→ September 21, 2017
→ By

The Little Paris Bookshop.

Nina George’s novel The Little Paris Bookshop, originally published in German as Das Lavendelzimmer (“The Lavender Room”), was a global bestseller shortly after its 2013 release and has been translated into over 30 languages. (Her website says “335 languages,” but I’m going to assume that’s a typo.) It’s … fine. It’s better than most popular fiction, certainly, and George infuses the work with her own expansive literary knowledge, but for a book that’s been marketed and reviewed as an inspiring, life-affirming sort of story, much of the plot itself left me rather cold.

Monsieur Jean Perdu runs a quaint bookshop on a little boat that’s moored in the Seine in Paris, from which he dispenses books like medicine, ‘reading’ his customers’ needs and diagnosing the proper books to treat what ails them. Of course, the one person he can’t help is himself; he’s been mooning over his lost love for twenty years, after she left him without warning to return to her husband, leaving just one letter that he never opened because if he had there wouldn’t be much of a story here. A circumstance occurs in the form of a new neighbor in his apartment building, a woman who’s just been thrown over by her husband, whom Perdu helps with a book and some furniture, and who ends up opening the letter and thus opening the rest of the story, in which Perdu, a young, bestselling author with writer’s block named Max, and a few stray eccentrics they pick up along the way set sail for the south of France to get the answer to the twenty-year mystery of Perdu’s paramour.

This book could have gone very, very wrong, but George at least avoids the most hackneyed or sentimental tricks of popular fiction – she has Perdu discover early in the book that his former lover died shortly after leaving him, to pick one ending I was afraid we’d get, and if you get the sense that Max might be Perdu’s son, as I did at one point, he’s not. The ending is a little sappy, and frankly not that believable given what we know of the two main characters; there’s also an absurdly coincidental answer to Perdu’s secondary quest, the search for the actual identity of the author of one of his favorite novels. Max is also a stock character, a literary wunderkind (and, apparently, a handsome devil) who’s stymied by the success of his first book and can’t seem to get started on his second one, only, of course, to find his true or second calling in the course of their sojourn down the river.

Perdu is at least the novel’s one credible, three-dimensional character, more than anything else for the way George portrays his grief. Perdu’s life outside of his work stopped when his lover left him, and if we can overlook the absurdity that he’d refuse to open the letter (but, say, would trash his furniture in despair), his arrested development after that point is a thoughtful depiction of someone who just can’t get over the death, or at least in this case the disappearance from his life, of a loved one. Telling the reader “you have to continue to live your life” as an answer to grief isn’t exactly profound, but the way that George incorporates Perdu’s knowledge of literary fiction, mostly real books, is novel (no pun intended) and gave the book a level of interest for me that elevated it above most popular fiction I’ve encountered. George didn’t stick the landing, but she didn’t flub it, either.

Next up: Just about done with Margaret Ayer Barnes’ Years of Grace.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ August 26, 2014
→ By

The Magic Mountain.

I have a new post for Insiders up on ten breakout players from 2014 whose performances look sustainable to me.

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain was, until this month, one of the only novels to ever defeat me – after reading the first few pages on a vacation (bad idea) in 2008, I set the book aside and couldn’t fathom tackling its heavy, leaden prose again. Its presence on both the Novel 100 and the Bloomsbury 100 Must-Read Classic Novels lists was enough encouragement to get me to try the novel again, and while I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it, I did at least finish the book thanks to a lot of time logged on trains in New York City last weekend. (I read the original translation, because I’ve had the copy for ages, but the link above goes to the newer translation by John Woods that earned high marks from people who actually look into such things.)

The Magic Mountain is a “novel of ideas,” which is a euphemism for a book without a plot. Hans Castorp, the everyman protagonist, heads to a mountaintop sanatorium for tuberculosis patients around 1907, ostensibly to visit his cousin Joachim for a few weeks before embarking on a career as an engineer. A chest cold convinces Hans to extend his stay, which turns into seven years – mirroring the seven years of tribulation in Revelations – that see Castorp exposed to all manner of philosophies of life, death, religion, politics, and meaning, not to mention the rather frequent expirations of his various comrades-in-phthisis. He spends much of his time listening to arguments between the patient Hans Settembrini and Settembrini’s friend Naphta, a dialectic that becomes increasingly rancorous as the book progresses, with Settembrini the humanist speaking in circles around Naphta the Catholic extremist’s outdated, reductive arguments. Neither man has any monopoly on truth, or even a fractional share of it, and their debate ends in the only realistic fashion, speaking to the futility of arguing over such philosophical questions to such an extent that one never does anything concrete about them.

Hans is a truly enigmatic central character, bland like Nick Jenkins of A Dance to the Music of Time, but more involved than Jenkins’ largely neutral observer-narrator, essentially committing himself to the sanatorium on the flimsiest of grounds – the whole institution is more a money-making enterprise than an institution boosting convalescence – partly because he develops a crush on the Central Asian-looking Frau Chauchat. (The Chauchat was a machine gun used by the French Army during World War I, which had just ended as Mann was writing his book but takes place after the novel’s conclusion.) Hans’ participation in the various philosophical debates he encounters, mostly between Settembrini and Naphta but occasionally involving Joachim or other consumptives, is abortive and often uncomfortable. He is a metaphorical man-child, but while his naivete allows his elders to engage in lengthy exhortations on their beliefs, his childishness becomes absurd when he abases himself in front of Frau Chauchat.

Mann intended his novel both as a grand book of ideas and as a subtle satire of other works of the time, much of which is lost on the modern reader because the targets of his parody haven’t held up as well as his own work has. There are passages where he shifts gears into comedy-of-manners territory, and dreamlike sequences – including the long, gripping passage where Castorp takes a walk on his own but is caught in a snowstorm that nearly kills him – that show tremendous imagination and Mann’s ability to create narrative greed that quickens the novel’s pace. But I’ve read most of the major philosophical novels of that era, and while they consistently rank highly on every list of the greatest novels ever written, they always fall short in the aspect of fiction I enjoy most: the story. Castorp grows, sort of, although at the end he’s more educated without being much wiser, and there’s no central plot that gets or even requires some sort of resolution at the end. He marches off to war, with a ten-page epilogue that shows him on the battlefield (and in the trenches), but is he any better off? Perhaps shaking off the illusions of childhood and of a life still permanent arm him better for what would be four years of a very ugly war, assuming he were even to survive it, but the experiences he had on that mountain seemed far from magic to me.

This leaves me with just one title left on the Bloomsbury list, War and Peace, and twelve left on the Novel 100, although I don’t intend to finish that list because some of those books look like they’ll cause me too much pain.

Next up: J.K. Rowling’s The Silkworm, the second Cormoran Strike novel, published under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 9, 2013
→ By

Catching up on recent reads.

For a variety of reasons, I fell behind on book reviews in December, so I’m cheating a little with an omnibus post on everything I read between Thanksgiving and New Year’s that I haven’t written up yet, aside from the usual Wodehouse/Christie/Stout stuff I generally don’t cover here. I had pretty mixed feelings on all of these works except the one non-fiction title, which is probably part of why I procrastinated on the reviews – it’s easier to write something quickly when you know which way you’re leaning from the start, but these books had enough positives and negatives to keep me from coming down on either side.

* The longest book I read in that span, and the one most deserving of a longer writeup, is Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, part of the TIME 100 and #81 on the Modern Library 100. Tabbed “the great American novel” by Martin Amis, praised by authors from Amis to his father Kingsley to Salman Rushdie to Christopher Hitchens, Augie March is an ambitious, expansive story of its title character’s growth from an impoverished Chicago childhood through one money-chasing scheme after another, including various brushes with the law and materialistic women. It starts slowly, hits a promising note for several hundred pages, and then ends with a gigantic whimper that ruined an otherwise enjoyable serious yet comical read for me.

