(CCLaP is dedicated to reviewing as many contemporary books as possible, including self-published volumes; click here to learn how to submit your own book for possible review, although be warned that it needs to have been published within the last 18 months to be considered. For the complete list of all books reviewed here, as well as the next books scheduled to be read, click here.)
 

 
The Conduct of Saints (Amazon link)
By Christopher Davis
The Permanent Press
Reviewed by Karl Wolff
 
Set in the immediate aftermath of World War II, The Conduct of Saints by Christopher Davis traces the lives of several characters in Rome. The first is the canon lawyer named Brendan Doherty, a Philadelphia native working for the Vatican in two disturbing cases. The first involves the child-murderer Alessandro Serenelli. Serenelli murdered Maria Goretti, a twelve year old girl the Vatican bureaucracy wants to see canonized. At least they hope to, preferably when the occupying American Army leaves Italy. Doherty's second case involves the mass murderer Pietro Koch, the former Republic of Salo* police chief responsible for slaughtering anti-Nazi partisans. Despite Koch's horrific crimes, Doherty does his best to lobby against the death penalty, something he opposes on moral grounds.

Davis creates historical fiction with an eye towards human fallibility and the consequences of total war. While there is machinations, treachery, and postwar moral murkiness, this isn't your garden variety historical espionage yarn. While Serenelli has amnesia about his crime, Doherty has a series of interviews with the child-murderer to prompt him to remember. Part of this is a moral issue for Doherty. He wants Serenelli's guilt to be genuine. Serenelli's childlike faith and clear conscience jibe with the tortured Doherty. The Pope also pressures to make his investigation as short and painless as possible, so the gears of beatification can go off without a hitch. One sees how the Holy See wants to beatify Maria Goretti in the hopes of inspiring Italian youth. This idealism is undercut by a mercenary desire to have the means justify the ends in a way reminiscent of a Mad Men-style marketing campaign. "Maria Goretti, ya know, for the kids!" Amidst the gilt decorations, polished marble, and fine linens, children prostitute their siblings for cigarettes. The Italians see the American Army as a means of liberation and regaining some dignity, at the same time, this is another set of foreign occupiers. Any one watching the TV series The Borgias or has read The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa understands Italy's history of occupying armies and the legacy of nineteenth century nationalism. Mussolini tried to recreate the glories of the Roman emperors and bequeathed the Italian people another layer of ruins and devastation.

Meanwhile Koch is receiving religious instruction from a pro-fascist bishop in order to be in a state of grace when he is executed. Doherty gets battered by the perplexing mental states of these two men he represents and battling his own deeply closeted homosexuality. Davis has created a morally tortured individual that reminds the reader of the tortured souls in the novels of Graham Greene and Robert Littell. Both Greene and Littell wrote masterworks of international espionage, but they also populated their works with realistic portraits of individuals plunked down in impossible circumstances.

The Conduct of Saints is recommended for those looking for challenging historical fiction. Even though the novel focuses on the inner turmoil of a Catholic priest, one doesn't have to be Catholic to appreciate the novel. The turmoil of military occupation and the moral twilight of a culture steeped in war should be familiar enough to anyone familiar with the War on Terror's ethically murky legacy.

*The Republic of Salo was the short-lived puppet regime set up by the Nazis following the downfall of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. It lasted two years.
 
Out of 10/9.5
 
Read even more about The Conduct of Saints: Official site | Amazon | GoodReads | LibraryThing | Shelfari

Today's photo of the day is entitled "laser cat" and is by Kubra Sagin. Kubra is based out of Istanbul, although I'm not sure if this particular shot was taken there or not. She also has a nice Tumblr account, for those who would like to see and learn more.

Don't forget that I actually maintain a whole page of favorite photographs over at Flickr, for those who would like to see more. To express an interest in having your own work featured, just drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com.

(CCLaP is dedicated to reviewing as many contemporary books as possible, including self-published volumes; click here to learn how to submit your own book for possible review, although be warned that it needs to have been published within the last 12 months to be considered. For the complete list of all books reviewed here, as well as the next books scheduled to be read, click here.)

