No Logo

No Logo

By Naomi Klein

After finishing this book I feel like I need a shower. Klein chronicles the modern world of branding and the resistance it engenders. Her work is comprehensive and profoundly disturbing, as it should be.

Klein goes everywhere in this one book. From export processing zones in The Philippines (if you don't know what those are you should read the book and then go cry in a corner for a while) to street protests in England to NikeTown in New York. She does an incredible job linking diverse problems with the root cause of neoliberal global capitalism.

But she does more than just decry sweatshops, Klein analyzes the way corporations create meaning for us. At its heart No Logo is a book about branding and the declining freedom from it. She writes about how we got to where we are and the process of corporations renouncing "things" in order to produce mostly semiotic signs. She then describes what this means in terms of our present reality - temp jobs and advertisements everywhere with CEOs cashing multi-million dollar bonuses while workers try to find full-time employment.

Yet despite all the problems Klein describes, she doesn't leave the reader without some hopes. She does not cave in to the simple lesson of the story which would be that we can all do better by purchasing responsibly blah blah blah Thomas Friedman bullshit. Instead she makes clear that the only solution to an institutional problems is institutional. The stories of resistance that accompany every problem are heartening and a necessary component of the book so it doesn't turn into a misery-fest.

No Logo is compulsively readable, which isn't the case with all books about the evils of branding and global capitalism. Klein doesn't fall into the trap of feeling sorry for herself or the rest of us, but rather is genuinely looking toward future solutions. The world is fucked up, but we're gonna have something to say about it. The most important thing readers can gather from No Logo is awareness, and with such a wide-ranging comprehensive book, it's a perfect resource for any commodity-obsessed young person in your life.

Love in The Days of Rage

Love in The Days of Rage
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I swore I wasn't going to buy any books. The English Graduate Association sometimes sets up a table in the lobby of the English building and sells used books to fund programs. Paperbacks cost a dollar a piece. I looked over and decided there wasn't anything I really needed enough to add it to my pile, so I sat down and read a book out of my bag. But I couldn't stop peeking at the piles out the corner of my eye. I saw Love in The Days of Rage and knew I would have to surrender. When I saw another student move toward the pile, I got up and bought it. Resigned.
Love in The Days of Rage is short enough to be called a novella. At just over 100 pages, it's a quick read, although not as quick as I thought it would be. Ferlinghetti - one of my favorite of the beat poets - writes prose in an unsurprising poetic way. There are pages that could pass as excellent poems; metaphors and similes not usually found in works of prose.
The story is about a woman - Annie - an American expatriate artist living in Paris in 1968 in the midst of the student uprising. She meets a man named Julian, a Portuguese banker with radical anarchist beliefs. The story revolves around their relationship as they grow closer against the backdrop of the revolution outside.
The biggest achievement of Love in The Days of Rage is its ability to intertwine the personal and political. Annie wonders constantly if Julian is all he claims - how could he be both an insurrectionary anarchist and a bourgeois banker? And what can't he tell her? She loves him but has a hard time justifying dating a plutocrat in the midst of a revolution.
The depictions of the students is romantic in the best way. Ferlinghetti does his job and raises question about how effective the protests are. But the demonstrators and demonstrations seem, above all, beautiful. This is Ferlinghetti's talent put to use, showing not just the anger, but the beauty of the protests. He writes about how poetry is used as both a sword and a shield.
It doesn't have as much protest-porn as I would have liked, but it still makes me wish I had been there.

Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest

By John Updike

John Updike's magnum opus series - Rabbit Angstrom - is one of those works that should be read in high schools but isn't for a lot of different reasons. Updike doesn't have the tragedy of a Hemingway or the shyness of a Salinger. He's undoubtedly a modern canonical author, but his work doesn't fit in the current trend in the literary world. With the opening of the canon, most modern authors that have been added - at least to school book lists -are from underrepresented minority groups. Not that these books aren't worthy, but it leaves out excellent authors like Updike. I'd be willing to trade some Shakespeare in for the more relevant Updike.

Rabbit at Rest is the final volume of the four-book series. The novels follow former-high-school basketball star Rabbit Angstrom as he moves through the 50's , 60's, 70's and 80's, each book taking one decade. Rabbit is a sort of everyman, a product of his times. With the shift of American society, Rabbit shifts too.

Rabbit at Rest takes place in the 80's, with the end of Reagan administration and Bush Senior taking office. Rabbit finally starts feeling like a relic. He's in his 50's and having serious heart problems. His illness and decline is paired with what he sees as the same decline of America. AIDS and the drug war are in the news, and he fears in his own family. His son Nelson is now an adult (sorta) and has taken over Springer Motors - Rabbit's wife's inherited car lot. Rabbit at Rest is largely about Rabbit and Nelson's relationship. All the trauma Rabbit has visited upon his son comes to the forefront as Nelson struggles with drug addiction while trying to raise a family and run a business - none of which he does very well.

Concluding a series like Updike's must be a difficult job. Philip Roth's Exit Ghost (also reviewed on this blog) did the same thing, and I think did it better. Updike's ending is clean, whereas Roth's is frayed. Rabbit's heart problems are neater and easier to deal with that Nathan Zuckerman's prostate cancer. Updike gives a sanitized version of decay, his protagonist doesn't suffer from impotence like Roth's, but instead deals with his continuing libido - and not very well.

