NETSUKE by Rikki Ducornet

Wow. I had been really looking forward to Netsuke, another member of our small press collection at the library. Coffee House Press put this one out and also recently donated books to the small press collection. They do awesome stuff.

I had not read Rikki Ducornet that I was aware of but I knew she was a contributor to another of our small press books, Fantastic Women, that Tin House Books put out which I am reading right now.

Having read Ducornet....wow. This is probably the most artistic writing I've read since Vendela Vida's Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name. Let me explain what I mean by that. You have your great writers: T.C. Boyle and Michael Chabon, for example. They have a mastery of the language that is just amazing. They leave me running for the dictionary some times because they have such a vast vocabulary and can find the word they want every time. There's a sort of precision to it. If they were painters, they would be Rembrandt. Highly detailed, every shadow and edge of lighting just right. They are artists in their own way. But although I can appreciate Rembrandt's skill, I don't like his paintings. I like Chabon and Boyle. It's not a direct comparison, OK?

In terms of art, I love Impressionism. My favorite painter is Camille Pissarro. I like Impressionistic paintings for their lack of detail. There's still tons of skill involved, perhaps even more so than someone like Rembrandt in that the image and purpose of the painting have to come through but without making sure every detail is captured. And that is what Netsuke felt like to me.

It surprised me to feel that way because there is a lot crudity in Netsuke. The book is 120 odd pages of sex. The main character is an older psychiatrist, on his third marriage, who abuses his role as a therapist to have sex with his patients. He also has sex with women he encounters when he's out jogging. He has sex with his male patients. He has sex with patients who are confused about their own gender. He doesn't care. He cares about his wife, to an extent. He worries about how being discovered would pain her. Yet he drops clues all the time. He's not a very likable fellow.

It's a short novel and a very quick read. The chapters are a couple of pages long each. The writing is such that it's a one-sit read. Once you start you won't want to put it down.

However, unlike Boyle and Chabon, who are also great storytellers in addition to being wordsmiths, I thought Netsuke was lacking in substance. There's not a lot of plot. The characters aren't particularly developed. It has flaws. Still well worth reading and I'm looking forward to reading more by Duchornet.

--Jon

HORSE, FLOWER, BIRD by Kate Bernheimer

Here’s a collection of strange very short stories that may be fantastic images of dreams, delirium, madness, or hallucinations.  It’s hard to know what to think about them.  They are bizarre.

One story starts with a musician who met his wife at a wedding, where he was playing.  But the story is about the sister of the bride and groom.  No connection between the musician and the sister that I can see.

The last story, “Whitework,” seems to be a fairy tale within the delirium of a sick woman, who may be insane.  But her prognosis is good.  “You have the key to the Library,“ the doctor says.  “Only be careful what you read.“    Anyone can follow his advice.  This may be one book you should be careful of.

-Sue

Why a small press collection?

Without a doubt, the question that has come up the most with this collection, from when I first came up with the proposal and even now that people are checking out the books, is why? Why start a small press collection?

For me, the answer is the result of two concerns; quality and money. According to Bowker, there are about 50,000 new fiction titles published each year. If we brought in one hundred new books a day (ignoring non-fiction for now), we'd barely get two-thirds of those books. You also wouldn't be able to walk through the door without clambering over the overflow from the new book shelf, but that's a different story.

So the library has to be selective. As you're probably aware, budgets are tight. State and local governments have been cutting library budgets for the last several years so every dollar counts. The collection funds go towards children's materials, young adult materials, audiobooks, movies, and non-fiction and fiction books (which also now include e-books). Keeping our focus on the fiction, a good portion of what is budgeted for fiction goes towards authors that we know have a large fan base - Patterson, Picoult, etc. Another portion goes towards books that get a lot of notoriety, either from media attention or being selected for the One Book, One Community efforts, winning prizes or what have you. Much of the fiction book buying budget goes towards titles that we expect are going to have a lot of interest.

Even still, that's a small portion of the 50,000 books published each year. There are a lot of really good books getting published that just don't get the attention they deserve.

Have you heard of Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon? It won the 2010 National Book Award for fiction and was originally published by small press McPherson Books. After winning the award, Vintage Contemporaries bought the paperback rights and made it more accessible. 

That's not an anomaly. Every year, some of the best works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry come from small presses. The collection at the library was started with the objective of bringing some of these overlooked titles to those who are looking for something different to read.

Take a look at some of the titles and consider donating to the library so that the collection can expand. YOU can have a say in what goes on the shelves and by contributing to the small press collection, you will be saying that you want to see great books that aren't part of the mainstream.

New books in the small press collection!!!

Thanks to a generous donation by Coffee House Books, we are pleased to announce the expansion of our small press collection. The collection is now located on top of the middle shelves in the fiction section at the library. The collection now includes novels, short story collections, poetry, and a biography. Be sure to check out the great titles now available.

Thanks again, Coffee House Books!

KAROO by Steve Tesich

For all of the dark subject material I've been reading about as of late - suicides, drug use, depression, soccer (a non-library book not reviewed here) - you probably wouldn't expect the most depressing book I've read in a while to be about a script rewriter. Especially given that the cover of the book contains a page from the script of one of my all time favorite movies, the uplifting Breaking Away. Nonetheless, this book was one big book of defeatism.

Karoo was another book from the small press collection at the library, this one published by Open City Books. The author, Steve Tesich, actually did write the screenplay to Breaking Away as well as The World According to Garp. Karoo is far closer to the latter than the former.

Saul Karoo is a guy Hollywood execs hire to fix scripts. Saul doesn't think much of his work and feels that he does more harm than good to the scripts on which he works. Even though the revised movies may be lacking artistically, once he fixes a script, the revisions tend to have box office success.

Saul is going through an incredibly amicable divorce with his wife, so much so that the proceedings have been going on for years, with occasional dinners out together to iron out details. Saul has a son in his twenties that he and his wife adopted as a newborn. Makes good coin, has a family, well-respected in his field...what does Saul have to be unhappy about?

Everything. He avoids his son like the plague. He's gained a ton of weight and can't quite land the caliber of girl that he feels he should, especially when trying to show off for Hollywood execs. The dude has no self-respect and doesn't care much for others either. He's middle aged and definitely feeling the crisis coming from his sense of meaninglessness.

He finds meaning when he's brought in to rework a movie done by a legendary movie writer. Saul watches it, realizes it is an artistic masterpiece, and proceeds to deconstruct it into a romantic comedy. During the process, a waitress with a bit part in the original movie laughs on film and Saul recognizes it from a phone call over two decades before. It is the laugh of his son's biological mother, a woman Saul got to talk with on the phone after she delivered her baby which Saul and his wife then adopted.

Saul tracks her down, uses the cut footage of the film to make her the star of the revised script, and creates a new family of himself, his son, and his son's biological mother. He doesn't tell either of the other two the truth about their relationship, hoping to spring the news on them at the premiere of the movie.

Even though Saul has created this movie script life for himself, he still isn't happy. When things turn sour, the book goes even further downhill.

The book seriously put me into a funk for days. Tesich writes well and the book is long because it's almost entirely in Karoo's head. Every single thought process, it seems, is covered. It's more coherent than a simple stream of consciousness but there's a lot of noise surrounding the story's signal. It's just sad. At least I think so.

Reflecting on the book, I was reminded of the movie Oscar and Lucinda, a movie that I first watched when I was going through a tough time in my life and that I thought was the saddest movie I had ever seen. Years later I re-watched it and couldn't believe I had thought it was so sad. The second time through the movie I thought Ralph Fiennes overacted so much as to make the movie right near unwatchable. So I might be unduly influenced by my own recent thought processes when it comes to Karoo.

For all the gloom, though, it's still a good, well-written book. Once again, it's not a book for everybody but I think it is one that has enough merits to make it worth reading.

--Jon

A SLEPYNG HOUND TO WAKE by Vincent McCaffrey

This is a well wrought story of intrigue, mystery, murder, and plagiarism among book sellers and writers.

And at the same time, McCaffrey writes about the demise of the book store. This he attributes to the authors who are part of the system, who write processed bestsellers and to the people who buy them because they saw an ad on TV. The book store’s whole thing was to “keep all those authors alive who wrote so well but got passed by in the bestseller parade.” And this is the same reason that the Strasburg Library has put together the Small Press Collection of which this novel is a part.

--Sue

GHOSTED by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall

This is the first book that I have read of our new small press collection at the library. Written by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall and published by Soft Skull Press, Ghosted is about the life of Mason Dubisee, a semi-aspiring writer and an addict of almost every shape and sort. Alcohol, drugs, gambling. Mason finds himself in Toronto where his long-time friend, Chaz, now resides. Chaz is a successful drug dealer who sets Mason up with an apartment and a job, an arrangement that works really well for Chaz given Mason's predilection for drugs and gambling (and his lack of skill at the latter).

The job Mason has is working as a hot dog vendor with the brand name Dogfather. Mason befriends one of his customers, a man named Warren who is afraid of just about everything. Warren discovers that Mason is a decent writer and asks Mason to write Warren a love letter for this girl he longs for at the video store. Mason, always interested in making a buck, does so. Warren is found dead and the love poem is deemed to be Warren's suicide letter.

This provides Mason with inspiration. He'll start a little side business writing suicide notes for people who are looking for an exit a little more literary. The problem with Mason (and he only has this one problem) is that he wants to help people. He finds he wants to save people instead of helping them towards their self-inflicted deaths (but he still doesn't mind taking the money for their notes).

The story is really entertaining. Chaz, at least at the start, has his own sort of lingo ("are you flapjacking me") going which unfortunately vanishes as the novel goes on. Mason, despite being a ne'er-do-well who can't seem to get his act together, is extremely likeable as a main character. So much so that he drives you nuts with his bad choices. You want to reach into the book and strangle him when he sits down yet again to play cards with Chaz after doing drugs he bought from Chaz.

Then you have the other characters. The potential suicides are all really quirky characters. There's the drug counselor with her own set of odd characteristics. You also have Mason's love interest, a heroin addict in a wheelchair who has feeling in one side of her body but is paralyzed on that same side. The side she can control has no feeling.

So two-thirds of the way through this book, I'm loving it. Debating whether it might be able to top Eleven for best fiction I've read this year. I'm liking it that much. Then it careens into one of the darkest, most depraved things I've ever read in my life. It came completely out of nowhere and was really disturbing. At that point I was left wondering how I felt about the book. Up until this point the book was a really entertaining and unusual story. Suddenly there's this psychopath involved and the entertainment factor is lost. Then it becomes a bit of an action story. Can Mason save the day?

All the loose ends are tied up, some in a manner a little too forced for my looking and some a little too out there for my liking, but the story returns to it's previous charm. Chaz even gets some of his lingo back.

That left me with my review. The writing was spectacular. I didn't ever want to put the book down. The characters are great. Unlike, say, Savages, where the characters are involved in activities generally frowned upon by society, I liked these characters and were rooting for them. I didn't view Mason as a bad guy. I saw him as someone with problems who wasn't happy with his lot in life.

Speaking of which, the title comes from the idea that we have these goals and achievements we want for ourselves in life. We picture ourselves as a writer or an astronaut or a professor at Minot State. But life takes its crazy turns and we don't always reach our objectives. Nonetheless, these pictures of ourselves stay with us and are "ghosted", haunting the recesses of our mind, making us think of what might have been.

There are a number of scenes where we learn about Mason's past and I think that helps make him more sympathetic to the reader. The oddball nature of all the other characters give them appeal as well (with the exception of one). And the story, while it goes every which way, is captivating. Without a doubt, I will remember this book for a long time.

But then there's that crazy dark section. It's part of the reason I'll remember this book. It's disturbing. I don't know that I've ever winced from a story I was reading before (bad writing, yes, but not the story).

I think, much like Lemon Cake, this isn't going to be a book for everybody. I can see some people putting the book down when the story turns. But it's still an awesome book and will be one of my favorites from this year.

--Jon