REVIEW OF RAGTIME-E.L.Doctorow

TOM'S REVIEW

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Per  Wikipedia, “In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Ragtime number 86 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to 2005.” And yet JFDI ratings ranged between 3.5 and 4.0 stars.

 I was inclined to go with the majority a give it 3.5 stars but bumped it to 4.0 because E.L. Doctorow is credited with popularizing (if not inventing) a genre, the historical novel in which the famous—in this case, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Evelyn Nesbit, Emma Goldman and Harry Houdini—are portrayed as characters with common frailties who bump up against fictional characters with the same hopes and problems as middle-class readers of serious fiction. 

Wikipedia goes on to describe Ragtime as “a unique adaptation of the historical narrative genre with a subversive 1970's slant.” And that’s its problem. It’s not a timeless classic; it’s a zeitgeist of a time of awkward sex, music, politics, economics and dress sense.

4 stars

JFDI BOOK NO. 22 FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON Daniel Keyes

 

A 1960s book. Part SciFi, part philosophy.

"a deeply moving novel exploring themes of intelligence, self awareness, friendship, love and human identity."

JFDI BOOK NO. 21 RAGTIME E.L. Doctorow

 

RAGTIME

E.L.Doctorow

 

Set in turn-of-the-century New York, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime seamlessly blends fictional characters and realistic depictions of historical figures to bring to life the events that defined American history in the years before the First World War. 

Chosen by Alistair

 

REVIEW OF THE FROZEN DEAD- BERNARD MINIER

ERIC'S REVIEW

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A FROZEN DEAD HAIKU

Frozen Dead killer.

Psychos. Secrets. Not much fun.

Vapid. Rapid. Done.

This book is a page turner. And I have. Turned the page on it. It was very good at making you turn the page, a two-station job in fact. By that I mean I missed both Kew Gardens, my end stop, and Victoria, a key waypoint, on separate occasions, so busy was I in turning pages. The only thing is, I turned the last page, and there was nothing there. Literally nothing. Oh yeah, and that was after reading an epilogue that tried (in vain) to tie up the loose ends. As if anyone cared.

There were plot twists, so many of them in fact, you began to see them coming a long way away. Characters (because all novels must have characters, surely) came and went like cardboard placards representing types, not people. You had your obligatory middle-aged divorced cop. You had your lesbian. Your secret societies. Your rich crook. Your evil twisted genius. Your tatted daughter. Your officious bureaucrat. Your pedophiles and maniacs. Your gay guy hiding behind his beautiful wife. Your assiduous young psychologist. And death. Always death. Death. Fire. Ice. You know, that sort of thing.

And laughably impossible situations waved away with a casual sleight of hand. Apparently it costs $135k to hire a private jet. Really? Exactly $135k?  Should have looked online. You can do it for $42k.

I got the book in French, but I gave up after a while, and not because of the french. Only because the pages weren't turning fast enough. 

2 stars (and a gold razz-star for the shortest JFDI discussion on record)

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TOM'S REVIEW

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THE FROZEN DEAD

There’s bad, there’s really bad and then there’s so bad it’s good.  THE FROZEN DEAD falls somewhere in between the last two. The writing is poor, the plots are ludicrous, the characters are cartoons and every element stretches the bounds of credulity to the snapping point.  But I made it to the end without breaking a sweat and I got some good laughs along the way, even if the author didn’t intend them.  I don’t remember reading many books that are worse, but I have had a fair number of reading experiences that were a lot worse.  

1 star

Average score: 2.25

JFDI BOOK NUMBER 19 THE FROZEN DEAD Bernard Minier

A french whodunnit. Chosen by James.

 

FROZEN DEAD AT AMAZON

REVIEW OF DEAD SOULS (AND reprise RE-REVIEW OF ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE)

BOTH REVIEWS BY T. FRED WELLS

DEAD SOULS by Nikolai Gogol is the sharpest satirical work of the 19^th C. and among the best examples of the genre in all of literature. Satire at its best takes a repulsive and yet acceptable social condition to its extreme but logical conclusion to show the grotesquery of the society that allows it to persist.  The satirical watershed in English language is Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal” in which the author recommends that Irish babies be slaughtered and processed into food in order to solve two problems—over-population and starvation—at once.  More subtle but just as biting is Gogol’s depiction of the social climbing Chichikov’s plan to buy up the property rights to dead Russian peasants.  At the time Gogol wrote DEAD SOULS in the 1840s, Russian peasants were still the legally owned property of Russian landowners.  Like any owned asset, they could be bought, sold and even mortgaged, and they were subject to property tax. The DEAD SOULS refer to those peasants who have met their maker but remain on the tax roles until the next census, a period as long as seven years.  Chichikov hits on the brilliant idea of having the current owners transfer ownership of the DEAD SOULS to himself.  As Swift does in his “modest proposal,” Chichikov addresses two problems at once: he relieves the current owner of the tax burden; and he becomes a man of property who can then mortgage his owned peasants, so long as the lender does not inspect the property.   The result is a cynicism rare in Western literature until the birth of Modernism following the First World War, as societal outrage is directed, not at the concept of owning human beings, but at a man of ample charm, average brain and little drive trying to improve his station by exploiting an evil and yet venerable institution.     

The inescapable problem of DEAD SOULS is that it is an ingenious allegory and laugh-out-loud societal skewering in search of a cohesive story.  There is a shambling beginning, a rambling middle and a missing end.  Gogol wrote the first half of the novel when he was a sharp, lean and mean thirty-something.  He then took a ten-year break and returned to DEAD SOULS just as he was becoming paranoid about the prospects for his own eternal soul, in no small part because of having written DEAD SOULS.  The result is a second half that attempts to blunt the sharp satire of the first and winds up pleasing no one, including apparently Gogol who burned several hundred pages of manuscript while failing to finish the book.     

Plot aside, the first half is masterful at depicting character types we encounter too often in our workaday lives and themes that make us thank God it’s Friday amid settings that shift between farmhouses, stately homes and government offices.  Chichikov is alternately loved and loathed, trusted and suspected, revered and reviled in Gogol’s examination, both surgical and blunt-force, of the different social strata.  And if there is any question about the relevance of this book 170 years after it was written, the reader need look no further than FIFA in 2015.  Chichikov is the Seth Blatter of his age, a man “suffering in public service for the truth...swaddled in forbearance, myself being forbearance itself.”  

A classic.  FIVE STARS

If DEAD SOULS has too little plot, ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE may just have too much.  I was more than satisfied with eventually conjoining stories of the blind French girl Marie-Laure LeBlanc’s survival during the years leading up to and including the Second World War and of the German youth Werner Pfennig’s training and deployment by the Army of the Third Reich.  The addition of the subplot about a world-famous diamond and the hunt for it by the cancer-stricken Von Rumpel threatens to turn a "serious novel” into a fanciful thriller.  It certainly helps to make the book a page-turner, but if that is the principal criterion for excellence then BILLIARDS AT HALF-PAST NINE would not be the consensus JFDI favourite.

Unlike the DEAD SOULS, the landscape of ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE is the world as it should be and not as it is.  Even against the backdrop of a savage war wrought by a brutal regime, the good guys are mostly stout-hearted and selfless while the bad guys are consistently selfish and cruel.  There is little if anything to admire or forgive about Von Rumpel , the school commandant Hauptmann or the French collaborator Levitte and little to disparage about Marie-Laure, her father, Werner, Uncle Etienne, Madame Ruell and Volkheimer.   In the end, bad things do happen to good people, with the book reminding us that it’s an existential world after all via plot turns—especially the Russian rape of Children’s House—adding up to a gratuitous cop-out.

What stands out about ALL THE LIGHT YOU CANNOT SEE is the meticulous research behind such disparate subjects as locks, radios, mineralogy, Nazi boot camps and American birdlife, all of which make for a cornucopia of metaphor that holds together the various subplots, time-shifts and characters.  Even then, the accumulation of detail eventually starts to feel like authorial sleight-of-hand meant to distract the reader with the injection of technical authenticity from the fact that the storylines and characters could never hope to exist in anything like a real world.  I only wish Anthony Doerr had stayed consistent and allowed that world to persist to the end. 

A very good read but not a classic. FOUR STARS        

JFDI BOOK NO.20 DEAD SOULS-Nikolai Gogol

 

DEAD SOULS

Nikolai Gogol

 

 

Russian black comedy.

 

 

Amazon

REVIEW-ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

AVERAGE SCORE: 4.3125 out of 5 although we only had 4 votes, as Alistair and James couldn't make it.



ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE
Anthony Doerr

TOM'S REVIEW

This is a meticulously researched and beautifully written book.  The physics of radio, the biology of sea snails, the Old World craftsmanship of the locksmith and the art of ornithology are just a few of the metaphors that tie several characters and their stories together, related in descriptions that are positively lyrical (“you can fight like a lion; or you can go as easy as lifting a hair from a cup of milk”).The overall story charts the decade-long courses of two apparently separate lives—those of a blind French girl and a wizardly German boy—that converge in the besieged French town of Saint-Malo in August 1944. The French girl Marie-Laure has hereditary cataracts, a love of gastropods and a father who is the locksmith at a Parisian museum housing the most valuable French treasures, including a priceless diamond called the Sea of Flames that der Fuhrer is keen to add to his art collection.  The German boy Werner is unusual in both appearance and intelligence: small in stature, large of ears, snow-white of hair; and with a preternatural instinct for the mathematics and physics of radio.  These two are the main characters in a roster more extraordinary even than the historic time in which they live. All of the principal characters—Marie-Laure, her Papa, her great-uncle Etienne, Madame Manec; Werner, Frau Elena, Frederick, Volkheimer the Giant, even the villainous Von Rumpel—have outsized intelligence, talent, courage and/or purpose.  In the world Anthony Doerr has created, to be ordinary—like Hans and Herribert, the schoolmaster Bastian, Professor Hauptmann, Frederick’s mother or Levitte the Perfumer—is to be morally bankrupt.And so when Werner dies in the most random and banal of wartime acts, I sat screaming with my inner voice in my mind’s ear, “No! No! No!”  For whatever reason, Doerr decides in the final act to become the bully who kicks over the sand castle.  It’s as if he’s realized he’s written a sentimental romance, decided that’s a bad thing, and thinks he needs to inject a short sharp shock of existentialism, which is what characterizes the novel’s last chapters against the tide of the previous 400 pages. For the survivors—Marie-Laure, Frederick and Werner’s sister Jutta—there is only resignation, regret or the desire to forget, all acceptable in a fatalistic world such as the one Frederic Manning so masterfully created in Her Privates We—but not in this one.    

 

 

 

 

FOUR STARS   

 

ERIC'S REVIEW

Movement and love. Gravity and time. Chance and physics. Sound and light. Fear and greed.  We as humans are insignificant flecks of dust in a vast universe. We are guided by light we cannot see, driven by desires we cannot fathom, shaped by forces we cannot comprehend. The invisible waves of the heavens crash against the shores of our existence, reshaping, revealing, sweeping us away to oblivion. 

In All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr the waves of sound, colour and light weave a lyrical tale using the magic of words to travel back and forth in time through the lives of two people fated to intersect for only a brief moment during World War II. Marie-Laure is a blind French girl in Paris lovingly cared for by her devoted father, a locksmith for the Musée de l'Histoire Naturelle. He unlocks her from her sightless prison by building scale models of her neighbourhood to help her navigate, teaches her Braille, and transports her with Jules Verne and the power of language. Werner is a young German orphan in the coal mining region of Germany who is allowed to escape, if that is the right word, a grim future as a miner due to his prowess with electronics. He is admitted to a school for the Nazi youth, the Schulpforta, designed to mold the elite of Aryan youth into heartless, ruthless killers. These two are linked through the sightless couriers of the air- radio waves, and by the bludgeonings of chance. They are both guided by the voice of Marie-Laure's grandfather in the past, broadcasting from the attic of the family home in St. Malo, who exhorted his listeners to 'open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever'. They do just that, metaphorically, and this book is the story of how their lives (and their fate) become intertwined.  We all have saviours we cannot see. We call them angels. 

A stone plays a central role in the story, a cursed diamond which through pressure and time captures fire within it, and becomes the object of the evil greed embodied in the least successful character and weakest part of the book, a cardboard cutout Nazi. But as her father tells Marie-Laure, stones are just stones, rain is just rain, and misfortune is just bad luck. 

 

Doerr's prose is spare, poetic, and mesmerising. This is writing of the highest calibre. It is a book which treads the rare fine line between making one want to greedily lap up one finely crafted sentence after another and taking the time to savour each morsel, between sating a hunger to find out what will happen next and not wanting the meal to end. The ending, when it comes, is deeply unsatisfying at first. Upon reflection, it becomes like life itself, a mystery full of chance where the logic of existence,  the rationale, the whys and wherefores, are all invisible. What do we call visible light?, asks the voice across the airwaves. We call it colour. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and to infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically all of light is invisible. And later: So how children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, create for us a world full of light?

 

The book answers its own question. Through imagination. The same imagination which enabled a gifted writer like Doerr to create this beautiful story, a story like the sea, only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite. 

 

FIVE STARS

JFDI BOOK NO. 18 ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE- Anthony Doerr

 

A WWII novel about a blind french girl and a German radio genius

 

ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE- AMAZON

REVIEW OF COSMIC BANDITOS

ERIC


COSMIC BANDITOS
A.C. Weisbecker


Great literature? No. Not as such. The author is himself perplexed by the havoc he has wreaked, variously describing his work as Crime and Punishment, without the punishment, or even better, a postmodern pulp "tzeuberg." Whatever the hell that is. And he spend a goodly amount of time hawking the work in footnotes (which, it must be said, either annoy or intrigue) and trying to recoup the lousy deal he negotiated when he was a starving spaced-out Californ-aye-eh wastrel during the 70s and didn't know better. 

Which is, essentially, the story of the book. It "lay dormant" (his words) for much of its history, until recently resurfacing as a more than adequate chronicling of the zeitgeist of that era (I love it when I can use that word, and also "tzeuberg" for that matter, in the same review. Brilliant!) Somehow it got a second breath, however. Not really a breath. More like a long toke of a spliff, punctuated by random mutterings about quantum physics, drug smuggling, cartoon characters morphing into novel characters,and...of course (OF COURSE!) the eponymous banditos.

Allow me to digress. In 1976 me and a mate did an epic six week trip from Italy to Egypt to Greece, seeing the Brigate Rosse riots in Rome, the food riots in Cairo, and arriving in Syntagma Square in Athens for Greek National Day, replete with tanks and flybys. Seeking cheap accommodation, we happened upon a large American Hippie with a capital H, long blondish hair, a huge walrus moustache, and faraway (very faraway) eyes. After digesting his considered response, we continued on with the usual niceties. Where are you from? I asked. Cosmos, he replied. Cosmos? I queried (I had heard of Ios, Paros, Naxos...so maybe I was ignorant of yet another Greek island). How long have you been there? He looked up. Well, in reality, man... all my life, but like, when I was a baby in my crib, all I knew was the ceiling of my room, but now I am conscious of the whole cosmos around me, man....nodding his head in agreement with himself.

Uh....ok...well good luck! as we beat a hasty retreat.

My point? There were a lot of people in the 70s like good ol' A.C. He just wrote it down. 

So back to my review. It ain't great literature, but it is an enjoyable romp. Like someone said about particle physics in one of the footnotes (and I reiterate, there are a lot of them): The worldview of particle physics is a picture of chaos beneath order. Indeed.

Is it believable? Who cares? Did I laugh? You bet? To the boo-bears in the group who panned this (and it split the group pretty evenly), I merely pass on another quote from Neils Bohr to Einstein re: Quantum Physics: You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.

I learned something from this book. I am not quite sure what, but one day whilst rummaging through the attic of my cluttered brain, I just might find some nugget....a quote...an image from this nonsensical work, some quanta....smile, and think the whole exercise quite worthwhile, thank you very much.

Then again. Maybe not.

Exactly.

FOUR STARS (JUST BECAUSE)



TOM'S REVIEW

A cult fave in the tradition of Rocky Horror, Hitchhiker's Guide and Mrs. Brown's Boys from a guy who wrote for Disney Inc., on which he has the churlish gall to turn in the Preface, even though it provided him with the stable income he admits this book did not.  I laughed once, because "molybdenum" is a word that always makes me laugh, like "gingivitis" or "styptic." It may not be the best book in the JFDI pantheon but it has spawned a book club embrace of Mexican tipple.  The last time I drank Mescal was at the top of San Marcos Pass in Cold Springs Tavern in 1976 and I sure don't remember it tasting like the fine example of the spirit Joe's daughter Katie gave him at Christmas and he served tonight.  It went down smooth like a rhapsody with a hint of peat.  Joe went on Google to report on the source of the drink.  Based on the piss I just took, I swear it must be Spanish for "Overripe Asparagus," but that won't keep me from drinking it again the next time we have a JFDI meeting at Joe's house.  And that's why I'm giving COSMIC BANDITOS... ONE STAR / FIVE SHOTS

JFDI BOOK NO. 17 COSMIC BANDITOS

COSMIC BANDITOS

A.C. Weisbecker

 

A book which somehow marries quantum mechanics with drug smuggling. The author went on to become a screenwriter on Miami Vice, apparently.

 

AMAZON.COM