Wednesday, January 31, 2007

"What is Dominic Smith reading?"

Dominic Smith is the author of The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, which just came out in paperback.

I asked him what he's been reading. His reply:
I'm currently re-reading Lolita. I'm coming back to this novel after an absence of ten years or so. What strikes me now is the sinister and beguiling voice, the rhythm of the language and the sense that the reader is trapped, as at a dinner party, by a brilliant yet unwholesome character. The linguistic pleasure of the prose seems to mask problematic issues of plot. The convenient death of Lo's mother, in the hands of a lesser writer, would seem too orchestrated. But running through the center of this "infernal machine" (as Mary McCarthy called it) is a kind of ode and love poem to fate. The fidget wheels turn, the trap is set, and we know the chase cannot be stopped. As long as the cartwheels continue in the language itself, we will forgive almost anything. It's a haunting and messy read, but one that--even ten years later--cannot be put down.
Read the results of the Page 69 Test for The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, and visit Dominic's website.

Dominic Smith's second novel, The Beautiful Miscellaneous, will be published in June.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Uncouth Nation"

Andrei S. Markovits is the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan, and the author of Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America.

I asked him to put the book to the "page 69 test"; here is his response:
Page 69 of my book Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America begins with the final paragraph of my historical presentation of German intellectuals' disdain for the United States before World War II. It also features how this disdain, so essential to the discourse of the European Right for two centuries, began to engulf the European Left after the Bolshevik Revolution. In particular, I describe how the great Bertolt Brecht mutated already in the 1920s from an admirer of things American to a harsh critic. In his comparing the United States with the Soviet Union, Brecht said: "The mistakes of the Russians are the mistakes of friends, the mistakes of the Americans are the mistakes of enemies."

The bottom half of my page 69 begins a presentation of anti-Americanism's history in Britain. While quite different from its manifestations on the Continent where anti-Americanism has often been coupled with an antipathy for all things Anglo as well -- American and British being perceived as virtually interchangeable -- it nevertheless features very similar tropes of resentment so familiar to Continental discourse.
Many thanks to Andy for the input.

Read an essay adapted from the book, and read the introduction to Uncouth Nation.

Among the praise for Uncouth Nation:

In Uncouth Nation, Andrei Markovits provides deep insights into anti-Americanism in Europe today and delves into many of the facets that make the American-European relationship so unique. This book should be read and discussed!"
--Joschka Fischer, former Foreign Minister of Germany, and Professor, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University

"Anti-Americanism is as old as the Republic--a historical constant, which is only remotely related to specific American behavior. So what is new? Andrei Markovits has delivered the best answer yet, ranging across an astounding wealth of material from politics and culture. Uncouth Nation is a rare academic treat. Rigorous and analytical, the book is also a pleasure to read as it penetrates a critical issue of our time."
--Josef Joffe, Publisher and Editor of Die Zeit, and Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University

"Andrei Markovits does three things in this excellent book: he provides an account of the historical and contemporary forms of European anti-Americanism (and of its close relative, anti-Semitism); he analyzes the roots and causes of this phenomenon; and, best of all, he gives us a running critique of the frequent silliness and malice of the anti-Americans and of their role in fashioning a certain kind, which is not the best possible kind, of pan-European politics."
--Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study

Read more reviews.

Jeffrey Herf recently wrote:
[A]s Andrei Markovits, one of our leading scholars European politics and society argues in his important new book, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America, we know that there are sources of anti-Americanism that originate in disdain or even hatred for what the United States is rather than what a particular administration does and that will lead to opposition to American policies even when they are at one with traditions of enlightenment and liberty.
Markovits' many other books and publications include Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism.

He is one of the authors of "American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto."

Read his recent paper, "Sports Culture Among Undergraduates: A Study of Student-Athletes and Students at the University of Michigan," and the description of his new research project into Human-Animal relationships, "The New Discourse of Dogs."

Andy is a Deadhead, and also likes Mozart, Beethoven, and Dvorak.

