52 in 07 Recap

2007 was a great year for my reading. Movies can awe you, and TV can entrance you, but books – at their best – can actually change the way you see things, restructure your personal philosphy. I was lucky enough to encounter a couple of these this year.

After some deliberation, a 1-23 ranking of the books I read this year.

1. The Stones of Summer – “Stones is like lead: it’s terribly dense and you go crazy if ingest too much.”
2. The Savage Detectives – “The fact that Bolano can invent all this bespeaks an oceanic imagination, one that’s wide and deep and glittering brilliant.”
3. The Road – “This lean prose sometimes spirals into beautifully complex sentences as the father dreams, and these moments of lyricism shine all the brighter for the dullness that surrounds them.”
4. Finn – “The prose’s form and purpose are so completely wedded it’s downright shark-like.”
5. Dominion – “And so Jane Austen has established, in forty words, that her main character leads a sweet life. Baker, in thirty, lets us know that people are eating corpses. Point: Baker.”
6. The Course of the Heart – “I worried at the end that the book would dissolve into meaninglessness, as all realistic novels must, because the real world does not recognize climax and denouement … but suddenly the normal is exalted, and all the spirits at the edge of apprehension make themselves plain.”
7. The Master and Margarita – “sometimes I don’t get these ‘cult’ things (Donnie Darko is not an enjoyable movie), but I’m fully onboard with this one.”
8. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ – “And it’s all so much richer than the official dogma.”
9. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union – “Mike Chabon is a writer with a warm eye and the deep empathy to make his characters next to real.”
10. Playing for Keeps – “Quite simply, the man was a top-flight journalist, with a keen sense of psychology, an endlessly readable style, and a finely honed ability to know what’s relevant to the story.”
11. The Collector – “Fowles got me again.”
12. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City – “‘Who doesn’t want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?’”
13. Nova Swing – “One more brilliant book by one of my favorite authors, so go read it.”
14. Light – “I think this is the ease of a master craftsman entirely comfortable with his medium.”
15. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana – “…like an object rushing at you in the fog, indistinct until the last instant, the heart of the book doesn’t become clear until almost the end.”
16. The Snow Leopard – “A leaf makes you see the underlying unity in all things? Really?”
17. Harry Potter 7 – “But then again, your average woman is much more likely to be a reader than your average man (who’s much more likely to be texting his vote to see WHO’S MORE NOW)”
18. Maps for Lost Lovers – “His successes, then, when they occur, must be praised, and so too should his failures be accommodated.”
19. I Am Legend – “He’s a smart writer, who obviously did his homework, only taking narrative shortcuts rarely.”
20. The End of Mr. Y – “am I reading the Player’s Handbook for D&D? What the hell is this?”
21. On Writing – “I’d say the stuff about King’s personal life is more worthwhile than anything he has to say about writing”
22. The Testament of Gideon Mack – “I hereby move that the sentence ‘The blood in my penis beat like a drum’ be banned from the language.”
23. Red Seas Under Red Skies – “it feels a lot like watching some dudes LARP.”

The Top 5: Stones of Summer is an enormously important book to me. I picked it up sophomore year of highschool, and finished it some 3 years later. I’ve never experienced a book like that, with a huge gap in between readings. What’s interesting about it is how crucial that 3 years turned out to be: Stones is divided into three sections, the first of which follows Dawes as a youngster, maybe till he’s 10 years old. I read this at what, 15? I left off right before the second section, which picks up Dawes story when he’s a full-fledged teenager, 18 years of age – just like me when I picked it up again. I imagine a lot of the middle portion of the book would not have made sense to the 15 year old me, but it was not only intelligible, but precision aimed at me, it felt like. Mossman showed me a new way to look at things (crazy as it is), and especially a new way to write. Stones thrums along with an intensity and emotion in its imagery and every sentence that I’m still trying to harness for just short bursts.

The Savage Detectives shares Stones’ sense of unchained expression and vigor. There’s a vital insanity present in both books, and I recognize it in myself on occasion. Bolano’s labile voice astounded me, and I’m sure 52 in 08 will feature some of his other work.

The Road wasn’t at all like the first two, which were both long works that sprinted through great tracts of plot, laughing the whole way. The Road plods through comparatively few pages, and each sentence is a punch in the gut (or the kidneys, depending on how badly Cormac wants to stomp on your feelings). It’s a real masterwork, compact and potent, battered and raw, like some dug up mine that’s still live.

Finn was just a beautiful exercise in style, and had me smiling in amazement over the prose more than any book this year. Clinch lets his sentences stretch and yawn for half a page, cramming clause after clause between the periods, but always maintains complete control. It can sweep you up like the Mississippi.

Dominion was another great style. Most TV shows I really like have a language not at all like my own: The Wire and Deadwood are two good examples. There’s a real joy in unfamiliar dialects, and Dominion has a great one, mixing the propriety of the colonial days with the rawness of the backwoods. Generational stories are a hell of a thing to pull off, and Baker absolutely pulls it off.

