Finally, a very solid enjoyable biography of one of the greats. I could have done without the pages of complete lyrics quotes, including all the repeaFinally, a very solid enjoyable biography of one of the greats. I could have done without the pages of complete lyrics quotes, including all the repeated lines � didn’t see the need for that; and the amount of endless praise that showers down on Randy on every other page, and his unbroken run of brilliant successes, does possibly get a little grating by the time Toy Story 3 comes into view � but heck, he deserves it! Robert Hilburn only allows that he made one bad record, Born Again, and really, the record wasn’t that bad, it was the cover, which was Randy in KISS makeup with dollar signs, a little heavyhanded maybe, and apparently no one got the joke so didn’t buy the record.
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Aside from that it’s all good � no, wonderful.
Fans might complain about the ten or twelve years Randy spent doing movie soundtracks and not albums, but when you consider that, as we read here, every album was like pulling teeth and all the soundtracks were strictly professional assignments to be turned in on time and no dillydallying and getting paid one cool million dollars or thereabouts per soundtrack, then you can see Randy’s reasoning.
Randy had to steer a unique path between other kinds of singer-songwriter types � he wasn’t like Bob Dylan, had no folk roots, had no blues roots; he wasn’t like Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen � I can only see two songs you could call autobiographical in all his stuff � I Miss You (addressed to his first wife, I guess he must have got clearance from his second wife) and Memo to my Son, all about how aggravating little kids are but you still love them. All his other songs are written in character, which allows him to include a lot of horrible stuff in his songs other more romantic types wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. And of course he wasn’t a rocker like Neil Young. And he wasn’t Elton John or Billy Joel neither. He was more of a rebooted Cole Porter type but not really, didn’t go in for fancy rhyme schemes. He was different. Maybe the only comparison is with another guy who deals in songs sung by characters, Tom Waits.
SOME LISTS
THE SIX NASTIEST CHARACTERS IN RANDY NEWMAN SONGS
The pyromaniac in Let’s Burn Down the Cornfield The stalker in Suzanne The slavemaster in Sail Away The Southern racist in Rednecks The child killer in In Germany Before the War The street thug in Mr Sheep
THE SIX MOST BEAUTIFUL SONGS
Louisiana 1927 Marie Texas Girl at the Funeral of her Father In Germany Before the War I’ll be Home When She Loved Me
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MY SIX FAVOURITES
Birmingham Baltimore Jolly Coppers on Parade Old Man on the Farm Same Girl Shame (I love the moment when he turns round to the backup singers who are chanting "Shame shame shame" and yells SHUDDUP!)
A FEW TIMES WHEN HE PICKED TOO OBVIOUS TARGETS
God’s Song (everyone praises this but Randy is shooting fish in a barrel here, too easy) Yellow Man (the criticism of racism can get too oblique at times) Old Kentucky Home Political Science (Let’s drop the big one) � closest he came to Tom Lehrer (“Who’s Next?�)
SOME EARLY RANDY NEWMAN SONGS MADE THE CHARTS!
I’ve Been Wrong Before by Cilla Black (this former Cavern cloakroom attendant friend of the Beatles who turned into one of Britain’s most beloved family entertainers freakishly got the first Randy Newman song into the charts � we suspect George Martin picked it for her) Just One Smile by Gene Pitney Nobody Needs your Love by Gene Pitney Simon Smith and his Amazing Dancing Bear by Alan Price The Biggest Night of her Life by the Nashville Teens
IN CONCLUSION
This is a shoo-in for all you Randy Newman fans....more
It ain’t easy to write a comic novel � your poison will be different to my poison for sure. I have myself hurled at the wall various beloved comedy noIt ain’t easy to write a comic novel � your poison will be different to my poison for sure. I have myself hurled at the wall various beloved comedy novels (A Confederacy of Dunces, White Noise, The Sellout) but I have loved some others (Trainspotting, Skippy Dies, The Slaves of Solitude, Eighty-Sixed). Charles Portis had a magical ability to write my kind of comedy � this is the 4th of his I have read. All recommended! He’s like � Charles who? Then you say � he wrote True Grit. Ah yes! Great film. Also � great book! Then he knocked out Norwood, The Dog of the South and this one - they're all great! Did I say that already? His last one was Gringos which I will save for a rainy day when I’ve got the low down shaking blues.
Masters of Atlantis has an eccentric subject � everyone has vaguely heard of the Rosicrucians, an esoteric cult devoted to the preservation of occult stuff from Egypt or wherever. So here we have the Gnomons, a truly hapless idiotic bunch who convince each other they have discovered the forgotten science of Atlantis. There is no plot, we are just bumbling through the decades with a loose constellation of earnest American eccentrics, some of which should be hogtied and throwed off the caboose if there was any justice, but there isn’t.
I can imagine this would not be everybody’s jalapeno popper but it was mine....more
Not as chilling as Hostage and not as expansive, funny and sad as Jerusalem or weird as Pyongyang but still really good. I am sorry that Guy Delisle sNot as chilling as Hostage and not as expansive, funny and sad as Jerusalem or weird as Pyongyang but still really good. I am sorry that Guy Delisle seems to have stopped moving. There are at least forty other countries he should go and live in and write a graphic novel about. Well, he is only 59 years old. There's time....more
I was informed recently that some younger readers of novels only ever read the dialogue in the novels they "read". They skip over the boring stuff in I was informed recently that some younger readers of novels only ever read the dialogue in the novels they "read". They skip over the boring stuff in between the dialogue and they say they "get the drift" of the thing just from the dialogue. And I think to myself - what a wonderful world. ...more
An amiable, spiky review of the 14 years of Conservative government, all the way up to last July when they were demolished and now have the smallest nAn amiable, spiky review of the 14 years of Conservative government, all the way up to last July when they were demolished and now have the smallest number of MPs ever in their long history. Will they ever come back? Well, Labour itself was demolished in the 80s then became the demolisher in the late 90s only to be turfed out in turn; so it goes, the jolly carousel of party politics. And if the Conservatives are done for, their replacement will be Nigel Farage and the Reform party, not a pretty sight, can’t say I would relish that.
(It's true to call Labour's tremendous Commons majority a "loveless landslide", hardly anyone voting for them had joy in their hearts, they were all voting against the Tories, not deliriously for Labour. )
But Labour's enormous majority of 156 means that they are there for the next five years, and there will be no clownish Boris Johnson moments and no Liz Truss style implosions and no three prime ministers in three months comedies. You might have hated the Tories but at least they were entertaining. But now politics in Britain will become a lot duller, not a bad thing.
My least favourite thing in January was : hearing Conservative MPs on the news fake-angrily denouncing the incompetent Keir Starmer (the Farmer Harmer) for not doing something in six months that they didn’t do in 14 years....more
This is a worthy chunk of brainy typing. It was the opposite of what I was hoping it would be (a survey of the 20th century novel). It kind of worriesThis is a worthy chunk of brainy typing. It was the opposite of what I was hoping it would be (a survey of the 20th century novel). It kind of worries me that I seem to be the only person not rhapsodising about it. What Edwin Frank means by The Twentieth Century Novel is mostly the thumping big high-toned literary novel. We’re in for a trudge up and down the Himalayas of Greatness. So you can predict the books that get full attention :
The Magic Mountain � Tommy Mann Ulysses � Jimmy Joyce The Man without Qualities � Bob Musil In Search of Lost Time � Marcella Proust One Hundred Years of Solitude � Gabe Marquez
And 28 other mostly mighty slabs. So sit up straight you at the back, no talking, this is serious stuff. If it’s 500 pages long and features swathes of ruminations by a philosophically inclined man then yes, it’s in. OK there are a couple of easy ones, The Island of Doctor Moreau and Claudine at School. But that’s it.
Altogether, 33 books get looked at, six are by women, the latest one is The Enigma of Arrival by VS Naipaul, published in 1987. There’s no Bellow, Roth, Rushdie, Gass, Gaddis or Pynchon. But still this is not a bad 33 books � I would have left out The Immoralist and Amerika and Life and Fate and would have substituted Journey to the End of Night, The 42nd Parallel and At Swim-Two-Birds (something a bit weird and wonderful as a relief from all this earnestness).
One thing that bugged me - he rarely dislikes anything. Here he is wondering about Gertrude Stein’s style
which � with its limited vocabulary, ever-expanding paratactic sentences, and repetition compulsion � might be dismissed as both flat and flatulent, maddening and even perhaps a bit mad�. It is writing that tends towards a drone, and a drone is perhaps the tone of boredom
But he quickly gives himself a shake and ends up by saying Gertrude Stein “gives language, rather miraculously, a new life�. I have often found it to be true that none of the professors can ever say anything bad about a novel that is part of the Canon of Great Literature, however dull or infuriating it is. I have a theory that if they do they will be kicked out of the Professors Club.
He gets tripped up by Lolita, as many people do
It’s worth considering why Lolita remains controversial. It can’t be because of the story itself � basically a story of an unscrupulous seducer and a wronged woman that is almost as old as story itself.
Wronged woman? Lolita is 12. He continues :
If the book remains scandalous it is because once and for all it interrupts, short-circuits, the connection between ethics and aesthetics that twentieth-century novelists like Wells and Musil…were desperate to affirm.
No, that is not why Lolita is still scandalous. It is about child rape, that is why.
What I didn’t like the most however was the professorial tone and the persistent tendency towards abstraction. Opening it at random, page 233 gives us
Musil participates in his growing novel as incredulously as Ulrich does in the parallel campaign, even as his novel often delights us with a sense that, caught up in appearances as it may be, its transparent factitiousness makes it the perfect (perfectly facetious) instrument for taking the measure of our factitious times.
Or try this
Character and situation, expressed and explored through a reliable interplay of dialogue and description conducted under narrative oversight : that’s the form the novel settled into in the nineteenth century, and which the vast majority of novels take to this day.
Welcome to the awards for 2024. It’s been a funny year. These days they’re all funny years.
THE 2024 AWARD FOR THE BOOK THAT STAYED ON MY ACTUAL BOOKSWelcome to the awards for 2024. It’s been a funny year. These days they’re all funny years.
THE 2024 AWARD FOR THE BOOK THAT STAYED ON MY ACTUAL BOOKSHELF IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD LONGEST BEFORE BEING READ
The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos (purchased in 2015)
NOVEL OF THE YEAR
The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos
You know this same thing happened to me before with Middlemarch. What’s the common denominator? They are both intimidating ! But when you finally finally pick them up they’re entrancing!
THE KARL OVE KNAUSGARD AWARD FOR THE HIGHLY PRAISED NOVEL I SHOULD HAVE LIKED WAY MORE THAN I DID
Guest presenter : Don DeLillo
The shortlist :
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks The Vegetarian by Han Kang Eurotrash by Christian Kracht
And the winner is :
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
I even ditched this. But I don’t think it was bad! Just bad for me. Too much World War One! I overdosed! Not Mr Faulks� fault.
THE ANCIENT SF CLASSIC WHICH MYSTERIOUSLY I HAD NEVER READ AND WHICH TURNED OUT TO BE GREAT AWARD
Guest presenter : an AI programme speaking with the voice of JG Ballard
The Death of Grass by John Christopher
FAVOURITE TITLE OF THE YEAR
Eat Them Alive by Pierce Nace
MOST APPALLINGLY WRITTEN PIECE OF TRASH OF THE YEAR AND THE LAST TEN YEARS
Eat Them Alive by Pierce Nace
The English language is inadequate to describe its own desecration in the pages of this horror novel about giant praying mantises. Maybe you think a horror novel about giant praying mantises is bound to be a ghastly read�. I disagree! I want Martin Amis to rewrite this!
THE LEAST POPULAR BOOK I READ
It May Never Happen by V S Pritchett
Only 12 other people have read this.
THE MOST POPULAR BOOK I READ
Educated by Tara Westover.
3,216,000 people have read this one
THE HIGHEST RATED BOOK I READ THIS YEAR
Rural Rhythm by Tony Russell
A survey of twenties/thirties early country music. Only three people have rated this and we have all given it 5 stars!
BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR
JOINT WINNERS:
J D Salinger : A Life by Kenneth Slawenski
George Gissing : A Life by Paul Delany
I had no idea JD Salinger was going to be so interesting, and I knew Gissing was going to be miserable but I had no idea he was THAT miserable ! Both great books.
THE 10001 BOOKS YOU MUST READ BEFORE GLOBAL WARMING TAKES ALL THE JOY FROM YOUR LIFE AWARD
OTHERWISE KNOWN AS THE WE-TOLD-YOU-SO AWARD
Guest Presenter : Taylor Swift (Thank you so much for making time in your busy schedule, Miss Swift)
Wild Harbour by Ian MacPherson
Occasionally I refer to the famous 1001 Books and pick a title I never heard of before and this was one. What a delight it was! File next to The Death of Grass � it was another tale of the apocalypse, but this one from 1930s Scotland. Very unusual!
BOOKER PRIZE SPECIAL
Guest presenter : Forrest Gump : My momma always said, "The Booker Prize was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get"
This year I got one absolutely terrible winner from 1986
The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis
And a 5 star gem from 2021
The Promise by Damon Galgut
GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE YEAR
No Award
Because I didn’t read any, not one! (Insert crying emoji)
HEAVIEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Guest presenter : Tyson Fury
Mixing Up the Medicine by Bob Dylan
which tipped the scales at 248 g. (This was nowhere near the all-time champion Century by Bernard Bruce, published in 1999 by Phaidon, which was a staggering 570 g.)
THE BRETT EASTON ELLIS AWARD FOR MOST VIOLENT BOOK OF THE YEAR
Nuclear War : A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen
(Announcer winds up by saying something sneery about the younger generation not being able to finish books any more because of their obsession with 20 second videos of 9 year old violinists playing Carol of the Bells although there are some really cute ones of cats did you see the one where this cat learns how to open the back door and shuts the dog outside.)...more
With Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys you always get wonderful music*, massive drug abuse, endless financial complications and ghastly psychological prWith Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys you always get wonderful music*, massive drug abuse, endless financial complications and ghastly psychological problems. Around when Brian got to be over 300 pounds and was probably going to be the next big rock death his wife Marilyn found a shrink with a Hollywood reputation by the name of Eugene Landy. In 2 years Landy with his 24 hour therapy takeover of Brian’s life got him slimmed down, facelifted and able to conduct a conversation with another human being, more or less.
Pre-Landy:
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Post-Landy :
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But as someone says in this book, what if the brain surgeon operating on you says “If I save your life I get 25% of all your future earnings � deal?�
That’s what happened � this psychiatrist suddenly became a record producer and a songwriter with his name on all future Brian Wilson compositions.
Gary Usher came into the Beach Boys picture in 1963 and co-wrote Lonely Sea, 409 and In My Room, then got edged out and replaced by other co-writers. In 1986, all those years later, Landy re-introduced him to Brian � the idea was that Gary would get Brian back into the studio and back into making music again and maybe a solo record would be the result.
Well it all ended in tears before bedtime. This book is a lot of excerpts from Gary Usher’s 1986-87 diary plus commentary by Stephen McParland. It turns out that Gary is not Mr Completely Level-headed either. He has some very Californian outbursts like
Brian is half on the inner levels and half on the outer levels and it was on the inner level that the damage had been done. I saw irreparable damage that had been done to his astral body and to his mental bodies and to his desire bodies.
To no one’s surprise, the relationship between Gary and Dr Landy does not run smoothly :
Dr Landy made it quite clear how stupid he thought Usher was, stressing that he thought he was probably the most stupid person he had ever met in his life. (p280)
This book is a weird one. Over months of stop-start recordings I lost count of the times these guys tinker and obsess over two songs, Let’s Go to Heaven in my Car and The Spirit of Rock and Roll neither of which ended up released anywhere except as bonus tracks, and why, because they are terrible.
Anyway, Gary Usher got elbowed out of the picture AGAIN in 1987 and Brian released his first solo album the following year. Allegedly it cost one million dollars and crawled up to number 54 on the album charts. (Note : insert something here about the Law of Diminishing Returns.)
This book is strictly for Brian Wilson fans who are doing a course in abnormal psychology.
"Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes" by Raymond Carver "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid (only two pages but wow!) "The WaA little bit so-so for me; best ones were :
"Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes" by Raymond Carver "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid (only two pages but wow!) "The Way we Live Now" by Susan Sontag "River of Names" by Dorothy Allison "Emergency" by Denis Johnson
and of course
"The Things they Carried" by Tim O'Brien
- there was a law passed years ago which stated that every anthology of great American stories had to include "The Things they Carried"....more
How happy I am to find a writer on Dylan who is as companionable, encyclopaedic, enthusiastic, and, most importantly, sane, as Jochen Markhorst. AfterHow happy I am to find a writer on Dylan who is as companionable, encyclopaedic, enthusiastic, and, most importantly, sane, as Jochen Markhorst. After hacking through a fair number of hopeless*, incomprehensible**, smug***or superfluous**** Dylan books, Mr Markhorst is a breath of fresh air. I wanted so much to dish out 5 stars to this short but sweet book on the brilliant Basement Tapes but as usual with self-published books proofreading appears to have been the last thing on the author’s mind and there are quite a few sentences that seem to have a word missing or simply make no sense. Oh dear! But never mind, this is still excellent for Dylan fans. (Favourite misprint: ”A Chance is Gonna Come�, Sam Cooke’s immortal masterpiece)
One of Jochen’s many great observations :
Dylan’s “Nothing was Delivered� does not go much deeper than Kung Fu Panda but some Dylanologists won’t have that.
Bob’s 1966-1968 story is weird. He finished a world tour and then had a motorcycle accident, it wasn’t that serious, sprained vertebrae, a few weeks in bed. But he used it to get out from under the ton of commitments Al Grossman, manager, had signed him up for. Instead of continuing the mad whirlwind he stopped dead and started hanging out with his backing band in their houses in leafy Woodstock far from the madding crowd and eventually started writing some goofy funny laid back songs for them all to have a fun time with. A tape recorder was switched on, and that’s what we got. While the psychedelic Sgt Pepper summer of love happened over there, Bob and the Band were over here ignoring it all.
After nine months or so they ended up with 155 songs of which 128 were different and 53 were complete new Dylan songs (2 co-written) and the rest old folky bluesy stuff.
About half of these new Dylan songs are semi-spoken, most are comedy songs and the lyrics are purely surreal
It’s a one-track town, just brown, and a breeze, too Pack up the meat, sweet, we’re headin� out for Wichita in a pile of fruit Get the loot, don’t be slow, we’re gonna catch a trout
There are a handful of strong serious songs � I Shall be Released, Tears of Rage, This Wheel’s on Fire, Too Much of Nothing � but mostly it’s more like this
I bought my girl a herd of moose One she could call her own Well, she came out the very next day To see where they had flown I’m goin� down to Tennessee Get me a truck or somethin� Gonna save my money and rip it up!
As for what they mean, well�. Meaning fluctuates in Dylan’s songs. It might be plain (Masters of War) or completely cryptic (Gates of Eden) but Dylan always makes them sound like they mean something. Which makes many people scramble around for something that isn’t really there.
A lot of the Basement lyrics are what Jochen Markhorst calls “placeholders� � like when George Harrison was stuck for the line after “Something in the way she moves� and Lennon suggested “attracts me like a cauliflower� and George improves it to “attracts me like a pomegranate�. Basement lyrics are rewritten from take to take and rewritten again when they appear in print then again when they appear on Bob’s website. These songs are not very stable!
(The easy, lazy surrealism that infuses song lyrics from the 1970s onwards can be laid at Dylan’s door. It’s his fault! It’s so much harder to write a song with a clear meaning so instead of that we skip the light fandango and turn cartwheels cross the floor.)
There are so many books about Dylan that I have already read two complete books just about the Basement Tapes. So this is the third. You might think everything’s been said but Jochen proves that just because people have done something before you it doesn’t mean you can’t do it better.