The Age of Miracles
By Karen Thompson Walker
Random House
Reviewed by Yair Ben-Zvi

You know, it's funny sometimes how a point you conceive of one day can find its echo sometime later. For a while now I've considered California to be 'the end of the world' but not in a necessarily bad way. I just had this image of the California beach coast being the furthest point west, the tipping point where the rays of the sun finally reach beyond their grasp and the world, from those shores, starts over again somewhere over the waters of the Pacific. Karen Thompson Walker taps into that sense, that idea of California's almost floating nature, detached from the rest of the world while being a part of it only after the fact. In this case being the last recipient of Armageddon.

Had I known about the apparent hype behind this book I, maybe, wouldn't have given it such a high rating. But the saying does go 'ignorance is...' so I went in blind and found myself continually intrigued and fascinated. Even had I been privy to the hype (I'm apparently out of several loops and not just the few I was aware of) I don't think it would have mattered too much. This book is polished, possessing only a few of the amateurish hallmarks endemic to most first novels.

Julia and her family in California are living a normal suburban life until one day the Earth's rotation begins to slow. It's a gradual process and Walker well illustrates the kaleidoscopic emotional upheavals that the people of the world would go through in the case of a global disaster like that. Suicide cults, refuge in decadence, denial, religious zealotry, wanton acts of passion. All or most of these tropes are touched upon or at the very least mentioned. In many ways this book is like a softer retelling of Lars von Trier's film Melancholia though with a greater belief in the resilience of the human spirit and even echoing an idea I heard regarding Saul Bellow's oeuvre, that "...it was worth it, being alive." Also, I couldn't help but think of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird as Julia felt like a somewhat less soulful version of Scout.

Now, the book does well in its depictions of the growing dread and unease of the world and its gradual deceleration. But where the book really shines for me is in its description of childhood and its inherent tragedy, especially in modern times. Yes, in a book about the end of the world, it's the indictment of growing up in the modern world that deserves the most mention. Julia is for all intents and purposes, a good kid. She loves her parents, has a crush on a boy, plays soccer, and just generally wants to have a normal childhood. But that doesn't seem in the cards for her, or anyone else anymore. The 'Slowing' of the book demands to be taken at more than just face value. It's, for me, a metaphor for how the young of the world are forced to, through various circumstances, just grow up too damn fast. There's no time for innocence, no time for joy, or for wonder, or naivete. You're born, you mature, you decline, and you die. And even a push from nature, the slowing, only exacerbates this, we as a civilization are speeding ourselves forward ever faster and no one seems to care about what's left behind, only about what can be gained ahead.

But again, unlike the work of a von Trier, and actually more in line with say Camus' The Plague or even Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life, the resilience of the human spirit, even set against the less admirable qualities of itself, has hope of winning out in the end. And even should the world end, and everything go to hell, it was, as was said of Bellow before and, it would seem, of Walker now, worth it to be alive, and therein lies the miracle.

Out of 10: 8.9

Read even more about The Age of Miracles: Official site | Amazon | GoodReads | LibraryThing | Shelfari

Today's photo of the day is entitled "grime" and is by Emily Howell. Emily is based out of Santa Cruz, California, although I'm not sure whether this particular shot was taken there as well. She also has a nice Tumblr account, for those who want to see and learn more.

Don't forget that I actually maintain a whole page of favorite photographs over at Flickr, for those who would like to see more. To express an interest in having your own work featured, just drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com.

(CCLaP is dedicated to reviewing as many contemporary books as possible, including self-published volumes; click here to learn how to submit your own book for possible review, although be warned that it needs to have been published within the last 18 months to be considered. For the complete list of all books reviewed here, as well as the next books scheduled to be read, click here.)

The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets
By Diana Wagman
Ig Publishing
Reviewed by Travis Fortney

With The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets, her fourth novel, Diana Wagman has written a funny, surprising and disturbing novel, the kind of book that grips you by the throat and doesn't release you until the last page is turned.

