The Daily Sabbatical

A lot has been said about this book and this writer: it was runner up for the NBA, and he’s received a MacArthur grant and has been compared to Nabokov more times than Nabokov.  So, I’m sorta just adding my voice to the choir: this is a really good novel.  It combines an adventure story, a buddy novel, a historical fiction, and a potent reflection on immigration to the land of the allegedly free.

The book flows from the project and ambition of it’s narrator, Vladimir Brik: a Bosnian/American transplant who wants to write a novel based on a true (in the fiction) story about a Jewish immigrant named Lazarus who in the early 20th century escapes the Russian pogroms only to be shot by a Chicago chief of police.  In pursuit of the facts, our narrator travels to Eastern Europe with his childhood friend Rora, who is, in my humble, the real star of the novel.  Rora’s anecdotes, jokes, and suspiciously elegant personality keep alive a novel that is involved, at least ostensibly, with the past.  The Lazarus Project switches from telling the story of the protagonist of Brik’s novel, to telling the story of Brik and Rora’s trip, to telling the story of Rora’s involvement in the intricate cloaking and daggering of war ravaged Sarajevo.  As a result, it keeps the reader’s interest hooked–I read it in a few sittings–but at the same time has much to say about the role of stories and fictions in helping us process our tragedies, the fragility and the questionable genuineness of the “American Promise”, and the evanescent quality of cultural identity.  Quite a feat.

Despite my admiration for the book and for Hemon, I have to get something off my chest: the comparisons to Nabokov are ridiculous.  I’ve read almost everything the master wrote, much of it more than once, and I just don’t see the comparison.  I hate to contradict James Wood, who sounds on the cover as if he prefers Hemon to Nabokov, but one of these guys is a good story-teller with an insightful, reflective bent, the other is a literary magician.  More apt is the frequent comparison to W.G. Sebold.  It’s an easy comparison in some ways, since LP and most of Sebolds books share the trick of having pictures interjected into the text to lend a sense of authenticity and character, but there is more to it.  Both Sebold and Hemon are interested in roots and journeys to sniff out the origins of culture and person.  Still, there’s something crystalline about Sebold’s prose that is lacking in Hemon.  Hemon learned English, growing up a Ukranian transplanted to Bosnia, only relatively recently, and while it is unfair to say it shows–he’s a splendid writer and outpaces most native english writers easily–it kinda does now and again.  Words are every once in a while made to do work they don’t easily do but that the OED might well suggest they are capable of.  Sentences haven’t yet gotten the rhythm that they have, say, in Joshua Ferris’ work.  Nevertheless, the guy is a top hand and will only get better.

A friend of mine once said that England and America are separated by a common language.  While not entirely sure what this means, I’m often surprised at how much the predominant sensibilities of the two countries differ.  We both have our forms of The Office, sure, and who doesn’t love Hogwarts, but it is startling how many things fail to translate even though no actual translation needs to be done.  The works of Penelope Fitzgerald might be an example.  This woman had two books shortlisted for the Booker and won it with a third book.  Even her books that don’t get Bookered are unanimously praised in the British press.  So why don’t we know her better over here?

It was in an attempt to find out that I read Blue Flowers, which was Fitzgerald’s last book which won the American National Book Critics award in 1998, two years before her death at age 88.  I probably chose the wrong book.  The Blue Flower is about the German Romantic poet Friedrich von Hardenberg  and his love for a woman whom everyone but Fritz recognizes to be a silly dunce of a girl.  She dies in the end and that’s very sad.

Before ripping into this book, which isn’t really all that bad, I should voice my prejudice.  It turns out that Fritz (who became famous as the poet Novalis) was a dabbler in idealistic philosophy and was a student of Fichte.  While I think there is some stuff to be learned from Fichte (I actually made a pilgramage to Jena once, myself) like most of those German idealists things lapse into nonsense pretty quickly.  I also hate romantic poetry, and I have little understanding of someone who falls in love with an idiot.  So, because of my own baggage, I hated Fritz and wished he had died alongside his hollow beloved.

Hating a novel’s protagonist is no better reason for hating a novel than hating a lead singer’s voice is for hating a band.  (Both are often sufficient motivators, but I’m not sure they are really good reasons.)  It must be said that Fitzgerald was talented.  She had a very light touch, with a sort of understated humor that almost made me grin once or twice, but in general I found the book somewhat boring.  It has been called a masterpiece by more than one critic, but I couldn’t help being thankful that the chapters were short and the book as a whole was only a couple of hundred pages.  So, I have my doubts about “masterpiece,” but it was good enough to where I will check out another book by Fitzgerald.  After all, surely so many British critics can’t be wrong, can they?

Though I now feel myself to be a southerner by little more than birth, I have to admit a tendency to seek out and relish southern writers with something approximating a search for kinship.  After his last book of short stories landed him on the shortlist for the Pen/Faulkner award and his novel Serena was one of the most lauded books of the year, I thought it time to check out the Appalachian poet and author, Ron Rash.  In the end I wasn’t disappointed so much as underwhelmed.

Serena is the story of the Pembertons and the swath they cut through the forests and communities of Depression-era North Carolina.  Pemberton and Serena, his wife, are logger-barons, ruthlessly indifferent to the toll they are taking on the environment and on human life in their ambitious grasp for power and wealth.  The body count of then novel is high, starting on the second or third page when Pemberton guts the father of a girl pregnant with his child.  In retrospect, this death will seem one of the most reasonable of the novel’s killings, and if the husband seems cold he is a kitten in comparison to his wife, whose singular drive is the engine at the novel’s center.

Rash’s novel is an entertaining read that definitely seems timely given the self-and-other-destructive selfishness that seems to be the rising picture of Wall Street.  Nevertheless, in the end its morality tale is a bit obvious.  Serena is such an extreme character that one is at a loss as to what really beats within her breast, and her husband’s shows of mercy at certain points in the novel do no more than open up cracks that reveal little beyond them.   Rash tempers the seriousness by introducing a sort of chorus of loggers who crack wise and philosophical in the background, but it’s hard to feel that one’s understanding is deepend by those comic moments–funny as they sometimes are.

Serena is not a bad book, by any means.  But it shows its seams a little too clearly for my taste, both in the form and the point of its construction.  At times I felt this was intentional–that Rash was trying to create a faithful homage to Greek tragedy, for example.  At other times, I wasn’t so sure and I ultimately don’t think it matters.  Serena does what it does, and it does it pretty well–but that’s not enough to earn it a home on my top shelf.

I recently read a story by Rick Bass in the 2008 Pushcart Prize anthology, my favorite book almost every year. I’d definitely heard of Bass–he’s in the pantheon of America’s short story writers–but till then I had never read him. It was a story about boys in Texas trying to turn a buck buying cattle, and I almost wept with laughter. I resolved to check this guy out, and though this story was from his new collection, The Lives of Rocks, anal retent that I am I had to start with his first book, The Watch, published in 1989. I was not disappointed.
Though Bass’s stories are often humorous, he is not a humor writer ala David Sedaris. The humour in his stories is a natural outgrowth of the voices of his characters, or their sideways perception of the events around them. (This as opposed to Sedaris, who I always feel is lying to me.) Bass is from Texas, so many of his stories are set here, but he feels more Southern than many Texas writers–more like Barry Hannah, perhaps. His characters are often just hanging on, trying to survive from day to day and to make sense out of the messes around them, but they are rarely desperate.  Rather, they accept the world that is theirs in a factual manner, and the distance between that factual manner and the often absurd situation is what generates a good deal of the humor.

Witness the first paragraph of the first story in the collection, “Mexico”:

“Kirby’s faithful.  He’s loyal: Kirby has fidelity.  He has one wife, Tricia.  The bass’s name is Shack.  The fish is not in an acquarium.  It’s in the swimming pool that Kirby built, out in his and Tricia’s front yard.”

This almost reads as notes for a story, but instead it sets the tempo and tone in a way that completely hooked me, and told me that the world I was entering was skewed, but that this was just to be accepted as part of the situation.

Bass’ grasp of voice is just masterful.  Check the start my favorite story in the collection, “Cats and Students, Bubbles and Abysses:”

“I got a roommate, he’s tally and skiny, when we get into arguments he says “I went to Millsaps,” uses the word like what he thinks a battering ram sounds like.  He’s a real jerk.  I could break both his arms just like that! if I wanted to, I’ve got a degree in English Literature from Jackson State.  I was the only white on campus, I can’t use “I went to Jackson State” like a battering ram, but I can break both his arms.”

Great stuff.  Reminds me a bit of Barthelme the Great and the late, sad David Foster Wallace.

Check this guy out.  It looks like he’s been pretty consistent over the years.  I’ll read everything the dude has written.

