BOOKS: AUGUST

BOOKS WE LOVE: In which we editors gush about the books—new or old—that have knocked our respective socks off.

Zeitoun
by Dave Eggers
(McSweeney’s, 2009)

Four years after Hurricane Katrina catastrophically overwhelmed a weak levee system, Dave Eggers makes a compelling case for the Zeitoun family—that theirs is another New Orleans story to be heard. Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a successful Syrian immigrant, uses his canoe to rescue neighbors and their pets in the days following the storm. He ends up in a high-security prison with no means of contacting his wife and children, who have evacuated to Arizona. As Eggers demonstrated in 2006’s fantastic What Is the What, an “autobiography” told from the perspective of real-life Sudanese refugee Valentino Achack Deng, and as he shows here again in Zeitoun, his capacity for empathy is virtually bottomless.

Lines we liked: “He was conflicted about what he was seeing, a refracted version of his city, one where homes and trees were bisected and mirrored in this oddly calm body of water. The novelty of the new world brought forth the adventurer in him—he wanted to see it all, the whole city, what had become of it. But the builder in him thought of the damage, how long it would take to rebuild.”

—SCA

Serena
by Ron Rash
(Ecco, 2008; pb forthcoming October 2009)

The feminist in me admires the eagle-taming, white-Arabian-riding, dark-hearted, sharp-tongued, take-no-prisoners force that is the beautiful Serena Pemberton, Ron Rash’s empress of the timber trade in Depression-era North Carolina. The brazen ambition of Serena and her new husband George is both thrilling and appalling. In their wake, natural beauty is devastated, whole forests are wiped out, and humans themselves are felled like hardwoods. Looking over the ravaged land, one sawyer remarks: “I think this is what the end of the world will be like.”

Lines we liked: “'I toast you as well, Mrs. Pemberton,' Doctor Cheney said. 'The nature of the fairer sex is to lack the male’s analytical skills, but at least in this instance, you have somehow compensated for that weakness.'
    Serena’s features tightened, but the irritation vanished as quickly as it had appeared, swept clear from her face like a lock of unruly hair.
    'My husband tells me that you are from these very mountains, a place called Wild Hog Gap,” Serena said to Cheney. “Obviously, your views on my sex were formed by the slatterns you grew up with, but I assure you the natures of women are more various than your limited experience allows.' …
    'By God you married a saucy one,' Wilkie chortled, raising his tumbler to Pemberton. 'This camp is going to be lively now.'"

—MGS

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales
by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (selected and translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers)
(forthcoming from Penguin, September 2009)

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s fairy tales roil with nightmare and mischief. When reality becomes most unfathomable—childbirth, a heart attack, suicide, the loss of a loved one—characters are transported to a parallel universe, Petrushevskaya’s invented “Orchard of Unusual Possibilities.” This is the land of the miraculous and the macabre. You may find sympathy—somewhere—but it’s more likely that the “charred stump” that keeps rolling into your legs as you fly across worlds in a burnt and beaten airplane will turn out to be what’s left of the hapless navigator. Take it in stride, dear reader, and remember that this collection of unnerving tales was born on ordinary and desperate streets.

Lines we liked: “She understood, she knew, that something was wrong, and she no longer wanted to have her mom here, or her son. She didn’t want to see anyone again, or if she did see someone she didn’t want to know who it was, hoped she’d be unable to distinguish between the young, pale, calm faces in the circle dance, flying free like her—and hoping not to meet anyone at all anymore, in this kingdom of the dead, and hoping never to learn just how much they grieved in that other kingdom, of the living.”

—JME

A Map of Home
by Randa Jarrar
(Other Press, 2008)
 
In Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home, Nidali, a refugee from Saddam’s bombs, finds a Texan adolescence dizzying to navigate with her Egyptian-Grecian-Palestinian background. Jarrar’s prose is as delightfully dry and intense as her main character; indeed, the unflinching portrayal of outspoken Arab women—cursing and sexual exploration uncensored—caused the author to be disowned by her father after the book’s publication. Sarcastic essays, Arabic lyrics juxtaposed with American rap, and other anecdotes present cross-cultural observations that are both humorous and wistful.

Lines we liked: “The weather is odd and Texan; it is hot, it is cold, and Baba loves it because it is like him and can’t decide which one it wants to be or even if it wants to stay or leave.”

—CMG

Rembrandt’s Nose: Of Flesh & Spirit in the Master’s Portraits
by Michael Taylor
(Distributed Art Publishers, 2007)

Michael Taylor takes a peculiar approach to the portraits of the Dutch master Rembrandt—he begins with an often overlooked facial feature. Not the eyes, which have been covered elsewhere, but the olfactory organ. As he says, “The nose alone is eloquent…. [I]t proclaims the man who wears it.” Taylor invites us to explore the details of Rembrandt’s work and to appreciate the painter’s mastery, but he doesn’t shy away from the amusing reality of an artist in front of his mirror, dressed up as a mad, snarling vagrant or a pretentious aristocrat. Though scholarly, this book is strangely intimate and, ultimately, Taylor’s peculiar thesis seems completely natural.

