The Periodic Table.

Primo Levi’s short story novel The Periodic Table is a strange, interesting, maybe convoluted book, with each chapter built around a single chemical element that usually figures into the story, with Levi’s life from childhood through the Holocaust and afterwards as the book’s through-line. It made the Guardian‘s list of the top 100 novels ever written, and in 2006 the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it the best science book ever written, for which it beat out The Selfish Gene, Double Helix, and Gödel, Escher, Bach, among other titles. It’s also an arduous read, not for the content around Levi’s time in Auschwitz but for his disconnected writing style and prose that is often a difficult slog. I’m also fairly certain there’s some metaphor in here I missed, perhaps because I found his prose so prolix that I couldn’t read the book on two levels at the same time.

The Periodic Table is an autobiographical collection for Levi, a professional chemist who survived World War II in part due to his chemistry skills (and due to some good fortune, like falling ill before the death march out of Auschwitz that killed many surviving prisoners of the Nazis). Two of the stories (“Lead” and “Mercury”) are straight fiction, but the remainder tell some stories from Levi’s life before and during the war, although a few others read like fables rather than renderings of real life.

The two fictional tales and some of the fabulist stories, like “Arsenic,” in which the narrator is asked to examine a sample of sugar that might be tainted, are much easier to follow in prose and story – Levi lets loose, so to speak, and writes more like a fiction writer than a scientist. Some of the earliest stories about his life prior to the Fascist takeover of Italy and his eventual imprisonment are among the slowest to read, with the elements in question also less directly related to the actual story … but when the Nazis arrive, Levi becomes a bit of a different writer too, working with the natural tension that comes from having a murderous regime in charge, with its agents unpredictable and violent. The stark “Cerium,” named for a rare earth element about which Levi knows little other than its use in the flints found in lighters, is set inside the Lager (Auschwitz), where he and a comrade Alberto steal supplies of cerium so they can trade them for rations to survive, making the grim calculus of X flints for Y more days of life.

Levi survives the war, of course, while many of his friends and colleagues did not. The chapters after the liberation skip over some of his worst experiences in the hands of the Russians, but detail his attempts to reintegrate into the greater science world. “Vanadium” has Levi trying to locate an old nemesis decades after their last meeting. “Silver” is a bit of a science mystery, as Levi has to figure out why certain photographic plates are arriving with flaws from their factory. The final story, “Carbon,” is the most literary of all, a fanciful, beautiful meditation on the arc of a carbon atom over the millennia, going from somewhere in rock and earth to forming part of an actual life and back again, a testament to the impermanence of our existence and the survival of the building blocks of the universe beyond ourselves. But I exited the book with the sense that I didn’t fully appreciate what Levi tried to express; it could be the translation, of course, but I think Levi was such an erudite and precise writer that he often sacrificed clarity to find just the right word or phrase, which meant I spent more time trying to follow the literal plot when there was probably a greater layer of meaning I missed.

Next up: Still reading John Berger’s G..

The Plague.

Reading Albert Camus’ The Plague, which appeared on the Guardian‘s list of the top 100 novels ever written, was itself a bit intimidating, because it’s the rare novel where I could go into it already knowing there would be layers of meaning beyond the text itself, presenting me with the challenge of reading for plot while also considering how much time to spend deciphering the metaphors and allusions throughout the book. Fortunately, it’s a better read than Camus’ The Stranger, a hallmark of existentialist literature that stands at an imperturbable remove from its protagonist, although I won’t pretend I truly understood everything Camus was trying to express in this text.

Set in Oran, in what is now Algeria but at the time was still a French colony, The Plague follows an outbreak of bubonic plague in the city through about a half-dozen characters, primarily Dr. Rieux, who becomes the leader of the efforts to treat and slow the progress of the epidemic despite a lack of medicines and unhelpful authorities. Bubonic plague, the best-known disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, had no effective treatment at the time that Camus wrote the novel, so characters who fall ill expect and are expected to die, making the response from Dr. Rieux and the other central characters more about management and quarantine rather than cure.

