→ May 6, 2011
→ By

A Wild Sheep Chase.

Haruki Murakami’s English-language debut novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, gives an early glimpse of the mind-bending plot twists that define his two best novels, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, along with the usual measures of food, cigarettes, nonchalant sex, and characters that alternate from three-dimensional to transparent, sometimes within single passages. While it can’t match either of the other novels I mentioned, it’s a good read on its own both for plot and for its expansive thinking, and also interested me as a look back at Murakami’s formative years as a writer, like watching video of a big leaguer from when he was a prospect in high school.

None of the characters in A Wild Sheep Chase have names; the best we get are the Boss, the Rat, and J, while the protagonist and his girlfriend don’t even get so much as a nickname or a single letter. The main character is in advertising and, as the book opens, his wife leaves him for one of his closest friends (although he’s more numb than mad or grieving, as the marriage seems to have been long dead), shortly after which he receives an urgent summons from a mysterious businessman about a PR flier his firm put out that included a photograph of a very unusual sheep. That photograph, sent by our hero’s friend the Rat, seems to show a sheep that, by all accounts, shouldn’t exist, at least not in Japan, but the businessman’s interest goes beyond mundane questions of taxonomy, as this sheep appears to have powers beyond any other ovine known to man.

That businessman represents a shadow organization that controls many aspects of Japanese industry, particularly on the advertising side. He offers the protagonist a deal, without much say in the matter: Find that sheep within a month or find your life ruined. So the hero and his girlfriend – whose ears are, as it turns out, fairly important in their subplot, if not the main plot as well – set out to figure out where the Rat is and thus, they hope, find that sheep.

The wild chase is anything but wild; it’s slow, halting, and in some ways quite realistic, even if the sheep they’re chasing and the people they encounter aren’t. And it’s not clear, even after the chase is resolved, whether the protagonist was searching on behalf of the Boss’s minion or for his own personal growth. Before the sheep tale appears, he has no real anchors left in his life – no wife, no kids, a routine job, a scarce existence in the physical or emotional planes. The chase itself provides much of what’s missing from his life, including purpose and urgency, but of course the chase will end, after which he’ll either find his life in tatters or he’ll have the riches promised him … and he’ll have to find a new purpose. Explaining my thoughts on the end and what Murakami may have been trying to express would give away too much of the resolution, but I can say that I found that payoff a little underwhelming. The physical plot was resolved, but the philosophical questions and answers remained vague. It’s a better read as a suspense novel that makes you think a little differently than as a book pushing for any specific philosophy or emotional reaction, whereas his best works provide more clarity without devolving into sermons.

Next up: Martin Amis’ Money: A Suicide Note, which seems to be just the book to buy your sister if she’s already read At Swim-Two-Birds. it’s currently on sale through that link for $6 in the Penguin Ink paperback, with cover design by tattoo artist Bert Kerk.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ July 14, 2010
→ By

The Unconsoled.

New blog entry on some Red Sox and Mets prospects in the NY Penn League is up. My hit from this afternoon with Colin Cowherd is also online. I’ve filed my reaction to the Blue Jays/Braves trade, so it should be along shortly.

—

One of you warned me about Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, but I believe I already had it on my shelf at the time and I’m pretty stubborn about at least trying books once I’ve obtained them. And it was a pretty quick read given its heft. But not only is it my least favorite of the four Ishiguro novels I’ve read, it’s just a conceptual mess that takes an interesting premise reminiscent of Philip K. Dick and forgets to flesh it out into a complete story.

The plot revolves around Mr. Ryder, a renowned concert pianist who has just arrived in an unnamed Central European town for a performance, only to find himself sidetracked by an endless series of errands and other unfinished business, because the town is populated by people he’s met before, even including a girlfriend and a sort of stepson, but he doesn’t remember any of this. Time bends in odd ways, people act and react strangely, and monologues go on for pages and pages. And the town seems to define its identity by the status of its best musicians, having cast one aside when his style fell out of vogue and a new star arrived, only to find the latter to be a broken man and a drunk.

It seemed clear to me from early on in The Unconsoled that Ishiguro was writing a realistic novel within the world of dreams – the abrupt transitions from scene to scene, the fact that two buildings on opposite sides of the town turned out to be one and the same, the way items could change within a room over the course of a conversation, and the frequent situation that should be familiar to all of you of Ryder’s inability to get to someone he’s left behind or forgotten about or just needs to reach. If that was the author’s intent, he was successful, as I was off balance almost the entire novel because various conventions of the realistic novel no longer applied.

But the execution suffered in two ways: One, Ryder’s actions became extremely frustrating. He’d fail to say or do obvious things to alleviate bad situations, such as the time a childhood friend wants to show him off to her snobby friends who doubt she knows Ryder, only to have him come along but do nothing to reveal his identity. He’s rude and even cold to the boy, Boris, to whom he is something of a father figure, and often leaves Boris on his own inappropriately. It was maddening, even more than in a novel where the main character is simply unlikeable. In this novel, he’s unreadable.

