The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail

 I dedicate this review to 70,000 missing migrants, to the 100,000 dead from the Mexican drug war and the 8 out 10 migrant women who are raped as they travel el norte. It is a small witnessing, but I do it for you.

As the lights flicker a little bit in the American empire, we see the cracks in facade, but we must remember that we still cast a very large shadow, and we must remember those in the shadows. There isn’t a more forgotten or scorned people on this continent than the central American migrant, and Oscar Martinez gives us a tour of their world. This tour is the tour of hell.  The horrible fates along this trail rival Dante and the violence seems pulled from the pages of Cormac McCarthy novel, but this is reporting, and Martinez reports it with compassion and humanity. This hell is ruled by the indifferent and at times hostile gods of the U.S. and Mexican governments and populated by more active demons like MS13 and Los Zetas, and “The beast”( a vicious almost legendary train that migrants need to hop). We start south in the violence wracked and collapsing countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. We learn the stories of those who travel north, many not just seeking a better wage, but actually fleeing for their lives. Then we travel through the desolate regions of Chiapas where the migrants are prey to bandits. Then to the ‘the beast”, descriptions of travels on the train are unreal.  Bandits jumping on or being attacked with convoys of trucks, people trying to jump on and not get mutilated or killed, and once there on having to cling to the train for dear life while fighting off sleep.  Then to the ghost towns and desolate regions of the border or “wall”, the deadly Rio Grande and deserts, and the hell of Ciudad Juarez. There the migrants are caught between the border patrol, the narcos, and their own coyotes. Martinez is in the Ciudad Juarez during the height of the drug war and his reporting is frightening, a city of pure fear and violence, a near civil war. He rides with the border patrol, the migrants, and those who few who try to help them without financial motivation, and those who prey on the migrants. He lets all of these voices speak. He is reporter and provides no real solutions to the disasters he witnesses, but we owe these who are among the most forgotten people in the Americas at least to hear their stories. Martinez tells it so well if you can stomach the subject matter it is a joy to read, and you will not forget it.

 

Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him

The Henry Brothers have done the world a favor with this beautiful book. It is a work of history, sociology, a critic of pop culture, and a prose poem, and it is very readable with poetic moments. It is unsentimental about its subject, the brothers are unapologetic though in their defense of Pryor’s genius though. They are equally unapologetic about Pryor’s dark side, his damaged psyche, abuses of woman and drugs. This book enters some almost terrifying moments, but it never feels exploitive, just the bitter truth. Paul Mooney as usual almost steals the show. The book in the end is a celebration of an American genius and his brief fulfilling of his promise and his long decline and neglect of his vibrant and important voice. He spoke a truth and then silenced himself with money and terrible movies.  This celebrates that short moment when Pryor showed us something about our country, the people he worked with and knew (and abused), and the world that created him. This book is must for fans of Pryor, standup comedy, pop and social culture of the 60’s and 70’s, and historians of those turbulent decades. It also stands as terrific literary artifact worthy of its subject.

Matt Taibbi

Taibbi’s reporting drips with caustic humor and intelligence. I picked up several of his books and worked through them and found an account of current history from the Kerry Bush election up until now through the lens of that reporting. Elections, the financial crisis, war, Katrina, immigration, stop and frisk, and corruption of our political order and imbalance of our legal system are all given a review. We can see the transition from a democracy to an oligarchy.  People may find Taibbi’s voice cynical and anarchist, but I find it mostly refreshing as he takes no prisoners and finds both parties at equal fault.

The Divide is the most current and the most important as it shows, to crudely paraphrase Taibbi’s thesis, the move of America towards a dystopia. An oligarchy that is criminalizing being poor by intertwining the social safety net with law enforcement and at the same time refusing to prosecute financial crimes criminally (only seeking fines). Taibbi gives us a tour of the bureaucracy of welfare, stop and frisk, immigration laws of Georgia, and other idiocy. He uses situations that seem worthy of the fiction of Heller and Kafka, a largely computer and statistical model  referencing bureaucracy gone amuck, serving only its illogical needs. Then he counters this with the inadequate prosecuting of financial crimes. HSBC bank can launder $100 million for the mass murders in the Sinaloa cartel without a single person going to jail but a homeless man caught with a single joint gets to serve 40 days in jail. The grotesque onslaught of short sellers on Fairfax Financial is particular bizarre episode. Case by case Taibbi goes through this surreal tilting of justice. A country where violent crime is on the downswing but prison populations are exploding. Those who suffer mostly are blacks and Latinos and some whites, but main the trend is towards the poor being the brunt of this upside down world of justice where crime is only prosecuted for one population. a population without a voice, a population the majority of Americans despise and fear. Fear that they will be there soon.  Whole communities are turned into occupied territory where the stupidest little mistakes that all kids make during adolescence, can pull you into a system that can grind you into nothing. 