Camus tracks the actions and emotional responses of those half-dozen characters as the plague appears, waxes, peaks, and wanes, with nearly everyone suffering some sort of loss as the novel progresses. Rieux has sent his wife, ill with some other ailment, out of town to a sanatorium as the novel opens, so she’s away during the plague but he has no contact with her. Rambert, a French journalist who was scheduled to leave Oran but who is trapped by the quarantine, speaks of his desire to return to his wife in Paris, even plotting escapes around the guards, but eventually choosing to stay because he feels some responsibility to help. The plague affects everyone, even those who don’t lose family members to the disease, as it first alters the rhythm of the town’s life – Camus writes of the movie theaters running the same films, then exchanging films with other theaters, just to retain some semblance of normal life – and eventually leads to shortages.

There are some strange omissions in the novel, as the major characters are all French men – the women who appear are all minor characters, and I’m not sure there’s even a single named Arab character in the book. Whether Camus intended this, it is a book of othering – his characters set themselves apart from the Algerians in Oran, but are themselves the others, the minority ruling class in a country that would begin a violent revolution for independence seven years after The Plague‘s publication.

Most critical analyses I’ve seen of The Plague describe it as an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France and the intermittent, nearly futile resistance offered by some French civilians against their occupiers and the collaborators in the Vichy puppet government. Camus’ protagonists know they are likely doomed to fail, and even success will be defined by forces outside of their control. I thought the disease worked better as a metaphor for life itself, especially as defined by Camus’ atheist/existentialist worldview: If life and death are largely random, both in the sense of unpredictable as well as without philosophical meaning, then how should we react? What moral codes dictate our actions? Is there value in finding external meanings, as the priest Paneloux – who argues that the death of a child due to plague must be right, because if it occurred, then it means God willed it, in a sort of ne plus ultra form of the unitary executive theory – does right up to his own death? If not, how do we give meaning to our lives when they are finite and may be cut short without warning?

If that was Camus’ intention, he gives us several possible answers, but none is as powerful as Rieux, who seems to sacrifice the most in the novel, but whose only gain is intangible and fleeting, the boost we get from helping others. In a time today when so many people still celebrate materialism or aspire to its excesses, and where we live as if the probability of a catastrophe like The Plague is almost nil, that message feels as relevant as it might have seventy-two years ago in the Holocaust’s wake.

Next up: Bianca Bosker’s Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste, recommended by a close friend of mine who used to work in a restaurant mentioned in the book.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont.

I had no idea there was a British author named Elizabeth Taylor, apparently of some repute in the UK, until I saw the name pop up on the Guardian‘s list of the top 100 novels ever written about ten years ago, and even then knew little about her beyond the Wikipedia entry. I imagine her chagrin at having a world-famous actress (and one who provoked many tabloid headlines) share her name, although perhaps it also pulled some readers toward her books when browsing store shelves. Regardless, she did make that top 100 with her wry comic novel Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, a sweet but unsentimental look at a widow’s move into a long-term hotel that attracted a number of retirees, forming the early equivalent of today’s over-55 communities, and the odd friendship she strikes up with a local writer. (It was adapted into a movie in 2005, but I’ve never seen it and hadn’t heard of it till now.)

Taylor rather deftly creates two parallel narratives around her protagonist and then spins them together to evoke comedy from the intersection. Mrs. Palfrey moves into the Claremont at the beginning of the novel and meets the cast of eccentrics – the busybodies, the would-be lothario, the lonesome, the creep – who populate it. Since the residents are all on the older side, that group will change over the course of the novel, naturally, and the tenor of life in the building (especially in the dining room, the center of most activity) will also shift slightly with each alteration in its makeup. One day, while walking to pick up a library book for another resident, Mrs. Palfrey slips and falls outside the home of Ludo Myers, a would-be writer who spends his days at Harrod’s trying to work on a novel, and who runs out to help her. The two strike up an immediate friendship, as Mrs. Palfrey just appreciates the young Ludo’s kindness while he sees in her a potential muse for his fiction, that drifts into comic territory when she introduces him to her new neighbors at the Claremont as her grandson, Desmond, who really exists but has yet to bother to visit her. (I’m sure you can guess what happens later in the book.)

Mrs. Palfrey was the last of Taylor’s novels published during her lifetime, written when she was into her 50s, and perhaps a look forward at life in old age for a generation that was living longer and more likely to have many years after their children were grown. (She was married and had one child, but unfortunately Taylor died just four years after this book was published at age 63.) One common theme among the denizens of the Claremont is that they’ve largely been forgotten by people in their lives from outside of the Claremont: Adult children don’t show up often, if at all, nor are there many visits or even phone calls from the outside world. And when someone departs from the facility for what we might now call assisted living, the residents seem eager to forget her.

