The Chris Farley Show by Tom Farley, Jr. and Tanner Colby

I do not usually read celebrity biographies. The last one I read was a memoir by Lauren Bacall which I enjoyed sometime in the 1980’s. But Tom Farley is a neighbor, and his son is my son’s friend, so this book came to our house and I started reading it because it was sitting on my kitchen counter. I am happy to say that I was immediately engrossed. The book is a collection of memories of the late comedian Chris Farley, arranged chronologically. Tom Farley (Chris’s older brother) and his co-author Tanner Colby interviewed dozens of people who were close to Chris (family members and friends, both famous and not famous) and strung the bits together to form a coherent portrait of his life. Interspersed between the quotes are brief factual sections that provide some background, but most of the story is told through the voices of those who were interviewed. The structure works very well to keep the story personal and immediate, but still move the action forward.

This book is very sad. Farley’s downward spiral through alcoholism and drug abuse was frighteningly intense. The authors do not sugarcoat or excuse Farley’s behavior and several members of the Farley family and Chris Farley’s immediate circle are open about their own feelings of guilt and failed responsibility. Together all the memories form a collage that I think must accurately reflect Chris Farley’s tortured brilliance. If all celebrity biographies were this good I would read more of them.

(Book 18, 2008)

The Priory by Dorothy Whipple

It’s difficult to read a Persephone book and not view it through a 21st century lens. As I read The Priory I kept thinking things like “The reason Penelope has to make this choice is because she has no education, so no other options are available to her” and “if Christine had her own money she wouldn’t have to leave her baby with her sister.” Of course these reasons are still the reasons if you know what I mean – I am not ascribing motivations inaccurately. But I wonder if I were reading this book in the late 1930’s (when it was originally published) whether I would be as sensitive to them, or would feel as bothered by them.

This is a story of a family of mostly women: two sisters, their aunt and their stepmother; also various women servants. The few male characters are ineffectual and mostly just cause problems for the women. Major Marwood, the father, is a retired army man. His estate is mortgaged, he owes thousands of pounds to his creditors, his house is crumbling around him, yet he stages exorbitant cricket tournaments each summer that put him further and further into debt. The women in his family see his foolish ways but are powerless to stop him. His daughters, Penelope and Christine, are forced to marry men to whom they are ill-suited, and in the case of Christine, whom she barely knows, to escape from the poverty and to have some opportunity for a life. His second wife Anthea sequesters herself in the nursery with her young twins and refuses to acknowledge the state of their finances. She willfully ignores all evidence of it, and forges ahead with an expensive nursemaid and redecorating projects that compound the family’s financial woes. The tragedy of the story is that all three women (and several other women characters also) are intelligent, resourceful, creative people who are given no education and no opportunities to be of any use to society. Anthea’s anger is most clearly drawn through her passive aggressive money battles with the major, but the daughters too (especially Penelope) seethe with suppressed rage.

As with every other Persephone book I’ve read, this book is filled with tiny telling moments that add up to a perfectly rendered world. I do have one small complaint: it’s very long, around 500 pages. I got about 9/10ths of the way through and ran out of gas. (Astute observers of my Shelfari sidebar will know that it’s been stuck there for weeks.) I finally finished it last night.

(Book 17, 2008)

Icebergs by Rebecca Johns

This is beautifully written and very moving but I couldn't finish it. I got too upset by the two WWII airmen who were stranded in Labrador in a snowstorm after their plane crashed. I just didn't want to read about their deaths (or rather the death of one of them, given what I managed to glean from the blurb). Alternating with the story of the two lost airmen is the story of Dottie, one of their wives, who is home on her family's farm in southern Ontario. I really liked her story, but again, I couldn't figure out how to read just those parts. I can usually read about unpleasant things but this time it was too raw. It was almost like I thought maybe I could keep the airman alive if I didn't read the part where he dies. I may try this book again when I am in a different mood.

This book reminds me of another wonderful book about a Canadian family in the years after World War II. That book is A Good House by Bonnie Burnard. I never have met anyone who has read this, but I thought it was extremely good. I don't know why it didn't get any press.

Both Icebergs and A Good House are examples of how a skilled author can turn domestic fiction into art. Both feature measured prose, a lack of sentimentality, and very realistic characters.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

This is not my usual thing, but I liked it. I was alerted to it after reading Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips, which I see now is pretty similar in premise, if not in style or execution. Gods Behaving Badly is much lighter and funnier. This book is dark, but very engrossing.

Here’s the idea: when an immigrant comes to America, he brings his gods (or other mystical creatures) with him. Thus the Irish brought the Leprechauns and the African slaves brought Anansi. These gods are still here, wandering around, getting by as best they can, even though almost no one believes in them any more. Recently, Americans have begun to believe in new gods, and they are here also; they include Media, who looks like a television newscaster, and also a god called Technical Boy – I’m not exactly sure what his area is, but he’s always going on about wireless Internet. Eventually, as you would imagine, these gods must battle for supremacy.

The leader of the old gods is Mr. Wednesday, who is of course Odin, the god of war in the Norse pantheon. But as in any good myth, Wednesday’s role is multi-layered and his motivations not always pure. He takes a protégé called Shadow, who turns out to be much more than he seems – this uncovering of people’s real (mythological) identities is the most fun part of the book. Gaiman does a great job of integrating mythology from every corner of the world, and while some characters I could identify right away, others were complete mysteries. Who is the old woman with dead mice in her refrigerator? I would love to find some kind of god-by-god guide to all the characters in this book.

