I am moved to put pen to paper to celebrate the peerless work and mourn the untimely death of my favorite author, Scottish novelist Iain Banks, who died on June 9^th, two months after being diagnosed with cancer, and two weeks before the publication of what will now be his last novel, The Quarry.

In an ironic twist that Banks himself would and did appreciate, The Quarry concerns events surrounding a middle-aged man dying of cancer. Banks had almost completed the book when he himself was diagnosed, and one has to assume that some of his own experience will be reflected in the completed manuscript. That, and the events which now surround its publication lend a grim poignancy to The Quarry for those of us who loved Iain Banks’ work. In a recent interview his own reaction, typically, was more sardonic: “I’ve really got to stop doing my research too late. This is really such a bad idea.”

By a calendrical coincidence, this year’s Father’s Day is an especially literary one. It falls on June 16th, which is celebrated annually, at least by English majors, as Bloomsday. That’s the day on which Leopold Bloom, the hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses, peregrinates around Dublin, and it’s the day on which Joyce’s ardent fans don period garb and recreate that journey by traipsing across the city in Bloom’s footsteps. On this side of the globe we just hoist a Guinness or two and affect an Irish accent for a few hours.

Ulysses has a lot to do with fatherhood, actually. Some representative quotes: 

• A father, said Stephen, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil.
• Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?  
• [A son’s] growth is his father’s decline, his youth his father’s envy, his friend his father’s enemy.

Sheesh. No wonder people drink on Bloomsday. Lighten up, Mr. Joyce....Read More

Recently some members of the industry press were abuzz and atwitter about the fact that Amazon asked some booksellers, including me, whether they could sell Kindles in independent bookstores. I guess this constitutes news, but it is no big deal to me. (We politely said no.) It does make me think about my mixed feelings about Amazon. Some people might be surprised to hear the adjective “mixed” being used. But I have a number of good things to say about the company.

The Good: They are building their headquarters right in the middle of Seattle. I think this is mostly a fantastic shot in the arm for the Seattle community and very exciting to watch. They employ and give a good wage to many families on Mercer Island, many of whom shop at our store. They are an impressively strategic company, forward thinking and creative. I have relatives who work there. I have two terrific employees that used to work for them. They are brilliant designers of customer-centric web services. You can find little tiny parts to things that break easily. And weird shoe sizes.

The early part of Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant fades back to the late 1920s, as narrator Nicholas Jenkins befriends composer Hugh Moreland. Over the next several years, the two men, members of the same quasi-Bohemian circle, converse at length about art, love, and life while they progress from pub to pub and from youth to (relative) maturity. The group includes the bilious music critic Maclintick and the artist Barnby, who demonstrates his knack for womanizing by picking up a waitress at the titular restaurant. Moreland marries actress Matilda Wilson at around the same time Jenkins marries the socially elevated Isobel Tolland. The narrative returns to the novel’s present in the middle ’30s as Jenkins lunches at the Tolland house with his wife’s large family, learning there of his brother-in-law Erridge’s plans to travel to Spain, then in the thick of civil war. Jenkins leaves to visit his wife in the hospital, where she’s recuperating from a miscarriage and the pregnant Matilda is also seeing her doctor. Widmerpool makes a typically unexpected appearance there as well, undergoing treatment for boils. Moreland and Jenkins later visit Maclintick at home and are exposed to to his argumentative wife and their corrosive marriage. Matilda loses her baby, and Moreland throws himself into his work. He completes and premieres his symphony while simultaneously becoming emotionally (and perhaps physically) entangled with Priscilla Tolland, Jenkins’ sister-in-law. Maclintick loses his job and is abandoned by his wife, thereafter gassing himself to death. Moreland breaks off his affair, and Priscilla almost immediately becomes engaged to another man.

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Well, Marani is an Italian native who lives and works in Brussels. His day job is at the European Union, dealing with issues of interpretation, so he’s a classic polyglot. In addition to Italian, he speaks French and English, translates from Finnish and Dutch, and is more than passingly acquainted with Slovenian and Spanish. While the fiction he writes in his own time isn’t overtly autobiographical, it’s clearly a transmutation of his own experiences with cultural dislocation and a sense of being adrift on a sea of half-familiar words.

New Finnish Grammar, Marani’s award-winning 2000 novel (trans. 2011 by Judith Landry), tells the story of a severely injured sailor found in Trieste in the middle of World War II. He has no memory of who he is or how he came to be there, and the only identifying information he bears is a tag on his clothing....Read More

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