Stay Close, Little Ghost Is Like the Modern Day Fairytale, A Love Story of this Generation

The TNBBC blog is a place for every book nerd, especially the book nerds who like books written and created by Indie writers. One day, Oliver Serang took over the blog and I watched the videos, read the blog posts, participated in the giveaway contest, and that was how this book ended up in my hands. It seems like a cute, lovable book, short, and the title itself. But the book doesn’t really give you any hugs, it’s all an illusion.

The story goes like this, the narrator, who also happened to be named Oliver, failed a lot at relationships. They never lasted, his heart broke, and he broke others’ hearts. There was something missing in this equation — he was a mathematician that never seemed to find the solutions for his heartbreak. He never found the right piece that fit with his. The whole story was a letter written to a nameless person, referred to as “you” and a bunch of asterisks, which was somebody that he must’ve dated in the past. There was no clear evidence over whether or not this “you” was dead or alive or lived somewhere else. I figured that maybe she moved away and died eventually. Maybe that person didn’t exist at all, since throughout the book, this was where the magic realism kicked, the main narrator experienced these hallucinations, and these fever dreams.

These fever dreams seemed to be messages for the impending dooms of any of his relationships. The first one was Yuki, a flirty girl he met in the elevator. She was insecure, a constant crier, and couldn’t make up her mind. She loved Oliver, or claimed to, but she hung around and flirted with any man that caught her eye, including her friends. This caused him to break up with her, every time she cried, she shed her eyeliner. Eventually, while chasing after him in a train, she disintegrated into a shadow on a train station wall, becoming a sort of black silhouette stain. There was also another girl he had been with, that disappeared into a snow storm. After Oliver had broken into a room that she kept closed off, to hide a secret. A hand behind a large grate near a vending machine reached out for him. A young girl scratching messages into walls, a young boy who drowned and continues to haunt the lake. Those are some of the odd summer fever dreams and oddities that he experienced. From talking strange hobos that predict your future, that seem to move at light speed, disappearing girlfriends forced out by his betrayal, and the sparks that faded away. Then there was the wolf in his stomach or mind. For some odd reason, I imagined the wolf being in his belly, a dark cavern, hidden away from everyone. This wolf seemed to be the narrator’s repressed emotions or more like what repressed his emotions. Every whimper, howl, and growl seemed to be the wolf’s defense mechanisms, the narrator’s defense mechanisms of what he truly felt, feared, or desired.

Stay Close, Little Ghost is a novel of loneliness and that aching feeling of being betrayed, yet you feel this sort of guilt deep within you, questioning whether or not it was your fault. Even if it is, you still feel this pain that could never be put back together again; nothing can be returned or regained. This comparison seems kind of silly, but I felt like this novel was sort of the birth child of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I’m not sure why, but the prose sort of has this childlike, doe eyed innocence, with a sprinkle of fairy dust, combined with the drug, sex, wild youth of the 60s, that has continued on today. There’s this strange sort of feeling of isolation, where connections with others feel more like brief flashes of light. This whole story is a love story and the fever dreams are his responses to his fear or acknowledging the fact that it will indeed, all end. He seemed to accept this at some point.

Stay Close, Little Ghost is like the modern day fairytale, a love story of this generation. At first I was quite unsure of myself when reading this. In the beginning I was reading it slowly, not because I didn’t like it, but because I wanted to absorb the prose little by little, because despite its simplicity, the words were filled with a new story, a new face of the character. I felt that if I missed a word, I would miss a piece of the character. So I had to latch onto each sentence. Here’s a sentence I underlined with a pencil, it doesn’t really fit with what I am saying, but there were so many other sentences that I would like to underline, that it would ruin the book.
“Being irreplaceable confers the greatest value that anything can have. Deciding that a person will be irreplaceable to you is the greatest thing you can ever give them. Knowing that you are irreplaceable to someone else is the only way to truly feel loved.”

