Month: February 2005
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The Unbearable Heart by Kimiko HahnKaya Production, 1995
Details like: the smell of garlic and how it lingers, how bedtime stories start in Japanese. Repitition of lines as one way to fragment the text, words inserted another, quotations (Barthes, Flaubert, Said) another still. Splitting the text open, splitting open sorrow: this is a book of elegies for a dead mother, and they are…
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A Reading Diary by Alberto ManguelFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004
A year in books, books re-read, musings on why certain stories resonate, theories on literature, on authors, on characters, wide-ranging references and quotations, lists, personal details of day-to-day living (travel, the weather, Manguel’s home in France). This book is a lovely hodge-podge of all of these things, and it makes me want to go read…
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I Can’t Tell You by Hillary FrankHoughton Mifflin, 2004
I have a thing for epistolary novels, and I liked the premise of this one: a college kid, after a fight with his best friend, decides he should avoid fucking up friendships by simply not speaking. He writes notes, instead, and that’s what this book is made up of: notes, e-mails, one-sided conversations in which…
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The Good People of New York by Thisbe NissenKnopf, 2001
Thisbe Nissen writes well: there are moments in this book that are perfect: descriptions, sentences, thoughts. Her characters are quirky and smart, especially Miranda, but their stories are less compelling than they could be. Something in the tone of this book struck me as off, or off-putting: it’s narrated in a third-person omniscient style, and…
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On Paradise Drive by David BrooksSimon & Schuster, 2004
Brooks describes himself as a “comic sociologist,” and the best parts of this book, I think, are the humorous ones, the amusingly exaggerated descriptions of suburban America and what you find there: price clubs and other big-box mega-retailers, chain restaurants, softball teams, competitive mothers. Brooks’s primary argument, which is that middle America actually has unplumbed…