→ July 23, 2008
→ By

Pale Fire.

You could interpret Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (on the TIME 100 and #53 on the Modern Library 100) in any number of ways. The book comprises an unfinished, 999-line epic poem – occasionally brilliant, but mostly pedestrian and often just silly – by John Shade, and 150 pages of critical commentary by the late poet’s neighbor, the very eccentric Charles Kinbote.

I prefer to view the book as a satire of modern critical commentary on poetry, where the critic or analyst can find whatever s/he wants in the poem by looking hard enough, even though the analysis may be informed by nothing more than a series of coincidences. As a satire along these lines, Pale Fire is undoubtedly successful, blending outright humor with the dry wit that comes of exaggerating the satire’s target to the point of comedy, but satire does not provide a novel with any narrative greed. Only a strong plot can do that, and the plot of Pale Fire is weak, not least because the reader can figure out the two main twists before completing the first third of the book.

Similarly, the clever wordplay throughout Pale Fire is amusing, but doesn’t hold the reader’s attention. Yes, it’s great to see a reference in the poem to “Hurricane Lolita,” followed by a dry, witless comment on the name Lolita. Yes, the reference to “word golf” in the index is funny when you follow the “see also’s” to their conclusion. The play on the names of Oliver Goldsmith and William Wordsworth is good for a chuckle, but the moment passes. You can’t sustain a novel on cleverness alone, so while Pale Fire is undeniably clever, you have to buy into the mystery of the narrator’s identity to find the narrative greed here that will propel you through the book.

Nabokov himself apparently said that the narrator is a fraud, a madman with an invented backstory, but there are other critics and fans of Pale Fire who offer differing interpretations, that perhaps the narrator’s commentary is guided by Shade from beyond the grave, or that the narrator is Shade himself, or that Kinbote is who he says he is (a minor plot point I won’t spoil). These debates are mildly interesting, but even the mystery of who is who and what is what wasn’t enough to propel me through the text. With thirty pages to go, I was still dragging myself to the end. It was obvious from the start how Shade would die, and obvious to me from early on who Kinbote was or thought he was. I thought we might get some major plot twist at the end, but none came, and the fairly insubstantial plot of the attempt to assassinate the king of possibly-fictional Zembla was boring, not least because we know it fails. Nabokov also said that he wrote primarily for himself, and I suppose his tastes were far different than my own.

Next up: An out of print novel by Anthony Powell, one of his first, a comedy called A View to a Death, which preceded A Dance to the Music of Time. I was lucky enough to stumble on a copy in a used book store for $2, although I see some copies online for under $10.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ July 20, 2008
→ By

Interpreter of Maladies.

I am fighting my way through Pale Fire, which has been very disappointing (great concept, sluggish execution), which has kept me from sitting down to review Jhumpa Lahiri’s wonderful short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies.

The book, Lahiri’s debut, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000. I’ve written before that I’ve had mixed success with the Pulitzer winners, although if we extend it to the award’s predecessor, the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, I’d say I’ve liked nine of the thirteen winners I’ve read. Interpreter makes it ten of fourteen.

The overarching theme – a popular one among literary critics now – is the cultural conflict faced by immigrants from the developing world to the United States. What makes Lahiri’s take different, at least to me, was her very specific focus: She eschews the Big Event, the Sudden Plot Twist, and the Grand Statement. Her stories are slices of life, sliced almost arbitrarily rather than crafted around endpoints that force the flow of the story from A to B. When she wants to tell the story of the effects of the Bangladeshi war of independence, she does so from the perspective of a young Indian girl in the U.S. whose family becomes close to a Bangladeshi man studying in the United States. His wife and daughters are in Bangladesh, and after the conflict breaks out, he loses contact with them. Another story, “Mrs. Sen’s,” explores the difficulty a 30-year-old Indian woman encounters with the transition to life in America through the eyes of the young American boy whom she babysits in the afternoons, using her problems learning to drive as a synecdoche for the larger issue of cultural transitions.

