Recommended: The Pacific is a delicious set of short stories by Mark Helprin. The prose is lyrical and provacative and the insights woven through each story are original and shared. The characters are unique, yet easy to identify, their lives are brewed in the earth, the sea, the air, our experience, and the spiritual. In fact, the life well-led, the characters who have found a dash of peace in the shifting sands of disappointment and mortality, are those who define their existence and find comfort within the broad parameters of the spiritual.
Disappointment: A Million Little Pieces. Redemption is redemption and one should never quarrel with the methods by which a person makes their peace. However, with that said, the current topselling A Million Little Pieces is worth ignoring unless, of course, you still need a dose of the anti-hero to help form your alternative universe. James Frey's autobiographic tale is story of the ultimate anti-hero, a narcissitic nihilist full of piss, vinegar, and more than enough anger to spoil everything he comes near. Frey pulls himself out of a death spiral to enter a rehab center where he eschews the programmatic approach to sobriety because he's smarter and better than the system--it's the perfect postmodern ruse, angry loner who has one foot on a bannana peel and other in the grave mends his way in the nick of time to show the establishment that foundations are corrupt, that meaning is useless, and the anti-hero knows more, knows better, and is capable of taking his vile, nihilist, narcissist temperment, turning it on a dime, and finding life, love, and success. Yeah, right.
1 comment:
The anti-hero got his due, didn't he? Imagine being dressed down and torn apart by Oprah, for godssake. It's karmic retribution, I tell you.
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