High Fidelity

High Fidelity
by Nick Hornby
read: circa 2001
Guardian 1000 Novels

I read High Fidelity in college and liked it. I liked the movie, too, though it bothers me that we have to Americanize everything set in England.

Casino Royale

Casino Royale
by Ian Fleming
read: 2012
Guardian 1000 Novels

I've seen most of the James Bond films, but I'd never read any of the novels until Casino Royale. It's surprisingly not very action-packed; Bond doesn't kill anybody, and doesn't even really get in a fight with anyone. Fleming makes the baccarat scenes impressively compelling, and captures Bond's paranoia and his romantic confusion with Vesper Lynd. A lot more of the action takes place in Bond's head than in the movies.

Bond is a misogynist, and it's unclear to what extent Fleming is trying to excuse his misogyny. Bond's lack of respect for women is set up partially to make his falling for Vesper all the more tragic, but when he starts talking about "the sweet tang of rape," that's a bridge too far. Any character development of Bond's attitude towards women is erased by the events of the novel, so I expect more cringe-inducing moments in the subsequent books.

Bond at one point gets in a discussion with fellow agent Mathis about the moral value of what they're doing, but his argument lacks the moral weight found in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; it feels abstract and  shallow, and Bond ultimately comes to feel it a childish perspective. Casino Royale isn't as complex as a le Carre novel, but it's a gripping read and I'm sure I'll read more novels in the series.

The Human Stain

The Human Stain
by Philip Roth
read: circa 2006
Guardian 1000 Novels

In a lecture on Philip Roth's The Human Stain, Professor Amy Hungerford said:

The very fact of a person's otherness to you means that there is always something fundamentally hidden about them.  And that arises from the simple difference between one consciousness and another.

Perhaps this is the fundamental problem of writing, and perhaps this is the fundamental challenge of being a human. We always spend infinitely more time in our own heads than we do in anyone else's, even those we are closest to. Roth gets this, and arguably the loose trilogy which The Human Stain concludes (also consisting of American Pastoral and I Married a Communist) is thematically linked by the attempt of narrator (and Roth alter-ego) Nathan Zuckerman to understand another man he admires. Professor Hungerford notes some homoerotic undertones in The Human Stain, but Zuckerman's infatuation with Coleman Silk parallels his idol worship of Swede Levov and his son-like affinity for Iron Rinn. Zuckerman is attracted to these men in a (mostly) non-sexual way, and his attraction manifests itself in his efforts to put himself in their shoes, to imagine their thoughts and feelings, to create their life stories out of his research and his imagination. Roth is exploring why literature even exists, and by employing Zuckerman as an intermediary he makes an argument for the noble futility of the craft.

I Married a Communist

I Married a Communist
by Philip Roth
read: circa 2006

I Married a Communist is kind of the second book in a trilogy narrated by longtime Roth alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman, but here Zuckerman is more front-and-center than he is in American Pastoral or The Human Stain.  Through the novel Zuckerman finds himself almost as a mentee for a variety of mentors, a passive observer soaking up the wisdom of his elders.  I can identify with that notion, and I liked this book.  Wikipedia says it was just a glorified hatchet job against one of Roth's ex-wives.  It can't be fun to be married to Philip Roth, based on the self he puts forth in his novels, but I love and admire his writing.

American Pastoral

American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
read: circa 2005
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

I read this book shortly after the Time list came out, and I was absolutely spellbound.  I lent it to a co-worker who, upon reading it, called it one of the five greatest books he'd ever read.  I can't disagree.

American Pastoral captures the mental state of obsession; not the external state of stalking somebody, but the internal state of poring over an event or a decision over and over and over again while maintaining a seemingly healthy exterior.  Roth evokes this repetitiveness without being boring; the novel is gripping.  I've read six books of his and in my opinion this is his masterpiece.

Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
read: circa 2010
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

Cormac McCarthy says he doesn't like magic realism:

You're somewhat constrained in writing a novel, I think. Like, I'm not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism. You know, it's hard enough to get people to believe what you're telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible.

This makes the character of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian puzzling, or maybe terrifying.  Holden is the most sadistic and ruthless member of a sadistic and ruthless band of scalp-hunters riding across Mexico killing Indians.  He is also the most learned, the most well-spoken, and the most ingenious.  Holden appeared in the desert to the group to aid them in making gunpowder and killing enemies, but each member also had a prior encounter with the judge as he roamed throughout North American sowing chaos and evil.  He is not explicitly superhuman, but as a character he has a mythical presence. This isn't Anton Chigurh, who acknowledges (and is ultimately undone by) the pivotal role of chance and fate in our lives; Holden is beyond such things: "He says that he will never die."

Professor Amy Hungerford of Yale talks about the various allusions present in Blood Meridian - to the Bible, to Moby Dick, to Paradise Lost, to a poem of Wordsworth's - but while McCarthy's words hearken back to those other works, the spirit is different.  Blood Meridian's protagonist (known only as "the kid") does not have the glib humor of Ishmael and there's little of the moral authority found in the Bible.  And while the story structure evokes the bildungsroman and the Western, it ultimately subverts them.  The kid becomes the man, but he never becomes a hero.  His acts of mercy are not good, but weak - in fact, his inability to shoot and kill Judge Holden may be his greatest sin of all.

Blood Meridian pulls from these works and these worlds, but the message throughout the novel seems to be: those original stories were missing something.  They pulled punches.  They were naive.  Because the truth is worse, so much worse.  Evil is everywhere; it is inherent in man, and has been since the beginning.  And it, like Judge Holden, will never die.  None of McCarthy's works have a positive outlook, but Blood Meridian's bleakness feels particularly timeless and profound.

Housekeeping

Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, PEN/Hemingway Award

Normally when I write about novels, I write about themes.  Details are too fussy and insignificant to a whole book.  But Housekeeping is in a lot of ways about details.  It's named after the mundane process of making sure the house is in order, but as with seemingly everything in the novel, it's metaphorical.  The knick-knacks and trash that fill the house where Ruth, her sister Lucille, and their Aunt Sylvie reflect big profundities.  "What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?" narrator Ruth asks at one point, and she might be talking about the novel itself.

Every scrap in Housekeeping is aching with meaning and memory.  One of the most devastating moments in the book is when Ruth looks something up in the dictionary and finds pressed flowers her grandfather had left in the book.  Her sister Lucille, who has little nostalgia, burns the flowers, to Ruth's dismay.  Their grandfather died before they were born, and while they can't know why he deemed those worth keeping, they provide a link between the living and the dead.  Things build these kind of bridges throughout the novel:

Such details are merely accidental.  Who could know but us?  And since their thoughts were bent upon other ghosts than ours, other darknesses than we had seen, why must we be left, the survivors picking among flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable?

