Grapes and Gripes: Sideways by Rex Pickett

Mark on my list About Schmidt and Sideways as two of my favorite movies, both directed by Alexander Payne (I’ve yet to see Election). Nevertheless, when I had the chance to read the book Sideways after seeing the movie, I was skeptical. The author’s notes did not help – Rex Pickett comments on how Payne adhered pretty closely to the novel. Thus, a part of me was nagging and pessimistic, insisting that this would be a less enjoyable escapade than the film.

At first I was thrown off from my low expectations. The opening scene is hilarious with rambunctious interactions ensuing between the lead, Miles, and his fellow oenophiles at their regular wine-tasting hub. The dialogue is sharp and witty, as the characters bite into each other. The action and commotion is thrilling. Miles’ friend Jack shows up and they’re set to go on their trip, with more to come. I thought, hey, maybe there is something to this book that I couldn’t get from the film.

Unfortunately, three-hundred pages later, I learned my mistake. The cynical, jibing dialogue gets old very quick. The protagonist becomes an annoying friend, who overdoes the witticisms and depresses the hell out of you. And Jack’s tumbles and falls aren’t as funny as they could have been, after seeing it on the screen. One thing appeared glossed over: Miles rats out Jack’s impending marriage, but never gets found out by Jack. Then there is this whole bizarre episode with a hillbilly stranger they meet and go boar hunting with, only to find out that he is slightly psychotic, taking shots at them. Entirely gratuitous. Granted, when Miles engorges himself with the spit bucket after discovering his busted book deal, the hilarity is just as intense as the film, but the relationships in the book aren’t as fully developed between the men and women as they could have been. Jack and Miles is well done, but Miles and Maya wasn’t as great of a ride. Plus, the dynamic of Miles and his mother whom he filches from is lost later in the novel. His plagues as a poor struggling writer turn him into a caricature rather than a character.

I was able to interact with the book on a different level after seeing the cinematic version, interested in the changes Payne, his producers and screenplay writers made and the rationale for those changes. I noticed on the basis of the book, they consolidated various scenes, moved around of characters, and made an intriguing decision to cast an Asian woman (Sandra Oh) as Jack’s paramour, Terra. I think it was a wise decision and provides fodder for good discussion about race and culture. In fact, all four main characters were not nearly as attractive in the film as they were described in the novel.

I am mostly certain that the wine critiques from Miles, Terra, and Maya are legit and that Pickett conducted extensive research. In these parts, the language is inventive and I feel as though I’m listening to a trustworthy wine connoisseur. Harmless fun to read, convivial and proffering tidbits about wine, the novel is a good summer read on the beach with a cold bottle of Chardonnay, though I’m more of Pinot guy myself.

Poet Brief: Khaled Mattawa

Born in Libya, and migrating to the United States for a college education and MFA, Mattawa currently teaches at the MFA program at Michigan. He never left his heritage behind, as his poems are infused with references to Middle-eastern places and practices along with commentary (usually not positive) on American culture. I appreciate his sense of irony and dark humor, as well as his sharp criticisms of societies, governments, and human nature as a whole, its history being anything but flattery.



His series, “Echo and Elixir,” includes engrossing poems that are absurd but so pressingly relevant. Without rhyme or any rigid structure, the poems still resonate with life and a strong rhythm. They are quickly paced and make twists and turns that can leave the reader behind if he or she does not keep up. I love the figuring of the discussion between the speaker and cab driver in this poem – the figurative treatment of language and the ballsy references to historic events.

