2019 Books

2019 Books 

 2019- the last year before everything changed.  I was pretty fortunate during the pandemic in that I live in a 3 bed 2 bath house with outdoor space, had a job that anticipated pandemic era changes in the work place and wasn't raising a young child.  However, after I actually got COVID I could barely read for a year- pretty much from summer of 2021 to summer of 2022 I could hardly read a book at all, and while I can read again, I'm still nowhere close to my old pace, and I'm not sure I'll ever get back there.

  In 2019 I was essentially done with the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die project, and most of my reading were titles nominated for awards or books by those who had already won awards, with an eye towards diversity (i.e. non US) writers- similar to 2018.

Published 1/4/19
Killing Commendatore (2018)
by Haruki Murakami

  Killing Commendatore was the first pick for my new book group.  I picked it because I knew the people in the book group would want to read it.  Murakami has that kind of pull- almost unique among top drawer serious writers of literary fiction.  Compare his sales figures to recent Nobel Prize winner Ishiguro, and I'm sure Murakami wins by a wide margin.  That impression was reinforced during a recent trip to that temple of the English language book trade- Foyle's in London, where Murakami gets two whole shelves to himself. 

  The book group was only so-so on Killing Commendatore, people thought it was a trifle long and  meandering for a Murakami book (although that describe almost all of his books).  Due to the 700 page length, we discussed it over two weeks- that was awkward- since people read to different points for the first session, and many didn't finish the book on time.  I guess that is typical in book groups.

  The story in Killing Commendatore will be familiar to any reader who has read any of his other books: A recently divorced man, who is taking an extended break from his career as a portrait painter, an isolated retreat, a strange twist into the supernatural, owls, cats, you know the drill...  I don't think it is a top Murakami book- but maybe the top of the second tier.  

Canadian author Harriet Alida Lye published her debut novel, The Honey Farm, last year.

Published 1/4/19
The Honey Farm (2018 )
 by Harriet Alida Lye

  The Honey Farm is the debut novel from Canadian author Harriet Alida Lye.  Lye tells the story of a group of would-be artists drawn by the offer of a free "artist retreat" at a working honey farm run by the mysterious Cynthia.   The primary drama involves Sylvia, a very young woman, recently graduated from college, who is more or less fleeing her religious family and Ibrahim, a talented painter from Toronto.   Ibrahim deflowers Sylvia, they fall into affair, and of course she instantly becomes pregnant.  It seems to be required in literary fiction, as much as in television and film, that a youthful affair will result in pregnancy, and I found myself loudly sighing after this development.

  Other reviews have hinted at "dark secrets" being revealed in the course of The Honey Farm, but I'll be damned if I could tell you what they are.  Lye is strong on conjuring atmosphere, and it seems like she actually knows how to run a honey farm, but I thought the story was weak and Sylvia, like many millennial protagonists, annoyed me to no end.   I wouldn't not read Lye's next book because there is promise in The Honey Farm, but I wouldn't recommend it outside of all but the most dedicated readers/listeners of debut literary fiction.

Alice Munro, Canadian short story writer and Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Published 1/8/19
Too Much Happiness (2009)
by Alice Munro


   One of my major Audiobook "fill" categories is Nobel Prize winners.  I thought that all the Nobel Prize in Literature winners would automatically have all their books available in Audiobook format, or at least those who won in the past twenty years.   Just to take recent winners- there are no available Audiobooks for 2014 winner Patrick Modiano (French.)  This is despite the fact that Modiano's works are typically translated into English and remain in print (they were all on the shelf at a recent visit to Foyle's Books in London.)

  BUT- Alice Munro- Canadian Apostle of the Short Story- she won in 2013 (which I did not even know) and ALL of her books are available as Audiobooks.  She's got 14 volumes of short stories published between 1968 and 2012, and then there are a handful of separate compilations. I selected Too Much Happiness, more or less randomly, because it was published shortly before she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and I'm of the opinion that the Nobel Prize prefers to give the award to Authors who are still doing their best work.

  I think the Audiobook and the short story go well together, in the same way that the novel really fits the paperback/hardback physical book format.  It's easy to dip in and out of an Audiobook, vs when I read a physical book,  I don't like to reset my attention frame every half hour.   Munro's Wikipedia tag line is that she revolutionized the architecture of the short story, especially the tendency to move backward and forward in time.    That last clause really resonates with me, "the tendency to move backward and forward in time," which has to be one of the techniques of writers that I most frequently call out after reading an entry on the 1001 Books list.   It's a technique I associate with the novel, specifically with the high modernists, though by mid century it was making it's way in the mainline literature.

    It strikes me that Munro has an incredibly low profile for the first North American to win the Nobel in Literature since Toni Morrison won a decade earlier.  I guess that win is reflected in the availability of her books in Audiobook format, but I'd be hard pressed to name a single person I've ever met who has read her, let alone would name Munro as one of their favorite authors.

   Of course, I'm not going to trash a collection of Munro short stories, but like all short story collections I'm left grasping at a sold critical approach.  Talk about themes? Individual stories?  All of the stories are set in contemporary Canada except for the title story, about an 19th century Russian mathematician who was the first woman to teach in Sweden (Nobel Prize committee catnip, no doubt.)

 I listened to Too Much Happiness in a variety of circumstances- it took me 40 days to get through the 11 hours.  Some of Munro's protagonists are men, most are women. Domestic relationships gone wrong feature strongly in several of the stories in this collection.  Too Much Happiness is another beast entirely- I wonder if it could be a novella, it seemed long enough on it's own.  I happened to be flying back from Iceland when I listened to most of Too Much Happiness, and I thought the Russian/Scandinavian angle was particularly well thought out and clever.

Published 1/8/19
My Sister the Serial Killer (2018)
by Oyinkan Braithwaite
Published by Double Day
(BUY)

  I was immediately interested by the caption description I read about My Sister the Serial Killer when it was published last November.  Debut novel by a Nigerian author that combines family drama and, yes, a serial killing sister.   You had me at debut novel by a Nigerian author!  It's a slim volume- 240 pages in print, and a little over four hours as an Audiobook.  It was an interesting choice as an Audiobook- the narrator- a Nigerian woman working as a nurse with a solid education and social background- speaks with something like an American accent, but then many of the secondary characters speak with a pronounced Nigerian accent- similar to those displayed in Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimanda Ngozi Adichie- another contemporary Nigerian author.

  It must be said that getting the accents is one of the pleasures of the Audiobook, and it makes we want to back and see what Scottish classics might be available in the same format.   There is nothing to dislike about My Sister the Serial Killer, I very much enjoyed it, and it seems like a choice for a movie or television version.   There's no question that there is a rise of distinctive African voices, including many young women, coming out of Nigeria right now. 

Published 1/13/19
The Heretic (2007)
 by Miguel Delibes

Replaces:  An Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma

  So many Spanish language books in the 2008 revision of the original 1001 Books list- like they didn't even know about Spanish language books when they were putting together the first edition. Maybe they added a specialist as an editor for the second go round.

  Miguel Delibes died in 2010 after a distinguished literary career inside Spain, and to, a lesser degree, Europe.  I don't think he ever really developed an English language audience, maybe because he achieved his success in Spain when it was still a vaguely Fascist state.   The Heretic is a work of historical fiction, about a Spanish nobleman, Cipriano Salcedo.   Salcedo leads a tortured life after his mother dies in childbirth and his father essentially abandons him, first to a hired nursemaid, and then to a boarding school. 

  Salcedo discovers the thinkers of the reformation at the very dawn of that era, and it isn't a spoiler to tell a prospective reader that the Inquisition is a' comin'.   And that is about it for The Heretic- it's not long- not even three hundred pages, but this was his prize winner in a hugely prolific career- the The Heretic won the top literary prize in Spain when it was published in Spanish in 1996, so I guess that is what us English speakers get, as far as Delibes is concerned.  I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend The Heretic unless you are specifically interested in the experience of the Spanish Inquisition- I mean I am- but how many others.  I've certainly not come across anything similar written in English.

Author Elliot Ackerman

Published 1/17/19
Waiting for Eden
by Elliot Ackerman
Published September 2018

    Elliot Ackerman is the latest in the fine American tradition of soldier-authors, or Ambulance drivers near the theater of war in the case of the Lost Generation, but FWIW Ackerman actually won some military commendations, and he combines his experience with the style of any ivy league educated writer of literary fiction (and maybe somebody who doesn't need to earn a living from his writing, based on his refusal to write the kind of book that would be a smash best seller/spawner of a feature film or television show, etc.)

   Waiting for Eden is his take on a Samuel Beckett novel- narrated by a dead soldier whose spirit is hovering over the mangled almost-dead body of his friend and fellow soldier, Eden, who is the "most injured man" to actually survive a war wound.   A more accurate title for Waiting for Eden would have been "Waiting for Eden to Die," because that is what the reader, and all the characters are awaiting.

  Fortunately, Waiting for Eden isn't overly long, only 192 pages in hardback, and the Audiobook I listened to was only four.

Published 1/18/19
The Book About Blanche and Marie (2007)
 by Per Olov Enquist

Replaces: Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry

  I might have lived by entire life without hearing about Swedish author Per Olov Enquist (P.O. Enquist) were it not for the first revision of the 1001 Books list. Enquist made it onto the list with The Book About Blanche and Marie, about the relationship between and lives of famous scientist Marie Curie and Blanch Wittmann, the "Queen of the Hysterics" and later triple amputee as a result of her being the subject of early x ray experiments.

  The major take-away from this slim volume, besides the fact of Blanch Wittmann's existence and the role she played in the development of Freudian Psychiatry, is to add color to the life of Marie Curie- one of the few people, let alone women to win  the Nobel Prize in two separate categories.  As the book relates, Curie became entangled in an affair with a married man (after her own husband died) which became a post-Dreyfuss affair cause celebre in fin de siecle Paris.

 Enquist adopts a neutral tone, neither canonizing nor demonizing Marie, and allowing the reader to puzzle through what, if anything, it all means. 

Published 1/19/19
Ghost Wall (2018)
by Sarah Moss
(BUY EBOOK ON AMAZON)

  In my post 1001 Books list era, I source many of my new choices from my feed.  The Guardian, in particular, provides many new ideas for books, both newly published and for catalog titles. The Guardian was founded in Manchester, though these days it is more typically associated with London, where it has it's present base of operations.   It certainly appears true to me that on a per capita basis, the UK has the strongest market for literary fiction both in terms of an actual audience for purchasing books and also for the critical audience. 

  That's how I came across Ghost Wall, the sixth novel by Sarah Moss, and English novelist who is well into her career but hasn't had the big splash, either in terms of cross-oceanic commercial success or a Booker Prize nomination.    Ghost Wall tells the story- of Silvie, an adolescent girl who is on a week long "Iron Age" retreat, with her bus driver father , who has the kind of working class intellectual obsession with the iron age that you only seem to hear about in British television shows and books.   As becomes clear, Silvie's father Bill is an abuser, of both the physical and mental variety (though not sexual, or maybe sexual, but not within this book, as told by Silvie). 

  Any reader familiar with the mentality of the victims of domestic violence will view Silvie with sympathy.  Moss stuffs Ghost Wall with authentic detail from the sub-culture of students and fans of iron age culture- it's a world where the Romans are viewed as arriviste's .  For Silvie's father, Bill,  there is a clear link between his mentality and the mentality of pro-Brexit voters: Immigrants out, even the ones from two thousand years ago.

  Ghost Wall isn't long- 144 pages in print and under four hours in the Audiobook format.  I don't think the physical book has been released in the United States, but in what is becoming an increasingly common occurrence, the Ebook and Audiobook were released simultaneously in the United States and the UK.  It was an excellent Audiobook- Silvie speaks with a north England accent, and the student characters she interacts with have the more common southern English accent, and this difference is an important part of what happens in Ghost Wall.

    Moss throws in a third act twist that leaves the reader satisfied with their minimal investment of time and energy.  Also, there is nothing supernatural or gothic about Ghost Wall, it's more like a work of kitchen sink realism with the iron age thrown in as a twist to engage the audience. 

Published 1/21/19
Indignation (2008)
by Philip Roth

  Philip Roth is another post-1001 Books project author I've singled out for further investigation, both because I like his books and because his work is readily available in Audiobook format on the Libby library app.  I selected Indignation more or less at random, seeing that it was available immediately and that it was only four hours long.   Published in 2008, near the end of Roth's active period, it is narrated from the hospital bed of Marcus Messner, who has just been fatally wounded in Vietnam, after being expelled from the Midwestern college where he had sought escape from his overbearing Kosher butcher father.

  The title refers to the attitude of Messner himself, who is perpetually aggrieved.  Initially,  due to Messner's position as a quasi-unreliable narrator,  at first we sympathize with the striving young student who is overwhelmed by his father's rapid descent into an aggressively paranoid mental illness that causes him to fixate on the potential for Marcus to come to a bad end.   By the end of the book, we realize that Messner himself is not the most stable tool in the shed.  I actually ended up rooting against Messner, and felt that he deserved his fate.

  In true Rothian style, much of Indignation is devoted to Messner's complicated reaction to receiving a blowjob from a mentally unbalanced (female) classmate.   You could say that the blowjob literally blows Messner's mind, and he simply can't recover. 

Published 1/21/19
Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of Los Angeles( (2018)
by Lili Anolik
Published by Scribner, January 8th, 2019 (AMAZON)

    Angeleno author Eve Babitz has been having a real cultural moment over the last couple years.  Up to this point, the major highlights have included her books being reissued by the New York Review of Books, laudatory national press and now, this biography, written by Lili Anolik, who wrote the Vanity Fair profile that some might argue (Anolik, for one) got the Eve Babitz revival rolling.   The reissue of  Eve's Hollywood has been sitting in my house for half a year, but I was more excited about the prospect of this new biography.

   Apparently, I'm not the only one.  The Amazon listing for Hollywood's Eve announces it as a best seller and it was recently announced that Hulu, of all places, has bought the rights to her books for a television show.   Babitz herself is still alive, living in semi-obscurity in Hollywood.  As the book reveals, she's been through a rough several decades- basically from the mid 1970's on, with monumental substance abuse issues capped with an accidental self immolation that covered most of her body with third degree burns.   Babitz is also a bit of a hoarder.

  The Babitz revival must surely come as a surprise to any critics left from the original publication of her series of roman a clef style books, which were basically panned and dismissed when they came out.   Prior to this recent revival, Babitz was essentially forgotten, or at the very most, relegated to a footnote of the halcyon days of rock and roll in the 1960's and 70's.   However, as Anolik ably argues in a book that veers between serious literary biography and anecdotal magazine article,  Babitz was present at many of the most important moments of Los Angeles music culture at a time when that culture was conquering the world, and dismissing her as a mere groupie is both sexist and ignorant.

  It goes without saying that were Babitz a man her sexual exploits would have made her a legendary lothario instead of relegating her to being dismissed as a glorified groupie.  Babitz hasn't done herself any favors by disappearing from public life for the past four decades- and her presence in Hollywood's Eve is that of a wraith, a shadow of her legendary former self.  Nothing is more emblematic of Babitz's absence from her own biography than a chapter of this already thin book where Anolik writes about her sister in an attempt to get more background on her upbringing.

  Indeed, it is the subject's own reticence to participate that dooms Hollywood's Eve to being something less than perfect.  If only she would speak for herself, regrettably, she chooses a tactic of half-hearted cooperation that leaves the reader with the thought that Babitz is no longer herself, protestations by the author that her absence is as Babitz-esque as her active period aside.  Still, despite the flaws there is no arguing that Hollywood's Eve is the revelatory literary biography of  early 2019, miss it at your peril.  

 Indignation was an ideal Audiobook, with only the single narrator's voice and an uninterrupted time line.  The content of the book at times makes for uncomfortable listening.  For example,   I wouldn't have wanted the parking lot attendant to hear Messner going on and on about the blowjob he received.  Also, there was a movie version of this book in 2016- I simply can't imagine sitting down to watch it.

Published 1/28/19
Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard  (2018)
by Cynthia Haven

  I had never heard of René Girard until a character called him "the French Nietzsche" in Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano.  Only days after coming across this first reference I saw a lengthy article devoted to Girard in The New York Review of Books.  Titled The Prophet of Envy and written by Robert Pogue Harrison, this article reviewed Evolution of Desire and discussed many of Girard's books.   Both Haven and Harrison agree that Girard is due a posthumous reassessment that would place his name among the first rank of late 20th/early 21st century philosophers.

  It is a bold claim, since Girard spent his professional life as a (more or less) Professor of French Literature at a series of American universities, culminating in his time at Stanford University.  As this biography makes clear, it shouldn't be a secret as to why Girard hasn't made a deeper impression: He espouses a deeply unfashionable blend of non-post modernist philosophy with a Christian perspective- both stances render him anathema to generations of professors and graduate students in the western world.

  On the other hand, his central hypothesis, stated on this wikipedia page as:

Girard's fundamental ideas, which he developed throughout his career and provided the foundation for his thinking, were that desire is mimetic (i.e., all of our desires are borrowed from other people); that all conflict originates in mimetic desire (mimetic rivalry); that the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry; and that the Bible reveals these ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.

  Just happens to anticipate the internet, social media, and what one might call our current wetanschauung.  You could call Girard a prophet of the post-Facebook, post-Instagram world, in the sense that both platforms specialize in mimetic desire and excel at scapegoating.  Examples are so numerous that it would be easier to list examples that don't fit into these two categories.   Evolution of Desire is a good departure point for an exploration of Girard, since his books are obscure enough to require some background, and his life is unfamiliar enough that a prospective reader would want some idea of what he was about.

  It should be said that his life was singularly unexciting outside of his ideas.  He never came close to doing anything exciting in his personal life, and his professional career was a steady upward progressions, culminating in his recruitment to Stanford, the most expensive recruitment of a professor in the humanities in US history.  

Published 1/28/19
The Middleman (2018)
by Olen Steinhauer

   Olen Steinhauer is a good candidate for "next canonical writer of spy fiction," with jacket blurbs that frequently reference John Le Carre (aka the last canonical writer of spy ficiton.)  Steinhauer has many of the attributes that may allow him to pass the boundary of genre and literary fiction:  Unusual locations, psychologically complex characters,  a big popular audience and a huge critical following within the genre.   He also has a moderately succesful television show, Berlin Station, which is on something called EPIX.

   Perhaps he's only one good movie adaptation away from crossing the border of genre and literary fiction.  George Clooney has optioned one of his Milo Weaver novels- about a CIA agent specializing in "black ops"- but there hasn't been much news since Sony announced Doug Liman as the directly six years ago.  The Middleman is a "stand alone" novel- about a group of crypto-leftists who have a vague plot to overthrow the American government. 

  The main protagonist is Rachel Proulx, a FBI Agent working in the emerging field of leftist domestic terrorists.  As with any good spy novel, you can't really get into the plot without venturing into spoiler territory.  Certainly fans of the genre will enjoy any book by Steinhauer, but I'm not entirely sold on his merit as a writer beyond the rule of genre.   The characters may be complex, but they are also predictable, and the plot was pretty standard- less inventive then All the Old Knives, his 2010 stand alone book about the aftermath of a terrorist hijacking of an airplane in the Middle East.

Published 1/30/19
So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood (2015)
by Patrick Modiano

    Jean Daragane is a Parisian author, past his most active period, living in near total isolation in his apartment.   His bouts of self-contemplation are interrupted when he receiving a threatening phone calll, followed shortly by the appearance of a classic film noir ingenue (or is she a femme fatale? or is neither category appropriate?   Daragane is quickly (the entire book is 160 pages long, a little over three hours in Audiobook form) drawn into a decades old murder plot, which forces him to come to terms with a traumatic childhood memory.

  If it sounds interesting- it isn't- at least not in any way the murder mystery/detective fiction plot precis communicates.   Modiano was a surprise (to English language readers outside of the French literature departments) winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014- and everyone in the English speaking world is coming to terms with the fact that when he won the award they had neither read any of his books or even heard of him.

  I'm not sure if that was entirely the case in the UK, but it is very much still the case here in the US, where it is hard to find a Modiano book in a bookstore (they had many of his books at Foyle's in London during a recent visit.)  For example, this particular book doesn't have a Wikipedia page, despite the fact that it was published the year after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  If ever one of his books would get an English language Wikipedia page, it would be the book published the year after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood resembles many writers from the last 50 years of European literary fiction:  A little detective story and a whole lot of ruminating.  Memory and trauma frequently appear in tandem.   That actually does describe this book, and it also accurately describes the kind of mainline European fiction that has been getting translated for decades.