The two most powerful stories were the first and last in the book. The opener, “A Temporary Matter,” tells of a childless Indian couple whose marriage has slowly eroded into mutual indifference since the wife suffered a late-term miscarriage while the husband was away on a business trip. During scheduled hourlong blackouts in the evenings in their Boston neighborhood, they’re forced to spend more time together, but the results are small and simple, rather than big and dramatic, showing an impressive feel for human relations for an author in her early 20s. The final story, “The Third and Final Continent,” a young Indian man comes to Boston to study and rents an apartment from the very old and very eccentric Mrs. Croft, developing a faint affection for the woman despite her eccentricities. He moves out when his arranged bride comes over from India, but pays the woman a visit with his wife. Mrs. Croft’s response is absolutely priceless.

None of the stories strikes a truly false note, not a bad read on emotions, no clumsy dialogue, no judgments on the superiority of one culture or another. Even “This Blessed House,” about an Indian couple who buy a house, only to find tacky Christian artifacts stashed in corners and cupboards, avoids the easy way out of ridiculing the house’s (absent) previous owners and focuses instead on the way the wife’s reaction to the pieces alters her husband’s views of her. Unfortunately, Lahiri’s The Namesake doesn’t appear to have been a good showcase of her talents, based on the film version and on several of your comments, but Interpreter of Maladies is a very strong showcase of a young writer’s eye for the way people interact. Fortunately, Lahiri has returned to the short story format for her most recent book, Unaccustomed Earth, released in hardcover on April 1st.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 10, 2008
→ By

The Counterfeiters.

I can’t say that I fully got the point of André Gide’s The Counterfeiters (#60, Novel 100). It’s interesting in a way as an early attempt at what we would now call metafiction, with mentions of a novel within the novel, and with the fictional author’s journals providing large chunks of the real novel’s narrative. But the story itself never grabbed me.

The novel’s overarching theme seems to be the decline of morality in post-World War I France, although how Gide could kvetch about morality is beyond me. The story lacks a single focus – Gide himself said his story was more like an ellipse, with two foci, than a circle with a single center – but generally revolves around Bernard Profitendieu, the illegitimate son of a judge who sets off on a search for identity, and Edouard, the frustrated novelist inside the book who ends up connected with Bernard through his own nephew Olivier, and who opens the door into a second plot revolving around a depressed old man who wants his grandson retrieved from his home in Poland. Neither of the storylines is particularly interesting, and the most interesting one, around the dissolute young boys who pass counterfeit coins (giving the novel its title), is given very short shrift until a sudden climax at the novel’s very end.

One thing that kept occurring to me is that Gide, generally classified as a homosexual but perhaps better described as a pederast, had little grasp of adult romantic relationships, especially those between men and women. Nearly every interaction among the various heterosexual couples or pairs in the book rang false for me, while the allusions to gay couplings mostly went over my head, except for the few times Edouard was a little less coy about his liaisons. Gide’s discomfort or unfamiliarity with normal adult relations kept me at arm’s length from most of the plot.

I also found some of the translations to be odd, resulting in awkward English phrasings that probably don’t reflect the actual tone of the French original.

Anyway, more comment seems superfluous since I didn’t care for the book and it doesn’t seem to be a commonly-read tome. Next up: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies . And yes, after that, Pale Fire.

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 26, 2008
→ By

The Klaw 100, part four.

Part one (#100-81)
Part two (#80-61)
Part three (#60-41)
Part five (#20-1)

40. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. I’m not sure I buy into Vanity Fair‘s oft-quoted review (“The only convincing love story of our century”), but as a study of obsession, arrested development, and rationalization, it’s powerful and cheerfully unapologetic.

39. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh. One of the strangest books on this list, as it starts out as a story of drunken revelry at an English prep school and ends up as a story of a romance torn asunder by theological disagreements (also explored in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair). Think of it as a fictional memoir that intertwines nostalgia for a bygone era of English culture with a re-examination of the narrator’s spiritual emptiness.

38. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. Major Major, Nately’s whore, Milo’s cotton schemes … and the flying missions that never end in a serious war with some very un-serious behavior. A sharp satire full of madcap laughs.

37. Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. The first novel in the Western canon, and the first comic novel, Don Quixote is actually two novels now published as one; Cervantes wrote a sequel in response to the flood of knockoffs and unauthorized sequels that followed the enormous success of the first volume of his work. If you’ve read it, check out Julian Branston’s The Eternal Quest, a funny homage that includes Cervantes and an unnamed “errant knight” as major characters.