Previous "page 69 tests:"
Julie Kistler, Scandal
Robert Ward, Four Kinds of Rain
Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist
William Landay, The Strangler
Kate Holden, In My Skin
Brian Wansick, Mindless Eating
Noria Jablonski, Human Oddities
Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity
Neal Pollack, Alternadad
Bella DePaulo, Singled Out
Steve Hamilton, A Stolen Season
Eric Klinenberg, Fighting for Air
Donna Moore, ...Go to Helena Handbasket
Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye
Neal Thompson, Riding with the Devil
Sherry Argov, Why Men Marry Bitches
P.J. Parrish, An Unquiet Grave
Tyler Knox, Kockroach
Andrew Rehfeld, The Concept of Constituency
Laura Wiess, Such a Pretty Girl
Jeremy Blachman, Anonymous Lawyer
Andrew Pyper, The Wildfire Season
Wendy Werris, An Alphabetical Life
Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know
Meghan Daum, The Quality of Life Report
Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin' Man
Richard Aleas, Little Girl Lost
Paul Collins, The Trouble With Tom
John McFetridge, Dirty Sweet
Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero
Bill Crider, Murder Among the OWLS
Zachary Shore, Breeding Bin Ladens
Rolf Potts, Vagabonding
Matt Haig, The Dead Fathers Club
Lawrence Light, Fear & Greed
Simon Read, In The Dark
Sandra Ruttan, Suspicious Circumstances
Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography
Alison Gaylin, You Kill Me
Gayle Lynds, The Last Spymaster
Jim Lehrer, The Phony Marine
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.
Debra Ginsberg, Blind Submission
Sarah Katherine Lewis, Indecent
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
William Easterly, The White Man's Burden
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth
Andrew Blechman, Pigeons
Anne Perry, A Christmas Secret
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers
Kat Richardson, Greywalker
Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile
Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile
Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few
Anne Frasier, Pale Immortal
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side
David A. Bell, The First Total War
Brett Ellen Block, The Lightning Rule
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice
Jason Starr, Lights Out
Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works
James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry
Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal
Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History
Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby
Cindy Dyson, And She Was
Simon Blackburn, Truth
Brian Freeman, Stripped
Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

"What is Gregg Hurwitz reading?"

Gregg Hurwitz is the critically acclaimed, #1 L.A. Times bestselling author of The Tower, Minutes to Burn, Do No Harm, The Kill Clause, The Program, Troubleshooter, and most recently, Last Shot.

I asked him what he's been reading. His reply:
I’ve been playing catch-up on some thriller writers I should have read more of. I took my first dip into the pages of John Sandford with Rules of Prey. He’s got cracking dialogue and wonderful characterization.

And I’m currently reading Trouble Is My Business, one of the only Chandlers I haven’t gotten to. It’s typically brilliant: “He had an idea and he was holding it like a sick baby.”

I’m also digging into Koontz’s Velocity, which not only has a wonderful high-concept hook but is really tightly written. So it’s lots of crime and bloodshed on my bookstand right now.
Read the results of the Page 69 Test for Gregg's Last Shot, and visit his website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Scandal"

Julie Kistler is the author of 30 romance novels and other works. She won the Madcap Award for the best romantic comedy of 2001 for Just a Little Fling and she was nominated for Romance Writers of America's Rita Award for Black Jack Brogan.

Her latest novel is Scandal, which she was kind enough to put to the "page 69 test." Here's what she discovered:
Scandal was written for Harlequin’s Blaze line, and they’re intended to be hot and spicy reads. Not in a cookbook way, but in an R-rated, adult content way, with sex as a major part of the romance. That isn’t something that necessarily lends itself to taking one out-of-context page as your entire experience with the book.

So I was happy to peel open Scandal’s page 69 and conclude that, while its content is probably a little racy, it’s more in a funny way than an OH MY GOD, TELL GRANDMA TO COVER HER EYES! sort of way. I think.

I don’t know that this applies to each and every page, but my feeling (before I looked at individual pages) was that pretty much any scene chosen at random ought to accomplish certain things in a book like this. Those would be:

1. Some idea of the plot (in this case a time travel romance where my heroine finds herself launched back to the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893)
2. Some definition of the characters
3. A sense of humor, and
4. Enough sexy bits to make it clear that it deserves to be a Blaze.

