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Fiction

Dave Barry is up to no good

Review by bookpagedev

Note to self: Avoid Florida. As if Carl Hiaasen’s entire ouevre hadn’t provided warning enough, now comes a new novel by Dave Barry, adding further weight to the Redneck Riviera’s anti-PR campaign. Granted, Barry reports on his home state’s weirdness with something that reads suspiciously like affection but then again, he lives there, and probably can’t be trusted.

Based on the evidence provided in the humor columnist’s second novel, living in Florida is likely to get you shot up, shot down, beaten, bitten, electrocuted, castrated, thrown overboard and/or bombarded by show tunes. Tricky Business is a rollicking crime caper set aboard the Extravaganza of the Seas, a gambling cruise ship, during the violent tropical storm Hector. The ship belongs to Bobby Kemp, sleazebag entrepreneur and millionaire owner of the Miami fast-food chain the Happy Conch. Bobby knows his ship is being used to launder Mafia money; what he doesn’t know is exactly what else the mobsters are up to onboard the Extravaganza. But he intends to find out. Devising a plan in his small but infinitely greedy brain, Bobby can scarcely imagine that his actions will have repercussions for a long-legged cocktail waitress, a crotchety pair of retirement-home residents, a talentless bar band, a bunch of brainless thugs and, ever so tragically, nine tabloid TV journalists who nobly sacrifice themselves in pursuit of a hot story.

Barry is one writer smart enough to skip anything that might resemble boring exposition; the whole book is either rapid-fire dialogue or high-speed slapstick suitable for an action flick. Arnie and Phil, the two curmudgeonly nursing-home escapees, provide some priceless repartee, and the stoners in the house band of the Extravaganza are hysterically bone-headed. A couple of brutal torture scenes might leave Barry’s Sunday-paper readership clucking their tongues, but he does put a warning at the front of the book, so it really isn’t his fault if some readers get upset. Excluding, of course, the members of the Florida tourism board. They’re probably the only ones capable of reading this book with a straight face. Becky Ohlsen writes from Portland, Oregon.

Note to self: Avoid Florida. As if Carl Hiaasen’s entire ouevre hadn’t provided warning enough, now comes a new novel by Dave Barry, adding further weight to the Redneck Riviera’s anti-PR campaign. Granted, Barry reports on his home state’s weirdness with something that reads suspiciously like affection but then again, he lives there, and probably […]
Fiction

Coming of age in Revere

Review by bookpagedev

In his new novel, Roland Merullo returns to familiar territory. Revere Beach, north of Boston, has already been the subject of his recent memoir, Revere Beach Elegy, and another novel. His latest work, In Revere, In Those Days, stands on its own as an honest and eloquent coming-of-age story.

Anthony Benedetto, a portrait painter with a fairly comfortable lifestyle, looks back at the saving of his soul. It began in the 1960s, during his preteen years, following the shocking deaths of both his parents in a plane crash. Anthony, or Tonio, was rescued by the devoted love of his large Italian-American family. A good student, Tonio eventually enrolls at Phillips Exeter Academy. The prep school environment provides the staging ground for a subtle break from his Revere roots. Tonio’s path also diverges sharply from that of his beloved (and beautiful) cousin Rosalie. Ultimately, for Tonio, seeds are sown for lessons that will comprise his salvation.

Two figures stand out in this boy’s life. Anthony’s grandpa Dom, for instance, is an orderly man whose outward demeanor conceals a long-held source of pain. By sharing a measure of it with his grandson, he fortifies him, in effect, by the magnitude and honesty of the gesture. Uncle Peter, Rosalie’s father and a failed boxer, chases one big score after another to elevate the Benedetto family out of the reach of humiliation. Roland Merullo’s characters struggle with their sense of place in a wider world. And they can’t quite fathom the nature of pain and suffering in their lives. That some like Tonio’s grandma Lia, a gentle Zen master in disguise still manage to go on, to internalize the lessons of grief, is Merullo’s great achievement.

The narrative hews a bit too closely to a rites-of-passage framework (including, for example, Tonio’s loss of his virginity to an older woman). Nevertheless, In Revere, In Those Days remains a thoughtful meditation on the process of overcoming personal tragedy and on the imperative to trust, once again, in the possibility of hope.

