AHML Staff Choices

Check the catalog for this item.

Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 comprises five distinct but intertwined parts: the story of four European literature scholars of a world-renowned, reclusive German writer, and the mystery of his identity; a Mexican scholar who hosts the four European scholars’ stay in Mexico; the story of the writer himself; that of a black American sports journalist, assigned to a boxing match in Northern Mexico, whose work leads him to investigate a years-long string of unsolved murders; and the story of the crimes, of the hundreds of inexplicably murdered women and girls in Santa Teresa (allegorical and perhaps merciful stand-in for the actual city and crimes of Juarez, Mexico), most of whom worked in U.S. and Canadian-owned maquilas and sweatshops that employ most of the city’s poor.

“The Part about the Crimes” is a nearly 250 page list of the women killed, the states in which they were found, the men brought to justice–sometimes unjustly–for their deaths, as well as all efforts political, journalistic, judicial, legal and extra-legal to stop the crimes or, at least, silence the public’s outrage. Its style differs completely from the rest of the book; in its delivery, it is dry, reportorial, almost repetitively laconic, and humorless. And it is harrowing.

The girl’s body turned up in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores. She was dressed in a white long-sleeved T-shirt and a yellow knee-length skirt, a size too big. Some children playing in the lot found her and told their parents. One of the mothers called the police, who showed up half an hour later. The lot was bordered by Calle Peláez and Calle Hermanos Chacón and it ended in a ditch behind which rose the walls of an abandoned dairy in ruins. There was no one around, which at first made the policemen think it was a joke. Nevertheless, they pulled up on Calle Peláez and one of them made his way into the lot. Soon he came across two women with their heads covered, kneeling in the weeds, praying. Seen from a distance, the women looked old, but they weren’t. Before them lay the body. Without interrupting, the policeman went back the way he’d come and motioned to his partner, who was waiting for him in the car, smoking. Then the two of them returned (the one who’d waited in the car had his gun in his hand) to the place where the women were kneeling and they stood there beside them staring at the body. The policeman with the gun asked whether they knew her. No, sir, said one of the women. We’ve never seen her before. She isn’t from around here, poor thing.

This happened 1993. January 1993. From then on, the killings of women began to be counted.

On the other hand,”The Part About Archimboldi” (The Writer), accounts the almost magical story of a boy obsessed by deep-sea life, who comes of age serving as German infantry in World War II, and becomes the writer whose life ties the rest of 2666’s parts together. Take this passage, for example, which echoes the Italian surrealist/magical realist Italo Calvino:

When his one-eyed mother bathed him in a washtub, the child Hans Reiter always slipped from her soapy hands and sank to the bottom, with his eyes open, and if her hands hadn’t lifted him back up to the surface he would have stayed there, contemplating the black wood and the black water where little particles of his own filth floated, tiny bits of skin that traveled like submarines toward an inlet the size of aneye, a calm, dark cove, although there was no calm, and all that existed was movement, which is the mask of many things, calm among them.

Bolaño’s prose throughout is stunning, and The Crimes’ dryness only seems to magnify this impression. The book, in both Parts about the Critic[s] and the Part about the Crimes, evoke a feeling of intangible helplessness, of a fear whose nature is impalpable and ineffable, like impression of a bad dream lost upon waking. 2666 is a massive 900 pages long, and tries the reader’s patience at times during the Part about the Crimes, but is also an unmistakably special novel, as shown by both critical response to it and the author’s struggling with its presentation up until his death.

Check the catalog for this item.

This novel is the story of Driftless’s July Montgomery before he settled in southwestern Wisconsin at the end of his life. The book starts, and ends, in Iowa City, Iowa, where July was born. When July is ten years old and his parents die in a car accident, he leaves Iowa and everything he knows, making his home in Philadelphia’s Center City’s subway system. Rock Island Line is the story of a boy growing up homeless, running away from his past, and keeping voluntarily disconnected from people, and what happens, eventually, when life forces him to confront his past.

Originally published in 1975, this book’s re-release coincides with the publication of David Rhodes’ Driftless, about July Montgomery’s twilight, and his first book in over thirty years.

Check the catalog for this item.

Richard Wright’s The Outsider tells the story of Cross Damon, a black man living in Chicago around 1950 who, after a narrowly escaping death in a freak ‘El’ derailment, lets the world believe he is dead and leaves for New York City to live as a ghost, a non-entity, an outsider. But when he gets to NY he finds his past life’s habits impossible to leave behind. Damon, an intellectual prone to obsessive thought and bouts of self-loathing, is borne immutably down the path he had tread his entire life, only now with the full understanding of its isolation, despair, and violence.

One of the most frightening books I’ve read since, well, Richard Wright’s classic Native Son,  this book examines the difficulty of changing one’s lot and the futility and danger of trying to do right through criminal, nefarious means. And above that, it’s a beautifully written, fully self-aware novel about the existence of those who never seem to fit.

Check the catalog for this item.

Probably the most absurd book I’ve ever read, Saunders’ The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is the story of the countries Inner and Outer Horner, which former is beautiful but so small that only one of its seven citizens can occupy it at any given time, which forces the latter to give up some of its abundant land as a temporary holding ground for the Inner Horner “refugees”, if you will. When a smitten, jealous, arrogant Outer Hornerite named Phil decides to levy immigration taxes upon the six Inner Hornerites living in Outer Horner’s Short Term Residency Zone–which is a misnomer, as the Inner Hornerites spend 6/7ths of their life in the STRZ–the Outer Hornerites declare that the Inner Hornerites have declared war on them (the Outer Hornerites).

