Archive for the ‘Book Reviews’ Category
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Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists
This winter I read the Bible from cover to cover –all 2,000 pages from Genesis to Revelation–as a way to examine my ambivalence about religion. Although I was raised Catholic, I have barely entered a church as an adult beyond weddings, funerals, and a trip to Rome. (Tierra Santa, the theme park in Buenos Aires does not count). I oppose the church’s positions on contraception, abortion, divorce, and same-sex marriage and Catholic candidate Rick Santorum’s wish to blur the boundary between church and state. I am horrified and saddened by the string of sexual abuse scandals, most recently today’s news that the Dutch Church castrated a young man who complained about abuse. After reading the Bible, I remain agnostic about the existence of God, the notion of the afterlife, and the efficacy of prayer. Yet for all its inconsistency, hypocrisy, and dogma–the text contains sound guidance for a moral and mindful life. An atheist might call me religious. A believer might call me an atheist. I prefer Conflicted Catholic, or Cafeteria Catholic who picks and rejects aspects of the faith as if it were a buffet and not a prix fixe meal.
But perhaps such labels are reductive or irrelevant. In his new book, Religion for Atheists, prolific pop philosopher Alain de Botton rejects the “boring debate” between faith and atheism to stake out a middle ground. To ease the pain and alienation of modern life, he argues, secular society should emulate and adapt insights from religion, namely Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism. He claims that the faithful are delusional in their supernatural beliefs, but that atheists throw out the baby with the bathwater. In his words: “Even if religion isn’t true, can’t we enjoy the best bits?” (Yes, he is British). With his usual blend of diligence, humility, humor, and insight—De Botton embraces the holy oxymoron of religion for non-believers. Read the rest of this entry »
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Sometimes, late at night, or even in the afternoon, I contemplate the history of language. How it is that humans were able to develop these skills, to communicate all of what is happening inside here [the author points to his own head] and express it in such a way that someone else can understand it inside here [the author points to the reader’s head]. I think of the struggles of translations, of archaic languages, of dead languages, of Rousseau and Hobbes, of society vs. nature, until it’s so overwhelming I declare the whole thing meaningless. That’s not to say I wouldn’t want to be able to ruminate like this in the first place. Since you are reading this, you know I consider myself a “writer,” one who finds meaning in life through language and the written word. Yet as with any passion, what can be so attractive about an art can also be what’s so repellant, toxic even. I have to wonder if Ben Marcus had these same thoughts as he began his third novel, The Flame Alphabet.
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Every cook knows olive oil is essential. For Tom Mueller, it’s the lifeblood of Western Civilization. In Extra Virginity, his lively, earnest, exhaustive, and sometime exhausting debut, Mueller discovers oil not only as food, but as fuel, lubricant, medicine, skin care, perfume, aphrodisiac, religious symbol, and way of life. In the words of one aficionado, true extra virgin olive oil is the stuff that “makes you get down on your knees and say, ‘Fuck’.”
As Extra Virginity explains, all olive oils are not equal. Each country has its own varieties, such as biancolilla, cornicabra, and racioppella in Italy, picual and arbequina in Spain, and koroneiki in Greece. Oil tasters talk like sommeliers; to them, oil can have pleasant notes of cucumber and artichoke or taste like pipi de gatto (cat pee). More broadly, oils range in quality from lampante (lamp oil) to extra virgin, a term coined in 1960 by the European Parliament. Unfortunately, as Mueller reports in the book’s central exposé, rampant fraud and lax regulation have made “extra virgin” meaningless. If you buy a bottle labeled extra virgin, there’s a good chance it’s lower quality or adulterated oil that pretends to be the real deal.
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The latest Ingo Schulze novel is an odd hybrid of sex comedy, road trip, and existential thriller. In Adam and Evelyn, the original sin occurs when an East German tailor named Adam sleeps with a female client. His girlfriend Evelyn catches him with his pants down, then flees to Hungary with a friend and her cousin. On impulse, Adam stalks her across Europe and tries to woo her back to paradise.
Set in the pivotal year of 1989, the domestic crisis of Adam and Evelyn unfolds against a political crisis prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. On his quest to reclaim Evelyn, Adam meets border guards, bureaucrats, and hitchhikers; these characters represent a world of fear and repression surely familiar to Schulze, born in the former German Democratic Republic and in his 20’s when the wall fell. Yet the question of whether to defect to the West seems to matter less to Adam, a dutiful and apolitical middle class guy, than his desire to resume domestic bliss. He wants to return to his version of Eden, but the confluence of his sins and the changing political landscape make this paradise obsolete.
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Ben Mezrich has chronicled the high-stakes shenanigans of shady students at elite educational institutions for nearly a decade. His best-sellers include: Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions; Ugly Americans: The True Story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions; and The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook. In his latest book, the precocious protagonist is Thad Roberts, an aspiring astronaut who steals moon rocks from NASA. Allegedly worth millions, the lunar samples are literally priceless, since it’s illegal for anyone to buy, sell, or even own a piece of the moon.
Sex on the Moon is a compelling hybrid of heist thriller, love story, and morality tale. Beneath the page turner plot, the book both celebrates and critiques the American values of self-improvement, prosperity, and recognition. As in his prior work, Mezrich vacillates between elitism and anti-elitism. His portrait of Roberts implies a fine line between striver and criminal, romantic and sociopath.
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Roberto Bolaño is best known for his epic novels The Savage Detectives and 2666, which were translated from Spanish into English to wide acclaim after his death in 2003. In the final years of his life, in poor health and laboring to finish 2666, the indefatigable Bolaño wrote a series of columns for newspapers in Spain and Latin America. Between Parentheses includes more than 100 of these columns, plus several speeches, and an interview in the Mexican edition of Playboy. While his fiction is filled with darkness and despair, these short and sweet pieces read like a feisty literary blog by a playful curmudgeon: a Latin cross between Mark Twain and Christopher Hitchens.