Griftopia is Taibbi’s sour take on the financial crisis and its aftermath. He reviews what he calls the “grifter era” where everyone in government and business have moved towards seeking a fast buck instead of long term planning. Pennsylvania attempts to sell its turnpike, and Chicago does sell its parking meters to fill a one year budget gap(for a 75 year lease)  This resembles the sacking of a crumbling empire rather than a plan for continued business. He treats the bailouts, the Tea Party, Affordable Care Act(which has done nothing to break up the insurance cartels and is many ways a gift to them) with scorn, disgust and also compassion. The consensus between the two parties to back up business at every turn while keeping people squabbling over social issues is creating a culture of cynicism and corruption, truly alienated from democratic impulse.

The Derangement is about the loss of a collective public narrative during the Bush era. People on the right and left started to use Taibbi's wonderful term “reality shopping”  to find their own narrative. He explores and infiltrates Pastor Hagee’s megachurch and the 9/11 truth movement. He finds an America disenchanted with its political options, seeking easy superhero narratives (the Matrix and V for vendetta being common touchstones), and mostly very lonely. I found this book deeply sad, the optimism of the conspiracy theorist (even though they think they are facing a truly evil and murderous foe) versus the cynicism, disinterest and shabbiness of reality is deeply depressing. Taibbi finds humanity in both of these camps and avoids easy humor, even though he exposes some troubling beliefs and subtexts in the current era of popular movements.

Episodes or dispatches from the disasters of Bush’s second term. Taibbi retains interest whether reporting on the corrupt do nothing congress, or reporting from where the thin veneer of civilization is wiped away to reveal the uncaring face of reality. For these later parts his trip into post-Katrina New Orleans with Sean Penn is a piece of reporting worthy of Heller or Thompson, a piece of apocalyptic comedy equal parts satire and deadly serious, and three surreal days in Abu Ghraib.

This earlier work covering the 2004 election is his busiest writing, filled with skits, jokes and lots of gonzo antics like drug taking and wearing silly outfits. Its thesis, that Taibbi delivers in more nuanced fashion in later books is of the presidential election as an elaborate version of the third world military parade. He heaps endless scorn on all the candidates and both parties, and the reporters who give it such an air of importance. The only politicos he retains any love for are Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders, which seems about right.  This book is cynical and disgusted, but in the end whom is more cynical, the pageantry or the one who exposes it.

  

Other Latin American authors

While I was sick last week of I have a dim memory of being asked by my wife Mariel to write a tribute to the then recently deceased Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Why the one of the 20th Century’s greatest writer’s legacy needs more noise from me I couldn’t wrap my head around. But, then I thought of the great heritage of writers from Latin America that people either don’t read or have never heard of. So I thought I could put together a list of ones I have read and reviewed in the past. This is my list it is not intended as critical overview of the whole “Latin American boom”, I am forgetting all the beautiful poets and most importantly I am lacking any female authors. Is this my fault or are other factors at work. I usually read a lot of female authors(Carter, O’Conner, Ducornet, Rhys, Bowles, Dineson, Spiotta, Joy Williams, Unica Zurn, Brontes, Djuna Barnes etc.) so who know where the failure is, probably my own ignorance. There is of course Isabel Allende who is almost as famous as Marquez, but I have never reviewed her, though am annoyed that her work get derided as historical romance, which I have feeling if she was Llosa, Marquez, or Fuentes this criticism would never come up. There is also the brilliant Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector but once again I have no reviews, I might right that wrong in the future as her work is definitely recommended.
A brief word on Marquez himself. I first read his work in the strange city of Chicago (a city both over commercialized and decaying) living off punk rock, free jazz, beer, and burritos (didn’t even have to leave my building for a $3 one). I was out of the habit of reading and remember being pulled into a full reality, like I discovered a bible from an alternate reality. Many of the writers on this list cannot be described as “magical realism” but most combine the traits of the 19th century novelists to take in the whole of society, the surrealism of the European writers, and their individual take on their culture. Bolano in fact speaks against the term, whether this is a genuine feeling, attention seeking behavior, or a case of kill yr idols is lost without context. But all these writers influenced or were influenced by Marquez (whether or not if it was to reject him or embrace him). For direct influence from Marquez I look more to work of Rushdie, Okri, Grass, and Pynchon who used his work as model.