This seems to have been an especially strong year in fiction.  It seems as though every book I have read recently has merited enthusiastic jigs.  Perhaps I’ve simply become better at choosing what I read.  Who cares.  The result is that I’m a happy reader.

Atmospheric Disturbances is a wow book.  It is a gift.  I had heard Rivka Galchen’s name, and I had seen the book’s striking cover, but I was not ready for such an excellent work.  I was, in fact, poised to hate this book.  It has an epigram from Gilles Deleuze, one of the great intellectal pretenders, and an epigram drawn from The Journal of Atmospheric Sciences that suggests all sorts of trying metaphors.  The last thing we need is another fiction that flirts with quantum profundities and chaos-theoretical butterflies.  That mess barely worked for Pynchon in Entropy, and it doesn’t need revisiting.

Then Rivka Galchen kicked my ass.

Galchen is apparently smart enough to avoid such intellectual muddling, but she is also clever enough to see that it still has comedic and, surprisingly, dramatic potential.  Her narrator is a psychotherapist who, in the process of treating a patient who believes he has the power and the duty to affect the weather, gets caught up in the delusion. He believes, to begin with, that his wife Rema has been replaced with a doppleganger, and the book follows his quest to find the real Rema.  A sort of post-modern Quixote, Leo finds clues everywhere he looks, particularly in the writings of one Tzvi Gal-Chen, a meteorologist who, incidentally, may or may not be the author’s husband.  Since the reader’s world is filtered through Leo’s confused perceptions, his disorientation is infectious–which fact explains, I believe, the chaos that was my dreamlife last night–but Galchen allows just enough reality to peek around the corners of his consciousness to make the whole adventure a very humorous farce.

I suspect some will compare this book to The Crying of Lot 49, but it doesn’t really read like Pynchon at all.  It reads more like a mix of Barthelme, Borges and Sebald.  That, my friends, is a good mix.

I’ve read some excellent stuff this year, and I don’t feel I can really name a favorite of 2008.  But there is no book I had more fun reading than Atmospheric Disturbances and there is no author I am more excited about than Rivka Galchen.

The new album by the Finnish group Paavoharju is my clear choice for an album to drive snow covered roads to.  Listening to this is like listening to a radio tuned between three stations, where one is playing the most beautiful melodies you have ever heard, another is playing organ music recorded in a gothic cathedral, and yet another is playing nordic-techno.  The music is of a crystal fragility, and it is layered beneath dissonant statics and hisses.  It is also utterly entrancing.  I haven’t heard their first album, but I will.  A lovely find.
Italialaisella Laivalla.mp3

I hope there is such a thing as a Marnie Stern wall-poster, and I hope that many of them are hanging on the bedroom doors of rock-aspiring young women everywhere.  This chick is completely kick ass.  Her new album “This Is It And I Am It And You Are It And So Is That And He Is It And She Is It And It Is It And That Is That” is one of the strongest records of the year.  Stern’s Deerhoof-ish guitar leads the way in this uncompromising album, but her voice–more rhythm than melody–and the spasmodic drums push this album to the top.  Comparisons are not easy to come by–Deerhoof is one, and there are Pixies-ish moments, but Stern is really doing her own thing.  And I fucking love it.
steely.mp3

I know next to nothing about Yussuf Jerusalem. Their myspace page says they are from Paris, but I’m not sure I believe it. They certainly don’t sound like it. They sound a bit like a garage band version of Joy Division, with female vocals thrown in on a track or two. Sound good? I’m excited as hell about them, in any case. You can purchase their wares at Floridas Dying records.  Nine bucks for nine kick ass songs.  Can’t go wrong.
We Ain’t Coming Back.mp3

In these early post Obama hours, I feel a need for a little garage-punk, and my morning anthem comes from a young band out of Seattle.  Love Tan has released one seven inch, and the have an LP just out of the box on Kill Shaman.  I loved this song so much that I ordered their new album.  Not much info out there about them, but so far, I’m a fan.  Check out their myspace page.
Brush Your Teeth.mp3

Nothing makes me happier than a purchase out of the blue that turns out to be a highlight of the year.  Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson is a transplanted Oregonian–and a current Brooklynite–who has completely blown my mind.  None of the comparisons I am apt to make do him justice–Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Walkmen come to mind, but great as those bands are I don’t sense in them the purity of inspiration that I get from Robinson.  He’s like a Bob Dylan who rocks.  I’m not going to say any more, or I’ll sound like a fool, but suffice it to say I’m excited as hell about this guy. Just listen up.
Woodfriend.mp3