The World to Come

On Halloween, I thought it would be appropriate to post on The World to Come by Dara Horn since the underlying theme of the book is the after life or from Horn’s point of view, the “pre-life.”

This book was on Slate’s list of Overlooked Fiction for 2006 and what sparked my interest was that it was about a painting by Marc Chagall, from its origins in a Russian orphanage during the 1920s to its theft from a New York museum. I am a huge fan of Chagall as well as Jewish themed literature (good to add some diversity to our blog) so the brief review sounded right up my alley. The book goes back and forth through the 20th century tracing the history of the Ziskind family and intertwining stories about Chagall and Der Nister, aka “The Hidden One,” who was a Yiddish author in the 1920′s.

The story begins with Boris Kulbak, the patriarch of the Ziskind family, who is living in the Jewish Boys Colony in Malakhovak, Russia after his entire family was killed in a program. There he meets a young artist, Marc Chagall, and trades him one of his sketches for a small painting by Chagall. Der Nister is also a teacher at the colony and crumples one his stories into the back of the Chagall painting. The story then jumps to the present time where Benjamin Ziskind, former child prodigy and great, great, grandson of Kulbak, steals the painting off the wall of a museum at a Jewish singles mixer. Each chapter goes back and forth between different characters of this family, different parts of the world and different periods of time in the 20th century. We hear first hand about the Russian pograms in the 20′s, the birth of Communist Russia, Vietnam in the 60′s and modern day Newark, NJ. At the same time, Horn gives us an intimate look at each of the characters and draws the reader into their trials and tribulations.

What I loved most about the book was Horn’s references to old Yiddish folktales. There are many excerpts from these stories and most of them revolve around the “next world.” She then uses these stories to interweave the character’s own philosophies:

I believe that when people die, they go to the same place as all the people who haven’t yet been born. That’s why it’s called the world to come, because that’s where they make the new souls for the future. And the reward when good people die is that they get to help make the people in their families who haven’t been born yet. They pick out what kinds of traits they want the new people to have – they give them all the raw material of their souls, like their talents and their brains and their potential. Of course it’s up to the new ones, once they’re born, what they’ll use and what won’t, but that’s what everyone who dies is doing, I think. They get to decide what kind of people the new ones might be able to become.

Isn’t that such a cool thought? These optomistic, thoughtful ideas are strewn throughout the novel. Dara Horn is not yet 30 years old and has completed her doctorate in Hebrew and Yiddish literature at Harvard University. I think it’s amazing that someone so young was able to write such a deeply philosophical novel and at the same time, keep it fresh, modern and entertaining.

I could not put this book down and absolutely loved it. It is at the top of my 2006 list.

Spooktacular Downloads

NPR’s This American Life is now available as a complimentary podcast.  Download the Halloween-themed episode “…and the call was coming from the basement!”

If you’d rather rock out to a sweet Halloween-themed mix, the folks at Yellow Stereo have you covered.  Includes tunes by Echo and the Bunnymen, PJ Harvey, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, etc.
And for God’s sake, don’t follow this link to Monster Chiller Horror Theater.

Fall Reading Crunch

If you’ve been in a book store lately, you know that the shelves are over-flowing with potentially great books by big name writers. Trying to make sense of it all, I’ve compiled some info that may be useful in making purchasing decisions.

• A.O. Scott takes a break from movies and reviews Richard Ford’s Lay of the Land in the Sunday Book Review. The New Yorker has an excerpt if you’d like to take the book for a test drive.
• The NYT also reviewed Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier this weekend. The first chapter is also available on-line. Thirteen Moons is currently the worst rated novel on review aggregating site MetaCritic.
• Jessa Crispin from Bookslut says she had to spend the day at Cute Overload after finishing Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The Road is tied for the highest rated novel on MetaCritic. I can’t find an excerpt. Pass one along if you find one.
• The Road is tied with The Night Gardener by George Pelacanos for highest rated novel on MetaCritic. Pelecanos also occasionally writes for the the HBO crime show, The Wire. Janet Maslin gives it a thumbs up in the NYT.
• A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon is reviewed here and here. Read the first chapter here.
• And out of left field, The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas has just popped up on my radar out of nowhere. It was reviewed this weekend by the NYT. Jessa Crispin at Bookslut gives it a rave review. First chapter is available here.
• That Devil in the White City guy has a new book out called Thunderstruck.

