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	January 2006 :: issue 27
	Books This Month 1. The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr 2. Sneaker Freaker by Woody 3. Hermit in Paris by Italo Calvino 4. Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick 5. Athena by John Banville 6. Hunger by Knut Hamsun 7. Self, Life, Death by Nobuyoshi Araki   Feature Book News Credits/About Us The Obsession Issue As we all take a minute to catch our collective breath after the holidays, some of us will be looking over our lists of resolutions. Around the Boldtype offices, we're committing to making a dent in those precarious piles of unread gifts. You could call us obsessed, but as we learned while making this issue, there are many flavors of fixation. This month we bring you a passionate hunt for a lost Caravaggio, as well as a kinky, early novel from 2005's Booker-winner, John Banville. For those of you who leapt on those post-Christmas sales, don't sleep on Sneaker Freaker, the Bible of fresh kicks. If you're in a more bookish mood, you can bury yourself in the diaries of Italo Calvino or Cynthia Ozick's tale of a family of bibliophiles. We've got a line on the darker side of obsession, too, in the forms of a classic chronicle of writerly mania and art-world darling Nobuyoshi Araki's fetishistic, erotic photos. There are also two special treats: a feature on a luscious, web-only book and our newest holiday tradition, the F-List — a Flavorpill-curated cheat sheet of cultural capital in 2006. - Toby Warner

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NONFICTION The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece by Jonathan Harr Published: October 2005 Pages: 271 Publisher: Random House Links: Caravaggio bio New York Times review Reader's Circle interview WNYC interview Synopsis An extraordinary account of the rediscovery of one of the art world's Holy Grails, by the author of the bestselling A Civil Action. Review In the spring of 1993, a headline in an Italian newspaper sent shockwaves through the art world: "A Lost Caravaggio Returns." "The Taking of Christ" — known for centuries only from meticulous copies suggesting an original masterpiece — had been discovered hanging in the dank parlor of a Jesuit residence in Dublin, attributed to a second-rate Dutch Caravaggisti named Gerard van Honthorst. The precious number of extant Caravaggios — between 60 and 80 (with some pending authentication) — grew by one; art lovers rejoiced. The headline might as well have been about the artist himself. History hasn't always been kind to Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, the most famous Italian painter of his time: defamed as vulgar by Ruskin and the Victorians, he and his Baroque contemporaries were all but forgotten by the turn of the 20th century. But in the wake of modernism came a reappraisal of his harsh chiaroscuro and dark, desperate subjects. Almost 400 years after his death, Caravaggio has finally ascended into the canon, revered by the establishment and trendsters alike. Jonathan Harr's account of the rediscovered painting's original slip into obscurity and misattribution reveals much about the intersection of art, politics, and commerce amidst Europe's ever-shifting fortunes — and even more about the evolution of artistic taste. But at its core, The Lost Painting is a detective story — as much about the gumshoes as it is about their quarry. Two young women — Roman undergraduates working on their senior theses, no less — did the archival sleuthing that discovered the misattribution, though they could trace the painting's ownership no further than 1920s Britain. Sergio Benedetti, an Italian-born restorer working at Ireland's National Gallery, did the rest when he realized instantly that the van Honthorst he'd been asked to clean was more than it seemed. Under the microscope, forensic evidence confirmed the students' research. What's not lost on Harr is that Benedetti and the students were all infected with what he calls the "Caravaggio disease." Their fervor for the artist's work showed just how far the master had come from the days when his paintings were worth less than their frames. - Chris Lamb back to top

FASHION Sneaker Freaker by Woody Published: November 2005 Pages: 320 Publisher: Riverhead Links: Sneaker Freaker site Woody interview Synopsis A compendium of the world's best, and only, sneaker-hunting magazine. Review This colorful compendium collects the first three years of Sneaker Freaker, a magazine by and for passionate disciples of sneaker culture. Those in search of more than foot candy will find (in between goggle-eyed spreads on vintage French tennis shoes and Korean Nike hi-tops) interviews with industry insiders, including Laser Project curator Mark Smith and obsessives such as DJ Clark Kent, who has 14,000 pairs of Air Force Ones. A truly global endeavor (the mag was founded in Australia), the book shares practical tips on the best spots to cop kicks in Melbourne, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, London, and New York. You can get the lowdown on how to spot fake A Bathing Ape high-tops and where to find boutique brands like Alife and Feit. There are think-pieces too — everything from meditations on sneaker fetishes of a more sexual nature to wistful "whatever happened to" elegies for extinct '80s brands such as Troop. Two such highlights among the personal essays are an article on the only shoes they let you buy in prison (New Balance Runners, people — so stay clean!), and a confessional piece by a female fiend who grapples with the latent chauvinism of sneaker-hunting culture. At the outer limits, you'll learn of the Adidas Superstar 35, which comes in a lockable briefcase and has fetched ten grand at auction. But taking the cake for sheer madness is the great Pigeon Dunk riot of 2005, when an extremely limited edition Dunk SB inspired a scene of fandom and mayhem in NYC's Lower East Side whose fervor was somewhere between a Dead show and a Soviet breadline. Even if you cringe at such rampant, materialistic lust, it's consoling to know that freakers aren't just a bunch of rich boys flashing their latest finds but rather a subculture of endearing addicts who know that their love is absurd — they just can't help it. Like ballers or chess masters, they're wise enough to know that there's always someone out there with more game — or, in their case, a pair of untouched Air Max '87s. - Toby Warner back to top

NONFICTION Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings by Italo Calvino, translated by Martin McLaughlin Published: (1994) 2003 Pages: 272 Publisher: Vintage Links: Artist bio Author site Other Books: If on a winter's night a traveler Invisible Cities Difficult Loves Synopsis In a series of essays and interviews — many published here in English for the first time — Italian author Italo Calvino chronicles his childhood in Liguria, his first impressions of America, and his solitary Parisian life. Review While the Lost Generation was "finding itself" in Paris, a young Italo Calvino was lollygagging a bit farther south, in his hometown of San Remo, Italy. Later, Calvino found his own spiritual Paris in New York's boho Greenwich Village and the concrete rivers of Manhattan. This collection of autobiographical essays, diaries, and interviews, disingenuously titled Hermit in Paris, is devoted mostly to previously unpublished letters Calvino wrote home during his six-month stay in the States in 1959. Writing to his colleagues back at Einaudi publishers, Calvino notes essential truths: that Allen Ginsberg "dresses up in dirty clothes only to go out," that the Sunday Times is a two-arm, all-day affair, and that no one walks in LA. Calvino loops westward through the Midwest to San Francisco and returns hugging to the southern border. He meets Martin Luther King, Jr. in Montgomery and falls in love with Savannah, Georgia, which he esteems "the most beautiful city in the United States." Years later, settled in Paris, Calvino hardly takes notice of the city, preferring instead the peopled solitude of his writing, the familiar island of his desk. When he does venture out, he delights in his own invisibility — it is no surprise that shortly after moving to Paris, Calvino wrote Le Città Invisibili, or Invisible Cities. Paris, for Calvino, has too much past to have much of a present. While America crackled with youth — both its own and Calvino's — Paris had the heavy, silent air of a museum. For this New Yorker living in Paris, Calvino's musings, more so than Gopnik's moonings, resonate strongly. Calvino, wide-eyed and meticulous, is a perfect companion; his essays, a vade mecum of familiar turf. I take the book around with me, asking tourists to snap our picture on the Pont Neuf. I take it to dinner, tucking a napkin into its pages. While Calvino's writings kept him a hermit in Paris, these days, they keep me in good company. - Joshua David Stein back to top

FICTION Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick Published: 2004 Pages: 322 Publisher: Mariner Books Links: Author bio Cynthia Ozick article on poetry Other Books: The Puttermesser Papers The Shawl A Cynthia Ozick Reader Synopsis The sentimental education of Rose Meadows, a caretaker and amanuensis coming of age amongst the passions and obsessions of the unusual Mitwisser household. Review Cynthia Ozick's Heir to the Glimmering World is a coming-of-age novel cleverly disguised as a novel of ideas. This book will satisfy readers who love a good plot as well as finicky word and style geeks who seem to be annoyed by any novel that follows a straight line. The story begins with the introduction of Rose Meadows into the household of the Mitwissers — a family of scholars (and Jews) escaping from Germany in the early part of the Nazi era. A feisty, bookish orphan from a nowhere town in upstate New York, Rose takes the first job available to her because it promises to bring her to The City. The Mitwisser paterfamilias, Rudolf, is a history professor so obsessed with his work that he finds it easy to neglect his family. He hires Rose to help with his research on an obscure branch of Jewish mystics called the Karaites. While Rose actually spends most of her time caring for the family's mentally fragile mother, she soon becomes infected with Rudolf's scholarly mania. Also obsessed by the professor's strange passion is James A'Bair, a wealthy gadabout who becomes the family's patron. James owes his wealth to the Bear Boy, his own father's series of world-beloved children's books, for which he served as the model. Like Rose, he is also searching for his place in the world, struggling to shake off the maddeningly persistent, idealized image of his childhood. At first an unseen benefactor to the Mitwisser family, James eventually moves in with them, sowing increased disorder within an already tenuous family structure. It is Rose, however, who is the "heir" to the glimmering world — a phrase that refers, naturally, to the world of books. While Ozick's characters may be consumed by the written word, time and again we're shown that literature is, above all, a refuge for their stray souls. While Heir is a book about books, Ozick's wry, agile, and wise playfulness is never too clever to tell a good story. - Sage Van Wing back to top FICTION Athena by John Banville Published: 1995 Pages: 240 Publisher: Vintage Links: Author bio Scriptorium article Elegant Variation interview Literary Encyclopedia article Prospect article Synopsis Booker-winner John Banville's best known protagonist gets caught up with Dublin gangsters, stolen paintings, and a lurid, fevered, S&M affair with a mysterious woman. Review John Banville's 1989 The Book of Evidence introduced readers to Freddie Montgomery, a Humbertian charmer who kills a chambermaid during the theft of a painting he has become consumed with. In Ghosts, a paroled Freddie contemplates his crime and its intersection with artistic questions of authenticity versus representation. The trilogy concludes with the breathtaking Athena, in which these concerns achieve apotheosis. "I don't understand why that book didn't do better," Banville has remarked. "I gave them sex. I gave them violence. What more do they want from me?" Following Banville's 2005 Man Booker Prize, Athena might finally get the attention it deserves. Freddie — now calling himself Morrow — is engaged by underworld don "The Da" (inspired by "The General" Martin Cahill) to authenticate stolen paintings before they are sold on the black market. The presence of the provocative "A" — to whom the novel is addressed — clinches the reluctant Morrow's participation. Before the backdrop of a string of unsolved serial killings, he struggles to balance a deepening erotic obsession with his work, while keeping his past buried and remaining one step ahead of the law. The climax of Morrow's and A's increasingly brutal couplings is a reenactment — at A's insistence — of the murder of chambermaid Josie Bell. Despite his efforts at concealment, Freddie has been found out. Further twists and betrayals await, but the central obsession of Athena is not so much Morrow's sexual longing as it is his ongoing search for the authentic self, the original concealed among the copies, among the myriad representations of self. It's the culmination of a conversation the solipsistic Freddie began with himself in The Book of Evidence; but the obsession is, in fact, Banville's — it goes back to his first novel, Nightspawn, though it takes its most elegant form in Athena. The narrative is interwoven with ersatz catalogue descriptions of 17th-century Dutch paintings depicting brutal mythological scenes — only each painter's name is an anagram of John Banville. If Freddie Montgomery is the patron saint of obsessives, John Banville may well be their deity. - Mark Sarvas back to top

NONFICTION Hunger by Knut Hamsun, translated by Robert Bly Published: (1890) 1967 Pages: 240 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Links: Author bio World & I article New Yorker profile Synopsis Not just another starving-artist story, Knut Hamsun's semi-autobiographical novel shows us what it really means to be hungry. Review "All of this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiania..." remembers the anonymous protagonist of Knut Hamsun's masterpiece, Hunger. Despite the wry offhandedness of such an opening line, the fact is that he had been starving — brutally and for several months, to the point of losing his hair in tufts. Penniless and having no possessions but a blanket, a pencil and paper, and the clothes on his back, Hunger's narrator seems to peel away, layer by layer — creeping along the edge of sanity, and, many times, peering over it. To live, he must write. Write what? Nearly anything — a short story, a philosophical treatise, a play — so long as it is salable. He commits volumes of ideas to paper, scribbling incessantly wherever he can find a suitable place to sit: on benches, on the floor of a tenement house, beneath a streetlamp at night. It is no accident that we are never allowed to read what is written. The focus remains on the labor, the material, the bread to be bought. All we have are important-sounding title which give the whole business an air of mysterious potentiality: a newspaper article called "Crimes of the Future," a one-act entitled The Sign of the Cross. Battling the severe physical and psychological stresses of starvation, the protagonist sells next to nothing and is propelled along a farcical narrative arc of lunatic coincidence and mishap. Hamsun, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920, deftly traces the rapid, recursive loops of the narrator's feverish thinking — marching us into every dead end, reveling in the maddening impossibility of salvation. Yet so much conspiring against him, the narrator conveys a sense that he hungers to starve — to live without bread, sustained only by his own grand, original, and as yet unpublished thoughts. - Stephen Dougherty back to top PHOTOGRAPHY Nobuyoshi Araki: Self, Life, Death by Nobuyoshi Araki Published: December 2005 Pages: 720 Publisher: Phaidon Press Links: Searle review (Guardian) Araki's personal site Araki by Araki Collector's Edition Synopsis This visually lush tome represents the most comprehensive compilation of maverick Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki's work from the past 40 years. Review Inarguably one of the most charismatic and controversial artists alive today, Nobuyoshi Araki captures his dreams, desires, and disappointments in photographs whose vibrant colors and fetishistic imagery have provoked equal levels of outrage and adoration. Every bit the mischievous character, Araki has done all he can to encourage criticism against his art, embracing his "dirty uncle" persona while defending the legitimacy of his work. This contradiction is evident in his photographs — some depict rope-bound women, masochistically dangling from the ceiling, while others capture the beauty of the surrounding world, documenting fragile flowers or the hustle of Tokyo streets. For Araki, the camera has become another appendage, almost an extension of the artist's eye. He captures everything, accumulating a plethora of images whose composite impression leaves the viewer with a sense of kinship — a true glimpse into the artist's reality. Understanding the unique intimacy that comes with leafing through the pages of a book, Araki has produced a number of photographic volumes. Published to coincide with the Barbican's retrospective of Araki's work, Self, Life, Death is exceptional not only for its visual impact but also for its variety of written resources — from the first-ever English translations of Araki's writings to his interview with renowned curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. The book's illustrated chronology of the artist's life perfectly embodies Araki's message — for him there is no distinction between art/life/self/other. He is there even in his portraits of friends, models, and lovers — symbolized by a plastic menagerie of dinosaurs, snakes, and lizards, who crawl upon breasts or slither up skirts. Araki's fearless ambition to embrace all aspects of human existence, continually illustrated in the images, recollections, and revelations of this book, has inspired generations of artists — past and future — to accept themselves as both creator and subject. - Allison Kave back to top

FEATURE A Non- Breaking Space   The publishing world had a shock last year when, instead of wading into the digital book market, Google's Print Library Project jumped in with a cannonball-sized splash. Quickly following suit, Amazon unveiled plans to sell electronic texts. Despite all the hoopla, the truth is that reading a whole book on a screen gives most of us a headache. Jen Bervin's A Non- Breaking Space is a cure for this common complaint. A 27-page book of delicate poetry and collages, the whole work is up online, for free, thanks to boutique Brooklyn publisher Ugly Duckling Presse. A Non- Breaking Space is defiantly not designed for the web — there are no flash interfaces, and readers can only navigate forward or backward. Yet by insisting that these haunting pages are something you should be able to touch and hold, Bervin makes us realize that a screen can be like a pane of glass, keeping you separated from what you're looking at. Bervin's last book was the impish collection Nets, in which she picked words out of 60 Shakespearean sonnets to create poems of her own. Traces of that cut-up aesthetic remain here, in a physical form. Wistful stanzas are printed on rectangular scraps of white paper like fortune cookies, which are then pasted onto tan sheets populated with blue and white shapes, fine, snaking lines, and curious holes. Each leaf is partially transparent, revealing traces of where you've been and where you're going. - Toby Warner back to top BOOK NEWS A few notable bits of recent book news. A picture worth several thousand words (Guardian) The Guardian is looking for an amateur photograph to grace the cover of one of Penguin's pocket classics. Drool over the complete set here. Look, Mom, I'm infamous! (BBC) Giles Coren is named the winner of 2005's Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Noble protest (Telegraph) Harold Pinter decries the invasion of Iraq in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Pamuk's trial postponed (International Herald Tribune) The trial of the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk has been delayed. Read Pamuk's recently published comments, and our review of his latest book. Whitbread goes stale (Guardian, via Maud Newton) The patrons of one of Britain's most prestigious literary awards may be shifting sponsorship to one of their subordinate brands. The Pizza Hut Prize, anyone? back to top

	CREDITS Editors Toby Warner Mark Mangan Paul Laster Jocelyn K. Glei Jamend A. Riley Nick Merritt Chris Gage Editors-at-Large Larry Weissman Sean McDonald Contributors Stephen Dougherty Allison Kaye Chris Lamb Mark Sarvas Joshua David Stein Sage Van Wing Production & Design Anjuli Ayer Morgan Croney William "Keats" Pierce Sascha Lewis Cover Art Nobuyoshi Araki from Nobuyoshi Araki: Self, Life, Death published by Phaidon, 2005 © Nobuyoshi Araki   ABOUT US Boldtype is a monthly, email-based review of books published by Flavorpill Productions. Our 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. MEDIA PARTNERSHIPS Every month, Boldtype presents one exclusive media partner. Click for more information about advertising opportunities on Boldtype and across all Flavorpill publications. FEEDBACK We welcome any and all feedback — comments, criticism, and even effusive praise. To reach the staff at Boldtype, please email us at editor. SUBMISSIONS If you have a book that you would like us to consider for review, please send an email to books or mail a copy here: Boldtype c/o Flavorpill Productions 594 Broadway, Suite 1212 New York, NY 10012 Our other email magazines: A twice-monthly email magazine highlighting the latest in electronic music — including news, reviews, and original features An email magazine covering a handpicked selection of music, art, and cultural events — delivered each Tuesday afternoon A twice-monthly fashion report providing an insider's view on trends emerging from Paris, London, New York, and around the world A twice-monthly email magazine covering art, design, and architecture with profiles, news, and reviews of inter-national shows
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