A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

This was an amusing little light-reading diversion for the women’s auxiliary chick-lit club of Skokie, Illinois.  The “Skokie Women’s Discussion Group” met yesterday (2^nd and 4^th Wednesdays of every month).  They love these stories that portray all men as bumbling idiots, easily swayed by any wiggly pair of “knockers.”  These stories that cast men with rock-solid egos, albeit with sometimes squishy other parts.  Besides work, these men play and watch games, and eat a lot.

This fictionalized memoir reads more like a series of neighborly chats at the checkout queue of the local Sainsbury’s, with the focus of the week being one of three alternating points: 1) sisterly bonding; 2) 20^th century Ukrainian history; and 3) a generous helping of Judge Judy.  All in all, I thought Marina’s writing style was “cute and entertaining.”  It’s a harmless book that can be read quickly or intermittently as the mood suits one.  I will recommend it to my sister, who wouldn’t miss a Judge Judy episode; she loves the sheer crassness of those who would seek J.J.’s opinion/decision.  My Slavic friends (in my age group) are all fervent, nationalistic slaves to polka dancing.  They will pour over this book with serious, critical attention.  For those more modern American friends of mine, the 99%, I’d recommend it to the women in my age group.  The family bonding/understanding issue is far bigger and certainly more important that what was attempted in this chin-wag book.  Nonetheless, it at least brings up the point that “older sister” maybe has some insights into the family history/dynamic from which younger sister was sheltered.

So, the undisclosed factor in my soft handling of this book is that my college 4th year roommate, and 5th year (I switched from engineering to Math, Physics, & German) best friend was known as Oleks Rudenko.  That was 1959-60 thru 61: the University of Arizona at Tucson. Oleks was a young teenager during the German offensive East (1941) and subsequent retreat West (1944).  He had joined the partisans for Ukrainian independence as a runner early on.  He was captured by the Germans and sent back as a worker.  In 1945, he was free as a 17-year old survivor to roam Germany with a band of like-thinking ex-patriots.  He had wild tales to tell of commandeered jeeps, teen-aged adventures, smiling American GIs with cigarettes, food, and gasoline.  He came across to America in 1948; worked to make money, learn English (badly, but it served him well in 50’s America) and also enough to get into college.  I stayed with Oleks and his wife eight years later (1968) when he was finally settling down and I was starting graduate school. 

I danced a lot of polkas in those days with the Slavic graduate student clubs; learned a lot of Eastern European history.  I hope that Oleks found peace with the dissolution of the Soviet Union:  I don’t know; I lost contact in the eighties.  I hope he got to go back.

The causes never die. 

What is the What by Dave Eggers

I’ll open with an apology: my normal voracious reading appetite has been soured for the past few months by attending four funerals over the summer.  I’m not reading as much, and I’m reading with impatience and an intolerant eye.

Nonetheless, I think I’m still reading good books like Joan Didion’s “Blue Nights,” which makes one think that she and JCO are in some sort of high-stakes poker game for who can open their veins wider.  For leitmotif, I’m gobbling up John Grisham’s latest, “The Litigators,” which is great fun.  My pulp-fiction bathroom book is “House Divided,” by Mike Lawson: a spy/murder/lawyer book about the NSA (like the Peace Corps, one of the few regrets at not joining from my post-college possibilities).  But back to the mortality memoirs, I recently finished JCO’s “The Corn Maidens” and am now setting out on the Julian Barnes book, “The Sense of an Ending.”  Even with the fluff reading, this is all well-written stuff: thoughtful, well-researched, and thoroughly life-relevant, even life-enhancing.

O.K., I guess I can’t avoid commenting on this month’s installment in our library book club text collection of dry, acidic diction.  “What” is right up there with “Envy” and “Sanctuary” as a compilation of words that characterize TMI: Too Much Information.  “Bliss” was in the running for this year’s prize, but wound up fourth – it was too accommodating to the reader.  These journalism articles, overly long and repetitive, were examples of bad memoirs – boring content, instead of exciting novels – emotive and insightful.

One lesson I’ve learned this year, and wish I could enforce, is that journalists should not be allowed to publish books.  There’s so much good stuff available, why encourage the proven bad writers.  One should: encourage youth and encourage fledgling authors; but hacks .??. – no advances – make them self-publish.

The cases in point are Eric “Bliss” Weiner, Neil “Sanctuary” White, and Dave “What” Eggers.  To me, these are men who beg, borrow, steal, and/or whatever to get their words out.  They’re con-men – out to sell a newspaper (Please see all the old Barbara Stanwick and/or Gary Cooper movies from the thirties).  These people changed that industry.  Reporters are now characterized as soulless jerks and creeps, male and female, who lust after the salacious and will go to any end to find gossipy items (just Google: Murdoch, Sun).

