Booknotes from Our Staff

Solo by Rana Dasgupta (Mariner)

Toward the end of a life lived too long, Ulrich daydreams about his early years in Bulgaria. Forbidden his true love of music, young Ulrich develops an obsession with chemistry and travels to Germany to study with a master. When his parents call him back to Sophia, he imagines that his creative life is over. But for us readers, this is where the magic begins. Through his fantasies, Ulrich explores the world of his repressed longings using as his avatar Boris, a childhood friend whose musical talent reflects Ulrich’s potential. In his second novel, Dasgupta creates a masterful and intricate web of meanings and connections within the vivid internal life of his protagonist. -Leighanne

 

BOOKNOTES, the book review of THE ELLIOTT BAY BOOK COMPANY, is written entirely by bookstore staff. It represents a sampling of recently published and forthcoming books that we have enjoyed reading. We appreciate every opportunity to assist in finding books to meet your interests.

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Bruce Duffy, David Markson, and the Philosophers

Bruce Duffy’s excellent novel, The World As I Found It (New York Review of Books), re-imagines the lives of philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and George Moore. In the way that you might tell a story from your past so many times that it begins to change upon each telling, Duffy uses the biography and mythology of these men, and the history that surrounds them, to create a new story. Facts are mixed with his own fiction but—what I think is the true feat here—these facts do not grate against his fiction. It’s a seamless re-telling of the lives of men who shaped schools of philosophical thought but struggled to manage the basics of living.

In one particularly memorable passage, Duffy has Moore reflecting on an incident at Cambridge when he, Russell, and Wittgenstein watch as their colleague, Alfred North Whitehead, challenges a pupil to a rowing race. The young pupil wins without much effort, leaving Whitehead “badly beaten; it was painful to see him sagging over the oars, sucking wind.” The spectacle causes Wittgenstein to erupt. “He said they might as well have watched a bullfight; it was just as brutal and senseless… Dogs tearing out each other’s entrails— that’s what this is!… This is so vile we don’t deserve to live!”

To my delight, this very same scene came up again a few weeks later while reading David Markson’s excellent and incomparable novel, Wittgenstein’s Mistress (Dalkey Archive). The narrator, Kate, writes:

“Once, Bertrand Russell took his pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein to watch Alfred North Whitehead row, at Cambridge. Wittgenstein became very angry with Bertrand Russell for having wasted his day.”

Kate believes that she is the last person on earth, and she writes her story in short, mostly one-sentence paragraphs, a form that alludes to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Kate’s remembrances come scattered, with no care for chronology. With the absence of other people comes the absence of time. One thing kinda sorta leads to the next. In fact, hers is not a story at all. It’s a mess really, but I mean that as a sort of odd compliment. Kate’s musings seem to be attempts at molding the past in order to give coherence to her present. An understandable aim, and not just one for the last person on earth.

Later in the book, Kate again mentions the day Russell wasted Wittgenstein’s day watching a rowing match, only in this retelling, Guy de Maupassant is in the boat.

Kate tries not to lie but she doesn’t have to try too hard. There’s a lot of room between inarguable facts and outright falsehood. -Molly

 

Bruce Duffy’s retelling of French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s life, Disaster Was My God, will be published by NYRB in July.

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Booknotes from Our Staff

The Empty Family: Stories by Colm Tóibín (Scribner)

In this beautiful collection of short stories, Colm Tóibín proves himself to be the master. The stories represent various time periods, but the common thread between them is that they all reveal the inner lives of the characters. I was captured from the very first story, “Silence,” a story based on a Henry James journal entry in which Lady Gregory is the central character. The story “Two Women” presents an arrogant and solitary set designer who returns to native Ireland to work on a film, which brings back memories of an affair that was the central passion of her life. These are just two of the excellent stories in this collection. Tóibín is a writer to be treasured. -Greg

(Signed copies of The Empty Family are available now. Call us to reserve your copy today.)

BOOKNOTES, the book review of THE ELLIOTT BAY BOOK COMPANY, is written entirely by bookstore staff. It represents a sampling of recently published and forthcoming books that we have enjoyed reading. We appreciate every opportunity to assist in finding books to meet your interests.

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Booknotes from Our Staff

We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

The Vikings are synonymous with prodigious seafaring, yet what became of the Scandinavian passion for the open sea once those fearsome longships ceased to ride the waves? Can it be that to this day stalwart Norsemen brave the icy seas seeking excitement and renown? The hailing port of this novel is the Danish town of Marstal, where the cemeteries are filled with women and children. The men are rugged sailors, and are mostly entombed in watery graves. This is a tremendous epic that spans generations, circumnavigates the globe, and brings the adventure and tradition of the Norse Saga into the Modern Era. -Jamil

 

 

BOOKNOTES, the book review of THE ELLIOTT BAY BOOK COMPANY, is written entirely by bookstore staff. It represents a sampling of recently published and forthcoming books that we have enjoyed reading. We appreciate every opportunity to assist in finding books to meet your interests.

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Dystopia and the Work of Paolo Bacigalupi

Dystopian young adult literature, while not new, is currently all the rage. Many theories abound as to why this is. Some claim it’s merely a reflection of adolescence itself, an allegory for the dubious and prickly nature of adulthood’s dawning. Others claim that it’s not just a microscopic lens, but a macroscopic one: to some children, it’s not a fictional future but a cold and very real now. In this case, it’s the author taking on current social issues, if not warning us where our own actions might lead. Laura Miller, writing for The New Yorker, elaborates on these ideas, as do many of today’s YA novelists in Room for Debate, The New York Times’ Op-Ed space.

However, it’s still exciting news that, amongst all the worthy titles out there, Paolo Bacigalupi’s young adult novel, Ship Breaker, has won ALA’s 2011 Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Bacigalupi, whose adult sci-fi has won him both the Hugo and Nebula Award, has employed the usual YA dystopia skeleton and teased out a unique little mind-blower.

In a bleak future along the oil-slicked Gulf Coast, New Orleans has been moved inland three times, hurricanes are dubbed “city killers” due to their frequency and intensity while class divides and violence are the norm. In true Dickensian style, Nailer and his friends work the “light crew,” crawling about the deep bowels of abandoned oil tankers scavenging for copper. During one such expedition, Nailer narrowly dodges death. Soon after, a hurricane surges through his community of lean-to dwellings and make-shift families. Accompanied by his tenacious and loyal best friend, a girl named Pima, they walk the debris on the beaches. They come across a shipwrecked clipper and a half dead “swank”, or rich person, surrounded by valuables. In this dog-eat-dog world, Nailer’s choice seems obvious: this could be the ticket out of the slums for both himself and his friends. But his near-death experience has complicated things and shifted his perception. It’s at this point that their lives are overturned.

High seas adventures, breath-suspending altercations, issues of friendship, morality, family, loyalty and the most ethnically diverse cast of characters I’ve ever seen in YA all weld together to make for a book that earns its 2010 National Book Award Finalist title, its Printz Award, as well as your undivided attention. -Shannon

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Booknotes from Our Staff

The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna (Atlantic Monthly Press)

This heartbreaking, absorbing story about love and the legacy of war raises deep questions about our ability to go on and to love again after losing those we love most. Set after the Sierra Leone Civil War of the 1990s, the novel’s characters include a young surgeon who lives with the consequences of what he has done for the love of an inaccessible woman, an elderly man who is finally ready to discuss his own betrayal of others, and a woman who, having lost her loved ones, must now endure more. The spare beauty of Forna’s prose makes these characters live on long after the last page is turned. -Karen

(Signed copies of The Memory of Love are available now. Call us to reserve your copy today.)

BOOKNOTES, the book review of THE ELLIOTT BAY BOOK COMPANY, is written entirely by bookstore staff. It represents a sampling of recently published and forthcoming books that we have enjoyed reading. We appreciate every opportunity to assist in finding books to meet your interests.

Read Full Post »

Booknotes from Our Staff

West of Here by Jonathan Evison (Algonquin)

Evison’s new novel is a panoramic homage to the people, climates, and landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. Set in Port Bonita, an imaginary town on the Olympic Peninsula, West of Here contains story lines like rivers that rush forward with astonishing momentum and force. A masterful meditation on time, history, and people, it moves and crashes like rapids—letting us up for air in the distant past of settlers, native wisdom, and horse drawn carriages, and towing us forward until we emerge in the present, working in factories and eating at KFC—until finally we are flung over the waterfall of time where the past and present collide with brilliant clarity. -Candra

Jonathan Evison reads from West of Here on Wednesday, February 16th at 7:00 p.m.

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Catatonic Cowboy Country

“If I were without responsibilities and ambition I would sit and read that book over and over until my body atrophied and my mind warped and I became a ward of the state. I turned the last page and said to myself, “Welp, guess I’m never gonna write a Western.”

This is how John Brandon, author of the fantastic novels Arkansas and Citrus County, described Percival Everett’s unconventional Western novel, God’s Country.

I figured any book that could stop one of my favorite writers in his tracks had to be worth checking out. So I ventured into God’s Country myself to see if I’d be zapped in a similar fashion.

I guess I enjoy a good Western as much as the next Oregon white boy raised on The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but, I must confess, I haven’t read too many of them. I’d recently picked up True Grit by Charles Portis, and was blown away by its wit and adventure, the perfect language Portis used to capture that special mixture of stodgy Christian propriety and filthy, two-faced, drunken cowboy savagery. There’s an excellent discussion of True Grit, both the novel and the new Coen brothers’ movie, between Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana at the New York Review of Books Blog.

Portis’s humor and hard-boiled precision were fresh in my mind as I began reading Everett’s novel. Both books encourage two dollar matinee behavior; it’s hard not to cackle out loud, bite your nails, or lean forward in anticipation… quite literally on the edge of your seat. But the differences emerged quickly, and, once they did, it was clear that God’s Country was a different kind of Western.

It was Everet’s humor, much more persistent and over the top than Portis’s, that zapped me first. The main character, Curt Marder, is an ass of great magnitude; his selfish stupidity truly boggles the mind. Though not completely without poetry (“On legs limper than a milked cow’s teats…”is how he he starts one chapter), when the local saloon keeper stands over him and says, “Curt Marder, you no-good, free-loadin’, back-slidin’, dog-lipped son-of-a-mud-rat, you owe me three dollars!” well, that about sums him up.

As Marder enlists/coerces a black tracker named Bubba to help him find the wife he doesn’t really care about, it becomes infuriatingly clear that Marder is a greedy, cowardly, unscrupulous bigot who will cause nothing but pain for those unlucky enough to be anywhere near him. It’s here that Everett’s genius starts to shine. The satire begins to tread on more serious ground and the laughter becomes increasingly uneasy. Slapstick antics brush up against slavery and genocide. Everett’s approach highlights the way period pieces such as Westerns can sidestep race and make light of grave issues. Everett twists and manipulates every rote narrative formula until you have no idea where you’ll end up. Is Marder going to finally face reality and act like a decent human being? Is Bubba going to give him what he deserves? Or will he somehow weasel his way to the top? Will there be no justice?

One of the funniest books I’ve ever read might also be the most dead serious Western ever written. It is the very best kind of disorienting. By the end, I too was sitting there, slack-jawed, maybe drooling a little, ready to turn back to page one and start all over again. -Casey O.

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Booknotes from Our Staff

Gryphon: New and Selected Stories by Charles Baxter (Pantheon)

For fans of Charles Baxter, this collection of new and previously published short stories embodies all that we’ve come to expect from Baxter: lovely writing, sharp dialogue, themes of isolation, Midwestern locales, and a thoroughly enjoyable read. The beauty of short stories is that you can savor them over time, like a literary dessert before bed each night. My favorites in this collection? The title story and “Horace and Margaret’s Fifty-second,” although each and every story flows and resonates with Baxter’s amazing talent. -Hilary

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Booknotes

Spring 2011

BOOKNOTES, the book review of THE ELLIOTT BAY BOOK COMPANY, is written entirely by bookstore staff. It represents a sampling of recently published and forthcoming books that we have enjoyed reading. We appreciate every opportunity to assist in finding books to meet your interests.

 

Fiction

Solo by Rana Dasgupta (Mariner)

Toward the end of a life lived too long, Ulrich daydreams about his early years in Bulgaria. Forbidden his true love of music, young Ulrich develops an obsession with chemistry and travels to Germany to study with a master. When his parents call him back to Sophia, he imagines that his creative life is over. But for us readers, this is where the magic begins. Through his fantasies, Ulrich explores the world of his repressed longings using as his avatar Boris, a childhood friend whose musical talent reflects Ulrich’s potential. In his second novel, Dasgupta creates a masterful and intricate web of meanings and connections within the vivid internal life of his protagonist. -Leighanne

 

The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna (Atlantic Monthly Press)

This heartbreaking, absorbing story about love and the legacy of war raises deep questions about our ability to go on and to love again after losing those we love most. Set after the Sierra Leone Civil War of the 1990s, the novel’s characters include a young surgeon who lives with the consequences of what he has done for the love of an inaccessible woman, an elderly man who is finally ready to discuss his own betrayal of others, and a woman who, having lost her loved ones, must now endure more. The spare beauty of Forna’s prose makes these characters live on long after the last page is turned. -Karen

 

Toxicology by Jessica Hagedorn (Viking)

(Available April 14, 2011)

A dying New York writer still grieving over the death of her artist lover prepares for a performance that could be the capstone of her career in Jessica Hagedorn’s novel, Toxicology. Filled with lively details of the gentrification (and many temptations) of her West Village neighborhood, this novel also makes readers think about risk. What is the cost of trying to make art versus giving up a dream? Does the possibility of success make up for the vulnerability of living and working as an undocumented worker? Is marrying and raising a child really the safest route for women? Books like this one leave readers in love with their worlds and thinking about the deeper philosophical questions the author raises. -Karen

 

Funeral for a Dog by Thomas Pletzinger (Norton)

(Available March 28, 2011)

Funeral for a Dog is a puzzle, a slowly unraveling mystery that my brain kept worrying over even after I’d closed the last page. Daniel Mandelkern is an ethnologist working as a journalist for an uncompromising editor—his wife. When she sends him on assignment to profile Dirk Svensson, an elusive children’s author who lives alone but for a three-legged dog, Mandelkern begrudgingly ventures off, suspecting ulterior motives. But when he uncovers Svensson’s manuscript detailing an entangled liaison, Mandelkern can’t help but dive into the mystery. This is a wonderfully paced and plotted novel that will appeal to fans of David Mitchell and Haruki Murakami. -Leighanne

 

Mr. Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt (Dial)

(Available February 8, 2011)

It is one week before Winston Churchill leaves Parliament, and he is plagued by a strange malevolent presence–an enormous black dog. In London, a young widow named Esther greets a prospective lodger, and there stands Black Pat, this same frightening creature. Possessing an irresistible wit and devious logic, he’s soon installed in Esther’s house and life. When Esther is assigned to take dictation for Churchill’s resignation speech, there is a revelation of their shared burden. Churchill, the powerful statesman, has learned to coexist with this furry, slobbering, confounding manifestation of depression, but Esther’s engagement with life and love is on hold.

This marvelously inventive first novel portrays a uniquely menacing villain, and those who rally against him, with humor and profound originality. -Erica

 

West of Here by Jonathan Evison (Algonquin)

Evison’s new novel is a panoramic homage to the people, climates, and landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. Set in Port Bonita, an imaginary town on the Olympic Peninsula, West of Here contains story lines like rivers that rush forward with astonishing momentum and force. A masterful meditation on time, history, and people, it moves and crashes like rapids—letting us up for air in the distant past of settlers, native wisdom, and horse drawn carriages, and towing us forward until we emerge in the present, working in factories and eating at KFC—until finally we are flung over the waterfall of time where the past and present collide with brilliant clarity. -Candra

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