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Sunday, November 23, 2014

Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver

Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver

Quite possible that this is the strongest collection of fluers du mal that I’ve ever made my way through. Is poison bon bons a better metaphor? How about “the longest collection of quiet, depressing little tales I’ve ever read?” Is that explicit enough? Did I mention that you’ll probably drink more than usual while you read this book? Maybe these are poisoned whiskey sours?

Carver is a modern American master. He captures the middle class and their dissolution and private dissatisfactions. The Great Generation and the Boomers are both well represented in this collection of nearly sixty short stories. They almost all acquit themselves poorly, having made a mess of themselves and the ones they tried to love. The collection is exclusively focused (myopic) on this narrow subset of citizens of the USA. They’re all white. They all live in the burbs. They are all between 18 and 60 in the year 1970, though the stories take place within two decades of that date.

These people have anger, complacency, petty wrongs, sexual frustrations, failed relationships, and alcoholism. Almost all of them.

Sound kinda grim and unpleasant? It is. Beware. If you read three of his stories and decide it isn’t your bag, that’s cool. They won’t get any nicer than those three. This book has thirty-six of them. Seven are new and were never previously published anywhere else.

Carver is a master. Make no mistake. His sense of the desperate, the unsaid, those things that people can’t speak out loud, even to themselves… is superb. His ear for dialog probably isn’t 100% pitch perfect, but if he misses many notes, I don’t hear most of them.

The final tale is a two part story dealing with the last days of Checkov’s life. For your Trivial Persuit needs, Checkov and wife and physician spent his last hour sipping Moet.

These are heavy stories. Where he’s calling from is a dry-out rehab center. It’s Christmas Day.

Japan by National Geographic Traveler

Japan by National Geographic Traveler

We’ve been looking for a better series of travel books since I gave up on The Lonely Planet as a publisher. National Geograpic does a stellar job of providing image rich local flavor and color, mostly skipping the dry catalog of things hotel and restaurant reviews which is better served by online sources. Instead, the folks at National Geo give us light history and lots of frank talk about what makes a place interesting. This was The Professor’s find, and I enjoyed it so much that we also picked up one on Vietnam to help us prepare for an upcoming trip.

Dead Broke in Jarrett Creek by Terry Shames

Dead Broke in Jarrett Creek by Terry Shames

The third installment of my aunt’s Texas based detective cozy is a good bit of fun. Former police chief, Samuel Craddock, gets reinstated to investigate a murder which is wrapped up in a shady land deal that left the town dead broke. There’s a little art, a little sleuthing, a little of that small town twang. Good fun!

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro

Read this tidy little collection of short stories on an overnight plane ride to Tokyo. Each deals with music and the ending of things. Only one of them sticks in my mind: a story about a plaza musician in Italy who is hired to take part in a sad parting of famous lovers- Hollywood has-beens- who use the young musician to invoke a song that reminds them of their good times.

Ishiguro is a superb writer, with a great sensitivity to the inability of humans to really connect with one another, or ever really get what they want. Each of these tales feels a bit like a sketch though. Readers new to his work should start with Never Let Me Go or The Remains of the Day.

A Man Without Breath by Phillip Kerr

A Man Without Breath by Phillip Kerr

In the Katyn Woods near Smolensk the Germans are awaiting a Russian counter attack. Things are not going well on the Eastern front. The siege of Stalingrad has just ended in disaster for Hitler. Nasty reports are starting to come to light about the activities of the Reich. Plots and schemes (which are the same thing) are being birthed right and left by the German nobility.

Bernard Gunthar is a man without hope. His wife is dead, his country in ruin, and Hitler is in power. He is recruited to head to Smolensk to help Goebbles to build a case against the Russian NKVD for the mass murder of a bunch of polish POWs in the hopes that this will sway international public opinion in German’s favor. Along the way he finds a lot of corpses, drinks a lot, quips a lot, kills a man, makes loves to a woman, and generally behaves like himself.

This one was written a good bit later than Berlin Noir and it shows. The language is occasionally anachronistic and the whole plot is rather contrived. Still though, this lives in the shadowy borderlands between historical fiction, noir detective drama, and spycraft. Good stuff if you like any of the three; popcorn even if you don’t.

The One From The Other by Phillip Kerr

The One From The Other by Phillip Kerr

Bernard Gunthar is back. The Russians and the Americans have divided up the former territory of the Reich. Jewish death squads from Haganah are hunting former Nazis, but there are many still in hiding and an underground railroad spiriting them away by way of the priesthood. There are villains aplenty here and Gunthar runs afoul of most of them.

Better for its setting and tone than its improbable plot, The One From the Other is still good gumshoe fiction. Gunthar meets dames, wisetalks authorities, trades punches and pistol shots with Nazi’s, CIA, thugs, and more!

The Things They Carried by Tim O’ Brien

The Things They Carried by Tim O’ Brien

Reread after a conversation w/ the esteemed CoggyCog. (Recently earned his 10 year merit badge!) The Professor and I are planning a trip to Vietnam later this year, and while I’m not interested in reducing the country to a shadow of a single war, there’s no doubt that as an American, the Vietnam War is an important part of how I think about the country. Moreover, I wanted to muse over what an anti-war war-game might be, and O’Brien’s work seemed a good place to start.

O’Brien’s lyrical collection of fables of the Vietnam war are as much a look at storytelling and how stories work as it is a war-novel. The book is sad and funny and poignant, and meta. It feels a little dated now, because twenty years ago when I first read it, this seemed like really cutting-edge narrative work. (Unreliable narrators, framework tales, etc. etc.) Maybe I was just new to the party, or maybe mainstream storytelling has stolen a bit of O’Brien’s thunder.

Still, this is a fine book, and probably one of the best pieces of fiction written about America’s misadventures in the jungles so long ago. We got ourselves a nice mellow war today…

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King

A living cliché of a retired ex-cop spends his days watching television and staring into the barrel of his service revolver. Then a snotty psychopath terrorist style killer decides to antagonize him and give him a reason to live. The old cop finds loves, does some detecting, and eventually uncovers the killer’s evil plot to… Well, you’ll have to read on to find out more, won’t you?

Pretty forgettable, this one.

I Wear the Black Hat by Chuck Klosterman

I Wear the Black Hat by Chuck Klosterman

I read this one for a second time in the Chana Hot Springs area of Alaska in an eighteen hour period waiting for the rain to subside. I still really enjoy Klosterman’s turn of phrase and cocktail-party parlor-tricks with pseudo-logical pop-culture legerdemain. His discussion of villains and why they matter is delightful and insightful, even upon a second reading. Big chunks of this book were read aloud to The Professor while we waited for a flooded stream that had swallowed our road to subside. I think she enjoyed it.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

Rosewater turns his back on his wealthy family and the guaranteed good life. Instead he drinks, lies around in a slovenly condition, and dispenses advice and little bits of money to his constituency, the local losers of Wherever, Middle America. This is more classic Vonnegut except… It just isn’t very good. The characters are less-than-compelling. The writing comes across as unstructured rant on well-mined turf. Vonnegut has already said all of this before, better elsewhere.

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut goes to a writers convention in middle America. Wait. Sorry, Kilgore Trout goes there. My bad. But Vonnegut’s there too, talking in your ear the whole time. He’s a charming drunk and cynic on a barstool.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Trafalgore, the cock of a Shetland pony, Billy Pilgrim, So it goes, po-te-weet. It’s all still here. It’s all still really powerful.

It’s funny to look back on the time-slicing and the filmstrip technique of bombers running backwards and realize how innovative this was at the time. In a post-David-Fincher and JJ Abraham’s world each of these bits of narrative trickery seem obvious, already done. But Vonnegut didn’t have a battery of post-effects editors and suites filled with gear. Nothing but a pencil, maybe an Underwood, and the power of the word.

Picked this one up to reread just one passage. Ended up reading the whole book. (It fit so nicely in a coat-pocket!) Ended up tearing through a whole stack of tiny little Vonnegut paperbacks in the next week, mostly on the road and crappy inns of the Alaskan Highlands.

Runaway by Alice Munro

Runaway by Alice Munro

Munro has a superb eye for detail and ears for hearing all the things people can’t say aloud. Runaway is every bit as good as Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Lovership, Marriage. Munroe tells us stories of the most intimate details of the tiny lives of the residents of Canada over the last seventy years.

One part Eudora Welty, one part Carver, one part Margaret Atwood, all masterfully rendered.

I am very eager to read the rest of her work. I expect to learn something quiet and important from every story.

Tenth of December by George Saunders

Tenth of December by George Saunders

Saunders writes strange, stylistically distinctive short stories about hopeless social situations in the modern age, or in near-future parody ages. A couple of these stories are quite powerful. Almost all of them are disturbing little bon mots of quiet desperation told with a lot of irony and black humor. Saunders remains fresh, distinctive, with a great eye and ear for the absurdity and hopelessness of Middle America.

Somewhere at the crossroads of Carver, Alice Munroe, Chuck Palahniuk, and Monty Python Saunders sits, grinning a slightly sad grin and spinning great little stories.

Wool by Hugh Howey

Wool by Hugh Howey

Interesting dystopian sci-fi with some predictable twists and turns. The world felt like an interesting sketch of life after the fall with a decent adventure tale and romance thrown in. Our heroine, mechanically inclined, independent, aloof goes on a harrowing adventure and loops back around to where she began. It’s all alright. The world is interesting, the action is capably rendered, but the characters (mostly) feel shallow and thin.

The book was recommended to me as an example of sci-fi that started on a writer’s forum website somewhere and became popular enough that Howey continued it, picked up a publishing contract, and now has a best seller. If so, and it is has first work, I’m eager to read his followup efforts.

IQ84 by Haruki Murakami

IQ84 by Haruki Murakami
What a rambling and strange novel by Japanese master Haruki Murakami. I don’t think I really liked it, but I did struggle through all 946 pages.

Two Japanese loners find themselves in the alternate reality of IQ84, a world where there are two moons in the sky. The title of the novel is a play on Orwell’s, 1984, sort of. But this doesn’t really carry through the plotting or analogy of the novel except in the most olblique ways. IQ84 has no tyrannical government, though there is a sinister cult, and some supernatural/metaphysical elements emerge eventually.

The novel is such a mighty tome that the translated English version cannot seem to quite hit a consistent tone. I suspect there was much linguistic byplay and punnery in the original Japanese, some of which seems like it is trying to peek through now and again. But I didn’t find myself delighted by the language very often. (Though there is a three page sequence describing getting kicked in the balls that I remember being impressed by.)

Overall, I may just not be smart enough to be down with Murakami. I know that he is spoken of with great reverence and has many disciples. But this is the second time now that I’ve really fought my way through a strange and seemingly endless book and been left just kinda scratching my chin and wondering what it all meant.

Berlin Noir Trio by Philip Kerr

Berlin Noir by Philip Kerr

Kerr’s trio, March Violets, The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem are so much more than noir detective fiction.

Bernie Gunther is a private detective, very much in the vein of Sam Spade, but his world is a lot more complicated. The Nazis are rising to power in Berlin. They are almost a joke for a bit; thugs no one quite takes seriously. Eventually they joke gets a lot less funny. People go missing. By the time the second world war is over a lot more people have gone missing. Berlin needs a hard drinking private dick with lady problems and a strong right cross more than ever. Sordid, historically fascinating, good language. Good stuff.

Of the two, March Violets and A German Requiem are the best. Cabaret era Berlin turns to a smoking ruin of rubble and crime over the course of these three novels. Quite a few people end up dead. And we get just a sense

This is excellent crime and detective fiction.

Six months...

Another six months without a post. Shameful! But hardly the first time, and likely won't be the last. Luckily, I've kept up notes on the books, read more than a few of them, written a few stories, spent some time making a couple of games, and done some delightful travelling with the Professor. Life remains good.

Now... quick thoughts on some of the books I read this year!

-tf