Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Otessa Moshfegh is described as one of the brightest new voices in fiction, an NEA fellow, Stanford Stegner grad, and she is but this book is a hard sale. Her story is suspenseful -- I kept reading avidly late into the night -- but it is a bleak tale (and I love bleak) of a young girl who is trapped living with her overbearing ex-cop alcoholic father, working at a prison for boys, suffering an eating disorder and troubled by her lack of intimate connections until Rebecca comes to work at the prison and provides a "ticket to a new life...She was so clever and beautiful, I thought, the embodiment of all my fantasies for myself." What keeps you reading other than the edge-of-seat shenanigans at the end, are strategic references to the beautiful, loving life she lives now, fifty years later, and the superb writing: "She whirled off her coat as though in slow motion -- this is how I remember it -- and shook it like a bullfighter as she strode up the corridor toward me, hair rippling behind her, eyes like daggers shooting down straight through my heart to my guts." She notes the motto written on a pack of Pall Malls "a shield between two lions -- Per aspera ad astra. Through the thorns to the stars. That described my plight to a tee." The story winds up hopefully "not a direct line to paradise, but I believe I got on the right road, with all the appropriate trips and kinks." I am glad I read Eileen and will read her next book but it's a relief not to be the bookseller for this one.


View all my reviews
And for more bleak titles, Paul Bryant on Goodreads offers a "rich seam of female self-loathing in fiction:"

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirio - the unnamed un-beautiful older sister spends her whole life hating everybody especially herself
A Day Off by Storom Jameson - the unnamed middle-aged alcoholic frump spends a day hating everybody especially herself
Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill - the unnamed (as I seeing a pattern here?) wife spends a solid  year or so hating mostly herself
Dietland by Sarai Walker - Plum Kettle (hey, unroll your eyes, that's her name)spends her entire life self-loathing her own plus-size body
All of Jean Rhys' novels except Wide Sargasso Sea - the variously named alcoholic heroines all of whom are Jean, spend their allotted few months in each book totally hating themselves and pretty  much everything else (the curtains, the breakfast egg, etc.)
 The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek - the gold standard of female self-loathing against which all other self-loathers are to be judged. Erica Kohut spends her entire waking moments hating herself and everything else to such a level of frenzy that the women in the above-mentioned books would only look on in envy and loathe themselves a little bit more because they couldn't quite get to the level of loathingness Erica Kohut achieves with seeming ease.

That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Baroque, ornate, dense, tangled, funny, brilliant unfinished 400-page rant from Carlo Emilio Gadda which
 
thwarts logical conclusions and forces the reader to go along for the ride in the many-layered, stinky, cacaphony of corruption and magic depicted as 1927 Rome. Ostensibly a detective novel, there's a theft, a murder, and a host of descriptions of Mussolini-era Italy including the memorable references to Il Doochay as "Death's Head," or "Fierce Face," or the Shit...the syphilitic Swaggerer." But the investigation is incomplete, derailed like the train in one scene, and the tale ends inconclusively, indeed an inventive "mess."

The book club discussion was lively and mostly enthusiastic. One member, Dani, even produced a fantastic glossary of the book's elaborate vocabulary.
William Weaver's translation was masterful in dealing with Gadda's imaginative vocabulary, made-up words, puns and double-meanings.

View all my reviews

Books - "Unalloyed, summer had lingered miraculously into 

late September without a suggestion that autumn 

was at hand." Mark Shorer, 1938, "Boy in the Summer Sun" 

I see the headline in an email, a newspaper article, or a magazine piece which says "Summer Reading" and I perk up and zoom in like some kind of addict. Well, not so much an addict as a bibliophile, a reader, a connoisseur of literature. I'm not so captivated by best seller fare so much, but anything from a new literary experiment in fiction, a novel from a favorite author, a forgotten treasure from New York Review Books, a travel story or a long and challenging classic. Or even the 78-year-old short story which provided the above quote. I remember the huge piles of books we'd take with us on family vacations in the narrow confines of our cabin cruiser where we slept, read, traveled and ate together in a space thirty feet by eight feet. I envied the hammock dwellers who stayed put and didn't have to leap up to handle the lines for docking or anchoring in a new harbor. Retired now, the idea of long, lazy vacation days from school or work has a different meaning in a life where "every day is Saturday" but still the reading freedom is constrained. Part of the imagined constraint is that it must be somewhere other than here. Somewhere with a hammock or a outside recliner or a beach rather than my own backyard which needs weeding. But I continue to stockpile the list, order from the library, run to the bookstore, to get ready for summer reading. I now have  High Dive
, Eileen by Otessa Moshfegh, the new Chris Cleve , the new Jenny Diski and have ordered  a whole spate of new novels by women which Bethanne Patrick mentioned in her Lit Hub column today, "Five Great Beach Reads Wherever You Are," http://lithub.com/  Even Bill Gates has a summer reading list this year: https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer-Books-2016
In fact, lots of people have lists: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/summer-2016-books_us_5734ec93e4b08f96c182a087
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/05/09/books-best-of-2016-so-far or, best of all, Washington Post's Michael Dirda's (Bound to Please)list from last year https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/summers-hidden-gems-selected-by-michael-dirda/2015/07/02/16f4dd4a-0a18-11e5-95fd-d580f1c5d44e_story.html

If I would just vanquish the tv with its summer movie collection of film noirs and newest releases, if I would not doze off in the summer sun or post dinner evenings with doors and windows open, I would read every book on my list and still may do so. My book club offered heavy reading this year, ten novels many of them dense and challenging and listed here: http://psullivan.fastmail.com.user.fm/books/booklist_15-16.shtml

Kelly Corrigan wrote this hymn to summer reading last summer at https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/kelly-corrigans-hymn-to-summer-summer-reading--and-her-mom/2015/07/02/dc8a8156-095d-11e5-a7ad-b430fc1d3f5c_story.html?tid=magnet

  "To the summer reader who snorts with laughter at Tom Perrotta, Tina Fey and P.J. O’Rourke and mops up tears reading Toni Morrison and Frank McCourt, who has walked Rajasthan with Salman Rushdie and the Sudanese desert with Dave Eggers and the New England backwoods with Stephen King, who learned greed from Tom Wolfe, fear from Tobias Wolff, advocacy from Naomi Wolf, who collapsed with Elizabeth Gilbert or cringed with Jeannette Walls, who has thanked God for David Sedaris, Anne Lamott or Anna Quindlen, I say, 'Me, too.'”

I look forward to not reading for purpose and discussion, just soaking up as many books as I can. And we do have a cabin in July on an island. What more does one need?

The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes by Joan Silber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

 The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes is a craft book for authors, but Silber also has a stellar book list with descriptions of the use of time in fiction. Even without concern for how to use time in a novel or short story, you could read the titles in her bibliography and know what good writing is all about. From Chekhov's "The Darling" to Henry James ("The Beast in the Jungle"), some Proust and deMaupassant, all the way to Denis Johnson, Alice Munro and Arundhati Roy. Many short stories are included but novels as well. There are translations from Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, French and Italian. There are books I have never heard of (Ya Hua's To Live) and short stories I've missed, even a challenge such as Kiergaard's Diary. I want to jump into a hammock with this list and forget my current fiction pickups at the library. Her clarity and love of literature underlies an informative and helpful discussion of time as it is handled in story, how it is slowed down or speeded up, or made circular or fabulously upended but, quoting Kierkegaard, "life can only be understood backward but has to be lived forward." Any which way it moves in time, read Silber's succinct thoughts and explore her bibliography.


View all my reviews

Get Pocket Tells Me What I Thought I Wanted to Read

Getpocket.com is one of those consolidators of web articles which occasionally alerts me to an article I've missed online. Do you too get  "suggestions" for your reading pleasure? My favorite so far has been http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-custodian-of-forgotten-books which I would have seen if I were diligent about reading my New Yorkers, but I'm not. Thank you, Get Pocket.

Today's entries included a piece by Heidi Isern, who reeled me in with a funny article on Quartz called "Almost Everyone Who Is Single Is Single for the Same Reason." She quotes her dad at the end:

"My father once told me that the secret to his loving 40 year marriage with my mother was simple. “We just like hanging out with each other doing nothing. And trust me, as you get older you have a lot of time together doing nothing.”
Wise words from her father.

Today's gem? I got as energized over this as I did over the task site last week www.toodledo.com which I just noticed fell off my toolbar and hence out of my life.

"Tell Me What You Did Today, And I’ll Tell You Who You Are" by Benjamin Hardy on The Medium.
I am seduced by this type of article. Maybe there is just that much of my business degree left in me? One, two, three and your whole life gains clarity, perspective and satisfaction. The author is working on his doctorate in industrial psych and it's all about setting goals and sticking to them. Isn't everything? So you imagine your ideal day (so much time spent with family, exercise, prep, reading, writing, working) and then see how close you come to achieving it.

"To ensure you not only achieve your goals, but radically exceed them, put substantially more effort in than seems needed. And plan for the worst. Rather than underestimate how much time and effort something will take, overestimate those things.

We are all in complete control of how we spend our time. If we don’t believe we are, we have an external locus of control (i.e., victim-mentality) and will remain so until we claim personal responsibility.

What does your ideal day look like?

How often do you live your ideal day?

If you were to consistently live your ideal day, where would you be in one year from now? Where would you be in five years?"

So I've plotted my ideal day:

coffee & breakfast with a brief look at the papers 60min or 8%;
Write My Words on 750words.com 50min or 6%;
pool or walk 120min or 16%;
lunch, 60min or 8%;
writing and submitting 100min or 13%;
reading, responding or sorting 90min or 12%;
crisis mgmt 30min or 4%;
cooking/eating dinner  90min or 12%;
tv, papers/magazines or Scrabble 150min or 20%;
walk round the block with the dog, 15min or 1%.
Total minutes: 765 or about 12 hours of the day.

To achieve this, I need to be up at 7:30 each morning. Today I got up at 8:45.

It pencils out well with a total of 765 minutes allotted in a standard 1440-minute day less eight hours of sleep minus my dedicated 765 minutes gives me a whopping 195 minutes to screw around, do housework, toilet activities, etc. and there are places like tv which can be shifted into productivity if needed.

It I consistently lived this way, in five years I'd have written a number of articles, maybe even the whole bloody memoir. I can see stealing from reading time for writing time. My writing time, including 750 words, may be a tad unrealistic since I often sit here for hours scribbling away, critiquing or doing book reviews.

Some people in this household might find this hilariously contrary to actuality, the thoughts of a fool or an optimist, but I find it comforting. One can have an agenda. One can stick with it. But most of all, it can be adjusted, expanded or altered to fit reality. Or my idea of reality. My manager friends are going to love this, and by posting, I might be forced to accountability.

 I am reminded of this classic book on time management by Alan Lakein, recommended by my favorite writing teacher, which I can always stand to reread.

Slightly Foxed https://foxedquarterly.com/blog/ what pleasure I get when this charming British quarterly with paintings on the cover arrives by mail, bearing its discoveries from writers describing treasures from the past. The latest volume brings Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (1983) by Julio Cortazar and his wife, Carol Dunlop, about a month-long journey they made in a red Volkswagen camper, named Fafner after Wagner's dragon, from Paris to Marseilles on the autoroute, stopping twice a day "at every one of the route's 65 motels, cafeteria. lay-bys and picnic areas" without leaving the highway. Sarah Bakewell (How to Live: A Life of Montaigne and At the Existentialist Cafe) calls the book "one of the most adventurous and wide-ranging travel books ever written." Next, a treatise on wilderness manuals from Gaylen O'Hanlon while Robert McFarlane (Landmarks) writes about Lexicographer-Poet James Stout Angus's A Glossary of the Shetland Dialect (1914) and the poetry within, i.e. "ABER, adj., sharp, acute, as an edge tool; clear, well-defined, as a cloudless sky; eater, as a hungry fish at a bait; secure, as a knot on a line, ardent, severe; v. to sharpen as a knife; to stir up and make bright, as a fire." More amazing entries cited on the sea (ADNASJUR, BAA, UTSHOT), and on flora and fauna (BARK-LEAF, 'the blade and blossom of tormentil' and SWABBI MAA, 'the great black-back gull.' Margaret Drabble extols the contradictory and moving life of James Joyce as illuminated by Richard Ellmann in the biography of 1980. And so many favorites written about with charm and panache: Evan Connell's Mrs. Bridge, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Alison Lurie's Real People, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, and authors Brian Moore, J. G. Farrell, Penelope Fitzgerald with titles we may have missed. Not that title choices are a problem for me, "so many books, so little time," but what fun to read these contributors who have a light touch and deep appreciation of good tales, for instance one note on a writer says: "retiring from 36 years as a Fleet Street sub-editor, Patrick Welland invested in a huge chair in which to drink red wine and read books." I've done the same.

The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

 The story is set in Bogotá, Colombia and the reader learns that much of the city is recovering from severe PTSD. Citizens who lived through the Eighties in the time of Pablo Escobar have symptoms not unlike war veterans, having spent a decade living in fear, not going out to public places, restaurants, cafes, etc. and never knowing when a family member or friend would go missing. The narrator grew up in the era and suffers irrational fears and despair after he is wounded while walking with his friend Roberto who is shot and killed, leaving him obsessed with trying to understand the death from the man's surviving daughter. The book becomes a mystery tale and spurs the reader on to discover what happened. The writing is beautiful in translation. Kudos to Anne McLean - I want to read more of her translations and am looking at The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination. One memorable setting of the ruined and abandoned animal park/zoo owned by the drug lord is so real you can hear the squeak of a broken sign hanging by one hinge in the oppressive ever-present heat. The pace is almost dreamy for the first section of the story but picks up rapidly moving forward to other events, further puzzles.
A favorite quotation from the book:
"There is just one direct route beween La Dorada and Bogotá...You turn south and take the straight road that runs by the river that takes you to Honda, the port where travelers used to arrive when no planes flew over the Andes. From London, from New York, from Havana, Colón or Barranquilla, they would arrive by sea at the mouth of the Magdalena and change ship there...long days of sailing upriver on tired steamships...From Honda, each traveler would get to Bogotá however he could, by mule or by train or in a private car...no one has able to explain convincingly, beyond banal historical causes, why a country should choose as its capital its most remote and hidden city. It's not our fault that we Bogotanos are stuffy and cold and distant, because that's what our city is like, and you can't blame us for greeting strangers warily, for we're not used to them."


View all my reviews