Three Histories: Fordlandia by Greg Grandin, The Wilderness Warrior by Douglas Brinkley, The Age Of Wonders by Richard Holmes

I've read one of these and really truly plan on reading them all. In brief, here's what you ought to know about them.


The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes. History. Pantheon Books. Hardcover. ISBN: 0375422226. 576 pps.

We are once again on the brink of such an age, when science and art will come together in new and powerful ways. For this we could have no better model than the lives of William and Caroline Herschel and Humphry Davy, whose dedication and scientific inventiveness were combined with a deep sense of wonder and poetry in the universe.

I vaguely remember Bertrand Russel knocking such concepts out of the proverbial park in his Religion and Science, but alas, it seems we humans truly desire to marry science and the metaphysical.

The reality though, is that much of our scientific imagination was born of the Romantic movement. Harold Bloom may stew in his gnostic paradigms but the literary truth is that science fiction, and its conceptual hypothesizing have not rooting in old testament lore.

Such a discussion is specifically why this book is high on my to-read list and one of the more interesting topics for the season. We tend to want to borrow science to justify desirable metaphysical concepts.

So you can obviously see why I'd be interested in a history of the Romantics view on science.


Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin. History. Metropolitan Books. 204 pps. ISBN: 0805082360.

This is actually the book at the top of my "unread" list from 2009. The concept is simple and fascinating. Henry Ford, in order to control his own rubber distribution and supply, built a rubber plantation in the Amazon River basin. The town's name was literally Fordlandia.

Ford didn't merely seek to maintain a fiscal advantage. No, indeed Henry Ford sought to build the ultimate American company town. Ford was responsible for the U.S.'s hard-charging movement into modernity, nationalism and a white supremacist to boot. Naturally in his Fordlandia he would try to create a utopia.

I find the whole concept fascinating. Ford honestly tried to build a perfect American town and a rubber manufacturing assembly line in the middle of the Amazon.

Nature, it would seem, had other things in store for Henry.


The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and The Crusade For America by Douglas Brinkley. Harper. History. 960 pps. ISBN: 0060565284.

Brinkley is one of the rare nonfiction writers that can delve into the driest stretch of history and weave a interesting tale. As I began reading The Wilderness Warrior the thing that struck me first and foremost is how important a moment in history the book captures and how boring it might have been to read about.

"Might have been" is the operable phrase.

The story of Teddy Roosevelt's landmark legislation protecting wildlife and the creation of a vast park system is one that begins in his early childhood. The bookish Roosevelt gravitated to the early stages of ecology, becoming a lifelong ornithologist and developing a healthy love of the out-of-doors. Writers like Emerson and John Muir inspired in Roosevelt a supreme sense of the importance of our wild lands, both as a ultimate place of communion and the defining feature of American greatness.

It is also an insight into the scientific life of our 26th President. In some ways, Teddy was the last of the great visionaries, a sort of throwback to our founding fathers. The importance of science and natural understanding belied more than a passing curiosity for Roosevelt. Instead he felt it a necessary component for adulthood and something more than merely useful to the President. In this sense Brinkley's book serves as reminder that our highest office should truly be inhabited by someone of more than average intellectual vigor.

Despite its ponderous size and someone dry subject matter, Brinkley's history is yet a page turner and one that I think is important to dwell upon as environmentalism continues to be cast in a weak light by business friendly conservatism.

Simply put: You will be amazed at how simply, with a scratch of a pen and a waive of the hand, sweeping change was achieved by our own bull moose. You won't feel great about our partisan mess we have today.

The Best Books Of 2009 - A New Approach

Since the Accountant has lapsed into a terrible apathy he is now way behind in his 31 books for December.

Because of this he is going to change the approach to handle three books a day, with brevity, and also include some titles that he did not read but definitely rank amongst the year's most interesting.

Tell me if that's disingenuous or something. Really, I want to know.

The Land Of Opportunity: Dave Eggers' Zeitoun - The Best Book of The Year

Before you either jump for hipster glee or level your cold-wrought literary edge, let me say that there are a number of factors that are involved. The biggest of which is that Abdulrahman Zeitoun is a honest-to-goodness hero, which is incidentally something I think that the realm of story has lacked for a long, long time.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun, or the version of the man as portrayed by Eggers, is an American hero. Plain and simple. His story is worth knowing, like those of John Henry of Audie Murphy, exaggerated or unbelievably real. Johnny Cash would have written a song about him.

Yeah, that kind of thing.

Let's get to it.


Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. McSweeney’s Books. Biography. Hardcover. $24. ISBN: 978934781630.

The first thing that requires saying is that this is the most stirring, most eloquent and by far the most important book I have read from this year’s releases. It is, I believe, a classic of American nonfiction.

I said that back in September and will stand by that remark today.

But before I let the superlatives fly let me fill you in on a couple of things that should convince you of my unassailable neutrality in deeming this book the best. Where to start...

Oh, yeah, Dave Eggers bothers me. In a nutshell, Eggers and McSweeney's always have seemed to me a little on the schizophrenic side. I am sure there is something of Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer in the seemingly random publications that the Eggers' imprints produce. I'm sure it's there but often I look at the imprint and the publications and scratch my head. So seriously capable and so incapable of being serious.

See how I did that? Reversed the... Nevermind.

Maybe my jeans aren't skinny enough. Maybe it's my lack of tattoos. Or my favoring button down shirts. I don't know. In any case I want to celebrate the man today and for some reason I felt the need to deride him in order to do so. Just know that I am not a fan. So much so that you should also be aware that I don't particularly care for Nick Hornby either. Yeah. I'm really not aboard the pirate ship. I'm old skool and serious and wear cargo pants everyday not because it's ironic but because I can carry useful things in them.

I almost sounded like Teddy Wayne right there. And that bothers me. So now you know that when I say Dave Eggers has penned the best book of the year, it very well could be. I mean it from the depths of my cargo pants left outer pocket. Right next to my pruning sheers and buck knife. That's right: I carry a buck knife at work. Okay, fine. I do think writing the word "buck knife" is kind of ridiculous but that shouldn't make you think I'm some sort of fawning Eggers fan with a yin yang tattoo on my forearm and throwaway lenses in carefully chosen black frames.

I really just want you to understand how good this book had to be in order to land itself here. I was bias at the start and it changed my opinions.

Rant shelved and subject at hand let's talk about the best book of the year.

At its core Zeitoun is about heroism. When a missionary worker handing out bibles in the correctional facility housing Zeitoun risks his ability to interact with prisoners in order to copy down Kathy’s phone number and promises to call her for Zeitoun, the man seems a saving grace. All Zeitoun wants to do is call Kathy, let her know that he is indeed alive and that he needs help escaping from a nightmarish imprisonment. Later, Kathy praises this anonymous man as a hero. Then sadly she reflects on this thought. Is this what it has come to in the United States? Surrounded by so much callousness and laziness, wickedness really, is merely doing the right thing heroic? She hopes not.

The story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his family is a two sided affair, one of the bright American Dream and the dismal American Nightmare. It is one of potential fulfilled and dreams deferred.

Abdulrahman was born in Jableh, Syria to a long line of mariners. His father had forbidden Abdulrahman and his two brothers from ever going to sea. After a terrible wreck Abdulrahman's father had spent days drifting, clutching to a barrel for his dear life. Such a traumatic experience had led the man to conceive of different fates for his progeny.

Mohammed, his oldest son, became the world record holder in ocean distance swimming. Ahmad, the middle son, became a sea captain. Abdulrahman himself sailed the high seas for roughly a decade before settling, somewhat randomly, in New Orleans.

Already we have the stuff of legend. A father forbids his three sons to ever sail the seas and all three make it their livelihood. One of them even doing so without a boat.

In New Orleans Zeitoun quickly made a name for himself as a hard working and above all reliable day laborer. It was also in New Orleans that he was destined to meet his future wife, Kathy.

Kathy's family never quite understood her conversion from Christianity to Islam, something she had done before she met Abdulrahman. In fact, the decade older Abdulrahman did not exactly waltz right into her life. A bad previous marriage had left Kathy a little shy of commitment and the idea of marrying an older man did not help ease those anxieties.

Zeitoun, like a rock, placed himself always in her presence. At community outings and through their shared friends, Zeitoun persisted to demonstrate his interest in Kathy. Never too forward and never too hidden, Zeitoun's boyish crush marches on regardless of obstacles. In time Kathy begins to notice Abdulrahman's strength of character, not to mention his curly hair and green eyes.

