Book thirty-one: C by Tom McCarthy

Tom McCarthy's novel C may be the best-written book I've read this year.  Is it the year's best book? I'm not sure.  But it's easily in the top three or four. And I'm having a hard time thinking of a book that is better written.  Maybe Tinkers.

The book follows the life of Serge Carrefax, from his unusual birth, through his service in World War One, to a drug fueled college career, and on to a return to government service with a stint in Egypt. I picked this book up because a reviewer I respect gave it high marks and called it "strenuously intellectual."  I took that as a reading challenged and expected a book that would be difficult, but hopefully rewarding.

What I didn't expect was a book that was delightful and beautiful.  Sure, there are a lot of historical, philosophical, and scientific references in this book that went right over my head.  I'll bet there are a whole grundle of references that I didn't even know were references.  But you can read this book on other levels.

For example, you can read C just for the stories.  I loved the opening section about Serge's childhood and growing up in a quirky British family.  We meet his father Mr. Simeon Carrefax, a brilliant character. He's a tinkerer of early wireless technologies who receives a delivery of copper wires in the same wagon that brings the doctor who delivers Serge.  Carrefax runs a school for deaf children that refuses to allow sign language. All this takes place at the quirky family estate known as Versoie.  This is such a wondrous, weird, funny place that I'm considering naming my house Versoie.  I might even take to insisting that friends refer to the front yard as the "Mulberry Lawn" and the back yard as the "Crypt Garden."  I could grow lime trees and keep bees.

You can also read this book on a literary level. C makes you wish for one of your favorite college literature professors to guide you through the themes.  The book crawls with insects that seem to invade the electrically charged story.  There's a Kafka-esque merger of bugs and technology and humanity.  This is a place where even the fireflies pulse "photically, in dots and dashes." This hints at another of the book's central themes: the buzzing, whirring, electrified technology that drives the character's lives.  C takes the early communications technology of the late 19th and early 20 Centuries and uses it to say something about now.  Maybe that's because we too find ourselves wrapped up in figuring out a whole new set of communications technologies.

One of the best reasons to read this book is the writing. Tom McCarthy is one talented writer.  C offers a dreamy, liquid style that might be pompous if it weren't so beautiful. Even though lush, the writing doesn't gets in the way of the story. Some passages are lyrical, almost poetic and themes emerge and re-emerge in subtle and delightful ways.

Sure, I'm still trying to process the book's fantastical, fever-induced hallucinogenic ending but even that is good reading.   So maybe I'll just wander out to the Crypt Garden, check in on the bees, and ponder it all.

A Dia de los Muertos moment. (Or maybe my house is just haunted.)

It's Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) and I'm celebrating this Mexican tradition of honoring those who have gone before by posting a couple of photos.  Several times during the past few weeks a strange apparition has been found on my front door.  Is it just me or does that look suspiciously like a skull? 

Maybe it's my ancestors giving me a sign that they've blessed my house.  Or, as my friend Felix suggests, maybe my house is haunted.  And according to Felix, if it is haunted, it has something to do with the front door.  How does he know?  Because when you leave a set of keys in the front door's dead bolt lock, they swing suspiciously for 10, 15, even 20 minutes with no additional physical encouragement. 

Then again, it could just be a cool play of light. I'll let you be the judge.  Whatever it is, I still appreciate all my ancestors have done for me.  Happy Dia de los Muertos.

Love sucks.

It's Halloween so I figure there's no better day for a post about Pioneer Theatre Company's (PTC) current production of Bram Stoker's Dracula.  I recently read a modern vampire tale, The Passage.  In that book, there's a scene where one of the main characters, Peter, watches an old vampire movie.  And he comments on how slow Dracula moves compared to his experience with vampires.  A little bit, this production felt the same way.  Yes I know that's because I've been desensitized by Hollywood's ability to produce stuff that's faster, bigger, more spectacular, and scarier than pretty much anything PTC can put on stage. But it's still a valid point.

Nonetheless, there is plenty to like about Charles Morey's stage adaptation of Stoker's classic novel. The play delivers a spooky Victorian attitude that I liked.  It made me want to know what it would be like to read a scary, strange story at a time before TV, Movies, or CGI.  And PTC did get my heart racing several times during the production. 