 Published 1/31/19

Nocturnes (2009)
by Kazuo Ishiguro

  Kazuo Ishiguro is the first author where I've read his entire bibliography as a result of the 1001 Books project.  I am genuinely grateful for the opportunity, and it turns out that I quite like Ishiguro, that all of his books are interesting, and that he is an ideal candidate for Audiobook treatment.   Nocturnes is his collection of short stories, all of which involve musicians as characters.   In interviews, Ishiguro said that the stories were conceived holistically, with the intent that they be published together, in this particular order, in a single volume.  That intent is born out by the over lapping of characters in two of the stories, and the similarity in tone and theme.

   It's also true that the same can be said of Ishiguro's entire bibliography, every book deals explicitly with the vagaries of human memory and features narrators who meander through the events of the particular novel at hand while they contemplate the past.   Ishiguro isn't the only one- memory and it's fail-ability are at the heart of many authors who have scaled the peaks of literary fiction stardom.  Unlike many of the European authors who work this territory, Ishiguro has the good sense to write in English, making him more accessible than many of the authors who have similar concerns but write in unfashionable non-English languages.

  If I had to list Ishigruo's novel in order from favorite to least favorite, I would do it this way:

1.   Never Let Me Go (2005):   This is Ishiguro's dive into science fiction, about some clones living in a dreary alternate history England where the clones are raised for spare body parts.  For me, it was the best of both worlds in terms of being a combination of fun genre and serious literary fiction.
2. The Remains of the Day (1989):  Ishiguro's break-out hit, and as pure a distillation of his literary technique as any of his later books, it shows that he showed up basically full grown on the world literature scene.   The backdrop of pre- World War II England also seems like the terrain that most suits Ishiguro and his thematic concerns.
3. The Buried Giant (2015):  This is Ishiguro's fantasy novel- loosely set in the world of King Arthur/Arthurian legend.  Like Never Let Me Go, the genre setting enlivens the typical themes of human memory (and lack of memory).
4. An Artist of the Floating World (1986):  An Artist of the Floating World is very similar to The Remains of the Day in that both books deal with unresolved regrets from behavior surrounding the wind up to the second world war.  
5. The Unconsoled (1995):  This is probably the first Ishiguro book I wouldn't recommend- best called "Kafka-esque" this novel lacks the genre hook that envlience both Never Let Me Go and The Buried Giant, and it also lacks the perfection of The Remains of the Day and An Artist of the Floating World.
6. A Pale View of the Hills (1982):  Ishiguro's dour first novel- it shows obvious promise but lacks any of the tricks he learned to spice up the brooding and reminiscing that occupies most of his protagonists, leaving a slog of domestic fiction.
7. Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009):  The main thing that Nocturnes has going for it relative to his other books is a noticeable sense of humor.  Unfortunately, humor is not really Ishiguro's strong suit.
8. When We Were Orphans (2000):  When We Were Orphans is his only genuine misfire, a soggy mess of a "Detective Novel" that begs credibility and mangles the promising setting of Shanghai during the Japanese invasion prior to the onset of World War II.

Published 2/4/19
The Fox Was Ever the Hunter (2016)
by Herta Müller

  It is kind of amazing how little a difference a Nobel Prize in Literature can make inside the English language world when the winner doesn't write in English.  Müller was and continues to be a virtual unknown in the English speaking world- her first Google hit is her criticism of 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Mo Yan for his complicity with the Chinese Communist regime.

 I think the Nobel Committee's own statement on Muller's importance is as good as any:

Herta Müller's literary works address an individual's vulnerability under oppression and persecution. Her works are rooted in her experiences as one of Romania's German-speaking ethnic minority. Herta Müller describes life under Ceaușescu's regime - how dictatorship breeds a fear and alienation that stays in an individual's mind. Innovatively and with linguistic precision, she evokes images from the past. Herta Müller's literary works are largely prosaic, although she also writes poetry.

  It seems to me that German language writers have a relative advantage because of the cultural similarity between German and Swedish culture, and the position of German culture as a parent culture to Scandinavia.   Muller has a spotty record in translation- for example, her Wikipedia bibliography is a mess- this book doesn't even have an English language title within Wikipedia.  As her Nobel's winner's bio plainly states, she specializes in life as a German speaking minority in the repressive Ceausescu regime.   

  There were mere many ethnic German trapped behind the Eastern bloc after the end of World War II.  Several hundred thousand were shipped to Soviet prison camps, and by that standard Muller's people did better than others. Muller herself emigrated to Germany in the 1980's, which seems like a pretty savvy move for your average writer writing in Eastern Europe or the Middle East.   

   Muller is far from straightforward in her prose style, despite knowing that The Fox Was Ever the Hunter was about life towards the end of the Communist era.  It is difficult enough to follow that I actively regretted choosing the Audiobook instead of getting a paper copy.  I only had the barest outline of the story in mind even halfway through.  Muller does get her act together in terms of the story towards the end, and the resolution was almost enough to make me forget the lengthy poetic passages.

 

Luccia Berlin is ready for her revival.

Published 2/5/19
A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015)
 by Luccia Berlin

 
  American short-story writer Luccia Berlin is undergoing the kind of post-humous literary revival that canon dreams are made of, A Manual for Cleaning Women representing a re-collection of her previously published self stories, a "best of" if you will, complete with a foreword, an introduction, a biographical post-script that confirms the biographical origins of all of her stories.  If you wanted to point to a reason for Berlin's revival it would seemingly lie at the intersection of the rise of "auto-fiction" or autobiographical fiction that Berlin embodies and her status as a non-conventional female author who combined incredible erudition with Bukowski-like life experience, including a lost decade or so as an alcoholic- a period which produces many of her most harrowing and best stories.

  I gather from the prefatory material that is more kosher to compare Berlin to Carver than to Burkowski, perhaps as a way to lessen the emphasis on her period as an alcoholic, but man- those stories really dwarf the other periods of her life: peripatetic childhood as the daughter of a mining executive in various western towns ranging from Alaska to Arizona, adolescence as the wealthy child of an expatriate mining executive in Chile, checkered student career and early marriage and divorce, second marriage to a heroin addicted jazz musician, aforementioned decades in the East Bay of California as a single mom, school teacher, alcoholic and then house cleaner, and post-recovery life in Boulder Colorado as a well-loved but non tenured college professor.

  The stories are told out of chronological sequence, although there has obviously been thought about how to structure the stories, with a general build towards the heavier stories, and short stories interspersed with longer stories.   But uh, clearly she was ahead of her time, or at the very least she was underappreciated in terms of her contribution to auto fiction, as an early practitioner of the form.   Maybe some of the under-appreciation has to do with her status as a short story writer exclusively.

  

French author Eric Vuillard won the Prix Goncourt in 2017 for The Order of the Day.  The English language translation was published late last year.

Published 2/6/19
The Order of the Day (2018)
by Éric Vuillard


  The Order of the Day won the Prix Goncourt- France's most prestigious literary prize- in 2017.  That typically means an automatic translation into English, and so it was no surprise that anEnglish language translation was published in October of last year.  Only 144 pages in length, The Order of the Day fictionalizes the real world events that preceded World War II, specifically, a meeting held between Hitler and a dozen of Germany's industrial families where said families gave the Nazi's enough money to take over the government.

   This is followed by a longer investigation of Austria's utter capitulation to an invading German army.  Readers familiar with 20th century literature about World War II are sure to anticipate the tone of The Order of the Day, yet another illustration of Hannah Arendt's comment about the "banality of evil" but perhaps the emphasis her is to point out that people like the representatives of Germany's leading industrial families and the sitting Austrian government were a little bit more than innocent victims of historical forces beyond their control.

   It's not a new observation, but Vuillard manages to get the message across in 144 pages of laconic fiction, and in this regard his take is probably more likely to reach a wide audience than a dozen tombs of history or political science exploring the same subject. 

Simon Stalenhag's American road trip, The Electric State, centers on the disastrous consequences of  a headset virtual reality device called the nuerocaster

Published 2/7/19
The Electric State (2018)
by Simon Stålenhag

   Author and artist Simon Stalenhag has developed a cult following world wide based on his drawings of an alternate history Europe where giant robots co-exist with bucolic rural scenes of the Swedish country side.

 It was, perhaps, inevitable that Stalenhag, like any good Swedish artist with ambition, has turned his sights on America.  The Electric State is the result, another alternate past (the 1990's) where a teen girl and her robot wander westward in a world that is first of all, eerily empty, second  in the aftermath of an unspecified apocalypse which involved spaceships and third, has recovered enough so that the remainder of humanity has been enslaved by the Neurocaster device, shown above.  Also, giant self propelled robots patrol the countryside with Neurocaster wearing humans attached by long hoses.  It is a nighmarish dystopia, but it is, like Stalenhag's other works, very laid back. 

  The teen girl, it turns out, is searching for her brother- that is about it for a plot.  The pictures sometimes depict important events in the written story- but not always- and some of the most horrifying word images were left maddeningly undrawn.   I got the Ebook version from the library- I was curious to see how a largely visual book would work in the Kindle app- it was great!   No complaints.  I could just enlarge the photos and pan across it- as big as I wanted.

  The Electric State is neither a graphic novel, or an illustrated novel- it's not long enough for a novel, and the drawings don't contain any cartoon style/comic book style text, just the drawings (paintings?) themselves.  It's most like an art book, the kind of thing that might accompany a museum exhibition. 

Published 2/12/19
My Struggle: Book One (2013)
by Karl Ove Knausgaurd

  Karl Ove Knausgaurd is the international literary sensation to emerge in the past decade.  His six volume, 3600 page autobiographical novel, My Struggle, was published in the original Norwegian in 2009.  It has since made it's way into 22 different languages, and in 2013 it got an American version, with My Struggle: Book One coming out in 2013 and the final volume, Book Six getting a release last year.  Given the length and recent publication dates of the books in English, I believe that few have actually read Knausgaurd in English- as supposed to Norway- where one in every nine adults in the entire country owns a set. 

   2017 marked another important milestone for Knausgaurd when he won the Jerusalem Prize, which is basically the second biggest global literary prize behind the Nobel and serves as a who's who of almost winners of the Nobel and actual winners.   Considering the length and general level of "heaviness" that confronts the prospective reader, I am happy to report that the actual book is the opposite of its ponderous reputation, and it was maybe five hours into the sixteen hour Audiobook version I listened to that I realized who people actually bother reading My Struggle.

  My Struggle is a landmark of autobiographical fiction, and Knausgaurd has a range that stretches from Proust to Seinfeld.   The struggle that Knausgaurd refers to is his ability to exist as an independent artist despite the distractions of contemporary existence: family life, money and the banalities of the day-to-day.  He introduces this overriding theme but it is mostly absent from Book One which mostly deals with his childhood and the death of his father.

   It is the Dad's death- which occupies maybe half of Book One, where I really began to recognize the genius within Knausgaurd.  His father, a distant parent and eventual alcoholic who, ended up drinking himself to death, locked in a flat with his own mother, is portrayed "warts and all" but there is no terrible violence or deprivation, just the more or less ordinary frustrations of an unusually artistic son and his unemotional father.

  I'm actually excited to tackle the second volume- I think Audiobook is a very solid option for this series of books, since it is basically the Knausguard talking about himself ad naseum- no other voices to confuse the flow, and all settings of time and place are narrated dear diary style, with an awareness of the presence of the reader.   Surely My Struggle is canon worthy, more worthy then Falling Man by Don Delillo, for example, which was the last book added to the 2008 revised version of 1001 Books. 

Esi Edugyan reads from her 2018 novel Washington Black.

Published 2/13/19
Half-Blood Blues (2011)
by Esi Edugyan

   It is pretty impressive when a new author can reach the Booker Prize short list for both her second and third novel.  It's almost more impressive then winning once and never having another short-listed book.  I think that is because the jury changes every year- totally changes with entirely new judges- so a win in one year might just be because that particular jury was in a crazy mood that day, but making the short list twice in a row means that two different juries agreed that both books could have actually won the award, and that trumps one win followed by no further nominations.

  Of course Edugyan ticks all the diversity boxes without being too challenging for the general audience for literary fiction in the English speaking world:  She is the child of African immigrants to Canada, she writes historical fiction (blessedly not historical meta fiction) and she isn't experimental in the way that word is used in 21st century literary fiction.

  I thought Washington Black was very good- even if it didn't win, and were it published during the period when Hillary Mantel was winning twice in four years for her Wolf Hall series, it might well have been the winner.  However the fact that Half-Blood Blues, which almost wasn't published after the original Canadian publisher went bankrupt, made it to the Booker Prize shortlist speaks volumes.

  Several critics, writing about Washington Black, commented that they preferred Half-Blood Blues so it seemed clear that I would at least enjoy it the same way I enjoyed Washington Black: great writer, great subject, great execution, probably not going to be her best book. 

  I checked out the Audiobook from the library, it proved a less than ideal choice, even though Edugyan's mainline style lends itself well to the Audiobook format.  The narrator and most of the characters are African American or African German, the title refers to the state of native or immigrant African-Europeans under the Nazi regime.   It isn't a topic unknown to literary fiction- Thomas Pynchon features the Schwarzcommando- a fictional group of German rocket technicians who are mostly the off spring of mixed couples from German southwest Africa- in Gravity's Rainbow, and his book V also has a plot line about the genocidal German experience in southwest Africa.

  For a book that largely takes place immediately before and during the beginning of World War II, Half-Blood Blues has surprisingly little in the way of action.  Instead, Sidney "Sid" Griffiths, who is the narrator, spends an interminable amount of time wooing an African-French singer, first in Berlin, then in Paris.   It does prove integral to the resolution of the plot, and even though the finale doesn't unspool as a surprise, there is no arguing that it packs an emotional punch.

  I can only wonder what Edugyan's next project is, she hasn't been prolific, so a multi-year wait would seem to be in order.  I'd expect a bildungsroman, a multi generational immigrant family saga or some combination of auto fiction and auto biographical fiction- any of which could be a prize winner, international best seller or BOTH.  The sky is the limit for Esi Edugyan.

English author Kate Atkinson

Published 2/15/19
Transcription: A Novel (2018)
by Kathryn Atkinson

  I hadn't heard of Kathryn Atkinson before Transcription, her sixth novel, was published last fall.  She won the Whitbread/Costa Prize for her last two books, and Transcription made an opening week appearance on Amazon's weekly "Most Sold" fiction list, so Transcription looks like a good bet for a Booker longlist- the Costa being a "fun" cousin of the Booker, but with a winners list that broadly overlaps with Booker Prize winners and repeat shortlisters.

  Her own Wikipedia page lists her as a "crime fiction" writer, which seems a little unfair.  Transcription, for example, is a work of historical spy fiction, the only crimes are treason committed. during wartime, with much of the malfeasance bearing the imprimatur of MI5.   Transcription is told entirely from the prospective of Juliet Armstrong, reflecting on her life as she approaches death in an anonymous London area hospital in 1981.  Armstrong is winningly voiced by English actress Fenella Woolgar,  I'm mentioning it because it was very rare that I'm listening to an Audiobook and the voice of the book is something that especially draws my attention, and when it does it's usually negative, so Woolgar's excellent interpretation of Armstrong is worth pointing out- listen just for Woolgar's voice.

  Atkinson folds the main narrative of Transcription inside the beginning and ending chapters set at Juliet's deathbed.  Much of it is a recounting of her service as a spy for MI5 during World War II, when she helped with the investigation of fifth columnists within England, seeking to support Germany.    The second layer of plot takes place in 1950, after the war, when Armstrong is working in children's programming in the BBC out of their famous headquarters in London.  Armstrong receives an anonymous note threatening her, "You'll Pay for What You Did" and that sets the second level of the plot in motion, as Armstrong revisits players from her war time exploits.  It eventually culminates in a third act that some critics have called implausible, but it by no means wipes out the good of the rest of the book.

  Only 352 pages in hardback, and a seven hour Audiobook, Transcription is an enjoyable romp, suitable for light reading situations like lunch breaks of commuting.  Fenella Woolgar is excellent voicing Kate Armstrong- really funny and charming.

Published 2/20/18
The Cage (2018)
 by Lloyd Jones

  One hot tip I've got for navigated the Ebook department of your local big city public library:  Books often come out in Ebook format in the USA before they are published in hard back form when the author is being released physically in another English speaking territory, i.e. Canada or the UK.  This has all to do with the vagaries of international publishing, but increasingly the Ebook is being published simultaneously in advance of a physical release.   Thus, you can follow literary fiction in the UK and be reasonably assured that there is, at least, an Ebook version of the latest release by an English language author not from the United States.

  Lloyd Jones is in that category, he is an author from New Zealand with a lifetime of literary fiction that didn't make it internationally and one book that did, Mister Pip (2006), which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and made it onto the Booker Prize shortlist in 2007.   The Cage is his third novel since that career peak.  The three ratings on his American Amazon product listing make it clear that The Cage has not garnered a very large audience in the United States.  Like many of the contemporary works of literary fiction I read, The Cage has a dystopian angle:  Two unnamed men, called strangers, are kept inside a cage on the grounds of the hotel, where the hotel owner and a "trustees committee" of local luminaries, refuse to let the men out for a two year period.

  Much is not explained- the men never give their names, never tell where they are from except that they are fleeing from an unknown catastrophe.   No description of the larger world is given, the technology and language of the people described would seem to place it in the late 20th century- for example, in an early part of the novel the strangers are taken up in an airplane in attempt to locate they place of the disaster they are fleeing;  but there is never an exposition on the larger society which allows a small village to imprison two men without cause for a multi year period without a single intervention by a larger authority.

  Jones is obviously operating in allegorical territory, with the cage referring to the way western societies are treating refugee-immigrants. Given Jones' locale, the treatment of refugee-immigrants by Australia, which is particularly cruel form of indefinite confinement on a series of incredibly remote islands, seems like a good point of reference for the kind of governmental behavior Jones is condemning. 

American-Irish author/actress Tana French makes a bid for literary fiction status in The Witch Elm

Published 2/22/19
The Witch Elm (2018)
by Tana French

  Tana French has done well in the crime fiction genre world with her Murder Squad series about Dublin police detectives Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddux.  The first volume in that series, In the Woods, won a drawer full of genre awards and she followed up with five more volumes, with the last being published in 2016.   In October of last year she published The Witch Elm or The Wych Elm in the UK, which is her first stand-alone novel and which has led critics to claim that perhaps French is better described as a writer of literary fiction, not genre.  This is a subject of great interest to me, so I took the chance to check out the audio book version of The Witch Elm- at over 20 hours it was a bit of a chore for a murder mystery, but I was heartened by the fact that my Libby library app told me that over 150 people were waiting for the chance to listen to The Witch Elm after I was done- which is as popular a book as I've ever read via the library.

  French combines her murder mystery pedigree with a couple of capital L literary fiction motifs: The Anglo-Irish country house novel, which triggers recognition from any series student (or critic) of literature; and the unreliable narrator, which also goes back centuries and is a technique central to the development of the novel as an art form.   Add that to the fact that French has escaped the genre constraints of her six volume set of conventional police detective fiction, and I can see where fans would say that French has made the jump to literary fiction, that The Witch Elm is good enough to win prizes outside of genre fiction awards, and that perhaps In the Woods deserves belated elevation as "the best" example of crime fiction from that particular time and place.

   I wasn't convinced.  Perhaps the mistake lay in choosing the Audiobook version- although The Witch Elm is only 330 pages, the 12 hours Audiobook felt endless, largely because the narrator is (at the beginning of the book) a smug, 20 something cis white male from a privileged Anglo-Irish background.  You can't get less sympathetic than that.  And while of course you quickly realize that life is not going to be a beach for this guy, it's also hard to really care what happens to him.  The genius of this book is the way that French turns this lack of empathy to surprising ends within the plot, but ultimately I didn't think it eclipses the crime fiction genre category.  To be clear, French sells buckets of books, so critical opinion isn't going to make or break her career, and the genre critics love her.  I mean it is great genre fiction.

Published 3/4/19
Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2018)
by Marlon James

  Marlon James won the Booker Prize in 2015 for his kaleidoscopic novel about Bob Marley and Jamaica,  A Brief History of Seven Killings.  When the post-win wave of publicity arrived, he was ready with a description of his next book, an African set fantasy trilogy that he jokingly referred to as an "African Game of Thrones."    Watching James in conversation with critic and author Roxane Gay at a recent Los Angeles Public Library sponsored event,   Both Gay and James chuckled over the degree to which that tossed-off reference has become the central description of Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first book in his Dark Star trilogy.  According to what James said the other night during his conversation with Roxane Gay, the trilogy will be a Rashoman style retelling of the same events from different perspectives.

  Book one is told mostly by Tracker, a man with an uncanny nose which has led him into a career as a finder of lost people.  The Black Leopard of the title is a were- creature- a leopard, obviously, who switches between the form of man and beast (though his man form is usually marked off by yellow cat eyes and/or whiskers.   Eventually, Black Leopard, Red Wolf resolves itself into the form of conventional fantasy narrative of a mis matched party of adventurers seeking on a quest.  However, it is a testament to the non-conventional nature of Black Leopard, Red Wolf that this conventionality doesn't come into focus until about 2/3rds of the book is complete.

