Tonight is the first event for the new book, and I've spent most of the afternoon at home with curlers in my hair and cucumber circles on the eyes...
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During the Sino-Japanese conflict before WWII, Japanese soldiers kidnapped thousands of young women, putting them to work as sex slaves for their officers. Paul West tells the story of Scald Ibis, an intellectual 16-year-old held captive in her own home in Nanking. Scald Ibis becomes the favorite concubine of Hayashi, the colonel who runs the Tent of Orange Mist, as the bordello comes to be known.
West's strong, finely wrought prose is at once tender in its texture and cruel in its lucidity; his characters are delineated vividly, with power and psychological depth. "The language thrilled and appalled him," the narrator says at one point. When West's pen traces appalling circumstances, the thrill is not mere sensationalism-it is sensation itself, technique and emotion joining forces to scale the reader's spine.
This fictional glance at a neglected episode in history is a profoundly moral book, as well as a rare aesthetic pleasure.
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(3 of 5 readers found this comment helpful)
A Russian novel can be a frightening thing: 600-plus pages filled with morbid melodrama, populated with 50 characters, each with five nicknames. The Yellow Arrow, however, is a sharp, aerodynamic projectile of a novel.
Without wallowing in Dostoevskian soul-composting, Pelevin combines elements of Eastern European dread and South American fantasy into an absorbing allegory that recalls the stories of Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges.
The eponymous arrow is a train on which the necessarily limited action takes place. Not only can no one get off the train, but most people are oblivious to their status as passengers. Andrei, the novel's protagonist, is one of a secret group that questions the status quo - even daring to consider the world beyond the train. Think of it as a travelogue of the absurd: Ionesco on wheels.
Though slim - 92 pages - this slip of a novella contains more fictive invention and food for thought than many books several times its size. Like Kafka, Borges, and Italo Calvino, Pelevin has created a fable without a moral, an ambivalent allegory with uncertain referents, a dry comedy laced with angst, and a realistic fantasy in miniature. What does it all mean? Everything and nothing. Where does it all lead? Don't worry about the destination - just relax, settle in for the trip, and pay attention to the passing scenery. All aboard!
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(0 of 1 readers found this comment helpful)
I picked this up at my library because I like these mysteries that have a bit of an intellectual conceit, such as the art-historical mysteries of Iain Pears, and it looked like a reasonable way to pass 2-3 hours. And it was. The plot didn't have many twists, and the resolution was not terribly surprising, but the characters and pacing more than made up for any weaknesses as a genre piece.
So I looked to see what other books Peterson had, and found just one thing, from 1980, that might or might not have even been the same Peterson. This one was first published in 1992, but not published in paperback until Worldwide (the mystery division of Harlequin) picked it up in 1997, and apparently not re-published since then.
Plenty of authors write a book or two but fall into, or remain in, obscurity, but there's something more poignant about it when the writer is clearly smart and talented. The book could have had a wide appeal: there are planty of other academic-themed mystery series, the characters display nuanced twists on the stock figures of the genre, the book has no present-tense violence (just discovered victims) and little profanity -- making it more appealing to tamer mystery fans -- yet is free from cats, aged amateur sleuths, and other elements that turn off fans of more serious mysteries.
Maybe there's no mystery or tragedy. Maybe he had an idea for a book and got it out of his system. Maybe, as my ex-wife pointed out, he might have been single when he wrote the book and then got married and wanted to spend time with his family, or maybe he got a more demanding or satisfying job. Pretty good book, though.
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(1 of 1 readers found this comment helpful)
Lou Reed has used his songwriting and sociopathic P.R. persona to tell the world more than anyone could have wanted to know about a middle-class Jewish kid from Long Island who just happened to revolutionize rock'n'roll. So why does the world need another soon-to-be remaindered rock-bio?
Two reasons. One: Reed changed his personalities more often than his underwear, contradicting himself and opening as many mysteries as he solved. Two: Victor Bockris has done a damn fine job of playing Boswell to Reed's drugged-out bisexual Dr. Johnson. Collating endless reviews, interviews, and other views of Reed's life and work, Bockris has used his considerable literary skill to form a coherent, insightful narrative from Reed's often incoherent chaos of a life.
Bockris has an authorial voice that's lively yet restrained; his writing takes a back seat to the biography, but his brisk style and intelligence are worthy of Reed, America's most literary rock star. Rock journalism needs a Victor Bockris almost as much as rock music needs a Lou Reed.
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(0 of 1 readers found this comment helpful)
Existential entropy is the dominant theme of Steve Erickson's sixth book, a meditation on the persistence of memory, the disappearance of the real, and the no-man's-land between fact and imagination.
With limber, hypnotic prose and vivid imagery, the nameless narrator leads us through a landscape of paranoia, sex, and decay. Though this no-man's-land takes the shape of L.A. early in the next century, the novel's axes are psychology and identity, not society and technology.
One of the narrator's obsessions is what he calls the Cinema of Hysteria: "movies that make no sense at all - and we understand them completely." Similarly, this tale seems plotless; but, as in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, the arbitrary oddities slowly coalesce into a haunting whole. Erickson has spun a cunning web - less a book of laughter and forgetting than a seductive insomniac nightmare of hysteria and amnesia.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
(0 of 1 readers found this comment helpful)
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sean.scott has commented on (6) products.
The Tent of Orange Mist by Paul West
sean.scott, February 11, 2007
During the Sino-Japanese conflict before WWII, Japanese soldiers kidnapped thousands of young women, putting them to work as sex slaves for their officers. Paul West tells the story of Scald Ibis, an intellectual 16-year-old held captive in her own home in Nanking. Scald Ibis becomes the favorite concubine of Hayashi, the colonel who runs the Tent of Orange Mist, as the bordello comes to be known.West's strong, finely wrought prose is at once tender in its texture and cruel in its lucidity; his characters are delineated vividly, with power and psychological depth. "The language thrilled and appalled him," the narrator says at one point. When West's pen traces appalling circumstances, the thrill is not mere sensationalism-it is sensation itself, technique and emotion joining forces to scale the reader's spine.
This fictional glance at a neglected episode in history is a profoundly moral book, as well as a rare aesthetic pleasure.
(3 of 5 readers found this comment helpful)
The Yellow Arrow
sean.scott, February 11, 2007
A Russian novel can be a frightening thing: 600-plus pages filled with morbid melodrama, populated with 50 characters, each with five nicknames. The Yellow Arrow, however, is a sharp, aerodynamic projectile of a novel.Without wallowing in Dostoevskian soul-composting, Pelevin combines elements of Eastern European dread and South American fantasy into an absorbing allegory that recalls the stories of Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges.
The eponymous arrow is a train on which the necessarily limited action takes place. Not only can no one get off the train, but most people are oblivious to their status as passengers. Andrei, the novel's protagonist, is one of a secret group that questions the status quo - even daring to consider the world beyond the train. Think of it as a travelogue of the absurd: Ionesco on wheels.
Though slim - 92 pages - this slip of a novella contains more fictive invention and food for thought than many books several times its size. Like Kafka, Borges, and Italo Calvino, Pelevin has created a fable without a moral, an ambivalent allegory with uncertain referents, a dry comedy laced with angst, and a realistic fantasy in miniature. What does it all mean? Everything and nothing. Where does it all lead? Don't worry about the destination - just relax, settle in for the trip, and pay attention to the passing scenery. All aboard!
(0 of 1 readers found this comment helpful)
Caravaggio Books by Bernard Peterson
sean.scott, February 11, 2007
I picked this up at my library because I like these mysteries that have a bit of an intellectual conceit, such as the art-historical mysteries of Iain Pears, and it looked like a reasonable way to pass 2-3 hours. And it was. The plot didn't have many twists, and the resolution was not terribly surprising, but the characters and pacing more than made up for any weaknesses as a genre piece.So I looked to see what other books Peterson had, and found just one thing, from 1980, that might or might not have even been the same Peterson. This one was first published in 1992, but not published in paperback until Worldwide (the mystery division of Harlequin) picked it up in 1997, and apparently not re-published since then.
Plenty of authors write a book or two but fall into, or remain in, obscurity, but there's something more poignant about it when the writer is clearly smart and talented. The book could have had a wide appeal: there are planty of other academic-themed mystery series, the characters display nuanced twists on the stock figures of the genre, the book has no present-tense violence (just discovered victims) and little profanity -- making it more appealing to tamer mystery fans -- yet is free from cats, aged amateur sleuths, and other elements that turn off fans of more serious mysteries.
Maybe there's no mystery or tragedy. Maybe he had an idea for a book and got it out of his system. Maybe, as my ex-wife pointed out, he might have been single when he wrote the book and then got married and wanted to spend time with his family, or maybe he got a more demanding or satisfying job. Pretty good book, though.
(1 of 1 readers found this comment helpful)
Transformer :the Lou Reed story by Victor Bockris
sean.scott, February 11, 2007
Lou Reed has used his songwriting and sociopathic P.R. persona to tell the world more than anyone could have wanted to know about a middle-class Jewish kid from Long Island who just happened to revolutionize rock'n'roll. So why does the world need another soon-to-be remaindered rock-bio?Two reasons. One: Reed changed his personalities more often than his underwear, contradicting himself and opening as many mysteries as he solved. Two: Victor Bockris has done a damn fine job of playing Boswell to Reed's drugged-out bisexual Dr. Johnson. Collating endless reviews, interviews, and other views of Reed's life and work, Bockris has used his considerable literary skill to form a coherent, insightful narrative from Reed's often incoherent chaos of a life.
Bockris has an authorial voice that's lively yet restrained; his writing takes a back seat to the biography, but his brisk style and intelligence are worthy of Reed, America's most literary rock star. Rock journalism needs a Victor Bockris almost as much as rock music needs a Lou Reed.
(0 of 1 readers found this comment helpful)
Amnesiascope: A Novel by Steve Erickson
sean.scott, February 11, 2007
Existential entropy is the dominant theme of Steve Erickson's sixth book, a meditation on the persistence of memory, the disappearance of the real, and the no-man's-land between fact and imagination.With limber, hypnotic prose and vivid imagery, the nameless narrator leads us through a landscape of paranoia, sex, and decay. Though this no-man's-land takes the shape of L.A. early in the next century, the novel's axes are psychology and identity, not society and technology.
One of the narrator's obsessions is what he calls the Cinema of Hysteria: "movies that make no sense at all - and we understand them completely." Similarly, this tale seems plotless; but, as in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, the arbitrary oddities slowly coalesce into a haunting whole. Erickson has spun a cunning web - less a book of laughter and forgetting than a seductive insomniac nightmare of hysteria and amnesia.
(0 of 1 readers found this comment helpful)
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