Book Reviewed: Alcools: Poems 1898-1913, by Guillame Apollinaire (Translated by Frances Steegmuller)
Obviously, I love poetry. But reading poetry is very different from reading fiction. When I start a novel or a collection of short stories, I can't stop myself from going forward. I plow through the book until the very end. I find that nearly impossible to do with books of poetry. I tend to take them slow, reading a couple poems per day. It often takes me a month or more to read a book of poetry. But every once in a while, I find a collection that becomes compulsive reading. I start and I can't stop until every page has been obliterated.
The quasi-symbolist French poet Guillaume Apollinaire never fails to give me that experience. When I bought his long book of poems related to his World War I experience, Calligrammes, in Chicago a couple years ago, I moved through it so fast that I was half-done by the time my train arrived in South Bend two hours later. I loved Calligrammes; it's definitely one of my favorite single-volume poetry books. So when I had access to the book that came before it, Alcools: Poems 1989-1913, I had to get it.
I wasn't disappointed. I didn't enjoy Alcools as much as Calligrammes, but I still found it super readable. Obviously, part of this is due to the translator, who is surprisingly good at attempting to follow Apollinaire's rhyme schemes and patterns of speech. Apollinaire is famous for being a very symbol-heavy poet, but unlike a lot of poets who do the same, he never gets bogged down in the strange images and weird line shifts. Instead, he manages to keep the humanity and language intact while still coming up with surprising details and language. He's got a lot to teach me as a poet.
The poems I enjoyed the most in this collection included his most famous poem, "Mirabeau Bridge," as well as "Song of the Poorly Loved," "The Farewell," "The Voyager," and "Sick Autumn." But without a doubt, my favorite poem in this collection is the long and weird "House of the Dead." In a World Poetry class a few years back, a professor spent half a class hour on Halloween reading us this poem in its entirety. Its images of the dead returning to hang out with the living are bizarre but also very beautiful. The dead and living mingle, fall in love. And then Apollinaire sticks in a killer of a last line (which I'm not going to give away here). It's just one of those poems that haunts me. Before I read it this week, it had been three years since I'd first heard it that day in class. But I still knew the stanzas with the dead boy proposing to the live girl, and I definitely had the ending memorized. And that's why I love and continue to read poetry. For experiences like that.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Happy Birthday, Erich Maria Remarque!
Today is the 112th birthday of one of my favorite fiction writers, Erich Maria Remarque. Remarque is famous for writing All Quiet on the Western Front, but his later works are just as tragically beautiful. I became a die-hard Remarque fan in high school, and All Quiet on the Western Front and its "sequel," The Road Back, are two of the most influential books I've ever read. There's only been a handful of writers who I can honestly claim have changed my life, and Remarque is one of them, introducing me to anti-war literature just as the Iraq War was starting. He's long been under-appreciated as a novelist, but he'll always have my vote as one of the best.
If you're interested in learning more about Remarque, his story is really quite fascinating. He survived World War I as a German soldier, took on the Nazis, and spent most of his life in exile from his home country.
Side Note: When F. Scott Fitzgerald was a Hollywood screenwriter at the end of his life, he only received screen credit for one movie: a film adaptation of Remarque's novel Three Comrades. I love this random connection between two of my favorite writers!
Monday, June 21, 2010
There's a Reason Some Books Are Considered Classics
Book Reviewed: Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
Sometimes, it's hard to understand how a book achieves its status as a literary "classic." I've read a handful of classics that I absolutely hate. I've also read minor works and loved them. What makes a book classic has very little to do with its emotional content or popularity. Rather, it's about a book being resonant with its time. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are made amazing by their artistic reaction to the emerging modern world after war; Dostoevsky's broken moral societies are views into the chaos to come in Russia. Some books are classics because they're just plain good. But most are classics because of what they do within context.