I‘ve concluded that page 69 of Scandal does all of that, if you know what you’re looking for. My heroine, Jordan, goes back in time when she falls under a piece of sculpture – a marble arch – carved with erotic figures from Greek mythology. On page 69, she happens to be accidentally resting against that arch, with her hand at the place where Narcissus is getting what she, as a woman of the New Millennium, calls “a blow job.” The two characters’ reactions to that should make it clear that he’s from 1893 and she’s not, plus I think it’s at least mildly funny and sexy, AND it highlights her method of transport back in time.

Not bad for one page!

Here’s most of that page, with an extra line from page 70 that finishes it off:

…She sagged in relief against the cool marble, bracing herself against one side.

Across from her, Nick clenched his jaw. He seemed to be staring at her arm. "Miss Albright, would you mind?" He waved a hand. "You'll probably want to move away from the, uh..."

She followed the path of his gaze. What she saw was her own hand, resting about an inch from a perfectly carved, fully erect penis. Not only was that definitely an erection, but there was a female face carved in stone right next to it, eager to pounce.

Her fingers burning, Jordan yanked back her hand. "Oh. Narcissus and the blow job. Well."

"I'm not familiar with the term, but... Yes. That." He shook his head fiercely, looking about as uncomfortable as Jordan felt. "Damn Isabella! What was she thinking? And how does she know enough about that to have carved it for posterity?"

"But you see," Jordan tried, "that's why Isabella is important. Not the, uh, blow job specifically, but the idea of women owning their own sexuality. That's so crucial."

He didn't say anything, but she saw the question in the sardonic lift of one dark brow. Do you own your sexuality?

Yes, yes, I do, she wanted to shout. But I'm willing to share it with you!
Many thanks to Julie for the input.

Read an excerpt from Scandal.

Julie's 2004 novel Packing Heat was nominated for Romantic Times' Best Temptation of the Year.

In addition to winning the 2001 Madcap Award for Romantic Comedy, Just a Little Fling was a Waldenbooks Bestseller (2000).

Calling Mr. Right (2000) was nominated for Romantic Times' Best Duets of the Year.

And there are more awards and rave quotes.

Visit Julie's website.

Previous "page 69 tests:"
Robert Ward, Four Kinds of Rain
Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist
William Landay, The Strangler
Kate Holden, In My Skin
Brian Wansick, Mindless Eating
Noria Jablonski, Human Oddities
Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity
Neal Pollack, Alternadad
Bella DePaulo, Singled Out
Steve Hamilton, A Stolen Season
Eric Klinenberg, Fighting for Air
Donna Moore, ...Go to Helena Handbasket
Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye
Neal Thompson, Riding with the Devil
Sherry Argov, Why Men Marry Bitches
P.J. Parrish, An Unquiet Grave
Tyler Knox, Kockroach
Andrew Rehfeld, The Concept of Constituency
Laura Wiess, Such a Pretty Girl
Jeremy Blachman, Anonymous Lawyer
Andrew Pyper, The Wildfire Season
Wendy Werris, An Alphabetical Life
Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know
Meghan Daum, The Quality of Life Report
Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin' Man
Richard Aleas, Little Girl Lost
Paul Collins, The Trouble With Tom
John McFetridge, Dirty Sweet
Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero
Bill Crider, Murder Among the OWLS
Zachary Shore, Breeding Bin Ladens
Rolf Potts, Vagabonding
Matt Haig, The Dead Fathers Club
Lawrence Light, Fear & Greed
Simon Read, In The Dark
Sandra Ruttan, Suspicious Circumstances
Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography
Alison Gaylin, You Kill Me
Gayle Lynds, The Last Spymaster
Jim Lehrer, The Phony Marine
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.
Debra Ginsberg, Blind Submission
Sarah Katherine Lewis, Indecent
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
William Easterly, The White Man's Burden
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth
Andrew Blechman, Pigeons
Anne Perry, A Christmas Secret
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers
Kat Richardson, Greywalker
Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile
Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile
Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few
Anne Frasier, Pale Immortal
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side
David A. Bell, The First Total War
Brett Ellen Block, The Lightning Rule
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice
Jason Starr, Lights Out
Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works
James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry
Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal
Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History
Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby
Cindy Dyson, And She Was
Simon Blackburn, Truth
Brian Freeman, Stripped
Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

A literary guide to Brazil

Anderson Tepper wrote Salon's literary guide to Brazil.

Jorge Amado, Machado de Assis, and Clarice Lispector merit discussions. Then Tepper turns to:
[a] side of Rio [that] explodes off the pages of Paulo Lins' novel "City of God," a sweeping, gritty, shoot'em-up accounting of three decades in the life of one of the city's most notorious favelas, or slums. Published in Brazil in 1997, "City of God" was a labor of love for Lins, an urban anthropologist who grew up in the neighborhood himself -- an exhaustive study that morphed into a novel, became a bestseller in Brazil, and then came to international attention as the acclaimed 2002 hit film by Fernando Meirelles.

Based on stories from Rio's grim underbelly -- as the drug business spiraled into violent turf wars in the '80s -- "City of God," the novel, reads more like a news flash, a bulletin from the front lines of Brazil's social ills.

Other contemporary writers mentioned in the article include Peter Robb, Alma Guillermoprieto, and Caetano Veloso.

Read the Salon article.

Other items in Salon's literary guide series include:
A literary guide to Colombia
A literary guide to The Netherlands
A literary guide to Chile
A literary guide to Alaska
A literary guide to Washington, D.C.
A literary guide to Vancouver
A literary guide to Baltimore
A literary guide to Argentina
A literary guide to Afghanistan
A literary guide to Louisiana
A literary guide to Australia
A literary guide to Norway
A literary guide to Turkey
A literary guide to Japan
A literary guide to Martha's Vineyard
A literary guide to West Texas
A literary guide to Togo
A literary guide to Brooklyn
A literary guide to Miami

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Coyote's in the House"

Some Angelenos are upset about the coyotes that have moved down out of the hills and into the city. Today, as is his wont, Joel Stein's column in the Los Angeles Times offers a take on the situation seemingly designed to maximize mail from outraged readers: he likes the coyotes.

The story's connection to a books blog: Stein mentions Jack London and God's Dog: A Celebration of the North American Coyote by Hope Ryden, the current reading of a wildlife biologist with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals who Stein contacted because "I figured she was likely to be as crazy as I am."

But Stein fails to mention my favorite book on coyotes in urban L.A.: Elmore Leonard's A Coyote's in the House.

Here's the publisher's spiel:
The first ever children's book from the New York Times bestselling master of contemporary fiction

Buddy's an aging movie star.
Antwan's a rough-and-tumble loner.
And Miss Betty, the show girl, is a princess.

Different in nearly every way, they share one thing: they're all dogs...at heart.

Though Antwan's the leader of his pack and loves hanging in the hills, feasting from Hollywood's chicest garbage cans, he's too curious a coyote to turn down his new friend Buddy's invitation to see how the other half lives. Convincing his new human family he's a mysterious pooch named Timmy, Antwan quickly becomes part of the brood.

But as Antwan's star rises, Buddy's spirits fall. Past his prime to humans, Buddy wants to chuck the luxury and live in the wild -- if Antwan will show him how. To cheer up their pal, Antwan and Miss Betty concoct a daring plan, setting off a chain of uproarious adventures that will teach them all a few new tricks about friendship, family, and life.

Filled with the spot-on dialogue and clever plotting that have made Elmore Leonard top dog among writers of every breed, A Coyote's in the House reveals the inner life of canines -- wild and domesticated -- in a fresh, funny tale for the young and the young at heart.
OK, so it's a YA book...a YA book by America's coolest grandfather.

