Friday Picture Reading

Image from the University of Wyoming

American Heritage Center

Remember, the Hop-a-long, Git-a-long Read-a-long Western Reading Challenge starts tomorrow.

Topology of a Phantom City by Alain Robbe-Grillet

Before I fall asleep, the city, again....

Opening to 

Topology of a Phantom City

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

translated from the French by 

J.A. Underwood

I love this book.

I'm not sure what it's about.

But I do  have five theories.

Theory #1:  A murder has taken place.  The narrator describes the crime scene like a detective who does not know which bit of evidence will prove relevant.  So the detective/narrator writes everything down without filtering his senses or his thoughts.  The result appears random the way notes often do.   The detective/narrator continues to record details moving outwards from the scene of the crime to the neighboring area, eventually throughout the entire city itself.

Nothing moves much.  What movement there is resembles the movement in a still photograph.  We can tell that this person was walking when the photograph was taken, though he is motionless in the photograph itself.  The novel becomes a series of crime scene photographs which we are  supposed to assemble to determine what happened.

Theory #2:  A group of young women, prisoners in the city jail, are playing with a deck of Tarot cards.  The narration moves from the real city into the phantom one depicted in the illustrations on the Tarot cards.  The subsequent  murders take place in an imagined world inside the imagined world of the novel.  Are the girls imagining the crimes--their own or ones they were the victims of--or is the narrator at work through them.  The crimes take on the mythic properties associated with Tarot cards.

Theory #3:  The murderer is a photographer.  He lures his victims to his studio where they pose for him, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups.  He reviews the photographs afterwards.  These become the book itself, a series of photographs presented to the reader by the killer/photographer/narrator who took them.  Like an artist would, the narrator shows us only what he wants us to see.  We must fill in the missing details, infer his true intentions, his motives, his character.

Theory #4:  There has been only one murder.  The variations presented to the reader are each ways to interpret the evidence the detective/narrator has gathered.  The crime could have happened this way, or this way, or this way.  The novel is an obsessive examination of the same event from many possible angles.  A search for truth that has no ending.  This is similar to the structure Mr. Robbe-Grillet's novel Jealousy which I reviewed here.

Theory #5:  The reader is the killer.  The detective presents us the still pictures of the novel which make little sense because our own psychology has become too disturbed to understand our own actions any longer.  We've no memory of committing any of the crimes depicted.  We've nothing left to help us make sense of our world except a series of images with no clear connection to each other.   How could we have done it if we don't remember it?  How can we make sense of the evidence the narrator shows us if he does nothing but wait for us to explain it all, to confess?

Of these five, I think theory #2 is least likely to hold up under cross examination.  I suspect theory #3 is closest to the author's intention.  But I'm starting to like theory #5 the most.

Whichever interpretation is right or best, the fact remains that Topology of a Phantom City is a mystery novel about interpretation. There is no solution.  Just evidence readers can use to come up with their own theories about what happened and about who done it.

I loved it.

TSS: A Visit to an Iris Farm, The Search for a Few Good Book Blogs, and Religion in our Time.

A Visit to an Iris Farm.

I intended to stay around the house this weekend to get some correcting done until I saw the Pleasants Valley Iris Farm open house listed on Facebook.   C.J. and I are not so much fans of irises as we are fans of show gardens.  On a trip to Canada several years ago we stumbled on a dahlia farm that had a stupendous show garden.  More varieties of dahlias than we knew existed, all of them in bloom, ranging from flowers the size of quarters to blooms bigger than a human head.

The irises we saw yesterday are not yet fully in bloom yet, I think we should have waited a week, but we still enjoyed them. We ordered three rhizomes which will come in the mail ready to plant sometime in late August. I expect we will have forgotten about them by then, so they will be a surprise.


The Search for a Few Good Book Blogs.

How often do you add new blogs to your blog roll?  It's been a while since I've added to my blog roll.  Last week I opened the whole thing up and found 12 that had not been updated in over two months.  So, I'm looking for a few good book blogs to replace those I retired.

If you know of a good book blog please leave a link in the comments below.  Feel free to leave a link to your own blog, too, if it's not in my current blog roll.  I feel like I could use a few new voices, new to me anyway.  I prefer book blogs that take me to unexpected, eclectic reading from all sorts of genres and perspectives.   Which is really just a high-fallootin' way of saying I'll read just about anything.


Religion in Our Time.

Religion can be a difficult topic in our household--one former Baptist now an atheist married to one devout Catholic who just can't support a church that calls his marriage a sin anymore.  Both of us are well versed in the Bible from childhood and both of us have strong opinions on religion.

