Tag Archives: United States

Literary Songs A-Z | C is for… ‘Catcher in the Rye’ by J.D. Salinger

01 Thursday Mar 2012

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The classic American ‘coming-of-age‘ novel ‘Catcher in the Rye‘ by J.D. Salinger is one of those books that leave me frustrated and slightly on edge. Holden Caulfield, the 16-year-old protagonist is an icon of teenage rebellion and angst. Now I’m well and truly past my teenage years I’m a little scared to relate with this strange boy who is caught in that in between stage of life.

So in honour of the novel here is Guns’n’Roses with their tribute ‘Catcher in the Rye’. Enjoy! Lyrics are below.

When all is said and done
We’re not the only ones
Who look at life this way
That’s what the old folks say
But every time I see them
Makes me wish I had a gun
If I thought that I was crazy
Well I guess I’d have more fun (Guess I’d have more fun)

Oooh, the Catcher In The Rye
Again Won’t let ya get away from him (Tomorrow never comes) It’s just another day… Like today
You decide
Cause I don’t have to
And then they’ll find
And I won’t ask you
At anytime
Or long hereafter
If the cold outside’s
As I’m imagining
It to be Oh, no

Lana nana na na na
Lana nana na nana
Ooh, the Catcher In The Rye Again
Won’t let ya get away from him (Tomorrow never comes)
It’s just another day… Like today
When all is said and done
We’re not the only ones
Who look at life this way
That’s what the young folks say
And if they’d ever change
As that reminds to say
But every time I see them
Makes me wish I had a gun
If I thought that I was crazy
Well I guess I’d have more fun
Cause what used to be’s
Not there for me
And ought to for someone That belongs… Insane… Like I do
Oh, no Not at all

On an ordinary day
Not in an ordinary way
All at once the song I heard
No longer would it play
For anybody
Or anyone
That needed comfort from somebody
Needed comfort from someone
Who cared To be Not like you
And unlike me

And then the voices went away from me Somehow you set the wheels in motion
That haunt our memories
You were the instrument
You were the one
How a body
Took the body
You gave that boy a gun

You took our innocence
Beyond our stares
Sometimes the only thing
We counted on
When no one else was there

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Book Review | ‘Man in the Dark’ by Paul Auster

19 Monday Dec 2011

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Man in the DarkMan in the Dark by Paul Auster

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination, where as you can watch a film-and even enjoy it-in a state of mindless passivity.”

It is my opinion that Paul Auster gets better with age. Whether that’s his age or mine I’ve not quite decided, but I’m finding him a lot more agreeable the older I get. I first met him in the acclaimed ‘The New York Trilogy‘; a book I fiercely wished I could like, but found I couldn’t because of all the disjointedness and the loose ends of plot he kept leaving artfully around for my poor brain to trip up on.

Anyway, the long and short of it is, I could smell a good thing was there and that my brain needed a bit more ripening, so I made a mental note to come back to Auster. Good job I did as well. After ‘The New York Trilogy’ I did what I normally do with fiction/ fiction writers I find hard to get into: try out a shorter work instead. So I indulged in ‘Travels in the Scriptorium‘ (excellent!) and now ‘Man in the Dark’, which I found electrifying.

One thing to remember is, when writing fiction, Auster can’t help but write ABOUT fiction as well. This must be a theme he loves returning to because both ‘Travels in the Scriptorium’ and ‘Man in the Dark’ have elements of ‘when fiction invades life’.

There is a decidedly Borgian element to ‘Man in the Dark’, mainly because it is a short narrative that harbours the seeds of a much larger one within it. There is a ‘story within a story’ thing happening here, parallel worlds that threaten to break through the thin membrane separating reality and imagination.

August Brill is an elderly man who is recovering from a car accident. He also suffers from severe insomnia, which compels him to make up stories to pass the time. One character, Owen Brick, becomes a fictional alter ego of sorts, and the world he occupies is an eerie place where history is re-written to create an alternative history. In Bricks’ world, America is a battleground as civil war ensues and fellow citizens kill each other relentlessly. The chapters alternate between Brill and Brick seamlessly and there is an overarching ’emptiness’ that unites or rather binds them together. For Brill this is the void left behind by the passing of his wife and his own general loneliness as an elderly man. For Brick, it is the frightening fear of waking up from a coma and not knowing who he is, where he is and more importantly what the hell he is doing there in the first place.

For those finding Auster difficult I highly recommend this short novel. If any of the themes in this review interest you then ‘Travels in the Scriptorium’ by the same author or ‘Point Omega’ by Don Delillo are equally as good (and short!)

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Book Review | ‘Civil War’ by Mark Millar

13 Saturday Aug 2011

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Civil WarCivil War by Mark Millar

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’m amazed by how Millar keeps coming up with these new slants on the Marvel universe. It must require a lot of creative thinking and collaboration with the ‘right’ kind of people. This time Millar explores what would happen if the superheroes that we all loved and trusted got out of hand and began fighting amongst themselves. The reality of that would be (as the title suggests) complete civil war. The story opens on a quiet American suburb in what looks like a ‘reality tv’ raid on a house full of rogue superheroes on the FBI wanted list for illegal activities. What ensues is a pre-emptive fight that gets out of hand – extremely out of hand. Cornered, confused and enraged, Nitro unleashes an explosive attack near a school which turns into a small-scale atomic blast. The result: an entire neighbourhood burnt to a crisp with a death toll of 900.

In the face of this catastrophe, the American public bay for blood, that results in a merciless witch-hunt for all superheroes. Torn between grief, shame and anger for the careless behaviour of their junior peers, established superheroes like the Avengers begin to suffer the wrath of people. There is soon talk of registering, legalising and uncovering the identities of those with powers to make them more accountable for their actions. This soon divides the superheroes into two camps; those who decide to yield to the public demands and those who resist.

There is more to this story than meets the eye: Nitro’s suicidal attack and its’ devastating effects mirrors the 9/11 attack on America’s twin towers. It is a commentary on fanaticism and the way the Western media have turned the conflict in the East (be it Afghanistan or Iraq) into ‘big brother’ style entertainment.

However having said that, I’m not that happy with the WAY it was told. The graphics were beautiful as always, yet there were some plot-holes that made it a little too unbelievable. There were fights a-plenty, in fact too much violence. I felt the frequency of the brawls eclipsed the storyline too much. Every other page was a fight or a tussle. It was interesting to see who would side with whom and in this version of events Tony Stark (Ironman) takes precedence as he tries to ‘do the right thing’. There are a few shocking events such as some heroes get killed, while others relinquish their well-guarded identities.

As a comic book fan I would like to have seen more of the Punisher and I feel he wasn’t given the credit he deserved. After a brief stint working for the rebelling superheroes, he is quickly cast aside as ‘insane’ and never heard of again. The very thing that makes the story weak is probably the fact that there are too many superheroes. There is an impressive cast, but I felt it truly overwhelmed me. Less could have been more. This felt like Millar was trying to find ways to include as many of his creations as possible.

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Book Review | “The Spy Who Loved Me” by Ian Fleming

26 Tuesday Jul 2011

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The Spy Who Loved Me (James Bond)The Spy Who Loved Me by Ian Fleming

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it.”

My initial thought when I began reading this novel was, ‘Hang on a minute… this isn’t the Bond I know. Nor the Fleming I’m used to for that matter. What’s going on?’ And indeed, I think a lot of people will recognise the stark difference of perspective that Fleming chose when he decided to write ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’. This time round, readers get to see Bond through the eyes of a young innocent French Canadian girl by the name of Vivienne Michel, who as things would have it is on a run from her own painful past. However, what Michel is yet to discover is that fate has more tragedy in store for her in the guise of two murderous villains Sol Horror and Sluggsy Morant.

Michel meets these two unsavories at a motel, which she has been working at for the past two weeks and has been left in charge of till the boss comes to close it for the season. The setting is as follows: Tragic and vulnerable heroine is left all by her lonesome, in the middle of a thick pine forest, with no one around for MILES. To add to the fright, a godalmighty lightning storm kicks off, knocking out the electricity supply. Can things get any worse? Fleming thinks they can. Enter two nasty guys posing as insurance people (Michel stupidly opens the door for them) and you have yourself one big, nasty party.

But Bond is never too far from the scene (apparently he is just in the vicinity), and arrives after Michel suffers a terrible night of ‘alluded’ rape and torture to take the bad guys out. Hmm… In fact, if it weren’t for Bond’s punctured tyre, Michel would never have been saved.

Ok, let’s get onto the actual review, this book shouldn’t be taken seriously. There are a lot of plot holes, and I mean a LOT. Take Michel for instance; she is an intelligent girl who had a semi-decent job in the editorial business. But she goes and sleeps with the boss (not good) who is a self-confessed nazi-minded ‘purist’. You would have thought our Michel had some sense, because before that she had the misfortune of losing her virginity to an Eton snob in a dirty forest! So why on earth did this girl think it was a good idea to travel through America by herself (on a scooter no less) is beyond me. And of all places, to allow herself to end up alone, in the middle of nowhere, in a run-down motel.

But Bond is no better. Oh no. Commander Bond, for all his suave, cold-blooded killer instincts fails to do away with the thugs at the first chance he gets. In fact, it takes him three attempts to actually kill them. I almost laughed out loud when he apologised to Michel, saying he was getting a little rusty. I think so too! I mean here’s a guy who is in a class of his own when it comes to espionage, yet two hard-boiled jailbirds very nearly succeeded in offing him. No wonder many Bond fans didn’t like Fleming’s 10th instalment. Because not only does Bond’s reputation and prowess come under scrutiny/ doubt, but we have to read the whole thing through the slightly whiny, sensual language of Michel, who can’t seem to find fault with our hero.

If you ask me, it’s good that Fleming took notice of his reader’s reactions and did not write any more novels in the same vein. I’d rather have Bond in the centre of the action, and not have to wait until he shows up halfway through the book, only to put on a mediocre show. Bond is better than this, much better. Accept no compromises people!

Overall, I can’t say it was brilliant, but it was certainly entertaining. Though I’m glad that female characters have a lot more backbone to them these days. Apart from that, it’s fun seeing Fleming attempt to write several ‘tasteful’ sex scenes.

This is one Bond novel you need to read in order to decide whether you like it or not. Can’t really recommend it.

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Literary Blog Hop | J. L. Borges and the Quintessential Latin America

03 Thursday Feb 2011

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Don\

Welcome to the ‘Literary Blog Hop’, a meme hosted by The Blue Bookcase for book bloggers who focus on reviewing literary fiction. This weeks’ hop comes with the question:
 
What setting (time or place) from a book or story would you most like to visit? Eudora Welty said that, “Being shown how to locate, to place, any account is what does most toward making us believe it…,” so in what location would you most like to hang out?
 
First of all, I’d like to thank Robyn for this weeks brilliant question. With some books I’ve often wished I could just dive into the setting and live there forever. The ones that made me feel this way are mostly set in or are by South American authors. Maybe it’s something to do with the way these writers write, but Latin America certainly does have a unique charm that blends the essence of two continents rather than one; the totemic mysteries of its indigenous tribes and the etiquette of colonial Europe. And it is on these two opposing axis’ that most Latin American literature is often played out. My first proper foray into it was seven years ago, when I came across ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges. At the time I was studying the finer points of short story writing and among the collection we had to read, this one stood out as a masterpiece. It sent shivers through me, and put me on the path to discovery, even though the others in the class weren’t particularly moved by the mind-boggling possibilities of what Borges conveyed.
Even though the story wasn’t about Latin America, I had my first ever taste of ‘magical realism’, been introduced to the concept of ‘hypertext fiction’ and one of Borges’ more permanent ‘personal myths’; the book as labyrinth. In fact, Borges seldom wrote about Latin America. So strong and clear was his grasp of ‘fiction’; the quality of its parts both isolated and as a whole that his stories sit on the very precipice of reality and are just as challenging today as they were 80 years ago. It was this feeling of walking around inside his Daliesque world when I realised I had probably stumbled upon Latin America at its most quintessential. Ultimately, Borges brought around the idea that a country, its people, its violent histories, its death as a nameless land and rebirth as the ‘New World’ is somehow genetically encoded in all who have come to live there. The writer merely heats this monstrous history in the crucible of his mind, reduces it down to its essence and pours it into a vessel of fiction.
Since then I have become enamoured with Argentine authors. With Borges I discovered a rare path into the avant-garde, Ultraist Literary movement of the 1900’s that I thought had ended with Anais Nin and Djuna Barnes. With Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Isabel Allende, I discovered the complexities of family lore and political turmoil and how this lay at the heart of all South American culture. Later, Roberto Bolano taught me about the kaleidoscopic ‘voices’ of the past that echo throughout the land and the way colonialism had all but destroyed the indigenous spirit of this great continent. Last year, Ernesto Guevara, another Argentine writer (and freedom fighter) showed me how all modern Latin Americans doom themselves to capitalism (the new colonialism) if they do not embrace and reconcile with that very spirit they once tried to cage and tame.
There is such a mixture of ideas, customs and cultures, that to understand Latin America, one would best remember that it does not actually belong to ‘a set’ of people, but like the elusive Jaguar, moves in the shadows of history and the wilderness of a past that refuses to die. One where the quetzalcoatl and many other gods who were considered extinct still live on, attached to Christianity and by burying themselves deeply in everyday folklore and myth.

Book Review | ‘Push’ – Sapphire

04 Saturday Sep 2010

Posted by in 50 Books A Year, Book Challenges, Book Review

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Claireece Precious Jones is sixteen years old. She cannot read or write and she is pregnant with her second child. Precious wants to learn. Her math teacher says she has ‘aptitude’ for numbers. That makes Precious happy. School is the only place Precious is happy, because home means hell. Home equals ritual abuse; physical, psychological and sexual. Home means a fat mother who lets her father rape her. Precious wants to go to school, because it’s her only way out. And one day, somebody helps her find a perfect school, a school where she can start fresh and have the courage to sit at the front of the class, not behind. At this school, Ms. Rain becomes the angel of words, where Precious learns to spell the pain right out of her life.

PUSH

“I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver. That was 1983…
My daughter got Down Sinder. She’s retarded…
My name is Claireece Precious Jones.”

Gritty, harsh, but tender and intensely human… this is written from the unique perspective of Precious; a young black woman living in Harlem with a terrible secret and a life scarred with crippling shame. Precious’ journal  (written in broken English) is endearing with its childish spellings, yet forceful in the clarity of the experiences it unfolds. And Precious is like a child, even though she is a mother of two babies, who are unfortunately also her siblings. She yearns for a clean life and rages at the hand dealt to her, but despite this, Precious has a goal and she can still dream. Precious’s wish to be a white girl, to be a virgin, to be young and clean and have people see the ‘good’ person inside her and not judge her by her looks or her past proliferates throughout the book. It’s heart-breaking and shocking to think this kind of thing still goes on in developed countries.
As a reader, we are put in her shoes. We live and breath the pain Precious must endure. At times, this kind of proximity can be too uncomfortable, but it attempts to answer the question everyone secretly asks themselves when they hear about situations like this, ‘how does one cope?’. The answer is to rise above yourself, which is exactly what Precious learns to do. This is an astonishing novel whose perspective never wavers for a minute. Sapphire always retains a steady focus on the psychology of the people who have to endure trauma’s like AIDS, drug addiction and incest.
So much pain, humiliation, confusion… but through it all Precious’s iron resolve to free herself from the sins she has been made to commit made me so proud of her and of the people like her who have endured this. At times, shocking to read, but the tenderness and scenes of female camaraderie kept me through it. Couldn’t put it down. Absolutely fabulous.I give it 4/5 stars.

Book Review | ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Stories’ – F. Scott Fitzgerald

04 Sunday Jul 2010

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This is a book of short stories aimed at encapsulating the fleeting American ‘jazz age’. Fitzgerald manages to convey the golden decadence of an era that is most famous for its ‘Lost Generation’. As Fitzgerald himself put it, the 1920’s held ‘a generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.’ Throughout this collection of stories, Fitzgerald maintains a thinly palpable vein of impatient inertia, where all his characters, big or small, find that life has somehow overreached them no matter what they do. I found the damning realisation of ‘time’ (or there not being enough of it) to be the greatest source of this anxiety.    
 

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Six Other Stories

What would life be like if you lived it in reverse..?

Out of the seven short stories collated in this edition, ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button‘, ‘The Cut Glass Bowl‘ and ‘The Four Fists’ are probably the most dynamic and startling. This is the first time I have ever actually read Fitzgerald. There was one botched attempt at ‘The Great Gatsby‘ but that ended in failure as I grew too weary to carry on. However, I am glad to say that Fitzgerald is far more successful as a writer of short stories. For one, all the stories save two (‘May Day’ and ‘Crazy Sunday’) span the lifetime of a character, drawing attention to a certain thread of events and the often irreversible effects of the decisions made by those characters. With ‘Benjamin Button’, we have the unique and surreal premise of a young child who decides to live life backwards. Fitzgerald’s play on chronology itself is a clever plot device and added a doubled effect of absurdity and poignancy to the flow of the narrative. The unnatural chain of events lead us to look at each era of human life at a different angle, rendering every stage from childhood to old age a precious gift not to be wasted.

‘The Cut-Glass Bowl’ is again a moralistic tale of karma, using the Gothic-inspired device of attributing a physical object, this time a glass bowl, as the harbinger of death. With this story Fitzgerald studies the nature of marriage in the 1920’s. He traces with deft descriptions the early bloom and subsequent break-down of husband/wife relationships through a decidedly macabre lens. ‘The Four Fists’ is in the same vein, this time telling the story of how manhood and meaning of ‘becoming’ an adult.

For me, this book was a great re-introduction to Fitzgerald, as it helped me understand his ‘style’ a little better. I often have trouble with certain American authors, especially when their work is concentrated within a specific genre or time-period that is slightly alien to me. I almost had the same problem with Henry James until I read ‘The Aspern Papers’. So if you are like me, and worried that you can’t quite ‘get’ into the flow of certain writers, my recommendation is to get your hands on something shorter and perhaps a little less denser.

I give this book 3/5 stars, but it has helped me tremendously in learning to like Fitzgerald a bit more.

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Book Review | ‘Free Food For Millionaires’ – Min Jin Lee

30 Wednesday Jun 2010

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Free Food for Millionaires

I have one thing to say about this book, and that is: I found it far too long. It weighs in at about 500 pages and does take a bit of time to get through, but the story itself did not have much substance. I can’t help thinking that the story could have been edited down to ensure a more dynamic and involving plot for the reader.

The characters were also a bit stale. I couldn’t relate to many of them. They were either too selfish, or far too giving. Lee’s characters weren’t very likable either. Like the majority of people who read this book on goodreads.com, I also didn’t like the main character Casey Han. I found her ‘wonder woman cuffs’ silly. Although there was nothing wrong with her towards the end of the book, the way she kept messing up her life and those around her made me mad.

I think overall, this story does have potential, it offers an insight into the Korean-American way of life, the adversities they went through, and how they have shaped their identity in the US.

Having said that, the Korean men got given quite a bad reputation by Lee. Almost all of them are two-timing, rapist, self-centred, egotistical chauvinistic pigs. And there was a part of me that didn’t quite agree with that. It felt Lee was cashing in on the stereotype ‘asian male’ figure, so that her western readers might identify with it. But all she did was end up painting a very dire portrait of her own people, which some might argue amounts to a certain backstabbing of her own culture.

Overall, I don’t think this book deserves the literary raves it is getting. Amy Tan did much, much better with Joy Luck Club. My advice = go read that instead.

I give this 1/5 stars.
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Quick Review | ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ Ken Kesey

22 Tuesday Jun 2010

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was one of the books on the 1001 Book list, and I would like to give this one 3.5 really, purely for the way it always caught me out with its fresh, often razor-sharp imagery of the warped human mind. The mind in question is none other than Chief Bromden, the supposedly deaf and mute narrator.

Bromden’s spectacular hallucinations alone should be reason enough for anyone to pick up this book and read it. They are quite unique, disturbing, and often (to my alarm) actually made sense on some level. Suffice it to say, they cut through the narrative like… well… like electric shock therapy! All the way through, it made me wonder if Kesey was writing from experience. The introduction to this edition was particularly enlightening, as it gave a lot of background information on Kesey’s involvement with drug testing during the 1960’s. Maybe he actually saw similar things when he was a volunteer during these sessions.

As hard as it was to actually get into this novel, I have come to believe that this is a must-read for those interested in psychiatric care. It’s inspirational and questions that fine (often too fine) line between sanity and real madness. Kesey made me reflect on just who really WERE the psychos in the novel – the staff or the inmates?

This took me much longer to read than I had anticipated, but I think I can say it was worth it. It’s one of those books that look good when you can claim to have read it.

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Book Review | ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ by Ernesto Guevara

21 Monday Jun 2010

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Book Challenges: 50 Books A Year (no. 5)

“Why don’t we go to North America?”
“North America? But how?”
“On La Poderosa, man.”

Finally finished ‘The Motorcycle Diaries‘ this morning, and I am pleased to report that it was a very easy read. Guevara‘s image as a die-hard communist is somewhat challenged in this very personal account of his pre-guerilla years on the road as a humble middle-class medical student. He and his hearty companion Alberto, along with their ramshackle Norton 500cc (‘La Poderosa’, or ‘The Mighty One’) make for some extraordinary adventures, as they travel up the spine of the Andes, through Argentina, Chile, Peru and Venezuela meeting all sorts of people, and getting into all kinds of embarrasing situations. This diary offers those acquainted with the political aspect of Guevara’s personality, the chance to get to know him as a person. The events he recounts are full of humour, his writing style is also very fluent and engaging, drawing the reader in and guiding them through events that some might argue have been heavily edited for aesthetic purposes, and some of which in hindsight, became a major influencing factor in later years.
The diary itself reads both like a coming-of-age journey and a travelogue that The Times described as ‘Das Kapital meets Easy Rider‘. I can’t argue with that. At the end of the day, the young ‘Che’ was nothing but a man with dreams and ideals that most people during the 1950’s secretly hoped for. His drunken, impromptu speech on his 24th birthday of a unified ‘Pan-Americanism‘, gives us a glimpse of the passion this road-trip developed within him for the people of South America, laying the foundation for his communist philosophy. Everywhere he went he chronicled the hardships and the political incorrectness that seemed to cripple the native peoples. He saw first-hand what the lack of basic priviledges was doing to the continent, and like any hot-blooded, politically-motivated University student, wished to find a way to do away with the shackles of imperialist US forces.

As I said before, the diary reveals a human side to Che, that is not widely written about. It highlights a time in his life when he was at a cross-roads, and in the first chapter ‘So We Understand Each Other’, he states that he too, felt the changes that were about to happen to him, “But I’ll leave you now, with myself, the man I used to be…”

I give this 4/5 Stars.

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