Things help us remember those we've lost.  But memory itself is a curse.  Ruth altruistically decides to become a transient with her Aunt Sylvie, because she can't bear the thought of becoming a ghost in Sylvie's memory.  She spends much of the last chapter envisioning how her sister Lucille, who believes Ruth and Sylvie dead, might imagine or not imagine she sees them. Ruth's and Lucille's mother committed suicide when the girls were young, and Ruth blames her not for abandoning them but for haunting them.  She never addresses her feeling of loss; instead her mother's suicide falls like a shadow over the whole story.

If that sounds depressing, it is.  This desire not to be a ghost to others seems to be the only that keeps Ruth from following her mother's path and killing herself, but there is an appeal in death.  "Darkness is the only solvent," she says at one point, and at another she describes herself as "unconsenting" in her own conception.  "By some bleak alchemy, what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.  So they seal the door against our returning."  Bleak alchemy, indeed.

On Beauty

On Beauty
by Zadie Smith
read: circa 2006
Guardian 1000 Novels, Orange Prize

Zadie Smith is a great writer, but On Beauty felt like paint-by-numbers.  Professor Amy Hungerford's lecture on the identity plot made me realize what I had found flat about the book.  While White Teeth was a fun look at the different iterations of culture and identity that permeate British society, On Beauty just felt like the same thing re-scrambled.  "I'll set it in America this time!  But the man will be English-born.  And we'll have a Trinidadian family instead of an Indian one."  Smith's prose is still strong, inventive and witty, so the novel is worth reading, but I would have found it more original if I hadn't read one of her books before.

Nostromo

Nostromo
by Joseph Conrad
read: 2012
Modern Library #47, Guardian 1000 Novels

As I read the first half of Nostromo, I tried to put my finger on exactly what I dislike about Joseph Conrad's writing.  I found his use of characters jarring; he would focus on Charles Gould or Martin Decoud or Nostromo for long stretches of the book, then drop them entirely for other long stretches to focus on Montero's brother or something.  I kept thinking, "There's a lot going on here.  This would make a good movie, but I'm not sure I like it as a novel."

I realized I was dead wrong about the time Conrad made it obvious.  He describes a journey the titular character takes that is integral to the revolutionary battle: "The history of that ride, sir, would make a most exciting book."  But Conrad leaves this exciting story out of his book!  Indeed, most of the drama and adventure that would make Nostromo an epic movie is incidental to the real story: a story of love, greed, and corruption in colonial South America.  People die, but their deaths are not tragedies; the tragedies are in a woman whose husband has built their lives around a business enterprise, in an old statesman who sees the same patterns of revolutionary ideals crumbling in corrupt realities, in a doctor who has been scarred for so long his heart has closed.  There is drama and heroism in the story of the revolutionary struggle of Sulaco, but ultimately the reader is left wondering, "What's the point?"  Triumph is hollow and morally bankrupt, wealth is at odds with love and happiness, and no heroism is beyond corruption.  And yet, like Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, it's a tragedy that's somehow not pessimistic or cynical.  Conrad's narrative voice is so democratic and so withholding of judgment, we can never utterly condemn even the worst sinners.  It's a terrific book, and I now see Conrad's writing in a whole new light.

The Autograph Man

The Autograph Man
by Zadie Smith
read: circa 2003

I read The Autograph Man before White Teeth, and while the latter got a lot more critical acclaim, I enjoyed the former more.  I think it's me; I read The Autograph Man at a time when I was pretty lost, having just graduated college and moved back home, so adrift protagonist Alex-Li Tandem resonated with me.  I might find him a whiny loser if I re-read the book now.

I Am Legend

I Am Legend
by Richard Matheson
read: 2011
Guardian 1000 Novels

Happy Halloween!  I've spent a good portion of this month catching up the AMC series The Walking Dead.    The Walking Dead, like virtually everything in the zombie survival genre, owes a debt to I Am Legend, Richard Matheson's 1954 story of Richard Neville, the last man on earth after some strange disease turns the rest of the world's population into vampires.  Neville walks around by day, gathering supplies and killing vampires, and holes up in his house by night, hoping his preparations make him safe from the undead horde.  If that sounds like the plot of a George Romero movie, that's no surprise; according to Romero, I Am Legend helped inspire Night of the Living Dead.  That said, I Am Legend is not a great book.  It's not a bad read, but Neville isn't a compelling character, and of course we spend a lot of time with him since there's no one else.  I'm not going to recommend it, but if you want to see where the zombie apocalypse craze started, go ahead and read I Am Legend.

White Teeth

White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
read: circa 2004
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, James Tait Black Memorial Prize

White Teeth is an example of a modern "identity plot" novel.  The characters are all from different ethnic and religious backgrounds and upbringings - white British, Jamaican Jehovah's Witness, Bangladeshi Islam, Jewish, and mixed race and religion - and they all seem to be trying to figure out how they fit in to modern English society.  It's almost an identity novel for England itself.  What is England in this world where being British can mean so many different things?

The Woman Warrior

The Woman Warrior
by Maxine Hong Kingston
read: 2012

The Woman Warrior is the ninth book for Yale Professor Amy Hungerford's class on the American Novel Since 1945, and Professor Hungerford uses it as an example of what she calls "the identity plot": basically, the main character, a member of a minority of some sort, does not identify with the minority nor with the larger majority.  The Woman Warrior is clearly an example of this; the narrator (Maxine Hong Kingston, presumably, as the book is classified as non-fiction) feels that as a Chinese-American, she can neither fully endorse the superstitious, sexist Chinese culture, nor entirely divorce herself from it.  She spends the first part of the book describing how her aunt was shamed into suicide and infanticide by her village because she committed adultery, then she journeys into an extended fantasy where she is trained as warrior and seclusion and comes back to rescue her village (disguising her gender to do so).  Ultimately, Kingston comes to an understanding that her identity will always incorporate elements of Chinese culture and the America she was born in.

Of the other books Hungerford prescribed for the class, Black Boy and The Bluest Eye are obviously in this vein.  She suggests you could make arguments for the other books - On the Road, Lolita, Franny and Zooey, Wise Blood, Lost in the Funhouse, The Crying of Lot 49 - and I think depending on how you define "minority, it's possible, though I'd say Lolita and The Crying of Lot 49 are less obviously about self-discovery and self-definition.  What about the other (non-genre) post-World War II novels I've reviewed on this blog?

