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.

Berlin Alexanderplatz and another list of novels.

I’m still not sure if I liked Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. I did not enjoy the process of reading it: It is slow, disjointed, and frequently aimless. Döblin uses a weird stream-of-consciousness style that almost seems to be an attempt to represent the inner thoughts of a borderline lunatic, even though Franz Biberkopf, his main character, isn’t so much crazy as unintelligent. He bounces from dialogue to thoughts to poetry and song lyrics to text from advertisements seen on posters and in newspapers. The book is written in the third person, but the majority of the prose is spent in Franz’s head, making it thoroughly confusing when Döblin switches to the internal monologue of another character. And on top of all that, the plot is relatively thin on action, with the pace only quickening in the final two chapters (of nine). So if the question is whether I enjoyed reading Berlin Alexanderplatz, I’d have to say no.

At the same time, I can understand why the book is consistently ranked among the greatest novels ever written, including #70 on the Novel 100 and an appearance in the Bloomsbury 100 as well (more on that list in a moment). It is a novel of ideas, or more specifically a novel of an idea, that of the increasing sense of alienation brought about by rapid urbanization and industrial development. The more that we are surrounded by people, the more we are alone. Yet we can not survive or thrive alone, and solving this conflict is key to the redemption of Biberkopf towards the novel’s end. I can also see why literary critics would heap praise on the book’s writing style, which is thoroughly modern and clever and draws from one of the century’s most exalted works, Joyce’s Ulysses. (Apparently Döblin rewrote Berlin from scratch after reading Joyce’s magnum opus.)

Berlin tells the story of Franz Biberkopf, a ne’er-do-well just released from Tegel prison, where he’d served four years for beating his girlfriend to death in a drunken rage, back into Berlin in the 1920s. The city, which is the second-most important character in the book, is changing rapidly, urbanizing and industrializing, facing social upheaval between communist and fascist movements, suffering an apparent decline in morality, and isolating its residents from each other and from society as a whole. Biberkopf says he wants to live righteously, but ends up falling in with the wrong people and making some stupendously bad choices, getting tied up in murder and racketeering, all the while blaming Fate for what’s happened.

Up until the final 30-40 pages, Franz’s refusal to take any responsibility for his actions, which among other things cause the death of someone close to him, drove me insane, particularly because the narrator appears to agree with Franz’s point of view. Franz’s redemption is incomplete and deliberately ambiguous, but it requires Franz to face up to who he is, the choices he’s made, and the need to adapt his approach to life to the changing environment of Berlin. If you can tough your way through the prose and are willing to ignore the allusions you missed (as I did, although I found myself wishing for an annotated text), there’s some payoff at the end both in terms of plot and the novel’s philosophical aims.

Next up is a nonfiction book I’m already mostly through, John Emsley’s The 13th Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus, an entertaining if somewhat macabre read. I admit it might be more entertaining because of the macabre material, though.

Bloomsbury Good Reading Guides: 100 Must-Read Classic Novels is yet another list of 100 novels (actually, 99 novels and one collection of short stories), with a strong emphasis on the classics. This one comes with a short essay on each entry, and each ends with short lists of similar books to read if you liked the one covered in that essay. The author/editor, Nick Rennison, limited himself to books published by 1950, and cast a fairly wide net, including a number of books with which I wasn’t familiar (such as Icelandic Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness’ Independent People, currently on my to-be-read shelf) and mixing in a P.G. Wodehouse book to balance out all the depressing books on the list. Rennison does have one strong bias towards English authors, who account for 42 of the books on the list, 46 if we include the two Scottish authors on the list as well as Joseph Conrad, who was born in Poland but moved to London in his early 20s and wrote in English. I was dismayed at the omission of The Master and Margarita, which is mentioned in at least one of the recommendation lists, but pleased to see that some of the overlong “classic” novels of early English literature, like Pamela and Clarissa, the latter of which runs to over a million words or roughly 3300 pages of normal text, weren’t included.

The Pickwick Papers.

My wife has long told me that I am afraid of long books. I think she’s right. Since college, I’ve only read a few books that were as long as 600 pages (not counting Harry Potter books – I’m just talking literature here), and I’ve been pretty selective about starting any book of more than around 400 pages. This does limit one’s options, especially in the realm of serious literature.

The flip side, however, is that I get great satisfaction from actually reading a book of that length. I’ve built reading long books up so much in my mind that completing one – especially doing so in a relatively short length of time – feels like a great achievement. As a result, I was very pleased to find Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers to be a great read, and, with some help from a too-long travel day and a stomach virus, managed to knock it off in just two weeks.

The Pickwick Papers (#76 on the The Novel 100) was Dickens’ first novel and is unique in his canon as both a comedy and a picaresque novel, making it much more readable than that scourge of all of our high school years, Great Expectations. Pickwick follows the four members of the “Pickwick Club,” a sort of traveling social group of four men, led by the elder Samuel Pickwick, and his three followers. Like most picaresque novels, the book is structured around a series of stories, and was in fact sold in monthly installments as it was written, but the stories last longer and are more interconnected in Pickwick than in other classics of the genre, like The Adventures of Roderick Random. The central storyline, emblematic of Dickens’ later subject matter, is a lawsuit, allowing Dickens to satirize the justice system, crooked lawyers, and greedy people, but threaded through it are the romantic follies of his followers and his loyal servant, Samuel Weller, as well as the Pickwick Club’s run-ins with the fraudster Alfred Jingle.

The novel is a masterpiece of plot construction and comic invention. Dickens weaves the subplots together and deftly paces the stories to keep them fresh in the reader’s mind without revealing too much of any one subplot at once. Although the story relies heavily on coincidences – mostly characters running into each other – it was a common plot device of the time. And the wit in his prose is tremendous, from Dickens’ descriptions of some of his fringe characters (“his forehead was narrow, his face wide, his head large, and his nose all on one side, as if Nature, indignant with the propensities she observed in him in his birth, had given it an angry tweak which it had never recovered”) to satires large and small on all manner of persons.

If you’re up for the 840-page read, I recommend the 2004 Signet Classics edition (linked above) because of the presence of a short afterword by Jasper Fforde, who sings the novel’s praises and also mentions the fate of some of the landmark buildings mentioned in the book, a few of which survive to this day. And if you’re not up for it, I suggest that you hop over to Project Gutenberg, download the free e-text, and read Chapter 49. It’s a self-contained story that is just brilliantly delivered, and a good taste of what the best parts of The Pickwick Papers have to offer.

Next up: Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler.

The Age of Innocence.

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (now known as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), with good reason, as Wharton uses the classic love triangle formula to expose the darker side of the seemingly idyllic Gilded Age of the late 1800s while also incorporating some savage wit. It’s also in the Novel 100 (#61), the Modern Library 100 (#58), and the Radcliffe 100 (#42), although it was published two years too early for TIME‘s top 100 list.

Age‘s main character is Newland Archer, a young lawyer in the social elites of New York in the 1870s who is about to marry the pretty but dull May Welland, a socially acceptable match and one he doesn’t question until he meets her cousin, the Countess Olenska. The Countess has just returned to the United States after fleeing a disastrous marriage in Europe to a man who used her ill (although his exact crime is never defined, I inferred that he was beating her), and Archer finds himself drawn to her in an obsession laden with sexual overtones. He ultimately has to choose between his engagement and then marriage to a woman he likes, but for whom he has no passion, and the woman who ignites his passion but for whom he’d have to abandon his family and status while flying in the face of all social conventions.

For a novel built around a serious idea, the choices people have to make between conforming to societal norms and following the riskier paths that offer a chance for greater happiness, Wharton manages to incorporate some bitterly sarcastic humor.

She sang, of course, “M’ama!” and not “he loves me,” since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English- speaking audiences.

No one is spared, but Wharton has a particular enmity for the small-mindedness of the pro-propriety set, who conspire first to send Countess Olenska back to her husband and later to keep her and Newland apart.

