→ March 10, 2010
→ By

The White Tiger.

Winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is a twisted, funny, angry book with a deadly serious core that takes aim at modern India and skewers every part of it that appears within a kilometer of the target. It is a 21st-century antidote to Horatio Alger’s novels, one where the hero is an amoral anti-hero who charms the reader while clawing his way out of poverty and into the upper class he despises and yet wants to join. Adiga presents you with the conflict of the rags-to-riches hero who gets there by being an amoral scumbag, rejecting all the traditional mores that most people hold dear (religion, marriage, culture, etc.) and arguing that he had to reject them to get where he was going.

The narrator and hero/anti-hero is Balram, known as the White Tiger, a poor boy who is determined from a young age not to remain poor and stupid and in the Darkness of rural India. He lies, cheats, and eavesdrops his way into opportunities like a job as a driver for the son of a local oligarch, one that brings him into contact with greater wealth and with the urban chaos of New Delhi. This new experience brings him greater opportunities for advancement and for stepping on or destroying people in his way until his actions eventually escalate to murder. Through this diary of his experiences, told through seven letters to the visiting Premier of China, Balram is cheerful, mocking or criticizing everyone from his idiot rich boss to the traditional Indians who remain happy stuck in the mire to the rich classes whose government and the gods to keep the teeming multitudes in penury.

White Tiger is a disingenuously quick read, with fast, witty prose, but underneath it Adiga is posing tough questions without really answering them. Was Balram a hero or an anti-hero? It’s tough to justify most of what he does in the novel, except that just about everyone he stepped on or hurt or killed had it, or at least something, coming. And who can blame someone raised in that kind of poverty and hopelessness for grabbing indiscriminately at an opportunity to escape it? Does one’s environment determine the morality of one’s actions? Does Balram feel guilty about any of his actions – hence his rationalizations – or does he believe that he’s fully justified?

Adiga’s targets are wide, but a huge portion of his satire – or just his ire – is aimed at “modern” India, which he views as segregated and corrupt, ruled by idiots who are simply smarter than the “slaves” in the country’s massive underclass. The corruption is endemic, from bribes paid to government officials to sinecures in local towns, but the characters’ mass acceptance of “how it is” is terrifying, and the one person who objects – because he has spent time in the United States – is too weak-willed to do much more than complain. The party that purports to represent the poor is every bit as corrupt as the one that rules the country for the rich, and both parties promise reforms to the masses without delivering anything.

I also read White Tiger while wondering if it was possible to write a book this funny and compelling with a moral central character. Balram simply has no moral center – he has rejected the dictums from his family, the faith of his caste (although he hasn’t given up on its superstitions), and the respect for authority that the authorities demand. He lies and acts to get what he wants, and has no compunction about his deception. A book like this almost requires a central character – or maybe just a narrator – who respects nothing and no one and is unflinching in his rejection of old institutions. Anything he does believe in, religion or tradition or family, would have to be home-brewed. If you’ve read a book that disproves this theory, I’d love to hear about it.

And, since I know someone will ask, yes, I expect The White Tiger will be on the next iteration of the Klaw 100, whenever that comes.

Next up: John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; his The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is my favorite spy novel and made both versions of the Klaw 100.

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→ January 5, 2010
→ By

Pedro Páramo.

Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo is barely a novel at a scant 123 pages and under 40,000 words, but was apparently a major influence on post-colonial literature in Latin America, most famously as the book that inspired Gábriel García Márquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude. Rulfo’s use of magical realism doesn’t seem all that groundbreaking today, but at the time it was published, it was.

Rulfo set the book apart from the beginning through its odd structure – seventy passages of varying lengths, some as short as a paragraph, all written as an interior monologue with very little descriptive prose. The novel includes three separate plot strands, loosely connected but woven together with frequent confusion as to which strand is the current one. Juan Preciado’s mother makes him promise to return to the town of his birth to find his father, Pedro Páramo, whom Juan’s mother abandoned when Juan was very young. On the way there, Juan has an unusual encounter with a strange man who tells him that Pedro PPáramo is his father as well, only to reveal that Páramo has been dead for many years. Juan finds the town, Comala, empty, yet full of ghosts and memories – yes, he sees dead people – and it turns out that the title character is the reason for the town’s decline and death, one that infects Juan as well, leading to an even more bizarre sequence of conversations he has and overhears from within his own grave. (Whether or not Juan is dead the entire novel is apparently a major subject of scholarly debate; I think he’s dead from the start, as the sequence that supposedly describes his death is unusually vague, but he doesn’t know he’s dead until that passage.) He learns that Páramo fathered many children with the women of the town, but became obsessed with the one he couldn’t have, Susana, who eventually returned to the town and married Pedro but never gave him her heart, after which he decided to starve the town to death.

