Brief Encounters With Che Guevara
Ben Fountain’s breakthrough with “Brief Encounters” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.
Annals of Culture Late Bloomers Why do we equate genius with precocity?
Theres nothing original about my stuff! you see these paintings in every art-schoool basement! our bios would allread the same: “favorite artist”:van gogh. Favortie subject matter: portraits of weathered faced. Hobbies: taking long walks in the rain and rinking black coffee. Im just good a imitating other painters. Theres nothing new in what I paint.
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974… My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license…records my first name simply as Cal.”So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.
When the story opens, Lou, a sometime painter, and Toby, a poet and house mover, fall intensely, almost instantly in love, and thereafter the phases of such a state are examined. In their early, heady days together, Lou, “shipwrecked on the sheets,” “opened her eyes and discovered where on their bed she had fetched up.” In her impassioned innocence, “love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature?” Likewise, a “wider life” breathed in Toby. “Only the lover sees what is real, he thought. … Far from being blind, love alone can see.”
In two beautifully told death scenes, Dillard has managed to achieve what Chekhov did with death in “The Bishop.” He “takes the mystery out of dying, makes it almost an ordinary occurrence,”
- via nytimes http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/books/review/Reed-t.html?pagewanted=2