The Rest

07 was also the year of M John Harrison. I read Viriconium in December of 06, then hit Light, Nova Swing, and The Course of the Heart in 07. I’m not sure how much of his ouevre I’ve got left to run through, but you can bet I will. With a shifting of my tastes, Harrison seems to emerge as my undisputed favorite author, while the former favorites have fallen by the wayside – he writes about things that interest me, and he does it better than anybody else. Or maybe he’s so good he makes me care about what he’s writing. Either way, the man’s great.

Red Seas Under Red Skies was easily the biggest disappointment of the year, and I think I kinda despise Scott Lynch now.

Also surprised by just how short I fell of 52 books. I felt like I did pretty well this year reading-wise, but a couple stretches of inactivity murdered my shot at hitting 52. We’ll see how 08 goes – I’ve already got a stack of Christmas books demanding my attention, and I try not to glance at them sidelong as I slog through The Master and Margarita. Why, oh why, would I pick the dense russian novel for my capstone?

Satan’s Grand Ball

By some weird coincidence, no less then 3 of the books read this year featured prominently the Great Deceiver himself: The Testament of Gideon Mack, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, and The Master and Margarita. No two depictions were the same – Saramago’s was well-meaning, Bulgakov’s might have been, but that wasn’t in his department, and Robertson’s didn’t seem to give a damn.

The Master And Margarita

52 in 07′s last, and slightly tardy, entry.

M&M took me months to get through – this is the kind of book that, until the style and voice clicks, is a real chore to slog through. But once you get into rhythm, it’s unbelievable. M&M defies genres, being a strange melange of fantasy, satire, comedy, and magical realism.

It’s widely hailed as one of the better Russian novels in the last century, and the author, Mikhail Bulgakov, must have had a couple shots of vodka before sending this one to any publishers. Clearly subversive (even to a non-Muscovite like myself), the Soviet secret police might have taken this the wrong way – he exhibited the kind of courage only Writers can. The Master, the novel’s sorta-protagonist who is introduced a third of the way in, is a stand in for Bulgakov, and he’s deeply obsessed with his work. He writes a book about Pontius Pilate, chapters of which are interspersed between the Soviet sections. They’re wonderfully written meditations on religion and guilt, and Pilate, history’s scapegoat, is presented in a new light. It’s the kind of depiction I’d expect from Jose Saramago in The Gospel.

But you certainly have to work at it. The annotations at the back were a godsend, and I missed an embarrassing amount of stuff on the first pass. The translation was good, but it adhered very closely to the text, which made passages sound stilted. Certain words will echo three times a sentence.

Well worth it, though. Bulgakov’s Satan, named Woland, is frankly awesome. He’s not on screen a lot, kinda like Vader, and the character’s damned effective for it. The real mischief-makers are his retinue, who wreak havoc across Moscow over the course of a few days. And this retinue is comprised of Koroyov, the former choirmaster with his cracked pince nez, Behemoth, a black cat large as a hog who is bipedal when it suits him, and Azazello, a fanged redhead who can put a bullet through any pip on a 7 of spades you want… facing backwards.

They terrorize various Muscovites, and especially the management team at the Variety theater, who are bewitched into allowing Woland a show… a show in which Behemoth rips the head off the emcee.

The book’s littered with that kind of stuff, because it’s dense as hell and the font’s intimidatingly small. But if you’re willing to put in the effort, you can see very easily why this is a cult classic – sometimes I don’t get these ‘cult’ things (Donnie Darko is not an enjoyable movie), but I’m fully onboard with this one. A great close to 52 in 07.

New Year

I love blank slates.  Headed to Colorado, and I’m bringing a stack of books with me. 52 in 07 is theoretically over, but there’s still 60 some pages left to Master and Margarita, and I’ve got to get through it. I guess I could put it into 52 in 08, but that’d be juking the stats. The Wire and myself will be back in a week.

One thought from the festivities last night: ARod came out to visit Carson Daly as the ball dropped – I was sure the cameras would cut to the two locked in a passionate embrace. Tough to start 08 on a disappointing note.

I Am Legend

*Spoilers for both book and movie*

Here are the facts about I Am Legend:

It was Richard Matheson’s 3rd novel, and it came out in 1954. It’s the story of Robert Neville, the last man alive, as he tries to keep the vampires at bay.

If you just saw the movie, you might be surprised that this is a vampire story. Well, it is – in fact, the story is more interested in the vampires than Robert. The moral and philosophical implications of his lifestyle are not examined until the last part of the story, whereas the vampire bacteria is fully explained with scientific nomenclature.

This is where the Will Smith movie veers away from book and never looks back. The movie is all about Will Smith and a New York reclaimed by nature. That’s a smart bet by the money men behind the picture – Smith is his usual force, and capably fills hours of screen time with nothing but his Tim Duncan/Robert Horry face. And New York, overgrown with weeds and home to roving herds of deer, is really something special. Locating the story in New York is probably the movie’s most canny decision. In my town, by 8 oclock it very well could be a ghost town – no lights, no movement. But New York is always moving, always breathing.