For each of the 32 songs he muses upon, Jochen assesses the cover versions he has heard. He loves a lot of them but one particular album comes in for special attention. The album is by a one-off band Coulson, Dean, McGuinness, Flint entitled Lo and Behold! (1972)
Their crisp debut album Lo and Behold! p26
One of the best Dylan tribute albums ever Lo and Behold! p 32
Perhaps the most beautiful Dylan covers album ever, Lo and Behold! p 101
The underestimated jewel Lo and Behold! p153
Their unsurpassed Dylan tribute Lo and Behold! p172
The artistic success of the resulting masterpiece Lo and Behold! p180
Okay, he wore me down� I may have to get a copy!
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*All The Songs : The Story Behind Each Track by Philippe Morgotin **Invisible Republic : Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus ***anything by Clinton Heylin ****Outlaw Blues by Spencer Leigh...more
I am a fan of Korean movies but I didn’t read a Korean novel before now. This one features two sisters, both with psychological problems caused by havI am a fan of Korean movies but I didn’t read a Korean novel before now. This one features two sisters, both with psychological problems caused by having to deal with three horrible men (two husbands and one father). South Korea is famous for having the lowest birth rate in the world and if you want to know why you could read this, it won’t take long. According to Han Kang, the less Korean women have to do with Korean men the better.
I want to read more translated fiction but sometimes I think the translations are strange and the language is stilted and kinda bland. I’ll give two examples.
As small children their young cheeks were frequently left throbbing by their heavy-handed father
I wouldn’t describe a father who slapped his kids on the cheek frequently as heavy-handed. Brutal, violent, abusive, but not heavy-handed, which means clumsy, insensitive or too forceful.
This next one might be all Han Kang and not the translator :
Had she ever really understood her husband’s true nature, bound up as it was with that seemingly impenetrable silence?
I have to ask do people really have a “true nature� which if they would only talk to you you could understand? I don’t think so. Really, who can understand anyone else? If you want to check out the total incomprehensibility of human beings, the recent Dominique Pelicot trial is a good place to start.
Korean movies � the ones that aren’t ultraviolent horror that is � are very often melancholy, as is a lot of this novel, but they have a sweet atmosphere that doesn’t rely on the lurid goings-on we find in The Vegetarian.
I know this book won the International Booker Prize and Han Kang just won the Nobel but when I reached into my sack of stars I could only find two in there.
SOME FAVOURITE KOREAN MOVIES
Oasis Spring Summer Autumn Winter…And Spring Secret Sunshine Breathless Poetry The Handmaiden Microhabitat House Of Hummingbird In Front Of Your Face Decision To Leave Return To Seoul Past Lives...more
Japanese culture goes from one extreme to the other � movies like Guinea Pig : The Devil’s Experiment, Tetsuo The Iron Man, Tumbling Doll Of Flesh, ViJapanese culture goes from one extreme to the other � movies like Guinea Pig : The Devil’s Experiment, Tetsuo The Iron Man, Tumbling Doll Of Flesh, Visitor Q and Tokyo Gore Police (watch these from behind your sofa or better don’t watch them at all); then books like Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami which is completely mad; then all those ones by Haruki the other Murakami, they are pretty weird; and then you get little novels like Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto and the (rightfully) beloved Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata where it’s all about alienated women gradually going mad and dissolving or managing to stay sane but only just. Extreme violence and extreme boredom. Nothing in between.
This little novel (novelette? no, I hate that word) is a not much good version of Convenience Store Woman. 20 year old Chizu goes to Tokyo to find work and lives with a 70 year old lady and footles and mooches around and gets stupid part time jobs and dislikes pretty much everything and can’t find any really solid reasons for stayin� alive and th-th-th-that’s all folks.
Random point : I don’t get how Japanese people aren’t all overweight � on every other page Chizu is going on about food
While the two of them picked away at a single plate of cabbage rolls, I silently devoured everything I’d ordered, beef tendon braised in black vinegar, veal Milanese, German potato salad, mackerel sushi wrapped in bamboo leaves, and an orange sorbet
(In every Asian movie I have seen there is a scene where they have a family meal about five minutes from the start but they are all slender. What is the secret.)
