Month: December 2007

Regarding Fidel Castro: My Life: A Spoken Autobiography (available January 8)— we’re curious about what the old man has to say, and we’re hoping for wardrobe and grooming tips, along with colorful yarns about outlasting ten American presidents. Plus, how can you resist a two-colon title? … As long as we’re pimping atheists and communists, we might as well throw this one out there, too: Eric Wilson’s Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (available January 22) is pretty much exactly what it says; it argues that depression is a vital force and the wellspring of creativity. We’re happy to hear that … In Life Class (available January 29), Booker Prize-winning novelist Pat Barker (The Regeneration Trilogy) continues her exploration of the First World War’s devastating effects on British society … A.L. Kennedy is one of those prolific, much praised, purported virtuosos that nobody seems to have read. We can all climb on the bandwagon with her latest, Day (available January 8) … Finally, want to read something unlike most of the stuff you read? Try sampling some of the reissues from the virtuous New York Review of Books Classics series. For starters, we’d recommend Elaine Dundy’s delightful The Dud Avocado, a novel of an adventurous American girl in Paris. Or Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Tenants of Moonbloom, about a bill collector for a slumlord. Or Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes. Seriously, their catalog is full of marvels.

Having adopted an alias, Michael Frame, the character at the center of My Revolutions is living a carefully constructed life of suburban mediocrity, hiding his radical history from a capitalist career wife and a stepchild who dreams of nothing more romantic than a gig as a corporate lawyer. As always seems to happen in such stories—whether in real life or fiction—ghosts come calling and Frame is dragged back into the past. That’s admittedly a tired premise, but Kunzru—one of Granta’s “Twenty Best Fiction Writers Under Forty”—has a pretty good track record at making something stylish and memorable out of unpromising material. His previous novels, The Impressionist and Transmission, seemed like cool, logical outgrowths from his work at Mute Magazine, a nifty British rag that focuses on the exploration of globalization and “network societies.” From the sound of things, My Revolutions is a sort of ambitious departure, and a meditation on the fluidity of time, identity, ideology, and necessity.

The history of literature—up to and including the stuff piled on the new arrivals tables at your local bookstore—is crammed with oddballs and anachronisms. That said, it’s still a rare novel that can take such raw materials and make something truly funny, compelling, and moving out of them. Based on the early reports, Tod Wodicka’s debut novel—which features a tunic-wearing medieval re-enactor as a protagonist—consistently hits all the right grace notes. British reviews have consistently remarked on both the book’s comedy and its compassion, and All Shall Be Well has drawn comparisons to both Don Quixote and the novels of Charles Portis. It doesn’t get much more promising than that.

Hot on the heels of the birth of Christ comes yet another assault on religious belief. God knows, the godless have been on the pop culture offensive of late (see: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Philip Pullman et al.), and if the other side of the barricades didn’t have such an overwhelming historical foothold, you could almost accuse the atheists of piling on. The irony of so many of the recent irreligious screeds is that they tend to be marked by the same brand of repellent intolerance that has been the appalling hallmark of God’s zealots through the ages. It seems sad that even the unbelievers are reduced to preaching to their choirs. As to whether John Allen Paulos has any truly fresh light to shed on the subject—hint: It says right there in the title that the man’s a mathematician, and his book undertakes all manner of logical refutations of God’s existence (yawn)—I’m afraid he’s ultimately just another dog barking at cars.

File this one under “can’t miss.” Zadie Smith asked a bunch of literary cohorts to contribute to her latest project. Her only rule: Each story must bear the name of a person, and be about that person. The result is a broad-ranging collection of characters (a giant, a judge, and a monster, to name a few) presented in formats ranging from comic strip to monologue. Indeed, the only common thread in this schizophrenic anthology is the fact that each author is hotter than the next; George Saunders, Miranda July, Dave Eggers, and Chris Ware are among the contributors. Given the spectrum of genres and styles, there’s guaranteed to be something for everyone, all of it quality. Plus, all proceeds will go to Eggers’s 826NYC organization, a nonprofit that teaches children to write.

Lynn Geesaman’s photographs always draw one in. And after that, you stand around in the image, thinking, Now what am I doing here? I came here to get something; what was it? The fuzzy, melting landscapes have the memory-dissolving qualities of a late spring day—and, quite honestly, who knows whether that’s good or bad? But these days, which seem to be an era of doldrums in the art world (however well masked by stratospheric speculation and its attendant glamour), art that affects its spectator with this kind of subtlety is worth a second look.

Thomas Barry Art Gallery, 530 N. Third St., Minneapolis; 612-338-3656.

Scrap yards and paper recycling form Michael Kareken’s usual subjects (though he has other, more conventional ones as well—figures, usually); many of the works in this show depict the Rock-Tenn recycling yard near his studio. Tough-love limnings of crushed heaps evoke the huge stone Aphrodite that stood at the old Getty Museum on the Malibu cliffs, her voluminous draperies blown by a hurricane and torn and broken by two thousand years. The formal visual qualities of these raw heaps is exciting in itself, but Kareken also manages to infuse the drawings and paintings with the pathos of drapery—material that takes on the shape of that which it clothes, be it divine flesh, the force of tearing winds, or the mindless crush of waste. These scraps record the currents of our desires.

Groveland Gallery, 25 Groveland Terrace, Minneapolis; 612-377-7800.

Creativity is a double-edged sword. This was something I first realized after reading a detailed account of the torture regimen used by the Sforzas, a Renaissance-era Milanese family whose fortune had been made in arms sales. They called it “Lent”: forty days of inventive and excruciating pain-inducing practices almost guaranteed to leave the victim alive at the end. And the Sforzas were renowned arts patrons to boot; Petrarch did their PR, in fact. What does this have to do with Lopez, who is getting a lot of attention in New York for her big, complex, print-based installations? These works, which explore infrastructure and built environments, are baroquely inventive, while also enacting the menace of urban sprawl and so-called progress; Lopez herself is an artist with enough sense to see not just the beauty in human creativity, but also its potential detriments.

Franklin Art Works, 1021 E. Franklin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-872-7494.

Immigration to the United States is at its highest level since its historic peak in the 1920s; there really are a lot of people roaming the world, either forced by war or economics or driven by curiosity or circumstance. And many of them, artists included, end up here. (Read some of their stories in the current issue of 10,000 Arts, the supplement to The Rake and mnartists.org.) This show promises an interesting look at the growing local community of international artists.

Altered Aesthetics, 1224 Quincy St. N.E., Minneapolis; 612-378-8888.