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Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls ~ A Capsule Book Review

Posted on May 6, 2013 by allen0997

Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls cover

Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp 

Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls is the title of David Sedaris’s new book of essays. This book is much like David Sedaris’s seven other books of essays (Barrel Fever, Naked, Holidays on Ice, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, When You are Engulfed in Flames, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk), meaning that it’s funny, entertaining and full of his trademark self-deprecating humor.

If you are a fan of David Sedaris, you know that his writing is as easy and quick to read as anything you’ve ever read in your life. The word “essays” seems a little formal and academic for these little stories that differ from fiction stories in that they are about real life instead of being made up. They could easily pass for fiction if you didn’t know any better. At the center of each story is David Sedaris himself talking about things that have happened to him (sometimes, but not very often, in the voice of somebody else).

The experiences he relates involve everything from his outspoken, rough-around-the-edges parents to visiting a French dentist to dealing with litter in the English countryside; from having a colonoscopy to meeting an interesting stranger on a European train; from feeding strips of meat to a kookaburra (a large bird) in Australia to dealing with a stolen laptop computer; from eating at less-than-sanitary restaurants in China to purchasing a stuffed owl from a very forthcoming British taxidermist.

The only thing about Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls that I didn’t like is when he ventures into the odious and offensive subject of politics. I despise politics, politicians and all things political. I would rather not hear anybody’s political views. If you don’t bore me with politics, I will extend you the same courtesy.

David Sedaris is a true literary star, a real celebrity, although you’d never know it from his humble demeanor and appearance. Years ago I stood in line for over an hour at one of his book signing events to get him to sign my copies of Holidays on Ice and Me Talk Pretty One Day. (The bookstore where the event took place waived its no-smoking policy for him only for that evening.) I had been to many book signings but had never stood in line that long before (or since). Somehow it seemed worth it. I still have the two signed books. Maybe someday it will be like owning a signed, first-edition copy of Tom Sawyer.

Copyright © 2013 by Allen Kopp

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Requiem for a Nun ~ A Capsule Book Review

Posted on February 15, 2013 by allen0997

Requiem for a Nun cover

Requiem for a Nun ~ A Capsule Book Review By Allen Kopp

William Faulkner, the master of twentieth century Southern American gothic writing, wrote Requiem for a Nun as a sort of sequel to his novel Sanctuary, meaning that it’s a brief glimpse into the life of fallen woman Temple Drake eight years after the close of Sanctuary. Requiem for a Nun was written around 1951, when Faulkner was 54 years old, about twenty years after Sanctuary.

Requiem for a Nun is an odd little book, not a traditional novel. The story is told in dramatic form, meaning that reading it is like reading a play. That’s not all, though. The “acts” of the novel are interspersed with some of Faulkner’s dense prose; dense in the sense that sentences are frequently half-a-page long or longer, and you won’t know what he’s saying unless you’re reading carefully and go back and break down the sentences into their various parts. Faulkner is the master of interjectional writing. Great writer though he was, it’s as if his mind was so twisted with interweaving thoughts that he couldn’t finish one thought before he started in on another. I suppose this is part of his “innovation,” although not easy on the reader.

The “narrative” portions of the book that are interspersed with the “dramatic” portions are about the fictional history of the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi, in fictional Yoknapatawpha County; specifically the jail, the courthouse, and how the town was begun. These fictional historical details actually have nothing to do with the “story” told in dramatic form.

Readers familiar with the character Temple Drake from Faulkner’s earlier novel Sanctuary know that she ended badly. She was witness to a murder and lied on the witness stand to defend the real murderer, a deformed thug named Popeye, who took her to Memphis and set her up in a whorehouse to keep her from going to the police and telling them what she knew. Requiem for a Nun picks up her story eight years later. She is free of Popeye (he was hanged for another crime that he apparently was innocent of) and is married to her drunken male companion, Gowan Stevens, from Sanctuary. They have two children, an infant daughter and a slightly older son.

