The real cat woman...

Fifth Life of the Cat Woman
by Kathleen Dexter



Here we go again. Romantic fantasy? Not my sort of thing. I picked this up in Borders one day and started reading. Thirty pages later I was hooked. Bizarre, but extremely well written, a compelling tale.

Temptation: leaving Eden leads to disaster. The Catwoman is hiding out on a mirage, surrounded by 50 cats, her orchards and fear. Gifted with nine lives by her first mother, Kat has lived through witch hunts, ignorance, and dire poverty. Now in her fifth life, she only wants refuge . . . until Angelo convinces her to teach. She teaches the "latrine version" of history - that lived by real people. She teaches about fear, violence, ignorance, poverty, and hunger, mesmerizing her students with her (real-life) stories. But when tragedy strikes, will the witch hunts begin again for the woman who is "too well-liked by cats?"

Kathleen Dexter self-published this book, which won a national self-publishing award and was then republished nationally. Apparently she has not written anything else of note. I couldn't even find a picture of her.

Know your muse...

Athena visits Apollo and the Muses by Bartholomeus Spranger (16th century)


Here you can find a wonderful essay "Love and Longing: The World of Poets and Muses" by Robin Frederick. An excerpt:

Perhaps the best way to describe an encounter with the muse is this: somewhere in your past there is a person who comes back to you in dreams. Maybe you barely knew them, perhaps it was only a brief encounter but you have never forgotten the face, the moment, the sudden sense of recognition. The image of this person is surrounded with a special quality of light - a luminous glow that is not present in other memories. There is something magical and transformative about it. This is the face of the muse. The image lives on in your memory, evoking a sense of yearning and the desire to be worthy of this luminous being. The statement that truly reveals the presence of a muse is: "Everything I did, I did for you."

She's a singer/songwriter, so there's some nice mp3 stuff here too.

Go to: Robin Frederick

Love beyond love...

Lolita
by Vladimir nabokov

Just reread this. One of the most important novels of the 20th century.

“Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have."

Humbert Humbert in Lolita


Vladimir Nabokov

Delicious skulduggery...

The Debt to Pleasure
by John Lanchester

Right from the start we know that the narrator is a snob & a gourmand. Gradually we learn that he is also the epitome of evil. Hilarious and brilliant!!!





















John Lanchester

Getting all wound up...

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
by Haruki Murkami


Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician. Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century. If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight.

Haruki Murakami

Chasing after dad...

Summer in the Land of Skin
by Jody Gehrman


Yet another search for a dead parent. Anna Medina, 25, leaves her empty life in California and goes to Bellingham, Washington to find her dead (suicide) father's former best friend and fellow luthier, Bender. There she falls into an orgy of gin, music and general craziness in the company of Lucinda and Arlan, who allow her to sleep on their couch.

Bender is a drunk and hasn't made a guitar in years. But at one point he gives Anna a package of her father's letters to him, which begin at about the same age that she is in the present. At first, she is repulsed by her father's accounts of his wanderings and love affairs in Europe and elsewhere, but she soon discovers that the only way to save herself is to immerse herself in her and her father's past.

I am told that this, like some of the others below, is a "chick book." Not the sort of thing I would normally be into. But I think it is well written, with some good characters, and it addresses something that is important for most humans.

Jody Gehrman is an award winning playwright. She teaches at Mendocino College.


Jody Gehrman

Huck redux...

The Secret Life of Bees
by Sue Monk Kidd

Lily is fourteen and a mess. She lives on a peach farm in South Carolina with her tyrant father, who has convinced her that she accidentally shot and killed her mother ten years before. The only person who loves her is the housekeeper, Rosaleen. The day after Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act, Rosaleen decides to go to town and register to vote. Instead, she is beaten, arrested, thrown into jail and beaten some more. Lily busts her out and they flee.

The only artifacts that Lily has left of her mother are a photograph, some gloves and a curious black Madonna image with "Tiburon, South Carolina" stamped on the back. So she decides to go to Tiburon and see if she can find out anything about her mother. She and Rosaleen arrive at the headquarters of "Black Madonna Honey," which is run by three sisters, August, May and June Boatwright. The sisters take them in, putting Rosaleen to work in the kitchen, while Lily works with the bees to earn her keep.

The writing is beautifully transparent. The characters are remarkable. Is Lily, finally, the female Huck Finn?

For an interview with Sue Monk Kidd, go here


Sue Monk Kidd

Love and devotion...

The Good Wife
by Stewart O'Nan

We are, by our nature, immersed in our own little corner of our culture. We tend to have little interest in or sympathy for other areas of that culture.

In The Good Wife Stewart O'Nan attempts to take us into another area, one that most of us want nothing to do with.

It is a cold night in a small town in New York. Patty is pregnant. Her husband is out playing hockey in the local amateur league. After the games, the guys go out and have a few drinks, so Patty doesn't expect to see her husband until quite late. Waiting, she falls asleep. Way after midnight the phone wakes her. It is her husband. He's in jail. Something's happened that involves a break-in, a dead woman and other things.

What follows is a remarkable chronicle, spanning over two decades, of love and self sacrifice. One of my female friends said the book should be titled The Stupid Wife. I disagree. Patty exemplifies the sort of loyalty and devotion that too rarely manifests itself in our times.

And her ordeal gives us a rare insight into what it's like to be married to or involved with a long-term prison inmate. Not a pretty picture.

Stewart O'Nan

Dante's Inferno in the flesh...

The Dante Club
by Matthew Pearl

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most widely read and influential American poet of the 19th century. After his wife's fiery death, he found solace in his project to create the first American edition of Dante's Inferno. Fellow Harvard poet/professors James Russell Lowell and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Longfellow's publisher J.T. Fields supported his efforts and soon became known as the Dante Club.