The French Lieutenant's Woman - you could make an interesting argument for this one, as the titular woman is oppressed by larger society because of her sex, but the narrative thrust isn't really her quest for identity.  We're never really allowed in Sarah's head..
All the King's Men - self-identity does seem important, but I have a hard time finding a minority group that Burden belongs to.  Maybe it's whether he belongs with the morally righteous (as symbolized by Adam Stanton) or the amorally pragmatic (as symbolized by Willie Stark).
Infinite Jest - I think you can, particularly with Don Gately and finding an identity in the world as an ex-addict.  Hal is also looking for himself in some fashion, though the resolution of his story is less clear.
Falconer - Again, I think there's a decent argument, with Farragut trying to figure out his life as a convict and drug addict and how he relates to the world at large.
Catch-22, Slaugherhouse Five, Gravity's Rainbow - I would say no; I think the backdrop of the war makes the kind of solemn self-reflection on personal identity a bit silly.
The Catcher in the Rye - Yes, probably.
Tinkers - Maybe.  Howard Crosby has to carve out a life despite epilepsy (though there's no real society he's part of).
Go Tell It on the Mountain - Yes
Never Let Me Go - Maybe.  Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are clearly part of a minority group, but the schism with larger society is so complete that it seems impossible to carve out an identity.
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - I'd say yes.
Midnight's Children - Yes, probably on a few levels.  Saleem is finding an identity as a child of midnight, just as India is finding an identity in the world.
The Bell Jar - I think so.  Esther struggles with the expectations others have of young urban women and tries to find an identity in that society.
The Moviegoer - The quest for identity and meaning is key, but what is the minority group Binx belongs to?
Beloved - Yes
Atonement - Probably not
A Dance to the Music of Time - Probably not
Deliverance - Maybe, but if so it's subservient to "man vs. nature" and "man vs. man" plot structures
The Adventures of Augie March - Concerned with identity, certainly.  Augie's minority group is a little less clear; maybe poor Americans?
A House for Mr Biswas - I think so, with Mohun trying to find himself as an outsider in the Tulsis.

Neuromancer

Neuromancer
by William Gibson
read: 2011
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, Nebula Award, Hugo Award, Philip K. Dick Award

A year after reading Neuromancer, I have a hard time remembering what happened in it versus what happened in Snow Crash, another book I read about the same time that also presaged a lot of the developments of the Internet.  Reading the plot summary on Wikipedia (which contains spoilers), I realize there are a hell of a lot of twists and turns that I don't really remember.

The novel brings to mind movies, too: Wikipedia references Escape from New York and Blade Runner but it also reminds me of Inception, which of course came afterwards.  The gritty, futuristic feel is reminiscent of those earlier works.  I think the plot structure of Inception with the "no one knows who anyone is really working for or what they're trying to do" paranoia owes something to Gibson.  

East of Eden

East of Eden
by John Steinbeck
read: circa 1995
Guardian 1000 Novels

I had to read East of Eden for summer reading before my sophomore year of high school.  This passage stuck with me:

"... A great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last.  The strange and the foreign is not interesting - only the deeply personal and familiar."

Samuel said, "Apply that to the Cain-Abel story."

And Adam said, "I didn't kill my brother -" Suddenly he stopped and his mind went reeling back in time.

 "I think I can," Lee answered Samuel.  "I think it is the best-known story in the world because it is everybody's story.  I think it is the symbol story of the human soul."

I didn't really understand that - the idea that the Cain-Abel story is universal - at the time.  Looking back, it's a powerful statement, but I don't think it's true. Maybe if I had a brother, I might think it was true.  And the larger sentiment here - that only familiar stories resonate - I think isn't quite true, either.  I'd say only the familiar parts of stories resonate, or the parts that can touch on familiar feelings.  Ultimately, we are always piecing together a story out of our own experiences and our own feelings.

The Cairo Trilogy

The Cairo Trilogy
by Naghib Mahfouz
read: circa 1997
Guardian 1000 Novels

I remember that towards the end of my junior year of high school, we got our summer reading assignments. Senior year was world literature.  We had a couple mandatory books and then could choose two books by any author on a list of about 25.  The problem was that I'd only heard of one or two of them!  But armed with some pluck, I did a moderate amount of research (this was pre-Wikipedia and I might have had to use actual books), learning a few facts about the writing of each author, his nation of origin, and a couple of his best-known works.  I think I even typed up my research for the rest of the class.  Man, was I ever cool in high school.  I ultimately decided that Egyptian novelist Naghib Mahfouz, the man who put the Arabic novel on the map, was the most obscure and pretentious name on the list, so I grabbed the first two volumes in the Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk and Palace of Desire.

Supposedly after writing The Cairo Trilogy, Mahfouz decided he had done all he could with the realistic novel genre and moved on to other novel styles.  I don't know if that's true or if Mahfouz's self-assessment is accurate, but these are great books and I enjoyed them.  I was a typical high school nerd who thought too much and was too much of a wuss to ask any ladies out, so I really identified with the overly-introspective, too-analytical Kamal, who I thought of as a kindred spirit across the barriers of time, oceans, language, and reality.

The Adventures of Augie March

The Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
read: 2010
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #81, Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award

When I started the Time 100 greatest novels list, The Adventures of Augie March is the first book I picked up.  Mostly because the list on their website is alphabetized by title.  Which is kinda weird.

Like the protagonist of A House for Mr. Biswas, the titular Augie March is not a remarkable figure on the face of things, nor an obviously heroic one.  His adventures are interesting and often amusing, as he holds a series of jobs, nearly gets adopted by a rich couple, and falls in love and travels to Mexico to train eagles.  But they don't really follow a narrative arc, and it's hard to discern what lessons we are meant to infer from Augie's experiences.  This lack of clear message makes the book feel honest, and Augie's optimism in the face of uncertainty feels real and refreshing.

