Letter to my blog

Dear blog,

I'm sorry you're feeling alone. I guess november blues doesn't make it easier, does it. Poor you, what must be going on in your heart. I know, I only wrote one review in November. But please keep in mind that I'm reading more books at the same time. Some need to be returned to the library, others are personal property, so I take more time with them. It doesn't mean I'm not reading and I'm not thinking about you. I do. I wonder if you like my latest review. I'm being really mean with all writers, aren't I? What all will people tell about my imaginary book, I wonder? I need to be prepared for the worse. Please don't take my reviews personally. I know you had to put up with a lot, and you can't even mutter a word of disapproval. You just sit there and accept everything like a good mother.

Listen to me, I haven't even asked how you feel about the settings, layout, you like them? Would you like to see any changes? What? They're too long? The reviews? Oh, it means they're also boring. Well, sorry, it's not Saturday Night Live here. I can't make writers' work better in a review. If they had asked me for cowriting, it would have been a totally different story. I would have felt obliged to be corteous. Luckily I have no obligations.

How are you, how is space treating you? Are satellites on time with dinner delivery, do you catch all 400 TV channels? Oh, c'mon, so what if Oprah retires? You should open an account on Facebook. It will make you feel better.

C'mon, let's get us some Tori Amos on youtube and chocolate icecream. Love is a tap, after all, and there's never want of plumbers.

Paulo, Oh, Coelho! or The Reader Stands Alone

He has a wonderful name. Very romantic. Paulo Coelho. It’s only natural that I like it, as I love Romance languages, I’m a Romanian. But when it comes to his books, and I admit only reading 2 of them, 11 Minutes and The Winner Stands Alone, I don’t think I’ll ever be tempted to start another one authored by him. “The Winner..’’ is the one I’m going to talk about since I just finished it. And it will probably be the briefest review I’ll ever write (am I being too optimistic?).
This book confirmed again the ‘’De gustibus non disputandum’’ dictum, I guess (sorry for the tongue twister). It must be a good book since I read it with quite an excitement probably caused by the successfully woven detective novel plot. A psychopat rich guy (which adjective goes first? And it’s not a grammar but an existential question!) decides to randomly kill people at the Cannes festival where he knows his ex-wife is present, just to draw her attention that he wants her back. In his view, anything is Ok as long as it's in the name of Love, even destroying whole worlds. He is the owner of an international phone company, so I guess the business might have run much smoother, without bloodshed, had he just picked up the phone and left a few voice mails. Alas, that cannot be recounted in 341 pages, that’s true. And then, he does have some cuckoos in his attic caused by his heroic participation in the Afghanistan war where he learned how to kill without remorse. The whole action happens only within a day - 4 victims, I think-, so I have to admit, he’s good at suspense and keeping my attention. The criminal manages to escape of course, and the morale is, well, a lot of bad guys get away with crime nowadays, so, bravo, realism at its best. Other than a successful plot, I feel I didn’t get much out of this book. He really tried, maybe too hard, to write more than a detective novel. He wanted to depict a modern kali yug in which stars of the show biz fall prey to an insatiable will for power: actors, fashion models, couturiers who all want to make it and forget when it’s time to stop and enjoy the simple things in life, like love and family. The problem is this craving-for-power-leitmotif gets repetitive and it loses its charm over 300 and more pages. Moreover, instead of him lecturing me on Power and the mortal traps it might set for people chasing it, I would have preferred to see it reflected in the way characters acted.
Another thing I don’t like about Coelho is his lack of language artistry. He’s blunt like my kitchen knives. How could he ever touch me? Not to mention he writes a short summary of his book together with the ‘philosophy’ behind it on the VERY first page. I mean, WTF, it’s like during an exam, the Professor gives you the answers to the problem you’re then ‘trying’ to solve. It only shows he’s afraid he’s going to lose his job, so he’s being a little bit ‘lenient’, poor kids need to make a future. Read as uncle Coelho needs to sell his books. To anyone. So, thanks to God, he tends to the less cultured ones by telling them what the book they’re going to read is about. Because, eventually, at home, the Reader stands alone.

PS. By the way, he has a blog. Please visit and discuss the depths of his work with other fellow enthusiasts.

