Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

I was impressed with “Night” last month.  I read the poignant story.  I devoured the history and meaning; even read more books on the subject.  It brought back visiting Yad Vashem.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG2QaN_LUao

 

This book captured my imagination, brought me back to the realities of today.  This is the new life in SillyConisco.  This was a fun venture into the craziness of Bay Area life, which reinforces the idea that we think we’re weird up here in Sonoma County. 

 

This book brought back so many memories of “City Lights” bookstore with its shelves to the ceiling and several floors, and the night-life people of North Beach.  All that stuff is mixed together with the High-Tech invasion of Googlers, Webinistas, and venture capitalists.  If I still lived on Upper Grant Avenue, I’d probably be Mr. Penumbra now, trying to learn Ruby[1].

 

I loved all the hi-tech gadgets and gizmos; nothing too Star-Trekkie, all believable.  I loved the character, Clay, with his make-a-list approach to all problems and with his almost autistic penchant for prime numbers, e.g. $2,357 in his bank account.  We had a monstrous book reader at IBM in the 80’s; it similarly took a team and a big room to operate.  IBM also had a private Internet in the early 80’s, just for developers.

 

The author is clever at weaving in some real things with total fiction.  I liked his Anatomix company of Neel’s, which is actually a basketball shoe manufacturer [Stephen Curry specials].  The main creative fiction was about the type font, Gerritszoon[2].  The footnote on Gerritszoon is a quote from a blog I found about this book[3].

This book is definitely an escapist, Mexican beach, summer read.  This is especially true if you work in SillyCon Valley.

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[1] Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, object-oriented, general-purpose programming language. It was designed and developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan. According to its authors, Ruby was influenced by Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp.

 

[2] “Griffo Gerrtiszoon is almost certainly a merger of Francesco Griffo (the designer of typefaces at the Aldine Press) and Gerrit Gerritszoon (aka Erasmus, who worked for the Aldine Press as a Greek scholar).  There is one typeface inspired by Francesco Griffo that has long been included on the Mac: Hermann Zapf's Palatino.  Interestingly Zapf considered Palatino a display typeface and designed a book weight complement called...wait for it...Aldus :-)  So I guess one could argue Zapf's Aldus is really Gerritszoon and Palatino is Gerritszoon Display.  But I think Palatino is most likely the typeface Sloan intended Gerritszoon to represent.”

 

[3] Thought Streams: a micro-blog for every idea

James Tauber

1429 thoughts; 125 streams
last posted April 11, 2015, 11:54 p.m.

 

Spark by John Twelve Hawks

An interesting action thriller – 300 pages –well written – suspenseful, as far as things like this can be with an Asperger’s Syndrome protagonist.

 

This is a new book at our Guerneville Library, but a 2014 publication date.  It’s a bit too weird to make it to any prize lists or even best sellers. 

 

Besides arcane subject matter – slightly futuristic trained psychotic assassins in an evil world, the plotline takes forever to develop.

 

From another angle, the pace picks up to frenzy pitch in the last third of the book, almost manic in the last fifty pages.

 

The predictions of half a dozen medical experts, including a few psychiatrists do become completely true by the end of the book.  Maybe it was written by a shrink.

 

No skimming in this book.  The writing is riveting and important to the events of the plotline.  It makes more and more sense as the story unfolds.

 

In the end, it’s a tale of love and morality: truth and justice prevail.

 

I picked it up from the New Arrivals shelves,

and it goes back there tomorrow.

The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami

I don’t want to say too much about this book.

 

Sorry, spoiler alert for anything I might say beyond page 1.

 

This book is continuously surprising.

 

Is it for 9-year-olds? 

     Maybe --  Maybe not ---  Maybe sort of. 

 

Is it for an 18-year-old boy? 

     Maybe --  Maybe not ---  Maybe sort of. 

 

It worked for me, and I am well beyond any category.

 

I picked it up [from the New Arrivals shelves],

  because I thought it might be another of those graphic novels.

 

    “Was it,” I thought to myself?

 

         Maybe --  Maybe not ---  Maybe sort of. 

 

 

After a dozen pages,

  I thought to myself,

      “Was it written for kids or with deeper meaning?”

 

         Maybe --  Maybe not ---  Maybe sort of. 

 

 

 

When I had finished, I thought to myself,

      “Was this a good book?”

 

         Maybe --  Maybe not ---  Maybe sort of. 

Night by Elie Wiesel

A spell-binding, riveting book that has a commanding story line as well as being, now, well written.  It’s a good thing it barely stretches 100 pages, as it’s almost impossible to put down once one starts reading. 

