Man's Best Friend Outside of a Dog: The decade in review

The best book I read from the past decade was a Great American Novel, in the all-caps sense, even though very few people seem to call it that just because the author is originally a Brit. Even though it fails to top my list, I see no need to insult Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, which topped The Million's best books of the decade list. It was very good, and written in the serious-story-about-a-troubled-family mode that invites being called a "Great American Novel", but it just doesn't top my list. No, my favorite book written in the past decade is undoubtably Neil Gaiman's America Gods, published in 2001.





Gaiman's story, which basically casts Norse mythology onto modern-day American society is a fantastic rea, as all Gaiman's books are. More importantly, the perspective he brings to American Society as an outsider seems to have leant him a much better understanding of what makes this country tick. America is big, and it's strange in a lot of places, and many towns in Illinois and the rest of the Midwest are a little depressing for reasons that are hard to name but involve some combination of flatness and economic stagnation. Gaiman manages to somehow make a comic book out of middle America without turning it into an out-and-out caricature, identifying the quirks of the culture and the fact that our values are often centered not so much upon the God who created us in his image but rather the gods that we created to transmit images. Part fantasy, part road novel, and part musing on the nature of modern identity, it captures the spirit of the contry right before the Bush era that could have easily served as an afterword to the novel.

Others deserving mention that I've read:

The Known World, by Edward P. Jones: Set in Virginia in the decade before the civil war, this story of a black slaveowning family is a slice of history about which I knew nothing. Fascinating, and the parallels to modern society aremore than thoughtprovoking.

The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz: One of the best new writers out there, this tale of life in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic has a strong narrative voice and a real joy for language.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon: Chabon is a much better writer when he writes about Jewish theme, and this counterfactual novel about a Jewish state set up in Alaska is his most complete work to date. His novella Gentlemen of the Road is also fantastic, for the same reasons.

The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri: Another novel in which seeing both India and America as an outsider has leant the author real insight into one's place in the world and the difficulty in establishing it. Her short story collections, Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth, show her mastery of the genre, too.

Radiance, by Carter Scholz: The best book about scientists I've read in possibly forever, this talk of bureaucratic malfeasance at a national lab does a great and frequently hilarious job of contrasting the big pictures we all dream of with the more humdrum aspects of modern life.

Just to clarify the quote, Grouho Marx quipped that "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

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Now playing: U2 - In God's Country
via FoxyTunes

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 12: Running With Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs

Due to a strange bit of scheduling, I read almost this entire book while sitting in the O'Hare Marriott, waiting to meet up with our ride back to Champaign. Let it be said, they have some really comfortable chairs, and are kind enough to not hassle people who spend hour after hour sitting there without any obvious purpose.

If World's Fair was about a family in which nothing too much happened, this could be considered the exact opposite situation. Burroughs' memoir, assuming it is even half truthful, deals with an upbringing about as unconventional and bizarre as just about any ever put into print. As to truthfulness, we'll leave that to the lawyers, and just evaluate the book as if it were a novel. I don't mean this as an insult in any way, because it's basically the way I read Bill Bryson, Erik Larson, and any number of other non-fiction authors whose style is more narrative than informational.

The obvious comparison for Burroughs is David Sedaris, as several hundred reviewers have noted. The comparison isn't exact, of course. Both are funny, and both are gay, but Sedaris' stories are more about minutiae blown up into shaggy dog stories, whereas Burroughs' childhood is so exaggerated that even if slightly falsified, it includes numerous felonies (with him as victim, not perpetrator) and events that should have required intervention by a host of public agencies. The comparison is inexact enough that Salon's reviewer slammed Burroughs in a three-page review for all his narrative flaws, but I find myself feeling vastly more kindly toward him. His writing style is indeed on the simple side (education was hardly his first priority growing up), but the material is so outlandish that it doesn't require verbal fireworks to jump off the page.

Burroughs is a very bemused, surprisingly detached narrator, whose adolescence was so traumatic that it is hard to treat his memoir as anything but a coping mechanism. It's a bit ironic that the family he lived with sued him, given that his tone is so nonjudgmental throughout that one could make a strong suggestion that there is a Stockholm Syndrome effect at play, especially in the case of the daughter who was apparently sold at age 13 to an adult mental patient of her psychiatrist father to be his girlfriend in order to pay the family's bills. This one seems to be on strong footing factwise, as the father lost his license as a result according to public records. In some ways, Burroughs blandness as a narrator could probably be attributed to his lack of finesse as a writer. You just don't always get the feeling he has much more to say about anyone around him. As a result, the appeal of the book is really at its heart the freak-show aspect, lightened up by its good-natured breeziness. I know I should look down on it for that, but it works. Even though his childhood was a trainwreck, the book is anything but, and makes for a disturbingly good read. I'm still surprised that I liked it so much, but I did.

The movie, it should be said, is faithful to the book, with some, but not all, of the more graphic bits removed or edited around. It falls into the category, in fact, of movies that hew so closely to their source material that they add almost nothing to the book whatsoever. Alec Baldwin's performance is good, but nothing else about the film is particularly memorable.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 11: World's Fair, by E.L. Doctorow

Last week I said I liked two out of the three final books I had read during the trip to Aruba. Oddly enough, this was the one I didn't think much of at all. I have nothing against Doctorow, and rather liked Ragtime, but there must be something up with him that rubs people the wrong way. Suffice it to say, among major literary authors, he has more copies of his works sitting in the $2 rack at used bookstores than anyone else I can think of. Janet Evanovich, Clive Cussler, sure, and about every mystery author who has ever lived, but also a constant stream of Doctorow. I haven't been able to find a single Vintage press copy of anything by Nabokov for less than 3/4 the retail price for years, but I could have owned 10 copies of Water Works or Billy Bathgate had I wanted to. In some ways, it takes some of the fun out of finding them in bookstores, since there's no excitement in the find. A nice copy of Vonnegut is impossible, Calvino a rare treat, and we've found John Irving from just about every printing through years of work, but Doctorow is just too easy.