Temple has taken a black woman named Nancy Mannigoe, former drug addict and prostitute, into her house as a sort of governess for her two small children. Temple believes she is saving Nancy from her terrible life and giving her a chance to have a better one. When the action of Requiem for a Nun begins, Nancy has murdered Temple and Gowan’s baby daughter in her crib and is going to be executed in a few days for her crime. Temple decides within two days of Nancy’s execution that she herself is responsible for the murder of her own baby, beginning with her actions eight years earlier, and attempts to save Nancy’s life. There is one very long scene where she and her husband’s lawyer uncle go and see the governor of the state in the state capital in the middle of the night to plead for Nancy’s life, even though Temple knows there is no use.

Since there is no nun in Requiem for a Nun, I’m not sure what the title means, although I’m figuring it refers to Nancy Mannigoe. She goes to her death serenely because she believes she deserves to die and because she is a “believer.” Nancy’s serenity is something that Temple Drake cannot touch, understand or share. She is a tormented woman and we get the distinct impression that she will never be anything but that.

Copyright © 2013 by Allen Kopp  

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The Song of Bernadette ~ A Capsule Book Review

Posted on January 9, 2013 by allen0997

The Song of Bernadette cover                                 

The Song of Bernadette ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

The Song of Bernadette, by the Austrian writer Franz Werfel, is a fictional account of the true story of a simple peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, who experienced visions of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes, France, in 1858. The novel was first published in 1941 in German and was made in 1943 into what is today considered a classic movie that is usually shown on TV around Christmastime.

At almost six hundred pages, The Song of Bernadette is not an easy book to read. The English translation is filled with oddly arranged and wordy sentences that often require re-reading to understand. You are going to have to be a dedicated reader to get through this book. The story is minutely and scrupulously detailed or, to put it another way, it’s a very slow-moving reading experience. It could have been told in half the number of pages. However, those readers who stick with the book through to the end will be glad they did. It’s a fascinating story of simple faith in a cruel, cynical and unbelieving world. The life of a saint is not an easy path.

Bernadette, following examples set in the Bible, was the least likely person to be singled out for a divine visitation. She was a sickly girl from a poor family that lived in what was known as the “Cachot,” a former prison converted into a poor dwelling place. She suffered from asthma from birth and was not a particularly well-liked or well-disposed child, or a bright student in school. There was nothing remarkable about her; she was, in fact, one of hundreds just like her.

One day when she was gathering firewood with her sister and another girl in an ugly, repellant place near her home, she experienced a vision of what she described as a beautiful lady in a niche in a rock formation. She thereafter referred to the vision as “The Lady,” while it is assumed to have been the Virgin Mary. Bernadette tried to keep the vision a secret but, of course, news of it broke out and everyone wanted to know what it was all about and what it meant.

The Lady instructed Bernadette to come to the place where she first saw her every day for fifteen days. On one of these daily visitations, the Lady instructed Bernadette to get on her hands and knees and dig in the dirt. When Bernadette obeyed this directive, a spring gushed forth beneath her fingers, a spring that was found to have curative powers. Among the first to be “healed” from their afflictions were a blind man whose sight was restored and a two-year-old boy, near death, who suffered from paralysis and convulsions. When word of these miraculous cures spread, the spring and Bernadette became famous. People from all over the world came to Lourdes to be healed of whatever ailed them. Enough genuine healings occurred to convince many that it was real.

With all her notoriety, Bernadette’s troubles were just beginning. For every person who believed she was genuine, there was an equal number who believed she was a charlatan and an instrument of the devil. Local officials and even some members of the clergy took it upon themselves to discredit Bernadette and to find plausible reasons to prove she was a fake.

With all that happened to Bernadette and her family, she never lost her simplicity and her faith in her visions of the Lady. What it meant was for others to figure out. She remained humble throughout her life and wasn’t interested in the ways of the world. She entered a religious order, where she performed menial kitchen duties, and died twenty years after her visions at the age of thirty-four from a painful affliction known as tuberculosis of the bones. When a fellow nun suggested during her illness that she partake of the curative waters of the spring at Lourdes, she stated simply that the cure was not meant for her.

Fifty-four years after her death, in 1931, Bernadette was sanctified as a saint in a ceremony at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, with fifty thousand people in attendance. Her body, during the investigative process for sainthood, was found to have not decomposed in all the decades since her death. Her detractors had a logical explanation even for that, saying that she had been expertly embalmed and was merely a “mummy.”

