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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
geoff.wichert has commented on (13) products
Unrecounted
by
W G Sebald
geoff.wichert
, January 25, 2012
While trends in mainstream publishing are driving readers towards the use of books as alternatives to other forms of entertainment -- TV, movies, and the newest-and-biggest, on-line computing -- writers like W.G. 'Max' Sebald continue to make the case for literature as a valid extension of real life. In 'Unrecounted,' short, aphoristic poems demonstrate that words can do much more than count experiences: they can penetrate and illuminate them and, perhaps most important, make the essence of life our common property for all to share. Juxtaposing these small gems with Jan Peter Tripp's engravings of the eyes of men and women, images reminiscent of M.C.Escher's finest depictions, advances Sebald's breakthrough, in his novels, of using photographs in the text to lend verisimilitude to already highly-detailed stories and bring back to the serious novel its revolutionary power to convince us of the reality of life in the mirror.
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Last Evenings on Earth
by
Roberto Bolano
geoff.wichert
, September 01, 2011
Roberto Bolano was a poet whose huge, posthumously-published novel, 2666, made him the critical and popular darling of those who love the realism, literary bravado, and vital sense that reading can still be more than just entertainment (no matter what they teach you in MFA school) that you get from European and Latin American authors. But during the ten years he spent at the end of his life writing prose, he cut his teeth on short stories, 14 of which are here translated by Chris Andrews, who specializes in Bolano's short works. While a couple will go into my all-time keepers list, every one of them offers something vivid, transporting, likely to stick with the reader for good. Read each one in a single sitting, or at least in a single day, and in two weeks you will have entered the future of prose literature: a literature that is instantly accessible, yet ready to open in the mind like a flower as the final words of each story are read.
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Elroy Nights
by
Frederick Barthelme
geoff.wichert
, August 05, 2011
I found Elroy Nights on a list of novels supposed to be about artists. That didn’t turn out to be quite accurate. Elroy, the protagonist�"and a narrator so casual that he doesn’t name himself until page 19�"teaches art at a former junior college that grew with increasing enrollments into a four-year state college. Although he used to make art, and some of his work lurks unseen in the background, he makes none in these pages, and seems not to have made any anytime recently. The one undisputed artist in the book, one of his students, commits suicide early on, and his death precipitates some desultory events and maudlin, if sincere, soul-searching. Anyone unfamiliar with what’s called Minimalism (Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, etc) may find this a dry read.The talk is realistically cryptic: they know what they mean in the moment, and we have to read between the lines. It’s also ironic, mocking, funny in a way the speakers are enjoying without laughter. This kind of impossibly clever patter will be familiar from TV and movies, which in their insatiable need for material stole it blind (and tone deaf). Readers used to conventional dialogue, which sounds like nothing outside of fictional narratives, may be lost or misled. Most of all, though, nothing dramatic happens in the present moment. We learn of the suicide, rather than see it. Even when a character is shot, a reader whose attention blinks could miss it. Those familiar with minimalism might imagine a whole novel (228 pages) written by Carver and necessarily (don’t take any nonsense about it) edited by Gordon Lish. The worse news, though, is that this isn’t a book for today’s primary book demographic, which is an alliance of fantasy-prone teenagers and their mothers. There are no living dead here, unless you count the long-married couple with a teenage daughter of their own. Elroy and Clare’s separation frames the novel, but it’s a separation as ambivalent as it is amiable. He may be a little more candid about the learning-sparking erotic charge between teacher and student than some readers are ready for. Or what goes on in the mind of a step-father. On the other hand, we all know a woman like Freddie, whose first serious entanglement is with her best friend’s father. What are we to make of it when Elroy says he not only loves his wife, but he has no other feelings for her? It may be that everything trivial has weathered away. His having been an artist is useful because when young, artists more than anyone else think of themselves as different, apart from the hoi polloi. Yet what comes with experience is the unwelcome realization that we’re all so much more alike than we are unique. Our lives are more like Barthelme’s account than they are like movies or adventures. That gives us reason to escape, but it also gives us reason to return to honest literature like this.