Mark Elliot Wilson is creepy and repulsive as Count Dracula.  And isn't that what you want from Dracula? Bob Ari delivers a perfect, Victorian version of Abraham Van Helsing.  I also liked Stephanie Fieger as Lucy Westenra, but aren't we glad that women have progressed since the late 19th Century.

What I like best about PTC's Dracula is the staging and direction.  The set is great.  But it wouldn't be as great if it weren't used so skillfully by director Morey.  And none of that would have mattered if it weren't for Kendall Smith's lighting design.  This is one of the best lit shows I've seen at PTC.

If you're in the mood for some scary theater, you've got one more week.  Bram Stoker's Dracula runs through November 6.

Book thirty: The Passage by Justin Cronin

The Passage by Justin Cronin is part Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games, part Cormac McCarthy's The Road, part sweeping fantasy epic in the tradition of Tolkien, and part the Bible.  This is one ambitious work of fiction.  And Cronin's writing lives up to the high bar he's set for himself.  Clocking in at more that 17,000 kindle units (that's about 800 pages for you old-school readers), this book has real thud factor; although I guess as a Kindle user that doesn't make any sense since even a book this big weighs only 8.7 ounces.

Cronin is a story teller.  His writing is crisp, clean, and descriptive. In fact many moments in the book are almost magical.  I loved the scene where soldiers and one of the central characters, Peter, watch the movie Dracula.  At this moment in the future, the movie is more than 150 years old, and it's the first movie Peter has ever seen.  Cronin brilliantly balances the rowdy soldiers (who've seen this movie so often they know all of the dialogue) with Peter's quiet awe and emotional engagement.  It's surprising how Cronin even manages to make the movie relevant to the story he's telling.

While the writing is almost always good, The Passage can get tedious, at least for me who may not be the best critic to read an apocalyptic vampire book, particularly when I'm reading it on the heels of the Hunger Games trilogy.  My friend Felix, who read The Passage before me, delighted in confusing me by asking questions like, "Have you gotten to the part where Katniss and Peta (characters from the Hunger Games) fight off the virals at the compound (a plausible moment in The Passage)?"  It was confusing because it seemed like a logical plot development in either book.

It can also be tedious when it gets to the endless walking and the driving and the horseback riding.  Many of those passages reminded me of The Road, only longer.  And you know how I felt about The Road. I'm one of the few people who didn't like it. But being compared to McCarthy isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Almost everyone I know liked the book and the critical acclaim for McCarthy's writing should make Cronin feel good about my comparison.

More interesting were the Biblical elements of the story.  Yes the endless lists of names in the tradition of so-and-so begot so-and-so could be tedious. But what about the twelve tribes of vampires, scattered across the land.  And Amy, the benevolent, eternal entity who is their only hope for departing their painful earthly existences and passing peacefully to a next and better life. Cronin is an ingenious craftsman, and the fact that the story can take on Biblical proportions without becoming preachy is a testament to his talent.  I also like that it's a nod to our collective traditions of religious story telling.

That brings me to the ending.  Here's where I might get a little bit cynical.

Really?

Really.

Really!

This isn't an ending.  In fact, I think I just read an 800 page prologue. Justin Cronin has me right where he wants me.  Because I'd like to know how this book ends.  And apparently someone forgot to include it in the first printing.  Looks like I'll have to buy the next episode.  But there damn well better be an ending in that one.  Or I will refuse to buy book three as a matter of principle.  I joke only slightly.  Sure Babcock gets killed and we learn more about the fate of humanity but none of the core stories are resolved in any rewarding way. And after investing in 800 pages, I'd like to walk away without feeling like the ending was MIA. 

Love is hard.

Here in Zion, we recently went through another gay debate as Boyd K. Packer reminded homosexuals where they fall in God's plan and the gays responded with indignation and more than one cheap shot. All this while gay teens are killing themselves at an alarming rate and everyone from Tim Gunn to a Texas City Councilman try to convince them that it gets better.

Against this backdrop, Salt Lake Acting Company (SLAC) offers its new production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America.   And it's a reminder how much things have changed in the last 15 years, and how much they've stayed the same.  Certainly AIDS is no longer the absolute death sentence it once was.  And I don't think any of us ever imagined 15 years ago that gay marriage would be legal in six states.  Yet the disdain, even disgust that many feel for homosexuals is alive and well.

SLAC can sure do a lot with not a lot of theater. Without the capabilities of many of Salt Lake City's larger theaters, SLAC has to be more ingenious in staging plays.  Keven Myhre's set is a brilliant, travel-induced dream of lost luggage that helps fuel the story's crazed, globe-spanning hallucinations.  Myhre also directs this production with an almost Shakespearean sense of tragicomedy.

But the real reasons the show works are good actors delivering Kushner's brilliant dialogue.  Alexis Baigue crackles as Louis Ironson, the neurotic gay Jew who can't deal with a dying lover. Charles Lynn Frost makes you hate Roy Cohn, and at the same time somehow understand this complex character.  Alexander Bala is perfectly conflicted as the struggling, married Mormon trying to balance his sexuality with the rest of his life.  And I loved Colleen Baum as the mother, who convincingly communicates the difficulties of unconditional love.

In the end, this is a play that remembers, as Kushner's characters remind us, that "Love is hard."  It's hard if you're straight.  It's hard if you're a mother who learns her son is gay.  It's hard if you discover that your husband is gay.  And it's really hard if you're a man who falls in love with another man.  But Angels in America makes me want to stand on the side of love, no matter how hard it is.  And if we all do that, maybe the world will be a different place 15 years from now, when SLAC hopefully revisits this powerful play.

Angels in America runs through November 7, 2010.

Book twenty-nine: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.

SPOILER ALERT.  There are comments in this post that give away elements of the ending.

When Jonathan Franzen's new book Freedom hit stores, it seemed like the book world could talk about nothing else. The reviewers raved endlessly about Franzen's amazing talent and modern story-telling ability.  So how could I not read the book.  But I downloaded it with a good deal of skepticism; I mean really, there's no way this book could be that good.  Mr. Franzen seems happy to prove my skepticism wrong.  This book is brilliant.

Franzen's writing is effortless.  So effortless that you sometimes forget how beautifully descriptive and observant it is.  It's hard to believe that Franzen is single with no children because he writes about family relationships with such precision that it infiltrates your mind and forces you to confront your own personal relationships.  I consider myself a pretty stable, well-adjusted person who's lived his life through strong family ties and no "psychological" issues. But this book called my stability into question, asking me to think about many of my relationships and how I've been unable to maintain some of them.

I loved the symmetrical structure of the book; the gossipy neighbors that inform the opening and closing; the dual third-person journals that fit just inside the opening and the closing (by the way my dislike of first-person writing seems justified in this book as Franzen chooses to have a character write her journals in third person); and the central sections that make you both love and hate key characters.

Freedom is long, clocking in at more than 12,500 Kindle units (beep boop bop bop beep). But it never reads long.  I never felt like the writing needed editing. And Freedom is often so engaging that I would re-read passages not to make sure I understood the meaning, but to just enjoy the writing.

For a book that loves depression and mental issues, Freedom offers a wonderful, happy ending, giving me hope that even if I've screwed up some my personal relationships, they might turn out alright after all.

Book twenty-eight: Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson.

First published in 1947, Hans Keilson's novella Comedy in a Minor Key is a delight.  Maybe delight is the wrong word to use to describe a book about World War II.  But somehow, this story about a couple who decides to hide a Jewish man from the Nazi's is rewarding in an unexpected way.

I don't want to give too much away about the plot because I hope you'll read the book.  Wim and Marie are a loving couple who make significant sacrifices to help save the life of a complete stranger.  The result is a tale about people doing what's right, even when they're nervous about their decision.  It's a story that reminds us that doing what's right is a reward in itself.  But it's also a reminder that doing what's right, doesn't guarantee the rewards that so many stories would have us believe.  This novel makes me want to be a better, kinder person, even if being that person creates problems.

Short enough to be read in an afternoon, Comedy in a Minor Key is written in a simple, straightforward style.  But that doesn't mean it's simplistic.  The structure of the story is intricate and engaging. I'm definitely going to read Keilson's other book that was recently re-released in English.