Echo & Elixir 2

Cairo’s taxi drivers speak to me in English.
I answer, and they say your Arabic is good.
How long have you been with us? All my life
I tell them, but I’m never believed.
They speak to me in Farsi, speak to me in Greek,
and I answer with mountains of gold and silver,
ghost ships sailing the weed-choked seas.
And when they speak to me in Spanish,
I say Moriscos and Alhambra
I say Jews rescued by Ottoman boats.
And when they speak to me in Portuguese,
all my life I tell them, coffee, cocoa,
Indians and poisoned spears.
I say Afonsso king of Bikongo writing
Manuel to free his enslaved sons.
And Cairo’s taxi drivers tell me
your Arabic is surprisingly good.
Then they speak to me in Italian,
and I tell them how I lay swaddled
a month’s walk from here. I tell them
camps in the desert, barbed wire, wives
and daughters dying, camels frothing disease
the sand stretching an endless pool
And they say so good so good.
How long have you been with us?
All my life, but I’m never believed.
Then they speak to me in French,
and I answer Jamila, Leopold, Stanley,
baskets of severed hands and feet.
I say the horror, battles of Algiers.
And they speak to me in English
and I say Lucknow, Arbenz. I say indigo,
Hiroshima, continents soaked in tea.
I play the drum beat of stamps. I invoke
Mrs. Cummings, U.S. consul in Athens,
I say Ishi, Custer, Wounded Knee.
And Cairo’s taxi drivers tell me
your Arabic is unbelievably good.
Tell the truth now, tell the truth,
how long have you been with us?
I say my first name is little lion,
my last name is broken branch.
I sing “Happiness uncontainable”
and “fields greening in March”
until I’m sad and tired of truth,
and as usual I’m never believed.
Then they lead me through congestion,
gritty air, narrow streets crowded with
Pepsi and Daewoo and the sunken faces
of the poor. And when we arrive, Cairo’s
taxi drivers and I speak all the languages
of the world, and we argue and argue about
corruption, disillusionment, the missed chances,
the wicked binds, the cataclysmic fares.

Poet Brief: Julianne Buchsbaum

Presently a graduate student down in Missouri, Julianne Buchsbaum has already produced some fascinating poetry. Her poems contain evocative language and there is no wasted movement as she makes unnerving observations. Highly intelligent poems that make effective, but not erudite, allusions, mostly to Greek and Roman mythology. Phonetically, some of her poems soar, such as “Slowly, Slowly Horses.” The opening stanzas almost always hook you in, such as in the poem “Thrillsville”:

When the mind begins to see the lies it loves
with eyes that could have looked elsewhere,
old pain repullulates. Errors of architecture,

errors of eros, the train ride out is not
the train ride in. Is this the kind of life
you left us for? No one has a face in the dark.

Buchsbaum’s poems have a kinetic energy, but also a shade of darkness that entangles the readers. Following is one of her harrowing pieces with stark imagery and a beautiful commingling sense of dread and positive urgency.



Clouds Swell Out

The finale of fall hangs in yellow clusters.
You can't muster

the drive required for potent acts—to hide
like the cat who eyed

each skittering leaf and churring sparrow from
a dark sanctum,

frozen, invisible, dumb—such is your will.
The world is ill

with demands it can't meet; hence, the crickets'
deaths, the rosettes

of rot, the dusky clusters, and flourishing worms.
All this confirms

your wish to divorce yourself from the vista
and phenomena

of autumn which looms from raw branches a dark
afternoon. The stark

landscape deepening its shadowed dales cannot
stray a lot

from the invincible doctrine, though owls moan
misgivings. Alone,

you watch a jet's contrail zip open the sky
and the high

clouds swell out like huge, snowy hearts disgorged.

No Reservation: "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian"

In my contemporary literature course I was exposed to Sherman Alexie’s premiere book of poetry and prose, The Business of Fancy Dancing. His play with language and innovative but relentless outlook on Native American culture on the rez were astounding. He has written much since, which I have not read, but I committed to reading his recent young-adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. As I embarked on reading this book, I used the mantra “MTV” to help myself as I attempted to re-imagine myself in the prime of teenage life, which was not more than six years ago.

