Twitter-Gate

Apparently Alice Hoffman got a little twitter-happy after reading an unfavorable review of her new book, The Story Sisters, by Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe. Unfortunately, if one puts one's art out into the world, the world will respond, and often the most classy thing to do is shut up and suck it up... Salon.com has an interesting take on this story, regarding the non-apology apology.

Brooklyn

....Well, I took Colm Toibin's new release Brooklyn from atop the pile and read it. Yep, mistake. This is well crafted account of a young Irish woman's immigrant experience in Brooklyn, NY, after the Second World War, and Toibin's perceptive portrayal of the shifting nature of familial relationships with those left behind is the best part of the novel. However, it lacks humor, and only humor or writing that is more than meticulous - that is ravishing - could save this book from being, I hate to say it, boring. My opinion is very much in the minority, I know, given Brooklyn's other reviews, but nothing frustrates me more than an immensely talented craftsman (or woman) forgetting that novels shouldn't only illuminate or educate, but entertain. 

Women and Readers first....

I suffer from a queasy concoction of guilt and desperation if I abandon a book before its conclusion, as though I were elbowing my way past the infirm to reach a lifeboat. I made it to the end of John Banville's Birchwood (1973), but I confess that I skimmed at an ever-more frantic pace through its final third. God, this book was awful....Fine writing, 'tis true, but so damned joyless... After completing Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture some time ago, I felt I'd had my fill of miserable Irish history, no matter how moving, so I've got what I deserve for returning to that well. Question is, what do I do with Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, perched atop my 'to read' list?...

The Orange Prize 2009

Marilynne Robinson has been awarded the Orange Prize for fiction for Home, her follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead. The Sunday Times have named Robinson the world's best living writer of prose, a stretch I think, but an homage to her unwavering focus on the work itself, and her disregard of literary fashion. She has written three novels in twenty-eight years (what a nice steady pace...), with quiet plots and a strong religious and philosophical intent.  My review of Home can be found in the blog archives for Wednesday 14th January. (Photo credit: Ulf Andersen/Getty)

Mme. Barbery's Divine Gallic Charm

"Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate while others are born. And in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb. So let us drink a cup of tea."

Wise words from Parisian concierge Renee, who makes pedagogical efforts to appear semi-retarded so as not to upset those bourgeois notions about intelligence and class still tenderly held by the majority of her oblivious, self-absorbed employers. 

French author Muriel Barbery's delicious novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog (now available in paperback) merits its runaway success, and much credit must go to Alison Anderson's rich and skillful translation. The quiet story of how the intellectual Renee is coached out of her shell by the arrival of a Japanese tenant, is delicately mirrored by the precocious musings of twelve-year-old Paloma, the daughter of another tenant, as she calmly plans her own suicide.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog's combination of bourgeois mise-en-scene, cinematic references, lush reveling in la table, philosophical and metaphysical debate and Japanese esthetics makes this book so irresistibly, well, French. Barbery's light touch triggered a surprisingly strong emotional response from this reader.  A particular highlight is Renee's flinching in the face of an employer's grammatical confusion between the verbs "to bring" and "to take." A confusion, I fear, which is so rampantly out of control in American English that it may need to be given up as a lost cause.

(Note to fans: Barbery's first book, Gourmet Rhapsody (Une Gourmandise) will be released in the USA this coming August.)

International Man Booker Prize

Canadian author Alice Munro has been awarded the 2009 International Man Booker Prize, in recognition of her "practically perfect" short story collections, chronicling small town Ontarian life. She could be considered a 'domestic' writer,(to use that slightly derogative term so associated with the concerns of us little women) following in the footsteps of Austen and Eliot, though she is more similar to Muriel Spark than Anita Brookner, as she tackles big issues in the miniaturist form (though without Spark's bite). The announcement was a minor upset, as Australian author Peter Carey had been deemed the favorite to win this time around. 

(photo: Andrew Testa / Rex Features)

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned...

Wells Tower's first story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, appeared in my in-box weeks ago, but I only got around to it during our recent break by Chesapeake Bay - an appropriate landscape of Waspish towns and lobsters shacks, pick-up trucks and yacht yards, foreclosed condos and back-creek ranchers in which to read his derisive assessment of our uncanny ability to balls-up the American dream. Tower's book has been extensively reviewed since idling on my desk, with raves from such as the New York Times to the Independent - so I guess the short story is not, quite, dead. So many raves that it seemed heavily freighted to disappoint.

It didn't. It is a remarkable debut about dysfunctional fathers and sons, sibling rivalry, bickering buddies, and messy love affairs, whose relentless catalogue of misery is saved - made bearable, made un-putdownable - by a combination of savage humor and literary agility. In "Retreat," a brother's festering jealousy peaks in the nastiest of conclusions, in "Wild America," adolescent despair and competitiveness swerves by disaster, and in the title story, a speedy yarn of gut-churning violence recounted in chirpy American-ese, two happy-go-lucky Vikings learn the unsettling side-effects of developing a conscience. Man's inability to vanquish lust, greed, envy, and careless destructiveness, Tower implies, stands between us and the potential for paradise. And the price paid for love is to lie awake night after night, waiting to hear "the sounds of men rowing toward your home." A chewy, heartbreaking collection - heartily recommended.