  Before the various plot elements coalesce into a recognizable form, James demonstrates an almsot preternatural ability for world building while avoiding almost all the pratfalls of genre fiction- another joke that Roxane Gay made during her conversation with James was that fantasy and science fiction often featured lengthy portions of background description in the form of some kind of lecture to the characters by a figure of authority.   James wholly avoids this by embracing the story-within-a-story-within-a-story-within-a-story formula of  One Thousand Nights and a Night (1001 Arabian Nights.)   The trade off is that Black Leopard, Red Wolf is extremely difficult to follow, and fans used to the conventions of sword and sorcery fantasy are likely to be baffled.

    Black Leopard, Red Wolf has already attracted some negative reviews for the prevalence of violence, but I see where he was coming from- like an attempt to out-genre the genre itself, much in the same way Brett Easton Ellis exploded a type of self aware fiction in American Psycho.  During his conversation with Roxane Gay, James made repeated reference to the fact that he spent two years researching Black Leopard, Red Wolf and it shows in the various cities and the grammar of the various characters- at least a half dozen different dialects were reflected in the Audiobook I heard.

  One place the research doesn't show up is in the physical description of the alternate fantasy Africa.  Many of the outdoor locations sound like the Europe of medieval fantasy, with none of the set-piece grandeur that you might expect.   I quite enjoyed Black Leopard, Red Wolf and I'm interested to see the impact it has in the larger culture- if it gets that far.   I would have to regard the recent news that film/television rights had been sold to actor Michael B. Jordan with a grain of salt.  Perhaps the incredibly level of violence is no bar, but I would say that the equally as frequent gay and queer sex very well might be.   But I'll be cheering for its success.  James' vision of a fantasy Africa is a powerful vision, and it deserves attention.

Published 3/5/19
Frog (2009)
by Mo Yan

  Chinese author won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009.  He was the second author from China to win the Nobel Prize in Literature- the first was Gao Xingjian- an emigre who settled in France.  China has been underrepresented on the world literature scene- even today it's a struggle to keep abreast of contemporary Chinese fiction published in English.  The situation is improving, but it's impossible to ignore the paucity of first rate literary fiction translated from Chinese to English.

  Still, a Nobel Prize in Literature does a lot for a non English language author in terms of getting their recent work more attention in English language markets, and Yan is no exception.  His 2009 novel Frog got a post-Nobel reprint in 2016, and with that came an Audiobook edition- extremely rare for fiction translated into English, even for recent Nobel Prize winners.

  Frog is a straight forward retelling of the abortion-intensive one child policy, as seen through the eyes of an extended family living in rural north-east China.  The narrator, a man named Tadpole, tells the story of his Aunt Gugu, who begins her career as a new obstetrician in the area where her family lives.  She is celebrated as a hero of the revolution, and ascends to a position of leadership within the party.

  This early period of glory is quickly supplanted by the horrors of the one child Chinese family planning policy, where most families were limited to one child, with additional children being subject to fines.   Many women attempted to have unpermitted pregnancies, and these pregnancies were extirpated- with abortions being performed well into the third trimester of pregnancy.  This policy comes to roost dramatically in Frog, when Tadpole's own wife is essentially murdered when she attempts to have an illicit pregnancy (without her husband's knowledge).

  It didn't leave me panting for more Mo Yan, but I'm glad I read Frog, since it is an interesting dramatization of a pivotal period in 20th century Chinese history.

Man Booker International Longlist for 2019 Announced

    Congrats to all the 2019 Man Booker International Prize (for best translated fiction).  The award is now yearly and for a a specific work (before last year it was awarded to an author for a body of work, every two years.)

Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi (Oman), translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth (Sandstone Press)

Love in the New Millennium by Can Xue (China), translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen (Yale University Press)

The Years by Annie Ernaux (France), translated by Alison Strayer (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

At Dusk by Hwang Sok-yong (South Korea), translated by Sora Kim-Russell (Scribe)

Jokes for the Gunmen by Mazen Maarouf (Iceland and Palestine), translated from Arabic by Jonathan Wright (Granta)

Four Soldiers by Hubert Mingarelli (France), translated from French by Sam Taylor (Granta)

The Pine Islands by Marion Poschmann (Germany), translated by Jen Calleja (Serpent’s Tail)

Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin (Argentina and Italy), translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell (Oneworld)

The Faculty of Dreams by Sara Stridsberg (Sweden), translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner (Quercus)

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (Poland), translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Colombia), translated from Spanish by Anne McLean (MacLehose Press)

The Death of Murat Idrissi by Tommy Wieringa (Netherlands), translated by Sam Garrett (Scribe)

The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán (Chile and Italy), translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes (And Other Stories)

  The only book on the list I've read is The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vasquez- it was good, but not amazing.  Olga Tokarczuk was last years winner, she has to be a shortlist favorite.  Small presses are well and truly represented- I recognize Granta, of course, and Yale University Press, but the other publishing houses are unknown to me.  I look forward to tracking down as many as possible. 

Published 3/20/19
Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another's Misfortune (2018)
 by Tiffany Watt Smith

  German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer famously said of schadenfreude, the emotion one experience when you experience pleasure at the misfortune of another, as "diabolical."  The idea that schadenfreude is a shameful emotion has persisted, even as the internet, and particularly the phenomenon of "fail videos," have inundated us with opportunities to experience it.   Smith, a researcher in neuroscience and emotions, has written her book in defense of schadenfreude, and she make it clear from the beginning that in her view, experiencing schadenfreude is nothing to be ashamed of, and indeed, that it helps us in both every day life and in a long-term, survival of the human species/evolution sense.

  Watt-Smith is an English writer, but the Audiobook edition I heard had a narrator with an American accent- which made me wonder if there is another, English version of the Audiobook where the narrator has an English accent.  Schadenfreude, though grounded in the latest scientific findings on the brain and human emotions, is clearly written for a general audience, and Watt-Smith spends the beginning of each chapter giving day-to-day examples of various types of schadenfreude we all experience.

   Reading as someone who doesn't work in a conventional office environment (specifically, with a boss and co-workers) I was surprised on the amount of work-related schadenfreude that Watt-Smith catalogs.   Between bosses, co-workers and family members, it was the intimate forms of schadenfreude that struck me.  The more familiar, public kinds- laughing at fail videos and the public shaming of bad actors in day-to-day life, seem easier to explain.

  Schadenfreude is a good introduction to recent research on the subject, as well as an excellent survey of current knowledge about why we feel good about others misfortune, but Watt-Smith is less succesful at proving her thesis that schadenfruede is an important emotion, and good for you.

Published 3/22/19
Deviation (2018)
by Luce D'Eramo

  Deviation, the bat-shit insane World War II memoir by Italian fascist-teen Luce D'Eramo, was published in the original Italian in 1979, but last year it finally got an English translation and made quite the splash in an area (World War II occurring literary fiction) at a time when many critics are professing exhaustion with the genre.

The splash has everything to do with the author Luce D'Eramo.  During World War II she was the teenage daughter of a pair of highly ranked Italian Fascists.   After the Italian Fascist state succumbed to the allies, she fled north where she volunteered (!) to work in a German labor camp, alongside prisoner and internees.  She left her first labor camp after an abortive suicide attempt, was repatriated back to Italy and then fled Italy again(!) winding up as a fugitive hiding inside Dachau (!)   One the eve of Allied victory, she escaped, only to be paralyzed from the waist down in what can only be called a misguided attempt to save civilians in the aftermath of an Allied bombing.

    Misguided is a good word to describe D'Eramo and her behavior. D'Eramo adds a layer of interest to her otherwise unsympathetic behavior by using the book as an opportunity to talk about her own emotions, and what she suppressed in the aftermath of her war time trauma.  As she herself acknowledges, the level of "I told you so" that must inevitably taint any of her relationships that span the war was almost unbearable.  What does it mean to tell your loving parents to f*** off, only to return several years later as a needy, wheelchair-bound invalid.

  Surely, it is enough to drive one insane, and her later years were indeed marred by swaths of institutionalization, even as she tried to raise her son.  Deviation is a deeply disturbing book, and not quite a must read, but certainly of interest to anyone looking for yet another take on the events of World War II from yet a different perspective.

  I listened to the Audiobook version, narrated by Justine Eyre, who is also narrating another Audiobook I'm listening to, Insurrecto by Gina Apostol- after several years of narrating nothing but romance novels.  She was good- performing the many different accents.

Published 3/25/19
The Black Notebook (2016)
by Patrick Modiano

  One of the long term subjects on this blog- going back over a decade at this point- is quantifying, describing and measuring the audience size for a particular work or artist.   One advanatage on focusing on audiences instead of artists when writing about bands, books or studio artists is that you avoid getting into the business of making artistic judgments on the artists themselves.  Being an art critic in the sense that you look at a specific work and say, "Yes this is good, No this is bad" has beyond being unfashionable.  Criticism in that sense, "This work is good and that artist is bad" in the age of the internet often means that sort of critic is saying such a thing directly to the artist.

  The artist is always part of the audience for criticism of their own art work, but the internet has multiplied the number of artists, and the possibility for individuals to react to the art, and anyone trying to perfect a critical voice in this environment is going to face the artist, the fans of the artist, and people who disagree with their critical opinion in the most intimate fashion. 

 On the other hand, you can describe, say, the audience at a Justin Timberlake show without being mean to Justin Timberlake.  Perhaps you might be mean to the fans, but not in an individual sense.  A corollary of these observations about the artist and audience relationship is that art that DOES NOT have an audience is not worth discussing.

  This is a statement that is dramatically opposed to the perspective of avant garde artists and their fans, who, overtly disdain the mass audience.   But it is also true that the internet affords the possibility of an individual critic creating an audience for a new work or artist simply by writing it into existence.

  This leads me to The Black Notebook, a 2016 "novel?" by 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, French author Patrick Modiano.  Modiano essentially had no American audience before he won the Nobel Prize in 2014.  In the five years since he won, many of his books have been translated into English, or in the case of The Black Notebook, Audiobook editions.  They are all freely available from local libraries- no waiting list for these books!

  In fact, if you look as his English language Wikipedia page, you will see an avalanche of translation activity in the aftermath of the 2014 win:  new translations of already translated books, first translations of previously translated books.   All in search of an audience that presumably appears by fiat after the Nobel Prize win.  Personally, I don't know anyone who has read a single book by Modiano, and I would be hard pressed to name anyone who knows he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014.

   Meanwhile, I'm out here looking for a hit, something that I, the reader, can sink my teeth into and say, "This is a hit, this is the one Modiano book to read in English translation, this is his best book."  Modiano has so little an audience in English that I can't even get that far.  The Black Notebook, an ellipitical sequence of observations by a narrator named Jean and his attempt to track down an old flame named Dannie, a mysterious woman. like So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood (and from what I can gather, many of this other books), The Black Notebook overlaps detective fiction, existentialism, psycho geography and elliptical, non-linear modernist narrative technique.

  In other words, The Black Notebook can be hard to follow, and even when it isn't, the pay off can be hard to fathom.  On the positive side of the equation, Bronson Pinchot, television's Balchi from TV's Perfect Strangers 

Published 3/28/19
Four Soldiers (2018)
by Hubert Mingarelli

  Four Soldiers is a French novel by Hubert Mingarelli.  It was translated by Sam Taylor, published in October of 2018, and received a longlist nomination for the 2019 Booker International Prize, for books translated into English.  Set on the Russian front during the waning days of World War I on the Eastern Front, Four Soldiers is just what it says it is, a book about Four Soldiers.  There isn't much in the way of conventional warfare, the Russian army having largely disintegrated, the four soldiers spend most of the book hiding in the woods.

    For it's advocates, Four Soldiers is what you call a "timeless mediation on an eternal subject," but for that same reason it is hard to say much about Four Soldiers or the author.  Part of the appeal of the reading is the feeling of astonishment that this is a book that was just published, like it could have been published at any point in the past two centuries.   I can't see Four Soldiers making the shortlist, but maybe the brevity will push it over the top.  

Zosia Mamet narrator of The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem

Published 3/31/19
The Feral Detective (2018)
 by Jonathan Lethem

   I've never been a Jonathan Lethem fan.  I've never been a Paul Auster fan either, and it seems to me that there are some superficial similarities between the two writers: obsessed with New York City, mixes genre fiction convention with literary fiction themes, characters tend to be white and well educated, if not financially succesful.    It seems like Lethem must have a limited fan base inside Los Angeles, because The Feral Detective, published only in October of last year, was freely available to check out from the library as an Audiobook, narrated by Zosia Mamet, daughter of David Mamet and star of HBO's Girls.

   Promoted as a "return to detective fiction" after his post-Motherless Brooklyn run of books, The Feral Detective is more accurately described as a Detective-client fiction, since the Zosia Mamet voiced narrator is in fact, a client of the so-called Feral Detective, who is an eccentric private investigator operating out of Upland, California (the Inland Empire.)   Most of the action in The Feral Detective takes place in the scrubbier parts of the Inland Empire and the High Desert.  I'm intimately familiar with both areas, and almost every physical location Lethem describes is a place I'd either seen with my own eyes, or when invented, was based on places I've been and seen.

   I know that is no standard for judging the work of an author- it's like the worst part of failing to suspend disbelief, but spending ten hours listening to Zosia Mamet complain about Southern California while trying to locate her poorly-explained disappeared friend among a group of counter-culture outcasts called Bears (men) and Bunnies(women), was almost too much to bear, and the only moment I really enjoyed in the entire book was reaching the end of it.

Published 4/9/19
The Years(2008)
 by Annie Ernaux

  The shortlist for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize was announced today.  I think The Years, by French author Annie Ernaux is probably a co-favorite with The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vazquez.  The other short-listers include last years winner, Polish author Olga Tokarczuk and her detective fiction novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,  as well as three long shots, Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi, The Pine Islands by Marion Poschmann and The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zeran.

   I would argue that The Years has the edge because of it's popularity inside France, where it has a canon-level reputation, and the natural relationship between English and French literature, historically speaking.    Personally though, I wasn't a huge fan of the terse, elliptical approach, a cross between roman a clef and auto-fiction, run through a food blender.   I believe the approach is more or less chronological, and this passage, from the earlier part of the book (page 35) gives the reader an idea of Ernaux at her best:

There were dead children in every family, carried off by sudden incurable diseases: diarrhea, convulsions, diphtheria. All that remained of their brief time on earth were tombstones shaped like baby cribs and inscribed "an angel in heaven." There were photos that people showed while furtively wiping their eyes, and hushed, almost serene conversations that frightened surviving children, who believed they were living on borrowed time. They would not be safe until the age of twelve or fifteen having made it through whooping cough, measles, chicken pox. mumps, ear infections, and bronchitis every winter escaped tuberculosis and meningitis, at which time people would say they'd "filled out." In the meantime, "war children peaky and anemic with white-spotted nails, had to swallow cod-liver oil and Lune deworming syrup, chew Jessel tablets, step on the chemist's scale, bundle themselves in mufflers, avold chills, eat soup for growth, and stand up straight un-threat of wearing an iron corset.

  I wasn't particularly impressed by the other short list title I've read, The Shape of the Ruins, and it makes sense that Ernaux would win.  My money is on her. 

Author Chimanda Ngozie Adachi

Published 4/10/19
Americanah (2013)
 by Chimanda Ngozie Adachi


   Chimanda Ngozie Adachi is one of the best authors out there- both Half a Yellow Sun, her 2006 work of historical fiction about the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War is a classic, and so is Americanhah, her bildungsroman about Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman who makes her way in America, only to return home to Lagos.   Along the way she recounts her adventures, early days in Nigeria, the only daughter of a well educated but not wealthy civil servant.  She makes through a year of university in Nigeria before she wins the opportunity to study in America.

  She experiences some mildly traumatic events getting her sea legs, but eventually solidifies her position working for a well to do white family in the Chicago suburbs, which is also the point where it becomes clear just how acute and observer Adachi is when it comes to the relationships between Americans and the "help."   From there, Ifemlu starts a wildly succesful blog about the perspective of a non-American African in the USA and even more fortuitously, a green card via the connections of her white boy friend, the brother of the wife of the family for whom she nannies.

  Ifemelu's story is contrasted to the experience of Obinze, Ifemelu's once (and hopefully future) love.  While Ifemelu struggle to success in the US, Obinze takes the route of an illegal immigrant in the UK, where he is caught and deported on the eve of his illegal green card marriage.  Obinze returns to Nigeria, where the bookish youth becomes a succesful real estate developer.  Americanah kept my attention throughout, particularly on those rare moments where we get glimpses of Adachi herself- as when Ifmelu's intellectual friends critique American Literary Fiction and its concerns (sad white people), or when an in-book character references the work of Philip Roth.

   

Published 4/10/19
The Great Believers (2018)
by Rebecca Makkai

     I'm a book finisher, not one to give up on a book just because I don't like it. I respect the other side of the equation, life is too short, etc, but there is plenty of great literature that just doesn't qualify as "pleasure reading" under any circumstances- starting with everything written before Charles Dickens, and of course basically every work of high literary modernism, whether you are talking about Joyce or Proust.  Most of the 20th century avant garde, in England, the United States and Europe are not writing for the enjoyment of the reader, and many are actively opposed to the leisurely enjoyment of a light plot by the reader.

   Besides the avant garde, you've got the well established literary tradition of the big issue novel, which also flirts with the attention span of the casual reader in that books of this sort can contain a half dozen plot lines and multiples of characters.  Which is all in the way of an introduction to The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, which is an admirable attempt at a novel about the AIDS crisis as experienced by the residents of "Boys Town" Chicago's version of the Castro or West Hollywood, in the 1980's.  Makkai does her best to keep reader attention by deploying two narrator/protagonists, Yale Tishman, a young gay man working for an art museum in acquisitions and Fiona, the little sister of Yale's friend Nico, one of the first of their circle to die of AIDS. 

  The part of the book taking place closer to the present only concerns Fiona, as she travels to Paris seeking information about her estranged daughter.  Yale narrates his portion in conventional fashion, watching his circle succumb to the ravages of the early AIDS epidemic.  I listened to the Audiobook, which I deeply regretted.  I would have loved to skim parts of The Great Believers, particularly the lengthy plot about Yale's attempt to acquire the collection of relative of Fiona, a woman living in upstate Wisconsin who collected in Paris between World War I and World War II. . Those chapters had me climbing up the walls, and there was a lot of that stuff- endless trips to Wisconsin.

  It took me months to make it through the Audiobook- two check out's from the library, so 42 days.  The Great Believers isn't short, either.  If you are serious about the AIDS crisis in the 1980's The Great Believers is a must but for more casual readers of American Literature it's a pass.

Author Gina Apostol, possible National Book Award in Fiction nominee?

Published 4/12/19
Insurecto (2018)
by Gina Apostol

   Filipino-American author Gina Apostol reminds me of Sigrid Nunez, last year's winner of the National Book Award in Fiction for her novel, The Friend.  Nunez had been around for a while, teaching and writing in the United States, but she hadn't had a hit, or really received much critical attention.  Then, boom, she wins the National Book Award in Fiction.   I'm thinking that it could be the same kind of deal for Insurecto, a book that has the sort of vibe that induces interest from the people who decide the nominations for major literary awards.

  I regret listening to the Audiobook instead of getting a hard copy.  The narrator, Justine Eyre, also narrated the Audiobook for Deviation by Luce D'Eramo.  Deviation is about an Italian woman who volunteers to serve in a German labor camp during World War II.  Insurecto mostly takes place in the present, though one of the plot lines involves an American woman, a photographer, who documented war time atrocities committed by United States during the war between the "liberating" US troops and the existing indigenous independence movement.  I found it disturbing that narrator Eyre used the same accent for her Italian characters in Deviation and the Philipina translator-narrator in Insurecto.  Surely they do not sound the same?

  This was a topic that was central to another- non-fiction book, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr.  Immerwahr makes a straight-forward case that the US/freedom fighter conflict was the crystallization of the not-so-low-key imperialism that the US has done it's best to forget in the past half century.   Immerwahr writes from the perspective of an American historian-journalist, whereas Apostol is a native of the Philippines and a writer of fiction.

  Insurecto blends the present, where a Sofia Coppola-type character hires an extremely literate translator to help her with a script about the American atrocities in the Philippines, specifically the incident that took place in Balangiga, Samar, in 1901, after rebels killed a few dozen United States troops.   US Forces were told to turn the offending area into a "howling wilderness" and to exact vengeance on the women and children.

  Midway through Insurecto is a much deeper read than I expected from the description.  Apostol supplies her characters with insights that sound like they were worked out in an academic talk about post modern literary theory.  Thus, I found myself craving the actual book, so I could physically see what Apostol was doing.  It's also this combination of subject and style that makes me think she has a shot at the National Book Award- or at least the shortlist, this year.