Anyway, on to the actual review. World's Fair is a fictionalization of what I have to assume is Doctorow's own childhood growing up in New York. Unfortunately, Doctorow seems to have had a childhood much like most of ours, full of events that are only passingly memorable and the rare moment that rises to the level of minor excitement. Unfortunately, that is about the extent of it. In theory, I am supposed to suggest that New York City in the 1930's is itself a character, but the narrator is much too young to really have experienced much of it at all. As a result, the novel is more than a bit flat. The emotion ranges from kind of happy to kind of sad, and even though our narrator's parents certainly have a troubled marriage, nothing ever really comes of it to spark some real dramatic tension. The dramatic ending, in which he sees both the magic but also the tawdriness of the New York World's Fair, similarly fails to inspire, breaking no new ground whatsoever. If you want to really read about the magic and horror of a World's Fair, try Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 10: Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Having discussed what some of the more backwards amongst us consider to be cultural Armageddon in our first post of the evening, we move onward in our second to a literary take on Armageddon that is vastly more enjoyable than the Left Behind series. Any time the end of the world is foisted upon you by Neil Gaiman, author of The Sandman graphic novels and the brilliant novel American Gods, among others, as well as Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, well, you know it has to be good. Just to get the obvious references, both men have the same British wit that is typically associated with Monty Python, Douglas Adams, or maybe Shaun of the Dead. It is unclear why the British are just funnier than Americans, most likely having to do with a certain fatalism inspired by the nasty weather, horrible food, and typically undrinkable coffee. Then again, maybe when you grow up watching your politicians hurl witty insults at each other rather than vapid sound bites, it can be a bit inspirational.

In any case, this little novel, written before either of them became famous, ranges from the drop-dead hilarious to the sidesplittingly funny, even when some of the subjects of the humor are a bit obscure. Still, you have to give them credit that they made me laugh about the M25 Motorway (the loop road around London: think the Beltway, I-95, and the tri-state tollway if you are familiar with DC, Boston, or Chicago; for NY readers, think I-287 with the traffic typical of the BQE or Van Wyck) and the planned town of Milton Keynes. A sample of the book's take on life:

Many phenomena — wars, plagues, sudden audits — have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A.

The plot, such as it is, concerns plans by the hosts of heaven and hell to spark Armageddon, each hoping for the ultimate victory, while a pair of friendly demons, realizing that low-level employees for competing firms often have more in common with each other than either has with their corporate management, do everything in their power to stop this from happening. Of great benefit to them is the fact that the Antichrist was misplaced at birth, and many of the supernatural beings about to wage battle are caught in traffic. Honestly, if this plot doesn't grip you yet, you probably need professional help. Fleshing out the novel are a multitude of jokes and witticisms, and it is a fun challenge to try to figure out which author wrote what. Having read a good bit of Gaiman and one book by Pratchett, I was pretty stumped, but I would imagine that an aficionado could do much better. Gaiman is the more Vonnegutian of the two, preferring jokes that rely on timing and misdirection, whereas Pratchett likes the more carefully constructed comic scenarios, but the book flows pretty seamlessly from one to the other without any obvious hitches. Even though it contains something of a moral conclusion, in that humans often act both better and worse than either God or the Devil could even imagine but that life is still better with us having free will than if we didn't, the book avoids adding too much saccharine to the mix.

If I had to choose between Gaiman and Pratchett, I could pretty comfortably choose Gaiman, but life is generous and we are lucky to be able to enjoy both. This one is definitely worth it, start to finish.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 9: Los Gusanos, by John Sayles

For the second half of our Cuban-American double feature, we have Los Gusanos (The Worms), by John Sayles. I should say off the bat that Sayles is one of those guys who has slipped under my radar. Best known as a director (Lone Star, Return of the Seacacus 7, Brother from Another Planet), the only movie of his that I've actually seen is Eight Men Out, and that only because it's about baseball. I can't claim any credit for picking this book up somewhere; as I remember, we got it during a Christmas book exchange, but sometimes you really do get lucky. Like the book I read immediately prior to it, the focus is on the Cuban-American and Cuban communities, though with a primary focus on Miami. Even though the basic setups are roughly the same, spanning decades in the lives of its protagonists, the books could hardly be more different. Sayles has a definite story to tell, and even though we often get looks insides his characters heads, they are very much rooted to their own location and situation. This is not a novel of dreams, but one of concrete histories, showing how we reach our current state through a series of events and experiences. Put another way, whereas the motivating forces in Dreaming in Cuban are primarily internal, here they are almost exclusively external. Characters are much more deeply tied to each other, in the tangled web of politics and culture that is Miami.

