A firmly held conviction was decidedly shattered this week, after I spent some time with a lovely little volume titled The Affection Provincial’s Companion: A Bounteous Selection of Essays, Philosophical Diagrams, Poetry, and other Arcadian Follies Concerning the Art of Curious Living and the Reintroduction of Ancient Charm into this Vale of Mud and Tears Known Heretofore as the Modern Life. Before encountering this delicious tome, I had consciously avoided books that presented themselves as handbooks or guides to a particular kind of lifestyle—especially when it’s supposed to be funny. These are the kind of books that you will find on table displays as you wait in a long holiday line at the bookstore, or advertised on a page of “stocking stuffers” in the Sunday Times. Snotty literary hack that I am, I have made a habit of unceremoniously dismissing these books without giving them a chance, assuming that they are fluff, inconsequential and completely devoid of any useful information.
However, upon taking a chance with The Affected Provincial’s Companion, I now stand corrected. Although this book fits into all of my above categories, I found that I immensely enjoyed it, and I learned a lot as well. Meant to both illuminate the general public and serve as a reference on the life and activities of self-described “dandies,” the book was written by one Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy. The first surprise I had with this text was how genuinely delightful and funny it is. Anyone who revels in the English language will take special pleasure in the deliciously verbose prose style employed by Lord Whimsy. Take the following passage, in which he describes the difference between bohemians and dandies:
Dandyism seems to flourish when cultures arrive at a baroque, overdeveloped stage, when other more obvious, robust creative avenues have exhausted themselves; when one might say that dandyism draws its delicate calligraphy between the margins of bohemianism’s broad cultural strokes
Bohemianism tends to avoid or reject the normal, but dandyism moves beyond normality by traversing through it: Dandyism either exaggerates normality or elevates it from within. The dandy enjoys the gamesmanship of pushing against convention without breaking it; in fact the dandy is quickly bored by the bohemian’s transgressive bombast. (5)
See what I mean? It’s funny and smart and interesting all at once. Can you honestly say that you knew what was meant by “dandyism” before reading the above passage? I can’t, and, honestly, I can’t say that I cared very much either. But, after reading the first few pages, I suddenly wanted to know more: Lord Whimsy, do keep talking. And he does, for 158 pages of hilarious subjects including: “The Joys of Lepidoptery,” “How to Become a Bon Vivant,” “The Rake’s Grommet,” “Silk on the Nipple,” and “The Moment of Truth; or Assessing one’s Man-Antler.” In case, you’re wondering, yes, a “Man-Antler” is just what you think it is.
The Affected Provincial’s Companion is a genuinely funny book that will surprise you with its interesting minutia and wacky diagrams (such as The Whimsy Bohemian-Dandy Continuum). Finding a consistently funny book is actually harder than you think it is, and having one to fall back on is not such a bad idea. With the dark and stormy winter approaching, it might behoove you to keep such a light and laughing text at arm’s reach.
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I have a serious problem when it comes to reading “classic” works of literature: I simply cannot make a decision about which inimitable tome to read first. Like most self-proclaimed booklovers, I tend to hoard all of those pleasing, Signet paperback editions of classics, with their shiny covers and classical paintings. They make up the majority of my personal library and most of them remain unread—although I love to take them out and hold them, read the description on the back for the ten millionth time, and gaze lovingly at the cover. Despite all of the fetishistic attention I lavish on these humble little paperbacks, I don’t read them as much as I should. Inevitably, I pick up a more contemporary novel–something I can read and actual absorb at lightening speed, thus working my way through great piles of these books in a short time.
However, on those rare occasions when I actually decide to undertake a classic, it is almost always such an amazing and delightful experience, that I decide to swear off contemporary fiction and set out reading the canon. Such was the case with Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’urbervilles. Published in 1891, Tess tells the story of a beautiful young peasant girl whose family unexpectedly learns that they are descended from one of England’s ancient, knightly families. Despite this fact, Tess’s mother and father continue to spend most of their time “down the pub,” as it were, thrusting the family’s wellbeing on young Tess’s shoulders.
