BookEnds

I was wandering through the Ferguson Library the other day, with no determined purpose, when I spotted one of the usual book displays on the first floor and noticed that the arrangement of the books seemed a little…familiar. “This Side of Paradise” next to “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”? “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” propped next to “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”? And then I realized - the books on display were all part of the article I wrote back in July about novels with local references. The library display is titled “A Connecticut Story” (I like that! It reminds me of “The Philadelphia Story”), and I was very happily surprised to see a neat printout of the list The Advocate compiled for the article stacked next to the books. It’s certainly a long enough list to stretch into the crisp months of fall (a Stephen King for Halloween, perhaps?). The next time I’m in the library, I hope to see some of these novels snapped up for a cozy armchair read…

Kudos to the Ferguson Library for the clever idea - and the display looks beautiful. Does anyone at the library know who put this together? I’d like to say thanks!

Image by emdot via Flickr

When I first read “The Great Gatsby”, it was summer — the best time of year, I think, to become acquainted with Gatsby’s decadent stretch of Long Island. Lying on the beach, I flipped through sun-soaked pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s languid prose, wishing I could dust off my sandy feet and step straight into one of those glorious, glowing parties.

That’s what happens, when we first slip between the pages of a book (or, in this day and age, scroll down the iPad’s screen or plug in the earbuds): we conjure up bits of the characters’ world until it begins to seep into our own. The Jay Gatsby I imagined was not like Robert

Redford, or indeed like the Gatsby of anyone else’s imagination. The characters and places of our favorite books become our own as we read, tainted by the elements of our surroundings, comfortably nestled in the recesses of our imagination for as long as we love our favorite books. They’re often shadowy figures, stronger in essence than in physical presence, and completely unique to our personal interpretations. Gatsby is a particularly elusive character to conjure up — which is why, perhaps, the new production of the show “Gatz” tries to capture, not the character himself, but the process of imagining him.

“Gatz”, which is currently running at the Public Theater in New York, sounds like  a strange hybrid between a play and a book reading. In the performance, presented by Elevator Repair Service , a man sits down to read “The Great Gatsby” — out loud and verbatim all the way through — in a nondescript office building and gradually finds the imaginative world of the book building itself around him. As he warms to the story, his voice plunges and falls with the dialogue and the bland characters around the office fantastically morph into Daisy Buchanans and Jordan Bakers.

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“One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.”

— Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”

Imagine, for a moment, a canon of Western literature without “The Metamorphosis.” Without Gregor Samsa’s bizarre plight as an insect, without the novels “The Castle”, “The Trial”, “Amerika”…without even the term “Kafkaesque.” That would have been the piteous state of affairs if Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s close friend, had not saved the author’s most famous works and other papers from destruction. On his death in 1924, Kafka left instructions for all journals, papers, manuscripts and letters to be burned. Brod made the prescient, though perhaps morally dubious, decision to defy his friend’s last wishes and brought Kafka’s works to publication.

The remainder of Kafka’s personal papers, though, have had a long and convoluted history, which has led them to an embittered trial over ownership rights that is…well, like something out of Kafka. There’s a preview of a New York Times magazine article coming out this weekend on the trial and the fate of the author’s papers — well worth a good read.

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The sinking of the Titanic in April, 1912 is such a well-known piece of history, that the spiral of events into disaster seems familiar and thoroughly picked over. However, a new book “Good as Gold”, written by the granddaughter of the ship’s Second Officer brings new facts to the surface about the human errors and callous decisions that set the ocean liner on its fatal course.

Louise Patten, a novelist and “the last person alive to know what really happened on the night Titanic sank”, describes family secrets long kept by her grandfather, Commander Charles Lightoller, as the inspiration for her part-fact, part-fiction book. Lightoller initially lied during inquiries into the disaster, saying he knew nothing at the time, but told his wife the truth, which was passed down to Patten.

Lightoller, right, with third officer Herbert ...

According to Patten (and Lightoller), the Titanic struck the iceberg because of a simple misinterpretation of orders. At the time the Titanic was built, ships were transitioning between sailing ships and steam ships, which have different steering systems. Sailing ships, on which Lightoller and many other of the Titanic’s officers trained, operate under tiller orders, while steam ships operate under rudder orders. In an article with The Telegraph, Patten explained the difference between the two:

“…on sailing ships, they steered by what is known as ’tiller orders’ which means that if you want to go one way, you push the tiller the other way. It sounds counterintuitive now, but that is what tiller orders were. Whereas with ‘rudder orders,’ which is what steam ships used, it is like driving a car. You steer the way you want to go.”

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The New York Times had a great fall book preview today. Here’s a peek:

There are novels by Ken Follett, Michael Cunningham, Nicole Krauss and Tom Clancy; cookbooks by Ina Garten and Jamie Oliver; humor books by both Amy Sedaris and David Sedaris; a collection of poems, notes and letters written by Marilyn Monroe; and a book by the Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward that is so supersecret its publisher, Simon & Schuster, refused to reveal the title. (A Borders executive said that it is “Obama’s War.”)

This fall is especially intense because of the midterm elections, which coincide with a handful of political memoirs, polemics and studies of the Tea Party movement, President Obama and Glenn Beck whose releases have been timed to the weeks before November.

Tony Blair, the former prime minister of Britain, just released “A Journey” (Random House), an account of his time in office and its aftermath, and was promptly the target of protesters tossing eggs and flip-flops at his first public reading, in Dublin, on Saturday. Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News commentator, will see his latest political book, “Pinheads and Patriots” (William Morrow), published on Sept. 14. Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, has written a memoir of her family and childhood in Alabama, titled “Extraordinary, Ordinary People” (Crown Archetype).

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel “Freedom” has already been scooped up by President Obama for his late-summer reading, lauded expansively by the New York Times, and projected to easily hit the best-seller list when it goes on sale tomorrow. Franzen himself has become the first author in a decade to grace the cover of Time magazine and, in advance of “Freedom”, has been called both the genius of a generation and the overexposed darling of the literary critics.

“Freedom”, the author’s first novel since the best-selling 2001 book “The Corrections”, follows the trials of a Midwestern family and scrutinizes life in the 21st century — and under the Bush administration — to the minute details. Michiko Kakutani of the Times called Franzen’s technique an “ability to throw open a big, Updikean picture window on American middle-class life”.

The arrival of “Freedom” and the praise surrounding it has also sparked a debate on the prevalence of male writers in the literary critical sphere.  Author Jodi Picoult has been tweeting about the coverage “Freedom” has received from the Times, writing, “Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren’t white male literary darlings.” Fellow novelist Jennifer Weiner joined the conversation and coined the term “Franzenfreude”, calling out for “non-Franzen” writers who chronicle “The Way We Live Now” to gain recognition. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Weiner said that her criticism is nothing personal to Franzen, but an observation on the Times’ critical preference for “white guys” with MFAs and that literature written by women for women is usually overlooked.

Is Jonathan Franzen the next great American novelist or is the praise overrated? I have never read any of his work, so I can’t honestly offer an opinion of his writing. But I am intrigued by the sound of “Freedom.”

David Mitchell

Well, I braved boiling temperatures, chugged endless water bottles and crowded into a near-bursting bookshop in a sweat-drenched t-shirt to see David Mitchell Sunday afternoon, the culmination of a literary pilgrimage that took me to a baking stretch of 10th Avenue in Manhattan.
Mitchell, British novelist and author of “Cloud Atlas”, chose the independent bookstore 192 Books in Chelsea to read from his newest novel, “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” (pronounced “de Zoot”, not “de Zo-et”, as I learned). The crammed bookshop fairly swelled with the author’s fans, many clutching copies of his novels along with their water and tote bags.
I confess to being a bit of a“Mitchell Geek”, as his fans are called, having admired his work since I first picked up his semi-autobiographical novel “Black Swan Green” four years ago. Mitchell’s writing tends to inspire devoted enthusiasm in his fans, and I admit to succumbing to a similar sort of fervor prior to the event.
Mitchell arrived with little fanfare via taxi, pulling up outside the bookshop where a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk. Several of the fans waiting outside had already cracked open the spine of “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet”; bookshop attendants rounded the sidewalk with cool paper cups of water to lessen the heat’s sting.
I was lucky; at the head of a long waiting list to get inside for the reading, I managed to squeeze, standing, into a corner near the window, between a young couple and a woman who continually fanned herself against the muggy heat.
It’s always curious to see someone you’ve only previously known from book jacket photos and newspaper portraits in the flesh; Mitchell, in person, is tall, soft-voiced and animated, laughs easily and jokes often, mostly at his own expense. He read a passage from the beginning of “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet”, a chapter in which the Japanese island of Dejima, where the book is set, crackles and blisters beneath an August heat (appropriately). As he read, Mitchell lapsed easily into the voices of each character, trading accents and expertly capturing the pitfalls of miscommunication between the Japanese and Dutch speakers in the book.

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