2666 by Roberto Bolano

My god has it been a long time since I've posted anything. No excuses, really, other than laziness--but I'm coming back with something good.

Robert Bolano's 2666 is a 900 page novel that was published posthumously as a boxed set of three paperbacks (as well as another edition in one volume). Such a beautiful package--I love the brown paper slipcase, the red lettering, and the design of each of the individual books inside.



Each of the covers wraps around from left to right to create one large image.

As for the content of the book, it's actually divided into five parts, each one loosely connected to the next, from a group of critics in search of a reclusive German author, to an untold number of serial murders in Mexico, to the Eastern front of World War II, and back again. I love a good literary mystery, and while it didn't follow that storyline for the entire book, I nonetheless enjoyed it. I didn't read it all at once, taking breaks between some of the sections, so that by the time I got to the end of part four I'd nearly forgotten how it started, but it didn't bother me. It may be sprawling, and at times feels a little aimless, but by the end the many plotlines come together.

I wish all long books were published in parts, as a 300 page paperback is much easier to cart around on the subway than a 900 page one.

Expelled from Eden by William T. Vollmann

My first introduction to William T. Vollmann came in an interview in BookForum about five or six years ago. I was intrigued, and decided to start with the then recently published Expelled from Eden, which collects excerpts from all of his novels, as well as essays, journalism, interviews, and letters, providing a window into Vollmann's voice, style, and breadth of work. I'm not sure I read the whole thing (certainly not straight through), rather leafing through it, reading bits of it here and there. Since then I've endured a number of his books (I think endured is the right word--while beautifully written, the subject matter is often bleak and horrific) and intend to read more. Eventually. I haven't worked up the nerve to tackle Imperial yet (1,200 pages about the California county right on the Mexican border) but I'll get there.

The Lime Twig by John Hawkes

The Lime Twig is a surreal, avant-garde novel melded with pulp crime fiction. (Many a review describes it as something like Dick Francis meets David Lynch.) The basic story—a race horse heist gone horribly wrong—is told in nightmarish, impressionistic sequences. The cover of the book, featuring a grainy, blurry mess of images that only come into focus when you really concentrate, is a pretty apt translation of my experience of the book.

I can't remember how exactly I first came across John Hawkes—in some chain of online links—but only a couple weeks later I found a copy of The Lime Twig in a used bookstore and excitedly picked it up, thinking it a nice coincidence. As I was paying for the books, the store owner stopped at The Lime Twig and got a funny smile on her face as she explained that John Hawkes had been her college writing teacher (which explains why the book was prominently displayed on the wall). I'm not really sure of the point of that story but it's what I remember most about the book when I see it.

Screw-Jack by Hunter S. Thompson

Originally published in 1991 as a private printing of 300 collectors' copies and 26 leather-bound presentation copies, Screw-Jack was published for the general public in 2000. It's a short little book, consisting of three short stories, including a stream-of-consciousness chronicle of Thompson's first mescaline experience in 1969 and a demented love story ostensibly written by Thompson's alter ego Raoul Duke. It might not be Fear and Loathing good, but it's pretty good nonetheless. I love the cover, with the giant letters reminiscent of antique wood type.

Candy by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg

While perhaps best known for writing screenplays (Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider, Casino Royale, etc), Terry Southern wrote several novels and essays. In the 50s he hung around in New York with the likes of Robert Frank, Larry Rivers, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and so on. During that time he wrote a short story "about a girl in Greenwich Village who got involved with a hunchback because she was such a good Samaritan" (that particular description of it comes from this interview). Several people, including the poet Mason Hoffenberg, felt this girl should have more adventures, and the two began writing alternating chapters that grew into the novel Candy.

Candy is loosely based on Voltaire's Candide, written as a kind of spoof on the dirty books being published at the time. Candy Christian is a buxom teenager who more or less spends the novel being raped by various people, including her uncle. I realize this sounds horrific and offensive, but it somehow manages to be funny and zany in a dated 1960s sort of way. I was introduced to a number of ridiculous words for "vagina" that I'd never heard before, including "honeypot" and "lamb pit." And yet, I think I liked the book. One of my favorite lines:

"'Uh-huh,' said the cynical cop. 'Dr. Caligari, I suppose.'
Candy didn't like this kind of flippant reference to an art film."

