Spring Break Reading Roundup

Did very little but read backlogged frivolities last week, and drank lots of Pepsi One which no one in Manhattan but me seems to like, which is a pity (found a cache at Rite Aid last week and bought 9 bottles, to the checkouter's horror).

Anyway, after working my way thought the V.S. Naipaul catalog, have approached point at which there are just a few left, which will have to be rationed. India - A Wounded Civilization is my least favorite of his 3 India books, but still better than lots. A Bend in the River, on the other hand, is right up there with Mr. Biswas. And A Turn in the South is also a damn fine book about race and the history of the Southland.

Finally got around to Edmund White's States of Desire, very smooth. Reminds me of a comment from an impossibly witty English professor from central casting I admired, that Oscar Wilde ruined it for all the witless gay men out there, who will always seem less than. Speaking of, Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool was kind of a disappointment, especially after The Line of Beauty, but will put it back on the shelf and dust it off in a few years. And Samuel Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, for my money, may be the best thing going on the cleanup of the deuce. Also, has one of funniest meta-riffs on writers' conferences that I've ever seen. Missing the chance to grow up in TS movie theaters goes on my list of things to regret about being born too late.

Ever sharpening my inexplicable but not yet worrisome Rothschild family fetish, also got through Amos Elon's lean little Founder which focusses on the first two generations, and gives a very atmospheric plenty of pics and maps spin cam feeling for Frankfurt, especially the Jewish quarter, felt like in the late 18th C. Less chatty than Frederic Morton's The Rothschilds, but still elegant, and I guess he wrote it in English (does Elon write in Hebrew and English, anyone?). This summer - Niall Ferguson's House of Rothschild.

And, since MTV didn't seem to have any livecast spring break mayhem to watch, thought turned to death and dismemberment. J.M. Coetzee's latest, Slow Man, about an amputee who falls in love with his nurse is really something. Age of Iron was less riveting, but still pretty damn good. Which leads me to something I've been meaning to get off my chest for a while.

After a stint in London playing with IBM punch cards, Coetzee did his PhD in linguistics at UT Austin. His diss, I think, was something like a computer algorithm that would generate Beckett prose, also back in the punch card days. (Which reminds me, Vonnegut mentions somewhere his equally nutso Master's thesis which was going to be a structuralist-style graph explaining the narrative of the Bible, which was duly rejected). Anyway, Coetzee taught for a while at one of those upstate SUNY schools, at which time he went to some Vietnam protests, like everyone else. And so later, when he applied for permanent resident status, or maybe citizenship, for the US, he was denied. So, he went back to Africa, taught at U Capetown for 30 years, and now has retired to Adelaide, Australia, a city that prides itself on being the only Ozzie settlement that didn't consist of convicts. Reason enough to hate this city, which when I was there struck me as one of the most boring places on Earth. I think Rushdie commented something along the lines that the absolutely straight Adelaide grid of streets had to reflect what must be the chaotic and brutal inner lives of its citizens.

Anyway, my point: It's a fine thing that Coetzee has written such astonishing things about Africa. Sure, he's African and all. But he could have been an American writer, and I'd probably have a shelf full of Coetzee books set in the US, and that is such a disappointment. Instead we have Slow Man, set in suburban North Adelaide, which is going to be thickened and refracted by Coetzee's voice, instead of, I guess, Albany, or wherever he would have got hired next. America, you blew it on this one. J'accuse.

Ian Buruma's new book Inventing Japan is also full of zingers, but that's enough for now.