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Friday, May 14, 2004

In modern America, no nightmare is forbidden

An intriguing piece from JG Ballard, who generated a very stimulating discussion when we discussed Crash last year.

"We might think that the US had enough problems coping with Iraq, where the abuse of prisoners has given a spin of sexual perversion to its drive towards world domination, something the British Empire, with its croquet and memsahibs, never achieved, alas" (The Guardian's leader writer seems less convinced that we're not capable of this kind of thing)

"As the nation infantilises itself, the point is finally reached where the abandoned infant has nothing to do except break up its cot. "

Posted by Jon @ 12:44 GMT
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Boris Vian, L’Écome des Jours, 1947, Translated by Stanley Chapman as 'Froth on the Daydream'1967, 1970, 1988

Current Book Club Book on the Back Burner

Herman Melvills's 'Moby Dick

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Previous Book Club Books

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

Senhor Jose is an official in a registry office, with a passion for unearthing every detail and reconstructing people's lives from the bare data in the archive documents. One file in particular challenges him: a woman's date and place of birth are missing, and so he begins his research in earnest.

The school gives them an education. I give them the wherewithal to resist it. Examine a boy and he is tamed already. Only examine him and you can tax him, empanel him, enlist him, interrogate him and put him in prison. You have only to grade him and you have got him. An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form boys in pursuit of sex, sport and a place at university. A maverick English teacher at odds with the young and shrewd supply teacher. A headmaster obsessed with results and a history teacher who thinks he’s a fool. In Alan Bennett’s new play, staffroom rivalry and the anarchy of adolescence provoke insistent questions about history and how you teach it; about education and its purpose.

A panoramic vision of America at the beginning of the 21st century, seen through the turbulent lives of the Lambert family. This novel is a moving family drama and a dissection of American society in an age of greed and globalism.

A collection of poems from a tenderly observant poet who writes about what all of us can understand. The title poem describes the poet's journey by train from Hull to London, using the tones and rhythms of ordinary speech and focusing on the urban landscape of the industrial north.

Accused of mocking the inviolate codes of Islam, Persian poet Omar Khayyam fortuitously finds sympathy with the very man who is to judge his alledged crime. He is spared, and thus begins the blend of fact and fiction that is 'Samarkand'.

Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. This is the story of two brothers, but the subject of the novel is in its dismantling of society and its assumptions, a dissection of modern lives and loves.

A debut collection of short fiction blends elements of Indian traditions with the complexities of American culture in such tales as

Koestler's story, first published in 1940, of an old-guard communist who falls victim to Stalin's purges, yet attains a personal freedom in his destruction.

This novel opens with the narrator in hospital after a serious car crash in which he killed a doctor's husband. When he leaves hospital, he revisits the scene of the crash, and meets the doctor. They begin an affair which involves sexual experiments on London motorways.

Georgie Jutland is a mess. At forty, with her career in ruins, she finds herself stranded in White Point with a fisherman she doesn't love and two kids whose dead mother she can never replace. Her days have fallen into domestic tedium and social isolation. Her nights are a blur of vodka and pointless loitering in cyberspace. Leached of all confidence, Georgie has lost her way; she barely recognizes herself. One morning, in the boozy pre-dawn gloom, she looks up from the computer screen to see a shadow lurking on the beach below, and a dangerous new element enters her life. Luther Fox, the local poacher. Jinx. Outcast. So begins an unlikely alliance. Set in the wild landscape of Western Australia, this is a novel about the odds of breaking with the past. a love story about people stifled by grief or regret, whose dreams are lost, whose hopes have dried up. It's a journey across landscapes within and without, about the music that sometimes arises from the dust.

Writer Jake Donaghue's adventures in London and Paris include falling in and out of love, kidnapping a canine film star, and trailing a onetime friend.

Like its noteworthy ancestors (Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, the Ancient Mariner and Moby Dick) Life of Pi is a tale of disaster at sea. Both a boys' own adventure (for grown-ups) and a meditation on faith and the value of religious metaphor, it was one of the most extraordinary and original novels of 2002. The only survivor from the wreck of a cargo ship on the Pacific, 16 year old Pi spends 221 days on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan and a 450-pound Royal Bengal Tiger called Richard Parker...

Into the intrigue and violence of Indo-China comes Pyle, a young idealistic American sent to promote democracy through a mysterious Third Force. As his naive optimism starts to cause bloodshed, his friend Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, finds it hard to stand aside and watch.

Patrick Bateman is Harvard-educated and intelligent. He works by day on Wall Street, earning a fortune to complement the one he was born with. His nights he spends in ways we cannot begin to fathom - doing impermissible things to women. He is living his own American Dream.

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