Book Review: The Chupacabra

ChupacabraThe Chupacabra: A Borderline Crazy Tale of Coyotes, Cash & Cartels

Author: Stephen Randel
Length: 233 pages
Date of Publication: August 19th, 2012
Why I read it: Review Request
Where I got it: Publisher

Quick thoughts: Zany fun that sheds a bit of serious light onto real world problems.

From the Publisher: He is called El Barquero. He makes his trade along the border, smuggling guns and killing without remorse. As he faces his one last mission, his perfect plan is unwittingly foiled by Avery, a paranoid loner obsessed with global conspiracy theories who spends most of his time crafting absurd and threatening letters to anyone who offends him. That means pretty much everyone.

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One of the best ways to tackle a serious issue is with humour, and that’s exactly what Stephen Randel has done with this novel. It’s not that he’s poking fun of the issues themselves. Drug cartels and border security are very real concerns with grave ramifications, and they’re treated as such in the novel. But when a bumbling set of hilariously inept characters manages to cross paths with a rogue smuggler, it permits us to look at everything with a sidelong ironical glance.

The lynchpin of the novel is the character of Avery Bartholomew Pendleton, a socially incompetent freeloader with more than his share of eccentricities. He spends most of his time in Mountain Dew-fuelled sprees of writing missives to large corporations and obsessively monitoring his chat feeds for any factual evidence of the elusive Chupacabra. Whenever his endeavours require a trip to the outside world, he  moves like a stealth ninja armed only with his bright yellow track suit and his Diners Club card. Needless to say, he’s the perfect explanation for how an average American household could manage to get tangled up in cartel affairs.

Avery is the sort of character who can really only be handled in small bursts to remain appreciated. Thankfully we are provided with a wide-ranging cast of characters to provide relief, although when the dog was given a brief POV scene I did have to wonder if maybe there were altogether too many characters being stuffed into the narrative. And speaking of stuffing things in, the same goes for the social issues that appear in the crosshairs throughout the book. The breadth of hot topics that Randel takes on is rather staggering: drug cartels, vigilante border patrols, conspiracy theorists, financial systems, gun laws and even hyper-fundamentalist religion. Sometimes it all feels like a bit much—and it probably is—but the fact that nothing is forced or preachy somehow makes it work.

In all, this was a solid bit of entertainment that pulls all the threads together to create a hilarious climax. If you have a soft spot for quirky characters and farcical humour, you’ll definitely want to take a closer look at The Chupacabra.

About Stephen Randel

Stephen Randel, CFA, was born in Houston, Texas. He is a graduate of Texas Christian University. Steve now lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with his wife and their two rescue dogs. Steve is a natural storyteller with a background as a financial services executive specializing in fiduciary liability, institutional consulting, and as a public speaker. His passions include cooking, college football, international travel, and English soccer. Unfortunately, he’s a long-suffering Queen’s Park Rangers supporter. Oh, well, maybe this is the year. His favorite authors are Kurt Vonnegut, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Douglas Adams, and Ferrol Sams. One of these is not like the others.

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Random Musings: Blogrolls

One of the issues I’m wrestling with at the moment is how I want to handle the blogroll on this new site. I’ve always found the blogroll to be an incredibly visible way of illustrating solidarity and community among book bloggers. I can also say from personal experience that seeing my blog highlighted on another site brings a smile to my face. It’s another way to share the love, and I think everybody wins.

Now that I’m a good few months into blogging, I’m also beginning to see the downside of the blogroll. Although I do follow and read every single site in my blogroll, it’s getting to the point of being unwieldy. And if I trim that list to a more manageable length, which blogs do I cut?

I’ll leave aside the fact that people have been declaring the blogroll dead for nearly a decade, because it certainly doesn’t show any signs of dying in the book blogging community. The argument that’s winning me over right now is whether a visitor can find any utility in a jungle of links. I’m not sure they can, and my tentative plan is to eventually scrap the sidebar blogroll in favour of a categorized and annotated links page.

