Everything Flows
Forever Flowing (also translated as Everything Flows), by Vasily Grossman is not a novel as we normally think of it. There are characters and some things that resemble a plot are in there. But most of the book feels like Grossman ranting, like it’s a cathartic release for the author. Grossman, who died of stomach cancer in 1964, was one of those Soviet writers who wouldn’t kowtow to the government’s idea of what authors should be writing. His books, including the monumental Life and Fate, were banned during his lifetime or forbidden from being printed during his lifetime. During World War II, Grossman was a reporter for Krasnaya Zvezda and followed the Red Army all the way from Stalingrad to Berlin. But Stalin’s policies and the twisted regime that grew up around him really bothered Grossman. Considering Grossman’s views, he was lucky not to have ended up in Siberia.
So, the book. The novel begins with Ivan Grigoryevich returns from almost thirty years of imprisonment in Siberia. Each chapter sets up a short episode in Ivan’s life or in the life of a person he knows. The episodes evolve into extended stream of consciousness (sometimes) explorations in different aspects of life in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. Mostly, these episodes deal with what a psychiatrist might identify as survivor’s guilt. One of the first shows Ivan’s cousin realizing that, by saying nothing when fellow scientists were denounced and not denouncing anyone else, it doesn’t mean that he was guiltless. Instead, he learns the lesson that Edmund Burke wrote about after the French Revolution: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
Later in the book, Grossman stages a mock trial of different kinds of informers. One is a person who actually believed that the denunciations were necessary. Another did it for personal gain. The third was afraid not to and named names during an interrogation. The judge and the prosecutor in this Kafka-esque chapter hurl accusations at the three Judases, as Grossman terms them, accusations similar to the ones that Ivan’s cousin asked himself. The questions they ask are a lot like the ones we ask now in hindsight. The informers reply:
Your question, for all its seeming surface simplicity, is by no means simple…In actuality, why seek out now those guilty of crimes committed in the Stalinist era? That is like emigrating from the earth to the moon, and then bringing suit over a question of land boundaries on earth…Why are you so determined to expose those like us who are weak? Begin with the state. Try it! After all, our sin is its sin. (80)*
This conversation (or whatever the proper term for these episodes is) is repeated in variations for the course of the book. Almost everyone you meet in Forever Flowing is like that. Before Stalin died in 1953, they all did something that they regret, even if it was just not speaking up when the authorities came for a friend or a relative. The only innocents Grossman introduces us to are the ones that were sent out to the camps, like Ivan Grigoryevich.
Another psychological tangle that Grossman attempts to tease apart is the belief among some of these guilty people that some of them believed that the people they denounced really were criminals, that they were helping the state by spying on their friends and family and reporting anything that could possibly be construed as a violation of the rules of the regime. Grossman reports a short conversation between Ivan and another prisoner who still excused the actions of the government:
“When they chop down the forest, the chops fly, but the Party truth remains the truth and it is superior to my misfortune. And,” he went on, pointing to himself, “I myself was one of the chips that flew when the forest was cut down.”
And he was nonplussed when Ivan Grigoryevich said to him: “That’s where the misfortune lies–in the fact that they’re cutting down the forest. Why cut it down?” (105)
It’s a question that I don’t think I’ve seen asked in fiction before. All of the other books I’ve read that are set during Stalin’s reign or immediately after his death just accept the Terror. Sure, Stalin and the psychopaths who set it up and ran the show get the blame. And the people who went along with it get some of the blame for not speaking up and stopping their government. But like I said, none of them ask the question about how it got started in the first place. Grossman does try to answer the question of why Soviet Russia happened, mostly by pointing out that there was no time in Russian history when the majority of people were really free. For centuries, most Russians were serfs. Unlike Europe, Russia didn’t have a real middle class develop. They skipped whole stages of political development in their rush to communism. Or, as Grossman phrases it, “It is time for those who would understand Russia to understand that a thousand years of slavery have alone created the mystique of the Russian soul” (217).
The entire experience of reading Forever Flowing is utterly depressing. Even during the thaw after Stalin’s death, it was still possible to get shipped across the continent to Kolyma for saying the wrong thing. The most heartbreaking thing in this book is probably when Anna, Ivan’s love interest, tells Ivan about what happened during the Holodomor** in the early 1930s. The Holodomor was a state engineered famine in Ukraine that killed millions. Grossman reminds us that the camps and the prisons were not the worst of Stalin’s crimes.
In all, I suppose, that this book accomplishes two things. First, I firmly believe that this book is a way for Grossman to take all the angry, guilty, and stressful emotions that were no doubt swirling around in his head and get them down on paper where he could start to deal with them. Second, it’s a reminder of a time and a place and a people that are incomprehensible here and now. It is probably one of the best books I’ve reading about the 1950s in Russia and, yes, I have read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
* All quotations from the 1972 hardcover Harper & Row edition.
** I didn’t want to link directly to the Wikipedia article on the Holodomor without putting a warning in front of it. Be warned that this famine was a crime against humanity and reading about the victims breaks my heart. Anyway, here’s the link for the curious: Holodomor.
Art of Detection
I spent most of today reading Laurie R. King’s The Art of Detection, the fifth novel in her Kate Martinelli series. I’ve been a fan of her Holmes and Russell series for years and, to a lesser extent, of her Martinelli series. Unlike the historical mysteries of Holmes and Russell, the Martinelli series is set in modern day San Francisco. While they are not the best contemporary mysteries I’ve read, I do enjoy spending time with the character.
Because the reviews and the back of the book mentioned Holmes obliquely, I had high hopes for this novel. I always enjoy when authors link their series together. The highlight of this book definitely was the short story the murder victim that portrays a detective suspiciously like the Holmes of King’s other series. It was so interesting, however, that it threatened to overshadow the mystery at the heart of the rest of the book. Well, not so much threatened in my case. It actually was more interesting to me.
The victim of the novel, is a Holmes nut, to the extent that the lowest two floors of his house are a reproduction of a Victorian gentleman’s house, even down to having gaslights reinstalled in the building. All the suspects are part of a Sherlockian club. There are clues that turn out to be red herrings or not actually clues at all. The Maltese Falcon was a nice touch, as well as the parallels in the short story to what happened to Martinelli’s victim. But when you actually get to the solution, the whodunit, it turns out to be a lot less interesting than it could have been.
I was glad to see the happy ending for Martinelli and her partner Lee at the end, but the end of the mystery felt like a cop out. I read all day, hoping to find out that the criminal behind the murder would be fiendishly clever and that what happened would have been worthy of one of Conan Doyle’s stories. It wasn’t, and what could have been a fantasic mystery storied turned into more of a ho-hum cozy. In the future, I’m probably going to stick to the Holmes/Russell novels. If another Martinelli novel comes out, I’ll just get it from the library if it piques my interest.
I’m back. What with the non-stop writing in November sucking up most of my free time, I got a little behind on my reading. And then I chose to read a huge book right after, hence the delay in posting. Anyway, I’m back on track with my reading.
Every Man Dies Alone
I’d read about Every Man Dies Alone*, by Hans Fallada, in one of the many book review magazines I read for work. Unlike the two rediscovered novels by Irene Nemirovsky, this one sounded like there was some action in it. This book is based on the lives of Otto and Elise Hempel, who started a campaign of sending out letters and postcards with anti-fascist messages on them. They got away with it for almost three years before they were caught. After the war, Fallada was recruited by a German author who’d spent most of the war in Russia. He actually had his hands on the actual Gestapo file for the couple. According to the rather brilliant afterword, Fallada wasn’t really interested in writing the story, because the Hempels never really accomplished much with their campaign–just like their fictional counterparts (520**).
Be warned. Spoilers follow.
Geoff Wilkes, who wrote that afterword, goes on to draw the parallel that Fallada is writing about the “banality of good,” like Arendt did for evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem (527). But even though the characters lead small lives, Fallada does a lot to show the moral dilemma of the average German. Do you support Hitler? Or do you not? If you do not, what can you go about it. This novel is set in 1940 and 1942-43. By that time, according to the author, Germany had reached a fever pitch of paranoia and denounciations, almost comparable to Russia during the Great Terror. You couldn’t talk politics with anyone but trusted family members (if then). You couldn’t talk about the war to anyone. Ending up in a rehab clinic or mental institution was often as dangerous as been sent to prison or the concentration camps. If you weren’t the Party (the National Social Party, because all other political parties were illegal), you had few opportunities and faced suspicion from the police and other Party members. Von Stauffenberg’s and the White Rose’s plans was a spectacular exception to the norm. Because everyday Germans were be spied on by other everyday Germans all the time, and because no one wanted to be implicated in anything, it was extremely hard to start anything without getting caught right away. It was so much easier to just keep your head down and pay at least lip service to the regime.
What starts Anna and Otto Quangel (the fictional version of the Hempels) on their small campaign is a letter delivered by local postwoman Eva Kluge informing them that their only son has died in battle in France. Otto, a very quiet man, get the idea first. Oddly, it’s not so much that his son has died as that Otto has realized that he can’t sit by and say nothing anymore. His idea is to write a postcard a week, sometimes two, and leave them in office and apartment buildings all over Berlin. He imagines that people will pick them up and, out of fear of being caught with them, pass them on to new buildings to start the cycle all over. He believes that he is saying out loud what the majority of people are thinking.
Along the way, we meet a bunch of other characters by chance: Eva’s estranged husband and perennial wastrel Enno; the bitter, failed criminal in the basement of the Quangel’s building, Borkhausen; the apparatchiks downstairs, the Persickes; and the Quangel’s erstwhile daughter-in-law, Trudel. Between an incident involving an elderly Jewish woman upstairs and the postcards, everyone gets swept into the Gestapo’s net over the course of the book. Fallada has everyone play a role, no matter how small, and we stay with those characters until the end of the book or their deaths (whichever comes first). Even though, in the scheme of things, no one seems to accomplish much that anyone outside of their small circles of aquaintance notices, it feels like a big story. As events played out, I got more and more worried about the Quangels and Eva Kluge and Trudel. And when they are eventually caught, it’s just heartbreaking.
The way that Fallada chose to write this story is pretty damn close to genius. Not only do the characters–in a very natural and believable way–show how ordinary Germans dealt with the ethics and morals of living in an evil regime, but they also show how–given enough scrutiny in this envirnonment–everyone is guilty of something. Once the Gestapo starts looking, they find whatever it is that you want to hide. They can arrest just about anyone on any pretense (again, Party members are protected, as the Persicke plot line illustrates), even being “politically unreliable.” In a sense, suspicion is like a virus. Everyone who is even remotely involved gets infected. People who were unlucky enough to be in the building where a card was found are infected. Once the characters are pulled in by the Gestapo, there’s no way to get rid of the virus either. In fact, once they get a character in their clutches, they force them to name names and even more people are drawn into the conspiracy, whether they actually knew about it or not.
Books like this one inevitable lead you to wondering what you would have done if you’d lived in German under the Reich. It’s easy to condemn ordinary Germans now, almost seventy years after the start of World War II, because we know what Hitler was really up to. What we don’t know is what life was like for the people who actually lived it. Fallada’s book helps fill that gap and, like any real ethical question, it makes the situation a muddy gray rather than black and white. According to the afterword, showing ordinary people dealing with major events in the world and trying to “stay decent” is a major theme in Fallada’s work (513, 523-524). How do you stick to what you know is right and wrong when everything is being twisted, when the world is changing those definitions to fit its own ends? And this is why Fallada wrote about ordinary people who got sick of staying quiet, who spoke their minds, who tried to carry on their lives like they had before, and failed.
While the novel does end with the capture, trial, and deaths of the Quangels, Trudel, and her husband, Fallada did make an attempt to end the book with a note of hope:
But we don’t want to end this book with death, dedicated as it is to life, invincible life, life always triumphing over humiliation and tears, over misery and death. (506)
The last chapter takes place in 1946, with a family starting to build a life as Germany gets back on its feet. A boy named Kuno is driving home in a wagon when a figure from his past–Borkhausen, who might be his biological father and who drew the boy into a scheme to track down Enno Kluge during the hunt for the postcard writer–begs him for a ride. When Borkhausen finds out who the kid is, he begs and threatens until Kuno throws him out of the wagon and threatens him to the point where Borkhausen slinks off into the woods. It’s not an overly hopeful scene, but it is sympolic of Germany’s attempts to move on from its terrible, terrible past.
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* Granted I don’t know all that much about translating German idioms, but the full German title Jeder stirbt fuer sich allein I would translate as Everyone dies for themselves alone. Given the death row conversations the characters have, I think this translation fits better.
** From the hardback edition by Melville House. All citations come from this edition of the book.
Girl Who Played With Fire
Just like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson takes a while to whip itself into a frenzy. The first 100 pages or so are used to catch the readers up with Mikael Blomkvist and the always fascinating Lisbeth Salander. After the events of Dragon Tattoo, Blomkvist goes back to his magazine and his new status as a celebrity journalist. Salandar takes her stolen rewards and travels around the world. But almost as soon as she gets back to Sweden, the plot takes off.
Three people are killed in one night in Stockholm, and Salander’s prints are on the murder weapon. Plus, on the victims was Salandar’s bastard of an advokat. Almost immediately, the police latch on to her as a prime suspect. As the incriminating evidence starts to roll in, things start to look more dire for Salander. Blomkvist, Armansky, and the rest of her friends know that she didn’t do it and start their own investigations to find the real killer or killers. Larsson made a genius move her by taking Salander out of the story for this section. You don’t get her side of the story until later and things start to look really dire for a while. And since everyone is heading in a different direction, following up on different leads, you as the reader are not sure what really happened on the night of the murder.
The truth seems to get further away until some key information from Salander’s past comes to light. The mystery turns into a conspiracy that involves the government and the GRU. I’m not going to give anything else away. But I will say that the first 100 pages are a small price to pay for the almost non-stop action of the last 300. The climax of the book is shatteringly exciting and I have to admire Larrson’s guts for what he puts his characters through.
What amazes me still is how much I like Lisbeth. I probably shouldn’t but I do. She’s difficult. She’s untrusting. She has almost no social skills. But I still feel protective of her, just like her allies in the book do. Even as she’s going out to get revenge, you’re rooting for her and hoping like hell she doesn’t get caught. Most of all, I hoped that she wouldn’t got through with it. I’ve only known her for two books, I know that it’s a line she really shouldn’t cross.
And now I have to wait until next year to see what happens next. Argh.
Ghost Ocean
I finished this book last week and actually wrote a post about it, but WordPress ate it. So, here I go again.
S.M. Peters’ Ghost Ocean is a contemporary fantasy that’s closer to the fantasy end of the genre than the contemporary part. It’s set in a city named St. Ives that could be anywhere in America, but might not be either. There are three plots that weave in and out of each other, but by the final third of the book, things get a little abstract. They could be taking place in St. Ives, the underworld, or in the main characters’ heads and it gets really hard to tell what’s real and what’s just a metaphor.
The first plot centers on Te Evangeline, a young girl who comes to discover that she’s at the center of a massive conspiracy. What most people don’t know about St. Ives is that it’s a prison for supernatural creatures. Te might be the key needed to let them loose again, and there are a number of characters who want her to do just that. Towards the end of the book, she has to decide if it’s really humane to keep those creatures locked up or whether its’ worth the price of letting them all free.
The second plot follows Evangeline’s erstwhile boss, Babu Cherian. Cherian used to be a cop before he ran into something that couldn’t be explained by rational science. After that, he becomes a part of a group of people who have the ability to capture and lock up supernatural things. Because of what happened to his brother, Cherian has a deep hatred of supernatural creatures–which causes a rift when Evangeline starts to manifest abilities that aren’t strictly human.
