Books | April 20, 2007

A Little Read, Thai Style

by Allan Appel | April 20, 2007 10:20 AM | Permalink

Tom Wellington's copy of To Kill a Mockingbird is that old 60-cent Dell paperback that many of us remember from college or high school. He was putting it to good use Wednesday night, when one of the Big Read's Mockingbird discussion groups gathered among the aromas of cardamom and curry at the Rice Pot Thai restaurant on upper State Street.

Wellington, who admitted to being more of a computer, science, and business book reader than fiction aficionado, had really gotten himself into the spirit of the Big Read, the series of events centered around having all of New Haven read the same book this spring and talk about it.

"I actually borrowed this copy from my friend," he said pointing to the fraying binding, "and look at the number I've done on it. I mean I really read it thoroughly, and I wrecked it. I'm going to have to buy him a replacement copy."

His energetic read was worth it. Wellington loved the book. He was especially drawn to the trial scenes, beginning about chapter 17, in which Atticus Finch takes on the wrath of his 1930s Alabama town by defending "Negro" Tom Robinson against false, racially motivated charges. "The courtroom scenes," he said, "are more gripping than a John Grisham novel."

The discussion was organized for The Big Read by Bookrounds , an online book discussion group that was established in New Haven in 2003. John Jessen (pictured with Rebecca Lowry) is the founder of Bookrounds. He too was on hand to help orchestrate the discussion. "Bookrounds has about 1,100 people registered on line," he said, "and people vote for the books they want to discuss. Mockingbird, of course, got some special treatment this summer, but lots of people wanted to read it."

Jessen, who, after jobs in bookstores and publishing in New York City now works with the New Haven Free Public Library (NHFPL), was in on some of the planning for The Big Read. "We really wanted to see if we could get (author) Harper Lee to come to town. I got as far as calling her hometown library in, I believe, Monroeville, Alabama. The librarian said, 'Oh, sure, Harper comes in to the library every two weeks,' but we didn't get much farther."

Second best to the author herself, Jessen said, will be a lecture given by Charles Shields, the man who (lucky timing for him) completed a biography on Lee (unauthorized) in 2006. He'll be discussing his book Mockingbird: An Intimate Portrait of Harper Lee at the main branch library on April 25 at 6:30. For a complete list of activities, click here.

Jessen's Bookrounds, he said, is thriving, composed of people across the whole range of the community. "Although we started primarily with graduate students, now we have all kinds of people, including an 80-year old participant, and even one kid age 14. We had to throw him out, because we would have needed parental permission."

Jessen also organizes for the library the Writers Live series. His take on the Lee novel is that the voice of the narrator, Scout, is so all-knowing, so acidic that at times it strains credulity that she is only a young girl, starting in the story at about six years old. When another member of the discussion group concurred, but also said that it is clear from the first pages that the story is told in recollection, Jessen nodded; it made more sense.

For her part, Lowry's particular interest in this summer's Mockingbird in New Haven derives from its potential to bring groups of people together from across the city. Born in Madison, returning to New Haven after several years of work volunteering in Botswana in the effort combat HIV/AIDS, she has also volunteered as a facilitator for Arts and Ideas, attending the various discussion groups, taking statistics, and helping to reports to the funders. She's especially looking forward to the gatherings when groups of kids are being bussed to senior centers.

The Big Read is, of course, comprised of many little reads -- by individuals who mull over their own reactions, when two people enter a dialogue, or in small and large group discussions. "I'd love to see," said Jessen, "a situation in town where people go to the butcher and say, 'I'd like a small leg of lamb, and, by the way, wasn't it terrific in chapter 4 of Mockingbird, the way Scout and Calpurnia, the 'Negro' housekeeper, really mix it up!'"

Perhaps that's happening already, perhaps not quite yet. In the meantime this discussion group, in the early days of our Big Read, didn't fail to raise glasses of Singha Thai beer, and toast Miss Harper Lee.

Bookrounds will be leading four more Mockingbird discussions at local eateries: Sandra's on May 8; Anna Liffey's on May 21; Indian Palace on Mary 16; and Scoozzi on June 2.

Books | April 20, 2007

A Little Read, Thai Style

by Allan Appel | April 20, 2007 10:20 AM | Permalink

Tom Wellington's copy of To Kill a Mockingbird is that old 60-cent Dell paperback that many of us remember from college or high school. He was putting it to good use Wednesday night, when one of the Big Read's Mockingbird discussion groups gathered among the aromas of cardamom and curry at the Rice Pot Thai restaurant on upper State Street.

Wellington, who admitted to being more of a computer, science, and business book reader than fiction aficionado, had really gotten himself into the spirit of the Big Read, the series of events centered around having all of New Haven read the same book this spring and talk about it.

"I actually borrowed this copy from my friend," he said pointing to the fraying binding, "and look at the number I've done on it. I mean I really read it thoroughly, and I wrecked it. I'm going to have to buy him a replacement copy."

