Deadeye Keith

Read from Thursday, January 27th to Sunday, January 30th.

Deadeye Dick, by Kurt Vonnegut, my favorite author.  He has been my favorite for many years now, and I consider Slaughterhouse Five to be my favorite book.  Deadeye Dick is the last novel by him that I have yet to own or read.  Vonnegut books exist in their own special world, and I love his deadpan black humor and quick, biting thoughts about the world and humanity and its cruelty.  Deadeye Dick was not my favorite Vonnegut book, but it did fit his traditional formula, and you can't mess up too much a sure thing. 

Deadeye Dick is the story of Rudy Waltz, who earned that unfortunate nickname as a kid when he shot a gun off his roof, and the stray bullet killed a pregnant woman vacuuming.  It is the seminal moment of his life, and he narrates his life story as a 50 year old man living in a hotel in Haiti.  His family was wrecked after that incident, so Rudy devoted his life to serving his incompetent parents.  His dad was a former friend of Hitler, a failed artist and eccentric, a gun collector, and a rich know-it-all in the small city of Midland.  But that was before the shooting, and he took the blame for his son, spent some time in jail, lost his money, and ended up just moping around the house all day with his wife.  Rudy's brother Felix fought in WWII, and was president of NBC for a time.  He had six wives, and ended up moving to Haiti with his brother. 

Rudy spent his life repenting for his crime.  He called himself a neuter, neither hetero or homosexual, just not interested in sex altogether.  He cooked and cleaned for his parents, while working the night shift as a pharmacist.  He wrote a play about a friend of his fathers who left Ohio for the Himalayas, looking for Shangri-La.  The play won a prize and was performed on Broadway, but was a huge flop.  His dad died, and he lived with his mom, but she soon died from a radioactive mantlepiece.  After that, he bought a hotel in Haiti, and just in time, because Midland City was destroyed accidentally by a neutron bomb.  It killed everyone but left all the structures intact.  Rudy and Felix get to tour this mausoleum city.  They reflect that it was a dying city anyway, and that nobody seems to miss it.  The government probably did it on purpose so they could give the structures to refugees from poor black countries, essentially creating a new slavery.  The buildings and things remained intact, so they kept everything important, right?

This is a book about the cruelty of people on all sides.  The isolation that people can feel even though they are surrounded.  It is about trying to find happiness, as in Shangri-La, or giving up completely and submitting to life.  It is a commentary on gun control, class structure, who is real and who is fake, nuclear arms, art, and perspectives.  Vonnegut's last lines are very direct.  "You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages.  The Dark Ages-- they haven't ended yet."  Even though he was a prolific writer, I still wish the world had more Kurt Vonnegut, and actually listened to what he had to say.  Three and a half out of four stars.

A Novel BookKeith

Read from Tuesday, January 25th to Thursday, January 27th.

A Novel Bookstore, by Laurence Cosse. I read this large book a lot quicker than I expected. I flew through the 400 pages in just two days. It was an easy read, nothing too difficult and with short chapters and lots of dialogue. When I first heard about this book, I was very intrigued, and I bought it right away. It is a story, originally published in France, of two booksellers who open a store that only sells good, quality literature, and not the latest trendy book.

Ivan and Francesca are both very passionate about literature, novels in particular. With Francesca's inheritance, they team up to open The Good Novel, in Paris. In this bookstore, they only sell novels that have been selected by a committee of authors as their favorites. The committee members are kept secret, so they cannot be pressured in their selections. It is an instant success. However, with success breeds resentment and anger. Authors who have not been selected are upset, as are publishers who make money off the trash, and critics whose choices are usurped by the book store. There begins a negative campaign against Van and Francesca. Newspapers publish vitriolic articles, there are angry web postings, and eventually there are violent attacks on some of the authors in the secret committee, whose identities have been stolen and revealed.

Nobody is killed yet, but Van and Francesca hire a detective to find out who is behind these attacks and defamations. Meanwhile, there are subplots of Van falling in love with a college girl named Anis, and Francesca confesses her unrequited love of Van. Unfortunately, he is obsessed over Anis, so that love cannot happen. Francesca becomes melancholy and distracted from the bookstore, and sales start to slow down. They are having difficulty surviving, and three new bookstores open in the area as competition. Finally, Francesca is hit by a bus and dies. Van buys the rights to the Good Novel, and after starting a collective, moves the store to a better location. Him and Anis move in together, and she is revealed to be the secret narrator of the book.