Augie’s odyssey of self-discovery while he’s trying to make a buck – or a pile of bucks – draws him into various webs of fascinating side characters, a panoply identified by Hitchens as Dickensian, but one I think comes from the broader tradition of picaresque novels (to which Dickens contributed in The Pickwick Papers) and that continues through postmodern works like Ulysses and The Recognitions and later writers like Dawn Powell, Haruki Murakami, and Richard Russo. Augie March even has the peripatetic thread that defines the picaresque novel, even though Augie’s adventures, like his brief but disastrous time in the Navy, rarely encompass the high ambitions of classic picaresque characters.

Augie himself straddles the line between hero and antihero – he’s the protagonist and quite likeable despite his highly fungible morality, in part because he’s got the rags-to-riches vibe about him and in part because he entertains us through one peculiar situation after another – creating a curious ambiguity about Bellow’s point. If this is to be the great American novel, what exactly is Bellow telling us about the American experience? Is the key to the American Dream a refusal to commit oneself to anything – an education, a career, a marriage? Or is he saying the American Dream is an illusion that we can pursue but never catch? I think Bellow was posing the questions without attempting to provide any answers, which works from a thematic perspective but left the conclusion of the plot so open that I felt like I was reading an unfinished work, like The Good Soldier Svejk or Dead Souls.

* I wanted to like Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, since I think Lolita is one of the best novels I’ve ever read, and while I didn’t enjoy Pale Fire I do recognize how clever it is and that I might not fully appreciate its humor. But Pnin, the story of a fish-out-of-water Russian professor at a fictional university in upstate New York, suffers from Pale Fire‘s problem even more deeply: The target of its parodic efforts is too obscure for the average reader to appreciate. Where Pale Fire satirized technical and literary analysis of poetry, Pnin takes aim at the ivory towers of academic life at private universities, which is probably hilarious if you’re a professor or a grad student but largely went right by me as someone who sleepwalked through college by doing the minimum amount of work required for most of my classes.

* Abbe Provost’s 1731 novel Manon Lescaut seemed to be stalking me over the last two months, so I had to read it – it appears on Daniel Burt’s revised version of the The Novel 100, then was the subject of allusions in at least two other books I read that time, including Augie March and I think Nicole Krauss’ History of Love as well. Manon Lescaut follows the Chevalier des Grieux as he ruins himself over his obsession with the title character, a young, beautiful, and entirely materialistic woman who throws the Chevalier overboard every time he runs out of money. The two engage in multiple schemes to defraud wealthier men who fall in love (or lust, really) with Manon at first sight, and eventually end up sent to the French colony at New Orleans, where the pattern repeats itself with a less fortunate conclusion. Its controversial status at the time would be lost on any reader today over the age of 12, but its depiction of sexual obsession mixed with several early examples of suspense writing (before either genre really existed in its own right) made it a quick and intense read. Plus now I get the references.

* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is another short novel of obsession, also appearing on the Novel 100, this one telling the tale of a man who is so in love with a woman who is betrothed to someone else that he eventually takes his own life. Told through the letters Werther writes to his friend, I found the deterioration of Werther’s mind as his depression deepens to be far more interesting than the pseudo-romantic aspect of a man so in love with another woman that he’d rather die than live without her. He just needed a good therapist. It was by far the shortest novel I had left on the Novel 100 and brought my total read on that list to 80, so it was worth the two hours or less I spent on it.