His energetic read was worth it. Wellington loved the book. He was especially drawn to the trial scenes, beginning about chapter 17, in which Atticus Finch takes on the wrath of his 1930s Alabama town by defending "Negro" Tom Robinson against false, racially motivated charges. "The courtroom scenes," he said, "are more gripping than a John Grisham novel."

The discussion was organized for The Big Read by Bookrounds , an online book discussion group that was established in New Haven in 2003. John Jessen (pictured with Rebecca Lowry) is the founder of Bookrounds. He too was on hand to help orchestrate the discussion. "Bookrounds has about 1,100 people registered on line," he said, "and people vote for the books they want to discuss. Mockingbird, of course, got some special treatment this summer, but lots of people wanted to read it."

Jessen, who, after jobs in bookstores and publishing in New York City now works with the New Haven Free Public Library (NHFPL), was in on some of the planning for The Big Read. "We really wanted to see if we could get (author) Harper Lee to come to town. I got as far as calling her hometown library in, I believe, Monroeville, Alabama. The librarian said, 'Oh, sure, Harper comes in to the library every two weeks,' but we didn't get much farther."

Second best to the author herself, Jessen said, will be a lecture given by Charles Shields, the man who (lucky timing for him) completed a biography on Lee (unauthorized) in 2006. He'll be discussing his book Mockingbird: An Intimate Portrait of Harper Lee at the main branch library on April 25 at 6:30. For a complete list of activities, click here.

Jessen's Bookrounds, he said, is thriving, composed of people across the whole range of the community. "Although we started primarily with graduate students, now we have all kinds of people, including an 80-year old participant, and even one kid age 14. We had to throw him out, because we would have needed parental permission."

Jessen also organizes for the library the Writers Live series. His take on the Lee novel is that the voice of the narrator, Scout, is so all-knowing, so acidic that at times it strains credulity that she is only a young girl, starting in the story at about six years old. When another member of the discussion group concurred, but also said that it is clear from the first pages that the story is told in recollection, Jessen nodded; it made more sense.

For her part, Lowry's particular interest in this summer's Mockingbird in New Haven derives from its potential to bring groups of people together from across the city. Born in Madison, returning to New Haven after several years of work volunteering in Botswana in the effort combat HIV/AIDS, she has also volunteered as a facilitator for Arts and Ideas, attending the various discussion groups, taking statistics, and helping to reports to the funders. She's especially looking forward to the gatherings when groups of kids are being bussed to senior centers.

The Big Read is, of course, comprised of many little reads -- by individuals who mull over their own reactions, when two people enter a dialogue, or in small and large group discussions. "I'd love to see," said Jessen, "a situation in town where people go to the butcher and say, 'I'd like a small leg of lamb, and, by the way, wasn't it terrific in chapter 4 of Mockingbird, the way Scout and Calpurnia, the 'Negro' housekeeper, really mix it up!'"

Perhaps that's happening already, perhaps not quite yet. In the meantime this discussion group, in the early days of our Big Read, didn't fail to raise glasses of Singha Thai beer, and toast Miss Harper Lee.

Bookrounds will be leading four more Mockingbird discussions at local eateries: Sandra's on May 8; Anna Liffey's on May 21; Indian Palace on Mary 16; and Scoozzi on June 2.

Books | February 5, 2007

Woman on Fire

by Linda Cuckovich | February 5, 2007 9:00 AM | Permalink

Tinling Choong took center stage at the New Haven Public Library on Saturday afternoon, despite her protestations that she writes "from the very peripheral." Choong read several short chapters from her first novel, Firewife, answered audience questions, and signed books at the library's latest Writer's Live! event.

Choong's novel, Firewife, deals extensively with ancient Chinese mythology that explores the struggle between archetypal forces of fire and water, along with yin and yang. The protagonist, Nin, is characterized as a woman who was born with a fiery spirit, but whose life had been shaped, even restricted by the demands of water.

Audience questions probed the writer's background as well as that of her work. Born in Malaysia but ethnically Chinese, Choong conceived Firewife as the story of eight women of Chinese heritage who live outside China, scattered across several countries. These largely disconnected stories are unified by Nin, a photographer who leaves her corporate job in California to travel and photograph women throughout the world.

Several in the audience who, like Choong, were native speakers of other languages, were particularly interested to learn that she had written the novel entirely in English. When asked how she made the transition to writing in English, Choong reminisced about an influential teacher; "She told me to let go of my editorial self."

Such notions of writing as a largely uncritical process came up several times in Choong's comments. She later noted that "Writing for me is very organic; I'm carried away by emotion."

Choong also shied away from attempts to characterize her work exclusively in any tradition. Instead she emphasized her sense that she, and her work, are "straddling several different cultures."

She also explained that the decision to situate all her characters outside China was "definitely a conscious choice." Alluding to her characters, which include a young Thai prostitute, a woman who serves as a nude table for Japanese businessmen, and a young girl who rents her forehead to advertisers in Taipei, she explained, "These are the effects of Chinese diaspora."

