An interview with author Jonah Berger

I meet Jonah Berger at his Cheesman Park apartment where he has prepared a classic dish: rotini pasta and marinara with quick-bake croissants. He dumps a mountain of Parmesan onto one of the dishes—more cheese than sauce. More cheese than any one man could possibly stomach. “Don’t worry,” he assures me. “This one’s mine.”

He swaggers out to the living room and drops into his sectional sofa. “Food first,” he says, “then we’ll get down to business.” Jack Johnson tunes spill from his computer speakers as we eat. On the sofa beside him lays a steel-string guitar. In a seated position, the ankles of Jonah’s hard plastic leg braces just peek out below the cuffs of his jeans.

A republican president whose popularity plummets as the country undergoes an unmatched economic crisis, and – rightly or wrongly – he is harshly criticized for arrogantly ignoring that crisis. A candidate who previously was considered an underdog wins the Democratic nomination, and then the presidency. The new president is put under suffocating scrutiny as he struggles to assemble a cabinet and implement myriad social programs that his critics decry as socialism.

Sound familiar?

“2666” by Roberto Bolano is looking like it will safely steal the title of 2008’s most acclaimed novel. For those unfamiliar with the back story: Bolano, a writer of significant renown in Spanish literature, succumbed to liver failure in 2003, at age 50. Knowing the end was coming because of an early diagnosis, Bolano spent the last five years of his life on “2666,” a novel that he fell just short of completing before his passing.

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