Fall 2004 Editors' Picks

By the LJ Editors -- Library Journal, 9/1/2004

Portrait of an Artist

Kafka: A Biography By Nicholas Murray
Yale Univ. Sept. ISBN 0-300-10631-9. $30
Franz Kafka (1883–1924) needs no introduction, and perhaps after the publication of this new life of the writer, Nicholas Murray won't need one either. A respected British novelist, poet, critic, and, in his own words, "independent literary biographer," Murray delivers an impeccably researched and superbly written biography of a man whose impenetrable stories continue to hold us. LJ asked him about his new work.

What attracts you to KAFKA's work?

Its wonderful strangeness and suggestiveness. His life has always seemed fascinating as the record of a struggle to dedicate a life to writing. He had a short and difficult life but not without its rewards, and he was more cheerful than he is sometimes allowed to be.

What sets your Biography apart from other recent ones on kafka?

One can look at biography as a massive, baroque funerary monument with marble figures and weeping virgins, or one can see it as an art of portraiture. I am in the second camp. Biography is never definitive, a word you see on publishers' blurbs; it is more an attempt at the truth about a writer. I found the other biographies helpful, but I didn't feel that they fully explored the richness of Kafka's riveting letters and diaries. But above all, as a professional biographer rather than an academic Kafka specialist, I made it a priority to construct a flowing and engaging narrative.

You have cetainly achieved that; I found myself forgetting that this was not a novel.

I tried to pay a great deal of attention to imaginative conjunctions. Although I tend to disapprove of biographers who confuse fact and fiction, I do also think that it is an art and one that in English writing has always attracted writers of outstanding literary skill such as Lytton Strachey or the great Boswell himself.

You've written other biographies (E.G., bruce chatwin). How was this different?

This biography was the most challenging because I had to step outside my field of the English literary canon and test my linguistic resources to the full. But the real challenge was to try to understand a writer whose name was so proverbial, yet who remained something of a mystery.

Can knowing too much about kafka's life ruin reading his work?

Knowledge of Kafka's life does help us to understand his art. At the same time, biographers need to avoid crass interpretations. More than this, there is a sense in which our engagement with a writer's work is a lonely business, a naked encounter that tests our imagination and understanding to the limit. To this, contextual matter can bring only a kind of secondary assistance.… [Proust] argues against the idea that the life in some measure explains the work. His writing, he insists, comes from l'autre moi, the other me, who was not the person his friends would meet.

Kafka's premonitions about the 20th century were uncanny. Ironically, it seems that the world we live in today may even be more "Kafkaesque."

Now that we are launched into a new century, Kafka seems just as relevant. I think the root of the "Kafkaesque" is this sense of the individual being caught up in the mysterious protocols of power, of forces beyond his or her control, and searching for meaning and a sense of purpose in the modern world. This is still our predicament.—Mirela Roncevic

As always, fall has brought a surge of new books to the desks of LJ's Book Review editors. The best part of sorting through the piles is choosing our favorites. This year's picks are particularly varied, ranging from leading biographer Elizabeth Frank's magisterial fiction debut to Gerard Jones's history of the comic book industry to Nigel Slater's celebration of comfort food. From photo essays to poetry, there's something here for everyone. Read and enjoy!

When Politics Is Personal

Cheat and Charmer By Elizabeth Frank
Random. Oct. ISBN 1-4000-6091-5. $25.95
Twenty-five years in the making, Elizabeth Frank's sumptuous Cheat and Charmer (see review, p. 139) is already being lauded as the great American novel of the blacklist era. Certainly, the story is set in motion when Dinah decides to protect her marriage to thriving screenwriter/director Jake Lasker by testifying that her glamorous (and startlingly amoral) actress sister, Veevi, was once a member of the Communist Party. But the novel goes beyond the political, finally becoming a profoundly personal exploration of the pain caused by our unrealistic expectations of others—and of ourselves.

Frank always wanted to write fiction and by college had decided to craft the tale of a Hollywood family enmeshed in the blacklist. With Norman Panama, her father, Melvin Frank, had been the creative force behind such movie classics as Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, and she grew up "knowing people on both sides of the 'naming names' question." Having made what she describes as a gratifying detour into nonfiction—a respected biographer who teaches at Bard, she won a Pulitzer Prize for Louise Bogan: A Portrait—Frank finally turned to "the book I had to write."

