Charlottesville Words

In contrast with January, February was an excellent month for reading. Mostly. Here’s the play-by-play:

The Commoner: A Novel, by John Burnham Schwartz: This story’s greatest fascination was, for me, also a weakness. Because The Commoner tracks actual events and persons in the Japanese Imperial Family so closely (at least until its surprising finish), a sensation of voyeurism haunted me throughout the reading.

And yet, fiction can be truer than fact: Schwartz’s apparently simple and restrained style masks a tale of great feeling and heartache, and left me with enormous sympathy for the real-life women trapped in the Imperial Palace.

• NPR feature
• New York Times feature
• Excerpt from The Commoner
• LA Times review

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, by Elizabeth Gilbert: There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground with Eat: either you went apey for it or it turned you off like a cold squid. I’m in the cold squid party. Maybe it’s not the most narcissistic piece of writing since Humbert Humbert’s diary, but I found it tediously self-absorbed and overwritten.

But let’s be positive. Even though the author has gotten billions of sales, thousands of disciples, and enough Oprah coverage for five lifetimes, I hate to knock her. Positive points: Seems like a lot of reviewers got bogged down in the “Pray” section, but I found the ashram somewhat more interesting than Gilbert’s noodle-by-noodle tour of Italy or her adventures in Bali. When Gilbert is able to step outside herself and give us a little objective background on the history and culture of Italy, India, and Indonesia, she’s good.

What’s sad about Eat, though, is that it’s by the same author who gave us The Last American Man, a well written, sensitive, moving, and relevant book. Skip Eat and read Man, that’s my advice for you.

• The Last American Man
• Hilarious Audio Book Club session from Slate

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