Inferno (A Poet's Novel) by Eileen Myles

Reading a novel by Eileen Myles is always a bit of a confusing experience for me, as she tends to write them from the perspective of a character named Eileen Myles, who, much like the author Eileen Myles, grew up in Boston, moved to New York in the '70s, and became a lesbian poet. So it's a novel--which, by definition, is fictional--in which the main character is the author. Or maybe not.

In a video on her website, she says, "The first fiction is your name, I think that's why I use it in my books all the time...I prefer to use my own name because in a way, there's nothing falser than 'Eileen Myles.' And like everyone else, I really don't know who I am." Which really gets you started thinking about your own name, and how it's sort of an arbitrary couple of words that someone else chose for you, yet really comes to define who you are. But anyway...

I like BookForum's review of the book, as it really sums it up pretty well, so I'm going to post some of that here:

"Loosely, Inferno tells the story of Myles, who left Arlington, Massachusetts, where everyone "lived in a roughly catholic world," to make her way as a writer in New York City. As the title suggests, the book owes something to Dante's Divine Comedy. Instead of a dark wood, though, we start out in a college lit class learning Pirandello from a woman with a beautiful ass, "perfect and full," and from there the tour—gossipy, funny, crass, earnest—continues.

Hell is scraping to pay the rent, working as a bouncer at a bar up by Columbia where you can still feel the aura of '68. It's being trained to give handjobs at a massage parlor. It's "inspecting lesbians because I was pretty sure I was going to be one. But I wanted to be a poet first." Purgatory is taking speed and working for James Schuyler. (See Myles's 1994 Chelsea Girls for more on both.) It's Deleuze's Masochism, grant applications, and a dog named Rosie. It's when "I didn't look like a woman or a man and didn't live here or anywhere." A clash with Amiri Baraka. A crush on Nan Goldin. St. Mark's Poetry Project. Touring Germany with Sylvère Lotringer and other Semiotext(e) writers, getting upstaged by Kathy Acker, peeing on Goethe's lawn.

Heaven, though, is Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan's kitchen. It's roaming the city with flyers for poetry readings. It's sex in a tent in a loft. René Ricard buzzing your apartment in the middle of the day...The prose often goes loose and raggedy, yet it always stays in focus. It's a novel in the way Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights and Renata Adler's Speedboat are—that is to say, on its own terms."

A novel on its own terms. I think that's a pretty good way of characterizing what I was getting at at the beginning of this post.

Also, I feel the need to mention that you can actually choose between two different covers for this book. It's an interesting idea--and I'm glad that I got to choose this one, as I really did not care for the other one--but at the same time, I kind of think a book should have one cover. Or, since publishers are always repackaging books, at least one cover at a time. (Actually, I guess I should say one American cover at a time, as almost always the international editions of a book will be published with different covers.) A book cover is so visually defining, and I like the idea of the cover art being really iconic and in a way contributing to the book's identity. Which I guess must be a scary thought for the writer.

Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr.

Just finished watching the movie version of this book and I feel a little nauseous. I mean holy shit. This is a portrait of the depths of human misery, of a lonely old woman's addiction to diet pills, fueled by an obsession with being on television, and her junkie son, who's convinced that if he can acquire a "pound of pure," all his troubles will be over. It does not end well.

I got really into Hubert Selby, Jr.'s work during my freshman year of college--it may have started after I saw this movie the first time, actually. I'd also just started college in Brooklyn, the setting of all of these books, which might have piqued my interest as well. I read Last Exit to Brooklyn and Song of the Silent Snow, although I strangely have no actual recollection of reading Requiem for a Dream (though I know that I did). I wonder how it would hold up for me if I read it again now.

I recall that Selby's punctuation was unorthodox, though consistent, something that didn't exactly bother me though I didn't quite understand the point of it. He used forward slashes instead of apostrophes, eschewed quotation marks altogether, and often neglected to indent paragraphs, simply dropping them to the next line. Now that I look it up, it seems that he preferred forward slashes to apostrophes because they were just a little bit closer on his typewriter, which kind of paints a picture of someone furiously typing, trying to get out the story as fast as possible before it's gone. Which I kind of like.