In many ways, the governments exist in Los Gusanos immediately off-screen, acting via the CIA and other sources to keep the community constantly in flux. Then again, I think it is fair to say that the Cuban community in Miami does a pretty good job of that all on their own. One of the greatest mysteries to me has been how the US government seems willing to maintain a policy towards Cuba that has never shown any sign of working, all while the expat community supports the vociferously no matter how many times the CIA undercuts their aspirations of retaking the island. From the Bay of Pigs to later failed insurgencies, it seems that some forces in our government are willing to trade something, be it reliable Republican votes, some control over organized crime in Southern Florida, or god only knows what, just so long as they make sure to say really mean things about Fidel. As for the Cuban-American community, you might think that having failed to overthrow Fidel for 40 years now, they might be willing to consider some amount of compromise in order to see long-separated family members...but apparently you'd be wrong.

In the novel, this plays out as a generation torn between the appeal of organized crime, ragtag invasion militias, or quieter, more humdrum lives in the beautiful weather of South Florida. Living so fast, many fail to see just how much they are pawns in the hands of the powerful (or to quote Fidel himself, Gusanos). Through vignettes, we get to see fragments of the life stories of the many protagonists, reminiscent of something one might expect from Robert Altman. It's hard to identify any particular story that is truly more compelling than the rest, but it's interesting to read a big, sprawling novel that can manage to balance any number of competing threads to paint a picture of a city across the years much more successfully than groups of blind men are typically assumed to describe elephants. If the characters themselves are a bit flat, the settings themselves certainly jump out. It's not the language per se, which features a somewhat intimidating amount of Spanish intermixed with decent prose, but rather the clear idea that he has for each chapter, infusing each with a strong sense of narrative flow that carries throughout the novel. I have to say, for a random acquisition, I really liked the book, enough to add several of his films to our Netflix queue.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 8: Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina Garcia

There is something of a recurring theme in the female characters that appear in magical realism novels, in that at least one woman per family needs to live at least partially on the spiritual plane. This is very clear in Isabel Allende's "House of the Spirits", forms perhaps the main theme of "Like Water For Chocolate (haven't read it, but I've seen the movie a couple times), and makes up the heart of this novel as well. The story of three generations of a family split between Cuba and New York, the book takes a very ethereal approach to issues of dislocation and separation, much more concerned with people's dreams than their politics. Garcia isn't much of a narrative storyteller, more a spinner of tales that illuminate facets of her characters and their relationships. Perhaps befitting the image of the Cuban community as a wee bit out there (let's face it, every fictional work ever set in Miami basically assumes this as truth, from Scarface to Miami Vice to CSI, or the novels of Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen, among others), most of the characters are a wee bit insane, at least at times.

If there is a running theme in the book, it is the ways in which isolation can force us to extremes, regardless of whether the isolation is caused by family or by the politics of an embargo. From generation to generation, we have love and other emotions expressed as both alliance and antagonism, as only families can inspire. Most of the action here, such as it is, lies within it's protagonists' minds.They retreat into memory, seek out connections, and basically try to find a place in the world for themselves, all while the potential sources of stability generally conspire against them. Still, it is not so much the events in their lives that define them, but rather their reactions to them, and the people who surround them. Inasmuch as the book is a meditation about mindsets, it is ultimately successful, more a painting than a story to remember. Garcia, it should be noted, writes in English like the world's finest writers write in Spanish, heavy on the adjectives but in a way that explores the bounds of expression. Think Marquez, but with multiple sentences per page. It's rare to find such confident prose stylings, and really stands out among the various Spanish/Latin American authors out there.

In the water, he was beautiful

It's tempting to talk about politics tonight. For several hours, the Attorney General was schooled by the Congress, including passages where he was reminded that if he was going to suggest that US Attorneys were fired for being poor managers, he should lose his job as well, as well as Chuck Schumer reminding him that the burden of proof lies with Gonzales to explain his actions to Congress, and not the other way around, since Congress isn't actually putting him on trial. It's a bit pathetic, really, that the Attorney General doesn't seem to be so well versed in the whole law thing, but rank incompetence no longer comes as such a surprise.

I'm even going to hold off on the news that the FBI raided Rep. Rick Renzi's (R-AZ) and he had to step down from the Intelligence committee. The investigation likely cost Arizona's US Attorney his job during the abovementioned Attorney firing scandal, just as San Diego's Carol Lam was forced out after successfully prosecuting the now former-Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA). Renzi's raid occurs just days after the FBI raided Rep. John Doolittle's (R-CA) house, forcing him to step down from the House Appropriations Committee, a committee whose ranking Republican member is Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), who you may be shocked to find out is also under investigation, in an inquiry started by former US Attorney Carol Lam, who as we mentioned was fired during the US Attorney scandal.

No rather than not mentioning politicians, I thought it would be a good opportunity to not review a book. During our trip, I read "The Sweep of the Second Hand", by Dean Monti, since it cost $2 and the cover review said it begged comparisons to Woody Allen and Nick Hornby. It doesn't. It begs comparison, rather, to Joseph Heller's "Something Happened". This is very, very much not a compliment. I could go on about the book I read, and take some potshots, but what's the point? It's not like anyone who reads this is likely to even see it in print during their lifetimes. Instead, I will take some potshots at Joseph Heller, by comparing him to the guy we killed by going on vacation, Kurt Vonnegut.

It is tempting to link Heller and Vonnegut in a way, as they wrote two of the most famous American novels about war during the previous century, books about WWII that seemed to describe Vietnam just as well. It should be noted that Catch-22 came out in 1961, long before Vietnam had entered into the American consciousness, whereas Slaughterhouse-Five was written in 1969. I have to say, between the two, I'd probably have to take Catch-22 if I was forced to choose. It's satire is as sharp as just about any serious novel ever written, and it is difficult to imagine a time where one can't describe the classic contradiction posed in the novel in any other terms. Without risk of hyperbole, it certainly deserves consideration as possibly the greatest American novel of the century (along with To Kill a Mockingbird, Gatsby, and what? Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck?). It is, sadly, really the only great novel Heller wrote.

