BOOK REVIEWS: 06.16.10

THE BEDWETTER    SARAH SILVERMAN
I'm happy to say that Bedwetter lives up to its promises of pee. A chronic bedwetter well into her teens, Silverman's memoir reads like an I Love Lucy marathon – series of vignettes of equal parts cringe-worthy awkwardness and charming endearment add up, with a healthy sprinkling of urine-themed incidents tying all of them together. By stodgy celebrity memoir standards, I guess you could say it's pretty flawed - the chronology is all over the place, and the sexy gossip is limited at best. It may not be an expose into the true Sarah Silverman psyche, but the book succeeds as a candid account of the heartbreaking inaneness of the entertainment industry. Her short stint as an SNL writer, where none of her sketches ever made it to taping and she accidentally stabbed Al Franken in the head with a pencil, is maybe the most depressing yet hilarious thing I've ever read.

OM

BLACK HOLE    CHARLES BURNS
If this book were a Chinese man, his name would be Ho Lee Shit. Burns’ masterpiece takes place in an alternate universe 1970s, where teenagers spend their days drinking, getting high, and fucking their brains out. What’s that you say? That’s what all teenagers do all the time? Well, in the world of Black Hole there just so happens to be an STD going around that transforms these kids into literal monsters, and the rest of the book devotes itself to portraying this world as realistically as possible. There’s an endless amount of praise that you can throw at Black Hole – it’s smart, funny, sexy, terrifying, mysterious, and compulsively readable, and Burns’ art is gorgeous throughout. But the best thing I can say about the book is that it is honest and true. And considering the fact this is a work whose centerpiece has a very stoned teenager fucking an older woman who has a tail, that achievement is remarkable.

TA

LABYRINTHS    JORGE LUIS BORGES
This collection of stories is not for the timid. Even via translation, Argentine-born Borges manages to attain a linguistic precision and mental projection that piles on the layers of metaphysical ruminations so deftly that Rush Limbaugh’s ass would implode if exposed to such brilliance. So often, the stories reinterpret the basis of our perceived reality, an approach to human history as a cabalistic narrative that is often spoonfed and shaped by the storytellers. In “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” Borges establishes a dreamscape in which the protagonist discovers a cryptic encyclopedia with an obscure definition of as yet undiscovered planets. The story, which describes the language and customs of the people, begins to manifest itself in the real world. The community finds artifacts from Tlon, which, up until the revelation of the encyclopedia, never existed. As you start to unravel the threads, Borges slips in this tasty bit of candor: “A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues.” Through this brand of playful metaphysical irony, Borges succeeds in playing the mystic, the sage, and the devil in all the rest of these stories as well.

V