Call it Masochism

There it is, lying near me: green covers, yellow, stained pages, old library smell. A 1979 edition of Dgey Pe Sartre (in case your tongue has some trouble with the last name, think about a lemon, it will come back to its common shape)- Nausea. Can’t tell you how glad I am I’m done with it. When I was little past the middle of the book, I couldn’t help writing this on Facebook, ‘Reading Sartre’s Nausea is like going to a dentist who runs out of anesthetic every time I have an appointment, so I end up staring at my pain like a frog watching a horror movie.’ I was not surprised there were no reactions to my post. Who in the name of God would read Nausea in the 21st C? Or to put it better, who would read Nausea when she’s thirty? It’s a book that is usually opened when your breasts grow or your voice cracks, and you start either feeling important (in which case you don’t read the whole damn thing; you throw it in the air, let it fall and enjoy whatever’s left from the book), or you’re wondering what’s so damn interesting about being important, anyway (in which case you read the whole damn thing). Sartre must have fallen under the second category, but he overdid himself by leaving the ‘important’ part aside. That he wrote the book when he was 33 years old is something that should leave one pondering or wobbling (depending on what part of the world one finds herself). It might be that red-haired guys grow their first beard only in their thirties. (Research needs to be done). Why did I read it? Call it masochism. Aesthetic masochism. You need to read ‘gloomy’ after ‘happy’, only so you can better enjoy ‘happy’again. You need some junk food after eating only home cooked food, so your taste buds can wholly appreciate the latter. Is there a better way to explain the bitter-sweet polarity of good-and-evil that we’re constantly bathing in? It’s God’s aesthetic taste, that’s all there is to It, if you ask me.

Existentialist friends, before you kill me for good, I have to admit. Sartre is not really junk. I am becoming a fan of the law of attraction. It postulates that the more you think about something the higher the chances it will happen. And it worked. I kept wondering if you can truly say, I read a good book but I did not like it that much. I’m not going to split hairs now about what makes a good book. Let’s just put it simply: something that both entertains you or makes you want to read the book, and has got ‘substance’, or ‘truth’ in it. So vieux Sartre returned from the grave to answer my question. ‘Il est possible, mon amie. It’s a perfectly valid contradiction in terms’, he said running his long fingers through his thick red hair.

What makes Nausea a good book? Well, it is entertaining, it makes you want to flip page after page in the hope that Antoine Roquentin, a historian, will find a cure to his malaise. His Nausea comes from the impossibility to find meaning to life, and thence, his acute feeling of being in the way of existence, of not fitting anywhere, among people, or not even in nature. He is first gripped by anxiety when he tries to pick a pebble from the ground and realizes he can’t because he’s struck by its mere existence and the nothingness it ultimately contains. In a nutshell, everything that follows is Roquentin’s discoveries of the uselessness of himself (‘’I hadn’t the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe’’), of his puppet, defined-by-duty fellow people (“How happy one must be to be nothing more than a Legion of Honor and a moustache’’), the general absurdity of life (“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance’’), and of death itself (“I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives. But even my death would have been in the way”). No surprise that very few ‘events’ really happen, other than his wide range of pathological feelings which sometimes reach the extremes of paranoia (‘’The nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café, I am the one who’s within it’. “I suddenly lost the appearance of a man and they saw a crab running backwards of this human room’’).

So what can a man who feels in the way of Existence do in order to get out of it? He’s permanently in search of what he calls ‘an adventure’, which actually translates as anything that could stir his interest in life again, anything that could make sense, yet all his ways out seem prone to failure: his book, sensual pleasures, love. He realizes it makes no sense to continue writing a book on Marquis Rollebon because he’s a thing of the past, and the past cannot explain existence (‘‘Existence is without memory; of the vanished it retains nothing-not even a memory’’). Finding pleasure in whores is also futile since they’re only doing their job, and as mentioned before, duty is not a good enough reason for existence. Romantic love, expressed by his love for actress Anny, also fails him. Anny escapes him twice. In the past, six years back, she could not bond with him because of a professional (but ultimately, existential) flaw, that of seeing Love as the pursuit of ‘perfect moments’(Ah, quelle illusion!) who never came into being. When they reunite, Antoine finds he's still in love with her, but Anny herself had an existential crisis realizing the grand illusion of her past existence, and of existence, in general, and regards him as a memory of the same past, which doesn’t make sense anymore (I’m not sure I understood her character completely, but I think neither did she, so no worries. The whole point in this book is there is no point. That’s why we can relax).

And relaxed we are. In spite of the uneasy ‘truths’ of this book, which make it a good book, goose bumps and all. The novel can be read as the tremendous angst (yes, I seem to like this word, see previous post) of man of all times who’s trying to make sense of his existence ( even if it may seem a little bit immature for someone to cut himself with a knife just to see if one exists or not, when one is already in their 40’s (not sure ab this detail). Sartre makes painfully accurate observations on the way people falsely define themselves through their social relationships (“People who live in society have learned to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might say,-yes you might say, you might say, nature without humanity”). He laughs at man’s ability to deceive himself in order to justify his meaning in the world (“This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story”). In an absurd universe, time is also a category that can’t make sense (“I don’t know where I am anymore: do I see her motions, or do I foresee them? I can no longer distinguish present from future and yet it lasts, it happens little by little”; “The past is a landlord’s luxury”). Last but not least, Sartre faces the ultimate deception, that of the impossibility of language to define nothingness (“Black? I felt the word deflating, emptied of meaning with extraordinary rapidity. [..] I looked at the root: was it more than black or almost black?)

Call me masochistic, but I’m also optimistic. The book ends in a rather ambiguous fashion. We find Roquentin elated at hearing a jazz tune, which moves him and suddenly gives him Hope. He is stirred by the possibility that he could write a novel that could give meaning to his life and make him finally accept himself. So even if his safe line is an uncertain future, I choose to believe the novel has an optimistic ending.

All of a sudden this review has an undesired length and an incroyable air of seriousness. A light nausea encompasses the writer's stomach and her fingers turn slowly into black insects. (Hey, that’s another novel.) But I, I have learned the Sartrian lesson. Existence doesn’t make sense out of existence. We live in order to live. We make love in order to make love. We make art in order to make art. Amen and women.

An itchy book

What do you do when you start reading a book that makes you itchy? Bad-itchy. Do you drop it thinking there are so many good books out there, why waste time on this one or keep reading just to satisfy your curiosity as to why it gained so much acclaim, even if you know it's polluting your mind? Even if you know it won't get better...How can we protect ourselves from what we read? This calls for a healthy laughter. Can you hear it?

Please share your thoughts.

Elizabeth Gilbert-Eat, Pray, Love

Although I’m sure it appeals more to women than men due to the chicklit perfume that emanates from Elizabeth Gilbert's book, I am recommending ‘Eat, pray, love’ to anyone who wants a fun, light, yet not superficial read. I actually didn’t know it wasn’t a fiction book, but rather a travel account, and while reading the first pages, I kept wondering why she had to 1) tell me she’s not going to talk about why she ended up in a divorce (fiction books usually focus on (melo)drama); 2) apologize for not revealing her guru’s name, and 3) lecture me on what a japa mala is, the origins of the Italian language, where the word yoga comes from etc. I kept waiting for the illusion of lights off, curtains drawing, characters bowing, doing their thing etc. It didn’t happen. And then I got my share of enlightenment (it will be called the Liss Gilbert phenomenon). I read on the back cover that it was one of Entertainment Weekly’s Top 10 NONFICTION Books of the year. 2006, i.e.

Taking off expectations like a rugged, old coat is the first step to freedom (Monica Dobos Garg, p 12). Therefore, I listened to the lectures as part of the deal and enjoyed the greatest quality this book has to offer, HUMOR (you won’t read the book if I tell you the best jokes I found in it). The author is mostly poking fun at herself, and even in the darkest hours of her fight with depression, she manages to come to the light with some dark humor. Another feature that makes this ‘travel book’ a very good read is the mix of honesty, candidness and her (hers and others’, whom she diligently and conscientiously quotes) philosophical musings on pleasure, love, God, and finding balance, which actually are the objectives she’s trying to meet during her four-month stays each in Italy, India and Bali.

So there she goes to Italy (or ‘Say it like you eat it’, the first Book) to find pleasure. In pizzas, pastas, wine, and pizzas, gelatos, and pizzas. (She doesn’t ‘taste’ Giovanni, her ‘tandem exchange’ -Italian for English- due to her one-year vow of chastity, which she actually breaks in Bali, in her third book. The misdemeanor happened after she found balance, so the jury is lenient). I found this first part a little bit ‘thin’. Maybe it’s because she mostly tells us how much she ate to overcome her post-divorce grief and feeling at a loss. I think she overdid it when she recounted how one night she had 2 large pizzas and then some pastry as well- probably because I’m on a cheese ban. I guess I just can’t understand American appetite (let alone American divorcee’s appetite). She obviously never had European female readers in mind. On one side we have Gargantua and Pantagruel, on the other side-Liss Gilbert. A good illustration of the concept of relativity.

India was her next stop, where she made an appointment with God, in a very organized fashion, like it best suits Americans. Now, you can call it innate skepticism, lack of faith, etc, but she didn’t manage to convince me God had actually showed up at the meeting. Someone who had had minor encounters with meditation before going to India was able in 4 months at an Ashram to 1). awaken the kundalini shakti after one session of So-Ham meditation, which she just decided to try, because the technique she had been practicing up to that point wasn’t fruitful; 2). to sit in Vipassana meditation (she decided to try this one out too) for 2 hours while being bitten by killer mosquitoes; 3). To reach the turiya state (i.e.the cherry on the cake of a spiritual journey to oneself, or ultimate enlightenment) during a group meditation. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that she might have, I underscore might, exaggerated the facts just because she had to write a book and meet the readers’ expectations that an Indian Ashram can only be a place where enlightenment will no doubt be attained. But again, I may just be jealous of her spiritual success or doubting Americans’ highly achieving capabilities.

Bali was my favorite book. Maybe because I never knew anything about Bali before: how they name their children First, Second, Third etc; how rituals and ceremonies arrange each individual’s place in the universal ‘grid'; how you have to consult the priest, and your dreams before buying a house, etc. Moreover, all characters in this book are very 'well-built': Ketut, the wise, funny, light-hearted magician/healer (my favorite); Wayan, the woman healer, who dares get a divorce in ultra-conservative Bali and tries to make a future for her own daughter and the two adopted girls by opening a clinic. In the good tradition of Balinesians, she’s trying to take advantage of charitable Liss, but can’t pull it off because Liz meets the love of her life, Felipe, a localite, who cautions her against Wayan’s plans (not before causing Liz a bladder infection, read the book and you’ll know why). And yes, she does meet her final objective, balance, as she falls in love and gives in to pleasure, but also manages to keep her daily meditations and enlightenments. Ha.

Concluding, Eat, Pray, Love is a funny, witty, informative book, and I’m looking forward to reading her fiction as well.

Chargers vs Rushdie

Why do we read? It may sound like a silly question with more or less straightforward answers (to kill time, to learn about different cultures, about ourselves etc). But I found an interesting implication to it. I read because I like to laugh, so whenever I come across one of Rushdie's witty twitty twist-of-phrases, I giggle. Sometimes I roll down on the carpet with Elizabeth Gilbert. I read, basically, to have fun. Don't remember what my face looked like while I was reading Kafka. I hate bugs. But, oh, back then, I was a teenager. Teenagers, if you recall, don't really want to smile. They want to feel gloomy and depressed, so as to resonate with the universal schmerz caused by the incomprehehensibility of this nonsense world. As time passes by, pimples receding and all, we start to feel brooding ain't gonna get us nowhere so why not try to relax and enjoy. Hit the movies, date some guys etc. And then we suddenly reach 30. Heavy questions pop up again, like shall I spend 1000 dollars to repair the bumper (the car runs perfectly fine without one), or what is the basic difference between me and my nextdoor neighbor who watches the big Chargers game? It's only a matter of decibels, in the long run. I giggle civilly, with a napkin under my chin; he yells windowbreakingly when LaDainian Tomlinson touches down (have no idea what that means, and picked the guy because he has an epic name). We're both entertaining ourselves, satisfying our senses, in a nutshell. So no need, really, to raise a brow on our 'uncultured' fellow citizens. Not too much difference between us.

howimetsalmanrushdie

Really? No, not yet. But plan to. And it's not like meeting the pope anyway. You'd only have to be 20 years younger (which I am), a top model (which I'm not), or a writer (which I will be). Ok, I guess I don't qualify. But, hey, did Julie (from' Julie and Julia' ) ever think her courage to fight a lobster would bring her fame, glory (and all the other important words)? I guess she hoped it would. With lights off. (BTW, don't know about the book, but the movie wouldn't stand on its feet without Meryl Streep.)



Anywho, this is supposed to be a 'literature' blog where people who read books and those who aspire to write them can meet and chat in a laid-back, cigar-in-mouth-- (oh, yes, smoking is good for you, most good writers were smokers), chopin-in-ear, and lots of chocolate at hand (unless you have some unexplainable stomach problems like me), this sentence is going to end now--who says me haven't met rushdie yet?--ATMOSPHERE. I plan to write a weekly review of a book I read. Something like that. And when I actually finish something I start writing and gather le courage, I'll even put up some of my own..things-let's just call them that, for now- for you to tear and cut (too much Grey's Anatomy).



Dear blog, welcome to the nuthouse.