At first, Frank struggled with a modernist conception, but once she opted for "a big, fat, 19th-century novel," everything fell into place. Yet at times, she confesses to LJ, writing the book was "excruciating—a big reason why it took so many years to complete." Frank had set herself the difficult task of trying to understand Dinah's choice to testify—and of getting Dinah to understand the consequences. Because the novel is told from the perspective of this essentially decent and likable young woman, readers find themselves in the awkward position of identifying with someone who named names—and seeing how it could have happened to them. As Frank observes, "I tried to write a drama about the way history and politics intrude into private lives at the most inconvenient times. It's a story of entrapment; the world won't let [the characters] forget the past."

Though Frank lets Dinah suffer for her decision ("when you love a character deeply, you have to be very, very hard on her"), she's not arguing for putting principle above the personal, regardless. If anything, her novel shows us how dangerous it can be to insist on moral imperatives—as she observed this summer when Iraqi insurgents beheaded two Bulgarian captives while she was staying in Bulgaria. "Two young men who had gone to Iraq to make enough money to feed their families had their heads cut off because their government refused to 'bargain with terrorists.' I don't see the principle here; for me, human life is an absolute value." It is a value evident throughout her fiction debut, which is indeed radiant with human life.—Barbara Hoffert

American Original

Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book By Gerard Jones
Basic Bks: Perseus. Oct. ISBN 0-465-03656-2. $26
Gerard Jones had flourished at every level of the comics industry before he turned to writing Men of Tomorrow, an early history of the comic book—that garishly dynamic American medium born during the Depression and World War II. Superhero comics were "a product of our loud, conflictive, mongrel nation—and our polyglot, violent cities in particular," Jones tells LJ by email. "Superheroes existed outside specific cultural streams from the beginning, because their creators came of such mixed cultures and were trying to sell their ideas to so many other people of cultural multiplicity."

Jones's previous writing credits include Batman and Spider-Man comics and screenplays, a book on sitcoms, and Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence (an LJ 2002 Best Book). That wise and original book drew on Jones's experiences in his Art & Story Workshops for children, challenging many cherished myths about children and fantasy violence. How did Jones get from comics fan to practitioner to historian? "I loved visual storytelling as a kid, loved creating it as an adult, wanted to see how other kids used it and made it their own and most recently wanted to understand how the very important piece of our visual culture came to be."In writing his compelling new work, Jones was blessed by his subject's particularly vivid cast of founding characters, from the Cleveland teenagers who dreamed up Superman (only heartbreakingly to sell their caped creation for $130), to Harry Donenfeld, the East Side gang kid who became DC Comics publisher. "New media generally attract outsiders," Jones observes, "but comics were so disrespected, so cheap, so questionable as a source of income that they drew an even odder bunch of outsiders than most new media. The men who created the industry functioned entirely beyond respectability and often beyond the law. The boys who created the content functioned beyond practical reality. The collision of the two resembled the clash of art and money in other fields, but comics had a strangeness all their own." Within a generation, as Jones explains so eloquently, the battle for wholesome respectability was won.—Nathan Ward

A Celebration of Human Diversity

In Focus: National Geographic Greatest Portraits
National Geographic. Oct. ISBN 0-7922-7363-X. $30
Inspired by the success of its best-selling Through the Lens: National Geographic Greatest Photographs (LJ 2/1/04), the publisher has put together an even more stunning sequel, a lavish coffee-table retrospective of the magazine's portrait photography that aims to promote cultural understanding. Due out in October, In Focus: National Geographic Greatest Portraits will be published simultaneously in a dozen languages and offered at a bargain price of $30 in the United States. Comprising 280 portraits by 150 of National Geographic's celebrated photographers (e.g., Sam Abell, Robb Kendrick), the text includes some familiar images (e.g., the now iconic picture of Sharbat Gula, the green-eyed Afghan girl photographed at a refugee camp in Pakistan in 1985), but most have never been seen. The book spans over 100 years and covers the entire globe. Organized chronologically as well as thematically and enriched with essays on the development of photographic styles through decades, it is a tasteful celebration of the medium but even more so of human diversity. Unlike many photographs, which aim to capture someone else's misfortune, the images here focus on the individual's eyes and expression. In an age when human calamity is shamelessly exploited by every medium imaginable, that is both admirable and inspiring.—Mirela Roncevic

Roll Over, Picasso

Art of Modern Rock: The Poster Explosion by Paul Grushkin & Dennis King
Chronicle. Dec. ISBN 0-8118-4529-X. $75; until 12/31/04, $60
If MTV is any indication, the face of rock'n'roll needs plastic surgery. Sure, Britney's got a hot belly and Beyoncé a glorious booty, but sex is this close to selling itself out. Soon, people will be demanding money shots in their milk commercials. Where's an intelligent consumer to find imagery that both tickles the brain and plugs one into popular culture?

