The Lives of Others

"The Lives of Others," is the best film I've seen in years, probably one of the best films I've seen, ever. It's beautiful on so many levels, but what struck me was how tightly woven the story is. There isn't a single wasted moment; every scene, every shot, every line of dialogue propels the story forward.

I think we get used to thinking that a story either has a great plot or is "literary" in some sense -- a study in character, or language -- and can't be both. But great literature, of course, does it all, and "The Lives of Others" is that kind of story. It's simply brilliant.

On the website for the film (click on the title, above) there's an engaging interview with director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, which begins with his lucid and (I thought) amazing description of the inspiration for the story (punch the tab marked "The Crew" and then hit "Interview with the Director").

Buddha Boy

The Braindead Megaphone, by George Saunders
(Pocket Book Review # 12)



George Saunders saves the best for last in his new essay collection. "Buddha Boy" describes his journey to a remote village in Nepal to investigate a fifteen year-old buddhist who has been meditating under a tree for seven months. In that time, apparently, the boy hasn't eaten, or even moved.

Saunders weaves Nepal's beauty and ramshackle poverty together with armchair soliloquies on Buddhism, suffering, and revelation, he lampoons his own failings as a journalist, and he tries to catch the locals sneaking the boy food, all the while maintaining a perfect balance of skepticism, sympathy, and reverance for his subject. It's a nice little story about our tentative and uneasy relationship with the miraculous.

"Manifesto," the last piece, is something I think I first saw in the New Yorker. It's a perfect, timeless, satire, a political screed from the mythical group People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction (PKRA).

Pocket Book Review # 11

The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright



I started to write this review by borrowing an old Monty Python joke, but then I realized -- by sheer coincide, or possibly by some deep operation of my subconscious -- that I have finished “The Looming Tower” and am writing this short review the night before the anniversary of 9/11.

What are the odds? How could this have happened, if not by some sort of deeply-hidden design?

And moreoever, given that I’m writing this review on such a solemn occasion, dare I make a joke about it? I just finished one of George Saunders’ essays (more on them in a few days), in which he emphasizes the value of humor in discussing dark truths, but still, it feels a little wrong to reach for an easy joke about 9/11 on the eve of the day itself.

I will say this, though. I believe our country desperately needs some sort of satire on the so-called War on Terror. Because satire can do things no other form of criticism can, and also the Yahoos running our country are in desperate need of a hard literary thrashing.

In any case, “The Looming Tower” is brilliant, not least because it so crisply and so beautifully puts the tragic events of September 11 into perspective. Bin Laden and his cronies, one sees, are not the menace the current Administration would have us believe. They are, rather, deranged fanatics who enjoyed the meager benefits of a safe haven in Afghanistan and an enemy paralyzed by bureaucratized law enforcement and -- critically -- a newly-elected President whose arrogance was matched only by his obliviousness in international affairs.

In other words, Lawrence Wright’s gripping account of the history of America’s worst domestic terrorist attack feels like essential reading. The story it tells is incredible, as well plotted as a great novel and full of as many unlikely characters.

Much the same story, by the way, is told (in less detail) in the slightly quirky BBC documentary “The Power of Nightmares,” which you can find in the latest three issues of Wholphin, the McSweeney’s DVD magazine of unseen films.

The Pocket Book Review Busts Out

I have a review on Bookslut of Claudia Smith's "The Sky is a Well." There's other cool stuff on Jessa Crispin's lit zine this month, including a story about a BBC reporter's return to her home country of Sierra Leone, and an interview with Jim Shepard, whose new collection comes out September 25th.

Pocket Book Review # 10

The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai



A young woman, Sai, shares a ramshackle house in the Himalayas with her grandfather, his cook, and the cook's ragged dog. There, they are robbed by Maoist Nepalese rebels. In New York, the cook's son Biju shuttles from one humiliating restaurant job to another, until he returns to India with even less than when he left. Kiran Desai's novel makes a quiet mockery of colonialism, globalization, and what the world calls progress. It is also filled with wisdom, and sentences that are as perfect as anything English can offer up.

It's not long on plot -- its mission is to paint a portrait, and as Desai tied up the loose ends on the way to the finish I found myself wishing there had been a point on which the story took a hard turn. But it's still a timely, rich and beautiful novel.

Pocket Book Review # 9

Palimpsest, by Gore Vidal



I have to begin this post by confessing my inability to remember much of what I read. What I retain, instead, are imagined thoughts about a book. This makes my recollections profoundly unreliable, and it means that when I compare a book to another I read a while ago I'm stepping onto thin ice.

I would feel worse about this if Nick Hornby hadn't confessed to the same thing in one of his "Stuff I've Been Reading" columns for the Believer. Don't ask me which one. I only remember him confronting his inability to remember what he'd read and asking, "If I'm not going to remember any of what I'm reading, what's the point?" I sort of feel that way.

