HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: MR. FOX BY HELEN OYEYEMI

  When  I finished Helen Oyeyemi's novel, I immediately turned back to the opening chapter. It wasn't that I had so enjoyed it that I planned to read the whole thing over. I was just trying, although it had been only a matter of a couple of days, to remember how on earth this thing had begun.

In the first chapter, Mr. St. John Fox, who despite his highflown name appears to be the successful author of violent potboilers, receives a visit from Mary Foxe. When he hears her come in, he assumes at first it must be his wife Daphne, a woman we will learn later spends much of her time in her room, depressed and suicidal. Mr. Fox has not seen Mary for six or seven years. He tells her he loves her. They have a brief, odd conversation which ends when Mary says, "You don't love me. You love that." She bares her breasts, lifts her dress up over her crotch, pulls her hair, and slaps herself on the face.

How could I have forgotten such an opening? In my defense I can only say that a lot happens in Oyeyemi's brief novel. In the next pages, Mary appears as an importunate fan and fledgling writer vying for Mr. Fox's attention in an exchange of letters dated 1936. There is another narrative thread involving Mr. Fox and Daphne. There are interpolated stories, apparently the work of Mr. Fox, although a couple may be Mary's and some may appear just for effect. And Mary, by the way, is not a real human being. She is Mr. Fox's muse, a constant cause of Daphne's jealousy, at least until they get to know one another toward the end of the novel.

Novel is probably not the right word here. This is imaginative writing of a very high order, with intertwined themes that may appear as either moments in the characters' lives or the plot lines of additional stories. Animals and spirits interact with the characters in fanciful if dangerous ways. World War One is a memory for some of the characters and World War Two is approaching. Mr. Fox either loves or is obsessed with Mary, and even though he treats her badly he loves his wife as well. Or he thinks he does, He may just be worried he might lose her. I believe her suicide only occurs in one of the "fictional" narratives.

This is not a book for readers fond of narrative closure. You can check out other reader reviews for confirmation. I am with those who wonder just what all this adds up to and what exactly has happened by the end of the story. But Helen Oyeyemi writes a kind of fiction where we have to assume that whatever happens on the page, happens.

(Looking over this review, I think I was overwhelmed by this book. For a more thoughtful, intelligent review, look here )

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: CENTURIES AGO AND VERY FAST by Rebecca Ore

Yes, it is a terrible cover

I cringe at author events when some one in the audience asks, Where do you get your ideas? But when I read what Ore's novel, or series of linked stories, was going to be about, I admit I wondered, How does someone think up this stuff?

Vel is a 15,000 year old man who never ages past the prime of his young manhood. He is not immortal, since he could die of an injury or by violence, but except for growing a new set of teeth every century or so, he stays both in excellent shape and immune to disease. He is also a traveler in time and space, a skill he discovered by accident but that has proved handy over the millennia. While other clans are starving during hard times in the Pleistoscene, he can run out for pizza or kill an auroch. In 18th century London, he advises his relatives who run the antique business that supports the family: Buy Hogarth. Invest in woolen mills. Snatch up copies of Gulliver's Travels, the anonymous author is really Jonathan Swift.

And he is gay. HIs homosexuality is accepted by his clan. It is neither unusual nor of particular interest. Men like Vel cut down on the competition for women, and Vel and those like him can both hunt with the men and care for children who might otherwise we be strangled at birth as that one-too-many child for a still nursing mother.

As for his longevity -- most of the clan die young so there are not many elders to comment on Vel's preternatural youth. For a time at least. And for the first 13,000 or more years of his life, the fact that he is "magic" is considered a blessing by his clan. Remember those take out pizzas and fresh auroch steaks. And I admire Ore for not attempting to explain her absurd but enjoyable premise. What explanation would not be either hopelessly convoluted or silly. And just slow things down. How many genre writers today would see Vel as the potential protagonist of a series of bloated 800 page novels? Ore wraps things up in 150 pages.

