written and performed by Scott Turner Schoefield, performed at Out North. Reviewed 30 March 2008
I usually don’t like this sort of autobiographical one-person show, but Scott Schoefield is especially good at creating a rapport with the audience. The gimmick of letting the audience select the stories they want to hear from a selection of 127 possible anecdotes about being transgendered works because Schoefield uses it as a way of making the show less formal. The stories themselves come off as well rehearsed and well loved by their creator. The one I liked best was an angry piece directed at the performer’s own father, who’s threatened violence against his own daughter/son. While the performance is not at all haughty or pretentious, Schoefield’s aerial acrobatics, incorporation of Joseph Campbell references and use of ultrasound imaging to evoke the biological capriciousness of sexual determination all add the necessary polish to let the audience want to be guided through the performance wherever it will lead.
Under the Volcano
by Malcolm Lowry, with Introduction by Stephen Spender. (1947). Printed by Plume Fiction in 1965. 376 pages.
Up to page 48. Reviewed 29 March
This book is the sort of fiction I find most enthralling, where I’m drawn as a reader very deep into the minds of reflective people right in the midst of their daily experiences. The story starts with an evening in the life one M Laruelle, a failed filmmaker living in Quanahuac, a small Mexican town situated between two volcanoes. During this particular evening, he recalls the Consul from Britain, Geoffrey Fermin. As Laruelle gradually drinks himself into a maudlin state of mind, he thinks back on his childhood friendship with Fermin, and summarizes what he knows of the man’s military career, hallmarked by a disturbing act of cruelty against German prisoners of war, which in his darkest moments Fermin admits to have carried out singlehandedly: the prisoners were incinerated in the ship’s boilers.
Clearly this opening section is intended to bracket the subject matter of the latter parts of the book, which will deal with the Consul’s time in Mexico, his broken marriage to a woman named Yvonne, and most importantly with the day of his death. I especially love the way that incidental sounds and occurrences keep penetrating Laruelle’s thinking, because to me as a writer and as a human being one of the most important conflicts in life is the ongoing attempt to find a balance between awareness of the present and reflection on the past: the invisible struggle to weed out distractions while not blinding oneself to the world; the quest for the right chain of mental associations and the endurance necessary to keep hoisting the chain up even as its branchings and tangles become evermore complex and thus weighty.
I very much liked the section that deals with Fermin’s letter to Yvonne, a letter that was never sent, filled with the sort of references to booze and cabbalism made by a man determined to use his own intelligence to destroy himself. I’m less charmed by the part of the second section where a nearby conversation keeps breaking into the scenery with Joycean associations just a little too forced to feel worthy of our attention. Still, I just love reading this book so far and hope the sensation will last.
p 48-121; reviewed 12 April 2008
My favorite part of this book so far has been the section told from the point of view of Geoffrey Fermin as he’s reunited with his wife Yvonne, because it brings together everything that’s horrifying about alcohol intoxication. What’s most horrifying about booze is how much fun it is; how it takes down our internal roadblocks, allows us to treat life as a grand joke, make novel and amusing observations without a moment’s introspection; how it unburdens us from the obligations of identity that are individually so tiny but collectively are capable of pegging us down for a lifetime. In reading the scenes where Geoffrey jokes with his wife, mocks her, struggles not to take another drink and then runs off to a tavern as soon as she gets in the bath, in reading these scenes the impression is of a splendid intellect shattered. Putting the pieces back together is a work of puzzlery for the reader, but because Lowry has made Fermin a full human being, the puzzlery is worthwhile. And Lowry clearly wants us to solve the puzzle, or at least assemble enough pieces that an image beings to form out of the nebula.
In the next chapter, we get a glimpse at Fermin’s rival for Yvonne’s affections: his own half-brother, Hugh, who seems to be plagued by everything that troubles Fermin, but to a lesser degree. A disenchanted journalist, tempted by the romance of throwing his lot in with those who battle against encroaching fascism, Hugh definitely has a trace of his brother’s cynical wit, especially after the first few drinks. But he seems to be protected from going too far with his boozing, protected not by prudence so much as an insulating sense of self-satisfaction. And this smugness, of course, makes him less attractive. It’s never said outright, but Lowry is telling us that Fermin’s alcoholism is a direct result of his brutal honesty and his drive for perfection.
