Harry Mathews, The Conversions ***

I'd never heard of Harry Mathews or The Conversions when I picked up the book at Moe's based entirely on the plot description and the blurbs ("The tragi-comedy of human ingenuity, which insists upon interpreting the facts of experience even when they are senseless, baffling, or banal..." -- Edmund White).

The narrator receives a gold adze at a dinner party and sets out to learn the meaning of the seven engravings on it. On his quest he meets a variety of colorful characters with fanciful stories to tell: a woman who discovered a sexual position in which it is impossible to get pregnant; a drug dealer who deals in the spines of a particular cactus; a composer with a collection of cowrie shells. Their stories seem to be leading the narrator to his answers, which relate to a suppressed religion.

The tone and story of The Conversions reminded me very much of the French Oulipo writers like Georges Perec, so it didn't surprise me to learn that Harry Mathews was a friend and translator for that group. As with Perec's Life, I enjoyed many aspects of the book but it didn't cross the threshold to a favorite.

Timothy Egan, The Big Burn ** 1/2

The Big Burn is a non-fiction account of the largest wildfire in US history. It occurred in 1910 in northern Idaho and Montana, just a few years after the founding of the Forest Service, and it destroyed a huge swath of the newly protected forests. Egan describes the fire and the efforts to contain it, and also puts the event in the historical context of the conversation movement started by Teddy Roosevelt. The hyperbolic subtitle of the book is "Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America."

The story has its share of adventure and heroism, but I think Egan oversells the importance of the fire in "saving" America. (What he means is that the fire came at a politically difficult point for the Forest Service and may have saved its existence.) More generally, Egan is a good prose writer but not an organized one. I often felt like he lost the narrative line of the incident he's describing (cf. page 126). His characters are either all good or all bad.

Benjamin Black, Christine Falls ** 1/2

Benjamin Black is a pseudonym of the Irish author John Banville, a Booker Prize-winning writer known for the richness of his prose. Benjamin Black is the name he uses for writing thrillers, which Graham Greene would have called "entertainments" as opposed to serious novels.

The prose in Christine Falls is definitely a cut above most crime thrillers, as is some of the character development. Unfortunately, though, the plot is a cut below most crime thrillers. The first problem is that Black lets the reader know about the underlying conspiracy early on, which robs the story of a compelling interest. The second problem is that the conspiracy itself is not very interesting.

Christine Falls is the first of a series of novels featuring the pathologist Quirke. I think I'll skip the rest.

Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever ****

This book, subtitled "An Aural History of Recorded Music," covers the history of recording technology in broad strokes. It's real concern, though, is the question of the real relationship between a musical performance and a recording. As the author says in the preface, "Ultimately, this is the story of what it means to make a recording of music -- a representation of music -- and declare it to be music itself."

The story starts with Thomas Edison and his rivals at the Victor Talking Machine Company. The goal in the early days of recording was fidelity: accurately capturing a real-world event. But this seemingly straightforward goal is not so simple on further examination. If you record a musical performance in a music hall, which is a more accurate representation of the music, a recording that captures the feel of the hall or one that captures the music without the "distortion" of the hall's acoustics? You can record an orchestra with greater dynamic range than any person in the hall could hear (softer pianos, louder violins); is that cheating?

Nowadays, of course, most recorded music doesn't capture an actual live performance. The recording is built from disparate sounds, recorded at different places and times, many of which are electronically generated or altered. So what criteria of perfection replaces fidelity?

I find these questions interesting, and incidentally I think they can give perspective on so-called "correspondence theories of truth" (with the world as the live performance and our concepts as the recording).

On top of the philosophical questions and the history lesson, Perfecting Sound Forever also gives the reader new things to listen for in their favorite music: the "dry" sound of 1970s California, the ambiance of Columbia 30th Street Studio, the compressed range of the Loudness Wars.

Very informative, thought-provoking, and enjoyable.