Recently in Non-African novels and stories Category

One of these days my sister Bridget Kevane is going to read and write about African literature (si, tu) but until then, I really enjoyed this latest by her... the whole piece is here in Tablet Magazine:

"Another jewy piece by that jewish girl/ in the poetry scene who keeps/ being all jewy, talking about being jewish, writing/ about being jewish .../ jew, jew, jew, jew, jew," is the battle cry of Vanessa Hidary, the Hebrew mamita. She is a slam poet known for her curves and for dressing like a Puerto Rican; big hoop earrings, tight jeans, hair pulled tightly back in a glistening high ponytail, great red lipstick, high heels. When I met her in New York at her favorite haunt, Starbucks, I admired her playful nom de plume, Hebrew mamita, for its mix of high-brow and low-brow culture, the former being the ancient language of Israel, the latter being the catcall that most self-respecting Puerto Rican girls cannot live without. (I am from Puerto Rico and know the catcall well: Though we hate being harassed, we also hate not being whistled at. And Jewish men do not whistle at women with curves or at all, for that matter.) Alas, Hidary has not one ounce of Puerto Rican blood in her. Does it matter?

One of the books that most profoundly influenced me in college was something I read, as a junior I think, on my own, a copy of a book I found in a thrift shop: Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves.  The idea of really taking your life into your hands and literally saying goodbye to all that was something that never really had occurred to me as a possibility.  I think I ruminated on that for years, and still find it a tremendous inspiration (whatever the actual details of his life etc.)

I was reminded of this because my kids and I are watching I, Claudius.  Terrible over-acting, but the stories of intrigue are incredibly compelling to the 9-13 year old set. 

And then, I was reading a few comments on Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's "A Brief Encounter with the Enemy" in a recent The New Yorker, and one commenter used the "sad sack" phrase... suddenly I remembered Sad Sack, which I read voraciously as a kid.  My brain made all kids of connections.... stunning!

You know I'm a pretty voracious reader, but someone, let's just call him "Uncle Kevin," has been taking advantage of my regular need for reading "fixes" and pushing me to the limit, with a steady supply of top-notch award winning fantasy novels.  Really, I've never read this genre before "Uncle Kevin" came on the scene.

I've read two decent ones over the last couple weeks.  The better was The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, a world-weary, Unforgiven-style meditation on the difficulties of being a "hero"... pretty nice actually. 

OK... but really just OK... was The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch.  Both will be Hollywood movies soon I am sure... apparently they already have been optioned and have screenwriters and producers and all that stuff. 

The genre, if these two novels are evidence, should last a long time.  I'm a fan of donuts, as are hundreds of billions of my fellow humans, and these are the donuts of fiction.  At first I scoffed my way through the often quite bad writing, even wondering whether practitioners of the genre deliberately make their writing bad, with anachronisms and pop-culture allusions that are wildly out of place.  Then I realized that the writing is so bad because so much of the author's energy is focused on how to keep the story moving forward.  Game of Thrones and all that (ah yes, suddenly I remember I did read the first volume of that series... far better than these, by the way).

Even if the writing were equally bad, I'd love to read an Africa-focused style fantasy novel, and have it be really successful amongst teens (OK, we really mean boys, this literature just rubs girls the wrong way, apparently... maybe because there are really no women characters? Maybe? Could be?).  It'd be great to have characters who were plainly African, and let the European types be the exotic ones.  It would be fun to see a whole generation of African kids reading stuff like this... 600 pages of deep-fried dough topped with sugar.

Every now and then something rings a chord in your life, and I came across this book in the library, and thought, "Wait a second, Pedro San Miguel taught me Puerto Rican history as an eighth grader in PR!"  At least, I think it is the same person.  I remember liking him a lot as a teacher.  If he is the same guy, he went on to get a PhD and write about Caribbean history.  This very short collection of simple stories would be a perfect formula for the African village libraries... each story is from the viewpoint of a child participating in a major event in Puerto Rican history.  Very simple prose, with a lot of emotional power.

Over the weekend I listened to two New Yorker fiction podcasts, and I highly recommend them as a "back-to-back"... both deal with very similar themes, from the possibility of "knowing" another person to the construction of identity though others, to the choices that we make as we construct our lives, to the chance that makes us take one turn to define our lives as meaningful, rather than another turn.  They are both exceptionally well-crafted.  Practically every other sentence can be read in different ways, and can be interpreted as "pregnant" with meaning. I would read/listen to second Saïd Sayrafiezadeh reading Thomas Beller's "A Different Kind of Imperfection," published in the February 11, 1991 issue of The New Yorker, and read/listen to first Lauren Groff reading Alice Munro's "Axis," published in January 31, 2011.  They are almost exactly 20 years apart.  Wonderful how human "life" changes so little.

