#494 The Hammer Man- Toni Cade Bambara

#494 The Hammer Man- Toni Cade Bambara

It is a violent world. The narrator, a school girl, says something mean and unwise to Manny, a big oaf that carries a hammer in his bag and likely is mentally unstable.

“Manny was supposed to be crazy. That was his story. To say you were bad put some people off. But to say you were crazy, you were officially not to be messed with.”

Manny doesn’t care that she’s just a girl, so now, he’s holding vigil outside her house for days ready to kill her when she comes back out. In a predictable but still crazy escalation, the mothers get in a fight because Manny’s mom is almost as crazy as he is; the girls father smashes Manny’s brother’s head into a mail box, Manny’s uncle threatens her father—and somehow Manny falls off the roof, ending the affair.

I guess you could chalk all that up to “it is a violent world”, but later on the girl imagines a world—not far from this one—that is much more violent and much more senseless.

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 29

#205 Year of the Spaghetti- Haruki Murakami

#205 Year of the Spaghetti- Haruki Murakami

You could name this one 'Zen and the Art of Cooking Spaghetti'. “Thinking about spaghetti that boils eternally but is never done is a sad, sad thing.”

Or you could name it 'Apocalypse Pasta' or something like that. “Spring, summer, and, fall, I cooked away, as if cooking spaghetti were an act of revenge. Like a lonely, jilted girl throwing old love letters into the fireplace, I tossed one handful of spaghetti after another into the pot.”

This man has two things going on in his world: he’s going crazy, and he loves spaghetti, although I don’t think one thing necessarily led to the other. He sits in his room on the floor where the sun warms the floor, and thinks people are outside his door, people like William Holden and himself from a few years ago.

“Not one of these people, though, actually ventured into my apartment. They hovered just outside the door, without knocking, like figments of memory, and then slipped away.”

He can no longer handle the everyday responsibilities of life, so he cooks spaghetti, alone, in a pot big enough to hold a German shepherd.

Rating: 7-7-6-7 Total= 27

#169 The Myth of Bears- Rick Bass

#169 The Myth of Bears- Rick Bass

Trapper and Judith are married and live deep in the forest, isolated rom the world, relying only on each other. But Trapper is bordering on insanity, or a prolonged version of cabin fever.

“In Trapper’s nighttime fits, he imagines that he is a wolf, and the others in his pack have suddenly turned against him and set upon him with their teeth; he roused in roused in bed to snarl and snap at everything in sight.”

She decides to leave him, and run away. But where? She is a forest woman and doesn’t want to go to town, she is like the Northern Lights. For now she is just glad to be free:

“The sadness of leaving him being transformed into the joy of freedom, and the joy of flight, too.”

He is a trapper, so naturally he goes hunting her. She feels comforted by his pursuits but doesn’t relent. “It’s not that he is a bad man, or that I am a bad woman, she thought. It’s juts that he is a predator and I am prey.”

He thinks about trapping her with gold chains and sugar. He has no introspection. Everything to him is about the hunt, finding ways to catch what he wants. “The mistake last time was that he didn’t hold her tight enough.”

As he pursues Judith, he is being pursued by the wolves, symbolic of his growing insanity.

“The wolves that have been following at a distance draw closer, knowing they are safe when a fit wells up from within him; at such times they know that he is not a man but one of them.”

She is incapable of fully leaving, his pursuit is what gives her identity: “It’s terrible without the thought of his out there chasing her, hunting her. It’s horrible. There’s too much space.”

This is a very strong story, full, earthy, animalistic. It makes me want to go watch Jeremiah Johnson.

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total=32

#114 Modern Love- T.C. Boyle

#114 Modern Love- T.C. Boyle

A man and a woman go on a first date, Thai food, movie, late drinks. It all seems to go well until she tells him how freaked out she was.

“I can’t tell how much of a strain it was for me the other night…I got drunk from fear…blind panic. I couldn’t help thinking I’d wind up with hepatitis or dysentery or dengue fever or something.”

The woman was a germaphobe of the highest order (and a little agoraphobic as well). But, he liked her so he gave it a shot. For a month they went out to clean places, museums, vegetarian restaurants, etc. And all this without nary a kiss, physical contact was the germs playground.

“There was the look of the mad saint in her eye, the obsessive, the mortifier of the flesh, but I didn’t care. She was lovely, wilting, clear-eyed, and pure, as cool and matchless as if she’d stepped out of a pre-Raphaelite painting, and I was in love.”

Finally, after she professing her love and deems him worthy, he gets an invite to het sterile abode for a macro-biotic dinner and a viewing from the plastic love seat of het favorite movie, Boy in the Bubble. “What a perfect life, Don’t you envy him?”

How far will she take her obsession? Pretty far it turns out, and even as far as he’s willing to follow for love, it still might not be enough, after all he works for a show company…and you know how dirty feet are!

Rating: 9-8-9-8 Total= 33

#96 A Lecture Tour- Knut Hamsun

#96 A Lecture Tour- Knut Hamsun

A professor in of Literature, in need of money, visits nearby Dram, meaning to give a lecture. He has not announced the lecture, planned the lecture, advertised the lecture, or even rented a hall until he arrives.

As we follow the running of his internal thoughts, we see that the man has a deluded sense of his own grandness and no handle on reality. He is constantly worried about the money he is spending but balancing it out with the impression he is making on the people around him. He wishes to look as important as he thinks he is.

Unfortunately for him, this is not the sort of town that draws big crowds for lectures, as he is told several times:

“We had a Swedish student come last year with a talk about everlasting peace. He lost money on it.”

And even worse luck, there is a big event happening while he is there that will certainly attract a crowd.

“Anti-spiritualist is doing a show at the Workers’ Hall. He has apes and wild beasts with him.”

As expected, he draws nearly no crowd and is generously offered a role in the anti-spiritualist show for the next evening. He is offended:

“Never would I be a party to such vulgarity! A Man has his honor to consider.”

However, need outweighs pride and he, in some convoluted rationality, convinces himself to join the show.

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 29

#66 Marching Songs- Keith Ridgway

#66 Marching Songs- Keith Ridgway

This man is sick, or at least thinks he is. He thinks he is dying but nobody will believe him. He blames the doctors, the indifference of people, society, the army and of course former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

“Mr. Blair is not the owner of his own evil. He is the host of it…His skin is a manila envelope. It contains an argument, not a heart.”

The man is sick. His mental illness is obvious, he fixates on the things around him and injects his paranoia into everyday things. He once shook the hand of Tony Blair and is convinced he was injected during that handshake with a tiny needle filled with nano-technology. He might be a veteran himself, although I’m not sure. During his brief interaction with Blair, they talked about formula one racing, so now he watches every racing crash video he can find on the internet.

This is a very good representation of a fragile human mind: “Beneath the fault there is solid ground. Beneath the ice. Under all the cracks. Under all the cracks there is something that is not broken.”

Ridgway does a great job of creating a loose frenetic mood in the narration. He has a fun, free way with phrasing that made me go back to re-read several sections to remember what I found I clever.

Notable Passages: “When nothing is happening we want something to happen, and when something is happening we want it to stop.”

“Policemen are standard procedures. There is nothing to them that cannot be confused.”

Rating: 8-8-10-9 Total= 35