→ October 15, 2007
→ By

Various murders on The Orient Express.

Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express remains her signature work. It features her most popular and most-used detective, the delightfully pompous Hercule Poirot; it is populated by a cast of unusual characters; its resolution is among her most complex and most difficult to foresee; and its setting captures the romance of European train travel while providing a perfectly closed system for Poirot’s investigation. The book’s structure is more regimented than a typical Christie mystery; rather than proceeding as a novel might, Murder on the Orient Express is mostly broken up by the stages of a planned investigation, with one chapter in the middle section devoted to each of the interviews with the suspects. That said, Christie was such a master of the language that the prose flies, and she even winks at the reader and tweaks M. Poirot with the discovery of the scarlet kimono.

Reading the book – which really needs little in the way of review anyway (if you like Christie’s books, you’ve either read this one or intend to do so) – reminded me of one of my favorite board games, a hidden gem from the late 1980s known simply as Orient Express. The game is long out of print, although it appears that at least one of the designers is trying to keep its memory alive through a new Website for the game. Orient Express takes the standard logic grid puzzles (here’s one example)familiar to law students studying for their LSATs and to buyers of puzzle magazines and turns them into a multi-player board game. There’s been a murder on the Orient Express and each player must try to solve the crime by searching berths, talking to suspects and crew members, and by sending telegrams regarding the suspects, all before the train completes its journey from Paris to Istanbul. The game itself requires that players follow trails of clues – often one crew member will suggest that the player talk to someone else or search a specific room – but some clues are simply red herrings, while others give information that might lead indirectly to the solution (e.g., the weapon used) without specifically pointing to a suspect or a motive. Players may also use “secrecy tokens” to make it more difficult for other players to interrogate a suspect or crew member or to search a room, as if the suspect/crew member had been bribed, and on certain die rolls a player may mess with one of his rivals by, say, moving him to a distant spot on the train. If the train reaches Istanbul before anyone has solved the case, every player remaining in the game must guess the solution; I’ve only had this happen once, and it requires a lot of high rolls on the die for it to come to pass.

The cases are very well designed; they’re all solvable and they’re all clear, with some occasional bits of humor (especially the victim’s names, which are always terrible puns) thrown into clues. The play itself is very simple – roll the die, move, interrogate someone or search a room, and occasionally move the train and, when it crosses a border, roll the die again for a somewhat random event to shake things up. If you already know how to fill out a grid for a logic puzzle, you can play this game with just a quick read of the instructions to get the board setup right. It’s a great thinking game that’s still fun because of the way the competition against the other detectives plays out.

The original game came with ten cases, each of which may only be played once, but there are at least three supplements of ten cases apiece available now. You can find used versions of the game online, at BoardGameGeek and occasionally on eBay, although I hold out hope that we’ll see a new version in print someday.

Filed Under: Games, Literature
→ October 14, 2007
→ By

The Fourth Bear.

Jasper Fforde’s The Fourth Bear, the second book in his “Nursery Crimes” series and sequel to The Big Over Easy, is a typical Ffordian romp through an alternate universe populated by nursery-rhyme characters, aliens, and talking bears (indeed, the battle over whether they can carry weapons to protect themselves from hunters – the “right to arm bears” – is an ongoing theme in the book), full of wordplay and allusions to works of adult and children’s literature.

Jack Spratt, the head of the Reading police department’s Nursery Crimes unit, finds himself suspended before this case has even gotten underway, due to the unfortunate recent incident when Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother were both eaten by the Big Bad Wolf (both survived but have suffered psychological trauma), leaving him somewhat hampered in his efforts to track down what happened to Goldilocks. He’s not sure what this has to do with an explosion in a greenhouse that held a nearly fifty-kilogram cucumber. And he happens upon a porridge-trafficking scheme in the ursine community that may or may not be tied to some highly-placed officials.

The Fourth Bear has fewer out-and-out laughs than the books in the Thursday Next series, but it’s full of humor, both highbrow and silly. The cucumber storyline leads to a series of puns that I won’t repeat because they’d spoil a good chunk of the plot. Anything involving Ashley, the Rambosian alien whose native tongue is binary and who harbors a secret crush on his colleague Mary Mary, provides comedy value because of how literally he interprets everything he’s told and because of his odd fascinations with things like pirates, elephants, and 1970s television series. The characters occasionally break the fourth wall, observing the coincidences and plot clichés that Fforde employs to keep things moving. And there’s an allusion to Rebecca for those of you who miss the more highbrow references of the Thursday Next series.

Fforde’s storycraft has improved with each succeeding book, making The Fourth Bear a smoother read. As usual, three or four different storylines converge towards the end of the novel, but the way the cucumbers, Goldilocks, the porridge, the three bears, and a World War I-reenactment theme park come together was tighter than similar sequences in previous books, where it was harder to see how anything would come together until a few seconds before everything actually did. Fforde weaves the various investigations together, sometimes having them cross paths within the story and otherwise simply having Spratt and the DCI investigating multiple crimes at once, as opposed to his more standard method of jumping from one story to another. It makes for a tighter read, and it’s a style he should take back to the Thursday Next books, which just entered their second four-novel cycle.

Filed Under: Literature
→ October 3, 2007
→ By

Never Let Me Go.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is not what it first seems to be. Set up initially as a wistful remembrance of a childhood in boarding schools, with an apparent destination of an adulthood encounter that brings old wounds to the surface, it turns out that it’s a drama of ethics within a romantic tragedy.

And if you want to read this book, I suggest that you stop here and go pick it up. There’s no way I can write about Never Let Me Go without revealing an early, major plot twist, and the experience of reading the novel will be much more enjoyable if you either figure it out (it’s not that hard) or if you come let the big revelation take you by surprise.

It turns out that Never Let Me Go is set in an alternate universe that is very much like our own but for one detail: Human clones are created and raised to adulthood so that their vital organs may be harvested for donations to conventionally-created humans. The three central characters, including the narrator, are all such clones, being raised in one of the few enlightened wards for these human livestock, and the narrator takes us back to their childhood, then adolescence (including the time when they learn their ultimate fate), then to the period of their “donations.”

The novel’s two parts – the dystopic horror story and the romantic tragedy – are perfectly integrated, but they weren’t equally effective. The romantic tragedy fell short for me; Kathy, her moody and often malicious friend Ruth, and the slightly simple but passionate Tommy end up in a sort of love triangle, and we’re to understand that Kathy and Tommy are in love with each other but are kept apart to a degree by Ruth. That feeling never came through in the characters’ words or actions, or even Kathy’s thoughts; she and Tommy are clearly friends, with a bond stronger than that between Tommy and Ruth, who are an actual couple during part of their time in boarding school and their time in the “cottages” where they spend their college-aged years. Kathy’s feelings towards Tommy seem to range from friendship to an almost older sister/younger brother dynamic, but romantic love didn’t come through until the two do become a couple as adults, when Tommy has begun his donations and Kathy is a “carer,” a visiting nurse to donors who will eventually begin her donations after a few years in carer service.

On the other hand, the quasi-morality play which Ishiguro presents to the reader is powerful and disturbing. The clones themselves seem to accept their fate without overtly questioning it – Ruth at one point asks, “It’s what we’re supposed to be doing, isn’t it?” – yet they show clear signs of humanity as well, falling in love and hoping they can find a way to defer their donation periods to enjoy a brief period with their mates, thinking and dreaming about living normal lives with normal jobs (Ruth dreams of having a routine 9-to-5 office job), and looking for the “possible” from whom they were cloned (much as an adopted or abandoned child might look for his/her biological parents). There are even discussions of whether the clones themselves have “souls” – Ishiguro seems to presume that they do, at least within the story’s context – and we see glimpses of the ethical discussions that go on in the fictional world of how to treat these clones: as people or as livestock (my word, not Ishiguro’s). Ishiguro even presents us with an argument that might sound very familiar to anyone who is squeamish about the idea of meat and poultry coming from the deaths of living creatures when he has one of the school’s teachers explain that people want organs to save the lives of their loved ones so long as they don’t have to know anything about where the organs come from.

It’s an uncomfortable read, but despite the slight failure of the romantic tragedy to capture my interest, it’s a riveting one that you probably won’t be able to put down once you’ve started it. I couldn’t, even though at times I wanted to once I realized that something was seriously amiss in the novel’s world, and that these characters were, by and large, just accepting their fates. It will force you to consider questions you’d rather not try to answer, because to many of them, you won’t find answers you like.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ September 26, 2007
→ By

Sleepwalking Land.