Kurt Vonnegut's famous war novel Slaughterhouse-Five is one of those books. It's such a bizarre little novel. It's about war and aliens and time travel and life and death. Trying to describe it to someone is nearly impossible. It starts out in Vonnegut's own voice, then transfers its attentions to Billy Pilgrim, an awkward man who survived being a prisoner of war in World War II Germany and the bombing of Dresden. Billy becomes a successful optometrist who eventually reveals to everyone that he has been abducted by aliens and is simply living his life in little time lapses. He can go forward and backward in time, always by accident. The aliens who have abducted him, the Tralfamadorians, can see all of time at once, a fact that Billy (and seemingly, Vonnegut himself) finds beautiful and preferable to our own world. See why it's hard to describe this book to people?
I first read Slaughterhouse-Five as an awkward high school student. Vonnegut was the favorite writer of my beloved high school writing teacher, so I felt it was necessary I read his most famous work. I wasn't disappointed. I remember really liking the book back then. As a teenager, I was obsessed with war as a literary subject. I loved anti-war novels like crazy. Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the most famous American war novels of all time. It's treatment of war as a bizarre venture and its depiction of Dresden as something so harrowing that it can barely be mentioned is made all the much more poignant by the protagonist's time-travelling. When the book finally hits its final pages, we really get to see the devastation involved in the total destruction of Dresden in World War II. Vonnegut's writing makes Billy's avoidance about talking about the war seems so much more tragic in those final pages. And the book is even more powerful when you consider that it was written just as the Vietnam War was becoming unbearable.
Slaughterhouse-Five is one of those books that absolutely deserves its status as a classic. The writing is plain but powerful, able to be funny and depressing at the same time. Also, for those of you who don't know, the novel is responsible for one of the most famous lines in all of American literature: "So it goes." When Vonnegut died a few years back, that line was all over the place. It's the Tralfamadorian response to death, and it is used so often in the book that it manages to become simultaneously silly and tragic.
This is one of those books that always makes me shake my head and say, "Wow." I really don't know how Vonnegut's mind managed to create something so strangely poetic. Seeing a belated response to devastation in the context of current disaster is what makes this book a classic. It's not necessarily one of my most favorite books, but it is one of the maybe ten or twenty books I think everyone in America should read in his or her lifetime.
Sometimes, it's hard to understand how a book achieves its status as a literary "classic." I've read a handful of classics that I absolutely hate. I've also read minor works and loved them. What makes a book classic has very little to do with its emotional content or popularity. Rather, it's about a book being resonant with its time. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are made amazing by their artistic reaction to the emerging modern world after war; Dostoevsky's broken moral societies are views into the chaos to come in Russia. Some books are classics because they're just plain good. But most are classics because of what they do within context.
Kurt Vonnegut's famous war novel Slaughterhouse-Five is one of those books. It's such a bizarre little novel. It's about war and aliens and time travel and life and death. Trying to describe it to someone is nearly impossible. It starts out in Vonnegut's own voice, then transfers its attentions to Billy Pilgrim, an awkward man who survived being a prisoner of war in World War II Germany and the bombing of Dresden. Billy becomes a successful optometrist who eventually reveals to everyone that he has been abducted by aliens and is simply living his life in little time lapses. He can go forward and backward in time, always by accident. The aliens who have abducted him, the Tralfamadorians, can see all of time at once, a fact that Billy (and seemingly, Vonnegut himself) finds beautiful and preferable to our own world. See why it's hard to describe this book to people?
I first read Slaughterhouse-Five as an awkward high school student. Vonnegut was the favorite writer of my beloved high school writing teacher, so I felt it was necessary I read his most famous work. I wasn't disappointed. I remember really liking the book back then. As a teenager, I was obsessed with war as a literary subject. I loved anti-war novels like crazy. Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the most famous American war novels of all time. It's treatment of war as a bizarre venture and its depiction of Dresden as something so harrowing that it can barely be mentioned is made all the much more poignant by the protagonist's time-travelling. When the book finally hits its final pages, we really get to see the devastation involved in the total destruction of Dresden in World War II. Vonnegut's writing makes Billy's avoidance about talking about the war seems so much more tragic in those final pages. And the book is even more powerful when you consider that it was written just as the Vietnam War was becoming unbearable.
