Ah, John Updike.

For me,  his writing is the highest standard of emotional and physical insight.  He has the unmatched ability to elevate the importance of mundanity.  Updike captures the everyday trivialities of his characters’ lives in a way that makes the reader feel as if their own experiences are reflected in the thoughts and reactions of the characters.

His writing is flooded with self-exploration.  Updike’s seemingly personal struggle with religion and with marriage (not fidelity, per se, but the heaviness of commitment), are themes visited and revisited throughout much of his writing, but, for the purpose of this post, I’m referring only to Pigeon Feathers.  What struck me the most about this collection of stories was the unflinching honesty and realism of the characters’ thoughts. In this collection, Updike didn’t shy away from imperfections in his characters, nor did he use those imperfections as the foundation for the stories.  These weaknesses were, as with ourselves and the people we know, merely parts of the whole.

It takes courage to write realistically, and wholeheartedly.  After finishing each story, I, as a reader, felt like I had gotten to know the deepest parts of strangers that passed by me on the street.  As a writer, I felt at the conclusion of each story as though an idea that had been sitting covered up in a dark room had its sheet pulled off  and was exposed completely to daylight.  The writing was visceral and clean, sharp and thoughtful.  It was filled with emotion and imagery and honesty and vulnerability, and to be privy to that level of intimacy was a rare pleasure.

But, I will admit to waning affection at multiple points throughout the collection.  “Archangel” was indulgent, and I thought that “Pigeon Feathers” was, as well.  Maybe my tolerance for religious exploration is low.  I don’t like to see an author working through a personal struggle so clearly – I prefer subtle ideas and a concentration on the outcome.  “Pigeon Feathers” lingered far too long in the personal debate over the existence of God, and I believe it would have been a more effective story had it skipped the internal battle.

That said, this was a collection I’ll read again, and I have no doubt it will feel completely different but just as warm the next time.

Does the attitude towards and descriptions of sex in the novels of the current crop of successful male authors (Franzen, Wallace, Chabon, etc.) say anything about the modern males? (courtesy of the NY Times, illustration by Paula Scher)

The belief that food has the ability to heal is shared by foodies and Jews everywhere. Courtesy of Cassie’s food-centric blog, I recently discovered  that very belief has a quarterly to call its own.  Introducing Remedy.

A few years ago, Amy and I started what has become a tradition, celebrating Puerto Rico Appreciation Day on New Years Day.  We make Pastelles.

Long Johns (Uniqlo) and socks (Woolrich / Wigwam) make the winter acceptable.

Google’s new browser, Chrome, lives up to its claims of being faster and smarter. How do they keep doing it?

Tupac and Biggie’s murders are still unsolved, but thankfully we still have Raekwon.

I am currently reading the second book in the Rabbit series by John Updike , Rabbit Redux. Chronicling the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the series has thus far painted a picture of a loser – a man who had some potential as a high school Basketball player, but who in mid life has slumped into annonymity and ultimately a plodding and mundane (but often violent)existence.

He uses any opportunity to reference his past glory, and does his level best to force his son into choosing sports, so he too can become the jock, the popular kid, the best at something.

Reading the first two novels, in tandem with the debut of drama Hung, on More4 got me thinking. The fallen sports star, is as much an architype of American society as the prom queen, the jock and the nerd.  You simply dont get these characters in British literature, or even in British life. The insular nature of practical americana means that when the drive, ambition and ability of the individual fail, the American dream desserts these individuals – leaving them behind with the underclass of society.

Life Class, Diana Athill

Published September 2009 by Granta / House of Anansi

ISBN: 9781847021230

The Recommend

This arrives in Canada courtesy of House of Anansi’s snowflake-covered tryst with Granta — a collection of autobiographies by the legendary literary figure Diana Athill.

The editor of Richler, Updike, Roth, Mailer, de Beauvoir, Rhys, Naipaul, and Moore has divided her life into a half-dozen memoirs, four of which are collected here.

If you work in books, love books, love authors, have slept with an author, have been jilted by an RAF pilot, want to start a publishing house, are being underpaid at a publishing house, fear advancing age or seek a happy life still writing at 92, it’s well worth your time.