Wikipedia has an article that identifies many of them, but it’s not complete, Some gods appear under their real names (Wisakedjak, of the Algonquins, and the Slavic god Czernobog, for example) but many use aliases, and the article doesn’t connect the gods to their associated characters, except in a few places. A few Web sites have popped up that do some decoding, but I haven’t found one that is really comprehensive.

My only complaint about this book is that the non-stop action and on-going puzzle of who’s who can obscure some problems with the plot. Some things didn’t quite hang together for me, and some characters’ motivations were sketchy, at best. And who, exactly, were Mr. Wood and Mr. Stone? But it was hard to get too worried about these details when the story was so compelling.

(Book 16, 2008)

My Life in France by Julia Child

This is a quick read. Three things struck me about it. One is this: Where will memoirs like this come from in the age of e-mail? Child and her co-author, Alex Prud’Homme drew heavily from letters she and her husband Paul Child wrote while they lived in France in the 1940’s and ‘50’s. These letters were saved by the recipients and were returned to Julia to help her remember her years in France in detail. Thus this book is filled with vivid descriptions of meals, friends, and vacations, details that no one would remember 50 years on without letters or perhaps diaries to jog the memory. Nowadays an American living in France is writing e-mail messages home to family and friends; what happens to these messages? I don’t imagine anyone is archiving them, but maybe I’m wrong.

The second thing that I noticed right away was how many hours poor Julia spent typing and retyping her manuscript! Mastering the Art of French Cooking would have been published years earlier if Julia had had a computer (but then again, she wouldn’t have had those hand-written letter to draw from, so it all evens out).

And the final thing that struck me was how far away from Julia’s ideal of cooking and dining we have traveled in this country. Going to the outdoor market, buying chicken from the old woman who raised the birds, perfectly cooking the chicken in butter with fresh herbs, making a simple salade verte to go with it, choosing the correct wine; I can’t even pretend that this is my life.

(Book 15, 2008)

The Italian Lover by Robert Hellenga

The Italian Lover is the story of two middle-aged Americans who meet and fall in love. Woody is a Classics professor who teaches American students in Italy, and Margot is a restorer of ancient manuscripts with a studio in Florence. They are an interesting couple, and interesting things happen to them: a movie producer is making a film version of a memoir Margot wrote years before and Woody and Margot work on a screenplay together. We also get to know the movie producer, the director, and the cast of the movie. Margot and Woody are intelligent and well educated, and there is much talk of literature, art, film, and history. It’s a good formula for a lovely literary novel set in Italy.

But wait, there’s more going on here. Years ago I read another book by Hellenga called The Fall of a Sparrow and it remains one of my favorite books of all time. I always meant to get around to his first novel The Sixteen Pleasures, and another recent one, Philosophy Made Simple, but didn’t quite. What I failed to realize is that The Italian Lover is a sequel to all three of these earlier books. Woody is also the protagonist of The Fall of a Sparrow, and Margot’s story is in both The Sixteen Pleasures and Philosophy Made Simple (the protagonist of this one is her father). To complicate matters further, The Sixteen Pleasures is the memoir (really a novel!) that they are filming in The Italian Lover.

I would like to tell you that you could read and enjoy The Italian Lover without having read any of the previous books, and maybe that’s true. But knowing Woody as I do (he makes a memorable impression in TFOAS) added a great deal of depth to this reading experience. I wish I had had the same background for Margot. So if you really want to do this right, read the books in the order in which they were written (The Sixteen Pleasures, The Fall of a Sparrow, Philosophy Made Simple and finally The Italian Lover), OR, read the one book about Woody (TFOAS) first, then read the two books about Margot (T16P and PMS), then read The Italian Lover.

Hellenga is an enormously intelligent writer, and he creates complex memorable characters (and great women characters!) While my description above may make this book sound a bit light, it isn’t; it’s subtle and emotional. But this book also isn’t nearly as powerful as The Fall of a Sparrow. The Fall of a Sparrow is the story of the death of Woody’s daughter Carolyn in the Bologna train station bombing in 1980, and the subsequent disintegration of his marriage. It’s a complex analysis of fatherhood, faith, anger, forgiveness, politics, terrorism, death, and art, and it’s truly a brilliant book that will haunt me forever. While I’m happy to see that Woody has finally found some peace and happiness with Margot, The Italian Lover did not move me the way The Fall of a Sparrow did. So if you don’t want to embark upon a total Robert Hellenga trip, just read that one instead of this one. Though I plan to go backwards soon and read Margot and her father’s stories as well.

(Book 14, 2008)

Last Rituals by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

It's been a long time since a book gave me nightmares, but this one did. And when I woke up, I was angry. Why did the author have to make this book so gruesome?

I think Yrsa (to be correct in Icelandic) is a talented writer, and she's created a likeable protagonist, Thora, and a great setting at the University of Iceland with quirky professors and likeable janitors and an interesting subplot about some missing historial documents, and then she's plunked this totally revolting murder into the middle of it. I kept trying to read around the murder but that didn't work, as you would imagine. Finally I gave up. I'm really disappointed to not be able to finish this book, because I like Thora, and I like Iceland and all the other stuff, but what happens to this murdered guy (who seems like he deserves it) just makes me lose my lunch (or certainly my sleep) and I couldn't hack it any more.