Book 2 of 52: Winter in Madrid

January's Compleat Bookseller Book Club book was CJ Sansom's Winter in Madrid.

Set in Madrid in 1940, Sansom's novel is two parts spy thriller and one part historical drama. He has a (justified) drum to beat about the horrors of the Franco regime, but he's fallen well short of a brilliant novel. It's a page turner, and the plot comes together at the end; however, while those are generally fine qualities for a mystery-thriller, when they are the only high points in the novel it's being damned by faint praise.

I'll take the last point first: the plot comes together. Winter in Madrid too Dickensian for my taste, and the characters plod along towards a conclusion that wraps up each of their storylines in a tight little bow. The worst thing, for me, was the ex machina conclusion: (this is no spoiler, because there's nothing to spoil) all the plots we read about for 400 pages are pointless little quiverings, because the characters are all outmaneuvered by another character. Had this seemingly minor player not emerged from the darkness for a classic Evil Gloating Monologue Winter in Madrid could very well have ended with all the main characters shot down in the snow without any explanation of how they were foiled. Truthfully, I might have enjoyed the novel better had it ended that way.

While the story was interesting while it was happening, there was nothing especially memorable. Compared to Hemmingway, who seems to drop witticisms and axioms between every comma, Sansom's writing was flavorless. It went down easily because there was no spice. I finished the book on Thursday; today is Monday and I couldn't describe to you what a single character looked like, how they spoke to distinguish them from other characters, or a particular scene that was particularly intense.

I haven't written at all about the epilogue that jumped the story from a moment of high tension, through a blackout, to 7 years later with everyone the author wants dead already dead, and everyone he wants alive in exactly the spot he wants them. It was everything I hate.

This was a book with a lot of potential, and just like with baseball players who never seem to put it all together, I'm most critical of the book that could have been great, but wasn't. Sansom has a great setting in World War II Madrid. He made the squalor and the rundown terror of the place really breath. But he couldn't find a story worthy of the city.

Happy Friday

A little work, so I can maybe fill our house with friends this weekend.
Happy Friday!

Book 1 of 52: Death in the Afternoon

My New Year's resolution is to read a book a week throughout 2012. If I read it, I might as well write  a review, right?

I didn't really have any expectations when Carol brought me Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon as an unabridged audiobook from the library. I love Hemingway: the terseness that, in Death... sometimes approaches self caricature; the depth of thought and conviction beneath the simplicity of the story; the richly textured world his characters inhabit.

I never realized that I love Hemingway's sense of humor. It may be that, in his other works I've read, the humor is overshadowed by his seriousness, by the great man trying to be great. I was prepared for Death... to be a book about bullfighting, but it's really a self- and critic-mocking books about life and performance, and where the two coincide to create art.

The highlight of the book for me revolves around the "old woman," a character that Hemingway creates in the midst of this 'non-fiction' book to stand in place of the bullfighting amateur to whom he may impart his wisdom on bulls, bullfights and bullfighters (and the various venereal disease to which they are prone). At her insistence, he weaves into his book on bullfighting, stories, digressions on art and literature (and the flaws of its critics), and his views on courage.

The most important lesson for us to take from the bullfight is the pride of the matador. A matador deserves to be applauded if he performs all parts of the bullfight honestly and to the best of his ability; we should not hold it against a matador if he is too fat to face the bull in a stately manner, nor if he is too slow of foot to make brilliant passes with the muleta. If he tries truly and passionately and sincerely then what he has done will always be "very fine."

And that is precisely what Hemingway has given us: a very fine book; a nonfiction that is equal parts American essay in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau and travel writing; a meta(non?)fiction that deconstructs our criticism of its flaws even as they form; a novel through digression that presages works like Nabokov's Pale Fire. It's been quite a while since I enjoyed a book this much.

Writing as Communal Art

One of the old truth that seems to have been passed down from every preceding generation of authors is that writing, like painting and composing, is a lonely art. A full life, Yeats reminds us, leads to nights filled with regret.

I spent most of this evening with my friend Adam playing Samurai Swords (a Risk-like board game that awaits a post I've been meaning to write for a couple weeks now). I could have sat hunched alone over my computer. I could have made a cup of tea and curled up with one of my books. I could have gone back to work and done any of the many projects calling me there.

I think Yeats is wrong. The modern writer (maybe the modern person?) is too plugged in to be as isolated as "The Choice" suggests a writer must be. When I look around, all I see are people writing. My blogging buddies have recipes for a steak-mushroom-cheese pie, ruminations on hand-written mail, and poetic horoscopes to get us through our week. Some of my friends are busy getting themselves published (yay Mel!).

Writing this way (on the internet, in a blog, often with no intention of editing and refining the little pieces of truth we stumble across as we work), this lacks the permanence of Yeats' work. But Yeats was an oddity in his craft and in his time: a successful poet (as such things are measured) who won a Nobel Prize for Literature at 58; who published some of his best work after that; we wrote wreaths of intricate work while also exploring Irish theater.

I have a half a dozen posts I really do mean to sit down and pound out as soon as I have the time, and I sometimes wonder why I keep writing. Mainly, I think it helps me think; writing helps me to know what I think and to find a way to articulate it. But I keep my pace because of all the writing I see around me, all the thoughts and words and ideas that my friends pour out. I'm grateful for them.

Happy Friday

Before it's over, today
will count twice against my life.
Work, then up to NJ.
It's gonna be a day.

Worst Customer Service Ever, or Giving Up On the New York Times

I've been a regular New York Times reader since high school, when I would swipe the print copy from the principal's office to read throughout my day. I read something from nearly every section, and with the joys of the online edition, I read (or skim) nearly every article.

When NYTimes.com went behind a paywall in May, they did their math and offered readers like me continued access to the NYTimes online free through December 31. This was both fantastic and logical: according to the little counter that appeared over the "Most Emailed Articles" I averaged around 300 articles per week.

At the start of December, I received an email inviting me to sign up for a reduced rate. I tried to sign up online, but since I had an "active" account, the NYTimes' system wouldn't let me pay. I called the phone number listed, and the lady on the phone told me that if I signed up that day (around the 20th) I would begin to pay immediately, and would be better off calling back after the New Year.

First off, I'm trying to give you my money. How can it be that you are running a business unprepared for a pre-pay customer? No wonder journalism is dying.

I called back today. I explained the situation to the young lady on the phone, who tried to look me up via my email address, which is my first initial followed by my last name, the number 2 @ my place of employment. It took us no less than 5 minutes and 3 attempts to get this right ("J as in Joke, B as in boy... No, you've got an extra 'O' in there... No, you've dropped the numeral 2...").

Once she finally figured out who I was, she told me that the offer was no longer available and would I like to sign up at the usual rate?

No, I would not like to sign up at the usual rate, since I'm doing what was suggested to me by the lady I talked to last time who couldn't sign me up then. This is ridiculous!

Here's the crux of the issue: there are plenty workarounds for the NYTimes paywall. Go ahead, turn to the googlemachine and look them up. The payment I'm willing to make is not, in my mind, a payment- to me, this is a gift designed to support an organization that performs a service I approve of, not unlike a donation to NPR.

After today's fifteen minute kerfuffle, I am no longer inclined to give; I'll use the workarounds while I decide whether I'm inclined to give them any of my money at all. Maybe in a few weeks I'll feel that I truly owe it to them: that I should try to prop up the Gray Lady beyond the revenue my traffic generates via their many roll-over and pop-up ads. More likely, they've missed their only chance to get my credit card information. In many ways, I feel guilty because I know how important a free press is to democracy, and I know how import this particular paper has been to me. But, really, if Geico and the doctor's office are prepared for me to pay up front, why shouldn't the New York Times?

The Hum of a House, A Prose Poem

It's been a quiet New Year's at our house, where the winter settled slowly around the old brick and bare trees. We've cooked little dinners with all those contented sounds we've always heard other people make: the uncorking bottles and drying dishes all give the same smiling sigh.
 New Year's came for a quiet evening of soft unimportant talk, for a few hands of rummy, and for just a splash of champagne. We lift glasses, and speak in turn about the was, the is, the will be.

We had a busy week, as we measure these things: many faces smiling full and round; familiar faces that we remember as smooth and strong and young, now deeply scored, each line a brimming well of joy. So now we sit on the couch. Our couch, in our house. I rest my head in your lap and read to you the news we missed of the world that hasn't mattered for New Year's week, while we've been busy weaving the quiet into tomorrow.