Diary of a Wimpy Kid : The Ugly Truth by Jeff Kinney

After all the heavy and so-called intellectual reads, it was now time that I jumped into some light reading and no better book to do that with than the new installment of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid – The Ugly Truth. I had chanced upon this book on a book-lending website and since then I have read each and every installment and also passed it on to my nieces and nephews and I am one happy uncle for doing so as they have immensely enjoyed the series.

Greg is just starting to deal with the onset of puberty (although it hasn’t hit him yet), and between his eternal search to be cool and trying talk to girls, he has lots of misadventures along the way. There’s the attempts at fooling the new “maid”, who turns out to be a lot harder to fool then he thought. There’s the upcoming family wedding, full of family “fun”. His immediate family is surprisingly absent from most of his big problems, but the rest of his family has no problems filling in for him. “Health” class and its new birds and bees lessons are just as awkward for Greg as they are in real life. And of course, there’s the big school sleep-over that eventually all goes down the toilet (I loved the flushing the cheesies down the toilet bit).

Compared to the other books in this series, I think this is the best one since the original. From a kid’s perspective, I was told that I should warn that there is a picture of a boy’s butt in this book. It’s not pretty, but it is funny. Beyond that, the humor here is a *little* bit more mature in general, but still accessible to the average child reader.

I suppose the strongest recommendation is that the kids I know who read it were sorry it ended so quickly (i.e., the roughly 200 pages went by too fast!). Kids wanting to read more is as good a recommendation as you can get, so maybe I’ll leave it at that. If you’re a fan of the series, this is a good read.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth; Kinney, Jeff; Puffin; Rs. 250

The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason

Zachary Mason suggests that Homer’s “Odyssey” was merely one particular ordering of the events of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca after the Trojan War. “Echoes of other Odysseys”, he suggests exist, including a 44-episode variation in a “pre-Ptolomeic papyrus excavated from the desiccated rubbish mounds of Oxyrhnchus” and this is what is “translated” here. So we are presented with these 44 often very short stories that reconstruct elements of the Odyssey in a kind of alternate reality, asking “what if it were slightly different”, and what emerges is a non-linear, mosaic of stories. If Homer had decided to present his book in DVD format, these would be in the “extras” of alternative “takes” on things. The result is like a jazz riff on the original stories.

The tales are sliced up into 44 easily digested chapterlettes, each with a unique point of view, voice, and alternate-reality take on Odysseus’ famous adventure. What astonishes me about Mason’s work is how easily he slips back and forth between a contemporary storyteller’s bag of tricks and that of the ancient bard Homer himself. The Odyssey, more than any other epic tale I can think of, is suited to this sort of literary legerdemain because Odysseus, being a direct descendent of Hermes, god of thieves and liars, excels in occupying more than one identity–he’s a king, a beggar, a general, a nobody, a trickster, a washed-up prisoner of love, faithful husband and father, and revengeful lord. He’s supremely confident yet consumed by doubts, talks to gods yet identifies with the commonest of his shipmates–in short, Odysseus is so full of contradictions, doubles, and slippery escape routes that is it any wonder we’re still in love with him after over two millennia?

Mason exploits all this and more. His is a wonderfully fluid style; reading this book is like taking a dip in one’s favorite swimming hole (or ocean). The words shimmer on the page and evoke both the dreamlike mind of Odysseus and the evocative mind of the storyteller as sorcerer. The closest thing I’ve read to it is another favorite novel of mine, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in which Marco Polo, in an extended conversation with Ghengis Khan, describes fantastic cities he’s seen on his voyages. Just as with Invisible Cities, the more fantastical Lost Books becomes, the more they ironically find their mark in the heart of the modern reader.

