Román Leão

Tag: book-review

  • The Day I First Believed—Wally Lamb

    Former Oprah Book Club golden boy Wally Lamb took his time writing his third novel, The Day I First Believed, a harrowing look at violence and the effect it has on those caught in its collateral snare. Lamb’s much anticipated follow-up to 1998’s I Know This Much is True is an engaging, terrifying, and at times, nauseating rollercoaster ride, even going as far as to include the feeling when the ride suddenly stops and you kind of lurch out toward the parking lot, dizzy, discombobulated, and trying not to hurl.

    The first half of The Day I First Believed deals with the real world events of the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. The novel’s protagonist, Caelum Quirk and his wife Maureen both work at the school, although Caelum is called away by the imminent death of an aunt on the East Coast and Maureen is left to live through the shooting on her own. She does survive, but is seriously psychologically traumatized by the experience.

    I remember when the shooting happened, and like everyone, I was shaken up, but I had already been out of high school for 15 years at the time and I think the immediacy of what happened was a little lost on me. Ten years later, I found myself back on campus, this time as a teacher, and the impact of Lamb’s narration scared the living shit out of me.

    Lamb uses snatches of diary entries, news reports, and transcripts of the taunting videos the two gunmen made before going on their rampage to good effect in the first half of the book, it’s in the second half when he resorts to a similar technique to introduce side plots dealing with the Quirk family history that the whole thing lurches to a halt.

    Dana and I saw Lamb speak at Corte Madera’s Book Passage after I had finished the novel, but she hadn’t. I was hoping to glean some sort of insight into what Lamb was trying to do with the second half of this novel, without standing up and asking him straight up, “What the hell?”

    We both found Lamb to be very personable, engaging, and a great storyteller. He mentioned the idea of the labyrinth as the story’s overarching metaphor, and personally, I think he became a little lost in his own maze.

    He mentioned how he inhabits his characters when he is writing, and if what I experienced just reading the first half of the novel is any indication of what that must have been like, perhaps he wandered a little off the reservation. I hope he makes it back.

  • Superworse—Ben Greenman

    If there is one thing you could say about this slowly aging, psychedelically dented, slightly cynical romantic, it’s that I likes me some metafiction. When Dave Eggers and his crew started up McSweeney’s back in ’98, I thought I had died and gone to a well-lighted, non-denominational heaven (which for some reason, looked a lot like Portland).

    Author Ben Greenman is an editor at the New Yorker and apparently indulges his non-monocled side writing for indie cred publications like McSweeney’s and Nerve. His 2004 novel, Superworse, is supposedly a paperback “remix” of his 2001 hardback effort, Superbad. It’s hard to know to what extent this is true as the novel itself is a Gordian knot of self-reference and too-clever-by-half literary winks and nods. Just the way I like ’em.

    Without giving too much away, the conceit of Superworse is that an old instructor of Greenman’s, one Laurence Onge, is asked to edit the original novel for the soft cover release by Soft Skull Press. Onge is a bit of a megalomaniac and sees references to his history with the author under every well-turned phrase. Onge had gone as far to impose a series of Greenman’s musical numbers onto the earlier version of the book, which have been removed here “at the request of the author.”

    When Greenman quits shuffling the cards and playing with the intricate structure of the 19 chapters of the book, he writes a good short story. Pieces like the twice-removed western, The Theft of a Knife, or the 13th century Florintine political drama, No Friend of Mine, show Greenman’s gift for set and setting, as well as psychological abstraction. Even the more traditionally structured stories in Superworse all leave the reader with a faint sense of unease. Nothing in Greenman’s stories is ever really resolved; we are only seeing as much of the drama as the author thinks we need to see.

    The feeling of vertigo is muted in shorter, McSweenyesque, sketches like, Notes on Revising Last Night’s Dream, and the superlative, What 100 People, Real, and Fake, Believe about Dolores, which masterfully maps the rise and fall of a relationship through short observations from friends, historical and literary figures, and… Superman, who simply believes “that the underwear she wore was the same as the underwear that Lois Lane wore.”

    To illustrate the extent that Greenman, or Onge, or Greenman/Onge has gone to tie all this together, the first nine chapters and the last nine are separated by a pivotal 10th chapter entitled Notes to a Paper You Wouldn’t Understand in which a series of footnotes thematically echo their corresponding chapters while they ostensibly relate minutiae about an absent piece about… well, who really cares, you get the idea. If this all sounds like your cup of mud, well, I’ll see you at the bar.

    Also by this author:
    What He’s Poised to Do: Stories

  • Gun, with Occasional Music—Jonathan Lethem

    One of my favorite things about Jonathan Lethem’s work is the sense of fun he imparts when playing with the expectations of genre. His first novel, Gun with Occasional Music, takes the noir of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and fuses it with the dystopian science fiction of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, with a little William S. Burroughs thrown in for leavening.

    The life of Gun’s protagonist, futuristic flat foot Conrad Metcalf, gets complicated when his client on a simple peep job ends up murdered. The problem compounds exponentially when the number one suspect, after Metcalf himself, shows up to hire the detective to find the real killer.

    This brings unwanted heat from the Inquisitor’s Office, an all-seeing, not-so-secret police force that has the power to remove “karma points” from citizens as they see fit. To let one’s karma fall to zero is to become a non-person and awards the unlucky a trip to the (literal) freezer. Further complicating matters, is the fact that everyone is hooked on the government-supplied drugs “Forgettol” and “Acceptol” which makes getting a straight answer from anyone an interesting challenge.

    Not satisfied with a run-of-the-mill paranoid run through one of our possible paths, Lethem ups the ante with super-evolved talking animals, including a gun-toting kangaroo (inspired by a Chandler quote reproduced at the top of the story), a concubine sheep, and disturbing “babyheads,” human toddlers who have had the same mutagenic fast-forward applied to them, making them little alcoholic fatalist assholes. Which tracks.

    In 2020, literally moments before COVID fucked everything sideways, the movie trades were abuzz with news that the book was under development for a television series. Johan Renck, best known for his harrowing Chernobyl, was named as director, with Jason Bateman’s Aggregate Films producing. It has been crickets since then, however.

    Talking kangaroos and the like are tricky to pull off without looking ridiculous, and like the creatures in David Cronenberg’s 1991 take on Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, perhaps left to the individual widescreens in our heads.