The intersection of her relationship with Ludo, which is somewhat maternal but with the awkwardness of a flirtation, and the way she tries to keep up appearances at the Claremont is the essence of the book’s humor – of course Desmond will show up, and hilarity will ensue. But Ludo also sees Mrs. Palfrey and her mates at the hotel as fodder for the novel he’s been long stymied in writing, a fact of which she’s ignorant, so the question arises for the reader if his affection for her is real or merely functional. The other residents of the Claremont are all stock characters skillfully deployed by Taylor for purposes of humor or pathos, both of a distinctly British variety – there’s little to make you laugh out loud, but much of the book is just witty, and it nicely balances out the obviously grim tone the book takes when one of its elderly characters dies.

This was Taylor’s most critically-acclaimed work, making the Man Booker Prize shortlist in its year, and appeared twice on top 100 lists in the Guardian – the one I use, and another that only included novels published in English (assembled by the same writer, twelve years apart). It’s a brisk, entertaining read, probably worth a more serious meditation on its thoughts on growing old and growing apart from the people who were close to us … but some topics are, perhaps, best left alone when one is in the throes of a good chuckle.

Next up: I’m many reviews behind at the moment, but I’m currently reading Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders.

The Pursuit of Love.

Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love appeared on the Guardian‘s 2003 list of the hundred greatest novels of all time (they’ve since produced other lists, but that’s the one I’ve been working through), a very British comedy of manners that focuses more on drawing humor from situations than witty dialogue or more overt humor. The first book in a trilogy of stories starring Fanny as narrator, telling the readers the romantic escapades of her cousins, this one focusing on Linda, her closest friend and a woman driven to love for the wrong reasons until she eventually has one affair that looks like the real thing.

Fanny starts the novel with a lengthy prologue of sorts that sets up the strange family dynamic; she’s growing up with her Aunt Emily and spends much of her time at the home of her cousins and her peculiar Aunt Sadie and gruff Uncle Matthew, as her mother has a habit of leaving her husbands or beaux the moment things become a bit too serious, earning herself the family nickname “the Bolter” as a result. Fanny is more than happy to live with her cousins, however, as she ends up a boisterous household with close friends who join her in various silly adventures and form a secret club they nickname “the Hons” (which appears to be a play on the British way of referring to certain sons or daughters of lesser nobles, the Honourable, abbreviated “Hon.” in writing). Matthew plays the misanthrope but is rather a soft touch where his daughters and nieces are concerned, although he opposes giving the girls much of any education and thus leaves them naïve and unprepared for the larger world.

Linda is the focus of The Pursuit of Love, and pursue she does, grabbing the first suitor who gives her a second glance after her older sister, Louisa, finds a husband, as does Aunt Emily, who marries late (to the ridiculous health-obsessed, fad-chasing Davey, who later finds work as a staff writer for GOOP) and leaves Linda the oldest girl in the group without a mate. She marries poorly, however, as her husband Tony is a financier with little personality and who views a wife as a tool for career advancement rather than as a life partner. After bearing Tony a daughter, much to his parents’ disappointment, Linda, who has no interest in being a mother anyway, is told never to have another child or she may die giving birth, which further loosens her ties to Tony. She eventually absconds with the communist Christian (irony alert), joining him as an activist during the Spanish Civil War, where he largely ignores her for his political work and eventually has a fling with her friend Lavender Davis, which leads her by chance and misadventure to meeting the son of a French duke, Fabrice, who woos her with a charming self-confidence and rather a lot of money, producing what appears to be the one true love of Linda’s life.

There’s a tragicomic aspect to Linda’s entire story here, as she’s chasing something that might not even exist and makes a series of bad choices along the way, while also trying to lord her own romances over others who either don’t have partners or who’ve made more sensible if less exciting matches (of course, whether Christian is “exciting” depends on your point of view). She has a child’s view of love and marriage, and in some passages appears to treat it as some sort of competition with her siblings and cousins; by the time she connects with Fabrice, the Bolter has returned to Matthew’s castle and tries to make Linda her compatriot in serial romances, much to Linda’s great horror.