There’s probably always the sense that getting wasted is an act of protest, but this sense must get more and more acute in periods that seem to reek to their core with injustice. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the rise of fascism in Europe or the ongoing American occupation of Iraq, there must be something liberating in the option of intoxication because when you’re drunk or stoned you at least have the option of becoming a conscious participant in the farcical nature of the plot that unfolds all around you.
As I grow older, intoxication becomes less and less attractive to me. Oftentimes it seems as histrionic and pointless an act of escape as jumping out a high window. But even if you don’t want to participate in such acts of self-destruction, it’s important to go to the scene of the tragedy, to examine the broken glass and traces of blood, both with a forensic eye intent upon discovering what horror might drive a person to such a point, but also with an artist’s eye to reassembling the mind and soul that’s been otherwise irrevocably sacrificed.
pp. 121-230; Reviewed 19 April 2007
It’s interesting to watch people attempt to be at leisure. You’d think that being at leisure would be the easiest thing in the world, but in order to take a holiday you first have to unhook yourself from all the reins and surplices that link you to the driving forces of conflict and ambition. So it is with The Consul, Geoffrey Fermin, and his company as they set off on a day trip to the town of Tomalín in order to see a “bullthrowing” competition. (I’m still not exactly sure what bullthrowing is—it seems to be some lesser variant of bullfighting, which itself is less an escape from struggle than an amplification.)
On the way, the group visits an amusement fair. To the addled brain of the Consul, the fair is less an amusement than a gauntlet of purgatorial tortures: suspended upside down on the roller coaster ride, he feels abandoned by the world and realizes he’s lost himself so much to drink that he’d actually prefer sudden violent death to the endless spiral of inebriation; running in search of a drink, he sees his wife and brother, Hugh, enjoying themselves at a shooting gallery and seems to come away defeated in a competition for being carefree. For months Fermin has pleaded with God for another chance at his marriage to Yvonne. Now Yvonne has returned, and asks only to share a little happiness with Fermin. But the only road to happiness Fermin knows passes through the mouth of a bottle of tequila.
You can’t completely love Fermin, but you can’t help empathizing with the dilemma he’s in. As the day wears on and he keeps sneaking away for a drink, he knows that he’s heading for catastrophe. His wife has come back to him in good faith, but instead of an experience of healing, Fermin seems destined to revisit and repeat the schism that separated them the first time around; only this time he won’t have the excuse of ignorance.
On the other side of the coin we have a long section of the book devoted to the reminiscences of Hugh about his career at sea. As a young man, Hugh played guitar and wrote a handful of silly songs. He pitched his own story to several newspaper editors: he would sign aboard a merchant marine ship and take along his guitar and his prodigious intelligence and he would come back a seasoned poet in the mold of Conrad or Melville. On board the boat, he seems to be tormented by how easy the life is compared to the romanticized version of raw toil he’d had in his head. He returns to London disillusioned and prepared to be annoyed at the instant celebrity that awaits him. Imagine his disappointment to find that in his absence his story has been all but forgotten by the press in his absence.
The nuance of the book lies in the fact that Hugh and Geoffrey find themselves in such a similar predicament: they’re quite fortunate men who nevertheless cannot be happy. But what is a comic predicament for Hugh is a tragic one for Geoffrey the Consul. It seems that Hugh will always be bailed out of his misfortunes, will always have the leisure to look back and pity himself for the fact that he deserved to be a much better man than he became. He will love himself, but the world will never leave him alone. The Consul on the other hand has gone a ways further along the road to ruin, cannot even afford himself the luxury of self-pity because he can no longer recognize who he truly is. Hugh can still play at the shooting gallery while Geoffrey is suspended on a roller coaster whose operator has fallen asleep.
p. 230 to end; reviewed 4 May 2008
I rushed myself to finish reading this book over the weekend, and that may have been a mistake. While the tenth and eleventh chapters are easy to follow, the last chapter reaches a chaotic climax that demands a great deal of time and attention if you want to keep tabs of all that’s going on. The idea is that Geoffrey, after cutting himself off from his wife and half-brother, wanders back to the Farolito, a tavern and brothel which, in his own private reckoning, represents the profoundest personal ruin imaginable. By this point he has long since switched from drinking beer and tequila to mescal, a concoction which gives him visions of being swift witted and entertaining but in truth only makes him uncontrollably cruel to those who seek to love him.
