Daily Archives: February 9, 2008

Fiction: “Tree of Smoke” by Denis Johnson

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A big whopper of a book, for which the reviews are either enthustiastically postive (almost anywhere you look, and it also won the National Book Award) or soo soooo negative as to be completely comical.

I fall somewhere between. Not the best book I’ll read this year: it’s sprawling and sloppy and segues awkwardly. Not the worst book I’ll read: it’s descriptive and evocative and critical and inquiring.

I thought the beginning was kinda confusing, as one event in the 1963 chapter flashes forward to 1967, and a lot of characters get introduced in offhand ways, leading me to create a flowchart (that I stopped needing after a bit) of who knew who and who was related to who. But once you get going, that all went away.

I thought it was sort of a rough-and-tumble “boy” book. If you’ve read any W.B. Griffin, you might know what I mean. Crudely descriptive, rude when it doesn’t have to be, but the way you imagine things in the military often are. Some things that the bad review mentions, I realized I had kind of chalked up to the “boy” ness of it. Maybe that’s me being kind? Maybe that’s not really acceptable in a book acclaimed to be of ‘such’ caliber? But it didn’t bother me the way it did that reviewer.

On the other hand, I can agree (with the bad review) that some of the writing isn’t great. (Although there were certainly chapters where I felt he hit his stride.) But I would say that wasn’t really The Point here. Isn’t the convoluted confusion of a messy mixed up war what the reading experience of this was like? Isn’t the disconnected rambling way in which these characters make decisions and relate to one another part of what war does to you? Doesn’t The Colonel and all his ridiculousness serve as a macrocosm for U.S. foreign policy and procedures of the time?

It’s certainly one of very few Vietnam novels to have fairly major Vietnamese characters, (as pointed out by fridaysixpm, one of the reasons I decided to read it), some of whom are fleshed out more than others, yes.

I didn’t like the end. I thought the “big event” of the end happened so weirdly that I felt sort of detached from it, and I really didn’t see the point in having a) the character who ended the book be the one to end it or b) those particular sentiments at the end as they are really in opposition to what I think the real feeling of it was.

But I certainly thought it was worth reading: intense, rambling, yet strikingly evocative. If “knowing the Vietnam canon”, so to speak, is one of your reading goals/needs, then I don’t see how you can pass this up. It certainly adds another view, and one I haven’t quite seen done before. And the ultimate truth of the experience relayed emotionally here is one I think agrees with other, perhaps more easily readable, of the famed Vietnam books (O’Brien, Caputo, and others).

Poetry: “Native Guard” by Natasha Trethewey

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LOVED this book, a Christmas gift from my Dad who saw her read once at the UND Writer’s Conference.

The first section is poems about her mother. They’re elegaic and beautiful. There’s love mixed with frustrating memories. There’s grief. Really wonderful.

There’s a section of poems that imagine things from the point of view of the (unfortunate) black soldiers in the Civil War. They’re unexpected and insightful. A history you or I could never experience, fully come to life. Wow.

And in the last section she explores her own history, mixed in to her parents’ lives, as a child of two races in a disapproving world. Returning home, both physically and emotionally. Remembering, and now understanding in a different way.

Really, really lovely. Highly recommended.

Stories: “The Oxford Book of English Short Stories” edited by A.S. Byatt

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The January book for me and Dad’s 2008 reading challenge. We picked this b/c Dad had (recently) so enjoyed V.S. Pritchett’s Oxford short story collection.

However, the selection of stories in this book felt very bizarre to both of us. Byatt’s particular idea of “what makes an English short story” was a very specific type and some of the things she claimed were “very particularly Britishly funny” in her introduction were things we either found a) not funny or b) not very British feeling (to us, both non Brits, of course).

So while there were some stories we really loved (some we both loved), there were a lot of stories that we didn’t like / I wouldn’t recommend the collection as a whole.

There were a lot of stories that were supposed to be (per her intro) scary = but weren’t. Or stories that would be scary if they were written differently, but a LOT of stories in this book were very distant / the heavy presence of a “storyteller” telling the story (a very passive voice relating the action) on top of the writer made what was happening in the story seem very far away and hard to connect with. There were a lot of stories I call “afterschool specials” = you know, “message” or “lesson” stories.

And there were a lot of stories that seemed very atypical of their authors. In other words, my dad said, “if the story in this book were the first A.E. Coppard story I read, I would never have been interested in reading him again.” Same goes for Dickens, Hardy, D.H. Lawrence and T.H. White. All great writers, all represented here by bad stories.

While we had different faves, these are eight we both liked.

Dad’s faves were: “”Wireless” by Rudyard Kipling, “”At Hiruharama” by Penelope Fitzgerald, and “An Englishman’s Home” by Evelyn Waugh.

Mine were: “The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown” by G.K. Chesteron, “Solid Objects” by Virginia Woolf, “A Widow’s Quilt” by Silvia Townsend Warner (and not because of the quilting), “A Dream of Winter” by Rosamond Lehmann, and “Telephone” by John Fuller.

We’d both recommend those (and some others), but not this particular collection. And we both thought “The Destructors” by Graham Greene was a really good story but had an incredibly devastating (and not funny at all) ending.

Given our experience with this collection, and his previous love for the Pritchett, we’ve added that one to our challenge for our last set of stories (even though he’s read it already).

Just another trip to Coinstar.

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Total change turned in for “real money” = $144.50.
“Change” rejected by Coinstar:

  • Another Boston T token.*
  • One 2-cent Euro.
  • One Canadian dime.
  • One British penny.
  • One, presumably U.S., penny so molded over and verdigreed that I think it might grow a tree if I planted it.
  • One U.S. penny just barely beginning to mold.
  • One U.S. dime, the side ridges of which seem to have somehow been replaced by the outside edge of a penny? I mean, it’s a dime, silver 10-cent piece, but instead of the thin silver scored outer rim a normal dime has, it has a smooth copper rim that extends past the edge on both sides (i.e., is for a fatter coin than a dime). Bizarre!
  • One perfectly normal U.S. dime.
  • And a perfectly good U.S. quarter.

So one transit coin, three non US, two US degraded, one US bizarro, and two perfectly good coins that should have been accepted as Legal currency.

*It’s got to be the Walgreens by work that keeps giving me these. I don’t know if they’re even still valid tokens!