nonfiction

The Rebel by Albert Camus, trans. by Anthony Bower
(released in English by Knopf, 1954)
Andrea Applebee

A Man Who Says No

An Algerian born working class Nobel laureate, Camus wrote fiction, plays, essays, and speeches. And he looked all the world like Humphrey Bogart. In The Rebel he asks: how can one respond to the experience of absurdity, without turning to nihilism and suicide, or the tyranny and murder that too often follows revolution? Assuming rebellion is “an essential dimension of human experience”, Camus examines how the rebel should act, and what the terms and consequences would be of that action. He considered this book-length essay a counterpart to his celebrated Myth of Sisyphus, and in it he takes on the massive concepts of value, freedom, and justice. Like the rebel, his method is provisional—and necessarily so. He progresses by associative leaps, metaphors, and delicate particulars.

Camus begins by describing a certain kind of rebel whose impetus is the experience of outraged innocence, an insulted sense of dignity: the feeling that something has “gone on too long” or someone has “gone too far”. Rather than respond destructively or try to replace what oppresses him, this person “pleads for life, undertakes to struggle against servitude, falsehood, and terror.” In this sense the rebel is unlike the heretics (“evil, be thou my good”) and the radical leaders (“we must force them to be free”) who set themselves on the level of their enemies regardless of consequence and “side only with themselves”. After sketching the characteristics of the ideal rebel, epitomized by none other than Ivan Karamozov, Camus establishes a genealogy of those who thought and acted in response to the metaphysical demands of their times. He moves from Sade to Baudelaire and the “dandies”, to Stimer, Nietzsche, Lautreamont, and the surrealists. His observations about these men and the aesthetics that guided them are full of critical admiration special to those who study out of love and necessity.

“More a writer than a philosopher.” — Advisor’s note on Camus’ dissertation

The latter part of the essay sketches a history of rebellion by surveying the stages of the French revolution, then turns to rebellion and the act of artistic creation. The artist refuses the salvific myths of otherwordly justification, even of social or political progress towards an ideal state. The artist makes this refusal in favor of adapting and stylizing the experience ready at hand on its own terms, creating a world out of and within this one. In the closing section, Thought at the Meridian, Camus draws on all of his stylistic powers in a statement of determination and encouragement. Facing and accepting limits is his strongest advice for rebels who refuse to assimilate the characteristics of those they stand against: “The revolutionary mind, if it wants to remain alive, must therefore return again to the sources of rebellion and draw its inspiration from the only system of thought which is faithful to its origins: thought that recognizes limits.” This sense of measure offers a treatment for the malady of nihilism, and an alternative code of action for the rebel.

After its publication in 1952, (he had just recovered from a relapse of tuberculosis), most of the French intellectual circle would have nothing to do with him. Sartre’s main complaint was Camus’ rejection of Marxist-Leninism—the kind of political action that he had found imperative as a responsible thinker. There was a big fuss about The Rebel’s wrongs and weaknesses. Camus not only lacked large-scale political strategies, he lacked a systematic understanding of many of his sources. More than that he lacked a logically stable method of argument. In The Philosophical Review, David Sachs spoke for a significant group of critics when he observed of The Rebel that “claims are made in the name of logic, but where ‘logic’ occurs, it sometimes would be better to read ‘tendency’ or ‘drift’…Camus gives the impression of employing a procedure and reaching a conclusion more original and profound than in fact they are”. He wasn’t playing by the rules.

It may be possible to read Camus’ “drift” more generously—as a method adopted not out of laziness or ineptitude, but as an extension of his concern with rebellion. This long essay evidences a conceptual and expressive refusal to capitulate, not only to political ideologies, but to conventional modes of inquiry, a generic regime, or as Sachs puts it, “procedure”. The mode of reasoning Camus refuses (or fails) to participate in prescribes how a good thinker thinks. Modeled after god himself, a voice in the dark void of the universe, conventional reasoning predisposes its participants to singular positions and enforceable claims. Linear, not addressing what it deems irrelevant or unworthy, its power is brutally formulaic, predictable, and closed. Any interlocution is highly manipulated. As revolutions end in oppression, so conventional reasoning perpetuates reductionism under the myth of an ideal language for thought.

