U and I by Nicholson Baker

U and I by Nicholson Baker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Nicholson Baker explores his creative process through his obsession with John Updike as he recalls a lifetime of reading John Updike and what he remembers without opening a book for reference. Wonderfully witty and charming and sending me back to read his idol and his idol's idols: e.g. Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Selected Writings of Walter Pater, Henry James ("The Figure in the Carpet"), Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes and Pages from a Cold Island, Edmund Wilson, BARTHELME DONALD, Nabokov Vladimir and his 3x5 cards for his fiction (Pnin, Glory).
Opening sentence: "On August 6, 1989, a Sunday, I lay back as usual with my feet up in a reclining aluminum deck chair padded with blood-dotted pillows in my father-in-law's study in Berkeley (we were house-sitting) and arranged my keyboard, resting on an abridged dictionary, on my lap."

A favorite quote:
"Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals." 135

"With dawning amazement, as the results of our various informal surveys come in, we realize how staggeringly disproportionate our debt is to gaydom, in every possible area of literary deportment, but especially in the novel; and we mingle this knowledge with the long recognized preeminence of women in the invention and perfection of the form, and we begin to get the uncomfortable sense, if we aren't gay or female, that we may have chosen a field we can't quite master. Heterosexual male novelists don't for the most part really get it, instinctively: they agree with Jane Austen that the novel is a magnificent thing, toward whose comprehension all other forms of writing and indeed of art, aspre, and this big time grandeur attracts them, but they find much to their perplexity, that they can't internalize and refine upon its ways with quite the unstraining unconscious directness they displayed when thrashing happily through earlier intellectual challenges."

"They stretch the stretchiest of all forms so that it embraces what they do well. And finally they produce things that are, though great, oddities: Ulysses by James Joyce, War and Peace, Pnin."



View all my reviews

TOAF (To After That) by Renee Gladman

To After That by Renee Gladman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Published by the Dorothy Project in 2008, this unconventional work is a retracing of the author's journaling, reading, walking and thinking about a novel she was writing in March of 2000.

She is a poet who lives and walks through an unnamed town with her dog Eva and writes in cafes. She occasionally mentions her lover, Frog. She provides a scene or two from the subject novel or novella, After That.

"Inevitably, one kind of reading leads to another kind, and it was this moving from author to author that allowed me to cover ground as to the nature of my tone," she explains and mentions the "undefined flatness of Julio Cortázar's prose" and the simplistic character in The Gangsters by the late French writer Hervé Guibert who wrote To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life about having HIV. Other references:

Marguerite Duras's Two by Duras: The Slut of the Normandy Coast / The Atlantic Man

Peter Greenaway film The Falls
Anna Bailey's "obscure festival" film, Carla and Aïda, about two black lovers not unlike the author and her Frog, and the narrator explores that film in great detail. I could not find the film online.

Michelangelo Antonioni's film of Red Desert..

I enjoyed meandering along with this author, but many puzzles remain and I look forward to further exploration of her readings and other writing.

View all my reviews

Pastors and Masters by Ivy Compton-Burnett

Pastors and Masters by Ivy Compton-Burnett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Let's go up to the fire, Miss Bentley," said Mrs. Merry, and leave the men to talk about the newspapers in the cold."

"Why, what a way for your wife to talk in your presence, Mr. Merry!" said Delia.

"I don't suppose wives ought to talk at all in their husband's presence, said Herrick.

"Civilised countries are so artificial," said Emily. "But you should not speak true words in jest, Nicholas. It is not open of you."

"Well, what about us single women, Miss Herrick?"

"Well, I don't suppose we ought to talk at all. I expect we ought to be exposed at birth, or something like that."

"How would it be known at birth which of us were going to be single?" siad Delia.

"That is really clever of you," said Emily. "Though people exposed at birth would be single, wouldn't they?"

"Well,l we were certainly classed by the state with paupers and idiots and children, before we had the vote," said Miss Basden. "I mean we women were."

"And no nice children, or paupers either, and no really sensible idiots, would talk in people's presence, " said Bumpus.

And so writes Ivy Compton-Burnett with her witty, clipped dialogue which makes up the bulk of the book. Pastors and Masters describes the relationships of those involved with a private English school through their conversation. I found it delightful if confusing as I struggled to clarify their connections (see Wikipedia for a who's who). The gist of the book is a promised new novel written by Mr. Herrick, proprietor of the school, who discovers a colleague has also written a new novel and they plan a joint reading where it all falls apart. Most enjoyable.