At the Farolito Geoffrey does, indeed, meet his ugly demise at the hands of the same band of thugs that earlier that day attacked an Indian by the roadside whom Geoffrey refused to help. There’s something satisfactory in the way that Geoffrey’s drunken mind equates the thugs with the general thuggishness of all those who would oppress the meek and vulnerable. And there’s a lot of poetic beauty in Geoffrey’s final visions of the world collapsing around him as he dies. But the novel fails for me because we never really get the sense of the bridge between the promising youth Geoffrey once was and the drunken wreck he is now. There’s all the drama of Greek tragedy, but without having a sense of inevitability, the tragedy seems histrionic instead.
Up to page 48. Reviewed 29 March
This book is the sort of fiction I find most enthralling, where I’m drawn as a reader very deep into the minds of reflective people right in the midst of their daily experiences. The story starts with an evening in the life one M Laruelle, a failed filmmaker living in Quanahuac, a small Mexican town situated between two volcanoes. During this particular evening, he recalls the Consul from Britain, Geoffrey Fermin. As Laruelle gradually drinks himself into a maudlin state of mind, he thinks back on his childhood friendship with Fermin, and summarizes what he knows of the man’s military career, hallmarked by a disturbing act of cruelty against German prisoners of war, which in his darkest moments Fermin admits to have carried out singlehandedly: the prisoners were incinerated in the ship’s boilers.
Clearly this opening section is intended to bracket the subject matter of the latter parts of the book, which will deal with the Consul’s time in Mexico, his broken marriage to a woman named Yvonne, and most importantly with the day of his death. I especially love the way that incidental sounds and occurrences keep penetrating Laruelle’s thinking, because to me as a writer and as a human being one of the most important conflicts in life is the ongoing attempt to find a balance between awareness of the present and reflection on the past: the invisible struggle to weed out distractions while not blinding oneself to the world; the quest for the right chain of mental associations and the endurance necessary to keep hoisting the chain up even as its branchings and tangles become evermore complex and thus weighty.
I very much liked the section that deals with Fermin’s letter to Yvonne, a letter that was never sent, filled with the sort of references to booze and cabbalism made by a man determined to use his own intelligence to destroy himself. I’m less charmed by the part of the second section where a nearby conversation keeps breaking into the scenery with Joycean associations just a little too forced to feel worthy of our attention. Still, I just love reading this book so far and hope the sensation will last.
p 48-121; reviewed 12 April 2008
My favorite part of this book so far has been the section told from the point of view of Geoffrey Fermin as he’s reunited with his wife Yvonne, because it brings together everything that’s horrifying about alcohol intoxication. What’s most horrifying about booze is how much fun it is; how it takes down our internal roadblocks, allows us to treat life as a grand joke, make novel and amusing observations without a moment’s introspection; how it unburdens us from the obligations of identity that are individually so tiny but collectively are capable of pegging us down for a lifetime. In reading the scenes where Geoffrey jokes with his wife, mocks her, struggles not to take another drink and then runs off to a tavern as soon as she gets in the bath, in reading these scenes the impression is of a splendid intellect shattered. Putting the pieces back together is a work of puzzlery for the reader, but because Lowry has made Fermin a full human being, the puzzlery is worthwhile. And Lowry clearly wants us to solve the puzzle, or at least assemble enough pieces that an image beings to form out of the nebula.
In the next chapter, we get a glimpse at Fermin’s rival for Yvonne’s affections: his own half-brother, Hugh, who seems to be plagued by everything that troubles Fermin, but to a lesser degree. A disenchanted journalist, tempted by the romance of throwing his lot in with those who battle against encroaching fascism, Hugh definitely has a trace of his brother’s cynical wit, especially after the first few drinks. But he seems to be protected from going too far with his boozing, protected not by prudence so much as an insulating sense of self-satisfaction. And this smugness, of course, makes him less attractive. It’s never said outright, but Lowry is telling us that Fermin’s alcoholism is a direct result of his brutal honesty and his drive for perfection.
There’s probably always the sense that getting wasted is an act of protest, but this sense must get more and more acute in periods that seem to reek to their core with injustice. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the rise of fascism in Europe or the ongoing American occupation of Iraq, there must be something liberating in the option of intoxication because when you’re drunk or stoned you at least have the option of becoming a conscious participant in the farcical nature of the plot that unfolds all around you.
As I grow older, intoxication becomes less and less attractive to me. Oftentimes it seems as histrionic and pointless an act of escape as jumping out a high window. But even if you don’t want to participate in such acts of self-destruction, it’s important to go to the scene of the tragedy, to examine the broken glass and traces of blood, both with a forensic eye intent upon discovering what horror might drive a person to such a point, but also with an artist’s eye to reassembling the mind and soul that’s been otherwise irrevocably sacrificed.
pp. 121-230; Reviewed 19 April 2007
It’s interesting to watch people attempt to be at leisure. You’d think that being at leisure would be the easiest thing in the world, but in order to take a holiday you first have to unhook yourself from all the reins and surplices that link you to the driving forces of conflict and ambition. So it is with The Consul, Geoffrey Fermin, and his company as they set off on a day trip to the town of Tomalín in order to see a “bullthrowing” competition. (I’m still not exactly sure what bullthrowing is—it seems to be some lesser variant of bullfighting, which itself is less an escape from struggle than an amplification.)
On the way, the group visits an amusement fair. To the addled brain of the Consul, the fair is less an amusement than a gauntlet of purgatorial tortures: suspended upside down on the roller coaster ride, he feels abandoned by the world and realizes he’s lost himself so much to drink that he’d actually prefer sudden violent death to the endless spiral of inebriation; running in search of a drink, he sees his wife and brother, Hugh, enjoying themselves at a shooting gallery and seems to come away defeated in a competition for being carefree. For months Fermin has pleaded with God for another chance at his marriage to Yvonne. Now Yvonne has returned, and asks only to share a little happiness with Fermin. But the only road to happiness Fermin knows passes through the mouth of a bottle of tequila.
You can’t completely love Fermin, but you can’t help empathizing with the dilemma he’s in. As the day wears on and he keeps sneaking away for a drink, he knows that he’s heading for catastrophe. His wife has come back to him in good faith, but instead of an experience of healing, Fermin seems destined to revisit and repeat the schism that separated them the first time around; only this time he won’t have the excuse of ignorance.
On the other side of the coin we have a long section of the book devoted to the reminiscences of Hugh about his career at sea. As a young man, Hugh played guitar and wrote a handful of silly songs. He pitched his own story to several newspaper editors: he would sign aboard a merchant marine ship and take along his guitar and his prodigious intelligence and he would come back a seasoned poet in the mold of Conrad or Melville. On board the boat, he seems to be tormented by how easy the life is compared to the romanticized version of raw toil he’d had in his head. He returns to London disillusioned and prepared to be annoyed at the instant celebrity that awaits him. Imagine his disappointment to find that in his absence his story has been all but forgotten by the press in his absence.
