Tag Archives: 3 star

Review: A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers

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21

Book: A Hologram for the King

Author: Dave Eggers

Published: June 2012 by McSweeney’s, 328 pages

Date Read: March 2013

First Lines: ”Alan Clay woke up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It was May 30, 2010. He had spent two days on planes to get there.”

Genre/Rating: Literary fiction; 3.75/5 bottles of moonshine, drunk alone in furtive gulps long after midnight, that make you think performing surgery on yourself is a very good idea

Review: I met Dave Eggers once.

It is true! He gave a reading at one of our local colleges, and after the reading, he did a book signing. He was very polite and very kind, even though he was there forever signing books and the line was very long. He wrote something like “your beautiful smile lit up the room” in my friend’s book, and that made her so happy she beamed like the sun. I loved that about him.

I know a lot of people think Dave Eggers is a hipster god. I think he’s fine. I like him just fine, but I like a lot of authors. I think he does a lot of good work and I like McSweeney’s a great deal and know he founded it. He works a lot with disadvantaged youth. He seems like a good guy. I think I’ve only read one of his books – A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – and have had The Wild Things on my to-read shelf for ages, but haven’t read it yet. I like him just fine.

Not surprisingly, I liked this book…just fine. A tiny little bit more than just fine, I guess. Just a bit under liked-it-a-lot.

Alan Clay is a consultant for an IT firm. He’s had a string of failures – his marriage, his various businesses, his relationship with his father. He thinks he’s dying of cancer. He can’t afford to pay his daughter’s tuition for her next year of college. He arrives in Saudi Arabia with his young, dynamic team of fellow consultants to present technology to the king. If this works, he will have enough money to do what he wants, send his daughter to college, take his house off the market. But in Saudi Arabia, things don’t run as Alan plans. The timeline seems to be much slower than he expects. There is no sense of urgency. Everyone is waiting for the king – but the king, much like Godot, never seems to arrive. And Alan seems to be looking at yet another failure in a long line of failures.

As a rule, I like books like this – a man pushed to the limit, at the end of his rope, a man who has to make a change or end up a casualty of life. I like them because I like to see what actions the character takes to get themselves out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves. I like to see the activity. What I didn’t like about this is there was very little activity. Which is, I suppose, more realistic – life, at times, seems to be all about inactivity – but I don’t know that I want to read about inactivity.

Alan didn’t do much. He was given opportunities to grab life by the balls and didn’t even make a snatch at it. He just let things pass him by. He seemed beaten, weary, depressed, down. And I know, this is realism. I know that. But I wanted him to fight. I wanted him to say, no, not today, I’m going to win this. And every time I thought he might – nope. Same old nothing.

That being said, the writing was beautiful. Eggers’ prose is haunting and spare and evocative. I love his words. I liked the characters, and I did appreciate the realism (even if I was wishing for a little more optimism in there.) I liked reading about Saudi Arabia – I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything about that area before.

Overall, not a book I’d unequivocably recommend, but not a book I’d steer people away from, either. It was good read, a solid one, and not a waste of time. And Dave Eggers, thank you for being so kind at the book signing. I will always remember that. We waited a very long time in line and you could have been an asshat, but you totally grinned like we were the only ones in the room.

Mine says "Do not turn away from the light!" This is a signed copy of Giraffes? Giraffes!" which he didn't write, but it's a McSweeney's book, so he signed it anyway. Also, read it, because it will make you laugh so hard you have a coughing fit.

Mine says “Do not turn away from the light!” This is a signed copy of “Giraffes? Giraffes!” which he didn’t write, but it’s a McSweeney’s book, so he signed it anyway. Also, read it, because it will make you laugh so hard you have a coughing fit.

Review: A Million Heavens by John Brandon

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17

Book: A Million Heavens

Author: John Brandon

Published: July 2012 by McSweeney’s, 272 pages

First Line: ”The nighttime clouds were slipping across the sky as if summoned.”

Genre/Rating: Literary fiction; 3/5 songs, written by the man you loved who died, filling your mind until you can think of nothing else

Review: I am an unabashed John Brandon fan.

His Citrus County was one of my favorite books of last year, and I’m still looking to get my hands on his Arkansas (my library isn’t the best at stocking indie-published novels, and the price tag is still a little steep for my Kindle, but I’m going to break down one of these days. I’m a terrible impulse-buyer when it comes to the Kindle.)

