Category: Mike’s Likes

View the Mike’s Likes Series ||View the Raves & Reviews series || View Robert’s Roundups ||

Occasionally I repost book reports by Michael Barrett who regularly posts film reviews at Popmatters. Two more columns by Barrett will be published in March.

Alienation of non-labor

Guido Morselli‘s THE COMMUNIST
Ebook checked out of the library!

Set in 1958-59 and written in the 1960s, this novel is a tenderly observed psychological portrait refracted through the struggle of political beliefs with daily reality, therefore becoming a broader portrait of Italy’s Communist Party by an author who remained aloof from politics and the world, yet who was clearly capable of engaging with it via research and imagination. However, some of his American details are off.

The protagonist spent part of his youth in America and had a failed marriage to a rich capitalist’s daughter who symbolizes a dual-personality America: prejudice and exploitation amid beauty, enlightened social concern amid disillusion, both personalities defined by industrious drive. Since returning to Italy after the war, he’s had success as a political organizer in Italy and now been “put out to pasture” by election to Parliament, where nothing constructive is done and his prickly relations with an estranged married woman come under strain. The book ends in transit.

Most chapters consist of discussions and thoughts on the collision of theory and such matters as the inevitability of labor, so it’s very much a book of philosophy and ideas as well as calm observation of life. We could say it’s about how people construct ways to interpret their world and guide their actions, even though these constructs can prove inadequate. This book can be both an act of empathy and also perhaps a translated self-portrait of a man in midlife taking stock and vacillating in a crisis of faith. Morselli also wrote more fantastical novels, all published after his suicide. As Elizabeth McKenzie’s intro states, our knowledge of this fact unavoidably informs our reception of them.

The novel has a cameo by Alberto Moravia and mentions some of the figures mentioned in Natalia Ginzburg‘s FAMILY LEXICON , and also some of the figures mentioned in Aleshkovsky‘s NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVITCH, a Soviet “science fiction” satire told by a vulgar postwar pickpocket who got recruited for experiments in artificial insemination.

From Hungary to Wales: The Rare Bits

Antal Szerb‘s THE PENDRAGON LEGEND,
Checked out of the library, thanks to Interlibrary Loan!

Having been recently delighted by Szerb‘s JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT, I had to track down his first novel, esp. since it’s described as a fantastical thriller.

Longish but fast-moving, THE PENDRAGON LEGEND (1934) is a breathless farrago of gothic adventure-mystery-horror elements all garnished with humor and wrapped around the obscure enigma of an immortal Welsh ancestor who seeks the Philosopher’s Stone. The narrator is a callow Hungarian scholar in parody of the author who gets casually swept up in bizarre events and outsized characters. Martin Seymour-Smith calls it “a thriller sceptcially based in Rosicrucian intrigue, and is an alarming book.” It’s more light and facetious than alarming, and while it wouldn’t make you think Szerb was about to produce the profound MOONLIGHT, similarities pop up.

In both, the narrator comes under the romantic spell of brother-sister twins, although the siblings have a very different rapport in this lark from the fraught one in the latter. In both books, the narrator has entanglements with women he’s glad to be shut of and asserts that he’s not cut out for it. The afterword by translator Len Rix observes: “Both are the record of a spiritual journey, thoughtlessly begun, that ends in significant failure” (with the hero no worse for wear), told by “a fatally shallow ‘seeker’ whose blunderings bring him up against profound truths the significance of which he never quite grasps” and that the characteristic irony is “a mode of vision, in which a fiercely searching intelligence is balanced by a delight in humanity and an irrepressible playfulness.” Also, both posit a numinous mystery behind the mundane world.

Digging for obscurities thru Inter-Library Loan

Phil Stong‘s THE OTHER WORLDS: 25 MODERN STORIES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION
Michael Fessier‘s FULLY DRESSED AND IN HIS RIGHT MIND
Checked out of the library! [exhumed from the archives of a few years ago]

Novelist Phil Stong, of STATE FAIR (turned into a great Will Rogers movie and then a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical) edited a 1941 anthology of weird fiction, mostly from the pulps. It’s considered the first of its type and the first to gather pulp SF tales. Stong prefers Gernsback’s term “scientifiction.” His intro begins well and degenerates into randomness.