The narrative incorporates mammoth hunts, the Stonewall riots, sodomy laws in 18th century London, various brief episodes from other time periods, and Vel's present-day, long-term relationship with Thomas, a local policeman in Somerset, where Vel's family maintains an ancestral home. Some of the story concerns the practicalities of Vel's situation -- he has realized that he can only reappear as his own nephew so many times and thank God New Jersey, in the 1960's doesn't require photo I.D.'s for a driver's license. Ore can be very funny with other almost throwaway details, such as Vel's introduction of modern-day lube to medieval sodomites. They are too pleased to ask questions

But the central narrative of Vel's relationship with Thomas is sexually robust and realistic, as Thomas comes to terms with the fact that he will age while Vel stays young. "..I wanted him to remember me in 10,000 years," Thomas confesses. But he realizes that Vel must have worked out the mechanism for moving on to other lovers when those times arise. The final scene, involving Thomas's death, is moving and complex.

In a brief afterwards, Ore describes the book as a form of slash fiction, that branch of fan fiction that imagines same sex relations between established characters; i.e., Capt. Kirk/Mr. Spock (boring), Starsky/Hutch (who hadn't already guessed?). She says that she did not want to go the popular route of starting a YA series, and since she had written some pornography in the past, this story line presented itself. (Had some of the sex scenes here been her first foray into pornography, she would have proven herself a natural at it.)

But this is not slash fiction proper. These are not established characters and the millennia-spanning time frame places the book in another genre. I am not sure what that genre might be, but Ore has made it her own. She titles her afterwards, "Slash is for Girls," and her publisher is a feminist press from Seattle . Apparently the market for slash fiction is girls, and it is unlikely that straight male readers are going to respond too enthusiastically to the more graphic moments in this book. (See other reader reviews for further details.) But in Centuries Ago and Very Fast Ore plays an excellent game of physical detail and heady ideas. It deserves a wide audience.

(Follow the Highly Recommended label for more highly recommended reading.)

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: IF YOU WON'T READ THEN WHY SHOULD I WRITE by Jarret Kobek

Vince Neil

This slender black paperback comes with no forward, preface, introduction, or author's note. There is a table of contents to let you know that what is on its way involves a panoply of America's most excruciating media whores, the actors, musicians, and TMZ regulars who trot their anything but private lives before the cameras of paparazzi, reality TV producers, and their friends iPhones. This is the leaked sex tape as burgeoning art form, the drug-fueled or drunken tirade as the spoken word art of the 21st century. Narrow black inserts list the featured celebrity's legal history, and in case you have trouble keeping up incident by incident a final section analyzes and graphs the sorry state of the American justice system when it comes handling those who drink and drug their way into the courtroom on charges ranging from street brawls to vehicular homicide.

Laurence Fishburne's Daughter

I am old enough not to know who some of these people are, but I was equally intrigued by the fact that I already knew so much about so many of them. They may sound like idiots, they probably are idiots, but similar transcriptions of You Tube tapes of solid middle class Americans watching their young children or pets play cute for the camera would probably be just as incoherent and inane. In such cases, however, I assume their would be fewer run ins with the law

Amy Fisher Today

Jason Shaw: A Model

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: FROM THE MOUTH OF THE WHALE by Sjon

Sjon's first novel to be translated into English was The Blue Fox. It was a spare eighty pages long and took the author two years to write. In an interview he said of the process

The first year was more or less spent researching 19th century Iceland and reading about the different subjects that make up the story, such as fox hunting, accidents at sea, avalanches, burial rites, the care or abuse of mentally handicapped people, opium smoking, cravats and bow-ties (late Byronesque or otherwise).

Sjon, who is also an award winning lyricist, can pack a lot into a narrative.The Blue Fox involves an elaborately worked out revenge and ends with a priest freezing to death while debating a dead fox on the diabolical nature of electricity.