Two, the end of the novel does not answer the key question: If this is all a dream for Ryder, what on earth does it mean? Are all of these people real, or merely manifestations within his brain of stages of his life? Stephan, a young pianist, can’t seem to satisfy his parents through his music, as they insist on seeing him as a disappointment; is that Ryder’s own experience as a young man? Why does Ryder spend much of the novel fretting over the arrangements for his parents, who are coming in to see the performance, only to find out (or be reminded) that there’s no evidence they’re coming at all? Why are there at least four or five of his friends from his youth in England living in this small Central European town, all acting like little time has passed? I read the book expecting some kind of a resolution at the end, either an explicit one (e.g., Ryder wakes up) or an implicit one (e.g., Ryder starts to identify some of the parallels between the dream-world and his own past), but I got nothing, not even hints at Ryder’s pre-visit life to help me make the connections myself.

I love Ishiguro’s prose, but in The Unconsoled his dialogue was out of control, with the aforementioned long monologues (one lasted at least five pages, with not so much as a paragraph break) and very frequent repetition of phrases or meaningless points. His prose was far more in control in The Remains of the Day, and after The Unconsoled he wrote another altered-reality novel that was tighter and much more compelling, Never Let Me Go.

Next up: Geraldine Brooks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning March.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 13, 2010
→ By

Midnight’s Children.

Futures Game recap is up, as well as a video of me & Jason Grey talking Futures Game.

—

In autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe.

My only knowledge of Salman Rushdie prior to beginning his much-lauded novel Midnight’s Children was that he was the subject of a fatwa for The Satanic Verses and that somehow he’d managed to bag, even temporarily, Padma Lakshmi. His public image and the controversy over the latter novel gave me the impression that he was a dour, serious writer, and I was only reading this work because it appears on the TIME, Modern Library, and Radcliffe top 100s through which I’m gradually working my way. (It also won the Man Booker Prize in 1981, and in 1993 won the Booker of Bookers, given to the best winner from the first 25 years of the award.)

As it turns out – unsurprisingly to me, and probably to you as well – I’d sold Rushdie short. Midnight’s Children is inventive, sprawling, witty, satirical, acerbic, gross, and, in many ways, important. I wouldn’t say I loved the novel, for a few reasons I’ll get into, but I don’t think I have to love reading a book to recognize it as great literature. It is, in many ways, the Indian One Hundred Years of Solitude, not quite as compact or as immersing, but with the same combination of wide and narrow scopes while using magical realism to tell its story.

The narrator of Midnight’s Children is Saleem, born at the stroke of midnight at the precise moment that India earned her independence from Great Britain, a date that has symbolic significance as well as plot significance within the novel. The symbolic significance is obvious, as Saleem’s story parallels and intertwines with the history of India, not just as a country but as a people struggling to figure out the whole independence thing, while the plot significance derives from the fact that each of the 1,001 children born in India within the hour after independence develops some particular magical skill or power, with Saleem eventually – in rather crude fashion – discovering that he has the ability to read or even enter other peoples’ minds.

The story of the novel spans three generations, going back to his grandfather and his peculiar courtship of his wife – originally his patient, as he was the town’s one doctor, sent to Germany for his education – through his own parents’ unusual union, with each marriage, courtship, or broken heart sowing the seeds of future calamities. As Saleem’s mother gives birth, a Christian nurse with anarchist leanings switches his tag with that of another baby born simultaneously, altering not just their fates but, in Saleem’s story, at least, that of India as a whole. Saleem leaves India for Pakistan and returns after two separate exiles, leads a mental conference of the thousand and one children of midnight, becomes an ascetic with a preternatural sense of smell, falls in love with an illusionist, becomes a father and a widower, and ends up with a strange wasting disease that leads him to write down the story of his life, one that cannot be untangled from the story of India from its independence through the novel’s present day. His dabblings with various forms of extremism all lead to disaster, not just for him but for anyone who comes near him – he is convinced that he is the cause of the misery – standing in for India’s own unfortunate swings toward communism or religious hatred.

Rushdie’s prose is at once maddening and magical, maddening because of stylistic quirks like strings of three adjectives without interruption of comma or conjunction, magical in passages like this one, where he introduces one aspect of the novel’s altered reality where the emotions of a cook enter her food and the bodies of those who consume it:

And, now restored to the status of daughter in her own home, Amina began to feel the emotions of other people’s food seeping into her – because Reverend Mother doled out the curries and meatballs of intransigence, dishes umbued with the personality of their creator; Amina ate the fish salans of stubbornness and the birianis of determination.

(The meatballs of intransigence. I worked for someone once who ate too many of those.)

