Not a favorite, but an interesting exercise in point of view. A young grad student taken up by a somewhat sinister visiting professor and his slinky, Not a favorite, but an interesting exercise in point of view. A young grad student taken up by a somewhat sinister visiting professor and his slinky, enigmatic French girlfriend seems like it would be an engaging story, but it soon morphs and morphs and morphs again. It goes from the 20 year old, who has a brief affair with the enigmatic girlfriend in the absence of the professor, who has offered him the money to create a literary magazine and staff it, and observes a crime committed by the professor which indicates he may be more than just a professor. The professor flees the country, the student reports the crime and vows revenge--though guilty he did not report earlier.
Then we switch to the story being a manuscript (which I hate, like a novel all having been a dream), that the story we've just seen is the first chapter. There's the new point of view character, an old school acquaintance of the original grad student, who receives the manuscript and learns more about the man's lurid former life in 1967, the attempt of the student to bring the former mentor down.
chapters are dealt out, and then one of the characters described in the book comes to be point of view in the last part of the story. We toggle between first and third, real time and the manuscript, and to my mind each switch drains more energy from the story, renders each part less believable. It's more a game than a novel, and it ends quite abruptly, rather shaggy-dog-like. But for those who like that kind of thing, there is much here to like. ...more
This was a beautiful, lush treatment in a slim volume of the fortunes of Prince Fabrizio Salina, the head of an old Sicilian family, at the time of ItThis was a beautiful, lush treatment in a slim volume of the fortunes of Prince Fabrizio Salina, the head of an old Sicilian family, at the time of Italian Unification. It is less about Unification than the very personal knife edge of old aristocracy in the face of great historic changes. The first chapter delineates the patriarch, his physicality--big, vigorous, imposing--his attitudes--surprisingly generous and both tradition-preserving and open to the present, and the wants and desires of such an outsized character. Its description of Sicily and its landscape and the culture that derived from it is wise and deep, perceiving a special relationship with entropy and death, where its resistance to improvement comes from,
The great event of the book is not Garibaldi and Unification so much as the rashness of the beloved nephew of the Prince to fall in love not with the Princes' proud daughter as with a village beauty, daughter of an upstart merchant who has managed to buy his own palace and insinuate himself into regional politics--in other words, the future. This love affair has deep metaphorical meaning, but also the physical/emotional specifics and fallout--the daughter turned forever after bitter and haughty by the nephew's choice.
But what we read here is about a class forever vanished, and their attitudes and estates and the values they held dear, which I found absolutely captivating. Here's a description of the ceiling in one of the rooms, as the family says their morning rosary below, which begins the book, the first chapter being devoted to a single day in the life of the Prince, and this is the morning.:
"The divinities frescoed on the ceiling awoke. The roots of Tritons and Dryads, hurtling across from ill and sea amid clouds of cyclamen pink toward a transfigured Conca d'Oro [name of the hills encircling Palermo] and bent on glorifying the House of Salina, seemed suddenly so overwhelmed with exaltation as to discard the most elementary rules of perspective; meanwhile the major gods and goddesses, the Princes among gods, thunderous Jove and frowning Mars and languid Venus, had already preceded the mob of minor dieties and were amiably supporting the blue armorial shield of the Leopard. They knew that for the next twenty-three and half hours they would be lords of the villa once again. On the walls the monkeys went back to pulling faces at the cockatoos."
Politics of a myriad types, sexuality, dreaming, monarchism, regionalism, it's all here, but embodied in a huge personality of the Leopard.
