kurtwombat's Reviews (902)

At the heart of Thomas Pynchon’s shaggy 70’s funny serious meta-noir, is a mystery greater than the plot presented. As revealed by Roman Polanski’s CHINATOWN (wonderful screenplay by Robert Towne) and Raymond Chandler’s every lit only by streetlight foray into Los Angeles and its environs, there is a river of turpitude flowing beneath the shiny hard gloss of Southern California. Whereas the earlier works dealt with that river seeping up through the cracks into the lives of individuals, Pynchon’s INHERENCT VICE places his plot just after a moment where such a crack became a seismic fault line—Charles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca murders. Barely addressed during the actual novel, this event was personal to Los Angeles in a way that the other death knells of sixties idealism were not. The clinical savagery of the murders by the blindly obedient seemingly harmless followers of a charismatic madman, stunned and horrified the public beyond startled head shaking and dismay. The murders crept down into the core of who we thought we were and many never quite saw the world the same again. (Can we trust authority to protect us—does authority even care?) Onto this unsettled plain, come the quirky goofballs and malevolent forces of Pynchon’s world. A music mogul’s disappearance seems to be the trigger of events, but as Pynchon unfolds his tale gradually and gracefully you realize that all the events of his story are just aftermath. We are only playing catch up to events that unfold without our knowledge and beyond our power and will likely escape our understanding when we come upon them. Pynchon also brings in one of his favorite recurring themes, identity. There are people undercover, people finding out who they are or were, people leading double lives and people who are so slightly connected to the world that they may be said to not to exist at all. Doc Sportello, Pynchon’s names are always marvelous, the PI that leads the reader through the tale is easy to dismiss as a drugged out hippie but he will grow in your esteem and affection while the music mogul at the center of the mystery does a character 180….and then another. He remains almost little more than a shadow figure that the other characters try to mold into the image they want to see. In the midst of this are the things we choose to distract ourselves with sex, drugs, rock n’ roll and television and munchies. Mix in Pynchon’s usual array of unusual characters who seldom do quite what you expect them to do for reasons you won’t see coming and what I have presented as a heavy and ominous tome reads more like an ingenious PI story rolled up in a pothead’s lark. The humor is often sly, sometimes bawdy and lewd but the trip always rewarding. An amusing romp amidst the tombstones of our culture.

Edward Hirsch's GABRIEL: A POEM is as much about the mystery of his son's life as it is about his mysterious death at 22 years old. Energetic and often out of control, Gabriel's life was unleashed by various personality disorders. He experimented with everything and shied away from few things but slowing down--almost like the doomed who know they have a short time to finish the race--a shooting star through the lives of those who loved him. All this restless energy, this ever quivering vibration of life, coming to a sudden stop as an arrow hitting it's mark compounded the already immense power of death. Left in this wake, Hirsch relies on his strength, poetry, to deal with his grief. The result is a marvel. The author writes to keep his head above water--grief must run its course but to fall below its surface is to risk losing one's way. Not a linear dissection of reality, instead it is a rapid and roiling river of pain moving ever forward but at the same time falling back upon itself to run the same course again. The narration starts at the end, jumps to the beginning and then to various passages in between the way memory does. This leaves you with not just the facts but also the impression of the facts, reality and rumination blended into one. The effect is wave upon wave of Hirsch's anguish and sorrow but as you work through the poem, you realize that it is also a celebration of the life lost. He loves and appreciates all aspects of his son as if for the first time. And not for the last time, for as long as his memories live, so will his son. By the end of reading this book, which I consumed with one massive swallow, I was left not only with Hirsch's sadness, but was again mourning the loss of those I've loved. And it was not a bad thing. I was left a better man. Better able to love and remember and appreciate while I still can.