I’m only superficially familiar with Indian history, although I hit Wikipedia many times to check and see if events described in the novel were taken from real life. (Unfortunately, most of them were.) But it’s clear that Rushdie intended to satirize many aspects of Indian culture, society, and especially its government; his comments on Indira Gandhi led the despot to sue him for libel when the book was published. Saleem and his family – included a number of cousins, uncles, and aunts who are various shades of wacko – seemed to me to stand in for various problems or crises of India as a whole, writ smaller and often with comic effects.

I could even see this book used in a class on comic novels – I took such a class in college, where I first encountered The Master and Margarita and If on a winter’s night a traveler – because of Rushdie’s use of farce and dry, sidelong wit, including this almost throwaway line where he pokes fun at Saleem’s innocence as the character walks through a dirty city street:

…and Japanese tourists who all (on this occasion) wore surgical face-masks out of politeness, so as not to infect us with their exhaled germs;

There were a few plot twists that didn’t sit right with me, generally characters making decisions that made little or no sense to me. There’s also a passage where a magician who specializes in making things or people disappear is presumed killed, but it’s not clear why she wouldn’t have used her power to save herself; I imagine it was necessary to have her killed or removed from the story, but the manner in which Rushdie did so felt incomplete, and I was half-expecting her to resurface.

Finally, I found the meandering story of the plot, especially its jumps back and forth in time, to be very distracting, since the transitions often weren’t clear and much of the present-day content was completely ancillary to the main storyline. I thought Rushdie may have even acknowledged the nonlinear, tangential nature of the book through the voice of his main character:

This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

But I may be erring by putting words in the author’s mouth when they only emanated from that of one of his creations. It was a tough read – not Tolstoy tough, but maybe Faulkner tough – but the creativity, the humor, and the borderline insanity of the book was remarkable, and as a window into a country and culture with which I wasn’t that familiar, it was an educational read as well.

It’s worth a mention that the witch with whom Saleem falls in love is named Parvati, while his second wife, who appears as audience and muse when he steps back from writing/telling his life story, is named Padma. So perhaps J.K. Rowling, in addition to reading A Dance to the Music of Time and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, read Midnight’s Children and threw in a reference via the names of two of her characters.

Next up: Kazuo Ishiguro’s frustrating, dreamlike novel The Unconsoled.

Filed Under: TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ February 17, 2010
→ By

The Known World.

Edward Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World combines techniques or themes from some seriously great novels of the last fifty years, including Beloved, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and a faux-historical writing style I’ve seen before but whose origin I can’t place. Unfortunately, it ended up less satisfying than the great novels it emulates, so while a solid novel in its own right, it suffers from the inevitable comparisons the reader will make while moving through the book.

The center of the book is the estate of the slaveowner Henry Townsend, a black man who became free around age 20 but who chose to purchase slaves for himself and build his fortune on the backs of members of his own race. Townsend dies at the beginning of the novel, although we see large chunks of his life through flashbacks, and the bulk of the plot revolves around the gradual decaying of the tight order of things – the business operations and the formal and informal hierarchies – of the tiny empire he’s built on that estate. The wide cast of characters includes slaves, freed blacks, and whites whose lives intersected with the Townsends, often with disastrous results.

While whites are largely depicted as forces of evil in the book, whether directly bringing evil on the black characters or simply by opening the door for ill fortunate, Jones targets black slaveowners and even highlights black slaves who exercised formal or informal authority over others for their moral culpability in the suffering of slaves. Using a black slaveowner and his family at the story’s center allows him to remove the facile white-bad-black-good dichotomy that could obscure the greater themes of morality he’s trying to explore, and the resulting moral ambiguity suffuses the novel, such as the question of whether a “fair” slaveowner is any better than a cruel one, or what the value of a law is when men charged with enforcing it fail to do so or even openly flout it. Jones mentions other outrages of the time like anti-miscegenation laws, but brushes past them because they’re not worth his time – his interest, beyond just telling a story, seems to lie in exploring situations that lack right or obvious answers, and thus he ignores those where modern sensibilities will lead all readers to the same horror or repulsion.

Where The Known World fell a little short for me was in narrative greed – it’s obvious from the start that the plantation will crumble without Henry Townsend, and it was evident to me early in the book that Caldonia, his widow, wasn’t up to the task of managing it, which presaged, at a high level, what was going to happen with the slaves and the estate. The interest of the plot, for me, was largely in finding out the fates of the various central characters, particularly the slaves, although Henry’s parents do figure into the last major plot strand, one that I thought had a strong symbolic significance and was the only area where Jones took square aim at whites, even non-slaveowners, for their role in the great cultural tragedy of slavery. And Jones remains true to life – some characters find positive, if not actually happy, endings, while others meet tragic ends and some just end up in the great grey middle.

The faux-historical trick I mentioned in the intro merits a mention. Jones intersperses fake historical facts, written in the dry manner of a history text or even a census register, throughout the book, whether to tell us the fate of a minor character or to give shape or color to a place or a county or a period of time. I found it very effective, and it gave the book the feel of a longer one because of its level of detail, without requiring the time an 800-page book demands.