I will go from the most obscure to the more accepted and recognized of these authors.
First up is the oddball Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernández. He is known if at all as an influence on Calvino, Cortazar, and Marquez.
I would not be the writer I am today. Because he taught me that the most haunting mysteries are those of everyday life. -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
His most widely available collection is Piano Stories. Here is my review of it.


The weird world of Uruguayan fantasist Felisberto is like one of his book flaps states, a look into "slightly different but parallel dimension", oddball humor meets phantasmagorical prose. Bizarre sketches etched with autobiographical authenticity that resemble Proust's capturing of time and memory, automatic writing of the surrealist school, and the goofball antics of silent film comedy. The highlights are definitely "Daisy Dolls" and "The Flooded House". The former takes place in weird house next door to a mysterious factory, and filled with eccentric servants, mirrors (which one of the characters is terrified of) and lifelike human size dolls (some in display cases acting out scenes which reminds of Raymond Rousell's Locus Solus") It is a full plunge into a world of erotic pathos and very bizarre ideas. The missing link between Hoffman's "The Sandman" and Landolfi's "Gogol's Wife" The latter is another odd dream were a possibly blind, obese women has an author slowly paddle her around her designed flooded house where she occasionally holds her own wake and waxes eccentricities about the nature of water. Other stories feature men who think they are horses,ushers whose eyes glow in the dark, companies that inject commercials into you by syringe, and a woman who can never leave her balcony.
Next is the equally odd Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera. A vegetarian and open homosexual whose writing style was surrealist, savage, and blackly comic. He did not fare well under Castro and there is the story (maybe apocryphal) of Che throwing his books across a library in disgust. His collection Cold Tales and bizarre novel Rene’s Flesh are recommended. He would be called ‘transgressive” or other such garbage if he had written more recently. sadly the editions imaged below are not the beautiful Eridanos editions I read. Here is my review of novel.



Piñera crafts an odd allegorical novel. A parody of coming of age novels or the novel of education, he has his young man Rene coming to self-realization in a very twisted version of our own world, where people are obsessed with eating meat (Piñera was a vegetarian I believe), a school teaches its students to suffer in silence (electrocuting them in chairs with muzzles on), murder is legal, people are paid to be surgically rendered as people’s identical doubles (also everyone seems to have a mannequin), and secret societies fight over the distribution of chocolate. A parade of grotesque characters (Skeleton and Ball of Meat, the king of meat), odd encounters, a surreal dead pan orgy out Marquis de Sade, and general absurdity is the state of affairs in this novel. Resembles very little, except possibly Kobo Abe’s bizarre novels of the seventies (Box Man, Secret Rendezvous) and Burroughs (though more linear). Not for the faint of heart.

This book by obscure Argentinian author Leopoldo Lugones Strange Forces is a wonder of weird gaslight science fiction and horror stories.

Adolfo Bioy Casare's Invention of Morel is haunting and singular fable that sticks in ones mind.Source material for the movie Last Year at Marienbad.




Brazilian writer Ignacio de Loyola Brandao’s wild and angry novel Zero is another neglected classic. Here is my review.


Zero is a wild, profane, irreverent, surreal novel written in Brazil’s years of lead during a repressive military dictatorship. The author uses collages, random illustrations, textual experiments, cinematic technique, faux documentary and textbook appropriations, advertisements, hilarious footnotes in an exuberant style that resembles Dos Passos , the over the top dark humor of Vonnegut or Pynchon, torture sequences worthy of de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius adventures, and foreshadows Junot Diaz, while creating a funny vibrant, and very black humored indictment of his time period that still feels fresh.

Columbian writer and poet Álvaro Mutis was friend of Marquez and wrote one of my all-time favorite novels (or series of novellas) The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. My review.



A beautiful and comic voyage of a book that at different times will evoke Heart of Darkness, Greek tragedy, Moby Dick, Sinbad’s voyages, King Solomon’s Mines, narratives of Proust and Nabokov, the rogue casts of Pynchon and Dickens, Don Quixote, Journey to the End of the Night, and Borges. These seven novellas form one novel are filled with stories that are comically absurd, fraught with menace or existential doom, and or both at the same time. The at times anachronistic feeling of the narrative, mix with the timelessness of the themes in a very effective way, and its underworld setting of rotting ports, abandoned and deadly mines, steaming jungles, whorehouses, army outposts, and rusty tramp steamers with its cast of terrorists, suicides, dreamers, psychopaths, homicidal dwarfs, drug dealers, soldiers, and the blind, are an endless riot, Adventure stories fill with wide eyed wonder but wrapped in a dreamy melancholy with ontological concerns. One of the great books of our time which I recommend wholeheartedly.

Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano’s Memories of Fire trilogy is a monumental work. It is a blend of documentary and more fantastic impulses. Here is my review of the first volume.




A beautiful book that exist in the strange ground between Howard Zinn”s People’s History and Borges’s Brief History of Infamy. It featured the rage and the unpeeling of the veneer of nostalgia and romance of history of the former and the irony, pocket novels, morbid humor of the latter. This is not a scholarly or popular history though the author does show his research, but more in the realm of epic poem and Borges, a savage and beautiful book.

Roberto Bolaño (from Chile, but lived in Mexico and Spain after fleeing the coup) has been getting a lot of attention recently for his posthumously available work. There have been some excellent novellas (my favorite Amulet is about the Tlatelolco massacre) but his most impressive is the novel 2666 which is almost a masterpiece. Each section builds in menace and weirdness until section called “Part about Crimes” which is a hellish noir abyss up there with Cormac McCarthy and James Ellroy, a witnessing of the murders of woman in Ciudad Juarez (renamed in the novel) that is harrowing. A pointless section tacked on at the end blunts the impact of the book.






Borges is everything; no writer has altered my vision or reality and literature in quite the same way.

Argentinian Julio Cortázar is nearly up there with Borges. His novel Hopscotch is playful and sometimes obnoxious reordering of the novel and his short stories are sometimes as brilliant as Borges or Kafka. My favorite is the absurdist Cronopios and Famas. He had a story of endless traffic jam which I’m sure influenced Godard’s Weekend and Ballard’s Crash.




Carlos Fuentes is probably the most famous Mexican novelist internationally. His work is ambitious, widely varied in tone and quality, and at some points bristles with political anger (long stander on the left, he was at the barricades during 1968 May revolts in Paris, I wonder if that saved him from Tlatelolco?) As I said he can vary from ambitious work such as Christopher Unborn, Terra Nostra, and Where the Air is Clear, and Years of Laura Diaz to lighter and shorter works. For an intro to his work I suggest one of both, the weird gothic novella Aura and the ambitious Death of Artemio Cruz

Aura
A 2nd person nightmare by Fuentes...terrifying and gripping and near genius.

Artemio Cruz
70 years of Mexican history are covered in Fuentes’ fever dream of a novel. Featuring narration that’s part Beckett, part Stern, and part Citizen Cane, Cruz recounts his life while rotting on his death bed with first person morbid reflection, second person rants, and third person remembrances. Bitter and profane at times and pretty relentless dark, but this is such a thoroughly realized book with the experimentation serving the ideas at every chance.

Mario Vargas Llosa the famous Peruvian novelist and now noble laureate. His work is as vast as Fuentes though Llosa moved to the right over the years. You can find epics, tales of dictatorship (Feast of the Goat, Conversations in the Cathedral), to lighter works and even comedies and romances. His masterpiece without a doubt is War at the End of the World, I also enjoy his story of Peru’s horrible civil war Death in the Andes. These are good intro to his work.



Another tale of mayhem, history and the macabre from Vargas Llosa. Whereas Death in the Andes was compared to a Diane Arbus styled portrait the visual artists this book evokes is Heiryonmous Bosch or Breughal. A medieval meets the wild west landscape(turn of the century Brazil) of prophets, bandits, water witches, droughts, a storytelling dwarf, flagellants, miracle healers, madmen, plagues, vultures, rats, a revolutionary phrenologist, pariah dogs, Barons whose time has past, circus freaks, a utopian colony, and marauding destructive army. Festooned with grotesques and corpses this is a book of violence and horror but it is a conflation of real history and not fiction. A historical novel in the tradition of Tolstoy, McCarthy, and Lampedusa. Exhaustingly long but worth it.



A masterful meditation on violence and its roots in politics, poverty, sex, and folklore; and a portrait of the mountain people caught between government indifference (and malice), the seemingly irrational violence of the Shining path rebels, and the harshness of the landscape. Told through flashbacks, and variety of intertwining stories this book has a love story, murder mystery, the bizarre tale of a Dionysian cult , and a dozen or so little stories thrown in, which makes the book sound really dense and complicated but the story telling is so effective I didn’t really notice. The title of the book must have been given in translation because the Spanish title is Lituma en los Andes (Lituma being one of the characters), but it works since it evokes both Agatha Christie and Thomas Mann, as this odd book should.

Lotus War #2: Kinslayer

Jay Kristoff had a charming debut with Stormdancer, but one I had some reservations with both morally (falling on some outdated fantasy tropes) and with its actual execution. The world he created resembled Hunger Games, The Last Unicorn, Miyazaki, and Kurosawa, but the novel had some logic and pacing issues that kept me from fully loving it, but was intrigued and entertained enough to continue. In a trilogy the second volume really only needs to be a decent bridging volume to succeed, but there is another way to tackle one. Kristoff thankfully went the latter route. This book betters the previous volume in every measure, creating a book more complex, gripping, brutal, tense, violent, realistic the handling of its themes, and morally probing. The action scenes are terrifically paced, the atmosphere is grim but captivating, and the new characters and plots lines all succeed. This book is so brutal in fact any lingering suspicions that this is a YA series disappear. But, the grim is undercut by strong characters and the thoughtfulness and maturity of the author’s performance, no grittiness for grittiness sake. The amount Kristoff learned between these two volumes is pretty impressive. The only problem (besides the demon subplot which still feels tacked on and unnecessary), is how he is going to better this for the finale. It is going to be tough but I will be there to see him try.

Bleeding Edge

Pynchon presents a book somewhere between his lighter cartoony romps (Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice) and his more epic works. A strangely accessible work that parodies some recent crime fiction and cyberpunk, but is still recognizably Pynchon and shows off his obsessions with paranoia, secret worlds, and the fading of promise. He fixes on the dot com crash, the internet and 9-11 as the moments where an irreversible change occurred in our world and I find him profound as ever if a little goofy in the virtual reality parts. The cultural references were strange in this one I could have been convinced a Gen x writer wrote this or maybe William Gibson. The conspiracies surrounding 9/11 made me fear for a second that Pynchon was handing us a “truther” manifesto, but as usual resolution and clear political agenda are not Pynchon’s game, and every clue and hint is another sign in his labyrinth of elusive meaning and shadows. A book easier to digest than most of his work and one as filled with little shards of dissonance to ponder over.

Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984

Punk has gotten too many histories and This Band could be your Life gave a history of the American Post hardcore, but my favorite moment in the history has been relatively undocumented until Reynold’s brilliant book. The collision of some of my favorite literature (Kafka, Ballard, Burroughs, New Worlds Science fiction), and music (Krautrock, Roxy Music, Bowie, Captain Beefheart, dub reggae, Parliament/Funkadelic,) the energy and DIY aspects of punk, and the pessimistic political situation of the seventies created some of the most innovative music of the 20th century. The Pop Group, This Heat, The Slits, The Residents, Pere Ubu, Devo, DNA, The Contortions, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Raincoats, Gang Of Four, Public Image Limited, Joy Division, Mission of Burma, The Fall, Cabaret Voltaire, and Throbbing Gristle are the canon as far as I am concerned. Reynolds is passionate, erudite writer who captures the narrative perfectly and makes this an irresistible book. Obviously some people are going to disagree with some of his statements (I for one find The Pop Group’s albums brilliant messes rather than ambitious messes and wish Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Birthday Party weren’t discussed only briefly and only in the context of Goth), but for the most part they are well thought out and worth grappling with. This book also provides a backdoor history of the era it covers which is equally fascinating as the music content. I lost a little attentiveness as the music starts to lose interest for me in the early eighties with New Pop and the early MTV generation, it’s sad to see the envelope pushing fade to boring pop and visuals, but Reynolds writing helped me push through. This book is a treat for music lovers and those curious about an era whose influence continues to reverberate. A great book on an exciting era of music and a great book of the how the despair and the hope for reinvention of the seventies gave way to the image based, money obsessed, and conservative eighties.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

