I reviewed a collection of photos of The Red Hot Chili Peppers for Pop Damage. Read it here. I’m a John Frusciante fan so I was dying to see it, but there really isn’t much to say about a coffee-table book of pictures.
- I reviewed Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2010, edited by Aleksandar Hemon, for Paste Magazine’s December/January issue. You can see a scan here.
- After freelancing for New York Magazine’s website, NYMag.com, as a copy editor since late September, I was hired full time last month.
- I’ll be blogging over at blog.alicia-kennedy.com (titled “fiction & caffeine”) using Tumblr’s more social platform. Any long work and links to published stuff will still be noted and/or re-created over here, but for short notes, reviews, and links, that is my new spot.
The New Yorker called Nick Hornby’s latest novel Juliet, Naked “shamefully readable.” And it is. His fiction and his criticism (originally published in The Believer, now collected in three volumes) read like a conversation with someone kind and funny. There is a reason his books Fever Pitch, High Fidelity, and About a Boy were made into successful films: they’re basically movies to begin with. He specializes in writing extremely believable unremarkable characters and making their rather unremarkable adventures amusing and, above all, heartwarming. Can we fault someone for this? No. But his personal disdain for “literary fiction” is certainly cause for some eye-rolling. Were all novels as easily imagined as films as his are, there would be no cause for novels.
Juliet, Naked is High Fidelity without the edge and with the internet. A childless English couple named Annie and Duncan live in a dull, seaside town and have been together 15 years but don’t actually love one another (is this possible?). Duncan considers himself a “Croweologist,” an expert on a musician who hasn’t released an album in 20 years, and he runs a website dedicated to him. That reclusive singer-songwriter is Tucker Crowe, who now lives a quiet life in Pennsylvania with his son, and a string of children and women he hasn’t paid much attention to tie him to a past he doesn’t quite understand. Through a series of events following the release of an acoustic version of Tucker’s seminal album, Juliet (hence the book’s title), Annie and Tucker end up falling for one another. Everyone learns something. Yeah: the End.
There is some predictably good stuff in there about obsession, music, and being a fan, but all wrapped up in its neat, white middle-class bow, it isn’t much of a revelation; it’s just Hornby. That’s why his name dwarfs the title on the cover.
In “Notes about the Political in the Latin American Novel,” Horacio Castellanos Moya writes that he’s been immersed in the political throughout his life—that it is a “genetic burden.” What his novels do, though, is not political in the usual sense: They remind us of the false distance we keep between our experiences and government doings. In both of the two new translations of his work, The She-Devil in the Mirror and Dance with Snakes, we don’t know when the main characters lost their connection to reality, but only how they’ve either related to or caused great upheaval in their cities. Because in these worlds, the political potential of all acts isn’t ignored.
The two novels have overlapping police and newspaper characters, but are structurally very different. The She-Devil in the Mirror is told solely through the frighteningly accurate voice of a clueless upper-class woman who is dealing with the murder of her best friend (think The Real Housewives scripted with a murder-mystery plot by a literary writer). She questions the motivations of journalists, detectives, priests, and the government while speaking to a nameless friend (probably imaginary, perhaps the reader). The whining grates on you after a while, but Moya is able to effectively tell a full, readable story through the perspective of this obnoxious, deluded character who turns out to be schizophrenic. In an interview with the publisher, New Directions, he explains how it came to be:
The voice of that lady started to sound in my mind and I couldn’t shut her up. I didn’t do any research or planning to build that voice, it just came to my mind and started to bother me a lot, insistently. I think that’s what compelled me to write the story, to get rid of her.
Dance with Snakes plays with the incompetence of bureaucracy and the need to assign order and meaning to happenings. Eduardo is young and unemployed, living with his sister. Everything seems normal with him until he becomes obsessed with a homeless man living in a car outside his apartment building, follows him one day, and ends up on a murderous rampage with talking snakes. Only his parts of the story are told in first person, but we’re also privy to third person accounts of the experiences of the same detective and journalist from She-Devil. They mean well in their attempts to find patterns in the chaos caused by Eduardo and the snakes, but their guns, pens, and power are proven futile in the face of true madness that can empty the president’s mansion without an army. The surrealism combined with great tragedy creates a terrifying, absurd tale.
These two novels and the previously translated Senselessness all have main characters whose minds unravel in vastly different ways, for different reasons. It’s as though Moya is morphing his perceived “genetic burden” into actual mental instability in his fiction—not to make sense of it, but to point out the futility of trying to escape into an apolitical life.
My review of Beauty Salon was quoted on its page on the City Lights website. Also, a review of Mirabelle Tavern is up at Gayot.com.
Much is made of Mario Bellatin’s “mischevious” (as the New York Times put it) manner, but with the recent translation of his 1994 novella Beauty Salon, his astounding mastery of the short form is what begs to be discussed. Through just 63 pages, a singular narrative voice that is equal parts haughty and heartbroken tells of how his beauty salon has become “the Terminal,” a place where he watches over ravaged men suffering from an epidemic so that they can die off the streets.
