“The fresh hell described by Robert Olen Butler’s new novel is crammed with random celebrities. . . Patrolled by Satan’s minions (among them, two of the Bee Gees) dressed in powder-blue jumpsuits, it’s filled with bookstores that optimistically open with new owners at every sunrise — only to go out of business by the end of each day. If the books they can’t sell in hell are maddeningly uneven, ever bouncing between passable wit and sophomoric giggles. Mr. Butler’s slapdash Hell deserves shelf space there. . .
Somehow, in the course of Mr. Butler’s fever dream of a plot, Hell also includes Dante’s Beatrice, now a film noir dame contending with Humphrey Bogart, who pines for Lauren Bacall; a chorus of singing cockroaches enamored of the phrase ‘poopy butt’; Michael Jackson, doing a woefully inadequate job of singing Wagner and consigned to ‘Everland, the densely populated molester estate on the edge of the city’; Bobby Fischer, playing chess with a computer from Hadassah; Jerry Seinfeld, whose jokes all bomb; and Celine Dion, who just won’t quit singing that damn ‘Titanic’ song.” [. . .] –Janet Maslin, The New York Times, September 6, 2009
Justin Cartwright, “To Heaven by Water” (2009)
“In the two-page prologue to Justin Cartwright’s new novel, To Heaven by Water, two brothers, ‘no longer young,’ are sitting by a campfire in the Kalahari Desert. The elder is smoking dope and reciting Gerard Manley Hopkins’s tongue-twisting, syntax-bending sonnet ‘The Windhover’: ‘I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon. . . .’ (This can’t be very good weed he’s smoking, since he makes it through all 14 lines without losing his way.) In response, the younger ‘feels a rushing, unstoppable love’ for him, which he expresses by mouthing the conclusion of the Divine Comedy: L’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle. (Cartwright goes on to translate for us, though such a familiar line needs Englishing far less than Hopkins does.) The scene ends with Cartwright’s own image of the stars, ‘implausibly bright, scattered carelessly like lustrous seed across the southern sky.'” [. . .] –David Gates, The New York Times, August 13, 2009
David Eggers, Zeitoun (2009)
“Imagine Charles Dickens, his sentimentality in check but his journalistic eyes wide open, roaming New Orleans after it was buried by Hurricane Katrina. He would find anger and pathos. A dark fable, perhaps. His villains would be evil and incompetent, even without Heckuva-Job-Brownie. In the end, though, he would not be able to constrain himself; his outrage might overwhelm the tale. . .
But within a week, the sense of menace and edgy despair becomes overwhelming. Now Zeitoun’s days are like a watery version of Dante’s Inferno, with flood and disease and tough moral choices around every bend: rescue or paddle on?” [. . .] —
Timothy Egan, The New York Times, August 13, 2009
“Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book”
“So Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Dore’ of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s Inferno that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dali'” [. . .] –Patricia Cohen, The New York Times, August 12, 2009
“Men Behaving Oddly”
“Robert Cohen’s Amateur Barbarians raises the question of whether the novel of male midlife crisis is suffering a midlife crisis of its own. . .
If we exempt from consideration the Dante of The Divine Comedy, who finds himself lost in dark woods and shortly thereafter enters the Inferno (this remains preferable to joining a men’s group), writers have been making narratives of midlife crisis since the ’60s, when an increasing level of economic prosperity and a loosening level of morality freed men to stare rapturously into their navels.” [. . .] –Will Blythe, The New York Times, July 16, 2009
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