→ February 12, 2009
→ By

Rabbit, Run.

I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.

Rabbit, Run, (#97 on the Radcliffe 100 and part of the TIME 100) has been on my to-be-read shelf for a few months, but in light of the recent death of author John Updike, I decided to move it up in the queue. I originally started this book about ten years ago, got through three or four pages, realized it was going to be depressing, and sold it at a used book store. I was more successful in a second attempt.

“Rabbit” is Harry Angstrom, a 26-year-old former high school basketball star who is now married to a twenty-year-old woman who has already born him a son and is pregnant again. Their marriage is crumbling, or has crumbled, to a point where any conversation degenerates into sniping and insults and where Janice is just withdrawn into alcohol and the television. Rabbit has a job demonstrating the MagiPeeler, a vegetable peeler for sale at the local five and dime store, a career roughly as fulfilling as his marriage. Faced with nothing rewarding in his life, Rabbit runs off, walking away from wife and job and falling into an affair with a slattern from the other side of town.

The fundamental problem with Rabbit, Run from my perspective is that Updike seems to be trying to present Rabbit as a sympathetic character: A young man suddenly realizing that he is trapped into a life of mediocrity and unhappiness, both in stark contrast to the small-world stardom he had in high school, who decides that the best option is to run, both physically and metaphorically. The truth is that Rabbit is a grade-A Asshole who mistreats his wife and then his mistress, refuses to take responsibility for his actions or to live up to the obligations of commitments he’s made (like, say, knocking up two women), or to just generally behave like an adult. Yes, his wife is a train-wreck, an alcoholic with hints of depression, but Rabbit at one point puts alcohol back in her hands when she is trying to give it up, because he can’t adjust to a reality of her sober and the commitment that that implies. But not only is his wife never depicted as “bad” enough for him to leave her, he has an innocent son, Nelson, who adores him as two-year-olds adore their parents, and on whom Rabbit runs out without any apparent pangs of remorse. I have a two-year-old, and I can’t imagine any situation in my marriage that would make me leave the house and not even try to see my daughter for over two months. Janice (Rabbit’s wife) tells her husband at one point after he has returned from his lost weekend about Nelson:

“Oh. Every day, ‘Daddy home day?’ until I could belt him, the poor saint. Don’t make me talk about it, it’s too depressing.”

It’s heartbreaking, and it makes Updike’s attempts to show some affection on Rabbit’s part towards the boy ring totally hollow. You have a clear two-way bond with your child by that age; if you can walk away from that for two months without making any attempt to see the kid, in all likelihood, you have no soul.

The craft of Rabbit, Run is strong. Updike’s prose is wonderful, as anyone familiar with his article on Ted Williams’ retirement knows. He’s also telling, or trying to tell, a larger story of the fears a person faces upon realizing that he has inextricably left his youth behind and has even made irreversible choices that dictate the path of the rest of his life. Rabbit is surrounded by people who symbolize hopes and fears and responsibilities, from the minister and his wife who represent faith and doubt, to the declining high school basketball coach who represents the past and ages and fades like memories, to the baby Janice bears, a metaphor for their marriage, briefly reborn as that, for whatever reason, is the event who finally brings Harry back home. But the fact that it’s well-written only made it an easier read, not a more compelling one, as my dislike for Rabbit only grew as the book went on and he failed to show any sign of maturity or simple recognition of the consequences his actions have on those around him.

Next up: A re-read of Catch-22. I have crab apples in my cheeks and flies in my eyes already.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 5, 2008
→ By

The Painted Bird.

Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (Kosinski, Jerzy) is an awful book. Not a bad book, but an awful one, easily the most graphic book I have ever read in terms of depictions of violence and of violent sex. It’s made worse by the fact that the narrator is a child, aged eight at the start and around twelve at the end, whose innocence is manipulated and destroyed by the people whom he trusts.

The Painted Bird, set during World War II, tells the story of a young boy whose ethnicity is unclear but whose swarthy color and dark hair makes him a potential target for the Nazis. His parents send him to live with a sort of foster mother, but the woman dies and the boy flees, moving from village to village and from one violent situation to another. He is beaten, nearly killed several times, turned over to the Germans twice, witnesses several murders and rapes, and becomes a sort of sponge who absorbs – or just accepts – whatever he’s told about life, or the way the world works. He is almost dispassionate about his suffering; the language of the novel occasionally shows fear when he’s near death, but is otherwise an almost stylistic monotone, reciting the horrors he sees in the way Melville described whales in Moby Dick.

The book reminded me, more than anything else, of The Road (Oprah’s Book Club) . The styles are not similar, and McCarthy’s book has substantially more emotion, but I can’t help but think that McCarthy was somewhat inspired by Kosinzki’s novel. Both books involve a young protagonist moving along an uncertain path towards an unknown destination that might be death. Food and shelter loom large, and there’s constant danger from almost everyone they meet. The protagonist of The Painted Bird is always carrying a “comet,” a tin can with a flame in it that’s used as a light, a heat source, and a weapon; The Man tells The Boy that they are “carrying the fire.”

The primary difference, of course, is in tone. I had a hard time getting to the father-son love story at the heart of The Road because the setting is so bleak. Now, looking back on McCarthy’s book after reading Kosinski’s, it’s much clearer, because Kosinski’s book is completely devoid of love, or much of any feeling at all, other than occasional dread. McCarthy’s book is telling a story; Kosinski’s book feels more like a protest – he wants you to be outraged – but also as a catharsis for the author, whether the experiences were his or just those of people he knew.

I make that last point because there’s apparently a controversy about Kosinski’s work, including whether his work is original and whether he lied about his experiences during World War II. The edition I have is old, from 1976, and predates the plagiarism claims, but he does make it pretty clear that he is not claiming that the work is autobiographical and is dismayed by critics who wish to turn the novel into a work of autobiographical fiction. Neither controversy is mentioned in his entry in Encyclopedia Britannica (although it does claim the novel is a fictionalized account of his experiences during the war) or in TIME‘s capsule on the book from the TIME 100 posting.

Bottom line: I don’t think The Painted Bird is a bad book, but I would in no way recommend it. But after reading it, I appreciate The Road, despite its oppressively bleak setting, a good bit more.

Next up: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , ,
→ October 13, 2008
→ By

Deliverance.

James Dickey’s Deliverance (#42 on the Modern Library 100, as well as part of the TIME 100) is probably best known today for the film it inspired, and that film is unfortunately best known for one scene. That lens distorts the book’s strengths and has almost turned it – and Ned Beatty – into a punchline.

The novel tells of four suburban middle-aged men, three of whom are married with kids, all of whom are in some way bored with their existences. Lewis, the gung-ho weekend warrior of the group, proposes a weekend trip, rafting down rapids in an isolated forest in northern Georgia with some illegal deer hunting thrown in for good measure. The other three men agree, each considering backing out at some point before they hit the river, and their fears, irrational and abstract at the time, prove well-founded when the trip hits a snag and two of the men run into a pair of insane hillbillies. The four suburbanites escape via violence and take off down the river, a trip that leads to more violence and a desperate, intense quest for survival that pushes Ed, the book’s narrator, to the limits of his courage and strength.

Going into the book knowing the basic plot outline affected its ebb and flow for me. Everything leading up to the encounter with the psychotic yokels seemed deliberate, a forced quietude to dull the reader’s senses and increase the impact of the jarring rape scene that sets the adventure/survival portion of the book in motion. The depictions of Ed’s inner thoughts and struggles as he tries to recover from the attack and then assumes a leadership position in the attempt to get out of the woods alive elevate the book beyond a straight adventure novel into something more literary, a psychological thriller that is purposefully light on action as Dickey delves more deeply into Ed’s mental state. Thus establishing his theme, Dickey imbues more tension to the book’s “After” section, where the men have to finesse their way past the local authorities to get out of town.

