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
©Copyright 2008 Libretto,
Inc. |