It’s fitting that a sequel to John Dos Passos’s renowned USA trilogy is a non-fiction book. Dos Passos’s work is a mix of brilliance and overreach, the newsreel, camera eye, and bio segments read as well as if they were written yesterday, but some of the fictional arcs drag which cannot be said for Packer’s continuation of it. The original trilogy covers the three decades in which America moved from a developing country towards empire, and Packer covers the three decades were America seems to be attempting to reverse this process. I am sure there is a collection of writers and journalists kicking themselves for letting Packer beat them to this idea, but one wonders who else could pull it off. This book I found at a luck day (2 hard to get titles for three weeks) rack at my library, and decided if I was bored once I would return it, needless to say I did not find myself bored for even a minute. His short bio pieces and newsreels are well handled but where succeeds the Dos Passos doesn't cut it anymore is in the key stories, he finds fascinating characters whose transformations and tragedies bring home the broad sweep of his portrait. We get to see the rise of Silicon Valley, the foreclosure crisis (his surreal descriptions of the failed suburban ghost towns of Tampa resembles Ballard more than Dos Passos), tea party movement, the occupy movement (providing great reporting on this showing starkly how Hedge’s and Sacco’s recent book failed in this regard), the scary divisions in our society, and the collapse of our industrial sector. Libertarian computer nerds, conservative movements that destroy infrastructure in their own communities(with money provided by rich industrialists), community organizers, dreamers and con men, billionaires and people left with five dollars after bills for a whole month are among the cast that Packer humanizes in these pages. I am intrigued how this book intersects with Simon Reynold’s Retromania and what many in the science fiction community having been harping about for a while is our mass inability to visualize any kind of a future anymore. I have had many bones to pick with Packer on issues in the past but have always respected him on his thinking even if I find some of his conclusions jarring, here his love for portraying complex characters and for wrestling with his beliefs in regards to the realities of our situation, and his rage at how deeply we have been cheated by the current system all serve to make this a remarkable summary of this nation’s current crisis. I fear the future will require a sequel.

Dana Spiotta

Lightning Field :Spiotta gets constant comparisons to Delillo and Didion and these aren’t imprecise, she offers the almost clinical dissection of the objects and anxieties that define our modern condition of the former and spare and stark style of the latter. Her first book features her at her murkiest, operating in a Bergmanesque fog of confused identity and enigmatic scenes, very detached and opaque most of the times and then almost humorous at others. It is cold book that offers up plenty of satire and surrealism but little cohesion or warmth, with the three main characters interchanged in my mind in way that was either purposely or accidently confusing. It has great moments but I recommend it a little less readily than her other two available books. Many of her traits are present first here, the brother suffering from mental illness, the extensive grasp of pop culture, old Hollywood movies (and the watching of an actor’s complete filmography, esp. James Mason), and people on film, these and many other elements pop up in her later work but it suffers more in comparison to those books than on its own, an author though is present with a distinct vision and style and almost painfully sad things to say about our present state. Her odd and condensed style is welcome in an era of doorstoppers and overreaching please all narratives, more reminiscent of the opaque and fierce movies of Michelangelo Antonioni, Godard, Fellini, and Bergman than any recent fiction.




Eat the Document :This book could be intimidating, addressing the cultural division between the 60’s and the 90’s, the failures of leftist protest in America, cultural obsession, and a critique of an overly medicated and corporatized society. A book handling that sounds bloated and unapproachable, but not in Spiotta’s hands, her vision is almost clinical but somehow remains human. She is despairing but understanding and her characters live and breathe and don’t exist to provide punch lines. Her understanding of record geek obsession shows her has a true audiophile, I can recognize a music geek, her placement of Captain Beefheart, Skip Spence, Beach Boys, the cult band Love, and Funkadelic’s beautiful and desolate “Maggot Brain” in the text in ways that are more than name dropping show her capability to critique and analyze our culture.





Stone Arabia :Many of Spiotta’s preoccupations appear here, obsessively watching movies, mentally ill siblings, cultural fixation to the point of psychological, our visions of reality versus the grim mortality of it, an almost surreal examination of the objects of our culture, and trying to find real emotions in a society built on spectacle. This book revolves around a sister and a brother. The brother has over the years obsessively (can’t help but use that word a lot when discussing one of her books) created a rock and roll stardom for himself. This book is about much more than that simple description can hint at. Spiotta’s insights are painfully exact but necessary, her vision is satirical but compassionate, odd but recognizable, and she will make you examine your life and face what makes a life in an over mediated and under caring world. Questions of what is fame, what is compassion, and what is life for are handled in an odd but compelling book with little fat or self-indulgence, Spiotta has an eye for the failures and triumphs of humanity and a voice to articulate it.

Death and the Penguin

Post-Soviet Ukrainian existential and absurdist noir is new genre for me and one I think Andrey Kurkov owns, Kurkov crafts tales worthy of Kafka but with warm humanity and humor and plotting that are definitely his own. The hero is a writer with writer’s block and a pet penguin (gotten from a defunded zoo) and while this combination at first seems a little bit precious but their melancholy day to day is described with well-placed rhythms and details and is never too cute. The events get both sinister and humorous as the protagonist accidently gains a family, writes obituaries for living people that then die, and is forced to attend gangster’s funerals with the penguin in tow. Death and the Penguin is a beautiful and amusing book with a sad sack sense of humor, affection for absurd and ominous situations presented in clear language, and humanity.

Empty Space: A Haunting

The finale to Harrison’s trilogy is as confounding, obtuse, and beautiful as the rest of the series. His prose is crafted so impeccably and relentlessly it is hard to resist chewing over each line and word choice (it is also very discouraging for the amateur writer) and occasionally losing the plot. But with Harrison you know you are going to read it again, soon I might restart the trilogy and see how they work together. His imagery, imagination, and prose are on such a level that they put much science fiction (is there anyone else who writes in the genre recently that is comparable as a stylist, Wolfe, Mieville, Shepard, or Gibson?) and other fiction in its shadow. Jodorowsky and Lynch should have skipped Dune and waited for these books to adapt. Quantum physics, Gnosticism, and dream imagery mixed with cyberpunk, noir, depressing near future science fiction, and space opera for a dense, cinematic, and surreal nightmare.

The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?

Like David Markson’s wonderful late fictions, Powell takes you on a similar reckless adventure in pure thought and language. Just questions after questions but every page and every line is remarkable; it is wickedly funny and deeply effecting in ways many more structure bound fictions are rarely. Powell along with Markson takes the spirit from Beckett and Barthelme and crafts darkly funny, evocative fictions, crafted in impeccable language that without even a hint of plot keep you turning pages drunk on the language alone. This is Literature without an ounce of fat, perfect in most of the ways that you want it to be, just an enigmatic text that forces you to contend with it but so funny and entertaining that pretentious thoughts as I have just voiced never comes to mind.

Predator Cities #1: Mortal Engines (Predator Cities)

Harry Potter and Dark Materials started the recent movement of YA titles that could be enjoyed by adult audiences as thoroughly as their target audience, but no title deserves this distinction more than Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve. A thoroughly unsentimental, cliché rebuffing, and occasional brutally dark novel that still revels in wild adventures, crazy machines, Dickensian names and characters, and the full screen sense of wonder that belongs in a YA title. This book came out in 2001 not sure if before or after the events of September but it seems infused with the crazed atmosphere of that year, the mad march for war, the feeling of besiegement and blind trust in misguided leaders. Philip Reeve wrote the book that Mieville probably wanted too with Railsea, in fact the future wasteland of Reeve’s work is undoubtedly an influence on that book. Reeve creates a book that evokes Gilliam, Dickens, and Vance, and is overflowing with puns, references, and jokes about our time (my favorite being a character named Nancarrow and an airship called the 13th floor elevator), and filled to the brim with undead killers, giant machine cities, pirates, mad, old tech from an insane era of war, desperate atmosphere, villains that are ruthless but still human, an airship piloting spy named Fang, and two believable, unlikely young heroes. Reeve knows the trick to keep audiences on edge, make every character a full and believable character and be willing at any moment to kill one of them. The myth of protagonist’s invulnerability, revenge seeking, happy endings, the idea that a character has a destiny, and other atrocious tropes and clichés of fantasy/adventure stories are thoroughly skewered by Reeve along the way. He has created a unfriendly world ruled by force, accidents, and chaos that the character have to fight for survival in, but he has filled it with the warmth of a realistic view of humans, they can be cruel, selfish and self-involved and live in desperate times but they are recognizable human. If this series retains half the success rate of this initial volume it will be the YA series I point to above any other.

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

It starts with a riot and ends in an elegy, a deep feeling of loss. In between is almost nonstop frantic energy and bad moods. This is not a biography of Nixon, though he broods and connives throughout like Milton’s Devil, this book is a panorama or Boschian landscape of the era that brought this deeply paranoid, inferiority complex plagued man to power. The title of Nixonland is taken from an Adlai Stevenson quote, “a land of slander and scare, of sly innuendo, of poison pen and anonymous phone call and bustling, pushing, shoving-the land of smash and grab and anything to win.” Civil Rights, and populist backlash against it, the restlessness of the baby boomer generation, the reckless and worthless escalation of the war in Vietnam created a confluence of factor that led to a civil war within the Democratic party, breaking the back of the New Deal (though ironically elements of it still continued in Nixon’s domestic policy). A revolution was also brewing in the Republicans as Barry Goldwater’s failed campaign left in its shattered wake a takeover by the conservative elements of the party. Arguably Perlstein is presenting nothing new in this book but he synthesizes seemingly everything in a thoroughly novelistic narrative. My Lai, race riots, the start of the culture wars, terrorist attacks, Attica, The Siege of Chicago, Nixon’s brilliant campaigning and crippling doubt, LBJ’s hubris, the turbulent presidential campaigns of 68 and 72, the assassinations, hippies, political trials, all get pulled into an entirety. He makes some mistakes along the way (the New York and L.A. Times reviews are good sources on these), but when juggling this much I will forgive him for a dropped ball or two. He is very fair when addressing all the various political factions and personalities in this narrative. He in the end has provided a riveting history of a turbulent era whose mistakes and children are still with us.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever

This is definitely the most fun I’ve had reading a book in a while, maybe not the best, though it is really good. The book is a kaleidoscopic social history of New York during its darkest years in the supposedly musically fallow seventies. So much of my favorite music bubbled under the surface in the seventies I always forget that it really was pretty awful time for popular music (as a quick listen to a current day oldies or classic rock station will show). Hermes travels similar ground to other tomes such as Please Kill Me, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, and Ladies and Gentlemen the Bronx is Burning, but his focus is different. His taste is very catholic and he draws on the whole experience of music in New York. The CBGB scene of Blondie, Talking Heads, Ramones, Television, Patti Smith and Suicide gets covered, the ascendance of disco, and the DJ parties that birthed Hip Hop, but Hermes has wider and more eclectic tastes and he draws in the vibrant Latin/Cuban music scene, the minimalist classical scene (Glass, Reich, Riley, and Young), the post Coltrane/Ayler loft jazz scene, rock mythmaker Bruce Springsteen, and multimedia and genre eccentrics like Arthur Russell, Laurie Anderson, and Meredith Monk. He draws connections between all of them and shows what an interconnected town it was. He brings to life a vast assortment of personalities, and places them in the context of that dystopian era of New York (as exemplified by the images from Scorsese’s Taxi Driver), an era of financial disaster, looting, arson, serial murder, power outages, garbage strikes, and crime. He intertwines this all with a bit of a personal memoir which doesn’t really distract and when it involves his personal take on several important albums of the era (Patti Smith’s Horses, Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Basement Tapes, and Television’s Marquee Moon) and movies of the era it works at other times it’s a bit inessential. I found the epilogue to be a bit sentimental but not damningly so. My only hope now is that he writes a sequel.