Monthly Archives: April 2006

Someone Woke Up on the Wrong Side of Crazy Today

Seriously, what’s going on with Michiko? First AM Homes:

A. M. Homes’s dreadful new novel, “This Book Will Save Your Life,” reads like a cartoon illustration for a seminar on men and middle age — a pastiche of all that is hokey, hackneyed and New Agey in Robert Bly’s “Iron John” and Gail Sheehy’s “Understanding Men’s Passages.”

and now Philip Roth:

“Everyman,” the title of Philip Roth’s flimsy new novel, announces that the book’s hero is meant to be a sort of representational figure: an average Joe, an ordinary guy, an homme moyen sensuel…The problem is, this nameless fellow turns out to be generic, rather than universal: a faceless cutout of a figure who feels like a composite assembled from bits and pieces of earlier Roth characters. Spending time with this guy is like being buttonholed at a party by a remote acquaintance who responds to a casual “Hi, how are you?” with a half-hour whinge-fest about his physical ailments, medical treatments and spiritual complaints.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Magnitude

I just got home from seeing Paul Rusesabagina speak at a store sponsored event at the First Parish Church in Cambridge. He’s touring to promote his new biography An Ordinary Man, which I reviewed here last week.

He’s an amazing speaker, and received several standing ovations from the 600 or so people that packed the church. He speaks with a wonderful accent in a very impassioned way with no notes at all — I imagine eveything is forever imprinted on his brain. He recounted several events that happened during the Rwandan genocide in 1994, including stories (I hesitate to use this word because it implies that they are made up and seems to deny the events their true signifigance in my mind) about the morning the genocide began on April 9th.

Above all, Paul Rusesabagina speaks about the power of words and how he used his words to save 1268 people. That may not seem like a large number considering how many people were slaughtered, but if it were you or me, that number would seem staggering. He also spoke at length about the current genocide taking place in the Sudan–genocide is the word he used. He visited there and noticed that the situation in Darfur mirrored the situation back in 1994. There are 2 million people without food, water, education or even hope. Rusesabagina urges us not to be bystanders, but to stand up for justice.

The part that spoke most to me was when an audience member asked him where he got his strength from during those horrible events? He replied that he remained himself throughout. Before the genocide he was a hotel manager, during the genocide he was a hotel manager, and afterward he remained a hotel manager. That’s a powerful message.

Plagiarism Ahoy!

It’s happening in my own backyard. According to this article in the Crimson and also in today’s Globe, Kaavya Viswanathan’s How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life might contain passages that are similar to a book called Sloppy First, published by Random House. Viswanathan, a Harvard sophmore, received a half a million dollars for her first novel. Dreamworks has already purchased the movie rights. She’s not responding to any of this yet.

The Globe has helpfully printed the passages for our comparison.

An Ordinary Man by Paul Rusesabagina

How does one review a memoir that details living through the Rwandan genocide in 1994? Paul Rusesabagina, manager of the Hotel Milles Collines, writes about his experience during that dark time in his new memoir. If you’ve seen the movie Hotel Rwanda, which is based on his life, you’ve seen some of the most visceral, awful, blood filled parts. His memoir deals with the more personal aspects, rather than focusing on scenes that must have been too mind-boggling for the human mind to comprehend.

I worried when picking this book up for the first time that Paul Rusesabagina would come across as self-important, but instead he just sounds sincere. As he says, “I am a hotel manager who was doing his job. That is really the best you can say about me.” In just 100 days, over 800,000 people were slaughtered, many hacked to death by machetes, which had been imported for this strict purpose. He writes about the events that led up to this atrocity as well as weaving in the story of his childhood. We hear about his wise father, who taught him the verbal skills and help infuse him with the wiseness that would save himself, his family, and 1,268 people later on in 1994.

The tone of this book is incredibly personal. You can almost hear Rusesabagina telling you his story in one ear as you read. He refuses to believe that everyone is either good or evil. Each person has a bit of both inside and that’s what enabled him to live day to day. He believed that as long as he could find the soft part of a person, he could win any negotiation. He sat with some of the main men behind the genocide, and even though he was harboring wanted Tutsis, was able to keep the hotel as a safe haven for several months. He dismisses the criticism from those who wonder how he could be friendly with such killers. He was only thinking about saving the people in his hotel. Evil men or not, they had the power to let the killers in or to keep them outside at the gate. Rusesabagina’s sincerity paints this entire memoir. How any man could survive let alone with such humility leaves one feeling pretty humble.

LBC Read This! Spring 2006

The latest round of selections and discussions from the Litblog Co-op starts today at the LBC blog. This season’s Read This! pick is Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated by Jordan Stump (Dalkey Archive, 2004). I enjoyed this book immensely and Dalkey provided us with an excerpt to post, so you can get a sense of the writing. Over the next 4 days, we’ll unveil the other 4 nominees and then we’ll devote the next several weeks to talking about all of these books.

P.S. I should mention that the next round, Summer 2006, will work a bit differently. We’ll only be discussing 4 titles, but we’re announcing ahead of time what they are so everyone has a chance to join in the discussion.

Odds and Ends

For a rainy Friday afternoon:

Cambridge Local First

I’ve gone on before (I know, I don’t shut up about it) about the importance of shopping locally. Here’s a great article from the Cambridge Chronicle that discusses local efforts here in Cambridge, MA. Frank Kramer, owner of the store in which I work Harvard Book Store, has lots to say.

“It’s not just ’Support us because we’re here’,” said Kramer. “Loyalty about shopping is about value.”