Check the Booker Prizes.
Best book of this quarter:
Never Let Me Go (
2005)
by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Books read recently by J. Zimmerman.
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| Mental Health of George W. Bush
Check the Booker Prizes. |
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Best book of this quarter:
Never Let Me Go ( 2005)
by Kazuo Ishiguro.
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"Every poet is an experimentalist."
[Marvin Bell in his 32 Statements About Writing Poetry in Poet's Market 2004] |
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Skip pages
Reread
Not read
Not finish
Not defend your tastes
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{ June (junio (see also books on Spanish)) 2005 }
See our Death and Dying web page.
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Finished listening to unabridged CD of Evolution. by Edward J Larson. It summarizes lots of history and science, as well as the evangelical legislation of terror to protect the young from the idea that monkeys, slugs, and microbes are all God's chillun - don't know about viruses. |
Alan Hollinghurst's
2004 Booker Prize winner, The Line of Beauty.
What a pain.
6/10 on the Blog-ometer.
How could this possibly be the winner? Did it get some kind of political (as opposed to artistic-merit) vote? It claims it's "a satire on Britain during the Thatcher years", centered on a wanna-be-cabinet-minister, Gerald. But it's just a sorry exercise in greed by all concerned. If this is the best the commonwealth can muster, one would reconsider opening up the Booker to USA citizens.
In addition I am in the group mentioned by Alfred Hickling in The Guardian as "those readers who ... weary of his [Alan Hollinghurst's] sex drive (even the Gay Times condemned the erotic passages of his previous book as 'selfish' and 'dull')".
The only truly funny section was when the lot of them were in the South of France on vacation and the greed was muted while their eccentricities shone. But the whole set-up, where an M.P. installs a known-gay university friend of his son in a what sounds like a servant's room, charges him rent[!], and uses him as an amateur baby-minder (for his daughter) and butler never seems plausible. If only Gerald had been gay!
Many reviews have acclaimed it, e.g. Publishers [sic?] Weekly: "Among its other wonders, this almost perfectly written novel ... delineates what's arguably the most coruscating portrait of a plutocracy since Goya painted the Spanish Bourbons. To shade in the nuances of class, Hollingsworth uses plot the way it was meant to be used -- not as a line of utility, but as a thematically connected sequence of events that creates its own mini-value system and symbols."
My assumption is that it's the unabated plutocracy that drives Catherine (critical of her family's values and ambitions) into wrist slashing and manic depression. Her reasonable view is as follows:
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"If I had power," said Catherine, "which god forbid --" "Amen to that," murmured Gerald [her deceitful, egocentric, and unsupportive father]. "I think I should stop people having a hundred and fifty million pounds." "There you are, then," said Sir Maurice, "... I must say, I hadn't expected to hear this kind of talk in a place like this."
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Catherine is the only aware, and certainly the most interesting, character in the plot. Geoff Dyer in the Telegraph recognizes "Toby's sister, the crazy Catherine, [as] in some ways the most important character in the book, its wayward and implicated conscience". How much more interesting the book would have been if told from her POV, and not from the inept wanna-be-pleutocrat, Nick. [One remembers, of course, the slang meaning of 'nick' as 'steal'.]
The 'line of beauty' to Nick is the ogee, the architectural S-curve admired by Hogarth, and whose name Nick contributed to the magazine that he and his risky lover eventually publish in a single rich, glossy, and useless issue. Nick, in Hollinghurst's sex-besotted world, turns it into a line of Nick's boyfriend's male back and buttocks. Or maybe a line of cocaine, another of Nick's obsessions.
Actually, they should have awarded the 2004 Booker to Colm Toíbín for The Master, his fictionalized biography of Henry James.
The recently announced winner of the first Man Booker International Prize, Ismail Kadaré, is a great writer and infinitely more worth reading than Hollinghurst. See Kadaré's The Three-Arched Bridge, and Spring Flowers, Spring Frost.
The Skaldic forms began in the ninth century in Norway, when the Skalds () created poems to praise their kings and other leaders. The skalds were early and artistic ministers of propaganda.
Hollander summarizes the forms of skaldic verse that have come down to us for over a millennium, and connect us to ninth and tenth century Norway and Iceland.
The book is told in the years from 1901 (on the day after Queen Victoria's death) to 1910 (on the night before King Edward's funeral). And in the voices of her 11 main characters. As Chevalier has written, this was "the transitional period between the Victorian era, with its strict social codes and elaborate commemoration of the dead, and the modern world where religion has lost its value and death is no longer celebrated. This change began in Britain during the reign of King Edward VII - the Edwardian period."