My volume has a worthless 34 page introduction by a family member about the manuscript itself which the reader should completely ignore and just dive in. ...more
Read as a young person, this book left a lasting impression on me. One of I'd say the twenty most influential books I read as a young adult. Searing aRead as a young person, this book left a lasting impression on me. One of I'd say the twenty most influential books I read as a young adult. Searing and startling, the story of an experiment which holds out extreme hope for a mentally disabled man--told in diary entries. Science fiction but more on the psychological end. Incredibly moving. I never liked the title--but what are you going to do. Every young adult should read. ...more
An absolutely delightful reference book for the devoted reader, this is more than a simple alphabetical-by-author compendium of all the (noteworthy) AAn absolutely delightful reference book for the devoted reader, this is more than a simple alphabetical-by-author compendium of all the (noteworthy) American books published in 1925--it incorporates major figures who contributed to the culture of the times like Duke Ellington and Charlie Chaplin with his film The Gold Rush, but also includes cultural elements like "Colonization" and "Emile Coue, Normalcy and The Crowd", as well as the important journals published in that year and the major news items.
But the most wonderful thing about 1925: A Literary Encyclopedia is the voice of our Virgil, Tom Lutz, founder of the Los Angeles Review of Books--a most charming and skilled reader, and it's one of the book's great pleasures just to read his witty and insightful commentary. I discovered so many books and authors I never heard of and want to read, as well as fascinating entries of books I probably will never read, but am happy to know of their existence. And simply enjoyed Lutz's voice on this most entertaining expedition.
The entries vary in length from a paragraph to several pages, and include books by writers we know well but aren't acquainted with the entry they published in 1925 (for example, Edith Wharton's The Mother's Recompense--which I went right out and bought), as well as major novels published at the pinnacle of that writer's career (Gertrude Stein's Making of Americans, Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Dreiser's An American Tragedy.).
I enjoyed discovering how that year took a sample of writers in a great cross section of career timelines--some at the very beginning of their careers (a 26 year old William Faulkner's New Orleans Sketches) alongside others one thought belonged to an earlier time but were still publishing (Joseph Conrad's Hearsay, Suspense, Laughing Anne--which was actually published the year following his death in 1924.)
There are novels, biographies, histories, memoirs, it's a treasury of culture pinned at that specific year for reasons the author gives in the introduction--post WW1, post the recession of 1924 when publishers held back books and then brought them out in the bull market of '25. TS Eliot's first Collected Poems came out that year, as did Alan Locke's anthology The New Negro, heralding the Harlem Renaissance. Anita Loos' fabulous sex comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes jostles with Willa Cather and her Professor's House, which leads to a general discussion of her work.
This would be a great gift for the reader for Christmas--not a. novel to be devoured and left behind, but a book to be taken out and browsed through many an evening, and opening doors we didn't even know were there. Bravo Tom Lutz!...more
I listened to this book, and I think a good deal of my pleasure in reading was the texture and cadences and burr-y quality of Jong-Fast's vocal perforI listened to this book, and I think a good deal of my pleasure in reading was the texture and cadences and burr-y quality of Jong-Fast's vocal performance. I just loved her voice. In memoir, sometimes the author's voice can add such a dimension, a certain incredible flavor that might not actually be on the page, I'm not sure. But my pleasure was my pleasure and so the high rating. [note: looking at a copy of the book, yes, the voice is absolutely there on the page]
As a writer myself, with a daughter, as well as a daughter with an accomplished and not always encouraging mother, and having had a nodding-acquaintance with Erica Jong as well has having read several of her books, I processed this story through many levels and mirrors. There are meditations on the nature of fame--extremely well-done, and from a personal point of view--the difficulty of being raised (or not raised) by a glamorous but narcissistic parent, the reassessment of a stepfather in the light of maturity, Erica's unacknowledged alcoholism through the lens of author's sobriety, the complexity of the author's relationship to a difficult, wonderful, weird, expansive, neglectful mother.
As Erica begins to exhibit signs of dementia, the author finds herself both responsible for a woman who has been highly problematic in her life and yet whom she has loved excessively--at the same time her husband's pancreatic cancer is discovered. Juggling young and then teenaged children, her husband's diagnosis, and her mother's increasing difficulty, Jong-Fast moves back and forth in time to detail her own nanny-raised childhood, her addiction and sobriety, and--fascinating--her father's own in many ways parallel struggle, having been raised in an achievement oriented family dominated by his father, the novelist Howard Fast.