Slaughterhouse-Five is one of those books that absolutely deserves its status as a classic. The writing is plain but powerful, able to be funny and depressing at the same time. Also, for those of you who don't know, the novel is responsible for one of the most famous lines in all of American literature: "So it goes." When Vonnegut died a few years back, that line was all over the place. It's the Tralfamadorian response to death, and it is used so often in the book that it manages to become simultaneously silly and tragic.
This is one of those books that always makes me shake my head and say, "Wow." I really don't know how Vonnegut's mind managed to create something so strangely poetic. Seeing a belated response to devastation in the context of current disaster is what makes this book a classic. It's not necessarily one of my most favorite books, but it is one of the maybe ten or twenty books I think everyone in America should read in his or her lifetime.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Poem of the Week: "Youth," by James Wright
In honor of Father's Day, here is a poem from one of my favorite poets, James Wright. Wright's poems are always deceptively simple, hiding a complexity of emotion under the guise of plain existence. Enjoy!
Youth, by James Wright
Strange bird,
His song remains secret.
He worked too hard to read books.
He never heard how Sherwood Anderson
Got out of it, and fled to Chicago, furious to free himself
From his hatred of factories.
My father toiled fifty years
At Hazel-Atlas Glass,
Caught among girders that smash the kneecaps
Of dumb honyaks.
Did he shudder with hatred in the cold shadow of grease?
Maybe. But my brother and I do know
He came home as quiet as the evening.
He will be getting dark, soon,
And loom through new snow.
I know his ghost will drift home
To the Ohio River, and sit down, alone,
Whittling a root.
He will say nothing.
The waters flow past, older, younger
Than he is, or I am.
Youth, by James Wright
Strange bird,
His song remains secret.
He worked too hard to read books.
He never heard how Sherwood Anderson
Got out of it, and fled to Chicago, furious to free himself
From his hatred of factories.
My father toiled fifty years
At Hazel-Atlas Glass,
Caught among girders that smash the kneecaps
Of dumb honyaks.
Did he shudder with hatred in the cold shadow of grease?
Maybe. But my brother and I do know
He came home as quiet as the evening.
He will be getting dark, soon,
And loom through new snow.
I know his ghost will drift home
To the Ohio River, and sit down, alone,
Whittling a root.
He will say nothing.
The waters flow past, older, younger
Than he is, or I am.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
I'm On a Roll...
Book Reviewed: Murder Mysteries, by Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell (Graphic Novel)
Third book reviewed this week! Since these last three books have all been under 300 pages, I've been going through them lately like nobody's business. It's all due to working at the library now, I think. Having such close access to so many good books turns me into a monster.
As you all know by now, "Murder Mysteries" is not only my favorite Neil Gaiman story, it's also one of my favorite short stories in general. So when I heard there was a graphic novel version, I had to seek it out. Luckily, it lived up to its origins.
The story itself is so good that there really didn't need to be a lot done to it for me to like this book. A story within a story, "Murder Mysteries" tells the tale of the first murder in heaven, pre-Earth. It's a cool little piece that plays a bit like a noir, but which has a resonance in the story's framing in the modern world. P. Craig Russell's artwork really does the story justice, with its attention to detail and body language. He did a great job using page and scene cuts to heighten the tension between the frame story and the inner tale. Overall, I was quite impressed.
It's a short review, since I've talked about my love of this story before, but just know that if you haven't read "Murder Mysteries" before, this graphic adaptation is a great place to start.
Third book reviewed this week! Since these last three books have all been under 300 pages, I've been going through them lately like nobody's business. It's all due to working at the library now, I think. Having such close access to so many good books turns me into a monster.
As you all know by now, "Murder Mysteries" is not only my favorite Neil Gaiman story, it's also one of my favorite short stories in general. So when I heard there was a graphic novel version, I had to seek it out. Luckily, it lived up to its origins.
The story itself is so good that there really didn't need to be a lot done to it for me to like this book. A story within a story, "Murder Mysteries" tells the tale of the first murder in heaven, pre-Earth. It's a cool little piece that plays a bit like a noir, but which has a resonance in the story's framing in the modern world. P. Craig Russell's artwork really does the story justice, with its attention to detail and body language. He did a great job using page and scene cuts to heighten the tension between the frame story and the inner tale. Overall, I was quite impressed.
It's a short review, since I've talked about my love of this story before, but just know that if you haven't read "Murder Mysteries" before, this graphic adaptation is a great place to start.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Anne Carson Might Be Too Smart for Me
Book reviewed: The Beauty of the Husband, by Anne Carson
According to its cover, Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband is "a fictional essay in 29 tangos." A series of poems about the marriage and divorce between the female speaker and her adulterous husband, the book is as complicated as any of Carson's other works. Using Keat's philosophy of "beauty as truth," Carson creates a picture of a failed relationship with snapshots ("tangos") of moments and emotion. The whole thing is kind of like a puzzle largely open to interpretation, playing with emotions but forcing the reader to come to her own moral judgments. Luckily, I've read a lot of Anne Carson before I read this book. Otherwise, I might have been pretty lost.
As you might remember from past Carson reviews I've posted here, I'm a huge fan of the way she uses verse to blend literary tradition into the contemporary world. Her book Autobiography of Red is a modern retelling of a Greek myth, and it works wonderfully. Unfortunately, I found that The Beauty of the Husband lacked the pathos and attention to image that defined Red. Instead, we get a lot of language and memory and leftover feelings. The rawness of love and betrayal were missing for me.
I liked the book well enough. Occasionally, a moment or line really wowed me, particularly in the moments shared between the speaker and her unfaithful ex's best friend, Ray. I felt like Carson had all the tools and did exactly what she set out to do. But for me, the emotional satisfaction I hope to find in good poetry just wasn't totally there. And because Carson has the tendency to be a tad too intellectual at times, the language wasn't graceful or arresting enough to make up for that.
Anyway, it's a decent book of poetry that I definitely didn't regret reading. I just plain didn't like it as much as some of Carson's other work. I like what she does. But sometimes, I think she might be a little too smart for me.
According to its cover, Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband is "a fictional essay in 29 tangos." A series of poems about the marriage and divorce between the female speaker and her adulterous husband, the book is as complicated as any of Carson's other works. Using Keat's philosophy of "beauty as truth," Carson creates a picture of a failed relationship with snapshots ("tangos") of moments and emotion. The whole thing is kind of like a puzzle largely open to interpretation, playing with emotions but forcing the reader to come to her own moral judgments. Luckily, I've read a lot of Anne Carson before I read this book. Otherwise, I might have been pretty lost.
As you might remember from past Carson reviews I've posted here, I'm a huge fan of the way she uses verse to blend literary tradition into the contemporary world. Her book Autobiography of Red is a modern retelling of a Greek myth, and it works wonderfully. Unfortunately, I found that The Beauty of the Husband lacked the pathos and attention to image that defined Red. Instead, we get a lot of language and memory and leftover feelings. The rawness of love and betrayal were missing for me.
I liked the book well enough. Occasionally, a moment or line really wowed me, particularly in the moments shared between the speaker and her unfaithful ex's best friend, Ray. I felt like Carson had all the tools and did exactly what she set out to do. But for me, the emotional satisfaction I hope to find in good poetry just wasn't totally there. And because Carson has the tendency to be a tad too intellectual at times, the language wasn't graceful or arresting enough to make up for that.
