Book Reviews – Flung

Barbarian Days: Travel with Purpose

Sarah Stodola — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 16:54:34 +0000

I picked up William Finnegan’s surfing memoir, Barbarian Days, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2016, not with the intention of reading it front to back, but to consult the passages in which he visits the island of Nias, in Indonesia, a place I’d just come home from 40 years after Finnegan. My own trip to Nias wasn’t easy, given the relatively short distance I was traveling—two flights from Singapore, then a three hour drive to the only […]

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‘On Trails,’ But Not On All of Them

Sarah Stodola — Tue, 06 Feb 2018 13:32:57 +0000

It didn’t occur to me until I was reading the epilogue of Robert Moor’s well regarded new book, On Trails, that the title has a dual meaning. I’d understood it first as one in a long line of similar titles: On Liberty, On Beauty, On Human Nature, etc. But coming toward the final pages, it suddenly hit me that Moor could have meant something more along the lines of [being] on trails, like On the Road. I wonder if this […]

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Katie Kitamura’s ‘A Separation’: An Impending Divorce Undone

Sarah Stodola — Wed, 22 Feb 2017 01:51:31 +0000

Until it isn’t, Katie Kitamura’s new novel, A Separation, is among the most perfect representations I’ve read in fiction of the ennui that engulfs any thinking person as she sinks, and then sinks further, into a luxury beachfront vacation. The view of the sea from the room’s balcony, the overly affectionate couple at the next table over, the “very nice pool.” None of it giving the observer any indication of which country she happens to be in. The observer in […]

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A History of Hennessy, from Ireland To France To America

Sarah Stodola — Sun, 12 Feb 2017 16:57:06 +0000

At the tail end of a vacation in France a few years ago, my boyfriend and I had a couple days in our rental car to get back to Paris from Bordeaux, where we’d been enjoying the countryside and the ocean and the wine and the perfectly ripe avocados. We had no plan, just a general direction we needed to pursue, waiting along the way for something to pique our interest enough to stop. I remember whirring past windmills and […]

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A Journey Through the Foodiest Country on Earth, Family in Tow

Alice Stephens — Tue, 06 Sep 2016 18:01:00 +0000

There’s a joke told among expats in Japan that newcomers deem themselves experts in the enigmatic country after a week and write a book about it after a month. The library is filled with these books. Dave Barry has one. So does Will Ferguson. Add another title to the list, Michael Booth’s Super Sushi Ramen Express: One Family’s Journey Through the Belly of Japan. The author freely admits that before he embarked on his three-month odyssey, he had “no definable […]

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The New York City of ‘A Little Life’: A Perpetual and Uneventful Present Day

Sarah Stodola — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 21:15:26 +0000

For a book whose very title indicates the prominence of a single character, it took me by surprise to find that 100 or so pages into Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, I still couldn’t remember which main character was which. There are four of them, all men, all with the same formal, bygone manner of speech: Malcom, JB, Jude, and Willem. They all went to an unnamed elite New England college together, where they became the best of friends, then […]

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‘Tyler’s Last’ by David Winner: A Round-the-World Paean to Patricia Highsmith

Alice Stephens — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 14:37:51 +0000

On September 5th, 2001, Tyler, the eponymous character of David Winner’s metafictional novel Tyler’s Last, scrambles up a steep, garbage-strewn incline in a Spanish beach town called La Porqueria, which translates to filth in English. That’s funny, because for all its in-country charms, Spain abounds in overdeveloped coastal towns inundated by sun-starved European tourists. Tyler, an elderly American conman whose duties sometimes stray into murder, has retreated to La Porqueria after the Italian government shut down his money laundering business. […]

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Rachel Cusk’s ‘Outline’: Incidental Athens

Sarah Stodola — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 14:14:39 +0000

I visited Athens late last spring, just before Greece’s near-default on its debt and possible exit from the euro. At the time, the city exhibited no signs of near-collapse to the untrained eye (mine): The subways were running well, the Acropolis was open and packed, the restaurants and bars we frequented at night were buzzing. Underneath the surface proficiency, though, I began to notice a certain faltering in Athens’ fabric. For example: In 2015, there was no centralized online location to […]

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Life on the Road of Oversharing: Rick Moody’s ‘Hotels of North America’

Greg Wands — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 16:13:08 +0000

In the preface to Rick Moody’s new novel, one Greenway Davies, director of the fictitious North American Society of Hoteliers and Innkeepers, explains what we’re in for: a collection of reviews from a man named Reginald Edward Morse, one of the more esteemed contributors to RateYourLodging.com, a TripAdvisor-esque online hotel review site. Morse’s digressive, overly personal missives have attracted enough of a fan base, we’re told, to justify a print compilation of his reviews. The compilation is the novel at […]

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Home and Away: Patti Smith’s M Train

Sarah Stodola — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 00:12:37 +0000

A recurring dream about a cowpoke with an earthy wit would not seem the best topic with which to open a memoir. And as expected, it makes for an inauspicious beginning to Patti Smith’s latest book, M Train. It’s not so easy writing about nothing, the cowpoke says to her as she enters the dream, and I braced for the worst. Luckily, the book runs uphill from there. In almost no time, Smith has woken up and walked over to […]

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