Chevalier explores this through two families: one family remains rooted in Victorian values while the other looks to the future of bicycles and university and votes for women, electricity, etc. In particular, she compares their attitudes and behaviors concerning death and mourning, focusing on a girl in each family and an apprentice gravedigger.
The interweaving of different viewpoints is handled beautifully, giving the reader all the knowledge and experiences and insight of each of the characters, while showing how we try and often fail to understand what motivates even those closest to us.
Finished
Myss asks: "What is this call that we have to be of service to each other. ... Is being of service a biological necessity, necessary for my health?" This is relevant to all of us, including those who work with Death and Dying.
Her solution is 'the alchemy of intuition'. She claims that intuition is not a gift, but it is instinctive. From survival intuition, she asserts, we work up to making conscious intuitive choices.
See specifics at Caroline Myss.
See also her Sacred Contract and The Energetics of Healing.
The incisive critic Ms. Liz Davis writes: "he's great, a Canadian hero: his books have good plot, lots of philosophy and Jungian psychology too."
English professor and commentator Ms. Jane Wyman writes: "I did like his Deptford trilogy: FIFTH BUSINESS, THE MANTICORE, and WORLD OF WONDERS. ... his later things were terribly self-indulgent."
The British Council writes that this book " tells the story of a Hungarian basketball player, Gyuri Fischer, dreaming of escape to the West while on a tour in 1950s Hungary. ... the first debut novel to be nominated for the Booker Prize. ... Fischer's is a familiar, knowledgeable and richly ironic voice ... frequently hilarious and farcical ... The political critique may extend little beyond blanket condemnation and ridicule of Hungarian totalitarianism ... the distinctive features of Fischer's writing [are] ostentatious (and bathetic) breadth of vocabulary, casually showy erudition, and bravura experiments with form"
She is, perhaps, the leading feminist writer of the Arab world. In this semi-autobiographical book based on her "inner landscape", Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif ("a chronicler of the personal and the political" who may have "put gender politics on the Arab literary map") has written a 313,000-word (Soueif's count) book that spans social and historical Egypt from the 1967 war to 1980.
Couldn't get into it. There was little action, no interesting writing, and no characters that hooked my attention. Tried reading the beginning and the end, but to no avail.
My favorite part was the Glossary, which includes:
The incisive (and more patient than I am) critic Ms. Liz Davis liked it, and writes: "In the Eye of the Sun [is] one of my all-time favorites ...read it NOW."
Likewise abandoned Ahdaf Soueif's 1999 Booker Prize nominee, The Map of Love.
A classic compilation of kōans from Chan (Zen) patriarchs of the Tang and Sung dynasties. Commentaries are included by the compiler, the eighteenth-century Japanese Zen master Genrō. His disciple, Fūgai and the twentieth-century Zen master, Nyogen Senzaki, also add comments. There are 100 kōans in the book, but I listened to the cassette tapes, which only include 72 kōans.
See also our initial book log entry.
{ May (mayo (see also books on Spanish)) 2005 }
Aqua Curves is beautiful. I love the curvy breaking wave on the front cover, and the presentation of the names of the book and the author in the same color of aqua as the wave. The back cover has a photo (also in aqua) of an intriguing statue of a mermaid. The whole outside of the book is very coherent and satisfying. Book and cover design is by Tommy Herrmann, who deserved enthusiastic praise.
Ms. Braucher says her book was, 'Inspired by the ocean and female themes' and 'abounds with mermaids, seafood, wit and humor.'
Aqua Curves won the 2004 Stevens Manuscript Competition for a poetry manuscript, judged by poet and fiction writer Peter Meinke. It contains some poems from her chapbook Mermaid Café (Pudding House, 2004) plus others.
For more see our web page on Karen Braucher.
Also by Karen Braucher:
Sending Messages Over Inconceivable Distances.
Mermaid Café.
Interesting observations on the attractions of staying in or returning to jail.
Other books reviewed in Sue Grafton's series include:
B is for Burglar
I is for Innocent
O is for Outlaw
Heart-felt poems of love and the natural world.
Dirt Music shares some of themes and methods of The Riders: themes of loyalty, secrets, and betrayal; methods of redemption through journey and the work of one's hands. Strong, boundary-crossing men and women. Children that are creative human beings.
