books1001, posts by tag: author:d - LiveJournal

Out of Africa, the first non-fiction book I've encountered on 1001 Books,
is a first-person description of life on a coffee farm in East Africa, near Nairobi, in the years during and after. Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen) bought the farm with her husband, managed it after she and he separated, and was finally forced to sell it because of the collapse of the coffee market in 1931. In this memoir she describes the landscape, her relations with various native peoples, her friends both native and European, and her travels around the countryside. What emerges is a vivid but personal picture of life of a certain class of people in an Africa that was not only different from European civilization then or now, but also utterly different from the post-colonial Africa of today. ( Collapse )

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Publication date: 1974
Edition: Penguin Classics with introduction 2006 (Plume Books 1996)
Publisher: Penguin Classics
270 pages
Source: Toppings Books, Ely

Summary/Back of the book: "Welcome to America at the turn of the twentieth century, where the rhythms of ragtime set the beat. Harry Houdini astonishes audiences with feats of escape, J.P. Morgan dominates the financial world and Henry Ford manufactures cars by making men into machines. Emma Goldman preaches free love and feminism, while ex-chorus girl Evelyn Nesbitt inspires a mad millionaire to murder the architect Stanford White. In this extraordinary chronicle of an age, such real-life characters intermingle with three remarkable families, one black, one Jewish and one prosperous WASP, to create a dazzling literary mosaic that brings to life an era of dire poverty, fabulous wealth and incredible change."

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Underworld - Don DeLillo
Publication date: 1997
Edition: Picador paperback
Publisher: Picador
Pages: 832
Source: bookdepository.co.uk

Summary/Back of the book:

While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the Cold War and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter--the "shot heard around the world"--and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand.

"It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.

Through fragments and interlaced stories--including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others--DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled. --Amazon.com


My review:

When I first saw the blurb of the book I thought it was mainly about baseball, which I know very little about (what I do know is from Summerland by Michael Chabon).While baseball is one of the unifying threads of the novel it's not at its heart a book about baseball, or sport, but about relationships, and the passage of time.

It's a very big book, and it took several sessions to get through it, but it didn't feel like a slog. It jumps around from story to story, which keeps it from getting too bogged down, as each mini story adds to your knowledge and understanding of one of the threads of the overaching story. The main threads are the history of the baseball from "the shot heard around the world" in the opening section as it passes through various hands, the history of Nick Shay and his family from growing up to the early '90s, the background threat of the cold war, and then there are the stories of numberous characters who interact in some way with either Nick or the baseball or both. It's very cleverly done to gradually paint up layer on layer the cancas of the novel, though it took a little time to get used to the changes in perspective generally the characterisation was clear enough that you could tell whose perspective a chapter was from without anything as clumsy as naming the character as the chapter heading as in some novels with multiple points of view.

He also uses real people and events from the period to create context and atmosphere. I'll admit my knowledge of the US during the Cold War is sketchy, but the historical events seemed to be written into the novel well, and weren't jarring, and seemed to be realistically portrayed, likewise the characters were well fleshed without becoming stereotypes. It would have been easy to fall into stereotypes, especially given that a large portion of the novel takes place among an Italian community in New York. The dialogue is unforced and fairly natural. Motivations are believable.

This is not an adventure novel or a thriller, there's not a set plot you can follow from page 1 to page 832, there's not a climax or a big THE END moment. Some people on Amazon have given this novel bad reviews because of that. This is a novel that is about, amongst other things, the passage of time, and continuity, and the fact that while some things end, people die etc. time and events keep moving onwards, and history is constantly being written and re-written. While the novel begins with "The shot heard around the world" and the Soviet Union's testing of a nuclear bomb and ends after the USSR is opening up to foreigners there are hints at ongoing issues both in the protagonist's life (he's on a business trip with his colleague who is also his wife's love), and global events (the consequences of the nuclear testing in the local area).

I very much enjoyed this book and have already bought another novel by Don DeLillo.



My rating: 9.5/10

Ecco Press: 1996
First Edition
175 pages

This short but fascinating novel offers a provocative interweaving of several themes, of which three of the most important are love, madness, and writing. It tells the story of a young graduate student writing a thesis on the fictional French gay novelist Paul Michel. The student learns that Paul Michel has been diagnosed as schizophrenic and confined to an asylum. Encouraged by his girlfriend (the nameless and enigmatic "Germanist") he sets off for France to find Paul Michel and if possible arrange his release. "Foucault" in the title refers to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, a real person, who died in 1984, 9 years before the events described in the novel.

Love refers at times to a relationship between two people, and it takes some surprising turns (a man who considers himself straight is seduced by and falls passionately in love with a gay man) but mostly it refers to a relationship between writer and reader. For whom do we write? For ourselves? for "the public?" for a "target audience?" for our colleagues? Or is the best and most serious writing for one particular person? And what connects the writer to that reader? Is it, or can it be, a kind of love? Paul Michel supposes (hallucinates?) a love between himself and Foucault, although the two are not supposed to have known one another except through their writing. In one of the letters he wrote (but never sent) to Foucault, Paul Michel addresses him as "my Muse," and my "beloved reader," saying "You are the reader for whom I write" and "I have always loved you."

Madness enters the book, obviously, because Paul Michel is supposed to have gone mad. But after we meet him in the asylum partway through the novel, that description seems less and less applicable. He does react violently and aggressively at times, and he has been known to do appalling things, but it may be that the outburst that led to his diagnosis and commitment was really an uncontrolled reaction to the death of his "lover" Foucault, not the result of a chronic mental illness. Throughout the last section of the book, titled "The Midi," he exhibits a touching sensitivity and gentleness.

There is much more in this book, including some things that are puzzling. One of those is the role of the Germanist--toward the end she seems almost a kind of Svengali figure, knowing all and directing others. But that can't be the whole story. The episode of the child on the beach that opens the novel, then is mentioned in one of Paul Michel's letters to Foucault, and explained more fully at the end, makes clear that there was a love between her and Paul Michel, both the love of writer and reader, and (a Platonic) love between two people. There is also the mysterious owl, the immediate cause of the fatal accident at the end. Owls are supposed to be wise, and perhaps the idea here is that there are some questions (in this case "I wonder whether she remembers me") that are best left unanswered. Too much knowledge--represented by the owl--can kill as well as enlighten. But that can't be the whole story. The owl also appears in one of Paul Michel's letters to Foucault, and I'm not sure what it is doing there.

Pointing out puzzling elements is not the same as objecting or criticizing. I liked this book. I would definitely recommend it, particularly to anyone interested in writing and the relationship of authors and audience.

An intergenerational soap opera on the surface, it's really about the stages of grief, memory as an unreliable narrator, and coping.

Shashi Deshpande's latest novel explores the lives of two women, one obsessed with music and the other a passionate believer in Communism, who break away from their families to seek fulfilment in public life. Savitribai Indorekar, born into an orthodox Hindu family, elopes with her Muslim lover and accompanist, Ghulaam Saab, to pursue a career in music. Gentle, strong-willed Leela, on the other hand, gives her life to the Party, and to working with the factory workers of Bombay.

Fifty years after these events have been set in motion, Madhu, Leela's niece, travels to Bhavanipur, Savitribai's home in her last years, to write a biography of Bai. Caught in her own despair over the loss of her only son, Aditya, Madhu tries to make sense of the lives of Bai and those around her, and in doing so, seeks to find a way out of her own grief.

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Verdict: I haven't read much Indian fiction, but I enjoyed the language and execution of Small Remedies with a writer's appreciation for craft, even though the story itself isn't something that would normally interest me much. Almost a perfect book in terms of accomplishing what the author intended, I would say it deserves a place on the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die at least as much as many of the more famous entries do.

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My complete list of book reviews.

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