Greatly Reviewed!

Jim Lynch’s The Highest Tide is actually on the same wave length with Mark Twain’s The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn. Both of them are “Literatures” (mark my capital L) and interesting and for kids and also mature reader-friendly.

It tells about the protagonist’s conflicts during three summer weeks. During t his time, he has to struggle with his parents’ pre-divorce relationship, his hidden love to his ex-baby sitter cum neighbor who prepares herself for college, and he also faces his sudden fame after finding a dead giant squid and another giant fish and attracting media’s and people’s attention with his mastery of marine biology as he reads from Rachel Carson’s works. Continue reading »

Master of the Jinn by Irving Karchmar, in my opinion, is a new thing in the tradition of sufi. If to this day we’ve only known about sufi poetry, such as that by El Jalaluddin Rumi (as translated by Anne Marie Schimmel), following your reading of Master of the Jinn you’ll know the so-called ’sufi novel’. Well, is this labeling appropriate? Prove it later sooner or later. I won’t bother concluding its decorum too soon. I don’t have a deadline to meet, right? I’ll just try to peel the novel layer by layer. Soon enough, when I feel sure enough, I’ll tell you what I’ve got to say about the labeling.

Reading the first half of the story, I can’t help comparing this novel with that written by Tucker Malarkey, Resurrection. Continue reading »

When Azadeh Moaveni , a Time Magazine journalist who seems to specialize in writing news stories about Iran and other Persian issues, lived in Iran in the early days of her career as a journalist, Iran was still under Khatami’s arms. While young people’s life seemed to be very depressed, very monotonous, very boring, the youngsters seem to always strive to take any chances to express themselves as soon as those chances approach. Well, you might say that Iranian young people wish to live like American youngsters they imagine.

In Lipstick Jihad Azadeh Moaveni records her life, which due to her living with them makes it possible for us to say that “she also records Iranian young people’s life”, during this phase. She records how, while out in the street they behave quite pious, nice, Moslem-clad, inside big houses where parties are held after paying some money to police officers they wear tank-tops that can only be seen once they enter the houses and throw their Islamic roopoosh (a kind of loose clothes worn by women in Iran) to jacket hangers. Continue reading »

The War Against Cliche is the kind of book I love re-re-re-reading. In it, you can find lots of reviews that Martin Amis wrote since the first days of his career as a literary reviewer until 2001. He mostly reviews literary works, ranging from popular novels to the canons, but you can also find several reviews on non-fiction non-literary works like Hillary Clinton’s book and Andy Warhol’s diary. All are reviewed in the holy Amisian way. They’re sharp, they’re to the point, they’re honestly admiring or denouncing.

For the ones on literary works, you can find how Amis repeatedly quotes sentences or words that highly show cliches. He gives sharp remarks as if addressed mainly to the author of those reviewed works. But, once he shows a huge interest in the book, he gladly and sincerely gives praises. Look at how he reviews Michael Chricton’s The Lost World, and compare it to his reviews on Vladimir Nabokov’s works. Continue reading »

Okay now, I gotta tell you about a book. The title is Otobiografi (or Autobiography in English). Wait up! It’s not time for you to draw a conclusion. No. Not yet. It’s not an autobigraphy in the conventional sense of this word. It’s not even a memoir. This is a poetry anthology of Saut Situmorang. FYI, Saut Situmorang is quite a controversial contemporary Indonesian poet. He’s controversial in terms that he is more well-known as a harsh-critic of a major Indonesian cultural pocket Komunitas Utan Kayu led by a senior poet Goenawan Mohamad. Saut shows an open opposition to Goenawan and all around him.

Well, back to Otobiografi, this poem is unique in two ways. First, it is the first poem in Indonesia whose write declares himself adhere to the so-called intertextuality, the notion that a certain work is in any way related with texts that precede it. A text is judged in the light of other texts that precede or succeed it, that’s how T.S. Eliot put it less than a century ago. Continue reading »