Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I picked up this book because it was sure to be more weighty than the other things I’ve been reading recently, and so it was.

The book is a short novel told in flashback by a reliable narrator. The first person narrator is a former Parisian lawyer who now haunts a bar called Mexico City in the red light district of Amsterdam. The narrator talks to a new visitor to the bar and, over the course of a number of nights and trips around Amsterdam, tells his story: He was a successful, had many mistresses, was respected, and demonstrated philanthropy until a single event called him to question himself, at which time he no longer felt the success he wanted to be and tried to show he was. He eventually ends up in this bar, telling his stories to try to knock other successful people off of their game as well.

Of course, the story told in flashback by an unreliable narrator makes it easy to dismiss his stories, but the book does illustrate a certain tension between a Dale Carnegie outlook and that of the Existentialist. That is, a Dale Carnegie self builds itself into greatness and might find happiness by striving to be better and experiencing setbacks, whereas the Existentialist might be going along all right until something triggers the Existentialism, the sense that the creation of the self is hypocrisy. I’m being a bit twee here, but I’m identifying two types of self-conscious personality types, people who think about who they want to be and either try to be it or do not. Of course, another personality type that is not so self-conscious exists and just does what it does, whether it’s Randian Triumph or Moochery or just people who go through their lives doing their things. Maybe I’m philosophizing a little glibly here and broadly talking about types of people who do not exist.

At any rate, it does show the defeatist Existential response to resistance in self-definition. Given the nature of the narrator, it’s not a ringing endorsement of this point of view, but it’s not an indictment of it, either. More of a description.

One can’t help compare this book to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea; in that book, a historian eventually has his Existentialist trigger moment, but it’s just thought-based, whereas in The Fall, it is the narrator’s reaction to an event (or events) that triggers his pessimism. Ergo, it’s a much more approachable and true-to-life book. Of course, it’s been twenty years since I read Nausea, so I might be describing my experienced flavor of it instead of the book itself, so your mileage may vary.

At any rate, it’s a short little novel, as the Existentialists were wont, and it does give one some things to think about regarding consciousness, our self-images, and their relationships to the world. Which is never a bad thing, unless one goes the full Existentialist and starts feeling the need to compliment Sartre.

Books mentioned in this review:

With this book, I decide I don’t like Ace Atkins’ books very much.

This is one in his Nick Travers line of books. Travers is a former New Orleans Saints linebacker who becomes a college professor, one who teaches only a class or two and spends most of his time researching blues music and interviewing old blues musicians. And doing favors for friends, favors of an investigative nature. Also, he becomes a bar owner during the course of the book and begins rehabbing/resuscitating his favorite blues bar. Also, he’s seeing a woman in Mississippi, but he spends a lot of time in New Orleans away from her, especially while on this case.

A fellow former football player, now a rap record mogul, turns to Nick when the new fifteen-year-old sensation is ripped off and when the rap mogul needs to come up with a large amount of cash to satisfy a loan from another rap mogul. So Travers looks into it amidst the other series business.

This book include the flaws I didn’t care for in The Lost Ones and Cheap Shot. Chief amongst them is how much of the book is spent on the series business and not on the efforts of Travers to solve the problem at hand. He gets a dog. He meets with his girlfriend, but she does not serve as a philosophical foil a la Spenser’s Susan Silverman. He kind of tries to mentor the fifteen-year-old by taking him to a friend’s farm, where he’s expected to do manual work to find himself (compare to Robert B. Parker’s Early Autumn). He gets ownership of a bar and works on it with friends; its opening serves as the triumphant end book. Most of these things do not apply to the actual plot of the book.

A good book, and a good series book, works the plot first and then a little bit of series growth and movement as the plot unfolds. In this book and others in Atkins ones I have read recently, the overarching movement of the series occurs at the same time and independently of the actual individual book’s plot. I’m not sure you even saw that in the late Parker as starkly as you see it here. Perhaps it’s the 21st century way–I don’t read that many modern series, as you know.

