No Frigate

I hoped to finish The Tin Drum before going on vacation . . . But I didn't.  The good news is that while bopping around Seattle and Vancouver, I not only finished with Oskar and his drum, but read a bunch of other good stuff as well.  Sadly, right now I have to succumb to my household's big pop culture addiction du jour (more on that later) so blogging will have to wait.  But not long!

Several people have asked me where the title of this blog comes from.  Well, here's the answer, courtesy of The Belle of Amherst (and my fifth grade English teacher):

There is no Frigate like a Book  

To take us Lands away,  

Nor any Coursers like a Page  

Of prancing Poetry –   

This Traverse may the poorest take         

Without oppress of Toll –   

How frugal is the Chariot  

That bears a Human soul.

How can it be that I've never seen or read Sophie's Choice? 

It has certainly been a while, but I've been busy!  It's summer after all, and I spent last weekend upstate with friends reading nothing more taxing than US Weekly.  I did carry my copy of The Tin Drum with me, but I confess that it didn't even get opened.

Before the weekend of lollygagging, playing ball girl while my friends played tennis, and eating copious amounts of pesto, I did knock a few things off my list.  Well, Ten Days in the Hills was never on my list of books to read, but now it merits its own special list: books I want to return to the kiosk in the Milwaukee airport to get half of my money back!  As I mentioned before, I bought the book at the Milwaukee airport.  Well, the newsstand there has a deal where if you buy a book and bring it back within six months, you get half of the purchase price.  Since I hated the book (lesson: buy your substantive reading materials before the airport) I will certainly be bringing it back.

I read something else that wasn't on my list here, but was certainly required reading.  One of my dearest friends is a vibrant Australian lass whom I'll call Julia, because of a strange resemblance to Julia Roberts that has only ever arisen when she ate something she was allergic to and her lips swelled up.  Back in the day, Julia was a globe trotting journalist (now she's a freelancer) and became friends with a gregarious ginger-haired guy named Bryce Corbett.  Bryce did a bit of globe trotting himself, and recently published a book describing his escapades in Paris titled A Town Like Paris: Falling in Love in the City of Light.  I have a only a hazy recollection of meeting Bryce at Susan's wedding (lack of recollection is really a mark of a good wedding, I think) but when she told me about his book and his New York book release party, I promptly ordered it on Amazon (gotta push up friends' Amazon ratings) and put the event into my calendar.

As I was reading Bryce's hilarious, sweet, and very specific account of his adventures (I particularly loved his description of the help-wanted ads in The Economist -- which I've always been fascinated by), his book got mentioned in the Summer Reading issue of the New York Times Book Review, which was great.  And then, the day of the party, he became my idol.

He got mentioned on Page Six.

I didn't put two and two together until later, when Julia told me that Bryce used to work with the now-editor of the Post, but still.  Very impressive to a gossip-lover like me!  Anyway, the book party was fabulous, and if you love Paris and, specifically, the Marais, where Bryce lived for a long time (his descriptions of meals at L'As du Falafel took me right back to my first trip to Paris as a college student) A Town Like Paris would be a perfect beach read for you.

Now I'm in the middle of The Tin Drum, which is dense and fabulous and scary and makes me wish I knew some German.  Won't be ensconced in things German tonight, though; my husband somehow got us tickets to the opening of the Louise Bourgeois show at the Guggenheim, so it's all things francaises pour nous! 

I'm still stuck in the Jane Smiley book (it's no Decameron, despite her intentions), but I wanted to mention that last night my husband and I went to see The Edge of Heaven at Film Forum.  The scene itself was hilarious; although the theatre is on Houston Street, the crowd at the 7:15 p.m. screening very Upper West Side.  We're talking Zabar's bags, sensible shoes, and lots of funky eyewear.  Even though I bought my tickets in advance, the guy at the box office advised me to arrive a full hour before the movie's start time -- and he was right; the place was packed.

I'm happy to report that the film was entirely worth it.  It would have been hard for the director, Fatih Akin, to top Head-On, his first film.  The Edge of Heaven comes close, though; this tale of groups of people coming together and breaking apart across Turkey and Germany is beautiful, ebullient, and despairing all at once.  My husband thought that the many coincidental jostlings between the two central narratives were contrived, at least in some moments.  While we've certainly seen this technique before (Babel, anyone?) I think that Akin used it particularly well . . . And I don't want to say anything about why I think he handled it well, because I don't want to give anything away!  Just see it.  And then rent Head-On.  Or rent Head-On first.

I guess it's a misnomer to title this post "Memorial Day Weekend" when I finished The Septembers of Shiraz on Saturday!  It was a relief to breeze through something after being stuck in The Savage Detectives for so long.  I didn't read The Septembers of Shiraz quickly because I didn't enjoy it, though; from the opening image of mint leaves drifting through an unfinished cup of tea I was riveted by the Amin family's story.

Initially, in thinking back on the novel, I kept thinking, "It was a quiet book."  Upon more reflection, however, I don't think that label is correct.  A lot happens in the novel's 300-odd pages, and there are many harrowing events and fraught conversations.  I think that I initially labeled it as "quiet" in my mind because the writing is so authoritative and capable that the prose feels very even.  There are images that stand out as particularly good, but none that made me wince.

Sadly, because I underestimated myself, I think I'm now stuck in a book I won't end up liking.  I only brought the Sofer book with me, whcih meant that for the return trip home my taste was dictated by a newsstand in Milwaukee.  So I'm reading (the blurb is from the Times):

TEN DAYS IN THE HILLS, by Jane Smiley. (Anchor, $14.95.) In March 2003, just after the invasion of Iraq, a group of friends, relatives and associates gather in the Hollywood Hills at the home of a movie director who hasn’t worked much lately. The novel is loosely modeled on “The Decameron,” Boccaccio’s 14th-century collection of tales, in which 10 men and women take refuge from the Black Death in the countryside and spend 10 days telling one another stories. In this case, the stories are sometimes movie plots, the satire is heavy-handed and the sex is X-rated.

I was home sick today, which enabled me to finally finish The Savage Detectives.  The novel begins in Mexico City in 1975 and spins through Latin America, Europe, and Africa as it chronicles the experiences of two poets on various quests.  Told from the perspectives of friends, casual acquaintances, lovers, and passers-by, The Savage Detectives is a funny, perplexing, and challenging look at what it means to be young, to be a poet, and what it means to create poetry.

I felt that my own enjoyment of the novel was hampered somewhat by my lack of knowledge about Latin American literature.  For example, the book begins and ends with one character describing his interactions with the poets -- who deem themselves "visceral realists" -- and their search for the earliest "visceral realist" poet, now an old woman living in the Sonoran Desert.  Because the novel constantly refers to names and movements in Latin American literature that I am vaguely familiar with, at least, I was never entirely sure what references were true and what references were manufactured.  Ultimately, however, that uncertainty was probably intentional. 

That said, in a novel about poets and poetry, I would have liked a somewhat better sense of what it meant to be a "visceral realist."  Again, maybe the point was that it was a meaningless construct, but I would have liked to read at least a snatch of poetry that was written by one of the "savage detectives."  It wouldn't be entirely surprising if the poets never wrote anything at all, though, given the amount of sex and drinking and general madness that they barrel through.

It is impossible to read The Savage Detectives without a certain degree of melancholy if you read the introduction and learn about Bolano's life.  (I usually try to read introductions at the end . . . I should have stuck to that rule, here.)  Roberto Bolano obviously drew on his own wanderings to inform the novel (born in Chile, after spending time in Mexico City, he ended up in Barcelona), which was published to great acclaim in the Spanish-speaking world in 1998.  Then, he died of a fatal liver disease in 2003 -- way before the English translation appeared in 2007 and earned him all kinds of kudos.

I'm still stuck in The Savage Detectives, berating myself for choosing French over Spanish in the sixth grade.  But I have been thinking about other books, at least.  Two weeks ago I went to a great reading at the 92nd Street Y by Meg Wolitzer and Andrew Sean Greer.  I'm not sure what the link was supposed to be between the two authors; other than the fact that they both seemed to be gracious and lovely people, they did not have much in common.  But their new novels, The Ten Year Nap and The Story of a Marriage, both sounded interesting.  I'm more likely to read The Story of a Marriage, particularly after the amazing New York Times review (although The New Yorker did not like it as much) but I have a feeling that if I ever have children, I'll be looking for The Ten Year Nap at the library.

Then, last weekend, the husband and I went to a reading hosted by the PEN World Voices Festival.  It wasn't a reading, exactly; it was more of a conversation between Jeffrey Eugenides and Daniel Kehlmann.  Not only was Jeffrey Eugenides as erudite and funny and thoughtful as I'd hoped, Daniel Kehlman -- who I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard of -- was also great, in a dry, German way, and his novel sounds right up the husband's alley.

Even though I'm still reading The Savage Detectives, I did check out a new book from the library to tempt myself into finishing faster.  Dalia Sofer's The Septembers of Shiraz is now on the shelf.  I was initially interested in the novel because I thought that "Shiraz" referred to the varietal.  I did not realize it referred to the Iranian city until much later.  Does that mean that I have an alcohol problem?

I loved The Intuitionist (I read John Henry Days too but didn't like it quite as much) so I was thrilled to see Colson Whitehead's name in the Op-Ed section of the Times this week.  His piece, "Visible Man," doesn't disappoint.  It becomes even more resonant in light of the Sean Bell verdict, I think.  But read it for yourself.

Made a scary pit stop at McNally Robinson this afternoon.  Scary because I had to physically refrain myself from buying out the store.  The friend who I was with wasn't so lucky; she bought four books!

The visit was good in that it reminded me that I really need to read:

The Post-Birthday World: A Novel (P.S.)

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao