→ August 10, 2007
→ By

The Kite Runner.

Closing Sohrab’s door, I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

I’ve touted Beloved as the best literary novel of the last 25-30 years, perhaps of the entire canon of postwar American literature. It told a story of a woman while telling the story of a people, and it touched on the emotions and events that drive and define our lives by using small and large events in one character’s life as metaphors for universal themes. No book since then had come close to this combination of great themes rolled up in a great story told in brilliant language.

Until The Kite Runner, that is.

Published in 2005 and headed for theaters in a film adaptation this fall, The Kite Runner is easily one of the best novels I’ve ever read and meets all the criteria one could ask for in a work of literature. The plot is riveting. The emotions it describes and that it elicits are genuine. The characters are fleshed-out and compelling. The prose sparkles. The story behind the story is real, and the layers of metaphor only make the surface plot more interesting and believable. And the novel relies on very little in the way of coincidence or other ridiculous plot contrivances that ruin a lot of novels, especially first ones.

The main plot itself revolves around the narrator-protagonist Amir, starting from his youth in Kabul and his childhood friendship with Hassan, the son of the family’s servant and a member of an ethnic minority known as the Hazaras. Hassan is a completely devoted friend to Amir, and Amir eventually betrays him, setting off a lifelong quest for redemption through his acts, a redemption – or, perhaps more accurately, self-forgiveness – he can’t find until he leaves America (his new home) and returns to Afghanistan. It’s a sad tale with flashes of hope and a certain streak of faith and even spirituality in the face of horrors, both personal and societal.

And much as Beloved tells the history of African-Americans and Absalom, Absalom! tells the history of the American South, The Kite Runner tells the history of Afghanistan, through actual events that the characters experience and through characters who serve as metaphors for peoples and nations in the history of that country. The rape of Hassan represents the rape of Afghanistan, with Hassan’s loss of innocence standing in for the end of the one period of stability and economic progress in Afghanistan’s history. One female character’s barrenness stands for the devastation wreaked on Afghanistan, first by the Soviets, then by the Taliban. And so on.

While these other attributes contribute to the book’s literary value, Hosseini’s storycraft is what really sets The Kite Runner apart as a reading experience. His plot twists are rarely outrageous and never gratuitous; he doesn’t provide pat resolutions or twist characters to make them act differently in key situations. Instead, he lets the story unfold in a natural if accelerated way, directing his lens in and out of the action as needed. It makes a melancholy book where a handful of scenes of frenetic action are separated by long periods of thought and descriptions of emotions into a page-turner that you can’t put down.

Hosseini’s second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, is now out in hardcover.

One other point that really hit me while I read The Kite Runner was the richness of Afghan traditions, particularly around Amir’s engagement and wedding. Although it is a typically Western view that such traditions – particularly if they’re tied to religion – are dated and restrictive and profoundly anti-intellectual, rituals and traditions are a part of our culture and they help define who we are. I often talk about my Italian heritage, but my identity is unabashedly American. I have no Italian traditions; even the simple Italian tradition of the long evening meal, still practiced at least on occasion in Italy, has never been a part of my life. Anyone I could ask about these traditions has forgotten or is already dead. I have no traditions, and as a result, I know less of who I am. If you have those traditions in your family, or still have someone who can teach them to you, do all you can to sustain them, so that you, your children, and their children will all know better who you are.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ August 5, 2007
→ By

Absurdistan.

So Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan was apparently one of the great critical successes of 2006, landing on a half-dozen or so Top Ten Books lists (including that of the New York Times) and otherwise garnering ridiculous praise. I’m mystified by this; the book certainly had its high points, but I preferred it in its first incarnation, when it was called A Confederacy of Dunces.

I’m not the only one to make this connection; Josip Novakovich’s review for the Washington Post, quoted on every online bookseller’s site, and the review in Publishers Weekly both point out the resemblance, but almost wave it off as irrelevant. But whereas the humor in Ignatius J. Reilly comes from his personality, his actions, and his words, the humor in Absurdistan comes from the situations and places that its antihero protagonist, Misha Vainberg, comes across, almost an unwitting victim of history in motion.

