3 posts tagged “italo calvino”

The first two books I read in November were The Best American Comics 2008 and A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley.  My reviews for those two books can be found here.  This post covers the rest of my book-related activities for the month.

BOOKS ACQUIRED:

• The Lottery and Other Stories--Shirley Jackson
• Stories in the Worst Way--Gary Lutz
• So Long, See You Tomorrow--William Maxwell
• Parade's End--Ford Madox Ford
• The Railway Children--E. Nesbit
• The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil--George Saunders
• #$@&!: The Official Lloyd Llewellyn Collection--Daniel Clowes
• Peepshow: 1950s Pin-ups in 3-D--Bunny Yeager

BOOKS READ:

Knockemstiff--Donald Ray Pollock

Donald Ray Pollock is from the real town of Knockemstiff, Ohio.  His first book is a series of 18 short stories featuring a group of interrelated characters from the town.  Most of the characters have issues.  There are alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, and down-on-their-luck losers.  Most of the individual stories are worth reading, but I came away from the book with a feeling of disappointment.  My complaint about Knockemstiff is that it didn't feel like there was any progression to what I was reading.  With the exception of the first and last stories, just about everything in this book could've been read in any order.  I usually don't have an issue with that in a short story collection, but this book featured related characters and I think it would've been more powerful if the book had been designed in a way that it told a larger story.

I don't even know what that means.  Maybe I'm just jealous of Donald Ray Pollock because I wasted a good chunk of my life trying to write a similar book about a group of interrelated losers from Ohio.  Pollock actually finished his book and it's far better than anything I could've ever come up with.  (And I just ended the previous sentence with "with".  I think that's against the rules.  And I just started a sentence with "and".  I'm pretty sure that's against the rules, too.  I actually did that one twice.  Dang.) 

What We Won't Do--Brock Clarke

One of the highlights of Brock Clarke's collection was a story called "She Loved to Cook but Not Like This".  The last line in the story was:

And since I was lonely and scared of repeating myself and sick at the thought of telling, revising, retelling this story of my life, I promised to never tell it again, and this is the last time.

Of course, Brock Clarke later went on to rewrite and expand this short story into the novel, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England.  I wish he'd taken his own advice and worked up a different story.  The novelization isn't anywhere near as good as the story he adapted it from.

My favorite story in this collection was probably "Plowing the Secondaries".  It's about two reckless brothers who drive around town plowing things with their snowplows other than snow.  "Up North" was also a highlight.  Like Glen David Gold's "The Tears of Squonk", this story deals with a town that decides to hang an elephant after a circus-related mishap.  Gold's story is the better of the two, but Clarke's has a great last line (also the last line in the collection) that really packs a punch.

Overall, I'd say that Brock Clarke is a much better short story writer than he is a novelist.  If you feel like reading some of his work, I'd recommend you start with this collection.

The Baron in the Trees--Italo Calvino

Sometimes a book's title provides a better synopsis of the book than any reviewer ever could.  This is one of those cases: The Baron in the Trees is about a baron who lives in the trees.  As a boy, the character gets into a fight with his family over having to eat snails for dinner.  He climbs up into a tree to sulk and decides to stay there.  Fortunately for him, there are a lot of trees nearby and he can climb from his tree to the others.  In this manner, he's able to move around the town and the countryside.

Years pass and the Baron stays up in the trees.  He manages to lead a full life up there.  He has a pet dog.  He reads books.  He makes friends and has adventures in the war.  He even has relationships with some of the local ladies.

This was my third Italo Calvino book.  I liked it a lot more than Invisible Cities, but not as much as If on a winter's night a traveler.

The Enchantress of Florence--Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is one of my all-time favorite books, so I thought I would give his latest a try.  I read it over the course of a week or so, and can honestly say I wasn't able to follow it very well.  I enjoyed it, but I really didn't know what was going on half the time.  I was at about page 150 before I finally figured out who the titular character was.

As best I can tell, The Enchantress of Florence is about an Italian who shows up at Akbar's imperial court with a strange story to tell.  I'm not going to go into much more detail than that because I gave/lent the book to someone and I don't want to spoil things for her.  Let's just say that the book is full of mystery, magic, four giant albinos from Switzerland, and about a hundred characters taken from the real world historical record.

This is one I'd really like to read again.  My concentration was off and it deserved better from me. 