The unrelenting insistence of Wiesel’s narrative, to demand the reader’s complete attention without letup is matched by one of Imre Kertész’s books.  “Kaddish For A Child Unborn”, first published in 1990 and translated into English in 1997.  It is 95 pages of straight stream of consciousness: no chapters, no paragraphs, all monologue.  He mentally puts forward all the arguments, to his wife and his friend, why he can’t consider bringing a child into a post-holocaust world.

This current edition of "Night"
   is translated from French by Marion Wiesel, 2006[see 2 below]

It is a more powerful rendering.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

It might be interesting to go back to the earlier translation to see what he was complaining about, and the reason he was so happy with his wife’s translation.  I’ve become interested in translators because of another book, apropos to this month’s subject: to wit, “An Unnecessary Woman” written by Rabih Alameddine.  The protagonist is a Beiruti woman who devotes her entire adult life to translating books, certain books, 37 of them as her story ends.

The holocaust features heavily in a few of these 37 books.  One of specific interest when reading Wiesel’s “Night”, is the Hungarian Imre Kertész’s “Fateless”, published in 1975.  This is a fictional memoir about a 14 year old boy who is sent to Auschwitz, also spending time in Buchenwald.  Rather than a Yiddisher, Torah-touting, Jew, this kid is a denier: he’s not that Jewish, isn’t religious; and actually thinks the work camps are a pretty good idea given the world-wide depression, and anyway everyone knows the bad guys are the Gypsies.  The environment is the same as for Wiesel, but their experiences are polar opposites.  Both wind up in an infirmary as the war ends: Wiesel flees the camp with the SS out of fear of being shot; Kertész finds the softer beds and better food [he fools the guards by talking to his dead bed-mate to obtain double rations] too hard to give up and is liberated.

I’ve obtained the earlier translation of “Night” and the difference is night and day.  Below is the first paragraph of the book: original translation on the left, latest one on the right.

The changes are from writing 101: active instead of passive or conditional verbs; no “very”s; clear sentences rather than reading like a computer translation from the German.  Rodway’s translation phrasing was clumsy.

Translated from French by Stella Rodway, 1960[see 1 below]

 

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[1] They called him Moishe the Beadle, as though he had never had a surname in his life. 

He was a man of all work at a Hasidic synagogue.

The Jews of Sighet—that little town in Transylvania where I spent my childhood—were very fond of him. 

He was very poor and lived humbly.

Generally my fellow townspeople, though they would help the poor, were not particularly fond of them.

Moishe the Beadle was the exception.

Nobody ever felt embarrassed by him.

Nobody ever felt encumbered by his presence.

He was a past master in the art of making himself insignificant, invisible.

 

[2]

They called him Moishe the Beadle, as if his entire life he had never had a surname. 

He was the jack-of-all-trades in a Hasidic house of prayer, a shibl.

The Jews of Sighet—the little town in Transylvania where I spent my childhood—were fond of him. 

He was poor and lived in utter penury.

As a rule, our townspeople, while they did help the needy, did not particularly like them.

Moishe the Beadle was the exception.

He stayed out of people’s way.

His presence bothered no one.

He had mastered the art of rendering himself insignificant, invisible.

Displacement: A Travelogue by Lucy Knisley

I’m a Virgin.

Yes, it’s my first time.

I’m reading my first “graphic novel” or memoir in this case.  She (the author) calls it a travelogue but I still reserve that term for those 3-minute “News-of-the-World” films shown in between double features at the cinemas of my younger days [40’s & 50’s].

Speaking from the POV of the grandparent, I had to face up to some realities of perception from a grand-daughter’s point of view.  These were not flattering.  Nonetheless, I want to keep in vogue, and graphic novels are today’s reality, so I bit the bullet, and, I loved it.  It’s not what I think of as novel writing, but it’s entertaining and the graphics make the story shorter and get the point across immediately.  I’ve only used eleven trite phrases so far and the last one will be SAS, Short Attention Span writing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For those of you who still remain virginal, this type of writing combines some graphics along with the writing of a tale, an episode, or whatever.  I still think of it as what my daughter [now 48] still calls a blog.  That’s a sprinkling of photographs along with a narrative description of a scene or adventure.  My daughter’s adventures, and blogs, have always been what every grandparent wishes for, a notch more adventuress than those of her parents. 

The author, Lucy Knisley in this case, thinks of herself as a cartoonist.  So she has moved the line forward to communicate the story almost equally between words and pictures: in her case the pictures are cartoon cels that, as they say, contain a thousand words.

Obviously this is hard to communicate with just words, so I will add in a picture from the middle of the book.

 

 

No one in the greater family wants to deal with Grandma & Grandpa who wished, in their 90’s, to go on a cruise.  Their grand-daughter said, “I’ll take them,” and thus the short story.