* Zadie Smith’s On Beauty reimagines E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End (which I read and didn’t care for that much) in a serious comic novel around a conflict of race rather than class, set in a New England college town in the early 2000s. Smith also sends up the conflict between conservative and liberal academic ideologies (or theologies, more accurately) in one of the subplots that, much like that of Pnin, ended up missing the mark for me, although I could at least recognize glimpses of my alma mater in some of the satire. The novel’s greatest strength is the way Smith defines so many individual characters, especially those of the Belsey family, headed by a white father and an African-American mother and whose children are searching for racial, religious, and cultural identities while their parents try to recover from their father’s inability to keep it in his pants. I couldn’t help but compare On Beauty, which has some brilliant dialogue along with the deep characterizations and is often quite funny, to Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, which produced very mixed feelings in me when I first read it and didn’t fully appreciate (as I think I do now) how Smith was trying to stretch the boundaries of realistic fiction to tell a broad and expansive story. On Beauty, paying homage to a classic work of British literature, feels restrained by the confines of its inspiration when Smith’s imagination is a huge part of why her writing is so appealing, leaving it a good novel, a funny yet smart one that reads quickly, but a slightly unsatisfying one because I know she can do more than this.

* Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World tells the history of that somewhat mundane, unrespected fish, which had a substantial impact on the growth of civilization in Europe and in North America, and which was one of humanity’s first warnings (duly ignored) that we could exhaust a seemingly endless natural resource. Kurlansky’s book Salt turned a similar trick, taking a topic that seemed inherently uninteresting and finding interesting facts and anecdotes to allow him to make the story readable. Cod actually has a stronger narrative thread because Kurlansky can trace the fish’s rise in popularity and commercial value as well as its role in international relations, climaxing in the sudden collapse of cod stocks and the uncertain ending around the fish’s future as a species and a food source. We’re really good at overfishing, because technology has allowed us to catch more fish (as well as species we didn’t intend to catch) which has in turn made fish too cheap to consume. Kurlansky didn’t focus enough on this issue for my tastes, although Cod was published in 1997 when overfishing was seen as more of a fringe environmentalist concern, before celebrity chefs embraced sustainability and began preaching it to the masses.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
→ April 25, 2012
→ By

The Tin Drum.

In case you missed it, I did a redraft of the first round of the 2002 Rule 4 draft for ESPN.com yesterday.

Günter Grass’ novel The Tin Drum stands for critics as one of the greatest novels in German literature, ranking 39th on The Novel 100, 70th on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels ever written, and ranking fifth on this list of the best German novels of last century. Reading it for leisure doesn’t quite measure up to reading it as literature, and I believe a good number of allusions flew over my head due to my unfamiliarity with German (and Polish) history, but I hope I can recognize a novel’s greatness even if I wouldn’t say I loved reading it.

The drum of the title refers to a toy drum received by the narrator and main character, Oskar, for his third birthday. Oskar, precocious, cynical, and perhaps delusional, claims his personality was fully developed at birth, and at the age of three he stages an accident to prevent himself from growing physically, giving him an unusual vantage point for seeing and fooling the world, as he can play the innocent child to escape from mortal danger (even as he sends others, including both of the men he suspects of being his biological father, to their deaths), and uses that ruse to survive the German invasion of his hometown of Danzig/Gdansk, the assault on the Polish Post Office, Kristallnacht, World War II, and its immediate aftermath.

Oskar is mischievous, often devious, and has a strong instinct for self-preservation that he executes with one of his two great skills, using his voice to shatter glass, often to get what he wants but sometimes merely for the pleasure of destroying (although he might actually view it as creating, as a form of art). His other skill is to communicate via his drum: By playing the instrument, he can tell extensive stories and communicate his desires even before he’s able to speak – and he can pretend that he’s unable to speak for years beyond the point when he’s learned to do so.

Aside from the rampant symbolism – the drum, art, glass, aromas (Oskar has a hypersensitive sense of smell), Oskar’s obsession with his heritage despite its lack of clarity, and more – the brilliance of The Tin Drum is its use of humor and picaresque elements to lampoon Naziism, the church (and its complicity with the regime), and the willingness of so many Germans to go along with the regime. The book is sometimes crude and bawdy, but it’s in the service of dark, biting humor that tears apart Grass’s targets, such as the Nazi soldiers rotely building a wall and entombing small animals in it. You may often wish to avert your eyes (the horse’s head scene comes to mind), but these passages tend to be the book’s most powerful both on initial reading and after the book is done.

That said, it’s a tough read for two major reasons. One is simply that German syntax, even in this new, improved translation, doesn’t read that well to my English-reared mind. The other is that Oskar rambles, leading me to question whether he’s all there mentally or might even be unreliable as a narrator, producing long passages where nothing happens and I felt like I was reading in circles. The lengthy gaps between passages of action, or humor, or even dialogue, made it a tough slog, especially the final 100-150 pages – ordinarily a time of acceleration as the plot nears its conclusion. With The Tin Drum more of a history of a fictional character than a traditional linear narrative, there are no major plot points to resolve, and Oskar only undergoes one significant (albeit very significant) transformation in the book. It’s a cerebral novel where Oskar has some realizations but generally refuses to grow up, drawing not just from the picaresque tradition but from coming-of-age novels as well.

Next up: Alan Bradley’s second Flavia de Luce novel, The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ September 13, 2009
→ By

The City of Dreaming Books.

I had two articles posted on Friday, one on the Brewers’ immediate future another on Mat Gamel, Alcides Escobar, and Colby Rasmus. I have also filed a blog entry on Wade Davis that isn’t up yet.

Walter Moers’ The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear was one of my favorite books of 2008 (books I read last year, that is, not books published last year), and his follow-up, The City of Dreaming Books, looked like it was more of the same, with a setting of particular interest to me, literature.

It is, like Bluebear, wildly imaginative, full of wordplay (including fictional author names like Asdrel Chickens) and incredibly sharp characters and settings. Moers has a gift for making the insane seem normal and for precise descriptions of places that evoke clear images in the reader’s mind, and, as in Bluebear, Moers has his main character, Optimus Yarnspinner, go through a series of vaguely ridiculous character-building adventures, although Yarnspinner does less to help his own cause than Bluebear did.

The problem with City is that the action plot isn’t well connected to the character-development plot. Yarnspinner spends 2/3 of the book in the catacombs under Bookholm and, while there’s plenty of action down there, the emphasis is on his development as a storyteller – both the effects his experiences have on his thinking and his ability to actually craft a story. There’s an obvious revenge plot at work, with Yarnspinner and one other prisoner looking for escape and vengeance on their captors, that portion of the plot is set aside for hundreds of pages. Moers brings it back when Yarnspinner and his comrade make their final escape attempt at the end of the book, and the resolution was quick, obvious, and cursory. I’m not arguing with the general plot, but with the lack of integration between that thread and Yarnspinner’s time in the catacombs. City is still a great read, but more for its cleverness and humor than for the action-oriented portion of the plot, and Bluebear was more imaginative and funnier.

Next up: The reissue of Leo Durocher’s classic memoir, Nice Guys Finish Last, due out on Tuesday.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ May 3, 2009
→ By

The Reader.

Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader – the basis for the film that starred Kate Winslet getting “repeatedly naked,” according to Bill Simmons – is an impressively complex work given its length, around 220 pages. It is nominally the story of Michael Berg, who is fifteen when the story opens, and Hannah Schmitz, who is more than twice that age; the two end up in an intense sexual relationship, one that echoes the relationship of Lolita but that is told from the younger participant’s perspective. (Of course, older man/younger girl is significantly more scandalous than older woman/younger guy, which further pushes this issue into the background.) Hannah breaks the relationship off suddenly, disappearing from Michael’s life without warning, only to reappear years later in a substantial coincidence as Michael finds himself assigned by a college class to cover a war-crimes trial in which Hannah is a participant. Michael realizes that he knows something about Hannah that would exonerate her of the worst of the charges – it won’t take you that long to figure it out – and his choices from that point forward dictate the course of the rest of Hannah’s life, much as her choices with him when they were lovers dictate the course of the rest of his life.

My theory of the book is that Schlink was not referring to Michael or Hannah with the title “The Reader,” but is referring to us. In the first part of the novel, he gives us the affair, one that despite Michael’s youth and a heavy reliance on sex with little conversation is not scandalous and is even presented positively. Hannah is mysterious and moody but appears to be hiding some secret pain. Michael is young and innocent but cares deeply for Hannah. There are a few hints of the age imbalance, but the net for Michael is give to us as positive. Schlink is just setting us up, however; the sympathetic characters of part one are not so sympathetic after all – Hannah was a guard in the SS and is accused of complicity, if not outright responsibility, in the deaths of hundreds of female Jewish prisoners; Michael, ruined emotionally by the teenage dalliance with Hannah, can’t take simple steps to help Hannah or simply make her life in prison a little better, much less offer her any sort of absolution for breaking off a relationship that, ultimately, was wrong. Did Michael have an obligation to come forward during Hannah’s trial with his exculpatory evidence – or to at least confront Hannah about it? Why would Hannah refuse to set aside her shame to avoid a horrible fate – did she want to go to prison, to seek absolution through the justice system because the dead could not absolve her? Hannah’s choices are particularly mysterious, since she rarely speaks to Michael when they’re together and has but a handful of lines of dialogue after part one. In a short novel, Schlink presents moral dilemmas while also challenging us to reconsider our loyalties to the two main characters. Why are those two sympathetic in part one, when ultimately, we know so little about them, and some of what we know is less flattering than we believed at first glance? Is the responsibility on the author to reveal everything at once, or on the reader to consider all possibilities before drawing conclusions or developing attachments to specific characters?

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ June 26, 2008
→ By

The Klaw 100, part four.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed Under: Literature, Sports Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
→ March 29, 2008
→ By

Berlin Alexanderplatz and another list of novels.

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 9, 2008
→ By

The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear.

Walter Moers’ The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear was described in a Washington Post review as “equal parts J.K. Rowling, Douglas Adams, and Shel Silverstein,” which isn’t too far off the mark. It’s a flight of fancy, a children’s book written for grown-ups, showcasing an amazingly creative mind, but a little light on storyline.

The book follows Captain Bluebear from his first memories as a tiny cub afloat on the ocean in a nutshell through his first thirteen and a half “lives” – a bluebear has twenty-seven, although these are lives in the sense of chapters of his life, rather than twenty-seven separate mortal coils – each of which is sort of a self-contained story. Most take the form of “Bluebear finds himself in a new environment, gets into trouble (generally not of his own making), and needs to escape.” There are recurring secondary characters through several of the stories, and Moers’ facility with creating both secondary characters and unusual places is incredible – for example, the Earspoonlets:

Even more innocuous and equally beneficial to society were the acoustic vampires popularly known as Earspoonlets, which lived on speech. They were little bigger than dachshunds but had hearing organs of which a young elephant need not have been ashamed. They spent most of their time lying around in public places and pricking up their ears – an extremely amusing sight. Earspoonlets were capable of storing up all they heard for months and regurgitating it before it was fully digested. Thus they were much in demand as itinerant purveyors of information of witnesses of arguments. You could easily annoy them by noiselessly opening and shutting your mouth as if talking. This made them bounce around like mad things, vainly trying to catch the words they thought they were missing.

The whole book is deliberately silly, and there’s little narrative greed to drive you towards the end – no big foozle to kill, no major question to answer, etc. It doesn’t have the relentless plot of the Harry Potter books or the cheerful nihilism of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but instead floats along on its own absurdity. It’s a bit like empty calories, but speaking as someone who loves a rich dessert, empty calories are a perfectly acceptable part of a balanced literary diet – as long as they’re worth it.

Next up: Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,