The Lost Books of the Odyssey Lost Me – The Book Blitz, Vol. 29

Author Zachary Mason - Via The L Magazine

The first semester of my sophomore year in high school left something to be desired. At my school, progress reports went out half way through each quarter. My lack of effort in all of my classes was pretty evident when my grades showed up at home. Not only was I failing geometry, I was pulling a solid D in  English, and a gentleman’s C in one other class. These were all honors courses.

Looking back, I can’t put a finger on where my motivation, or I should say lack of motivation, on the school front originated. What I can pinpoint though, is lost experiences due to my academic negligence. That first month of school, my English class read The Iliad. I wasn’t doing my assigned reading after getting home from school. Instead, I waited for my mile long walk to school in the morning to thumb through The Iliad. Suffice to say, reading an epic poem while making sure not to get run over while crossing street is not the most direct route to good grades and incisive analysis of Homer’s work. I lost interest in the poem and with it, any serious understanding of Greek mythology. This literary Achilles heal of mine made its re-acquintance with me as I read Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey.

While The Iliad tells the story of the war between Athens and Troy after Helen is kidnapped, The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus’ struggle to return home to his wife and family in the years after the war. Mason’s book, filled with purportedly lost books of the latter tale, starts with a preface explaining what is to come.

It seems as if Mason’s work is intentionally disjointed. It was hard, at least from my perspective to find an internal logic to its structure. The different books jump back and forth in time and story, leaving a novice reader of Greek mythology easily lost. There were times where I felt like Odysseus himself, stranded in the middle of this mythological universe filled with different worlds represented by the different chapters.

Admittedly, my area of expertise is Greek Mix-ology - Via Kaboodle.com

It is only after you keep going and get further and further into this mythological eco-system do signposts and language in the form of descriptions start to seem familiar and does it become apparent that among these seemingly disparate chapters is there the making of a handful of different tales going at the same time. My personal favorite, which gives nothing away, is the scenario in which Odysseus is an inveterate liar who made the whole odyssey up. The Lost Books of the Odyssey can at times be frustrating as some stories don’t go anywhere, and there are moments where clarity would only be available to those with an academic’s background in Greek mythology. Nevertheless, the moments of clarity, and the books that do hum with Mason’s crafty storytelling are worth, what I promise will not be a 10 year trek on the open seas.  Just don’t read it while walking to school, ok?

The Book Blitz: Vol 27 – Bound by Antonya Nelson

Bound by Antonya Nelson - Via Bloomsbury USA

Hovering throughout Antonya Nelson’s “Bound” is the real life story of the BTK Killer. The serial killer, who murdered 10 people, was dubbed BTK because he would bind and torture his victims before killing them. The novel is set in the mid-2000′s when the serial killer returns from his hiatus, and it novel flashes back to when BTK began his murders in the mid-1970s. Despite this plot device, the BTK killer drifts in and out of the primary story.

The main story in “Bound” is about the power of friendship. Two women who were best friends growing up in 1970′s Wichita eventually drift apart, due in no small part to their post-high school decisions and their family backgrounds. Catherine, daughter of a university professor, graduates from college while her friend Misty, who lived with her poor grandmother drifts away in the wake of a series of bad decisions. Eventually, she settles down to raise her daughter Cattie. We learn all of these events through flashbacks as the novel opens with Misty dying in a car crash in Colorado.

Cattie, now a high schooler, is at a boarding school in Vermont. Upon hearing the news of her mother’s death, she disappears from school, hiding out in the house of a classmates’ sister in Montpelier.

As this part of the story unfolds, the reader meets Catherine and her much older husband Oliver. Nearly seventy, Oliver is on his third wife and believes he has just found the next love of his life in a young woman working at a restaurant he owns. The only reason Catherine finds out about her old friend’s death is because Misty’s will made her guardian of Cattie. Catherine and Cattie.

BTK Serial Killer - Via Frances Farmers Revenge

Reading “Bound,” I assumed that at some point the BTK Killer would rush to the forefront of the story. This was due in part to the opaque references to the serial killer and the fact that Cattie used to take long walks at night back home in Houston. Maybe I’ve become accustomed to TV/movie style foreshadowing. On top of that, I guessed that is what the bound in the title referred to.

The strength of the novel lies in the true meaning of bound and the role it plays in the plot development.  Some relationships start and end. Others develop unexpectedly. We are bound by the connections we’ve made in the past, we are bound by the decisions we make, the consequences of those decision, and in some cases, bound by the actions of others.

These bindings are evident in the relationships scattered throughout the story. It is crystal clear in the way Oliver deals with his two ex-wives, setting one up with a business and being a participant in an on-going art exchange with the other. These connections criss-cross. As Catherine’s relationship with Oliver sours, he and her mother, nearly the same age, enjoy a thawing of feelings.

