Lost and Found at Armando's Table

Dinner and Acknowledgments

Last Wednesday was only our second dinner together since 2020 and, like our meal in May at Tom's, it was worth the wait. Mando served up a series of classically French dishes whose ingredients had the imprimatur of none other than Claude Monet and our very own Le Comptoir. From the opening cheese selection to the roast chicken, from the potato casserole to the apple pie, c'etait tout magnifique!

Our Discussion and Review of Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a collection of essays on a seemingly endless variety of topics—from the plot of Vertigo to the travails of Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca to a heroin overdose by a close friend—all connected (sometimes flimsily) by the notion that true self-discovery occurs only after one has lost one’s way.

When we picked A Field Guide from Mando’s list of titles last month, we naively thought that we were finally going to understand why it’s better to put away the map. We didn’t expect that Solnit’s path was going to be more metaphysical than literal. Yes, there were the obligatory references to Thoreau's road less traveled and to early explorers relying on maps with too little topography and too much terra incognita. But Solnit’s emphasis on geography was simply to get us in the mood for more serious soul-searching. And that’s where our problems began.

Most of us felt Solnit’s essays were, ahem, all over the map (thanks for the pun, Dan). Her ideas and associations move quickly and at times randomly. Some guys couldn’t follow the thread and others simply lost interest. Worse, her commentary is surprisingly uneven for such an accomplished writer, with trenchant observations and clever asides followed by more than a few clunkers.  To paraphrase Paul, Solnit's ideas were fascinating and frustrating, erudite and interesting, but with no obvious lesson to be drawn from the collection.  (I'm tempted to also paraphrase Dean, who characterized Solnit's stories as David Sedaris writ noir, but my notes don't do his wit justice!)

Rating A Field Guide to Getting Lost

With her intentionally discursive style, Solnit doesn’t make the reader’s task easy. And so we complained, predictably. But she earned our grudging admiration nonetheless. She provoked us with her impressive range, she made us consider our place and our potential, and (for most of us) she had us thinking long after we’d finished the book. So, despite our various disappointments, we gave her effort a respectable 6.1.

Next Up:  Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Doug offered us an excellent list of titles to choose from.  We chose James McBride’s recent novel, but we paused to consider Days Without End (Barry), The River (Heller), and The Splendid and the Vile (Larson).  We’ll decide in August if McBride’s novel about New York in the late 60’s is worth the acclaim it’s received.

Mando Takes Us Out to Sea

Dinner and Acknowledgments

After a break in August, we returned in September ready for two things: a delicious meal and a vigorous discussion of a truly gruesome seafaring tale.  We had both and weren't disappointed by either. As to the first, Armando grilled an outstanding yellowtail tuna (caught, incidentally, by him on his most recent trip to the Sea of Cortez) and paired it with a perfectly done beef tri tip. To eat so well when discussing the plight of 19th-century sailors trapped in Arctic ice was almost criminal. Almost. But not enough to prevent some of us from reaching for seconds. Thank you, Armando, for setting an outstanding table, as usual.

We should also acknowledge Paul Liberatore, whose lifestyle pieces in the Marin IJ are consistently interesting and enjoyable. Paul was our guest for the evening and we are grateful to him for the positive reaction that followed his recent article about our book group.  Thanks, Paul.  Your profile of us provided a perspective sorely missing in the New York Times' trend piece last May.

Our Review and Discussion of The North Water

First, a disclaimer:  a courtesy copy of The North Water was sent to us by the good folks at Henry Holt & Co. Evidently, they were hoping we'd review it and help them sell a few copies.  Unfortunately, it was several months before Ian McGuire's first novel finally made it into our rotation.  During that time the book was published, got great reviews, and sold plenty of hardcover copies.  Thank goodness, because we genuinely liked the book and wouldn't want anyone to think we'd sing for the price of a lousy hardback.  (We can be bought, just not that cheaply.)

