Literary License (short reviews, real opinions)

2011-12-25T21:03:00.005-06:00

4.5 out of 5: Luis Fiore just shot his wife in the face after a day of hunting with his family. This fictitious brutality serves as the plot hub for Scars, a 1969 novel by Argentine writer Juan José Saer (1937-2005) that was recently published in an English translation by Open Letter Books. Four spokes radiate outwards from the novel’s murderous hub, each one comprising a stand-alone vignette with a different protagonist and a unique connection, some intimate and some remote, to Fiore’s crime. Other than the final section of the novel, which is told in the voice of the murderer himself, the other three sections revolve around their own unrelated events and distinct motivators. With this unique structure, Saer seems to be making the point that even the most dramatic event matters only to those directly involved in it. For the rest, the event is merely a blip in everyday life.

In a very brief space, Saer creates four distinct protagonists. In the novel’s first section, a young journalist struggles to write daily (usually fictional) weather reports while living with his irritable mother. In the second and third sections, a lawyer is hopelessly addicted to gambling, and a judge recognizes the meaninglessness of his life. Even the judge’s hobby of translating Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray into Spanish adds nothing to the world (“Whole passages come out exactly the same as the versions of the professional translators.”). In the final section, the novel telescopes into Fiore’s day of hunting and his fatal moment of misjudgment.

Scars is a beautifully-structured lesson in humility and perspective, accented with sparkling, if dark, humor. Dolph’s lively translation captures the underlying play and tension in Saer’s writing. I would have preferred more resolution of the distinct stories and less focus on hyper-realistic details (do we really need to know every turn the judge makes in his car on his way to the office every time he makes the trip?). Nonetheless, Scars delivers the rare combination of entertaining suspense and thought-provoking, intelligent writing.

Literary License Reaches 1000 Posts

2011-12-21T17:42:00.003-06:00

Thanks to all of you loyal Literary License readers! More reviews are on the way!

Review of From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón (translated by Victoria Cribb)

2011-12-17T07:19:00.003-06:00

From the Mouth of the Whale
4 out of 5: Icelandic author Sjón’s latest novel follows the life of Jónas Pálmason, an Icelandic man sentenced to live out his life on a bleak and uninhabited island after being convicted of outlawry for practicing the arts of sorcery and necromancy. The novel, which is set in the years 1635-1639 when Jónas is in his mid-sixties, is Jónas’s poetic and surreal stream of consciousness touching on the major events of his life, including laying to rest a troublesome ghost who haunts a remote village and meeting and falling in love with his wife.

Aside from a brief trip to Copenhagen to plead his case, the whole of Jónas’s story is confined to his island. After years of solitude, Jónas’s identity has merged with that of his desolate surroundings:

I am the brother of all that divides, all that curls, all that intertwines, all that waves … after the day’s rain showers the web of the world becomes visible … the moment night falls, the beads of moisture glitter on its silver strings … nature is whole in its harmony.

Jónas’s weighty and formal voice makes his story feel almost Biblical, calling to mind the universal conflict between innovation and repression. And, like that of many visionaries throughout history, Jónas’s tale is filled with loathsome villains “who every day outlive their victims, sprawling in their high seats and thrones, gorging themselves on meat, dripping with grease, from the livestock that grew fat on the green grass in meadows tended with diligence by innocent, God-fearing souls; congratulating themselves on having stripped this man of his livelihood and that woman of her breadwinner.”

Victoria Cribb is to be commended for capturing Sjón’s unique voice in her English translation, a difficult task to be sure. While this is undeniably a fictional account of a man living during the 17th century, it shares few characteristics with those novels described as historical fiction. This is not a realistic rendering of a specific historical time and place so much as it is an exploration into the ravaged mind of a persecuted man. Reading From the Mouth of the Whale is like studying one of those gruesome Goya paintings of the interior of an early 19th century madhouse: a fascinating, if unsettling, experience.

A Review of The Book of Happenstance by Ingrid Winterbach (translated by Dirk and Ingrid Winterbach)

2011-11-10T19:11:00.005-06:00

The Book of Happenstance

3.5 out of 5: Open Letter Press recently published an English translation of The Book of Happenstance by well-known South African author Ingrid Winterbach. As the novel opens, Helena Verbloem has just moved to Durban, a port city on the east coast of South Africa, to undertake a special project. Verbloem is to work with the elegant and learned Theo Verway to create a compilation of obsolete Afrikaans words. She brings along her collection of seashells, which is a kind of spiritual talisman for her:

Meditating on the shells is one way of centering myself and lowering my levels of anxiety. These shells are a source of infinite beauty and wonder to me. I can rely on their beauty to divert me from vexation and discontent.

By page five we learn that Theo is to die within seven months and that Helena’s shells have been stolen by a burglar. Herlena spends the rest of the novel in a kind of spiritual quest. Not only is she seeking her shells, but she is also trying to understand her attachment to them. She enters into extended conversations with her coworkers about the origins of life on the planet and the miracle of evolution. Throughout it all, she examines her own life, which includes a lover who inspires nothing more than “great affection.”

Not much happens in The Book of Happenstance, but there is a pervasive sense of foreboding as if the narrative is suspended in a moment of pause right before a dramatic denouement. Clearly, this is Winterbach’s intent, and she goes so far as to have a friend of Helena’s vocalize this: “That’s how I would have liked to write if I could … with little happening ostensibly, but everything charged with meaning.” That promised drama never arrives, however, and I found myself wishing for either an exciting event or a resolution to the many subplots. On the whole, The Book of Happenstance was unsatisfying, though I enjoyed many of its constituent parts.

Review of The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am by Kjersti Skomsvold (translated by Kerri Pierce)

2011-10-14T14:20:00.003-05:00

The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am

4 out of 5: This debut by Norwegian Kjersti Skomsvold is a sparkling jewel of a novel. At around 140 smallish pages, The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am is not much more than a novella, really, but it tackles big themes like aging, mortality, and the loneliness of the human condition. The novel’s first-person narrator, Mathea Martinsen, has outlived her peers and is fed up with being invisible to the world. Even people Mathea interacts with take no notice of her, including the grocery store clerk: "When I give him my money, I touch the palm of his hand, but he doesn't notice. ... And if I was kidnapped five minutes later, and the cops came by and showed him my picture, the boy would say he'd never seen me before in his life."

In a quest to increase her social footprint, Mathea decides to take a series of actions to force people to notice her. She starts wearing a watch in the hopes someone will ask her what time it is, but nobody does. She bakes buns for a residents' meeting at her condominium but eats them all before mustering the courage to go to the meeting. She calls information and asks for her own number because "maybe Information keeps statistics as to the most requested and most loved person in the nation ... and I shouldn't just sit here moping around because my name isn't on it."

Because Mathea has always spent most of her time sequestered at home, her personality hasn’t been dulled by the hundreds of minor social corrections most of us experience every day. Her voice is a compelling mix of naiveté, blunt observations, and dark (often unintentional) humor. While reading passages like this one, I found myself alternating between cringing and laughing out loud: "I talked Epsilon [Mathea’s husband] into buying a rabbit, but didn't tell him it was because I couldn't be alone in the apartment anymore. He wouldn't understand. ‘I just love animals,’ I said. ‘Almost as much as Hitler did.’"

The ending of The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am is beautiful, tragic, and surprising. Best of all, it just might change the way you interact with the people around you who you’ve always ignored.

Literary License Fiction Round-Up

2011-09-17T14:14:00.007-05:00

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan: Nancy Horan’s debut novel—a fictionalized account of renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s adulterous relationship with Mamah Borthwirk Cheney—explores the tension between duty to family and freedom to pursue love. When Frank and Mamah, who hires Frank along with her husband to design a house for their family, fall in love, they are ostracized by their former friends and denigrated in the press. Horan portrays Frank and Mamah’s relationship unsentimentally and, at times, in an unflattering light. Frank and Mamah are self-absorbed and arrogant in their love, but Horan elicits sympathy for these two talented and passionate people who are confined by their society. Intelligent historical fiction.

The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine: A clever reimagining of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. When the husband of septuagenarian Betty Weissmann decides to divorce her to pursue a relationship with his much younger co-worker, Betty moves out of their shared Manhattan apartment into a dumpy beach cottage in Westport. Betty’s two unmarried, middle-aged daughters move in with her to provide emotional support but end up needing more support than Betty. Although Schine’s novel is loosely based on Sense and Sensibility, the novel’s resolution is original and unpredictable. Filled with clever dialog, quirky characters, and enough humor to maintain a light tone despite weighty issues like divorce, aging, and death, The Three Weissmanns of Westport is a perfect summer read.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett: Marina, a pharmacologist at a large pharmaceutical company, travels into the heart of the Amazon jungle to check up on a reclusive colleague (Dr. Swenson) engaged in researching a remote tribe that’s discovered the secret to lifelong fertility. Patchett has developed some wonderfully vivid characters, especially Dr. Swenson. The jungle is portrayed in lush detail, and the science is meticulously described. However, this novel is overloaded; there’s too much science, too much complicated backstory, and too many long passages devoted to characterization. The overall effect is a sluggish read, and Marina doesn’t even make it into the jungle until midway through the novel. State of Wonder is a worthwhile read but doesn’t live up to all the hype.

Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman: Despite the fact that most of us spend the majority of our waking hours sitting at our office desks, there are relatively few novels that explore this setting. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris is one good example of such a book, and, now, Domestic Violets can be added to the (relatively short) list. Clearly, Norman has some experience with office work. He portrays the petty feuds, the office flirtations, the awkward boss-employee relationships, the stolen afternoons at the golf course, and the overall cynicism that monotonous office work can breed perfectly. Other aspects of this novel ring true to life, including the marital difficulties and the challenges of the writer's life, but I most appreciated Norman's treatment of office life. Norman tempers the novel's cynical tone with plenty of humor to create an enjoyable read.

A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards

2011-08-20T20:01:00.003-05:00

A Cupboard Full of Coats

4.5 out of 5: Yvvette Edwards’s debut novel, A Cupboard Full of Coats, is an elegantly structured story of guilt and redemption. Fourteen years after her mother’s murder, Jinx still blames herself for her role in the crime. She is living alone and in a state of emotional exile in London’s East End, separated from her husband and young son, when Lemon arrives on her doorstep unexpectedly: “He just knocked, that was all, knocked the front door and waited, like he’d just come back with the paper from the corner shop, and the fourteen years since he’d last stood there, the fourteen years since the night I’d killed my mother, hadn’t really happened at all.” An old friend of Jinx’s mom and her abusive husband, Lemon blames himself for the death. Lemon’s arrival sparks “some kind of voyage of discovery” for Jinx and Lemon as they spend the next few days revisiting old wounds and reliving past events.

Jinx’s first-person narration is emotionally raw and brutally honest. Her edgy voice is counterbalanced by Lemon’s melodic, Caribbean diction. Over several days, the healing process begins as Lemon breaks down Jinx’s self-defenses with home-cooked meals and other ministrations, including a foot massage that left Jinx a “shapeless, boneless heap of melted contentment.” Edwards’s vivid language captures the full range of human appetites and emotions with admirable precision. Jinx’s dark thoughts are portrayed in clipped, brusque sentences—“I wanted to kill him. I’d been angry before in the past, but nothing on this scale ever. I wanted him dead”—but the passages of longing and desire are flowing and sensuous:

“He’d cooked oxtail and butter beans for dinner, with small round dumplings the size of marbles, brought it to me in my bedroom on a tray, waited while I adjusted the pillows behind my back and smoothed a level space on the duvet for him to put it down. … The meat was so tender it fell from the bone, melting inside my mouth, the gravy spicy and so compelling I found myself unable to stop eating even when the plate was empty, sucking out every crevice of the bones, using my mouth like a bottom-feeder, my tongue like a young girl French-kissing an orange.”

The narrative alternates between the present day interactions of Jinx and Lemon and Jinx’s memories of her mother’s last months of life, culminating in the events leading up to her violent death. A Cupboard Full of Coats is a masterfully structured novel, building suspense even though the ending is revealed on the first page. Impressive in its psychological complexity, this is one of the best novels I’ve read this year.

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? By Johan Harstad (translated by Deborah Dawkin)

2011-08-17T06:53:00.003-05:00

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?: A Novel
4.5 out of 5: “The person you love is 72.8 percent water and there’s been no rain for weeks.” So begins Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?, the impressive debut novel by Norwegian author Johan Harstad and translated into English by Deborah Dawkin. After losing his girlfriend and his job, first-person narrator Mattias leaves his home in Stavanger, Norway to travel with a friend’s rock band to a concert on the remote Faroe Islands, located halfway between Scotland and Iceland. Following a series of events he can’t remember and carrying an inexplicable pocketful of cash, Mattias ends up living in a kind of commune for people existing somewhere between a mental institution and normal society. Their limited interaction with the world matches Mattias’s own desire to disappear:

"I’d decided I didn’t need to be the best, the most popular, or even liked, I just wanted to find myself a vacant space and stay there, do my thing, maybe I was just frightened of disrupting something, of knocking the world out of its delicate balance by being in the way, in the wrong place, if I was too visible, tied people to me."

Buzz Aldrin is a long, blowsy, meandering novel crammed full of digressions and unnecessary scenes. Mattias’s extreme passivity and self-destructive tendencies have the potential to annoy readers, and, near the novel’s end, Harstad introduces some plot elements (including a journey and some secret psychiatry files) that seem overly contrived. Nevertheless, these narrative flaws are more than made up for by this novel’s abundant charms. From the very beginning of Mattias’s story, I was hooked by his voice, a compelling mix of humility, melancholy, earnestness, and humor:

“It is a Tuesday. There can be no doubt about that. I see it in the light, the traffic outside the windows will continue to stream all day, slowly, disinterestedly, people driving back and forth out of habit rather than necessity. Tuesday. The week’s most superfluous day. A day that almost nobody notices among all the other days. I read somewhere, I don’t remember where, that statistics showed there were 34 percent fewer appointments made on an average Tuesday than on any other day. On a worldwide basis. That’s how it is. On the other hand a much greater number of funerals are held on Tuesdays than during the rest of the week. They sort of bunch up, you never get on top of it.”

