It’s an okay book, made good by Rushdie’s way with words, made bad by his meandering style, made beautiful by his willingness to give in to every impulse he has, but ultimately made meh by his lack of restraint. There is so much in this book that in the end, there is too much and I don’t care about any of it.

The story starts in ‘90s Los Angeles, goes back to partition era Kashmir, then further back to World War II France, then forward to ‘50s and ‘60s Kashmir, the ‘60s Delhi, then fast forward back to modern day Los Angeles. By the time we get to the end, I am not sure which tangent to care about and which loose ends will be resolved. I don’t need a story to resolve everything—far from it—but I do need to have some sense of where it is headed, or if it is headed anywhere at all.

But Rushdie does have a way with words. As I said a couple of weeks ago, his character names alone are more creative than some authors’ entire life’s work.

Me and Rushdie, at a book signing. The purple book on the table is my father’s old copy of Midnight’s Children, one of my favorite books ever.

There’s Bombur Yambarzal, the waza of Shirmal. Boonyi Kaul Noman, the Anarkali of Pachigam, and her mother, Pamposh Kaul. There is Nazar-e-Buddoor, the seer of Pachigam. Maximillian Ophuls, the flying Jew.

Larger than life characters need larger than life names.

To quote RGV, as I usually do:

Why do villains have names like Bikhu Yadav, Bhai Thakur, Gaddam Narayana, etc instead of Santosh, Ramu, etc?
Ans: Larger than life characters demand larger than life names. If Vito Corleone’s name was John David, Godfather would not remain Godfather.

I think hearing the names in audiobooks makes you a lot more aware of the music of the names.

∞

The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
“I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time.”

World War Z is a book written by Max Brooks, on behalf of the United Nations. It is a series of interviews, presented as an oral history of the zombie apocalypse. No, the zombie apocalypse has not actually happened.

The book tells of an alternate present, where an outbreak of rising dead turns in to a world-wide epidemic. The story doesn’t unfold as classical horror, but as a look at geopolitical implications, military strategy, and individual survival instincts in the face of an unprecedented, global threat.

It deals with the big questions—wouldn’t Israel deal with such a threat in a fundamentally different way than say South Africa or Russia, because of their history? How would our military machinery work against an enemy who does not work under the traditional parameters—has no emotions, no family, no expenses, and can only be downed by decapitation? And for every one soldier you lose, they gain one.

As I said, the story is told as a series of interviews, a few years after the war is over—an interview of a doctor who saw the first cases in China, an Israeli intelligence agent who was among the first to take the threat seriously, of US military personnel, a South African politician, and of so many individuals from across the globe. While the climax is told from an American perspective, this is a global story and that is what really makes it special—the plausible military, social and political implications.

∞

The audiobook makes this book even better. Here’s part of the cast: Alan Alda, Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner, John Turturro, Mark Hamill, Henry Rollins, and Jürgen Prochnow. Since each chapter is an interview with a different person, this format works really well.

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.—Jonathan Swift

Toole wrote it in the ‘60s and then promptly killed himself. A decade later, his mother sent a smeared carbon copy of the novel to Walker Percy (author of that other New Orleans tale, the story of my life, The Moviegoer). His mother insisted it was a masterpiece. Percy read it on a whim, and agreed. It was a masterpiece.

It is a masterpiece.

Percy published it, and it won a Pulitzer Prize.

∞

There are no minor characters in A Confederacy of Dunces. While it is ostensibly the story of 30-year old Ignatius J. Reilly, a large, lazy Don Quixote, who would rebel against all the failings of the modern world, its offenses against “theology and geometry”, if only he could work up the energy to get out of his mother’s bedroom where he wrote about his troubles at great length on Big Chief tablets. When he finally does—to work in a garment company, to sell hot dogs, to rescue a woman, to launch a gay uprising—we discover the world is not ready for him, and he is certainly not ready for the world.

∞

I did the audiobook for this one—audible had it as a freebie around Christmas. Ordinarily, I would not buy an audiobook from Audible—you can only listen to their files on certain authorized devices/players. I use eMusic; their audiobooks are MP3, so they work on any MP3 player.

The voice actor for this book—a Barrett Whitener—is extraordinary. He does male voices, female voices, and various New Orleans accents including Yat, a black night club janitor, and Reilly’s own (I hear his incredulous “Oh my god!” as I think about it).

∞

Ignatius J. Reilly is an avid moviegoer. As is Walker Percy’s Binx Bolling, the protagonist from his excellent The Moviegoer. Reilly and Bolling both lived in ‘60s New Orleans. I like to imagine they happened to share a movie theater more than once. I hope their paths did not cross, for Bolling’s sake. To put it mildly, they would not have gotten along.

Many people have tried to make a movie based on A Confederacy of Dunces, but have not come close to succeeding. I have been wondering who I would cast in the various parts.

I can’t figure out who to cast as Ignatius and Irene Reilly, but I’m fairly certain about Kathy Bates as Santa Battaglia. Zach Galifianakis as Angelo Mancuso? Mos Def as Burma Jones? Jude Law as Gus Levy and Jullianne Moore as Mrs. Levy? Cloris Leachman as Miss Trixie? Is Winona Ryder too old for a cameo as Myrna Minkoff? I would have said Brittany Murphy as Darlene, but she’s no more. How about Jennifer Jason Leigh as Lana Lee?

Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, of course.

Thoughts?

∞

In the Tim Burton movie that comes out today, Johnny Depp plays the Mad Hatter. My earliest memory of the story was this big golden book by Disney.

And of course, there was the strange Hindi version that used to come on Doordarshan in India. “Tap tap topi topi top mei jo dube, far far farmaaishi leke hai ajoobe…”, went its title song. I discover, courtesy Wikipedia, that it was a 1983 Japanese cartoon called Fushigi no Kuni no Alice (Mad Tea Party from that version).

Here’s the book, open at the right chapter, from Google Books:

I Am the New Black is kind of a stream-of-consciousness narration of thoughts, lessons, and stories from Tracy Morgans life. To get an idea of what the book is like, check out this interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. And there is an excerpt from the first page there as well.

Don’t read it if you don’t know who Tracy Morgan is or if you just kind-of like him. If you are a fan, it’s worth it, especially if you do the audiobook. Listening to him narrate it is a lot more fun than (I would imagine) reading it. Compare the NPR interview with the excerpt on that page—it works better coming from his mouth.

The first thing was the documentary Food, Inc. which we watched on new year’s eve. I’m not one for new year’s resolutions, but this movie will help you come up with half a dozen. From simple ones like “Eat food” (as opposed to gook), to more challenging ones, like “eat healthy, cheap, local, green, fair and wise”. Five out of six is good enough too.

The other thing that changed the way I think about food—specifically restaurant food—is Anthony Bourdain’s excellent book Kitchen Confidential. Bourdain has worked his way up from the most unseemly corners of the restaurant industry to the… most unseemly corners of the restaurant industry. To hear him tell it, all the corners are unseemly, and so is everything in between.

This is not a story about the horrors of hygiene around food, though there is some of that. It’s about the characters that the restaurant industry attracts, the traits needed to make it in the business, and war stories from behind enemy lines. To hear him tell it, the restaurant kitchen is a pirate ship, with all manner of highly-skilled, foul mouthed, burly thugs, who can give abuse in six languages and take it in nine. As long as they’re some variant of Spanish.

Bourdain is at his best when he’s exploding myths and letting us in on insider secrets, and directing his highly opinionated attacks at himself or restaurant industry standards. Or when he walks us through the day in a life of a high volume, high priced kitchen. The biographical bits are not the best part, but they do provide context to the rest of the story.

I did this one as an audio-book, and it pays off. Anthony Bourdain’s own words benefit from his delivery, especially in the chapters on a day in the life of his kitchen or the parts about the language.