Its first two sections, devoted respectively to strange new ideas and fresh variants of old ones, are fantasy and SF of humorous and even facetious tone emphasizing story over cardboard characters, including entries from Theodore Sturgeon (an ancient god), Lester Del Rey (ditto, Pan), Murray Leinster (4th dimension money trick), and Henry Kuttner (time travel to Shakespeare).

Two stories are by Mindret Lord, whose claim to fame is that his wife is a daughter of classic regional writer Hamlin Garland. Ralph Milne Farley’s “The House of Ecstasy” is in the second person–you are hypnotized. One of Eando Binder’s Adam Link robot stories is serious and full of melodrama.

Very curious and interesting: “The Adaptive Ultimate” by “John Jessel” (aka Stanley G. Weinbaum), about a woman whose experimentally advanced intellect turns her into a callous monster (beware), was adapted several times on radio, TV and even a movie (SHE DEVIL), thus indicating a raw nerve.

The third section is serious horror, mostly from WEIRD TALES, and includes Kuttner’s classic “The Graveyard Rats” and two by Manly Wade Wellman, including the still provocative “Song of the Slaves”. There’s a Lovecraft, a Jean Ray, one of Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin bits of garish nonsense, and two August Derleths.

I requested this book thru ILL specifically to track down a curious tale by Michael Fessier about the narrator’s recurrent fateful meetings with an old man in a black hat. I’d just been able to acquire his 1935 novel FULLY DRESSED AND IN HIS RIGHT MIND, also thanks to ILL. Fessier’s short story is very similar to his novel.

The novel is a weird, brisk anecdote in which the narrator meets an embodiment of evil (little old man who keeps showing up to cause mischief) and embodiment of beauty (skinny-dipping water nymph), both of whom have portraits painted by an artist friend. It begins with a great first paragraph (opening sentence: “I was standing in front of the Herald and somebody fired a shot and I saw a fat man turn slowly on one heel and fall to the sidewalk.”) and a promisingly uncanny first chapter and eventually bogs down for a hundred pages or so and the end peters out, leaving our hero safe from commitment.

The style is Hemingway-esque terseness (tersity?): “I never tried to argue with Peter. He was the janitor of the apartment house and he could do you a lot of favors. He could keep you supplied with light-globes and bring you some wine he got from his brother in Sonoma County. And he could be mean as hell and rap on your door if there was a lot of talking late at night and do other things to make you uncomfortable. If he thought hospitals killed people, it was okay with me. Anything anybody wanted to think was okay with me because for all I knew they might be right.”

That’s Chapter 7, and Ch. 13 begins: “And so that’s the way things were with me. Pestered by the little old man, trying to catch the girl in the lake, and supporting an artist who painted things and threw them away. It was all very goofy. It had never happened to me before and I don’t suppose anything like it ever happened to anyone before. But that’s the way it was.”

Unnerving tales for today

Brian Evenson‘s Song for the Unraveling of the World
Asja Bakic‘s Mars
Ted Chiang‘s Exhalation and The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate
Checked out of the library!

Evenson’s horror tales often feel like variants of each other, reworking existential themes on malevolent houses, breaking into same, glimpsing some Lovecraftian evil behind the veil, obsession with mundane details or impressions, sisters, parents, hideous transformation, people without faces, murderers, the narrator or protagonist’s madness and death. Three are about shooting films.

One original and refreshing story, about a drunken woman spotting a gold-suited stranger, has a happy end, or at least different from expected. Although most are tentatively set in our world, a few are on spaceships or strange worlds. A haunting one is a puzzler about a possible brother and sister living in a strange container with two doors, one to an outside wildness and the other to darkness. One is about being transformed into a monster in a post-apocalyptic world and another a female robot wondering about herself. The experimental joke “Trigger Warnings” mocks being afraid of or disturbed by fiction.

Translated from Croatian, Bakic’s tales could be described as Euro-existential shudders with elements of SF (writers are exiled to Mars, the heroine is a clone or a robot for sexual purposes), fantasy (a writer is still expected to be productive in the afterlife), or crime (murderers), often narrated by women writers. The author says she doesn’t write about the 1990s Yugoslavian wars she witnessed as a teen, but a couple of stories feel pretty directly based on that. One non-fantasy about a neurotic writer turns out to have a completely rational explanation for its mystery, and that’s the exception. A story told by a reporter investigating a “cult” ends, like the Mars story, on a discovery of her secret powers, so a partly dreadful self-knowledge is a recurring theme.