Bonus coyote/L.A. movie note: Michael Mann's 2004 film Collateral has a brief scene where a coyote strolls through downtown L.A. at night.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, January 29, 2007

Andreï Makine's "L’amour humain"

Ray Taras, whose reviews for the blog have covered Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island, Emmanuel Dongala's Johnny Mad Dog, and Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, turns now to Andreï Makine's L’amour humain (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006):
Ever since his first novel, Dreams of My Russian Summers (the French title is Le testament francais), was published just over a decade ago, a debate has been conducted among his readers about whether Makine is a French or Russian writer. Born and educated in Siberia, he arrived in Paris in 1987 at the age of thirty having few material possessions or even a support network. The sans papiers immigrant is familiar to contemporary French society but Makine was unusual. He brought with him an extraordinary talent for writing prose…in French. The best known story told about this story teller is that he had quickly to compose a Russian-language draft of his first novel after he had submitted his original French-language manuscript to publishers so that his Russian credentials could be established.

His debut on the Parisian literary scene was spectacular. He achieved the unprecedented honor of winning two of France’s top literary awards (Prix Goncourt and Prix Médicis) in the same year (1995). Back in Russia, however, the literary establishment, slow to shed its rigid hierarchical mentality after the disappearance of the Soviet Writers’ Union, refused to accept Makine as a Russian novelist in exile. “He writes about us but does not speak to us” was the most grudging recognition he could expect in his native country.

All of his novels and a book of essays have dealt with Russian and French identities. He is a romantic and a lyricist about both these countries, though his critiques of the Stalin years are merciless. Coming from a man born in 1957, the year after Khrushchev had denounced Stalin’s cult of personality, the realism of the gulags and purges as depicted in his novels does not stand up to Solzhenitsyn’s. But we cannot hold that against Makine.

He is a prolific writer. L’amour humain is his tenth novel. But for the first time, the main setting is not Russia or France but Africa. The principal character, Elias, is an idealistic Angolan freedom fighter engaged in the bitter struggle to drive the Portuguese colonialists out. He is an assimilado “which signifies, he learns pretty quickly, that he, a black hardly different from an ape, could one day gain entrance into the world of the whites” (p. 60).

Training in a military camp, Elias is charmed by the long-haired Spanish-speaking commandante named Ernesto who appears for a few days to teach guerrilla warfare, then just as quickly vanishes, on his way to tutor rebel movements elsewhere. It all forms part of the Soviet-sponsored worldwide anti-imperialist movement, for Makine, itself an imperialist movement.

The narrator is a decades-long friend of Elias who recounts the twists and turns in Elias’ life. But the narrator has occasion along the way to indict the smug bourgeois globalized societies of the post Cold War era. Makine’s evocations of the sexual act have often been overwrought but he reaches a new plateau in depicting new-style Western exploitation. A French woman attends a literary conference in Africa and lands in bed with a trophy African male--a naïve native artist. Engaging in lovemaking does not deter her from simultaneously talking on the phone with her husband back in France. Makine’s narrator overhears the goings-on in the next bedroom and debates whether to march in on the couple and moralize to the woman: “In this world there is a child who is six years old, this Delphinette, your daughter, who you will kiss, Madame, with those same lips that are sucking this erect black member” (p. 29).

Later the author more skillfully captures the civilizational rather than racial divide of today’s world. He attributes to the West “This arrogant will to transform the life of the other into an ‘experience’, into an experimental laboratory for its ideas. And if this human matter resists, to abandon it, to go and find more malleable matter” (p. 92). This is a brutal encapsulation of the cynicism of the West’s democracy promotion and human rights imperialism, as it is sometimes called in the developing world.

The West’s liberal rhetoric irritates Makine. A 1960s’ gauchiste turned TV pundit warns that “if the French don’t get back to work it will be the developing countries that will teach them liberalism” (p. 217). Globalization is a pathology that unleashes “the energy of thousands of men who crash into each other, plot with each other, who sell unfanthomable riches, stow billions away in secret accounts, flatter their rivals and devour their partners, drag their countries into long years of war, starve entire regions, pay hordes of penpushers to eulogize their policies” (p. 227). He takes a shot at the concept of “The end of history proclaimed by a Nipponese luminary who the whole world takes seriously, for the moment” (p. 247).

