“Sometimes we find our true and inherent selves during youth. It is a recognition of something that at first is small within us, that we will grow into somehow. My shipboard nickname was MYNAH.  Almost my name but with a step into the air and a glimpse of some extra thing, like a slight swivel in their walk all birds have when they travel by land.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (OCT 5, 2011)

In his new novel, The Cat’s Table, Michael Ondaatje imagines a young boy’s three-week sea voyage across the oceans, from his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to England. The eleven-year-old travels alone and is, not surprisingly, allocated to the “lowly” Cat’s Table, where he joins an odd assortment of adults and two other boys of similar age.

In the voice of young “Michael,” Ondaatje shares the boys’ adventures on the ship with charming immediacy, while an older, adult “Michael” looks over his shoulder, first hardly noticeable, and later, more and more directly reflecting on his own recollections and moving the story forward. Are we reading a childhood memoir of sorts, a coming-of-age story, a personal journey into the past? Are we reading fact or fiction? Maybe, all of it. The parallels to the author’s life are easily spotted: a childhood in Ceylon, a nineteen fifties journey by ship from there to England… Other parallels to the author’s life come into view in the course of the book. Also, Ondaatje suggests in the first pages: “I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was…” In the Author’s Note (at the end of the book) Ondaatje is as clear and opaque as can be: “Although the novel uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography, The Cat’s Table is fictional – from the Captain and crew and all its passengers on the boat – to the narrator.” Still…

Young Michael and his two new friends, Cassius and Ramadhin, become soon inseparable; yet, their friendship does not extend to sharing much about their backgrounds, so we don’t know more about them either at this point. They freely roam the huge ship, exploring any nook and cranny they can get into, especially during nights. Cassius is the rambunctious, Ramadhin, the cautious, more reasonable one, conscious of his “weak heart.” Michael describes himself as a “follower.”

The men at the Cat’s Table, astutely observed by young Michael, while distinct in personality and behaviour, share, nonetheless, their curiosity for the happenings on the ship – one could call theirs “the gossip table” – and, more importantly, they each provide some kind of “life lesson” for the boys, be it in history, music, literature or biology. The most intriguing passenger at the table, however, is Miss Lasqueti, who appears to have insider knowledge of a very different kind. From time to time, they are joined by seventeen-year-old, beautiful and “mysterious” Emily, a distant cousin of Michael’s. Given her “higher social standing” and her placement in the dining room, she can contribute intriguing news for any evolving “story.” She knows, for example, much about the dangerous, heavily guarded, prisoner, who the boys have noticed during their nighttime adventures. Of course, Emily also has her secret encounters at night, overheard by Michael hiding in a lifeboat…

For the first half or so of the novel, I am simply charmed by the descriptions of the boys’ hilarious or risky escapades on the ship as it moves across the Indian Ocean towards the Suez Canal. We explore the ship’s “world” through a child’s eyes. The episodes, told more like independent vignettes than in a contiguous narrative, succeed, nonetheless, in carrying our curiosity forward: they capture the atmosphere on ship, provide personality capsules of passengers or crew, and details of their various activities. Once closer to land, we are offered glimpses into the varying landscapes and port cities. While Michael’s journey is depicted with gentleness and often lyrical descriptions, something seems to be missing in terms of the story’s overall meaning and depth – at least for me. But soon enough, like entering a new section in the book, the voice of the adult Michael takes on a more prominent role. He drops hints how different episodes or people might be connected; he starts asking questions about the veracity of what we have been told, pondering the reliability of his long-term memory…

And, most engagingly, Ondaatje, while continuing to remain within the overall three-week time span of the journey, now leaves it with ease to reveal aspects of past and future of several of the central characters. These mental excursions – relating to Emily, Miss Lasqueti, Ramadhin, etc. and, last but not least, the prisoner – help us fill in gaps within earlier descriptions of episodes during the voyage. They also add an integrating layer to the narrative that I had been hoping for. Finally, they bring us also closer to the adult Michael. It is only later in life that he realizes the journey’s importance as “a rite of passage;” a journey that formed him in more ways than he has acknowledged for a long time. In hindsight he can give voice to an emotion that he experienced then and many times since as he grew into an adult as “a desire that is a mixture of thrill and vertigo.” Emily, when he meets her again, much later, has the better phrase for what affected them: “We all became adults before we were adults.”

