Review: Proust's Overcoat by Lorenza Foschini

"You can't take it with you." How many times have I heard that? Yet despite this maxim, people are frequently still judged by their possessions. Perhaps this is nowhere more evident than when viewing the possessions of famous people. When you go for a tour of a famous author's home, doesn't it feel a bit like a cheat if the furnishings are only representative of the period and not original to the author? Somehow, knowing that your favorite author sat at this desk or wore that dress makes viewing these artifacts that much more exhilerating. And to know that the manuscript laid out under glass is original? Priceless. So what if you had the opportunity and the money to collect your favorite author's belongings? Would you?

Jacques Guerin was the head of his family's very successful perfume business when he fell ill and was attended by the late Marcel Proust's brother, Dr. Robert Proust. While perfume was Guerin's business, rare books and author possessions were what fired his imagination and drove him in his obsessive collecting. His acquaintance with Dr. Proust and subsequently to an antiques dealer who also knew the Prousts enabled him to amass much of the collection he prized so dearly. Woven through the tale of Guerin's thorough and careful hunt for Proustiana, is a brief but instructive history of Proust's relationship with his unfaithful brother and bitter sister-in-law to whom Proust's homosexuality was a terrible and appalling embarrassment. The history works seamlessly with the story of Guerin's collecting and author Foschini's literary detective work to uncover both of these aforementioned stories. The book is slight but engaging and there's no need for the reader to be more than passingly familiar with Proust. I have never read his works and yet the story of Guerin's quest to save Proust's belongings from the flames to which his brother's widow would have consigned them was fascinating as was the short history of Proust himself. While this hasn't necessarily convinced me to search out Proust's Remembrance of Things Past with so many other books still on my plate, I definitely have to admit to more curiousity than before.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review.

Review: The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet by Myrlin A. Hermes

Hamlet is the Shakespeare play I have read over and over and over again. It was a perpetual inclusion on class reading lists from high school all the way to graduate school. I've even seen it performed more than once. And yet I never thought too much about what kind of past would have created a melancholy character like the ever philosophical, strangely stagnant Prince of Denmark. Luckily for me, Myrlin Hermes has thought about that past and written a truly rollicking good novel complete with many of Shakespeare's own crazy conventions to flesh out that topsy-turvy tale.

Loyal Horatio is a poor scholar at Wittenberg University, toiling away for years on a philosophical dissertation that has long since ceased to interest him, chiefly because of his badly concealed agnosticism. Into his narrow world comes Baron de Maricourt, who commissions a romantic play meant to laud his own holdings and flatter those among his friends. Horatio cannot afford to turn down the commission even if he struggles not only with the original source material but also with the increasingly ludicrous additions suggested by the Baron, or rather by his lady wife Adriane. Meanwhile, as Horatio wrestles with what sounds suspiciously like A Midsummer Night's Dream, he meets Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, and in this possibly mad but exceedingly fair wastrel, finds his muse.

Horatio writes for Hamlet, falls in love with him, and devises a way for Hamlet to act in his play. But this brings Hamlet into the sphere of Lady Adriane, the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets, with whom Horatio is also half in love and having an affair. And just as in Shakespeare's comedies, this love triangle becomes confused and befuddling. Add in a late-arrival in the character of a poet called Will Shake-speare, seemingly Horatio's rival both for the affections of both Hamlet and Lady Adriane and for the job of playwright/poet and the plot gets dizzyingly intricate.

Horatio narrates the majority of the novel but occasionally the reader hears from Lady Adriane's perspective when Horatio's limited knowledge of the complicated and carefully orchestrated situation doesn't reveal enough. It can be a little jarring, despite the font difference, the first time the narrator changes but in the end, it works well. Hermes has sprinkled little Shakespeare treats throughout the story and the astute reader will feel little puffs of pride at catching more than simply the most obvious of the allusions and famous lines. Her narrative is madcap and definitely twists Hamlet in ways I never would have suspected but she has done it with such facility that it seems nothing more than entirely plausible to me now having come to the end of her prequel.

It did take a sort of re-alignment of my expectations in order to sink fully into the text but once I did, the comedic twistings and turnings, the bed-hopping and gender identity issues, the nods and curtsies to the Bard, the wild imaginings, and even the sly questions on Shakespeare's authorship kept me reading along at a good clip. It's probably best for a reader to have some knowledge of Hamlet before reading this but those without that grounding might still find the romance and the tragedy of friendship, true love and loyalty appealing as well.

For more, be sure to visit Myrlin Hermes' website as well as her blog.



Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours for sending me a review copy of this book.

Review: If You Follow Me by Malena Watrous

Marina is twenty-two, living in rural Japan, and teaching English in a vocational university. She moved to Japan with her girlfriend Carolyn, in part to escape her grief over her father's suicide. But living in the midst of such a foreign culture, bottling her emotions up so tightly, and hiding the actual nature of her relationship with Carolyn makes for a stressful and eventful year. The novel opens with a letter to Marina from her supervisor Miyoshi-sensei trying to explain to her the importance of the elaborate and confusing gomi (trash) disposal rules in rural Shika and her neighbors' unhappiness at her inability to follow these rules. Throughout the year, Marina continues to receive these letters from her supervisor, both chastizing her and illuminating the Japanese character.

Marina's experience teaching is not at all what she expected and her relationship with Carolyn struggles and undergoes a major shift during this year abroad. Marina's students run the gamut from girls studying to become secretaries and oblivious to the accepted marginalization of women that surrounds them, to cock-sure boys destined to work at gas stations and in factories who harrass Marina and Miyoshi-sensei, to a silent and sullen former shut-in. She finds the majority of her interaction with the Japanese in town to be superficial, suffering disappointment whenever she thinks she's making a friend and discovering that said new friend only wants free English conversation. So the fact that she and Miyoshi-sensei develop a friendship is all the more valuable, until a strain threatens to eliminate this source of comfort for Marina. Meanwhile, being each other's only friend and companion is proving to be too much for Marina and Carolyn's relatively new relationship as they find themselves sinking under the combined weights of homesickness, loneliness, and grief.

Absurdities, humor, disturbing events and characters, and quirks, cultural and personal, abound in this novel. While the entire year covered in the book is narrated by Marina, the other characters do come off as fully-rounded as her understanding of them allows them to be. The conceit of using Miyoshi-sensei's letters to Marina to insert interesting cultural tidbits about Japan that otherwise would seem out of place, is well done and creative. Isolation as a major theme is handled well, with Marina's internalized feelings accurately reflected by her external circumstances: grief and aloneness reflected in her failing relationship and in her cultural isolation. Watrous has drawn a vivid picture of a small corner of Japan and although it is a picture that entices me to visit Japan not at all, I still appreciate the insight into the culture. More than the story of a young woman traveling part way around the world to find herself amidst a completely different culture, this plumbs the depths of love, life, and community.


Check out Malena Watrous'Facebook page.


Thanks to Trish and TLC Book Tours for sending me a review copy of this book.

Review: Dog Years by Mark Doty

When I picked this book up, I expected it to be a memoir about Doty's life with his two beloved dogs. I certainly didn't expect it to be a rumination about life and loss and the ways that grief pushes into your life and holds on. But that is indeed, in many ways, what this is. Arden and Beau, the dogs of the title, just offer a central focus for the philosophical musings put forth here by Doty, a poet and memoirist. His relationship with his dogs is the scrim through which he recalls the slow decline and death of his partner from AIDS. And the dogs weave in and around his eventual relationship with his new partner as well.

But there's an interrupted feel to the writing here with chapters dodging and weaving about with no clear sense of timeline. Of course, starting the narrative with Doty's philosophical conception of dogs and language followed swiftly by the death of Beau, it is clear that this will not follow a conventional timeline or a conventional memoir's path. His writing tries a little too hard to capture poetry in prose and in the end ended up alienating me. I am a sucker for animal stories and yet this one elicited very little response, perhaps because it was more about Doty's cumulative losses and his grief than about the dogs. His dogs clearly meant the world to him but the sometimes overly florid writing and the intrusion of so much else detracted from their stories.

Although Doty claims that his dogs helped to lift him from depression and grief, there was very little uplift here, overwhelmed as it was by depressing outpourings on the ephemerality of life and the certitude of loss. As a reader, I needed a more focused narrative, a smoother integration of his life as a gay man both facing the loss of a beloved partner and finding a new love as well as showing more of the concrete, never-wavering love of his animals. Some animal lovers have praised this book highly while others have panned it so I seem to be fairly alone in thinking it was just an okay read. I did struggle a bit with the style and the disjointedness of the narrative but underneath it all, there was some good bone structure. I had just hoped for more out of it than I found.

Review: Openly Bob by Bob Smith

Smith was the first openly gay comic to appear on The Tonight Show. Given that I am long asleep before the show comes on, I did not see him on there and had few expectations of this book beyond hearing from a friend years ago that it was hilarious. And you know what? It absolutely was hilarious. This is a memoir of sorts in the form of essays that Smith has written dealing with being gay and being a grown-up. He takes on all sorts of topics like needing couples counseling, coming out to his parents, taking his boyfriend home to meet his quirky family, working as a comic, auditioning for roles as the stereotypical gay man, and so much more. The tone throughout these connected essays is humorous and amusing and while a few pieces have bits that might date them, it is also instructive that some of his politically relevant jibes are still, unfortunately, relevant, 12 years after this book won a Lambda Literary Award. Smith has a biting humor and a sharp wit and those who enjoy word play, will find much to admire here. Although the essays were certainly polished over time, it is clear that Smith must be a pretty darn funny stand-up comic off the cuff as well. He's insightful and observant and quirky and the book stands as an entertaining testament to the ups and downs in one gay man's slightly offbeat life. Read this one when you want to laugh, a lot.

GLBT Challenge

I've never joined this challenge before but I thought it sounded really interesting and given my eclectic mix of to be read books, I was fairly certain that I could come up with at least for books already on the shelves that would fit the GLBT Challenge, aka the challenge that dare not speak its name.

The basic idea of this challenge is to read books about Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual, or Transgendered topics and/or by GLBT authors.

The challenge runs year-round, and there will be three levels of participation:

Lambda Level: Read 4 books.
Pink Triangle Level: Read 8 books.
Rainbow Level: Read 12 or more books.

You don't need to choose your books right away, and they can change at any time. Overlaps with other challenges are fine.

I'll be going for the Lambda level, which only requires 4 books because I am generally clueless about the sexual orientation of the authors whom I am reading (as a matter of fact, I had to scroll through the list of authors on the site to find three of these four but I did already own them so that's good).

1. The Well of Loneliness by Radcliff Hall
2. The Kid by Dan Savage
3. Openly Bob by Bob Smith
4. She’s Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan
and the trusty alternate since I never stick to my original lists:
5. Swish by Joel Derfner