by anneMoore on February 2, 2010
With friends and family griping about the dearth of good new reads, it’s worth a look back at the best of the last decade. That’s always my default: Nothing new? Look back.
Explains reading all of Hardy, and Richard Yates, repeatedly.
Of course, the last decade gave us the me me me “Eat, Pray, Love” and the gimmicky “Everything is Illuminated” — two I read and wish I hadn’t. But there were big, messy reads put out in the last decade that will forever live on my shelves. They are, in no particular order:
1) White Teeth, Zadie Smith. Too long by a third, but the rest is a glorious, heart-rending tale of modern London’s melting pot.
2) The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen. A Midwestern family blossoms elsewhere, hilariously. I’d lend it …Who has my copy?!?
3) Empire Falls, Richard Russo. Heartbreak and acceptance in a fading mill town. An American masterpiece; Russo’s finest.
4) When We Were Orphans, Kazuo Ishiguro. A detective searches for parents he lost as a boy, in Shanghai. What he finds is both mundane and shocking. My favorite Ishiguro.
5) Lush Life, Richard Price. A robbery gone wrong on New York’s Lower East Side opens up a Pandora’s Box of wanna be’s and has-beens. Too long? I wanted more.
6) Little Children, Tom Perrotta. A bored young mom carries on a torrid affair with a slacker dad. Rest of the neighborhood worries about a hometown child molester. Perrotta’s best.
7) Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky. Written on the run during German invasion of Paris; found by author’s daughter and published in 2004. No one behaves well during an occupation. Beautifully written.
My Life in France, Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme. On tv, Julia Child scared me. On the page, her life inspires and charms.
9) The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright. The road to 9/11 began with an Egyptian scholar whose time in postwar U.S. disgusted him. Astonishing research; fascinating read.
10) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz. Don’t be put off by the title, the impossibly nerdy main character, the Spanglish, the footnotes. Best read of the decade.
by anneMoore on January 15, 2010
When I began this blog, I made a choice to write about books and art and cities and food I admire. Too easy to pick on the second rate! But as a new decade dawned, and “best of” lists spawned, I couldn’t help thinking about the piles of books in my home and office, books I can’t finish and can’t pass on, because no one will take or buy: door stoppers.
I know, I know: buy a Kindle. But I like books, big books, messy full-bodied reads. Hardy, Dickens, Tolstoy. From the here and now: Price, Russo, Ishiguro, Diaz. Their weight, their textured jackets, their pages.
I end up with door stoppers because I take chances; I want to find and devour good reads, to be taken in, seduced. These led me on, but left me cold.
1) I am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe. Pre-ordered from Amazon. Read 90 pages. A boring, predictable read from the master of the universe? When I tried to sell, hundreds of new copies already for sale, for $1.40. Later, a born-again friend invited me for coffee; she was troubled Charlotte gave up her virginity. All I could say was, “You read that whole book?!?”
2) Man Gone Down, Michael Thomas. Interesting set up: a black man has only a few days to regain his young family. That’s all: an interesting set up.
3) And then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris. Don’t know anyone who made it to this book’s end. Told in the collective first person.
4) The Emperor’s Children, Claire Messud. New York narcissists? My kind of story! One chapter. Friend who lent won’t take it back.
5) Beautiful Children, Charles Boch. A child is missing: where’s the urgency?
6) Driftless, David Rhodes. If fly-over country is this odd, we’re doomed.
7) A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore. Same suspicions as above, re fly-over country. Provocative ideas, none fleshed out.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl. One breathless chapter.
9) Away, Amy Bloom. Rapturous reviews, ludicrous tale. When my friend Jennifer wouldn’t take it back, we left in on an empty seat at a book signing.
10) The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver. Read to page 62. Bland character heading into a Forrest Gump life. Even my niece, a Kingsolver fan, won’t take it off my hands.
by anneMoore on December 2, 2009
Blockbuster shows of museum art enthrall — and exhaust. Yes, it’s astonishing to see the treasures of Tutankhamun, the Picasso retrospective, Matisse beside Picasso, Calder’s circus.