First thing: the illustrations. The “art” by Ellen Forney. It proliferates throughout the novel. At times a gimmick, but more often complementary to the story with humor or expansive shading of the characters or scenes in which they dwell. They are drawn from Arnold’s perspective, but we forget this as its use as a literary device is more obvious. Still, they fit seamlessly in the story. My favorites were the caricatures of people in his life: his parents, sister, coach, friends, and girlfriend. These literal portraits of characters are vivid and plant the individuals as unique in the reader’s mind. A lot of culture references are included, usually playing on pop icons or stereotypes, which adds to Arnold’s white-Indian identity conflict. A coping strategy, the drawings merge humor with sadness in a profound way at points. How else can Arnold deal with his abysmal surroundings and pangs of humor?

Alexie overplays the Indian card at points - treading on territory in ways he has trodden before. He addresses this in an excerpt from an interview I include below. Still, the straightforward plot does take strange turns at points and even when predictable, remains engaging. Arnold’s a smart kid who breaks away from “the tribe” and attends a well-funded, whitewashed high school outside the reservation. He falls in love with a white girl (one of Alexie’s obsessions in his writing) and has a fall-out with his best friend, only to find another one at his new school. His parents let him down, his sister runs away, he becomes a basketball star, and reconciles his relationship with his best friend, Rowdy. Alexie tackles the popular issues high school students run into, mostly in successful ways, with striking candidness.

The writing style is sparse, consistent with his approach in Fancydancing, but in a different way. The book was too dialogue-ridden and at times felt like an Indian version of Wonder Years. Alexie’s po-mo irony shines through during some pivotal moments. He is steeped in a sharp sense of reality though, and respectfully doesn’t protect Arnold from real-world tragedy when his sister senselessly dies in a fire. I could tell from the honesty that this “diary” was at least semi-autobiographical. While this raised the “level” of the book in my eyes, on the whole it could have been slightly more sophisticated for the intended audience. After finishing the last page: Highly enjoyable. It succeeds in what it strives to do. I connected with Arnold’s experiences and reminisced about my own. A little more unconventionality would have perfected it.

From Seattle Times interview:
Q: So do you still feel like the title, that you're a part-time Indian?
A: God, I don't know what I am now. I'm a writer. I'm this sort of amorphous, ever-shifting writer.

Q: How do you answer criticism that you're exposing kids to a lot of negatives in Native American culture, from poverty to alcoholism to bullying?
A: It's what happened and what continues to happen. My dad died three years ago from alcoholism. ...

They [his critics] have no idea how bad it is. Nothing I've written actually comes close to how bad it can be and how bad it is, the level of desperation. The people who don't want it written about or who think it's stereotypical, within the Indian world, are just dealing with a lot of shame. And outside the Indian world, it's just a lot of romantic bastards.

Q: You mock white people in the book who say they love Native Americans. Is there a respectful way for white people to admire the culture?
A: The best way to deal with it is just to leave it alone. You know, you don't need to go into a sweat lodge to respect us. You don't need to wear turquoise earrings to come to my readings. ... People who are way into the Native culture rarely look at the whole picture. We're just as messy and ugly as anybody else. So "admiring" worries me. That's pretty myopic — widen your lens, I guess I'd say.

Stein’s Top Chef: “Book of Salt”

My campus will receive the author Monique Truong as its guest tomorrow. She will read a selection from her only published novel, The Book of Salt, and then an excerpt from a more recent project. I’m looking forward to her reading but also the following Q&A session. Her work fits into the discussions I’ve participated in during my Multicultural Literature course (a.k.a. books about women getting raped and “coming-of-age”). Seriously, I think she will have something to say about identity as an author and how an author connects to his or her characters.

An overly pessimistic and tough critic, (in all modes of life, not only books) I’ll only devote one paragraph to my problems with her novel. In fact, I’ll include an efficient, nifty list of the top three things that irked me.