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Oregon Favorites Trails & Tales
by
William L Sullivan
geoff.wichert
, July 30, 2011
this sort of thing can be useful if done well, and only time will tell if Sullivan has . . . BUT here's the thing that bothers me. We humans have a knack for saying "This place is beautiful! Let's move here and spoil it." Portland between 1980 and 2000 was a case in point. So at the least ironic, books like this enrich one man's career while increasing the load of visitors on a place that may not be able to sustain it. On the ironic side, if everyone follows the writer's advice on when it's best to visit, those people -- who presumably could have found it on their own if they'd been looking -- will find themselves on the natural equivalent of the freeway at rush hour. So my suggestion is buy this book, read this book, get inspired by this book, but don't follow this books directions. Go find your own place. It will be as spectacular as Multnomah Falls, but without the intrusive fences and acres of chain-link avalanche fenders. And the crowds.
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An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
by
César Aira
geoff.wichert
, July 26, 2011
An Episode In The Life Of A Landscape Painter by César Aira translated by Chris Andrews New Directions, 87 pages. ($12.95) No one is eager to talk about it, but every reviewer faces the dilemma of how much attention to pay to prevailing public opinion. Fortunately, in the case of César Aira�"like Roberto Bolaño and a handful of other wonderful writers�"that’s not a problem, because a critical perspective has yet to crystallize around Aira and the 30, or 50, or according to his latest translator, 70 novellas he’s written in the last decade or so. That An Episode In The Life Of A Landscape Painter is a masterwork of story telling and prose writing cannot be disputed, but when it comes to explaining just what makes it so good, critical voices falter. What seems clear is that Aira’s prose is simultaneously strange, unprecedented, and yet in some important way familiar. His methods remain unpredictable, yet the results quickly come to feel like a part of the reader, as if one has always been reading this book, or isn’t now reading it but hopes to get back to it soon. Like we had been waiting for this experience, and now it’s finally here. Part of the quality that makes Aira irresistible is sheer talent. He can write the kind of paragraphs that leave a discerning reader hungry to read them again, but out loud, and preferably to someone else. An anecdote early in An Episode hints at how such compelling passages arise. The protagonist’s great-grandfather was trained as a clockmaker, but had to start over when an accident took his right hand. Rather than abandon the skills he’d practiced since childhood, he redirected them into drawing and painting with his left hand. Meticulous training, practical adaptation, and methodical deliberation gave him preternaturally precise draughtsmanship: ‘An exquisite contrast between the petrified intricacy of the form and the violent turmoil of the subject matter.’ Something similar may have happened to an experienced translator�"Aira’s day job�"whose inner, creative turmoil finally overflowed the precise use of language he’d practiced daily for decades. What makes an Aira novella unmistakably his, in spite of the wildly inventive subjects and plots and the range of sub-literary genres he draws from freely, must be his approach to the actual process of writing. An outspoken partisan of el continuo, his term for constantly forward motion in a story, he has called his own technique fuga hacia adelante: flight forward. Painters among his readers will understand that an artist who meticulously prepares, working from sketches, preparing a ground, and finally filling in the colors, who examines the results and then makes changes as necessary, will get a different result from one who brushes paint on an unprepared canvas and takes directions from the spontaneous result. Aira’s method is similar to the second, or to a brush-and-ink or watercolor process permitting no penitence. Aira composes episodically, supposedly in coffee shops, and should it go badly, he continues to write forward until the problem is resolved. The result, when he’s ‘hot,’ is one of those sections that soars and rushes along, hypnotic prose that generates surgically precise sense impressions that can build to overwhelming intensity. Then when he resumes, he may very well be in a completely different narrative mood, and the result may be a change of direction, a philosophical digression, or (in one of the best-known cases) a sex change for the protagonist that goes un-remarked upon within the text. Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802�"1858), the landscape painter of the title, was born and died in Germany. The men in his family had been documentary painters for generations, and Aira identifies him as not only the best of them, but the finest documentary painter of all. He is surely one of the most influential. How he became a painter, spent half his working years in Central and South America, and established his reputation on the work he did there forms the introduction to Aira’s tale, in which the novelist shows how Rugendas’ circumstances and his response to them, like his great-grandfather’s response to the loss of his hand, came together to produce a watershed moment not only for him, but for art. Before him, the family business was painting the warrior caste in Europe and their battles. But Johann Moritz had the misfortune to come of age just after Napoleon’s defeat, at the beginning of what he foresaw would be a long peace. Realizing his predicament, he left his teacher and enrolled in the Munich Academy of Art to study nature painting. Then as now, a graduating student