    Also by this author:
    Chronic City: A Novel
    The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

  • What He’s Poised to Do: Stories—Ben Greenman

    Ben Greenman’s wistful collection of short stories, What He’s Poised to Do, begins at a remove. For a book that both posits and ponders the importance of interpersonal communication, Greenman chooses to keep readers at arm’s length—at least until he’s gotten to know you better. His use of characters identified only by third-person pronouns in the title piece underlines the faceless isolation that an unhappy businessman out on the road feels as he engages in a cool affair with a woman who works at his hotel.

    There is an echo of the relationship between Lydia and Ricardo Reis in Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis in that even within an ongoing carnal relationship, Greenman’s guest remains alienated from everyone to a debilitating extent. The businessman’s one remaining open conduit of exchange is the series of postcards he writes the woman, his wife, and his son. Even this method of expressing his feelings stumps him at the end of the story, revealing that Greenman’s title is, if not ironic, then overly optimistic.

    “He sits down at the desk, finds a pen, and holds it over a postcard, uncertain exactly what he’s poised to do.”

    Greenman underscores this theme throughout the collection by postmarking the first page of each story, indicating the date and place from which it was sent. Even a cursory glance at the contents page gives the reader a pretty good idea of the breadth of Greenman’s stages for his universal passion play; settings range from North Africa, in 1851, to Atlanta, in 2015, and everywhere (and when) in between—including the imagined Lunar City, in 1989, and the confounding Australindia, in 1921.

    One standout piece, To Kill the Pink, is written from Harlem in 1964 at a time when both racial and personal boundaries were burning. Greenman writes as an African-American man who, after a tragic incident, decides to travel to Malawi to better understand his heritage and the extraordinary woman he loves. When he asks her how a “twenty-four-year-old black girl who’s never been out of New York City” knows so much about the world, she replies, “I always paid attention… while you were busy studying the human comedy, I was trying to figure out the human drama.”

    “You’re the sad mask; I’m the happy mask,” he answers. “Takes both of us to put on a play.”

    While Greenman’s gift for whimsy does surface from time-to-time, owing perhaps to the impossibility to cage such a formidable beast, he is wearing his sad mask for much of What He’s Poised to Do.

    “I write often about sadness and loneliness … the only cure, I think, is intimacy,” Greenman writes in About the Author, “which is what the people in my stories are struggling to achieve.”

    It is telling that Greenman’s stories revolve around written correspondence, a form of communication quite possibly in danger of becoming archaic. How will future generations understand us, or how will we ultimately understand ourselves, if our written interactions diminish to texts scattered on the digital wind?

    If there is a lesson to be had from this book, it’s this: Go write a letter to someone you love.

    Also by this author:
    Superworse

  • Gentleman of the Road: A Tale of Adventure—Michael Chabon

    Since he left the smoky environs of Pittsburg behind, transplanted Berkeley author Michael Chabon has evolved into quite a chameleon—trying out genres in the same way the rest of us might try on hats. His preceding novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, was all about the fedora. With Gentlemen of the Road, Chabon was looking for something a little more… exotic.

    With a scant page count of 200-and-change, Gentlemen is no more than a palate cleanser by Chabonian standards. Its brevity does give the book a momentum that carries its relatively thin conceit forward, whereas a heavier tome may have collapsed under its own weight.

    Chabon’s inspiration for the story was outlined in his working title for the book: Jews with Swords. With Gentlemen, Chabon shoots for an adventure in the old-school style of Robert Lewis Stevenson or Burroughs (Edgar Rice, that is—decidedly not William S. or Augusten).

    The wonderfully rendered illustrations by Prince Valiant artist Gary Gianni help make that classic connection. His depiction of the gaunt, chapeau-obsessed Zelikman with his sword-sized surgical tool (since Jews, by Frankish law, weren’t allowed to bear arms in 950), and his partner in crime—the massive Abyssinian Amram and his ever-present Viking battle axe—took me back to the hours I spent lost in vintage editions of Treasure Island and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe that my grandmother had stashed in her basement.

    My only complaint with Gentlemen is that Chabon seems to be writing by-the-numbers at times. Whereas, I have often been flat-out amazed by his imaginative plot twists, this project seems satisfied to inhabit an exotic landscape and then defer to the dictates of genre. Unless, and I don’t think this was hinted at, the spiritual leader of the Khazars foresaw the entire chain of events—from the fall of the original leader, or bek, onward—and orchestrated them to ensure… well, you’ll just have to read it yourself.

    Random House Books

    Also by this author:
    The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: A Novel

  • The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye—Jonathan Lethem

    This collection of short stories from Berkeley-by-way-of-Brooklyn writer Jonathan Lethem explores the same sort of absurdist science fiction landscape as his novel Amnesia Moon. These seven pieces show the depth and breadth of Lethem’s creativity as he explores the outer reaches of genre.

    The stories that were previously printed in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine are among the standouts in this collection and speak both to the editor’s catholic (small c) tastes and Lethem’s ability to inhabit vastly different worlds and report back with chilling clarity.

    The Happy Man—the lead off tale of a guy who spends half his time in Hell and the other half trying to make up with his increasingly distant wife and troubled teenage son—sets the tone for the volume. In this troubling story, the reappearance of a ne’er-do-well uncle in his Earth-bound life begins to draw the two worlds into closer proximity. Lethem telegraphs his final blow but it is devastating all the same. The story stays with the reader and reveals the barely-disguised malice in our classic fairy tales.

    Vanilla Dunk, is a slightly futuristic story of professional basketball in a time where the sport is in an advanced state of atrophy and has begun to consume itself like a snake eating its own tail. Powered exosuits give players the sampled skills of the greatest athletes of all time, turning the game into a live fantasy league.

    Lethem uses the post-sport spectacle to probe the issues of race (when a white hotshot draws the much-vaunted skills of Michael Jordan) and fame like a tongue returning to the socket of a broken tooth. This is quite a different tale than The Happy Man and it’s a testament to Lethem’s deft touch that one doesn’t need an understanding, or fondness for that matter, of basketball to enjoy it.

    Not every story in The Wall of the Eye is a slam dunk, but the penultimate tale, The Hardened Criminals, shows what an incredible imagination Lethem possesses. To give away the story’s main conceit would be a crime in and of itself, but it ends up being a chilling indictment of the prison industry and the way that it is designed to strip away the humanity of those stupid, crazy, or unlucky enough to fall under its purview.

    Lethem is a prolific novelist as well as short story writer and at times his prose reads dangerously close to poetry as in this introduction of the prison in The Hardened Criminals:

    The prison was an accomplishment, a monument to human ingenuity, like a dam or an aircraft carrier. At the same time the prison was a disaster, something imposed by nature on the helpless city, a pit gouged by a meteorite, or a forest-fire scar.