Next up: Since finishing this, I read Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder, the last published Christie novel, a solid but unspectacular Miss Marple novel that, as always, had me second-guessing my instincts (which turned out to be right, although I can hardly take credit after doubting myself so heavily) after I thought I’d picked out the culprit. After finishing that this morning, I’ve started Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the year before Jones won with The Known World.

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→ January 5, 2010
→ By

Pedro Páramo.

Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo is barely a novel at a scant 123 pages and under 40,000 words, but was apparently a major influence on post-colonial literature in Latin America, most famously as the book that inspired Gábriel García Márquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude. Rulfo’s use of magical realism doesn’t seem all that groundbreaking today, but at the time it was published, it was.

Rulfo set the book apart from the beginning through its odd structure – seventy passages of varying lengths, some as short as a paragraph, all written as an interior monologue with very little descriptive prose. The novel includes three separate plot strands, loosely connected but woven together with frequent confusion as to which strand is the current one. Juan Preciado’s mother makes him promise to return to the town of his birth to find his father, Pedro Páramo, whom Juan’s mother abandoned when Juan was very young. On the way there, Juan has an unusual encounter with a strange man who tells him that Pedro PPáramo is his father as well, only to reveal that Páramo has been dead for many years. Juan finds the town, Comala, empty, yet full of ghosts and memories – yes, he sees dead people – and it turns out that the title character is the reason for the town’s decline and death, one that infects Juan as well, leading to an even more bizarre sequence of conversations he has and overhears from within his own grave. (Whether or not Juan is dead the entire novel is apparently a major subject of scholarly debate; I think he’s dead from the start, as the sequence that supposedly describes his death is unusually vague, but he doesn’t know he’s dead until that passage.) He learns that Páramo fathered many children with the women of the town, but became obsessed with the one he couldn’t have, Susana, who eventually returned to the town and married Pedro but never gave him her heart, after which he decided to starve the town to death.

Rulfo wrote the book after a visit to the town where he was born, one that was nearly depopulated as part of the great urbanization in Mexico in the early part of the last century. This shift also meant the destruction of local institutions in the rural towns that were the backbone of Mexican culture. The desolation and loneliness he experienced on that return visit formed the basis for the abandoned Comala of the novel – haunted by sounds and memories without a clear line between life and death (perhaps because everything is on the wrong side of that line). You can play all sorts of matching games between the main characters and the forces or events that shaped that period of Mexico’s history – Susana, for example, could stand in for that siren’s call of the city that ultimately wrecks the towns and people who heeded it – because Rulfo painted them with broad strokes and doesn’t provide a ton of detail in such a short work. He also gave his characters names with obvious metaphorical implications – Páramo is “barren,” Preciado is “precious,” Fulgor is “glow” – which is great fodder for academic interpretation, and I’m not sure it’s possible to read or enjoy this book without looking at that second level of meaning. The plot itself is so thin and unsatisfying that it can’t stand on its own and only rises to greatness when you consider Rulfo’s concern for his country rather than his characters.

Since Pedro Páramo needs analysis for the reader to fully grasp what Rulfo was trying to express, here are a few links I found useful in thinking about the book once I’d finished it:

Next up: Marilynne Robinson’s follow-up to one of my top 100 novels (her 1980 debut, Housekeeping), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ October 13, 2008
→ By

The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (on the Bloomsbury 100; #34 on the Guardian 100) is a sort of gothic novel that crosses a morality play with the epigrammatic style of his (other) magnum opus, the play The Importance of Being Earnest, employing what today would be called magical realism for the key plot point. The story is a straightforward riff on the Faust legent, but the witty prose – particularly the dialogue given to one character – make it a must-read.

The plot, in case anyone here doesn’t know it, is simple: Dorian Gray is a young, well-off romantic who has his portrait painted by Basil Hallward, who (unbeknownst to Dorian) is obsessed with him. Prodded by the Mephistopheles stand-in Lord Henry Wotten, Dorian utters a wish that the portrait would age and he would remain young, which, of course, comes true. Dorian becomes a heartless, dissolute wastrel as the image on his portrait becomes not just old, but ugly and mangled. There is one small plot twist, but otherwise, you can figure out where the whole thing is headed.

The scene-stealer, however, is Lord Henry, who is the little red devil on Dorian’s shoulder, and who speaks in paradoxes and epigrams that are usually funny and sometimes thought-provoking, but never superfluous. Coupled with the occasional quip from Dorian himself, these bons mots infuse the book from sour morality play with a streak of cynical humor. Some of my favorite lines:

Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us to do masterpieces, and always prevent us from carrying them out.

Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.

Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.