On top of the love triangle and its underlying story about choice, The Age of Innocence reflects the social upheaval of the interwar period in which it was written. May Welland represents the longing for the pre-war period, a true age of innocence in which the U.S. hadn’t been embroiled in a major conflict since the Civil War, and prosperity and opulence seemed guaranteed. The Countess represents the future, from the vantage point of the end of World War I, from America’s increasing involvement with foreign nations to the uncertain economic outlook (the book was written in 1920, before the great bull run of the 20s) to the changing cultural and sexual mores of the time. Wharton comes down clearly in favor of the forward-looking viewpoint, but that doesn’t mean that Newland and the Countess live happily ever after.

The Age of Innocence is comfortably in the top 20-25 books I’ve read, more evidence that the most fertile period for the American novel was the time between the wars. It’s an outstanding marriage – pun intended – of wicked humor and social commentary, with a simple plot made interesting through strong characterization.

Conrad, Le Carré, Greene, and Shelley.

Jospeh Conrad’s Nostromo represents his lone appearance in the The Novel 100, and it’s apparently considered his best novel. It is an intensely political and psychological work, a comment on the inherent and perhaps inevitable corruptibility of man when confronted with temptations of power or money. Set in the Sulaco province of the fictional South American nation of Costaguana, which sits on the brink of revolution at the novel’s start, the novel’s plot centers around the re-opening of the San Tomé silver mine, owned by an Englishman who has become a full-time resident of Costaguana, and that mine’s relationship to the ensuing power struggle.

The plot weaves several storylines together on top of this structure, including a doomed romance, several independent searches for redemption, and the shadowy presence of the folk hero and reluctant revolutionary Nostromo. (Although I don’t believe it’s ever spelled out, “Nostromo” is a contraction of the Italian phrase nostro uomo, meaning “our man.” In spoken Italian this would sound very much like “nostromo.”) Nostromo barely appears in the first section of the book, but his own corruption as he feels the betrayal of the people of Sulaco becomes the central theme and driving plot element of the novel’s final half.

Conrad’s stories are always strong, and his characters are well-developed, but his prose is a little slow, so I don’t think it makes sense for a reader new to Conrad to start with a complex novel that runs a little over 400 pages. Either the novella Heart of Darkness (the book that became the movie Apocalypse Now) or the more straightforward intrigue The Secret Agent would be better introductions to Conrad’s work.

John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is one of the better spy novels I’ve read, built around a simple deceit that folds back on itself repeatedly, leaving the reader to try to figure out who’s lying and which characters are the “good guys.” It revolves around a British spook who’s out on one last mission, ostensibly to try to eliminate one of the top men in the East German intelligence service. The spook, Alec Leamas, goes through an elaborate charade to make it appear that he’s lost his marbles and is ready to turn traitor, only to find himself embroiled in a power struggle between his target and that man’s top lieutenant, with accusations of treason flying in both directions. Leamas’s situation is complicated by his brief fling with a girl, Liz Gold, who ends up folded into the drama as well. I won’t spoil the end, but the entire meaning of the book hinges on what happens in the last five or six paragraphs, which also reveal just how deep the deception runs. Great airplane reading.

I’m a big Graham Greene fan, and Orient Express was the ninth of his works that I’ve read, and probably my least favorite. ( Our Man in Havana remains my favorite, the perfect blend of the styles of his serious works and of his “entertainments.”) Orient Express revolves around a group of people on the famous train, headed for Constantinople but largely sidetracked in Yugoslavia when one of them, a Communist returning from exile to face trumped-up charges and certain execution in Belgrade, is pulled from the train by the authorities. Each character is flawed, some more deeply than others, and while every character has a goal or set of goals, none of them is remotely admirable. I understood the novel’s themes of alienation and the fungibility of many of the relationship types we employ in our lives, but the lack of a compelling character and the somewhat awkward way the novel ends (failing to really wrap up the plot line of Carol Musker, perhaps the most sympathetic of the characters) overshadowed the novel’s depth.

And I finally read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein … I’m not sure there’s much I can add here, other than to say that I was surprised to find that it’s not a horror story at all, but a morality play that’s built on a horror story, and a generally sad and bleak book at that. Anyway, that brings my tally of Novel 100 books read to 61, which is about the best I can say about this particular book.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows review to come Sunday or more likely Monday…