Category Archives: Sexual Episodes

Black Swan Green (2006)

We already reviewed David Mitchell’s first novel Ghostwritten (1999) in which we list his novels in order of date written.

After reading “Black Swan Green” I should probably re-read “Catcher in the Rye”. In Mitchell’s version, Jason Taylor is a 13 year old student living in Worcestershire, England. For a well-written review see the Wikipedia review. If there is a theme that stands out, it is Jason’s struggle to fit in with the crowd, made very difficult by the fact that he stutters and that he is bullied mercilessly. It doesn’t help that his parents don’t get along.

The Pugilist At Rest (1993)

Pugilist 1 Pugilist 2 Pugilist 3

For background on the author Thom Jones see the Wikipedia article.

If you read nothing else from this set of short stories, you must read the short story entitled “The Pugilist At Rest” for which the book is named. The above photos are different views of a Roman copy of the Greek original “Pugilist At Rest” attributed to Apollonius which copy is found in the Palazzo Massimo, Rome, Italy.

It helps if you read each of Jones’ short stories quickly as if you were having a manic attack because that’s fairly close to the author’s reality. Note that he suffers from temporal lobe epilepsy and diabetes. As noted in the Wikipedia, he has two more collection of short stories: Cold Snap (1995) and Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine (1999).

I just finished “Cold Snap” and I assure you it is just as manic as “Pugilist”. There are some wild and very explicit sex scenes. There is a lot of drug use. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Enjoy the roller-coaster ride!

The Terracotta Dog (1996)

Andrea Camilleri is a Sicilian author who in fact writes in an Italian that has a sprinkling of Sicilian phrases and grammar that is sufficient enough to make it a real pain for yours truly to translate. He has created another famous detective Inspector Salvo Montalbano, a fractious Sicilian detective in the police force of Vigàta, an imaginary Sicilan town. Of course, the Mafia play a big role as does Sicilian cooking. You can read more about Andrea Camilleri in Wikipedia.

“The Terracotta Dog” is number 2 in a series of 16 Montalbano novels. The last two have not been translated into English. This is my first Montalbano and again I am hooked and will read more. In this particular novel in addition to a main plot, there are side episodes, discussion of food, sex scenes, and problems with personal relationships.

Jesus’ Son (2000)

From NetFlix:

Nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, director Alison MacLean’s reflective drama follows FH (Billy Crudup), a well-meaning drug addict who stumbles backward into redemption. When his longtime love (Samantha Morton) leaves, FH follows her but meets and falls for the older Mira (Holly Hunter) along the way. Amid his life’s wreckage, a near-fatal car crash and a chance to save a child’s life force FH to examine his existence and its meaning.

Believe it or not, this film (which has the feel of an independent film) won some awards. I first read the book because it was recommended in the NY Times as an older book which you might as well get at your local library. I can only guess that the book made a splash in an epoch in which it was a novelty to write about drug-addled losers. The book travels from episode to episode while the druggies do outrageous things. Maybe I am getting too old for such nonsense.

Following the book fairly closely, the film is also like some otherworld travelog. But I was never bored (“OK, now what ?”). Still, think twice before you start this trip.

Two Lovers (2008)

From NetFlix:

After his engagement falls through, Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) juggles the affections of Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), his beautiful, self-destructive neighbor, and Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the attractive, sensible daughter of his father’s business associate. Writer-director James Gray’s beautifully nuanced romantic drama is set in Brooklyn and also stars Elias Koteas. The film was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

In my search for an actor’s actor, among others I nominate Joaquin Phoenix. He has never, to my knowledge, appeared in an unworthy part. His roles in “Gladiator” and “Walk The Line” were astounding. Also noteworthy were his roles in “Reservation Road” and “We Own the Night”. But for me his role in “Two Lovers” is the best yet. He plays an ordinary human being, albeit one with lots of problems.

Gwyneth Paltrow plays a mixed-up bleached blond. For our tastes Paltrow is getting a bit too old for such a part. But Paltrow always does a good job.

Playing a really sweet young woman (who aggressively pursues Leonard) is the stunningly beautiful Vinessa Shaw. She was the character Emma Nelson playing opposite Russell Crowe in “3:10 To Yuma” (which you MUST see).

And then there is Leonard’s beautiful mother. We sat there watching Ingrid Bergman in looks and speech and mannerisms. Finally it hit us – the actress is Isabella Rossellini, the daughter of Ingrid Bergman.

For me the plot came to a perfect conclusion. Would anyone out there like to disagree ?

Wife Kathy also liked the film. For a non-movie person like Kathy, that is saying a lot. Don’t miss this one!

The House of God (1978)

Direct quote from Alex Beam in the Boston Globe:

Give the doctor his due: The staying power of Stephen Bergman’s 1978 novel, “The House Of God,” is astonishing. (Begman published the book under the pseudonym Samuel Shem.) Largely ignored when it first came out, with its author shunned by his colleagues for telling tales out of medical school, “The House of God” has since sold more than 2 million copies. It appears on med-school syllabuses and has become a cult classic in the shadowy insider world of aspiring doctors.

“The House of God” is a book to which few are indifferent. A dark, satirical bildungsroman set in the hurly-burly of Beth Israel Hospital’s emergency room, where Bergman worked as an intern, it has been dismissed – by a doctor, or course – as “a piece of trash.” John Updike loved the book and in 1995 contributed a near-fulsome introduction, comparing it quite aptly to Joseph Heller’s classic “Catch-22”; Bergman’s work “glows with the celebratory essence of a real novel,” he wrote.

My son and I confessed to each other that we didn’t read much past the iconic sex scenes in the middle of the 400-page novel. That’s OK: Updike loved the gamy parts, too. “The sex is most conspicuous,” he wrote, “an in the orgies with Angel and Molly acquires an epic size and pornographic ideality.”

But the clean parts stay with you too. Who can forget ER epithets like “LOLNAD” (Little Old Lady in No Apparent Distress) or “GOMER” (Get Out of My Emergency Room), taught to the impressionable young interns by the profane, countercultural resident, the Fat Man. Said Fat Man counsels his young charges that “the only good admission is a dead admission” (because they don’t have to be turfed out of the ER to another service) and to avoid touching patients at all costs. Why? Because they are sick!

In addition to lucrative sales, Bergman and his book have something else to boast about: newfound respectability. Writing in the British medical journal The Lancet, Anne Hudson Jones compared “The House of God” to Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith.” Bergman contributed a long article about his book to an American College of Physicians Journal last year and guesses that he has addressed more than 50 medical school commencements in the United States and Europe in the past decade.

But none in Boston, where memories are long and fuses short.