But the real problem here is that Chizu is mindnumbingly bland and uninteresting as she mopes about, and the old dame she lives with isn’t the most electric raconteur you ever came across either. At the moment of high drama when Chizu breaks up with her boyfriend this is what they say :
“You like someone else, don’t you?� “No, it’s not like that.� “I know you do.� “It’s Ito-chan, isn’t it?� “No, I mean, I don’t know. Sorry.� “You might as well come out and say it. How can you be so casual about this?� “About what?� “About everything.� “What’s everything?� “I don’t know, okay?�
Well not everything has to be Dostoyevsky but really.
Two stars not one because I still get a cool feeling when I read a novel in a day, even one like this....more
This year I had a project : reread all my favourite short stories. There are about 450 of them, some 3 pages long, some 60 pages long, I’ve got about This year I had a project : reread all my favourite short stories. There are about 450 of them, some 3 pages long, some 60 pages long, I’ve got about half of them done so far. Quite a bit of reading that doesn’t show up on GR at all ! A great short story is a real treasure and so hard to recommend, there might be only two in a 20 story anthology but those two will occupy a part of your mind forever. The big hitters for me are Raymond Carver, Ray Bradbury, Donald Barthelme, Thom Jones, Irvine Welsh, Matthew Klam, Jordan Harper and Cordwainer Smith � last one is an old sf guy I want to reread everything by, that will be the next project.
Some stories are unrereadable � for instance they have a massive shock ending � once you know it it would be like having someone tell the same joke again � so "The Star" and "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C Clarke, and "A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury (sf is very good at the perspective-altering ending that turns your mind upside down).
Some stories are so strange you think whaaaat did I just read? "In the Hills, the Cities" by Clive Barker, "Mr Boy" by Patrick Kelly, "User" by Juan Valencia, I remember those! Some long ones have such a lush power to create a whole world (a whole world just for a short story, such profligacy) � like "Special Economics" by Maureen McHugh or "R & R" by Lucius Shepherd or "Ant Colony" by Alissa Nutting (that last one would also fit into the what-did-I-just-read category). And some are funnier than ten of the last Netflix comedy shows, like "The Toast" by Rebecca Curtis, "The Rabbit Hole as Likely Explanation" by Ann Beattie or "The Issues I Dealt with in Therapy" by Matthew Klam.
And some are�. Well. Enough. You get the picture. Novels can be wonderful but don’t forget short stories. That’s the moral of this review.
As for this book, the best one is one of the all time creepiest, "Raspberry Jam" by Angus Wilson....more
I have a naïve belief that a foreign novel must pretty hot stuff if it winds up being translated into English because far too few of them are � only tI have a naïve belief that a foreign novel must pretty hot stuff if it winds up being translated into English because far too few of them are � only three out of Christian Kracht’s eight novels have been so far and in Germany this guy is a big name. But alas my theory didn’t pan out and I’m scratching my head about what makes people like this. It’s very mildly funny. A full CT scan would show that 65% of Eurotrash is indeed comedy. The rest of it would be 16% namedropping high toned authors, ritzy destinations and designer fashion labels, 7% descriptions of meals and hotel rooms and the final 12% is rambling chat between this guy and his batty 80 year old alco-mom.
So this is a road trip story about a 50-something year old author called Christian Kracht visiting his wreck of a mother and taking her out for one last Big Adventure which, being Swiss, turns out to be rolling around Switzerland in a taxi. Not too much happens. The author ruminates for pages about his obnoxiously rich parents, his Nazi grandparent and his youthful obsession with David Bowie, particularly the Ziggy Stardust album (which by the way has not aged well, gawky songs and thin sound, one of Bowie’s worst. But I digress, as Christian himself very often does.)
Occasionally the mother-son dialogues flare into something approaching poignancy but mainly it’s two cartoony characters flouncing and preening and moaning on about the past, the past, you’re a terrible person, you’re worse, hand me the vodka.
One good thing though, you can read it in a day....more
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