Shivering typewriters, 'Martian' favorites
People always say things twice, James Thurber pointed out -- they always say things twice.
So welcome to ''A Reading Life Redux." Pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable. We're going to be talking again about some old friends today.
In Boris Vian's world, I wrote here almost two years ago, mice persuade ambivalent cats to kill them because people they love have died. Stallions are crucified for their sins, and even bathroom fixtures have a life of their own. When one character puts Duke Ellington's ''The Mood to Be Wooed" on the phonograph, the O's on the record label cause the corners of the room to become round: Everything is transitional, becoming. I was reviewing a new translation of Vian's classic ''L'Ecume des jours." Now from the same publisher, Tam Tam Books, we have ''Autumn in Peking" (paperback, $18). The translation, stunning in itself, is by Paul Knobloch.
Ostensibly about the expedition to build a railway in the desert of Exopotamie, populated with engineers, randy priests and hermits, lovelorn couples, and a physician obsessed with model airplanes, as well as by buses that feed on catfish bones, typewriters that shiver when uncovered, and bedclothes that climb affectionately back into place when thrown back, even a chair that falls ill and must be hospitalized, this is the strangest of many strange Vian novels, like the others part science fiction, part love story, part surrealist farce -- and wholly, unforgettably readable.
Some writers, I suggested in a column last year, have a presence so pervasive that we take them for granted: They're the very air we breathe. For almost 70 years now, Ray Bradbury has produced such a barrage of stories and books that it sometimes seems as though the man exists only to write, turning out a short story between breakfast and lunch, taking time out after dinner to finish up a new book. He's been a presence in my life for most of it, helping shape the way I think about myself and the world. To judge from his introduction, the same is true of journalist Sam Weller, which is why we now have the first major and most welcome biography, ''The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury" (Morrow, $26.95).
Based on long-term interviews, Weller's book gives almost a day-to-day accounting, often in Ray's own words or those of his wife, friends, and associates, providing a fine limning of the life. And while there is not much by way of critical insight or any real penetration into Bradbury's character -- it's a book that stays close to the surface -- one cannot fairly fault it for failing to be other than what it sets out to be.
Any writer would be pleased to produce one or two works that endure. But ''Fahrenheit 451"? ''The Martian Chronicles"? ''Something Wicked This Way Comes"? Stories like ''The Pedestrian" and ''All Summer in a Day"? Bradbury long ago took up an honored place in American popular culture -- perhaps even in our mass consciousness. In one interview Bradbury fondly imagines some kid living on Mars a hundred years from now, reading ''The Martian Chronicles" under the covers with a flashlight. It's the perfect Bradbury story: matter-of-fact, wonderful, intensely human.
To conclude our tasty buffet we have the tastiest of all: ''The Pitcher Shower," by Donald Harington, due in September. This new novel is published by Toby Press, which brought out last year's ''With" -- my choice for novel of the year, incidentally -- and which has committed to reissuing all Harington's work.
Regular readers of this column know well my admiration for Harington, whom I believe to be among our finest writers, one whose work, though for some time now sadly overlooked, will endure long after the award winners and current critical darlings have passed from our ken.
Relatively short, set in the 1940s and, like most of his work, in and around the fabled Ozark town of Stay More, this novel, Harington's 13th, gives us Landon Boyd in full bounce among the 12 towns to which he travels showing cowboy movies. He pretends to be Hopalong Cassidy, going by the name of ''Hoppy," even calling the truck out of whose bed he shows the films ''Topper" in imitation of Hoppy's horse. The women and kids love him, of course. But like the real Hoppy, he always winds up riding off into the sunset alone.
And now, since Preacher Binns, figuring to save all them folk from themselves, from Landon, and from the temptations of modern life, has stolen his Hoppy film, he's going to have to somehow whip up interest in ''A Midsummer Night's Dream," the only film available. Not to mention that his new ride-along, Carl, well, Carl's really Sharline . . .
Words are little miracles, Landon's grandfather told him; you can do anything with them. As Landon waits to sell tickets, he juggles and performs magic tricks: small lies before the large; pintsized miracles. And the silver screen (''just a pair of alabastine-coated bedsheets sewn together") -- what miracles are wrought there! Harington's latest novel is a meditation on faith and belief, and on dreams: those that flicker and pass on the large screen and those of far lesser wattage that shine dimly, though eternally, within us.
''A James Sallis Reader" will be out in midsummer from Point Blank, and a new novel, ''Drive," from Poisoned Pen in September. 