Fast forward and the Zeitouns are running a respected painting and renovating business specializing in historical restorations. They've managed to buy and rent out several properties and through her clever administration and his skillful know-how they've gone beyond what is "ordinary" or "expected" out of a typical life. In short: The Zeitouns are living the American Dream.

Granted there are the small but nagging issues of Kathy's white, Christian family. They urge her to take off her hijab or indulge in a hot dog when Abdulrahman is not around. This of course annoys Kathy greatly, because it both portrays her husband as overbearing and belittles the fact that it was her choice to convert to Islam and that she did so before meeting the love of her life.

It is always a struggle for Kathy to coax her hardworking husband to take vacations and so when a somewhat enigmatic storm is headed toward the Gulf Coast she knows that any desire to evacuate will be met with resistance. As the days pass the storm looms more and more powerful. It is by the time that it is mere hours away that Abdulrahman says that his wife and three daughters ought to leave, but also that he will stay and wait it out like so many other storms.

They have too many properties to look after. There are peoples whose lives they are responsible for. He will stay behind and face this supposed maelstrom.

The storm was Hurricane Katrina and as you know it was nothing to be taken lightly.

The biography of Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his family is a story of people living exemplary lives. This is particularly the case of Abdulrahman, who despite the devastation of the flooding after the hurricane remains in the city he loves and helps people. Swimming into houses to save the elderly, paddling his canoe (which Kathy had made fun of when he bought at a yard sale) to checkpoints to procure bottled water for those who were still stranded, in short, Abdulrahman does the extraordinary.

When you combine exemplary with extraordinary you arrive at heroism. There is no other definition. A hero represents the aspirations and goals of a society and it is this manner that Abdulrahman Zeitoun is an American hero.

Soon though Abdulrahman encounters the sloth that was Katrina relief work. Overwhelmed police and soldiers, the bad ones callous or lazy and the good ones too overwhelmed with the insanity of New Orleans after the storm. In one case a police officer even lies to Abdulrahman, saying that he will go and pick up an elderly couple needing help (a wheelchair bound Pastor and his wife) that Zeitoun could not help in his canoe. That night he finds them still stranded on their porch. Their health is slightly worse than before. It is Zeitoun who rescues them, who figures a way, and who is furious that the police officer had made a false promise.

Promises, a person's word, to Zeitoun are supposed to be essential. Elemental. It is supposed to be a sanctity that no one would defile because to live with the shame of having done so is inconceivable. The paladin assumes all are just only to find out the world is full of wickedness.

It is also Zeitoun who is arrested in his own home, and slapped into a Guantanamo Bay style Homeland Security prison erected just hours after Katrina had subsided. Before aid logistics had even been scratched out on chalkboards the office of Homeland Security had built a prison to detain "persons of interest." Stripped of his American rights, it is Zeitoun who is accused of being a terrorist and who is strip-searched, cavity searched, fed meals only containing pork (as a Muslim his captors know he cannot eat pork and enjoy starving him) and who is beaten and eventually held for a month, without phone call or due process in a maximum security prison.

While being cuffed and sent away, Zeitoun feebly told one soldier that someone would have to feed the dogs in his neighborhood. The soldier said that he would but refused to note the addresses where the dogs were located.

How does a President who supposedly sought to win the hearts and minds of people in Iraq and Afghanistan believe he can succeed when he and his offices proved so incapable of doing so at home? The answer is probably that he didn't.

It is in this broader sense, beyond the incredible story of one exemplary man and his family, that Dave Eggers has penned the best book of the year. Zeitoun is the case study for the failures and wretched failure of American ideals during the 2000's. It sits atop the burnt rubble of a decade of polemics and nuanced dissections of presidential malfeasance. It achieves such a state simply by being an uplifting book.

Zeitoun is about heroism. It is about remembering what a nation wanted to be and therefore a reminder of what we should strive for. Abdulrahman Zeitoun is what every American should strive to be.

Dave Eggers may have written the most patriotic book of our time. And you know what? There isn't one mention of the Hill or the passing of legislation.

So next time I'm standing in my favorite bookstore and looking at the new releases I am going to buy the next Dave Eggers book without inspection.

Well, the next Dave Eggers book that doesn't come in a fuzzy special edition.

Kidding aside you should take a look at The Zeitoun Foundation, which was organized by the Zeitoun family in order to benefit the wrongly imprisoned. Like a said. Hero.

A Stern Talking To: John Lukacs' Last Rites

Since I failed to get a post up yesterday I am doubling up with a pair of posts today. The first of which is one of the strangest, most useful books of the year and the other is my pick for the best book of the year.

That's right, this evening I am going to such lengths as to tell you what I think was the most important book of the year.

I'll try not to disappoint.

But first to the most underrated book of the year, and really I am not blaming anyone for its underestimation. It merely is one of those quirky books that seems one way and really is drastically different.


Last Rites by John Lukacs. Yale University Press. History/ Intellectual Memoir. Hardcover. 208 pps. ISBN: 0300114389. Click the picture above to purchase Last Rites from Powell's Books.

When I first met John Lukacs it took him very little time to announce his unfortunately rare brand of incisive wit. Standing in my former bookstore, holding a John Updike new release, Lukacs hit my former business partner and I with a wonderful little gem.

"John Updike writes very beautifully but has very little to say."

Such is the sort of unabashedly aggressive remark that Lukacs is capable of. He knew not our opinion of Updike and really, he did not care. If we adored the writer then certainly some intellectual sparring would have ensued. The reality was that we more or less agreed with Lukacs on the fact that Updike was a great writer who chose the most mundane of subjects.

The first chapter of Last Rites is titled "A Bad Fifteen Minutes" and the great historian opens up with an insult levied at modern attention spans. Bare with him, he asks, because for the first thirty-three pages of his memoir of personal ideas are going to be brutally forward.

The dissolution of physics into lurid fantasy, the death of the historical novel, the closing of the modern era and its chief creation: liberalism, and a lengthy and immensely entertaining rebuttal of Cartesian notions of objectivity and subjectivity all populate this "bad fifteen."

One of the literary observations that I found very interesting was how Lukacs cites the uselessness of historical fiction. Those sweeping dramas by Lloyd Douglas, Mika Waltari and Anya Seton, which so popular and useful in their day, have been replaced by the engrossing popular historians like David McCullough, Dorris Kearns Goodwin and David Brinkley.

The argument, in my opinion is air tight and incredibly observant. As a former owner of a used & new bookstore I can tell you that there is an amazing separation between the number of "historical" or "period" set novels from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries through the 1980's, which suddenly drops off with the rise of best-selling history writers like Shelby Foote and those mentioned above. Think of Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, stow your bile, and then think of how little actual historical fiction (not books merely set in the war years) has been written since that publication.

The most striking aspect of Lukacs memoir is the fact that it maintains a touching biographical component along with the rigorous philosophical bombast of his bold assertions, all of which are well equipped to defend against counters.

So while Lukacs may sing a dirge for liberalism, point out the historical misprision of modern conservatism in the US (Reagan, contrary to what you may think, did very little to close the book on communism) he also writes beautifully on the quiet moments of a very impressive life.

I suppose that's the most important thing to note about this strange book. For all its polemic and intellectual firepower, it is the essentially nostalgic Hungarian who emerges in the end. Lukacs is capable of extreme compartmentalization however, and none of his softer moments leak into the hardened philosophical ones.

This is a Hungarian Catholic man with a Jewish mother, who has spent a good portion of his life thinking about Hitler. He is that rare form of intellectual that appreciates the difference between understanding and knowing.

This slender book is by far one of the most interesting books of the year and a worthy introduction to the wonderful mind of John Lukacs.

It is rare to find someone willing to roll up their sleeves and soberly say what they think is the case. And back it up. Please do not confuse this with the bullshit sophistry of TV pundits.

And just think: This is only the first post of the day.

Who Killed Olga Maria? - Horacio Castellanos Moya's The She Devil In The Mirror

Late is better than never. Right?


The She-Devil In The Mirror by Horacio Castellanos Moya. Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. Fiction. New Directions. Trade Paperback. ISBN: 978-0-8112-18467. $14.95.

"The only writer of my generation who knows how to narrate the horror, the secret Vietnam that Latin America was for a long time."

-Roberto Bolano

This one makes my list for one simple reason: It breaks with convention.

That and it will make you laugh out loud.

With a great deal of humor and genre self-awareness, Moya constructs a sort of anit-noir crime novel. Taking the lead away from the lantern jawed square shoulder private eye he places it in the hands of a somewhat ditsy, materialistic daughter of luxury.

What makes this especially humorous is the fact that the backdrop is one of the yet fiery embers of civil war.

