I've been thinking about Iceland and Strasbourg a lot today, maybe because we got a measly but beautiful couple of inches of snow yesterday evening. I started mooning over my Facebook photos.
This one is of Skógafoss inIceland, from a 2011 trip I. While it's not snow snow, it is snow melt, which is what I've been listening to all evening, dripping from the roof.
This is Iceland 2011, too, taken at the Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon. The black stuff is ash from the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull just before I arrived.
And here is the view from my beloved little apartment in Strasbourg on a snowy Christmas day evening in 2010.
Who knows? Maybe I'll be back in a land where it really snows next winter.
Reviewed today:
God is Dead ****
Everything Matters! *****
I know it's early days; today is only, what, January 13? Still, I have a good feeling about proclaiming 2013 the Year of Ron Currie, Jr. Here's why.
Like many people, I spent a decent amount of time in the last weeks of 2012 poring over best-of-the-year lists. Unlike most people, the populace of my Twitter feed excepted, I restricted myself to books lists. Because I had spent all of last year buying books like there was no tomorrow, I found myself in possession of most of the predictable titles that showed up again and again on the major U.S. lists by the likes of Alice Munro, Dave Eggers, Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, Kevin Powers, etc. Rather than feeling smug about this and resolving to do the same old same old in 2013, I'm striking out into new reading territory this year and reading works by authors who maybe aren't represented on those mainstream lists but are every bit as good as those who are.
(To chuff myself up a bit, I've long read books from many genres. A glance at my still-partially-loaded LibraryThing library confirms this. In 2012 I sought out works in translation and those published by small presses and so "discovered" the wonders of Cesar Aira and Tin House Press. End of defensive paragraph.)
Other reading goals for 2013 include reading more works published before the last five years, reading more of the books I already own instead of going on mad buying sprees that result in stacks of guilt-inducing spines on every flat surface in the apartment, and reviewing a decent number of the books I've read.
Yes, all of this is relevant to my opening statement about Ron Currie, Jr., not just because I've spent the last two days reading his first two books, God is Dead and Everything Matters! and will write about them here. No, it's because these books were so damned good that I've granted myself a lifetime pass on any self-imposed ban on book buying for any work that he puts out, an honor held by just one other author.
I had never heard of Ron Currie before reading about his new novel (see below) on David Abrams' fantastic Quivering Pen blog, but I knew immediately that I wanted to read his first two books as soon as I could get my hands on them.
What would mankind do if God died? Currie explores some of the possibilities in the the connected stories of God is Dead (2007). Not surprisingly, some people respond with more dignity than others.
Yes, God dies. War breaks out. Many people suffer and die, often for no reason. Despite the ugliness of the images Currie portrays, he doesn't pull his punches, and the writing is vivid and beautiful.
This partial passage, instructions from a guard at a mental hospital from the story My Brother the Murderer, stuck with me, probably because of the calmness with which the narrator receives and follows the instructions.
Follow the corridor all the way down, he said. On this level, the patients are allowed to move about freely. Some of them may talk to you, may even say something nasty or threatening. Just ignore them. Sure they smell bad and are strangely and sometimes only partially dressed. Some even look dangerous. Don't be fooled; they're harmless. All the same, keep walking. Don't stop for any reason. On the other hand, do not -- I repeat, do not run.
Compared to the shit going down in the outside world, a walk through a mental hospital is a piece of cake. Here, God's death isn't the end of the world, just the collapse of the "first" world as we know it. In Currie's hands it's by turns funny, touching, horrible, and heartbreaking.
In Everything Matters! (2009), he takes on the end of the world for real, this time through the eyes of Junior Thibodeau (the fourth smartest person in the history of the world), his family, and an omniscient voice (so God isn't dead!) that speaks to Junior throughout his life.
Through Junior, Currie explores the question how one man chooses to live his life knowing exactly when, and how, the world ends. Shifting among narrators keeps the story moving rather than bogging it, and Currie writes convincingly in each of the narrative voices. His characterization of Amy, the love of Junior's life, was especially well done. Currie makes us care about - and want happy endings for - all of these characters, despite their flaws.
In both of these books, Currie emphasizes both the positive and negative aspects of being part of a family. People come together, by blood or by choice, to grapple with the situations that they may or may not have created, and Currie charts their successes and failures with an open heart and graceful prose.
I am, as Amy describes herself toward the end of the novel, "a cash-and-carry kind of girl" when it comes to mysticism, and I did not feel at sea with either of these books.
Currie's next book, Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles: a Novel, is due in early February and sits at the top of my "cleared to buy" list. The trailer, which pitches the author Currie into Scrabble, crossword, drinking, and boxing-gloved battle with his protagonist, is just terrific.
