Cosmopolis Trailer

While I liked Don Delillo's Cosmopolis, it really did require a suspension of disbelief. I thought certain episodes worked very well, while others most definitely did not. Overall, I enjoyed certain scenes and his observations on society and people, but didn't think the book held together as a whole. Of course, this didn't stop me from reading it twice!

Come to find out that David Cronenberg has made a movie out of the book and it looks quite compelling! Check out the trailer. I try to catch all of Cronenberg's flicks, and now i'm excited to see what he does with the book. Plus, I don't think any of Delillo's books have been made into movies yet, so i'm intrigued to see how his voice and tone translates to the big screen.

Review: The Angel Esmeralda (Don DeLillo)

The Angel Esmeralda is Don DeDeLillo’s first book of short stories in his forty-year career. Flipping through the nine chronologically-arranged stories, the reader is bound to wonder, is that all there is?  Or has he honed his output down to this slim volume for a reason?

A slim collection is more easily justified if it deals with a single character or theme.*  Numerous professional reviewers have referred to these as stories about terror, but that seems to me to be a rather limited point of view.  While there is terror in some of these stories, most, if viewed through that lens, are failures. 

Well, there are a few stories that seemed, to me, to be failures at any level.  Which is not unusual for a short story collection.  One of them, a 1983 story involving spaceships and laser beams, may have been readable once, but now is simply a victim of time.  On the other hand, there were two other stories that struck me as being excellent, and one – the title story – that was transcendent.  Consider the scene of two nuns, visiting a Bronx flophouse:

Watch the needles, sidestep the needles, such deft instruments of self-disregard.  Gracie couldn’t understand why an addict would not be sure to use clean needles.  This failure made her pop her cheeks in anger.  But Edgar thought about the lure of damnation, the little love bit of that dragonfly dagger.  If you know you’re worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity. 

The story succeeds because in it DeLillo squarely addresses the human condition: what it is like to suffer, and to confront suffering, and what it is to hope.  He does so without condescension or romanticization, but in the process, he finds art. 

If only all the stories here were so powerful!  Certainly, the potential was there, particularly in one story dealing with a European earthquake, and in another set in a jailhouse of white collar criminals.  Too often, though, these stories read like miniature versions of his novels.  As I’ve observed, DeLillo’s novels are often built on the worlds that are just so slightly askew from ours.  To effectively craft such a space requires room, and DeLillo does not have that luxury in the short story form. 

And yet.  With his mastery of the sentence, all but a few of the stories are well worth reading, even if most are unlikely to linger in the mind for more than an hour or two.

*See The Lemon Table, by Julian Barnes, or Nocturnes, by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Related posts:
Michiko Kakutani's Top Ten for 2011
First Lines of "The Runner"
DeLillo's Short Stories

So What's Next?

So I got a shiny new kindle for my birthday, and it's just sitting there unused because I also got Murakami's 1Q84 on the same day. However, I’m closing in on the last page of the big novel (only 100 more pages to go!), and will want something to new read when it's done.

I know it's sick of me to be thinking about my next book when I'm not even done with 1Q84, but that's just how I roll, baby. At times it feels like I almost get more enjoyment about of perusing and thinking about books then I do actually reading them!

Anyways, here are the candidates for my next book. It’ll also be my first kindle book, so I’m hopking that it’ll also be memorable. The following are a mixture of books that sound interesting to me or have been recommended by people that I trust. What do you think I should choose first?

• Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
• C - Tom McCarthy
• Aurorama - Jean-Christophe Valat
• Freedom - Jonathan Franzen
• This Boy's Life - Tobias Wolff
• Septuagenarian Stew - Charles Burkowski  
• Apples Are from Kazakhstan: The Land that Disappeared - Christopher Robbins 
• The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories - Don Delillo

Related Posts:
Don DeLillo's The Angel Esmeralda
1Q84: Hardcover
Michiko Kakutani's Top Ten for 2011
National Book Awards: The Finalists

First Lines of "The Runner"

The runner took the turn slowly, watching ducks collect near the footbridge where a girl was scattering bread.  The path roughly followed the outline of the pond, meandering through stands of trees.  The runner listened to his even breathing.  He was young and knew he could go harder but didn't want to spoil the sense of easy effort in the dying light, all the day's voices and noises drained out in steady sweat.

-Don DeLillo, "The Runner," in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories

Related posts:

DeLillo's Short Stories
Baseball Writing

Michiko Kakutani's Top Ten for 2011

Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times has picked her top ten books of 2011.  In no apparent order:

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer
Van Gogh: The Life, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
Rome: A Cultural, Visual and Personal History, by Robert Hughes
The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, by Don DeLillo
The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by Kim Barker
The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace
The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obreht
Blue Nights, by Joan Didion
The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, by Michael Lewis

I have not (yet) read any of these books, so I can't say whether any would qualify to be in my top ten.  There do seem to be several notable omissions from the fiction side (which has only four books), but that may reflect the fact that some of the best novels of the year have only recently come out, and she may not have had time to read them all.

In any case, I look forward to diving into some of these.  Kakutani is wide-ranging, cerebral reader, and I always find her reviews to be insightful and interesting, even when I disagree with them.

Related posts:
Quick Review: The Art of Fielding
Don DeLillo's The Angel Esmeralda
DeLillo's Short Stories

Don DeLillo's The Angel Esmeralda

I just bought The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, by Don DeLillo.

The New Yorker, which generally gives books only brief, one-paragraph reviews, has given Martin Amis several pages to ramble on about Don DeLillo in general, and this collection of short stories in particular.    I'm not a fan of the first person plural in reviews.  For example:

DeLillo is the laureate of terror, of modern or postmodern terror, and the way it hovers and shimmers in our subliminal minds. As Eric Hobsbawm has said, terrorism is a new kind of urban pollution, and the pollutant is an insidious and chronic disquiet. Such is the air DeLillo breathes. And so strong is this identification that we feel slightly dislocated when, in “The Ivory Acrobat” (1988), he confronts a form of terror that is “natural” and therefore ancient and innocent: the earthquake.

Just how is it you know that I also feel slightly dislocated, Martin?  (I presume that I may call you Martin, since we are on such intimate terms that you presume to speak for how I feel.)

In the end, Martin concludes with a simple declaration that he loves the book.  You don't often get that kind of unabashed affection in the New Yorker.  Or in the New York Times.

But, Michiko Kakutani, writing in the Arts section, notes of the title story that, "this tale not only uses all of Mr. DeLillo’s electric gifts of language but also is one of his rare, deeply emotional forays into the human heart."  And Liesl Schillinger, in a longer review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, concludes that "DeLillo packs fertile ruminations and potent consolation into each of these rich, dense, concentrated stories."

Note that none of these authors are unabashed DeLillo fans; Amis and Kakutani each carefully explains that he / she doesn't like all of DeLillo's work.  So, this would seem to be a return to form.

Despite some initial skepticism on my part, I look forward to telling you what I think.

Related posts:

DeLillo's Short Stories

Fall Reading List

Defending the Short Story

Delillo's Short Stories

I'm a huge Don Delillo fan. While I don't think that his recent work has reached the heights of Mao II or Underworld, every one of his novels has taught me somehting or has make me ponder something interesting that I hadn't thought of before. And make no mistake about it; Delillo is a novelist, having penned 15 books since 1971.

So it was with some surprise that I discovered that he has a collection of short stories out: The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. Now, I've read a few of them; at least two were published in Harpers, and, if memory serves, I remember really liking "Hammer and Sickle" while "Baader-Meinhof"- not so much. This disparity in reaction may stem from the fact that these stories were written during a wide range of time: 1979 to the present day. I'm sure i'll pick it up, but i'm afraid I don't have very high expectations for it. What about you?

Related Posts:
Defending the Short Story
Delillo on Baseball

Fall Reading List

The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje, is getting rave reviews from the New York Times, the New York Times Sunday Book Review, and just about everyone else.  Despite the fact that I felt the New Yorker excerpt didn't work as a short story, I will be picking this up.

So, my fall reading list (with publication dates in parentheses) is shaping up as follows:

The Cat's Table, Michael Ondaatje (10/4)
The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes (10/5)
The Stranger's Child, Alan Hollinghurst (10/11)
1Q84, Haruki Murakami (10/25)
The Prague Cemetery, Umberto Eco (11/8)
The Angel Esmeralda, Don DeLillo (11/15)

Holy crap - after a dry summer, what an embarrassment of riches! And on top of that, when it comes time for a break from fiction, there's the new biography of Hemingway due on 10/17, Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost.  Definitely, there's no need to sit around bemoaning the end of the baseball season.

Are there any upcoming new releases that I am missing?

Delillo on Baseball

In a fortuitous occurrence, Joel's posting of a baseball quote from Delillo's Underworld put that book in the forefront of my mind just in time for the author to grant a rare interview about that novel's introduction to Grantland.

Baseball Writing

They're all waiting on the pitcher, he's a faceful of boding, upper body drawn forward, glove hand dangled at the knee. He's reading and reading the sign. He's reading the sign. Hitter fidgeting in the box. This son of a buck can bring it.

The shortstop moves his feet to break the trance of waiting.

It's the rule of confrontation, faithfully maintained, written across the face of every slackwit pitcher since there were teams named the Superbas and the Bridegrooms. The difference comes when the ball is hit. Then nothing is the same. The men are moving, coming out of their crouches, and everything submits to the pebble-skip of the ball, to rotations and backspins and airstreams. There are drag coefficients. There are trailing vortices. There are things that apply unrepeatably, muscle memory and pumping blood and jots of dust, the narrative that lives in the spaces of the official play-by-play.

-Don DeLillo, Underworld