View all my reviews

Malady of Death - Marguerite Duras

The Malady of Death by Marguerite Duras
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The disquieting narrator of Marguerite Duras' 1986 novel The Malady of Death hires a woman to sleep with him silently and submissively for an extended period of time to satisfy his need for intimacy and, ultimately, sex because of his inability to love; he hopes "to make his body less lonely." She diagnoses his affliction as the malady of death" (others critics suggest he is homosexual) and she sleeps in his bed. He weeps for himself "as a stranger might." Finally, they appear to consummate their affair. She slips away one night and he hunts for her to no avail.

"You tell yourself that if now, at this hour of the night, she died, it would be easier for you to make her disappear off the face of the earth, to throw her into the black water, it would only take a few minutes to throw a body as light as that into the rising tide, and free the bed of the stench of heliotrope and citron."

The story ends in a haunting vision of white sheets, black sea and instructions for a theatre or film rendition which was later produced on stage.

View all my reviews

Long Island

Long Island by Colm Tóibín
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I remember being better satisfied with Brooklyn than my response to this one. Long Island continues the story of Eilis Lacey, the young woman in Brooklyn twenty years hence now married with two children and visiting her mother in Ireland. The writing is skillful if not demonstrating the beautiful language I am eager to underline or note. I felt that there was too much introspection on the part of the characters especially Nancy, her one-time best friend. After a bang up beginning on Long Island, the action and pacing are slow and deliberate which I guess is fitting for inhabitants of this small Irish town where most of the novel takes place. Each of the characters is somewhat calculating, Eilis in her strength and refusal to be pushed, and especially Jim and Nancy as they individually plot their relationship, him by omission, her by action. The only notation I made was the use of the word "remonstrate" at least twice in a few pages because I'd not heard anyone use it. The mother was well-drawn as were the other lesser characters. I didn't feel the passion of the key figures in this story, it seemed everyone was making do, or is that the author's comment on late life romance? The ending does not resolve these dilemmas for the reader so it appears Colm Tóibín plans a sequel.

View all my reviews

The Most of It - Mary Ruefle

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Most of It by Poet Mary Ruefle is her first book of prose. Quirky and surprising assessments of commonplace things beginning with snow which awakens her desire for sex and ending with burial and comments on the tombs of Jesus and of King Tut. In between she comments on killing, dying, lichen, birds, religion, housekeeping and a potpourri of thoughts from an anchorite on lists, penance, prayer, Shakespeare, news, books, rabbits and mistaken facts. The book defies description but yields similes and smiles. And I read and reread in a kind of calisthenics of the mind.

"Soon the trains, too, shall pass out of all being, while books, I'm afraid, will go on pretending the are still among us. My friend--for nothing hinders me from calling you my friend, especially the fact we have never met, and are only now pretending to--if all the world were made of paper, and perhaps it is, it could one day conceivably burn for year, like the rainforests of Brazil were once so fond of doing, and eventually we'd be reduced to a few square heaps of ash, as if the sun had strayed too close, or one among us drifted too far, the sensitivity of his organs of perception so extreme he regarded all of civilization and most of literature, an illusion."

Just pick it up and read a few opening sentences of the short pieces which make up the book:
"This morning I want to talk a little bit about killing."
"Fire is my companion, but I do not talk to it, it talks to me."
"A pet is a good way to tell time, better than a clock, for time is a measure of the changing position of objects, and soon it will be time to feed the pet, to exercise the pet, to replace its little ball, clip its nails or talons, wash it ever so gently, vaccuum up its shedding and so forth."
"After father died, he said that dying had taken a longer time than he had previously imagined possible."
"I wanted to go into the forest and collect lichen."
"Remove everything beautiful from your home, remove everything you like, love, cherish or are fond of."

See what I mean? Unexpected and compelling.

View all my reviews

The Best American Essays 2024 - Wesley Morris

The Best American Essays 2024: An Engaging Essay Collection with Award-Winning Voices by Wesley Morris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Impressive collection edited by Pulitzer-winner Wesley Morris. I have read over half of them and was particularly impressed and touched by the work of Jenisha Watts relating her journey as a young writer from Kentucky; Jennifer Senior "The Ones We Sent Away" about her institutionalized aunt; Richard Prins' heartbreaking tale of mental illness in the mother of his child; and Christienne L. Hinz lovely piece on being a weed and natural gardening. I also was drawn to Brock Clarke's piece "Woodstove" about deaths in his family, dogs and people. There are also essays "grappling with the issues of our time" from Teju Cole, Sallie Tisdale, Yiyun LiRémy Ngamije, and Jerald Walker.

View all my reviews