That’s pretty much the movie’s only success, though. Artistic integrity and financial profitability rarely intersect, and by going for the expanded audience a PG-13 rating can pull, the producers defanged this vampire story.

Look at the title: I Am Legend. In the movie, Neville is legend because, oh wonder of wonders, he’s discovered the cure for vampirism! And the enclave of human survivors join hands and sing kumbaya together in Bethel, Vermont.

In the book, Neville spends his days stalking from house to house, murdering the comatose vampires in their daytime stupors. He hopes to reduce the numbers, so that the nightly sieges against his house are not so intense. But not every one of his victims is one of the undead – there are some that are merely infected. These half-vamps have put together a new society, and look to be the new world order. One of their ranks infiltrates Neville’s fortress home to collect information, which they use to capture him. They want Neville for a public execution, because he is legend: the human scourge who has killed so many of their number. Just like the vampire, the nightstalker, used to command the fear of the superstitious, now Neville is the daystalker. Hence, legend.

Right there you can see why I Am Legend is much better read than seen. It’s a brief story, 170 pages long, because it’s one of those tight, high-concept sci-fi stories. If Matheson tightened up his writing, this story would be 120 pages – he’s got a strange habit of describing every physiological result of whatever emotion Robert’s feeling. Fear? “He could hear his heart pounding, like maniac fists on a dungeon wall.” Pain? “He could feel hot coals dropping through openings in his flesh.” It is ‘show don’t tell’ taken to a distracting extreme.

On the other hand, Matheson’s Neville is erudite, making references to Gulliver’s Travels rather than Shrek. He’s a smart writer, who obviously did his homework, only taking narrative shortcuts rarely. He’s also fully explored the ramifications of such a concept: the last man on earth, beset by vampires, and does a good job of letting us in on all the stuff we have to know. He deftly handles action sequences, and Neville’s struggles with his own sanity are reasonably poignant.

He makes a few missteps, though – flashbacks to pre-vampire life aren’t terribly well rendered. The book features a character, Ben Cortman, who was Robert’s friend and neighbor in the old days, and now primary tormentor in the present. The two have an interesting, complex relationship, but it doesn’t translate because we never seen Ben when he isn’t screaming for Robert’s blood. Just one scene with these two pre-vampire would have ratcheted up the emotion in the finale.

The movie does a great job tugging the heartstrings with Neville’s farewell to his family. Of course, their helicopter promptly crashes. Not really an on-theme death, you know? Meanwhile, book Neville has his wife come back to try and suck his blood after he’s already buried her. That’s affecting shit.

The book has a dog as well, but instead of a boon companion like Sam, it’s an unnamed mutt that dies a week after Neville takes it in. It’s a brief interlude that signals the death of Robert’s hope for companionship, and not the loss of a friend.

Having seen the movie and it’s inspiration, I can understand why writers like Alan Moore wash their hands of movie adaptations.  A book is one person and a few years of their life – a movie is a multi-million dollar production with cast, crew, and caterers. There’s monetary pressure, and it’s the focus groups and not the writer’s artistic vision that must be served. And that will result in garbage more often than not.*

*Garbage with a two week box-office take of 137 million dollars.

The Course of the Heart

I realized about three quarters of the way through The Course of the Heart that M. John Harrison is depressingly good. I discovered MJH through Neil Gaiman, who mentioned on his website that he’d written a foreword for Viriconium and that it was quite a good book. I saw it in Border’s, skimmed a few pages, and bought it.

Course of the Heart has this endorsement on its cover from China Mieville: “That M. John Harrison is not a Nobel Laureate proves the bankruptcy of the literary establishment. Austere, unflinching, and desperately moving, he is one of the very great writers alive today.” Nice sentiment, and just as fiery as you’d expect from a socialist.

So why is Harrison depressing me? Other than the fact that he’s a few orders of magnitude better than me its because, so far as I know, he isn’t wildly successful – in a just universe, it would be Harrison deigning to write a blurb for the Gaimans and Mievilles of the world. Talented as they are, this guy is a luminary.

I can’t think of a writer with a better eye for gesture, light, and “the physical truth of the world,” as he puts it. He notices light like a painter, and he composes scenes like Rembrandt.

Harrison’s a sci-fi/fantasy/weird fiction writer, and CofH is not in this vein – firmly grounded in the real world, with the faintly ridiculous place names of Britain (How can Weston-super-Mare be a real place?), its references to the fantastic are oblique, almost incidental.

But a surreal, dreamy quality permeates the book. Just like with his other works, characters will spit lines of nonsense dialogue, or inexplicably start to shout or maybe fall asleep. I don’t know if this is my phrase or not, but it all has the silent import of dreams, and I sense strange truths lying just beneath the surface.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, line by line and sentence by sentence, Harrison can’t be beat. Selections:

“The child stared back vacantly, upset, knowing full well they were from competing species.”

