Reading roundup

Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez

My second reading of this one. It's a wonderful book, exquisitely translated by Edith Grossman. Although Márquez is famous for his magical realism, there is not much magic here. Behavior and incidents are occasionally implausible, but hardly fantastical. The battle between the powerful and capricious forces of inevitable death and uncertain love drives the narrative, along with numerous picaresque set pieces.

The Beauty of the Death Cap
Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze

Knowing my love of all things mushroom, MK couldn't resist gifting this one to me. It's a novella in the tradition of French noir thrillers about nasty characters, a la Jean-Patrick Manchette. Our protagonist narrator Nikonor is indeed a nasty fellow who loves mushrooms too. His obsession, it turns out, is not with the death cap, but with the highly prized edible cep (porcini), although he doesn't eat mushrooms himself. That doesn't prevent him from putting the death cap to other purposes. Funny and well-written, if not up to Manchette's standard.

Good People
Patmina Sabit

This is a novel about a crime (maybe) and assimilation (or maybe not), taking place in a fictional Afghan-American family/ community. Was it an accident or an honor killing? Was the investigation driven by a search for truth and justice, or racism and xenophobia? Written as a sequence of interviews with acquaintances and witnesses, it has a Rashomon vibe that won it a good bit of praise. Although the plot will keep you going, I found the style and tone of the "interviews" implausible, and the characterizations a bit one-dimensional. 

'Sierra Blue,' RIP

This Ceanothus 'Sierra Blue' was one of the first California native shrubs I planted in the yard, about 20 years ago, and one of my favorites. Last year it started looking a little rough, and this spring it simply expired, after its final impressive display of the large sky-blue flowers that were always as popular with the pollinators as they were with me. There was no obvious event or disease that did it in – perhaps simply old age. It always received my benign neglect: no summer water, no fertilizer, limited pruning. Just what is supposed to keep a ceanothus happy. I'll miss it.

James Blood Ulmer, RIP

His synthesis of blues and free jazz was unique. Like many jazz guitarists, it seems, he followed an inner flame.

Anthony Head, RIP

Giles, to most of us. 

Sonny Rollins, RIP

At the risk of playing a stupid game, I would place him in the top three jazz instrumentalists, with Louis and Bird. Here he is live, in 1986. And what a band... Bob Cranshaw on bass in particular.

Reading roundup

City of Glass
Paul Auster

A postmodern meta riff on the suspense novel. Overall I enjoyed it, even if in the end it seemed too clever by half. It shares with some other novels I have read a denouement that places the protagonist(s) in a shrinking universe, partly of their own making, including John Williams's Stoner, E.L. Doctorow's Homer and Langley, and Kafka's story A Hunger Artist. 

The Keeper
Tana French

This completes her Ardnakelty crime trilogy, featuring the transplanted American cop Cal Hooper and his constructed Irish family. As in the previous installments, the village of Ardnakelty forms a collective character, often manifested in the person of Mart Lavin, Cal's crusty and not entirely trustworthy neighbor and confidante. French is the master of this kind of psychological and anthropological entertainment, and for the most part The Keeper does not disappoint. I could have wished for a little more of Trey, Cal's tough-as-nails, more-or-less adopted teenage daughter; and I found the resolution of the suspicious death at the center of the plot not entirely credible. But none of those quibbles will stop me from snapping up the fourth installment, if there is one, or whatever French's next book happens to be. 

A Fool's Kabbalah
Steve Stern

This is about as entertaining as a historical novel about the Holocaust by bullets could be. The book switches between twin narratives. One follows Gershom Scholem as he travels through eastern Europe after the War, attempting to gather and save Jewish books looted by the Nazis, including historical documents relating to Jewish mysticism. The other narrative features the antics of the village fool Menke Klepfisch, as the Nazis occupy his shtetl and visit one atrocity after another on the hapless and superstitious residents. 

The book is ultimately about the futility of some of the most deeply human defenses against the vicissitudes of life – whether religious mysticism, rational philosophy, or humor – in the face of the ultimate evil. But it is often touching and very funny. Stern surely wants us to feel discomfort when we chuckle, given the horrors he rather graphically describes. He succeeds.

Babe

April showers are unusual in San Jose. They spritz up even Babe's muffler shop. That's Babe to the right, I believe.

Monte Bello Open Space Preserve

Beautiful all times of year, but especially in spring, with the flowers blooming and the oaks leafing out. Photos in order: the elegant Pacific trillium (T. ovatum); the very spiny fuchsiaflower gooseberry (Ribes speciosum); the fetching red vetchling (Lathyrus cicera). And lastly, dog-vomit slime mold (Fuligo septica): Visually speaking it is aptly named, but olfactorily speaking it is actually neutral to pleasant in odor; it is known as caca de luna (moon poop!) in parts of Mexico, where some folks eat it. I have not tried it... yet...