Archive for the ‘Book Reviews’ Category
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Paris, Je T’Aime, Mais…
[ Click to read the original English version of this article]
Parfois, être un Américain à Paris semble le plus grand cliché du monde. J’habite ici depuis sept mois et je tombe encore en extase devant les parcs, les marchés, le fromage (mon Dieu, le fromage !). Je me plains de la bureaucratie comme si tout bureaucrate français ne visait qu’à me persécuter personnellement, et je fais mes pèlerinages à Hemingway et aux lieux fréquentés par (Henry) Miller. On dirait que chaque grand Américain a eu une expérience parisienne de quelque sorte (voir le livre et la vidéo « Barbie : un Conte de fée de mode », surtout si vous projetez de déménager à Paris avec un enfant de presque quatre ans). Des fois, ça suffit pour me donner envie de me mettre le doigt dans l’œil, sauf qu’alors je ne pourrais pas regarder passer les gens à mon café préféré.
Le seul lieu commun qui dépasse celui d’être un Américain à Paris est de prendre cela comme sujet d’essai. Mais, comme le prouve Jorge Luis Borges, le fait de répéter les contes peut les rendre plus convaincants. Avec cette idée, j’ai téléchargé mon premier livre électronique sur le Kindle de mon mari pour lire Paris, Je T’aime, Mais Tu Me Fiches Le Cafard par Rosencrans Baldwin. C’est l’histoire d’un Américain qui passe un an et demi à travailler dans une agence de publicité aux Champs-Elysées.
Paris, I Love You But…
Posted on: August 10, 2012
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Rosencrans Baldwin: Paris, I Love You But…
[Click here to read this article in French]
Sometimes being an American in Paris feels like the biggest cliché in the world. I’ve lived here seven months and I still swoon over the parks, the markets, the cheese (my God, the cheese). I complain about the bureaucracy as if each French bureaucrat were out to persecute me personally and I make my pilgrimages to Hemingway and Miller’s former haunts. Seemingly, every great American has had a Parisian experience of some sort (see the book and video “Barbie: A Fashion Fairytale,” particularly if you plan to move to Paris with an almost-four-year-old). It’s enough to make me want to poke myself in the eye some days, except then I wouldn’t be able to people watch at my favorite café.
The only cliché that seems to top being an American in Paris is writing about being an American in Paris. But, as Jorge Luis Borges proves, the retelling of stories can make them compelling. With this in mind, I downloaded my first e-book on my husband’s Kindle to read Rosencrans Baldwin’s Paris, I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down, the story of an American’s year and a half working at an ad agency on the Champs Élysées.
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Rajesh Parameswaran, I Am An Executioner
Hyphenated-American fiction writers often face an unfair conundrum. If they focus on race or ethnicity, they risk being pigeonholed or fetishized or deemed spokespeople for their racial or ethnic group. If they avoid these topics, they risk charges of cultural treason. In his dark, imaginative, and engrossing debut short story collection, Yale Law graduate Rajesh Parameswaran splits the difference: embracing his Indian heritage yet transcending that heritage with universal themes of love and loss.
To be sure, I Am An Executioner has plenty of Indian culture. There are arranged marriages, culture and caste clashes, saris and chappels, and mouthwatering meals of chutney, samosas, and okra. The narrator of one story is a tiger; another is an elephant. Yet not all of the stories star Indian or Indian-American characters. And even when they do, Parameswaran seems eager to subvert cultural clichés. In the title story, the narrator, never ethnically identified, speaks in what seems like a parody of Indian English: “Normally in the life, people always marvel how I am maintaining cheerful demeanors.” In another story, the hapless hero is an unemployed computer salesman who pretends to be a doctor –that stereotypical Brahmin profession – with disastrous results. In “Demons,” an Indian-American woman tells a neighbor that her dead husband on her living room floor is doing yoga, saying: “That is, you know, one of the things we do in India.” And the gullible gringo swallows the story.
