I saw this film at the Seattle International Film Festival with the writer/director and one of the stars in attendance. Nearly everything about this movie surprised me. It has great acting, cinematography, editing, and an awesome soundtrack. Most surprising was the clever script that managed to be both funny and suspenseful.

Alas, without big-name stars, I wonder if it will ever make it to a theater near you. I hope it does.

This novel is about what it’s like to be staring down the last third of your life when you’re an upper-middle class, white, male American living on the east coast. You might be thinking that’s a crowded piece of real estate, what with Philip Roth’s Everyman and other works. Ford defends the property well and has a lot to say. My one complaint with the book is that he takes more room than he needs to say it. It’s a thick book, and some parts move pretty slowly.

The book takes place over a busy Thanksgiving holiday in 2000. The millenium and the undecided presidential election complements the precarious tone of Bascomb’s life. In the months preceding the novel’s setting, his otherwise happy and loving wife has left him for a long-lost and presumed dead former husband, he’s been diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer, his one realty associate has been mulling plans to Bascomb’s agency, he’s locked in a cold war with his neighbors and he’s had worrisome relations with his first wife and his adult son and daughter. Add to this his unresolved grief over the death, years ago, of his oldest son.

Ford is a master of creating all of these underground rivers in a character who relishes tranquility. Over the course of the book, these rivers collide and spring up to flood the lay of the land and wash away his emotional bulkheads. Frank tries to keep it on cruise control, but Ford torments the guy like a greek god and forces him to break down and see his own-our own-desperation.

I listened to this audio book while on the road myself, driving from Seattle to Las Vegas. It was a strange feeling to be driving on a lonely two-lane road going south while listening to this alternate dystopia.

The book is compelling because McCarthy paints such a realistic scenario for the end of the world. The book starts six or eight years after something awful and irrevocable has put the world in decline and its immediately clear that things won’t be getting better any time soon. No one in the book even knows for sure what the event was. Whether it was nuclear holocaust, massive volcanic explosion, or a meteor impact that burned the cities to the ground and poisoned the air doesn’t really even matter. It’s all ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

The unnamed protagonist is walking down the road with his son and he’s pushing a shopping cart-that symbol of modern surplus and convenience-filled with whatever they can scavange. They are moving south because the planet is getting steadily colder due to a permanent haze that’s blocked out most of the sun. Most everything-people, animals, and plants-is dead. The man and the boy must contend with occasional marauders and zombie-like survivors, but it is the creeping death of starvation, dehydration, disease and exposure that hunts them continually through the novel.

At one point, the man finds some withered, leathery apples half buried under the ashes of a former orchard. He carefully collects them all and shares them with the boy. If the biblical book of Genesis is the first chapter of the world, this scene could have stood as its last chapter: two humans gnawing on the fallen fruit of the tree of no more knowledge.

This book is a tough read because there is so little hope to be found. It’s a good read because, through it all, the reader must question why they are on the road. The protagonist doesn’t know where they’re going or what they’ll find when they get there, but he’s driven by something beyond the pure animal will to survive.

I was in a bar in Big Bear, CA the first time I had a martini. I was 25 at the time and had never ordered a mixed drink from a bartender. Like playing a table game at a casino, ordering a mixed drink can be intimidating because they’ll ask you all sorts of questions you aren’t initially prepared to answer: “Straight up? On the rocks? Shaken? Stirred? Olives? Twist?”

It was a poorly made martini. It would be another 10 years before I had my second. I’ve since learned that a poorly made martini tastes like gasoline, but a well-made martini tastes like ethanol…smooth, high-octane ethanol.

I think of the martini as the most masculine and sophisticated mix drink out there. It’s not at all sweet or cute, aside from the girlish glasses in which they’re often served. It’s the drink of statesmen, favored by both FDR and Winston Churchill, and by mid-century men in grey flannel suits.

What I love about martinis is what just one will do for you. Especially in the summer, when it stays light late into the evening, a martini cools you down and warms you up at the same time.

As H.L. Mencken once said, the martini was “the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet.”

I want answers after Wendy’s death. I’ve always been a rational person, but since she died, I’ve had some, uh, mystical experiences. Not nearly as many as I would like, though.

The book is a pretty good microhistory of scientific investigation into the afterlife, though the author’s jokey style is often irritating. She ought to have more confidence in her subject matter and research or, at least, have better jokes.

I just finished a chapter today about electro-magnetic fields and their effect on the brain’s right lobe. Essentially, the right EMF can create hallucinations in some people that feel ghosty.

She points out that the stress of grieving can release hormones that do the same. I have to admit that my heart sank when I read that.

This is an interesting, inventive story about an obsessive who favors big, impossible dreams. The main character is played with panache by Klaus Kinski, who would have made a perfect silent film star. He has a very expressive face and piercing eyes. The best scene in the movie is when he’s on top of the boat, going up river, playing a Caruso opera for the natives hiding in the banks.

Few books have grabbed me so quickly. Even though the subject matter is likely to give any reader “heavy boots,” there’s a lightness and playfulness to the writing.

I read this and, while the arguements made sense, it’s just too hard to learn excercises from a book. I think it’s better, or easier, to go to a gym.

It was just too harrowing. Reading about his depression was fascinating, but then it became very frightening, as if I was giving my subconscious ideas. I don’t know…I guess I’m just not in the right frame of mind for this book. He’s a very capable writer, though.