And having finished what proved to be the best book I've read in a long time, Bruno Schulz's "The Street of Crocodiles", introduced to it by the animation of the same name by The Brothers Quay, a rich, vivid, metaphorical description of the author's life in Poland around the turn of the century.
“There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are double, make-believe streets. One's imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which the streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night.”
You can read it online here: http://www.schulzian.net/translation/shops.htm, which may be easier than finding a print edition...
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And I picked this up at the Flea Market, a Graphic Novel, attracted by the environmental themes and rough graphic style, I can imagine that with a little (or probably a lot) of practice my style might approach it. "For the daughter" I tell myself - because, indeed, I think she'll like it, but as she's still a few months away I pass the time by reading it.
And it's brilliant. By brilliant I mean it uncovers and reveals the complex layers, motivations and consequences of the ecological abyss we are plummeting into. And it's a bit hard-hitting, but the truth is, and it doesn't satisfy itself with the conventional media platitudes of "reuse, recycle...", it attacks the corporations, governments and institutions that are promoting the destruction of the planet, and raises complex philosophical issues of how domesticated, indeed zombified, by corporate and consumer culture, we are, and how we rebel against doing small and necessary evils to prevent larger ones...
It tackles in uncomfortable ways our passive and impotent attitudes towards the destruction of our planet, and raises up a call to arms...Genius. It's not a happy book, but unless you've been on Prozac the past hundred years, it's not a happy world.
AS THE WORLD BURNS: 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Stay In Denial - By Derrick Jensen & Stephanie McMillan. 5/5 Stars, and kudos for them for having the courage to write a book that calls it like it is and probably hasn't sold that well. I'm hoping the daughter loves it as much as I have.
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Now I saw this at a thrift-shop and as I like Louis De Bernieres and have been on a bit of a reading roll I picked it up.
It's good.
But, less on the review front I read it and begin to recognize myself - the plot - a middle aged man falls for a young Yugoslavian Girl (Serbian). That's plenty. No spoilers here. But there's the curious symmetries - heroin lives in Clapham - I lived in Clapham - Heroin is a Serbian Hostess in a Hostess Bar in Soho - oddly enough, my housemate was a Bosnian Hostess at a Hostess bar in Soho...and the stories, well, fictionalized for sure, but one recognizes enough places and parallels to ones own life to wonder...
A curious coincidence, timing, whatever, that took me back to the day...
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Funniest book I've read since...well, for a while. Collections of Mr. Thorne's emails with the unwitting, unwary and, for lack of appropriate un-word, stupid. With their replies. Loads of LULZ.
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