When it comes to it, we take stock in the middle of our existence and ask ourselves: do we have more yesterdays or more tomorrows? What I wanted was for time to slow down, to stop like the wrecked ship.

One of the various lists of books I’m working through is the twelve greatest African books of the twentieth century. Mia Couto’s Sleepwalking Land is the fifth I’ve read of this list, and it’s probably the most abstract of the group, but also features the most advanced plot, with two stories intertwining and perhaps – depending on how you interpret the book – connecting as well.

Couto was born in Mozambique, although unlike the other eleven authors on the list, he’s white. He lived through the country’s independence and the resulting seventeen-year civil war, between the country’s first government, a Soviet-aligned Marxist government that shut all the country’s religious schools, and a pro-democracy guerrilla group, RENAMO. Sleepwalking Land tells the story of that civil war by focusing on its effect on the population, eschewing any depictions of actual warfare.

The novel contains two narratives. One tells the story of a pair of refugees, an old man and a young boy he has saved from a refugee camp, who take up shelter in a burned-out bus, where they find a suitcase containing the notebooks of a dead man whose body was found nearby. The young boy reads the stories in the notebooks to the old man, with unusual consequences for their immediate environs. Those notebooks tell the story of Kindzu, whose life story appears to be part allegory for the history of Mozambique, but with a focus on what has been lost through colonialism, civil war, and corruption. He is guided by a dwarf who came from the heavens to a woman named Farida, who gave up her son to adoption many years earlier and begs Kindzu to try to find him. Kindzu’s search for Gaspar yields the occasional clue but he never seems to get close to his quarry, symbolizing the way innocence, once lost, can’t be regained, but along the way he meets many villagers and acquaintances of Farida, whose stories further depict the horrors of civil war.

Couto’s style makes heavy use of magical realism, while his prose mixes the simple structures of African literature (like Things Fall Apart) with the more poetic and metaphorical style of Western literature. It was an easy read, although I couldn’t shake the feeling that a lot of the symbolism was flying over my head due to my unfamiliarity with the history of Mozambique. (For a more detailed and informed review of Sleepwalking Land, you might want to read the New York Times review of the book.)

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ September 22, 2007
→ By

Fraternity.

“The heart,” he said, “is a dark well; its depth unknown. I have lived eighty years. I am still drawing water.”
“Draw a little for me, Dad.”

I found John Galsworthy’s 1906 book Fraternity via a book trail: One book mentioned another book which mentioned this book. I’ve had pretty good luck with book trails in the past; one of my best finds via a book trail was discovering Booth Tarkington by a mention of one of his novels in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise.

Fraternity itself is a quirky book, something of a satire of upper-middle-class attitudes towards the lower classes in turn-of-the-century England. The plot of the book revolves around the slow-burn relationship between Hilary, the emotionally estranged husband of Bianca, and a young model named Ivy who comes to pose for a portrait Bianca is painting. But the book itself is more concerned with the way that the extended family of which Hilary is a part views “those people” – the truly poor, but also simply the working classes, the less fortunate but not poor (like Ivy), and the riffraff who inhabit the parts of London where decent folk simply aren’t seen.

Galsworthy showcases a dry wit, sprinkling the novel with smart-assed rejoinders and silly names (the pious, loyal butler named Creed; the socialite named Mrs. Talents Smallpeace; the intimidating activist named Mary Daunt), and also treating the upper-class denizens of the book with just a touch of disdain for their snobbery. The story moves along quickly, in part because of copious amounts of dialogue – both real and imagined, as Galsworthy likes to describe facial expressions with quotes that explain what the person might be thinking – and also because of the various minor subplots among the various characters in Hilary and Bianca’s family. It’s a minor work of literature that for whatever reason seems to have been swept aside, perhaps because of the wave of more serious English novels that followed in the 1910s and 1920s.

Filed Under: Literature
→ September 18, 2007
→ By

Empire Falls.

The moral of this story is that I need to listen to my readers when they recommend a book, because they’re two for two so far. The most recent successful suggestion is Richard Russo’s Empire Falls.

The book’s jacket describes Russo as a “compassionate” writer, which sounds like something that some halfwit in marketing came up with after reading two or three pages of the book, but it turns out to be an incredibly apt description of the way Russo creates and develops his characters. Empire Falls is set in a declining mill town in Maine, and the plot centers on the slightly hapless Miles Roby, manager of the Empire Grill, father of a teenaged daughter, en route to a divorce from his longtime wife Janine, who is leaving him for Walt Comeau, the “Silver Fox” who owns the local gym and is forever challenging Miles to an arm-wrestle. His daughter, Tick, is having her own troubles, including an ex-boyfriend with anger issues, a classmate with a terrible family life and who never speaks, and difficulty dealing with her parents’ divorce, which she squarely blames on her mother. And Russo has populated the town with a number of other characters, all surprisingly well developed despite limited screen time, from Miles’ kleptomaniac father, Max, to the young and possibly gay Catholic priest Mark, to the omnipresent town matriarch, Francine Whiting, who has Miles and perhaps the rest of the community by the balls. Yet with perhaps the sole exception of that last character, everyone in the book is presented with some degree of compassion or at least understanding – people are shaped by their circumstances, some of which are beyond their control, and while many people manage to overcome disadvantageous backgrounds, it’s too easy just to pile blame on those who can’t or won’t.

The story revolves around Miles Roby’s divorce and some of the events in his life that the arrival of the actual legal event (as opposed to the end of his marriage, which happened some time prior to the book’s opening) sets in motion. He has spent twenty years of his life at the restaurant, forever awaiting the day when Francine Whiting will give him the restaurant, probably through her death, which doesn’t seem all that imminent. Russo tells Miles’ story through intermittent flashbacks and changes in perspective, revealing in stages the history of the Whitings, Miles’ family history, and even some of the stories behind the other characters. And since the town is so small, all of the stories intersect at multiple points with other stories, characters run into other characters, and in very thin sheets Russo gives us more and more details on each of them.

The book also reads as an allegorical history of small-town New England, which is dotted with slumping or failing former mill towns that have never really recovered from the end of the area’s textile industry. Empire Falls residents continue to cling to hopes that the mill will re-open and that those who remained will get their old jobs back, remembering, perhaps, good old days that weren’t all that good, and that aren’t coming back even if the town does find a new industry.

The story finally turns in its last fifty or so pages on the one real event of the book, the external stimulus that shocks Miles out of his emotional stupor. It was foreshadowed for a while in the book, but Russo handled it deftly and quickly, almost as if he disdained writing about action when he had dialogue and introspection to write.

A couple of quick notes:

  • This is the seventh winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction that I’ve read, and it’s been a mixed bag. Beloved and To Kill a Mockingbird are among my favorite novels, but Independence Day was disappointing, and I thought The Shipping News managed the twin feat of being vulgar and uninteresting.
  • I was helping out at the Tepper School of Business’s table at an MBA recruiting event on Sunday, and had my copy of Empire Falls sitting on the table. One prospective student noticed it hidden behind a sign, pointed, and just said, “Great book.” Turns out he’s a Mainer and thought that Russo did a fantastic job of capturing the culture of the state’s small towns.
Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ August 31, 2007
→ By

Starting with Wodehouse.

So a friend/reader asked me today where he might get started with the works of P.G. Wodehouse. Here’s what I wrote:

Well, he has two primary series: Jeeves/Wooster and Blandings. Jeeves/Wooster is more famous, but I wouldn’t say it’s better, just different.

There’s a three-in-one set called Life With Jeeves that’s a great place to start with those stories. It comprises two collections of short stories, plus one entire Jeeves novel. It’s how I got started on Wodehouse, and since seven years later, I’m still enjoying his stuff, I’d say that worked out.

The first Blandings novel is Something Fresh and introduces the critical character, Lord Emsworth, who is something of a dingbat with an odd affection for his pig, the Empress. The book I mentioned in chat today, Galahad at Blandings, is much later in the series.

And if you just want to read a standalone book that’s not part of a series, I’m particularly fond of The Small Bachelor, a really funny book with some of Wodehouse’s best characters.

Filed Under: Literature
→ August 30, 2007
→ By

Rebecca.

I’m a big Hitchcock fan – I’ve seen over twenty of his movies, and when AllNight’s Jason Smith asked me (off air) the other day which was my favorite, I scuffled a little, because it’s hard to pick one. I eventually went with North by Northwest, although I considered Rear Window and To Catch a Thief (Two hours of Grace Kelly? Hell yeah!) first. But there’s one major Hitchcock flick I’ve yet to see, because I wanted to read the book first: his adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca.