Even if you are not intimately acquainted with the original “Odyssey” of the worst commute home from work of all time, you will probably be familiar with some of the imagery and stories. There’s Penelope waiting for her husband’s return, the Cyclopes, the Sirens attracting sailors to their death on treacherous rocks. Well, they’re all here but each tale is slightly altered or viewed from a different angle. I confess that my last encounter with the original was at school and a detailed knowledge of the “Odyssey” is not absolutely necessary to appreciate this book, although I suspect the more you know, the more you will appreciate this book. Certainly some passing familiarity with the story would be advantageous.

In The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Zachary Mason follows the lead of the ingenious Homer who plays with fantasy and reality to construct an epic that takes account of the full range of human emotions in their ambiguous and ambivalent relationship with the harsh facts of life. His novel is an exploration of the possible realities that could have underlain the wish-fulfilling fantasies that Odysseus spins at the court of the Phaeacians. Of course, Mason’s speculations are fantasies too. He’s making the point that when we sort our perception of reality through the filter of our feelings (and that’s all we can do) we enter into an infinite regression. Every attempt to correct our distorted impressions is subject to its own kind of distortion.

Nevertheless, the speculations about speculations don’t cancel one another out. They produce a wide range of possibilities that generate valuable and original insights, if not a consistent and fully coherent picture. The brilliance of Mason’s book lies in his ability to make the various might-have-beens seem equally plausible. They are all fully compatible with our knowledge of human nature. To accomplish this Mason uses two basic techniques, the deidealization of Odysseus and the shifting of points of view. Homer provides the clues to the deidealization, even as he magnifies Odysseus (whose name probably means “trouble-maker”). But the shifting of points of view among the winners and losers in the story of the Odyssey is not part of Homer’s strategy. Mason’ departure from Homer in this regard highlights Homer’s determination to create a hero out of the ordinariness of human beings, even the most talented of them.

Mason effectively and cleverly writes in a very similar style to the Homeric epic. It’s episodic, poetic, often beautifully written but with an added dry humour. In the very first chapter I was completely charmed by Odysseus’ return home after his 20-year journey, noticing that a gate had been mended in his absence which struck me as particularly poignant. There are several such instances throughout the book. In the same chapter, he goes on to note that seeing Penelope “without the eyes of a homecoming, only an echo of her beauty remains”.

We are presented with several conflicting versions of events – in one story Odysseus marries Helen rather than her sister Penelope, and in several he returns home to find different scenarios. In one story, Homer himself makes an appearance.

To sum it all, it is not easy to write a book based on a classic. There will be comparisons and I do not blame reviewers or readers who would tend to do so. I loved the book. I have not read Odyssey but I sure will after reading this one. Thank you Mr. Mason.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey; Mason, Zachary; Picador; $14.00

All and Nothing by Raksha Bharadia

I am not a fan of first books. In fact there are times I get scared reading firsts as I have had no reading experience with the particular author earlier. Call it a judgmental issue or a perceptive one, however that is how my reading gene works and we all have that reading gene somewhere, which works differently for different people.

So I was quite surprised when my gene acted out of the ordinary and read a first and actually enjoyed it. Well there you go! I managed to break into my gene just a little bit. And now to the review.

Human nature has always been the centre point of most novels and this one with that regard is no different. I think understanding human nature and its existence is one of the major quests for any novelist. It exists in almost all books written and read. All and nothing also sets out to do that at some level.

All and Nothing is about life – the travails, the small joys and the disappointments we sometimes face as we go along the way. It is about five individuals (seems familiar, doesn’t it?) who are somehow connected – but obviously, these guys are friends. Everyone is on the edge of their lives – either broken or on their way to being broken – issues ranging from domestic violence to discontentment to a marriage souring – the link that binds them.

Tina (one of the individuals) then summons them one fine day to share their stories from the beginning – from when it all started and that is where the story begins.

The plot is not very unique, however the way it has been told is. The characters at some point in the book grate to you, and there are times they are endearing and that is primarily because of the writing.  I did not love the book, nor did I dislike it. I liked it. There is no sense of closure towards the end which I personally liked. Some of it is left open for the reader to decipher and that is the beauty of the book. The layers are taut and do not give way easily. Would I recommend this book? Yes I would, however do not expect to read something extraordinary. Read it with an open mind and see what you discover. That is what reading should be, right?

All and Nothing; Bharadia, Raksha, Rupa and Co; Rs. 95

Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa

Seventeen year old Mari is narrator of the Hotel Iris. Her life is not the kind of life any girl her age, or anyone for that matter, would envy. A high school dropout, she lost her father to a violent death at the age of eight, and now she spends her days and nights working the front desk, among other duties, at the Hotel Iris which is owned by her mother. Mari is clearly not only a lonely girl, but an emotionally damaged one as well. Her father’s death and the treatment she receives from her mother, who is who is constantly barking orders and criticizing her, have not helped her self esteem.

The hotel is a shabby seaside hotel, presumably in Japan. The only other hotel employee besides Mari and her mother is a kleptomaniac for a maid. The hotel is rarely busy off season; in fact oftentimes its only customers are prostitutes and their clients. One day while Mari is working the front desk a loud commotion and fight ensues in Room 202. A man in his 50′s chases a woman, obviously a prostitute, out of the room. He yells, “Shut up whore” at the woman. When Mari hears his voice yelling at the woman, her reaction is, “when giving orders……his voice is beautiful”. This, of course, is in contrast to the way her mother orders her around all the time.

When Mari later sees the mysterious man in town she decides to follow him, wanting to find out more about him. Once she meets him, she follows him to an isolated island cottage, there she finds out he is a Russian translator, and what follows is a sick sadomasochistic relationship.

For no matter where the story goes (and it takes us into some strange territory indeed) it retains some of those qualities of eager innocence, a bud that opens in the span of a single summer. But nothing about the book prepares the reader for the R-rated content. The girl, Mari, first encounters the older man (simply referred to as “the translator” since he ekes out a living translating from Russian) when her mother throws him out of the hotel after a noisy row with a prostitute. Bumping into Mari some days later, he is apologetic and almost old-fashioned in his meticulous courtesy; we assume that this was a one-time occasion that will not be repeated. But Mari, it seems, was equally attracted by the man’s power and sense of danger. More than once, she lets him take her to his home on an island a short ferry-ride from the town, and all that happens there is embraced by her as much as by him.

In some ways this book was like a horrible car crash you pass on the highway–you don’t want to look, but you can’t help yourself. I felt the same way about the book, I wanted to turn my head, but the beautiful writing just would not let me quit. The writing hooked me from the first page of the short (164 page) novel. Because the story is so short, I never felt I totally understood what was going on inside of Mari’s head, and why she was so obsessed about continuing to see the unnamed translator; her obsession with him was unshakable. It is tough to read in parts, but in the end, I am very glad I read this novel.

Hotel Iris; Ogawa, Yoko; Picador First Edition; $14.00

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Reflect for a moment upon the hedgehog – that small, prickly, reclusive little creature. When feeling safe and secure, the quills of the hedgehog lie flat against its body, but when threatened in any way, this little animal quickly curls itself into a small ball, protecting its soft underbelly, bravely extending its sharp quills outward to ward off all that might threaten it. How elegant is nature.

So are we all like versions of the hedgehog; guarding our innermost thoughts and feelings, protecting our vulnerabilities behind an emotional armor of sharp little spines. For which one of us, after being hurt in some way, have not curled in upon ourselves, forming tight little balls, all quills standing firmly out, in order to protect ourselves from a future encounter? Only, sometimes for us (unlike the hedgehog), the fear of the past or the trepidation of the future keeps us curled in that tight little ball, warding off all who would trespass into our hearts – and make us care again.

This observation is exquisitely, yet so quietly, expressed as in Muriel Barbery’s “The Elegance of the Hedgehog”. In contrast to other finely written books in which the prose flashes and sparkles like sharply etched facets of a brilliant diamond, the softly glowing quality of Barbery’s prose more closely resembles that of a luminous pearl, quietly hidden within its oyster home. I found myself reading passages more than once, simply to experience the beauty, harmony and symmetry of those lines.

Like pearls within oysters, Renee and Paloma are the two protagonists and we come to know them through their journals, the only place where they open their minds and souls, pouring their thoughts and feelings into lines and lines of prose that only they will ever read. Although vastly different in age (Renee is 54 and Paloma is 12), they share two important similarities: 1) they have perfected the art of the “hedgehogdom”, having both retreated inward into the vast richness of their intellects and 2) they have done this out of fear.

We can quickly pick up on Paloma’s fear – although she would be the last to admit it as a fear. It is a fear of the mundane, the ordinary, and the commonness of adulthood. She isn’t the first teenager who has looked upon adulthood as the time when one’s life is essentially over and all that waits is some kind of gradual crumbling of mind and body. But she separates herself from the rest of the teenage crowd in her decision to end her life on her 13th birthday; unless, that is, something, someone or some series of events causes her to change her mind. She isn’t exactly sure what that will be, but she feels she will know it if she finds it. Although hers is definitely an over-the-top decision (although she presents her case with seeming detached logic), we realize that such dramatic ruminations are very much a part of growing up. Paloma has a bright and inventive mind, and reading her journal pages is very entertaining, for they are filled with lively accounts of her thoughts and experiences. Some are quite humorous; others shine a light into the future and the sparkling young woman she will become (should she allow herself).

Renee’s retreat from the world and the panic she experiences whenever she feels someone comes to close to guessing her “secret” (which is how intelligent and well read she is) is a puzzle. The reasons for her intensely guarded interior existence are harder to fathom, and its elusiveness can be distracting at times as we move through the world she has created on the head of a pin. Her retreat from life would seem to go beyond the grief of a loving husband taken from her and the loneliness of a child whose parents did not understand her. The pieces Renee allows us to see simply do not add up. We cannot put our finger upon what happened to make this particular hedgehog curl so tightly upon herself in the first place or why she has remained so barricaded against the outside world for so many years. We sense there is more to the story than she is willing to acknowledge – even to herself.

Because of their fears – and because curled up hedgehogs aren’t very mobile – Renee and Paloma are observers, not participators. They watch, absorb and reflect. But underneath their quite considerable intellect, and all their protestations that keeping to themselves is the perfect state of being for them, they sense that all is not what it should be. In spite of their vast interior resources (books, music, poetry, philosophy, etc.), they understand that theirs is a limited world. In Paloma’s case, she views the world as something disappointing in its limitations, a world in which she does not feel there is a point to joining; and therein lays the basis for her decision to end it all at the ripe old age of 13. Renee, as befits a quietly intelligent woman who has experienced some of life’s quiet joys and her fair share of poignant sorrows has decided that she has had enough of those kinds of experiences, thank you very much, and she has firmly shut the door upon them. Hers is a deliberate, conscious decision to turn her back upon the outside world and furnish the interiors of her solitary existence with the vast resources of knowledge, beauty and wonder which can be found everywhere – if one but has the discernment (and the willingness to stand still enough) to detect it.

Which makes their blossoming (precipitated by the arrival of a new tenant) all the more of a quietly joyous awakening. It is deeply moving to watch these two prickly, elegant little hedgehogs gradually uncurl, lower their quills and take a cautious look around. Throughout this lovely book, we are treated to a lyrically expressed ode to the “greatness of the small”, an appreciation for the tiniest of things which, in and of themselves, can represent so much beauty – a steaming cup of jasmine tea, a beautifully rendered still life, the lovely, delicate strains of a piano motif. All small, all exquisite.

How disappointing then, to encounter an ending that feels stilted, contrived and inharmonious with the rest of the book. It is almost as if the book is the physical expression of Paloma’s fear: an ultimate slide into the mundane, the ordinary. Throughout the book, we have been wafted effortlessly higher and higher, floating upon the luminous prose, gentle, delicately drawn characters and the greatness of the small – that is, until the last pages of the book when our magic carpet drops us to the ground with a disconcerting thud. It feels as if the ending of another book has somehow found its way into this one. 

I found the end disappointing. Not because of the sudden sorrow introduced, but rather the loss of the glowing pearl this book represented. It loses its magic by employing an ending that, against the beautiful backdrop of the rest of the book, seems elementary, pedestrian and jarringly artificial, plunging the book from the sublime to the shallow. The plunge is all the greater when considering the heights to which this unassuming, luminous, glowing little book floated so effortlessly and yes, elegantly.

For me, this book cried out for a non-ending of sorts – an ending as delicate, uncertain and elusive as the rest of it. The beginning of a blossoming, an awakening, the tentative beginnings of a small, prickly hedgehog just beginning, very slowly and very carefully, uncurling, just a little at a time. Had we left our little hedgehogs in that magical instance of tentative awakening, what a perfect ending that would have been. Instead, the door is crudely slammed shut.

Alas, this gem of a little book, this journey of the interior, this delicate little hedgehog, deserved better. Still, I urge you to pick up a copy of this book and experience it for yourself.

If you are the kind of reader who loves to underline or highlight beautiful, evocative passages, you will find, as you look back through the pages, that you will have underlined more sentences than otherwise. The writing is that beautiful, that lyrical, that much of a work of art in and of itself. You get the feeling that Ms. Barbery could write an essay on the yellow pages and you’d still be reaching for your pencil…or rereading certain passages just to savor them once more before you turn the page. Perhaps with a cup of tea close at hand.

Read the book for all of its considerable beauty, imagery and meaning. For me it was a richly rewarding experience. If you find the ending to be poignant and bittersweet, so much the better for you; if you do not, don’t allow that to detract from your appreciation of this exquisitely-told story.

Elegance of the Hedgehog, The; Barbery, Muriel; Europa Editions; $15.00

The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

It is not easy to write a short story. To be able to express everything that you want to say concisely and simply is not an easy feat. Personally I prefer the form of the short story over the novel and that is only because at a certain level the writers not only manage to evoke the feelings hidden deep within the reader, they however also manage to do it within a short span.

Writing a short story is as artful as the careful peeling of an orange – the layers need to be peeled, however the essence should not be lost. I was introduced to Deborah Eisenberg by a friend. I remember reading, “Flotsam” a long time ago and falling in love with the way she wrote.

For the past quarter of a century, Eisenberg has created short stories without any hurry. She completed her fourth collection which totaled under a 1000 pages, enough for an anthology which Macmillan has come out with under the title, “The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg”.

I dove into the collection like a famished man who entered a burger-eating contest. I could not get enough and with each bite (each story that is), I realized what I had been missing out on for almost all my life. Deborah’s heroines are forever struggling – either to find jobs or men. Their disappointment and friction with life is so isolating that they try recreating their lives all over again – by being someone else or in new situations.

She writes of disconnected people and troubled loves, above all of the loneliness and emptiness in these people’s lives. Her protagonists suffer from a withdrawing from or atrophy of experience. They are drifting, seeking an anchor sometimes, or a jolt of experience at other times to reset their emotional clocks. An experience, sometimes the most mundane and inconsequential experience, shocks them into an awareness of how separated they are from feeling, the people around them, their own past histories or a consciousness of a meaningful future ahead of them. All of the stories in the first collection, Transactions, are first rate. It’s hard to pick a best one but the last story in the collection, “Broken Glass,” exemplifies them.

If I were to meet the people in these stories, I sure would shake them up – give them an earful and send them home. I would want to wish them well and safe, as they are adorable and so disjointed from reality. I largely attribute this to the voice of the stories as well – they are mostly told in first person. Each of them involves someone trying to find something – waiting for that momentous turn in the bend, so to say.

I cannot review every story in this collection, that’s obvious however what I loved about the collection is that it does not get dreary or burdensome to get through. The prose is crisp and hits you in the face most of the time, till you learn to deal with it. As I close this review I am reminded of a line from one of the stories called “Rosie Gets A Soul”, – “Yes, this was where she lived; this barren, icy planet where she lived now.” Such is the beauty of Deborah Eisenberg’s language. Read the collection. I for one will go back to it soon.

The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg; Picador; $22.00

Mango Mood by Sharmila Kamat

The great French dramatist, Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais once wrote, I hasten to laugh at everything, for fear of being obliged to weep. On going through the book, Mango Mood, one gets the impression that the author, Sharmila Kamat, too, subscribes to the same philosophy.

Indeed, Sharmila Kamat has an inborn flair for light satire. She has wielded her pen with ease to depict the foibles and weaknesses of human nature without hurting the feelings of the subjects of her pieces. From her writings, one gets the impression that she would like to see a change for the better from those entrusted with the destinies of the common man.

Her pieces on our society are lighthearted on the surface but, on closer observation, serve as pertinent comments on the way of life in our country. Besides making us chuckle, they arouse our conscience and set us thinking about what we would have dismissed as everyday realities.

From her articles, one concludes that human behaviour is the same everywhere. The vagaries of human nature are, and will continue to be, a fertile ground for humorous pieces by persons like Sharmila Kamat who possess an observant eye and a witty turn of phrase.

Today’s world is full of turmoil and tensions. A casual glance at a newspaper makes us realise that murder and mayhem reigns supreme across the globe. Internecine conflicts, regional tensions and the threat of terrorism have combined to make world peace a distant dream. We are fortunate, therefore, to have writers like Sharmila Kamat who, through their witty writings, make us laugh despite all these depressing realities.

Jean de la Bruyere, a seventeeenth century French essayist and moralist, once wrote, One must laugh before one is happy, or one may die without ever laughing at all.

Those who will read Sharmila’s pieces need not have this fear. It gives me great pleasure to recommend MANGO MOOD to the reading public.

Mango Mood; Kamat, Sharmila; Rupa and Co; Rs. 195

The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks

If I were to ask you to descrbe the differences were between what your eyes see, and what you see, you’d probably think it an odd question. After all what you see is what your eyes see, right? Curiously enough, what you see when you perceive the world around you is very different from what your eyes “see.”

Consider this: The human eye can detect fine detail over an angle of about 2 degrees. That’s not much; it’s roughly the area of a dime held at arm’s length. Your first instinct is probably to say nonsense; after all, you can easily perceive the entire scene before you, over an angle of at least 90 and as much as 180 degrees. You’re right, at least in part. You perceive the wide expanse of the world before you, but what you perceive and what your eyes take in are two very different things. The world you perceive is not the raw input from your eyes, but rather something constructed by your brain, using input from your eyes as well as a lifetime’s experience and memory of the world around you.

Here’s another example. You’ve probably, at one time or another in your childhood, placed a finger in front of your face, and then viewed it through each eye in turn, noticing how it appears to jump back and forth and you switched eyes. Obviously, your eyes see slightly different pictures of the world. Yet when you look at the world, you don’t see two different pictures. You see a single picture of the world, with a sense of depth and dimensionality not apparent when viewing with either eye alone. That third dimension isn’t there in the pictures coming from your eyes- it has to be added by the brain.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks has made a second career for himself writing about neurological affectations, and how they affect the people who suffer them. In this book, he examines how vision works, and what happens when it doesn’t. Sacks has a particular insight into the problems of those whose vision differs from that of the population at large, as he himself suffers from prosopagnosia- the inability to recognize faces. For years, this was assumed to be a purely psychological problem. How could someone with excellent vision fail to recognize a face- even that of a family member? But for severe prosopagnosiacs, even the face of a parent or child is a nondescript set of features, no different from any other. This can and does affect recognition of things as well as people. Sacks, for example, tells how how he many times walked past his own house many times until a neighbor or family member spotted him and guided him home again. Prosopagnosia can range from the slight to the severe. Perhaps as many as 2.5% of the population carry a gene that predisposes them to the condition, and most mild prosopagnodiacs are probably unaware that they have the condition, thinking instead that they simply have a “bad memory for faces.” Sacks speculates if many instances of social shyness may in fact be due to the difficulties brought on by prosopagnosia; his own mother was painfully shy, and he suspect, given the genetic component, that he may have inherited his condition from her.

A related condition Sacks discusses at length is alexia, the inability to recognize letters.Usually brought on my injury, disease, or stroke, alexics can see letters, but the letters make no sense to them. One subject, a writer by trade, describes his post-stroke perception of English language as looking like “Serbo Croation (cyrillic) characters.” Curiously enough, most sufferers have no difficulty writing, a condition known as “alexia sin agraphia”- alexia without agraphia. They can write, but they cannot recognize their own handwriting after they write. To a neuroscientist, this is strong evidence for very different areas of the brain being involved in the production of text and the perception of it; to a writer, or a voracious reader, it can be a devastating condition. Some found they can switch to audio books and dictation, and a very few have managed to teach themselves new strategies to read, if slowly.

Midway through the book Sacks describes the discovery of a tumor in his dominant eye. Though the tumor is treated, successfully, he loses a part of the visual field in the affected eye, and eventually, most sight. This leads to a number of very curious things. At one point, Sacks describes closing his eye- and continuing to see the scene about him, as if his eyes were still wide open. The brain, Sacks notes, is predisposed towards receiving information from the senses, and if deprived of that information, will fill in as best it can. There is a rare condition in which the sufferers are objectively blind, yet maintain that they can see, even as they find themselves bumping into objects, and many older people with visual impairment suffer from Charles Bonnet syndrome, a condition in which the mind creates objects (and occasionally people) to fill in for missing visual stimuli. (Charles Bonnet syndrome is rarely reported, as the sufferers are often afraid it will be taken as a sign of senility.)

Sacks also discusses stereo vision, and those who have lost and gained it, and the loss and recovery of vision in general. Interesting, although most sighted people who lose vision eventually lose their visual imagery as well, some gain an enhanced sense of visual imagery. One subject Sacks discusses became so good at integrating the information from his other senses into his visual imagery that he could confidently walk down the street without a cane or dog. Another repaired the roof of his garage- at night (terrifying his neighbor!), since the presence or absence of light made no difference to him.

As with all Sacks’ books, “The Mind’s Eye” is a superb synthesis of science, medicine, and insight into the human experience. His obvious empathy, and even affection, for the people he meets and consults with come through in his writing, and help the reader to see the person behind the affliction, and to give each of us greater appreciation for the wonder and the mystery of the senses we possess.

 Mind’s Eye, The; Sacks, Oliver; Picador; £12.99

The Cypress House by Michael Koryta

Arlen Wagner did not speak to the dead but he could see the dead walking among the living. When death was about to happen Arlen saw smoke rising out of the living and knew that someone’s time was up. This ability to understand the consequences of having such a gift had gotten his father killed and made Arlen’s life a nightmare. But he knew how to manage the curse and even through WWI he was able to fight when he needed to and walk away. Arlen was aware that for some of the enemy soldiers he was not going to die today by Arlen’s hands.

When the war is over and he is working his way around the country trying to scrap a living together he finds himself on a train bound for Florida. When again Arlen sees the smoke signals of death rising he jumps off the train that he finds out later was bound to collide head on with a hurricane. Thinking he and his traveling partner Paul have been saved Arlen settles in someplace he never wanted to be again – a small town with corrupt law enforcement.

Through a strange set of circumstances Arlen finds himself in a backwater town in Florida repairing a hurricane ravaged tavern wishing he were anywhere but there. The police are turning up bodies that Arlen and Paul are getting blamed for and the corrupt judge is putting on a show for everyone with him as the puppet master.

Arlen knows he should leave and wants to leave but is drawn to Rebecca, the woman running this broken down place. His friend Paul thinks she can be won over but fails to realize that Arlen has already gotten the prize and Rebecca is playing hard-to-get for a reason. But Rebecca has a lot of secrets she is not sharing and the danger she dances around is making Arlen very nervous. He knows everyone has their past but believes Rebecca’s past is going to end their future together.

When Arlen figures out who the players are and he knows what is really going on in this town he figures out who needs to be removed and Arlen puts a plan into action. Arlen never expected to have someone turn on him but figured out early in life that everyone is not your friend but love does linger if you grab onto it and don’t let go regardless of what you have to do to keep it.

I thought Mr. Koryta’s last book So Cold the River was scary but it is nothing in comparison to this book. I kept the lights on and the shades drawn for fear of what was creeping around in the night. Both Arlen and Rebecca have such complicated pasts you don’t think there is enough time to explain it all but the author does and gives so much more than just character development he gives you Goosebumps. Great book and while this is a standalone every reader should pick up all other books by this author as they are great.

The Cypress House; Koryta, Michael; Little, Brown and Company; $24.99

The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolaño

The Skating Rink begins as one kind of book, an awkwardly plotted ‘crime’ novel with a self-consciously literary narrative structure. The three narrators are plausible enough as characters but their narrative voices are not natural, not recognizably ‘themselves.’ This is especially so in the English translation, in which they have no syntactical fingerprints. I found myself wondering, as I read, how I would have reacted to the first half of The Skating Rink if I hadn’t already read some of Bolaño’s later novels. I might well have tossed it aside. In short, the first half – make that the first two-thirds – isn’t very good. I doubt that I’d have recognized the ‘promise’ in it.

Those three narrators are all men, writing about their involvement with women. The women remain phantom obsessions in the men’s minds. Two of the narrators are what Bolaño calls “hardened poets,” a sub-species unknown in most northern climates but endemic to Bolaño’s later writings as well. The third is a self-important obnoxious bureaucrat; Bolaño struggles, I think, to make this character psychologically credible. Someone will get murdered, readers are told early in the story, and all three narrators will be involved, but there isn’t precisely a mystery. The murder occurs late in the book, and the victim isn’t who one has been led to expect. The main action takes place in a sleazy beach town on the Catalan Costa Brava, where decomposition rules.

Social and individual decomposition would become Bolaño’s overriding theme in his later books, along with despair and depravity. Don’t expect beauty, joy, or lyricism in this or any other novel by Roberto Bolaño! Somewhere around two-thirds of the way through The Skating Rink a seismic shift occurs in Bolaño’s style, and the characteristics of his mature writing begin to emerge: his sinister cynicism, his queasy indirectness, his nightmarish sense of impending horror, above all his terrifying moral ambiguity. Nothing is ever not subjective, not merely one mind’s partial perception; every thought skates on the edge of madness. Even the eventual ‘murderer’s confession’ seems doubtful, possibly only one illusion in one debauched and damaged mind.

On the other hand, and as a solid recommendation, The Skating Rink is a much ‘easier’ book than Bolaño’s later novels. It’s short, the plot exposition is forthright, the syntax is uncomplicated, and there are few of the obscure allusions to Latin American literature and history that make his work challenging for anglophone readers. Bolaño was a major talent, the most interesting Latin American writer since Julio Cortázar, and his premiere novel might well serve to teach Americans how to read him as effectively as it taught him how to write.

The Skating Rink; Bolaño, Roberto; Picador; £14.99