The North Water places the reader aboard the Volunteer, an 1850's whaling ship whose sailors are wretched (to a man), whose voyage is futile, and whose prey has retreated far north of their usual breeding grounds. But if any of us thought these simple themes would combine for a pleasant bit of historical fiction, perhaps with elements of Herman Melville, Patrick O'Brian, or Richard Henry Dana, we were in for a big surprise.  The first page treats the reader to the novel's prime antagonist, Henry Drax, leaving a whorehouse and openly savoring the residue of a night of fornication.  Within a few short pages he has killed a man, sodomized a boy, and shipped out on the Volunteer. 

All of us found McGuire's novel rich in its language (with all of its coarseness) and peopled with unforgettable characters.  As for universal themes, we kept coming back to the obvious: good vs. evil.  Although, as Roy pointed out, since virtually every character is badly flawed, the contrast is really between Drax's malevolence and the more modest shortcomings of his shipmates.  No one, including the protagonist Sumner, gets a pass from McGuire.

Rating The North Water

While Armando critiqued one of the whaling scenes as "inauthentic," the rest of us were captivated by a story so different from anything we've read to date. According to Larry, the book had the urgency and harshness of The Revenant; Doug found it "unflinchingly violent"; Tom said it was "engrossing" (high praise from the engineer!); Paul fell hard for McGuire's many "well-turned phrases"; and the history geek in Terry was fascinated by the novel's prescient account of a dying industry.  With a rating of 7.8, The North Water landed high on our growing list of books read.

Next Up: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Doug miscalculated badly when he offered us 14 titles for our consideration.  He subsequently pared the list to four in order to force a decision.  We rejected Barbarian Days when we learned we could read a magazine-length version; Underground Airlines had some confusing it with Underground Railroad; and The Throwback Special simply didn't resonate.  Which left us with Nguyen's much-praised The Sympathizer.  Given how impressed we were with another recent Pulitzer winner (The Orphan Master's Son), we have high hopes for our next selection.

The First Trimester of 2015: No Snow But Some Diverting Reads

Like last year, January’s ski trip was a bust.  Too little snow too early in the season canceled our Sierra excursion. Instead we met in February at Tom’s to see if Irving Stone’s 1938 work of biographical fiction (think The Agony and the Ecstasy, only much earlier and mercifully shorter) justified its selection as our first title of 2015. The verdict on Sailor on Horseback:  with a middling 6.4 rating, it didn’t quite deliver the goods. It certainly wasn’t the subject matter, as we all have a soft spot for local favorite and hero of Tales of the Fish Patrol, Jack London.  (Indeed, Irving Stone himself was a San Francisco native.)  Maybe it was the dated writing, the clutter of detail, or—as Stan put it—the fact that Stone “kept droning on,” but no one was actively applauding when the votes were tallied (except perhaps Tom, our resident Jack London fan).  No matter.  All in attendance enjoyed Tom’s food and wine pairings.  (Was it really Mondavi, Tom?)

March had us only two years removed from Sailor, as we brought back another local writer and past MBC author, John Steinbeck, but this time on an adventure down to Baja with his 1940 travelogue, The Log from the Sea of Cortez.  With fellow traveler and field biologist Ed Ricketts providing some of the narration, Steinbeck took cover from the furor over The Grapes of Wrath by embarking on a collecting expedition to Baja California with a notebook in hand.  His descriptions of marine life were frequently interrupted by a variety of philosophical and humanistic meditations.  Stan called them rants, and for once I had to agree.  While I criticized his constant riffing as self-indulgent and repetitive, others were much more forgiving. Larry and Glenn found the digressions refreshing, and Paul who likened these digressions to those in Moby Dick found enough to keep himself reading the interesting parts.   All of us, however, enjoyed Armando’s stories of his field work in the Sea of Cortez and especially the slide show of his most recent trip just a week before our dinner.  As an added touch, Armando’s main course (blue fin tuna) was caught, cleaned, and packed in the very locale described by Steinbeck. For that we gave Mando a huge thumbs-up and Steinbeck a very respectable 6.8.

For April, Doug convinced us to give short form fiction a try, and he sealed the deal when he offered to prepare and email us a packet of short stories with a combined page count of less than 100!  Not only were we engrossed by his selected stories (George Saunders’ Sea Oak took top honors in the length-of-discussion category), but every one of us claimed to have done the reading (impressive, even if some were embellishing a little).  With selections from Jess Walters (Anything Helps), Tom Perrotta (The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face), Dennis Lehane (Until Gwen), Steve Almond (Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched), and others, there was something for everyone.  With such impressive writing, I had high hopes our next selection would be from one of these men, but George tortured us and then steered us back to Gabriel Garcia Marquez (recall, we read News of a Kidnapping) and the work that sealed his Nobel Prize, Love in the Time of Cholera. In June, we'll find out whether a 50-year deferred romance in the Caribbean piques our interest as much as Bernie's lost appendages did in Sea Oak.

A Make-Up for 2012

As club secretary, I must fall on my sword for my repeated failure, over the last year or more, to regularly post summaries of our meetings. I blame Tom A. for initially stepping in to save me, only to later step out and expose my lack of constancy. With that mea culpa, herewith a very quick summary of our meetings since January's A Sport and a Pastime.

In February, Paul fed us victuals from the Kashmir as we considered the story of the 1999 expedition that discovered the remains of legendary British mountaineer, George Mallory.  In Ghosts of Everest, Hemmleb et. al. chronicle their successful attempt to re-trace Mallory's fateful route in 1924 in order to figure out what exactly happened to Mallory and his climbing partner, Andrew Irvine.  Less successful was the manner in which Hemmleb and his co-authors joined their account with Mallory's.  The story of each expedition was fascinating, but the book's split narrative was awkward and resulted in a modest 6.7 rating. Maybe it was the intimidating presence of our guest and published author/teacher, Andy, that made us extra critical.

In March, we convened at Stan's (yes, another outstanding meal of grilled meat and roast potatoes!) to consider Sherman Alexie's modern-day account of life on the rez in Reservation Blues.  We split over the dream sequences and mystical moments, but were taken by the honesty with which Alexie paints his characters.  Alternatingly sympathetic and scathing, Alexie depicts life on and off the reservation (and his characters' infatuation with music) with a remarkable vividness, especially for those of us for whom the BIA is just another acronym.  The 7.0 rating understated the generally positive tenor of our discussion.

Armando hosted us in April with an ethnic feast that complimented Robert Laxalt's beautifully drawn memoir set in pre- and post-war Nevada.  As men of a certain age, perhaps we were predisposed to fall hard for Sweet Promised Land and its elegiac re-telling of a quintessentially father-son story.  The father, Dominique Laxalt, is a hard-working immigrant (herding sheep in the foothills near Carson City) whose sons achieve fully the American dream (one as a US senator, another as a university professor) but whose heart can't quite forget the family he left behind in a small town in the Pyrenees.  His return home with his younger son is both reunion and closure. Several guys commented that this story continued to resonate long after the pages were turned.  It certainly did for me.  For that reason, it earned an 8.3 rating and climbed into our current Top 5.

We met next in June at my house and enjoyed plenty of sushi and sake as we considered Louis Zamperini's unforgettable odyssey from Torrance, CA to the Berlin Olympics to a POW camp in Japan.  Laura Hillenbrand is a shameless crowd-pleaser whose recreation of the Zamperini story engendered questions from us (and others) about its authenticity of detail. That aside, most of us felt uplifted and exhausted by Zamperini's extraordinary resilience and will to survive.  Our conclusion was to forgive the sometimes tedious and occasionally hyperbolic passages and celebrate--with a 7.4 rating--an amazing story of survival.

In July we declared a bye and instead appeared with spouses and no books at Doug's house for his second annual summer party.  After commiserating with him over his recent burglary, we tucked in and stuffed ourselves.  Thanks again, Doug.

Our last meeting was delayed to September, when Glenn hosted us at Roy's house.  With food from Sol, we were all ears as Ralph Leighton regaled us with stories about Richard Feynman, the Nobel physicist who was also his father's colleague at CalTech.  Glenn had proposed and we picked Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, unaware that Ralph Leighton was Roy's brother-in-law.  The book was filled with the infectious humor and antics of a renowned physicist who related his personal story to Leighton in a series of recorded conversations over the space of several years.  From those recordings, Leighton produced this delightful memoir.  Even those of us with little interest in applied physics found in  Feynman (via Leighton) a riveting storyteller indeed. 

Tinkering at Armando's

Acknowledgments

Armando raced back from Merced and, with a little help from Garth, put together a fine meal of good old fashioned meatloaf.  Just the right menu for a cool fall night spent contemplating a novel whose most vivid settings were in the cold outdoors.  As comfort food, it was the perfect accompaniment for the conversation that followed, with its emphasis on death and dying.  We were especially touched by  Armando's account of the joy and pathos surrounding his mother's recent funeral.

The Book

Paul Harding's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Tinkers, had the virtue of brevity, which compensated for the disjointed narrative style.  According to Doug, after Harding had drafted this story of a dying father's reminiscences about his own father (and son), he shuffled its chapters in order to collapse the generations (and, according to some of us, confuse the reader).  

Our comments were all across the board.  But many reflected an appreciation for Harding's elegance with language, the visceral impact of his story, and the various metaphors (especially that clock!) for our mortality.  Nevertheless, Peter griped about the deathbed obsession with mortality, Garth saw a plot suffused with mental illness, Dan found the story haphazard even though he insisted he read it while sober, and Paul and Tom A were both underwhelmed by the spareness of the story.  

Our voting produced a miserly 4.8--faint praise for such an acclaimed title but certainly in keeping with our mixed feelings about this elegiacal father-son novella.  

Next Up

Glenn gave us several fine choices for September, but the vote came down to a nailbiter between serial murder and magnificent architecture in turn-of-the-century Chicago and the musings of Paul Theroux as he revisits eastern Africa.  With a little prompting from Garth, who clearly felt our political sensibilities have been dulled by too much award-winning fiction, we went with Dark Star Safari.

Armando's Hideaway

Acknowledgments
We came expecting a dank room with a lumpy mattress on the floor, adolescent guards at the ready, and beans and rice for sustenance. Armando was only able to conjure up the beans and rice (courtesy of Picante), but when paired with his homemade tamales, green salad, and a pleasing berry and ice cream dessert selection, we were most forgiving. The smooth brandy from Roy, and the selection of Latin beers, also helped.

Armando never circled back to his father’s barroom antics (we’ll wait for that next time), but he did impress us with his tales of whales (and their 10-foot appendages), Fresnel lenses (yes, that was young Armando in the lighthouse), and a 20-year men’s group that’s still going strong. Some of us were even invited into his “man cave,” whose artifacts and animals (those were California Kingsnakes!) might have entertained us all evening.

The Book
Had we picked any other of Armando’s book choices, we would likely have been pleased. But as it was, we felt merely informed by our reading of Marquez’ account of the 1990 kidnappings in his native Colombia. Our criticisms centered around the limits Marquez imposed on his reporting: he spent too much time lionizing the hostages and their high society families and friends, and too little time exploring the class tensions, the widespread violence, the political instability, and the shadow of Uncle Sam—all of which contributed to Pablo Escobar’s desperate bid for leverage as he sought to avoid extradition and protect his family.

Fortunately, Stan happily filled in some of the missing context! (How about we next pick a book about Mongolia and see if Stan also spent time there in 1972 playing music and marveling at the abundance of cocaine?) I'm not sure I get Stan's connection to Havana Nocturne, and I know Peter is still smarting from George's generalizations about where all the stable democracies are located (none south of the equator, apparently). As we went around the table, no one was quite as critical as I, but the rating still fell solidly into the mid-range, with the final result a disappointing 4.9.

Next Up
Our next selection is David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. We will take off the month of January and instead travel up to Tahoe for a weekend of skiing and bonding (not bondage, Garth). Food and beverage assignments are coming, so be sure to RSVP if you haven’t already. So far, 14 are confirmed, and we now have a second cabin reserved for the overflow.