PS – since it is four books in one volume, I tended to read one, set it down, come back a week later and dive back in.

PPS – I have to say that no title is more deserving of an ebook edition than this fantastic, forearm-cramping tome!
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About Michael Tamblyn

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Michael Tamblyn heads up Content, Sales & Merchandising at Kobo.

Before that BookNet Canada.  Along side those, Adjunct Professor at SFU’s Masters of Publishing Program.

Over all of the above, decent dad, enthusiastic cook, ineffective dancer and performer of infrequent yet well-publicized acts of home maintenance.

Datorita SuperBlog si a serviciului, am reusit sa citesc o carte de 260 pagini A5 in 3 saptamani. Asta da contraperformanta… Totusi, cum v-am obisnuit, cateva citate…Centaurul, de John Updike, scriitor american din secolul trecut…Cartea a aparut in colectia Cotidianul in 2006.

“Nu reuseam sa-mi inchipui opera mea ; dar stralucirea ei lipsita de trasaturi precise forma miezul tuturor lucrurilor, in timp ce il duceam pe tat ape coada unei comete, prin vazduhul plin de surprize al natiunii noastre muzicale”

“-Eram sigur! Ne-au mintit! De ce naiba si-ar pierde cineva vremea spaland toata viata niste trepte de marmura alba, ca indata ce le curate frumos cu apa si sapun, sa apara un cretin cu pantofi murdari sis a lase urme pe ele? Nu mi s-a parut niciodata verosimil”

“Scoala este acolo unde te duci in perioada dintre epoca in care nu te pot tine parintii sic ea in care nu te poate tine industria”

“La varsta ta aveam atata timp de omorat, incat am si acum mainile patate de sange.”

“Majoritatea bolilor noastre vin din doua locuri, de la cap si de la spinare. Noi am facut doua greseli: prima a fost ca ne-am ridicat in doua picioare, si a doua ca am inceput sa gandim. Asta oboseste sira spinarii si nervii. Creeaza o anumita tensiune nervoasa, iar creierul modifica timpul.”

“-Ia-l cu dumneata! Exclama tata. Daca e un pusti care sa merite o vacanta, apoi el este.Gologanii mei s-au topit. E timpul sa-si faca rost de un nou tata. Eu sunt un conglomerat  ambulant de deseuri.”

For today’s “Thousand Word Thursday – baseball sans words” I present a 6,000+ word document. How does that make sense? Well, I know it’s not a picture, but the way Mr. Updike writes – to me that’s imagery at its finest, even if it’s word imagery. Of course I’m talking about John Updike’s famous “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” piece from the New Yorker. Enjoy.

Rabbit Angstrom and John Updike and I are all of an age, born in the early years of the depression, attended public school during World War, took on family responsibilities in the 1950s and 1960s. John Updike died earlier this year and, before he did, he killed off Rabbit in his last of his Rabbit tetrology, Rabbit at Rest. They are gone, and I am still here.

Updike states a writer’s hope for remembrance in one of his late poems which the Times reprinted at the time  of this death: Requiem. As he says, whatever our puny achievements and concerns, “death is real, and dark, and huge.” It is dark and huge for Rabbit, but never entirely real.

Rabbit at Rest, like the other Rabbit books, seems to be a book about sex, but I read it as a book about life and death. Life — like sex– is temporary, real only for Rabbit while he is experiencing it. And that’s Updike’s great gift to the reader, Rabbit’s sensual experience of things.

“A couple won’t kill me,” he reassures her, and to be polite takes a few macadamia nuts into his fingers. Nuggets, they are like small lightweight nuggets with a fur of ssalt. He especially loves the way, when he holds one in his mouth a few seconds and then gently works it between his crowned molars, it breaks into halves, the surface of the fissure as smooth to the tongue as glass, as baby skin.

The surface of life is often trivial: TV surfing, baseball scores, the colors of a woman’s hair. Rabbit’s experience of this surface, this life, is intensely in the present. All of the Rabbit novels are written in the present tense, as Rabbit lives from moment to moment. He lives, he feels, but he doesn’t love very much and in the end he is tired and ready to rest.

