Everyone in the store is really looking forward to Monday, March 22, 2010. Chang-rae Lee is coming to Lemuria!!  He will be signing (5 pm) and reading (5:30 pm) his new novel, The Surrendered.  He has never been to the bookstore before so I thought I would take a little time and introduce him to you.

Chang-rae Lee was born in Seoul, Korea in 1965 and immigrated to the United States in 1968 with his family.  Lee was raised in the suburbs of New York and graduated from Yale University in 1987.  He began his career as a equities analyst on Wall Street but quickly realized that writing was his passion.  He soon finished an unpublished novel, Agnew Belittlehead, and was accepted to the creative writing program at the University of Oregon where he earned his MFA in 1993.  He has since published four novels, Native Speaker (1995), A Gesture Life (1999), Aloft (2004) and The Surrendered (2010).  He has won various awards throughout his writing career including: “New Voices Award,” Oregon Books Award, ALA Notable Book Award, American Book Award, and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.   In 1999, The New Yorker named him one of the 20 best American writers under the age of 40.

Here is a video of Chang-rae Lee discussing The Surrendered with WNYC on the The Leonard Lopate Show:

You don’t want to miss this event and we look forward to seeing you on March 22!!

I heard The Girl Who Fell from the Sky reviewed on public radio; the review whetted my appetite. This novel is not for the faint of heart, but for those who read it, a powerful experience emerges.  The author, Heidi W. Durrow, a graduate of Stanford, Columbia School of Journalism, and Yale Law School, received  a Bellwether Prize of Fiction for this her debut novel.

As the novel opens, the reader meets Rachael,  a bi-racial young girl, whose mother is Danish and father is African American. Because of a horrific accident, which left her as the only survivor,Rachael has recently  gone to live with her very strict African American grandmother. Having been reared as a “white girl” in Europe where her father was a serviceman, she is now thrust into an American black community and quickly learns that her very blue eyes will constantly be an attention getter, for good and for bad. Set in the early 1990s in Oregon, the novel flashes back and forth in time, and the reader slowly learns about Rachael’s past while cringing with her about the  unfamiliar social norms and customs which she encounters in the black community. She knows there is a mystery behind her mother, s0 Rachael tries to fit pieces of a missing puzzle together.

Friendships with positive and negative people, both old and young, develop for the adolescent girl as she grows from year to year. Unbelievably a childhood friend who met her father and witnessed first hand the horrific accident, appears in Rachael’s neighborhood and a renewed friendship develops. Filled with sadness, pangs of adolescent development and experience, heartbreaks of love lost, and limited hopefulness, this provocative novel will make its mark on readers as they decipher their own views of our newly changing American culture.

See Heidi W. Durrow’s website.

-Nan

I liked this novel! It is very unusual and mesmerizing, and I could not put it down! I had read about it in a review just before Christmas, and so when it came in the store, I was thrilled.  As a finalist for the 2009 Man Booker Prize, it was released in the United States only in paperback, which is a shame, for it would have been a collector’s item in hardback (see the original British hardcover below right). A resident of Italy, Simon Mawer teaches at St. George’s British International School in Rome.

Opening in the 1920s in Czechoslovakia, this novel follows the lives of a young married couple, Viktor and Liesel Landauer, as they first hire the acclaimed modern architect Rainer von Abt to build them a house which will be an award winning showplace, a place for music gatherings with the best European composers performing, as well as a home for their two children. Seeing as money is no object Viktor, who is a Jew, and who creates the sought after Landauer automobile, informs the architect to spare no expense. Hence, as a special part of the house, a totally glass room is created which makes the house the most talked about structure  in the area.

Flash forward and the reader sees the house move from Czech to Nazi to Soviet states and then back to the Czech state.  As the family flees Nazi rule along with the nanny–who is  “more than a nanny”–and her child, the reader experiences the ravages of a Nazi infused chaos.  Therefore, the reader is taken on a wild daring ride from the beginnings of WWII until its demise. So, actually the house itself becomes like a character as the reader learns of its occupants and its purposes as the years pass.

In the “Author’s Note,” given as a preface to this remarkable book, Mawer states, “Although The Glass Room is a work of fiction, the house and its setting are not fictional. I have disguised both with name changes but that will not fool anyone who knows the building on which the Landauer House is modeled or the city that hides behind the name Mesto. However, penetrating those thin disguises will not lead to any further revelations…..A few non-fictional characters do make brief appearances. One such is the talented composer Vitezslava Kapralova, whose tragically short life seems emblematic of the brilliant but doomed First Republic of Czechoslovakia.”

A totally separate story emerges within the lives of the Landauer family and their friends. As a cosmopolitan European art form in itself, this novel requires dedication to all of the underlying currents, both political, aesthetic, social, and personal. I am richer for having read it.

See Lisa’s blog on other books shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize and an additional review of The Glass Room.

-Nan

I took one glance at the covers of Simon Van Booy‘s books, one long, lingering glance at his photos, and then noted that the word love appears in nearly every title of his published works and I thought to myself, what a curious, calculated man. (You can drool over him at his website.) Born in rural Wales, Simon attended a prestigious private school for boys in Wales, eventually ended up playing football at a university in Kentucky, taught English in Greece and endured the earthquake and personal poverty there while writing. Today he lives in New York City–I guess enjoying all a hunky 34-year-old man can, all the while teaching and working with an outreach program for adults in underserved communities.

I am taking home Love Begins in Winter and hope to read at least one of his stories tonight. As may be apparent to you by now, I am trying to get past the strong romantic image SimonVan Booy seems to have put forth intentionally and move on to more of a substantial impression of him.  Most people have a degree of narcissism,  I think he certainly has found a healthy outlet for his.

Now back to his writing . . . sigh.

The Secret Lives of People in Love (2007) is a collection of short stories set in New York City, Paris and Greece and has been re-released this February 2010. Love Begins in Winter came out in 2009 and won the prestigious Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. His published writing includes a collection of poetry, a children’s book and a series of philosophical works (Why We Need Love; Why We Fight; Why Our Decisions Don’t Matter–all out in August 2010).  His first novel, The Greek Affair, is supposed to be out in 2010 as well.

I don’t mean to treat Simon Van Booy as a man might be tempted to treat a stereotypical blond bombshell, but I think he has the potential to intrigue us all with his charms in the midst of a dismal and endless February.

I promise to report back on the courtship.

2/26 Update: I am on page 30-something of the first story which is 70-something pages long. I guess these are really more aptly titled novellas. But what is important is that I find his writing to be very agreeable. Simon has a neat way of leaves spaces in thought between the sentences, but he so far has filled in the spaces quite elegantly at later points in the story. I can’t wait to finish this story. The only interference in our courtship is my own fatigue and my true-love who loves to talk to me. Life is so hard!

Please comment if you have read Love Begins in Winter!

I wish that I had written this blog two weeks ago when I had finished reading Point Omega over a cold weekend. I read it in two sittings, just to make it last a little longer, but this short novel could easily be read in one.  My experience with DeLillo’s work is limited in my having read only one other: White Noise, which I found on the bedside table of my then college-aged English major daughter several years ago. Intrigued as I was then, when Point Omega arrived at Lemuria, I watched it from afar on the shelf in front of me for a few days before I made the move to pick it up and then the decision to take it home with me. That was a very good decision! How to write about this extremely complex work of fiction poses quite a challenge.

First, for a little background information: DeLillo, the author of fifteen novels and three plays, won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, as well as many other smaller awards. He also won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’  William Dean Howells Medal for his 1997 novel Underworld.

The initial thing to know about this novel is that the action which appears at the surface is secondary to what the book is “really” about , in my opinion. Then, another thing to consider is the element of what “really” happens, action wise, versus what is happening in the mind of the protagonist, which is not to say that the subconscious is secondary at all. In fact, it could be argued that the subconscious just might be the protagonist!

Before you, reader, stop reading this blog, I should move ahead before this all becomes way too esoteric.  So, let me begin with the surface action which most Americans will be familiar with–the Alfred Hitchcock movie sensation “Psycho”. For those of us who wither and cringe at the idea of watching a horror movie, even a cult classic horror movie, all the way through, then even reading about someone else watching “Psycho” would send chills up my arm! The shower scene has been permanently fixed in our collective consciousness. Now, imagine a slow motion version of the movie with a protagonist going to a venue to watch it over and over and over, especially that scene. Just ponder for a moment why anyone would want to do that! Maybe it is understandable if I tell you that the protagonist is a filmmaker himself. So, this is the opening of Point Omega. Actually, in this opening scene, DeLillo references the real life/slow motion version of “Psycho” in Douglas Gordan’s film project exhibited in 2006 at New York’s MoMA (Museum of Modern Art). The film scene ran non-stop for a full day and a night. In Point Omega, the narrator/protagonist also watches and comments on other interested patrons moving in and out of the film room. This allusion to other characters yields great importance later on in the novel.

Flash forward……..the filmmaker, protagonist Jim Finley, goes to the desert to talk a brilliant governmental war consultant into agreeing to a documentary about his work with war planners. Days and nights pass where little dialogue occurs and the two men, who barely know each other, become ensconced in watching desert life from a backyard deck. Every now and then the filmmaker tries a different angle to try to persuade scholar Richard Elster into being filmed as a one man show. The slow paced motion, simple sentences, and sparse language which Delillo uses expertly in this part of the novel mimic the lack of action.

Enter the scholar’s daughter, a mysterious twenty-year-old from New York who arrives for a visit which is preplanned by her mother in order to get the young girl’s troubled mind off a bad relationship. Equally withdrawn, much like her father, the now threesome watch the desert together.  She disappears! Questions, hopes, then fears surface. A futile search begins! Heartache surrounding the unknown ensues. The scholar and the filmmaker sadly return to civilization.

So, now, you, reader, know the “surface action”. I won’t tell you the underlying action. You’ll have to figure it out for yourself. I can say that there is a conflict among time, perception of time, and the imagination.  For those of you who read In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien back in 1994, you’ll be reminded. Suffice it to say that the old adage, “Things will seem as though they are and yet they are not” will work quite well here. Isn’t it always true that appearance versus reality is the true question about  human nature or for those who study it either in life or in literature?

See Kelly’s Blog on Point Omega.

-Nan

Has anybody read Amy Bloom’s new book? I know that Away was and still is widely read. Today I was reading The New York Times Book Review and I am still curious to read Where the God of Love Hangs Out.

They travel to St. Kitts for winter breaks and to Florence for their 20th wedding anniversaries. They play CDs of Joan Sutherland in their car radios. When crises arise they take to bourbon in the midafternoon and snack on olive tapenade. Rome’s air pollution is a likely subject of conversation over their dinners, which might feature gnocchi in basil cream sauce and radicchio and orange salad, washed down with a St.-Amour Beaujolais. They read The Economist and go to psychiatrists who subscribe to Paris-Match. Readily dropping foreign phrases, they flatter a woman by saying that she looks like a Balthus or that she has a lot of chien.”

Which is to say that most of the characters in Amy Bloom’s fictions are exceedingly cosmopolitan and worldly-wise. In her latest, erotically charged, highly explicit collection of short stories, “Where the God of Love Hangs Out,” they also think and speak in a cheeky if not impudent manner. “You come to my house and I’ll shoot you myself,” a daughter says to her difficult mother. An aging man, recalling the loves of his early youth, describes one as “a big, bushy-haired girl with thighs like Smithfield hams,” another as “an Egyptian ballerina whose kohl ran onto his linen sport coat.” “Your prostate alone’s enough to scare her off,” a fellow advises a friend whose marriage has grown precarious. “You gotta get a guest room just to keep it somewhere.”

This upbeat sassiness of tone is one of the many treasures of Bloom’s new collection, which differs markedly from her previous ones (“Come to Me,” “A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You”). It includes two sets of linked narratives, each consisting of four stories, as well as several free-standing stories . . .

. . . Bloom, who is also a psychotherapist, vividly chronicles the inner lives of people caught in emotional and physical constraints — illnesses they are striving to survive, regrets they are trying to allay, desires they often dare not fulfill. She writes in beautifully wrought prose, with spunky humor and a flair for delectably eccentric details. Her narrative talents include a fine touch with flashbacks, which she handles as suavely as any writer I can think of. Her gift for dialogue is equally terrific. Here is Lionel instructing 15-year-old Buster about the facts of life:

“You want to be the kind of man women beg for sex. . . . Don’t slobber. You’re not a washcloth. You. Are. A. Lover.”

Brava, Ms. Bloom. Send us an equally sly, dashing book very soon, please.

Click here for the full review written by Francine du Plessix Gray, February 7, 2010.

Illustration of Amy Bloom by Tina Berning.

by Kelly Pickerill

Point Omega by Don DeLillo.  I talked to Nan about it on Saturday, and she said that along with Coetzee’s new one, Summertime, she considers Point Omega to be one of the most important novels she’s read in some time.

Excerpted from the New York Times Book Review article, “A Wrinkle in Time,” by Geoff Dyer:

The book begins and ends with Douglas Gordon’s film project “24 Hour Psycho ” (installed at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in 2006), in which the 109-­minute Hitchcock original is slowed so that it takes a full day and night to twitch by. DeLillo conveys with haunting lucidity the uncanny beauty of “the actor’s eyes in slow transit across his bony sockets,” “Janet Leigh in the detailed process of not knowing what is about to happen to her.” Of course, DeLillo being DeLillo, it’s the deeper implications of the piece — what it reveals about the nature of film, perception and time — that detain him. As an unidentified spectator, DeLillo is mesmerized by the “radically altered plane of time”: “The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.”

Illustration by John Ritter; photograph from Paramount Pictures

Within the more circumscribed realm of literature, this is where DeLillo has staked his mighty claim. He has reconfigured things, or our perception of them, to such an extent that DeLillo is now implied in the things themselves. While photographers and filmmakers routinely remake the world in their images of it, this is something only a few novelists (Hemingway was one) ever manage. Like Hemingway, DeLillo has imprinted his syntax on reality and — such is the blow-back reward of the Omega Point Scheme for Stylistic Distinction — become a hostage to the habit of “gyrate exaggerations” (the phrase is in “The Body Artist”) and the signature patterns of “demolished logic.” “Point Omega” starts out by contemplating a reprojection of a famous film. It’s barely had time to get going before it ends up reflecting on the oeuvre of which it’s the latest increment and echo: a “last flare” that — we’ve been here before, too — may not be the last after all.

See Nan’s Blog on Point Omega.

First I will confess…..I have not started this book. I am very soon though!! The problem is that we can’t seem to keep it in stock!! As soon as we get some in, they fly off the front counter. I DO know that my mother loved it and my mother-in-law is reading it and it is becoming somewhat of a phenomenon. It’s cracking the best sellers lists and is a book that is hot all over the country.

An intriguing part of this story is the author herself. Leila Meacham, a retired teacher from San Antonio.

Publishers Weekly interviewed Meacham:

“The epic novel Roses isn’t the first outing for author Leila Meacham. In the mid-1980s, Meacham wrote and published a handful of romance novels. But it wasn’t a process she enjoyed much. At the time, she was teaching English, and the solitary process of writing took her away from preparing lesson plans, learning about new techniques and enjoying hobbies like gardening. After retiring, Meacham ran through her list of retirement goals. She and her husband traveled. Thirteen years into retirement, at age 65, she was left with a question: Now what?”

