Lynn Hoffman

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami 

As you read the reviews of this wondrous book, two themes recur. One is the absolutely hypnotic, addictive quality of the prose. Somehow this doesn't feel like a translation: it's more like a transcript of some events taken directly from one person's experience and put on the page. The transcript feels disturbingly like real life. There is a partly-understood disaster: the hero's wife disappears. There are glimmers of hope, even hints of redemption. People do things for reasons that aren't outlandish but we don't quite comprehend. Threads develop in the plot and then are left unr.....

While the reader is becoming annoyed with the lack of resolution, she becomes even more exasperated at her own inability to put the book down.She is left with the suspicion that the author has tapped into some spring of human consciousness and simply let it flood the page so that we readers are helpless to do anything but bathe in it.

I have the feeling that this book will be a monument, a milestone in literature and storytelling. After this, it will be hard to tell stories the same way again.

Lynn Hoffman author of the much-less mysterious bang BANG: A Novel and the perfectly comprehensible New Short Course in Wine,The which may also be referred to as the Wined-Up Bird Chronicle.

Hmmm. Maybe I didn't get that headline right. What's sold out is the Austrian Wine Event on November 14th at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York. If you're one of the lucky ones who has a ticket, you'll get to taste the wines of Weininger including the luscious Gemischte Satz. There's still lots of Austrian wine around, but if you don't hurry up and buy some, that may soon be all sold out too.

Lynn Hoffman--author of The New Short Course in Wine 

They just found a kid out in the white, bright suburbs of Philadelphia who had an arsenal and plans to use it at his school. Now I know that some dim bulbs like to chant slogans like "if guns cause crime, do matches cause arson?" but a case like this forces us all to think about the truth: guns are different. They're not matches that can be blown out, they're tools that can be used to blow people away. Because of their extraordinary destructive power, citizens have the right to a few assurances from those who own guns in their midst. Let's start by accounting for them by a sensible registration system. We don't have a meaningful one right now and those who oppose registration often whine about their 'freedom' being restricted.

 
I wonder what freedom we would lose if everyone who wanted a handgun had to show that they weren't criminal or crazy. Whose freedom would be impinged if we all knew who owned what guns?
There's something a little hysterical about the opposition to these fairly sensible measures, something that reminds me of little old ladies worried that nude paintings in the museum are going to lead to promiscuity.
So you have to wonder: who benefits from everyone being able to buy a gun of any sort at any time? It wouldn't be the gun manufacturers and their favorite lobby, would it?

C'mon, give the rest of us a break. We don't want to take your little bang-bangs away from you, we just want the right to keep them out of our neighborhoods or at least to know who's packing what.

Lynn Hoffman, author of bang BANG

 

My novel, bang BANG has had some really generous reviews, but this one-from an Amazon Top Ten Reviewer-is really satisfying. IThere's a lot of advice out there about how to handle bad reviews, but not much about the overwhelming feeling of getting one like this.


 

(FIVE STARS) Lynn Hoffman Adds Another Feather to his Toque, September 20, 2007

By     Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) – TOP 10 REVIEWER

         

Lynn Hoffman, a highly regarded food and drink writer from Philadelphia, tops his 1997 fiction debut of 'The Bachelor's Cat' with a fully mature novel 'bang BANG', a book so well conceived and stylishly written that it places Hoffman in the realm of top American writers. And while many readers may know him form his books on food, beer, and wine (terrific tomes of culinary skill admixed with humor and wit), few will be prepared for the impact of this superb new work.

 

Paula Sherman is a waitperson in a stylish restaurant Odetta, a wannabe singer simple girl whose best friend Tom is killed as she watches by a foolish gunman with little apparent reason for the deed. On the scene a reporter quotes the distraught Paula's comment 'It wasn't the gun, it's that man', a slogan picked up quickly and twisted by a senator who is backed by the UGA (United Gun Association) to campaign against gun control. Paula's life changes abruptly as she emerges into a woman with a mission: she manages to surface from an ordinary life as a vigilante who targets the cars bearing UGA decals, shattering windshields as her gesture against the wasted death of her friend Tom. In time Paula meets Daniel, a man she can actually love, and with his support she gains courage an influence that rapidly spreads across the country in an anti-gun movement.

 

One character who adds immensely to the story is constant Odetta gourmet diner Emanuel Cardoso (and his frequent dinner companion, the short of stature Lichtmann), who witnesses Paula's nighttime derring-dos and who eventually is Paula's elected source for political payoff. By introducing Cardoso, Huffman allows space for some wonderful writing about food and the culinary arts as well as some light comedy and compassion: pages from the observing Cardoso's diary are sprinkled through the pages of the novel: they are a pleasure all to themselves!

