esrosedotblog

One word TransAtlantic and the spell check takes it, capital and all. It doesn't like "Colum" though.

This is a book about Ireland and America and some places in between. I use the term America as even our northern neighbors do not do. Canada counts with McCann. Newfoundland to be exact.

The book is organized into what seem to be a series of short stories. The first involves a blow by blow (that thar' wind) description of the actual first flight between America and the land to the east. TransAtlantic, literally. Very exciting.

Then, a different period of time and a story about a rich family and a maid, a girl really,Lily, who hearing stories about America leaves one day, walks to the boat, which is jam-packed with emigrants escaping the potato famine, then a story about, of all things, the contemporary story of Senator George Mitchell (Maine) who with a set of iron pants outsits all the factions in Ireland to reach an agreement, the first ever, to end the long suffering of war and British occupation.

Then, oddly, a story about Frederick Douglass who stopped in Ireland to promote his books on his way to London to buy out his ownership as a slave. Born a slave, purchased his own freedom.

At some point, some characters begin to show up in others' stories. By the end of the book, two things have happened. A saga about Irish American history has unfolded, the Civil War is seen from the eyes of an Irish girl, the end of slavery seen through the eyes of a former slave and so on.

We also get to trace a long line of Emily's descendants as they wax and wane in influence and personal fortune.

McCann is a great story teller. It is the third or fourth of his books I have read. He also designs word pictures that might involve a thousand words but are worth every dot of the picture he is painting. I will be reading his next book about the real Mary, Jesus' Mom. It got him in some trouble.

I read anything that Gaiman writes and this is his latest.

He is a fantasist. Not usually my cup of tea but there is something in the way he draws us in that makes us partners. A team. I first read his cyberpunk stuff which interlock. I like that. Continuity. You don't have to relearn the stuff over and over. He uses the same basic elements and then stirs the pot.

This one is a child's fantasy of an early time in his life. Well, a man's memory of it as he sits in a special evocative place.

I resist. I don't want to go there. These are kids. There is an evil au pair who seduces his dad, there are magical people who somehow control the world but at the same time are charged with letting the world go and be itself.

I like this line from the NYT review.

There is a moment, toward the end of this novel, when the narrator drops into the duck pond (or ocean, as the Hempstocks call it), and his mind melts and achieves a kind of transcendent understanding: “I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.”

Which replicates the experience I have whenever reading one of Gaiman’s books. His mind is a dark fathomless ocean, and every time I sink into it, this world fades, replaced by one far more terrible and beautiful in which I will happily drown.

The author of the recent American Studies, this is the first novel by Merlis that I read.

He updates the legend of Achille's gay son Pyrrhus (Neoptolemus) by putting the boy in a gay bar as a stripper with a little work on the side as a prostitute.

The legend says that Achilles' son will go to Troy and cause the final defeat of the Trojans by Odysseus, the general and will use a bow and another man Philoctedes somehow to engineer the Trojan's defeat.

What ensues is a gay version of the legend full of contemporary features. There are cars, there is a gay mecca like Provincetown. There is AIDS.

But not yet.

Merlis deals in biting humor. Accute observations of contemporary gay life abound. Of course, Oddyseus and other principles except Philoctedes are straight as an arrow. Only one apt analogy or use of the term. An arrow's flight is the spot where, when an army approaches, it stops until the first man steps forward within range. The fight begins. A hero saves the day although usually the hero is the first slain. Else how would they know the arrow's flight?

I read this book before and decided to read it again. I am so glad that I did. I know how it is going to turn out but it doesn't help either with the suspense which is taut or the mystery of the sex which goes on. Mystical in spots, lousy sex in others.

Merlis knows how to use queenspeak when it is used to its best advantage. He also knows that gay men do not talk that way which is one of the mainstays of the story. Straight people's assumptions about gay men, heroes or not, and how wrong they are. A totally enjoyable book and a very strong message. In short, it shows how straight people subjugate gays and how, with retaliatory power, the gays can get out from under and even end up on top.

Martin is fiendishly funny if set up in the right venue. The books work almost as well as his act which I love (not his teevee series, sketches).

Point Your Face is a cartoon book. Line drawings almost entirely weirdly funny. This is a Book is really the sketches written out. Not so funny, to me. I like the one liners whether as cartoons or live standup. Well, video of live standup.