Back in January, I vowed to not read any more books that were compared to Catcher in the Rye. Well, Catcher in the Rye is just about the only book that The Raw Shark Texts has not been compared to. I left my copy of the book at home tonight, but the cover and the inside first few pages is awash with praise, most of it by way of comparisons to (from memory alone): The Matrix, Memento, Borges, Auster, Melville, Jaws, Douglas Adams, the Da Vinci Code, Murakami, Lewis Carroll… the list, truly, is almost to the point of the absurd.
But while the comparisons between Bad Monkeys/Prep and Catcher are clumsy at best and a farce at worst, nearly all of the above comparisons to the Raw Shark Texts are, at least, plausible.
A better reviewer might be able to pinpoint where the genre emerged—the genre of “main character wakes up and has no idea who he/she is and appears to be suffering from nearly complete amnesia.” I cannot. I trace my exposure to said genre to the film Memento, the 2000 psychological thriller featuring an underrated Guy Pearce. Amnesia is not a requirement of this genre; the protagonist must only have a tenuous grasp on reality, a sense that what he or she knows of his or her life may or may not be the “truth” (hence the comparisons to The Matrix, and even to the recent Sci Fi Channel production, Tin Man).
Eric Sanderson wakes in an apartment that he soon finds is his own. He knows his name only from the driver’s license in his pocket. Leaning against the front door is an envelope addressed to him; he opens it and finds a letter directing him to call a Dr. Randle. Dr. Randle explains that Eric is experiencing a dissociative disorder. This is, according to Randle, the eleventh time Eric has completely lost his memory. It all began three years ago when he and his girlfriend, Clio Ames, were vacationing in the Greek Islands. Clio died in a mysterious accident and these episodes are how Eric has been dealing with his grief.
Simple enough, perhaps, until the protagonist Eric begins to receive cryptic daily correspondence from “the First Eric Sanderson,” correspondence that hints to the current Eric’s lack of safety and to a much deeper plot involving “conceptual fish”—creatures that inhabit a surreal alternate existence—the largest and most menacing of which, the Ludovician, has repeatedly devoured Eric’s memories.
I’m still processing my reaction to this book. I read it voraciously in a matter of two days, despite its length. That’s a good sign. As I read it, I thought “I’ve read this before and I’ve read it better,” but I honestly can’t say where or how. I do know that the tragic end of the book hit me like a stiletto to the gut. I read and reread the last two pages to try to find something hopeful or peaceful to cling to. I didn’t find it. And still, two days later, I still feel a bit despondent about it.
It was the snippets of flashback that really got to me. The current Eric Sanderson’s life didn’t affect me to the same degree that the shadows of his true life shook me. Likewise the real-time love story that emerges is far less moving and passionate than the slivers of the love story between the lost Eric and the doomed Clio.
Apparently The Raw Shark Texts was huge in England (whenever I say something like that I am reminded of Matt Dillon in the 1992 movie Singles, talking about his pathetic Seattle grunge band, Citizen Dick, “We’re huge in Belgium, man.”). But my jury is still out on this book. I can say without a doubt that I liked it but that it wasn’t quite worthy of the gushing blurby praise on its cover. It wasn’t as groundbreaking as the critics professed it was, but it broke a little tiny something inside of me. I miss the book, and that’s something.
Monday, April 14, 2008
March by Geraldine Brooks
Several years ago, I fell in love with a book called Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, a gorgeous historical novel set in a “Plague Village” in England in the mid-1600’s. When Brooks won the Pulitzer in 2006 for her book March, a retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women from the POV of the largely absent patriarch of the March family, I knew I would eventually have to give it a read.
In order to appreciate March, it’s not essential that you’re familiar with the story of Jo, Meg, Amy, and Beth, the little women of the original book. I have to admit that when I read Little Women in my teens, I was less enthralled than my mother had been—she’d lauded the book as being the most influential of her life, so much so that she changed her name briefly, I believe, to Beth, when she was a girl. I may be wrong about which little woman she emulated—young Mama-of-Lou was probably more Jo than the sensitive Beth, but that doesn’t ring a bell for me. (Lou, in seventh grade, changed her name to Mary for a year and still has report cards citing Mary’s success as proof.)
