jasonfurman's reviews
1367 reviews

My excitement at seeing a newly published Richard Wilbur translation of a Moliere play I hadn't heard of was tempered slightly by the worry it was just a different title for a play I had already read. (This recently happened to me with Bulgakov's A Dead Man's Memoir, and years ago I was excited to read Camus' The Outsider -- only to figure out pretty quickly it was just a different translation of The Stranger.)

According to the introductory notes, this was Moliere's first major play and the first play in verse. It is a Commedia Dell Arte that tells a stock farce plot of a bungling young man, Lelie, and his resourceful valet as they attempt to get a woman, currently held as a slave and also pursued by another young man. Every time the valet has a new scheme it gets thwarted by Lelie's bungling. It is a testament to the play that I found myself laughing just as hard the twelfth or so time the formula of valet devises a seemingly fool-proof plan to get the girl, and the fool ruins it.

Nowhere near Moliere's later plays in depth, complexity, psychological insight and development, plot etc. But Wilbur's verse translation is as witty and enjoyable as the best of Moliere -- as I suspect the original French is as well.

I won't review the play itself, except to say that for some reason I found the scenes of Gloucester and his sons, especially his attempted suicide, much more moving than anything with King Lear and his children, not sure if that's because they came across as more original because I didn't remember them as well as the other parts.

But I will say that this version, a graphic novel by Ian Pollack, was outstanding. It includes the full text and the illustrations are a beautifully rendered companion to the text. They function as a creative and thought-provoking production that is in a highly stylized fusion of traditional and contemporary costume with a wide variety of human and quasi-human shapes and forms for the characters.

It's a very good way to read the play which, after all, was meant to be watched. Unfortunately looking through the shelves of Barnes and Noble and Amazon, this appears to be just about the only decent graphic novel version of Shakespeare. The rest of them seem hackneyed and to subtract from the text. But tell me if you think otherwise.

This novella is a slight effort, not as good as any of the other Michael Chabon I've read, but on a less demanding scale one would still say it's excellent.

It takes place in 1944 and centers around an elderly amateur sleuth who is not named but clearly meant to be Sherlock Holmes. The crime the sleuth is focused on is the disappearance of a mute Jewish refugee boy's parrot, although there is also a murder. The twin mysteries have a reasonably obvious solution, which is not really the point of the book. Instead, lurking behind everything, is the horror of the Holocaust and the parrot's recital of strings of German numbers that everyone wants to get their hands on, from British codebreakers to would-be thieves of numbered bank accounts.

I love Joan Sfar's drawing and storytelling sensibility. This short graphic novel is aimed for children, it tells three stories of a little vampire living in a house of ghosts and other ghouls who befriends a local orphaned Jewish boy. Each story unfolds as an adventure but ends with a distinct moral.

I started re-reading Nicholas Nickleby thinking it was something like my 13th or 14th favorite Dickens novel (Hard Times has an uncontestable hold on 15th, or last, place). In reading the second quarter or so that judgment felt vindicated. After the excellent last half, however, I am starting to think I was unfair. Not that there are other obvious candidates one would want to downgrade.

There is an unfair misunderstanding of Dickens that he wrote in a hurry, by the word, in serials, and that as a result his books are not well thought out integrated novels but instead one incident following another in a somewhat muddled progression. That is unfair for just about all of Dickens

Really enjoyable, if you could use that word in connection with this subject. Reads like a fast-paced thriller -- with entire chapters covering time spans of as little as 15 minutes. Also superbly researched with a strong and successful effort at achieving balance, including presenting the reader with contradictory evidence along with a judicious weighing and balancing of that evidence.

As the title indicates, the book focuses on the President Johnson's first day in office, starting with being thrown to the ground in his limo by his alert secret service protection and ending with a series of photo-op meetings with his team in the Oval Office and what appears from the pictures to be the Roosevelt Room. In between, Johnson has to make rapid judgments under enormous uncertainty -- while balancing the need to project continuity with the importance of not appearing greedy or ambitious to a nation deeply in mourning for Kennedy.

This may be at the pinnacle of its genre and an impressive work of art that repays reading and rereading. But despite being a unique and memorable experience, it wasn't for me.

Tree of Codes is essentially a short story formed by Jonathan Safran Foer taking Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles and cutting out most of the words on every line. What is left is a story with a completely different title (___ _tree of C_o_d__es) and a completely different story. I only dimly comprehended the story, which seemed to be about a city, a father, and various other things -- although I'm sure that the dim comprehension was some sort of failure on my part. If it were printed like a normal story I would not have finished it, but the experience of turning the puzzle-like pages, each one cut in a different manner leaving holes and spaces and truncated words, was fascinating and worth doing once a lifetime.

The other big plus of this book is that it motivated me to read The Street of Crocodiles.

The Seas was an extraordinary novel by Samantha Hunt. It is told in the first person by a 19 year-old woman living in an unnamed small, northern seaside town with only one road leaving it (to the South, the road does not continue north). We are told the town has the highest rate of alcoholism in the country and it appears to be up there in suicide, accidental death, depression, insanity and cruelty as well.

The lyrical and spellbinding story is narrated by a 19 year-old girl (she does not seem anything like a woman) whose father drowned himself 11 years earlier and who thinks that he is still alive in the sea and that she is a mermaid. The novel is amazingly inventive with whimsical wordplay and imagination from beginning to end, telling the story of the girl's increasingly precipitous descent into her own world as she pursues a relationship with an emotionally damaged older man who returned from the war in Iraq.

Ultimately as much as one wants to believe that her father still loves her, that the older man knowingly sacrificed himself for her, that the blue lights following her car as it speeds along are the ocean and not the police, Hunt makes it nearly impossible and it is hard to escape the tragic conclusion that this is a sympathetic portrait of a wonderfully inventive but ultimately deeply depressing insanity, not a beautiful fantasy of a girl who is protected by her merman father who lives an enchanted life in otherwise dreary surroundings.

Samantha Hunt also wrote The Invention of Everything Else, a fictionalized account of the last days of Tesla as he befriends a chambermaid, which is also a window into madness and very highly recommended. Looking forward to more books by her.

Last read this trilogy as a teenager, it has aged well both in terms of the passage of time and, hopefully, slightly more mature tastes on my part. Although I don't find it a particularly profound meditation on free well, the law of large numbers, and the great man theory of history. Not sure if is intended to be, but it is a great story.

The trilogy really picks up with the introduction of the Mule in the second half of this book. It runs at a fast pace through the end of Second Foundation. At some point it has a slightly Scooby-Doo feel as successive masks are pulled off characters/plots. And ultimately it is a bit dehumanizing. Except for social psychologists (who seem a lot like economists) who end up in charge of the galaxy. Only fair.

Last read this trilogy as a teenager, it has aged well both in terms of the passage of time and, hopefully, slightly more mature tastes on my part. Although I don't find it a particularly profound meditation on free well, the law of large numbers, and the great man theory of history. Not sure if is intended to be, but it is a great story.

The trilogy really picks up with the introduction of the Mule in the second half of this book. It runs at a fast pace through the end of Second Foundation. At some point it has a slightly Scooby-Doo feel as successive masks are pulled off characters/plots. And ultimately it is a bit dehumanizing. Except for social psychologists (who seem a lot like economists) who end up in charge of the galaxy. Only fair.