Book Reviewed: So Cold the River, by Michael Koryta
I rarely get to read books set in places I've actually been. Sure, there's books with scenes in Paris's Latin Quarter or set in South Carolina or whatever. But I'm talking about books that take place in actual rooms where I've stood. And I very rarely get to read books about places that I've not only been to, but that I actually love. Which is why I went out and ordered the hardcover copy of Michael Koryta's new book as soon as I heard about it last week.
So Cold the River takes place at one of the most amazing sites I've ever stepped foot inside: the West Baden Springs Hotel in southern Indiana. During a visit to the infamous resort town of French Lick, Indiana, a couple years ago, my family went on a tour of the historical West Baden hotel. At that time, the hotel had just come under new ownership and was beginning to be restored to its former glory. Before that, it had sat for decades as basically very pretty ruins. From the very first glimpse I had of the hotel, my breath was completely taken away. I can honestly say that the West Baden blew my mind. It's such an incredible place, full of history and wonder. Its most famous feature, its massive atrium dome, was a groundbreaking architectural phenom at the time it was built. That dome is so big I could barely comprehend it when I saw it. Seriously, I can't describe how awesome that place is. Here's the website for the newly restored (and now very expensive) resort. Please look at the pictures. I think you'll agree it's something.
Anyway, despite all its grandeur, there's something kind of creepy about a place that big sitting so empty for so many years. Not to mention how strange that whole part of Indiana is, with its rolling hills and its underground river. So it's no surprise that Koryta, who lives in Bloomington and apparently grew up near French Lick and West Baden, chose to make his book about the hotel and its surrounding area a supernatural thriller. Unfortunately, it wasn't that scary. Or thrilling for that matter.
The book centers around Eric Shaw, a filmmaker without much of a film career. He's resorted to making movies about people's lives to be shown at funerals and weddings. After one funeral, he gets chosen by a woman named Alyssa Bradford to make a movie about her dying father-in-law, a mysterious businessman who abandoned his hometown of West Baden, Indiana. Shaw stays at the famous hotel and attempts to make his film, but he ends up just getting haunted instead. He encounteres ghosts and mysteries and some really terrible people. We meet a variety of characters who try to help him find the truth as he begins to get a little too into the history of West Baden as a producer of "healing waters" over the last century.
The problem with the book is that it's kind of boring. It reminded me of a case-heavy episode of my favorite guilty pleasure, the TV show Supernatural. I don't mean that as a compliment. The book just doesn't have much spark to it. Koryta writes wonderfully about that part of Indiana, and he uses French Lick and West Baden to terrific affect. As I read the novel, I couldn't help but wish he had written either a straight mystery or a piece of literary fiction centering on an unfairly misunderstood place. Unfortunately, he wrote an uninteresting ghost story instead. Oh well. At least I got some major kicks out of reading a book about one of my favorite places in the world.
But seriously you guys: This book might not have been that great. But West Baden Springs Hotel? That place kicks ass.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Congrats, Dana and Matthew!
Hey everyone! I just wanted to post a quick note letting you know I won't be posting anything for the next four or five days. So there won't be a new Poem of the Week on Sunday or any new reviews. I'll be out of state, but I have a pile of some very exciting books coming with me, so expect an onslaught of reviews later next week.
I'll be going to Alabama for the wedding of one of this blog's most loyal followers. I know it's going to be an awesome time. So enjoy your weekend, everyone, and congratulations to Dana and Matthew!
I'll be going to Alabama for the wedding of one of this blog's most loyal followers. I know it's going to be an awesome time. So enjoy your weekend, everyone, and congratulations to Dana and Matthew!
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
A Rare Thing in Poetry
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.
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.
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.
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