The nuance of the book lies in the fact that Hugh and Geoffrey find themselves in such a similar predicament: they’re quite fortunate men who nevertheless cannot be happy. But what is a comic predicament for Hugh is a tragic one for Geoffrey the Consul. It seems that Hugh will always be bailed out of his misfortunes, will always have the leisure to look back and pity himself for the fact that he deserved to be a much better man than he became. He will love himself, but the world will never leave him alone. The Consul on the other hand has gone a ways further along the road to ruin, cannot even afford himself the luxury of self-pity because he can no longer recognize who he truly is. Hugh can still play at the shooting gallery while Geoffrey is suspended on a roller coaster whose operator has fallen asleep.
p. 230 to end; reviewed 4 May 2008
I rushed myself to finish reading this book over the weekend, and that may have been a mistake. While the tenth and eleventh chapters are easy to follow, the last chapter reaches a chaotic climax that demands a great deal of time and attention if you want to keep tabs of all that’s going on. The idea is that Geoffrey, after cutting himself off from his wife and half-brother, wanders back to the Farolito, a tavern and brothel which, in his own private reckoning, represents the profoundest personal ruin imaginable. By this point he has long since switched from drinking beer and tequila to mescal, a concoction which gives him visions of being swift witted and entertaining but in truth only makes him uncontrollably cruel to those who seek to love him.
At the Farolito Geoffrey does, indeed, meet his ugly demise at the hands of the same band of thugs that earlier that day attacked an Indian by the roadside whom Geoffrey refused to help. There’s something satisfactory in the way that Geoffrey’s drunken mind equates the thugs with the general thuggishness of all those who would oppress the meek and vulnerable. And there’s a lot of poetic beauty in Geoffrey’s final visions of the world collapsing around him as he dies. But the novel fails for me because we never really get the sense of the bridge between the promising youth Geoffrey once was and the drunken wreck he is now. There’s all the drama of Greek tragedy, but without having a sense of inevitability, the tragedy seems histrionic instead.
Gentlemen of the Road
by Michael Chabon. (2007) Published by Del Rey. 204 pages.
Up to page 107. Reviewed 15 March 2008
Reading Michael Chabon’s account of an uprising in the Eastern European kingdom of Khazaria is like going back to the greatest games of pretend I used to play with my friends in childhood. I don’t know if it’s true of everyone, but my friend Duncan and I used to be shameless borrowers of themes and ideas, taking stories from books, tv and comics and reenacting them with action figures or in drawings or with toy soldiers or even just making up stories. Play was a means of bridging gaps through time and space and trying to explore events real and fictional that we were curious about.
The kingdom of Khazaria was an actual place, a Jewish kingdom located in the middle of Eastern Europe. I first learned of it reading Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, Volume 3, (I highly recommend Gonick's whole series) and it fascinated me because it went so much against the stereotype of European Jews as a permanently displaced people. Michael Chabon is also interested in this aspect of the story and in his book he reminds us of the fact that the ideas of Judaism traveled far and wide during the Dark Ages; the main characters are Zelikman, a Jewish physician from the Frankish kingdoms, and Amram, an Abyssinian Jew on an apparently hopeless quest to find his lost daughter.
What’s fun about this novel? The much-celebrated use of lush vocabulary (fleam, mahout, affined); the sense of taking a visit to an intersection of the great Eastern cultures that actually thrived during the so called “Dark” Ages, which were a time of darkness and squalor mostly from the perspective of Western Europe; the chance to see Chabon flirt with thoughts of today’s cultural wars in the Middle East by drawing a bloody conflict for the fate of Khazaria where the labels of race and creed are all familiar but the affiliations are drastically different; and the chance to see how Chabon, who’s very good at “serious” fiction, takes on a setting that’s Tolkeinesque.
It would be more fun if the characters were a bit richer. Zelikman and Amram are basically nice guys, each with their own troubles and idiosyncrasies, but even halfway through the book I’m sure that neither of them will draw me in enough to inspire the sort of love-hate relationship I had with Grady from The Wonder Boys.
Page 107 to end; reviewed March 22, 2008
107 to end.
At the end of this book Chabon writes a short afterword in which he touches on what should already be blindingly obvious to everybody who’s familiar with his other work: that Gentlemen of the Road is very different from other things he’s written. Any time an author has to go to this much length to explain a supposedly bold artistic choice, you have to wonder if the motive is to vent all the lingering insecurity. In his afterword, Chabon tells us that we might be surprised that he’s breaking the rules; he usually writes New Yorker type fiction about contemporary conflicts and anxieties, and now he’s writing an adventure story. Having loved Wonder Boys, I know that I started reading this book with a sense of excitement. It seems natural that a writer like Chabon should try to expand his horizons, should take the skills he gained in describing more familiar territory and see how they transfer to settings more remote and exotic.
But when a writer enters a new genre, he or she should have something to contribute. Chabon seems to assume that because he’s writing about swordfights and troop movements, he no longer has to live up to the standards set in his previous books. Gentlemen of the Road borrows heavily from the clichés of fantasy writing and historical fiction, and does a major disservice to both genres by never partaking in the sort of overindulgence of the imagination that both genres allow. By taking Khazaria as his subject, Chabon has chosen a distinctive world to set his story in; one hopes he could make it into his own Hogwarts, his own Middle Earth, his own Narnia. But Khazaria ends up being just a piece of stock historical scenery, as though Chabon is saying, “Did you see the movie Gladiator? Just imagine the whole thing transposed a little to the east and you’ve got it.”
By the end of this book the narrative keeps making big jumps in time, as though he’s eager to get away from the whole situation. The sentences get long and muddled. Chabon seems to want to use elephants as a symbol for something, but it’s never clear what. The first chapters of this book were well written and fun to read, but by the end I was just thinking that if Chabon didn’t have anything fresh to offer with this book, at least he had the courtesy to make it short.
Up to page 107. Reviewed 15 March 2008
Reading Michael Chabon’s account of an uprising in the Eastern European kingdom of Khazaria is like going back to the greatest games of pretend I used to play with my friends in childhood. I don’t know if it’s true of everyone, but my friend Duncan and I used to be shameless borrowers of themes and ideas, taking stories from books, tv and comics and reenacting them with action figures or in drawings or with toy soldiers or even just making up stories. Play was a means of bridging gaps through time and space and trying to explore events real and fictional that we were curious about.
The kingdom of Khazaria was an actual place, a Jewish kingdom located in the middle of Eastern Europe. I first learned of it reading Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, Volume 3, (I highly recommend Gonick's whole series) and it fascinated me because it went so much against the stereotype of European Jews as a permanently displaced people. Michael Chabon is also interested in this aspect of the story and in his book he reminds us of the fact that the ideas of Judaism traveled far and wide during the Dark Ages; the main characters are Zelikman, a Jewish physician from the Frankish kingdoms, and Amram, an Abyssinian Jew on an apparently hopeless quest to find his lost daughter.
What’s fun about this novel? The much-celebrated use of lush vocabulary (fleam, mahout, affined); the sense of taking a visit to an intersection of the great Eastern cultures that actually thrived during the so called “Dark” Ages, which were a time of darkness and squalor mostly from the perspective of Western Europe; the chance to see Chabon flirt with thoughts of today’s cultural wars in the Middle East by drawing a bloody conflict for the fate of Khazaria where the labels of race and creed are all familiar but the affiliations are drastically different; and the chance to see how Chabon, who’s very good at “serious” fiction, takes on a setting that’s Tolkeinesque.
It would be more fun if the characters were a bit richer. Zelikman and Amram are basically nice guys, each with their own troubles and idiosyncrasies, but even halfway through the book I’m sure that neither of them will draw me in enough to inspire the sort of love-hate relationship I had with Grady from The Wonder Boys.
Page 107 to end; reviewed March 22, 2008
107 to end.
At the end of this book Chabon writes a short afterword in which he touches on what should already be blindingly obvious to everybody who’s familiar with his other work: that Gentlemen of the Road is very different from other things he’s written. Any time an author has to go to this much length to explain a supposedly bold artistic choice, you have to wonder if the motive is to vent all the lingering insecurity. In his afterword, Chabon tells us that we might be surprised that he’s breaking the rules; he usually writes New Yorker type fiction about contemporary conflicts and anxieties, and now he’s writing an adventure story. Having loved Wonder Boys, I know that I started reading this book with a sense of excitement. It seems natural that a writer like Chabon should try to expand his horizons, should take the skills he gained in describing more familiar territory and see how they transfer to settings more remote and exotic.
But when a writer enters a new genre, he or she should have something to contribute. Chabon seems to assume that because he’s writing about swordfights and troop movements, he no longer has to live up to the standards set in his previous books. Gentlemen of the Road borrows heavily from the clichés of fantasy writing and historical fiction, and does a major disservice to both genres by never partaking in the sort of overindulgence of the imagination that both genres allow. By taking Khazaria as his subject, Chabon has chosen a distinctive world to set his story in; one hopes he could make it into his own Hogwarts, his own Middle Earth, his own Narnia. But Khazaria ends up being just a piece of stock historical scenery, as though Chabon is saying, “Did you see the movie Gladiator? Just imagine the whole thing transposed a little to the east and you’ve got it.”
By the end of this book the narrative keeps making big jumps in time, as though he’s eager to get away from the whole situation. The sentences get long and muddled. Chabon seems to want to use elephants as a symbol for something, but it’s never clear what. The first chapters of this book were well written and fun to read, but by the end I was just thinking that if Chabon didn’t have anything fresh to offer with this book, at least he had the courtesy to make it short.
I Saw Esau, the Schoolchild’s Pocket Book
edited by Iona & Peter Opie, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. (1992) Published by Candlewick Press. 160 pages.
There’s nothing in this book of taunts, chants and schoolyard riddles that will make you pause very long and ponder the meaning of life, Nor do these poems have the sometimes fantastical scope that you’ll get from a more “legitimate” book of nursery rhymes. But this book is a lot of fun because the editors have no compunction about filling their book with the silliness and capriciousness of true childhood. And Maurice Sendak’s illustrations give you a sense that spirit of this book, if not some of the rhymes themselves, reaches back beyond all the finery of the renaissance to the gritty and grubby world of the dark ages.
There’s nothing in this book of taunts, chants and schoolyard riddles that will make you pause very long and ponder the meaning of life, Nor do these poems have the sometimes fantastical scope that you’ll get from a more “legitimate” book of nursery rhymes. But this book is a lot of fun because the editors have no compunction about filling their book with the silliness and capriciousness of true childhood. And Maurice Sendak’s illustrations give you a sense that spirit of this book, if not some of the rhymes themselves, reaches back beyond all the finery of the renaissance to the gritty and grubby world of the dark ages.
Tishomingo Blues
by Elmore Leonard. (2002) Published by William Morrow. 308 pages.
Compared to Out of Sight, this book is a little bit lackluster and even phony. The whole idea of mixing up a southern mob thriller with a civil war reenactment seems too pat, a way to fill up a few paragraphs and chapters with trivia about archaic weaponry and bivouac sleeping arrangements. Nowhere is this more true than in the interminable passages where policeman John Rau drones on interminably about how best to prepare salt pork.
Still, in the last few chapters, when the inevitable stand off finally comes to pass, it becomes apparent that Elmore Leonard really is making some points here, especially about the way men compare themselves to one another. As is often the case, he creates a hierarchy based on the concept of “cool,” and the consequence of being uncool is typically death. Coolness is more than simply an ability to be unfazed by violence. The gangster Robert Taylor is able to outcool his boss Caesar Germano simply because Taylor forms a rapport with Germano’s henchmen, jokes with them, treats them with respect, and uses imagination in finding them new assignments and missions. That’s another aspect of “cool” that’s at play here, the concept of something being “cool” in the sense of fascinating. Robert is a dangerous character, but he also understands that behind all the darkness and danger of the world he’s chosen, there’s still the cops-and-robber appeal to the boyish mind. Interestingly, Robert develops a man-crush on the high-diver Dennis Lenahan, who doesn’t have any sort of criminal past but has chosen in his own way to structure his life around facing death.
Tishomingo Blues was an interesting diversion, but I came away feeling my time would have been better spent elsewhere.
Compared to Out of Sight, this book is a little bit lackluster and even phony. The whole idea of mixing up a southern mob thriller with a civil war reenactment seems too pat, a way to fill up a few paragraphs and chapters with trivia about archaic weaponry and bivouac sleeping arrangements. Nowhere is this more true than in the interminable passages where policeman John Rau drones on interminably about how best to prepare salt pork.
Still, in the last few chapters, when the inevitable stand off finally comes to pass, it becomes apparent that Elmore Leonard really is making some points here, especially about the way men compare themselves to one another. As is often the case, he creates a hierarchy based on the concept of “cool,” and the consequence of being uncool is typically death. Coolness is more than simply an ability to be unfazed by violence. The gangster Robert Taylor is able to outcool his boss Caesar Germano simply because Taylor forms a rapport with Germano’s henchmen, jokes with them, treats them with respect, and uses imagination in finding them new assignments and missions. That’s another aspect of “cool” that’s at play here, the concept of something being “cool” in the sense of fascinating. Robert is a dangerous character, but he also understands that behind all the darkness and danger of the world he’s chosen, there’s still the cops-and-robber appeal to the boyish mind. Interestingly, Robert develops a man-crush on the high-diver Dennis Lenahan, who doesn’t have any sort of criminal past but has chosen in his own way to structure his life around facing death.
Tishomingo Blues was an interesting diversion, but I came away feeling my time would have been better spent elsewhere.
Tales from Firozsha Baag
by Rohinton Mistry (first prineted 1987. This edition first published 2002) Published by Penguin Books. 250 pages. Reviewed 1 March 2008
Rohinton Mistry is preoccupied with suffering. At the end of this book—a collection of linked short stories that develop a novel’s momentum and scope over time—the character Kersi Boyce grows frustrated with his lack of knowledge when it comes to the trees of Canada, where he has made his new home. He vows to purchase a guide to trees so that next autumn when the leaves fall he will be able to recognize than just maple leaves.
In a similar way, by reading the stories of the dwellers of Firozsha Baag (an apartment complex housing members of Bombay’s Parsi community) we get a glimpse of what a field guide to suffering might be like. We see the controlled, redemptive suffering of Daulat Mirza as she bids farewell to her much loved husband; we see the tortured, adolescent sufferings of Jehangir Bulsara as we strives to understand his own sexuality and develop his abundant intellect in the most adverse of conditions; we see the sufferings that arise from pride and selfishness as the Bomans seek to evict the paying guests they’ve taken into their homes; we see the righteous suffering Percy Boyce who chooses to champion the interests of India’s indigent poor; and we see the suffering of the uprooted Kersi, who has to look back on all his memories of Bombay and try to find some sense in it.
I cannot recommend this book enough. The humor is wicked, the subject matter is gutsy, the thoughts are intricate and the characters engaging. In the course of these stories we see Mistry systematically gathering together all the ingredients that will eventually become central to his later novels Fine Balance and Family Matters.
Rohinton Mistry is preoccupied with suffering. At the end of this book—a collection of linked short stories that develop a novel’s momentum and scope over time—the character Kersi Boyce grows frustrated with his lack of knowledge when it comes to the trees of Canada, where he has made his new home. He vows to purchase a guide to trees so that next autumn when the leaves fall he will be able to recognize than just maple leaves.
In a similar way, by reading the stories of the dwellers of Firozsha Baag (an apartment complex housing members of Bombay’s Parsi community) we get a glimpse of what a field guide to suffering might be like. We see the controlled, redemptive suffering of Daulat Mirza as she bids farewell to her much loved husband; we see the tortured, adolescent sufferings of Jehangir Bulsara as we strives to understand his own sexuality and develop his abundant intellect in the most adverse of conditions; we see the sufferings that arise from pride and selfishness as the Bomans seek to evict the paying guests they’ve taken into their homes; we see the righteous suffering Percy Boyce who chooses to champion the interests of India’s indigent poor; and we see the suffering of the uprooted Kersi, who has to look back on all his memories of Bombay and try to find some sense in it.
I cannot recommend this book enough. The humor is wicked, the subject matter is gutsy, the thoughts are intricate and the characters engaging. In the course of these stories we see Mistry systematically gathering together all the ingredients that will eventually become central to his later novels Fine Balance and Family Matters.
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