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Friday, April 18, 2003
posted by gbarto at 10:49 AM:
Pleasures of the moment: For Christmas, I received two audio books which I've just been getting to, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul. I've subsequently found - on a Barnes and Noble bargain rack, Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Both are acquired tastes, perhaps, but the late Adams and the ever-living (much to multiple Ayatollah's chagrin) Rushdie are two of the brighter spots in contemporary British fiction. The Rushdie book is every bit as absurd as most of his other works, but comes together much better than the Satanic Verses, though I'm not sure it quite compares to Midnight's Children. But in this performance of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the actor (Cazenove?) does a superb job in spinning the tale of a photojournalist and the female rock star with whom he - and everyone else - is obsessed. Another novel where East meets West, the commentary is hip, the story delightfully awful. Click the link to buy or look for it at Barnes and Noble in the discount racks.While the plug continues, I'll put in a special pitch for Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. While Douglas Adams is best known for the wild and crazy Hitchiker series, it is these two books that see his postmodern outlook become most ridiculously serious and seriously ridiculous, here that he turns from what Douglas Adams can dream up to what we, the human race, already have. Dirk Gently is a masterpiece, revealing a dimension to the poetry of Coleridge that even doctoral candidates have probably never heard in seminar - a loss to their profession. The Long Dark Teatime gives a riff on quantum physics that is quarky, even by that profession's standards. With electric monks, horses in bathrooms and improbable Norse gods stalking this earth, the two books offer a carnival of bizarre ideas that come together for fun and fascinating stories.
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