Xan Cue is a pseudonym for Chinese writer Deng Xiaohua

Published 4/15/19
Love in the New Millennium (2018)
 by Xan Cue

  Love in the New Millennium by Xan Cue was a Booker International Prize longlist title, but it didn't make the shortlist- a bit of a surprise I think, because Cue had one of the higher international profiles of the longlisted authors. The jacket copy of the book I checked out from the Los Angeles Public Library has a quote from Susan Sontag stating that Cue is the only Chinese writer with a plausible chance of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.  I think Yan Lianke and his fans might have something to say about that claim, but still, she said it.

  The tone of Love in the New Millennium is poetic, vague, elliptical, about several women and their lives and loves in contemporary China.  The publisher, Yale University Press, gives a good precis:

In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flower beds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalizes paranoia and suspicion. Some try to flee—whether to a mysterious gambling bordello or to ancestral homes that can be reached only underground through muddy caves, sewers, and tunnels. Others seek out the refuge of Nest County, where traditional Chinese herbal medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self. Each life is circumscribed by buried secrets and transcendent delusions.

  I guess that describe it.  Truth be told, I had trouble enjoying Love in the New Millennium- it reminded me of the books produced by avant garde type writers in central and eastern europe under Communism.   Sometimes you can slip under the radar of of dictatorship by retreating into the abstract.  

Published 4/23/19
Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana: A Visual History (2018)
by John Peterson and Sam Witmer

  I almost bought the coffee table sized hard copy of this book from Barnes & Noble with a Holiday gift card I received as a present, but I figured there would be no way that my girlfriend would let me display the enormous red colored book with a dragon on the cover on our coffee table, so I checked out the Ebook instead from the library.

  Surely, it is a different experience looking at the artwork on a smart phone vs the enormous physical edition, but Art and Arcana is also a narrative history of the Dungeons & Dragons phenomenon, which has directly inspired a generation of sword and sorcery entertainment in a variety of mediums, ranging from movies, to books, to video games.    The weakness of Art and Arcana is the weakness of Dungeons & Dragons itself: A relatively brief golden era where it rained supreme and the market for role playing games was expanding and then at a peak, and then several decades of rights mismanagement:  Missing key trends (card games, video games), embracing product churn (five editions) and of course, ill advised movie versions (the live action Dungeons and Dragons film, the animated Dragonlance film.

  I had my own period of interest in Dungeons and Dragons, beginning in late grade school and ending in middle school.  It was casual- I never went to conventions or had any awareness of the larger culture in the pre-internet era.  By the time of the internet I was over it, and I ended up being too old for Dungeons and Dragons inspired online games like World of Warcraft or any kind of console game. 

  The most interesting chapters were the pre-history of Dungeons and Dragons- I think I could read a separate book about the pre-D&D world of warcraft type gamers.  One other conclusion impossible to ignore is how white and male Dungeons and Dragons began and remain, even as they branched out to scenarios directly based on Arabic or Meso-American cultures.

  Another interesting section dealt with the 1980's anti-Dungeons and Dragons hysteria, and while of course it's appalling, I do say, that upon, reflection, the early versions of Dungeons and Dragons were a little obsessed with devils and demons, and it was a criticism seemingly embraced by the parent company itself.

Published 4/28/15
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)
 by Junot Diaz

  Junot Diaz is one of those contemporary authors who I managed to miss over the past decade.  I knew that Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2008.  I noticed the Audiobook edition was read by none other than Hamilton the musical writer Lin-Manuel Miranda- another cultural phenomenon I've missed.  Which is all in the way of saying I had long suspected that I wouldn't like this book, but I wanted to give it a fair shot, especially since so many other people love it.

  I'm sure there isn't a lot of advantage to be had in trashing a decade old Pulitzer Prize winner.  Diaz isn't the first person to tackle the Trujillo Dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, and this book often references The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa.  The travails of  life under the Trujillo regime are similar to the travails suffered by others under Third World dictators- or the mid twentieth century totalitarian dictators of the World War II era. 

   The other part of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao involves the life of young immigrants in America, Oscar and his older sister.    I can't remember a book I've enjoyed less.  I think it was probably the combination of Diaz' "street smart" jargon- which I believe is a major reason people love it- and the voice of Lin-Manuel Miranda who I clearly do not appreciate in any way shape or form.  I'm not saying this book or Miranda is not good, the popularity of both and the general universal critical acclaim would indicate that they are both excellent at they do. but no, not for me. I'm also going to take a pass on Diaz' other books because I just don't think I could take it.

Zambian-American author Narwali Serpell

Published 5/7/19
The Old Drift (2019)
 by Narwalli Serpell

   The Old Drift is Zambian-American author Narwalli Serpell's first novel.   It is sprawling and ambitious in all the best ways, introducing the reader to multiple generations of families who live in what is called Zambia today, though the book covers the pre-Independence era when it was called Northern Rhodesia.  Serpell traces the fortunes of three families, one of Italian immigrants, who come to build the great dam- the biggest in the world at the time, a mixed family founded by a marriage between a black Zambian studying in England and his white wife, who is blind.   The final family is black Zambian.   Serpell herself is mixed race, the daughter of a white Zambian professor of economics who left to teach in the United States and his wife. 

  Even though I pride myself on my interest in Africa and familiarity with the history of the continent, Zambia is itself a major character, particularly the capital of Lusaka.  I found myself looking up locations on Google Maps, and reading the Wikipedia page for the real-life Zambian Space Program, which pops up in the lives of the black-African family.

 Serpell isn't content to merely tell the story of modern Zambia through the interlinked lives of three families, she also throws in a near-future science fiction plot that takes up the bulk of the end of the book, and includes a meta voice of a swarm of mosquitoes- voiced on the Audiobook by the inestimable Richard Grant.

   The Audiobook was a positive delight- specifically, the Zambian accents, which sound like an off shoot of the Dutch accented English spoken by the Boer people in South Africa.     The Old Drift isn't perfect, but it stands out simply for the combination of place and the ambition and execution of the narrative.  Don't be caught sleeping, but be aware that the print version is 566 pages.

Irish author Sally Rooney

Published 5/8/19
Normal People (2018)
by Sally Rooney

  Irish author Sally Rooney is being hailed as a millennial J.D. Salinger, and I can't say I have a problem with it.  I first heard about Rooney last year when she made the shortlist for the Booker Prize. It wasn't quite at the level where I bought a UK edition of Normal People during a recent visit to London, but that was only because I knew it would be getting a big release in the United States.  I was willing to wait, not being overly excited about a novel concerning the lives and loves of young people in Ireland, no matter how deafening the buzz.

  I mean, the mere fact of the buzz around the book and the author based on a such simple description can only make a prospective reader anticipate some kind of near universal literary magic.  There can't be more than a half-dozen serious non-American writers of literary fiction that receive the kind of attention Rooney received, irrespective of age.  More attention than Ian McEwan received for his most recent book.

The story she tells about the on again off again will they won't they between two brilliant young people: Marianne, the emotionally isolated and abused daughter of a wealthy barrister mother and a deceased barrister father and Connell  the only child of a single mother who cleans the house of the girl's family.   Rooney revisits the two as they fall into and out of love while also building a lasting, complicated friendship. 

 Like I said earlier, I'm sold.  I really enjoyed Normal People, and I'm a believer in Sally Rooney and her future status as a potential "voice of a generation."  The Irish accents of the Audiobook readers were intoxicating- if you ever think about it, get an Audiobook written by an Irish author.  

Published 5/10/19
Machines Like Me (2019)
by Ian McEwan

  Ian McEwan is a giant of literary fiction in the United Kingdom, in the United States he isn't as popular, but McEwan is still one of those non-American writers of literary fiction who sells enough to merit a United States specific press campaign and book tour.   I therefore had high hopes for Machines Like Me, McEwan's latest book, sparking a wave of McEwan related press and excitement, but alas, it seems like the public reception for Machines Like Me  has been muted. 

   It was hard to read Machines Like Me without thinking about Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.  Both books take place in a parallel science-fiction past/present where technology has advanced beyond that of our own world while at the same time maintaining a retro air in the area of aesthetics and creature comforts.  In Never Let Me Go the sci fi element where clones grown for organ transplants, in Machines Like Me, the hook is artificially intelligent androids, produced in a limited edition of 26, 13 Adam's and 13 Eve's. 

 Charlie Friend, the narrator of Machines Like Me, purchases one of the Adam's, the Eve's already sold out.  Friend is not the kind of independently wealthy gentleman you would imagine buying such a cutting edge technological innovation: he has recently inherited some money after the death of his mother, and he scrapes by day trading and engaging in a desultory affair with his upstairs neighbor, who may or may not have framed a man for rape.

  McEwan doesn't stint on his alternate history/past, a world where Alan Turing refused chemical castration, avoided suicide and emerged as an apostle of open world science (and artificial intelligence).    McEwan is known for his interest in technical research in many of his books, sometimes it is intimately intertwined with the plot, other times it just kind of sits there.  Machines Like Me is more of the later than the former,  at times the exposition is closer to what you would find in genre fiction. 

 Like every Ian McEwan book, events take a dark turn.  He didn't earn the nickname, "Ian Macabre" for nothing!

Published 5/11/19
Notes From the Fog (2018)
 by Ben Marcus

   Ben Marcus has a pretty amazing resume for a writer of literary fiction: his dad is a Jewish mathematician and his mom is a Irish Catholic Virginia Woolf scholar.  He was raised in Austin.  He is a Professor at Columbia University.   Marcus has written novels and short stories, Notes From the Fog is a collection of short-stories that share a theme of near future dystopia.  It is a world that is immediately recognizable, it's a place where a pharma company uses employees as guinea pigs to test a new method of feeding human beings through light (with disastrous consequences), a couple specializes in designing memorials to victims of mass shootings, a ten year old boy hates his parents.

   Like George Saunders, Marcus is an accomplished prose stylist, and I gather that many of his earlier books used challenging grammar and plot construction.  Notes From the Fog is very straight forward with none of that sort of literary experimentalism- the only challenge is orienting yourself to the parameters of each individual scenario, since it isn't clear that the stories take place in the "same" world.   I listened to the Audiobook- a choice I regretted- I would have liked to have seen the actual book.

Korean author Han Kang

Published 5/11/19
The White Book (2019)
by Han Kang

  I really enjoyed The Vegetarian by this author.   The success of that book- she won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016- really made her at the international level, and The White Book was nominated for the Booker International Prize last year- 2018- and made it to the shortlist.  The American publication followed this year- February- to be specific.  I managed to get the library copy of the Audiobook quickly, and I wasn't surprised to see that it was barely three hours long- The Vegetarian was itself very spare, and I gather that is Han Kang's style.

    Hang is also what you call poetic and elliptical,  The White Book is described by the published as a "meditation on the death of her older sister" who died as an infant, while the author is on a literary tour of Warsaw.   Truth be told, nothing really grabbed me about The White Book, it came and went and I barely registered it- another book that would have been better in print to allow me to meditate on the mediation, as it were.

Published 5/15/19
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019)
 by David Wallace-Wells

  I spent most of my time listening to the distressing Audiobook version of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming thinking of the proper word that best describes Wallace-Wells' approach, and the one that came to mind is "jermeiad" which is defined as,  "a long and/or mournful complaint or lamentation; a list of woes." 

  That is indeed an accurate description of the The Uninhabitable Earth, which is part a forecast of the various impacts of climate change (Drought, Rising Sea Levels, Political Instability) and part an attempt to describe and address the failure of the world to do much about the problem.  Much of the individual pieces of The Uninhabitable Earth should sound vaguely familiar to all but the most ignorant- if you don't know the relationship between rising sea levels and global warming already, The Uninhabitable Earth will come as a huge shock, but Wallace-Wells takes a step further by explaining just how bad things could get.

  However, as horrifying as everything he describes might be, he also argues against what I think is the obvious end result of climate change if we fail to act:  Billions will die, and there will be significantly significantly less fossil-fuel driven activity as a result of the drastically reduced amount of humans on the earth.   I also found myself speculating about whether a global nuclear war- millions of death and the resulting "nuclear winter" might be another "solution" to the global warming crisis.

  Wallace- Wells is very specific about setting the time horizon of many of the climate change related disasters to "within our lifetime" and argues that our children, and certainly their children, will be doomed to living in the ruins of a collapsed civilization.   It sounds like those of who are adults today will be impacted, because it is all happening right now, but, unless we live in someplace like India, the Middle East or the low lying islands of the pacific (or along the coasts of the Eastern or Western United States) the change will probably not be enough to disrupt our lives in the dramatic way Wallace-Wells prophecies. 

Published 5/20/19
The Library Book (2018)
 by Susan Orlean

  As a rule I'm not someone who reads books because someone says that I "have to," but such was the case with The Library Book, Susan Orlean's absorbing account of the 1986 fire in the central Los Angeles Library that damaged hundred of thousands of books while managing to leave the library itself largely intact.  Of course, this being a Susan Orlean book, The Library Book is about much more than just the fire, and actually covers the entire history of the library albeit in episodic fashion.

 The Audiobook I listened to was narrated by Susan Orlean herself- which is a much rarer occurrence in the world of Audiobooks then one might naturally expect.  Orlean has a crisp, pleasant voice, like an NPR announcer, and I thought having her read the Audiobook was a huge plus to the listening experience.

    As for the book itself, if you are a huge library nerd it's a must, even if you've never been to the Central Los Angeles library itself.  Orlean doesn't shy away from the tough issues surrounding modern library practice, specifically the homelessness issue- which gets it's own thoughtful chapter.  Other stand out chapters include those dealing with the history of the librarians of the Los Angeles Public Library and her investigation into the cause of the fire- although a suspect was pursued charges were never filed and a finding of responsibility was never made.

  Published 5/20/19

The Day the Sun Died (2018)
 by Yan Lianke

  China is not a place that most think of when it comes to satire.  The Chinese government seems like a pretty humorless entity, and they exercise a level of censorship that is best described as, "active."  As China's most renowned practitioner of literary satire, author Yan Lianke occupies a precarious position within China, and his international reputation has lagged, as has the translation of his back catalog- which includes two novels that remain untranslated.

  Trying to get into the controversy that surrounds Lianke within China is both too complicated to get into AND the single most important key to understanding why western critics see him as potential Nobel Prize in Literature winner.  Certainly, he belongs to the generally well received of (mostly European) contemporary writers who have lived all or part of their lives under the eye of censorious government.   To the extent that someone is going to make the case that literature is a life or death situation, it helps to have authors who put their lives on the line with their work.

  As much as I'd love to say that I really enjoyed The Day the Sun Died, I didn't.   It might be the translation, or it might be my general level of ignorance and lack of familiarity with Lianke.  The story, about a village seized by near universal sleep-walking, during which the townspeople commit various crimes and misdemeanors,  has aspects of science fiction/fantasy, 20th century anti-totalitarianism political protest fiction as well as the distinctive cadence and rhythms of translated Chinese prose.

    I picked it up because it sounded like a fun read, but it was not, more akin to something written by an experimental modernist living in central Europe under Communist rule.   It wasn't enough to turn me off Lianke entirely, and just the fact that he is now a Chinese writer of literary fiction that I've read makes it more likely that I will continue to read his books. 

Published 6/18/19
Instructions for a Funeral (2019)
by David Means

   I enjoy listening to short story collections more than I enjoy reading short story collections.  Thus, the increase in Audiobook consumption has led to a corresponding increase in reading short story collections.   David Means is six short story collections into a career that includes stories published by New Yorker-level magazines and journals, as well as a Booker long-listed novel in 2016.  That novel was Hystopia, and it is the kind of alternate-history, sci-fi, literary fiction cross-over that I would expect to know, but did not, before reading this book.

   The characters of Means' stories in Instructions for a Funeral are mostly men, and mostly men grappling with different aspects of masculinity:  A fist-fight in the back alleys of Sacramento in the 1950's,  a father watching his young son fall off a sea-wall, and the eponymous title story, which involve the highly detailed instructions left by a still-living real estate investor, as he contemplates the legacy of a deal gone dramatically wrong.   His prose has the kind of tightly wound sentences that appeal to literary critics and fans of "serious "literature, but might well leave the casual reader cold.   Six short story collections in, Means has defined his voice and his insights leave the reader with plenty of quiet insight into the human conditions, as long as you are talking about a white guy who is married with  young kids. 

Published 6/18/19
Early Riser (2019)
 by Jasper Fforde

   Jasper Fforde is an English novelist who slots into the comic/science fiction genre area notably occupied in the past by Douglas Adams, a legit canon level writer who never wrote anything resembling "serious" literary fiction but managed to transcend genre both in the realm of science fiction, with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series AND in detective fiction, with the Dirk Gently Holistic detective series.  Both were represented in the original edition of 1001 Books, and I agree- I loved The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in middle school, and enjoyed re-reading it more recently.

  Fforde imagines an alternate-Earth where human hibernate during the winter, leaving a skeleton crew of maintainence workers and law enforcement to deal with the many perils of winter:  "Nightwalkers" (humans who fail to wake up from hibernation at the end of winter), small scale nuclear disasters caused by reliance of nuclear powered hibernation chambers, and depredations by various groups of winter raiders.

  The alternate history scenario includes a world where Wales is independent, and the remaining English nobility are exiled to the far reaches of northern Wales, where they persist in speaking English and observing antiquated customs, like afternoon tea.  The characters of the novel are presumably speaking Welsh.   Fforde doesn't skimp on alternate history detail, including repeatedly mentioning that the Ottoman Empire has survived the 20th century and the Nazis, and Stalin, are nowhere to be seen. 

  The primary concern of this world is reproduction, and the cold fact that a certain percentage of the human population doesn't make it through the winter.  Within this world, the major development of the mid 20th century is a drug called "Morpinox" which greatly increase the chance that a specific human will survive the winter, but which has the unfortunate side effect of creating Nightwalkers.

 Charlie Worthing, the narrator and protagonist, signs up for the Winter Consul Service out of a yearning to escape the quiet desperation of his young adult life, where he is stuck in a dead end job as an assistant at a nursery/orphanage where the goal is to generate new humans in a collective environment, run by nuns who are kept perpetually pregnant.

  For his first assignment, Worthing, is dispatched with his sponsor/mentor to the mysterious "District 12" (Northern Wales).  First, his boss is killed, then he is drawn into a plot involving the sinister corporation behind Morphinox, a woman with a split personality who spends half her time as the head of the Winter Consul Service and the other half as head of security for the Morphinox producing corporation. 

   Early Riser is interesting as a work of funny science fiction- it was a great listen as an Audiobook.  There is ambition in the scenario, though the execution ends up being pretty rote and genre-y.  Still, I'd recommend it to genre fans and non genre fans who happen to like Douglas Adams type jokes.

The famous and rarely seen Bull and Cow Bison from the French cave at Tuc D'Audobert

Published 6/18/19
Underground (2019)
 by Will Hunt

   Underground by writer/"audio journalist" Will Hunt is a work of creative non-fiction about humanity and it's relationship with caves, basically.   Incredibly, in between the time it took me to request and listen to the Audiobook (read by the author, fyi) ANOTHER book came out about a similar subject, Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane.  That's crazy, right?

  The tone of Underground varies between capable reportage and summaries of recent academic research about various caves.  Early chapters trace the author's fascination with the underground, from abandoned railway tunnels in his native Rhode Island, to formative years spend urban-spelunking with hipsters and graffiti artists in New York.  Adulthood arrives with a south-to-north journey through the catacombs of Paris.

   Hunt concludes with two of his strongest chapters- the first a visit to the rarely visited cave at Tuc D'Audobert with the 14,000 year old pair of bison shown above.  That chapter counts as a genuine coup, and I wonder if it helped sell the book.  Finally, there is a chapter about the Maya and the Yucatan, which, as any world traveler knows, is the world capital of underground caves.

  My interest in each individual chapter peaked when Hunt wrote about lesser known subjects, and slackened in areas where I had some background.  For example, I own a first edition hardback of Mole People by Jennifer Toth, which is pretty much all you need to know about the New York Underground.   The Parisian Catacombs are familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of 19th century French literature- I wasn't sure what a group of early 21st century spelunkers could bring that writers like Zola lacked.

Published 5/21/19
Golden State (2019)
by Ben Winters

  I am very interested in writers who move from popular/best-seller/genre work into the world of literary fiction.   That is as supposed to the more traditional route of a "serious" writer with low sales who breaks through with a major prize winning book and thereafter gains a popular audience.  Ben Winters is definitely working his way "out" of genre work, beginning with his classic, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (2009) and then making a career of combining detective/crime fiction with science fiction, see his The Last Policeman Trilogy.   Most recently he landed on the New York Times best seller list with Underground Airlines (2017),   I didn't read Underground Airlines at the time, perhaps because it came on the heels of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016)- both books dealing in an alternate present/past where slavery has continued legally in parts of the south.