Buzz Aldrin is filled with an emotional exuberance that’s rare and a joy to experience. Deborah Dawkin’s translation preserves that exuberance along with the brisk pace of Mattias’s narration. Over the course of almost 500 pages, I became thoroughly immersed in Mattias’s world, and even though I finished reading Buzz Aldrin more than a week ago, I still wonder how he’s doing. My strong emotional connection to this story proves what Mattias eventually realizes: “[E]ven an invisible person will be seen in the end, as a white aura flickering through nature, and there are no places to hide.”

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin (translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim)

2011-07-30T09:50:00.003-05:00

Please Look After Mom

4 out of 5: In Please Look After Mom, Korean author Kyung-sook Shin gives us a beautifully written (and translated) admonishment not to take our parents for granted. When an elderly mother (Park So-nyo) goes missing from the platform of a Seoul train station, her four adult children are plagued with guilt. Why didn’t they offer to pick up their mother from the station after her journey into the city from the country? Why didn’t they pay more attention to her after moving away from home? Why were they such ungrateful children?

The novel is told in alternating perspectives, beginning with So-nyo’s daughter. Shin’s unusual use of the second-person point of view depicts each narrator’s thoughts as an internal dialog:

When you first heard Mom had gone missing, you angrily asked why nobody from your large family went to pick her and Father up at Seoul Station. ‘And where were you?’ Me? You clammed up. You didn’t find out about Mom’s disappearance until she’d been gone four days. You all blamed each other for Mom’s going missing, and you all felt wounded.

This technique brings much-needed dynamism to a story that mostly takes place inside the narrators’ minds in the form of memories and guilt-laden thoughts. Shin depicts the life of a family as a complicated web of ever-changing relationships. Never over-sentimental, Please Look After Mom succeeds as a sensitive and powerful examination of the selflessness of parental love.

A Review of Victor Halfwit by Thomas Bernhard (translated by Martin Chalmers and illustrated by Sunandini Banerjee)

2011-07-30T09:46:00.002-05:00

Victor Halfwit: A Winter's Tale

4.5 out of 5: Victor Halfwit is a (very) short story by Thomas Bernhard. Seagull Books, with the help of translator Martin Chalmers and the invaluable contribution of illustrator Sunandini Banerjee, has elevated this story to a work of art with this lavishly illustrated edition. What would easily fit on two pages has been spread over more than two hundred pages, many of which contain just a couple words or even no words at all. Without a doubt, Banerjee’s illustrations take center stage in this production. Composed of intricately layered collages in lush colors, these illustrations are gorgeous and eye-catching. Their surrealistic elements and juxtapositions of images from different time periods complement Bernhart’s prose, and the book’s high production value, including thick creamy paper and flawless color printing, show off Banerjee’s art to great effect. Bernhardt’s simple fable, however, cannot support the weight of its powerful artistic accompaniment and ultimately reveals itself to be nothing more than flimsy scaffolding. Read this book for the art or give it as a gift but don’t expect much from the story.

A Review of Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras (translated by Frank Wynne)

2011-07-17T16:10:00.002-05:00

Kamchatka

4 out of 5: Kamchatka, a novel by Marcelo Figueras, is a fictional first-person remembrance of childhood in Argentina during the Dirty War (1976-1983), a time of political instability and government-sponsored violence when thousands of civilians were “disappeared.” The story begins when the narrator, then a ten-year-old boy, is uprooted from his comfortable life in Buenos Aries and forced to go into hiding in the country with his activist parents and younger brother.

Kamchatka is a realistic imagining of a child’s experience of political turmoil. The potential dangers take the form of vague references in overheard conversations and other oblique manifestations. In general, the narrator spends most of his time describing his (often humorous) exploits with his younger brother, his attempts to emulate Harry Houdini’s daring escapes, and his love of Superman. The overall effect is that of a happy childhood occasionally marred by darker overtones (e.g., the unexpected and unexplained death of a young family friend and the need to assume fake names). The narrator’s voice is charmingly naïve and optimistic except for those instances where his adult persona intrudes on his childhood experiences with over-long lectures on academic topics like astronomy or the changing concept of fatherhood over time. Kamchatka would have been better without these digressions, but the novel still succeeds as a tribute to the resilience of children and the strength of family, even in the most difficult circumstances.

A Review of Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

2011-07-17T15:49:00.002-05:00

Cold Comfort Farm (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

4 out of 5: In Stella Gibbons’s contemporary classic novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932), the orphaned, 20-year-old Flora moves in with distant relatives living on a remote farm in Sussex, England. Accustomed to glamorous London, Flora is not equipped to handle the hardscrabble life of a farmer, but with unflagging enthusiasm, she makes the best of her bleak circumstances. Flora sets about improving the farm and the lives of its inhabitants, who have suffered under the tyrannical influence of Aunt Ada Doom for many years.

Flora’s first glimpse of Cold Comfort Farm is anything but cheery:

Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.

As this overwrought passage suggests, Cold Comfort Farm is intended as a parody of the sentimental and grim novels of rural life popular during Gibbons’s lifetime (see, e.g., Mary Webb’s The Golden Arrow). Despite a limited (or nonexistent?) collective memory of books like Webb’s, Gibbons’s parody remains fresh and accessible and, most importantly, hilarious. Overall, Cold Comfort Farm is an entertaining and unique reading experience.

A Review of Stone Upon Stone by Mysliwski Wieslaw (translated by Bill Johnston)

2011-07-06T21:04:00.002-05:00

Stone Upon Stone

4.5 out of 5: Stone Upon Stone is the first-person narration of the fictional life of Szymek Pietruszka, a Polish farmer living during and after World War II. At various points in Szymek’s life, this proud bachelor worked as a barber, a fighter in the resistance against the German occupation of Poland, and a government administrator. With charming honesty and rambunctious humor, Szymek covers all the details of his life from the banal (the proper technique for mowing a field), to the lurid (his womanizing and knife-fighting) and the universal (his deep love of family and the land).

As Poland rushes towards modernization, Szymek attempts to establish a sense of purpose and stability in his life. In particular, he seeks permanence in the form of an elaborate family tomb, despite the fact that nobody else in his family seems interested in the project. The building of the tomb provides an overall framework for Szymek’s story; it is the physical embodiment of his metaphysical struggles. Although Szymek’s lengthy monologues are occasionally tedious, his (often unintentional) humor keeps the story lively and entertaining. Only Szymek, for example, could turn dangerous food shortages into something funny:

No one bothered setting snares anymore, there was no point when they had rifles, handguns, automatic pistols. And how many hares could there be left after that long of a war? When you saw one hopping by somewhere it was like seeing a miracle. Look, a hare, a hare! And it didn’t even look much like a hare, it’d have its ears shot away or a missing leg and it’d be peg-legging it along more like an old man than a hare.

Szymek’s no-nonsense attitude often leads to distasteful actions (like the time he sold his dog to a dogcatcher to get money to go to a dance) but also provides a hopeful contrast to the often bleak postwar conditions:

I was always more interested in living than in dying. Living and living, as long as I could, as much as I could. Even if there was no reason to. Though does it matter all that much whether there’s a reason or no? Maybe it actually makes no difference, and we’re just wasting our time worrying about it. … People don’t need to know everything. Horses don’t know things and they go on living. And bees, for instance, if they knew it was humans they were collecting honey for, they wouldn’t do it. How are people any better than horses or bees?

This 500+ page novel will reward the patient reader with a remarkably detailed understanding of postwar life in rural Poland and, by extension, the human condition in general.

Literary License Fiction Round-Up

2011-06-17T21:00:00.010-05:00

A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear by Atiq Rahimi (translated by Sarah Maguire and Yama Yari): In Kabul in 1979 Farhad, a 21-year-old university student, is out after curfew to celebrate a friend’s imminent escape to Pakistan. After suffering a vicious beating by soldiers on patrol, a mysterious and brave woman rescues the unconscious Farhad from the sewer. A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear consists of Farhad’s splintered memories and dreams mixed with his brief moments of lucidity as Fahad slowly returns to awareness. A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear is a disturbing and masterful depiction of the harrowing circumstances suffered by both men and women in war-torn Afghanistan.

A Thread of Sky by Deanna Fei: Spurred on by the unexpected death of her husband, Irene Shen organizes a trip back to her family’s Chinese homeland for herself, her three daughters, her sister, and her mother. Told from alternating perspectives, this novel of family (dys)functioning touches on just about every drama-filled issue imaginable. Although never boring, A Thread of Sky takes on too many topics to address them all with satisfying depth. Nevertheless, the novel is a thought-provoking look at family dynamics on the road.

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles: This debut novel is a Wharton-esque tale of post-Depression New York City during the year 1938. The action follows the ever-morphing relationships of several young men and women as their fortunes rise and fall, seemingly overnight. The self-assured voice of 25-year-old Katey Kontent leads the reader through it all with confidence and verve. Rules of Civility is an entertaining exploration of the whims of Fortune.

Seven Years by Peter Stamm (translated by Michael Hoffman): In this novel of obsessive love, Alex, an architectural student in Munich, vacillates between his admiration for a fellow-student (Sonya) and his irrational attraction to a dumpy, taciturn Polish woman (Ivona). Although Alex eventually marries Sonya and starts an architectural firm with her, he remains strangely drawn to Ivona. What at first seems to be Alex’s inexplicable obsession with an unworthy woman is slowly revealed to be Alex’s desire for unconditional love and the freedom such a love provides. Seven Years is a masterful exploration of forbidden love and its consequences.

A Review of Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke (translated from the Chinese by Cindy Carter)

2011-06-03T19:46:00.002-05:00

Dream of Ding Village

4 out of 5: In Yan Lianke’s novel, Dream of Ding Village, a remote, agricultural village in China suffers from an AIDS epidemic. Ten years ago, the inhabitants of Ding Village sold their blood to blood collectors to increase their wealth and improve their standard of living. While the blood sales allowed the villagers to replace their traditional mud and thatch huts with two-story houses made of brick and tile, the unclean blood collection practices infected many villagers with AIDS. This novel’s disturbing premise is based on the true story of the 1990s AIDS scandal in Henan Province.

The novel is narrated from the grave by the murdered son of Ding Village’s primary blood collector. The dead boy describes the slow and painful deaths of the AIDS-infected villagers, as well as the actions taken by the villagers in response to the calamity. Some attempt to profit from the tragedy (stealing from the sick or selling coffins, for example) while others seek to alleviate the pain of the sufferers or to bring hope to the dying. Lianke’s prose embodies a sing-song, repetitive quality reminiscent of an oral storytelling tradition, and the plight of the dying villagers is reflected and magnified by the parallel destruction of the village’s land, which suffers from drought and neglect.

Dream of Ding Village occasionally loses focus and, near the end, approaches absurdity with a complicated subplot about arranged marriages between dead people. While a tighter narrative would have increased this novel’s power, Dream of Ding Village remains a compelling portrayal of humanity’s ever-present potential for self-destruction.

A Review of The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Michael Emmerich

2011-05-15T08:07:00.003-05:00

The Lake

3.5 out of 5: The Lake, the latest novel by well-known Japanese novelist Banana Yoshimoto, is an enigmatic love story told from the first-person perspective of Chihiro, a muralist and “going on thirty” daughter of unmarried parents. Chihiro’s unconventional childhood and the recent death of her mother contribute to her sense of isolation and unrest, and she spends hours staring out of the window of her Tokyo apartment. Eventually she notices a man (Nakajima) across the street engaged in the same activity, and they forge a window-to-window relationship made up of shy glances, waves, and smiles. As the connection grows, the couple spends increasing amounts of time together in Chihiro’s apartment, and Chihiro learns Nakajima is haunted by a terrible past experience. Ultimately, Chihiro must decide whether to commit to a relationship with the mysterious and damaged Nakajima.

In her typically compact style, Yoshimoto creates a relationship of ever-increasing power with minimal words. The conversational casualness of the prose keeps the story rocketing along. While the overall effect is potent, the story is marred by too many clichés (“sleep like a log,” “bored me to death”). It’s difficult to know whether such imperfections arise out of the translation or from a conscious choice by Yoshimoto to give Chihiro a naïve and relatively uneducated voice, but, either way, the resulting prose is often uninspiring. Nevertheless, The Lake is a unique love story and a quick, entertaining read.

A Review of Beautiful & Pointless by David Orr

2011-04-24T07:07:00.003-05:00

Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry

In honor of Poetry Month (April), here’s another piece on poetry:

Despite its subtitle, Beautiful & Pointless is not really a “guide” to modern poetry. I would call it more of a meditation. Orr, the poetry critic for the New York Times Book Review, doesn’t really explain the various poetic forms or the different methods for deconstructing and understanding a poem. He doesn’t give any helpful tips to the beginner for how to read and appreciate poetry. Instead, Orr describes his task as “try[ing] to give you a sense of what modern poets think about, how those poets talk about what they're thinking about, and most important, how an individual poetry reader relates to the art he usually likes, always loves, and is frequently annoyed by.”

Using many examples of contemporary poetry, Orr discusses how poets inject the personal into their poetry (and, just as importantly, how some poets avoid the personal altogether) and how poets address and respond to current politics through poetry. There’s a chapter on form, but its main point seems to be that contemporary poets feel free to bend the rules of form. Two chapters (titled “ambition” and “the fishbowl”) discuss the inner workings of the poetry world, from the aspirations of contemporary poets to their reactions to each other to the difficulty in getting poetry published these days, much less read. A regular reader of poetry will find much of interest in Beautiful & Pointless and is likely to discover even more reasons to love poetry. For the poetry novice, however, this book is not the best choice of a guide as it assumes a certain, not insignificant level of prior knowledge and appreciation. In the book’s last chapter, Orr attempts to identify what makes poetry (both in the writing and reading) worthwhile. He dismisses the predominant views (i.e. poetry’s special connection to language, to ourselves, or to our society/culture and concludes that “[p]oetry is a small, vulnerable human activity no better or more powerful than thousands of other small, vulnerable human activities” such as gardening or movie watching. In the end, Orr believes we read poetry simply because we love it: it “seems beautifully pointless, or pointlessly beautiful.”