Also, this book offers three points of view: The first person of Nick Travers; a third person limited omniscient focus on one of the bad guys in scenes to show us how bad he is; and the first person of the fifteen-year-old. The perspective of the fifteen-year-old and all the scenes there only give us the flavor of his perspective and don’t advance the plot. The third person of the bad guy only serves to show us how bad he is. Well, okay, they show a little of relationships that prove important to the plot, but the scenes aren’t really necessary to show the relationships. They don’t even really humanize the bad guy or add depth to him; they just illustrate he’s a bad guy. And he’s just a level boss, not the big bad guy..

I’m not sure whether these extra scenes and extra points-of-view merely padd the book up to hardback size or if they’re intended as what my fiction professor told our workshop were nice little moments. But they slow the book down quite a bit.

Additionally, the book is built out of short chapters jumping around amongst the points of view and into and out of the plot. This doesn’t suit my current reading style, which is just a brief twenty or thirty minute session at night before bed. I found myself having to re-read preceding chapters to ensure that I hadn’t forgotten something out of left field that I’d read the night before. With a more linear book, I can recap by simply finding my place in the book.

At any rate, I only picked this book up because I dropped by the library when I was going to have an hour available for reading and nothing to read on hand. Unfortunately, I didn’t find a short history summary book and ended up with this book. Next time, I will try harder. Or make sure I’ve got a paperback in reach at all times.

Books mentioned in this review:

I picked up these books in Clever this spring for something to flip through during football games. And so I did.

The first, Bomun Temple in Seoul Korea, is an inexpensive tourist trinket for visitors of a Buddhist temple in Seoul, South Korea. It’s a set of photos with captions bound with string, and it includes errata such as the same page appearing twice. It focuses on the artifacts and architecture of a single temple, so it’s pretty in-depth.

The second, Wonderful Korea, is broader. It’s broken into sections by province or geographic region and has a couple photos of different temples, pagodas, parks, and museums. As such, it focuses on things you can see all over Korea. It’s broken down into districts within Korea and highlights some of the things to visit in those areas. The area around Seoul is heavily represented, and the locations are given a couple of images and sometimes a couple of artifact images, but it is by design not very detailed about any one location. The book also includes a number of maps to help you get around Korea and the districts in each chapter, and amid all of the eastern architecture and art, there are dots on the map for the local YWCA. Which would now be historic, but were then contemporary.

Takeaways from flipping through:

• Historical books from continents other than North and South America really drive home how recent our historical sites are. Whereas your local historical societies run back about a hundred or a hundred and fifty years before getting very swirling-fog-of-prehistory, these books feature temples built while the Roman Empire was a thing that were burned when Charlemagne was important and then rebuilt when Christopher Columbus was considered crazy instead of evil.
   
• Eastern art and architecture aren’t my thing. I’m more into the highly realized works of the European Renaissances and beyond, and Asian art looks a little primitive and playful to me. That’s a taste judgment, ungentle reader, not a moral one. Your kilometerage may vary.

Still, I’m glad to have looked through them. I have a couple more from that score this spring and I’ll keep you apprised as I go through them, but I imagine my reaction will be similar.

Books mentioned in this review:

So close after reading Designation Gold, I picked up this book to really juxtapose and contrast the Marcinko books with more common men’s adventure fiction.

This book finds Barrabas set up and kidnapped in Athens by a former associate who blames Barrabas and the SOBs for a botched operation that left him disfigured. Once he has Barrabas locked in a basement on a Greek island, the man now going by Joshua leaves a trail for the SOBs to follow to lead them to his island–and an ambush.

The book starts out with the operation that went bad and then seemingly tries to play up the mystery of who this “Joshua” is. Perhaps the scene at the beginning was added later. It’s a quick read, of course, and interesting and consumable in that men’s adventure novel way.

Where I dinked the Marcinko and Weisman book about the non-first person narrator characters for seeming like NPCs, this book uses third person, so many of the characters come across that way, too. The good guys and the named bad guys are interchangeable but for a characteristic. O’Toole is the Irish one, Billy Two is the Indian one, Lee is the woman one, and so on. The plot is thinner and more straight forward than the more modern thriller (although there are only eight years that separate these two books, one is patterned on the thriller and one on the adventure novel).

At any rate, they’re different books and they suit different audiences or moods. But I experienced the flavor of each and, as I said, got the contrast acutely.

I’ve got a couple more SOBs books (and keep accumulating men’s adventure novels), and I’ll get to them as the mood strikes. The SOB books aren’t as good as the old Pendleton Executioner books, but they’re not dumpster diving like some of the paperback series are.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book, strangely enough, is the first one I tried to read after I read the purportedly nonfictional Rogue Warrior, and I was immediately bogged down in the very opening of it. So I set it aside and later realized it was not the first of the fiction (Rogue Warrior II: Red Cell was, and I’ve since read that).

However, on my second go-round, I was more into it.

Within the story, Marcinko goes to Russia (ca 1997) to investigate the killing of one of his “shipmates” and his family, including Marcinko’s godson. He finds Russian gangsters, a multinational fixer, and ultimately a plot for the Syrians to build a nuclear weapon for it–or be framed for the effort in order to draw an Israeli strike. Marcinko investigates, does some action stuff, leads some set piece raids, gets thwarted by the brass, overcomes obstacles, meets some kindred spirits, and triumphs.

It’s a decent thriller, thicker than a men’s adventure novel and written with a little more depth. Many of the non-Marcinko characters do come off a bit like non-player characters where they’re only distinguished by their nickname. But the voice of the narrator is distinct and brash and, if you’re in the mood for it, a bit of fun. The definite, conscious asides about exposition, equipment, tactics, or whatever the narrator is going on about now contrasts with Clancy-esque attempts to just fit it into the narrative where it can be tedious and jarring. The voice also contrasts a bit with the first person narrator of the Odd Thomas novels, wherein Odd goes into deep musings of philosophical questions in between action bits. In these books, the narrator is briefing you, often at the presumed annoyance of his editor. It works pretty well.

Secondly, these books are coming on twenty years old, and the world has moved from a place of turmoil in the shadows to a place of overt turmoil. The plot described in the book isn’t imaginative or speculative since the Israelis have hit a Syrian site thought to be preparing nuclear materials. Twenty years ago, this stuff might have been just outside the realm of what we thought was really possible. Imaginative. Now, it seems a little more true-to-life. Sadly, it’s aging too well.

So I’m looking forward to reading the others I have (but that doesn’t mean I’ll rush right into them), and I’ll probably fill in the gaps such as I can. I have to wonder, though, if they suffer from the same eventual fate of these kinds of thrillers when they transition authorship that they will lose that which makes them special. Probably, but I have a ways to go until I get there with the series.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book proves me a hypocrite. I’ve dodged cultural sensations like Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games because, I’ve ::sniffed::, they’re children’s books. But put a discarded library children’s book about an artist in front of me, and I’m all over it.

Because, let’s face it, my knowledge of Picasso is precursory. I know his era, his acquaintence with Gertrude Stein and the Lost Generation, and he did La Guernica which I did a paper on in college, although I’m not entirely sure what I had to say about it. Probably that it fought the norms of the day in which I wrote the paper, which strangely enough were sort of still norms instead of the anachronisms they are now. Everything else I got from Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which is why I’m prone to answer at trivia nights that Picasso knew Elvis.

This book is a simple little book from the Museum of Modern Art and takes a brief, high-level overview of Picasso and his work and its phases. So I learned a bit about his Blue Period and what he was trying to do with Cubism. Basically, it’s a painted collage of different views of the same image. Okay, I get it, but I don’t think it’s any less stupid.

So I got something out of this book, and it didn’t take too long to read. Best of all, there are others in the series with other artists, so I’ll definitely keep my eyes open for others in the line. Because I like to know a little bit about a lot of things, even though I have to go to children’s books to learn them. And it didn’t take a million words to get to the end and think it was stupid that Picasso and Hermione weren’t together.

Books mentioned in this review: