Carey's Ned Kelly

Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 2000. This Booker Prize winner is about the real-life outlaw Ned Kelly, a Jesse James of the outback of Victoria, Australia in the late 19th century. It is full of action and contains fine passages set in the wilderness. Both the vernacular speech and the inner monologue of the title character are excellently done. The Irish identity of Kelly and his family, and the economic and legal injustices to which poor "transported" Irish were subjected by the colonial authorities, are among the real subjects of the book. Ned is a stubborn enough force of nature to hold our sympathy without heroics. Carey's Australian contribution to the outlaw genre is an instant classic.

Plunkett's Strumpet City

James Plunkett, Strumpet City (1969) This is Plunkett's biggest and most ambitious work and generally regarded as his masterpiece. It is a novel of social realism with obvious debts to Dickens and Balzac. A large cast of characters live out personal and social dramas during the vicious dockside labor wars in Dublin from 1907 to 1914, important stage-setting for the subsequent war for independence. Try reading this one first and then reading Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry.

Meanwhile Strumpett's book caricatures the three priests of a poor parish, three working men on the front lines of the strikes and lockouts and their women and families, a rich but worldly and liberal-minded owner and his less enlightened tenement-owning friends, two destitute men who beg in the streets and others (the characters weave in and out of each others' lives). The title character, of course, is Dublin itself, a shocking strumpet of a city where all the foibles of human nature are laid bare for all the world to see. This is a big novel, 549 pages, but if you like to read progressive, historical novels of social realism then you'll enjoy Strumpet City.

Life of Dampier

Diana and Mitchell Preston, A Pirate of Exquisite Mind, Walker, 2004. William Dampier was an English explorer and naturalist, the first Englishman to explore Australia and the first to circumnavigate the world three times. He was one of the most important scientists of the European exploration and colonization of the world in the 17th and 18th centuries, studying tides, ocean currents, tropical storms, and cartography with such precision that his work was still in use as basic reference more than a century after his death in 1715. Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin are among those who acknowledged his influence on them, largely through accounts of his voyages published at the end of the 17th century. A biography of Dampier is thus long overdue. However, in addition to his importance to science and literature, Dampier also lived a fantastic life of adventure. He did not ship out as a scientist, commissioned to conduct research, but rather joined up with buccaneer crews as a young man in the West Indies during the days of piracy along the Spanish Main. His reputation as perhaps the greatest navigator of his day was based on his part in notorious and illegal raids against the Spanish in the Caribbean and the Pacific as well as on later and more legitimate accomplishments. Land crossings of the Central American isthmus, shipwrecks, naval battles, mutinees, midnight raids, disease and starvation, often violent encounters with strange tribes, unknown animals (the pirates hid out on the Galapagos), and hurricanes were his lot on his first, twelve-year long circumnavigation, while Dampier all the while carefully preserved his charts and records in a sealed bamboo tube, often while running for his life from one calamity or another. The Prestons do an excellent job of bringing all of this to life, with very good period illustrations and solid notes. A must for anyone interested in the Age of Exploration.

Fools of Fortune

William Trevor, Fools of Fortune, Penguin (1983). William Trevor is known best as a short story writer, and in this short novel one can see the influence of the shorter form. Large events are compressed into paragraphs, transitions are executed in a sentence or two that would take other writers pages to lay out. The writing is excellent, the story very sad. We are in Troubles territory, here in County Cork, where a Protestant mill owner runs afoul of the Black and Tans when an informer is murdered on his property. Two generations of Englishwomen have married into this Irish family, and some around them understand that this is one root of inevitable tragedy. After the killings of his father and two sisters, Willie grows up while his mother slides into alcoholic resentment. After her suicide he gives up his own future in favor of vengeance, in turn maiming the lives of his true love and their daughter. Resentment, vengeance and vendetta are the subjects, illustrating the costs of endless English depredations of the Irish. In the middle of this very dark novel there is a pricelessly funny interlude of classic boys' school shenanigans, one of Trevor's stories dropped in to relieve the weary reader. Highly recommended, and a great introduction to Trevor, his style and his range can be appreciated here.

