Thursday, July 30, 2009
RollnSmoke Reviews: LE DIVORCE
Le Divorce by Diane Johnson (Plume, 1998). An amusing, quick summer read features Isabel Walker, a young American from Santa Barbara, who has recently dropped out of USC Film School to head to Paris to live with her step-sister, Roxy, who is pregnant and separated from her French husband who has run off with a Czech sociologist named Magda. Because Isabel is young and fun and seemingly “indifferent to her future,” the reader experiences the high culture and sumptuous food and worldly sights of Paris from an unpretentious, newcomer’s point of view. It’s not long before Isabel begins a secret affair with one of Roxy’s in-laws, a seasoned and accomplished 70-year old French political figure. A string of somewhat far-fetched tragedies, including a suicide attempt, a kidnapping and a homicide, jars the frivolous vibe of the first half of the book, and Isabel’s response to these events reveals her to be deeply flawed, narcissistic and greedy (8/10).
Friday, July 24, 2009
RollnSmoke Reviews: THE SONG IS YOU
THE SONG IS YOU by Arthur Phillips (Random House, 2009).
Called a “dark comedy about obsession and loss,” this newest novel by acclaimed author Arthur Phillips is his least cohesive and absorbing. For recently-divorced and grieving protagonist Julian Donahue, longing and music go hand-in-hand. Living in New York and working as an advertising director, he fixates on an emerging club rocker Cait O’Dwyer, who is half his age, as a conduit out of deep despair. In the course of pursuit, his musical taste is revealed as dated (“the rock of aging”), his sexuality emerges as defeated and his stalking is creepy. The strategy of slowly revealing truths – about a dead son, a manic ex-wife -- doesn’t work here mainly because the present tense non-romance between this narrator and the young girl-rocker fails to compel. (6.5/10).
Called a “dark comedy about obsession and loss,” this newest novel by acclaimed author Arthur Phillips is his least cohesive and absorbing. For recently-divorced and grieving protagonist Julian Donahue, longing and music go hand-in-hand. Living in New York and working as an advertising director, he fixates on an emerging club rocker Cait O’Dwyer, who is half his age, as a conduit out of deep despair. In the course of pursuit, his musical taste is revealed as dated (“the rock of aging”), his sexuality emerges as defeated and his stalking is creepy. The strategy of slowly revealing truths – about a dead son, a manic ex-wife -- doesn’t work here mainly because the present tense non-romance between this narrator and the young girl-rocker fails to compel. (6.5/10).
Sunday, July 12, 2009
RollnSmoke Reviews: THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul
THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (Patrick French, Knopf, 2008). When I chose this fat book from the shelf, I had a vague idea of who V.S. Naipaul is – I’d read A Bend in the River – and knew that he’d won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, but I had no idea I would find his life story so irresistibly – I couldn’t put this book down!
Naipaul was born to a poor East Indian Brahmin family in colonial Trinidad in 1932 and rose to become a great writer, at once outrageous, funny and offensive. Vividly written to reveal the truth of an imperfect life, biographer Patrick French shows how Naipaul struggles in constant exile – neither Indian nor British nor islander – a writer of the world without a homeland – to achieve a writing style that is a combination of travel, fiction, history, politics, literary criticism and autobiography.
What is most interesting about Naipaul’s life, however, is his fascinating relationships with women: His mother, always poor and at home in Trinidad, whom he refuses to see towards the end of her life; his tragic, literary spouse, Pat, whom he relentlessly taps for deep and comforting loyalty; his own claim to once “being a great prostitute man”; his lover, Margaret, an Anglo-Argentine, with whom he has a torrid and twisted affair for 24 years; his sister, Kamla, to whom he is devoted during his lifetime; and his second wife, Nadira, a divorced journalist from Kenya and Pakistan, whom he marries directly after Pat’s death from cancer. Indeed it is his relationships with these women that bring his full writing character to the fore: “His scope, irascibility, outsider status, rudeness, Pat’s silent presence.” (9.5/10).
Naipaul was born to a poor East Indian Brahmin family in colonial Trinidad in 1932 and rose to become a great writer, at once outrageous, funny and offensive. Vividly written to reveal the truth of an imperfect life, biographer Patrick French shows how Naipaul struggles in constant exile – neither Indian nor British nor islander – a writer of the world without a homeland – to achieve a writing style that is a combination of travel, fiction, history, politics, literary criticism and autobiography.
What is most interesting about Naipaul’s life, however, is his fascinating relationships with women: His mother, always poor and at home in Trinidad, whom he refuses to see towards the end of her life; his tragic, literary spouse, Pat, whom he relentlessly taps for deep and comforting loyalty; his own claim to once “being a great prostitute man”; his lover, Margaret, an Anglo-Argentine, with whom he has a torrid and twisted affair for 24 years; his sister, Kamla, to whom he is devoted during his lifetime; and his second wife, Nadira, a divorced journalist from Kenya and Pakistan, whom he marries directly after Pat’s death from cancer. Indeed it is his relationships with these women that bring his full writing character to the fore: “His scope, irascibility, outsider status, rudeness, Pat’s silent presence.” (9.5/10).