A Bunch of Shorter Reviews

* - A collection of what's left. Don't worry, I'm almost done.

Black Snow ("1967") by Mikhail Bulgakov

A biting account of the inflated egos incumbent in Moscow Theatre in the 1930's. This is a very quick, tight story of a would-be-author would-be playwright who lucks his way into the wondrous world of theater only to discover it is just as insane, corrupt and ridiculous as everything else. It's satire that refers to very specific historical figures, but you don't really need to be in-the-know to get the jokes - in fact, it probably translates quite well into all kinds of social and professional venues. It's the kind of book that does not grip you in throes while you're reading it, but upon finishing it, you realize you've just read a classic and expertly executed work of art. So, maybe not top notch in the immediate kickback department, but a truly great work. I found the left turn that the novel takes at some point (I'll let you wait for that) to be both frustrating and brilliant, and thoroughly sad. This is, at its heart, a novel about a highly imaginative man suffering from melancholia - so you should probably know that going in, too. Great work by a great author - if you've never read Master & Margarita, go grab it now.

Seriously. Let go of that mouse. Grab a classic Russian Novel. Join the Literati Elite. Get your cocktail party on.

Einstein's Dreams (1993) by Alan Lightman

Very quick read, and more of a series of vignettes - so while it was enjoyable, I'm not about to call it life-changing or essential or anything of that sort, hence the rating of just good. It's a very tightly written account of 30 different dreams or versions of time - told against the backdrop of Einstein as he developed his Theory of Relativity in the early 20th century. The dreams succeed in unravelling every aspect of time - future, past, human perception, the meaning of now, etc. Some of the ideas are extremes of the implications of Relativity; most are just fantastic spins and non-standard takes. In fact, I think this book overly simplified things - by attacking each of times individual elements, it killed the collective mystery. No one aspect standing alone - unchangeable past, the never attatinable ever-present now - reads as all that bizarre, even when exploded to its extreme conclusion. The mystique of time sits in the fact that all these elements occur coincidentally, so when Einstein's brain strips the elements away one at a time and considers them individually, he really doesn't create a more spiritual expeience of his theories for me - perhaps its just that these are all things I've though before. No doubt time is an enigma, and this novella does a good job of capturing each element of it in vignette form - but the very fact that this was nothing special, just flashing thoughts and not a literary space for characters to *really* exist in, left me wanting a lot more out of the world's most notorious genius's dreams. Also, some times (ugh), I think the novel ran out of steam - though the repeated use of villagers in everyday events and lovers and dreamers and mothers and fathers brought a nice consistency, it also wore thin by the end. Turns out that even time gets tiring the 30th time around.

Fever Pitch (1992) by Nick Hornby

Simply a great, great book. Hornby writes a memoir demarcated in its chronology by League games of his childhood and lifelong obsession, Arsenal soccer games. After two or three of his earlier game accounts, I thought there was no way he would be able to keep it up - he is, after all, talking about people I don't know, a sport I barely know, and he is more or less playing the same angle over and over again, that it is completely ridiculous that his life centers around this seemingly arbitrary soccer team which, incidentally, is not even his hometown team. But he pulled it off and then some - weaving the history of the club with his relationship with his father, mother, girlfriends, roommates, schoolmates, fellow fans, his own writing career, his depression... you name it. Surprise, surprise, I did not find my self laughing so hard that I cried, as the bookback promised - he is a witty chum, but it was really the amazing craft to paint his life around the soccer backbone. Along the way he makes poignant comment on the history of the game in his times, the riots, hooligans, deaths by stampede, the lack of modernity of the sport and the dying nature of the club loyal to its fanbase in the pursuit of dollars. Highly, highly enjoyable, and while I do find Hornby a little unquestionably sentimental and overly "bought-in" at times, this was really stellar stuff, and his wry telling of a story that could have turned into another Cubs-and-or-Sox bitchfest carried itself with grace. Great work.

Side note - Jimmy Fallon is on my hit list of sorts. That movie, while okay in and of itself, is just a slap in the face to this book. Tragic, really.

