Tuesday, February 09, 2016

Going Pretty Good

Well, Chris's new book is so jaw-dropping and fantastically compelling that I read it in one day. I almost never read a book in one day. I think I've read, for example, three more pages of THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY since the last time I mentioned it (October 10, since you're probably keeping track), though I was going along pretty good with that one for a while. So I'm back to the Norman Mailer book about Lee Harvey Oswald sooner than I thought. It contains touching interviews with innocent people who knew him back in Minsk. At the time of the interviews they're going gray and soft and thinking about their youth. One of Oswald's Russian sweethearts loved Deanna Durbin movies. I don't know why that detail stands out. Marina Oswald was interviewed for the book. When she read it - as recounted in the Mailer bio I read - she said, "Tolstoy, he's not!" Ha ha! (Another review: after Marilyn Monroe read THE DEER PARK she said that Mailer was "too impressed by power.") Anyway, Megan sent me the "link" to the whole Warren Commission report, so that's probably healthy.