Although the final installment of the Rabbit series is my least favorite of the four, it gives the reader a depiction of the 80's in suburban America, instead of the high-flying Wall Street version that's usually portrayed. It's a strong and solid novel that ends one of the better modern narratives, something people who lived it will remember, and those of us who didn't can imagine.

Fathers and Sons

Fathers and Sons

By Ivan Turgenev

According to his Wikipedia entry, Nabokov thought Turgenev was the 4th-best Russian author (above Dostoevsky) and he has the the largest recorded brain-weight. For these reasons alone I wanted to read his best-regarded novel.

Fathers and Sons is about two sets of pre-revolutionary Russian fathers and sons and their ideas about life and society. The new generation's philosophical nihilism is pitted against their fathers' traditional (albeit modernizing) beliefs.

I was surprised how much the character depictions and conflicts remain relevant to this day. It's definitely a good read for radical sons and liberal fathers. It teaches us that our kitchen-table arguments aren't that original. (Dad, I swear I just call you a fascist sometimes because it pisses you off).

The novel also deals with reconciling philosophical dogmas with the reality of human feelings and desires. Can a doctrine like nihilism overthrow the desire for family and love?

The depictions of college-age radicals is right on. They're not portrayed as petulant or dumb, but still in the process of solidifying their beliefs. The adults aren't condescending but are legitimately afraid of the generational shift. The parents also aren't aristocratic autocrats, but rather good-hearted men trying to keep up with changing times. Their interactions have a very realistic nuance.

Tom Stoppard seems to have stolen a lot of Turgenev's ideas in his Coast of Utopia play trilogy. Yet he lacks Turgenev's sympathy for the young men. Stoppard sees them as arbitrary and immature while Turgenev sees that they're bright and forward-looking, if not fully clear on their complete philosophies. The conflict and writing are both engaging and it's a quick read. I generally trust a guy smart enough to write Lolita in his third language, and he didn't let me down.

This Boy's Life

This Boy's Life
By Tobias Wolff

Writing a memoir that doesn't stink of trite self-obsession is a tough job these days. Wolff wrote This Boy's Life well before the current crop of made-up personal histories brought shame on the whole genre, and it seems like those fabricators might have read his book for inspiration.
More than anything, This Boy's Life is about the central role lying played in young Mr. Wolff's life. the story is of his childhood, from elementary through high school with his single mother. It has the elements that seem perfunctory in such a story, the crazy abusive step-father and the distant admired father. Thankfully Wolff portrays these people from his memories as just that instead of crude caricatures. He's too good a writer for anything less.
Wolff shows how lying becomes a lifesaver for him in his tumultuous childhood. He has some of the regular childhood experiences with fibbing, but when his trusting mother lets him get away with it, the lies don't contract but expand. It's easy to see the progression from sneaking cigarettes and graffiti to attempted check fraud and boarding school application-doctoring.
The virtuosity of the writing comes though in the lack of emotional blackmail that would have been simple with such a moving story. Wolff doesn't demand the reader's sympathy, but instead tells what happened and how it felt without an apparent an agenda. It's more a work of literature than a confessional sob-story, much like Dave Eggers's Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius.
I'm not sure why true stories tend to sell a lot better than novels about the same topics, it leads to people who have gone through a lot of shit writing about themselves and breaking into the literary world. But Wolff is not this, he is a novelist who tackled the story of his own history.
Just looking for the image for this review I found out there was a movie made in 1993 with Leonardo DiCaprio. Judging from the poster, it's everything I was thankful the book wasn't. That's probably why I never heard of it.

Weight

Weight
By Jeanette Winterson

I have to give my mom her due credit. Throughout my life she has suggested authors I'd like (Gide, Calvino, O'Toole and many more) and I usually ignore her at my own peril before eventually reading them and regretting not doing it years ago. Jeneatte Winterson is one of these authors. It wasn't until my narrative theory professor made me read one of her short stories (the most graphic depiction of lesbian sex I've read for class since grade school) that I finally understood why my mom had been badgering me. Winterson grasps post-modernism in a way no other author I've read does, she swims in it like a fish while other authors doggie-paddle to stay above the water line.
Weight is a re-telling of the myth of Atlas and Heracles with Winterton's signature firm touch. Heracles is basically the frat-boy we would be instead of the Disney hero. It feels like Winterson understands and embraces the brutal sensuality of the Greek myths that we seek to sanitize.
Atlas is long-struggling Christ figure, but his fight is more with himself than with socialism, sorry Ayn Rand.
To just tell the story wouldn't be good enough for Winterson. She integrates autobiographical elements and a Soviet astro-dog to add facets of the Atlas story not normally discussed. She manages to make the break between the (semi)mimetic and non-mimetic cleanly enough not to bother me. It doesn't feel like an exercise, but rather a confession.
Using a familiar myth that already has so much attached to discuss what our pasts mean to our futures is a tough burden, but Winterson shrugs it off with her overwhelming ability. The book is about 150 pages, read it in one sitting, it'll take you about an hour and a half.

Simulations

Simulations
By Jean Baudrillard

Woah.