A couple of excerpts that I enjoyed are below, and there were many great segments splattered throughout the book along these lines:

"Arsenal were too good, Charlie's goal was too spectacular, the crowd was too big and too appreciative of the team's performance...The 12th of February did happen, in just the way I described it, but only its atypicality is important now. Life isn't, and never has been, a 2-0 home victory against the League leaders after a fish-and-chip lunch."

"Sport and life, especially the arty life, are not exactly analogous. One of the great things about sport is its cruel clarity: there is no such thing, for example, as a bad one-hundred metre runner, or a hopeless centre-half who got lucky; in sport, you get found out. Nor is there such thing as an unknown genius striker starving in a garret somewhere, because the scouting system is fullproof. (Everyone gets watched.) There are, however, plenty of bad actors or musicians or writers making a decent living, people who happened to be in the right place at the right time, or knew the right people, or whose talents have been misunderstood or overestimated. Even so, I think there is a real resonance with the Gus Caesar story: it contains a terrifying lesson for any aspirants who think their own unshakeable sense of destiny (and again, this sense of destiny is not to be confused with arrogance - Gus Caesar was not an arrogant footballer) is significant. Gus must have known he was good, just as any pop band who has ever played the Marquee know they are destined for Madision Square Garden and an NME front cover, and just as any writer who has sent off a completed manuscript to Faber and Faber knows that he is two years away from the Booker. You trust that feeling with your life, you feel the strength and determination it gives you coursing through your veins like heroin... and it doesn't mean anything at all."

P.S. I neglected to mention something that I mentioned over in blogland, which is that this book put a huge dent in enthusiasm over the current state of pro-sports and any fandom I have staked therein. Hornby just nails it - the constant switching of teams, locations, taking away the sporting event from the working class - I'm sure you can read about all of these things elsewhere, but FP really nailed that home, the impossibility of devoting yourself to a club and having any stability associated with your devotion outside of uniforms (and even that is no longer sacred). I've definitely soured on the Cubs and their rotating OFs, middle infielders, catchers, relief pitchers; I guess really it's only Wood and Prior that have been around any substantial amount of time but they've probably missed a collective 80 starts between them at this point. The Red Sox are no better, dropping WS heroes left and right. I also think fantasy baseball and good ol' ubiquitous ESPN have a lot to do with this, too - as awesome as it is to watch every game simultaneously in the country, know all the stats, etc., it kills the need to sink your teeth into one team. Hell, in college I even mindlessly devoted myself to the San Jose Sharks (for a very important reason, to be revealed later) and rode the ups and downs of that team, but then it became watching who was on the tube... I think the hyper-availability renders supporting your "local team" pointless, even worse when that club is a revolving door, too. And colleges that recruit world-wide and the players only stay for two years - you see where I'm going with this. It's all disheartening and impersonal, like, I don't know, say, a modern times metropolis. So in a way, Hornby's great book about his intertwined life with a sports team was a dirge - and although that's probably just more misguided nostalgia for theoretically golden times, it is true, your local club is not your local club any more. I feel painted into a corner where I enjoy the ballet of it all more than anything else - but that just makes those Olympic human interest pieces, soft-focus and all, all the more trying.

All the same, it would be really nice if the Cubs could win the World Series. Tres nice.

In Cold Blood (1967) by Truman Capote

Supposedly the first "true crime" novel in that the narrative is based on actual events (Ripped From the Headlines!), In Cold Blood is a great novel independent of that fact. It consistently bounces between the perspectives of the crime victims, the town they psychologically destroy, and the criminals themselves. And what starts with a horrifyingly brutal and arbitrary crime is explained in an equally terrifying manner: it was just brutal, and just arbitrary, the intersection of two very socially and mentally maladjusted individuals and a chance cell-sharing with a former employee of an upstanding family. The criminals' nonchalance is "chilling," ha ha, the detective's obsession is meticulously detailed, and the breakdown of the affected town is just wrenching. Excellent, excellent story, and Capote really creates and covers a universe in a very tight narrative.

On top of that, Capote's writing style is fascinating - it is densely descriptive and detailed without being overhanded, and there's a sense that not only is he leaving no stone unturned in terms of story details, he is also not leaving no sentence re and re edited - everything comes out very polished and processed, very efficient. That's just the style: great for the most part, a little overbearing at times - I think I remember the phrase "minute Lilliputian figurines," which to me is a direct application to the department of redundancy department. Anyhoo - I am not really a big fan of "true stories," I think once the narrtive is written it is implicitly interpreted and whether it "actually happened" or not is not very meaningful. I think James Frey probably likes my take on that. But Capote keeps you in this one and amazingly so - definitely a gifted man.

The Inner Game of Tennis (1973) by Timothy Gallwey

I had long wanted to read this classic of East-Meets-West sports psychology/philosophy, and after reading a couple of tennis-based DFW essays, I finally went to the library and grabbed it. I found it to be a meatloaf-spoon version of another EMW classic, Zen in the Art of Archery, meaning that it took the intricate complexities of that activities and boiled them down even further, turning everything into a simplistic model of Self 1 versus Self 2, "letting it happen" v. "making it happen."

That is the jist of the book - that you are split into two selves, 1: the teller and 2: the doer. And the teller self, Self 1, has a nasty habit of harshly judging what Self 2 does and actually impedes what Self 2 is attempting to accomplish. So turning Self 1 into an observant machine and not a judgmental one is a major goal of the book. And he offers a lot of techniques for doing so, including amping up Self 1's concentration level such that a, you don't have time to critique Self 2 because you are so busy concentrating, and b, you are actually making Self 1 more observant of the situation at hand. Think focusing on the seams of the spinning ball or concentrating on the sound the racket makes. The other major goal of the book is to identify and address the actual version of the inner game being played - why do you play tennis? Why do you do anything? In re-aligning these goals, being more honest about your reasons and hoepfully, dropping some of the interfering inner games that tend to get played (perfectionism, ego-inflation, etc.), you cn achieve a great deal more in tennis. This is the straight up ironic "you can only achieve greatness if you aren't obsessed with being great."

When reading books such as this, I feel like I am being sold a car: "it's just that easy - for the low low price of $1995," etc. This book has brilliant ideas about being in the moment, dropping the judgmental frontal lobe activity in favor of the observant, knowing sub-conscious self and identifying the real inner game you are playing when engaged in competition. Unlike ZitAoA, it acts as if these monumental tasks could be accomplished with the flick of a wrist. Denying the complexity and the difficulty of overcoming natural western tendency is bizarre and misleading - I did not appreciate that aspect of the book. But I did enjoy the general message, and I enjoyed the fact that the vast majority of the book is a transparent metaphor and not an actual tennis instructional guide. I skimmed through the actual instructions on strokes and serves and such, trusting that the general philosophy will be easy enough to apply when and if I take up tennis again. But the central message that you can apply these concentration and achievement techniques to any field is great. Which makes it all the more bizarre that he wrote the rest of the series, the Inner Games of Golf, Music, Business, Butterfly Taxonomy, etc. And makes him see that much more like a car salesman.

The Stupidest Angel (2005) by Christopher Moore

The B-movie in book form, and spliced with the utter wackiness that Moore is known for. The story is set in a small Californian town at Christmas time - the angel Raziel (aka the Angel of Death) has lost a bet and therefore must perform this year's Christmas miracle. And yes, he is the stupidest in question. A ridiculous cast of characters, many of whom have appeared in other Moore novels, flush out the "setting" in a way and when Raziel's miracle goes haywire, they all collectively take it on the chin with a hilarious lack of grace. I can't get over the B-movie comparison because that's exactly what it is, except with someone competent at the director's wheel - so even though the outcome and events are fairly obvious, Moore absolutely nails the pacing and it's just a joy to read as the events hurtle toward their crazed conclusion. I'm doing my best not to give anything away here - so I'll just sum it up by saying that it's a fairly stereotypical "Crazy things take place in a small town" story, only Moore spices it, the town and its inhabitants, up nicely and makes it a great trip. Some of his "modern day" jokes are a little played - like "Hummer" the vehicle v. the sinful act playful puns; that type of thing. So while that detracts a little bit, the "spirit" is definitely there, as are Moore's usual zany but heartfelt characters. Very good read; doesn't aspire to much, but it kills what it does. So to speak.