(Also, can we just marvel over this cover? Gorgeous. McSweeney’s really excels at cover art.)

I was so looking forward to A Million Heavens, and after a few initial disappointing chapters, I thought, “it will get better. It just has to hit its stride.”

Unfortunately, it never really did.

Set in New Mexico, it follows, in small, somewhat strange chapters, the events that happen to various townsfolk over a bleak winter. A young prodigy lies in a coma while his father sits by his bedside, helpless. People sit outside in vigil, for various reasons. A woman on the run from her life attempts a new start with a man with a checkered past. A lost young musician mourns the death of the man she loved, which is proving to also be the death of her muse. The mayor of the town tries to find himself through his love for a woman who is possibly off-limits. And a wolf travels through the town, trying in vain to retain his wildness in a town that’s becoming increasingly industrialized and filled with the mystery of humans.

The problem I had was that I cared about very few of the stories/characters. I found myself waiting, somewhat impatiently, for the chapters involving Cecelia, the musician, and her departed love, Reggie (who actually gets a voice and a storyline from the beyond.) They were the two characters who seemed the most fleshed-out, whose fates and outcomes I actually cared about. The rest of them, although not poorly written (Brandon couldn’t write clunky prose if he tried; the man writes beautifully) were…somewhat cardboard. Uninteresting. I was not invested in their stories, in their fates. I was reading to see what happened to Cecelia; if she would redeem herself, if she would find what she was looking for under the New Mexico stars, in the damage she found herself drawn to cause. I was reading to see if Reggie would be able to finally communicate his love for her from beyond, because he’d missed his chance when he was on earth.

I’m not flat-out panning the book. Brandon’s prose is leaps and bounds better than most people’s I read, and I will continue to read his work, and eagerly await what he publishes next. But after the wonder and mystery and magic of Citrus County, I found myself disappointed by this one. I know he’s capable of more and of better. I appreciate that he was trying something different and outside the box, and I like that he’s attempting to evolve; I just don’t think this book worked on all levels.

Review: Fakes Anthology, edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer

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8

fakes

Book: Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts

Editors: David Shields and Matthew Vollmer

Published: October 2012 by W.W. Norton, 368 pages

First line: “Disclaimer: nothing in this story is true.”

Rating: 3.75/5 fonts not used in this edition overall, but with some 5/5 apology poems from William Carlos Williams pieces in the book

(cracks knuckles) Well, I think I remember how to do this review thing, so let’s dive in, shall we?

This anthology caught my eye because of a review I read in the LARB (and by “read,” I mostly mean skimmed). The concept of the book revolves around the “fraudulent artifacts” in the title; it reminds me of a cross among blogs like Letters of Note, which contains real artifacts giving us fascinating peeks at people and situations via correspondence, pieces from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and fake Amazon reviews, the writing of which has become an art form unto itself. (The reviews for Looking For … the Best by David Hasselhoff kept me entertained for literally hours. Also, the three wolf moon shirt.)

The “artifacts” in the anthology range from an irate letter from William Carlos Williams’ “roommate” (“Will, you are a dick. You’re goddamn right I was saving those plums for breakfast”), to an essay from Lorrie Moore on how to become a writer (“First, try to be something, anything, else”), to reviews of Chris Bachelder’s beard, to a series of police reports that unfold a more personal story. Many of the stories have elements of humor, which is to be expected, given the playfulness of the idea of a false artifact; some of the stories also deeply move the reader. My breath caught more than once.

The anthology goes deeply enough into its concept that many of the usual bits of an anthology (acknowledgements, fonts used in this edition, the index, end notes, etc.) were also fakes. Some of these were good, others I found to be a bit tedious. I also had the feeling that the book was actually two separate books, if that makes any sense; continuing the fakes was a neat idea, but it also gave me the feeling that I was in a theatre still watching a play after all of the house lights had come up and people were starting to leave.

A couple of other things that I didn’t love about the volume. One was the introduction, which goes into the whole process of writing a fraudulent artifact (I like reading introductions… but not this one, I found it dry and I didn’t want to peek behind that curtain). The second thing, and perhaps this is just me, is that I felt a few of the pieces were far too long, considering they were written as concept pieces. One early piece, “From Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to my Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood” (yeah, you can already see in the title, it’s a bit wordy), had me a tad frustrated–because I liked the piece, but when you’re reading a piece in an affected style, it can be mentally taxing if it’s overlong.