This is not much of a criticism, mind you, very few of us have even a readable novel in us, much less a good one. Heller wrote one of the best of all time. Still, why could he never reach that height again? The sequel, Closing Time, felt like a pale imitation of the original (think U2's most recent stuff compared to their mid-80's peak). Good as Gold is like a lesser novel by Bellow, God Knows is funny but hardly memorable, and for the life of me I don't remember a thing about Picture This. Something Happened, on the other hand, is wretchedly awful, a long slog of several hundred depressing pages filled with quasi-ironic "insights" about how much life sucks that we are supposed to find deeply meaningful, as if Heller's discovery of angst is really something new. The contrived ending only makes the rest seem like an even greater waste of time. The question becomes: why did Heller have one great book, and so many more that pale so much in comparison?

I think the answer lies in the way he writes. He is always funny, but it is a cold humor. The insanity he channels throughout Catch-22 is madcap but somewhat passionless at times, and that lack of empathy shows through much more in his later works in which the cold glare falls on our very real lives. Where Catch-22 can be enjoyed for finding humor in what would otherwise be tragedy, the rest of his books basically seem like descriptions of just how tragic life in general tends to be, and the jokes have a gallows quality that kind of ruins the enjoyment. Sure Heller is a satirist, but he just doesn't always seem to care about anything or anyone, and that grates after a while.

Vonnegut, on the other hand, may have been a satirist and a notable pessimist about human behavior, but in the end he remains one of the most deeply humanist authors ever to achieve greatness. I'm not talking about the Secular Humanist sense (which he was), but rather in the sense that he had a deep and powerful love for humans and humanity. It's been said that his books are "bitter-coated sugar pills", with a thin veneer of irony covering an almost cloying desire for people to be better. I can't say that this is description is wrong, but in many ways it is what makes him such a joy to read. No matter how bad things are, and in a Vonnegut book, we're usually talking about Armageddon-level bad, there remains the hope that if people are better, things could improve. It's not that he thinks we'll actually be better, just that we have the potential. He even could see it in himself, in a way. Tonight's post title is taken from his description of himself in the foreword to "Welcome to the Monkeyhouse".

Our book club will be reading Cat's Cradle for next month, perhaps his greatest novel (unless you prefer Breakfast of Champions or Slaughter House-Five), but even a middling Vonnegut novel can stick with you for years. In Slapstick, which Vonnegut himself only graded as a "D" (really!), he manages to introduce a concept for artificial communities that I really think might radically change American society for the better if we ever tried it, by assigning random names and numbers to all people that would serve as communities to which everyone gets to belong. If you think about it, given that we bond with people because of common interests in sports teams, favorite authors, and any number of other random things. Why not give people a few more, in such a way that everyone gets to have some. There is literally no downside, beyond getting used to middle names like Daffodil-11 or Raspberry-19.

It's strange, both men are dead, and I will be forever glad that Heller ha one amazing novel within him, but I feel like I miss Vonnegut and will for a long time.



So it goes.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 7: Persepolis 1 and 2, by Marjane Satrapi

Continuing the Iranian theme we had in the last book review, tonight we've got a pair of graphic novels from an Iranian expat who now lives in France. For those unfamiliar with the term, which seems unlikely given the known preferences of most of our readership, graphic novels are long-form comic books.

Compared to most of the other prominent graphic novelists out there, Satrapi is quite the crude illustrator, preferring a rather simplistic drawing style with a black and white palette. She has a few pretty poetic touches, but nothing to compare to the more artistic panels in Maus or something done by a professional illustrator, like V for Vendetta or The Watchmen. Then again, that's not really the point. She has a story to tell, and comics are her medium of choice. The graphic elements certainly are there to add to the story, but it is the narrative that makes or breaks it. How is that narrative you ask? It is interesting certainly, a very personal take on growing up, first in Iran during the Revolution, later in Europe as a teenager, and finally in Iran as a twentysomething.

Satrapi lacks much of the intellectual grounding that Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, but she may be better at describing her own situation (Nafisi is certainly more gifted at describing that of others). This is both a blessing as a curse in her case: she is able to describe her own reactions to situations throughout her childhood and teenage years in great detail, but the result is something less than sympathetic at times, even though she is the one telling the story about herself. Maybe it's me speaking as someone who kind of missed out on their rebellious phase, but while I understand that life's troubles can be hard to deal with, I can't help but have mixed feelings about some of the situations the author put herself into. Then again, this may be part of her point: life can put us in impossible situations, frequently in the case of Revolutionary Iran, but we can also put ourselves into similarly difficult spots through our own handiwork.

Just like in the reading Lolita, we see again that the standard perceptions of Iranians is a poor reflection of the society as a whole (one could make the same claim about Iraq, or just about anywhere else, of course). The upper class in Iraq was, and remains, extremely Western in outlook, and the middle class seems to be more concerned with what people in the middle class are typically concerned about than about most of the religious nonsense put forth by the government. Iran, like many nations, is propped up by the blood of the masses (who were slaughtered during the Iraq-Iran war), and that seems to be where the current religious officials still draw most of their support. Somehow, reactionaries always seem to know that they can prey upon the religiously guided ignorance of large segments of the population in many nations, even those that one would think too modern to fall under their spell (cough, Karl Rove, cough).