Like many people, I have a couple of different editions of Tao Te Ching--one a sort of coffee-table-ish version illustrated with beautiful black and wLike many people, I have a couple of different editions of Tao Te Ching--one a sort of coffee-table-ish version illustrated with beautiful black and white photographs and calligraphy, (translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English) published by Vintage/Random House circa 1972, bought by me as a high school student, the other a pocketsized version suitable for the backpacking Taoist, "The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu" (translated by Witter Banner) in a 1962 Capricorn Books edition--I can imagine Japhy Ryder in Kerouac's Dharma Bums carrying this edition.
But Master Wayson Liao, whose Tai Chi school in Chicago is one of the best and who was trained in traditional taoist practice by a wandering monk in China during his teen years, a monk very like Lao Tzu himself, has decided to share the wisdom of that training with the public--not in a straight translation, or essays, but in the form of a novel which reads wonderfully well.
The novel concerns the visit by Lao Tzu to one Prince KuWu in a border city, threatened by barbarians, where he agrees to spend nine nights. On each night, the Prince is allowed to ask nine questions-- hence the 81 traditional "chapters" of the Tao Te Ching. But it is a fully developed novel with suspense and humor and crime and the problem of princes, the whimsical charm of the great sage, and is just a delightful read as well as providing terrific context (historical/social) for the wisdom and the reception of Lao Tzu and his ideas. If you enjoyed the Tale of Genji, you will fall right into this.
The traditional sayings of the Tao Te Ching are numbered and highlighted within the novel, so when you read the actual line translations by Master Liao at the end of the book, it's easy to flip back and see how they were presented in the novel. Also the original Chinese is included, for those who can benefit from that, as well as an interview with Master Liao concerning the background and writing of the book, and a section explicating the terms Lao Tzu uses, including the symbols for those terms--(useful in case anybody wants to practice calligraphy or get a tattoo).
My understanding of the Tao--not the religion of "Taoism" which the author doesn't really care for, (thinks it's a distortion to 'worship' the Tao or worse, Lao Tzu)--has expanded tremendously since reading this and it's already affected the way I see the world, especially the idea of non-action, which was always confusing for me before, and the workings of Tao and Te (the inner bit of Tao we all have). I had expected a wise and knowledgeable treatment of the Tao Te Ching, but was surprised that someone I only know as a great tai chi teacher turned out to be such a good writer!
Come for the story, leave with a better sense of the Tao....more
This was a purely beautiful experience--which I happened to listen to on audio, slowing me down, stretching out this small intensely human novel over This was a purely beautiful experience--which I happened to listen to on audio, slowing me down, stretching out this small intensely human novel over the course of a couple of weeks--exquisitely read, and appropriately, by a male Irish actor Eanna Hardwicke. I have never read a Sally Rooney novel, and this was an absolute pleasure from beginning to end, one of those books where you keep thinking, 'gosh this is good!' It's the story of two estranged brothers, ten years apart in age--Peter, 32, a successful attorney who we see is actually not the together top of the world guy he seems to be, and Ivan, 22, a shy, awkward chess master who falls into a tender relationship with a woman of 36, Margaret, who works at a small town arts center sponsoring a chess exhibition. These are the point of view characters, and they're all deeply internal. The actual dialogue is not punctuated, and I love sometimes the inarticulateness of the characters, when their inner lives are so rich and clear. There are two other puzzle pieces- Peter's great love, Silvia, who was critically injured in a car accident, and Naomi, a 23 year old playgirl he is also in love with. The recent death of Peter and Ivan's father sets the action in motion, leaving both men adrift and on an emotional collision course.
Now I'll have to buy a physical copy so I can reread all those exquisite sentences--the minimalist storytelling is nevertheless rich with a casual telling detail, little grace notes, perfect observations. A stunner....more
Loading...
