Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (1911)

The tale of a man caught between two women.

Classics Review: Ethan Frome is short but carries within its stark and desperate pages an amazing history of literature in English. Edith Wharton (1862-1937) began writing when her doctor prescribed it as a remedy for her stress -- the opposite prescription to that of the heroine of "The Yellow Wallpaper" (written by Wharton's almost exact contemporary, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)) who is confined to bed doing nothing until she goes mad. Wharton gives her story a framing device parallel to that of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1818-48). We meet our three characters, Frome himself, his older, "crippled," and bitter wife Zeena (Zenobia), and their young servant girl Mattie Silver, living the harsh, wintry, brutal life (both economically and literally) of New England. Wharton's tale of illicit love exists on a plane somewhere between the harsh early-American puritan judgment of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804-64) and the Job-like physical and mental suffering commonly imposed on his protagonists by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Wharton's story, both morality tale and tragedy, moves on to the inexorable poetic justice and punishment (trebly destructive) of its conclusion. There's never a dull moment in this simple tale, each paragraph has its job to to do. Oddly, the tragic flaw of its essentially good eponymous hero, is that as he was submissive to the needs of his crippled parents before they died, he is then too-submissive to the demands of his wife. The reader cannot stop railing at Ethan Frome for failing to stand up for himself. Rather than employ the patriarchal "be a man" (although it occurred to me), I think the proper literary exhortation would be "have some agency, darn you!" But Ethan Frome's only act of agency leads to the self-destruction that fate decreed. Despite the more appealing characters of Mattie and Ethan, the most complex character of the tale is the wife, Zenobia, who has depths to explore as her role changes dramatically for reasons apparently unexplained.  [4½★]

A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes (1957)

Con artists fleece a good, church-going man and all hell breaks loose.

Mystery Review: A Rage in Harlem introduced Chester Himes' tough, no-nonsense police detectives, Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, though they only act as supporting players in the novel. Unlike most detective novels, we rarely live in their minds and spend much more time with other characters. The book is well written, cleverly plotted, and fast paced to the point of bedlam. The controlled chaos in A Rage in Harlem is as good as I've ever read. Many authors, even skilled ones, can lose the thread when writing about mayhem and the writing becomes dark and hard to see. But not so with Mr. Himes. He can juggle no end of craziness. Himes also makes 1950's Harlem come alive as Raymond Chandler did with his L.A. backstreets. Although written in 1957, Himes never loses sight of the societal position of his mostly black characters: "Below the surface, in the murky waters of fetid tenements, a city of black people who are convulsed in desperate living, like the voracious churning of millions of hungry cannibal fish ... . That is Harlem." There may be criminals here, and good people tempted to crime, but the why is never far from the page. Recently saw the film, which has the same characters but the plot veers far from the book; worth seeing, enjoyed the visuals, but the book was better. Before Walter Mosely there was Chester Himes, an author who also wrote mysteries which were tough detective stories, who was too little known, too little read. A Rage in Harlem is a brilliant beginning.  [4★]

Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante (1992)

After her mother's unexpected and curious death, a woman searches her hometown for a key to the past.

Book Review: Troubling Love was Elena Ferrante's first novel and she began her writing career talking about mothers and daughters. Taking place after a mother has died, the book is something of a mystery -- as are mothers and daughters. The descriptions and plot are intensely realistic, our narrator recalling the intricacies of her mother's life, until her memories become hallucinations. At that point her mind, and the writing and the reader's understanding, become fantastical, and unclear. Lost within an "aggressive, pleasure-seeking, and sticky realism." Immersed in Naples, the tunnels of Naples where her mother was followed by "peddlers, railway workers, idlers, stonemasons ... often breathing in her ear ... they tried to touch her hair, her shoulders, her arm ... she kept her eyes down and walked faster." Ferrante's powerful, muscular writing is here, fully developed, in her first novel. There are many themes to follow in Troubling Love: one with a significant role is clothing (as on the brilliant cover image). Being about mothers and daughters, this motif really does connect with the well-worn query: "Are you really going out dressed like that?" What is less accomplished is the plot, the continuity. Events tumble over themselves, time stretches and shrinks, the pace changes. Characters don't always seem to act as she's led us to believe. Our narrator has two sisters and both are invisible in a story of family, of mothers and fathers. Despite Ferrante's keen eye and insights, Troubling Love isn't as well constructed as her later novels, it doesn't hang together of a piece, instead hinting at various directions that aren't explored. As if she wanted to do too much, but then sensibly restrained herself. Ferrante's attitudes, issues, thoughts are all here, they're just not as well put together as they needed to be. I wouldn't wish this on her, but I'm curious how she might write the book today. That said, if you enjoy reading Elena Ferrante as I do, this is still Ferrante, it's still her sentences, intelligence, and eye. And hints of the books to come.  [3★]

A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas (1952)

The great Welsh poet shares memories from Christmases past in his own rolling words and tolling voice.

Classics Review: A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas is prose that's poetry, written simply and magically, telling stories from the Christmastime of his youth, just as the title says. Stories of kitchen fires and snowballs, of Uncles falling asleep bellies full, Aunties nipping at the wine, and of haunted caroling, all laced with a dry and straight-faced humor. There is much I miss and fail to understand in these old words, not the least since it was written a long time ago now. Also that it's British, and even more that it's Welsh, being not only other times but other places and people I've never known. Also that A Child's Christmas in Wales is Dylan Thomas with his self-mythic images of "the two-tongued sea" and the "harp-shaped hills." With his pictures of "birds the color of red-flannel petticoats," "fish-freezing waves," "a duchess-faced horse," and bells that "rang their tidings over the bandaged town," while walking through the cold "with taproom noses" as they "huffed and puffed, making ghosts with our breath" under the "silent one-clouded heavens" without even "the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets."  But even if there's much that I don't grasp from A Child's Christmas in Wales, living in our time here and now, I still gain all that wonderful sound and syllable, whether I catch every bit or not. Perhaps these sentiments are sentimental, but all children, wherever they grew up, have the right to remember: "It was always snowing at Christmas."  [5★]

Therese and Isabelle by Violette Leduc (1966)

Two girls in boarding school burn for each other at a white heat.

Book Review: Therese and Isabelle is a story of adolescent love. The first love after infatuation that feels as if there will never be another love, all new in the whole of the world, a feeling never felt before, exhilarating, maddening, addicting, and overwhelming. Where lust and love are inextricably intertwined. Where dying together seems possible, yet every second of life not spent together was wasted and the fear of any future separation becomes obsession ("Her sleep had filled me with despair. 'Don't go! ... Why did I go to sleep? Why?'"). When the immense commitment of love creates the insecurity that it's all for nothing. When drama and tension are part of the emotion. A selfish love. Knowing that one's love of the other is so powerful, so extreme and complete, that any flaw, turn, or hesitation by the other seems to bring the whole crashing down because her love doesn't match in every particular. Violette Leduc writes of this love in Therese and Isabelle, captures it wholly, beautifully. Leduc recognizes the self we put on for the other, the "I" that we want the other to see: "revealing ourselves as actresses to the manner born." The secret mundanity: "Those in love are always standing on the platform of a railway station." When Therese kisses her love who lies asleep: "I was unfaithful to Isabelle with herself, I was depriving her of the kiss that I was giving her." Although most of the book is the fever plaguing the two girls, some story is supplied. After her mother's betrayal by remarrying, Therese "had become a boarder in a boarding school: I had no home." Even apart from the love story, there is always the keen perception of a true writer: "The professorial voices of the masters had lost their winter resonance now that all the classroom windows were open." This may not be erotica, but it's certainly quite sensual. Leduc's awesome success in Therese and Isabelle is to fully capture the feeling of such love and obsession in immense detail, vividly and viscerally. The reader is caught in the pages, in love, in lust, and every moment is real. The novel could be called a slice of life, a small piece, but perfect all the same. N.B. My copy was a small hardback with the author's initials on the cover published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1967, translated from the French by Derek Coltman. The author's biography at the end of the book notes that Therese and Isabelle was "originally intended as a section of La Batarde" (published in 1964), but "was actually first published separately and privately before that work."  [5★]

Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy (1989)

A resident in a girl's boarding school learns about life, despite or because of her sheltered world.

Book Review: Sweet Days of Discipline is the story of a fourteen-year-old girl, written by a woman looking back at age fifty ("years and years have passed and I can still see her face"). Written in a quiet, almost icy manner, everything is seen at a remove. No flaming passions; always control and discipline. Each student in the boarding school builds a facade for the world to see, until a new student arrives, Frederique, who seems beyond that, the perfect student ("she was entire unto herself"). Our narrator "wanted to conquer her ... I had to conquer her." The two become friends, though "even now, I can't bring myself to say I was in love." The friendship is at an almost mystic level, but always restrained: "We never held hands ... there was a kind of fanaticism that prevented any physical expression ... the thought of flesh or sensuality eluded us." At first our narrator is captivated: Frederique "played [piano] with a certain passion"; she "spoke of a man as of a completed parabola." She was "the most disciplined, respectful, ordered, perfect girl, it almost made your flesh creep." The object of her attention is always distant, immaculate, as if from another plane. Although Frederique is the center of Sweet Days of Discipline, she is not the whole and our heroine explores other aspects of life, always coming back to the contradictory complexity of "the pleasure of disappointment ... perhaps they were the best years ... those years of discipline ... there was a kind of elation throughout all those days of discipline." There are also other stories: the stolid German roommate, the beautiful young girl who isn't as beautiful as she thinks she is, the new interest whose "red hair was magnificent," the tragic African girl who withers alone in a strange land far from home. I had to read Sweet Days of Discipline twice to fully appreciate it. The ending came as a surprise, came from nowhere, and I went back to read it again to see that the resolution came from somewhere. On my first reading the novel seemed too little, too much withheld, too superficial, too much allusive and hinting, not enough substance, only suggestion. But on second reading I grasped the whole, restrained, controlled, and distant as it is. In her subtle, muted way Fleur Jaeggy captures something unusual, "The pleasure that comes from obedience. Order and submission, you can never know what fruits they will bear in adulthood."  [4★]

Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee (1980)

The Magistrate of a small outpost at the farthest edge of the Empire confronts the barbarism of his own people.

Book Review: Waiting for the Barbarians is novel about the superior and the inferior, the master and slave, the demeaning and the demeaned, those over and those under. I expected this short novel to be an allegory about the sins of apartheid in the author's native South Africa, but Coetzee is working with a larger canvas, making a broader statement, applicable to any imperialist state, but even more so to any power differential between two groups. And for being written almost four decades ago, Coetzee fully illustrates the realization seen so often in recent years that in attacking those we label barbarians, we become barbarians ("the new barbarians"). We see the sensual and sybaritic Magistrate and his town living in peace with those across the border in a far flung idyll, when his eyes are opened as the Empire (for no apparent reason) flexes its muscle: "I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected there seems to be no recovering ... the knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end." We see his sensuality awkwardly transformed into an ineffectual attempt to make amends to a crippled barbarian woman. Eventually, his "dreams of becoming an unthinking savage" are more palatable than remaining part of his own "civilization." The Magistrate realizes that "what has become important above all is that I should neither become contaminated by the atrocity that is about to be committed nor poison myself with the impotent hatred of its perpetrators." As he states: "Empire dooms itself ... to plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end ... how to prolong its era ... by night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision." All of this, still so relevant today.

The writing is also wonderfully perceptive, Coetzee is an intelligent and talented writer, perhaps taking his lesson from some morsel of Kafka, such as "An Imperial Message." When reading, note how often the sun is described and designated, a signpost for what is embodied in the scene. As Virginia Woolf used clocks and time in Mrs. Dalloway, so Coetzee uses the sun in Waiting for the Barbarians. In the narrative the Magistrate, imperfect as he is, pays for his complicity with his own immense physical pain the whole described as an "empire of pain," and Christ-like images abound. Coetzee is writing of time and history, and like history he leaves us with a little scrap of hope at the end. For Coetzee is carefully and determinedly didactic, he knows he's writing meaningful and literary fiction, and doesn't try to keep his prestidigitation secret. The little story told here is taken from a much wider world as when using phrases like "peace in our time" and "barbarian-lover." He's writing for someone more intellectual or educated than I am. Although I get the big picture, I'm sure there's numerous points I missed. My greatest fault with Waiting for the Barbarians is a purely personal bias, and if I may, a small rant. That flaw is Coetzee's use of dreams. All readers know that literary dreams, those fabricated by an author, are nothing like the dreams of people in real life, are not believable (I'm excepting dreams that take the reader to another, otherwise inaccessible world). We are not even expected to find them credible. The reader is always aware that the author is trying to stick in some meaning, some symbolism, some foreshadowing or gloss on what is going on. Describing a character's dreams, those artificial, carefully constructed authorial tools, are the easiest, cheapest, and most obvious of an author's tricks. Perhaps this wasn't so in 1980 ... I don't know. But for me, at least, they damaged the story in their frequent use, repetition, and disturbance of the narrative. Rant done. Waiting for the Barbarians is an important and thoughtful work on a timeless subject, as significant now as when it was written.  [3½★]