The Pursuit of Love is wry and sardonic throughout, but it’s not very funny, other than perhaps Mitford poking fun at the hypochondriac Davey, who is constantly changing what he can or can’t eat, often in absurd fashion (for example, making a weird distinction between “red” and “white” foods, but moving foods around to suit what he wants to eat, too). There’s a long tradition in British literature of satires of middle to upper class lives that combine parody with more traditional humor, but Mitford here sticks more to the former, apparently drawing on her own upbringing for some of her source material. The result is a fine novel with a compelling throughline around Linda’s lovelife, but one so light on humor I’d recommend a dozen or more similar books before getting to this one.

Next up: Arundhati Roy’s Man Booker Prize-winning debut novel The God of Small Things.

A Bend in the River.

V.S. Naipaul is one of the most lauded novelists still living, a man whose legacy appears to have been carved in stone long ago and that is now impervious to reassessment. The Trinidadian-Indian author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, won the Booker Prize in 1971 for In a Free State, won the David Cohen Prize in 1993 (for an author’s entire body of work, limited to the English language), and several lesser prizes. His seriocomic novel A House for Mr. Biswas, which catapulted him to global literary fame, appeared on both the Modern Library list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century and the TIME list of the 100 best novels written in English from 1923 (the magazine’s founding) to 2005.

His 1979 novel A Bend in the River, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, also made the Modern Library list and the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels ever written. Dispensing with the comedy of some of his earlier works, this novel instead paints an unflattering, inside picture of the brief rise of a newly independent African nation, but one that slides just as easily into despotism once the white authorities who provided the country’s power structure have left.

* I should mention that Naipaul’s longtime mistress Margaret Murray accused him of physically abusing her, and author Paul Theroux supported this and also wrote that Naipaul abused his wife but refused to divorce her. You can see letters from both in the New York Review of Books from 2009. Whether you can separate the man from his art is up to you.

The country of the book is never named, perhaps to keep the story generalizable to the dozens of newly formed nations in Africa of the 1960s as the white colonizers, having taken their fill of the country’s natural resources, departed the continent, sometimes with violence (Algeria, Belgian Congo), sometimes without. Naipaul’s narrator is Salim, an Indian Muslim in Africa, an outsider by caste who can observe the changes in the country in somewhat dispassionate fashion, although there are points in the novel where his difference from the majority of the population becomes or at least threatens to become an issue. The bend in the river of the title refers to the location of the small interior city where Salim lives, chosen for its advantageous geography for colonial traders, and thus a relic of a previous and dark era in the country’s history.

Salim is friends with several people who are deeply involved in the economy and/or the government of the new country, one of whom in particular becomes adviser to the leader who turns strongman as the novel progresses. Raymond, the adviser, becomes increasingly impotent even as the President – also called the Big Man – seizes more power, eventually creating a Hitler Youth-like group of young partisans while empowering the army to terrorize the people and plunder at will. It’s a familiar story drawn from dozens of real histories of newly independent nations that fell quickly into authoritarian rule because the white people left nothing behind – no institutions, no guidance, and an uneducated population unprepared for rule after years of forced ignorance from their colonial oppressors.

Naipaul couldn’t be clearer in his disdain for the colonizers and the mess they left behind, but he also seems to have little use or empathy for the populaces now under the thumbs of their new dictators, often men they supported and voted into power. The last section sees Salim traveling to London to see an old colleague, and it becomes clear that Salim is not long for his country, as Naipaul’s depiction has the new nation worse off under native leadership than it was under the white regime. Things did fall apart in many places, but there’s an underlying implication – or perhaps just my inference – that things were better under European rule, and I think that is, at best, an oversimplification.

The other issue with this book and with Mr. Biswas is that I couldn’t connect with the main characters. Biswas was a sad-sack type, born under a black cloud, but also prone to making really bad decisions that exacerbated his bad luck. Salim isn’t quite so unfortunate, running afoul of the authorities just once near the end of the book, but he’s inert as a character – the neutral narrator, involved in some of the action, but betraying none of his personality. If there’s a star in the book, it’s the town, not the people; you get glimpses of the haphazard growth of an interior city in a country that is simultaneously booming and collapsing. But that wasn’t enough to power me through the novel.

Next up: Maryn McKenna’s Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats

Wise Blood.