A Yale Ph.D. candidate, Choong has taken a leave of absence to promote Firewife. When a colleague in Yale's literature department asked how her graduate studies had affected her fictional work, she responded, "It's actually interrelated." Her dissertation also dealt with evolving notions of Chinese women's sexuality, a central theme in her novel. Ultimately, Choong's background in literary criticism shaped her writing and her audience.

She did have to grapple with some difficult questions. One audience member commented, "Each of the women [in the novel] reinforce stereotypes" about Asian women. She wondered, "Where are you going with this?"

After joking, "That is the question I most fear," Choong gamely responded, "I'm hoping that my readers will read them as a collection of eight women" and see in the stories "pure emotional truth" rather than stereotypes.

Books | November 9, 2006

"Hyper Radiance" Comes To New Haven

by Staff | November 9, 2006 9:09 AM | Permalink

Conventional wisdom: Listen to kids. Believe them. When a teen-aged girl speaks of abduction, her shrink has his own ideas in Heidi Julvaits' new novel, The Uses of Enchantment. Julvaits (pictured) reads from the book, her third, beginning at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the New Haven Free Public Library. Read on for Tanya Angell Allen's review.

The Uses of Enchantment
By Heidi Julvaits
Doubleday, $24.95

Reviewed by Tanya Angell Allen

"Every girl wants to be Anne Frank," says Mary Veal, the teenaged main character of Heidi Julavits' novel The Uses of Enchantment. "I mean, minus the dying part. But how exciting, to be locked in an attic like that. If you didn't have to die, you know? That's why it's such a great read. Because the bad stuff happens outside the book."
When psychiatrist Dr. Hammer tells Mary that she's missing the point of Frank's life, she replies, "Her life didn't have a point...she was just a girl. Girl's lives don't have points. That's why they do what they do."
Mary herself becomes the subject of a best-selling book called Miriam, written by her psychiatrist Dr. Hammer. The book is later criticized by other psychiatrists because it contains fabricated exchanges and a possible misdiagnosis. Comparisons are made to Freud's Dora: Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, which has also been criticized for Freud's use of deception in presenting his patient's story. Freud, referred to in The Uses of Enchantment as "the greatest novelist of the twentieth century," allegedly altered Dora's story to back up his own psychoanalytic theories.
Mary's life becomes the subject of psychoanalytical study after she reappears one day as mysteriously as she disappeared a few weeks earlier. She claims that she was abducted, has amnesia, and that she has been under an enchantment. Hammer decides that she made the abduction up and had instead hidden herself away. He makes comparisons between Mary and young women who in the seventeenth century claimed to have been kidnapped by witches. He refers to them all as "hyper radiants," saying that for people with this condition,

Tthe increased pressure under which they've existed either crushes their spirit, or, as I suspect is a trend, their spirit rebels, it ingests this negative energy and reflects it outward as an act of intensive, even destructive creativity. I can help them harness what currently manifests as a destructive tendency and transform it into a positive tendency. A work of art.

We are not told how Hammer proposes to help these women turn this creativity "into a positive tendency," but clues about this might be found in the novel itself and in Julavits' example, as The Uses of Enchantment is partly a story about storytelling. It alternates between stories of the man who might or might not have abducted Mary in 1985; the older Mary of 1999, who has come back to her home town to attend the funeral of her mother; and the psychiatrist who wrote Miriam. Tellingly, the younger Mary is sometimes referred to as "Scheherazade" by her suspected abductor, who might or might not have been abducted by Mary himself.

The real details of the teenager's story are purposefully ambiguous, but at one point the Mary of 1999 realizes that one thing she has always been good at is "creating a plausible story out of disparate details." She can "help people make sense of the senseless; as in the game of props, she could take these seemingly unrelated objects or details and weave them into a convincing story that would alter a depressing landscape into one slightly more saturated with hope."

This is, in a way, a description of the work of creative writers, many of whom transform the energy created by emotional pain and traumatic circumstances into art. As Anne Frank once wrote, "I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn." If The Uses of Enchantment was a different book, it might contain an epilogue in which Mary goes on to get a fiction writing degree from a top university and then becomes a celebrated author like Julavits herself.

The Uses of Enchantment is the third book of Julavits' promising career. She is a founding editor of the literary review The Believer, which is a sister-publication of McSweeneys. Although The Uses of Enchantment is a book for adults, discovering authors like Julavits might help more creative young women find voices of their own through writing. By harnessing their creativity they can make sense of the senseless, give their lives meaning, and gain control of their own stories.

Heidi Julavits will read at the New Haven Public Library at 6:30pm on Thursday, Nov. 9. For more information please see the Writers Live! website or contact John Jessen at

this e-mail address

Books | November 1, 2006

Shula's "Treadmill"

by Paul Bass | November 1, 2006 4:19 PM | Permalink

Shulamith Chernoff of Westville, associate professor of education emeritus at Southern Connecticut State University, has discovered a new career long past the time many other people have retired. She has become an award-winning poet. Click here to watch her read aloud a poem -- from her new published collection, The Stones Bear Witness (Hanover Press) -- about turning 80.

