An Almost Made Up Poem

This novel is absolutely awesome. The Tenants of Moonbloom is set in New York City right after WWII when Mott Street was not the realestate hot spot it is now, and when the city was still a dirty, grungy mess of poverty, literature, and alienation. Norman Moonbloom is an intellectual going through an existential crisis as he ventures away from school after 8 years of bouncing from major to major. He now finds himself having to work for his brother Irwin, who is the landlord of 4 less-than-desirable apartments. Moonbloom figures out a meaning for himself as he encounters all of his quirky, depressed, and sometimes outright odd tenants. Moonbloom battles with his conflicted about his tenants who always in need for him to fix and arrange their deteriorating apartments. Through rebuilding the sad habitats of the other, his tenants, Norman is able to find contentment and even happiness.

Yes, the book is a little heavy, but it has a lot of funny, poignant moments that showcase both the corruption and deprivation of city life, and its tenants constant struggle to survive as a community, rather than a get lost in the anonymity of the city. This book is a great example of a work that not only pulls on your heartstrings but also demonstrates the ability for community to be a positive element in the event of such alienation. In this novel, identity is debilitating whereas the ability to be towards… the ability to interact and face the world around you, can save you from the depths of depression and stagnation. The Tenants of Moonbloom provokes you to acknowledge the dirty, impoverished areas of your life. These are the areas that everyone sees reflected in others and usually never accessed and accepted as one’s own inequities.  This novel begs for the reader to apply some critical theory and provokes some serious soul searching.

I am extremely glad that I read What is the What?although it left me utterly emotionally destroyed. It is the kind of novel that drives a reader to actually do something… take action… move in some way to make a difference. I have yet to figure out what to do, but I definitely will. I have to do something; there is no way I can’t after reading this novel.

I jumped right into reading The Savage Detectivesby Roberto Bolano which is a novel that promotes life through literature. Yes, it is a very Mathew Arnoldesque, but it is done in Latin America through the eyes of a sexually experimental teen.  The movement mentioned in the book is a fictional and undefinable movement of lit which is the characters dubbed visceral realism. All the characters are involved in at least one aspect of this fake movement that produces some real pretension in a lot of cases. Although this book focuses on a sort of rebellion against society in order to live through literature, the characters cannot help but sounds like a bourgeois bored suburbanites looking for something to belong to. Who really claims a movement while still in it? I don’t know exactly what it was about the novel but I couldn’t stop reading eventhough there were obvious aspects of the novel I didn’t care for. The main character for one is an unlikable, self-indulgent poet who uses women for sex, money, and poetic status (whatever that means). Mind you this is just a description of the first part of the book because the second part is just a clusterfuck of characters much like a Russian novel, and I couldn’t deal. The sudden switch from a one-person narrative to a multi-character orgy of narration was too much for me. The book has some redeeming qualities: its subtle wit and enuendo, beautifully phrased descriptions, poetic rhetoric. It proved to be both romantic and pretentious. What do I do with that?

So… then I saw “Love in Time of Cholera” and laughed as people ran around with spanish accents speaking English in bad geratric makeup pontificating about love. I might have loved if I was on my period and needed a sap story that really didn’t develop the main characters to my liking but prodices lots of romantic much laced with a Shakira song…. yes, Shakira. Not to mention they decided to hire the everso annoying John Leguizamo. I really wanted to love this movie cause Javier Bardem was in it and he’s the cat’s meow, but really… what am I supposed to do with John Leguizamo?!

Let’s explore foreign, totalitarian countries by dissecting the most dysfunctional characters it produces! Zuckerman, Philip Roth’s recurring character, finds himself trying to recover a manuscript for his friend, but there is one slight problem: he must retrives the manuscripts from his friend’s ex-wife. Tomfoolery ensues when Zuckerman is introduced with his friend’s wife, Olga (a diry-mouthed, lecherous, vagina enthusiast) at a Prague Orgy, and she immediately cried, ”Kafka is dead!”  Indeed, Prague is a void for writers where the government listens and watches to your every type. Kafka is not only dead, but has taken every shred of hope and morality along with him.

Olga, who is fascinated by the word “Fuck,” a word that does not translate in Russian, a word that exudes all the power Olga lacks, wants desperately to be a part of the American world. Olga begs Zuckermen for sex, liberty, and marriage in America; thus, through Olga, Roth highlights the moral deterioration of a country whose only liberties are fucking and drinking. 

I won’t ruin the ending of the fucking Prague Orgy, but this little fucking novella can defintely be fucking read in a day.