  Also, Ben Winter is white, not black, and I thought, at the time, that the choice of subject, with an ex-slave narrator, no less, was a little questionable, but still, it signaled that Winters was making a play at breaking out of genre fiction.  2019 brought Golden State, which returns to the conventions of detective fiction but conjures a real winner of an alternate history scenario, a place where California has emerged from some kind of murky Apocalypse to become "The Golden State" a place where lying is illegal, and everyone has to record everything they do every day.

  Lazlo Raresic is a twenty year veteran of what is called the Speculative Service, tasked with policing the truth in every day life.  They work alongside but slightly above the standard police, and are characterized by an innate sensitivity to the "truth": a lie made in their presence literally causes the air to shift, in a way similar to what you see out in the desert when it is super hot- the air shimmering and shifting.

  The idea of a society built around only speaking truth is inherently interesting to anyone familiar with the past half century of philosophy and critical theory.  The "linguistic turn" as it is known spawned generations of linguistically obsessed intellectuals, and it was hard not to hear J. L. Austin and his classic of linguistic-philosophy, How To Do Things With Words.    If full points are given for the underlying concept, the story itself is more conventionally genre, but a distinct combination of detective fiction and post-apocalypse science fiction.

Published 6/5/19
1Q84 (2012)
by Haruki Murakami

Replaces: The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

  I think if you polled a hundred readers familiar with the high points in Haruki Murakami's bibliography, a majority would pick 1Q84 as his masterpiece.  I would agree with them.   1Q84  has all the characteristics of a mid career masterpiece.  First, it is a definitive statement- over a thousand pages- originally published in three volumes in Japan (though consolidated into a single volume in English translation).  Second, it brings together all the themes of his early career successes: dreams, loneliness, contemporary Japanese life and supernatural elements.  Third, it is memorable- with well drawn characters and a compelling love story at the heart of the narrative.  Only the length of 1Q84 prevents it from being the "if you only read one book by Murakami read this one" pick.

   Trying to get to the bottom of Murakami, his style, and his appeal is liable to ruin the magic.  Suffice it to say that his books contain magic.   The simple fact of his great international success while maintaining a style that is accurately described as, "experimental," should tell you all you need to know.  Who does that?  The relationship between experimental fiction in English translation is basically that of charity, recent attempts to increase the profile of works in translation aside.   An author might be able to make graduate school reading lists, but true commercial success in translation is basically impossible for a writer of experimental fiction.

Published 6/10/19
The Plotters (2019)
by Un-Su Kim

   The pull quote on the publisher's product page for The Plotters, a crime novel by Korean author Un-Su Kim calls it right when it claims The Plotters is, "as if Haruki Murakami rewrote Day of the Jackal."   The straight genre premise:  Assassin becomes disillusioned by the powers-that-be and wreaks insane vengeance is enlivened by the Murakami-esque prose and a variety of "only in Korea" details.  Specifically, the fact that the other than some guest appearances by a silenced pistol and improvised explosives, the only weapon used by the numerous assassins in this book is a more-or-less standard kitchen knife.    The grit level of an assassin who works with a knife is like, one million.

  I listened to the Audiobook edition, which was great, and I immediately recommended it to a friend who is a crime fiction obsessive- he also loved The Plotters.   And while the foreign setting and stylistic quirks mark it as a genre-category escapee, from crime fiction to literary fiction, the grit and gore of repeated knife fights is likely to dissuade more timid readers.

Author Ottessa Moshfegh

Published 6/19/19
My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)
 by Ottessa Moshfegh


    This was a book club selection- I'm in a book club in Atwater Village- if there are any la readers who want to get in on it LMK- NO WEIRDOS!  Unlike most of the book club picks, I was actually excited to read My Year of Rest and Relaxation, having heard a plot summary, "Young woman uses pills to try to sleep her life away" which deeply aroused my interest.    Set in the year before the 9/11 attacks, in Manhattan, the unnamed narrator is a young/thin/blond Manhattanite woman, recently orphaned via the death of her father from disease and her mother from suicide.  She is wealthy enough to be able to hatch her plan- to self medicate herself into oblivion for a year as an attempt to deal (or not deal) with the unresolved trauma surrounding the deaths of her parents.

   Her partner in crime, and almost the only other character in the novel, is Reva, the aspirational Jewish sidewalk to the narrator's waifish WASP.  In what constitutes almost the entire "action" in the whole book, the narrator makes her way to Long Island for the funeral of Reva's mother.

  But most of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is about the narrator, her pills, and her interior monologue.  And yet, I found My Year of Rest and Relaxation impossible to put down (it isn't long) and read it in one sitting.  After finishing it, I had suspicions that Moshfegh might be one of those rare writers who can evoke both sales and critical praise.  It's also interesting that some readers HATE My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and that can also be an indication of greatness.

Author Sara Collins grew up in the Caribbean and studied creative writing in England (at Cambridge University, in case anyone is asking)

Published 6/22/19
The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2019)
by Sara Collins

    I managed to check out the Audiobook for this new novel by Sara Collins- no wait- which is hugely unusual in the library/Audiobook universe, probably because of a quirk in international publishing where books will be published in multiple English speaking countries at the same time but only promoted in certain territories.   Here,  The Confessions of Fannie Langton received a good bit of press in the UK but almost none in the United States.

  Like recent Booker Prize winner and personal favorite Marlon James, Collins is of Jamaican decent but left Jamaica to find her voice- James to the United States and Collins to the United Kingdom.  Also like James, she includes LGBT voices in her fiction- not particularly unusual outside of Jamaica, but still controversial inside Jamaica, which has a terrible track record for protecting LGBT rights, and in fact, was actively persecuting LGBT people until late into the 20th century.

  The Confessions of Fannie Langton is Collins' debut, and I agree with The Guardian that she is a  star in the making.  I would be surprised if Langton isn't longlisted for one or more major literary prizes.  The two major touchstones for Collins- outside of what appears to be her voluminous historically based research- are Moll Flanders by Daniel DeFoe, a book to which Langton refers regularly as she recounts her Confessions and Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, which is similar in terms of the narrative:  A servant accused of murdering her employers.

  Set in the 1820's, an awkward period after the slave trade had been outlawed in the British Empire, and inside the United Kingdom, but where slaves themselves were legal in places that already had them (Jamaica), the first setting of Confessions is set on the inappropriately named "Paradise" where Langton is plucked as a young girl to be a house servant.

    After a difficult childhood and adolescence, where she is taught to read and write and eventually adopted by the plantation master to be his "scientific" assistant in his experiments into the nature of racial differences, she is gifted to London based scientist and scholar George Benham, who is married to the eccentric daughter of French (presumably) Hugenot's, Marguerite.  In England, Frannie is no longer a slave, but also, as she often observes to herself- far from free- with no friends outside the home (or in it) and no place to go should she wish to leave.

   The Audiobook was read by the author herself, and it was enjoyable as an Audiobook, and works well in that format, since it is the voice of a single narrator, recounting her past in a prison cell.   It's possible to make it half-way through Confessions wondering if there are to be any twists and turns beyond the "did she or didn't she" murder narrative, but they do begin to appear, and they are fascinating and horrifying, and such that I would recommend  The Confessions of Frannie Langdon as an ideal beach read (as did The Guardian) and a great candidate for the Booker Prize longlist.

Published 6/22/19
McGlue (2014)
by Ottessa Moshfegh

  I was intrigued enough by My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh to turn around and check out the Audiobook for McGlue, her 2014 debut novella (or novel if you want to stretch the term.)    McGlue is a sailor living in the mid 19th century.  He wakes up in the hold of a ship where he was employed as a sailor.  His captors tell him that he has murdered his best, and only friend, an act McGlue can not remember.

   Soon enough, McGlue finds himself in a prison cell in Salem, Massachusetts.   He is alcoholic, a deviant and he has a literal crack in his skull through which the brain is visible.  The prose is biting, bitter, sardonic.  In other words, similar to the other Otessa Moshfegh book I've read, which is narrated by a young woman living in the late 20th century.   That is what you call style.

  I'm inclined to think that McGlue is another exhibit in the case that Moshfegh is a major talent. 

Published 6/28/19
The Porpoise (2019)
 by Mark Haddon

   You could call English author Mark Haddon a one-hit wonder on the basis of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which has spawned a theatrical version and which, to this day, continues to sell buckets.  Just in the past week, I check his Amazon sales rank- which was impressive- and I saw Curious Incident on display at the local Barnes & Noble.

  But, as my girlfriend reminded me when I brought up The Porpoise, Haddon's new novel, he actually has published multiple novels since Curious Incident as well as a collection of short stories.   Both novels were standard issues white people and their problems type books, but the collection of short stories included flights of fancy and science fiction type themes which hinted that Haddon was figuring out what he should have known after Curious Incident proved a hit:  YOU NEED A HOOK.

  Curious Incident, a detective story about an autistic kid, had a hook.   The Porpoise also has a hook, being a remaking of the Greek myth of Antiochus, the Greek tyrant with incestuous leanings.   Shakespeare remade the Greek myth in his Pericles play, and Haddon layers his own modern interpretation on top.   Haddon really lets himself go in terms of themes, in addition to the incest, which is unavoidable with the source material being what it is, he also adds ghosts, time travel and Godly interventions, while juggling narrative in the present, the Mediterranean middle ages and the Elizabethan era.

  The Audiobook I listened to made for an exciting listen- I raced through, and emerged convinced that Haddon maybe had another hit on his hands, but it doesn't seem like he's generated alot of buzz and/or sales, so maybe not.

Published 6/28/19
A Memory Called Empire (2019)
by Arkady Martine

  If you search the term, "space opera" on Google, you will read that it was coined as a pejorative term to describe over-wrought science fiction which mimicked the "opera" of a soap opera on television.  It was never a reference to opera the art form.  Space Opera is known for imitating models like ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, ancient China, etc, except with advanced weaponry and fast than light speed travel, all of it poorly explained to the reader.

  So to call A Memory Called Empire a space opera is accurate, but also a little dismissive.  There's nothing wrong with space opera per se, but it would be hard to imagine such a work transcending genre limitations.   However, Arkady Martine- a pseudonym for Anna Linden Weller, a scholar of the Byzantine Empire, is not your average space opera debutante, and I think her publisher, Macmillan, has high hopes for her Texicalaan, of which A Memory Called Empire is the first volume.

  I listened to the Audiobook- I think I might actually be too ashamed to read an actual copy of A Memory Called Empire.  They used a woman to narrate, which makes sense because the narrator and protagonist is a woman- a young ambassador sent from an independent mining outpost to the center of a giant galactic empire.  It is a human universe, though Martine appears to be setting up a conflict with the first "non human" civilization in the galaxy.  Martine's academic background shows up in her loving description of the Texicalaan imperial bureaucracy.

  Oh also Martine is LGBT and so is the main character, so that's cool, because the world of speculative science fiction can be pretty male and cis male heavy. 

Published 7/10/19
Last Day (2019)
by Domenica Ruta

  I'm trying to keep up with contemporary literary fiction.  This basically involves subscribing to the book review feed of the New York Times, the Guardian (UK), Kirkus Reviews (not very useful), The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books.  The physical copy of Entertainment Weekly, to which my girlfriend is a subscriber.  The physical copy of the Los Angeles Times Sunday edition.  The nominations for the Booker Prize, the National Book Award and the Pulitzer.

  I managed to check out the Ebook edition pretty close to the release date of May 28th.  Ruta has a non-fiction best-seller about her childhood, and the New York Times review raved about this book. I wasn't taken by it, but that might be because of the Ebook format- which does a disservice to any title that strays outside of conventional genre territory: ok to read crime fiction or science fiction, but not literary fiction.

 Last Day is a book about people and their relationships, covered with an alternate world situation where the End of the World is celebrated each year in the same way that we celebrate New Years.  The various characters- nerdy Sarah and Kurt, her reprobate love interest, crazy Karen, on the precipise of homelessness as she struggles with mental illness and an international cast of characters on the space station orbiting above the earth.

  Details on the holiday are scarce- that's one way to tell that Last Day is a work of literary fiction, not genre fiction.  It's more of a collection of short stories about the various characters then a conventional novel, linked by the temporal element of the Last Day celebration.

  

Published 7/10/19
Power Trip: The Story of Energy (2019)
 by Michael E. Webber

  There is a school of thought that our whole modern civilization is basically a century long ponzi scheme based on the exploitation of our available fossil fuel resources.  Once the fuels are gone, so our the advances that we have attributed to our human ingenuity.  It's a hypothesis that is intriguing even without the bonus kicker: that it is these fossil fuels that are causing global client change and the imminent collapse of said civilization enable by fossil fuel exploitation.

   Michael E. Webber is an engineer/professor/energy executive, not a liberal climate-change obsessed muckraking journalist, and Power Trip goes deeps into the the role of energy and energy exploitation in human history.  He is deeply concerned in the same way you might imagine the chariman of Exxon/Mobil might be in his/her private moments: Sure, the planet faces some pretty stiff challenges, but we wouldn't even be here without fossil fuels, and we've got plenty of ways to fight this thing together!

  Contrast this perspective to the more alarmist The Uninhabitable Earth, which covers many of the very same subjects but without the engineering/energy industry can-do enthuasism for ways we can get out of this mess.    It's an interesting take- I'd recommend the incredibly detailed product page written by Basic Books.

Published 7/11/19
The Wolf and the Watchman (2019)
 by Niklas Natt Och Dag

   There is no question that the "Scandanavian Noir" genre has a pedigree which carries the potential to ascend into the precincts of literary fiction, from Smila's Sense of Snow to the Girl With A Dragon Tattoo, we are talking about close to two decades of critical-popular cross-over hits in English translation, with movie adaptations in the bargain.   One of the characteristics of the genre is a thematic darkness that is more apt to evoke the Marquis de Sade than Raymond Chandler as an influence.   Sexual abuse, torture, sexually abusive torture, all figure prominently and it's possible that the idea of European sophistication allows some of these writers to get away with material that would be beyond the pale if set in America.

   So, when critics call The Wolf and the Watchman a combination of Sherlock Holmes and True Detective, but set in early 18th century Stockholm and when said combination wins best Swedish Crime Novel in 2017, the reader can be assured shit is going to get mental.  Just the set up should be enough:  A corpse is discovered floating in the water around Sweden.  It is limbless, eyeless and has had it's tongue ripped out.  Who is the victim?  Who did this to him, and why?

  I listened to the Audiobook- it was a good choice for the format, as crime/detective fiction always seems to be.  At slightly over 10 hours, The Wolf and the Watchman runs a bit long, largely because Natt Och Dag splits his narrative between a handful of narrators.   The Sherlock Holmes character, a consumptive lawyer-detective and his sidekick, an alchoholic night watchman with one arm, haunted by his experiences in the Swedish-German wars of the late 18th century, turn into an appealing duo and the general similarities with "Sherlock Holmes" are overwhelmed by the difference in setting and Dag's interest in the actual history of Sweden. 

Published 7/13/19
 The Road
 by Cormac McCarthy

    The Road is one of those classics: best seller, critical hit, great movie version; to which I find myself returning.   Cormac McCarthy is an author  in my top 10, if you are talking about contemporary American writers it would be McCarthy, Pynchon and Roth at this point.  For each of those writers, I'm going  back through the various back catalog titles and formats, filling in the blanks as it were.

   Cormac McCarthy and the Audiobook seem like a particularly good combination of canon level author/and format- most of his Audiobooks are narrated by actor Tom Stechschulte, including The Road.  He's the first Audiobook narrator who seems a star in his own right- it helps that all of McCarthy's books work SO well as Audiobooks.   His prose-style is unmistakable: economical and violent, and it translates directly into the spoken words.

  Hearing McCarthy's sparse descriptions of what we call "the After Time" around here, are particularly compelling in Audiobook.  At times more evocative then the also very good movie.

Published 7/13/19
The Traitors Head (2019)
by Ismail Kadare

   This 2017 nominee for the Man Booker International Prize finally got an American release in June of this year, allowing me to pick up the Ebook from the library after only a couple months on the waiting list. (Not a huge number of Ismail Kadare fans in the Los Angeles Public Library system?)
Ismail Kadare is THE Albanian author to read if you are going to read one Albanian novelist, and he's got a great reputation in France.  Also, he's the kind of writer the New York Times calls a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.   Seems like a long to medium shot to me, and he's generally in the same category as Ohman Pamuk  (2006 winner).   Or I guess you could call him a Balkan writer- which hasn't produced a winner since 1961. 

  The Traitors head is historical fiction, set in the time of the Ottoman Empire, and it is quite literally about the head of a traitor having his head transported to the so-called traitor's niche in Istanbul, where the head's of traitors are displayed and maintained by a doctor so the public can bear witness.   Like many of Kadare's books, the characters- there are maybe a dozen different narrators, are obsessed with power, and Albania's relationship to power. 

Novelist and journalist Joanne Ramos, author of The Farm.

Published 7/14/19
The Farm (2019)
by Joanne Ramos

   One of the interesting aspects of the entertainment-industrial complex is watching the process by which a debut novel by a previously unknown author is introduced to the critical and general public.  Joanne Ramos is a very interesting example of this process, being with her pedigree: Daughter of Filipino immigrants, raised in Wisconsin, educated at Princeton, worked on Wall Street, became a journalist, has a position at the Economist.   Next you've got the announced pre publication value a "six figure" sale for the publication rights.

  Then you've got the pre-publication role out, gathering up the book jacket quotes, early reviews and whatever public appearances a multi national publishing corporation can arrange for a first time author with no pre-existing celebrity.   I listened to The Farm Audiobook after fully witnessing that process for Ramos and her debut novel, about a shadowy, but very well-heeled surrogacy operation running in upstate New York.  The narrators include Jane, a failed Filipino-immigrant baby nurse, looking for a way to secure a future for her father-less daughter;  Ake, the Grandmotherly cousin of Jane who plays a vital role in the local (Manhattan) immigrant community, connecting new arrivals with families needing child care solutions;  Mae, the half-white, half-Chinese corporate executive, running the business for her billionaire boss; and Raegan, the privileged, white fellow "host" who becomes central to the narrative.

   There is a definite "thriller" feel to the later parts of the plot that preclude any kind of detailed description.  I would also dissent for the more hyperbolic prose which compares The Farm to The Handmaid's Tale and other works of feminist-dystopian fiction.   Whether situations such as those described by The Farm actually exist in America, they certainly exist in other parts of the world.  The issues around surrogacy are incredibly complex, but turning it into a market transaction takes away much of that complexity.  If the host and the client agree on the terms of the transaction, that's great.  If the host fails to understand the full meaning of the contract because of her status as a non-high school graduating immigrant to America, that's not great, but hardly unusual in this (or other) countries.

  I didn't love The Farm, but I liked it.  Ramos lands halfway between writing a standard-issue thriller type book and something more complicated.  I guess the year end Awards will provide the first verdict.  It doesn't look like it's been a huge sales success- it looks like the press exceeded the sales, but a run on the year end prize lists/best of lists would likely elevate those numbers.

  The Farm is a great Audiobook- another example where the accents make all the difference.  I don't think I could have put on the female, Filipino accent which describes the speech of several of the main characters in my own head, they would, at best, not sound like Filipina's.

Published 7/14/19
Vernon Subutex 1(2017)
 by Virgine Depentes

   Vernon Subutex 1 is one of the last titles from the 2018 Man Booker International Prize shortlist, alongside the winner, Flight by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, The White Book by Han Kang,  Like a Fading Shadow by Anotnio Munoz Molina, Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi and The World Goes On by László Krasznahorkai.  That last one is the only book on the shortlist I haven't read.    I thought Vernon Subutex 1 would get a United States release in the aftermath of the shortlist, but I was mistaken.  Eventually I tracked down the UK published English translation in London over Christmas.

  Flash forward to summer vacation, and I actually pulled it off the book shelf and read the darn thing.  I figured the lack of US publication put an end to any possible English language audience made available by the Booker International shortlist.  I suppose it's possible that the US publication rights are held by the UK publisher- that would account for a delay or absence.

 Her Wikipedia lists volumes 2 and 3 of Vernon Subutex- I don't think either book has been translated into English yet- volume 3 was published two years ago.  Subutex is the protagonist, though he shares narrating duties with varieties of friend and enemies.  Comfortable in his role as the proprietor of a Parisian record store specializing in vinyl, in the opening page he is hit with a triple whammy: the death of his Kurt Cobain-like pop star friend, the loss of his record store and eviction from his long time apartment.

  The eviction puts him on the road to homelessness, though not without a half dozen rest stops at the apartment and homes of friends from his past, each of whom gets their own narrated chapter.  Depentes tells her story mater-of-factly, there is nothing maudlin about Subutex and his descent.   He's arguably unsympathetic, since he does nothing to try to stop his fall.

