Women by Charles Bukowski (04/10)

The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.

I was being catered to as if I was an invalid. Which I was.

"Why can't you be decent to people?" she asked.

"Fear," I said.

"Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Bach, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart, People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.

"I took my choice, I raised the fifth of vodka and drank it straight. The Russians knew something." (177)

"I was a bush-league de Sade, without his intellect" (236).

A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe (03/10)

"Bango!" he wrote.

Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (03/10)

Wolfe's subject is male ego, that most underserved of themes in literature. Bonfire isn't subtle or lyrical, but it is magisterial, cutting, and fun. "Wolfe contra Woolf," I would title my oh-so-clever article contrasting the two in an upper-middlebrow literary publication, but really: they were born opposites. Since my thing, it seems, is literary treatments of masculinity, I obviously had to look at Wolfe, and he is good, just...simple. Wolfe's men are broad, simplistic parodies, or perhaps I would prefer to think so.

Bonfire of the Vanities is also a clear precursor to The Wire: white journalists chronicling the decay of a post-industrial, segregated city where race and class overlap, or not chronicling so much as attempting a portrait. Of course, The Wire is much bolder and more sophisticated--it actually looks into the lives of the young, black men who feed the criminal justice system. Wolfe just touches on them, looks at them through the eyes of outsiders. Probably wisely, he doesn't try to write outside the perspective of white men whose sole motivation, ever, is ego.

This book is also a scrupulous catalog of suit descriptions, which is useful right now as I get a custom suit tailored at Khan Market. Thanks, Mr. Wolfe! Posing so audaciously on the back cover, pure white, double-breasted suit with peaked lapels and black-and-white striped shirt with the narrow collar blaring out as if to say, "I am a character!" Wolfe the Southern Duke.

India's Struggle for Independence: 1857-1947 by Bipan Chandra, et al. (02/2010)

Something about nationalist historians interpreting--and justifying--everything in light of a final independence that was never a foregone conclusion, all events woven into the independence narrative, all acts exonerated on grounds of being anti-imperialist, etc., goes here.

I read most of this on a two-day train ride from Kannur, Kerala, to Delhi. It made a good pillow.

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins (02/10)

Look, I've joined the culture.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (02/10)

See, Natasha? A woman. With adjectives like "dustgreen" and "mossgreen." On the same page: page 1, in fact. Satisfied?

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (02/10)

What author works harder than a young Salman Rushdie? If classic Hollywood cinematography conceals the presence of the camera so that all we see is pure story, artifice folded in on itself like the best of dinner parties, Rushdie is the Soviet auteurs of the 1920s with their frantic montage, the experimenters of the French New Wave with cameras hanging from car windows and trains. (I choose the film metaphor in homage to Rushdie's own cinematic fascination.) Here the effort is so self-consciously obvious that I find it a little annoying, but Rushdie's willingness to spare himself nothing as a writer continues to win me over.

The book bulges gracelessly at the seams. It is several novels--a black satire, a family chronicle, an allegorical fable--smashed together, and some of the fragments fare better than others. The whole midnight children concept seemed underdeveloped, an afterthought--or perhaps Rushdie's first idea, out of which other, better ones grew, and he never brought himself to throw out the original stillborn fetus.