The novel lashes out at Western culture. It depicts an American eating a 16-ounce steak and links this to U.S. foreign policy. The narrator inveighs that “America uses all of its power to protect the right of this man to eat such a quantity of meat” (p. 119). While Makine’s novels usually say little about the United States, they consistently hint at it being an “uncouth nation.”

A Makine novel is incomplete without a denunciation of Soviet society. This time the author exposes the deep-seated racism of that system. On spotting the Angolan on a street in Moscow where he has come for political training, a Russian hooligan remarks to friends: “I told you, fuck, they forgot to lock the cages at the zoo” (p. 133). Elias is beaten by “Men for whom he was nothing but a monkey… their hatred, in a country that was promising a world without hate” (p. 140).

Poor Elias. I am reminded of the group of American students, one of whom was black, that I took to Siberia in the early 1980s. In a gloomy corner store in the godforsaken town of Ulan Ude--not far from the Mongolian border--the shop assistant stared at the young African-American, then turned to me and asked: “Is that a real Negro? I’ve only seen them on television.” Makine finds viciousness in such naiveté: “Look, a monkey, right in the middle of the street” (p. 144).

After the “enormous farce” of the Cold War era (p. 228), after decades of unceasing political struggle, Elias is left with no illusions. Bipolarity was an ideological construct--“This world neatly carved into two does not exist” (p. 202). A long-winded speech by Castro heralding the society of the future makes no mention of the possibility that “it might include love between two human beings” (p. 109). What really count, then, are human lives, deaths, ambitions, and abysses.

So this novel, in common with Makine’s earlier ones, is about love, as its simple title suggests. It is intended as a corrective to the loveless politics pursued by the Cold War’s adversaries. It narrates a touching love story about Elias, maligned while visiting the Soviet Union, and Anna, his only source of comfort on that first visit. Love is symbolized by the orchid blooming in the snow outside a remote Siberian village where Elias and Anna briefly find happiness.

M
akine is driven to the conclusion that a person’s life begins when “History, having exhausted its atrocities and promises, leaves us bare under the sky, to experience only the look of the one he loves” (p. 236). As is invariably the case with one of his novels, we are left with a beautiful thought that raises our spirits and makes the debate about Frenchness or Russianness irrelevant. It is this: “the sovereign truth of life--the certainty that the passing of a man who has loved does not mean the disappearance of the love that he carried within himself” (p. 295).

Many thanks to Ray for the brilliant review.

Ray Taras is professor of political science at Tulane University and director of its World Literature program for the past three years.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Four Kinds of Rain"

Robert Ward is a novelist and screenwriter. His first novel was the critically acclaimed Shedding Skin, which won the National Endowment of the Arts award for first novel of exceptional merit. He has since written seven more novels, including Red Baker, which won the PEN West prize for Best Novel of 1985.

His latest novel is Four Kinds of Rain, which he was kind enough to put to the "page 69 test." Here is what he found:
I took a look at page 69, and it turns out it's one of my favorite parts of the book. My hero Bob Wells has decided to steal a valuable, ancient mask, The Mask of Utu, and then resell it...but since he's not a crook, and has no experience in stealing anything, he has not a clue as to the worth of the mask. All he knows is that the mask is considered "priceless"...but what does "priceless" mean? Bob thinks of old movies, in which shady art dealers (the kind always played by Clifton Webb) say ancient objects are "priceless" but in those movies the crooked dealer always knows what the term means. Bob, however, doesn't know anything at all...until he learns on page 69 that Utu was once sold for between 9 and 10 million dollars. This fact stuns him. Can he walk up to a crooked art dealer, Colin Edwards, a guy who is ruthless and probably a killer, and demand between 9 and 10 million bucks for The Mask of Utu? Certainly not. The guy will either laugh at him or shoot him in the head.

This leads Bob to start thinking about the mask in another way. Maybe he shouldn't consider how much Utu is worth on the black market but how much he needs. This is almost a Marxist notion. "Each according to his needs." By page 70 Bob is thinking about the mask in this new way. Does he need two million, three, four? Pages 70 and 71 are an extended comic meditation on how much he thinks he needs. And, of course, the more he thinks, the more he thinks he has to have. He has started on his downward spiral into greed, madness and eventually murder. Right here on page 69.

