Cocktail Columnist's Flight Far From Smooth, but Turbulence Hilarious

Summary

---

His letter includes the story of how his manic-depressive mother met his taciturn Polish father, snippets of the book he's translating from Polish to English and how he turned from poetry to translation, which both took the spotlight off him and had another appeal, as he recounts in his rambling misdirected missive. "'What a translator tries for,' the great John Ciardi wrote back in the '60s, 'is no more than the best possible failure.' For someone who'd made a life's habit of failing, this sentiment held a balmy appeal," he says.

"You certainly wouldn't think of discussing, say, Lacanian theory on a jumbo jet spiraling earthwards. Unless of course you were Lacan, but even then: Jeez, Jacques, call the kiddos," says protagonist Bennie Ford, 53, to excuse his complaining as he languishes for his eighth hour in Chicago's O'Hare airport, almost sure to miss his until-recently estranged daughter's wedding to another woman.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

Cocktail Columnist's Flight Far From Smooth, but Turbulence Hilarious

:Reviewed by Jill Wilson

Dear American Airlines

By Jonathan Miles

Houghton Mifflin, 180 pages, $25

If one were to judge a book by its cover (and jacket flap and even the ...

See the full content of this document

---