Rulfo wrote the book after a visit to the town where he was born, one that was nearly depopulated as part of the great urbanization in Mexico in the early part of the last century. This shift also meant the destruction of local institutions in the rural towns that were the backbone of Mexican culture. The desolation and loneliness he experienced on that return visit formed the basis for the abandoned Comala of the novel – haunted by sounds and memories without a clear line between life and death (perhaps because everything is on the wrong side of that line). You can play all sorts of matching games between the main characters and the forces or events that shaped that period of Mexico’s history – Susana, for example, could stand in for that siren’s call of the city that ultimately wrecks the towns and people who heeded it – because Rulfo painted them with broad strokes and doesn’t provide a ton of detail in such a short work. He also gave his characters names with obvious metaphorical implications – Páramo is “barren,” Preciado is “precious,” Fulgor is “glow” – which is great fodder for academic interpretation, and I’m not sure it’s possible to read or enjoy this book without looking at that second level of meaning. The plot itself is so thin and unsatisfying that it can’t stand on its own and only rises to greatness when you consider Rulfo’s concern for his country rather than his characters.

Since Pedro Páramo needs analysis for the reader to fully grasp what Rulfo was trying to express, here are a few links I found useful in thinking about the book once I’d finished it:

Next up: Marilynne Robinson’s follow-up to one of my top 100 novels (her 1980 debut, Housekeeping), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead.

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→ December 29, 2009
→ By

A House for Mr. Biswas.

Lying in the room next to Shama’s, perpetually dark, Mr. Biswas slept and woke and slept again. The darkness, the silence, the absence of the world enveloped and comforted him. At some far-off time he had suffered great anguish. He had fought against it. Now he had surrendered, and this surrender had brought peace.

Nobel Prize-winner V.S. Naipaul first achieved critical acclaim with A House for Mr. Biswas, which appears at #72 on the Modern Library 100 and is on the (unranked) TIME 100. As you might imagine, the novel details the lifelong desire of Mohun Biswas, an Indian man born to expatriate parents in Trinidad, for a house of his own, as much for what it represents (independence, status, success, dignity, masculinity) as what it provides (privacy, stability, an escape from his insane in-laws). But Mr. Biswas is no up-from-nothing Horatio Alger hero – he’s petulant, immature, and incredibly self-centered to the point of all but ignoring his brilliant young son until the son’s academic efforts promise to shine respect upon his father.

Mr. Biswas is partly a comedy, with Naipaul mining some humor from small bits of dialogue and the minor calamities that befall the title character. Mr. Biswas goes to work for one of the smaller newspapers in Port of Spain, and receives some pointed and slightly obnoxious feedback from the paper’s harried editor:

‘”Considerably” is a big word meaning “very,” which is a pointless word any way. And look. “Several” has seven letters. “Many” has only four and oddly enough has exactly the same meaning.’

And Naipaul’s ear for dialogue down to the minutiae of conversation is very strong. But the core theme, that Mr. Biswas perseveres despite continued misfortunes, strikes me as less a celebration of human dignity than a mockery of how some people can’t get out of their own way – or perhaps that people can achieve their goals despite screwing up left and right for twenty or thirty years. Almost everything that goes wrong for Mr. Biswas is his own fault. He rushes to marry a girl of whom he knows nothing, then he keeps knocking her up despite the fact that they have no money and mooch off her extended (and crazy) family). He blows a month’s salary on a dollhouse for his daughter; he buys a house he can’t afford without even bothering to see it in the daylight; he’s rude to everyone, including his wife, and then acts surprised when he gets nastiness in return. By the end of the book, I was half-hoping he didn’t get the house after all, even though it was promised in the prologue that he did.

Naipaul receives tremendous praise for his prose, which is effusive and heavy on descriptive language, reminiscent of Dickens’ prose … but of course, Dickens wrote in serial form and was striving to fill pages and stretch stories out over more issues, making him the bane of English and American schoolchildren for over a century now. The book appeared on the TIME 100, compiled in 2005, but received a less-than-flattering review in the magazine in 1962 when Mr. Biswas was first published; the reviewer praised the colorful patois of the Indian expatriates in the novel and their melange of old and new customs, “but Naipaul’s House, though built of excellent exotic materials, sags badly; ‘economy, style, and a less elastic blueprint would have done wonders.” A verbose author can be a pleasure to read when the plot moves quickly or the novel is short, but neither was the case in Mr. Biswas, which runs 560 pages in the current paperback edition and lacks any major narrative thread to pull the reader to the finish.