More essential is an understanding of the Civil War era of Louisa May Alcott’s young life, especially the philosophical underpinnings of New England during that time period. Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne make guest appearances and Mr. March’s character is deeply influenced by Alcott’s father, a radical, transcendentalist, abolitionist, vegetarian preacher from Concord, MA.
That being said, a reader who knows none of this will still welcome the expertly crafted, beautifully woven story of a man whose deeply held beliefs conflicted—sometimes violently— with the prevailing tide of his times.
March, for all of its history and philosophy, is a zippy read. I devoured it in less than two days. Brooks mimics the writers of Alcott’s era with rich descriptions of nature and emotion—the relationship between which echoes the relationships forged by New England transcendentalists. More modern, however, is the depth of pure passion related in the pages, passion not only in the romantic sense but also in the zeal for cause and conviction.
Mid-book, the novel takes a radical turn and shifts POV to another character. I had been so won over by Mr. March’s narration that I was at first angry and discomfited by being removed from a POV I had come to trust. But as I read on, the new perspective won me over, and I began to understand the reason behind the shift. I was afraid that the book had taken a turn for the worse, but instead ended up citing the twist as among the book’s many strengths.
I no longer remember the book’s competition for the 2006 Pulitzer, but I feel quite confident that it would have taken an extraordinary book to be more deserving than March.
In order to appreciate March, it’s not essential that you’re familiar with the story of Jo, Meg, Amy, and Beth, the little women of the original book. I have to admit that when I read Little Women in my teens, I was less enthralled than my mother had been—she’d lauded the book as being the most influential of her life, so much so that she changed her name briefly, I believe, to Beth, when she was a girl. I may be wrong about which little woman she emulated—young Mama-of-Lou was probably more Jo than the sensitive Beth, but that doesn’t ring a bell for me. (Lou, in seventh grade, changed her name to Mary for a year and still has report cards citing Mary’s success as proof.)
More essential is an understanding of the Civil War era of Louisa May Alcott’s young life, especially the philosophical underpinnings of New England during that time period. Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne make guest appearances and Mr. March’s character is deeply influenced by Alcott’s father, a radical, transcendentalist, abolitionist, vegetarian preacher from Concord, MA.
That being said, a reader who knows none of this will still welcome the expertly crafted, beautifully woven story of a man whose deeply held beliefs conflicted—sometimes violently— with the prevailing tide of his times.
March, for all of its history and philosophy, is a zippy read. I devoured it in less than two days. Brooks mimics the writers of Alcott’s era with rich descriptions of nature and emotion—the relationship between which echoes the relationships forged by New England transcendentalists. More modern, however, is the depth of pure passion related in the pages, passion not only in the romantic sense but also in the zeal for cause and conviction.
Mid-book, the novel takes a radical turn and shifts POV to another character. I had been so won over by Mr. March’s narration that I was at first angry and discomfited by being removed from a POV I had come to trust. But as I read on, the new perspective won me over, and I began to understand the reason behind the shift. I was afraid that the book had taken a turn for the worse, but instead ended up citing the twist as among the book’s many strengths.
I no longer remember the book’s competition for the 2006 Pulitzer, but I feel quite confident that it would have taken an extraordinary book to be more deserving than March.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Bonk by Mary Roach
I’ve read Mary Roach’s three books in three days. Not three consecutive days, although for Christmas 2006, I received both Stiff and Spook off my Amazon wishlist as presents from a very understanding (or very confused) family member and devoured them on December 25 and 26 respectively. That should tell you a little bit about me and my holidays.
On impulse, just before I went on Spring Break this year, I Googled Roach and found out that her latest book, Bonk, had just been published just days before. Before I even got to the subtitle, I knew I’d have to pick it up in hardcover. When I read the subtitle: “The Curious Intersection Between Sex and Science,” I knew I had scored. No pun intended, although Roach would certainly appreciate the pun.
Stiff remains my favorite non-fiction book period. Although I read Bonk in a matter of less than a day, chuckled my way through it, and admired its art, surprisingly the subject matter of Stiff, the history of experiments on cadavers, is actually a bit more interesting than sex. Not sex itself. But sex studies. And that points to something that Roach attempted to highlight in her book, specifically that sex study has suffered from such restriction that the answer to so many questions about sex is “we don’t know.”