“Birchwoods more than any others are meant to be seen by autumn light! It surprises them in a dance, a celebration of something which is, in a tree, akin to the animal. They dance even on cold still days when the air leaves them motionless: limbs like illuminated bone caught moving – or just ceasing to move – in a mauve smoke of twigs.”

“Pam, her late child, reaching maturity then Cambridge from within a stone’s throw of the sea, flowering only to books and epilepsy despite red hair and a Pre-Raphaelite calm, had always puzzled her.”

“Pam opened her arms wide, as if to embrace him, then wider to take in the whole scene behind him: the clear air rippling with heat; the tide, slack and warm; the red setter running in delighted circles over the beach, snapping up at the gulls twenty feet above its head as if they were butterflies.”

“In that part of Northamptonshire (Lucas read on) the winter copses seem to hang forever in the moment of darkening against a pale blue sky – as if it will take forever for night to fall- in a gesture so perfect there will never need to be another day.”

He uses perfect metaphors, employs flawless rhythms, and selects his verbs like a surgeon – how else could you describe your breath on cold glass except as “blooming”?

The plot is incidental. Three middle aged people engaged in some sort of magical experience during their Cambridge days, and they’re struggling with the aftermath 20 years later. There’s Pam, who suffers from epilepsy, her ex husband Lucas Medlar, with the “ravenous face of an adolescent,” and the unnamed narrator, a pretty content guy. The magician who bound their fates, Yaxley, also appears, and he seems a character straight out of Viriconium.

With an auxiliary plot, Harrison grapples with some themes. The pain of the shapeless, or ungestalten, haunts the pages, and the characters keenly feel this pain in their unresolved lives. The mysterious incident at Cambridge is never directly addressed, and another enigmatic magical ritual goes unexplained. We learn that the ragged edges of life, where the fabric doesn’t quite fit, are in fact serrated.

Gnosticism is another theme, though I wouldn’t have known it if it hadn’t been on the back cover. I’m not sure on Harrison’s view on the subject – maybe him and Alan Moore have tea parties and talk about monadism, but I think after watching John From Cincinnati, I ought to familiarize myself with the system.

Harrison describes it beautifully, as Lucas and Pam, struggling to comprehend their cambridge experience, bury themselves in the myth of the Pleroma (greek for fullness). The Pleroma is something like Heaven, and Lucas posits that there are times when it “breaks into ordinary existence, into political, social, and religious life, and becomes a country of its own, a country of the heart.” They call this the Couer, and I’m in love with this idea of a country of the heart; I understood it as a perfect storm of variables combining to create this country, and that it could be anywhere. This fanciful country is always moving.

I was curious to see how Harrison would engage the real world with his writing. His unique eye can describe the mundane just as aptly as the fantastic, and I think the narrator’s trip to the seashore is etched into my brain, just like the last page of The Dead.  I worried at the end that the book would dissolve into meaninglessness, as all realistic novels must, because the real world does not recognize climax and denouement. Harrison sets the last scene in a pub, a banal circumstance. But just like A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium, suddenly the normal is exalted, and all the spirits at the edge of apprehension make themselves plain. The interlude in the snow that’s not snow, but in fact white rose petals falling from the sky, left me breathless.

I’m not sure where The Course of the Heart ranks with the rest of Harrison’s ouevre. My gut tells me the monumental Viriconium is still number one, as its scenes still revisit me to this day, but Course of the Heart is probably two.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

Ow.  That was a devastating layoff. For the 20th entry in 52 in 07, I’ve got a book by Umberto Eco, and not the one you’d think – Foucalt’s Pendulum struck me as a little weighty when I glanced at it a couple years ago. Queen Loana seemed more doable – it’s the story of a 50-something antique book dealer named Yambo, a man who has suffered a stroke and awoke with no memory.

Well, he’s got some stuff – everything he ever read, especially anything to do with fog, is still there. He’s got a parchment memory, remembers all the protagonists of every book he read, but his emotional memory – his wife and children, are all gone.

This book is very thin on plot, as Yambo spends a great deal of it outside the world, deep in a coma. His journey through his own memory is what we’re concerned with, and Yambo/Eco take an exhaustive tour through WW2 Italy; if this book isn’t autobiographical, I’d be shocked. Eco has assembled magazine covers, stamps, books, song lyrics, and advertisements from the era and put them in, and Yambo responds to each of them. He spends at least half the book traveling through this labyrinth of paper, and this segment seems less a story than an essay giving us the political and social climate of  Italy at the time.

The propaganda at the time was bizarre, completely different from what you’d expect. It’s actually defeatist – some selections:

“And as for death
We’ve faced it with grenades in hand
and a flower between our teeth.”

“Colonel, sir, I don’t want bread,
put some bullets in my hand,
that and these bags of sand
will be enough for me today.
Colonel, sir, I don’t want water,
give me fire’s destructive flood,
that and my heart’s own blood
will satisfy my thirst today.”

“our hearts are eager to obey,
even to our last breath.”

