A Review of Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow

Homer & Langley: A Novel
4 out of 5: E.L. Doctorow’s most recent novel, Homer & Langley, is an epic history of twentieth century America as it was experienced by two brothers living in a Fifth Avenue brownstone in New York City. Homer, the blind brother, narrates the story and describes how the brothers become ever more eccentric and reclusive over the decades. Their home becomes a repository for everything the brothers pick up on their wanderings through the city—including gangsters, hippies, and even a jazz trumpeter from New Orleans—and eventually becomes a destination for curiosity seekers and reporters.

Doctorow is a master at capturing the zeitgeist of a particular period in just a few sentences, like this view of the Prohibition era: “Some of the clubs were rather elegant, with a pretty good kitchen and a dance floor, others were basement dives where the music came from a radio on a wall shelf broadcasting some swing orchestra from Pittsburgh. But where you went didn't matter, you could die of the gin in any of these joints, and the mood was the same everywhere, people laughing at what wasn't funny.”

Such conciseness is necessary since, in just over 200 pages, Homer & Langley takes us through the twentieth century’s most transformative moments in America, including the transition of silent films to talkies to television, the development of jazz, the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War and its opposition, and the Civil Rights Movement. Homer explains: “It was as if the times blew through our house like a wind, and these were the things deposited here by the winds of war.”

At times, Homer & Langley feels too much like a contrived stage for the organized parade of history (compare Forest Gump). Mostly, however, the compassion and sensitivity with which Doctorow presents the brothers, along with Homer’s unique voice, make this novel a joy to read.

Review of The Vampire of Ropraz by Jacques Chessex (translated by W. Donald Wilson)

The Vampire of Ropraz

3.5 out of 5: It’s 1903, and a suspected vampire is on the loose in Ropraz, a small, forested town in Switzerland, described as a "land of wolves and neglect," oppressed by "four centuries of imposed ‘Calvinism.’” Even without vampires, Ropraz is a town steeped in suspicion and superstition:

Endlessly construing the threat from deep within and from without, from the forest, from the cracking of the roof, from the wailing of the wind, from the beyond, from above, from beneath, from below: the threat from elsewhere. You bar yourself inside you skull, your sleep, your heart, your senses; you bolt yourself inside your farmhouse, gun at the ready, with a haunted, hungry soul.

The terror begins in Jacques Chessex’s atmospheric novella when the recently buried corpse of 20-year-old Rosa Gilliéron, daughter of the town’s Justice of the Peace, is found unearthed and violently desecrated. The local paper quickly labels the perpetrator the “Vampire of Ropraz,” and the finger-pointing starts. Loaded with sexual tension and provincial overreaction, The Vampire of Ropraz is a dark portrait of a remote place trapped in its own suspicions and tortured by its oppressive religious beliefs: "There is, above all, welling up from generations of tortured brooding, the assurance of punishment from on high suspended over our lives."

Nine-tenths of The Vampire of Ropraz is a concise and masterful rendering of a dark place victimized by an even darker act. A bizarre, ironic twist at the very end of the story, however, throws a farcical light over the book, serving to undo much of the powerful effect achieved earlier. It's an unfortunate ending to a grimly entertaining tale.

Review of The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

The Little Stranger
4.5 out of 5: The Little Stranger, a new novel by well-known British author Sarah Waters, examines the great social upheaval in England during the years immediately following World War II through the perspective of a once-grand family as that perspective is narrated by the family’s local doctor, Dr. Faraday. Mrs. Ayers and her two adult, unmarried children, Caroline and Roderick, are the last remnants of the Ayres family living in crumbling Hundreds Hall on an unkempt estate in rural England. Dr. Faraday, who comes from humble origins, befriends the family after a house call to treat an ailing servant. It’s a friendship that never would have formed in the pre-war era of strict social hierarchies, and Dr. Faraday takes great pride in his association with the high-class Ayers.

Beginning with an inexplicable dog attack, a number of strange occurrences in the Hall suggest a supernatural presence. Though the occurrences become ever more violent, it remains unclear whether the ghostly presence is real or merely a figment of the family’s over-stressed imagination. Things become increasingly desperate, and the Ayers family, one by one, succumbs to the force—whether supernatural, socioeconomic, or imagined—that seems determined to break them. Through it all, Dr. Faraday is the steady voice of rationality, at first a welcome respite but becoming more and more ominous over time.