In his new novel, Roland Merullo returns to familiar territory. Revere Beach, north of Boston, has already been the subject of his recent memoir, Revere Beach Elegy, and another novel. His latest work, In Revere, In Those Days, stands on its own as an honest and eloquent coming-of-age story. Anthony Benedetto, a portrait painter with […]
Fiction

When friendship is fodder for fiction

Review by bookpagedev

No sophomore slump for Christina Schwarz. All is Vanity is just as good as Drowning Ruth, the debut novel that won critical acclaim and a coveted slot as an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 2000.

What this book shares with Schwarz’s popular first novel are strong characters, evoked through multiple first-person narration. The novel focuses on two couples: Margaret and Ted in New York, and Letty and Michael in Los Angeles. Friends since childhood, Margaret (the self-interested leader) and Letty (the good-hearted follower), are still close. Now in their mid-30s, both feel vaguely disappointed that they are not further along by now.

The precocious Margaret had excelled in childhood. At 7, she built a scale model of the Temple of Athena from Ivory soap, Play-doh clay and Styrofoam. No wonder she decides to chuck her job as an English teacher to write a novel despite the fact she’s never published anything before. Letty, a stay-at-home Mom, believes her dear friend will succeed.

Meanwhile, Letty’s scholarly husband Michael gets a chance to work for the Otis Museum. It means they mingle with the wealthy. Quickly, the couple’s needs change a bigger house, a better car and more debt to finance it all.

Serious problems arise when Margaret realizes she can’t write fiction after all. Desperate, she starts copying Letty’s lively e-mails about the search for the perfect house into her manuscript. Pretty soon Letty has become a character named Lexie, whose rise echoes The Great Gatsby and proves fine fodder for fiction.

Ultimately, Margaret must choose between her story and their friendship. Without giving anything away, let’s just say that Letty doesn’t fare so well. But in the end, neither does Margaret.

The author proves herself to be witty, as well as wise, as she effortlessly highlights the ludicrous aspects of precocious children, aspiring authors, elitist English majors, ambitious mothers and upwardly mobile Californians. All is Vanity is a rewarding read for any fiction lover, but particularly recommended for aspiring novelists. Anne Morris writes from Austin.

No sophomore slump for Christina Schwarz. All is Vanity is just as good as Drowning Ruth, the debut novel that won critical acclaim and a coveted slot as an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 2000. What this book shares with Schwarz’s popular first novel are strong characters, evoked through multiple first-person narration. The novel focuses […]
FictionWorld Fiction

Wisdom in disguise

Review by bookpagedev

Much Madness is divinest Sense/To a discerning Eye, wrote Emily Dickinson. Ha Jin, the National Book Award-winning author of Waiting, revisits this connection between insanity and sagacity in his new novel, The Crazed. The year is 1989. The country: China. Jian Wan is the protŽgŽ of Yang, an ailing professor of literature. Jian is also engaged to marry Yang’s ambitious daughter, Meimei, who expects Jian to follow in her father’s academic footsteps. But when Jian is charged with caring for Yang, he discerns divine career advice in the old man’s demented outbursts. Don’t become an academic like me, he moans. You should learn how to grow millet instead. Yang argues that intellectuals in China are mere stooges for the regnant Communist Party, glorified clerks doomed to enslave knowledge to ideology. As long as foreign influences are shunned and, George Bush is the number-one Current Counterrevolutionary, intellectual endeavor is absurd. Yang persuades Jian to abandon years of study, and Jian resolves to become an actual, rather than a glorified, clerk a knife rather than meat. Even though it was her father who led Jian astray, Meimei calls Jian a coward and gives him the slip.

As Jian plummets into apostasy, pro-democracy demonstrators are massing in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Jian joins them, but his motives are less than pure: He wants to show Meimei that he is not a coward. It’s personal interests, he concludes, that motivate the individual and therefore generate the dynamics of history. But we all know what comes next. The People’s Liberation Army arrives, butchering the demonstrators and horrifying the world. Surprisingly, the actual death toll is still unclear. According to Ha Jin, the BBC reported 5,000 deaths; official China, not surprisingly, reported zero. Jian escapes with his life, but without his illusions. And he sets out for Hong Kong, then a British protectorate. Like many books by Chinese dissidents, The Crazed occasionally reads like anti-Communist propaganda, and its pro-Western subtext will certainly promote its success with Western audiences. The dying professor offers lengthy orations in praise of Canada and the United States, and Ha Jin himself, a professor of English at Boston University, praised America as a land of generosity and abundance in his National Book Award acceptance speech. In some ways The Crazed is one long thank-you note to Ha Jin’s new home, and a Dear John letter to the China he left behind. As a work of art, The Crazed is hard to fault. Ha Jin, who writes in English, has perfected a prose that is accomplished without being ostentatious. His characters are credible precisely because they are as benevolent as they are flawed and confused. And though the novel’s events proceed in a natural and captivating way, the author still finds room for meditations on Genesis, The Divine Comedy, Bertolt Brecht, the questionable value of suffering, the sublimity of carnal pleasures and China’s empleomania: a mania for holding public office. American literature is dominated by sprinters (as opposed to milers) and professors (as opposed to writers). But Ha Jin’s new novel proves him a laudable exception to this rule. May his madness, such as it is, continue to make such admirable sense.

Kenneth Champeon is a writer based in Thailand.

Much Madness is divinest Sense/To a discerning Eye, wrote Emily Dickinson. Ha Jin, the National Book Award-winning author of Waiting, revisits this connection between insanity and sagacity in his new novel, The Crazed. The year is 1989. The country: China. Jian Wan is the protŽgŽ of Yang, an ailing professor of literature. Jian is also […]
FictionWorld Fiction

Family obligations in Bombay

Review by bookpagedev

Within Bombay’s Towers of Silence, the Parsis expose their dead to hungry vultures a practice as environmentally friendly as it is macabre. Ethnic Persians who had migrated to India, the Parsis have traditionally led Bombay’s commercial class. And though they have become an endangered species due to stagnating birth rates and miscegenation, their Zoroastrianism has largely removed them from the constant squabbling of Bombay’s Hindus and Muslims, which a decade ago erupted into carnage and fire.

Behind the riots was the Shiv Sena, a Hindu supremacist band of thugs, whose agenda includes abolishing Valentine’s Day, razing mosques and, according to writer Rohinton Mistry, subjecting innocent letters and postcards to incineration if the address reads Bombay instead of Mumbai. Such is the cultural and political backdrop of Mistry’s commanding new novel, Family Matters, his follow-up to the acclaimed A Fine Balance. A Bombay native, Mistry capably evokes a city that would explode were it not for the Indians’ heroic tolerance and patience. I am a born-and-bred Bombayvala, writes Mistry. That automatically inoculates me against attacks of outrage. Nariman is an old Parsi widower cared for by his children Jal and Coomy. But Coomy soon connives to move Nariman into the house of Roxana, his daughter by another marriage. Roxana’s husband Yezad resents the new addition, and he takes to illegal gambling to subsidize Nariman’s care. Mistry deftly shows how necessity compels Indians to embrace corruption, India’s scourge. Even Yezad’s son starts taking bribes in his capacity as a Homework Monitor.

Nariman becomes demented and incontinent; Yezad’s boss, Mr. Kapur, abandons his dream of becoming a muckraking politician; Jal and Coomy enlist the help of a semi-competent handyman to refurbish their flat this in a Murphy’s Law country where anything that can go wrong usually does.

Any novel set in Bombay must be as vast as the city. Mistry’s knowledge of its customs, locales and languages is encyclopedic, his cast of characters panoramic, and his portrayal of Indian attitudes spot on. Indians perceive the use of toilet paper as unhygienic; they often converse in trite proverbs, and their attitude toward the West is decidedly conflicted. So is their attitude toward India, a great country and a hopeless one.

Indians writing in English are producing some of today’s most inspiring and original fiction. And with Family Matters, Mistry’s name may soon take its place alongside those of a Rushdie or a Roy. Kenneth Champeon is a writer living in Thailand. He lived and worked in Bombay for six months.

Within Bombay’s Towers of Silence, the Parsis expose their dead to hungry vultures a practice as environmentally friendly as it is macabre. Ethnic Persians who had migrated to India, the Parsis have traditionally led Bombay’s commercial class. And though they have become an endangered species due to stagnating birth rates and miscegenation, their Zoroastrianism has […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

A 12th century magical mystery tour

Review by bookpagedev

Umberto Eco’s new novel Baudolino is a huge, beautifully conceived and executed tale of history, passion, love, imagination and guile. Challenging and illuminating, full of the digression, invention and brilliance Eco always provides, the book is an absolute joy to be savored.

During the sacking of Constantinople by Crusaders in 1204, Baudolino saves the life of a high court official named Niketas and, while the city is being burned and looted, he proceeds to tell the appreciative and increasingly intrigued gentleman his life story and quite a story it is.

Born in northern Italy to peasant parents, Baudolino very early on exhibited two qualities which would serve him, for better or worse, his entire life: a talent for languages and a penchant for lying. While still a lad, he charmed by wit and guile a military commander he met in the woods near his home. The commander, who turned out to be none other than Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in Italy on one of the many expeditions that would occupy him for years to come adopted Baudolino, and after a few years in court sent him to be educated in Paris.