    Harcourt Brace & Co.

    Also by this author:
    Chronic City: A Novel
    Gun with Occasional Music

  • Memory Wall: Stories—Anthony Doerr

    One of the elusive pleasures of reading is discovering an author that has somehow slipped through your own personal cracks, a writer that once found, seems to have been working just for you all along, you were just too busy or preoccupied to notice.

    The best part of finally finding each other, even if unbeknownst to the other party, is much the same as in any new relationship; there are stories to be told, histories to be learned—the literary equivalent of a new continent to be explored.

    In Anthony Doerr’s case, the quest covers the entire globe—poking into corners of the world you may have missed. Doerr’s collection of short stories, Memory Wall, wanders from South Africa to Wyoming, from a Korean no man’s land to a soon-to-be flooded Chinese village, and from post-Soviet Lithuania to the horror of World War II Germany.

    As far-flung as his narratives may be, there remains a common human thread that keeps all places from seeming alien, or so very different from home.

    This collection is bookended by two novellas dealing with two very different women at the end of their respective lives. The title piece carefully extends a toe into the realm of science fiction as a suburban Cape Town resident—suffering from Alzheimer’s—desperately tries to hang on to her memories by having them recorded on discs to be played back at will.

    The “memory wall” is both the disorganized map-cum-art project that she constructs in an attempt to make sense of a life quickly becoming a series of digitized vignettes as well as the literal rock cliffs that her late amateur paleontologist husband prowled, searching for proof of a deeper permanence.

    The story takes an unexpected turn when two men break into the woman’s house to play through her memories looking for clues to a major find that her husband may have made right before he died. The men soon figure out that it’s pretty easy to burglarize someone who isn’t going to remember that you were there. The subtext of a cultural power imbalance becomes glaringly apparent as the younger of the two men experiences the woman’s disconnected memories.

    We soon learn that she wasn’t all that nice of a person, which was an interesting way for Doerr to go since, up until then, we were feeling quite sorry for the woman. At that point, loyalties realign, and the young man becomes the hero/sacrificial lamb to root for.

    The final story, Afterworld, is a ghost story of sorts and deals with a Holocaust survivor whose epileptic fits have given her a window into another world that has both sustained and haunted her throughout her life. A Jewish orphan in Hamburg at the worst possible time to be either of those things, Esther Gramm’s out-of-body experiences afford her insights that the other orphan girls don’t fully appreciate until it is much too late.

    While having a fit, she has a vision of the bleak future and brings back an explanation of how other people’s memories keep us tethered to this world, “In another world, folded inside the living world, we wait. We wait until everyone who knew us as children has died. And when the last one of them dies, we finally die our third death.”

    Not everything is grim, however, as Esther also catches a glimpse of those ready to move on, an encampment of pilgrims in tents on the edge of a great forest, and sharing this vision ultimately saves her life. Of course, since she remains living, the girls who were murdered by the Nazis are stuck waiting around in a bombed-out limbo, trying in vain to contact her.

    Alone with the aged Esther, her nephew Robert gets her to share her memories of the war for a thesis project he is supposed to be working on, and finally becomes a hero in his own right at the end of the story and Esther’s life.

    Memory is the thread that connects all of the stories in Doerr’s book in much the same way it connects everyone in real life. Whether you cherish them, are losing them, or are haunted by them, memories are what make us who we are as well as what makes the world itself.

    “Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.” Poetry.

    Scribner

  • Chronic City: A Novel—Jonathan Lethem

    Jonathan Lethem, Brooklyn native and de-facto chronicler of life in the borough, caught a lot of flak for placing his novel Don’t Love Me Yet (gasp!) in Los Angeles. In Chronic City he casts his gaze back to the city that never sleeps, although his version of Manhattan is, as you might imagine, a little off beam.

    Lethem has a gift for blending literary genres. His fiction always has a smattering of science fiction; his noir, a shadow of the metaphysical. In between 2007’s geographically-maligned book and this novel, he even took a stab at reviving the forgotten superhero, Omega the Unknown for Marvel Comics, and it is the comic book that informs this novel; it’s characters are, by choice, two-dimensional, and play out all the necessary New York archetypes against a flat back drop of apartments, diners, taxi cabs, and improbable not-so-random violence.

    The novel’s protagonist is an empty vessel named Chase Insteadman, a former child actor who lives off of royalties and making the scene with Manhattan’s rich and even richer. His latest claim to fame, and the one that instills him at all the important parties, is his engagement to an astronaut who is marooned on the International Space Station due to a carpet of space mines that have been sowed underneath its orbit by the Chinese.

    Like a lot of things in the novel, this is taken for granted and nobody seems that interested in doing anything about it. Perhaps, and just perhaps, this is Lethem’s dig at the place the international community finds itself in relation to China’s rising prominence on the world stage. At this point, what could we do if they decided to mine the heavens? Write a strongly worded letter? Stop buying… oh, I don’t know, everything? Tariffs?

    Insteadman’s “lostronaut” writes him letters that are reproduced in The New York Times (albeit in the War-Free edition that seems to be favored by most) so that most people know more about what is going on than he does. Insteadman’s problem is that he can’t quite remember his fiancé or how he became an ornamental table setting.

    There are clues from the beginning that all is not right with Lethem’s island, for one, Lower Manhattan has been enveloped in a mysterious dense fog that never dissipates. Like Don DeLillo’s “air-borne toxic event,” there is a disconnect between what’s real and what is simulated. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (whose position, as the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona, Lethem inherited) has become Obstinate Dust by Ralph Warden Meeker, another overly long book that no one finishes.

    The Muppets have become Gnuppets, which may just be a wink at Gnosticism, loosely defined by Wikipedia as “consisting of various belief systems generally united in the teaching that the material cosmos was created by an imperfect god.” The root of Gnostic belief, gnosis, is further defined as “a form of mystic, revealed, esoteric knowledge through which the spiritual elements of humanity are reminded of their true origins within the superior Godhead, being thus permitted to escape materiality.”

    Insteadman’s catalyst, and a fount of esoteric knowledge, is Perkus Tooth, a stand-in for an aspect of Lethem’s own personality in much the same way as Kilgore Trout took the heat for Kurt Vonnegut. Tooth is a twitchy, well-stoned cartoon in the Lester Bangs mold, and although he bristles at being called a rock critic, is as remembered for a stint at Rolling Stone than for a series of intellectual commando-style broadsides that papered the Bowery back in the day.

