"World's End" by Pablo Neruda

"World's End" by Pablo Neruda
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Reviewed By Richard Rayner
LA Times

"World's End," originally published in Spanish in 1969, toward the end of the career of the great poet Pablo Neruda (he died in 1973, soon after the coup that killed his friend and compatriot Chilean President Salvador Allende), is a book-length sequence that weaves together the personal and the political, the public and the private, the domestic and the global. For Neruda, poetry meant much more than the expression of emotion and personality. It was a sacred way of being and came with duties. He wrote poetry to explain himself to himself, but he had a mission to shape the world too. He was opposed to W.H. Auden's famous declaration: "Poetry makes nothing happen."

Ambitious in every sense

Neruda didn't buy that for a moment. For him, poetry could change everything. He lived a life of passionate engagement and his work was ambitious in every sense. He was, as American poet Campbell McGrath has written, "president of Pablo Neruda Enterprises / director of the great public works project: Pablo Neruda." "World's End" -- here translated into English in full for the first time by William O'Daly in a bilingual edition -- balances nothing less than the tumult of a century against a lifetime's personal vision.

Neruda personally experienced many key historical events (the Spanish Civil War, for example, in which his friend and fellow poet Lorca was assassinated) and bore witness to others. Here he rants full-on against U.S. involvement in Vietnam: "Why were they compelled to kill / innocents so far from home, / while the crimes pour cream / into the pockets of Chicago? / Why go so far to kill / Why go so far to die?" Elsewhere he rebukes (and excuses) himself for having believed in the tyrant Stalin for too long, remaining loyal to "el partido" even when other leading writers and intellectuals drawn, like him, to Marxism and the Soviet Union during the turbulence of the 1930s, had long since rejected Moscow's leash. "I was unaware of that which we were unaware," he writes. "But light was discovered / and we recovered our reason: / not for any man or his crime / would we throw the good / into the cellar of the wicked."

This may not seem like much of a mea culpa, but Neruda the idealist struggled to come to terms with the failure of the Soviet experiment even while he railed against an America that, he believed, had moved dangerously beyond the traditions of freedom and democracy expounded by Lincoln and Whitman, the poet whom Neruda revered above all others. Neruda described "World's End" as his "bitter book," and one of its subjects, certainly, is disillusion. "I have taken a kick / from time and it is now a mess, / the sad box of my life," he writes. "I cannot show people / my collection of shivers: / I felt lonely in a house / riddled with leaks / in a downpour that heard no appeal."

The desolation recalls his earlier groundbreaking book "Residence on Earth." There's the same sense of life turned to ashes and strangeness, wonderfully expressed. But in Neruda the possibility of revival is never far away. That's why so many readers throughout the world still rely upon him. He sings of despair in tones that soon thrill again, using his verse like a shaft of light, cross-examining the darkness so that a switch can be turned, or a metaphor spun magically into something that sustains. "As a poet baker / I prepare the fire, the flour, / the leavening, the heart, / and I, involved up to the elbows, / kneading the light of the oven, / the green water of language, / so the bread that happens to me / sells itself in the bakery."

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“Cheever: A Life” By Blake Bailey

“Cheever: A Life” By Blake Bailey

Reviewed By Bret Anthony Johnston
New York Times

Blake Bailey’s “Cheever: A Life” opens with a reference to the time John Cheever emerged, presumably drunk and definitely naked, from his Boston apartment. It was seven years before his death, a winter evening when he was to accompany John Updike to the symphony. His books were out of print, his marriage on the verge of collapse and his ambiguous sexual orientation a daily torment. He had taken to walking the streets and drinking with bums. Upon discovering Cheever in this compromised state, Updike, as he described it, “primly concentrated on wedging him into his clothes.” Afterward they went to Symphony Hall as if nothing unusual had occurred. Essentially, nothing had.

Bringing the lives of writers’ writers to the reading public is Mr. Bailey’s specialty. In “A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates” (2003) he delivered a sensitive and powerful portrait of the vastly underappreciated author of “The Easter Parade” and “Revolutionary Road.” Following Yates with Cheever makes sense. Both men waged desperate, lifelong battles with alcoholism, and Cheever, like Yates, spent his career attacking the hypocrisy of suburban life in keenly observed, downhearted narratives. Ultimately, though, their career trajectories diverged. After publishing three story collections and the novels “The Wapshot Chronicle” and “The Wapshot Scandal,” Cheever was hailed as “Ovid in Ossining” by Time magazine in a 1964 cover story — he also made the cover of Newsweek in 1977 with the release of his novel “Falconer” — while Yates remained a critical darling ignored by readers.

Yates never had a story in The New Yorker, whereas Cheever published a staggering 121 stories there. Most of those stories, Mr. Bailey writes, were born of autobiography or notes recorded in Cheever’s journal, a voluminous daily accounting maintained, Cheever said, as “a means of refreshing my memory.” (Only a fraction of the journal — 4,300 typed, single-space pages — has been published, but Mr. Bailey had total access.)

Cheever wrote conventional and experimental stories alike, though in fiction, as in life, he was obsessed with the dark secrets of the middle class. In “The Enormous Radio,” one of his masterpieces, a married couple find that their new radio inexplicably allows them to eavesdrop on their neighbors. The Westcotts “overheard demonstrations of indigestion, carnal love, abysmal vanity, faith, and despair.”

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"Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand: A Novel of Adam and Eve" by Giaconda Belli

"Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand: A Novel of Adam and Eve" by Giaconda Belli

Reviewed By Susan Salter Reynolds
Chicago Tribune

The creation story is the best improv exercise ever invented. Creation and destruction, self and no-self, story and history, fiction and nonfiction chase themselves in endless circles. The creation story is the Mobius strip, the double helix, the pattern language of art.

For an artist to take it on, she must feel that she is really ready to take it on. It is an act of calligraphy—too much ego, and the mirror that is the story cracks, the pool ripples. Narcissus remains deluded. Told with pure intent, imagination and clarity, the story is generous, capacious. The story becomes The Story.

So you will be glad to hear that Gioconda Belli, who is not a restrained sort of writer, keeps her creation story simple. First, she peels off the old layers of morality—her creation story is hardly a cautionary tale. Second, good and evil, if they exist at all, are two sides of the same state of being. The lovers, who try to figure out who this "Other" is and why he punished them so harshly, even wonder whether the serpent is God's Eve, if the serpent was taken from the Other, just as Eve was from Adam.

This is important, for if there is a new, evolved religion, surely it must embrace the possibility that we are pure at heart, that we do the best we can. To Belli's Adam and Eve, things that are good feel good; things that are bad feel bad. Belli's Eve sincerely believes that God wouldn't have put the tree or the fruit or the knowledge of good and evil in their path unless he had wanted them to partake.

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Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers, March 8-14

Compiled By The Boston Globe

1. Outliers
By Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown.
2. Last Lion
By the Team at the Boston Globe. Simon & Schuster.
3. The Yankee Years
By Joe Torre and Tom Verducci. Doubleday.
4. The Lost City of Z
By David Grann. Doubleday.
5. The Gardner Heist
By Ulrich Boser. Collins.
6. The Inaugural Address 2009
By Barack Obama. Penguin.
7. Animals Make Us Human
By Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
8. Food Matters
By Mark Bittman. Simon & Schuster.
9. Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man
By Steve Harvey. Amistad.
10. Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics
By Ina Garten. Clarkson Potter.

'Stealing MySpace' By Julia Angwin

'Stealing MySpace' By Julia Angwin

Reviewed By Janet Maslin
New York Times

There’s at least one story that has never been told on the no-holds-barred social networking Web site MySpace. That story is the chaotic, action-packed history of MySpace itself. Now Julia Angwin, a technology and media reporter for The Wall Street Journal, has done prodigious digging into the shady business practices, trailer-park aesthetics, lucky accidents and borderline personality types that have allowed MySpace to tap into the American psyche.

Her account is necessarily convoluted. But like the site itself, Ms. Angwin’s book about this, “Stealing MySpace,” is accessible to anyone, except during its most intensive dissections of deal-making. Overall, you needn’t know a portal from a platform to follow thihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifs sprawling, rollicking Internet history.

There are many books about how tech stars struck it rich in Silicon Valley. “Stealing MySpace” isn’t one of them. This isn’t a tale of shy computer geeks making billions by creating perfect algorithms. Instead it’s about rogue marketers cobbling together half-baked plans, trying reckless gambits, relying on a “get it out fast, fix it later” philosophy and never bothering to worry about the consequences. With its Santa Monica corporate ambience and utter lack of scruples, Ms. Angwin says, MySpace qualifies as “a Hollywood-style media company — one where crazy creative people run the show, and nobody really knows what makes a hit or a flop.”

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'Etta' By Gerald Kolpan

'Etta' By Gerald Kolpan

Reviewed by Caroline Berson
Philadelphia Inquirer

Our heroine is dead before the tale can begin. The opening pages deliver the obituary of Lorinda Jameson Carr, an 80-year-old woman remembered for her philanthropic work and sharpshooting skills. Her adult life is well chronicled by the New York Herald Tribune, but "little is known of Mrs. Carr's early life."

And thus our story begins, not as a novel built on suspense, but rather on bringing to life a little-known member of the infamous Hole in the Wall Gang and capturing the mood of the Wild West.

According to historians, Etta Place was either a prostitute or a schoolteacher who, through unknown means, was rumored to be the girlfriend or wife of Harry Longabaugh, alias the Sundance Kid.

Gerald Kolpan's version of history opens on a gentleman's farm in 1898 Philadelphia, where Lorinda Jameson, celebrated debutante and daring horseback rider, lives with her alcoholic father. Lorinda's lifestyle disintegrates when her father commits suicide rather than deal with his growing debt.

In a meeting with the family lawyer, Lorinda learns that one of her father's lenders is a notorious Sicilian gang.

"Your poor father had been laid to considerable debt by a cabal of gamblers, unscrupulous and desperate men who preyed upon your father's weakness for horse betting, no doubt with his enthusiastic support," the lawyer says. "Like the remainder of his creditors, these villains have contacted this office and informed me of their need to be remunerated . . . [or] they shall be forced into actions that will mean suffering for any whom your father loved in life."

To escape their promised revenge, Lorinda accepts a new name - Miss Etta Place - and travels west to Colorado, where she serves travelers as a Harvey Girl waitress. Etta soon realizes that her incomparable beauty attracts unwanted advances and is forced to extremes to defend her pure character. She escapes to "Hole-in-the-Wall, Wyoming territory. Somewhere between the beginning of nowhere and the end of nothing."

Here she finds herself in the company of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Kolpan first mentions the well-known outlaws by including a wanted poster in his narrative, one that identifies their criminal occupations as "bank robber and highwaymen, train robber, cattle and horse thief." These stark depictions are later softened by introducing different perspectives. Kolpan breaks away from his journalism training to reveal the souls in his novel through diary entries, newspaper articles, personal letters, and straight third-person narrative.

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'The Kindly Ones,' by Jonathan Littell

'The Kindly Ones,' by Jonathan Littell

Reviewed By Laila Lalami
LA Times

Literature has given us many unsympathetic protagonists yet relatively few genuine monsters: "Lolita's" Humbert Humbert, Shakespeare's Richard III and "American Psycho's" Patrick Bateman come to mind. In each case, the writer was successful because the reader was drawn into the narrative by the beauty of the language, a masterful use of point of view, or an intriguing personal life against which the monstrosity of the main character could be highlighted. In "The Kindly Ones," the Prix Goncourt-winning novel that has created a cultural sensation in France and is now being published in the United States, Jonathan Littell has done none of this, with the result that his novel reads like a pornographic catalog of horrors.

"The Kindly Ones" is ostensibly the memoir of Maximilien Aue, a legal scholar who joins the main intelligence branch within the SS and slowly rises through the echelons of power. As a Nazi officer, he witnesses or participates in the major events of World War II -- the Eastern Front, the Battle of Stalingrad, the massacres in Auschwitz -- but evades capture after the fall of the Third Reich. He flees to France, uses his prewar connections to start a lace business, marries, has children and grandchildren, and leads the quiet life of a petit bourgeois.

In occasional flashbacks, the reader discovers a few details about Aue's birth and upbringing. When Aue was just a young boy, his father, a German veteran of World War I, went to visit a relative and never returned. Aue's mother then married a Frenchman, moving the family to the Côte d'Azur. For several years, Aue carried on an incestuous relationship with his twin sister, Una, until the two were found out and swiftly separated. Aue later has many homosexual encounters because, he says, he hopes to replicate his sister's sexual pleasures with him. If you think this story is unpleasant, or convoluted, or tragically Greek, wait until you get to the last third of the book.

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