It will make you cry, young or old.  And it’s only 150 small pages, mostly pictures.

 

 

 

 

 

Sacrifice & Perfect Witness by JCO & Iris Johansen

It’s always interesting for me to compare two books that have some sort of over-arching common theme.  I just finished two books with which I was alternating chapters to pace my reading.  Last year when I was on vacation, I did that with five books – reading one chapter in each, every night.

This time the thread was mother-daughter relationships -- gone awry.  Why is it, so often, that stories are written about evil mothers [or step-mothers to protect the innocent].  I don’t know of any father-child relationships discussed in novels, where the father is evil ! – perhaps addicted to liquor or drugs and thus inflicting abuse on the child.  Mean, nasty people abound, irrespective of gender, but there is no ambivalence when it’s a father.  And that’s the interesting point for novelists to dig into with mother-daughter relationships.

The two books I read this past month were:

n  “The Sacrifice” by Joyce Carol Oates published now because of all the Ferguson uproar over white police issues in African-American communities.  In this book, Mama, a half a gray-notch above her neighborhood’s crack ho’s, is afraid of the ramifications of revealing the truth about the beating of her 15-year-old daughter by mama’s live-in, scum-bag [but I love him] druggie boyfriend.  So she and daughter blame things on “white cops”, which in the end, gets everyone killed.  Welcome to JCO.

 

n  “The Perfect Witness” by Iris Johansen, is almost in the fantasy genre: its theme is people with psychic abilities.  Our protagonist’s mother has trained her 15-year-old heroine to obey her over all others in all matters, always! through mama’s psychic ability to sway people. But our heroine is kidnapped by the good guys at the last minute and proceeds down a path of psychic righteousness leading to her mother being eaten alive by a tiger.

JCO’s blatant exploitation of the current turmoil between black and white disappoints me, but the writing is rock solid even if the theme is sordid.  Nothing was a surprise as this morbid tale slowly proceeded as if following a trashy newspaper story.

Johansen also exploits all the themes that sell books: sex, money, beauty and power.  These things actually have nothing to do with the main plotline, but are provided in ample doses throughout the very predictable book.

In the end it wasn’t just the bad mothers that tied these two books together.  As books, they both exploited the seamiest crap to boost book sales and movie rights.

The Sparrow by Mary Dora Russell

Sorry, this is a Sic-Fi book that doesn’t stand the test of time: twenty years, and it’s laughable.  It might have been a reasonable guess 25 years ago, that religion was going to be a major future factor in world history.  Things didn’t turn out that way though; secularism won the war.  This was for a strange and unpredicted reason: global warming.  Granted, major world –isms were conflicted around the turn of the millennium.  But they had no believable answer for global warming, which continued into the 21^st century for year after year, forcing people to accept scientific survival theory.

Unfortunately for Russell, having bought into the Western, Christian, Catholic doctrine, hook, line and sinker, she was locked into supporting an unrealistic, unpopular dictum about celibacy and sex in general [centuries away from any female issues with these topics].

This was a first novel. As such, it is uniquely open to both praise and criticism. The topic and plotline were relevant at the time because of the coming 3^rd millennial celebration. This was a generational thing: Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles”, Clark’s “2001”, & Sagan’s “Contact” each stirred huge new audiences to consider what it would be like to confront an alien people. All thoughtful people including writers want to take a stab at this topic.

Science Fiction allows an author to re-invent society in their own image, God-like.  “The Sparrow” looks twenty years ahead, enough to disavow any prognosticating ability.  This allows the author, Russell in this case, to proclaim her position on politics, religion, sex, and relationships; all taboo subjects normally, but she’s working under the guise of genre-writing; she has carte-blanc to create her own world.

As a novice, Mary Doria fell prey to the temptation to use omniscient narrator at the extreme in this first book of a series.  Personally, I feel that novels benefit from multiple points of view.  “The Sparrow,” having a great focus on spirituality, foregoes the atheistic POV, with God-adoring characters, combined with an omniscient God analyzing the human interactions.  

Besides the Sci-Fi imperative about an author defining the ingredients of a better-designed world, which Mary Doria does nicely, there is a need to define the inter-personal relationships between people and peoples who must co-relate in an alien environment.

Since Russell’s themes are captivity and sex, eventually rape, I can’t help but draw the conclusion that things went wildly in a different direction from when she conceived this novel.

We’ve now in the last 20 years had long-running [read popular] series about: Pelican Bay, a men’s prison, and more recently “Orange is the new Black” about women’s prisons.  The majority of people here in the US understand that sex is a dominant factor in prison life.  Send a healthy, young man or woman to prison and besides incarceration, you’re probably sentencing them to be raped, by inmates, guards or both.  We, the people, know this and continue to do this.