notanotherbookreview

Peter Cherches’ LIFT YOUR RIGHT ARM, (March, Pelekenesis) Peter Cherches is a master of the conundrum, a poet of the nuance that makes nonsense of logic and meaning where it wouldn’t be caught dead.  Imagine the love-child of Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein, or the uneasy marriage of Archibald MacLeish and Harold Pinter and you may have an idea of the singularity of his style. Mr. Cherches' new book of minimalist prose, LIFT YOUR RIGHT ARM, is a novel with five movements or five novels--as you find it. Coincidentally, Cherches means to search for in French and his humor is found in unlikely places. Take the opening section with the adventures of Mr.Deadman. Here's an excerpt: “Life,” Mr.Deadman says, “is a death-defying stunt.”  And with some chill and much amusement, you accompany Mr. Deadman to a sushi restaurant, a barbecue, keeping up with the Joneses, and on a holiday.  The punch line is, as always, as you knew it would be, that life's different bec...

Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan, published by Farrar Straus Giroux, is a very smart novel that pits new technologies against old (think Google vs, Name of the Rose) and in the process, it examines what language tells us about meanings.  Is our consciousness transformed by the medium? Marshall Mcluhan, sage of communication, believed the medium is the message and that technology is the content. In Don DeLillo’s The Names, clashing languages form a furious Tower of Babel. Sloan has similar questions about the language of technology and how it’s shape shifting us in the 21 st century. But that may be his next, darker book. Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore is an entertaining mystery wrapped in a love for the miraculous tools of our 21 st century technological genius. Language, code, is the heart of this mystery, which begins in a strange bookstore of unreadable books. Clay Jannon, web site designer, is desperate after being laid off from his job. He’s walki...

A “Farewell” that’s really a hello to Dorothy Parker I’m a fan of Dorothy Parker’s story, Big Blonde, though she may be better remembered for her clever quotes, “I’ve never been a millionaire but I just know I’d be darling at it.” Though her heyday was 1920’s, Parker’s wit is still fresh and inspiring. So I cheer Ellen’s Meister’s novel, which brings her ghost to the rescue of a modern literary woman. Farewell, Dorothy Parker by Ellen Meister (Putnam & Sons, February 2013) is a thinking woman’s fantasy. Violet Epps, fearless movie critic for a national magazine, is a hopeless wimp in her personal life, crippled with anxiety not entirely of the neurotic variety. Recently, Violet lost her sister in a car accident, as well as custody of her beloved niece. To add to the turmoil, her loser boyfriend is set to move into her house and her snarky assistant wants her job. Feeling she needs inspiration, Violet, who thinks of Parker as a kind of literary alter ego, makes a rese...

The Stockholm Octavo is completely entertaining and totally unexpected Karen Engelman’s The Stockholm Octavo (Nov 2012, Ecco/Harper Collins) is completely entertaining and totally unexpected. Not only is it set in 1791 in Stockholm but the plot hinges on Cartomancy, a form of divination using cards. This is not Tarot. The Octavo is a construct with its own images and meanings, involving Masonic metaphysics. It is crucial to the fate of our hero, the Seeker Emil Lasson. When Emil first goes to the gaming salon of Mrs. Sophia Sparrow, there are rumbles of the revolution in France and the revolt of aristocratic “patriots” against Sweden’s populist king, but the people in her comfortable rooms are more interested in gambling. There are also those seeking Mrs. Sparrow’s gifts as a seer. And when the vision comes to her, she must communicate it.  That first night, she sees in Emil’s hand a good future in cards. And his dexterity at the gaming table is such that he bec...

The Middlesteins is a Greek Tragedy in Bar Mitzvah clothes. This is a funny novel in a sad grotesque kind of way. It's also painfully familiar in the way of family dramas. But this is a barbed comedy, where characters are not just edgy depictions but  instruments of destiny that are very connected to earthly tortures. It begins with our heroine, Edie, as a little girl. Her mother and father, immigrants from the war-torn old world, are delighted that she can eat what she wants and as much of it as she likes. Isn't that the idea of the land of the free and plentiful? So when little Edie suffers pain, she's of course given food as solace. She grows up equating food with love, the pleasure that never lets you down, until of course, she can't eat. And that is the crux of this book, Edie's food obsession. Only time she stopped eating was when her father was dying and she was in law school. A svelte 164, she agrees to meet Richard on a blind date, though she's s...

How can I say this? Probably because I never read it before. Tolstoy wasn't on my high school reading list. And I studied art in college. I've spent years reading for truth, when this book existed; luminous, transcendent, full of dirt and tragedy--like life itself. Tolstoy doesn't open with Anna, but her brother Stepan and it's brilliant he does so, because Stepan, Anna's brother has some similar proclivities. Stepan is a pleasure-loving family man, a sensualist easily moved by passing sentiments, and a philanderer. He's presented as attractive, a fun aristocrat with the usual indulgences of his class. In society he's liked for his easy-going personality and Stepan understands how to network and use connections. You almost agree with him that he's right to have a mistress or two, because pretty women are attracted to him and his wife has lost her looks, disposition, and has little of interest to say to a man of his cultured intelligence. You may symp...

This novel steals you, SUTTON by J.R. Moehringer (Hyperion) I was grabbed by  SUTTON, a novel about the famous bank robber from the Great Depression. Sutton is aspiring and resigned, flinty and sensitive, brilliant and a fool. He got under my skin with his soft noirish voice and the pathos of his thwarted life. I heard Moehringer talk about researching this novel and the odd coincidence that his mother, once a bank secretary, witnessed one of Sutton's robberies. It's the kind of coincidence Sutton details, and these telling details have more weight than bare facts in the elusive life of SUTTON . It's a fact that "Willie the Actor" was released from Attica prison on Christmas Eve 1969, after serving 17 years. (The irony that Gov.Rockefeller, a former banker, signed the order was probably not lost on Sutton). His lawyer made a deal with a newspaper for an exclusive, so he spent his first night secluded with a reporter and photographer.  SUTTON, the fictio...