The plot is simple. Winnie, resident of a bleak Los Angeles with a sky that's "vacant as a starlet's smile," mother of Lacy, ex-wife of Jonathan (the host of "TV's most popular game show") and daughter of Daisy (a multiple Oscar-winning actress) is stopping to drop off her Puegot at the mechanic on her way to her tennis lesson. These days Winnie feels limp "like an old balloon caught on a fencepost," and her inner mantra is "wait, not yet." While she's waiting on the rental car shuttle, she's kidnapped by Oren, a disturbed young ex-carnival worker who is the keeper of Cookie, a gigantic iguana, and who is also her daughter Lacy's new internet boyfriend. Lacy has invented an elaborate fantasy life for Oren, in which her mother keeps attack dogs at her bedroom door, hires a chauffeur to follow her every move, forces her to wear ugly clothes, and abuses her in a hundred other little ways. Oren is a child of abuse himself, but Cookie the iguana has taught him how to care for who you love, and his aim in kidnapping Winnie is basically to sit her down, have a meaningful and heartfelt conversation about the proper way to treat her daughter, and set her on the right track so that they can all live happily ever after. Oren isn't the sharpest tool in the shed. His plan doesn't take into account that Winnie--being a divorced woman living alone in L.A.--might have taken self-defense classes. She has, and she's a fighter, and the moment Winnie becomes Oren's captive all hell breaks loose.

What I loved about this book is that it functions so well on so many levels. It's a heavily plotted thriller that moves at a rocket pace, it takes brief detours into the disturbing territory of "torture porn," it's a very funny satirical look at life in modern Los Angeles, a frightening and believable character study of a deranged individual, a portrait of divorce, and a statement about the human need for companionship and love. The book manages to feel both self-contained and expansive. It takes place over the course of a single morning and afternoon, but is told from a dozen or so points of view. Perhaps more than anything else, the book functions as a kind of deranged bedtime story warning young daughters about the dangers of anonymous internet communication.

What surprised me most about this book is the quality of the writing. In recent weeks I've stumbled onto a long string of mediocre books, the most recent of which was Sam Pink's Rontel which I reviewed here last week. In that review, I took Mr. Pink to task for his failure to bestow full humanity on his secondary characters. I bring it up here, because when I wrote about generosity in that review, I was talking about precisely what Ms. Wagman accomplishes in Exotic Animals. Ms. Wagman deals with a large cast of characters, and every one of them is fully drawn and compelling, even the ones who could easily have become two-dimensional cliches in the hands of a lesser writer (the kidnapper and the philandering ex-husband, to name two). In Ms. Wegman's world, character development is not code for dry or boring writing. Her details are often funny or dark, her characters aren't always likeable, and she never openly manipulates us.

I would place Exotic Animals in the bizarro fiction category, and compare it to recent efforts I've read from Fiona Maazel and Ryan Boudinot (and even the aforementioned Mr. Pink), but Ms. Wagman's book compares favorably to those authors' efforts for her insightful writing and discernible plot. The book is extremely dark, but for those who don't gravitate toward black and white depictions of good and evil, who don't mind a little blood, guts, animal cruelty and explicit sexuality, there are ample rewards to be found here.

I won't spoil any of the surprises, but I will say that the Cookie the iguana clawing menacingly at the kitchen door acts as a kind of gun placed on the mantle, and that it will be fired during the final act.

Out of 10: 9.5

Read even more about Exotic Pets: Official site | Amazon | GoodReads | LibraryThing

Today's photo of the day is entitled "Ben Franklin Bridge VIII" and is by Owen Luther. Owen doesn't mention much about himself over at Flickr, although obviously this particular shot is of the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia. Do make sure to stop by his main photostream for a lot more great images.

Don't forget that I actually maintain a whole page of favorite photographs over at Flickr, for those who would like to see more. To express an interest in having your own work featured, just drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com.

(CCLaP is dedicated to reviewing as many contemporary books as possible, including self-published volumes; click here to learn how to submit your own book for possible review, although be warned that it needs to have been published within the last 18 months to be considered. For the complete list of all books reviewed here, as well as the next books scheduled to be read, click here.)
 

 
Boston Noir 2: the Classics
By Dennis Lehane
Akashic Books
Reviewed by Karl Wolff
 
Boston has been in the news lately with more than its fair share of bad news. But this East Coast city of the Ivy League and the Brahmin WASP aristocracy has also had a dark underbelly. Everything from the Boston Massacre of 1770 to the Boston Strangler of the 1960s, the town of MIT, Harvard, and the Atlantic, is no stranger to blood, brutality, and death. The Akashic Noir series returns to Bean Town with Boston Noir 2: the Classics, edited by Dennis Lehane, Mary Cotton, and Jaime Clarke. In a bloody tribute to this great city, Lehane and company have resurrected several out-of-print classics and pushed the meaning of noir into peculiar places.