    The chronic in the novel’s title, is an allusion to the high-grade marijuana that Tooth, Insteadman, and a former activist-turned-mayoral-fixer, Richard Abneg, imbibe with stunning regularity. The trio’s pot-driven cultural insights and conspiracy theorizing are either the best parts of the book, or the worst, depending on one’s own proclivities. I, for one, loved Tooth’s Marlon Brando obsession and manic drive to “connect the dots.”

    Almost exactly halfway through the book, a game-changing possibility is introduced that ties directly into Gnostic belief and, like religion, either explains everything or nothing at all. Tooth’s homeless associate, Biller, finds work designing “treasure” for a virtual universe called Yet Another World, created in turn by Linus Carter, a brilliant but socially inept designer—an imperfect god.

    A description of Carter’s online universe reads like a Lonely Planet guide to Manhattan itself, a “… paraphrase of reality which welcomed role-players, entrepreneurs, sexual trollers, whatever.” The line between real and unreal becomes even more blurred as Insteadman realizes that “Yet Another World wasn’t the only reality that was expansible. Money has its solvent powers…”

    In the end, our empty hero comes to realize it doesn’t really matter if the island that he knows is indeed real, or if anything actually exists on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel. He learns the hard way that what is important is the real relationships that we form with other travelers.

    As for Tooth, he is finally permitted to escape the Material World through losing everything and finally finding a kindred spirit, in this case a massive three-legged pit bull named Ava. The dog continues to work healing magic on Insteadman after his own collapse into his own footprint.

    Having inherited the responsibility of walking her, he finally abandons Manhattan’s ubiquitous taxis for a street-level view of his realm. “… it occurred to me how Ava’s paces, her bold and patient pissings, must have been immensely comforting to Perkus, and in a sense familiar. Ava’s a kind of broadsider herself, famous within a circle of correspondents, invisible to those who don’t care.”

    Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

    Also by this author:
    Gun with Occasional Music
    The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

  • When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison—Greil Marcus

    Funnily enough, considering the subject and theme of this book, reading übercritic Greil Marcus is a lot like listening to Van Morrison. The experience can be illuminating, frustrating, transcendent, and solipsistic—often in the same paragraph or song.

    Like Morrison, Marcus has been following his own path for quite some time, and anyone who has a passing familiarity with either of them will always be able to find the gold hidden down a backstreet or way up top a flight of fancy.

    My struggle with Marcus is that his exhortations can be the definition of pedantic, referencing far-flung obscure artists and works in order to make a point that no one can truly argue with, having no idea who or what he’s is talking about.

    On the other hand, like listening to Morrison himself, if you’re willing to put in the work, you can be turned on to artists, books, movies, etc. that may later become indispensable to your life. What Marcus does here is doubly off-putting, as he spends a great deal of time extolling the virtues of tracks and performances of Morrison’s that are unavailable anywhere but bootlegs, a stream that Morrison spends a great deal of energy to dam, enlisting the services of Web Sheriff to scour the internet of any traces of illicit music.

    I was lucky enough to have a copy of the 1971 KSAN Pacific High Studios show which is referenced pretty heavily, but as far as Caledonia Soul Music, which according to Marcus is the key to the whole thing, I’ll just have to take his word for it.

    In this book, Marcus eschews most biographical information, much, I can imagine to Morrison’s relief, only pointing out pertinent signposts along the way. The whole focus is on those moments of unforced transcendence that Marcus believes paint a secret map through the jungle of Morrison’s work. As with any great artist—and to put my cards on the table, I believe Morrison to be one of the greatest singers of the last 40 years—what pieces resonate with your soul at any given time is completely subjective.

    I think Marcus is either trying to be cute, or is just being lazy to discount in one fell swoop everything Morrison put out between Common One in 1980, and Tell Me Something in 1996. Marcus talks about looking for the “yarragh” in Morrison’s performances, that moment that transcends language and artifice to, as Morrison once sang, “get down to the real soul, I mean the real soul, people.”

    To take a page from Marcus’ book if I may refer to a performance now out-of-print and unavailable, as a child of the ’70s I knew Morrison primarily as an AM radio hit maker and it wasn’t until PBS ran Van Morrison The Concert, recorded at New York’s Beacon Theater in 1989, that I was exposed to Morrison the mystic.

    I don’t recall which number he used to launch himself into the “yarragh,” but all of a sudden, he was growling and barking, not like a madman, but like a genius. I remember standing in front of the TV just slack-jawed; this was someone who warranted further investigation. All of a sudden I understood why someone like Morrison would rankle against cheap stardom. It wasn’t the fucking point. This, this is the point. And although Marcus’ examples are personal to his own experience, as far as catching the desperately vital point of it all, we really do see eye-to-eye.

    PublicAffairs

  • The Sirens of Titan: A Novel—Kurt Vonnegut

    I have to admit that the main reason I was aware of Vonnegut’s second novel, written in 1959 right after the launch of the space age, was the trivia night nugget that Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead owned the movie rights for years and had actually worked up a script with SNL alum Tom Davis.

    After discovering what an amazing feat of imagination this book is, I can see why self-styled hippie intellectuals like Garcia and Davis were drawn to it. It was quite unlike any other novel, even other Vonnegut books, I have read. At no time while devouring The Sirens of Titan could I ever say to myself, “Oh, I know where this is going.”

    Vonnegut sends up the whims of capitalism with the main character Malachi Constant, the richest man in the world. Constant is a playboy/bon vivant who, for reasons to be revealed, was born with the luck to maintain his lifestyle with very little effort on his part.

    At the beginning of the novel, he is summoned to the mansion of Winston Niles Rumfoord, the first man to fly a private rocket to Mars. Rumfoord is also, or so it’s understood, one of the last—having unwittingly flown into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, which effectively spread his (and his dog’s) existence throughout sort of a wormhole between the Sun and Betelgeuse. (Now you can start to imagine the types of conversations Garcia and Davis must have had.)

    When Earth happens to transect the glitch, once every 59 days, Rumfoord and his dog materialize at the mansion for a short period of time where he alienates his wife, predicts the future (since he happens to actually be everywhere and when), and generally makes everyone uncomfortable.

    Vonnegut’s description of the first meeting of the two men is a good example of his wonderful use of language in this novel: “Winston Niles Rumfoord’s smile and handshake dismantled Constant’s high opinion of himself as efficiently as carnival roustabouts might dismantle a Ferris wheel.” Granted, this all takes place within the first 20 pages or so.

    Rumfoord (and I couldn’t stop substituting Rumsfeld, especially when we begin to find out how his motives, while being altruistic from his viewpoint, are seriously fucked up) goes on to tell Constant that he will end up traveling to Mars, Mercury, Titan, and end up having a son with Mrs. Rumfoord. Awkward.

    Vonnegut’s savaging of organized religion at the back end of this novel counterbalances his having peeled back the curtain hiding the machinations of the free market in the front. Along the way, Mars attacks, a shipwrecked alien manipulates all of human history in an attempt to get a part, and… just read the damned thing.

    I, for one, don’t need some infundibulated asshat to tell me that I will be revisiting this one again and again.

    Random House Publishing Group

  • A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll never Do Again—David Foster Wallace

    While some authors make you feel stupid for even trying to read them, I’m looking at you, James Joyce, others seem to immediately give the ol’ noggin a boost. While working through this collection of “essays and arguments” by the late David Foster Wallace—sometimes referred to as our generation’s Joyce for his long and obtuse novel Infinite Jest—I made a list of 20 words I had been lamentably unaware of, as well as two that, apparently, he made up: ablated, anaclitic, appurtenance, belletristic, commissure, decoct, enfilade, erumpent, espial, exergue, frottage, hieratic, lalations, otiose, preterite, sedulous, threnody, titivation, ventricose, weltschmerz

    Of those 20 words, I have to say that the most amusing discovery for me was frottage, which I’m sure that some of you already know means, “the act of obtaining sexual stimulation by rubbing against a person or object.” I’m not here to judge; I’m just sayin’. Erumpent is also pretty fun to say, and could actually be onomatopoetic if you were to listen very, very closely.

    As for the two Wallacisms that don’t seem to exist in the English language, some DFW obsessives have pointed out that katexic could be derived from Freud’s katexis referring to “the process by means of which libido energy is tied or placed into the mental representation of a personality, idea, or thing.” In this respect, Wallace’s writing in toto could be viewed as katexic. The energy that must have gone into building such a vocabulary and the means to swing it around as effectively as he did—the creation and subsequent projection of “David Foster Wallace” as a literary force—could easily be imagined as a gloriously sublimated primal urge.

    Plumeocide is another matter. Wordnik member vbogard22 has postulated that “plumeo- could come from the Latin pluma, which means feather or pen [when] added to -cide (Latin, kill) would come to mean something along the lines of ‘death of the pen.’”

    Given Wallace’s tragic end by his own hand, the fact that he may have coined a word for the silencing of a writer is a bit prescient, although I am buoyed by the acknowledgment that the only way to get a writer to shut the hell up is by resorting to plumeocide.

    I was also beguiled, beleaguered, and besotted by Wallace’s use of language, often all at the same time. In much the same way that Wallace thought he was a decent tennis player until he got the opportunity to view the pros in action, I thought that I could, on occasion, craft a clever line. Now I’m reminded that there are players out there operating on a whole different plane.

    I almost forgot to mention that the book is really funny. Cheers to you, DFW, wherever you are.

    Now, about that Goddamned Jest…

    Back Bay Books

  • (Not That You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions—Steve Almond


    I picked up this collection of essays from Boston writer (and Bay Area native) Steve Almond on a total whim and found it to be one of the explosively funny books I’ve read since Ozzy’s autobiography. Almond is just nuts—and honest to a fault—which may or may not be a product of his insanity.

    Not that You Asked is organized thematically with the chapter entitled About My Sexual Failure (Not that You Asked) being the most cringe-worthy of the bunch. In the extended piece Shame On Me (Why My Adolescence Sucked Donkey Cock), we are regaled with tales of his late-blooming sexuality via the water jets in the Almond family hot tub; hand jobs con sharp, inexperienced, fingernails; the family dog’s rooting out of a used condom from the trash and subsequent tug-of-war with Almond’s mother leading to predictable, but no less horrifying results; and getting publicly busted for shoplifting condoms and Sta-Hard gel from Longs Drugs.

    Chestfro Agoniste and My First Fake Tits reveal waxing and breast implants to both be somewhat less wonderful than advertised, the former resulting in this conversation painfully recounted by Almond. “Me: Ow! Please. Please, don’t—Fuck! Her: It’s almost out. Me: You have to do it faster, really—No! Ow! Fuck! Please move to another—that part really—Owwww! Her: Stop being a baby. Me: Please, sweetie. Please, I’m not joking. Her: Lie still. Just fucking lie still and let me— Me: Owwwww! You fucking bitch! You mean fucking bitch!”

    For every writer who has attempted to wince his or her way through a sex scene, Almond offers a 12-step program that lays out some pretty good (and common sense) advice, such as, Step 5 (Real people do not talk in porn clichés): “Most of the time, real people say all kinds of weird, funny things during sex, such as ‘I think I’m losing circulation,’ and ‘I’ve got a cramp in my foot,’ and ‘Oh, sorry!’”

    Given my utter lack of interest in the sport of baseball, it took me awhile to battle my way through one of the longer essays in the collection, Red Sox Anti-Christ, which ended up having some interesting and insightful things to say about sport and its place in a war-loving society such as our own. He equates the coverage of the kick off to the invasion of Iraq with a major sporting event. “Nightly highlight reels charted the day’s major offensive drives. Correspondents offered sand swept on-the-field interviews with our burly combatants, while generals served up bromides fit for a head coach.”

    Almond goes further and takes part of the blame for the unnecessary war onto his own shoulders. “As a fan, I had helped foster a culture governed by the sports mentality, in which winning mattered above all else, and the application of violence was seen as a necessary means to that end rather than a betrayal of our democratic standards.”

    In a chapter entitled In Tribute to My Republican Homeys, Almond turns on the vitriol. Demagogue Days, Or How the Right-Wing Hateocracy Chewed Me Up and Spat Me Out spins the story of how Almond, an adjunct professor at Boston College at the time, resigns over the school’s invitation of Condoleezza Rice to give the commencement speech. Almond uses the format of Dante’s descent into hell to map out all of the insidious devils of punditry that all wanted a piece of him for a brief, terrifying moment.

    With the ability to ride out ridiculous situations with the artistry of a Mavericks surfer (see How Reality TV Ate My Life), one starts to wonder just what would really get to Almond, what would crack his smooth, white chocolate exterior and let the creamy nougat pour forth?