Next up: Back to Wodehouse – sort of a Christmas tradition for me – with one of the few Jeeves novels I’ve never read, The Mating Season.

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→ June 9, 2008
→ By

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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→ April 23, 2008
→ By

The House of the Spirits.

The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende, is one of the great works in the magical realism movement prominent in post-colonial literature, especially that of Latin America. While it lacks the broad scope and dreamlike qualities of the genre’s paragon, One Hundred Years of Solitude, it is still an epic combining romance, the rise and fall of a great family, and the turbulent political history of the never-named country of Chile. (The book also appears in the “second 100” list of honorable mentions in the Novel 100.)

The central thread in the story is the Trueba family, introduced after what amounts to a lengthy prologue on the daughter of a prominent local family who is betrothed to Esteban Trueba. When that girl, the beautiful Rosa, dies suddenly, Trueba heads to his family’s property in a remote section of the country and builds a modern-day plantation, sublimating his grief into work. He returns to marry Rosa’s younger sister, the clairvoyant Clara (Spanish for “clear”), and the two enter a long and ultimately stormy marriage, begetting three children and one grandchild who will become central in the book’s rapid-fire conclusion during the overthrow of the democratically elected government of The Candidate. (Never named, the Candidate is obviously Salvador Allende, the author’s uncle, who was overthrown and assassinated in a US-backed coup in 1973 that installed the brutal dictator Augustus Pinochet into office and plunged Chile into over a decade of political and economic misery.)

The emphasis of the story is fluid, with early emphasis on the passionate yet dispassionate love affair between Esteban, who on some level still yearns for his deceased lover, and Clara, whose connection to the spirit world puts her beyond Esteban’s emotional reach:

He wanted far more than her body; he wanted control over that undefined and luminous material that lay within her and escaped him evening those moments when she appeared to be dying of pleasure.

Esteban is, despite humble origins, a reactionary, an ardent defender of The Way Things Are and The Way We’ve Always Done It, putting him in conflict with his wife, his daughter and her revolutionary lover, and eventually his granddaughter and her own forbidden paramour. The father’s sins are ultimately visited on his progeny, especially granddaughter Alba, who ends up a political prisoner of the Pinochet regime.

Allende mixes narratives, with most of the novel told by an omniscient narrator with a wry outlook and hints of sarcasm, broken up by occasional soliloquies from Esteban Trueba, speaking in his last years as he looks back over his life and those of his family members. Trueba’s sections drag relative to the remainder of the book because we know that his perspective is tainted by his political leanings and complicity in much of the violence that peppers the book. The third-person narration also has a near-monopoly on the book’s subtle humor, which never dominates the text but slips seamlessly into the narrative, such as the description of one of Esteban’s sons, returned from a spiritual journey in India:

… his skin clinging to his bones, and that lost gaze so often observed in those who eat only vegetables.

Or, in my favorite line from the book, in the discussion of how most families have one member who’s certifiable, while the Truebas appear to have avoided that affliction:

No. Here the madness was divided up equally, and there was nothing left over for us to have our own lunatic.

Allende clearly favors the progress of modernity over the rigid hierarchy of the old economic system and the autocratic system used to prop it up, but there’s a recurring note of wistful nostalgia for the culture of the earlier years. The book’s spiritual underpinnings, ranging from Clara’s communications with the spirits living in their urban mansion to her ability to play Chopin on a piano that’s several feet away to the simple naturalism of the peasants on their rural estate, are all presented favorably, even admiringly, and are set off from the obstinate conservatism of Trueba and the old guard.

The novel undergoes one abrupt change after Clara dies and the coup to overthrow the Candidate begins, turning from an epic romance/family saga into a political or psychological thriller. Allende takes us into the political prison with Alba while we also see the frantic efforts of her aged grandfather, now politically impotent after years of playing a critical role in the government, to free her. How he ultimately does so is one of the most charming, emotional, and wryly funny passages in the book.

Next up: Having finished book eleven of A Dance to the Music of Time while I procrastinated on this writeup, I’ve just started Halldór Laxness’ Independent People. Laxness was an Icelandic novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, but 120 pages in, I’m not impressed.

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→ April 13, 2008
→ By

The Alchemist.

Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist is subtitled “A Fable About Following Your Dream,” and within the context set out by the author – that this is a fable, and not a traditional novel – it’s good.

The linear plot revolves around a shepherd boy who meets with a mystical man who implies that he is a physical manifestation of the Soul of the World and encourages the boy to pursue his life’s purpose, which involves a trip to the pyramids and a search for treasure. Along the way, the boy meets an Englishman who seems to be on a similar quest but for the wrong reason, a girl who appears to him to be his soulmate, and the title character, whose skill in alchemy is secondary to his wisdom about our “Personal Legends” and the vicissitudes of life.

The Alchemist has a strong religious component, and all I’ll say about it is that if you’re opposed to religion, the book will be a tough read because belief in God and in a purpose in the universe underpins the entire story. Coelho is clearly engaging in a bit of magical realism here, doing so within the context of a sort of ecumenical theism. Whether The Alchemist is a self-help book in addition to a work of fiction is a subject I will avoid here.

As a straight novella, the book works well because the main character develops. The Alchemist struck me as a straightforward example of how to structure a short novel: The main character is on a quest or journey with a clear endpoint, and encounters obstacles along the way that help him grow emotionally while providing tension and moving the plot forward. Coelho could have extended some of the tense moments to enhance the reading experience, and probably should have, since I estimated that the book clocks at under 50,000 words, a shade short of what’s required to build the crescendo I expect in a typical novel.

My main complaint with the book was that the translation came off a bit stilted. It’s possible that Coelho’s language is just choppy, but my instinct says that it was translated too literally, and it gives some of the narration a trite feeling that, at the least, couldn’t have been intended. Quick reads, which any 167-page book should be, need smooth prose to succeed, and The Alchemist didn’t deliver that.

Next up: Having started and dispatched a Wodehouse book en route to Baltimore on Friday, I’m now about a third of the way through Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, another of the great works in the tradition of magical realism novels from Latin America.

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→ January 6, 2008
→ By

Love in the Time of Cholera.

I’m a big fan both of Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez’s work and of magical realism in general, so I was excited to pick up Love in the Time of Cholera , which promised to take Garcí­a Márquez’ style and apply it to an epic romance. The result is more the story of a man who refuses to grow up, and in the end, is rewarded for it.

The plot of Love in the Time of Cholera revolves around the long-suffering Florentino Ariza, who falls in love with Fermina Daza when the two are teenagers, only to see her reject him and marry the wealthy young doctor, Juvenal Urbino. Florentino decides that he must wait for Dr. Urbino to die, at which point he can resume his pursuit; in the meantime, he will get his rocks off with almost every woman who crosses his path (the novel claims he has 622 affairs over the 51 years of Fermina’s marriage, not including one-night stands, seemingly a mathematical impossibility for a man with a full-time job, even granting that Florentino conducted some of those affairs simultaneously), with a particular jones for widows. (I’ll give you all five seconds to glean the significance of that. Got it? Excellent. Let’s move on.)

It seems that this is intended as a soaring romantic tale of a love that wouldn’t die, that transcended the years, and so on, but that feeling disappears from the novel the moment Fermina rejects Florentino until after Dr. Urbino dies. Garcí­a Márquez (GGM, from here on out) tells us Florentino’s emotional state is due to his immense ability to love, but it seems to me that Florentino was suffering from a case of arrested development. When he approaches Fermina just hours after her husband has died to reiterate his undying love for her, he’s not being romantic – he’s acting like a self-centered teenager, tone-deaf to the emotions of the people around him. It is as if he has caught a disease and doesn’t wish to be cured.

That ending is one of the book’s brightest spots; it’s a clever and unexpected resolution to a plot that looks to be headed toward a predictable, Hollywood-style ending (they get together, one of them dies, the women in the audience cry and see it over and over again), and it includes some of the book’s best writing. GGM does have an incredible gift with prose, and uses it to great effect in parts of the book about love and sex, fear of aging and death, and familial relationships:

But in her loneliness in the palace she learned to know him [her son], they learned to know each other, and she discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.

One negative aspect I’ve noticed in other GGM works shows up again here – his obsession with bodily functions. For example:

Even when it was not the season for asparagus, it had to be found regardless, so that he could take pleasure in the vapors of his own fragrant urine.

Wow. Thanks for sharing. Good thing this wasn’t a scratch-and-sniff edition. One of the fantastic things about GGM’s masterwork, One Hundred Years of Solitude , is that it transports the reader into a sort of dreamstate, where closing the book results in a brief moment of confusion that’s akin to waking up in the middle of a vivid dream. Yet Love in the Time of Cholera continually interrupts any of its own attempts to create that immersive, dreamlike feeling with verbal tritones about urine, feces, vomit, or semen.

By tying up the romance story and fading out the various little subplots one by one, GGM leaves the reader with a satisfying ending that’s not unrealistically happy (one of the subplots ends very badly, although it’s brushed off a bit in the broader context). The problem is the meat of the book, where the reader sees Florentino and learns he’s not a romantic hero but a juvenile antihero unworthy of the exaltation that the ending seems to give him.

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→ August 10, 2007
→ By

The Kite Runner.

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

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

Until The Kite Runner, that is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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