As with The Riders, Tim Winton is particularly smooth and readable in his conversation, written (wonderfully) without quotation marks. [Only once (on Jude's visit to Georgie) did I feel as if the conversation was being rolled out for the sake of the plot.]
This sample shows the format, as well as another of his ongoing themes - that in a relationship we often ignore hearing something important to the other:
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The glare from the scalloped shell beach was punishing. The guide pointed out the ruins of the ancient boab destroyed by lightning and he led them up through the rainforest toward the base of the bluff. He's been here, said Red. Look at the trails he's made. And you told him about this place? Jim asked Georgie. Told you too, she murmured. I don't recall. |
Well-deserved nominee for the 2002 Booker Prize. However, I preferred The Riders, which did not explain so much about people's circumstances and motives.
Hooray for a book that is strong rather than delicate, and about an emotional man.
The Riders are:
| 'waiting for something promised, something that was plainly their due' |
Perhaps a leader, or an answer, or a wife.
And hooray for Sculley's decision that:
| 'he would not be among them and must never be, in life or death.' |
I preferred The Riders to Lighthousekeeping. Nonetheless, this is another story of light and dark, loyalty, obsession, and abuse. (Is there a pattern in my reading?)
For most of the last half of the book, despite its physicality, I had a parallel universe going where Scully (the protagonist) was dead already. But he was not: it just felt like he was.
So why did his wife leave? And why leave the way she did? People who need this question answered above all are missing (imho) the point of the book, which is to get over an unanswerable question. As Mary Oliver writes in "The Journey":
you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do - determined to save the only life you could save. |
Specifically, though, one can certainly speculate about Scully's wife, Jennifer: perhaps she was afraid of Scully; perhaps she hated him; perhaps she had just fallen out of love; or perhaps she discovered (shades of Georgie in Dirt Music) that she had never been in love with her man.
There was certainly serious miscommunication going on, though it's not clear what was deliberately hidden, what was naiveté, and what was incompetence. In the end, though, it's an Odyssey about how we try to make sense of something so huge that it cannot make sense, and on recognizing (his wife, his daughter, himself) when to just walk away.
The only (and minor) negative was that sometimes Winton's scenic descriptions were too detailed: they went on far too long. Oh, that and the typos in the USA edition. A couple that I stumbled over were: p.192 has "it's motion"; should be "its motion"; and p.196 has "be"; where he needs "he".
Still, it's a well-deserved nominee for the 1995 Booker Prize.
A story of light and dark, loyalty, obsession, and abuse. Good in parts.
Because I borrowed this book from the library (after a wait of a couple of months to work my way up the queue) I shall be adopting her strategy (p.144):
| "I have a list of titles that I leave at the [library] desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it's best to be ahead of the queue." |
Robert Sward is very generous, not only in his production of poetry but also in appreciating the work of others. Recent examples are: his reading of many poems by other people in the Monterey Bay Anthology during the Poetry Show on KUSP radio; and his interview in Caesura (the 25th anniversary special edition for the San Jose Poetry Center) of poet Morton Marcus; Sward's questions on style, metaphor, form, etc. shaped the interview and helped bring us many interesting ideas.
Sward has published 24 books of poetry, and the new book selects from 12 of them. Jack Foley provides the Introduction and Bruce Myer the Epilogue. Other Introductions (by William Meredith, Morton Marcus, William Minor) to some of the sampled books are reprinted at the end of a The Collected Poems of Robert Sward, 1957-2004.
Poets are renowned for writing about themselves, and Sward mocks this natural tendency to excess in his "48 Poets Named Robert" (p.132-133) and "Three Roberts" (p.117-119).
Sward is at his best, for me, when he is briefest, and where he is the commentator (rather than the main event) of the poem, as in the delightful "Hannah":
Her third eye is strawberry jam
has a little iris in it
her eyelids
are red
she's sleepy
and the milk
has gone down
the wrong way.
I've just had breakfast
with the smallest person in the world.
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The interested reader is referred to the Globe and Mail review by Robyn Sarah, "Sward cuts deeply" (January 8, 2005).
My favorite poems are Wendy Videlock's beautiful "North of Mist" (a successful merger of language poetry and music), David Yezzi's "Tritina for Susannah" (the tritina being a delightful and fairly new form, similar to the sestina but with roughly a quarter of the lines), and Elaine Sexton's "Lower Manhattan Pantoum."
Of the various reviews, Vivian Gornic's ("why, exactly, was this book written?") about the memoirs by Donald Hall and others has my strongest sympathy.
