Hot Books in a Cold Season
BOOKS WE LOVE: In which we editors gush about some books (old and new) that have knocked our respective socks off.
THE QUEST FOR CORVO
by A.J.A. Symons
(Quartet, 1993)
Cult-like stirrings regarding the charms of a queer 1934 biography about an even queerer subject, a mostly forgotten writer named Baron Corvo, have, for some years, teased our attention. Last year, another vague stirring finally caused us to try a few pages.
Which quickly prompted us to gobble up the entire tale.
If there is a stranger and yet more satisfactory biography of a writer than THE QUEST FOR CORVO, do tell.
The first time A.J.A. Symons took up the writings of Baron Corvo (real name: Fr. Frederick Wolfe), he did so with a book called HADRIAN THE SEVENTH. Almost immediately he "felt that interior stir with which we all recognize a transforming experience." Symons's wonderment over HADRIAN THE SEVENTH was fed not only by the book's felicitous prose, but by the "superman" qualities apparent in the protagonist, an unhappy Catholic chosen to be Pope: high intelligence, moral courage, "his steadfast and touching confidence in God and himself."
From there, it is a short hop to being obsessed with Wolfe/Corvo and deciding to find out everything possible about the late novelist's life. Early in the pursuit, Symons is given a stash of disturbing Wolfe letters, which lacked "the generous sentiments and hopes for man and the world which distinguish HADRIAN. On the contrary, they gave an account, in language that omitted nothing, of...an existence compared with which Nero's was innocent, praiseworthy, and unexciting."
Despite the sweeping erudition that suffuses both Symons's and Wolfe's writing—and which often reminds the reader of his own deficiency—there is little to experience in THE QUEST FOR CORVO but compelling drama. Each sentence seems to contribute irresistibly to the pull: "Horrible though the letters were," Symons writes, "they possessed all the graces of the book that had so charmed me: the spirit and the content differed, not the style."
To broaden his understanding of Wolfe, Symons gathers "clues" wherever he can. Many drop from Wolfe's unpublished manuscripts or correspondence, but mostly it is Symons's encounters with Wolfe's friends and enemies, including Wolfe's recalcitrant and touchy brother, that layer the book with RASHOMON-like multitudes.
NOTE: Symons's other few books aren't much discussed. He died in 1941, at age 41. He was the brother of the popular mystery writer Julian Symons. Many people finish THE QUEST FOR CORVO as thrilled and stirred up by A.J.A. Symons's prose and intellect as Symons was by Wolfe's.
LINES WE LIKED: "Where and how did Corvo live, then? (One is almost tempted to add, why?)"
—MAS
CREATE DANGEROUSLY: THE IMMIGRANT ARTIST AT WORK
by Edwidge Danticat
(Princeton University Press, 2010)
During "a dictatorship that had forced thousands to choose between exile and death," Edwidge Danticat left Haiti to come to the U.S. at age twelve. This dichotomy defines Danticat's relationship to her home country and to her art: both are places where death and yearning intermingle. Accordingly, CREATE DANGEROUSLY reveals a Haiti that is far more complicated and alluring than some Westerners might expect. The essays detail an absorbing succession of individuals, from the aunt guarding the family's "ancestral home" on a mountaintop to a woman maimed and tortured by a paramilitary junta who now tells her story "to help Haiti." In some way, this is Danticat's mission, too—in CREATE DANGEROUSLY, she helps her home country by bringing it vividly to life.
LINES WE LIKED: "There are many possible interpretations of what it means to create dangerously, and Albert Camus, like the poet Osip Mandelstam, suggests that it is creating as a revolt against silence, creating when both the creation and the reception, the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings, disobedience to a directive."
—CAF
QUARTET
by Jean Rhys
(Perennial, 1981)
We revel in thrillers we can label "Highsmithian" (after Patricia), which means a book that can satisfy both a literary fix and a taste for suspense/creepiness. QUARTET is decidedly Highsmithian. It also provokes as a distaff response to Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES, another spare novel that appeared three years prior to QUARTET, in 1926, and also concerned expats living glamorously squalid lives in Paris, France.
Marya, the young heroine of QUARTET, has her insular little world turned inside out when her husband is jailed for art theft and she is left, friendless and penniless, to fend alone in a country she knows very little about. Enter the creepy Heidlers, a couple she met just once before, who abruptly volunteer to rescue her with the offer of free room and board in their apartment. It's a bargain she tries, but fails, to refuse.
LINES WE LIKED: "She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. She had always known that it was there—hidden under the more or less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child."
—MAS
THE FROZEN RABBI
by Steve Stern
(Algonquin Books, 2010)
In 1999, schlubby suburban teenager Bernie Karp accidentally thaws a hundred-something-year-old rabbi who has been stored in his family's deep freezer. Bernie, suddenly obsessed with Jewish mysticism, conceals Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr in the guesthouse until the rabbi decides his television consumption has given him enough insight into American culture to pursue an enterprise of his own. Paralleling this present-day plotline, THE FROZEN RABBI also details the saga of the rabbi's preservation, which began with toiling generations of Russian émigrés who transported his mystical being from Russia to Ellis Island and, eventually, Tennessee. Told with a sharp linguistic wit—punning in dialects from Yiddish to Memphian patois—Stern's smart, gritty tale also feels like a magical coming-of-age story. With the help of otherwordly sex scenes, religious satire, political commentary, and gender-defying romance, this book gets away with it.
LINES WE LIKED: "'Sure, it was nice to become one with the Godhead and all that, but in the end, as the sages said, 'Life is with people,' and if you couldn't take it with you, what was the good of leaving your body at all?"
—NE
AN UNCOMMON HEROINE
by Jamie Cox Robertson
(Adams Media, October 2010)
Everyone from Thomas Hardy's Tess Durbeyfield to Ann Patchett's Roxane Coss of Bel Canto makes a cameo in AN UNCOMMON HEROINE. Featuring chapter-by-chapter portraits of famous book heroines, it's a quirky, welcome addition to the literature of fiction fandom. Organized not in chronological order but around couplets based on common themes of, say, independence (Catherine Earnshaw and Holly Golightly) or childhood neglect overcome (Jane Eyre and Anne Elliott), AN UNCOMMON HEROINE succeeds as part reference guide, part paean to the great female characters of Western lit. Our only question: Where is Caddy Compson?
LINES WE LIKED: "She is smart, but prefers not to think."
—MTP
SAUL BELLOW: LETTERS
edited by Benjamin Taylor
(Viking, 2010)
Culled from a lifetime's worth of correspondence, these letters reveal the mechanics of the man behind some of America's greatest literary characters. The collection begins with a break-up letter to Yetta Barshgvesky. "I hate melodrama," writes a seventeen-year-old Bellow. "The only thing I hate more than melodrama and spinach is myself. You think perhaps that I am insane? I am. But I have my pen; I am in my element and I defy you." To read LETTERS is to experience the maturation of an author who early on dedicated his life to turning all of base experience into "[manufactured] gold." In 1950, well into THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH, the book that would establish Bellow's reputation as a serious novelist, he wrote to his editor at Viking, "I knew that the course I'd been following for a long time was at last producing results, that I'd put my hand strongly to a good thing and was making it resound. Or, putting it another way, I believe I'm beginning to make some real excavations." Thank God, Bellow took letter writing as seriously as he did; for anyone who loves his stories, as I do, this book is a gift.
LINES WE LIKED: "Consequently there is a sort of richness in writing which is supposed to be not for us: the honey in the lion's mouth. It's not so much considered daring to go into the lion's mouth as it is thought bad form. One doesn't go into anybody's mouth."
—JHB
NATURE STORIES
by Jules Renard (translated by Douglas Parmee, illustrated by Pierre Bonnard)
(New York Review of Books, 2011)
NATURE STORIES consists of more than eighty playful sketches of the earth and its cohabitants by Jules Renard, whose writings have animated the mental landscapes of writers as dissimilar as W. Somerset Maugham, Susan Sontag, Donald Barthelme, and Samuel Beckett. Here's Renard—playful, introspective, vibrant, somber, quixotic, delightfully absurd, and unapologetically anthropomorphic—as he describes the natural world around him, from a grasshopper who is "not afraid of anyone because he's got seven-league boots, a bull neck, the forehead of a genius, the belly of a ship..." to an "open rose, the color of a guileless little girl...intoxicated by her own luxuriant scent..." to a toad whose "childish mouth" speaks in a British accent. Renard reminds us that the artist's role is to listen carefully enough to ask good questions.
LINES WE LIKED: "In the night, a flight of cranes passes overhead; I recognize their call. I can't see them clearly but I can hear the beating of their wings. The only thing I can see is stars. A shooting star flashes across the sky and its trajectory seems to me to be cutting through the cranes' flight, that their rallying calls are increasing and that, during their journey, they'll be shot at by the stars, so there'll be no sound, no smoke."
