on mike’s suggestion i read david mitchell ghostwritten, a really exceptional book, all the more so if one thinks that it is a first novel. dazzling and original and whimsical and perfectly written. a joy. but then i fell into a bad reading spell, with book after book being a disappointment and me feeling restless and unhappy, as i do when i’m not reading a book that anchors my day in looking-forwarding-to-going-back-to-itness.

i was intrigued some time ago to find that subcomandante marcos and renowned mexican mystery writer paco ignacio taibo II had teamed up to write a novel. but i found the novel, the uncomfortable dead, a disappointment and didn’t finish it. among other things, the translation is below par. anyone else?

after that i thought i’d return to the tried and true and read me a carol shields novel i hadn’t yet read, the box garden. now, carol shields is in many ways a really spectacular writer, but, really, the only book by her that has totally grabbed me is unless. the other ones leave me pleased, impressed, but a bit cold. it’s as if they failed to congeal in my imagination into compelling, forceful stories. too much set up, maybe? the fault, if fault is the right word, is, i feel, in me, not her. i do love her take on life, which is gentle and easy and wry. life is this big unruly blob and you do best by smiling and going along as easily as you can, avoiding the knots and most certainly not trying to untie them. a box garden, too, adds religion to the mix, and it’s, as everything in shields, with a sweetly skeptical take that leaves one quite impressed with her intelligence and the depth of her soul. then maybe what doesn’t talk to me is her canadian gothic. like all anglo gothic (american, english, australian/new zealand), i don’t get it. very alien.

which brings me to richard flanagan’s gould’s book of fish, which looks amazing, reads amazing, but i had to abandon after a few chapters. i can’t stand the relentless abuse of antipodean literature. when i put myself through her work, janet frame just about finished me. i’m sure some of you have read gould and know what i’m talking about. what’s interesting about it, i find, is its look at colonialism and imperialism from the point of view of the terrible abuse it brought, not only to indigenous people, but also to the colonizers themselves. kind of like a modern version of the scarlet letter. the conditions to which the prisoners that became australia/new zealand’s founding fathers are subjected, the arbitrariness of the violence, are really beyond words. read janet frame’s astounding faces in the water if this stuff talks to you. i had knots in my stomach and on occasion i felt nauseous, not because of squeamishness, but because i don’t want to believe we can be so terribly brutal to one another. i’ll admit with not a small amount of shame that the fact that the violence was white-on-white might have made it worse. it’s not that i think it’s better to abuse non-white people, godforbid. it’s that we are just not habituated to seeing such terrible abuse perpetrated on white people, and it hit very close home. evidently, i draw comfort in those other stories from thinking that it won’t happen to me.

talking of things that might happen to me, check out this story. a “little-known but common practice?” REALLY???? so now the state of virginia has a law against it. how about the rest of us? and why isn’t this widely discussed? and: why not proctological exams on men, dental exams on children, etc? i am confused, bewildered, shocked, and scared.

i then started chris abani’s latest, the virgin of flames, but at this point i needed plain and solid writing, not abani’s weird stuff. i’ll certainly return to it, though i’ve got to say that abani confounds my belief that one has to be a good stylist to write good novels. his graceland is a fabulous book, in spite of the less-than-clean writing. still, i look forward to this book, some other time.

same with muriel spark’s the mandelbaum gate. fine book, but i really, really need some honest-to-goodness, dyed-in-the-wool americana right now to clean my palate and settle my stomach. terrible image. i don’t mean it that way.