4G— Morning News • Sunday, February 9. 1997
INPRINT
BEST SELLERS
Untold Stories
Knight Ridder
Here are the best sellers for the
week endir^ Feb. 7 compiled
from data from independent •
and chain bookstores, book
wholesalers and independent
distributors nationwide.
i
Previously unknown works by Ralph Ellison surface
HARDCOVER
FICTION
1. Hornet's Neat Patricia '
Cornwell. Putnam. $25.95
2. Total Control. David BaWacci.
: Warner. $25
3. Slant Wtoeaa. Richard North
Patterson. Knopf. $25.95
4* Sinai Town QblLaVyrle
Spencer. Putnam. $23,95
&1to CMe. Jonathan
Kellerman. Bantam. $24.95
6. AMwne. Michael Cricbton.
Knopf. $26
7. The Deep End of the Ooaan.
, Jacqueiyn Mitchard. Viking.
$23.95
8. The Cat Who Tated a TNef.
Lilian Jackson Braun.
Putnam. $22.95
9. Onm of Autumn. Diana
Gabaldon. Delacorte. $24.95
10. Tna Notebook. Nicholas
Sparks, Warner. $16,95
NON-RCTON
1. Simple Abundant*. Sara Ban
Breathnach. Warner. $17.95
2. Angola's Aahaa. Frank
McCourt. Scribner, $24
o. man wv irom mare, IWHMI
Are from Venus, John Gray.
HarperCollins. $23
4. Mattering the Zone. Barry
Sears. Regan Books. $22
5. Tbe Arthritis Cure. Jason
• Theodosakis, Brenda Adderty
and Barry Fox. St. Martin's.
$22.95
6. A Reporter'* Life. Walter
Cronkite. Knopf. $26.95
7. Suzanne Somere' Eat Great,
LoseWett*. Suzanne
Somers. Crown. $23.
8. Evfctence Warntoaed Det.
Tom Lange & Det. Philip
Vannatter, as told to Dan E.
Moldea. Pocket. $24
9. GVt of Peace. Joseph
Cardinal Bemardin. Loyola
Press. $17.95
10. My Sanjafc A Low* Story.
Ekaterina Gordeeva with
EM. Swift. Warner. $18.95
A
••
AMA
^MMA
BA^^
tAfckMfeAM
MASS MARKET
1. The Runaway JUT* John
Grisham. Dell/Island. $7.99
2. The Ruler Time-Tested
Secrets to Capturing the
Heart of Me R0iL Ellen Fein
and Sherrie Schneider.
Warner. $5.99
3. Absolute Powet David
Baldacci. Warner. $7.50
4. Gutty as Sin. Tami Hoag.
• Bantam. $6.50
5. Rve Days hi Paris. Danielle
Steel. Dell. $6.50
6. IX Attdns' New Diet
- Revolution. Robert C. Atkins,
M.D. Avon. $6.50
VW^ UA^^A «••-•
7. ino norav wnvpOTK
Nicholas Evans. Dell. $7.50
& McNaty's Puzzle. Lawrence
Sanders. Berkley. $6.99
9. The Hnal Jud0nent Richard
.. North Patterson. Ballantine.
$6.99
10. Tha Lost World. Michael
Cnchton. Ballantine. $7.99
TRADE
1. She's Coma Undone. Wally
Lamb. Washington Square
: Press. $14
2. H» fit** Patent Michael
Ondaatie. Ballantine. $12.50
*. Tha Book of Ruth. Jane
Hamilton. Anchor Books.
$9.95
4» Snow FaMnj( on CeoBfs»
David Guterson. Vintage. $12
Woman's SouL J. CanfteW,
M. Hansen, Jennifer
Mawthome & Marci Shimoff,
eds. Health Communications.
$12.95
-
People. Stephen R. Covey.
S&S/ Fireside. $12
7. CMcfcen Soup tor the Sod.
Jack Canfield & Mark
Hansen, editors. Hearth
Communications. $12.95
8. Song of Sotomon. Toni
Morrison. Plume. $11.95
9. A CM Acton. Jonathan Harr.
Vintage. $13.
:1O. The World Almanac and
look of Facts. Edited by
Robert Famighetti. World
Almanac Books. $9.95
R
alph Ellison is one of American literature's
one-hit wonders.
His hit, though, was extraordinary. When
"Invisible Man" appeared in 1962, it con, founded critics' expectations of what a "Negro novel"
should be.
Using an unforgettable metaphor, the book took us
inside the painful ironies of black American life. But
Ellison, refusing to be fenced in by race, had larger
aims; his treatment of what he deemed "human universals" made "Invisible Man" one of the post-war period*
most influential works of fiction.
And then, for years: Silence. Though not quite a withdrawal like that of J.D. Salinger, who struck like lightning with "Catcher in the Rye," then vanished into a
truculent hermitage.
Ellison, indeed, for decades spoke of a massive second novel in the works. Tragedy battered him in 1967,
when a fire at his farmhouse in Massachusetts
destroyed the manuscript Even after that setback, the
book, year after year, was rumored ready to appear.
