Flashback: reading like it's 1999

In our books pages today, several writers look back at the decade in reading. Of course, their perspective is retrospective, informed by this moment at the end of 2009. So to provide another angle -- what reading was like a decade ago -- Jacket Copy is returning to some vintage reviews.

In July 1999, Mark Rozzo reviewed the debut by Jhumpa Lahiri for the L.A. Times. Issued in trade paperback, there was nothing to indicate that "Interpreter of Maladies" would go on to win the Pulitzer and its many other awards and accolades. Nothing, that is, except for the voice. Powerful and assured, it quickly established Lahiri as one of the major literary figures of her generation.

This is how Rozzo saw the book back then:

"Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri; (Mariner: 208 pp., $12)

In "The Third and Final Continent," the closing story in this stunning debut collection, a Bengali man, after spending the last 30 years in the impossibly strange land of America, finds himself "bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept." A similar sense of bewilderment pervades these pages, as Jhumpa Lahiri's displaced Indian men and women are continually challenged to cope with new forms of everyday life and with each other, which they do, with comical pragmatism, hard-headedness and bitter honesty. The newlyweds in "This Blessed House" find themselves at loggerheads over what to do with the unlikely trove of Christian paraphernalia they uncover in their new Connecticut home; in "Mrs. Sen's," a recently emigrated wife is determined to buy fresh fish with their heads on, even if it means tackling her crippling fear of American roads; in "A Temporary Matter," a young couple take the opportunity of nightly power outages to tell each other horrible secrets in the dark; and in "Interpreter of Maladies," an attractive American-Indian tourist blithely confesses her marital infidelity to an astonished tour guide at the Sun Temple at Konarak. Lahiri's touch is delicate yet assured, leaving no room for flubbed notes or forced epiphanies.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Jhumpa Lahiri in Washington at the state dinner in honor of India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Nov. 24. Credit: Mandel Ngan  AFP / Getty Images

Flashback: Susan Patron's Newbery winner, pre-controversy

In today's paper, our pages focus on books for children and young adults. Susan Patron, the author of "The Higher Power of Lucky," has some suggestions on how to pick books for young readers: Mix classics with those hot-topic books like the "Twilight" series.

Patron spent more than 35 years working in children's services at the L.A. Public Library, so she knows her stuff. She also knows how worked-up people can get about what their children read: After her book won the Newbery Award, some school librarians objected to its use of the word "scrotum." In this 2007 L.A. Times editorial, which ran before the controversy broke, we see a snapshot of a writer who'd been at work for a long time, and was just about to get more attention than she'd bargained for.

Hollywood's latest celebrity shrinks from the limelight. Susan Patron has spent her career in one of the least glamorous places in Los Angeles: the public library.

Patron, who won the Newbery Medal for children's literature last month, has worked for the Los Angeles Public Library for about 35 years. Her office is in the gorgeous Central Library downtown, though she travels frequently to the branches, helping librarians select books and organize events for children. She also tried her hand at creating children's literature, but after publishing a few books in the early 1990s, she produced nothing for more than a decade.

Then came last year. After years of weekends and vacations spent writing and rewriting, she was finally able to make a story work on the page for the characters she had in mind: three idiosyncratic kids in a washed-out desert town. The book received a modest initial printing of 10,000 copies.

Last month, "The Higher Power of Lucky" won the Newbery Medal, considered the Pulitzer of children's literature. Patron was called to appear on the "Today" show, and "Lucky" -- on back-order lists at bookstores all over the country -- is going through a second printing of 100,000 copies.

Vintage review: even in 1958, 'Lolita' was esthetic bliss

This week, we review "The Original of Laura," the last book written -- partially written, anyway -- by Vladimir Nabokov. This unfinished work may provide "some precious insight into Nabokov's compositional methods," our reviewer James Marcus writes, but it isn't a novel as complete or as polished as his other books.

Now Nabokov is recognized as a master novelist; his greatest accomplishment, "Lolita," frequently tops best-of lists. Even in the moment, it was possible to see that with "Lolita," Nabokov had written something extraordinary. It was, at least, for LA Times books editor Robert R. Kirsch, who reviewed "Lolita" on August 31, 1958. The review, in its entirety, follows.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Esthetic Bliss in Satirical Novel

In a postscript to his novel "Lolita" (Putnam, $5) Vladimir Nabokov answers the question which teachers of literature are apt to ask: What is the author's purpose? he says, "Now, I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to write a book has no other purpose than to get rid of the book and who, when asked to explain its origin and growth, has to rely on such ancient terms as Interreaction of Inspiration and Combination -- which I admit, sounds like a conjurer explaining by one trick performing another."

The simplest part of the matter is that he had to write the book because it would not allow itself to remain unwritten.  Books have such a away with serious and dedicated authors, a life and almost will of their own. "Once or twice," he writes, "I was on the point of burning the unfinished draft... when I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life."