The anthology is a rogues gallery of literary heavy hitters. Joyce Carol Oates gives us an occult tale of Gilded Age Boston. Written originally in 1977, the short story reads like an extended riff on "The Turn of the Screw." There are stories by Robert B. Parker, Dennis Lehane, George V. Higgins, Andre Dubus, and the late David Foster Wallace. Excepting a portion of Wallace's gigantic tome Infinite Jest, we follow two ex-junkies as they wander around the Brighton neighborhood. Wallace intersperses flashbacks that become scenes of simultaneous gut-wrenching sadness and gut-busting hilarity. The farcical-tragic tone is buried beneath Wallace's trademark manic prose and the inevitable footnotes.

Because of recent events, Robert B. Parker's short story "Surrogate" has added menace. Set in Watertown, where the surviving Tsarnaev brother was cornered and eventually captured, the story involves impotence, rape, and revenge.

"Townies" by Andre Dubus is about a murder of a college girl. The first half has a lonely campus security guard narrate his discovery. Both voyeuristic and pathetic, we witness a husk of a man enact a masquerade of daily duties. The second half is about the drunken college lout who murders the girl. I'd have mentioned spoilers earlier, but the story isn't about solving a mystery in the conventional sense. With an unsettling and spare prose style, Dubus delves into the greater mystery of the male psyche in the modern age. Civilization nothing but a thin veneer covering a slavering beast beneath. The short story has a haunted quality of the marginal characters stumbling around Beckett Country.

Besides these short stories, the editors reprint rare classics from George V. Higgins, the author of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and Barbara Neely, who has written mystery stories about an African-American domestic as the protagonist. Neely's novel, Blanche Cleans Up, is a fun whodunit, but also a fantastic meditation on race and class in modern America.

For those unfamiliar with Greater Boston and its literary heritage, Boston Noir 2: the Classics is a great place to start. And like the bar where everyone knows your name, you'll meet familiar faces and new ones.
 
Out of 10/9.0
 
Read even more about Boston Noir 2: the Classics: Official site | Amazon | GoodReads | LibraryThing | Shelfari | Wikipedia

(CCLaP is dedicated to reviewing as many contemporary books as possible, including self-published volumes; click here to learn how to submit your own book for possible review, although be warned that it needs to have been published within the last 12 months to be considered. For the complete list of all books reviewed here, as well as the next books scheduled to be read, click here.)

The Average American Marriage
By Chad Kultgen
Harper Perennial
Reviewed by Yair Ben-Zvi

I've been following Chad Kultgen for some years now. He's one of the few authors of whom I can say I've read every one of his books. I remember reading The Average American Male on break and after work when I was working at the UCLA student store. I remember reading it in two sittings and laughing, actually laughing, which is a hard thing for a book to make me do and yet still take it seriously, which I certainly did for this one. I didn't buy it (sorry Chad) but I did buy his next book The Lie and enjoyed it (though not quite as much as its predecessor as it seemed to let go of some of the comedy in lieu of some Bret Easton Ellis style collegiate emptiness).

I bought and read his next book Men, Women and Children just before I went off to live abroad for a year and change. It was good, very good. The book, not the year. To me it was what The Lie could have been if it had just been played out and developed a bit more.

And now here we are at the sequel to his first novel: The Average American Marriage. And again, I laughed my ass off while still taking it what it had to say seriously. The nameless protagonist from the first novel has returned having been married for a few years to the once hot and now quite frigid woman he left his old girlfriend for. He is, more or less, where he was at years before. He masturbates in secret, attempts sex with a, now, wife who couldn't be less interested. Has two kids that he appears to be a surprisingly good father to. He works at a job that doesn't seem to fulfill him in any way other than financial. And, as Vonnegut once said, so it goes. Or rather, so it went, until (spoiler) he hires a beautiful college intern.

The actual progression of the story is fairly standard (spoilers, last warning). Nameless man cheats and cheats quite severely with Holly the intern and destroys his marriage. Eventually he kicks Holly to the curb and begins the slow process of reconciling himself not only to his wife but his life within the modern incarnation of American marriage.

What Kultgen is a master of here is voice and the depiction of feeling. What a man goes through as he contemplates ruining his marriage for a quick but reinvigorating fling. He doesn't just paint his female characters as negatives, his wife is unattractive and the intern is attractive so there it's justified. Rather, Kultgen depicts the drudgery and the slow and miserable process of physical desire denied and denied again under the strain of a marriage well into, I believe, its half decade mark, and shows the fountain of life, of the reawakening inherent in really good, really passionate sex.