Eco has awesome command of Yambo’s voice, so that was interesting.  And as an acolyte in the Cult of Reading,  anything that speaks to the magic of books will intrigue me.  Queen Loana does that, and though none of Yambo’s readings are familiar to me, I still get the sentiment they stir up.

Maybe one day I’ll write a loving remembrance of Redwall.

Fog is an overriding theme, and like an object rushing at you in the fog, indistinct until the last instant, the heart of the book doesn’t become clear until almost the end.  Eco’s obvious intelligence and breadth of knowledge left me grasping at times – it’d help to have a friend who knows french and latin, I think.

All in all, a pretty satisfactory book, but as you can tell by the time it took to read it, not one that draws your inexorably through its pages.

Playing for Keeps

I read a lot of basketball writing. But nearly all of it is online material like blogs. I’ve never been particularly enchanted by newspaper’s coverage of the sport, since it feels like as the official outlet, their coverage is somehow constrained. Ditto for ESPN. Blogs, then, please me to no end – they’re the closest thing going to a journalistic counter-culture, one of the real triumphs of the internet’s democratization of public discourse. So maybe you wouldn’t expect me to pick up David Halberstam’s Playing for Keeps. But after his recent passing, I read Bill Simmon’s elegy to both the man and his work, and the way he spoke of Breaks of the Game intrigued me. Then I saw Halberstam on Charlie Rose’s show. And now I’ve read the book, and I can see why his loss was mourned.

Quite simply, the man was a top-flight journalist, with a keen sense of psychology, an endlessly readable style, and a finely honed ability to know what’s relevant to the story. Also, I think he broke a record for usage of the words “skillful” and “skillfully”.

Besides the draw of Halberstam’s own talents, the subject matter (of course), helped a lot. Playing for Keeps is an examination of Michael Jordan and his enormous impact on the world of sport. Growing up in the House of Jordan (strictly defined as the Greater Chicagoland Area anywhere between 1985-1998), I was intimately familiar with his exploits. Jordan won basketball games. That’s it. Not yet a Bears fan – or a witness to the atrocities of Tim Floyd’s reign – I wasn’t yet accustomed to mediocrity in my favorite team. So Jordan spoiled me, no doubt; to see greatness like that for years on end, I started to think maybe this is how all athletes are.

Boy, was I wrong. To think Michael Jordan anything but extraordinary, hell, even sui generis, is the height of folly. Playing For Keeps illuminates just how special MJ was, and not just because of his massive hands, spring-loaded calves, or preternatural reflexes – it was also because of his drive, passion, and as Halberstam puts it, his “competitive rage” that he became the game’s greatest.

Since I was so young, most of my memories of Jordan are strictly visual, short films of him floating through the air, hitting impossible scoops and reverse layups. I don’t think I had a conception of Jordan as a man before reading this book. It seems obvious now, but precisely the things that made Jordan so dominant as a player made him such a harsh man. The iron will lets him hit game winners – it also lets him abuse his teammates. The competitive desire lets him fight time itself to snag another ring – it also lets him lose hundreds of thousands of dollars betting of rounds of golf. Jordan seems to be an instrument, so specific and so exquisitely purposed, one that you don’t even want to see in another context.

One of the unexpected delights of the book is its age. Published in 1999, Halberstam was writing about an earlier era of the NBA, and his off-handed comments about future superstars seem quaint with our modern knowledge. For instance, Shaq was still a talented “man-child” and Kobe was “infinitely talented but unfinished”. A great number of Jordan Pretenders were yet to fall, and Penny, Allan Houston, Jerry Stackhouse, and Vince Carter were still beacons of hope. Vinsanity being named a possible Jordan heir is particularly hilarious, because while he has many of the physical tools Jordan had, he lacks his heart. And without that inner steel, we’ve seen what his game is – insubstantial, meaningless. With a chance to win the ball game, he passed to Bostjan Nachbar! VC highlights just how crucial Jordan’s psychology was to his success.

Another fascinating angle to the book that Halberstam could never have foreseen is the parallels between Michael and LeBron. More than any of those pretenders I named, LeBron seems to have a legitimate shot at taking Jordan’s throne, empty these long years. His physique suggests that God, having seen Jordan play, wondered what would happen if he threw on another 40 pounds of muscle and let him keep all the speed. And his career arc has followed much the same path – initially laboring as a supernova surrounded by 40 watt bulbs, LBJ has already had his talented PF flee (Boozer=Horace Grant). One wonders if the narrative will continue from there, and if LeBron will heed the lessons of Jordan’s saga. For instance, James has made his corporate aspirations well known. Jordan realized these same aspirations a decade ago, becoming the face of Nike and generating something in the neighborhood of 10 billion dollars in revenue for them. But Jordan had a crack team of marketers and a wizard/agent, David Falk, representing him. LeBron has assembled a couple of dudes he went to high school with.

