Boldtype | June 2008


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June 2008:: issue 56

Books This Month
1.	Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow
2.	Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong
3.	Frankenstein: A Cultural History by Susan T. Hitchcock
4.	Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story by Leonie Swann
5.	The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges
6.	Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters by August Ragone
	Interview: Ralph Bakshi Feature: We'll Eat You Up, We Love You So! Book News Credits/About Us

Creatures
Stories about monsters and animals have a timeless allure — perhaps because we all get bored with being merely human now and again. Amidst this month's beastly selection, you'll find a number of books that examine how such creatures come to be. There's a cultural history of the Frankenstein phenomenon, a monstrous encyclopedia by Jorge Luis Borges, and an eye-popping biography of the king of Japanese monster-makers. A good creature tale is always waiting to be reinvented, as Toby Barlow shows with his noir-as-pitch debut novel (in verse!) about werewolves in LA. For Leonie Swann, it's about getting inside an animal's mind, with her detective yarn about a flock of sheep who investigate their shepherd's murder. We close with two features: an interview with alternative-animation pioneer Ralph Bakshi and a meditation on the glorious strangeness of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.

- Toby Warner, Managing Editor

FICTION

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow


Published:	February 2008
Pages:	312
Publisher:	Harper
Links: Washington Post review LA Times review LA Weekly review Book website

“As brutal and as bloody as Sharp Teeth becomes, the book is grounded by a love story — even as it gets hollowed to a pulpy, low-slung core.”

Review
This about sums up the bleak image of the City of Angels that serves as the backdrop for Toby Barlow's hard-bit epic Sharp Teeth:

This is a violent city
and I don't mean rapes and bloodshed.
I mean the existence of every ounce of it.
This entire vast urbanity was bludgeoned from the earth,
torn and wrought,
piece by piece. A thousand bricks.

It's a stark, unforgiving portrait (never mind the verse — we'll get to that). But what else would you expect of a neo-noir tale about werewolves running loose in the streets of Los Angeles? Unsurprisingly, Barlow's book is ultra-violent. But as brutal and as bloody as it becomes, the book is grounded by a love story — even as it gets hollowed to a pulpy, low-slung core.

Anthony is an accidental dogcatcher with a heart of gold plate, and his unnamed beloved is a half woman/half bitch who's trying to extricate herself from the pack she once led. She must do whatever it takes to protect her initially clueless man from the world she's left behind, which has just been turned upside-down by a coup that ousted her former alpha male, Lark. The latter is the story's reclusive schemer, who works all the angles from a suburban subdivide where he's holed up in dog form, pretending to be someone's loyal best friend. From there, he handpicks a new pack, plots vengeance, and keeps tabs on some former running buddies who are undercover at a bridge tournament.

What, you didn't know lycanthropes played bridge? Apparently so. They also run crime gangs, torch meth labs, maul dog-smugglers, and, in the end, fight the shadowy power that impounds us all. Oh yeah, and their story is told entirely via verse.

Sharp Teeth is written like a long-form poem. But forget full moons and dames named June, because the blank verse on each page only superficially resembles poetry. "This ain't poetry," said former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins when he handed back the book to Barlow, too scared even to read it. And he should know.

Instead, Barlow's uneven lines are just another jagged edge in a dark, wicked story.
- Ray Thornton

FICTION

Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong


Published:	April 2008
Pages:	527
Publisher:	Penguin
Links: Guardian interview China Daily review NY Times review

“Wolf Totem portrays what happens when differing ideologies come to a head at geographical, cultural, and epochal borders.”

Review
Chen Zhen, the main character of Jiang Rong's semi-autobiographical novel, wasn't exactly raised by wolves — he was just schooled by them. As a 21-year-old Beijing student in the late '60s, Chen voluntarily moves to the vast plains of Inner Mongolia under the auspices of a re-education program. Once there, he is adopted by the stoic leader of a local community and learns to revere the Mongol customs that have ruled the grassland alongside the wolf since the time of Genghis Khan. Wolf Totem portrays what happens when differing ideologies come to a head at geographical, cultural, and epochal borders. Part bloody action novel, part war story, and part parable, this hefty work hovers between myth and memoir as it draws from the author's own 11 years on the Steppe.

Young Chen begins to believe that, while the agrarian-based Han are domesticated, the nomadic Mongols, like wolves, are free. Despite Chen's newfound respect for the Mongol way of life, however, there is tension created by his very presence. The Red Guards are out to destroy the "Four Olds" — traditional habits, customs, culture, and ideas — and as a relocated Han urbanite, Chen inevitably symbolizes the Cultural Revolution's efforts to eradicate his host's history and tradition. The great frozen tundra of the Mongolian desert creates a fantastical setting as Chen contends with wolf packs for survival. Rong's descriptions of these feral creatures are the most striking sections of each chapter — he pays tribute to the wolves' capacity for human levels of battlefield intelligence, vengeance, and even filial love.

Published in China in 2004 and awarded the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize in 2007, Wolf Totem is valuable to the American reader as a clue in the convoluted media representation of contemporary Chinese culture. The now-extinct Mongolian wolf acts as a metaphor for the traditional cultures on the fringes of China — places like Tibet and Xinjiang, whose own "wolf totems," or traditional cultures, are not yet extinct — but very close. A runaway bestseller in China (with a children's version also available), the book sparked thoughtful discussion about the importance of studying the nature of tradition.
- McKay McFadden

NONFICTION

Frankenstein: A Cultural History by Susan T. Hitchcock


Published:	2007
Pages:	392
Publisher:	W.W. Norton
Links: Wired review Author blog Author website

“Susan T. Hitchcock traces the path of an icon as he is manipulated, conflated, abused, honored, and redeemed throughout two centuries of reinvention.”

Review
Detailing the cultural history of Frankenstein's monster — a literary figure so entrenched in our common psyche — is a daunting proposition. With all the versions and variations that demand attention, there's a danger that any study could turn out a little too similar to the creature itself: a shambling, directionless, schizophrenic beast, misunderstood by all who encounter it. Fortunately for the reader, Susan T. Hitchcock's Frankenstein: A Cultural History is no such ill-conceived work. Hitchcock deftly moves between mediums, interpretations, and eras to craft a surprisingly complete account of our fascination with the unnamed monster.

The story begins with his creation at the hands of Mary Godwin (later known as Mrs. Percy Shelley) and from there traces the path of an icon as he is manipulated, conflated, abused, honored, and redeemed throughout two centuries of reinvention. Hitchcock devotes special attention and space to those interpretations that have forever colored (for better or worse) our contemporary imagining of the doomed being: the pitiable man-child, mute and towering, with heavy-lidded eyes and a scarred, ghoulish visage. Hitchcock examines the true origin of these seemingly indispensable attributes, revealing, for example, that the character's enormous stature and greenish pallor were Hamilton Deane's inventions when he played a more melodramatic — and eloquent — version of the monster on the London stage in 1927. The book itself is more than just pop history and trivia, however; Hitchcock's expertise and painstaking research provide more than enough of the scholarly depth that serious readers will be looking for.

The amount of detail in Hitchcock's book is exhaustive without ever slipping into tedium. The reader encounters a tremendous array of interpretations of the character — as a misfit, loner, lunatic, orphan, and murderer — but the author's attention to specific peccadilloes never bogs down the narrative thread that chronicles the monster's centuries-long journey into our collective awareness. What ultimately emerges is the biography of a creature existing both as a fictional giant and a broader metaphor — a perpetually revivified and revitalized stand-in for ourselves, scars and all.
- Rob Hebert

FICTION

Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story by Leonie Swann


Published:	2007
Pages:	341
Publisher:	Flying Dolphin
Links: Guardian review Author interview

“While talking-animal stories tend to either lapse into allegory, or stoop to the level of childish whimsy, Swann's sophisticated take on sleuthing sheep in an Irish town avoids both.”

Review
In Three Bags Full — the debut mystery from German writer Leonie Swann — a flock of sheep play detective in order to investigate their shepherd's mysterious murder. While talking-animal stories tend to either lapse into allegory, or stoop to the level of childish whimsy, Swann's sophisticated take on sleuthing sheep in an Irish town avoids both. Most of the flock's techniques are not abnormal: they gather clues, like cast-off jewelry, and eavesdrop outside windows to connect the dots. Yet their heightened sense of smell, which detects fear and anxiety, is a unique asset that helps with their investigations of a suspicious herder and a bloody butcher.

The book would verge on preciousness if not for Swann's deft touches of humor. The sheep misinterpret sexual situations, as well as human concepts like the meaning of "soul," and a running joke involves a grazing stop whenever the flock is on the brink of a breakthrough. Miss Maple, billed as the cleverest sheep, fills the archetypal detective role, while Mopple the Whale offers a great memory, and Othello, a feisty black ram, provides the muscle. They're later joined by an ineffective detective named Holmes, who laments the unreasonable expectations that his surname routinely raises. The book also carries an undercurrent of religious resentment: there's a less-than-admirable priest who the sheep call God, a proselytizing Bible-thumper, and a donkey named Satan.

Adding to this modern fable, the bottom-right corner of every other page features a stick-figure lamb in various stages of jumping (flipping through the pages reveals a happy expression on the ascent, which then turns to a frightened look as gravity kicks in). Swann ultimately grounds the novel by exploring the nature of the classic detective story. The sheep poke fun at the traditional motifs of the genre and conclude that in this mystery, "perhaps not everything has to fit. Perhaps the answer is that many things simply don't fit." For her part, Swann certainly fits enough together to satisfy.
- John Fox

FICTION

The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges


Published:	2006
Pages:	236
Publisher:	Penguin
Links: Washington Post review Curledup.com review Author bio

“The Book of Imaginary Beings is as much about the transmission, translation, and re-creation of stories as it is about the creatures within them.”

Review
Jorge Luis Borges' The Book of Imaginary Beings is his encyclopedia of the "fauna of mankind's imagination." The volume describes 116 wondrous creatures culled from a worldwide library of literary traditions and cultural mythologies. Though this Penguin Classic Deluxe Edition is packaged as a whimsical celebration of the fantastic, it is, in fact, a much more complex beast. Like the creatures it chronicles, the book is a strange amalgam, combining themes that lurk within all of Borges' fictional worlds — worlds where myth is the linchpin of everything, and the lines between reality and fiction, memory and oblivion, and origin and translation are blurred.

Throughout brief, alphabetized entries, Borges shifts his tone and method. He tells, translates, quotes, and alludes; comments and criticizes; mocks and reveres. Often, Borges writes in the measured, elliptical style of his own parables, evoking works like those collected in Dreamtigers and Universal History of Iniquity, with his keen ear for both the humorous and the poignant. His scope of reference is characteristically vast, and the sheer variety and abundance of selected creatures is amazing: from the famous and familiar — the gryphon, dragon, unicorn, and sphinx — to the obscure and forgotten — the Hochigan, kraken, catoblepas, and squonk. He delivers this labyrinth of cross-referenced and open-ended descriptions in a way that forces the reader to reinterpret each character within the context of a global pantheon.

Borges explores each creature's mutations across time and text, mirroring his own protean nature as an author. This book, then, is as much about the transmission, translation, and re-creation of stories as it is about the creatures within them. And in the rush of contradictory variations, we come to understand that stories themselves are creatures, passing through stages of metamorphosis into extinction, obscurity, cliché, and sometimes the renovating forces of fresh imaginations.
- Michael Romano

ART

Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters: Defending the Earth with Ultraman, Godzilla, and Friends in the Golden Age of Japanese Science Fiction Film by August Ragone


Published:	2007
Pages:	208
Publisher:	Chronicle
Links: Book website Time review Tooth and Dagger review Author blog

“Eiji Tsuburaya is still widely honored in Japan, but his international recognition is often eclipsed by his iconic creatures.”

Review
August Ragone's Master of Monsters is the first book published outside of Japan to examine the life and work of special-effects master Eiji Tsuburaya. While today's big-budget CGI creations often relegate previous styles to the realm of kitsch, Ragone's account is an insightful look at the innovation and technology behind one of the industry's pioneering craftsmen. Tsuburaya is still widely honored in Japan, but his international recognition is often eclipsed by his iconic creatures: from Godzilla and Mothra to Booska and Ultraman, these unforgettable characters represent the height of kaiju culture and presage the modern taste for nightmarish chaos and catastrophe. And yet, as Ragone tells it, the story behind their construction is as engrossing as their infamous acts of destruction.

Born in 1901, Tsuburaya first began working as a cameraman in Japan's silent-film industry when he was only 18 years old. Through dedication and no shortage of ambition, he was hired (and occasionally fired) by many of the country's best production companies before becoming the head of Toho Studio's technical division in the '30s and eventually founding his own production studio decades later. His work with costumes, set design, and nature-defying effects is a testament to the ingenuity native to the pre-digital era.

Master of Monsters is part biography, part coffee-table art book. The large volume is organized into chronological chapters about Tsuburaya's life and career, balancing Ragone's absorbingly detailed account with stunning images of the man in action. Along with his nationalist propaganda films and sci-fi superheroes, the photographs variously capture Tsuburaya in conversation with reptilian actors, measuring toy-size models of cityscapes, and directing his army of technical engineers. Although the subject matter may seem esoteric, Tsuburaya's story is as much about the evolution of Japanese cinema as it is about one of its most pivotal practitioners.
- Chelsea Bauch

INTERVIEW Ralph Bakshi		Ralph Bakshi is an alternative-animation pioneer. His controversial work — including the notoriously X-rated Fritz the Cat, a Harlem-based retelling of Brer Rabbit, and a pre-Peter Jackson adaptation of The Lord of the Rings — paved the way for incendiary illustrators from The Ren & Stimpy Show's John Kricfalusi to South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Following the publication of Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi, Boldtype's Chelsea Bauch spoke with the reclusive animator about his artistic motivation, what he really thinks of Walt Disney, and the creatures that haunt his imagination. Boldtype: Who or what were some of your influences as a budding social critic and filmmaker? Ralph Bakshi: I grew up in a different America, the America after WWII, so I saw all the guys come home, and I heard all their stories. Bill Mauldin, who did Willie and Joe during the war, showed me that cartoons could be adult. Long before the underground and Robert Crumb, Mauldin was making millions of American soldiers in the trenches happy, in part because his work was so real. And I grew up as rock 'n roll was starting to break and jazz was starting to break and modern art was starting to break. I was influenced by the great painters and writers — that whole great period in America: Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Jackson Pollock, Mad comics. BT: How do you think the cultural scene has changed since then? RB: Back then, one could progress at one's own speed. Nobody was making money, so you had this tremendous honesty in the work. Whether you wanted to make a lot of money or not wasn't the issue. Love really was a large part of what drove what you did. And we all were poor so there wasn't anything wrong with being poor. The big corporations and all the merchandising you see nowadays just weren't so powerful. I knew that when kids started playing basketball in $250 sneakers that America was finished — I mean, I knew that if you had to buy expensive sneakers to play basketball that things had shifted. BT: Do you see some of the same shifting values when it comes to art? Keep reading »

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FEATURE We'll Eat You Up, We Love You So!		When I went away to college, one of the few possessions that I brought with me was a recording of Maurice Sendak's 1963 picture book, Where the Wild Things Are. The story was read by singer, actress, and theatre performer Tammy Grimes, whose voice — which the NY Post has described as "half velvet, half gravel, and all magically rusty" — was utterly unmistakable, and, frankly, thrillingly scary. The first time I played it, my roommate immediately stiffened and told me how she had broken the record in half and hidden it under the sofa when she was five — apparently, the story still incited a visceral reaction some 15 years later. Because the book went on to win the Caldecott Medal in 1964 and eventually became a bestseller, it's easy to forget that Where the Wild Things Are was initially quite controversial. Children's book reviewers thought that Sendak's drawings of wild beasts with fangs and claws would scare young readers, while psychologists wondered if Max's acting out — hammering nails into walls, shouting orders and having wild rumpuses — would set a negative example. It is of note that the most harmless-looking "wild thing," with human rather than clawed feet and square rather than pointy teeth, is the one featured on the book's cover. Since 1963, the book has been recorded and re-recorded (with the Grimes version available now only on cassette), adapted into a children's opera as well as a ballet, and numerous attempts have been made to animate the story. Though it took him five years (due to extensive back and forth with Sendak), Czech animator Gene Deitch completed a seven-minute-long adaptation of the story in 1973 — Deitch called the source text the "Mt. Everest of children's books" — and Disney used the tale as the basis for an early CGI test in 1983, but nothing ever came of the project. Keep reading »

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BOOK NEWS A few notable bits of recent book news.
Top dollar for Britain's worst poet (Wall Street Journal)
An anonymous buyer spent $13,200 on original poetry by William McGonagall — a 19th-century scribe who is regarded as Britain's worst poet.
Dutch oven bakes books (Bloomberg)
A fire at the Netherlands' Delft University of Technology may have engulfed up to 40,000 books, including illustrated manuscripts from the 17th century.
A lady as laureate? (Guardian)
Carol Ann Duffy is rumored to become Britain's next Poet Laureate, an honor that would make her the first woman ever appointed to the 400-year-old position.
US book sales up (Publishers Weekly)
Despite fears to the contrary, US book sales are up for the fifth consecutive month.
T.S. Eliot rules Google (LA Times)
The first line of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land became one of Google's most popular searches after a related question appeared on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
Slush pile averted (Guardian)
HarperCollins is launching a website where aspiring writers can submit their work with the hope of landing a book deal.
Steinbeck reconsidered (Washington Post)
Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley examines John Steinbeck's enduring popularity among adults.
Internet novel not up to snuff (Gawker)
Penguin's conceptual, community-written book — based on contributions by 1,500 people — is better lauded as a novelty than a novel.
Nobel curse (BBC)
Doris Lessing, recipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, claims that receiving the award has been a "bloody disaster," due to the increased media attention around her life and work.
Best of Booker shortlist announced (Times)
The newly founded Best of Booker award will be given to the Man Booker Prize for Fiction's most popular recipient, to be voted on by readers. The six-author shortlist includes Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, and J.M. Coetzee.
Even better than Scrabulous (Slate)
Slate offers a roundup of great novels about procrastination. We'll get around to reading them some day.
Surrealism sells (Times)
Nine of André Breton's original manuscripts, including a complete copy of his "Surrealist Manifesto," brought $5 million at an auction by Sotheby's.


CREDITS Managing Editor Toby Warner Deputy Editor Chelsea Bauch Contributing Editors Jennifer Chen Chris Parris-Lamb Paul Laster Doug Levy Mark Mangan Editors-at-Large Larry Weissman Sean McDonald Contributors John Fox J.K. Glei Rob Hebert Ray Thornton McKay McFadden Michael Romano Production & Design Adda Birnir Morgan Croney Sascha Lewis Andrew Steinmetz Daphne Yang Cover Art Michael Wolf Pink Poodle in Hong Kong, 2004 LightJet print 15 3/4 x 19 3/4 in. / 40 x 50 cm Courtesy the artist From the book The Photographed Animal — Useful, Cute and Collected Published by Steidl and the Museum Folkwang, 2005 All Rights Reserved		ABOUT US Boldtype is a monthly, email-based review of books published by Flavorpill Productions. Our mission is to cover five to seven books each month that are worth reading. No money is accepted from any publishers, writers, reviewers, or marketing or PR companies. In addition to this monthly review of books, Flavorpill publishes a series of online magazines, covering ART, NEWS, MUSIC, and cultural events in six cities — NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, SAN FRANCISCO, CHICAGO, MIAMI, and LONDON. Coming soon: STYLE/DESIGN and FILM. Subscribe now. ADVERTISING PARTNERS Every month, Boldtype presents one exclusive advertising partner. Click for more information about advertising opportunities on Boldtype and across all Flavorpill publications. FEEDBACK We welcome any and all feedback — comments, criticism, and even effusive praise. To reach the staff at Boldtype, please email us at editor. SUBMISSIONS If you have a book that you would like us to consider for review, please send an email to books or mail a copy here: Boldtype c/o Flavorpill Productions 594 Broadway, Suite 1212 New York, NY 10012

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