In the broader sense, these books should serve as a reminder that wars are really, really bad. Yeah, I know, some insight there, but go with me on this one. The US was busy supplying arms to Iraq in the 80's, in order to contain the Iranians, to whom we were also supplying arms, but less publicly. This containment managed to strengthen the mullahs in Iran, strengthen Hussein to become the figure we became familiar with during our wars against him, and generally made a mess of the region. Scarily enough, these weren't our biggest strategic mistakes at the time. That would be our support for the Taliban in Afghanistan. I think it is fair to suggest that when we encourage our bastards over there to fight against the other bastards over there, the result is generally a lot of dead people, a lot more poorer people who will be more likely to get behind unsavory leaders, and a bunch of formerly weak unsavory leaders who are now much stronger unsavory leaders. This is not idle speculation, given that we are rather actively supporting the government of Ethiopia during their current efforts to boot out Islamic militias in Somalia. Needless to say, I predict that this will likely lead to the standard awful results in the coming years, which is really saying something when you are talking about Ethiopia and Somalia getting worse (think famine and Black Hawk Down for our current images of both nations).

Anyway, back to Persepolis. I'm not entirely sold on Satrapi as a particularly good storyteller, but she lived through incredibly interesting times, and that counts for an awful lot in a memoir. I learned more than a bit from the books, and would recommend them to anyone in a heartbeat. They are two long comic books in the end, not War and Peace, and more than justify the minimal time it takes to read them. Go do so!

BTW, we announce the next Rooted Cosmopolitans Charity of the Month tomorrow, so donate to Doctors Without Borders today of you haven't done so already. Also, the Mets won the first game of the season, so let's see if they can go wire-to-wire in first place. Expect much more baseball here coming soon!

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 6: Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi

With Iran in the news, I decided to clear out the growing Persian presence on my shelf of books to read. Most of the news coming out of Iran at the moment is pretty bad, though there are some funny exceptions to that rule. Anyway, the first book up is Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi, which has certainly made the rounds of the book club circuit over the past year.

It's not hard to see why this book is so popular. Iranian society remains a mystery to most people in America, and this book goes a long way toward undercutting some of the more outlandish notions we may possess about them. In particular, it becomes immediately evident that while the public face of Iran is one of religions hardliners and fundamentalist rule, the society there was, and still is, vastly more modern than we ever give them credit for. American ignorance can hardly be considered shocking by now, and it says something that of the few Americans who can recognize Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as President of Iran that very few realize that though he may be an anti-Semitic provocateur, he has very little power over any foriegn policy issue whatsoever (that would be the milieu of Ayatollah Khamenei and the clerical establishment). Neither of these political forces represents the actual population all that well (not that I would dare to suggest a similar principle applies with regard to American society...) Iranians love their illegal satellite dishes, their forbidden music (click on the second link above), and just about all the other things that we would love in the same circumstances.

Nafisi's book does present a thorough treatment of one facet of life that Americans do have trouble imagining: life under the rule of a truly oppressive government, especially during wartime on one's own soil. While we were sending weapons openly to Iraq and under the table to Iran, the people there were suffering under the double threat of foreign missiles and self-imposed political terror. The choices faced by liberals and intellectuals were truly terrible, much worse than anything their counterparts over here have had to go through. Even in the most extreme cases where the US government spied on peace groups, they didn't just haul people off and summarily execute them. As for those who wholeheartedly get behind an ideological movement, Nafisi has even less respect for such people than I do. There have always been many people out there, especially among the young and impressionable, willing to slaughter their fellow men for the sake of Revolution, or God, or Country, or any other capital-letter ideal, but the ends are almost never happy ones. Among the most striking passages of the book is the trial of The Great Gatsby by one of her classes, where the book is accused of all manner of evils and recommended for banning by the hardline students, as if the ideas themselves are dangerous. One could suggest of course, that this is the ultimate failure of debate: if an idea you dislike is so very appealing, then you have failed in your duty to build a better counterargument.

I should say that discussing the book only in terms of its grand themes does it a disservice: it is not a mere political statement, but a memoir, and a damn good one at that. Centered around the private sessions the author held in secret with seven students who were devoted to literature, the book doesn't scream it's positions on imagination and individual expression, it paints them in rather fetching language. If anything, Nafisi is at her weakest when dealing with her own reactions to newsworthy events: in describing her own reactions she seems to get so involved that she loses some of the strength of her narrative voice. Instead, she is at her best describing the others around her: how they react, how they interact, and how they maintain their own concepts of identity in the midst of a regime trying to undercut it through physical and mental intimidation. Nafisi is clearly from the school of teaching via contrast and comparison, and it is the reflections and refractions between she and her students, her students with each other, and all the other pairings upon which this book has earned its reputation. Definitely worth a read, if for no other reason to remind us that the people that many people in our government are looking to bomb to smithereens in the near future are very much like us once you look past the headscarves.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 5: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne

Somehow, I managed to re-read TS for our book club here at UIUC, and then ended up too busy to go to the book club meeting. Why did I read it the first time, you ask? Well, it's the second important novel ever written in English (after Clarissa), and the second great postmodern novel, after Don Quixote. For my original take on TS, you can take a peek at my old book review page. For those unfamiliar with the book, the title may be dignified, but the novel is anything but. it's a long series of tangents on philosophy, political and religious jokes, amusing anecdotes, further digressions, and just about anything other than either the life or the opinions of its narrator. For the first four books, we are treated to the story of his conception (it doesn't go well) and birth (even more poorly). Eventually, we get to his accidental circumcision as a youth while pissing out a window, a book devoted to insulting France, and the almost but not-quite romance between his uncle and a local widow...but this is beside the point. Tristram Shandy is not centered around its plot, but around its fun with language and storytelling. Sterne is a constant practical joker (much like Cervantes), with a true talent for blue humor, rather impressive for an 18th century clergyman.

In many ways, the novel shows off just how much society has changed with time, especially with regard to moral values. Needless to say, people today are vastly more prudish than they were back then. Yes, I said more prudish now, not the reverse. There is nothing more amusing than the editor of this edition stumbling in his attempts to explain some of Sterne's bawdier references, even though Sterne himself was never so shy (to be fair, Sterne himself edits out the really dirty parts, but in such a way that there is no mystery whatsoever as to what he is implying). I have a real beef with the editing team, it should be said. The endnotes fail to translate any number of the parts written in foreign languages, fail to explain some crucial allusions unfamiliar to a modern reader, constantly refer to works that no one outside a graduate English program could be expected to track down, and have a bizarre obsession with TS's citations in the OED. The introduction is a horrid piece of 50's literary criticism, of virtually no interest to anyone but a diehard Shandean, which in no way even attempts to explain how the novel has remained influential to this day.

Quoth wikipedia:

Today, the novel is commonly seen as a forerunner of later stream of consciousness, self-reflexive and postmodern writing. However, current critical opinion is divided on this question. There is a significant body of critical opinion that argues that Tristram Shandy is better understood as an example of an obsolescent literary tradition of "Learned Wit", partly following the contribution of D.W. Jefferson.

I believe our editor was from the latter school, which is deeply, deeply misguided at best. I would have to argue that when a book clearly influences any number of modernist and post-modern writers (Joyce and Rushdie are mentioned by wikipedia), many of whom seem to have taken notes on the style of writing via digression, it needs to be classified as such even if there is a gap in the historical chain between then and now. Needless to say, no book so influential today can be properly considered only in terms of an obsolescent tradition. If anything, I think it shows off more just how misguided critics of PM fiction tended to be, given that virtually every aspect of popular culture is moving steadily in the direction of self-reflexivity (remember, on the first day we founded this blog, Time Magazine named us people of the year!).

Anyway, back to my main point. It is almost shocking to see just how modern the sensibilities of the 18th century were, at least with regard to the vastly more buttoned-up taste of the 19th. We often forget, in these days or rapidly lapsing Victorianism, that it wasn't always like this. Maybe 19th century Brits had some serious sexual hangups that required about 150 years and the introduction of pay cable and the internet in order to break down, but the 18th sure seem free of these problems. In the end, we can deny human nature for decades, but in the end people are much more the products of our animal ancestors (Sterne would likely say "animal spirits") than your average Conservative would care to admit. The second novel ever written in the English language begins at the moment of its narrator's conception, and I mean the exact moment, and ends with a celebration of its own place as a Cock and Bull story, where I would note that the allusion there means exactly the same thing now as it did them. Speaking of the closing line, it was used as the title of Michael Winterbottom's rather shockingly good movie version of the novel, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants a free mental cheat sheet in place before they read the book.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 4: The Lost Continent, by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson, the author of the multi-year bestsellers A Walk in the Woods and A Short History of Nearly Everything, may be one of the funniest (and most intelligent) authors currently working. He's basically like Dave Barry, except that he uses travel as a theme rather than family life in Miami. In this case, he decided to take a driving tour around the USA after two decades living in England writing about it as an insider turned outsider, shortly before he actually moved back to New Hampshire, providing him an opportunity to write about the USA as an outsider turned insider. The end product is hilarious, a sarcastic yet warmhearted exploration of the USA and what makes it so unique, for both better and worse.

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-town America, by Bill Bryson ISBN: 0060920084 Compare prices at fetchbook.info Categories: American authors, Non-fiction, Travel

It is strange that a book written almost twenty years ago would still seem so relevant, but in many ways Bryson was prescient about the direction of life in America, almost certainly more correct than he might have wished for. Driving through 38 states, stopping at both small towns and large cities (the subtitle is a bit of false advertising), Bryson really did get to the heart of what defines America as a nation: it's vast spaces, it's highways, and the incredibly commercially driven culture. Let's not even bother with crap like our indomitable work ethic or some such nonsense; we tell ourselves that to assuage our guilt about spending our lives at work while wishing we were on vacation. Bryson, who had lived almost two decades in England after growing up in Iowa, is constantly amazed by the size of the country, especially out west, and the huge variations in cultures that this allows for. If we are a nation divided at times, it is because some of us live over 3,000 miles from their compatriots, a greater distance than separates Western Europe from Eastern. As a result, our highways are an integral part of the culture, and in many ways have determined our evolution since the Federal highway system was built 50 years ago. More than anything else, it has led to a homogenization of America at highway exits. You can find the same chain restaurants, fast food joints, and now coffeeshops from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and only the accents of the waiters, waitresses, register operators, and baristas change. In the late 80's the process was well underway, and is essentially complete now. Champaign got it's first standalone Coffeeshop that dare not speak it's name a year ago; now there are three.