In the end, it does not matter anymore – at least to me – whether this book is a novel or a memoir/autobiography. It is a beautifully rendered story of growing up and living with the memories of youth. The novel’s language, the tone, the images and the tender approach to his subject suggest that this is probably Ondaatje’s most personal and intimate novel in many years.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 46 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Michael Ondaatje
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor

Bibliography:

• Coming Through the Slaughter (1976)
• In the Skin of a Lion (1987)
• The English Patient (1992)
• Anil’s Ghost (2000)
• Divisadero (2007)
• The Cat’s Table (October 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Running in the Family (1982)
• The Conversation with Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (2002)

Poetry:

• The Cinnamon Peeler (1991)
• Handwriting (1999)

Movies from books:

• The English Patient (1996)

“What I mean is that a lot of stuff that I thought were weaknesses of mine turned out to be strengths. And one of them is that I am not, I’m not a particularly exceptional person. I think I’m a really good reader, and I’ve got a good ear. And I’m willing to work really really hard. But I’m more or less a regular person. – David Foster Wallace”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (JUL 20, 2011)

There is that question we asked one another in college: Who in history, if you could meet and talk to whomever you wished, would you select? Depending on orientation and background the answers are all over the place: Jesus is a regular; Buddha, and other spiritual luminaries frequently show up. Second tier options, Nietzsche, Thoreau (personal favorite), St. Francis. No surprises there. Aside from a small collection of history’s heavyweights, answers are typically–and sophomorically–idiosyncratic. (More recently, at a dinner party that included a bunch young adults, one answer was, oddly, Jeff Buckley.) I wouldn’t easily toss aside posterity’s world-making worthies, but if I were so inclined, I’d turn to the great creative artists. Shakespeare certainly would be a contender. Homer too. Rimbaud would be fun over a couple of beers. Joyce was a good singer, I understand. I’m sure he’d light up a room. Reading Lipsky’s book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, reads like a contemporary answer to the “who would you choose” hypothesis. Wallace is gone now, but what if you could just spend a few days with him, even a few hours? What was the man like, really? By his work, he will be remembered. But what of the man?

In March 1996 David Lipsky was assigned to interview David Foster Wallace by Rolling Stone Magazine. Wallace was coming off a book tour, promoting his ground-breaking–and best-selling– tome, Infinite Jest. Wallace, uncharacteristically, agrees to the interview. It will span several days, with Lipsky riding along with Wallace to book readings, NPR interviews, coffee-shop breaks, pit-stops and dog walks. Lipsky writes of Wallace in the introduction, “David had a caffeine social gift: He was charmingly, vividly, overwhelmingly awake–he acted on other people like a slug of coffee–so they’re the five most sleepless days I ever spent with anyone.” The book reads accordingly. Wallace is a brilliant raconteur, breathlessly intelligent, informed, thoughtful and entertaining in that way we once thought we’d be, after we got out of college.

The premise is simple: Ride around with Wallace for five days, tape recorder running and ask him questions. This is the raw stuff of Lipsky’s journalism, though it a properly massaged transcription. For example, on smoking pot: “I stopped smoking pot–I think I stopped smoking pot right about the time I got out of grad school. You know, it wasn’t any kind of big decision. I just, it wasn’t shutting the system down anymore. It was just making the system, it was just making the system more unpleasant to be part of. My own system.” On watching T.V.: “I also, there’s the–like the thing that’s killed it recently for me, is the channel-surfing thing. Is because, I always have this terrible fear that there’s something even better on, somewhere else. And so I will spend all this time kind of skating up and down the channel system. And not be able to get all that immersed in any one thing.” The book is raw in that stream-of-consciousness way.

The project was shelved and Lipsky never wrote the article. Now, fast-forward a dozen years to the height of the David Foster Wallace posthumous creative industrial complex and someone thinks: Hey, what about those Lipsky’s tapes with Wallace? Surely there is a buck or two to be made there! That is the cynical dark-side opinion one might suspiciously hold of this endeavor. That is, here lies yet another exploitive American money-making scheme, cashing out on a brilliant dead writer’s extemporaneous ramblings. But there are two sides to this coin. The good news, setting aside this reader’s apprehension to slink through the graveyard, is that the rambling is brilliant, insightful, funny and, most of all, human. Magnificently human, that is, if one might be capable of being human on the scale of the magnificent. And as if the writer’s works themselves where not sufficient evidence, we now have Lipsky’s record. Let there be little doubt, David Foster Wallace had the capacity to be magnificently human. That is, I think, at the core of what draws so many legions of readers. His brilliance was tempered through the filter of his humanity. Here in Lipsky’s ride-along, we enjoy the genius–and the man.