A House for Mr. Biswas

A House for Mr. Biswas
by V.S. Naipaul
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #72, Guardian 1000 Novels

The most interesting thing about A House for Mr. Biswas is how ostensibly uninteresting it is.  Mohun Biswas is born in Trinidad, marries into the Tulsi family, holds a series of jobs, has four kids, and ultimately (not a spoiler, as it's revealed in the first few pages) - buys a house and dies at the age of 46.  The protagonist himself isn't a remarkable man.  He's sometimes a clown, sometimes an intellectual, sometimes ambitious but often buffeted about by stronger personalities.  He's not a great talent nor a man of outstanding courage and integrity.  Many of the auxiliary characters in his life - head of the family Mrs. Tulsi, chosen son Owad, even Mr. Biswas's wife, son, and daughters - seem like they might be more interesting subjects for a novel.  So I continually found myself asking, as I worked my way through the 576-page A House for Mr. Biswas, why did V.S. Naipaul write this book?

There's an autobiographical component to the story; apparently Mr. Biswas is based on Naipaul's father.  It is interesting that Naipaul centered the story on his father (or a facsimile thereof) rather than his own life.  After all, Naipaul became a famous writer and married a British woman; Mohun Biswas never even leaves Trinidad.  But this connection to Trinidad is one of the keys to the story.  Naipaul himself transcended Trinidad and become more of a citizen of the world, but Mohun Biswas didn't.  His life's path took him from the rusticity and superstition of the country to the poverty and industry of the city.  He sees the country shift, the old Hindi values and ethnic segregation dissipating, the children (even the girls!) encouraged to become educated and learn European and American ways.  Mr. Biswas is on both sides and neither.  He is proud of preserving some aspects of the Hindu faith and mocks the Tulsis for dabbling in Catholicism, but he is not pious and mocks the righteous.  He falls in with a group of political radicals and yet has little imagination for treating his wife and female relatives as true equals.  In Mr. Biswas we can see the war between the modern and traditional, the urban and pastoral, that is raging throughout Trinidad.

The honorific "Mr." is applied to Biswas' name throughout the story.  The narrative voice never calls him "Mohun."  This gives the character a dignity that his actions don't always merit; he can be cruel, lazy, fickle, ill-tempered, tyrannical, and even abusive.  But this dignity is absolutely essential to the story.  He is not a conventional hero, and the plot ostensibly has little drama, particularly since Naipaul gives away the ending in the first chapter.  We see Biswas struggling to make his own way, build a career, make a family, and buy a house.  These are somewhat unremarkable actions on the surface, but A House for Mr. Biswas is a reminder that all human beings have a profound struggle.  And despite the title character's brief life, his lack of career success, his somewhat dubious family life, and even the ramshackle quality of his house, the novel is a happy one, with a happy ending.  Towards the end of his life, his health failing, his son still overseas, Biswas' oldest daughter Savi returns and gets a job, which means the family will be able to pay off the house.  "How can you not believe in God after this?" he asks in a letter.  That Biswas is able to live the life he does and, at the end of it, still believe in God, still believe in miracles, is a remarkable triumph.

My father, along with my mother, raised me.  His father went to college, and got an Engineering degree.  He was able to do that because his father (my great-grandfather) had his own carpentry business in Medford, MA.  My great-grandfather was in Medford because his father moved there from Nova Scotia.  A few generations before that, my oldest record ancestor and his family made the long journey from Northern Ireland to America.  I am my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, and all my ancestors; I am their biological product, but I am also the product of their decisions and ambitions, and I live the life I do because they  wanted better for themselves and for subsequent generations.  Mr. Biswas (and Naipaul's father) wanted the same, and the existence of A House for Mr. Biswas is a sign that that endeavor was successful, and worthwhile.

A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens
read: circa 1993
Guardian 1000 Novels

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.  Highlander was on TV, but I couldn't watch it because I had to write a stupid book report on stupid A Tale of Two Cities.

I haven't decided whether I will actually attempt to read all the books on the Guardian list of 1000 books everyone should read, but if I do I hope I like / appreciate Charles Dickens more than I did in middle school; he's on there a whopping nine times.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by Thornton Wilder
read: 2011
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #37, Pulitzer Prize

I started trying to read the books in the Time 100 greatest novels list a little less than two years ago, and starting the list made me look forward to going to Maine.  My family has a place up in Wells, an old house that used to be my great-grandmothers, with has no heat or air conditioning.  A little way up the road is a used book store, and I was looking forward to picking up a few books there.  I was able to pick up some of the novels I needed, but for one I didn't have to go that far; I found a copy of Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey sitting atop an old bookshelf at the house.

That shouldn't have anything to do with my reading of Bridge, but it does.  It was a happy accident that I found the book.  When I finally read it, I found that the novel - really a few connected short stories with a wrapper tale - is a tale of an unhappy accident, a fictional bridge collapse in Peru in the early 18th century.  The premise is that a monk, Brother Juniper, witnessed the accident and wants to research the story of those killed in an attempt to determine how it was all part of God's plan.  He never is able to conclusively do so, but I wouldn't say Bridge is an atheistic work.  Instead, it suggests that God works in mysterious ways and his actions and motives are often inscrutable.  Maybe there are no accidents, but that doesn't mean we will ever understand why.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert Heinlein
read: circa 1994
Guardian 1000 Novels, Hugo Award

I don't re-read a lot of books, but I've read Stranger in a Strange Land at least two or three times.  I wrote a paper on it for high school English class, one of the longest papers I've ever written on a novel. The subject was religion, and even at the time it seemed like an obvious choice; Valentine Michael Smith parallels Jesus Christ, and Stranger in a Strange Land is the story of him creating a new, superior church.

It's been a while, so a lot of the details of Stranger in a Strange Land are fuzzy.  I guess the adjective that comes to mind is "Heinlein-y."  Robert Heinlein has a lot of interesting characteristics as a writer, and even the negative ones are often charming.  He repeatedly suggests open relationships as superior to monogamy.  His male characters often seem like thinly-veiled representations of himself, and his women ... well, it's hard to say.  Some of my friends had a spirited Google Plus debate about whether Heinlein's writing is sexist.  On the one hand, he does sometimes create strong female characters, like the titular heroine of Friday, but they're always ... Heinlein-y.  They are strong, but within certain constraints.  It's like Heinlein has a tension between a liberal open-mindedness and a need to project a Hemingwayesque masculinity.

I'm not explaining this very well; it's hard to explain.  Just read one of Robert Heinlein's books.  You might as well start with Stranger in a Strange Land; it's his best.

The Name of the Rose

The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
read: circa 2006
Guardian 1000 Novels

I read The Name of the Rose a few years after Foucault's Pendulum.  I don't remember as much of it, and I didn't like it as much, but they did make it into a movie with Sean Connery, so there's that.