Ted Chiang‘s stories reflect a mind analytical, metaphysical, brilliant and generous. He picks a single idea from just around the corner and works every variation of it, thoroughly and surprisingly, usually in a very “today” context. Business transactions, self-knowledge and faith are recurring elements. The stories tend toward philosophical conclusions about embracing the positive aspects of life, and this too is refreshing. One is narrated by a parrot. It’s no surprise that Chiang’s successful in the SF world, and these are exactly the type of stories that would even intrigue people who “don’t read science fiction.”

The Hugo and Nebula winner The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate puts time travel within a beguiling pastiche of Arabian Nights tales-within-tales. Hugo-winning title story is narrated by a robot scientist who doesn’t grasp that he’s within a mechanically constructed universe; he discovers entropy by dissecting his own brain. “Omphalos” is told by a devout woman scientist in a universe that proves creationism even as astronomical discoveries shake her faith anyway; in other words, proof of God’s work doesn’t necessarily prove our assumptions about it.

Another Hugo story is about raising digital AI creatures, designed to be cute, to become self-governing and how this parallels child-rearing (also the subject of a Victorian steampunk tale). The terrific final story, which would make a good TV anthology episode, posits that people have the power to access their para-selves in alternate universes through laptops that create those parallel realities. These last two stories, as well as the anecdote about a free-will-thwarting game and the long story about recording the details of your life to substitute for imperfect organic memory and how this creates a mental shift akin to the transition from oral to written culture, attend to the influence of boom-and-bust marketing on techno-development and exploitation and vice versa. Even the Arabian Nights tale shows how technology affects capitalism.

Fear, sadness, loneliness, vitality, dreams, love

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS by Natalia Ginzburg
Checked out of the library!

A magnificent act of historical reportage via fiction, Natalia Ginzburg‘s novel is one long breathless express-train of boxcar-length paragraphs cataloging an Italian family’s personal (mis)fortunes during Mussolini. There’s not a line of dialogue in the book, or rather the whole thing is indirectly reported dialogue and thoughts, repetitious and incantatory and mesmerizing as countryside passing rhythmically before the windows, capturing anthropologically and without comment the cliches in which people speak and think, as transcribed with compassion and duty by a recording angel, or perhaps the wise village gossip. Everything is reported almost passively yet vividly, from the worst events to the most trivial details, the falling of bombs and sparrows.

You can feel the connections between this novel and her great memoir FAMILY LEXICON which was devoted to the strict truth and the same commitment to repeated words and phrases by which people express themselves and live; the main differences are this fictional family isn’t Jewish (one minor Jewish character comes to the fore near the end) and that the author gets rid of the parents right away so that siblings exist in a self-determined free-fall between the limits of the world and themselves. A book of bustling life and melancholy and the comedy of fearful and self-centered comings and goings, just as thoughts go back and forth and around, with displays of valor among the flawed and telling flaws among the heroes. Wow. This is more than writing, this is understanding.

Fast is loose

THE HUNTER AND THE TRAP by Howard Fast
Thanks to Interlibrary Loan, checked out of the library!

While Howard Fast is best known as a political-historical novelist, these two odd stories are philosophical fables. The first story is so reminiscent of Orson Welles‘ THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND as to make you wonder if Welles read it, and at the very least shows how large was the legacy of Hemingway’s death in the ’60s and how they all heard the same rumors. The narrator is summoned to the arrival of a famous writer friend who’s a thinly disguised Hemingway: star novelist, heavy drinker, Spanish Civil War ambulance driver, interest in bullfighting (or matadors), big game hunter. His entourage consists of two sexually ambiguous people, including a woman called Diva. He instantly throws a huge society party, and when the party’s over he discovers he’s somehow transformed from hunter to quarry. The fact that he’s being “hunted” is greeted only as one more news story as the narrative becomes a parable of celebrity.

The second, longer tale is mostly epistolary with a drawn-out set-up about finding extraordinary children to test a theory that the next step in evolution gets strangled in the crib, as it were, by being raised by ordinary humans–not unlike my wacky theory of autism based on the mythology of Spock and Vulcan, and also not unlike certain SF stories of advanced children who achieve psychic gestalt, from John D. MacDonald‘s “A Child Is Crying” to Sturgeon‘s MORE THAN HUMAN to Wyndham‘s MIDWICH CUCKOOS. Posits that “naturally” raised children would be poly-sexual telepaths who learn to control atomic structures, as either humanity’s doom or salvation.