Flannery O’Connor is a fascinating figure in American literature – a staunch Catholic who wrote macabre, misanthropic, even violent stories seem to stem from a mind like Cormac McCarthy’s, becoming a leader of the new Southern Gothic style before her death at 39 of complications from lupus. Her short story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find includes the title story, one of the creepiest I’ve ever read, a story that seems completely without hope and presents as dark a view as possible of humanity.

O’Connor wrote two novels, including Wise Blood, about a young man named Hazel Motes who decides he’s going to start a Church Without Christ, a sort of anti-church, not a church of atheism specifically but a church opposed to churches. If it sounds like a less than coherent philosophy, then you’ve got the idea, as Hazel is very mad and not very smart. He’s befriended by the teenaged zoo employee Enoch, an eager and socially inept youth who is looking for anyone to whom he can attach himself. Hazel’s half-hearted attempts to preach his anti-gospel are quickly subsumed by a local con man, who names his church the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ and starts collecting donations while steering attention away from Hazel. Hazel’s rage gets the best of him as he sees someone else profiting from his ideas, leading to violence and then a period of remorse marked by self-mutilation and asceticism.

Wise Blood is disjointed, and side characters and themes come and go without much bother, so it wasn’t surprising to see (after I read it) that O’Connor cobbled it together from previously written short stories and her master’s thesis (the first chapter). The one unifying element is Hazel himself, a damaged World War II veteran whose family has disappeared while he was away, and who returns believing in nothing at all – a pure nihilist, angry at the world and at the God in which he claims to disbelieve. He’s a comic antihero, in part because he’s a bit of a moron, and in part because so much of what he does goes awry. So while the novel does have a climax and long resolution, it’s more a connected set of stories around Hazel’s return from war and anti-religious fervor, culminating in his attempt to find redemption via masochistic means after committing a horrible crime.

O’Connor makes heavy use of symbolism in her works, none more here than the repeated references to characters’ eyes. We get the crooked preacher who pretended to blind himself with quicklime but is the first one to see through Hazel for what he is. Hazel is stopped by a police officer at one point whose eyes are ‘diamond blue.’ The crooked preacher’s daughter, named Sabbath Lily, decides she loves (or just wants) Hazel because of what she sees in his eyes – that he’s not just looking at you, but through you into the future. And the name Hazel Motes includes two allusions to eyes or sight, hazel as a distinctive eye color, and mote as a reference to Matthew 7:3-5 (“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”), which decries those who see flaws in others but are blind to faults in themselves.

But despite comic elements and text rich with metaphor and allusion, Wise Blood feels inconsequential; I read it, but never felt absorbed at all in the story, and found the redemption arc too inverted to connect with it. The side characters are all too one-dimensional and serve as props for Hazel’s actions, not as fully-realized individuals themselves. And the ending moves more into speculative fiction territory, losing any threads of realism we’d had earlier in the book. The Guardian named this one of the 100 best novels ever back in 2003, but I’ve read a few hundred novels better on both a literal and a symbolic level.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

I’d only read one Salman Rushdie novel prior to this month, tackling Midnight’s Children back in 2010; I found it a somewhat difficult read, but brimming with imagination, big themes, and incredible prose and wordplay. What I didn’t know until very recently was that he wrote a children’s novel called Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which appeared on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels ever written. It’s quite wonderful, featuring more of the wordplay and creativity that marked Midnight’s Children, reminding me in many ways of The Phantom Tollbooth, one of the best children’s novels I’ve ever read (twice, in fact, once on my own and again to my daughter), and the works of Roald Dahl.

Haroun Khalifa is the young son of Rashid, a storyteller who suddenly loses his gift of narration when his wife leaves him, leaving the two of them without any means of support and Rashid without his identity. When Rashid fails to deliver at a speaking engagement, he and Haroun are whisked off to the Valley of K for his next assignment, speaking for the politician Snooty Buttoo – there are a lot of Butts in this book – only for Haroun to discover that his father has lost his ability to weave stories because Iff the Water Genie is trying to sever Rashid’s imagination. This leads Haroun to learn about the Sea of Stories, the plot by the evil Khattam-Shud to poison it and block its source, and the impending war between the Kingdoms of Chup and Gup that will determine the fate of the Sea.

Rushdie makes Haroun the hero of his own story in the tradition of children in literature who have to do something to save one or both of their parents. Haroun faces difficult choices and shows courage in the face of great odds, standing up to the various otherworldly creatures trying to steal his father’s gift or kill Haroun’s new friends from Gup or sew the lips of the Princess Batcheat shut. (He gets no help from the vacuous Prince Bolo, the antithesis of the typical prince-hero character, generally saying and doing the wrong thing or just showing no awareness of what’s happening around him.)

