Foreskin's Lament started off more promising than it finished for me. What I hoped would be a sharply funny collection of essays ended up being a few sharply funny essays and some bleak and angry essays. As a collection there are holes left unexplained. The author turns so far from his orthodox upbringing that he wallows in pornography, smokes pot while sitting with dead Jewish bodies overnight in a funeral home, and eats traif, non-kosher food, regularly. But suddenly in a late essay, he and his young wife walk 14 miles, partially on highways, to get to a hockey game (Rangers?) on the sabbath, because driving and all other forms of work on the sabbath are strickly forbidden. Since when does he care? We see him as a teen steal backpack after backpack full of clothes from department stores. He claims his yarmulke made him invisible to security guards, but one day he is caught. We don't hear about the ramifications of this within his family. He openly talks about his and his family's lowest points but doesn't really examine them or make connections between some of these isolated events. I'm not saying he owes us readers anything. What a thing it is to lay open the most difficult or humiliating moments of your life for everyone to read. It just seems that if you'd be willing to bare yourself in such a way, you'd want the telling to create a new thing, an understanding and not just be a cheap shock or laugh.
What are you reading?
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6 comments:
Good day, ya'all! First post, how exciting! Foreskin's Lament got a great write-up in Entertainment Weekly, but I feel like you read it for me, Christine. I just finished Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen. Lovely, relaxing, and light. I enjoyed it! I'm a fan of magic-realism. I'd love it if Erin could tell me which Margaret Atwood she was quoting. I'm a big fan and can't place that one for sure and it's making me nuts.
Cooksin:
The quotation is from The Blind Assassin, which I'm also reading right now. It's fantastic. The only other Atwoods I've read are Cat's Eye, The Handmaid's Tale, and The Robber Bride.
Still working on The Namesake, too. Gogol is beginning to annoy the hell out of me, even though he shouldn't, and I'm having a hard time figuring out why. I think it's because he's so dismissive of his parents, even after his father tells him about the train and where Gogol's name came from. But that won't stop me from finishing the book. Lahiri's too good.
Just read the first two books of the Oresteia trilogy--Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers. I really, really like that they're short. They make me want to go back and re-read The Flies, by Sartre, in the hopes that I'll understand it a little better.
One thing that really annoys me about the "trilogy," though, is the amount of energy people put in to exclaiming over how wonderful it is that we have this one extant Greek trilogy. Then, hemming into their beards, they admit that it was actually a quartet, and we're missing the last play--but isn't it great that we have a complete trilogy?
But maybe I was just annoyed because the introduction was 97 pages long.
DRD
All I seem to be able to read at the moment are homeschool high school "how to" books and I'm thinking I might not be able to read for my pleasure until the kiddos have all graduated high school!
I have to get my reading pleasure from books I read to the kids:just finished "Archimedes and the Door of Science" - boy were those Greeks amazing (and Cooksin - I don't just mean the bods either!)
I am reading "The Bookseller of Kabul" - the second in my Pakistan/Afghanistan book bonanza. It's human, factual, interesting, informative. And Z and I finished F 451, and are reading "Tuck Everlasting".
Sophia, I saw the movie of Tuck Everlasting before reading the book--big mistake! The book's main char. is a young girl, the movie's is a young woman. There's a whole love thing going on in the movie.
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