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Reviews of three new books.
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Grant
Speaks
by Ev Ehrlich
(Warner Books, 404 pages, $25.95)
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YO, CLAUDIUS
Ulysses S. Grant was a failure in everything but love and
war. Dying of throat cancer from a 20-a-day cigar habit,
the tarnished president and Civil War hero decided in 1885
to write a book so his family could inherit something besides
his crushing business debts. The Personal Memoirs of
U.S. Grant proved a runaway bestseller, the Harry
Potter of presidential autobiographies. Grant Speaks
by Ev Ehrlich pretends to be the long-lost, uncensored first
draft of the Memoirs and reads like an I, Claudius
for Civil War buffs. Like Robert Graves' clubfooted Roman
emperor, Ehrlich's doomed hero recounts his unlikely rise
to power, tweaking the facts for dramatic effect but mostly
within the bounds of historical possibility. Most startling
is the fictional Grant's portrayal of President Lincoln
as an arrested adolescent who dazzles the people with talk
of Providence and forefathers but laughs at them behind
closed doors. The Old Rail Splitter challenges his generals
to "rasslin'" matches in the West Wing while his half-demented
sexpot wife tries to corner them for rasslin' of a different
sort in the East Wing. Ehrlich accurately mimics the self-deprecating
humor and plain-spokenness of the original Memoirs,
which remain surprisingly fresh and accessible to the modern
reader. By transforming the merely historical into the wildly
hysterical, Ehrlich captures a higher truth about the tanner's
son from Ohio who understood the "terrible arithmetic" that
would be needed to preserve the Union but who was powerless
to rescue his own personal fortunes. Matt Buckingham
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Anil's
Ghost
by Michael
Ondaatje
(Knopf,
311 pages, $25)
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SWIMMING TO THE ISLAND
In his first novel since his Booker Prize-winning The
English Patient, Canadian writer and Sri Lankan emigré
Michael Ondaatje takes as his subject the decade-long civil
war of his birth country. The war claimed 70,000 lives but
never received the media attention that others in Northern
Ireland, Guatemala or Rwanda did. It wasn't for lack of
atrocities--crowds were bombed, bodies dumped from helicopters,
heads impaled on stakes as government and rebel armies strove
to outdo one another in sadistic vengeance. Ondaatje unflinchingly
portrays the war through the eyes of Anil Tissera, a forensic
scientist working with a human-rights agency who returns
to the country she left as a young woman. But the adult
Anil is now a visitor to her homeland, alienated from its
suffering.
Author Ondaatje is first and foremost a poet, with a poet's
talent for creating weighted metaphors that bob lightly
on a character's surface. Anil's metaphor is her child-athlete
status as a long-distance swimmer. Everyone she meets in
Sri Lanka remembers her in this way, as someone who stays
above the waves while others drown. Anil and her mysterious
partner Sarath must piece together the identity and manner
of death of a skeleton nicknamed "Sailor." Sarath, an emotional
paralytic whose allegiance is always in question, acts as
Anil's guide through the mysteries of the world she's forgotten.
The story's movements are jittery and abrupt and its short,
numberless chapters come like piecemeal visions. There are
certain mantras that repeat--truth is malleable, betrayal
is the general order in calamitous times, alienation is
protection--each of them dark, but no less true. Ultimately,
the novel is about what's lost, not what's gained. That
the book's ending is tragic yet still above despair is Ondaatje's
gift. Bill Smith
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Driving Mr. Albert: A
Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain
by Michael Paterniti
(Dial Press, 224 pages, $18)
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HEAD GAMES
God knows why, but Michael Paterniti's Driving Mr. Albert
has caught the attention of literati all over the country.
Part memoir, part travelogue and part essay, Driving
Mr. Albert details how Paterniti chauffeured the man
who stole Einstein's brain across the country, with the
brain itself nestled in the car trunk.
Spending a week with Einstein's brain is remarkable,
to say the least, and Paterniti's already milked it for
a Harper's essay and almost as much press as Eminem's
getting these days. Beyond the hype, though, is a slack
and superficial book. Paterniti is in love with clichés,
and he uses them whenever possible. Almost every slouching
person in the book is referred to as a human question mark,
and (surprise!) Las Vegas is described as a town full of
lonely people. When the clichés subside, the metaphors
kick in. Paterniti's metaphors are boats riding rivers that
originate from the glaciers of near-meaning, cascade down
the waterfalls of SAT vocabulary words and open to the oceans
of shallowness only after extensively meandering the watersheds
of melodrama. Granted, Paterniti fills some spots with excellent
humor (the chapter in which the brain-robber visits an aged
and slightly coherent William Burroughs is funny enough
to skim in the bookstore) and renders a few beautiful images
of the American landscape ("dopamine sunset"). But these
moments don't make up for the work's biggest downfall: It
has no point. Clichés, overextended metaphors and
bad grammar could all be excused if Paterniti presented
at least one meaty theme. He doesn't. His few insights are
so simple that only readers who base their personal philosophies
on SARK's mug and calendar designs, or learned everything
they needed to know in kindergarten, will find them meaningful.
Lisa Lambert
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