Tooth and Claw by T. C. Boyle

This is the very first book I found on a "take shelf" when I started working at Penguin and I remember it was so exciting to just be able to take a free book. I'd read the title story in The New Yorker, as well as one other short story ("The Hector Quesadilla Story," from the Paris Review anthology), but otherwise it was my first introduction to Boyle's work, which often incorporates elements of satire and magical realism. "Hector Quesadilla" stands out in my mind as the stronger and more memorable work, so I think I might have to try Boyle's 1985 short story collection, "Greasy Lake & Other Stories," in which that one appears.

Lithium for Medea by Kate Braverman

Here's another author I was introduced to by a college teacher, through a few photocopied short stories distributed in a class. I decided to check out Braverman's first novel, a tale of addiction, unhappy relationships, and dysfunctional families in 1970s Los Angeles. At the time it was out of print (it's since been reissued), but I found this first edition copy online somewhere. The cover seems weirdly minimalist, though maybe that was the design trend at the time. (I do like the type treatment, but not the font of the author's name.)

A very young photo of the author on the back.

The Road to Los Angeles by John Fante

I was tipped off to John Fante by a teacher who said if I liked Bukowski I'd be into Fante, who was an influence on the former. That and the 1930s-'40s Los Angeles setting was enough to convince me to give him a try. The Road to Los Angeles was the first book of his that I read, and it was also the first book that Fante wrote. Much like Buk's Henry Chinaski, Fante's fictional alter ego was Arturo Bandini, a character he returned to many times throughout this novels. The Road to Los Angeles introduces Bandini as a young man struggling to become a great writer as he works odd jobs to make ends meet. It's not Fante's best but as I said, it was his earliest novel, written when he was 24 years old, with far better things to come.

Christmas themed books (and one audio recording)

I wanted to post something holiday-ish today but I think I went through my only two Christmas-themed books last year. So in case you missed them, here's a look at Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris and The Twelve Terrors of Christmas by John Updike.

And finally, here's my real Christmas gift to you. I linked to a print version last year, but I'm taking it up a notch this time with an audio recording (you can ignore the weird video montage someone has put together) of "Six to Eight Black Men" by David Sedaris. A word of warning: do not watch while sipping egg nog or hot cocoa, as you may spit it out in a fit of laughter. Not kidding.

Confessions of a Crap Artist by Philip K. Dick

The “crap artist” of the title is Jack Isidore, a socially awkward man who seems a bit obsessive compulsive, fanatically cataloging old science magazines and collecting random objects. He believes that the earth is hollow, that sunlight has weight, and other disproved theories. Broke, he moves in with his sister’s family and joins a religious group that shares his interests in ESP, telepathy, and UFOs, believing the world will end on April 23, 1959.

While the details of the novel involve some paranoiac elements, this is actually a straight fiction novel--nothing otherworldly occurs. Dick wrote a few other mainstream novels early on in his career, some of which were recently reissued by Tor, but for awhile this was the only one of them in print. While I definitely love some of the stranger PKD novels (Ubik is hands down my favorite), this one is certainly worth checking out.

P.S. To the people at Vintage: please repackage these books! They're ugly as sin! Thanks. (Although I guess there is a kind of charm in this level of hideousness. It's almost a way of weeding out the poseurs—only a true fan would be willing to be seen purchasing something that looks like this.)

Virginia Dare by Fielding Dawson

I first heard of Fielding Dawson in an article about him in The Believer a few years ago, which definitely got me interested. A beat-era writer and painter, he studied at Black Mountain College and hung around with Franz Kline and Philip Guston. (A favorite detail about him is that he pitched for the Max's Kansas City softball team. I especially love that there was a Max's Kansas City softball team at all.)

I came across this book when I wasn't looking for it, at Robin's Books in Philadelphia. (A signed copy by a dead author on a now defunct* legendary press...for $8.50. Go figure.) In the book's introduction, Dawson announces that "this book draws to a close my involvement with the first person and autobiography" and that it marks his "entrance into third person fiction, and open endings through transitions," as well as his intent "to undo the corset concepts of beginning, middle and end, as well as lucid description and dialogue in 123-ABC type progressions, and the mistaken dogma that novelistic completion brings, or ties, all loose ends together." Many of the stories are extremely short, a page or two, or even just a paragraph.

I remember feeling disappointed as I read it, but less disappointed in the book than I was with myself for not "getting it." Flipping through it now, the stories kind of remind me of a more beat-like Raymond Carver. I'd like to give it another try, or at least check out another of his books.

Dawson was also a painter and collagist, and there are many photographs and collages scattered throughout the pages of this book, as well as on the front cover.

*I've just learned that though John Martin did retire in 2002 and sold the rights to the works of Charles Bukowski, Paul Bowles, and John Fante to HarperCollins, he then sold the rest of his inventory to David Godine for $1, and Godine now not only distributes the remaining Black Sparrow stock but also publishes new titles under it as an imprint of his own publishing house. But for all intents and purposes, Black Sparrow is, in the classic sense, still defunct in my eyes.

The Way through Doors by Jesse Ball

This is Jesse Ball's second novel. I read his first book, Samedi the Deafness, simply because I liked the cover art, but was pleased to find that I enjoyed the story as well. The Way through Doors also has a lovely cover--the rectangle within a rectangle within a rectangle, the words of the title cut in half, aptly symbolize the structure of the novel itself.

When a pamphleteer sees a woman run down by a taxi, he takes her to the hospital and lies that he is her boyfriend. He must keep the woman awake, so he tells her stories all night, attempting to revive her memories in the process. At this point the book launches into a rather unconventional story arc, with the novel beginning again, the narrative folding in upon itself, breaking off in new directions while leaving the earlier story unfinished each time. In every version, he seeks to learn the woman's identity.

This is a complex, many layered, comically absurd novel, written with poetically skillful language. I'm excited to see that he has a new novel coming out in June, called The Curfew.

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom was a star high school basketball player, which was pretty much the highlight of his life. It's all been downhill from there. Now he's a little older, and his job and marriage are miserable and unfulfilling. One day on a whim he gets in his car and keeps driving. Except then he turns right back, but instead of going home shacks up with someone else for a few months, while a priest keeps trying to get him to reconcile with his pitiful wife.

I bought this book in a used bookstore in Kansas City, along with a stack of other old paperbacks. The owner commented that this one was "excellent" (the only other title that received a comment besides that was George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, which is allegedly also "excellent").

Other than one short story, I'd never read John Updike before, and I had a really hard time getting through this book. I couldn't stand any of the characters, except for maybe Ruth, the former prostitute. (Which I suppose doesn't necessarily make for a bad book, but that wasn't my experience this time.) Rabbit's wife is completely helpless. I pictured her as some kind of a pathetic blob of a human being, and quite frankly, I wish Rabbit had kept running that very first day and hadn't turned back. Although at the same time I didn't particularly like Rabbit either.

I have to assume Updike's work developed over time considering his literary reputation but this book did not make me want to read anything else of his.

By the way, I had no idea this had been made into a movie. Starring James Caan, no less!

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

This is David Foster Wallace's debut novel, which takes place in 1990 in an alternate Cleveland, OH. At some point in the past, the government decided that Ohioans would benefit from having a desert--a place to wander alone and reflect, free of shopping malls and civilization--and so they engineered the Great Ohio Desert, or G.O.D.

Our heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, is the daughter of the wealthy owner of a baby food company but chooses to work as a switchboard attendant at a publishing company. Her great-grandmother, a former student of Wittgenstein who cannot survive if the room temperature is below 98.6 degrees, has just disappeared from a nursing home, along with 25 other inmates. Her boyfriend, who's also her boss, is insanely jealous and possessive. And her pet cockatiel has begun speaking a mixture of sexual and religious psychobable, which may propel him to stardom on a Christian broadcasting network.

There's a lot going on in the story, but it didn't seem as difficult as his fiction is made out to be. (I'd previously only read his nonfiction.) Granted, many reviews say it is much more accessible than Infinite Jest (which I do intend to take on at some point, though I don't look forward to having to lug that thing around with me on the subway).

The book is bizarre, funny, and highly imaginative. It ends in the middle of a sentence, which feels a little dissatisfying, as though the story should keep going but we are only revealed a slice of it. But that feeling wore off after awhile.