This book was very paradoxical. It made me think a lot. It talks about all the fine French literature,and the importance of great novels. However, I did not think the book itself was very well written. It had moments of greatness, but overall was pretty cliched and predictable. On the cover, a review said it was 'a hymn to fine literature,' and I think that is a good way to put it. It is a love song about fine literature, but it does not pretend to be fine literature either. It is a mystery novel about the publishing and book selling businesses.

However, the subject matter is fascinating. I have always wanted to do something like this, open a store that only sold books I liked. It is like Cosse was writing directly to me, although I am sure that many out there would say the same. The vast majority of books mentioned were French, and I unfortunately have never heard of them. I wish there were more shout-outs to books I have read, so I could feel like I would belong in the Good Novel clientele. They did mention Bolano's Savage Detectives (which I loved) and Pamuk's Snow (which I own but have yet to read).

Some things were left unfinished or unresolved. The detective, Heffner, came up with a solid theory on the failed author behind most of the attacks, but they lacked enough evidence to prosecute. Heffner said he would keep looking, but then the novel ended. Also,the relationship between Anis and Van was confusing and a bit creepy. Anis was a college girl, and Van was over 40 when they met. She played hard to get, but Van was very persistent, and called her all the time. It was not a feel-good romance, it mostly creeped me out.

All in all, it was a good, interesting read. I wish there was a Good Novel bookstore near me, or if I had the funds to open one myself. I would be a frequent customer, I can be sure of that. I would be interested to learn more about some of that French literature as well. Three and a half out of five stars.

The Keith of Crocodiles (and other stories)

Read from Tuesday, January 18th to Tuesday, January 25th. 

The Street of Crocodiles, and Other Stories, by Bruno Schultz.  This is the collected fiction of Polish writer Bruno Schultz, who was tragically killed by a Nazi Gestapo officer.  It includes, The Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, and three other short stories, Fatherland, Autumn and The Republic of Dreams.  I only learned of Schultz after hearing about Jonathan Safran Foer's new book Tree of Codes.  It is a different die-cut on each page that is more like a work of art in a book.  I am eagerly awaiting that book, I ordered it online but it is delayed by the publisher.  Tree of Codes is cut out of Street of Crocodiles, so I thought I should read the full version before seeing what it has been carved into.  I was not disappointed, this book was excellent.  I can see why Foer said it was his favorite book of all time. 

All of the writing in this book can be discussed together.  While Sanatorium and Crocodiles were published at different times, they are remarkably similar.  There is no traditional plot, just many different chapters or short stories that revolve around a family, from the point of view of the young narrator, Joseph.  The main character could be considered Father, who while a shop-owner, is also the family eccentric.  He is an inventor, scientist, astronomer, bird-breeder (I guess you could say), and mythological Demiurge.  All of the stories are magical in that sense, and Father repeatedly transforms, dies, comes back to life.  It is tough to encompass all of the stories in this review.  In one, a comet is heading to Earth; there are the magical cinnamon shops in town; the street of crocodiles section of the city; the sanatorium that Father and Joseph are trapped in, where time moves backwards, and Father exists almost everywhere at once; there are cockroaches, and birds, and magnificent gales.  There are stamp collections with political intrigue, wax figures come to life, a magical Book, and a Republic of Dreams.

Most amazing is Schultz's use of language.  Although it is translated from Polish to English, this book is just simply beautiful to read.  The imagery, description, metaphors and everything else is brilliant, and I had to read certain passages out loud.  Especially evident throughout the book is his descriptions of seasons.  Each story is firmly set within a certain season, which is beautifully personified.  Other common themes and symbols throughout were the flies and cockroaches, the wind, the town square, Adela the maid, and the beds as a boat to sail away.  Similar to magical realism, everything had a fantastical, mythical element to it.  This is the kind of book I would love to write (if I had that amount of talent.)  I am so very excited for Tree of Codes, and I need to read this book again as well.  First five star review.  Five out of five stars.

Beds unmade for days on end, piled high with bedding crumpled and disordered from the weight of dreams, stood like deep boats waiting to sail into the dank and confusing labyrinths of some dark starless Venice.

The Land of Keith Plums

Read from Wednesday, January 12th to Monday, January 17th.

The Land of Green Plums, by Herta Muller.  I first heard about this book recently after I saw that it won the 2009 Nobel prize for literature, even though the book was first written in the early 1990's.  It is a haunting book, apparently close to an autobiography, of a young woman and her friends stuck in Romania during Communist rule under the dictator Ceausescu (I can never pronounce that name).  Reading almost like poetry, and without any traditional chapters or sequential flow of time, this was a great book, and I am glad I took a chance on it.