But there’s a deep pleasure in being drawn to a museum to see a single work, on loan, set among its peers. There you’ll find no headsets, no clots of viewers; just people who love art and its tentacles.
Caravaggio’s “The Supper at Emmaus” (1601) hangs in Gallery 211 at the Art Institute of Chicago, grouped with contemporaries and followers, from Baglione and Manfredi to Velazquez and Rembrandt. (On loan from the National Gallery of London, through January 31.)
This Caravaggio, a huge canvas, still shocks more than four centuries after its creation. Light and shadow, perspective, a calm center anchoring the taught energy at its edges: this old works feels brash, fresh, explosive.
Truly, it astonishes, and the work that came after Caravaggio (1471-1610) clearly shows his influence.
The painting tells the story of Christ’s appearance after his Resurrection. Four figures group at a table laid with fruit, bread, wine, a roast bird. Two, his disciples, recognize Christ, and seem on the verge of leaping up or out of the frame.
This is a masterpiece of contained energy. Little wonder that Caravaggio’s work is considered a precursor to photography and cinema.
In the same gallery, and in adjoining ones (208 and 209), Caravaggio’s methods can be seen in the composition, light and shadow, and physicality of Manfredi’s “Cupid Chastised” (c. 1605). Too, we find Caravaggio’s light and shadow in a quiet domestic scene, Velazquez’s “Kitchen Servant” (c. 1618 ) and Rembrandt’s portrait, “Old Man with a Gold Chain” (1631).
Another uncluttered show at the Art Institute is a tribute to photographer Irving Penn, who died earlier this year. It’s in Gallery 3, a narrow space that in this exhibit holds a dozen photographs and a glass case display of Penn’s contact sheet binders and notebooks. Prints of workers, freaks, cropped nudes, a cigarette butt. Magnificent. (Through December 13.)
by anneMoore on November 11, 2009
Some books enchant, others repel. The other day I closed a book after 30 pages and drove it directly back to the library branch it had been borrowed from. I pulled an illegal u-turn and parked in a tow zone, risking all to be rid of it. Clunky writing, horrific story; thank you, no!
Another, by a lauded literary writer, had an interesting set up but was so poorly told I pressed it on a writer friend as a great example of a how not to tell a story.
Why keep reading?
When we open a book, we take a leap. And sometimes we’re rewarded: we’re hooked, we’re grabbed, we’re taken in.
From a stack of newly published books I pulled C.E. Morgan’s “All the Living,” Farrar Straus Giroux, $23. I was nabbed by its first sentence: “She had never lived in a house and now, seeing the thing, she was no longer sure she wanted to.”
She is Aloma, a young woman just out of school, orphaned at a young age, arriving at the tobacco farm her boyfriend, Orren, has come to own.
Sex is their common ground. She’s a trained musician, aching to leave the moment she arrives. He devotes his every hour to saving his family’s farm. When Aloma signs on to play piano for the local church, the pastor quietly, and heartbreakingly, pursues her. It sounds hopelessly old-fashioned, but the book’s most moving passage is when the pastor shames Aloma for leading him on.
It’s a present day story but the world we’re taken into — its language, and foods, and landscape — seems from the near past. Television, but it’s on only for its tornado warnings. Telephones, but no cell phones; no texting, no tweeting. Places to eat, but no fast food. “Don’t be ill” means “don’t be mad.”
There’s no bad guy, no boogie man lurking in the woods. The only menace is the drought, and a mean rooster, and Orren’s buried grief for the family he’s lost.
It’s a Plot 101 tale — will she stay or will she go? — but the quality of the prose kept me reading. A simple story in a remarkable landscape, tightly focused and exquisitely wrought. A model of Aristotle’s unities of time, place and action.
It had me in its grip all weekend.
by anneMoore on October 23, 2009
Should you trust the narrator? Depends on the book.
Two I read this summer set me up to believe that its main character, and narrator, was seeking to repair a significant love (a wife, a daughter). Each starts with a similar premise — I need to get her back — then widens in the telling, providing a much different, and far richer story than its initial pages suggest.
In Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, narrator Hans is a Dutch energy analyst living in post 9-11 New York. His wife leaves him, taking their young son to her native England. Though he (implausibly) wins his family back in the end, they’re not his true love. Cricket, and the immigrant who brings Hans back to the game, are his chief interest.
Without the game’s green fields and international players, Hans is the walking dead. Indeed, when a woman picks him up at an art gallery, she expects to be whipped by his belt. He obliges.
Cricket is Hans’ lifeblood. With Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian immigrant, Hans seeks out places to build a cricket stadium in New York. When Hans finally bats in a winning style, the one he cares for most is witness: “Chuck had seen it happen…had prompted it.”
The writing is lush, but the story — about alienation — is cold.
In Dear American Airlines, Jonathan Miles gives us Bennie Ford, the narrator understandably upset by captivity at O’Hare Airport, where his N.Y. to L.A. flight is grounded. Bennie is trying to get to his daughter’s wedding; he last saw her as an infant.
The letter is the book: Bennie’s howling screed to the airline contains the story of his sorry-ass alcohol-soaked life. He fails everyone except — his mother! The book’s sweetest passages give us their story.
Bennie is the only child of a Polish immigrant and a Southern schizophrenic in New Orleans. More than once his mother takes off with him, driving for days until the car breaks down; father drives out to fetch them.
Their relationship continues into his adult life; his mother, speechless from a stroke, lives with Bennie in New York’s Greenwich Village. She’s spoon fed, and communicates — furiously, hilariously — via post it notes.
The title is slight; this story has heft.
by anneMoore on October 12, 2009
When I first read E. M. Forster’s “Where Angels Fear to Tread” I thought it a twisted comedy. (It is.) I read it again years later and found it sad — still a comedy, but threaded with tragedy. Loss, loss and more loss, complicated by squashed emotions and cultural misunderstanding.
Why do we reread? I get frustrated by the poverty of newer books. Character? Plot? Language? A book I’ve enjoyed in the past has hit all three.
I just reread Frederick Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes.” I’ve read it so many times its cover has come loose and its pages are divided into five uneven parts. Still, I worried: I hadn’t read “A Fan’s Notes” in 20 years. Would I like the character, again? He’s a drunk.
“A Fan’s Notes” is an autobiographical novel. Frederick Exley is a likable, good looking, intelligent young man who refuses the American dream as he pursues it. When he beds the most American girl of all, a Midwest beauty named Bunny Sue, he can’t get it up. Enjoy “Mad Men”? He’s the shiny apple who gets canned for flipping off a client or starting a barroom brawl.
No friendship or relation is worth more than a drink.
It’s a train-wreck of a life. L.A., Miami, the West, New York in all its parts. Chicago is his Onhava: “In the summer we sat around gallon thermoses of vodka and tonic, as tribesmen around the beneficent fire, taking the sun on the most exhilarating city lake front in the world…behind us rose the dizzying turrets of Chicago’s skyline, pale and iridescent facades rising into the azure heavens, buildings all constructed, it seemed, for nothing save the pleasure of our eyes.”
He’s most often found on his mother’s davenport. More than once he’s institutionalized, electroshocked. He fails as a teacher, he flunks selling aluminum siding. The girl with roan hair takes him for drives; they marry. He fails her, too.
This read I was amazed by his junkie-like behavior in search of alcohol. But I never quit him; even at bottom, Exley finds a kind of wisdom, and humor.
