"We Have No Bananas": Mike Peed is a member of the magazine's editorial staff. The article at first reminded me of the bat article from three weeks ago. Both deal with scientists studying and fighting a microscopic killer. In this case, we get a fungus that kills bananas in Australia. Both pieces feature intense and kind of stressed-out western scientists. Peed is a funny writer, or at least recognizes the humor in a stressed-out banana scientist whining about the poor phallic humor he hears. Then there's the bizarre name of the fungus, Tropical Race Four. Then there's the dark anecdote about a researcher, Rowe, toiling for four decades searching for a better banana hybrid until, in 2001, he hanged himself in his experimental banana fields. Peed has a tactical advantage because the word banana is just hilarious by itself. I think he knows this. The word permeates the article like a deadly...fungus.
"Le Divorce": Ian Buruma examines Belgium. Not sure why this was put behind the paywall as opposed to something a bit more more inviting like, say, the Saddam statue piece. Oh, well.
It was an enjoyable read, though. Who knew Belgium had the same conservative-populist uprising against, among other things, the immigrant population. The outright division of the country was compared to Italy, but I was also saw parallels to the griping of Northern Virginians about supporting the rest of the commonwealth.
A quibble: steak tartare is mentioned in the piece, but in the illustration the steak is without question a slab.
Kind of a consistency issue, in my opinion. I guess artistically it would be harder to portray the division of the country with a patty of finely minced uncooked cow.
I was really prepared to hate this peice, but the charming class war, urban decay, and De Wever's folksy sayings -- "'The future? You might as well peer through thick coffee'" -- won me over. Color me charmed.
"Meet Dr. Freud": Evan Osnos delivers this bomb: "nearly one in five adults in China has a mental illness, a figure that put China in the ranks of one of the most mentally ill countries in the world." With China's adult population of over a billion, if the mentally ill people in China were granted their own sovereignty, their country would have a population greater than England and Russia combined.
"Years of My Birth": Louise Erdrich claims to have written this short story paragraph by paragraph over a span of years.
I haven't forced myself to read the latest Alice Munro stories in the New Yorker, but something about the narrator made me think Alice Munro. The story spans fifty years in four pages. But if you read it backwards you'd have the same story, essentially.
The plot could almost be distilled to a ballad and sung in three verses by Tom Waits. That would be my biggest issue, that it's tonally all over the place. It was like a letter to The Ethicist in the Sunday Times with a dash of the caddishly awful: the brother's interaction with the narrator reminded me of Sterling Archer.
However, I read it intently and I felt things. After reading the above blog post with Erdrich, I was ready to hate it. Well played, I guess.
Is this New Yorker worth purchasing? Yes.
No comments:
Post a Comment