An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine

Wow.!.!.!  This is the first time in a number of years that I would agree with whatever committee gave this book a National Book Award prize [actually the author was only awarded a “finalist” designation; God only knows what book beat him out in the finals. 

In my opinion, this is the best book club read I’ve ever encountered {albeit not a Sonoma County Library selection}.  Being second tier is something I got used to while living in Europe.  The concept is anathema to most Americans, but we have AAA baseball.  Those sub-strata of teams relegated to second-tier are like our Library book groups: not as much funding, and not the all-star players.  And yet, the Library Foundation has its conservative rules – no new books, established acclaim, literary east-coast prizes – within which this book might eventually fit, as a contender, albeit in three years.  The problem we at Guerneville Library have experienced is that in 2017, this book may not have the same topicality as now.

So, this is the style of writing that violates all the rules, and thus is brilliant because of that violation.  I’m now finished my first read of this book – there weren’t any chapters to help set a pace, but it’s one of those reads that’s hard to put down, so I used toilet paper as marker stop-points.  The book uses a declarative first person protagonist (which I just complained about in another recent book commentary), and yet the author has captured me, my thoughts, and my actions in detail, so how can I complain.  I love this style – because the protagonist is me.  She’s a woman, with full feminine attributes and capabilities – and a woman I could love – and yet she easily fits within the minds of men, in all their disgusting habits: farting, swearing, disrespecting women, killing other people with guns, and in all sorts of ways, being stupid.

To our reading group, the heroine is “of an age”, our age.  Done with a gazillion and one things, that have bothered us between birth and 65.  What she’s left with, as we might agree, is a love of the written word, specifically literature.  Our protagonist, probably unlike us, has devoted her life to translating “the great works of literature”, in her opinion, into Arabic.  Was this book like “The Housekeeper and the Professor” or other stories, which place a heroine in harm’s way and then tie up the loose ends.  Quite often, these books develop their stories in the Middle or Far East.

This month will be my first, in a long while, at a non-library-based book club.  In the past, my experience with most reading and writing groups has been that they are predominately feminine.  This new “Meet-Up” group limits itself, wisely, to sixteen people per event, but allocates 2 hours instead of only one.  I hope this means that each participant will have 4-5 minutes to put forward their ideas on the book.  I can only hope that, over time, there will be a gender balance in these Meet-Up groups.

My library book this month was a memoir that cited 300 book titles.  I hated that book and loved this one, and had to ask myself, why?.  Was I being inconsistent?  The difference I found was that whereas the Beiruti author’s protagonist was a hermit-style, solitary reader and writer, the Will Schwalbe memoir was a gregarious journalist/publisher for whom books were his career bread and butter.  He didn’t really like them, reading or writing.  Books were Aaliya’s Life.  They were her only and true friends.  I compiled a list of Aaliya’s 37 best friends, which is documented on the next four pages.

I normally resist the temptation to quote passages from the current book, but with a supposed few extra minutes I will cite page 54 after a self-proclaimed bucolic passage

“I sway a little, lean on the wine-red and urine yellow abomination of a breakfast table that my husband brought with him when we were married and left when he left.  I shake the loose folds of my robe de chamber.  Dust motes hang thick in the air.  The kitchen has two windows on adjacent walls.  A spider with shockingly long front legs busies herself with prey caught in her web.  All that remains is a wisp of gossamer with striated veins..  The spider chose the wrong window; her home will be washed away with the first rains.”

 

 

The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe

Will is the ideal son of a Jewish mother, gosh, any mother would love this guy who is loving and devoted, respectful and caring; what’s not to love?  Well, becoming a doctor or a lawyer might be nice too, but as his mother reminded him, he’s independently wealthy and doesn’t need to work.  This may be why he’s flirted with journalism, publishing, book editing, and hey, why not, a gourmet food website.

This book is primarily a monster homage to his mother who comes off as Mother Teresa, Maggie Thatcher, and Hillary Clinton all rolled into one.  Now he is self-admittedly not a writer.  Nonetheless, his ego has seeped into the text of this book.  Although it’s not clear to me what is his “memoir”, and what belongs to his Mother’s continued child-rearing.  Right at the end [and keep in mind that 90% of all readers skip to the end, at the beginning], he owns to receiving, from his mother, the appendix, most of the philosophical insights, and copious notes to be included into this book, including the Blog entries.  What are left are some editorial fill, details research, and a few anecdotal diary thoughts.

Yes, what I’m saying is that Mom is still running Will’s life.

Will is a small scope kind of guy; his mother is world-scope.  Will doesn’t want to be President of … or Board Chairman of … ; he likes the comforts of life, especially this life; not particularly interested in an afterlife.  That’s why he daubs his fingers in all these great books, but draws no over-arching conclusions from this entire 18-month period.  Will is not a big thinker and it is a shame that in penning his Mom’s self-eulogy, he couldn’t balance it with some thoughts of his own.

But at least … !     we’ve finally pinned him down. 

Yeah.!   Yes, the white-wine swilling imbecile who keeps putting books on the New York Times bestseller list, et al.  The guy who has a pile of “must-read” books by his bedside [that admittedly never get read] that are nonetheless advanced along the path towards Sonoma County Library selection. 

The guy who brags endlessly about this and that event where he co-hosts his “publishing pals”;  who also lets drop, humbly, all his charitable and volunteer time spent on numerous worthwhile causes in Africa and the Middle East.  I won’t mention name-dropping.

It is interesting to note that “our guy” says he doesn’t like to read about or discuss subjects like sex, defecation, and many other taboo subjects.  On the other hand, he documents his Mom’s list of 150 [famous] books that are all referenced in this {lengthy, 300-page} expansion of a New York Times article.  These guys loved fornication and shitting.

Now I am trying to keep an open mind but obviously failing.  We all have people in our lives, and/or families that are like this.  Generally, they live back in Ohio, and we’re out here in California.  Mammals like to stay with their own.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

A Valentine’s Day Selection. 

 

This should have been our selection for February 2015 at the Brown Bag Book Club.[1] 

As you can see from the citations below, this won an “unpublished” book award in Australia (?).  The author sold the movie rights {but no movie}.  He did get an Advanced Diploma of Screenwriting in 2013, and when he wrote the sequel, he got, in 2014, a Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing; both from the University of Melborne. [This was not his undergraduate, but his graduate school.]

I can’t recall what prompted me to order this book – I actually bought it. 

This is another entry into the genre-world of O/C behavior comedies.  The protagonist is off the charts of “normal” and the reader is encouraged to feel sympathetic as one might to a child with-learning disabilities.  Robin or Padma could comment on what variations are being portrayed.  The plot line is a basic boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl: a romantic comedy.

Like Christopher Boone, the 15-year-old narrator of Mark Haddon's 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, he's appealing not just despite his eccentricities but because of them.  We read that book in this group back in June 2005 (see next page for what I wrote then).

The O/C behavior just spices up an otherwise standard R/C plotline that has been done for as long as I can remember: movies like “It Happened One Night”, or anything with Tracy and Hepburn; stage plays like with Burton and Taylor.  This is the basic essence of writing for social communication – Conflict – Yin and Yang – Opposites Attract – Salt and Pepper.

 

The predictability of the storyline is only matched by our, the reader’s, capacity to insatiably digest an infinite set of variations on this popular theme.

 

It’s a fun read.

 

I will offer up the paperback this Thursday in out book group.

 

The curious incident of the dog in the night-time           June 2005 Brown Bag

For me, Christopher’s way of thinking is natural, obvious, and the only logical way to view the world.

I took a scientific and mathematical training path all through school and in my career work.  I look at the physical aspects of the world through the lens of the laws of science, and I see the art and beauty of the world through mathematics.

I could easily and comfortably be just like him, except his behavior patterns have been “socialized” out of me from birth.  His is the natural way to look at life.

 

Books like this give one pause to stop and wonder about life.  Maybe that “retard” you’re either feeling sorry for or trying to trip is the next Stephen Hawking¥, world’s greatest genius in Cosmology.  Christopher and Hawking have different problems at the base of their “uniqueness” from other people.  What they do have in common, though, is focus.  It does seem that people who are lacking in some areas tend to focus their unused energy in other areas.  For Hawking and Christopher, the areas are mathematics and science.

I don’t want to tread into the more religious aspects of life & death, but one lesson to be appreciated from this cute short story is that all life is precious.  No life is beyond exclusion from respect and consideration and everyone needs to be given as many chances as possible to succeed in their chosen areas.  How do we know who will be the next Stephen Hawking?

The other lesson is that there is always hope for salvation from one’s demons, but it may take a lifetime, as it will for the father who has murdered an innocent dog and lied about a child’s mother, all caused by uncontrolled anger and jealous passion

I am also reminded of the movie, “Liar, Liar,” Jim Carrey, 1997, where Fletcher Reede must speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  It results in uncomfortable situations like in our book, when the police sergeant wants Christopher to say that he didn’t mean to hit the policeman, but he can’t say that because he did intend to hit him and he can’t lie. 

Part of the transition from childhood to adulthood is the graying of the spaces between truths and lies.  It seems that full adulthood represents the ability to never quite tell the truth.  The more respected and powerful the position: politician, media person, corporate president, even President Of The United States; the higher they go, the more these people have been seduced by the dark side of the force.  It is a sad commentary that concomitant with the lengthening noses of those on top, is the population’s willingness to accept the lies.

The truth is often a bitter pill to swallow, but we’re better off to take it when the doctor orders.

 

It was said of Diogenes that throughout his life he "searched with a lantern in the daylight for an honest man." And though Diogenes apparently did not find an honest man, he had, in the process, "exposed the vanity and selfishness of man." (The Chambers Dictionary.)

 

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[1] Simsion won the 2012 Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award for his book, The Rosie Project. Text Publishing has sold the rights to the book internationally for over $1.8m. The Rosie Project was published in Australia in January 2014, and has since sold more than a million copies in over forty countries around the world. The screenplay has been optioned to Sony Pictures Entertainment. A sequel to The Rosie Project, titled The Rosie Effect, was published on 24 September 2014 by Text Publishing.

Prior to writing fiction he was an information systems consultant and wrote two books and several papers about data-modelling. He established a consulting business in 1982 and sold it in 1999. At that time Simsion Bowles and Associates had over seventy staff. He co-founded a wine distribution business, Pinot Now with Steven Naughton.

From 2002–2006, as a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, he conducted the largest published study of data modelling practitioners (489 participants, most with substantial industry experience), to address the question 'Is data modelling better characterized as description or design?' The research included interviews with thought leaders, surveys of practitioners, and practical modelling tasks.

He concluded that, in contrast to the assumption implicit in most data modelling research, data modelling is best characterized as a design discipline (the term design is used in the broad sense of design theory, rather than its more narrow and casual usage in the information systems field). His work was published as his PhD thesis Data Modeling: Description or Design, University of Melbourne, 2006 and in Data Modeling Theory and Practice (Technics Publications, 2007).

 

¥ Stephen Hawking has worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes. These results indicated it was necessary to unify General Relativity with Quantum Theory, the other great scientific development of the first half of the 20th Century. One consequence of such a unification that he discovered was that black holes should not be completely black, but should emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear. Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. This would imply that the way the universe began was completely determined by the laws of science.  http://www.hawking.org.uk/home/hindex.html

their eyes were watching god by Zora Neale Hurston

The African-American argot is not a problem for me, although I wouldn’t recommend this book to those who don’t have a language-dexterity capability.  Hurston keeps the reader from straining by switching periodically to an omniscient narrator, who uses well-educated English.  This narrator is a brilliant poet and an artist, who paints beautiful, lively visions, captured momentarily in words.

This is an old book (1937).  I’m almost done - the reading seems to go fast, but these days Hollywood film [2005, Halle Berry] captures events in 3-4 minutes.  It’s a 200-page book, so the essence is in front of me, and I relish the read.  The author fully embraces a passion for life.  She appears to a keen awareness of all life surrounding her.  She is a guru of her times.

Once you’ve trained your BabelFish to handle Ebonics, the dialogue is just sometimes tedious; but the anticipation of the author’s true thoughts is worth the wait.  It’s a melodic love story spanning the protagonist’s lifetime.  Not quite a “coming of age” story; more of a “Let me grow in order to find myself” movie.

Is it racist?  Well, there aren’t many American books that use the argot of Boston Wasps or the Georgia Klan, but recently some authors have used New York and Chicago ghetto talk.  Nobody complains when the British perform Shakespeare with “as written” language.

Possibly she was just writing, in memoir style, about her own upbringing and using the language of those neighbors and family, close and dear to her.  She was smart enough, and well-educated sufficiently to see the arc of history and thus feel a need to document the vernacular of her birth place, before it disappeared.