The text itself is replete with puns, references to Hindustani words or Indian historical figures, and even pop culture references. Iff and the Butts work for the Walrus, who employs technicians named the Eggheads, a reference I trust I don’t have to explain. Butt the Hoopoe certainly sounds like a nod to the British glam-rockers Mott the Hoople. Many names allude to characters in the stories of One Thousand and One Nights, including Haroun al-Rashid, a real-life Caliph of Baghdad who appears in many of those tales. General Kitab’s name means “book” in Arabic and Hindustani, and his army comprises numerous Pages. And the fish with multiple mouths, or maws, are referred to as Plentimaws … and there are Plentimaw fish in the Sea. (The book also has a brief appendix where Rushdie explains many of the character and place names.)

It’s also hard to avoid the likelihood that Rushdie wrote this as a reaction to the fatwa issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran after the publication of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the general controversy over a portion of the book that some Muslims deemed blasphemous. In the wake of its release, at least ten countries banned the book in some form, including his native India, while many U.S. bookstores declined to sell it. There were also multiple bombings of bookstores and newspapers in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom related to the book’s sale, while the Archbishop of Canterbury called for an expansion of England’s Blasphemy Act to cover offenses against Islam. (That law was repealed entirely in 2008.) Haroun may be just a children’s novel, but it’s probably also a parable about censorship and the threat to the marketplace of ideas, showing how a society might suffer in a world without stories.

Haroun is better for slightly older kids, because the vocabulary would likely be too demanding for children below fifth grade or so, although the story itself would mostly be appropriate – Haroun’s mother runs off with another man near the beginning, but eventually returns without any real comment – and easy for any child to follow. I could see younger kids being disturbed by the threats to sew the Princess’ mouth shut, although Rushdie softens that possibility by having other characters complain about how awful her singing voice is. It’s a book for younger readers, though, so Haroun saves the day, no mouths are sewn shut, and Rashid eventually regains his talent for weaving stories. The beauty of this book is the journey, the literal one Haroun takes to this other world – I haven’t even mentioned the earth’s second moon, Kahani, which you might not have noticed because it moves by a Process Too Complicated to Explain – and the one on which Rushdie takes the reader, with puns and gags flying so fast that you might miss them on your first read. It’s a delight and a testament to Rushdie’s boundless imagination.

Next up: I’m many books behind in my reviews, but right now I’m reading Kat Kinsman’s memoir Hi, Anxiety: Life with a Bad Case of Nerves.

Wise Children.

Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 1984, and then won a special Best of the James Tait Black award in 2012 as the best of the 90-odd winners of the annual honor in its history, beating out such widely acknowledged classics as Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (which was shortlisted), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Robert Graves’ Claudius duology, and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. I read it in April of 2016 and found it impenetrable, between her recursive prose and her seamless mixture of unreality into the realistic narrative, without any core characters to whom I could relate or with whom I could empathize. It’s been only a year and a half since I read it and I’d have a hard time telling you what it was about.

Her last novel, Wise Children, is completely different in everything but prose style – but here the almost Proustian prolixity is far more effective, as it reflects the effusive, vivacious personality of the narrator, Dora Chance. Dora and Nora are twins, the illegitimate offspring of the stage actor Melchior Hazard (I trust you’ve noticed these surnames already), who grow up in and around the theatre and whose lives intersect regularly with those of their biological father, their uncle Peregrine who pretends to be their father when he’s not wandering the globe, and Melchior’s various wives and other children, the latter of whom also come in pairs. The book is a bawdy, boozy, life-affirming comedy, told by Dora as she, her sister, and Melchior’s first wife, the Lady Atalanta, prepare to attend Melchior’s one hundredth birthday party.

Carter employs a ton of wordplay in the book, with double meanings, allusions, and rhyming. Referring to a little closet where a lost cask is found at one point, she has Dora call it “the place where the missus could stow away the master if the master came home plastered.” Her prose is musical, and the puns can be auditory or visual (Peregine calling his nieces “copperknobs,” a deviation from the British slang term for a redhead “coppernob,” and then referring to them getting the “key to the door” when they turn eighteen). I’m sure I only caught a fraction of the references to Shakespeare, English poetry, Greek mythology, and more.