Try Paul Grushkin and Dennis King's Art of Modern Rock, which showcases in full color more than 1600 rock posters and flyers by some 200 international artists, from veterans like Frank Kozik to up-and-comers à la Leia Bell. More than a sequel to Art of Rock (Abbeville, 1987)—Grushkin's best-selling survey of psychedelic posters from the 1960s and 1970s—this is the definitive document of a tens-of-thousands-strong countercultural revolution that began in the late 1980s with the grunge movement and continues today from New York City to San Francisco to…Des Moines and Denton, TX?

"Wherever there's a 'kid'—a teenager, a twentysomething, or even a thirtysomething who is on the cutting edge of music—there's someone cranking out posters," Grushkin asserts.

In fact, more rock posters have been made in the last ten years than in the history of rock'n'roll. To hear Grushkin tell it, this explosion has to do with how today's teenagers access music, i.e., without seeing great LP art, as Grushkin did in his youth, and, increasingly, without walking into a music store. With MP3 looming large, "the art that always defined your relationship to the music" is disappearing.

In the spirit of the hippies, punks, and alternative rockers before them, young music fans have been filling the void themselves. Via the Internet, these kids track their favorite bands as they tour and call up promoters about doing posters for shows. While some may go digital, many still rely on the old-school (read: cheap) silk-screen method, which King—who holds one of the largest rock poster collections in the world—credits with starting the poster revolution.

"It's almost political: all these people realizing that they have the power to create and disseminate their own imagery," he says.

The insane eclecticism of the featured artists called for a thematic organization; readers will witness the many incarnations of that rock poster staple, the devil, for instance. Heightening the effect is King's clever layout, which mimics both a gallery wall and a web site. The final product is a pastel-cum-Day-Glo gem that will make music fans into art fans and vice versa.—Heather McCormack

Journey of a Poet

The Prodigal By Derek Walcott
Farrar. Oct. ISBN 0-374-23743-3. $18
It's hard to imagine a Nobel prize winner getting even better, but here Derek Walcott does it with verve. Styling himself as a "prodigal son" (prodigal, too, in the richness of his appetite and his verse), he presents a continuous narrative of his travels from his native St. Lucia through New York, Italy, Germany, the Alps, and Cartagena, on Colombia's coast. This is at once a journey through vividly rendered landscape and cultural history; we see the poet shaped by his encounters ("I have been blent in the surface of the frescos"), mourning what he has lost ("For approbation has made me an exile"), and steadfastly yearning to return to the radiance of his home ("I carry a small white city in my head").—Barbara Hoffert

Prodigal, what were your wanderings about?
The smoke of homecoming, the smoke of departure.
The earth grew music and the tubers sprouted
to Sesenne's singing, rain-water, fresh patois
in a clay carafe, a clear spring in the ferns,
and pure things took root like a sweet-potato vine.

A Czech Childhood

The Twelve Little Cakes By Dominika Dery
Riverhead: Putnam. Oct. ISBN 1-57322-283-6. $24.95
The publisher proclaims that "it will steal your heart"; Nicholas Sparks beams that it will "take your breath away." But don't let these fevered accolades put you off—Dery's clear-eyed memoir of growing up behind the Iron Curtain in late 1970s Czechoslovakia is no fairy-tale fluff: think hopeful Hans Christian Andersen rather than anything Walt Disney. The title, from Dery's love of pastries and each of the book's 12 chapters, evokes for Dery the "little things that made us happy" in her youth and the time her family spent together.

But there is anger here, too. Communism had torn her family apart. Dery's parents, avowed dissidents, were disowned by her maternal grandparents, who were great supporters of the status quo. Yet, typically, Dery turns this on its head, believing now these divisive politics actually made life easier. "People were forced to either stand up for what they believed in or accept the lie. There wasn't much space for doubt," says Dery, who is now 29 and living once again in Prague. "There were good guys and bad guys, just like in a fairy tale." However, Dery points out, "not every fairy tale has a happy ending. My grandparents never reconciled with my mother. They took their grudge to their grave."

At 19, Dery left her country, vowing never to return: "I was very idealistic and angry," she tells LJ. Penniless and unable to speak English, she moved to Brooklyn, NY, working seven days a week as a waitress. Reading and writing poetry were her "only escapes from the reality of working for tips and endless hours of traveling on the subway"—that and a proximity to the Brooklyn Public Library. "Whenever I had time, I would walk to the Brooklyn library and borrow books. I was always looking for stories that would give me hope, reading them over and over." Seven years later, with four collections of poetry and a play under her belt, Dery sat down to write The Twelve Little Cakes (see Review, p. 162) and found her anger had given way to compassion. "My only ambition," Dery confides, "was to create a book that would cheer people up…an addition to a shelf in the Brooklyn library, where it could be picked up one day by another desperate little waitress who would read it over and over."—Tania Barnes

Short and Sweet

The Courage Consort: Three Novellas By Michel Faber
Harcourt. Nov. ISBN 0-15-101061-7. $23
The Pacific and Other Stories By Mark Helprin
Penguin Pr: Penguin Putnam. Oct. ISBN 1-59420-X. $25.95
The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios By Yann Martel
Harcourt. Dec. ISBN 0-15-101090-0. $23
In an age of the blockbuster novel, some readers fear that the distinct pleasures of short fiction are getting lost. So it's good news that three major authors are offering collections this fall. Michel Faber follows up his best-selling The Crimson Petal and the White with three novellas, each as startling and startlingly different as the last. After the sumptuous 19th-century setting of his previous work, it's a pleasure to see Faber return to dealing so deftly with more contemporary situations. Mark Helprin, not heard from since the 1995 release of Memoir from Antproof Case, returns with 16 sparkling vignettes that perfectly capture moments in time and the dignity of each well-wrought character, from the generous owner of a construction company to the wealthy man left alone in a house he cherishes. And Yann Martel, whose Booker Prize–winning Life of Pi is still tracking well on LJ's Best Sellers list two years after publication, will prick our interest with four quirky and imaginative tales. Who can resist a story titled "The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton"? Anyone who loves good fiction—short or otherwise—should take courage and consort with this group. [For reviews of Faber and Helprin, see p. 144-145.]—Barbara Hoffert

Food, Glorious Food

Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger By Nigel Slater
Gotham: Penguin Putnam. Oct. ISBN 1-59240-090-6. $26
For nine-year-old Nigel Slater growing up in 1960s suburban England, comfort food was the toast burnt to a crisp by an affectionate but culinarily impaired mother. It didn't matter that the burnt part had to be scraped off; to Slater, that charred slice of bread reflected his mother's love.

After her premature death from asthma, Slater's emotionally distant father awkwardly tried to console his son by placing two marshmallows ("the nearest food to a mother's kiss") on Slater's bedside table every night.

Not surprisingly, this connection between food and love has been a driving force in Slater's life. Today he is a popular food columnist for The Observer, a London newspaper, and a best-selling cookbook author (Real Fast Food) with a reputation for unpretentious, mouth-watering "dishes cooked with love" (a.k.a., comfort foods).

"Food was and still is an escape and comfort for me," the author tells LJ by phone from his London home. His memoir, Toast (see review, LJ 8/04), was published to great acclaim in England last year. It vividly evokes the myriad candy bars, puddings, trifles, and other sweets that Slater passionately consumed as a substitute for the affection lacking in his life.

To get the details right, Slater returned to the foods he hadn't eaten in over 30 years. Memories, pleasant and painful, flooded back with each bite. "There were certain chocolates that my class-conscious father hadn't approved of. When I was eating them, I felt like a naughty child again," Slater exclaims.

Along with the memories came the realization that he never got a chance to say good bye to his mother. "In those days you kept children away from funerals," says Slater, who was shunted off to his aunt's house. Writing the book was cathartic, but Slater remains angry at his late father for various reasons, including marrying a woman who, ironically, was a fantastic cook but an unloving stepmother.

Slater did worry how well his autobiography would translate to an American readership; the U.S. edition includes a glossary of colorful Brit terms ("candyfloss," "gobstopper"). But American friends reassured him that they got the gist, even if they didn't always get the specifics. "What I hadn't realized while I was writing the book is that so many people have had similar childhoods."—Wilda Williams