Opening Sentence of the Day: Venusberg

"Lushington collected the pieces of typewritten foolscap and shook them together so that the edges were level."

-- Venusberg by Anthony Powell.

I have been tearing through books here the past week. I'm on a reading roll.

Anthony Powell is a favorite author of mine. His magnum opus, A Dance to the Music of Time, is my "desert island" book and one I look forward to re- and re-reading.

Venusberg is an earlier novel, first published in 1932, almost two decades before the first volume of Dance.  It is the story of a British journalist sent to cover the unstable situation in an unnamed Baltic state.

My copy is a particularly cool little paperback edition put out by Green Integer Books. It is 4.25" wide by 6" tall -- an interesting, compact size. 

Opening Sentence of the Day: Housekeeping vs. The Dirt

"The story so far: I have been writing a column for this magazine for the last fifteen months."

--  Housekeeping vs. the Dirt: Fourteen Months of Massively Witty Adventures in Reading Chronicled by the National Book Critics Circle Finalist for Criticism by Nick Hornby.

This is the second compilation of Nick Hornby's columns for the Believer magazine.  I got a big kick out of the first volume, The Polysyllabic Spree (reviewed here) and am enjoying this one just as much.

This is one of my choices for the Bibliophilic Books Challenge.

Opening Sentence of the Day: Every Bitter Thing

"It was Norma Palhares who first steered her new husband towards the offshore oil platforms."

-- Every Bitter Thing by Leighton Gage.

That is a catchy first sentence. I like it. It turns out not to have a lot to do with the plot, but it sets up a good opening sequence that tells the reader a great deal about the setting -- modern day Rio de Janeiro.

This is the fourth book in a mystery series featuring Chief Inspector Mario Silva of the Brazilian Federal Police.


NOTE

Book Beginnings on Fridays is a Friday fun "opening sentence" event hosted by Becky at Page Turners. Post the opening sentence of the book(s) you started this week and see what other books people have going.

Review of the Day: Saving Stanley

Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories by Scott Nadelson is a terrific collection of eight interrelated stories about Daniel Brickman and his family. The stories move back and forth in time and focus on different family members, eventually piecing together a family history from the grandfather’s Communist youth in Leningrad, the parents’ early years of marriage, and Daniel’s adolescence, to Daniel’s own marriage.

The stories that focus on Daniel’s mother Hannah are the strongest, starting with the title piece in which she fanatically nurses the family’s old, sick cat Stanley. Making Stanley the temporary but absolute center of her life causes Hannah to reconsider her relationships with academic colleagues, her husband, and her children. The later stories, “Why Not?” and “Hannah of Troy,” fill in details of Hannah’s years as the young, sometimes overlooked, wife of a scientist.

Many of the stories deal with Daniel’s troubled relationship with his older brother Jared. The best is “With Equals Alone” in which Daniel panics about starting high school with Jared off at college and Jared, uninterested in his own pending high school graduation, spends all his time and energy preparing for a local body building contest. The strain between the brothers is palpable, typical, and humorous – at least to outsiders.

“Kosher” and “Young Radicals” are the funniest of the stories. Daniel is a young adult in each, busy rebelling against his parents’ suburban life. In “Kosher,” he gets a shady job fundraising for the Robowski Fund for the Disabled – a charity benefiting only Helen Robowski and her sole employee. In “Young Radicals,” Daniel reconnects with his grandfather with vague plans for a college thesis on early Soviet history. His plans go awry when faced with the reality of his grandfather as a Florida retiree clash with his image of a fiery Russian laborer.

One weakness in the collection is that Nadelson does not elaborate on how the brother’s got along after they grow up. Also, the adult brothers, as characters, started to conflate. They were totally different people when they were young, and they remained factually different as adults, but what went on in their heads started to look the same. In “Anything You Need,” Jared and his girlfriend are having difficulties and he ponders what she wants that he can’t provide. In “Hannah of Troy,” Daniel has pre-wedding jitters and wonders what his fiancée wants that he can’t provide. With only eight stories in the collection and only one featuring Jared as an adult, it is a shame there wasn’t a broader range.

But that minor quibble shouldn’t keep readers away. Nadelson’s writing is fresh and clear and brings the Brickman family to life. Although only 212 pages, Saving Stanley packs the wallop of a long novel.

OTHER REVIEWS

(If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

NOTES

Saving Stanley won the Oregon Book Award for Short Fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. Scott Nadelson teaches creative writing at Willamette University and lives in Salem, Oregon.

Announcement and Miscellany

ANNOUNCEMENT

The August issue of the Internet Review of Books is up now, with a dozen non-fiction reviews, a half-dozen fiction reviews, two poetry reviews (including one of a collection of Dorthy Parker's poetry that is particularly interesting), and the always-entertaining Brief Review section.

BOOK RELATED MISCELLANY

I got several things in the mail this that caught my bookish fancy.

ONE

The first is a catalog from Open Letter, an publishing house I had never heard of before. Based at the University of Rochester in New York, the press specializes in "literary translations" and has a small but impressive selection of books in print.

The book that caught my eye is The Ambassador by Bragi Olafsson, translated from Icelandic. It is a novel about a poet invited to an international poetry festival in Lithuania as official representative of Iceland, only to be accused of plagiarism on the eve of his trip.  It looks great.



The catalog is a treasure trove of novels, stories, poetry and non-fiction  from Argentina, France, the Czech Republic, Poland, Catalonia, and elsewhere. This is a terrific resource and would be particularly useful when finding books for an international reading challenge.  I see from browsing the on-line catalog that you save 20% by ordering direct.

TWO

The second thing I got in the mail iss the latest calendar for workshops and events at the San Francisco Center for the Book.  It made me wish that I still lived in San Francisco! I attended several events there, including a poetry reading/letterpress exhibit with Kirsten Rian and a Mail Art workshop where we made collage postcards and submitted them for this "digital exhibit."

For anyone living in the Bay Area or visiting, I highly recommend taking part in the goings on at SFCB.

THREE

Finally, a friend of mine sent me a book swap chain letter.  The idea, as with all chain letters, is to send whatever it is to the name at the top of the list and to pass the letter on to six friends, with the idea that when your name goes to the top, you will receive multiple whatevers. 

In this case, the whatever is a paperback book and the list only has one name on it.  That is, there is one person's name on the back of the letter -- I am supposed to send her a book.  The friend who sent it to me included six of her own return address sticky labels. I stick one on the back of each of the six letters I send out. So the pyramid for this pyramid scheme is pretty squat!

I have always been a sucker for chain letters. Ever since I was a kid, I have sent pennies, recipes, stamps, socks -- anything. Well, maybe not socks.  But I am enchanted with the idea, even though I don't know that I ever got anything.  The chain always broke before my name got to the top of the list.

So, Annette in Wisconsin -- keep a loot out for your book. It's on the way!

I am curious to know what other people think of chain letters. What about book chain letters? Tempting at all? Has anyone ever successfully participated in a chain letter?