Tangentially they both deal with college, which I like of course as a university professor, and today is the first day of classes, and I love thinking about the students sitting in class as characters out of a brilliant short story. 

I had never read this, despite a very good "classic French novels" education in high school and college. I unfortunately started an English translation (by Robert Baldick, and quite bad, though as I said I have not read the French yet) and got hooked so quickly I just had to keep reading rather than switching to French (a free online version is here). 

The plot moves quickly, and concerns the "sentimental education" of Frédéric Moreau, a young bourgeois gentleman in 1840-1865 France.  Lots of insight into what life was like during the heady period of seesaw between monarchy and republic. I especially liked the crowd scenes during the various revolutions.  It has been more than 40 years since a "mob" changed government policy in the United States, but very pertinent for Egypt and Syria.

The female characters are almost more interesting than the men. I'd love to have known more about the inner life of Madame Arnoux, the Mareshal, Madame Dombreuse, Madame Vartnaz.... but M. Arnoux, Deslauriers, Sénécal, Husonnet, Regimbart are pretty unforgettable also.

I especially enjoyed the ending.  Frédéric and Deslauriers ask each other what caused them to live how they lived..."Puis, ils accusèrent le hasard, les circonstances, l'époque où ils étaient nés."  And then, Falubert writes a very brief the vignette that begins: "C'était pendant celles de 1837 qu'ils avaient été chez la Turque."  Frédéric flees as the girls laugh; he thinks they are laughing at him, when really they are laughing in a good-natured friendly way.  To close the vignette, Flaubert writes, "Cela fit une histoire, qui n'était pas oubliée trois ans après."  This of course is then the beginning of the novel three years later, and the loop suddenly closes on the reader, of why Frédéric is so hesitant about his sentimental education... the one incident when he was 15 affects his whole life trajectory.

About this last vignette, Arnold Hauser apparently wrote: "That is, in fact, the meaning of the final pages of L'Education sentimentale, which contain the key to the whole novel and to F's whole conception of time. That is the reason why the author singles out an episode from his hero's past life at random, and calls it the best he probably ever had from life. The absolute nothingness of this experience, its complete triviality and emptiness, means that there is always one link missing in the chain of our existence, and that every detail of our life is replete with the melancholy of objective purposelessness and a purely subjective significance."

Came across the above on the Internet the other day (it's amazing what you can find when you are bored). It's a Bookcase Staircase, located in London. The owner had limited space in his attic apartment but wanted a library. This was the solution. I thought it was pretty original. Looks cool and, hey, you can get a little exercise while looking for Shakespeare. Or, if you are out of shape, midway up the stairs you can take a breather and read some Mark Twain.

Allegra Goodman reads John Updike's story "A & P" from The New Yorker.

If you wanted a vision of what your life might be like, technologically-speaking, around 2040, then Rainbows End does the job brilliantly.  The idea of "wearable" computing, where imagery can be projected directly into to retina, is a simple extension (now) of walking around with an ipod and cellphone plugged into your ears.  You'll "see" a bunch of "skins" over everything.... why not?  No more strange than walking around listening to your own ambient music cancelling out the noise around you.  As Vinge notes (in this excellent interview) we went from a pretty unconnected world, in 2000, to one where maybe 3 billion people have cellphones.  I sometimes get calls (and emails!) from farmers in Bereba village in Burkina Faso.  So as more and more of those 3 billion start moving objects around virtually, and sharing them (have you ever asked who created doodle.com, the best meeting coordination device ever?  I have no idea who they are, but it have saved me tens of hours, to read things like Vinge now!) we'll get even more innovation and collaboration.

What I liked about Rainbows End is that Vinge's wonderful description of ordinary life in this new technology world...

1)  A main part of the novel is about LIBRARIES... and the books.  Yaay!
2)  The plot moves along very nicely... quite a good read.
3)  The theme is that technology doesn't make you a better person... the central theme is how a poet (a poet!) goes from being a jerk to being rather a nice guy.  But you only become a better person by living in the real world, and experiencing real people that you can come to care about.  Vinge's novels all deal with the alienation that comes with technology change and growing "apartness".... he a hopeful dystopian.

We readers have lots of regrets though, and if my kids didn't have to get up to school at 6:30 am I'd think about drinking heavily tonight.

He also professed to have no regrets for a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. "Writing is what's important to me, and anything that helps me do that -- or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation -- is worth it to me," he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was "impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle."

The full front page obituary is here.