What are your thoughts on the matter? Are blogrolls an essential resource, or do you think there’s a better way to go about it?

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Audiobook Review: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

WonderAuthor: Michael Chabon
Narrated by: David Colacci
Length: 26 hrs 20 mins
Original Publication: 2000
Why I read it: Personal selection
Where I got it: Audible.com

Quick thoughts: Highbrow fiction and page-turning entertainment meet with a big comic-style KAPOW!

From the Publisher: It’s 1939, in New York City. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat: smuggling himself out of Hitler’s Prague. He’s looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn’s own Sammy Clay, is looking for a partner in creating the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book.

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Did you look at that cover art and instantly think Pulitzer material? Yeah. Neither did I, but that pulpy bent is half the charm of this not-so-little gem, which really did win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction back in 2001. Despite all the literary trappings and acclaim, at its heart The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a paean to the golden age of comic books. And it’s not just a story pandering to escapist entertainment (even if the comic book hero in question is actually called The Escapist). It’s more of an apologetic argument for the vital force behind comics, the innate power they possess to capture the imagination and inspire us to rise up against the evils of the world.

The pacing of the novel is well suited to the subject, with events constantly in motion and little time given to navel gazing. It’s one of those books where the length belies the reading experience, because the pages fly by with very little effort. There are also vignettes interspersed throughout the tale that work as a mental diversion, allowing the story to keep a heady pace without becoming weighed down by its size. These vignettes are always relevant to the events of the larger story, and they serve as an illustrative counterpoint to what is occurring in the “real” story. Often these vignettes will be narrated panels from one of Kavalier and Clay’s comic books, with particular emphasis given to the development of drawing styles or narrative techniques. At other times it might be some legend from the Old World, such as the story of the Golem. Sometimes it’s just an old-fashioned flashback to bring one of the characters’ personal history to bear on their current situation. In any case, it works well to break the book into more easily managed chunks.

What really makes The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay rise to literary heights is how deeply it invests in the struggles of its characters. It is a book about the archetypal power of comics, but at the same time it explores the human realities behind that creative force. And while the characters in their comics are altruistic heroes with the power to change the world, Kavalier and Clay are powerless in all of their struggles, whether that be finding a way to strike a direct blow against the Nazi regime or gaining their deserved recognition as artists.

Even if it might not have hit all the right notes at all the right times, this is one of those exquisitely constructed novels that you’re pretty sure will stand the test of time. With its mixture of literary forms, it’s also a good bet that it will appeal to a wide range of audiences. Definitely recommended.

Audiobook Notes: David Colacci might just be the best audiobook narrator I’ve encountered. Perhaps it’s just that he excels at capturing the Eastern European and Bronx accents that are prevalent in the story, but he also gives a genuinely unique inflection and timbre to each speaking voice that remains constant throughout the novel. Listening to the audio version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was a true joy, and it’s one of a handful that I would unreservedly recommend to anyone looking to test the waters of audiobooks.

About Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon (b. 1963) is an acclaimed and bestselling author whose works include the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000). Chabon achieved literary fame at age twenty-four with his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), which was a major critical and commercial success. He then published Wonder Boys (1995), another bestseller, which was made into a film starring Michael Douglas. One of America’s most distinctive voices, Chabon has been called “a magical prose stylist” by the New York Times Book Review, and is known for his lively writing, nostalgia for bygone modes of storytelling, and deep empathy for the human predicament.

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Other People’s Musings: My favourite posts of the week – June 8th edition

Here are a few blog posts that caught my eye this week:

Funnyman Terry Fallis’s Career Ain’t No Joke (Salty Ink)

Terry Fallis is one of my favourite authors, and among the few that would have me lining up for the pleasure of buying their next book. This is a nice little tip of the hat by Chad Pelley to acknowledge Terry winning the CBA Libris Award for Canada’s Author of the Year.

John Scalzi interviews Matthew Stover about the ACTS OF CAINE (whatever.com)

This one is worth reading just for the laugh-out-loud description of why Star Wars is fantasy and not science fiction. Stover was already pretty high up on my TBR list, and this interview makes me want to get to his books that much faster.

