Category Archives: Book Reviews

Staff Picks: INRI

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Claire recommends INRI by Raúl Zurita, translated from the Spanish by William Rowe:

My first foray into the NYRB Poetry series and into the work of Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, and let me say: I’m entranced. Here is a poet who is simultaneously invested in the evolution of the soul, and in exposing the violent inhumanity of the political history of his native land, Chile.

In the Introduction to INRI, we learn that on the morning of September 11, 1973, the armed forces of Chile overthrew its socialist government, establishing General Augusto Pinochet at the head of a military dictatorship. Zurita—then only 22 years old—and thousands of others were herded into the National Stadium in Valparaíso. Zurita was later tortured, but eventually let go. During those years, thousands of Chileans “disappeared,” never to be seen or heard of again, while the authorities remained silent.

Though many Chileans emigrated, Zurita chose to stay in Chile, enduring the ruthless seventeen-year dictatorship. “I had to learn how to speak again from total wreckage, almost from madness, so that I could still say something to someone,” Zurita writes in a note at the end of INRI.

Fast-forward to January 8, 2001, when social-democratic President Ricardo Lagos made public some information pertaining to those still unaccounted for in the government-sponsored killings during the 1970s: these missing people had been kidnapped by militant forces, their eyes gouged out, and their bodies thrown from helicopters “into the ocean, the lakes, and the rivers of Chile” as well as the Atacama Desert in the north. After this announcement, reports and additional evidence started surfacing, and a kind of collective grief began to solidify in the memory of the people of Chile who lost loved ones, neighbors, friends to the senseless violence that marked that time in the country’s history.

It is from this tragic experience that INRI was born as a lament for the dead, and though it is heavily steeped in this set of circumstances, the poetry itself reads like a kind of disembodied incantation coming from the voices of the disappeared. The poems also move in and out of the voices of Chile’s landforms, divorcing the mountains, glaciers, oceans and deserts from the idea of a national ownership, just as the dead bodies of the disappeared were returned to a kind of nationlessness as they were thrown to their deaths.

But if the poetic sequences in INRI can be said to have a “speaker,” it is that of a vast and all-knowing entity like some form of the divine; it knows not only the sordid secrets that plague Chile’s history, but it knows the myriad internal experiences held in the minds of the disappeared, the dead, what occurs in silence, in isolation, at the bottom of the ocean, underneath the heaps of snow on the Andes, mechanisms at work at the atomic level.

This omnipotent voice moves in patterns, and one of the most compelling things about Zurita’s writing in INRI is the hymn-like repetition of words and phrases that accumulate like falling snow. But the repetition is not quite that; the words mutate and change completely each time they reappear. This snow heap of language gets lit up in every different perceivable color, viewed from all angles, including from inside its frozen core from which the voices of the dead speak.

But what was absolutely indispensable to me as a reader of poetry, and as a poet myself, the biggest and most triumphant quality of Zurita’s spirit as a poet is that the sequences in INRI culminate in a mantra of love, love that is so persistent, it survives the petty political contrivances of humanity, no matter how destructive they are, love that, even in the face of death and loss on a national scale, flows in the background of every terrible moment like the undulating lyric of ocean waves.

Reading this book during a time of quarantine has been a truly transformative experience, and I think the highest honor I have felt as an isolated creature has been this book’s reminder of my own empathic emotional self, that disembodied voice permissioning me to feel the full forces of grief and love, even in a state of isolation.

Staff Picks: The Factory

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Celia recommends The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada:

There’s a Lauren Berlant quotation that I think of sometimes, which goes like this: in the face of a life that isn’t meaningful, there is a “life drive psychosis, a radical splitting that makes it possible to live on by leeching the intensity that ordinary contact otherwise engenders.” Without hope, people embrace flatness, because flatness allows one to go on living in a situation that should be unendurable. Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory is a novel of flatness, one that embraces boredom and the very quiet horror of monotony. I’m not sure I’ve read anything quite like it. A lot of works that engage with the senselessness of life ask their readers to experience anguish or the shock of finding meaninglessness where you expected to find meaning. Oyamada asks you to live with the flatness of her characters, the ways in which their lives are hollowed out without their own awareness.

