Thursday, October 29, 2009

CHRONIC CITY By Jonathan Lethem

CHRONIC CITY By Jonathan LethemCHRONIC CITY By Jonathan Lethem

Another World

By GREGORY COWLES
The New York Times, October 25,2009

By now, Jonathan Lethem is so identified with his native Brooklyn that when he chose Los Angeles as the setting for his last novel — the modest “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” in 2007 — it felt like a vacation or a willful act of misdirection. In fact, though, Lethem’s reputation as a hometown booster rests on the strength of just two books, “Motherless Brooklyn” and “The Fortress of Solitude,” each of which applied a cartographer’s loving attention to the borough. But in four earlier novels and two story collections, Lethem has traipsed all over creation, from Wyoming to the San Francisco Bay Area to the distant Planet of the Archbuilders. Now, in his bravura eighth novel, “Chronic City,” he visits what may be his strangest destination yet: the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Let an early scene stand in for the astonishing whole. The narrator — a former child star named Chase Insteadman, who lives off the residuals from an insipid 1980s sitcom — is getting to know his new friend Perkus Tooth at a Second Avenue burger joint. Perkus is a cultural critic with a recognizably New York sort of résumé: he achieved underground success with a series of broadside rants pasted around the city, then went mainstream with a column in Rolling Stone before fading back into dissolute obscurity. Yet he has never abandoned his wide-ranging obsessions, which echo Lethem’s own: film, literature, music, media. Now, in a booth at Jackson Hole, he holds forth to the affable, vacuous Chase in a stoned seminar that even in summary takes three pages to relate, jumping from Greil Marcus to Chet Baker to Marlon Brando to the insidious effects of The New Yorker’s choice of typeface. It’s a wonderfully slippery list of references, at once dense and daft, as if Susan Sontag had written alternate lyrics to the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Werner Herzog, Monte Hellman, Norman Mailer, Frederick Exley! Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom!

“Can we have discussed so much the very first time?” Chase wonders. “The New Yorker, at least. Giuliani’s auctioning of 42nd Street to Disney. Mailer on NASA as a bureaucracy stifling dreams. J. Edgar Hoover in the Mafia’s thrall, hyping Reds, instilling self-patrolling fear in the American mind. In the midst of these variations the theme was always ingeniously and excitingly retrieved.”

If you don’t recognize that last sentence (I didn’t), Lethem helpfully confesses in his acknowledgments that he has lifted it whole from “Humboldt’s Gift.” It’s a nifty tribute to another novel about a fraught tutor-protégé relationship, and an unsurprising flourish from Lethem, who once composed an entire essay about artistic appropriation by using sentences pilfered from other sources. But don’t read too much into it. With its broad brush strokes and bright primary colors, “Chronic City” owes less to Bellow (a scrupulous realist, after all) than to antic postmodern fabulists like Pynchon and Rushdie and DeLillo — or, as Lethem also puts it in the acknowledgments, to “everywhere else forever and ever amen.”
Lethem’s Manhattan is an alternate- reality Manhattan, an exaggerated version where an escaped tiger is rumored to be roaming the Upper East Side and Times readers can opt for a “war-free” edition dominated by fluffy human- interest stories. Instead of terrorist attacks, an enervating gray fog has descended on the financial district and remained there for years, hovering mysteriously. (Mysterious to the novel’s characters, anyway; investigators may want to subpoena DeLillo’s airborne toxic event.) Lethem has been at this long enough that the style has become recognizably his own: knowing and exuberant, with beautiful drunken sentences that somehow manage to walk a straight line.

Here’s Chase, newly recovered from the flu, describing his first post-fever dalliance with his ghostwriter girlfriend, Oona: “That night we started in the fluorescent glare of Perkus’s hallway, like teenagers escaping a party, hands invading outfits, knees interlaced, sagging to the wall until our breathing got too slow and regular and we contained ourselves, shoved out through that subset of Brandy’s smokers drunk enough not to realize they were freezing, then teetered together, hips eagerly jostling, to my apartment.”

And here he is again, arriving with Perkus at the site of a building collapse that may have been triggered by the tiger, “milling in that human amoeba of gawkers as it was brushed back from the scene by policemen and emergency medical workers, though at its outer edge the collective creature grew grotesquely huge, and throbbed, livid and possibly dangerous, faces lit from underneath by sparkling red-and-yellow flares that had been laid like sticks of dynamite at the feet of barricades.”

In Lethem’s earliest work the tricks and extravagances and gymnastic prose sometimes seemed arch or mannered — merely clever — but they have grown steadily more confident, and here they serve the higher purpose of flinging Manhattan onto the page in all its manic energy. When style and subject merge, tics recede into invisibility.

The turbocharged plot of “Chronic City” is too intricate and seamless, and also too odd, to summarize easily. It involves migraines and hiccups and a luxury residence for dogs, and Perkus’s quest for unattainable vaselike objects, called chaldrons, that hold an almost mystical appeal. Stripped to essentials, though, the story centers on the friendship between Chase and Perkus, and on their travels through Manhattan’s social strata: a party at the billionaire mayor’s mansion, a film project at a highbrow production company, all those hours at Jackson Hole.

Chase is in demand at dinner parties not only because of his days as a child actor but also because of a more recent claim to celebrity — his fiancée, the astronaut Janice Trumbull, is stranded on the International Space Station, from which she sends him long love letters that are excerpted in the war-free Times. This space opera is, to tell the truth, kind of a drag on the narrative, but it does create a useful love triangle: Chase needs to hide his affair with Oona lest he disappoint his adoring public. There are other characters too, representing variations on the theme of idealism and corruption, but never mind them. This is really a buddy novel, no less than “The Fortress of Solitude” was. Chase and Perkus are nominally adults, older than Dylan and Mingus in “Fortress,” but they’re just as adolescent. They eat messy burgers; they watch cult movies; they smoke potent weed and indulge in the kind of paranoid conspiratorial philosophizing that can be tedious in real life but thrilling in dorm rooms and fiction (where, after all, somebody else really is pulling the strings). And, improbably enough, we want it to last forever — or at least long enough for Chase and Perkus to save each other.

That won’t happen, of course. Chase is too ditzy and Perkus too damaged for their friendship to survive unscathed. But if they can’t be rescued, they can and do help each other; Chase, especially, starts to wake up and cast aside his blank torpor. (I do mean blank: in one of the book’s less subtle moments, a waitress misremembers his name as “Chase Unperson,” sending Perkus into a fit of giggles.) “Chronic City” is a dancing showgirl of a novel, yet beneath the gaudy makeup it’s also the girl next door: a traditional bildungsroman with a strong moral compass. Under Perkus’s tutelage, Chase moves from placid compliance toward engagement and self- determination; the actor learns to take action, not just direction.

“The Fortress of Solitude” was a great novel, but also a chaotic sprawl — it addressed gentrification and race relations and comic books and disco and the prison system and more, on and endlessly on. “Chronic City” is more contained, less greedy in its grasp, and it is even better. It limits itself to a single big theme — but then, it’s the biggest there is: the pursuit of truth. Lethem once wrote, in an essay about John Ford’s movie “The Searchers,” that an actor “can be placed under examination as icon of a set of neurotic symptoms . . . and yet still operate as a creature of free will and moral relevance, a character whose choices matter.” This is Perkus’s lesson for Chase. Even in an alternate reality — even in a fiction — passion and significance are everywhere if you know where to look.

Gregory Cowles is an editor at the Book Review.

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Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour

Censoring an Iranian Love Story By Shahriar Mandanipour


About the Author
Shahriar Mandanipour has won numerous awards for his novels, short stories, and nonfiction in Iran, although he was unable to publish his fiction from 1992 until 1997 as a result of censorship. He came to the United States in 2006 as the third International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University. He is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in PEN America and The Literary Review and is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review.

Amazon.com Review
Book Description
From one of Iran’s most acclaimed and controversial contemporary writers, his first novel to appear in English—a dazzlingly inventive work of fiction that opens a revelatory window onto what it’s like to live, to love, and to be an artist in today’s Iran.

The novel entwines two equally powerful narratives. A writer named Shahriar—the author’s fictional alter ego—has struggled for years against the all-powerful censor at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Now, on the threshold of fifty, tired of writing dark and bitter stories, he has come to realize that the “world around us has enough death and destruction and sorrow.” He sets out instead to write a bewitching love story, one set in present-day Iran. It may be his greatest challenge yet.

Beautiful black-haired Sara and fiercely proud Dara fall in love in the dusty stacks of the library, where they pass secret messages to each other encoded in the pages of their favorite books. But Iran’s Campaign Against Social Corruption forbids their being alone together. Defying the state and their disapproving parents, they meet in secret amid the bustling streets, Internet cafés, and lush private gardens of Tehran.

Yet writing freely of Sara and Dara’s encounters, their desires, would put Shahriar in as much peril as his lovers. Thus we read not just the scenes Shahriar has written but also the sentences and words he’s crossed out or merely imagined, knowing they can never be published.

Laced with surprising humor and irony, at once provocative and deeply moving, Censoring an Iranian Love Story takes us unforgettably to the heart of one of the world’s most alluring yet least understood cultures. It is an ingenious, wholly original novel—a literary tour de force that is a triumph of art and spirit.

"Wheatfields or Apple Orchards": An Essay by Shahriar Mandanipour

At book readings, authors are often asked, Why do you write? One says, I write to inform and enlighten people. Another explains, I write because it is my socio-political responsibility. One more declares, I write for myself. Yet another suggests, I write for the sake of literature and the beauty of language. And one writer dares, I write to achieve immortality. Their many different answers each contain a story, because they are storytellers. And I, too, have a story of my own.

I need to begin back in fourth grade. Until then, my mother would always write my school compositions for me. But one day when I came home for lunch, she had gone out, and I was forced, for the very first time, to write my composition myself. In Iran, it is customary for teachers to select the subject of composition assignments based on the season of the year. At the time, it was Autumn—describe the Fall, instructed the teacher. I had little time before the afternoon school session began, and so I sat down to write. After struggling through the first few sentences, suddenly I saw myself writing words that I had never thought of before. Furiously, I wrote of a field whose wheat stalks have turned golden and are ready to be harvested. I wrote of a shepherd sitting in the shade of a tree and playing his flute while his sheep bleat and graze nearby. In this vein, I wrote and wrote until suddenly I realized I needed to hurry back to school.

Before that afternoon, whenever the teacher made me read my compositions in front of the class, I had mostly received a B or B-minus. But on this day, I was sure I would earn an A-plus. For the very first time, I shot up my hand to read my composition. I read of the melody of the shepherd’s flute, of how happy the sheep are, and of the golden wheatfield that is ready for the harvest. But as soon as I read this sentence, the teacher started to growl. "Wheatfields are not harvested in the Autumn!" she shouted. I continued to read anyway. I was proud of the words I had written, about how the wind blows in the golden wheatfield, and about how the golden wheat stalks, ready, eager, to be plowed, to dance. "You stupid boy, wheatfields are not plowed in the autumn," she snapped again. She gave me a C-minus.

Years have passed since that day. I have published ten volumes of short stories and novels. I have managed to cross over the walls of a sterner censorship than my teacher’s that afternoon in Iran. And now that I have also crossed over the threshold of fifty, I know how I’d answer that question about why I write. I write to bring a wheatfield to harvest in my own words, in my own autumn. If I have succeeded, or will succeed, it will be because perhaps there are some who may benefit from the crop. Each grain of wheat is a word and each word a grain toward a story. In the Islamic account of Adam and Eve, the two are driven from heaven to earth after eating not an apple but grains of wheat. What the first pair of lovers ate in Eden eat isn’t important. What is important is for each of us—all the storytellers of the world—to bring our own apple orchards, or wheatfields, to harvest, in our own time and our own seasons.

Perhaps there will be those who will eat from them, and are driven to heaven. —Shahriar Mandanipour

(Translated from the Farsi by Sara Khalili)


From Publishers Weekly
The first of Mandanipour's novels to appear in English follows an ambitious but censored Iranian writer as he attempts to write a Nobel-caliber love story that will pass the censors' inspection. As a professional writer, narrator Shahriar has known his censor, nicknamed Pofiry Petrovich, for long enough that he can anticipate his objections. Shahriar's work in progress, which unfolds as a subnarrative within the novel, concerns Dara and Sara, teenagers named after prerevolutionary Iranian children's book characters, as they explore sexual and emotional love in a nation that forbids physical or social interaction between young people of the opposite sex. As the couple's love grows, the self-censoring writer strikes out whole passages in anticipation of his censor's objections. All the while, the writer converses with his censor, his characters, the reader and himself to create an intriguing postmodern, multifaceted romance steeped in Iranian culture. Kudos to Khalili for a wonderfully fluid translation of an intricately layered text. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

June 30, 2009
Books of The Times
Where Romance Requires Courage
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

In what now reads like an eerie echo of the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young Iranian woman cut down by a bullet during this month’s election protests and captured on video, the Iranian author of this new novel foresees the possible death of his heroine in the streets of Tehran: “The girl does not know that in precisely seven minutes and seven seconds, at the height of the clash between the students, the police, and the members of the Party of God, in the chaos of attacks and escapes, she will be knocked into with great force, she will fall back, her head will hit against a cement edge, and her sad Oriental eyes will forever close.”

Her fellow students, “aware that they are about to be attacked, break into a heartrending anthem:

My fellow schoolmate,
you are with me and beside me,
... you are my tear and my sigh,
... the scars of the lashes of tyranny rest on our bodies.”

“Censoring an Iranian Love Story” by Shahriar Mandanipour — an Iranian writer who is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard — is, at once, a novel about two young Iranians trying to conduct a covert romance in Tehran; a postmodern account of the efforts of their creator — or his fictional alter ego — to grapple with the harsh censorship rules of his homeland; and an Escher-like meditation on the interplay of life and art, reality and fiction.

Although Mr. Mandanipour’s literary games occasionally make this book read like a Charlie Kaufman movie script run amok, his novel leaves the reader with a harrowing sense of what it is like to live in Tehran under the mullahs’ rule, and the myriad ways in which the Islamic government’s strict edicts on everything from clothing to relationships between the sexes permeate daily life.

The novel provides a darkly comic view of the Kafkaesque absurdities of living in a country where movies could be subject to review by a blind censor (in her best-selling memoir, “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” Azar Nafisi wrote about the same blind, or nearly blind, censor); where records of enrollment at a university can be so thoroughly erased by authorities that a student can come to doubt even his own name. In fact, at its best, “Censoring an Iranian Love Story” becomes a kind of Kundera-like rumination on philosophy and politics, exploring the nervous interface between the public and the private in a totalitarian state, even as it playfully investigates the possibilities and limits of storytelling.

Mr. Mandanipour’s two central characters, Sara and Dara, are both virgins — she is 22, and he is 30-something — and naïve about courtship, never mind the mysteries of sex and love. They must contend with the watchful eyes of parents and nosy neighbors, and also with those of the ever-present morality police, who patrol the city, looking for unmarried couples, public signs of affection, dress-code violations, signs of Westernization. Dara has already served time in prison for selling and renting illegal videos of movies by Western filmmakers like Altman, Kubrick and Welles.

Dara courts Sara by leaving hidden messages for her in library books — he places little purple dots under certain letters in certain words, which she must then decode. Eventually the two contrive to meet in places like a museum, a movie theater and a hospital emergency room, where they can steal a few moments of conversation.

While Sara finds herself falling for Dara, she is also considering the marriage proposal of a well-to-do entrepreneur named Sinbad, whom her family wants her to marry: Sinbad is not an unappealing figure, and his wealth would enable her to help her relatives and buy the freedom to travel to the West.

While recounting the adventures of his characters, Mr. Mandanipour also tells us about the travails of being an Iranian writer. He says he is “tired of writing dark and bitter stories, stories populated by ghosts and dead narrators with predictable endings of death and destruction,” but while he wants to tell a love story, he knows that this is not easy in a country where a censor scours books for “immoral and corruptive words and phrases” that might pollute readers’ minds, and where “there is a politico-religious presumption that any proximity and discourse between a man and a woman who are neither married nor related is a prologue to deadly sin.”

He tells us about the linguistic acrobatics required to circumvent the censors; the complexities of censorship in Iran, where there is a literary tradition of using ornate metaphors and similes for bodily and sexual attributes (including lots of fruit, flower and food imagery); and the government’s reported use of Western computer software to identify literary works published under pseudonyms.

As the novel progresses, the author’s relationship with a censor who works under the alias of Porfiry Petrovich (the name of the magistrate in Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”) grows increasingly complicated, as does his relationship with his own characters, who, he suggests, have begun to escape his control.

Some of Mr. Mandanipour’s efforts to inject his story with surreal, postmodern elements feel distinctly strained (the intermittent appearances of a hunchbacked midget, in particular, are annoyingly gratuitous and contrived), but he’s managed, by the end of the book, to build a clever Rubik’s Cube of a story, while at the same time giving readers a haunting portrait of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran: arduous, demoralizing and constricted even before the brutalities of the current crackdown.







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Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Fairy Tale (Hardcover) by Cyn Balog

Fairy Tale (Hardcover) by Cyn Balog

A captivating and witty dark fantasy that will have girls lusting after it.

Morgan Sparks has always known that she and her boyfriend, Cam, are made for each other. But when Cam’s cousin Pip comes to stay with the family, Cam seems depressed. Finally Cam confesses to Morgan what’s going on: Cam is a fairy. The night he was born, fairies came down and switched him with a healthy human boy. Nobody expected Cam to live, and nobody expected his biological brother, heir to the fairy throne, to die. But both things happened, and now the fairies want Cam back to take his rightful place as Fairy King.

Even as Cam physically changes, becoming more miserable each day, he and Morgan pledge to fool the fairies and stay together forever. But by the time Cam has to decide once and for all what to do, Morgan’s no longer sure what’s best for everyone, or whether her and Cam’s love can weather an uncertain future.

About the Author
Cyn Balog is the race and event manager for Runner’s World, Running Times, and Bicycling magazines. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and infant daughter.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 1


People call me spooky.

Maybe because by eleven o'clock on that day, I'd already told Ariana Miles she'd starve to death in Hollywood, Erica Fuentes she'd bomb history, and Wendell Marks that he would never, ever be a part of the A-list, no matter how hard he tried.

Now, sitting in the bleachers after school, half watching a meaningless Hawks football exhibition game and waiting for some nameless freshman to bring me my French fries (psychics cannot work on an empty stomach), I've just about reduced my fourth client of the day to tears (well, Wendell didn't cry; he just pretended to yawn, covered his mouth, and let out a pathetic snurgle). But hey, sometimes the future is scary.

Sierra Martin won't look at me. Instead, she's taken an unnatural interest in the Heath bar wrapper wedged between the metal planks her sequin-studded flip-flops are resting on. A tear slips past her fake-tanned knees and lands perfectly on her porno-red big-toe nail.

"Sorry," I say, offering her a pat on the back and a couple of orange Tic Tacs for consolation. "Really."

Sometimes this gift does suck. Some days, I have the pleasure of doling out good news--BMWs as graduation presents, aced finals, that sort of thing. Today, it's been nothing but total crap. And yes, it obviously must have come as a shock that I'd envisioned Sierra, whose parents had bred her for Harvard, walking to Physics 101 on the Middlesex Community College campus, but it's not my fault. I just deliver the mail; I don't write it.