The powers that be at Harvard, fearful that Dante's work would infect American thought with superstition and fear, opposed the project and mounted a strenuous effort to end it.

Matthew Pearl received his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1997, won the Dante Society of America's Dante Prize, then entered Yale law school, where he began writing a novel based on the story of the Dante Club.

The result is a literary thriller of extraordinary breadth and depth. Pearl has recreated the gritty underbelly of Boston in the 1860s. He has blown life into several dusty historic icons. Overlay that with the tale of a serial killer who replicates the horrific details of Dante's graphic circles of Hell, and you've got one of the most gripping, compelling, exciting novels of recent times.

I don't read many book reviews, because the reviewers almost always tell me too much. I like surprises. I hope you do, too, because I'm stopping right here. Just read The Dante Club.


Matthew Pearl

Hell in a very small place...

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
by Mark Haddon


I try to read "outside the box." Even so, only a handful of the books I read are worth touting to other readers. Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is one of those.

The narrator: A fifteen year old autistic boy. Nah. Other than my own, I'm not particularly fond of children. Most of the people who have them shouldn't. I'm not going to read this book.

Well, wait, some of my favorite books are narrated by boys. Catcher in the Rye. Huckleberry Finn. Some Dickens stuff. Maybe I'll read a few pages.

So in the beginning our hero, Christopher Boone, finds his neighbor's dog "murdered" with a garden fork and decides to find out who did it. Not exactly the most compelling plot line I've ever seen. I should stop reading here. But there's something about the writing that keeps me going.

In no time at all, I'm fifty pages in and committed to the finish. Why? Christopher's autism is maddening. He spends a lot of time kneeling on the floor or in the grass with his head pressed to the surface, moaning. You want to give him a good smack on the head and say "Suck it up, boy." His mother does. That leads to one of the central problems of the novel. His father is a dull, unimaginative, accomodating plumbing contractor, who believes that whatever Christopher wants should be acceded to. Most of the remaining characters are barely sketched in cardboard cutouts. So why am I still reading?

Part of it is Mark Haddon's writing. Spare, precise, minimalist, but blessed with a superb internal rhythm that feels just right. But mostly it's about being allowed to see the world from Christopher's perspective, which is not the perspective that most of us are familiar with, at least on a conscious level. Most people, especially in the United States of America, tend to think that their world view is the average world view. Christopher is acutely aware that his view is not. And along the way, he manages to demonstrate that the views of "the rest of us" are not, either.

Christopher has problems with certain colors, yellow and brown in particular. His caregivers find these problems to be, themselves, a problem. Pop culture goes in the other direction. One of the standard questions addressed to cultural icons for the purpose of published profiles is "What is your favorite color?" Meaningless, but required. Better to ask them what colors turn them off. Ask any truly sophisticated graphic designer. They know. What color turns this demographic on. What color turns them off. What turns them off is much more important than what turns them on. The one thing that is certain is that most people have no idea about this. But Christopher does.

Christopher has problems with being touched. On page six, he says "Then the police arrived. I like the police. They have uniforms and numbers and you know what they are meant to be doing." But on page eight "The policeman took hold of my arm and lifted me onto my feet. I didn't like him touching me like this. And this is when I hit him." I grew up in a world where people rarely touched each other. My ex-wife grew up in a world where hugging, even cheek kissing, was a way of greeting. Imagine how tense our family get togethers were.

Christopher has problems with anything that departs from his daily routine. Going out in public. Finding any place that he's never been to before. Dealing with people who are not "family or friends." His experiences are intense, but are they that different from those of most of us?

All of these themes and more are thoroughly developed in the first half of the book. Then things start breaking and racing out of control downstream. I wouldn't dare to even hint at what that entails. Read this book. You won't be sorry.

Mark Haddon

Surviving against all odds...

Infidelities
by Josip Novakovich

---As Serb, Croat, and Bosnian Muslim armies clash in the cities and countryside of the former Yugoslavia, it's impossible to delineate the home front from the front lines. In "Ribs," a Croatian widow goes to desperate lengths to keep her son out of the army. A Buddhist soldier in the Bosnian Muslim military is falsely accused of being an enemy informer after his detachment ambushes itself in "Hail." A draft dodger is in the hospital for a transplant in "A Purple Heart," when a Croatian general steals the heart for himself. In "Spleen," a Bosnian émigré cannot find release from the haunting memories of her homeland.

The stories in Infidelities cover a broad sweep of time, from the first shots of World War I fired in Sarajevo to the plight of Balkan immigrants in contemporary America. Throughout, acts of compassion, dark humor, and even desire arise from a landscape devastated by tragedy.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.---

The above is reproduced from a blurb about this book. I didn't think I could improve upon it. But my favorite story in this collection is "Snow Powder," in which ten-year-old Mirko receives his first kiss, a surprise, from his dream girl, Bojana. She says "Now, no matter what happens in our lives, we'll always be the first, you know that? We'll never forget it." "Do you want to do it again?" he asks. "No, not today," she says."It's too early for the second kiss. That can wait for a year."

And that's OK with him. He's in heaven. Until a couple of days later, when he finds her engaged in a much more passionate kiss with one of his classmates. Afterward she walks by and says "You know what? We didn't do it right. We just lip-kissed. You got to tongue-kiss, deep French kiss, that counts.You just saw my first real kiss! It's wonderful, so much better than lip-kissing, you got to try it one day when you grow up."

So now he is destroyed. Meanwhile he has stumbled onto an enemy army concentration on the mountain above his village. After teasing him, they let him go. He should warn the village. Instead, humiliated by Bojana's betrayal, he takes another course.

Any man who has ever been victimized by a self-absorbed slut will understand this one.

Some of the best short stories I've read in years.

Josip Novakovich