Camus takes issue with the premise of universal reasonability in The Rebel and elsewhere. For him, people are reasonable but the world is not. This gap is what interests him. And it is reason in the face of its disastrous context—the experience of the absurd, the mind against its limits, the conditions of life—that Camus engages. Drowning men don’t dance. Even if it were possible it would be unbefitting. Many a professor has smiled with tender condescension at the tattered works of Camus stuffed in the pockets of their students. But those who marginalize Camus as a “good writer but messy thinker” may be missing his true value. His insistence endears; his prose addresses the senses and emotions as well as the intellect. His ideas make sense on their own terms and his methodology, while provisional and limited, has integrity to his subject rare even in those who think clearly.

Andrea Applebee lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Madre: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun by Liza Bakewell
(Norton, November 2010)
Emily Stone

Mother of All Things

Madre is a book about language, about the motives for expression that are most familiar and most foreign, the characteristics of a single word that are both obvious and obscure. Brown University linguistic anthropologist Liza Bakewell takes as her subject mother in Spanish (very specifically in Mexican Spanish, a detail that the book’s title does not convey) in this associative, inquisitive, and nostalgic personal account. The jacket copy describes Madre as “a sui generis marvel,” and that’s true in the sense that the book’s tone and structure are more idiosyncratic than conventional of the genres from which the author borrows. Yet Bakewell does have peers in this kind of project, other writers and scholars who have approached their fields of expertise with enough calm and pleasure to turn the research projects that sent them scrambling around the globe into romantic travelogues—Michele Morano’s Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain (cited in Bakewell’s first chapter) immediately comes to mind, followed by Ted Bishop’s Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books. Madre is a cool book, or rather a warm one, full of intelligence, honesty, and the jagged edges of a mind at work.

Bakewell, who has lived on and off in Mexico since 1987, speaking its language at work and at home, wants to know, compared to the vernacular in other Spanish-speaking countries, “Why are idioms with the word madre so popular here in Mexico?” Her answer encompasses the common Western mothers Eve and the Virgin Mary, their distinctly Mexican counterparts Malinche (Cortés’s lover and “tongue,” the translator and intermediary between the Spanish conquistadors and the colonized indigenous people, both a mother and a traitor in the creation story of the country) and the Virgin of Guadalupe (the miraculous 16th-century apparition credited with the founding of a nation and the founding of a nation’s Catholicism), gender roles in Spanish grammar, and feminism in the kinds of verbal spars known as piropos.

“The anthropologist’s approach revels in the fluidity of language, its infinite variations, its heterogeneity, the way speakers and listeners manipulate their communication, the way the variables of gender, class, religion, age, education, ritual, religion, and the like interact with what’s said and how it is understood within these performances,” Bakewell explains. “And then there’s pure play, rhythm and rhyme, tone and style, twisted grammar and far-flung punctuation.” She is a skillful writer and her compressed, almost choral sentences can mix musings on theories of childhood language acquisition with reminiscences of dining with friends in elegant settings. Parenthetical statements about political shifts and presidential elections in Mexico imply a chronology, but Bakewell is less telling a story than recreating a process of understanding that unfolded over time. Bakewell is possessed of an easy intellectualism that allows her to hold an incredible amount of information in her mind at once, but that particular strength also accounts for one of the book’s few vulnerabilities—the weight of each chapter shifts unevenly and uneasily between passages that ask to be read as personal asides revealed in the context of a linguistic study and others that provide academic anecdotes in the context of a memoir.

The joy of reading Madre is watching Bakewell assemble the pieces in front of you. Riding in cars with unemployed politicians in Mexico City, cooking Asian-fusion enchiladas for her graduate students in Oaxaca, sitting at home alone on the couch in Maine, she wonders aloud why this word so closely associated with the source of life should have so many convoluted (and often counter-intuitively vulgar) connotations. In eight chapters that represent over two decades of curiosity, excitement, and frustration, she reviews and revises a running list of these mothers. She does not, however, include a glossary. The choice must be deliberate, as if explaining that the meanings of these explosive expressions—

me vale madre, de poca madre, a toda madre
desmadre, en todo la madre, madriza, madrazo,
me di un madrazo, le dieron un madrazo de aquellos…

cannot exist apart from the world in which they are spoken. Come to Mexico, Bakewell seems to blithely conclude, and figure it out for yourself.

Emily Stone received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Pitt in 2010. Her work has been accepted for publication by AGNI, Fourth Genre, Tin House, and the North American Review, and she has twice been included among the notable authors of the year in Best American Travel Writing. She teaches creative writing, journalism, and literature in English at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China.

Half Empty by David Rakoff
(Doubleday, September 2010)
Jessica Wang

Rakoff’s Full Glass of Wit

Those who have read David Rakoff before—the author of Fraud, Don’t Get Too Comfortable, and  numerous  magazine pieces—or heard him on Public Radio International’s This American Life, won’t be surprised by the wry pessimism that radiates from Half Empty, his most recent book of essays. The ten essays that comprise Half Empty all address pessimism in some fashion, and while dark, they’re refreshingly funny rebuttals to the positivity that pervades our culture today.

Certain pieces have a stronger focus on pessimism than others. The first essay, “The Bleak Shall Inherit,” falls into this category, introducing the idea of “defensive pessimism”: assuming the worst is beneficial because it means you won’t be disappointed. This attitude allows you to prepare back-up plans. Essays that aren’t as tied to this theme include “Shrimp,” in which Rakoff talks about having a small frame his entire life, and “Dark Meat,” which discusses the complicated relationship between Jewish people and pork. But for readers craving more on pessimism, the theme resurfaces again in the book with touching pieces like “All the Time We Have,” which addresses Rakoff’s relationship with a longtime therapist, and “Another Shoe,” which details his brush with cancer in middle age.

Even though some of his topics are downright grim and he claims to be “anti-fun,” Rakoff doesn’t really hate fun—he’s just wary of self-delusion and cultural phenomena that encourage such misguided thinking. He slams the musical Rent in the book’s best essay, “Isn’t It Romantic,” and makes a convincing case for why this attack is warranted: Rent romanticizes the life of an artist to an absurd level. The essay is filled with witty lines, proof that at the very least, he’s having fun with language.  

“Creativity demands an ability to be with oneself at one’s least attractive, that sometimes it’s easier not to do anything. Writing—I can really only speak to writing here—always, always only starts out as shit: an infant of monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever).”

Rakoff isn’t afraid to turn his critical eye inward. In this essay, he shows his own unattractive moments, in his struggle to live the creative life. Another entertaining essay, “The Satisfying Crunch of Dreams Underfoot,” follows his stint in the movie business, with a small role in the 1996 comedy The First Wives’ Club. (Don’t search for his name in the cast credits, as he was very quickly dropped from the production). Part of the humor in this essay comes from the fact that Rakoff makes a very apparent effort not to name-drop the movie or Olivia Goldsmith, the author who wrote the book that’s the basis of the movie. What makes the essay even more hilarious, though, is that Rakoff the character becomes swept up in the fantasy that this little role will propel him to stardom—the kind of delusions that Rakoff the author criticizes.

The one essay that falls short is “A Capacity for Wonder.” Each section focuses on a “constructed Eden”: the Disney Innoventions Dream Home, Hollywood Boulevard, and Mormon Salt Lake City. While all three sections have amusing moments—an African-American man he bumps into in Salt Lake City equates becoming a Mormon to joining the Klan—Rakoff doesn’t show us how the three places connect or reveal something about contemporary culture. In other essays, his tendency to digress is entertaining, and he does return to his point, but “A Capacity for Wonder” lacks this point-of-return.

Having a pessimistic outlook may be seeing the glass as half empty, but Rakoff delivers an essay collection that is full of sharp observations and ideas. If someone has to break it to us that the world is not as bright and brimming with possibilities as we make it out to be, he’s the man for the task. At least we’ll go out laughing. 

Jessica Wang is currently a MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, working on a family memoir. She previously reviewed A Good Fall and Notes from No Man’s Land for Hot Metal Bridge.

The Witness House by Christiane Kohl
(Other Press, October 2010)
Nicole Carroll

The premise is too fascinating to pass up: in 1945, while Germany is a vast, raw expanse of post-war ruins and hunger, take one villa in Nuremberg and populate it with former members of the Nazi party. Add some former members of the Resistance movement and several concentration camp survivors. Finally, find a beautiful Hungarian countess, ask her to manage the villa and keep the conversation civil, and wait for the war crimes trials to begin. Thus, The Witness House, a work of nonfiction by German journalist Christiane Kohl, translated into English by Anthea Bell.

In the beginning of her book, Kohl discusses her inspiration for the project. One night a man named Bernhard von Kliest (a house-guest staying with her parents) revealed a visitors’ book with signatures of people ranging from Rudolph Diels, the man who created the Gestapo, to concentration camp survivors like Eugen Kogon. von Kliest explained to Kohl that he had been a translator in the Nuremberg Trials while his wife, Annemarie von Kliest, took over the management of this odd place—the Witness House—that the American occupying forces had established to house those who were to be interrogated for the Nuremberg trials. Her interest piqued, Kohl began her research, locating and conducting interviews with the Hungarian countess, Ingeborg Kálnoky, who had managed the house from 1945-1947 during the height of the trials before von Kliest took over in 1947-1948.

The book is technically impressive, painting quirky and detailed portraits of many guests of the Witness House. Kohl pulls much of her material from first-hand interview accounts (with Kàlnoky and several others) as well as documents like interrogation records and letters. She moves in and out of the story, giving narratives of present-day interviews, in which her voice is very much present, and then slipping back out to discuss the Witness House and German post-war history from a greater distance. The narrative shifts, for example, from the larger political climate of 1930s and 1940s Germany in the shadow of the Third Reich, to stories of a former Nazi functionary at the Witness House begrudgingly giving soap and razor blades to a former Resistance member. Horrors like laboratory experiments performed on Jewish concentration camp inmates exist alongside a snapshot of General Köstring impatiently looking for a lost fountain pen.

Especially compelling is the fact that Kohl focuses almost purely on the lesser-known, more indirect contributors to the atrocities committed by the National Socialists—men like Heinrich Hoffman, Hitler’s personal photographer and Gisela Limberger, Hermann Göring’s secretary and librarian—rather than the infamous Himmlers, Görings, and Ribbentrops who were being held nearby under lock and key at the time.

By focusing on so many of these figures and their involvement as witnesses in the trial, Kohl is able to show how those existing in the ethically grey areas after the end of World War II quietly scrambled to re-classify themselves among the changed and remorseful, the latecomers to the Resistance, the unknowing, the outright innocent. The guests at the Witness House hang in a certain balance: former Nazis accept, deny, and brood over their guilt, their complicity, the people they have been over the past decade and a half. Some assert their continuing superiority and lament their ill treatment at the hands of the Americans. All the while, former Resistance members and concentration camp inmates navigate their way through their grief and torment, their anger and betrayal and loss, the compromises they have been forced to make, while sitting across the dinner table from those who controlled their fates until far too recently, sometimes only months before. These face-to-face encounters are troublesome for everyone—for those on each side of the trial and for the reader, because Kohl has portrayed the multi-faceted human being underneath the villain and the victim. In one chill-inducing scene, Kohl describes concentration camp survivors asking Hoffman, with very genuine curiosity, for his impressions of Hitler.

However, the great imbalance in this book is the painfully limited amount of space Kohl leaves for discussing what I felt to be the overarching questions of the book. How could conversation stay so civil? Why did the guests stay almost completely silent on the matters at hand, rather than come out and ask “Why?” and “How?” All while people were testifying about events that would be imprinted in the consciousness of the western world. All while guests of the Witness House were listening to death sentences read over the radio after the first round of trials. It’s not that I find it unbelievable that rage and flare-ups would be self-repressed; on the contrary, it feels like a reaction that human beings in the circumstances of the book would be likely to have. Kohl offers several possible explanations for the steady tone and atmosphere maintained in the house; however, I found myself begging her to have taken it further. What was really going on in the psychology of these people who had just experienced a seismic shift in their lives and worldviews? Was Kohl simply limited in exploring the Jewish reactions to being at the Witness House because it was too painful to be able to comment on the experience at the time? Because no former Nazi would have yet processed the magnitude of what he had contributed to?

In the end, however, this is a book that is very much worth reading and that is very different from other accounts of Germany during and after the war. While the writing itself is not necessarily stunning, it is artful enough, and the weaving together of narrative and history is done in a deft and thought-provoking manner. I can acknowledge that, in some ways, the entire book is asking the questions above, simply by the anecdotes that are offered—juxtaposed with meticulous and often horrifying historical facts—to the reader. A reader can piece together possibilities for answering these questions or be content to keep creating questions to follow Kohl into the human psyche. What is it about human beings that makes us turn inward, shut down, gloss over, deny? What makes us able to push a Holocaust to the side, finish our dinner with perfect manners, and follow it with a drink and a cigarette?

Nicole Carroll exists somewhere between Buffalo and Pittsburgh and is currently an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh.

Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays
(Graywolf Press, February 2009)
Jessica Wang

An essay collection about race in America. Wary, you circle around it. It won the 2008 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Its back cover sports blurbs from big names like Sherman Alexie and David Shields. Still, you might ask: haven’t enough books covered race by now? What new insights could author Eula Biss possibly have to offer? Retract your claws and dive into Notes from No Man’s Land, because the connections Biss makes in her essays startle and, more importantly, confront us with truths we usually try to avoid.

The essay collection’s artfulness has much to do with how Biss gradually approaches her subject. The narrative voice doesn’t come across as one stalling for time until a big reveal, because the details she provides while pushing towards her argument are fascinating. Take the first essay in the collection, “Time and Distance Overcome.” Biss tells us about the animosity the public initially had towards telephone poles and how people considered the poles an “urban blight.” It’s interesting for us readers to imagine telephone poles, which are now ubiquitous—and maybe even a little quaint thanks to the popularity of cellular phones—being so objectionable. We’re treated to four pages of the war against telephone poles, and then Biss surprises us with a shift:

“In 1898, in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole. And in Weir City, Kansas. And in Brookhaven, Mississippi. And in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the hanged man was riddled with bullets. In Danville, Illinois…”

To move from animosity towards telephone poles to the lynching of black men from those poles isn’t a leap in logic, but it’s certainly unexpected.

Another particularly effective essay that makes surprising yet logical connections is “No Man’s Land,” in which Biss ties the prairie experiences of Laura Ingalls Wilder (the author of the much beloved Little House series) to her own experiences in Rogers Park, a predominantly black neighborhood in Chicago (both Biss and her husband are white). Such an essay could turn paternalistic or self-congratulatory, but Biss avoids such traps by questioning herself as much as everyone else. For example, she expresses discomfort when she sees racial profiling in action, but then makes an admission: “I consider going to one of the monthly beat meetings the police hold for each neighborhood and making some kind of complaint, but month after month I do not go.”

Readers familiar with Joan Didion will be interested to read Biss’ version of the iconic essay “Goodbye to All That.” Not only does Biss’ essay have the same title, but her sentences often echo Didion’s. “But that is not the way it really happened,” she writes after relating an anecdote about moving into her first New York City apartment. “That is how I learned to tell the story of my life in New York.” While she tweaks the moving to New York essay (even challenging Didion at times), this essay pales in comparison to others in the collection, because they venture onto unfamiliar ground while this one does not.

In fact, the strongest essays in Notes from No Man’s Land tend to be the ones about the Midwest, rather than the ones that revolve around New York and California. The aforementioned “No Man’s Land” is one of the Midwestern essays, as is the equally impressive “Is This Kansas,” an account of teaching white Iowan college students around the time of Hurricane Katrina. Didion and many other writers have written about New York and California, but the Midwest is underrepresented, especially when it comes to race issues, and Biss fills a major gap by giving us a quartet of essays on the Midwest.

While there are moments in Biss’ essays in which you’ll want to argue with her, those moments speak to the power of the essays rather than serious weaknesses.  She might end Notes from No Man’s Land with an essay titled “All Apologies,” but there’s one thing she doesn’t need to apologize for: this fine collection of work. Her surprising but sound connections make us reconsider how we see things, and wonder if things we’ve previously thought of as dissimilar can in fact be linked to one another.

Jessica Wang is currently a MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, working on a family memoir. She previously reviewed A Good Fall for Hot Metal Bridge.

Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace
(W. W. Norton & Co., 2003)
Robyn Jodlowski

There are certain expectations one has before beginning a text by David Foster Wallace. One: the reading will be pleasurable but by no means leisurely. Two: you will learn about subjects both tangential and unrelated to the supposed topic at hand. And three: there will be lots of footnotes, abbreviations and surprisingly hip professor slang. All these hold true and then some in Everything and More.

This particular text was written for the “Great Discoveries Series” which, according to their website, “pairs today’s top writers with crucial scientific breakthroughs in ways that are both surprising and illuminating.” As Wallace explains (indeed, almost apologizes for) in his “Small But Necessary Foreword”:

“[The book’s] subject is a set of mathematical achievements that are extremely abstract and technical, but also extremely profound and interesting, and beautiful. The aim is to discuss these achievements in such a way that they’re vivid and comprehensible to readers who do not have pro-grade technical backgrounds and expertise. To make math beautiful—or at least to get the reader to see how someone might find it so.”

You know you’re getting into some heavy stuff if DFW not only gives a disclaimer, but begins his book with a dedication to his parents in Greek.

The foreword, complete with abbreviation glossary (one of several), then moves into the problem of infinity and the history of mathematics on both the meta and micro levels. Georg F. L. P. Cantor, we learn, is the cat behind the book, the guy who “solved” infinity in a sense. Infinity, seemingly either straightforward or baffling, is both and neither.

In the next section (divisions are marked with the mathematically-appropriate § symbol throughout the text), he backs up to think about just how abstract math and numbers truly are. Somehow Wallace uses quotes from math historians, O.E.D definitions of “abstract,” and common stumbling blocks for grade schoolers learning numbers to illuminate the distinction between saying there are five oranges on the table versus the concept of the number five: math suddenly seems much harder, but in a whole new way. Even the innocent number line gets a good philosophizing while symbols and representation reemerge throughout as important concepts of infinity, the term being represented by Wallace with the lemniscate symbol rather than linguistically to remind us of the utter abstraction with which we’re dealing.

The tale really begins with logical traps like Galileo’s and Zeno’s paradoxes, the latter of which goes something like this: in order to cross the street, you must cross every single point between one side (A) and the other (B). Because there are an infinite amount of points between A and B, it should be impossible to traverse that distance of infinity, therefore we shouldn’t be able to cross the street.

Obviously we’ve all crossed the road before, so something is instantly fishy. Stuck on this and similar mind traps, early mathematicians ignored or brushed aside infinity and greats like Plato and Aristotle developed incorrect theories that misled the math world for centuries. It wasn’t until the 1600s that mathematicians, by divorcing themselves from geometrical referents like the number line, were finally able to begin developing a rigorous definition for what had become the “problem” of infinity.

The book proceeds in much the same way as it begins: history of math, trimmed and in context; tight, clear reminders of common mathematical concepts and rules; no-nonsense explanations to bring you to his next arithmetical point.

What Wallace ends up achieving is a beautiful book, but not one that’s available to just any audience as the series wants him to do. By no means a technocrat or math genius (I took AP Calculus in high school and even retained a bit of that derivative and integral business), there were still parts of the text, full of symbols and variables, that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around, even with rereads of Wallace’s patient prose. At the very least, readers would benefit from a calculus class, a philosophy course, and probably another book or two of Wallace’s under their belt before they attempt Everything and More.

There are also sections with an overload of abbreviations and incomplete sentences that give it a not-quite-finished draft feel, though given the glut of research and rewriting the work must have taken, I can’t fault Wallace and the editors for not smoothing those out.

That being said, math types have found calculable problems with the text—problems I am too dense to understand but did the equivalent of a vacant head nod as I read about them online. Wallace seemed to anticipate this, as his acknowledgment ends with, “It goes without saying that the author is solely responsible for any errors or imprecisions in this booklet.”

I won’t give away the ending, mostly because I can’t, but let’s just say that the levels of abstraction increase quite a ways above the problem of five oranges and reach a universe of symbols I’ve never seen before, in arithmetic or otherwise. Rules are broken, infinities are found, and I’m back to feeling like a grade schooler.

All abstraction and mind-boggling philosophy-math aside, I’d say the book is worth a try—at least the first hundred pages if you’re weak at math but strong at patience. It’s interesting to see DFW in a realm he was interested in (his senior thesis was on modal logic), but not well-known for, and after reading, I felt like I had sat in on one of his lectures. The voice here is teacherly, kind, and witty. More than ever, I saw his dexterity, his mastery of language and thought, as he twisted around purely conceptual subjects and bowed under the weight of his characteristic sensitivity to ensure understanding, or at least interest. It’s wild to see spots where even a master like him couldn’t quite bend the language his way.

Like most of his work, and infinity itself, Everything and More is about one thing and everything, base and beautiful, floating somewhere in the realm of ideas.

Robyn Jodlowski is a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh and the book review editor at Hot Metal Bridge. To read more of her work visit http://www.politicsunlocked.com/

Medium Raw:  A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook by Anthony Bourdain
(Ecco, June 2010)
Erin Lewenauer

It’s been a busy ten years since Anthony Bourdain first let readers into the dark corners of his kitchen and his mind with the mega-bestseller Kitchen Confidential:  Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.  The sometimes ornery chef has gone on to publish a hefty handful of books and articles while moving from country to country with his Emmy Award-winning show No Reservations.

Now retired from the restaurant kitchen, Bourdain proves that he has indeed learned a lot in his 28 years behind the stove. Like him or hate him, Bourdain does not pull punches.  He speaks with clarity about chefdom in his Confidential sequel, Medium Raw, revealing “the searing heat, the mad pace, the never-ending stress and melodrama, the low pay, probable lack of benefits, inequity and futility, the cuts and burns and damage to body and brain—the lack of anything resembling normal hours or a normal personal life.”

The book opens with a scene a la film noir in which a group of heavy-hitter chefs gather in secret to partake in illegal cuisine.  The chapters that follow touch on Bourdain’s reckless days on St. Barts, the conundrum of selling out, and the chef-author’s updated feelings on fellow gastronomic celebrities. “Rachael Ray sent me a fruit basket.  So I stopped saying mean things about her.  It’s that easy with me now,” a sanguine Bourdain admits.

Once a rogue and a provocateur, the Bourdain of Medium Raw is a sage authority.  “I am frequently asked by aspiring chefs, dreamers young and old, attracted by the lure of slowly melting shallots and caramelizing pork belly, or delusions of Food Network stardom, if they should go to culinary school,” says Bourdain.  “I usually give a long, thoughtful, and qualified answer.  But the short answer is ‘no’.”

After his own graduation from the Culinary Institute of America in his early 20s, Bourdain published two “unsuccessful novels” and kept his day job, which spanned an impressive number of Manhattan kitchens.  But the facts of Bourdain’s life are different now; he is older, he is a father, he is no longer a chef, and he deems himself happily uncool.  He has traded the fast-paced, sweaty, profanity-ridden days in the kitchen for the time and the pleasure to dream up new ways to vilify Ronald McDonald for his daughter’s benefit.  The bombastic and angry tone has mellowed considerably.

Medium Raw’s camera pans out slowly on the present, the scene spliced together with vivid shots of bygone years.  Bourdain manages to avoid sentimentality in favor of a studious take on today’s food culture, where the Food Network thrives yet Gourmet magazine is out of business.  Bourdain intelligently and humorously explores the effects of the economic crisis on the restaurant business, the ups and downs of Top Chef, a day in the life at New York’s Le Bernardin, the benefits of dozen-course tasting menus versus lure hamburgers, and his latest heroes and villains.

All of the skills that served Bourdain well as a chef—“creativity, technical skill, leadership abilities, flexibility, grace under pressure, sense of humor, and sheer strength and endurance”—have translated into his writing.  In one of the best and most candid moments of the book, he allows readers to peer in on his coveted “food porn,” describing himself devouring a pain raisin at a small, Parisian boulangerie:  “The reaction is violent.  It hurts.  Butter floods your head and you think for a second you’re going to black out.”

The tamed, more circumspect Bourdain of Medium Raw remains detail-oriented, hilarious, and sharp as ever despite the constant references to his age.  As impressive as his hyper-awareness of foodies and the food industry is his generosity in sharing an honest view of a world that blends food and travel with an intimacy that so few people ever experience first-hand.

Erin Lewenauer, a poet and freelance writer from Milwaukee, is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a graduate of Vassar College and has lived in Paris, Boulder, and New York City.