Review: "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay"

We're in the middle of Passover right now. Let's celebrate by reviewing a book about Jews!

Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" won a Pulitzer, so it's not going to be earth-shattering when I say that it is a great book. It's about the American Sam Clay and his Czech cousin Josef Kavalier, who team up in 1939 to create one of the most famous comic book superheroes ever, The Escapist. The Escapist is a Chabon invention--no such character exists in comic books--but the circumstances of his creation and the cousins' rise in the newly-created comic book industry is factual, an amalgamation of the many real artists and writers that found success and failure in this uniquely American form of art.

The Escapist is an escape artist who goes around the world liberating the trapped and oppressed. The artist part of the duo, Josef Kavalier, was also an escape artist, or at least he was training to be one in Prague before he came to America. The book begins with Kavalier escaping the Nazi occupation of his city by smuggling himself out in the coffin of the Golem of Prague.

The Golem of Prague is a figure from Jewish folklore, a proto-superhero that a rabbi creates out of clay and animates by carving the name of God into its forehead, in order to protect the community from people who get the itch to beat and kill their Jewish neighbors. The most famous Golem was created in Prague in the 16th century by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, and this is the Golem that Kavalier accompanies to Lithuania so the Nazis can't get their hands on either Kavalier or the Golem. His new life in America revolves around him getting enough money to get the rest of his family out of Prague and give them a new start in his adopted country.

It's a short leap from there for Kavalier, with his cousin Clay, to create a superhero who continuously escapes and helps others escape from evil men. The theme of escape and liberation runs through the various events of the novel, which follows the two cousins through 20 years of love, war, and personal and professional setbacks. While I initially picked up this book because I wanted to see Chabon's take on rise of the comic book industry, I was pleasantly surprised to see how the story was about so much more than just comic books: it was about dreams, and freedom, and the inability to escape from your own basic nature, no matter how hard you try.

Final Grade: A. A smashing read. Recommended for those interested in comic books, Jewish history and folklore, World War II, and magical realism

Baldwin Blowout!

The BF and I were watching clips of "Totally Biased" online and a drag queen made a joke about the Stonewall Riots that I didn't understand. She said, "And I think James Baldwin was there, too," and the studio audience laughed and laughed. Every schoolyard instinct in my headspace lit up like a Chanukah Bush: everyone is laughing and I don't know why, so it must be a joke at my expense!

So the BF loaned me his copy of "The Devil Finds Work" to convince me the TV people weren't mocking me, and we find ourselves here today. I'll be reviewing "The Devil Finds Work" (1976), "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone" (1968), and "Giovanni's Room" (1956), all works by writer, activist and world traveler, James Baldwin.

Baldwin (1924 to 1987) was an important literary voice in the black civil rights movement. You may be familiar with Baldwin's more famous works, "Go Tell It on the Mountain," and "Notes from a Native Son," both of which deal with the experience of being black in America. He was also gay, which explains the "Totally Biased" reference that confused me so, and brings me "Giovanni's Room."

This was only Baldwin's second published book, so he was pushing the boundaries of social mores in literature right out of the gate. The main character is an American man living in Paris in the 1950s. He is engaged to another American, but she goes out of town for a while and he moves in with a young Italian man, Giovanni. The book opens with the narrator sitting up all night, getting drunk in a small rented house on near the coast because Giovanni is going to be executed in Paris the next day. The narrator backtracks from there, relating how he fell in love with but ultimately betrayed Giovanni and left him in the state that lead to his execution. It's a story of shame, love and lost, not exactly good times, but an interesting read that provides a frank and honest description of homosexuality from a time when the topic was still very taboo.

"Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone" is also about homosexuality--or rather, bisexuality--but mostly it's about art, specifically the experience of the black artist in America. The main character of the book is a very famous black actor who suffers a heart attack on stage, which leads him to consider the life choices he's made and the people he's met along the way. I like this book because of the gulf it describes between the artist as an individual and the artist as he exists as a symbol for his audience. The main character struggles with his desire to live an unorthodox life that is true to his chosen craft, because it is at odds with the expectations his family and community has for him. They want him to be a preacher, like his older brother, or at least get a regular job and raise a family of his own, while he would rather travel, be on stage, and fuck a lot of people (wouldn't we all). Not that his vision of himself as an artist is perfect either, though. He has to struggle for many years, playing the roles of servants and bootlicks on stage because those are the only roles available to black actors, before he gets his break. I really enjoyed and admired how "Tell Me" so thoroughly explored the profound ambivalence that comes with being an artist and a public figure, especially as the artist realizes that the things he holds most dear are the things that most alienate him from others.

"The Devil Finds Work" was the first book of Baldwin's I read, as I mentioned earlier, but chronologically it comes last. It's not really a book at all, but an extended essay on the portrayal of blackness in American film. It was very dense and took the the longest to read of the three, even though it's the shortest. Unfortunately, I'm sure a lot of the essay's brilliance was lost on me, because I haven't seen any of the movies referenced in it (except for "The Exorcist"). The BF writes in the margins of all of his books, so there were plenty of notes to help me along, but I'm hard-pressed now to remember any of the points Baldwin made.

I'm not what you'd call a film buff. Movies unsettle me for their ability to deliver a huge emotional wallop in a relatively short amount of time. I prefer novels, which give me space and time to inhabit the characters' worlds and absorb their struggles; or television episodes, for the the same reason. So it a weird way, "The Devil Finds Work" was a pretty good way for me to explore the deeper meanings of film without having to put myself through the experience (ordeal?) of actually watching the movies.

Since this was a special post, I'm not going to grade any of the books. I'll just end with stating that James Baldwin is one of the Great American Authors and you should read his work if you get the chance (not the later stuff though, my local librarian told me that his last three novels were awful).

Review: "To the Heart of the Storm"

Strangely enough, that title has nothing to do with the foot of snow that fell last night. "To the Heart of the Storm" is a graphic novel by Will Eisner, an autobiographical account of growing up Jewish in New York City. It's the only book I've ever successfully gotten the BF to read.

I don't mean to imply that he doesn't read, it's just that he tends to read non-fiction, mostly for his own edification, writing supplemental notes in the margins that bug the hell out of me when I borrow his books. He doesn't read like I do, constantly, compulsively, sometimes painfully, to the exclusion of all other activities. For a while, I had a half-hearted campaign to turn him into me. I gave him books to read, fantasy and horror and superhero, thinking that he surely must be bored with those film and architecture books, and just needed the right piece of fiction to awaken the true book addict that lurks inside everyone. As you might expect, the whole thing went about as well as his attempts to get me interested in classic episodes of "The Twilight Zone." You just can't force your passions on your partner.

You wait to force them on your children.

He's never going to come to ComicCon with me, and I'm never going to get that excited about spending the afternoon in a museum. (It's cold, you can't touch anything without him scolding you, and there's no place to sit down unless you're cheek by jowl with sticky Midwesterners. I don't understand the appeal.) So imagine my surprise when I handed him "To the Heart of the Storm" and he sat down and read the whole thing in an afternoon. I think I've cracked the code: the BF likes Will Eisner.

A note about Eisner: he was a cartoonist and writer, and one of the inventors of the American comic book, creating titles like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and The Spirit, the latter of which has never been out of print. In World War II, he pioneered the genre of "instructional comic," producing booklets for the Army during the war, and for private companies and schools in peacetime. The comic book industry awards are called the Eisners (and Will Eisner actually won several Eisners in his lifetime, which pleases me greatly for reasons difficult to articulate).

This was actually the first work by Eisner that I've read. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that as a comic book fan, because it's like being a film buff without ever having watched "The Godfather." As far as introductions go, "To the Heart of the Storm" is one of the best graphic novels I've ever read, and completely explains why Eisner gets to have the industry awards named after him. It's a deeply personal work that showcases his extraordinary talent for sequential art and writing. It's also a deeply political work about Eisner's experiences with racism and antisemitism as a child, told from the point of view of Eisner as young man on his way to fight in a war that's been brewing his entire life.

What I find fascinating about this book is that Eisner wrote it in 1991, when he was in his seventies.  He'd already lived a lifetime between the events of the book and the time of its creation, and yet "To the Heart of the Storm" feels so immediate and raw, like it all happened to him yesterday. I was struck in particular to the detail he put into his mothers and aunts shoes in flashbacks to their childhoods on the Lower East Side in the late 1890s and early 1900s. And there is such an overall feeling of sadness and anger over the whole work, a helpless and confused kind of anger that only children, with their limited understanding of the world, are capable of feeling. This enormously successful man, having proved all detractors and tormentors wrong decades before, still felt the pain of being called "kike"; of pretending to be gentile so he could go to parties in middle school; of hearing his so-called friends supporting Hitler's actions against the Jews. It never stopped hurting.

I would recommend this book to--well, anyone. It's suitable for children as young as ten or twelve, no swearing or nudity. Even people who don't normally read comic books will appreciate the work of this master of the form. And if being racist knocks you down a full letter grade in my system, creating a thoughtful and biting anti-racist and pro-humanity piece must get you bumped to the top in Big Island Rachel's world.

Final Grade: A+. It gets the + because the BF liked it, too.

Review: "This Book Is Full Of Spiders, Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It"

I called it!

Last week, I wrote about the joys of other people's bookshelves and said I would find my next book to read on R's shelves. And sure enough, this week we're looking at David Wong's "This Book Is Full Of Spiders, Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It" (2012).

David Wong is the pseudonym of Jason Pargin, a senior editor and columnist for the  humor website Cracked.com. Go there now if you want to never get anything done, ever again. I have a feeling that Cracked is responsible for more lost productivity than Lolcats and pornography combined, at least in my own experience. It has a seemingly endless archive of funny columns and lists on any number of topics, updated every day,  and it's affect is best described by this xkcd comic:

This book is actually a sequel to Wong's "John Dies At The End" (which was made into a movie this year). Both are set in a Midwestern town only identified as Undisclosed, an area known to the Iroquois as Seriously, Fuck That Place. It's poor, boring, and quite possibly the portal to Hell, or at least to another dimension of shadow men and monsters. David Wong, both narrator and author, and his best friend John are life-long inhabitants of Undisclosed and self-appointed monster-hunters and protectors of the town. They are also complete drunken fuck-ups. This is a difficult enough situation when they're just trying to save their own skins in "John Dies At The End, " but when they're called on to save their entire town and possible the world from evil brain parasites in "This Book Is Full Of Spiders," they have to somehow rise above their own jackassery  and become heroes after a lifetime of being losers.

It's rare that a book can both make me laugh out loud and have to sleep with the light on. "Spiders" is hilarious, especially in the first third (it gets less funny and more action-oriented toward the end), but it's also terrifying. The humor is in the words, the horror in the situations, and it works surprisingly well. The genre of horror humor is pretty sparse to begin with, but books like this one show that the two don't have to be mutually exclusive. Both humor and fear draw their impact from surprise. We laugh more at jokes when we don't know the punchline ahead of time; we don't fear the monster we see as much as the monster we don't see. Wong the author understands the similarities between the two states and takes us on a wild ride to the end of the world and back again.

At the risk of big ole SPOILERS:

"Spiders" is a book about zombies. The brain parasites that begin multiplying through the town can reanimate their dead hosts, exist only to expand their numbers, and can only be stopped by removing the head of the host or destroying the brain. The twist on these zombies is that the parasites change the physical make-up of their hosts, much like the alien in John Carpenter's "The Thing." The world reacts to the news of the zombie apocalypse much like you'd expect them too: by setting up anti-zombie militias and Tweeting.

I have to confess that as much as I enjoyed "Spiders," which is a more technically accomplished work than its predecessor, on the whole I prefer "John Dies At The End." I'm just not that into zombies, and we've reached such a pop-culture saturation point with them that I've lost whatever small interest I may have had with them (and it was a very small interest, because as we've established, I'm a massive pansy). 

As far as zombie apocalypses go, "Spiders" is fairly standard, from the shady government goons who may hold the key to the cure, right up to the stirring action movie climax. And if you like that sort of thing, you'll love this book. Wong is clearly versed in the tropes of the zombie genre (zomb-re?) and his love and appreciation for his source material shines through in this well-crafted addition to the cannon. It's done well. It's just been done.

Final Grade: B. Recommended for zombie fans, horror fans, readers of Cracked, and people who like dick-jokes.

Interlude: Other People's Bookshelves

I don't want to make my shelves jealous, but I love browsing through other people's book collections, especially if they're readers like me. I can spot a kindred spirit by their books: by the variety of theme and type, by the way the books are organized, and by the person's willingness to talk about their books the same way others talk about their pets or their kitchen.

Get ready for an onslaught of library porn. I found a tumblr on the subject.

 There's an indefinable something that distinguishes a book lover's from a layperson's collection. I can tell at a glance who has a true library and who just has a place where the books go. The presence of so-called genre writing is a big clue. If there's a lot of sci-fi and fantasy hanging around, that person is probably a reader; ditto for comic books and graphic novels, especially if they're prominently displayed where visitors can see them. There's still a big of shame and stigma attached to enjoying genre writing, so a willingness to display such works and invite comment says the reader ain't give a damn what other people think of her interests.

Why yes, I do own every book every written about Rubicks cubes.

Variations on theme are another clue. Readers who are really in to reading tend to go for depth and completism. The BF has "The Sun Also Rises," "This Side of Paradise," and "The Great Gatsby"; he also has many books on the subject of the Great Depression and the art and design aesthetics of the 1920s and 30s. R's bookshelf has "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," so it's not surprising she would also have a non-fiction book called "Teaching Race in the Classroom."

I'm a bit hard-pressed to explain my own thematic elements. Maybe it's like tickling: you can't do it to yourself. I may have to get someone in here to look at my shelves and explain them to me.

And finally, a true reader and book-lover will always have something to say on the subject of organization. My friends J and L organize alphabetically by authors' last names, like a proper library; the BF shelves his books (and DVDs) chronologically by the year they were published/produced; right now I'm shelving by height, though I may organize them by color in the near future, just for a change. It's never haphazard. There's always a reason the books are set up like that, and the book-lover desperately wants you to comment on it so she can explain her system.

It all began when I saw "Beauty and the Beast" as a child...

 This post was originally going to be a review of Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," which I borrowed from R's library. But while I enjoyed the book and could probably mash my brains into saying something witty and profound about the text, what I'm actually thinking about this morning is the fact that I'm going to R's apartment later today and will be able to browse through her books again. That's what I'm really excited about: other people's bookshelves. It got me to thinking about the people I've known and the book collections I've had--no other way to put it--relationships with, and decided to say something witty and profound about that instead.

I may just be a hawa'e maoli (collector urchin) when it comes to books and want to pick up every book I see and glom it on to my body to conceal me from predators.

Turtles and sharks will be baffled by my impenetrable armor of cornflakes

But there's more to it than that. I like other people's bookshelves because while reading tastes are a very personal thing, a bookshelf is rather public in nature. A bookshelf is an open display of a person's inner world and imagination, what they like, what they think about, what they desire. It's a strange mixture of the public and the private that endlessly fascinates me for its potential to both reveal and conceal the truth of a person's being.

Sauron knows what you think about at night. For shame.

Now why do I get the feeling other people are going to stop showing me their bookshelves?

Review: "Geisha: A Life"

You may have read over at my other blog that I'm swamped with work stuff right now, so it's an interesting coincidence that this book popped up on my radar. "Geisha: A Life" (2002) is a memoir by Mineko Iwasaki that describes her training and career as the most successful modern geisha in Japan. At one point in her life, she worked for five years straight without a single day off, and lately, I've been feeling her pain.

Just to be clear, I'm not reviewing "Memoirs of a Geisha" by Arthur Golden. In fact, Iwasaki sued Golden over his book, because he listed her as one of his primary sources after he promised to protect her identity. She wrote her book as a kind of anti-Golden account, even stating in a few places that she wants to clear up the misconceptions that outsiders have about geisha and the world of the karyukai ("flower and willow world," basically the districts in Japan that house geisha and cater to their clients).

The book itself is a quick read. I've actually read it twice since my busy time started. I found it compelling for the world it described, though the writing itself is a bit dull. As far as memoirs go, it commits the fatal sin of telling-not-showing, using the "This happened to me, and then this happened to me, and then I met this person and we did this together" method. Shirley Jackson she ain't. But Iwasaki is a fascinating person who has led such an interesting life that the dull writing almost doesn't matter. She's giving away intimate details of one of the most secret and misunderstood societies in the world. How can you look away?

I'm biased in favor of this book to begin with because modern Hawaii culture is greatly influenced by our Japanese population, and I recognized a lot of the festivals and art forms described in the book. Furthermore, I played taiko drums for many years under both Japanese and American teachers, so I recognized many of the techniques and attitudes Iwasaki's teachers used on her during her training. Of course I never got within a hundred miles of the kind of talent and mastery that a geisha has over her chosen art form, but it was all familiar enough to make me feel a bit nostalgic.

Final Grade: C. Recommended for those interested in Japanese culture, geisha, and sticking it to the imperialist white man who tramples the dignity of your profession.

Review: "Flight Behavior" by Barbara Kingsolver

I felt so confident that I would love Barbara Kingsolver's latest novel, "Flight Behavior" (2012) that I actually bought it. New. In hardcover. I had an option at the time, because I had a gift card to the fabulous Greenlight Bookstore, to purchase two of her earlier works in paperback, but went for the shiny new book instead, because I've followed her career and she tops herself with every subsequent work she publishes. Hot damn, I thought, new Kingsolver and gift card to afford the hardback. I am one lucky Big Island Rachel.

Luxury goods!

But no. Just--no.

"Flight Behavior" wasn't as big a disappointment to me as reading Monique Truong's mediocre "Bitter in the Mouth" after her superlative "The Book of Salt." That let-down was a literary tragedy for me because I just loved "The Book of Salt" so very much. I will get around to reviewing it someday, I promise.

This was merely a disappointment, considering that it came close on the heels of "The Lacuna," which literally made me clasp my chest and cry out in pain at one point. And I recommend Kingsolver's "The Poisonwood Bible" to anyone who talks with me about books for more than two minutes. (I really regret not buying those two books in paperback at Greenlight when I had the chance.)

What both of these books have in common is that they deal with sweeping historical events from the perspective of the rather insignificant individuals caught in the middle of them. The overall effect humanizes these big, almost unfathomable occurrences that shape countries and cultures. There's something so intimate and personal about her stories, something immediate, that both transcends and illuminates time and place in Kingsolver's novels. You never feel like you're reading "historical fiction."

"Flight Behavior" attempts to do the same thing, but instead of discussing Communism in the Americas ("The Lacuna") or the de-colonization of Africa ("The Poisonwood Bible"), this book is about climate change. The every-man that walks us through the issues of the day is Dellarobia, a young mother in the Appalachias who discovers a colony of monarch butterflies on her in-laws' property. The monarchs should be at their winter home in Mexico, but have instead come here, because of climate change. A media circus swirls around the butterflies appearance, a handsome scientist moves into Dellarobia's barn to study the phenom, and she realizes that she has some tough choices to make about the unhappy life she's built for herself.

This is not a bad book, by any means. I read the whole thing, after all. I really like Dellarobia and feel for her plight. She married the boy who got her pregnant in high school, and while he's a good man, she's just too quick and smart for the kind of the life he can offer her. She loves her kids, but resents the hell out of the limitations of stay-at-home mothering. And she's poor. So poor, gang.

Poverty in modern America is a big theme in this book, and I sort of wish it had been the sole focus, because Kingsolver describes it so well. I loved the scene where Dellarobia and her husband have a fight in the dollar store as they attempt to put together a "real Christmas" for their children on a $50 budget. The book lingers over details like their truck on its third engine, the lack of protein in their diets, the shoddy stitching on their cheap clothes, and the free lunch forms Dellarobia gives to her son to take to school.

Much like Edith Wharton does in "Ethan Frome," Kingsolver illuminates the dark reality of the American dream, where all pathways to salvation and happiness require an amount of money that is simply impossible for the protagonists to acquire without an act of evil, wanton destruction. A lot of the tension in "Flight Behavior" comes from Dellarobia's father-in-law, who wants to sell the timber rights of the butterflies' mountain to a logging company to pay off his debts so he doesn't lose his land outright. If the mountain is logged, it will effectively mean the extinction of the species, because so much of the North American population is wintering on the mountain. And worse, it will only pay the debt for a month or so, leaving the family right back where it started. It's a short term act that will have permanent repercussions.

Anyone else hear the whistling of the symbolism sledgehammer as it swings down toward your head?

Here's where the book falls apart for me. It's about climate change, and when I say that, I don't mean that climate change is the larger issue in which these characters' stories play out; I mean it's about climate change. There's long passages where scientists explain how climate change works, what greenhouse gases are, and why every argument that states climate change isn't happening is wrong. There's protesters and activists camping out on the butterflies' mountain. There's media personalities describing how they'll put the spin on the story to make it seem like climate change is a matter of controversy in the scientific community. And at some point, all of this tips the balance, and the book stops transcending its theme. It becomes polemic, its agenda too transparent, and I feel like I'm being preached at.

It's such a shame, because I feel like certain aspects of this book really do keep that balance. The preacher of the community makes some great arguments about God wanting humans to be responsible stewards of the planet, showing that the issue of climate change isn't as clear-cut as rational, science-minded people on one side and stupid religious people on the other. The scenes about poverty show that planet-destroying habits don't come from a place of selfishness or evil, but from need and lack of affordable alternative options. Dellarobia's whole situation is symbolic of climate change: she just sort of went along with everything and made the best decisions she could, until she looked up one day and realized that she was fucked.

But all of that deftness and subtlety is thrown out the window whenever people sit around a table and talk about climate change. It feels so clumsy and forced, like that part in George Orwell's "1984" that is just a passage from another book analyzing how totalitarianism works. Did he think his readers wouldn't understand it without the scholarly essay? We have just spend a hundred-odd pages with characters living in that society, I think we know what's going on.

I don't love all of Kingsolver's books. I didn't even finish "Animal Dreams," one of her earlier works. But the talent and skill she's accumulated over the course of her career made me expect a little more from "Flight Behavior" than was actually delivered. It's an okay book. It's just not great.

Final grade: C+. Recommended for those who like family dramas, stories about the American frontier, environmental issues, and butterflies.