Has anyone joined The Rumpus Bookclub?  For 25 bucks a month, you get a book and a whole community of folks committed to reading and discussing it along with you.  Then there’s an online chat with the author, the opportunity to submit your written review to The Rumpus, etc.  I can buy my own books, interview authors, and review on my own — but these are books that haven’t released yet.  I like the idea of reading it before the media buzz starts suggesting how I should react to it.  It’s hard to ignore the chatter once it’s out there, right?

Today I received my first installment of a new monthly enews from FSG called Work in Progress.  What’s not to like about interviews, audio archives, and book giveaways?

How can I fit this awesome bookcase in my little bungalow?!  The interweb has been gaga about this for the last few days, but it was Kate who first directed me to it via Twitter (she also has a great blog!).

And this discovery made Tuesday has nothing to do with books, but I think it’s way cool.  Part of me still wants to be an archaeologist when I grow up.

If I had to sum up Yann Martel’s new novel in one word, it would be “grim,” which is not to deter readers but to prepare them.  In scope, if not in length,

Henry is a Canadian writer whose first novel, featuring wild animals, was hugely successful.  (Sound familiar?) In the five years after this success, Henry throws himself into a new and unusual work, which Martel describes in a superb essay-within-a-novel:

He’d in fact written two books: one was a novel, while the other was a piece of nonfiction, an essay. He had taken this double approach because he felt he needed every means at his disposal to tackle his chosen subject.  But fiction and nonfiction are very rarely published in the same book.  That was the hitch.  Tradition holds that the two must be kept apart.  That is how our knowledge and impressions of life are sorted in bookstores and libraries—separate aisles, separate floors—and that is how publishers prepare their books, imagination in one package, reason in another.  It’s not how writers write.  A novel is not an entirely unreasonable creation, nor is an essay devoid of imagination.  Nor is it how people live.  People don’t so rigorously separate the imaginative from the rational in their thinking and their actions.  There are truths and there are lies–these are the transcendent categories, in books as in life.  The useful division is between the fiction and nonfiction that speaks the truth and the fiction and nonfiction that utters lies.

But Henry’s publishers prefer the traditional methods, and roundly reject his proposal: “This idea you have where we’re supposed to throw our whole imagination at the Holocaust–Holocaust westerns, Holocaust science fictions, Holocaust Jamaican bobsled team comedies–I mean, where is this going?”  Demoralized, Henry slinks away to Europe with his wife, living abroad incognito, until he receives a letter from an admirer with a vague request for help.  The letter writer turns out to be an unsmiling taxidermist-playwright, who introduces Henry to Beatrice the donkey and Virgil the howler monkey.

Henry is soon caught up in the story of Beatrice and Virgil, who talk around but not quite about a brutal experience they have shared.  Their conversations are poignant, philosophical, and terrifying, and often interrupted by sobbing, howling, or hiding.  Take this scene, for example:

VIRGIL:  We could just talk.
BEATRICE: That won’t save us.
VIRGIL: But it’s better than silence.
(Silence.)
BEATRICE: It is.
VIRGIL: I was thinking about faith.
BEATRICE: Were you?
VIRGIL: To my mind, faith is like being in the sun.  When you are in the sun, can you avoid creating a shadow?  Can you shake that area of darkness that clings to you, always shaped like you, as if constantly to remind you of yourself?  You can’t. This shadow is doubt.  And it goes wherever you go as long as you stay in the sun.  And who wouldn’t want to be in the sun?
BEATRICE: But the sun has gone, Virgil, gone! (She bursts into tears and beings to sob loudly.)
VIRGIL: (stroking her shoulder to comfort her) Beatrice, Beatrice.  (But Virgil in turn loses his composure and begins to weep uncontrollably. The two animals bawl for several minutes.)

Morbid curiosity compels Henry to assist the taxidermist with his play, mostly in the form of asking questions.  Henry finds his creativity reignited even as his connection to Beatrice and Virgil becomes increasingly disturbing.

The play, like Henry’s unpublishable book (and thus Martel’s novel), asks, How do you speak of the unspeakable?  How do you talk about what happened if you survived?  Like the taxidermist stripping the fox or rabbit flesh from the bone and then reconstructing the body over a fiberglass mold, the play/novel strips away the familiarity of Holocaust narratives and reconstructs it in animal form, shocking the observer into dealing afresh with the horrifying realities to which he or she has been inured.

Martel is not a writer for the faint of heart.  Reviewers who decry this novel as cruel to animals have missed the point; so have those who “enjoyed” the reading.  It’s as ambitious, obscure, and dislocating as Life of Pi.

What are you all doing this summer?  Any progress on the writing projects and TBR stacks?

The Singer’s Gun

Anton Waker, around whom the action in The Singer’s Gun revolves, is a young reformed crook whose dream it is to marry a nice girl and become a successful middle manager in a quiet New York office tower.  But everyone he has ever known has a secret (or two or three) and their conflicting “truths” begin to undo one another, from Anton’s hard-working and shady parents and his commitophobic bride back in New York, to his former secretary Elena and last-minute business partner David in self-imposed exile on the Italian isle of Ischia.  I can say no more about the plot without spoiling it.

But the delightful thing about both of Mandel’s novels is not the plots—though they are psychologically complex and multiculturally gritty and walk the tightrope between the familiarity you relate to and the fantastical that beckons you into the glittering unknown—but the pacing.  She teases out simultaneous trails of present and past that reveal in small gasps, and without timeline confusion, the major and minor twists of the story (and there are many).  These forays into past and present are lengthier at the beginning, giving the reader time to test theories about the characters, but begin to alternate with more speed until near the end they are rapid-fire, prescient glimpses of the final page.  This attention to structure now has me studying it for the benefit of my own writing.

Characters come and go in these books, and I found I identified with the players of The Singer’s Gun more so than I did with those of Last Night in Montreal.  But all of them have stayed with me, despite the other novels and stories I have read since.  Memorable characters are perhaps harder to write than likable characters, and Mandel reminds us that they are not always the same.

Another point in her favor: beautiful passages appear without warning.  The writing is emotional without sentimentality and evocative without excess.

This is a smart novel, better than her first (which, as I said, I enjoyed), and getting some well-deserved critical acclaim, such as this recent review by The Washington Post.   Recommended for mystery and crime lovers, fans of indie publishing, those who enjoy a good character study, or anyone seeking smarter-than-usual summer reading.

How much do you use your local library?  How does that compare to your other book sources?  And what makes your local library unique?