The gradual mental and financial collapse of the Ayers family parallels the disintegration of the British class system, and this interplay results in a rich story with many layers of meaning. The supernatural elements avoid cliché by their ambiguity. Is Dr. Faraday correct that there’s a rational explanation for everything? Or is Roderick right that an unseen malevolent force is threatening the family? Waters masterfully maintains this delicate ambiguity to the chilling and dramatic end. The Little Stranger is a quick-paced psychological thriller nested within an insightful social commentary. The combination is thrilling and intelligent.

Review of Rex by José Manuel Prieto (translated by Esther Allen)

Rex: A Novel
4 out of 5: This novel by Cuban-born, Russian-educated José Manuel Prieto is narrated by a tutor (who asks to be called Psellus) and directed to his pupil, eleven-year-old Petya, the son of two Russian émigrés living in luxury on Spain’s Costa del Sol. Petya’s parents, Vasily and Nelly, are hiding from two Russian mafiosos they swindled out of millions in a scheme involving fake diamonds. But, in Rex, appearances are highly questionable, and the purported swindle could be merely a tool used by Vasily and Nelly to persuade Psellus to do their bidding, including transforming Vasily into the long-lost czar of Russia. Whatever the truth, plot is secondary in Prieto’s unique literary creation that is Rex.

Psellus derives his lessons to the young Petya, and indirectly to the reader, exclusively from the Book, Psellus’s name for Proust’s In Search of Lost Time:

If you receive nothing more from me than some knowledge of the details of the Book, if in all your adult life you don’t manage to retain any more than a few passages, a few scattered phrases of the Book, that would be enough to give you a distinct advantage as you go out into the world. Only through the Book can you learn to judge men sensibly, plumb their depths, detect and comprehend their obscurest motives, sound the abyss of their souls.

Psellus’s other influences include the supremely worthy Writer, who is really an amalgamation of numerous writers, including Shakespeare, Nabokov, and Dostoyevsky, and the despicable Commentator, quite likely intended as a stand-in for Jorge Luis Borges, and perhaps even, at times, for Prieto himself.

Prieto’s prose defies description. It’s unlike anything else I’ve read recently (or maybe ever). It’s a highly referential banter of thoughts, images, dialog, and questions to the reader. Often lacking in subjects or verbs or other generally indispensable parts of sentences, Prieto’s sentences are obscure and difficult, but also loaded with charm and humor. Esther Allen’s flexible, lively translation is its own work of art. As demonstrated by this scene where Psellus steals a dance with the beautiful but unattainable Nelly, Allen captures the musicality and exuberance of Prieto’s language:

In which the two of us danced, Nelly’s face and mine, our faces consumed by fire, the blue tongues of my passion, the impulse that led me to inhale the aroma of her hair, bewitched by the arc of her brows, revolving at the center of a slow song that astonished me when I heard its first chords because I said to myself: jazz, but without being able to tell you [Petya], you up in your room at that moment, to interject a rapid commentary, overlooking for the moment the commentaristic (or belated? Or belated) nature of jazz. A song that now, each time I hear it, of course.

Rex is a thoroughly enjoyable literary puzzle for those who embrace originality and can accept some amount of confusion for a little over 300 pages (if the quote above brings fear to your heart, you should probably skip this one). This book begs a second reading, which I suspect would be even more pleasurable than the first.

Are You Ready For Proust?

As a sort of precursor to my review (coming tomorrow) of José Manuel Prieto’s Rex, a novel that revolves around Marcel Proust’s masterpiece In Search of Lost Time (a.k.a. Remembrance of Things Past), check out The Cork-Lined Room, a blog off-shoot of Publishing Perspectives. The Cork-Lined Room, the brainchild of Dennis Abrams, is undertaking the monumental project of reading and discussing all 3000+ pages of In Search of Lost Time at a pace of about 15 pages a day. If you’ve always meant to tackle Proust, now’s a great time to do it. The reading will start on Monday, November 2, but head over to The Cork-Lined Room now for a discussion about which translation you should read.

Review of After the Fire, a Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld

After the Fire, a Still Small Voice: A Novel
3.5 out of 5: In Evie Wyld’s debut novel, Frank Collard, often consumed with fits of uncontrollable rage, flees from a broken relationship to a remote cabin on an isolated stretch of coast in Queensland, Australia. The cabin, a lonely place of inherited anguish, is the same one his grandparents inhabited after fleeing their own inner demons years before. In a parallel story line, Leon is forced to take responsibility for the family bakery in Sydney when his father returns from the Korean War unable to cope with the business. In time, Leon is drafted for the Vietnam War and forced to endure the horrors from which his father never recovered. Eventually, Frank’s and Leon’s stories come together, resonating with their shared themes of trauma and the succeeding attempts to heal.

After the Fire, a Still Small Voice is a quiet character study of those on the fringes of society, those struggling to replace pain with a livable kind of contentment. This human drama plays out in the richly described landscape of the Australian coast. It’s a place at once welcoming and threatening, filled with its own secret pleasures and ominous mysteries. In addition to the setting, Wyld takes time to craft realistic layers of complexity in her characters. In one scene, Frank and his neighbor have a meandering conversation over several beers and many hours while the late afternoon sky slowly darkens into night. It’s an evocative and acutely realistic scene, but when combined with similar scenes, the book exhibits a lethargy that becomes sluggish in places.

Wyld exercises admirable restraint throughout and refuses to resolve the novel in expected or conventional ways. The lack of closure is beautiful and appropriately tormented but also frustrating, particularly given the novel’s overall aimlessness. After the Fire, a Still Small Voice is a masterful portrayal of human resilience but suffers from an occasional lack of momentum and direction.

Literary License Is Changing Format

Starting today, Literary License is morphing into a weekly book review format. I’ll run a book review every week on Wednesdays. I’ll continue to write about interesting publishing and other book-related news as the mood strikes and time permits, but I will not be providing daily coverage after today. Daily coverage of the book world is extremely time-consuming, and since there are so many great sites already providing this coverage, I’m going to focus instead on reading and reviewing books.

I will continue to focus on literary fiction, particularly those books with international settings or that have been translated into English from other languages. I’ll also mix in the occasional memoir or other non-fiction book. With the extra time I’ll gain with this format change, I hope to discover even more great books and to pass those discoveries on to you. First up, see my review of Guillermo Rosales’s The Halfway House below. Happy reading!

Review of The Halfway House by Guillermo Rosales (translated by Anna Kushner)

The Halfway House
4 out of 5: Guillermo Rosales, a Cuban-American writer who suffered from mental illness, committed suicide in 1993 after destroying most of his work. The Halfway House survived and is the first of Rosales’s novels to be translated into English.

In this autobiographical novel (a novella, really), Rosales’s protagonist, William Figueras, flees to Miami from Cuba. Instead of the “future winner” Figueras’s relatives expect to greet at the airport, they discover “a crazy, nearly toothless, skinny, frightened guy who had to be admitted to a psychiatric ward that very day.” After a couple unsuccessful moves, Figueras’s relatives eventually abandon him to a decrepit halfway house. The Halfway House, comprising Figueras’s first-person narrative of his life in the halfway house, begins with this characteristically dark and pointed line: “The house said ‘boarding home’ on the outside, but I knew that it would be my tomb.”

This compact novel (under 150 pages) is structured around the routines of the halfway house: its inedible meals, the residents’ unsanitary habits, the nightly dramas of sexual abuse, and Figueras’s rambling walks through the city. The Halfway House’s elegant structure contrasts markedly with its squalid subject. In another stark contrast, Figueras exhibits very few symptoms of mental illness and, thus, finds himself in a position of relative power. As if from the perspective of an objective observer, Figueras’s narrates his own gradual transition from victim to victimizer and then back again. Although he exerts some control over his status as a victim or a victimizer, his attempts to break out of the cycle altogether fail.

Anna Kushner’s masterful translation retains the bite of Rosales’s prose and also its subtle humor and playfulness. The Halfway House reveals the horror of a halfway house run by unscrupulous men and, at the same time, the beauty of the residents’ undeniable humanity.

The Red Book by Carl Jung

The Red Book
Norton has just published a gorgeous edition of The Red Book, Carl Jung's long unpublished journal of inner exploration. A Shelf Awareness story describes the edition as an “elaborate, leather-bound book that resembles a medieval illustrated manuscript.” In conjunction with publication of The Red Book, the Rubin Museum in New York City is running an exhibit featuring the original Red Book, which has been previously hidden from public view.

Sonu Shamdasani, editor and one of the translators of The Red Book and a Jung scholar, explains that Jung began writing The Red Book in 1914 as a way "to explore his fantasies and to think mystically." His writing in the book continued for 16 years.

1 Year, 365 Books

The New York Times recently profiled Nina Sankovitch, a book lover who pledged to read a book a day for a year, beginning on her 46th birthday. Sankovitch also reviews the daily books she reads on her blog Read All Day, and her reviews are quite substantial, especially considering she’s writing one every day. While it might not always be easy to finish a book every single day (she got started on a book at 10 pm on Christmas Day, for example), she’s “getting to do what she really enjoys.” Learn more about the 365 Project here.

The Extinction of 'Men of Letters'

In an article in the New Statesman, DJ Taylor bemoans the fact that, "with one or two very singular exceptions, it is impossible to make a living out of [book] reviewing any more." As he mourns the death of traditional "Men of Letters," Taylor takes the typical pot shots at internet-savvy newcomers:

[H]ere in the early 21st century, the once-homogeneous entity known as "literary culture" has become horribly dispersed, blown out into cyberspace and colonised by bloggers and self-appointed savants who think their opinion of a book is just as good as the Sunday Times's.

Although I share Taylor's disappointment in the disappearance of—or, at the very least, the diminishment of—literary culture, I certainly don't agree that the "dispersal" of such culture throughout the internet is a bad thing.

Dragon House by John Shors (a review)

Dragon House
3 out of 5: In this novel, Iris, a book critic, leaves an unfulfilling life in Chicago to finish her recently-deceased father's dream of opening a center for street children in Vietnam. Noah, Iris's childhood friend and a wounded veteran of the current war in Iraq, decides to join Iris in her journey. Opening the children's center in Ho Chi Minh City proves more difficult than expected as Iris and Noah confront powerful figures seeking to maintain the status quo. Along with the challenges come great rewards, including the chance to rescue children from life on the streets and an opportunity for emotional healing.

Unlike most novels set in Vietnam, which focus on the war years or the romanticized period of French colonialism, Dragon House examines the world of contemporary Vietnam. Most of the action takes place in Ho Chi Minh City (a.k.a. Saigon), but excursions to the Mekong Delta, Hanoi, Halong Bay, and Nha Trang provide a broader perspective. Shors has spent time trekking across Asia, and Dragon House includes plenty of realistic details of Vietnam's diverse landscapes to satisfy arm chair travelers. Dragon House is heart-warming and uplifting in an uncomplicated and overly sentimental way. Readers looking to escape to a little known world with a simple story will enjoy Dragon House while those preferring more nuanced characters, plot, and prose are likely to be disappointed.

Kindle Moves Beyond U.S.

Amazon has announced the long-awaited availability of its Kindle device in the UK and more than 100 other countries and territories. The device costs US$279 and will ship October 19th in plenty of time for the upcoming holiday gift-giving season. Additionally, customers in the U.S. can now purchase a Kindlefor $259, a $40 price reduction.

Herta Müller Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

On Thursday, the Swedish Academy awarded Herta Müller, a Romanian-born German novelist, the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. Obviously, this has been widely reported elsewhere. As I've been out of town and away from a computer the last few days, I'm a bit behind. I won't repeat the commentary here, but Literary Saloon has collected links for all the articles if you're interested in the media response. Summary: Herta who?

A New Literary History of America

A New Literary History of America (Harvard University Press Reference Library)
A little over two weeks ago, I picked up a copy of A New Literary History of America at my local bookstore on a whim. I like books and I like history, so what could be better than a literary history? I'm also currently studying early American literature, making the essays touching on pre-1865 works particularly useful. Plus, the striking cover caught my attention.

Edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, A New Literary History of America is composed of more than 200 essays written by as many contributors, each about 4 to 5 pages long. As explained in the editors' introduction, the essays address "points in time and imagination where something changed: when a new idea or a new form came into being, when new questions were raised, when what before seemed impossible came to seem necessary or inevitable." The essays, which are arranged chronologically, start with the naming of America in 1507 and continue through Obama's election in 2008.

Since that serendipitous day in the bookstore, I've spent several pleasant hours reading about Diaz's account of the tragic fall of Tenochtitlan, Cabeza de Vaca's chronicle of his trek to Mexico City, John White's influential watercolors of the Carolina Algonquians, and the writings of early colonists like John Smith, John Winthrop, Roger Williams, and Anne Bradstreet.

I've also seen a surprising amount of great reviews for a book that's a 1128-page reference book published by a university press and selling for somewhere between $32 and $50. Here are just a few examples:

• The Wall Street Journal—"[T]he editors have drawn a new map for us and inscribed it boldly with the strange name America."
• The New York Times—"A New Literary History of America is not your typical Harvard University Press anthology. ... [It] roams far beyond any standard definition of literature. Aside from compositions that contain the written word, its subjects include war memorials, jazz, museums, comic strips, film, radio, musicals, skyscrapers, cybernetics and photography.
• Salon.com—"This magnificent volume is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture."
• Entertainment Weekly—"You could read this 1,000-plus-page book forever and never use up its revelations and its pleasures."

The book even has its own website.

Not everyone loves this book. The minority view is nicely summed up by 'A Reader' in a 1-star Amazon.com review calling A New Literary History of America nothing more than "cocktail party multiculturalism served up by the Harvard boys."

E-book Pricing

The Bookseller considers an e-book pricing survey conducted by the Frankfurt Book Fair (FBF). Not surprisingly, the survey shows that “[a]n overwhelming majority of publishers believe that e-books should be less expensive than the printed version,” but that’s where the agreement ends. The responses ranged from “10 per cent cheaper than the printed book” all the way down to “[a] standard price as with Amazon ($9.99),” and the various price points garnered almost equal support. The FBF concluded that the industry remains "completely divided about appropriate e-book pricing."

Here are the survey's results:

The price for an e-book should be:

• More expensive than the printed book - 4%
• As expensive as the printed book - 15%
• 10 percent cheaper than the printed book - 11%
• 20 percent cheaper - 17%
• 30 percent cheaper - 14%
• More than 30 percent cheaper - 16%
• A standard price as with Amazon ($9.99) - 15%
• Other price model - 6%

I'm not sure where I fall on this issue. Personally, I love the convenience of e-books, particularly for books I plan to read once and never look at again. I may even be willing to pay the same price for an e-book as a printed book under certain circumstances. When I purchase a book to add to my permanent library, though, I'll always pay for the printed book, regardless of the price differential. So, for me, the decision to buy an e-book versus a printed book turns on what I plan to do with the book rather than any price break I might get for buying the e-book version.

Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada (a review)

Every Man Dies Alone
4 out of 5: Hans Fallada (real name: Rudolf Ditzen) wrote Every Man Dies Alone over the course of twenty-four days in late 1946, shortly after the Nazi defeat. Suffering from lifelong alcohol and drug addictions, Fallada died in a mental hospital just before Every Man Dies Alone was published. Based on the true story of Elise and Otto Hampel, this novel spotlights a Berlin couple who undertook a dangerous campaign of Nazi resistance by writing and distributing hundreds of anti-Nazi postcards over a three-year period during World War II. Thanks to Melville House, Every Man Dies Alone is now available in English for the first time.

Fallada’s personal conflicts with the Nazi regime (including denunciation and censorship) are apparent in his evocative portrayal of Berlin during the war, particularly the pervasive atmosphere of fear and oppression. Every Man Dies Alone is full of finely-drawn characters, many with real-life counterparts, who range from brave Nazi resisters to loyal and brutal supporters of Hitler’s regime. This novel’s unadorned prose and quick pacing give it the feel of a thriller, but this is a thriller with a deeper purpose. Fallada uses a lively plot to examine the motivations for resistance and to question its worth, particularly in those cases where unsophisticated subversions are destined to end in failure.

At its center, Every Man Dies Alone stands for the principle that all actions attempting to suppress evil, even failed actions, are necessary to uphold human dignity. After all, as one character notes, “no one could risk more than his life,” and this is true regardless of the impact of the action. Another resistor explains:

[W]e all acted alone, we were caught alone, and every one of us will have to die alone. But that doesn’t mean that we are alone [] or that our deaths will be in vain. Nothing in this world is done in vain, and since we are fighting for justice against brutality, we are bound to prevail in the end.

Despite its bleakness, Every Man Dies Alone is ultimately hopeful and is “dedicated [] to life, invincible life, life always triumphing over humiliation and tears, over misery and death.” A dark but uplifting tribute to human dignity and courage in the face of relentless brutality.

Wolf Hall Wins the Booker Prize

Wolf Hall: A Novel
Not since Life of Pi by Yann Martel won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 2002 has the favorite won. Until today, that is. Minutes ago, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall was announced as this year's Booker winner. The Times reports that Mantel's 650-page historical novel about the life and times of Thomas Cromwell edged out the competition "in a secret ballot by three votes to two." James Naughtie, chair of the judges panel, said that "Mantel’s book was the most towering achievement in a shortlist that resembled an alpine landscape of accomplishment."

Booksellers are thrilled with this result. Janine Cook, the fiction buyer for Waterstone’s, commented to the Times "that Wolf Hall was the sort of book that brought new readers to literary fiction."

Here's the publisher's description of the book:

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.

Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?

In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.

Nobel Prize in Literature Expected Thursday

It's turning into a big week for literary prizes - first the Booker later today, and now the Nobel. The Swedish Academy will announce this year's recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, October 8th. Like last year, this early announcement date suggests the Academy quickly came to a consensus on the winner.

For commentary about the potential winners and links to stories about the upcoming award, see Literary Saloon.

Leading Up to the Booker Prize

The 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction will be awarded tomorrow to "the very best book of the year" (keeping in mind that quite a lot of excellent books do not even qualify to enter the running). See the shortlist here. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a historical novel about the life and times of Thomas Cromwell, remains the current favorite to win. As always, the Prize garners a lot of attention, particularly in the UK. If you're following the Prize this year, you might be interested in some of these stories.

In a strange article that's half about Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol and half about the Booker shortlist, Robert McCrum in the Observer notes:

A lot of commentary, mine included, has focused on the "historical" nature of the shortlist, from Hilary Mantel's Tudor spellbinder Wolf Hall to Sarah Waters's psychodrama of austerity Britain (and homage to Josephine Tey) The Little Stranger. What no one has said, so far as I know, is that every one of these books is a cracking good read, a novel you can lose yourself in, with the childish gratification that good storytelling provides.

As Michael Prodger, a member of this year's Booker judging panel, notes in an article in the Telegrah, not everyone is happy with the shortlist's historical focus. The judges "have been accused of having a fear of the contemporary ... [b]ecause all six books are set in the past." Others suggest this shortlist is "part of the wider retrenchment brought on by the recession–comfort reading for uncomfortable times." Prodger hopes the Prize this year might go to a "truly significant book":

Statistically speaking, truly significant books – those that will still be read in 20 years time – don't come along every year but re-reading and re-re-reading our shortlist makes me think that we have at least a couple in there that will achieve that status.

Not everyone loves the Booker. Jenny Colgan at the Independent thinks "[t]he sense of sombre worthiness surrounding the awards drags everything down." For Colgan, "the Booker's enduring legacy ... is this: this is Grown-up Serious Reading and would all you little sentimental people who like being entertained please scuttle back to your tawdry little comics, your Katie Prices, threefers and celebrity autobiographies.

And what about those titles that didn't make the list? At the Chronicle Herald, Mary Jo Anderson is "less interested in the results of this year’s Booker Prize" because William Trevor's Love and Summer didn't make the shortlist. Anderson describes Love and Summer as "simply sublime," "spacious and profound," "deeply moving and technically brilliant," and "exactly the sort of novel that made me become addicted to novels and reading." I agree with Anderson's view of Love and Summer (see my review), and I would've liked to see the book on the shortlist.

Ben Meyers on Christmas Bestsellers

Ben Meyers makes his debut as a MobyLives contributor with a very funny piece about this season's Christmas bestsellers:

"Christmas best-sellers" is [a] code-word [for] "lame celebrity, stocking-fillers cash-ins". Books by twats off the telly, basically. Books for households that contain one book-–last year’s lame celebrity, stocking-filler cash in. By twats off the telly.

Here's more:

My point is this: the publishing industry is in a pretty poor state because the publishing industry doesn’t know what it is doing. Too long it has rested on its laurels, signing generic clichéd tat. Chick lit. Unfunny comedy books with quirky titles. Sub-Dan Brown–-and that’s pretty low—cash-ins. You know: meaningless crap that real people don’t bother with. And while regular book shops are doing badly in the UK, bargain bin, end-of-line bookshops are positively thriving. Which is good news for some of us. Because deep in the worst recession of many of our lifetimes, it is more economically viable to buy a stack of novels than it is to buy the equivalent in fire wood. Books will be keeping me warm this winter. Literally.

MobyLives is generally entertaining and often funny. I'm glad to see Meyers added to the mix of talented contributors.

Defamiliarization and Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine

Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading has an interesting post about the purpose of art. First, Scott cites Viktor Shklovsky (from Structuralism in Literature):

Habitualization devours objects, clothes, furniture, one's wife and the fear of war. "If all the complex lives of many go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been."

Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony. The end of art is to give a sensation of the object as seen, not as recognized.

The technique of art is to make things "unfamiliar," to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception. The act of perception in art is an end in itself and must be prolonged. In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product.

Scott then applies Shklovsky's concept of defamiliarization to Nicholson Baker's novel The Mezzanine, praising Baker's "great ability to defamiliarize those things that most of us probably have lost any ability to take any pleasure whatsoever in," like broken shoe laces and cardboard milk cartons. Scott's full post is well worth reading.