The narrator, unnamed in the book but can be seen as Herta Muller, starts off by describing Lola, her roommate at college.  She slept around with strangers, and then ultimately killed herself when one of them rejected her.  After Lola's death, the narrator bonds with three male classmates, Georg, Kurt and Edgar.  They all have German heritage, and that makes them subversives in the eyes of the dictatorship and the secret police.  They collect books and poems and keep them hidden, but eventually they fall under the scrutiny of Captain Pjele, of the secret police.  He questions them constantly, terrorizes them, and eventually gets them fired from their jobs after college.  They all try to emigrate to Germany, but Pjele makes it a bureaucratic nightmare for them, and continues to track them after they have left.  Only Edgar and the narrator survive, Georg and Kurt both mysteriously kill themselves.

More than the plot itself, the book is about life in that communist dictatorship.  It is about the emotions of feeling trapped, the helplessness, the mindless hordes of the proletariat.  It abounds with symbols and metaphors, such as the wooden melons and tin sheep (for the industrialization of agriculture and rural life, and the complete state control of that system), the chicken torture, her hair, her belts (Lola's suicide), seamstresses, dogs, the blood guzzling accomplices, back-pain, and most notably the green plums, which the guards and police devoured constantly, even though they were not ripe and were dangerous.  They represent the complete corruption and greed of the state, that has infiltrated all aspects of the society.  Every resident is affected, whether they bend and become accomplices and informers, or they break and become a casualty of the state.  This is a beautiful, haunting poem with such rich language that it deserves to be read out loud.  Highly recommended, five out of five stars.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Keith

Read from Monday, January 3rd to Wednesday, January 12th.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon. This book, another from my haul from that used book store in Asheville, North Carolina, is widely considered to be Chabon's masterpiece.  I had previously read Gentlemen of the Road, by Chabon, and I was not very impressed.  But this epic story of two cousins, Josef Kavalier and Sammy Clay, truly lived up to the expectations.  It was a very long story, but it was well written, defied standard formulations, and constantly kept surprising me.

A brief synopsis:  Josef (Joe) Kavalier is a Jewish boy from Prague, growing up in the 1930's under growing German authority.  He studies both art and magic, mainly how to be an escape artist, like Houdini.  However, under threat of war, his parents secure passage for him to America.  The Germans stop him at the border, so he hides in the coffin of the Golem of Prague, and finally escapes to New York City, where he stays with his aunt and cousin he just met, Sam Clay.  In New York, he resolves to get a job to save up enough money to get all the rest of his family to America.  Sammy is an aspiring graphic designer and he longs to get rich and escape his family and city.  Sammy quickly discover that Joe can draw really well.  At this point, Superman is starting to take off, and Sammy and Joe resolve to create their own comic book, based on their own character, the Escapist.  Joe draws the comics and Sammy writes the stories.  Through the help of Sammy's boss, they are able to publish their stories, and it is a big hit.

Newly rich in New York, the boys live a good life.  Joe begins a relationship with Rosa, and they work on saving enough money to secure passage for Joe's brother Thomas on a ship to America.  Joe takes up performing magic shows at bar mitzvahs.  They create new characters and comic books, and their characters are turned into a radio show, and later a movie.  However, Sammy discovers he is homosexual, and begins a covert relationship with the star of the radio show, Tracy Bacon.  And Joe encounters many bureaucratic nightmares trying to get Thomas to New York.  The war is growing, and Joe fights as many Germans as he can provoke.  He is upset by his inability to do anything to save his family.  Finally, Sammy is forced by the police to give up his relationship with Tracy, and on the same night the ship that is carrying Thomas is sunk by a German U-boat.  Joe runs away and joins the navy that same night.

The next chapter is dark and surreal.  Joe is stationed in Antarctica.  But due to carbon monoxide poisoning, all his fellow soldiers and dogs are killed at the station, except for the pilot.  They stave off cabin fever all winter, and then set off to kill a lone German scientist stationed at the other end of the continent.  Joe does kill him, although he immediately regrets it.  He is brought back to the States, but he remains alone.  He hides from Sammy and Rosa, who meanwhile have gotten married, although it is a marriage of convenience.  Rosa was pregnant when Joe ran off, although she hadn't revealed it yet.  She named her boy Tommy, and Sammy felt it his duty to stay and help raise him.  Finally, eleven years after Joe had run away, he reveals himself to Tommy in a comic book shop.  Tommy eventually lets his secret escape, and Sammy and Rosa bring Joe back home with them.  There are many awkward exchanges, and reconciling the past with Tommy.  Sammy and Joe talk of grand new plans to buy a publishing house and create a whole new line of comics aimed toward adult audiences.  But Sammy runs off this time, heading to California, finally accepting his sexual identity.  Joe and Rosa are free to resume where they left off.

