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Arab-American Nights

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights Salman Rushdie Random House, 2015; 304pp Salman Rushdie‘s twelfth novel is a New Yorker’s Arabian Nights, a wryly witty, promiscuously intertextual work that offers delirious pleasures and fantastical beings in equal measure. Our world — New York in the present day — has been beset by “strangenesses”. A gardener who hovers an inch or so above the ground, an abandoned baby who identifies moral corruption in her presence by inflicting disfiguring sores on its source, lightning strikes, wormholes. Much as midnight’s children, in the novel of that name, derived their telepathic powers from an accident of birth, so the people on whom these strangenesses center share a common (supernatural) origin, a jinnia named Dunia who fell in love with the twelfth-century philosopher Ibn Rushd and bore him enough children to guarantee a healthy global distribution of descendants eight hundred years later. As we move between happenings in our world and Fairyland, we learn that, in order to save the world, a showdown between humankind and the four Grand Ifrits, the dark jinn, must be provoked — and won. Two Years‘ overarching narrative concerns an alleged philosophical disharmony between faith and reason. Ibn Rushd, when we meet him in […]

Tarantino’s White Hell

The Hateful Eight Directed by Quentin Tarantino Release date: December 25, 2015 Running time: 182 minutes (roadshow version, screening in the 70mm format); 176 minutes (digital version, sans overture and intermission) Rated R for strong bloody violence, a scene of violent sexual content, language and some graphic nudity PERVASIVE SPOILERS Most of the characters in Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, The Hateful Eight, seem to be governed by codes of behavior and philosophies that they hold to be more important than the sanctity of their own bodies. The vile and fantastic carnage that transpires is a direct consequence of their collective disregard for human life. This is not untypical of Tarantino’s work. From the greedy thieves of Reservoir Dogs to the perverted honor of Kill Bill‘s assassins, his characters have regularly indulged in acts of grotesque violence — and put themselves in danger of being its subject — in the service of various notions and aims concerning revenge or money. Death and mutilation occur when these notions reach their (il)logical conclusions. The special genius of The Hateful Eight, which makes it my favorite Tarantino movie since Kill Bill (and I’ll allow it may be better), lies in locking so many of these characters in a snowbound cabin in Wyoming and simply waiting to see what happens. https://youtu.be/gnRbXn4-Yis Kurt Russell is bounty […]

Best of 2015: A Personal Take

“Best books” lists are a perennial inducer of anxiety. So this isn’t quite that; rather, a short tour of impressions from a year of reading — haphazard, sometimes misguided, always pleasurable. Starting with fiction, I’m perhaps ashamed to discover, while tallying, that I read mostly the Great White Males. I both enjoyed and was frustrated by the firestorm now typical of the publication of a new Jonathan Franzen novel — for better or worse, Franzen has become the locus for a debate over all the inequities of the publishing industry, while his work is autopsied by those hoping to prove he’s the misogynist they, strangely, seem to want him to be. The actual book (Purity, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux) won me over with the vomitously tense novella at its center — the Tom Aberant section, if you’ve read it — in which our hero’s masochistic relationship with a neurotic feminist heiress is played out in gruelling detail. It’s an abject, despairing piece of writing — and no doubt at least partly a playful provocation of the author’s critics. I also enjoyed Peter Buwalda’s rather nasty Bonita Avenue (Hogarth; review), and Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (Knopf Doubleday), a “corporate anthropology” romp packed with failed parachutes and data-anxiety. Tom Cooper’s debut novel, The Marauders (Crown; review), a thriller set in the swamps […]

Paradise Lost

Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawai’i Susanna Moore Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; 320pp “There is no little irony in recognizing that the speed with which [the near-annihilation of the Hawaiian people] occurred,” writes Susanna Moore in her engrossing new book, “serves as testimony to the generosity of spirit, patience, and adaptability of the Hawaiians themselves. In their grace lay their defeat.” Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawai’i, which was a worthy nominee for this year’s National Book Award for Nonfiction, surveys the 120-year period between Captain Cook’s arrival on the Hawaiian Islands in 1778 and their annexation by the United States in 1898. In little more than a century, an entire civilization was stopped in its tracks, its ontological outlook completely overthrown. A native population estimated to be as large as 800,000 when Cook arrived was, by 2013, smaller than 90,000. A culture condemned as heathen by the missionaries who arrived in 1820 was, within decades, literate and largely Christian. Sailors, whalers, merchants and tradesmen radically altered the ethnic makeup of the archipelago. In the end, it was the grandson of one of the first missionaries who successfully petitioned the US Congress to annex the Islands. Moore is careful to position her history […]

The Emperor of Water Clocks

The Emperor of Water Clocks: Poems Yusef Komunyakaa Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; 128pp Yusef Komunyakaa’s poems are governed by a deeply anthropological sensibility. This allows the slips of time and geography that occur in his latest majestic collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks, to reveal how human rituals and behavior repeat themselves across time and space. In “The Gold Pistol”, the language of folk tales, legends and myths evokes a sort of timeless evil: “There’s always someone who loves gold / bullion, boudoirs, & bathtubs, always / some dictator hiding in a concrete culvert / crying, Please don’t shoot, a high priest / who mastered false acts & blazonry”. In these opening lines, one’s thoughts might flit to Hitler or Saddam (“in a concrete culvert”). But Komunyakaa’s subject is another, more recent dictator: “& this is why my heart almost breaks / when a man dances with Gaddafi’s pistol / raised over his head, knowing the sun / runs to whatever shines”. What causes the poet’s heart to break is the historical inevitability (“the sun runs to whatever shines”). The military intervention in Libya, like those in Afghanistan and Iraq, may have prompted brief celebrations in some quarters, but the aftermath has proved cruel. Indeed, […]

Dispatches From Area 51

I See You Made An Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories From the Edge of 50 Annabelle Gurwitch Blue Rider Press/Penguin Random House, 2014; 256pp “Maintaining a sense of humor is the final frontier or at least our saving grace as we age.” Every seven and a half seconds, an American turns fifty. In her latest hilarious book, I See You Made An Effort, actress and writer Annabelle Gurwitch opens up about the many implications that passing over the threshold of fiftydom has had for her. Whether it’s the unfortunate synchrony of menopause and raising an adolescent boy, the temptations and pitfalls of having work done, or the increasingly depressing career options left open to her in the film and TV industry, she has a brilliantly funny story or flight of fancy to reassure you that with a little laughter we can all get through this together. As subject matter, ageing offers boundless opportunities for excruciating self-revelation. Gurwitch never misses a trick, whether discussing the leakage she experiences when trying out her son’s trampoline or her tentative steps onto the slippery slope of cosmetic surgery. “I’ve filled, frozen and ultrasounded,” she writes, “all in the name of what is often referred to as ‘maintenance.'” Trouble is, she adds, once […]

Did Dark Matter Kill the Dinosaurs?

Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe Lisa Randall Ecco, 2015; 432pp In 1908, an object that may have been an asteroid or a comet exploded a few kilometers above the river Tunguska in the forests of Siberia. The blast was a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima; the wave from the explosion went three times round the world, like Superman turning back time. It could be heard by people “living at a distance as far away as France is wide”. Windows shattered in a village seventy kilometers away. Two thousand square kilometers of forest were razed. It’s estimated that this exploding bolide (an object from space that disintegrates in the atmosphere) was maybe fifty meters wide. Rewind sixty-six million years. (You can probably see where this is going…) This impactor would have been an object the size of a major city moving 500 times faster than a vehicle on an autobahn… To put it in some perspective, an object of its size and speed would have released an energy equivalent to up to 100 trillion tons of TNT, more than a billion times greater than that of the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima […]

Only In Dreams

Daydreams of Angels: Stories Heather O’Neill Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; 368pp A girl and a boy sit in a kitchen listening to their grandfather’s absurd stories of Christmas past, when potatoes had eyes and lions could speak. “It was harder to tell the difference between when you were asleep and when you were awake. Children would sit and slap each other in the face, trying to wake one another out of a dream when things weren’t going right.” In Heather O’Neill‘s strange and fabulous new collection, Daydreams of Angels, we too find ourselves in the liminal territory between dream and reality (whatever that may be). Hers is an imaginary world where tigers and wolves prowl the streets, where a soldier shot fifteen times can be revived by a toymaker and a child playing Bartók, where ascetic twins shipwrecked on a cello case can become international causes célèbres. Beautiful, witty and deeply Freudian (there’s even a Québécois wolf-boy), these stories are truly fairytales for adults. O’Neill lays out her cards right from the start. In “The Gypsy and the Bear“, the characters in a child’s fantasy are abandoned mid-story when the boy is called to lunch. In the midst of life, they find themselves, like Dante, […]

Altered States

“We’re going to get very intimate very quickly,” promised the evening’s first speaker, Tony Award-winning playwright Doug Wright, at the House of SpeakEasy’s Altered States at New York’s City Winery on September 22. And he wasn’t wrong. Obscure Ken Russell movies, Donald Trump’s dangerous experiment in democracy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the home life of a comedy legend were the stuff of SpeakEasy’s latest #SeriouslyEntertaining foray into the world of literary cabaret. “‘Altered States’ makes me think of an overindulgence in alcohol or recreational drug use,” began Wright, “but there’s only one time in my life when I was truly at the mercy of a hostile foreign chemical — and that was adolescence.” Puberty, for Wright, unfolded in early-70s Dallas, a time when Mark Spitz’s speedos and “fabulous 70s porn moustache” might occasion titillation, anxiety, and confusion for a young man. The guardian angel of Wright’s sexual awakening, though, was no Olympic athlete. The day before his tenth birthday, Wright saw The Homecoming on TV and found himself enchanted by a boy with “a shock of blond hair, big doey eyes, and a mole just like that singer I liked, Peggy Lee. He wasn’t good at farming and he didn’t like to hunt; he […]

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