The Teleportation Accident

The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman
Sceptre - July 19, 2012
357 pages

HISTORY HAPPENED WHILE YOU WERE HUNGOVER
When you haven't had sex in a long time, it feels like the worst thing that is happening to anyone anywhere. When you're living in Germany in the 1930s, it probably isn't. But that's no consolation to Egon Loesser, whose carnal misfortunes will push him from the experimental theatres of Berlin to the absinthe bars of Paris to the physics laboratories of Los Angeles, trying all the while to solve two mysteries: whether it was really a deal with Satan that claimed the life of his hero, the great Renaissance stage designer Adriano Lavicini; and why a handsome, clever, charming, modest guy like himself can't, just once in a while, get himself laid. From the author of the acclaimed Boxer, Beetle comes a historical novel that doesn't know what year it is, a noir novel that turns all the lights on, a romance novel that arrives drunk to dinner, a science fiction novel that can't remember what "isotope" means, a stunningly inventive, exceptionally funny, dangerously unsteady and (largely) coherent novel about sex, violence, space, time, and how the best way to deal with history is to ignore it.
LET'S HOPE THE PARTY WAS WORTH IT

You know those summaries of books where you really wonder if whoever was tasked with doing that truly read the book or if they just skimmed it and decided to come up with a wild hook to get people into the novel? Well, I think that's what happened here. Maybe thirty pages are devoted to the Lavicini mystery, and it isn't even about a deal with Satan, It's about whether the "Teleportation Accident" of 1679 was actually an accident.

So, the book. Not one of my favorites. I think it might have been my fault, because I was thinking to myself one day that I had read so many good books, and I would just love to rant and rant about how horrible a book is. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten something that horrendous. In fact, I've gotten stuff I've forced myself to finish, felt bad about finishing, but didn't want to go crazy ranting about it like I had Mockingbird.

I simply didn't care about any of the characters, which was good considering how many of them popped up and then disappeared. In addition, the last few chapters skip about ten years, and you're expected to understand everything that happened in those ten years. The plot isn't a clear, defined one, much like The Dead Zone; instead it aimlessly wanders around, pausing at times to poke at something that might become sort of a story before the author gets bored with it and throws it away. He even grew bored with the era of the 1930's/40's, so near the end he just skipped a decade per chapter and expected you to know what was going on.

I don't know why I forced myself to finish this. Maybe I thought that it would get better? Whatever the answer is, it didn't get better. There's no plot, just some meandering stories that happen to feature an unlikable protagonist and his interactions with unlikable people. I would give it an F, but then I remind myself of Mockingbird.

Grade: D-

TransAtlantic

TransAtlantic by Colum McCann
Random House - June 4, 2013
320 pages

Newfoundland, 1919. Two aviators--Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown--set course for Ireland as they attempt the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, placing their trust in a modified bomber to heal the wounds of the Great War.
Dublin, 1845 and '46. On an international lecture tour in support of his subversive autobiography, Frederick Douglass finds the Irish people sympathetic to the abolitionist cause--despite the fact that, as famine ravages the countryside, the poor suffer from hardships that are astonishing even to the American slave.
New York, 1998. Leaving behind a young wife and newborn child, Senator George Mitchell departs from Belfast, where it has fallen to him, the son of an Irish-American father and a Lebanese mother, to shepherd Northern Ireland's notoriously bitter and volatile peace talks to an uncertain conclusion.
These three iconic crossings are connected by a series of remarkable women whose personal stories are caught up in the swells of history. Beginning with Irish housemaid Lily Duggan, who crosses paths with Frederick Douglass, the novel follows her daughter and granddaughter, Emily and Lottie, and culminates in the present-day story of Hannah Carson, in whom all the hopes and failures of previous generations live on.

(Spoiler level: Minor/moderate)

Whew! That was about the longest summary I've ever had to find. I tried to condense it as much as possible, but then I wouldn't get the whole story.

So, I picked this book up because I saw two things that interested me: Ireland and strong women. There are about four stories shown, and so it's really a motley semi-anthology.

Lily Duggan/Frederick Douglass: I really enjoyed this one. It may have been my favorite part of the entire thing. I liked Frederick Douglass's descriptions of the potato famine and his interactions with the various Irish people. Lily Duggan was barely mentioned in the first part except when she ran off to America after meeting Douglass. I'm not sure I would have enjoyed page upon page of description of a seventeen-year-old Irish maid going about her daily business, though.

Emily Ehrlich/Alcock and Brown: This one I had more mixed feelings about. I enjoyed the broken family/single mom aspect of Emily and her daughter Lottie, but later Emily marries one of the aviators in something I found a little too hard to believe. The Emily story had the main part of TransAtlantic, which was a letter that Alcock and Brown were supposed to deliver from Newfoundland to Ireland. I preferred the first part of this story to the second.

