Showing posts with label a new book I like. Show all posts
Showing posts with label a new book I like. Show all posts

Ivan Vladislavic's The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories

I'd been waiting for Ivan Vladislavic's The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories somewhat anxiously since discovering that it would exist. I say anxiously in part because that waiting also entailed hoping that it would, in fact, be what I hoped it would be, though I didn't know quite what that was. (This can be a thrilling but somewhat stomach-tightening process in discovering a book that seems to be just what you were looking for -- I've left a book unopened for a while simply because I'm afraid that it won't speak to me as directly as its title does, or that it won't end up being about what I want it to be about). What I do know is that lately, I've had somewhat of an insatiable appetite for books that are in a roundabout way about writing -- to get at some sort of truth about process, perhaps, or simply to understand what writing is better.

The Loss Library, as lovely a thing open as it is closed with its accompanying illustrations, did not disappoint.


Ivan Vladislavic describes this collection of stories he hasn't written (plus the completed titular story that deals in books his predecessors haven't written) as a gathering of "unsettled accounts" or "case studies of failure". But while I appreciate the soul-baring nature of such statements and can relate to the sentiment, as reader, I felt nothing akin to failure or unsettledness. I would instead describe the collection as being an account of circling things -- ideas, characters, research, inspiration -- in a way that brings them into such a clear focus that, in the end, the fictionalized version needn't exist at all. What exists instead is something I find much more interesting: a map of sorts through the formation of the idea itself.

In The Last Walk, he begins with an idea to write about a writer who dies while walking to his favorite vista in a winter landscape -- a thought inspired by the famous photograph of Robert Walser dead in the snow on his own such walk. In preparing to write the story, he instead finds himself "preoccupied with hats", preoccupied with how a photograph documents a moment (quoting Geoff Dyer), and disappointed to discover a photograph of the same scene from a different vantage point that alters some of the enigma that drew him to the image in the first place. In Gravity Addict, a story idea of a woman who is writing a book called The Art of Falling instead becomes a thought about Don Delillo's account of the World Trade Center collapse. In Mrs. B, his research for a fictionalized account of the Burden Expedition in search of the Komodo dragon leads him to dislike the real people involved so strongly he can't see fit to continue with the project -- leading, then, to this strange and dismal thought:

In a gloomy corner of hell reserved for readers, the damned clutch copies of the books they dislike most. The masters of scholarly misunderstanding and the critics who turned a profit on review copies fight over the armchairs in which no one may sit. Instead, they crouch in the corners, where a little light lingers, trying to decipher the notes on the backs of their hands. Sometimes they open the books they carry and gaze dumbfounded at the space between the lines. The room is lined with shelves and the shelves are crammed with books, more books than you could read if you lived to be two hundred years old, but the damned, who have all the time in the world, are not allowed to touch.

To which I can only say: yeesh.

The more wonderful aspect of this image, though, approaches what is wonderful about this collection of essays as a whole: that image of a room lined with more books than you could read if you lived to be two hundred years old. Doesn't that line make your heart leap a little bit at how much knowledge there is in the world? When you think about that, don't you kind of panic, want to simultaneously absorb everything you can and also move on to the next thing because OH MY GOD THERE'S SO LITTLE TIME FOR ALL THIS STUFF? That's how I feel. That, at its most heartfelt and poetic and urgent moments, is how this book feels. And it is, I think, an honest, lovely, and heartbreaking way to think about not only writing but also reading -- always an expedition, always something of a race against the clock, always an attempt at something, often a desperate one. But nothing beats that feeling when the thing you're trying to trying to describe gets drawn close enough that you no longer feel a need to describe it. The Loss Library is an account of that, over and over. The word "failure" has no place here at all.

A new book I really like: Fire Season

Fittingly enough, I reached the peak of my Kerouac phase at sixteen, when I read Desolation Angels, his account of a summer spent as a fire lookout in the North Cascades in Washington. Although I’ve long since outgrown this phase, the romantic daydream sparked by that novel—of retreating into the wild to spend a season in solitude—continues to smolder on. Kept largely in check by my (reluctantly admitted) reliance on creature comforts, there are still moments when this desire bursts into a bright conflagration, leaving me ready abandon all these coffee shops and wireless devices, these sidewalks and brunches and the dust of bookstores to go off into the wild for what promises to be an experience unobtainable elsewhere (or in our virtual age, at secondhand).

It should come as no surprise, then, that the publication of Fire Season, Philip Connors’ memoir of a season spent as a fire lookout in the Gila National Forest in New Mexico (an area of over 5,000 square miles), rekindled my interest in this solitary and, as seems a sadly common fate of many of the things I cherish, increasingly rare profession.

Connors’ book offers several lessons in what it takes to survive a season in the wild. (As well as a dose of reality: a fire lookout works in ten day stretches, taking four days off between.) To be a successful fire lookout (i.e., one who returns season after season), a person must possess a curious mixture of character traits. One must be equal parts dreamer and pragmatist, be tough and sensitive, patient and persevering. Even this rare combination may prove inadequate when you realize just what the job entails: a fire lookout perches in a metal tower designed to attract lightning strikes on the peak of a mountain, exposed to buffeting and clamoring winds, alone in a true wilderness (full of bears, mountain lions, and rattle snakes), left largely to fend for him or herself through hours, days, and months of tedium and idleness.

My youthful daydreams were tinged with romance and grandiose aspirations. I was certain a few months secluded in a cabin would be all I needed to get writing a great novel or tap into some heretofore unexplored region of my psyche. By virtue of experience, Connors, who admits to being temperamentally inclined to similar fantasies, tempers his philosophical speculations and instead focuses his attention to the contours of the land and sky, the changes in his dog’s demeanor from timid suburban pup to fearless mountain wanderer, to stories he’s accumulated over the course of his eight seasons as a lookout... and to frisbee golf. This isn’t to say he completely lacks self-reflection: looking out so insistently naturally leads one to correlate the outer with the inner.

One of the great pleasures of Fire Season is the manner in which Connors’ strikes a balance between the outer (captivating descriptions of a rugged and remote wilderness, a history of the changing relationship between humans and fire) and inner (the effects of weeks of isolation). In a genre prone to self-indulgence, this is the highest praise I can think of and, coupled with its important ecological message, is a reason why this book feels vital and necessary.

Nota bene
: excerpts of Connors' lookout diaries have been published in the latest issue of The Paris Review and are available here.

The Emperor of All Maladies


The Emperor of all Maladies:

A Biography of Cancer


Convincing you to buy a book about the history of cancer and the search for its prevention and cure is either going to be easy or very hard.


For those already interested, all I will add is that The Emperor of All Maladies is expertly researched, clearly narrated, and hopeful, if realistic. It's everything you hope for.


For those not interested at first glance, I just have to say that this is one of the most compelling non-fiction books I’ve read in years. A page-turner chock full of scientists, discovery, failure, “victims,” genomics, politics, moral quandaries and a persistently evasive disease that will, alas, afflict one in three American women and one in two American men in their lifetimes. Knowledge is power, right? Get your knowledge here.


This book is fantastic (and totally readable for the curious layperson without being dumbed down). My highest personal recommendation.