Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground [Paperback]

Charles Bowden (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 6, 2002

Blues for Cannibals continues the quest Bowden began in Blood Orchid-to discover the headwaters of the sickness that seeps through the American soul, and to consider what it might mean to come fully alive in a time of exalted consumption, global pillage, gated communities, and wholesale destruction of the environment. Down, down he leads us, in intoxicating, nearly hallucinogenic prose-past the Yaqui, the Anasazi, and other ghosts of our collective history, past the hookers, winos, and assorted have-nots outside the prosperous circle by the fire. We meet a prisoner obsessed with painting presidents, sex offenders whose desires are not as alien as we wish, a murderer whose execution does not cure what ails us. "I wound up looking at a world where cannibalism is life," Bowden writes, "and of course, given the diet, a life without a future." He mourns a young artist who couldn't find a reason to keep living and tends a mesquite tree that won't die. And down among its metaphoric roots, he reacquaints us with the appetites-fierce, flawed, human-that might save us too. Blues for Cannibals is scripture for an age when bushes no longer burn.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Bowden, a midwesterner who discovered his spiritual home and totem, the mesquite, in the brutal and beautiful Sonoran Desert, trained as a historian but was destined to become a journalist witnessing life in a violent and volatile world ruled by "cannibals . . . who create nothing but who can consume everything." In a fiery and poetic indictment that continues the feverish social and moral inquiry begun in Blood Orchid (1995), he profiles rapists, drunks, outlaws, a suicidal artist, ne'er-do-wells, and do-gooders; suffers grievously over tortured and murdered children; brilliantly links the story of an institutionalized self-taught artist and convicted killer who obsessively paints pictures of presidents with a blazing reassessment of Lyndon Johnson; chronicles an execution; mourns the death of four friends; and vividly portrays the mighty nineteenth-century Yaqui war leader Cajeme. As furious, wounded, lustful, and compelling as Algren and Miller, Bowden confesses his depthless hunger for women, good food, red wine, sunlight, gardening, and freedom, and warns, presciently, of an inevitable wave of violent change. Fueled as much by love and compassion as by sorrow and rage, Bowden's red-hot blues embrace life in all its confounding intensity. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"A vivid, lyrical journey through the American Southwest...[but] this book is no travelogue. Rather it is a visceral exploration of a much darker, landscape, that of the human psyche." --Debra Ginsberg, The San Diego Union-Tribune

"As a writer seeking justice in his words, he is like a man clearing the brush, trying to break through, to get enough light and oxygen to see his trees and sky again before he goes back under." --Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A¿powerful book, a hybrid of journalism, memoir and natural history that roves restlessly, almost tangentially between places, times and perspectives." --Eric Hanson, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"He seems to me a literary descendant of both Henry Miller's mad and energetic jazz riffs and the passionate rhetoric of James Agee." --Bill Holm, Hungry Mind Review

"A thrillingly good writer whose grandness of vision is only heightened by the bleak originality of his voice." --Ron Hansen, The New York Times Book Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: North Point Press (November 6, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865476535
• ISBN-13: 978-0865476530
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,359,199 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bowden's Mesquite Manifesto., March 4, 2002

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground (Hardcover)

Charles Bowden's got the blues. "I am a fallen man and I know it," he writes, "and I accept the torture of living this fact. But I will be damned--and they say I surely will be damned--if I accept God's answer. So I do not pray. Nor do I worship. I can love, I can comfort. I am the tree struggling in the hot ground of my desert. No bended knee and please no messages from on high. The messages must come from here, from the ground itself or away with them. That is what I learn from the mesguite, my brother-in-arms" (p. 6). In his 293-page book of revelations, he looks deeply into our cold, modern culture of gated communities, suicide, death row inmates, and sexual predators, to discover we are cannibals now--"we can devour and take but cannot give" (p. 28)--living a life of unrestrained consumption without future.

For too many of us, Bowden may be the best writer we've never read. His prose is powerful, prophetic, hallucinogenic, and poetic. Using mesquite as a metaphor to connect his essays, he encourages us to face the truth about American culture, and to question the people who try to give us easy answers. "I believe in dirt and bone and flowers and fresh pasta and salsa cruda and red wine," he writes. "I do not believe in white wine, I insist on color. I think death is a word and life is a fact, just as food is a fact and cactus is a fact" (p. 246). Although Bowden's "Mesquite Manifesto" is rooted in despair, in the end it encourages us to celebrate life: eat, lust, caress, fight, and swallow. "Now," Bowden tells us, "choke it down" (p. 277).

G. Merritt

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I am not a man of the center. I am from somewhere else.", February 16, 2002

By 

James L. Breithaupt "Book Fiend" (Anytown USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground (Hardcover)

Bowden's prose is actually a long tone poem, and if you read it this way, you will not be disappointed. The mesquite is the metaphor: once you read it, you'll understand, and you'll want to read more. Bowden is one of our most brutally honest writers practicing the trade today, but he writes with velvet gloves. He teaches us how to rejoice in our despair--he's a practicing buddhist, he just doesn't know it.
If you are new to Bowden's writing, this book is as good a place to start as any. For a man who has probably seen and witnessed the worst we can do to each other, he somehow holds out hope for the best. What else can we do but sink our taproots and satisfy our appetites?---at least that is something, as Bowden says...

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars beautiful writing, scary images, life, December 14, 2002

By 

Ricky Hunter (New York City, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground (Paperback)

Blues for Cannibals can be a hard book at times to work through. The ideas become circular and repetitive but the beautiful writing often smooths over these rough spots, while at other times there is true beauty, touched with both horror and sadness, in its words and thoughts. Charles Bowden writes near the beginning that if he had life to live over again he "would never think that wars are events recorded in the book of history but realize they are actual and always take my hands from my ears and hear the cries of the slain." Much of this book is filled with those cries, and not only from war. He also would never say no to a woman or skip a meal. From evidence in this book, one gets the feeling he never has. The section on food and his dying friends is the best part of the book and reverberates with a quiet power. An unique book.