Lines we liked: “Writing an essay on Rembrandt and the way he depicted noses—his own and that of his sitters—seemed so obvious to me that I was surprised no one had done it before.”


—RJBF

The Death of Bunny Munro
by Nick Cave
(forthcoming from Faber & Faber, September 2009)

Often disturbing and profane, The Death of Bunny Munro follows its title character, an irreverent door-to-door salesman obsessed with sex, drugs and alcohol, during his final days. Through Bunny, Nick Cave reveals an elusive, self-destructive world that has lost all humanity—but what happens when that world wants it back?

Lines we liked: “Auden said it all. ‘We must love one another or die.’”

—RK

Netherland
by Joseph O’Neill
(Vintage, 2008)

Netherland is about post-9/11 New York. It is also, to varying degrees, about cricket, unlikely friendship, the immigrant experience, the unsettling journey past young adulthood toward middle age, and putting a marriage—a family—back together. Due to the framed-flashback structure of the novel, the reader knows more or less from the outset where Hans, his wife, and his new friend Chuck Ramkissoon are going to end up. We do not finish Netherland to learn their fates. Instead, we find ourselves compelled to discover the imperfections of Hans’s journey through the four-and-a-half years that follow this iconic and terrifying event in American history. In Hans’s case, the pieces of the puzzle still haven't fallen into place. In fact, they may never fit the same way again.

Along with Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Netherland was perhaps the most hyped novel of 2008. But read it for yourself, please.

Lines we liked: “As I stood there, thrown by Herald Square’s flows of pedestrians and the crazed traffic diagonals and the gray, seemingly bottomless gutter pools, I was seized for the first time by a nauseating sense of America, my gleaming adopted country, under the secret actuation of unjust, indifferent powers. The rinsed taxis, hissing over fresh slush, shone like grapefruits; but if you looked down into the space between the road and the undercarriage, where icy matter stuck to pipes and water streamed down the mud flaps, you saw a foul mechanical dark.”

—SCA

Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, The Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small
by John Cook with Laura Ballance and Mac McCaughan
(forthcoming from Algonquin, September 2009)

John Cook offers a colorful glimpse into the world of Merge Records, the acclaimed indie label that launched such revered groups as Arcade Fire, Spoon, the Magnetic Fields, and Neutral Milk Hotel. He passes the mike to Merge co-founders Laura Ballance and Mac McCaughan, as well as a motley cast of fellow musicians and friends, so they can tell a story of unlikely success that began twenty years ago with a stash of borrowed cash.

The interviews, anecdotes, and a slew of visual materials that make up this book reveal a strange juncture in American music, spurred by the unslung, gritty sounds of the late-’80s North Carolina scene, which Laura and Mac mined to forge a bold new aesthetic. There’s something miraculous, if not peculiar, in how they clawed through the tectonic shifts in music of the following decades, eschewing major-label theatrics (and contracts!) along the way for passion and handshakes—a human approach to putting out the records they love.

Cook captures the spirit of Merge Records, where noise is art and music is manifesto. And in the end, he leaves us wondering: What will Merge pull off next?
 
Lines we liked: “They were like, if you took a carnival, and you played it on an AM radio, and then you stuck it in a bucket with a microphone and recorded it, and then took that recording and played it on a victrola, and then rolled it down the stairs and there’s someone there to catch it. That’s a Neutral Milk Hotel show.”

—JTM

Long Story Short: Flash Fiction From Sixty-Five of North Carolina’s Finest Writers
Edited by Marianne Gingher
(forthcoming from UNC Press, August 2009)

Is writing flash fiction a lazy way to write a story, a cheater’s avoidance of hard work? Write until you get stuck, take a massive detour to the ending, tack on a snazzy last line, and you’re done. Well, that’s one way.

Or take the Long Story Short approach: flash fiction as a form reserved for skilled craftsmen. Highlights include Orson Scott Card’s story about a group of young unseers—those unaware of The Emperor of the Air; a Quinn Dalton story about Roy’s motional problems; and Michael Parker’s ditty on putt-putt-golf hell.

Lines we liked: “In the cafeteria fourth period Lori said she had her Uncle Bert’s nipple in an envelope. We were all like, What are you talking about, and she was like, I’m not kidding, his nipple fell off and I got it and he doesn’t even know I have it.” —Wendy Brenner, “Nipple”

—MB

Photographs by John McElwee and Cassandra Gambill