Author Archive
According to anthropologist Piers Vitebsky, for thousands of years of human history, reindeer were a central means of life. Entire cultures evolved around the hunting and/or raising of them. In Siberia, native tribes managed to domesticate reindeer, much in the manner of cattle and horses. The reindeer provided these tribes with meat, clothing, transportation, and spiritual access. Vitebsky’s The Reindeer People paints a lovely portrait of one of these tribes, the Eveny, and their struggle to maintain the vestiges of a beautiful but doomed culture, ravaged by change and decades of state oppression.
Vitebsky’s Eveny are resourceful in many ways. For thousands of years, they’ve managed to live in one of the most inhospitable (for large parts of the year, the temperature is far below zero) and isolated places on earth. Though they have survived, a great deal of their cultural resilience has been lost, first whittled away by centuries of Tsarist mistreatment, then seriously eroded by a years of Soviet oppression. The Soviets imposed on the originally nomadic Eveny a more industrial, factory style of reindeer raising centered on remote villages. While the Soviet empire lasted, it did a good job of supplying these villages with material goods, transportation, and veterinary help. The Eveny grew dependent on this largess, forgetting many of their more ancient ways. Unfortunately, with the demise of the Soviet Union, the supplies suddenly disappeared, leaving the Eveny in the lurch.
Vitebsky takes great pains to faithfully capture the last, fading echoes of an ancient and mysterious culture. But I occasionally questioned to what extent he was embroidering his picture of the Eveny’s culture. As it is, his account provides a rich and fascinating picture of the Eveny’s shamanic/animist religious beliefs, their social mores (Eveny social interaction is governed by a “discretion in the face of the mystery of another human being’s existence”), and their rather unique and complex conception of animals. This is not a dry, academic book; Vitebsky presents a culture by introducing the reader to a community of individuals who he tracks over time in an at times soap-opera like fashion. By turns lyrical, learned, angry and funny, this wonder-filled book took me out of my world and broadened it.
February 2nd, 2008
Jim - South Madison
Jennifer Egan’s novel, The Keep, is a novel within a novel within a novel. The novel at the center is an attempt to update the old, early 19th century gothic novel. Which is a tall order, considering that these novels were never terribly plausible in their original form. If memory serves, they typically featured wayward daughters defiantly seeking to elope with true loves against the wishes of tyrannical fathers. I remember pages and pages of escape scenes, chases through tunnels, surprise reunions with mothers/brothers/cousins the daughter had presumed dead, and marriages based on true love and in defiance of the father.
Kind of hard to update? It may be that Egan thought so since her update strays quite some distance from these plot elements. Her faux gothic story involves cousins Howard and Danny whose shared outsider status forges a strong childhood bond between them. That bond is ruptured when Danny does something nasty and life-threatening to Howard to gain the approval of a cool cousin. Years later, Danny is down on his luck and in need of refuge. Having nowhere else to turn, Danny accepts Howard’s offer to help him turn a mysterious old castle in a remote corner of Eastern Europe into a resort. Danny suspects Howard’s motivation and fears he’s falling into a trap. But with few options he accepts.
There is no father-daughter combat, no marriage plot. However, there is a castle, a mysterious princess in a tower, horrific acts of punishment and revenge, and lots of tunnels. Like many old gothic novels, this story is about confinement: what does it mean, how can it be constituted? Which is not surprising because, as the reader learns early on, the Howard/Danny story is being written by a lifer, Ray, taking a creative writing class. Although Ray started the class to get out of his cell a couple of hours a week, he soon uses the class and the writing as a possible bridge to the woman teaching the class.
Egan’s book is a thoughtful exploration of the uses of stories, the way they can serve, reflect, and answer to the needs and circumstances of the teller. That being said, The Keep does sometimes come off as a bit of a creative writing exercise gone amok. I got the feeling that the reader is supposed to find the occasional clumsy plotting and purple prose in Ray’s telling comic. I think Egan is offering it as a parody of the type of stuff churned out in creative writing classes. However, she fails to the extent that Ray is a remarkably good story teller. His style has a refreshing honesty, simplicity and engaging conversational quality to it. Sure, there is some clumsy writing, obtrusive authorial intrusions, and over the top locutions in Ray’s telling; however, it doesn’t come off as the work of an amateur. While it is interesting to go ‘behind the scenes’ and see the ways Ray has reworked the elements of his life into his story, it is the story he is telling that ultimately drove my interest. A quick, suspensful and entertaining read.
January 14th, 2008
Jim - South Madison
Poet Gabriel Fried describes riding on a ferris wheel in one’s small, rural hometown as offering “the feel of dough and the pleasures of ascenscion.” His prize winning collection, Making the New Lamb Take, delivers in a similar fashion.
The biblical, classical and pastoral imagery and stories girding many of the poems have been often told and used. Oh no, another poem featuring the Eurydice/Orpheus story? This collection has three good ones, offering vantage points on the story that were new to me.
Stylistically conventional, the poetry is full of rhyme and alliteration; while he employs end-rhymes sparingly, nearly every other line features an internal one. Fried delights in assonance. In many cases, he resorts to quiet and simple rhymes that are barely there, but when consciously noted, please and induce smiles.
Cloaked in this bread of tradition (and bread’s a good thing in my book), Fried’s poems take sudden and strange turns delivering the reader to new ground and perspective. Or should that be new depths? His poems have a vortex-like effect: each line propelling you down to the one below it till you find yourself at poem’s end, a bit breathless and asking “what have I just heard?”
Fried’s poems speak to the experience of mourning and hope. The voice in many seems to be struggling to recall a marvelous vision or knowledge that, like a half-remembered dream, seems to only decay and grow uncertain with the effort of recall. Conversely, others express a yearning or hope based on the hunch that our present conceptions of reality are as the ant’s to our own.
I would be hard-presseded to abstract in a line or two the thoughts and emotions evoked by many of the poems in this promising debut collection. Instead, one is best left with the poems themselves as precise evidence of the emotion/thought they evince. A collection that tantalizes, frustrates and fosters attention.
November 14th, 2007
Jim - South Madison
In Black Swan Green, novelist David Mitchell tries to tell a child’s story using a child’s logic, language and point of view. The adult novelist David Mitchell is definitely present in the voice of his thirteen-year-old narrator, Jason Taylor, as he relates a years worth of events dominated by the disintegration of his parents marriage. At times, Jason seems a bit too sophisticated for his age. Yet, to the extent I can remember the way a thirteen-year-old boy sees and talks about things, Mitchell’s done a remarkable act of ventriloquism.
Jason’s story is a universal one: he is trying to find his voice and the courage to use it. His task is complicated by a stammer which leaves him a bit bullied and an outsider. However, his stammer delivers a gift. To hide it, on a daily basis, Jason’s forced to quickly find synonyms and locutions so as to avoid words beginning with certain letters. This habit gives him a facility with words, a poet’s tongue.
Like many teen outsiders, he’s also blessed with an imagination. His most prosaic accounts of his daily life will suddenly veer off into beautiful and quite original flights of language. On the other hand, his poetic description of a woods can be suddenly interrupted by his noting the brand of gum someone is chewing.
Jason’s story-telling style is what makes this book interesting. Driven both by a fascination with the world and a contrary wish to escape it, Jason tends toward the spectacular, the unusual and the gross when relating the events of his days. He very much wants your attention.
This desire of his to engage his listener shapes the novel. As composed by Mitchell, it is a series of episodic stories, any one of which might almost serve as a stand-alone short story but for Jason’s telling. Although the central story-thread of any chapter is normally resolved by chapters end, in the process of telling it, Jason will introduce a whole bunch of little, tiny stories along the way. Many of these go entirely unresolved at a chapters end with Jason only providing closure on them indirectly and in passing, in the course of relating another story much further on.
He has an age-related ability to wander about a story. He is quick to drop a spectacle/adventure if a new one comes to mind. And, when reality grows unredeemably mundane, his imagination comes to the fore: without notice, commonplace stories will suddenly take sudden and unannounced narrative turns imported from fairy tales and horror movies. The novel explores the ways people use stories, and how they serve and fail us.
The book is set in England during the year 1983 and is replete with an astonishing amount of detail likely to evoke intense nostalgia for folks who grew up in that time and place as well as for anglophiles who might have done so in a vicarious fashion. However, this is a universal ‘portrait-of-the artist’ story that is touching and engaging. And, there are lines and paragraphs you will take away as poems.
October 22nd, 2007
Jim - South Madison
Sarah at Alicia Ashman recently mentioned feeling alone in her liking of Jim Crace. Her post reminded me how much I too have enjoyed his work and prompted me to discover that he has new novel, The Pesthouse.
A big part of The Pesthouse is its setting in a future
America. After catastrophes specified and unspecified, it is a decidedly primitive place: there appear to be no cars, no communication systems, no science or medicine. A harsh and lawless place, the majority of this America’s woebegone inhabitants are in the process of picking up stakes and heading East. Pathetic and near hopeless, they mindlessly stream toward the ocean and sailing ships, neither of which they’ve ever seen (and can hardly imagine). In reality, nobody seems quite sure where they are going, other than East, but they feel the time’s come to flee. Vivid and detailed, the setting of this novel is worth the price of admission; it serves the English Crace as a forum from which he casts a caustic eye on modern America and the ideas and myths that have shaped it.
However, it is the love story at the center of the novel that won my heart. Among the desperate stream of would-be emigrants are two comically shy, gentle and sheltered individuals: the literally giant mama’s boy Franklin who grew up in the sticks of this stickish America and the radically bereft and mortally ill Margaret who heretofore has led a sheltered life in a clannish community.
Compelled by circumstance, having lost everything and everyone close to them and confronted by a world for which they feel grievously ill-suited, the two turn to each other as a last resort. Unable to imagine another way forward, they find themselves ‘drawn’ into the desperate Eastward tide of emigrants. As they confront harrowing adventures on their journey East, toward a land of dreams both are too smart to really believe in, they create/find a home with each other.
I came to this book fresh after reading Cormac McCarthy’s dark and moving novel, The Road. The two novels share a remarkable amount in terms of story and theme. One can only wonder if the two were aware that they were writing such similar stories at the same time. Someone, somewhere, should see if the two would review the other’s novel.
Ultimately, the two books are very different in how they treat their material and the differences favor Crace. McCarthy’s book felt like an elegy. Crace’s book is marked by humor and compassion. It offers pertinent reflections and ideas. It offers hope.
June 4th, 2007
Jim - South Madison
I turned to SPY The Funny Years, a history of the satire 
magazine SPY, just to glance at it and kill a little time. I ended up reading this coffee-table tome from cover to cover.
SPY magazine was a particular favorite of mine during its heyday in the late eighties. It rightfully prided itself on being a literate, smart, funny, take-no-prisoners satire/investigative magazine with a penchant for pranks. It was celebrity obsessed, New York focused, information packed, from time to time obsessively fascinated by minor figures and minutae, but in the end, it usually offered a sharp-eyed perspective on social trends and mores. No social sphere was exempt from SPY’s gaze; publishing, academic, art world, and political elites all took a riddling.
According to one of SPY’s founding editors, Graydon Carter (now chief editor at Vanity Fair), SPY was intended as a cross between the very early New Yorker and National Lampoon (the original home of SPY’s other founding editor, Kurt Anderson). It was unique in that it was a humor magazine that meant to be more than just funny; it made news, and as with all great satire, fostered introspection.
I turned to this history in hopes of finding fondly remembered articles and comics from the magazine. There is a great deal of original material from the magazine interwoven throughout the book. However, as the title indicates, this truly is a history of the magazine as opposed to an anthology. There needs to be an anthology. It is the original material from the magazine that really make this book worth checking out.
However, the history offered here is fairly engaging and sadly instructive. Written by longtime SPY writer George Kalogerakis, it is funny, self-obsessed and self-mocking, and fascinated with absurdity in the style that marked much of the magazine’s articles. It provides an interesting look into the world of magazine publishing in America.
Largely financed by a bevy of relatively small investors, in its early years SPY had remarkable editorial independence. Kalogerakis’ history is a sad one telling of how time and financial necessities gradually robbed it of much of this independence and much of the satiric spirit that distinguished the magazine at the outset.
May 14th, 2007
Jim - South Madison