One can only imagine what this book would have been like to a South American reader. The pitch-perfect absurdity of situation and protagonist dots an "i" that other, supposedly more serious works have not been able to do.

With the Bolano quote floating around the back of your consciousness and the above teaser I will set you free on this evening of the Nor'easter fimbulvetr and link over to my previous review for the Phoenix.

Breathing Excercizes: David Foster Wallace's This Is Water

One of the best books of the year and one to protect sanity this holiday season.


This Is Water by David Foster Wallace. Little, Brown. Philosophy/Essays. Hardcover. $14.99. Click the image above to purchase David Foster Wallace's wonderful essay.

Let me start with a tale of cafe foibles.

One merry evening in May I wandered into my favorite cafe in Phoenixville. I wanted to get a cup of coffee, talk with my friend the owner, and be on my way with the diminutive little book I carried with me.

After a brief session of catching up with town gossip, the subject of David Foster Wallace's recently published "final work" was broached by the cafe's owner. Coincidence of all coincidences: that was exactly the small book I carried with me, which upon my arrival home I was going to read and review for the local paper.

The cafe's owner had discussed the book with one of the employees and they had both been excited to take a look at it. Neither had read Wallace before but the most certainly Zen title seemed too intriguing to pass up.

After I published my tepid , introductory review I came back in and asked if they had read the book. No, they had not. Yes, they had read my review. The employee wished I had talked more about the ontological concepts of the book. The ontological concepts of the book he, no bitterness here, had not read.

Now I love talking to these fellows. They're intelligent folk and rare birds to boot. The irony of the above situation should not in any way color their character in any negative light but rather to emphasize the grandeur of Wallace's essay.

Using wry meta-Aphorisms (what else would Wallace use?) David Foster Wallace delivered his only public address to the graduating class of Kenyon College in 2005. Titled This Is Water, it is anything but Zen.

The framework for this essay is a justification of the liberal arts degree. Wallace, in his wonderfully oblique way, does not climb down from the podium to slap faces and proclaim the BA student the most well-girded learner in the world. Instead Wallace calls attention to the cliched notion that a liberal arts degree is designed to teach "how to think" and in its stead places the often overlooked notion of "when to think."

The book is a soothing and tragic (Wallace of course committed suicide in September of 2008) assessment of how thinking arms human frailty to resist the repetitive droning of Western life.

It is essentially a novelist's guide to thinking as therapy. If that makes any sense.

Using clever phrasing, wry humor, sardonic philosophy and a self-deprecating eye for absurdity, Wallace weaves a fable-like address that affirms life and arms the reader with the not-so-subtle reminder that it is one thing to have gained knowledge and another to know how and when to use it.

He's not talking moral quandaries of "to abort or not to abort" caliber. David Foster Wallace reminds us, in stunning clarity, that you can (and should) take a moment to think about what is happening while standing in a wretched line at a supermarket.

Like I said: This is a novelist's guide to life.

And most certainly one for the season. Required reading for any of you poor souls who have yet to plumb the malls for gifts and goods.

Woe need not be yours.

Oh, and on the notion of "when" to think. Applicable to books too, incidentally. Think about them after you've read them.

Insert smiley face emoticon here.

The Art of Arrival: Emily St. John Mandel's Last Night In Montreal

Ironic title, considering it is a book about disappearing.

Today I have another offering that I featured none too long ago. This one is from all the more recent and therefore I will take a somewhat sidelong look at one aspect of why the novel is extra special.


Last Night In Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel. Unrbidled Books. Fiction. Hardcover. $24.95. ISBN: 9781932961683

The excitement surrounding the debut work of a new writer, particularly (but not always) a novelist, is substantial. If the book is even marginally well executed then the legion that is hyperbole begins to descend.

When a debut book is legitimately incredible, like Zadie Smith's White Teeth or Anthony Swofford's Jarhead (I told you there'd be nonfiction), then you find more than just the grizzled industry rubbing its hands together, excited about the prospect of a new bestselling author.

The true magic of the debut work exists only for the reader. That special, nostalgic and observant reader, that finds in the arrival of a strong new voice not just the pleasure of the current work but also the exciting reality that this writer might well write another book as good or maybe even better than the one they just completed. You imagine preordering the sophomore effort, claiming it's slight mediocrity to the first and then triumphantly buying the author's third book, which undoubtedly will be their masterpiece.

It is exciting. I swear.

Last Night In Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel is such a debut. After reading it you will find yourself looking at the author's website in hopes to catch site of a second book on its way. Not only will you find said second book but in the case of the apparently prolific Mandel you will also find it well on it's way.

All added up, Last Night In Montreal makes the list of best books of 2009 by two different roads. One is by the strength of its writing, which you can read about here. The other is by implication of a new and very talented writer.

Buy the book. Read it. Get excited about the next.

Incidentally, I have on good account that the next book is better than the first. Better to get on this bandwagon now, folks.

As We Are: Lydia Davis' Collected Stories

Workmanly is a non-word that I am going to stake a claim on. If nothing else.


The Collected Stories by Lydia Davis. FSB. Hardcover. Fiction. ISBN: 9780374270605. $30.

A few weeks back I published a comment on and link to my review of the Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. I kind of slipped into a refutation and justification of the labels that have been placed on Davis over the course of her career. I refuted them by stating her accessibility and I justified them through creating a mystique around them.

Pretty ridiculous, right? I thought so.

I am going to send you back to that post in a moment but before that I want to say why I think this collection is one of the most important publications of 2009.

Let me start by saying that a substantial Introduction is the only way FSG could have improved on this publication. It would have been useful to have a canonized voice writing on behalf of the often misunderstood writing of Davis. Heck, I'd even have taken Jonathan Franzen pontificating about lost time and how Davis has sat many a time on his various nightstands. I'm just kidding, Jonathan. They tease but you do wax a good Saint Anthony.

Small criticism aside, and Catholic flavored lit joke placed firmly in my cap, I'd now like to trim the fat on my previous dithering.

Davis is accessible. She is accessible because she writes that "one true sentence" that Hemingway alluded to in A Moveable Feast. Her stories are episodes and no matter how brief or disjointed they maintain a continuity with what is both real and what is experientally already known by the reader. They are situations taken from realities, often ones typical or maybe even cliche, and so even when she is sliding towards a fanciful or unreal setting she maintains a cozy tongue-in-cheek relationship with her reader.

However clever her literary machinations might be, she never allows the obscuration to be complete. Homey becomes cruelty. Mundane becomes oppressive. Routine becomes defiant. Sanity touches insanity.

In short, Lydia Davis writes about life with such vivid reality that we cannot help but know what she's talking about.

FSG has done we readers a great service by compiling her stories and giving us a chance to see the overall aim of this brilliant writer.

Now, off to that previous post. If you like...

Hustle & Flow: R. Crumb's Illustrated Genesis

Today we have another book I recently reviewed for the Phoenix getting a supplemental appraisal from the one I did a few months back.

To be sure, this one is high on my list. Partly for sheer absurdity and partly for perfect union. What better two-part solution to describe the book of Abraham and Isaac.

Wait. Not The Book Of Abraham. That's a whole other thing. You catch my drift.

R. Crumb's Genesis. One of the best books of 2009.


The Book Of Genesis. Illustrated by R. Crumb. Religion / Graphic Novels. ISBN: 9780393061024. Hardcover. $24.95. Click on the image above to purchase a copy from Powell's Books.

Genesis, especially if you take the time to visualize what is happening, is not for children. At least most people would say it's not. In fact if there was a television show on primetime that had a particularly graphic (for argument's sake we'll say that it is without any full nudity) depiction of Lot being seduced with wine by his two daughters so that they could lay with him and continue his seed, well, if there was such a show it would be canceled after one airing. Apologies would follow, not mention potential boycotting of the station by Tipper Gore.

-from my original review in the Phoenix.

As I stated in the piece I wrote before, the mere mention of R. Crumb's name evokes instant polarities of opinion. If someone can maintain the middle ground concerning the man's career it is probably through a shake of the head and a lingering, sidelong glance at one of Crumb's voluptuously drawn bimbos. I won't split hairs about that. The guy can draw T & A with the best of them.

Crumb is one of those succinctly American characters that populate the world's stage. His fame abroad is mainly due to (well, aside from drawing nudey pictures) his seemingly "anti" status quo stance on nearly everything. Crumb is an oddly curmudgeonly figure whose sweet tooth is strictly for nostalgia. So while in France he may be seen as a antihero, or rather a antiAmerican, he is in fact overly drenched in that most essential of American elixir.

