A MISCELLANY OF BOOKS

Arrow Pointing Nowhere: Henry Gamadge #7
By Elizabeth Daly
Felony & Mayhem (May 2009)
ISBN-13: 978-1934609248
Reviewed by THE WRITTEN NERD || FEB 2010

As I mentioned in the previous post, a large part of the charm of Felony & Mayhem mysteries is the immersion in the past. For a sense of the Agatha-Christie-only-more-so appeal, I can’t say it better than F&M’s modern back cover copy from Arrow Pointing Nowhere, part of the Henry Gamadge series:

“Take one grand house, stuff it with staff, and make it home to several generations. If they send their sons to Oxford and occasionally knock each other off, you’ve got a country-house murder mystery, that classic of English crime fiction. But ift he boys are at Yale, odds are that you’re reading a New York mansion mystery — a genre largely invented and perfected by Elizabeth Daly.”

Yep, only the boys are at university, and all kinds of extended family share the mansion with the servants — it’s a whole different world. >>READ MORE

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The Notebooks of Robert Frost
Edited by Robert Faggen
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2009)
ISBN-13: 978-0674034662

Frost’s notebooks: a disaster revisited
On Harvard’s half-baked reissue of The Notebooks of Robert Frost

Reviewed by William Logan || THE NEW CRITERION || FEB 2010

The Notebooks of Robert Frost were published three years ago to rapturous approval. Frost is still an American icon and an American nonesuch, the last major poet to find a public audience—his poems say more about the American character than any poet’s after Whitman. Though Frost’s America seems distant almost a century after the publication of North of Boston, he remains the most quoted American modern. The notebooks gave a rare look inside his workshop, showing the painstaking and sometimes clumsy way his poems, essays, and talks were put together. Reviewers for newspapers and magazines, working to short deadlines, usually trust the labors of scholars. Still, it was hazardous for the New Republic to call the book “expertly edited and annotated” without apparently checking the editing or annotation, or the TLS to declare the editing (apart from one minor cavil) a “superb job” and a “labour of love,” saying that “anyone who dips into them has reason to be grateful to their editor.”

Late in 2007, a review by James Sitar in Essays in Criticism accused Robert Faggen, that very editor, of making monstrous errors of transcription, some so embarrassing they made him—or Frost—look like an idiot. A few months later, after six months in press, my own review in Parnassus condemned the edition in similar terms. Both pieces claimed that Faggen, though in many places a canny reader of Frost’s diabolic hand, had offered hardly a page that did not need revision. The errors ran to the thousands, many of them major; and a good proportion gave readings that were nonsensical or preposterous. Who would believe, had a scholar not said so, that Frost wrote “picktie exhibition,” or a “hide [linigue] for harriners,” or “Columbus brooch alone awhile,” or “In colleness or in the quest of fruit,” or “all he is parinian,” or “use of lipstitch and howdy,” or many like acts of myopic absurdity? >>READ MORE

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What the Furies Bring
By Kenneth Sherman
Porcupine’s Quill (2009)
ISBN-13: 978-0889843189

Review by Ezra Glinter || FOREWORD REVIEWS || FEB 2010

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Canadian poet and literary critic Kenneth Sherman asked himself what the response of literature to such traumatizing events should be. For guidance, he turned to writers who had addressed the most horrific experiences of the 20th century, including the Holocaust and the Soviet Gulag. In this collection of essays, Sherman analyzes with care and precision some of the best such writers, including both well- and lesser-known figures.

While Sherman’s subjects represent a wide variety of artistic and moral positions, certain themes recur. Throughout the book, Sherman questions the value of “art for art’s sake,” and posits that great literature must grapple with the issues of its time. “Reality bombards the modern writer and it is reasonable to feel overwhelmed,” he acknowledges in the preface. “Yet the true writer—not the propagandist and not the giddy experimenter—is engaged in a difficult dialogue with the real.” >>READ MORE

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The Beat: A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources

THE SECOND PASS || FEB 2010

Will Blythe reviews Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain, “a surrealist’s attic of unlikely juxtapositions” in which “[t]he expectations of a conventional mystery are thwarted at every turn.” . . . Alan Wolfe is very clear: “Let’s get my judgment of Thomas Sowell’s new book out of the way first. There is not a single interesting idea in its more than three-hundred pages.” But that judgment doesn’t get out of the way so much as it gets repeated in different varieties throughout the review: “The flatness of [Sowell’s] sentences is matched by the flatness of his trajectory. Whatever darkness exists in the world does not reside in his soul. He undertakes no bildung and experiences no crises. He learns nothing that does not confirm what he already knew. If he were a character in a novel, it would end on page one.” . . . I recently mentioned David Peace on the blog. Richard Rayner reviews his latest, based on a real-life 1948 crime in which a Tokyo bank robber poisoned a dozen people. (Rayner: “Expect to be enthralled and maybe amazed, although not cheered up or even necessarily entertained.”) . . . Graeme Wood says that the stories in Ted Conover’s The Routes of Man, about global roadways (in China, Peru, Israel, etc.), are “compelling,” and that: “The book’s faults mostly follow from its broad theme and structure. Indeed, so loose is the organizing principle that two of the chapters, including the best, have little to do with roads.” . . . The New Republic’s new review site, The Book, joins The Second Pass (and others, of course) in appreciating more obscure titles. This week, acclaimed Dostoevsky biographer Joseph Frank writes about a memoir by someone who grew up in Mussolini’s Italy before moving to Palestine. . . . A review to print out and read over the weekend: William Deresiewicz on the stories Tolstoy wrote in old age, a time in the author’s life “marked by a turn toward ideological radicalism and spiritual extremity.”