What Could Be More Fun Than Reading About a Terrible, Heartwrenching Tragedy on Your Commute?

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Zeitoun is written in a very simple, declaratory style, so it makes for easy, breezy reading -- almost simple, though it certainly sucks you right in. It's such a sympathetic portrait of this family you'd be somewhat stone-hearted not to be sucked in to their lives and situation.

It's a double-edged sword, though, because even as I enjoyed the "backstory" on Kathy and Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Eggers definitely makes you wait...not until around the 200-page mark does the absolutely crazy stuff take off. And the absolutely crazy stuff is unimaginably frustrating and infuriating. I was, for lack of a better word, enraged by it all. I'm not someone who does well with helplessness in general in my own life, so the terrifying loss of control was hard to read about. The crowded, claustrophobic commuter train oftentimes proved not the best place for me to read.

The genius of this book is to boil a huge, systemic failure down to an individual and manageable level -- a human level. Most everyone knows by now that the handling of Katrina's aftermath was itself a disaster, though before reading Zeitoun I don't think I could have really said WHY that was, specifically.

A sad book that makes a point to be hopeful, Zeitoun was a quick, but excellent, read.

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An Unabashed Rave for Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent

Greg, our erstwhile Culturephile, may not contribute to this blog he co-founded with me any longer, but I have to hand it to him – he does manage to find sneaky ways to keep contributing to the Overall Mission of Good Culture. A couple weeks ago, while dining with our respective wives at Piece (gratuitous plug in the naked hope of garnering corporate goodwill and free pizza), he gifted me a bunch of interesting music, but one that stood head & shoulders (not a gratuitous plug) above the rest.

Basically if you have ever liked ANY of the music recommendations on this blog, you will love Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent. Their collaboralbum (tm) is “Shovels & Rope” – each has some previous music, EPs and such, but “Shovels & Rope” is a massive homerun. I’m serious. Their duets – especially the opening track and “1200 Miles” – have some Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros resonances, but the guy/girl country harmonies obviously have a far greater tradition than just that. Think Porter and Dolly, Gram and Emmylou, Johnny and June. More recently some great work is being done by Buddy and Julie Miller, Caitlin Cary & Thad Cockrell, Allison Krauss & Robert Plant. Come to think of it, seems like there's a real mini-renaissance of the guy/girl duo album: She & Him, The Weepies, Pete Yorn & Scarlett Johanssen are all doing great and exciting work. Well, not Yorn & Johanssen (sorry guys). At any rate, in this duo Hearst seems to be in the lead most of the time, but Trent certainly has a few moments to shine.

Regardless of who's singing lead and who's singing harmony, as well as where they do or don't fit in the past & current pantheon of mixed-gender singin' partners, they make a truly dynamic duo and this awesome first album has a great, rootsy feel. They find themselves in a place that aligns most closely with country, but feels almost more fundamental than “country music” -- there’s banjo and lots of acoustic instruments but it’s hardly a twang-parade. It feels primal and organic – simple, beautiful, catchy – while also delivering gut-punches and kiss-offs and swift kicks-in-the-ass -- with a snarl. The ten songs on here blow me away: spooky spiritualism, heartbreak, and murder; not to mention some great driving songs, toe-tappers, and great turns-of-phrase with smart lyrics. Pretty much everything any music fan could ask for. The cameo appearance by the musical saw on “Build Around Your Heart a Wall” (a fantastic, scary, beautiful murder ballad) gives me the final excuse I need to make this a contender for my Album of the Year.

Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent, neither of whom I had ever heard of two weeks ago, totally crushed this one out of the park. Plus, they close with a fantastic cover of a great old Jump Little Children (or maybe it was just “Jump” by this time) song, “Mexico” – a song that has long begged to be rediscovered and reinterpreted. It gets fantastic treatment here.

Get on this album, culturephiles!

Let the Great World Spin: The Beauty in Between

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am happy to report that this novel lived up to all the hype, and there has been lots of hype for Mr. Colum McCann. It’s a sad, lovely work that does a remarkable job stringing a cable from 1973 New York to the present time and dancing all along that wire. The book may end quickly and softly in the present day, and the vast majority of the action may take place in 1973, but it is the space in between that makes this book so worthwhile – connections made without fanfare, resonances as light as air – a literal and figurative high-wire act. It almost felt like an exercise – “take these two disparate time periods and tie them together though subtle inference” – but was executed elegantly enough that what could easily have been strained and formal was smart and lithe.

Some chapters and characters and stories I liked more than others; I’m particularly finished with the literary elevation of graffiti, not because I have any puritanical dislike of graffiti, but because I feel like Jonathan Letham’s The Fortress of Solitude (a book I liked much less yet can’t help but compare with this one) so completely exhausted that topic that I can now go the rest of my life without again being asked to reconsider the "tagger-as-artist." Other chapters – particularly the first grieving mothers chapter – delivered pure emotional knockout punches straight to the heart.

The subtle interplay of fact and fiction I also enjoyed, accomplished all without rubbing the reader’s nose in anything too post-modernist. Like I said before: elegant. And although much of the novel was sad-very-sad, I appreciated the quiet undercurrents of hope and beauty, especially in McCann’s ability to find some quiet optimism in these two time periods of similarly seminal, unsettling change. As the old saying goes, it’s easy to tear something down, but much harder to build something up. And much harder still to tie a linking line, connect, and dance in the vastness between.

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Snow Will Make You THINK

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Snow is a big, think-y book. (See what I did there? Think-y!) It didn’t necessarily feel like a novel so much as a series of complex, interwoven themes on the nature of Turkey and the state of that distant, strategic republic – Eastern vs. Western, political Islam vs. secular Islam, belief vs. apostasy. Basically, it served as a huge exercise in thought-provocation, while also feeling somewhat impenetrable to poor, hopelessly Western, purely secular me.

Some of this impenetrability I chalk up to translation – the writing in places is a little clunky – although I’m not willing to criticize either Orhan Pamuk OR his noble translator Maureen Freely, since I can’t imagine what kind of mental and linguistic gymnastics are required to bring a work from Turkish into English. The remainder of the books’ opacity I put down to my own cultural distance, plain and simple; all the relationships (especially male-female) felt highly loaded yet mysterious; the various political, philosophical, and religious minefields of Turkey aren’t places I’d casually traipse through but this book takes them up – takes them ALL up – to ruminate and churn them all around.

I also take issue with any and all critics whose blurbs in the front of my paperback copy referred to this book as a “political thriller.” Oh brother. Political, certainly! But as for thrilling...well, I missed those parts. I could see a “poetic and brooding” blurb, or “pensive and intelligent,” but it would take a truly sensitive soul to be thrilled by Snow, though I mean that in the nicest way possible. Even the various mysteries and overall suspense seemed secondary to the larger ideas being plumbed; I didn’t really think at any point, for instance, that we would ever discover “whodunit” or what any answers might be. The questions mattered far more.

Ultimately, I enjoyed the layers upon layers of theme, symbol, and meaning that Pamuk presented, while (just barely) managing to keep himself on this side of didacticism. Since the book didn’t necessarily proffer any answers to the huge questions it asked or opinions about the controversies it presented, perhaps it couldn’t be considered didactic, but at times it verged on sounding like a Socratic dialogue. I remained engaged throughout, though by the end it took something of an increased effort.

I can certainly say without hesitation now that I am fascinated in this vast country -- caught as it is at the crossroads of so many political, religious, and cultural differences. Thanks to this book for making me think.



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