booknotes

Clarice Lispector – “Crónicas”

In one of her skillfully composed articles, Lispector describes the moments we experience when unconsciously emulating the behavior of someone else. She is traveling and in close proximity to a missionary woman, or nun we suppose, whose movements and demeanor she can’t help but study. The effect is one of contagion. She herself begins to assume a holy countenance and step about in a sort of controlled glide, feet moving above the earth. Later she encounters a prostitute and wittingly decides to experiment and imitate. She puts on a sultry stare and flirtatious cigarette, with some perfume as well. But her experiment is a failure, not because she cannot be that way, we are to assume, but because she consciously chooses to make an attempt. Whereas with the missionary, she would rather avoid taking on her habits, if you will, even not think about it, and by so avoiding the attempt, she succeeds at it. Zen.

Accordingly, a writer finds it impossible to not try and mimic some of Lispector’s language of contemplation and appraisal. The rhythm of her prose and rhetoric of certainty and persuasion gets into one’s writing machinery.

The crónicas are selected daily news articles Lispector wrote for a newspaper in Río de Janeiro. Her topics come forward one after another. Relentless observation and insight. Honesty. Although she said journalism was not her speed, her readers must have certainly enjoyed what she offered each day. Topics offering a buffet of soul food for thought and rumination: the animal within us; assumptions we make; gifts; belonging or not; laziness and reliance on others; uncertain inquiries; odd habits; chickens and eggs; an ordinary married couple…and on the subjects go, often intersecting and chemically working with other themes throughout the book. Some say her writing has the power of witchcraft.

Clarice Lispector, born into a Jewish family in the Ukraine in 1920, moved with her family at an early age to Brazil. Her writing has been largely off the radar in America. New Directions Books has brought her back to circulation and renewed popularity by republishing all of her works, as translated from the Portuguese. If, as they say, Portuguese is the most beautiful language of them all, I wish I knew it well so I could read her original prose.

She died in 1977.

“City of the Dead” by Sara Gran

Gran’s highly unusual protagonist, the private eye Claire DeWitt, knows an awful lot. She is wise beyond her years and more daring than most of fiction’s male detectives, often to the point of being reckless. She is confident that no case will remain open under her watch, with the exception of the disappearance of her teenage best friend Tracy, a tragic theme that repeats within the DeWitt series of novels.

Also reiterated in the series is Claire’s history as apprentice to the late detective Constance Darling (they lived and worked together in New Orleans, a fact that prompted Claire to return there and take on a case). We are also treated, as in Gran’s other “Claire” novels, to excerpts and examples from French author Jaques Sillete’s counter-intuitive Zen-like book on the art of solving a crime.

Using his teaching points, Claire shows how she can find clues in unexpected ways. She has an uncanny ability to relate to the people of New Orleans, from the Garden District privileged to the deep-ward street level. She has a tough outlaw side of her own. Knowing what pain and bad luck can be, she is able to meet anyone down and out on equal grounds and interact via exchanges of frankness and respect. There’s some remarkable writing depicting these interactions. She has an edge in how to get information, a desirable trait for any private detective.

Her rapport is especially rare when she engages with some pistol-toting black youths with whom the ravages and injustices of hurricane Katrina are still fresh and raw. In the world of forty-ounce malt-liquor beers, uppers, lies, and violence, she seeks and manages to find accomplices and allies, not enemies.

More importantly, she has heart. Lots of it, and we feel it.

“Infinite Blacktop” by Sara Gran

The book consists of three narratives, each at a different place and time, each with their own line of action. There are common elements defining the background, life and career of Claire DeWitt, the private eye who by her own cocky admission no one ever defeats. Having read one of the other DeWitt novels, I already knew about her mentorship under Constance Darling and her deep study in the cult book Detection written by Jacques Sillete. The Sillete book is fictitious, but she makes it so intriguing we wish it was out there on Amazon.

I like how Gran writes. Informally, brash, yet with skill and measure. Her character’s search in these stories is not so much for the whodunnit aspects, but to find retribution and meaning in, or confirmation of, what is right. This is not a superficial exploration she makes. It is heart-rendering, totally committed, down to the blood and bones level. We all miss Tracy and feel Claire’s pain for her. When Claire suffers, we do. When she makes mistakes and still brags, we cringe. When she gets cornered and in trouble (repeatedly) we root for her to get away. When she wins and finds respite and understanding, we do too.

If I go back for a second read one day, I would thumb through the pages and read each part separately. My hat’s off to Sara Gran, who has shown the bigshot book guys what she can do, and has now carved a way to run her own publishing company.

“Generation Loss” by Elizabeth Hand

I went shopping earlier this year for mystery novels narrated from the perspective of a modern, female character. I read in the NYT about this Elizabeth Hand book, which won a notable award, and seemed a likely starter for what I was looking for. I have been long accustomed to the hardboiled accounts from male-centric crime and detective novels by old craftsmen like Chandler, Hammett, MacDonald; and newer ones like Lindsey, Markson, and James Lee Burke, etc. In the aughts, I read two of those amazingly engaging “Girl With ___” novels by Stieg Larsson. When he died, I quit reading mysteries altogether and went back to my usual fare of snobby supposedly literary novels, of which half were remarkable and the other half mostly NYC publisher hype. No wonder I retreated to older tried and true novels.

In this novel, Hand’s heroine is Cass Neary. Cass is not a detective but is reckless and ends up being one. Like Larsson’s first “Tattoo” novel, we follow Neary and root for her. The pages fly by. The rugged coastal Maine setting and cast of characters are intriguing. We are there and feel it. It’s, as they say in CW 101, atmospheric. Of course it doesn’t last, this lyrical writing, because the sellers of mystery/crime books demand storylines explode with ghastly appeal to the most jaded of book readers.

Cass wanders off with the curiosity of a typical Gothic heroine and finds out more than she bargained for, reaching shore on the bad guy’s property on an even more remote island than the bleak, subsistance-level one she had been staying on. Oddly, in a bit of dubious editing, the bad guy’s place is somehow like a self-sufficient Four Seasons Resort, complete with a Chamber of Horrors. It reminded me that Larsson’s first book went off the tracks in a similar way, with a far-fetched B&D dungeon and torture basement making us erase all our nicer memories of fast-lane life in cool Sweden.

Cass Neary is much like Claire DeWitt in Sara Gran’s series (to be posted soon) that also features a lovable punk, down & out, beer-swilling, pill-taking tough-ass grrrl renunciant who gets knocked around to hell and back but still keeps going in order to find the truth and prove a point.

The ghost and soul of the crime/detective genre’s most unforgettable woman character — Lisbeth Salander — remains as Influencer.

Five Stars: “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner

In Kushner’s latest novel are some of the most captivating passages you will ever read in today’s fiction. But, you have to work your way mindfully through Sadie’s story to encounter and appreciate them. In the story she’s an infiltrator, a provocateur, and independent 34-year old. In the novel delivery itself, she is an intelligent and delightful narrator who can be quite personal. She lets us in on all she’s doing.

Sadie breaks into the account of a protest movement’s grand poobah and mentor, a man named Bruno. She spies on his email-delivered anthropological truths, profound ones, which she gladly shares with us the reader. Her gritty details of espionage and public relations entrapments often give way to Bruno Reports. These delve into the importance of man’s progress on earth, from mindless ape to thinker.

The plot may be confusing at first. Under an assumed identity, Sadie is being paid to compromise herself in order to disrupt an event. She even takes her role into a romantic relationship. The main incidents occur in rural redneck France, which is well-depicted. Sadie, in her dry wit, informs us that Tractor Pull culture is international and often where we’d least expect it.

Things boil over at a farm protest festival where a visiting government minister is set up as a target. When the minister is dashed and the event is over, Sadie the independent contractor agent is highly rewarded. She collects her money, and retreats to solitude. Free and unattached, she has time to reflect on Bruno’s weightier observations.

One in particular is about the location of Earth among the movement of galaxies, and how the Dipper constellations have long been used as points of navigation. She contemplates Bruno’s description of how ancient Polynesian boaters learned to sail vast distances in the Pacific and even to America by following Polaris, the North Star. As Sadie, flat on her back, studies the night sky in her remote hideaway in Spain, she begins to understand the “continuum,” the eternal movement of our planet in time, the value of natural versus artificial.

She observes that many of the noticeable twinkling lights in the blackness above are in fact man-made satellites, hundreds of them, which she compares to lice.

A great novel has unique revelations of everyday life plus an over-reaching theme, a wise spin on current affairs, science, art, or philosophy. The views encompass and at the same time transcend the novel’s plot and characters’ mundane lives. Kushner can do this, and with Sadie’s dry piercing wit, make us laugh as well.

Sadie’s journey may have begun when she was a fearlessly sexy and brash agent on assignment, but it concludes when, having learned more about mankind than she bargained for, she seems a humble soul approaching enlightenment. It’s time for her to head for the hills back where she calls home.

Rachel K always writes a good book. I love “Telex from Cuba” and consider it the most consistently interesting. IMO, “Creation Lake” is her most literary novel so far. And Sadie Smith, who in the South we might call “a caution,” is a narrator I’d gladly read again.

Steinbeck’s “East of Eden”

Published in 1952, this is Steinbeck’s virtuoso performance. Nearly 600 pages of clean, direct prose colored with history, lyrical geographic description, fully rounded characters, and a story that marches ahead toward the fate of two families in California’s Salinas Valley, the Hamiltons and the Trasks.

I came to it looking for an American saga, expecting a novel of broad range over people and time. There is that, but far more. There is a wealth of great reading, along the lines of Tolstoy, DIckens, Hemingway. By Steinbeck’s own admission, the novel is his magnum opus, collecting and utilizing all that he has learned as a writer and applying it to “the big one.”

Of course, with the title and the Cain v. Abel / brother v. brother motiff, paradise lost, etc. There is considerable documentation out there that draws the book’s biblical parallels, especially with the book of Genesis.

Our recent grim and fearful post-election period has been an appropriate time to read about Evil. I reached the end of my read soon after the Inauguration, a queasy time when false pretenders are assuming the reins of power, truth is moving to the shadows again, and actual demons are literally being released.

You’ll spend a lot of time in this book. Sort of like being inside the world of McMurtry’s novel Lonesome Dove, being a close witness type of reader, involved emotionally, staying up late turning pages. Steinbeck relates and spins the story but does not try to razzle-dazzle us with literary pyrotechnics. There are academic debates about who the scarcely-mentioned “I” voice could be. I go with the one that says it’s Steinbeck himself, posing as one of Hamilton’s grandchildren. He extends the fun a little and has the Steinbeck house and family appear in a late chapter. Cameo stuff, based on fact. No matter. Just read, knowing that essentially the story is presented in third person POV all the way through.

Adam Trask is the good-hearted character who cannot quite attain a successful place in life. He is demoralized and cursed by his past affection for Cathy Ames, possibly the most vicious and nasty woman to ever appear in a modern classic American novel. Their offspring (or, as we later learn, from she and Adam’s brother) are the young twins Aron and Cal, who will carry the saga forward into the century.

The wise Chinaman Lee is almost too good a character, and for my money steals the show. He exceeds Sam Hamilton in his ability to shoot the shit, i.e. talk to any topic, and he does so with eloquence. He shows even more intelligence, compassion, and duty than Sam or his wife Liza combined. He is the saving grace of the twins. His major role however is philosophic. His deep studies and knowledge of the bible and beliefs both Oriental and Occidental, allow him to give us the novel’s key message: timshel, Hebrew for “thou mayest,” which moves us out from under the imperative of “thou shalt.” So, we have a choice about Evil.

And somehow that choice about Evil brings us back to election-time again.

Reading Tom Gold Weathers, Jr.

Most likely, Tom would not believe it: my recent reading binge of his indie-published books.

I’ve read them now, but for a while I had yet to finish a journey through several of his paperbacks. Some I read were were small storybooks or collections of verse (those items he called “poem things”). There were also essay-like ruminations, and engaging articles observing people around him. I read all of these and for good measure re-visited a favored older book or two.

Many of us called him “Stob” back in the 1970s because he once worked part-time staking out house foundations, literally hammering stobs into the ground. He compared it to structuring written pieces.

Tom Weathers has an author persona that straddles the line between a Southern gentleman writer of intelligence and refinement and a Waffle House good ole boy scribbler. He can pull the mix off. His writing is congenial and well-constructed, wide in its readability appeal.

Tom’s published ventures are in sum his crónicas. His reports of life as he sees it, come from vantage points often located in Shelby, NC or Gastonia, NC. Most accounts are humble and honest, almost none are showy. He also produced a wealth of travelog writing and photos based on his roadtrips throughout America and Canada in his pal Conservative Bob’s BMW Roadster.

With Weathers in general, here are a few things you get: inside accounts of close family events, astute profiles of friends and work peers, clever cosmic realizations, tales of his uphill veneration and loss of certain women very dear to him, the odd twists of fate and Vonnegut-like moments of karass, or as we called it, intertwingle, where lives magically cross other lives. e.g., Who among us but Tom would have someone like a tanned post-pubescent George Hamilton drift in and out of his personal history chapters?

I stumble over the riffs about physics and engineering that are beyond my grasp. It’s in Tom’s DNA. Once when we traveled together on an Amtrak to NYC, he talked about the theory of relativity as our train ran next to another train going in the opposite direction.

He is an admirer of Faulkner as well as Castaneda and Hemingway. His writing is often understated, and he withholds content that could be considered “unseemly.” Part of doing so is brought by the caution of being un viejo wary of being too brash.

Tom’s writing has always put me in the spirit to write a little bit myself. After all, he was my editor and supervisor in my first writing job out of college. His stuff has always influenced the way I write.

I’d tell him that. It’s praise. In previous times, hearing it would please him. But for now he’s conspicuous in his absence. O Lost, and by the wind grieved…Stob.

Tom Wolfe’s novel “Back to Blood”

wolfe author

I’ll give the author credit for opening the action with two issues that inflame the senses and test the sanity of every South Floridian: dealing with ethnic differences and finding a damn place to park.

Within its folds of fat, the book does contain some good writing and entertaining scenes, if only (ojalá que) Wolfe weren’t so repetitious, tedious and hell-bent on the obvious. Narrative takes a backseat to excess, and his snarky novelistic tune about Miami becomes a highly exaggerated and unlistenable rap.

If Wolfe or an editor had taken a scalpel to the manuscript and cut the hyperbole and tirades down to reasonable size, we might have been reading something special.

As is, I can’t get through it all. Not even close.

Tom Wolfe was certainly a fine writer, someone who dove in and lived what he wrote about. We owe a debt to him for his pioneering and producing some landmark works in Literary Journalism and American fiction with attitude. Like “Right Stuff” and “Bonfire of the Vanities.”

God knows what sort of real or imaginary head trip Wolfe was on during his research days and writing time in South Florida. Maybe “Return to Blood” was a statement to those other Florida biggie writers, saying, “Hey I can write crazier shit than you can.”

“The Secret History” by Donna Tartt

(review from 2014 with small add in 2024)

This is Tartt’s Vermont winter garden where characters are carefully developed and tended. In the early chapters the chaos of college grows like grass in the distance, not in the forefront (later that chaos will manifest like tall gnarly weeds).

Narrator Richard Papen chooses to escape from the crowd and joins a small elite group of rogue Classical Studies students, five of them, who are home-schooled (in a way) and students of the erudite and mysterious Professor Julian. Julian’s advice is to not waste bookstore money on “Goodbye, Columbus.” When the faculty reviews Professor Julian by survey, student Henry says words to the effect, “How can they grade a deity?”

Are they outcasts or intellectual saints? Classic scholars or pretenders? Cold-blooded killers or repentant bunglers?

It’s a mix, from the obnoxious Bunny to the placid and caring Henry to the wholesome twins, and so forth. Richard himself seems the one most like a fish out of water.

The plot unfolds slowly, as Tartt takes us on excursions into the countryside and into bleak halls of hardwood floors, tables laden with whisky, unpatched roofs that allow snow, and grandiose old houses gone bohemian. The mental excursions are ours via Richard. Trepidation, doubt, mistrust, admiration, and in the case of the girl in the group an unfulfilled adoration. Some screwy happenings take place. A conspiracy is likely, and Richard is riding the fence in a dangerous position. While the story unravels artfully, Tartt (who was in college when she wrote this) makes a few missteps with contrived plot events, just a couple that seem too coincidental and mechanical. Hard to find flaw, however.

Some chapters – like the one in which Richard spends semester break alone – are densely atmospheric and make for compelling reading. Things slow down as Tartt describes each person in the group’s psychologically detailed experiences with the bad side of Bunny Corcoran. Bunny is one of the worst villains I’ve read. Then, toward the end of Part 1 and into Part 2, the story accelerates again and pulls us back in. There is little relenting (other than maybe an overly long stay at the Corcorans before the funeral) all the way to the end.

A terrific book, a novelist’s extravaganza of technique and talent, in story movement and especially in characterization. I appreciated this even more the second time around.

Miami Novel / Climate Change

“Things are getting rough out there; High water everywhere…” -Bob Dylan

The colorful characters from the novel Oceanaire return. Property Manager Leon goes on vacation to Texas and drops out of sight, abandoning Lease Manager Gloria and her residents to make do for themselves. On Halloween, atmospheric conditions bring a freak northeaster and a wall of water. Meanwhile, Leon is still on the highway far from Miami, trying to sort out his life. Everyone’s fate lies in the balance.

Now available at Amazon and other online retailers in paperback or Kindle.

“Desolation Angels” – Kerouac

I read it in the 1970s and decided earlier this summer to go back and revisit. Mellowed in most all my habits by now, I took my time and relished the clarity and beauty in Kerouac’s prose. This time I better recognized his visions, and appreciated his sharp reporter’s eye for life on the streets among the poor and artistic and the beat – and the pretenders too, in America and in Algiers or Mexico or Paris. His views are amazingly prophetic, inserted unobtrusively, on social and environmental conditions as well as cultural strata and public attitudes.

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This book is more meditative and patiently presented than “On the Road,” where constant acceleration urges the narrative forward. “Desolation Angels” is less screenplay-like and more a spiritual testimony. It’s by far my favorite of all his books.

Kerouac details his life journey in the year 1957. A hundred pages in, I had to remind myself that it is not a work of fiction but autobiographical, or what some today call “autofiction.” A full list of the corresponding real-life names of the characters is commonly available in roster form on any article that thoroughly examines the book. Yet, it’s a small matter where it belongs on an academic chart of genres and sub-genres. The writing is so entertaining and soulful, and the imagery and themes so rich and resonant that the book crosses over into the land of literary fiction and certainly merits being there.

Kerouac based the structure and Parts on changes in location, starting with his solitude working a summer in a national park fire tower, and concluding with his return to be with Memére at her simple haven in Florida. In between, he meets up and shares adventures with a vast cast of fellow poets and writers, the Beats.

He has gone from lonely, spartan living in the mountain tower to sleeping bags under the stars to shared apartment crowds to the womb at Mom’s house. We think his account ends in Florida, but it doesn’t. Kerouac is too restless. The book reaches its finale with his rapid exodus back to Mexico City only to find his friend Gaines has died. He travels to New York where he and his striving writer-poet friends gather and consider their new status as known, published authors. As with many a hero’s journey, the story leaves the suggestion that the quest is often more rewarding than the realization of obtainment.