The book takes place over the course of maybe one hour, but the tension and the flashbacks make the snail-pace at which the two newly weds (both virgins) move towards the bedroom to consummate their marriage run like a thriller. But McEwan knows the writing game well, and just when you think a denouement has been reached, he turns time to fast-forward, leaping decades into the future to leave the reader breathless, unconscious and violently aware of the passage of time. That McEwan – as opposed to other writers I’ve read recently who employed this technique – also suggests that the blunders of youth could turn into tremendous regrets doesn’t help.

Yes, we’re small against the background of history. Yes, we do foolish things and think they mean everything when in the context of one’s life, they are small. But, McEwan says, what if they ARE everything? Or, more accurately put, what if those things do change everything and 40 years later we actively regret the outcome, without realizing it could have ended differently if only one extra word had been spoken.

It began Tuesday night, when Martha McPhee’s heart-breaking book “L’America” reminded me of how our choices open us up to unforeseen events, which will—when the lights go off—define our life. Beth and Cesare met because their seemingly inconsequential decisions brought them to the coast of Greece at the same time. Choices about who they wanted and/or had to be eventually kept them apart (Beth was American, Cesare was Italian), but they never forgot. They, like all of us, were “ordinary people engaged in ordinary lives that amount to everything.”

This is that kind of story.

Late Saturday afternoon, panic began creeping in. I was going to be alone that night and that didn’t sit well with me. Especially not after spending Friday night in the company of the Boston hipster establishment, sipping tall-boy PBRs, and using the wrongest pickup conversation topics January has seen.

Eventually, I decided to suck it up, spend Saturday night at home, and crawl into bed with a book. Not a bad idea, since it’s finally warm in my room after I isolated a leaky window using double sided tape and a plastic sheet—crafty and homelessy at the same time. I decided it was time to read Paul Auster’s “The Brooklyn Follies” and four hours later I welcomed midnight by finishing it and nodding in approval at my decision to read it. The book was also about chances, randomness, love (though less personal and more directed to humankind), the stupidity of men, and about never underestimating the power of surprise this thing called life holds. When Nathan Glass, the narrator of this tale, shows up to his surprise 60th birthday party, he wisely proclaims (quoting a Mets manager): “There comes a time in everyone’s life, and I had plenty of them.”

This made roll around in laughter. My good friend Adi sometimes uses the first part of that sentence and I knew I never quite found the perfect ending to it. Now I had it.

But this story, while about randomness, is not about Adi or about parties. It’s about my mouth—sort of.

I turned off the light ready for sleep and that’s when I heard my landlord/roommate return home with her date (both of them in their mid to late 40s). They were laughing and being noisy, which was rare. Was that spanking I heard? And what about the ripping noise? Are they peeling wallpaper? At 1 AM? And what’s with the pounding? Are they hammering? Are they changing the art on the walls? That sounds like too many new nails. Are they hanging a shower curtain across the living room?

Needless to say I fell asleep in a state of utter confusion. It wasn’t enough that Paul Auster made me think of what to do with my life, but now I was also stuck with the mystery of the deep night noises.

I woke up late. 10 AM. Very unlike me. Still, I felt good. My mind was sharp, and the room was still warm. This was going to be a good Sunday. I dragged myself slowly to the kitchen, and then I saw it.

An axe was on the floor, in the middle of the living room. So was half of a big ass log (I live in the city, not in the woods!) and debris all around it. I looked at the fireplace and saw another big ass log was lying there bored as shit, smoking itself out. In the three months I’ve lived here the fireplace has been used for storage, but some kind of “spontaneous things to do” list must have told my landlord to chop wood at 1 AM and get it going. As simple as that I had solved the mystery of the noise, which only made the omelet and toast taste better.

I then rushed off to the gym, where just a few days earlier—the same day I finished “L’America”—I found out I weighed less than I expected and decided I should diversify my diet of cereal, eggs and yoghurt (and the occasional vodka tonics).

After the gym I stopped at the grocery store to buy detergent, but I didn’t have enough money for my trusty Tide. But I did have enough for a medium non-fat latte (which I picked up at my favorite neighborhood coffee shop), and then walked home to the beat of Dr. Alban’s early 1990s hit “It’s my life.” The latter was hot and a pleasure to hold in the friggin’ cold. But it was sunny outside so I didn’t care about the cold. Life was good. In a few hours, the Saints would face the Bears for a place in the Super Bowl and that gave me goose bumps (I’m buying a Drew Brees) jersey if the Saints make it there). The mailbox hid the last issue of Wired, as well as the my first New Yorker in a while (after reading two great essays on literature by Orhan Pamuk and Milan Kundera I had decided it was time to subscribe again). This was a great Sunday.

But this story is about what happened after I climbed the stairs to my second floor apartment and opened the door.

My landlord apologized for the wood chopping and the mess, and I said I hadn’t heard a thing. It was no big deal and I like the occasional mystery. But as I started down the hallway to my room, the toilet flushed and the man walked out of the bathroom. With foam in the corners of his mouth, he was vigorously brushing his teeth using a white toothbrush with blue rubber grip.

MY TOOTHBRUSH!

This is a story about returning home, coffee in hand, smile firmly planted on your face and finding a man in his late 40s, forcefully working the inside and outside of his teeth with your toothbrush. And for all you know, this probably wasn’t the first time he did it.

I am not one to be easily grossed out. I have let women use my toothbrush, and I have used the toothbrushes of others. I ate food of the floor. I ate candy and snacks that I found inside the sofa. I bought and worn second-hand underwear. I sat on dubious toilets. I ate my boogers, grass, paper and drank oil (some of these were done unintentionally). I even spent the better part of an hour sniffing somebody to figure out where a certain funky odor was coming from (to my surprise, it was her belly button).

But seeing this man with my toothbrush in his mouth was too much. I imagined he had used the last time he was here as well. Maybe he’s been using it since Christmas. Or earlier. Maybe we’ve both been doing the same brush for a while, utterly oblivious of its duplicity. This was just too much. Not only do I not know this man, but the thought of brushing my teeth with the same toothbrush he used made me feel I tasted the 1970s and 1980s in rapid succession. I had contemporary American history in my mouth. Decades of it. I brushed my left side with the Reagan years. The left maybe with a failed marriage. Certainly with my landlord. Maybe with one of those dry-mouth hangovers. The memories of some nasty colds in the 1990s. Who the hell knows?

There is only so much history I’m willing to stick and hold inside my mouth. I’m sensitive like that.

I took in a deep breath and quickly said a mental goodbye to the toothbrush. I grabbed my wallet and rushed out to get a new one, along with the detergent I previously had no money for. As I walked out I realized that if I had had enough money for the detergent earlier, the time I would have spent with the cashier would have made me miss the toothbrush episode. It would have negated me the truth about what I put in my mouth.

Life is random my friends. And what you put into your mouth matters. My new toothbrush will now be located in my room.

* Post written to the sounds of The Umbrellas and stellastarr*.

Boym quotes Dubravka Ugresic talking about her experience of being in Amsterdam with a Croatian passport:

“My problem is of a different nature,” writes Ugresic. “My problem consists in the fact that I am not and do not wish to be different. My difference and my identity are doggedly determined by others. Those at home and there outside.”

Boym continues:

Thus the border crossing to the West reinforces identity politics that one hoped to escape. Recognition of difference results in a nonrecognition of communality, of the other’s aspiration to be treated as an individual, not a member of a blood group or a nation state. (…) The Easterners end up being the most consistent liberals–not only political liberals but also existential and aesthetic ones. While writing about memory, East Central European writers refute the idea that a national community or a nation-state is the sole treasurer of memories.

I know Eastern and Central Europeans are far from this ideal description (we are plenty racist and well schooled in identity politics), but I quote it because it aptly reflects what I often felt in America. Trying to join in on conversations about the American present of politics, sports and entertainment, I was frequently labeled as “the Romanian,” some guy processing reality through his Romanian-self. I know this was done mostly out of courtesy, as if recognizing my origins would flatter me.

It didn’t flatter me, and it occasionally annoyed me (I did rant on similar issues before). I did not want to always be “the other,” I just wanted to be one of many. But this equality rarelly works well in practice, does it?

When Alice died, I was going over the galleys of a novel about parking in New York—a subject so silly that I think I would have hesitated to submit the book to a publisher if she hadn’t, somewhat to her surprise, liked it. When the novel was published, the dedication said, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.”

Music: Boston’s Dear Leader. Their record “The Alarmist” is a straight forward rock record, but the coarse groans of their front-man makes it a worthy ride.

Television: The NFL Wild Card weekend. Yes, I am a sucker for American football, and the last quarter of the Dallas – Seattle game only reinforced this guilty pleasure.

Movies: “Notes on a Scandal.” Yes, Judy Dench is always unbelievably good, but who knew Cate Blanchett, who has played an elf queen and a slain journalist in her career, could be so arousing as an upper-middle class tormented school teacher?

They are, in no particular order, Jonathan Safran Foer (“Everything is Illuminated” and “”Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”), Gary Shteyngart (“The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” and “Absurdistan”) and Benjamin Kunkel (“Indecision”). (Follow the links for more info on the authors and their books).

These young writers are hilarious, touching, but most of all, incredible storytellers and character builders. One might argue almost all the characters, including Foer’s 10-year-old Oskar, are on a quest to find themselves and their place in the world. In addition, Shteyngart’s Russian men are two of a kind in their dimwitted capacity to overcome the weirdest and deadliest of Central and Eastern Europe’s problems. And Kunkel’s Dwight, well, it’s hard to decide, dude.

Go here for some of my rants on Foer. Read on for some amazing excerpts from Shteyngart and Kunkel.

From “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook”:

* Scene takes place in the early 1990s in a Prague club populated by the hip, family-financed American expats. They had just been insulted by music choice (“How Cleveland,” one said) and are now staring at some regular young American tourists in Ohio State tees, carrying backpacks:

“They are our mortal enemies. They must be destroyed, torn apart by the babushkas like a ham on Christmas, dragged by the trams through the twelve bridges of Prava, hung from the highest spire of St. Stanislaus.”

* On picking a movie in early 1990s Prague:

According to the paper, Prava was awash with Hollywood movies, each stupider than the next. They finally settled on a drama about a gay lawyer with AIDS, which was apparently a big hit in the States and was approved by many of that nation’s sensitive people.

* American-Russian hero Vladimir pondering introducing his girlfriend to the Russian mobster he works for.

Vladimir imagined Morgan and the Groundhog breaking break at the weekly biznesmenski lunch, with its customary postprandial discharge of weapons, deflowered Kasino girls going down on the Hog to the tune of ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me,” Gusev drunkenly railing against the Yid-Masonic global conspiracy.

* I reproduced a lovely segment featuring Vladimir and Morgan here.

From “Indecision”:

* Dwight tells Brigid about his desire to not be so indecisive anymore and take action.

“But a convert to what do you mean?”
“I don’t know. To action! I was tired of doing just maintenance work on my life. You know, put on clothes, do laundry. Eat food, brush teeth. Excrete waste. Go to work. Have or seek girlfriend—“

* Dwight on modern life.

In my experience when a person doesn’t know what to do with himself, he will check his email.

* One of Dwight’s friend mocks the hero’s recent conversion to decisiveness.

“So in Ecuador you had a midlife crisis,” Dan said. “Dwight, people don’t do this anymore. You don’t fly to Latin America, take psychedelic drugs, and find sexual liberation with some suntanned goddess of international socialism. Excuse me,” he said to Brigid. Then back to me: “Now is not thirty-five years ago.”

I’ll let the author, Gary Shteyngart, pick up from here (passage is from “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook“):

“See, here’s the thing about you, Vladimir,” she said. “I like you because you’re nothing like my boyfriends back home and you’re nothing like Tomas either… You’re worthwhile and interesting, but at the same time you’re… You’re partly American, too. Yeah, that’s it! You’re needy in a kind of foreign way, but you’ve also got these…American qualities. So we have these overlaps. You can’t imagine some of the problems I had with Tomas…He was just…”

Too much of a good thing, Vladimir thought. Well then, here was the scorecard: Vladimir was fifty percent functional American, and fifty percent cultured Eastern European in need of a haircut and a bath. He was the best of the best worlds. Historically, a little dangerous, but, for the most part, nicely tamed by Coca-Cola, blue-light specials, and the prospect of a quick pee during commercial breaks.

“And we can go back to the States when all this is over,” Morgan said, grabbing his hand and starting to pull him back to her panelak with its promise of stale Hungarian salami and a glowing space heater. “We can go home!” she said.

Cut to a theater in Cambridge, Mass. five minutes walk from Harvard Square, the throbbing corner of the East Coast where intelligentsia meets tourism. I am sitting on a bar stool watching Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls drilling mercilessly into her piano, her grin rouge red and her feet encased in stockings. By her side, Brian Viglione buries the sticks into his drums and the waves of sounds wash over the audience, drowning the Onion Cellar, that special place where there is no barrier between your personal fears and the audience. The Dolls are the house band of this dreamy performance club where you pour your heart out, and rejuvenated by this confessional experience, you emerge new (the idea comes from Gunther Grass’ Tin Drum).

I sit there and think of what a perfect metaphor the Onion Cellar is for this age of gentle voyeuristic self-revelation. I think of much I want to shout that out, of how important I believe this story of people’s need to confess and hear the confessions of others to be in the modern context (Ira does, too). I think of how much the Onion Cellar ideas says about who we are, about why we’ll blog about the show (how meta…) and about what answers we’re looking for in the stories (and songs) of others.

For a split second I briefly think of Vladimir’s riotously disjointed self and for another one, fancy myself just as confused about my place and my own story. That’s when a flier lands in my hands. The Dolls are subjecting the audience to the same torment they’re taking the characters through.

Share and be re-born!

I look at my question. Of course, I mumble to myself. It’s the question I’ve been asking myself a lot as I ponder a potential return to what I still call “home.” The question reads: “If you could change your job, what would you do instead?” I grin, I stop for a second and then I reach for a pen. For Vladimir, for Manea, for myself, for whomever cares, I write:

“The same thing–except that I want to do it for MYSELF.”

I hand that to the staff and sigh. Was that enough?

I don’t know. My reply wasn’t a protest or a cry for help. I don’t want Morgan to pull me home. I want to pull myself home, wherever that is. And once there, I want to tell the story of the Onion Cellar, and all the other stories that make up the world we live in today. I want, as Amanda Palmer cries in the closing song of the show to…. “just sing.”

There is thing keeping everyone’s lungs and lips locked
It is called fear and it’s seeing a great renaissance
After the show you can not sing wherever you want
But for now let’s just pretend we’re all gonna get bombed
So sing…

I just finished reading the second one; a book that follows nine-year-old Oskar Schell’s quest to understand the death of his father in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Oskar’s mission spans the whole city of New York and involves dozens of people named Black, who Oskar seeks out because he is trying to find the origin of a mysterious key found in an envelope that had “Black” inscribed on it.

Here is Oskar talking to one of the Blacks, an old reporter who had fought three wars and had passed the 100 mark. Black tells Oskar about one of the stories he reported on when he was young and makes a heart-warming point about the importance of stories. The sucker for stories in me fell for this one right away:

“I once went to report on a village in Russia, a community of artists who were forced to flee the cities! I’d heard that paintings hung everywhere! I heard you couldn’t see the walls through all of the paintings! They’d painted the ceilings, the plates, the windows, the lampshades! Was it an act of rebellion! An act of expression! Were the paintings good, or was that beside the point! I needed to see it for myself, and I needed to tell the world about it! I used to live for reporting like that!

Stalin found out about the community and sent his thugs in, just a few days before I got there, to break all of their arms! That was worse than killing them! It was a horrible sight, Oskar: their arms in crude splints, straight in front of them like zombies! They couldn’t feed themselves, because they couldn’t get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did!”

“They starved?”

“They fed each other! That’s the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!”

“I don’t believe in the afterlife.”

“Neither do I, but I believe in the story.”

Some context first. I’ve not read anything of Boia before (he is a history professor at the University of Bucharest) or heard much about him. I picked up the book last winter on a visit home because I had become haunted by the question of Romania. What is Romania? It was a natural progression after asking for more than two years: “What is America?” As the answers to my second questions kept coming I realized I lacked that knowledge about my country. I wanted to be able to grasp intellectually what my country meant and needed some material to turn to.

Boia sets out to answer this question in his book and in my mind, he does a decent job of it. What he says is something I have been feeling but probably never articulated quite so forcefully: Romania is not a mythical entity, nor a chosen land with a people tricked by history, nor an idea always persecuted and undermined by the vile West. It’s just another country with its ups and downs, highs and lows, succeses and failures.

In dissecting the historical record of the language, the people, the territories, Boia doesn’t necessarily bring out new facts to life, but he offers a non-partisan and non-nationalistic view of the Romanian nation. This is not a patriotic treaty of victimisation, and it is its straight forwardness that has sparked my anger.

Not at Boia, but at the people who taught me I should believe in rotten revisionism, the story of a country that could have been more if it weren’t made to fight off invaders and protect Europe. What loads of bullshit. Certainly, every country has its myths and every country cultivates nationalism to various degrees. Still, I can’t help feeling betrayed by communism and the first decade that followed its toppling for wanting to eliminate my capacity to be critical of my country, its history and its culture.

When this winter I criticized my country in an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, I was branded as a traitor, someone who doesn’t respect or love the homeland. It is this victim-prone heritage and the incapacity of being self-critical that Boia criticizes (he has been in turn branded as being anti-Romani) and that many of my fellow countrymen lack.

I wanted to expand on some of his ideas and take apart the blind right-wing nationalistic instincts some Romanians have. But I won’t. Why? Because I realized that I had done something similar in the past, albeit in a more naive fashion. Here you can find the first of three essays that speak about Romania–they all appeared on dbrom.ro.

My apologies to English speakers–they are all in Romanian. But you could always enjoyed our national obsessions–as seen here in a self-serving (failed attempt at satire) beer commercial.

I have been fortunate to avoid an Office Space workplace and reading Max Barry’s brilliant noir satire Company is making me pledge (to myself) that I will stay away from any place that aims to “build and consolidate leadership positions in its chosen markets, forging profitable growth opportunities by developing strong relationships between internal and external business units and coordinating a strategic, consolidated approach to achieve maximum returns for its stakeholders.”

So, all you Bangalorians and Babadagans waiting to drive your cars every morning into the underground garage of a high-rise that looks like a putrid stick of butter, think again. Look at every floor of the building you work in as an extra circle of hell. Dante set the limit for those a long time ago. It’s nine! Now you’ll understand why it sucks if you work on the 10th floor and management is holding an audition for secretaries at the indoor pool up on the 39th floor.

Here’s more wisdom from Barry’s depicition of the corporate ethos. Below is a beautiful and concise explanation of why employees — you, me and all the others not managing stuff — are annoying and should be avoided at any cost (read: at the cost of outsourcing).

The problem with employees, you see, is everything. You have to pay to hire them and pay to fire them, and, in between, you have to pay them. They need business cards. They need computers. They need ID tags and security clearances and phones and air-conditioning and somewhere to sit. You have to ferry them to off-site team meetings. You have to ferry them home again. They get pregnant. They injure themselves. They steal. They join religions with firm views on when it’s permissible to work. When they read their e-mail they open every attachment they get, and when they write it they expose the company to enormous legal liabilities. They arrive with no useful skills, and once you’ve trained them, they leave. And don’t expect gratitude! If they’re not taking sick days, they’re requesting compassionate leave. If they’re not gossiping with co-workers, they’re complaining about them. They consider it their inalienable right to wear body ornamentation that scares customers. They talk about (dear God) unionizing. They want raises. They want management to notice when they do a good job. They want to know whta’s going to happen in the next corporate reorganization. And lawsuits! The lawsuits! They sue for sexual harassment, for an unsafe workplace, for discrimination in thirty-two different flavors. For-get this-wrongful termination. Wrongful termination! These people are only here because you brought them into the corporate world! Suddenly you’re responsible for them for life?

As with anything, there is the occasional exception — in my case it’s Philip Roth. A new Roth book automatically creates a reading mood, even though two and a half hours later that mood can be sullen, rotten and overly pensive.

Several books Roth’s has written over the past decade deal with death in one form or another. But it’s never been so in your face as it is in his last book, “Everyman,” a chronicle of an average man’s life — so average he doesn’t even need a name. It’s the story of the body, the human body, an instrument that will fail us all and one we cannot maintain in good shape for too long: “Old age isn’t a battle, old age is a massacre.”

Roth himself is getting old (he is 73, although that doesn’t make him less productive) and I can’t help wonder if the great novelist shares the omnious fear of death his character has had since he was nine.

I guess that sometimes as a reader you look to your favorite writer to help you defeat your own anxieties and fears. Not this time — this time Roth decided to have me wallow in mine. It was a tough and scary ride, but the book is, as the Atlantic dears to say, a “masterpiece.” And the Atlantic goes on: “Every sentence is urgent, essential, almost nonfictional. The sophistication and indirection forced on practically every writer are replaced by a straightforwardness of, yes, masterly authority.”

“Everyman” doesn’t have a suprise ending — after all, death is no suprise. But it’s furious while telling the story of this one life.

“He’d married three times, had mistresses and children and an interesting job where he’d been a success, but now eluding death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story.”

It seems I’ve been reading too many books about death and bodily decay, but it’s not my fault that the people I enjoy reading all picked up the topic (Joan Didion in “The Year of Magical Thinking”; Marquez in “Memories of my melancholy whores”). And it’s one subject that never gets old. Here is Roth’s character pondering his life in the retirement community he moved into after the attacks of 9/11 pushed him out of New York:

“How long could he watch the tides flood in and out without his remembering, as anyone might in a sea-gazing reverie, that life had been given to him, as to all, randomly, fotuitously, and but one, and for no known or knowable reason?”