The whole novel is a psychoanalyst’s – or a psychoanalytically-minded literature student’s – dream. Why, while he’s on the river, does Ed constantly imagine watching the way his wife’s back undulates when they have sex? Why do the men choose to go on this trip in the first place, and then ignore their doubts before they enter the forest? Isn’t it a little creepy that Ed has sex with his wife in the same position as the one used during the rape? (I mean, Dickey could certainly have had them use the missionary position. This had to be a conscious choice by the author.) Is this book, at its core, about the emasculation of the 20th-century American male? I feel like I’m back in my high school AP Lit class, where my teacher found a phallic symbol on every other page, but if I’m picking up on this stuff, I figure it must be pretty blatant, since I was the kid who would argue that the teacher’s oversexed interpretations were wrong. It would make great fodder for a literature paper, but I could have done without some of the imagery.

(Apropos of nothing: Was the rape scene in Pulp Fiction Tarantino’s homage to the scene in Deliverance?)

I’m backlogged on reviews, having knocked off three other books on the trip; I just started Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, another entry from the TIME 100, last night, but I should have reviews of the other books up this week.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ October 7, 2008
→ By

The Sot-Weed Factor.

John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (on the TIME 100) is a spot-on parody of the picaresque novel, a genre that includes Klaw 100 entries Tom Jones and The Pickwick Papers, novels with wide-ranging comical adventures running to seven or eight hundred pages. The style had been out of favor for well over a century at the time that Barth began work on his magnum opus in the late 1950s, and in satirizing it Barth also managed to imbue his work with a strain of social commentary and of symbolism that the earlier works often lacked.

The book’s unusual title comes from a real poem of the same name, written by Ebenezer Cooke, an English poet who sought himself to satirize the culture and society of the Province of Maryland, about whom little was known at the time that Barth decided to build a false history/biography of the man. “Sot-weed” was another name for tobacco, and a factor is, of course, a middleman in the trade of tangible goods. Barth takes Cooke and makes him into the poet laureate of Maryland, a man bent on preserving his innocence even as he is caught up in various political, military, and criminal intrigues that involve him, his twin sister, the fallen prostitute who is the object of his affections, and his childhood tutor, the shapeshifting Henry Burlingame. Many of these machinations are apparently at the whim of the God-like Lord Baltimore and the Satanic sociopath John Coode, although their appearances in the novel are oblique, to put it mildly.

In great picaresque style, Barth takes Ebenezer from his childhood to his dissolute days of drinking and idleness in London and then sets in motion a Rube Goldberg-like chain of events that lead him into and out of such troubles as marriage, kidnapping, bankruptcy, various threats to life and limb, the loss of his father’s estate, and endless encounters with impostors, not to mention at least three people who pretend to be Ebenezer when he’s not around to defend his name. Like most picaresque novels, The Sot-Weed Factor starts to drag in its final third, but Barth rallies for a slam-bang finish with a sham trial, the exposure of the frauds that remain on the table, and the settlement of all of the loose ends still untied, all set in motion by another pair of coincidences (a standby of the genre) that put Ebenezer and two of his comrades in just the right place at just the right time.

Barth’s novel also veers from the picaresque norm, perhaps by way of deepening the parody, through its sheer bawdiness. The prose is full of double entendres and euphemisms for sex and the body parts used therein. Men are often depicted as sexual animals who’ll take whatever they can get – in some instance, not distinguishing between man or woman, and in one instance between man or beast – while women veer from manipulators who use sex as a tool or as trade to victims-in-waiting for rape or abuse. (Indeed, the offhand treatment of rape was the one glaring negative aspect of the experience of reading the book; whether or not it is appropriate to the time in which the book is set and faux-written does not make one more comfortable with reading about rape, even when it’s never brought to pass on the page.) Tom Jones, at the least, had plenty of sexual shenanigans, and part of the book’s climax (!) comes as the title character nearly unknowingly commits incest. Barth gives the reader more sex, particularly more talk of sex, both satirizing the giants of the literary genre but also setting contrast to the willful virgin Ebenezer, whose drive to protect his innocence is a joke that runs through the entire work to the very last pages. One of the best in-jokes of the book is the alleged “true story” of John Smith and Pocahontas, after which you will never think of an eggplant in the same way again.

Next up: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ September 6, 2008
→ By

Call It Sleep.

