Last week I read a book and an essay, though the essay was printed and bound as if it were a book, so we’re going to count it…
#1- “Within the Context of No Context”- by George WS Trow.
Originally appearing in the New Yorker in 198?, this is an essay essentially about the way American culture has changed as a result of television. The arguments are all pretty standard now, though coming from a guy writing in 1980, it’s a lot more impressive. The way television has created one national culture, at the loss of more personal relationships, etc. In a way, it reminds me of the Dead Kennedys song “MTV Get Off the Air” written from the perspective of a New Yorker writer as opposed to some punk whose too inbriated to attempt procreation. That said, Trow is infinitely more interesting to read than J. Biafra is to listen to. I wish that the companion essay, written in 1997, would have been updated again in 2007 to take into consideration the way the Internet has changed the landscape again (perhaps “Within the Context of Infinite Context”?) Unfortunately, Trow passed away in 2006.
#2- The Enormity of the Tragedy, by Quim Monzo.
Quim Monzo is a Barcelonan writer. Awesome. I first came across him four years ago or so, when a book store dude in Barcelona found me a Castilian copy of El porque de las cosas, a collection of short stories, originally written in Catalan. I spent most of my tme in Barcelona wandering around reading that. The style and subject matter was very reminiscent of Raymond Carver, which is a supremely good thing. This time, however, I was only able to find an English translation, which is fine, but I think the translation from Catalan to Castilian preserves the style a lot better than one into English. Whereas the first was choppy/straightforward in a Carveresque way, this was just choppy. I don’t blame the translator,though I do think the translator was English, which was mildly annoying because some of the translations were what I can only imagine to be English words, eg “bathing costumes” instead of “bathing suits.” No big deal.
The story itself was great. A man secretly with a terminal disease spends his last weeks to live squandering all the money his step-daughter should inherit upon his death. Meanwhile, the step-daughter spends the story plotting to murder her step-father, who she (I think irrationally) completely hates. The two characters deal with a lot of internal struggles, with the terminally ill man trying to make sense of his life and trying to discover who is truly is: what you might expect from a man who suddenly finds out he’s about to die. The girls struggle revolve around constantly falling deeply in love, and then becoming deeply ambivalent, and then moving on: what you might expect from a teenager with nothing better to think about. As the story beings to close, much tension comes from wondering whether the girl will be able to kill her father before he dies naturally. Also, the father, without the aid of neither sildenafil citrate nor tadalafil nor vardenafil, has a permanent case of priapism/satyriasis, which leads to some.. um.. interesting plot points. Can’t say how it ends, but it was satisfying. Nonetheless, it doens’t hold a candle to El porque de las cosas. That book was awesome.