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Michael Barrett is a writer, librarian and critic based in San Antonio. In addition to writing film criticism for Popmatters, Rotten Tomatoes and other national publications, he has published two works of children’s fiction. You can follow his daily posts on his Facebook page (and read a long interview with him on this blog). For the last 10 years he has written a Christmas letter detailing things read and watched for each year. Periodically, his book reports from Facebook are reposted here as “Mike’s Likes.”

View the Mike’s Likes Series ||View the Raves & Reviews series || View Robert’s Roundups ||

Occasionally I repost book reports by Michael Barrett who regularly posts film reviews at Popmatters. Two more columns by Barrett will be published in March.

Two milestones of midcentury malaise

THE (INCREDIBLE) SHRINKING MAN by Richard Matheson
(INVASION OF) THE BODY SNATCHERS by Jack Finney
(E-Audiobooks checked out of the library!)

In keeping with Richard Matheson‘s mission of exploring the failures and phobias of the postwar American male chained to an expectation of suburban paterfamilias he proves unable to manage, THE SHRINKING MAN (here retitled THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN after the movie) presents a stark symbol for impotence and obsolescence, and he doesn’t neglect to mention the resulting sexual crisis. It’s a surprisingly sexual book, with desire and threat and frustration in almost every chapter in just about every wrinkle the situation could present. The movie concentrates more on the physical threats: spider (a black widow, and Scott understands his rage against it has a symbolic angle but he doesn’t quite grasp what it is), cat, etc. But those are struggles against nature while his most basic struggle is against himself.

The narrative flips back and forth between an agonizingly detailed (if not always easily picturable) odyssey of a desperate man just under one inch trying to survive in his basement (or his subconscious) and flashbacks to the journey here. Above all, it’s a psychological portrait of almost constant rage, humiliation and self-absorption that becomes increasingly pathetic and irritating as he becomes “a bellicose doll.” He understands that from his daughter’s POV, “in the actuality of pure sight, he was nothing but a horrid midget who screamed and ranted in a funny voice. ” He must be brought low b/c the implication is that even at a normal 6′ 2″ he must have been an often unhappy, demanding egotist. Matheson’s daring choice makes him unsympathetic much of the time, so that Scott can finally be dragged, hopeless, to the epiphany of the great last line.

Another title change is Jack Finney‘s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS from merely THE BODY SNATCHERS, but this 1978 revision of his 1955 novel renames the town from the fictional Santa Mira to the actual Mill Valley where Finney lived, and it updates certain details to the 1980s. He also tosses in an in-joke where the hero goes to see a good movie called TIME AND AGAIN based on his greatest novel. He has to leave without seeing the end, which might also be a nod to the fact that the property was in development forever without being made.

Looking over blogs about this book, it seems not everyone understands that two slightly different versions exist. They have the same optimistic ending, which is very different from any of the film versions, and that’s the most surprising element. Some readers are disappointed by its supposedly anti-climactic nature, but I find it fascinating.

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Book report: The man who would not be king

OLIVER VII by Antal Szerb
Checked out of the library–thanks to Interlibrary Loan!

Continuing my obsession with Hungarian writer Antal Szerb, his last and lightest novel (1943) is a Ruritanian comedy that refers to Europe’s current war only by the most indirect discretion in references to “those days” when events like this gentlemanly souffle of mistaken identities were supposedly possible. The fretful monarch stages a revolution to drive himself into exile (a plot echoed in the middle section of Herbert Read‘s THE GREEN CHILD) and in Venice gets mixed up with con artists, one of whom calls himself St. Germain, descendant of the notorious Count. They make him masquerade as himself in a scam diplomatic deal that turns real. Lots of clever dialogue and farcical situations that could serve in a play. The novel implies that the trickster St. Germain is a fateful puppet-master who knows what he’s doing from the start.

Translator Len Rix traces the strong parallels with JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT (including Venice and the hero’s quandary between two women, running away or going home) to point out that this variation comes to a more mature and forthright conclusion about accepting the destiny of one’s role with no shilly-shally or dilly-dally. Sadly, this moral decisiveness mitigated against the author’s “running away” when he had chances to leave Hungary before his death in a work camp.

Spooky tales of magic and mystery

W. Somerset Maugham‘s THE MAGICIAN (download)
ONCE AND FOREVER: THE TALES OF KENJI MIYAZAWA (translated by John Bester)
Soji Shimada’s THE TOKYO ZODIAC MURDERS and MURDER IN THE CROOKED HOUSE
(Checked out of the library!)

Maugham’s novel is a quaint melodrama, old-fashioned even for 1908, supposedly inspired by Aleister Crowley. The title figure is seen from outside by four proper Edwardians, two women and two men, who cross his path. The book’s romance is doomed and unredeemed, and the final chapter a revelation of grotesquerie after an anti-climactic battle.

The 1926 film (reviewed by me in Video Watchdog) alters the plot, providing a happy ending to function as an Expressionist link between Trilby and James Whale’s Frankenstein. (Trilby was filmed as Svengali at the same time as Frankenstein.) Wiki quotes Maugham’s self-critique decades later in which he finds the writing “lush and turgid” and thinks he was trying to imitate French decadent writing.

The Miyazawa stories, translated in 1994 by John Bester, are animal and pantheist fables (foxes are popular, also birds and frogs), supernatural anecdotes and mysterious existential parables. Some are clever and comical, with keen views on human foibles. The one about young crabs talking on the sea floor is ecstatically beautiful and gnomic. Some are realist tales, like the origin of a neighborhood wood planted by a mentally disabled boy who died young.

Soji Shimada‘s two novels concerrn a brilliant eccentric solver of locked-room murders in the early 80s. His Zodiac debut involves a three-part family massacre presented as a famous (invented) uncanny mystery of 1936 that begins with an artist’s bizarre confession of his intention to commit the murders, except he gets killed before they happen. This shows classic misdirection. As for the second book, the flummery and useless talk about the eccentric house and the walking golem puppet couldn’t fail to distract this reader by the halfway point from whom was most obviously guilty, and therefore anticipate the surprise of the third murder. Both crimes have their origin in Japan’s militarist era, with one referring to Manchuria and the other connected to war crimes.

Quick reads, because I like ’em short

Checked out of the library!

Guy de Maupassant‘s final novel, ALIEN HEARTS (“Notre Coeur,” our heart), is a work of Henry Jamesian psychological anatomy in which the love affair between a witty, intelligent, self-centered salon hostess and a witty, intelligent, self-centered dilettante is exposed as painful to the latter because the former doesn’t respond as all-consumingly as he wishes but regards him as a pleasing and flattering bibelot she’s collected and feels very fondly toward. A couple of passages imply that she’s never felt an orgasm, and also that she may be a latent lesbian who prefers the company of a female friend. Intended as the dying author’s (of syphilis) exposure of the hollow distraction of Parisian social circles, which has implicitly engulfed him and from which he files his report, with a quietly forceful cameo by a Rodin-like sculptor who steals his chapter.

The stories in Ray Russell‘s HAUNTED CASTLES:THE COMPLETE GOTHIC STORIES include the Victorian pastiche “Sardonicus” (whose characters are referred to in a couple of the other stories, such as “Comet Wine” about famous Russian composers and a Faustian pact), the 1960s New York fireside tale “Sagittarius” combining Edward Hyde and Jack the Ripper, and “Sanguinarius” narrated by Countess Bathory. They combine antiquarian conceits out of classic horror fiction with whiffs of sulfur and sadism in the tradition of cruel tales.

H. Beam Piper‘s LITTLE FUZZY (1962) supposedly explores the question of whether a race of critters has “sapience,” and it’s one long celebration of cuteness. One wonders how it would play if the aliens looked like horned toads and stank to high heaven. It’s less clear if the cardboard humans have sapience. The most characterized one is a Heinleinian Wild West prospector. The baddies are the corporation who own the planet; the deus-ex-luna saviors are the military who declare martial law and unveil courtroom evidence in the last act.

Richard Hull‘s THE MURDER OF MY AUNT (1934) is mostly the unwittingly self-revealing narration of an effete, effeminate, pretentious, dull-witted, lazy, overweight young man who decides to murder his battle-axe aunt in a Welsh village. The reader understands more than the narrator does as he works out one near-slapstick plan after another in a variety of inverted mystery indebted to the author’s inspiration in Francis Iles‘ MALICE AFORETHOUGHT. Almost feels like murder by P.G. Wodehouse. The intro quotes from Dorothy Sayers‘ rave: “The insensitive might even find it as funny as it appears to be on the surface; the sensitive will find it painful, but continuously interesting and exciting.”

“He greeted Griselda as crossly as if she were a member of his family.” Writing swiftly and succinctly with waves of controlled hysteria, Dorothy B. Hughes‘ debut novel, THE SO BLUE MARBLE, cleaves tightly to the POV of a young divorced dress designer, formerly a Hollywod star, who drops into an uncanny thriller about deadly Italian twins seeking a whatsis of legend and lore. Characters include elite society, film stars, an evil teenage sister, a radio newsman, a prof of Persian antiquities and the police. Disorienting, senseless and foreboding with moments of psychopathic violence. Our heroine proves smarter and more resourceful than she seems at first, although she keeps clinging to her love for her ex-husband, which is par for the era.

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Michael Barrett is a writer, librarian and critic based in San Antonio. In addition to writing film criticism for Popmatters, Rotten Tomatoes and other national publications, he has published two works of children’s fiction. You can follow his daily posts on his Facebook page (and read a long interview with him on this blog). For the last 10 years he has written a Christmas letter detailing things read and watched for each year. Periodically, his book reports from Facebook are reposted here as “Mike’s Likes.”

View the Mike’s Likes Series ||View the Raves & Reviews series || View Robert’s Roundups ||

Occasionally I repost book reports by Michael Barrett. Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting highlights.

These things happen, or Buzzati too is God

CATASTROPHE AND OTHER STORIES by Dino Buzzati

This collection reprints a 1965 translation and adds four “new” gentler less dark stories. They add up to a concept album on terrible events and depend more on queasy undefined anticipation and escalation than the disaster, though disasters do arrive. People are often terrified of some unclear thing or deny this terror. Several tales are basically about time and life. They all tend toward political and existential parables, like the passengers on a train who perceive everyone fleeing from the direction in which the train is heading (this mere idea is brilliant, the story needs nothing else), or the hospital in which people descend the seven floors according to their prospects for recovery (everyone’s headed down to first floor).

The story where an elite group feels compelled to slay a pathetic dragon mirrors a story where a traveling couple descend into public pillory. The one about an epidemic ends with a positive twist on political fashion. The longest story, “The Scala Scare” (one of the added tales), is about the chimera of political fear among the privileged who, put into a state of mind by the art of a clangorous contemporary opera, convince themselves a bloody revolution is occurring.

The other three new stories have different qualities. One employs disaster at the service of class revenge, one is a deal with the devil with a very concrete message (you get money at the expense of others, similar to Matheson’s “Button Button”), and one is about the beatification of saints and what becomes of them. That story ends on mystic beauty and provides a transcendent end to the book, partly by sheer contrast with all that came before. I’ll retell it, spoilers and all.

It begins: “Each of the saints has his own little house beside the shore with a balcony overlooking the sea–and that sea is God. In summer when it is hot they refresh themselves by plunging into the cool water–and that water is God.” The story tells of a neglected saint whom nobody prays to, even when he pulls a few miracles, but he makes a friend in the saint who unwittingly usurps his glory. “They went in, cut a little wood and lit the fire with some difficulty because the wood was still damp, but by blowing and blowing a bright flame sprung up at last. Then Gancillo put a pot of water over the fire for the soup, and while waiting for it to boil they both sat on the bench warming their knees and chatting away happily. Then from the chimney there issued a thin column of smoke, and that smoke too was God.”

Here’s another review of Buzzati’s Catastrophe by Ben Roth.

Book report: Two writers of brilliance and delight

Lucia Berlin‘s EVENING IN PARADISE (audiobook)
Natalia Ginzburg‘s FAMILY LEXICON (ebook)
Checked out of the library!

A couple of years ago, A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN introduced me to one of America’s best short story writers in the 2nd half of the 20th Century, the late Lucia Berlin. Apparently this collection was a “bestseller” (whatever that means) b/c the publisher followed with two more.

The brilliance continues with the stories in EVENING IN PARADISE, this time arranged by internal biographical order as inspired by Berlin’s Texas childhood, teen years in Peru, bohemian marriages with husbands addicted to jazz and/or heroine, single motherhood and alcoholism, and finally graceful retired teacher. The title story, which doesn’t tip an autobiographical hat, concerns one night at a Mexican hotel with the cast and crew of NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, and a character from that story shows up in a later story of violence and horror, calmly recounted. We certainly hope it’s mostly fiction. A later story splits first-person narrators during a vanished-child crisis between the mom and a nosy neighbor. Her best stories, which is most of them, are marked by a sane poise of comedy and pathos, of confession and containment.

The first paragraph of Natalia Ginzburg’s delightful and enthralling FAMILY LEXICON asserts that she disciplined herself only to write what she knows is true about her memories of growing up in Italy as an anti-Fascist Jewish family that survived the war (except her first husband). Each paragraph and page is funny and sharp in its catalogue of eccentric or specific details of family and everyone she knew, including famous people, with particular attention to family jokes and code phrases.

Her loudly argumentative family could be seen as typically Italian or typically Jewish and is really just typically family. They feel alive, credible, exasperating and fun, and the sad and poignant parts, also described simply, have power. So does her observation that when she thinks of Pavese, she thinks mostly of his irony and wants to cry that it’s vanished from the earth because he never put it into his books. This is among the few moments when she agrees to refer to herself, whom she largely treats as another bemusedly observed acquaintance. She describes things that happened and never wallows in emotions, yet these can be sensed. A great accomplishment.

Book report: The effect of gamma rays on social processes and OTHER MEN’S DAUGHTERS, by Richard Stern

Richard Stern’s 1973 novel seems written as a snapshot of transition to divorce culture in Harvard WASP country. Stern writes an often vivid, telegraphic kind of poetry for phrase and metaphor; seemingly random moments are in present tense. An early 40s biology prof, now in a sterile tense marriage after four children, stumbles into an affair with a (wish fulfillment?) forward, beautiful, smart, rich, often insecure woman in her 20s.

Despite occasional dips into the girlfriend’s and wife’s heads, this is the man’s POV (reflected in the title) as he’s broken out of the shell of routine and outdated assumptions, partly echoed in his work on biological processes and evolutionary change, and essentially a story sympathetic to all its participants while recognizing their flaws. They keep reading novels (Balzac’s LIKE DEATH) and seeing movies (THE BLUE ANGEL) all too appropriate as commentary, but without commentary. Only a trip to THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO evokes a conscious twinge.

The moving penultimate chapter involves his telling the two younger children about the divorce and handling their reactions. The author transcribes the events simply and exactly: “George cried. Sarah’s and Merriwether’s hands were on his head and back.”

His older sister puts on a braver front. “She turned away. ‘It isn’t as hard for me at my age, Daddy. It’s harder for George. I’m taken up with things.’
‘I love you so, Esme, dear. I’ll always be here. I’m glad it’s not that hard for you. But you may have hard moments. Mommy and I will do everything we can to help you.’

‘Thank you. I think I’d better be alone.’ The voice led to the edge of years she did not want him to see. Feeling a depth of love absolutely new in his life, Merriwether resisted lifting her into his arms.”

What’s important is to accept their signals of what they need; the expression of deep love is resisting the embrace in this case, while the boy needs it. Or should he not have resisted the impulse? “George cried”–I cried, and I’ve never been in any situation near this.

“A week later, the thought came to Merriwether that the moments holding each other on the bed were the best he and George would probably have together; it was as strong a love as two human beings could have for each other without sexuality (stronger for its absence). ‘You who are made of me, formed from–and against–me, you whom I’ve seen grow from bulge to this, you George Merriwether, whom I named and who will–please God–have me in mind years after my death, you my beloved child…’ Nothing in Merriwether’s life had come close to the love behind this unvoiced invocation.”

Despite this potpourri of raw emotions, the book refuses to indulge in tragic melodrama–in stark contrast, for example, to the marital transgressions in Updike’s first two Rabbits.

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Michael Barrett is a writer, librarian and critic based in San Antonio. In addition to writing film criticism for Popmatters, Rotten Tomatoes and other national publications, he has published two works of children’s fiction. You can follow his daily posts on his Facebook page (and read a long interview with him on this blog). For the last 10 years he has written a Christmas letter detailing things read and watched for each year. Periodically, his book reports from Facebook are reposted here as “Mike’s Likes.”