There, Baudolino made a number of equally adventurous, imaginative and intellectually curious friends, and together they laid the foundation for an epic quest that is part myth, part hallucination, part reverie and a small dose of fact. This quest, which consumed the rest of their lives, was the pursuit of the kingdom of Prester John, the legendary priest-king of the east, said to rule over a wild and wonderful land of bizarre creatures, eunuchs and unicorns. Fueled in no small part by Baudolino’s fecund imagination and willingness to believe his own fabrications, the group eventually set out on the long and extravagant journey to find Prester John.

Moving between passages of slapstick hilarity and poignant beauty, Eco uses the venerable quest motif to unfold a narrative of great depth and feeling in which no less than the core of western theology is examined and elaborated with dazzling intelligence. Baudolino’s journey of the spirit takes him through his own middle age and beyond, and in the process we are treated to an insider’s view of the historical era of the Middle Ages, with all its inventions, brutality, hope, failure and promise. Christian relics, both real and counterfeit, play an important role in the story, along with an authentic one still debated today. Eco’s craftily developed introduction of this item is a delight.

The narrative comes full circle as we learn why Baudolino is in Constantinople to tell his tale. Another brilliant device takes the story one step further as Baudolino, in his 60s, makes yet another effort to redeem a life of near total fabrication. Whether or not he succeeds, we know by then, is of little importance, for as Baudolino says many times in many ways, believing in something makes it real. Sam Harrison, a writer in Ormond Beach, Florida, is currently working on his third novel.

Umberto Eco’s new novel Baudolino is a huge, beautifully conceived and executed tale of history, passion, love, imagination and guile. Challenging and illuminating, full of the digression, invention and brilliance Eco always provides, the book is an absolute joy to be savored. During the sacking of Constantinople by Crusaders in 1204, Baudolino saves the life […]
Children's & YA

Fudge is back! Fudge is back!

Review by bookpagedev

There’s probably no better way to celebrate the 30th birthday of the hero of Judy Blume’s now-classic Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, first published in 1972, than the publication of a new Fudge book. And, thankfully for Fudge fans, the irrepressible 5-year-old hasn’t aged at all in this new celebration of family life, Double Fudge.

Double Fudge is the first Fudge book Judy Blume has written in 12 years. She based the original character of Fudge on the antics of her son, Larry. Now, at the urging of Larry’s 11-year-old son, Elliot, as well as thousands of fan letters, grandmother Judy Blume has given a new generation of young readers another warm and funny book to treasure.

In fact, Blume’s grandson is the inspiration for the new adventure, in which Fudge (Farley Drexel Hatcher to be precise) is driving his older brother, Peter, and the rest of his family crazy due to his obsession with money.

Blume got the idea from young Elliot. When he was small he believed that all you had to do to get money was put a card into a machine and money would come pouring out, says the author, whose books have been translated into 26 languages.

Of course, Fudge never does anything halfway. First, he skips down the stairs singing, Money, money, money . . . I love money, money, money . . . Next, he demands to be paid one dollar to pass the saltshaker at the dinner table. Then he decides he wants to make his own money, Fudge Bucks. I’m going to make a hundred million trillion of them, Fudge tells his family. Soon I’ll have enough Fudge Bucks to buy the whole world. Clearly, Fudge’s obsession is getting out of hand. His older brother, Peter, finds it embarrassing. He convinces his parents they simply have to do something. But Peter’s not entirely sure their idea is a good one: The family travels to Washington, D.C., to tour the Bureau of Printing and Engraving to show Fudge how real money is made.

While there, the Hatchers have an unexpected reunion with their long-lost relatives, the Howie Hatchers of Honolulu, Hawaii. Now Peter not only has Fudge to deal with, but twin cousins named Flora and Fauna, plus a 4-year-old mini Fudge, also named Farley Drexel! In Double Fudge, Judy Blume shows her extraordinary ability to create timeless and appealing characters and humorous family situations. Unlike J.K. Rowling, who always intended the Harry Potter books to be a series, Blume didn’t start out to write a series about the Hatcher family.

In fact, after writing Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, Blume didn’t expect to write about any of the characters again. But, says the author, Over the years I received thousands of letters from children begging for another Fudge book. Eventually I decided that if I got the right idea I’d give it a try. Then one day when I was in the shower an idea popped into my head. (The shower is a good place for ideas!) That particular time, the idea was to give the Hatchers a new baby, and Tootsie and the book Superfudge were born. After that came Fudge-a-Mania, which was inspired by a real family vacation in Maine.

