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BOOKS THIS MONTH
1. Against Love by Kipnis
2. Norwegian Wood by Murakami
3. A Venetian Affair by Di Robilant
4. Talking It Over by Barnes
5. The Beautiful Room Is Empty by White
6. Orientalia by Louie
Featured Partner: M3 Summit
Book News
Credits/About Us
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THE LOVE ISSUE
This is the year of the monkey. And this is the month, some say, of love.
To get in the mood, we present more than
one variation on the theme — from the star-crossed
passions of Di Robilant to the unrequited discoveries
of Murakami to the three-way amorousness described by Barnes,
we almost find our way to the elusive emotion. And with the
salacious trysts of White, yearning polemic
of Kipnis, and love for sale by Louie, we take different
routes altogether. Somewhere in between all the words and
pictures lies the answer. May we all have double happiness.
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Synopsis
Against Love isn't really against love per se, just the soul-stifling
conventions of marriage and couplehood that seem to inevitably go along with
it.
Review
Welcome to the modern marriage: an institution filled with loneliness,
deception, alienation, and self-medication, according to author and
Northwestern Media Studies professor Laura Kipnis. In her hilariously
unapologetic and contrarian style, Kipnis has written a tirade against what
she calls the "emotional anesthesia" of monogamy, and suggests that adultery
just might be the most sensible response.
Kipnis bucks convention from the onset in choosing the form of a polemic, a
one-sided argument traditionally invoked when attempting to ruffle some
serious feathers. Applying Marxist theory to our social norms, she suggests
the institution of marriage is simply a societal tool to keep citizens
working day and night, thereby rendering us easier for the government to
control. After all, since we seem to willingly accept that all
relationships require work, maybe "love is the latest form of alienated labor."
Adulterers are the true freedom fighters of our world, says Kipnis, boldly
toying with society's constructs in hopes of truly fulfilling the human
spirit. "Adultery is a container for experiments," she says, and within it,
"something new might be invented or understood."
Kipnis does tread a fine line between hopelessness and empowerment while
airing out all the things we're afraid to admit about romantic love. And by
the end of this gleefully entertaining book, one might consider giving
it all up and heading off to a monastery. What is the answer then, if
it's not the relationship models we've relied upon for centuries? Kipnis
doesn't quite provide the answer, but she certainly succeeds at leading us to
question our own sexual status quos. (CM)
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| FICTION |
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Norwegian Wood
by Haruki Murakami
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| Published: |
September 2000 |
| Pages: |
293 |
| Publisher: |
Vintage |
Links:
Roundtable between Murakami's
translators and his US editor
Murakami at The Complete Review
Murakami Forum |
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Synopsis
A deceptively simple coming-of-age story that tenderly charts the expectations and disappointments of youth, this artful meditation on love sold so many copies in in Murakami's native Japan that he was forced to flee fame and go into exile.
Review
Like Proust's madeleine, the strains of "Norwegian Wood" being piped through the speakers of his plane as it taxis to the gate send Toru Watanabe's thoughts reeling back almost 20 years to the girl he loved who couldn't love him back. At the time, Watanabe, his best friend Kizuki, and Kizuki's girlfriend Naoko are inseparable. When Kizuki commits suicide, Naoko drifts ever deeper into an abyss of guilt and depression, and though they have gone their separate ways, Watanabe reaches out to try to help her. In doing so, he falls in love for the first time.
At school Watanabe is just another cynical misfit, unsure of himself and his place in a world of conformity. He embraces his mediocrity and feels there's absolutely nothing special about him — "ordinary family, ordinary education, ordinary face, ordinary grades, ordinary thoughts in my head." Midori, an eccentric, enigmatic classmate breaks through this alienation as she challenges their society's rigidity, beguiling our ordinary hero, breathing life into him, and creating a confused double helix of emotion. Attempting to balance his devotion to Naoko with the powerful feelings he has for Midori — one of contemporary fiction's most enchanting heroines — proves increasingly difficult for Watanabe, and he is forced to figure out what real love is.
Atypical for his oeuvre in that it lacks hairpin plot twists, fantastical imagery, or genre-melding, Norwegian Wood nonetheless displays Murakami's trademark humor, sly symbolism, and empathy. This bittersweet love story exemplifies his poetic mastery of yearning and nostalgic what-could-have-beens. As with most of Murakami's books, it draws you in slowly, until at some point it suddenly dawns on you that this endearingly sentimental, funny, sad book has sneaked up to capture your imagination and take hold of your heart. (LW)
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Synopsis
The true story of a tortured love affair between a Venetian nobleman and an English commoner as told through their letters.
Review
The Baroque era has no more perfect representatives of its passions than Andrea Memmo and Giustiniana Wynne. In the halcyon days of masks, casinos, and theaters preceding the death of the Venetian Republic, these star-crossed lovers begin a secret and forbidden affair that they take pains to conceal, but cannot suppress. As their tale of passions, deceits, marriage schemes, and secrets unfolds, letter by letter, the story expands from Venice through a Europe at war with itself. The breadth of their passion for one another is matched by the drama playing out in the world's stage around them.
The love story between Venetian nobleman Memmo and the British commoner Wynne was discovered by a descendant of Memmo in a bundle of letters salvaged from their ancestral home on the Grand Canal. Playing Virgil to the reader's Dante, author Andrea Di Robilant guides us through both the story of their ill-fated passion and the mysteries of its discovery. Di Robilant has a deft touch in providing us with enough background information to understand the subtleties of 18th-century culture while letting the characters speak for themselves.
Along the way, there are memorable appearances by historical personages like Casanova, perhaps the all-time most mischievous cad, who provides charming, albeit ill-conceived, counsel for his friends. But this is primarily the tale of true love as told by the lovers themselves through their sole means of contact with one another — their pens. (AD)
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Synopsis
A London love triangle is dissected by each of the participants in this quick, witty novel.
Review
Flamboyant, charming Oliver and dull, plodding Stuart have been best friends since their days at St. Edward's grammar school. Oliver went to university and honed his flashy verbal and sartorial style, while Stuart bought a medium-dark gray suit and a dark-dark gray suit and went to work in a bank. Of course, each of their personae is reliant on contrast with the other's, so their friendship continues comfortably until we meet them, now in their early 30s, living in London, and about to fall for the same girl.
With characteristic want of panache, Stuart finds Gillian — a pretty, sensible art-restorer — at a mixer for lonely singles at the Charing Cross Hotel. The three form a cheerful trio at first but, inevitably, on the day of Stuart and Gillian's wedding, Oliver realizes he's desperately in love with Gillian himself, and feverishly commences wooing her as soon as she gets back from the honeymoon. Despite her initial bewilderment, Gillian eventually succumbs, and Stuart is left to ruminate that "love — or what people call love — is just a system for getting people to call you Darling after sex."
Barnes is a master of the British middle-class vernacular, and this story, told entirely through a roundabout of dramatic monologues from the characters, shows him at his chatty, biting best. Oliver blithely derides Stuart's "jugular podge" (double-chin) and "lorry-like directness," and soon Gillian and even staid, decent Stuart are merrily joining in the mutual "slagging off." As each self-serving version of the saga unfolds, with occasional input from Stuart's bitter ex and Gillian's sage French mother, the novel's Russian epigram — "he lies like an eyewitness" — rings humorously true, not only in the characters' dishonesty with each other and the reader, but in the extent to which love drives them to deceive themselves. (TG)
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Synopsis
An autobiographical novel tracing a young man's coming-out in mid-20th-century, Midwestern, and middle-class America — a time and place in which the only social crimes that eclipsed homosexuality were murder and communism.
Review
The second installment of White's autobiographical triptych begins when a nameless protagonist crosses the road from his Midwestern prep school to a sanctuary for mid-'50s bohemia, the local art academy. It concludes with Stonewall, the legendary 1969 West Village gay uprising in which the author participated at age 29. Bookended by these two events, a bildungsroman spools out, not only of one gay man's self-reckoning but of 20th-century US counterculture — nosing cautiously, then brazenly, aboveground.
As he attends college and moves to Chicago and then New York, the narrator uncovers the underbelly lurking in every "nice society" to which he gains access. The ad exec in his mother's posh building schools him in the ecstasies of enemas; a dorm-mate silently propositions him for sex; mad orgies ensue in campus bathrooms; a lascivious frat brother mauls with equal zeal both his girlfriend and the protagonist; and a Freudian psychoanalyst pops too many pills to cure anyone of their so-called perversions. At first his democratic fascination with such characters seems to preclude the emergence of any true amour. Then a casual one-night stand blooms into an idée fixe, a blond beauty unable to accept his own homosexuality, let alone our narrator's. Love for another must be predicated on self-love — always elusive, he suggests, and nearly unattainable when the basic tenets of who you are and who you desire are viewed not only as aberrant but fundamentally illegal.
In lesser hands this novel could've devolved into the stridency or, worse, the piety that afflicts some politically conscious memoirs. White deftly sidesteps such pitfalls by rendering in Proustian detail everything from his mother's carpeting to a lover's heroin-induced paroxysms. He draws on his sociopolitical observations only to season the meat and potatoes of any story: lust and love, especially of the unrequited sort. (LR)
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Synopsis
Louie's colorful photographs of female sex workers in Asia tell a contemporary tale of lust and longing as Tracy Quan's essay delves into feminist issues in this intimate, elegant, and disquieting book.
Review
In 1980 Reagan Louie, a Chinese American from San Francisco, went East to discover his ethnic identity and pursue his photography. Subsequent visits led to a body of work, Toward a Truer Life, which revealed a Chinese people slowly emerging from the shadow of the cultural revolution. In 1997, Louie received a coveted Fulbright Fellowship and returned to investigate the subject of love and romance in modern China. A trip to a karaoke sex club gave a new definition to his topic, and his focus soon set
on a complex picture of human desire, sexuality, and love for sale.
Over the next five years, he made countless visits to brothels, clubs, and red-light districts in Tokyo, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and other Asian cities, large and small, to photograph a secretive society of hostesses, masseuses, and hookers for this collection, which was shown last fall at Von Lintel Gallery in New York and at SFMoMA.
Like a john, Louie paid the gals for their time, and although they were just doing their jobs, each projects a distinct humanity. The bored, beautiful, and forlorn working girls actively collaborated with the artist to convey their image. "I was drawn to people who had a certain sense of themselves," Louie told a KQED interviewer. From the cover image of a nude Bangkok woman bathing a man to Tokyo schoolgirls in various poses to demure temptresses in Seoul to a serene siren perched on a bed in Rangoon, Louie's
pictures capture disturbing scenes with style and grace. Love is everywhere. (PL)
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FEATURE
M3 Summit
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In anticipation of next month's Boldtype — the music issue — here's a groundbreaking
music conference and series of events in Miami in March called M3 Summit. For years now, the electronic music
world has converged on South Beach for what some believe is the best gathering of DJs and good vibes
anywhere in the world. But before the loose affiliation of events slips into the abyss of Wild On,
spring break, and Superbowl halftime, M3 Summit has come to break it on down and bring it all together —
with access to industry leaders, panel discussions, new technologies, and poolside parties. We're partially biased because our
partners at flavorpill helped start this venture, but that's just more of a reason to go. If the
future of music is any of your concern — buying,
selling, producing, or listening — then this is the frontier. By the beach, of course. (MM)
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BOOK NEWS
A few notable bits of recent book information and reporting.
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The LLSU Word Banishment selection committee releases its 2004 list (LSSU)
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From the banal to the enraging, LSSU gives us 17 words and terms that we should know to avoid.
(Past Lists) |
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Haddon wins the Whitbread Book of the Year award (BBC)
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| Author Mark Haddon claims the £25,000 prize for his novel The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time.
The book, which appeals to adults and children alike, was also a selection of The Today Show Book Club.
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2004 looks like a great year for eagerly anticipated sophomore efforts (Guardian)
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| Expect great things from authors whose debuts made reading lists and won awards. |
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New York Times editor Bill Keller contemplates dumbing down NYTBR (Salon)
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As editor Charles McGrath resigns from a recently scandalized New York Times, Keller admits he might make more
mainstream literature and nonfiction the focus of the industry's vanguard review.
Another look at the story (Yankee Pot Roast) |
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National Book Critics Circle chooses award nominees (bookcritics.org)
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| Now in its 30th year, the categories are fiction, nonfiction, biography/autobiography, criticism, and poetry.
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Spalding Gray is still missing (newyorkmetro.com)
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The writer/performer may have been haggling with a waitress in Orange County, but officially he hasn't turned up yet.
Gray Interview (altx.com) |
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| BOMB magazine announces its First Annual Fiction Prize (BOMB) |
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Enter for a chance to be judged by A. M. Homes and to win a $1000 honorarium and publication.
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CREDITS
Editors
Mark Mangan
Joe Mangan
Christopher N. Hampton
Jocelyn K. Glei
Paul Laster
Editors-at-Large
Larry Weissman
Sean McDonald
Contributors
Adam Davids
Tara Gallagher
Carolyn Murnick
Lisa Rosman
Lavina E. Lee
Felicia C. Sullivan
David J. Prince
Elizabeth L. McDonald
Ernie Hilbert
Marisa Lowenstein
Paul McLeary
Yancey Strickler
Steve Nalepa
Production & Design
Anjuli Ayer
William "Keats" Pierce
Peter Stepek
Sascha Lewis
Header Image
"Kabukicho Signs, Tokyo," 2000 (detail)
by Reagan Louie
Courtesy powerHouse Books
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ABOUT US
Boldtype is a monthly, email-based review of books. Formerly a web-based
literary magazine published by Random House, it is now produced entirely by Flavorpill Productions.
The Boldtype mission is to cover five to seven books each month that are worth reading.
No money is accepted from any publishers, writers, reviewers, or marketing or PR companies.
FEEDBACK
We welcome any and all feedback — comments, criticism,
and even effusive praise. To reach the staff at Boldtype, please
email us at editor.
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If you would like to get involved, please send an email to contribute.
If you have a book that you would like us to consider for review, please send an
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Boldtype
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like-minded brands to integrate their creative into the mailer. For more information, please
email us at media-partner.
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