  Also there are terrible decisions along the way: stealing from a wealthy divorcee who takes a shine to him, banging the tranny love interest of another temporary landlord.  Again, I'm surprised there was no American release. Hell, I'd put it out.  There is an audience among the urban hipster-lit crowd, particularly among vinyl nostaligists and/or people who 'love Paris' any of whom might be inclined to pick this up in a local indie bookstore.

Author Ottessa Moshfegh

Published 7/16/19
Eileen (2015)
 by Ottessa Moshfegh

  If you want to find commercial/literary cross-over success, head to your local major metropolitan airport- New York, Los Angeles, and look at the display for the airport bookstore.  If a work of literary fiction is getting major shelve space, as is the case for Moshfegh's latest book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I saw it myself at JFK airport in New York three weeks ago, Boston two weeks ago and Los Angeles this week.   Surely, My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a good prize for the major book awards- maybe not the Pulitzer, but a Booker Prize or the National Book Award would seem to be in reach.

  It's also a pretty good sign that after I read My Year of Rest and Relaxation I ran out and BOUGHT paperback copies of her first two books, the novella McGlue and her debut novel, the sleek n' nasty Eileen, about Eileen Dunlop, who narrates the events as a much older woman a la Titanic.  The events take place in a small town in Massacusets in the mid 1960's.  Eileen Dunlop works at a local juvenile prison and lives with her alcoholic ex-cop father, still a semi-respected figure in the town even though he has completely lost his mind and spends his days tormenting Eileen, drinking himself into a stupor, and pointing his gun at local school children who happen to walk past his house on their way to and from school.

   Eileen and her Dad live in a squalor familiar to watchers of TLC style reality shows like Hoarders and 600 LB Life.  Neither one cooks or cleans, Eileen also drinks and suffers from a variety of physical and mental maladies ranging from constipation to severe anxiety and depression.  She is, in other words, a classic Moshfegh narrator/protagonist.   I found it a compelling read, like all of her books.  I'm a believer! The cross-over success of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is no fluke!

  It's also worth noting that Eileen made it to the Booker Prize shortlist in 2015, the first year American published books were eligible, losing out to The Sellout by Paul Beatty.   That automatically makes her a contender for the Booker Prize this year.  The commercial/critical success makes her a good candidate for the National Book Award. 

Published 7/18/19
The Gallows Pole (2017)
by Benjamin Myers

    I actually heard about The Gallows Pole from my girlfriend, who is friends with the Author's wife.  Before I bought it I heard that Third Man books would be issuing an American edition...someday, but in the meantime I picked up the UK paperback edition (was there even a hardback edition?) in December when I was last there.

    Let me tell you, if the idea of  a band of 18th century counterfeiters, (or "clippers") in the parlance of the day, operating in 18th century Yorkshire excites you, then The Gallows Pole is the book for you!   Less so for fans of English literary fiction and historical literary fiction, and maybe not at all for your average American reader of literary fiction- the jury is still out on that question!

  I found The Gallows Pole delightful- it is apparently based on real events, and the experience of people from Yorkshire at this particular time is scarce enough that The Gallows Pole can serve as a rough history of the same subject. 

Published 7/18/19
Wit's End: What Wit Is, How Wit Works & Why We Need It
by James Geary

   Wit's End came out at the end of last year, I finally got around to checking out the Ebook from the library, in keeping with a comes-and-goes interest in philosophy and rhetoric.  The loss of rhetoric as a subject for contemporary education is understandable if regrettable.  It still has a way of popping up in creative non fiction via a variety of routes.   A major popular route is in books related to speaking and speech, and speechmaking, and all aspects of speaking, including humor, which is where you locate Wit's End: What Wit Is, How Wit Works & Why We Need It.  An sub-title might be, "Why puns are funnier than you think," because puns play a major part in the text of the book. 

  Geary also quotes liberally from sources extending back centuries in time- the story of wit is rooted in ancient Greece and Rome, and Geary also finds a way to fold in Buddhist, Jewish and Chinese holy men to make his conception of wit as nearly universal as the existence of humor.  Aside from his broad case for the universality of wit to written/spoken human discourse, he also delves into the mechanics of wit, see puns, above, but he also spends pages on the importance of ambiguity, including lofty claims about the preferences of large groups of human beings for "ambiguous" painting styles over realistic painting styles that I'm still thinking about.

  Geary doesn't talk about timing very much, which seems like a clear element of spoken wit, and also the distinction between spoken and written wit is obscured, or maybe just left unexplained.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus as President Selina Meyer on VEEP, the television show.

Published 7/18/19
Woman First: First Woman (2019)
 by Selina Meyer

   I've been a huge fan of the television show VEEP from Day one, was already a fan of Armando Iannucci via his work in The Thick of It.  I was also a fan of Julia Louis-Dreyfus.  Post-VEEP,  Louis-Dreyfus is set to make history as the most Emmy winning Actress of all time.  VEEP survived the departure of Iannucci half-way through the show, and prospered even after he left.   Surely Louis-Dreyfus was key to this longer-term success, though I thought she was matched by other members of the cast, especially Tony Hale- who joins Meyer/Louis-Dreyfus on the Audiobook, reprising his role as "body man" Gary Walsh.

  Fans of the show are sure to love the Audiobook, which is as funny as the writing for the show, and adds some depth to the Selina Meyer biography, including her sexual obsession with her own father, her fondness for fox hunting and blood-sport of all types and manages to leave out any mention of the time she freed Tibet.  Like Meyer herself, you get a lot of her back story, childhood and college years- which Meyer's herself thinks should have been the focus of Woman First- and very little actual politics.  It is, of course, because Meyer, who emerges as a near sociopathic personality by the end of Woman First, is motivated by nothing but an unquenchable thirst for "more," and a total lack of commitment to any ideology or even single idea.

  One part of Woman First that adds to the show is Meyer's account of her rise through the house and Senate, which was almost never discussed on the show.  Meyer displays contempt for both institutions, hilariously, in what is some of the best material in Woman First.  Meyer is also forthright about her contempt for, you know, voters, portraying the act of campaigning and even just talking to your constituents as an onerous chore.

   The whole book was hilarious- specifically AS an Audiobook, I don't think it would be nearly as funny without it being read by Meyer herself (since most of the humor of the book revolves around the fact that she didn't write the book herself, and is therefore unfamiliar with the details of her own auto-biography, amplified by her reading the book herself for the Audiobook, seemingly for the first time. 

2019 Booker Prize longlist

Margaret Atwood (Canada), The Testaments (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)
Kevin Barry (Ireland), Night Boat to Tangier (Canongate Books)
Oyinkan Braithwaite (UK/Nigeria), My Sister, The Serial Killer (Atlantic Books)
Lucy Ellmann (USA/UK), Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar Press)
Bernardine Evaristo (UK), Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton)
John Lanchester (UK), The Wall (Faber & Faber)
Deborah Levy (UK), The Man Who Saw Everything (Hamish Hamilton)
Valeria Luiselli (Mexico/Italy), Lost Children Archive (4th Estate)
Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria), An Orchestra of Minorities (Little Brown)
Max Porter (UK), Lanny (Faber & Faber)
Salman Rushdie (UK/India), Quichotte (Jonathan Cape)
Elif Shafak (UK/Turkey), 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (Viking)
Jeanette Winterson (UK), Frankissstein (Jonathan Cape)

    The 2019 Booker Prize longlist headlines include several unreleased heavyweights, particularly forthcoming titles by Margaret Atwood- her sequel to The Handmaid's Tale and Salman Rushdie, who has perhaps finally connected in his "American period" with a version of Don Quixote embodied in an American salesman. 

    If I was to handicap the shortlist, I would put Atwood and Rushdie on it.  I think probably Oyinkan Braithwaite is a good bet as the only debut novelist and one of two African writers.  My Sister, The Serial Killer, established a new dimension in contemporary African literary ficiton, in my opinion.   Turkish writer Elif Shafak has been in the new lately for her persecution at the hands of the Turkish government, she's a good shortlist bet.     Jeanette Winterson is a good blind bet- a canon level author who hasn't had a hit in some time.  Finally I have a feeling that Ducks, Newburyport, a one sentence, one thousand page stream of consciousness novel written from the point of view of an Ohio house wife, by an author who is the daughter of a prominent Joyce scholar, has the makings of an experimental classic. 

  The only one of the 2019 Booker longlist I've actually read is My Sister, The Serial Killer.  Ducks, Newburyport, The Wall, Lost Children Archive, An Orchestra of Minorities and Lanny are all on my radar or in my borrowing queue.   The Wall hasn't gotten a United States release yet.  Atwood and Rushdie are going to be literary events- either one could win the Nobel Prize.   I know Lost Children Archive and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World  have United States editions, they shouldn't be hard to track down.  That leaves only four books that look to be UK only at this point.   

 Whether you read Ducks, Newburyport is probably going to be *the* book for serious readers of literary fiction.   Atwood winning for a sequel would be pretty unheard-of, but The Handmaid's Tale has seemingly ascended to Brave New World/1984/The Hunger Games levels of cultural presence and resonance. 

Published 7/26/19
American Spy (2019)
by Lauren Wilkinson

  It's a spy novel about an African American woman!  If there is one thing you can say about the genre of spy fiction, its that it lacks diversity.  In fact, spy fiction embodies many of the "dead white male" values where women are desirable objects and minorities are the enemy, or simply non-existent.   Like the blidungsroman and mutli-generational family drama, there is a strong argument that EVERY group should get their own spy novel- an argument that has already carried the day in more progressive genres like science fiction and detective fiction.

  Told in a modified flashback format as ex-FBI agent and ex-CIA contractor Marie Mitchell takes refuge from the aftermath of a shadowy attempted assassination of herself at her home in Connecticut. She dispatches the assassin and flees to Martinque, where she takes refuge with her mother and her twin boys.  The "modified" flashback approach consists of a book length letter to her still-too-young-to-understand twins, describing to them her childhood, work as an FBI agent in New York City and involvement in a shadowy Reagan-era CIA-sponsored plot to compromise real-life left-leaning leader Thomas Sankara. 

   Mitchell's back story is more bildungsroman than spy novel, and it's equally and arguably more interesting then the spy story intself, as Mitchell struggles to answer the question as to why an African American woman would choose to the join FBI, which, even among the world of law enforcement has a pretty shitty records vis a vis minority rights.   Mitchell's semi-mentor at the agency is Ali, a long time friend of her father (a New York City Police Officer) who made his bones infiltrating and compromising civil right's groups in the 50's and 60's.

    I'm just assuming that Wilkinson is setting up some sort of franchise, so it was difficult to really fear for Mitchell's safety, reinforced by the flashback format, assuring us that Mitchell has survived her travails.   In the end- and I'm sure this is by design, Mitchell never really answers the questions, and it's unclear what her post-FBI/CIA career involves, exactly.   At least one more book is required to finish the narrative that is set into motion in American Spy.

Mozambiquean author Mia Couto.

Published 7/29/19
Woman of Ashes (2018)
 by Mia Couto
Book One of the Sands of the Emperor Trilogy


   Mozamibaquean author Mia Couto is the biggest writer of fiction to ever emerge out of Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony on the south eastern coast of Africa, north of South Africa, nestling Zimbawbwe in the middle, with Tanzania to the north.  Mozambique finally gained independence from Portugal after a decade long war, in 1975.   The Portuguese were replaced by a Communist dictatorship.  The Communist dictatorship was pushed out in 1990 after a mysterious plane crash (probably staged by the South African) wiped out the dictator and 33 more of the party leadership.   Elections were staged in 1994, and since then things have been relatively stable.

  Couto has been a prolific writer of both fiction and essays.   A handful of his major works have been translated into English.  Woman of Ashes is the first volume in a projected trilogy about the colonial history of Mozambique, and narration duties are split between Imani a 15 year old girl, who comes a tribe that is allied with Portugal;  and Sergant Germano De Malo, the exiled representative of the Portuguese emperor.  Both groups: Imani's tribe and Germano's men,  face emperor Ngungunyane, a native African ruler who stands opposed to the Portuguese.

   The colonial dynamic that Couto is interesting: this is not the aggressive efforts of an ambitious empire like France or England, but rather the fringe of an already decrepit empire.  The Africans in this book are not subjugated, indeed, the primary villain is not the colonialism but other Africans.   It's easy enough to slot Woman of Ashes into the "developing world magical realism,"  category with plus points for the location.  But truth be told I wasn't wowed, and I was even less wowed when I learned that the author wasn't an African woman but rather a white African man.  I should have known more about Couto going in, I suppose.

Aithor Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Published 7/29/19
We Cast a Shadow (2019)
by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

 It's hard not to think about the "satire" of We Cast a Shadow, set in a slightly futuristic, slightly more dystopian world then the one we inhabit presently, and not think about Paul Beatty, and The Sell Out another racial satire, and one which one the Booker Prize in 2016.   So says Roxane Gay, whose quote making that comparison is splashed all over the promotional materials put forward by Penguin Random House.  I finished the Audiobook just as the 2019 Booker Prize longlist was announced- as it turned out only one American author made the longlist, not Ruffin.  My observation is that We Cast a Shadow is very much a prize winning type of book, in that it takes a serious subject, race and identity in America, and layers on near-future dystopia in such a way that the reader is disarmed by whatever preconceptions they bring to the table.

  The unnamed narrator is an African American man, on the cusp of partnership at a prestigious law firm in a similarly unnamed near future city in the southern United States.  He has a white wife, and a bi-racial son, Nigel, who is sole and abiding obsession.  Specifically, he wants Nigel to be white.  The long term goal is race switching surgery, but in the short term he makes do with very not-science-fiction whitening creams.   His white wife doesn't support his behavior, neither does his mother.

 We Cast a Shadow is a great Audiobook because of the single narrator, and Ruffin makes his unnamed narrator a uniquely "unreliable" due to a combination of anti anxiety-pill popping and genuine inter-personal trauma.  Ruffin errs on the side of literary fiction in describing his near future dystopia.  The North still won the Civil War, but the civic activism of the "civil rights" era appears to have created a "white lash," where African American are still free, but are subject to increasingly harsh persecution through "legal" and quasi-legal means.

   Like Beatty in The Sell Out, Ruffin creates an uncomfortable world that SHOULD challenge a readers pre-conceptions about race and identity in our own world.  The narrator is easy to despise, but Ruffin wants us to understand how he reflects a persistent desire in our own world to eradicate blackness by "blending in."

  

Author Halle Butler.  She also reads the Audiobook for her novel, The New Me. 

Published 8/2/19
The New Me (2019)
 by Halle Butler

   This was an Audiobook read by the author- I love that! It should happen more often.  The New Me is a an existential bildungswoman about Mildred, a 20 something college graduate living in Chicago and working a terrible temp assignment as the assistant to a receptionist at a downtown design firm.   Most of the book is narrated by Mildred, with some chapters told by Mildred's boss at the design firm- the receptionist- who is the only potential villain in the piece besides Mildred herself, who is a basket case.

   Mildred, basically friendless and alone in Chicago, relationship-less, poverty stricken, surviving only on a monthly stipend paid by her well off, well adjusted suburban Chicago area parents, is unhappy, deeply and sadly unhappy in nearly comical fashion, if you happen to be a reader who doesn't immediately identify with Mildred's millennial specific plight.  

Published 8/12/19

Lanny (2019) 

by Max Porter

  Lanny is a Booker Prize longlist nominee this year, written by English author Max Porter.   His first book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, was critically acclaimed, but it didn't make much of a splash over here in the USA- that was in 2015-   it did well enough to get him an international release for Lanny, which was already on Eshelves in the United States when the Booker longlist was announced this year, and thus it's the first of this year's nominees that I managed to track down.  And an Audiobook, no less!   

  It's a good fit for the Audiobook format, with a polyphony of voices revolving around the disappearance of the eponymous Lanny, a Manic Pixie Dream Child who is likely to either enchant or annoy the reader, depending on their feelings about the merits of manic pixie dream children irl.  Lanny lives in a small bedroom village on the outskirts of London, with his City-Trader father, who is also not such a fan of manic pixie dream children himself and his mother- who is a dominant narrative voice in the greek-chorus style Porter embraces.  It's reminiscent of recent price winner Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders.

  The fantastical element of the set up involves Dead Poppa Toothwort, an ancient earth spirit who watches the village- leading to dada-esque sequences of overheard dialogue- and malevolently covets Lanny, because, ancient evil spirits, innocent manic pixie dream children.   Unlike many of the reviewers in the UK, I was not charmed.  Which is not to say that Porter is being cloying or sentimental- Lanny is a sharply observed, nasty piece of work that says as much as the environment of a commuter village outside London and the dynamics of the people who live there as the missing boy narrative.

Published 8/12/19
The Electric Hotel (2019)
 by Dominic Smith

   American-Australian author Dominic Smith is five novels deep into his career- which is great, but he hasn't had a hit yet.  Last time out, he made a move onto Farrar, Straus, Giroux and The Electric Hotel is his second book for them. It's a sprawling work of historical fiction mostly about the silent film era and World War I.   Claude Ballard is living out his days in a decrepit Hollywood area SRO when an enterprising film student induces him to revisit his lost silent film classic The Electric Hotel- years ahead of it's time but essentially lost and forgotten in the present day.

  Much of the book involves Ballard recounting his biography:  Childhood in Paris, recruited by the Lumiere brothers to market their motion picture machine  internationally,  pre-Hollywood film impresario, love of a Greta Garbo esque silent film star, clashes with Thomas Edison over motion picture patents- and I really had trouble making it through this first half of the book- even in Audiobook format, because the plot often seemed more like an essay on film history than the kind of narrative you look for in a early 21st century work of literary fiction. 

   However, Smith continues the story into Ballard's sojourn as a would-be journalist on the western front of World War I, and at that point, the pace really picks up, and the fairly mundane details of the pre-Hollywood silent film era are replaced by a more engaging story about World War I. 

Published 8/16/17
Exit Ghost (2007)
 by Philip Roth

  Exit Ghost is the final of the nine book Nathan Zuckerman series by Philip Roth.   I think you can probably divide Roth's career into the period before Portnoy's Complaint, when he was three novels into a career as a writer that showed promise, but hadn't delivered fame and fortune, and after Portnoy's Complaint, published in 1969, which catapulted Roth into the world of general and literary celebrity that comes maybe three or four times in a generation.   The Zuckerman series started a decade after Portnoy's Complaint, and a common theme in the first four books is Nathan Zuckerman dealing with the consequences of his post-fame live, specifically, the impact on his immediate family.

  Family continues to dominate through the fifth book, The Counterlife (1986), and then the last three books before Exit Ghost feature Zuckerman as a listener, and the plots revolve around the characters talking to him.   Exit Ghost returns to the earliest book and picks up with a Zuckerman centered narrative, with Nathan in Manhattan and returning to the territory of the first book, The Ghost Writer, which was about Zuckerman's relationship with an reclusive, isolated author when he was a young man.

  Exit Ghost picks up the thread half a century later, with Zuckerman seeking medical treatment in New York City, leaving his isolated cabin in New England for the first time in a decade.  Impulsively, he responds to an ad placed by a young pair of New York writers who want to swap their apartment in the city for an isolated cabin.    Zuckerman quickly becomes obsessed with Jamie Logan, the wife of the young couple, and through her he is introduced to Richard Kilman, a young man trying to write an autobiography of E.I. Lonoff, the reclusive mentor figure from The Ghost Writer.   Kilman knows about an incestous affair Lonoff had with his older sister, and Zuckerman swears to stop him from publishing about it. 

  Like Prague Orgy, Exit Ghost is more of a coda and less of stand-alone novel, clearly secondary to the the other seven books. 

Published 8/16/19
Second Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets (2013)
by Svetlana Alexievich

  I can't get enough of 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich.  Her books take the form of extensive interviews with dozens, maybe hundreds of individual sources, each book tackles a different subject, this book is about the fall of the Soviet Union and its aftermath. The overwhelming theme is regret and a sense of nostalgia for the loss of the Soviet state.

  The regret and nostalgia is intermixed with the stories of many who suffered greviously at the hands of the state during the Soviet period, who survived and eventually were able to access their files and figure out which among their friends and neighbors denounced them.  Victims and executioners, that is a phrase that reccurs frequently.

  Another frequent topic is the presence of salami in the stores after the fall of Communism, "We were no longer equal, but there was salami in the stores."    The voices of the losers out number those of the winners- just like life; but there are no interviews with oligarchs or the thuggish mafia who serve as the bogeymen to the normal people she interviews.

  Many of the most horrific stories come from the events in the former Soviet Republics in Central Asia and the Caucuses, where Russians and Armenians were ethnically cleansed in horrifying fashion.  

Colson Whitehead

Published 8/16/19
The Nickle Boys (2019)
 by Colson Whitehead

  Colson Whitehead is a top 5 American writer of literary fiction, he's coming off Underground Railroad- a career highlight- that won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  Pretty incredible for a book that is basically science fiction.   In The Nickle Boys, Whitehead turns to a more realistic milieu, a school based on the real-life horror of Florida's Dozier School for Boys.

   Whitehead manages to walk the fine line between writing a book that soft pedals the horror enough to guarantee a large general audience and the kind of realistic description of emotional and physical pain that defines canonical literature.   The nature of the plot and the narrative pay out is such that any lengthy description risks compromising the experience for another reader.   I listened to the Audiobook, which is very well done- it's a good book for Audiobook format in terms of length and the material.

   The Nickle Boys isn't an endless catalog of gothic horror, in fact it's the quiet moments that elevates the material into the stratosphere.  Neither the Pulitzer or National Book Award is known for repeat awards, but The Underground Railroad was three years ago.   It does look like another sales hit- still in the Amazon top 100 two months after publication.

  

Published 8/16/19
Exit Ghost (2007)
 by Philip Roth

  Exit Ghost is the final of the nine book Nathan Zuckerman series by Philip Roth.   I think you can probably divide Roth's career into the period before Portnoy's Complaint, when he was three novels into a career as a writer that showed promise, but hadn't delivered fame and fortune, and after Portnoy's Complaint, published in 1969, which catapulted Roth into the world of general and literary celebrity that comes maybe three or four times in a generation.   The Zuckerman series started a decade after Portnoy's Complaint, and a common theme in the first four books is Nathan Zuckerman dealing with the consequences of his post-fame live, specifically, the impact on his immediate family.

  Family continues to dominate through the fifth book, The Counterlife (1986), and then the last three books before Exit Ghost feature Zuckerman as a listener, and the plots revolve around the characters talking to him.   Exit Ghost returns to the earliest book and picks up with a Zuckerman centered narrative, with Nathan in Manhattan and returning to the territory of the first book, The Ghost Writer, which was about Zuckerman's relationship with an reclusive, isolated author when he was a young man.

  Exit Ghost picks up the thread half a century later, with Zuckerman seeking medical treatment in New York City, leaving his isolated cabin in New England for the first time in a decade.  Impulsively, he responds to an ad placed by a young pair of New York writers who want to swap their apartment in the city for an isolated cabin.    Zuckerman quickly becomes obsessed with Jamie Logan, the wife of the young couple, and through her he is introduced to Richard Kilman, a young man trying to write an autobiography of E.I. Lonoff, the reclusive mentor figure from The Ghost Writer.   Kilman knows about an incestous affair Lonoff had with his older sister, and Zuckerman swears to stop him from publishing about it. 

  Like Prague Orgy, Exit Ghost is more of a coda and less of stand-alone novel, clearly secondary to the the other seven books. 

Published 8/16/19
Second Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets (2013)
by Svetlana Alexievich

  I can't get enough of 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich.  Her books take the form of extensive interviews with dozens, maybe hundreds of individual sources, each book tackles a different subject, this book is about the fall of the Soviet Union and its aftermath. The overwhelming theme is regret and a sense of nostalgia for the loss of the Soviet state.

  The regret and nostalgia is intermixed with the stories of many who suffered greviously at the hands of the state during the Soviet period, who survived and eventually were able to access their files and figure out which among their friends and neighbors denounced them.  Victims and executioners, that is a phrase that reccurs frequently.

  Another frequent topic is the presence of salami in the stores after the fall of Communism, "We were no longer equal, but there was salami in the stores."    The voices of the losers out number those of the winners- just like life; but there are no interviews with oligarchs or the thuggish mafia who serve as the bogeymen to the normal people she interviews.

  Many of the most horrific stories come from the events in the former Soviet Republics in Central Asia and the Caucuses, where Russians and Armenians were ethnically cleansed in horrifying fashion.  

Published 9/7/19
My Struggle (Volume 2)(2009)
 by Karl Ove Knausgård

    I was lukewarm about the first volume of My Struggle- I listened to the Audiobook- as I ended up doing for Volume 2 after a couple of unsuccessful attempts to read an Ebook copy.  At the end of Volume 1, I felt like I could understand the appeal, but that I didn't quite connect with the book.

  Volume 2, which I mostly listened to while helping my Mom with her hip surgery in the Bay Area the past week, was quite a different experience- often moving me close to tears and leaving me with the conviction that at least the first two volumes of My Struggle- both of which were written before the first book was released and became a world-wide phenomenon- are among the greatest works of 21st century literature, and are both dead-bang canonical.

  I can see where the following four volumes- all of which were written and published after Knausgard became a world-wide literary phenomenon, might be...different, since the theme of the first two volumes deals so explicitly with Knausgard's perceived failings as a writer and human being.   If the sacrificial family member of Volume One is his father- a man who quite literally drinks himself to death in that book, the sacrifice of the second book is his second wife, Linda Boström, a Swedish poet and mother of his children.  In this book, Knausgard reveals the nature of his struggle for the first time- that is, to maintain a quest for artistic and/or personal greatness while surviving the prosaic mundanities of everyday life.  In this regard, his wife and children are cast as the role of the villains, as is Knausgard himself.

  I resisted My Struggle for so long that I feel almost ashamed lauding it now, but man- I really connected with the themes as a I drove to and from the hospital surrounding my Mom's surgery.  Knausgard truly is a Proust for the twenty first century.

Published 9/10/19
The Wall (2019)
by John Lanchester

   With an abiding interest in the intersection between dystopian futurism and literary fiction, I was a fool for The Wall by English journalist/author John Lanchester even before it made the 2019 Booker Prize longlist.  It didn't make the shortlist.   The Wall posits a near-future Britain after "the change" which, though never explained (see: differences between dystopian genre fiction and dystopian literary fiction) appears to be a massive rise in sea levels by the melting of the polar ice caps.  Global civilization is a state of disrepair.  Great Britain (or at least England, Scotland and Wales) have clung to a semblance of normality behind an island encircling wall.

  Kavanagh, the narrator, is a fresh recruit to the Defenders, the civil-defense entity who is tasked with keeping out the rest of the world, called, "the others."  Supposedly, all citizens of whatever they call the UK in this book are tasked to serve a two year term.  Letting an other through the wall means exile- in the event of penetration, one defender is sent "to sea" for every other that makes it through the wall.    The first portion reads like an update on The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati, a book from the 1940's about a  young soldier similarly situated on the cusp of a gigantic desert, but Lanchester pumps up the action as the plot proceeds.

  It was a great Audiobook- it didn't really get a wide release in the US, so I was able to pick it up from the Los Angeles Public Library with a minimal wait, and the first person narration by Kavanagh makes for an easily translatable experience.

Published 9/11/19
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2019)
by Olga Tokarczuk

  Big ups to Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, who is finally receiving some English language attention in the aftermath of her Booker International Prize win for Flights- originally published in Polish in 2007, then published in English translation in 2018, where it promptly won the Booker International Prize and scored a National Book Award for Translated Works nomination in the same year.  Similarly, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was originally published in Polish  in 2009 and received an English translation (and an English language Audiobook- bless you PenguinRandomHouse for your largess) this year. 

  Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is described as both "detective fiction" and "literary fiction."  It also has strong roots in the existential/philosophical literary tradition of late 20th century central and eastern Europe.   Anyone who has read Flights will expect witty, sparkling prose from Tokarczuk and those readers will not be dissapointed.  Janina Duszejko, Tokarczuk's narrator, is what you might call an "old crone," living alone after a career as a civil engineer.  She spends her retirement on an isolated plateau near the Czech border, where she teaches English part time to the local school kids, cares for the summer houses of city dwellers during the off season, and carries on a long running, low intensity skirmish with the local hunting/poaching culture.

  The status quo is interrupted when a neighborhood poacher turns up dead.  The first death is followed by a series of deaths among the local power elite, and Duszejko decides to investigate.   The mention of literary fiction and the tradition of the European philosophical novel should be enough to forewarn potential readers that this is not your normal whodunit, and Duszejko is no Ms. Marple in that she despises the local victims.

  The Audiobook edition, read by a narrator who used a Polish accent- raises a question about Audiobooks read in translation.  Why, if the book has been translated into English, does the English language reader affect a Polish accent?  After all, the narrator is speaking in Polish, not English.  Isn't more consistent for the reader to use an American accent?   It's also an issue in a lesser-Murakami book I'm listening to right now, where all the characters speak heavily Japanese accented English, and the characters don't speak English at all.

   Generally speaking I'm up for ANY author who can get their non-English work of literary fiction a major label release in the United States- if there's an Audiobook- I'm there.

   

Sexy Anna Kendrick/GQ photo

Published 9/16/19

Scrappy Little Nobody (2016)
by Anna Kendrick

  It's only mildly embarrassing to declare myself a fan of Anna Kendrick, based on her performance in Up in the Air.  I learned from this book that she was in the Twilight movies but the closest I've come to that franchise is a sighting of Kristen Stewart with her girl posse in Echo Park five years ago.  The Audiobook is freely available at the Los Angeles Public Library- over 60 copies available at a time!  Also, Kendrick herself reads her own book, which was something I enjoyed listening to Julia Louis Dreyfus read the Veep memoir of her television character.

  So yeah, I listened to Scrappy Little Nobody, Anna Kendrick's best-selling 2016 memoir, and I have to say that I found it incredibly, heart crushingly sad, and I can't believe that Kendrick and her publishers didn't see it the same way.  Take, for example, the saddest portion of the book, where Kendrick describes the imaginary parties she would like to throw for her non-existent friends, she doesn't have time for parties or friends because she has been working non stop since she was in junior high.

 I'm not a snob when it comes to celebrities, I'm interested in the process of fame as it relates to art, and you can make an argument that actors are artists (they would certainly make that argument.)  Unsurprisingly, Kendrick doesn't spend any time on the craft/art of acting, presumably because the assignment is to create a series of themed "essays" with the depth you expect from twitter- where Kendrick maintains a well-curated presence.

  I am of the frequently voiced opinion that all famous artists are monsters because they possess the irrational believe that they, among thousands, are destined for fame.  I also think Kendrick is interesting enough to have some thoughts on that subject, but baby, they ain't here.

Published 9/22/19
The Map and the Territory (2010)
 by Michel Houellebecq

     The 1001 Books Project included Houellebecq's first three novels in the first and second editions.  The Map and the Territory, his fifth book, was released after the second edition came out, and it was included in any subsequent edition, but it did win the Prix Goncourt, which is the French Pulitzer Prize, more or less, and Houellebecq continues to publish with regularity, though he was hasn't yet had a hit in the USA, and I'm assuming that he has more of a following in the UK, since there are plenty of literate people over there who actually read novels in French, and a greater audience for literature in translation.

   If I was to trace a trend in his novels it is that each successive novel has grown more "high concept" and elaborate in terms of the characters and the story.  Whatever, his first book is basically an anti-bildungsroman in the mold of Catcher in the Rye, but French, and the protagonist is a yuppie working with computers. Atomised begins the trip towards elaboration with the character of Michel, the biologist who eliminates sexual reproduction, but also keeps to his root obsession with the unhappiness of families and the emptiness of modern existence.

   Platform is very high concept, with sex tourism, extensive monologues on the state of the leisure-industrial complex and a gruesome bombing by Muslim terrorist.   This thematic ambition is rare to non existent in contemporary European fiction, which mostly involves sad failures being sad about everything, call it the European existential novel.   And while most Houellebecq's characters are miserable assholes, they at least do things besides being poor and sad.

 The Map and the Territory delves into the world of modern art, featuring a typically Houellebecq-ian protagonist who sounds like a post-modern artist who could really exist.   Sure, he's hateful, but he's fun- fun to read- so much of the literature I read is tedious or a chore.  

Balkan-American writer Téa Obrecht 

Published 9/21/19
Inland (2019)
by Téa Obrecht

 Inland is the second novel by Téa Obrecht.  Her first novel- The Tiger's Wife, published in 2010, it won the Orange Prize in the UK and was short listed for the National Book Award.    Nine years is a long time between published novels, and I checked out the Audiobook last month with the thought that Inland might but a National Book Award longlist- although it might not be eligible till next year- it didn't get nominated this year.

  The Audiobook is partially narrated by Anna Chlumsky- who I loved in VEEP- and the stroy is set in pre-statehood Arizona in 1893.  Narrating duties are shared by Nora (voiced by Chlumsky) a wife and mother who is anxiously awaiting the return of her husband- an intellectual pioneer who has failed in a succession of western towns.  The other narrator is Lurie- a former outlaw who falls in with a bunch of camel jockeys.

  I read some rhapsodic reviews, and I like revisionist stories of the old west- Cormac McCarthy- to name the most famous writer in that area; but I wasn't taken by Inland.  Nora did not move me with her plight, and Lurie was barely interesting.   Everyone in the book is simultaneously over-articulate for the character and largely unsympathetic.

Published 9/4/19
The Devils Dance (2018)
 by Hamid Ismailov

    Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbekistani author who fled the country in 1992, just after this book was originally published in Uzbekistan, and landed in the United Kingdom, where he spent 25 years working for the BBC. 

  Uzbekistan is a core element of  Central Asia, one of the most interesting, least understood regions on Earth.  The region emerged from Soviet dominance after the collapse of the USSR only to confront a series of (still ongoing) dictatorships of the largely secular variety.  The west has been quiescent in the repression, since the dictators over there are, by necessity, key partners in the war against radical islam.  Recently, the Chinese part of Central Asia has been in the news for an anti-Islamic gulag prison camp system.   

  At one point- maybe in the period between the conquest of the region by Islam through the conquest of the region by the Mongols, you could make a case that the area was one of the bright spots of global civilization.    By crushing the Oasis-centered Islamic city-states of the region, the Mongols ushered in a still-ongoing dark age that has led to a region that is not only under the boot of a variety of dictators, but also one of the poorest places in the world.

  In theory, it is a rich history that would seem to call for a rich literature, but of course, repression and a century of Russian Communism have not helped its authors make a dent in the global literary marketplace.    I was pretty excited to find The Devils' Dance available as an Ebook through the Los Angeles Public Library system- score one for global capitalism!

  Set during the winter of 1938, under the boot of Stalinism, Abdulla Qodiriry, one of Uzbekistan's most famous authors, is taken from his home by the Soviet Secret Police (not for the first time) and thrown into a prison with a grab bag representing the region's cultural diversity.   This was really a book where I wished I had read it as a physical book as supposed to an ebook, but I'd wager that I will never, ever see a physical copy of The Devils' Dance unless I buy one. 

    The narrative ping pongs back and forth between the secret prison and 19th century Tashkent, a relative high point in the post-Mongol historical record, and the time of the "Great Game"  which was a struggle for cultural hegemony in Central and South Asia fought between the British Empire and the Russian Empire.  Uzbekistan and the environs were on the margins of this conflict- which was focused further south in Afghanistan, but Ismailov/Qodirity bring it alive through the novel that Qodirriy composes in his cell.

    It's compelling material, but dense in terms of references that the average (or even above average) Western reader is unlikely to grasp without looking stuff up on the internet.  If you see a hard copy- grab it- who knows when another Uzbekistani novelist will get an American publication of one of their novels.

Published 9/25/19
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013)
by Haruki Murakami

  The amazing fact about this Audiobook is that it is narrated by a reader in English with a heavy Japanese accent.  The explanation I heard from a friend is that it must be a situation where it was supposed to be like the author- Murakami speaks in heavily accented English- reading the book to you, but I found it incredibly distracting.

 Aside from the accented narration, everything else is classic Murakami: An emotionally shut-off man living alone in Japan, puzzling over unresolved issues from his childhood- here the central issue is a close knit group of friends the narrator had in high school and the fact that they expelled him suddenly without explaining why.

  There is also hints of the supernatural, parallel universes and carefully described food preparation.  Missing in this book are actual supernatural characters, cats and/or owls and references to jazz.  At times, I feel like Murakami has only written one book, and he just adjusts the various ingredients, like a chef experiencing with a recipe he knows by heart.

Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa

Published 9/25/19
The Memory Police (2019)
by Yoko Ogawa

  The 2019 National Book Awards Longlist: Translated Literature was announced last week.  Ten books made the list:

Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet
The Barefoot Woman by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Jordan Stump
Crossing by Pajtim Statovci, translated by David Hackston
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
The Collector of Leftover Souls: Field Notes on Brazil’s Everyday Insurrections by Eliane Brum, translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty
Space Invaders by Nona Fernández, translated by Natasha Wimmer
Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund
Death Is Hard Work by Khaled Khalifa, translated by Leri Price

and The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa.   I already listened to the Audiobook of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk.  I've got Death is Hard Work by Khaled Khalifa on my Kindle- I think that book- about the Syrian civil war is a lock for the shortlist and maybe a winner- it's shocking and amazing and I'm only halfway through.  I may be able to land Crossing and Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming from the library- for the rest of the books I'm going to wait and see about the shortlist.

  I was already listening to The Memory Police Audiobook when the National Book Award: Translated Literature longlist was announced, so that was mild thrill.  I was interested by the reviews referencing dystopian literature and intrigued by a Japanese language novelist who isn't Murakami or Endo.    I think The Memory Police is meant to be an allegory of some sort- it's about a woman living on an isolated island where the government is making everyday items disappear, one by one- everyone is required to destroy all their objects and that follows by everyone forgetting that the disappeared objects ever existed.  People who remember things that have been disappeared are hunted by the Memory Police in a manner that evokes the extirpation of the Jewish population in Europe outside Germany by the Nazis.

    The Memory Police was originally published in 1994, so the depiction of a "present" without internet connected computers and smart phones is not a purposeful anachronism.  Despite the seeming promise of violent action, The Memory Police is quiet to the point of somnolent- passive resistance is the order of the day, and all of the violence takes place off stage.

  The third act introduces some genuinely surprising twists, but the ending  is more like the rest of the book, abstract and elliptical. Which is not a bad thing- in fact- that is how you know it's literature and not genre.  Ogawa is a major writer in Japan- where she's won "every major literary award" but English translations have seemingly proceeded in random fashion. I'm sure a win here would do much to bolster interest in her books in translation- probably the strength of her international reputation will get her to the shortlist, but I wouldn't pick The Memory Police as a prize winner.

Author Silvia Moreno Garcia

Published 9/28/19
Gods of Jade and Shadow (2019)
by Silvia Moreno Garcia


   Gods of Jade and Shadow is a jazz-age magically-realist bildungswoman-fairy tale about a young woman from an impoverished branch of wealthy Yucatan area family, cursing her fate at her plight, when she awakens a Mayan God of Death, imprisoned for the past several decades by his evil twin with the connivance of the mean old patriarch of the protagonist, Casiopeia Tun. Casiopeia is a pretty garden variety hero, with super high diversity points as a half-Mayan half-Mexican heroine, even is Casiopeia behaves more like a contemporary American teen then her biographical details would dictate.

  More power to her, Moreno-Garcia is obviously going for a modern day fairy tale, and I thought it was pretty good.  The ambition of it, the creativity of the narrative.  I'll look forward to future books, and I wouldn't be surprised by a movie or television version in the near future.

Published 10/7/19
Night Boat to Tangier (2019)
by Kevin Barry

  Night Boat to Tangier, by Irish author Kevin Barry, is a good pick from the 2019 Booker Prize longlist- in fact- after listening to the Audiobook- which is memorably narrated by the author- I was surprised that it didn't make the shortlist- if you look at the shortlist book- at the very least you would think Barry would have been picked over Salman Rushdie, who is going on a streak of six duds in a row- and whose shortlist title, Quichotte, was panned by the New York Times last week.  That makes  four books from the longlist, and none from the shortlist.   I guess you could say that Barry, was a white, hetero Irishman scores a zero on the diversity meter, but seriously- Rushdie? In 2019?

  The shorthand for Night Boat to Tangier is "Crime Fiction a la Beckett," with two over-the-hill Irish drug dealers keeping an eye out for the twenty-something daughter of the boss of the pair.  At first, it's basically the two crooks bantering, waiting for this daughter who never (to their knowledge) materializing, while the boss tracks back and forth in time, describing the details of his autobiography in terse but memorable detail.   Like many books written by Irish authors, the Audiobook is an excellent experience as you actually hear the accent of the characters- again- here narrated by the Author. It's a shame it didn't make the longlist, but it did get a recent American publication, so be sure to check it out.

Syrian author Khaled Khalifa- give the man a prize already.

Published 10/9/19
Death is Hard Work (2019)
by Khaled Khalifa

  The finalist for the five National Book Award categories were announced this week.  I'm trying to keep up with two of the five categories, fiction and translated fiction.  Death is Hard Work made the shortlist in translated fiction- a newish category- and even though it's only the second of the five titles that I've read, I would pick it as my choice for the winner.  First, consider the competition- you've got The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, which I've read- it just is not as good as Death is Hard Work.  Straight up- there is simply no saying that The Memory Police is better than Death is Hard Work.

