Book Review: Falling Man

Falling Man by Don DeLillo

There should be little doubt that DeLillo is a master of sorts. While I still have to catch up and read much of his work, this novel proves his ability. Falling Man is purposefully despondent. Surrounding characters touched by the collapse of the World Trade Center and taking place in the moments, weeks and months after the events of 9/11, the novel shows characters out of sorts. The narration is sparse, ephemeral. The course taken by the characters, the novel's plot itself, though, does not seem well thought out. The characters float, and I think this is also purposeful, but they float away from us.

I probably wouldn't recommend this book to someone unless they were looking to read more DeLillo or were looking into post-9/11 literature, but somewhere in the narration, the mode of this novel is a model for writing I would like to try in the near future.

Book Review: Returning to Earth

Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison

Though two other books by Harrison sit on my shelves, this was my first time reading his work. And I felt like I came in late to a conversation. It seemed to me that people who have read and enjoyed Harrison would see similar aesthetics here and be at home. This being my first experience with Harrison, I didn't get it.

There is beautiful writing here. Harrison manages to capture the landscape and the way nature infiltrates the souls of his characters. And though he establishes well the different voices in the multiple first-person narrators, it is this range of voices that makes the book disjointed. The only thing that really carries the novel forward is the notion of death.

Though I'm fond of mortality as a motif, the last couple of years seemed full of aging writers sorting out their anticipation of an inevitable death through their novels. Philip Roth in Everyman, Richard Ford in The Lay of the Land, and nearly everything Updike has written in the last decade centers on this issue. In the end (pun not intended), this Harrison novel did little for me but did not discourage me from giving him a second chance.

"... and take out all the good things I said about you."

Sometimes that New Yorker subscription actually proves worthwhile. This week it's the Raymond Carver special, with a Gordon Lish-free version of Carver's story "Beginners." And then they threw in a version with all the Lish edits (online only), an article on the relationship between writer and editor, and some correspondence between Lish and Carver, closing with this letter from Carver to Lish:

What’s the matter, don’t you love me anymore? I never hear from you. Have you forgotten me already? Well, I’m going back to the [Paris Review] interview and take out all the good things I said about you.

Maybe I'll actually get a chance to read all of this this weekend, and then I'll report back.

Book Review: Then We Came to the End

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

This book is appearing on all the best of 2007 lists and it's easy to understand why. Good books about work are hard to come by, books that capture the mundane and the inane like this one does. Even if the reader doesn't work in a similar environment of cubicles and corridors, we know these people, these relationships. And then there's the first-person plural.

I may have said this before, that I'm not one for novelty for its own sake. It seems that much of the attention that this book has garnered has been because of the point of view, that "we" voice. Now, I have of course read Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and this book works in a similar fashion. Faulkner's small town and Ferris's ad agency both suffer from group think. The distinction is that for Faulkner he only used this voice for a short story, Ferris drags it out for the length of a novel. Getting a hundred pages in and realizing that you don't have a single character to associate with is difficult. And at that point the book's novelty wears thin.

The book was funny and quotable, some of the characters unforgettable, but in the end I felt about as empty as the characters, the agency's employees who just keep coming into work for no particular reason.

WaPo's Top Ten Books of 2007

Only two of the five fiction titles are the same as the NTYBR.

Finn, by Jon Clinch
The Last Cavalier, by Alexandre Dumas; translated from the French by Lauren Yoder
On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan
The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolano
Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson

Edith Wharton, by Hermione Lee
FDR, by Jean Edward Smith
Ralph Ellison: A Biography, by Arnold Rampersad
The Unnatural History of the Sea, by Callum Roberts
The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story, by Diane Ackerman

Neighbors Reflect on a Death No One Noticed

Neighbors Reflect on a Death No One Noticed - New York Times: "Ms. Copeman was upstairs, dead, curled in a fetal position in the hallway, where the police found her skeletal remains on Monday morning, said Peter Bishop, her nephew. She was dressed to go out, in a coat and a beret, Mr. Bishop said. “Winter clothes on,” he said yesterday, “so I guess she died in the winter.” Ms. Copeman had died of heart disease, the medical examiner said yesterday. The police said she had been dead between a year and 18 months."

Newsletter Update

Let me say this first, the service I had been using to send out the weekly blog newsletter, Zookoda, sucks. They were bought out by a company called PayPerPost, whose purpose is to have people blog for money by writing about products. As you can imagine, the company could care less about its free newsletter service while it's busy robbing the authenticity from blogging. So, the service has gone down hill, trouble tickets go unanswered, and the can't seem to read my RSS feed anymore.

So, I decided I might try Feedburner. The trouble there is that when you sign up (using the form on the right) you don't get a weekly newsletter, like I would like to distribute, but instead you get daily updates. I get enough email as it is. I'd like this newsletter to come to you on the weekend, when you might actually have some time to read and give the posts some thought (and of course you're always welcome to post comments).

For now, I think I'll do it the old fashioned way and dump the week's blog content into a regular old email and send it out. For those of you up on the technology and want to put satoriworks into your newsreader, there are now three feeds available:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/satoriworks
http://satoriworks.blogspot.com/rss.xml
http://satoriworks.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Thanks for your patience.

Updating the update: So, we're going to try Feedblitz now for the weekly updates.

Movie Review: No Country For Old Men

No Country For Old Men

Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy and produced and directed by the Coen Brothers of Fargo and Raising Arizona, No Country For Old Men had a lot to live up to. It wasn't very long into the movie, though, before I thought to myself, "Damn, this is good." It wasn't just that every setting was just how McCarthy's description made me imagine it. It was just that so much of it was spot on. The dialogue was just so real and believable. Capturing all of the idioms we use daily is a hard thing for writers to do, I believe. To hear McCarthy's dialogue come out of characters, many of them ancillary and insignificant, who look as rough as the landscape that surrounds them, is nearly to be right there. It is authentic. Or it has the feeling of a portrayal of authenticity, at least.

Tommy Lee Jones is always good, but as a tired and death-obsessed west Texas Sheriff, he is perfect. And the villain, portrayed by Javier Bardem, is creepy and unsettling, and his philosophy gets under your skin.

It really was an excellent movie, despite a couple of quirks at the end that escape the normal Hollywood conventions. I imagine some might be upset with the way it ends, but any other direction would have been blasphemy.