Also, did I mention that Phil had been in love with an Inner Hornerite named Carol, and had “spent many hours casually circling Inner Horner, hoping to catch her eye, inflating and deflating his central bladder in order to look more manly and attractive” ? And that when Carol married fellow Inner Hornerite Cal, “a gigantic belt buckle with a blue dot affixed to it, if a gigantic belt buckle with a blue dot affixed to it had been stapled to a tuna fish can”, Phil had stood across the border, “passing bits of machine oil from his lower strata”?

The citizens of Inner and Outer Horner are silly, anthropomorphic, Frankensteinian, but somehow also intensely and innocently human. The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is an allegory on power and nationality, plus also use of propaganda and preemptive war, disguised as a story almost childish in its simplicity and imagination.

Check the catalog for this item.

Consider the Lobster includes almost everything you could ask of a book of essays. The titular essay dissects  “the whole morality-of-boiling-lobsters-alive issue” for the discomforted readers of Aug. 2004’s Gourmet Magazine. “Big Red Son”–Hollywood’s pejorative sobriquet for adult film industry–exposes us to  the U.S.’s  “$3.5-4 billion/year” porn habit, and what it means. “Up, Simba,” more relevant now than ever, follows Arizona Senator John McCain on the 2000 Republican Presidential Primary trail and shows us, ultimately, why he lost to then-Governor G.W. Bush.

My favorite essay in the collection is “Authority and American Usage,” which, in addition to reviewing Bryan A. Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage (since re-released as Garner’s Modern American Usage, which you can find in our Reference section, call number: REF/423.1/GARNER, B), informs us of the on-going “grammar war” and its significance to us. This essay alone is over eighty pages, with footnotes, and leaves the reader feeling surprisingly accomplished at its completion.

But the best part of this book is that after you finish it–or before, if you prefer–you can check out the audiobook Selections from “Consider the Lobster”, read by the author, and found at call number CD/FIC/WALLACE, D.

Links:

Original, truncated essay, Consider the Lobster.

Authority and American Usage.

Host, profile of conservative radio host John Ziegler.

Check the catalog for this item.

Nathan Nelson is, as a child, involved in a terrible car accident, dies briefly, and awakens from a coma “gifted” with synethesia (sort of like a permanent acid trip: hearing colors, tasting sounds, smelling television, etc.) and an Eidetic (or photographic) memory. His father Samuel had for years, to no avail, tried to coax out Nathan’s genius, only to discover that his son was average, normal, unremarkable.

But after the accident, Nathan’s parents send him to a special school for special children, including: a teenaged girl who is “medically intuitive” and can diagnose cancer, tumors, multiple sclerosis, by the tone/timbre of one’s voice; a blind, sex-obsessed piano prodigy; a savant who can’t tie his shoes but knows what day of the week 12 October 1843 fell on; and a man who replicates citiscapes in his head and then builds them.

The book explores how the children’s gifts isolate them from the rest of the world, and how their parents’ expectations shape and preclude certain paths before they (the children) have any say in the matter. It’s a beautiful novel that verges on poetry at times, due to the narrator’s synesthetic descriptions and the writer’s rhetorical brilliance. It is a novel about the Permanent Search, the sort of hyper-stringent expectations we have of life that preclude happiness and keep us forever Outside of what we need desperately to be In.

—

The following excerpt best summarizes the novel’s conflict. It is an apostrophic letter written by the protagonist Nathan’s father to a Higher power he (the father) doesn’t believe in, yet nevertheless dedicates his life to chasing, in a way.

Samuel Nelson’s Letter to God

Check the catalog for this item.

David Rhodes named his book, Driftless, after the Driftless Area, which comprises Southwestern Wisconsin, Northwestern Illinois, Northeastern Iowa, and Southeastern Minnesota, and is bereft of sediment or glacial drift left behind as the last ice age’s glaciers receded into Canada. And both the novel’s topography and that of its characters reflect this.

The book portrays the forgotten, driftless (and ficticious) town of Words, Wisconsin, which has been left behind by all of the technological and societal advancements the United States have made in the last fifty years. They are a rustic, reclusive people. They are Rusty Smith, whose dilapidated house he needs to repair before his wife’s family visits, and the Amish men he hires begrudgingly to help him; they are Grahm and Cora Shotwell, who run a small dairy farm in cooperation with American Milk until Cora finds evidence that A. M. sells tainted, watered-down, and biogenetically “enhanced” product and they are forced to decide between dignity and prosperity; they are the spinster Violet Brasso and her physically handicapped sister, Olivia, devout Christians in an insincere and unbelieving world. They are the rural separatist militia, who test their guns daily and warn of the U.S. government’s imminent demise. And they are July Montgomery, the man who connects them all, a man who all but materialized out of a cornfield one day and decided, hey, why not here?

This novel shows how rural people deal with a world they can’t quite control; it echoes the late 19th century’s Naturalism, in that sense. It’s a beautiful novel that captures the essence of the Midwest perfectly.