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil--George Saunders

I read this novella on a plane trip from Seattle to Cincinnati.  It's a political satire about the residents of a tiny country named Inner Horner.  The country is so tiny that only one of its residents can be there at a time.  The rest have to wait in a containment zone in the surrounding country of Outer Horner.  An Outer Hornerite named Phil gets it into his demented little brain (which keeps falling off) that the Inner Hornerites are evil and deserve to be exterminated.  He usurps the presidency of Outer Horner and then uses his new-found powers to attack the helpless Inner Hornerites.

But wait...Outer Horner is itself entirely surrounded by a country called Greater Keller.  Will the Greater Kellerites sit back and let Phil disassemble the Inner Hornerites?  Will they let Phil's unprovoked aggression stand?  Or will they ATTACK!!?!

Oh, and the "people" in the book are made out of tin cans, ball bearings, and blinking lights.  You figure it out.

#$@&!: The Official Lloyd Llewellyn Collection--Daniel Clowes

This is just another Daniel Clowes collection.  I'm not a big fan of his Lloyd Llewellyn character, but I thought I'd buy this one anyway because it was only $8 and I'd never seen it before.  I think it's out-of-print.  I also really liked the cover art (different than the one shown here).  It features Lloyd and a woman who looks like she could have been an early prototype for the Enid character from Ghost World...if Enid had been an incredibly tall, busty gal with crooked teeth.  Very strange cover art.  As far as the stories go, they were alright.  My favorite was "Crawl, Worm!"  In that one, Lloyd lusts after a lady and she rewards his attentions by biting off his fingernail and turning him into a worm.  You know, the usual.

Peepshow: 1950s Pin-ups in 3-D--Bunny Yeager

This is really just a picture book, but I'm including it here because it's fun and I did actually read the intro (really, I did).  As the title would suggest, this book is a collection of photographs of pin-up models from the 1950s.  Each picture is printed twice and when the "reader" looks through a pair of fold-out glasses, the images appear in 3-D.  I found this strange little volume at Half Price Books while looking for books about Bettie Page.  She actually makes two appearances in Peepshow, so I'm glad I found it.  I just hope no one saw me looking in the nude photography section.

CURRENTLY READING:

• Stories in the Worst Way--Gary Lutz

I graduated from a decent college and have gone on to tackle some of the toughest novels in the English language.  I like to think I'm a relatively intelligent guy.  I like to think I'm a good reader.  Well, it turns out that I'm a lot dumber than I thought.  I read two books over the weekend and didn't understand either of them.  Both left me perplexed.  One of them was even a comic book.  Here they are: 

Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron--Daniel Clowes

Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron was my seventh Daniel Clowes graphic novel.  It's also the first one I wasn't able to follow.  As far as I can tell, it's about a man named Clay who sees his former wife in a pornographic movie.  He then goes on a quest to find her.  Of course, you can't have a quest without some trials and tribulations.  Clay gets puked on by a drunk, gets arrested and beaten by some cops, wakes up in a cult full of busty, short-haired girls, steals a van, meets some conspiracy theorists obsessed with corporate logos, acquires an orifice-less dog, earns the unwanted affections of a mutant girl who looks like a potato, accidentally kills the orifice-less dog, finds out about a little girl who writes snuff films, and is then literally torn limb from limb by a crazy man hired by the orifice-less dog's former owner.

What is all that supposed to mean?

I have no idea. 

Invisible Cities--Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities was my second Italo Calvino novel.  I'm not even sure I should call the book a "novel".  I have no idea what it was.  It's unclassifiable.  Invisible Cities basically consists of a long conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in which the explorer tells the ruler about 55 cities he's visited on his travels.  The thing is that the cities described don't seem to actually exist.  They're clearly imaginary.  Perhaps they're metaphors for something.

For example, two of my favorite cities were Euphemia and Eusapia.  The former features a thriving market where the trading of spices and cloth is supplemented by the trading of memories.  The latter features an identical copy of itself underground where the citizens go when they've died.  They're not just buried down there, though; they're propped up like puppets or mannequins.

Once again, I have to ask, "What is all that supposed to mean?"

Once again, I have to answer, "I have no idea." 

CURRENTLY READING:

• The Book of Yoga--Christina Brown
• CivilWarLand in Bad Decline--George Saunders

For Whom the Bell Tolls--Ernest Hemingway

It was never my intention to read For Whom the Bell Tolls, or any other Hemingway books, for that matter.  I read A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises years ago.  They were enjoyable books, but they left me feeling a bit let down.  This was, after all, Ernest Hemingway, one of the titans of 20th century American literature...and yet his books didn't touch me like I thought they should.

Earlier this year I went to a huge booksale and found a hardback copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls.  It was ragged and enveloped in the musty smell of basements.  There was even some turquoise mold growing on some of the pages.  I normally would stick a book like that right back on the shelf, but I noticed there were old pieces of paper sticking out of the side.  I opened the book up and found that its previous owner had decorated the inside covers with pictures and articles about the 1943 movie adaptation starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman.  There were a couple loose pictures, but most of them had been pasted into the book itself.  Some of them even folded out of the book.  Some of the pictures were in color, but most of them came out of a local newspaper trying to promote the movie's October 8th, 1943 Cincinnati premiere at the Capitol Theater.  It was just about the coolest thing I've ever found.  I dropped $2 and took the book home with me.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is about an American partisan (Cooper) who's given the strategic mission of blowing up a bridge during the Spanish Civil War.  He teams with a group of guerrilla fighters and falls in love with a girl in their charge (Bergman).  The love story is kind of stilted in places, but that didn't detract from my enjoyment of the book.  Even with all the outdoor screwing and pet names, For Whom the Bell Tolls is one of the best books about war that I've ever read.  The only one I can think of that tops it is Norman Mailer's The Naked & the Dead. 

It took me 471 stinky pages, but I finally understand all the hubbub about Ernest Hemingway.  (If you're a doubter as I was, I challenge you to read Chapter 10 of For Whom the Bell Tolls.)

If on a winter's night a traveler--Italo Calvino

Simply put, Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler is one of the most amazing books I've ever read.  This might sound like hyperbole, but I literally had butterflies in my stomach throughout much of it.  It felt like the author had sat down 25+ years ago to write a book for me to enjoy today.

(Thanks to Scott for telling me about it.)

 

 

Death and Restoration--Iain Pears

Death and Restoration is the sixth book in Iain Pears' seven book Art History Mystery series.  The series stars Flavia di Stefano, a high-ranking investigator in Rome's Art Theft Squad, and Jonathan Argyll, an art dealer and occasional professor.  Just about the same thing happens in all the Art History Mysteries: a painting goes missing and Flavia is called in to investigate.  Jonathan (who by the 6th book is Flavia's fiancé) supplements the investigation from a more academic perspective.  His research usually turns up a previously hidden secret about the missing painting or a far-reaching conspiracy of some sort involving monks, Nazis, or museum curators.  By the end, the painting is recovered, the international art community is shocked, and Flavia and Jonathan are one step closer to matrimonial bliss (or disfunction).

Death and Restoration has the couple investigating a burglary at a small Roman monastary.  There are harmless-looking old lady art thieves, egomaniacal painting restorers, hired assassins, kidnappers, gullible monks, and a strange family whose members have been janitors at the monastary for 400 years.  You know, the usual stuff.

If this kind of thing interests you, forget about Death and Restoration for awhile and start in on the first book in the series, The Raphael Affair.  I accidentally started with the seventh book and it really goofed up my reading.

Icelander--Dustin Long

"Never judge a book by its cover."  I often ignore that adage and read books solely because they look like they'd be good.  Conversely, I often skip over books because they're poorly presented...they've got cheap paper, lame cover art, or a picture of Chuck Palahniuk on the back.  I usually have pretty good success with this method.  Unfortunately, I sometimes get taken in by packaging.  That was the case with Dustin Long's Icelander.  The braintrust over at McSweeney's Rectangulars took a poorly-written, convoluted Icelandic murder mystery and gave it perhaps the most beautiful cover ever.  There's a gigantic fox overlooking a tiny cartoon town.  The fox has real silver flecks in his coat that sparkle at certain angles.  Fat snow flakes complete the scene.  The blurb on the back calls the book "Nabokovian" and compares it to The Crying of Lot 49.  Surely this is a book I'm meant to love.

Wrong.

Icelander was a mess of a book.  It could have used a real editor as opposed to the editor "character" who kept interrupting the flow of the story with his comments and useless footnotes.  The book was fun and creative in places, but as a whole it felt like Dustin Long was just throwing into the book all the tricks he'd picked up by reading other (far better) authors.  I'm not sure if this was an attempt to make his book hip or post-modern or whatever, but he failed.  Normally I'd sell a book like this back to Half Price Books.  I'm going to keep it, though; it looks wonderful on my shelf.