That’s just the first table into the store…

The Saints are Coming

U2 and Green Day offer some suggestions on how things might have been handled a little better/quicker in New Orleans after Katrina:

King Procrastinator

I finished King Dork, by Frank Portman, a week or so ago while I was on a plane. I can’t believe that I’ve been too busy to post on it until now. But maybe you can believe it. Anyway, this fine tome was a gift from DJ Cayenne, I think for my birthday (which was last spring). My goodness I take a while getting around to stuff, don’t I?

I know the DJ has posted on this one, but I haven’t read his post yet; I’m still sticking to my theory that any posts I write must not be tainted by those who’ve gone before me. So I’ll read his when I’m done with this. Hopefully we won’t say the same things. Or really different things.

King Dork, a/k/a Chi-Mo, a/k/a Sheepie, a/k/a lots of other names that aren’t his real name (Tom Henderson), is a high school student at Hillmont High School in Santa Carla, California. His father is dead, he’s got a weird stepdad who tries to be hip and cool, and he is antogonized by a verbally abusive principal. And Chi-Mo spends all day, every day, trying not to get beat up by the “normal” kids and thinking up new band names, band member names, and album names for the imaginary band that he fronts with his “friend” (i.e., the only person who he believes doesn’t hate him), Sam Hellerman (who has grown up as Henderson’s alphabetical order buddy).

As I read this book, trying not to think of Chi-Mo as a dork (he is our narrator and protagonist, after all), I realized that I used to do a lot of the same things he did when I was in high school. Not worry about getting beat up, but come up with band names and album covers. I even had an album cover for our fictional band “Trooper” entered into the Scholastic Art Awards Competition. It was awesome: an American flag for a backdrop (inspired, ironically enough, by Def Leppard’s British flag muscle tee’s), with a black Gibson Explorer coming out at you, and “TROOPER” written across the bottom in black stencil. Fine perspective drawing, if I say so myself, and not too shabby with the tempera paints, either.

So I can’t, in good faith, say that these activities make a guy a dork. Doing so would undermine all of the street cred that I’ve worked so hard to amass over the years. Besides, by the end of the book, I don’t think you view Chi-Mo as a dork. Sure, he’s obsessed and infatuated by some unusual things, but I think he proves his mettle as a cool dude by the time you get to the end of the story, no matter what criteria you would base such a determination on.

Without getting too much into the story itself, I’ll disclose that Chi-Mo becomes obsessed with his late father’s collection of books, including his copy of Catcher in the Rye. Chi-Mo hates Catcher in the Rye and the cult of people inspired by it, but he is intrigued by some notes, scribbles and stains he finds in the copy that belonged to his father. And he works with Sam Hellerman to try to get to the bottom of the cryptic codes contained in his late father’s books. And it leads to a pretty interesting denouement. That’s French, by the way. Which leads me to my favorite, laugh-out-loud passage in the book, when Chi-Mo is talking with Yasmynne Schmick during the last fifteen minutes of Advanced French class, when the kids are required to speak only in French. I know it sounds like the old Steve Martin bit, but it had me rolling around laughing, as the conversation drifted into statements like “all the world very much loves the automobile who calls himself a cat”, and “our little green hat is orange on the head of this very interesting horse”. Maybe you had to be there, but I dug it.

And I’ll close with these comments: (1) this is the second book I’ve read in recent memory in which a young boy is obsessing over a book (see The Shadow of the Wind), and (2) I wholeheartedly expect, when I read Mr. DJ’s post, to read of his disappointment that Chi-Mo doesn’t even list the Clash in his listing of the greatest rock-and-roll bands of all time (although I suspect he still liked the book anyway).