Books | October 9, 2006

Things Fall Into Place

by Staff | October 9, 2006 3:43 PM | Permalink

Half of a Yellow Sun
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Alfred A. Knopf, Hardcove
September 2006, $24.95

Reviewed by Richard Stack

First novels have a habit of being autobiographical: stories of coming-of-age. Second novels are more varied, but often represent the effort to come to terms with the lives and the world of the parents, in the period, perhaps, before the writer was born. Instead of a fictionalized self, then, we have a fictionalized family history, and if one gets going on this project early enough, parents and their friends will still be available, as they were to our author, to talk about their experiences.
Half of a Yellow Sun is such a book. It recounts the early married life of twin sisters, the beautiful one with a great figure whom everyone falls in love with, and the skinny one, tart and skeptical, who gets things done. It covers a period of some six or seven years, between 1962 or so, to 1969, ending about eight years before the author's birth.
The twins, both well-educated, have grown up in an affluent world in the capital, their father a wealthy, politically connected businessman. When we first meet them they are in the middle of falling in love and beginning a family. They have moved from the capital to a university town where the two men work, one as a brilliant and charismatic mathematics professor with a strongly political bent, the other as a writer, a rather romantic foreigner who has abandoned his career at home as a journalist and has come to settle in their country in the hope of turning himself into a writer, and who naturally falls in with the university crowd. For the first years, the two sisters are rather wary of each other, but as time goes by they move closer and closer together.
The structure of the book is rather unusual. It is divided into four parts: "The Early Sixties", then, "The Late Sixties", then "The Early Sixties" again, and then "The Late Sixties" again. There is no single narrator, so we move fluidly, from chapter to chapter, from one focal character to the next, gradually filling out our understanding of them and their families and the contexts in which they live. Each of main figures is richly drawn, three-dimensional, idiosyncratic, and we develop great sympathy and affection for them as the story moves along, and come to care very much about what is in store for them, as all the very best novels make us do. Not for a moment is there a sense that they are mere "characters", standing in for a certain array of attributes which might, in the hands of a lesser writer, be used merely as a means of illustrating the history in which they are embedded.
There is one further central character, with whom the novel begins and ends. He is about 13 when we first meet him, and is being brought into town from his native village by his mother, who has heard that the Maths Professor is looking for someone to work in his house. He is an extremely clever, adept boy who has had almost no schooling, and his slogan is: "can learn very fast." His adolescence provides a counterpoint to the lives of the others, and we stay very close to him in his tentative explorations of his new sexuality and growing skills, as cook, nurse and general housekeeper. As with the other figures in the story we become very fond of him, as do his employers, and anxious about what is to become of him in the tumultuous and tragic events soon to engulf them all. In fact, he finally emerges as himself a writer, committed to telling the story of this time.
The novel is set in the recently independent Nigeria, and a couple of background notes may be in order for those unfamiliar with the history of this country. A product of the Berlin conference of 1885 which carved up the African continent among the European powers, in what is generally referred to as the "Scramble for Africa," Nigeria was initially divided into two British protectorates, one in the North, where the principal tribal group was the Hausa, who ruled a Muslim Kingdom, and the southern, in which the two principal groupings were the Yoruba in the West, and in the East a non-monarchical tribal grouping mostly speaking the Igbo language (formerly referred to, incorrectly, as "Ibo"). The Igbo, who had had contact with the Europeans for some time, had, for the most part, become Christian.
Britain made the fateful decision, in 1914, to incorporate its two protectorates into a single country, leading to endless trouble between the two quite distinct parts of the country, particularly in the period following independence in 1960, a chaotic time, with things coming to a head in a coup in January of 1966. It was thought that those leading the coup had been Igbo officers, and there followed a widespread massacre of Igbos in regions other than the Southeast, sometimes called Igboland. By the late summer, the military commander in the East had proclaimed the region an independent Republic, which he called Biafra. The central government imposed a blockade, and waged a bombing war on the Biafrans for the next several years, causing widespread death, mostly through starvation, until the seccessionist state finally capitulated at the end of the decade.
It is this series of events which form the context for the novel, set almost entirely in Igboland, and dealing with the fate of the little group I have described earlier.They all become deeply involved with the fight to maintain Biafran independence, but gradually their resistance is worn down, as they become refugees moving further and further to the East, as the Nigerian federal troops gradually conquer the land. One becomes almost unbearably anxious about them as things get worse and worse, so I will give away the fact that almost all of the characters do manage, somehow, to survive the horrors of bombing and near-starvation.
But I want to lay stress on the fact that this is not primarily a political novel, but a novel about a group of people undergoing a catastrophe and somehow enduring. The political events are generally outside their purview, even though they are from the intellectual class. The information they receive is totally unreliable radio propaganda from both sides, and they desperately cling to their belief that somehow they will prevail.