    That force majeure comes in the form of a baby girl, the arrival of whom is hilariously recounted in 10 Ways I Killed My Infant Daughter in Her First 72 Hours of Life. It is this window into the hopes and fears that people have shared from time immemorial, that saves Not That You Asked from being simple a collection of ravings from another smart ass cynic. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

    Random House

    Also by this author:
    Which Brings Me to You

  • The Romantic Dogs—Roberto Bolaño

    By the time an English translation of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives was finally released in 2007, he had already passed like a glowing comet, having succumbed to a failing liver in 2003. Bolaño’s novel followed every drunken debauch and whim of a group of young Mexico City poets calling themselves visceral realists, but while the prose was beautifully crafted, the book was starkly short on actual poems.

    His biographers make a point of saying that Bolaño’s first love was poetry. Supposedly he only turned to writing novels at the age of 40 after the birth of his son forced him to give up a more bohemian lifestyle. This collection spans his career from 1980 through 1998, the year The Savage Detectives was first published.

    There are many allusions to the novel and, as in much of his work, some of the same territories are traveled, making this a good companion piece to the novel, or visa versa. Several poems deal with the enigmatic figure of a detective, questioning but never solving the seemingly random and unending violence of South America.

    I dreamt of frozen detectives; Latin American detectives who were trying to keep their eyes open in the middle of the dream. I dreamt of hideous crimes and of careful guys who were wary not to step in pools of blood while taking in the crime scene with a single sweeping glance.

    His fascination with forensics would find full flower in 2666, by many accounts, his crowning achievement. At nearly 900 pages, the book is a mammoth project that Bolaño struggled to finish before he died. It is rumored that he even went as far as to postpone a much-needed liver transplant so as to not break stride on his defining work. This struggle is reflected in one of the most moving poems near the end of The Romantic Dogs.

    Muse, wherever you might go I go. I follow your radiant trail across the long night. Not caring about years or sickness. Not caring about the pain or the effort I must make to follow you.

    New Directions

    Also by this author:
    The Insufferable Gaucho
    The Return
    Savage Detectives: A Novel

  • The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: A Novel—Michael Chabon

    I always feel a little sad upon finishing one of Michael Chabon’s novels. The Berkeley author weaves such wonderfully detailed tapestries of language and imagery that a feeling of loss is inevitable once the Big Finish has come and gone.

    That same feeling pervades The Yiddish Policemen’s Union from the jump as the world the characters have inhabited for 60 years is about to be flung on the trash heap of history. The alternative-history conceit is as follows: after the horror of World War II, and a collapse of the stillborn State of Israel, Jewish refugees were settled in an American Federal District hastily carved out of the Alaskan wilderness—and now the lease is up.

    As alcoholic policeman Meyer Landsman begins the search for who may have killed a fellow tenant of his own down-at-the-heels hotel, he heads toward the basement and this throw-away bit of narration: “[Landsman] checks behind the hot-water tanks, lashed to one another with scraps of steel like comrades in a doomed adventure.” The metaphor could be stretched to represent Landsman himself and his ex-wife/new-supervisor Bina Gelbfish who has been sent to tidy up all the loose ends at Sitka Central, and Landman’s investigation is one big throbbing nerve of a loose end.

    Drowning in the machinations of the District’s Hasidic mafia and a cold ocean of slivovitz, Landsman is haunted by a complex chess problem left by the dead tenant. Is it a clue? Is it just a reflection of his own hang-up caused by his chess champion father’s disappointment in him and resultant suicide? Chabon has explored these themes before. He revels in the arcane details of modern Judaica, and I was waiting past the 200-page mark for his patented Big Gay Character to show (he does, although posthumously).

    As Chabon has repeatedly shown—in his on-going bid to become a one-man Coen Brothers of the literary world, chewing up and spitting out genre after genre—it’s not the materials, plot points, or archetypes you start with, it’s how you play the familiar pieces that wins the game.

    Harper Perennial

    Also by this author:
    Gentleman of the Road: A Tale of Adventure

  • The World Without Us—Alan Weisman

    Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you—just one word.
    Ben: Yes sir.
    Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
    Ben: Yes, I am.
    Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
    Ben: Exactly how do you mean?
    Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
    Ben: Yes, I will.

    While reading Alan Weisman’s fascinating book, The World Without Us, that scene from The Graduate kept playing in my head. Plastics. It turns out that there is a great, or at the very least, long future for all one billion tons of it as it never really breaks down—pieces just become smaller and smaller and by doing so can be swallowed by organisms at the very bottom of the food chain. Which is bad.

    It was frightening to read how quickly plastics have permeated every aspect of our lives (they’ve only been around since the end of World War II), and just how badly we manage what happens to them when we’re done using them. Weisman describes in detail the great wastes of floating plastic that circle the center of each of the world’s oceans.

    There was something about growing up in the waning years of the Cold War that left an indelible mark on the collective imagination of my fellow Gen Xers and myself. We are suckers for stories of our own destruction. Maybe it was the sight of the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand at the end of Planet of the Apes, or just the constant fear of nuclear destruction, but as kids, I think most of us had spent some time thinking about what would happen to the world once all of us were gone.

    Weisman looks at all of the things that may benefit from our demise (almost all other species except those that have been domesticated), and all of the things that will simply go to hell without us here to manage them (it turns out that nuclear reactors, refineries, and power plants don’t really run themselves for very long).

    As we all learned in science class and/or the Discovery Channel, water is the one unstoppable force on Earth. You can try to dam it, pump it, or redirect it, but whatever you choose to try and force it to do, you’ve created yourself a full-time job. Without us around to maintain the infrastructure, it will just be a matter of time before rivers undermine and retake the streets of New York, the delta washes away Houston, and, well, we’ve already seen what could happen to New Orleans.

    The book isn’t all doom and gloom, there are very interesting scientific tidbits scattered throughout that I have not encountered anywhere else. His glimpses of the last remaining piece of the primeval forest that once covered Europe made me want to book a flight to the border of Poland and Belarus.

    The human narrative emerging from the Eastern African Rift Valley really points up how we are all really the same, like it or not. For those that will never wrap their minds around that fact, there is the cold comfort that war is actually beneficial for some species, if only by reducing the number of people degrading the environment.

    The amazing return of several endangered animals to the Korean peninsula’s DMZ echoes an idea by environmentalists from The Rewilding Institute who are committed to developing naturalized corridors crossing each of the continents where wildlife could live, migrate, and hopefully, thrive.

    As for humankind, well… we had better get our house in order. To paraphrase Weisman, we choose not to see the biggest elephant in the planet-sized room, although it’s harder and harder to ignore it. Perhaps the last great hope for us is to reduce current population trends before we experience total environmental collapse. It wouldn’t be the first time the Earth has pushed the reset button, and it won’t be the last, it’s just that we are supposed to be the smart ones.