Lightman's Dreams

Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams, 2004. Lightman is a physicist who has written these short meditations on conceptually-possible variations on time. Time might be slower at a lower altitude, or it might be different from one place to the next, or faster at some center and slower far away, and so forth. Vignettes are presented, mostly taking place in the German-speaking world of Einstein's early life (and, one can't help sensing, location of many a well-appreciated sojourn for Prof. Lightman himself). There's really good food as we sit at big wooden tables overlooking the river near the somethingstrasse, it's nice just to be there. Not much actually happens, maybe that's part of the joke, although it's frequently poignant as relatives and lovers lose each other in time and so forth, which grabs you a bit. All in all I enjoyed it.

A Wreath for Udomo

Peter Abrahams, A Wreath for Udomo, Faber and Faber, 1956. Abrahams takes the reader to places that few authors could. It is a story about African revolutionaries in the idealistic years after WWII, first in exile in London and later struggling and in power in fictional African countries. It is not a war novel (the account of the jungle is notably naive), rather it deals with the intersection of politics, culture and society. These men are essentially intellectuals, inevitably transformed by their exposure to Europe (and de rigour relations with white women) and some of them are able to connect to populist elements back home, others not. There is the old lion whose time has past, there is the idealist whose character does not pass the severe tests to which it is subjected. It is similar to John Williams's The Man Who Cried I Am in treating with educated, sophisticated characters at a time when most black literature was preoccupied with tribals (in Africa; e.g., Amos Tutuola) and the street (in the USA; e.g., Ishmael Reed).

The Known World

Edward P. Jones, The Known World, HarperCollins, 2003. Using recent scholarship on census data and other 19th century sources, Jones tells an extraordinary story of daughters owning mothers, brothers owning brothers, black slave owners, illegal slave trading and many other aspects of life under slavery that have hitherto been unappreciated. He shows how the institution of slavery corrupted everyone who lived with it, black, white, or otherwise. We are still working through the national issue of slavery. Now we are seeing a great wave of African-American literature, and Toni Morrison, Maryse Conde, and Edwin P. Jones are all tremendous examples.

Absurdistan

Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan (Randon House, 2006). Ada meets Da Ali G Show. The wicked command of both English prose and American ways owes much to Nabakov, and the unforgiving rage at Soviet injustice and exasperated love for dumbed-down American pop culture are Nabakovian as well. Here hip-hop, or should I say the raunchier precincts of gangsta rap, stands in for everything that is swallowed whole, without regard for consequences, from the West by the East. Misha Vainberg is a modern version of Tolstoy's Pierre Bezukhov, so rich and cosmopolitan that he is the last man to understand that the war, and the country, have been lost. The ghost of Mikhail Bulgakov also haunts these pages, where not only chaos but also phantasmagoria constantly threaten to erupt. In the end the most damning indictment is of the rapine of the former Soviet Republics after the collapse of the USSR; this comic writer has written perhaps the ultimate Halliburton novel.

McGahern's Amongst Women

John McGahern, Amongst Women, 1990 (Penguin). A very well-written short novel that I read because it won the Irish Times Literary Award. Michael Moran is a former IRA soldier (a long-ago guerrilla, not a hard man of the North) who feels bitter and alienated in modern Ireland. He is a highly conceptualized, allegorical figure, standing in for a certain part of Ireland itself. He is emotionally austere and estranged from his oldest son, but far from a monster, capable of warmth and very loyal but committed to a minimalist lifestyle that reflects a history of poverty even as prosperity slowly blossoms around him. His Catholic faith is his staff and a matriline of women is his world. His sin is pride, that shuts him off from almost the entire world outside of his family. A deep theme in Irish literature is displacement, the presence of incongruous elements in the Irish character, vestiges of another world, another Irish reality, that is felt more than understood. This novel is a near-perfect crystallization of that theme. Compare this one to Aidan Higgins's Langrishe, Go Down (1966); Catholic and Protestant versions of the Irish eulogy.

