BIG name for a book: The Return. Victoria Hislop’s second novel, following her popular debut, The Island. Books titled The Return share with The Iliad, Divine Comedy, and War and Peace a BIG thematic title that promises a BIG delivery. Such works are must-reads for any serious Book Being. Victoria Hislop was thinking BIG. Give her credit for that, but you also have to wonder what she was thinking… I do try to avoid clumsy…
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I’ve never been a big fan of the writing style of Joyce Carol Oates. At times her writing seems to me awkward, a bit uneven and unfinished. But her widely acclaimed 2004 novel, The Falls, has a strange, muscular power that drew me in and caused me to lose myself in the very mist rising from those rampaging waters. Niagara Falls has been known over the years to have a remarkable power to entrance, beguile,…
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Fyodor Dostoevsky wanted to write a story about a perfect man and show how that perfection jarred with the world. He created Prince Myshkin, a somewhat Christ-like figure, and placed him with less perfect persons in a complicated scenario populated by Russian aristocrats. You couldn’t help but love the gentle and humble prince, or hate him. Were you a truer person in his presence, or were you threatened by his purity? He graciously accepted being…
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Lennon and McCartney had an almost effortless ability to create something new and interesting from disparate themes, images and sounds. Their infectious energy and awesome brilliance still make me laugh. And despite Maxwell’s Silver Hammer ineluctably falling down on all our heads one day, the Lads shined a light of wonder that made us like the world and each other and the idea that all you need is love, despite all the incomprehensibilities that separate…
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Who the hell do you think you are? Can’t place it, the moment or location, but hasn’t just about everyone been asked this question in this precise way some time in his life? Maybe it was in Spanish, in my case. Or maybe it was a rhetorical question, directed by a frustrated elder or superior at not just me but those around me as well, the Captive Collective (e.g., classroom, military barracks, locker room, office,…
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You’ll surely think of other examples, but for me two that stand out as being highly representative of “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” are the 1996 Yankees (who won the World Series without a super star on the No-I-in-Team team) and Pink Floyd’s trenchant observation of the precariousness of the human condition in The Dark Side of the Moon. I’ll add Richard Powers’s National Book Award winning novel, The Echo…
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In the title story of her short story collection, Everything that Rises Must Converge, Flannery O’Connor introduces us to Julian, a gloomy young man burdened by a martyr complex, and “Julian’s mother,” who embodies everything he detests. Julian, who is living with his mother in a run-down neighborhood where the houses are “bulbous liver-colored monstrosities,” is one year removed from acquiring a college degree at a third rate college. His bleak job prospects, financial dependence…
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A certain arrangement of words may sound right enough to you that you write them down without fully comprehending what they mean grouped together or why they sound right. Where did they come from? Is this the spark of inspiration? More often than not such word groups are conceived and quickly trampled by more desperate ones pushing forward, ensuring the demise of all. (when someone cries Fire in a crowded theater…) Sometimes a spontaneous burst…
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Life is precious. Somebody told me that this morning. On my way to work on a rear bumper sticker on a Chevy veering right off the highway, exiting. I like to think whoever applied that sticker on the Chevy’s rear bumper didn’t really have to tell me that because I’ve known it all along, but who could blame him for reminding me? We could all use a little reminding now and then. We could remind…
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World War I has been on my mind a lot lately. All Quiet on the Western Front planted the seed a long time ago. There followed A Farewell to Arms, The Guns of August, and The Four Horseman of The Apocalypse (by the Spanish writer, Blasco Ibañez), among others. Recently, Deafening, by the Canadian writer, Frances Itani, presented a unique perspective from which to view the impact of the “Great War” on everyday people as…
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