{"id":68440,"date":"2019-12-29T21:52:18","date_gmt":"2019-12-30T02:52:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=68440"},"modified":"2020-05-07T13:26:56","modified_gmt":"2020-05-07T17:26:56","slug":"a-year-of-reading-by-tom-bowden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2019\/12\/29\/a-year-of-reading-by-tom-bowden\/","title":{"rendered":"A Year of Reading by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following is a partial list of books enjoyed by Tom Bowden, a local educator,  obsessive reader of quality lit, cultural fl\u00e2neur, and longtime friend of the Book Beat. We’ve invited Mr. Bowden to comment on some of his favorite titles published during the past year.<\/p>\n

Literature:<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a>All My Cats<\/strong><\/em> by Bohumil Hrabal.
\nA short moral story about . . . well, “pet ownership” hardly does it justice. This is not a happy-clappy book about an old man and the neighborhood cats (a l\u00e0 William Burroughs, say), but a story of love, cruelty, guilt, and redemption without absolution.<\/p>\n

Somehow I had reached an age when being in love with a beautiful woman was beyond my reach because I was now bald and my face was full of wrinkles, yet the cats loved me the way girls used to love me when I was young.<\/em>
\n–Bohumil Hrabal, All My Cats<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

August<\/strong><\/em> by Christa Wolf.
\nA short, beautifully rendered tale of remembrance by a recent widower, August, of his seasons in a tuberculosis hospital as a child shortly after WWII and the teenage girl, Lilo, who protected and befriended him<\/p>\n

Head-to-Toe Portrait of Suzanne<\/strong><\/em> by Roland Topor.
\nThe left foot of a morbidly obese man turns into the shape of his old girlfriend, Suzanne. Old love is re-kindled and explored; jealousy and unfaithfulness ensue; vengeance and retribution provide the tragic ending. Yes: one man’s desire trips him up.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Mac’s Problem<\/strong><\/em> by Enrique Vila-Matas.
\nPerhaps my new favorite among Vila-Matas\u2019s works available in English\u2014the usual extensive literary references, allusions, quotations, and paraphrases, coupled with an inane but simple plot allowing for \/ requiring frequent diversions, anecdotes, and essays in which Vila-Matas’s narrator weaves fiction and “reality” together in multiple, fugue-like ways: theme and variations, playing to the narrator’s stated love of repetition, never the same way twice. “Mac’s Problem” is a celebration of the human imagination, and an encouragement to readers themselves to create.<\/p>\n

\u2018I like to show some restraint when it comes to making things up…\u2019 The Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas discusses the role of risk in writing, the \u2018crisis of the novel\u2019, and five books that have shaped his own work. –Five Books.com<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Other Stories<\/strong><\/em> by Maxim Osipov.
\nBecause Osipov is a small-town practicing physician who uses physician narrators or characters with close connections to a physician, comparisons to Checkhov are probably inevitable (and accurate). Take Checkhov’s characters, transplant them to present-day Russia (Osipov was born in 1963), little has changed but the technology and hovering presence of a corrupt, citizen-hostile government. Osipov can be funny, too, and Alex Fleming’s translation of “On the Banks of the Spree” captures the flow of conversation idiomatic to U.S. ears. So, hats off to Fleming for his fine translation work; \u201cAfter Eternity\u201d purports to be a former theater worker’s notebooks, left behind in the offices of the doctor who presents them to us. The narrator is, I suspect, the type of physician Osipov can’t stand. Here’s the narrator on how much he loathes patients who hope they can get his signature for disability benefits: “[Those patients] I refuse ruthlessly: show any sign of yielding and you’ll get a stack of requests under the door. Medicine is serious work; we aren’t in the hospitality trade, thank you very much. . . ” And later, on a different matter: “[I]f one begins hospitalizing patients not for medical reasons but on humanitarian grounds, on the grounds of personal sympathy, what would that lead to?<\/p>\n

Ash before Oak<\/strong><\/em> by Jeremy Cooper.
\nAlthough Thoreau is never quoted in Cooper’s novel about recovering (if that’s the word) from suicidal depression, one line from “Walden” summarizes much of the emotional and intellectual territory covered in “Ash before Oak”: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Our narrator chooses life over death, but not before a profound internal struggle with himself and his relationship to friends, family, and lovers.<\/p>\n

Birthday<\/strong> <\/em>by C\u00e9sar Aira.
\nOne of Aira’s better improvisations, this one a musing on turning 50. (Is this Aira talking or “Aira” talking? Doesn’t really matter.) A novella in the form of an essay\u2014Aira is a great BSer, and along with nonsense are liberal sprinklings of insight; at its best the distinction between the two isn’t always clear. The essay is on life, what we think we know (or should know by now, already!), and memory. And another worthy translation by Chris Andrews.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead<\/strong> <\/em>by Olga Tokarczuk.
\nI love Tokarczuk’s ability to create eccentric characters of substance, characters you can sympathize with if not wholly agree with. In this case, it’s Janina Duszejko and her circle of friends who live in a small Polish village where a series of hunters have been killed. Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation presents a strong, convincing voice for Mrs Dusejko that sounds individual and cranky.<\/p>\n

Agnomia<\/strong><\/em> by R\u00f3bert G\u00e1l.
\nA cryptic summary: At some point late in this novella, the narrator lists Thomas Bernhard, Georges Bataille, and John Zorn as his intellectual heroes\u2014three artists whose works explore the extremes of human thought, behavior, and ethics. G\u00e1l has his own obsessions, metaphysical and physical, which are explored here in a medium that combines and (con)fuses fiction and nonfiction.<\/p>\n

Memoir:<\/h2>\n

The Big Love<\/strong> <\/em>by Florence Aadland.
\nIf anyone deserves credit for this book, it\u2019s Tedd Thomey, the ghostwriter behind the voice of Mrs Florence Aadland, the memoir\u2019s putative author. Think late-career Shelly Winters with that brassy Brooklynese accent barking away in perfect obliviousness to the horrors she routine spews. That the book has a coherent narrative flow must also be due to him, since anyone so self-obsessed and reality-shy can hardly be expected to plot out anything. If it helps, imagine the book being told by Trump\u2019s mother. Most people now probably neither know nor care who Errol Flynn was, so the only point in now reading \u201cThe Big Love\u201d is as a document\u2014a testimony sans mea culpa\u2014of wanton child abuse. That is, \u201cThe Big Love\u201d records the affair between Aadland\u2019s 15-year-old daughter and the married, 50-year-old Flynn. The book is \u201cenjoyable\u201d to the extent that manipulation, self-deceit, and rape are ever funny. For social workers and psychologists, the book is probably an animated version of the DSM-V.<\/p>\n

Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II<\/strong> <\/em>by Svetlana Alexievich.
\nInterviews with dozens of Russians who were children (2-14 years old) when WWII broke out. Many horrors and depravations are reported, unforgivable atrocities committed and witnessed, and almost everyone speaking here is emotionally traumatized still. (The book was originally published in Russia in 1985.) Despite that, almost everyone interviewed here owed their ability to survive the war because of someone else’s act of kindness or bravery. Children survived as orphans because a stranger said, “I will be your mama.” Moving and highly recommended.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks<\/strong><\/em> by Lawrence Weschler.
\nTwo of my favorite non-fiction writers and their 35-year friendship. The first 325 pages of this book are based on notes Weschler originally began for a profile of Sacks for the New Yorker. After 10 years or so of note-taking (!), Sacks asked Weschler to kill the profile, since he didn’t want his homosexuality to even be inferred by the piece. In the months before Sacks died, however, he gave Weschler the green-light to publish this memoir, having already outed himself in one of his autobiographical books. . . Anyhow, the writing is first-rate, the facts about Sacks and his life astounding, and the sheer enthusiasms of the man burn through.<\/p>\n

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