The plot of this book is almost irrelevant: Misha, a Russian-born secular Jew and the son of a dissident-turned oligarch, has become Americanized but is currently banned from the United States because his father killed a man from Oklahoma. Returning to New York is his sole goal, so he travels to the former Soviet republic of Absurdistan to buy a Belgian passport. While he’s there, the Absurdi government collapses and Misha ends up in the middle of a civil war while he’s “popping” the daughter of the leader of one of the factions.

Absurdistan isn’t really about Misha, though; it’s an attempt at a satire of modern foreign relations, of life in post-Soviet Russia, of the American government, and of a few other things I probably missed or just ignored because I was getting tired of figuring it out. There is humor to be found in all of these areas, but in trying satirize all of them, Shteyngart ends up creating a farce, where his portrayals of the local Absurdi (divided into Svanï and Sevo, who disagree over the direction of the footrest on Jesus’ crucifix) are superficial and companies like Halliburton (mentioned by name, oddly enough) are accepted as corrupt despite figuring heavily into the plot.

Shteyngart, whose first novel was called The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, isn’t above a bit of self-parody, as one never-seen villain in Absurdistan is the Russian émigré novelist/professor “Jerry Shteynfarb,” whose first novel was called The Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job. And that’s one example of the facet of this book that bothered me the most: Its unrelenting crudeness. Shteyngart seeks to mine humor from bodily functions, from physical disfigurements and defects, from the fat and from the stupid (OK, I’ll admit I’m comfortable with that last one), and his heavy use of vulgar language – not just profanities – amounts to beating the reader over the head with the words, almost as if he was a twelve-year-old boy who has just learned a half-dozen terms for the female genitalia and wants to show them off to his friends. It gets in the way of the humor, and all that crudeness coming from the mouth of the main character made him even less sympathetic than he already was. Yes, there are some funny lines, but he beats even his better jokes to death, like the fact that Misha and his friend Alyosha-Bob enjoy American gangsta rap. (I particularly enjoyed the reference to DJ Assault, a real hip-hop artist whose song “F*ck You Hoe” remains the all-time pinnacle of unintentional comedy in rap.)

I’ve loaded this review with some criticisms of the book because most of what I’ve read about it has been praise, often without restraint, and the fact is that this book has its flaws. Shteyngart is not a humorist like Waugh or Wodehouse, and he lacks the insight into personalities that Toole displayed in that one masterwork. What Shteyngart does very well in Absurdistan is build up – and then, in his way, tear down – a ridiculous situation that almost resembles an elaborate con. Had he focused his sights more squarely on foreign relations in an age of short attention spans and a surfeit of media outlets, he could have produced a brilliant satire for our age that sums up the way wars are created more than fought, a modern take on Waugh’s Scoop that added the dimension of the economic depression that the Soviet Union is still foisting on its unfortunate progeny. But in my opinion, Shteyngart set his sights too low and lowbrow and missed his opportunity. I liked the book enough to go back and read his first novel, but from a critical perspective, this book just didn’t cut it for me.

Filed Under: Literature
→ July 22, 2007
→ By

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows full review.

So I’ll do my best to review this one without spoilers, although if you still intend to read the book, you may want to stop here to be safe.

Even after a good night’s sleep, I still think this book was the best of the series. When I evaluate a book, I focus on three things: plot, prose, and characters. I’ve always thought Rowling excelled at prose – more on that in a moment – which propelled the first two books through some fairly simple plots and characters that were a little one-dimensional. Whether it was part of a plan or just Rowling’s growth as a writer, her plots became significantly more involved, with multiple subplots and a number of additional characters getting more screen time. And her characters really started to develop in the third and fourth books, with most of the central characters becoming three-dimensional by books five and six. Deathly Hallows didn’t disappoint in any of these three criteria, although I did find it odd that the character who develops the most is one who’s already dead when the book opens.

Rowling’s prose has come under a little criticism recently, although it’s possible that this has been going on all along and I just missed it. (To see what I mean, Google “Rowling clunky prose” and see how many hits come up – it’s almost as if one writer used that phrase a few years ago and every blogger on the Internet has picked it up.) The CNN.com review said “Rowling has attracted much criticism for her often clunky prose;” I couldn’t disagree more: Rowling’s prose is straightforward and descriptive, evoking images in a way that no other writer I’ve encountered is able to do. When I read a well-written book, I “see” the action in the book, almost like a movie playing in my mind as I read. The clearer the movie, the better the prose must be, and I have never run into an author who produces such incredibly well-defined images with her prose. That doesn’t necessarily mean she spends the most time on describing the scenery – I’m pretty sure Charles Dickens has that title sewn up – but that she strikes a perfect balance between descriptive text and active text. I understand that J.R.R. Tolkien’s works are more literary, but for readability, Rowling destroys Tolkien, who hails from the Dickensian tradition of giving us too fine a level of detail. Clunky prose gets in the way, slowing you down, throwing you off of the story, whereas good prose lets the story stand for itself. A good story is like fresh fish or a high-quality steak: You don’t foul that kind of food up with a heavy sauce or with overrich side dishes or with less-than-fresh ingredients, so why foul a good story up with prose that gets in the way? You want clunky prose, go read James Joyce or Henry James – if you can stomach it. I’ll stick with Rowling’s because it gets the job done.

I don’t want to talk too much about the plot for fear of introducing spoilers, but I’ll speak a little in generalities. In the context of the entire series, I don’t think Rowling could have done much better. The resolutions for the main characters worked for me, although I echo one commenter’s post on the prior thread about the epilogue being a bit too sparse; the deaths Rowling promised/threatened were reasonable, and clearly a few of the “good guys” had to die for the plot to have any semblance of believability, even within the fictional world.

The action sequences were some of Rowling’s best, with none of the muddled details and running about that made book five my least favorite in the series (due to the entire sequence at the Ministry of Magic towards the book’s end). What really worked for me in book seven, however, was the way Rowling uses a couple of major anecdotes and a few recurring characters to give both the global view of what’s going on in the wizarding world and the local view of what’s going on with Harry in the search for the Horcruxes.

She also works heavily with a few major themes – including the related themes of disillusionment and of faith – making this probably the deepest of the seven novels. Harry learns some unsettling details about Dumbledore’s past while he’s struggling to formulate a plan for locating the missing Horcruxes, leading him to wonder about the wisdom of continuing to carry out the mission Dumbledore assigned to him before his death. Harry’s relations with Ron and Hermione and the relationship between those two vacillate for much of the work as the quest goes less than smoothly and the three spend an inordinate amount of time together in uncomfortable conditions. I’ll be honest – I’m not reading these books for their deeper meaning, and while I thought I sensed some allegory about faith and trust, I was too busy enjoying the story to worry about any of that.

The seventh book’s character development is middle-of-the-pack for the series, in part because the three major characters were already pretty well developed by the end of the sixth book. Ron does end up maturing during the seventh book, but the point where he loses faith in Harry wasn’t much of a surprise and I felt like I’d seen it in an earlier book. Harry himself shows some growth towards the end of the seventh book, although this was a necessary element for the plot to reach its denouement. The character who develops the most is Albus Dumbledore, who dies at the end of book six, but whose character and background were never fleshed out previous to this book, with him serving as more of a benefactor and protector than as a full-fledged character. What you see in the back half of book six is a taste of what Rowling offers on Dumbledore in book seven. We also get some more insight into Snape’s character, but like that of Dumbledore, it’s by flashback, rather than by the characters developing as a result of the action and dialogue in the book’s present. The fact that the Big Three don’t develop much, and that the necessary direction of the plot means we don’t get to see as much of the better secondary characters (the various Weasleys, Luna, and Neville), made the lack of character development and the very heavy focus on Harry and Hermione the one big disappointment for me, although I’m obviously very invested in those characters and still ended up completely engrossed in their actions.

As I mentioned at the top, if a book has good plot, clean prose, and compelling characters, I’m in. I’ve been hooked on Harry since book one and if anything, I’m disappointed that the series is over, and the characters I know so well have seen their stories come to a close. (I did spend today in my typical post-Potter melancholy, which always hits me after I finish one of the books for the first time.) But before I let the subject drop, let me throw one story at you about what that first Harry Potter did for me.

I’ve seen a lot of criticism of Rowling’s work from people (including Harold Bloom and A.S. Byatt) who say that because the Potter novels aren’t real literature, they’re not going to lead people to read the classics or to otherwise up the quality of their reading materials. I can only speak to my own experience, but for me, that is absolute bollocks. I was a bookworm when I was younger, but my tastes were typical teenaged-boy – science fiction with a strong dose of countercultural books like Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and any number of books by Vonnegut. The “great books” forced on me in high school bored me to tears, and as soon as I got free of those requirements, I stopped reading them altogether (which isn’t to say I read everything that was assigned to me, either). When I got into my 20s, I more or less stopped reading fiction for pleasure, period, reading nonfiction when I wanted a book for a long flight.

In the fall of 2000, my wife picked up the first two Harry Potter books, tore through the first one, and gave me the old, “You have to read this!” line. So I took it on a business trip to California and started it on the plane ride home – and I was hooked. In 2001, I read the next two books, but also found myself getting back into the reading habit; I discovered P.G. Wodehouse and started perusing used book stores for the first time in a few years. I read Goblet of Fire in January of 2002, and ended up reading 75 books that year, including Moby Dick, Silas Marner, and The Sound and the Fury. Since I read that first Harry Potter book, I’ve read over 300 books, hitting Tolstoy, James, Dostoevsky, two Brontës, Fielding, Hemingway, more Faulkner, Stendhal, Hardy, Nabokov, Morrison, Eliot, Foster, Defoe, Proust, Flaubert, and the entire catalogs of Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The universal statement that the Harry Potter novels will not lead anyone to read the classics is wrong. J.K. Rowling reminded me that I love to read, and I will forever be grateful to her for that.

Indeed, I think that the criticism of Rowling’s work is a bit of literary snobbery, a reflection of the dismay that the exclusivity once offered to those who put the time into reading “great books” is losing currency in a world where great storytelling trumps metaphor and symbolism and all of the other things that our English professors told us were important without ever telling us why. Reading the classics has become its own reward, rather than a prerequisite for graduating from Eton before moving on to Oxford and then a job in the City, and our definition of “classics” is likely to change as well, with verbose authors like Richardson and Trollope sliding from view while new voices emerge from outside the Western canon. I won’t deny that there is tripe to be found in the fiction section of every bookstore in the United States, but lumping Rowling’s output with that tripe is unfair to her and to those of us who have loved her work to the point that it kindled – or rekindled – a love affair with the novel.

UPDATE: JC Bradbury weighs in on the Potter book – and its possible effect on baseball attendance over the weekend – on the Sabernomics blog.

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

Finished!

Just finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I’ll write more tomorrow, but my brief review now is this: Best book in the series.

Filed Under: Literature
→ July 20, 2007
→ By

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…

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ June 18, 2007
→ By

Snow Crash.

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash is apparently considered a classic of the cyberpunk genre, even earning a nod on TIME‘s list of the 100 best English-language novels published since TIME itself began publishing in 1923. Until I saw that list, I’d never heard of the book or of Stephenson, and didn’t get around to picking it up until earlier this year. It turns out that I probably did myself a small favor, since a lot of what the book “predicted” has started to come to fruition in the last 12 to 24 months.

Snow Crash takes the basic template of William Gibson’s genre-defying Neuromancer (also on the TIME 100 and also a great book), depicting a semi-dystopian future where top hackers can program and even exist from within a virtual reality that sits on a global telecom network. But Stephenson fleshes that virtual world – called the Metaverse – out in a way that makes it easier for the reader to envision it and to imagine himself in it, which for me is a critical component in my enjoyment of any book (and is one of the major reasons I’m such a cheerleader for J.K. Rowling). The Metaverse is a burgeoning virtual world with streets and buildings, businesses and transport systems, and a programming-on-the-fly feature that allows the more advanced residents to customize certain aspects as they go. It makes Second Life look like the virtual-world equivalent of Pong.

