John Peck
***May 2010 Newsletter Pick***
Novelist, essayist, and poet Gilbert Sorrentino, who died in 2006, was one of the great under-appreciated American writers of the last century. His work has a consistently pitch-black humor that is particularly Irish in pedigree, placing him in the tradition of writers like James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O'Brien. Many of his books, including this one, combine meticulously experimental prose structures with vivid, all-too-real narratives of the mundanities and small horrors of working-class American life. Sorrentino achieved most of his notoriety from novels he wrote in the 70s (among them Mulligan Stew and Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things), but his later books - such as Gold Fools, a novel written entirely in questions - are my personal favorites, and are, if anything, even more dark and uncompromising than his earlier work.
This amazing book, previously only available in extremely limited hand-assembled versions, is finally out in a beautiful hardcover edition. While the original "Choose Your Own Adventure" books from decades past provide some context for Shiga's masterwork, this book goes leaps and bounds past those source texts, in both subject matter and format. Multicolored tubes travel three-dimensionally through the book, via tabs at the outer edges of each page. The result is beautiful, brilliant, confounding, and utterly unique - and, despite its generally whimsical artwork, probably not suitable for children.
It's not just this book's 900 page heft that makes it a modern epic - it's Bolano's use of multiple perspectives, each of which contains a fully realized narrative arc, and which together fill out a dense, tragic, and incredibly captivating story. Dense and challenging, but very worthwhile.
Collections of essays need not be the reading equivalent of broccoli. In his essays, as in his fiction, George Saunders seems incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence. Highly recommended.
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Charles Burns has always had an obsession with biological anomaly, but this book is his masterpiece. It's not for the squeamish (the films of David Cronenberg are a good comparison), but it's an amazing read, with moments of real beauty.
Although Brautigan is inextricably linked to the counterculture of the 1960's, I've always found his books to be surprisingly modern in tone and language. While TFIA is brisk and often funny, its absurdist approach, like all great absurdist art, hints at the sadness beneath the surface. A great novel of the American West.