Like the most memorable critics, Bolaño rarely pulls his punches. Early in the book, he muses: “I don’t have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that’s twelve inches long while erect.” Elsewhere, he slams popular Latin American writers like Isabel Allende and Paolo Coelho, and says Argentine writer Osvaldo Lamborghini “should have gone to work as a hit man, or a prostitute, or a grave digger, which are less complicated jobs than trying to destroy literature.”
Our Dreams are Corporate Owned
Posted on: January 4, 2012
In 2009, Marvel Comics was aquired by Disney. DC Comics has been owned by Time-Warner since 1967. In other words, Superman is a corporate trademark. As is Batman, Wonder Woman, Spiderman, Wolverine and practically any other superhero the average person can bring to mind. It is fitting, perhaps. Comic Books are a uniquely American invention, along with jazz, rock n roll and, you guessed it, the corporation. Of course our Gods would be owned by them.
And make no mistake, the superheroes are American Gods. No matter what Rick Perry and the red states say, we have been a secular, urban nation for over a century now and it shows no signs of changing. The old Gods didn’t make their way from Europe so immigrant kids from New York had to make up new ones. What are Batman and Superman if not 2 different sides of The Messiah? Is Iron Man not America’s dream of itself? Who are the X-Men if not the marginlized made strong through talent? If myths are the stories we tell ourselves so we might understand what it means to be human, in our particular time and place, then superheroes are most assuredly modern American myths.
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Roberto Bolaño
To read Roberto Bolaño is to enter a world of poetry and violence, where fantasy meets the mundane and writing is a matter of life and death. Since he died in 2003, sixteen of his books, notably the epic novels The Savage Detectives and 2666, have been translated into English. The latest, The Third Reich, was written in 1989, before these masterpieces, but published only now with the high demand for his work. It is not Bolaño ’s best book, but is nonetheless an excellent novel: a psychological thriller, a meditation on evil, and a glimpse at the seeds of a brilliant and prolific literary career.
Bolaño had a lifelong fascination with violence. As a young man, he was imprisoned during the 1973 military coup in his native Chile, after which he lived in exile. His final novel, 2666, catalogues the unsolved rapes and murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez in graphic and relentless detail. The violence in The Third Reich is more abstract, yet still terrifying. While on vacation with his girlfriend in Spain, the German protagonist Udo Berger plays a fantasy board game called “The Third Reich” –a cross between Risk and Dungeons and Dragons –in which he tries to rewrite history and win World War II on behalf of the Germans.
Roberto Bolaño, The Third Reich (Audiobook Excerpt)
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[Our resident poet Jeffery Berg shares his favorite poetry collections of 2011]
10. Lauren Berry, The Lifting Dress
A very strong debut. Berry’s Southern Gothic poems are unsettling, beautiful, and mysterious.
9. Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split
I’m in awe by the electricity and inventiveness of this collection which pays tribute to the American forgotten and also the emblematic in such poems as “Red Velvet,” a moving elegy for Rosa Parks and the compelling “concertos” for Condoleezza Rice.
8. Sommer Browning, Either Way I’m Celebrating
Browning’s fun, eclectic book features her own comic drawings and dry-wit poems which travel to places like the Walt Whitman Mall and a bland hotel for a pay-per-view fight.
7. Michael Montlack, Cool Limbo
A book about growing up gay in the era of Stevie Nicks and feathered bangs, Montlack’s celebratory poems look back and forward with a refreshingly earnest and hopeful eye.
6. Marcus Jackson, Neighborhood Register
In these moving, clear-eyed poems, Jackson recalls growing up in the dying industrial towns of the Midwest. He can also be dryly funny as in his odes to “the hater,” to his old friends and to Kool-Aid.
In the latest Ali Smith novel, a precocious 10-year-old girl asks: “If a story isn’t a fact, but it is a made up version of what happened…what is the point of it?” Her conversational companion, an eccentric middle-aged man, replies: “Think how quiet a book is on a shelf, just sitting there unopened. Then think what happens when you open it.” In that spirit, each of 10 books below is a passageway to possibility, a free trip to another world: whether it’s India, Japan, or the Balkans, a college campus in New England, or a government office in Illinois. As with yesterday’s list of The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2011, these are listed in alphabetical order by author; ranking them further seems as problematic as ranking one’s friends, parents, or children. Please add your own fiction favorites in the comments section below and check back tomorrow for the best poetry books of the year. Happy reading!
Anita Desai, The Artist of Disappearance
This quiet triptych of novellas set in India begins with an epigraph from Jorge Luis Borges (“One thing alone does not exist –oblivion”) and the fabulist spirit of the Argentine short fiction master informs the entire book. The first story features a civil servant who discovers an abandoned museum of forgotten treasures. The second stars a translator who tries to upstage the author whose work she’s commissioned to translate. The title story features a hermit whose solitude gets disrupted by a television crew. All three protagonists are lonely and artists in their own way; their stories meditate on the relationship between the past, present, and future, especially the notion of legacy and what gets passed down between generations. Whatever the 74-year-old Desai thinks about mortality, she clearly does not equate Death with oblivion.
And there was still more to see: cases that held all manner of writing materials with inks reduced to powder at the bottom of glass containers, pens and quills no one would ever use again, seals that no longer stamped; a chamber of clocks where no sand seeped through the hourglass, water had long since evaporated from the clepsydras, bells were stilled, cuckoos silenced, dancing figures paralysed. Time halted, waiting for a magician to start it again. -From “The Museum of Final Journeys”
Frontier Psychiatrist 