My secret love’s no secret any more… (FictionFan’s Book Reviews)

A Kindle reader comes out of the closet with a humorous and cheeky list of reasons to love your e-reader. “How do I love thee, my Kindle Fire? Let me count the ways…”

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Book Review: Wonder

WonderWonder

Author: Hugo Claus
Published: 1962 (trans. 2009)
Length: 338 pages
Why I’m reading: Around the World in 12 Books Challenge
Where I got it: Library

Quick thoughts: An all-around challenging read.

From the Publisher: In his novels, Hugo Claus lays bare the haunted underbelly of twentieth-century Flanders with portraits of a shattered society and warped psyches rising to a mythic pitch. In Wonder, Victor-Denijs de Rijckel, a bewildered schoolteacher, is led to a distant village in pursuit of a mysterious woman. Tracking her to an underground political conference in a remote castle, he poses as an expert on Crabbe, a messianic Belgian fascist who disappeared in World War II. Drifting into a dense fog as his sanity begins to crumble, de Rijckel soon finds himself trapped among a handful of desperate individuals still living out the consequences of their collaboration with the Nazis decades earlier, all of whom are united by their belief that Crabbe’s return is imminent. The subtle cadences of the prose and the dense emotional texture of characters lost in complex moral labyrinths make Wonder a symphony only Claus could have composed.

For May, our reading cohort from Giraffe Days visited Belgium. Although I’ve watched a lot of movies and read quite a few comics from Belgium, I don’t think I’ve read any of that country’s literature. As has tended to be the case with many of the countries we’ve “visited” over the past few months, the book selection process was surprisingly difficult. Any of the novels that I really wanted to read just didn’t seem to be readily obtainable where I live, and choosing from among less recognized works is really a stab in the dark. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this reading challenge, it’s that international literature is nowhere near as available as I expected.

My heart was truly set on reading Hugo Claus’s acclaimed masterpiece, The Sorrow of Belgium, but I settled upon Wonder, his earlier work which also recounts Belgium during WWII. Although he passed away a few years ago, Hugo Claus remains one of Belgium’s most prominent authors, and was also well-regarded for his work as a dramatist, poet and visual artist. As an additional sweetener, Michael Henry Heim won the PEN Translation Prize for his work in bringing this novel to an English audience.

Wonder is a work that I can only describe as high literary art. Language is used to stunning effect, and you could randomly open the book to any page and be awed by the majestic elegance of the writing. It’s all too easy to see both why Claus is so revered as an author, and why Heim was recognized for his translation. What is staggeringly beautiful in small doses, though, has the potential to become overwhelming in larger quantities. And since the plot is nonlinear and written from the illogical perspective of a madman, that overwhelming complexity often brought me to the point of bewilderment.

I must also admit to some thematic threads simply being beyond my grasp or appreciation. The novel is prefaced with these words: “Tú que no puedes, llévame a cuestas (Castillian proverb).” No translation is given for this proverb, but it is the theme of the Goya etching that graces the cover of this edition. Roughly translated, it means “You who can not, carry me on your shoulders.” As I understand it, the proverb has the socialist note of the rich oppressing the poor, and I can’t for the life of me make out how it fits into this particular story. There are some works of art where the various elements are just too abstract or fanciful to make any connection with my sensibilities. This would appear to be such a one.

In its defense, however, I must concede that my general ignorance about Belgian history and culture left me at a distinct disadvantage. I was even clueless as to where exactly Flanders was located. Since it was specified as the setting of the story, I felt compelled to look it up, and was rather embarrassed to find that Flanders refers to the entire northern area of Belgium where Dutch is the spoken language. It’s doubly embarrassing considering that “In Flanders Fields” is a poem recited in Canada every Remembrance Day, so I really should have known better. Another blind spot was Belgium’s involvement in WWII. What should have been a quick fact-check to see why the beginning of that war was referenced as 1940 in the novel (rather than 1939) turned into an hours of lost time as I dug through mounds of fascinating references.

Wonder ended up being perhaps the most difficult book I have ever read, but it certainly wasn’t lacking in merit. And although it was a tough slog for me, I learned quite a bit about this small pocket of Belgian history (albeit by a roundabout route).

About Hugo Claus

Hugo Claus
Hugo Maurice Julien Claus (5 April 1929 – 19 March 2008) was a leading Belgian author who published under his own name as well as various pseudonyms. Claus' literary contributions spanned the genres of drama, the novel, and poetry; he also left a legacy as a painter and film director. He wrote primarily in Dutch, although he also wrote some poetry in English. His death by euthanasia, which is legal in Belgium, led to considerable controversy. (Excerpted from Wikipedia)

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Upgrading the platform

Today was the day I learned that the reason why I couldn’t figure out how to install all the awesome widgets and plugins being used by the cool kids was because I was using the free WordPress platform. Novice that I am, I had no idea of the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Go figure…

I’m hoping the migration will only have a few hiccups, but I figure it’s better to give everyone a heads-up as to why the site might look different with each new visit over the next week or so. And even though I’ve made sure that traffic is redirected from the old site, you may want to update any bookmarks or links that you have. Thanks for keeping up with my reading (and blogging) journey!

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Book Review: The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

Unchangeable Spots of LeopardsThe Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

Author: Kristopher Jansma
Published: 2013
Length: 272 pages
Why I read it: Personal selection
Where I got it: Local library

Quick thoughts: Brilliant writing, but it’s a story best read with the head and not the heart.

I have to admit to a fair bit of excitement when a young author makes such bold waves with his or her debut novel. Kristopher Jansma’s The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards seemed to appear from nowhere, and effortlessly stole the hearts of a great many critics and writers.

Once I opened the book, I broke out in a toothy grin before the book proper had even begun. It’s a habit of mine to savour the cover blurbs and dedications before diving into a novel, and in that oft-skipped section appears the following appeal: ”If you believe that you are the author of this book, please contact Haslett & Grouse Publishers (New York, New York) at your first convenience.” I was expecting a meta-novel of sorts, and that fictional plea from a fictional publisher set exactly the right tone for what followed.

As the novel unfolded, my eager expectations quickly settled into a mixed response. On the one hand, there was much to appreciate. The prose in The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards is exceptional, and often exquisite, while the composition is reckless, daring, innovative, exuberant and self-assured. Literary quotes, allusions and metaphors abound in such measure that they are bound to make any bibliophile grin with childish delight. An obvious example is the title of the book, which is referenced in the novel as a quotation from Jeremiah 13:23. The more pervasive and thematic quote, though, is taken from an Emily Dickenson poem: “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” Another narrative element that garnered my appreciation was how the story worked as an intellectual puzzle. The same story was told from vastly different perspectives (did she marry an Indian scientist or a prince from Luxembourg, or does it even matter?), and we are left with the question of what is true—which brings us right back to the quote from Dickenson. When the story begins to travel around the world, it takes on the tones of gleeful absurdity that one would find in William S. Burroughs or Hunter S. Thompson, and it is handled brilliantly.

On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be anything deeper than a dazzling literary spectacle and an abstract examination of “truth” as a slippery concept. The constant quotes and allusions hit all the right notes, but there are so many that they almost become a substitute for what the novel is trying to say; in a sense, it’s writing by proxy. Having the same stories retold but told slant is appealing, yet it effectively hits the reset button on character development with each retelling. Without any emotional connection to the characters, the subplot of love and longing felt rather flat and unearned. Despite the deftly nimble prose, my heart felt atrophied from lack of use. It almost seemed as though the book was so keyed into its own cleverness that it neglected to care about the characters.

If I could sum up this book in just a few words, it would be “clever but aloof.” There are lightning flashes of genius here, but they never really penetrate beyond the superficial. Without the necessary grounding they remain bursts of brilliance that leave no mark. Still, Jansma’s writing is of such a calibre that I will definitely be paying attention to his next effort.