The One From the Other by Philip Kerr

In my opinion, this is his best yet.  I would yield to Pat Nolan in these matters, if necessary.  Kerr covers ground that is far more interesting to “Amis” [Americans]: specifically “the Jewish problem”, Ami-support of post-war Nazis, and the Communist menace.

I might also add that Gunther is far more a Chandler-esque detective in this book than the pre-war tough guy.  I can’t imagine the Krippo cop, before the war, turning in the ubiquitous gorgeous blonde after he may have sullied her reputation: post-50’s, he’s capable of shooting her if she warrants it.

This is clearly not modern and not now: Bernie would be 119 years old, so dial it back 70 years to 1949, when Bernie Gunther has turned 40.  He buries a second wife; can’t remember how many women he’s had; or men he has killed: a jaded, cynical man.

In true noir form, he’s continually sapped and has his money stolen.  I loved every page of it.  He covers a lot of territory; and runs into a lot of “top” Nazis.  This turns out to be a hodge-podge of good short stories, linked together, skillfully, by a good author, who has come into his seniority.

Hey, he’s playing to his audience, and succeeding, he’s good.  But we’re getting to the end of the saga.  Bernie is now closing in on sixty.  For you and me, these days, that’s still young.  But through experiences as a cop with KRIPO, a private detective in Berlin, and as an SS “specialist”; Bernie is no longer to be played by Matt Damon in the movies, maybe, at best, Clint Eastwood, and that’s if Clint is bank-rolling the picture.

What makes it worth the read, is that Clint [or Bernie] really has American values and doesn’t know it: resists it.  He hates the Amis as much as the Ivans; he’s German through and through:

 alt-Deutsche, not Hoch-Deutsche, more like Weimar Deutsche.

Summer House with Swimming Pool by Herman Koch

This is a good read.  A translation from the Dutch 2011 book, “Zomerhuis met zwembad”.

The stream of consciousness narrative is from Doctor Marc Schlosser, a GP.  He is a GP who has taken the easier pathways presented to him: no post-school specialty; and he has customized his clientèle to wealthier people who want to be coddled.  He looks the other way at excesses in drinking and smoking.  He is free with drug prescriptions; after all they’re adults who can make up their own minds.  He’s a very conservative and almost prudish man.  He’s married with two young girls. 

He ventures slightly over the edge when his mid-life flirtation with a patient’s wife begins to obsess him.  This comes to fruition at a two week summer holiday shared between his family and the other couple, who have two teen-age boys; all at the eponymous rental house. 

The writing is solid and Marc’s thought processes are fascinating and realistic from a male point of view.  The author isn’t afraid to delve into taboo topics that receive more circumspect coverage in most novels: pedophilia, homosexuality, and philandering.  There is a time he is prepping to do a prostate examination, but goes off into a mental review of his Med-School Professor’s philosophy, and when he snaps back to present time, he says to the patient, “Maybe another day”, removing his gloves.

Dr. Schlosser is a fallible man in a fallible world.

Wild the Movie by Cheryl Strayed

Well,

Right up front,
I hated this movie.

I was so looking forward to this movie.

I thought it would be an uplifting resurrection from drug oblivion to healthy, normalcy.
 
Redemption – the right path – beautiful panoramas with a moral at the end – a modern Jimmy Stewart movie.

This was part of my December miasma of depression, regret, and various rationales for committing suicide. 

The cinematography and direction were confused, piecemeal, very disappointing.  There was lots of potential here: the trail; a great actress, an interesting story.  All of this seemed to be lost on the director.  Jean-Marc Vallée was obsessed with tine-slicing; past plot references; and symbolic “moments”. 

This resulted in a confusing presentation of what should have been a simple plot.  Maybe he was pressured to stick close to the book’s plot development.  If so, that’s always a big mistake.  Movies have to have a fairly simple plot arc, unlike books, which, these days, have three or more concurrent plots and development of a dozen characters.  Doing that in a movie requires seeing the movie twice {good marketing gimmick} to understand what the director was “saying”.  This film was so confusing that I wouldn’t see it a second time if you paid me to do it.

The bright point of the movie was the performance of Laura Dern.

She gave a creditable portrayal of Cheryl’s mother.  It was easier to follow her time-line, and so, the flash-backs weren’t as confusing as Cheryl’s.

 

 

 

I didn’t think {or was unaware} that Cheryl had accomplished anything by this 1,000 mile journey.  Her character was still messed up, and from my experience would be back on drugs with months.

Nothing about the journey encouraged me to try one on my own.