Two other book pieces caught my eye recently.
First was another Guardian piece (I do love their book coverage), this time an extract from the new Haruki Murakami novel
Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing direction. You change direction, but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverised bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine..
The second is an LA Weekly feature piece on Bruce Wagner. I just recently finished reading his Cellular Trilogy, which was a biting satire (although he says it’s not–because the reality is this bad and worse) of Hollywood. As the article puts it “In fact, he is our premier ‘Hollywood novelist,’ part of a celebrated lineage that runs from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Nathanael West, Budd Schulberg, Michael Tolkin and other witty, jaded observers of L.A.’s sun-dappled, soul-mottled, earthquake-rattled scene.” That might be going a bit far, but the books are certainly fun to read–kind of like a literary version of the schafenfreude that draws people to the gossip rags.
Asked whether he thought Wagner’s novels had any merit as satires of Hollywood and the movie industry in general, Indiana replied that they did to a degree, but that the satire was marred by a surreptitious pandering. “He’s cruel to people it’s safe to be cruel to, but he’s happy to let us know he’s friends with Carrie Fisher and Diane Keaton. If he had real guts as a writer he’d satirize those people, because I don’t think anyone survives in that business without a few hairs on them. It’s so easy to attack David Geffen and other people who are thinly disguised. Make some real enemies if you want to be a satirist. I have!”
“The idea that I’m pandering — it’s an interesting notion,” Wagner said when I brought this up with him. “In other words, how have I benefited? In my mind — and I may be delusional — I don’t write about Hollywood. I write coincidentally about Hollywood because it’s the place I physically inhabit. But I’m not a player. Producers don’t say, ‘Get me Bruce Wagner!’”
