Archives for June 20, 2006

On Monday I filed my Wall Street Journal drama column, filled a suitcase full of books about Louis Armstrong, picked up a Zipcar, and headed for Connecticut, stopping along the way to grab a bite at Super Duper Weenie (which really is as good as its reviews, in case you were wondering). Where I am now is nobody’s business, though I’ll admit to hearing frogs and crickets outside my open window. I plan to spend the next three days working on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong, writing my “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Journal, and taking it easy when not otherwise occupied.

I’ll be back in New York on Friday afternoon. I don’t expect to post much between now and then, save for the daily almanac entry and the usual theater-related postings. Have a nice week!

“The point of life is–I think–its imperfection. The point of human beings to me is that they are full of faults and weaknesses and wickedness–it is because of all that that they are human, made up of a thousand things: defects, qualities, idiosyncrasies, tricks, habits, crotchets, hobbies, little roughnesses and queer pitfalls, unexpected quaintnesses: unexpected goodness, and unexpected badness; take all that away, and what is left? Nothing that I want to see again.”

Maurice Baring, C

I reviewed Monica Ali’s sophomore novel, Alentejo Blue, in the Baltimore Sun last weekend. While more sweeping and ambitious than her first book, Brick Lane, this novel proved less satisfying in the end. Ali is a deft and sometimes flat-out dazzling writer, and I was rooting for the book to succeed. But the form she chooses is a difficult one to make work: she strings together several short stories about different characters residing in the same small Portuguese town. Taken individually, the stories are compelling and wonderfully written. But she seems not to know how to finish the book as a whole.

The final story, encompassing all of the characters’ points of view and pushing uncertainly toward meaningful closure, just doesn’t make much of an impression. As a formal choice, this late move from limited to omniscient narration is an interesting failure–I appreciated the risk Ali took, but at the point it should have been peaking, my engagement with the book crashed and burned. As I said in the Sun:

Each of the first eight stories belongs utterly to a single character, steeped in that individual’s consciousness, sensibility and ethos. But Ali’s reversion to third-person omniscient narration in the last story is the real innovation and surprise – one that, alas, doesn’t have whatever effect was intended. Instead, it ends the reader’s journey on a flat tire, dispersing the separate intensities that had mounted in each boldly imagined, pristinely written story that came before.

Still, I found large swaths of the book pretty impressive and involving, and will continue reading the talented Ali.