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, who passed away yesterday at the age of 84, was very important to me in my school years, in the 1970s. I started reading science fiction at a young age, and Vonnegut was there, a bridge to lead me from genre fiction to the world of ideas. He was a satirist, an ironist, a writer eager to stare down the pitiless reality of life and death, but he was also funny (I might have prized that most at the age of, say, 14), and he took it as a moral imperative not to take himself too seriously. To this day there is no critical consensus as to his literary stature. As a creator of worlds he was very ambitious, but he didn't experiment with prose style or narrative form the way "literary" writers often do. He was comfortable with his instrument, a dead-pan delivery full of quick changes. He reminds me of Russian writers, Gogol with his noses on the moon, and Eastern Europeans, Kafka and Kundera: a fabulist of outrage. Slaughterhouse Five is his masterpiece, and I also recommend the movie version on its own terms (I don't know who directed). For myself, Cat's Cradle was always the definitive Vonnegut, whimsically portraying the human-caused end of the world as part of some cosmic joke, but not too big a joke. The Sirens of Titan is underrated I think, further exploring the possibility that we might become unmoored from our planet of origin (as Vonnegut was during the fire-bombing of Dresden). His first novel, Player Piano, contains the themes that he developed over many subsequent books, and stands as a good novel on its own. A 70s story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House, holds its own with the novels. Later I moved on, I remember being disappointed with Breakfast of Champions, finding the ironic glibness now cloying, and it's true that his range was not endlessly wide. But Douglas Adams, cyberpunk, the films of Terry Gilliam: none of that would have been done the way it was without Vonnegut. I don't know that he's a "great writer," whatever that is, but as a cultural influence he was an important, blackly funny, ultimately humane voice.

Richard Yates's Almost Forgotten Classic

If you mention Richard Yates's 1961 novel Revolutionary Road (Little, Brown; reissued by Vintage Contemporaries), a whole lot of people never heard of it. That's too bad, because this is a novel that belongs on any list of classic statements of the 1950s and 1960s. The author creates a world that is at once complete artifice and too close to reality. It is at times almost unbearable, in the sense lauded by Kafka: "We should read only those books which wound and stab us." A young couple are entering their thirties and they are unhappy, maybe they're neurotic, certainly April had a terrible childhood, maybe they're trapped by "the system," certainly we are in the familiar American landscape of morally compromised and unfulfilled suburbia. Frank had dreams of...what, exactly? He didn't want to be just another person. He wanted to be "authentic," and he is filled with contempt for his employers, his neighbors, his country. They dream of moving to France with their two children, where Frank (a combat veteran of the war in Europe) can "find himself." Admirable iconoclasts, or merely narcissistic? Frank retreats on this, derailing the plans of April, who really means to do it: to drop out. Is he a moral coward or a decent man? Does he grow up or lose himself? The presence of a "crazy" person, the adult son of the neighbor/realtor, represents a certain interpretive alternative. He thinks he knows a sellout when he sees one and says so after Frank tells him that the Europe plan is off. His mortified parents take him back to the institution, and gradually taper off their visits to him there. Is this the thesis of R.D. Laing, that being "crazy" is just not being integrated into convention? He certainly recognizes April as a compatriot, as a "real female" as he says. One is reminded of the wonderful shyster Tamkin of Bellow's Seize the Day, only here it is the author himself who we're unsure of. What's he mean by all this? There is the irresistible entropy of Heller's Something Happened, the sad juxtaposition of formal dreams and human reality of Salter's Light Years , the terrible trauma underneath "normal" behavior of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. It's possible, but only just, to read the novel as black comedy. I'm a pretty tough reader I think, but I wasn't laughing. It occurred to me that there is a kind of "curse of the Beats" here, thinking more of the legendary failures of Neal Cassidy and Jack Kerouac to have marriages and homes than the overt marginalization of Burroughs or Ginsberg. Alcoholism might be a puppeteer. The genius of the novel is that we don't ever really know who or what the demonic puppeteer is, but someone or something is pulling the strings of these characters, so convincing and yet so obviously caricatures. And so we come back to the author. What's he up to? Something deadly serious: this is a novel with the moral ambition of Ivan Illych.

How Faulkner Looks Today

An aquaintance was dismissive about Faulkner. Seems he'd sat down to reread The Sound and the Fury and had found it dramatic and obvious. "For kids," he said. It's true that I couldn't see slowly trolling through four or five of the novels like I did when I discovered him as a teenager. But it occurs to me that a reader today would simply look through what at the time was most significant about Faulkner. Internal monologues, polymorphus grammar, shifting points of view; if I'm talking about Modernism in early 20th century literature, in my class it's James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, the James brothers, and William Faulkner is next. Not too far down the list. But my friend has probably read hundreds of novels written since then that simply take these narrative mechanisms for granted, and thus he focussed on the crazy Gothic people living in the ruins of the once classy world now torched, which subject matter in Faulkner is rich but to taste. The truly influential writer erases himself.

Galeano's Masterpiece Inspires an Irish Delight

One of the most crucial writers for understanding Latin America, and all of the Americas, is the Uruguayan historian Eduardo Galeano. His Venas Abiertas de America Latina (Open Veins of Latin America) is, I think, the essential history of colonial exploitation of the New World. But his masterpiece, a literary as well as an historical milestone, is Memoria del Fuego (Memory of Fire), a searing review of the injustice, caprice, craziness, but also majesty, magic and drama of the Western Hemisphere from pre-Columbian days through the twentieth century.

It is a work as significant for its form as for its content, as Galeano presents short passages collected from myriad sources to weave an impressionistic collage of events large and small, making connections and stirring intuitions as only the very best literary masters can do. The fact that these passages, paragraphs, stories are for the most part drawn from authentic historical sources draws the reader's amazement and shock beyond the text as literature and outward to the world itself. Only a handful of writers have the erudition and eloquence to transport us the way Memory of Fire does.

The trilogy was composed by Galeano in the 1980s, and nobody really attempted to match it for many years. It was sui generis, until 2005, when along comes Don Akenson's An Irish History of Civilization in two massive volumes, dedicated "To the memory of Sir Walter Raleigh, who should have known better, and in honour of Eduardo Galeano, who certainly does." The collage technique is again deployed to carry us from Biblical times to the twentieth century, and to convey something of the tragic and funny experience of the Irish diaspora. I love Irish history and above all Irish literature, and what is not lost on devotees of the subject is the tremendous weight of melancholy that weighs on the whole terrible Irish experience. Thus the deep, deep sense of humor, evolved as it is to look with clear eyes at a world where men are "straw-dogs." Galeano, Akenson. Now we need the Jewish version.

Real West

Two indispensable books about the American West both have the word "blood" in the title: Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America by Charles Bowden (North Point Press, 1995), and Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West (Vintage, 1985) by Cormac McCarthy. These are books beyond revisionism, where a moral imperative has seized the writer with a compulsion that seems like it might overrule death itself. We all know, after all, that the North American continent was "settled" by Europeans in a long campaign of murder and rapine, and we all know (don't we?) that the real history of human cruelty is more than anything anyone might imagine. So what does the obsessively unflinching writer have to offer us, if we already know this, if we already can fill in the blanks in the backcountry in our own troubled minds? The obsessive writer can offer us an awful lot. This is the only book I've ever read by McCarthy, although his The Road is in my Stack (of books to be read) and I may go back to the earlier westerns on the strength of his writing. He overwrites by any sane standard, but like Jacques Derrida (hah!) he does it so well that what would be (is) merely silly from a different writer is compelling and persuasive in his hands. He's a poet's novelist, forcing the reader to write down a list of words to follow up, names of scrubby bushes, Latinate adjectives and long-forgotten verbs. I don't care much for violence in literature, and McCarthy is as violent a writer as you're likely to find (one English professor told me he'd sworn McCarthy off once and for all after Blood Meridian). The sadism comes long and hard. But this story, of a bunch of desperadoes on a long trail of pillage and despoilation along the Mexican borderlands in the mid-eighteenth century, is dead-on necessary, hammering home a lesson that we all still do need to learn, about not only the West but above all about the Myth of the West. Which brings me to Mr. Bowden, another subversive with a long list of books and a longer list of grievances. This non-fiction meditation looks not only at the history of violence underneath the history of romance, but also takes us deep into the street life of today, the druggies and smugglers and poor Indians (Eastern readers with delicate sensibilities: out west they call themselves "Indians," mostly) still there, in Tucson and Reno and Pueblo, some still waiting for the USA to pass away and leave them as the Navajo elders prophesied, others marking time to leave this world themselves. An Indian gambler tells Bowden that he can't stand to leave the casino while he has any money left: something more could still happen. Bowden's own obsessions keep him with the rough trade in the oil fields, in the Mexican factory towns, in the merchant marine. Whatever grips him, it won't ever let him walk away. The monster that grips these two endlessly moralistic writers is history. You try to do right in a wrong world until you die. Then you can't to it anymore. And that is life.

Lawrence Durrell

It was fifteen years ago or so that I discovered the "Alexandria Quartet," Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea, by Lawrence Durrell. I remember luxuriating in my recliner (no pretensions to classiness please!), having some wine and that layered cheese, you know, cheddar with creamy stuff alternating, and listening to Gorecki, it was, and reading these dreamy, worldly, intricate novels, soaking in the atmosphere Durrell creates. Everything here is ambiguous and wonderful, and the love of a lifetime is identical to a city and a moment. The novels are famous as an evocation of Alexandria, but the reader is out on the water, riding across the desert, off to Greece. And in Greece a whole lot more of Mr. Durrell, a former British diplomat, awaits the reader fortunate enough to discover him today. His "Sketches from Diplomatic Life," Esprit de Corps, Stiff Upper Lip, and Suave Qui Peut are a masterpiece of English humor, and I would hope to find people high up in the State Department familiar with them, there must be someone, and that's who I would want to talk to. But my personal favorite, a little book (and none of these are over long), is Reflections on a Marine Venus, a more earnest treatment of diplomatic life in provincial Greece after the war, also very funny to be sure, but packed with insights, historical, political, archeological, classical: one simply couldn't find a better host to visit this forgotten world. There is more, notably the novels Tunc and Nunquam (also published together as The Revolt of Aphrodite) and The Dark Labyrinth. It's striking when someone's life experience and someone's skill as a writer are both so considerable and so well-suited to each other. Compare the optimism of Durrell to the cynicism so common to "travel" writers such as Theroux. Which is more inherently insightful, and makes for better company?

Earl Lovelace's Trinidad

The Dragon Can't Dance, Earl Lovelace, Persea Books 1979. Most writers of fiction have good intentions (not that that's a requirement for good literature!), but good writers are rare, and good writers whose experience of the world equips them to shed some light for the rest of us are rarer still. Earl Lovelace manages to transport us to an urban neighborhood of Port of Spain, Trinidad, where the impoverished residents live tot-to-toe with each other, and with their own thwarted dreams. The persistence of the human struggle to achieve something against the powerlessness of poverty is the theme here, woven into stories of young love and bad decisions, jealous neighbors and provocative new bicycles, and strategies for walking past the tough guys on the corner. Carnival, music and costumes are the vehicles for people stubbornly championing their sense of self-worth. You might not want to walk up Calvary Hill and explore around yourself, and Lovelace does us all a service with this devotional writing, preserving a sense of a hard-to-see world.

Stewart on Spinoza and Leibniz

Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (Norton, 2006). This is a very well-researched intellectual history of two of the so-called Rationalist philosophers of the 17th century, and its success with the public ought to tell publishers a lot about the public appetite for this kind of material. It takes a real talent to popularize this highly abstract subject. This is not a hard-core philosophy book, like reading Stuart Hampshire on Spinoza or Bertrand Russell on Leibniz, but enthusiasts will still enjoy Mr. Stewart's argument that Spinoza was the catalytic philosophical influence on Leibniz, and the thorough review of what is known about these two colorfully contrasting characters. Stewart's repudiation of the old "Rationalist/Empiricist" picture of Early Modern philosophy is right on. He offers a very consistent interpretation of Spinoza that sees him as a full-blown modern physicalist; Chapter 10 merits a careful once or twice through, and is mostly persuasive, as on the impossibility of a personal God or personal immortality on Spinoza's view. My main disagreement with Stewart on Spinoza is that he tends to collapse the mental aspect of things into the physical aspect of things too much. A mental description of a thing is, according to this interpretation, a particular species of physical description. It seems to me that Spinoza is insisting that everything can be understood as having both mental descriptions and physical descriptions, in the context of his metaphysically monist claim that everything is God. I think it is reductive to interpret Spinoza as a physicalist. Another problem is that Stewart doesn't appreciate the importance of modal logic for metaphysics, then and now. Spinoza thought that everything that existed existed necessarily, necessity following from the perfection of God. The idea was that contingency and possibility were illusions of human finitude. The ancients had the same problem from Parmenides to Aristotle, and it wasn't until Frege developed a way to formalize modal operators in the 19th century that logic could truly be said to represent the real world of accidents, contingencies and probabilities. But Leibniz anticipated all of this: he saw that God could still be seen as making a willful (and thus moral) decision in the creation of the world if God chose among possible worlds. Stewart conveys this well, making it the more surprising that he doesn't see where Leibniz went beyond Spinoza on the problem of determinism. Quantifying over the objects in sets of possible worlds is the way that modern computers represent/handle modal operations. The metaphysical implications of possible-worlds modeling is one of the core arguments in the recent revival of metaphysics, for example in debates between David Lewis and Alvin Plantinga. The young Bertrand Russell uncovered the forgotten Leibniz sources and made his own name with the publication of his book The Philosophy of Leibniz in 1900, one of the great interpretive coups of modern philosophy. Stewart waves the whole discussion off thusly: "Russell and others who sought to place the study of logic at the foundation of philosophy claimed to see in Liebniz's metaphysics an astonishingly prescient and coherent application of fundamental principles of logic." This implies that Stewart is a partisan who doesn't like the idea of "the study of logic at the foundation of philosophy," and is antagonized by Russell. Stewart never even bothers to explain possible worlds modeling: the fine index has 24 citations of "modernity," not one of "modality." But I doubt that I'm the only reader who picked up a popular discussion of Spinoza and Leibniz precisely because these metaphysical ideas are currently in the air.

Ben Okri's Realistic Magic

Ben Okri's novel The Famished Road (Anchor Books 1991) is part of a widening stream of contemporary African literature, written in English and in many other languages. Here there is a sense of traditional African narrative techniques conveying some of the sense of life in a poor, tough, semi-rural African town in the twentieth century. There is no attempt to romanticize this place where a father goes to his work "carrying heavy loads" and there is a palpable sense of the destruction and degradation of the forest on the margins of urbanization. Civil unrest, alcoholism and violence are present in this surreal world of magical causes and dreamlike descriptions. Yet the storytelling power and the engagement with the interior life of a young man trying to make sense of a difficult world, gives the phrase "wrestling with demons" some fresh force. I liked the way he showed how the local tavern owner made a lasting impression and the oblique way of showing the moral dilemmas of the young boy. But the critical point, I think, is that here we have an authentic African sense of magical causation that owes nothing to South American phantasmagoria and that, paradoxically, conveys a persuasive sense of real life on a real dusty street. A great novel, a cut above the merely very good.

Burdett's Bangkok Cop

John Burdett, Bangkok 8, Vintage Books, 2003. My friend Tom Jacobs gave me this paperback for Christmas a year or so ago, along with Alma Guillermoprieto's Dancing With Cuba, on the correct assumption that I view literature as a way of expanding my horizons. You will expand your horizons with this book, unless you're already immersed in Buddhism, the Bangkok sex trade, and transexuality (be honest now!). This is an extremely well-conceived book written (by a Westerner) from the point of view of a half-caste Thai policeman, an imaginative exercise few Western writers would dare try to pull off (I'm reminded of Anthony Burgess's massive novel Earthly Powers written from the point of view of a gay man). Burdett can do it because he's so passionately involved with Bangkok and with the East-West interface, and obviously with Buddhism as well. There is a fine noir atmosphere and lots of, shall we say, information about the sex bars of Bangkok that compels one to scrutinize Mr. Burdett's bookjacket photo from time to time. Unfortunately as any aspiring genre writer knows well-conceived is one thing and well-realized is another; the second half drags (pardon the pun) a bit while the author cranks us through the awful (high-concept) truth and the awful (high-concept) retribution and so forth. Still I heartily recommend this one for mystery fans of all, um, persuasions.

McMurtry on Vidal

I draw your attention to Larry McMurtry's review of the new (and second) volume of memoirs by Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, 1964 to 2006, in the November 30 issue of the New York Review of Books. I love the NYRB, but in particular I never miss anything by McMurtry or by Russell Baker, both brilliant and funny writers. Speaking of brilliant and funny writers, here the topic is Gore Vidal, one of America's most important writers who is now in advanced age and intimating mortality, apparently doggedly writing which comes as no surprise. McMurtry does a fine and sensitive job of conveying some of the elegiac spirit of the work, all the better coming from reviewer and author neither one of whom is known for delicate sensibilities. Anyway, let me get out of the way so you can follow McMurtry's advice to Amazon, and I quote: "But the best of the writing is much more telling than the Personality - or any Personality, is likely to be. I refer particularly to Julian, to Homage to Daniel Shays, and to the excellent Messiah, a book that's not remotely had its due," and further on, "In my opinion Palimpsest is about as good a literary memoir as we have." Well there you have it.

First Post, December 12 2006

This is the first installment of Anderson Brown's Literary Blog. Here I will keep a reader's blog of books and articles, reviews and so forth that I am reading or thinking about. I read through a lot of novels and I've been wanting to set up a blog like this for some time, so this is a good day.