In the letters, the most illuminating were the petulant blasts from Franz Wright, author of the iridescent Walking to Martha's Vineyard, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and (in this situation) sounding like a peeved teenager. He begins:
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The blank form rejection was a nice but predictable touch coming from vengeful, petty, reactionary &
aesthetically moridbund [sic] freaks like yourselves. Enjoy your money.
Franz Wright
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Presumably P.O.d by any attempt to calm him by the editors of Poetry, he amplified his personal attack in this second letter:
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You must realize, of course, that no genuinely literary person - no person who actually knows
anything about contemporary poetry and the clarity that is coming back into it now
after a couple of decades of Neo-Formalist gibberish and doggerel -
would ever have picked
Poetry
to shower all that dough on. Your receiving it is more or less proof of the irrelevance you have
been enjoying since the seventies.
Franz Wright
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And after a third flurry, he ended the affair with a fourth letter:
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I had a brief interest in
Poetry
but I won't be dumb enough to make that mistake again.
I think you're fools.
Franz Wright
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As the editors respond, they include the letters because they could "be interesting and worthwhile for our readers to get a behind-the-scenes look at the editorial process and the occasional fallout from that. Second, the letters underscore the point that ... Poetry treats all manuscripts equally, including those from Pulitzer Prize winners." And I am happy to echo their final reason:
| we just couldn't resist. |
Meanwhile, my own more humble letter is on its way to the Poetry editors:
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Dear Editors:
Thank you for publishing the deliciously petty correspondence from Mr. Franz Wright in the May 2005 issue of Poetry. It is such a relief to know that some of the greater lights of American poetry have the same tantrums as we, the un-Pulitzered lesser lights. I shall be more tolerant of my future rejection slips, for they will each recall Mr. Wright and summon a grin. |
The author is unknown to me but apparently is a famous sports writer, which is an additional reason for his interest in chronocling the dying weeks of his one-time professor (Morrie Schwartz) from ALS, which "melts your nerves and leaves your body a pile of wax."
See our Death and Dying web page.
Having recently enjoyed Sexton's Transformations, I was delighted to find this collection of essays that include:
Not recommended. Completed only because I could listen to a version on CD while tidying the house.
Some of Klein's favorite words about Bill Clinton or some of his years as President include irresponsibility, exploit, scandal, allegedly, cowardice, sadder still, and dreadful. Perhaps this is because Klein likes to focus on scandal.
Apparently Klein was once a big fan of Clinton, but when he could not be on the inside of the Clinton presidency he became jaded. And then he wrote this book.
Klein is an equal-opportunity insulter, which may be intended to demonstrate a kind of objectivity. It adds to the density of his loaded verbiage. Why does he needs to prompt his readers to feel his emotions rather than simply letting them see the data. I feel he is afraid that if he does not prompt the reader, the reader will actually feel something quite different from Klein - a kind of sleepiness, in fact, and relief when the book can be returned to the library.
This is a couple of cozy short storied in the guise of a book. Arch and boring.
I much preferred listening to the series on Alexander McCall Smith's lady detective, Mma Precious Ramotswe: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Tears of the Giraffe, and Morality for Beautiful Girls.
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Finished Never Let Me Go
( 2005)
by Kazuo Ishiguro.
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This is his best yet. I'm especially admiring how precisely he has captured the voice of the type of young English woman that is his protagonist. It's the voice of the 14-year-olds I went to school with. And like them, while the protagonist has a simplicity, innocence, and lack of information, she makes up for that as much as she can by her observations and her imagination.
The name of Hailsham (the school where most of the story is set), must denote the sham of being hale (having sound or vigorous health). The young people of the story are healthy and their role is to provide health to others. But the system in which they live is a sham of healthiness and they are trapped in an evil medicine.
Never Let Me Go could seem a macabre story. Publishers Weekly summarizes: 'Set in late 1990s England, in a parallel universe in which humans are cloned and raised expressly to "donate" their healthy organs and thus eradicate disease from the normal population, this is an epic ethical horror story, told in devastatingly poignant miniature.'
It explores not just what we remember and misremember about
Among the huge ethical issues raised by the book are:
It's the first book for a long time that I reread as soon as I had finished it. Should be nominated for the 2005 Booker Prize.
{ April (abril (see also books on Spanish)) 2005 }
My favorite poems are by Kay Ryan:
Also Kay Ryan has a two-page essay-ette ("The Double") on "the audience for poetry", which she answers in two ways: "first, [from the position of the] godlike writer of poems, serenely independent of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and, second as her cousin. ... Her only ambition is to hold the audience."