Reading this novel can feel a little bit like the endless distraction of doing busywork or scrolling through a phone, the way that a mind in search of distraction will pick up one task, then another, then change back to the first, holding each strand clear from the other with a kind of focused unenjoyment. The Factory follows three main characters, switching between their perspectives in alternating chapters, which don’t neatly align in terms of timeline. Ushiyama is a young woman who’s struggling to find a fulltime job. She interviews for a permanent position at the eponymous factory, a position for which she appears to be overqualified, only to be told that her employment history renders her ineligible and she might qualify instead as an hourly worker, shredding endless documents in a basement.

Her brother, meanwhile, is an engineer who’s recently lost his job when his company laid off most of its staff. He takes a proofreading position at the factory through the temp agency where his girlfriend works, and finds himself repeatedly falling asleep in his cubicle as he reads documents that are increasingly meaningless. Nobody minds or even notices that he sleeps through most of his shifts. No one appears to read or edit the documents that he proofreads. His days are punctuated by his lunch break, by the breaks his coworkers take to brush their teeth in the public bathroom.

The third narrator, Furufue, is a graduate student researching moss at a local university. He’s recruited by the factory to lead a green roofing project on the factory campus. The factory pays him a lavish salary and puts him up in a factory-owned house, but it slowly becomes clear that no one expects the project to go anywhere or cares if it does. Furufue is welcome to spend years wandering the factory and analyzing specimens of moss, and no one will ever ask him for anything or expect him to show what he’s accomplished. He lives in security, but without meaning or purpose. He can’t quite visualize the lives of the contingent workers around him. Surely everything is fine. It’s easy to live as long as you surrender to the fact that you’re unnecessary, and go on drawing your salary.

There’s a small cast of ancillary characters—coworkers, managers, a girlfriend—but the last main character is really the factory itself, a sprawling creature that includes offices, housing, restaurants and cafeterias, its own bus system, a carefully hierarchical system of access cards and security. It makes nothing. Or if it once made something, it’s so unimportant to its real function that no one can remember what it made or why. Its real function is to be a sort of monotony machine, an ecosystem of impoverishment.

The factory has its own animal life. There are coypu, giant semiaquatic rodents, and flocks of black birds called factory shags that are everywhere, in the first sentence of the novel and the last, and a colony of lizards that live in the washing machines and eat soap. They, stranded within the factory as on an island, become an object of fascination or frustration. A child trying to strike up a friendship with Furufue gives him a report about the factory animals, which, without explanation, arrives also on Ushiyama’s brother’s desk for proofreading (just as surely, it will later be shredded). It’s as if the most trivial and intangible things, the stuff a novel would usually be made of—the child’s curiosity and wonder, the secret lives of animals, the whole natural world—can all be fed into the factory’s machinery and emerge as an artifact that makes you want to sleep through the day to avoid it.

Then too, The Factory’s stream of narration is itself fragmentary, cutting between points in time without warning or pattern. The effect is to create a sort of narrative determinism: when Ushiyama stands outside a restaurant with a man she’s just met, half hoping and half dreading that he’ll ask her to eat lunch with him, the novel lurches without transition into the aftermath of that lunch, and then back to the moment that he asks her. There’s a misery and an embarrassment in knowing what’s going to happen, especially when the future isn’t particularly novel or good, but just a continuation of the same senseless sequence of events.

Is there, then, any hope? The factory is not without its pleasures, but they are mostly perverse ones: the relief of work that doesn’t require you to think, the safety of isolation and indifference, the comfort of being underpaid but not destitute, of having nothing asked of you, of sitting on a shelf in a room whose door no one ever opens, of accepting that you are worth as little as the world claims. If there is an escape, I think it might be not in joy but in anguish, as when Ushiyama, near the end of the novel, thinks, “I want to work and I’m lucky enough to be able to work. Of course I’m grateful for that. How could I not be? Except, well, I don’t want to work… Life has nothing to do with work and work has no real bearing on life.” Life is somewhere else, but it is inaccessible. It is in the voice that asks, Please, give me beauty, love, compassion, even suffering, but send me something that allows me to feel.

