Showing posts with label
book reviews (scratch one off the list).
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Showing posts with label
book reviews (scratch one off the list).
Show all posts
How the Light Gets In by M.J. Hyland
What I said then:
Debut from an interesting Aussie author about a girl on exchange in America.
What I say now:
Lou Connor, a stroppy teenager too smart for her bogan Sydney family, plots an escape from their stultifying home and heads to suburban Chicago on a student exchange. The Hardings, her host family---affluent, fashionable, pampered---try and make her feel welcome, but Lou's self-destructive habits continually drive a wedge between them. Soon her presence causes cracks to appear in the facade of the Hardings' laundry-commercial lives, and the differences in temperament prove insurmountable.
Lou is a fascinating character, and Hyland nails her tone of voice, giving us a complicated, flawed teenager. She's super smart in some ways but kind of clueless emotionally (the way all teenagers are), and she constantly thinks she can get away with more than she really can. She reads way above her level, but drinks way above her level too, using alcohol as a crutch any time things get tough. She looks down on her low-rent, unambitious family in Sydney, but seems to do everything she can to sabotage her chances of leaving them behind. It's a tour de force performance from Hyland.
The other thing that makes the novel memorable is its depiction of the Hardings and their milieu. It's a vision of a suburban Americana that is too perfect to actually exist, but nobody will admit that their lives aren't as picture perfect as they appear. It's like the whole family is trapped inside a staged photo portrait, their shiny white smiles fixed in place for all eternity. Lou's sulking, snarky presence invades the Harding home like a rank smell, and she wears them down until each member (except for the shopping-obsessed teen daughter) eventually admits to her their secret dissatisfactions.
Plot-wise, it meandered a little too much for my taste. When Lou's at the Hardings the book falls into a distinct pattern: she tries to fit in, the pressure to act a certain way gets to her, she acts out (boozing, smoking, falling for a ne'er-do-well who talks her into taking speed) then gets caught, and she vows to try harder to fit in. This pattern repeats a few times, and (as enjoyable as Lou's voice is), I thought it needed more variation. There's also a couple of late-book swerves (into a rooming house for failed exchange students, then into a placement with a secondary family) that were interesting, but didn't quite feel properly integrated into the whole narrative.
Those were pretty minor complaints, though, and How The Light Gets In is worth a read for Lou's brilliantly constructed voice: she's bitter, insouciant, troubled, intelligent, emotionally stunted ... and fascinating company.
Cheers, JC.
The Artist, the Philosopher and the Warrior by Paul Strathern
What I said when I got it:
I've been really interested by the concept of this one since it first arrived: basically, Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia all knew each other, and at a certain point they all travelled together. This non-fiction book examines that moment in time and what it meant to each man's career. Now it's out in a paperback, there's really no excuse to put off having a look.
What I say now:
I was reading this at basically exactly the same time as the enclave in the Vatican was choosing the new pope (yes, that's how far behind I am with my book reviews), and the timing was perfect. Reading about how Cesare's power-hungry father Rodrigo shamelessly bought the papacy and used its power in a grab for real estate made the rituals and solemnity of the modern Vatican seem absolutely ridiculous. I can't imagine anybody learning about the sordid history of middle ages Catholicism and remaining devout (sorry, Dad).
That aside, this was a fascinating peek into an era of history which is hugely important (in so many ways, Renaissance Italy shaped the history and culture of Europe, and thus had effects still being felt today), yet about which I knew very little. The book rotates chapters, focusing in turn on da Vinci, the brilliant artist and engineer who designed increasingly elaborate instruments of war; and Machiavelli, the young diplomat who would become the most radical political thinker of his age; and Borgia, tyrant and murderer, rampaging through Italy trying to claim a Kingdom with the sword.
Luckily for Strathern, Machiavelli kept meticulous journals, and his notebooks lay out exactly how the men met, and how they reacted to each other. Borgia loaned da Vinci from his Florentine masters to aid him militarily; Machiavelli was sent by the same men to divert Borgia's attentions away from defenceless Florence; the two Florentines (da Vinci nearing the end of his career, Machiavelli at the beginning of his) met in Borgia's train and struck up a brief friendship.
Strathern charts their time together during Borgia's campaign, and how their meeting affected each of their subsequent careers, in particular the effect that the charismatic (yet psychotic) Borgia had on the other two. Da Vinci, horrified by the realities of war, stopped designing weapons. Machiavelli, inspired by Borgia's ruthlessness, applied that ruthlessness to the world of politics, writing his famous tract The Prince using Borgia as an inspiration. Strathern's writing is clear and succinct, and doesn't have the grinding density of some non-fiction.
But despite Strathern's best efforts, it's da Vinci who makes problems for his book, remaining stubbornly a mystery: the man himself didn't keep any journals of his own, and the scraps of thought left in his notebooks are more likely to be shopping lists or reminders of chores than anything else. Whenever he and Machiavelli are apart, Strathern is left in the field of conjecture, prefacing a lot of his statements with phrases like 'da Vinci must have felt ...' or 'da Vinci surely saw ...' or 'da Vinci certainly would have been aware of ...' It lends those portions of the book an insubstantial air, which is unfortunate. That's a pretty small quibble, though, in a thoroughly researched and extremely readable history.
Cheers, JC.
Dracula by Bram Stoker
What I said then:
The original, but is it the best?
What I say now:
Dracula, I'm sorry to report, is most definitely not the best. In fact, it's not even very good.
Jonathan Harker, a young real estate agent, travels from London to Romania to help settle the purchases of some land in England for a mysterious Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula. Once there, it slowly (too slowly) dawns on Harker that Dracula is creepy as fuck, that weird happenings are afoot, and that he, Harker, is now a prisoner in Dracula's ancient, crumbling castle. Once Dracula sets off for England, Harker's wife Mina and occult expert Abraham Van Helsing gather together a small group of monster hunters to counter his plans to take over the world, one innocent English neck at a time.
The book's got a heap of problems, but the main one is the simplest: there's not enough Dracula in it. The Count's eminent position in pop culture makes obvious that he's by far Stoker's most interesting/original/captivating creation. The novel's first section, involving Harker trapped in the Count's castle and slowly realising the horrifying truth about his host, is actually pretty good. Unfortunately, once the action moves to England, Dracula basically exits the book, never to return. From that point on we hear about his actions, but never really see them; we see how much other characters fear him, but never see anything that makes us fear him ourselves. It's a genuinely strange choice on Stoker's part.
In some respects he's hamstrung by his choice to make the novel epistolary(ish) --- that is, it's constructed entirely of letters, diaries and journal entries. Dracula isn't one of our correspondents, and as he spends most of the novel hiding from the characters whose point of view we're getting, we just don't see him. Still, there had to be a way to give us more blood-sucking action.
The other big issue Stoker has with his letters/diaries style is that almost every single character speaks in exactly the same tone of voice. Even Van Helsing, who has a few 'foreign' mannerisms to his speech, still speaks in basically the same manner, and with the same vocabulary, as everybody else. The other members of the anti-Drac league might as well be the same person, for all the personality that comes through their voices.
The other major issue I had with the book was the nature of the action: Stoker seems to have no idea how to structure his story to make the most of its inherent drama. The vast majority of the book is spent having theoretical discussions. When the anti-Drac league does take action, it's most often through waiting in doorways, or writing letters to shipping agents, or looking up train timetables. Even in the final denouement, which should be super-duper satisfying after we've waited so long for it, they kill Dracula without actually having to confront him! I mean, surely that's a no-brainer, right? I couldn't believe it.
Obviously the book is super famous and continues to be read widely, and it's not for no reason. And in some ways I can understand the appeal: not only would the text itself have been pretty daring for its time, but the subtext is absolutely, positively drenched in sex (or, more specifically, the fear of sex). I have no idea what Stoker had going on in his personal life, but I suspect he was pretty hung-up about a lot of things, because a hell of a lot of psychological weirdness seeps through the edges of the novel. Unfortunately, in my opinion he wasn't in control enough of that psychological stuff to make it focussed and thematically coherent, and he certainly wasn't able to marry it to a well structured story. This ended up a pretty major disappointment for me.
Cheers, JC.
The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
What I said then:
Weirdly, this seems to have the same basic plot as Iain M. Banks’ The Player of Games. Maybe I’ll read them back to back.
What I say now:
Haha, wow, they're not very similar at all. I think I was fooled by the word 'game' appearing in both titles. Where Banks' novel is an enjoyable romp, Hesse's is a stately, philosophical, largely plotless examination of life, spirituality, art, and the meaning of it all.
One of the reasons I've been absent from this blog for so long is that this review was the next I had to write and I have no idea how to go about it, because I simply lack the vocabulary to follow Hesse into the never-ending abstractions of thought that he leads us. I'm no philosopher; I'm just a guy.
In the 23rd Century, all intellectual and artistic production has ceased: at some point along the way it was decided that, with the music of the great classical composers, art had reached its highest apogee. In this future, a caste of 'game-players' have synthesised all knowledge into its root concepts, concepts that the 'game' (which is part music, part mathematics, part performance) then states and recombines in ways which give intellectual pleasure to the audience. Here's Hesse himself: "The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colours on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property --- on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ." It's an incredibly ambitious concept, tying the entirety of the arts, of science, and of religion together into one great attempt to perfectly understand humanity.
So that's the background. Hesse's novel has us follow the life of Joseph Knecht, who begins as a passionate but unfocused student and ends up as the Magister Ludi (the supreme Glass Bead Game player in the world), which allows the author to expand on his concepts one piece at a time, the reader gaining knowledge and understanding as Knecht does. And that's basically the book: Knecht wrestles with philosophical ideas and with his own place in the world, and we watch him do it. It's dense and difficult, with barely any story to speak of, but it's also kind of amazing (it's hard not to be dazzled by the breadth of knowledge Hesse displays).
The book ends with three short stories that are linked to the main body of the novel, and those stories were probably the highlight of the novel for me: they managed to combine their exploration of Hesse's philosophical concerns with more rigorously focussed storytelling, and I felt they were more successful as a result.
The Glass Bead Game is a really unusual book, and though I can't honestly recommend it (it's just too likely to bore people, I think), I can say without reservation that I'm glad I read it myself, and if you approach it like it's a philosophical tract rather than a novel, I think you'd find much to admire in it.
Cheers, JC.
The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
What I said then:
The second book in his Culture sci-fi series, about a 'game' so complicated and vast that it consumes its players entire lives.
What I say now:
I read the first of Banks' set of novels about The Culture (a massive alliance of organic and AI civilisations, so advanced that they've created a post-scarcity world in which anybody can have anything, at any time, and never works a day in their life) a few years ago and liked it quite a lot. So here I am for a second go round, and The Player of Games didn't disappoint.
The thing I most appreciate about Banks' sci-fi writing is the perfect tone: they're page-turners, but they're smart. They contain interesting ideas, but never sacrifice the plot to those ideas. A lot of sci-fi disappears up its own arse trying to explain everything, and a lot of it is just fantasy in space, with science so inexplicable that it's basically magic. Banks manages very nicely to tread the line down the middle, and for that more than anything else, I'm a fan.
In The Player of Games, Gurgeh, one of The Culture's most brilliant (human) minds has devoted his life to games, and game theory. He is a born adept, picking up the rules, strategies and subtleties of any world's games as naturally as breathing. Basically, if Earth joined The Culture, Gurgeh would be the best chess player in history half an hour later. When The Culture discovers a (by their standards) barbaric empire called Azad whose power structure is based on a sprawling, incredibly complicated game (also called Azad), they send Gurgeh in to play. At stake is Azad's future and, as he moves through the tournament that will end with the winner crowned emperor, Gurgeh's life.
Gurgeh's story takes a while to get going: fully a third of the book is taken up with his time on his home orbital (kind of a man-made inverse planet) before he ever even leaves for Azad. In retrospect, it felt like much too long, and his relationships with a couple of drones weren't so interesting that I needed a hundred pages of them. Once we hit Azad, whose society Banks sketches with elegance (and some wonderful oddball flourishes) things start to pick up.
My main criticism from that point on would be that we never come to understand the game of Azad like we do the place. Given how much time Gurgeh spends playing, Banks remains pretty vague about how exactly the game works. I'm not unsympathetic: having made absolutely clear to us that Azad is the most complicated game anyone's ever seen, it would be impossible to actually follow through and invent the most complicated game anyone's ever seen. Still, a little more detail would have been nice. As Gurgeh is learning the game, we discover that some of the pieces are biological life-forms themselves, altering the way they're played based on the player's mood ... which is kind of a cool idea, but which is barely mentioned again.
The closer Gurgeh gets to the pointy end of the great tournament, the more the tension really ratchets up (certain political facets within Azad simply cannot allow a stranger to beat them at their own game), and I read the last hundred pages in a single setting.
Ultimately The Player of Games is a rollicking good read, and it's pitched right at the perfect level of intelligence that I'm looking for in a page-turner. It's never so philosophically minded that it becomes hard work, but it's also never dumbed down enough that I feel guilty about enjoying it. It really was just a blast.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: Dracula by Bram Stoker
books to go: 71
Hello America by J.G. Ballard
What I said then:
I love J.G. Ballard. I'm determined that before I die I will read everything he ever wrote. This one will be next, I suppose.
What I say now:
Yep, still love him.
Ballard began his career in science-fiction (though writing much more wonky, arty sci-fi than could normally be found in the early sixties), then went through this incredible period in the seventies where he fused his sci-fi themes with everyday (but off-kilter) settings and plots; The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, Concrete Island and High Rise are the books I'm thinking of. Hello America came out in 1981, just after that golden period and just before his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (which, in its way, holds the key to all of his work), and it marked a brief return to the dystopias of his earlier works.
A hundred years in the future, an energy crisis has left North America a barren wasteland, the deserts of the southwest U.S.A. having spread to cover the entire continent. With severe oil rationing over the rest of the globe, most technologies have ground to a stand-still, or even devolved to mimic earlier, pre-Industrial Revolution times. A team of research scientists --- and one stowaway --- who are all descended from American refugees, land their ship at the edge of the dunes of New York City and set out on horseback to explore. Lo and behold, they find that the American Dream isn't quite as dead as they had imagined ...
If I'm being honest with myself, this is a fairly minor entry in Ballard's canon. He is usually at his best when describing one or two obsessive loners, driven characters who dance around each other under the influence of whatever bizarro concept he's dreamed up this time. The size of the cast here feels limiting, rather than the opposite: we're introduced to several scientists, and the stowaway, and the research ship's captain, yet because they all share similar motives, none of them emerges from the pack to become a distinct focal point for the book. It seems Ballard felt this too: there's a chapter in the middle in which he uses one character's diary entries to skip over a period of about three months, and incidentally to kill off a couple of people as well, just to keep things from getting too unwieldy.
Another flaw is the hamminess of a lot of his satire. Sure, I'm writing from thirty years in the future (and having studied postmodernism ad nauseam at university) but giving the 'native Americans' (those who never abandoned the continent, and have become Bedouin-like drifters through the desert) brand names for names? It's just trite, and silly ... and the kind of thing I'd have come up with while I was at university. When Heinz, Xerox, GM and Pepsodent turn up I'll admit, I was a little disappointed in the obviousness on show.
Also, setting an apocalyptic showdown in Las Vegas? Again, kind of obvious. Of course that mirage of a city, the decadent neon heart of America's love affair with everything tacky and shiny and loud, is a perfect setting for a book that's all about the core of American culture, but it just feels ... done. Hello America followed Stephen King's The Stand by just a few years, and surely Ballard was aware of it. I dunno, again, I was just a little disappointed that Ballard, whose imagination is normally off-the-charts original, was reduced to reproducing elements I'd seen before. He did it well, sure, but I come to his novels expecting to have my brain exploded. Didn't happen this time around.
Almost the most interesting aspect of the book for me was in a short interview with Ballard that the publishers have included in the back. In it, Ballard talks about his childhood in 1930's Shanghai as being more influenced by American culture than British, and how his return to Britain after the war had it seeming dismal and dull by comparison. His infatuation with, and critiques of, American culture are ever-present in his work, and that little bit of detail shed a lot of light on novels of his that I'd read previously. Even when they're set in England, they're about aspects of our culture that we'd usually regard as American: cars, and TV, and advertising, and Hollywood mythologising. Having glimpsed an American(ish) culture as a boy, then being forced into exile from it in ration-starved England, Ballard's obsessions become more understandable. In some ways those obsessions reach their apogee (if not their finest expression) in Hello America, and for that alone it's worth a read for a Ballard nut like myself.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: Dracula by Bram Stoker
books to go: 71
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
What I said then:
I bought this years ago, and really only because I knew Updike’s name and at the time that seemed like reason enough.
What I say now:
Though slim, this book was a slog to get through. There's something about Updike's writing style that just doesn't chime with me: it felt too studied, like it was trying too hard or something. His tale is one of small suburban decay, and often he'd be caught reaching too far in his attempts to give the details of his mundane setting the metaphorical weight he so desperately wanted them to have. Does that make sense? It was like, the main character could never just walk home beneath a row of streetlights, the streetlights always had to be symbolising something profound about the way the character's life was in constant flux between darkness and light, or some bullshit like that. Everything was freighted with meaning, but the meanings were spelled out and too obviously artificial. If you make everything poetic, then nothing is, you know?
So the plot basically runs thus: Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is a massive selfish jerk who can't face the responsibilities of adulthood, and he proves this fact again and again. Rabbit was a star basketball player in high school, but those days are gone. Approaching his mid-twenties and stuck in a loveless marriage to a pregnant girl that drinks to escape her own boredom (and she is still a girl, as Rabbit is still just a boy), one night he snaps or something and just drives off and leaves her. He only makes it as far as the next town over, where he shacks up with a sorta-kinda prostitute for a few months. Having knocked the new girl up, he promptly ditches her and heads back to his wife when she has the baby ... only to argue with her and run out again (twice, somehow).
Seriously, Rabbit is a fucking arsehole.
You can write about arseholes, there's nothing wrong with that, but they've got to be interesting. I don't have to like your characters, but I do have to find them captivating. Rabbit was just an oaf, an uncomplicated oaf, and I found his company pretty much unbearable. Not because he was an arsehole, just because he was boring. It wouldn't have been so bad if Updike had seemed to have any insight into the guy, or was able to shed any light on his psychology, but he really didn't. At the moments of highest drama, the moments when Rabbit decided to turn one way or the other, it never illuminated anything. Those moments always sprang from moments of random impulse, and we never got a chance to properly understand them.
There were other things that bugged me. Updike has his (not particularly intelligent) characters participate in that silly literary convention where, in conversation with one another, they'll speak in 'meaningful' non sequiturs, giving poetic summations of something or other which have nothing to do with the conversation they're actually having. Also, when the sex scenes come, Updike switches modes completely, getting both deliberately vague and kind of breathlessly excited. That obvious excitement, coupled with his horribly old-fashioned gender politics, had me leaving those scenes feeling pretty scuzzy.
All in all, there just wasn't much to like about this book. At all. There are another three books about Rabbit Angstrom, but I've had my fill of him, and of Updike too.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
books to go: 72
Persuasion by Jane Austen
What I said then:
[One of] the last two unread books from my much-loved Folio Society boxset.
What I say now:
(Please note, that is NOT the cover on the edition I've got. I couldn't find an image of my version online, and this one was just too silly not to use.)
Persuasion was Jane Austen's final novel, and was written as her health went into its final, terminal decline. Lacking the energy to properly revise and edit her work, Austen left us a novel that is somewhat lacking in her usual masterful control (in terms of both plot and prose). In her finest works (massive Pride and Prejudice fan here), Austen's prose has that knack of being concise, witty, and true. But there are --- shock horror! --- inelegant sentences in Persuasion. There are plenty of elegant ones as well, but it was a bit of a shock to find myself having to read a sentence twice or thrice in order to grasp its meaning. That just doesn't happen with Austen, who ordinarily writes with perfect clarity.
In short: several years before the novel begins, Anne, the plain and oft-ignored (but supremely sensible and virtuous) third Elliot sister, was persuaded by her snobbish father to break off an engagement with Mr Wentworth, an impoverished naval officer. Since then the Elliot's fortunes have been frittered away, while Anne's sometime lover is about to return from the recently concluded wars a successful (and wealthy) man. Can their love survive her rejection of him, and the intervening years? Will she fall for her (way too obviously 'charming') cousin, William? There's also a plethora of subplots involving the romantic entanglements of Anne's silly, shallow cousins and sisters, and the machinations of their on/off flirtations with various gentlemen.
Though the scene in which Anne and Wentworth finally reconcile is quite wonderful and moving, and is the equal of anything in Austen's oeuvre, we've never really learned why we should hope for their reconciliation in the first place. Their love was formed and dashed before the novel ever begins, and we're never given much of an account of it. Then, for the vast majority of the book they act towards each other with cold formality, each wishing to bury the pain of the past. Austen relates this cold formality with considerable skill, but neglects to ever really delve into its inherent falseness, or to give us a glimpse of either characters' continuing love for the other. When the damn bursts, it feels less like a satisfying resolution to an ongoing story, than it feels like a bewildering bolt from the blue.
Several of the other, more minor subplots are resolved in similarly haphazard fashion. One of Anne's cousins, in the space of a couple of weeks in which we don't see her, falls out of love with one man and becomes engaged to another. This second suitor, given every single thing we've learnt about either character, should never have come to her notice at all (he's bookish and shy, she's wild and wilful). It's all a bit convenient.
Some of the subplots lead nowhere (and get resolved ridiculously easily), and there are dramatic events that are undeniably silly, and characters' interior lives seem to change in the blink of an eye to suit whatever purpose Austen requires. It's all a bit of a confused muddle. Don't get me wrong, there's still genius at play here, but it's only occasional, and you've got to look a little harder for it.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
books to go: 72
The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
What I said then:
I saw her in a session at the Writer's Festival and she was impressive enough that I bought her book ... but not so impressive that I read it.
What I say now:
The Lost Dog is a strange old book, and I must admit I found it a bit of a muddle. It gestured towards being a lot of things: a romance, a mystery, a Garner-esque dissection of Melbourne's contemporary art scene. But it never really committed to being any of these things, leaving important story elements dangling all over the place, and ultimately ending up an underwhelming reading experience (despite de Kretser's obvious skill).
Tom Loxley, half-Indian academic, is staying alone in the mountain shack of a friend while trying to finish his thesis on Henry James. When his dog runs off while they're out on a walk, he assumes it'll be back soon. When it doesn't return, he spends the next ten days searching for it in increasingly frantic fashion. While the search gives the book its through-line, the narrative keeps jumping backwards in time to fill out Tom's family history, and to detail his unrequited love for Nelly Zhang, friend, shack-owner, and artist, as well as Nelly's mysterious (possibly murderous) past.
If that last sentence was confusing, good. The way the novel skips about in time makes it difficult initially to track who everybody is, where they are, who they know, and when this scene I'm reading is actually happening. De Kretser doesn't help us out, leaping from Melbourne in the present, to India in the past, to Melbourne in the slightly-more-recent past without doing anything much to make sure we know where we are at any given moment. Early on in particular, while all the characters were being introduced, I found it pretty difficult to keep track of who was who.
And then there's the mystery element. Nelly Zhang's husband went missing from the mountain cabin in strange circumstances years ago (suicide? murder? secret flight to a new life?) and during Tom's wanderings after his dog, he starts to delve into what exactly happened. Which made me think that, by the end of the book, I'd get to find out what exactly happened. But the investigation goes nowhere. Tom does come up with a theory, and in the penultimate chapter he explains it to Nelly ... and she explains it's not possible. And that's it. There was no revelation, no catharsis, no nothing. Look, I don't mind when writers get playful with genre conventions, but this just seemed perverse the way de Kretser set me up to expect an ending, then refused to give me one. It really stuck in my craw.
Prose-wise, she's a super talented writer (if occasionally a little verbose, using five complicated words when two simple ones would do) but it was the structural looseness that kept getting in the way of my enjoyment. Ultimately it was kind of a missed opportunity: there was lots of interesting stuff in it, but it didn't come together in a satisfying way at all.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: Hello America by J.G. Ballard
books to go: 74
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot DÃaz
What I said then:
Won the Pulitzer a few years back, and is about a Dominican kid who's obsessed with comics.
What I say now:
Maybe I ought to steer clear of prize winners from now on, because I've gotta be honest, I was a bit underwhelmed by this one. Don't get me wrong, it was really entertaining: it's written in a casual, conversational kind of style that kept me turning the pages. I just found it pretty emotionally hollow.
Oscar, a second-generation Dominican living in the New Jersey suburbs, is an unsuccessful romantic. A true nerd's nerd (fat, ugly, loves comic books and Tolkien novels, plays Dungeons & Dragons ... it'd all add up to a a dumb cliche, except DÃaz's own love for geeky stuff shines through), Oscar falls in intense, instantaneous love with every beautiful woman he meets. This love, which the novel kindly characterises as generous and genuine, rather than creepy and weird, is basically never reciprocated. As he suffers rebuff after rebuff, Oscar retreats into worlds of fantasy, either in the literature he loves, or in the novels he's writing.
Hey, I dig nerdy stuff (I'd estimate I understood around 75% of the references to geek culture), and I could definitely dig a novel that takes a character who's a cliched nerd and then, by giving him an interior life, busts him out of the cliche. Unfortunately, by the end of the novel, we really don't learn anything about Oscar that I haven't included in that second paragraph. His entire life he just repetitively does the same things, and encounters the same problems, and deals with them the same way. I never felt like I gained a deeper understanding of him, or really any understanding at all. It's like writing a novel about Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons, without ever delving deeper than "Worst ... [whatever] ... ever!"
Because Oscar's story is so thin, DÃaz veers off on tangents about his mother and sister and, while he's doing so, delves into twentieth century Dominican history. As somebody entirely ignorant of twentieth century Dominican history (before reading this novel I'd never even heard of Trujillo, the Dominican Republic's murderous mid-century dictator) I found that stuff pretty fascinating, with its secret police and purges and distinctively Latin-flavoured fascism. Unfortunately even those aspects of the book begin to get repetitive, each subplot beginning with love (or at least sex) and ending in secret murder in the countryside. When the two halves of the story do meet up, it's not in a way that's thrilling or unexpected, it's in exactly the way I could have predicted two hundred pages ago.
The tone of the writing was really light and fun (and I'll always give bonus points to a book that throws in a reference to the Witch-king of Angmar), but even that wasn't without its issues: most of the book is narrated by an unknown person who knew Oscar and is relating the events of his life. Just who this person is is kept secret from us for more than half the book, for no apparent reason: when it's revealed to be an old college roommate of Oscar's, it doesn't mean anything (other than for us readers to go "Oh, him ... okay"). Why play coy, when it doesn't matter? I found it a little frustrating, I'll admit. It just seemed like a strange bit of mis-direction.
And then, to add to the issues with the narrative voice, some chapters aren't narrated by the old roommate. They seem to be narrated by the member of Oscar's family directly involved: the sister, for example. But the narrative voice doesn't change as the narrator changes, it's still written in exactly the same style. So, is the roommate pretending to be the sister? Do all New Jersey Dominicans speak exactly the same? Or is DÃaz just unwilling (I'm not gonna say 'unable') to break out of this one tone of voice? I dunno, it just felt a bit lazy to me.
As I said up top, I found Oscar Wao to be a fun read. But it didn't touch me emotionally at all, and that's a problem.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: Hello America by J.G. Ballard
books to go: 74
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
What I said then:
Not only is it 1,000 pages long, but it promises misery in its very title. Uh-oh.
What I say now:
By far the greatest thing this 'read everything I own' challenge has done for me is forcing me to sit down and give a chance to those classics which I would never have opened otherwise.
I was dreading Les Miserables. And then I read it, and holy hell, it was absolutely wonderful.
It's almost doing Victor Hugo and his masterpiece a disservice to call it a novel. As you finish it (you'll probably be crying), it feels like so much more than that. It's hard to get across the grandeur, the titanic majesty, the all-encompassing, all-consuming nature of this book and how it's written. If every other novel tells a story, then Les Miserables tells a whole world.
The only thing remotely comparable (in my reading, anyway) is Moby Dick, but where Melville brings an intense focus to a very narrow, limited time and place (the final voyage of the Pequod), Hugo is trying to do the same thing with something as large and ungainly as Paris, over the course of about twenty years. His ambition is so enormous that it's absurd; when he pulls it off, all you can be is flabbergasted.
Where can I even begin? Well, there's the huge cast of characters, all of whom feel vital and alive, despite also fitting neatly into one-dimensional archetypes. It's actually incredible how he does this, taking a stock character with one personality trait and making them seem so human, and so real. I couldn't even tell you how he does it, except to say that perhaps, by examining each of his cliches to such a microscopic level, he finds again the human truth that made it a cliche in the first place.
There's his magical turns of phrase. All of a sudden, in the middle of a long paragraph, there'll suddenly be a sentence that sums up an idea with such clarity and succinctness that it feels like an entirely new thought, minted fresh, that nobody's ever had before, yet which is obviously and utterly true.
And there's the way, across hundreds of pages, an uncountable myriad of plot threads slowly draw together, forming a vast tapestry that feels completely satisfactory. Nothing is left unexplained, no character's fate is left untold, yet it all hangs together as one single story. A momentous, epic, grand, beautiful story.
Now, look, there are undeniably things about Les Miserables which will challenge a modern audience. There's the way the same ten or so people keep bumping into each other, one fantastic coincidence following another. There's the way that Hugo, clearly a wannabe philosopher, treats his story like a clothesline, hanging on it all sorts of colourful digressions. (This actually becomes endearing, mainly because he's so good at it: he takes a timeout for fifty pages while he tells the story of the battle of Waterloo; he gives an exhaustive account of the criminal slang of the time; when his hero, Jean Valjean, enters a convent, he gives a history of the building, then a history of the order of nuns that has made it their home, then discusses that orders place within Catholic doctrine, then talks for a while about why he thinks religion is stupid. At the climax of the novel, at one of the moments of highest excitement, he spends twenty pages giving a history of Paris' sewers, and then ten more using them as an extended metaphor for the darkness in humanity's soul.) But if you are willing and able to forgive these eccentricities, you'll be in for one of the reads of your life. I promise.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
books to go: 77
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Why I bought it:
After getting over my fear of 19th century Russian authors with Anna Karenina, I thought I'd have another crack at one of the big ones. After doing some highly unscientific research (which mostly consisted of reading blurbs) I decided Dostoevsky was the most likely to be my cup of tea.
What I say now:
Crime and Punishment is a fascinating book. It manages to examine a tawdry, grubby little crime in such minute, exquisite detail that it actually becomes kind of beautiful, even transcendent.
Raskolnikov, a poor (and almost starving) student, manages in his addled state to philosophically justify committing a murder. After briefly (and ineffectually) planning it out, he goes ahead and kills an elderly pawn-shop owner. The actual murder scene is an incredible piece of writing, suspenseful and horror-filled to a degree that any contemporary crime writer would surely be envious of. It also takes place barely one-sixth of the way into the book: the bulk of the novel from then on is taken up by Raskolnikov's attempts to come to terms with what he's done (and continue to justify it in the face of sordid reality), and to stay ahead of the police.
Raskolnikov's wrestling with his conscience, which might in lesser hands be boring ('a man thinks' is hardly the stuff of great drama ... except when it's great, I guess) is given a kind of feverish, manic intensity by the thrill of Dostoevsky's prose. He also makes a genius decision in having Raskolnikov fall ill immediately after the crime: as the character's literal fever rages, his thoughts and feelings are clouded and confused in terms of real-life logic, but make perfect sense on a thematic and philosophical level.
Though it's founded on a moment of horrific violence, Raskolnikov's journey is strangely touching. A large part of his thinking before the murder, and even afterwards, is that, well, some men are great, and are destined for great things. The usual rules of society cannot apply to them. Raskolnikov fervently believes he has greatness inside of him, that he is capable of something magnificent. The murder becomes almost a test of this: if he is truly to lead a remarkable life, then he can't be caught, because that would interfere with his destiny. The realisation that comes late on --- that he is only an ordinary man, that there's no divine spark within --- is acually kind of heart-breaking. We've all had grand dreams, haven't we? And we've all had some moment when we've had to come to terms with the fact that we're not special, we're not incredible ... we're simply ordinary. It's not easy. But Dostoevsky's genius is to take the heartbreak of that realisation and make it beautiful: what could be better than to be a part of humanity? What could be worse than being unique, if being unique means being alone? Raskolnikov is not weakened by his epiphany, but strengthened. And, by reading this novel, so are we.
Oh, and a brief structural note: Crime and Punishment was written in the 1860's (at almost the exact same time as The Moonstone), which is right when modern police forces were just coming into being throughout Europe, and 'crime novels' were first being imagined. The major addition that Crime and Punishment gave to the incipient genre was Dostoevsky's brilliant use of small details in the crime scene, that could be recalled and expanded on later in the novel. By which I mean, there are several things mentioned in passing while the crime is being committed that come back later, either as clues or as important elements of mis-direction, as the police (and Raskolnikov himself) try to piece together what actually happened. This would become a staple of the genre (It's been ages since I read any Agatha Christie, but if memory serves this was a particular favourite trick of hers), but I seriously doubt if it's been done as well as Dostoevsky does it.
In summary, this book is incredible on every level: theme, plot and prose (major props to Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the translators of this edition). You really should read it.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
books to go: 78
Before They are Hanged & The Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie
What I said then:
Books 2 & 3 in a schlocky fantasy trilogy that, surprise surprise, is actually pretty good (so far).
What I say now:
In terms of contemporary fantasy stuff, Abercrombie is considered one of the best young writers going around. I've gotta admit, though, that these two books didn't really do it for me (and didn't really live up to the promise of The Blade Itself, the first in the trilogy which I liked quite a lot).
I've got no problem with an author playing with genre conventions, and making unusual narrative choices (and in a genre as stultifyingly conservative as fantasy, I'd really much prefer it), so long as those choices add up to something. Or go somewhere. Or make sense.
Unfortunately there were whole swathes of Abercrombie's work that led to a complete dead-end, story wise. Honestly, you could pretty much cut all of Before They are Hanged from the trilogy, and not even really miss it. Too much of what was going on in both of these books was inessential. They were chock full of pleasant-enough diversions, with interesting-enough things going on ... but which didn't have anything to do with anything else. I was willing to let that stuff ride in book 1, because there's always the chance it comes back later. By the time the trilogy was done, and all those loose ends were simply left dangling, it was getting on my nerves.
Heck, there are entire major characters who Abercrombie simply can't find a use for them in the end. After spending three books in their company, it'd be nice if they had something to do, when the ginormous battle gets going ...
In terms of the prose, for a quick, pacy read like this, it's generally pretty good. He does have a habit of dropping into sentence fragments during more 'action-y' moments which grates after a while. I understand there are people out there who love that shit ... I'm just not one of them. I know you can write a proper sentence, Joe, why stop now? Do you really think the words 'and' and 'the' are going to slow down the action that much?
These were a disappointment, to say the least, and I probably won't be reading Abercrombie again.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
books to go: 78
Necronomicon by H.P. Lovecraft
What I said then:
When I realised there was actually a book called the Necronomicon, I had to have it. Classic, bleak horror. Fun!
What I say now:
Actually, this wasn't nearly as much fun as I'd hoped. Lovecraft wrote a multitude of horror stories for American pulp magazines in the twenties and thirties, and Necronomicon is a chronologically arranged collection of some of his best, and most well known, tales. It's also eight hundred pages long.
There was my real error. If I'd picked up a book which contained a small handful of stories, and maybe one longer novella, I might have been able to appreciate the good things Lovecraft does. He's pretty good at establishing atmosphere; he sets most of his stories in a tainted, haunted version of rural New England, a setting which is pretty off-beat and unusual; and he definitely had a flair for inventing demons and ghouls and alien consciousnesses.
Unfortunately, under the weight of eight hundred god damn pages, all these positives came to seem repetitive and dreary. Honestly, the vast majority of the stories contained in this collection are incredibly similar: similar in setting, in tone, in language. Once I'd read five stories, I wasn't surprised (or even particularly interested) again.
Add to the repetitiveness his exorbitantly 'gothic' language, which sometimes was so overblown as to almost serve as its own parody. Check this sentence out (a character has just heard a horrifying sound): "To call it a dull wail, a doom-dragged whine or a hopeless howl of chorused anguish and stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its most quintessential loathsomeness and soul-sickening overtones." Yikes.
That sentence gets at another of my issues with Lovecraft: he has an almost complete fear of actually describing anything. He won't tell you about the horrible monster or whatever, he'll relate how horrible his characters feel upon beholding it. Describing something's effects, rather than the thing itself, is always a good way to get on my nerves. (There is one way to make this work, which is to have me care so deeply about the characters, and know them so well, that hearing about the creature/alien/thing's effect on them is enough to sustain the drama. Unfortunately Lovecraft's characters are, without exception, two-dimensional nobodies, so this option wasn't available to him.)
There are more than a few stories where, having told us in exruciating detail about every step in an expedition into some haunted, blighted place, Lovecraft completely wimps out and says 'Oh, what they saw there was so horrifying that I can't even relate it to you, that's how scary it is! The end.' Seriously. That rivals 'and then they woke up and it was all a dream' as one of the worst ways you can end a story, and Lovecraft did it over and over again.
There were occasional stories that stepped out of his usual, frustrating patterns, and they were by far the highlights. The stories being arranged chronologically, it was also really interesting to follow his growth as a writer across the years: he definitely became a better writer with time and practice. Those occasional moments of interest were nowhere near enough to make up for wading through the rest of it though.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
books to go: 79
note: I've fallen way behind with my reviews (sorry 'bout that), which is why the numbers don't quite add up here. Not that anybody probably pays attention to this stuff, but I'm totally anal-retentive, so I feel compelled to explain.