The narrative itself is also unorthodox; it’s written like a memoir, but Dora can’t exactly walk a straight line (unsurprising, given her self-professed alcohol intake) when delving into the past, and her reliability is questionable – or Carter is employing a little magical realism, especially when Peregrine is involved. Much of the comedy is situational, as Carter weaves a web of love/hate relationships among the various half-siblings, parents, uncles, and associates, complete with mistaken identities and the Chances taking advantage of others’ inability to tell them apart. There’s a lot of booze, a lot of sex, and a fair amount of confusion over who is actually the father of each set of twins – much of that fostered by Melchior himself, as his interest in fatherhood is directly tied to its utility in his stage career.

This book appeared on the Guardian‘s list of the top 100 novels of all time, rather than Nights at the Circus, and although that opinion seems contrarian I’d have to agree with it. This is more accessible, funnier, and far more engaging. I’d challenge anyone who reads this to not adore the Chances, who make effrontery their primary coping mechanism in a world that would often rather forget their existence, and who turn the randomness of life into a series of opportunities. It wouldn’t make my top 100 novels list, but it is an incredibly fun, erudite book that regularly had me laughing out loud.

Next up: I’ve got 100 pages to go in Dan Vyleta’s Smoke.

Waiting for the Barbarians.

I’d sort of avoided J.M. Coetzee for a while, given his reputation for dark, depressing themes; one of his two Booker Prize-winning novels, Disgrace, involves rape as a significant plot point more than once in the book. I was in a used book store in Manhattan in June, however, and saw Waiting for the Barbarians, which made the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels ever written, on the shelf for a few bucks, and figured at 156 pages it would at least be over quickly if I hated it – and maybe it would surprise me. I can’t see it as a top 100 all-time novel, but I got more out of the book than I expected, as it’s a fable that seems to combine some of the best of Italo Calvino and Kazuo Ishiguro (the latter of whom won the Nobel Prize for Literature, as did Coetzee), in a work that I’d call the better Darkness at Noon.

The story is set in an unnamed frontier town at the edge of the Empire, where the main character, the Magistrate, has served his country for some years when a Colonel arrives and “interrogates” some prisoners, including a father and son, about the activities of nearby barbarians who might threaten the town or the Empire itself. The Magistrate is dubious about the actual level of the threat, and is disgusted by the Colonel’s use of torture, which kills one of the prisoners and leads to questionable answers – likely the ones that the Colonel wanted anyway to justify a military effort against the barbarians. When the first effort yields a new set of prisoners, who are further tortured, the Magistrate takes pity on one woman among them who’s been blinded by the Colonel’s men. This decision and a journey to eventually return her to her people pits the Magistrate against the Colonel, who declares him a traitor and makes him a political prisoner and pariah in his own town.

Waiting for the Barbarians was first published in October of 1980, winning the James Tait Memorial Prize for that year, but it certainly seems to presage the United States’ two invasions of Iraq (1991 and 2003), especially the latter which, as we now know, was predicated on questionable intelligence about the Iraqi regime’s possession of or attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Coetzee’s use of nameless towns and characters only emphasizes its fabulist, universal nature; he’s discussing core features of leaders who operate without viable opposition and exposing how functionaries may work to provide the answers desired by their superiors rather than the correct or just ones. Coetzee exposes the worst of humanity here, but it’s all well-grounded in actual events that preceded the book’s writing, in dictatorships and democracies.

I read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, considered one of the peak novels of anti-communist literature, back in 2008, but couldn’t connect with any of the characters and found the narrative to be distant and cold. Coetzee infuses the Magistrate with more complexity; he’s flawed, a little bigoted, or at least mistrustful, but also highly empathetic, and less disdainful of women than the government officials or soldiers who come to the village and do as they please. The submissive response of the residents of the town, who seemed to respect the Magistrate until the Empire turned on him and labeled him a traitor, mirrors the inaction of many residents of past aggressors, including the Axis powers of World War II, who stood by while their neighbors were arrested, tortured, or murdered. The Magistrate seems to hope that if he stands up for what he believes to be just, others will support him; instead, people he thought were his friends act as if he’s not even there, until later in the novel when the tides shift the other way again and it’s safer to come out on his side.