But hey, that’s one of the good things about anthologies–if a piece doesn’t suit your fancy, skip it.

I definitely recommend picking up this anthology, especially if you’re the kind of person who reads any of those sites I linked above. While I did have a few issues with it, I know that I will dip into it again and again to read the many pieces that I did like, because they were outstanding.

Review: The Light of Amsterdam by David Park

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3

The Light of AmsterdamBook: The Light of Amsterdam

Author: David Park

Published: November 13, 2012 by Bloomsbury

First lines: “The ink was black, the paper the same shade of blue as a bird’s egg he had found a week before.  In their balanced elegance the capital G and B mirrored each other. Unlike most of the soccer signatures he collected which were largely indecipherable hieroglyphics–the bored scribbles of fleeing stars–this name was readable and perfectly formed.”

Rating:  Not bad.

(Electronic galley provided by Bloomsbury)

Reading The Light of Amsterdam was like reading a good painting. It was really beautiful if not very exciting.

The story follows three different characters from Northern Ireland who all travel to Amsterdam for their own reasons: Alan, a divorced college professor who gets stuck taking his skulking teenage son with him to a Bob Dylan concert; Karen, a working-class single mother who is attending her daughter’s hen party (for the American readers, that’s the UK equivalent of a bachelorette party); and Marion, an older woman who goes on holiday with her husband.  The characters all have their own past events, regrets, and scars, and each of their traveling companions is someone with whom they have lost touch.  The characters are all interesting in that they are realistic, and it’s easy to find yourself in them.  None of them are particularly heroic, but they do all grow and change.

One of my favorite things about this book was the descriptive writing style and the use of imagery.  The motif of lights popped up constantly, but the descriptions were effective and they never got old or repetitive for me; it always seemed appropriate.  Here’s a passage that I particularly liked:

She passed lots of groups, mostly of young women with their cigarettes held aloft like fire-flies in the night and shiny mobile phones pressed to their ears.  There was the chattering clatter of their heels and despite the cold their primped bodies on show with their excited voices breaking against each other before shattering into laughter again and again.

There’s a rhythm and a poetry to the words, and the images are gorgeous.

That being said, there was one thing about the writing style that annoyed me.  The point of view jumped between the three characters with little or no transition, and I found it disorienting.  Galleys often lose some of the formatting that appears in commercial e-books, so perhaps some of the space breaks were omitted.  Still, even if there had been space breaks, the author seldom used the characters’ names, instead just referring to them as “he” or “she” from the time they entered the scene, and the only way I even knew the characters’ names was from the rare instances when other characters used them.

I think some readers would complain about the lack of action or happy endings that our culture prefers, but I liked it for what it was.  There were no life-and-death struggles or thrilling high notes, but those wouldn’t have suited the kind of story that was being told.  As I mentioned above, the characters were normal people undergoing their own melancholy self-discoveries and learning how to communicate with the people in their lives in an unfamiliar setting.  If there was a theme, it’s that life never quite works out the way you expect it to.

With the name of the setting in the title, I would have expected it to almost be like another character, but it mainly served as an opportunity for the characters to escape from their normal lives and take a look at themselves from a different perspective.  They went to bars, restaurants, and coffee shops, and they found their way into the Rijksmuseum and the red light district, too.  But the main focus was on the characters rather than the setting.

Overall, The Light of Amsterdam was not a bad read.  If you’re looking for something fast-paced that will keep you on the edge of your seat, this probably isn’t for you.  However, if you enjoy good poetic writing that reflects the bittersweet beauty of real life, then you’ll probably want to check this out.

Buy the book: (Powell’s or Amazon)

Review: The Angry Buddhist by Seth Greenland

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5

Book: The Angry Buddhist

Author: Seth Greenland

Published: April 2012 by Europa Editions, 395 pages

First line: “Everyone knows that when a certain kind of single American female on a Mexican holiday drinks too much tequila she will get a tattoo.”

