For Valentine's Day: An Edward Gorey Review: The Black Doll: A Silent Screenplay

This book is something special, primarily for Gorey fans (this is admittedly true of everything he wrote). The book opens with a rare interview with Edward Gorey that is full of enchanting and informative tidbits; Gorey himself is charming and fun, as you would expect.

The screenplay of "The Black Doll" is mysterious, macabre, and full of references to films both familiar and obscure.  It has the satisfying inscrutability of a Robbe-Grillet novel—but with much more charm and friendliness. I suspect that this screenplay would not make a terribly watchable film--much of the action and information about the characters appears in explanatory texts within the screenplay, but not in dialogue or explicit action--but that is sublimely unimportant.  All in all, The Black Doll is a book to go back to, and puzzle over and delight in again and again over a glass of port (or three).

Speaking of the unfilmability of things:  this is as good a place as any to call you attention to the utterly amazing Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story,  a delicious and hilarious film of (and ode to) Sterne's 'unfilmable' Tristram Shandy.  I've never been able to finish the book, so I can't in good conscience write anything about the film's relationship to the book, or vice versa--but the film is endlessly surprising in its sophistication and delicious literary whatnottery.  Check it out!

The Show That Smells, by Derek McCormack

This book is a delicious, delicious treat, full of surprises. 

I picked up The Show That Smells after reading the plot summary on Dennis Cooper’s blog (the book is published by Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery series). I expected a delightful, quirky and enjoyably subversive summer read. I was completely unprepared for what this little book really is: startling, funny, full of unexpected twists and morsels of horrific glee. It is almost a novel in verse, and reading it is like watching an unusually wonderful contemporary silent film in novel form. It smells like Edward Gorey, Kathy Acker, Ed Wood, Guy Maddin, and Jean Genet all at once, but somehow doesn't feel derivative at all.

This is a singular, unique work full of punning vampire queens, sexual slapstick, Lon Chaney and righteous queer carnie power. I can’t wait to read it again.

Best of 2009: James Magruder's Sugarless

James Magruder's Sugarless is my favorite book of 2009. In the book, Rick--the narrator--looks back on a formative period in his life with astonishing insight and nostalgia, feeling again, through the telling of them, all of the thrills and anguish of becoming an adult. It offers the reader the vicarious pleasure of watching Rick negotiate his initiation into the sexual world, and then complicates that pleasure with honest depictions of the failure, loss, and grief which constitute mature self-awareness and social existence.

Along the way, we experience surprisingly clear yet complex descriptions of Rick's self-discovery: puzzling out the tangles of sexual desire, family, and social relationships, and of the ways that people talk around and about both the important and trivial things of life. As confusion resolves into certainty, Rick, his world, and the important people in it hurtle with all of the intensity of adolescence to a crisis as unexpected as it seems inevitable. Rick's conflicts and strength and emotional landscape shine through the prose with amazing clarity. The last chapter, in which an older Rick looks back on his life, expresses the losses of youth with a beautifully understated profundity.

I wholeheartedly agree with Tony Kushner's applause: "The texture of Rick's world and the details of his experience ring true and important, with emotional depths that warrant and reward repeated re-readings" (from the back of the book).

You should take a look at the website for the novel--it has a great trailer (when did books start having trailers, anyway?) and lots of interesting tidbits about the author and his work:

http://www.jamesmagruder.com/