Underworld by Don DeLillo

Well...The opening chapter was stunning in the way it reads like in you were seeing the action in a film with the camera weaving around the stadium switching from wide shot to close up. It was also clever in setting up the themes and plot lines...the start of the cold war and its impact...loss...and the mystery/holy grail hunt for the baseball.., and waste(of human life and of the environment. This continues when we meet the main character at the end of the cold war and the planes of war being turned into art and start to learn about some major event in their lives some 40 years ago that is going to unwind and make clear the rest of the story. Which it does as you meet his brother, his wife, his partner, his science teachers and then the characters in their lives and so on. They begin to flesh out the political and emotional implications of the cold war and the waste internal and external this represents. Unlike a lot of the critical reviews I did feel that his characters were well sketched.

I did get 2/3s of the way through but the reason for abandoning it was that it didn't emotionally engage me. And the reason for this is that for me it lacked a dramatic drive that pushed me to find out if all the story lines were resolved. Because of this I was "analysing" its processes rather then able to live the story in my imagination. A important factor for this was the(have a stiff drink here!) basis of why it is a highly skilled novel...its Americanness. Getting around the book and knowing what period and location and so being emotionally engaged depended on getting the cultural/social history clues which as a non-American does not have the same resonance.

Here I am thinking of a similar story that was written from the British perspective. It would have a problem of finding a universal sport as cricket, tennis and football have class connotations and the nearest to a game having the 1951 spot was the 1966 world cup which was a very different era. So the British story would have focused on the loss of empire and the political and social changes this required over the same time period. Our crime patten is very different so the mobster angle would have focused on London and the London gangs. We could not have had a Texas Highway mass murder given our gun laws. Our mass murders are more domestic. We would not even had the popular TV stars of the 50's has we were about 10 years behind in TV access.

Hence as the story that is about American experiences and cultural perspective it dramatic weakness means it lost its hold over me. Just to sweeten the pill I moved on to Post Office by Charles Bukowski which is equally American as a British equivalent of this would be Saturday's night, Sunday morning by Alan Sillitoe but which grips from the opening lines as it types into universalise experiences of bad jobs, being screwed over, self hate etc. Its the first I have read of his but now a fan!

Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver

Have you ever had one of those Blair moments when after weeks of being nice to everyone you have to finally make a decision which means that enemies are made as they see a must have dismissed? Well this is one of those moments. I have been struggling with Raymond Carver’s “Where I'm Calling From” a collection of thirty-seven stories chosen from several previous collections published over 20 odd years which should therefore be an ideal introduction to his work. And… wait for it… I am going to abandon it unfinished half way despite him being seen As "the American Chekhov or the laureate of the dispossessed”

Let me say up front, that his prose, ear for dialogue and depiction of the ordinariness of every day life masking unexpressed pain and joy is the best. His stories are like photos that capture the moment frozen with no past or future with all the ambiguity that the unknown allows the reader/observer. The opposite of Norman Rockwell homeliness, more akin to the photos of Walker Evans of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. But they have no plot, twists, surprises, or surface complexity of character. These are often blue collar workers in small-town or rural settings struggling with jobs, partners, children and booze and it’s the unsaid that reveals more then the fractured words.

The stories reflect his own drink problems and failed jobs and marriage in his 20s so he turned to writing to escape and short stories could get something in quickly to pay the rent and get food on the table. His life did begin to turn around and his work started to get critical alarm in his 40’s before he died of lung cancer. His accessible prose, realistic situations and comprehensible characters are seen as a counter to egghead experimentalism

But for me, I was left all too often thinking yes and what happens next even while the image created hung in my head. I also think that stories ripped from their original magazine context make the stories work harder then they needed to. I would have welcomed an edition that merged the stories with a set of photographs worthy of the writing. However, if you want to dip in and perhaps read a couple a stories a week or if you enjoy short stories then this is a book for you. As you say at the end of a failed relationship its not you it’s me, and lets remain friends. Knowing it’s really about the lack of passion. Yet the spurned has the chance of real love else where…will that be you?

Other points of view:
Isolation and the short stories of Raymond Carver
It snowed today
Alysson’s Weblog
Bryan's Book Blog

Shoeless Joe by W.P.Kinsella

Well it’s supposed to be about dreams, magic, life and not about baseball...wrong it’s about baseball and an American understanding that baseball is a way to unlock dreams, magic, and life.

But I am not an American follower of Baseball so along with Underworld by Don DeLillo it went over my head (although DeLillo’s books first chapter was a stunning, lyrical depiction of the centuries’ baseball World Series final moments). So is Shoeless Joe...stunning, lyrical writing? No, assume wooden, workaday.

Think I am being harsh? Well I look forward to a story based of a brickie who puts a goal up in Norfolk. George Best then appears to help him build the football pitch and gradually all the world ** players appear (Lev Yashin as goalie, Carlos Alberto Torres, Nílton Santos as full backs, Franz Beckenbauer, Bobby Moore as centre backs etc for one last game with the Brickie’s long lost father as the ref. That I would understand so Nick Hornby get writing it.

But for the moment I am sticking to the film of the book-Field of Dreams. And making a mental note to be wary of any book that has a sports theme!

** run past me again how in Baseball one country = a world series whilst the 2006 World cup has 198 counties competing and over 700 million people watched the actual finals

The Tetherballs of Bougainville by Mark Leyner

Well could be fancy and say its a post modernist novel with a form that counters the tyranny of the outdated narrative and naturalist tradition. Its plot: son at father's failed execution; father enrolled in the State's lotto prisoner execution programme, son writes a screenplay is merely a rack for lots of streams of conciousness/montage pieces.

I love books that break with conventions but when they engage me and not being just fun for the writer. I loved 253 or The Saddlebag for example. This is supposed to be his most novel like book but it reads like he lacks the discipline to write for the reader. Or at least not the sober drug free reader...it must be a profound read if stoned

Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost and Where Did It Go? by Michael Baywater

Failed the first chapter test...irritating chattering classes book that no doubt enables amusing dinner party conversations...clearly I am too common to appreciate its wit...sigh back to the scullery where I belong-see what the reaction was when I told them?

Abandoned book: Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker

I am reading 50 cult books this year and this would have been the third but its on the to be swapped pile now!

This is a book first published in 1978 and is an experimental novel. To put it context imagine an 18th century painting of a landowner and his family under a tree. At first glance this is natural but it’s a construct from both the style of the sitting to the painting techniques used to artificially create naturalism. If you deconstruct this then you draw on a range of counter images or techniques. Say having the landowner be a woman and the landscape constructed from dead bodies reflecting the true nature of the power illustrated.

This book is based on post modernist assumptions of deconstructing narrative or form etc to expose the oppressive nature of being a woman defined by men or being in a system then robs individuality- libertarian feminism as it were. One of the approaches that Kathy Acker takes is to take a brutal pornographic view of men and have the women adopt the same view to expose how a feminine romantic view of sex is part of the oppressive suppression of female sexuality.

The book does not follow the rules of dramatic narrative but is a montage of pastiches, poems, play scenes, pornographic drawings, dreamscapes that are not about telling a story but creating images and feelings that deconstruct the social view of say education, the state, religion etc. The opening few pages are written as a play dialogue with inner monologues between a 10 year old girl and a father who has sex with her. But from the context its not a 10 year old girl(the language and the content is of an older woman) so one reading is that this is a inner monologue along the lines of Transactional Analysis of stern parent and child which reflects how women are infantilised by men.

So why abandon the book? Two reasons, the first is its relentless politics. It’s a book best read by young students who have the advantage of seeing the world in black and white: all men are bastards; your parents *** you up; police are pigs; education is fascism etc. The second is the format whilst containing many powerful nuggets tends to drag and not engage me as it is essentially a series of diverse pieces of writing and drawings thrown together it feels at random. Life is too short…which was first put into print in May 1877, The Morning Oregonian included a story with this opinion:

"Oh I say, drawled Gerard; 'life's too short to be wasted talking about a woman. Let's go and get some beer."

Oh dear…

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Don't you find that books are like lovers? Some you can’t bear to be parted from, wanting to spend every spare moment in each others arms, share intimate secrets as the relationship deepens so you are changed but heartbroken when the relationship has to end and you both go your separate ways. Yet with others, after the initial excitement of the first date and the promise of the pages to come, it fades, you find excuses not to read, when you do its for less and less time, you get distracted by other books and even start to two-time by skimming them, trying to convince yourself its only a fun no strings fling.

Sadly this is happening with The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. It had all the signs of the great read; political satire, Gothic appearances and interventions by the Devil, suppressed by the Soviets, but... but I have faded starting dalliances with other books such as The life and times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson.Why the fading relationship? Well the usual thing is to say its me not you, I am not ready for commitment, let’s be friends rather then face the pain of saying you are not lovable by me. The killer, as in all relationships, is the minor fault that reveals deeper flaws. For me this is the idiom and speech patterns feeling false. I find it difficult to suspend believe and become part of the world so it remains intellectually satisfying but an emotional famine.

The book was written over the 20's and 30's at the height of the worse excesses of Stalin and would have cost the writer his life had it been found at the time. It’s a period of history I have had a great deal of interest in so it’s even more disappointing that the book feels flat. Its very urban based and concerned with the cultural politics of the intelligentsia but the great disasters of the period, the destruction of the rural classes, wiping out of the party, the show trails, mass imprisonments are barely touched on Perhaps the problem is past relations with other Russians such as Solzhenitsyn who deal with similar themes but with greater distinction. Perhaps because I looking for something that the novel does not have, I am missing what it does offer. Friends of the novel say

Ultimately, the novel deals with the interplay of good and evil, innocence and guilt, courage and cowardice, exploring such issues as the responsibility towards truth when authority would deny it, and the freedom of the spirit in an unfree world. Love and sensuality are also dominant themes in the novel. The novel is a riot of sensual impressions, but the emptiness of sensual gratification without love is emphatically illustrated in the satirical passages

For now, I have decided to not spend more time with my family and stop at Book 2. So am I on a break or is this the end for us? Only time will tell but always more books in the library that I can cherish and love... And dear reader, my spurned lover could be the passion of your life so make a date and enjoy the bitch about the failures of ex’s if the relationship works out.