It’s hard for us to see it now, but at the time of its publication, the book was controversial because it was seen as immoral, a stance that Wilde himself contested unsuccessfully by arguing that “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” Of course, the book scolds the reader on the wages of sin, and I can’t fathom how contemporary readers missed that. Dorian lives a hedonistic life, enjoys it less and less all the time, and eventually gets what’s coming to him. How this is an “immoral” book is beyond me. If anything, it was too direct in its moral, but the pedantic style is softened by the cleverness of the language.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ June 27, 2008
→ By

The Klaw 100, part five.

Part one (#100-81)
Part two (#80-61)
Part three (#60-41)
Part four (#40-21)

I doubt there will be too many surprises here, as I’ve discussed most of these last twenty books somewhere before. The complete list of 100 is available as a spreadsheet at Google Spreadsheets. But don’t click now or you’ll spoil the top 20…

20. Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett. Dark and violent and completely gripping, Red Harvest was Hammett’s first novel and established the format of the hard-boiled detective novel with its sparse style and unblinking descriptions of bloodshed. It may have been the basis for Kurosawa’s Yojimbo as well.

19. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. Perhaps the archetype of the brooding male hero, although I kind of felt Heathcliff was just an asshole. It’s a tremendous story of anger, vengeance, and cruelty, unfolding in layers as one might peel back an onion. Also available in a much-beloved semaphore version.

18. If on a winter’s night a traveler, by Italo Calvino. If you love inventive or just plain weird books, this is for you. The subject of the novel is the reading of a novel. Alternating chapters show a dialogue between the Author and the Reader, interlaced with opening chapters from various fictional novels. Calvino, one of the great fabulists of the twentieth century, takes his inspired silliness to a new level.

17. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s all about the green light. Jay Gatsby’s ill-fated chase of the American Dream, set in the Jazz Age as the automobile begins to make its presence felt on our culture. It ranked first on the Radcliffe Publishing Course’s list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century, and second on the Modern Library’s own list.

16. The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford. A classic English novel of betrayal, The Good Soldier describes a web of infidelities that destroys the lives of five people, with incredible dialogue and the powerful, recurring symbol of the human heart. I’m pretty sure that at $2.50 it’s the cheapest book on this list.

15. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter , by Carson McCullers. Full review. An amazing achievement of prose and of literary introspection. McCullers looks into the human soul and finds a lot of dusk, if not dark night.

14. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. Like stepping into a lucid dream, and indeed, the protagonist finds the line between reality and dreams blurring while searching for his wife, who has either left him or is being held against her will. You’ll have a hard time putting it down, although there is one scene of graphic torture that was tough to get through.

13. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. Ignatius J. Reilly with his dyspeptic valve is one of the great hero-antiheroes in American literature as he’s forced to get his lazy ass a job. The book was published posthumously after Toole’s suicide through the persistence of his mother, who is portrayed in an unflattering light in the book, and novelist Walker Percy; twelve years after Toole’s death, Confederacy won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

12. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy. Hated it in high school … okay, that’s not fair, I hated the first twenty pages and rented the movie. I went back for a re-read 16 years later and saw what I’d missed: One of the greatest ironic novels I’ve ever read. It’s bleak in its portraits of English society and its strictures, of human emotions, and of fate, but Hardy (who also was a noted poet) writes beautifully and slips numerous bits of wordplay into the text.

11. The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins. Collins, a protégé of Charles Dickens, believed that nothing in the novel was more important than the plot, and he wrote perhaps the first suspense novel in this story of mistaken identities, ghost sightings, and the unctuous, nefarious villain Count Fosco. Its use of multiple narrators was revolutionary for the time, and while it has the potential to be confusing, it’s critical for the way Collins wants to unfold the plot before the reader

10. Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh. Full review. A hilarious and absurd satire of the news media that was written in the 1930s but is just as relevant today, as a man who wants no part of the job becomes a foreign correspondent to an African state on the brink of civil war.

9. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by Henry Fielding. Fielding made his bones as a novelist by parodying Samuel Richardson’s Pamela with his own work, Shamela, and then moved to a broader satire with Joseph Andrews before stepping out with an entirely original work, the comic picaresque Tom Jones. The story is built around Jones’ romantic pursuit of the daughter of Squire Western, who is constantly trying to pair his daughter up with the villainous son of Jones’ foster parents. Along the way Jones is arrested, accosted, consorts with prostitutes, and runs into no end of conniving, selfish secondary characters.

8. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez. The history of Colombia told as the history of one family, with a heavy dose of magical realism and the sweeping feel of an epic despite the focus on individual characters. The Buendía family plays a role in the rise of the fictional town of Macondo until a banana plantation, owned by foreigners, arrives and triggers a lengthy and ultimately complete collapse.

7. Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner. The history of the American South told as the history of one family, mostly limited to the decline of the region after the Civil War. Patriarch Thomas Sutpen builds his fortune, but sets the seeds for his family’s downfall through his greed and racism. Told in Faulkner’s usual style of multiple perspectives and winding prose.

6. Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton. The best book ever written about Africa was written by a white South African, decrying the country’s apartheid system while offering threads of hope for its future once the system is dismantled. Preacher Stephen Kumalo leaves his rural village to go to the city to help his dissolute sister, Gertrude, and find his son, named Absalom, who went to help Gertrude earlier but never returned and ends up in jail.

5. Beloved, by Toni Morrison. And here we have African-American history, dating back to their emancipation from slavery. Sethe and her daughter Denver are trying to establish a live for themselves as free women when a young woman, known simply as “Beloved,” arrives at the house. Is she the reincarnation of the child Sethe killed to keep her out of slavery? Sethe’s obsession with Beloved opens the door to a host of questions – are African-Americans held down by the weight of their past, or are they complicit in allowing their past to weigh them down? No one writing today does so with prose like Morrison’s or with as much literary depth.

4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. The greatest one-hit wonder in literature and perhaps in the arts. The story alone makes it a classic, but Lee’s use of language, combining a Southern dialect with the unmistakable voice of a child, elevates it to its legendary status.

3. Emma, by Jane Austen. Austen herself wrote that she didn’t expect anyone to like her meddling, imperious protagonist, but nearly two hundred years after publication the book remains extremely popular, and the title character is a major reason. Character development was never Austen’s strength, but Emma grows up across the book’s 400-odd pages, with the usual cast of comic-relief supporting characters, including her worrywart father and the garrulous Miss Bates.

2. Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. To the reviewer who called Lolita “the only convincing love story of our century,” I submit Tender is the Night, the story of the gradual, inexorable breakdown of the seemingly perfect marriage between two beautiful people by way of infidelity, drink, and mental illness. If Fitzgerald had to go out early, he could not have gone out on a higher note.

1. The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. An absolute masterpiece, banned by the Soviets for decades for its subtle yet severe indictment of communism’s many, many failures. The Devil comes to Moscow and exposes its society for all its vapidity, running into the frustrated author The Master and his faithful girlfriend Margarita, a story intertwined with a dialogue between Pontius Pilate and Jesus, all stacked with allusions to the Bible and major works of 19th century Russian literature. It is a work of unbridled genius, of acrimonious dissent, and most of all, of hope and faith in humanity.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
→ June 23, 2008
→ By

The Klaw 100, part one.

Part two (#80-61)
Part three (#60-41)
Part four (#40-21)
Part five (#20-1)

I’ve pointed you to many lists of great books – the Novel 100, the Modern Library 100, the Radcliffe 100, the Bloomsbury 100, and the TIME 100, all of which have become reading lists for me. I thought it would be fun to put together my own greatest books list. This is the Klaw 100.

My qualifications for assembling such a list are scant. I estimate that I’ve read somewhere between 400 and 500 novels in my life, but can’t say I’ve even reached 70 out of 100 on any of the greatest-books lists I cited above. I’ve never read War and Peace, Ulysses, or The Grapes of Wrath. I hated Moby Dick and A Farewell to Arms. I started The Ambassadors and sold it after fifty fruitless pages. I can’t say this is a greatest books list. It is, however, my greatest books list.

My criteria are wholly subjective. The primary criterion is how much I enjoyed the book, accounting for more than half of the “score” I might give each book if I was inclined to go to that degree. I also considered the book’s literary value, and its significance in the annals of literature, whether by its influence, critical reception, or the modern perspective on the book. There is nothing on here I don’t like.

There are only three items on this list that run beyond 1000 pages, one of which is a series, and another is two books that I combined into a single entry. The third is the longest single book I’ve ever read, although that was originally published as two volumes itself. By and large, the one hundred books listed here are highly readable, accessible even to the casual reader.

I did omit works of primarily popular fiction, even ones I enjoyed, so there is no Harry Potter and no Jasper Fforde. I slipped P.G. Wodehouse in there, since his works have influenced at least two generations of writers and performers, and there are four or five works on there that might straddle the line between popular fiction and literature. You’ll also notice the absence of some works of undeniable literary importance that I either haven’t read or just flat-out didn’t like. I make no apologies for these omissions.

The bottom line: My list, my call.

I’ll post a spreadsheet with the entire list after the last post in this series on Friday. For now, we start with the first twenty, #100-81.

100. A Hero of Our Time, by Mikhail Lermontov. Lermontov’s only novel – he was killed in a duel shortly afterwards – follows its antihero, Pechorin, on several pseudo-adventures in his quest to avoid boredom. One of the earliest nihilists in literature, Pechorin was a controversial character in his time, and his loose moral compass remains shocking.

99. Silas Marner, by George Eliot. Eliot, the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, wasn’t known for her brevity, but this work is both brief and beautiful. Marner is a religious dissident who is ostracized from his community and retreats into a hermit-like existence until a foundling appears at his door. He takes her in and raises her, rediscovering his own humanity in the bargain.

98. The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton. A suspense story with strong Catholic overtones, Thursday tells of a government agent’s attempt to infiltrate a ring of anarchists, only to find that no one is quite what he seems.

97. The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. A brilliant book with a bit of a twist at the end. Is it allegory? Magical realism? A comment on the human ability to cope with unspeakable tragedy? A testament of faith? All of the above?

96. A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster. The only Forster novel I’ve read and enjoyed, probably because it’s not such a complete downer as his other novels. It’s a straight romance, but also a commentary on the dated mores that still ruled the Edwardian era in England.

95. The Man in the High Castle, by Philip Dick. I’m no expert on science fiction; my knowledge of that genre is limited to Asimov, Dune, one or two books by Heinlein, and Philip Dick. I doubt anyone could top this work, however – an alternate history where the United States has lost World War II and been occupied by the victorious Axis powers. The novel’s structure is unusual, without a single, defining plot thread, but is worth the extra effort required to decipher it.

94. Germinal, by Émile Zola. Full review. An angry novel of social outrage and individual tragedy.

93. The Conformist, by Alberto Moravia. A dark psychological novel that’s not well known in the U.S., The Conformist tells the story of a man pushed along by forces beyond his control, all while struggling with his own lack of emotional responses to major events.

92. Nervous Conditions, by Tsitsi Dangarembga. The debut novel by a Zimbabwean playwright, Nervous Conditions might be the best work ever written about the plight of women in even the “developed” parts of Africa, as they have to deal simultaneously with traditional and modern pressures in their lives.

91. The Reivers, by William Faulkner. Criminally overlooked today by most Faulkner readers, The Reivers won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1963 and is Faulkner’s most accessible and light-hearted work. It’s a comedy set, as always, in Yoknapatawpha County, focusing on three ne’er-do-wells who steal a car, consort with prostitutes, race a horse, and try to get ahead by any means.

90. The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle. The grand-daddy of all mysteries, and the only full-length novel featuring Sherlock Holmes, Hound is as good a mystery as you’ll find, with Holmes at his brilliant and smarmy best.

89. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Full review. Ishiguro’s romantic tragedy within a dystopian alternate reality is imperfect, but the societal aspect is powerful and incredibly disturbing.

88. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. Too long by half, but it’s still the archetype of the ruined-woman genre that became a frequent theme in literature later in the 19th century.

87. Native Son, by Richard Wright. Perhaps the American equivalent to Germinal for its sheer anger and social commentary, Native Son is the story of a black man who is hemmed in by white society and whose culpability for his crimes may not entirely be his own.

86. The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers. In writing the first spy novel in 1903, Childers was also calling for Britain to ramp up her naval presence to prevent a potential invasion by Germany, which seems prescient given later events. Childers himself was executed during an Irish uprising in 1922, leaving Riddle as his only novel.

85. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. Full review. Not Murakami’s best, but still strong, with the same immersive, dream-like atmosphere as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It’s a story of a search for identity and meaning, told through two narratives headed for an inevitable intersection.

84. Right Ho, Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse. I’m not sure how to choose any single Wodehouse novel, or where to rank them on this list. I’ve read nearly all of the Jeeves novels and am hard-pressed to pick a favorite, so I’ve chosen this one, which also made the Bloomsbury 100. Describing the plot is pointless; the joy is in the telling.

83. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. Not really my favorite Twain book – that would be The Prince and the Pauper, a late cut from this list – but Huckleberry Finn is one of the few legitimate contenders for the appellation of The Great American Novel, a comedy, a drama, and a stinging social commentary all rolled up into an adventure story to appeal to the kid in every reader.

82. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John Le Carré. A seminal spy novel, but also a character-driven drama, one in which loyalties are uncertain, and so are fates. Impossible to put down, and not laden with all kinds of technobabble to try to distract the reader from a thin or implausible plot.

81. Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. In praise of economic man. Crusoe finds himself stranded on a Caribbean island and must find a way to survive, never giving up and in fact finding God during his time in solitary. One caveat: Defoe wrote without chapter breaks, which makes finding stopping points a little tricky.

Tomorrow: #80-61.

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→ April 23, 2008
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The House of the Spirits.

The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende, is one of the great works in the magical realism movement prominent in post-colonial literature, especially that of Latin America. While it lacks the broad scope and dreamlike qualities of the genre’s paragon, One Hundred Years of Solitude, it is still an epic combining romance, the rise and fall of a great family, and the turbulent political history of the never-named country of Chile. (The book also appears in the “second 100” list of honorable mentions in the Novel 100.)

The central thread in the story is the Trueba family, introduced after what amounts to a lengthy prologue on the daughter of a prominent local family who is betrothed to Esteban Trueba. When that girl, the beautiful Rosa, dies suddenly, Trueba heads to his family’s property in a remote section of the country and builds a modern-day plantation, sublimating his grief into work. He returns to marry Rosa’s younger sister, the clairvoyant Clara (Spanish for “clear”), and the two enter a long and ultimately stormy marriage, begetting three children and one grandchild who will become central in the book’s rapid-fire conclusion during the overthrow of the democratically elected government of The Candidate. (Never named, the Candidate is obviously Salvador Allende, the author’s uncle, who was overthrown and assassinated in a US-backed coup in 1973 that installed the brutal dictator Augustus Pinochet into office and plunged Chile into over a decade of political and economic misery.)

The emphasis of the story is fluid, with early emphasis on the passionate yet dispassionate love affair between Esteban, who on some level still yearns for his deceased lover, and Clara, whose connection to the spirit world puts her beyond Esteban’s emotional reach:

He wanted far more than her body; he wanted control over that undefined and luminous material that lay within her and escaped him evening those moments when she appeared to be dying of pleasure.

Esteban is, despite humble origins, a reactionary, an ardent defender of The Way Things Are and The Way We’ve Always Done It, putting him in conflict with his wife, his daughter and her revolutionary lover, and eventually his granddaughter and her own forbidden paramour. The father’s sins are ultimately visited on his progeny, especially granddaughter Alba, who ends up a political prisoner of the Pinochet regime.

Allende mixes narratives, with most of the novel told by an omniscient narrator with a wry outlook and hints of sarcasm, broken up by occasional soliloquies from Esteban Trueba, speaking in his last years as he looks back over his life and those of his family members. Trueba’s sections drag relative to the remainder of the book because we know that his perspective is tainted by his political leanings and complicity in much of the violence that peppers the book. The third-person narration also has a near-monopoly on the book’s subtle humor, which never dominates the text but slips seamlessly into the narrative, such as the description of one of Esteban’s sons, returned from a spiritual journey in India:

… his skin clinging to his bones, and that lost gaze so often observed in those who eat only vegetables.

Or, in my favorite line from the book, in the discussion of how most families have one member who’s certifiable, while the Truebas appear to have avoided that affliction:

No. Here the madness was divided up equally, and there was nothing left over for us to have our own lunatic.

Allende clearly favors the progress of modernity over the rigid hierarchy of the old economic system and the autocratic system used to prop it up, but there’s a recurring note of wistful nostalgia for the culture of the earlier years. The book’s spiritual underpinnings, ranging from Clara’s communications with the spirits living in their urban mansion to her ability to play Chopin on a piano that’s several feet away to the simple naturalism of the peasants on their rural estate, are all presented favorably, even admiringly, and are set off from the obstinate conservatism of Trueba and the old guard.

The novel undergoes one abrupt change after Clara dies and the coup to overthrow the Candidate begins, turning from an epic romance/family saga into a political or psychological thriller. Allende takes us into the political prison with Alba while we also see the frantic efforts of her aged grandfather, now politically impotent after years of playing a critical role in the government, to free her. How he ultimately does so is one of the most charming, emotional, and wryly funny passages in the book.

Next up: Having finished book eleven of A Dance to the Music of Time while I procrastinated on this writeup, I’ve just started Halldór Laxness’ Independent People. Laxness was an Icelandic novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, but 120 pages in, I’m not impressed.

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→ April 13, 2008
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The Alchemist.

Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist is subtitled “A Fable About Following Your Dream,” and within the context set out by the author – that this is a fable, and not a traditional novel – it’s good.

The linear plot revolves around a shepherd boy who meets with a mystical man who implies that he is a physical manifestation of the Soul of the World and encourages the boy to pursue his life’s purpose, which involves a trip to the pyramids and a search for treasure. Along the way, the boy meets an Englishman who seems to be on a similar quest but for the wrong reason, a girl who appears to him to be his soulmate, and the title character, whose skill in alchemy is secondary to his wisdom about our “Personal Legends” and the vicissitudes of life.

The Alchemist has a strong religious component, and all I’ll say about it is that if you’re opposed to religion, the book will be a tough read because belief in God and in a purpose in the universe underpins the entire story. Coelho is clearly engaging in a bit of magical realism here, doing so within the context of a sort of ecumenical theism. Whether The Alchemist is a self-help book in addition to a work of fiction is a subject I will avoid here.

As a straight novella, the book works well because the main character develops. The Alchemist struck me as a straightforward example of how to structure a short novel: The main character is on a quest or journey with a clear endpoint, and encounters obstacles along the way that help him grow emotionally while providing tension and moving the plot forward. Coelho could have extended some of the tense moments to enhance the reading experience, and probably should have, since I estimated that the book clocks at under 50,000 words, a shade short of what’s required to build the crescendo I expect in a typical novel.

My main complaint with the book was that the translation came off a bit stilted. It’s possible that Coelho’s language is just choppy, but my instinct says that it was translated too literally, and it gives some of the narration a trite feeling that, at the least, couldn’t have been intended. Quick reads, which any 167-page book should be, need smooth prose to succeed, and The Alchemist didn’t deliver that.

Next up: Having started and dispatched a Wodehouse book en route to Baltimore on Friday, I’m now about a third of the way through Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, another of the great works in the tradition of magical realism novels from Latin America.

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