[But see, here I go: reacting to the loss of my mother, a radio friend, a church friend, and a local neighbor.]  I want to [and will of course] continue to say that my mother’s parents were both lifelong newspaper people.  My grandma opened her first paper at 19, as publisher/editor on the Louisiana/Texas border.  My mom’s father taught me to run the linotype at a young age.  They jointly ran the county papers, including the Waterloo {where my mother was raised} Gazette.  These kind of people are the genesis and inheritors of “the freedom of the press.”

My three minutes are running out.  I have hardly spoken of Eggers or his book.  Eggers is a bad writer – it’s a shame he had to drop out of Cal-Berkeley.  One reviewer tactfully says, “it defies categorization” – biography or novel – fiction or memoir.  I answer that an author knows what they are writing.  The story is not “engaging”, as another reviewer says; it is completely boring – I read it all – I never was interested in anyone’s story ---- whether they lived or died ---- nor what they were living or dying for ---- not in anything from the book.

Eggers didn’t do the number one thing an author must do: make me care whether they lived or died, whether they thrived or succumbed, whether they became relevant or not.  Journalists only have to achieve a buy-in for two minutes of one or two days. 

Good writers make you think about their characters for weeks, months and years afterward.  I will not remember Achak Deng next week. 

Will You .?

The Windup Girl -- Paolo Bacigalupi

Published: October 30, 2011
BANGKOK — Shielded by hundreds of thousands of sandbags piled shoulder high along the city’s outskirts, most of Bangkok remained dry on Sunday, allaying fears for the time being that the massive metropolis would be swamped by monsoon floodwaters.

I’m one of the few who read all 359 pages of this diatribe against bio-engineering. I read it even though I wouldn’t call it a Science Fiction novel. There’s a nice travelogue on Siam (remember “The King and I”,) including a brief political history. It’s about what research you’d get from clicking on Wikipedia. The plotline is cute, but too thin for a real Sci-Fi book. The insistence on Thai names for people and places is always difficult for American readers. It takes over a hundred pages just to get into the flow of the author’s style and gain familiarity with the characters.

Now if I just look at the book as a modern, action movie script, then I think the author has done a wonderful job. There’s just enough character development to carry a 120-minute, all-audience film. There are plenty of sympathetic characters to root for: Jaidee (think Obi Wan-Kenobi) and Kanya (Luke); Anderson the American; Hock Seng the loyal but befuddled foreigner; and of course Emiko who will provide plenty of female sisterhood as well as contortionist sex for the 14 year-old male viewer. Evil-doers abound leading off with global mega-corporations versus populist farmers; then politicians (shoot them all, like the lawyers) versus the eco-friendlies.

I’m sure this will be filmed in a 3-D format. There’s plenty of opportunity for computer graphics. All our favorites: war, violence, torture, and sex, all to extremes. It was a hard slog through the repetitious action scenes. I guess this leaves the movie director with multiple options for filming. However, I did finish the book and liked it. Author Bacigalupi is certainly no William Gibson as many of his credits claim, but it’s an enjoyable read that I would and will recommend. I’d certainly point out this book to anyone contemplating travel to Thailand. I can’t wait for the movie.

A Long Way Down -- Nick Hornby

The Breakfast Club – (revisited 20 yrs on)

I’m too old to put up with the angst and yammering of youth’s hard slog up the hill of adulthood. I can take a few hours of this whining, but I would have much preferred a 90-minute Hollywood version.

The Breakfast Club (1985) was successfully targeted on 14-year olds. It quickly became an adolescent classic like my generation’s James Dean flic, “Rebel Without a Cause” 30 years before.

“Way Down” takes a similar four losers from the Breakfast Club; ages them fifteen years; and places them on top of a building, each with a perfectly rational and expedient solution to their dysfunctional lives – jump off.!! Unfortunately, they fail. What could have turned out to be a great population control idea, through a strategy of weeding out the weak, instead turned into a paper wastage machine for the author.

Yes, I think success spoiled Nick Hornby. Then again, maybe he only had the one book in him. He’s certainly been writing the same story over and over again. This idea, of the four on a building, could have been an interesting short story, or a stage play, or a screenplay without the precedent book. However, Hornby seems to be locked on the 300-page novel format. This particular effort was a cheap, gimmicky shortcut – four, otherwise unrelated mini-stories, wrapped into one “novel.”.

Now I grant you that British humour plays a lot on human foibles, mistakes, and downright stupidity; and I do love my “Red Dwarf” and “Absolutely Fabulous”. However, these four idiots would be lucky to average an IQ of 65. Then again, I have to admit how idiotic it is for so many “bright” men to be caught with their pants down so often. Nonetheless, this book didn’t pass test number one of fiction, suspension of disbelief. And without that, who gives two cents about the miserable, depressing lives of a quartet of wankers in England.

Portraits of a Marriage -- Sándor Márai

This recent translation of an older Hungarian book is a great example of several styles that are outdated these days. First, there is the multiple POV approach, which was just beginning in the pre-WWII days when this was written. Like my favorite model, Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, this book is composed of four short stories, all chronicling the same events but from different points of view and time frames.

The separate story approach has the advantage of reinforcing the truism that 100 people will see the same events in a hundred different ways; and that there are 100 different “truth”s to the one set of events. The memoir genre, which is becoming more and more extensively used, has come under fire recently for “distorting” the “real truth” of events. This separated POV story approach helps to define the memoir as just one of the 100 truths of an event. This clarification isn’t a part of the modern multiple-POV styles. When the POV switches from within a single story, the reader is forced to multi-task and switch POVs, often beyond their ability. There seems to be a fine, gray line of acceptable frequency of switching POVs. Dickens switched at a macro level, maybe every few chapters to a new sub-plot. Alternating chapters is quite common these days, but not commonly done well. I often decide to skip an entire POV, alternate set of chapters, assuming that the author will knit them together in the end.

The other older style of writing was the use of the expository first person narrative. In this case, other characters are never actually incorporated, merely spoken to without response coming back. Each of the first three chapters is a supposed several hour monologue, or more accurately, a dialogue with an imaginary or unhearable friend. This avoids the pesky details like scene setting, entrances and exits, and “he said”-“she said”s. This was an acceptable style prior to stage and screen adaptation became popular around the time of WW-II.

I enjoyed this book, but it’s not for the casual reader. It is a book to be read slowly and one where the entertainment comes from delving deeply into characters.

The Guilty Plea by Robert Rotenberg

For those who like a bit of contrast, here’s a Canadian legal thriller. And in keeping of contrasts, I’ve shown both book covers, American on the left, somewhat subdued with a techie background finish; and then on the right, a more old-fashioned but bloodier, hit-you-over-the-head cover used in Toronto Canada where this author hails from.

Lawyer stories always make good summer reading and this is a good one. The outcome is always clear (see the title.) It is the contrasting explanations of American versus Canadian judicial systems that were interesting to me: rules of evidence, cross examination, and other lawerly detail of that sort. My sister, who spent many years as a paralegal would love this book.

Of course, there are the usual twists and turns to catch the reader by surprise and plenty of sex to keep the action going. Canada, however, is a quiet place. There’s not much violence in this book, that didn’t seem to cross the border. Moreover, without violence, there aren’t any villains to stimulate our moral outrage.

Overall, the writing seemed like a retro throwback to American lawyer stories of the nineteen seventies. With the good writing, that made it easy and pleasant to read: a good book for the summer of 2011.

All the Time in the World -- E.L. Doctorow

This guy Doctorow is a prolific writer. I’ve seen his name now for years. I’ve picked up novels of his several times, and then put them back down because I thought they were too “heavy.” This book of short stories was a way to get into hits style and thoughts. Now, on reflection, I think maybe he just hit too close to home with me. I really enjoyed his stories; they made me laugh, and think, and pause to say to myself “that’s me.”

The opening story, Wakefield, tells the story of a yuppie man who, on a whim, spends a year hiding from his wife and job, in his garage loft.
Edgemont Drive is another tale of the suburbs. An old man arrives in front of a couple’s house in an old Ford Falcon. He parks there for days, weeks, and then wheedles his way into the house: his old house. He has come to die there; and does.

These are not thrilling tales. These stories are readable etudes. Doctorow does a good job of capturing people, their thoughts and dialogues. He makes it all real. He spins a yarn that pleases us, the reader. In Assimilation, we read the story of Ramon, a legal immigrant busboy, and Jelena, the foreign daughter of a Russian gangster. Ramon is tricked into a marriage with her, but after many trials and tribulations, she falls in love with him. This sounds like a 1940’s movie plot, but Doctorow has freshened it up and brings it off satisfactorily.

There are a dozen short stories in all, just right for summer reading by the pool, each one takes about an hour or two of distracted reading. The stories in the middle of the book are centered on religion as a theme, with quite a bit of tongue-in-cheek moralizing.

The tongue-in-cheek becomes comedic with stories like Jolene’s, who from age 15, continuously sells her soul to the lowest bidder and bounces from bottom to bottom; all the way to The Writer in the Family, who writes letters home to his mother from his dead father; and then Willi, who lusts after his step mom.