Lottie Carson (nee Ehrlich)/George Mitchell: I wasn't as big a fan of this one. I think it was because I wasn't much a fan of George Mitchell. Well, he at least wasn't that great in what I read. He could be a perfectly nice man in real life. In the story, though, he has a much younger wife and a newborn that he said he was so sad to leave behind. Lottie, on the other hand, I enjoyed. Good books should make you feel something, and I generally felt bad for her when she tried to play tennis but was much too old.

Hannah Carson: Ah, now the interesting part of the Hannah Carson story, as I'm sure you've noticed, is that she meets no one famous. Hannah has no living family now that her mother Lottie and son have both died, the former of old age and the latter of The Troubles. Her story mainly revolves around whether or not to open the letter that Alcock and Brown carried across the Atlantic. While certainly interesting, it didn't captivate my attention like the others.

Overall comment: One of my biggest pet peeves in any novel is when they try to do something creative with the dialogue. In some books they only put one quotation mark to either side instead of two. In Mockingbird, which I detested for other reasons as well, people talked with italics. In TransAtlantic, people talk with an emdash followed by straight text. No quotation marks or anything. I am not a fan.

Grade: B+

To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
J. B. Lippincott and Co. - July 11, 1960
296 pages

"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel--a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice--but the weight of history will only tolerate so much.

(Spoiler level: Minor)

This classic frequently makes lists with titles such as "Books you have to read in school that are actually good". I happen to agree with those lists on this account.

When you open the novel, you don't completely understand what the narrator, Scout Finch, is talking about. It tells you that her brother Jem broke his arm when he was almost thirteen, and he was fine with it because he could still play football, even though that arm was deformed-looking. Scout then says that she believes the Ewells started it all. By the ending of the novel, you'll understand why Jem broke his arm and what the Ewells had to do with it all.

My one major complaint with To Kill a Mockingbird is that there is very little happening in the entire first part. It's mostly character building and an introduction to a theme. I doubt that To Kill a Mockingbird in its current state would have been published in today's market with that entire first part.

And that's pretty much all I have to say about this one. The rest of it is completely excellent in terms of character, plot, metaphor, setting, etc. I don't like writing long, flowery descriptions about the awesomeness of everything. I prefer the critical take. So deal with it.

Grade: A-

Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Delacorte - 1969
186 pages

Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Trafalmadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who watches the firebombing of Dresden.

Honestly, at first, I was a little confused reading this novel. That's because chapter one is more like an introduction to the novel, where Vonnegut describes how he poured his life into this novel, but it was truly terrible and jumbled. Vonnegut inserts himself into two more situations, one where he is suffering the consequences of food poisoning and suggests that his brains may be coming out, and again where he says "Oz" as the characters are going to Dresden.

That being said, once it got into the actual novel, it turned wonderful. I was glad to see that it was supposed to be funny, because there were times I disturbed people around me with my laughing. For example, the protagonist Billy Pilgrim is reading the Bible and thinks that the message of the Gospels is: "If you are going to kill someone, make sure it is someone who is not well-connected."

In the beginning, I felt that Slaughterhouse-Five was a little too jumpy with the time-travelling, going from World War II to Pilgrim's childhood to visiting his mother in the nursing home in spans of only a few paragraphs, but then it finally levelled out to focus mainly on its topic: the firebombing of Dresden in World War II.

While I was a bit hesitant to pick up World War II fiction, as it's not exactly my favorite period of historical fiction (that one's actually tough: maybe Black Death in England, the Industrial Revolution, World War I, or Anglo-Saxon times), it is easily wonderful.

Grade: A-

Fenrir

Fenrir by M.D. Lachlan
Pyr - January 1, 2011
441 pages

Let me give you the basic setup, i.e. what the book is for the first twenty pages or so before Lachlan just rips everything established to shreds. The Vikings are in Paris and they're setting fire to everything. They say that they want the Count's sister so that they can marry her to their ruler Helgi. The Count doesn't know what to do, so he calls Jehan of St. Germain, a blind and crippled confessor, to help him. Meanwhile, his sister Aelis is running away because Munin and Hugin are after her. Then there's the Easterner Leshii, who happens to be hanging out with a man named Chakhlyk (I don't remember, it's something crazy like that). Chakhlyk also happens to be a werewolf. Then there's the Viking chieftain Ofaeti.

I'm just going to get this out of the way: Chakhlyk = Sindre. This is never explained in the book. First he's called Chakhlyk by Leshii, then Aelis calls him the wolfman, and then all of a sudden (without him telling her his name, mind you) she starts thinking that he's called Sindre. It took me a few chapters to realize he was Chakhlyk/the wolfman. That was part of the overarching problem with the book: it's trying to be mysterious and just ends up being confusing. The last chapter has LITERALLY NOTHING to do with the rest of the book. This is the second book in a trilogy and I was told that you could understand this just fine without the first book. Something tells me even with the first book I wouldn't know what was going on. The one saving grace was that it was only 441 pages instead of double that.

Grade: D

Roadwork

Roadwork by Stephen King as Richard Bachman

Signet Books - March 1981

274 pages

Barton George Dawes has a problem. Well, actually, he has a few problems. He lost his job. His wife left him. His son died of a brain tumor. Oh yeah, and they're going to build a highway through his house. That's also the reason he lost his job; caught in the path of the wrecking ball. Well, fine, he says. You can take my son, you can take my wife, and you can take my job. But you aren't going to take my house as long as I'm still standing here. So he goes right ahead and buys $900 worth of guns and some gasoline for Molotovs and decides that he's just going to destroy the superhighway. And along the way he becomes friends with a Mob boss and a hitchhiker.

I apologize for the poor description of the book, but that's pretty much how it was in my point of view. Yeah, they've taken everything but my house, so instead of look for a new house like a sensible person I'm going to blow up everything, get into a (spoiler alert!)stand-off with police(spoiler end), and if everything goes my way I'll have an empty house that I can't pay for. If nothing goes my way I'll end up in jail and they'll still destroy my house. A rock and a hard place. Except, he was the one that shaped the rock and molded the hard place. Sure, a brain tumor isn't your fault, but you could have saved your marriage, and the real reason he lost his job was because he refused to sign a paper to relocate it. Yup, the place was moving instead of closing. So I have a hard time encouraging someone who creates a bad situation. Stephen King originally said that this was horrible, but then later changed his mind and said it was the best of the Bachman Books. I agree with 1985-Steve.

Grade: D

The Contender

The Contender by Robert Lipsyte
Harper Teen - October 11, 1967
192 pages

Alfred Brooks is a high school dropout who works at Lou Epstein's grocery store in Harlem to make a living but spends his nights with a street gang. One night information slips about how this night the Epsteins leave money in the cash register, and the gang is out there in a flash. Too bad Alfred forgot about the silent alarm. Now gang member James is in jail, and the others--Sonny, Hollis, and Major--are out to get him for this. Alfred is scared, and he knows that the only way he'll be able to protect himself is if he knows how to fight back. So he joins Donatelli's Gym to learn how to be a boxer. Donatelli tells him that everyone jumps in wanting to be a champion, but you have to start by being a contender.

There was an original premise to this book. There was. In 1967, when it was published, this was relatively original. Now it has been copied over and over, and there is no way to claim that this was the original. The plot may be original and creative, yes, but what about the rest? When it comes to characters, Lipsyte spends an exceedingly long amount of time developing them from archetypes into some semblance of an actual human being, with deep levels of psyche. Of course this can never be truly accomplished in a book, but the first time I thought of Alfred as something more than an archetype was in chapter 18, and there are only twenty chapters in the entire book. As for the setting, since I wasn't alive in 1967 I wouldn't know how popular certain locations were in settings, but Harlem seems a bit overdone and stock-y. When it comes to the dialogue, it seems more or less wooden, as if there were automatons instead of humans. If that's the case, it explains the lack of character development.

The plot is good, though, and that's the second most important thing in a novel. The first being character, of course. (The total order is character, plot, dialogue, writing, setting).

WARNING: This book contains violence, language, and drug use, among other things. Please know what you are reading before you read it.

Grade: C+

The Master Puppeteer

The Master Puppeteer by Katherine Paterson
Thomas Crowell - 1975
179 pages

Jiro is a thirteen-year-old boy in eighteenth-century Osaka, Japan and extremely poor. His family is always telling him that he's messing up and he's tired of it. So he joins the Hanaza, a puppet theater, where he is mentored by Yoshida Kinshi, the puppet master's son. Meanwhile, a thief by the name of Saburo is acting like a Japanese Robin Hood, gagging merchants and policemen and giving back to the night rovers, a group of sometimes violent beggars.

Let me start off by saying that I always choose the picture of the first edition cover, and this is probably not the cover that you will be seeing if you get the book. The cover you will be seeing is to the left, of the mass market paperback 1989 edition. And that cover is possibly one of the most frightening things you will ever see. So don't read this late at night or some other time when you might fall asleep lest you wake up and see it.

Now we can actually get down to business. The novel is extremely bad. I felt sympathy for Jiro when he was poor, but later he gets some money from the Hanaza that he doesn't need because they provide everything for him. At this time (spoiler alert!) his mother is a night rover. Meanwhile Kinshi is going out late and giving his money to some of the night rovers, but he doesn't know who Jiro's mom is. So Jiro asks if he can come with and give money to his mother, but Kinshi says that it's too dangerous. So instead of saying "What do you know?" and going anyway like any other hero would, Jiro just mopes and stays back at the Hanaza.(spoiler end) That's right, Jiro is the kind of person who gives up after being told no, just like every interesting hero. Some of the so-called "surprises" aren't very surprising, and some was just thrown in for a little pizzaz, for example when (spoiler alert!) the night rovers set fire to the Hanaza after the puppet master refuses to give them food by throwing lanterns at the straw. Where do beggars get expensive oil lanterns anyway?(spoiler end) Also, I have no idea where the climax was supposed to be, because all the action Jiro just seemed to wriggle his way out of in a few paragraphs with little description.

Katherine Paterson's fingers should have beeen controlled by Yoshida so she knew what to write. The only redeeming quality of the book was how short it was.

Grade: D-