This touches on a topic Bryson dances around without attacking directly: Americans love familiarity, and seek it out away from home. We may speak of the quaint and quirky, but we love the familiar and convenient. Chain hotels with HBO and wireless internet, chain coffeeshops with familiar baked goods and wireless internet, chain restaraunts with vaguely Tex-Mex menus and occasionally wireless internet. We love to bash how tacky tourist traps can be, but they seem not only to stay in business but to prosper, especially in the emptier middle of the country, where it doesn't take much to be the best vacation spot around, and in coastal Florida, where all the longer-distance travelers go. If all the same curiosity museums (biggest ball of twine, etc.) and interesting cultural group-oriented trading posts/stores (Amish, Native Americans, ...) sell the same refrigerator magnets, t-shirts, and shot glasses, it's because that's what people actually want. Bryson is struck repeatedly by how ugly this can look to an outsider, with state parks in all their natural beauty surrounded by towns that are little more than a series of tacky strip malls, but this is how we really do choose to live. It is convenient and commercially viable. Maintaining beautiful old towns with manicured lawns takes work, and most of us have neither the money nor the time. Instead, we condense the places where we buy stuff into convenient but utterly personality-free plazas, typically near highways, and have collections of stores designed to maximize the amount of stuff bought by tourists, also near highways.

Bryson's favorite cities are particularly telling, especially to a transplanted upstate New Yorker. He may like the company of Midwesterners (they are remarkably friendly, if not a bit more passive aggressive than he acknowledges), but his favorite cities on the trip are Savannah, GA (pop. 128,500), Charleston, SC (pop. 115,400), and Cooperstown, NY (pop. 2000). The former two are quaint, older, midsize cities in the Southeast, not too big nor too small, and even if he doesn't think much of Southerners they are gorgeous to visit for a day or two. Cooperstown is smaller, but New York is densely populated even outside of cities; no town is an island, entire to itself. West of the Mississippi, where the population is concentrated in cities and towns with very little in between, smaller towns are, frankly, surprisingly boring. We refer to them around the house as "funesque", resembling fun without giving itself over to the hedonism of true entertainment. I'll suggest here, to create as much controversy as possible, that this results in part from a rejection of some elements in modernity that shows itself in cultural conservatism and a certain isolationist tendency in the definition of one's community. Even in central Illinois, there is a tendency to frown on the modern world and it's trappings. Many people in Champaign look down on the University students, the City of Chicago, restaurants with white tablecloths, and all the other signs of a world that they are pretty sure looks down on them. They are wrong in that; people in Chicago don't think about Champaign at all, much in the same way that New Yorkers are happy to consider the Midwest a million square miles containing a few important connection airports. In this culture, the tourist traps, which resemble islands surrounded by a sea of farms, take two forms: either the ultra-quaint visits into the past (typified by Amish country stores and towns that rebuild their 50 year-old facades), or frequently feeble attempts to ape the trappings of modernity after sanitizing it to be safe for families, typically involving indoor water parks. State fairs, with their cross of agricultural shows and QVC merchandise, incorporate both tendencies. Back east, the smaller towns seem to manage a better mix. Somehow, even the tourist towns seem like they would make it without the constant influx of visitors, just like all the towns surrounding them do. Newport, RI is within a few miles of Providence (as is the entire state), almost in its suburbs.

In the end, though, both of these are America. It's a vast place with a ton of people, and enough room to contain those who like to live near a few million of their closest friends, and those who prefer something a bit more off the beaten path. What it lacks in centuries of history and a certain aesthetic sense, it makes up for in the comfort of daily life. If it has shortcomings in the eyes of an outsider (as I am to the Midwest even after a few years here), it is generally because cities and towns aren't generally built for the tourists, they're built for the locals. In some places, it's amazing to look at; even in the other places, what the heck, it's home.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 3: A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby

I'm curious to see if this becomes yet another Nick Hornby book to get turned into a movie. It happened to High Fidelity (fantastic in both media), About a Boy (better as a book, according to my previous review; I had forgotten that I had even read it), and even Fever Pitch (the movie is loosely inspired by the book, the latter of which is far superior). For reasons I'll get into below, this one will be a bit more of a challenge.

A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby ISBN: 1594481938 Compare prices at fetchbook.info Categories: European authors

It is a strange book that begins with four strangers meeting on a roof all seeking to commit suicide; it is even stranger when that book is a comedy of sorts. In Nick Hornby's hands, though, it seems natural. His talent is for creating flawed protagonists (including himself in Fever Pitch) who manage to evolve a bit during the course of a book without ever really finding redemption, or even necessarily changing all that much. Much as for families, each of our unhappy protagonists/narrators is unhappy in his/her own way, but there is no fairy godmother with her magic problem-solving wand to be found. In Hornby's tale, life is a messy, complicated affair, and the people who get themselves into difficult situations, either actively or passively, are unlikely to extricate themselves from them all that easily. Instead, Hornby does a surprisingly subtle job treating the compromises we sometimes make during the course of our days to get to the next one, embracing with a surprising amount of warmth and humor the distinction between leading an acceptable life and leading a happy one, at least in the short (or even medium) term. Though known better for his love of music and sports, Hornby probably deserves mention for being something of a humanist as well, in an era where some level of ironic detachment is more prevalent; he respects his literary creations almost more for their flaws rather than in spite of them.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 2: Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami

Before the book review, a quick digression on judging a book by it's cover. Here are the eight cover designs I found between British and American versions and the original Japanese paperback.











Picture number 1 is vastly more explicit than the book tends to be, and while 2 and 3 are at least relevant to the Greek Island part of the book, the same complaint applies. Number 4 is more abstract, and does accurately reflect the notion in the book of characters who feel split in two, but the tone is still wrong, as this design was originally chosen for Murakami's other romantic books, like Norwegian Wood and the like. 5, taken from a critical scene in the book, and 6, a picture of Sputnik, are just a bit too literal for my taste. My favorites are 7, the version I own, and 8, both of which combine the joke in the title with the romantic aspect of the story. Honestly, though, some of these designs are so different that I wonder if the text would seem different between the covers as well; the first visual impression you get from a book isn't trivial after all, maxims about judgment be damned.