Cormac McCarthy en route vers l’apocalypse

http://www.rue89.com/cabinet-de-lecture/cormac-mccarthy-en-route-vers-lapocalypse

Quelques mois après » Un homme » , de Philip Roth -autre géant vivant des lettres yankee-, Cormac McCarthy propose lui aussi une réflexion sur la mort. Et, un an après avoir revisité le western ( » Non, ce pays n’est pas pour le vieil homme » ), revisite le roman apocalyptique. Roman le plus étrange de son auteur, » La Route » obtint le Pulitzer 2007. Et est le premier coup de coeur du Cabinet de lecture en cette rentrée 2008.

Depuis la disparition de Norman Mailer, Philip Roth et Cormac McCarthy sont -avec Thomas Pynchon- les derniers géants de leur génération. Deux écrivains reclus, introuvables, quasi impossibles à interviewer. Aussi, en juin, quand le dernier accepta l’invitation télévisée d’Oprah Winfrey, ce fut le tonnerre. C’est que le roman venait de recevoir le Prix Pulitzer 2007. Quelques semaines auparavant, les frères Coen avaient projeté à Cannes l’adaptation de » Non, ce pays n’est pas pour le vieil homme » .

Ainsi, après une décennie de silence, l’auteur du capital » Méridien de sang » (1985) refaisait donc bel et bien surface. Et montrait à quel point ses fictions étaient utiles.

Le monde d’hier, le monde de demain : un roman de transition

» La Route » est un vrai roman de transition. Idéal pour passer d’un monde à l’autre. Les ombres y sont aussi vivantes que les hommes, et on ne sait pas où on est.

Nous voici dans un pays où les cendres fument encore, un pays que vient de traverser une tragédie (laquelle ? nous ne saurons jamais). Ne subsistent que des routes, des ruines, des palissades, des restes d’incendies.

Un homme et son petit garçon semblent être seuls survivants de la tragédie. En pleine apocalypse, ils marchent, avancent vers les côtes du Sud. Ils poussent un caddie orné d’un rétroviseur chromé, où est stocké le strict nécessaire. Ils croisent nombres de cadavres, de ruines, de carcasses. Tel un prédateur, le père quête les conserves pourries et les ramène comme nourriture à son fils. Le parcours est lent, très lent, dans la peur, la pluie, le vent, la neige, la nuit.

L’un comme l’autre vivent surtout la peur au ventre. Peur de la mort, certes, mais aussi peur d’eux-mêmes : quand l’adulte voit son reflet dans la glace, son premier réflexe est de pointer le revolver. Les dialogues sont rares. Ils matérialisent trop la peur. Et pour survivre ici, il faut marcher. Ils croiseront quelques » survivants » , êtres non-définis d’un monde en recomposition.

C’est que le couple est pisté. Sont-ils les derniers hommes du monde connu ? L’existence même de l’enfant devient une énigme : il est le futur incarné… Mais il reste quelques autres hommes qui ont survécu. Rares. Peut-être notre duo est-il, seulement, le dernier spécimen de » gentils » , de » ceux qui portent le feu » . Aussi doivent-ils échapper aux pillards.

Roman réaliste et new age

Dans » Le Méridien de sang » , dans » Non, ce pays n’est pas pour le vieil homme » -deux westerns-, comme dans ce dernier livre, McCarthy revisite des genres littéraires. Dans ces derniers -polar, western, SF-, il est souvent question de la fin d’un homme, de la fin d’un monde. D’une civilisation. Le genre a ceci de particulier qu’il angle, qu’il métaphorise. Qu’il offre la matière et l’anti-matière.

« La Route » est comme une métaphore plurielle. Globale. A l’heure où, allongement de la durée de vie et clonage faisant, l’homme a un rapport de moins en moins rationnel à sa vie et à sa mort, le livre de McCarthy agit comme le roman d’une autre rationalité. D’un monde où l’homme n’est plus seul, mais où il n’a pas conscience de ce qui l’accompagne. Il n’a plus conscience que de sa survie.

Ici, le père » ne savait qu’une chose, que l’enfant était son garant. Il dit : « S’il n’est pas la parole de Dieu, Dieu n’a jamais parlé’ » . Ici, les survivants sont » assis au bord de la route comme des aéronautes en détresse » .