Class out the Wazoo

Mrs. Salman Rushdie IV is starring in her own reality TV show, Top Chef, this season on Bravo. Naturally she abhors reality television. However, she reassures us that her show will be a “very high-caliber, high-brow food show.” Don’t follow the link unless you want to see Padma laying on a prep table in her underpants with some lobsters.

Imaginary Journalism

As a follow-up to DJ Cayenne’s post on new non-fiction, this stunning review in New York magazine of What is the What, the new book by Dave Eggers, deems the book “imaginary journalism.”  Even though it is billed as a novel, Eggers spent years interviewing the Sudanese refugee that the story is based on. 

If the review is accurate, run out today to Barnes and Noble and purchase it.

NOLA 2-For-1 Special

Speaking of pestilence: I had hoped to finish writing about one or both of two New Orleans/Katrina books that I’ve read “recently” in something approaching a timely manner. The one year anniversary of the storm seemed like a good target date. So did the Saints v. Falcons/re-opening of the Super Dome (eat it Falcons!). Then, I mentioned in a post a few weeks back that I would get around to it in a few days. Better late than never I suppose.

In order to not drag this out any longer, I’ve decided to tackle both books at once. The books are The Great Deluge by Douglas Brinkley and Why New Orleans Matters by Tom Piazza. For books with the same basic subject matter, they couldn’t be more different.

The Great Deluge

The Great Deluge is almost an encyclopedic catalog of the human suffering that occurred in New Orleans and Coastal Mississippi in the week following Hurricane Katrina. The book gives a short account of the world before the storm, but it seems that just about everything that happened in that one week is mentioned in great detail. Here are some stats from the book:

More than 200,000 homes were destroyed while another 45,000 were deemed unlivable…15,000 apartments washed away… Both St. Bernard Parish and Plaquemines Parish were 90% obliterated…

Our correspondent, Dr J, an authority on these things, loathes Brinkley as a hack historian. Those feelings are borne out in parts of the book. There are passages that feel overly political, including screeds against the Mayor, the Governor, the President, that come off as partisan attacks. Some of those people are in different political parties, so I’m not sure what the goal of these attacks are.

There are also some errors in the book that are obvious to even the most casual reader. The most embarrassing error has to be when Brinkley refers to Trent Lott as a former Louisiana Senator. Brinkley lives in Louisiana. How did no one proofing the book pick that up?

For all its faults, The Great Deluge is a gripping read and me become the definitive book on the subject. It’s certainly the biggest.

Why New Orleans Matters

Why New Orleans Matters, on the other hand, is a very personal book. I was expecting a book length dispassionate argument about why the City deserves to be rebuilt better, stronger, faster, etc. Instead, Piazza hits all of the things that he loves about New Orleans, his adopted home town.

On Jazz Fest: “…the subtext, as it always is in New Orleans, is that we’re all still alive and we might not be tomorrow.”

That’s true. This book came out well before the love fest that was the post-Katrina 2006 Jazz Fest. I never got around to posting on my ’06 Jazz Fest adventures. The passage was so prescient of the shared experience of survival and hope that it is spooky.

But Piazza also gives a fair appraisal of what’s not OK with New Orleans: “Sooner or later New Orleans will test any love that you bring to it”. Too true. If it was all rainbows and unicorns, I’d live there instead of here.

Piazza also provides the best first person account of what life was like for the people who went back to see what was left of their lives. He offers the following thought experiment. Begin by drawing a line three feet or higher around all of the walls or your house. Now imagine that everything below the line has been completely ruined. This Included all of your books and pictures, which have been knocked over onto the floor. If you’re having trouble imagining what your books now look like, submerge your favorite book in the kitchen sink for a week and then leave it out for another week to mold over.

If it is still difficult to imagine, take all of your books, place them in your bathtub and immerse them in a mixture of water, urine, spoiled food, feces, weed killer from the garage, and perhaps your beloved cat, preferably drowned and bloated. Make sure to turn all the lights off and to leave the house as nearly as possible sealed to the fresh air…

Yikes. As it turns out, having read many of the big Katrina books, a consensus is emerging that the best Katrina book may be Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City by Jed Horne. Which I haven’t read yet. Dammit. I don’t know that I’ve got another one of these in me. Another Katrina Book that I’ve heard good things about (but have not read) is The Storm by Ivor van Heerden, which provides more of a science and engineering approach to the subject matter.

If you’ve got a minute, there are two recent articles from the New Orleans’ Times-Picayune that are worth your while.

The first is an article by columnist Chris Rose defending the spectacle that was the Saints/Falcons game. Apparently some felt that it was unseemly for people to listen to Green Day/U2 while others were still homeless. His response is outstanding.

The second is an article by the same columnist, Chris Rose, about how the crushing weight of what the disaster almost drove him to suicide. It’s a moving piece and it gives some hint at the amazing depth of the trauma that is being felt by everyone who has survived (Another Times-Picayune employee, a photographer, tried to kill himself by running over a cop (the idea, apparently, was that the cop would shoot him – shockingly, he didn’t).

And lastly: My daughter dropped and cracked her cheap New Orleans snow globe. Her second. After putting it on a table and watching the water leak out of it, I was struck by the metaphor-iness of it all. See for yourself. Deep, man.

Get Your Plague and Pestilence On

Yesterday, I linked to a review of Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map. Afterwards, I came across this trailer for the book.

Since the author tells you essentially the whole story, I don’t feel too badly telling you how it ends. They began by removing the pump handle, and the cholera incidence rate instantly dropped. The map that Johnson alludes to is also a classic in data presentation design.

Steven Johnson recently compiled a list of the Five Best Books about Plagues for the Wall Street Journal.

New Stuff – Non Make Believe Edition

For curmudgeon Dr J (see comments to 1001 Books), a non-fiction round-up:

Dave Eggers has a new book coming out that will be sold as Fiction, but it is largely based on the true story of one of the Lost Boys of the Sudan. It’s called What is What and has some nice blurbs from the authors of Beasts of No Nation and Kite Runner.

The Complete Works of Charles Darwin will soon be available online. Be sure to tell your favorite nut job.

Barack Obama has a new book, The Audacity of Hope, which was positively reviewed in the NYT.

Boing Boing has a rave review of Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. The book is a non make believe “science thriller” about one of the classic cases of early epidemiology. It’ll be on my shelf shortly.

The Five People that You Meet in Hell: Surviving Katrina includes the judge from Night Court (according to the Amazon info) but not the dismember-your-girlfriend/leap-to-your-death suicide guy (pdf). Go figure.

1001 Books

Jessa Crispin talks about the book, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die at the Book Standard. That’s a lot of books. She’s read 96. I’ve read 86. Read the list here (Jessa recommends the book, too). Counting the books that you’ve actually read (all the way through) is this week’s meme. In lieu of work today, download my handy spreadsheet here and get cracking. If you follow the brief directions at the top, your score will automatically be calculated at the bottom (if this actually works, I’ll be stunned). Post your results in the comments section. No score is too depressing.

Mrs Rushdie

After a hard day of fatwas and PEN conferences, it’s important to have the right little woman to come home to. Here’s the fourth Mrs. Rushdie:

I don’t know if she’ll be joining him at Emory, but if I’m still working at the English Department there when he arrives, I’ll keep everybody apprised.

The New New Journalism

Or is it the New New New Journalism?

• Alternadad and Grup poster-child, Neal Pollack, has a thoughtful piece on Hungry Hungry Hippos in the New York Times Magazine.
• Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puff’s Chuck Klosterman writes about the disappearance of barefoot kickers in the NFL on ESPN’s Page 2.

In other news, I’ve settled on a name for my alt-country, yall-ternative, cow punk band (that will also be steeped in the tradition of the Bakersfield Sound): The Train Rex. Too bad that I can’t sing or play an instrument.

Digested Reviews & Other News

Digested Reviews

• Slate loves The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
• Slate then takes a big poop on Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier.
• Malcolm Gladwell loves The Blind Side.

Other news:
If you’re in Jersey City tonight – hey, it could happen – check out the art opening for the Hurricane Katrina photo book Signs of Life. The book features photographs of the hand made signs that began popping up around New Orleans in the days after the storm. Some humorous, some filled with despair – primitive blogs that signalled the return of life to the City.

Home Land’s Sam Lipsyte writes from the road, while waiting for something really bad to happen, with French author and fire brand Michel Houellebecq in The Believer.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

For me, reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics was not optional. It all began with Janet Maslin’s review in the NYT, which included the following:

Marisha Pessl’s “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” is the most flashily erudite first novel since Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Everything Is Illuminated.” …Q: Is “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” required reading for devotees of inventive new fiction? A: Yes.

There you go: required. Pessl has been compared to other innovative and much hyped young writers like Donna Tarrt, Dave Eggers, and Zadie Smith. She has also been compared to Nabokov. A review in L.A. Weekly that asserted that the book was definitely not a literary masterpiece stated that she is more accurately compared to Hitchcock.

Then there was a brouhaha about her large cash book advance possibly being related to her looks. (Gawker initially rated Pessl only “book hot”, but then upgraded her to “TV hot” after further review). I can’t let this much buzz about a book go by without picking it up and forming my own opinion. I’m a chump for endless hype.

So the real questions is: did the book live up to the hype?

The Introduction begins, “Dad always said a person must have a significant reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.” So, Pessl sets the bar for her tale at the very outset. There will be a significant reason.

The story is told from the viewpoint of Blue van Meer, a Rory Gilmour-esque teenager. Blue is exceedingly bright and hopefully Harvard bound. She idolizes her brilliant father, Gareth, a vagabond academic who teaches political science at a different bottom-tier university each semester.

As a special treat, Blue’s father agrees to accept a position at a university in North Carolina for her entire Senior year. We find all of this out, though, after Blue tells us that she has stumbled across the body of one her teachers hanging from a tree in the woods. (Not a spoiler: Blue tells us this happened in the first sentence of Chapter 1). So it falls on the remainder of the book to fill in the back story.

Once the promised school year starts, Blue is improbably pulled into a a group of cool kids at her exclusive private school that are known as the “blue bloods”. The blue bloods are widely loathed by the other students for their hipness. The sophisticated drama teacher, Hanna Schneider, is the center of their universe. It was Hannah that pulled Blue into the clique after a strange meeting in a grocery store. Feeling out of place from the start, Blue compares herself to a young Jane Goodall studying the lives of the beautiful people.

With Hannah’s death, the blue bloods come unglued resulting in heaping helpings of teen angst for Blue. Striving to make sense of her world, Blue sets out to uncover who is responsible for Hannah’s death. Surprises ensue.
Blue’s father advises her:

Always have everything you say exquisitely annotated, and where possible, provide staggering Visual Aids, because, trust me, there will always be some clown sitting in the back – somewhere by the radiator – who will raise his fat, flipperlike hand and complain, “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong.”

As a result, Blue provides references for just about everything in the book. If she remarks that someone looks like a frog, she’ll refer you to a specific page in a wildlife guide. A more typical Blue citation might look like this:

Each featured the same carrot topped woman flashing a banana grin that walked the fine line between ecstatic and fanatic (see Chapter 4, “Jim Jones,” Don Juan de Mania, Lerner, 1963).

Blue may the first narrator that I’ve encountered that appears to be conscious of the fact that someone may consider her unreliable, and she does everything that she can to combat it. She even includes a number of self-drawn pictures as Visual Aids. It may or may not be beside the point that most of Blue’s citations, like this one, are bogus. As the story reaches its conclusion, Blue’s reliability becomes more critical.

Blue is also a master of the simile/metaphor. Her prose is peppered with nuggets like, “My thoughts moved slowly like blobs in a lava lamp…” and “(because I was about as cool as Bermuda shorts), they’d drop me like laundry and accelerate into the whispery night with its plum sky and black mountains…” – that sort of thing. The simile/metaphor-a-thon distracted another reader of the book, but I didn’t mind so much. I’m easily impressed.

My reading of the book went something like this. The first 100 pages or so provide a pretty solid and interesting introduction to Blue and her life. The next chunk of book seems to meander a bit, but from page 311 until the finish – it is riveting. It turns out that when you’re finished, you realize a lot of what happens between pages 100-ish and 311lays the groundwork and spreads the clues around for the big finish. I wanted to go back and read the whole thing again. I did re-read the Introduction and First Chapter.

So it’s not perfect. It very nearly lives up to the hype. And that’s OK with me. From the review in LA weekly mentioned above:

When it comes to most art, I’m an advocate of lowering the bar. Call me conservative or simply pessimistic, but I’d much rather watch someone sail gracefully over a low ribbon than witness yet another hapless high jumper smack his poor forehead on that awful obstacle, The Next Great American Novel.

I’m the complete opposite. I cheer for the author to put it all on the line and bite my nails hoping that they pull it off. If they come up a little short, well, hats off for trying. So that’s where I am with this book. I loved it and would highly recommend it with one caveat: read it or not depending on whose camp you’re in, mine or the LA Weekly guy.

Also: Blue has her own MySpace page.

Rushdie, Spoilers, Hornby, & Overlooked Books

An article in the Guardian says that Salman Rushdie’s decision to sell his literary papers (and join their faculty) to Emory University is an unqualified good thing for British literature.

McSweeney’s has the ending to 10 famous books that you’ve been meaning to read.

Nick Hornby says that we should cut the DaVinci crowd (and ourselves) some slack.

Slate has a list of 2006′s best overlooked fiction that were highlighted in a box that said, “books that you should be reading instead of Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

Coming tomorrow, my review of Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

Friday Night Video

This is a video for the French band Nouvelle Vague. The song is a cover of the punk(ish) band Lords of the New Church song “Dance with Me”. The actual film is a repurposed chunk of a Jean-Luc Goddard movie. That’s a lot thrown in the blender, but the result is pretty great. Says me. Now get dancing on a Friday night.

In the Non-Suck Book Awards…

Turkish author, Orhan Pamuk, has won the Nobel Prize for literature.  He’s still hoping to bring home a Quill Award though.  I’ve had Pamuk’s book Snow in my “to read” stack for about two years now.  It never seems to make it to the top for some reason.  No idea why.  Maybe his winning the Nobel is just the push we both need.

The Quill Award Must Die

In all the excitement over the announcement of the Booker Prize, I completely missed that the 2006 Quill Awards were awarded the very same night. The Quill Awards are some manufactured corporate bullshit People’s Choice-style awards that are at least 87% ridiculous. The Awards view themselves this way:

The Quill Awards pair a populist sensibility with Hollywood-style glitz and have become the first literary prizes to reflect the tastes of the group that matters most in publishing-readers.

What that means in practice is that the Book of the Year is Tyler Perry’s Don’t Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings: Madea’s Uninhibited Commentaries On Love and Life. You heard me. Book. Of. The. Year. That’s just offensive to me, as the most important person in publishing – a reader.

Marley and Me won Best Audio Book and Best Memoir (it was my pre-event favorite to win best book at this travesty). Best Business Book? The Girl’s Guide to Being A Boss (Without Being a Bitch) (Ladies – is that title at all offensive?). I keep waiting for the companion book for men – How to Be A Boss Without Being a Complete Douche. So far, nothing. Best Cooking Book author? Rachel Ray.

On the plus (non-BS) side, Al Gore won for An Inconvenient Truth, and If You Throw a Pig A Party is pretty awesome.

Seriously. Madea won Best Book of the Year. That’s just F-ed up.

It’s not all gloom from the Big Apple

This Sunday is The Great Read in the Park.  Highlights include readings by Marisha Pessl, Mary Gaitskill and Jeannette Walls.  Sounds like a perfect break from Sunday sports.