But where Kultgen sort of slips is the mistaking of pleasure for happiness, as Roger Ebert stated reviewing Todd Solondz's film Happiness. Though anything but a psychologist I can see a lack when it's this ever-present. The characters here, up to and including the protagonist, don't seem to be happy. And that makes sense. Happiness is, while maybe not the most complex thing, something nonetheless earned, which in this modern America of quick fixes, instant gratification, and turning away from the more than the instantly attainable, something incredibly elusive.

And the characters seem to cobble together something resembling but not not actually happiness. Facebook, video games, parties, drugs, all the standards new and old, of ritual and instant gratification are here. It's a heavy handed satire that makes modern life less than attractive but at the same time bracing in its honesty.

Most people, especially after some of Kultgen's previous works, may accuse him of misogyny or, at the very least, favoring the males of his cast over the females. And, well, he does. But that doesn't mean the women are whores and mothers and the males dashing rouges chained down by their insanity. Everyone is brought down here by the doldrums of modern life. And if the men are depicted in a more sympathetic light it's only because, so I read it, of something akin to what was found in Fight Club (film and novel) that men have been so thoroughly emasculated and even destroyed a bit by the increasingly rapid progress of the modern world that their lack is just more obvious than that of the women.

What's left from all this? Night darkest before the dawn? No, not quite. As the protagonist points out at a certain juncture in the book, America is not in the best of straits. But the night isn't all black. The fact that the protagonist is able to be a (mostly) good father to his kids and a.) appreciate the sexual power of a woman while b.) return (grudgingly) to his imperfect but loving (on her side it would seem also grudgingly) wife, says that while people may not always, or even ever live up to what they're truly capable, there are certain near absolute goods that we as people can still wander our way towards if we just keep ourselves open to them...sometimes.

Anyway, it's a good book, hilarious, and the humor goes hand in expert hand with the acidic critique of the modern American life.

Out of 10: 8.9

Read even more about The Average American Marriage: Official site | Amazon | GoodReads | LibraryThing | Shelfari

(CCLaP is dedicated to reviewing as many contemporary books as possible, including self-published volumes; click here to learn how to submit your own book for possible review, although be warned that it needs to have been published within the last 12 months to be considered. For the complete list of all books reviewed here, as well as the next books scheduled to be read, click here.)

Connecting Two Worlds: An Environmental Journey From Peace Corps To Present
By Anthony Simeone
Peace Corps Writers
Reviewed by Yair Ben-Zvi

Though this kind of book is not my usual milieu it was an interesting, if foggy, read. Many issues of great importance (overpopulation and the ensuing over taxation of the planet's resources and the price the world and its people are paying because of it all) are brought up and although Simeone doesn't suggest much in the way of resolving these problems outside of a few generalized vagaries, he elucidates the issues in such a way as to make them compelling and worth listening to without overplaying his authorial hand. The book lacks in depth and could have used some substantial editing but, overall, it's a solid treatise on the world as it is today and how much is "...rotten in the state of Denmark" as someone else once said.

Out of 10: 6.3

Read even more about Connecting Two Worlds: Official site | Amazon | GoodReads | Shelfari

Today's photo of the day is untitled and is by a Flickr member who goes by rskm. R doesn't mention anything about themselves there, nor anything about this particular shot; nonetheless, you can stop by their main photostream for a lot more great images.

Don't forget that I actually maintain a whole page of favorite photographs over at Flickr, for those who would like to see more. To express an interest in having your own work featured, just drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com.

(CCLaP is dedicated to reviewing as many contemporary books as possible, including self-published volumes; click here to learn how to submit your own book for possible review, although be warned that it needs to have been published within the last 18 months to be considered. For the complete list of all books reviewed here, as well as the next books scheduled to be read, click here.)