McCarthy, dans son style toujours très resserré, allie roman réaliste et récit new age. Un livre narratif et puissamment philosophique. Qui unit le défini et l’indéfini : ici, peu de faits, peu d’histoire, seulement le souffle pur de ce qui fait survivre.

De McCarthy à Spielberg en passant par les Pink Floyd

Cela donne un livre où les deux garçons semblent fuir leur propre mort comme leur propre vie. Où tout ce qu’ils croisent (objet comme signe comme homme) semble symboliser la mort. En lisant » La Route » on pense beaucoup à  » Duel » , le premier téléfilm de Spielberg (1975), à cette course à la mort entre la voiture et le titanesque camion.

En lisant » La Route » , on se dit que » Wish you were here » , l’album de Pink Floyd sortit la même année que » Duel » -l’album de » Welcome to the Machine » et de » Shine on you Crazy Diamond » , l’hommage à Syd Barrett- a trouvé son histoire.

» La Route » se lira avec » Un homme » de Roth, paru en France à l’automne. Deux auteurs qui n’avaient jamais si profondément évoqué la mort. Roth est un urbain, et » Un homme » est un livre psychologique. McCarthy est un nomade, et ses romans sont des romans d’espaces.

Le souffle et la perspective qu’on trouve dans la dernière partie de » La Route » est titanesque. C’est le roman le plus dépouillé de McCarthy, un vrai roman car il est un espace-temps.

Lightman’s Song of Two Souls or whatever the hell it’s called isn’t impressing me so far. Though when I read a little bit of it out loud the other night to my roommate in an attempt to show how silly it sounded, I was a bit astounded to hear it sound quite lovely. Out loud, it has a nice rhythm and a fast pace that I do enjoy quite a bit. I haven’t given up on it yet.

I actually abandoned my current reading for a chance to devour Lightman, but being non-plussed, I’ve switched back to John Updike’s posthumous collection, My Father’s Tears. It’s good.

Updike’s stories are heavy with emotion and solidly character-driven without forsaking plot. The stories move through themes and each of the seventeen stories following the first (‘Morocco’) seems like a logical progression from the previous.

A major theme in My Father’s Tears is the weight of aging and the effects it has on reflective, articulate aging-or-elderly gentlemen. Is it possible that Updike himself was a reflective, articulate aging-or-elderly gentleman when writing these stories? I would guess yes.

The titular story, ‘My Father’s Tears,’ is an eloquent and painful look at an old man’s relationship with his now-deceased father. The narrator gives glimpses into their past relationship while inhabiting a distant future (one that contains high school reunions, wives, in-laws, second wives). The reflections are clear and clearly painful:

I blamed it on our handshake: for eighteen years we had never had occasion for this social gesture, this manly contact, and we had groped our way into it only recently. He was taller than I, though I was not short, and I realized, his hand warm in mine while he tried to smile, that he had a different perspective than I. I was going somewhere, and he was seeing me go. I was growing in my own sense of myself, and to him I was getting smaller. He had loved me, it came to me as never before.

Way to go, Updike. The stories are all pervaded by this steady base-sadness of saying goodbye. Of saying goodbye to fathers, to children, to wives. Of saying goodbye to the past. They are beautifully written and remind me that with Updike’s death in January, time is still passing, and we are still saying goodbye.

Is the girls behavior in “A&P”  itself a kind of statement or rebellion of some sort? What message are they sending by walking into the A&P in their bathing suits? What messages do the girls send through the commodities they pick? Why is it significant that they choose a supermarket for their self-display?

Questions for John Updike’s “A&P”:Is Sammy’s quitting a form of rebellion or a statement of some sort? Does it have any meaning? What is he rebelling against? Are there unconscious targets of his rebellion?

As a mild change of pace here at ALS, I thought I’d run you through the books I read whilst I was away, and share my thoughts thereof. First off, a couple of things I believe: anyone who wants to be a good writer needs to first be a good reader; anyone who claims they have ‘a favourite book’ isn’t to be trusted; and finally, young Suits will learn more about how to be better at their jobs by reading Updike, Roth, James and Marquez then they will in Whipple, Herd (personally, I’ve always harboured a soft spot for Earls’ first book, which is essentially about a banana) or Ogilvy on Advertising. Leave the ‘Advertising and Marketing’ books to the Planners – they love that shit.

So, to my reading holiday. I’ll start with the only advertising book in the pile – Matt Beaumont’s ‘e2’. If you work in advertising and haven’t read ‘e’ then you’re really missing out, and whilst the follow up lacks some of the energy of the first one, it’s still one of those books you have to read. Beaumont, as you might expect from a Creative Director, can’t write Suits particularly well, and Planners are patently a total mystery to him, but he sure can write brilliant Creatives and management. It goes without saying that it’s very funny, and it goes without saying that some strands are much more affective than others (some of them, it has to be said, are utter nonsense), but I was genuinely surprised to find myself getting a bit emotional about one of the characters as I came to the end of the book. These are cartoon creations, but some of them come with a pretty sizeable cartoon heart. Go read.

Richard Ford’s ‘The Sportswriter’ had come highly recommended from somebody whose opinion I respect, so I was pretty disappointed to find it cold, emotionless, contrived and utterly lacking in any kind of heart. Ford’s clearly a very good writer, and I could appreciate the craft of it, but it was all pretty joyless, and ‘Independence Day’ and ‘The Lay Of The Land’ made the journey back home unread.

The same was very much not the case with John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ books. This was my first experience of Updike, having always looked to Roth for my ‘Contemporary American Fiction’ fix, and I can now gleefully admit that I’d missed out. For the unfamiliar amongst you, there are four volumes of Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ books (‘Rabbit, Run’, ‘Rabbit Redux’, ‘Rabbit Is Rich’ and ‘Rabbit At Rest’) each written and set a decade apart, and dealing with the life and times of the eponymous Rabbit, a high school sporting legend and local hero raging against the fading memory of his glories, and his family and friends, and I can’t recommend them strongly enough. Rabbit is far from a sympathetic character, but Updike writes him with such a wonderful mix of frailty, fury, insecurity and arrogance that you just can’t help but care. These are incredibly human books, and incredibly involving as a result – and also, at times, extremely funny. The way in which they were created means that you’re not just reading the story of Rabbit’s life, you’re reading the story of America in the second half of the 20^th Century, and it makes for a subtle, involving and addictive read. Finishing ‘Rabbit At Rest’ was quite a big moment – there was a genuine sense of loss as I realised I’d never get to read a Rabbit book for the first time again. Anyway – the ‘Pomposity Sensor’ is ticking, so I’ll move on.

To balance the amount of middle-aged naval gazing literature I’d brought out with me, I dipped into Wodehouse from time to time – a couple of hours spent dashing through the merry travails of Jeeves and Wooster were hours pleasantly passed. It lightened the mood and it made me laugh out loud, and sometimes that’s a very important thing.

I’ll dash through the rest now before I bore you all terminally. Victoria Hislop’s ‘The Return’ was just about smart enough to sit slightly above your standard holiday puffery (though not miles above), and Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s ‘The Angel’s Game’ was Garcia Marquez re-imagined by somebody who is distinctly lacking in soul. Not a bad book by any means, but as a Spanish novel dealing with preternatural themes, it’s playing in a pretty tough league, and it struggles. Geoffrey Household’s ‘Rogue Male’ on the other hand (an old-fashioned ripsnorter of a tale, following our protagonist as he attempts to avoid being captured after a failed assassination attempt) is bonkers, and brilliant. And finally, of Roth’s ‘The Human Stain’, an achingly intelligent book, all I’ll say is that it’s one of Roth’s finest. That should be all you need to know. And finally, from time to time, I dipped into Louis MacNeice – ‘Snow‘ and ‘Sunlight On The Garden‘ are worth the price of the collection on their own.

So there you have it – read Updike, Roth, Wodehouse and Beaumont. When it comes to Richard Ford, don’t believe the hype. But, most importantly, just get reading – proper books. Put down John Grant, and step away from Earls. There are far too many wonderful books out there to waste your time reading about advertising. Apart from on ALS, obviously.

“Villages” is the second novel I’ve read by John Updike. When Mr. Updike died last year, I was ashamed to say I did not remember reading any of his books, which felt – to me – like admitting you never read anything by that Shakespeare guy.

The first Updike book I experienced – “S” – drove me to tears. In it, a female protagonist is determined not to be the victim of her husband’s philandering and embarks on a spiritual journey.

“Villages” is a book about a man’s sexual awakening and subsequent sexual transgressions.

Owen McKenzie, once he makes up his mind to cheat on his wife once, then seems to go through the rest of the book almost making a game of his conquests. The village women who willingly lead him down the road to repeated adultery seem mostly to have the same thing in common, they are married to men with boorish behavior and are looking for some excitement in the sack, in the park, in the office, wherever they can find titillation over the illicitness of their affairs.

McKenzie is not a very sympathetic figure. In fact, several times throughout the book, he points to his affairs as evidence of his charmed life. The townswomen, for whatever reason, can sniff him out as an easy target.

One thing that was never very clear in the book until the end was why Owen felt such dissatisfaction with his marriage. His wife, Phyllis, a brainy ethereal blonde, was the one woman he felt a strong attraction to in college. Her sangfroid and Waspy background were a turn-on to the young man climbing the social ladder.

After a period of plundering that Owen refers to as his “adolescence”, he decides to settle down in the end with the wife of the new preacher, who scandalizes the village by divorcing her husband to marry Owen.

Only in the end do we learn that Owen mostly craved a loving wife, who told him she loved him and who, like his second wife, Julia, missed him when he was gone. That is the explanation that is offered, but it doesn’t seem to fully explain away years of indiscriminate affairs. In one scene, Owen decides to cop a feel of one of the village women merely because they passed each other in a hallway and they were both inebriated. That gesture led to another affair and a child of indeterminate paternity.

This book might help explain why Updike reportedly was labeled a misogynist by some. However, I don’t feel as if the author – who is merely telling a story with clear-eyed dispassion – is the villain. There would seem to be many villains lurking beneath the respectable veneer of our communities.

We enter this week headlong into the territory most familiar to people who might have read a bit of Emerson: his self, lead by the essay “Self-Reliance.” It has become, ironically, perhaps the most conventional of his essays–the one always referred to as evidence of what a literary critic called “The Imperial Self.” A more recent version of this convention, this critique of Emersonian egotism came in 2003, in the celebrations around his 200th birthday. An editorial in the New York Times blamed Emerson for the American tradition of self-absorption, the excessive egotism that leads to greed on Wall Street and go-it-alone foreing policy. Another version of this critique, less agressive but still distrustful of Emerson, came from John Upike in the New Yorker. A more recent and more positive view of the Emersonian self and its lessons for us today can be found in this Op-Ed by the literary critic Harold Bloom “Out of Panic, Self-Reliance.”

I said irony regarding these conventional views of the Emersonian self: the irony, of course, given that Emerson writes (in these very essays, certainly in “Self-Reliance”) about resisting convention and conformity of thinking. So what do yout think? If the convention is Emersonian imperial ego, is this all that we find in these essays–or is there a resisting vision, a contrast, if not a contradiction, that we can read?

One way into this, I will suggest, is to consider more directly what Emerson himself writes and thinks regarding contradiciton (and also convention). I think there is more to say than what, traditionally, people have said for Emerson.

Here is an entire issue of the journal In Character devoted to the idea and the word “self-reliance.”

No matter in how many ways our lives are demonstrated to be insignificant, we can only live them as if they are not.

-John Updike

John Updike's 'Terrorist'

I was round by the British Museum the other day when I stumbled across this great little bookshop, the London Review Bookshop. I could write a whole post about the place itself, from its selection of books to its wonderful (if rather tiny) coffee shop attached but I’ll save that for another day (as an aside though, really do go and visit if you’re in the vicinity).

Anyway, I was in this lovely bookshop and perusing the shelves when I stumbled across the John Updike selection. A few years ago I read the Rabbit books (‘Rabbit, Run’, ‘Rabbit Redux’, ‘Rabbit is Rich’ and ‘Rabbit At Rest’) as they were recommended to me by a very well-read friend of mine and I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed them. For no particular reason, however, I had read nothing of his since, so I decided to get myself a ‘new Updike’ for Summer 2009. After cruising through various titles I picked out ‘Terrorist’.

The back of the book (the Penguin Books version of 2007) gave a very conceptual outline: “John Updike, America’s foremost writer on the times we live in, turns his brilliant novelist’s gaze on the United States post-9/11 and creates a gripping, searing and meticulously exact portrait of what it means to be alienated and powerless in the early years of the twenty-first century.”

The actual synopsis I would give off the cuff goes something like this: A story about a short but critical period (maybe about a year or so) in the life of a young egyptian-american boy who is just about to graduate from high-school and head into a job his imam at his mosque recommended to him, driving a lorry for a furniture company.

To be honest, I know shamefully little about any of the major religions and it is one area in which I have never been that worried about extending my knowledge. And admittedly, on the surface reading a story about a period in the life of a young man’s life which centres around his faith, wasn’t that gripping to someone who really isn’t big on religion. However, I decided to give it a go despite the misgivings I had – no time like the present to broaden one’s horizons.

The first few pages were surprisingly easy to fall into. Updike has a fantastic writing style that eases you into the story and its characters quickly and unobtrusively, and I surprised myself how quickly I became engrossed in the story of Ahmad, this clean, smart and upright student who is the focus of our novel. With each new character introduced, especially Jack the life-weary school Guidance Counsellor, I found myself eagerly turning pages, keen to progress their seemingly uneventful lives.

Updike has been masterful with his characters in this book. There are just the right number for you to care about, with enough on the fringe of the story to provide a backdrop of everyday reality to the unfolding events but without distracting from our main focus.

There are also no ridiculous twists and turns of fate that beggar belief that you often associate with a ‘thriller’, but instead the quiet and constant passing of time unraveling the plot with no need for gimmickry. I think the beauty of this book is not in the ‘not knowing what is coming’, but instead ‘knowing’ (or having a strong hunch) what is coming and seeing how it all happens.

That is not to say there aren’t a few twists and turns that you don’t see coming in the last third of the book (none of which I shall mention for fear of spoiling it) but it isn’t the objective of the book to point and laugh shouting ‘gotcha’. It’s the point to chronicle how it ended up happening.

For me Updike’s brilliance with this novel lies in capturing the absolute essence of his subject matter and characters, marking the passage of time with all content mattering and all content that matters captured, but without getting bogged down in irrelevant minutia that would otherwise result in a turgid novel.

Having read some other reviews about this novel, there is a school of thought that suggests the description is in fact too heavy, but I disagree. Granted, I may have skim-read the direct quotes from the Qur’an that I had no chance of understanding, but there always followed in the following paragraphs an explanation to the relevance and I felt that this was engaging to read, not a chore at all.

I also actually learnt rather a lot. Granted it comes through fiction, but I somehow trust John Updike to get it right when he is talking about the Qur’an and Islam. It is a subject I had little interest in, and yet now I find myself curious to read about it a bit more. Surely that is not bad for a work of fiction?!

I don’t want to fill this with spoilers for the book (if you want spoilers check out the Wikipedia entry for ‘Terrorist’), so I guess it will remain necessarily cryptic, but what I will say is go buy this book. Borrow it. Do whatever. Even if you don’t think it will interest you. I bought it on a partial whim and to be honest, even then plot didn’t appeal, and here I am spending the best part of a Thursday tea-time writing about how fantastic this novel is and recommending to anyone . I guess that makes me a little sad, but I think I can live with that for a while …

Prompted by his death, I’ve been slowly picking my way through John Updike’s Rabbit series. Rabbit’s boss Pajasek, upon laying Rabbit off from his job running a printing press drops this note, which would suggests that Craig Newmark, Arianna Huffington, Google and the internet in general are off the hook for the collapse of the newspaper industry.

Maybe one of the Brewer dailies can take you on, maybe something in Philly or up in Allentown, though what with papers dropping out or doubling up all over the state there’s something of a glut in the trade right now.

Monday 21 July 2008

I am now 19
The death of naivety?
No longer can I ramble wild, with age as ammo for action
Yeah – of course I can
18 was a busy year

Today is my birthday and I am fully content
I haven’t downed drink, partied hard or swallowed a feast… I’ve chilled
I’ve done things I enjoy in times of relaxation >>>
Cycling fast across the French countryside, returning home with pained muscles
Lying in the Dubieniec bath reading Updike for hours
Stretching in the hammock listening to the twitter of birds and the scrape of the neighbour’s rake

One of the books I bought with my wonderful book store gift-certificate birthday present was “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz, which I later discovered had been one of the books read in my Boston bookclub.  Boston Bookclub, we are in harmony even now.   How I miss you.

In other book-related news, I went crazy yesterday and ordered 3 books from Half.com.  Oh how I love Half.com, with its promise of $1.49 paperbacks, except that the price never includes shipping.

The books which are now headed my way are:

1)  “Dry”, by Augusten Burroughs.  I loved his first book, “Running With Scissors”.  I recently devoured his latest, “A Wolf at the Table”, about his life growing up with a sociopathic father.  It was terrifying but also reminded me how macabre and hilarious his writing is.

I recalled perusing “Dry” at the airport when it first came out several years ago, and deciding I couldn’t afford to buy it new just then.  So I was long overdue to read it.  (In airport news, the Raleigh airport has a used book store!  I KNOW!!  The last time I traveled by air in early May I bought and read “Ethan Frome” by Edith Wharton, because I somehow thought I had never read anything by Edith Wharton, except I have– “The Age of Innocense” and “The House of Mirth”, both of which I loved.  So oops.  Anyway “Ethan Frome” was absorbing but kind of a downer.)

2)  “Nightwood”, by Djuna Barnes.  Highly recommended to me by my friend Donn, I have been meaning to read this book for over a year, but every time I was at the library or the bookstore, it slipped my mind– kind of like how I can never remember to pick up milk at the grocery store, but I constantly buy packets of Taco Seasoning like there’s a great Taco Seasoning Famine sweeping the nation, even though we have a stack of such packets in the pantry at home.  So in conclusion, I’m excited to read “Nightwood”.

3) “The Stories of John Cheever”, by Guess Who.  I recently read a review of a new biography of Cheever by Blake Bailey entitled “Cheever: A Life”, and the review made me extremely curious to read the author’s work.  (Although currently I’m reading “Rabbit is Rich”, by John Updike, and it’s kind of depressing me with it’s ‘lives of quiet desperation in the suburbs’ theme.  And since Cheever is apparently known as the ‘Chekov of the suburbs’, I’m probably in for a fairly downbeat ride.  But we’ll see.)

John Updike is one of those authors (along with Hemingway and Faulkner) whose work I know I should have read, or read more of, but just never did.  So I’m trying to remedy this one book at a time, although the Garner public library branch is not helping me.  Each time I go in there looking for a particular book by an author, they have a different book by that author that is not the one I wanted.  So last month I went in looking for “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand (don’t even get me started on my hate-hate relationship with Ayn Rand) and came out with “Anthem”, which I probably won’t read.  I went in looking for one of the earlier books in Updike’s Rabbit collection, and came out with a later one which probably spoils all the twists in the earlier books and presents a fairly depressed protagonists in his early 50s who feels that his best days are behind him.  Another problem I have with the Garner library (and I hate to dis on libraries, because I loves me some libraries) is that it shelves romance novels in with regular fiction, which means that every third book on the shelves has some variation of the word ‘passion’ or ‘rogue’ in the title.  I can see why they are shelved in this way though, since shelving the romances separately would only highlight how many more romance novels there are than non-romance novels.  Dang it.
Anyway.  Sorry for the rambling.  What are you reading right now?

gestern starke Bilder bei John Updike: Die Witwen von Eastwick: “… sie hatten sich in das Heer älterer Paare eingereiht, die in Krankenhäusern die Wartezimmer füllen …” >> Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging! >> “… Jims Krankheit trieben sie und Jim … hinunter in die breite Gesellschaft in die Täler der Sterbenden – eine riesige Herde, die wie eine Bisonstampede auf die tödliche Klippe zustürmte … ” >> (wenn es so wäre, das Bild, wäre es beeindruckend, aber es ist so spröde und will nicht in meinen Kopf) >>

I know this is late for Easter, but I just saw it this morning and thought it was great and wanted to share it.  This is from Ross Douthat’s blog -

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

- the late John Updike, “Seven Stanzas at Easter”