| After reading Paul Auster’s new novel, The Brooklyn Follies (Henry Holt, 306 pp.), I returned to Hand to Mouth, his hilarious memoir detailing his daily schemes to stay alive while writing. And there the evidence was: in order to survive, he had to create shiny happy drivel along the way to find the resources needed to create his best fiction. The most notable of those works being The New York Trilogy, a work so haunting and calculated that it ranks among the best outsider fiction of the last 50 years, and The Invention of Solitude, his paean to fatherhood.
Now this. Follies is another homage to Auster’s beloved Brooklyn, although the awe and occasional horror he has displayed in the past has given way to quirky nonsense – the same sugary salve that the uninspired use to keep Frank Capra and all the other eternal optimists’ bloated corpses from rotting completely.
As for the book: Nathan Glass, a retired, pasty insurance salesman who’s recently divorced, moves to Brooklyn to die. Once there, he meets his nephew in a bookstore, and together they embark on a series of wacky literary exploits. This serves to drive Glass out from under his masturbatory idea of writing a book detailing his life of stupidity — and not, I gather, to self-flagellate each tubby old white man’s quest for middle-class martyrdom.
Auster can’t be blamed for his deep-rooted fears of disparity – we all have them. Read his early work and regard The Brooklyn Follies as a baffling misstep.
Onto news and events: Xstine Cook won last week’s Calgary Poetry Slam, and tonight, March 9, she’ll compete in the face-off at The Auburn at 8 p.m. The winner will go on to compete in this April’s Calgary International Spoken Word Festival.
On Monday, March 13 at 7:30 p.m., Dr. Steven H. Gale is giving a lecture at the Nickle Arts Museum entitled Butter’s Going Up: Harold Pinter and the Artistic Process, looking at last year’s Nobel laureate (and newly self-proclaimed political pundit) and his impact on modern drama.
Governor General’s Award-winning poet George Elliott Clarke will be here this week to give the Lafontaine Baldwin Lecture, co-hosted by the Dominion Institute and John Ralston Saul. The first lecture is on Friday, March 10 at 7 p.m. in the Jack Singer Concert Hall, followed by the second on Saturday, March 11 at 10 a.m. in the public town hall at Artspace in the Crossroads Market. He will also be at McNally Robinson on March 12 at 11 a.m. to read from his new collection of poetry celebrating black womanhood, Illuminated Verses, which also features photography by Ricardo Scipio.
Also at McNally Robinson, on Friday, March 10 at 4 p.m., there will be a free exchange reading by writers from the University of Calgary’s Creative Writing Program, led by author Melanie Little (Confidence).
This week at Pages, Lynn Coady (Saints of Big Harbour) will read from her fantastic new novel, Mean Boy, on Monday, March 13. The novel explores the hero worship a young university student has for his famous poet teacher. On Wednesday, March 15, derek beaulieu launches his new poetry collection, fractal economies. Both readings start at 7:30 p.m. |
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