Nightstand Archive

The Reader By Bernhard Schlink

Lolita By Vladimir Nabokov

Where I'm Calling From By Raymond Carver

Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children By Dorie McCullough Lawson

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game By Michael Lewis

Plays Well With Others By Allan Gurganus

Cosmopolis By Don DeLillo

Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña
By David Hadju

Middlesex By Jeffrey Eugenides

Bel Canto By Ann Patchett

The Tin Drum By Günter Grass/
Stones From the River By Ursula Hegi

The Corrections By Jonathan Franzen

House of Sand and Fog By Andre Dubus III

A Natural History of the Senses By Diane Ackerman

Invisible Man By Ralph Ellison

Confederacy of Dunces By John Kennedy Toole

The Guns of August By Barbara W. Tuchman

Midnight’s Children By Salman Rushdie

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies By Jared Diamond

Reviews By

Alison Case

Nancy Williams Faris

Sarah Jensen

Chris Kane

Neal Kane

Jason M. Rubin


 
 

Capsule reviews of what we’ve been reading.

The Reader
By Bernhard Schlink
I don’t know about you, but it’s exceedingly rare that a book actually makes me cry. It’s even rarer for me to have this experience while reading a selection from Oprah’s Book Club. Yet this is exactly what happened with The Reader, Bernhard Schilnk’s taut, heartwrenching novel about life in postwar Germany. When 15-year-old Michael Berg falls ill while walking home from school, he encounters Hanna Schmitz, an enigmatic woman in her mid-thirties, with whom he enters into a passionate affair. Later, Hanna disappears from Michael’s life until, as a law student, he goes to witness a war crimes trial and sees Hanna in the dock, where he learns that she once served as a guard in a concentration camp. Both the revelations that arise from the trial, and the role that Michael plays in Hanna’s subsequent redemption, are inextricably linked to the awesome power that words exercise over our lives. The Reader is a spare and deceptively simple novel, but one whose exquisite poignancy lands squarely on the solar plexus, and lingers in the mind.
Neal Kane

The History of Love
By Nicole Krauss

Everything in The History of Love is true. It’s true that lonely octogenarian Leo Gursky feels connected with the world only because his upstairs neighbor, Bruno, delivers his mail sometimes and late at night knocks on the pipes to see if Leo’s still alive. (Two return knocks mean “yes”; one means “no.”) It’s true 15-year-old Alma is on a mission to find her mother a suitable new husband while simultaneously trying to convince her brother he’s not really the Messiah, even as he constructs an ark in the lot across from their Brooklyn apartment. And it’s true that somebody in Chile published a book a long time ago called The History of Love, whose main character Alma is named for, her mother is commissioned by a mysterious stranger to translate from Spanish, and through which Leo is surprisingly connected with them all. But the facts behind these truths lie just beyond reach, allowing the reader to savor the delicious shifting palimpsest of the real and the merely imagined, wished for, remembered. Born in 1974, Krauss is of a generation of postmodernists seemingly intent upon the extinction of narrative. But her deft layering of images, complex characters, and interwoven plot lines hark refreshingly back to a time when structure and craft were essential elements of literature, and renew my hope for the future of the form. Combination mystery, dysfunctional family case study, and lush poem sequence, The History of Love resolves itself in a heartbreakingly moving ending, revealing long-sought-for facts, yes, and driving us to amazon.com for more of Krauss’ books. More than anything, though, The History of Love is a paean to language and its alchemical ability to be made flesh. Leo’s and Alma’s and Charlotte’s stories symbolize our own – tales we translate and refine and tell out into the world until their truths elicit – maybe – two knocks in response. Sarah Jensen