  As for the rest of the competition, you've got maybe the last novel by Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, a sentimental favorite perhaps, but Ogawa also has an entire career behind her, so they would probably cancel each other out in the legacy oriented judges on the panel.   The other two books: The Barefoot Woman by Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga sounds intriguing but is out on a tiny press.   Then you've got Crossing by Pajtim Statovci- a Kosovan author, and I sincerely doubt that he can drum up anything to top Death is Hard Work, about a trio of siblings who need to bring the corpse of their father from Damascus to Aleppo during the height of the Syrian Civil War.

  Khalfia apparently still lives inside Aleppo, he should get a medal for that fact alone, but Death is Hard Work is genuinely moving- with a story that tackles the big issue of the Syrian civil war and the small story of  Bolbol, the youngest son of the dead man. I just can't believe any other book would win the 2019 Booker Prize for Translated Fiction.

Published 10/10/19
Honeymoon (2011)
 by Patrick Modiano

    The Nobel Prize Committee awarded to prizes in Literature this year, one for 2019, and one for 2018, when they didn't award a prize because of the committee members husband was a rapist, more or less.  Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk won for 2018 and Austrian writer Peter Handke won for 2019.  Tokarczuk is a great pick, Handke is more controversial, mostly because of his support for convicted Serbian war criminal and dictator Slobodan Milosevic.  Neither writer is a stranger to this blog- I've read three books by Handke and I can tell you I don't like him, and two books by Tokarczuk, who I do like- and I'm excited that this will result in more of her works being translated into English and/or sold in the United States.

    Meanwhile I'm three deep into the bibliography of French author Modiano- the 2014 winner- and like Handke, I can tell you that I don't much like him.   On the plus side his works are freely available in Audiobook format from the library, and they average about five hours each, so it isn't much of a time investment.  I can see why Modiano won, his books are difficult and complicated but in a delicate way, and he deals in the kind of existentialism that seems to be favored by the Nobel Committee.

  Honeymoon is about Jean, a documentary films maker who becomes obsessed with a Ingrid Teyrsen, a woman who has just killed herself.  Jean realizes that he knew Teyrsen when she was a girl, and he goes on to piece together her life, specifically her relationship with a man named Rigaud, a wealthy but slightly dissoulate Parisian who helps her escape the Nazi's as they occupy Paris. It's not exactly clear why Teyrsen has to flee Paris, I assumed it is because she was Jewish but Jean never specifies. 

   Like Modiano's other books there are elements of a detective story, spy novel and existential European novel, but you can't describe Honeymoon as any of these, it's more of a "meditation" on themes of memory, forgetting and the gaps in biography synonymous with the modern world.

Published 10/10/19
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013)
 by Mohsin Hamid

  I was a big fan of Exit West (2017) and also enjoyed The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), which was his second book and his break-out.   Hamid is a British-Pakistani writer who lived in the United States- attending Harvard Law School and working in New York.   Set in a nameless South Asian city in the recent past, Hamid adapts the format of a self-help book, to the point where How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is written in the second person, ex. "You ask yourself what you have to do to escape the poverty of your childhood."  It's an unusual, difficult choice for a novel, and it's a tribute to Hamid's technical skill that How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia holds together.  In addition to the trappings of the self-help genre, Filthy Rich is also a take on the O Henry rags to riches tale, with the narrator finding success as a seller of water in a thirsty city.

  Hamid is not a great depictor of female characters and I think all of his protagonists have been men. The female counter part of his narrator, a classmate who evolves from a high priced call girl to an independently wealthy television celebrity, is less well drawn, and their relationship becomes central in an ending that seemed a little pat.  Hamid also touches on LGBT issues with a gay son, but doesn't get deep into it.  It's not his best book, but he's also readable, or listenable, as I listened to the Audiobook.

Published 10/10/19
The Warlow Experiment (2019)
 by Alix Nathan

  I juggle five or six Audiobooks a time in the Libby app (thanks China!).  There's a clear hierarchy of the books I check out.  First tier is books I can't wait to get through, to the point where I fail to rotate through the rest of the books until I finish.  That's less than 10 percent of the books I listen to- 175 as of this review.  The lowest tier is books I either don't like or fail to finish- I keep track of those within the Libby app and the count is 42.  All the rest of the Audiobooks are in the middle tier- ranging from titles that I like but don't love to books I either need to revisit more than once or finish but don't enjoy.

  The Warlow Experiment, a work of historical fiction about a 17th century gentleman squire who recruits a local member of the working class to live underground without human contact for seven years, is at the bottom of this broad middle category of Audiobooks.  I finished it, but I didn't really enjoy it, and I probably wouldn't have finished it if I had better options at the time.  Part of the problem with The Warlow Experiment is that there is no element of surprise.  Any modern reader knows EXACTLY how the proposed experiment will end: Warlow will go mad and probably end up murdering someone.  I mean, you can guess that from the paragraph long description that the provide in the app.

  Especially tedious in the Audiobook format is the journal penned by the barely literate Warlow- the narrator sounding out his primitive sentences is border-line excruciating, even is Nathan is kind enough to drop the pretence halfway through the book.

Published 10/21/19
HHhH (2012)
 by Laurent Binet

   HHhH is what you might a call a "dazzling work of metafiction" and it won the 2010 Prix Goncourt for first novel- different from the main Prix Goncourt- which is like the Pulitzer Prize for France.   The unnamed narrator is determined to tell the story of Nazi leader Richard Heyrdrich, notable for this role as an architect of the "final solution" and Nazi leader of the occupied Czech Republic.   Heyrdrich was killed by two partisan's during World War II, and his assassination was the most significant assassination of a Nazi by a partisan group during World War II.

   HHhH is about Heydrich, the plot to murder Heydrich and the life of the unnamed narrator, who is not Author Binet but resembles him in several notable respects, including time living in Prague.  The narrator is not unaware of contemporary trends in Nazi inspired lit- notably The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, published in 2006 and winner of the Prix Goncourt, it covers similar territory but is closer to a late 19th century realist novel than the metafictional wizardry of HHhH.

   I enjoyed this Audiobook, which wasn't long- racing through it to the detriment of the other books I was listening to at the same time.  There is something...fun, about Binet- fun in the hatefulness, in the same way that Michel Houllebecq is fun. If people are going to be hateful miserable fucks they should at least be fun about it.  

Author Marlon James

Published 10/28/19
The Book of Night Women (2009)
by Marlon James

   The Book of Night Women was Marlon James' second novel, after John Crow's Devil- published in 2005.   James broke through into the wider public consciousness when his A Brief History of Seven Killings, about the rise and fall of Bob Marley as told by a chorus of different voices, won the Booker Prize in 2015.  Black Leopard, Red Wolf, published this year, is on the shortlist for the National Book Award-opening up the possibility of James as a rare double Booker/National Book Award winner.   Like John Crow's Devil, about the goings-on in an isolated Jamaican town in the 1950's, The Book of Night Women is squarely in the category of "historical fiction."  Unlike John Crow's Devil, The Book of Night Women is set in the eighteenth century, at a time when slavery was still a fact of the present.

  Lilith is the protagonist, the daughter of a slave who died in childbirth and the now retired overseer of the estate.  No one would ever accuse James of being a bloodless aesthete, all of his books have visceral scenes of sex and violence that combine realism and a sensitivity to the taste of contemporary audiences of literary fiction for sadistic cruelty.  I purposefully sought out the Audiobook for Night Women- it is read by Robin Miles- she has to be the best narrator working for books that require a Jamaican accent, and again, she didn't disappoint

  At times, I wished I was reading so I could just skip some of the more brutal moments, but that would have been cheating.   The plantation slavery world that James has drawn is well informed, you can hear the clear echoes of the Foucaultian preoccupation with the infliction of coercive power on the body of subjects (I'm not sure if James has read Foucault or not, but I would guess so...)   

Published 10/29/19
Last Witnesses (2019)
by Svetlana Alexievich

   Winning the Nobel Prize in Literature is a career maker for everyone, but Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich went from being essentially unknown to getting her entire back catalog translated and published in English, with all the trimmings- including Audiobook editions for her big hits.  Last Witnesses is her second book focused on World War II, the first being The Unwomanly Face of War, about the experience of women during World War II, and together they make a good trilogy with The Last of the Soviets, about the end of the Soviet Union.   All three are incredibly powerful, and they all make for superior Audiobooks- thank you Nobel Prize for making that happen.

  Last Witnesses is not of epic length like Unwomanly and Soviets, probably because most of the interviewees are talking about events that happened when they were under ten years old.  Many say so, "What can I remember, I was three."  Still, they remember enough.   I'm glad I encountered Alexievich, she's spurred a small obsession with the experience of life in the USSR.

Finnish-Albanian writer Pajtim Statvci

Published 11/4/19
Crossing (2019)
 by Pajtim Statovci

  The 2019 National Book Awards are set to be announced on November 20th.  Crossing by Patjim Statovci is a finalist in the new category of best translated work, alongside Death is Hard Work by Khalid Khalifa (my pick), The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (I thought it was just ok) and two books I haven't read, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming by Hungarian author  Laszlo Krasznahorkai and The Barefoot Woman by Scholastique Mukasonga.  It's unclear whether this award is going to function as a proxy for a career achievement award- in which case Krasznahorkai would be a clear favorit and Ogawa a runner up, or whether it will be based on the book itself, in which case I think Death is Hard Work, about adult Syrian siblings trying to transport the corpse of their father to its final resting place at the height of the Syrian civil war,  is the clear winner.

  Crossing though is a worthy shortlist pick, translated from the Finnish(!) but written by a gay or trans Albanian immigrant, who I imagine resembles the author in some important biographical detail, and it takes the form of a bildungsroman, starting with life at the end of the Enver Hoxha regime, and following the narrator through a perpietic asylum seeker who makes stops in Italy, New York and finally lands in Finland, where *he* gets into a relationship with a Finnish trans woman, steals her life story, and seeks fame on a Finnish version of American Idol.

   Bujar, the narrator, makes for a complicated figure and Crossing isn't merely a ra ra tale about an immigrant overcoming hardship.  Bujar is forced to make impossible choices between relationships and survival, family and freedom, personal safety and happiness.  His motives are complicated and his actions fall on either side of the imaginary dividing line between ethical and non ethical behavior. 

Author Kali Fajardo-Anstine, photographed in Denver, the scene of most of the stories in Sabrina & Corina.

Published 11/13/19
Sabrina & Corina (2019)
by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

   The 2019 National Book Award Prize Ceremony is next week, and I've been racing to finish up the shortlist before the award is handed out.  The nominees are Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James, The Other Americans by Laila Lailami, Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips and Trust Exercise by Susan Choi.  I'd read Black Leopard before the shortlist was announced.  I couldn't make it an hour into Trust Exercise when I checked out the Audiobook.  It's a coming-of-age-novel set in the American south, I just couldn't handle the precious teen protagonist. 

  I made it slightly further into Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips, about two young sisters who disappear in Kamchatcka(!?!) and the way it impacts the lives of people living there, mainly a precocious adolescent girl.   Again, with the precocious teen girl protagonist, and also I couldn't get over the fact that it was set in the Russian Far East, and written by an American author.   I'm finishing up The Other Americans Audiobook, about the hit and run death of a Moroccan high desert, told by a variety of different narrators, but mostly by his daughter, a precocious post-college composer who returns from the Bay Area after the accident.   I live The Other Americans, but I don't love it, and it just doesn't seem like a prize winner.

  That leaves Black Leopard and this book, Sabrina & Corina, a series of short stories about the lives of indigenous/latina women living in the Denver area.  Sabrina & Corina seems precisely like the type of book that both could and should win the National Book Award- Fajardo-Anstine has a genuinely novel perspective, that of women from the lower quartiles of the socio-economic ladder with mixed indigenous/white/latina heritage.   I found Sabrina & Corina to be mildly revelatory in that regard, and I think Kali Fajardo-Anstine is a major talent.   She would have my vote if I were on this jury!  I love her social media presence! Authors need to do more of that.

Published 11/15/19
Fates and Furies (2015)
 by Lauren Groff

  I enjoyed Florida, the collection of state-centered short stories that Lauren Groff published last year.  It was a National Book Award shortlist nominee- losing to The Friend by Sigrid Nunez but making the longlist over An American Marriage by Tayari Jones and There, There by Tommy Orange- two books I thought were better than Florida.  I thought There, There, about the lives of "urban Indians" living in the Bay Area, was good enough to win and should have won.

  Still, when I saw Fates and Furies, Groff's popular 2015 novel- also a National Book Award finalist- in the Little Library down the street, I grabbed it.  Groff is one of the those few authors who is able to combine a wide general audience with critical acclaim, so she bears watching.  Basically the criteria are "New York Times Bestseller List" and "National Book Award Nominee" are the minimum levels of success to grab my attention, as far as American fiction goes.  Fates and Furies is the kind of literary fiction that relies on spoiler level surprises in the course of 400 or so pages.   You can't really criticize Fates and Furies without ruining the plot for a potential reader- something straight out admitted in a New Yorker review that questioned it's literary merit.

  I think I side with the haters for Fates and Furies.  I just didn't buy any of it, and I didn't like anyone and it was set in a milieu (the world of serious theater) that I also don't like.

 

Omani author Jokha Alharthi, this year's winner of the Booker International Prize

Published 12/3/19
Celestial Bodies (2019)
by Jokha Alharthi

  Jokha Alharthi made waves this year as the first Arabic-language winner of the Booker International Prize (which is admittedly only a couple years old in the present incarnation of awarding a book instead of an author).  Celestial Bodies is also, according to what I'm assuming is press release language, the first novel by an Omani woman to be translated into English.  However, you don't need to be a compulsive reader of literary fiction to recognize the rarity of a novel from the Arabian peninsula.

 I couldn't name a single novelist- male or female, from any of the Gulf states.  It's hard to write anything about Celestial Bodies without observing that Oman was among the last (the last?) nations in the world to outlaw slavery- which happened in 1970-  meaning that the legacy of slavery is very much a live issue in Oman.

   Celestial Bodies takes the familiar form of a multi-generational family drama- three sisters- their parents and children and husbands.   Alharthi eschews the kind of langorous prose style you might expect from a "first" novel from Oman- her manner is more like Sally Rooney then Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

  I listened to the Audiobook- a decision I regret- the narrator has an English accent, which I guess makes sense for some of the wealthy characters, but generally I would have liked to have different voices for at least the three sisters at the center of the narrative.

Published 12/9/19
Ducks, Newburyport (2019)
by Lucy Ellman

  Ducks, Newburyport, by British author Lucy Ellman, about an unnamed ex-college professor turned housewife in a small midwestern town, is my pick for book of the year.  Also it is one thousand pages and one sentence and narrated entirely as a stream of consciousness of the narrator, often divided by variations on "it's a fact that" interspersed with an apparently unrelated story about a wild "eastern cougar" who loses her cubs and creeps across Ohio in a quest to be reunited.

  Just reading Ducks, Newburyport is a minor achievement, and given the length, it's possible that you could read Ducks, Newburyport and only engage with large portions of the book at the barest level of "reading."   There are entire pages of lists, grocery lists, for example.  Much of the critical attention has focused on the "everywoman" character of the narrator and whether that perspective makes Ducks, Newburyport, genius, specious or potentially unworthy of the time it takes to read a thousand page, one sentence book.   My technique was to focus on 50 page blocks for a day- broken into two 25 page segments, once a day, and then doing a couple hundred page days at the end.  Took me about a month.

  I found Ducks, Newburyport to be far more enjoyable on a day-to-day basis then I would have thought possible given the kind of modernist predecessors from which Ducks derives inspiration.   Ellman is treading in the path establish by Joyce, Proust and Gertrude Stein, but Ducks is more fun to read than anything written by ANY of the original group of modernists.   This is my book of the year.  There's an argument that Ducks is the book of the decade.  Just the achievement of it, and making a book that isn't absolute torture to read.

Natalie Portman played "the biologist" in the 2018 film version of Annihilation by American author Jeff VanDermeer

Published 12/15/19
Annihilation (2014) 
Book one of the Southern Reach Trilogy
by Jeff VanDermeer


   If I had to pick on sci-fi representative for "best science fiction book of the 21st century," I'd pick The Three-Body Problem, the first book of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy by Liu Cixin.   The Three-Body Problem, published in the original Chinese in 2008, wasn't published in English translation until 2014, the same year as Annihilation, the first book in the Southern Reach trilogy, was published by American author Jeff VanDermeer.  The Southern Reach trilogy has proved a spectacular success, with the combination of popular and critical acclaim that often coincide with canonical status.   Science fiction has a small but enduring place in the canon of modern literature, with a two to three writers a decade that achieve lasting regard outside the genre itself.

  So, Liu Cixin is one of those authors, but the second slot is still open, and VanDermeer, and American writer and biggest success of the so-called "New weird" literary movement makes a case for his presence as that second representative of hard science fiction.   I hadn't heard of the New weird genre until I read VanDermeer's wikipedia page, but I was struck by the citation of H.P. Lovecraft on a major influence on VanDermeer and other practitioners of that sub genre, because for me, Annihilation is deeply influenced by the Lovecraftian technique that I like to call "nameless horror" where the reader doesn't really get a clear idea of what is going on because the inevitably unreliable narrator has his or her mind melted by some force of evil beyond comprehension.

  This influence becomes clearly the further the reader gets into the Southern Reach Trilogy, which I managed to mainline during a couple of long drives to the desert this month in Audiobook format.  I suck up genre type Audiobooks- whether science fiction or crime fiction, like I'm drinking a milk shake, with none of the discipline required to make it through a similarly lengthed work of literary fiction or non fiction.

  To say that I gobbled up Annihilation and the other two books isn't to say that I fell in love with them.   Like much genre fiction, it is hard to do more than hint at the major plot points since the spoilers are the plot.  The Lovecraftian obfuscation becomes particularly prominent after Annihilation, which is the best of the three books in the trilogy by a country mile.  The final two books do little to extend the appeal of the first book and the reader has to get all the way through the second volume before any of the characters refer to the mysterious "Area X" a self-contained biological free-fire zone where DNA mutates at an astonishing rate.

   I had seen the generally well regarded movie version- starring Natalie Portman as "the biologist" and directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina) before listening to the trilogy, and I went back and watched it again after, gaining a new appreciation for the film, which certainly should be an asset to any argument that Annihilation may obtain canon level status as a representative of science fiction in the early 21st century. 

   I can imagine reaction varying with the level of familiarity an individual reader has with H.P. Lovecraft.  If you know enough about Lovecraft to make jokes about his style- epitomized by the "nameless, creeping horror" that runs through most of his stories, you will likely appreciate Annihilation but not be wowed, whereas, if you've never read Lovecraft, you very might well love Annihilation.
   

Published 12/22/19
The Red Haired Woman (2017)
by Orhan Pamuk

   Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, and in the decade and a half since his substantial bibliography has received the full English language treatment, including a nearly full set of Audiobooks that are freely available from the Los Angeles Public Library- Turks aren't very popular in Los Angeles.   The question of whether a Nobel Prize win results in widespread English language translation and dissemination for non-English language winners seems to largely track with recency- a writer who wins in the present era gets the benefit of all the recent trends in publishing, but an Author like Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian writer and the first Nobel Prize in Literature winner writing in Arabic, who won in 1988, is largely absent from the ebook and Audiobook worlds.

   The Red Haired Woman is the second novel by Pamuk I've read where the action is related to the activities of a travelling 1970's era leftist Turkish theater troupe- the other book is Snow, and I'm beginning to suspect that Pamuk must have himself been involved in this scene (travelling 70's era leftist Turkish theater troupes.)   Here, the troupe is embodied by the eponymous red haired woman of the title, actress, and the devirginizer of the apparent narrator, a wealthy Turkish real estate investor named Cem,  who is forced to revisit his past when he receives some surprising news.

  The first segment of the narrative deals with Cem's experiences as a young man, when he was apprenticed to a old-fashioned well digger who went to work outside the town where the troupe of the red haired woman was temporarily performing.  What appears to be a straight forward recounting of an important coming-of-age episode by a wealthy Turkish businessman begins to twist and turn after the preliminary episode (of the well digging by teen age Cem) ends.

  Suffice it to say, all is not as it appears, and Pamuk does not disappoint.   Istanbul plays a central role, here it is the rapidly expanding Istanbul of 70's and 80's.   The Red Haired Woman isn't a top 3 type Pamuk book- The New York Times actually panned it back when the English version was released in 2017, but I enjoyed the ride, and Turkish language literature is still novel enough for me that I enjoy simply soaking up the milieu.