My wife had a copy of Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn in the house for years, but I never considered reading it because it was a purple mass-market paperback that looked like a trashy romance novel (which is odd, because my wife never reads that crap). Then I noticed Hitchcock had adapted that book as well – it’s a 1933 film before he came to Hollywood, and the print that still survives is low quality, with horrible audio – and my wife told me I was being an idiot. It turns out that it’s an incredible suspense novel with a faint romantic element, and it has a steady crescendo that accelerates through the last two-thirds of the book or so. I enjoyed the book even more because I’d recently finished The Lighthouse Stevensons, a nonfiction book that describes the construction of lighthouses around the coast of England by the family that also produced Robert Louis Stevenson, and which gave me a lot of background that made the plot of Jamaica Inn clearer.

Rebecca is a different kind of suspense novel than Jamaica Inn, eschewing the protagonist-in-mortal-danger motif for a more psychological one, with jealousy as its dominant theme. The narrator, a never-named 21-year-old woman, marries Maxim de Winter, a 42-year-old widower who lives on an estate called Manderley in rural England. Maxim’s previous wife, Rebecca, was killed in a boating accident just under a year prior, and it appears that the staff, particularly the sinister Mrs. Danvers, are none too pleased about his quick remarriage. The discovery of the boat Rebecca was sailing when she died sets off a chain of events that put Maxim, his wife, and Manderley into danger, but largely danger of a psychological sort rather than a physical one. Jealousy flies in all directions from multiple characters, notably the narrator’s jealousy of her deceased predecessor and Mrs. Danvers’ jealousy of the narrator for taking Rebecca’s place.

Du Maurier’s prose is fantastic, as she has a clear eye and an easy way of imparting the details of the environment, particularly anything out of doors, to the reader, and her dialogue is quick and intelligent. The story itself flows brilliantly, hinging on small twists of fate and relying more on the realistic actions of its characters to drive the plot forward. And the characters are given multiple dimensions, although the narrator’s timidity – overcoming which is a background theme in the novel – made me want to slap her a handful of times after she first arrived at Manderley.

Rebecca also owes a significant debt to Jane Eyre, another novel of a somewhat-forbidden relationship set in a large, foreboding country estate. I hate to apply the word “gothic” to any novel, given the connotations the word has today, but these are two clear masterpieces of English literature and transcend the limitations that “gothic” might seem to impose on a work of fiction.

All that said, I think I preferred Jamaica Inn for its intensity and the way it builds to a big, long climax to Rebecca‘s more grounded and perhaps more realistic drama of speech and situation, even though Rebecca stands up better to literary analysis … and is the only one that comes in a non-purple, trade-paperback edition.

Filed Under: Literature
→ August 25, 2007
→ By

Don’t Look Back.

Reader Abel Wang was kind enough to first recommend and then lend me a copy of Karin Fossum’s Don’t Look Back, a straightforward detective novel that won the Glass Key Award for the best detective novel written by an author from any of the five Nordic countries.

Don’t Look Back is a very quick read, and I knocked it off in a few subway trips over a 24-hour period in New York City. The main character, Chief Inspector Konrad Sejer, isn’t the hard-boiled type I like most (Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade), but is more of a stoic without a strong personality trait to define him. He’s a young widower and a grandfather, and both characteristics bring some touches of humanity to his approach to this particular case, but given that he’s the central character and now has appeared in a series of detective novels that followed this one, he could use something to set his character apart.

The story is set in a small Norwegian town, where a fifteen-year-old girl is found dead near a lake, her body naked except for an anorak laid on top of her. What set this novel apart from most mass-market detective books was the gradual unfolding of the back story behind the victim and behind the various suspects and witnesses Sejer and his partner Skarre interrogate. Most pulp detective novels today unfurl the story in a small number of very large discoveries, wow moments that seem more designed for a film adaptation or just to shock the reader into feeling excited. Fossum instead brings out the details slowly, in small doses, often presenting them as facts without immediate relevance, which strikes me as a lot more realistic and is definitely a lot less contrived.