Lodgings by Andrzej Sosnowski (translated from the Polish by Benjamin Paloff)

2011-04-16T10:16:00.003-05:00

Lodgings: Selected Poems 1987-2010

I'm certainly not qualified to review poetry, so this isn't a review, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to tell you about Lodgings, the latest book published by Open Letter (one of my absolute favorite publishers). We are very lucky to get this opportunity to read Andrezej Sosnowski’s poetry in English. Lodgings in the first book-length collection of Sosnowski’s poetry to be translated into English from the Polish, and translator Benjamin Paloff has done a marvelous job capturing Sosnowski’s dream-like imagery and contrasting tones. This collection includes poems from nine of Sosnowski’s books, spanning more than twenty years of work (1987-2010).

Although I’m not an educated poetry critic, I am a longtime poetry appreciator. I know what I like, and Sosnowski’s poetry definitely qualifies. It’s challenging and often nonsensical on the first reading, but the lush imagery leaves me in a pleasant, rather than an annoying, fog of confusion. In each poem, I usually discover a line or two that really grabs my attention and encourages me to read the poem several times over so as to untangle its meaning. Meaning often shifts from line to line. These poems demand an open-minded and flexible reader.

To give you a sense of Sosnowski’s style (and Paloff’s translation), here are a couple of my favorite lines from two of the poems included in Lodgings.

From “Warsaw”:

Yesterday, after the paper, they were giving out a new hymn, actually /

a two-for-one mazurka and dream cake in chocolate sauce /

garnished with candied angelica, and today on the stairs and in the elevator /

the smell of mint chewing gum so that once again like the speech /

bubble in a comic strip it’s going to follow me all day.

From “Life in Korea”:

The intellect dozes a little, /

the senses have their turn, and again I’m seized /

by the lovely things of this world: apples, water, milk, /

purest air. And once you get it, /

that you haven’t earned these or any other /

fifteen minutes, you can have a drink, /

smash your world to pieces, and at long last /

think it over.

A Review of Open City by Teju Cole

2011-04-12T18:45:00.003-05:00

Open City: A Novel

4 out of 5: From the very first paragraph, Teju Cole’s debut novel Open City announces itself as the tale of a wanderer:

And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city. … These walks, a counterpoint to my busy days at the hospital, steadily lengthened, taking me farther and farther afield each time, so that I often found myself at quite a distance from home late at night, and was compelled to return home by subway. In this way, at the beginning of the final year of my psychiatry fellowship, New York City worked itself into my life at walking pace.

As Julius, a Nigerian immigrant, meanders around Manhattan (and also around Brussels during a vacation trip), he ruminates on an astonishing array of topics. Chapter One touches on bird migrations, classical music radio programs, the art of listening, memory and the practice of memorizing, the failure of Tower Records and Blockbuster, and the recent death of a neighbor's wife. And that’s just the first chapter. Julius transitions from subject to subject effortlessly, if a bit randomly, reflecting on serious subjects as well as lighter ones. Like a cafe conversation with an intelligent and educated friend, nothing much happens in Open City and yet the book is never boring.

Julius’s sense of isolation permeates his thoughts, creating a somber tone for the novel, which is further compounded by recent events including the September 11th terrorist attacks and Julius’s breakup with his girlfriend. Residents and frequent visitors to New York City will recognize Julius’s path through that great city’s distinct neighborhoods, which he meticulously describes with street names, subway stops, and notable landmarks. Those without much experience or interest in the city may be bored by the specificity, but it’s easy enough to skim past these details. Overall, Open City is a thought-provoking meditation on the important (and some of the not so important) issues we all confront in contemporary America and Europe.

A Review of Solo by Rana Dasgupta

2011-04-04T16:00:00.006-05:00

Solo

4 out of 5: Solo by Rana Dasgupta is a diptych of a novel composed of two related but independent halves. In the first half, a blind, 100-year-old Bulgarian man named Ulrich reminiscences about his life from the vantage point of his squalid apartment overlooking a train station in Sofia, the Bulgarian town in which Ulrich spent the vast majority of his life. Though graphically limited, Ulrich’s life touches many of the important moments in modern history, beginning with the last years of the Ottoman Empire and continuing through both World Wars, the Nazi and Russian occupations, post-war Communism, and eventually up to contemporary, independent Bulgaria.

Ulrich’s imaginative life is just as vivid as his actual life, and the second half of Solo is made up of Ulrich’s daydreams. Beginning as a series of distinct stories and characters, Ulrich’s daydreams become gradually more intricate and interrelated. Ulrich’s imaginative “children” include a young, ambitious Georgian woman and her shiftless brother, a Bulgarian musical prodigy, and an American executive of a record company. Their stories converge in contemporary New York City, where Ulrich inserts himself as a character in his own daydreams. In lush prose, Solo confronts the consequences of abandoned dreams and explores the relationship between life as it is lived in reality and as it unfolds in the imagination. Many of Ulrich’s creations stretch credulity (How does an elderly, blind Bulgarian man know about the internal politics at an American record company?), but these flights of fancy don’t detract from the overall effect. Ultimately, Solo suggests the life of the mind can be just as soul-sustaining as the life of day-to-day reality:

Thinking back, [Ulrich] is surprised at the quantity of time he spent in daydreams. His private fictions have sustained him from one day to the next, even as the world itself has become nonsense. It never occurred to him to consider that the greatest portion of his spirit might have been poured into this creation. But it is not a despairing conclusion. His daydreams were a life’s endeavor of sorts, and now, when everything else is cast off, they are still at hand.

Do I Like Every Book I Read?

2011-04-02T10:02:00.003-05:00

Some of you have noticed that the vast majority of my recent reviews have been favorable. Have I gone soft? No. I've just decided that, with the limited time I have, I'm not particularly interested in taking the time to write reviews for books I don't like. Although my reviews are generally short, each one takes at least an hour to write and most take several hours. I've got a substantial list of books I've read recently that I would rate no better than a 3.5 out of 5 (some would be 1/5 or 2/5). I keep meaning to write up a few of those reviews to mix in with my more favorable reviews, but since that task is so much less pleasant than writing a positive review of a book I'm excited to tell you about, I never seem to get around to it. For every review posted here at Literary License, there's at least one review (and often more) that never gets written. So, rest assured, I haven't lost my objectivity. I've just lost the motivation to tell you about books I don't like.

A Review of Funeral for a Dog by Thomas Pletzinger (translated by Ross Benjamin)

2011-03-27T05:43:00.000-05:00

Funeral for a Dog: A Novel

4.5 out of 5: Thomas Pletzinger’s imaginative novel, Funeral for a Dog, proceeds on two parallel planes. One plane is inhabited by the present-day diary entries of German journalist/ethnographer Daniel Mandelkern recording a brief visit to the Italian lakeside home of reclusive children’s book author Dirk Svensson. The other plane consists of Svensson’s previously-written memoir about his travels through New York City at the time of the September 11th terrorist attacks and through remote regions of Brazil. As Mandelkern attempts to draw enough material out of Svensson for a 3000-word profile piece, he gradually loses hold over his original purpose and, further encouraged by his discovery of Svensson’s memoir in a locked suitcase, perseverates on his own personal crisis:

I’m lying between books and people, between words and bodies. My language is of
no use for decisions, each word is only true for a few seconds, then it dries and turns to paper …. Svensson has decided on things: he lives in a ruin, now he chops the old wood, he jumps in the clear, reliable water. Is that how one should live (is that how I should live)?

Funeral for a Dog is many things. It’s a novel about parallel searches for identity and meaning, a recording of the events of a five-day house party, a mystery about the death of a friend, and a chronicle of the slow decline of an elderly, three-legged dog. Scenes peppered with the funhouse imagery of carousels, roller coasters, and cotton candy alternate with those filled with dark foreboding.

In Funeral for a Dog, Pletzinger delivers a challenging and innovative novel that asks more questions than it answers as it wallows in the kind of directionless seeking that has become a hallmark of postmodern fiction. This puzzle of a novel is filled with echoes, repetitions, and reflections, which are carefully preserved by Benjamin’s adept translation. In a Mobius-worthy trick, the last page of the novel loops right back to the first page. Rather than leading towards clarity, Funeral for a Dog proves clarity is an illusion. This high-energy read will frustrate some readers, but those willing to commit to the journey will be rewarded with an intelligent and creative portrayal of the intermingling of love and loss, life and death.

A Review of Agaat by Marlene Van Niekerk (translated by Michiel Heyns)

2011-03-22T18:05:00.006-05:00

Agaat

5 out of 5: At the beginning of this epic novel, seventy-year-old Milla de Wet is confined to her bed. Once the strong and competent owner of a successful farm inherited from her mother, Milla suffers from A.L.S. and now is left with only the ability to blink her eyes and, after a while, not even that. Milla is entirely dependent on the ministrations of Agaat, her devoted house servant, who wordlessly promises Milla “the best-managed death in history.” It is 1996 in South Africa, just two years after the demise of apartheid.

From this confined vantage point, Milla narrates her adult life story, beginning with her troubled marriage to the dashing, if agriculturally-challenged, Jak de Wet in 1947. Soon after she and Jak settle on her farm, Milla decides to take in and raise the abused young daughter of a farm laborer, renaming the girl Agaat. Long unable to have a child of her own, Milla eventually gives birth to a son named Jakkie, marginalizing Agaat’s position in the family. Over time, Milla and Agaat develop a complex co-dependency, as do Jakkie and Agaat, while Jak becomes jealous of Agaat’s hold over both his wife and his son. Agaat forms the center of a decades-long, multi-dimensional game of tug-o-war: “a pivot she was, a kingpin, you’d felt for a while now how the parts gyrated around her, faster and faster, even though she was the least.”

Agaat is about many things, including marriage, parenting, friendship, sickness, and death. Politically-minded readers will find plenty of support for interpreting the novel as an allegory for apartheid, while those with more domestic interests will appreciate the details on embroidery, ecologically-sensitive farming practices, and home-based nursing procedures. Perhaps Agaat’s most important lesson concerns the importance of communication to achieving lasting change. The best education and carefully constructed systems cannot bridge the gap between master and servant, between white and black. Rather, true understanding is possible only after years of empathetic communication. As Milla nears death, she and Agaat have finally approached this kind of understanding:

[The doctor’s] face looms above mine. He looks at my eyes as if they were the eyes of an octopus, as if he’s not quite sure where an octopus’s eyes are located, as if he doesn’t know what an octopus sees. He shines a little light into my face, he swings it from side to side. I look at him hard, but seeing, he cannot see.
Agaat catches my eye. Wait, let me see, she says.
[The doctor] stands aside. He shakes his head.
Agaat’s face is above me, her cap shines white, she looks into my eyes. I blink them for her so that she can see what I think. The effrontery! They think that if you don’t stride around on your two legs and make small talk about the weather, then you’re a muscle mass with reflexes and they come and flash lights in your face. Tell the man he must clear out.
A small flicker ripples across Agtaat’s face. Ho now hopalong! it means. Her apron creaks as she straightens up. Her translation is impeccable.
She says thank you doctor. She says doctor is welcome to leave now, she’s feeling better. She says thank you for the help, thank you for the oxygen, we can carry on here by ourselves again now.
I close my eyes. He must think she’s crazy.
Again the fingers snapping in front of my face.
She’s conscious, really, doctor, you can leave her alone now, she’s just tired, when she shuts her eyes like that then I know. Everything’s in order, she says, she just wants to sleep now. I know, I know her ways.

Milla’s disease has the potential to reduce this nearly 600-page novel into an exercise in claustrophobia, but, instead, Van Niekerk has created a work of stunning breadth and emotional potency. Milla’s second-person narration is liberally broken up by her diary entries, which Agaat has decided to read to Milla during her last days, and by italicized paragraphs of Milla’s stream-of-consciousness musings. Van Niekerk is a poet as well as a novelist, and her considerable poetic abilities are on display throughout the novel. Likewise, Michiel Heyns’s masterful work yields an English translation with all the elegant power of the original language. These various elements come together in Agaat to create an unforgettable reading experience that transcends the lives of its four primary characters to implicate the broader world.

This review also appears at Three Percent in a slightly different form. Agaat is longlisted for the 2011 Best Translated Book Award (BTBA), and my review is part of the "Why This Book Should Win the BTBA" series at Three Percent, which covers each of the twenty-five longlisted titles.

2011 Best Translated Book Award

2011-03-17T21:19:00.003-05:00

The Best Translated Book Award (BTBA) was founded in 2007 for the purpose of recognizing the very best international works of fiction and poetry published in original English translations (i.e. not retranslations or reprints). The shortlist for this year's award will be announced on March 24th. Go here to see the list of the twenty-five titles on the longlist for this year's award, which covers books published between Dec. 1, 2009 and Nov. 30, 2010.

Much of my reading each year focuses on works in translation, so I have been an avid follower of the BTBA since it's founding. I am thrilled to have the honor of serving on the panel of fiction judges for next year's BTBA, covering books published between Dec. 1, 2010 and Nov. 30, 2011. This means I'll be posting lots of reviews of translated books here at Literary License over the next year. Also, if you come across a new translation you think deserves to be considered for the BTBA, please leave me a comment or send me an e-mail.

A Review of On Elegance While Sleeping by Viscount Lascano Tegui (translated by Idra Novey)

2011-03-16T17:47:00.007-05:00

On Elegance While Sleeping

4 out of 5: Emilio Lascano Tegui (1887-1966) was, at various times during his eventful life, an Argentinean, a Parisian, a self-labeled viscount, a translator, a journalist, a curator, a painter, a decorator, a diplomat, a mechanic, an orator, a dentist, and, fortunately for us, a writer. Tegui’s 1925 novel On Elegance While Sleeping, a cult classic in Argentina, Tegui’s home country, is now available for the first time to an English-speaking audience (thanks to Dalkey Archive Press and translator Idra Novey). This genre-defying novel is framed as a four-year series of chronologically-ordered diary entries composed by an unnamed French infantryman in the late 1800s. Like its author, this novel’s narrator concerns himself with a bit of everything, including the proverbial kitchen sink (or, should I say, the cultivation of carrots). The entries touch on the themes of life, illness (specifically, syphilis), death, sex, gender, memory, crime, and literature, to name just a few. Seamlessly shifting among present reflections, past recollections, and stories within stories, the entries examine the mundane (one begins “Cotton mittens bother me when they’re dyed black.”) as well as the sublime (“Nothing spreads sadness like popularity.”) and range in length from just two sentences to almost seven pages. The result is a work of art that’s impossible to categorize. Is it autobiography? Allegory? A crime novel? An experiment in form? In a word, yes.

Just before we lose our bearings wandering among this heady collection of seemingly aimless thoughts—that is, at the perfect moment—On Elegance While Sleeping changes registers. The novel adopts a foreboding tone as the diary entries slowly coalesce into the thoughts of a man intent on committing murder. Driven by a Raskolnikov-like need “[t]o unburden humanity of an imperfect being: a weakness,” the diarist lays out his motivations in chilling and poetic prose:

I’ve sketched out my plans and am ready. I have a new strength in me, taken from the secret core of my life, driving me on, controlling me. It’s health, youth, and optimism combined. Until yesterday, my tentative novel (“The Syphilis of Don Juan”) served as a haven for my imagination. Today, it doesn’t satisfy my thirst—or, better said, can no longer stem the anguish that gnaws at me on the eve of an act that is now quite inevitable. I’m halfway between a comedy and a strange sort of drama, and feel an overbearing need to lower the curtain. No simple curtain: the front curtain of the stage, the grand drape, the great iron and asbestos curtain that drops like a zinc plate from the sixth floor and creaks as it falls. Something like that, flamboyant, coarse, unexpected—something that will impose its tyranny over my life without question. I’m going to kill someone.

Tegui’s prose is a seductive mix of hard edges and soft contours, flowing musings and sharp declarations. Translator Idra Novey maintains this delicate balance, juxtaposing “a haven for my imagination” with “the anguish that gnaws” and following a complex and elegant three-sentence metaphor with the startling declaration, “I’m going to kill someone.” Tegui’s compelling style relies as much on rhythm and sound as it does on content, and Novey masterfully recreates this effect in English.

At its core, On Elegance While Sleeping gives us access to the soul of a man who is desperately seeking. Whether it’s love, sex, happiness, connection with his fellow man, an imaginative outlet, or simply a good story, the problem is the same: to find what he lacks. He asks, “Could it be that the thing I’m missing is courage?” Does our diarist have the fortitude to follow through with his murderous plan? To discover the answer, you’ll have to read the book.

This review also appears at Three Percent in a slightly different form. On Elegance While Sleeping is longlisted for the 2011 Best Translated Book Award (BTBA), and my review is part of the "Why This Book Should Win the BTBA" series at Three Percent, which covers each of the twenty-five longlisted titles.

A Review of Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

2011-03-09T04:52:00.001-06:00

Skippy Dies: A Novel

4 out of 5: As might be guessed from its title, one of the primary characters (14-year-old Skippy) dies within this novel’s first few pages. After that unexpected death, which interrupts a doughnut-eating contest between roommates, the narrative jumps backwards in time to cover the events leading up to that fateful event. Along the way, Skippy Dies touches on every imaginable component of adolescent life in the context of a group of young students at Seabrook, a prestigious, all-male Catholic preparatory school located in contemporary Dublin, Ireland. Drugs, alcohol, cliques, girls, sports, video games and cell phones, depression and existential angst, friends and enemies, and even attempted travel through time and space all play a part in this sprawling, messy narrative.

In telling this complex story, Murray skillfully shifts between numerous points of view, including that of both students and teachers, to create a multi-dimensional world in all its disarray. Coming in at well over 600 pages, Skippy Dies is too often weighed down by long expositions—including detailed descriptions of the concepts of m-theory physics and the origins of Irish sidhe (ancient burial mounds)—and tedious descriptions of the boys’ video game and role playing sessions. Perhaps Murray intends for these elements to illustrate the non-linear, rambling adolescent mind, but their effect is to slow down the narrative, which otherwise moves along at a brisk, entertaining clip.

Murray has a great talent for concise and evocative character descriptions like this one of Father Green, one of the most senior teachers at Seabrook: “Rail-thin, a head taller than the tallest of the boys, on his best days the priest looks like the end of the world; his presence itself is like smoldering kindling, or knuckles cracking over and over.” Skippy Dies is liberally sprinkled with such imaginative prose without being overburdened with flourishes. Similarly, in telling the stories of the Seabrook boys and their teachers, Murray masterfully balances the narrative in the space between seriousness and humor, repulsiveness and charm, and despair and hope. Overall, Skippy Dies is an insightful and engaging, if over-long, examination of the adolescent condition.

A Review of You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon

2011-02-28T05:31:00.000-06:00

You Know When the Men Are Gone

4 out of 5: Siobhan Fallon lived on the army base in Fort Hood, Texas while her husband was deployed to Iraq for two tours of duty, and it is this fertile setting that gives rise to Fallon’s recently published collection of stories You Know When the Men Are Gone. Although a couple stories unfold within sight of the front lines, the most successful ones take place on the base, where Fallon’s personal experience yields a richly detailed world about which we civilians know very little.

Fallon’s plain prose is well-suited to her context, never overshadowing the raw emotions experienced by her characters. Her simple images underscore the gravity of a country at war:

No more boots stomping above, no more football games turned up too high, and, best of all, no more front doors slamming before dawn as they trudge out for their early formation, sneakers on metal stairs, cars starting, shouts to the windows above to throw down their gloves on cold desert mornings. Babies still cry, telephones ring, Saturday morning cartoons screech, but without the men, there is a sense of muted silence, a sense of muted life.

Most of these stories focus on this “muted life” lived by the women left behind on base after their husbands are shipped overseas to Iraq or Afghanistan. Without calling into question the enormous respect and honor owed to these soldiers, Fallon doesn’t shy away from the unpleasant aspects of a country at war: the post traumatic stress disorder and other injuries suffered by soldiers, the abuse of alcohol and drugs, the potential for domestic violence and adultery, and the specter of war widowhood.

You Know When the Men Are Gone opens a window into a foreign world that’s hiding within ordinary communities scattered across the United States. This is a world we dutifully honor from afar but neglect to examine closely. Fallon’s stories make us suspect we’re not doing enough, not sacrificing enough, for our country. As such, they are challenging and well worth reading.

A Review of The Philosophical Breakfast Club by Laura J. Snyder

2011-02-21T06:15:00.001-06:00

The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World

4 out of 5: The Philosophical Breakfast Club is a comprehensive history of the beginnings of modern science told from the alternating perspectives of four Cambridge students. In the early 1800s, William Whewell, Charles Babbage, John Herschel, and Richard Jones met at Cambridge and instituted regular discussions over breakfast where they committed to work for scientific progress and the greater public recognition of scientists. During the momentous lifetimes of these four men, a man of science went from “a country parson collecting beetles in his spare hours” to “a member of a professional class … pursuing a common activity within a certain institutional framework ….”

The Philosophical Breakfast Club covers, in great detail, Babbage’s invention of the first computer, Herschel’s book introducing Francis Bacon’s scientific method to the general public, Whewell’s universal theory of tides, Jones’s economic theories, and many other important scientific breakthroughs. The chapter describing Herschel’s 4-year stint in the Cape Colony of southern Africa mapping the stars of the southern hemisphere is a particularly nice set piece. Snyder’s clear, simple prose brings complex topics within reach of a lay audience, but the book occasionally gives more detail than the non-scientific reader will have patience for. Overall, The Philosophical Breakfast Club is an engaging and accessible history of modern science.

Happy Valentine's Day!

2011-02-12T08:37:00.005-06:00

As you can see from my below post, I really enjoyed Herve Le Tellier's novel Enough About Love. If you're curious about Le Tellier's writing but not quite willing to commit to a full-length novel, try reading a novella instead. Other Press generously shared this link with me to Le Tellier's novella The Intervention of a Good Man, and I'm passing it on to you. Consider it a Valentine's Day gift. You can print the story or read it online.

A Review of Enough about Love by Hervé Le Tellier (translated by Adriana Hunter)

2011-01-31T05:11:00.000-06:00

Enough About Love

4.5 out of 5: In true Oulipo fashion, Hervé Le Tellier’s latest novel, Enough About Love, is a constraint-filled endeavor. With a structure inspired by a game of Abkhazian dominoes, Le Tellier’s six protagonists combine and recombine in every possible two-person configuration in short chapters titled according to their major players (e.g., Yves and Anna, Thomas and Louise). The chapters follow quickly upon one another and, as they are often dominated by dialog, give the flavor of a dramatic performance rather than a traditional novel. Indeed, Enough about Love would make for a very entertaining play, and Le Tellier’s self-imposed constraints never get in the way of the story.

The novel’s main action consists of two overlapping love triangles involving two married couples and two single men, all middle-aged. The constantly morphing relationships illustrate various forms of love, including married love, adulterous love, and jealous love. The overall effect is kaleidoscopic, the characters’ ever-shifting emotions and interactions slide against each other to reveal different shades and nuances. Enough About Love’s complex structure supports and enhances its story, and Adriana Hunter’s adept English translation delivers all the playfulness and complexity of the original.

Within the novel’s larger framework, Le Tellier cleverly embeds a couple stand-out set pieces. One is a public reading by Yves of an essay he wrote on “foreignness” juxtaposed in two-column format with a running internal monologue by Yves’s lover’s husband, who’s decided to attend the reading in an act of curiosity or martyrdom or both. The second set piece is a book written by Yves’s for his lover Anna composed of forty of Yves’s most significant memories of Anna. In an audacious move, Le Tellier includes Yves’s entire book (all 25 pages of it) within this novel. The result is a stunningly intimate portrayal of love, leaving the reader feeling like a voyeur who stumbled upon an open bedroom window, uncomfortable and thrilled at the same time.

The two female protagonists, Anna and Louise, share too many similarities, including fashion tastes, high-powered careers, and dominant personalities. More contrast would have been welcome in these characters, but this is a small complaint in a book filled with so many wonders. Highly recommended.

A Review of The Marriage Artist by Andrew Winer

2011-01-17T06:12:00.000-06:00

The Marriage Artist: A Novel

4 out of 5: The Marriage Artist, Andrew Winer’s latest novel, weaves together two love stories, one contemporary and one historical. As Daniel Lichtmann, a modern-day art critic, seeks the truth behind his wife’s recent suicide, he discovers a back story that originates in Vienna before World War II and continues through the Holocaust. Winer’s portrayal of love and marriage in difficult circumstances is nuanced and intelligent. The Marriage Artist avoids syrupy, sentimental romances in favor of complicated, and often doomed, relationships that reflect the idiosyncrasies of their participants: “[W] hen we love we are not really looking to see something new, but rather our own ideas embodied in the other person—qualities that awaken echoes already resounding in us.” This finding of ourselves within those we love is an important concept explored by The Marriage Artist.

Along with love, art is a recurring motif across the decades of this novel, beginning with the beautiful illuminated marriage contracts made by Josef Pick, a Jewish artist in Vienna, and continuing up to the dramatic final sculptures of contemporary artist Benjamin Wind. Eventually, this novel’s present and past love stories converge in a devastating conclusion. Overall, The Marriage Artist is a sensitive rumination on the complex nature of love and marriage.

A Review of Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick

2011-01-10T05:56:00.001-06:00

Foreign Bodies
4 out of 5: Cynthia Ozick’s latest novel, Foreign Bodies, is a reworking of Henry James’s The Ambassadors. Middle-aged, unmarried Bea is sent to Paris by her volatile brother Marvin to rescue Marvin’s son from a life of dissipation and from the clutches of an older woman. The story unfolds in the year 1952 through a combination of letters and shifting narrative perspectives. Even a charlatan doctor, the temporary lover of Marvin’s daughter, gets a turn as the protagonist. Ozick’s prose is complex and poetic; it’s infused with a rhythmic musicality that, while striking, sometimes loses its meaning: “Grief is nightmare, grief is gargoyle: the shock of fresh bereavement must be stirring up such grotesqueries of criminality.”

Like a Gothic cathedral, Foreign Bodies is a beautifully intricate construction, filled with endless nooks and crannies that repeatedly echo the more general motifs. The ever-shifting perspective, while masterfully executed, does not linger on any character long enough to engage the reader. The resulting emotional distance results in an admirable book that’s not likely to inspire a deep emotional response.

A Review of Where We Know: New Orleans As Home

2011-01-03T04:58:00.000-06:00

Where We Know: New Orleans As Home
4 out of 5: This anthology, edited by David Rutledge and titled Where We Know: New Orleans as Home, collects essays and two short stories about the city of New Orleans. Most essays are contemporary and focus on the city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but a handful are historical, including essays by Barbara Bodichon and Dudley Warner, first published in 1867 and 1887, respectively.

As New Orleans rebuilds after Hurricane Katrina, some stay in the city, some return to the city, and some decide to leave the city forever. Where We Know captures all these various voices and reveals the diverse emotions surrounding this culturally complex American city. Essayist Anne Gisleson notes about post-Katrina New Orleans that “the city is alive in a new sort of way … [with] a sense of hope, opportunity and purpose I never felt growing up here.”

As I’ve come to expect from Chin Music Press, Where We Know is gorgeously designed. The book’s front and end papers reproduce full-color sections of old maps of New Orleans. Quotes about the city from its famous citizens and visitors—dating from 1721 to 2009—are interspersed throughout. A map in the front of the book pinpoints the exact locations in the city that form the settings of the book’s essays and stories, and a few essays are even accompanied by color photographs. Thanks to this thoughtful design, Where We Know is as rewarding to look at and to hold as it is to read.

A Review of By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

2010-12-27T06:33:00.000-06:00

By Nightfall: A Novel
4 out of 5: In By Nightfall, Michael Cunningham’s sixth novel, Peter and Rebecca Harris have a comfortable, if complacent, marriage. Peter runs a mildly successful art gallery, and Rebecca works for a soon-to-be sold art magazine. In a textbook example of the “stranger comes to town” plot, the Harris’s relationship is thrown off balance when Rebecca’s feckless and beautiful younger brother, Ethan, comes to visit.

Cunningham writes intelligently about the art scene, but the primary focus of this novel is on the characters rather than the context. By Nightfall explores the precariousness of human relationships with sensitivity without shying away from the worst parts of human nature. With a fluid, stream-of-consciousness style of narration, Cunningham enters into Peter’s head and reveals his deepest thoughts and darkest desires. This point of view captures Peter’s second-by-second existence in a way that feels real and honest. Some of Peter’s decisions seem a bit impulsive and out of character, but, on the whole, By Nightfall is a revealing portrait of a man who almost loses everything in his reckless quest for love.

A Review of World and Town by Gish Jen

2010-12-20T06:30:00.000-06:00

World and Town
4.5 out of 5: In World and Town, Gish Jen’s fourth novel, the small Vermont town of Riverlake isn’t quite sure how to interact with a troubled Cambodian family that moves into a trailer under the sponsorship of a local church. Hattie Kong, a 68-year-old widow grieving both her husband and her best friend, lives next to the newcomers and befriends their 12-year-old daughter, Sophy. To complicate matters, Hattie’s first love returns to town after a long absence. It is a tribute to Jen’s abilities as a writer that this novel tackles so many different themes—love, death, grief, friendship, family, community, religion, domestic abuse, drugs, alcoholism—and yet never feels messy or overextended.

Jen’s prose is both blunt and dense, as exemplified by the novel’s first few sentences:

Last week, a family moved in down the hill—Cambodian. They plan to build themselves a little house, people say. Hoping that the house will—ta daah!—become a home. Well, that’s not so simple, Hattie happens to know. But never mind; this is an age of flux. She, Hattie Kong, came from China; her neighbors from Cambodia; is there anyone not coming from somewhere?

Jen’s writing has the satisfying heft of 9-grain bread, but it’s lightened with enough humor to avoid being overly weighty. The details of her characters’ lives and relationships are revealed slowly and obliquely. Jen leaves much unsaid, trusting in her readers to pay attention. Such writing rewards close and patient reading. World and Town is a masterful depiction of the world from the perspective of a small town.

Essay Anthologies

2010-12-06T06:55:00.000-06:00

I am a longtime reader and collector of essay anthologies. A well-written essay provides an opportunity to learn something new and interesting, and also an opportunity to sample the writing of an unfamiliar author, without committing to a full-length book. Essays are often the perfect length to read from start to finish in one sitting, providing a satisfying feeling of accomplishment. Further, for someone who generally prefers to read fiction, an essay delivers a nice dose of nonfiction without becoming too great a distraction from other reading. Essay anthologies offer the added benefit of variety—of subject, of author, and of original publication. For all these reasons, I’m rarely without an essay anthology on my nightstand.

The Best American series releases several annual essay anthologies, including The Best American Essays, The Best American Travel Writing, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and The Best American Sports Writing. This year’s The Best American Essays (2010), edited by Christopher Hitchens, collects writings on a wonderful variety of topics, including a trip to Tolstoy’s house for an academic conference, the emotional burden associated with the power to declare a person’s time of death, a rogue lion in a wildlife preserve in Africa, the various ailments of eyes, encounters with literary luminaries, and much more. Most of the selections are concerned with subjects of general interest rather than specific events or people, ensuring that most of these essays will be just as accessible and relevant years from now as they are today. I also appreciate the mix of shorter and longer writings included in the collection. No matter the amount of reading time available, this anthology includes an essay of the perfect length to fill that time. Consider this anthology for your nightstand or as a sure-to-be-appreciated gift.

A Review of Handing One Another Along: Literature and Social Reflection by Robert Coles

2010-11-20T09:39:00.003-06:00

Handing One Another Along: Literature and Social Reflection

4 out of 5: In Handing One Another Along, Coles analyzes many classic writings (including non-fiction, fiction, and poetry) and asks “[w]hat happens to you when you read these books, what should be happening, not only to your mind as a cognitive instrument, but with respect to your conscience and even your yearning, if not also your lusts?” In answering this question, Coles looks at writings by James Agee, George Orwell, William Carlos Williams, Raymond Carver, and others.

Handing One Another Along originated with a series of lectures Coles delivered at Harvard, and its academic, conversational, and occasionally disorganized style reflects its origins. Touching on a wide range of themes and ideas, Coles moves quickly from one work of literature to another, drawing parallels and seeking universal truths. Occasionally, Coles moves beyond the written word and includes paintings and music in his analysis. Handing One Another Along is not an organized presentation of the moral precepts that can be gleaned from literature. Rather, it is an enjoyable meandering through literature with a view towards its larger social implications.

A Review of Trespass by Rose Tremain

2010-10-19T17:24:00.002-05:00

Trespass: A Novel

4 out of 5: Beginning with the very first chapter, in which a young girl makes a shocking discovery in a creek while on a school field trip, Trespass overflows with foreboding and suspense. The novel progresses in two alternating storylines. In one, an alcoholic man living in the Cévennes region of southern France is seduced by the money he can make by selling his crumbling ancestral estate, a sale that is vehemently opposed by his sister who lives in a small bungalow next door. In the other storyline, a sophisticated London antiques dealer decides to wrap up his failing business and to relocate to the Cévennes to be closer to his beloved sister. These two narratives move slowly towards each other and eventually intersect in surprising and violent ways. As its title suggests, Trespass is full of encroachments, including those affecting the land, the body, and the mind.

Tremain effectively harnesses the mysteries of the remote French landscape to enhance the tone of ominous dread that pervades this novel. The alternating narratives propel the story forward, and, although the novel labors under an unrelenting grimness, the momentum never flags. Trespass is a haunting and beautifully written novel with a satisfying, but not too neat, ending.

A Review of The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

2010-10-14T10:34:00.002-05:00

The Finkler Question

3.5 out of 5: The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson’s latest novel and the winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, is an exploration of love, death, grief, friendship, and what it means to be Jewish in contemporary London. At the novel’s beginning, Julian Treslove is mugged after leaving a dinner party with his two best friends, Sam Finkler and Libor Sevick. Based on something his attacker may or may not have said, Julian comes to believe the attack was motivated by anti-Semitism. The problem with this theory is that Julian is not Jewish. The incident sends Julian into an identity crisis, causing him to wonder if he might actually be Jewish without knowing it and leading him into a romance with a Jewish woman. In the meantime, Sam and Libor, who are Jewish, are grieving for their recently deceased wives and spend a great deal of time arguing about the moral status of Israel.

Although Sam and Libor play large roles, Julian is the primary protagonist of The Finkler Question, and he holds the bleak view that “[j]ust to be a human animal [i]s to be a disgrace. Life [i]s a disgrace, an absurd disgrace, to be exceeded in disgracefulness only by death.” This pessimistic outlook, coupled with Julian’s relentless expectation that he is always about to fall victim to a tragic event, results in a great deal of hand-wringing that becomes quite tedious over the course of 300+ pages. Sam and Libor’s ongoing debate about Zionism also runs long for those readers without a serious interest in the subject. Fortunately, Jacobson lightens the mood with plenty of humor, albeit of the dark variety, and his well-paced prose keeps the novel from becoming overly sluggish. Further, Jacobson weaves together the three men’s stories seamlessly and elegantly. The Finkler Question presents its themes intelligently, sensitively, and humorously, but those themes will not appeal to every reader.

A Review of The Elephant's Journey by José Saramago (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

2010-10-12T14:55:00.007-05:00

The Elephant's Journey
4 out of 5: José Saramago’s latest novel, published after his death earlier this year, borrows its action from an actual historical event: the gift of an elephant by the king of Portugal to the Archduke of Austria in 1551 and the elephant’s subsequent journey to its new home. Filled with charm and whimsy, The Elephant’s Journey reads like an adult fairy tale. The uncomplicated plot, which follows the elephant’s path through Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Austria, provides plenty of superficial entertainment as humorous events (a fabricated miracle) alternate with more suspenseful ones (a harrowing mountain crossing). Just beneath the story’s straightforward surface lie more complicated issues of class conflict and religious tensions, though Saramago chooses not to fully explore these more serious issues in this lighthearted novel.

Saramago maintains a witty and satirical tone throughout The Elephant’s Journey. No character is spared from his teasing manner, including Saramago himself:

There is no wind, although the mist seems to form slow whirlpools as if boreas himself were blowing it down from the far north, from the lands of eternal ice. However, to be honest, given the delicacy of the situation, this is hardly the moment for someone to be honing his prose in order to make some, frankly, not very original poetic point.

Some may find Saramago’s way of presenting dialog to be confusing. In typical Saramago form, conversations unfold in long paragraphs of run-on sentences with the occasional comma and capital letter providing the only clue that the speaker has changed. This format lends a natural quickness to the spoken exchanges but can be difficult to follow at first. Although rather simplistic and frivolous compared to Saramago’s more major novels, The Elephant’s Journey is a warmhearted and engaging tale.

A Review of "C" by Tom McCarthy

2010-10-07T05:00:00.000-05:00

4.5 out of 5: Tom McCarthy's "C" is a brilliant and challenging novel. "C" follows the life of Serge Carrefax, beginning with his childhood in rural England and continuing as he leaves home to fight in World War I, returns to a drug-addled life in London, and finally travels to Egypt to pursue a job in communications. The novel lacks a traditional narrative arc, and the various segments of Serge's life are relatively unconnected to each other in a narrative sense. However, "C" has a strong inner network of recurring motifs and concepts that gives the book structure and cohesion. Throughout all his various adventures, Serge seeks something larger than himself. As a teenager experimenting with wireless communications, he is fascinated by the static that exists at the end of the radio range, which he views as evidence of a greater, unifying power. As Serge matures, he continues to look for the universal constant that holds everything together.

McCarthy peppers Serge's story with recurring motifs of insects, broken or fraudulent communication systems, machinery, and dismembered bodies. These dehumanizing symbols constantly work against Serge's desire to identify a kind of universal humanity, setting up a tension that is never resolved. "C" is not a typical novel with a traditional plot structure and is not likely to appeal to those readers looking for a traditional novel-reading experience. However, for readers interested in an intellectual challenge and willing to try something utterly original, "C" is the perfect choice.

A Review of Room by Emma Donoghue

2010-10-04T09:51:00.000-05:00

Room: A Novel

4 out of 5: Told from the perspective of a 5-year-old boy named Jack, Room is the story of a mother and her child held in captivity in a 121 square-foot room. Jack was born in the room and knows no other existence. To him, the small space is the entire world, and he and his mother are its only inhabitants. In an attempt to give her child a normal life, Jack’s mother fills their days with invented games and activities using their limited possessions. At the end of each day, Jack must go to sleep in a wardrobe by 9 pm in order to avoid encountering his mother’s captor (and his father), who drops by most nights to rape his female victim.

Despite this exceedingly grim premise, Jack’s innocence coupled with his mother’s enduring desire to create a happy life for him ensure that Room never wallows in sadness. Jack’s quirky view of his world is often humorous, and he’s perfectly content with his confined life. Donoghue does an admirable job writing from the perspective of a 5-year-old, though the inherent limitations of that perspective are occasionally tedious. Although the first third of the novel drags a bit, after Jack’s mother decides to take action to change their circumstances, the pace quickens dramatically. Given the constraints of her protagonist's young age and narrow experience, the fact that Room is such an engaging novel is a remarkable achievement.

New Addition to the Literary License Family

2010-09-28T11:02:00.007-05:00

Sarah Elizabeth was born on August 26th at 6:53 pm, weighing 8 lbs., 2 ozs. and measuring 20 inches. It's difficult to believe she's already 1 month old!

Thanks to everyone for your support and best wishes. Things have been a bit hectic around here, but Sarah's late night feedings have given me plenty of opportunities to keep up with my reading (and reviewing).

More reviews are on the way!

A Review of In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut

2010-09-27T11:49:00.004-05:00

In a Strange Room
4 out of 5: In South African writer Damon Galgut’s latest novel, which is shortlisted for this year’s prestigious Man Booker Prize, the narrator (also named Damon) describes three different journeys he took as a younger man, one where he filled the role of the follower, one the lover, and one the guardian. Although each trip is distinct, involving different locations (Greece, Africa, and India), travel companions, and challenges, certain themes resurface throughout Damon’s wanderings, including his unceasing drive to keep moving and his inability to form lasting relationships. Damon’s changing character—which ranges from a powerless follower to an assertive protector, depending on the varying circumstances he confronts—suggests that a large part of human identity derives from external influences rather than from an inherent inner quality. Locating a solid core within this impermanence is what compels Damon to undertake his quests and what creates this novel’s momentum.

Throughout Damon’s travels, Galgut’s sensual prose captures the essence of the traveler’s changing landscapes and moods while maintaining an elegant simplicity that shades the three stories with allegorical overtones. Frequent switches between first and third person narration create interesting tension between the older narrator and his younger, traveling self. Overall, In a Strange Room is a beautiful and haunting meditation on loneliness and the unending drive to discover a deeper meaning of life.

A Review of Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

2010-09-19T11:49:00.002-05:00

Parrot and Olivier in America

4.5 out of 5: In Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey uses the medium of a historical novel to explore the concept of democracy as it existed in the early years of the United States. French aristocrat Olivier is sent by his family to America to study the new nation's prison system and to escape the hostilities threatening aristocrats in his home country. Once in America, Olivier is captivated and puzzled by the country's democratic ideals. In his travels, Olivier is accompanied by John "Parrot" Larrit, who acts as Olivier's secretary. Ultimately, the relationship between Olivier and Parrot undergoes a dramatic change as it encounters the egalitarian spirit of America. The character of Olivier is Carey's fictionalization of the great French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the influential Democracy in America. However, Parrot and Olivier in America goes well beyond a mere retelling of the travels of a historic personality to create a complex world of interlinking characters and events.

The story unfolds through the alternating narrations of Olivier and Parrot (a favorite technique of Carey's). By the end of the novel, Parrot's character, wise and full of heart, has stolen the show, but the spoiled and self-focused Olivier shows eventual signs of reformation. Carey refuses to tie up all the loose ends, making the novel seem all the more realistic and complex. Parrot and Olivier in America is a fascinating read when viewed as an intellectual examination of the early days of American democracy and its effects on human interactions, particularly those between diverse classes. More superficially, the novel also succeeds as a good, page-turning story.

