Egging AIG

MoveOn.org, which Bill O'Reilly claims is worse than the KKK or something, has a letter writing campaign to stop the AIG bonuses.

She Loves Paris

My review from today's San Francisco Chronicle:

MURDER IN THE LATIN QUARTER

By Cara Black

Soho Crime, 317 pp., $24

She dives through windows, ripping her pencil skirt and shredding her fishnet stockings; she prowls subterranean Paris in her beaded Schiaparelli jacket and hospital scrubs; she's knocked unconscious and has her Vuitton handbag stolen; she races down cobblestone streets in her Louboutins. Yes, Cara Black fans, Aimée Leduc is back.

This is the ninth of Black's novels about the chic, indomitable Parisian detective, and it has all the elements Black's readers have come to cherish: an engaging protagonist with a likable sidekick (her diminutive partner, René Friant), cops who hinder more than they help, villains with murky motives, grisly crimes, and above all, the unique Parisian atmosphere. This time, the air Aimée breathes is that of the Rive Gauche, the heart of intellectual Paris.

The action of the novel takes place in September 1997, just after the death of Princess Diana, an event with which the Paris constabulary is obsessed – fortunately for Aimée, who uses their distraction to her own advantage. The setup is this: a beautiful young Haitian woman named Mireille shows up, claiming to be the half-sister Aimée didn't know she had. And then she disappears. René is convinced that Mireille is a fraud, out to claim half of Aimée's inheritance, but of course Aimée has to go in pursuit. And inevitably, she winds up discovering a corpse – that of a professor of comparative anatomy who is a famed authority on pigs. Figuring out the connection between the murdered and mutilated swine scholar and the elusive, alleged half-sister will take Aimée the rest of the book.

Black gives substance to her detective stories, as implausible as they may be, by underlying them with real-world references. In this book, the plot centers on a project to supply water to the poorest parts of the horribly impoverished nation of Haiti, a project that involves the World Bank and millions of dollars. But where she's most skillful is at evoking the sights, sounds and scents of the Paris that Black, who lives in San Francisco, clearly cherishes.

Black's dialogue is sometimes a little starchy, with needlessly interjected French words and phrases, oui and non and excusez-moi, as if to remind the reader what language the characters are speaking. And there are a few too many speeches that exist only to provide exposition, as when the murderer fills Aimée in on the back-story of the crime. But Black creates rich, plausible characters, giving them individuality and depth.

She is, for example, not afraid to halt the action so that Aimée can have a Proustian moment: “As she hurried in the dusk across rue Mouffetard, a familiar scent filled the air. Swollen, purple figs nestled in a bed of green leaves at the fruit stall. Fit to burst, like those in her grandmother's garden in the Auvergne. It took her back ... to the smell of her grandmother's tart aux figues, warm from the oven, her father's favorite, and how he always claimed the largest slice. The way his eyes crinkled in a grin.” Touches like that, which betray an intimate understanding of where her characters come from, are what lift Black's fiction above the routine of the genre she practices so well.

Brain Strain

I did my taxes today, which took the usual sweating and scrabbling. But what made it even harder is that I tried to load TurboTax on my ailing laptop, which has never worked right since I cursed it by switching to Vista. Fortunately, my dear old neglected desktop computer still has XP on it, and it slurped up the new software like a kitten lapping cream.

I have come to the conclusion, sadly, that my laptop has a brain abscess. When I first came down with my own abscess, I would read names like "Julian" as "Ian." I think laptop is doing something similar. Instead of "Install," it sees "Stall." Which it does. Often. I think my tax refund is going to be used to replace it.

A Passage From India

The following review appeared today in the San Francisco Chronicle.

THE PRAYER ROOM

By Shanthi Sekaran

MacAdam/Cage, 382 pp., $14

This question may sound a bit churlish, but sometimes it's a reviewer's duty to ask churlish questions: With writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee and Chitra Divakaruni among us, do we really need yet another novel about culture clash in the Indian diaspora? The simple answer is yes, when the novel is as engagingly written and sharply observed as Shanthi Sekaran's The Prayer Room. On the other hand, the genre – the novel of exile -- has begun to engender a certain feeling of déjà vu (or rather, déjà lu – the feeling that one has read this book before).

In Madras, young and somewhat rebellious Viji impulsively marries an Englishman, George Armitage. They settle in suburban Sacramento, where Viji gives birth to triplets, two boys and a girl. Before long, they are joined by George's widowed father, Stan, a lecherous old vulgarian. Viji adjusts to her new American life, but she also converts a small room in their house into a puja room, a refuge for meditation filled with statues of the Hindu deities and pictures of dead family members. As the children grow, the marriage of George and Viji stagnates until one day she announces that she is taking the children with her to India. She promises George that she'll have them back before school starts. What she won't promise is whether she'll come back with them.

Sekaran calls Sacramento her home town, but now divides her time between Berkeley and London. The Prayer Room, her first novel, is full of lovely and accomplished things, including some breathtaking observations of place. This is India as viewed (and heard and smelled) by George: “sweaty silk, water, the curiously thin coins, ... the empty smell of boiled rice, turmeric, coriander, cumin, coconut oil, cow dung, ... power cuts, irrigation ditches, billboards, hotels, mothballs, citronella, fire. All of it rushed into George each time he inhaled. And when he exhaled, none of it came back out.”

And here is England as encountered by Viji: “Every blade of grass looked like every other blade of grass, as if they'd all had a meeting and decided how to be. Blankets upon blankets of miniature flowers, atop the greenest green. Nowhere could she see the dusty roadsides or pointless rock piles of home. The English countryside was like English desserts: custard on pudding, cream on cake, sweet smothering sweet and holding at bay the salty bits of life.”

And as if in between both, a kind of tabula rasa for their new life together, the blankness of American suburbia. George's culture shock is almost as acute as Viji's. He had “stepped off the Greyhound bus expecting” to find the vibrant, jazzy America of movies and pop culture. “Instead, he'd found Sacramento.” As he later reflects, “his life would never, ever be anything like a Woody Allen film. No chance encounters on a busy sidewalk, impromptu cups of coffee, or wandering in dusky, cramped bookstores. ... Outside, the streets of Sacramento stretched wide and barren, the sidewalks pristine.”

First novelists often try too many things, as if afraid they'll never get another chance to do them. The Prayer Room is a little too loosely constructed, too much a collection of poignant and funny set pieces, without a strong and clear narrative thread to pull the reader through. Some of the narrative seems like mere novelizing: There are Family Secrets to be revealed, and some extramarital dalliance on the part of both George and Viji to be got through. And as an examination of lives led in exile, it has little new to tell us.

But delight is in the details, in the wry and often touching perceptions of Sekaran and her characters. A first novel is always a mixture of achievement and promise. They come in equal measure in The Prayer Room. Buoyed up by Sekaran's wit, the book inspires hope that there will be more and better to come from its talented writer.

No Mo' Nocardia?

I learned a new word today: nocardia. It may have caused my brain abscess -- which according to last week's MRI has pretty much gone except for some swelling. So Dr. B. has decided to take me off the daily infusion -- woohoo! no more PICC line! -- and cut back on some of the antibiotics. I'll no longer have to schlep to Stanford every day, or wake up at 6 a.m. to take clindamycin. Life is good.

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Mondo Cane

Good grief! I didn't realize how long it's been since I posted here. To tell the truth, I've been dumping a lot of stuff I'd usually blog about on my Facebook page instead. Curiously addictive, that Facebook. Fortunately, I'm still immune to the charms of Twitter.

Anyway, here's a review of mine that ran today in the Dallas Morning News:

DOGHEAD

By Morten Ramsland

Translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally

Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, 384 pp., $29.95

Happy families, as Tolstoy noted, are so much alike that they make for dull fiction. It's dysfunction we want. And in his first novel to be published in English, the Danish writer Morten Ramsland has served up a smörgåsbord of dysfunction.

As the novel's narrator, Asger Eriksson (aka The Liar, The Latchkey Kid, The Bastard Boy, The Danish Shrimp, and The Bandit), notes at one point in his saga of three generations of his family, “There was Anne Katrine, who was robbed of her mother's love. There was Leila, who lost both her parents. There was Niels Junior, with his ears and his corset. There was Knut, with his broken nose. There was Madam Mother's reproachful grief, Grandmother Elisabeth's illness, and Grandfather Hans Carlo's galloping tumor. There was Great-grandfather Thorsten's bankruptcy. There was Grandma Bjørk with her alcoholic husband, and there was Grandpa Askild with part of his index finger missing and those bloodhounds on an eastern German plain.”

Who would blame this Dane for being melancholy? The Eriksson family is dragged all all over the Scandinavian landscape by the roguish, bullying head of the clan, Grandpa Askild. And yet, this is a raucous, high-spirited novel, laced with dark humor and creepy stuff out of Scandinavian folklore. And while Mr. Ramsland has been likened by blurbists to John Irving, he never goes over the top or sinks into sentimentality the way Mr. Irving sometimes does. The novel's title brings to mind the movie My Life as a Dog, and it has some of the same boy's-eye-view, off-kilter observation of an eccentric world.

Above all, the novel is a tribute to the power of narrative, the preservation of memories, however distorted and embellished, that makes a family into a coherent unit. At the end of the novel, Asger reflects that “none of us realized that the stories were the glue holding our family together, because it was only after they vanished that everything began to disintegrate, and slowly we were scattered to the winds.”

To return to Tolstoy, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But it's the way they share the unhappiness that makes them family.

Another Groundhog Day: The End of Six Months of Winter?

I saw Dr. B. today, and he's pleased with my progress. Wants another month of IV treatment though, which will bring me up to six months of antibiotics. He also switched me off of Flagyl, a particularly potent and bitter pill that I had to take every six hours. (I have to set the alarm clock to wake me at six a.m., though there's something like a guilty pleasure involved in shutting off an alarm clock and rolling over to go back to sleep.) One of the side effects of Flagyl (or its generic, which has one of those methawackadoodle names) is a tingly-numb-burning sensation in the fingers and toes. It's mostly a nuisance, although Dr. B. says it could turn into permanent nerve damage, which is why I'm now taking clindamycin instead.

The next checkup is March 4, and I have to have a CT and an MRI before that. But there's light at the end of my tunnel vision.

Back to the Future

A TV news report from 1981:

The beginning of the end.

A Medical Item

On Daily Kos, of all places, I found this admirably lucid explanation of something I once experienced:

There's flu and then there's complications from flu. This one is a pneumonia complicated by pus formation. Think of a 2 liter soda bottle, empty, and then put a balloon in it and blow it up so that the balloon takes the shape of inside the bottle. The bottle is your chest wall and the balloon is your lung, filled with air. Put water in the balloon and you have pneumonia. But put an inch or two of water in the bottle, and then put the balloon in, and you get water outside the balloon/lung but inside the bottle/chest. It's a complication of pneumonia called a parapneumonic effusion and it's not good. It often has to be drained via a hole in the bottle/chest wall. But if instead of fluid you get pus, it's called empyema. That's even worse, and is difficult to treat, especially in young children (i.e. it's hospital stuff with maybe an invasive procedure for drainage. Do not try this at home.)

Bacterial pneumonia with empyema is a serious complication of influenza and commonly resulted in death during the 1918 influenza pandemic. We hypothesize that deaths caused by parapneumonic empyema are increasing in Utah once again despite advances in critical care and the availability of antimicrobial drugs and new vaccines. In this study, we analyzed the historical relationship between deaths caused by empyema and influenza pandemics by using 100 years of data from Utah. Deaths caused by empyema have indeed increased from 2000–2004 when compared with the historic low death rates of 1950–1975. Vaccine strategies and antimicrobial drug stockpiling to control empyema will be important as we prepare for the next influenza pandemic.

I include this because people often say, "but 1918 was primitive, and we have fancy medicine." Nuh-uh. Even modern medicine is seeing increasing bacterial resistance and virulence (think MRSA, another potential flu complication). If hospitals are full, medications are in short supply, and you have to deal with this at home, you are in big trouble. And if you want to add in the health reform/finance/insurance issues that interfere with excellent and timely care... well, in the meantime, get your flu shot.