 

The story is a very powerful anti-gun statement, but fine as that theme may be it has rarely been accompanied by the extraordinary skill of a writer as creative and gifted as Lynn Hoffman. Hoffman has a way with words that makes the reader pause in this propulsive narrative to simply bask in the pleasure of well-crafted phrases. "Our park bench lets us see past Rodin's fame-slain Thinker, sucking his knuckles at the entrance to the Rodin Museum. In the distance, in the thin, late winter sunshine, we observe a swaying dark blob that widens and narrows without changing height. The blob becomes a group of six skaters, telephotically compressed. The widening is the centrifugal swaying as the saw their way up the street....". Such is only a brief example of how Hoffman paints his scenery for the story that is so keenly and succinctly addressed.

 

'bang BANG' is one of those little treasures of a book that rewards on every level and it most assuredly confirms the stature of an important American writer. Highly recommended for a very wide reading audience. Grady Harp, September 07

 

 Let's Increase Gun Violence

By now, you may be almost weary of the news from Blacksburg, Virginia: Thirty three people died on April 16th as a result of a single man with a gun. Let’s think a second: that’s thirty-three familes who heard this afternoon that the child they loved and raised and laughed with and hoped with is dead.

Phone rings.
Dingaling.
“Your kid is dead.”  

If you’re a parent, you don’t want to imagine what that news would be like if it were your kid and at the same time you can’t not imagine it. If you can absorb the horror of that thought, imagine this one: Over one hundred families in Philadelphia got similar news so far this year. It wasn’t always about a college kid. There was the mother of four and the neighborhood baseball coach. There was the cop and the high-school honor student.

So what can we do to reduce the killing, to make things better? Let me answer that question with another question: What would you do if you wanted to make it worse? Suppose that you were, oh, let's say The Devil, and you wanted more people to die from gunshots on the streets of Philadelphia. What would you do to make that happen?

Well, for starters, you'd make sure that there were lots more guns around. You'd sell them in every gas station and corner store. You'd make them cheap and untraceable. If you couldn't make those conditions legal in Philadelphia, you'd make it legal in the surrounding counties of this and other states. Then you'd encourage some free-enterprise by people buying guns out there and reselling them here.

The next thing you'd do is you'd make guns seem very sexy: sort of romantic. A pistol would become a poor man's Porsche. You'd promote images of cool dudes carrying guns and occasionally using them to settle things with misguided, less cool people who challenged them. You might even write songs or make movies about the gun-runners who brought the little bang-BANGs to the streets. Oh, and you'd use sex to sell the idea. You'd have some hot pop-star look-alike on posters at the bus stop allowing that she really likes "a man with a nine. A Tek-Nine, that is."

I think that in one form or another, those things are already happening.

Why is it happening? Well, for one thing, guns are big business.
Domestic gun manufacturing was worth $1.2 billion dollars in 1997. For another, scaring gun owners is pretty big business too. There are organizations-like the National Rifle Association-that exist because they have cynically convinced hunters and marksmen to fear  any regulation of guns-even something as innocuous as registration. The big lie in this case is that registration or licensing or banning cop-killer bullets will inevitably lead to the confiscation of weapons and to a pretty dull deer season.

No one, not even the most hysterical gun nut, seems to be able to explain how requiring a license will lead to people’s guns being taken away. (Anybody tried to confiscate your car lately? Your dog?) But the power of these scare-the-public groups in the voting booth pretty much assures that no congress or state legislature will pass even the most modest gun laws.

There's not much that I can do, as a novelist to change the laws that make guns so easy to get. In fact, the political cowardice of our legislators pretty much insures that the laws won’t change. But what I can do, and what the heroine of bang BANG, Paula Sherman can do and what you and that pop-star look alike can do is help change the dominant message about carrying a handgun.

Here's the new message: Handguns are for two kinds of people, cops and dorks. If you're carrying a gun and you're not a cop, then, well we know what you are. It’s mostly a male problem and we can't wait for you to get over it. That's the important message in bang BANG: real men don't play with guns and real women know that. If you’re a woman who likes men, make it known that you don’t like men with guns.
In my novel bang BANG, Paula Sherman campaigns for that change. She suggests that women who take the pledge to avoid gun-totin’ boys wear a blue dot as a sign of their commitment. Maybe it’s time we took Paula seriously.
Here’s another new message: you buy a gun, it’s yours forever. That means that you’re responsible for everything that’s done with that gun for as long as you live. If somebody steals the gun and does some harm-you’re responsible. If you sell it to your cousin and he does harm with it-it’s on you. We may not get to make this a matter of law, but if the media reported the ownership chain of guns used in crimes, we could at least bring some shame to bear.

Gun deaths won't stop until we change the culture, so let's change the culture. Let's start now.


Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINE  and
the novel bang BANG.