A Review of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

2010-08-24T12:21:00.002-05:00

A Visit from the Goon Squad

3 out of 5: A Visit from the Good Squad, a collection of loosely connected short stories presented as a novel, spans decades and covers the overlapping lives of numerous characters. Each of the thirteen chapters is told from the perspective of a different character such that no single character emerges as a protagonist. In addition to jumping back and forth across various times and characters, Egan also experiments with form in these stories. The most unusual story takes the form of a PowerPoint presentation.

Egan's self-imposed constraints are conceptually interesting, and, evaluated individually, the stories are generally well-crafted and imaginative. Overall, however, A Visit from the Goon Squad lacks narrative cohesion and doesn't exhibit enough direction or momentum to tie the stories together. The PowerPoint chapter, for example, is visually striking but delivers a reading experience that feels more like an over-long business meeting than an engaging work of fiction. While Egan's creativity and willingness to push boundaries is laudable, the uncoordinated result disappoints.

A Review of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

2010-07-20T21:06:00.002-05:00

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel

4.5 out of 5: In 2004, David Mitchell impressed readers and critics alike with Cloud Atlas, his genre-defying (and Booker-Prize-shortlisted) novel with a structure more akin to a set of Russian nesting dolls than a typical novel. In his most recent novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Mitchell skips the literary fireworks in favor of the more conventional form of the historical novel. Mitchell’s protagonist—Jacob de Zoet—travels around the world in 1799 to the trading post maintained by the Dutch East Indies Company off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan. The Dutch traders are confined to the man-made island of Dejima, lying just off the coast of Nagasaki and connected to the mainland by a heavily guarded bridge. Seeking to earn enough distinction and money to wed the sweetheart he left behind in the Netherlands, de Zoet is tasked with investigating Dejima’s notorious corruption. In de Zoet’s time, Nagasaki was a mysterious land ruled by powerful samurais and enigmatic traditions, and the inevitable clash between East and West provides the animating force for most of the novel’s action.

With its large cast of colorful characters and its adventure-laden plot, including a forbidden love affair and a daring rescue attempt from a dangerous sex cult, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet maintains its quick pace for nearly five hundred pages. Throughout it all, Mitchell employs the conventions of the genre while avoiding most of its clichés. This book’s fault, if it has one, is its exuberant excess. The plethora of characters, subplots, and historical details can be challenging to keep up with, particularly in the first hundred pages. This superabundance is also the novel’s greatest strength, however, as it results in a realistic rendering of an entire world with all its messiness and complexity. While not as groundbreaking as Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is an old-fashioned historical adventure tale that also manages to be thrilling and inventive.

A Review of Monsieur Pain by Roberto Bolaño (translated by Chris Andrews)

2010-07-01T20:28:00.003-05:00

Monsieur Pain

3.5 out of 5: Set in Paris in 1938, Monsieur Pain is the first-person account of a series of strange events in the life of a practitioner of animal magnetism (a mesmerist). With typical élan, Pain, an eccentric bachelor, explains how he became a mesmerist after a bad experience in World War I:

From then on, supported by a modest invalid's pension, and perhaps as a reaction against the society that had imperturbably sent me forth to die, I gave up everything that could be considered beneficial to a young man's career, and took up the occult sciences, which is to say that I let myself sink into poverty, in a manner that was deliberate, rigorous and not altogether devoid of elegance. At some point during that phase in my life I read An Abridged History of Animal Magnetism, by Franz Mesmer, and, within a matter of weeks, became a mesmerist.

Because of his expertise in mesmerism, Pain is asked to treat a friend’s husband, a Peruvian poet suffering from a severe case of hiccups. Before long, the case takes a turn for the surreal when two mysterious Spaniards trail Pain through the city and bribe him not to treat the hiccupping poet. Pain finds himself within ever stranger hallucinatory scenes, calling into question the border between reality and Pain’s own mental labyrinths.

Pain confronts the increasing confusion with a kind of naïveté that is both charming in its innocence and frustrating in its passivity. The novel’s lively dialog and frequent moments of suspense overcome its frustrating fragmentation and occasional self-indulgence. Written in 1981 or 1982, Monsieur Pain is one of Bolaño’s earliest novels, and, at fewer than 150 pages, it is also one of his most concise. Monsieur Pain is a nice introduction to Bolaño’s particular brand of genius for those readers new to Bolaño, while those familiar with his more major works (The Savage Detectives and 2666) will enjoy witnessing Bolaño’s writing at a more formative stage.

A Review of Gasoline by Quim Monzó (translated by Mary Ann Newman)

2010-05-18T15:24:00.004-05:00

Gasoline
4 out of 5: Gasoline, Quim Monzó’s latest novel to be translated into English, opens at a moment of crisis in Heribert’s career as a painter: he must paint enough canvases to fill two galleries in time for an imminent double show. Instead of working, however, Heribert wallows in indifference and boredom, wandering the city streets, drinking in random bars, and visiting sex shops. As Heribert’s career stagnates, another younger artist—Humbert (bizarrely, almost all characters’ names begin with the letter ‘H’ in Gasoline)—steps in to take advantage of Heribert’s artistic and romantic slump.

Gasoline explores the joys and pitfalls of creativity and obsession, alternating whimsy and humor with dark moments of doubt. Heribert’s dilemma is both heartbreaking and absurd, causing the reader’s feelings towards this unhappy artist to vacillate between pity and derision. During one bleak scene, for example, Heribert attempts to turn on every light and appliance in his house to drown out his sorrow over his estrangement from his wife. The touching scene shades into absurdity when Heribert is thwarted in his noise-making by a cassette player that refuses to play both the radio and a cassette tape at the same time, leading Heribert to conclude that the machine is nothing but “a lie.”

Gasoline is a sensitive portrayal of artistic creation and its often unstable personalities. Half cautionary tale, half tribute to the limitless capacity of the human imagination, Gasoline is wholly provocative and entertaining.

A Review of The Most Beautiful Book in the World: 8 Novellas by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt (translated by Alison Anderson)

2010-04-29T20:49:00.003-05:00

The Most Beautiful Book in the World: 8 Novellas
4 out of 5: Although labeled “novellas” in the subtitle, these eight pieces are true short stories; each one contains only a few key characters and spans roughly twenty pages. In the broadest sense, these stories uncover the hidden sources of humanity’s best qualities: happiness, forgiveness, love, and generosity. Schmitt’s tormented characters stumble upon these redemptive qualities in the unlikeliest of places, often despite their own reprehensible behavior. In “Wanda Winnipeg,” a wealthy divorcée anonymously gives hundreds of thousands of dollars to her destitute first lover in an uncharacteristic showing of generosity and consideration. In “A Fine Rainy Day,” a “cynical and disenchanted” widow discovers her buried optimism. An ironical deathbed gift turns into a much-needed fortune in “The Forgery.” All eight stories in The Most Beautiful Book in the World are tightly constructed and concise without sacrificing a deep sympathy for humanity’s dark moments and a celebration of its redeeming acts.

Schmitt’s simple and artful prose captures his characters' most intimate and raw moments without melodrama. In this example from “Odette Toulemonde,” Balthazar, a wildly successful novelist, recognizes the falsity of his life:

[H]e owned an apartment in the center of Paris which left many people feeling envious, but did he really like it? There was nothing on the walls, windows, shelves, or sofas that he himself had chosen: a decorator had done it all. In the living room there was a grand piano that no one played, a laughable symbol of social rank; his study had been designed with magazine publication in mind, because Balthazar actually preferred to write in cafes. He realized he was living in a décor. Worse than that—a décor that wasn’t even of his own making.

Schmitt relies too often on tidy endings—several stories involve conveniently-timed medical emergencies, for example—but such occasional contrivances cannot overshadow this collection’s masterful depiction of the messy but wonderful human condition.

A Review of The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

2010-04-19T10:14:00.001-05:00

The Imperfectionists

4 out of 5: In this collection of linked short stories, each story follows the perspective of an employee (or, in one case, a devoted reader) of an international English-language newspaper based in Rome. As a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and with experience as a foreign correspondent stationed in Rome, Rachman is well-qualified for his subject. Every story is graced with his first-hand knowledge of the industry and his obvious love of the profession. Many of the same characters appear in several stories, creating a book that falls somewhere between a short story collection and a novel.

With lightening-quick prose that’s heavy on dialog, Rachman catches his characters at tense, often life-changing, moments. On the whole, these are energetic and suspenseful stories, filled with crises and stress. I often found myself disappointed at the end of each one, not because the stories aren’t good but because they’re almost too good. I wanted each one to continue. The stories of Rachman’s full-fledged characters could support several full-length novels, and these brief glimpses into their chaotic lives left me craving more. The Imperfectionists confronts some of life’s most difficult moments without ever losing its snappy and entertaining style.

The Literary License Family is Growing/Schedule Change

2010-04-13T04:00:00.000-05:00

My husband and I are expecting our first baby in late August. We're excited for her arrival, but my reading for Literary License is now frequently interrupted with baby books, trips to baby stores, and an increased number of visits to family and friends. As a result, I'm unable to maintain my weekly review schedule for the time being and will be switching to a looser schedule of two to three reviews a month. I will post reviews as I finish books, rather than targeting a particular day of the week. Thanks for being flexible during this busy time!

A Review of The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano (translated by Shaun Whiteside)

2010-04-07T00:30:00.000-05:00

The Solitude of Prime Numbers: A Novel

4.5 out of 5: Physicist Paolo Giordano’s debut novel, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, won Italy’s premier literary award, the Premio Strega, in 2008. Now available in the U.S. in an English translation, The Solitude of Prime Numbers explores the poignant relationship that develops between two misfits, Alice and Mattia. Alice, an anorexic with a limp left over from a childhood skiing accident, resists forming trusting relationships, and Mattia, carrying a lifetime of guilt over the early loss of his twin sister, is forever surrounded by a “contagious air of tragedy.” Beginning with their teenaged years, Alice’s and Mattia’s lives progress in mostly parallel narratives with only occasional, and often awkward, intersections. Over time, Alice and Mattia build “a defective and asymmetrical friendship, made up of long absences and much silence, a clean and empty space where both could come back to breathe ….” Like for prime numbers, which are always sandwiched between ordinary numbers, “solitude is the true destiny” for Alice and Mattia.

Giordano’s elegant and understated prose perfectly matches the elegiac tone of Alice’s and Mattia’s story. Shot through with poetic passages that resist shading into extravagance, Giordano’s sentences are a joy to read even if the novel’s episodic presentation, along with the accompanying substantial gaps in time, is sometimes unsatisfying. The novel’s graceful conclusion resists smoothing over the wonderful and confusing complexity of human relationships. Overall, The Solitude of Prime Numbers is a haunting and rewarding read.

A Review of Solar by Ian McEwan

2010-03-31T00:30:00.001-05:00

Solar

4 out of 5: Solar, Ian McEwan’s eleventh novel, follows the troubled career and love life of 53-year-old physicist Michael Beard. Beard won the Nobel Prize in physics for work he completed as a young man but, after five failed marriages, is now trapped in a decades-long slump of “no new ideas.” Living the life of an aimless bureaucrat saddled with speech commitments and honorary positions, Beard no longer resembles the “ethereal Beard of planetary renown” he once was: “It sometimes seemed to Beard that he had coasted all his life on an obscure young man’s work, a far cleverer and more devoted theoretical physicist than he could ever hope to be. ... [T]hat twenty-five-year-old physicist was a genius. But where was he now?”

Beard’s story takes a dramatic turn when he discovers a way to revitalize his career as a climate scientist by employing morally questionable tactics. Along the way, Beard’s bumbling antics and social awkwardness provide plenty of humorous set pieces. While laugh-out-loud funny, most of these incidents bear little relation to the primary action of the novel. Additional sidetracks slow the novel’s momentum, including numerous in-depth descriptions of Beard’s work on artificial photosynthesis as a way to save the earth from both global warming and the impending energy crisis. Despite the detours from the main story in Solar’s middle section, McEwan revives the novel’s quick pace in its final third as Beard faces ever increasing physical, mental, and financial dangers. Although Solar’s weak, overly-convenient ending fails to live up to the strength of the rest of the novel, it does deliver to Beard the comeuppance he deserves.

A Review of The Boy with the Cuckoo Clock Heart by Mathias Malzieu (translated by Sarah Ardizzone)

2010-03-24T00:30:00.000-05:00

The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart
3 out of 5: Jack, the first-person narrator of Mathias Malzieu’s most recent novel, is born in Edinburgh on an uncommonly cold day in April 1874. A clever midwife saves the newborn from certain death by surgically implanting a cuckoo clock in his chest to regulate his weak heart. Abandoned by his mother and sporting a loudly ticking clock for a heart, Jack is destined to be an outsider. Nevertheless, he falls in love with a beautiful girl and, while still a teenager, embarks on a cross-continental journey to follow his love to Andalusia, where she’s originally from.

The Boy with the Cuckoo Clock Heart is an adult fairy tale. As is typical with such tales, many of the characters are thinly developed and highly stylized. Fantastical events and complicated metaphors abound. The novel’s primary message appears to be that our self-imposed limitations are the only obstacles to achieving what we desire. Unfortunately, this rather hopeful message is diluted in the final pages with a jarring and confusing plot reversal, making for an unsatisfying ending.

Malzieu’s unique prose is the greatest strength of The Boy with the Cuckoo Heart Clock. It’s an elegant combination of fairy-tale whimsy and Dickensian realism. Malzieu excels at combining opposite concepts in startling ways, like this example of the juxtaposition of death and birth: "It is so cold that birds freeze in mid-flight before crashing to the ground. The noise as they drop out of the sky is uncannily soft for a corpse. This is the coldest day on earth, and I'm getting ready to be born." The Boy with a Cuckoo Heart Clock offers an unsatisfactory story packaged in beautiful and unusual prose.