Compared to The Blue Fox, this second novel is long at 250 pages. A list of topics addressed in From the Mouth of the Whale would include eclipses, natural history, the Icelandic trade in unicorn horns, exorcism, toxic ignorance and married love. Jonas Palmason, known as "The Learned," receives an eccentric education from his father's fragmented library, but in 17th Iceland it makes him both admired and shunned in the communities where he lives. Although his medicine is learned from books, as a child he becomes expert in diagnosing women's ailments by feeling their bodies under their clothes. They like this more than they can admit. He can draw anatomical charts and maps, both of which are in high demand, but the Protestant reformers that have taken over the land find cause to brand him a witch for the research he does into the ancient customs of Iceland. For the rest of his life, he will be either on the run or imprisoned or living among the educated classes of Denmark as an admired equal. But for the most part he will suffer at the hands of those who fear his knowledge, knowledge that is very much a part of his time. The novel is interspersed with his comments on natural history, and modern readers will find them to be equal parts scientific observation and folklore. 
Jonas narrates the story from his final island prison. He has returned from Denmark expecting all charges against him to be dropped, only to find himself again in the hands of his enemies. When they agree to send him back to the island rather than to a dungeon, he looks forward finding his wife waiting for him there. Instead he finds only her bones. The story of their first meeting, which occurs during a funeral interrupted by an eclipse, captures the innate ignorance and savageness of their society.

I was as bewldered as the dogs that howled, the cats that hissed, the ravens that crawled along the ground, the cows that wandered dazed in the fields. I was as unfortunate as the rest, as unmanned by the dread of what catastrophe this eclipse might bring, what terrible tidings it might portend, what loss of life, what pestilence would now wash up from the sea on to our rock, what heresies, what insanity; indeed, I was as confounded as those that ran weeping round the yard or pressed their faces to the muddy paving slabs, tore off their clothes and any hair they could get hold of, many vomiting in mid-prayer...[T]hree men burst out of the front door carrying the old man's body. They swung the corpse's mottled limbs back and forth until it appeared to be raising its wizened arms to heaven...It did not take a great physician to realise that the old man was as thoroughly dead as he had been but a short time before. People now began to crowd around the threesome with their pathetic puppet...lifting it so it appeared to be proceeding in little hops to its intended destination, which was the roof of the living quarters.

During this event Sigridur, Jonas's future wife, explains the means of predicting eclipses, science she has worked out for herself through observation and a natural inclination for math. They are in love.

The chirping of small birds was stilled, the baying of the dogs was silenced, the people on the turf roof ceased shaking the corpse, a hush descended on the countryside and I felt suddenly cold. High above the Earth the disc of the moon completed its shape on the orb of the sun and in the same instant something was completed inside me. Neither Sigridur nor I looked up when the gable gave way with a loud crack beneath the weight of the corpse-bearers.

Jonas's story will also involve the successful exorcism of an angry ghost and the tragic tale of massacred Basque whalers at the hands of ingnorent Icelandic villagers manipulated by their venal community leaders. It's hard to imagine that Sjon will become a beloved voice of Icelanders, but his unflinching vision of meanness and ignorance goes beyond a critique of his homeland's history. He opens his novel with a scene placed in heaven. Lucifer has returned from a successful hunt to find the heavenly household in disarray.

...the stench that now tainted the air in His palace was the stench of blood and urine, sweat and sperm, mucus and grease...I looked at the Father, who was lounging at ease on his throne...He examined something small in His palm...there you lay in His hand, with your knees tucked under your chin, breathing so fast and so feebly that you quivered like the pectoral fin of a minnow...the Father...addressed me in an affable but commanding tone..."Lucifer, behold Man! You must bow down before him like your brothers..." I looked at you a second time and in that instant you released a stream of slimy black faeces. Quick as lightning, you shoved your hand under your buttocks, fetched a fistful of whatever you found there, and raised it to your mouth.

I've noticed than when I really like something, I tend to quote a lot.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: REDEMPTION IN INDIGO by Karen Lord.

I am inclined to quote extensively from Lord's novel in this review. Her opening paragraph establishes a voice that will do a great sorting out of her potential readers.

A rival of mine once complained that my stories begin awkwardly and end untidily. I am willing to admit to many faults, but I will not burden my conscious with that one. All my tales are true, drawn from life, and a life story is not a tidy thing. It is a half-tamed horse that you seize on the run and ride with knees and teeth clenched, and then you regretfully slip off as gently and safely as you can, always wondering if you could have gone a few metres more.

Thus I seize this tale, starting with a hot afternoon in the town or Erria...

Her narrator speaks to the reader with the omniscience and wit of Henry Fielding translated into the imagery and diction of a oral teller of folk tales. And notice that the complaint has come from a "rival" and not a "friend." The narrator who is willing to jump onto a half-trained horse does not hesitate to defend her position, and she states absolutely that all her tales are drawn from life before embarking on a story that will involve talking spiders, tricksters, psychic communication, and djombi, undying beings that mess constantly, for good or ill, in the concerns of humans.