Coraline by Neil Gaiman (2002)

A young girl (small for her age) explores an old house and discovers that all is not as it seems.

Book Review: Coraline is a children's adventure story with a bit of the scary and a talking cat. The book updates old folk or fairy tales ("Hansel and Gretel" comes to mind) and is something like a modernization of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865): as wondrous as Wonderland was, there was no microwave pizza in the court of the Queen of Hearts. Sadly, I had trouble making myself six again to fully appreciate this, though I'm sure I'd have trouble with a phrase such as "ghastly parody" (I appreciated that Neil Gaiman doesn't talk down to his audience). The tone of the book is perfect for reading to children and Coraline is a true and worthy hero, a brave and determined explorer who thinks of others. If I'd first read Coraline when younger I know I'd appreciate it even more.  [3½★]

A Spy in the House of Love by Anais Nin (1954)

A woman seeks to live with the freedom of a man in 1950's New York.

Book Review: A Spy in the House of Love is the fourth book written in Anaïs Nin's continuous novel sequence, "Cities of the Interior" (the novels can be read in any order, "continuous" in the sense of a circle). The three central female characters in these books embody the primal elements; here, Sabina (introduced in the first book, Ladders to Fire) represents fire or passion. She is described as evoking "the sounds and imagery of fire engines as they tore through the streets of New York, alarming the heart with the violent gong of catastrophe." An observer realizes that the "first time he looked at her he felt: everything will burn." At the beginning of the novel's journey Sabina is Stravinsky's The Firebird, needing change and motion, even if motion becomes meaningless. For her "later was always too late; later did not exist." She desires to encompass the same amorous life as men are allowed, without commitment, free of "the capacity for pain." In A Spy in the House of Love Nin explores this concept in depth, having Sabina will herself "to be like man, free to possess and desire in adventure, to enjoy a stranger ... her fantasy of freedom ... to arrive at enjoyment without dependence which might liberate her from all her anxieties connected with love." She is willing to be "the whim, the caprice, the drug, the fever." She dresses conspicuously: "the cape held within its folds something of what she imagined was a quality possessed exclusively by man: some dash, some audacity, some swagger of freedom denied to woman." In a brief but memorable scene, Sabina walks down the street feeling fragile, brittle, "crushable," overwhelmed by danger, but is startled by the strong woman walking next to her, comforted "by her tallness, the assurance of her walk," that this woman walks without terror. Sabina suddenly realizes that this is her reflection in a store window: the startling contrast between how a woman might see herself and how she might be seen. As she moves through various affairs, Sabina realizes that she jeopardizes what she values (or at least, "needs") and that living like a man requires her to live in deceit and to divide herself into parts. I have a weakness for Nin's writing, although this is less like her usual diary style and more similar to typical novels (if one can call anything Nin does "typical"). Bantam Books took the opportunity of the success of her Delta of Venus to give this edition a cover tie-in, but while at times sensual it's not erotica. In fact, the few hints at erotica seem horrible failures: "only one ritual, a joyous ... impaling of woman on man's sensual mast." Ugh. Although I haven't read it, A Spy in the House of Love seems an obvious precursor to what was considered revolutionary much later in the Seventies, Fear of Flying (1973) by Erica Jong. So far, this is my favorite of Anaïs Nin's work. Here, with Sabina, you will discover the wonderful concept of "moon-baths," and that for "living like a spy in the house of many loves, for defeating ... definite boundaries, for passing without passports and permits from one love to another. Every spy's life had ended in ignominious death."  [4★]

Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt by Richard Brautigan (1970)

The eighth book of poetry by the American Sixties counter-culture  writer.