The narrator—a fish aficionado and transvestite who frequents Japanese baths—is not given a name, and neither are the city or the sickness. This namelessness gives the book a haunting, disorienting quality that allows you to become submerged in the narrator’s stream of thoughts on his life before the Terminal, dying, and his beloved fish, all of which are rooted in an obsession with beauty.
Much of the text is consumed by the narrator’s passion for his fish, which he first bought as a means of making the salon stand out and in the hopes that they’d make clients feel refreshed. He regards them with the utmost concern even after he has given up caring for them:
The water, though, isn’t very clear anymore. It’s taken on a greenish tinge, fogging up the glass walls of the aquarium. I’ve placed this fish tank somewhat away from the guests. I don’t want their rot to reach the water; I don’t want the fish to be infected with any fungus, virus or bacteria.
They are an escape, just as the salon once was for women—and as were the jaunts in drag he and his friends enjoyed. The fish allow him to feel control over life amidst the inescapable presence of death. It is beauty, though—particularly feminine beauty—that exists throughout the text as life itself, a powerful force that cannot be exposed to the decay of the Terminal.
The beauty salon had once been dedicated to beautifying women and I wasn’t willing to sacrifice so many years of work. Which is why I never accepted anyone that wasn’t a man, regardless of how much they pleaded.
The narrator and his friends who ran the salon with him didn’t just go out to work the streets dressed in women’s clothes, but would operate the salon in sequined garb. This, he says, created a more intimate atmosphere with the clients. It is not intimacy, but lethargy that he is interested in creating now: There is nothing to idealize about men because he has known them intimately in his life. When a strained relationship with his mother is mentioned, you understand that he strives to attain and sustain feminine beauty in order to compensate for the emptiness of that relationship. Eventually he himself begins to succumb to the sickness and discusses a desire to let the current guests die and then restore the salon to its previous state and die in its glory, once again a testament to the feminine.
Throughout the book there are hints that he has fallen ill when he wonders why he can’t care for the fish in the same way, though he goes on dressing up and visiting the baths until sores appear on his cheek. As he becomes weaker and weaker he speaks about his life and imminent death with regret; the vanity that had been saturating his words has eroded.
It’s an obvious turn in this work so obsessed with death, but Bellatin doesn’t seem to know a cliché. He keeps the voice measured and tightly enclosed in the nameless world he has created to the very end, as though it’s a fish bowl.
—
That questions about gender can be gorgeously rendered in such a short work so obsessed with death speaks of Bellatin’s mastery of the form, and we’re left to grumble about the paltry amount of fiction translated into English (translations of three of his stories were included in Chinese Checkers, released by Ravenna Press only in 2007). Thanks to his “unusual” personality, though, Bellatin was featured in the New York Times. Score one for non-English-language lit?
I wrote an artist’s biogaphy for All in Time Art, the work of Edwin Bolta Jr., that you can read on his website here. He recently had an exhibition at Sapphire Lounge in New York City, and I wrote the press release for the opening party. It was featured on Juxtapoz.com, NBC.com, and as an “Editor’s Pick” on the NY Daily News website.
I stood up—the pain beginning to set in—and unpacked my mother’s chicken-and-pepper sandwich; it was stale, the pepper mushy and bitter. I turned on the lights, found my notebook, and after biting into the sandwich and staring at the blank page for a long time, wrote a poem that I titled “Love and Obstacles,” the first lines: There are walls between the world and me,/and I have to walk through them.
-”Everything”
Literature is a constant and storytelling is necessity in Aleksandar Hemon’s Love and Obstacles, a collection of interlocking stories about the growth of a nameless Bosnian writer. It begins and ends with stories that include American storytellers—Spinelli the conman and McCalister the Pulitzer winner—and between these are many Bosnians who approach the act of writing in vastly different ways—from poetry, to straight nonfiction, to aggressive notes to roommates, to film. Through it all, the protagonist is evolving, bringing the lessons from each storyteller he meets into the next experience.
The protagonist has in common with Hemon all the skeletal aspects of life—birthplace, vocation, and ultimate life as a not-quite-exiled writer in the US. This is the case in each of his books, and as in the others it takes nothing away from the work. English is Hemon’s second language and he takes no aspect of it for granted; from using words we don’t hear in ways we couldn’t have imagined to his perfect use of the oft-maligned semicolon. He often gets playful, with “atwitter,” “asparkle,” and “adrizzle” all making appearances.
“The Conductor” is the collection’s best moment. Placed between stories of the protagonist’s youth in Bosnia and his life in America, it encompasses the chronological trajectory of the collection and gives it its shape. At the beginning, the protagonist is a student of literature in Sarajevo who goes to a café to hang out with the famous poets, including the most famous of them all, Dedo. Eventually, after the war in Sarajevo when they are living in the States, they are both invited to speak on the same panel and end up sleeping in the same bed. It, like the entire book, is a gorgeous, seamless ride from youthful stupidity to wise uncertainty.
What is most refreshing is that through it all, we’re not wrestling with whether or not his Bosnian nationality is important to him, or whether Americans aren’t to be trusted, or if his father’s hatred of fiction means anything grand. There is no tossing and turning over politics or relevance, it’s just human characters, living and being portrayed in writing that is both palpable and meditative.
My review of this journal is up at The Latin American Review of Books.