- In: Book Reviews | Books | Music
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Rick Moody, On Celestial Music
There’s a certain ebullience to Rick Moody’s new essay collection On Celestial Music, a compulsion to keep talking, what Moody himself calls an “inability to stop trying to explain this imprinting, this mark that music has made on me.” This sentiment may bring back all the nights you stayed up with a friend, putting songs on the speakers one after another to keep the party going until the proverbial break of dawn when everyone is spent and sub-verbal. Apparently, the prolific novelist Moody, still best known as the author of The Ice Storm, is one of us—not a rarified music critic but a music nerd who’s parlayed his chops as an A-list fiction writer into a chance to go semi-pro. Not a bad hustle. Fortunately, his critical substance complements his prose chops rather than imparting the sense that he’s out of his depth. In fact, Moody claims more than an incidental relationship between his skills and his subject:
“There is a link, I mean to suggest, between literary writing and music—a very specific link, a link of great relevance, which finds itself in the fact that literary writing is an aural phenomenon, though it appears on the page. The origin of literature is in the oral tradition, in what is spoken. That is, literature that avoids its sonic register does so at its peril. Literature that never lived in someone’s mouth, or someone’s ear, is desiccated literature.”
To someone from the world of poetry, which can feel like the neglected sibling to our favored brother Narrative, this declaration feels like a welcome mat. Between reading Stein or inheriting the modernist one-two punch of Pound’s suggestion that poems are more a musical composition than a literary art and Zukofsky’s more succinct “lower limit speech / upper limit music”—and an arena full of poet-critics carrying their torch—Moody’s statement feels like an familiar and welcome turn. Maybe poetry’s focus on musicality and aurality over the lauded glories of finely hewn story and character development hasn’t been for nothing. Maybe mom and dad will give us the keys to the car that bro outgrew, etc.
- In: Book Reviews | Books | Food
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- Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA
One of my favorite places to eat as a kid was a Mexican family restaurant off the Saw Mill River Parkway, 35 miles north of Manhattan. Since then, I’ve eaten Mexican food across the country: tacos in Brooklyn, Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Denver, mission-style burritos in San Francisco, enchiladas at the 24-hour San Antonio landmark Mi Tierra, and nearly everything on the menu at Tacos El Pueblito in Nebraska City, where local cuisine also includes fried gizzards and runzas (American empanadas that taste more like Hot Pockets). I also try my best to cook Mexican-style food and have picked up a few tricks: steeping red onions in red wine vinegar, marinating fish in lime and cilantro, slow-cooking pork for carnitas, and after slicing jalapeño or habanero peppers, not touching my eyes or my private parts.
I’m hardly the only gringo with these tastes. A new book, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America reveals that salsa has displaced ketchup as the America’s top selling condiment, nachos are the third largest concession food after popcorn and soda, and the U.S. is the world’s largest consumer of tequila. And in case anyone thinks the taco truck is a hipster invention, in 1901 a L.A. police chief called the popular tamale wagons “a refuge for drunks who seeks the streets when the saloons are closed for the night.”
Taco USA tracks the tremendous popularity of Mexican cuisine and its spin-offs, including Tex-Mex, Cal-Mex, and West-Mex, which feature a bastardized version of Tater Tots. Author Gustavo Arellano (who writes the syndicated weekly column ¡Ask a Mexican!) offers a lively and entertaining gastronomical and historical tour, equal parts research, reportage, and riffs. While it certainly whets the reader’s appetite, Taco USA also aims at history buffs, and anyone intrigued by the paradoxical, parasitic, and symbiotic relationship between America and Mexico. Beneath its celebration of food, the book critiques culinary capitalism in a tale tinged with irony and prejudice.
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Rick Bass, In My Home There is No More Sorrow
Consider your immediate associations with the word Rwanda. The image of Don Cheadle’s face from Hotel Rwanda may flash in your mind, and those from a generation older than I may even remember actual news stories that relate to Rwanda’s troubled history or Philip Gourevitch’s masterful We Are Here To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. As in many African nations, Rwanda’s post-colonial period has been plagued by revolts, massacres and civil war, specifically the ethnic majority Hutus dominating the Tutsis, the former comprising 85% of the country’s 11 million population. In his new book, bundled in the new issue of McSweeney’s, prolific fiction and nonfiction writer and activist Rick Bass revisits Rwanda’s history as he contemplates its present and future.
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Adam Levin, Hot Pink
A recent New Yorker article about good bad books asks why anyone would choose to read pulp instead over something intellectually stimulating (the illustration shows a man hiding a Stephen King novel inside the cover of War and Peace). The article makes a valid point. You don’t want to read Shakespeare all the time, and if you do, you’re probably a very boring person (consider how watching nothing but Godard films could become tiresome; you need a Farrelly Brothers every now and again). So while ‘genre novels’ may be considered formulaic and sometimes cheesy, they can be good for an overstimulated mind to take a break. What the article doesn’t consider, however, is the middle-ground. Here’s where Adam Levin’s short story collection comes into play.