The third plot was a little hard to nail down at first, because it’s narrated by an ‘I.’ After a chapter or two, it becomes clear that I is Angreal, a fortune teller who turns out to be a lot more than human by the end of the novel. She’s in on the conspiracy, which makes her sections interesting reading. Most of the time, in any book that involves a mystery, the reader doesn’t get to see what’s happening on the criminal’s end of things. You get the investigator’s side and you get the pleasure of figuring out what happened along with them.
Ghost Ocean is a very interesting read, but I’m not sure I’m entirely satisfied with it. I really enjoyed the first two thirds, when the plots were pretty grounded in reality and folklore. But when things start to go abstract, it gets hard to determine what’s really happening and what’s just a vague metaphor for something really, really weird. It’s been a week and I still haven’t made up my mind. I have another book by Peters, so we’ll see if I can make up my mind after that one.
Darker Angels
This sequel to Unclean Spirits is, I think, even better than the first book in the series. In Darker Angels, we meet up with our heroine, Jayne Heller, and her gang about six months after the events of Unclean Spirits. Jayne gets a call from a former colleague of her mysterious uncle asking for help in New Orleans. What follows is one of the best plots I’ve seen in contemporary fantasy lately. Not only is there a great mystery to be solved, but there’s some fascinating incorporation of Lousiana voodoo that had me on Wikipedia for hours after I’d finished the book.
Almost immediately after getting off the plane in New Orleans, Jayne is attacked by an incarnation of Papa Legba and the plot kicks off with a bang (or, more accurately, with a big serpent). Jayne and her crew are swept up in what remains of the voodoo aristocracy with a former FBI agent and plot trips along so fast that there’s almost no time for anyone (even the reader) to get their bearings and figure out what’s going on. Readers who are more familiar with mysteries might suspect that something is fishy about the situation, but the big plot twist about two thirds of the way into the book is a magnificent shocker.
This book was so good that I wished it would have gone on longer. I look forward to more from M.L.N. Hanover and Jayne Heller. I’d write more about this book, but I don’t want to give any thing else away.
On a side note, I apologize for not posting recently. For a week or so, I was rereading old Terry Pratchett novels, which always happens to me after I read his latest. Then I read some fluff that, while entertaining, doesn’t really lend itself to posting. And then NaNoWriMo started. I expect the reviewing to be pretty light until the end of November.
Unseen Academicals
I always look forward to book by Terry Pratchett, especially the Discworld books, because I know I’m going to have a good time. The books are not only entertaining satires in and of themselves, but I also get to try and chase down the references. In Unseen Academicals, not only is Pratchett lampooning soccer and soccer fans, but he also takes shots at psychoanalysis, Romeo and Juliet, and fashion. It’s kind of a messy book, because these lesser targets sometimes steal the stage.
The book starts when the wizards of Unseen University (nunc id vides, nunc non vides*) find out that their funding is in trouble if they don’t field a soccer team. One of their bequests had that annoying clause stuck into it. But by this time, soccer has devolved into a streetfighting matches between nearly tribal groups in the city. Fans of one team don’t mix with the other. And this is where the sadly underused allusion to Romeo and Juliet comes in, when a Dimwell fan falls in love with a Dolly Sisters fan (and vice versa). Parts of the book has the characters trying to come up with rules that mean that they don’t have to worry about keeping their teeth or, possibly, death, on the field. This was so well done that I’m closer to understanding the off-side rule than I’ve ever been. Now if only Pratchett would go after cricket.
The psychology comes into play with another character, an over-educated orc from the hinterlands who has the uncomfortable ability to instantly psychoanalyse people or speculate on the philosophical dimensions of soccer. (The best part of this plot, I think, is when he is forced to analyse himself, complete with Dr. Ruth accent.) I speak some German, but unfortunately not enough to understand the jokes that I know are embedded in the names of the books Nutt cites. The English ones, like The Doors of Deception, is good enough it itself. The fashion satire really just seems tacked on to the whole. It’s a little distracting, even though it turned out to be necessary.
