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"Mesler, Corey"
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Memphis movie
\"Like almost everyone, Eric Warberg went to Hollywood to make it big. For many years, he was successful, until directing a few box office bombs made him virtually unemployable. When an opportunity presents itself for a return to his hometown of Memphis, to direct a small, independent film, it is a return to his roots in more ways than one. Despite the fact that he's greeted like a star, his homecoming is bittersweet. The novel begins on the onset of filming of what is temporarily called Memphis Movie. From day one, Eric feels stuck and unable to find his creative spark. He is helped along by a large cast of characters, some from his past and some from the filmmaking industry, including his partner, Sandy, who wrote the script for the movie. Their open relationship will be challenged by Eric's return to his roots. Running parallel to the film's production is the story of ex-hippie poet Camel Jeremy Eros, who has been hired by Eric to add \"Memphis mojo\" to the script. Camel, who is in his twilight years, will be both tainted and awakened by his assignment. He is helped along by a teenage runaway who has come to live with him and who may or may not be of the \"fairy people.\" Memphis Movie reads like a Robert Altman film, with many story strands making up the rich tapestry. The novel's central question: Will Eric lose or find his soul in Memphis, a town where soul has so many meanings? \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
POSTMODERNIST HEIR, BEAUTIFUL DREAMER
\"We are both busy people, so let's cut the small talk,\" the book begins, and just like that we are thrust into the narrator's dream world. The thin line between fantasy and reality is traced throughout his long account, enticing, enchanting and disturbing. The storyteller is Eiji Miyake, a resident of an ultramodern Tokyo, who is searching for his father, an enigmatic ghost, who disappeared when Eiji and his twin sister Anju were infants. Eiji's quest is Pynchonian, like the quest for who or what V. is, in [Thomas Pynchon]'s novel of that name, a search that will take Eiji through a labyrinth of seamy, underground life. [David Mitchell] makes the modern city an organic machine, a clockwork orange, lively, deadly, malignant and frenetic. It is T. S. Eliot's \"unreal city\" merged with the dark, nihilist vision of Irvine Welsh. \"Now I understand what fuels dronehood,\" Eiji says. \"This: you work or you drown in debt and the underclass. Tokyo turns you into a bank balance with a carcass in tow.\"
Newspaper Article
AUTHOR LOOKS AT '70S WITH WIT, EMPATHY
British writer [Jonathan Coe]'s last two novels, The House of Sleep and The Winshaw Legacy, provided the kind of literary fireworks that spark careers. They were rightfully greeted with lavish praise. His new novel is a quieter but no less compelling book, a meditation on the '70s, with a concentration on politics, music, racism, sex, love (unrequited and sometimes illicit), coming of age, schooling and bourgeois existence, all filtered through Coe's sardonic and discerning intelligence. The Rotter's Club is a bit like a British version of Rick Moody's excellent '70s novel, The Ice Storm. And, if it doesn't cut quite as deeply as that book, or dissect the sociology of its zeitgeist with the same sort of zealous, microscopic scrutiny, it is funnier. It also further demonstrates just how flexible Coe's talents are; this is an author who attempts something different with each book and succeeds largely because he is sharp and droll and especially perceptive.
Newspaper Article
RADIANT NOVEL CASTS SEEING IN NEW LIGHT
My Name is Red is [Orhan Pamuk]'s most ambitious work. Set in 16th Century Istanbul, it concerns the commission of a book of illuminated art, a murder of one of the artists, artistic freedom and the depiction of reality, a practice prohibited by the Koran. Art must be stylized, whether it depicts people, animals or plants, but this new commission is to contain a lifelike portrait of the current Sultan, a work in the Western style that will revolutionize the centuries-old practice of book illumination. It is likened to Venetian artistry \"that duped the viewer by trying to depict reality itself rather than its representation, in all its detail: pictures, shadows included, of cardinals, bridges, rowboats . . . churches and stables . . . as if all of them were of the same importance to Allah.\"
Newspaper Article
A RICH FEAST FROM A MYTHIC SOUTH
[Marly Youmans Farrar] engages the reader with prose that is sonorous, elegant and, at times, colloquial. When Agate relates her own story it is told with lavish, book-learned eloquence, and her autobiography, a tale of torture and redemption, resonates throughout the novel. Agate's story is painful, yet Youmans manages to make it both heart- rending and affirmative. The narrative progresses slowly, Biblical and intense, replenishing itself with great gulps of history and panorama. Youmans writes like the child of Allan Gurganus and Toni Morrison, with a gift for sentences that carry theme and incident in their sheer craft. And, the use of the \"ancient tale\" structure is inspired. Youmans subtitles each chapter as if it were an age-old ballad: \"Concerning wolves and wolf pits And a fight in the burning wilderness,\" or \"Two narrative of loss, Comprising a picnic on the last careless day And a pilgrimage to harvest wands.\" Its oracular nature touches deep well-springs of storytelling.
Newspaper Article
ARTIST'S APPEAL TRANSCENDS SLOPPY PORTRAIT
The Passion of Artemisia is highly readable in some ways, but it lacks passion. [Susan Vreeland]'s style is too breezy here, her first person voice for Artemisia too modern. The story lacks verisimilitude; the novel seldom feels set in the 17th Century. And, for a painter, Vreeland's Artemisia lacks a good eye for observation. She never makes us see Genoa or Florence. \"An artist's job as well as a scientist's is to study the universe of the eye,\" she says, yet that eye is clouded here. Instead we get a recitation of incident in a bland tongue and tone-deaf recollection, without fury or love or verve, all emotions we assume for the teller of this tale.
Newspaper Article
STRAIGHT-SHOOTING AMIS WIT RARELY MISSES
[Martin Amis] admits at the outset that as he grew older he grew kinder, less likely to go for the easy kill. Early in the book we find some of Amis's slickest barbs; he reserves his sharpest rapier for, among others, Elvis, Andy Warhol and Ronald Reagan. In a review of Dee Presley and the Stanleys' book, Elvis, We Love You Tender, he says, \"In many respects their book is a sorry effort - coarse, sentimental and lurchingly written. But the vulgarity of its idiom provides some inadvertent literary interest, and the memoir is far too damaging to all concerned for one to doubt its authenticity.\" On Warhol: \"Once the artist urging us to re-examine the ordinary, Warhol is now the commercial portraitist celebrating the vendible.\" And in a conglomerate review of numerous books on SDI he sums up Reagan's Star Wars this way: \"Reagan likes his idea, partly because it is the only idea he has ever had, but also because it chimes with his belief in the superiority of the American people and the American system.\"
Newspaper Article
NOVELIST BARTH COMES FULL CIRCLE
The two writers set up a friendly rivalry, both to write the same narrative, the telling or re-telling of the story of \"The Adams Original Floating Theater,\" which was the basis not only for Edna Ferber's novel Show Boat (published in 1926 and the basis of the Kern- Hammerstein musical the next year) but also for Barth's first novel, 45 years ago, The Floating Opera. Young Johns works on The Floating Opera II, a showboat named for Barth's first novel, as an actor and writer, and he goads his older guru into the contest of pen vs. word processor. Throughout the book are pictograph computer click boxes, as if the text you had in hand were interactive, with prompts like [Get to Story], [Hell with Story], or [Whatever].
Newspaper Article
NOVEL CLEVERLY PLUNDERS ALPHABET
Here's the extravagant plot: On the fictional island of Nollop, off the coast of South Carolina, a small kingdom exists, its progenitor and hero one Nevin Nollop, the man who invented the famed pangram \"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.\" A pangram is \"a phrase, sentence or verse composed of all the letters of the alphabet.\" A statue of Nevin Nollop stands in the center of this \"quasi-communal society\" and on the base of that statue, spelled out in ceramic tile, is the famous pangram. A sort of hysteria grips the island, as neighbor begins to turn in neighbor to the authorities. As one civic-minded citizen explains, \"We believe . . . that Nollop does indeed speak to us from his place of eternal rest, through the manipulation of the tiles upon his hallowed cenotaph, and that the Council serves only as his collective interpreter.\" And from the Council: \"Adhering to the commandments of Nollop leaves no room for fear of punishment or forfeiture. (He who walks in the light has no reason to fear the darkness.)\" [Mark Dunn]'s sly send-up of religious zealotry resonates throughout the story. It's Arthur Miller's The Crucible with word-puzzles.
Newspaper Article
NOVEL TEEMS WITH LIFE THROUGH PERSONALITIES OF MOTLEY CHARACTERS
The plot, such as it is, is simple. [John McGahern] draws two main characters, Joe and Kate Ruttledge, and describes the life that swirls around them and their lakeside farm. The visitors they receive include irascible Bill Evans, who suffers from the abuse he received as a child at the hands of priests; gossipmonger Jamesie, one of the book's more likable eccentrics; the dodgy womanizer John Quinn; and Joe's aristocratic uncle, whom everyone calls The Shah. There is no real action, yet the book teems with life. \"Had Bill any news?\" asks Joe at one point. \"Big news,\" Kate tells him. \"One day every week from now on he is going to town on the bus.\" And, during a trip out of the area, Jamesie complains, \"You see nothing at home. Nothing.\" To which Joe replies, \"You see the birds and the sky and the tracks of animals.\" In lesser hands, these sentiments could be lackluster, but McGahern is a master prose stylist and writes with a keen understanding of human psychology. The reader is drawn into the book's simple life, pulled by a temperate tide of wisdom and grace.
Newspaper Article