Book Talk

Annie Leibovitz is, of course, a photographer, not a writer. That's why her new book, At Work, might surprise some who crack the 240-page hardcover and find that the vast majority of the pages are covered in black type, not the iconic images the esteemed American photographer has captured over her 40-year career.

Fear not, there are plenty of photos to behold in the book. But this isn't a coffee table book, rather a platform for Leibovitz to tell the stories behind the photographs she's taken over the years. At Work provides priceless tales of Leibovitz's work with some of the most well-known individuals in the world - ranging from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Queen Elizabeth, and damn near every major rock star you can think of.

Author and narrator Thor Hanson details his Peace Corps experience from beginning to end in his new book, The Impenetrable Forest: My Gorilla Years in Uganda. The story begins with a host family's home in Kajansi - a small town in Uganda where Hanson trained for his impending Peace Corps duties.

Craig Childs, out talkin’ to the animals.The operative word in the title of this book is "Dialogues." Craig
Childs doesn't just observe and report on 34 different animal species.
He has conversations with them, albeit unconventional ones. Consider
this passage in which he's followed a raven into a desert canyon only
to find himself in the midst of dozens of ravens: "'Listen to us!'
cried the ravens. 'I don't speak your language,' I called out,
exasperated. Hearing my voice, the ravens only became more infuriated.
I was disoriented, watching them dive around me . . . 'Listen to us!'
they kept crying. 'This is not your place!'"

But besides artful
descriptions, the author does his research and knows his subject matter
well. In the same essay I also learned that ravens can follow another
creature's gaze, sometimes cooperate with wolves in making a kill, and
have even been seen pulling in a baited fishing line with their beaks
and then stepping on the slack line over and over until they've
"caught" a fish. Childs’ writing often gives the impression that he
himself is some sort of permeable membrane at the border between
scientific fact and poetic mystery. His sharp eye for observation is
matched by his taste for experiences that cannot be explained or
familiarized. In this he's a direct literary descendant of the great
Loren Eiseley.

Frayed Ends of Sanity

An editor becomes a prisoner of the page in Senselessness

"We are all tainted with viral origins," William S. Burroughs once observed. "The whole quality of human consciousness, as expressed in male and female, is basically a virus mechanism." No one understands this idea better than the agitated writer-hero of Horacio Castellanos Moya's "Senselessness," who has taken on the task of editing a 1,001-page oral history of the torture and mutilation of a Latin American country's indigenous population. The man has three months to complete the task - a not unreasonable deadline, if only the sentences of the victims didn't unhinge him so.

"I am not complete in the mind" is the first sentence Moya's narrator reads. It comes from a man who watched his wife and children hacked to death by machete. This utterance soon describes the narrator's frame of mind, too. Paranoia rises up within him, clanging like an ever-louder alarm. Something is not right. People are watching him. The secret police know he is in the country. If only he could relax. Feverishly, he tries to seduce one woman after the next, but the images he reads in that day's work of editing combine with his pornographic fantasies in a hideous montage.

Moya brilliantly scripts this breakdown. His sentences bulge and seethe, coiling around the parenthetical self-justifications and self-recriminations of his increasingly frenzied narrator. Following each lapse of debauchery the man attacks the report with more empathic gusto. He is a novelist, after all, so he doesn't just tinker with style and language; he must imaginatively place himself at the center of it. He imagines being maimed and murdered; he imagines himself doing the killing and the torturing.

Thirty years ago, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami owned a jazz club in Tokyo. It was a tiny place. During the day, he served coffee; at night, the club became a bar. Murakami closed up himself, arriving home as the yolk-y sun was rising in the sky. It had never occurred to him to do anything else, let alone write fiction. And then, it did.

This charming, sober little book tells the story of how, shortly after Murakami embarked on a career as a novelist, he was blindsided by an even unlikelier idea: to go for a run. One can understand his surprise. At the time, he was smoking 60 cigarettes a day. He had never been an athlete. But he was a solitary person, and before long, he was hooked.

Runners will find a kindred soul on these pages. Here is everyman, hitting the pavement, falling into that peculiar mental void that opens up on a long jog. He endures the indignities of the sport, too. Completing his first marathon in Greece in midsummer, his sweat dries so fast, it leaves behind smears of salt. "When I lick my lips," he writes, "they taste like anchovy paste."

The Art of Racing In The Rain by Garth Stein puts a canine in the narrator's seat and gives readers a chance to experience life through the eyes of a dog. From the clumsiness of birth to the agony of old age, the character of man's best friend, Enzo, guides readers through love, loss and victory as he discovers his passion for car racing.

His owner, Denny Swift, happens to be a race car driver as well as Enzo's hero and some of their best times together consist of watching car racing videos. But as many pets often realize, humans desire to share their lives with other humans and Enzo finds he is literally the odd dog out. Much of his life is spent at home watching the Speed Channel on cable. But it is Enzo's quick ability to compare the sport of car racing with the lessons of life that captures the reader's attention. Throughout the book, Enzo often expresses his desire to spend his next life with opposable thumbs as a human being. But before he can think about reincarnation, he must help Denny get back the one thing they both hold dear.

While Enzo's opinions on evolution and his knowledge of television shows such as Law & Order seem a little far-fetched, readers will enjoy insightful statements from Enzo such as "your car goes where your eyes go," that are developed throughout the book. Stein's attention to detail when describing the bitter personality of crows, observations of Denny's in-laws and rides around a race track are what captures the reader. Most of all, Stein is successful at making us believe we're on hands and knees with a keen sense of smell. As with any good dog story, emotions run high as Stein tackles some of life's most painful experiences. But his playful illusions through Enzo's eyes otherwise keep the book light-hearted and humorous.
Garth Stein Central Oregon Appearances
12pm Friday, August 1. Paulina Springs Books in Sisters. 252 W. Hood Ave. (Signing only). 5pm Friday, August 1. North Soles Footwear. 800 NW Wall St, Bend.
5pm Saturday, August 2. Sunriver Books & Music, Sunriver Mall Building.  

Sisters Rode-Ode
By Brad Lockwood
The "biggest little" rodeo is in town
"The Greatest Show on Dirt!"
According to JJ the Clown.
Imported princesses, Fort Dalles,
Umatilla, Jefferson…
Peer and praise until they're done.
Denim on denim, top to toe.
Wrangler pleats like rails,
U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Co.

Outlegged by news networks that never sleep, outsold by the juggernaut of visual entertainment, the novel doesn't bring us the news as it once did. Or it's easy to think so until you read a book like Joseph O'Neill's splendid, "Netherland." This wholly unexpected novel turns the city once known as Nueve Amsterdam inside out with the tale of a Dutch banker clinging to his crumbling marriage and family in the aftermath of September 11th. It is a fabulous, deeply enjoyable New York story about the fantasies that prop up daily reality - in other words, a deeply New York novel about that deeply New York penchant: new beginnings.
 
The man we're rooting for - and it's impossible not to cheer him on - is Hans van den Broek, a six-foot five, 40-something equity analyst. He spends a good deal of this novel holed up at the Chelsea Hotel, the bohemian landmark where Arthur Miller wrote some of his best known work and Andy Warhol once called home. Something essential has jostled free from Hans' marriage, sending his ex-pat wife back to England with their son, Jake. Hans stays behind, and pours his restless, misbegotten self into a cricket league out on Staten Island, where he meets - and befriends - a Trinidadian entrepreneur of sorts, Chuck Ramkissoon. It is Chuck's dream to build a world-class cricket arena - he doesn't like the word stadium - in Brooklyn.

Rick Steber is a local literary hero, the author of more than 30 books, many of them set in Central Oregon. But it still took more than 100 pages for me to start to care about the main character in his new novel, Forty Candles on a Cowboy Cake. The novel focuses on a character with the awkward handle of Waddy Wilder, a buckaroo on a ranch outside Sisters. It didn't help that Waddy is a malcontent, unhappy with the scourge of developers, but equally irritated by environmentalists working on behalf of "an army dressed according to L.L. Bean, Cabela and Eddie Bauer."