was expected to take on a kind of thesis project, though Aira compares Rugendas’ next step to Charles Darwin’s decision to sign on for a sea voyage as the captain’s companion. The failure of Rugendas and his new employer to get along is another deciding circumstance: while the expedition met with disaster in the New World, Rugendas was able to pursue his own interests. Aira tells this story as efficiently as a summary, but in more forceful prose, bracketing the names of factual objects with evocative adjectives and strong action. I couldn’t help comparing this lithe, fast-moving story telling to where creative nonfiction seemed to be headed before being hijacked by memoirs wallowing in self-regard. A novelist’s decision to take real people hostage as fictional characters can cause a deadening rupture in the reader’s suspension of disbelief. Aira avoids this pitfall by carefully controlling his proximity to the painter. Rugendas took copious notes throughout his travels, which aided him in turning his thousands of sketches into finished works. He also wrote long letters to his family and colleagues. By anchoring his point of view to this documentary record, Aira delivers a convincing illusion that combines the verisimilitude of fiction with the factual accuracy of a biography. Rugendas returned to Europe and published a journal of his travels that brought him to the attention of Alexander von Humboldt, whom Darwin called the greatest scientific traveller ever, and who is known to us as the father of modern geography. Humboldt had already put forth the goal of setting down in one place everything known about the earth, with his priority on visual presentation as the most direct. He urged his theory on Rugendas and urged him to confine his art making to the tropics, where the density of mineral and vegetable data was richest. But a secret, life-long desire drove Rugendas: he wanted to explore the absolute emptiness that he anticipated finding on the Pampas of Argentine. Attempting to reach it led to the devastating title ‘episode,’ and subsequent events reveal how Rugendas’ character enabled him to translate Humboldt’s process for portraying the rain forest into a model of anthropological study and presentation. It’s not as dry as that makes it sound, and the challenges of carrying fragile art materials in nature and the sequence of sketching, note-taking, and synthesizing images makes for a story that can stand beside the accounts of Monet, van Gogh, and company as they learned to paint al fresco half a century later. The popular imagination sees the artist as a romantic figure propelled by cyclones of inspiration, but Aira writes two to four novellas a year�"some of them based, like this one, on 19th century history, others set in his neighborhood and full of surreal whimsy�"and Rugendas is important to him because of the way, in the face of adversity, he got back on his horse with his sketch pad and returned to work. When the trackless plains of the Pampas presented him with new battles, this seventh-generation professional was ready to depict them, to rise above the fray and capture truth on both sides. He faces philosophical questions here, but ultimately what matters to Rugendas, as to Aira, is the work. Making art saves Johann Moritz Rugendas, and An Episode In The Life Of A Landscape Painter ennobles César Aira.
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Great House
by
Nicole Krauss
geoff.wichert
, January 04, 2011
I had read that the interweaving of several stories in one novel made this book hard to follow. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each story is wonderful, the characters fascinating, and the details of the telling make for compelling reading. When the connections between stories do become clear, it's delightful and not gimmicky. I found something on every page to make me feel rewarded for the reading and want to continue. This is her third novel and she has arrived: she's "there," in the place where a novelist's work can be presumed to be worth buying and reading.
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Counterlife
by
Philip Roth
geoff.wichert
, November 07, 2010
I hesitate to call anonymous critics anti-Semitic, although in the case of the very Christian Updike, anonymity is not a problem. But Roth, by pursuing his experience as a Jew in a supposedly prejudice-free country, has delved into universal themes through specific experience in a way that few American writers have done, and the unwillingness of some readers to follow him is far more exhausting to read about at this point than anything he writes. For one thing, Roth is still the most extraordinary and exquisite prose writer in English today. This book, which I nearly quit reading early on, but am grateful now that I stuck with, contains paragraphs of language written at full passion, emotionally and intellectually, that constitute deep water that I suppose we must forgive Updike et al. for finding too daunting to swim into. In The Counterlife Roth takes on those readers who cannot read fiction without coming to believe that it is autobiography with the names changed. He swaps the same events around several ways, five times total, and lets each fictional character have a go at narrating and responding. What emerges from this is not a single story, or even a single, Roshomon-like non-story, but a close look at the reality of fiction, including how even if he SHOWS us the machinery behind the cape and top hat, we may still end up choosing to believe the magician. It's a magnificent gift for an artist to give to his readers, some of whom have already chosen to reject it as too unconventional and challenging. For me, tired of gimmicky attempts to make new fiction, this worked. I was moved deeply by the sheer beauty that emerged finally from the abuse, buffeting, pain, and outrage of what came before.
