When I last blogged a couple of weeks ago, I had not finished reading C by Englishman Tom McCarthy. Last night I did!

Since it is short listed for the 2010 Man Booker Award, I am indeed happy that I have now completed this very unusual novel. When the winner is announced on Tuesday, October 12, I will be waiting to see if “my book” wins. (I plan on listening to the live interview with the nominated authors a couple of days before the award is announced. I really, really want to hear what McCarthy says about his novel!) I’m betting C will win!  I have read one other novel which was long listed for the Man Booker this year, Trespass, which is to be published in October. I will review it for my next blog.

Picking up where I left off with C, I can tell you that the novel totally switches directions! Serge, the protagonist, becomes a fighter pilot in WWI. Even though I did not much like this section, titled “Chute” (part II of the novel), I can now see its merit. Section III, is titled “Crash”, and section IV: “Call.”I may not have mentioned that section I is titled “Caul” in my previous blog. Note that each section begins with a “C”, hence one reason for the book’s title: C.

Of course, the sections are all very symbolic of the protagonist’s life, which is continually plagued by the absence of his sister.  Toward the end of the novel Serge visits Egyptian tombs. How does this work into the framework of this novel? I really don’t want to give too much away from this incredibly literary and challenging novel. Streams of consciousness much akin to Joyce or even to Faulkner ebb and flow in this austere novel. No, I would not say it is character or plot driven, but perhaps theme driven.

As I turned the last page, I did realize how all of the plots and subplots did work together to drive home the multi-layered themes of sibling love, depression, intelligence, and exploration, all apparent in the symbols.  How McCarthy did it mystifies me. I think I’ll chalk it up to one word: GENIUS! Even though this was one of the most challenging works of fiction that I have ever read, it was well worth the work. The way that McCarthy puts words together amazed me.  I’m betting McCarty and C will win the 2010 Man Booker Award! I can hardly wait to see~(not intended as a pun!)

Click here for Part 1 of Nan’s blog

-Nan

Teen-aged David “Honeyboy” Edwards met Charley Patton. Soon he left home with Big Joe Williams to hobo and ramble. He played with Robert Johnson and was with him the night he was poisoned. Big Walter, Sonny Boy and Little Walter all played harp with Honeyboy. He became pals with giants Son House and Roosevelt Sykes. Who knows? He might have played with everybody.

My live introduction to Honeyboy: 9:00 p.m. August 11,  2005.

Honeyboy, an acoustic set, front porch style, Robert Johnson-like stuff, in Clarksdale’s Ground Zero, 90-years-old giving it the old way, for real. First joined by Bobby Rush on harp in two straight back chairs rocking with shoes patting the floor in time together. Then joined by Pinetop Perkins, 92-years-old on piano, killing a packed house. Guitar man, Big Jack Johnson takes over the drums from Sam Carr, as the old guy tires. Bobby Rush harping hard, joined by Big George Brock at Bobby’s feet laying on his back giving the music his all. Honeyboy on the side as the whole bunch are jamming hard.

All this jive, a once in a lifetime “Big Blues Bright Moment.” Need I say more?

If you haven’t experienced the blues of “Honeyboy Edwards,” now you have a chance at the eccentric Ponderosa Stomp September 24th and 25th in New Orleans.

Click here to see all of our blogs on Mississippi State of Blues.

Ken Murphy and Scott Barretta will be signing at Lemuria on Thursday, November 11th.

Reserve your copy online or call the bookstore 601/800.366.7619.

jjj

Back in August we had picked John Brandon’s second novel for our First Editions Club, taking out the remaining stock at the publishers. It was some time for us, and everyone else, before receiving the second printings; but I hope it is not forgotten. The novel is well worth reading. I very much enjoyed meeting Brandon and his family when they came down from Oxford for the signing. It was impressive the amount of hard-working odd jobs the man has gone through to be able to support his family and be able to write at the same time.

I believe his work is paying off and he has given us a solid story showing us twisting minds of the normal (ish) people that we are. He used such a delicate plot that was not abused or manipulated to strum the heart strings as it could have. The story hangs onto you and the intensity of the unsaid is powerful. His sense of the characters involved is a powerful hard copy that illustrates for us the situations and minds of the young and not so old as they are coming of age. He displays such a natural knowledge of the characters and that is definitely one of my favorite things to read. Its going to be exciting to watch this man continue with his work.

-John P.

What?  Are you saying that you don’t know anything about football?  Well, I have the perfect book for you!!  Talk Football by Alice Nicholas is what you need to understand and enjoy football season!!  I mean going to the ballgame or watching the game with friends can be so much more than just cheering when your team scores a touchdown.

Think about how impressed everyone will be be if you all of  a sudden yell out “ILLEGAL MOTION“!

(An Illegal Motion is when a player in the offensive backfield moves toward the line of scrimmage before the ball is snapped, resulting in a 5-yard penalty and the down must be repeated.)

Or if you started a conversation about how the quarterback needs better protection from the “BLITZ” (when the defensive linemen and defensive backs “rush the quarterback” at one time to “sack the quarterback” or force him to make a bad throw).

Did I mention that the book is illustrated by wonderful paintings by Janie Davis so never again will you confuse a hand signal for ‘loss of down’ with ‘illegal receiver downfield’.

Ladies…come on let’s talk some football!!!  It’s no longer cool to walk in the party and ask…’Now what color are we?”

I somehow overlooked it on the longlist for the Booker prize — it was somewhere there among other titles that caught my attention, The Slap, Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas’s controversial novel in which eight characters share their stories after an inciting incident (guess what?) occurs at a barbecue, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell’s latest opus that has infected Lemuria with Mitchell fever (see here, and here, and here), Skippy Dies, a cutely packaged novel (it comes in three boxed paperbacks or one hardback) by Paul Murray that has one of the most fun dust jacket blurbs I’ve read in a while,

Why does Skippy, a fourteen-year-old boy at Dublin’s venerable Seabrook College, end up dead on the floor of the local doughnut shop?
Could it have something to do with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, an overweight genius who is determined to open a portal into a parallel universe using ten-dimensional string theory?
Could it involve Carl, the teenage drug dealer and borderline psychotic who is Skippy’s rival in love?
Or could “the Automator” — the ruthless, smooth-talking headmaster intent on modernizing the school — have something to hide? (more)

not to mention the highly anticipated C by Tom McCarthy, and the (very good so far, though I feel like I’m all of a sudden reading tons of French Revolution novels . . . too many?) Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey — but when Emma Donoghue’s Room was shortlisted (along with the last two longlister’s I mentioned), I noticed, and since I had been planning on reading it anyway, I started it that evening. Evening turned to night and then to 3 a.m., and I finally decided it wasn’t worth being a zombie at work the next day to finish it, though it was still very hard to put it down.

I don’t want to tell you much about the story of Room; in fact, please don’t read what the Booker site has up about it — it reads like a TV show synopsis that someone would use to catch up after missing an episode. I will say this, though: Donoghue’s storytelling choices, the fact that she has chosen a five year old as the narrator, affords her opportunities (which she never wastes) to show her readers that the way they see the world is completely and irrevocably colored by their experiences. When I started reading the novel I thought I wouldn’t be able to make it through it — I thought I would get claustrophobic. Because I will tell you this about the plot: as you start reading Jack’s story you realize that he calls his bed “Bed” and a wilting plant “Plant” (as though they are the singular instances of those things) for the same reason he says that other children are “only TV” — because he has never been outside the twelve foot square shed that his mother has been locked in for seven years.

What would it mean for someone literally to have grown up in Plato’s cave, only seeing shadows on the wall, representations of “true” things and people and experiences, for five years of his life, suddenly to come into the world for the first time?  It was fascinating to see through Jack’s eyes as his vision of what the world is really like shifts, and to gain through him the unique perspective of one who takes nothing for granted, for whom everything is new.