That first talking spider could be the next challenge for many readers. I am no fan of full blown magic realism, novels hundreds of pages long with butterflies flocking from a character's ears or tropical snowfalls following the death of someone's great grandmother. (I think I concocted both those incidents on the spot here.) But Lord's short novel stays true to the spirit of folk tales where spider's absolutely hang out in bars and contract with shady characters for less than reputable services. Where a band of dissident djombi pass the Chaos Stick onto Paama, Lord's heroine who is a runaway wife, excellent cook, and brave but never foolishly so.

Lord lives in Barbados, but she bases the early scenes of her novel on a Sengalese folk tale, and the geography throughout the book is more African than Caribbean in scale. Paama has left her absurd, gluttonous husband Asinge and returned to her parents house. After two years Ansige follows her, craving her cooking which is the only thing that comes close to satisfying his abnormal appetite. When most of his servants, disgusted by his childish and distasteful habits, abandon him, he unfortunately enlists the aid of a trickster who will see to it that all his behavior in his wife's family's village will humiliate him and shame him back to his home.

This preamble is a way of certain djombi to study Paama's behavior and decide that she is in fact worthy of maintaining the Chaos Stick they have stolen from the indigo lord who has controlled it for -- well, it's hard to say for how long when dealing with eternal beings who also time travel. The indigo lord, disguised as a traveling merchant, finds Paama and her family and at the end of an elaborate dinner carries her into his world, which is her world minus the boundaries of space and time. The indigo lord is a magnificent creation. He is arrogant and seductive, apparently unfazed by the fate of lovers in plague-stricken city and dryly witty about a marauding army destroyed by a flood after an unprovoked attack on a innocent city. Surveying the carnage, he says, "I might have gotten a little carried away." He is angered and hurt that the Chaos Stick, his reason for existing, has been taken from him. I am not clear on how irresponsibly he might have wielded it but he is clearly devastated and also outraged that he cannot simply snatch it back. Getting it back will entail negotiations with Paama, who is neither a fool nor a coward. There are lessons to be learned on both sides, and the narrator states at one point that she is opposed to those who think stories should not have morals.

This is a story about the responsible use of power even given the overwhelming influence of chance of human life -- a big theme that fits neatly within this 200 page tale as it ever could in a political novel several times the length. While Lord's characters, both undying and human, learn to question every aspect of their realities, she is confidently riding her half-trained horse, never losing the track of her story while keeping an eye on her readers. In one scene a character talks to a village storyteller about his profession. His answer could be Lord once again stating her goals and narrative technique.

"I am a storyteller. I travel to collect stories, and I return to tell the stories of one place to the people of another. That is the important part of the trade. You must never tell people their own stories. They have no interest in them, or they think they can tell them better themselves. Give them a stranger's life, and they are content."

YOU SHOULD BE READING A RICHARD STARK NOVEL RIGHT NOW

I love this is the "Martini Edition"
I think Parker drinks whiskey.
Maybe he likes to eat the martini glasses

I am not pretending that I have made some great discovery here. Stark's fans are, I would hope, in the millions. Here are links to the three I have read.

The Outfit

The Jugger

Comback

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: I AM A VERY PRODUCTIVE ENTREPRENEUR by Mathias SvalinaR

If some one were to tell me, "I am an entrepreneur," I would place that person somewhere on a continuum that swung from chronically unemployed to shifty to the outright criminal. Because really, who would say that? Maybe an uncle, your mother's brother, who is always hitting your own father up for investment capital. Money that will never be seen again. 

When I picked up Mathias Svalina's slender volume I am a Very Productive Entrepreneur, I had all those prejudices firmly in place. I expected amusing anecdotes about a perpetual loser, an expectation reinforced when I saw that each brief entry began with the statement, "I started this one business..." But I was wrong about Svalina's undertakings and his themes. Some of Svalina's entrepreneurial schemes are outrageously impossible -- his first involves putting padlocks on clouds. Some cater to our vanities, like his proposal to build a skyscraper in his client's exact semblance. There is the occasional, peculiar act of kindness: one company leaves long blonde hairs on the pillows of bachelors. Most often, from the initial proposal, i.e., "I started this one business that released dangerous animals into quiet suburban neighborhoods," he takes the reader in a few hundred words into unexpected and often unsettling territory. He proposes to retrofit your memories with pilot lights, so they will stay lit even when you are on vacation, when you are asleep, or when your loved one has been dead for so long junk mail no longer arrives in his name.

Svalina's entrepreneurial work takes place in a sorrowful world that continues to promise endless possibilities. In this world he is both the eternal optimist and the man who's seen it all. The one thing he is not, ever, is the voice of reason. He is the voice of imagination, which offers the only possible redemption for those of us who know that the voices of doomed lovers just may end up on old dollar bills eventually so crumpled that vending machines reject them.


(Some one has already asked me how on earth I stumbled across this book. What I stumbled across was the publisher,  Mud Luscious Press. They were bringing out a new book by a favorite author, Grim Tales by Norman Lock. When I went to their site to order it, I signed up for a season of their books. You should try both the press and the season subscription (if still offered.) You get lots of cool add-ons with each book -- bookmarks that contain brief stories, stories designed to fit onto postage-stamp-sized cards, and stapled pamphlets of other new writers.  Mud Luscious Press )

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: NOISE, by Darin Bradley

Without realizing it, Hiram and Levi had been in training for the Collapse most of their lives. They learned lessons in shop class, Boy Scouts, Renaissance Fairs, and all night sessions of Dungeons and Dragons. The began to receive instruction and train in earnest after television went all digital. On the unmonitored analog channels, 'Casters began sending out coded messages buried in the static, saying what to expect and how to prepare. Other messages were hidden in the wild style graffiti covering the walls of their college town somewhere in North Texas. When the Collapse occurred, Hiram and Levi would be among the prepared. The 'Casts had helped them assemble The Book, a sort of army training manuel for the survival of your Group. Following instructions Hiram and Levi already have established their Place in the country and stocked it with Salvage, i.e. stolen stuff. They have planned an escape route.

I was reading Noise on Black Friday. I took a break after about fifty pages, turned on the computer to check email, and saw first thing the videos of ambulances driving the fallen away from Best Buys in Colorado. Then I read the story of the woman at the California Wall Mart who pepper sprayed her fellow shoppers to protect her xbox console. And all morning I had thought I was reading a novel.

What Hiram and Levi have been learning, what they have assembled in The Book, are lessons in ruthlessness. They will not be victims. They will take advantage of chaos. They will regard all those outside their Group as enemies, and they will neutralize them when necessary. They neutralize some unsuspecting National Guardsmen who have been called in to discourage the turmoil breaking out in malls and on the campus. They steal the NG's Humvee with its 50 caliber machine gun. It comes in handy when dealing with disgruntled suburban males who don't like the look of what's going on. Hiram and Levi pick up some followers before their escape from the city, but this crowd, only partially trained in the disciplines of the 'Casts, prove to be a mixed blessing. When one thirteen year old is caught trying to escape -- he wants to go home to his parents across town -- he is tied to a porch railing, judged, and neutralized. The Group has done the right thing. The kid knew too much.

Noise is an unsettling read. It follows its relentless logic for just 200 pages and gets the survivors of Hiram and Levi's group to their Place of safety. I am one of those movie watchers who always wonder why characters hit guards and bad guys over the head instead of killing, I mean, neutralizing them, but I also know there is always payback time. Much of what is in The Book makes an awful sort of sense, given the situation. But nobody's long-term prospects look good.

Get the message?

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: THE BALLAD OF PECKHAM RYE by Muriel Spark

Dougal Douglas, or Douglas Dougal depending upon when and on what side of town you meet him, is a Scottish devil. He offers to let most anyone feel the nubs of his horns buried in his curly red hair. The good working-class citizens of Peckham Rye, a South London suburb where people speak with distaste of any need to "cross the river," don't know quite what to make of Dougal or his nubby horns. If he is not a devil he is certainly a rascal, a young man who cons his way into local industry as an "arts man," a position recommended by progressive minded politicians who think if only workers could expand their minds they might also be less inclined to absenteeism. Dougal takes this position at two competing firms, hence the name change, and sets about his "human research" that assures he seldom darkens either of his offices. Instead he makes friends all over Peckham, which means, in effect, he sets about ruining several peoples' lives.

When Spark published her novel in 1960, Peckham Rye was a shining example of British pettiness and tedium. During the next decades it would become one of the highest crime districts in London, and hints of violence among discontented youth run throughout the novel. For her characters the sophisticated city across the river was equally a lure and a object of distrust. They like their quiet life in Peckham Rye, which retains some of its pre-suburban village character. They are sitting ducks for Dougal's freewheeling, mayhem-inducing charades. By the time the Scotsman feels its time to leave, he has left broken hearts, cancelled weddings, and crimes of passion in his wake.

Spark tells her story in an economical 140 pages.

I like to think that in the picture below she is writing the scene that involves murder by corkscrew.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS by Muriel Spark

The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first Muriel Spark novel I have read, and I have always had the notion that she was an author one read entirely, not just a random novel here and there. But The Girls of Slender Means is a completely satisfying three hours' read. Spark had me from the first paragraph, and when the novel was over, the incidents of death, murder, and insanity seemed all of a piece with the sort of girls' boarding house comedy I associate with something along the lines of Stage Door.

The setting is London, 1945, after the war in Europe but with VJ day still in the future. Ration cards for everything from powdered milk to clothing are tradable commodities, and bombed-out ruins litter the urban landscape. It was a time, Spark says, when "all the nice people of England were poor, allowing for exceptions." The May of Teck Club stands opposite Kensington Gardens and provides a home for the daughter of country clerics and other respectable middle-class families who must find work after the war. Exactly what many of the young women do remains vague, but they date a great deal, the youngest settling for RAF pilots and the more mature girls setting their eyes on American officers.

Spark's voice provides insights and asides that are remorseless rather than cruel. The action, such as it is, builds towards the kind of flamboyant set piece Alfred Hitchcock favored in his films of the 1940's. The denouement, which Spark intersperses throughout the book starting on about page three, takes the reader out of the closed-in world of the May of Teck Club and into the 1960's.


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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: TROPIC MOON, by Georges Simenon

Tropic Moon by Georges Simenon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sex, murder, privilege, racism, and all the nastiness of French Colonial rule in Gabon circa 1930. The only thing that could make this book more satisfying would be if it was only 130 pages long. Wait -- it is 130 boozy, feverish pages long. A perfect afternoon read.


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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: DIRTY SNOW by Georges Simenon

Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Not often can you say of a novel's protagonist that he amounts to nothing more than a human shit stain. Frank Friedmaier is a nineteen-year-old, fledgling career criminal living in an unnamed city in Nazi occupied France. In the opening scene he commits his first murder, an act he feels that like losing his virginity he needs to get out of the way. Other crimes and one repulsive act of betrayal follow, but what ties the reader to the book is Frank's abhorrent life and the convincing picture of life under occupation Simenon paints. Frank's mother runs a brothel, a solid business paid for in cash and favors. While their neighbors suffer from near starvation and the lack of heat during the dead of winter, the Friedmaier's have coal, real coffee, and decent clothes. They are despised, and in Frank's case, feared. Frank misreads all this as a form of respect from people he finds beneath him. Although the story doesn't get this far, the Friedmaier's are the type of people who will be murdered by their neighbors after the war. But Frank is living the good life until there comes the inevitable knock on the door.

I have never read Simenon because the Maigret novels never appealed to me. I lumped them together, unfairly I am certain, with Agatha Christie's Poirot or any of the other long running, mid-twentieth-century detective series. Dirty Snow is one of Simenon's noir titles and among the darkest novels I have ever read. NYRB has issued several of these Simenon novels in classy paperback editions that look great and feel good in your hands as  you read. You may want to have a warm bath ready for after you finish.



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BOOK REVIEW: A BRIEF ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MODERN MAGIC by Micahel Stewart

A Brief Encyclopedia of Modern Magic by Michael Stewart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Stewart's A Brief History of Modern Magic is less a chapbook than it is a pamphlet, the size of those still found racked in the foyers of Baptist church's. It might be fun to slip a few of these into the racks in Baptist churches.

In thirty pages Stewart presents brief biographies of imaginary magicians, a guide to some of the language of magic, and a series of Tricks You Can Do At Home. Don't try them. The instructions for cutting a woman in half are fairly straightforward, "..the trick," Stewart says, "is in putting her back together."

When possible, Stewart gives the birth and death dates of his magicians. Some practiced in the late 19th and early 20th century, other may still be practicing now. Sometimes the information is incomplete: Jones, William (1938 - soon?) A few have intersecting lives, and they all exist on the shadier side of show business. Some may have been capable of genuine magic, but then there is Rhodes, Tammy (1906 - 1984) "Skill, unfortunately, is not among the requirements to become a magician. Tammy is perhaps the best example of this."

Photographs that could be lifted from a mid 20th century magician's manual illustrate the text, and Stewart's prose never strays from the tone you'd expect in a layman's book on this subject. It's just that every so often what he has to say is so outrageous. He even has one of his imaginary magicians, now a dissappointed failure who plays bridge with his wife, contribute the prologue.


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BOOK REVIEW: HIEROGLYPHICS by Michael Stewart

The Hieroglyphics by Michael Stewart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Harapollo Niliacus wrote his interpretations of Egyptian hieroglyphics during the fifth century CE. Some commentators think Harapollo might have been a pagan holdout in a rapidly Christianizing world, but in any event he knew very little about hieroglyphics. He ascribed moralizing meanings to the images, a practice that would remain popular into the Renaissance. You can read his work on the internet.

Michael Stewart has taken Harapollo's organization and his fallacious interpretations and entered into a dialog with the ancient writer. Stewart covers the seventy glyphs described in Harapollo's Book I, borrowing freely from the original text, bringing in semi-historical elements from the Old Testament, and creating an elliptical vision of his own society with its rituals, philosophy, and mores. The result is mesmerizing, most often hovering on the verge of revelations that would bring sharper focus to the place where Stewart has deposited us. The language is as matter-of-fact as dictionary entries, with an occasional, effective jolt of obscenity.

I usually hate it when reviewers say they look forward to "going back to [insert title here] frequently," because I never see much sense to that. But I had to go back to Hieroglyphics just to write the short review and enjoyed the experience. Rereading the book piecemeal, or even front to back, is not going to reveal some secret key to its meaning, but Stewart's world, wherever and whenever it is, remains a good place to poke around.


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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: SLOW CHOCOLATE AUTOPSY by Iain Slinclair

Slow Chocolate Autopsy by Iain Sinclair
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sinclair's subtitle is Incidents from the Notorious Career of Norton, Prisoner of London. "Incidents" is the apt word. The book has twelve sections, four of them graphic narratives illustrated by Dave McKean, the remarkable graphic artist who works frequently with Neal Gaiman. All twelve sections could be called stories, given how loose that category has become, but they are clearly not chapters in a novel, no matter how loosely that category might be defined. There is murder, ghosts, miserable day labor, a mysterious nighttime soccer match, and a evening with the British mid-20th century crime scene. Norton is there, whether the time is the present day or the 16th century, sometimes as a central character, at other time a more peripheral presence. Once he is glimpsed only as a laborer who leaves for lunch and never returns So yes, each section is an incident, chronologically unhinged but firmly based in a London that is both world and prison for Sinclair's characters.

Phantasmagoria were popular Victorian entertainments where magic lantern technology allowed presenters to send images of ghosts and demons careening about a dark interior. Slow Chocolate Autopsy is a type of phantasmagoria. I found I was alternately lost and exhilarated. It's best to let the images wash over you and enjoy the ride. Although it wouldn't seem possible, the final pages takes the work to a whole new level of unexpected strangeness.

HIghly recommended for those whose favorite J.G.Ballard work is The Atrocity Exhibition.


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BOOK REVIEW: BAD NATURE, OR WITH ELVIS IN ACAPULCO, by Javier Marias

Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico by Javier Marías
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is what happens when you commit an irreversible act.


Our Spanish hero is picking up piecework in 1960's Hollywood, when he gets something of a break. Elvis Presley is on his way to Mexico to film Fun in Acapulco, and for some reason he has decided it is necessary that he have a true Castillian, rather than a Mexican, accent for his role. Our hero is hired as voice coach, flown to Acapulco, and enters the wonderland that is Hollywood on location. Although he is not able to improve The King's Spanish a great deal, it hardly matters. The Spanish he speaks in the film amounts to little more than, "Buenos dias, muchachos," or "Follow me, my four amigos." But Elvis takes a liking to our narrator and draws him into the inner entourage that after a day of filming hops in a private plane and flies off to whatever restaurant or strip joint has been recommended that day.


One night things do not go well. And since this is a Javier Marias story, much of what goes wrong has to do with language. The narrator finds himself stuck with diplomatically translating the insults that begin to fly between some Mexican gangsters and some asshole moneyman from the Midwest. Civility breaks down, and anything beyond that would be a spoiler. I will just say that although the narrator knows the events occurred forty years ago, he still feels he can never return to Mexico. And as for Fun in Acapulco, the official studio line is that the entire film was shot on sound stages in Burbank.


Bad Nature is fifty-five pages long, elegantly published as a New Direcctions Pearl, a new series of short works from an international list of authors. I finished it wondering two things. How can anyone pull off a 400 word sentence with 32 commas? And, when is Javier Marias going to win the Nobel Prize?


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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: GRIM TALES, by Norman Lock

Grim Tales by Norman Lock
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Brothers Grimm get a nod in the first of Norman Lock's Grim Tales.

Each morning when he woke, he found that his papers had been worked on during the night. His affairs were being put in order -- no matter how hard he tried to resist it.

It's the Shoemaker and the Elves. But by the end of the paragraph -- Lock's grim tales range from a paragraph to a single sentence in length -- the protagonist commits suicide rather than allow his life to be taken over by his unseen helpers. This sets the tone for the 150 tales that follow.


I have read two other books by Norman Lock, and this is my least favorite. Perhaps I did not know how to read it. It is only sixty-eight pages long, and my first thought was to spend a couple of hours with it one afternoon. That didn't work. I got burnt out by the suicides, murders, and disappearances that average two per page. I read it over three days, but the notion grew that perhaps one should read a tale per night just before bedtime.


What happens in these tales? People disappear up staircases or more often into the earth and those left behind can hear their screams. Murders occur regularly and spouses are especially lethal. A sooty cloud drifts down from the sky and erases the part of town it lights on. In one story a man dreams each night that he must deflect a comet headed for earth. The last sentence of his story encapsulates much of Lock's vision

So that he would no suffer this most mortal dream, he took an overdose of sleeping pills and died without waking,

Everything there is to admire about Lock's prose is here, unfortunately mentioning them makes all those admirable traits sound like cliches -- it's merciless, lapidary, he wields syntax like a scalpel. The ideal way to encounter this book, like the protagonist in the first tale, would be to find a story or two somewhere in your home each morning when you first got out of bed.


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BOOK REVIEW: WHO WAS CHANGED AND WHO WAS DEAD, by Barbara Comyns

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The setting is the village of Warickshire around the turn of the century. When the novel opens, there has been a flood. The ground floor of the Willoweed home has filled with water and ducks swim through the windows. For the Willoweed children the house and grounds have become an aquatic playground, although the bloated dead animals strike a melancholy note. Their father finds the flood another ordeal to be endured.  For their grandmother, in whose house they live, the flood is an inconvenience that is delaying lunch.

On one level. Comyn's novel is parody of the English novel of village life, filled with eccentric characters and their rustic doings. Her characters are eccentric, but also, in the case of the matriarch, somewhat psychotic. The villagers have more pathologies than charm. Reader's know something bad is going to happen, and it's not surprising to read about halfway through the book

Within a few weeks funerals were to become a common occurrence in that village; but at this time they were rather scarce and looked forward to eagerly.

When I worked around used books, Barbara Comyns was one of those writers published as a Virago Classic whose novels sat unsold next to other remaindered Virago Classics by Christina Stead, Molly Keane, and Elizabeth Taylor. (How often did we have to say, "No, it's not the Elizabeth Taylor.") I had never looked at one and only remember the name because I remember lots of names. This book has shown up on several reader's lists with enthusiastic reviews, and I decided to take a look. Everything everyone else says is true. It is peculiar, delightful, dark, al those things. It is a perfect, preferably rainy afternoon read.


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