Thoughts on World Literature, including The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

I’ve gained most of my knowledge (what it is) not through histories, biographies, or other nonfiction works — but through what the professors call “world literature.” I’ve never read a complete biography of Napoleon, but have read his extensive depiction in War & Peace.

Yes, I’ll admit, most of my understanding of the world comes from literature, starting with Shakespeare and Dickens — and then moving around the globe. These writing hero/heroine guides are too numerous to mention, but I will applaud the literature of Great Britain, Ireland, Europe, Russia, China, Japan, Australia, Africa, South America, Latin America, Canada, India, and many other places not specifically mentioned.

All this is a preamble to my thoughts on The White Tiger, a novel set in India, by Arivind Adiga. First off, I’ll say this is one of the best novels I’ve ever read (hands down). Why do I love it? The book has all the components that, for me, make a work fascinating — unique voice, compelling main character, exotic location, an inside look at a subculture (taxi drivers in India), and an intriguing mystery.

Yesterday, I read an article on another blog about literary mashups (a woman had written an Oscar Wilde mashup called Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray). While I can’t say that most of the current mashups on the market appeal to me (you know, the ones that feature zombies, vampires, et al), I do love genre crossovers: Magic realism detective novels (Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami), science-fiction/comedy/war stories (Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut), and sci-fi-alternate histories (The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick).

All this leads me to another reason why I admire and adore The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga — it reminds me of Dostoyevsky meets Vonnegut meets Hamsun, while remaining totally original. The novel isn’t a mashup (which to me reads “ripoff”) but an homage to great world literature.

Hats off to young Mr. Adiga (born in 1974) who in 2008 won the prestigious Booker Prize for The White Tiger. (The novel is available at Amazon.com, where copies are on sale for just 1 cent plus shipping!)

To get a “free” flavor for Adiga’s masterful writing, check out his short story “The Elephant” in the New Yorker at this link.

Photo: Aravind Adiga winning the 2008 Booker Prize for The White Tiger.

Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life

Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life is on my holiday “must read” list. Sounds like the perfect read — humor, writing advice, plus the charming, incomparable Monsieur Snoopy in his atelier (i.e., doghouse roof) writing about dark and stormy nights.

Here’s a blurb about the book from Library Journal: Using the many Snoopy “at the typewriter” strips as jumping-off points, 30 famous writers as disparate as Ray Bradbury, Elmore Leonard, Budd Shulberg, Dominick Dunne, Danielle Steele, and Sue Grafton have written short pep talks, amusing anecdotes, or just useful advice to would-be writers based on their own experiences. Witty and charming, the essays offer much creative and practical wisdom. But the highlight of the book is the touching foreword by Charles Schulz’s son, Monte, who offers some striking insights into his father’s life, giving the reader a glimpse of the legendary cartoonist as a reader as well as a writer.

It appears that Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life is out of print, but copies are available at libraries — and used paperback editions are available at a reasonable prices (starting at $7.32) on Amazon.com.

Shoes to FIll, or Don’t Make Me Laugh — Poem by Gerald Locklin

SHOES TO FILL, OR DON’T MAKE ME LAUGH

Poem by Gerald Locklin

I saw today, in Coda: The Poets’ and Writers’ Newsletter,
A highly amusing item:

The State University of New York at Binghamton
Is advertising to fill the Chair
Formerly held by John Gardner.

Among the qualifications is that the candidate
Possess “similar achievements” to Gardner’s.

Maybe they haven’t heard in Binghamton
That Hemingway, Faulkner and Edmund Wilson
Are all also dead.

Photo: John Gardner (1933-1982), novelist, essayist, literary critic, university professor. Winner of the 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award for his novel October Light, Gardner was also the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Sunlight Dialogues and Grendel. After Gardner died in a motorcycle accident in 1982 at age 49, Harpur College of Binghampton University issued a classified ad for his replacement — as Gerald Locklin describes in his poem “Shoes to Fill, or Don’t Make Me Laugh.”

Back to Blood, novel by Tom Wolfe, and Musings About Monet

Little, Brown will release Tom Wolfe‘s new novel, Back to Blood, on Tuesday, October 23rd, but the book is already #28 on Amazon.com. Set in Miami, Back to Blood is Wolfe’s long-awaited “next book,” after what many consider a disappointing I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004).

The new novel has earned — for the most part, anyway — positive reviews for the 81-year-old Wolfe. I’ve read or scanned many of the top reviews and the bottom line is that Back to Blood is much better than I Am Charlotte Simmons, but nowhere near as great as The Bonfires of the Vanities (one of my all-time favorites).

Reading the reviews of Wolfe’s latest effort — with their many references to the similarities between The Bonfires of the Vanities and Back to Blood (racial/ethnic tensions, hedonistic characters, lots of CAPITAL LETTERS, and exclamation points!!!!, and other resemblances) — I recalled a writer’s warning I read somewhere. The cautionary words were: “You know you’ve lost your soul as a writer when you start imitating yourself.”

To me, this means you are trying to recapture some former glory or a time when writing came easily and you turned in virtuoso performances. Now, you’re rusty, so rather than find a new authentic voice, you just turn in a weak imitation of some past performance — but now the effort lacks soul.

I’m not saying this is true for Wolfe because I haven’t yet read Back to Blood (I am number 151 on the L.A. Public Library waiting list). But I think this is true for any writer. You can’t look over your shoulder at what you once were, but need to write from an authentic place — even if it’s a less impressive performance.

Several years ago, I read an art history study that examined whether famous artists produced their greatest work when young or when old. In the study, Pablo Picasso was an example of an artist who’d created his best work during his younger years (Picasso lived to be 91), and Claude Monet was cited as an artist who’d produced his greatest work when old (he lived to be 86).

While many will agree that the older Picasso sometimes tried to imitate the younger, wunderkind Picasso, no one could accuse Monet of such behavior. In fact, Monet’s later work is considered his greatest precisely because he didn’t try to imitate himself. When he was stricken with cataracts and was nearly blind, he changed his style and started to paint everything in large proportions on gigantic canvases. So, despite his physical limitations, his soul prevailed and he was able to create magnificent works of art.

But getting back to Tom Wolfe’s latest novel. It is my fervent wish that this feisty octogenarian has produced something truly great. I’m looking forward to reading the 720-page novel (Wolfe, at his best, makes the pages fly by) — maybe I’ll get to it sometime next year when my number at the library comes up.

Painting: “Water Lilies” by Claude Monet (1916) — painted when the artist was in his 70s and suffering from cataracts. I was lucky enough to get a ticket for the comprehensive show of Monet’s work held in 1995 at the Art Institute of Chicago. The museum exhibited Monet’s paintings in chronological order, so that by the time I arrived at the later work (Monet painted until a few months before his death in 1926), I was dumbstruck, awestruck, and inspired that someone could create such masterworks well into “old” age.

Mo Yan Wins 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature

Congratulations to author Mo Yan for winning the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature. Born Guan Moye, Mo Yan (which means “don’t speak” in Chinese) is the first Chinese citizen to receive the honor. The Nobel Committee lauded the 57-year-old writer for his work that “with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.”

A few months ago at a used book store, I purchased a pristine copy of Mo Yan‘s novel The Garlic Ballads (1988), which The San Francisco Chronicle has called, “A work of considerable political power and lyrical beauty.” I have been meaning to read the novel, but have decided to borrow it from the library — so that I can celebrate Mo Yan’s Nobel prize by mailing my copy to the first person (U.S. only due to postage rates) who leaves a comment about this post. 

Again, congratulations to Mo Yan! 

Defining the Magic, Poem by Charles Bukowski

DEFINING THE MAGIC

Poem by Charles Bukowski

a good poem is like a cold beer
when you need it,
a good poem is a hot turkey
sandwich when you’re hungry,
a good poem is a gun when
the mob corners you,
a good poem is something that
allows you to walk through the streets of
death,
a good poem can make death melt like
hot butter,
a good poem can frame agony and
hang it on a wall,
a good poem can let your feet touch
China,
a good poem can make a broken mind
fly,
a good poem can let you shake hands
with Mozart,
a good poem can let you shoot craps
with the devil
and win,
a good poem can do almost anything,
and most important
a good poem knows when to
stop.

Painting: “Hollyhock Pink with Pedernal,” 1937 by Georgia O’Keeffe, Milwaukee Museum of Art

Note: “Defining the Magic”  is included in Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories by Charles Bukowski, available at Amazon.com.

Wind and Wedding Cake by Jesús Salvador Treviño

“A capricious breeze escaped from a small hole in the ground in Mrs. Romero’s front yard at precisely the place where more than a year before the sinkhole had erupted. The freakish wraith of wind rose from the vent and moved, snakelike, across the dichondra lawn and then began a slow ascent into the sky, traveling in a lazy spiral, like a hawk riding hot thermals, rising higher and higher, until the effervescent current was circiling high over the dilapidated wooden structure at 410 Calle Cuatro, which for forty-eight of her eighty-two years Mrs. Romero had called home.

 The breeze then suddenly plunged into a sharp dive, gathering speed and momentum as it descended, honing in on Mrs. Romero’s house like a precision arrow finding its bull’s eye. As the gust of wind reached the house, it found an opening in the kitchen window and burst through like a sprinter crossing the finish line.

Inside, the octogenarian was busy beating the special batter for the wedding cake she had committed to bake for Rudy Vargas and María López’s big wedding…With her back to the pastry cookbook that lay open to a recipe for “Golden Cream Wedding Cake,” she did not notice when the rascally draft swept over the cookbook, rustling its pages from page 231 to page 238, the recipe for “Three-Tier Chocolate Layer Cake…”

Note: The above excerpt is taken from the short story “A Boogie-Woogie Wedding Cake” by Jesús Salvador Treviño (Found in The Skyscraper that Flew and Other Stories. This remarkable collection is available at Amazon.com)

Painting: “Lady” by Isblahblah, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Palm Latitudes by Kate Braverman

“My life was an arc between darkness and irradiated clarity, an unpredictable and brutal journey. I felt as if I were a stranger to this earth. No, not merely this collection of angles, streets and alleys named Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles. I was estranged not from a particular season or region, a climate or a barrio, but from the planet itself. I stood motionless on my front lawn, humbled by sun, wind or fog, a passing sparrow. I heard the sighs of trees in their inviolate dominion where the sky is pearl, glazed, a mesa of puffy clouds tracked by wild gulls that could if they chose, shriek your name and the hour and latitude of your birth. I thought all women lived like this, in a torment of concurrencies.” KATE BRAVERMAN, Palm Latitudes

Painting: “En Vakker Dag” (“A Beautiful Day”) by Isblahblah, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

BOOK RECOMMENDATION: I’ve read Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates three times— and consider this 1961 novel a prose miracle. And  I’m in good company.

“The Great Gatsby of my time…One of the best books by a member of my generation.” KURT VONNEGUT

“Here is more than fine writing; here is what added to fine writing makes a book come immediately, intensely, and brilliantly alive. If more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction, I am sure I don’t know what it is.” TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

NOTE: At a thrift store, I recently found a Vintage Contemporaries paperback edition of Revolutionary Road  (in very good condition) and will mail the book to the first person in the U.S. who leaves a comment on this post. This is our second book giveaway.

The Pequod Sails…Poem by Fred Voss

THE PEQUOD SAILS UPON THE SEA OF MATRIMONY

Poem by Fred Voss

As he has every night for 4 months Frank is reading MOBY DICK

(a novel he has read 5 times)

to Jane before they go to sleep.

Having reached chapter 72 he reads details of how a whale is stabbed and speared

again and again at close range by laughing pipe-smoking sailors until the whale

spouts blood

and rolls over and the sailors carve up its blubber and cut off

its head

and gather whale vomit.

Frank smiles and says, “Melville’s detailing of the tools and skills of whaling

is just like what I do with the machine shop

in my poems,”

as Jane sighs and bites her fingernails.

“Frank, please stop,” Jane says. “I can’t take anymore. I can’t even swim.

We’ve got to get off the Pequod. I want romance.

I want you to read to me from MY BOOK now.”

Frank winces

and reaches for Jane’s pretty little book ELIZABEH AND PHILIP

in which he has reached chapter 2 and reads

of their royal wedding on November 20, 1947

wedding presents

rings and jewelers

wedding gown with rose-and-corn-ear-patterned lace pink carnation floral decorations

chauffeurs and royal coaches and The King’s Valet

and what the Huntley and Palmers wedding cake was made of and how much it weighed

are detailed and analyzed to Jane’s smiling anglophile delight.

Frank and Jane look at the photographs of Elizabeth and Philip standing at the

Westminster Abbey altar waving out the windows of the Cinderella carriage

smiling from the Palace balcony.

“Oh wasn’t Elizabeth beautiful! Royal weddings are so romantic!” Jane gushes

as Frank writhes and slaps shut the pretty little book

unable to take any more and eager for tomorrow night

when he can get back to the fun and pleasure of reading MOBY DICK

with tattooed-all-over shrunken-head-carrying cannibal Queequeg

and a giant Albino whale

who methodically saws off Captain Ahab’s leg and drowns sailors with a slap of its tail

and finally rams and sinks the Pequod itself in the middle of the Pacific Ocean

leaving Ishmael afloat on Queequeg’s coffin

like an orphan ready to be rescued

by the ship Rachel looking for its lost sailors.

Now what royal wedding,

dear readers,

could be more romantic

than all that?