And both of us got something out of  Andrew Sullivan's recent piece on A "Rigorous" Theology.  If you missed it, it's well worth a read.  Some highlights:

We cannot deny Darwin without also denying God, to put it provocatively, since God cannot be in contravention of Truth. And sincere Christianity is a faith, it seems to me, that can embrace the deepest truths about human existence and salvation as revealed by Jesus without also embracing every empirical nugget in the flawed, mis-copied, mis-written, second generation oral accounts of the life of Jesus, let alone the even older myths and stories the Jewish people told about themselves through the millennia.


...


Does a force exist that is behind everything we are and see and know? Is that force benign? Does that force love us? Was the only way that truth could be revealed was by God becoming man and sacrificing himself to show us the only way to save ourselves? Today, in the darkness of the Cross, I say yes to these questions, which go to depths that literal parsing of parables or Gospels misses entirely. Which is why Scorsese's version of the Passion is so much deeper and truer than Gibson's.


The article has already sparked several interesting discussion in our household.  

Friday Picture Reading - On the Beach

From a New York Times article

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

His eyes still shut, a dream

dissolving and already

impossible to recall.

Opening to

The Slap

by Christos Tsiolka

The Slap by Christos Tsiolka begins at an afternoon barbecue in suburban Australia.  Family, friends of family and their children gather together  with the usual blend of affection and affectation. Everyone gets along until three-year-old Hugo threatens another child with a cricket bat.  The threatened child's father, Harry, takes the bat away only to be kicked by Hugo whom he then slaps. Once.  The other children are relieved that an adult has finally disciplined Hugo who has been spoiling their fun all afternoon.  Some of the adults quietly agree while the rest are horrified at Harry's sudden violence.  The police are called. Charges are filed.  The repercussions of Harry's action are both long lasting and devastating.

And they make for a fascinating read that kept me up past my bedtime. 

Mr. Tsiolkas is interested in how his characters react to what Harry has done.  While the book moves forward in a traditional linear fashion, showing what happens to those at the party, the narrator shifts focus from one character to another when the chapters change.  We begin with Hector,  the barbecue's host, who does not really like either Hugo or Harry.  Hugo is the son of his wife's good friend Roxie.  Hector believes Hugo is spoiled, raised by parents who don't know what they're doing.  His mother is still breast feeding Hugo at age three.  Hugo's father, Gary, gets drunk every chance he can.  The slapper, Harry, is Hector's brother-in-law, tolerated because he is family but no more admirable than Gary.  Hector knows Harry should not have hit a child, but he also believes Roxie and Gary go too far when they press charges.

Already most readers will have taken a position of their own, sure that they are correct. ( Be honest, you have haven't you?)   How can the morality of such an action be anything but clear cut?

However, as the narrative shifts from character to character, the reader is forced to reconsider what happened at the barbecue.  Through the mixture of characters, Mr. Tsiolkas gives us many points of view, from that of first generation Greek immigrants, to native Australians both white and Aboriginal, from teenagers to grandfathers.  Of course everyone brings their own baggage to the table, including the reader.  Mr. Tsiolkas lets none of us off the hook easily.  Part of what makes The Slap such a compelling read is the way the reader is made uncomfortable.  You think you know enough to make a judgement, but wait, what about this?  Don't you need to consider what this character is like or what this other character has done in the past?   

POSSIBLE SPOILER FOLLOWS

The book ends with a second slap.  Again, an adult hits a child, but this time there is no grey area.  This time no one will file charges with the police; no repercussions will be felt.  The child slapped will learn his lesson and move on with his life.  No hard feelings.  This time everyone will be okay with the same act of violence that occurred in the opening scene.  In the end it's not the slap that upset everyone but the circumstances around it.  Who slapped whom and why matters much more than the act of violence.  What makes The Slap such compelling reading is not the position the author takes on the issue, in fact I doubt readers will be able to determine the author's view. What makes The Slap compelling is the way it forces readers to reexamine the position they took the moment the first slap occurred.

A First of its Kind Reading Challenge

On May first, a new reading challenge will begin, one the book blogosphere has never seen before anywhere, on any continent--the Hop-a-long, Git-a-long, Read-a-long Western Reading Challenge.

Often ridiculed by the uninitiated, the western genre has been abandoned by many modern readers as 'something my grandpa used to read.'  But maybe grandpa was on to something. Maybe it's time to give grandpa his due.  Maybe you should join in on the fun.

The Western Reading Challenge begins May 1 and runs for just one month.  The rules are simple: read a western.  You can read more than one if you like.  You can also join me in a read-a-long of Little Big Man by Thomas Berger.  Or, you can join Sandy of You've GOTTA Read This and me in a read-a-long of Outlaw by Warren Keifer.


So why not saddle-up and join in the fun.  How often do you get the chance to join in a challenge that has never been done anywhere ever before?*








*As far as I know. If someone out there has participated or run a western reading challenge prior to this, please let me know and please accept my apologies, pardner.

TSS: Spring Break Reading

This past week was spring break-- I intended to do so many things but ended up reading novels instead.  Isn't that always the case.  The stack of papers-- untouched; the vegetable bed--seed packets; the unfinished projects in my studio--unfinished;  even get my hair still needs cutting.   Instead of doing anything productive, I spent the week ensconced on the sofa reading  novels, and a biography.  I didn't even finish all of those.

C.J. and did take a brief trip up to Clear Lake where we stayed in a caboose.  The Featherbed Railroad Inn in Nice (pronounced like the sister of your nephew) just across from the lake is made up of 10 retired railroad cabooses that have been converted into bedrooms.  (If the plural of moose is moose, is the plural of caboose caboose?)  We stayed in the Wine Country themed room pictured in the lower right inset.  I did spent part of  the evening sitting in the cupola reading.  We're considering buying a vacation home near Clear Lake.  It's beautiful, cheap and the people are very friendly.    You never know.

I'll have full posts about the books I read this week up soon, but here are some teaser reviews.  I've read or am reading eight different books.  A few of them I have not finished yet, and one of them I gave up on just past the halfway mark.

The Slap by Chirstos Tsiolka:  I loved this book.  I'm posting my full review on Tuesday, so I won't say much about it here.  The Slap has been an award winner in it's home country of Australia, but has received mixed reviews on the book blogs.  I can see why.  It's not a comforting book.  The characters are often sexist and racist which is not something that's easy to deal with, especially when so many of them hit so close to home. But I couldn't put it down.  I stayed up way past my bedtime reading it then got back to it first thing the next morning.  It's going to be on my top ten favorite reads list of 2011, I'm almost sure of it.

For each of the past two years, I've read the biography of an artist.  Just one, but each time the book has been among my favorite reads of the year.  This year I bought the new biography of Modigliani.  I'm enjoying it so far, but it's more concerned with his life than with his art.  What  I liked about the other two books was the way each dove into how art was made and into analysis of it.  I'm hoping that will come along soon  in Modigliani.  Turns out what I like is not so much a biography as a critical biography.

I cannot justify or excuse Temple of the Winds by Terry Goodkind.  It's escapist fun, entertaining, but no literary merit at least in the first 100 pages.  You can tell by the cover all you need to know.  I bought it for the plane ride to New York last summer and never got around to it. What annoys me and surprises me about epic fantasy fiction is how much talking there is in it.  Does anyone read books like this for the conversation?  They talk and talk and talk for tens of pages at a time.  Me, I skim the dialogue in favor of the action.  I've a feeling everyone else does, too.  But it's the dialogue that gives books like this one their high page counts.

If anyone suggests that you read Ghost Town by Robert Coover punch them.  Hard.  I don't usually advocate violence, but there is so much gratuitous violence in this book, which is the one I didn't finish by the way, that people who say good things about it should be made to feel real pain.  So punch them.   I think this book is supposed to be a humorous, satirical deconstruction of the western genre.  A lone cowboy rides into town, ends up the  sheriff, has to face various bad guys, etc.  I suspect we're meant to think the town is  full of ghosts or something like that, because the violence is so overblown, dying men have time to make long speeches in spite of multiple bullet wounds, stabbings and dismemberments.  And they all talk in a very bad parody of movie western speech.  Whatever reaction I was supposed to have, I was disgusted at first and finally so bored that I gave up.  DO NOT READ THIS BOOK!  Instead, read Welcome to Hard Times by E.L. Doctorow.  It deals with the same themes and has lots of violence but actually deconstructs the western genre in a way that is literary, enlightening and enjoyable.

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones is my book club's current book.  I'm just about finished and loving it so far.  It got the same mixed reviews on book blogs that The Slap did, though not as angry as the reviews for The Slap were, which I don't understand at all.  I think Mister Pip is a charming story though the setting  is a wartime one.  I may have a different opinion by the time I finish it, but I think this one may also be a contender for my top ten favorite reads list this year.

 Some of my book club members suggested, jokingly, that we also read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens since it is the book the characters in Mister Pip are reading.  I thought why not; it's one of Mr. Dickens's shorter works?  Well, it's short for Dickens.....  I've not read it since graduate school and I've not read anything by Dickens in several years.  We'll see how it holds up.  This is my forth or fifth read.  I've lost count.

I picked up Doghead by Morten Ramsland at Mrs. Dalloway's Books in Oakland last month.  I bought it for the cover because I am just that shallow.  It's been sitting in a small stack waiting to join my TBR shelf after the TBR Dare ended.  Now that the dare is over, I can read it.  It's very funny so far.  It's a generational story about a family in Norway.  Grandpa survived the holocaust as a boy only to wreck havoc on his family decades later.  Until his death, his family believed he was a war-hero, but shortly before her own end, Grandma starts telling the truth.  He did survive a concentration camp but he was sent their after his arrest for illegal dealings on the black market which would have sent him to prison even in peacetime. Afterwards, he goes from town to town trying to make a living designing ships only to be repeatedly fired once he tries to introduce cubist ideas into his designs.  I love the notion of a cubist boat.

That's  it.  If you happen to visit the Clear Lake area, C.J. and I recommend Angelina's Bakery and Espresso in Lakeport, where they have delicious food and they still know how to put an impressive amount of real foam on your latte.  It's just a few doors down from Watershed Books.

Dakota's Favorites: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.

To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee has become a recognized popular classic, the sort of book both critics and audiences publicly gush over. I liked it but I'm not gushing over it.

I think everyone in America reads To Kill a Mockingbird before they're allowed out of high school-- I know I did. It has large international following and the movie is also a classic, so I'll be brief about the plot. The novel follows the lives of young Scout, her brother Jem and their friend Dill over the course of several years spent growing up in a small southern town in the 1930's under the guidance of Scout and Jem's father Atticus.

Throughout the first half of the novel the children have a series of adventures, some fanciful some serious. They learn a series of lessons through the example of Atticus who is without a doubt the best father, maybe the best parent, ever to be portrayed in literature maybe in any medium. I challenge you to find a better father anywhere. In fact, I could go so far as to say that you'll simply not find a better man.

He's so good that after a while I began to doubt him. Can anyone really be as wonderful as Atticus Finch? The narrator, Scout, is a devoted daughter who has not yet reached the age when she would begin to find fault in her parents. But, to her credit, Mr. Lee does us show Atticus's weak spots. He is not free of racism, nor sexism. (No man in 1930's America could be.) But you'll have to be a careful reader to spot these faults and basically merciless not to forgive them. This is Atticus Finch we're talking about after all.

Reading the book this time around, I found close links between To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn . Both novels are about white children dealing with black adults. In both novels this distancing is used to promote an anti-racism message and to make it safer to critique American society. At the time of their publication, both novels were set in the recent past, when things were much worse "than they are now." (One could argue a character by character match-up: Scout = Huck, Dill = Tom Sawyer, Mr. Ewell = Huck's father.) And both novels feature a strong dramatic shift about halfway through when they stop being a series of adventures and start to develop a traditional story line.

It is only once Atticus begins to defend Tom Robinson, a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman, that To Kill a Mockingbird begins to follow a clear plot arc. I am a sucker for courtroom drama, and the courtroom drama in Mockingbird is excellent. (It must have been the easiest part of the book to adapt for the screen.) An innocent family man wrongly accused, a stalwart defense attorney, unreliable witnesses for the prosecution, a curmudgeon judge with a short temper. It's great stuff.

But I'm not gushing. Not me. Okay, I find that I am, maybe a little. Which may just be an example of why To Kill a Mockingbird enjoys the success it does. It has the ability to win over readers  in spite of themselves. What won me over this time is finding how much I like the character of Atticus Finch, how much I want him to be real. He deserves his place in the pantheon of great American characters.

What do you think? Who is the best father figure you've encountered in fiction?


Dakota's favorites are reviews from the Ready When You Are, C.B. archive.

The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, translated from the Spanish by Annie McLean

On the morning of April 7, 1991, 

when my father telephoned to invite 

me to his apartment in Chapinero 

for the first time, there was such a

downpour in Bogota that the

streams of the Eastern Hills burst

their banks, and the water came 

pouring down, dragging branches 

and mud, blocking the sewers,

flooding the narrowest streets, 

lifting small cars with the force

of the current, and even killing 

an unwary taxi driver who 

somehow ended up trapped under

the chassis of his own vehicle.

Opening to The Informers by 

Juan Gabriel Vasquez

translated from the Spainsh by

Annie Mclean

One of the many reasons for reading literature in translation is the window it can provide onto experiences other than our own, sometimes experiences we never knew existed.  The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez provides a window on life among German nationals living in Columbia during the second world war.  Because of diplomatic pressure from the United States, the government of Columbia published a list of German nationals deemed security risks.  Many of these men were arrested and confined for the duration of the war.  After their release, they were not allowed to work in certain areas for several years.  Many lost their livelihoods, their homes, the families; some lost their lives.

In the chaos of the early days of the war, many German nationals were added to the list whether or not they were fascists, supporters of fascists, even Jewish.  In the hotel that served as a prison, it was not uncommon to find Jewish men and Nazi party members sitting poolside waiting for a friend or family member to arrange their freedom.

This event provides the background for Mr. Gabriel Vasquez's look at the nature of informing and its consequences.  Mr. Gabriel Vasquez is not really interested in the ins and outs of these arrests but in those who informed and what happened to them.  The novel's narrator, Gabriel Santoro, is a Columbian author of German descent.  His own father was not imprisoned during the second world war but many of his peers were.  After Gabriel Santoro published a book based on interviews with a family friend about her family's experience as German Jews living in Columbia during the war, his father refuses to speak with him for many years.  His father sees this act as a betrayal, a revelation of family secrets best kept quiet.  Why bring up the past?  No one is interested anymore.

In a sense the younger Santoro has informed against his father, though he does not know it yet.  Years later,  the two reconcile after the father suffers a near fatal heart attack only to die six months later in an automobile accident.  After his father's death, Gabriel finds out that he once informed against an innocent family friend.  While Gabriel's father survived the war unarrested, the family friend was unable to find a way off of the government's list and consequently lost everything.  In the end, he killed himself.

While there are several thriller like elements in The Informers, what makes it an interesting novel is this look at the nature of informing and its consequences.   Gabriel's father informs on a friend to escape prison.  Gabriel informs on a friend to publish a book.  Later, a television crew will inform on them both for a sensational story.  All three acts have complicated consequences, some generational.  In the end, the reader must ask himself just how much should have been kept quiet.  Are we really better off knowing?

Tristram Shandy by Lawerence Sterne, Book IV: A Really Big Nose, An Unfortunate Christening, and a Chapter about Chapters

Life is Faster than Art:  Laurence Sterne's novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy promised to be an all encompassing account of an English gentleman's life as well as his views on issues of the day.  But the narrator goes astray even before the story begins, running off on one tangent followed by another.  I'm just about halfway through the book and pleased to report that Tristram has, at last, been born.

In chapter 13 of book IV, Tristram confesses this central problem of his novel--he is now one year older than he was when he began writing it, and still has not finished covering the events and opinions of his first day on earth.

--was every day of my life to be as busy a day as this--And why not?--and the transactions and opinions of it to take up as much description--And for what reason should they be cut short? as at this rate I should just live 364 times faster than I should write--It must follow, an' please your worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to write--and consequently, the more your worships will have to read.

The more I write, the more I shall have to write and the more you shall have to read.

Stick that in your post modern pipe-not-a-pipe and smoke it!

A Chapter About Chapters:  If the narrator revealing that he cannot write fast enough to outpace his own life making it impossible for him to record everything he has set out to record isn't post modern enough for you, book four contains a chapter devoted to the nature and importance of chapters.  The narrator is in favor of them.  It should be noted that his own chapters  range from many pages to a single sentence.  Take, for instance book four, chapter five reprinted below in its entirety:

Is this a fit time, said my father to himself, to talk of Pensions and Grenadiers?

This is actually a very funny chapter, taken in context, but I would like to point out that if current copyright law applied to Tristram Shandy, thankfully it does not as the book has long been in the public domain, the above quote might  be in violation of it.  According to my understanding of current copyright law in the United States, it is permissible to quote source material in a review.  However publication of an entire chapter typically requires permission from the copyright holder.

Another chapter is devoted to a conversation between Tristram's father and his brother, Uncle Toby, which the two have while descending a staircase. The conversation is so intricately described that it must be broken up into a second chapter as soon as the two gentlemen reach the first landing.  The narrator seizes this opportunity to discuss the nature and importance of chapters, which he feels provide a needed break for the senses, a chance for the mind to briefly rest before continuing, in this case, down the staircase.

A Big Nose, The Wrong Name and Farewell for Now:  There's also a wonderful story within the story by the great Swerinbergus about a stranger with a nose so big that when he comes to town all of the female members of the local religious orders are unable to sleep so obsessed are they with touching the enormous proboscis to determine whether or not it is real.  (See previous post re: noses to discover why this is so funny.)   Book four concludes with the unfortunate mix-up at the christening wherein the narrator is named Tristram instead of Tistmegistus as his father wished.   I suppose the reasons why this is so terrible are self-evident so I need not explain them.

In the end, Tristram promises the reader that he will return in  twelve-months time with another volume in his story, should he survive the vile cough he is suffering from, but not before saying his farwell:

Was I left, like Sancho Pansa, to choose my kingdom, it should not be maritime--or a kingdom of blacks to make a penny of;--no, it should be a kingdom of hearty laughing subjects; And as the bilious and more saturnine passions, by creating disorders in the blood and humours, have as bad an influence, I see, upon the body politic as body natural--and as nothing but a habit of virture can fully govern those passions, and subject them to reason--I should add to my prayer--that God would give my subjects grace to be as wise as they are merry; and then should I be the happiest monarch, and they the happiest people under heaven.

Be wise and laugh.  Good advice.

Friday Picture Reading - Henry Louis Stephens

Henry Louis Stephens, Black Man Reading Newspaper by Candlelight
The newspaper headline reads "Presidential Proclamation, Slavery"
referring to the Emancipation Proclomation

Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil by Rafael Yglesias

This manuscript has been sealed

at the request of the author, 

Rafael Guillermo Neruda, M.D., 

until  fifty (50) years after his death.

Opening to 

Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

 by Rafael Yglesias

I have been fascinated with the work of psychologists and psychiatrists since the time in high school when I saw Robert Redford's film Ordinary People, which centers on a young man's visits to his psychiatrist, to my current fascination with HBO's In Treatment starring Gabriel Byrne as a troubled psychiatrist dealing with his patients, his failing marriage and his own crisis of faith in psychotherapy.  I suppose I should include the time I spent watchingg The Bob Newhart Show, too.   Sigmund Freud's talking cure makes for fascinating theatre, whether it works or not.

A psychiatrist who attempts to cure evil has lots to offer someone with an interest in the field, even a skeptical interest.  Make him the novel's narrator and you have Rafael Yglesias's,  Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil.  As the narrator and title character explains, in order to understand and evaluate what happens to patients in therapy we must understand the doctor treating them.  The first part of the novel looks at the significant events in Dr. Neruda's childhood.  The second looks at one of Dr. Neruda's patients who succeed in coming to grips with the world only to find his own so full of evil that he could not face living in it.  The final section describes Dr. Neruda's attempt to cure the evil mentioned in part two.

I enjoyed part one, thought part two fascinating, but found part three unconvincing.  Mr. Iglesias's novel is at its best when the focus is on the work of psychotherapy.  A novel about work is a rare thing these days, unless the work is somehow related to criminology.  That all three parts of Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil feature the work of psychotherapy make for a refreshing change.  In the first, young Rafael Neruda undergoes psychotherapy after a failed suicide attempt.  His doctor becomes his professional mentor after he enters a career as a psychotherapist in part two.  In the final part, Dr. Neruda puts his professional reputation on the line in an attempt to cure two people whom he classifies as evil.

Dr. Neruda treats patients with extreme problems, abused and severely traumatized children much like he was himself.  Their cases and their treatment are fascinating reading.  In part two Dr. Neruda  treats a more average patient, with what appear to be a run-of-the-mill set of neurosis as a favor to a friend and for the chance it offers him to take a break from his more serious work. These two sections of the novel worked for me, but the third section went astray as it went into uncharted territory.  When Dr. Neruda encounters two people who are comfortable in their success in spite of their clear sadistic characters, he concludes that they are evil and that he must cure them. While Mr. Yglesias portrays even this fantastic section of his novel with a convincing realism, I found it a hard pill to swallow.  But, two out of three ain't bad, as they say.

What Should I Read for the Hop-a-long, Git-a-long, Read-a-long Western Reading Challenge?

Next month Ready When You Are, C.B. will host the first ever Western Reading Challenge to be held on any book blog anywhere.  (As far as I know.)  The rules are simple: read a western.  If you like, you can join me in reading Thomas Berger's novel, Little Big Man, or you can read something else.

Very few book blogs feature westerns.  Some might argue that this is due to the fact that the large majority of book bloggers are women who do not read westerns.  Maybe so, but one reason I am  a fan of the genre is that my mother was.  I grew up watching not only Bonanza, Gun Smoke and The Big Valley every week, but also High Chaparral.  You have to be  dedicated fan of westerns to have watched High Chaparral.  My mother was a life long fan of John Wayne as well, so every time his oeuvre was featured on the movie of the week or Dialing for Dollars we were there in front of the television. (Unless it was  one of the movies he died in.  My mother would never watch a John Wayne movie if she knew he was going to die in it.)  So in her honor I've selected the month of May for the Western Reading Challenge because Mr. Wayne was born on May 26, 1907.

All this is my round-a-bout way of getting you to join in the Hop-a-long, Git-a-long, Read-a-long Western Reading Challenge.  You can find out more about it by following the link above or selecting the Western Reading Challenge button at the top of this page.

And if you're wondering what to read for it, I'd like to suggest Deadwood, by Pete Dexter.  My review of it below first ran here in May of 2009.



The boy shot Wild Bill's horse at dusk, while Bill was off in the bushes to relieve himself.

Deadwood by Pete Dexter was published the same year as Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove which won the Pulitzer Prize for 1986. The award could have just as easily gone to Deadwood as both books are very well written and both turn the western genre on its head in similar ways.

The American western has not been the clean-cut altruistic battle between good and evil that many people view it as for some time. Even John Wayne's movies moved into gray areas towards the end of his career. The Searchers, for example, seems like a simplistic story about how bad Indians are, but if you look closely enough, if you can get past the apparent racism in the movie, you'll find that Wayne's character, who hates the Indians the most, is the one that is no longer welcome in society. It's not the girl raised by Indians but Wayne who cannot return to white "civilization" in the end. Even a character as noble as Shane has to leave town because it's no place for an ex-gunfighter anymore. Taking the turn towards the amoral man-with-no-name stories Clint Eastwood's westerns just wasn't all that big of a leap. Westerns had long been on the way there.

What was new with books like Lonesome Dove and Deadwood was the way they took historical figures and events and presented them in a raw, unvarnished, style that bordered on revisionist history. I'm not well-versed enough in the genre to say with certainty, but I imagine both novels were heavily influenced by the new takes on the American West that historians were writing in the 1970's and 80's which presented history that focused on Native Americans, Mexicans, Chinese immigrants, freed slaves and women rather than on the on-going, unquestioned story of Manifest Destiny.

Pete Dexter's Deadwood differs from Lonesome Dove in that all of it's characters are based on historical people, even the very minor ones. Deadwood could almost pass as the sort of new-journalism Truman Capote was aiming for with In Cold Blood; it's just about a non-fiction novel as far as I can tell. It's also a novel with an ensemble cast, something not typically found in a western.

The setting is Deadwood, South Dakota during the early years of the town's existence. Deadwood began as an illegal settlement of miners who violated treaties with Native American tribes in order to prospect for gold in the Black Hills of the Dakota territory. The men who went there at first were all law-breakers just by being there so the overall lawlessness of the place should come as no surprise. The women of Deadwood, at least at first, were largely made up of prostitutes, portrayed in Deadwood as essentially slaves owned body-and-soul by the men who ran the brothels. This is not the Dakota territory of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

The characters in Deadwood include Wild Bill Hickock, Calamity Jane Cannary, Sheriff Seth Bullock, and Charley Utter who functions as the linchpin that the rest together. Utter, a truly decent man, has followed Hickock to Deadwood which has just passed its initial glory days as a mining boom town. Hickock is dying, probably from Syphilis, but his presence will haunt the story and the town long after he has been gunned down. The other characters and their stories circle around Utter who is the one character to continue throughout the entire novel in part because he is one of the historical figures to remain in the area until the end of his life and he seems to have known just about everyone at least in passing.

If books like Deadwood and Lonesome Dove can be said to have moved the western genre forward then the HBO television series Deadwood can be seen has having moved westerns back a bit. (The two appear to be unconnected; there is no credit to Mr. Dexter on the official HBO Deadwood website which I find a bit hard to believe.) The novel is focused on the character of Charley Utter who serves as a moral compass for everyone else, albeit perhaps a damaged one, but Mr. Utter plays a much more secondary role in the series. The television series, instead, sets up an on-going rivalry between Sheriff Seth Bullock, who is morally upright, and Al Swearengen who ends up being a brothel owner with a heart of gold. By the final episodes of the television series the audience is rooting for Swearengen even while his actions remain repulsive. This is not possible in the novel. The Seth Bullock of the novel is not entirely likable the way he is in the series, and Al Swearengen is completely despicable. The Chinese immigrants who lived in Deadwood play a serious part in the novel, several of them are featured characters, but they are basically reduced to a single role throughout most of the series. This seems like a great oversight on the part of the series in my view since the experience of Chinese immigrants in the American West is not one many Americans know well. It strikes me that it could have been a very rich source for possible story lines. According to Wikipedia the owners of the most prosperous brothels in Deadwood were women whom neither the novel nor the television series feature.

In both, characters move in and out of the story, just as real people moved in and out of Deadwood, South Dakota. Some are more compelling than others and the resulting novel, like the television series, has a plot like a soap opera--events build to a climax and then keep on going to another climax next week instead of building for a big climactic finish. Things don't really end, except in death, people just move along. Maybe, in the end, that is the story of the American West.

Hint Fiction edited by Robert Swartwood

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Short story attributed to 

Ernest Hemingway.

Ernest Hemingway has long been credited with writing the shortest story ever, six words--For sale: baby shoes, never worn.  Six words that suggest an entire family drama, one probably, but not necessarily, grief filled.  Since the reader has no way of knowing what happened, the story can be interpreted any number of ways.  It's almost a Rorshach test; the details demand filling in, but doing so reveals more about the reader than about the author.

Do you think the baby died at birth?  Or did the parents buy shoes with frilly lace expecting a baby girl only to find that grandma's predictions are not all their cracked up to be when their first son was born?  Both interpretations are equally valid.  Maybe the family struck it rich, left their crummy apartment in a hurry and just forgot about the shoes leaving them to be found by the next occupants.

This is what makes Hint Fiction, edited by Robert Swartwood, so much fun.  Mr. Swartwood solicited contributions from both amateur and published authors and assembled the best in his small volume of very short stories, each less than 25 words. He calls these stories hint fiction because at such a short length  each story can only provide hints at what is really going on.

Take, for instance, Ideal by Ha Jin:

The boy dreams of becoming a panda who makes money by meeting visitors.  For such a pampered celebrity, even a girlfriend is provided.

Or Chance Meeting at the Insurance Office by Adam-Troy Castro:

He had a fat neck, predatorial eyes, and a smirk of cruel recognition.  "Yes," I said, without any pleasure. " I do remember you from high school."


There is clearly much more that could have been said, more story to tell, just as there so often is with a full length short story.  If a novel is an entire chocolate cake, and a short story is a slice, the stories in Hint Fiction are a fork sized tastes of someone else's cake, a bite shared or stolen from the plate of another.   Part of what makes them good is the paradoxical pleasure that comes from wanting more which can only exists in the absence of getting it.   


However, while I may have wanted more from individual entries, I did not want more from Hint Fiction. Overall, the stories are a humorless bunch.  It may be a shortcoming of the form itself, but there is little to laugh about in Hint Fiction. While a few of the entries could be called light hearted or darkly humorous, most of them are simply dark.  Mr. Swartwood's anthology needs stories from someone like P.G. Wodehouse or Jean Shepard, masters of the comic short story.  The stories in Hint Fiction are rich chocolate cake, but take too many bite size pieces a rich dark chocolate and you'll regret it later.  

TSS: Dressed for Reading

One week to go until spring break and I can't wait.  Meantime, I have to start getting my classroom cleaned up for open house which is this Wednesday.  We should have an interesting open house this year since I'm sure every parent's number one question will be where am I teaching next year year.  My school is closing at the end of this year, so I'll be sent to one of the other two middle schools in my district.  I still have no idea which one it will be.  Not entirely true, I have a pretty good idea which one it will be, but I've not heard anything official from the district yet and don't expect to anytime soon.

I am however confident that come the end of August, I will be in a classroom full of 28 to 34 12-year-olds like I have been every August for the past 20 years.  In 2014 I will have been a teacher twice as long as my students will have been alive.  Man, I'm old.

Meanwhile, this has nothing to do with anything, but still, it's a ball gown made entirely from children's Golden Books.

The designer has a full post detailing how it was made at ryannovaline.  It's well worth taking a look at.  

Did You Dare?

The TBR Dare officially ends today.

No foolin'.

How did you do?

I'm pleased to say that I managed to stick with it.  I did feel some extra pressure since the whole thing was my idea in the first place.  Otherwise, I probably would have strayed earlier this month.  I'll confess that I did not stopped buying books, I've just kept them in a separate pile until today.

My TBR shelf is notably emptier.  I measured it this morning I found I've read 23 inches worth of books.  Just shy of two feet.  I also measured the pile of new books waiting to go on the TBR shelf--18 inches.  That's a net reduction of 5 inches which means that if I repeat this activity yearly my TBR shelf will be empty around the year 2051.  I'll be 87 years old.   Should I live to be 87 and I'm still reading, that will be fine with me.

Meantime, I'm off to the bookstore.