See what some other bloggers have said:

52 Books or Bust: “The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma is one of those post-modern, meta novels that is hard to describe. There are stories within stories, outside of stories all told by a highly unreliable nameless (or multiply named?) narrator. Sound confusing? Well, it was and it wasn’t. One thing that can clearly be said about The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards is that it is brilliant.”

Bookshelf Love: “The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, like these other volumes, is one of those books that takes up residence right behind your breastbone and settles in, molding itself and wrapping itself around your heart and changing you, perhaps in a subtle way, until you are no longer quite the same person you were before you read it.  In the same way that Possession was about reading and literary study, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards is about writing.”

It’s Either Sadness or Euphoria…: “I love books that leave you guessing, and I love those that challenge the truth, but I struggled with this book because it never tied things up for me. Perhaps it was never meant to. But in the end, I thought this was a book with tremendous potential that sadly (and somewhat frustratingly) was never realized.”

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Audiobook Review: A History of the World in 6 Glasses

6 glassesA History of the World in 6 Glasses

Author: Tom Standage
Narrated by: Sean Runnette
Length: 7 hrs 38 mins
Original Publication: 2005
Why I read it: Personal selection
Where I got it: Audible.com

Quick thoughts: If you love fascinating but worthless bits of trivia, this is a must-read.

I think most of us would be pretty comfortable with the concept of defining historical eras by new innovations. Whether those innovations are military (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age), cultural (Renaissance) or economic (Industrial Age) in nature, their impact on the world is so great that they become the definition of a new epoch. In that same vein, Tom Standage makes the argument that social and cultural development can be traced by the discovery and popularization of six beverages: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and cola.

This isn’t a dry book (pun totally intended). Standage’s approach is quite engaging, and the tone almost borders on conversational. Each of these six beverages is introduced with a brief history of its discovery. The cultural significance of each drink is then examined by summarizing the cultural landscape at the time, giving reasons as to why that beverage was so readily woven into the social fabric at that particular moment in time.

What really makes this book stand out, though, is how effortlessly vast amounts of historical trivia are condensed into the most freakishly cool factoids. One example: Bread and beer were used as cash in Ancient Egypt, and the two were used together as an invocation of blessing. Standage links this to the theory that bread and beer—the essential forms of nourishment—shared a common ancestor: gruel. A thick gruel accidentally left in the sun would become bread, and a thin gruel became beer. The cultural and economic drivers of the entire Egyptian nation are explained in one fell swoop, and in such a simple way that it really stick in your head.

Other facts I found interesting include: how the sharing of wine graphically illustrates the differences between the more egalitarian Greeks and the class-conscious Romans; how alcohol was discovered by the Arabs (the word is even Arabic in origin); how Lloyd’s of London began business as a coffee house; how tea made it socially acceptable for British women to venture out of the house; and how Coca Cola’s wartime patriotism in supplying the troops was most likely with an eye to circumvent home front rationing during WWII.

I was transfixed by this book, and I think it may be a few years before I can partake of these beverages without having some latent trivia leap to mind. Highly recommended.

Audiobook notes: I rarely noticed Sean Runnette’s voice, and that’s perhaps the highest compliment I can pay. I should also point out that this is a nonfiction book which works really well in the audio format. There aren’t any footnotes or appendices, and the text reads more like a story. In short, there’s no need to flip around the text or refer to figures and maps. It’s definitely an audiobook worth its salt.

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Random Musings: American Women Novelists

A few weeks ago, this article about Wikipedia’s classification of American novelists appeared on the New York Times website. The writer, Amanda Filipacchi, is herself an American novelist. She was rightly shocked to find that Wikipedia was in process of moving all female authors to a separate list titled Amercian Women Novelists, while leaving the all-male list still titled American Novelists. I recently took a peek at Canadian Novelists to see if that page was affected as well. Sure enough, Margaret Atwood—one of Canada’s most venerated literary icons—does not appear on that list. She’s been moved to the land of Canadian Women Novelists. Crazy, right?

Shortly after the NYT article stirred the pot, James Gleik posted this piece on the New York Review of Books Blog, which digs into the how and why beneath the hooplah. It’s actually a pretty interesting read if you’re at all curious about the inner workings of Wikipedia, but the crux of the issue rests on the intent of classification. It seems that some editors at Wikipedia are creating categories—of gender, race, culture, orientation, etc.—with the aspirational intent of highlighting areas of “cultural and sociological interest,” while other editors are just compulsively populating these categories because they are obsessed with classification and organization. Thankfully, Wikipedia is taking this fairly seriously, and if you visit the site for American Women Novelists you will see that the page has been red-flagged for discussion (or hopefully you’ll be reading this far enough down the road that it won’t be flagged anymore!).

What remains after the storm, though, is the reality that female authors are frequently treated as “other”. Judging by Wikipedia’s initial gaffe and their subsequent reactions, that perception is still pervasive. It shouldn’t have happened in the first place, and there shouldn’t be a need for discussion; it should be blindingly obvious.

As Filipacchi said in her NYT article, “It’s probably small, easily fixable things like this that make it harder and slower for women to gain equality in the literary world.” I think that’s an accurate statement, and one that probably deserves a more active response from the reading public.

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Book Reviews: Two Short Works by Bob Thurber

It wasn’t all that long ago that I read Paperboy: A Dysfunctional Novel, so news that two of Bob’s other books were being released in paperback editions really grabbed my attention. It’s perhaps a bit ironic that news of a paperback release had me rushing off to pick up the Kindle version. I guess there’s something to be said there for the value of publicity regardless of the final impact. Since both books are exceedingly short, it seemed more appropriate to have one big “Thurber-a-thon” post. Here, then, are my write-ups for these two books:

Nickel Fictions

The subtitle is not an exaggeration. These are indeed exceedingly short stories, with one running a scanty total of just 25 words. Most of the entries are about a page and a half in length, which is still surprisingly brief for a self-contained story. If you want an example of lean prose, then look no further.

“Duck Walk”, which ended up being one of my favourites, is a look at the lengths to which we will go in evading difficult conversations. “Three Days of Mourning” is followed by a note on the anatomy of the story, which breaks down each sentence to define its structural purpose. There are stories that relate the strain of a broken relationship or a cheating partner, and others that paint troubled childhood memories. Some must surely be autobiographical; others must just as surely be fiction. One of the stories is even about a cricket infestation. There is a considerable diversity in this collection, but every story shares the same keen eye for detail and the pared-down preciseness that cuts like a blade.

As a reader, I know that one of my biggest weaknesses is an unwillingness to concentrate or analyze the small details. It’s something I can easily get away with in novels, because the canvas is so expansive. With short fiction, though, it’s not possible to skim the details. I hate to admit that I often find it more difficult to read a series of one page stories than it is to read a thousand-page novel, but it’s the truth. Nickel Fictions was a great exercise for me in this respect. I only allowed myself to read one or two stories at a time, and to focus on the detail. It was a great experience in my opinion, the sort of experience where you feel like you’ve become a better reader in the process.

Cinderella She Was Not

The cover blurb for this book describes it as a novelette, which I think is a bold and cheeky move. Not only is it a term that you don’t hear too often, but it can carry a belittling connotation—like a shavette as opposed to a straight razor, or a cigarette compared to a cigar. Myself, I love the format. When done properly, it’s a complete story that’s been distilled into only the essential parts.

Cinderella She Was Not is told from the perspective of Raymond, an unambitious layabout who seems to have hit the jackpot with Alice, a monied girl who falls for him. They become engaged before he even meets her family, and the interactions that follow—especially with regard to Alice’s two sisters—are incisively rendered with penetrating precision.

As with Nickel Fictions, this was an exercise of learning to read with a different approach. There isn’t much attempt to pretty up the prose, or to use lyrical descriptions. The writing is incredibly lean, pregnant with implied meaning and taut as a bowstring. It’s a compelling example of what can be accomplished or conveyed with just a few well-chosen words.

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