Other reviews of this book have pointed out that Pratchett also goes after racism. He does, but he’s gone after that in all the rest of his recent books. Some reviewers have seen it as an interruption, but I thought it was incidental. Anytime you get a new “race” in Ankh-Morpork, there’s some stereotyping, but people get over it. And the population has been getting over it so much in their recent history that’s not such a big deal anymore. One of Pratchett’s other books, Thud!, is much more about racism than this one. I read the reviews before I read the book, but as I read, I just didn’t see what the critics are making such a fuss about. I just wish that Pratchett had played around more with the Romeo and Juliet motif.
Still, I really enjoyed this books. Everyone is precious, given the author’s condition. It will be an unutterably sad day when Pratchett retires his pen (or keyboard or whatever).
* Now you see it, now you don’t.
The Wordy Shipmates
I wish I could have experienced this as an audio book. Not just because Sarah Vowell is a very entertaining and erudite speaker, but because the book is written in such a way that it feels like you’re having a long conversation with the author. The Wordy Shipmates is an informal history of the Puritans who arrived in Massachusetts in the 1630s and 1640s, after the Pilgrims and the Jamestown colonists. Vowell’s history revolves around John Winthrop, on the first governors of the Massachusetts colony, and his struggles with trying to create a “city on a hill” while dealing with rightfully angry natives, fanatical and not so fanatical Puritans, and the harshness of the climate.
Vowell makes repeated allusions to how little we Americans know about our history and how erroneous our view of the Puritans is. Years of movies and books about the Salem Witch Trials would give anyone a dim view of that bunch of immigrants. What surprised me was the evidence that the Puritans were highly educated (about Christianity and its theology) and that one of the first things they did after their got their farms and towns up and running was to found a university, Harvard, in 1636. They weren’t a grim bunch of nutters living in the paranoid fear that someone, somewhere, was having a good time. Sure, they probably wouldn’t have been the funnest bunch of people to hang out with, but they weren’t superstitious morons either.
And boy, did they like to argue! A big chunk of the book has to do with the ongoing arguments between Roger Williams (who, after his big mouth got him banished, founded the colony of Rhode Island) and Winthrop. For Williams, the colony wasn’t radical enough. Williams was a separatist and so religious that, in Jon Stewart’s words (more or less), the other Puritans thought he should cool it. But at the same time, Williams also believed in religious freedom and a strong division between the Church and the State. If he hadn’t been such a jerk, I would probably have admired him for those ideas. Anne Hutchinson, for other reasons, got into similar trouble with the colony’s leaders. Her problem, however, was that she believed that women ought to have the right to opine on religious matters and that, in a nutshell, people could have a personal relationship with God and that they could achieve salvation. This may not seem like a big deal unless you know about the Puritans’ soul-gnawing belief in predestination (and maybe not even then). If you’re not religious, it’s hard to see what people get so worked up about. Hutchinson eventually got kicked out and headed to Rhode Island, as well.
Another thing that Vowell meditates on is what it really means to be a Puritan country. She rightly states that most people use that phrase to say that Americans are prudish or pigheaded about their opinions or think they are superior to other countries. Vowell traces the idea of American exceptionalism back to some of the things that the Puritans believed. First, Winthrop and others believed that they were headed over to “help” the native population. Second, Winthrop wanted to create a “city on a hill” that would be a beacon to other countries. Their colonies and, later, America, were special. They weren’t about making money or politics (according to the Puritans if not the king who signed the charter or the merchants who no doubt bankrolled the project), but it was about creating a haven for fellow believers. It was a way to escape the dominion of Archbishop William Laud so that they could practice in their own way.
When I first learnt my American history, this was where I started to get the idea that the colonies (with the exceptions of Virginia and Georgia) were founded for religious freedom. When I got older and into the more advanced and nuanced interpretations of history, I learned that this meant religious freedom only for members of the original faith and no one else. Just like other nations, we look to our past (sometimes) to find inspiration and a mission. But unlike other nations, America was created on purpose and didn’t just evolve on its own. We had blueprints that are filled with high-minded ideals that we strive to live up to. It’s no small wonder that we think we’re special. The Wordy Shipmates is a great lesson in history, but also an opportunity to examine the origin of those ideals.
Sandman Slim
I think this book is what Jim Butcher’s books are trying to be: urban fantasy noir. At least in my mind. I couldn’t get through the first Harry Dresden book no matter what I tried. It’s got more in common with Mike Carey’s novels than anyone else I’ve seen it compared to so far. This book is dark in the ways that the best Raymond Chandler stories are, but with the added bonus of magic and angels and demons and other fantastical weirdness. And the dames are anything but helpless. Plus, it’s set in Los Angeles. Sandman Slim, by Richard Kadrey, is about revenge. Our anti-hero escapes from Hell (yup, that Hell), and goes after the people who put him there.
Stark, our anti-hero, is the first human to survive Hell. Anytime anyone tries to kill him, Stark just gets harder to kill. Before he leaves Hell, Stark becomes Sandman Slim, “the monster the other monsters are afraid of.” Back on Earth, Stark starts his quest for revenge by finding the weakest member of his old magic Circle and uses the guy’s head as a source of information on the other members of the Circle and, for the readers, unintentional comic relief. But as Stark starts trying to pick off the members of the Circle, they start dying before he can get his hands on them. Before he realizes it, Stark is caught up in a war between the angels and a previously unknown (to Stark) race of supernatural beings who are addicted to chaos.
This twist in the plot is, as far as I know, original in fiction. It takes some of its inspiration from the idea of divine sparks (nitzotzot, if I’m being pedantic) and the Breaking of the Vessels out of Jewish mysticism, but goes somewhere I’ve never seen before. I love it when a plot does something that I can’t work out in advance. Stark, like the anti-hero he is, pursues his revenge and his plans to rescue his few friends in spite of a conspiracy that could mean not only the end of the world as we know it, but also Heaven and Hell. Along the way, Kadrey introduces us to all sorts of fascinating characters: an immortal French alchemist, a vampire-like creature who’s trying to stop eating humans, a branch of Homeland Security that’s helping Heaven fight its seventy thousand year war against chaos. I am so looking forward to what Kadrey comes up with in his next endeavors.
Sandman Slim was a hell of a lot of fun to read. It kept surprising me and entertaining me, all at the same time. I had such a good time that I just kept reading it this morning until I finished it. I didn’t even bother getting out of my PJs until I was done, it was that good. The only reason I stopped reading last night was because I couldn’t keep my eyes open. The last two hundred pages just grabbed my attention and didn’t let go until I was finished.
Devil's Food Dictionary
This book is a must read for foodies with a sense of humor. Hell, if you’re a foodie without a sense of humor, you need to read Barry Foy’s The Devil’s Food Dictionary anyway. It’s a collection definitions of food and cooking terms with hilariously satirical definitions. Plus, there are great running gags about chick peas, barbecue, and crispy, fried things in a bag.
I enjoyed it so much that I read this book in three sittings, and was really tempted to stay up on Monday just to finish it. (But I learned my lesson on Sunday when I stayed up reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.) As I read, I was glad that I watched all those hours of the Food Network. A lot of the humor derives from what the terms actually mean or from culinary history. A few times, I admit, I had to go to Wikipedia to check things, because this book is subtitled A Pioneering Culinary Reference Work Consisting Entirely of Lies.
People who talked to me earlier this week got treated to recitations of some of my favorite definitions, like:
Beer…The ancient Egyptians, too, were fond of beer, and the beers of the Nile region were famous for their potency. A batch served at a going-away party for the Hebrews left that venerable people wandering helplessly around a smallish patch of desert for some forty years (20).
Marinade…Marinating can last anywhere from less than an hour, as in some Asian dishes, to decades, as was the case with the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (134).
Second Coming, The The sell-by date on a can of spam (195).
Oh, and there’s a great health food to normal food conversion chart on page 87 that’s just priceless.
This is one of the most entertaining books I’ve read this year.