Like most 19th century novels, Tess of the D’urbervilles is chock full of events and incidents, choices and conversations, people and places. To go over them all would be foolish. It is enough to say that Tess, in the course of trying to save her family’s honor, is raped in the woods by a roguish gentleman who simply cannot resist her charms. Rather than going completely downhill from here, the story goes up and down, again and again, and the reader is genuinely unsure of what’s going to happen to our dear heroine, whose delicate balance of misery and hope is so potent it’s almost unbearable to read.
Thomas Hardy is a very unusual writer. When Tess was first published in the 1890s, it was met with much dismay by its Victorian audience, who were shocked by the novel’s frank attitude about sex. In his “Explanatory Note to the First Edition,” Hardy writes:
I will just add that the story is sent out in all sincerity of purpose, as an attempt to give artistic form to a true sequence of things; and in respect of the book’s opinions and sentiments, I would ask any too genteel reader, who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels, to remember a well-worn sentence of St. Jerome’s: If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come than the truth be concealed.
I don’t know about you, but that modest little drop of defiance cements my love for Thomas Hardy. Seriously, how brave and noble of him (as a man) to tell such a sensitive, nuanced story of a woman whose life is completely ruined as a result of her being raped. In the time when this book was published, it would have been considered some fault of Tess’s own that led to her being raped—a historical fact that I had serious difficulty getting around. One of the most heartbreaking moments in the whole novel comes when 16 year-old Tess goes home and tells her mother what happened to her:
“Oh Mother, my Mother!” cried the agonized girl, turning passionately upon her parent as if her poor heart would break. “How could I be expected to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago. Why didn’t you tell me there was danger in men folk? Why didn’t you warn me? Ladies know what to fend hands against because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance o’learning in that way, and you did not help me!
Now, maybe Tess’s spirit wasn’t completely broken at that point, but mine was. For we wise readers know the ways of these classic 19th century novels, and we know better than to expect more than some terrible tragedy.
Despite its vivid misery, the novel is also full of breathtaking descriptions of the English countryside in every season and every hour of the day. Tess spends several months working on a dairy farm, and the picture Hardy paints of that happy time and the warm souls she works with were enough to make me seriously consider farm life. Similarly, before we reach the sorry end of Tess’s tale, Hardy gives us a kind of reprieve with a beautiful sequence of events that reads almost like a dream.
Tess of the D’urbervilles is a very strange and wonderful combination of heart-hardening pessimism and sweet, dashing romance. Tess Durbyfield and her surroundings will become so real and natural to you, that it will be hard to leave them when it’s over. But, as I often do after reading a classic, I felt like my life had seriously improved as a result of reading this book. Like I was a freaking better person or something. I know that sounds a little ridiculous, but just indulge me, will you? If nothing else, Tess will make you feel like you’ve learned a lot about the best and worst parts of the world and the people in it, and, really, what more could you ask for in a novel?
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Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake was a deeply pleasurable experience—akin to the most perfect evening of delicious food, strong wine and satisfying conversation. While it is also true that one can feel a little too full after reading this book, by the next morning, all will be forgiven, as you lovingly remember each delicious detail.
The Namesake is first and foremost, the story of a family: its humble beginnings and struggles, its births and deaths, its future. We begin in 1968 with Ashima, a young, pregnant woman who has recently started a new life in Cambridge, MA with Ashoke, her PhD candidate husband. They are both from Calcutta and were introduced by their respective families in an arranged marriage. While Ashoke, absorbed in his studies, remains indifferent to the complexities of American life, Ashima has a difficult time in this cold, unfamiliar place, far away from her family. She feels unbearably sad and a little frightened by the prospect of having a child in such a place, without the comfort of her mother and grandmother to get her through.
