Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Read three novels while visiting GH's family for Christmas. The first was a recommendation by his father, who is an avid reader.  Calico Joe , published in 2012,   is touted as John Grisham's first baseball novel. In my teens I used to tear through Grisham's legal thrillers, absorbed in the arcane world of courtroom drama. Baseball is just as arcane to me, but my ignorance was no barrier to enjoying this fast-paced novel. A boy is torn between his baseball idol and his baseball father, who play against each other in one fateful match. Grisham is a good storyteller, who knows how to put a story through its paces. What annoyed me was the times when he tried for some deeper meaning, and sounded pretentious instead. It's pretty obvious that the story is about the all-American hero and his evil twin. There is no need to hammer home the dualistic point. The characterization is not very complex, but the father comes off as the most interesting character because he was the m...

Top Ten Books of 2013 10. Magritte at the MoMA, The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938 9. From the open-air market in Nice, fresh figs, goat cheese, baguette 8. The young astrophysicist in the hotel shower 7. The Seven Samurai 6. Splash Bar closing. Any reference to dancing in my writing is in part a reference to the dance floor at Splash. 5. Your excitement inside Cité radieuse in Marseilles 4. After reading One Hundred Years of Solitude , I saw an old man walk by with his grandson 3. The Talipot Palm flowering for the first and last time before it dies 2. Massage oil  1. The garage mechanic in Tara Bergin’s This Is Yarrow  and his black hands—“everywhere they touch will be evidence of him.”

As I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude , I kept thinking of how much Salman Rushdie owes to this novel when writing his Midnight's Children . Not just for the general method, now labeled magic realism, but also for particular incidents such as the plague of insomnia and particular characters such as the old prostitute Pilar Ternera. Was Rushdie electrified by the discovery that the language that generations of Buendias tried to decipher in the parchments of the gypsy Melquiades is Sanskrit? Did his discovery establish a personal link to the Muse of Marquez's city Macondo so that one novel directly inspired another? I felt such a connection, though in a far smaller way, when I read that Melquiades died on the sands of Singapore. The island-state is still a killer of the imagination. Rushdie's brainchild in Midnight's Children  was to dramatize the history of post-independence India through the life of one magic child Saleem. In doing s...

"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu," so begins the Prologue to Ha Jin's novel Waiting (1999) . The beginning must rank as one of the most striking openings in English-language fiction. Persuaded by his parents, Lin married Shuyu so that she could look after them in the country. But the army doctor working in the city falls in love with Manna Wu, a nurse, who returns his feelings, and so condemns herself to wait for the divorce. The novel traces waiting's terrible and quotidian effects on love. Manna Wu reminds me of another lover who waits for years, Florentina Ariza in Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera . However Ariza maintains his idealistic passion for Fermina Daza, mostly because, I think, he does not have much contact with the beloved through the years. Distance enables one to keep up one's illusions. There can be no distance in the army hospital. No distance between the lovers who work together. No distance ...

The novel invites me, as the reader, to identify first with Juvenal Urbino, the husband of Fermina Daza, the man who has it all, before seducing me to empathize with Florentina Ariza, the man who lost Fermina to Juvenal but loves her for the rest of his life. Both identifications, so cunningly sequenced, require only imaginative empathy, which I give willingly to get into the skin of characters otherwise so different from myself. So it is with a shock, not of identification, but of recognition, that I read the satiric set-piece on the Poetic Festival, and the Chinese winner: When a bewildered Fermina Daza read out the name, no one understood it, not only because it was an unusual name but because no one knew for certain what Chinese were called. But it was not necessary to think about it very much, because the victorious Chinese walked from the back of the theater with that celestial smile Chinese wear when they come home early. he had been so sure of victory that he had put on a yello...

Started reading Love in the Time of Cholera at Christopher Street Pier this afternoon. The Statue of Liberty was small but clearly visible from where I sat. Once in a while, the interval unmeasured by me, the yellow river taxi motored to the pier. Across the Hudson, the tower blocks of New Jersey. In front of me, a very young man, bare-chested, sat in a lotus position. Then he stood on his head. Then he sat down, and bent his leg in an impossible position behind his back. Two guys and a girl sat to my left, with a dog, and a stuffed white tiger. Two men, who had obviously been spending a lot of time at the gym, were talking about their boyfriends, one speaking in a girlish tone that issued so unexpectedly from his mighty chest. It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urg...

from Robert Irwin's review of Ken Jacobson's Odalisques and Arabesques : …Jacobson shows that the history of Orientalist photography begins weeks afer the invention of photography itself. The secrets of Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s method of trapping light were revealed to a joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts on August 19, 1839. Eighty days later, the Orientalist painter Horace Vernet made a daguerreotype of the entrance to the Harem of Muhammad Ali in Alexandria. From the first, the history of Orientalist photography developed in parallel with that of Orientalist painting. ***** from Matthew Peters' review of Peter Brooks' Henry James Goes To Paris : In an interview published in 1994, Brooks spoke of the "temptation" of writing a biograpy of a literary figure. Biography, he believed, was "one of the few forms that a literary critic can use, in our culture, to reach a large audience." * Brooks contrasts the c...