All of which is a long way of introducing Gore Vidal's memoir "Palimpsest" by saying it reminded me of "The Education of Henry Adams," which I read a few years back. "The Education" is a classic, the delightful autobiography of the comically detached Henry Adams, who keeps himself at arms' length throughout his narrative by writing about himself in the third person. Adams was born into wealth and privilege (he was the grandson of John Quincy Adams and great grandson of founding father John Adams). Yet he seems not to have had much of a knack for wealth and privilege. He bounced around Harvard, Europe, and Washington, never knowing what to do with himself, even as every opportunity lay open to him, all the while seeking education in all its forms, until, as I remember it, he suddenly realizes that he's always been a writer.

You might think of Gore Vidal as a writer who writes about himself in the third person without formally employing that point of view. The comic detachment that Adams had to achieve with the third person is there in Vidal's memoir, even when Vidal writes in first person about himself. It's one of Vidal's great talents.

"The Education" doubles as a history of 19th Century America, but "Palimpsest" takes place in the milieu of 20th Century American writers and actors, and the Kennedy-Gore clan. Which, to Vidal, amount to the same thing. History itself is barely present.

So it gets a bit gossipy, but Gore Vidal is nothing if not entertaining. Anais Nin, Truman Capote, and the Beats all come in for various degrees of Vidal's patented comic disdain.

Vidal seems to understand that "Julian" was his greatest book, and it easily could be. I haven't read a smarter or more entertaining fictional treatment of the Roman Empire, and "Julian" will always be one of my favorites. "Creation" -- a kind of sequel -- is also well worth the time.

Pocket Music Review # 1

"City Hall" by Vienna Teng

"City Hall," the fifth track on Vienna Teng's 2006 album "Dreaming Through the Noise," is a moving and beautiful piece of songwriting. It does so many things: tells a heartfelt story, memorializes an historic event, and raises a chorus for a political cause, all within the form of an infectious pop song.

Vienna's albums, "Warm Strangers" and "Dreaming Through the Noise," are a blend of jazz, pop, chamber music and folk. She's like a more jazzy Sarah McLaughlin, with classical training and better lyrics. (There's nothing inscrutable and wildly romantic about vampires striking suicide poses, for example.) I'm sure her first album is also fine, I just can't vouch for it because I haven't heard it yet. You can also find, on YouTube, some glamorous and often hilarious footage of her life on the road, taken on this summer's tour by Vienna and her friend, the underwater marine photographer Eric Cheng. It all looks remarkably like driving cross-country with a buddy to change jobs or go to school, except that every other day you put on a show.

Here is Vienna Teng performing "City Hall" at the Living Room in New York:

Pocket Book Review # 8

Babylon and Other Stories, by Alix Ohlin



"Babylon" is a fine, fine collection of stories propelled by Alix Ohlin's deadpan, offbeat humor. The stories fit her style perfectly; they all seem to be about things flying apart. And there is a wonderful combination of absurdity and drama in them. What's strange but also compelling about Olin's stories is the way the comedy doesn't release the tension, but tightens it.

In "Land of the Midnight Sun" a Russian boy named Yuri just shows up one day on the front step of the house of Maxine, a high school student home alone doing her trig homework. She answers the door, a car honks and drives away, and there he is.

"I am exchange student," Yuri says. "I live in your house one year." Yuri explains that, after one year, Maxine can live in his house in Russia if she wants. "It is glasnost program," he says.

"It's like nobody tells me anything," she says.

She shows him around the house. When she explains that everyone calls her younger brother Bat, because his room is like a cave, Yuri says, "You are talking of the mouse with wings."

What follows is a charming coming of age story that ends with Maxine, years later, visiting Moscow, married and struggling to remember the encounter she and Yuri shared at Carlsbad Caverns, where they went to see the bats fly out in droves before sunset.

She remembers how she and Yuri "had walked up the hill out of the darkness of the Caverns," Olin writes, "his fingers brushing against hers, furtive, barely there, yet electric. They emerged into the sudden, blinding desert sun and it shocked her, as if they'd been expecting midnight."

Pocket Book Review # 7

Saving Angelfish, by Michele Matheson



“Saving Angelfish” is a character study of a Hollywood junkie at the end of her rope. Michele Matheson describes the low life in L.A., the desperate days of her junkie heroine, in prose that is childlike, innocent, angelic, and that conveys the allure and impossibility, the otherworldly kick, of a good high.

This book is not heavy on plot. The main line of suspense is whether someone or something will arrest Maxella Gordon’s downward spiral. Matheson spares no details in describing Max’s gutter life of heroin dependency and sickness. I never read any William S. Boroughs but, honestly, I have a hard time believing he could have written anything more raw than this.

I was lucky to meet Michele at this summer's Tin House workshop. She is charming and hilarious and, not that this is a standard for literary reviews, but she deserves all of her success. Hurry up and buy her book already!

Pocket Book Review # 5

You Are Not a Stranger Here, by Adam Haslett

Judging solely from the story "Vincennes," which he read at last year's PEN/Hemingway event in Washington, D.C., Adam Haslett is working on a second collection of amazing short stories. In the meantime you can read "You Are Not a Stranger Here," his first collection, published in 2002 and out in paperback from Anchor Books. All of the stories in this collection are confident masterpieces of the form, the kinds of stories Chekhov might write if he woke up to find himself among us.