Anyway, it's a decent book of poetry that I definitely didn't regret reading. I just plain didn't like it as much as some of Carson's other work. I like what she does. But sometimes, I think she might be a little too smart for me.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
This Week in Trashy Reads #7
Trashy Read #7: Flat-Out Sexy, by Erin McCarthy
Race car drivers have never really done anything for me. Until now. Let's just say that Erin McCarthy's contemporary romance, Flat-Out Sexy, lived up to its name.
The book is quite simple and doesn't really have much of an external plot. Tamara Briggs, the widow of a dead stock car racer and a single mom, meets the hot and younger driver Elec Monroe, and they have a steamy night together before a race. However, they both soon fall in love with each other and get over a couple of personal issues to find love together. That's it.
Although her writing wasn't anything special, McCarthy shows a flair for creating inviting characters. Tamara and Elec are genuinely good people who are extremely mature in comparison to most characters in the romance genre, who tend to be overly defensive and jealous. As problems arise, Tamara and Elec deal with them like two kind-hearted adults, which is exactly what they are. They're sweet together, and McCarthy inserts Tamara's two kids into the mix without shifting the focus too much. This is one of the few romance novels I've ever encountered where I really just enjoyed seeing the characters as a couple, hanging out and attempting to understand one another. The whole relationship was handled very well.
But my real reason for liking this book is much more shallow. Quite frankly, Elec Monroe is one of the hottest romance heroes I've encountered in a long time. I might like most romance heroes I encounter (since I'm such a picky reader), but I actually had an out-and-out crush on Elec. First off, he's super good-looking, and McCarthy gives him warm brown eyes instead of the boring blue orbs most romance writers saddle men with. But under all that, he's also just super-sweet and quiet and careful. He doesn't take overly big risks, and he hates the spotlight. With Tamara and her kids, he's gentle and never pushy. Overall, he's the kind of awesomely great guy you see so rarely in real life. Hell, even his name is hot!
Anyway, overall, I'd totally recommend this one to anyone who likes contemporary romance or racing. I was impressed.
Note: There's a "sequel" about two of this book's minor characters titled Hard and Fast. I gave up after about 50 pages. It seemed like it'd be an okay book, I just wasn't feeling it the way I did with this one.
Race car drivers have never really done anything for me. Until now. Let's just say that Erin McCarthy's contemporary romance, Flat-Out Sexy, lived up to its name.
The book is quite simple and doesn't really have much of an external plot. Tamara Briggs, the widow of a dead stock car racer and a single mom, meets the hot and younger driver Elec Monroe, and they have a steamy night together before a race. However, they both soon fall in love with each other and get over a couple of personal issues to find love together. That's it.
Although her writing wasn't anything special, McCarthy shows a flair for creating inviting characters. Tamara and Elec are genuinely good people who are extremely mature in comparison to most characters in the romance genre, who tend to be overly defensive and jealous. As problems arise, Tamara and Elec deal with them like two kind-hearted adults, which is exactly what they are. They're sweet together, and McCarthy inserts Tamara's two kids into the mix without shifting the focus too much. This is one of the few romance novels I've ever encountered where I really just enjoyed seeing the characters as a couple, hanging out and attempting to understand one another. The whole relationship was handled very well.
But my real reason for liking this book is much more shallow. Quite frankly, Elec Monroe is one of the hottest romance heroes I've encountered in a long time. I might like most romance heroes I encounter (since I'm such a picky reader), but I actually had an out-and-out crush on Elec. First off, he's super good-looking, and McCarthy gives him warm brown eyes instead of the boring blue orbs most romance writers saddle men with. But under all that, he's also just super-sweet and quiet and careful. He doesn't take overly big risks, and he hates the spotlight. With Tamara and her kids, he's gentle and never pushy. Overall, he's the kind of awesomely great guy you see so rarely in real life. Hell, even his name is hot!
Anyway, overall, I'd totally recommend this one to anyone who likes contemporary romance or racing. I was impressed.
Note: There's a "sequel" about two of this book's minor characters titled Hard and Fast. I gave up after about 50 pages. It seemed like it'd be an okay book, I just wasn't feeling it the way I did with this one.
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