Once Upon a Gypsy Moon: An Improbable Voyage and One Man's Yearning for Redemption
By Michael C. Hurley
Center Street/Hachette Book Group
Reviewed by Travis Fortney

Once upon a time, I came up with a half-baked notion to sail around the world. It didn't matter to me that my only sailing experience up to that point was on a Hobie Cat on Lake Erie. My self-confidence at that time--I was a Junior at Prescott College in northern Arizona--was infectious enough to make other people at least entertain the possibility that I wasn't completely nuts. I remember precisely where my sailing dreams ended. I'd convinced a young lady to take to the seas with me, and we drove together to visit a thirty-six foot sailboat resting in a field on a small farm in Chino Valley. I spoke the the owner of the boat, we climbed aboard, we talked about the price and the work the boat needed, and the owner left us alone to make our decision. We stood together on the deck and looked out over the bow--I suppose both of us were imagining the Arizona desert to instead be the Pacific Ocean--and it suddenly dawned on me that I was expected to purchase this boat. I realized the enormous and thankless task ahead of me if I actually wanted to make the trip happen, and I abruptly came to my senses. But I digress.

For those who understand the urge to leave the landlocked life behind, there are ample rewards to be found in Michael C. Hurley's new memoir Once Upon a Gypsy Moon, which describes the author's solo adventure to Nassau in the Bahamas and beyond. It's not quite a trip around the world, but Hurley does a wonderful job of describing the perils of solo sailing, the determination that such a trip requires, and just how long such a dream must sometimes be held in order to come to fruition. Hurley was first bitten by the sailing bug at the age of eleven but only set off on his trip more than three decades later, when his life was in a state of mild crisis due to a recent divorce and a series of professional and financial setbacks.

Hurley makes for a personable traveling companion, and Gypsy Moon is well written, but I didn't feel like I was the target audience for this book. Hurley's Christianity plays a large role in the text, as do his generational musings, and online dating. It's makes for a touching and engaging read, but readers who share Hurley's concerns about God, fatherhood, infidelity, career, and finding love in early middle age would more closely connect to the book, especially the large sections which don't take place on board the Gypsy Moon.

All in all, Hurley has crafted an inspiring, heartfelt and honest read about accomplishing a long-held dream, which is especially recommended for readers who appreciate inspirational and confessional writing from a Christian viewpoint.

Out of 10: 8

Read even more about Once Upon a Gypsy Moon: Official site | Amazon | GoodReads

(CCLaP is dedicated to reviewing as many contemporary books as possible, including self-published volumes; click here to learn how to submit your own book for possible review, although be warned that it needs to have been published within the last 18 months to be considered. For the complete list of all books reviewed here, as well as the next books scheduled to be read, click here.)

My Only Wife
By Jac Jemc
Dzanc Books
Reviewed by Travis Fortney

This marks the first title I have read from indie publisher Dzanc Books, and the happy truth is that Jac Jemc's My Only Wife is an enjoyable, engaging, and well-written book. I read it in a single afternoon, and I firmly believe that if I am going to sit with a story that long, then then writer has done the part of her work that consists of writing good sentences very well.

The book's premise is simple and straightforward. A man is left by his wife after ten years of marriage. She is a mysterious woman he has never fully understood. He revisits memories of her, trying to understand who she was.

The story relies heavily on its mythical style. Phrases are repeated again and again. Very short chapters are made up of very short paragraphs, which are made up of short sentences. Neither the narrator, his wife, nor a single character in the entire book, are named.

The book's style serves the plot, because the world of the book clearly isn't quite the real world. In the real world, upon the dissolution of a ten-year marriage, parents or friends would be called, the missing spouse would eventually be contacted, divorce papers would be served, the household would be divided, and closure would in this way be had. In short, in the real world, there would be no reason to "freeze on the details of her," because all of this would be sorted out before the door on the relationship closed for good. In a nutshell, that's the book's main weakness--it's very conceptual, but the concept is not strong or believable, which the author tries to cover up with intentionally vague and mysterious writing. This is never a good idea, and it's interesting to note that My Only Wife is edited by the author Matt Bell, whose debut novel In the house upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods suffers from the same problem in a much more irredeemable and pretentious way.

As it is told in My Only Wife, the husband and wife exist in a kind of vacuum, sealed off from the rest of the world. Because their world is literally just the two of them, they come to define themselves against each other. This causes the wife to push back against the loss of her personal identity in favor of the marital "we," which causes the husband to respond to his wife's resistance with puzzlement and anger. Obviously this is well-traveled ground in literature, from Madame Bovary to Anna Karenina to Revolutionary Road, and on up to Serena, Gone Girl and a host of others, but Ms. Jemc's aforementioned minimalist, mythical and somewhat oblique style allows her to explore the material in what feels like a unique way.

The style has its problems though. Foremost among these occurs as soon as you get past the concept and plot to the characters. We're told that the marriage at the center of the book has lasted ten years, and that's precisely when the willful suspension of disbelief required of the reader, the balance between real and unreal, becomes too much. The narrator's wife has a thousand and one quirky habits. She frays her clothes after buying them new! She locks herself in a closet and records stories on cassette tapes! She works as a waitress by choice! Strangers tell her intimate details about their lives! She paints! She likes old hats! She tears the pages out of books she likes and litters the streets with them, hoping they will provide comfort to a passerby! She's clumsy! She acts like a mafia Moll in bars! The list goes on and on and on. This might not have been too much had the duration of the marriage not been explicitly stated (or if the narrator's valid recollection of the marriage, i.e., his reliability, were somehow called into question), but as the story is written I did not believe that there was any way the marriage would have lasted ten years.

Almost everyone has had a relationship (usually in high school or college) where one person is in love with every little thing about the other, puts him or her high up on a pedestal, doesn't really bother with the messy details, and is crushed and confused after the idealized (and unreal, since in these cases we mostly love our invention) partner gets bored and leaves--but I would bet that very few, if any, ten year marriages end this way. After ten years, it's impossible both that the narrator's wife would have remained such a mystery to him, and that he would have remained so devoted to her. He would either know the facts by the ten year mark, or would have decided them on his own. It's an absolute certainty that the narrator would have grown to hate nearly every single one of his wife's little quirks by that time. The quirks, after all, are an act of defiance against the marital "we," the wife's pushback against the definition the husband wants to impose on her. I would almost have found the story more believable if it had ended in a murder (which it seemed to be trending toward a few times in the middle of the book). If this is that one marriage in a million where the wife remains a mystery and an enigma for ten full years, where the husband keeps her high up on a pedestal and never truly interacts with her for that whole time and is crushed and confused when she leaves, then I needed to know a little bit more about what made the relationship so unique.

Again though, I don't want to get too negative about this one, because it really was a quick and enjoyable read, and there is much to be impressed by here. Overall, My Only Wife left me nostalgic for a kind of simple, straightforward, well-written book that doesn't seem to exist very often anymore but ought to. Jac Jemc is an author to watch, and I've already purchased a few new titles from Dzanc Books and added them to my reading list.

Out of 10: 8.5

Read even more about My Only Wife: Official site | Amazon | GoodReads | Shelfari

(Once a month through 2013, CCLaP staff writer Karl Wolff investigates literature of a more carnal kind with The NSFW Files. Despite the erotic, is there literary value to be found? For all the essays in this
series, please click here.)
 

 
Story of the Eye
By Georges Bataille
Review by Karl Wolff
 
The History: In Susan Sontag's essay, "The Pornographic Imagination," she discusses five novels, including The Story of the Eye. My essay series, The NSFW Files, will cover three, the first being Georges Bataille's 1928 shocker. Easily dismissed as juvenile and vulgar, a reader new to the capacious works of Georges Bataille should first have some historical, literary, and aesthetic background surrounding the novella. Written in 1928 by Georges Bataille under the pseudonym Lord Auch, the novel went through four versions (1928, 1940, 1941, and 1967). The City Lights edition I'm using for this review is based on the 1928 version.*

When it was written, France had endured the hardships and atrocities inflicted by the First World War. To put a perspective on how this effected the nature of French culture I will throw out some not-so-random numbers. 1.4 million. That is the number of French military casualties. During the Second World War, the United Stated had 418,000 total deaths, including military and civilian casualties. I mention this because during the Twenties, France becomes the hot-bed for the artistic avant-garde. Creating this infusion of literary and artistic radicalism involved a rejection of the old values that killed millions in the trenches, left survivors scarred and insane, toppled most European monarchies, and obliterated the techno-capitalist-progressivist optimism that fueled the Nineteenth Century.

Amidst this cultural change and aesthetic avant-garde is Georges Bataille. Novelist, poet, anthropologist, surrealist, pornographer, philosopher, and literary critic, Bataille is comparable to William T. Vollmann in terms of scope of knowledge and dwelling on the more salacious aspects of human existence. Story of the Eye is the tip of a massive, fascinating iceberg. (I will explain more of his philosophy and how it dovetails with Story of the Eye below.)