And does this sound familiar? “Jordan was not in any way political, and he was uncomfortable with the new part of American celebrity life that demanded that its celebrities take stands on all kinds of political and social issues, qualified or not… When Harvey Gantt, an early black civil rights leader, ran against Jesse Helms, the nemesis of Carolina blacks (among many others), for a Senate seat in NC, it seemed like an easy call for someone who was black and who was still so amazing popular in the state. But Jordan would not take a stand, pointing out that Republicans buy sneakers too.”

This sheds some light on LeBron’s noncommittal on the Darfur issue.

Reading all about Jordan’s legend, I’m just not sure LeBron can become the same kind of player. On a night by night basis, he seems more comfortable as a Scottie Pippen type player, a guy who can present nightmarish matchup problems and fill the stat sheet with points, assists, rebounds, the works. LeBron hasn’t always seemed comfortable with taking the big shots, and ESPN discussed for three weeks straight his abilities as a closer. Considering his superlative physical gifts, it is vaguely disappointing every time the fourth quarter rolls around and LeBron doesn’t dominate it, because it seems like it should be so easy.

But LeBron’s showed flashes, and I think you know what game I’m about to reference: Game 5 of the ECF against the Pistons. Now that shit was Jordanesque. Faulkner once described Joyce as a genius “electrocuted by the divine fire,” and that was LeBron for that incredible game.

Then the Finals rolled around and the Cavs got steamrolled by the blandly efficient Spurs. LeBron at no point looked like a man who simply refused to lose, as Jordan did in all the big games.

But LeBron is still young – Jordan didn’t win his first title until he was 28, so if that’s the benchmark, LBJ has got another six years to climb that mountain. What if it never happens, though? What then?

Hmm…

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

In my Arts Review class, we’ve spent a lot of time reading about and discussing the question: “What is art?” While I think the whole debate is about as useful as shooting yourself in the foot, I did come across one definition that I enjoyed. Art, this person (who I can’t be bothered to recall the name of) said, is an artist’s expression that is so uniquely and specifically their own.

If we use this as a guideline, Jose Saramago is one of the great artists of our time. That gold-leaf “Nobel Prize Winner” stamp on all his book covers seem to back this up. His style is truly inimitable. Just the look of the text on the page is unlike anything else I’ve seen. For one thing, there are no quotation marks of any sort. Just words, periods, commas, and maybe an em dash once in a blue moon. Paragraphs will run for four, five pages, and in total there can’t be more than 200 paragraphs in the book.

Just by looking at the book, you’d be tempted to call it stream of consciousness writing. You’d be wrong. It’s true, that if you took all 377 pages and laid them out, top to bottom, you’d have a dense river of unbroken black text stretching about 220 feet; but Saramago never penetrates his character’s consciousnesses. There are no internal monologues, just classic storytelling from a distance, provided by an original narrator.

This narrator is the novel’s greatest strength. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ is essentially fan fiction, a retelling of Jesus’s life by somebody who didn’t “create the IP”, if you’ll forgive the term. What’s delightful about Gospel’s narrator is the fact that it’s Saramago himself: an old, wry, possibly atheist, modern Portuguese man. After spending 400 pages in his company, it feels natural to call him Jose. He’s a deft guide through the tale, and takes plenty of asides to address the readers or point out the ironies as he relates the action. It might be distracting from a lesser writer, but Jose’s observations are so on point it’s uncanny.

Jose also has his own take on Jesus’s life. Like with any satire, it helps to be familiar with the source material. In this case, I’m pretty ignorant, so some of the “inside jokes” went over my head. But the stuff that I was familiar with, and knew was being recast, really impressed me – if you check out the book, you’ll know what I mean when you get to Judas Iscariot.

Like I said, I don’t know much about this stuff, having never read The Bible. So I started drawing comparison between Gospel and some other similar works. The Passion of the Christ came to mind immediately, just because the two are so very different. Gibson’s Christianity is masochistic, flagellant – you can almost feel the joy he takes from showing Jesus Christ getting the Christ beaten out of him. Saramago’s take is infinitely more human and infinitely more engaging. Jesus is not punching bag – he’s a man, and instead of focusing on The Passion (which only receives two or three pages of description), he gives us the entire span of Jesus’s existence. And even then, it’s Joseph who dominates the first part of the book.

The book starts off strange. Saramago realistically portrays a society two thousand years old, and it’s jarring at first. The squalor that Mary and Joseph live in, the starkness of their existence. It is so far removed from our frame of reference as to seem alien. We spend the first 50 or so pages getting ground in the culture and customs of the time – the frequent thanksgivings, the outrageous misogyny – and then it fades into the background, the scene established. Before it does, we see Joseph moving through this world, his visits to Jerusalem, etc.

Jesus is born a cave, with the manger and everything. By the way, I clarified my definition of manger to: “trough to feed livestock from”. I think my prior definition was “place to put baby Jesus”. Since Jesus is in a cave and not the town proper, he’s lucky enough to avoid The Massacre of Innocents. Unfortunately, his father Joseph could have done something to prevent the slaughter, and is from there on out a marked man. When Joseph meets his end, I was taken aback. Here we were, happily following along this carpenter, and then he’s crucified, all of a sudden.