Copyright © 2013 by Allen Kopp

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Sanctuary ~ A Capsule Book Review

Posted on November 30, 2012 by allen0997

Faulkner - Sanctuary

Sanctuary ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Many readers find William Faulkner’s work difficult to navigate. His style is very dense at times and we don’t always know at first what he is saying. Whereas many writers walk the reader step by step through what is going on, Faulkner leaves the reader to make certain connections that aren’t always easy to make. For example, in his 1931 novel, Sanctuary, the character Horace Benbow mentions Little Belle, his stepdaughter, on numerous occasions. Little Belle seems to be extremely important to Benbow but we never really known why. Is he in love with her? Does he lust after her? Why has he run away from his wife, Little Belle’s mother? Why does the subject of Little Belle come up with him so much? Why does Benbow have such a contentious relationship with his sister, Narcissa? Is Narcissa his conscience?

These small things aside, Sanctuary is (along with As I Lay Dying) one of Faulkner’s most accessible works, at 250 pages. I first read it many years ago and, after seeing the sanitized 1935 film version, called The Story of Temple Drake, I dug the book out of a box in my basement and read it again. It’s a sordid story about bootleggers (it takes place, after all, during Prohibition), prostitutes, and a fallen woman. Over everything looms the presence of a character named Popeye (we never know him by any other name). Popeye is a sociopath with a misshapen body (he was sickly as a child and never developed properly).

Bootlegger Lee Goodwin operates out of the shattered shell of an antebellum mansion. He has a woman with him (apparently they are not married) and a baby that’s sick all the time. Several nefarious types, including Popeye, hang around Lee Goodwin’s place. His “woman” cooks for them, complains all the time, and takes care of the baby.

Pretty college girl Temple Drake goes to Lee Goodwin’s with a male friend to buy some illegal booze. When the male friend becomes permanently drunk and can’t be relied upon to remove Temple from this awful place, she finds she is in for an extended stay, whether she likes it or not. She tries to get somebody to take her back to town, but it seems that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. She captures the attention of the low men who inhabit the place, including Popeye.

In the course of sexually assaulting Temple, Popeye shoots and kills Tommy, a halfwit who has taken it upon himself to protect Temple. Popeye then leaves with Temple and installs her in a Memphis whorehouse. Lee Goodwin, the bootlegger, is assumed to have killed Tommy and jailed to await trial, although he is innocent of the charge.

At the whorehouse where Popeye has taken Temple, she becomes mentally unhinged. She seems to have given up on being able to return to her old life. Is she willing to let Popeye do whatever he wants with her, or is she only pretending? We learn later that Popeye is not able to perform sexually. (In his initial assault of her, he used a corncob.) At one point he uses a man named Red to engage sexually with Temple while he watches and then shoots Red in the head and kills him.

The whorehouse gives Faulkner the chance to add some humor to the story, especially in the person of Miss Reba, who runs the house. She has two little yapping dogs named Reba and Mr. Binford. (Mr. Binford is a long-dead sweetheart of hers.) In one of the chapters that provides a comic interlude, Reba and two lady friends have just come from the funeral of Red and are getting drunk. One of the ladies has a small boy with her whom they call Uncle Bud who has an unusual (for a child) fondness for beer.

Horace Benbow defends Lee Goodwin in his trial for killing Tommy, but it is a miscarriage of justice. Lee knows that Popeye killed Tommy but won’t say so. When they bring in Temple Drake, she testifies that she saw Lee Goodwin kill Tommy. She is afraid of what Popeye will do to her if she tells the truth. Her testimony seals Lee Goodwin’s fate.

Popeye leaves town but, we learn, his past catches up with him when he is apprehended someplace else for an earlier murder he committed. Temple is free of Popeye but apparently her life is ruined. She is beyond redemption.

Copyright © 2012 by Allen Kopp 

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ~ A Capsule Book Review

Posted on September 3, 2012 by allen0997


One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

The classic American novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, was first published in 1962. It is set entirely (except for one brief scene on a fishing boat toward the end of the novel) in a men’s ward of a state mental hospital. The book owes a large part of its fame to the 1976 Oscar-winning film version starring Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher.

The first-person narrative of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is told in the voice of one Chief Bromden, a very tall half-Indian-half-white-man, who is a long-time patient (maybe “inmate” is more appropriate) in the ward. He pretends to be “deaf and dumb” but isn’t. He sweeps the floor constantly, allowing him to be in places (closed-door meetings, for example) where he otherwise wouldn’t be allowed. He sees and hears everything. He is the silent observer.