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Becoming Pablo OHiggins How an Anglo American Artist from Utah Became a Mexican Muralist
by
Susan Vogel
geoff.wichert
, June 23, 2010
The son of wealth and society travels to a country devastated by revolution, where his name becomes synonymous with Communism and his outsider status makes him the best prism through which the people's story can be told. To many of us, this is John Reed, but it is also Paul Higgins, whose father argued on behalf of the State of Utah that Joe Hill should die by firing squad, but who as Pablo O'Higgins surpassed Diego Rivera in capturing the plight of campesinos—especially miners, but poor laborers everywhere—in the Mexican art renaissance of the 20th century. Katherine Anne Porter, Isamu Noguchi, and Leon Trotsky typify the range of personalities who walk through his life, but like his great friend, Tina Modotti, Pablo remains faithful to the ideals that brought him to witness this epoch. Susan Vogel has spent 20 years digging out the story and has written the record that the future will have little choice but to consult.
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Manhood for Amateurs
by
Michael Chabon
geoff.wichert
, September 21, 2009
"I don't think public schools should impose Christian worship on anybody, least of all Christians." If the humor in this appeals, so will Manhood for Amateurs. But if its wisdom also speaks to you, you're ready for Chabon's incandescent prose and this constantly surprising reply, in part, to his wife, Ayelet Waldman's, own sweeping and ornery collection of essay, Bad Mother (link?) Together they survey the frontiers of today's rapidly evolving connects and disconnects 'twixt women and men.
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Love and Other Impossible Pursuits
by
Ayelet Waldman
geoff.wichert
, August 16, 2009
This novel begins with a depiction of what used to be called hysteria -- a pitch-perfect account rich in details, but something supposedly only a woman and mother could understand. Waldman's accomplishment, as she goes on, is to open her protagonist's world to us so vividly that we enter her consciousness and not only comprehend but share her feelings. Perfectly capturing our best contemporary understanding of human nature, she gives us characters who are neither heroic nor evil, but flawed and each determined and trying to do her or his best. In the end, the pieces fall together unexpectedly and we recognize the courage it takes to live in the real world.
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Follies Of The Wise
by
Crews, Frederick
geoff.wichert
, September 27, 2008
The subtitle, "Dissenting Essays," makes me wonder: if such absolutely good sense and rigorous skepticism are the hallmarks of dissent, what does that tell us about going along with the wisdom of an age?
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Everyman
by
Philip Roth
geoff.wichert
, June 23, 2008
“It’s because life’s most disturbing intensity is death.” With these words Roth’s everyman could be justifying why this biography of his life focuses on its end. Sure it’s unwelcome, but death touches us all. And in this novella, readable in a sitting, Roth’s stripped to the American essentials prose tells a story that at some point touches everyone’s dying--and living.
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The Enchantress of Florence
by
Salman Rushdie
geoff.wichert
, June 21, 2008
Modern physicists explain the multitude of dimensions in their theoretical models by postulating directions lying not beyond the three we know, the way mere length is compounded into area and area is compounded into volume, but rather as interior dimensions lying folded within those three. So post-modernist Salman Rushdie creates a narrative in which scenes and events are so richly imagined and depicted in such detail that the eye turns inward from the whole tapestry to relish the weaving and eventually to take delight in the crafting of individual yarns. The Enchantress of Florence challenges readers not to become so intoxicated and bewitched by lush details that they lose sight of the overall narrative. Rushdie commits all the postmodern sins: mixing fact and fiction, misrepresenting historical persons and events, and forging fiction that cannot violate, and hence cannot transcend the events into which he interpolates it. Some critics have complained that this is not Rushdie’s deepest story, but they may mean only that this is not his most difficult prose. Instead, this historical novel is one of his most approachable, and among the wonders it creates in the reader’s mind are genuine and important allegorical insights into the humanity common to all peoples and times.
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