“The answer was Roses.”

“One day I was in bed, drinking my cup of coffee, and I just thought to myself, ‘I’ve got so much to offer somebody somewhere or something. I just don’t know what to do with the rest of my life,’” Meacham recalls. “I will defend this to my dying day: A voice in my head said, ‘You will get down Roses and you will finish Roses.’ I like to believe that’s a divine inspiration.”

“Meacham had begun the novel in 1985, when a bad case of pneumonia forced her to temporarily resign from teaching. As years passed, the typewritten pages of the novel were stored in a box in a closet, almost abandoned as Meacham and her husband moved from one house to another.” Six years ago, his suspicions proved accurate as Meacham pulled the box off the shelf and resumed writing.”

“The novel traces nearly 70 years in the history of the Toliver family, owners of a cotton plantation in a fictional Texas town. When patriarch Vernon Toliver dies, he entrusts the land to his daughter, Mary, because he knows she will love and care for it. His wife and son are outraged.”

“That decision and the stubborn love that motivated it determine the course of Mary Toliver’s life. She’s unwilling to compromise anything that would negatively affect her beloved Somerset plantation, whether it means sacrificing her fair complexion to work in the field or the man she loves because he won’t settle for second place in her heart. The decisions Mary makes, and the lies that accompany them, alter the history of the Toliver clan and its relationships with the town’s other founding families, the department store-owning DuMonts and timber magnates the Warwicks.”

“It’s only appropriate that this 600-page epic took Meacham five years to write. The narrative sprawls across geography as much as time, stretching from the fictional Texas burg of Howbutker to Lubbock, Dallas and points between.” (‘The two together—cotton and timber—you don’t find that in the same state’ anywhere but Texas, Meacham says.)

“Now the 71-year-old Meacham is not only anticipating book signings to support the book, she’s also hard at work on another epic novel, this time with a more modern focus. So what happened to the woman who so disliked the solitary nature of writing?”

“I didn’t like the confinement, the frustration of trying to get your thoughts on paper,” Meacham recalls. “Oddly enough, I’m happiest when I’m writing now. And I’m all by myself and anything in the world can come out on the page.”

“What this has done for me has made me aware that I can write. Now, I don’t know if you’ll agree with me. But I feel that I can write. I can tell a story.”

Pretty cool, huh?  It’s next in my stack, so y’all start it, too, and let’s talk about it!

J. D. Salinger passed away today. read the ap story here.

It’s taken me too long to get around to reading Denis Johnson, but here I am.  I just read Jesus’ Son and I want to recommend it to everyone because it was that good, but I’m having trouble thinking about what to say about it?  Let’s see.

I think my first reaction to these stories was confusion, sort of at how anything in them could be happening in the first place because they’re dreamy and fuzzy and vague.  They’re also pretty brutal – they are the stories of, as a blurb on the back puts it, “dreamers, addicts, and lost souls”, and to do any of Johnson’s fantastic characters justice I’ll just have to quote him:

“That night I sat in a booth across from Kid Williams, a former boxer.  His black hands were lumpy and mutilated.  I always had the feeling he might suddenly reach out his hands and strangle me to death.  He spoke in two voices.  He was in his fifties.  He’d wasted his entire life.  Such people were very dear to those of us who’d wasted only a few years.  With Kid Williams sitting across from you it was nothing to contemplate going on like this for another month or two.”

And so maybe you can understand that my second reaction was to lap this up.  The stories in Jesus’ Son ARE brutal and violent, but they’re also witty and sad and tough and sweet, and with characters like Kid Williams and Jack Hotel – won’t tell you about him – they’re hard to forget.  Johnson is a great writer, and a short story master, and I’m a convert now.  Better late than never!  Right!

Susie