A Review of The Privileges by Jonathan Dee

2010-03-17T00:30:00.001-05:00

The Privileges: A Novel

3.5 out of 5: Jonathan Dee’s latest novel follows Cynthia and Adam Morey, a loving couple leading a charmed life ensconced within “a zone of privilege.” Surrounded by friends and family, Adam and Cynthia get married young and quickly produce two beautiful children. Adam’s career in a private equity firm in Manhattan is progressing well while Cynthia stays home with the children. As they get a glimpse of the fairy tale life led by the super wealthy, the Moreys yearn for even more financial success, leading Adam to make riskier and riskier decisions. Eventually, Adam crosses over into illegal territory, supplementing his substantial income from the private equity firm with even more millions stashed in offshore accounts.

As Adam’s decisions descend into ethical ambiguity, Dee maintains a nonjudgmental perspective. Rather than a novel preaching against financial malfeasance, The Privileges is a sympathetic portrait of a family that slowly becomes comfortable crossing the line. Throughout, Adam and Cynthia remain completely in love. Even their troubled son Jonas recognizes his parents’ strong connection: “They are just really in love with each other, in this kind of epic way. … That’s the real context of everything they do—each other. The other stuff is just kind of outside the walls.”

Dee tells the Morey’s story in four sections, separated from each other by large gaps in time. This technique allows Dee to focus intently on specific incidents in the family’s life while still managing to cover a large expanse of time in relatively few pages. In the novel’s fourth and final section, the children’s incidental dramas and Cynthia’s final interactions with her father draw the attention away from the prior focus on Adam’s career and its associated ethical dilemmas. This ending, while anticlimactic, is interesting enough not to taint the more compelling story of the prior sections. Overall, The Privileges is an intelligent portrayal of the intoxication of wealth.

A Review of The Salt Smugglers by Gérard de Nerval (translated by Richard Sieburth)

2010-03-10T00:30:00.000-06:00

The Salt Smugglers
3.5 out of 5: The Riancey Amendment passed into law in France on July 16, 1850 and imposed a serial novel tax on newspapers, charging one centime per copy of any newspaper that included an installment of a serial novel. The law was based on the belief that serial novels had been responsible for fomenting subversive ideas. Gérard de Nerval’s The Salt Smugglers is, in large part, a response to this law.

Awarded with a commission for a historical serial novel, Nerval’s plans were thwarted by the new law. Instead of a novel, he undertakes to write a history of the life of the abbé de Bucquoy, a historical figure of questionable authenticity. This endeavor proves to be difficult, and the work devolves into the story of a quest for information as Nerval visits numerous libraries and historical sites in and around Paris, encountering many adventures and colorful characters along the way (though all the while insisting “Have no fear,—this is not a novel.”) Nerval’s “history” is mostly composed of diversions, including the story of the failed romance of one of the abbé’s relatives. Other diversions have even less connection to the abbé, like Nerval’s examination of “the musical possibilities of unrhymed verse” or his quotation of the eviction notice he receives when his apartment is expropriated for public purposes.

Not until three-fourths of the way through the book does Nerval get to the story of the abbé that he initially set out to tell. Although this delay is frustrating at times, the abbé’s story is not the real point of The Salt Smugglers. Nerval’s true purpose is to reveal the undefined the border between fact and fiction. Throughout his “history,” Nerval scrupulously relies on actual sources, but he undermines those sources by exposing their questionable accuracy. Nerval also relates numerous anecdotes that are indistinguishable from fiction, always being careful to follow each one with a tongue-in-cheek avowal of its truth: “I don’t know whether this simple story of a young lady and a pork butcher’s son will prove to be entertaining for my readers. It at least has one thing going for it: it is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, entirely true.” The overall effect is one of humorous, if distracted, subversion. The book’s design—double columns of text recalling the newspaper columns in which The Salt Smugglers originally appeared—adds authenticity to the reading experience.

A Review of The Confessions of Edward Day by Valerie Martin

2010-03-03T08:20:00.002-06:00

The Confessions of Edward Day: A Novel
4 out of 5: Written in the style of an intimate memoir, The Confessions of Edward Day delves into the daily lives of a group of struggling stage actors living in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s. Edward Day is the first person narrator and the undeniable star of this novel. As his career unfolds, we follow Ed through acting school, numerous auditions and call-backs, conflicts with friends and family, and even a summer season spent in a Vermont theater company. Throughout it all, Ed makes the most of the insignificant parts he lands, always hoping for the next big break and waiting tables between shows to pay his rent.

Through the engaging and honest voice of Ed Day, Valerie Martin writes with authority about the uncertain and stressful world of stage actors. Indeed, Martin so successfully inhabits the life and voice of Ed Day that she all but disappears from view. Ed’s charisma and motivation drive the action, most of which centers around a complicated love triangle and Ed’s ongoing power struggle with a rival actor. With this quick-paced and intelligent novel, Martin delivers a riveting look inside the psyche of an actor.

A Review of The Golden Calf by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov (translated by Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson)

2010-02-24T00:30:00.002-06:00

The Golden Calf
4 out of 5: The Golden Calf, a classic Russian novel now available in a new English translation published by Open Letter Books, is an exuberant road trip story, a financial thriller, an examination of the criminal underworld, and a social commentary, all rolled into one package. The story spans the era of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, under which private enterprises coexisted with state entities, to the time of Stalin’s rigid program of collectivization. Set against this backdrop of significant social upheaval, Ostap Bender, facetiously nicknamed the Grand Strategist, devises a plan to swindle an “underground millionaire,” named Koreiko, out of a million rubbles. Bender, along with a colorful band of fellow thieves, tracks Koreiko through multiple cities via camels, trains, and automobiles (and even attempts, unsuccessfully, to board an airplane). In the meantime, Koreiko, who disguises himself as a lowly clerk to avoid detection, hoards his past earnings from dubious deals while “saving himself for capitalism.”

In a brief note from the authors preceding the novel, Ilf and Petrov resolve “to make the novel as funny as possible,” and they have succeeded. Some of the humor is playfully absurd: “It was that time, between five and six in the morning, when … the city is light, clean, and quiet, like a state bank. At moments like this, one feels like crying and wants to believe that yogurt is indeed tastier and healthier than vodka.” Other passages carry more subversive meanings: “The cathedral was enormous. Thorny and sharp, it ripped into the sky like a fish bone. It stuck in your throat.” Throughout, The Golden Calf wears its political and social messages lightly, never forgetting that a good story is more entertaining (and more likely to escape censorship) than a political statement.

Some of The Golden Calf’s masterfully constructed set pieces have little connection to the novel’s primary action, and, when necessary to keep momentum high, Ilf and Petrov have no qualms about glossing over the finer details holding the plot together. While resulting in a somewhat chaotic narrative, this unapologetic disregard for relevance and order contributes to The Golden Calf’s undeniable charm. Wouldn’t you rather read about the escape of one of Bender’s inept colleagues from the clutches of two spell-casting priests than about how Bender managed to collect the necessary details about Koreiko’s past exploits? I certainly would. For a hilarious and utterly unique reading experience, pick up a copy of The Golden Calf. Then, sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.

A Review of Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

2010-02-17T00:30:00.000-06:00

Brooklyn: A Novel
4 out of 5: In Colm Toibin’s latest novel, Brooklyn, young Eilis Lacey leaves the struggling economy of her small hometown in southeast Ireland to forge a new life in Brooklyn, New York. In unadorned prose, Toibin describes the daily struggles and triumphs of Eilis’s life in the unfamiliar, and often inhospitable, urban environment of her new home. In many ways, Eilis’s story is a small, insignificant one, but it’s one that was repeated thousands of times in the 1940s and 50s. The backdrop of these repetitions, coupled with Toibin’s deft use of just the right amount of historical detail, lends resonance to Eilis’s journey. The question at the root of Brooklyn, and the one that drives much of the action, is whether it’s possible to truly leave home.

This is not a book filled with impressive literary effects. The chronology is simple and the story is familiar. Nevertheless, Toibin’s gift for storytelling maintains the momentum, particularly in the last third of the book when Eilis is faced with a difficult decision. Eilis rarely takes initiative, instead merely reacting to what happens around her, including the overtly manipulative actions of stronger characters. Some readers will find Eilis’s passivity annoying, but this trait seems a natural result of her sheltered upbringing. A more hard-charging personality wouldn’t ring as true. Overall, Brooklyn is an emotionally rich story about leaving home and starting over.

A Review of The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi (translated by Polly McLean)

2010-02-10T00:30:00.000-06:00

The Patience Stone

4 out of 5: In this slim novel, an unnamed woman ministers to her comatose husband in a small back room of their house in war-torn Afghanistan. The man, wounded by a bullet in his neck, lies inert on a dirty mattress, indifferent to the action unfolding around him, from gunshots in the street to a fly exploring his mouth. Over time, the woman is driven by the stress of her life of constant danger to reveal increasingly dramatic secrets to “the man who may or may not hear her.” She becomes close to him in a way that was not possible when he was conscious:

How strange this all is! I’ve never felt as close to you as I do right now. We’ve been married ten years. Ten years! And it’s only these last three weeks that I’m finally sharing something with you.

The most striking aspect of The Patience Stone is Rahimi’s use of an unusual narrative device—a strictly limited perspective. The perspective of the story never leaves the room where the man lies unconscious, and the narrator functions as the proverbial fly on the wall. The woman, her two children, and a few other unnamed characters come and go, but the perspective never moves beyond the single room. This daring construct presents a unique view of the strains of war on everyday existence, a view that is so satisfyingly subtle because it is so constrained geographically. Rater than a novel, The Patience Stone—with its limited scope and its concise 142 pages—is more akin to a fable, which, I’m sure, is exactly what Rahimi intended.

A Review of Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich

2010-02-03T00:30:00.000-06:00

Shadow Tag: A Novel

3.5 out of 5: This bleak novel tracks the slow destruction of a marriage and, ultimately, a family. Irene, a failed historian, and her husband Gil, an artist who’s grown famous off of his revealing portraits of Irene, are the parents of three precocious children, including a math genius and a budding artist. While the love between Irene and Gil is undoubtedly powerful, the couple’s self-destructive, co-dependent tendencies result in constant friction. At the start of the novel, this marriage has already descended into an unhealthy state, and Louise Erdrich masterfully captures Irene’s and Gil’s shared sicknesses without crossing the line into melodrama. The couple’s deliberate ripping apart of their family is unpleasant to witness but profoundly moving nonetheless.

I really wanted to love this book, and is has many wonderful aspects: poetic language, powerful imagery, psychological depth, and the haunting (and surprising) ending, to name just a few. The novel’s harmony, unfortunately, is unsettled by some distracting flaws. Although most of the story is told through Irene’s point of view, Erdrich chooses to switch points of view periodically, and seemingly at random, introducing a jarring incoherence into an otherwise well-structured narrative. The children, even the youngest, say and do things that are absurdly adult. Despite that annoyance, I still found myself empathizing with the improbably wise children, rather than with Irene or Gil, who are intended to be at the emotional center of the story but who are too contemptible to elicit much empathy. Despite these flaws, Shadow Tag nevertheless succeeds as a suspenseful and memorable read.

A Review of Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (translated by Joanne Turnbull)

2010-01-27T00:30:00.001-06:00

Memories of the Future

4 out of 5: This collection of seven loosely interconnected short stories, by turns whimsical and menacing, examines Soviet Moscow in the 1920s. In these stories Krzhizhanovsky primarily focuses on the lives of displaced intellectuals—those who, after World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917, are left with little to do but wander the city’s streets wondering what happened to their settled lives of respectability. One of Krzhizhanovsky’s protagonists describes Soviet Russia, and particularly Moscow, as a “country of nonexistences,” and it is these nonexistences, left without a place or function in society, that populate Krzhizhanovsky’s stories. While often representing an isolated point of view, Krzhizhanovsky’s stories contain enough dark comedy and signs of hope to mitigate their overall bleakness.

In a self-described style of “experimental realism,” Krzhizhanovsky mixes gritty details (dark rooms in concrete block buildings, frozen boulevard benches) with fantastical elements, including several extended dream sequences. In one story, the Eiffel Tower uproots itself and heads towards the revolution in the East, laying waste to everything in its path. In another, a sociable corpse manages to miss his funeral while trying to experience one more day of life. In the last story of the collection (Memories of the Future), Max Scherter is a man obsessed with the concept of time. He works to build a time machine only to be repeatedly interrupted by war and revolution. Despite the obstacles Max faces, his story is a hopeful one of the perseverance of a noble idea over mankind’s tragedies.

Krzhizhanovsky died in 1950 before any of his stories were published. Now, for the first time, these seven stories are available to an English audience thanks to Joanne Turnbull’s translation and the New York Review of Books. Memories of the Future, although sometimes confusing in its wild departures from reality, gives us a valuable and unique insider’s view into a closed society.

A Review of Lying with the Dead by Michael Mewshaw

2010-01-20T04:00:00.000-06:00

Lying With the Dead
3 out of 5: In Michael Mewshaw’s latest novel, three grown siblings, all haunted by a traumatic childhood, converge on their dying mother’s home in Maryland. Maury, the eldest sibling, has Asperger’s and suffers under the guilt of having killed his own father years ago while defending his mother. Candy, the middle sibling, lives with the aftereffects of polio. Still living in Maryland and taking care of her mother, Candy longs for a life and love of her own. Quinn, the youngest, is an actor living in London, who supports his mother financially but otherwise attempts to minimize all contact with his troubled family. When the family comes together, shocking secrets are revealed, culminating in a dramatic, if predictable, ending.

The narrative alternates among the three voices of the siblings, but, because there’s little difference between Candy’s and Quinn’s voices (Maury’s Asperger’s makes his voice a bit more distinct), much of the effect is lost. Further, depicted as unrelentingly abusive and selfish, the mother has few redeeming qualities and forms an unconvincing emotional center of this novel. Mewshaw’s real strength is in writing credible dialog. At least half the book (and probably more) is straight dialog, which keeps the pace lively and engaging. Although lacking depth of characterization, Lying with the Dead is an entertaining and quick-paced family drama.

A Review of Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis (translated by Helen Caldwell)

2010-01-13T04:00:00.000-06:00

Dom Casmurro: A Novel

4 out of 5: This classic Brazilian novel, written by Machado de Assis and first published in 1899, is available in the U.S. in a new edition published last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In this first-person narrative, an elderly Bento Santiago reminisces about his happy childhood, including his devoted mother and his enduring love for his childhood sweetheart, Capitú. Over time, Bento’s adolescent happiness matures into a complicated adult life, rife with drama and tragedy.

As Bento progresses through his life story, his easygoing and often humorous voice adopts a deceptively light tone. This misleading lightness masks a much darker story, one of a man regretful of destroying his happiness with his own crippling jealousy. Not only is Bento the master of his own tragedy, but he also revels in telling the story to us, complete with dramatic flourishes and strategic asides. With strong parallels to Shakespeare’s Othello, Dom Casmurro is a classic story of love won and then lost. Although over a century old, this fresh and modern story remains as relevant today as when it was first written.

A Review of Fun with Problems by Robert Stone

2010-01-06T04:00:00.000-06:00

Fun with Problems
4 out of 5: The stories in Robert Stone's newest collection, aptly titled Fun with Problems, run the gamut from west coast to east coast, from the drug-addled dregs of society to the troubled lives of dot-com millionaires. Stone's characters are equally at home listening to Mahler and alluding to Shakespeare as they are prone to drug-induced misbehavior and drunken rages. Lucy, the impulsive, self-destructive protagonist of "High Wire," one of the strongest stories in the collection, could be speaking for all of Stone's characters when she describes herself as "in difficulty."

Stone's style is unrelentingly raw and testosterone-pumped. While potentially off-putting to some, I found Stone's writing to be refreshingly different from the norm, if occasionally overindulgent. Some of Stone's meltdown scenes—and there are many of them—stretch credulity (would the Secretary of Defense really lose his mind over a disparaging comment?). But, for the most part, Stone powerfully portrays humanity at its nadir. Certainly, these are not uplifting or hopeful stories. Rather, they seek to shed light on our darkest instincts and desires, and, on this point, they succeed magnificently.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T11:09:00.002-06:00

May 2010 be filled with lots of good books for you and your family!

Review of Red April by Santiago Roncagliolo (translated by Edith Grossman)

2009-12-30T04:00:00.002-06:00

Red April: A Novel

3.5 out of 5: Félix Chacaltana Saldívar, the Associate District Prosecutor in the city of Ayachucha in Peru, is tasked with investigating a brutal killing spree that takes place during the time leading up to and including the Holy Week of 2000, culminating on Easter Sunday. The mutilated corpses of the victims bear wounds with religious significance, and Chacaltana wonders whether the murders signal a resurgence of the Shining Path terrorist group, a resurgence the Peruvian government refuses to acknowledge. As Chacaltana's investigation uncovers more uncomfortable facts, he faces increased bureaucratic hurdles and personal danger.

With endearing naiveté, Prosecutor Chacaltana bumbles his way through Peru's corrupt bureaucracy, achieving success through sheer tenacity rather than professional skill. Chacaltana's continuing obsession with his long-dead mother and his romantic interest in a pretty waitress add further dimensions to his likeable character. Roncagliolo's depiction of Ayachucha nicely offsets the citizens' religious devotion with their near constant fear of the city's sinister underbelly. Although Red April has some messy loose ends, the novel is a mostly enjoyable screed against the ineffective Peruvian system of justice knitted together with a suspenseful, quick-paced political thriller.

A Review of Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar

2009-12-23T04:00:00.002-06:00

Wish Her Safe at Home

4 out of 5: This wonderfully original novel examines the happy side of madness. Rachel Waring, a middle-aged spinster living in London with a cantankerous flat-mate and a dead-end job, unexpectedly inherits from a forgotten aunt a beautiful but dilapidated Georgian mansion in Bristol. As a result of her unforeseen good fortune, Rachel decides to remake her life. She quits her job and moves to Bristol where she lovingly refurbishes the house and, in the process, becomes obsessed with a former occupant from the 18th century.

This book’s genius is its close first-person point of view. The reader witnesses everything from Rachel’s increasingly unbalanced perspective. Determined to always look at the bright side, Rachel slowly descends into a gleeful kind of madness, but we’re never quite certain whether Rachel is truly insane or merely optimistic. By turns, we’re charmed by her and embarrassed for her. We laugh at her numerous follies and cringe at her missteps, all the while wishing her the very best. Wish Her Safe at Home is a remarkable achievement in characterization and a refreshing examination of the brighter aspects of madness. Thanks to NYRB Classics for reviving this novel, which was first published in 1982.

The Best Books I Read This Year (2009)

2009-12-21T04:00:00.001-06:00

Out of the over 100 books I read in 2009, only 7 garnered 4.5 points on my 5-point scale. Only 3 were perfect 5's. For those of you looking for last-minute holiday gifts, any of these books would be a great choice. Or you can use your holiday gift cards to get yourself a gift. Here's the list of the best books I read this year (the 5's, the 4.5's and five runners up). Click on the title to view the review.

The Perfect 5’s:

Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda
Little Bee by Chris Cleave
Love and Summer by William Trevor

The 4.5's:

The Collector of Worlds by Iliya Troyanov
A Country Called Home by Kim Barnes
Effigy by Alissa York
Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Rupert by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer
The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer

The Runners-Up: These earned 4 points, but looking back, I'm now thinking they actually deserved 4.5 points.

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Passing Strange by Martha A. Sandweiss
Vilnius Poker by Ricardas Gavelis
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Review of The German Mujahid by Boualem Sansal (translated by Frank Wynne)

2009-12-16T04:00:00.000-06:00

The German Mujahid: a novel
4 out of 5: Rachel and Malrich, Algerian-born brothers living with distant relatives in a rough Muslim ghetto thirty minutes outside of Paris, discover the horrible truth about their German father: he’s a former SS officer employed in the Nazi death camps during World War II. Their father’s secret past only comes to light after he and his wife are brutally murdered by Islamic fundamentalists in the small Algerian village where they live. After this devastating series of events causes Rachel to commit suicide (an event disclosed on page 1), Malrich sets off on a journey to come to terms with his brother’s death and his father’s evil past. Along the way, Malrich draws parallels between the Holocaust and the more recent murders perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalists.

Clearly, there is a lot going on in The German Mujahid, but the book’s structure—rigid enough to shape the story but relaxed enough to allow for relevant tangents—holds it all together for the most part. Composed of the brothers’ alternating journal entries and skipping nimbly back and forth in time, this structure maintains suspense while filling in enough background details to create depth and resonance.

Sansal’s central concern is whether a father’s sins should be (must be?) imputed to his sons, and the brothers’ attempts to answer this question drive most of the action. Malrich asks:

Am I supposed to believe the man I called papa and the SS officer are really the same person? How is it possible to blame one and honour the other, to hate the killer he was—a man I never knew—and love the father, the victim he is now, a victim of the same terrorists who are gunning for us?

It’s a complicated question, and Sansal’s treatment is appropriately perceptive, if occasionally preachy. The German Mujahid is a powerful examination of terrorism, both past and present, and its effects on those innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire.

It's Not Too Late to Win a Copy of The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

2009-12-11T13:26:00.006-06:00

As mentioned previously, I'm giving away twenty galley copies of Gina Ochsner’s The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight. Twenty copies is a lot, so your chances of winning one are quite good! I'll accept entries through next Friday, December 18th. If you're interested, please e-mail me (litlicense AT gmail DOT com) with your name and address (no PO boxes; US/Canada only). For more details on the book and an explanation of how you can get two entries, go here.

A Review of Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

2009-12-09T04:00:00.001-06:00

Await Your Reply: A Novel
4 out of 5: In this gripping literary thriller, Dan Chaon weaves together three distinct story lines, each with its own set of fully formed characters, including a father-son team of identity thieves, a high school teacher who skips town with his favorite female student, and a man searching for his mentally-ill twin brother. The plot switches from story to story until, in the final one-third of the book, the stories come together in surprising ways.

Throughout it all, Chaon's primary concern is the concept of human identity. Chaon's characters grapple with what it means to change names, escape from families and towns, and alter appearances. We are left wondering if a person has a fixed identity (a true essence) or if identity is merely relative, shifting according to circumstances and desires. The answer to this question suggested by Chaon is unsettling and thought-provoking. Chaon's workmanlike prose maintains a quick pace, making for a real page-turner. Await Your Reply combines a high entertainment value with literary depth.

Galley Giveaway: The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

2009-12-04T04:00:00.000-06:00

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has generously offered to send twenty galley (pre-publication) copies of Gina Ochsner’s The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight to readers of Literary License. The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight, Ochsner's first novel, was longlisted for the 2009 Orange Prize and is described in a review in the Guardian as “[o]ne part post-Soviet insanity to three parts magical realism.” This novel won’t be published in the U.S. until February, so here’s your chance to grab an early copy.

Book description:

In a crumbling apartment building in post-Soviet Russia, there’s a ghost who won’t keep quiet. Mircha fell from the roof and was never properly buried, so he sticks around to heckle the living: his wife, Azade; Olga, a disillusioned translator/censor for a military newspaper; Yuri, an army veteran who always wears an aviator’s helmet; and Tanya.

Tanya carries a notebook wherever she goes, recording her observations and her dreams of finding love and escaping her job at the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum, a place which holds a fantastic and terrible collection of art knockoffs created using the tools at hand, from foam to chewing gum, Popsicle sticks to tomato juice. When the museum’s director hears of a mysterious American group seeking to fund art in Russia, it looks like she might get her chance at a better life, if she can only convince them of the collection’s worth. Enlisting the help of Azade, Olga and even Mircha, Tanya scrambles to save her dreams and her neighbors, and along the way discovers that love may have been waiting in her own courtyard all along.

If this sounds interesting to you, please e-mail me (litlicense AT gmail DOT com) with your name and address (no PO boxes). I'll select twenty winners at random from the qualifying entrants. For those of you who are overachievers, send a brief description of a dream or a journal entry along with your name and address, and I’ll enter you in the drawing twice. Sorry, but the quagmire that is international publishing rights limits this giveaway to those living in the U.S. or Canada.

I will accept entries until midnight on December 18th. Good luck!

Review of Rupert: A Confession by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (translated by Michele Hutchison)

2009-12-02T04:00:00.001-06:00

Rupert: A Confession
4.5 out of 5: In this novel by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, we learn immediately that Rupert has been accused of a horrible crime, but we know nothing of the specifics. The novel is structured as a confessional monologue, and Rupert begins his defense for the jury by describing the end of his relationship with Mira, his cherished lover. Emotionally devastated, Rupert wanders the city seeking satisfaction of his desires but finding only memories: “I sought her in vain in the mirrors and found instead the twinkling emptiness of memory and longing.”

Like an expert performer, Rupert maintains a taut suspense by slowly revealing, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, the important details of his story. His monologue is littered with early, subtle signs of his lunacy, such as his explanation of why he's an expert at all martial arts after only "a couple of lessons": "Those born to the Path see through the principles of every martial art and assimilate them into their soul without having to get bogged down in the details of the particular techniques." Delusional, surely, but also quite humorous. As the monologue progresses, the humor subsides, and Rupert’s delusions become ever more menacing. Rupert constantly plays with the distinctions between performers and audience, exhibitionists and voyeurs. Eventually, like many violent criminals, Rupert views himself as existing outside of his body and its actions; he becomes "the voyeur of his own exhibitionism."

Pfeijffer’s lyrical prose shows heavy influences of Nabokov: “Mira, my sugar-sweet, shimmering Mira, my masochism, my martyrdom, light of my lips, lymph of my cyanic sadness, sea of my swan dive, salt on my howling wounds, wait for me and let me find you.” These lines (so beautifully translated by Michele Hutchinson) reveal the depth of Rupert’s obsession with Mira and hint at the trouble to come.

This masterfully constructed novel culminates in a scene that might be the most powerful description of a crime I’ve ever read. As to be expected with the stories of psychopaths, Rupert is sexually explicit and loaded with the worst kinds of violence. If that’s okay with you, this glimpse into the twisted mind of a criminal will blow you away.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-25T04:00:00.000-06:00

Literary License will be back next week with more book reviews.

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

2009-11-18T04:00:00.001-06:00

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)

2009-11-11T04:00:00.003-06:00

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

2009-11-04T04:00:00.000-06:00

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)

2009-10-28T04:00:00.002-05:00

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?

2009-10-27T10:35:00.002-05:00

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

2009-10-21T04:00:00.000-05:00

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

2009-10-14T04:01:00.000-05:00

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)

2009-10-14T04:00:00.001-05:00

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

2009-10-13T11:57:00.001-05:00

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

2009-10-13T04:37:00.001-05:00

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'

2009-10-13T04:09:00.000-05:00

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)

2009-10-12T04:11:00.000-05:00

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.

2009-10-12T04:03:00.000-05:00

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

2009-10-09T15:54:00.004-05:00

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

2009-10-09T04:27:00.001-05:00

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

2009-10-08T04:17:00.000-05:00

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)

2009-10-07T04:14:00.000-05:00

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

2009-10-06T16:36:00.005-05:00

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

2009-10-06T04:24:00.000-05:00

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

2009-10-05T08:12:00.004-05:00

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

2009-10-02T04:22:00.001-05:00

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

2009-10-02T04:07:00.001-05:00

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.

Banned Books Week

2009-10-01T04:21:00.000-05:00

It's banned books week this week, and in order to demonstrate the continuing threat of censorship, this cool interactive map shows recent cases of book banning in the US. There are a bunch of them. Click on a marked location to learn more about a particular case. Although I'm proud to say there are no cases from Houston on this map, here's the entry for a 2008 case in Austin:

Lauren Myracle's TTYL was banned and removed from middle school libraries through the Round Rock Independent School District. A review committee recommended that the books be left on shelves but the superintendent had the book removed throughout the district. NCAC and ABFFE sent a letter to the school board and to the Austin-American Statesman opposing the ban.

Given the hundreds of cases included on this map covering just the last couple years, it's frightening to think "70 to 80 percent [of cases] are never reported."

Today is Super Thursday in the UK

2009-10-01T04:16:00.001-05:00

The British publishers think it’s a good idea to release around 800 new books on a single day (namely, October 1st). That's three times as many as normal. In a rather cryptic explanation of this event (dubbed "Super Thursday"), associate editor of the Bookseller magazine, Benedicte Page, comments that “for the bookselling market, certain dates are particularly propitious." See the full story, including reactions from booksellers, at the Guardian.