→ September 11, 2008
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You Shall Know Our Velocity!

I don’t remember who recommended Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity! to me, but I liked the title and have seen a few things on McSweeney’s that made me laugh, so I figured I’d give it a try. The book is funny in places, especially in the first third or so, but as Eggers tries to become more serious (well, I think he was, at least), the book started to unravel for me.

Eggers’ prose is his strongest point as a novelist. He’s got a great knack for descriptive text, whether in analogies (“Down a low-ceilinged hallway and down again and then through a swinging double-door and finally we were in a sort of basement den, the basement of an ancient building, almost surely once this structure’s dungeon or crypt, where hay would be stacked in one corner and men tortured in the other.”) or just in piling words together – and I do mean piling, to the point of overflow – to create a mental picture. Some of the reviews I found compared the running internal monologue of the narrator to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, but Eggers crushes them on readability, and contrasting those monologues to the actual dialogue – what we say, versus what we should say or want to say – gave the book an extra layer of complexity and ultimately of meaning.

Much of the book’s humor comes through the fact that neither of the main characters (Will, the narrator, and Hand, his friend – you could write a thesis on the meanings of those names alone) is all that bright. They plan a trip around the world to all sorts of random countries, without thinking that they might need visas or that there may not be a direct flight from Ulaan Baator to Greenland. Will doesn’t want to bring the heavy Churchill biography he’s reading on the trip, so he rips out the first two hundred and last two hundred pages instead. Hand puts on a pretty good smart-guy act, giving us some clever one-liners:

“The mafia here is organized.”
Here I knew what Hand was going to say – I saw it coming from miles away, a slow steamtrain chugging and hooting – and I could do nothing to stop it.
“So you might call it … organized crime?”

The novel starts out as something of a madcap quest to travel around the world for a week, giving $32,000 (a windfall won by Will in appropriately silly circumstances) to deserving people. As the two men travel – and often fail to travel through their own incompetence – they find that giving the money away isn’t as easy as they expected; or, perhaps, that they’re judgmental assholes who keep finding reasons not to give the money away. Or maybe both. Will engages in some internal monologues, rationalizing away his reluctance to give money to certain deserving people, and often gives the money away in hit-and-run fashion – here, take this money, don’t talk to me, don’t look at me, I’m just going to run away now thanks bye.

The descent into vague self-loathing, accented with small doses of existential doubt and and unresolved but never quite explained issues between the two friends, gets old quickly. Will tells us about their longtime friend Jack, who was recently killed in a bizarre car accident, and it’s possible that this is all a reaction to their sudden loss … but the treatment is superficial, just some scraps that could let us speculate wildly but not enough to let us talk intelligently. A novel that started out funny and clever with great prose ended up dull and slow and almost difficult to read.

There are two versions of Velocity! out there, one of which contains a roughly 50-page addendum narrated by Hand that, among other things, casts doubt on Will’s reliability as narrator. The section was apparently written after the book’s publication and is available on the McSweeney’s site if, like me, you get the original edition of the book. If the additional material is meant as satire – a self-deprecating review of sorts, written by one of the principal characters – then it’s clever and kind of funny. If it’s meant as a serious addition to the book, then I wish I’d never seen it.

Several of you have suggested I read either of Eggers’ other books, and since I liked his prose style, I’m sure I’ll give A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius a try.

Next up: I have already started and finished a nonfiction book, Taking on the Trust , about investigative reporter Ida Tarbell and her groundbreaking series about the Standard Oil trust. I’m now into a Brit Lit novel, North and South , by Edith Gaskell.

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→ August 3, 2008
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Bel Canto.

All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and a PEN/Faulkner Award, is a beautifully written, intelligent novel with one of the best-developed character ensembles I have ever found in a work of literature.

Bel Canto is based on the 1997 hostage crisis in Lima, where fourteen members of a fringe guerrilla group invaded the Japanese embassy and held 72 people hostage for four months, at the end of which the Peruvian army stormed the embassy and killed all of the terrorists, with one hostage dying of a heart problem in the assault. Patchett’s version is in an unnamed, poor, Spanish-speaking country, in the Vice-President’s residence, where a party is being held in honor of a Japanese executive, Mr. Hosokawa, who may be about to bring a large capital investment to the country. However, he only agreed to attend the party when the organizers agreed to fly in Roxane Coss, a world-famous opera singer and Hosokawa’s favorite artist.

Patchett tips us off up front that the eventual murder victims will be the terrorists, not the hostages, although of course the characters don’t know that as we follow them through the ordeal. Patchett has created an amazing number of fleshed-out characters, showing skill both at delving into human emotions and at painting characters with the flourishes that give them definition. Once the initial period after the raid has ended, each character, terrorist and hostage alike, finds his or her niche within the makeshift commune, like the Vice President who becomes the housekeeper, or the poor priest with a secret love of opera. (In a flashback scene, Father Arguedas confesses his love of opera to his priest, who responds, “Art is not sin. It’s not always good. But it’s not a sin.” The priest asks Arguedas if he prefers Verdi or Wagner, and when Arguedas responds, “Verdi,” the priest answers, “You are young. Come back and tell me again in twenty years.”) But more impressive is the way Patchett takes the relationships between some of the hostages and some of the terrorists beyond simple Stockholm Syndrome territory, showing how factors such as age, size, gender, and skill define interpersonal relationships and building a web of interactions on that basis.

If there’s a flaw at all in Bel Canto, it’s that Patchett made her terrorists too sympathetic. Most of the rank and file members are just teenagers without ideology, and each of the leaders has some distinct humanizing trait. It’s good writing, but also the book’s biggest departure from reality.

Bel Canto lacks a linear plot, instead telling the stories around the shift from the captor/hostage dynamic to a commune that is so tranquil that some of the hostages find they lose their desire to leave. Whether this is because they’re truly happy or because they’re happy to be escaping from the tedium or stresses of their daily lives is left to the reader to decide.

Next up: I owe you reviews of Embers and the nonfiction book Manhunt, but the next book for me to read is a behemoth, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.

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→ June 9, 2008
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A Thousand Splendid Suns.

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

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

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

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

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

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→ August 10, 2007
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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.

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