For example, here Wallace, sipping on a Diet Pepsi, lays out his simple belief on art: “I have this–here’s this thing where it’s going to sound sappy to you. I have this unbelievably like a five-year-old’s belief that art is just absolutely magic….And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do. And that the good stuff will survive, and get read, and that in the great winnowing process, the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise.”

Or cultural survival: “At some point, at some point I think, this generation’s gonna reach a level of pain, or a level of exhaustion with the standard, you know….There’s the drug therapy, there’s the sex therapy, there’s the success therapy. You know, if I could just achieve X by age X, then something magically…Y’know? That we’re gonna find out, as all generations do, that it’s not like that.”

There is a terribly sad and poignant scene Lipsky shares in the afterword. Wallace’s condition has deteriorated. His depression medication has lost its punch and he is reeling. He calls his parents and they come to visit. The story, as a family member shared it with Lipsky, is that “one afternoon before they left, David was very upset. His mother sat on the floor beside him. ‘I just rubbed his arm. He said he was glad I was his mom. I told him it was an honor.’” It sounds blithely naive, but reading this book gave me a feeling of being honored as well, a sense that the man had carved out a bit of time for me. By the end of the book my cynicism had evaporated and I was grateful for this record and the insights it contains.

On a practical note, Becoming Yourself is a good David Foster Wallace reader companion. The copy I read was loaned to me by a friend who has never read his fiction, though she aspires to. Her copy was underlined and dog-eared. It will serve her well once she dives into the works. She will have a foundation of understanding the currents that carry his narrative. Conversely, I’ve read his fiction and coming to the book after that experience, I found it illuminating. It underscored what I found in the readings and nicely dove-tailed into the universes he had so carefully constructed. For the stand-alone experience, that is, the reader who has not read Wallace and has no intention of doing so, the book provides a worthwhile and insightful peek into the world of a modern creative genius.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 45 readers
PUBLISHER:	Broadway; 1 edition (April 13, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on David Lipsky
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Infinite Jestby David Foster Wallace The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

Bibliography:

• Three Thousand Dollars : Stories (1989)
• Art Fair (1996)
• The Pallbearer (1996)

Nonfiction:

• Late Bloomers: Coming of Age in Today’s America: The Right Place at the Wrong Time (1994)
• Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point (2003)
• Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (April 2010)

“Pat Tillman understood that outside the wire, bad things happen. But he was an optimist. Archetypically American, he was confident that right would prevail over wrong. When he swore the oath of enlistment in the summer of 2002, he trusted that those responsible for sending him into battle would do so in good faith. At the time, he didn’t envisage that any of them would trifle with his life, or misrepresent the facts of his death, in order to farther careers or advance a political agenda.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (JUL 27, 2010)

Where Men Win Glory, by Jon Krakauer, is a book about several things – Pat Tillman, the NFL, the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. army and its role in Pat Tilman’s death, friendly fire during wars, and the history of our involvement in the Middle East. Each of these topics is covered in a wonderfully page-turning manner, with the reader not wanting to put the book down. At the same time, Krakauer provides a huge amount of information that may be new, surprising or downright horrific.

Pat Tilllman was raised in Almaden, California to a family of free thinkers who encouraged their children to be individualists and speak their minds. Pat always had an opinion about something and was never shy in sharing it. He had a lot of faith in himself and his ability to perform well in whatever he chose to do. As a youth and a young man, he chose to excel in athletics, first baseball and later, football. Pat was not built like the typical football player. He was smaller but he was fast, agile, and had an uncanny ability to predict his opponents’ next moves. This made him a good football player, so good in fact that he played college football and moved on to the major NFL leagues where several teams competed to have him play for them.

Pat was a rather wild young man in his youth who liked to drink, carouse and occasionally fight. He was taught that honor and revenge were both admirable. At one point in his young life he got into a misguided fight that changed his life. He ended up in prison for a very short time and realized that he wanted to spend his days more productively. He started to read a lot, choosing from classics such as Emerson, Homer and Chomsky. He was rarely seen without a book in his hands. He also was an avid journaler, perspicaciously looking inward and outward in a very philosophical way.

After 9/11, Pat felt the call of patriotism and enlisted in the U.S. army, walking away from a 3.6 million dollar NFL contract in order to serve his country. He ended up in the Rangers, an elite group of army special operatives. Pat was unusual for a soldier in that he ended up not being in favor of the war he was fighting. He felt that the invasion of Iraq was a political ploy and that the U.S. should be focusing more on Afghanistan. He also understood the power of “spin” and public relations. When the army was busy using Jessica Lynch as a poster girl, Pat knew in his gut that the story behind her heroism and her rescue was skewed and that Bush was using her for P.R. to save his election from going down the tubes. Despite Pat’s personal feelings about the war, he remained a patriot and felt that he should do his utmost best all the time to defend and protect the United States. He himself would never grant interviews nor would he let the military use him in any way for public relations.

Krakauer does an excellent job in explaining the background of the war that Pat Tilman was fighting. Initially, the U.S. provided guns, ammunition, bombs and bomb-making instructions to the Taliban. This was done by the CIA during the time that the U.S. was involved in the cold war with Russia and Russia was in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban. After Russia left Afghanistan in defeat, the Taliban then used the weapons and instructions the U.S. had given them for terrorist acts against the U.S. A similar story took place in Iraq, where the U.S. gave political insurgents weapons and ammunitions only to have these same insurgents turn against them.

Pat and his family were very close and Krakauer does a fine job of examining the roles that his parents, his wife, his friends and his siblings played in Pat’s development and life as a man. Interestingly, Pat’s brother Kevin enlisted in the army at the same time as Pat and they ended up serving along side each other until the day that Pat was shot at and killed by his own troop members.

Pat’s death by friendly fire and the U.S. government’s cover-up of the details and circumstances surrounding his death, make up for a large part of this book. With painstaking detail, Krakauer takes the reader through every step of Pat’s mission until the time of his death by friendly fire. Krakauer also investigates the investigators, showing how the army misled, lied, delayed and mishandled most every aspect of reporting the true circumstances of Pat’s death. Ultimately, Pat’s mother made such a tenacious case for the truth that congress became involved.

Ironically, Pat Tillman was used as a public relations vehicle in much the same way that Jessica Lynch was. Pat would have hated this. He didn’t want special treatment in the army and he certainly didn’t want the army to invoke his name as a hero for a war he didn’t support.

Krakauer does a brilliant job of utilizing Pat’s journals, interviewing his friends, family and members of the military. He provides maps, documents and has done extensive research for this book. Despite all the details, this book is accessible to any reader, even one like me who had little knowledge of many of the historical aspects of the war prior to reading this book. Pat Tillman was an amazing human being, one that I ended up admiring immensely. I thank Mr. Krakauer for bringing Mr. Tillman to life and for delivering the truth that Mr. Tillman and his family so deserved.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 470 readers
PUBLISHER:	Anchor; Reprint edition (July 27, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jon Krakauer
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our short review of: Into Thin Air

Bibliography:

• Eiger Dreams: Ventures among Men and Mountains (1990)
• Into the Wild (1996)
• Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster (1997)
• Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (2003)
• Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (2009)

Movies from books:

• Into the Wild (2008)

“It is agonizing. Life here at Yasnaya Polyana is completely poisoned.  Wherever I turn, it is shame and suffering…”
Diary entry, 3 July 1880, Leo Tolstoy

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (APR 25, 2010)

Leo Tolstoy famously opened Anna Karenina with the observation that, “All happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” He was 45 when he wrote that. Thirty-seven years later, at age 82, he would die at the remote Astapovo train station, not far from his home, after fleeing, in the middle of the night, his estranged wife of 48 years, abandoning his family, his wealth, and setting out to live the life of a wandering ascetic. Ironically, he fulfilled the observation that his family was, indeed, singularly unhappy. A.N. Wilson described marriage between Leo and Sofya as the most unhappy in all literary history. The Last Station is the fascinating fictional construction of what transpired in the life and household of Tolstoy’s last year.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born into a family of landed aristocracy. He inherited the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, along with 700 serfs, after serving in the Crimean War in the 1850s. Prior to that, to settling down and writing two of the greatest works of world literature, War and Peace and Anne Karenina, he lead a life of, as he later reflected, “vulgar licentiousness”–or whoring around, to use his wife’s phrase. He fathered thirteen children by Sofya and was grandfather to at least twenty-five. He cared for his serfs and established a school for their education. He attempted to bring about emancipation for all serfs, thus labeling him a threat to the state, albeit a world-famous one. In the 1870s he underwent a spiritual crisis. He renounced his former beliefs and literary works. He embraced and expanded upon a primitive Christianity, developing a simple theology based on love and asceticism. He took vows of chastity–ironically–and vegetarianism. His influence was so far-reaching that Gandhi cited Tolstoy, or more properly Tolstoyism, as his major influence in the development of non-violent social reform.

Against this background, The Last Station, picks up in 1910, Tolstoy’s last year. The Tolstoy household is a buzzing hornet’s nest of intrigue, pent-up anger, fear and distrust. Sycophants and toadies fill the hallways, along with family members, disciples and admirers. To some the great man is a Christ-like figure, to others, particularly his wife and the very few of her supporters, he is deemed a selfish eccentric. Tolstoy had been developing his Christianity against a backdrop of luxury and affluence. He had a family to support and a wife who accustomed to her lifestyle. He was a torn man. He was viewed by the world as a mystic and original Christian thinker, yet he saw himself as a hypocrite. The reader can’t help but tune into his personal tension. But the experience does not stop with Tolstoy. One also feels for Sofya. She bore him all those children, transcribed War and Peace by hand, three times–she put up with him. “Only I could read Lyovochka’s [Tolstoy} handwriting,” she writes in her diary. “His crablike hieroglyphs filled the margins of his proof sheets, driving the printers wild…Even he could not make out what he had written much of the time. But I could.” And she withstood his eccentricities until she could no longer.

The author, Jay Parini writes in an afterward to his book, “The Last Station is fiction, though it bears some of the trappings and affects of literary scholarship.” He continues to describe how fifty years ago in a used book store he stumbled upon the diary a Tolstoy house member, Valentin Bulgakov. Bulgakov was there for the last year, observing and taking notes. From there Parini collected and read other diaries and memoirs of family members, visitors and students. “Reading them in succession was like looking at a constant image through a kaleidoscope. I soon fell in love with the continually changing symmetrical forms of life that came into view.” He tells us that the quotes attributed to Tolstoy in the book are, indeed, his; too, that he drew from major and minor sources, biographies and letters, in fleshing out the chronology of the book.

There is an approach to the popular “historical novel” that is often foot-loose and fancy-free. My sense here is that of an extremely well-employed and detailed accuracy. (I have read the major works, but am no Tolstoy authority.) Reading The Last Station was akin to reading the best biography. Only better. There is the opportunity to get lost in a period, a life and follow it through the ups and downs, the history and intrigue.

Parini employs multiple voices in the telling of this tale, bringing into focus multiple perspectives and view points. There is, of course, Tolstoy, as revealed by his voice, his writings and his diary entries. And his wife, Sofya Andreyevna, is a major presence, as one would expect. But too, we hear the voice of the doctors, adult children and onlookers. (Daughter Sasha: “Mama does not understand my father’s goals. He is a spiritual creature, while her chief concerns are material.”) Each voice speaks in first person, their chapters weaving one through another, to form the kaleidoscope Parini refers to. One voice, in particular, that of the young new hire, Valentin Bulgakov, acts as a touch stone of reason and balanced observation throughout.

Bulgakov has been hired by Vladimir Grigorevich Chertkov, Tolstoy confidante and threat to the status quo, to act as literary secretary and quotation-gatherer for Tolstoy. Bulgakov gets thrown into the household when all contrasting forces are at fever pitch. Sofya is afraid that Leo is re-writing his will and leaving his copy-writes to Chertkov for distribution to the public domain. She fears that Chertkov is plotting to undermine her and further the rift between she and her husband. (“Since Chertkov came to live here again, the situation has grown even less tolerable,” she writes in her diary.) Her fears are well founded. But she takes them to hysterical pitch and drives the great man mad, sending him fleeing into the winter Russian night. The children take sides, fearing on one hand destitution once their father dies and, on the other, immense pride at being a child of such an individual. Coming and going throughout is a mix of personalities whose allegiance and trust is never fully established.

The Last Station reads much like life: there is no omniscient narrator, only participants functioning from their individual perspective. It is a wonderful and immensely interesting method. The knowledge that it was created with a scholarly approach to accuracy only makes the reading experience so much the richer. Tolstoy had a profound influence on the creative literary tradition. That he renounced all of that and set out to follow an idiosyncratic voice pulling him in an opposite direction is fascinating. Parini renders the experience in a remarkably entertaining fashion. This is a wonderful book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	Anchor; Mti edition (January 12, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jay Parini
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another novel on Leo Tolstoy’s last day: The Commissariat of Enlightenment by Ken Kalfus

Selected Bibliography:

• The Love Run (1980)
• The Patch Boys (1986)
• The Last Station (1990)
• Bay of Arrows (1992)
• Benjamin’s Crossing (1996)
• The Passages of H. M.: A Novel of Herman Melville (November 2010)

Nonfiction:

• John Steinbeck: A Biography (1995)
• Some Necessary Angels: Essays on Literature and Politics (1997)
• Robert Frost: A Life (1999)
• The Apprentice Lover (2002) (with A. Kenneth Ciongoli)
• One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner (2004)
• The Art of Teaching (2005)
• Why Poetry Matters (2008)
• Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America (2008)

Movies from books:

• The Last Station (2010)