Fossum also manages to fold in small details about characters who ultimately have nothing to do with the resolution of the main mystery, but whose interactions with Sejer lead to something small further down the line – for example, when he interviews a Turkish family that has had some trouble assimilating into the community, the father offers a suggestion for Sejer’s eczema … and several chapters later, in an offhand sentence, it appears that Sejer has followed his advice, implying even that Sejer went to the family’s store to pick up the folk remedy in question.

This subtle, fine-pointed approach has an obvious downside, which is that readers used to the big wow are going to find the book dull and the climax anticlimactic. That approach felt a lot more real to me than the constant crescendos of the typical detective novel and of the typical TV crime drama, and I enjoyed the way Fossum depicted Sejer slowly gaining understanding through diligence and through dialogues with his partner. While I prefer the stylings of Hammett and Chandler, for a more contemporary and straightforward detective story, Don’t Look Back was right in line with what I like to read.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: ,
→ August 23, 2007
→ By

Possession.

A.S. Byatt has briefly been a target of mine for her criticism of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, so I thought it was a good idea to read one of Byatt’s novels to get a better idea of her views on literature. Possession made TIME‘s list of the 100 greatest English-language novels published since the magazine’s inception – another list I’m working my way through – so I made that my first stop on the Byatt train. It’s a good novel from a lot of perspectives, and a fairly deep one from a thematic viewpoint, but I saw a few major flaws in its construction and one major problem to the reader.

Possession revolves around the discovery by a milquetoast poetry researcher/grad student type of two unfinished letters by the great (fictional) English poet Randolph Henry Ash to a previously unknown correspondent, the minor (also fictional) poet Christabel Lamotte, who has become a cult hero to those who study literature from a hardcore feminist/lesbian point of view. That researcher, Roland Michell, and another researcher whom he contacts for help, the sort-of feminist Maud Bailey, begin to follow the trail of letters like a pattern of clues to unravel what exactly the relationship was between Lamotte and Ash, while their attempts at secrecy attract attention from several competing researchers who want to find the answer and/or any related documents for their own purposes. Through the correspondence of the two poets, and some further correspondence from Ash’s wife and Lamotte’s female companion (it’s not clear whether we could call them lovers in any modern sense of the word), we gain windows into discussions of the nature of love, poetry, literature, religion, and the afterlife.

And if that doesn’t sound like a thrilling plot, you’re right. Possession‘s major problem, to steal a phrase from Michell and Bailey themselves, is that it lacks “narrative greed.” The characters are driven forward by an almost primal desire to learn what happens next in the story of Ash and Lamotte, but it rang hollow for me. These characters have invested much of their adult lives in learning about one of the two poets, giving them a sense of urgency that it would be impossible for the reader, who has never heard of either poet because Byatt invented them both, to acquire. Add to this the fact that the plot’s denouement ultimately hinges on a quirk of English copyright law and there’s not enough narrative greed to keep me rolling through 555 pages without having to push myself forward at times.

Compounding the problem with the plot was the lack of a single compelling character. Michell is a dull, meek man, whose emotions all seem variations on the color gray, and who is completely tone-deaf to the feelings of the woman with whom he lives (Val) and is sort of seeing. Bailey is sort of prissy, emotionally restrained, often curt, and tinged with a sadness that is never explained. Ash, Lamotte, the various “villains” (including the American researcher Mortimer Cropper, a ridiculously two-dimensional character who almost seems inserted to provide one person against whom the reader can root), all are thin, and the various people with whom we’re expected to connect emotionally are unsympathetic. In fact, the most likable character of all is Euan, a lawyer who ends up playing roles in two plot threads and who has a sense of humor and a set of bollocks that would make him a good protagonist for his own novel.

I give Byatt credit for ingenuity, including the creation of miniature catalogues of material from Ash and Lamotte, with several entire poems, excerpts of epic poems, and a short story by the fictional writers appearing in the book. Unfortunately, those were exceedingly boring, and when I came across the occasional chapter that comprised only verse written by one of the characters, I skipped to the next batch of regular prose. Possession felt more to me like an achievement, a demonstration of cleverness and of ways of using different styles of narration (mixing poetry, omniscient narration, and the epistolary novel) to weave concurrent plot lines together into a cohesive whole. It just would have been a lot better if she’d done anything to make me give a damn about what was going on in the book.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: