Tuesday, May 16, 2006

How We are Hungry
By Dave Eggers
2004

Edward is nudging me as I run. Edward is pushing me, bumping into me. All I want is to run but he is yelling and bumping me, trying to bite me. All I want is to run and then jump. I am telling him that if we both just run and jump without bumping or biting we will run faster and jump farther. We will be stronger and do more beautiful things.
From “After I was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned”

In all the irony and footnotes of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and McSweeney's, it gets lost that Dave Eggers is, at his core, a genuine writer. He celebrates the perfection of childhood, and the beauty and pain of adulthood. We are all people and we all feel – rawly, happily, angrily.



Monday, May 08, 2006

Fiction and memoir

The People of Paper
by Salvador Plascencia
2005

Physically, The People of Paper (published by McSweeney's) is beautiful. The writing is at times beautiful, too. But somewhere in the middle, the author breaks into what I think is a memoir of heartbreak. And he mourns and curses his ex-girlfriend, and this plays into the plot but also gets in the way. I did, however, get voyeuristic pleasure from this tangent.

Plascencia writes in the tradition Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but I found him more accessible.

He uses visual gimmicks, such as having multiple columns of type on a page (sometimes in multiple directions). But it's nice to see someone recognize that words are visual, too.

His characters -- like the author himself, it seems -- are in search of a cure for sadness. There is a Baby Nostradamus, a Church of Thieves, a cardinal remembering his first (and last) love. They are fable characters, but they are also, to their core, human. And that is the beauty of Plascencia's first novel.

Monday, May 01, 2006

Art and the Soviet Union

The Dream Life of Sukhanov
by Olga Grushin
2005

In the last third of The Dream Life of Sukhanov, Anatoly Sukhanov's wife, Nina, asks him: "My God, Tolya, don't you remember what it feels like? ... To be in a hurry to live, to dream of overthrowing conventions, to hope to make the world a gift of something beautiful and everlasting? Don't you remember, Tolya? Tolya?"

And it's hard to believe he does or that he even felt like that ever, because this good Soviet citizen is a pragmatist, and in his childhood even there is a glimmer of that pragmatism.

He is an artist by training and a critic by profession. In school, he suppresses his unique artistic style because it does not meet with Soviet approval. As an adult, he suppresses his aesthetic sense for the same reason. He is not a critic so much as a mouthpiece for the Soviet Cultural Ministry.

But as much as he doesn't want to remember, Sukhanov does remember what it's like to dream of overthrowing conventions. And The Dream Life of Sukhanov is the story of memory making itself known. Memory tells him what it felt like and replays the incident that led to his choice of a comfortable life over his art.

As Sukhanov's memory unfolds, it's finally possible to reconcile the child taking delight in a book of Chagall's work with the man editing out of articles references to God.

A current of Communist oppression runs through Dream Life, but it is more about a man whose family orbits one another without forming a unit -- a man near the end of middle age realizing how much and how many people he has betrayed.

Sukhanov is on the verge of trying to make things right or at least acknowledge that he is finally in on the secret, but until his life falls apart, he never quite gets there, hobbled by trivia every time.