Foucault's Pendulum

Foucault's Pendulum
by Umberto Eco
read: circa 2003
Guardian 1000 Novels

I'm a smart guy.  I've been smart as long as I can remember.  It doesn't seem like something I can even take credit for; it's just something innate.  And with intelligence comes a healthy arrogance; there are quite a few people smarter than me, but there aren't very many people I will admit are smarter than me.

Umberto Eco is way smarter than me.  The amount of knowledge and research that must have gone in to the writing of Foucault's Pendulum is staggering, and the way he weaves it all together is nothing short of genius.

Foucault's Pendulum, like The Crying of Lot 49, is about conspiracies and their effect on people's sanity.  But while our guide through Pynchon's tale is an every(wo)man outsider, trying to figure out what's going on, the narrator of Eco's novel is an insider, part of a group creating a fake conspiracy.  Casaubon and two of his friends have encyclopedic knowledge of the legends and histories on which many conspiracies are based, and they weave an elaborate "Plan," a conspiracy to end all conspiracies.  It's compelling and exhaustively detailed, and ultimately the characters (and maybe even the reader!) start to wonder if maybe the Plan is more than just an intellectual exercise.

The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon
read: circa 2006
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

I've read The Crying of Lot 49 twice.  I did not quite understand it the first time, so I read it again.  I still did not quite understand it.  I imagine I will repeat this pattern a few more times over my lifetime.  The Crying of Lot 49 has a wonderful quality where you keep feeling like you almost understand it, even though true understanding for the reader is futile - as it is for the book's protagonist Oepida Maas.  But I still feel that if I read the novel just one more time, I can glean another clue.  Maybe I can piece together what is going on in the chopped-up and out-of-order movie Oedipa watches with the lawyer, or Mucho's LSD-inspired speculation that you can re-create an entire person by the pitch they play the violin, or what in the world is going on in play-within-the-play "The Courier's Revenge," or whether any of the secret postal organizations actually exist.  If I can just figure out one more thing, maybe it will all make sense.  Or maybe not.  Is Pynchon cautioning me against reading too much into literature, or encouraging it?  Or is he just messing with me?

The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
read: 2012
Guardian 1000 Novels

Toni Morrison wrote the following paragraph in the introduction to The Bluest Eye:

One problem was centering the weight of the novel's inquiry on so delicate and vulnerable a character could smash her and lead readers into the comfort of pitying her rather than into an interrogation of themselves for the smashing.  My solution - break the narrative into parts that had to be re-assembled by the reader - seemed to me a good idea, the execution of which does not satisfy me now.  Besides, it didn't work: many readers remain touched but not moved.

There are two things of interest to me here.  One is the notion that I as the reader should be interrogating myself for the "smashing" - which Morrison elsewhere in the introduction refers to as "psychological murder" - of major character Pecola, as her self-image and sanity are destroyed under the pressures of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse and the way society perceives her.  The second item of interest is that the arrangement of the story factors into how I feel about the fate of this character.  Taking the second part first, it is interesting to hear an author talk specifically about this element of the craft.  Whether in novel or in film, I often feel that showing the narrative out-of-order is a cutesy trick that makes the story more confusing without really adding more depth.  Morrison's explanation is convincing, though; in linear order the sequence of events that conspires to Pecola's downfall would have felt like a runaway train out of control, almost fatalistic.  Instead we can treat each individual malady that befalls her separately, and wonder what kind of environment she exists in that this can happen to her.

The environment brings me back to the first point, about interrogating myself for personal blame for Pecola's suffering.  I didn't know what Morrison meant, and I probably still don't completely.  But I was in a Baby Gap the other day and noticed that the posters they had on the walls were angelic white children, nearly all with blue eyes.  That's no crime of mine, but I felt guilty when I realized I hadn't even noticed.  Of course the children were white.  Of course they had blue eyes.  How else would they look?  That's the society we live in, boys and girls, and our casual, even unconscious acceptance of it is a big part of the problem.

I have a lot of sympathy for the struggle for gay rights that is going on today.  Aside from the overt prejudice gay people face, I find the denial of self tragic.  Gay folks that are "in the closet" don't feel free to be who they are openly.  I never saw the struggle for African-American rights on the same level.  Black people are black people; it's obvious, and they can't hide it, right?  Then a year ago I listened to Roots on Audiobook, and realized that white slaveowners eradicated African roots from black slaves, taught them they were worse, taught them they were ugly, barred them from practicing their religion, barred them from speaking their own language, and robbed them of their family history.  Malcolm X makes the point powerfully in the first minute-plus of this video:

Morrison makes a strong effort, here and in Beloved, of trying to reclaim an African-American sense of identity, of beauty, of purpose.  There are so many white assumptions that we make in our society; Morrison does a great job breaking these down.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
by Italo Calvino
read: circa 1997

Lost in the Funhouse reminded me of a novel I read years ago that explored the nature of writing, reading, and fiction: Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.  If on a Winter's Night is light-hearted, a fun exploration of the joy of reading, particularly the joy of discovering new books.  The book alternates first chapters of fake novels in various styles with chapters following a reader's quest - in second-person! - to find the rest of the books.  Ultimately he (you?) fails but achieves a deeper understanding, or something, I don't really remember.  It's kind of a tease but it's well done.

Lost in the Funhouse

Lost in the Funhouse
by John Barth
read: 2012

A couple years ago I was trying to start a business with my friend Mark.  The basic idea was visualizing date-based information, but Mark saw it as more than that; he saw it as part of a larger effort to replace language with something more inherently meaningful.  As you might imagine from someone who has a blog about literature, I like language, so we would often have interesting disagreements on the subject.

Mark would probably agree with the following passage from Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth's collection of loosely related short stories:

I believe literature's not likely ever to manage abstraction successfully, like sculpture for example, [...] because wood and iron have a native appeal and first-order reality, whereas words are artificial to begin with, invented specifically to represent.  [...] Well, well, weld iron rods into abstract patterns, say, and you've still got real iron, but arrange words into abstract patterns and you've got nonsense.

Barth explores this concept throughout Lost in the Funhouse: "Frame-Tale" invites the reader to literally make a Moebius strip; the Author's Note says that "Autobiography" was written "for monophonic tape and visible but silent author"; "Menelaiad" is written as a nested dialogue with seven sets of quotation marks at points; the title story is peppered with sentences like "Description of physical appearance and mannerisms is one of several standard methods of characterization used by writers of fiction."  Barth takes the rules of the short story form and twists and breaks them throughout.

I'm not normally a fan of "the novel as craft," but as Professor Amy Hungerford points out, under this exploration of narrative techniques and the nature of language is a paralyzing self-awareness that prevents "the author" (whoever that may be) from experiencing life's profound feelings in the moment.  This tension is captured best in the final line of the title story: "Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator - though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed."  This schism between artistic creation and awareness of language comes up repeatedly through the stories; it's echoed in Ambrose's detachment when recalling his sexual roleplay with Magda and in Menelais' inability to believe in Helen's love.  But then we also have "Night-Sea Journey," written from the perspective of a sperm, which reminds us that sex, too, is an act of creation.  Seen from this perspective, the linguistic gymnastics of Lost in the Funhouse are practically a cry for help, an attempt to reach understanding through exhaustive exploration when what the author really needs to do is just stop thinking and feel.

Ultimately, I didn't buy everything Barth was doing, but it was interesting, and I generally felt that the crazy techniques and structures ultimately served a purpose.  Lost in the Funhouse is a unique book.

A Night of Serious Drinking

A Night of Serious Drinking
by Rene Daumal
read: circa 2009

This is a weird book.  It's not even really a novel so much as a thought experiment.  The first third of the book begins as you might imagine a book called A Night of Serious Drinking would, with a bar full of heavy drinkers, and the narrative lucidity decays as the evening wears on and talk turns more philosophical.  The second third is a journey to an alternate universe ostensibly still within the tavern.  The final part begins with a man waking up in a spare room who comes to operate a larger machine that simulates the human body waking up.

The second third is probably the most interesting piece.  The inhabitants of the parallel universe in the   the tavern bear strong resemblance to those in our world, just taken one absurd step further.  Daumal skewers military leaders, doctors, scientists, and artists alike.  The equivalent of poets in this world are folks who try to produce completely random words utterly devoid of meaning or thought.  Architects strive to create forms of pure beauty that no one could possibly live in.  The section goes on for a while, but at times it's so clever it's laugh-out-loud funny.

A Night of Serious Drinking is an unusual novel, but it took me places few books have taken me, so on that basis I can recommend it.  (Yes, the price is ridiculous.  Don't buy it.)

A Journey to the Centre of the Earth

A Journey to the Centre of the Earth
by Jules Verne
read: 2012
Guardian 1000 Novels

Science fiction ages like no other genre of fiction.  A realistic novel is frozen in its place in time, and even fantasy novels are divorced from reality to the extent they can't be subject to retroactive criticism.  But humans are terrible at predicting the future, so any novel that attempts to do that is bound to fail.  A Journey to the Centre of the Earth doesn't place itself in the future per se, but the exploration of the earth's interior, something that was poorly understood at the time and much better understood now, comes off as quaint at best and wildly unscientific at worst.  Still, the story is interesting, and even if the interaction between the characters becomes repetitive (the narrator is a wuss!  The uncle seems irrational but ends up being right!  Hans has no expression!), it's a fun read.

Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe
read: circa 1996
Guardian 1000 Novels

I had to read Robinson Crusoe as assigned summer reading before my junior year of high school.  It was my least favorite of all the books I had to read.  The plot outline - a mariner stranded on a desert island, relying on his wits to survive - sounds like an exciting story, but as I remember it largely consisted of lists of provisions.  Reading it was much less fun than going to the beach that summer.

The Coming Race

The Coming Race
by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
read: 2012
Guardian 1000 Novels

Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race is another "Lost World" novel.  But The Coming Race is less of an adventure story a la King Solomon's Mines and more of an allegorical societal critique a la Brave New World.  The narrator discovers an underground society composed of humanoid creatures called "Vril-ya" who have mastery of "Vril," which is kind of like "The Force" from Star Wars.  As a consequence, they have moved beyond war, needing to provide for themselves on a day-to-day basis, and many of the other struggles in our day-to-day life.  Ultimately, Bulwer-Lytton doesn't really choose sides.  There are pieces of the Vril-ya society that challenge flaws in human society; for instance, the gender roles among the Vril-ya are almost flipped, and their society has interesting means of dealing with over-population and new settlements.  But like in Brave New World, the society's advancements have casualties, as art is rendered completely superfluous and the Vril-ya seem almost passionless.  This even-handedness makes The Coming Race thought-provoking.

The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep
by Raymond Chandler
read: 2011
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

I read The Big Sleep at about the same time I read the Dashiell Hammett novels and it all blurs together a little bit.  My recollection is that I preferred Raymond Chandler's writing to Hammett's and liked the more subtle style of Sam Spade versus the violence and aggressiveness of some of Hammett's protagonists.  It's the quality that makes a James Bond film a little more interesting than a typical action film.  I should check out some more Chandler.

King Solomon's Mines

King Solomon's Mines
by Henry Rider Haggard
read: 2012
Guardian 1000 Novels

I'm writing a story for a pulp publication some friends are creating (details to follow!).  I've settled on doing something in the adventure tradition, a la Henry Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, but I'd never actually read any Haggard ... until now.

King Solomon's Mines is a really charming read.  The characters are vibrant: the vain, profane, competent Captain Good, brave and hotblooded Sir Henry Curtis, proud African Umbopa, and narrator Allan Quatermain, a wise sharp-shooter who claims to be a coward but risks his life at every turn.  The figures are larger than life, and even villains Thala and with Gagool are memorable.  The plot was probably more inventive at the time than it seems now, but the story is crisp and holds the reader's interest.  There are some passages and assumptions that would be considered racist by modern standards, but since it was written in 1885, I guess we can cut Haggard a little slack.  King Solomon's Mines will be good inspiration for my own literary endeavors.

The Thin Man

The Thin Man
by Dashiell Hammett
read: 2011
Guardian 1000 Novels

My favorite of the three Dashiell Hammett novels I've read.  I loved the banter between Nick and Nora Charles, the protagonists, and I thought the mystery was better-developed than in Red Harvest or The Maltese Falcon.  Definitely a lighter tone, though that belied what was a pretty disturbing mystery.

The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon
by Dashiell Hammett
read: 2011
Modern Library #56, Guardian 1000 Novels

Even if you don't know the novel or any of Hammett's oeuvre, the "Maltese Falcon" has entered the popular lexicon.  I think I first heard it on The Simpsons, though I imagine the film with Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade was the gateway for a lot of people.  Just those two words together conjures up the image of an artifact of value and mystery.