In addition to the Fudge books, Judy Blume is the author of such children’s classics as Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, as well as Blubber and Forever. She has also written three best-selling adult novels.

Decade after decade, readers are attracted to Blume’s warm voice and understanding of childhood issues. In 1996, Blume was honored by the American Library Association with the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement. And it’s no surprise that, with 75 million copies of her books in print, she still receives thousands of letters each month.

Who knows, maybe one of those letters will inspire this amazing writer to give her readers one more story about Farley Drexel Hatcher! Deborah Hopkinson writes from Walla Walla, Washington. Her newest children’s title is Cabin in the Snow, book two in the Prairie Skies Series, available from Aladdin Paperbacks.

There’s probably no better way to celebrate the 30th birthday of the hero of Judy Blume’s now-classic Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, first published in 1972, than the publication of a new Fudge book. And, thankfully for Fudge fans, the irrepressible 5-year-old hasn’t aged at all in this new celebration of family life, Double […]
Biography

The life of a legend

Review by bookpagedev

Author of Zelda, the best-selling biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, Milford delivers a fascinating account of the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the first female poet to win a Pulitzer Prize. Seductive, beautiful and undeniably brilliant, Millay born in 1892 in Camden, Maine attended Vassar with the backing of wealthy patrons, where she began a tumultuous series of love affairs with women and men. From her Greenwich Village home, she composed brave, lyric verse that the reading public couldn’t resist. During the Depression, her books sold in the tens of thousands, and her controversial personal life kept her in the public eye. Millay’s reliance on alcohol, morphine and men are recounted here in vivid detail. This is biography at its best a page-turning account of a remarkable writer.

A reading group guide is included in the book.

 

Author of Zelda, the best-selling biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, Milford delivers a fascinating account of the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the first female poet to win a Pulitzer Prize. Seductive, beautiful and undeniably brilliant, Millay born in 1892 in Camden, Maine attended Vassar with the backing of wealthy patrons, where she began a […]
Travel

New series pairs authors and destinations

Review by bookpagedev

Travel books generally adhere to one of two camps: the promotional (go here, see this, don’t miss) and the vicarious (sagas of astounding adventures few would dream of trying to duplicate). The new Crown Journeys series, which debuts this month with a pair of titles from Edwidge Danticat and Michael Cunningham, assays an offbeat category: The ruminative. The idea is to pair a litterateur with a setting he or she finds especially evocative and to create an extended, moseying-around essay a walk," both literal and figurative. Forthcoming matches include Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate) on Mexico, Myla Goldberg (Bee Season) on Prague, Christopher Buckley on Washington, D.C., and Roy Blount Jr. on New Orleans. Intriguing as the prospects may be, the two initial titles raise some interesting questions, such as: Can an author be too close to a subject, so entwined as to neglect the need to reach out to the reader? Might a writer accustomed to spinning fiction lose his or her way without a narrative thread? In After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (Crown, $16, 160 pages, ISBN 0609609084), Edwige Danticat, who has probed her conflicted relationship with her natal land in such novels as Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones maintains a sense of suspense by playing up her dread of actually attending carnival. Little wonder she’s apprehensive, having been raised on her Baptist minister uncle’s warnings that People always hurt themselves during carnival gyrating with so much abandon that they would dislocate their hips and shoulders and lose their voices while singing too loudly." Further, the author is warned, Not only could one be punched, stabbed, pummeled, or shot during carnival, young girls could be freely fondled, squeezed like sponges by dirty old, and not so old, men." Danticat has returned to the island as an adult with a journalistic mission to cover carnival, but the nervous girl in her makes her approach the task perhaps too portentously. She interviews officials, quotes poets from Ovid to Octavio Paz, and takes preparatory field trips: to a cemetery, to the final resting place of a rusting steam engine (sought out as a symbol of 19th-century industrial Jacmel"), to an art show of carnival masks, to a remote and rare forest (much of Haiti has long since been stripped, largely for fuel, and partly to rout out revolutionaries). Then finally, 127 pages into the book, she faces up to the dreaded day.

Is the wait worth it? Retroactively, yes. Impatience melts as you realize how carefully, while seeming to dance around the topic, Danticat has laid the groundwork for witnessing the event and beginning to understand it. Carnival, as she describes it, is frightening: The image of an AIDS-awareness activist, for instance, who growls with blackened teeth and flashes blood-stained panties is indelibly disturbing. The gathering is also clearly cathartic, not only for the locals who yearly confront their demons (both traditional and modern) and celebrate a cycle of renewal, but also for visitors, as well, including the many Haitians who, like Danticat, have had to move abroad and yearn to recapture a sense of belonging.

Provincetown, that artsy sand-spit at the tip of Cape Cod which has served for centuries as an eccentric’s sanctuary" in Michael Cunningham’s apt phrase, is a far less foreboding place than Danticat’s Haiti. In fact, he asserts in Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown, it’s not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions." True, men consort openly in the grass maze enroute to Herring Cove beach (a pastime which strikes him as innocently bacchanalian, more creaturely than lewd," and circumnavigatable in any event), and you cannot walk more than 100 yards down crowded Commercial Street without being flyered" by an eight-foot tall counting the bouffant transvestite advertising a revue. The author describes one such encounter, in which a towering drag queen amused a 4-year-old by repeatedly doffing, on command, his blue beehive wig to reveal the crewcut beneath: The child fell into paroxysms of laughter," he writes.

Cunningham, whose novel The Hours won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999, first came to town two decades ago as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, a cross-disciplinary incubator founded in 1968 by local luminaries such as Robert Motherwell and Stanley Kunitz. He admits his off-season sojourn was a total bust. Yet somehow, mired in a slough of despond and thwarted ambition, he fell in love with Provincetown, the way you might meet someone you consider strange, irritating, potentially dangerous but whom, eventually, you find yourself marrying." A summerer ever since, he understands the intricate weave of Provincetown’s social fabric far better than Peter Manso, whose gossipy potboiler Ptown, released in July, earned Land’s End some well-deserved collateral pre-publicity. Cunningham grasps the rhythms of the place and, like the many local poets he quotes (Kunitz, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, Alan Dugan, Mary Oliver), has a gift for touching on the timeless. He describes a certain segment of August, for instance, as a deep blue bowl of perfect days, noisier than winter but possessed of a similar underlying silence: A similar sense that the world is, and will always be, just this way calm and warm, bleached with brightness, its contrasts subdued by a shimmer that makes it difficult to determine precisely where the ocean ends and the sky begins." His often-rambling walk" is essentially a love sonnet whose sentiments are easily shared. Sandy MacDonald, the author of Quick Escapes Boston (Globe Pequot), lives in Cambridge and Nantucket in Massachusetts.

Travel books generally adhere to one of two camps: the promotional (go here, see this, don’t miss) and the vicarious (sagas of astounding adventures few would dream of trying to duplicate). The new Crown Journeys series, which debuts this month with a pair of titles from Edwidge Danticat and Michael Cunningham, assays an offbeat category: […]
Travel

New series pairs authors and destinationsm

Review by bookpagedev

Travel books generally adhere to one of two camps: the promotional (go here, see this, don’t miss) and the vicarious (sagas of astounding adventures few would dream of trying to duplicate). The new Crown Journeys series, which debuts this month with a pair of titles from Edwidge Danticat and Michael Cunningham, assays an offbeat category: The ruminative. The idea is to pair a litterateur with a setting he or she finds especially evocative and to create an extended, moseying-around essay a walk,” both literal and figurative. Forthcoming matches include Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate) on Mexico, Myla Goldberg (Bee Season) on Prague, Christopher Buckley on Washington, D.C., and Roy Blount Jr. on New Orleans. Intriguing as the prospects may be, the two initial titles raise some interesting questions, such as: Can an author be too close to a subject, so entwined as to neglect the need to reach out to the reader? Might a writer accustomed to spinning fiction lose his or her way without a narrative thread? In After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti, Edwige Danticat, who has probed her conflicted relationship with her natal land in such novels as Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones maintains a sense of suspense by playing up her dread of actually attending carnival. Little wonder she’s apprehensive, having been raised on her Baptist minister uncle’s warnings that People always hurt themselves during carnival gyrating with so much abandon that they would dislocate their hips and shoulders and lose their voices while singing too loudly.” Further, the author is warned, Not only could one be punched, stabbed, pummeled, or shot during carnival, young girls could be freely fondled, squeezed like sponges by dirty old, and not so old, men.” Danticat has returned to the island as an adult with a journalistic mission to cover carnival, but the nervous girl in her makes her approach the task perhaps too portentously. She interviews officials, quotes poets from Ovid to Octavio Paz, and takes preparatory field trips: to a cemetery, to the final resting place of a rusting steam engine (sought out as a symbol of 19th-century industrial Jacmel”), to an art show of carnival masks, to a remote and rare forest (much of Haiti has long since been stripped, largely for fuel, and partly to rout out revolutionaries). Then finally, 127 pages into the book, she faces up to the dreaded day.

Is the wait worth it? Retroactively, yes. Impatience melts as you realize how carefully, while seeming to dance around the topic, Danticat has laid the groundwork for witnessing the event and beginning to understand it. Carnival, as she describes it, is frightening: The image of an AIDS-awareness activist, for instance, who growls with blackened teeth and flashes blood-stained panties is indelibly disturbing. The gathering is also clearly cathartic, not only for the locals who yearly confront their demons (both traditional and modern) and celebrate a cycle of renewal, but also for visitors, as well, including the many Haitians who, like Danticat, have had to move abroad and yearn to recapture a sense of belonging.

Provincetown, that artsy sand-spit at the tip of Cape Cod which has served for centuries as an eccentric’s sanctuary” in Michael Cunningham’s apt phrase, is a far less foreboding place than Danticat’s Haiti. In fact, he asserts in Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown ($16, 176 pages, ISBN 0609609076), it’s not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions.” True, men consort openly in the grass maze enroute to Herring Cove beach (a pastime which strikes him as innocently bacchanalian, more creaturely than lewd,” and circumnavigatable in any event), and you cannot walk more than 100 yards down crowded Commercial Street without being flyered” by an eight-foot tall counting the bouffant transvestite advertising a revue. The author describes one such encounter, in which a towering drag queen amused a 4-year-old by repeatedly doffing, on command, his blue beehive wig to reveal the crewcut beneath: The child fell into paroxysms of laughter,” he writes.

Cunningham, whose novel The Hours won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999, first came to town two decades ago as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, a cross-disciplinary incubator founded in 1968 by local luminaries such as Robert Motherwell and Stanley Kunitz. He admits his off-season sojourn was a total bust. Yet somehow, mired in a slough of despond and thwarted ambition, he fell in love with Provincetown, the way you might meet someone you consider strange, irritating, potentially dangerous but whom, eventually, you find yourself marrying.” A summerer ever since, he understands the intricate weave of Provincetown’s social fabric far better than Peter Manso, whose gossipy potboiler Ptown, released in July, earned Land’s End some well-deserved collateral pre-publicity. Cunningham grasps the rhythms of the place and, like the many local poets he quotes (Kunitz, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, Alan Dugan, Mary Oliver), has a gift for touching on the timeless. He describes a certain segment of August, for instance, as a deep blue bowl of perfect days, noisier than winter but possessed of a similar underlying silence: A similar sense that the world is, and will always be, just this way calm and warm, bleached with brightness, its contrasts subdued by a shimmer that makes it difficult to determine precisely where the ocean ends and the sky begins.” His often-rambling walk” is essentially a love sonnet whose sentiments are easily shared. Sandy MacDonald, the author of Quick Escapes Boston (Globe Pequot), lives in Cambridge and Nantucket in Massachusetts.

Travel books generally adhere to one of two camps: the promotional (go here, see this, don’t miss) and the vicarious (sagas of astounding adventures few would dream of trying to duplicate). The new Crown Journeys series, which debuts this month with a pair of titles from Edwidge Danticat and Michael Cunningham, assays an offbeat category: […]
Memoir

September paperback releases offer good choices for reading groups

Review by bookpagedev

America’s favorite Southern author returns with a delightfully down-home look at the life of his ornery grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, a tough-as-nails moonshiner and roofer who along with his equally ornery wife Ava raised seven children in the backwoods of Alabama. Bragg, who never knew his grandfather, interviewed a slew of relatives about Charlie, a man admired for his family loyalty, his honesty and his unabashed courage (he once stood up to a passel of drunks armed with an ax, a hammer and a shotgun). A moving collection of stories inspired by Charlie, this wistful memoir captures a long-gone era in rural America. Bragg’s newest entry in the chronicles of his unforgettable family will amply satisfy fans of All Over but the Shoutin’. A reading group guide is available in print and online at www.vintagebooks.com/read.

America’s favorite Southern author returns with a delightfully down-home look at the life of his ornery grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, a tough-as-nails moonshiner and roofer who along with his equally ornery wife Ava raised seven children in the backwoods of Alabama. Bragg, who never knew his grandfather, interviewed a slew of relatives about Charlie, a man […]
Children's & YA

Dogs will be dogs and vice versa

Review by bookpagedev

If Snoopy ever needed a soul mate, terrier Ike LaRue would fit the bill. Poor, misunderstood Ike: He has been banished for two months of behavior training at the Brotweiler Canine Academy, and he is miserable. But, like Snoopy, Ike is handy with a typewriter, and Dear Mrs. LaRue compiles his pleading letters home to his owner, Mrs. Gertrude R. LaRue, along with a few related newspaper articles that further relate his exploits.

Artist and writer Mark Teague’s books always feature great humor, intriguing, unusual plots and witty, eye-catching illustrations. Not surprisingly, Dear Mrs. LaRue: Letters from Obedience School serves up all the good things readers have grown to expect from the author.

Juxtaposing his letters home with scenes from what he actually experiences at the school, the book begins when Ike writes: Dear Mrs. LaRue, How could you do this to me? This is a PRISON, not a school! You should see the other dogs. They are BAD DOGS, Mrs. LaRue! I do not fit in.” The spread shows Ike mailing his letter in a plush, flower-filled area, with signs pointing to the pool and sauna. Ike’s imagination, however, features a Transylvania-like scene, complete with a winding road leading up to a foreboding castle, surrounded by bats, ravens and lightning.

Poor Ike. He can’t understand why Mrs. LaRue was so miffed when he ate her chicken pie, chased cats and tore her camel coat. Were you really so upset about the chicken pie?” he writes to his mistress. You know, you might have discussed it with me. You could have said, ÔIke, don’t eat the chicken pie. I’m saving it for dinner.’ Would that have been so difficult? It would have prevented a lot of hard feelings.” Kids will enjoy Ike’s hilarious comments and adventures, while adults will snicker at the sophisticated humor. Not surprisingly, Ike plots a daring escape from his canine prison and braves a long journey home. He ends up a hero, with the entire town saluting his bravery and holding signs that say I Like Ike.” Mark Teague has created a book full of canine capers, with superb details in every corner. Ike is so endearing, I wouldn’t be surprised if he returns in a sequel.

If Snoopy ever needed a soul mate, terrier Ike LaRue would fit the bill. Poor, misunderstood Ike: He has been banished for two months of behavior training at the Brotweiler Canine Academy, and he is miserable. But, like Snoopy, Ike is handy with a typewriter, and Dear Mrs. LaRue compiles his pleading letters home to […]
History

The muses that inspired men of genius

Review by bookpagedev

If you ever chuckled when you heard the phrase battle of the sexes,” thinking to yourself, that’s no battle, child,” Francine Prose’s book might make you reconsider. In The Lives of the Muses, Prose explores nine of the most tortured, devious relationships known to art and science. But instead of focusing on the famed artist in each couple, she looks at his lover, spouse or eroticized friend the artist/thinker’s muse, in other words.

People who saw Sharon Stone in the screen hit The Muse may scoff at the idea of a woman who can channel brilliant ideas to a genius. But, for Prose, there’s no getting around the role that women have played in bringing to fruition some of the world’s great masterpieces, from Samuel Johnson’s dictionary to the surrealist fantasies of Salvador Dali to the song lyrics of John Lennon.

Contemporary readers may find Prose’s chapter on Yoko Ono the most interesting. Was she the bloodsucker so many Beatle fans painted her to be, or did she inspire Lennon to think outside the rock and roll box? The truth lies somewhere in the gray area between those two extremes, Prose thinks. She wonders out loud how much of the contempt for Ono was racial prejudice and misogyny masquerading as compassion for John.

Lou Andreas-Salome will be less well-known to Prose’s readers, but she is arguably the most interesting and eclectic of Prose’s subjects. Andreas-Salome was a serial muse whose life intersected meaningfully with Frederick Nietszche, poet Rainer Rilke and Sigmund Freud. She liked to juggle two men at a time, while steadfastly refusing to have sex with anybody, including her husband, until her mid-30s when she entered into an extramarital affair with Rilke, who was 10 or so years her junior.

Prose’s fascinating book sheds light on a group of extraordinary women who filled a variety of roles some were lovers; some just friends. Some sought money and recognition, while others went after the ephemeral something akin to spiritual insight. In the end, what they all seemed to share was a deep, abiding hunger to be more than ordinary. And so they were. Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

If you ever chuckled when you heard the phrase battle of the sexes,” thinking to yourself, that’s no battle, child,” Francine Prose’s book might make you reconsider. In The Lives of the Muses, Prose explores nine of the most tortured, devious relationships known to art and science. But instead of focusing on the famed artist […]

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