Poetry Review: Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt is an idiosyncratic book of short poems, all written in a gentle, pointed, sarcastic, or wondering tone. Richard Brautigan (1935-1984) is a poet and novelist I've long heard of but never read, and he writes in an astonishing variety of genres. Here there are surreal poems (which reminded me of Sixties poet, Bill Knott): "He's howling in the pines/at the edge of your fingertips." Love poems: "and then to lie silently like deer tracks/in the freshly-fallen snow beside the one/you love. That's all." What would someday come to be known as tumblr poetry: "Do you think of me/as often as I think/of you?" Hippie poems: "There is a motorcycle/in New Mexico." Poems of childhood: "My teachers could easily have ridden with Jesse James for all the time they stole from me." He can venture back to the Eighth Century to echo Chinese poet Li Po: "Drinking wine this afternoon/I realize the days are getting longer." Brautigan's flaws include a Sixties love of sometimes using word choice simply to shock, and occasionally violating Lawrence Ferlinghetti's dictum (as do virtually all tumblr poets): "don't think quirks of thought are poetry." Although not all these poems are gems, there are still so many successes so quickly read that the joy rarely wavers. Personally, I love short poems -- for me a long poem might as well be prose. The point of a poem is to be brief, targeted, rapier. An epiphany, a revelation, a crystalline moment imprismed. And Brautigan delivers. Although I think he's lost much of his fame since the Sixties, the poems in Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt are more than just a time capsule. Some of them are quite daring, breaking with what would've been acceptable in those days, as did beat poets such as Gregory Corso or Peter Orlovsky: "I feel so bad today/that I want to write a poem./I don't care: any poem, this/poem." Brautigan also embodies that all too rarely found role of the poet as mystic, seer, prophet, channeler of the zeitgeist. But don't let that discourage the reader: he can be plain spoken as a shovel. For those intimidated by poetry, who feel it may be too deep, difficult, or daunting, Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt is the book to change your mind.  [4★]

The Story of Gosta Berling by Selma Lagerlof (1891)

Stories of love and adventure involving rich and not, lovely and not, brave and not, in the Värmland region of Sweden, mostly tied together by our eponymous protagonist.

Book Review: The Story of Gösta Berling is told as a collection of folk tales transmuted into a novel. Some of the tales involve our hero Gösta Berling, but many don't. Gösta Berling reminded me of so many other stories: One Hundred Years of Solitude, "The Lottery," Tortilla Flat or Cannery Row, The Birds, perhaps a touch of the Byronic hero (his horse is named Don Juan), and of course an infinite number of folk tales. In fact, although one can't help but think of the label "magical realism," the real origin of this novel is in the magic and wonder of old folk stories and fairy tales told around a fireplace. Those stories had no end of the extraordinary posing as actual. It's as if Hans Christian Andersen had written a novel. And if he had, he couldn't've done better than Gösta Berling. The story is written in a rich, energetic, voluptuous language, and Berling is something of an Odysseus, a Kokopeli, a mixture of duty, opportunism, and cleverness An unfrocked priest, he is an imperfect man, called the "strongest and weakest of men." He does wrong as well as right. A unique hero, he's described as having "lived though more poems than all our poets have written." So there! He's named the "lord of ten thousand kisses and thirteen thousand love letters." He's "a drunkard, a Cavalier ... ."
Gösta Berling was Selma Lagerlöf's first novel, and what an amazing first novel, a happy mix of Arthurian tales and Christian memory. As our narrator says, "I have nothing new to tell you, only what is old and almost forgotten. I have legends from the nursery ... or from the log-fire in the cottage ... or from the hall, where old men sat in their rocking chairs, and ... talked of old times." That is this book. Given its folk tale origins, there is folkish poetry in its repeated phrases, such as "the highway is my home and the haystack my bed." There's a bear that can only be killed by a silver bullet. There are places one is cursed to never leave: "This was exactly the seventeenth time squire Julius had tried to leave Ekeby ... [he] had already forgotten both this and all his previous attempts." We hear of actual paintings of saints that walk back "dripping with water ... stained with green slime and brown mud" from the depths of the watery grave in the lake in which they'd been thrown. We watch a battle between peasants and the tradesmen. Berling is the center of our story, but there are myriad others' stories as well. We have a mass bear attacks led by an old major, creatures of which "it is dangerous to call it by its right name." Ravening packs of wolves. Someone who may be in league with the Horned One. The witch of Dovre. The author is unafraid to venture into philosophy in her folk tales.
When Lagerlöf touches on existentialism (discovered by one of the Cavaliers before Sartre was born), the young Countess says, then "how ugly and gray the world is; how futile everything is! I should like to lay down and die." She soon discovers that Love is the answer to the bleakness of an existential world. She also takes us into the grim terrors of old folk tales, describing an attack of wolves "until the wife must take her little child ... and throw it to them, to save her own and her husband's life." Our narrator notes: "often a soul that has tried all other sensual pleasures endeavours to find delight in cruelty." Hills overgrown with sedge "which had been sowed there as a reminder that no man's life is like another's, but differ like leaves of grass." Selma Lagerlöf was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. While some might see picking Lagerlöf as a bit of favoritism by the Swedish judges, based on this single example I see nothing to say it wasn't deserved. "The Story of ..." is also known as "The Saga of ...", but my copy, printed in Sweden in 1959 and translated by Pauline Bancroft Flach (and perhaps W.H. Hilton-Brown?) in 1898, titles it as "Story" so that's what I used here. from the land of Ikea, Saab, and Abba comes a story I somehow feel privileged to have read.  [4★]

In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (1925)

The first story collection by the future Nobel Prize winner.

Book Review: In Our Time is better than I'm going to make it sound here. It had a revolutionary impact on writing style. Hemingway has several valuable skills as a writing teacher: his writing is short, concise, with few extraneous words. While this can be taken to an extreme, for those used to the Victorians it must've seemed like a blessing. Hemingway works to use the right word, it's a "Wagner apple from beside the road," not simply some generic, undescribed apple as so often pops up in writing. He'll spend a paragraph describing grasshoppers. He also knows what he's writing about. When Hemingway tells how to do something (here usually camping or fishing), you know he's done it dozens of times and one could practically learn the process through his story. He'll spend paragraphs on setting up a tent. Too often readers complain that when they find some flaw, inconsistency, or inaccuracy (such as legal issues in a mystery) in a story, they lose confidence in the author. Not so here. For me, the greatest strength and interest of In Our Time is Hemingway's ability to seem to be writing about one thing, while the real subject of the story lingers beneath the surface like one of his trout, nibbling at the reader's awareness. He's the master of the subliminal story. So, what are my tiny problems? First, several of these are "Nick Adams" stories and he just seems like a rather bland, awkward character to me -- something I doubt Hemingway was. I'm unsure that Nick Adams is the best vehicle for the stories, he's often less interesting than the other characters. Second, Hemingway's style, while a step forward can also become its own parody. Young writers in their teens or 20s are often infatuated by the freshness and clarity of Hemingway's writing, but then turn out endless reams of unintended parody. Hemingway himself falls into this. It can become a bit "See Jane run": "She loved to fish. She loved to fish with Nick." He also falls into writing that sounds British: "It was absolutely topping." Then, as Mailer did later, he uses euphemisms: "That son of a crutting brakeman." As a craftsman, if you can't use the word you want to, use something real, even "son of a dog" would sound better. Euphemisms are, by definition, the wrong word, and the wrong word won't cut it when you're brilliant. Two words that become a habit in Hemingway's writing are "good" and "much." When he says "good" he's making a small value judgment, without providing any explanation. "It was a good camp." "It was a good feeling." Why? What makes it good? Saying the cabin was tight, warm, and bright might be better than saying, "the cabin was good." Also, the word "much," which I suspect he appropriated from the Spanish. Again, when he repeats the word it almost sounds like he's parodying himself. Overall, of course, his writing is amazing, but when you're known as a master craftsman, small flaws grow large and it hasn't all aged well. I can see why readers today may puzzle at the "Genius writer" title. Again, these are minor criticisms of a great writer. As far as the macho thing, I didn't see it. In most of the stories the female character (when there is one) is more mature, independent, and capable than the male character. The men are immature, inarticulate, unsure what they want. There was one vignette that overdid the gore (in both senses of the word, pobre caballo), but that has nothing to do with gender. In Our Time hasn't entirely aged well, and though it has some excellent stories it doesn't have his best work, but as a historical step in writing and as a workshop for learning to write solid, seaworthy stories, it's invaluable.  [3½★]

The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll (1978)

The story of latter day American punk rocker and poet Jim Carroll (1949-2009) at age 12, sniffing, screwing, stealing, and doing everything else that begins with the letter "s" in New York City.

Book Review: The Basketball Diaries is labeled a memoir, but seemed incredible to me from the start, and I wasn't sure why. Carroll is 12 as he's doing all these things, which seems a bit young (first page: "I'm too young to understand about homosexuals"). Teenagers have been known to exaggerate their stories for effect. Sure, some of these things. I knew kids who did some of this stuff (usually when they were a little older), but everything at that age just didn't seem believable for me. It's not a pretty picture. Then finally it dawned on me. Why is he doing this self-destructive, escapist, nihilist stuff? The kids I knew that were doing the worst stuff had intelligible, articulable reasons (reasons on-lookers could identify even if the kids themselves could not). They had bad stuff in their lives. But Carroll doesn't seem to have any such bad stuff in his life. His only problems are those he creates for himself and leaps in with both feet. Without some motive for his behavior, the story rang a little hollow. I mean, The Basketball Diaries makes Charles Bukowski look like a Boy Scout. Carroll lives just a borough (and a couple of decades) away from Hubert Selby's characters, and they have loads of reasons for doing what they do. Even Hunter Thompson didn't have such a résumé. As the story of a basketball prodigy doing his best to ruin his life, looking at the seamy side of New York in the early Sixties, living a life without caring, concern, or empathy, it's an interesting excursion into the wilds. In the second half he begins to mention the words swirling in his head, and quotes a poem he wrote at 15 about an acid experience: "I just want to be pure." Later after a stint in jail he mentions, "I didn't become pure on Riker's Island." It's unclear whether he wants to be pure, or even what "pure" means to him. In the end nothing is examined, there is no reflection. As an adult (when a teenager I might've loved this: crazy stories, man!), The Basketball Diaries just seemed a little pointless.  [3★]

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe & Other Stories by Carson McCullers (1951)

The title novella and six other stories written from 1936 to 1951, by the underrated and under-known Southern Gothic writer.

Book Review: The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories is a wonderful introduction to the far too overlooked writer from the American South, Carson McCullers (1917-67). The stories are brilliant, traditional and modern at the same time. Traditional in the sense that she uses intense observation and description to make her stories real and realistic. But modern in that nothing is simple, nothing is explained, and right or wrong have little to do with conclusions. Which means, yes, it's going to be depressing more than cheerful. Throw in that McCullers writes of misfits, freaks, and failures and the reader isn't getting a lot of sunshine in these pages. If the reader can't take that (meaning life) then this isn't your cup of soup. Some might say McCullers is a writers' writer, in that she writes so darn well. I want to call her a reader's writer, however, because if you're a talented and hard-working reader, willing to work to enjoy and understand how a story functions, then you'll find this worthy and rewarding. If you're willing to meet the author halfway, understand the thought and work involved, each of these stories is a gem and a treat. Not for the lazy.

Her vision consists of immense powers of observation intimately tied to immense powers of description. All of the people in these stories are important, and especially important to Carson McCullers. And though she gives no easy answers and nothing is clear, all of the stories are about love. Her many lessons, much more richly embroidered, are: we can't help who we love, love may provide endless comfort and it may hurt, unbearably; we want to love people, to please those we love, and sometimes we can't no matter how we try; love is more than the other rewards of life; let us love our illusions; love can linger beneath and then rise above other emotions, all unwilled; we love in different ways, some we love may hurt others we love, but we still love; when love has hurt us, we can try to learn to love again, which is still better than being without love. Those we love are those we love and that may be without reason. If those are thoughts worth thinking of, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe may be for you. The gang of Southern Gothic writers includes those such as Tennesee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, Faulkner, Capote, and Harper Lee. Carson McCullers can hold her head high in that group. This is a brilliant and wonderful book for those willing to try.  [5★]