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lization of the 1984 doctor who serial the twin dilemma but there s a similar sledgehammer application of satirical wit in the proceedings and flaubert has at least the excuse of being great and of writing at a time when this approach could have seemed mildly shocking and salutary even carrying such baggage education succeeds even if its lessons are somewhat depressing and lightweight frederic and company flit through life with relatively few complications and finish out the main story there s a coda set around the time of flaubert s writing almost as well as they d started out i couldn t help comparing flaubert s attempted panoptic examination of french life with zola s and thinking how perversely satisfying it would have been to see the characters all run afoul of louis napoleon s coup d etat it grew quickly apparent though that not only were folks like frederic the kind of one time firebrands louis napoleon courted but that they all would have done just fine by the second empire any one of them could have been a grand zola villain inasmuch as there was such a thing j p donleavy the ginger man 1955 the ginger man will make your head hurt so basically like actual ginger maybe that s just me under certain circumstances it was a free book at a library giveaway and i m not terribly sorry for it regarded by many as a comic masterpiece the ginger man was based by donleavy on his own experiences and those of his friends including future film director george roy hill as an american attending trinity college dublin in the late 1940s it purports to tell of the postwar anomie of a pair of expat americans in ireland and the havoc they cause when they don t get their way sixty years later some of the underlying themes seem awfully prophetic with a name like sebastian dangerfield it s unlikely one was ever to lead a normal life like i should talk brought to the old world by a catastrophic war sebastian and friend kenneth o keefe stay behind to spread the new american gospel in ways that aren t officially covered by nsc 68 which came out while sebastian o keefe et al were studying presumably without their knowledge sebastian a former officer in the u s navy remained in ireland his oft eulogized ancestral home after his war service to study at trinity under the provisions of the g i bill or at least that s his official story married to the terribly english marion and with a small child he spends almost his entire time sleeping around drinking pining for home and generally causing trouble while hanging out with fellow expat o keefe as the only person who really gets him like flaubert s aforementioned hero he waits on an inheritance this time from a wealthy father who despises him and his wastrel ways though the hypocrisies of mid century irish society would probably drive anyone mad sebastian always unerringly hits on the best way to make things worse he constantly browbeats marion to work on her own wealthy or at least aristocratic father for money while just as constantly cheating on her and habitually antagonizes his neighbors and landlady never knowing when to quit eventually his misdeeds affairs arrears of rent multiple misdemeanors catch up with him and his flight from dublin to follow o keefe who s similarly escaped reveals that not quite like the bourbons he s learned nothing but didn t remember a whole lot to forget in the first place the ginger man wasn t an easy read for me and not in a way that eventually rewarded donleavy s been praised for his love of language and how that love infects his prose most particularly in the ginger man but somehow it leaves me cold there s probably an argument to be made that sebastian s wallowing in his own problematic irishness and the contrast between the heartfelt ruminations and sebastian s own turgid punching down lifestyle makes for compelling reading but it didn t strike me that way to say the least coming up with the proto american empire reading was the only way i could really make the ginger man all that interesting and i seriously doubt that s what donleavy had in mind curious to see how others reacted i unearthed a positive and negative review worth reading and probably fall more towards the latter interpretation nowadays there would be trigger warnings for sebastian s casual abuse of marion and the kid which go a long way towards undercutting the jovial oirish blarney that supposedly infuses this hugely problematic occasionally entertaining but not very worthwhile work gary shteyngart the russian debutante s handbook 2002 shteyngart over the last couple of years has emerged as one of my favorite contemporary writers i read his near future dystopian romance super sad true love story 2010 for my old blog and greatly enjoyed it even with its melancholy and occasional bit of lead footed satire he became something of an inspiration too for a talk he gave on public radio that i ve only heard secondhand through friends a recommendation in itself in which he claimed that there were increasingly more writers than readers i still consider this tremendous hyperbole but it did kick me in the rear enough to start returning to consistency and application in my own reading handbook was his first novel making a splash for its entertaining revision of post soviet eastern europe and its rendition of shteyngart s biographical details into an amusingly weedy antihero his second absurdistan 2006 i m saving for a special occasion if the record so far is any guide we should expect a new book next year that i can have such a hope pleases me greatly and gives me a good feeling both for contemporary literature and for the direction of this blog vladimir girshkin is like shteyngart a russian jewish immigrant to the u s having arrived when he was a child as a soviet refugee in the company of his intellectual but impoverished parents the latter have managed to make good in the new society but vladimir hasn t been so lucky an unwitting victim of the boomer drawbridge perhaps working a crap job as a clerk for an immigration aid society a venue that gives him a front row seat to the multicultural panoply of pre giuliani new york acting on a tip from his friend baobab gilletti his name appearance and behavior might have come straight out of jonathan goldstein s wiretap which is a very good thing vladimir gets mixed up with the catalan mob which is apparently a thing before getting an out from a client of his one rybakov who claims to be related to the russian mafia in prava a fictionalized version of prague in an otherwise genuine eastern europe vladimir flies to prava and gets involved in the nefarious doings of rybakov s relations while ingratiating himself with the then burgeoning community of american expats there cue the infamous you can trade em for a car commercial after a scheme he concocts becomes much bigger than he d expected creating a fake literary magazine for artistic minded expats in a hilarious inversion of the cia s real life support of encounter in the 60s and 70s he finds the pleasure from a new american girlfriend somewhat negated by the not unimportant fact that his life is often in danger handbook is a wonderful hugely entertaining comic novel but what hit home hardest with me is how flat out nostalgic it made me feel dave eggers s a heartbreaking work of staggering genius which came out a couple of years earlier had a similarly unexpected effect vladimir feels to some degree that he s come home by returning to the former iron curtain while i was struck by the powerfully familiar sense of time and place it evoked i ve never been to prava or indeed any foreign country apart from canada but i do remember the mystique its real life counterpart evoked among well heeled american students and young folk the ensuing self absorption and entitlement are bleakly portrayed only to bring the laughter even harder prava in this sense can exist everywhere even in small midwestern college supporting cities vladimir s new girlfriend morgan hails from shaker heights ohio for michiganders the grosse pointe of cleveland for everyone else a high income small city perched at the edge of an ailing metropolis and her hometown hilariously becomes a mantra for a frightened vladimir after he learns she knows more than he believed about prava s history and culture unlike say sebastian dangerfield whose own proximity to his ancestral lands turns him into more of an asshat vladimir s too nice to thrive in this sort of world the lightness of satire contrasts nicely with vladimir s turbulent relationship with his new employers a relationship his own jewishness makes harshly problematic it s not giving away too much i think to reckon that vladimir comes to realize that he s just as american as any expat possibly more so because he knows so deeply if not clearly what it s like to live in both worlds filed under uncategorized bad romance june 1 2013 2 comments emily bronte wuthering heights 1847 the precise identities of our required reading in middle and high school escape me but i m reasonably certain that one of the books was wuthering heights along with great expectations as i lay dying and some goofy hemingway title whether through a greater interest at the time in jules verne or more likely sinclair lewis or through the normal distractions of teenage life i don t think i really got emily bronte s legendary contribution to world literature wuthering heights was a novel i would and should have remembered the earnshaw family living in darkest yorkshire during the late eighteenth century adopts thanks to the paternalistic generosity of the family patriarch a foundling they name heathcliff whose disturbing urban origins and ethnically ambiguous description have led to a host of different interpretations notably andrea arnold s controversial 2011 film in which heathcliff is quite unambiguously black the son hindley treats him more or less like a slave while the daughter catherine is at first discomfited and then obsessed an obsession heathcliff comes to return much to hindley s dismay mr earnshaw s death and hindley s growing resentment of heathcliff along with catherine s prospective marriage to milquetoast pretty boy edgar linton drive the earnshaws adopted far away some years later he returns guileful and moneyed to work his revenge on the earnshaws the lintons and all they hold dear wuthering heights begins gently enough with the comically tactless narrator a mr lockwood demonstrating amusing unease on his introduction to heathcliff s moorland world and the dark secrets it harbors the narrative conceit becomes a pattern as large stretches of the novel are instead recounted by ellen dean a nurse housekeeper and general helpmeet and troubleshooter for the area s families her ability to transcend familial bloodlust reminiscent of bel of cuthilgurdy in dorothy dunnett s house of niccolo books or almost certainly vice versa a number of sundry characters wind up doing the same especially edgar s flighty ill fated sister isabella the bracketing of memories within memories creates a strangely refractive feel one that threatens but happily never succeeds in holding the reader at arm s length it s strange to think that public consciousness of the novel at least from what i remember has been along the lines of a romantic love story between heathcliff and catherine when the reality is anything but a pair of twin obsessions that damage all who come into contact the effect is one of somber inevitability sometimes leavened with humor sometimes one almost wishes for a respite as wuthering heights is full of emotion mood and violence everyone s feelings or actions at least for victorian literature are turned up to maximum strength and they match as has often been remarked the tempestuous nature of the surrounding landscape the turbulent and occasionally savage events the novel chronicles radically challenge and disrupt an established family structure and the challenges success remains excitingly ambiguous throughout wuthering heights anzia yezierska hungry hearts 1920 anzia yezierska left little trace on the popular consciousness of american literature born in russia she came to the united states as a young woman fleeing the czarist pogroms and spent the next two decades fitfully assimilating into american culture and building the life of the struggling aspiring writer hungry hearts a set of short stories both semi autobiographical and generally descriptive of jewish working class life on manhattan s lower east side appeared in 1920 to positive if somewhat bemused reaction yezierska s literary success was quickly followed by the lure of celluloid glory as mgm moved to make a film of hungry hearts which bowdlerized its source material somewhat and appalled its author though she wrote several novels over the next several years yezierska whose relationship with her own short lived literary celebrity was always fraught and uneasy never quite regained the fame she had once enjoyed and died in relative obscurity in 1970 her rediscovery by literary scholars following almost a decade later the title of hungry hearts which i could have sworn was a novel when i grabbed it on a whim during a store credit binge at dawn treader one sunny afternoon suggests the kind of romantic frippery one might imagine characters of a more orthodox high minded novel of the period reading in order to escape drab drudgery filled lives to an extent the suggestion is accurate as hungry hearts is full of emotionally unvarnished characters and heartsore feeling much like wuthering heights which i d be wholly unsurprised to learn yezierska read at some point during her successful education as an american and english speaker the characters almost all live in dingy hovels in the bowery and alternately celebrate and despise their close knit immigrant world itself riven by rigid boundaries of class and gender several of the stories whose characters often know or interact with the characters in others directly confront some of the nagging questions of immigrant identity shenah pessah for example works as a cleaner and thinks of little but her job until a chance encounter with john barnes a handsome gentile professor who encourages her instincts for self improvement later in another story she nurses her former crush even as she meets sam arkin an attractive co worker and co religionist in her new factory job her feelings transcend mere physical or romantic attraction though both barnes and arkin represent different aspects of her new experiences the one a catalyst rather than an end of aspiration and the other a fellow traveler rather than a drag on her prospective journey sara reisel on the other hand back in poland sees few prospects either professional or matrimonial until a letter from hannah hayyeh a village girl made good in new york inspires her and her family to make the sacrifices necessary to emigrate where she finds both joy and sadness in her new life hann...