Also includes Billy Collins, particularly his "Silence". Collins, too, has an essay-ette ("The Club") on "the audience for poetry":
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Every active poet these days has two audiences to contend with,
the one he has in mind when he writes -- some kind of imagined ideal listener --
and the one that actually shows up at readings.
... But when I am composing, I am too busy
... paying attention to what poets pay attention to:
how the poem is developing,
where he wants it to go;
and I am thinking about line breaks,
stanza formation, cadence, vowels, consonants ...
... The imagined audience is stable, the real one unpredictable. |
And finally an essay-ette attributed to Ezra Pound.
How delightful to have an adventurous time-traveling librarian as a protagonist. It's a science fiction story, wrapt in layers and layers of a love story beyond time. Of course Claire is much too understanding as the wife. But otherwise there wouldn't have been this confection of a book.
A classic revenge novel, where the main characters fall as thickly as Hamlet and his nearest and dearest.
Nominated for the the 1998 Booker Prize.
Amazing book of powerful poems that re-envision the Grimms fairy tales. Snow White, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, the Frog Prince, and various other beloved characters of our childhoods reappear in these poems for grownups.
The Forward by Kurt Vonnegut is an added treat.
A puzzling book. Ralph Ellison won the National Book Award for Invisible Man (1952) (not the H.G. Wells book of the same title). From 1951 until his death in 1994, Ellison worked on Juneteenth, of a man apparently white (the son of a white woman and probably a black man), who becomes a bigoted Senator ("I'll call him Bliss, because they say that's what ignorance is," comments the other main character) before he is shot.
Some good ideas for exercises targeted for various pains. Some points worth remembering:
Specific exercises are given. e.g. for the feet:
Her lively poems mix narrative and language poetry. She is a fan of cut-ups through which she introduces a large vocabulary in unexpected juxtaposition.
My favorite poems include "To a Young Woman in a Coma", "Nearby", "Word Salad", "Mysterious Tears", the title poem "Medicine", "A Crushed House", "A Severe Lack of Holiday Spirit", and the opening poem, "Prayer for Jackson" (new-born child) that includes:
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Dear Lord, fire-eating custodian of my soul,
author of hermaphrodites, radishes, and Arizona's rosy sandstone, please protect this wet-cheeked baby from disabling griefs... ... Make him so charismatic that even pigeons flirt with him, ... Fill him with awe: for the seasons, minarets' sawtoothed peaks, the breathing of cathedrals, and all that lives - for one radiant day or six pitiful years. |
I could have done without the radio play ("Lovesickness") however.
A delightful book of poems of the experience of a well lived and well thought life. Shaw's unusual telegraphese and sometimes-rebellious line breaks take the reader into a self-observant and wry mind, as in "Quitting Computer Solitaire, After Playing 17,309 Times":
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What finally saved me were the total lapsed
hours - converted into work weeks, I realized they equaled 5 months. |
She also lets us share, and recognize in ourselves, our occasional astonishment by our goodness, such as when we take care for an elderly parent, as in "Bathrooms on my Mind Again":
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it amazes how cheerfully I respond, so
pleasantly I could even be faking. I'm not used to this unreal wonderfulness in me, each act I do too easy (despite my complaints), ... Like a darn dance step, our making music together, what the rest of me is totally unprepared for, discomfited, not believing it could, in the least way, conceivably after all be true. |
Fourteen tales of Odin, Thor, Loki, gods, dwarves, and giants, adapted from the Poetic Edda (the oldest written source of Norse mythology). Brilliant paintings by Troy Howell transform symbolic Viking art into life. (Sadly Osborne's text is a bit stilted.)
2005)
by Judy Budnitz.
Short stories, some with magical realism; others, set in the mid-20th century, are equally exotic.
Favorites (in this order) are:
| "If they all got together and cooperated, stacked up their sample cases in one column, they would be able to climb out. But they are too competitive to think of that. They are salesmen to the core. Occasionally you will see one digging at the base of the fence with an eggbeater or a corkscrew decorated with poodles, but he always stops early on for fear of damaging the merchandise." |
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Related pages:
Books on Buddhism.
Books on Learning Spanish.
Poetry - Learn How to Write Your Own.
Forests of California and Trees of the World.
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Copyright © 2004-2016 by J. Zimmerman. |