1) She writes like a lawyer (she used to be one): the structure’s too tight and the figurative language overdone. Food is sensual and kinda like sex, or at the least an aphrodisiac. Okay, I get it. Too many parallels – the book ends up a funhouse of mirrors. More on this follows.
2) Binh is a slut. He sleeps around too much. Also, we get claustrophobic in his point of view – too many second person chapters to lovers or his bosses. Keep it in your pants, man, you’ll be less miserable. The overbearing religious father was pigeonholed from the outset. Not that he had to have moments of being a decent father, but there could have been moments of doubt about his hatred of his son - doubts that could be rescinded anyway.
3) Redundancy. Without a crucial plot, besides the point where Binh decides whether to return home or go to America, the layering of his character has to be diverse. Some sections could be consolidated to get through to the reader about Binh’s identity and conflict. One of the story’s threads could be cut out at no great cost.

Disregarding my immature tendency to make gay-food jokes, and to insist this book will become a Bravo Original Movie, let’s move on to how I enjoyed this novel. First, the Ho Chi Minh episode was worth the risk Truong took. She successfully avoided dropping cameos, any of the celebs whom Stein included in her company, and when she did include an incredibly well-knonw historical figure, made it worthwhile. The “man on a bridge” provided more depth to Binh’s crisis of returning home. But precisely what home? Minh’s emergence and the death of Binh’s father signify the rise of a new Vietnam. The French would soon be driven out and Communism would rise. Besides, the description of the meal they shared was tantalizing. Truong uses the art of cooking and the sport of eating in tremendous fashion. Lost on most Americans and descendants of the culinary-challenged United Kingdom/Ireland, the fusion of French and Asian senses for cooking and consuming is perhaps the novel’s strongest assets.

Some examples of how food works in the novel:
“We then exchanged words, sparingly, between generous forkfuls of food. Chopsticks had not been offered, and we did not ask for them. Why waste time on the technicalities of tableware when a feast is before us?”

“Salt-and-pepper shrimp finished in a glaze of browned butter!”

“He will always cook from all the places where he has been. It is his way of remembering the world.”

The relationship between Stein and Toklas is not central to the novel, but the bits offered to the reader are usually tasty. The portrayal of Stein’s eccentric artfulness and Toklas’ more rational, day-to-day thinking was well-executed. I especially enjoyed the moments where Toklas instructed Binh and communicated her particularity. Binh is allowed moments of creativity, but his adherence to meticulous recipes was needed.

Overall: A great premise carried out with lovely language and makes your mouth water with descriptions of food. But the desire for a trip to the fridge outweighs the desire for Binh to find happiness.

Bad Potatoes - "Law of Dreams"

I express or have enacted my Irish heritage in the following ways: 1) I read Angela’s Ashes in high school, 2) my favorite meal consists of Harp, medium-rare steak, mashed potatoes, bread, following by an Irish coffee and dessert, 3) I perpetually keep a bottle of Jameson on my desk - a balm on those late nights writing papers. So when my friend gave me a pre-publication (“Advanced Reader’s Edition”) version of a novel his friend obtained at a book publisher fair, I obliged.

I felt like a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, sifting through the pages with a curious, scrupulous eye. I kept several deft comparisons to similar novels in my pocket along with witty cultural references or jokes about the Irish that The Law of Dreams would confirm or disavow. Maybe I would boost the novel’s sales with my grand review.

Peter Behrens résumé piqued my interest. After producing a collection of short stories entitled Night Driving in 1987, he has since worked primarily as a screenwriter for Hollywood. This knowledge helped me detect the stench of “novel-written-to-have-movie-made-starring-Scarlett-Johansson.” Because, you know, she’s Irish and needs to reboot her career.

The novel sets out ambitiously and at first delivers but then dissolves into a cyclical mess the last 250 pages (out of nearly 400). The prologue takes a promising look at a pressured farmer/landlord in mid 19th-century Ireland. With the beginning of the famine and typhus fever spreading, he is forced to evict his poor tenants.

