Category Archives: Storytelling

8 Exciting Summer Reads

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reading

(photo: Pedro Ribeiro Simōes, Creative Commons license)

With publishers so intent on finding the next blockbuster, it’s easy for good books, make that Very Good Books, to slip by unnoticed. I’d like to suggest that my writing coach Lauren Davis’s new book, Against a Darkening Sky, which is on top of my “to read” pile, is a book I hope escapes that fate. I also trust that the flow of good will and good media coming its way will continue.

Set in 7th century Northumbria, as Christianity sweeps the countryside, it considers issues that are universal and timeless. Says Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler, it “brilliantly achieves the ideal for a historical novel: period and milieu seem utterly inextricable from characters and theme.” I’m looking forward to reading—and savoring!—it this summer.

More Recommendations

In case you missed Nancy Pearl’s “under the radar reads” segment on NPR’s Morning Edition late last week, here are her recommendations for intriguing and beautifully written works of fiction beyond the B&N front table that are well worth seeking out.

  • The Revolutions by Felix Gilman – A little steam punk, a little sci fi, a little magic and the occult—and the perils of dabbling in them. Says Pearl, “I’ve always believed that people learn from every book they read, . . . I think reading about the past in the context of the present is just fascinating.”
  • The Swimmer by Joakim Zander – in this fast-paced thriller a former spy tries to help a young woman with whom he has a strange connection. She’s seen something she shouldn’t have . . . and she’s on the run.
  • Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper – Says Pearl, this is another page-turner, not because of the speed of the plot, but because the characters from two time periods (around World War I and late 20th century) are so interesting. The story is set in motion when 83-year-old Etta decides she must see the ocean before she dies and sets out to walk there—from Saskatchewan.
  • Unbecoming by Rebecca Scherm – which is, Pearl says, “a novel about lying.” Not only is lying “unbecoming” in the old-fashioned sense, but the main character gradually “unbecomes” who she is. In a Paris antiquities shop she waits for her crimes to catch up with her.
  • The Half Brother by Holly LeCraw – We’ve all had strange coincidences in our lives, situations about which one says “if that were in a novel, no one would believe it!” Well, this novel takes on the issue of coincidence versus fate. How one choice would have created a totally different self—in other words, the spiraling kind of speculation that can drive you crazy.
  • The Strangler Vine by M.J. Carter – Carter is a historian, who can provide the convincing details of the exotic setting this novel uses. In 1837 India, its two British protagonists journey all over the subcontinent to find a missing writer. The first of a series, about which Pearl says, “I personally cannot wait for the second one.” (Awesome cover!)

A Sad History Tale

Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep himself has a new book out, Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab. It’s the true story of an Indian leader who used the tools of American democracy to try to make the case for his people and their land rights. His futile legal battle continued for two decades and ended in the Trail of Tears.

Any of these books would make for memorable summer reading. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on them and to reading at least some myself!

Fan Fic Fest

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Sherlock, Freeman, Cumberbatch

Martin Freeman (Watson) & Benedict Cumberbatch (Holmes) in Sherlock

Last night a high-powered panel of experts discussed fan fiction and its uneasy relationship with traditional media, moderated by Anne Jamison, author of Fic, and oft-quoted academic expert on this phenomenon. (She teaches the fan fic class I’m auditing at Princeton.) Fan fiction, in essence, is taking existing characters (from Elizabeth Bennett to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sometimes both at the same time) and creating new plots and storylines for them. One of its fundamentals is that people write it for love of the characters, not for money. On the panel were New Yorker tv critic Emily Nussbaum, Jamie Broadnax, creator of the website Black Girl Nerds, commentator Elizabeth Minkel of The Millions and The New Statesman, and intellectual property attorney (and fan) Heidi Tandy.

Traditional media often treat the huge and hugely diverse fan fiction universe in what the panelists observed is a mocking way, as if it were made up solely of young women who want to write about male-on-male sex. That trope is called “slash,” it is alive and well, and it really got going with Spock/Kirk fan fic. Now there’s a huge Johnlock (John Watson/Sherlock Holmes) fandom. (Find some well-written Johnlock material here.)

By contrast, the X-Files spawned a lot of het (heterosexual) fic written by people who really thought Scully and Mulder should get together. And, of course, the runaway financial success 50 Shades of Grey began as E.L. James’s fan fic based on the Twilight series.

Though sex is an important component in some fan fiction, and though a lot of it is written by young women, it’s a much more diverse field than commentators typically acknowledge. Meanwhile, there’s something unseemly, panelists agreed, about highly paid stars and showrunners snidely critiquing the writing of people who are doing it for free.

Interestingly, some tv shows are courting the fan fic community, counting on its obsessiveness to uncover Easter eggs in the story and faint clues and parallels and arcane references. Sherlock (though Benedict Cumberbatch has run afoul of the fan fic world for some of his critiques of it) uses many fan fic tropes, and the first episode of Season 3 included a group of fan fic writers as characters, creating their explanations for how Sherlock was not dead, even after the fall witnessed at the close of Season 2. Panelist Minkel has covered these developments nicely.

The Sherlock showrunners draw on many sources—not just the “canon” of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories—but all the movies, books, and other derivative works about Holmes that have been created subsequently. Fan fiction, the practice of live-tweeting shows, and other possibilities are cracking open the tv screen, and, in the future, popular programs will likely exist both within and outside their scheduled allotments.

Fan fic is a great big and raucous world, and if you’re at all curious, here are some places to start exploring or toe-dipping: Archive of Our Own (AO3), which reports it contains almost 18,000 fandoms, has more than a half-million users, and 1.6 million works; and the FanFiction Network, which used to be the most popular fan fic site, but is being outrun by AO3.

The tagline of Jamison’s book is the possibly aspirational “Why fanfiction is taking over the world.”

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****Mr. Mercedes

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car, Mercedes

(photo: commons. wikimedia)

By Stephen King. I’d resolved to read some Stephen King this year and picked this one up in the San Diego airport. I see that the Mystery Writers of America have nominated it for the Edgar Award—“Best Novel” category—for 2014. Five more nominees to go.

King fulfills all the standard thriller conventions—ticking clock, protagonist who must act outside the system with aid only from clever, but unofficial sources (in this case a black high school student and a woman with a serious mental disorder), a diabolical threat against a passel of innocents, and an opponent with sufficient intellectual- and fire-power to keep the stakes stoked. With characters from the crime novel version of Central Casting, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the plot–despite its interesting set-up–is more than a wee bit predictable.

It’s an artful page-turner, if you don’t think too hard, and King fans may love it, but it breaks no new ground. (Read about the “King for a Year” project, which so far revisits some of his more innovative works.) And perhaps it’s no surprise then, that Mr. Mercedes will be turned into a television series, with the script to be written by David E. Kelley (Boston Legal and Ally McBeal), and Jack Bender (Lost and Under the Dome) to direct.

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*****The Cowboy and the Cossack

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Cowboy and the Cossack, Clair HuffakerBy Clair Huffaker, narrated by Phil Gigante. I loved this!! It’s one of Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscovery novels—books she believes are out of print and shouldn’t be. If this one is an indication, the whole list deserves to be checked out.

The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) is the story of 15 Montana cowboys and a herd of 500 longhorn cattle who travel by ship to Vladivostok and embark on a journey across the Siberian wilderness en route to the small town of Bakaskaya where the people are desperate to have them. Unexpectedly, when they arrive in Russia, they’re met for the trip by a troop of elite Cossack horsemen. The cowboys, under the leadership of laconic Shad Northshield, don’t want or need their help. Or so they think.

But what they think doesn’t matter, because the Cossack leader, Captain Rostov, is every bit the stubborn leader Northshield is. Told through the eyes of a young cowboy named Levi Dougherty–and Gigante’s perfect narration–the novel is a coming-of-age story, a “when men were men” Western, and a thrilling adventure. It’s told in the appropriately colorful language of a young man of the 1880’s, which adds to the realism. Levi struggles to see the multiple points of view of the two cultures—and the men in them—thrown together in extreme and life-threatening circumstances.

Clair Huffaker, who died in 1990, wrote more than a dozen Western and other novels, as well as screenplays (including The Comancheros and Rio Conchos) and for the television series, Lawman. Huffaker’s daughter has written about the significance of having this book dedicated to her, and among her thoughtful comments is this: “It is a profound honor for me to (invite) new readers into an epic adventure tale which at its core illuminates the essential traits that my father believed a true man should steadfastly possess: honor, courage, integrity, and quiet strength.”