36. My Ántonia, by Willa Cather. Never mentioned in discussions of the Great American Novel, but isn’t a tale about immigrant families working to create better lives for themselves and their children an integral part of the American story?

35. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë. The consummate Gothic romance, with a little magical realism (although it was written a century before the term existed) and a couple of absurd coincidences, still captivates readers and, of course, gave us Thursday Next and The Eyre Affair.

34. The Trial, by Franz Kafka. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

33. The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal. Sort of a French picaresque novel, but with a heavy dose of the realism that characterizes most great French 19th-century literature. The protagonist, Fabrizio del Dongo, is a slightly dim young nobleman who sets off on a Quixotic quest to fight with Napoleon’s army (even though Fabrizio is Italian) and become a hero.

32. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini. Full review. The history of Afghanistan, told as the tragic story of two childhood friends separated not by war, but by a child’s severe error of judgment. Whether he finds redemption as an adult is left to the reader, but unlike, say, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Hosseini’s work at least opens the door.

31. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner. The toughest read on the list, because Faulkner – never an easy read – wrote the first fourth of the book from the perspective of the severely developmentally disabled Benji, who senses all time as now and drifts in his rambling narrative from the past to the present without warning. The four parts describe the decline of a Southern family – and of an entire stratum of Southern society – from four different perspectives. And by the way, the book’s title comes from Macbeth: “It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing.”

30. Empire Falls, by Richard Russo. Full review. A bit rich for such a recent book? I won’t deny it, but despite being set in contemporary America, Empire Falls harkens back to the storytelling of American literature from the first half of the last century, following a cast of ne’er-do-wells around a failing Maine mill town as they wait for something good to happen.

29. A Dance to the Music of Time (series), by Anthony Powell. Full review. Powell’s twelve-part sequence follows Nick Jenkins as he moves from boarding school to college to the army to the publishing world, with him serving as our wry tour guide through the follies and life events of a wide-ranging cast of characters.

28. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess. Full review. A dystopian novel about the simple things in life, like free will.

27. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. A great romance and a commentary on first impressions and, of course, how our pride can get in the way. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and the unctuous William Collins rank among Austen’s best comic creations.

26. Appointment in Samarra, by John O’Hara. Full review. A Fitzgerald-esque novel about one man’s self-destruction through alcohol as he rebels against the confines of the small town where he and his status-conscious wife live.

25. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury is better known for his science fiction – the dystopian masterpiece Fahrenheit 451 just missed the cut for this list – but this old-fashioned gothic horror story uses fear to drive the narrative forward as a sinister circus comes to a small Southern town and two kids find that their curiosity may do more than kill a cat.

24. Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene. Although it doesn’t have the gravitas of Greene’s serious novels (like The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair), Our Man in Havana is the most serious of his “entertainments” that I’ve read. It’s a rich satire about a vacuum cleaner salesman who is recruited as a British spy and fulfills his duties by sending in blueprints of vacuums and passing them off as new Cuban weapons systems.

23. The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens. Full review. Dickens’ first novel and perhaps the first true best-seller in English literature, Pickwick is a classic picaresque novel that showcases the sense of humor Dickens apparently lost somewhere on the way to two of the banes of my high school years, Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities.

22. The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton. Full review. Another Pulitzer Prize winner, two years after The Magnificent Ambersons won, Age combines a love triangle, biting but hilarious commentary, and the stifling social norms of the Gilded Age for one of the greatest American novels ever written.

21. Persuasion, by Jane Austen. Anne Elliott was persuaded by her father and Lady Russell to decline an “unfavorable” match with a poor sailor when she was nineteen. Now twenty-seven and apparently headed for spinsterhood, she learns that her suitor has returned to England a wealthy captain. Austen’s last novel is the tightest and brings the most tension without skimping on the wit provided by, among others, Anne’s complete fathead of a father.

Filed Under: Literature, Sports Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
→ June 25, 2008
→ By

The Klaw 100, part three.

Part one (#100-81)
Part two (#80-61)
Part four (#40-21)
Part five (#20-1)

60. The Secret Agent, by Josef Conrad. Conrad is highly esteemed within the literary world for both Nostromo and Lord Jim, but I prefer The Secret Agent for its readability and the presence of some real, bona fide narrative greed. It was adapted, loosely, by Alfred Hitchcock for his 1936 film, Sabotage. (Conrad’s best-known work, Heart of Darkness, is too short for this list.)

59. Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol. The first third of an unfinished trilogy, usually sold with the surviving fragments of book two (destroyed by the author about ten days before his suicide), Dead Souls is a dark comedy about serfdom in czarist Russia and the buying and selling of the rights to recently deceased serfs. Its publication and success mark the beginning of the Russian novel and one of the most fertile periods of great literature in any culture.

58. The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. Like so many novels on this list, The Leopard is the only novel written by its author. In fact, it was published posthumously by the author’s widow, and eventually became the first best-seller in Italian literature. It tells the story of the decline of a noble family during the unification of Italy, based loosely on the own author’s family history.

57. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson. Long John Silver, Captain Flint, Billy Bones, pieces of eight, fifteen men on a dead man’s chest. Yo ho ho!

56. The Small Bachelor, by P.G. Wodehouse. Not part of any series, this one-off book encapsulates the Wodehouse novel’s form perfectly, with two couples kept apart by circumstances, an incompetent artist, an efficiency expert, a policeman bent on becoming a poet, a female pickpocket, and the usual dose of misunderstandings and chases.

55. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett. The book is a must-read; the movie is a must-see. It’s probably considered the best hard-boiled detective novel ever written … but there’s one I rate higher.

54. Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson. Full review. Haunting yet beautiful, desolate yet hopeful, Housekeeping shows how much a skilled author can do with just a scarce supply of characters and limited dialogue.

53. 1984, by George Orwell. The ultimate dystopian novel as well as the most scathing attack on totalitarianism in literature, 1984 wins out over Brave New World for me because the polemic is built around a deep study of the main character, Winston Smith. Irrelevant note: The best paper I wrote as a student was a comparison of the way colors and light are described in 1984 and Brave New World. Where Orwell saw “yellow,” Huxley saw “gold,” and so both authors created vastly differing pictures of their dystopian futures.

52. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. The Great American Novel? Not for me, but certainly a great American novel, featuring thinly-veiled versions of Allen Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Kerouac himself, criss-crossing the country, with inventive phrasing and a dialect that defined the Beat Generation and two generations that came after it.

51. The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington. Winner of the 1919 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, Tarkington’s best-known novel tells of the rise of the United States – both the growth of its economy and the democratization of its society – by depicting the gradual decline and ossification of an aristocratic family. It also became perhaps Orson Welles’ least favorite of his own films, as the studio forced him to change the ending and cut significant chunks of the finished film; the original footage is lost.

50. At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien. A silly novel that was meta before meta existed, with a novel within a novel that sees its characters revolt against their fictional author. It also spawned the greatest endorsement in the history of the novel, from Dylan Thomas: “This is just the book to give your sister … if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.”

49. Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis. Full review. A great comic novel about a mostly-normal professor at a small English college who is surrounded by wackos and manages to get himself into increasing quantities of trouble.

48. I, Claudius and Claudius the God, by Robert Graves. A tour de force of historical fiction, told from the perspective of Claudius, the slightly lame and (as we learn) totally insecure man who survived decades of political intrigues and murders to become first Caligula’s consul and later an exalted Emperor of Rome.

47. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. A protest novel and an affectionate portrait of the title character, whose name has sadly been misused as an intra-racial insult by people who do not appear to have read the book.

46. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. I often vacillate on the question of my favorite Vonnegut novel, so I’ve punted and gone with the experts’ pick. Although I can almost certainly say that this wasn’t my favorite, it is one of his most coherent, and at the same time has enough wackiness and weirdness and Kilgore Trout to be undeniably Vonnegut.

45. The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas père. Filled with a chewy nougat center … um, and lots of adventure, with a pair of villains, plenty of treachery, a young man seeking to become the fourth musketeer … and a smooth milk chocolate exterior.

44. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. So simple in style that it reads like a fable meant to be told through the generations, with an unflinching message about the effects of colonialism on Africa’s culture and its people. Its sequel, No Longer at Ease, is also worth your time, even though it runs over similar ground.

43. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey. A comic novel in a serious setting, Cuckoo’s Nest always struck me as the dissection of a power struggle between two people and a statement on how leaders, and perhaps governments, attempt to sway the hearts of men. The pickup basketball game remains a personal favorite scene of mine.

42. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A novel of serious moral questions, of Dostoevsky’s own philosophy blending Christianity with existentialism, of redemption, and most of all of the power of rationalization.

41. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, by J. R. R. Tolkien. One ring to rule them all.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
→ June 24, 2008
→ By

The Klaw 100, part two.

Part one (#100-81)
Part three (#60-41)
Part four (#40-21)
Part five (#20-1)

80. Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow. An extremely easy read, despite the references to some characters by roles (“Mother’s Younger Brother”) rather than names, with rolling, twisting plot lines and text that takes you into another era.

79. Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier. Full review. A classic gothic mystery, which also led to Alfred Hitchcock’s only non-honorary Oscar.

78. The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy. Overlooked now, probably because of the rather unflattering depiction of a Jewish character, it’s a fast-paced and tense adventure story that deserves to be read by readers who understand its historical context. (And it’s hardly the only book on this list to take its shots at Jews.)

77. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison. Full review. Morrison’s second-best novel, the story of a black family divided through two generations and of one of the sons, Milkman Dead, who is searching for his own identity in the world.

76. A Grain of Wheat, by Ngugi wa’Thiongo. One of the best and most important novels written by an African author, Grain depicts a Kenyan village divided by the white colonial authorities, who use their power to split and oppress the people whose land they rule.

75. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy. Full review. Beautifully written tale of good and evil with an uncomfortably high level of violence.

74. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin. A novella in the ruined-woman genre, The Awakening takes the story of Anna Karenina, transfers it to New Orleans, and condenses it to focus strictly on the woman, her choices, and the society that boxes her into a corner.

73. Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev. An under-read Russian novel, like Goncharov’s Oblomov, Fathers and Sons captures a generational clash that threatens the traditional way of life in Russia, while introducing the then-chic philosophy of nihilism to the broader public.

72. A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini. Full review. Hosseini’s second book wasn’t quite the tear-jerker that his first was, but still had power in its subtlety, with the occasional burst of drama to keep you alert.

71. Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe. Another straight narrative without breaks, Moll is a picaresque novel and a twisted morality tale that follows a woman of uncertain scruples through her entire life, from her birth in a prison to her life as a prostitute to her eventual rise to wealth.

70. The Adventures of Roderick Random, by Tobias Smollett. An early and now somewhat-overlooked picaresque novel by one of the first great novelists and translators in the English language.

69. Watership Down, by Richard Adams. I struggled a little bit with this one; it’s a children’s novel, but it’s not. It’s more of a modern epic, a fable about a warren of rabbits who find their home threatened by human development, with one rabbit emerging as a hero through his own wiles and personal growth. The book is so good that it violates two of my core rules, that a book with a map or with a glossary should be avoided.

68. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. Criminally overlooked for decades, Eyes has become a classic in the growing canon of African-American literature. Its use of dialect cleared the path for Alice Walker and the grandmaster of the genre, Toni Morrison.

67. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. One of the leading dystopian novels with Orwell’s 1984, which is coming up on this list. Huxley’s depiction of a world overrun by technology was both prescient and paranoid, and perhaps rings more true than Orwell’s work given subsequent developments.

66. Monarch of the Glen, by Compton Mackenzie. Full review. Brilliantly funny. Currently out of print in the U.S., although it remains in print in England.

65. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler. Chandler is half of the pair of leading lights of the hard-boiled detective genre, and The Big Sleep was his best work, with sleuth Philip Marlowe as the pensive star, with dry wit and filled glass and a very clear moral compass.

64. All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren.Full review. The fictionalized story of the rise and fall of Huey “Kingfish” Long, told almost as the backdrop for the story of the narrator, political crony Jack Burden.

63. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark. Full review. A novel of feminism, of religious ideologies (and fascism!), told with an unusual and effective back-and-forth narrative style and a dose of humor.

62. The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West. A scathing indictment of early Hollywood culture and its pernicious effects on those who chase its rainbows.

61. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow. Far more enjoyable than the self-loathing of Herzog, Henderson employs humor and a touch of the absurd to explore the meaning of life and one über-successful yet spiritually unfulfilled man’s search for it in the hinterlands of Africa.

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.

Filed Under: Literature, Sports Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
→ June 20, 2008
→ By

The Assistant.

Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant, part of the TIME 100, tells the story of a drifter, Frank Alpine, who shows up mysteriously at a failing grocery store in a declining neighborhood in Brooklyn before World War II. The store is run by Morris Bober, a sixty-year-old Jew who appears unable to catch any sort of break in life. Morris wants to be able to provide enough for his daughter to be able to attend college instead of working in a clothing store, and to see her marry well, preferably to the law student Nat Pearl, but at least to a young Jewish man. Frank ends up becoming Morris’ assistant when the owner takes a fall and can’t work.

Of course, the daughter, Helen, ends up developing feelings for Frank, the dark and brooding type strip-mined by Hollywood in the last few decades. Frank, always coy about his past, is left to consider his options: make a clean break by owning up to his history, or blowing a potentially good situation and leaving town after a few months, which is the pattern of his life to date.

The Assistant is understated, although I’m not sure whether it’s fair to call it dull. Malamud’s prose moves despite his use of the broken English of Jewish immigrants from the early 20th century, and there’s enough “action” (although much of it comes in the form of words) to keep you turning the pages. But by the time you reach the end and look back on what actually took place, it doesn’t add up to much. Yet at the same time, it’s not a detailed character study of Frank, nor is it a comment on the plight of immigrants who saw their neighborhoods begin to rot from under them. If anything, the lead character in the book is Judaism, or perhaps Jewish-ness as a cultural rather than religious identity. Perhaps if you grew up Jewish, it would resonate more strongly than it did with me.

Next up: A rarity for me, a re-read. I first read Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews in the same college class that introduced me to The Master and Margarita, but I didn’t care for it and forgot pretty much everything about it. About two years ago, I tackled Fielding’s magnum opus, Tom Jones, and loved it, so I thought I should give Joseph another shot.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , ,
→ June 9, 2008
→ By

A Thousand Splendid Suns.

A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini’s second novel, will inevitably be compared to his first novel, The Kite Runner, a runaway success (which I read last summer) and an announcement of a tremendous new voice who could straddle the chasm between popular fiction and contemporary literature. I’ve been told that A Thousand Splendid Suns is even better than Kite Runner, but I’m not sure I could say either work was superior. What Suns offers that Kite Runner didn’t was a more assured and complex narrative, evidence of Hosseini’s development as a writer and storyteller.

Suns is, in Hosseini’s words, the story of the women of Afghanistan. It focuses primarily on two: Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a Herat businessman and one of his servants, who ends up orphaned and married off to a man forty years her senior; and Laila, a young girl raised in relative prosperity in Kabul whose life is altered by the civil war after the Soviets are expelled. Their lives end up intertwined through independent tragedies, and one of them will ultimately have to make the ultimate sacrifice to save the other.

The two women face hardship after hardship, both finding themselves victims of circumstance and of the men in the increasingly patriarchal world of Afghanistan as it moves from rule by Communists to warlords to the Taleban. Both of their lives end up dominated by Rasheed, Mariam’s husband, an older man who abuses both women, forcing them into an uncertain and eventually fulfilling partnership.

Hosseini makes it clear that he believes that Afghanistan can never rebuild without contributions from and involvement of its women; the book’s conclusion, more positive than that of Kite Runner in spite of all of the tragedies that have preceded it, punctuates this argument by tying several areas of rebuilding to the involvement of women. He also emphasizes the importance of living and loving in the moment; in a world where the future is so uncertain, allowing short-term anger and resentment to trump ties of blood and love is more than foolish, but can lead to a life of regret. Neither theme is all that deep or complex, but the stories he weaves around them are. Hosseini also continues to offer references or nods to works of classic literature, from the plot point borrowed from Tale of Two Cities to a soft allusion to the lovers’ separation in Jane Eyre, and I assume those are complemented by references to poetry and narratives from the Afghan literary tradition that are unknown to most Western readers.

Next up: I’m already halfway through a nonfiction book, Organic, Inc., a history of the natural-foods movement that will, at the very least, have me buying organic strawberries from now on.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,