I’ve said before that I don’t really get Jewish-American literature, and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep – on the TIME 100 and #67 on The Novel 100 – now joins that list. It is apparently considered one of the best, if not the best, depictions of the Jewish immigrant experience in America. There was, somewhere, a central theme or concept in this book that flew right over my head, which left me with a slow, difficult-to-read novel with very little plot until the very end of the book.

The protagonist is David Schearl, a perpetually terrified boy who, after arriving as an infant in the prologue, is eight years old at the start of the first section and eleven at the end. He has a vivid imagination, usually for the worse, is afraid of everything, and engages in incoherent internal monologues whose style I imagine is ripped straight from Ulysses. (They were reminiscent of Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, which supposedly took the technique from Joyce’s novel.) His father is a violent man who can’t keep a job because he does things like attack co-workers with an axe. His mother coddles him and tries to protect him from his father. His aunt comes to live with them for a few months, runs her mouth (not without justification), and ends up feuding with David’s father.

I look for a consistent plot to carry me through any novel, but Call It Sleep offers the thinnest of threads. In the final 60-70 pages, Roth finally gives us a story, a question about David’s parentage and the true pasts of both of his parents, leading to a confrontation and an accident that may have had some deeper symbolic meaning, but again, it was lost on me. While we’re waiting for something to happen, we have chapter upon chapter of David’s time in Hebrew school, or hanging around the other Jewish kids in his neighborhood. As a slice of life in a short story, it would be interesting, but as a novel, it’s a weak foundation. It might be that my own life experiences are too far away from those of the protagonists in novels like Call It Sleep, Herzog, or Portnoy’s Complaint for me to relate to them and to understand the central themes, but then again, I’ve had no problem with African-American classics, and I doubt that I am more in tune with Milkman Dead or Bigger Thomas than I am with David Schearl or Alexander Portnoy.

Next up: I’m halfway through Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity!, a reader suggestion from probably a year ago.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , ,
→ July 23, 2008
→ By

Pale Fire.

You could interpret Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (on the TIME 100 and #53 on the Modern Library 100) in any number of ways. The book comprises an unfinished, 999-line epic poem – occasionally brilliant, but mostly pedestrian and often just silly – by John Shade, and 150 pages of critical commentary by the late poet’s neighbor, the very eccentric Charles Kinbote.

I prefer to view the book as a satire of modern critical commentary on poetry, where the critic or analyst can find whatever s/he wants in the poem by looking hard enough, even though the analysis may be informed by nothing more than a series of coincidences. As a satire along these lines, Pale Fire is undoubtedly successful, blending outright humor with the dry wit that comes of exaggerating the satire’s target to the point of comedy, but satire does not provide a novel with any narrative greed. Only a strong plot can do that, and the plot of Pale Fire is weak, not least because the reader can figure out the two main twists before completing the first third of the book.

Similarly, the clever wordplay throughout Pale Fire is amusing, but doesn’t hold the reader’s attention. Yes, it’s great to see a reference in the poem to “Hurricane Lolita,” followed by a dry, witless comment on the name Lolita. Yes, the reference to “word golf” in the index is funny when you follow the “see also’s” to their conclusion. The play on the names of Oliver Goldsmith and William Wordsworth is good for a chuckle, but the moment passes. You can’t sustain a novel on cleverness alone, so while Pale Fire is undeniably clever, you have to buy into the mystery of the narrator’s identity to find the narrative greed here that will propel you through the book.

Nabokov himself apparently said that the narrator is a fraud, a madman with an invented backstory, but there are other critics and fans of Pale Fire who offer differing interpretations, that perhaps the narrator’s commentary is guided by Shade from beyond the grave, or that the narrator is Shade himself, or that Kinbote is who he says he is (a minor plot point I won’t spoil). These debates are mildly interesting, but even the mystery of who is who and what is what wasn’t enough to propel me through the text. With thirty pages to go, I was still dragging myself to the end. It was obvious from the start how Shade would die, and obvious to me from early on who Kinbote was or thought he was. I thought we might get some major plot twist at the end, but none came, and the fairly insubstantial plot of the attempt to assassinate the king of possibly-fictional Zembla was boring, not least because we know it fails. Nabokov also said that he wrote primarily for himself, and I suppose his tastes were far different than my own.

Next up: An out of print novel by Anthony Powell, one of his first, a comedy called A View to a Death, which preceded A Dance to the Music of Time. I was lucky enough to stumble on a copy in a used book store for $2, although I see some copies online for under $10.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ June 20, 2008
→ By

The Assistant.

Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant, part of the TIME 100, tells the story of a drifter, Frank Alpine, who shows up mysteriously at a failing grocery store in a declining neighborhood in Brooklyn before World War II. The store is run by Morris Bober, a sixty-year-old Jew who appears unable to catch any sort of break in life. Morris wants to be able to provide enough for his daughter to be able to attend college instead of working in a clothing store, and to see her marry well, preferably to the law student Nat Pearl, but at least to a young Jewish man. Frank ends up becoming Morris’ assistant when the owner takes a fall and can’t work.

Of course, the daughter, Helen, ends up developing feelings for Frank, the dark and brooding type strip-mined by Hollywood in the last few decades. Frank, always coy about his past, is left to consider his options: make a clean break by owning up to his history, or blowing a potentially good situation and leaving town after a few months, which is the pattern of his life to date.

The Assistant is understated, although I’m not sure whether it’s fair to call it dull. Malamud’s prose moves despite his use of the broken English of Jewish immigrants from the early 20th century, and there’s enough “action” (although much of it comes in the form of words) to keep you turning the pages. But by the time you reach the end and look back on what actually took place, it doesn’t add up to much. Yet at the same time, it’s not a detailed character study of Frank, nor is it a comment on the plight of immigrants who saw their neighborhoods begin to rot from under them. If anything, the lead character in the book is Judaism, or perhaps Jewish-ness as a cultural rather than religious identity. Perhaps if you grew up Jewish, it would resonate more strongly than it did with me.

Next up: A rarity for me, a re-read. I first read Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews in the same college class that introduced me to The Master and Margarita, but I didn’t care for it and forgot pretty much everything about it. About two years ago, I tackled Fielding’s magnum opus, Tom Jones, and loved it, so I thought I should give Joseph another shot.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , ,
→ May 15, 2008
→ By

A Dance to the Music of Time, completed.

UPDATE, December 2010: The University of Chicago Press has made volume one of the Dance available as a free e-book on amazon.com and on their own site.

—

Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, is a masterwork of dry English humor and brilliant characterization. Part of both the TIME 100 and the Modern Library 100 (where it ranked 43rd), Dance is told by Nick Jenkins over a period of nearly fifty years as he moves through the social circles of interwar London, serves in a rather low-risk infantry unit in World War II, and then becomes a distinguished writer after the war and returns to many of the same characters who populated the earlier books. It’s a popular series in the United Kingdom, but it’s not well-known in the United States.

Nick himself is a wry observer but a milquetoast character, and his wife, Isobel, is a phantom in the stories. The main character and antihero is Kenneth Widmerpool, a climber lacking in social skills but not in confidence who always seems to find himself in the right situation, exasperating anyone hoping to see him fail. The series is full of funny, well-drawn secondary characters, from Nick’s alcoholic school-mate Charles Stringham to the “mobile laundry unit” head Bithel to the ice queen Pamela Flitton, who destroys every man on whom she sets her sights. The narrative greed that I look for in every novel isn’t strong here, but the reader is drawn forward simply by the music of time: We’re following Nick as he goes through life, seeing the world through the lens of his professional and personal lives.

Powell’s observations on the rhythms of life display Nick’s interest, but with a surprising bit of dispassion. Broken marriages, personal setbacks, and even deaths are reported as facts intrinsic to life, but by and large unworthy of comment; by the last book, where secondary characters are dropping like flies, their deaths become parenthetical phrases, a reflection (I suppose) on how we perceive the deaths of those with whom we’ve lost touch as we ourselves grow older. Instead, Jenkins (whom Powell admitted was based on himself) prefers to find interest in small stories and little scandals, although as the series advances the scandals do become proportionally bigger and Powell’s writing veers somewhat more towards the risqué and sensational, perhaps a reflection of the various time periods covered by the series.

The twelve novels, comprising roughly 65-70 long chapters over about 3000 pages, don’t quite match Wodehouse for laugh-inducing content, but Powell infuses the writing with wit. His characters names can totter on the line between the ridiculous and the plausible, from the Walpole-Wilsons to Flavia Wisebite (and her ex-husband, Cosmo Flitton) to Scorpio Murtlock. When books written by some of the secondary characters are mentioned, they have glorious titles like Camel Ride to the Tomb and Dogs Have No Uncles. The punch lines, when they do arrive, are funny because of the context; having one character pour the contents of a sugar-bowl over another’s head is not intrinsically all that funny, but when it happens in Dance, it rises to another level of humor. Jenkins plays the Bob Newhart role of the one sane or normal person surrounded by wackos on lunatics, leaving him, with some later help from Isobel, to offer his commentary.

I have a strong feeling that J.K. Rowling has read Powell’s series and paid homage to it through two minor characters in the Harry Potter series. One minor character in the series is a mystic and spiritualist named Dr. Trelawney, who speaks in aphorisms and vague pronouncements, greeting people by saying, “The Essence of All is the Godhead of the True,” and expecting (but rarely receiving) the reply, “The Vision of Visions Heals the Blindness of Sight.” The similarity to Professor Trelawney in name, in bent, and in obsession with visions is unlikely to be a coincidence. I also saw similarities between Powell’s character Sillery and Rowling’s Professor Slughorn; both are slightly unctuous men who ran salons in their college’s houses and seemed to devote significant energy to determining whom to invite, measuring their gatherings’ success by the names and status of the attendees.

If you enjoy English writing, Powell’s depiction of upper-class English society from the immediate aftermath of World War I into the turbulent 1960s is worth the significant time investment. Next up for me: I’m already a third of the way into Emile Zola’s seminal socio-political novel Germinal.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ April 7, 2008
→ By

E.L. Doctorow on Ragtime.

Just wanted to throw up a link to a Q&A with E.L. Doctorow from New York magazine on how he wrote Ragtime. That novel appears on the TIME 100 and is one of the best reads on the list, evoking turn-of-the-century America with crisp language and the use of actual historical figures. It’s a serious work that also manages to be a page-turner.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , ,
→ April 5, 2008
→ By

Naked Lunch.

William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is on the TIME 100, but I have to admit I’m hard-pressed to explain its presence there. I suppose it was highly influential in its day, judging by the number of band and book names I found within its pages (as well as the name of a defunct Massachusetts company, Thinking Machines). From my vantage point today, however, its intended window into drug addiction and the attendant delusions and paranoia seem overdone, and the violent sexual content that fill the middle third of the novel are just gratuitously disgusting while at the same time managing the unusual trick of being boring.

The book starts out as the disjointed narrative of a well-educated heroin addict who’s fleeing from something, although we don’t find out what until the book’s end. With no obvious transition, we’re shifted into the Interzone, a dystopian North African city populated by deviants, addicts, and at least one Josef Mengele-type doctor, leading to a barrage of stories about orgies and murders, often at the same time, all told in deliberately explicit language reminiscent of the way that kids curse when they’ve learned that certain words are bad and start inserting them at random throughout their speech. There’s an obvious anti-consumerist, anti-conformist message somewhere under the text, but it’s half-formed and is left on the floor under the bodily fluids Burroughs pours all over his text.

If Naked Lunch has a saving grace, it’s that Burroughs could spin a phrase, from the insightful witticism (“Citizens who want to be utterly humiliated and degraded – so many people do, nowadays, hoping to jump the gun”) to inspired silliness (“where they are referred to the We Don’t Want to Hear About It Department”). He was also capable of extending his humor over longer passages, such as the story within the story about a man whose anus learns to eat and then speak, after which it takes over the man’s body. The story implies a question of whether we as individuals are anything more than consumers (and waste producers) within the global ecosystem – reminding me of Robert Rankin’s references to humans as “meat” in The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse– but it’s a floating island of sense within a larger sea of verbal sewage.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , ,