| Just over a year ago, Hunter S. Thompson described himself to Salon magazine as "an elderly dope fiend living out in the wilderness."
That's a self-deprecatingly benign description for an author whose anger still fulminates in his 2003 book Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century. How did Thompson feel about current U.S. leaders at that time? Well, he did say, "They are the racists and hate-mongers among us – they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis." Yes, it's hard to picture Thompson going gently into any kind of night. So it wasn't entirely surprising to hear that the 67-year-old journalist, novelist and icon of chemically fuelled spontaneity had shot himself last Sunday night at his Colorado home.
As the obituaries flooded onto the wire services, blogs and websites in the hours after his death, the process of entombing Thompson in a reputation and an image – already so far advanced in films, and in the frames of Doonesbury, while he was still living – reached a frenzied pitch. Fortunately, the journalist who was among the first to act upon the insight that "truth is weirder than any fiction I've seen" has attracted thoughtful readers like the Guardian's Jon Ronson. Ronson sees past the pharmaceutical side of the "gonzo" mythology to recognize that Thompson's "best writing has, beneath the apparently frenzied stream-of-consciousness surface, a very precise construction. You can't write that well on drugs, and you can't be that funny either. People only think they're funny on drugs."
And although the fear and loathing Thompson chronicled could be genuinely, frightfully funny, he also recognized that fear's hallucinations could be just as deluding as the chemical kind. "I don't think fear is a very effective way of dealing with things, of responding to reality," he said after 9-11. "Fear is just another word for ignorance."
In other book news…. It features work originating in places as diverse as Cuba and Newfoundland, Portugal and Canada's Pacific coast, and with writers from Steven Heighton to Patrick Lane and Robert Hilles. Qu’est-ce que c'est? It's Translit Volume 6, the newest collection in a decade-long enterprise of literary translation. Meet two Calgary translators, Maureen Ranson and Nesida Loyer, who will present work from six languages at McNally Robinson on Friday, March 4 at 7:30 p.m.
Calgary author Cecelia Frey has published three books of poetry and five novels. The Writers Guild of Alberta has recognized her three times with their Short Fiction Award. Now she has a new novel entitled A Fine Mischief, set along the shores of the Shuswap. She'll read from the novel at Memorial Park Library on Thursday, March 3 at 7 p.m.
Best-sellers
Best-selling books for February 13 to 19 at Pages on Kensington
Fiction and Poetry
1. Saturday
by Ian McEwan
2. George and Rue
by George Elliott Clarke
3. Seduction
by Catherine Gildiner
4. The Da Vinci Code
by Dan Brown
5. Wild About Books
by Judy Sierra
6. McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories
edited by Michael Chabon
7. Silt
by Jordan Scott
8. Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami
9. Casanova in Bolzano
by Sandor Marai
10. A Complicated Kindness
by Miriam Toews
Non-fiction
1. Blink
by Malcolm Gladwell
2. Eats, Shoots and Leaves
by Lynne Truss
3. The End of Faith
by Sam Harris
4. Collapse
by Jared Diamond
5. A Short History of Progress
by Ronald Wright
6. The Curious Cook at Home
by dee Hobsbawn-Smith
7. In the Feng Shui Zone
by Debra Ford
8. On Literature
by Umberto Eco
9. Alberta Images
by Daryl Benson
10. Grazing
by Julie van Rosendaal |
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