Rating: 3.25/5 charismatic opponents who might be a little too Sarah Palin-esque

(review copy provided by Europa Editions)

The Angry Buddhist was the first book I ever read from Europa Editions, and I have to say, it may not have been the best first choice for me. EE specializes in both literary fiction and high-end mystery and noir; I was expecting The Angry Buddhist to be a little more literary and a little less noir, which is probably my fault for having unrealistic expectations.

As a genre novel, it’s perfectly all right. I wouldn’t quite put it up there with Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard, but it’s in the same school of novel: a tight, complex story with a large cast of characters and many linchpins that could, at any moment, undo a delicate balancing act and bring trouble crashing down. The novel centers around the Duke brothers: a policeman, a politician, and a criminal, all of whom have gotten sucked into Randall Duke’s congressional re-election campaign against a wily opponent named Mary Swain. Swain has proven that she’s an unexpected force to be reckoned with, considering her friends in high places and her legs that seem to go on forever; Randall’s already running a tough campaign, and things become even more complicated when blackmailing and body counts arise.

Real live politics clearly influenced The Angry Buddhist. Swain is a stand-in for Sarah Palin in many ways, campaigning with loads of good looks and a “folksy” demeanor, but without much professional experience to back herself up. Randall’s campaign manager, Maxon, seems to be a smaller-time Karl Rove-type character, a man who will do anything to win even if it’s not legal or moral. The book delves into the messier side of politics, cranking up the intrigue and scandal factor considerably higher than we see on the news. It read a bit like a caricature for me, though–or maybe I was just sick of dirty politics in general, I don’t know.

I also had a really hard time giving a damn about most of the characters, to be honest. A lot of the book hinges on Randall’s campaign. I didn’t like Randall or his wife, so I didn’t really care if they crashed and burned or not. (I did like the daughter quite a bit.) The hero of the story is Randall’s brother Jimmy, who does his job perfectly well, but with whom I never really connect well enough to care about the stakes against him. The plot was intriguing and I read through it quickly to find out what happened, but it’s not a story that lingered or stuck with me. Political-mystery joyride with flashes of literary writing here and there.

There’s a blurb on the front from Larry David (part of what prompted me to read this in the first place) and I’m seeing around the internet that The Angry Buddhist is being developed for Showtime. I think it will do far better in the television medium–not that the book was bad, but it just seemed to be missing something. A book better read as a palate cleanser, for me. If you’re a politics geek and you want to read something a little less heavy, but that’s still well-written, this is definitely a book to consider.

 

Hot Off the Press! New Fiction Review: The Law of Strings by Steven Gillis

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6

Book: The Law of Strings 

Author: Steven Gillis

Published: August 28, 2012 by Atticus Books, 180 pages

First Line: ”They gathered us all together, those of us who’d been here a while and those new to the game, and told us to go have a look.”

Genre/Rating: Short stories; 3.5/5 girls who wake up one morning with bones hundreds of times denser than lead

(Copy provided by Atticus Books)

Review: The press release we were sent for this book compared it to Aimee Bender (if you haven’t read her short story collection Willful Creatures, please treat yourself; it is a delight) and promised “surrealistic twists.” I was sold. I’m often an easy touch for such things. (This also holds true for movie trailers. Even though I KNOW the trailer makes a movie look amazing that often won’t be, I’m always sold on almost every single movie once I see a trailer. I’d be an easy mark if I were to ever enter a county fair, I’m afraid.)

I started the book and wasn’t impressed, and was sad about that – the author co-founded Dzanc Books and 826michigan, and has written numerous other books. I worked my way through the first story and despaired I’d be reading the rest of them. It was very physics-heavy and very esoteric, and I know next-to-nothing about the former and care very little for the latter in my fiction.

The second story was better. And they just kept getting better from there. Which raises the question – why would you begin a collection with a story that doesn’t grab your reader by the throat and refuse to let them go? I know enough from reading to know you need to hook your reader early on or you stand a good chance, in this fast-paced world where there are a million other things clamoring for our attention, of losing them to the next shiny thing. I also work in theater, and know theater is the same way. If a play starts slow and remains there long enough, your audience is daydreaming and have mentally tuned out. We need a hook. It’s just a little perplexing why the story that was chosen (“What We Wonder When Not Sure,” the title really was the best part of the story, unfortunately) to be the first impression made when reading this collection.

That being said, the rest of the collection was good, bordering on excellent. Beautiful, slightly strange, surreal little stories, most of which have some physics component, which seems to be the theme of the collection and ties in with the title, of course (it only got intrusive and obnoxious once in a while, and that might be because I have a mental block stemming from high school when it comes to physics). Some so poetic it makes your teeth hurt to read them, they’re so sweetly perfect.

The best: “As Dudee Fell” (a bittersweet, tragic friendship and romance), “The Things We Cling To When Holding On” (a beautiful piece of magic realism where one morning, a boy wakes up able to levitate and a girl wakes up unimaginably heavy) and “Hurbestone the Magnificent” (a magician, reeling from a loss, allows a new protégée into his life). Other than a couple of misses, the rest of the stories are solidly wonderful. There’s a lot of magic in this book, a lot of wonder. I’m planning on looking for other work by the author – I like his style, and I’d like to see what else he’s capable of when not tied down by the constriction of “physics” that the book prescribes. (It’s a fine idea, and I don’t mind that the book has a running theme, I’d just like to see what else he can do, especially since physics isn’t my thing.)

Lovely collection, overall. I’d be interested in seeing what others think of it.

Should you read this? A review of The Absolutist by John Boyne

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Book: The Absolutist

Author: John Boyne

Published: July 10, 2012 by Other Press; 320 pages

First Line: “Seated opposite me in the railway carriage, the elderly lady in the fox-fur shawl was recalling some of the murders she’d committed over the years.”

Genre/rating: Literary fiction; 3.25/5 letters written home that turn you into a ghost

(e-galley provided by Other Press)

Oh, The Absolutist–as much as I wanted to love it, I came away from this book with a feeling of “meh.” The whole book wasn’t “meh,” though, and that’s what I found interesting (and frustrating) about it. The very beginning sucked me in, then lost me, then sucked me back in. I liked the writing. The characters intrigued me and I thought they were well-written. (One character in particular fascinated me–he went from a character I loved to a character I loved to hate.) The opening scene shows us Tristan Sadler, our protagonist, embarrassing himself in front of an Important Novelist on a train. I like a protagonist who has weaknesses to sink my teeth into. I was set to enjoy this book.

As I read, though, little things perturbed me. Boyne presents the story as a bit of a mystery, meting out revelation slowly (perhaps not slowly enough); we find out early on, for example, that Tristan’s father disowned him, but we’re not told why. The main problem I had was that Tristan has a habit of “noticing” and suddenly “remembering” things to draw your attention to them. If you’ve read my previous reviews, you already know my grief with this; having the narrator point out bits to the reader as foreshadowing, calling them “suspicious” or telling the reader that the narrator “might have/should have thought more” of an event or a person puts a big neon arrow in the story: “LOOK! LOOK AT THIS! SOMETHING IS HAPPENING HERE! Don’t miss it!” I don’t like having things pointed out to me; I’m smart enough to figure things out without a guide, but more, I don’t want to figure them out. I want just enough of a taste that I realize after the fact that I’ve been set up, but not nearly enough that I know I’m being set up as it happens.

Boyne scattered huge breadcrumbs–slices, really, maybe loaves–throughout the story, so that by the time I got to what could have/should have/would have been a shocking ending, I’d already figured it all out. Sigh. I don’t know, guys–I feel like this is a major complaint lately in my reading world. Am I just super smart at figuring things out or have modern literary writers fallen a little short when it comes to delicately unfolding the plot? Am I being overly picky? I can’t tell.

I can’t say that I don’t recommend this book, though. I enjoyed reading it. You’ll probably enjoy reading it, with the caveat that  . . . it falls a bit short of what it tries to do. The characters’ stories are strong enough to somewhat redeem the obviousness of the foreshadowing. I wasn’t wild about the ending–I didn’t really believe it, and I thought that Boyne set it up a bit too obviously–but the ending wasn’t devastating to the book by any means. Despite my reservations, I still turned–ahem, clicked, I suppose–the pages as fast as I could to get there, and that must account for something. Plus, other people that I know and trust thought it was brilliant (specifically, Heather from Between the Covers and Jenn from The Picky Girl), so I might just be way off the mark.

What about you guys? Did you read The Absolutist? What did you think? Leave a comment or three below!

Review: Vandal Love by Deni Y. Béchard

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5

Book: Vandal Love 

Author: Deni Y. Béchard

Published: January 2006 by Milkweed Editions, 352 pages

First Line: ”Even when Jude was a boy, his arms and legs bulged, his neck corded, his muscled gut humped beneath his chest.”

Genre/Rating: Short stories; 3/5 babies born cradling their twin sisters to protect them from the dangers of the world

(Copy provided by the publisher)

Review: The press release for this book piqued my interest – it hinted at children born with genetic aberrations, a sweeping, multi-generational saga, some magic, some mystery. All things that I love. I was eager to dig in and find out what was going on in the Hervé family.

The press release didn’t lie – all of what was promised was there – but it just seemed flat, unfortunately. And isn’t that the worst? When there’s an amazing book there, and you can see it, but it just wasn’t brought to life as fully as it could have been?

The children of the Hervé family are born either giants or runts – sometimes alternating, one giant, one runt; sometimes twins, one of each born at the same time. The runts are very small, if they grow up at all (they tend to be very fragile and very ill); the giants are abnormally large and strong. The family all seem to have wanderlust and head out for what they think are greener pastures as soon as they get the opportunity. The book goes from Canada to Georgia and Louisiana and Maine, back to Canada, then to New Mexico, as it follows the line of the giants (in Book One, which is about 3/4 of the book) and then the line of the runts (in Book Two, the remainder of the book.)

I have no fault with Béchard’s writing. He writes well and has a very strong voice. I just am not sure if he knew quite where he was going with the book or the characters. Just when you thought you had a handle on a character, when you were getting to know them – that character would be dropped, and another character would be picked up. You had to learn not to get too invested in anyone, because the minute you did, they’d be swept away from you.

I also am not sure that splitting the book into two sections was the best solution. I think it might have served him better to make it two novels – that way, he could spend more time on each character, and flesh out each section more. (I also had a major confusion with the runts section – this might have been me, or might have been the writing, but I feel as if it was hinted at that the characters in the second section weren’t actually related to the Hervé family. If that’s the case, it makes no sense to have them there at all, since the book is ostensibly about the descendants of the Hervé family. I may have misread, but I did read and re-read that section a number of times trying to get a handle on it. If something you’ve written is that convoluted, it might not be the reader’s fault.)

Do I recommend the book? Well, I don’t not recommend it. I know, that’s vague. It’s not badly written. It’s got a touch of Marquez to it, to the generational saga. (He’s no Marquez, but there’s some similarity.) It’s not bad, but it’s not the best thing I’ve read lately. It wasn’t a waste of my time, but there were times I just wanted him to push it a little more, take it a little farther, see where else it could go…and he didn’t do that. So, I don’t not recommend it. But I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it, either. It’s a toss-up. If it sounds interesting to you, give it a go. It won’t be the worst thing you’ve read this year. But I think you might finish it feeling like it’s missing something that could have made it great.

Review: Almost Never by Daniel Sada

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9

Book: Almost Never

Author: Daniel Sada

Published: April 10, 2012 by Graywolf Press; 320 pages

First Line: “Sex, as an apt pretext for breaking the monotony; motor-sex; anxiety-sex; the habit of sex, as any glut that can well become a burden; colossal, headlong, frenzied, ambiguous sex, as a game that baffles and then enlightens then baffles again; pretense-sex, see-through-sex.”

Slide Ruler Rating: 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 stars

When someone like Roberto Bolaño speaks on literary matters, even from the grave, one tends to stand up and take notice, and I won’t say he was wrong here. ‘Daring’ Daniel Sada certainly is, but, for myself, I don’t think this will be the start of the sort of literary love affair that I tend to forge with Latin-American writers. However, this book defies a pithy ‘That sucked!’ or ‘That was brilliant!’, which is how I tend to judge books and be done with it; hence the sliding ruler rating because sometimes it was one, or the other, or both together, or neither. But then Latin-American literature tends to be full of layers, and the layers have layers. So reviews should always take this into consideration, right? but I’m unnerved by the sneaking suspicion that Senor Sada is sitting on a cloud smirking down at me while I write this, which is a pisser.

Did Mr. Sada write this book to be exasperating on purpose? Of that, I have no doubts whatsoever.

Even so, while reading I felt he sometimes went too far with it, dumping the reader all too often, and gleefully, I don’t doubt, into the ‘Tedious Zone’ with his narrative. His well-known wit sparkled most brightly when his characters were talking, but with his narrative I found myself gritting my teeth and snarling for him to GET ON WITH IT!

But that was his whole point, wasn’t it? This glacial development of the story wasn’t there to just drive the reader insane but to allow us to share, viscerally, in a slice of time and culture that is his own.

(Sighs) When you deconstruct a book for review it’s another pisser to know exactly what the writer is doing while only partly enjoying the experience. Sada writes in a series of staccato run-on sentences that has you reading quickly, but no matter how fast you read you never seemed to go anywhere. Was this effect done on purpose, too? Oh, you betcha. And it can be fun watching Sada spin his yarn knowing that he was probably cackling gleefully as he wrote the damn thing. (Huffs in disgust)

All right, we’ll skip the ‘the writing was brilliant but it drove me nuts’ phase of this review, the smirking is getting too damn loud.

So, story…that might have been part of the problem for me. There’s Demetrio ‘our hero’ (snorts) who has a big problem; should he stay with the nice whore who’s willing to bang him anytime, anywhere, and as often as possible? Or should he listen to his mother and aunt and go for the socially acceptable, demure, proper, and damned annoying virgin? Ah, here’s where we oscillate back down the rating star slide; who cares? But that’s the whole point of the story. It doesn’t help that Demetrio is a skunk, who I didn’t find the least bit lovable, and his meandering, zigzag, unlovable, and skunkish thoughts committed the fatal error of being boring all too often. However, there was a counterpoint to this since the strength of the story rested more on the other characters, particularly his Aunt Zulema and his mother.

As to Katherine Silver’s translation, it’s hard to judge that sort of thing when you don’t speak, let alone read, in Spanish, but I’ve read her work before with César Aira and Horacio Castellanos Moya and she was talented enough to tease out the best of those writers without getting in the way, and so with this, meaning that while I was reading Almost Never it was the smirking, wiseass writer I heard in my head narrating his exasperating story, not Silver, and I can’t think of a better compliment to give a translator, and I hope we’ll soon see more of Sada’s work in English, with Silver, who probably understood him best, taking point. We might just get to be friends.

But all in all, Bolaño was right. He usually is.

Get the book: (Powell’s) (Amazon) (Kindle)

Triple-Decker Review, pt. 2: 11/22/63 by Stephen King

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This is the third review of our triple-review of 11/22/63, the first parts of which were posted here yesterday.

 Book: 11/22/63

Author: Stephen King

Published: November 8, 2011 by Scribner; 849 pages

First Line: ”I have never been what you’d call a crying man.”

Genre: Science fiction/alternate history

Rob’s rating: 2.5-3/5 magic Mannlicher-Carcano bullets

Rob’s review:

con•spir•a•cy [kuhn-spir-uh-see]
noun, plural -cies.
4. Law – an agreement by two or more persons to commit a crime, fraud, or other wrongful act.

Well, it’s nice to know that some things never change…

I haven’t read Stephen King in, um…(counts on her fingers)…23 years. IT is the reason for that. I, by some miracle of fortitude, managed to get through three-quarters of that damn book before I came to my senses and realized that I did not care one miserable iota what happened to these characters – in fact, I hoped the spider-clown thingy massacred them all and good fucking riddance to them. So I flung my copy out my bedroom window, where all books I hate and consider unreadable go to their ignoble death, and since it was winter I had the unspeakable joy of watching it rain and sleet and snow all over it so that by spring it was little more than the pulpy, disintegrating mess it deserved to be.

I cackled when I finally picked it up and chucked it into the garbage. (smiles beatifically at this very pleasant memory…)

(coughs) Anyway, that is why I have not read King in twenty-odd years, but 11/22/63 could not be ignored as easily as the rest of his work has been since IT was destroyed. Anything JFK and RFK has always been a pull for me, and I was curious about King’s take on it all.

Question One: Was it a good book?

In its way…page-turning, certainly. But he usually is, as far as my memory reminds me.

Is he still in possession of his many irritating writerly habits?

Oh, God…yes. He’s still aggravatingly windy, still repetitious in a way that I always found insulting; phrases that he repeats and repeats and repeats, over and over and over until you want to hunt him down and beat him to death with his own hardback – which is entirely possible with this damn brick of a book. Go ahead, drop it on your socked foot. I double dog dare you.

Yes, I get what he’s doing. I get that it’s a narrative device, one he thinks is pretty fucking nifty, and in the right hands can be useful keeping the theme front and center in the reader’s mind, blah blah…it doesn’t make it any less annoying, repetitive, or insulting – to me, a writer uses it only when he expects his readership to be made up entirely of cretins.

‘Life turns on a dime.’
‘The past harmonizes.’
‘The past is obdurate.’

Get used to them now.

Next question: Did I find King’s take on time-travel plausable?

Eh, well…are any of them? Standing stones, complicated contraptions, rips in the air, flying DeLoreans…none of them are, really, but some fit more smoothly than others. Was King’s scenario smooth? heh, well…possibly more so than the flying DeLorean, but it was clever enough, as these things go, so points for that.

Next: And the story?

Ach…it wasn’t bad, all in all. However, I could have done without his endless nattering and repetitious rhapsodizing of the 1950s…yeah, yeah, they were swell, peachy-keen, yowsa…can we now move the fuck on, please? He bogs himself down in this shit like a plesiosaur in a LeBrea tar pit so that the story doesn’t move already. It’s maddening.

And Jake Epping? Our adventurous protag?

(sighs) He made me tired…especially from the halfway mark on. Some writers just don’t know when to shut the fuck up. Dickens had this same problem, so I suppose Stephen thinks he’s in good company.

Yeah, well…I don’t like Himself* either.

Was it well plotted, well-thought out, blah blah?

Huh…I suppose it was, (sneers) the past harmonizes, after all. Or so we’re told endlessly.

What about King’s research?

Hard to say, since he doesn’t include a bibliography, which is rather bad form for any book using history as its framework. But I get the impression that it’s spotty. There’s plenty on the assassination, on Oswald, on the faboo 50s – there seemed to be far less though on JFK himself, on RFK, on Jack’s presidency. You want to study the man’s death, you have to study his life and his work, because therein lies the answers. otherwise you’re getting only half the picture which makes one more susceptible to the likes of Gerald Posner.

So, did I buy King’s version of 11/22/63?

Not. I’m a ‘contrarian’ like his wife. Though since far more people believe something other, that would make King himself the ‘contrarian’, not his wife..

Oh, and Posner’s book?

Discredited long since by those who know what they’re talking about. But King is the new kid on the block on this subject, so you can almost forgive him. Almost. But using Posner’s book as a template for your opinion that was obviously already decided on the subject is just sloppy research with a good dose of wishful thinking. Was he using Posner’s book purely for fictional reasons? No, he makes that quite clear in his afterward. He buys what Posner was selling.

What about Occam’s Razor?

(snorts) Please…William of Occam always seems to be trotted out when the other side doesn’t have a plausible argument of their own to render for public consumption. ‘All things being equal’. Sure. ‘The simplest answer is usually the right one.’ You bet. Simple is nice, and convenient, especially for the novelist writing a big book on a complicated subject. But ‘all things’ are never equal, and there is nothing simple whatsoever about that damn magic-bullet theory – if it was, Posner would not have needed 640 pages to explain it.

Was the damned thing entertaining, at least?

Sure. King usually is. But if you’re a student of JFK’s assassination, wait for the paperback because there’s nothing new here. But if you’re just a King fan I doubt you’ll be too disappointed. (Eyes her blog partner’s review above) or maybe you will.

For myself, will I read more King? Possibly backtrack and read all the stuff I’ve missed in the last twenty-odd years?

Um…no. I think not. Why? Because some things do not change. And here I was all worried, but not very, that I might have been missing out. Thanks for setting my mind at rest on that, Stephen.

One more question. Do I believe there was a conspiracy, myself?

Well, let’s just say that I don’t believe Oswald was there all by his psychotic lonesome – or that the bullet from his rifle was the money shot. Posner, and many others who believe in the one man, one rifle, one bullet business, tend to ignore some wery simple impossibilities, and some equally simple physics. As well as their own eyes.

Occam’s Razor, indeed.

*my affectionate title for Charles Dickens.