The Buffalo News - Books and Poetry http://www.buffalonews.com Latest stories from The Buffalo News en-us Sun, 26 May 2013 02:02:49 -0400 Sun, 26 May 2013 02:02:49 -0400 <![CDATA[ Great summer reads for porch or pool ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130526/LIFE/130529551/1058
by Gillian Flynn

This brilliantly constructed thriller, with a jolt of a twist midway through, is the tale of young marrieds Amy and Nick, forced to leave Manhattan to move back to his hometown of North Carthage, Mo., after he loses his job. When Amy disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary, fingers of suspicion point directly at Nick. This riveting page-turner requires you to spend some time in extremely unpleasant company.



Fear in the Sunlight

by Nicola Upson

This absorbing mystery is Upson’s fourth starring real-life mystery writer Josephine Tey. It links murders in 1936 in the unique resort village of Portmeirion, Wales, with murders on the Hollywood set of “Rear Window” in 1954. Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “Young and Innocent” was based on Tey’s novel “A Shilling for Candles,” and Upson brilliantly makes that connection the basis of this vivid, psychologically complex tale made all the more sinister by the presence of Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville.

His Majesty’s Hope: A Maggie Hope Mystery

by Susan Elia

MacNeal

Maggie now is an elite member of the Special Operations Executive on assignment in Berlin in this latest World War II thriller from a Nardin graduate.



Broken Harbor

by Tana French

A woman is found clinging to life, her husband and two children murdered in a half-finished, abandoned seaside housing development in what may be the Dublin author’s best psychological thriller yet.

Reconstructing Amelia

by Kimberly

McCreight

This outstanding debut novel, from an author named one of Entertainment Weekly’s “13 to Watch in 2013,” is a beautifully plotted legal thriller about a grieving single mother investigating, through blog posts, texts and Facebook posts, the death of her only child, 15-year-old Amelia, whose fatal fall from the roof of her pricey private school may not have been a suicide after all.



City of Saints

by Andrew Hunt

Now a resident of Waterloo, Ont., Hunt grew up in Salt Lake City and paints a vivid portrait of the “city of saints” in the 1930s, the tension between Mormon and non-Mormon, as straight-arrow sheriff’s deputy Art Oveson investigates the brutal murder of a doctor’s wife and stumbles into a cesspool of corruption and blackmail. (An afterword notes that the book was inspired by the notorious 1930 murder of a Salt Lake City socialite.)



The Last Policeman: A Novel

by Ben H. Winters

A young detective sets out to prove that what looks like just another suicide – an insurance actuary found hanged in a bathroom stall at a McDonald’s – was actually a murder. This intriguing, well-crafted first installment of a trilogy is set in a creepy pre-apocalyptic world, six months before a massive asteroid is due to hit the earth. Winter’s previous novel, “Bedbugs,” was hailed in Vanitary Fair as “a diabolical tale of paranoia.”



The Stranger

by Camilla Läckberg

Dubbed the “rock star of Nordic noir” in one review, and apparently outselling Stieg Larsson in their native Sweden, Läckberg juggles multiple perspectives in this fine mystery of a car crash that leads to a serial killer, set against the backdrop of a Swedish town rocked by the filming of a crude reality TV series.Beautiful Ruins

by Jess Walter

This lovely, engrossing entertainment – which was on numerous “Best Book of 2012” lists – spans decades and continents, from 1962 Italy, to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to community theater in present-day Seattle. Walter, a National Book Award finalist, weaves his magic of gawky Italian innkeeper Pasquale Tursi (eking out a living at a crumbling pensione dubbed “the Adequate View”) falling for a gorgeous American starlet fleeing the lavish set of “Cleopatra” and the antics of stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.





Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

by Ben Fountain

This elegantly written, hilarious and heartbreaking novel, of the “welcome home” accorded heroes of the Iraq War at a Dallas Cowboys game, was dubbed “the ‘Catch 22’ of the Iraq War” by Karl Marlantes. Nineteen-year-old Billy Lynn and other members of Bravo company, whose firefight with Iraqi insurgents at the battle of Al-Ansakar Canal was filmed by an embedded Fox News crew, are brought home for a victory tour to drum up support for the war. Every phrase is perfect; the effect is a devastating portrait of the country.

Silver: Return to Treasure Island

by Andrew Motion

A former poet laureate offers fine entertainment, as Jim Hawkins’ son joins forces with Long John Silver’s daughter in this thrilling, faithful sequel to the Robert Louis Stevenson classic.



The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

North Korea is not anyone’s idea of a vacation destination, but this extraordinary page-turner, winner of this year’s Pulitzer for fiction, takes you there in riveting, heartbreaking detail.Wild

by Cheryl Strayed

Admire the descriptions of the Pacific Coast Trail and marvel at the author’s chutzpah at the same time. Strayed (a name she created for herself) bares her soul in this spellbinding account of her hastily considered plan at age 26 to hike the difficult trail alone while dealing with the emotional aftermath of her mother’s death, her own divorce and a period of heroin use. She braved hazards that included snow, bears, rattlesnakes, dehydration, a “Monster” backpack and hiking boots that pinched her toes.



Brothers

by George Howe Colt

The second-oldest of four baby boomer brothers weaves an exploration of his complicated relationship with his siblings, from childhood to middle age, with fascinating chapters about famous brothers including responsible Edwin Booth and spoiled younger brother John Wilkes, battling cornflake entrepreneurs John Harvey and W.K. Kellogg, Theo and Vincent Van Gogh, the Marx brothers and John and Henry Thoreau. Marvelous snippets about other brothers are woven throughout: a violent quarrel between Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his mother’s favorite, and brother Frank over some toasted cheese, for one.

The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death

by Jill Lepore

This amusing, informative and very different history of the United States traces the evolution of ideas about life itself, with much to say about who we are now, through changing attitudes about children, sex, gender roles, work, marriage, children’s books, baby food, old age and death. The launching point is Milton Bradley’s original idea in 1860 for the board game “The Checkered Game of Life.”Divergent (and sequel Insurgent, with “Allegiant” coming in October)

by Veronica Roth

This standout among dystopian novels will surely appeal to fans of Suzanne Collins’ “Hunger Games” trilogy. (The movie will star Shailene Woodley, Kate Winslet and Ashley Judd.)

Code Name Verity

by Elizabeth Wein

The winner of the Edgar for best Young Adult mystery is a heartbreaking tale of friendship set during World War II, written as a puzzle.

The Fault in Our Stars

by John Greene

Any baby boomer who wept over “Love Story” should check out this far superior novel of young love between two teens who meet at a cancer patient support group. Green is one of today’s outstanding writers of fiction for Young Adults.



Jean Westmoore is The News’ children’s book reviewer. ]]> Fri, 24 May 2013 13:22:17 -0400 By Jean Westmoore / News Staff

]]> <![CDATA[ Eduardo Galeano’s calendar of civilization’s errors ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130526/LIFE/130529556/1058
A Calendar of Human History

By Eduardo Galeano,

translated by Mark Fried

Nation Books

432 pages, $26.99



By Jeff Simon

News Book Reviewer

It’s a funny thing about presidential libraries – no, not the shrines to their administrations that they build in self-deification like Roman emperors intoxicated by history’s mirror or Shelley’s Ozymandias warning posterity to “look on my works ye mighty and despair.”

We’re talking here about the real presidential libraries, the ones where presidents might actually deposit books famously given to them as presents. They’ve done well in an era that many were afraid was post-literate.

Whatever one thinks of Bill Clinton’s sloppy, pizza-flavored dalliances with Monica Lewinsky, one has to have a high regard for her taste in writers to pique the presidential erotic interest. She gave him Nicholson Baker’s famous phone sex novel “Vox.”

Were the former president to drift outside the undeniable strain of comic erotica in Baker’s oeuvre, he’d find a very serious writer indeed –the pacifist who, in “Human Smoke,” made the argument that World War II (and Winston Churchill especially) unnecessarily engendered the Holocaust, and the Gutenbergian critic of the digital era in “Double Fold” who decries the vanquishing of paper in libraries as a defeat of civilization itself.

In 2009, the late Hugo Chavez famously gave Barack Obama Eduardo Galeano’s “Open Veins of Latin America.” Chavez, too, may have had narrow reasons for giving the book to a sitting president but there too there is nothing remotely narrow about the oeuvre of the writer who was being introduced to the keeper of the White House library.

If, in fact, the Nobel Prize for literature weren’t a shadow of its former splendid self (and not what is an annual disappointment and error in Swedish academic judgment), the works of the great and utterly uncategorizable Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano would be recognizable as a Nobel laureate’s canon if ever there was one: the trilogy “Memory of Fire,” “The Book of Embraces,” “Voices of Time,” “Mirrors,” and now this typically Galeanovian declaration of terminal skepticism about human history, arranged as a calendar.

Galeano is now of ripe Nobel laureate age – he’ll be 73 in September – should the Swedes ever decide to render the great dynamiter’s guilt prize honorable again.

Galeano’s genre is his own – a mixture of fiction, journalism and history that, as always, is conveyed in orderly fragments of various sizes and is best understood as an outgrowth of his first midteen self-expressions as a socialist cartoonist.

If you think of every short individual Galeano piece in the mammoth collection of them that comprises his life’s work as a kind of verbal cartoon – or a set of variations on a verbal cartoon – then you understand both the striking singularity of his work and its innovation.

It has brought him so much political opposition in his life that, at one point, “Open Veins” (Chavez’s gift book) was banned by several South American governments including Uruguay’s and, at another, he had to take refuge (as have so many other Latin American writers) in Spain.

Galeano’s books are, typically, schemes that allow the writer to collect many short pieces interrelated by theme and variations on the theme.

In “Children of the Days,” he gives us, as promised, a “calendar of human history.”

But, as implied to anyone who knows his work, it’s unlike any calendar to be known by anyone anywhere.

Our beginning January 1, he hastens to explain, “is not the first day of the year for the Mayas, the Jews, the Arabs, the Chinese or many other inhabitants of the world.” Rather, “the date was chosen by Rome, Imperial Rome and blessed by Vatican Rome.”

“That said,” though, says Galeano, “today we ought to acknowledge that time treats us rather kindly. Time allows us its fleeing passengers, to believe that this day could be the very first day, and it gives us leave to want today to be as bright and joyous as the colors of an outdoor market.”

We can want all manner of things.

But on Jan. 13, Galeano is happy to remind us that “in the year 2010, an earthquake swallowed a large chunk of Haiti and left more than two hundred thousand dead. The following day in the United States, a television preacher named Pat Robertson explained what happened. This shepherd of souls revealed that the blacks of Haiti were to blame, that their freedom was responsible. The Devil had liberated them from French slavery and now he was collecting his due.”

All that he writes of May 23 – last Thursday in our current year – is this: “In 1937, John D. Rockefeller, owner of the world, king of oil, founder of Standard Oil Co., passed away. He had lived for nearly a century. The autopsy found not a single scruple.”

Just in case you want to know, Galeano tells us that on Dec. 31 in Rome, the year 208, “Quintus Serenus Sammonicus wrote Liber Medicinalis, a book in which he recorded his discoveries in the arts of healing.”

And “among other remedies” he proposed an infallible way to avoid tertian fever and keep death at bay: by hanging a word across your chest day and night.

“The word was ‘abracadabra’ which in ancient Hebrew meant and still means ‘Give your fire until the last of your days.’”

Galeano’s fire is unquenched. He keeps giving it to us in abundance.



Jeff Simon is The News’ arts and books editor. ]]> Fri, 24 May 2013 13:18:04 -0400 <![CDATA[ A look at life of Saul Bellow, through son’s eyes ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130526/LIFE/130529557/1058
By Greg Bellow

Bloomsbury

232 pages, $26



By Stefan Fleischer

NEWS BOOK REVIEWER

The great age of Jewish-American fiction with its critical successes, best-seller popularity and the cachet of celebrity has passed. Of three major figures – Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) and Saul Bellow (1915-2005) – only Roth is still alive. Despite his protestation that he’s now retired, Roth still remains very much in the public eye.

Within this context, Greg Bellow’s memoir of his father, Saul, may be understood as the attempt to do justice to his father’s reputation as a person, rather than as a literary figure. Son Greg resigns himself to the idea that Saul has become a “literary lion,” a symbol resting on a reputation for importance that’s not likely to change. He sees himself as illuminating the “real” Saul Bellow, a tender-hearted figure whose vulnerability is always masked by his callous and insensitive behavior. An unkind review of the memoir would characterize it as being merely a species of the higher gossip about the life of a figure who is hardly read anymore. But that would be a mistake.

Bellow turns up in odd corners. In a recent New Yorker profile, Noah Baumbach talks about Bellow’s influence on his recent filmmaking efforts. Baumbach cites “Herzog” specifically for its “relentless portraiture.” One can see the Herzogovian traces in Baumbach’s character “Greenberg” (in the film of 2010) with his obsessive cranky letter writing as well as the obsessive self-pity.

In an interview on NPR in 2009, author Jeffrey Eugenides has this to say about Bellow’s influence: “There’s a little thing I do when I can’t write: When I’m feeling sleepy, when my head is in a fog, I reach across my desk, digging under the piles of unanswered mail, to unearth my copy of ‘Herzog’ by Saul Bellow. And then I open the book – anywhere – and read a paragraph.”

These two recent examples run counter to the generalization that as he got older Saul Bellow simply fell out of favor, becoming less widely read and becoming more notorious for provocative sexist and racist remarks on matters both literary and cultural. My hunch is that you’d have a hard time finding “Herzog” or “Augie March” on the undergraduate American lit survey syllabus in any of the nation’s better colleges. Nevertheless, among some younger literary and film types, Bellow is still read thoughtfully and deeply.

Younger writers and filmmakers would make use of Bellow for their own creative purposes. It would be interesting to find out if Lena Dunham might have read some Bellow, browsing in one of her parents’ well-stocked bookshelves. It’s the mixture of her love of disorder (the fine 2010 movie “Tiny Furniture”) and the boundary bending in her HBO series “Girls” that suggests this speculation to me.

Bellow’s peculiar writerly genius left a widespread although problematic patrimony. In “A Son’s Memoir,” Greg Bellow attempts to rehabilitate the reputation at least of the “young Saul” as a tender-hearted, if irresponsible father. “Saul Bellow’s Heart” covers a long stretch of time, since Saul lived to be 90 and Greg must have been in his 70s when he began work on the book. Greg goes through family history all the way back to Saul’s grandfathers.

There’s interesting stuff here, a classic turn on the Jewish 20th century immigrant saga, with more than a couple of twists: Saul’s father was a patriarchal bully, having among other careers one as a failed bootlegger. Greg Bellow is on solid ground when he’s telling us about myriad aunts, uncles, brothers and cousins, with everybody trying to obey the immigrant’s dream imperative: Make money.

As soon as he moves away from family background and early childhood memories, things get shaky. Greg is clear and perceptive about Saul’s public life in the earlier years, describing a far left-leaning, dedicated warrior for causes of social justice. He’s less persuasive about his father’s later public life. Sometime in the ’60s Saul became the figure noted on television for racist remarks about literature (“Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?”), sexist remarks about women’s liberationists (“sagging breasts” 10 years after going braless), and homosexuals (“Ivy League catamites”), as well as generally espousing the most retrograde conservative opinions on culture and education. Here Bellow came under the baleful influence of Allan Bloom, whose book (“Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students”) codified the conservative side of the “culture wars” debate that started in the ’60s and can still be felt today. Bloom’s book carries a forward by Saul Bellow.

Janis Bellow, the fifth wife, 40 years Saul’s junior, deprived Greg of access to Saul Bellow’s letters and much of the archival material because she is intent on absolute control of Bellow’s legacy. Greg therefore settled on his task as revealing the “real” Saul as a person by applying a psychoanalytic lens based on his own training and lifelong practice as a psychotherapist. It is surprising that Greg Bellow shields himself from his own self-knowledge even as he writes perceptively about Saul’s blind spots. Greg stresses how close he was to his father as a child, but what comes across is a book about a son who is so love-hungry that he’s grateful for any crumb of affection or attention his philandering and often absent or preoccupied father happened to toss his way.

It pains me to say this, but “Saul Bellow’s Heart” is unfailingly interesting to read despite being mostly awkwardly written. Greg Bellow too often reaches for the trite, ready made adjective: Silences are typically “stony,” crises are always “sudden.” Modifiers dangle off the end of sentences, far removed from their subject.

Greg has a tendency toward the melodramatic, something of a family trait shared by son and father and grandfather. For example, Greg’s introductory chapter has the title “Awakened by a Grave Robbery.” We’re not sure whether the melodramatic “grave robbery” refers to Greg Bellow’s resentment that his place of honor at his father’s funeral was given over to Saul’s “literary sons” or to Janis Bellow’s decision to bury Saul in Vermont rather than with other family members in Montreal.

The motif of the eldest son’s fury at feeling cheated or tricked out of his rightful portion goes all the way back to the Old Testament, with the story of Esau and Jacob. One reason for all this trouble is the old patriarchal habit of having too many wives for good order.

Saul Bellow probably did have too many wives for good order, although he had them serially rather than simultaneously, but often with mistresses alongside. Greg Bellow offers some mostly unconvincing psychoanalytically tinged explanations for this reckless behavior (five wives, three sons each with a different mother). Much better is Saul Bellow’s own succinct explanation that comes in a brilliant passage in “Herzog:”

“In the depths of a man’s being there was something that responded with a quack to such perfume. Quack! A sexual reflex that had nothing to do with age or subtlety, wisdom, experience, history, Wissenschaft, Bildung, Wahrheit. In sickness or health there came the old quack-quack at the fragrance of perfumed, feminine skin.” Nor was Bellow immune to other seductions of “quack, quack.” To name just two: the nutty quackery of Wilhelm Reich’s orgone box and the high falutin’ nutty metaphysics of Rudolph Steiner.

The son’s task of rehabilitating the father’s reputation is hardly an easy trick if your father is Saul Bellow, an extraordinarily complicated man and very clearly not a nice one in almost all of his dealings. Nevertheless, although the largest questions remain teasingly unanswerable, one can always forward an opinion. Greg Bellow quotes his father shortly before his death asking his friend Eugene Goodheart, “Was I a man or a jerk?” a question that could be rendered back to the saltier Yiddish of Bellow’s childhood in Lachine, the poor mostly Jewish suburb of Montreal.

One might ask, “Was he a mensch or a schmuck?” Greg Bellow tries hard to advocate the former. This reader tends to the latter judgment. And in all this Saul Bellow gets the last and lasting word, a single one above his name to mark his gravestone: “Writer.”



Stefan Fleischer taught in the English Department at the University at Buffalo for 39 years. He now resides in Houston. ]]> Fri, 24 May 2013 13:17:59 -0400 <![CDATA[ Editor’s Choice: Painter Eric Fischl on being a ‘Bad Boy’ ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130526/LIFE/130529558/1058
With a once-scandalous reputation like Fischl’s, there would have been no point to this memoir at all without candor. And you certainly have to credit passages like the above with that. Nor is it unusual.

About the most famous of Fischl’s bids to attract the art world’s scandalized attention “Bad Boy” – which gives his memoir its name – Fischl describes it this way: “ ‘Bad Boy’ rendered a moment, fraught and mysterious, in the relationship between an eleven-year old boy and a mature woman, possibly the boy’s mother but perhaps his older sister or a stranger. … ‘Bad Boy’ extended the larger themes running through my work – family dysfunction, the narcissism, the careless inattention with which parents blind themselves to their children’s needs and impulses, the suburban commodity culture that blurs the line between sexual and buying power, between genuine emotion and the superficial look of things.”

The established artist three decades later is a very different figure, of course. But there would have been no point to this book if “America’s foremost narrative painter” (as the book’s publicity has it) hadn’t addressed head on his ’80s reputation. The book begins in 1986 with “Jack Daniel’s (sic), wine, Armagnac chased down with lines of cocaine” and ends with him explaining why he once “couldn’t make happy pictures” but now (when, by the way, he’s a friend of Steve Martin and Mike Nichols), he can. A book about contemporary art that may tell vastly more than it intends. – Jeff Simon ]]> Fri, 24 May 2013 13:17:40 -0400 <![CDATA[ Poetry & Literature Calendar: May 26-June 1 ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130526/LIFE/130529559/1058
Thursday, 7 p.m.: Tangential Readings, open format poetry, prose and spoken word performance series hosted by George Georgakis. Rust Belt Books, 202 Allen St. $2. ]]> Fri, 24 May 2013 13:17:37 -0400 <![CDATA[ Poems of the Week by Christine Fina ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130526/LIFE/130529560/1058


By Christine Fina



The new house is starting to speak,

but the space is cautious.

It doesn’t know what to say or how to react.

It watches like a newborn, each eye wide-open

trying to grasp shapes,

trying to perceive sounds.



Out of the incubator it needs to be fed.

A Monet painting or Christmas candle,

A Tuscan table or tapestried rug.

These early days are critical,

each room needs conditioning.



Play a soft ballad or two,

make soothing sounds.

Allow conversations to linger into the evening,

resist sensory overload.

Over time it will move past simple reflexes,

welcome unfamiliar objects that fit its space,

bond with others, deciding what to be.

But it has time.



Without Windows

By Christine Fina



You and I can’t see out and in

without rectangular windows

framing our worlds, our thoughts.

The turquoise sky with slender clouds,

the golden sunrise, illuminating

each morning sight and sigh

each soaring plane and bird

can’t be our morning conversation, nor could the cars

that drive by cutting through each wooded area

be our quick lunchtime chat, as we wonder where their journey leads

today, tomorrow, tomorrow and today.

Our night-time closing thoughts, not heard, silently sitting,

in a room without a window, without clarity,

without spring-like greens and browns, changing, as we

dip our brushes into the palette, altering our picture,

adding new layers, as the colors change with each moment.



CHRISTINE FINA is a graduate of SUNY Buffalo State, where she won both the Joan D. Rosso Award and the Master’s Thesis Award. She taught English for five years in the Western New York area and is now working on a chapbook titled “The Unknown Spaces.” ]]> Fri, 24 May 2013 13:17:30 -0400 <![CDATA[ Best sellers ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130526/LIFE/130529561/1058
1. Inferno. Dan Brown.

Doubleday, $29.95

2. 12th of Never. Patterson/Paetro.

Little Brown, $27.99

3. Dead Ever After. Charlaine Harris.

Ace, $27.95

4. Silken Prey. John Sandford.

Putnam, $27.95

5. The Hit. David Baldacci.

Grand Central, $27.99

6. Whiskey Beach. Nora Roberts.

Putnam, $27.95

7. Daddy’s Gone a Hunting.

Mary Higgins Clark.

8. Gone Girl. Gillian Flynn.

Crown, $25

9. A Delicate Truth. John LeCarre.

Viking, $28.95

10. A Step of Faith. Richard Paul Evans. Simon & Schuster, $19.99

NONFICTION

1. Happy, Happy, Happy. Phil Robertson.

Howard Books. $24.99

2. The Guns at Last Light. Rick Atkinson.

Henry Holt, $40

3. Lean In. Sheryl Sandberg.

Knopf, $24.95

4. Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls.

David Sedaris. Little, Brown, $25.99

5. The Duck Commander Family.

Willie & Korie Robertson.

Howard Books, $23.99

6. Keep It Pithy. Bill O’Reilly.

Crown Archetype, $21.99

7. Waiting to Be Heard. Amanda Knox.

Harper, $28.90

8. Life Code. Dr. Phil McGraw.

Bird Street Books, $26.

9. It’s All Good. Gwyneth Paltrow.

Grand Central, $32

10. Cooked. Michael Pollan.

Penguin, $27.95 ]]> Fri, 24 May 2013 13:16:43 -0400 <![CDATA[ Books in Brief: Black Helicopters, NOS4A2 ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130526/LIFE/130529562/1058
Black Helicopters by Blythe Woolston; Candlewick Press, 166 pages ($15.99). Ages 12 and up.

...

This disturbing, compelling short novel holds you in its grip and never lets go. Valkyrie White, 15, has been raised to fear “those people” and the “black helicopters” that killed her mother, then, apparently, her Da. With Da gone, Valkyrie and brother Bo have their instructions. When Bo falls short, Val will complete the mission alone if she must. Woolston, who won the William C. Morris Debut Fiction award for “The Freak Observer,” says she was pondering what would make a person become a suicide bomber “a terrible choice - a terrorist’s choice - but also the choice of a human being with a mind and a heart and a life before that moment.” Woolston makes us see the world from Val’s point of view, a world where one is ever-vigilant, where one must follow the plan, where anyone who gets in the way is just so much collateral damage. This is a chilling, thought-provoking tale.

– Jean Westmoore

THRILLER

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill; William Morrow (704 pages, $28.99)

...

It’s ironic that “NOS4A2,” the book that will in all likelihood be Joe Hill’s breakthrough to superstardom, is also the first book in which he’s gone all-in with acknowledging his way-above-average literary genes.

Hill, 40, uses a shortened version of his middle name (Hillstrom) and for several years didn’t tell anyone he was the son of Stephen King. Hill “came out” in 2007.

By then, he had already received awards for his short stories and had won the prestigious Bram Stoker Award for his collection, “20th Century Ghosts.” Two novels followed, “Heart-Shaped Box” in 2007 and “Horns” in 2010. While those contained elements of horror and fantasy, they were heavily symbolic examples of those genres, mostly bereft of the down-and-dirty terror of most of King’s work. Not so with “NOS4A2,” whose vampire-referencing title is the vanity license plate of its villain, Charles Talent Manx.

A ghastly, not-quite-human specter with a vile sense of humor, Manx trolls for children in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith and then spirits them away to an “amusement park” called Christmasland, where every day is Christmas and unhappy thinking is simply not tolerated. It’s an overly decorated holiday phantasm, complete with evil elves, teeth dripping blood and gore, and everything twisty and convoluted, as though seen in a funhouse mirror.

Hill is very much his own writer, at least as talented as King and a smidge more literary in his approach. He takes his time building to the epic horror that awaits in the book’s final third.

– Joy Tipping, Dallas Morning News ]]> Fri, 24 May 2013 13:16:36 -0400 <![CDATA[ Robert Oppenheimer remains enigma after 825 pages ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130526/LIFE/130529563/1058
Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of the Manhattan Project and hence, father of the atomic bomb, was at times more than one person. If one were to analyze him under the microscope of human behavior, he shape-shifted from brilliant physicist to being contemptibly rude and, by his own admission, serially untruthful concerning his affiliation with communists.

The permutations of the Oppenheimer enigma are investigated in this nonpareil biography by Ray Monk, who also wrote “Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius” and a two-volume biography of Bertrand Russell.

Monk, in subtitling his book “Inside The Center,” wanted to concentrate on writing a biography of Oppenheimer that would try to understand his inner self. Of course, he fills in the scientific, social and political background. Think atoms, for example, as an extension of “inside the center.” There are pages of exquisite explanation of a relativistic quantum-field theory, among many other postdoc topics, that achieve clarity for the scientific reader, far more than I understand.

However, Monk writes so clearly that I had the feeling I understood his technical explanations – of course I do not – even though I had taken only a few classes of explanation of infrared spectroscopy in 1955.

Monk, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Southampton, quotes the American diplomat George Kennan who spoke at Oppenheimer’s memorial service. Kennan coped with the riddle of Oppenheimer and framed his analysis this way:

“The arrogance which to many appeared to be a part of his personality masked in reality an overpowering desire to bestow and receive affection.” Kennan continued, “Neither circumstances nor at times the asperities of his own temperament permitted the gratification of this need in a measure remotely approaching its intensity.”

The author picks up this thread, earlier articulated by another friend of Oppenheimer’s, Isidor Rabi, who characterized Oppenheimer as “a man put together of many bright shining splinters … who never got to be an integrated personality” and concludes, “The feebleness in Oppenheimer … the sense one has of him almost disembodied, is connected with his enigmatic elusiveness and his inability to make ordinary close contact with the people around him.”

This disembodiness may have been a reflex of Oppenheimer’s unwillingness to come to terms with his religion, which was Judaism. He avoided it by adhering as he grew older to the Ethical Culture Society, a reflex of his father’s beliefs as well. The credo of the organization was derivative of Immanuel Kant’s “moral law,” a “do as you will be done by” set of beliefs birthed from the ruins of religion.

Born in America and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan of German Jewish parents, Ella and Julius, he lived in splendid isolation, a world apart from the Polish and Russian Jews of the Lower East Side and different again from the still earlier migration of Sephardic families who had come from Spain and Portugal in the 19th century.

Robert’s father was in the apparel business and his mother was an artist. Oppenheimer later observed that he was “an unctuous, repulsively good little boy,” his upbringing having offered him “no normal, healthy way to be a bastard.” He lived in a world, according to Monk, “from which all coarseness, vulgarity and discord has been expunged.” Later, when bullied at a summer camp as a teenager, he never forgot it.

Oppenheimer, supremely gifted, attended private schools, Harvard University, and studied abroad. Earlier, a classmate remembered that he had a great need to declare his pre-eminence. “Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek,” he once remarked to a girl in his class. George Birkhoff, the eminent Harvard mathematician, supported his application with this backhanded piece of prejudice common to the time: “He is Jewish but I should consider him a very fine type of man.”

Oppenheimer arrived in England in 1925, a time when, according to Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, “the most profound revolution in physical theory since the birth of modern physics in the 17th century” was taking place. Young physicists just a few years older than Oppenheimer were in the lead. There was immense pressure in being at the forefront of what was called Knabenphysik (boy physics.)

His destination was Cambridge, where he became so unhinged (he almost murdered two of his tutors), that he considered suicide. “I was on the point of bumping myself off,” he later wrote. His father made an agreement with the university to allow him to continue his studies on probation if he underwent treatment by a psychiatrist.

Oppenheimer was encouraged to leave Cambridge – he didn’t need much inducement - and go to Göttingen in the summer of 1926 by Max Born, later to be a Nobel winner, who recognized the young man’s superiority. Born’s most famous paper, “The Quantum Mechanics of Collision Processes,” which he had read at Cambridge, was translated by Oppenheimer, which boosted the young man’s confidence immeasurably, too much perhaps. He intimidated everyone there, looking for opportunities to condescend.

Monk notes that “His greatest love was possibly that which he felt for his country. In his mind at least, the answer to the question about the nature of his identity was simple: He was not German and he was not Jewish but he was, and was proud to be, American.”

Was he ever a communist? Monk says that there is some question about that, but he was certainly what became known as a “fellow traveler,” claiming to have read the complete works of Marx and Lenin.

More on the personal side: Oppenheimer married late. He married thrice-earlier-married Katherine (“Kitty”) Harrison on Nov. 1, 1940. She was already pregnant with his child. By combining aristocratic hauteur with bohemianism, she was almost universally disliked by Oppy’s colleagues; a far distance from an earlier “love of his life,” Jean Tatlock, who later committed suicide.

Back to the bomb: Once fission was recognized as a fact and that a chain reaction was possible, scientists encouraged Albert Einstein to write a letter to the president recommending a permanent contact between physicists working on chain reactions and the government. They didn’t want the Nazis to get the weapon first. The letter was delivered by Alexander Sachs, an adviser to the Roosevelt government on Oct. 11, 1939. Great space is given to the coordination of the Manhattan Project, which produced the atom bomb and which employed more than 150,000 workers at its peak. Oppenheimer impressed Col. Leslie Groves, whom the secretary of war had chosen to get things done on the prospective bomb, and Groves chose Oppenheimer to be at the center of things with him. The story of the building of the bomb is the nub of the story.

All in all, Monk’s biography satisfies what he set out to do. He does justice to Oppeheimer’s important role in the history and politics of the 20th century, to the singularity of his mind, and to the depth and diversity of his intellectual interests. He hobnobbed with the greats of 20th century physics: Niels Bohr, Born, Paul Dirac and Einstein. He delved into the secrets of the universe, helping to unfold them. Equally important, Monk describes and explains Oppenheimer’s contributions to physics and places them in their historical context.

Monk’s insight does more for the reader. He writes, “We want to understand Oppenheimer … just because he was an interesting man.”

Well, yes and no. Let me tell you why I hedge my bets on Monk’s conclusion, not because it isn’t admirable but because it is unattainable.

Oppenheimer and Born published another paper in 1927, “On the Quantum Theory of Molecules,” considered a classic because of the paper’s central idea, “which has become known as the “Born-Oppenheimer approximation.” It was a paper that used quantum mechanics to explain “why molecules were molecules.”

I think that after reading Monk’s exhaustive work, it is more apt to say that I have a sense of Oppenheimer the man as an “approximation” of why Oppenheimer was Oppenheimer. It is not complete because Oppenheimer the enigma goes beyond the wavelength of even this masterful biography by which he is incompletely measured.

NONFICTION

Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside The Center

By Ray Monk

Doubleday

825 pages, $37.50





Michael D. Langan is the former headmaster of Nardin Academy. ]]> Fri, 24 May 2013 13:16:30 -0400 By Michael D. Langan

NEWS BOOK REVIEWER

]]> <![CDATA[ Jackson books detail death row ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130521/LIFE/130529933/1058
The book, released a year ago to ecstatic reviews from across the prison and civil rights community, is the product of Jackson and Christian’s 1979 visit to the Ellis Unit near Huntsville, Texas, where the state’s death row prisoners were held. Its title comes from a poem written by one of the convicts the authors interviewed, who captured one of the book’s central themes: that on death row, time as we know it ceases to exist and the only solid concept to grab onto is one’s impending death.

The book is remarkable for many reasons. One is the unexpected warmth of the photographs and their subjects. Another is Jackson and Christian’s clear-eyed descriptions of life on death row: “His sentence was reduced to life September 24, 1982, and he has been eligible for parole since November 19, 1980, two years and two months before his current sentence began,” they wrote of convict Mark Moore. “No one cares.” The crystalline lucidity with which they explain the incontrovertible arguments against the death penalty is also a great achievement. But mostly the book is remarkable because it was allowed to happen in the first place.

Such a book could never be written today, a time when prisoners’ experiences on death rows across the United States – though their numbers are slowly dwindling – is worse than it was in the late ’70s. And much more tightly sealed off, lest the public catch wind of the daily horrors which occur therein.

That sense of limbo and the thick layers of bureaucracy even Kafka could not have dreamed of come across so strongly that reading this book becomes a harrowing, unforgettable experience.

Something similar applies to “Inside the Wire,” a collection of Jackson’s earlier photographs of Texas and Arkansas prisons from 1964 through 1979, with a few stunning mugshots of prisoners he discovered in 1975.

The book contains his best body of work, a series of panoramic photographs he made of the Cummins prison farm in Arkansas which might as well be pictures of the slave plantations of the preceding century. They work as stunning landscapes and social commentary. Interspersed with photographs of life inside the prison walls, portraits of individual prison workers and other glimpses of daily life, these scenes evoke a sense of menace and hopelessness that is indelible and chilling.

– Colin Dabkowski ]]> Mon, 20 May 2013 17:08:23 -0400 <![CDATA[ 'Scatter, Adapt and Remember’: How to avoid extinction ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130519/LIFE/130519190/1058
The result is that there is something profoundly ambivalent about what Doubleday calls its author’s “brilliantly speculative work of popular science” focusing on humanity’s long history of dodging the bullet of extinction. Should we believe her nonexpert’s keen research and clear writing?

My answer is: Yes, we should. Sometimes, a brilliant observer can make an end run around what appears endless scientific quibbling daubed with politics.

In “Scatter, Adapt and Remember,” she helps us understand deep science and our future as a species. Newitz has done this by working her way through a series of interviews with experts and readings about how “scientific breakthroughs today will help us avoid disasters tomorrow.”

Our earth has been battered before. First, our planet has almost been erased a half dozen times in its 4.5 billion-year history, shattered by asteroids, entombed in ice and smothered by methane. Her argument is that we’ve survived the first half-dozen extinctions; why not another one?

I am not sure that I agree with her assertion that “humans will survive a mass extinction.” It seems to me that we humans “may” or “might” survive. But she is positive and that’s a good thing.

What has she found out in her study? These are her characterizations:

• Newitz’s hope is based on hard evidence gleaned from the history of survival.

• The title of the book is a distillation of strategies that have already worked.

• Evidence of the next mass extinction begins with bees’ Colony Collapse Disorder. “If bees go extinct,” she says, “their loss will trigger an extinction domino effect.”

• Extinction is a fact of life. At present, “E.O. Wilson of Harvard estimates that 27,000 species of all kinds go extinct per year.”

• Thus, we may be at the beginning of a mass extinction that includes us. This is what proponents of the “sixth extinction” theory believe. It is a term coined by paleontologist Richard Leakey in the 1990s. (Elizabeth Kolbert, the New Yorker’s environmental journalist, has tirelessly reported for two decades on this phenomenon called “The Great Dying.” Are we sure of it? The answer is “no.”)

Newitz says that in any case, the sixth extinction is going to happen and we should begin to prepare for the inevitable. Rather than be depressed about it, she advises that we switch gears and get into a survival mode.

She says we can survive by “… simulating tsunamis to studying central Turkey’s ancient underground cities; from cultivating cyanobacteria for “living cities” to designing space elevators to make space colonies cost-effective; from using math to stop pandemics to studying the remarkable survival strategies of gray whales, scientists and researchers … are discovering the keys to long-term resilience and learning how humans can choose life over death.”

Buzz Aldrin, the 83-year-old astronaut, seems to be on the same page with his new book, “Mission To Mars, My Vision for Space Exploration.”

All this may be beyond the capacities of people who have a hard time carrying home groceries from the supermarket.

But it’s a consolation that at least one non-expert with a capacious mind is doing more than storing comestibles in a bomb shelter in her yard.

Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

By Annalee Newitz

Doubleday

320 pages, $26.95



Michael D. Langan is a former employee of the Labor and Treasury departments. ]]> Fri, 17 May 2013 12:57:07 -0400 By Michael D. Langan

NEWS BOOK REVIEWER

]]> <![CDATA[ ‘Dream Merchant’ lacks charm of ‘Fischer’ debut ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130519/LIFE/130519192/1058
Twenty-five years have passed between “Searching for Bobby Fischer” and Waitzkin’s debut novel, “The Dream Merchant.” Waitzkin is now 70 years old, quite elderly for a step onto the stage as a first-time novelist, and we can speculate that “The Dream Merchant” is a kind of hail and farewell to literary culture. It feels like Waitzkin has thrown everything he has and then some into the project.

The quick acclaim for “Searching For Bobby Fischer” and the late debut of this novel may explain something of the frantic pace of high-octane narrative propulsion Waitzkin achieves. The story concerns a certain Jim the narrator runs into in a dive bar on Bimini, Bahamas, in 1983. About 55 at that time, handsome, barrel-chested (we are meant to think of photos of Hemingway shirtless about to go fishing for marlin in the deep, blue sea) Jim charms the nameless narrator (clearly a stand-in for Waitzkin) into a great friendship by telling great stories about his successes as a fisherman, as well as his schemes and projects all having to do with selling something. Jim is the salesman without peer, who bounces from project to project never looking back with regret or second thoughts.

Jim and his early partner, Marvin Gesler, “a Jewish guy about 70 pounds overweight,” together can sell anything, from near worthless household toasters and the like to near worthless real estate, relying mostly on pyramid schemes drawing in the naïve and the greedy with the dream of making the big score. Gesler, a man of disgusting habits of personal hygiene, is the idea guy and Jim puts Gesler’s theories into practice. With the inevitable pyramidal collapse, Jim and Gesler simply move on to something else. While along the way the partners gather in tons of money. Explicit comparisons can be made to Bernie Madoff.

The story of Waitzkin’s protagonist is also the story of the narrator’s father and by extension Waitzkin’s own father. These men were salesmen, all of them. Given the overall narrative arc of rise and fall, comparison with “Death of a Salesman” seems inevitable, but somewhat misleading as to the details by which the story is told. There’s more Mamet here than Miller, more intimidation, chicanery, ruthlessness and repeated rebounds, rather than an endless spiral of defeat. The sales tactics here remind one of “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Capable of great callousness, dropping sales allies and mistresses without a second thought, Jim nevertheless stays steadily optimistic. For most of the book the narrator remains as a stenographer, taking pretty much at face value whatever Jim has to say, never really questioning the probability of exaggeration or the possibility of lying. The narrator never quite grapples with the idea that he’s getting a long con.

“The Dream Merchant” is a novel with too many sex scenes: The governing idea is that every successful sales job must end in a sexual as well as a monetary score. Jim is virile into his 80s (he tells us repeatedly). In an early chapter, Jim (already near 80) takes up with an Israeli woman, a 30-year old mother of two small boys, who adores him so thoroughly that she arouses him to near continuous sexual performance, often in the direct presence of the narrator and seemingly put on in part at least for the narrator’s voyeuristic delectation. The most graphic sex writing comes at the front of the book, perhaps to catch the interest of the casual bookstore browser, but the narrator keeps careful accounts of Jim’s sexual prowess throughout. After the first section, the sex writing, formulaic and tired, resembles the kind of middlebrow, soft-core porn available on the bookracks of any Hudson News store at any airport.

In Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim” the narrator Marlow affirms that Jim (no surname) “was one of us.” For all of his distance, mystery, humiliations, failures and possible redemption as a hero, Conrad’s Jim was finally an ordinary British chap. Waitzkin, in “The Dream Merchant,” probably has Conrad in mind as the narrator tells the complicated story of his central character, named simply Jim (also with no surname) suggesting similarly that Jim is “one of us,” an ordinary guy, only one with much more drive and gumption. In broadest outline both books are adventure stories. But that’s not saying much. Unlike Conrad, “The Dream Merchant” tells its story without a bit of self-conscious reflection, without the narrator’s ironic distance acting as skeptical commentary. In consequence it’s just one adventure after another. How much is to be believed? How much is simply the skilled salesman’s line of serial exaggeration? We can’t know.

As in “Lord Jim,” “The Dream Merchant” divides neatly into two sections. There we have Jim fleeing to Patusan, here we have Jim fleeing into the Amazonian jungle to embark on a dangerous gold-mining project. Jim’s disappearing to the jungle is a consequence of having been embezzled out of his latest fortune by his partner, Marvin Gesler. So, flat broke, and with the IRS after him for something like $20 million owed in back taxes, he starts over on the rumor that it’s easy to find gold in the deepest jungle. It turns out to be not so easy. Yet Jim succeeds in extracting a fortune out of the Amazonian dirt. He loses that fortune almost immediately to his second partner, Ramon Vega, who assaults Jim’s mining camp by helicopter, massacring all the workers and absconding with satchels full of gold bars.

Jim’s partners (Gesler and Vega) are the only characters in the book to have last names and both betray him, one by embezzlement and other by mass murder. I have no idea what to do with this detail besides simply to take note of it.

Is this a good book? Probably not. And I wanted so much to like it more than I do, because I like the movie of “Searching for Bobby Fischer” so much. My wish is that the interested reader might revisit the movie, courtesy of Netflix. Without aesthetic grace, the novel has a mind-blowing energy propelling the reader from one episode to the next, up and down, back and forth, jumping around in time and geography. Yet the narrative is surprisingly easy to follow.

This is an accessible book. The reader going along for a sometimes preposterous ride is moved finally to a grudging admiration just by the sheer stuff that gets you to turn one page after the other. For example, in one vivid scene almost at the end of the book we find Jim after Brazil completely impoverished yet again (but only for the moment, because Gesler, after decades, becomes conscience-stricken and is about to return to his former partner half the fortune he embezzled). Always the optimist, Jim strolls hand-in-hand through a Miami shopping mall with the gorgeous, sexually voracious Israeli, Mara, 50 years his junior, entirely happy. Lucky Jim.

The Dream Merchant

By Fred Waitzkin

Thomas Dunne Books/ St. Martin’s Press

296 pages, $24.99.



Stefan Fleischer taught in the English Department at the University at Buffalo for 39 years. He now resides in Houston. ]]> Fri, 17 May 2013 12:56:59 -0400 By Stefan Fleischer

NEWS BOOK REVIEWER

]]> <![CDATA[ Editor’s Choice: The Very Best of Red Smith ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130519/LIFE/130519196/1058
He never wrote a book. Mostly, he wrote sports columns, which is why, says his son Terence Smith in his afterword, he and his pal, racing columnist Joe Palmer, would sit around Palmer’s study – Red with his scotch and soda, Joe with his bourbon and branchwater – and pray “Give us this day our daily plinth.” A plinth, you see, is, as Terence explains, “the base of a column.” Red Smith’s refusal to write a book hasn’t stopped others from writing books about him. The trouble with the legend of sportswriter Red Smith – or any other daily functionary in the journalists’ raffish trade – is that if you collect a lot of his life work in a 500-plus page fiesta like this, you’re seeing it all, plain, wheat and chaff. It’s not just individual lines that can be excised from columns and showcased like great lines from poetry – his reference to a boxer in the ring “being separated from his intellect” or describing Stan Musial getting his 3,000th hit as “a grown man in flannel rompers swinging a stick on a Chicago playground.”

The ruthless truth is that bulk is not Red Smith’s friend here, the way it would be for a writer of more variety of subject (think, for instance, of those 500-plus page omnibuses of John Updike’s nonfiction pieces). It begins with his 1975 reminiscence of buddies Frank Graham and Grantland (“Granny” he called him) Rice. Its end is his farewell column from 1982 in which he said of the athletic ability of jockey “Bill” (we call him Willie) Shoemaker that, after 32 years riding horses, he was “still at 96 pounds and will beat your pants off at golf, tennis or any other game where you’re foolish enough to challenge him.” Not sportswriting, though. That was Red’s game. – Jeff Simon ]]> Fri, 17 May 2013 11:16:25 -0400 <![CDATA[ Acclaimed new novel by Claire Messud ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130519/LIFE/130519197/1058
Like Messud’s celebrated “The Emperor’s Children,” it is a book full of contrasts, particularly between perception and reality – but unlike “The Emperor’s Children,” it dwells strictly within the emotional confines of its narrator, Nora Eldridge, a Cambridge, Mass.-based spinster-schoolteacher who would far rather be a full-time artist.

“The Woman Upstairs” is Nora’s story – quiet in the telling, near deafening in its effect, a chronicle of her infatuation with a sophisticated international couple, Skandar and Sirena Shahid and their small son Reza, a “luminous boy” in Nora’s third-grade class.

Yes, this is the Nora who tells us at the outset that, despite her demeanor, she is no sweet schoolteacher. Instead, she is furious. “How angry am I?” she asks. “You don’t want to know.”

In Nora’s universe, she rants, she is one of many seething women “who have to cede and swerve and step aside, unacknowledged and unadmired and unthanked … But the world should understand … that women like us are not underground … We’re always upstairs. We’re not the madwomen in the attic … We’re the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell … and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound … We’re completely invisible … The question now is how to work it, how to use that invisibility, to make it burn.”

Chilling, no? It is Messud setting the internal stage for a perfect storm of human interaction that will hold our attention to the last word on the last page.

Nora is the triumph here – a woman surprisingly naive for someone engaged in education, especially in Cambridge; a 37-year-old quick to undervalue herself, to set herself up, a willing victim in other words, waiting for life to come to her. So much so, we want to wring her neck. But we don’t. Messud has us in her thrall.

“I always thought I’d live in Paris, Rome, Madrid – at least for a while,” muses Nora (whose late mother called her “Mouse”). “It strikes me now that I didn’t dream of Zanzibar or Papeete or Tashkent: even my fantasy was cautious, a good girl’s fantasy, a blanched almond of a fantasy. Today, even that is enough to clench my fists and curl my toes.”

It is in this fragile and thus dangerous state that Nora meets Sirena and Skandar Shahid, she an Italian artist, up and coming on the international scene; he a Lebanese ethics scholar, a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. The couple is based in Paris but is in the Boston area for a year, with their small son Reza, who – during his early days at Nora’s school – is roughed up by another boy who calls Reza “a terrorist,” a scene that will repeat itself, adding political relevance to Nora’s tale.

Nora falls in love with Reza – “all perfect promise” – then with his mother, and eventually, his father. Along the way, she agrees to share an art studio with Sirena, and, in time, to serve as a frequent sitter for Reza. Her friends, Didi and Esther, a lesbian couple, are skeptical of all this devotion to the Shahids, Didi referring to Sirena as “the Siren.”

“Tell me,” Didi asks. “What is this actually about, for you?”

Nora tells herself it is about art, her art – miniature creations of rooms for her heroines, Emily Dickinson, Alice Neel, Edie Sedgwick, Virginia Woolf … symbolically (think Nora of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”). Messud’s Nora does everything small – tiny dioramas beside Sirena’s gigantic and overdone installation, “Wonderland.” (Skandar will call Nora’s portion of the studio “the elves’ workshop.”)

Months of a heightened state carry Nora here, her thoughts spoon-fed to us via Messud’s achingly fine prose. We may wish to shake Nora but that does not keep us from caring about her, all the time sensing a very real, unknown menace, one of always knowing Nora is riding for a fall.

Most importantly, we believe that, for Nora, her love of each of the Shahids (she treasures them separately, never as a unit) is her reality. She is palpable to us in this, using her friendship with the Shahids as the measure of her self-worth, her validation, her fulfillment.

“It’s not right to say they made me think more highly of myself; perhaps more accurately, that they allowed me to in their wanting,” she confides at one point. “My lifetime secret certainty of specialness, my precious, hidden specialness, was awakened and fed by them, grew insatiable for them, and feared them, too: feared the power they might wield over me, and simply on account of that fear, almost certainly would.”

Like Stewart O’Nan’s “Emily, Alone,” and some of the novels of Anita Brookner and Alison Lurie, “The Woman Upstairs” dwells on an interior plain where all that really transpires is momentous but out of sight.

Messud, we are told, has fashioned the “rantings” of the furious Nora on those of Dostoevsky’s “The Underground Man.” And yes, Nora rants – but Nora is unreliable. We only have her word here – about everything. She tells us she is furious without showing us – for a very long time.

“I will be continent,” she promises after a predictable Christmas Day with her septuagenarian father and maternal aunt. “I will continue. I will not spill into the lives of others, greedily sucking and wanting and needing. I will not. I will ask nothing, of anyone; I’ll just burn, from the inside out, self-immolating like those monks doused in gasoline.”

The Shahids have gone to Paris for the holidays, Nora unsure whether they will be returning, when she remembers a story from her college days – Chekhov’s “The Black Monk.”

“The black winter of my second year, assailed by doubt at not having gone to art school, I’d read it over and over,” she says, recounting the story “about a man who imagines himself visited by a ghostly monk, with whom he has life’s vital conversations, about creativity, and greatness, and the meaning of existence.

“The monk assures him of his importance, of his exceptional talents. Then he realizes the monk isn’t real; that he himself must be mad. But how much better to be mad in the company of the monk, than to be sane, and constrained in his aspirations, and alone. And mediocre. That, worst of all, is what he has to acknowledge, when his family forces him into clarity: that he’s nothing special at all.”

If this is Nora’s own moment of clarity, it is short-lived, saved for a rainy day (which will come). For the Shahids reappear, sweeping her into their fold once more – a way of Messud preparing us for her novel’s end – the what of it not a surprise, but the how shocking.

There is only a small story here, but a very large picture, all told in Messud’s confident, encompassing prose. When, at last, she gives Nora wings of her own – we can attest to the fact that they are hard-earned. Fly, Nora, fly!

FICTION

The Woman Upstairs

By Claire Messud

Knopf

253 pages, $25.95



Karen Brady is a retired Buffalo News columnist. ]]> Fri, 17 May 2013 11:16:22 -0400 By Karen Brady

NEWS BOOK REVIEWER

]]> <![CDATA[ Poem of the Week by Ryki Zuckerman ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130519/LIFE/130519198/1058


By Ryki Zuckerman



many have searched

for signs from above

while stretched out on lawngrass

or meadow field, looking up,

arms folded under their downy heads,



waiting for the gray elephant to show itself,

or the white cat,

(ah, my dearest companion

who made me wheeze) –

the cat you captured

forever in white alabaster.



but how will you

come to me, mother?

how will you make

your presence known?



will you come as a pale bird

poised on a branch

with your song faint, fading?



will you move in the air,

a slight breeze

jostling my hair,

a tender gust,



or will you announce yourself

with claps of thunder,

raining down on me

so that my own tears

are washed away?



RYKI ZUCKERMAN will read from her new poetry collection “Looking for Bora Bora” (Saddle Road Press) at 7 p.m. Thursday at Talking Leaves Books, 3158 Main St. A Buffalo-based artist, educator, poet, literary event organizer and longtime co-editor of Earth’s Daughters magazine, she is currently the coordinator and host of both Earth’s Daughters Gray Hair reading series and the Crane Branch Library’s Wordflight reading series. ]]> Fri, 17 May 2013 11:14:28 -0400 <![CDATA[ Poetry and Literature Calendar: May 19-25 ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130519/LIFE/130519199/1058
Tuesday, 7 p.m.: Circleformance Series reading featuring poets Gene Grabiner and Michael Steffen. Meridian West Gallery, 1209 Hertel Ave. $5.

Wednesday, 6 p.m.: “Writing the Unknown,” a conversation with award-winning fiction writer Sarah Gerkensmeyer, author of the story collection “What You Are Now Enjoying,” the 2013 winner of the Autumn House Fiction Prize. Gerkensmeyer teaches creative writing at SUNY Fredonia State. The event will be followed by a reading and book signing at 7 p.m. Talking Leaves Books, 3158 Main St.

Wednesday, 6:15 P.M.: Spotlight on Youth: Open format performance showcase for Western New York area young artists, age 12 to 21. Shea’s Smith Theatre, 658 Main St. Call Just Buffalo at 832-5400.

Thursday, 7 p.m.: Reading and book signing featuring Ryki Zuckerman, author of the recently published poetry collection “Looking for Bora Bora” (Saddle Road Press). A Buffalo-based artist, educator, poet, literary event organizer and longtime co-editor of Earth’s Daughters magazine, Zuckerman is currently the coordinator and host of both Earth’s Daughters Gray Hair readings series and the Crane Branch Library’s Wordflight reading series. Talking Leaves Books, 3158 Main St.

Friday, 7 p.m.: Fourth Friday Poetry Series reading featuring poet George Georgakis, organizer and host of the Tangential Readings Series at Rust Belt Books. Additional reading slots available. Dog Ears Bookstore, 688 Abbott Road. $3. ]]> Fri, 17 May 2013 11:13:35 -0400 <![CDATA[ Best sellers: May 19 ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130519/LIFE/130519200/1058
1. Dead Ever After. Charlaine Harris.

Ace, $27.95

2. 12th of Never. Patterson/Paetro.

Little Brown, $27.99

3. Silken Prey. John Sandford.

Putnam, $27.95

4. The Hit. David Baldacci.

Grand Central, $27.99

5. A Step of Faith.

Richard Paul Evans, Simon & Schuster, $19.99

6. Whiskey Beach. Nora Roberts.

Putnam, $27.95

7. A Delicate Truth. John LeCarre.

Viking, $28.95

8. Daddy’s Gone a Hunting.

Mary Higgins Clark.

9. Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland. Ace Atkins.

Putnam, $26.95

10. Gone Girl. Gillian Flynn.

Crown, $25

NONFICTION

1. Happy, Happy, Happy. Phil Robertson.

Howard Books. $24.99

2. Lean In. Sheryl Sandberg.

Knopf, $24.95

3. Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls.

David Sedaris. Little, Brown, $25.99

4. The Duck Commander Family.

Willie & Korie Robertson.

Howard Books, $23.99

5. Waiting to Be Heard. Amanda Knox.

Harper, $28.90

6. Cooked. Michael Pollan.

Penguin, $27.95

7. It’s All Good. Gwyneth Paltrow.

Grand Central, $32

8. Keep It Pithy. Bill O’Reilly.

Crown Archetype, $21.99

9. Dad Is Fat. Jim Gaffigan.

Crown Archetype, $25

10. The Unstoppables.

Bill Schley. Wiley, $24.95 ]]> Fri, 17 May 2013 11:13:15 -0400 <![CDATA[ Book in Brief: New ‘W.A.R.P.’ series from Eoin Colfer ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130519/LIFE/130519201/1058
W.A.R.P. Book 1: The Reluctant Assassin by Eoin Colfer; Disney-Hyperion, 341 pages, $17.99 ages 12 and up.

...

The author of the “Artemis Fowl” series offers the first installment of a high-octane time travel adventure, from the smelly back alleys of Victorian London, to the present day. The premise is this: What if the FBI decided to change the witness protection program to the Witness Anonymous Relocation Program (W.A.R.P.), sending witnesses back in time with FBI agents for protection? What kind of havoc could such witnesses wreak in the past, if FBI agents were no longer on guard? Confined? Riley is a teen in Victorian London, orphaned as a baby, and apprenticed to Garrick, an illusionist and killer known as the Red Glove. When Garrick’s latest victim turns out to be a scientist from the future, Garrick and Riley are sucked back through the wormhole to the present where they encounter a 17-year-old FBI agent named Chevron Savano. Riley and Chevron must evade Garrick, who has become even more fearsome after acquiring the full grasp of all modern science and technology during his trip through the wormhole. But Garrick knows the real advantage will be returning to his own time, with modern weapons, where no one will be able to stop him. Colfer offers vibrant detail of Victorian London, along with larger-than-life personalities, from Garrick to the Victorian-era mob boss Otto Malarkey with his crew of Battering Rams, to the sniveling Tibor Charismo in his mansion. The pairing of 14-year-old Riley and 17-year-old Chevron is inspired and sure to make this series appeal to both male and female readers.

– Jean Westmoore

]]> Fri, 17 May 2013 11:13:08 -0400 <![CDATA[ Twain author will appear in Larkin Square writers series ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130518/CITYANDREGION/130519060/1058
Leslie Zemsky, who describes herself as “director of fun” at Larkin Square, calls the event “a fun twist on the typical book talk.”

The talk is set for the Filling Station, 745 Seneca St., but during previous talks in fine weather, audiences have spilled out into the open areas, settling in comfortable chairs outside, including seating areas in the adjoining boardwalk. The event is free and open to all, with light food and drinks sold inside the Filling Station.

The series, held in partnership with Talking Leaves Books, spotlights local authors and those who have written works of interest to local people. A May 6 talk by Lauren Belfer, author of “City of Light,” drew more than 300 people, dozens of whom lined up afterward to have her sign their books.

In “Scribblin’ for a Livin’,” Reigstad uses a variety of primary sources to prove that the 18 months Twain spent in Buffalo in 1869 and 1870, while fraught with personal difficulties at the end, was not the grim, unproductive period other biographers have described.

The book, published by Prometheus Books, will be sold at the event.

“The life of Mark Twain in Buffalo is such a fascinating part of our city’s history, and Thomas approaches it with great passion and research,” said Zemsky. “We’re excited to welcome Thomas to Larkin Square for what will surely be a fun and colorful discussion.”

The Larkin Square Author Series will continue on June 11 with Ania Szado, author of “Studio Saint-Ex” and “Beginning of Was.”

For more information about Larkin Square and the series, go to www.larkinsquare.com.



email: aneville@buffnews.com ]]> Sat, 18 May 2013 19:10:58 -0400 Anne Neville
]]> <![CDATA[ Poetry & Literature Calendar: May 12-18 ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130512/LIFE/130519926/1058 :30 P.M.: Wordflight Series reading featuring Jennifer Attaway and Marjorie Norris. Attaway is an assistant professor of English at Empire State College, author of the critical study “Cyborg Bodies and Digitized Desires: Posthumanity in Philip K. Dick” and co-host of the monthly Empire State College/Appletree Campus reading series. Norris is the author of the poetry collections “Two Suns, Two Moons” and “Resilience” (both published by Aventine Press) and “Woodland Heart” published by The Writer’s Den Press. The recipient of the Greensboro Poetry Award in 2004 and a former Just Buffalo Writer-in-Residence, she has edited an anthology of AIDS voices (“Full Circle”) and a community anthology (“Trees of Surprise”) in response to Buffalo’s “October Surprise” snowstorm of 2006. Additional reading slots available. Crane Branch Library, 633 Elmwood Ave. (upstairs).

Wednesday, 7 p.m.: Reading and book signing with Lorna MacDonald Czarnota, the Buffalo-based writer, storyteller, and author of a debut novel “Breadline Blue” (Little Creek Press), a young boy’s coming-of-age story set in the Depression Era . Talking Leaves Books, 3158 Main St.

Wednesday, 7:30 P.M.: The Screening Room Series reading featuring award-winning Buffalo-based storyteller, educator and author Karima Amin, co-founder of Spin-A-Story Tellers of WNY, Tradition Keepers: Black Storytellers of WNY, and The Daughters of Creative Sound. Additional reading slots available. Northtown Plaza Business Center, 3131 Sheridan Drive, Amherst. $2.

Thursday, 7 p.m.: Reading and book signing by Steve Ulfelder, Edgar Award-nominated mystery novelist and author of the newly released “Shotgun Lullaby” (Minotaur Books), his third novel featuring auto mechanic and “troubleshooting” protagonist Conway Sax. Talking Leaves Books, 3158 Main St. ]]> Fri, 10 May 2013 12:52:32 -0400