I enjoyed this one, a short read this week.
From the book cover:
“A richly comic work about parenthood, about adults who won’t grow up and children who do, Morning, Noon and Night stands as Spalding Gray’s most mature work…”
Praise for Spalding Gray
“Spalding Gray may be the nation’s most outstanding storyteller. Nothing eludes his eye or the sureness of his satire. The secret of his success is the skewed angle of vision–his eccentric wit and ruthless candor.” — Los Angeles Times
So I finished this book over the weekend with all the rain keeping me tucked in, and after decorating the Christmas tree, which is really bringing the spirit home.
And thankfully it is not the spirit that haunts this book. I didn’t read The Time Traveler’s Wife, and from what I’ve read in reviews of Her Fearful Symmetry, if you’ve read Time Traveler you’ll surely be disappointed with this one. Since I am new to Niffenegger’s novels, this one was a fine read for me, though strange at times.
We find some unique character building in the chapters, and I sometimes did wonder what was connecting them all, aside from where they lived, but that aside, a guy with an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder who incessantly cleans with bleach and won’t leave his apartment, and mirror twins who dress alike and are 21-years-old was enough to keep me going. Though I do find the twins’ lives implausible, except perhaps in a fantasy world unlike our own, I bought into it for the story’s sake and went on. The ghost who ends up haunting them is at first a delight to get to know, and the author’s take on the afterlife is quite thought provoking, but the spirit in question turns a bit weird and egoistic, and without giving away the story, well, she becomes sort of creepy, which would be right up my alley, if I thought the story was supposed to be really scary, but it wasn’t. In any case, one would have to read this one to get their own final take on the ending, which I think was appropriate for all involved. I am left remembering these characters; they are visions in my mind, and somehow I know they will never leave. This is a compliment to Audrey Niffenegger, which I hope she’d appreciate.
Yes, yet again life is interrupted with great reading….this time in the form of a great book by the late Spalding Gray.
Life Interrupted, The Unfinished Monologue, was Gray’s last work. He was a pretty well-known actor, appearing in such films as The Killing Fields and Steven Soderbergh’s Gray’s Anatomy. He is best known for his one-man shows on Broadway, a lone man sitting at a desk, with a glass of water and a notebook, performing the monologues of his life. He was still working on Life Interrupted, and suffering from intense depression, when he died in 2004, another tragic suicide in which it is believed that he jumped off the Stanton Island ferry, his body found in the East River a week later.
Life Interrupted sort of tells the initiation he had into his depth of depression, recounting the tale of the car accident he was in on a trip to Ireland with his wife and some friends. Heavily present throughout the reader can feel “a lot of death in the air.” The accident left Gray’s right hip crushed, an injury he never fully recovered from, and an injury to his brain from a cranium fracture, that went undetected for some time (Irish hospitals were not up to snuff, and quite filthy it seems during his stay). Gray’s intense and honest words hold the reader captive. I could only imagine him acting them out on stage, or perhaps I’d rather have listened to him over a glass of wine in the living room just sharing his thoughts straight out…laughing and crying at the same time.
I’ll leave you with the end quote:
“I’ve never been able to give advice before in my life. I’ve always been a relativist, and someone who felt that he didn’t know. Even as a father it’s been difficult to say what exactly one should and should not do in this world of confusing, relativistic, movable-feast morality. But I have to say that I now can give advice around one issue, or two issues: Always wear your seat belt in the back seat of the car, which I’m sure you know, whether you do it or not. And whatever you do, get an American Express platinum card–it’s only three hundred dollars extra–so you can be medevacked the fuck out of a foreign country if you get in an accident.
Thank you for coming tonight.”
Yes, I know, Halloween is well over, and I was late in picking up a good scary read for the season….but I have to say I’m not disappointed. Let the Right One In is the scariest read since Duma Key by Stephen King. Writer John Ajvide Lindqvist has been proclaimed the King of Sweden. I can see why. This is a true vampire story without the sickening crap, smoldering glares, and teen drama trauma to hinder its brilliance.
Though the story left some mysterious mysteries hanging….like that strange gold egg puzzle of Eli’s and what ever happened to the intern guy who got half eaten…he should have perhaps attacked quite a few people in the morgue later….
So it wasn’t prefect, had a lot of extra detail, but the last half of the book is so frightening we don’t care a wit. The extra sexuality I can do without. It was unnecessary to enhance the story.
Yet to see either Swedish or American versions of Let Me In….will fill you in when I get my wits up see it.
I leave you now with the opening text of Part Five: Let the Right One Slip In:
Let the right one in
Let the old dreams die
Let the wrong ones go
They cannot do
What you want them to do
– Morrissey, “Let the Right One Slip In”
She rises from bed and goes into the bathroom….In the bathroom, she washes her face. She does not look directly into the oval mirror that hangs above the basin. She is aware of her reflected movements in the glass but does not permit herself to look. The mirror is dangerous; it sometimes shows her the dark manifestation of air that matches her body, takes her form, but stands behind, watching her, with porcine eyes and wet, hushed breathing. She washes her face and does not look, certainly not this morning, not when the work is waiting for her and she is anxious to join it the way she might join a party that had already started downstairs, a party full of wit and beauty certainly but full, too, of something finer than wit or beauty; something mysterious and golden; a spark of profound celebration, of life itself, as silks rustle across polished floors and secrets are whispered under the music. –The Hours, by Michael Cunningham
Currently reading The Hours by Michael Cunningham. This part is from a section in the narrative about Virgina Woolf, a fictional account of her life. Or a part thereof….The entire book is a fascinating read.
Photo: Mirror by In The Cold Breeze