But I suppose you have to throw the narrative over to the title character at some point. Jesus’s disputes with his family and subsequent maturation is awesome to read, and here the story transforms a bit. The narrative voice takes front stage, as seen here:

“When critics discuss the rules of effective narration, they insist that important encounters, in fiction as in life, be interspersed with others of no importance, so that the hero of the story does not find himself transformed into an exceptional being to whom nothing ordinary ever happens… The woman carrying a child in her arms, whom we deliberately planted there to fill in the story, had not been license enough.”

I suppose your enjoyment of this kind of thing will be directly proportional to your enjoyment of metafiction – but I found myself smiling at a lot of it.

Another element I was pleased with was Saramago’s portrayal of the Devil. This was my big complaint with The Testament of Gideon Mack. First off, Saramago’s Devil actually goes by Pastor, and by the end of the book he’s a far more sympathetic character than God. He tends to the largest flock of sheep and goats in all of Israel, and he never kills one of his flock unless it’s sick and ailing. He sells no paschal lambs, and turns no profits. He just wanders with the flock, subsisting on their milk and cheese, and living out in the open. Jesus learns plenty from Pastor, though he is eventually expelled and told that “[he] has learned nothing”. This is probably why the book generated so much controversy and is described as irreverent – God’s a total dick, and Satan is the only one who gives a damn about man’s problems.

Like I said earlier, a lot of the the book’s enjoyment comes from the perceptual twists Saramago puts into Jesus’s story. Lazaraus’s death is easily the most poignant moment in the whole book, and Judas’s is a close second. Pontius Pilate’s sentencing of Jesus takes on a whole new light, and even the crucifixion has a different meaning. And it’s all so much richer than the official dogma.

More to say, but it took me 3 weeks to finish this one, and I’ve got to get moving on Only Revolutions.
Another review of the book, this one focused on plot.

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

The hobo used to be seen as freedom incarnate, a happy wanderer free of a job, family, obligations – just him and the rails, with a bindle and a begging cup. To the middle class drudges thrall to the 9-5, this vagrant seemed to living life as it was intended, on one’s own schedule without some asshole in a tie telling you what to do.

Of course, that’s a fairy tale, ridiculous as the one which told immigrants that American streets were all paved with gold. Nick Flynn has seen the reality of the destitute, and knows the terrible prisons they inhabit.

Prisons of money, alcohol, and blood. Some people say they don’t need money to be happy. That’s true to a point – but when you can’t afford food or clothes, you’re damn right you need money. Money determines our sphere of action, the possiblities available to us; some respectable people (whose grandfather probably fucked somebody over) could hop on their private Gulfstream and take a long weekend in Monte Carlo. The character’s in Flynn’s book cash their disability checks and stock up on booze, and when it runs dry half way through the month they go begging to get some more.

But I don’t mean to stand on a soapbox and decry the evils of this modern world, that so many should be homeless and marginalized – and neither does Flynn. This is a book about his father, and the blurb says it “tells the story of the trajectory that led Nick and his father onto the streets, into that shelter, and finally to each other.” Trajectory – I think that’s a fascinating word choice. This isn’t a story about facts (Nick’s dad is a pathological liar) but rather about the slow spiral of those circling the drain.

Nick’s father is one of these. He’s crippled by his alcoholism, and if you’re one of those who thinks alcoholism is a weakness of character rather than a disease, Suck City might disabuse you of that notion. It’s incredible to watch this little man destroy anything and everything he ever had in service to his booze. He left his wife with their two kids, and never really seems to give a damn about any of their existences.

Nick, though he never knew his father as a boy, is terrified that he’ll become him – that the curse of his genes will suck him inexorably into that doomed trajectory, fated to die in the streets because he shares a name with a world-class fuckup. This is the prison of blood, the fact that everything about you is predetermined by 23 chromosomes. One can see a self-fulfilling prophecy take shape as Nick leads a wild youth, doing drugs and screwing up as badly as his old man, and it all seem desperately unfair. Here is a boy raised poor, with a tendency towards addiction, an absent father (whose surrogates are frightening: one, a Vietnam vet, sits down Nick and his brother and shows him a photo album of his time in ‘Nam, corpses and destruction), and a struggling mother.

With all of these influences, why wouldn’t Nick become his father? Nick’s dad, Jonathan, has all sorts of delusions of grandeur. Jonathan thinks himself the next Dostoevsky, and talks constantly of his classic in the making, how he’s holding out on the publishers until they give him a two million dollar advance. He always indentifies himself as a poet and a writer, but it seems more a ruse to attract women than anything. His oft-mentioned novel never seems to materialize, and Jonathan uses the mere idea of it as a buoy.

It’s immensely satisfying to see that Nick becomes the poet his father always claimed he was. For all his bullshit about how he’s the scribe, it’s Nick who simply does it. The book is an easy read, and Flynn’s voice is wry and sometimes wise.

Examples:

“Many fathers are gone. Some leave, some are left. Some return, unknown and hungry. Only the dog remembers.”

“Who doesn’t want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?”

Suck City is broken into easily digestible chapters, most no more than a few pages. Some dance through the Flynn family chronology, some in Nick’s POV and some in Jon’s. Others are a little more experimental, and these are delightful. Flynn has published a few books of poetry, and his command of meter and rythm allow him to pull of a chapter I could never even attempt. It’s a night out drinking, all in the lexicon of the drunk. It’s easier to show a sample than explain:

“The usual I say. Blood of Christ I say. Essence. Spirit. Medicine. A hint. A taste. A bump. A snort. I say top shelf.”

On and on like that, for four pages. It’s impressive and mesmerizing, something those massive lists usually aren’t.

Another chapter, one that I think would remind me of Beckett (had I read any of his stuff), is a mini play featuring 5 Salvation Army Santas and 3 Daughters. It’s absurd and abstruse, and I was lapping it up.

Nick’s father claimed to know Vonnegut. Who knows if it’s true or not. But after Vonnegut died, I read an interview wherein he said you should never try and write about your father. What’s miraculous about Suck City is that Flynn’s managed to do it, perhaps by attacking the problem obliquely – he’s written a book about himself. But this necessarily becomes a book about his father, because the two are one and the same. A Zen master he sees tells him that “my body is the continuation of my father’s body.”

Not only does Flynn ignore Vonnegut’s dictum, but he also manages another feat: to write honestly about the self. A coup.

The Collector

Subtitle: 52 in 07′s forgotten entry.

I read this one all the way back in March, I believe, between Dominion and Stones of Summer. I neglected to write it up then, and so I’m doing it now for completeness’s sake.

John Fowles got a life-time pass from me after The Magus. It could be revealed that he wrote The Da Vinci code, and I still wouldn’t hold it against him. The Magus stunned me, time and again, and it’s one of my favorite books, if not the favorite. Gorgeous writing, lushly imagined scenarios, and a plot that felt like it was aimed directly at me.

I could gush like that for longer, but I just want to establish that Fowles is a hell of a writer. Naturally, you’re hesitant whenever you come across a second effort (technically a first – the Collector was Fowle’s debut novel) by someone like that – what if this one can’t live up to your fond memories of the first? Considering the Magus’s enormous impact on me, The Collector had to be near-perfect to compare.

The story feels like it’s been done a thousand times, but no other examples come to mind – perhaps that’s an indication that Fowles has hit on a fundamental theme. In brief, Ferdinand Clegg, a lonely lepidopterist who wins at the pools (British lottery) decides to abduct beautiful arts student Miranda and imprison her in a basement cell he’s fashioned with the winnings. He’s loved her from afar and stalked her for some time, and he imagines that she’ll fall for him once she has no other choice.

It’s simple and beautifully executed, and hits on themes of power, isolation, and (this being a British book) class. Miranda and Clegg truly are polar opposites – she’s refined, upper class, and has the world figured out. Clegg’s a lowly clerk, and desperately sad, even if he can’t recognize it. He seems to operate on principles and emotions so unnatural to Miranda as to seem alien, some malicious entity masquerading as a man. A favorite line: “He’s not human; he’s an empty space disguised as a human.”

And Clegg really is despicable – the injustice of Miranda’s imprisonment is so flagrant, yet he’s blind to it. This makes him even more chilling; but Fowles fully realizes his sociopath, and his psychology becomes clear to us through brilliant use of voice and internal monologues. And as we’re drawn deeper into the gray voice of Clegg, we begin to understand him. As I said in my review of Finn, with “evil” characters, the author has a serious challenge ahead of him if he wants the character to carry the story. Fowles being Fowles, he pulls it off like nobody I’ve ever seen before.

Interspersed with Clegg’s chapters are selections from Miranda’s secret diaries. These are a welcome, often beautiful, respite from the dreariness of Clegg and his existence. Thinking back on the character five months later, Miranda seems to me a bird. Of course, considering Clegg’s hobby, she could just as easily be represented as a butterfly, but that’s a little facile. Either way, her voice is so much lighter and hopeful than Clegg’s, who’s a clod in every way. It’s Miranda’s diary where Fowles allows himself to approach the beauty of The Magus – had I the book, I’d hit you with half a dozen passages.

The disparity of these two voices is extraordinary, and the character’s interactions are equally fascinating. I can’t go too much into this for fear of spoilers, but there’s a moment where the cores of each character are laid bare, and from these few actions we can extrapolate everything about them, worlds and galaxies of personality in one heartbreaking scene.

In any event, Miranda is a deep character in her own right, and not just a lens to view Clegg’s madness. I imagine it was a challenge to keep Miranda from becoming simply Clegg’s antithesis, a prop to highlight and further our understanding of her captor.

Again, the spoilers thing kinda crimps any further review, but as I glance over what I’ve written so far, it’s obvious Fowles got me again. Strongly recommended.