The one non-Igbo character, Richard, has come to Nigeria because he has, as he repeatedly says, fallen in love with a beautiful bronze vase, which had been excavated some years earlier at a site called Igbo-Ukwu and dated from a period some thousand years ealier. The Igbo are of very ancient lineage, and are great craftsmen, but how such an ambitious piece could have come to be cast, using such refined and elaborate techniques, in a rainforest in South-eastern Nigeria has caused enormous perplexity, even the suggestion that it may have been as a result of the influence of bronze-casters from Indonesia. In any case, this beautiful vase, now in the museum at Lagos, serves as a continued reminder of the great antiquity of Igbo civilization, of the extraordinary resourcefulness of its people, and of the vigorous local tribal culture.
And this, ultimately, is the message of this moving tribute to her people which Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has composed. Our sense of the canon of Great Novels is, of course, the product of their reception over a long period, but I suspect it will not be long before Half of a Yellow Sun (the title is a description of the hopeful flag of the short-lived Biafran republic) becomes a classic, and not just of Nigerian literature, in the Igbo tradition inaugurated by her illustrious Igbo predessor, Chinua Achebe, best known for his extraordinary novel, Things Fall Apart, dealing with the travails of his country as it was taken over by the British in the late nineteenth-century, but will, like Achebe's book, come to take its place in world literature, alongside the masterpieces of the post-colonial world.

Achichie has recently enrolled in the African Studies department at Yale, and gave a reading a few weeks ago, at the Yale Bookstore. For those (like myself) who missed it, and who are prepared to drive a bit, there will be another at South Hadley in Massachussets, half an hour or so north of Hartford. Wednesday, Oct. 11, at 7 p.m., Odyssey Bookshop, 9 College St. South Hadley, MA. Reading and Signing. Tel: 413.534.7307.

Books | September 29, 2006

Reporter Wooed, Shot, Mugged -- & She Gets Her Story

by Paul Bass | September 29, 2006 8:52 AM | Permalink

Who knew working for the Register was so thrilling?

I mean, look what happens to Annie Seymour on a single assignment. She watches a popular restaurant burn. She ends up on the scene of a murder. She gets shot at herself. She finds herself threatened, followed, invited inside a car for a private chat with a mobster. And she gets one heck of a story.

It's a wonder she ever finds time to do her laundry.

Oh wait. Annie Seymour doesn't work for the New Haven Register. She covers the cops for the New Haven Herald. You know. The monopoly daily newspaper in town.

The Herald is the Register, of course -- thinly disguised in a series of hard-boiled murder mysteries written by a Register newsroom veteran, Karen E. Olson. Annie Seymour is the series' heroine, a cynical, cut-throat, work-obsessed, sometimes heartless newshound everyone loves to hate. Or, if you're a reporter yourself, the newshound you'd secretly love to be.

Mysterious Press, a Time Warner imprint, released Olsen's latest Annie Seymour novel this week. It's called Secondhand Smoke. Like its predecessor, Sacred Cows, it's a fast-paced, delicious guilty pleasure.

And a trip through the New Haven we know and love.

In between jawboning (and getting sweaty) with cops or a private investigator, arm-wrestling with newsroom colleagues, and chasing down bad guys, Annie Seymour fulfills her Sally's or Consiglio's or Claire's cravings. She takes us on rides down Chapel Street past the park in Wooster Square near her brownstone.

Olson (pictured) captures not just the landmarks but the essence of New Haven. She takes us inside a town where conflicts of interest are harder to avoid driving into than one-way streets or illegal parking spaces -- where the cops and the reporters and the crooks not only know each other, but have slept with each other, or gone to school together, or grown up with each other's relatives. Olson's New Haven, like real-life New Haven, is a Venn diagram with distinct ethnic and cultural enclaves, of Wooster Square and Morris Cove Italian-Americans and of Yalies and animal-rights gasbags and Westville Jews, who inevitably bump into each other and cross boundaries with sometimes uproarious, sometimes painful results.

Tough town, New Haven. In Secondhand Smoke, even the chickens are in on the racket.

Olson, like her heroine, also knows how to get a story. Secondhand Smoke starts with a fire at a popular Wooster Square restaurant. It follows the trail of a first, then a second murder that reveals a parallel underworld universe in New Haven. It also reveals a family tie that until now the middle-aged Seymour has wanted not to explore. To get to the truth, Seymour has to battle a pesky cub reporter, neighbors who don't quite consider her one of their own, and her own unrequited feelings about a cop and a p.i. in the know.

Annie is part Philip Marlowe, part Nancy Drew. Like Humphrey Bogart's classic Raymond Chandler detective, she hides a sentimental, idealistic heart inside a crusty, cynical exterior. And she can never seem to keep her professional pursuits separate from her romantic pursuits.

Like Carolyn Keene's ageless girl detective, Annie, at least in her first two books, keeps running into thugs amid the shadows who shoot at her, threaten her, or beat her just to the point of death, but not quite.

To wit:

"...I turned toward Wooster Square. I pulled up in front of my brownstone and parked. The streetlights played against the snow, casting weird shadows. I didn't look toward Prego as I got out of the car and started up toward the steps.
"Someone grabbed me from behind, and an arm stretched across my chest, keeping me from turning around, my arms pinned behind me.
"'What?' I started to say, but a hand clasped over my mouth.
"'Listen,' a voice hissed in my ear, 'you better stop messing around in things that don't concern you.'
"The arm wrenched my body backward... like I were going to snap in two. I tried to catch my breath, but the hand over my mouth was tight and sweaty.
"'Hey!' The shout came somewhere from my left, and in a second the grip loosened and I fell to the ground, the slush seeping into my skirt. I heard footsteps off to my right, and with a stab of pain in my side, I looked toward them. A large shadow disappeared around the corner..."

Most of all, author Olson nabs the essence of the news reporter. Annie bitches, bitches, bitches. About her paper. About her assignments. About stories that consume her life. About close-mouthed sources who make you push, push, push to tease out every tidibit of information. And yet it's clear: She couldn't imagine doing anything else.

Who can blame her?

Karen Olson, who until recently was the New Haven Register's travel editor, will make the following appearances to discuss her new book: Oct. 4 at R. J. Julia in Madiosn; Oct. 6 at the Book Vault in Wallingford; Oct. 7 at the New Haven Free Public Library. For details check her website.

Books | September 21, 2006

Reruns, On The Page

by Staff | September 21, 2006 10:16 AM | Permalink

Rereadings: Seventeen writers revisit books they love
Edited by Anne Fadiman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Reviewed by Richard Stack

The first book I reread was in 1950, when I was 12. I had first read the book at 11, and
had fallen in love with it, and over the next few years I dipped into it again and again, and read here and there, over and over, until I knew it by heart. I had picked it out of my father's bookcase because of its bright orange leather cover and wonderful comic illustrations.

Recently (some 50 years, and thousands of books, later) I returned to it. But the adventures in
the book had been so deeply engraved in my soul that rereading brought little new to light. It was a new translation, which I found annoying, for I remembered the sentences themselves. (I who have such a terrible memory!) What I did see clearly on rereading (or re-rereading) was what the book had done for me. The author had provided me my own very private Other, a canny survivor, whose basic tactic was to present himself as, on the one hand, an enthusiastic "patriot" (which he was not), and, on the other, a "congenital idiot" (which he also, most certainly, was
not !). It was a simple enough trope, but I LOVED IT: I could be heard, during those years, cackling with pleasure, up in my room.

Later I learned that this book had served essentially the same function for a whole country, Czechoslovakia, in the period following the First World War. The book was called The Good Soldier Shweik, and Shweik had become, for the Czechs, a deeply treasured symbol of national endurance for a small people caught up in the insane affairs of their neighboring superpowers.

For me, as a boy trying to come to terms with the recent business of World War Two (which at that time had been over only a few years), this book was a pure treasure, for it turned me not only into a reader, but a rereader.

Thus when I came across a book called Rereadings in the wonderful new Labyrinths bookstore, a recent immigrant (from home across-the-street-from-Columbia) on York Street (next to Toad's), I was very taken not only with the title but with the idea behind it, which was to commission a series of personal essays by practicing writers of all kinds to write about the experience of rereading a book they had loved when they were young.

Although reading is the defining mark of developed civilizations, it is seldom attended to as such, except in the context of elementary pedagogy. Attention is endlessly diverted from the act of reading, to the thing read, the text. In such a conception, the ordering of the material is crucial, and forms the basis for that ancient art, rhetoric, and its modern descendent, criticism. But the actual reader (let alone the rereader) is nowhere to be found.

But there are many fascinating dimensions to reading, the most important of which is the specific set of needs which reading meets for the individual reader, and the range of ways in which a given text responds to these needs at different periods in a reader's life.

One secret to this book's very high quality is that Anne Fadiman, the editor, turned out to be also the book's midwife, for though she is now the new Francis Writer in Residence at Yale, in her previous incarnation, as editor of The American Scholar, it was her highly innovative idea to commission these essays and to shepherd them through to print. They are her babies.

A bonus attraction, which I picked up from her Yale bio, was that one of the courses she offers undergraduates is "Writing about Oneself." That called to mind the first course of my own devising that I ever taught, some 30 years ago, which I called "The Language of Identity." We read all sorts of exciting confessional literature, starting with Rousseau and ending with Henry Miller and Jean Genet. The readers were to write about themselves, letting their reading rub off on their writing (which it did, in spades !).

It was a very successful idea for a course, and this is a very successful idea for a book.

Since the writers here represented were almost all born in the couple of decades following World War II, Rereadings can stand as both a record of the literary love-affairs of precocious literary teens in the '60s and early '70s, as well as a mature and, occasionally, rueful reassessment of these often violent enthusiasms.

It seems that the aspiring adolescent writer selects, from the luscious and alluring array provided by literature, a new or supplementary parent/grandparent as an ego-object to model himself or herself on. It is notable that they all seem to have known they were to be writers, and that they were right: between them they have produced a small library, some 65 books, together with countless articles, essays and reviews.

Catnip for those whose taste for fiction has, perhaps regretfully, abated, Rereadings marks a rare event, the invention of a genre, within the broad and fruitful domain of memoir.

Fadiman has taken as her own mentor the greatest of English essayists, William Hazlitt, and in particular his essay "On Reading Old Books." She effortlessly lives up to her chosen ancestor. Her writing is of the purest variety: graceful, yet pithy, personal, yet without a trace of sentimentality. Beyond her talents as an essayist lies an even rarer talent, that of a truly great editor. The magazine she edited was showered with prizes during her tenure, and the writing she managed to nurture, if this collection is anything to go by, is of the very highest quality, blessedly free of any of the manifold contaminants emanating from the theory-laden academy. As one of her writers remarked to a journalist: "You always felt so princely because she treated your writing so seriously.''

I asked Fadiman what principle had governed the order in which the essays were presented. Her reply was typically clear. She wanted the first and last pieces, which deal with Salinger and the Beatles, respectively, to be clear and strong and deal with texts she imagined most readers would themselves be familiar with. She wanted the middle arranged as she would arrange a dinner party: folks who would enjoy sitting next to each other. Not similar, but congenial.

I do not propose to list the 17 contributors or their topics. There is an easy way for you to find out for yourself, particularly since this little future classic is now out in paper. I just want to suggest that if you are an inveterate reader, then this is one of the most delightful ways I can imagine of discovering new books and essays to be on the lookout for! There are, amazingly enough, no weak links at all, for these essays are, every one, written out of sheer passion. (The $500 the American Scholar paid was just a token, a fraction of the ordinary fee.) If you would like to know whom to read, then have a look at these delicate essays, and you will soon begin to keep an eye out for Allegra Goodman, Luc Sante, and all their dinner-party friends.

The Good Soldier Shweik turned me into a person who read for joy. As a consequence, I became, early on, protective of the obscure impulses which lead me from one book to the next, for the totally unexpected book turns out, more frequently than one might imagine, as Rereadings has, to be just what I was needing!

Books | August 29, 2006

Literary Addiction, Literary Solution

by Staff | August 29, 2006 2:23 PM | Permalink

The First Verse: a Novel, by Barry McCrea (pictured), published by Carroll & Graf, New York, 2005. $14.95.

Reviewed by Richard Stack

Dublin and New Haven have, these days, more in common than one might expect: a lively downtown scene animated by the presence of a large number of young people, both college kids and their slightly older IT brethren, looking for action in the bars and nightclubs; the centrality to the life of the city of a number of excellent colleges and universities; and the presence of a ring of rather sedate suburban communities full of young people anxious to escape them. But perhaps in the very long run the most important connection will turn out to be the arrival here of a first-class Irish literary talent, Barry McCrea, who focuses on all this material in his new fiction. Let us hope New Haven (which is to say Yale) can overcome its ingrained prejudice towards assistant professors, and hang on to him!

McCrea's debut novel, The First Verse, a story of real moral and aesthetic complexity, is worth comparing to the early work of one of his heroes, James Joyce. Like Joyce's famous Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this is a "bildungsroman": a story of what it is to come of age. What happens as one suddenly and shockingly becomes aware of a world beyond? What happens, at this exciting moment, to one's hitherto suppressed questions about one's sexuality, and how does one begin to deal with the ancient questions of the meaning of life ? As does Joyce's novel, the book plays expertly indeed with our expectations of the genre, and, again like Joyce, it is both highly allusive (in a most unusual fashion, which I will explain), and immaculately well written.

The obvious question arises: why should a writer of such brilliance have to go abroad to get his book published ? In the last section of the book itself we get at least a partial answer: the first person to whom the hero feels he can unburden himself of his painful story is a kind and dispassionate American (yet another Joycean theme -- almost all Joyce's real confidants and supporters as he was writing his books were Americans).

In the main part of the novel there are three distinct "normal" worlds, from each of which the young narrator, Niall, will gradually detach himself: the comfortable world of the southern suburbs where Niall has grown up, peopled by his family and school-friends; the Dublin world of young gay men, one of whom, an easygoing working-class man, Niall falls for, and then, like everyone and everything else, drops; and the world of undergraduates in the college, Trinity, where he has been given a scholarship and which he gradually abandons.

One feature of this normal world is the quite astonishing ubiquity of alcohol; endless pints, and whisky, and vodka tonics; endless drunkenness and hangovers. The abstemious Leopold Bloom muses, in Ulysses, about the impossiblity of crossing Dublin without passing a pub, but McCrea's Dublin seems to be nothing but pubs and bars and night-clubs, all crowded to bursting point. Alcohol is, apparently, the only thing anyone spends their Irish Tiger money on. Interwoven with this compulsive and addictive conviviality is the mobile, with its constant stream of texts and left messages, which Niall will increasingly fail to respond to, and which he eventually will toss into a canal.

This novel is, then, appropriately enough, an account of an addiction, an addiction which turns out to be even more powerful than alcohol, and at the same time, one which completely cuts the addict off from all conviviality. It is the story of a young man's deliberate and willful self-entanglement with, and eventual self-extrication from, a cultic group, named, with a rather dreadful irony, Pour Mieux Vivre, devoted to a modern variant of the ancient practice of divination.

Instead of using as a divinatory resource a well-known set text, such as Virgil or the Bible, this group uses any text that happens to come to hand. A passage, or a group of passages in which the texts become blended into a pure stream of language, deliberately robbed of context or syntax, plucked at random and then made to divulge an occult content by the practice of a quasi-religious art-ritual. As things progress, this practice rapidly becomes an all-consuming obsession, and the cultists, including our narrator, drop all outward concerns, friendships and occupations, spending their days wandering the streets and pubs with their book-bags, sad parodies of the Baudelairian flaneur, moving from place to place driven by the magical "synchronicities" they discover in the books they carry with them for the purpose, and, eventually, from anything at all, the text on a bus ticket or a snatch of overheard conversation, returning at night to their lair lit by candles, drinking the holy potion, Southern Comfort, and surrounded by piles of books. Their obsession is driven by the hope that they will if they persevere be permitted to ascend to the next "level", where they will be, presumably, vouchsafed a fuller vision of the Truth of Things.

One consequence of this topic is that scattered through the book are some 50 or 60 short excerpts from other books, as chosen by the cultists. They are of a wide range, some easily identifiable (Tolstoy, Carroll, Joyce, the Vulgate Psalms, Flann O'Brien, several Elizabethan sonneteers), some less so (Ellmann's biography of Joyce, Sebeok's Encyclopaedia of Semiotics), some from Irish folksongs and Gaelic rhymes, and some from commercial books, such as travel guides. Such an eminently literary topic might have led a lesser writer into a satire of contemporary literary studies, with its myriad interpretive strategies, but McCrea is after bigger game, for, at its heart, this brilliant and disturbing book is a study of the engulfing power of visionary religious experience.

This experience is rendered head-on, undiluted and unexplained: the major climax has the three cultic adepts walking on water! We are left to cope with these experiences as best we can, for the narrator does not seek to debunk them. He does gradually, however, come to see the whole experience as dark, as a breakdown of human relationships, and as an addiction needing drastic cure. In the last section of the book this cure is finally effected, as I have mentioned, by Niall's dispensing with all the lies he has become accustomed to telling his normal friends and parents, and unburdening himself to an American student from Princeton whom he meets in Paris, where he has travelled in a desperate final effort to achieve some kind of sanctity. In effect it is a literary solution to a literary addiction.

Niall is set up for his absorption into the cult in three ways: by his painful baptism into sexual passion, by a series of uncanny visitations, and by a short passage from Ulysses. He has, over the last few years in his secondary school, developed a totally unrequited passion for a popular boy called Ian, (the Scots form of John). As he arrives in college he is still trying to get over this. And at that moment he has a visitation (I use the word advisedly) from an immensely attractive, playful, figure who calls himself Pablo Virgomare (a name which conveniently combines Paul with the Virgin Mary), who largely confines himself to singing, from a distance, verses from the old English song that begins "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of Saint Clemens," after which he always manages to dissolve into a crowd, leaving Niall panting for more, and hearing echoes from the song all over the place. Pablo shows up again and again, his hallucinatory character never quite experienced as such, and it is when Niall finally registers the significance of the last verse of the song, "I do not know, say the great bells of Bow," that he able to finally break the evil spell under which he has been laboring.

Ulysses shows up at his first encounter with the cultists, where their practice appears merely as a kind of partygame. Niall poses a question as a kind of test: "Where do my parents live?" and when he picks up a copy of Ulysses at random, and opens it, his finger comes to rest on the passage in the first chapter where Stephen is suggesting to his roommate Mulligan that, lacking milk, they should put lemon in their tea. Mulligan replies: "Oh damn you and your Paris fads, I want Sandycove milk." Sandycove is, in fact, where Niall's parents do live, and so Niall is hooked. He will also, in fact, become decisively unhooked when the same passage crops up at the end: whereas the other cultists give the passage a typically bizarre reading, taking it to mean that they should set off for Rome, he, more sensibly, takes it as an indication that he must go home, which, to our intense relief, he does.

Although I have tried to give some sense of the general structure of the book and of its intentions, I have not, I hope, spoiled it for the reader. Indeed, I have barely scratched the surface of this rich, dense and absorbing novel. I hope I have suggested, however, that, particularly as a first novel, it is an astonishingly ambitious and successful piece of work.