Mary Roach is the David Sedaris of science writing. In order to give her work its due, I’d have to replicate whole chapters here. While the stand-alone chapters in all of her books highlight the works of particular researchers, Roach always becomes a character, more than a guide, in the research. She not only divulges the substance of the research, but she also discusses the process through which she researches the research.
In Bonk, because of the general reluctance of so many researchers to allow a reporter to witness their work (in her Acknowledgements, Roach makes it clear that many of her subjects jeopardized their funding by allowing her to observe), Roach takes this a step further and actually becomes a research participant in two of the studies.
In Chapter Twelve, “Mind Over Vagina,” Roach discusses her own experience at the Female Sexual Psychophysiology Lab at UT Austin. During this experience, she is asked to insert a vaginal photoplethysmorgraph probe into her… er… vagina and watch a series of videos. She writes, “I take the probe out of the bag. An LED and some wiring are encased in a round-tipped, bullet-shaped piece of clear acrylic. ‘Cinderella’s tampon,’ I write in my notebook… I follow the instructions I was given, and now the cable is curling down in front of my chair. I feel like a bike lock.”
Roach also memorably convinces her husband, Ed, to participate in a 4-D imaging experiment in an MRI machine in London. She says that her guide to good taste reporting of the experience was to make the chapter describing the 4-D copulation palatable for her stepchildren. It is, understandably, one of the briefest chapters in the book.
On April 9, NPR featured an interview on Roach, where she discussed the nature of the experiments of the (sadly recently deceased) Egyptian doctor Ahmed Shafik; although his studies of sex ranged far and wide, he’ll forever be noted as the man who studied rats who wore teeny-weeny polyester drawstring pants. Apparently, it’s a scientific fact that rats that sport Sopranos-wear get less action than those who wear natural fibers. Stunning discovery, and so sad for the entire state of Florida. What the NPR interview left out, though, was that Shafik was a big fan on polyester leisure suits, although he swore to Roach that he never wore faux-fiber undies.
A.J.Jacobs, author of Year of Living Biblically, says in a blurb for Bonk, “I would read Mary Roach on the history of Quonset huts. But Mary Roach on sex? That is a godsend.” Pardon my girl crush, but Mary Roach on anything is a godsend. I’ve devoured her books, gotten downright testy with people who’ve tried to interrupt my reads.
Despite the severely gory and outrageous content of Stiff I have recommended it with no reservations to my students. That being said, it led to no small discomfort when I happened to blab that Roach had written a new book. My kids asked me what I planned to read during Spring Break, and without thinking I mention Bonk. I insisted quite firmly that the book was not appropriate for teens, but I know for a fact that at least one nascent Roach fan went out and bought it. I read the book with her in mind and realized that while it was, honestly, inappropriate for a 17-year-old girl, but… you know, if I’d known just a little bit more about sex before I started having sex, whole chunks of my life might have been different. Probably different good, not different bad.
Perhaps I am justifying my own bad judgment here, but if Roach’s book makes any final proclamation about the nature of human sexuality it is that she reveals through good humor and scientific study that no one really “has it down” when it comes to sex. We’re all different. And for anyone who’s ever felt slightly insecure when it comes to sex, that’s a reassuring scientific fact, and certainly a fact worth knowing when you’re just starting out.
On impulse, just before I went on Spring Break this year, I Googled Roach and found out that her latest book, Bonk, had just been published just days before. Before I even got to the subtitle, I knew I’d have to pick it up in hardcover. When I read the subtitle: “The Curious Intersection Between Sex and Science,” I knew I had scored. No pun intended, although Roach would certainly appreciate the pun.
Stiff remains my favorite non-fiction book period. Although I read Bonk in a matter of less than a day, chuckled my way through it, and admired its art, surprisingly the subject matter of Stiff, the history of experiments on cadavers, is actually a bit more interesting than sex. Not sex itself. But sex studies. And that points to something that Roach attempted to highlight in her book, specifically that sex study has suffered from such restriction that the answer to so many questions about sex is “we don’t know.”
Mary Roach is the David Sedaris of science writing. In order to give her work its due, I’d have to replicate whole chapters here. While the stand-alone chapters in all of her books highlight the works of particular researchers, Roach always becomes a character, more than a guide, in the research. She not only divulges the substance of the research, but she also discusses the process through which she researches the research.
In Bonk, because of the general reluctance of so many researchers to allow a reporter to witness their work (in her Acknowledgements, Roach makes it clear that many of her subjects jeopardized their funding by allowing her to observe), Roach takes this a step further and actually becomes a research participant in two of the studies.
In Chapter Twelve, “Mind Over Vagina,” Roach discusses her own experience at the Female Sexual Psychophysiology Lab at UT Austin. During this experience, she is asked to insert a vaginal photoplethysmorgraph probe into her… er… vagina and watch a series of videos. She writes, “I take the probe out of the bag. An LED and some wiring are encased in a round-tipped, bullet-shaped piece of clear acrylic. ‘Cinderella’s tampon,’ I write in my notebook… I follow the instructions I was given, and now the cable is curling down in front of my chair. I feel like a bike lock.”
Roach also memorably convinces her husband, Ed, to participate in a 4-D imaging experiment in an MRI machine in London. She says that her guide to good taste reporting of the experience was to make the chapter describing the 4-D copulation palatable for her stepchildren. It is, understandably, one of the briefest chapters in the book.
On April 9, NPR featured an interview on Roach, where she discussed the nature of the experiments of the (sadly recently deceased) Egyptian doctor Ahmed Shafik; although his studies of sex ranged far and wide, he’ll forever be noted as the man who studied rats who wore teeny-weeny polyester drawstring pants. Apparently, it’s a scientific fact that rats that sport Sopranos-wear get less action than those who wear natural fibers. Stunning discovery, and so sad for the entire state of Florida. What the NPR interview left out, though, was that Shafik was a big fan on polyester leisure suits, although he swore to Roach that he never wore faux-fiber undies.
A.J.Jacobs, author of Year of Living Biblically, says in a blurb for Bonk, “I would read Mary Roach on the history of Quonset huts. But Mary Roach on sex? That is a godsend.” Pardon my girl crush, but Mary Roach on anything is a godsend. I’ve devoured her books, gotten downright testy with people who’ve tried to interrupt my reads.
Despite the severely gory and outrageous content of Stiff I have recommended it with no reservations to my students. That being said, it led to no small discomfort when I happened to blab that Roach had written a new book. My kids asked me what I planned to read during Spring Break, and without thinking I mention Bonk. I insisted quite firmly that the book was not appropriate for teens, but I know for a fact that at least one nascent Roach fan went out and bought it. I read the book with her in mind and realized that while it was, honestly, inappropriate for a 17-year-old girl, but… you know, if I’d known just a little bit more about sex before I started having sex, whole chunks of my life might have been different. Probably different good, not different bad.
Perhaps I am justifying my own bad judgment here, but if Roach’s book makes any final proclamation about the nature of human sexuality it is that she reveals through good humor and scientific study that no one really “has it down” when it comes to sex. We’re all different. And for anyone who’s ever felt slightly insecure when it comes to sex, that’s a reassuring scientific fact, and certainly a fact worth knowing when you’re just starting out.
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
A non-fiction book isn’t a novel. Non-fiction is real life, and real life is sloppy, complicated, and sometimes, as in the case of Three Cups of Tea, more far-fetched than fiction. It’s possible that if Greg Mortenson had pitched Three Cups of Tea as a novel to a New York agent his query would have been rejected for being too grandiose.
The thing is, “grandiose” is a word that just doesn’t apply to Mortenson, who spoke on April 1, 2008 to a group of Louisville high school students at the Mohammad Ali Center. He delivered his speech by the light of only the slides he projected on the giant screen; he was soft spoken, but reluctant to use the microphone. And despite the fact that the speech lasted less than an hour, by the end of his time with the students, they were fired up, believers, converts to his mission.
His mission is dictated by a proverb he learned while growing up as a child of missionaries in Africa: “If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. If you educate a girl, you educate a community.”
Since 1993, Mortenson has worked to build more than fifty schools, mostly for girls, in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He’s raised several million dollars for the efforts, survived crushing personal defeats and failures, conquered two fatwas issued against him, become a sort of folk hero in the regions which he’s helped, provided education for tens of thousands of children who would otherwise go un- or inadequately-educated, started a family of his own, written a book that’s landed on the New York Times best-seller list, and become president of the Central Asia Institute.
I lump his accomplishments of the past fifteen years together to amplify their already massive significance; the cover of the book touts a blurb by Tom Brokaw that reads, “Thrilling… proof that one ordinary person… really can change the world.” But there are times when you’re reading the book when you feel as though you’re watching a B adventure movie; when you, as the audience, have already figured out that the shifty Changazi cannot be trusted to warehouse Mortenson’s building supplies, that the men on horseback have no humanitarian issues in mind, that the little old lady in Atlanta is no benefactress. So often, early on when Mortenson seems to fail more often than he succeeds, you find yourself slamming your fist into your desk as you read, cursing the naiveté of this teddy bear of a trusting man who seems determined to overreach, to dream too big.
The lesson of the book, and the reason people are already speculating about Nobel Prize nominations for this man, is of course that Mortenson didn’t overreach. He may have been foolhardy and overly trusting at times—and one gets the sense that he probably still is—but in the end his original ambitions paled that which he has been able to accomplish.
It’s probably a good thing that Mortenson sought out a co-author, not the least of which because the book wouldn’t have been written. This book that nearly lionizes him features interviews with those in his close company who say that he drives them crazy; when he’s not abroad making things happen, he’s a veritable hermit. But after having seen Mortenson speak, it’s easy to believe that if he’d written the book himself, we’d have an overly humble account of his success.
At the speech, he recounted the story of the beginning of his journey; an avid climber, Mortenson swore that he would summit K2 in 1993 to leave a tribute to his younger sister who’d died of epilepsy. According to Mortenson, he’d failed and it was his failure and his subsequent depression that spurred him to promise the small village that helped rescue and nurse him that he would build a school for them. All fine and true, but students who failed to read the book after seeing the speech would have missed out on the fact that Mortenson failed to summit because he chose instead to save the life of a member of his climbing party who’d been reckless and become ill.
That being said, the coauthor, David Oliver Relin, doesn’t quite do the story justice. At times the story is slow and cluttered; the writing is well organized but artless. It’s such a laborious read at the beginning that by the time the first school is built, you feel quite sure that this is the denouement; a full character arc has crested and settled even though there’s still a full half of the book to scale.
That’s Mortenson’s heroism; any mortal would have settled for the thudding achievement of having built not only a school, but a bridge to the school, in this remote, forsaken region of Pakistan under the shadow of K2. Instead Mortenson parlays this success into greater opportunity to spread education throughout the troubled region.
Even in America, education is the answer—or at least one of the answers—to what ails us. In the Middle East, education may be the route to peace and to our own national security. A boy who is educated is much less likely to be swayed to join a terrorist group; a girl who is educated is less likely to become a mother who would sanction her son’s involvement in terror. Women who are educated suffer less infant mortality and are likely to bear fewer children, reducing poverty.
And who better to provide that education? Mortenson was in Pakistan when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. He left weeks later, but returned just weeks after that to places that had been devastated by American retaliation. As America itself had become the source of so much suffering of so many innocent people, here was an American bringing books and buildings and teachers to ameliorate the foundation of hatred against the West—ignorance.
As the old American proverb goes, “Behind every great man is a great woman,” and Mortenson is no exception. Reading Three Cups of Tea, it’s hard at times to not feel as though the emotional hero of the book is Mortenson’s wife Tara, whom he met and married after just six days. Tara is the Mother Teresa of wives (I can just hear a literary agent saying to Mortenson: “You know, Greg, the novel would be much more believable if you left out the part about visiting Mother Teresa’s body as she lay in state. That’s overkill.” Seriously, the guy, on a whim, gets to visit the dead saint’s body!).
The whole book, at times, feels like overkill, sloppy, complicated, larger-than-life overkill. And that’s the beauty of non-fiction, it sometimes feels like the elaborate lead-up to a monumental tall tale, “Let me tell you the one about the guy who grew up in Africa with a sister with epilepsy who died and then he tried to climb K2 and was rescued by a village… and went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize.”
The thing is, “grandiose” is a word that just doesn’t apply to Mortenson, who spoke on April 1, 2008 to a group of Louisville high school students at the Mohammad Ali Center. He delivered his speech by the light of only the slides he projected on the giant screen; he was soft spoken, but reluctant to use the microphone. And despite the fact that the speech lasted less than an hour, by the end of his time with the students, they were fired up, believers, converts to his mission.
His mission is dictated by a proverb he learned while growing up as a child of missionaries in Africa: “If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. If you educate a girl, you educate a community.”
Since 1993, Mortenson has worked to build more than fifty schools, mostly for girls, in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He’s raised several million dollars for the efforts, survived crushing personal defeats and failures, conquered two fatwas issued against him, become a sort of folk hero in the regions which he’s helped, provided education for tens of thousands of children who would otherwise go un- or inadequately-educated, started a family of his own, written a book that’s landed on the New York Times best-seller list, and become president of the Central Asia Institute.
I lump his accomplishments of the past fifteen years together to amplify their already massive significance; the cover of the book touts a blurb by Tom Brokaw that reads, “Thrilling… proof that one ordinary person… really can change the world.” But there are times when you’re reading the book when you feel as though you’re watching a B adventure movie; when you, as the audience, have already figured out that the shifty Changazi cannot be trusted to warehouse Mortenson’s building supplies, that the men on horseback have no humanitarian issues in mind, that the little old lady in Atlanta is no benefactress. So often, early on when Mortenson seems to fail more often than he succeeds, you find yourself slamming your fist into your desk as you read, cursing the naiveté of this teddy bear of a trusting man who seems determined to overreach, to dream too big.
The lesson of the book, and the reason people are already speculating about Nobel Prize nominations for this man, is of course that Mortenson didn’t overreach. He may have been foolhardy and overly trusting at times—and one gets the sense that he probably still is—but in the end his original ambitions paled that which he has been able to accomplish.
It’s probably a good thing that Mortenson sought out a co-author, not the least of which because the book wouldn’t have been written. This book that nearly lionizes him features interviews with those in his close company who say that he drives them crazy; when he’s not abroad making things happen, he’s a veritable hermit. But after having seen Mortenson speak, it’s easy to believe that if he’d written the book himself, we’d have an overly humble account of his success.
At the speech, he recounted the story of the beginning of his journey; an avid climber, Mortenson swore that he would summit K2 in 1993 to leave a tribute to his younger sister who’d died of epilepsy. According to Mortenson, he’d failed and it was his failure and his subsequent depression that spurred him to promise the small village that helped rescue and nurse him that he would build a school for them. All fine and true, but students who failed to read the book after seeing the speech would have missed out on the fact that Mortenson failed to summit because he chose instead to save the life of a member of his climbing party who’d been reckless and become ill.
That being said, the coauthor, David Oliver Relin, doesn’t quite do the story justice. At times the story is slow and cluttered; the writing is well organized but artless. It’s such a laborious read at the beginning that by the time the first school is built, you feel quite sure that this is the denouement; a full character arc has crested and settled even though there’s still a full half of the book to scale.
That’s Mortenson’s heroism; any mortal would have settled for the thudding achievement of having built not only a school, but a bridge to the school, in this remote, forsaken region of Pakistan under the shadow of K2. Instead Mortenson parlays this success into greater opportunity to spread education throughout the troubled region.
Even in America, education is the answer—or at least one of the answers—to what ails us. In the Middle East, education may be the route to peace and to our own national security. A boy who is educated is much less likely to be swayed to join a terrorist group; a girl who is educated is less likely to become a mother who would sanction her son’s involvement in terror. Women who are educated suffer less infant mortality and are likely to bear fewer children, reducing poverty.
And who better to provide that education? Mortenson was in Pakistan when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. He left weeks later, but returned just weeks after that to places that had been devastated by American retaliation. As America itself had become the source of so much suffering of so many innocent people, here was an American bringing books and buildings and teachers to ameliorate the foundation of hatred against the West—ignorance.
As the old American proverb goes, “Behind every great man is a great woman,” and Mortenson is no exception. Reading Three Cups of Tea, it’s hard at times to not feel as though the emotional hero of the book is Mortenson’s wife Tara, whom he met and married after just six days. Tara is the Mother Teresa of wives (I can just hear a literary agent saying to Mortenson: “You know, Greg, the novel would be much more believable if you left out the part about visiting Mother Teresa’s body as she lay in state. That’s overkill.” Seriously, the guy, on a whim, gets to visit the dead saint’s body!).
The whole book, at times, feels like overkill, sloppy, complicated, larger-than-life overkill. And that’s the beauty of non-fiction, it sometimes feels like the elaborate lead-up to a monumental tall tale, “Let me tell you the one about the guy who grew up in Africa with a sister with epilepsy who died and then he tried to climb K2 and was rescued by a village… and went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize.”
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