certainly the Wachowski Brothers must had been influenced by Neuromancer.  Gibson gives us beautiful descriptions of the architecture of the virus, as it merges with its host, and Case's movements as he soars through it.  There is, even in their pain and panic and in the general breakdown of society, beauty.

Edward Docx, The Calligrapher

The Calligrapher, by the seemingly pseudonymous "Edward Docx," is a book I don't think I'd have picked up in a shop, since -- like all of us -- I judge books by their covers.  This one has the look of a literary romance, with the pen, the bed, and the pairs of shoes.  Hardly my style.  No monsters, no grim settings, no apparent darkness at all.  But the book was recommended (and given) by a friend whose taste is impeccable, so I gave it a try.

It is brilliant.  And there are monsters.  They are just shaped like beautiful people.

The novel is centered on Jasper Jackson, a talented calligrapher and therefore a living anachronism.  He was raised by his grandmother, who is a scholar of medieval manuscripts, and as a child he was punished by being made to copy out Latin texts in various formal scripts.  He has grown into a rather finicky playboy.  Perhaps as a result of his careful study of the painstaking art of calligraphy -- an art form with very little tolerance for error -- he has become a perfectionist in many quarters of his life.  There is a proper way to make a cup of tea (loose leaves, never bags), of coffee (espresso only), a proper way to prepare a dinner, and, most importantly, a proper way to carry on multiple affairs, while deluding one's loving, faithful girlfriend.

Jasper excels at all of these things.  He is something of a professional.  Until he slips, and makes the grandest of rookie mistakes:  he falls in love.

Throughout the novel, Jasper is working on a private commission of the love poems of John Donne, and each chapter takes its title and framing structure from one of Donne's complex, fraught poems of love.  This might have been merely a clever trick, but Docx turns many of these poems into rich points of contemplation, poignant reflection, and, increasingly, menace, sorrow, and loss.

The Calligrapher is bitingly funny, compelling, and beautiful.  And damn, I didn't see that ending coming.  Well worth the read.  And thank you, Suzanne!

Helene Wecker, The Golem and the Jinni

If an author were to reverse-engineer a book especially for me, it would probably be a hybrid novel set in New York, in the Jewish community of the Lower East Side, and probably around the turn of the last century, but about historically-rooted monsters.  This book, of course does not exist, since it is an absurd setup for a novel.  Or rather, it didn't, until a few months ago, when Helene Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni was published.  I got a copy right away, and bumped it to the top of my queue.

Perhaps I was therefore overly excited, anticipating too much.  It is good.  It has flashes of rich insight.  But somehow, it lacks teeth.  The main characters are a female golem -- a clay creature animated by a corrupt Jewish mystic -- and a male jinni, a shapeshifting spirit of fire from the deserts of Syria.  The golem is dubbed "Chava," created to serve as a faithful wife to a man who animates her and then dies shortly thereafter on the transatlantic to New York.  Created to serve him and anticipate his every need, she is now masterless, and her ability to sense the needs and desires is therefore rootless.  She becomes overwhelmed by the desperate needs of those all around her, first on the crammed and cramped ship and then in the Jewish neighborhoods of lower Manhattan.  The jinni is a fiery character, impulsive and somewhat reckless.  Nicknamed "Ahmad," he was trapped in human form by a shady Arab mystic, and then -- as in most jinni narratives, trapped in a lamp.  He is accidentally released by a metalsmith living in Little Syria, a smaller community not far from the Jewish neighborhoods of the Lower East Side.

We follow their trials and tribulations separately until, eventually and inevitably, they have a chance meeting.  They recognize one another's inhumanity, and fall into an unlikely odd-couple relationship, fraught with friction based on their inherent differences.  They need each other, though, if only to have someone with which they can each be what they are.

The two "monsters" are both pretty human from the start, and that might be some of the trouble I had with the novel.  They each say several times how hard it is for them to understand humans, but, take away their special powers and they both basically are human.  The troll in Kerstin Ekman's Forest of Hours, for example, really doesn't understand humans, or himself for that matter.  The scene in which he cuts off his little finger, expecting it to grow back like a tree's branch, has stuck with me as a compelling example of his failure to grasp what he is, and what the humans around him are.  He doesn't understand why they are so horrified.  The jinni is a playboy who doesn't understand why humans take sexual relations so seriously, but that confusion hardly requires one to be an air elemental.

The novel picks up the pace well in its last quarter, and is, all throughout, an enjoyable read.  It just should have been great, fabulous, perfect (at least for me).  Ah, well.  Surely there will be another Lower-East-Side-Historical-Monster novel published soon...

Parnassus on Wheels, Christopher Morley

I stumbled on Christopher Morley's Parnassus on Wheels in a used bookshop (The Bookshop in Chico). I am a sucker for books about books -- I write them, as well as reading them, as do a great many authors. (There have been several others reviewed on this blog, like Fahrenheit 451 and Zafón's Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game.)

Parnassus, though, is something altogether different. Published in 1917, it is the tale of a man fired with the urge to sell books -- good books, real books -- to the ordinary people of the USA. Roger Mifflin is a small, pugnacious fellow, part traveling salesman, part preacher, part roadside carnival barker. His Traveling Parnassus* (named for the mountain in Greece where the Muses of the arts were believed to live) is a rickety old wagon, filled to the brim with books and drawn about by a gentle old horse named Peg (for Pegasus). Morley made an interesting choice of narrator, and this is what gives the book much of its interest. Rather than have it narrated by Mifflin, or by Andrew McGill -- rural writer of the beauty of rustic farm life -- it is narrated by Helen McGill, Andrew's sister and a plainspoken, non-nonsense, heavy spinster approaching middle age. Helen is what makes the book work because it surely would otherwise glow warmly with the treacle of nostalgia. Her dry wit and increasing enthusiasm drive the short novel as surely as she comes to drive the Traveling Parnassus, which she buys on an impulse, both to stop Andrew from buying it and to have an adventure -- her first! In this age of closing bookshops, when it seems that students are rarely asked to read real literature, full-length novels, a book like this should be mandatory. It just might be the spark to get a person reading!

[*There is now, by the way, a Parnassus Books, recently opened by novelist Ann Patchett in her hometown of Nashville.  For an interesting NYTimes article on this, see here.]

Mario Vargas Llosa, The Dream of the Celt

Last year, I read Mario Vargas Llosa's The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto and The War of the End of the World, and reviewed them here.  Both were really impressive -- almost shocking -- and in dramatically different ways, though they held together as a pair quite well.  This later novel, The Dream of the Celt (2010), for which Llosa won a Pulitzer Prize, seems less unremittingly grim in its assessment of humanity, though only just.

Dream is based on the life of Roger Casement, an Irish nationalist who began as a functionary in the British Empire.  As a young man, he dreamed of the romantic world of explorers, like David Livingston, and eventually joined the entourage of Henry Morton ("Dr. Livingston, I presume?") Stanley in the Congo, then a Belgian colony.  His experience throughout the rubber plantations is one of constant disillusionment with the colonial exercise.  Casement signed up with simplistic dreams of bringing civilization (mostly in the form of Christianity and Commerce) to the "savage" natives, but he rapidly learns that the colonists are the savages, capable of astonishing cruelty and violence, which is narrated (as in The War of the End of the World) at great length.  This is not a book for the faint of heart.

Casement returns to England, writes an exposé, and gains a reputation as a crusader against social injustice.  This lands him a post in Amazonia, again on rubber plantations, and again filled with grisly horrors.  He first realizes that Amazonia is just "[t]he Congo, again.  The Congo, everywhere, …"  The inhuman cruelties he saw in the Congo are ubiquitous.  His greater realization, though, is that he is not colonizer, but colonized native -- as an Irishman of hidden Catholic descent, he is a subject of, and lackey for the British Empire.

As Casement thinks it through, he concludes, "Wasn't Ireland a colony too, like the Congo?"  His native land is, no less, a colonized region:  "There in the Congo, living with injustice and violence, he had discovered the great lie of colonialism and began to feel 'Irish,' that is, like the citizen of a country occupied and exploited by the Empire that had bled and weakened Ireland."  In this sense, the novel takes a postcolonial perspective, and its insights are applicable not merely to the novel's three settings but to the whole world, colonized through and through in one way or another.  The ultimate accomplishment of colonizing forces is the complete dehumanization of the colonized, which allows for any level of mistreatment:

For them the Amazonian indigenous people were not, strictly speaking, human beings, but an inferior, contemptible for of existence, closer to animals than civilized people.  That's why it was legitimate to exploit them, whip them, abduct them, take them to rubber plantations or, if they resisted, kill them like rabid dogs.

The history is rather complex, and much of the prose of the novel is given over to it.  Llosa succeeds most boldly when he humanizes his subjects and hovers inward to the small moments of interaction -- Casement's brief and frantic love affairs with young men on four continents, his discussions with priests on the nature of humanity.

