Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

I do cheat when I read books—can't help it; I do. Start in the back and read from the middle before I settle in with page 1, and where there are acknowledgments, I read them early, and where there are author interviews bound right in, I read them straight off, first. Maybe it shouldn't matter who a writer really is, but to me (and call me sentimental; you wouldn't be the first) it always has.

Yesterday's book was BRIEF ENCOUNTERS WITH CHE GUEVARA, the incredibly charming and smart collection of stories by Ben Fountain, and if you're writing about place, if you are interested in the world, you just have to read this book. Fountain knows exotic birds, Haitian street names, indigenous terrors, but in particular he knows how not to drown a story out by the hard-earned particulars. You get that reading the stories themselves, but in the About the Author pages, which I of course read first, he explains just how he works:

"Research is done by the saturation method; I try to get my hands on whatever is out there, and by the end of the process I'll usually have a big thick file and half a shelf full of books. I almost always reach a point where the thing seems unmanageable—I've got too much information and too little ability to handle it, but I've learned over time that this too is part of the process, the despair that comes of 'oversaturation'....."

A nod of thanks to Fountain, then, for this morning, after weeks of wavering, I took the research plunge. I'm about to go straight down the stony path toward despair. I'm going to hope for my own rescue.