Friday Reads: Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch"

As I've been reading Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize, I cannot help but think about preservation in the face of decay. Certainly the theme is there in this coming-of-age tale of 13-year-old Theodore Decker, whose world is (literally) blown to pieces when a bomb explodes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Theo crawls out of the museum rubble, carrying a priceless painting of Carel Fabritius' "The Goldfinch," and the novel takes off from there. Theo, still dealing with the psychological and physical aftershocks, is moved from world to world—from Park Avenue high society, to West Village antique shops, to the desolate & foreclosed subdivisions outside Las Vegas.

Your Easter Bunny Solutions

Easter may be the holiday best known for gooey chocolate eggs, but at Wallace Books we've learned that our customers want something a little more lasting for their children. While much of our new stock has been bought up already (with a resupply of new stock due on Monday, a day too late), we thought we'd point out some lovely books that are sure to have a lasting impression on your child's Easter holiday.

1. BUNNIES!!

Friday Reads: Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette?"

Satire has always been, to me, a proletarian endeavor. By which I mean that specific type of lampooning is best directed at the upper classes in order to bring the upper class down a notch. The fun made at the expense of the lower classes can usually be called (at best) clowning. When, in Shakepeare's Twelfth Night, the clowns, Sirs Toby and Andrew, make mockery the aspirations (and transgressions) of the play's malcontent, Malvolio, the satire is at Malvolio's belief he is more than a servant. Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," as every college freshman knows, takes a bite (pun intended) at the rhetoric wealthy lawmakers of 17th century England expound on the solution to Irish poverty. P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh (who share the same crate at Wallace Books) made a living mocking the upper classes; Wodehouse a little more lovingly than Waugh, who made sure to point out that the post-war British upper class had no more money than the lower. The idea is to make the upper class as foolish as us, perhaps (let's hope) even more.

Accessories not included. 

Where'd You Go, Bernadette? follows in this tradition, with an irresistible twist. The novel is epistolary, with some small narration from Bee Branch, thirteen-year-old daughter of Elgie and Bernadette Branch. Emails, report cards, traffic incident reports, alerts, all go into telling the story of a mother who is at once fearless and intelligent, willful and broken.

What we gather from this (mostly electronic) ephemera, is the story of Bernadette Fox, a reclusive, antisocial mother, who twenty years ago was a brilliant and ambitious architect. A disaster, which has mostly to do with Bernadette's overconfidence (equal parts hilarious and maddening), leads her to leave the architectural life and move with her husband Elgie from L.A. to Seattle, buy a dilapidated mansion, and after several attempts get pregnant and have a daughter, before descending into an antisocial and bitter life. Surrounded by what Bernadette calls "gnats," native Seattle-ites whose outdoorsy, Subaru driving, nosy ways Bernadette cannot stand, her one consolation is her daughter, Balakrishna. Bee is a brilliant young girl waiting to hear from an acceptance to the boarding school her mother went to, a dream misinterpreted by the "gnats" as her mother's desire, not Bee's. Upon the very first page we learn that Bernadette has disappeared, and although her husband Elgie knows, he refuses to talk about it to Bee, who begins discerning why. The novel is that discernment. It is equal parts laugh out loud funny and bitterly sad.

The first ingredient for satire is that the satirized must be unaware of their absurdity, and if we are honest with ourselves (something the subject of satire can never be, in real life or in art), we will realize that an email is a great starting point. In an email, rhetorical structure and exposition make way for the Ego, and expose us to ridicule. In Where'd You Go, Bernadette, the characters are woefully unaware at how exposed they are, which is exactly where author Maria Semple (who wrote for, among other shows, Arrested Development) needs them to be. Perhaps the best subject is Bernadette's neighbor, Aubrey, a mother at the same private school Bee attends; her correspondences, emails between her friend, emails back and forth from her landscaper, even school notices after an "incident" with her foot and the wheel of Bernadette's car, are all marvelously biting just because Aubrey is so very unaware at how absurd her emails are to any reader other than the intended. But although Aubrey was my personal favorite, the other characters, Bernadette included, don't fare much better. The only correspondence that seems mostly bewildered at the indignity of the emails is Bernadette's agent, an obscure and capable woman who arranges all of Bernadette's appointments, travel itineraries, reserves tables for the Branch family at Thanksgiving, and (of course) lives in India.

At the shop, the used copies of this book have been trickling in, and I picked it up in a lull to get a sense of it. Eighty pages later, I realized I had read eighty delightful pages and thought I should get back to work. It is a trap at a bookstore -- "falling down a rabbit hole" is what I call it. I fell into the novel with great good humor and it was hard to pull myself back. Do yourself a favor: fall into it as well.

~ James, February 2014

Friday Reads ~ "Of Walking in Rain" by Matt Love

Nestucca Spit Press $19.95 USD

Matt Love's newest self-published book.

Let's let Newport author Matt Love get the first word:

Who would you rather hang out with? Someone playing hooky from work because of the sun or rain? Rain is a bindle, the sun carry-on luggage. You can slide in rain. You can smear rain, but never touch the sun. Rain sluices gold. Rain foments serenity. Rain launches sedition against conformity. Rain sends roots deep; the sun desiccates. The sun speaks in monologues while rain always dialogues. Rain is aural and visual and has body; the sun can't possibly compete with that Triple Crown. Only genuine awakening results during encounters with rain. The sun? Mostly relaxation or trying to forget. All my great notions manifest in rain. All my mediocre ones emerge with the sun. We can thank capitalism for making the word "acid" an obscene adjective of rain. The Hindu religion has a rain god. Noah's 40 days and 40 nights is a richer story than Joshua's sun standing still. What are the semiotics of rain? Is it a symbol for transparency or solidity? Earlier, I switched on Save Me Jesus Radio and a crooner crooned a maudlin "thank you " to God for taking him out of rain. The implication was that Satan lurked there. God I hope so! If I find him, we'll get right down to it.

For all you puddle-splashers, you rainy-day bicyclers, you who see umbrellas as eight-pronged instruments of hell: this is the book for you. Matt Love, a prolific self-published author (check out his website, Nestucca Spit Press, where you can order books and see where Matt Love will be reading, here), should be considered Oregon's minister of rain, which puts him in a holy caste.

Of Walking in Rain is firstly a record of three months in 2012 -- from October to the end of December. Plot and story arch take a back seat to what ends up to be a record of rain, the best way to describe a book that churns and skids along: on some days Love is lucid, political and anecdotal; other days he wants nothing to do with expository and sets off on diatribes like the one above. There are moments of love, moments of conflict -- characters are introduced and forgotten, old memories are revived and new memories created. For the reader this means movement--in time, in language, in rain--and if it is raining as you read this, it will be hard to put down.

I love this book. I keep it in my bag so it is now a banged up beautiful copy. I've left it out in the rain so its pages are puffy. I'm writing this today during an obscene dry spell in hopes that rain will hear my plea and come back. Every time we have those beautiful rains that last for days, and the clouds just keep coming and every body starts to feel miserable until they stop feeling miserable, I pick up this book and read it. You should do the same. It'll make you proud to be an Oregonian. And after summer I'm thinking I'll start my own rain journal, which is essentially what Love wants me -- wants us -- to do: join his Church of Rain by creating your own rain journal. And support self-published authors and local business.

Although I'm loath to send you over to Powell's Books' website, nonetheless there are some blog posts by Matt Love I think you should check out. Maybe he'll do a few blog posts for us as well.

~ James Maynard, January 2014

Books You Didn't Know You Needed: The Completely Mad Don Martin Collection

The Completely Mad Don Martin (2 Volumes), $89.00 USD

 

Cartoonist Don Martin (1931-2000) has come into the shop, in a beautiful two volume box set! With matching red and blue cloth covers, with each cartoon pasted neatly on each page, this set is a veritable homage to a man considered Mad Magazine's "maddest" cartoonist.

In case you didn't know, Don Martin was perhaps most famous for his original sound effects in his cartoons (perhaps my favorite would be the sound of Captain Kirk Crying ~ "BAHOO, BAHOO, BAHOO"). 

Interested? We'll have it here in the shop -- shop local, don't pay shipping, and add a gorgeous gem to you book collection!

Matching red & blue cloth covers

Each cartoon carefully pasted to each page.

Some Great Poets Stopped By Today

Including some Neruda, Gluck, the complete Anne Sexton, Li-Young Lee, even some Lorca (so rarely seen and so quick to go!)

Before shelving these into our poetry section (which you should totally browse), I thought I'd post a poem I stumbled on as I was sifting through Gerald Stern's poetry collection, "American Sonnets."

Peaches

What was I think of when I threw one of my

peach stones over the fence at Metro North,

and didn't I dream as always it would take

root in spite of the gravel and the newspaper,

and wasn't I like that all my life, and who isn't?

I thought of oranges and, later, watermelon

and yellow mangoes hanging from sweetened strings,

but it was peaches, wasn't it, peaches most of

all I thought about and if the two trees that

bore such hard little fruit would only have lived

a few years more how I would have had a sister

and I would have watched her blossom, her brown curls

her blue eyes, though given her family she wouldhave

been wild and stubborn, harsh maybe, she would

be the angry one--how quiet I was--the Chinese

grew their peaches for immortality--the

Russians planted theirs so they could combine

beauty and productivity, that was

my aesthetic too, I boiled my grape leaves,

I ate my fallen applies, loving sister.

~Gerald Stern