    Every four days, the population of our small planet rises by one million people. If things continue at the current rate of projection, we should reach a mind-blowing total of nine billion people by the middle of this century. According to Dr. Sergei Scherbov from the Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the World Population Program, if families were limited to having only one child, we would be back down to 19th century levels by 2100.

    However, with pronatalism promoters like Elon Musk—14 kids and counting—and Vice President JD Vance pushing the idea that (white) people should have more babies on behalf of the nation, I’m not going to hold my breath.

    ‎Picador Paper

  • The Confessions of Rick James “Memoirs of a Super Freak”—Rick James

    Jeesus. You cannot accuse Rick James of false advertising, although you probably could have charged him with just about anything else at anytime, and the charges would have stuck.

    It was hard to keep from copy editing James’ autobiography as I read along. Although after a while, the awkward repetition of sentences—and entire paragraphs—began to seem like part of the experience. It was easy to imagine him telling a story and adding the same crazy bit several times in a row.

    Me: “Erm, Mr. James, you just said that.”

    The imaginary Rick James that lives in my head: “Cocaine’s a hell of a drug.”

    The most interesting part of the book for me was the Zelig-like way that James was involved with so many of the people and bands that came to embody the late-’60s rock scene. Who knew?

    Rest in peace, super freak.

    Amber Communications Group

  • The Savage Detectives: A Novel—Roberto Bolaño

    The release of an English translation of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives went head-to-head with the appearance of Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke for 2007’s literary news of the year.

    Lucky for us, Bolaño’s novel turned out to be every bit as great as the hype. Long known and respected by Latin American readers, Bolaño was a bit of mystery for most English monolinguists who, if hip to his writings at all, had to subsist on a few slim volumes published by New Directions.

    With the heavyweight house of Farrar, Straus and Giroux picking up the mantle and feature-length articles in the New Yorker and The New York Review of Books touting the novel’s many charms, Bolaño was the toast of the literary world—four years after his death in Spain of liver failure.

    The Savage Detectives begins in a mid-1970s Mexico City where a young poet, Juan García Madero, is invited to join a mysterious fraternity of writers calling themselves “visceral realists.” To call the group a movement is a bit of a stretch as no one, García Madero especially, knows (or is willing to say) exactly what visceral realism is. This doesn’t stop the group’s leaders, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (a thin, thinly disguised Bolaño) from conducting purges that would make a Maoist nervous.

    The writers prowl the streets and back alleys of Mexico City, constantly writing, having sex, getting drunk, and ultimately running afoul of a killer pimp and his corrupt police buddies. As one does. Of course, this encapsulation does rough injustice to Bolaño’s kaleidoscope of richly drawn characters, some of which—like rare desert flowers—bloom once, fade, and are never seen again.

    The middle of the book picks up after the poets have returned from the desert where they had been searching for the mysterious poet who started the original visceral realism movement in the 1920s. For the next 400 pages, we see Lima and Belano through the eyes of people who cross paths with them in a 20-year span ending in 1996. This fractured faux-oral biography plays with the notion of identity while giving the disorienting, yet thrilling, feeling of looking at the pair through a many-faceted diamond.

    The final third returns to the Sonoran Desert to tell the story of what happened to Lima, Belano, García Madero, and wayward prostitute Lupe on their search for the elusive Cesárea Tinajero. To paraphrase García Madero: When it was all over, I felt like I knew every inch of that f’ing country. Even more, I felt I was born there.

    Picador

    Also by this author:
    The Insufferable Gaucho
    The Return
    The Romantic Dogs

  • The Insufferable Gaucho—Roberto Bolaño

    In death, Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has become the Tupac Shakur of the literary world. Since succumbing to liver failure in 2003, he consistently released books for years (including the 900-page masterpiece, 2666). I realize that this incredible feat is due more to the slow process of translation than any powers Bolaño may have developed from beyond the grave, but I really wouldn’t put anything past him.

    The Insufferable Gaucho is a slim but powerful offering of short stories as well as a pair of essays in which he elliptically explores his own approaching mortality and place in the pantheon of Latin American literature. Bolaño’s Police Rat revisits Franz Kafka’s hidden world of Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk. Pepe the Cop, a nephew of Josephine’s who, like his famous aunt, has a sensitivity that raises him a cut above the common rat, is on the tail of a killer in their midst.

    Unfortunately for Pepe—and as we have learned through countless police stories—individuality isn’t necessarily a trait that is appreciated by superior officers. As Josephine’s star wanes, Kafka’s narrator muses, “She is a small episode in the eternal history of our people, and the people will get over the loss of her.”

    One has to wonder if Bolaño was winking at us from his own position as a singing rat of some renown and one fully aware of his own demise. Perhaps it was a poke back at his own growing fame in the years right before he died when he chose the epigram for this book from the end of Kafka’s story: “So perhaps we shall not miss so very much at all.”

    If Martin Scorsese ever decides to direct an animated movie for Pixar, I’d like to see Police Rat on the big screen. I could just imagine Robert De Niro doing the voice-over for Pepe: “Have you ever taken on a weasel? Are you ready to be torn apart by a weasel?” Maybe it’s time for the studio to leave behind Lady and the Trampist fare like Ratatouille, and get fucking real. But I digress.

    In Literature + Illness = Illness, a many-faceted facing of the terminal disease that cut his life short at 50, Bolaño writes, “Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.” It is a shout back from the ragged edge of things, and about as true as anything I’ve ever heard.

    New Directions

    Also by this author:
    The Return
    The Romantic Dogs
    Savage Detectives: A Novel

  • Which Brings Me to You—Steve Almond & Julianna Baggott

    After coming dangerously close to blowing hot coffee out of my nose while reading Steve Almond’s Not That You Asked, I decided to dive a little deeper into his (sure to be twisted) oeuvre. Swimming around, I bumped into this book, a novel of letters co-written by sometime (and, as quickly becomes apparent, sometimes not) children’s book author Julianna Baggott.

    It’s a conceit that could have ended up too clever by half, but is so well handled that I kicked myself for not thinking of it first. The story begins—like most Hugh Grant movies—at a wedding. I was hooked after the very first line, “I know my own kind. We’re obvious to each other. I suppose this is true of other kinds, too: military brats, for example, anarchists, mattress salesmen, women who got ponies as birthday gifts.”