Why, you may ask, does a writer feel it necessary to explain a book? There are so many novels being publish which are never explained, are in fact unexplainable. The answer lies in the publishing history of "Lolita." Nabokov, a professor of European literature at Cornell, an amateur lepidopterist and a writer of unique style and talent, offered the manuscript of "Lolita" to four American publishers, who were so shocked by it that they would not publish it. The novel deals with a middle-aged European man who has an obsessive love for nubile, pre-adolescents, whom he calls "nymphets." Very likely behind their reasoning was the haunting possibility of litigations and bans. They just didn't want to take a chance. This would have been understandable had one of them not suggested to the author that he turn Lolita "into a 12-year-old lad and have him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, 'realistic' sentences ('He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess.)." Nabokov refused. the book was publishing in France in a two-volume paperback. American customs authorities, displaying unusual literary taste, allowed the book to be imported to the United States where it was promptly sold under the counter at black market prices. The matter came under discussion in the Anchor Review and other publications and ultimately Putnam's decided to publish an American edition. 

Word-of-mouth reports hinted that "Lolita" was hot stuff and the implication was that the book was a high-class "Peyton Place." Nothing could be farther from the actual fact. "Lolita" is not a lewd book and if it arouses any prurient interest in anybody, I will be very much surprised. Those who are seeing thrills would be well advised to go elsewhere to those novels which have no other purpose than the collection of sexual scenes bathed in cliched lust.

Kurt Vonnegut reviewed by Harlan Ellison, 1969

In this Sunday's paper, we've got a never-before-published story by Kurt Vonnegut. "Look at the Birdie" is the title story of the collection to be released next week, two and a half years after his death.

"I'm lucky," Vonnegut told David L. Ulin in 1997, "that I'm free to do art, and presumably to keep my soul growing, by finding something else to do. Participation in the arts -- drawing, dancing, and all that -- makes the soul grow. That's why you engage in it. That's how you grow a soul."

When Vonnegut's masterpiece "Slaughterhouse-Five" was published in 1969, it was reviewed for the L.A. Times by Harlan Ellison. Here's his review:

For those who have never slipped down any of the special rabbit holes Kurt Vonnegut has been boring into the decaying flesh of the American Novel, dropping hints about the plot of his new novel only serves to confuse. This is Vonnegut's attempt to describe his feelings about the Allied fire bombing of Dresden, a singular act of senseless brutality in which 135,000 men, women and children were incinerated. (An act of war now generally considered to have been of no strategic value. Dresden, at the time, was an "open" city. One wonders who, inevitably, will be asked to support the guilt for such a deranged deed.)

Though Vonnegut himself was a prisoner of war of the Germans, and was saved from cremation during the raid by a quirk of chance that put him in a deep cellar beneath the Dresden stockyards while the fire bombs fell, and though he has spent 20 years working himself up to the re-creation of the event, he is once again eminently Vonnegutesque in that Dresden barely gets mentioned. It is a novel about war and what men do to each other in the name of holy causes.

Which is not to say it is anywhere near "The Naked and the Dead" or "From Here to Eternity." Vonnegut fights his wars with feathers rather than with jackhammers. "Slaughterhouse-Five" is funny, satirical, compelling, outrageous, fanciful, mordant, fecund and at the bottom-line, simply stoned-out-of-its-mind.

Rearview: E.L. Doctorow's 'Ragtime'

In this Sunday's book section, our reviewer David Ulin notes, regretfully, that E.L. Doctorow's "Homer and Langley" just doesn't measure up to the novelist's past inventions. Among these, he includes "Ragtime," Doctorow's classic novel of New York City in the early 20th century. Geoffrey Wolf, in July 1975, was  captivated by that novel and its creator, writing in The Times:

The novelist E.L. Doctorow is loyal to nothing if not to excess and monomania, to men and women staring straight ahead at a mad goal while they walk straight toward it, across rivers and seas, and up the backs of their fellows, straight ahead, not giving a damn, till something -- often death itself -- blocks them.

Before turning to "Ragtime," however, Wolff first describes the author's achievement in his previous novels, "Welcome to Hard Times" and "The Book of Daniel," noting the obsessive attention in both of these books to ledgers and keeping records. Then, he opens the floodgates on his enthusiasm for the writer's new novel:

Doctorow does not cringe before the assaults launched against language, or what the jargonists call "communication." He is a true believer: words can be shaped and turned to uses no less beautiful for their utility. To tell stories is a sacred trust, and a possible calling. And to tell them well is to be attended, and redeemed.

Lord, he tells this one well. Houdini's escape -- will he get free? will he die? -- recover their full measure of suspense, despite the fact that we know their outcome. And his manipulation of historical personages, improving always on the impoverished truth, is both exuberant and controlled.