The plot of Snow Crash revolves around an attempt to simultaneously crash the virtual world (“Infocalypse”) and at the same time take over what’s left of the United States, which has devolved into an endless series of independent neighborhood-states run by continent-wide corporations. It’s a bleak view of capitalism run amok, one where many people live in public storage facilities and the Mafia isn’t so bad after all. In a clever bit of storycraft, the twin schemes are intertwined in the narrative, which is then also split between the two protagonists, the too-cleverly-named Hiro Protagonist and the teenaged skateboard courier Y.T. It’s a lot to follow, but Stephenson’s prose is clear and as a result I never lost any of the threads.

The one real problem with the book is that the resolution to the scheme hinges on some esoteric knowledge of the history of Mesopotamia, particularly its languages and its proto-religion. Delivering that knowledge to the reader so that the plot’s resolution makes sense takes up a lot of pages in the dreadful form of lectures from a virtual librarian to Hiro, who sends the librarian on research tasks and then receives the information in a sort of Q&A format. It got old, especially when most of the rest of the book delivers a lot of adrenaline. Fortunately it was over within fifty or sixty pages, at which point the action picked back up and never let up until the second-to-last page.

I definitely enjoyed Snow Crash and recommend it, although I’m not sure about its inclusion on TIME‘s list over, say, Brave New World or Tender is the Night or A Confederacy of Dunces. Heck, if we’re considering a novel’s influence, why not include The Lord of the Rings? But I shouldn’t complain, since I wouldn’t have found this book if TIME hadn’t gone outside the box to include it.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With:
→ May 25, 2007
→ By

Blood Meridian.

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is one of the most brutally violent books I’ve ever read, but in spite of that, it’s also one of the most beautifully written.

McCarthy’s prose is often compared to Faulkner’s, and while some of that is because they’re both from the South (just like every right-handed pitcher from Stanford is automatically compared to Mike Mussina), there are definite similarities in their styles. There’s a lilting quality to many of McCarthy’s sentences, even when he defies conventional sentence structure. He can be sparse with details when it suits his purpose (the novel’s protagonist is never identified beyond “the kid”), but can also fire off a stream of seemingly minute details that in the end paint a rich picture of a scene, a character, a moment. He never descends into the sheer inscrutability that scares so many readers away from Faulkner, who was an original in many ways but who’ll always be loved and reviled most strongly for his prose.

The story revolves around the aforementioned kid, a fourteen-year-old who runs away from his father (his mother died giving birth to him) to head out west and falls in with a group of mercenaries who are hunting an outlaw named Gómez while also collecting scalps of Apaches, all under the auspices of the Mexican government. And that’s where it gets violent – ruthlessly, sociopathically so. The violence isn’t disturbing because it’s graphic – it is, somewhat – but because it’s so effortless and is achieved on so grand a scale. It is genocide writ small, and it’s made all the worse by the fact that McCarthy based it loosely on the real-life Glanton gang, using Glanton’s top lieutenant, Judge Holden, as the primary villain.

The plot didn’t pick up until I was about halfway through the book; the kid seems to take forever to fall in with Glanton/Holden’s gang, and it’s not until things start to go awry that the plot gets interesting, with the kid and Judge Holden gradually forming the central conflict that defines the last third of the book.

If you’ve got the stomach to get through several scenes of extreme – but, as TIME wrote in its summary of the book, never gratuitous – violence, then I would certainly recommend Blood Meridian to anyone who enjoys Faulkner, morality plays (even ones where the moral lines are blurred), or great American literature. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when the scalps start flying.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ April 27, 2007
→ By

Cortázar, Hammett, and a nonfiction book.

Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch is a bizarre novel; the first 56 chapters represent a complete work, a single story with a single protagonist and enough pseudo-intellectual pablum to make this Virginia Woolf hater want to light the book on fire. The last third of the book comprises interstitial chapters which may be added to the story proper if the reader wants to read the longer work. A few relate to the main narrative, a few more are of the newspaper-clipping style seen in a lot of other works, but most are just nonsense. The book is quite acclaimed – someone named C.D.B. Bryan is quoted as saying it’s his favorite novel, although why I’m supposed to take the opinion of a man with three initials in place of a first name seriously I have no idea – but it was a slog, and even slowed down towards the end. The core storyline is somewhat directionless, and doesn’t really conclude in any conventional sense; the main character needs a smack upside the head, both to get him to stop talking nonsense and to get him to do something with his life. The “freewheeling adventures” promised on the book’s jacket don’t even begin until the book is two-thirds finished, and they’re not freewheeling, not terribly adventurous, and are by and large extremely boring. (Exception: a bit of chapter 51, where the main character begins working at an asylum, a scene which sparks a few laughs.) So I wouldn’t exactly recommend this one.

Cleaning up a few books I read in March: Dashiel Hammett’s The Thin Man doesn’t exactly need my recommendation. Hammett’s one of my favorite authors, with a spare style that conveys so much more than Hemingway’s more-praised sparseness (which often struck me as a bit sing-song). That said, I’d probably send Hammett first-timers The Maltese Falcon, and for readers who want a lot of action I’d recommend Red Harvest. The Thin Man is best-known for the characters it introduced to the world, Nick and Nora Charles, but the book didn’t have quite the same tension as the other two I mentioned.

Ingrid Rowland’s The Scarith of Scornello was a fun, short read, telling the true story of a simple hoax orchestrated by a teenager in 16th-century Tuscany that turned into an elaborate academic fraud and ended up altering the course of the kid’s entire life. It’s billed as a bit of a mystery, which it isn’t, because the back cover of the book tells you that the whole thing was a hoax, and it turns out that some of the teenager’s contemporaries knew it was a hoax all along, while others were more than happy to believe in artifacts that appeared to increase the glory of their region in ancient times.

Filed Under: Literature, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ April 20, 2007
→ By

A Dance to the Music of Time.

So I’m curious whether any of you have read all or part of Anthony Powell’s novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time. I just finished the first book, A Question of Upbringing (there are twelve parts in all), and I’m hooked. There’s a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Powell’s writing, especially This Side of Paradise (not as good as Gatsby or Tender is the Night, but still brilliant), and I can see some Evelyn Waugh there as well. I actually bought volume two, A Buyer’s Market, at a used bookstore for $2, and then picked up the first part on half.com, but I’ll probably go for the three-volume sets (the only way it’s still published) for the rest of the series. Has anyone else tackled this one?

Filed Under: Literature
→ March 12, 2007
→ By

Scoop: Feather-footed through the plashy fen…

So in a recent chat, I mentioned that I had Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop on my to-be-read shelf, and a reader said something to the effect of, “You HAVE to read Scoop!”

Dear Anonymous Reader:

You were right.

Keith

It’s been a while since I ripped through a classic novel the way I tore through Scoop last week. It is brilliant, hilarious, sublime, a pinpoint satire with an everpresent smirk. It’s the novel I wish I could write.

For those who, like me, were introduced to Waugh by means of the good but serious Brideshead Revisited, here’s a quick synopsis of Scoop: John Boot is trying to land a high-paying, low-work job to escape from a persistent girlfriend. Lord Copper, the head of the tabloid newspaper The Beast, ends up with his request and hires the wrong man, William Boot, as their new foreign correspondent and sends him to cover the brewing civil war in the African nation of Ishmaelia. Misadventures ensure, including a question of whether the civil war brought in the reporters or whether the reporters (especially William) brought on the civil war.

I’m hesitant to say anything more for fear of ruining any of the jokes. It’s a hilarious book, laugh-out-loud funny in many places, and amusing throughout, with shades of Wodehouse in the snarky prose and Molière’s touch for satire, with almost everyone and everything in the book looking like a sendup of someone or something else. My favorite joke in the book involves the Ishmaelian town of Laku, including the origin of its name. You’ll have to read the book to understand why, but you won’t regret the choice, either.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , , ,