Word: novels
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...tell you about ..." So begin the e-mail missives of Hiroshi Sakamoto, the septuagenarian survivor of the atomic bomb in Nagasaki, whose love of haiku poetry is later parlayed into an appreciation of all things modern. In Gail Jones' seductive new novel, his captive audience is young Australian Alice Black, who is researching her book, The Poetics of Modernity. And over the course of Dreams of Speaking (Vintage; 214 pages), a succession of machines are summoned, from the Xerox copier to the neon tube, to glow in the novel's velvety darkness. Here the things which bring people together also...
...Capturing both the intimacy and detachment of photography, Jones' breakthrough novel Sixty Lights (2004) might well have been subtitled I Am a Camera. A snapshot of 19th century Australian orphan Lucy Strange, who picks up the camera to make sense of her curious, off-kilter life in London and Bombay, the book limned the early history of photography while foreshadowing the advent of the moving image. Strange by name and nature, Sixty Lights risked alienating readers but ultimately dazzled with its precise image-making, from a gentleman's top hat set aflame in gaslight London, a dhoti-flapping Indian impaled...
...forever at 11:02 a.m. on Aug. 9, 1945, or the array of appalling statistics (73,884 dead), but a single written testimonial which makes time cease for her: "From the window I saw my mother in the garden, picking aubergines for our lunch. She burst into flames." Jones' novel works in much the same way as this. With carefully chosen images and words, the reader is transported across the tyranny of time, to face a century of terror...
...ARMY OF IDEAS With 16 of Enron's execs pleading guilty to various crimes since 2002, it's easy to forget that the company had thousands of employees who moved on without rap sheets and, in many cases, with their novel thinking. Lynda Clemmons, who at Enron pioneered weather derivatives (financial products used to hedge climate-related risk like energy consumption) did the same for XL Weather & Energy. Top Enron trader John Arnold now runs an energy hedge fund, Centaurus, and a group of those pioneering risk specialists started Mobius Risk Group. Enron's top talent might have...
...ever realizing your masterpiece. Too often, I fear, we start chiseling away—at our own lives, at our own world—without taking that essential first step. Yet without it, monkeys pounding away on typewriters have as great a chance of writing the next great American novel as we do of making the next Michelangelo. Certainly, much of our world is determined, molded by forces completely beyond our control. Our chances of affecting meaningful change may be extremely slim or nonexistent altogether. Nevertheless, we forfeit any such opportunities if we abandon our hope in their existence...