This is a very grim worldview, but it’s an accurate one, and the 37 years since the book’s publication haven’t dulled its (deckled) edges one iota. Leaders continue to provoke conflicts and pursue wars on spurious grounds to distract their citizens or stage some patriotism theater. Had Coetzee made the Magistrate more of a one-dimensional martyr, it would have come at a great cost to the story’s staying power, but because his protagonist is so thoroughly human, it seems like a story that, while depressingly real, will have staying power for decades to come.

Next up: Angela Carter’s Wise Children, also on that Guardian list.

The New York Trilogy.

Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy is a collection of three novellas that are just barely connected enough that I would call this one novel, although it certainly bends the boundaries of the form. Each part starts out as a detective story, but turns into something else entirely, exploring questions of identity and meaning, with the three protagonists devolving into madness as their “cases” go awry. The work appears on the Guardian‘s 2003 list of the hundred greatest novels ever written, which is the only reason I even knew of its existence.

The first novella, City of Glass, covers a writer named Daniel Quinn who works under a pseudonym, William Wilson, about a detective named Max Work. Quinn gets a strange call one night asking for the detective Paul Auster, and after dismissing the first call, receives another one a few nights later and decides to play along, pretending to be Auster and taking on the case, which involves protecting a young man, Peter Stillman, from his abusive father as the latter is about to be released from prison. Peter speaks in a unique, stilted fashion, the result of the abuse his father, who was gripped by a sort of religious mania, put him through. Quinn decides to take the job, following the father, also named Peter Stillman, from Grand Central Station on the day of his release to the flophouse where he settles, eventually forcing a meeting with the older man, while also tracking down Paul Auster, the writer (not a detective), who is working himself on an article on the narrator character of Don Quixote. Quinn assumes the identity of the Auster-detective and goes undercover to an absurd extent, such that the case gets away from him and he begins to lose his own sense of self.

Ghosts, the shortest of the three acts, covers a detective named Blue, who is hired by the unseen White to stake out a target named Black. Every character has a color for his/her name – sometimes just part of the name, sometimes that’s all we get – but Blue, like Quinn in the first story, veers off the path, as he finds that watching Black day in and day out seems increasingly pointless, and eventually he decides to try to stalk White and find out what the purpose of the assignment is. It doesn’t go well, as you might imagine.

The Locked Room has the most conventional narrative of the three stories, and works less like a detective story and more like a psychological study. The unnamed narrator finds out that his childhood friend Fanshawe, with whom he’s had no contact for a decade, has disappeared, asking his wife to contact the narrator if he doesn’t reappear within a certain length of time and to have the narrator look through his collected writings. Fanshawe’s unpublished works turn out to be critical masterpieces and become commercially successful enough to allow the narrator, who quickly falls for and marries Fanshawe’s wife, to walk away from his own life and become Fanshawe’s agent, of a sort, as the steward of his friend’s various works. Of course, Fanshawe isn’t dead, and the narrator can’t leave well enough alone, especially once rumors start that Fanshawe is just a fabrication, so he tries to track his friend down despite explicit instructions not to do so. The resolution of this ties the three stories together in an unexpected and (by design) incomplete fashion, which I would argue makes the three novellas together a single work of narrative fiction despite the incongruities between stories.

Postmodern with metafictional elements, The New York Trilogy plays with layers of reality to push the three protagonists through varying levels of internal and external rebellion, against their senses of self and against the perception that they lack free will in a universe that is forcing action upon them. Blue and the nameless narrator both try to find the scriptwriters directing their lives. Quinn, himself an author, is presented with an entirely new script, but becomes obsessed with its narrative to the point that he completely loses himself, as if he’s playing a role that consumes him. In all three stories, Auster gives us less-than-reliable narrators and causes to doubt whether the antagonists or their backstories are real. Even when he unites the three narratives in the last few pages of The Locked Room (with a few scattered hints before that), the truth remains ambiguous – it’s possible that the stories all share a character, or that a character from one story created one of the others. It’s a work that asks questions without answering them, but still manages to grab the reader with the detective-novel paradigm and determination (if not entirely hinged) of its lead characters. I’m a devoted fan of noir detective fiction; this might be more gris than noir, but it works well with its foundation.

Next up: I’m reviewing out of order, but I’m currently on Frederik Pohl’s Hugo & Nebula Award-winning novel Gateway.