So I had to slow down my reading a bit and absorb it as much as possible. This prose is quite a beauty though, one of those observances of life, the words of the people who question the reason why their cells float on the universe. What’s the point of being some random mound of cells that interacts and looks for the affection of other mounds? We’re so easy to replace, yet the act of replacement is so hard to deal with, the previous can’t be erased.

I Have Never Read A Book that Defied My First Impressions So Quickly: On Joe Nelms's The Last Time I Died

All readers have biases. We can’t help it. Some of us are genre snobs, reading only literary fiction, science fiction or New Romance. Some of us are book-jacket snobs, unable to pick up a volume that looks cheaply made. Some of us are title snobs, letting a well-turned phrase turn our heads so that we snap up a book without even reading the back cover and rejecting unappealing titles out of hand.

It may be a backhanded compliment to say Joe Nelms’ debut novel, The Last Time I Died, might be prey to book-snobs’ prejudices, but that those prejudices would be, in this case, completely unfounded. The title is, to my mind, unfortunately basic, and the cover image and font make it seem like a grocery-store rack kind of read, possibly a knockoff of some popular thriller that is currently on the best-seller list.

However, I have never read a book that defied my first impressions so quickly. From the very first page, I could tell that Nelms was a good writer. By the tenth page, I knew he was an excellent one. His sentences are crisp, clear and surging, creating a current that makes you unable to put the book down:

My head is pounding and there’s only so much coffee I can drink before the balance tips from beneficial by way of caffeine buzz and energy boost to an annoying incessant need to urinate causing me to excuse myself three or four times from the same meeting. Unprofessional.

I wish I had some coke. I don’t. I have to gut it out.

Alternating between longer rants and short, bite-sized observations, Nelms’ hero – antihero may be a better term for him – begins the novel as a miserable divorcee intent on self-destruction. He’s not the typical successful sleaze ball lawyer, though he seems like it at first. He grew up in foster-care and cannot remember anything that happened to him before he was nine, when he witnessed his father murdering his mother. He never had a problem with this lack of memory, until a fight, which he initiated, leaves him momentarily dead. In the space between living and dying, he catches hold of an early memory.

This memory leads him on what is not simply a masochistic journey, but rather an intensely dangerous and risky path towards the discovery of what he actually experienced before age nine. The reveal of further details is too delicious to spoil them here, but it is perfectly paced and incredibly readable.

Even more surprising, the book is often funny. The alternating voices of the wry first-person narrator and the observing and sarcastic third-person narrator balance one another out and describe situations both familiar and foreign with equal ease and self-deprecating humor:

Our man has arrived back at his apartment upright and sober.

Having administered his own slightly premature dismissal from the hospital, he has bypassed countless liquor vendors along the way home, no doubt disappointing the local population of mixologists hoping for a despondent derelict to while away an afternoon at the mercy of their skilled hands.

Though the plot gets dark quicker than nighttime falls in February, there is playfulness in almost every paragraph. An extremely satisfying read, it’s made sure that I pay attention to Joe Nelms’ future offerings.

Funny and Heart-wrenching All At Once: Sarah Bruni's The Night Gwen Stacy Died

There is so much material to be plumbed from the Spider-Man canon, so much mythologizing and fantasizing and romanticizing to be had, and it’s not so much that Sarah Bruni wields an encyclopedic knowledge of all things Spider-Man in her debut novel, The Night Gwen Stacy Died, but she is skilled in exploiting this material, understanding the weight it carries in the minds of both her readers and characters. Wrapped in a sleek, hardboiled-ish sheen, the narrative skulks behind high schooler Sheila Gower, gas station attendant in insipid Iowa with dreams of the bright lights of Paris. When in walks Peter Parker—or a boy calling himself Peter Parker—brandishing a gun he’s never used and a backstory he doesn’t understand. Sheila is swept away in a stolen cab, the willing victim of a staged abduction, and the pair sets its sights on Chicago—it’s not Paris, but it’s not Iowa. Sheila buys into Peter’s story, adopting the name of the tragic Gwen Stacy, Spider-Man’s first love (well “first” for all intents and purposes, although that’s up for debate within the Marvel Universe), allowing the Spider-Man myth to assume its role in her life:

“There are moments when such slippage occurs, between the regular, everyday world and the interior worlds created, and these are the moments that fortify and support the worst delusions.”

Much to her credit, Bruni uses the Spider-Man lore not to ignite her story, but to fuel it: these are real issues for her runaway characters, speaking to larger themes of first love, of responsibility, of identity. Sound familiar? At no point does the conceit feel authorial; Bruni’s prose is the webbing to support this. With literary agility that is playful in its storytelling and plot-handling, Bruni weaves in and out of the heads of her characters, the sorcerer of a teenaged world that is as authentic as any in literary fiction. In this respect, Bruni’s treatment is reminiscent of the work of Brian Michael Bendis, longtime Marvel Comics writer and pioneer in the new age of Spider-Man storytelling, expert at rendering the complicated lives of teenagers, super-powered or not. Bruni, like Bendis, is funny and heart-wrenching all at once.

But The Night Gwen Stacy Died is not lacking in its superpowers either, or at least the supernatural. The Chicago of the novel is mysteriously overrun by a Greek chorus of displaced coyotes. Peter Parker is a boy overwhelmed by prophesizing dreams that can only be described as Spider-Sensical. Bruni litters the narrative with ghastly images both real and imagined. Hitchcock’s Vertigo readily comes to mind, and to a lesser extent the detective novels of the 1920s and ’30s, as Bruni employs a narrative pacing that makes for a genuine page-turner. Bruni’s world is dark in the ways the world can be for a seventeen-year-old and her ennui-addled heart, a world so close to our own and yet so distant. To great effect does Bruni invoke the Spider-Man lore for her reinvented Gwen and Peter and with a deft hand infuses her runaway tale with the weight of fifty years of comic book storytelling. Not as a crutch, but as a complement not often seen in literary fiction. This is what separates Bruni’s debut novel from mere fan boy fantasy. It’s a fine line Bruni walks, and she walks it well, as she knows she must. After all, with great power there must also come . . . well, you know.

A Conversation with Kate Southwood

This splendid and profound debut novel is set in 1925 in fictional Marah, Illinois. Falling to Earth swirls its way into a violent tornado that leaves the town in total destruction – with the exception of one man, his business, and his family. The author’s story of the town’s reaction to his circumstances will stun you with its elegant prose, artful construction, and emotional investment. The conundrum regarding ethical choices friends and community make in a time of crisis will supply food  for thought long after you have read the last page.

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MaryAnne Kolton: Talk a bit about your childhood, please. Happy family? Books you loved? Who encouraged you to read?

Kate Southwood: I was an oddity from the start: an only child in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in Chicago, surrounded by classmates who had two, five, even ten siblings. There seemed to be an endless list of things isolating me, turning me inward: we lived a block away from Lake Michigan, but I wasn’t taught to swim; our home was the furthest away from our parish church and school of all of my friends, and so there was no one nearby to play with; and my parents divorced when I was ten, which was still highly unusual at the time.

My parents were both professional writers and they encouraged my reading. We often read together, my parents on the couch and me on the floor in front of them, each with our own book in one hand, rummaging with the other in a big shared bowl of popcorn. We did have a small television, but it was rarely turned on. My mother, always freezing, wrapped up in her big Irish sweater and the afghans my grandmother knitted and read book after book from the heavy canvas bag we carried to and from the public library every week. My father rarely went anywhere without a paperback in his pocket, something to pull out on the bus or the “L” or while stuck standing someplace in line.

The result of their example was that I read constantly, too. I was obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder and C. S. Lewis, both of which allowed me to escape city life, which for me then was dreary. I read novels, fairy tales, and mythology, and when I had exhausted my own shelves, I read my parents’ childhood books and borrowed stacks of books from the library. I was even able to read in bed at night without the customary flashlight, the Chicago streetlights outside my bedroom window were so strong. I started reading English history and Shakespeare’s plays while still in grade school, and somehow managed not to stop or to pretend that I didn’t read these things when I was inevitably taunted for it in the schoolyard.

I realize now in writing this that my parents and I rarely, if ever, discussed what we read with each other. When I finished something my father had already read that he’d thought I’d like, too, it was enough to exchange a look of pleased understanding with him; meeting his eyes, already smiling with childlike excitement was its own discussion. Reading for the three of us was solitary, and as necessary as breathing. So, a happy childhood? No, I was different and my peers never missed a chance to let me know it. But in my case the cliché was laughably true: an unhappy, largely solitary childhood spent reading turned out to be the perfect foundation for becoming a writer.

MK: What led you to write Falling to Earth?

KS: The idea came to me piecemeal, the first part coming as a total surprise while I was surfing the Internet. I would love to go back to that moment and see what it was I was Googling, because somehow (and I truly don’t know how) I landed on information about the Tri-State Tornado of 1925. I started reading out of curiosity and was staggered that I had never heard of the Tri-State before. I lived just a few hours north of the path of that storm in downstate Illinois for many years, and although I’ve thankfully never been through a tornado, I have hidden from my share of them passing nearby–afternoons when the sky turned green, the air got eerily still, and suddenly I was stuffing the cat in a pillowcase and heading for the basement with a battery-powered radio.

Initially, I read about the Tri-State out of sheer astonishment, but then found myself returning to the Internet to look at archival photos taken after the storm. I also read several survivor accounts and was saddened to think that the storm had disappeared from popular memory. I remember thinking, This would make a great story, and then sort of shelving the idea because I still had a preschooler at home and didn’t have enough time to write. But the idea wouldn’t leave me alone. Around the same time I read Ian McEwan’s Atonement and was just devastated by it. I kept coming back to the idea of preventable tragedy and found myself thinking about the tornado again. By the time my youngest daughter had started first grade, I was ready to start writing: I didn’t know everything about my story yet, but I knew that I wanted a preventable tragedy to follow the unavoidable disaster of the tornado itself, and so I settled on the Graves family who lose nothing in the storm, while all around them their neighbors and friends lose something, someone, or everything.

MK: In a New York Times review, it is said of Falling To Earth: “Southwood’s beautifully constructed novel, so psychologically acute, is a meditation on loss in every sense.” Is that what your book was meant to be?

KS: I would say absolutely yes to the psychology. I’m always interested in characters’ psychology in books and movies, in what they reveal about themselves when they speak, when they are silent, when they can’t stop themselves from looking in a certain direction. I didn’t make things easy for myself in terms of my characters’ psychology in this novel, but that was part of the fun; nut after difficult nut that had to be cracked precisely and carefully. As for the novel’s being a meditation on loss, that was perhaps less consciously planned, but equally inevitable. I moved to Oslo fifteen years ago to be with my Norwegian husband, and I’ve been homesick for the States every day of those fifteen years. Obviously, I remain in touch and visit when I can, but I’m separated from family and friends, from my country, and even from my language every day. Also, the older you get, the more you end up dealing with death. I’ve lost several close family members over the last several years, and I made free use of my own pain in writing about my characters’ losses.

MK: In stark contrast, a Kirkus reviewer states: “By the time Paul finally realizes that he can’t reverse the senseless scapegoating, it is too late: His family’s sheer politeness and unwillingness to confront their detractors or one another will be their undoing. Unfortunately, all the conflict avoidance saps the novel of forward momentum, not to mention that essential ingredient of drama: the struggle against fate.” Do you care to comment?

KS: The only possible answer is that book reviews are necessarily subjective, not everybody can like every book, and I never expected everyone to like this one.

MK: Within this story, there is a confounding, almost frustrating, inability of the protagonist to see clearly what is going on around him: “It seems I’ve done absolutely everything wrong. I hauled what wreckage I could out to the burns along side the rest of them. I hardly slept those first days. I just cut wood and cut wood for coffins, I thought that was what I was supposed to do. Cut wood because people needed it. Look them in the eye and do business with them and help them to keep their dignity. I was only trying to be mindful of their pride, and now they’ve got it figured as greed.” How did you come to this?

KS: Alongside the idea of preventable tragedy, I was also interested in using Greek tragedy as a framework. In classical Greek tragedy, the protagonist suffers a downfall, which is the result of a combination of outside circumstances and personal failing, or a tragic flaw. Obviously, the tornado is the outside event that changes everything for Paul Graves, but his flaw is more complicated than that.

Part of Paul’s inability or unwillingness to see what is truly going on is simply the result of inexperience. He’s only 33 years old at the time of the storm: old enough to have established himself as a businessman and family man worthy of the town’s respect, but still mostly naïve about the unpleasant sides of human nature.

It’s important to remember that Paul is a really good guy who is universally liked before the storm. He in turn likes to be liked—who doesn’t—and can’t believe that the town’s esteem has been taken away from him. Perhaps as a way of grappling with this loss, he tries to find meaning in having been spared, and decides that because he is a good man who happens to own a lumberyard, he’s the perfect candidate to help the town rebuild, thereby regaining the town’s esteem. In the end, his inexperience and goodness conspire against him, and he simply can’t see that waiting out the town’s collective temper tantrum is not enough.

MK: A certain luminous precision defines your voice, and a cadence, if you will, that show themselves particularly well in every descriptive passage: “Lavinia thinks it will likely snow. She’s regarded these very fields often enough in winter, but always from the inside. When there was outside work for her to do on the farm in winter, she’d always hurried along and done it and saved staring into the distance for the window over the kitchen sink. The white, sleeping fields reaching out endlessly from the house, the sleeves of her old, blue cardigan pushed up for work, the click of the vegetable peeler on the slick, white ball of potato in her hand, the coffee pot and her cup still left to wash. A glimpse of Homer from the window.” Is this effect studied or do you access it naturally?

KS: This is a very hard question to answer, actually. A sort of which came first, the chicken or the egg for writers. The short answer is that this is the way I always wanted to write when I was younger, and through years and years of reading good writing, paying attention to details around me, and working hard at my own writing, I can now do it. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that the way I always wanted to express myself is within my reach. If an image or a scene comes to me, I know that I will be able to render it on the page very precisely (to borrow your word) if I give it enough time and all of my attention.

MK: In your opinion, and without giving too much away, what role does Lavinia play in this tale.

KS: In the broadest terms, Lavinia represents the past, both of the Graves family and of Marah, the town they live in. When she recalls her grandfather’s stories, she serves as a link to the time the first white settlers came to Little Egypt in Southern Illinois. She also functions as a complement to Paul’s character in that they both misread the resentment growing around them and, for their individual reasons, believe that they’ve earned better treatment than they’re getting.

Lavinia also functions as a warning about the lure of the past. She realizes it too late, but she does come to understand the harm inherent in allowing the past to get a grip on you, in elevating the past as an idyllic time, and forgetting to live in the present.

MK: What are your writing habits like? A special time and place? Music or silence? Do you carry a notebook to jot ideas in or are you the type of writer who scribbles notes on paper napkins to incorporate later?

KS: My writing habits are dictated by my daughters’ school days. Once everyone has left the house, it’s just me and the laptop. I do need silence and I have a hard time writing if anyone else is home. I often listen to music, but that seems to function as part of the silence for me; a sort of white noise that I choose according to my mood.

I always carry a small notebook, but generally prefer to just duke it out with the laptop—I find that ideas can sometimes be spoiled if I write them down before they’re fully formed. The most important ingredients for me are time and solitude. After that comes persistence. There’s no point in having a time and a place to write if you don’t show up.

MK: Are you working on a new novel?  Any hints as to subject?

KS: I am working on a new novel—the main character is a widow at the end of her life, giving her marriage a good hard look and asking herself about the life she created when, as a young woman, she made a choice between two proposals of marriage: one from an arrogant, passionate man, and one from a tender, safe man.

Layers of Violence, Professionalism, Paranoia, and General Distrust: A Review of Robert Pobi's American Woman

I like strong women. I like strong female protagonists in my fiction. Robert Pobi does not disappoint with his third novel, American Woman. Alexandra “Hemi” Hemingway is a lot of things: brilliant NYC police detective, Ivy League educated daughter of wealthy parents, brutally protective of herself and those she holds close, deeply troubled, prone to violent outbursts, pregnant.

That, in and of itself, could have been the basis for a wonderful, but less exciting novel. Pobi chooses instead to move quickly away from Hemi’s internal struggles and focus on her latest case. There’s a sadistic serial killer on the loose, and he’s targeting New York’s children, cutting them up, and leaving the pieces for the police to find, taunting them with his ability to move about unseen and always be two steps ahead of them.

Hemi’s internal struggles are sharply contrasted with the need to find this killer. Not only does she have a huge decision to make regarding the life growing inside of her, one that she knows would forever alter the life she’s spent fifteen years working her ass off to build in the face of often brutal sexism, but she’s still reeling from the violent death of her boyfriend a few years earlier. A death that she avenged in a hail of bullets and blood that left six men dead and her with a few new dental implants, a reconstructed cheekbone and shoulder blade, and a partially collapsed lung. Like I said: brutally protective, deeply troubled, and prone to violence.

It would be easy to say that Hemi is an over-the-top, Hollywood rendition of a New York City detective. And it would also be accurate. The things that she gets away with, never mind survives, would be grounds for immediate dismissal of any actual police officer. She is, in the parlance of the clichéd police drama, a “loose cannon”. But I can forgive Pobi for drawing her outline in such stark and simple terms, because he is also able, amid the frustration, gore, and quickly climbing body count, to fill in that outline and make her something more than Die Hard’s John McClane with breasts. She is full of conflicting drives and self-doubts, frustration at how much harder she’s had to work for acceptance in a historically male-dominated field; she has a family that will never understand the decisions she makes, and that she is therefore estranged from. She spends what little down-time she has worrying herself sick about what it would mean for her to become a mother, to bring a child into a world that she knows all too well is working hard to take you out of it. She is human. And it is Hemi’s humanity — admittedly hidden deep below the layers of violence, professionalism, paranoia, and general distrust — that make her a compelling character.

The main plot of the novel — the finding of the killer — is pure Hollywood crime thriller. The sheer number of unexpected twists makes it improbable in reality, but Pobi builds a fictional version of the city through Hemi’s eyes that makes it believable. I admit that this was often a book I had to put down and walk away from for a while. Not because I found it hard to suspend my disbelief, but because I found myself becoming overly-affected by the violence and brutality of the killer. There were nights I lost sleep over it. Nights I found myself double and triple-checking that I had locked my doors against the night and the invisible terrors lurking in it. And I know from first-hand experience how difficult it is to write in a way that elicits that kind of instinctual response.

Speaking of Hollywood, I found myself imagining the novel projected onto the big screen as I was reading it. Mostly this was not a problem, and spoke to the author’s ability to conjure images fully-formed on the page. However, there are several times when the narrative point-of-view shifts to a different character for a chapter to show what the killer is thinking, or what one of his future victims is doing right before being abducted. In a movie, this technique can be used to great effect, building tension and offering relief from staring at the same couple of actors who are up on the screen for 95% of the film. In a novel, I personally find it distracting, and even jarring at times to be suddenly yanked out of the protagonist’s head and dropped suddenly into someone else’s. Pobi does scores extra points for being able to shift his narrative style to indicate this change in point-of-view, however.

In the end, I found myself unsurprised by the shocking revelations as to the killer’s identity and connection to his victims. But that was only because I had figured it out a hundred pages earlier from the clues that Pobi dropped throughout the story, clues that might be less obvious to a reader less familiar with the genre (or less obsessively detail-oriented) than I am. Despite this, I still found myself tensing up as I reached that final confrontation, as Hemi puts together the pieces and realizes just how terrifying this case truly is. And that’s a skill that I envy in Robert Pobi. Even though I knew the answers, I was still on the edge of my seat to see what would happen next.

And I can’t wait to see what does happen next. If this novel gets optioned for a movie, I will gladly pay $15 to go see it, despite already knowing the plot. And, if it’s made well and sticks to the source material (no guarantee in this day and age), I will be both happy and deeply disturbed by that movie. But you know what I want even more than to see this up on that screen? I want more of Hemi on the page. I want to learn more about her, to see her face new challenges with the same dogged, often self-destructive, determination that made me love her in this book. Get on that, Mr. Pobi.

A Deep Private Ocean: A Review of Joseph Riippi's Because

I want to fly to LaGuardia. From there, I want to ride a dirty bus and an empty subway train to Brooklyn and pace the wet streets glossed with streetlight until I find where Joseph Riippi lives. When I find him, I want to buy him a drink. After that, I want to punch him, and then buy him another drink. Then, before I leave, I want to become his friend. Let me explain.

Joseph Riippi’s Because is a litany of his personal desires, a catalog of his wants, and because of that, it’s deep, beautiful, disorienting. The cover says it’s a novel, but I’m not buying that. It is more of a long prayer, a meditation, a love letter to life, perhaps a cathartic self-examination or the schematic diagram of what it means to be a human being. You might even call it bipolar-memoire; the comparative overlay of a life half-lived with the life not yet lived but hoped for. Riippi didn’t write this book as much as he must have unzipped himself from chin to navel and bled it out:

I want my great-great-grandchildren to know who I was. I want them to read this. I want them to know about the wife I loved, the places I lived, the things I did. I want them to know that I had a full head of hair and that baldness does not run on my side of the family. I want them to know they should watch themselves with alcohol, because their blood was born with a craving. I want them to know they should watch themselves around knives. I want them to know how I died, if it will help them.

There is reminiscent sadness, certainly, but there is also plenty of warm hope and genuine optimism:

I want us to swim together until we’re too tired to float, and then paddle exhaustedly back to our front door. I want us to spend every weekend like this. I want us to spend our lives like this. I want us to always call out to one another. I want us to relive this over and over throughout the week. I want our children to call us on weekends and ask, How was your morning surf? as we sip our tea and espresso, dripping and exhausted in our kitchen, at our island, smelling of salt and licking our lips and smiling.

I found the read a bit hard at times, but always worthwhile. Since Riippi writes in stream-of-consciousness mode, his thoughts always swirling and eddying, doubling back upon themselves, a reader must do without the usual reference points. It’s the equivalent of being dropped in open waters. There are plenty of inspiring sights, night skies packed with stars, expansive yet dizzying as well. The endless waves of one man’s thoughts. Treading water in the middle of the Riippic Ocean. It’s rare to see such intimacy, such humanity exposed. I can say, without spoiling anything for future readers, is that he confesses deeply. Riippi writes, more than once, his expectation:

I want you to understand why I am writing this. I want you to listen to me.

And I feel like I do know him now, which is why I want to fly to New York City and find him and buy him a drink, to thank him for writing this book. I want to punch him because he wrote the book I should have written, a book that we all should write for ourselves at the coming of middle-age, when it’s time for us to reach some semblance of peace with the first half of a lifetime lived for better or worse, but more importantly, to re-evaluate our hopes for the dwindling road left to travel. I wouldn’t punch him that hard, by the way.

And then I’d buy him another drink, to apologize for my bit of writerish jealousy. And then, before I left Brooklyn, I’d make sure I was friends with Joseph Riippi. Because after you have read this book and toured the chambers of the guy’s heart, you really have no other choice.

Vinton Rafe McCabe's Death in Venice, California

Retelling a classic novel is about fashioning the story in a way that holds true to the original, but that adds a new spin on it. Death in Venice, California by Vinton Rafe McCabe did just that. Disclosure: I received a copy of it for review from the publisher.

I’ve observed three perspectives a reader might come from when reading a retelling such as this: blind ignorance, a depth of understanding, or a vague remembrance.

In my case, I came from two of these perspectives. I didn’t remember reading Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (first published in 1912). I wanted to make sure I knew what I was reading, if, in fact it was a modern retelling of a well-known literary story. I decided to check my Goodreads account. Lo and behold, it was there. I had read it in 2011 for my mini book group (MBG por vida) where we read only novellas. I wondered why I hadn’t remembered it. After checking the book out from the library I decided to flip to the latter half of the book. Ah! I did remember this book. What I remembered most about it was a sort of comic view of the narrator hiding under a towel with a hat on his head so he could spy on a beautiful young man while on the beach.

In fact, I remembered this vividly because my book club, from time to time, will dress up as characters from the novellas we are reading. One of the members brought a beach towel and a hat to illustrate how the narrator might have looked. McCabe’s version of the story used similar tactics of comic relief to offset the overall story of the destruction of desire and obsession.

One of the more comical parts of McCabe’s story was when the main character, Jameson Frame, reluctantly goes along with getting a tattoo: “Frame looked down at his leg, expecting to sees a massive wound. Instead, he saw what looked like a short line, as if a child with a pen had drawn on his skin.” He isn’t able to withstand the pain so instead of getting the word “vinsible” he gets the letter ‘V’ which he says stands for Venice so he can remember his trip in the future. I couldn’t imagine Aschenbach, Mann’s original main character, getting such a tattoo, and this gave me a fuller perspective on the story while making me feel in on the joke. Though, it is unnecessary for one to have read the original to understand McCabe’s novel.

This present-day telling in a stream of consciousness-style narrative pulled me in much quicker than Mann’s original. I enjoyed McCabe’s modern day take on a not so modern narrator. Frame is a writer who buys his first laptop on vacation and has had some success as a poet. His well-known book of poetry gets him noticed on the airplane on his way to his destination, and again in the hotel where he is staying. Frame is a proper middle-aged man who likes order and routine. A vacation to Venice Beach disrupts that and opens up a whole new world to him. I was genuinely interested in Frame’s purported aimless vacationing and was happy to go along for the ride.

Because of this attitude he meets some interesting people. Vera and Elsa become his closest companions and, thinking they know what is best for Frame, set him up for his ultimate demise. One of their early meetings includes a tarot card reading where the card of The Hanged Man reveals some truths about Frame. Of this Vera says, “So, we begin with an enigma of sorts, a man, like the card, who does not fit the usual pattern.” Vera goes on to tell him that the card indicates great change and that he also doubles as a fool on a different card in the deck. This sets us up for the rest of the story. Elsa and Vera introduce Frame to Chase, a beautiful tattooed youth only too willing to play on Frame’s desires and vulnerabilities. The reader then sees Frame make foolish decisions based on lust and a wish to be young again.

McCabe adds a fresh touch to an old classic, in part because he was able to write about homosexuality openly, and in doing so shows how gay literature has changed for the better over the years. After all, he is retelling a story that some consider the first work of gay literature in modern, Western culture. More than that, this is a story of obsession and its destructive nature.