Book Review Blogging

November 27, 2007

Oops. Sorry about that. Falling off the blogging universe and all. I’ll spare you the boring excuses. Well, other than to say that the holidaze led me to be enslaved by the reader bug. I was a largely immovable object from the “reading sofa,” devouring J.M Coetzee’s “Slow Man,” James Salter’s “A Sport and a Pastime,” and Gordon and Trainor’s “Cobra II.” And then I thought: To hell with blogging. Give it a rest. And so I did. Forgive me. Or don’t. But in the process of forgiveness or vengeance (your choice), please do yourself a favor and read Coetzee and Salter.

Salter’s “A Sport and a Pastime” is – like all of his work – a compact and potent word explosion. His short, dense and descriptive sentences leave me fulfilled like a rich dessert. Go ahead, read it and then roll it around on your tongue/mind for a bit. Taste it. Smell it. And then just try to put it down. But then the story ends and, if you’re like me, you’ll find yourself standing at your bookshelf wondering where the other Salter books are. Damn, I need more, you’ll say, like any good junky-reader would.

Here, for example, is a brief Salter excerpt to whet your appetite:

In the corner in a trenchcoat, her hair gleaming, sits a silent girl with a face like a bird, one of those hard little faces, the bones close beneath it. A passionate face. The face of a girl who might move to the city. She has large eyes, marked in black. A wide mouth, pale as wax. Around her neck is a band of imitation diamonds. It seems I am seeing everything more clearly. The details of a whole world are being opened to me.

It is, indeed, a softly erotic story, told by a man we never really know. He remembers and lives through a friend, vaguely bouncing around France but coming into clear focus when love and lust become paramount – which is often. He’s stricken by the bug of love at first sight over and over again, the symptom of searching and longing and attempting to fill an obvious void. And so the most routine (and brief) encounters with a woman on a train, for example, become life giving and forever memorable. Taste this moment of memory from a train scene:

She has taken a caramel out of her handbag. She unwraps it, put it in her mouth to ensure her silence. Her fingers play with the paper, rolling it slowly, tightening the roll. Her eyes are pale blue. They can stare right through one. The nose is long but feminine. I am curious to see her teeth.

Oh just read it. But do yourself a favor and have Salter’s “Last Nights” on hand so you’ll lessen your withdrawal pangs when you’re finished.

Coetzee’s “Slow Man” is also a kind of a love story. Specifically, it’s about a sixty-ish single man, Paul Rayment, who loses a leg in a bicycle accident and, as a result, begins to ponder his life. His wound leaves him feeling alone and wondering about his decisions not to marry, not to have children and his general perspective on life. Ah, the void! And so he seeks…and seeks…and stumbles. Such is life.

Rayment’s lost leg becomes a metaphor for his lost love and, it seems, a lost life. And he doesn’t take long to fill the void of his lost leg/love with his desperate pursuit of his nurse. He must have her. Never mind that she’s married with three children of her own. Ha! He will take care of the children. And he will befriend her husband. Whatever it takes. Whatever promises have to be made. Whatever. Please, oh please, be his.

Like most of Coetzee’s fine works, Slow Man asks more questions than it solves. Again, such is life. And, in the end, Rayment struggles, ponders and stumbles in a rather existential dance with life. He’s a man in need, seeking to fill a void and changing people’s lives like only a man in desperate search of “love” can: messy and sometimes endearing and sometimes loathsome. Beware the drowning man, for he may take you down with him. Unless, of course, he finds the shore all by himself.

And now, for something completely different, there’s Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor’s “Cobra II,” the much ballyhooed and self-proclaimed “inside story of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.” Gordon, the New York Times reporter, and Trainor, the retired gerneral, are, for sure, decidedly mainstream. No surprise there. But the story of the Iraq war doesn’t need ideological bending to make it appear as ridiculous as it is. And so, Gordon and Trainor methodically – 700-plus-pages worth! – detail the very real insanity of the planning and implementation of an insane war.

I picked it up while browsing at Bear Pond Books over the holiday. I thought it was going to be one of those quick pick it up, scan it for a moment and then put it back with a smirk of a thought. But as I began reading one random passage after another I found myself enjoying the pace of the writing and the rather dispassionate condemnation of the entire affair. It’s dispassionate like a morticians account of a corpse is. It ignores the wails from the adjoining rooms and plows on to record the events and only the events. But that didn’t prevent me from slinging the heavy tome across the room more than a few times with shouts of outrage and hopes that someday the architects of the Iraqi War madness see the jail cells that they deserve to see – especially Donald Rumsfeld.

I’m going to have more to say about this book but, for now, I’ve run out of time. Yes it was a fine Thanksgiving. I’m thankful for the fine books and the sofa to read them on. And you?

Posted by M. Colby | Filed Under blog, books 

Comments

2 Responses to “Book Review Blogging”

  1. Cher on November 28th, 2007 4:32 pm

    when netflix has the books on dvd, i may check them out.

  2. JD Ryan on November 28th, 2007 8:44 pm

    And me? I’m thankful that you blogged about something besides politics for a change, you Rennaisance man, you.

Got something to say?





*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture. Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the word.
Click to hear an audio file of the anti-spam word