While Cattie and Catherine’s relationship becomes the center of attention by the end of the book, it is Cattie’s exchanges with her classmate Ito and housemate Randall that take up a good deal of the early sections of the book. Ito is the only classmate Cattie connects with at the boarding school. He is the one who provides her with the chance to escape the school and stay with his sister after news of her mother’s death reaches Vermont. For as withdrawn as Cattie is, Ito is the opposite.

Antonya Nelson - Via REAaward.org

She meets her match in Randall, a housemate whose experience in the army has left him as solemn as he is quiet. Eventually, they decide to leave for Houston, Cattie’s hometown. The trip doesn’t go as planned. And, one of my few critiques of the book is that once Randall leaves Cattie to find help, he disappears from the story with little resolution.

The most moving connection, in my opinion, is the one between Cattie and her mother. Misty was a recovering alcoholic who had on a few occasions fallen off the wagon. It is her voicemails, left on Cattie’s cell, that are one of the last ties she has to her mother.

In such an emotionally powerful novel, it is surprising that Nelson devotes the first and last pages of the book to Cattie and Misty’s dog. Now that isn’t the bitter complaint of a cat person who believes Bound would have been better if the canine companion had been switched out for a feline. To this reader, it slowed the book down and the side story of the women, hiking with her boyfriend, who finds the dog seemed extraneous to me. Nevertheless, Bound is a good book that is well worth your time.

The Book Blitz – Vol. 26: White Egrets by Derek Walcott

White Egrets by Derek Walcott - Via Betterworldbooks.com

My relationship with poetry is very off and on. Besides required poetry readings in Freshman english, it was a rare occurrence for me to cross paths with poetry in high school. One instance where poetry and I did come together happened in the fall of my senior year.

I had developed a crush on this uber-brainy girl in my grade. In an effort to spend time with her and show her I had more to me than being a sports obsessed political junkie, I attended a meeting of the school’s poetry club. In my mind’s planning, I’d attend, keep my mouth shut, be attentive, and leave having said nothing that would reveal me for the scamster I was.

As it was, the Poetry Club met in the school’s library. As I showed up and took a seat, I was quickly reassessing the thought process that had brought me to this juncture. It would only get worse. There might have been a few poems read at the beginning of the meeting or not. All I remember is the faculty advisor posing a question to the group at large: Who is your favorite poet?

Sounds like an innocuous question, but I quickly realized my seat location towards the end of the circle doomed me as the old stand-bys quickly went off the board. My mind was scrambling. And then it was my turn. As if it were yesterday, I still remember saying, “My favorite poet is Bob Dylan’s favorite poet: Smokey Robinson.” Now a Poetry Club is a pretty quiet group as it is, but even their silence at that moment was deafening.

Uncertain how to respond at this out of left field response, the group kept going around the circle. I don’t remember anything else from the meeting, except that was the last time I show up at the Poetry Club. And my love of Smokey Robinson, the man who wrote Tears of a Clown, got me nowhere with said girl. Fitting.

My Favorite Poet in High School: Smokey Robinson - Via Lyricspond.com

I share this with you all not for purposes of catharsis but as a humble nod to my inexperience with poetry. This inexperience, I fear, if not put into proper context, could make the following, my review of a collection of poems by Derek Walcott seem facile, sophomoric, or even trite.

White Egrets is Derek Walcott’s 14th collection of poems. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, Walcott’s poems offer a glimpse into the world seen as it was and currently is by an artist who knows his best days are behind him. Aware that what is in front of him is limited, the poems are more than just a collection, they represent a journey and a transformation.

Walcott hones in on this theme through various topics. Always close to Walcott’s thoughts is his home of St. Lucia as well as the titular bird. Those egrets, whose name is one letter off from the word regrets, appear throughout the poems. In the poem, The Acacia Tree, Walcott reveals the transformations St. Lucia has undergone in the name of attracting tourists.

From what St. Lucia used to be to the long dead British Empire, the theme of changes at home (St. Lucia) and glorious pasts lost (the British) are shown to the reader. While the theme stays the same, it is Walcott’s tone that changes. By the end of the collection he has come to embrace his old age and in some ways, his fate.

Nobel Prize Winner Derek Walcott

A recurring feature in the collection is suites or poems penned in tribute to his experiences in cities and places across the globe, from Barcelona and Sicily to New York and Amsterdam. I couldn’t help but smile as Walcott writes of my home city, ” Everybody is New York is in a sitcom.” His descriptions of these places make the locations jump off the page.

From the opening poems, the specter of death is present in odes to fallen friends, including the playwright of August Wilson. As we travel with Walcott and revisit the places of his youth and the loves he lost, the poet also shares new hopes and realizations that have been revealed to Walcott in his old age.

Subjectively speaking as a poetry luddite, I liked a good many of the poems found in White Egrets. But two stand out. In the first, Walcott encounters a past lover from his youth, now both ravaged by old age, she in a wheelchair, at an airport. There is a simple beauty in the description of this interaction. In the other, Walcott, who is also a painter, describes the realization that he not only never reached the heights of a Picasso or Bacon, but he also invites the reader into how it feels to be an artist who senses they are losing control over their craft as old age’s power increases. It is this honesty, found throughout the collection, that makes Derek Walcott a poet I wish I’d knew of in high school.

The Book Blitz: Vol. 25 – Charles Yu’s How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

 

How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe - Via Wired.com

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (henceforth HTLSIASFU – Points for best organization that acronym represents) is a novel written by Charles Yu. The central character in Yu’s novel is Charles Yu. Yu’s debut novel is the story of a Charles Yu who lives in a universe, Minor Universe 31, where time travel exists and fictional Yu is a time machine repairman.

HTLSIASFU is a short book, compared to some of the others that have appeared on this list. While it clocks in at 231 pages, Yu, the author, does a lot in that space. I could go on about the science fiction angle or how all the sci-fi stuff converges with the mechanics of fiction layered into the novel, but to be honest, I have little in the way of experience with science fiction and I fear any effort by me to expound upon the narrative structure might drive away what readers there are frequenting this blog out-post.

If, after reading HTLSIASFU, you were to sit down and try to plot out the story from its beginning to end, you would, much like Yu, the central character, focus on a graph with an x-axis and y-axis to keep up. On top of that, within HTLSIASFU, Yu is given a book titled How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. Guess who gives him this book. Have you? Himself. Yu gives the book to Yu. And it is written by him too!

I am leery of saying the heart of the book lies in Yu’s exploration of father-son relationships and our species’ persistent devotion to the past at the loss of the present, because that implies the narrative and sci-fi stuff is unnecessary flourish. Its not. However, the part that resonated with me the most is the main character’s desire to find his father, who left his wife and son after he discovered time travel.

Charles Yu - Via LA Times

Like father, like son. Yu’s father, with help from his son, invented the first time machine. Yu is a time machine mechanic who helps folks, primarily those who get stuck trying to change the past even though they can’t. Yu doesn’t live outside his machine, even though he has an apartment in a Lost Loop City. Within the space of his own machine, he is kept company by a dog that is “nonexistent by ontologically valid” and an operating system with esteem issues. Yu is caught in a loop. And then he finds himself in a loop of a whole different sort.

In deftly created flashbacks, Yu revisits his memories of his father and re-experiences the emotions those episodes brought him. It is this sequence that got me most. My father never left, but that doesn’t mean he was always there. As a young child, he was the guy at little league games with the Wall Street Journal. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, our wider than average age difference made certain father-son activities non-existent. The relationships with ones parents are always complicated in some manner.

Now, as an adult, I have a father who is physically here, but in some ways is part Yu, the character, and in others, a lot like Yu’s mother. Yu is so stuck in a past that he loses sight of the possibilities available to him in the present. There are moments where the mental relitigation of the past by my father rushes to the surface and it becomes evident for us around him to see and hear these battles from the past. Unlike Yu though, when my father does it, he doesn’t create a time warp. Much like Yu’s mother, who signed up to repeat a one-hour cycle of time, my father seems to repeats all the same steps, struggles, fights, and issues.  Any deviation is cause for consternation. It seems I have gotten off track in terms of HSLSIASFU.

I enjoyed the book immensely. If you grew up reading sci-fi or can truly appreciate the narrative structure engineered by Yu, pick this book up immediately. In the present.

What the Heck Is The Book Blitz? A Primer

In 1953, the Boston Braves were on the verge of becoming contenders in the National League. After years of mediocre play and poor returns at the gate, the future looked bright. With players like Warren Spahn, Eddie Matthews, and a young rookie outfielder named Henry Aaron, the team was just a few years away from winning the World Series against the hated Yankees.

There was just one small hiccup from the point of view of folks in Boston. The Braves did all of this in Milwaukee. That spring, the Braves ventured west in search of a media market of their own and a less divided fan base.

Sign Me Up! - Via DowntownPhoenix.com

The Composite came to be, in theory, over a few drinks at a Queens bar last fall. By the time Rich and I kicked it off, I was living in Boston. The sole repeating feature on the blog has been the Boston Book Blitz. A quick reminder about the Blitz: At the end of the year, The New York Times posts its list of 100 Notable Books of the past 12 months. The Blitz is my attempt at reading all 100 and review/blog them. So far, two of the authors of the books have been kind enough to re-tweet the reviews. Check out the 2010 list here. I’m hoping, once I get wi-fi at my new place up and running, to create a static page listing the books read and other possibly interesting info.

Unlike the Braves, who left Boston for fresh territory, I am retracing the steps of many others who have once been my age, myself included. I’ve returned to New York City. It would make little sense to continue to have the name of a city I don’t live in as part of the title. At the same time, subbing Brooklyn in for Boston would make tweeting an exercise in character tight-rope walking; same for Brownstone Book Blitz. Also, that sounds kind of bougie. Next thing you know, I’ll be doing a 38-part series telling you all about which urban vineyards are the ones to kno-se. So now the series will be called: The Book Blitz. Or as my French readership likes to say, Le Blitz de Livre.