In essence he draws counterculture as it was, he maintains a view of things as they should be. It's a convincing middle ground that allows readers/fans to see create a comfortable misprision of their own design. Bob Dylan comes suddenly to mind. That's a whole other thing.

All this hedonism of voice and place leads me to my essential point about Crumb's Genesis. The book of Genesis is the perfect book for Crumb to impose himself upon. If for no other reason than his artwork and worldview align in perfect, though a hair tongue in cheek, with that of the Old Testament.

Really though, it's not such a stretch to find the similar world-views between Laban and Jacob's wheeling and dealing over Lia and Rachel and Fritz the Cat's manipulative monologue enticing college girls to his sexual will.

All this makes for a very bold publication. The fact is that Crumb maintains a strict interpretation of Genesis and renders it scene by scene as it states itself. Now granted, the women could be drawn with more average physical dimensions but other than that excess, Crumb plays it straight.

By doing so he gives a unbelievable glimpse of the street hustler style violence that inhabits the Good Book's oldest text. I don't care what you say. Esau gets straight bamboozled by Jacob.

To read the original review follow the link provided right here.

The Cold, Cold Spring: Romano Bilenchi's The Chill

“The chill of suspicion and incomprehension came between me and humankind when I was sixteen, at the time of my high-school exams.”

-Romano Bilenchi, The Chill

I had not read Bilenchi before Europa Editions did their thing and brought him into the English speaking world. In my first reading I was struck by how accurately described the emotions of the protagonist are described. After a second reading, made last night amidst the remaining fumes of a Sunday hangover, I was struck by something else.

Namely how entirely accessible the entire novel is.

So let's get to it. I'm trying to do right by you all on this overcast Pennsylvania Monday.


The Chill by Romano Bilenchi. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. Europa Editions. Fiction. Trade Paperback. $15.

"Sometime later, on a Sunday, I saw Rosa arm in arm with her fiance: they were walking along a shady street parallel to Via dei Tre Mori, one of those favored by young couples who, segregated from the larger public, compared their looks and their clothes. The man seemed even stronger and taller: Rosa, still a fragile child, awkward, her narrow shoulders squared and bent forward, had lost the customary movements that often gave her an air of assurance and ease and grace. Maybe she, too, was gripped by the chill that was blocking me."

This is a coming of age story, as I pointed out in my review of it for the Phoenix a month ago. The awkward journey of youth into adulthood is one that has been a popular one for authors for a long time. In fact, as I said in the review, even a book like Robinson Crusoe, which was one of the first complete English novels, can be viewed as a coming-of-age story. Complete with paternal defiance.

As more niche publishers work with out-of-print or neglected titles we are finding a more unified vision of the twentieth century and man in general. Bilenchi's coming-of-age tale ranks higher in my estimation than that of writers we are more familiar with telling such stories. I am thinking of Salinger (Catcher In The Rye), Roth (Portnoy's Complaint) or Updike (The Centaur), all of which are exceptional works, with perhaps Roth's coming in last. The difference is in Bilenchi's universal concern of emotional alienation and perception frozen by confusion over the changing meanings of life's smallest encounters. This elevates his novel past specificity and into the more difficult to control land of "everyone's experience."

Whether man or woman, the reader will remember the distilled awkwardness of those moments, and we all had them, when we were between child and adult. The protagonist of Bilenchi's novel may be a young man, with the particular concerns that young men have, but by placing a healthy level of emotional intelligence in his protagonist, Bilenchi allows him to feel like everyone and sympathize with others, including teenage girls.

Something the trio above may not have ever achieved.

This of course makes it more intrinsic than Roth's sexually concerned novels, or Updike and Salinger's success driven youths. In my mind, there is no better book to demonstrate the ironically solidifying confusion of youth ascendant into adult.

You can read more about the milieu and history of Bilechi in my article written for the Phoenix. I recommend you go to your local independent bookstore and procure a copy of The Chill. Make them order it if they don't have it. A novel this good needs all the readers it can get.

The Mad Bomber of Literature: James Ellroy's Blood's A Rover

Due to the perniciousness of my hangover I am doing a cut and paste job with links to my review of James Ellroy's Blood's A Rover for the Phoenix and the additional write-up I did on this site back in September.

It is an odd argument and I recognize that it may be at times untenable but I yet maintain that in his bizarre, kooky conservative manner James Ellroy may be the best all-around novelist writing in the US. It's not an issue of profundity or supreme invention, but one of workmanship, fearlessness and sheer storytelling ability.

Seriously.

Why the hangover? I was in Phoenixville last night for the annual Firebird Festival. Like all pagan festivals one has to eat, drink and perform feats of strength in order to fit in.

Thus I hurt allover today.

On to Ellroy.


Blood’s A Rover by James Ellroy. Fiction. Hardcover. $28.95. ISBN: 978-0679403937.

Those that have read Ellroy have goose bumps already. They know that cocksure paranoia and down low hipster jingle jangle is best when filtered through the terse language of a true professional. James Ellroy doesn’t write novels; he ties bows on bomb boxes.

James Ellroy is the most interesting writer living. I also think he is the best living American novelist.

I'll let that soak in and offend those who will be quick to point to other names.

There are others that write more important books. There are others who are better stylists (though very few). There are even those who plot better page-turners than James Ellroy (though his triple narrative device is as clever as it can get).

There just isn't anyone else who does it all as well as he does.

My belief is based off of a series of measures. James Ellroy is a kooky, paranoid conservative who is best known as a writer of genre fiction. While "crime fiction" has always produced great writers few of them have been considered the best in their country or world. Leonardo Sciascia of Sicily is perhaps the exception.

The measures though... James Ellroy is above all a stylist, whose obsession with language calls to mind names like Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Hemingway and to a lesser extend Andre Malraux. Men who wrote "straight" stories wrestling with cultural and societal themes as diverse as death, cultural disconnects and the relevance of the masculine in society. Like these writers Ellroy achieves innovation in style through parred down terse prose that above all is not fearful of indulgence.

Unlike other terse prose practitioners James Ellroy is willing to include whimsical asides, whether through hipster musings or the specialized cant of the CIA in the 1960's. All weighed, he spends more time thinking about individual words than many writers spend on entire paragraphs. I know I can't support that claim. I just feel its the case.

That's the other thing to measure too. The total lack of political correctness. Though beneath the surface there is a definite political conservatism to his writing, and he has called himself the "White Knight of the far right" he is fair in his political dealings. He hands people their asses no matter the politics at work. If the person was a fake or a criminal then they're a fake or a criminal. No matter the affiliations. If the person was a racist then the language they speak will be riddled with base derogatives. He pulls no punches. The language is as it would be no matter the potential offense.

Then there is the fact that the man is a very literate writer. I mean, on Tuesday potentially his highest octane novel is being released with a title derived from an A.E. Housman poem. Dig?

Basically James Ellroy performs at a high level on so many fronts. He writes highly stylized works that both thrill and in the case of his USA Underground Trilogy (the final act of which drops on Tuesday of this week) he writes important, scarily exigent lessons for the naive political bystander.

He is a gifted stylist and a relevant writer who aims for the everyman as an audience. I might be a liberal minded person, but I also like good writing. Especially when it takes on the bigger demons in the world.

Again, here is the link to my review of the final book in the trilogy, Blood's A Rover.

Magritte's Sherlock Holmes: Jebediah Berry's The Manual of Detection

Certainly one of the more unheralded books published this year. Perhaps it is the large publisher (Penguin) or the cloak of being a "detective story" that hid this book so well, but whatever the case it is certainly one of the best published this year.

Not top 5. But close.


The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry. Fiction. Penguin Books. $25.95. Click the book's image above to purchase.

Charles Unwin, most respected of clerks, works for a vast, labyrinthine detective agency. The agency exists in an official capacity, protecting the streets, as well as secrets. Unwin, like all agency clerks, is assigned to a single detective and in Unwin’s case it is the illustrious, and certainlly Holmesian influenced Detective Travis Sivart. No detective is allowed to know his clerk, and in turn neither clerk nor detective are allowed to know their “Watcher” or supervisor. Protocol aside, the lucky assignment of Sivart’s famous cases coupled with Unwin’s bureaucratic brilliance meld to create the reason why he is the most respected of clerks.

One thing though: Sivart has gone missing and in a mysterious series of events the unlikely Unwin is promoted to rank of Detective. Unwin refuses to believe the promotion is accurate, believing some clerical error has led to his promotion. Unwin, in all fastidiousness, begins to prepare a report that searches out the origin of the error and corrects all problems concerning the misappropriated promotion. It doesn’t take long for Charles Unwin, newly made detective, to stumble upon a body, get framed and begin a descent into the noir world of the detective. His only assistance is an incomplete copy of the agency’s most essential tool, a book titled… Yes. You got it: The Manual of Detection.