—JHB
RAVENS
by George Dawes Green
(Grand Central, 2009)
In RAVENS, best friends Shaw and Romeo hope to move away from Ohio to shed their loser ways and find new and less-nerdy lives in Florida. But en route, when Shaw learns of the Boatwright family, who have just won the multi-million-dollar-lottery jackpot, he recruits his kind-hearted best friend into terrorizing the family for half their winnings. While Shaw casts a Stockholm-syndrome spell on the nuclear family—Christianity-ridden Mitch, his alcoholic wife, Patsy, their crybaby Jase, and Tara, their stubborn teenage daughter—Romeo drifts around Brunswick befriending oddballs and preparing himself (unsuccessfully) to kill any one of the Boatwright's nearby kin at Shaw's command. Shaw and Romeo never quite make it to Florida—instead, the novel takes us to darker, funnier places, especially when Nell, Tara's firecracker grandmother and confidante, shows up on the scene with a slow-witted sheriff.
LINES WE LIKED: "'Galo pequeno! Quem o ama? O pescador. Idoso. Ama-o!' He was a childlike wraith posing as an old fisherman posing as a roosterish kid. This pierced Romeo."
—MTP
UNCLEAN JOBS FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS
by Alissa Nutting
(Starcherone, 2010)
If you follow the sundry musings of Steve Almond, including his recent author interview, "Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex #4: The Rumpus Interview with Alissa Nutting," then you're probably familiar with how hilarious this Alissa Nutting person is: "I've seen men in $5,000 suits urinate in public fountains here. Las Vegas is the best place on earth." (Really, she's that much fun. I once attended a party she threw where she and her husband were dressed as werewolves in togas, for no discernable reason.) The best part: Her fiction is as irreverent, grotesque, and left-handedly clever as she is in real life.
At first, the reader might want to just categorize these stories as absurdist comedy. Each story involves a (mostly) female character in an "unclean job," which includes the run-of-the-mill "Porn Star" and "Cat Owner" alongside less-common callings like "Ant Colony" and "Corpse Smoker." The cavalier voices of her occasionally deluded protagonists belie their deep terrors as they confront loneliness, baby-craving, and anxiety over being treated as sex objects. Nutting's achievement is that her characters are consistently funny—perhaps even painfully so.
LINES WE LIKED: "I was holding my head onto my body, carefully and by the window, so that its breeze might sober me up enough to walk to the end of the room where I might then become sober enough to walk to the toilet and land on the floor. There, hopefully, the pressure from my cheek against my cell phone could call someone who knew me and liked me and wanted to get me a cab and make sure this night was not where my life¹s journey would end." From "Model's Assistant"
THE UN-NATURAL STATE
by Brock Thompson
(University of Arkansas Press, 2010)
THE UN-NATURAL STATE is an eye-opening look at the gay, queer, and/or simply flamboyant men and women who have called (or still do call) Arkansas home-bittersweet-home. From journal entries written in 1683 by explorer Rene Robert Cavelier describing encounters with homosexual Indians in the Arkansas territories to Bill Clinton's 1992 pro-gay presidential-acceptance speech, Thompson covers a lot of ground. But for all its historical depth, the true gems here are the anecdotes. My favorite: the story of David Lee, aka Fonda Le Femme, Miss Gay Arkansas 2001. After her hometown victory, Fonda Le Femme goes on to a successful career as a drag queen, and along the way makes a compelling case that her profession might be nothing less than the perfect embodiment of the grace, manners, and glitz that define Southern culture.
LINES WE LIKED: "All good history is in some way personal, and how it is important to the historian, I believe, must be articulated.... I came to realize that a better understanding of myself over time provides not only a better understanding of those who came before but also a possible connection to people and places now gone."
—KNW
AFRICAN AMERICAN FRATERNITIES AND SORORITIES: THE LEGACY AND THE VISION
edited by Tamara L. Brown, Gregory S. Parks, and Clarenda M. Phillips
(University of Kentucky, 2010)
In 1903, black male students at Indiana University established the first Black Greek Life Organization for the purposes of racial solidarity. AFRICAN AMERICAN FRATERNITIES AND SORORITIES begins with this event and follows the story of all-black male and female Greek organizations through the Jim Crow laws and Civil Rights Movement of the twentieth century. Describing how groups like the so-called "Divine Nine" (the first five fraternities and four sororities created between the years of 1907 and 1963) provided a platform from which to pursue social reform and to party, this collection of academic essays and ethnographic sketches points out fascinating bits of history—for instance, unlike their white counterparts, most black frats to this day do not have access to private housing so must hold their functions in public spheres, leading to fewer instances of sexual abuse and hazing. Despite the occasional overdose of academic prose, AFRICAN AMERICAN FRATERNITIES AND SORORITIES is a rich read about a side of Greek Life seldom seen.
LINES WE LIKED: "Instead, recruiters [for the XYZ fraternity's sweetheart program] emphasized their desire for 'strong' black women, an attribute ferreted out with questions such as this one: 'I'm going to give you three categories: woman, XYZ sweetheart, and black woman. What order would you put them in and why?'"
—MTP
Photos by WGE