    Jane ruminates while spying John standing under a white crepe paper wedding bell, “My own kind. I’m not sure there’s a name for us. I suspect we’re born this way: our hearts screwing in tight, already a little broken. We hate sentimentality and yet we’re deeply sentimental.” Sound like anyone you know?

    The two are drawn to each other like cracked magnets—repelling those they should be attracting, yet powerless to avoid the collision with their harmonious defect.

    After a furtive and aborted liaison in a cloakroom—the pair pulls apart long enough to realize that hooking up with a stranger under a bunch of outerwear would be a mutual mistake in two long, sad trains of mistakes—they hatch a plan to exchange letters confessing their respective tragic love lives. The sense that both of them know that this encounter just may be their last best chance permeates the already stuffy coat check.

    “No e-mail.”

    “Absolutely,” he says. “Real letters. Ink. Paper. The whole deal. We’ll be like the pioneers, waiting by our windows for the Pony Express. In bonnets.”

    John kicks things off with the story of Jodi Dunne, his first love at sixteen. Almond nails the tentative stirrings of romance fighting against the poison tide of peer and familial pressure, social awkwardness, and “erotic incompetence” that make up everyone’s high school years.

    Almond’s doppelganger proves his commitment to the spirit of full disclosure by recounting an unfortunate (and nearly geometrically impossible) incident wherein he ejaculates into his own mouth and gives himself, “as known in porn circles,” the Pirate Eye.

    Now, if I hadn’t read Almond’s harrowing tales of his own sexual awakening, I would have called gratuitous bullshit and might have given up on this character, but that would have been a mistake.

    Jane fires back with her tale of Asbury Park boys and a brooding and doomed muscle car driving boyfriend, and we’re off to the races. “Michael Hanrahan was something that I hoped would happen. In fact, I hoped he’s gone off like a bomb in my life, obliterating most everything except me, still standing, albeit charred and dizzy.”

    By the time we find them back at the wedding, “charred and dizzy” describes the state of both characters having weathered romantic disaster after romantic disaster. Will they be able to put it all behind them and start anew, one more time? Or are their respective personnel files too stuffed with abject failure to recommend advancement? Come to think of it, get Hugh Grant’s agent on the phone!

    ‎Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

    Also by this author:
    (Not That You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions

  • The Return—Roberto Bolaño

    This collection of the late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s short stories reads like a Cliff Notes introduction to the world he traveled in, and in his literature, populated. The Return is stuffed with whores and hit men, poets and porn stars, Communists and black marketers, ghosts and conjurers, and (obviously) detectives.

    The book kicks off with a pair of stories about misplaced foreigners in Russia, one by choice, and the other by bureaucratic snafu. In Snow, a Chilean ex-pat living in Barcelona tells the story of when he was “a trainer’s assistant for a man of dubious and disconcerting moral character” in post-Soviet Moscow.

    Rogelio Estrada falls in with a gangster called “Billy the Kid” né Misha Pavlov and ends up procuring young women for him. “Pavlov’s taste in women was for athletes: long jumpers, sprinters, middle-distance runners, triple jumpers… but his real favorites were the high jumpers. He said they were like gazelles, ideal women, and he wasn’t wrong.”

    Herein lies the rub: one Natalia Chuikova, who Estrada lovingly describes as “five-foot-ten and can’t have weighed more than 120 pounds. She had brown hair, and her simple ponytail gathered all the grace in the world. Her eyes were jet black and she had, I swear, the longest, most beautiful legs I have ever seen.” Let’s just say, that’s not the healthiest attention to detail for a hired goon to have.

    Another Russian Tale follows a Spaniard captured while fighting with the Nazi Germans in a World War II footnote that I was completely unaware of. The Spanish Blue Division was a volunteer force sent by fellow fascist Franco on (according to Wikipedia) “condition they would exclusively fight against Bolshevism (Soviet Communism) on the Eastern Front, and not against the Western Allies or any Western European occupied populations.”

    Within such a historical anomaly lies the kernel of a tragic novel in its own right, but Bolaño purposefully crash lands the premise, turning the man’s fate on a linguistic misunderstanding of a sputtered epithet.

    Detectives, the piece in this collection that best shows off Bolaño’s singular talent is written entirely as an extended dialogue between two policemen pulling duty in a Chilean jail. Bolaño slips in exposition, politics, and world history all without letting the conversation seem forced or false.

    His own literary counterpart, Arturo Belano—co-founder of Visceral Realism and co-hero of The Savage Detectives—makes an appearance as little more than an apparition, but one real enough to shake one of the detectives out of his comfortable stupor.

    In one of the most heartfelt examples of Bolaño’s ability to bring the seedy underbelly of society to life and make it seem as valid a way to live as any other—perhaps even more valid, as hypocrisy must be one of the first vices to burn away in the fires of Earth-bound hell—he chronicles the story of an Italian porn star, Joanna Silvestri, who returns to Los Angeles in 1990 after AIDS has run rampant and rocked the industry. Its “biggest” star, a barely-disguised John Holmes, still haunts the valley, a walking shell of his former self.

    Silvestri knows “Jack” from the old days and looks him up in a tender scene that stands out no less for being surrounded by work-a-day debauchery. Her matter-of-fact accounting of her chosen trade is at first shocking but soon begins to make sense.

    Porn, for the professional who makes it, must end up being just another day at the office, and in the end (no pun intended) don’t we all whore ourselves out in search of the all-mighty dollar?

    And while we’re on the subject, Murdering Whores paints the gruesome picture of a prostitute who singles out a guy coming out of a soccer match, kidnaps him, and tortures him to death. I read somewhere that this collection was originally named after this story: Putas Asesinas. I think it sounds better in Spanish.

    Ghosts real and imagined flit thematically throughout these tales, some of them merely glimpsed and some of them fully present and pissed off. The way that the specter of death hangs over this book, one can’t help but wonder if Bolaño was working through his own approaching mortality, picking it up and observing it from every angle.

    One hopes that he didn’t become like the ghost that narrates the title piece. “I have good news and bad news,” he begins. “The good news is that there is life (of a kind) after this life. The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac.”

    I’ll leave it to the porn star to sum up what Bolaño finally discovered while turning his imminent death into The Return. “I’m tempted to tell him that we are all ghosts, that all of us have gone too soon into the world of ghost movies, but he’s a good man and I don’t want to hurt him, so I keep it to myself. Anyway, who’s to say he doesn’t already know?”

    New Directions

    Also by this author:
    The Insufferable Gaucho
    The Romantic Dogs
    Savage Detectives: A Novel