So, yes, page 69 is very representative of the book, in that much of the novel is about Bob's rationalizations for his evil actions. Which is what I believe good crime writing is all about. Not so much about the crimes committed but the reasons and psychology of the criminals and the cops who apprehend them.

Thanks for being interested in my novel. Hope this helps explain what I am attempting to do in Four Kinds of Rain.
Thanks to Robert for the input.

Read an excerpt from Four Kinds of Rain.

The novel was one of Sarah Weinman's "Picks of the Week"--she called it "one of the most plausible noir novels I've read in some time." David J. Montgomery wrote, "Four Kinds of Rain is as black as a chain smoker's lungs, but it's also deviously funny, as Ward takes us into the mind of this very human, but very messed-up man. The plot is twisted and suspenseful, but it's the wonderfully original characters that really bring it all to life."

Veronique De Turenne reviewed Four Kinds of Rain for NPR's Day to Day.

Marilyn Stasio of the New York Times called the novel "Fiercely funny...as sharp and nasty as a paper cut."

Praise from Ward's peers includes:
"Four Kinds of Rain is a great read. Robert Ward has created a darkly comic masterpiece that keeps you thinking long after the last page is turned."
-- Michael Connelly

"Four Kinds of Rain is feverish and funny, an end-of-the-dream novel that could only have come from the very talented, slightly twisted mind of Robert Ward."
-- George Pelecanos

"Noir for the lost. Heartbreaking, hilarious and oh so beautifully written. A renegade prose poem to the loss and regret we carry like the best rock 'n roll music, full of beauty and despair with the gonzo gift of sheer immediacy."
-- Ken Bruen
Read Robert's Q & A with Publishers Weekly.

Along with Bill Crider and charter member Kevin Guilfoile, Robert is a member of the blog's The Moviegoer fan club.

His TV and film experience includes work on "Hill Street Blues," "Miami Vice," and other productions.

Previous "page 69 tests:"
Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist
William Landay, The Strangler
Kate Holden, In My Skin
Brian Wansick, Mindless Eating
Noria Jablonski, Human Oddities
Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity
Neal Pollack, Alternadad
Bella DePaulo, Singled Out
Steve Hamilton, A Stolen Season
Eric Klinenberg, Fighting for Air
Donna Moore, ...Go to Helena Handbasket
Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye
Neal Thompson, Riding with the Devil
Sherry Argov, Why Men Marry Bitches
P.J. Parrish, An Unquiet Grave
Tyler Knox, Kockroach
Andrew Rehfeld, The Concept of Constituency
Laura Wiess, Such a Pretty Girl
Jeremy Blachman, Anonymous Lawyer
Andrew Pyper, The Wildfire Season
Wendy Werris, An Alphabetical Life
Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know
Meghan Daum, The Quality of Life Report
Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin' Man
Richard Aleas, Little Girl Lost
Paul Collins, The Trouble With Tom
John McFetridge, Dirty Sweet
Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero
Bill Crider, Murder Among the OWLS
Zachary Shore, Breeding Bin Ladens
Rolf Potts, Vagabonding
Matt Haig, The Dead Fathers Club
Lawrence Light, Fear & Greed
Simon Read, In The Dark
Sandra Ruttan, Suspicious Circumstances
Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography
Alison Gaylin, You Kill Me
Gayle Lynds, The Last Spymaster
Jim Lehrer, The Phony Marine
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.
Debra Ginsberg, Blind Submission
Sarah Katherine Lewis, Indecent
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
William Easterly, The White Man's Burden
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth
Andrew Blechman, Pigeons
Anne Perry, A Christmas Secret
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers
Kat Richardson, Greywalker
Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile
Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile
Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few
Anne Frasier, Pale Immortal
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side
David A. Bell, The First Total War
Brett Ellen Block, The Lightning Rule
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice
Jason Starr, Lights Out
Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works
James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry
Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal
Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History
Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby
Cindy Dyson, And She Was
Simon Blackburn, Truth
Brian Freeman, Stripped
Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue