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Two Books

I am reading John Cheever's Falconer side by side with Salman Rushdie's Golden House. Not sure why I would choose such a mis-matched duo but I struggle to stay on one story-line these days. A combination of age, access to technology, multi-tasking as a way of life and survival are likely to blame. But this makes for such a strange back and forth - Cheever and Rushdie. I would not recommend it. 

For one thing, I am definitely not interested in magic realism anymore. There was a place and time for that in my life decades ago. I feel like Rushdie failed to grow up as a writer - continue to appeal to the tastes of an older, more frazzled, more impatient readers who in their youth had the time and energy to dissect his complex prose and thought process. I crave the elegant beauty of his Haroun and the Sea of Stories. That is magic realism done right to my taste. Read the book first in college and then again after J was born. Did not love it one bit less. 

Cheever stays very away from magic, metaphor and allegories. He tells it very harshly like it is with no adornment or flourish. One of his character's in Falconer says 

"Nobody ever give it to me willingly. I know hundreds of men, not so good-looking as me, who get it for nothing all the time, but I never got it once, not once for nothing. I just wish I had it free, once.”

The Rushdie prose reads very differently

They were an old family claiming to be able to trace their ancestry all the way back to Alexander the Great—alleged by Plutarch to be the son of Zeus himself—so they were at least the equal of the Julio-Claudians who claimed descent from Iulus, the son of pious Aeneas, prince of Troy, and therefore from Aeneas’s mother, the goddess Venus. As for the word Caesar, it had at least four possible origins. Did the first Caesar kill a caesai—the Moorish word for elephant? Did he have thick hair on his head—caesaries? Did he have gray eyes, oculis caesiis? Or did his name come from the verb caedere, to cut, because he was born by caesarean section? 

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