There's a new edition of the book with Vlad the Impaler (the cockatiel) on the cover, which is all well and good, but I really prefer the one pictured above. It features an aerial view of the Cleveland suburb where the story takes place, a town that was designed to look like Jayne Mansfield's head from above.

The Petting Zoo by Jim Carroll

I can't believe it's been almost a month since I last posted anything. I guess I've been taking a bit of a break. But now I'm back (hopefully more regularly).

The Petting Zoo, which was released just last month, is Jim Carroll's first and last novel. He's of course published many volumes of poetry and two collections of his journals--the famous Basketball Diaries and the perhaps lesser known Forced Entries (I actually prefer the latter one). He died a little over a year ago, after turning in a draft and revising the first two parts of The Petting Zoo. A literary scholar was able to finish revising the novel based on Jim's detailed notes.

I'd seen him read part of this book about nine years ago, and according to his website, he first began reading pieces of it aloud in 1989. In other words, the book has been a very long time in the making, and I was really looking forward to reading it.

The protagonist, Billy Wolfram, is a painter who has achieved a high level of wealth and celebrity in the 1980s New York art world. Some say he's essentially a version of Jim Carroll without the sex, drugs, and rock n roll. Yes, Wolfram is a hugely successful artist...and a 38 year-old virgin, due to unresolved sexual neuroses dating back to his mother walking in on him during his first and only attempt at jerking off. (I've purposely left out a few amusing details...you'll have to read it to find out the rest.)

I hate to say it, but I was disappointed with this book. It may be a result of others having to finish it for him, or, similarly, perhaps the book would have required a lot more rewriting on Carroll's part had he lived longer, but was published prematurely upon his death. The writing style feels flat, lacking the kind of poetic virtuoso one might expect from him, and the dialogue seems unnatural and a bit stilted at times. I'm also not sure how I feel about the talking, immortal raven that keeps appearing throughout the story (there seems to be an implication that it's the same one that knocked at Edgar Allan Poe's chamber door).

On a more positive note, the cover art was illustrated by Raymond Pettibon, which might be the only reason I'm keeping the book.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

I read this book for my high school AP English class. We also read Beloved by Toni Morrison, and afterwards the teacher asked us to write a paper on which one we liked better and why. Which seems a little odd. But the point is that I was only one of two people in the class who preferred The Sound and the Fury, which I find kind of interesting.

It's a notoriously difficult book, but I remember that once I started reading a particular section and really got into the rhythm and feel of a character's thought processes, however confused and tortured they might be, I could actually kind of follow it. (I'm sure I missed some details here and there.) I'd never read anything like it, that was for sure.

I started to re-read it about five years ago but never finished for some reason. I should try it again.

Demonology by Rick Moody

Not too long ago I read Rick Moody's latest novel, The Four Fingers of Death, and I wasn't all that crazy about it. It's ambitious, for sure--three novels in one, using satire and humor to explore themes of ennui and interpersonal relationships (in this case, on the planet Mars), but it just didn't do anything for me. I can't really say why. Helpful, I know. But I loved his earlier work when I first read it--for instance, this collection of short stories, Demonology, which I remember first reading and wanting to do that. One of my favorites in this volume is "Wilkie Fahnstock: The Boxed Set," in which the story of a man's life is told as a series of music tracks and accompanying liner notes. ("Tragedy struck in 1970, when Elise Fahnstock's marriage to Stannard Buchanan Fahnstock ended in acrimonious divorce--to the sounds of Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water.") It's a pretty good mix.

While You Please Be Quiet Please by Raymond Carver

At one time I really wanted to write like this--sparse, economical, and evocative, chilling in its ability to communicate what is just below the surface without actually saying it. In the critical introduction to my senior thesis (hilarious that such a thing exists) I named Carver as one of my primary influences, along with Mary Gaitskill, Amy Hempel, and James Salter (I had to dig it out of a filing cabinet to confirm this; I also praised Carver for the lyrical effect of his dialogue). Nowadays I'm more of a surrealist crime fiction kind of a girl, so it just goes to show you how much your tastes continue to change.

I see that all of his books have been repackaged. I'm not that big of a fan--it's just different photos taken at dusk of houses with the lights on, and I'm also not too crazy about the font--but it's a definite step up from this. Although I do love how the text gradually gets smaller on the older version, which was not kept in the new cover.