Comment from reader Nancy Kaminsky: “I am half way through reading The Cowboy and the Cossack per your recommendation. I love this book. The writer’s descriptions are so vivid. Thanks for your review. It may be the best book that I have ever read.”

10-28-14 ****Bastard Out of Carolina

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Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison, Southern gothicBy Dorothy Allison – The West Windsor Library’s annual book sale is where I stock up on books I should have read a long time ago. Set in Greenville, South Carolina, this debut novel, published in 1992, was probably somewhat more shocking as a tale of parental oversight and abuse at the time, and so beautifully written it’s no surprise it was a National Book Award finalist. It remains a powerful and empathetic portrayal of class and gender differences in the 1950’s.

Prior to this book, Allison had published two volumes of poetry sharing the same main title, The Women Who Hate Me, and it’s interesting how she’s able to tamp that back and stay in the voice of the pre-teen first-person narrator, Ruth Anne Boatwright, whom everyone calls Bone, even as she reveals great depth and precision of language. Bone both lovingly and mercilessly describes the hard-drinking, violence-prone Boatwright men and the frustrated and hard-working Boatwright women. They may be poor—“trash” people call them and they call themselves—but they are tender toward Bone and her only thin protection against her mother’s new husband.

You may be familiar with the 1996 movie version of the novel, but I haven’t seen it. Anjelica Huston directed, and it starred Jennifer Jason Leigh, Ron Eldard, Christina Ricci, and Dermot Mulroney. Jena Malone played Bone. A 100% critics rating from Rotten Tomatoes!

****The Danube

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Danube, river

(photo: author)

By Nick Thorpe, a BBC East and Central European correspondent who has lived in Budapest for more than 25 years. Subtitle of this book is “a journey upriver from the Black Sea to the Black Forest”—in Bavaria, home of Danube’s the headwaters, a spring in the town of Donaueschingen. The Danube, queen of rivers, runs through and along the borders of ten countries of Western and Central Europe—Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, and Germany—the middle six of which I’ve visited. In one brief stretch, it passes through four nations’ capitals: Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, and Belgrade. And through great swaths of sparsely populated countryside, known mainly to birds and watermen.

Thorpe’s travelogue-cum-history lesson-cum natural history exploration ranges widely and freely over this vast geographic and intellectual territory. In part his story is told through the wars and occupations, the conquests and lost empires that have shaped the region over thousands of years, and in part through his warm-hearted stories of individual men and women who still depend on the river as neighbor and provider today. Ways of life that withstood centuries of disruption have been torn apart by modern improvements—hydroelectric dams, locks, canals, diversions, “straightening.”

Though Thorpe understands the motives behind these changes, his heart is on the side of the scattered environmentalists who are trying to restore the natural flow of the river and, here and there, to nudge it back into its old, meandering course. Efforts to do so have led to a resurgence of wildlife and an elevation of spirit among those who perceive a river as a living thing, moving and changing, mile by mile, as Thorpe’s book so eloquently shows.

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Writers as Storytellers

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front porch, rocking chair, storytelling

(photo: Lars Ploughmann, flickr)

Eric Nelson’s recent Ploughshares article describes the “10 times in life when writers have the upper hand.” Writers who can tell stories out loud and off the page, that is. As Nelson says, “With the right kinds of stories, you can sell anything, including yourself.”

I have a friend who writes monologs, and I’ve come to appreciate the amount of work that goes into shaping this material, polishing it, honing it, and then, hardest of all, making it sound spontaneous, fresh, alive. The impact of his stories on the page versus what happens when he “tells” them is transformative.

In the days before television, storytelling was a much-appreciated front porch gift that we’ve mostly lost track of. Even writers, who should be superb oral story tellers, may limit their audience to the glowing rectangle. We keep our best stories, the personal, true ones, locked up inside.

The organization The Moth (“True Stories Told Live”) sets out to preserve and celebrate oral storytelling, and a book of 50 “brilliant and quietly addictive” stories from its archive has five stars on Amazon. Like my friend’s work, the best stories display honesty, vulnerability–and a little structure. This is not the same storytelling as effectively recounting “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”; these are true stories of the kind familiar to This American Life addicts.

Life situations when Nelson says a good story—or the ability to put one together—comes in handy include childcare (“It’s easier to keep a car full of kids from hitting each other by entertaining them with stories than hoping their iPad batteries hold out”), the classroom—from first grade to adult education, parties, job interviews, dates, the doctor’s office, therapy, on juries, in political campaigns, and at the DMV (where everyone is bored silly “except the writers. They’re too busy working on their stories in their head”).

Nelson refers to a recent article by Neil Gaiman about being asked to appear at The Moth—something out of his comfort zone, and so a good reason to do it, Gaiman says. Something he says about the importance of stories really resonates, given this week’s news events: “And the gulf that exists between us is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin colour, gender, race or attitudes, but we don’t see the stories. And once we hear them we realise that the things dividing us are often illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are no thicker than scenery.”

*****Down by the River

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drugs, El Paso, Rio Grande, narcotraficantes, DEA, Border Patrol, Mexico, Texas

U.S. Border Patrol agents on the Rio Grande (photo: c1.staticflickr)

By Charles Bowden. Investigative reporter Bowden has produced a number of excellent nonfiction books, and this 2002 book about the porous U.S.-Mexico border between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez and the heavy traffic in drugs and violence spanning the Rio Grande there–was highly regarded from the start. Since it’s a dozen years old, as I read, I couldn’t help hoping the situation has improved. Ample recent evidence here, here, and here, suggests it has not, and ongoing drug-related violence throughout the Central American region is a principal reason its children are fleeing here.

The rivalry, lack of cooperation, and mutual undermining of DEA, FBI, and CIA agents in their interactions with the corrupt Mexican hierarchy clouded any comprehensive understanding of the problem and precluded any effective action. When one of these government agencies would get the goods on a bad guy, another would put on the brakes, maybe because the man was one of their thousands of snitches–an always shaky investigational strategy, as any TV watcher knows–or maybe for some other reason. The Mexican drug lords outflanked the clueless American agents at every turn, playing one against the other.

Bowden had no idea it would take eight years to sieve the truth from the slurry of lies and to assemble the fragments of this accounting from hints, scattered news reports, reportorial digging, and conversations with people afraid to talk. He doesn’t discuss the risks to himself, but they had to be industrial grade. He frames the whole convoluted, vague, and hopelessly tangled mess with the story of the death of one 26-year-old El Paso man, Bruno Jordan. Jordan’s family lives close to a border bridge, dangerous Ciudad Juarez crowded up to the Rio Grande’s opposite bank. Jordan was shot down in a K-Mart parking lot in what the police claimed was a car-jacking by a 13-year-old boy, and what his family believes was a hit. Bruno had nothing to do with drugs, but his older brother headed the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center and, in the course of his career, had rubbed a great many of the vindictive and ultra-violent narcotraficantes the wrong way.

The cupidity and corruption of Mexico’s elected leaders, the federal police, the army, and every “get tough on drugs” task force they set up is old news now, but the extent of it is nonetheless shocking. According to a source Bowden cites, when Vincente Fox became president, one of his cabinet members said, “All of our phones, faxes and e-mails are monitored by the narcos. We are surrounded by enemies. We cannot attack corruption unless Washington ends its indifference to wrongdoing by the Mexican elite.” But Washington ignored it, for political reasons of its own, and instead, for decades, has touted the phony War on Drugs.

confiscated drug money

Confiscated drug money (photo: wikimedia.org)

While the people live in poverty and terror, the drug czars live in multimillion-dollar mansions, protected by gun-toting federales. One provincial governor cracked down on the drug lords who live in luxury and some safety in his prisons (operating their networks unimpeded, of course), by decreeing they could no longer have Jacuzzis in their cells. At the time of Bowden’s writing, Northern Mexico was essentially a lawless region where the amounts of money are so huge that anyone can be bought. According to the DEA, in 1995 Amado Carrillo Fuentes’s Juarez-based cartel alone was generating approximately $200 million every week.) With cash flow like that, the Mexican government couldn’t afford to shut it down if it wanted to. “Unsuspecting” U.S. and European banks launder perhaps $.5 to $1 trillion dollars a year of this dirty money. Have an account at Citibank?

U.S. law enforcement and border officials may not be corrupt individuals, but everyone they must deal with is likely to be, or might be, today, or another day. In a 2013 interview Bowden talked about the continued violence and murder in Mexico, spawned by Americans’ drug habits, and how this violence is routinely ignored by politicians, bankers, and others who wink-wink don’t ask where the money comes from, calling it “the willful ignorance of the US press covering Mexico. The Mexican press is terrorized. The U.S. press does not like to challenge power.”

Author Charles Bowden died August 30, 2014, at his Las Cruces, New Mexico, home.

Mother Jones encomium and other excellent links.

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Amen.

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amen, Costa-Gavras, Vatican, NaziCosta-Gavras’s 2002 movie about the role of The Vatican in World War II (you can watch it here) was certain to be controversial, as opinions are strongly felt, relevant information is still secreted in Vatican archives, and the movie is based on a controversial play, The Deputy, by an erratic German playwright, Rolf Hochhuth. (The movie promotion, like this poster, offended many, as well.)

Most interesting is the portrayal of an SS officer hired to help “control vermin” at military bases—typhus was a big problem—using deadly Zyklon B gas. At a concentration camp, he witnesses the gas being used against people and is so horrified, he makes many efforts to bring religious leaders’ attention to the carnage, believing that if they would only speak out, the horror will stop. He befriends a (fictional) young Jesuit who joins his crusade and takes these concerns all the way to Pope Pius XII.

In real life, and improbably, such an SS officer did exist. Kurt Gerstein was thrown out of the Nazi party in the 1930s, yet allowed to join the SS in 1941 and, because of his engineering and medical education, soon became head of the Technical Disinfection Services. In custody after the war, he wrote lengthy testimony about the death camps that became prominent evidence in subsequent war crimes trials, including at Nuremberg. Gerstein died in French custody in 1945, reportedly by suicide. His story is included in Europe Central, a National Book Award-winning novel by William T. Vollman.

Throughout the period, the Pope’s pronouncements were consistently anti-war, but vague. In the movie, he doesn’t speak out about the Jews, specifically, for a number of reasons (explored in an interesting article by Jewish historians here): The Vatican’s neutrality (the Allies and the Nazis both criticized it for favoring the other side); fear that Church properties in Germany would be seized, or The Vatican itself invaded; and concern that opposition to Germany would give support to the atheistic Soviets, with communism deemed the greater long-term threat to the Church. When this issue came up during a visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau, an American Catholic defended the Church, saying rather heatedly that the Pope couldn’t speak out, or “the nuns and priests would be next.”

People's Palace, Bucharest, Palace of the Parliament, Romania

Parliament, Bucharest (photo: 1.bp.blogspot.com)

Despite all this, many individual clergy and religious moved to protect threatened individuals, and the Pope himself quietly urged Catholic churches, convents, and other facilities to take in Jews, and the movie includes this. Amen. makes for interesting viewing, and perhaps we will never know the full story.

As a side-note, I learned about this movie when visiting Romania last year. Because filming inside The Vatican was not allowed, the movie Vatican was the enormous, surreally empty “People’s Palace” in Bucharest.

****Glimmer Train

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Recently finished the Winter 2013 issue of Glimmer Train, one of the most competitive literary magazines on the U.S. scene, with 32,000 submissions a year. Its almost 200 pages included nine short stories and an interview with author Pinckney Benedict (after reading this interview and reveling in his awe-inspiring name, I bought his most recent book, Miracle Boy and Other Stories; apparently, he’s inspired other readers, too). $19.95 from Benedict’s hard-working small publisher, Press 53; $17.96 from amazon. Hoping my extra $1.99 is nurturing the dream of small publishers.

wrecked boat, ribs, sea

(photo: pixabay.com)

Among the stories, I especially liked “Angstschweiss” by Susan Messer, and anyone who’s had to make a trepidatious visit to a nursing home, rehab hospital, or other institution caring for the wreck of a loved one remembered in full-sail, will identify. The title of her novel, Grand River and Joy, Detroiters will recognize as an intersection, and far from being an uplifting statement, the book explores the city’s racial tensions that exploded with the 1967 riots—“complex, challenging, and bitterly funny.” On the “to read” list.

Two stories—“Wilderness of Ghosts” by Janis Hubschman and “Patient History” by Baird Harper—focused on young women troubled at leaping the chasm from late adolescence to “what’s next.” “Gladstone,” a charming story by Marjorie Celona, nicely capture the skewed neighborhood observations and preoccupations of a group of 10-year-old boys. Her novel Y—about the fractured life of a newborn baby left at the YMCA with a great many questions—one Goodreads reader said, “I don’t think I have ever been so sad to see a book end.”

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