“That evening, inspecting his field of ripening wheat, plucking a stalk and pressing the grains out onto his palm, he tastes one on his tongue. Cracks it between his teeth.
Then opens his hand.
Light and dry the pale grains are, wholly ripe, practically weightless.
In a second, the casual wind has swept them away.”

A beautiful image, capturing the blight perfectly. This book promises a country’s beauty and agony, trust and betrayal, redemption, resourcefulness, and a plaintive gaze at evanescence. Our protagonist Fergus O’Brien will fall in love, work through his struggles, and eventually live in happiness or die a hero. He is my ancestor as well as Behrens’.

Wrong. While his struggles are laid out powerfully in the first section of the novel, his journey becomes a repetitive pornographic and disinterested wandering. Yet several Amazon reviewers draw comparisons to Joyce’s Daedalus! His first, unrequited love (Phoebe, the farmer’s daughter) and his second, passionate lover (Luke) are the only two women we care about. Their relationships are poignant and tragic. But then the tone of the story comes through: misogynistic and bitter, Fergus runs into some lamentful women, and eventually arrives at the heels of another intemperate female: America. The language is chauvinistic, especially during the sex scenes (more than the reader could wish for!) and the female characters are portrayed poorly. Fergus’ continuous wet dream leaves the reader unsatisfied.

But how does Fergus’ primary pursuit (perhaps secondary) of the American dream pan out? Can Behrens pull off an overdone conflict? For the most part, it works. The metaphor of salmon in the river – sometimes literally or figuratively caught by Fergus and sometimes himself being caught – is intriguing. The novel loses a beautiful lyrical quality partway through. We go from wheat in the fields and Irish landscape to horses. A blue Mr. Ed becomes man’s best friend.

In the end: a well-intentioned but unsatisfying affair. The idea of researching his family history and creating a story about his great-great-grandfather’s journey to Canada is fantastic. The song of himself – the struggle, hunger, love, violence, racism – all great, but it just doesn’t play a melody we haven’t heard.

Snowed in with Orhan Pamuk

East vs. West: a Crystallization of Humanity
Snow
by Orhan Pamuk
First Vintage International Edition, 2005

Orhan Pamuk’s homeland of Turkey suffers the abrasions of existing as the rift between the tectonic plates of the Eastern and Western worlds. Snow principally succeeds in analyzing this tension; the local politics and the love story are coincidental. A grouping of epigraphs pinpoint the novel’s main sentiment: “The Westerner in me was discomposed,” from Joseph Conrad, and “Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European enlightenment is more important than people,” from Dostoevsky.



The conflict of the novel is embodied in the poet Ka’s return to his Turkish home city from Germany. Central to Ka’s struggle lies religion: “As Ka knew from the beginning, in this part of the world faith in God was not something achieved by thinking sublime thoughts and stretching one’s creative powers to their outer limits; nor was it something one could do alone; above all it meant joining a mosque, becoming part of a community. Nevertheless, Ka was still disappointed that Muhtar could talk so much about his group without once mentioning God or his own private faith. He despised Muhtar for it.” Pamuk’s characters refresh the tired battle between atheists and fervent believers.

Ka’s visit is incited by a report of suicides committed by Muslim girls who take drastic action after being prohibited from attending school covered in head scarves. His ostensible purpose is to investigate and write a report for a German newspaper, but his real motive is to reacquaint himself with the beautiful and recently divorced Ipek and marry her. His desire for her is entirely shallow, based on her tremendous beauty, and nothing more substantial than lust composes their relationship. The presence of a second author, the translator, may be the source of the inanity. It is possible that idiosyncrasies of the Turkish language are lost in the English language. Nevertheless, when their relationship tragically falls apart in the throes of miscommunication, the reader is neither surprised nor significantly affected. As our narrator informs us that “we are now approaching the heart of the matter: for until that moment I could have said I had seen nothing for which I had the story I have related in this book: Ipek was more beautiful than anyone could have imagined,” we are frustrated by a lack of imagination in describing her beauty.