I enjoyed The Maltese Falcon less than Red Harvest and The Thin Man, the other two Dashiell Hammett novels I've read.  It was still a fun read.  I think the last quarter or so of the book raised some moral questions, but I don't think they were developed enough to be truly thought-provoking.

Red Harvest

Red Harvest
by Dashiell Hammett
read: 2011
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest is considered a giant of the noir genre.  Noir is a genre that I think works best on film, where the screen dances with moody blacks, whites, greys, and reds, and the actors can bring the dialogue to life with the machine-gun timing that the prose suggests.  Red Harvest is as much action movie as noir, featuring a couple large-scale gang shootouts that would explode on the big screen.  The novel is a good story and a fun read.

Bartleby the Scrivener

Bartleby, the Scrivener
by Herman Melville
read: 2012

I think I read Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener in high school.  I don't remember it very well and didn't appreciate it very much at the time.  Because while Bartleby is a short story (maybe 20 pages in dead tree form) it is very rich: an absurdist comedy, a cautionary tale for managers, a kind of living ghost tale, a mystery, and a sad tale of depression.  It's really unlike anything I've ever read, and Melville's prose is funny and creative without being unwieldy.  Bartleby may have been wasted on teenage me, but fortunately I got the chance to re-read the story now.

The Red Badge of Courage

The Red Badge of Courage
by Stephen Crane
read: circa 1996
Guardian 1000 Novels

I read The Red Badge of Courage for sophomore English class in high school.  I remember one question on the test.  There's a scene in the novel after Henry, the main character, flees from a battle in fear.  As he is walking along he throws a small rock at a squirrel which darts off, making Henry feel better about his cowardice.  After all, he rationalizes, isn't fleeing from danger a natural reaction for living creatures?  One of my classmates, when asked to analyze this passage, wrote only "The squirrel did not want to die."  Mr. Carta gave him one point partial credit for that answer.  I feel that was a bit generous.

Deliverance

Deliverance
by James Dickey
read: 2011
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #42, Guardian 1000 Novels

I've spent a few posts recently talking about my love / hate relationship with the writing of Cormac McCarthy.  McCarthy's world is full of gruff, strong, Hemingwayesque heroes and anti-heroes in a merciless world where they must kill or be killed.  The people and the situations aren't really relatable for me, but despite that McCarthy manages to hit on universal elements in the human condition.

James Dickey creates a similar situation in Deliverance, but he also does something else.  Ed Gentry isn't an inscrutable symbol of the West; he's a mild-mannered graphic designer who is thrust into a kill-or-be-killed setting that isn't dissimilar from the environment in McCarthy's world.  Through Ed, the reader explores multiple aspects of the relationship between modern society and this more primitive world, a rural river in Georgia.  The country is beautiful but dangerous.  The denizens of the river are territorial - even to the point of murder - but they have cause to be distrustful, as there are already plans to dam up the river and turn it into a lake for further developments.  Ed's experience on the river is the worst thing that ever happened to him, but at the same time the reader gets the impression that he wouldn't go back and undo it if he could.  This tension between the positives and negatives of the primitive world, and how we think about our modern life in relation to it, makes Deliverance one of the best novels I read in 2011.

All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
read: 2012
Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award


Cormac McCarthy is one of the most interesting novelists working today.  I laid out some thoughts on his writing in my review of The Road, but I think I sold him a bit short.  This is what I wrote:

McCarthy has stated in interviews that he doesn't think much of literature that doesn't "deal with matters of life and death."  I disagree with him on this front; once we move past concerns of life and death, we can engage what Faulkner called "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself."  My issue with The Road, and with McCarthy in general, is that he doesn't take us there.

Having just finished my fourth McCarthy novel now, All the Pretty Horses, I realize that I was wrong.  McCarthy is dealing with many of the same themes and issues as the other great writers, but he's coming at things from a different angle.  To McCarthy, talk is cheap, and thoughts are even cheaper; it's action that reveals character.  He's not always going to spell out what going's on in the characters' heads, but their actions open a window to their minds and souls.


The question of fate looms large in All the Pretty Horses.  The novel is open to the idea of a Christian God who controls the destiny of His subjects.  This is laid out early in an exchange between John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins.  Cole suggests that if Rawlins' parents hadn't met, he never would have been born.

Rawlins lay watching the stars.  After a while he said: I could still be born.  I might look different or somethin.  If God wanted me to be born I'd be born.

And if He didnt you wouldnt. 

Fate, God, and destiny show up repeatedly in the story.  Blevins is petrified he will be killed by lightning because his family members were all killed by lightning.  Cole himself is a born horseman, who "if were begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway."  Alejandra's aunt notes the trouble her families women has with men and hopes it's not "tainted blood" or "a family curse."  When Cole returns to the ranch towards the end of the story, the workers tell him "that it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other."  However, Cole later tells Rawlins that America, his land of birth, "ain't my country."  There is a capriciousness to birthrights.


Fate is a major topic in a conversation between Cole and Alejandra's aunt after he is released from prison.  She makes the analogy to

A tossed coin that was at one time a slug in a mint and of the coiner who took that slug from the tray and placed it in the die in one of two ways and from whose act all else followed, cara y cruz.

She suggests in the next breath a "puppet show" where the puppet strings "terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on."  All the Pretty Horses is open to the idea of a Christian God, but it doesn't matter.  Because if God exists, His will is virtually indistinguishable from nihilistic randomness.  And ultimately, how can we know if something was fated to happen, or whether it just happened to happen?  The aunt makes this point also:

In history there are no control groups.  There is no one to tell us what might have been.  We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been.  There never was. 

The closest McCarthy gets to laying out some sort of theory, some method to God's madness, is Cole's thought that pain exists as some sort of currency to create beauty.  "The blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower."  It's not clear whether this is a blessing or a curse; Rawlins says early on in the novel that a good-looking horse or woman is "always more trouble than what they're worth."


How is a person to act in a world where he does not have control over his destiny?  The book makes two suggestions.  The first is acceptance.  Cole's mother leaves his father and he cannot keep the farm, but he bears this pain without fighting back, even accepting the divorce.  The judge who exonerates Cole near the very end of the tale is another model of acceptance.  He tells Cole that "I sure didnt want to be a judge," but ultimately ends up taking on that role out of duty to his country.  "I think I just didnt have any choice.  Just didnt have any choice," he says.


The other option is raging against destiny.  Alejandra's aunt describes wanting "very much to be a person of value" when she was younger.  "If one were to be a person of value that value could not  be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune.  It had to be a quality that could not change.  No matter what."  Cole subscribes to this philosophy.  Later in the book he tells the judge that his greatest regret is not attempting to intercede when Blevins was killed.  The judge asks him "Would it have done any good?"  He replies, "No sir.  But that dont make it right."  Very early on, McCarthy tells us that "all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise," in a rare instance of the narrative voice telling and not showing.  In a way, All the Pretty Horses mirrors the Book of Job, except unlike Job, Cole does not humbly accept his suffering and trust in God's plan.


There are no easy answers.  Cole's father wastes away, "thin and frail," with "sunken eyes."  Blevins, takes great pains to avoid death by lightning but in doing so sets off a chain of events that results in his death.  Alejandra's aunt tries to set up a better life for Alejandra, but it is unclear whether her machinations will be successful.  Cole's quest to find Blevins' horse's rightful owner, and with it possible absolution in the eyes of Alejandra's family, fails.  So is man to accept his fate, or rage against it?  McCarthy leaves both doors open, but behind each is suffering and death.

True Grit

True Grit
by Charles Portis
read: 2011

I saw the movie, the Coen Brothers one, before I read True Grit.  I found both entertaining but not earthshattering.  The characters, especially Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn, are great and iconic, and the action moves at a quick pace, but it's not the sort of deep book I would mull on for weeks.

The narrative is fundamentally a revenge story, and contains many of the cliches of a good guy / bad guy Western.  What's interesting is that the narrator is not Mattie in the moment as the 14-year-old adventurer, but an older Mattie looking back on her experiences.  One gets the impression that Mattie would not change anything about what happened, but it's hard not to look at her quiet, lonely adult life and wonder if she bears emotional scars from her experiences along with the physical ones.  At the very least, the fact that so many years later this is the only episode of her life she feels worth retelling carries an element of tragedy.

Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park
by Michael Crichton
read: circa 1995
Guardian 1000 Novels

I haven't read Jurassic Park in years, nor have I seen the Steven Spielberg movie in some time.  I suspect if I did I would find it doesn't hold up; not that it would be terrible but just that it wouldn't be as good as I remember.  How could it be?

The Andromeda Strain

The Andromeda Strain
by Michael Crichton
read: circa 1995
Guardian 1000 Novels

Neal Stephenson's writing reminds me a fair amount of Michael Crichton's.  I haven't read Crichton in years but read quite a few of his books when I was younger.  Like Stephenson, Crichton will often explore topics (usually science-related) of interest to him in the course of the novel.  This often stops the narration and feels a bit heavy-handed, but it is usually interesting.

Andromeda Strain has one of the lamest cop-out endings of any novel I've read.  I linked a while back to an article suggesting that we don't need to finish books, as readers or writers, and that's advice Crichton should have taken in his career.  I probably read six or eight of his books and all but one or two had lousy endings.  Andromeda Strain might have been the worst.  In fact, it almost completely obscures my memory of the rest of the novel, though I do remember liking it.

A Dance to the Music of Time

A Dance to the Music of Time
Series of 12 books
by Anthony Powell
read: 2011
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #43, Guardian 1000 Novels, James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for At Lady Molly's)

Atonement reminded me of A Dance to the Music of Time, particularly how the lives of the characters were disrupted by the war.  But while the characters in Atonement are mired in the blood and guts of the conflict, narrator Nick Jenkins is mired in red tape.  The war effort is not spared author Anthony Powell's dry wit, and Jenkins spends his time sending paperwork to embassies, helping a lovelorn officer, and (as always) trying to avoid being swept up in Kenneth Widmerpool's machinations.  But it's not all humor; many friends and family members die in the War, and the reader gets the impression that their lives were snuffed out with their stories yet untold, much as a person living then would.

I spent a long time with these books.  None were particularly long but there were twelve of them.  Most had themes, and often the story jumped between time exploring those themes.  For instance, the first book "A Questioning of Upbringing" concerns Nick's relationship with schoolmates Peter Templar and Charles Stringham and issues of class, "The Kindly Ones" features the occult, especially embodied in the odd Doctor Trelawney, and "Temporary Kings" deals with themes of sexual deviance.  Each book can be read as a standalone work, especially since narrator Nick is largely a background character, but reading it in sequence you become fond of the different characters, even the officious, manipulative Widmerpool.

I feel like making this entry a lot longer, to preserve my memory of the characters and the episodes in the different books.  But it's hard to know where to start.  I think I'll just leave it in my memory so I can return to it when prompted, as the narrator is at the very beginning of the novel.

Atonement

Atonement
by Ian McEwan
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

I try not to read too much about these books before I read them.  Afterwards I might go back and see what the critics thought or what the author said about the novel or at least read the page on Wikipedia, but I like to form my own opinion first.  The first third or so of most books is a game where I'm trying to figure out what kind of book it is, what the author is trying to say, and why he wrote the book.

Through that lens, it seemed like Ian McEwan was messing with my head.  As I read the first section of Atonement (the part labelled "Book I"), I kept seeing setups of what kind of story this way.  A silly misunderstanding over an accident as Robbie and Cecilia broke the vase?  No, Cecilia just fixed it, good as new.  The semi-autobiographical story of a writer's development, as a paragraph reveals little Briony's future history as an author?  No, let's forget about that for a few hundred pages.  The story of Robbie's unrequired love?  No, it just takes a couple dozen pages to reveal the love is requited after all.  Is the not-yet-seen husband having an affair, and that's going to be a big reveal?  Well, he is, but no, it isn't.  His wife Emily is well aware Jack's not staying in a hotel when he has to work late in the city, but doesn't care.

But just when I thought the novel was going nowhere, that it was just an exploration of the form, teasing me with hints of stories, McEwan staggered me with a right cross.  Books II and III, which focus on Robbie's experience as an infantryman in World War II and Briony's nursing career in a wartime hospital, respectively, are devastating.  There's a scene between Briony and a wounded French soldier where you can see the tragic ending coming from pages away it does nothing to cushion the blow.  The effect is, I imagine, calculated to approximate the effect of a war, with all of the melodramatic prose describing 11-year-old Briony's despondency over the disruption of her play seeming very silly compared to 18-year-old Briony dealing with real matters of life and death.

The novel then takes a meta twist towards the end, and ultimately the book stands as a statement on the life-destroying and life-preserving powers of fiction, and the God-like qualities an author possesses while wielding a pen.  Atonement is a great book that will be kicking around in my brain for a long time to come.