Anyway, on to the book Review:

Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami ISBN: 0375726055 Compare prices at fetchbook.info Categories: Asian authors, UIUC Book Club

Murakami ranks highly on the list of my favorite authors, and in many ways this book helps to explain why. It is a smaller, more compact effort that his quasi-science fiction classics like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and Wind-up Bird Chronicle, lacking their scope but able to bring more focus to its topic. Like all Murakami books, our protagonist is a lonely man who feels detached in his day-to-day life. He is in love with a woman, Sumire, who feels nothing for him but falls madly in love with another woman, Miu, setting up a rather strange love triangle of frustrated desires and heartbreak.

In other hands, this would be a book that cuts to the heart of pain and loneliness, but that is hardly Murakami's style. Instead, he pushes their fears and desires into the dreamworld, where metaphors for detachment (disappearing into oneself, feeling split in two) become literal physical manifestations, and where his evocative but introverted prose has its maximum effect. In some sense, we all understand how an interior monologue works, but there is new ground to be found in a world where such thoughts are made flesh while remaining unconstrained by ordinary notions of reality and logic. I am not sure if this reading is correct, but it struck me that the two crucial incidents in the lives of the female characters, described here in dreamy and relatively unthreatening tones, are very suggestive of much darker analogues in the real world. If this is intended, then the book becomes a more disturbing work, in which we use out fantasies not to explore potential fates outside our control but to protect us from real life and all its associated unpleasantness. Either way, Murakami remains the master of tangential feeling, allowing us to see into his characters in a way that they themselves cannot. If his books tend to leave an ambiguous aftertaste, that is almost certainly the point; we live not in a world of absolutes but rather one of shades of meaning that we impose over external reality. This one fits that description well, bizarre at times but ultimately a satisfying exploration of loneliness and the ways in which we deal with it.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 1: Snow, by Orhan Pamuk

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. -Groucho Marx

As some people may know, I reviewed a bunch of books at my old department website, and figured this would be a good venue to continue the tradition. In a bit of fortuitous timing, the first book I'll review here is by the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature, although some have suggested that he earned it as much for his political stances as for his writing. He was recently put on trial for "insulting Turkishness" for making comments about the Armenian genocide, before the charges were eventually dropped. I cannot psychoanalyze the Nobel committee, but I can at least say that his most recent book is a fine work of modern political literature.

Snow, by Orhan Pamuk ISBN: 0375706860 Compare prices at fetchbook.info Categories: European Authors, Magical Realism, Post-modernism (?), Nobel Prize Winners

Just to clear up one misperception quickly, Pamuk is often referred to as a post-modernist, which some people regard as a literary turn-off (I love PoMo literature myself, but more on that in later reviews). In this case, it is because Pamuk has inserted himself into this novel as a narrator. However, the narrator by any other name would leave us with essentially the same book. Pamuk just happened to name his literary alter ego after himself, which is a rather mild flavor of post-modernism if it qualifies at all. Let me suggest instead the book is more properly classified as being in the magical realist school, albeit the more Eastern European-inflected introverted school (a la Ismail Kadare), rather than the extroverted South American version.

Our protagonist, a poet known to us as Ka (I have trouble not seeing it as a Kafka reference), revisits his hometown in Eastern Turkey after many years away. Upon arrival, he sets out to woo an old acquaintance, even as the town is taken over by a theater troupe-led coup his first night there. In many ways, the action in the book is secondary to its meaning, as in some ways are the characters, who stand in for the political archetypes to be found in the region: Islamists, Kurdish nationalists, secularists, students, soldiers, police, and more. Opinion is mixed online as to how well he draws characters; I found them to be intentionally sketchy, as what they have to say is more important that who they are and what they do.

The fascinating aspect of this book is its introverted perspective (our narrator has Ka's extensive journals from his three days in Kars), which lends an air of detachment that defines the whole novel. In the midst of a coup featuring arbitrary imprisonments, executions, and tanks in the street, Ka spends his time looking for love, even as he goes back and forth and back again on behalf of virtually every major political faction in town. While it takes getting used to, such detachment has real-life examples, most recently to my knowledge the coup in Thailand. In a city (or country) under the gun, there is a very odd combination of panic and daily routine; some people find themselves on one end or another of anarchic violence while some just try to pass the time waiting for stability. Even though no reference is made to conditions in Iraq (the war must have started either during or immediately after the book was finished), it is hard not to view events there in this light; imagine, if you will, tens of millions of people trying to feed their families, be a part of their community, and not get blown up by a car bomb. Ka, as an outsider, is detached both psychologically but also practically from those he meets, the bearer of mostly bad news of great relevance to everyone but himself. On a day where we find American and Iraqi politicians debating the political motives of Iraq's leading cleric and Islamic scholar, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, it is hard not to see a parallel in Ka's philosophical discussions with the local Islamists and rebels, whose beliefs and actions possess the same complicated and convoluted relationship. Ka is very much Pamuk's doppelganger, but for a western reader he is clearly ours as well, looking around at an unfamiliar culture that we can describe in words but barely begin to understand. As a cultural critique alone this book is a worthy addition to anyone's reading list; that he is a gifted wordsmith and storyteller only adds to the enjoyment.