In Cold Blood
By Truman Capote

On the heels of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Academy Award-winning turn asTruman Capote in the eponymous film, our book club decided to take on In Cold Blood, the work that inspired it. Much has been said about the complex interplay between “truth” and “fiction” in the work, which was hailed on publication as “the first non-fiction novel.” (In the ensuing years, the advent of reality TV, crime show reenactments, Fox News, and A Million Little Pieces have only served to further blur those fine-grained distinctions between veracity and invention.) More than 40 years after publication, the writing is incredibly fresh, vivid, and compelling; the book has both the urgency of a page-turner and an astonishing literary flair. In Cold Blood also endures as one of the most insightful meditations ever written on our uniquely American brand of violence. In a country where young children are allowed to witness thousands of fictional (and sometimes actual) murders, but the sight of Roseanne Barr kissing a woman on television is beyond the pale, In Cold Blood still manages to haunt – and move – the reader. In Capote’s able hands, one comes to understand that while Perry Smith and Dick Hickock were exceedingly brutal killers, they were complex characters, not cardboard cutouts. Similarly, the members of the Clutter family who perished were not plot devices: they were fully realized human beings who suffered and died horribly (as described by Capote in a nightmarish, four-page passage that is both exhaustive and excruciating). During a time when gratuitous violence litters (if not dominates) our cultural landscape, In Cold Blood accomplishes the nearly-impossible by enabling us to identify deeply and emotionally not only with the victims of a heinous crime, but also with its perpetrators. Neal Kane

broken symmetry
By Jack Ridl

Michigan poet Jack Ridl has created a wonder of a book. If, as they say, God is in the details, the selections in broken symmetry glisten with the divine. Every small item – and Jack chronicles lots of them in his poems: collections of salt and pepper shakers, Vs of geese, broken windows, a spray of violets sent from France during World War II – shines with significance. Jack’s specificity forces us to pay attention to the complexity of overlooked things, taken-for-granted things, as in his “The History of the Pencil,” reminding us of the simple tool crucial to all this writing stuff in the first place. Jack doesn’t just write about toast, but toast with jam – currant jam. On a plate not just a plate, but a chipped plate. Painted with a half-moon. At its center. In the hands of someone less masterful, less controlled, such incessant accretion of detail would amount to annoying linguistic disposophobia. But Jack guides us to look – at egg timers and piles of television sets, his gone father’s old shirt, cheese curls, the honeysuckle in the back yard – the way mathematicians view a shoreline. Measure the edge of each grain of sand along the coastline, and seemingly fixed distances become as they are: infinite. (Indeed, the poems are gently arranged around a trio of mathematic tropes: fractals, quantum theory, and differential equations.) Jack writes in the opening poem: “Only the broken reveals, gives / the universe its chance at being / interesting…” And when I finished the book and looked up from its pages, my tchotchkes and stack of newspapers and a subway token on the coffee table and the ailanthus umbrellas outside my window seemed suddenly dear, fundamental to the galaxies’ continued spinning, luminous as stars. Sarah Jensen

The Long Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora
By Michael Nesmith


Much as I like this book, it’s difficult to avoid – or resist – damning it with faint praise. So here goes: The Long Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora is the best book written by an ex-Monkee (but not the only one: both Mickey and Davy wrote memoirs designed to make a fast buck, while this is a work of fiction guaranteed to make a few really slow ones). At first glance, the line between fiction and non appears thin: the hero is a musician named Nez (as the author is known to his fans, of whom this reviewer is one). However, the object of his quest, the elusive and enigmatic Neftoon Zamora, is variously described as either male or female, actual or mythical, and, as early as page 2, “part Zuni, part Martian, and part Delta blues player [who] had come from the Great Spirit, Mars, or some place in Mississippi, thousands of years ago.” Nez learns of NZ from a friend who has a tape of him/her/it performing blues songs. Nesmith describes this sufficiently well to make me wish for a soundtrack. (In fact, Nesmith’s 1974 album The Prison is actually described as “a book with a soundtrack.” The idea is to read the story and listen to the album concurrently; when one becomes accustomed to paying attention to both sources at the same time, one hopes to experience a certain synergy. I can vouch that with the right attitude, the effort is not fruitless.) Anyway, back to this book. During his journey, Nez comes upon a woman named Neffie, who has long sandy hair. Is this Neftoon Zamora? We aren’t sure, and Neffie joins the quest. The story takes place in New Mexico, first in a canyon village, then at a desert enclave. Along the way, we meet colorful characters, go to a swinging dance, and get pulled deeper into the mystery. Unfortunately, three-quarters into the book, Nesmith takes us away from these organic and exciting environs and plunks us into the mechanized compound of a crazed billionaire. In a Monkees episode, this is when the zany montage would come on over the song. Unfortunately, as I’ve said, there is no soundtrack. And so the book, which begins with much promise, ends with little clarity or satisfaction. Still, I think it’s a worthwhile read – but then, I’m a Believer! Jason M. Rubin

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