The ward is ruled with an iron fist by one Nurse Ratched, who the men call “Big Nurse.” She is about fifty years old, wears lots of lipstick, has enormous breasts, and is a former army nurse. She is friends with the mother of one of the patients, Billy Bibbit, and, except for that, we know nothing about her life away from the hospital. Is she married? Does she have children? Is she a lesbian? We never know. She remains throughout the novel a rather one-dimensional character.

Over time Nurse Ratched has fine-tuned the ward to her liking. She believes in strict adherence to rules and schedule. The patients are all afraid of her one way or another. She uses fear, intimidation, humiliation—and sometimes electroshock therapy—to keep them in line. She herself is as machine-like and as tightly controlled as her ward. She seems invincible. No one will go against her.

Enter patient Randle Patrick McMurphy, transferred to the mental ward from a state work farm. He is the rowdy nonconformist, the extrovert from the lower classes, the master manipulator. He has been bucking authority his entire life and isn’t intimidated by it. Whether he really belongs in a mental hospital or not is never established. As a work-farm prisoner, he wangles a transfer to the mental hospital because the food is better, the surroundings more comfortable, and the living easier. He has made himself master of his world.

R. P. McMurphy challenges Nurse Ratched’s authority in a way it has never been challenged before. He lets her know that she has met her match in him. He isn’t intimidated by her the way the other men are. He breaks all the rules and leads the other men into doing the same. Finally they have found somebody who speaks for them, who stands up for them. He gives them courage they never realized they had. When he finds that most of them are in the mental hospital voluntarily (they can leave whenever they want to) rather than “committed,” he forces them to look at their lives in a different way: they are masters of their own destiny, most of them, instead of pawns to be manipulated by the “Combine.”

The story doesn’t turn out well for McMurphy, but has Nurse Ratched really won in the end? Hasn’t McMurphy wrought a change that otherwise (if not for him) would not have been possible? It’s the end of the road for him but the beginning of a new and better road for some of the others. In the end he has triumphed over the “Combine” in a way we didn’t expect. He is the classic antihero, the “one against many.”

Copyright © 2012 by Allen Kopp 

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The Kid ~ A Capsule Book Review

Posted on March 20, 2012 by allen0997

The Kid by Sapphire ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

We first met the character Precious Jones in the novel Push by Sapphire. It was made into an excellent movie in 2009 with the title Precious. (It seems that Push had already been used as a title for a different movie.) In the novel and the movie, Precious Jones is black, overweight and illiterate at the age of sixteen.  She has a foul-mouthed, welfare-recipient mother who regularly heaps abuse on her head and a father who routinely rapes her. By the age of sixteen, she has given birth to two children by her father, the first of which was a girl with Down’s syndrome called Mongo.

The second baby Precious gives birth to is a boy that she names Abdul. The novel The Kid begins when Abdul is nine. His mother, Precious Jones, has died at age twenty-seven of AIDS that she contracted from her own father. Abdul has no known family, so he becomes an orphan, a ward of the state. He is put into a foster home with an indifferent foster mother, where he is beaten and sexually assaulted by an older boy. After he recovers from his injuries, he is placed in St. Ailanthus, a Catholic boys’ school.

Abdul comes to regard St. Ailanthus as his home, even though he is sexually assaulted regularly by the “brothers” who run the home (it seems this is something he must tolerate just to get along). In spite of all that, though, there are benefits to living in the home: it’s clean and there’s plenty of food to eat; also there’s an education to be had for those willing to take advantage of it.

It’s while Abdul is at St. Ailanthus that he is exposed by accident one day to African dance. After that, becoming a dancer is the one driving force in his life. He intends to overcome all the obstacles put in his way to get the education and training he needs to become a professional dancer. His path is about to become more difficult, however: He is accused of sexually assaulting a younger boy at St. Ailanthus and is expelled. He believes he is being falsely accused so the brothers in charge of the home can somehow use him as a scapegoat to sidestep their own culpability.

After he leaves St. Ailanthus, he is sent to live with a great-grandmother that he didn’t even know he had. She lives in a filthy, roach-infested apartment and seems to not be in full possession of her faculties. She hasn’t seen Abdul since he was a baby. Abdul refuses to admit he is related to her.

Through all the ups and downs of his young life, Abdul never stops wanting to be a dancer. He lives for a while with an older, effeminate dance instructor. He finds himself in a dance troupe (of sorts) with an Asian girlfriend who calls herself My Lai; his feelings toward her seem to be ambiguous at best, especially after he finds out what she wants him to do for her.

The Kid is a fast, almost effortless reading experience. Those readers who read and liked the novel Push or saw the movie Precious will probably be interested in this story of young Abdul Jones’ troubled life. Although it held my interest throughout its 373 pages, I was a little disappointed in the rather unsatisfying ending. The book seems to just stop, rather than end, with Abdul at age twenty in another terrible jam that he may or may not be able to overcome. It seems another book is needed to tell us what happens to him from there on. Does he overcome all the bad stuff and become a successful dancer? Does he find someone who appreciates him for what he is without using him? These questions are yet to be answered.

Copyright © 2012 by Allen Kopp

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Out of Oz ~ A Capsule Book Review

Posted on January 9, 2012 by allen0997

Out of Oz ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

American writer Frank Baum created the Land of Oz in a popular series of children’s books in the early 1900s. Contemporary American writer Gregory Maguire takes Oz one step farther in his Wicked Years series of four books that are decidedly more for adults than for children. The first (and, I think, the best) book in the series is Wicked. It’s about the life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West. She’s the one that Dorothy Gale of Kansas kills by throwing a bucket of water on her. (Wicked, by the way, was turned into a famous Broadway musical.) The second book, Son of a Witch, is about Liir, the strange bisexual son of the Wicked Witch of the West. (Yes, she has a son—you have to read the book to see how that comes about.) Liir has a daughter, named Rain, who figures prominently in the fourth book in the series, Out of Oz. Just so we don’t fail to mention it, the third book is A Lion Among Men. It’s about (you guessed it) the Cowardly Lion.

Out of Oz begins with Rain as a child. She doesn’t know who she is or where she came from, but she’s living with (and being cared for) the Good Witch of the North, Lady Glinda. (You will recall, in the movie version of The Wizard of Oz, Lady Glinda arrives in a bubble. She’s the one who eventually facilitates the return of Dorothy Gale to Kansas.) As the granddaughter of the Wicked Witch of the West (although she doesn’t know it yet), Rain has the potential to shape the empire with her as-yet untapped magical powers. A war is raging between Munchkinland and Loyal Oz. Both sides are seeking Rain, but especially a book of magic called the Grimmerie. It seems the Grimmerie will give a powerful strategic advantage to the side that has it. Through her bloodline, Rain is perhaps the only person in all of Oz who can know how to harness the power of the Grimmerie. It’s up to Rain’s parents, Liir and Candle, along with the Cowardly Lion and an assorted group of characters (Mr. Boss and his Munchkin wife Little Daffy, Iskinaary the Goose, etc.), to keep Rain and the Grimmerie from falling into the hands of the warring factions.

In Out of Oz, Dorothy Gale of Kansas has returned to Oz via the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and is being used as a pawn in the war between Loyal Oz and Munchkinland. She is being tried for murder in the deaths of the Wicked Witch of the East (you recall she accidentally landed her house on her) and the Wicked Witch of the West (death by a bucket of water). She is found guilty and is going to be executed until the Cowardly Lion and his crew rescue her and take her away with them. Dorothy gets on everybody’s nerves, as she is so chipper and always about to burst into song. I thought she was a fun character and would like to have seen more of her.

At 568 pages, Out of Oz is a long reading experience. It could have had more punch, I think, if it had been, say, 200 pages less. Possibly only those readers who have read the other three books in the series will want to stick with Out of Oz through to its conclusion. Maybe Gregory Maguire, in writing it, was following Oscar Wilde’s dictum: Nothing succeeds like excess.  

Although Out of Oz is billed as the fourth and final book in the series, there seems to be plenty of potential material for a fifth book. If such a book comes out, I’ll be over my Out of Oz fatigue enough by then to want to read it, especially if it’s about 350 pages or less.  

Copyright © 2012 by Allen Kopp

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