Kavalier and Clay is a grand tome that fits the character's lives snugly into the history of the country, both in the political and military history, and the cultural and comic book history of that golden age.  Chabon treats the book as if it is an historical novel.  He acts as a reporter and researcher, even including footnotes about certain artifacts and documents, even though they never existed.  Along with the time line of actual facts, it gives the book a real authenticity.   There are many interesting recurring themes and symbols.  The theme of escape is ever-present.  Everyone is escaping from something, whether it is Prague, New York, family, responsibilities, or death.  As well there are many symbols of Jewish mythology, such as the Golem of Prague, a superhero in its own right.  Comic books are given their deserved rights as a legitimate form of media and art.  The superheroes represent everything that the characters, and we the readers, aspire to be.  They unleash their frustrations on Hitler, they do good and they act, they are not passive observers.

The chapters on Antarctica were some of my favorites.  There was a whole new tone in those chapters, and it was very surreal.  It was a psychological adventure, and it reminded me of Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges.  Chabon definitely experimented in this book, and it paid off.  His masterful attention to detail, and his beautiful imagery worked exceptionally well in this book as well.  This book exceeded my expectations.  Four and a half out of five stars.

Keith Office

Read from Saturday, January 1st to Monday, January 3rd.

Post Office, by Charles Bukowski. Bukowski was always one of those semi-famous underground authors that I wanted to check out. So one day I bought three of his books on Amazon. This is the first that I've read.

Apparently it is the first of a series of books about a character called Henry Chinaski, who is Bukowski's literary alter ego. Chinaski is an alcoholic, a womanizer, and a gambler at the race tracks. In this book, he painfully suffers through many years of working at the Post Office in LA in the 1950s and 60s. He is a letter carrier first, and then a clerk that sorts the mail. The bosses are always all over him, and Chinaski has to constantly file his job down into smaller and smaller time increments. He always shows up hungover, and frequently takes days off to go to the race track, where he has some mild success. He suffers through all the write-ups and reprimands and crazy co-workers and bosses.

He also lives with a string of 'shack-jobs,' women that he supports. But they eventually all he leave him one way or another, and he goes off and finds another. Chinaski is just looking for the cheap, easy thrills of life. He is not greedy, but he has his three vices of gambling, booze, and women. Eventually the post office and the women wear him down so much that he finally resigns. He goes on a bender and almost kills himself. But he persists, and wakes up one morning and writes a novel. That is where the story ends, presumably to be picked up in the next installment.

It is a quick book with short chapters. Filled with black humor, we the readers, along with Chinaski himself, are able to laugh at his life and job. I am interested to see where he goes from here. Three and a half out of five stars.

Keith Stealing Horses

Read from Wednesday, December 29th to Saturday, January 1st, 2011.

Out Stealing Horses, by Per Peterson. First book of the new year! My first instinct was to make a resolution to read more books, but I think I am keeping up a good pace right now. I should probably slow down a little to focus on other areas of my life (i.e. get a job!).

This book, supposedly a classic in his native Norway, was recently translated into English, and the translator did a beautiful job. I got this as a present for my Mom for her birthday in October, and she regifted it to me as a Christmas present. I am not complaining, it was a great book in good condition.

It is the story of an elderly man, Trond. Having lost his wife in an accident, he leaves the city, Oslo, and moves to an isolated old cabin in the north. He spends his days with his dog fixing up the place. Then he meets his neighbor, another old man, and Trond starts having memories of a summer when he was 15, back in 1948. The rest of the book is alternating chapters of the present, and the summer in 1948.

During that time Trond spent the summer with his father in a small cabin in the north as well. Trond was friends with a boy, Jon, in a neighboring cabin, but one day he left a gun out and his brother Lars shot his other brother, and Jon was sent away to be a sailor. It is then revealed that the present day neighbor is that boy Lars who shot his brother. (Do they live in the same houses as when they were kids that summer? It is not explicitly revealed or denied.)


Most of the story focuses on the relationship between Trond and his father, who has a mysterious past. He would disappear for months at a time during the war. It turned out he was a spy, secretly delivering messages to resistance fighters across the border in Sweden. Trond and his dad and some neighbors work on clearing some forest and shipping the logs down the river to a sawmill. At one point Trond catches his dad kissing the wife in the neighboring cabin. He is confused for a lot of the summer, constantly admitting that he does not know everything he should. Everything becomes clearer by the end of the summer. They bond on a trip on horses down the river, but after Trond is sent home to Oslo, his father never follows, and he never sees him again. Trond worries that his father stayed with Jon and Lars' mother, and he spent the rest of his life as a father to Lars. It is never revealed, and Trond does not ask Lars about it. But he takes the absence of that conversation as proof.


Trond struggles with the memory of that summer while alone in his own cabin, as winter is setting in. He physically begins to have problems as well. Then his daughter tracks him down and tries to reconnect with her father. It is a cyclical story, but Trond ultimately decides not to abandon his own children like his father had.


It is a beautiful book, full of rich imagery of a summer and winter in rural Norway. The book makes me want to visit that area. See the deep woods, the river, stay in a cabin. Trond and his father are complicated men. Similar in many ways, they are hard workers, appreciate a good day's labor and keeping things organized. They value nature and honesty. It is a shame that he had to abandon him like that. I really enjoyed the book with its beautiful, poetic prose. Information is shown to us readers slowly and deliberately, and the story unfolds in ways you cannot expect. Highly recommended. Four out of five stars.

The Wordy ShipKeith

Read from Sunday, December 26th to Wednesday, December 29th.

The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell. This was a history book, one that I got as a Christmas present from my girlfriend. Sarah Vowell is an NPR broadcaster and author with a great sense of humor. In this book, she examines the Puritans that founded the great state of Massachusetts (where I'm from). Vowell uses the original documents written by these men as the primary sources, and she tries to paint a different picture of the colony than we tend to imagine.

Vowell follows the voyage of John Winthrop and the Arbella ship that founded Boston. She does not talk about the Mayflower voyage or the Plymouth Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving. The main character is John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630. Winthrop imagined the colony to be a 'city upon a hill,' a line repeated many times by leaders of our country as justification for American exceptionalism. Winthrop also kept an extensive journal of those first ten years of the colony. He was a complicated man. Serving off and on as governor, he was considered by some to be too lenient, but at other times a traditional harsh Puritan. He sympathized with Roger Williams, a dissident of the colony that was exiled to Rhode Island, because he taught religious tolerance.

There were many minor theological problems that plagued the colony, such as Anne Hutchinson and her followers. She believed in a more evangelical Christianity, that the spirit dwelled within the believer. She was kicked out as well. Then there was also the Pequot War. Soldiers from the colony massacred an Indian settlement, including women and children. Through it all, the colony survived and flourished, and thankfully the religious fanaticism subsided.

Vowell is a liberal, and she definitely lets her personal viewpoint come across frequently. She is funny and witty, and points out the hypocrisy in many of the old beliefs. However, she is sympathetic to these founders. For all their flaws, they advanced and changed as best as they could, and it could have been worse. They were not all bad people, they were just products of their society at the time. I will definitely read more Sarah Vowell in the future. Three and a half out of five stars.

Keith in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

Read from Wednesday, December 22nd to Sunday, December 26th.

Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, the classic by Lewis Carroll. These two books combined in one are really one long story of Alice and her journeys through a magical, nonsensical land of strange creatures and objects. I read this book after finally seeing the modern movie adaptation starring Johnny Depp, directed by Tim Burton. The movie is very different than the book. The movie borrows certain scenes, characters and lines and forms a coherent plot and adventure for Alice.

The book, both stories in fact, follow Alice as she meets new people and animals. There is really no plot. In Alice in Wonderland, she tries to get to the Queen's garden to play croquet, and while avoiding getting beheaded, she is called upon as a witness in a court. In Through the Looking Glass, Alice goes through a mirror and follows a journey that loosely follows a chess game, as she is a pawn that makes it to the other side and becomes a queen. But in each short chapter she meets new characters. Some of my favorites were the Mad Hatter and friends, the Chesire Cat, Humpty Dumpty, the King of cards, the Mock Turtle, and others. All the characters are mad, and make no sense. They play upon the English Language, and recite many funny poems. Alice maintains her reason and child-like sense of wonder. She is not afraid, but merely keeps exploring.

Carroll wrote these stories for Alice Liddell, a little English girl he was friends with. He would tell her and her sisters stories, and they begged him to write them down. The stories are fun, and it is interesting to hear the origins of so many phrases and characters that we take for granted. Carroll is a master of the language, so some passages are witty adventure rides for the reader. I would have liked more of a plot or more danger, but it was good nonetheless. Three out of five stars.