→ August 10, 2020
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The True History of the Kelly Gang (film).

I enjoyed Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel The True History of the Kelly Gang when I read it ten years ago, but the new film adaptation of the book, released briefly to theaters this spring by IFC Films (now available via amazon), is a huge disappointment. It bears little resemblance to the book, revels in pointless violence, and makes use of some confusing camera tricks that left me with the impression that the filmmakers were more impressed by their technical ideas than they were concerned with making the film comprehensible.

Ned Kelly is a real historical figure, a bushranger and outlaw in 1800s Australia who has become a sort of Robin Hood-style folk hero in the century-plus since his capture and execution. He was born to an Irishman who was forcibly transported to Australia as a convict, and fell in with horse thieves before a violent confrontation at his family house with a Constable named Fitzpatrick led to Ned shooting the Constable and taking flight. He stayed on the run for two years with a ‘gang’ of fellow outlaws, gaining sympathizers across the continent due to antipathy towards the English or distrust of the corrupt colonial police, before he was caught and arrested in a shootout and conflagration that led to the death of Ned’s brother, several hostages, and a 13-year-old boy. Ned was tried and hanged for the murder of one of the officers who had been hunting for him, whom Kelly and his comrades ambushed at Stringybark Creek.

Carey’s novel follows the true story of Ned Kelly fairly closely, at least at the level of macro events, but this film goes its own way, inventing new events out of whole cloth, often to try to amp up the violence or depravity of the story. More than half of its two hours pass before Kelly (played by George Mackay) goes on the run, which happens earlier in the book and opens the door to most of the action in the story. The film dwells too long on Kelly’s upbringing, overdramatizing his tutelage under the bushranger Harry Power (Russell Crowe), then dropping the latter with a one-sentence narration, and jumping ahead in time to show Ned getting out of jail for a crime he committed under Harry’s direction. There’s a lot of underexplanation in this film, and knowing the book or the real story of Ned Kelly isn’t a lot of help because the script deviates so far from both.

The movie has Dan Kelly, Ned’s brother, and his fellow horse-thief Steve wearing fancy dresses on their escapades, a disguise that Ned adopts as well for his gang – something that appears to be pure invention on the part of the screenwriters. The film also implies multiple times that Ned and his friend Joe Byrne were lovers, which doesn’t seem to derive from any historical evidence at all. There’s also a brothel where Ned first meets Fitzpatrick, who later tries to woo his sister; the wooing is true but the house appears to be a fabrication, one that appears multiple times in the story.

The one shining light in the movie is Nicholas Hoult, who plays Fitzpatrick with a sort of disturbing yet genteel charm, although this again doesn’t appear to match the historical record. The real Alexander Fitzpatrick was only a Constable for three years, was a longtime alcoholic, and had a reputation for arresting and charging men on dubious pretenses – such as spiking Ned Kelly’s drink and then arresting him for drunk and disorderly conduct, a probably true story that would actually have made for a good scene in this film. Hoult plays Fitzpatrick less as a lush and more as a proud yet unscrupulous man, one whom you could understand Ned briefly befriending and young women possibly admiring. You might know Hoult as the boy in About a Boy, but he came to my notice more recently in 2018’s The Favourite, where he played the only male character of any substance in the film, a foppish dandy of sorts whom Hoult played to the hilt.

Mackay, unfortunately, plays Ned as a bestial figure, one devoid of nearly all personality or reason; it’s unclear why anyone would follow this madman, let alone why he’d eventually become a folk hero whose legacy is still debated to this day in Australia. Mackay was very good in 1917 and a pleasant surprise in the uneven Captain Fantastic, but this script did nothing to make use of his talents. Dismissive of its main character’s complexity, obsessed instead with pointlessly graphic violence, and shot in eccentric ways, The True History of the Kelly Gang does a disservice to its protagonist and to the book from which it came.

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→ June 17, 2020
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Cyteen.

I started C.J. Cherryh’s Hugo Award-winning novel Cyteen back in February, which feels like a decade ago, but stopped after 190 pages because it was so slow and I was wrapped up in finishing the top 100 prospects package for The Athletic. I returned to it in late May and did indeed finish it the day before the draft last week, because I’m very stubborn, and it bothered me that I had just three Hugo winners left to read. (I now have two, the last two books in the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, which in turn inspired the game Terraforming Mars.)

Cyteen is not very good, just as Downbelow Station, a novel set in the same universe as Cyteen that is Cherryh’s other Hugo winner, was not very good. They’re emblematic of what science fiction used to represent – books that were so heavy on the fictional science that they paid little attention to the aspects that make a novel good: plot, prose, and characters. Cyteen has a plot, sort of, although it’s paper-thin for a novel of more than 650 pages. The prose is leaden enough that you could use it at the dentist’s office to protect your chest during X-rays. The characters are at least moderately interesting, although I found it hard to get to them through the byzantine renderings of story and scene in the book.

Cyteen is set on a planet and two space stations of that name, serving as the capital of the Union, which has itself declared independence from the Alliance … none of which is necessary to know to read this book. The intrigue here is all internal to Cyteen politics, as the wise, Machiavellian leader Ari Emory, who runs the cloning-research station Reseune and serves on Union’s executive council, is murdered early in the book, after which some of her adherents initiate a program she’d designed to raise a clone of her to take over where she’d left off. The bulk of the novel follows her clone, also named Ari, and sets her in opposition to two groups: her ‘uncles’ Denys and Giraud, who are both powerful figures in the Reseune hierarchy and would benefit from Ari’s return to power; and the Warricks, Jordan and his clone/son Justin, as well as Justin’s clone and companion Grant, who were implicated in the first Ari’s death and remain untrusted rivals as the second Ari grows up and gains authority.

That’s about enough story for a novel of half Cyteen‘s length, but Cherryh stretches this out to a needless degree, incorporating all manner of side plots or irrelevant details that make this an utter slog to read. The discussions of young Ari’s puberty felt made me feel like I was invading a fictional character’s privacy, and it’s discomfiting to see a young girl’s moods reduced to a function of her hormone changes. The details of the cloning program are not interesting in the least, nor are those of the Alliance-Union conflict or the internal intrigues of Cyteen and Reseune politics. It just doesn’t work: making readers feel interested in the details of politics of fictional entities requires a lot of effort, at the macro level and the micro level of individual characters, and Cherryh just doesn’t do it.

The character of Ari is by the far the most compelling, although it’s more for what she represents than who she is. Ari is genetically identical to her predecessor, and her guardians attempt to mimic as many conditions of her predecessor’s upbringing as possible, as if by creating a perfect facsimile of the original’s nature and nurture they will thus develop a perfect facsimile of the original person. Of course, it’s never quite possible to replicate the ‘nurture’ half of the equation, and Ari deux is still a person with free will and agency, eventually pushing back against the bounds of her strict environment. It’s also a meditation of sorts on predestination, whether the second Ari can escape the destiny that’s been assigned to her by her genes and her makers.

The Hugo Awards have recently faced and defeated an attempted coup by a small number of white, male, pathetic authors who claimed that their works were being unjustly overlooked in the voting in favor of works with more progressive themes. My interpretation is that these authors, whose leaders include an open white supremacist, want a return to the earlier era of the Hugos and sci-fi in general, where setting took precedence over story or character – greater reliance on the science part of science-fiction or heavier use of fantasy elements in fantasy. Cyteen is heavy on the science, both hard sciences and soft, and that might be why it won the award in 1989, but I don’t think it would get nearly the same reception, critical or commercial, today. Cherryh is still writing and I presume she still has an audience, since I always see new books of hers whenever I’m browsing in bookstores, but this type of science fiction is best relegated to the dustbin of history.

Next up: I’m about to start Richard Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking.

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→ December 17, 2019
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Booksmart.

I wanted to like Booksmart, now streaming on Hulu, and the first twenty minutes were so promising … but I don’t think it lives up to its opening, and while there are some clever running gags and a few good quips, in the end it’s another teen movie that’s just a shade smarter than some of the films it rips off. (You can also rent it on amazon or iTunes.)

Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) are best friends and massive overachievers who’ve spent their high school years studying and doing all the things you’re supposed to do to get into a good college, but never doing anything fun, only to discover that a bunch of their classmates who have partied their way through high school have also gotten into elite schools. Molly’s the Class President and has a crush on her Vice-President, Nick, who appears to be a dimwit but, of course, isn’t. Amy has been out for two years, but has never kissed a girl, and has a crush on a classmate, Ryan, although she doesn’t know if Ryan is into girls. The night before graduation, they decide to go to a huge party at Nick’s aunt’s house, and spend about the half the movie trying to figure out where the party is and then trying to get there. Once they do arrive, they go after their respective crushes, only to have things not go as planned (obviously) and then something else works out for each of them instead.

There’s a lot of promise in this premise, and the two leads are both quite good. Feldstein is wonderfully annoying throughout the movie, and handles the transitions well from earnest to flailing to, at one point, shockingly rude to her closest friend in a way that makes the character feel entirely coherent and three-dimensional. Dever has somewhat less to do until they get to the party, and even then plays an unfortunate second fiddle to Feldstein until she has her unexpected tryst and can be the main character on the screen without her co-star. Billie Lourd is hilarious as Gigi, a prominent side character with the best running joke in the film, and some of the other kids are effective in narrow roles, although half of the actors are in their mid-20s already and look it. There are a couple of gay kids in their class played by Noah Galvin and Austin Crute who play both their characters as if they’re acting in a play within the movie, and most of their scenes are well-written and funny in an absurd way. (I’d watch a movie that starred just those two.) In fact, just about all of the actors playing the students are good at what they’re asked to do – in contrast to the adults in the movie, most of whom look out of place or uncomfortable, and all of whom are poorly written.

The story is nothing you haven’t seen before, unfortunately. A couple of kids want to have fun/drink too much/get laid before they go to college, and have a hard time doing any of these things correctly at first, only to get to the big party and have things go wrong before they go right. There’s some witty banter early in the film, but the script can’t keep up the pace, and things start getting progressively weirder as the film progresses. Their principal (Jason Sudeikis) moonlights as an Uber driver, and the situation gets kind of creepy. Another of their teachers has serious boundary problems, leading to a seriously cringey movement at the party. Amy’s big moment is sort of marred by a bad writing decision at the end of the scene that was unnecessary. One of the girls ends up in jail – seriously, the entire plot is ripped from Can’t Hardly Wait, which isn’t a good enough movie to rip off in the first place – and the way they get her out is a ridiculous plot contrivance. And how are they totally unable to figure out where Nick’s aunt lives in an era where most addresses are listed online and everyone has the internet on their phones? Oh, in the span of a few seconds one of the girls loses her phone and the other’s runs out of charge, because of course it does. These characters deserved a smarter story, right up to the resolution.

It was just too easy a movie to pick apart. Very little of it seemed realistic, and the script couldn’t maintain all the energy from the first few scenes – especially the one scene in a classroom, where the one-liners are flying back and forth and the kids all show their most interesting sides. This movie took in around $22 million at the box office, beating its budget comfortably but spurring a weird social media campaign, led by director Olivia Wilde, that made it seem like the movie was a flop. The better explanation is that the movie didn’t find a big audience because the script wasn’t good enough. Feldstein and Dever did their parts, but this is a forgettable entry in the sad tradition of mediocre teen comedies.

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→ November 11, 2019
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The Calculating Stars.

Mary Robinette Kowal won the trifecta of sci-fi literary awards this year for her novel The Calculating Stars, taking home the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus prizes for the year’s best novel. (The Hugo’s list of nominees included six titles, five written by women, which I think is a record.) The book seems destined to hit the screen somewhere, given its popularity, themes of feminism/misogyny, racism, and climate change. It’s also utterly awful, a bit of trite juvenilia, easily one of the worst Hugo winners I’ve read, with silly plotting, stock characters, and prose befitting a first-time author. How this book won any of those awards, let alone all three, is totally beyond me, because, while I finished it since it’s an easy read, it is treacly nonsense.

Elma is the protagonist, and as the novel opens, she’s on a hillside north of DC with her husband, where they’ve flown in a private plane to get away for a little sexytime, only to have their reverie interrupted by a massive explosion somewhere to the south. After their initial fears that the Soviets have launched a nuclear missile appear to be unfounded, they realize it was a massive meteorite strike into the ocean, which they learn shortly afterwards has vaporized the mid-Atlantic coast, killing millions, and will eventually lead to runaway global warming because of all of the water vapor the impact sent into the atmosphere.

Elma and her husband Nat both work in aerospace, she as a computer (a term that used to refer to people, not machines), he as an engineer, and both are immediately involved in the international effort to race into space to try to get off this planet before it boils. Elma is also an experienced pilot, having worked as a WASP (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, although I’m sure Kowal intended the wordplay around calling Elma, a somewhat observant Jew, a WASP) during World War II, and she seethes when she realizes that NACA (the actual predecessor of NASA) is only considering men as astronauts, even though colonizing the moon or Mars or anywhere else would obviously require women. (Actually, it only requires women; you can send the male contribution to reproduction to space in a test tube.) The bulk of the book covers her quest to become an astronaut, to change hearts and minds, to fight a little garden-variety racism, and to overcome her anxiety disorder enough to get a seat on the rocket.

There’s so much wrong with The Calculating Stars, but nothing is worse than how incredibly obvious the whole book is. Of course Elma is going to be an astronaut. Of course she’s going to fight racism and win. Of course everything she does is going to work out, because this is a children’s book – well, it would be, were it not for the frequent and very awkwardly written sex scenes, although even those are written as they might be in a young adult novel. Elma is ridiculously perfect as a person; the calculations she can do in her head defy credibility, and if there are people who can do what she does there couldn’t be more than ten in the United States. (Her obsession with prime numbers, however, is completely credible, and one of the only things about her character to which I related.) She nearly always has the right words, the right responses, and when she doesn’t, Nate does. It makes Kowal’s hamhanded attempts at cliffhangers fall totally flat, because they always work out within a few paragraphs in some ordinary fashion.

The science also feels incredibly dicey to me. Kowal refers to colonizing Venus, which scientists already suspect was inhospitable to life by this time period, as Rupert Wildt theorized that the surface temperature of Venus was above the boiling point of water due to all of the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere. She later creates a sort of cold fusion mechanism in a chapter heading, where “a catalyst” allows rockets to combine atomic oxygen in the upper atmosphere into O2, releasing substantial quantities of energy for free. Even throwing those small points aside, Kowal has 1950s science building and successfully launching an orbiting space station and planning a lunar colony several years before the MOSFET transistor, without which modern computing would not exist, was even invented. It’s a fantasy, and it detracts from the realism Kowal is trying to infuse in the cli-fi aspects of her story.

If I had to speculate on why this book won the big three awards, I’d guess it’s because the novel is, indeed, a climate change story. The climate isn’t changing because of man in The Calculating Stars, but it’s changing, and because the meteorite in the novel hit water and not land, it has probably pushed the climate past the point of no return. Kowal simply accepts that as a given, and then uses it to give us Republicans in Congress denying the accuracy of climate models, or average citizens asking why the government is spending money on long-term projects instead of helping people who need it today. It’s so thinly veiled you can see right through it, and even though I’m obviously on the side of the world’s scientists who say that climate change is real, I found Kowal’s approach graceless and infantile, including how easily some of the climate change deniers in the book suddenly drop their opposition. I don’t see the present GOP changing its tune on climate change quite so easily.

That’s without even getting into how weak the characters are; most are more memorable for their names than anything about their personalities. Elma and Nathaniel are themselves just too good; he’s certainly a dream husband for the era, progressive and willing to stand up for what he thinks is right. People are flawed, even the best people, and protagonists like these two don’t really appear in adult novels, not in 2019, certainly not in novels that deserve consideration for major awards.

It’d be hard to be worse than the second Hugo winner, They’d Rather Be Right, which isn’t really even a proper novel, but The Calculating Stars comes close. After the Broken Earth trilogy won the last three Hugos – and while I had issues with those novels, especially the third, they are way better written and more intelligently plotted than this novel – Kowal’s book is a huge letdown. I need to read some of the other nominees because there is no way there wasn’t at least one sci-fi novel better than this one in 2019.

Next up: B. Catling’s The Cloven, the conclusion to his Vorrh trilogy.

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→ October 21, 2019
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High Life.

Claire Denis’ dystopian sci-fi film High Life, which just hit Amazon Prime earlier this month, is a strange and brooding film that uses its setting to distill life to its most basic functions. By putting her characters into tense situations that force them all to confront their mortality in a more overt way than we would normally face, she explores the darkest sides of humanity … but it is a long, slow drag to get there, punctuated by some highly disturbing sequences.

Robert Pattinson plays Monte, the sole surviving member of an interstellar journey whose purpose becomes apparent later in the film. His only companion on the ship is a baby, the one successful child to come from the ship’s scientist’s artificial insemination program – a program that, of course, causes a lot of outrage among the rest of the crew – all of which is explained in flashbacks over the course of the film. Without spoiling too much here, the gist is that these crew members were all criminals, given the choice to go on a mission that takes them well beyond the solar system rather than face life in jail or execution. Living in such close quarters, with the added stresses of both the control of the scientist (Juliette Binoche) and her bizarre effort to breed the crew members, only increases the odds of conflict, which is graphic and violent when it comes.

Before then, however, we see much more of the quotidian lives of the crew members through flashbacks, including their work in the ship’s gardens, the favorite spot of Tcherny (Andre Benjamin), and the use of what fans of the film have called the “fuck box,” a masturbation machine used by most of the crew members but not by Monte. Denis appears to want to strip her characters down to the basics – food, sex, shelter – to dehumanize them, making it easier to follow some of them down into a bestial sort of madness that ultimately leaves all of them dead except for Monte.

I’m not sure why this film exists, though. Pattinson is excellent – he’s turned out to be quite a good actor – and does everything he can to prop this movie up, especially in the torpid first half, but by the end I certainly had no idea why Denis had taken any of us on this particular journey. What does the rising tide of violence that engulfs the crew actually tell us about people as a whole or these characters in particular? Are we just to think that once a violent criminal, always a violent criminal? Or are they driven to madness and violence by the realization that their mission can only have one possible end?

The look and feel of High Life far surpass the content of the film. The spaceship’s exterior has a barebones look by design, as Denis has said she couldn’t imagine this dystopian future country spending on anything superficial for a mission of this kind. The interior also looks stark and grim, again fitting the nature of the mission, also enhancing the general sense of dread around the story and the fatalistic outlook of the various people on the ship. There are little details around things like resource management – including, of course, how they recycle their waste products – that give the film a layer of additional realism that would have really paid off if the story were better.

In the end, though, I never got on board with High Life‘s plot. Pattinson is good, but I didn’t relate to the character, and I think Denis’ decision to tell the story via flashbacks ultimately robs the movie of any real dramatic tension. It’s an experiment, with a decent idea at its core, but the experiment doesn’t succeed.

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→ August 21, 2019
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the second of Milan Kundera’s books I’ve read, along with The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting, and … I don’t get it. I admit this of my own free will: I don’t understand why his books are revered, but revered they are, with literature professor Daniel Burt including Unbearable Lightness on his revised list of the 125 greatest novels ever written at #112.

I do understand the core theme of this book, at least, since it is spelled out in the title and Kundera makes frequent references to it in the text. In direct contrast to Nietzsche’s idea that anything we experience just once might as well not be experienced at all, Kundera subscribes to the believe that we live just once, and that everything that we do and undergo is thus unique. He describes life in terms of contrasts, and how you can view life as having weight or, in the case of the title and most of his characters, as being unbearably light. It is as if he’s saying life is so nasty, brutish, and short that we might as well try to enjoy it in spite of ourselves.

His characters do seem to get after it, at least; Tomás, the main character, is a philandering asshole who refuses to keep it in his pants even when he belatedly realizes that his bed-hopping is making him miserable and that he actually loves his paramour Tereza, for whom he flees the communists of Czechoslovakia and, almost inexplicably, then follows her back into the authoritarian state even though he knows he will lose his livelihood and possibly his freedom for doing so. One common criticism of horror movies is that the plots require the characters to do dumb things so that the bad stuff can happen. Kundera makes Tomás do a dumb thing – really, who defects from a police state and then un-defects? – so he can move the story along too. He does have a bizarre philosophy to rationalize his womanizing, but I found it unconvincing.

Tomás is a man of principle at work, despite his utter lack of scruples when it comes to women or his one son, custody of whom he gives up to the boy’s mother so that he doesn’t see his own child for about twenty years. When Tomás is asked to renounce an essay he’d written for a newspaper about the meaning of Oedipus Rex because the Communist puppets in charge of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring find it subversive, he declines, even though he knows it will cost him his job as a surgeon, eventually leading him to increasingly menial jobs and out of the city entirely. It’s the contrast Kundera outlines in the first part of the book, although I found it hard to reconcile the two sides of Tomás’ character, since the area where he acts amorally involves causing pain to many other people.

These two are connected with another couple, Sabina and Franz, via, what else, Tomás’ affair with Sabina. Sabina is an artist who loathes kitsch, a term that Kundera takes from its normal denotation of tackiness in art to some broader connotation across multiple disciplines, including philosophy, that nearly put me to sleep. Franz is the least defined of the four major characters – the dog, Karenin, might have more depth – and I never quite understood why he ended up in a protest march in Cambodia alongside publicity-seeking American celebrities.

I hated this book – not so much while I read it, but when it was done and I realized how little I’d gotten out of it. Perhaps it’s a function of my lack of any philosophy education whatsoever – I probably got more from Monty Python than I did anywhere in school – but I didn’t take anything away from the book other than Kundera’s extreme materialist attitude towards life; his characters are inscrutable and unlikeable and they do and say things that feel unrealistic. I know a few of you mentioned absolutely loving this book, but it did nothing for me whatsoever.

Next up: I’ll be reading Wolf Hall for a while longer.

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→ July 17, 2019
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G.

John Berger’s G. won two of the biggest literary honors in the Commonwealth after its 1972 release, taking home the James Black Tait Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize; at the ceremony for the latter, Berger tore into the sponsoring company, Booker-McConnall, for exploitative practices, then gave half the prize money to the British Black Panther movement. G. was just the fifth winner of the Booker Prize and was considered “experimental” for its time, just as Berger, an outspoken Marxist, was seen as a sort of curiosity. Perhaps this book was revolutionary in its time, but nearly a half-centiury it feels dated and irrelevant, more notable for the author’s prurient obsession with women’s genitalia than for anything that happens in the book itself.

G. is the book’s protagonist, set on a dissolute course from childhood – he’s the illegitimate son of an Italian philanderer who made his money in canned fruit, but was raised by a mother who refused to let his father have anything to do with the boy – and growing into a heartless, wanton libertine who seduces women just to have them, even for a single tryst, with no regard to what happens to them afterwards. His escapades culminate in the simultaneous pursuit of two women in Trieste on the eve of World War I; he inveigles a Slovene servant girl into coming to a major, upper-class ball as his date promising her his fake Italian passport in return, so that he can also jilt the wife of a major local official, a move that, unbeknownst to him, marks him as an Austrian agent (which he’s not).

The novel was sold as a picaresque, which it certainly isn’t. If anything, it’s a thinly veiled commentary on the class structures of western societies that existed prior to the first World War and, with some obvious changes in who’s in the upper echelon, persists today. It is a scene from the class struggle, told about an idiot who was born into privilege and keeps failing upward until the war finally stops him. It’s also wildly out of date: We still have class distinctions, but where once a person was born into a class, now the distinctions are more of income inequality, or race, or their intersection. The Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts are gone, replaced by other families, but their names lack the power of the earlier leading families; it is their money that speaks, and their money that explains the different treatment they get at every step in their lives.

Berger comes off as a Marxist, for sure, but he comes off even more as a pervert. The book is replete with descriptions of genitalia, primarily women’s, but in a gynecological way, not an erotic or even pornographic one. It’s as if Berger was obsessed with and disgusted by a woman’s sex at the same time, so he describes the vulva and vagina in the basest way to try to diminish the women themselves. Indeed, the women G. pursues here are mere props in the story; G. doesn’t care about them and Berger doesn’t give the reader any reason to care either.

I’d enjoyed a bunch of more recent Booker winners, which led me to decide to read most or all of the previous winners, but some of the pre-2000 titles just aren’t that good. I bailed on James Kelman’s How late it was, how late before I reached the quarter mark, as its stream of consciousness prose was maddening, the main character hadn’t moved more than about half a block in all that I read, and the heavy use of the c-word was really grating. I read but never reviewed Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, about an author of romance novels who has fled some embarrassment in England and takes a room at a seaside hotel in Switzerland where she meets the usual cast of eccentrics and learns things about herself. It’s a trifle, not as funny as it would like to be and nothing you haven’t seen before (Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont covers similar ground, and better). I’m not sure who was picking Booker winners before this century but I’m at least glad they’ve upped their standards.

Next up: Like a moth to a flame, I’m reading another Booker winner, this time Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road.

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→ May 22, 2019
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Killing Commendatore.

I’m a huge fan of Haruki Murakami’s two peak novels, the dreamlike The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and similarly surreal Kafka on the Shore, but have found some of his earlier and especially his later work disappointing, as if he’s trying to recapture the spark that lit those two novels but can’t find it. His newest novel, Killing Commendatore, might be the last straw for me, as it’s not just a disappointment – it is awful, lacking any of the magic or creativity that Murakami showed in the first half of his career, with a boring plot and some outright creepy details that someone should have told the author to cut.

The novel is narrated by its main character, a painter and portrait artist who is never named, and who begins the book by talking about his wife leaving him for another man, a shocking announcement that unmoored him and led him on a winding path to living in the disused house of his friend’s father, a well-known painter named Tomohiko Amada. (The narrator mentions in passing that he and his wife have reunited, one of many throwaway subplots in the book that has no fulfilling qualities when it’s resolved.) While there, the narrator discovers an unknown painting by Amada called Killing Commendatore that depicts a violent murder from the opera Don Giovanni; multiple characters in this painting come to life over the course of the novel, notably the Commendatore himself. Meanwhile, an eccentric, wealthy, handsome loner named Menshiki, who lives nearby in the mountains, shows up and asks the narrator to paint his portrait, but has an ulterior motive involving a young teenaged girl, Mariye, who lives nearby and might be Menshiki’s daughter.

The fundamental problem with Killing Commendatore is that Murakami doesn’t seem to give a shit about what’s happening in the book, and as a result, I didn’t either. In nearly 700 pages, only one tangible thing happens with actual stakes, and everything else is a mystery that Murakami can’t even be bothered to resolve. (I’ll warn you now that you don’t find out if Mariye is Menshiki’s daughter.) There’s a pit and a bell that seems to ring by itself, which is a mystery of sorts but not a particularly interesting one – and is also poorly resolved – while Menshiki’s own backstory is shrouded in another mystery that didn’t grab my attention. Eventually, the characters from the painting appear and Murakami’s trademark magical realism shows up, but it’s a relatively minor part of the book – this is my personal view, but I think magical realism needs to be suffused throughout a work of fiction if it’s there at all; a little bit just feels like a cheat – and the connection between the characters and their roles is extremely tenuous.

Murakami’s lead characters tend to be stand-ins for him – at least, they share a lot of personality quirks and interests with the author, often working as creatives with loves of classical music and cooking. The painter-narrator here has all of that, as well as the passing knowledge of baseball that shows up in many Murakami novels, so it’s fair to wonder how much else of the narrator’s character also applies to the author – especially because the narrator is kind of a creep. He’s completely obsessed with the growing breasts of pubescent girls, referring both back to his sister, who died of a heart defect in her teens, and again to Mariye, who is herself obsessed with her changing physique, with an excessive attention to their busts. It goes nowhere in the plot, and it doesn’t seem like anyone around the narrator is the least bit perturbed by this – including Mariye, who you would think would be uncomfortable talking to an adult male she barely knows about her breasts, or hearing his thoughts on the matter. The result was just gross to read.

But wait, there’s more! Murakami’s prose has never bothered me before, but this translation feels like a mess – his prose is wooden and his sentences awkward and terse, sometimes even broken into fragments. It feels like an unedited manuscript at far too many points. One of the translators, Philip Gabriel, has translated several Murakami works, including Kafka on the Shore, which I loved; while the other, Ted Goossen, translated Men Without Women, which I found generally inert. In neither case did Murakami come across as an amateurish stylist, however, which is an overwhelming sense I got from Killing Commendatore from the very beginning. It’s harder to get lost in a plot when the prose keeps jarring you out of the reverie, and the story here didn’t absorb me the way some other Murakami novels did anyway. When you add the the main character’s failure to evoke any interest – he seems totally disconnected from life, but there’s no explanation of why – you get a complete dud from an author who has shown he’s capable of so much better.

Next up: I’m reading an advance copy of Homegrown, Alex Speier’s forthcoming book on the building of the 2018 Red Sox.

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→ April 17, 2019
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The Inheritance of Loss.

Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize in 2006 for her novel The Inheritance Of Loss, a slow-burning tragedy set in the Darjeeling district of northeastern India, near the border with Bangladesh, that covers distinctions of class, gender, and language, but never establishes a single compelling or central character anywhere in the novel’s 350-odd pages. It’s an oddly dispassionate novel given how much the passions of individual characters factor in the story.

The most central character in the novel is Sai, the suddenly orphaned daughter of an Indian engineer who is killed while in Moscow training for the Soviet space program; she arrives, without warning, at the home of the judge, a curmudgeon who has distanced himself from the rest of his family, living on his estate with the man known only as the cook. The cook’s son, Biju, has gone to America to make his fortune, but instead works his way through a series of entry-level jobs in various restaurants in New York City that rely on undocumented labor to run their kitchens.

These stories play out against the background of the rise of a Gurkha self-determination movement in the district that continues today. The Gurkhas, Indian natives who speak Nepali, have been agitating for their own state within India for over a century, and a more militant group, the ominously-named Gurkha National Liberation Front (styled after numerous insurgent groups, nearly always with communist leanings, around the developing world), sprang up in 1986, leading to a lengthy general strike depicted in the novel. Sai falls in love with her tutor, Gyan, who joins the GNLF and who makes a decision that affects their budding if likely forbidden romance as well as the lives of the judge, the cook, and other family members who have lived in privilege in a region where the ethnic majority has been subjugated.

There’s some beautiful imagery in the book and some recurring metaphors that would probably be worthy of a deeper dive – vapors appear in various forms from the first page onward – if I cared one iota about any of these characters. I’ve generally enjoyed fiction from South Asia, whether translated or originally written in English, probably because the setting is so different to me and because that part of the world has an ethnic and cultural diversity that lends itself well to complex stories, with many writers with south Asian backgrounds incorporating myths or magical realism into their works. Desai’s style is dry in just about every way; the prose is uninteresting, the characters unmemorable and unlikable. The judge’s back story, for example, explains his grim, misanthropic exterior, but in a way that will make you loathe him for his cruelty. There’s a parallel between his upbringing and what the cook hopes for Biju, certainly, where Biju chooses family and emotion over the sort of materialistic ambition that defined the judge’s life. Perhaps I would have felt more invested had Biju’s story resolved a little sooner, but Desai has us watch his debasement a little too long before anything of consequence happens in his story, and the novel ends before his story gets any sort of answer.

I still can’t decide what Desai was trying to depict in The Inheritance of Loss or what aspect of life she wanted to explore, which could be my failure as a reader rather than hers as a writer – but whatever it was, I didn’t get it, and that’s a pretty rare experience for me at this point in my life. I may not always like novels I read, but I’m rarely this flummoxed. That puts this towards the bottom of the two dozen Booker winners I’ve read so far, at least.

Next up: I’ve just started Richard Powers’ The Overstory, which just won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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→ February 12, 2019
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The Finkler Question.

I have no idea why Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question won the Man Booker Prize; it’s not just unworthy of the honor, but it’s an aggressively bad novel, hard to read (despite some strong turns of phrase), full of unlikeable characters, and populated with bad stereotypes of Jewish people and, worse, Jewishness as a whole. It is a blurry facsimile of a Philip Roth novel; it is to Portnoy’s Complaint what the new Greta Van Fleet album is to Led Zeppelin IV.

The novel revolves around three men – Julian Treslove, Sam Finkler, and Libor Sevcik – who socialize from time to time in London. Finkler and Libor are both Jews, and both somewhat recently widowed. Treslove and Finkler were schoolmates, and Sevcik was their teacher at one point. Treslove is a Gentile, and not a widower but unable to maintain a relationship, with two sons by women who’d already left him before they found out they were pregnant. And for some reason, Treslove becomes obsessed with Jewishness – not Judaism the religion, but the Jewish culture, identity, and experience. He does so just as Finkler becomes involved with a group he renames the ASHamed Jews, anti-Zionists who express their disdain for Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, and seems to be renouncing some of his Jewish heritage.

Treslove begins referring to all Jews as Finklers, which … seems problematic. It’s unclear if Jacobson meant this synecdoche as some sort of clever gimmick, but it comes off as a kind of bad stereotype, as if Finkler himself is representative of all modern Jews. Jacobson himself is Jewish and has spoken out against anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, especially that within Jermey Corbyn’s Labour Party, so it seems wrong to ascribe a malicious motive to Jacobson here, but the device does not work in the least – it is both grating and problematic.

And I’ve discovered that I’m not the only one who thinks this – in looking for a Guardian review of the novel from when it came out in 2010, I found this editorial that expresses my feelings on how the book uses Jewish identity as a sort of running punch line to no purpose. It feels dehumanizing on the page, which makes the book a worse read both for its inherent unpleasantness and because the characters become so much less interesting.

The story itself is also just not compelling at all, with Rothian obsessions with sex and genitalia, including a bizarre passage about an older circumcised Jew trying to create a new, faux foreskin for himself. (Don’t ask. Really, just don’t ask.) Finkler was serially unfaithful to his wife, who cheated on Finkler with Treslove. Treslove himself probably can’t maintain a relationship because he can hardly distinguish between sex and intimacy. He does meet his match, which is bizarrely foreordained by a fortuneteller at the start of the novel in a plot element that just drops off the page once the prophecy is partly fulfilled, and manages to screw that up too, in large part because he becomes obsessed with her Jewishness and can’t see her as anything but Jewishness incarnate. Treslove and Finkler are both insufferable in different ways, with Finkler a bit worse for me because I have met a couple of people of whom he reminded me, but must we quibble over degrees or flavors of insufferability? You can’t anchor a novel with two nitwits like them and then expect the reader to connect with what’s happening on the page.

Yet it won the Man Booker Prize in what looks like it might have been a weak year of candidates; I had only heard of one book on the shortlist, Emma Donoghue’s Room (the basis for the movie starring Brie Larson), and one other author, Peter Carey, who has won the Booker twice already. I don’t know what the judges saw in this but I think it’s just plain dreadful, even if you give it a few points for Jacobson’s intelligent yet stolid prose.

Next up: Reading an out-of-print Graham Greene short story collection, after which I’ll read Philip K. Dick’s Our Friends from Frolix 8.

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