Berry’s debut novel is a wonderfully entertaining and certainly inventive type of detective story. From the surreal institution of the detective agency and its Kafkaesque bureaucracy to the phantasmagorical elements involving dream-crimes, Berry’s novel deftly walks traditional as well as quite unconventional lines.

In the character of Charles Unwin we find a classic archetypical antihero of the seemingly incompetent sort. Unwin, like LeCarre’s George Smiley or television’s “Columbo” (Peter Faulk), seems to be too frail or without any savvy to make a good detective. The LeCarre comparison is the most apt. Like that consummate spy of LeCarre’s invention, Unwin is a meticulous individual. He is the type of person that detail never escapes notice.

Unlike the realism found in John LeCarre’s celebrated novels, Berry is willing to leave in the vague and fantastical. The entirety of The Manual of Detection, right down to the text within the text – the manual itself – is willing to give in to fanciful humor and imaginative wandering. This has led to comparisons to such writers as Jorge Luis Borges or Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I am certainly not willing to compare this book to any of Borges’ writing. Too often when confronted with a “type” of book, people grasp at others who have written similar “types.”

This is a good book. One of the better books left unheralded this year. It is not great in the Borgesian sense. It merely borrows some of the Argentinian’s smoke and mirrors, which may be compliment enough.

The Manual of Detection isn’t concerned with high literature, even as it's increasingly absurdist and surreal plot push it higher into the literary stratosphere. Of course this is exactly why it is so good. It is a debut novel that is very comfortable in its skin, fully willing to indulge itself with an increasingly inventive plot and pamper the reader with fantasy and humor.

Then there is the matter of the plotting, which calls to mind G.K. Chesterton or Borges' prodigy (who perhaps is the author whose work is closest to this work) Adolpho Bioy Casares. Too few books are plotted as well as Jedediah Berry’s first book.

This makes him an author to watch and his book one to read.

The New Dumas: Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Angel's Game

Late but not forgotten. Today's book is Carlos Zafon's very enjoyable follow-up to the epic success of The Shadow Of The Wind.

The more this guy writes the better.



The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Doubleday. Fiction. Hardcover. ISBN: 0385528701. $26.95. By clicking the above book image and purchasing a copy you will support the DA, as well as Zafon. Too low?

Every reader who is fortunate enough to have read The Three Musketeers knows how exciting a title like the one above would be if it were true. Dumas wrote stories that fully consume the reader, even when reading at the end of a long day, when dog tired and in bed, somehow the book keeps tired eyes open and formerly fatigued fingers turning page after page. You were all set to read one chapter and grab some shut eye and next thing you know thirty pages have gone by.

Dutifully you close the book. Falling asleep isn’t as easy now, as your mind is still wandering in the author’s fictional universe. That and the fact that you are deeply disturbed by what you just read.

Well the statement above is true. We have, more or less, a new Dumas.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon will be read for generations. His historical Barcelona is comparable to the Paris found in Dumas’ The Three Musketeers or the high seas of Raphael Sabatini’s romances. That is not hyperbole. It is simply the case. I am saying that this is fun at its most literary.

Zafon is an anomaly, a throwback really, living in an era of writing that tends to exist at strict polarities of being either “literary” or “popular.” Bookstores and publishers alike are doubly self-conscious of what those titles should mean. The “literary” writer must be serious, innovative in style and if nothing else must handle supposedly “serious” topics. The author of “popular” fiction has only to make sure they align with a popular trend. Legal drama, vampire thrillers and slow love affairs set on beachfront property (with some epistolary component) are examples of such trends.

The Angel’s Game is a prequel (you do not need to read the first in order to read the second) to the international bestselling The Shadow Of The Wind, and though it might behoove you to read the first installment, it really is not required. The Shadow Of The Wind is quite worth the read, being an exceptional book. In fact part of the reason The Angel’s Game is so exciting is that it is a second book. Sophomore efforts are not always banner affairs and yet after reading it you will quickly realize that Zafon will be able to write more still.

The story takes place at the turn of the 19th century and during the build up to the Spanish Civil War. The young protagonist is David Martin, a boy whose love for literature is without bounds and whose luck seems to only be capable of either being wholly good or completely awful. Time and dedication will bring young Martin to his desired profession: that of writer.

Problem. David’s patron and close friend, one Pedro Vidal, may not be doing everything in the young man’s best interests. Problem. David has been locked into a ten-year contract with a disreputable publishing firm to write “penny dreadfuls” under the wonderful name of Ignatius B. Samson. Problem. His first work – the first novel written from his heart is cruelly overshadowed by his mentor’s, lets say less than authentic masterpiece. Solution. A mysterious stranger claiming to be a publisher offers to make real David’s wildest dreams (and cruelest fantasies) if he will spend one year writing a book for him.

The man merely wants David to write a religious text. A bible, if you will, in which the increasingly mysterious stranger plays the part of god.

Things get bloody fast.

The power of The Angel’s Game does not exist in its engrossing plot (and it is). Instead it lies in the clean, almost perfect writing of the author. Barcelona comes alive and these fictional characters truly inhabit your mind while under the book’s thrall. Like he did in The Shadow Of The Wind, Zafon crafts a page-turner of a most serious comportment.

His are stories for the grandkids to read someday.

Sleeping One Off In The Ivory Tower: August Kleinzahler's Collected Poetry

Originally issued in hardcover in April of 2008, the trade paperback edition was issued one year later and thus a viable choice for this list.

This is perhaps one of the books I most enjoyed reading and to tell the truth, have perhaps reread the most.

What kind of a poet is August Kleinzahler?

The typical Keillor selection tends to be anecdotal, wistful: more often than not a middle-aged creative writing instructor catching a whiff of mortality in the countryside — watching the geese head south, getting lost in the woods, this sort of thing.

-August Keleinzahler on Garrison Keillor's poetry anthology,Good Poems.

Enjoy.


Sleeping It Off In Rapid City: Poems, New and Selected by August Kleinzahler. FSG. Trade paperback. ISBN: 9780374531737. $16.

August Kleinzahler is a poet of diners with smoking sections and hotel bars. That is if the diner played Ravel and Coltrane and had a ready bottle of Chateau d’Armailhac Pauuillac. Let’s not get it wrong though: this is still a diner we’re talking about, and this particular one would be a favorite truck stop, known for a serviceable eggs Benedict. Strangely, the diner’s menu is spectacularly illustrated by Robert Hooke, famous for his drawing of a flea under the first microscope. The diner would also need to be nearby an airport, lending a transient feeling to nearly everyone and thing.

Sure, lovers are there, watching each other go but in Kleinzahler’s universe there is shrugging instead of a lamenting.

This metaphorical diner isn’t done yet. It would need to be a handful of blocks away from an old jazz club, where university students and grizzled old jazz vets mingle, get hammered and talk history with a capital “H”. Did I mention the decent booze? Well there’d be cheap stuff too. Plenty of that for talk of domestic politics.

Outside it might be raining, with a chilly fog blurring the lights of taxi cabs.

Or it might be brilliantly sunny, and the onlooker can easily see from their pastoral patio:

Red pear leaves take the light at four,
and a patch of brick on the south, rear wall.

Or perhaps the night is descending and charmingly you can behold:

Dogwood blossoms drift down at evening
as semis pound past Phoenix Seafood.

Better still let us look upon the stuff of scientific inspiration:

Good, patient Leeuwenhoek of Delft,
having “partook of hot smoked beef, that was a bit fat,
or ham,” of which he was most fond.

The scientific discovery? The same as the subject of the poem: “Microorganisms.” Patient Leewenhoek got diarrhea and decided to look into what caused it. Obscure? I’d say so. Funny? You bet.

Kleinzahler has had a long career, one that has touched base with some of the previous generation’s masters. The great British modernist poet, Basil Bunting, is often referred to by Klenzahler as his greatest teacher. There too is the time he spent in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco, which led to Allen Ginsberg’s notice and compliment, “August Kleinzahler's verse line is always precise, concrete, intelligent and rare…” Ginsberg goes on to sum up the then young poet, “A loner. A genius.”

Sleeping It Off In Rapid City is the first career spanning collection fo Kleinzahler’s poetry. Issued originally in hardcover in 2008, it won that year’s National Critic’s Circle Award. Though he is a poet worth a more thorough reading, this wonderfully organized collection, which includes some new material, is a great place to start.

Within any of the 234 pages of this book you will see Kleinzahler’s protean academic interests and raw, world-worn ability. A single poem can display beatnik homage to jazz, Robert Lowell-esque (pardon me) historical obscurity, subtle literary allusions and (always) a healthy dose of sardonic observations on everyday life, and its routine functions.

It all leads the reader to find the poem “accessible.” If you miss one aspect of the poem, there will always be another. There are many doors in the house of Kleinzahler. If Kleinzahler can’t poke your brain, he’ll waft the smell of cheap, greasy but good food across your nose. If that doesn’t phase you he’ll remind you of the low life, of sleeping off hangovers and temporal frailties in our relationships. If still unfazed, he will point out the absurdity of modern life – the falling petals and roaring semis of Northeastern boulevards. If all else fails he’ll tell you a joke, probably dirty.

It’s rare to find so much in one place, and this belies a poet who has lived as much as he’s looked.

Essentially, reading a Kleinzahler poem is like being invited to a party at an eccentric genius’s house. As a host, he’ll pours you glass after glass of fine wine, but later on when he gets the munchies, he’ll ask you if you’d like a hot dog, since he’s microwaving a couple. It’s conflicting, sophisticated and ruggedly charming.

In other words: it’s essential American poetry and one of the best publications of the year.

When Small Looms Large: Alejandro Zambra's Bonsai

This is the first of at least two (maybe three) titles from Melville House make my list of the top 31 books of 2009.

Melville House deserves (and has received) a lot of credit for publishing not one, but two lines of novellas. There is the classically minded The Art Of The Novella and the contemporary issues under The Contemporary Art Of The Novella.

Today we're looking at a title from the latter.


Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra. Translated by Carolina De Robertis. Melville House. Trade Paperback. ISBN: 9781933633626. $13.

Let me start by saying that I work with bonsai nearly every day. My day job requires me to care for at any one point upwards of thirty bonsai trees. Additionally I have three of my own. A bay leaf tree (hey, what else would an Italian-American bonsai?), a golden gate ficus (that I cultivated over a decade ago) and a boxwood shrub I hauled out of the nursery a month or so ago.

Additionally I get to produce them from time to time at work. I have a great little banana tree I did (with beach-like sand soil cover) that can be yours for $59.99 and another boxwood that will cost you a mere $79.99.

Kidding aside, there is a reason why I am discussing the art of bonsai production. Two reasons in fact. One, because the title and at times subject of Zambra's gem of a book is, well, bonsai and secondly because the novella itself is a form that strives to do similar things as the purely aesthetic art of bonsai.

Living somewhere between the short story and the novel, the novella is usually defined as a prose fiction ranging from 30,000 to 50,000 words. There must be a unity of vision and technique to successfully keep it separate from the relatively fractile short story. It can afford to do this for only so long, as any more and it becomes a novel.

The novella had a rocky existence in the last decades of the 20th century. This was very much the case in the United States, where the idea of the Great-American-Novel requires six hundred pages and a complex layering of plots, people and a nostalgic Midwestern setting (okay, so the last part is meant to be humorous).

In any case, the slender novella was too diminutive for many writers’ egos. On a different and equally damaging tip, some respected American novelists (Philip Roth, Don Delillo) have used the form as an occasional cash cow. They have generated quick and often less than thought provoking fare set on either a campus or a limo ride or whatever. The setting doesn't really matter. The important thing is that their loyal fans purchase these books and the parade of baby boomer critics adore them for the slight nods made backwards into the supposed confusion of the 1960's.

While writers in other countries were producing novellas with purpose the US book market only purveyed them as "qucik" reads and half novels written by writers who are better suited at the distance run. The sport of the novella is one of sprinting and weightlifting. It is about packing a shit ton of power in a small space.

Shelving the rant, let me get back to what Melville House has done. In both series they have created a wonderful introduction for readers to explore this potent short form. Whether a classic like The Man Who Would Be King or a modern situated title like Bonsai, both achieve that all-important element of sublimity. Just as a bonsai tree is supposed to evoke the power and awe of a massive tree growing on a wind-scorched mountainside so too is the novella supposed to impress the import of a more full-sized book. Or more. Such power so briefly rendered is possibly more noticeable to the reader.

Bonsai by the Chilean writer, Alejandro Zambra, is a case of more. Weighing in at 83 sparsely printed pages, Bonsai is yet a complex and sophisticated story concerning subjects as expansive as love and art. In a few very simple words a handful of lives are given life. For such a small book to have fully developed characters is impressive and this, in the end, is what is essential to the novella. A good novella must impress you with its tiny size and the power of its language.

Okay. You get the point. Back to Bonsai.

The story is simple. Boy falls in love with girl and vice versa. They share dreams and aspirations and yet there is an ever-looming mortality to their love. The beauty of their young love is haunting to both them and the reader. They are budding aesthetes, readers and engaged in cultivating a idealized picture of themselves.

In time they part and yet neither, despite future amorous ventures, finds a love like the previous one. Because of their early conception of the beautiful this first love, which is nearly always the most beautiful of our lives, looms larger than they. They are stunted before it.

The boy dreams of becoming a writer and yet does not write very much. In a moment of weakness he begins to lie to people, explaining that he is editing a manuscript for a very respected writer. He is not. He wants to seem a success and so has conjured the lie from tenuous truths (he did interview for the job but was turned down on account of asking for too much money). In time he has to deepen the lie and in order to keep it going and remarkably he begins to actually write the chapters of this imaginary story he is editing, which in cruel irony concern bonsai. This is where the magic happens.

It is reversed however, the role of tree and bonsai. More accurately it is transformed and twisted into a postmodern situation. Instead of the small, highly cultivated tree borrowing the spirit of its fully grown natural cousins the young pair are left merely twisted and small before the vast power of their idealized love. Not to diminish them however, for while Zambra may make a stab at paralelling a tree's soul it is still humanity he is writing of. They are quietly and profoundly touching in their unraveling.

The Defining English Work Rendered Spectacularly Into English: Burton Raffel's Translation of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

I nearly forgot to post this. Tomorrow's post will be more timely for all you cubicle lit-warriors out there.

Today we'll be tipping our hats to one of the more epic offerings in literature this year. Burton Raffel's very accessible translation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

I can only imagine your chagrin if I failed to post this, he says tiredly.


The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. A New Translation by Burton Raffel. The Modern Library. Hardcover (deckle edge!). $36. By clicking the picture above and buying the wonderfully large hardcover edition of Chaucer's masterpiece you support the DA.

Born in 1343 (or so the prevailing wisdom states), Geoffrey Chaucer predates William Shakespeare by over two-hundred years. His seminal work predates the first English novels by fifty to one-hundred years, depending on who you think wrote it. Besides his claim to primacy, there is the matter that after Chaucer we find a quick rise in quantity and complexity of English writing.

Why? It’s simple: Chaucer’s creative collection of tales portraying Medieval England’s facts and foibles assembled a useful and coherent language. Chaucer standardized our English.

If you can think back to your first experience reading The Canterbury Tales you will undoubtedly remember how vaguely English it was. Here, take a look at our first great English poet’s language.

“This frere bosteth that he knoweth helle,
And God it woot, that it is litel wonder;
Freres and feendes been but lyte asonder.
For, pardee, ye han ofte tyme herd telle
How that a frere ravyshed was to helle”

That is most likely what you read in class. It is the original Middle English of Geoffrey Chaucer, and like Dante’s Italian before him, this nascent language would come define the culture. Language after all, is culture.

Most of you die-hard English lit types will without a doubt disparage what Burton Raffel has done by "translating" Chaucer's still nascent English into our modern coin, but I will cast it in a different lyte.

See how I did that?

Raffel's new rendering is not truly for everyone. Not in the way that J.U. Nicolson's "update" from first half of the 20th century was. That was a truly modernized work. Word substitutions were made with enough liberalism to warrant the labeling of "retelling."

In Raffel's case it is a true translation, seeking and finding the best words to communicate the original's meaning, style and rhythm. Raffel is a startling talent, whose translations are as varied as they are convincing. We are talking about a poet and linguist who has successfully rendered works as diverse as Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais (from the French), The Nibelungenlied (from the German) and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's Don Quixote (from the Spanish).

Add to the list Chaucer, Stendhal and a host of early unattributed works like Beowulf as well as the five rhyming works of Chrétien de Troyes. This is not a minor talent at translating.

As I was saying though, before I so rudely digressed, this is not a translation for everyone in the very same sense that Chaucer, though it pains me to say it, is not for everyone either. It takes a great deal of patience and fortitude to press through the more slowly paced moments of Chaucer's massive and incomplete work. What Raffel's work excels at is rewarding any stout reader who decides to pick it up.

In Raffel's hands the ironies, slapstick humor and picked boil honesty of Chaucer's original come to life.

Originally issued in a handsome hardcover door-stop (with deckle edge), Raffel's translation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is now available in a more comfortably managed paperback edition in Random House's Modern Library.

Such a massive and meritous undertaking is worth doffing a hat or two.

As Old As The Hills: W.S. Merwin's The Shadow Of Sirius

The show keeps going. I am not one to scramble too quickly onto award bandwagons but when a legend like Merwin wins another award you have to pause and take a look.

Like Daniyal Mueenudin's In Other Rooms this collection of poetry by W.S. Merwin gets the distinction of being listed in the top five of the year. Again. No numbers to further delineate.


The Shadow Of Sirius by W.S. Merwin. Copper Canyon Press. ISBN: 9781556592843. Hardcover. $22. You know the drill. If you click the picture above and purchase the book I get paid. A pittance mind you, is still something.

I have a longstanding quarrel with a particular literary misconception (see how I color the argument already?). In relatively short order it goes like this: Clichés are detested because they are tired and overused, which is the concept I take issue with. Sure, descriptions like “Big as a barn” and “So hungry that you could eat a horse” are exactly as above: tired and overused. Some clichés need rest. They glow with the heat of their overuse and never fail to annoy those that are aware of them.

There are other clichés, briefer ones consisting of single words, that aggravate writing school teachers and poetry editors. Dark. Light. Day. Night. Moon. Sun. Star. Lightning. Wind. Breeze. Song. Echo. Shadow (they hate this word with particular energy). No doubt, these are well-travelled words. Every would-be poet’s first poem contains at least one conjugation of the above set. I won’t deny that. What I will contest is the notion that these words, fired off by so many poetasters, are then off limits to real poets.

The cliché is found in the poor usage. The words themselves are some of the best going.

I felt vindicated on Monday (a feeling we rarely experience at the dawn –add that word to the list- of the work week). W.S. Merwin was awarded his second Pulitzer Prize for poetry. His most recent collection, The Shadow of Sirius, beat out a strong field of offerings to claim this country’s biggest award for poetry.

He did so by using, in almost every poem, words like shadow, dark, song, night, wind, etc. etc.

I will quote a stanza from my favorite poem in the collection, “The Piano.”

“each valley walking a different echo
out of the narrow vibrant shadow
between the piano and the wall that emerges above it
papered to be wheat fields without wind
with no horizon and with a smell of walls and night”

The words are there. No hiding them. Echo. Shadow (somewhere a man in a tweed jacket shudders). Wind. Night. Merwin however ignores the conceptions of cliché or overuse and brings them full bear, containing their primal luster. The night is a daily (ignore the irony). Yet when conjured forth as a smell related to walls in a well-known room it changes into a memory and from there it evolves into reflection and thought.

This poem struck a chord with me (heh) because my mother plays the piano. I remember the days of my childhood growing up in Florida. Late in the hot afternoon I’d come in from baseball or whatever sport I was playing (sometimes just chasing lizards) and I would hear her playing “Fur Elise” or “Rhapsody In Blue.” The Beethoven particularly comes to mind. Merwin successfully pulled those memories forth, and he did so with supposedly tired words.

Cliche is not the right word. Elemental might be more apropos.

Daddy, What Is Beer For?: Tom Robbins' B Is For Beer

In the AM! And on a schedule! That means this becomes useful for you and less painful for me.

Going back to the well here with another kid's title. Well, sort of a kids title. B I For Beer is illustrated and written by beloved funny man Tom Robbins and it makes the list of top 31 books.

If a lover of beer you know is without this book then you know what you need to do.


B Is For Beer by Tom Robbins. Illustrated by the author. Ecco Books. Hardcover. $14.95. Childrens/Humor/Beer. By clicking on the picture above and purchasing the book you support the Devil's Accountant.

Gracie Perkel is five-years-old (well nearly, almost, practically six) and on one august Saturday (in Seattle where it always drizzles) she resolves to tackle one of life’s most essential questions.

“Mommy,” Gracie asked one afternoon, “what’s that stuff Daddy drinks?”

After some fencing with her daughter (telling her not to describe someone’s drink as looking like pee-pee) Mrs. Perkel sends her off to ask her father. After all, who would know better what it was that he drinks.

Except her father doesn’t really want too much to do with Gracie. He’s watching a University of Washington football game and lacks the interest to answer her questions past the simple answer of, “Beer.” Lucky for Gracie, her somewhat flaky though always humanely philosophical Uncle Moe is on hand. Not only does Uncle Moe (the “Moester” ) give Gracie a complete lesson on beer nature, production and history, but he also lets young (almost six mind you) Gracie take a swig from his glass.

Despite the bitterness, Gracie is intrigued. What ensues is one of the strangest children’s books written. Through the didacticism of Uncle Moe (a man with dozens of degrees and no discernable job) Gracie learns to think outside of the box, stand up for herself and, most of all, just about everything about beer. For instance, her Uncle Moe explains to Gracie that when he comes back in his next life he’d like to be reincarnated as a vinegar eel. These eels, he explains, live on the remaining spilt off mugs in Germany.

Your humble reviewer had to go to the Wikipedia well to look into this one. Sure enough: Vinegar eels. Tom Robbins (Still Life With Woodpecker, Jitterbug Perfume) newest book is as funny and unconventional as the rest of his celebrated novels. In a remarkably insightful manner he observes through the story of Gracie Perkel the nature of how children learn, giving prominence to those random magical moments where something (often left by a character like Uncle Moe) quite random leads to childhood’s most memorable moments.

The unconventional subject of beer becomes a backdrop for truly American family experiences. The depth Robbins plumbs into the way children feel about things is impressive. This is all made doubly impressive with the educational (learning about beer is important, parents – from chemistry to ancient history) aspects of the tale, let alone the typical Robbinsesque humor laced throughout. Softened though. Robbins transforms the humor into one that is as tender as it is sarcastic. A not easy feat.

This is not a book to buy and give to a child. This is a book for adults, or adults to read to their children. I will warn you though: you will be asked questions about many subjects we typically label as “touchy.” This might be Robbins greatest achievement in this small, fun book. It forces a dialogue between parents and children about the those odd, often overlooked topics. I would hope that parents would feel comfortable, capable enough to answer these questions, vinegar eels and all.

One Mouse's Struggle to...: Rumer Godden's The Mousewife

I have handled children's books less frequently on the DA. Those that I have reviewed are out-of-print.

Such was the case with Rumer Godden's wonderfully serious children's story, The Mousewife. It was out-of-print. Now, thanks to the people at the New York Review of Books it is available once again in a affordable and attractive hardcover.

Just in time for the holiday season. I will endeavor to get more children's literature up over the next year. They're our future and all that...

Anyway, enjoy. This is a really good book, regardless of where it's shelved.


The Mousewife by Rumer Godden. Pictures by William Pene du Bois. New York Review of Books Children’s Collection. Hardcover. $14.95. Click the image above to support the Devil's Accountant.

“I think about cheese. Why don’t you think about cheese?”

So inquires the Mousewife’s husband. He is concerned about his wife’s suddenly strange behavior, as she has been around less of late. She no longer scampers with him every day, nor does she crawl out onto the rug to collect crumbs. She has for the last few days been spending all her time sitting at one of the windows in the house where they, and other housemice live. He doesn’t like this one bit.

The Mousewife was first published in 1967 and it enjoyed a successful readership for years. Of late it has been out-of-print, unavailable to old friends or young newcomers. That is until NYRB released it in their wonderful children’s collection.

NYRB (New York Review of Books) publish mainly critically acclaimed works that are now out-of-print or have not been previously translated/ have older, more awkward translations. The bulk of their catalogue represents works of complex, sophisticated literature. Their recent addition of a children’s catalogue serves a much needed role. Too many kids’ books, of wonderful authorship and illustration, have been unavailable for the last two decades.

These older kids books, most of them from the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s are often more serious and less politically correct (and less prone to outright fantasy) than their modern counterparts. The hearken to the days of fable and in using this simple but efficient narrative form they succeed in providing succinct lessons, both moral and knowledge oriented.

The Mousewife is of the moral sort. This tenderly illustrated book is a story of a remarkable incident in an otherwise average life. The Mousewife, through a surprise friendship with a recently caged turtledove, learns much of the outside world. As a housemouse, she has never set paw outside of the small routine, which defines the mice’s lifestyle inside Miss Barbara Wilkinson’s home.

The turtledove is not well however. He is a bird from beyond the windows and misses his open skies, lush green bowers and most of all, his wife. Though it begins to jeopardize her home life, and her husband begins to become abusive of her new interests (and her, in one awkward but poignant scene), the Mousewife spends time with the turtledove, listening over and over again to his tales of the outside world.

In time she has babies and in this realizes that she must stop going to see the turtledove, as responsibility to her children demands she spend most of her time foraging for food. She is sad, thinking of how ill the turtledove had become. Thinking of the caged bird she spies an open window. The very window she spend her days trying to see outside through the blurry glass.

She resolves to do something amazing.

The Mousewife is a fable about compassion, friendship and above all, daring. It is a story about doing the right thing, no matter the potential costs and by doing so learning and experiencing more than one would have if they had taken the easy, sleepy road of complacence.

This is a wonderful book that the young will love to hear aloud and one that parents will quietly read to themselves after the young ones go to bed.

The Pulitzer Makes The List - But Barely: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

You knew the Pulitzer would have to make an appearance on the list at some point. I enjoyed this year's winner for fiction enough to place it among my favorites from the year.

Critically I will say this: The book is convenient. There is enough of a youthful return to simplicity to hearten any hipster's soul and enough apple pie to invigorate each and every foodie's fiction tooth. I think you can read between those lines.

Then I have to get out and drink. All this accounting work is stressing out the old boy.


Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. Fiction. Trade Paperback. $14. Click on the book above to purchase and support the Devil's Accountant.

Olive Kitteridge is set in a small coastal town in northern Maine. Maine is perhaps one of the Union’s more quirky states, with a wonderful collection of exaggerated colloquialisms, regional foods and a way of life that is largely reminiscent of a mainstream America of yesteryear. It is also one of the nation’s most depressed economies and small town life in Maine is often, to borrow a term favored (perhaps belabored) by Vice President Joe Biden, “hardscrabble.”

The novel is formatted as a collection of interconnected short stories, each with its own individual story arc and characters. These stories and characters are connected by place but not necessarily by time, as the novel deftly changes both time and scene throughout. They are also connected by the book’s lead character (and she is a character), Olive Kitteridge.

In some of the stories Olive is merely mentioned. Others find her in the role of protagonist, filling page after page with her larger than life persona. At other times she merely inhabits some other character’s story, at moments stealing their thunder with a sassy comment issued from over stewing apples or while weeding her garden.

Here's where I come in with my comment. Olive Kitteridge is a very enjoyable, breezy read. Nearly every story slides towards ominous tidings and yet it never ascends to tragedy. The reason? Everyone is vested with a supreme confidence and inborn talent. They are, in short, very nostalgically American.

As Strout paints pictures of a difficult existence she consistently invests her characters with incredible native abilities that allow them to persevere where an average or (oh no - he won't say it!) less than average person would find themselves overwhelmed.

This sounds elitist, but I honestly think it has more to do with realism than any snobbery. Not everyone is vested with the mental toughness or intelligence to endure extreme or repeated hardships. And that's fine. It's okay. Really. It is.

There is a trend in American fiction to write of the everyman's struggles. Poverty and issues more particularly extreme (cancer, heart disease) are rendered plain upon the page and in some cases the reader is allowed to learn of dire existences they would never have experienced as closely otherwise. This is the power of fiction and one of Olive Kitteridge's strengths as a novel.

It suffers however from another trend I am seeing in American fiction. It is a celebratory trumpeting of the abilities of the common man. When I am not blogging I am a blue collar worker. I work in the garden industry. Unloading Christmas trees and unsleeving mile upon mile of poinsettias. When the body and mind go numb, there is no upbuilding. You just go home and dig out the coldest beer you have in the fridge.

Something I need to go do now, in fact.

Basically my complaint is that in a work of realism, which Olive Kitteridge is, not everyone can be vested with the powers of the hero. Strout's novel is very good but a little too full of indomitable heroes.

Boy. I really do need to get a drink.

Signing off.

-Grumpy Accountant

To Everyone An Experiment: Steven Johnson's The Invention Of Air

Statue of Joseph Priestley, Chamberlain Square,
Birmingham, England. 1874 by A W Williamson,
recast in bronze 1951.

I can't tell you how much I am excited to get these posts to a better hour. By Monday I promise.

In the meantime I need to be excited about Steven Johnson's wonderful history of the remarkable Dr. Joseph Priestley.

While in no way a gem from a writing standpoint, the organization of the ideas and the driving point (even the fact that the point is driving) of the book is what makes it one of the best of the year.


The Invention Of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and The Birth Of America by Steven Johnson. Riverhead Books. Trade Paperback. ISBN: 1594484015. $16.00.

Like In Other Rooms (featured yesterday) this title was published in hardcover early in 2009 and is now available in paperback. For the Walmart types it is also available on Kindle.

Long day. Sorry.

So about that amazing Dr. Joseph Priestley.

Priestley was a preternatural talent who could memorize and recite almost anything put before him. He had memorized the responses to the 107 questions of the Westminster Short Catechism by the age of four. More than just a talent for memorization, Priestley had that supreme gift of the true scientist: curiosity.

The subject of Steven Johnson’s intellectual biography would be somewhat of an anomaly in our age. After all, how many leading scientists do you know whose intellectual interests oscillate easily from science to politics and then to religion? This is the major theme to Johnson’s book; that intellectual life shouldn’t be isolated and codified like the subject of a textbook.

Despite (or is that too casuist of a word?) his early theological training Priestley was very much interested in the new wave of scientific discoveries. In particular he was interested in the work of the electricians (yes, that stolid trade started as experimental science). He was particularly taken with the work of a man from Philadelphia who spent a great deal of his time in Warrington, England. The man was Benjamin Franklin and the two would become lifelong friends.

Priestley was introduced to Franklin at a meeting of the Honest Whigs, a group which Franklin belonged to whose sole purpose was to discuss natural and moral philosophy. Well, not sole. They also drank and ate prodigiously. Priestley was on hand as a guest who sought their blessing (Franklin was one of the foremost experts on electricity) for a common history of electricity he wanted to write. Priestley wanted to make the science of electricity understood in plain language that anyone who could read would understand. Franklin, who had great success in the Colonies as a publisher, understood the potential of such a history. Franklin also was a political idealist, and such a concept of populism in science probably delighted him.

Science had been a field of knowledge populated by such legends as Isaac Newton, whose discoveries a hundred years before had seemed to come out of thin air. Newton was revered as a demigod, largely because of the cloistered life Newton lived. Priestley, in the tradition of Franklin, showed his findings and experiments to everyone who asked. There was no secrecy or isolation like Newton’s. Naturally this openness was taken advantage of.

Priestley, somewhat accidentally, discovered a process for carbonating water. His invention was a hit at parties and elevated his status in the scientific community. He even published a pamphlet on how to duplicate the process. Within a decade or so, Johann Jacob Schweppe (yes, as in Schweppes ginger ale) produced the first marketed soda water. Priestley made nothing from it.

Evelyn Waugh made a interesting midday drink from it, Guinness and gin.

Priestley went on to achieve many firsts. For one he was the first of a growing tradition of scientists who fled to the United States to avoid persecution. In his case it was because of some very scandalous interpretations of the New Testament.

Before his exile, he discovered oxygen (though he failed to understand it fully) through experiments involving mint sprigs, mice and sealed bottles. He was the first, with Franklin’s aid, to realize the relationship between the “clean” air produced by plants and our dependency upon it.

Franklin upped the anti (as he so often did).

"From these discoveries we are assured, that no vegetable grows in vain, but that from the oak forest to the grass field, every plant is serviceable to mankind…nor is the woods that flourish in the most remote and unpeopled regions unprofitable to us, nor we to them…”

Franklin went on to hope that this new discovery would curb the barely begun deforestation of the inhabited world.

The above is the essential point to Johnson’s book. Not that of celebrating a budding environmentalism (though it is impressive to think about), but the notion that everyday life and lofty ideas are inseparably linked. We live in a day and age where specialization has replaced intellectual curiosity. Johnson’s entertaining book reminds us that it doesn’t take a lot to be aware of the workings of subjects like politics and science. We merely have to be curious.

In the 165 letters written between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, George Washington is mentioned three times. Benjamin Franklin receives five mentions. The mutual rival of Adams and Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, is referred to only twice. Dr. Joseph Priestley, an English scientist and theologian, warrants 52 mentions.