There is a bunch of reviews coming down the pipe over the next few days. So keep refreshing the home page, comment when so inspired, and remember, your public library is the best deal in town.

The Book Blitz – Vol. 24: To The End of the Land by David Grossman

David Grossman - Via TheWorld.org

In the early stages of David Grossman’s “To The End of the Land,” the book’s protagonist, Ora, sees her youngest son, Ofer, off at an Israeli Defense Forces location. With his three year tour of duty completed, Ofer and Ora were supposed to be setting off to hike the trails of Israel. Instead, Ofer voluntarily re-upped for the IDF’s newest military campaign.

The description of parents seeing children off to war, soldiers greeting each other with bellicose salutations, and the machines of battle revving up has a particular resonance for me. Over the last month and a half, my brother’s deployment date for Afghanistan has been pushed back time and time again. Originally scheduled for early June, and then later that month, it is now set for the middle of July.

The heart of Grossman’s novel lies in how family responds to a beloved relatives return to the front lines impacts those left behind at home. The sad explanation for the vividness of a parent’s struggle with the potential loss of a child in what has been such an endless fight can be found at the end of “To The End of the Land.” In a note from the author. Grossman explains that during the writing of the book, his son Uri, was killed in the closing moments of the 2006 war in Lebanon. The tank his son was in was trying to rescue a group of soldiers when the vehicle was hit by a rocket.

There is a beauty in this book and it emanates from the interwoven natures of the various stories coming together over the course of Ora’s hiking (Some spoilers ahead). With her youngest son back in the military and her husband, Ilan, along with their oldest son Adam, having run off to the Galapagos Islands, Ora commandeers Avram, her and her husband’s oldest friend, into taking Ofer’s spot on the hike.

The story of how Ora, Ilan, and Avram met and began their life-altering friendship is told in the opening chapter. All three are teenagers in an Israeli hospital, overcome by extreme fevers, in the midst of the Six Day War of 1967. It took me two weeks to read this book. The first week was dedicated to this first chapter. At first, I thought the whole book was going to be slow going, cover to cover. After finishing the book, the writing in the first chapter seems to be intentionally slow going since all three characters are in a feverish state where sometimes they believe their interactions are just figments of their own imagination, not reality (Serious spoilers ahead).

Revealed through flashbacks as Ora and Avram cross rivers, climb mountains, collect a canine companion, and meet a wide variety of folks during their hiking, the reader finds out how Avram and Ilan became inseperable as friends. We also find out how Avram deeply loved Ora, despite the fact that she was in love Ilan.

To The End of the Land - Via Bookstorepeople.com

Their lives change, inexorably, in 1974. A moment, that these friends can never shake, sends Avram to the front lines where he ends up being captured, tortured by the Egyptians, and then harshly interrogated by the Israelis on the grounds that he might have divulged classified military intelligence. Ilan and Ora are together and she becomes pregnant with their first child. After the birth of Adam, Ilan leaves them, only to end up moving into the shed in the backyard of the house they were living in – Avram’s house

During the hiking, Ora tells Avram about his son Ofer. Ora has decided to hike because she wants to get as far away from any possible bad news. She doesn’t want the military messengers to find her. She wants to protect Ofer with her thoughts. She wants to keep him alive, to shield him with her words. To do this, she tells Ofer’s life story to Avram. But to tell Ora’s story, she tells the story of Adam and the story of Ilan and Ora. In a year where many books have focused on the quirks and problems of families, “To The End of the Land” stands out because as Ora realizes, with her husband and oldest son gone and Ofer on the frontlines, she is eulogizing her family.

Grossman’s book is more than a novel about a family. It is a novel about history. History as it happened and history as it unfolds in the present. Before the hike, where Ora helps Avram reanimate himself, she has spent most of her time with Sami, her driver. A Palestinean, their friendship frays when she has him drive her and Ofer to his deployment. Later that night when she requests a ride to pick up Avram, he makes a pit stop at a school where illegal refugees who need medical care are being sheltered. On the ride up to this make shift hospital, Ora sits next to a young child with several serious conditions. Israel’s YNET described “To The End of the Land” as “the closest thing to antiwar novel that has ever been written here….” What makes it so antiwar is that it shows the devastating impact war has on individuals on both sides of the battlefield. The writing is evidence that skin deep wounds may heel, but a part of soldiers, and those at home, are never the same. Even worse, generations not yet born during these battles carry the wounds and scars of those fights into this world.

Boston Book Blitz – Pt. 23: An Encounter with Milan Kundera

Even before the first page of “Encounter,” Czech-French author/critic Milan Kundera lays out his book’s roadmap. These signposts come in the fragment of a larger line. Kundera writes:

“…an encounter with my reflections and my recollections, my old themes (existential and asethetic) and my old lives…”

What follows the quotation is exactly that. Some segments are pieces he wrote several decades ago. Others were written in the present. One splices his old work, not with revisions, but instead with his current thoughts on the same topic. A few chapters are more long form essays, sometimes broken up thematically, sometimes not. Throughout it all, we, the reader are encountering great works of art, iconic artists, historic social movements, and European history spanning several centuries through through Kundera’s perspective.

Encounter by Milan Kundera

Its not until nearly page 100 of “Encounter,” when writing about Martinique and the island’s literary community’s response to movements in the 1940′s does Kundera explicitly state what an encounter is. He writes, “Not a social relation, not a friendship, not even an alliance: an encounter which is to say a spark, a lightning flash; random chance.”

“Encounter” shares similarities with the previously reviewed “Changing My Mind” by Zadie Smith and “The Possessed…” by Elif Batuman in that all three books examine the meaning of literary works and writers who have influenced each author. With Kundera, however, most of these works get a few pages at most. It is the rare book to have a fully fleshed out chapter. Smith and Batuman give us the plot and all the characters before jumping into the analysis. Kundera is giving us “a lightning flash” with each work instead of a “friendship.” Kundera is interested in telling us his opinion of the work and artist.

The flipside of these brief encounters with writers, books, artists, paintings, political movements, composers, and the whole lot of folks and ideas that are crammed into the book is that Kundera presumes his readers know whom and what he is writing about. This goes back to a subject Zadie Smith discussed: the roles of the reader and writer. Being uneducated in the ways of Roland Barthes, who gets name dropped as part of an erudite joke in “Encounter,” I came away from this book feeling as if Kundera’s intention wasn’t to educate the uninformed, but instead to, at the age of 80 at the time of publication, let the world know where he stands on these matters.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being....Milan Kundera

As much as Kundera is presumably addressing a more educated and enlightened circle, his political mindset, as liberal as it may be, ends up being so very wrong when writing about NATO’s actions in Serbia. In the book’s final character, where Kundera addresses Malaparte’s two novels on World War II in Italy, he mentions NATO’s military action in Serbia and Kosovo. Kundera’s argument is that the Europe of the second half of 20th Century is a “New Europe.” It is a place born out of the defeat of an entire continent as it was both liberated and occupied at the same time. Kundera notes that there is one exception. He writes, ” Which is why Serb cities had to be bombarded for many long weeks in 1999: in order to impose, a posteriori, the “vanquished’ status on even that part of Europe.”

I could write how Kundera seems silly when describing NATO’s horribly late reaction to the actions of Milosevic and the Serbian government as an effort to finish off the vanquishing of Europe some fifty years after it began. The funny thing is I don’t have to since Kundera himself did it earlier in the book. In an earlier “encounter,” he writes about Phillip Roth’s use of sex in the novel as a development in our history. Kundera’s analysis is the counterpoint to his bombing claim.

“The acceleration of history has profoundly transformed individual lives that, in centuries past, used to proceed from birth to death within a single historical period; today a life straddles two such periods, sometimes more. Whereas history used to advance far more slowly than human life, nowadays, it is history that moves fast, it tears ahead, it slips from a man’s grasp, and the continuity , the identity, of a life is in danger of cracking apart.”

Kundera’s wrongness stems less from a disregard for the lives of those in Kosovo, but from the fact that today’s history has slipped from his grasp. It is an irony that a critic like Kundera would appreciate, if he could see it.

The Boston Book Blitz – Pt. 22: Tales of Russian Literature and Horrible No Good Interviews

The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them - Via Borders.com

I can’t speak Russian. I haven’t read any of the seminal works of the country’s literary greats. And I can’t see Russia from the porch of my house. Typically, this would mean a book that is one part-memoir about the author’s time studying Russian literature and another part exploration of the linguistic development of languages in the Soviet Republics would leave me high and dry. That “The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them” didn’t is a testament to Elif Batuman’s story telling skills. Thats not to say there weren’t times where I felt like I was diving into some serious academic esoterica, but it was always interesting and well-written.

At the outset, humble readers (a tad presumptuous on the plural, I know), I apologize for the lack of details below. This is the first in the series of books I read but failed to review over the last two months. These posts will be immediately recognizable because they will inevitably include red herrings that will hopefully distract you from the notable tardiness.

Batuman’s memoir/linguistics guide/travelogue is broken down into different chapters that focus on various parts of her experience with Russian. These sections includes tales from her post-grad studies at Stanford to her unintended summer abroad in Samarkland learning the Uzbek language. The summer in Samarkland, where the reader is introduced to the linguistic developments of languages in the Soviet Republics, is more than just a dry explanation of linguistics. It is a vivid description of the locales she lived in and visited, as well the people she met.

The Samarkland story is broken into three different sections. This editorial decision gives the reader a chance to mull over different characters in her life while we wait for the conclusion of her summer. While her glum boyfriend and super shady landlady are interesting, the real stars of Samarkland are the teachers she works with on a daily basis: Muzzafar and Dilorom.

Author Elif Batuman - Via Boston.com

Experts in Uzbek, able to speak at least two languages, they are woefully underpaid due to a state structure that misappropriates academic salaries to those who sit around with fancy titles and do little else. These academics toil in buildings that are rundown and lack the libraries of their academic contemporaries who call Western Europe and America home. Nevertheless, Batuman makes clear that these two tireless individuals teach her all they can and they deserve more in return from their government and country.

Having never read any of the Russian works that Batuman mentions throughout the book, I found myself taking her description and analysis as my own. Being unfamiliar with many of the authors beyond their names and works, I was not only appreciative of the biographical information she provided, but found it really interesting. One section of the book describes her experience at a Leo Tolstoy conference where she presented a fledgling theory that he was killed and also looks into a possible Anna Kareina/Alice In Wonderland comparison. Batuman also chronicles her trip to St. Petersburg to see the recreation of Anna Ionavova’s Ice House.

Toward the beginning of the book, there is the story of writer Isaac Babel and how his relationship with the political leaders of his day changed over time. The tale of the Babel Conference she helped put together, which included Babel’s wife and daughter and a lot of craziness along with her writing on the story Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, are where Batuman turns the focus away from the language and literature to herself and her classmates.

Visit Samarkland - Via travelblogs.com

After explaining Dostoevsky’s Demons, Batuman describes how she felt herself and her classmates were following their colleague Matej, in a fashion like those in the story. Matej is mentioned periodically throughout the book, but it is only at the end where the full blown story between himself, Batuman, and their classmates is explained.

It was while reading “Possessed” this April that I had the worst interview ever. Not bad. Not awkward. Just the worst. I have had interviews where I’ve Biden’ed up, putting my foot in my mouth. I have had interviews where it is clear the interviewer and I just don’t mesh. This was not the case in April.

I had applied for a communications job with a New York City Councilor. A week or two later, I heard back from someone in their office. They wanted me to come down that week. I booked my bus ticket from Boston to NYC. I would go down the night before and after the interview, I would come back.

I get to the interview about 15 minutes early. I once had a boss tell me, “If you’re early, you are on time. If you are on time, you are late. If you are late, you are history.” That has a way of sticking with you. The person interviewing me is about five minutes late. I get it. Schedules are in a state of perpetual flux in politics. Then I’m kept waiting another ten minutes. Finally, I get brought in for the interview. My resume and cover letter are pulled out and glanced over.

The Ice Palace Recreated - Via BBC.co.uk

The first question is, “Are you still at Fordham?” My resume, very clearly states I graduated in 2010 – and that I’m living in Boston. Taken aback a little, I say, “No” and explain what the classes covered. My most recent experience on my resume is as Communications Director for a City Council candidate in Boston. There were zero questions about that job. The first question about my old job in New York City is, “How did you get it?” Not anything about my responsibilities, my experience, or what I learned in my time there. Combined with all zero questions about my current job, I was trying to figure out why these were the questions asked.

Towards the end of the interview, I was asked if I had seen the job description. I answered in the affirmative, saying I saw it in the posting for the position. The interviewer proceeded to recite it verbatim to me and upon completion, go silent. Thinking I was expected to answer this non-question, I made something up about how I fit the requirements for the job. At the end of the interview, I asked if I could leave my messenger bag and duffel bag there to use the bathroom. I was told I could and then asked, “Did you come down from Boston?” At this point, my head wanted to burst because it says Boston on the very top of my resume!

Walking from the office to the subway, I was absolutely frustrated. I had taken two days off from work and spent money I didn’t really have to interview for a job that seemed like a good fit. And upon arrival, it seemed as the person interviewing me was either 100% unprepared or 100% disinterested in the interview. I thought my time had been wasted and that the staffer was doing the Councilor a disservice by not taking this process seriously.

There were several times over the last two months that I thought about writing a post about this experience. I kept walking back the idea, thinking it wasn’t worth it, and since I had never heard back at all about the interview that there was an infinitesimal chance I’d get it. A week ago that all changed. I got a form email from the person who interviewed me. It read:

“Thank you for taking the time to send our hiring committee your resume. Unfortunately, at this time you will not be asked to interview….”

The email continued to explain why they wouldn’t be brining me in for an interview. You know, despite the fact that they had actually brought me in for an interview. That, my friends, is a front runner for email of the year. I like the Councilor this staffer works for. That is part of the reason I applied for the job. My hope is they realize the sloppiness and poor job this person is doing sooner rather than later.

Boston Book Blitz Pt. 21: Kwame Appiah Talks About Honor In Moral Revolutions

Professor Kwame Appiah - Via Princeton University, Office of Communications

In his latest book, “The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen,” Princeton University professor Kwame Appiah examines the role honor played in the ending of three different customs. The book, easily readable in two or three sittings, comes across as lively as the best college lecture, combining history, philosophy, and international relations.

At the outset, Appiah lays out a roadmap for where the book, and his argument, is going. At the center of Appiah’s claim is that we must talk about honor, since it is a fundamental part of the human experience. Appiah’s three case studies from the pages of history are the last days of the duel in Britain, the end of foot binding in China, and the banning of the transatlantic slave trade in Britain. These historical moral revolutions are the building blocks towards the issue of honor killings in Pakistan and the way we can use the different forms of honor to better the  communities we live in.

In the first study, Appiah focuses on the 1829 duel between the Duke of Wellington, then the Prime Minister, and the Earl of Winchilsea, both members of the House of Lords. Winchilsea claimed that Wellington was supporting Protestant causes as a cover for his efforts to give Catholics in the country more rights. When Wellington asked for a public apology, Winchilsea rebuffed him. Since both were gentlemen, and hence equals, Wellington challenged his foe to a duel.

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen - Via being.publicradio.org

Appiah goes in-depth into the particulars of the duel, how it got to that point, and the public’s response to the event. Inasmuch as honor factors into the duel, Appiah points out that moral arguments against the duel had existed for centuries. For a long time it was considered the gentlemanly thing to do to defend one’s honor in a duel.

The practice started to fade as society got more democratized, newspapers became more prominent, and these publications began to expose the practice. At the same time, duels started to spread to what was perceived as less gentlemanly classes. As Appiah tells it, the duel died out because its popularity made it less honorable for gentleman and the laws against were applied to commoners. The moral arguments long lobbed against it did little to end the practice.

The second example Professor Appiah highlights is the practice of footbinding in China. Starting in the opening years of the 20th Century, which also happens to be the last days of the Qing Monarchy, it was the increasing globalized world that helped seal the demise of footbinding. In those days, there was a brief window of reform, where a younger generation of the literati in the empire pushed through changes in society, including the end of foot binding.

Wellington vs. Winchilsea - Via kcl.au.uk

The earliest documentation of footbinding in China goes back to 975 CE. Appiah explains the intense pain suffered by women and the rationale for the spreading of the practice, despite the fact that it has no ties to Confucian practices. The efforts of religious evangelicals and foreigners living in China helped start the movement. It took off when members of the literati and upper class realized that the outside world could not be kept away, and that footbinding would bring dishonor to the nation. Once the literati and upper classes stopped engaging the practice, it disappeared within a generation.

The final historical example is the British ending their participation in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. In an example about national honor, Appiah retells how the country abolished the slave trade in 1807, slavery in their colonies in 1833, and ended the Negro apprenticeship program that took the place of slavery in the West Indies in 1838.

Much like the dual, moral arguments had been around for years. Instead, Appiah argues that the development of a middle class and a growing pride in labor by the working classes were powerful forces in the British abolitionist movement. In this case, it was a new investment in their own dignity and the dignity of their hard labor that powered the moral revolution.

Foot binding image - Via historyforkids.org

After showing three different historical examples of how honor was pivotal in moral revolutions, Appiah turns to a contemporary problem: honor killings. Acknowledging that this practice is in countries across the globe, he focuses specifically in Pakistan, in the Pashtun tribe. He tells the story of Samia Shawar, the daughter of respected businessman who marries a doctor. Unhappy in her marriage, she decides to get a divorce. Her family kills her because in their society, a divorce would bring dishonor to the family. But killing her didn’t and politicians ignored or minimized the murder. Appiah explains how the fight to stop honor killings, at least in Pakistan, should be tackled. In explaining how Pakistan’s legal system has handled the practice and how honor killings are anti-Islamic, Appiah concludes with point that the practice is “immoral, illegal, irrational, [and] irreligious.”

In the closing chapter, Professor Kwame Appiah wraps up his ‘lecture’ on honor with two stories illustrating the power of honor in the individual lives of a US soldier in Iraq whose actions brought to light violations of the Geneva Convention and Muhktaran Bibi, a victim of a gang rape who has worked tirelessly to protect women who have suffered a similar fate.

A few weeks ago, I attended a talk given by Canadian Lt. General Romeo Dallaire. He was discussing his new book about children soldiers. During the question and answer session, he retold an anecdote from his days in the Canadian government where a younger official complained about how it takes 20 years for a project to come to fruition. Dallaire’s response was that without the young worker, it would take even more time. With a better appreciation for honor and dignity and the role it plays in our world, it may take 20 years for the next moral revolution to unfold. Without it though, it will definitely take longer.

Boston Book Blitz – Vol. 20: American Subversive by David Goodwillie

Rutland's Wal-Mart Parking Lot - Via flickr account of NNECAPA

Live in New York City long enough and some of your haunts will make their way into the pages of fiction or the reels of TV and movies. Spend your teenage years up in Vermont’s third largest city, you don’t expect to see its downtown play an important role in the plot of a critically acclaimed novel. In David Goodwillie’s “American Subversive,” Rutland, Vermont is just such a city.

Towards the end of the novel, is it revealed that two characters regularly meet at the Wal-Mart parking lot in Rutland. While any other city in Vermont could have been subbed in, it makes an already realistic book that much more striking. Nestled in downtown, near the Amtrak station, it is a parking lot I’ve driven by, walked through, and passed thousands of times. It is also, at least in “American Subversive,” where two folks discuss plans to use non-lethal violence to promote their fight for what they believe is a better America.

American Subversive by David Goodwillie - Via Observer.com

“American Subversive” is a story with two narrators: Aidan Cole and Paige Roderick. Cole is a blogger who writes for Roorback.com. Imagine Dan Abram’s Mediaite with the sarcastic and ironic bent of Gawker. Cole’s life, including his on again off again relationship with a journalist at The New York Times and his mysterious best friend Julian Touche, are nights filled with parties, access to exclusive clubs, and lots of hangovers. The reader hears from Aidan first and the opening chapter is set after the events of the novel transpire.

Roderick’s already tenuous existence is rocked by the death of her brother, who is serving in Iraq. Having drifted from New York to DC to work for an environmental think tank, she returns back to her native North Carolina. After spending time with her brothers friends, she realizes their back to the earth ways are a facade of sorts to an existence where they attack industrial targets. Roderick quickly rises through the ranks of this decentralized group and moves to Vermont with two other operatives, Keith and Lindsay.

The engine that sets the story in motion is the Vermont cell’s first “Action” as they are labeled. A bomb is placed in a midtown Manhattan office building, targeting a shadowy multi-national corporation. A few days after the bomb detonates in the early morning hours, a photo of Roderick casing the building is sent to Cole’s Roorback email address.

With the narrative switching back and forth, we learn about Cole’s efforts to find Roderick with the unwitting help of his sort-of-kind-of girlfriend and his friend Touche. At the same time, we learn that in the wake of the Vermont Action, the cell is looking for its next target. While this search is progressing, the dynamic between Paige, Keith, and Lindsey is shifting dramatically. This tension only ratchets up the intensity that comes develops with Keith’s unilateral decision to target a media company whose similarity to Fox News is so close they practically share the same Manhattan office space.

Author David Goodwillie - Photo by Marion Ettlinger

The novel, which is well-written and paced pitch perfectly, includes a handful of unfolding mysteries that come into vision as the story rushes to its conclusion. These include, but are not limited to: will Aidan, a J school drop out, find Paige? Will it make any difference if he does go public with the information he discovers? What becomes of Paige? Will Keith’s plan for the Fox News doppelganger succeed? All of these are answered as people in Aidan’s personal orbit, like his girlfriend, his best friend, and his mother’s upstate artist boyfriend figure into the story’s resolution.

Unlike many of the other novels on the Times list, the family structure is not the prominent construct pulsing through the story – it isn’t the identity that the characters are struggling with. Instead, the characters in “American Subversive”  wrestle with what it means to be an American in this century, as members of a generation who will be given a country that is gasping – overstretched by two wars, fighting a war against a tactic, hampered by an economy hobbled by a financial meltdown. These characters struggle with the real world issues of what it means to be an American. One chronicles the over-consumption of the rich and spoiled, the other lost her brother in the streets of Mosul. Paige and Aiden may be fictional, but their worries are real. They go beyond themselves. They see a world struggling and a country focused on the maximization of profit. “American Subversive” is a study of how far some people go when they have nothing else.

On top of the story, Goodwillie’s description of Manhattan and New York seemed spot on. Even when he name drops Zadie Smith, Jenny Lewis, and other bold names, it doesn’t feel ostentatious or showy. It fits and that is a credit to the author’s writing. That being said, there are two glaring instances and a particularly humorous edit in the book that I want to share. First, Aidan Cole takes Amtrak directly from New London, CT to Yonkers, NY as he travels to see his mother in upstate New York. The only way Cole could have made it to Yonkers from New London is with a transfer in Penn Station. Minor, I know, but still.

Second, Goodwillie is on point when he describes Williamsburg in the early to mid 2000s and its transformation into a destination today. However, when forced to describe the bar scene in other parts of Brooklyn, he is less sharp. A throw away line about a possible night out on Smith Street describes girls loaded with tattoos. I am not too sure that the streets of Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill are filled with those types of girls. Again, a small issue, but something that stands out.

Recently, I have been checking out my books from the Cambridge Public Library. On one of the pages, the word beneficiary had been scratched out and a previous reader had written in pencil, benefactor. To whomever this mysterious editor was, thanks for the chuckle and the concern for me, the future reader. My suggestion to you is to go out and get this book.