As a whole, Dream is an intricately postcolonial novel.  Chapters alternate between Casement awaiting his death sentence in a prison in English-colonized Ireland and his adventures as colonizer in Africa and Amazonia.  In both locations, Casement (really, of course, Llosa) has much time to reflect on the base nature of humanity:

The Congo had humanized him ..., if being human meant knowing the extremes that could be reached by greed, avarice, prejudice, and cruelty.  That's what moral corruption was:  something that did not exist in animals but belonged exclusively to humans.

And finally, there is a lesson in here for me and my fellow historians:

Was all of history like that?  The history learned at school?  The one written by historians?  A more or less idyllic fabrication, rational and coherent, about what had been in raw, harsh reality a chaotic and arbitrary jumble of plans, accidents, intrigues, fortuitous event, coincidences  multiple interests that had provoked changes, upheavals, advances, and retreats, always unexpected and surprising with respect to what was anticipated or experienced by the protagonists.

Indeed, so it is.

Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York

 I won't pretend anything approaching objectivity, here. I read Colson Whitehead's The Colossus of New York on the flight back to California, after six months of utter bliss on sabbatical in New York City. I was filled with sorrow, torn from the only place where I have ever truly and completely felt at home, at ease, amongst "my people" -- loud, brash, argumentative, filled to the brim and overflowing with life! 

A few days before we left, we stopped into a local bookshop, around the corner from our apartment in Morningside Heights. They have a section of "local interest." It was there that I found The Colossus. Some sections celebrate the best of the City. Some revel in the grim and grit. As I loved every street, every pothole, every broken curb, I loved every page of this love song to the one and only New York. Whitehead could have been writing the words of my heart:

I never got a chance to say good-bye to some of my old buildings. Some I lived in, others were part of a skyline I thought would always be there. And they never got a chance to say good-bye to me. I think they would have liked to--I refuse to believe in their indifference. You say you know these streets pretty well? The city knows you better. 

Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue

I believe I have read just about everything that Michael Chabon has written, give or take, starting with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which was assigned reading for a course I took in grad school (with the inimitable Scott Bukaman) on the history of comic books.  It knocked me off my feet.  I wish I hadn't loaned my copy to a friend, who loaned it to his friend, with whom he had a falling out...  I'll never see it again.  I will, at some point, break down and buy another copy.

After winning a Pulitzer Prize for the rather amazing Amazing Adventures, Chabon wrote a series of smaller-scale genre exercises, which are varyingly entertaining and, after such a grand work as AAKC, disappointing.  I was therefore excited when I saw the heft of Telegraph Avenue, a novel of mighty proportions, promising to encompass a grander scope.  And, indeed, it does.

Set in the hippy hills of Berkeley and the gritty back alleys of Oakland, the novel is filled with contrasts and with overlaps.  At its core are six characters:  two couples, and their (more or less, their) two sons.  One couple is Jewish, the other African-American.  The women are partners in a midwife business, and the men are parters in Brokeland Records, a classic vinyl shop in Oakland (on, of course, Telegraph Ave) that is barely scraping by, catering to an odd assortment of jazz hounds in leisure suits.

The situation seems more or less stable at the outset.  Both couples seem fine, both businesses seem, if imperfect, fine, but then a serious of events upsets the balance that holds these two couples and two friendships together.  Gibson Goode, a former NFL-starter-turned-media-mogul plans to open a megastore a few blocks from Brokeland Records, which will surely annihilate it.  A secret son from a former relationship, now a teenager and otherwise orphaned, arrives on a doorstep (and rapidly becomes the best friend and love interest of the other son).  And then one of the midwives looses her cool (quite justifiably), in a way that jeopardizes their business.

Everything begins to spiral out of kilter, as the central question is raised, implicitly and then, increasing, explicitly:  can all these boundaries be crossed?  Can people from such divergent backgrounds truly be friends?  Can men and women understand each other enough to truly be heard?  Can lactose-intolerant Berkeley raw-foodists connect with Oakland heroine junkies?  Of course, you'll have to read the novel to find out.

Everyone is a geek of some sort.  Characters are vinyl fetishists (that is, devotees of classic records), Blaxploitation film buffs, Samuri film buffs.  Quotes from Star Wars appear, as do references to A Canticle for Leibowitz, (recommended to me by a friend back in grad school, and worth reading, as well!).  Even the glamorous (if tacky) Gibson Goode turns out to have been a comic book fan in his youth.  Chabon's Berkeley and Oakland are clearly a reflection of his own interests, and the impression is something like the towns have been recreated by Quentin Tarantino.  Characters saunter in hats made by Borsalino, the brand made famous by every celebrity from Humphrey Bogart to Michael Jackson to Samuel L. Jackson.

After several years, we have a novel from Chabon that encompasses vast (and vastly important) issues, but, after his years in genre writing, he brings to it humor and lightness.