It’s worth reading “A Fan’s Notes” again, and again. It’s dense, episodic, hilarious, horrifying. It’s also beautifully written, in loops: you could start at its end and find the same rich story.
by anneMoore on October 5, 2009
My friend J.M. reads nonfiction only. When she makes this brash statement, I mourn for all the fiction she misses. Sure, some fiction I’ve read in the past year has been flawed, but most fiction takes me for a ride, makes me laugh and smile and think about other lives.
Nonfiction, I find, is more of a chore. There’s a stated thesis, and footnotes, and — let’s face it — an arid tone. I’ll keep reading typically because there’s something I want to learn.
Imagine my surprise, and delight, to stumble upon Anne Fadiman’s “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $15). It was one of those annoying suggestions that pop up when I’m ordering from Amazon.com. I’m glad I took the bait.
“The Spirit…” tells the story of a Hmong family that flees Laos for a refugee camp in Thailand, then emigrates to the U.S., settling in central California. The Lees believe that when one of their daughters slammed the front door of their apartment, the soul of their baby daughter, Lia, was snatched by evil spirits. Thereafter, Lia became severely epileptic.
Fadiman tells the story of the U.S. doctors who try to save Lia, as well as her family’s efforts to heal her through Hmong ritual. It’s a heartbreaking, maddening tale that stretches back to the Vietnam War. Hmong warriors helped the U.S.; as a reward, the U.S. promised protection. That’s how Lia’s family was able to emigrate.
I’m not anti-immigration, or an isolationist, but I winced more than once when the Lees sacrifice pigs to heal Lia. The pigs are paid for from the family’s welfare funds.
Is it wise for the U.S. to take in illiterate immigrants? Lia’s parents are unemployable; they’d been slash-and-burn farmers in Laos. Neither can recognize letters or numbers. When Lia is sent home from the hospital with medications, no one is sure she’s receiving them, or receiving the correct dose.
Fadiman is a warm and wise storyteller, and a fearless reporter. Through her work, I came to understand the rich Hmong culture, which persists in spite of diaspora. Too, I came to honor the U.S. doctors who cared for Lia. One of them reminds us, emphatically: “Western medicine saves lives.”
by anneMoore on September 28, 2009
The last warm, sun-filled Sunday in September and I was heading to the underground Harris Theater to see Baryshnikov dance. When I mentioned my indoor plans for the afternoon, my neighbor snickered. I worried, too: would the great male dancer embarrass himself?
Pas de tout.
I’d seen Baryshnikov dance many times, in the mid-to-late 1970s, in New York. Even then people said he was past his prime, but I remember his astonishing athleticism and grace. It was like watching Michael Jordan play basketball: these were the exemplars of their art, and it was my great good fortune to see them perform, live.
In the first piece, Baryshnikov stepped onto a black stage, dressed in white. He pulled on a deep blue sport coat, then fussed in an imaginary mirror. A recorded voice-over informed the audience that Baryshnikov’s character was preparing to see a woman he’d once loved; he no longer felt anything for her. Not sure the voice-over was needed, but it made the audience laugh.
And then Baryshnikov broke into dance. He didn’t soar, like he once had. But he moved so fluidly, with grace and skill, wit and humor. A master at his craft. If Fred Astaire had danced the ballet, this would be it. “Valse-Fantasie” is simple beauty: a black stage, lively music, a world-class dancer.
“Years Later” paired Baryshnikov with video images of him dancing as a young man, and sometime later, perhaps in his 40’s. (Baryshnikov is 61.) What a charming piece of dance! On stage, he catches sight of his younger self on screen. He dances with earlier versions of himself (!) and keeps up — until the youngest version of him, in grainy black and white, spins at warp speed. With Philip Glass’s Saxophones Nos. 10, 2, 13, 12. Daring, fun, and deeply satisfying.
Not so the two pieces that paired Baryshnikov with Ana Laguna, 54, the Spanish ballerina with whom he is touring.
Choreographed by Mats Ek, “Solo for Two” and “Place” were slapstick and herky-jerky; neither called for their great talents. In both, Laguna was sometimes squatting, seemingly rubbing her ass against the floor. My dog does that.
“Three Solos and a Duet” closed Sunday in Chicago. The dancers continue on to other U.S. venues. Don’t miss them — even for a sunny day.
by anneMoore on September 18, 2009
In Chicago, we savor every warm sunny day in September. Last gasps of summer happen all over the globe, of course, but in Chicago each day of warmth and sun is one we soak up and store within ourselves. We’re like Lionni’s Frederick, who uses those rays to soothe his fellow mice during the bleak, cold months of winter.
Chicago’s motto is “city in a garden” and in these last summer weekends we insist on the outdoors: eating meals or sharing cocktails in city gardens, sunning and reading on roof decks, swimming fast in open-air pools, biking or walking the lakefront.
Eight of us dined at Piccolo Sogno, 464 N. Halsted St., a newish restaurant in an old space that holds Chicago’s prettiest and most spacious garden, anchored by a huge Spanish sycamore. Strange how a place can be both achingly romantic, for a couple, and accommodating to a crowd.
Later we sat in a private garden, our friends’ good dog at my feet. Deborah pointed to a climbing vine with heart-shaped leaves. My young daughter and I had started that moon flower from seed in March, and I’d been giving the tiny sprouts as hostess gifts during the spring. There it was, grown as tall as their house. The next evening it bloomed, gleaming white against the dark.
I curled up in a comfy chair set to my garden’s one square of sunlight the next day, where I finished Henry Roth’s “Call it Sleep”. What a day; what a book. I’d chugged along for hundreds of pages, wondering how Roth’s simple tale would tie up. (It’s narrated by an overly-mothered boy whose father doubts his paternity). Wow. The climax is positively psychedelic; a cocktail of Whitman, Joyce, Ginsberg.
After another delicious dinner in a city garden — thanks Elaine and Dave! — I took our dog for his nightly walk. I passed an old home with a low-fenced yard open to the street. There, a group of friends sat at a red picnic table, lit by candles, enjoying dinner and a movie playing on an oversized screen. What a night; what a choice. “Stranger than Fiction”, a wonderfully told life and love story — set in Chicago.
by anneMoore on August 29, 2009
I recently finished an exasperating read: an unhappy couple can’t bring themselves to divorce. If they part during the spring, it will color every spring. If they tell her father…if they tell their son….
The book is “Some Prefer Nettles”, by Junichiro Tanizaki, Vintage International, $13.95, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker.
I loved it. The book brings an old world to life, the story is thoughtful and unpredictable. Best of all: it made me think.
Written and set in the late 1920’s, the story is a confessional: its author offered his wife to a friend, who accepted. He didn’t dislike her; she didn’t interest him sexually.
Or does she? When the story opens, husband Kaname catches the scent of his wife’s perfume, the care and attention she takes with her dress, the feeling of her hand against his neck as she helps him dress. He professes a steadfast belief in their “modern marriage”, but it bothers him that Misako sees her lover more often and for many days in a row.
As the story unfolds, it’s clear that no woman can fulfill him: Kaname is attracted — and repelled — by every woman. The prostitute he frequents is too modern, his father in-law’s young mistress is luscious but schooled in Old World arts and manners.
Kaname and his travels are the bulk of the story, but my heart went out to Misako. If her father finds out about her affair, he could disown her. When she leaves, she’ll lose her son. And if she waits too long to leave, her lover’s family could decide her unworthy of their son.
She is the property of men.
When her father learns of the affair, the couple finally act. They go to Kyoto to meet with him, even though Misako protests. After all, her fate is to be decided by her father and her husband. Once there, her father takes her to dinner; Kaname is left with the mistress.
The ending is so provocative, it took me several re-readings and days to figure it out. Too, it sent me to the translator’s notes. There he writes that Tanizaki is purposely vague. “Do not try to be too clear; leave gaps in the meaning.”