"Are you . . . su-ure?" she asks me, sniffling and wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

I sigh. This is the inevitable question, and I always answer the same thing: "I'm sorry, but I've never been wrong."

I know that probably makes me sound like a total snob, but it's simple fact. Since freshman year, I've correctly predicted the futures of dozens of students at Stevens. It all started way before that, though, in junior high, when I correctly guessed who would win the million-dollar prize on every reality-TV show out there. At times I would have to think, really think, to know the answer, but sometimes I would just wake up and, clear as day, the face of the winner would pop into my mind. Soon, I started testing my abilities out on my friends, and my friends' friends, and before long, every other person at school wanted my services. Seriously, being a psychic will do more for your reputation than a driver's license or a head-to-toe Marc Jacobs wardrobe.

Sierra tosses her frizzed-out, corn-husk-blond spirals over her shoulder and straightens. "Well, maybe you saw someone else. Someone who looked like me. Isn't that possible?"

Actually, it isn't possible at all. Sierra has a totally warped sense of style, like Andy Warhol on crack. Everyday things lying around the house do not always make attractive accessories. I shrug, though, since I don't feel like explaining that hell would have a ski resort before two people on the face of this earth would think it was okay to tie their ponytail up in a Twizzler, and crane my neck toward the refreshment stand. I'm starving. Where are my French fries?

"I mean, I did get a twenty-three hundred on my SATs," she says, which is something she's told me, and the rest of the student body, about a billion times. She might as well have broadcast it on CNN. However, she hasn't taken into account the fact that there are thousands of other students across the country who also got those scores, and took college-level physics or calculus instead of Dramatic Expression as their senior extra_curricular activity. Everyone knows that Sierra Martin screwed herself by deciding to coast through her classes this year.

See, I'm not that spooky. Truth is, most people don't use enough of their brains to see the obvious. Part of it is just being keenly aware of human nature, like one of those British detectives on PBS. It's elementary, my dear Watson. Colonel Mustard in the Billiard Room with the candlestick, and Sierra is so not Harvard material.

"We need to do the wave," Eden says, grabbing my arm. She doesn't bother to look at me; her attention is focused totally on the game, as usual. "They need us."

I squint at her. "It's an exhibition game."

She pulls a half-sucked Blow Pop from her mouth with a smack and says, "So?"

"Okay, you go, girl," I say, though I wish she wouldn't.

She turns around to face the dozen or so students in the bleachers, cups her hands around her lips, and screams, "Okay, let's do the wave!" Auburn hair trailing like a comet's tail, she runs as fast as her skinny, freckled legs can carry her to the right edge of the seats, then flails her arms and says to the handful of people there, "You guys first. Ready? One, and two, and three, and go!"

I don't bother to turn around. I know nobody is doing it. It's human nature--doing a wave during an exhibition game is _totally lame. Actually, doing a wave at all is totally lame. And nobody is going to listen to poor Miss Didn't-Make-the-Cheerleading-Squad.

She scowls and screams, "Morgan!" as she rushes past me, so I feel compelled to half stand. I raise my hands a little and let out a "woo!" Sierra doesn't notice Eden's fit of school spirit, since she's still babbling on about her three years as editor of the yearbook, as if giving me her entire life story will somehow get her closer to the Ivy League.

Eden returns a few seconds later, defeated, and slumps beside me. The spray of freckles on her face has completely disappeared into the deep crevasse on the bridge of her nose. "This school has no spirit."

It's true--and ironic, really--that, though my best friend, Eden McCarthy, probably has more school spirit in her pinky than the entire student body put together, she didn't make cheerleading. Being a cheerleader, though, isn't just about having spirit.
Eden could make a cow look graceful. I say, "Well, good try; A for effort," and pat her back.

Product Details
Reading level: Young Adult
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers (June 23, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0385737068
ISBN-13: 978-0385737067
Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.8 x 1 inches
Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #9,084 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in this category: #98 in Books > Teens > Literature & Fiction > Love & Romance






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