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Roberto Bolaño, The Secret of Evil
Dead men tell no tales, unless they happen to be named Roberto Bolaño. Since the relentlessly prolific Chilean writer died in 2003, eighteen books of his fiction and nonfiction have been published in English translation; these include his autobiographical masterpiece The Savage Detectives, the epic unsolved mystery 2666, and three books in the last twelve months alone. The latest, The Secret of Evil, published last month, collects the writing Bolaño had saved on his hard drive, some of which has appeared in Granta, Harpers, and The New Yorker. Unless someone finds some napkins or matchbooks on which Bolaño jotted down ideas, the posthumous party seems to be nearing the end.
The Secret of Evil seems less likely to win Bolaño new fans and more likely to satisfy addicts who need another fix or scholars who want to analyze every word he wrote. For the enthusiast, reading this slim collection feels like flipping through a scrapbook or photo album of a deceased relative or absent friend. As always, the protagonists are mostly male literary types who narrate in the first person. As always, Bolaño moves deftly between pulp and literary forms, mixing low and high culture, such as the auto mechanic who quotes pre-Socratic philosophers. There are the familiar settings from the writer’s life: his native Chile, the Mexico of his youth, the Spain of his adulthood. There are the recurrent motifs: literature, death, exile, crime, and fear. There are the withering critiques of Latin American writers whom Bolaño skeweres without mercy. Several stories feature Arturo Belano, the author’s alter ego from The Savage Detectives. Now middle-aged, Belano reflects on his past, still haunted by the ghost of Ulises Lima, his poetic partner in crime, the Neal Cassady to his Jack Keroauc. Even the translators, Natasha Wimmer and Chris Andrews, are the same pair responsible for rendering Bolaño’s massive oevre into English.
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Pico Iyer is a prolific writer, so prolific that I haven’t read anything by him (oh, but please be kind: there’s a lot of stuff to read out there). Graham Greene is also an author of no small merit, with 30+ books (novels, short story collections, memoirs) to his name, and while I’ve brushed upon only a few select titles, such as The Quiet American and Brighton Rock, his writing instantly excites, not only for the vast array of settings and circumstances, but for the religious undertones that compete with a blatant lack of moral compass.
Iyer’s latest book sketches the author’s life alongside the life of Greene. In The Man Within My Head, stories of Iyer’s upbringing in America and England, his time in Bolivia, an unintentional experiment with MDMA, and unfortunate events involving automobiles are juxtaposed with accounts of Greene’s coming of age in England in the era of flight and television, his unconventional Catholic attitude, his hate for Mexico and support of Cuba at a problematic time. While Iyer provides many details and insights about Greene, the book comes off as nothing more than a personal diary entry posing as an enigmatic character study.
A Review of Teju Cole, Open City
Posted on: April 17, 2012
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Teju Cole’s Open City is the most important book I have ever read. I understand this statement has very little bearing, on you, the reader. My credentials are slim, and my knowledge of the gamut of literary history, although unquenchable, does not quite match those of say, a reviewer for the New York Times or the praise from an established author. And while many books have impacted me so immediately, they’ve mostly been from at least a generation removed. So within these 750-1000 words, I will try to convey why this book is so important, particularly while so fresh from publication, not only to those with an intellectual curiosity or a political mind, but for those simply looking for a good read.
Open City follows a Nigerian born psychiatrist named Julius through his walks and thoughts around New York City. While the setting may have been the inspiration for Julius’ thoughts, its not necessary for the reader to be familiar firsthand with the landscape. First and foremost, Cole is a precise descriptor. He doesn’t drown the reader with unnecessary detail, yet provides enough to paint a setting thoroughly and poetically. Likewise, Cole uses countless philosophers, artists, and musicians to fully shape his view of the world. And while it may be helpful to know a bit about Nietzsche or Mahler, Cole doesn’t pander to the reader and offer unnecessary timelines. Cole himself, like the narrator, although born in the US, was raised in Nigeria, which further helps to emphasize his worldly view.
Frontier Psychiatrist 