That expectation was finally
dashed in 1994, when the novelist died in New York City.
Now his posthumous career
has begun. After Ellison died,
his wife told his literary
executor, John F. Callahan,
about a box beneath their dining room table. In the box,
Callahan found the manuscripts of early Ellison fiction.
"These were stories,"
Callahan recalls, "that had
Review by
never been published, never
been mentioned — stories no
Doug Wyatt
one even knew about"
In "Flying Home and Other
Stories," we have those six heretofore buried stories,
published with seven other tales that were published in
magazines and journals before Ellison's death. The stories were written between 1937 and 1964, most before
the publication of "Invisible Man."
How are they? They mostly seem the work of a talented apprentice, humming tunes he'd later turn into symphonies.
Hemingway obviously influenced some of the stories'
punchy prose and hard, spare dialogues. Even as
Ellison experimented and assimilated fictional techniques, though, he was finding his own distinct voice.
Some of the strengths of "Invisible Man" — its powerful
use of metaphors, its quick-witted satire, its commingling of tragedy and laughter—are here, too, abundantly in evidence.
The best of the stories linger in your imagination. In
"A Party Down at the Square" a young white boy, visiting from Cincinnati, witnesses a lynching in a Southern
town.
The act's insensate brutality is made all the more
chilling by the young narrator's matter-of-fact, shameless account of the horrific night Numbed by the values
^ie's been taught he refuses, at least verbally, to
acknowledge the wrong he witnesses.
Finally, though, he responds on a more elemental
level: By throwing up. "I was sick, and tired, and weak,
and cold," he explains. In his last words, the boy at once
Ralph Ellison
declares and disguises his respect for the murdered
man, whose crime remains unspecified: "It was my first
party and my last" he
says. "God, but that nigger
was tough. That Bacote
nigger was some nigger!"
The shallower the
responses of the narrator,
the easier time he'll have
of fitting into the town's
brutal society.
The central figure of
"Boy on a Train" is far
more aware, far more
questioning of the world.
Young James, who has
recently lost his father, is
riding on a train with his baby brother and his mother,who has a job as a domestic waiting for her.
Through his child's eyes, he sees how whites look differently upon blacks; he notices, too, how the world
passing by the train window differs from conventional
images of the world: A cow in a field jocks "like a cow
in the baby's picture book: only there were no butterflies about her head." The lesson he learns? There's a
difference between how things look (and are supposed
to be) and how they really are. He knows, as he grows
into a man, he's got to be careful.
In other stories — particularly "A Hard Time
Keeping Up." "The Black Ball," and "King of the Bingo
Game" — we meet young black men trying to make their
way in a world demarcated by a color line, where the
odds are long and the games frequently fixed. Even
when they win — the protagonist of the bingo game hits
the jackpot at double zero — they lose: a cop simultaneously whaps him over the head with a blackjack.
Violence and absurdity are close neighbors in these
tales.
That joining of disparate elements is particularly
striking in "In a Strange Country." In the story. Parker, a
serviceman in Wales, is roughed up by racists in his
division but greeted warmly by the Welsh, who think of
him as a true American. When a Welsh chorus belts out
"The Star Spangled Banner" for him, "as though to
betray him he heard his own voice singing out like a
suddenly amplified radio." At once Parker believes in
the professed American ideals he experienced in
mixed jam sessions back home — "when we jam. we're'
Jamocrats" — and feels haunted by America, "the horrible foreboding country of dreams."
So, too, are we haunted by passages in these stories,
even if fashioned at the end of an inexperienced pen.
For here it's clear an artist an American original, was
learning his craft and thoroughly savoring the process.
More's the pity, I think, we never heard his Second
Symphony.
9
Feeling forlorn?
'Tours of Hell old tales with a new twist Check out
a swan
The Hartford Courant '
The notion of American literary characters
traipsing off to Europe to find themselves is so
old that there can't be anything new to say about
it right? In the two novellas comprising "Guided
Tours of Hell," Francine Prose sets about the
risky business of turning this gem in her hands
until she finds a shiny new facet
The novellas, the shorter "Guided
Tours of
Hell," from
which the collection gets its
name, and the
twice-as-long
"Three Pigs in
Five Days,"
are not connected, but they have certain features in com
mon: American protagonists riddled with selfdoubt and marooned, uncomfortably, in a
European capital; excursions to horrific tourist
sites; relationships with other characters that
point up every flaw, doubt fillip and quirk of the
main characters, who have ample supplies of all
of those.
The first story, "Guided Tours of Hell," plunks
a middle-aged mediocre playwright Landau, in
Prague for a Kafka conference. The chief attraction of the conference is the leonine, lionized
writer J in Krakauer, and the chief entertainment is the group excursion, with Jiri, to the concentration camp (now tourist site) where he was
hooks onto by mistake, she is ushered into a private studio to see the great sculptor's hidden
erotic drawings.
This city she has seen so often in the pastel
glow of sex with Leo now befuddles and terrifies
her. "It was so risky," she thinks, "being shut off
in some little love capsule, losing contact with
the truth, losing your faculties, your judgment It
once interned and out of which he has found his
was dangerous, like joining a cult or a fascist
writing material
army for two." So when Leo shows up, full of
Landau, in the universal manner of the
plausible explanations for everything, Nina
mediocre, can't figure out what makes Jiri so
crumples into his arms. But when Leo embarks
special. He resents his way with women, his universal adulation, his charisma. He pits himself in on his "Paris Death Trip" — a tour of ghoulish
tourist sites such as the Catacombs, the
imaginary alpha-dog contests over sex and work
Montpamasse cemetery (on Nina's wish) and the
with the self-absorbed Jiri. He doubts Jin's conConciergerie — she begins to see, very slowly,
centration-camp stories, then doubts himself for
the distance she already has put between them.
doubting them. The significance of the camp is
Prose has an unerring ear for the inner tumult
lost recovered and lost again in the posturing.
of late-20th-century big-city neurotics, and it's a
Then, suddenly, Jiri's health fails, and the
dynamics become even more complicated.
joy to eavesdrop with her. But there's more going
on here than that This is her 12th volume, and
But as solid as this story is, it dims in the light
we're treated by the surefooted-ness of a master.
of "Three Pigs in Five Days," a complex, classiIn both these hell tours, Prose takes us literally
cally wrought and engrossing trip into the alley"down," then back up, at least partway. And in
ways of that Old World capital of emotion, love.
"Three Pigs," she skillfully depicts not only the
Nina is a travel writer for her lover's newsletclassic paranoia of the stranger in the strange
ter about Paris tourism, called Allo!. Nina and
land, but uses historical and classical allusions
Leo appear, at least to her,tobe deeply in love
when suddenly, inexplicably, Leo ships her off to — Orpheus and Eurydice, most successfully —
Paris without him to do a story about a hotel.
deftly and unobtrusively.
The hotel, as it happens, is a grimy, unreconIt would be easy, too, for Prose to keep more
structed former brothel, recently bought by one
distance between us and poor Nina. She's a type,
of Leo's former French lovers. Nina, convinced
after all, the slightly silly, skittish, smart sexthat Leo has not only left her but punished her
charged single working woman.
by shipping her off to this dump, falls apart She
But its another measure of Proses gift that at
stumbles around Paris, alternately menaced and •the end, when Nina came to know herself and
repelled by the lovingly entwined couples everylife and love and death a little better — at the
high
retail price of loss — I cried.
where.
This is (Prose's) 12tti volume,
and we 're treated by the
surefooted-ness of a master.
In a private tour of the Rodin museum Nina
Piecemeal approach give 'Dictionary' odd definition
The Baltimore Sun
According to its dust jacket this
book provides "what every
American needs to know as we
enter the next century." The introduction expresses the more modest
hope of offering readers "a sampling of cultural contributions from
around the world."
The editors, colleagues at
Harvard University, invited experts
in many fields to help select and
define the alphabetically arranged
topics that make up this dictionary.
Entries are detailed, accurate
and solid, written in clear, nontechnical language for (he general reader. Each entry encapsulates a good
deal of information, be it a discussion of Jainism, a history of the
Reformation or a biography of
Kenneth Kaunda. The editors' introduction is intelligent and inviting
The problem is what gets left out
Understandably, some less impor-
tant Western figures will be omitted
to make room for those from other
cultures. But something odder
seems to be going on here. It's very
odd/for instance, to find an entry on
Frances Brooke, but none on Oscar
Wilde
Although it contains much to
interest and inform the general
reader, this dictionary lacks an
informing idea of what global cut
Hire is or might be. It offers, instead,
the unsystematic, piecemeal
approach to knowledge that already
has undermined the value of an
American higher education.
Savannah Morning News
Susan Branch's keepsake book,
"Love," could be just the Valentine
for that special someone.
The 64-page book, fitting in the
palm of your hand, is filled with
such sweet notions as love potions,
the language of flowers, and quota/
tions about love ranging from The
Beatles to Robert Browning to
Amanda McBroomfe lyrics from the
song, "The Rose."
Branch doesnt miss a trick in
this charming book that she has
handwritten and illustrated.
Including chocolate among her list
of aphrodisiacs, she dishes up
chocoholic recipes for eclairs, truffles, and an ice cream cake roll
called "Death by Chocolate" that's,
topped off with killer sauce.
For added measure, consider gazing at a swan or bathing in buttermilk — both considered aphrodisiacs.
Potions in the book assure of a
renewed love, good luck on your
wedding day, and everlasting beauty—the latter accomplished by
rolling naked in the dew at sunrise
on the first of May.
If a glimpse of a dewey, nubile
body isn't enough to win a heart' a
turn of a French phrase or two
could come in handy. Pen in "Sans
vous je ne suis qu'un ver de terra
("I am only an earthworm without
you") or "Vous etes une super nana"
<",You are one fabulous babe") on
that Valentine card, and the night is
yours.
If that doesn't work, remember
that a cup of tea cures heartbreak.
That and a couple of chocolate
eclairs.