Which, you have to admit, would be pretty weird, for Chekhov to rise from the dead and start writing Adam Haslett stories.

Will all of these pocket reviews be of paperbacks? you ask.


Mostly, yes. These are reviews of whatever I happen to be reading, with little more design or intention than to put down whatever thoughts I have about them, and I read mostly paperbacks. Also, these are "pocket" book reviews, so it makes more sense they would be of paperbacks.


How did we get off on this tangent?


Good question. But I will say that the word that comes to mind after reading "You Are Not a Stranger Here" is "fine." These are fine short stories. Fine, fine.

Pocket Book Review # 4

Travels With Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski



When he was a young correspondent, Ryszard Kapuscinski left Poland for his first foreign assignment in with a dog-eared copy of Herodotus’ “The Histories” as his only field guide. Kapuscinski’s idea for this memoir -- the last of his collections of essay and reportage -- was to describe those early travels with the father of literary travel writing, to place his early experiences in the shadow of Herodotus’ stories.

It was a lovely idea, and reading Kapuscinski is always a delight. But I have to say that this one didn’t quite seem to work as well as Kapuscinski might have intended. The early chapters, when Kapuscinski first sets off, are delightful, and of course Kapuscinski quotes the best parts of “The Histories.” He also finds some connections between Herodotus’ classic and his own adventures. But if you’ve read Herodotus before, and “The English Patient,” and seen the movie, the idea and the material will seem a bit familiar.

In the end, though, Kapuscinski turns the story toward something more personal, and more meaningful. As if he were Homer, conjuring his muse to sing, Kapuscinski writes a kind of love song to what it means to be a foreign correspondent, that is, a journalist charged with traveling to and reporting from a foreign place. The last chapter of the book is wonderful, and Kapuscinski’s final descriptions of Herodotus are the closest he comes to autobiography. When he describes Herodotus as “a vivacious, fascinated, unflagging nomad, full of plans, ideas, theories,” he is, of course, talking about himself.

Pocket Book Review # 3

No One Belongs Here More Than You, by Miranda July



It would be a disservice to say the stories in Miranda July's collection are propelled by a quirky voice. They are propelled by a voice that is captivating, funny, wise, and honest. What July has figured out is that a voice can sound strange but also be a delight, that it can be slightly alienated and confused but also have the timing of nightclub stand-up.

Here is the narrator of "Majesty" explaining her job as an earthquake safety counselor:

"There's a school in the neighborhood, Buckman Elementary, and every year they invite the firemen in to explain how to Stop, Drop, and Roll, and later in the day I come in and talk about earthquake safety. Sadly, there is very little you can do. You can stop, you can drop, you can jump in the air and flap your arms, but if it's the Big One, you're better off just praying. Last year a little boy asked what made me the expert, and I was honest with him. I told him I was more afraid of earthquakes than any person I know. You have to be honest with children."

Pocket Book Review # 2

In the Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuscinksi



"The Soccer War" is an egaging and fascinating read, but "The Shadow of the Sun" is a masterpiece.

"The Soccer War" bounces all over, from Africa to Latin America, and occasionally Kapuscinski steps in with a journal entry on the Big Book he wished he'd written and that, perhaps, he thought he never would. It's great reading, but it's also a disparate collection.

All the stories in "Shadow" are set in Africa, which makes the work cohesive and coherent in a way that "Soccer War" is not. This collection of reportage is essentially a checkered history of 20th Century Africa, reported by an eloquent, thoughtful, and thoroughly engaging correspondent.

Colonialism in Africa reduced ten thousand entities to fifty, Kaupsinski writes, "but much of the underlying variety, this mosaic -- this shimmering collage of pebbles, bones, shells, bits of wood, pieces of tin, and leaves -- has remained. The more closely we stare at it, the better we see how the bits and pieces of this tableau change place, shape, and hue, giving rise to a spectacle staggering in its mutability, richness, and pulse of color."

Pocket Book Review # 1

The Soccer War, by Ryszard Kapuscinski



From 1958 to 1980 Kapuscinski was the Polish Press Agency's correspondent in Africa and Central and South America. He flew from one crisis to the next, a literary man with a journalist's notebook, reporting on wars and revolutions, profiling political leaders, revolutionaries, and madmen, and living with the common people in their tin houses on their ramshackle streets.

The Soccer War is a collection of reports from Kapuscinki's far-flung travels, interspersed with soaring diary entries styled, whimsically, "Plan for a Book That Could Have Started Right Here," "Plan for a Book That Could Have Been Written," "Plan for a Book That Will Never Be Written," etc. It's touches like these that make Kapuscinski's essays so special. He writes about tragedy, but never loses his sense of the beauty and absurdity of the world.

It's a Vintage paperback. $14. You cannot go wrong.