Every Lost Country

This is the third Steven Heighton novel I have read.
He does not stumble. Three-hit wonder!
For me as a reader, I need to feel that an author is in control of his story, and this is what I get with a Heighton book.
Often people will ask me what kind of books I like to read, and I used to hesitate, but I've learned that the answer is "Literature". When they ask me what I mean by that, I get positively nebulous. If I could adequately answer the question I would probably be writing literature!
The closest I have come to explaining it to myself is that literature is something that breathes beyond its own pages. When the covers are closed, a dialogue ensues. Especially if you are alone.

I have noted [elsewhere] how Heighton loves to pit his characters against the elements, I won't repeat myself here. They [his characters] battle nature, and in so doing, discover aspects of their own nature that they would have never known, otherwise.
Reviews can often say too much about the plot and I think that should be the dictionary definition of evil. But I think it's OK to say that this book takes place in Tibet/China.
The slash mark in between is so significant. It is a book about borders.
But not just between fractious nations.
In Every Lost Country, Heighton explores the borders between immediate and larger concerns.
Immediate, being those of personal safety and prosperity. And familial concerns.
Larger, being the safety and well-being of others -- those others we could just as easily avoid, or discard with impunity.
For Heighton's protagonist, Dr. Lewis Book, there is almost no such thing as this latter beast. He responds with his entire being to the needs that present themselves. This is exemplified when his ex-wife says over the phone at one point: "I know Lewis, when people are in trouble, there isn't a border."
In this novel, a lot of people are in trouble.
Lewis Book goes to Tibet with his teenage daughter, to be the doctor for tempestuous mountain-climber Wade Lawson, and his team. The expedition is quickly altered by the political [border] problems of the area.
Lewis makes a quick choice that radically alters the lives and deaths of many.
For the love of others -- others are saved, and lost.

I admit, I haven't always been completely sure of what literature is, or has been. But in this case, I'm quite confident that Steven Heighton knew. Knows.
And he gave it to us.
Could've kept it to himself, but he didn't. Ran into the bloodied snow with his supplies. The "Book" getting the better of him….
Get your own --> HERE.
*******

Afterlands: A Perfect 10

Well just today I finished reading one of the best novels I have read in a long long while.
Afterlands, by Canadian author, Steven Heighton.
It is definitely the best book I have read so far this year, and I cannot imagine another one being better for me in 2009.
It is now up there in my opinion with the greats, like Alias Grace, and As The Crow Flies, and Libra, and stuff like that.
You know, when you are as multi-talented as I am […ahem…] there are times when it seems you can do anything. I can discuss junk as good as the other dude, I can sing better than this guy, I can play drums better than that guy, I can still beat Joe down the hall at tennis, and I can write…… pretty good.
But then you read a book like Afterlands.
And you realize stuff.
It is very humbling, but in a good way.
I very quickly and profoundly realize that even if my writing talents were to multiply exponentially over the next ten or twenty years, I would still never be able to write anything a hundredth as good as this guy can.

← This Steven Heighton character!
The novel, God, I don't even know where to start, rather than delineate it in my own words I am going to direct you to a good synopsis of it → HERE.
In this brief blog I just want to take the time to say that in my opinion, Afterlands is almost a dual novel.
After the Arctic portion of it, the author follows the protagonist Roland Kruger into Mexico, and to further adventures so epic in scope that, as I say, it is almost like reading a second novel. Yet all remains so intertwined [woven], so intricately connected to the themes of displacement and alienation, peril and rescue. Love and loss.
Kruger emerges a hero, but not a super-hero.
There is not one aspect of this novel that is flippant. Nothing is under or over cooked. And let's face it, both things can give one indigestion.
It is a thriller, but not a potboiler. Because it is based on actual events, it could be considered historical fiction, yet does not have the feel, in any typical sense, of the genre.
The perfect blend of wild invention and bone-numbing reality.

The white bird, an albino vulture, slouches in a niche in the canyon wall, like statuary in a satanic chapel. Its bald gory head is half turned away, as if feigning disinvolvement or anonymity. [p.320]

Come on now!
That is gorgeous, perfect, writing. And the whole entire book is that good.
It’s a perfect ten of a book and had me riveted from start to finish.
I encourage you one and all to trust me just this once. Afterlands cannot disappoint you.
I happen to have the inside scoop that Steven Heighton is busy at work. Even as I write this, he is squirreled away on an island writing his next novel. In the meantime, I have already picked up his former book, The Shadow Boxer.
And I am in the process of reading his poetry.
Yes, it is humbling to read stuff that is this good. And it is dizzyingly exciting.
Do not be discouraged that you will never write as good as Steven Heighton.
Neither will I.
Neither will anyone.

*********

Girls, BEHAVE!

It's so nice to return today to an author that I can trust.
<-- Plus, he's pretty hot. At least I think so!
Not that I'm… nor that it would be wrong if I was….. never mind!
I am in the beginning stages of Canadian author Steven Heighton's latest novel, Every Lost Country.
Having read almost all of his other work, as well as some of his poetry, I can confidently say to you that Steven Heighton is an author you NEED to invite into your parlour. You must let him in.
Heighton likes to explore, in his fiction, the theme of human vs. environment.
Dire predicaments, with emphasis on cold temperatures!
In this latest one, we are in the mountains of Tibet. At least for now.
But he takes us many places -- for all I know, before this novel is done, we could all be falling off of some near-dead donkey in the sweltering heat of Mexico!
Wherever he goes -- he knows where he's going.
Poetry in prose. A depth, where every paragraph counts. No sentence should be excised. Nor another, added.
When you get your hands on him girls, remember to BEHAVE!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

I just finished another EXCELLENT novel by Steven Heighton.
← The Shadow Boxer.
I think of literature as putting us face to face - and at times, hand to hand, in struggle or in love - with strangers. So we're forced to look them in the eyes and see them not as others but as variations on a vast, familiar theme. Ourselves.
-- Steven Heighton --

Have a great Wednesday!
**********

Top Books of 2009

I read 48 books last year.
<-- CLICK on the image of me carrying them, for a more detailed account.
A few times I have abandoned a book halfway through, and not just because a book is bad, but sometimes it's because I just lose interest.
This happened especially with several books of non-fiction I started, but did not finish, in 2009.
The listing though, is of books I read in their entirety.

And since the overwhelming percentage of them were fictional, this New Year's Day I am just going to select a few of these, let's say 8, which were especially outstanding. Memorable. Lasting. Timelessly good.

Even a cursory glance through my books of 2009 will reveal that I do not rely on Bestseller Lists to choose what I am going to read next.
And every year, as I myself peruse the previous year's adventures -- I make mental notes to myself.
Things like:
1) You did not read any Shakespeare? And you call yourself a "reader"?
2) Why have you not yet read Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone?
3) You are not reading enough poetry collections.

Then I crack open a beer, and relax.

Here are my 8 Favorite Books of 2009.
[Note: Not necessarily in order of preference, but in order of having read them.]

1) Libra, by Don DeLillo. [1988]
An unputdownable, riveting, fictional speculation on the assassination of J.F.K.
2) Afterlands, by Steven Heighton. [2005]
An 1872 Arctic expedition gone seriously awry. What a joy to discover this amazing author. I've already pre-ordered his new tale.
3) The Hotel New Hampshire, by John Irving. [1981]
Vintage Irving. This one has all the eccentric weirdness you could throw a transvestite bear at!
4) Herzog, by Saul Bellow [1964]
By way of letters and flashbacks, a vivisection of the profound mind of the inimitably perturbed Moses Herzog.
5) Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett [2001]
A South American hostage-taking. The beginning and ending are violent, everything in-between reminding the reader that there are two sides to every story.
6) The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood [2009]
One thing -- you've got to already love Margaret. And I did. Do. Which is to say... may not make you want to marry her, but if you were already hers, you'll want to renew your vows.
7) The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien [1990]
A collection of related stories / vignettes, about a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War. It creeps up on you.
8) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon [2000]
I will remember 2009 as the year Michael Chabon discovered me. What a terrific, rollicking, book!

All of these books were great!
And I am looking forward to 2010. A year of reading, with every moment I able to give to such adventure. Such vicarious experience. Such pleasure.
HAPPY NEW YEAR, to you, my fellow book-addicts!
And finally, I do not want to verbally single out two favorites among my 8 favorites, [as Margaret Atwood once told me when I asked her what her own favorite book was, "The other ones would find out!"] but I will let the following photograph, laced with steroidal-proportions of subliminal suggestions, make its unspoken impression upon thee.











Cheers.
Cip
*******

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

We have to remember how to invite and receive the words and insights we can’t force to mind.  We have to relearn how to muse, drowse and stare into blankness, adrift, dormant, even bored, especially now when our various screens are always present – firewalls between us and the reality of dreams.
-- Steven Heighton, Workbook: Memos & Dispatches on Writing --

Have a great Wednesday!
*****

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

“So that's the secret when you're bacheloring, boy, to keep your expenses in reason. Don't wash anything. Just let it all air. Before long nothing smells of anything."
-- From The Shadow Boxer, by Steven Heighton –

Note: From my own bachelor-perspective I find the above advice, given from fictional father to fictional son, to be very interesting. I'm going to try it out. Henceforth, I am no longer going to wash stuff, and see what happens!

Have a great Wednesday!
**********

Splash du Jour: Monday

Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them.
-- Steven Heighton --
Have a great Monday!
*****

Splash du Jour: Monday

"Calm and simple delight. Any childhood lover of books remembers that wave of relief and exaltation that would buoy you the moment you realized you could return to a book you'd been living deep inside for days. So that you would climb back in, as into a cardboard-box fort, and close the cover behind you like a door. Such is one common encounter with what American essayist Sven Birkerts calls ‘deep time’ - that clockless, borderless psychic state whose inhabitants have dual citizenship and can live out in the world with others or deep in the collaborative, fantastic world of books. Adults are not barred from that state, but it takes real time and peace to get to the border, and for adults such commodities are scarce. Birkerts argues further that the speed of our lives has accelerated to the point where even for children the experience of ‘deep time’ grows rare."
-- Steven Heighton –

Have a great Monday!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Adult readers have the right to expect and demand that writers not condescend to them but treat them with respect -- challenge them, unsettle them, refuse to talk down to them. Personally I don't want false comfort, I don't want to read writers who flop in to join me in the shallow end where, like most people, I sometimes find myself cowering out of fatigue or disappointment or the natural human aversion to spiritual deep waters. I want to read writers like Franz Kafka or Mary Shelley or Mavis Gallant or Cormac McCarthy who grab be by the hair and haul or pitch me out into the deep end of the pool and say Swim, you bastard, your life depends upon it.
-- Steven Heighton --

Have a great Tuesday!
********

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

"In my last years as an editor I saw more and more stories and poems that amounted to a kind of literary MTV - they were sleek and shifting, quick and gadgety. I could have filled the pages I was editing with competent examples, by truly talented writers, of this 'tough, urban' writing, this so-called sudden fiction. Suddenly read, suddenly forgotten, but that hardly matters, as readers weaned on TV and videos we'll think we're getting the real thing, and maybe if we went and tried to read, say, Alice Munro or Keith Fraser, we'd have real trouble, would grow impatient for the payoff, the climax, the wrap-up and credits, and on to the next channel. Click."
-- Steven Heighton –

Have a great Tuesday!

Discovering Sleepers

I am so NOT a morning person.
I'm a night person. The night is when I come alive!
I like staying awake till all hours, sleeping like a dead rhinoceros -- and my perfect day is when I can awaken due to natural causes. Like…… sunlight. Or Jack's lovely mewling. Or the sheer desire to read, with a coffee steaming away beside me. I like sleeping until then.
And when it comes to reading, I like discovering sleepers.
Books that are surprising in that, for all their obscurity, they turn out to be quite good -- these are what I call "sleepers". I'm in the midst of a real good one, right now.
It's called All Will Be Revealed, by Robert Anthony Siegel. [2007]. The fact that you have never heard of this book is my very point here. It's too bad that for whatever reason it does not have a greater readership, because really it is a terrific read. Dealing with the subject of the dawn of pornography -- and how one of its early moguls gets involved with the phenomenon of the seance, the occult practices that were so prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century.

As any reader of Bookpuddle knows, I am not a follower of the bestsellers.
I'm a bit of an Ibsenite, I'm afraid.
Old Henrik said "The majority are always wrong" and I tend to agree. I like finding that underdog book -- the sleeper that is a real keeper.
Over the years I've unearthed a few real dandies.
Books that no one has read, like:
The Ash Garden, by Dennis Bock.
Some Things That Stay, by Sarah Willis.
Slammerkin and Life Mask, by Emma Donoghue.
The Doctor's Wife and An Answer From Limbo and The Great Victorian Collection, by Brian Moore.
The Watch That Ends The Night, by Hugh MacLennan.
The Way The Crow Flies, by Ann-Marie MacDonald.
The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien.
Afterlands, by Steven Heighton.
Or, the ultimate Book That No One Has Read… Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis.
I've read this last one about four or five times.

What is your ultimate Sleeper Book that you have read but you are quite sure no one else in the world has read but yet you have a feeling that it should be read by everyone in the world?
********

Splash du Jour: Thursday

In childhood when you wake in the night it's often to fear; in adolescence it's to the engorging ache of lust. In adulthood, in the wee small hours, even a happy man or woman wakes troubled, and at first, before the full return of identity and causation, the feeling is sourceless and absorbing, as if part of a cosmic sadness every adult sleeper taps into. Wo bin ich? Where am I?
-- Steven Heighton, Afterlands –

As for me, I tend to wake up in the middle of the night and want a hamburger!
At any rate, this book Afterlands, I am reading it right now and I’m telling you friends, I cannot put it down, it’s that terrific.

Have a great Thursday!
**********