With apologies to the similarly time encapsulating THE SOUND OF MUSIC: How do you solve a problem like Christopher Isherwood? In his rather lengthy introduction to THE BERLIN STORIES, Isherwood admits to having difficulty deciding how to present his myriad recollections of pre-WWII Germany. Initially, he thought one long novel but he struggled to find threads strong enough to hold so many characters and paths together in one story line, so he eventually he broke them down into smaller projects such as the two novellas collected here--allowing his memories to coalesce into clumps largely held together by time and place and little else. Today such a project might more likely be allowed the fluid form of memoir as opposed to being forced into the ill-fitting structure of the novel. How much fun and more natural for the author this would have been is hinted at by his enjoyable introduction. A memoir with literary flourishes would have worked better than several memoir-ish novellas. So all that being said, you may wonder why I gave this ****. Ultimately I have surprised myself. Considering that virtually nothing happens over the course of the two novellas, and at times I found myself clambering for any foothold to hold my interest, a strange thing happened. I became lost amid the squalid tenements, beach resort hotels, and the crowded and just barely kempt boarding houses of Isherwood’s Berlin and became friends with the poor and rich alike and everyone in between striving or falling while walking the streets, drinking in dives or going to parties, bordellos and burlesque joints. THE BERLIN STORIES were like moving into a new neighborhood, the lines between familiar and unfamiliar blur and then vanish until it is like you have always been there and can never imagine forgetting what you have seen. The image of each person is so vividly crafted that many of them remain projected in my mind long after their moments upon the page and I was left wondering what happened next in the life of everyone who passed through the stories. At first it bothered me that so many lives dropped from the authors hands without seeming to go anywhere but I came to accept that as part of the point. While the Nazi’s are barely referenced, it is understood that they are always lurking—an inescapable tragedy that will toss millions of lives into the air let alone the relatively few presented here. Few realize that their lives really aren’t going anywhere despite the mad dash of the every day. As each character fell away from the narrative, I could not help but imagine them kind of freezing in place and awaiting the massive wave of WWII much like the main character of Francois Truffaut’s 400 BLOWS who finally manages to run away to the beach only to find he doesn’t know what to do next. As all these lives mount over the course of the two novellas, the power of expectation increases. What will become of all those characters left standing on the shore waiting for that wave to come for them?

The genius of the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson is the Girl of the titles. Lisbeth Salander alone is worth diving into these books for. Her specific vision of the world and her extreme reactions to almost everything are a delight. This intro to the series was my favorite of the three books largely because Salander is more actively involved throughout. The story sets up one mystery that quickly turns into parallel mysteries that span generations and tease along throughout the book. Journalism is the hero in the person of sexual vagabond Mikael Bloomquist. His heated idealism balances nicely against Salander’s cold pessimistic practicality. Either character alone might tend to smother the narrative but bouncing back and forth between them constantly injects fresh air. My eyes widened at several of the surprises in the book, and my pulse pounded at a couple. One mystery involves family drama and murder while the other corporate malfeasance in the extreme but throughout both extend the ideals of responsibility and watchfulness. The book is busy enough with its mysteries not to dwell on these themes heavy handedly. While the two mysteries have connections, their solutions remain separate—calming my fears of one big tidy solution. Fortunately, not much is tidy about this book especially the relationship of the two main characters—devout individuals realizing their situational dependence on each other and not always liking it.

Imagine that you wake up one morning with a hand at your throat trying to strangle you. You scream out in alarm waking your spouse who turns on the light and finds that it is your own hand at your throat and you are unable to stop it. Imagine someone asks you to identify an object and your best guess is that it might be for holding change because it has five long pouches. Then it is put on your hand and you realize it is your glove. Imagine being able to walk perfectly fine but your friends tell you something is wrong. You go to a doctor who films you walking across a room. When you see the film, you realize for the first time that you are leaning so far to one side, at least 20 degrees, that if you leaned much more you would fall over—and you have no sense of it at all. Some of the amazing and true patients treated by Dr. Oliver Sacks and discussed in this book.

Reading books about science (in this case neuroscience) can often be dry and mechanical. The poetry and mystery that moves in and around all things can be lost with the mere recitation of facts and figures and the faces of those most intimately impacted can become dry stiff masks revealing little of their inner life. I enjoy reading Oliver Sacks because he opens the door to poetry and mystery without making light of the science. The science, after all, is why we are here and while I certainly don’t want a soapy drama about each patient, Sacks strings enough humanity through each case that it intensifies the power of each affliction. For many of these folks there is an understandable depression over their plight but some have so little awareness of what they are suffering that the sadness has nothing to latch onto. The feeling becomes kind of a vagabond sadness permeating every working sense and weighing down any emotion that might try to take flight.

Though not every story is a sad one. The patient who didn’t recognize his own glove, was a music teacher who taught until he died in his late eighties. He could not recognize people or objects out of context but often could link clues together with music to create a kind of alternate image. He hummed while he walked across campus to find classrooms he had taught in for decades. He also painted and when he lost his connection with objects, gave up realism for abstract art. Part of the power of this book and people in general is that even under the most awful conditions—we often find a way to not only survive but to thrive. But for those who did succumb to their afflictions, often by just living a kind of shadow life until their bodies finally quit on them, perhaps what we learned from them affords a kind of meaningful afterlife they were denied while on earth.