In addition to the creative maelstrom of the Twenties, Bataille's pornographic fiction is part of a larger French literary heritage. The United States has the historical baggage of being founded by the Puritans with their funny shaped hats, harsh Calvinism, and penchant for hanging Quakers. France is an entirely different animal. Apart from France's ferocious secularism following the 1789 Revolution, France also has two literary figures instrumental to understanding this novella: the Marquis de Sade and Alfred Jarry. Jarry wrote Ubu Roi in 1896 to the shock of polite French society. Sade, as Sontag wrote, "had never been forgotten. He was read enthusiastically by Flaubert, Baudelaire and most of the other geniuses of French literature of the late nineteenth century ... The quality and theoretical density of the French interest in Sade remains virtually incomprehensible to English and American literary intellectuals, for whom Sade is perhaps an exemplary figure in the history of psychopathology, both individual and social, but inconceivable as someone to be taken seriously as a "thinker." Sade's literary footprint looms large in Story of the Eye.

(I will be approaching this analysis from a literary perspective, avoiding the condescension implied by both the moralizing and pathologizing perspectives.)

The Book: Story of the Eye is broken into four parts. The first is "The Tale," concerning the carnal misadventures of an unnamed Narrator, his friend Simone, and a girl named Marcelle. The Narrator and Simone participate in a series of sexual situations. Marcelle also participates, is scandalized, institutionalized, and, shortly after the Narrator and Simone free her, she hangs herself. As fugitives, the Narrator and Simone flee to Spain. They meet a debauched English aristocrat named Sir Edmond and their carnal misadventures escalate in ferocity and intensity. In one scene, Simone reaches orgasm upon witnessing a bullfighter getting gored, the bull's horn going through the bullfighter's eye. The final scene in this novella involves the Narrator, Simone, and Sir Edmond sexually abusing a priest, eventually killing him. The reader understands the title of the novella because of things done with a plucked out eye. With Bataille, as with Sade, sex is inextricably linked with death. In French, the orgasm is called "la petite mort," translated as "the little death."

The second part, called "Coincidences," is Bataille's biographical and psychological explanation for "The Tale." In this essay, he gives a kind of psychological exorcism, explaining his eccentric and torturous childhood. His father, a syphlitic, slowly disintegrated, mentally and physically during Bataille's childhood. His mother also attempted suicide. During the First World War, his family had to abandon his father in their home during the German advance. Like a bonus featurette on a DVD, Bataille pulls back the curtain and explains the transpositions and substitutions he made to his personal history. Taken alone, "The Tale" would be an amusing shocker and probably fade into literary obscurity. "Coincidences" transforms this shocker into literary art. The artistic merit is gained from how Bataille uses pornography. (By comparison, look at how the steampunk genre uses history.) The last two parts include "W.C.", a short essay about an abandoned work similar to Story of the Eye, and "Outline of a sequel," which follows Simone and the Narrator fifteen years after the novella, with Simone dying in a scene of sublime torture. (Again the sex and death motif.)

The Verdict: Yes, Story of the Eye is pornographic and yes, it is an example of literary genius. "The Tale" has cardboard characters, inexhaustible sexual acrobatics, and is festooned with four-letter words. But ... it is a monument of psychological confession and the power of transgressive literature. Besides influencing the Surrealists, Bataille's work can be seen as an early version of bizarro fiction.

*For more on City Lights and their legal battles, check out my review of Mania! by Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover.
 
Read even more about Story of the Eye: Official site | Amazon | GoodReads | LibraryThing | Shelfari | Wikipedia
 
Coming next: Our Lady of the Flowers, by Jean Genet

Today's photo of the day is untitled and is by Jeff Economy. Jeff is a filmmaker based out of Chicago, although I'm not sure if that's where this particular shot was taken or not. He also has a nice website for his production company, for those who would like to see and learn more.

Don't forget that I actually maintain a whole page of favorite photographs over at Flickr, for those who would like to see more. To express an interest in having your own work featured, just drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com.

Today's photo of the day is entitled "USS Nostromo" and is by Chris Dessaigne. Chris is a fine artist based out of the French city of Perpignan; this particular shot was taken in an abandoned factory in the area, its title referring to the science-fiction movie Alien. He also has a nice personal website, for those who would like to see and learn more.

Don't forget that I actually maintain a whole page of favorite photographs over at Flickr, for those who would like to see more. To express an interest in having your own work featured, just drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com.