Tag Archives: book review

Bel Canto: Unlikely Situation Sings

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To my own surprise, I have finished a good contemporary novel. I suspected it might be one, but then I was warned it got slow in the middle. I reserved judgement until I shut the covers last night. Bel Canto is an engaging and graceful read by award-winner Ann Patchett.

It concerns a birthday party featuring an opera singer held in a poor South American country, in hopes of luring the guest of honor, a Japanese business tycoon, into building factories there. As she sings, the room is invaded by terrorists who take the group hostage. The substance of the book lies between this action-packed beginning and it’s similar, and inevitable, end. The group of prisoners and captors forget more and more of the outside world, as the weeks go by inside their new home. Relationships form, eventually between the captors and their prisoners as well. And then people begin falling in love!But, as they all forgot inside the house they share, the situation is a ticking bomb.

An interesting premise and a well-done story, Patchett excels at creating depth in a wealth of characters. So there we have it, a good book. It’s treatment of opera (bel canto means beautiful song), and how it moves this diverse group of people is lovely. Opera in many ways dominates the characters lives, as the singer begins to practise every morning. Conterposed to child terrorists in fatigues it seems improbable, as if both could not exist in the same world.

I am still sticking to my resolve, however. Only classics from now on. Dickens and Proust. There’s not enough time to read everything. If only I could have a separate self of me, just for reading. But first some Baudelaire and Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.

Book Review: The Subway

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The Subway is an intriguing quasi-fictional appropriation of reality that all New Yorkers can identify with. The Subway contains the full sweep of humanity in its passengers, as they jostle or sit at safe distances or stare into the passing faces. This panorama of society contains the myriad human interactions that make up civilization, from shoving to giving up your seat to flirting.

Minute gestures of the passengers lead one to observations of humanity. For the protagonist is like Everyman of Pilgrim’s Progress. He goes about his quest to arrive at his destination, and struggles with the conflicts of finding his metro card, missing a train by a second, being crowded into a smelly homeless person; we see his personality revealed, and as people and especially as New Yorkers, we can identify with his quest.

Within The Subway, all the glories and incongruities of American democracy are present. From the homeless to the elite, at any hour of the day the vast swell of humanity is present in all its odors. All people in the hunt for seats have the equality that makes America great.

Who wrote this fascinating study of the human psyche and deployed his acute and pointed observations on human nature? Who depicted the possible scenarios that could happen among such a group of people? No one. This novel doesn’t exist.

How is it possible that no one has written this book yet? I can’t be the only New Yorker who on their endless commute sometimes wondered about their fellow passengers, about where they were going and why. Storytelling has its roots in such unparalleled access to people. People who are too immersed in their experiences to put up facades. The subway is humanity raw and uncensored.

Considering people’s (and my own behaviors) on the subway, I’m convinced it is a minefield of character and of situation that is integral to a great story.

Musicians…

Mother with child, woman in pink, and Hasidic Jew

Nursing mother

Young lovers

Homeless man

Young pole dancers

These photos from the NYC subway make great character studies. It’s seems so much like a book already written to me. But I checked on the Internet, where all things are true, and The Subway hasn’t been written. Yet.

Hating Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal and Sabbath’s Theater

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Maybe you learn more about yourself by reading a book. Apparently I find lecherous, scheming old men inexcusable, and therefore renounce Philip Roth’s works. I finished The Dying Animal, about an aging professor having an affair with a young woman that drives him mad, over a year ago. I didn’t enjoy this accomplished, character-driven story last year, for all its merit. I was never going to read him again. Currently, I am not enjoying Sabbath’s Theater, which seems remarkably similar.

Indeed, I hate Sabbath’s Theater much as I hated The Dying Animal. In Roth’s hands, themes of sexuality rankle with me. Adultery is glorified as the only real type of love, where both partners are free. (Except it never really works out well for the aging buccaneer.) His emphasis on sexuality seems wishful rather than a fully formed theory about people. As is imagined sex with young girls and prostitutes and maids were some Freudian projection of his penis, and thus his self-worth. Yet he buys into conventional morality just enough to use its labels of ‘bad girl’ and ‘satanic lust’ to great effect. Interestingly, sex ultimately does not offer his characters salvation. Maybe conflating Roth and his characters is a mistake?
I do not identify with, and in fact hate, the protagonist of Sabbath’s Theater, which is a problem in a character-driven novel. Hate is no light word, and I think for Roth to inspire such a reactions in me he must be doing something right. Sabbath’s Theater is driven by the death of a great mistress and realization that Sabbath has nothing left. Sabbath, a puppeteer before he became an arthritic, lecherous old man, attempts to deal with this much like a mental patient.
Sabbath’s (and Roth’s for all I can see) merit is a brutal honesty and fluency when describing life without money or friends or hope, when all the women you love have died, and the feeble desires of a fading penis become more than solace but life itself. Despite what you might think, Sabbath needs no pity from you, dear Reader, and Roth accomplished something when he created a character so repulsive that even hearing of his brother’s death and mother’s tragedy doesn’t redeem him somewhat. Theories on the glories of free love, love you pay for, and love with those underage fall much like self-justifications on these deaf ears.

As to recommending these books, rarely have I enjoyed reading something so little. Yet both The Dying Animal and Sabbath’s Theater are capably done. The characters are rich and interesting, and the harsh, jaded take on humanity is as humorous as it is dour. Philip Roth is an accomplished writer with a great knowledge of the nuances of people; I just happen to dislike his people. Hating his novels makes me wonder if there’s something wrong with me….