Staff Picks: Insel

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Celia recommends Insel by Mina Loy:

Mina Loy, of the many names! Most people who know her, I think, know her as a poet, for her volume Lunar Baedeckers. But she was also, by turns, an artist, novelist, designer, inventor of various practical and fanciful contraptions, and an intimate but aloof observer of just about any early twentieth-century avant-garde movement you’d care to name. Currently, I’m writing about her novel Insel, a self-contained segment of a larger autobiographical project, which was called “Islands in the Air” and deemed unpublishable in Loy’s lifetime.

Insel is a fascinating prose experiment, marked by Loy’s poetic interest in the strangeness of language. Loy’s prose has one foot in academic jargon and the other in playground babble. She mixes French and German phrases liberally into her English, and, in high Surrealist fashion1, has great fun displacing words from their accepted contexts so that they sound strange and incomprehensible.2 She likes to insert a dependent clause in odd places, so that her twisty sentences have an element of the maze in them, leaving you to wander through them two or three times before you figure out where you’ve gone off course.

At the same time, Insel is a roman à clef about Loy’s friendship with the German painter Richard Oelze. The novel finds her—or rather, her heroine, Mrs. Jones—in Surrealist Paris in the early ‘30s, largely oblivious, as yet, to the war that hangs on the horizon, working as an art dealer for a gallery based in New York. Here she meets Insel, a feckless and impoverished painter who looks like a death’s head ravaged by black magic, who boasts loudly that he is starving to death, whose clothes are held together mostly by the dirt in their seams, and whose cadaverous and horrifying body sometimes dissolves, without warning, into an unearthly halo of psychic rays.3 Why is Mrs. Jones so drawn to him? Because he is more surreal than the Surrealists, because he seems to live in a waking dream, because despite her occasional disdain, they communicate on a psychic level at which mere personality disintegrates. Also, she’d have the reader know, she’s not drawn to him and she doesn’t like him. She merely admires his paintings, sort of, when he manages to work on them at all, which isn’t often.

An exile from Germany in 1933, Insel is, as Mrs. Jones puts it, “in a fix—for, in the ‘event’ being a German, here he was an enemy, whereas if he could return to Germany, there he was Kultur Bolshevik” (this is, remember, around the time the Nazis were purging so-called decadent artists).

Moreover, he’s destitute, and quite possibly in thrall to a morphine addiction.4 Despite the best efforts of Mrs. Jones and the Quaker charities of Paris, Insel is withering away in apparent starvation, looking ghastlier every time she sees him.

This is not to say that Insel is an object of pity. Despite the ethereal and visionary qualities that draw Mrs. Jones to him and the desperation of his poverty, he is also capable of a great deal of awfulness. When a girlfriend leaves him for another woman, he threatens to shoot them both—and, lest the reader find this threat unserious, he repeats the story for effect and gaily describes to Mrs. Jones how the two women hid together in their apartment for days while he waited outside on the street, so afraid were they that he’d make good on his threat. He gets into an argument with a black woman—maybe another lover, maybe a sex worker—in a café and slaps her across the face, to Mrs. Jones’s dismay.

Still, Mrs. Jones is largely untouched by his misogyny, protected by a kind of armor that might be that of her relative prosperity, her status as the collector who can get his art into the gallery or drop him, or might have to do with age. One friend of Insel’s, meeting her for the first time, is “appreciative until he discovered the hair in the shadow of my hat to be undeniably white— [whereon he] apologized with a shudder, ‘I won’t say it doesn’t look alright on you—but I can’t bear the sight. It reminds me that I am old.’” She recognizes that Insel frequently looks at her as if she were a sort of beefsteak, an amorous adventure rolled up with a nice wad of cash, but she doesn’t particularly care. Afflicted by the pain of “what turned out eventually to be a duodenal ulcer,” she lies down in his apartment and pretends to writhe in an agony of unrequited love for him. And oh, isn’t it funny, she seems to ask him, that you think this is the real thing?

And yet despite her determined refusal to empathize with his suffering, she is drawn to him. “Remember,” she tells herself sternly, “you don’t give a damn what happens to this thin man.” Then he gets an eviction notice, and she invites him to stay in her apartment while she’s at a country house. She is horrified when he takes her up on it, and then hurt when he never shows up after all.

Imagining him inhabiting her apartment, she works herself into a terror that she might have accidentally switched a bottle of gin with some leftover bleach in a gin bottle, and admonishes Insel, by telegram, to please drink absolutely nothing out of any kind of bottle in her house. It’s lost on absolutely no one that the root of this anxiety about poison is really that she’s worried Insel might be making himself at home in her house, touching her glassware, and, despite having invited him, she’d prefer it if he didn’t. Before letting him into the house, she’s collected all her papers out of her drawers, sewn them up in a kind of body bag contraption made out of an old and voluminous painting apron, and locked them alone in a spare room, where they lie like an inert and wordy Mrs. Rochester. They’re an uncomfortable pair, these two—Insel with his barely-restrained hunger and disdain for women, and Mrs. Jones, whose experiences of psychic transcendence are tempered by the protection of her money, and her almost touristic curiosity about the squalor of Insel’s life.

At this point, one could be forgiven for thinking that what we’re dealing with here is basically a realist novel set in the milieu of the Surrealists, but if I leave you with that impression I will have done a terrible job of describing exactly what is so strange and marvelous about this book. The realist concerns of setting and character, here, are to a great extent only the undercurrent beneath Loy’s greater concern, which is the lived experience of Surrealism and psychic derangement, and how to express these uneasy experiences of art within the framework of a quotidian, chance relationship. Like Breton’s Nadja, Insel provides Mrs. Jones with an opportunity for what she calls “psychic research”—a term whose suggestions of voyeurism and power struggle Loy treats with rather more self-awareness than Breton.

While their early meetings are marked only by a weird synchronicity and Mrs. Jone’s indefinable sense of a shrouding black magic, as their friendship continues, strange things begin to happen. First of all, there is Mrs. Jones’s consciousness of Insel’s rays, or Strahlen, as she says in German (Insel is proficient in neither French nor English, and they speak to each other in a mishmash of languages), which emanate from him at odd moments, with such force that they erase his skeletal, dirty body. Or there is the day that, after spending a night drinking with Insel, Mrs. Jones is walking down the street and finds that “… I was cleft in half. Like the witch’s cat when cut apart running in opposite directions, suddenly my left leg began to dance off on its own.” Insel’s eyes become oysters swimming in strange constellations. His arms extend to fantastic lengths. He is a sick clochard, perhaps sick unto death, he is a mean and sadistic piece of work, but he’s also held together by some force of psychic power which fascinates Mrs. Jones, and without which she suspects he would simply fall apart into his component pieces.

Near the end of their relationship, Mrs. Jones confronts Insel, longing to tell him this: “I have absorbed all of your Strahlen. Now what are you going to do?” As if she might be able, truly, to vampirize him and absorb his madness and the enormous wasted potential of his art. No sooner has she thought it than she must admit that it isn’t true. She’s been an observer. And now she has seen enough.

  1. To be clear: Loy did not self-identify as a Surrealist, having too little patience for the fussy hierarchies that André Breton liked to impose on his followers. Mrs. Jones, the narrator of Insel, frequently pauses to mock the Surrealists for not, as it were, practicing what they preached.
  2. A certain cast of light, for instance, is penetrant, a word which, with its aural echo of penitent, I was sure that Loy had simply invented, but which turns out to mean, variously, “a compound that penetrates the skin, as in a lotion,” “a substance that lowers the surface tension of water,” and “a large nematocyst discharging a barbed thread that penetrates the body of its prey and injects a toxic fluid,” in addition to being a banal synonym for penetrating.
  3. Yes, psychic rays. We’ll get back to that.
  4. Mrs. Jones hears this rumor about his morphine use only some time into her acquaintance with Insel, and prefers to erase it from her memory, even as the money that she and other friends loan Insel consistently disappears into the ether, and he looks more and more ill. Loy herself was rumored to have helped Oelze quit his own morphine addiction, and there’s some evidence that she erased references to drug use from successive editions of the manuscript of Insel. A separate novel fragment, appended to this edition, describes him rather lovingly as “my drug addict.”

Staff Picks: Advantages of Being Evergreen

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Claire recommends Advantages of Being Evergreen by Oliver Baez Bendorf:

Advantages of Being Evergreen was the winner of the 2018 CSU Poetry Center Open Book Competition, selected by Samuel Amadon, Leora Fridman, and Jane Lewty. Published in September 2019, this is a fresh book of poetry and a fresh prayer of transformation.

Here is a book rooted in identity that does not seek definition in terms of what it is not, but rather defines the self through aggregation—a self that takes up as much sacred space as it needs without asking for, or receiving, permission. These poems do not remain uniform or predictable for the comfort of the observer, but evade strict formal, or even tonal categorization, in search of a more authentic and wild representation of a life lived intuitively.

I find that the titular concept of ‘Being Evergreen’ surfaces in these poems as a kind of homage to the transcendental power of resilience in the Trans experience, describing the self in its many undulating forms, nebulous, indestructible, branching out green and alive through all seasons. From the poem “Evergreen”:

What still grows in winter? / Fingernails of witches and femmes

What is evergreen, even in winter? Bodies, the poem points out. But not just any bodies—these are magical bodies, femme bodies that are perpetually in a stage of growth because they are forever in a state of transformation. Not even winter, or, let’s say, the heteronormative gender binary, can stop this transformation from happening. Here, the body is not a fixed object; it is turbulent and changeable as water, as in “Oracle”:…

today, I am a static channel / carrying the weight of logic

And Witches, water is the element of this book. In it, the speaker finds the archetypal site of the sacred rite of passage, and of eternal change. Always in flux, slowly bending and transfiguring the world over time, water seems to be where this speaker is drawn. These poems go to the river to find love, give their body over to the river stones:

River rock digs into my shoulders / like a lover who knows I don’t want / power.

Indeed, the river is the site and symbol of identity in this book:

I become my wildest self / through make-believe—to the river with this thunderous me: carrier and / carried

as well as a place to simply be held:

What I want from the river is what I always want:/ to be held by a stronger thing that, in the end, chooses mercy

Though water is essential to the life of these poems, they wonder also at the rest of the natural world, its weirdness and monstrosity, the way we ourselves mirror it. They relish in the shared monstrosity of body and earth, as in the poem “Witch Kept”:

… fur that creeps down / my belly and out / my thighs—I become a / wolf so that I may / speak to / my grandmother

In this pursuit of a connection with the primal, the poems in Evergreen sometimes reach a state of ecstasy that is undoubtedly spiritual:

over the lake / moonbeams reach / and reach for me, / spider arms smack / me over whose knee, and I howl.

Reminiscent of fairy tale, this poem is actively communing with ancestors via bodily transformation, a séance uniting the ideas of gender, animal nature and personal origin. This book brings a witchy queerness to these ideas that expands the Whitmanic notion that “I contain multitudes” in service of inclusivity. Here, that idea is a resistance to the history of oppression through language by trying on different monikers like linguistic costumes, embodying the essential spirit of both/and.

These poems are prayers, spells, incantations; populated by the ferocity of the natural world, the most tender corners of the human psyche, as well as witches, wolves, ancestors, ghosts, and voices that speak to us form beyond the known world. I can’t think of a single reason not to read it.

Staff Picks: The Bog People

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Celia recommends The Bog People by P.V. Glob:

Have you heard the story of the bog bodies, dear reader? It begins long ago and far away, and is the kind of tale you might want to read in the dark of the year, when the nights (even in Austin) are getting cold, and the days are shorter and shorter. It begins like this:

Sometimes a bog spits up a body, deceased but so perfectly preserved that no untrained eye could tell you whether it’s a few weeks or many centuries old. And they are centuries old, many of them, and they have been discovered for centuries on end, by people cutting peat by hand or with machinery, who go into the bog for fuel to burn in the hearth and emerge with something other. The tannins in bog water, working in the right conditions, turn the human body into leather, and so you’re left with a corpse that looks ageless, hardened off by time and weather but still so intact that you could take its fingerprints. So intact that you can tell whether its owner wore their hair loose or in braids. That’s sometimes. Sometimes, also, you find a body that is strange, compressed by the weight of the peat above it, or partially dissolved, leaving only a strange, vampiric castoff to history, a ghost of a corpse.

It’s impossible to talk about this book without talking about its photos, which are uncanny and upsetting and which capture the physicality of their subjects so distinctly that they seem to open the door into another, timeless dimension. I suspect that you will either hate them and want to look away or find them fascinating. To me, what is fascinating in them is the apparent care and attention with which the uncaring processes of nature have scooped these bodies of men and women out of the past and delivered them, whole or almost whole, into the present.

In the face of this otherworldliness, P.V. Glob’s narration is oddly steadfast and charming. A Danish archaeologist who examined many of the bog bodies first hand, Glob dedicates the book to a group of schoolgirls who had written him a letter years earlier about his work on one famous discovery. He remarks, apologetically, that the children who wrote to him at that time are doubtless grown up now: “I have all too little time, and so it has taken me a long while to finish my letter.”

The book that follows is part archaeological mystery, part academic treatise, and part idiosyncratic reflection of the person who produced it. Glob’s writing charitably pauses to explain the practice of carbon dating (perhaps less well known to the general public in the ‘60s, when he was writing) and pollen analysis. He transcribes, somewhat cantankerously, a rude poem printed in the Danish tabloids after the discovery of a body in a fen near Grauballe, the better to dismantle its argument. Describing how a man had a heart attack attempting to remove a body from the bog where it lay, he writes: “The bog took a life for a life; or, as some may prefer to think, the old gods took a modern man in place of the man from the past.”

One feels that Glob, too, is toying with the idea that the old gods to which (he believes) the old residents of Tolund and Grauballe sacrificed the people in the bog might still reach into the present day through the bodies of those that were dedicated to them. And his work is at its haunting best when he is observing those bodies, their clothes, hair, and teeth, the mystery through which they’ve come into the present. The science of archaeology has progressed somewhat since The Bog People, but the moment that Glob captures of being face-to-face with deep history, and trying to push a candle a little forward into the darkness, remains haunting.

Staff Picks: I Used to Be Charming

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Julie recommends I Used to Be Charming by Eve Babitz:

I’ve read everything by Eve Babitz except for her nonfiction books Fiorucci, the Book; and Two by Two: Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night, and only because the former costs an armload and the latter would have required making a purchase online (gross).

I only mention this by way of saying that I’m not a binge reader of any author’s work (I need time for TV), but with Eve Babitz, it’s different. If she wrote the airplane flight safety guide, I’d read it. If she wrote the menu at The Cheesecake Factory, I’d gobble it down. If she scrawled a single word under a bridge, I’d brave my fear of murderers just to decipher the code.

When I told a fellow bookseller that if I had read Eve Babitz in my early twenties my life might have been very different, I wasn’t kidding. Perhaps I would have dropped out of college. Perhaps I would have bought a hotrod (a 1969 Pontiac GTO). Perhaps I would have ignored everyone who told me, “L.A. sucks, don’t move there.” Instead, I had to wait until my late thirties—a time when I’m officially going gray, a time when my idea of a wild night means renting DVDs from the public library—to finally find an author that I connect with, because if I know anything about reading Eve Babitz it’s that it’s very difficult not to become attached, or see her as a long-lost friend.

And pretty much everyone wants to be her friend (and/or ally). When Eve Babitz called into C-SPAN’s Book TV to say hello to Joan Didion, Didion smiled wide and said, “Hi Evie.” Eve didn’t ask her a “literary question”—she wanted to know about Didion’s fancy china and how she managed to put together such fabulous dinner parties with so many people passed out on the floor; it’s hilarious.

Eve Babitz dissolves the barrier between formal and informal, high art and low, celebrity hunk and average Joe; she writes books you can be yourself in the midst of—and you can bet money that my copy of Black Swans contains cookie crumbs and chocolate ice-cream stains.

It’s true, I have a bad habit of talking about the authors that I love like I hang out with them in my head, and I do. This means that I fail, as a reviewer, to speak cogently about the actual book. I neglect to talk about craft and voice and sentences, so here’s my one-line summation of Eve Babitz’s prose:

It’s great!

Nouns, verbs, and the other stuff, it’s all there and it works. I have so many favorite essays in I Used to Be Charming, it’s impossible to pick; they all reach out, whisper in your ear, and make you feel like you’re in on a daring heist—these are the sort of essays that’ll make you forget to put on your seatbelt.

In “My Life in a 36DD Bra, or, The All-American Obsession,” the essay begins in her quintessential deadpan style:

When I was fifteen years old, I bought and filled my first 36DD bra. Since then, no man has ever made a serious pass at me without assuring me in the first hour that he was a leg man.

In another piece, “Great Legs,” Babitz proves that two can play at the objectification game. Calling herself an “appreciative student of men’s legs,” she outlines all of the preferred types in ascending order:

There are, it seems to me, three basic styles of great [legs]: cowboy, athletic, and my beloved scrawny rock and roll. The cowboy legs most women can’t help feeling weak in the knees about are Clint Eastwood’s in those Sergio Leone movies. They are so graceful and divine that even my grandmother, dozing before the TV, sits up the minute the flute solo comes on.

I get her point, but I’m more of a butt gal.

In choosing Molly Lambert to do the introduction, NYRB made a good call. Lambert doesn’t attempt to close read in that way that twists your brain into a knot, nor does she fan-girl in that way that sucks all the fun out. She tells it straight about the city Eve adores: “Anyone who thinks Los Angeles is only gorgeous would-be starlets dangling over the maw of destruction has never had jury duty here.”

Like Babitz, Lambert is a true-blue Angeleno, aware of the hustle of being a writer in a city that’s shifting like a rubik’s cube. She writes:

The cost of living in L.A. has gone up absurdly…even as wages have stagnated, leading to a housing crisis that has pushed thousands of people into tent villages all over the city.

Loving a city doesn’t mean overlooking its flaws and injustices, nor does it mean ignoring how hard it is sometimes to survive. In the title essay Babitz writes:

I once read in The Village Voice that an artist was anyone over twenty-five without health insurance—well, that was me alright: over fifty without health insurance.

I finished the book with a feeling of deep gratitude that Eve Babitz exists. She produced a body of work—many pieces appearing in “women’s” magazines like Ms., Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Self—in a voice so distinctive, writers today have to envy her and an era when editors didn’t squash out personality in favor of a uniform (snooze-fest) house style. In short, Eve Babitz can only write like Eve Babtiz.

Lambert gets it right when she states that:

To be a female artist is to put your own stubborn obsessions above all else in a world that still expects you to take care of other people while setting your own obsessive interests aside.

She reminds us that “Eve Babitz was of the first generation of women who really had it in their power to decide not to get married or have children.”

I always thought you had to be a sexless schoolmarm in order to become a great writer, but Eve Babitz disproves this. Foot-shuffling aside, I arrive at the point where I state the obvious, I Used to Be Charming is not a Babitz book one can live without, or you could, but it wouldn’t be fun.

* In true Hollywood style, I would like to thank everyone who made this review possible. To Joe Bratcher and Becky Garcia, for giving me a job. To Tracey, for keeping an eye on my tenses. To NYRB, for sending us cool stuff. To my mom, for letting me bake for nine months. And lastly, to Eve Babitz for not dying from smoke inhalation or over boogie.