With the birth of her first son, followed by a daughter a few years later, Ashima reluctantly accepts her new surroundings and even gives into her children’s American desires for a Christmas tree, Easter eggs and junk food. As the story progresses, we come to focus on the eldest child, the namesake of his father’s literary hero, Nikolai Gogol. We watch him grow up, become a stubborn teenager, scornful of his parent’s old world ways and what he sees as their oppressive traditions. Finally, he goes away to college. And after a few years of dutiful visits home every weekend, Gogol begins the natural progression toward his own lifestyle—which is meticulously constructed to avoid his Indian-American roots. He changes his name from Gogol to Nikhil, without bothering to learn how and why his father came to love the strange and troubled Russian writer of the same name. He begins a series of relationships with women, three white and one Indian, and it is through these experiences, that our hero eventually learns to accept his past and his present.
The main outline of The Namesake’s plot, as I’ve described it, sounds rather unremarkable. And, while it’s true that Lahiri’s tale is not groundbreaking or startlingly original, it’s also true that her familiar story is written in a uniquely beautiful voice—a voice heavily influenced by the great masters of literature like Tolstoy or Dickens. When we remember that she is still such a young writer, and this is only her first novel, we can’t help but wonder what treasures her literary future holds.
Lahiri’s most potent gift as an artist is her ability to write so exquisitely about ordinary things—like cooking a meal, feeding a baby, or taking a drive on a Sunday afternoon. In the following passage, we learn how Gogol falls in love with Maxine, a woman he meets one evening at a dinner party, when he’s living in New York:
They go to darkened, humble-looking restaurants downtown where the tables are tiny, the bills huge. Almost without fail they wind up back at her parents’ place. There is always some delicious cheese or pate to snack on, always some good wine to drink. It is in her claw-footed tub that they soak together, glasses of wine, or single-malt Scotch on the floor. At night he sleeps with her in the room she grew up in, on a soft, sagging mattress, holding her body, as warm as a furnace, through the night, making love to her in a room just above the one in which Gerald and Lydia lie. On nights he has to stay late at work he simply comes over; Maxine keeps dinner waiting for him, and then they go upstairs to bed. Gerald and Lydia think nothing, in the mornings, when he and Maxine join them downstairs in the kitchen, their hair uncombed, seeking bowls of café au lait and toasted slices of French bread and jam (Lahiri, 136-137).
Like all good writers, Lahiri plays on the senses to draw you into this sumptuous description of the early, golden days of a relationship. She has an uncanny talent for attracting you with the familiar and titillating you with the sophisticated and the exotic. While reading this book, I began to long for the lifestyle she described, or, better yet, I began to wish that Jhumpa Lahiri could narrate my life, that she could cast a spell on my everyday experiences and turn them into something romantic, worthy of being written about in a novel.
Despite my wishful thinking and Lahiri’s lingering descriptions of a beautiful life, she does not shy away from the sadder aspects of our existence, the frustration and the guilt that are unshakable aspects of family life. We try to get as far away from our families as we can, to forget them, almost, and to remake ourselves in a new place. But the past is never past and a kind of panic and shame will infiltrate whatever lives we make for ourselves if we don’t face up to who we are and where we came from.
Again, many of the themes and the messages we get from Lahiri’s book are common ones. The experience of reading The Namesake, however, is entirely unique. I fell almost immediately into a comfortable rhythm with this book, and could hardly bear to put it down in those inconvenient moments where I had to do things like sleep and eat and work. I had a strange and unexpected reaction to her writing style: at least once per chapter, my eyes would fill with tears at some random moment in the narrative. The Namesake is not, in essence, a sad book. But Lahiri manages to do what every great artist should strive for: she teaches us to recognize beauty in the world, to see the elegance in making a cup of tea for yourself on a snowy afternoon, the sweetness of washing dishes with your lover after a long, lingering meal, the incredible intimacy of waking up with another human being by your side, of allowing yourself to be just that vulnerable.
Religious dogma, inspirational speakers, hallmark commercials and Hollywood movies, among other things, are always going out of their way to remind us how valuable our lives are, how fortunate we are to live every day. This advice is fine and true, of course, but it starts to sounds meaningless when put to a soundtrack or printed on card stock. In The Namesake, Lahiri conveys this essential truth with her subtle pen, and leaves almost nothing to be desired.
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I have spent the past few hours struggling to figure out the best way to talk about Haruki Murakami. I have written a dozen false starts, filled with half-hearted metaphors and clever one liners in a futile attempt to draw you in. It’s exasperating, this empty page.
I just spent two weeks immersed in the odd, peaceful universe of Murakami’s newest novel Kafka on the Shore. About half way through, I made myself slow down, suddenly reluctant to leave his world. When I finally finished the last chapter, early in the morning, over a cup of English Breakfast tea, it took me 10 minutes to get out of the chair I was sitting in and coax myself back into reality. And now I find myself in the odd position of being unable to describe how it felt to live in that world.
Someone told me recently that before becoming a novelist, Haruki Murakami used to translate American crime novels. Though none of us have been able to back this story up, it makes perfect sense in the context of his writing. Every book he writes is driven by an incredibly interesting plot. No matter how unattached to the characters you make think you are, something about the story and what happens next will keep you coming back. He’s sneaky in that way. Murakami’s prose style always strikes me as remarkably distant emotionally. He writes about terribly sad things and creates characters who have lived through all sorts of tragedy and disappointment, yet he doesn’t linger on with the specifics of how they feel. The narrator, almost invariably male, keeps his own emotions so immovably solid, that we readers tend to follow his lead. We move through the lovely, surreal landscapes he is so skilled at painting, watching the world around us with a passive mind and heart.
When I first read his work, I was rather put off by this characteristic, finding it so foreign to my own. But it turns out to be rather refreshing, even soothing, once you find yourself drawn into the story. It’s as though we actually have the opportunity to live someone else’s life for the duration of the novel. One of the reasons this works so well in Murakami’s prose, is the fact that he fills you in on the most minor details of a person’s ordinary routine. In Kafka on the Shore, we learn about every meal that our teenage hero devours–how the noodles tasted, smelled and felt, and what he drank to wash it all down. We learn how long it takes to boil a cup of tea, and how the steam rose from his mug, and where he sat to drink it. It is through these details that we find ourselves inescapably members of Murakami’s world.
Murakami has written many novels and is widely regarded in the literary world. Yet, he remains a rather mysterious fellow, knowing and serene in his author photo. Every few chapters into Kafka on the Shore, I found myself turning back to look at his photo on the jacket (something I do whenever a writer astonishes me), as if staring at it long enough would take me on a tour of his twisting imagination. Kafka on the Shore encompasses several characters, all fascinating in their own right, but focuses on a teenage runaway named Kafka Tamura. He flees his home in Tokyo after his sculptor father prohesies an Oedipal curse. This leads to a journey, which leads to the classic cast of Murakami characters: a young, pure-of-heart- truck driver, an elderly man who can talk to cats and stones, a beautiful, troubled older woman, a brilliant, cross-gendered scholar, and a spunky, precocious teenage girl.
To tell anything more about the plot would absolutely give it away, and since Murakmi has written Kafka on the Shore to read like a mystery novel, you can trust that, at the very least, you will want to know what happens next.
Strangely enough, my favorite passage in the book comes from the third or fourth page. In a Hemmingway-esque turn of prose, young Kafka explains his troubled soul:
Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Everytime you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That’s it. That’s my heart.
This is the kind of writing that kept me reading Kafka on the Shore, and keeps me coming back to Murakami’s book. The description is simple, familiar and evocative all at once—a combination I find extremely comforting. Everything about Murakmi’s work is completely unique. With the exception of his trademark character types, his plots continue to astound even the most seasoned of readers.
If nothing else, pick up Kafka on the Shore for its beguiling cover. Many a strolling shopper at the bookstore, has been drawn to the hypnotic face that graces the cover of this book. Scary, serene, omniscent, this face conveys many things, much like the novel itself; It’s hard to look away….
After three delightful months, I have finally finished Susanna Clarke’s ginormous novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Something about the antiquated black and white covers and the wonderfully plain, English font on the cover made me ache to read this book. As a long time employee of Barnes & Noble, I am frequently guilty of fondling books. Once a particular title catches my fancy, I am likely to have it near me at all times throughout the rest of my shift, so that any opportunity I have to slack off and read, it will be close by. This was the case with Jonathan Strange. I started reading it right before the start of a new semester and thus was forced to keep it next to my bed in perpetuity, to read on those quiet nights.
In a ridiculous twist of fate, Jonathan Strange entered my life on the eve of a rather tumultuous and sad time. A relationship ended, I lost my appetite, got sick, got swamped with school work and started a new job. And—to top it all off–the leaves began to fall from the trees and night has started stretching its cold fingers around our shoulders even sooner. My “quiet nights” have become somber exercises in escaping a stubborn, encroaching melancholy, and my one saving grace has been Jonathan Strange.
Perhaps the quintessential escapist novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell tells the epic story of two magicians in England in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and their struggle to rescue magic from the dusty subject of books to which it has devolved in the preceding century or so. Chock full of interesting characters and layer upon layer of stories and sub-stories, Susanna Clarke’s first novel is simply too big to summarize without doing it a grave injustice. If it is the plot you seek, get thee to Amazon.com. They’re good at summing things up in a neat little paragraph.
What I hope to convey are the places Jonathan Strange will take you.* You will trip down uneven cobblestone streets on a dark, cold day, following a regal black slave named Stephen who has been enchanted by a Fairy and has only a vague, pulling sense that something is wrong with him. You will sit in warm parlors, next to a bright fire, listening to a delightful lady named Arabella converse with her magician husband and bite your lip at the pain of seeing her, too, fall prey to the Fairy enchantment. You will stray to the scrubbier section of London in search of a street prophet named Vinculus who has a secret book written all over his body in mysterious blue ink and you will love him despite his inherent bad attitude and stinking clothes. But most importantly, you will inhabit a world where magic is real, where it is one of those remarkable realties in the world—similar to the incredible feat of a Chopin Nocturne or a Modigliani nude—people do magic. It is magic that helps England win wars, and it is magic that brings a young woman back from the dead and starts the whole fabulous mess at the center of this book.
* * * * *
The world is not a happy place to inhabit right now. Besides our own sad stories, George Bush has been re-elected, giving us all a reason to mourn. Jonathan Strange promises to pluck you from this fresh hell. At my bookstore, when I am in a hurry, I tell people that it is as if Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and J.K. Rowling had a lovely dinner together, drank some port, and came up with this story. C’mon, give yourself a break. Escapist fiction is not so bad, especially when it is smart and well-written. You’ll have plenty of time to read your JT Leroys, your Jonathan Franzens and your Dostoevskys; save them for the summer when at least you’ll have the sun to warm your cold souls, for chrissakes.
Finally, as an added incentive, a lovely new edition with a bright red cover has been released for the Holiday season. I recommend getting one of these special editions as soon as you can, before all of the collector jerks scoop them up and sell them on Ebay for 100 bucks.
* Because above all, a book should take you somewhere. When you are finished, you should feel like you have your very own mental photo album and travel story about some grand old place you’ve just visited. Sometimes you’re happy to leave because the place was weird and depressing and made you remember everything sad that’s ever happened to you, all the terrible things people do to each other because they are weak and scared and everything about the world that’s bad in general. But sometimes, a book will take you someplace remarkable, full of details you never would have dreamt of yourself. And you are sad to leave, because this place is infinitely better than the place you are actually in. Jonathan Strange will take you to a place like this. I promise.
What better way to initiate a column than with the glorious words of the man who started it all for me–Jack Kerouac. And I do mean “it all.” I first stumbled on the work of Jack Kerouac through a rather embarrassing connection. I was 14 years old and absolutely taken with Johnny Depp. I read every article I could get my hands on and plastered my bedroom walls with his picture. For those of you who don’t know already, Johnny Depp is obsessed with Jack Kerouac, and at this particular phase of the early nineties, he was name-dropping him in every interview he did. I was intrigued. I went to my local, shiny Borders and picked up the classic Penguin edition of “On the Road” with the black and white photos of Jack and Neal Cassidy fooling around on the street circa 1956.
I was a goner almost instantly. Jack has always peppered his prose with these incredibly graceful, yet informal and wonderfully colloquial expressions that never fail to kill me. Examples :
“…for to him sex was the one and only holy and important thing in life, although he had to sweat and curse to make a living and so on. ”
“…we understood each other on other levels of madness.”
It was this style of his that pulled me in. “Sweat and curse to make a living!” I love it, it’s so appropriate for what we do, no? So he got me on that level first. And then I kept reading and reading, and he kept pulling me in deeper.
Jack’s style of writing and his observations about people and life were like the natural expression of everything I had ever felt but couldn’t express up to that point. I had always felt ultrasensitive to things, shy, but obsessed with the wonderful little intracacies of people’s minds and hearts. Old men on park benches made me sad, the blue lights at the airport made me cry, they were so beautiful in the night. Until Jack, I didn’t know what to do with these feelings. They were heavy, stagnant. Jack’s writing embraced this part of life. He embodies that quality that some of us have–that feeling that everyone else is so interesting we dont have time to think about our own sad souls:
“But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn burn burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “awww!”
Why not fall in love with the world instead? That way, we dont have to deal with ourselves . Giving has always been easier, because how we can trust anyone enough to truly take?
But that’s the sad part. By falling in love with everything and everyone, it is almost the ultimate vulnerability. Your heart gets broken a thousand times over. People, places, experiences, they always end up hurting us.
I know this. Jack knows this. He drank himself into a stupor on the tragic, burning sidewalks of St. Petersburg, Florida! Florida! ick. At least St. Petersburg conjures up Dosteovsky, which Jack would have undoubtedly appreciated.
He had other wonderful books in addition to “On the Road,” you know. I dont want to neglect to mention them. Everyone knows “The Dharma Bums,” of course, but I reccomend “The Town and the City,” in which Jack tries very hard to be like his hero Thomas Wolf, and does a pretty good job, I’d say. There are all sorts of inspired passages of family life and winter evenings in New England. A big, epic saga of a sprawling family.
My favorites, however, are “The Vanity of Duluoz” and “The Subterraneans. ” “The Vanity of Duluoz” focuses on the time before “On the Road.” It starts with his childhood in Lowell and his days as a football star, and takes you right into his initiaion into the beatnik underworld of NYC in the 40s and 50s. It’s wonderful. We get to experience his first New York City impressions and all of the silly little daydreams he indulged, like “hanging around lunch carts, looking for Hemmingway heroes. ”
“The Subterraneans” takes place in San Francisco and concerns his love affair with a beautiful black woman. It is filled with adorable little indie-pop-esque lines like “Wide-eyed hugging in heaven together.” This book also has the best description of being drunk I have ever read. He describes drinking red wine and the special kind of drunk it produces, as he is pushed down a San Francisco (Frisco) hill in a shopping cart by his buddies, the stars streaming above him, the wind in his hair… you get it.
To bring in some contemporary relevance, Jack’s diaries have just been released in a beautiful hardcover edition edited by Douglas Brinkley–who I have mixed feelings about, but that’s for another post. There also continues to be a slew of new biographies about him, with a wide ranging opinion on his “issues.” One biographer’s thesis was that Jack’s latent homosexuality was the root of all of his problems.
no comment.
One more perfect quote from the end of “On the Road.”
“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and the tonight the stars will be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear?”
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