Ka’s visit to the economically and spiritually depressed Kars is strangely enchanted. The city is blanketed in snow (a reiterated image) and awash in blinding whiteness. “It was as if snow cast a veil over hatreds, greed, and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another. They fell silent for a while.” Rather than simply a sign of renewal or redemption for the town, the oppressive weather signifies a “carnivalesque” period. In a brilliant ironic twist, the roads are all closed and the town falls to a takeover by a “coup-de-theatre.” Nationalistic actors and a few soldiers stage a play in which an actress removes her head scarf – not to cleanse it as the audience expects – but to burn it in an act of defiance. Religious youths in the crowd become boisterous and protest this blatant offense against Islam, only to witness some soldiers/actors fire rounds into the crowd. Based on the premise of the theater and a play being performed, the audience is slow to comprehend that the guns have shot actual rounds, killing nearly a dozen people. This section is a striking depiction of political upstarts, using the theatricality of the event to point to the absurd events. During the last performance by the troupe, the leader Sunay is shot, lamenting, “How stupid all this is! They know nothing about modern art, they’ll never be modern!”

As a reader biased with the privileges and prejudices of being a member of the Western world, I experienced moments of uncertainty. I stood guilty in the face of characters who provided such indictments as: “When they write poems or sing songs in the West, they speak for all humanity. They’re human beings—but we’re just Muslims. When we write something, it’s just called ethnic poetry.” I appreciated the irony, but was unsure if I was missing out on other aspects of the story. Westerners are helped by the encouraged empathy with the narrator and his protagonist, who is just as much of a stranger in Kars as the reader. Narrated by a phantom for most of the novel, we only learn more about the author’s identity and relation to Ka late in the novel. “Here, perhaps, we have arrived at the heart of our story. How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another’s heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend’s difficult and painful life: How much can he really see?” If this is truly the heart of the story, it is frail; the relationship between the two is unwisely presupposed and referenced to as an entity outside the novel. With the elision of all but six lines of Ka’s poetry, where we would hope to glimpse more of his life, the reader cannot see very much at all.

My expectations may have been inflated with the knowledge that Pamuk received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pamuk displays ingenious marks of the great Russian writers, such as Dostoyevsky and Turgenev. Snow openly wrestles with ideas of freedom, religion, and humanity by employing similar techniques as Brothers Karamazov. Instead of the Grand Inquisition, we have Muhtar preaching on the tragic loss of identity in the East: ‘“But I didn’t tell you this beautiful story to show you what it means to me or how I relate it to my life; I told it to point out that it’s forgotten. This thousand-year-old story comes from Firdevsi’s Shehname. Once upon a time, millions of people knew it by heart—from Tabriz to Istanbul, from Bosnia to Trabzon—and when they recalled it they found the meaning in their lives. The story spoke to them in just the same way that Oedipus’ murder of his father and Macbeth’s obsession with power and death speak to the people throughout the Western world. But now, because we’ve fallen under the spell of the West, we’ve forgotten our own stories…How do you explain this?”



Ka’s poetry is incredibly intriguing but problematic. Nowhere do we receive more than several lines of his highly esteemed work. Instead, the reader is provided with notes from his journal and an interesting geometric figure – a six-pointed snowflake representative of his newest collection of poetry. Upon visiting Kars, his writing drought ends and a bevy of new poems results from the landscape, his conversations with others about God, religion, and love. The axes of this diagram are labeled “Memory, Imagination and Reason.” It is at these termini that he organizes his poems into different groups and establishes the relationships between them. At the center is the seminal poem, “I, Ka,” which is his European manifesto of individualism. Ka’s solipsistic wandering across town and poetical musing, his attempt to possess a beautiful woman rather than love her, and the narrator’s devotion to having his story told leave the reader wondering what else would Ka expect other than misery and lack of fulfillment?